Hong Kong: National Security Law forum set

The Department of Justice will hold a forum on the National Security Law on July 5, bringing together legal experts and academics to discuss the application and interpretation of the security law.

The National Security Law was promulgated and took effect on June 30, 2020, and has been implemented for almost a year. The Security Brings Prosperity forum aims to enhance understanding and awareness of it.

The legal forum comprises a series of keynote speeches given by distinguished speakers and three panel discussions that will examine the substantive and procedural aspects of the National Security Law and deliver a comparative study of national security laws of other jurisdictions.

The forum will be held online. Click here for details and the live webcast arrangements.

This story has been published on: 2021-06-29. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Hong Kong: 24th anniversary events set

Acting Chief Executive John Lee and senior government officials will attend a flag-raising ceremony and reception on July 1 to celebrate the 24th anniversary of the establishment of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

The flag-raising ceremony will be held at Golden Bauhinia Square.

Because of the current public health risk, no public viewing area will be set up for the ceremony.

The reception will be held at the Convention & Exhibition Centre after the ceremony.

This story has been published on: 2021-06-29. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
South Africa: Cele warns COVID-19 regulation transgressors

Police Minister Bheki Cele has warned that transgressors of Adjusted Alert Level 4 regulations will leave law enforcement with no option but to effect arrests.

Cele made the declaration while addressing reporters during a National Coronavirus Command Council (NCCC) briefing, after President Cyril Ramaphosa on Sunday moved the country to Adjusted Alert Level 4, amid a rapid rise in COVID-19 infections.

Law enforcement is up to the task. Their aim is not to arrest and criminalise people in mass, said the Minister.

As a country we are all wiser to the effects of this deadly virus. We all know the pain and destruction COVID-19 continues to cause us as a nation and I am confident, there will be more compliance to the regulations set out to save lives.

Non-compliance of the regulations carries an option of a fine or imprisonment not exceeding six months or both. Since 27 March last year, police had arrested 465 098 citizens who have been charged with the contravention of the Disaster Management Act. Of these, 7 439 of them were nabbed during adjusted alert Level 3 which commenced on 16 June 2021.

Police will continue to monitor compliance through targeted operations, which will be intensified in hotspot provinces. Community members are also encouraged to continue to be instrumental in reporting the flouting of the regulations, he said.

He warned that reckless calls for mass contravention of the Disaster Management Act would not be tolerated, saying police will act decisively against anyone who deliberately and unashamedly contravenes the regulations.

He added: In the same breath, let me emphasize, that mass gatherings are not only prohibited but are criminalised under Adjusted Alert Level 4.

Political leaders of all parties are urged to act responsibly during this time and be reminded that no amount of political mileage is worth peoples lives.

During the briefing, Cele welcomed the upcoming commencement of the inoculation of security personal. The sector will begin administering jabs from 5 July.

He said the Ministry had already received a comprehensive briefing from the SAPS management in this regard.

We are satisfied that the inoculation of over 180 000 SAPS members and supporting staff will go ahead as planned.

COVID-19 has claimed the lives of 666 police officers since the country recorded its first case in March last year.

While we gear up for the vaccination of officers in the frontlines, we know that for the next two weeks it will not be business as usual as we operate under Adjusted Alert Level 4.

Over and above the national vaccination program that is underway, breaking the chain of transmission by reducing person-to-person contact remains a priority as government, if we are to flatten the curve, he said.  SAnews.gov.za

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Oregon State graduate student sheds light on better way to study reputedly secretive toad

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Research by a graduate student in Oregon State University's College of Science has upended the conventional wisdom that for a century has incorrectly guided the study of a toad listed as endangered in part of its range.

Anne Devan-Song used spotlighting - shining a light in a dark spot and looking for eye reflections - to find large numbers of the eastern spadefoot toad. The study illustrates how confirmation bias - a tendency to interpret new information as ratification of existing theories - can hamper discovery and the development of better ones.

Her findings, which show that the toad spends much more time above ground than commonly believed, were published in the Journal of Herpetology.

Known for bright yellow eyes with elliptical pupils and, as the name suggests, a spade on each hind foot, the eastern spadefoot toad ranges from the southeast corner of the United States up the Atlantic Coast to New England. Known scientifically as Scaphiopus holbrooki, it is a species of conservation concern in the northern reaches of its territory.

Devan-Song, a Ph.D. student in integrative biology, grew up in Singapore, where she learned she could search for reptiles and amphibians by spotlighting. In Rhode Island, where she earned a master's degree and then worked as a university research associate, the eastern spadefoot toad is endangered.

One rainless night while surveying for amphibians during a project in Virginia, Devan-Song's spotlight detected one eastern spadefoot after another. That surprised her because the toads were thought to be detectable only on a few rainy nights every year, when they emerge from underground burrows to mate in wetlands.

She continued looking for eastern spadefoots and kept finding them on dry nights, including in upland forest locales not close to any damp areas. Spadefoots remain still when spotlighted so it was easy for Devan-Song to approach the eye-shines and positively identify the toads.

"They need to get above ground to hunt for insects and build up energy stores for mating," she said. "That's why we were finding them when and where conventional wisdom said we weren't supposed to be finding them."

Back in Rhode Island, she tried spotlighting for spadefoots; it took her just 15 minutes to find one. The success led to a 10-night survey in a pair of locations last summer that produced 42 sightings - nearly double the number of eastern spadefoot toad sightings in Rhode Island over the previous seven decades.

Devan-Song also learned that she wasn't the first to question the notion that the eastern spadefoot was so "secretive" as to almost always avoid detection. As far back as 1944, Devan-Song said, it was suggested in scientific literature that the toad could be found outside of rain-induced migration and breeding aggregations. And in 1955, researchers used spotlighting to detect huge numbers of eastern spadefoots in Florida; the technique subsequently, inexplicably fell into disuse.

"Confirmation bias perpetuated the fallacy of when the eastern spadefoot could be found," Devan-Song said. "No breeding events or migration occurred during our surveys and we detected thousands of toads in Virginia and dozens in Rhode Island. The majority of those were subadults, a demographic category mainly overlooked in the literature. Progress in learning about the toad, its ecology and its conservation has been greatly hindered by a misconception that persisted even when evidence to the contrary was presented."

The ease with which many toads could be found during breeding, combined with a lack of data on toads in upland habitats, helped fuel confirmation bias in this case, she said.

"Everyone assumed they were underground most of the time so no one was really looking for them most of the time," Devan-Song said. "Our research demonstrates that you can detect them year round, though they do remain rare in Rhode Island. But likely not as rare as the scientific community thought."

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The National Park Service, through a cooperative agreement with the University of Rhode Island, supported this research.

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The final dance of mixed neutron star-black hole pairs

Gravitational wave detectors have observed a new type of cataclysmic event in the cosmos: the merger of a neutron star with a black hole.

The phenomenon was detected twice in January 2020.

Several hypotheses could explain the existence of such mixed pairs. Further observations will be needed in order to settle the question.

Another missing piece has just been added to our knowledge of cosmic phenomena. The LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA collaborations have announced the first detection of gravitational waves (1) resulting from the 'mixed' merger between a black hole and a neutron star (2). The discovery, published on June 29, 2021 in Astrophysical Journal Letters, involves CNRS researchers working within the Virgo scientific collaboration.

Although it has only been only a few years since the very first observation of gravitational waves, the technique has yielded an extensive repertoire of phenomena involving massive cosmic objects. The LIGO and Virgo detectors have already observed mergers of pairs (or binaries) of black holes and, less frequently, of neutron stars. However, gravitational waves detected in January 2020 provide evidence of the existence of a new type of system. The signals, named GW200105 and GW200115 from their dates of detection, were produced by a process that had been predicted but never observed until now: the coalescence of 'mixed pairs' called NSBH pairs, each made up of a neutron star and a black hole (3).

Gravitational waves contain valuable information about their source, such as the mass of the components making up the binary. Analysis of the signals revealed that GW200105 resulted from the merger, some 900 million years ago, of a black hole and a neutron star, respectively 8.9 times and 1.9 times more massive than the Sun, while GW200115 originated from an NSBH pair which coalesced around 1 billion years ago, with masses 5.7 and 1.5 times greater than the Sun. The difference in mass between the components of the system indicates that they are indeed mixed binaries: the mass of the heavier object corresponds to that of a black hole while the mass of the lighter object is consistent with that of a neutron star. The difference between the two masses could also explain why no light signals were detected by telescopes. When a neutron star approaches a black hole it can theoretically be torn apart by tidal forces, causing flares of electromagnetic radiation. However, in the two cases observed, the black hole, being much more massive, could have gobbled up the neutron star in a single mouthful, leaving no trace.

Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain the formation of mixed NSBH binaries. The first involves the evolution of a pair of stars in orbit around one another. Towards the end of their lives, one of the stars could become a black hole and the other a neutron star, while still rotating around each other. According to another hypothesis, that of dynamic interaction, the two components of the pair form independently in a very dense stellar medium before coming together. These results open up the way for the detection of other mixed binaries, as well as for the observation and understanding of extreme phenomena of a similar nature.

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Notes

(1) Gravitational waves are tiny ripples in space-time and were first observed in 2015, a century after Albert Einstein predicted their existence in his General Theory of Relativity.

(2) A neutron star is the residue of the collapse of a massive star at the end of its life.

(3) The two signals have different confidence levels. Although the statistical significance of GW200105 is not very high, the shape of the signal and the parameters inferred from it point to an astrophysical origin.

About Virgo, LIGO and KAGRA

The Virgo Collaboration is currently composed of approximately 690 members from 15 countries. The European Gravitational Observatory (EGO) hosts the Virgo detector near Pisa in Italy, and is funded by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France, the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) in Italy, and Nikhef in the Netherlands. A list of the Virgo Collaboration groups can be found at http://public. virgo-gw. eu/ the-virgo-collaboration .

LIGO is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and operated by Caltech and MIT, which conceived of LIGO and led the project. Financial support for the Advanced LIGO project was led by the NSF, with Germany (Max Planck Society), the UK (Science and Technology Facilities Council) and Australia (Australian Research Council-OzGrav) making significant commitments and contributions to the project. Approximately 1,300 scientists from around the world participate in the effort through the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, which includes the GEO Collaboration. A list of additional partners is available at https:/ / my. ligo. org/ census. php .

The KAGRA laser interferometer is located in Kamioka, Japan. The host institute is the Institute of Cosmic Ray Researches (ICRR) at the University of Tokyo, and the project is co-hosted by National Astronomical Observatory in Japan (NAOJ) and High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK). KAGRA completed its construction in 2019 and the data taking started in February 2020 during the final stage of the run called "O3b." KAGRA Scientific Congress is composed of over 470 members from 14 countries/regions. See: https:/ / gwwiki. icrr. u-tokyo. ac. jp/ JGWwiki/ KAGRA/ KSC/ Researchers

The scientific article announcing this discovery is co-signed by 102 scientists in France, working in eight teams from the CNRS and associated universities, part of the Virgo Collaboration:

'Astroparticule et cosmologie' laboratory (CNRS/Universite de Paris) ;

Artemis laboratory (CNRS/Observatoire de la Cote d'Azur/Universite Cote d'Azur) ;

g-MAG team, with scientists from the 'Institut lumiere matiere' (CNRS/Universite Claude Bernard Lyon 1), the 'Institut des nanotechnologies de Lyon' (CNRS/Ecole Centrale de Lyon/INSA Lyon/Universite Claude Bernard Lyon 1/CPE Lyon), the 'Institut des nanosciences de Paris' (CNRS/Sorbonne Universite) and the Navier laboratory (CNRS/Ecole des Ponts ParisTech/ Universite Gustave Eiffel) ;

'Institut de physique des 2 infinis de Lyon' (CNRS/Universite Claude Bernard Lyon 1) ;

'Institut pluridisciplinaire Hubert Curien' (CNRS/Universite de Strasbourg) ;

'Laboratoire d'Annecy de physique des particules' (CNRS/Universite Savoie Mont Blanc) ;

'Laboratoire Kastler Brossel' (CNRS/Sorbonne Universite/ENS-PSL/College de France) ;

'Laboratoire de physique des 2 infinis - Irene Joliot-Curie' (CNRS/Universite Paris-Saclay).

Some of the authors are associated with the teams mentionned above while working in other laboratories: 'Institut Foton' (CNRS/Universite Rennes 1/Insa Rennes), Lagrange laboratory (CNRS/Universite Cote d'Azur/Observatoire Cote d'Azur), 'Laboratoire de physique et d'etude des materiaux' (CNRS/Sorbonne Universite/ESPCI Paris).

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'Edge of chaos' opens pathway to artificial intelligence discoveries

Scientists at the University of Sydney and Japan's National Institute for Material Science (NIMS) have discovered that an artificial network of nanowires can be tuned to respond in a brain-like way when electrically stimulated.

The international team, led by Joel Hochstetter with Professor Zdenka Kuncic and Professor Tomonobu Nakayama, found that by keeping the network of nanowires in a brain-like state "at the edge of chaos", it performed tasks at an optimal level.

This, they say, suggests the underlying nature of neural intelligence is physical, and their discovery opens an exciting avenue for the development of artificial intelligence.

The study is published today in Nature Communications.

"We used wires 10 micrometres long and no thicker than 500 nanometres arranged randomly on a two-dimensional plane," said lead author Joel Hochstetter, a doctoral candidate in the University of Sydney Nano Institute and School of Physics.

"Where the wires overlap, they form an electrochemical junction, like the synapses between neurons," he said. "We found that electrical signals put through this network automatically find the best route for transmitting information. And this architecture allows the network to 'remember' previous pathways through the system."

ON THE EDGE OF CHAOS

Using simulations, the research team tested the random nanowire network to see how to make it best perform to solve simple tasks.

If the signal stimulating the network was too low, then the pathways were too predictable and orderly and did not produce complex enough outputs to be useful. If the electrical signal overwhelmed the network, the output was completely chaotic and useless for problem solving.

The optimal signal for producing a useful output was at the edge of this chaotic state.

"Some theories in neuroscience suggest the human mind could operate at this edge of chaos, or what is called the critical state," said Professor Kuncic from the University of Sydney. "Some neuroscientists think it is in this state where we achieve maximal brain performance."

Professor Kuncic is Mr Hochstetter's PhD adviser and is currently a Fulbright Scholar at the University of California in Los Angeles, working at the intersection between nanoscience and artificial intelligence.

She said: "What's so exciting about this result is that it suggests that these types of nanowire networks can be tuned into regimes with diverse, brain-like collective dynamics, which can be leveraged to optimise information processing."

OVERCOMING COMPUTER DUALITY

In the nanowire network the junctions between the wires allow the system to incorporate memory and operations into a single system. This is unlike standard computers, which separate memory (RAM) and operations (CPUs).

"These junctions act like computer transistors but with the additional property of remembering that signals have travelled that pathway before. As such, they are called 'memristors'," Mr Hochstetter said.

This memory takes a physical form, where the junctions at the crossing points between nanowires act like switches, whose behaviour depends on historic response to electrical signals. When signals are applied across these junctions, tiny silver filaments grow activating the junctions by allowing current to flow through.

"This creates a memory network within the random system of nanowires," he said.

Mr Hochstetter and his team built a simulation of the physical network to show how it could be trained to solve very simple tasks.

"For this study we trained the network to transform a simple waveform into more complex types of waveforms," Mr Hochstetter said.

In the simulation they adjusted the amplitude and frequency of the electrical signal to see where the best performance occurred.

"We found that if you push the signal too slowly the network just does the same thing over and over without learning and developing. If we pushed it too hard and fast, the network becomes erratic and unpredictable," he said.

The University of Sydney researchers are working closely with collaborators at the International Center for Materials Nanoarchictectonics at NIMS in Japan and UCLA where Professor Kuncic is a visiting Fulbright Scholar. The nanowire systems were developed at NIMS and UCLA and Mr Hochstetter developed the analysis, working with co-authors and fellow doctoral students, Ruomin Zhu and Alon Loeffler.

REDUCING ENERGY CONSUMPTION

Professor Kuncic said that uniting memory and operations has huge practical advantages for the future development of artificial intelligence.

"Algorithms needed to train the network to know which junction should be accorded the appropriate 'load' or weight of information chew up a lot of power," she said.

"The systems we are developing do away with the need for such algorithms. We just allow the network to develop its own weighting, meaning we only need to worry about signal in and signal out, a framework known as 'reservoir computing'. The network weights are self-adaptive, potentially freeing up large amounts of energy."

This, she said, means any future artificial intelligence systems using such networks would have much lower energy footprints.

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DOWNLOAD the study, photos of researchers and nanowire networks at this link.

INTERVIEWS

Joel Hochstetter | joel.hochstetter@sydney.edu.au (located in Sydney)

Professor Zdenka Kuncic | zdenka.kuncic@sydney.edu.au (currently in Los Angeles)

MEDIA ENQUIRIES

Marcus Strom | marcus.strom@sydney.edu.au | +61 423 982 485

DECLARATION

The authors acknowledge use of the Artemis High Performance Computing resource at the Sydney Informatics Hub, a Core Research Facility of the University of Sydney.

This story has been published on: 2021-06-29. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Black holes swallow neutron stars like 'Pac Man'

Scientists have for the first time detected black holes eating neutron stars, "like Pac Man", in a discovery documenting the collision of the two most extreme and enigmatic objects in the Universe.

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the US and the Virgo gravitational-wave observatory in Italy have captured the gravitational waves from the death spiral and merger of a neutron star with a black hole, not once but twice. The findings are published today.

The researchers say their observations will help unlock some of the most complex mysteries of the Universe, including the building blocks of matter and the workings of space and time.

More than 1,000 scientists were involved with the world-first detections, with many from Australia, including The Australian National University, leading the way.

Distinguished Professor Susan Scott, a co-author on the study based at the ANU Research School of Physics in the Centre for Gravitational Astrophysics, said the events occurred about a billion years ago but were so massive that we are still able to observe their gravitational waves today.

"These collisions have shaken the Universe to its core and we've detected the ripples they have sent hurtling through the cosmos," she said.

"Each collision isn't just the coming together of two massive and dense objects. It's really like Pac-Man, with a black hole swallowing its companion neutron star whole.

"These are remarkable events and we have waited a very long time to witness them. So it's incredible to finally capture them."

One event included a black hole with a mass nine times bigger than our own sun and a neutron star with two times our sun's mass. The other event included a black hole with about six times the mass of our sun and a neutron star with 1.5 times its mass.

Professor Scott, also a Chief Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), said the international team had previously captured many events involving two black holes colliding as well as two neutron stars smashing together.

"Now, we've completed the last piece of the puzzle with the first confirmed observations of gravitational waves from a black hole and a neutron star colliding," she said.

Dr Johannes Eichholz, from the ANU Centre for Gravitational Astrophysics and an Associate Investigator with OzGrav, said the two detections were originally made on 5 and 15 January 2020.

"These kind of detections are incredibly rare," he said.

"We haven't detected these events once - but twice and within 10 days of each other.

"Like the ripples from these two events, which have been felt a billion years later, these findings will have a profound impact on our understanding of the Universe for many years to come."

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The findings are published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

FOR INTERVIEW:

Distinguished Professor Susan Scott

ANU Research School of Physics

M: +61 450 522 939

E: Susan.Scott@anu.edu.au

For media assistance, contact James Giggacher on +61 436 803 488 or ANU Media on +61 2 6125 7979 or media@anu.edu.au

Additional information about the gravitational-wave observatories

The ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) is funded by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council Centres of Excellence funding scheme. OzGrav is a partnership between Swinburne University of Technology (host of OzGrav headquarters), The Australian National University, Monash University, University of Adelaide, University of Melbourne, and University of Western Australia, along with other collaborating organisations in Australia and overseas.

This material is based upon work supported by NSF's LIGO Laboratory which is a major facility fully funded by the National Science Foundation and operated by Caltech and MIT, which conceived of LIGO and led the Initial and Advanced LIGO projects. Financial support for the Advanced LIGO project was led by the NSF with Germany (Max Planck Society), the UK (Science and Technology Facilities Council) and Australia (Australian Research Council-OzGrav) making significant commitments and contributions to the project. Nearly 1300 scientists from around the world participate in the effort through the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, which includes the GEO Collaboration. A list of additional partners is available at https:/ / my. ligo. org/ census. php

The Virgo Collaboration is currently composed of approximately 700 members from 125 institutions in 15 different countries. The European Gravitational Observatory (EGO) hosts the Virgo detector near Pisa in Italy, and is funded by Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France, the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) in Italy, and Nikhef in the Netherlands. A list of the Virgo Collaboration members can be found at http://public. virgo-gw. eu/ the-virgo-collaboration/

This story has been published on: 2021-06-29. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
FAU lands $736,000 from NASA to study the coastal carbon budget from space

Coastal ecosystems sequester large quantities of carbon through processes at risk of disturbance from changing climate, land use change and rising sea levels. How carbon moves from land to ocean is one of the critical knowledge gaps needed to constrain the structure and functioning of the Earth system. In coastal regions, the origin of various carbon sources is very difficult to identify - for example, whether the carbon is from rivers or marsh runoff, or created in place via phytoplankton production. Moreover, the generalization of these sources and the processes involved in transport to the ocean is even more difficult, thus limiting the ability to make future projections based on a changing climate and associated events such as wetter, more intense hurricanes.

One potentially underappreciated carbon source, the underlying marine sediments, may be particularly impacted under these conditions and may play an outsized role in the overall carbon budget. Satellite remote sensing is often used as a tool to characterize and quantify the various sources of carbon in coastal regions by measuring colored dissolved organic matter (CDOM) - more colloquially known as the "brown stuff" in rivers in Florida and beyond. However, it is not currently possible to discriminate between sediment-derived carbon versus other sources.

Using satellite images, hydrodynamic modeling and field work, scientists from Florida Atlantic University's Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute are setting out to quantify this sediment carbon contribution, make historical reconstructions, and contribute to future projections of the coastal budget. They have received a three-year, $736,000 grant from NASA's Minority University Research and Education Project Ocean Biology and Biogeochemistry (OCEAN). FAU is one of 10 universities in the nation and the only university in Florida to receive this grant in support of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in seeking a better understanding of the ocean's role in the Earth system.

If successful, this research in the Gulf of Mexico's hypoxia region off the coasts of Texas and Louisiana may demonstrate not just the ability, but also the utility, of remote sensing as an observational technique for characterizing potentially critical but often neglected carbon cycle processes related to marine sediments. Marine sediments are essentially a permanent means for carbon removal from the surface of the Earth over geological timescales. Yet, a changing climate, coastal eutrophication (i.e. excess nutrient inputs), and processes such as trawling are reducing their carbon storage capacity, resulting in the "browning" of coastal waters.

The FAU Harbor Branch project targets a NASA objective to "Improve understanding of carbon cycle processes and feedbacks in aquatic critical zones that are particularly vulnerable to environmental changes." Aquatic critical zones are regions where important biogeochemical and physical processes take place and together regulate the functionality of aquatic ecosystems.

The FAU Harbor Branch team includes: Veronica Ruiz-Xomchuk, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow who will lead the technical research aspects as the scientific principal investigator who has expertise in physical oceanography and ocean modeling; Jordon Beckler, Ph.D., the project's primary principal investigator and an assistant research professor and a fellow of FAU's Institute for Sensing and Embedded Networks Systems Engineering (I-SENSE) who has expertise in chemical oceanography and sediment geochemistry; and Tim Moore, Ph.D., co-principal investigator and a research professor who has expertise in ocean color and bio-optics.

The team is collaborating with Martial Taillefert, Ph.D., Georgia Tech, who is the chief scientist for a series of National Science Foundation-funded oceanographic research cruises that will be used to explore effects of ocean acidification on sediment processes. Taillefert has invited the FAU team onboard to leverage this campaign, allowing for the "groundtruthing" of the satellite observations using corresponding measurements obtained directly within the water.

By using a "benthic lander" developed via an existing collaboration between FAU and Georgia Tech to explore blue holes, the team will obtain direct flux measurement of dissolved organic matter and the CDOM from sediments to the water column above the seabed, otherwise known as the benthic-boundary layer. Then, the hydrodynamic model will simulate if, where, and when this carbon may be uplifted to the surface of the ocean where it can potentially be detected using satellite remote sensing.

Researchers will combine these sediment flux measurements with more than 20 years of ocean color satellite data and modeled ocean current dynamics to simulate this carbon transport, while additionally ensuring to account for other potentially confounding carbon sources such as river inputs. The research team will then extrapolate these sediment measurements across the entire study region over various timescales to corroborate satellite-derived estimates.

"We've seen huge inventories of darkly colored pore water in coastal ocean mud, which we know is CDOM, and I couldn't help but wonder to what extent this carbon could be escaping across the sediment surface and affecting the optical properties of the ocean," said Beckler. "However, it isn't yet possible to directly implicate the sediments over large areas by just looking at satellite images since they aren't able to 'see' more than a few meters below the surface of the ocean. The hydrodynamic model uniquely allows us to bridge the gap between the seafloor and the surface ocean. This is an exciting new avenue for my own sediment-centered research - and a topic that is rather unconventional with regards to NASA's typical project portfolio."

An important aspect of the project is the STEM engagement (science-technology-engineering-mathematics) portion that is weaved throughout the research and involves FAU's PK-12 schools and educational programs. The vast majority of work effort will enhance the capacity for STEM research and educational opportunities for underrepresented groups and will create many opportunities for student/intern engagement regarding ocean issues and experiential learning opportunities and the use of NASA products. The students also are invited to participate in the research cruises, depending on the school year schedule.

"Receiving funding from NASA for this innovative proposal is very exciting because, if we are successful, results from our project will have a tremendous impact on scientific inquiry from space to the seabed," said James Sullivan, Ph.D., executive director, FAU Harbor Branch. "We will know whether or not sediment-derived colored dissolved organic matter is routinely visible in the northern Gulf of Mexico."

FAU is the most racially, culturally and ethnically diverse university in Florida. In 2016, the FAU College of Engineering and Computer Science received designation as a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) by the United States Department of Education, only awarded to colleges and universities with enrollment of full-time Hispanic undergraduate students of at least 25 percent. This year, FAU's College of Engineering and Computer Science was recognized as a national leader in diversity in engineering by the American Society of Engineering Education.

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About Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute:

Founded in 1971, Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute at Florida Atlantic University is a research community of marine scientists, engineers, educators and other professionals focused on Ocean Science for a Better World. The institute drives innovation in ocean engineering, at-sea operations, drug discovery and biotechnology from the oceans, coastal ecology and conservation, marine mammal research and conservation, aquaculture, ocean observing systems and marine education. For more information, visit http://www. fau. edu/ hboi .

About Florida Atlantic University:

Florida Atlantic University, established in 1961, officially opened its doors in 1964 as the fifth public university in Florida. Today, the University serves more than 30,000 undergraduate and graduate students across six campuses located along the southeast Florida coast. In recent years, the University has doubled its research expenditures and outpaced its peers in student achievement rates. Through the coexistence of access and excellence, FAU embodies an innovative model where traditional achievement gaps vanish. FAU is designated a Hispanic-serving institution, ranked as a top public university by U.S. News & World Report and a High Research Activity institution by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. For more information, visit http://www. fau. edu .

This story has been published on: 2021-06-29. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Old oil fields may be less prone to induced earthquakes

Boulder, Colo., USA: Subsurface carbon sequestration--storing carbon in rocks deep underground--offers a partial solution for removing carbon from the atmosphere. Used alongside emissions reductions, geologic carbon sequestration could help mitigate anthropogenic climate change. But like other underground operations, it comes with risks--including earthquakes.

Geophysicists are still working to understand what can trigger human-induced earthquakes, which have been documented since the 1960s. A new study, published in Geology on Thursday, explores why part of a heavily produced oilfield in the U.S. has earthquakes, and part of it doesn't. For the first time, the authors demonstrate that the influence of past oil drilling changes stresses on faults in such a way that injecting fluids is less likely to induce, or trigger, earthquakes today.

The study focuses on the Delaware Basin, an oil- and gas-producing field spanning the border between West Texas and New Mexico. Drilling there has taken place since at least the 1970s, with over 10,000 active individual wells dotting the region. There, Stanford geophysicists No'am Dvory and Mark Zoback noticed an interesting pattern in seismic activity. Recent shallow earthquakes were mostly located in the southern half of the basin, while the northern half is seismically quiet, despite shallow wastewater injection occurring across the basin.

"The compelling question, then, is why are all the shallow earthquakes limited to one area and not more widespread?" Zoback says.

Earthquakes can be induced by injecting fluids like wastewater underground. When wastewater is injected into the rocks, pressures increase, putting the rocks and any faults that are present under higher stress. If those pressures and stresses get high enough, an earthquake can happen.

Earthquakes from injection in the southern Delaware Basin tend to be shallow and relatively low-magnitude, typically strong enough to rattle the dishes, but not enough to cause damage. However, if deeper faults are activated, higher-magnitude earthquakes can occur and cause damage. For example, in March 2020, a magnitude 4.6 earthquake rumbled in Mentone, Texas, likely due to deep injection that interacted with faults in the crystalline basement rock around five miles belowground.

"The size of an earthquake is limited by the size of the fault that slips," Dvory explains. Where faults are shallow and small (just a few kilometers in size), quake magnitudes tend to be small. "You can still feel it, but it's less dangerous."

Minimizing the risk of earthquakes is a goal for any subsurface operation, whether it's oil and gas production or carbon sequestration. That made the Delaware Basin, with its odd pattern of earthquakes, a great target for Dvory and Zoback. It was a natural experiment in geomechanics, the "why" behind induced earthquakes.

To decipher the pattern, Dvory and Zoback first modeled the underground pressures needed to cause faults in the basin to slip and connected those values to estimated stress values. Once they had established that baseline, they calculated the pore pressures around the Delaware Basin. Their results showed a clear pattern: geologic formations in the northern basin where hydrocarbons had previously been produced had lower pore pressures than in "unperturbed" rock, and there were no earthquakes. The southern basin, which had almost no previous production from the same formations, had higher initial pressures and earthquakes.

"In some areas we have evidence of oil and gas development from even the 1950s," Dvory says. "Where there was significant hydrocarbon production, pressure was depleted, and the formations essentially became more stable."

Now, when fluids are injected back into those 'stable,' previously drilled rocks, the starting pressure is lower than the first time they were drilled.

"So where oil production occurred previously, current injection results in significantly lower pressure such that it's much less likely to trigger earthquakes," Zoback explains. "It's not inconceivable that at some point, if you injected enough, you could probably cause an earthquake. But here in the area we study, we are able to document that what happened previously strongly affects how current operational processes affect the likelihood of earthquake triggering."

Targeting these sites of past oil production, with their lower earthquake risk, could be a good approach for carbon sequestration.

"We have a global challenge to store enormous volumes of carbon dioxide in the subsurface in the next ten to twenty years," Zoback says. "We need places to safely store massive volumes of carbon dioxide for hundreds of years, which obviously includes not allowing pressure increases to trigger earthquakes. The importance of geoscience in meeting this challenge can't be overstated. It's an enormous problem, but geoscience is the critical place to start."

FEATURED ARTICLE

Prior oil and gas production can limit the occurrence of injection-induced seismicity: A case study in the Delaware Basin of western Texas and southeastern New Mexico, USA

Noam Z. Dvory; Mark D. Zoback

Author contact: Noam Z. Dvory, nzd@stanford.edu

https:/ / pubs. geoscienceworld. org/ gsa/ geology/ article-abstract/ doi/ 10. 1130/ G49015. 1/ 604590/ Prior-oil-and-gas-production-can-limit-the

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GEOLOGY articles are online at https://geology.geoscienceworld.org/content/early/recent . Representatives of the media may obtain complimentary articles by contacting Kea Giles at the e-mail address above. Please discuss articles of interest with the authors before publishing stories on their work, and please make reference to GEOLOGY in articles published. Non-media requests for articles may be directed to GSA Sales and Service, gsaservice@geosociety.org.

https:/ / www. geosociety. org

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South Africa: Gauteng ramps up bed capacity to deal with COVID-19 patients

Acting Health Minister, Mmamoloko Kubayi-Ngubane, has reassured the citizens of Gauteng that government is working around the clock to ramp up bed capacity to deal with the third wave of COVID-19 infections.

While the Nasrec Field Hospital has been closed, Kubayi-Ngubane said other health facilities have been activated to deal with the influx of patients.

The province had challenges [with field hospitals] and there were limitations in terms of utilisation of the hospitals - thats why they were no longer used because we couldnt justify the cost, she said during a briefing of the National Coronavirus Command Council on Tuesday.

The 1000-bed Nasrec Field Hospital was set up to help alleviate the burden of COVID-19 patients at clinics and hospitals across the province during the first two waves.

In the meantime, the Minister said more work has been done to ensure there is enough bed capacity in Gauteng, which is currently the epicentre of the pandemic.

The province will benefit from the newly opened AngloGold Ashanti Hospital, Jubilee Hospital, Bronkhorstspruit Hospital, and the Chris Hani Baragwanath Academic Hospital that has recently been extended.

These hospitals are doing exactly what the field hospital at Nasrec was doing. The information Ive been receiving is that they have not been full to capacity, the Minister explained, adding that the 300-bed Jubilee Hospital has not been full beyond 50%.

We do have the capacity in terms of the general wards and work continues, she added.

In addition, Gauteng is working on providing more resources to recruit more healthcare workers.

She said government was monitoring beds in Gauteng and the entire country and that they are seeing more pressure in the private health sector.

In addition, she announced there are no oxygen supply challenges.

Oxford-AstraZeneca

Meanwhile, the Minister addressed the decision to terminate the usage of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine in light of the Delta variant, which was first discovered in India.

In February, South Africa suspended the rollout of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine after studies showed that it was less effective against the mutated COVID-19 501Y.V2 variant, which was common in South Africa.

The National Institute for Communicable Diseases of South Africa (NICD) said Gauteng remains the epicentre of the resurgence, accounting for an average of 65% of daily new cases.

In Gauteng, 64% of 244 genomes sequenced from May 2021 are attributed to the Beta variant, while in June 2021 this dropped to 37%. In contrast, during June, 53% of genomes from Gauteng were the Delta variant.

The growing prevalence of Delta doesnt mean that Beta no longer exists in the country. The decision was correct at that time because the efficacy of AstraZeneca against Beta variant seemed very low. That's why the decision was taken.

This comes after new studies show that two doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca may be highly effective in preventing hospitalisation due to the Delta variant.

Kubayi-Ngubane said the Alpha and Beta variants are still circulating in all provinces.

Vaccine rollout

The Minister acknowledged the country will not be able to meet the target of vaccinating over five million senior citizens by the end of June.

This is mainly due to vaccine hesitancy, lack of technology for some of these citizens to sign up and the vaccination centres that are located far from peoples residences.

However, she said her department was addressing all these issues.

She said there was still an issue around the payment of overtime for those who will be vaccinating on weekends.

The Ministers who serve in the National Coronavirus Command Council (NCCC) were outlining measures to ensure compliance with the regulations in the fight against the spread of COVID-19 in South Africa.  SAnews.gov.za

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Collaborative care effective for pain, depression and anxiety

INDIANAPOLIS - With the growing prevalence of chronic pain, depression, anxiety, and other symptom-based conditions, physicians and the healthcare systems for which they work are increasingly considering how to augment the care they can provide within the limited time allotted for patient appointments.

According to Regenstrief Institute Research Scientist Kurt Kroenke, M.D., writing in the Journal of General Internal Medicine (JGIM), collaborative care can and should play a major role targeting the treatment of symptoms and functional decline, both too frequently marginalized in medically oriented care delivery.

Collaborative care is a team-based model in which the patient's primary care physician is assisted in the management of specific health conditions (for example depression, anxiety or pain) by a care manager (often a nurse supervised by a physician specialist) with advanced expertise in the management of those conditions who provides care virtually.

Care managers help patients process information provided by their primary care physicians. For example, care managers can review treatment options, helping patients decide which option they prefer.

"We at Regenstrief and others have extensively studied utilizing collaborative care to provide behavioral treatments, education and care follow-up to patients with depression, anxiety and pain and we have found that it works," said Dr. Kroenke, a professor of medicine at Indiana University School of Medicine, an internationally respected pioneer in symptomology and the co-developer of the depression and anxiety scales most commonly used in primary care. "Collaborative care works because it provides patients with needed support between physician visits, augmenting medical practice via telephone or another telecare modality, making it easy for patients to fit into their schedules."

Collaborative care is becoming more common. Dr. Kroenke is currently exploring the use of collaborative care for substance abuse disorders.

"Perhaps the major reason that collaborative care hasn't gained traction outside of some large, integrated healthcare systems with multiple clinics, is because insurance companies typically have not covered augmenting physician care via telephone," said Dr. Kroenke. "But this barrier has eroded during the pandemic as telecare has been reimbursed by Medicare as well as insurance companies. And expanded use of telecare during the pandemic has also taught us to deliver virtual care more effectively and efficiently."

In addition to describing the collaborative care model and highlighting its application to patient care, "Canons of Collaborative Care" by Dr. Kroenke and Andrea Cheville, M.D., of the Mayo Clinic, provides principles for implementing collaborative care in real world clinical practice.

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About Regenstrief Institute

Founded in 1969 in Indianapolis, the?Regenstrief Institute?is a local, national and global leader dedicated to a world where better information empowers people to end disease and realize true health. A key research partner to Indiana University, Regenstrief and its research scientists are responsible for a growing number of major healthcare innovations and studies. Examples range from the development of global health information technology standards that enable the use and interoperability of electronic health records to improving patient-physician communications, to creating models of care that inform practice and improve the lives of patients around the globe.

Sam Regenstrief, a nationally successful entrepreneur from Connersville, Indiana, founded the institute with the goal of making healthcare more efficient and accessible for everyone. His vision continues to guide the institute's research mission.

About IU School of Medicine

IU School of Medicine is the largest medical school in the U.S. and is annually ranked among the top medical schools in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. The school offers high-quality medical education, access to leading medical research and rich campus life in nine Indiana cities, including rural and urban locations consistently recognized for livability.

About Kurt Kroenke, M.D., MACP

In addition to his role as a research scientist at Regenstrief Institute, Kurt Kroenke, M.D., MACP, is also a professor of medicine at Indiana University School of Medicine.

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Hong Kong: Commerce centre tenants get jab

Secretary for the Civil Service Patrick Nip today viewed the administration of a COVID-19 vaccine to staff from different companies working at the International Commerce Centre.

This is the first time that a property management company has taken the lead to gather building tenants to participate in the outreach vaccination service. About 250 people from Kai Shing Management Services which manages the commerce centre, Ritz-Carlton Hong Kong and international financial institutions in the building, received the BioNTech vaccine.

Mr Nip said: I am grateful to Kai Shing Management Services for taking the lead and Ritz-Carlton Hong Kong for providing the venue, which makes the outreach vaccination service possible today by gathering staff members from various companies of the building who would like to get vaccinated.

People working in the same building often have to use common facilities such as lobbies and lifts. Hence, they can gain better protection if all of them are vaccinated.

He also called on various sectors and industries to join the Government in encouraging people to get vaccinated in order to significantly raise the citys vaccination rate and restore normality to society.

Enterprises and organisations can call 3904 1490 from 9am to 6pm, Monday to Friday to arrange outreach vaccination services.

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RTHK: Sormer South African president sentenced to jail

In a historic ruling, South Africa's top court on Tuesday handed the country's former president, Jacob Zuma, a 15-month jail term for "egregious" contempt of court after he refused to appear before graft investigators.

Zuma was told to turn himself in within five days, failing which police will be ordered to arrest him and take him to jail.

The ruling sets a precedent for South Africa -- and a benchmark for the continent -- by jailing a former head of state for failing to respond to a corruption probe.

"Mr. Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma is guilty of the crime of contempt of court," Constitutional Court judge Sisi Khampepe said.

"No person is above the law," she said and made reference to Zuma's "egregious affront on judicial integrity, the rule of law and the Constitution".

Zuma, 79, is accused of enabling the plunder of state coffers during his nearly nine-year stay in office, which ended calamitously in February 2018 when the ruling African National Congress (ANC) forced him out.

Before he left office, he responded to mounting pressure and set up an investigative commission, headed by Deputy Chief Justice Raymond Zondo.

The panel has encountered years of resistance from Zuma.

He only testified once, in July 2019, before staging a walkout days later and accusing Zondo of bias.

He then ignored several invitations to reappear, including a Constitutional Court order in January, in some cases citing medical reasons and preparations for another corruption trial.

He presented himself again briefly in November but left before questioning, and an exasperated Zondo asked the Constitutional Court to intervene for contempt.

"This kind of recalcitrance and defiance is unlawful and will be punished," Khampepe said.

"I am left with no option but to commit Mr Zuma to imprisonment, with the hope that doing so sends an unequivocal message... the rule of law and the administration of justice prevails."

She said Zuma, as an ex-president, was aware of the law yet placed himself "in blatant violation" of a court order.

"The majority judgement orders an unsuspended sentence of imprisonment for a period (of 15 months)," she declared.

She ordered Zuma to hand himself over to the police in Johannesburg or in Nkandla, a rural town in southeastern Kwa-Zulu Natal province where he has a home, within five calendar days.

If "Mr Zuma does not submit himself... the minister of police... must within three calendar days of the expiry stipulated of the period... take all steps that are necessary and permissible in law to make sure that Mr Zuma is delivered to a correctional centre in order to commence the sentence," said the judge.

In determining the sentence the court also took into account Zuma's "scandalous" attacks on the judiciary which it found "certainly constitute aggravating factors".

Zuma did not immediately react to the judgement, but a loyal ally Carl Niehaus tweeted that the imprisonment "is totally unacceptable. In fact it is an utter outrage!"

Analysts say he will not avoid jail.

"There is no appeal against a decision of the Constitutional Court," Lawson Naidoo, head of the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution said.

Most of the graft investigated by the commission involve three brothers from a wealthy Indian business family, the Guptas, who won lucrative government contracts and were allegedly even able to choose cabinet ministers.

Corruption Watch, a non-profit organisation, described the judgement as "momentous" and "historical".

"For the first time in South Africa, we are seeing a former head of state held directly accountable by way of a prison sentence," said Corruption Watch's legal officer Karam Singh.

But the ruling will spell disaster for the ANC and "aggravate the factional differences" leading up to the October local government votes, said WITS university lecturer Susan Booysen.

Aleix Montana of the risk analysis firm Verisk Maplecroft said the ruling will boost the fight against graft.

It was "an important milestone for South Africa's judicial independence and its fight against corruption," the analyst said.

Zuma is separately facing 16 charges of fraud, graft and racketeering relating to a 1999 purchase of fighter jets, patrol boats and military gear from five European arms firms for 30 billion rand, then the equivalent of nearly US$5 billion.

At the time of the purchase, Zuma was president Thabo Mbeki's deputy. (AFP)

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RTHK: Delta variant drives infection surge in Russia, UK

Covid-19 infections are rising again in Europe after falling for two and a half months, mainly because of the Delta variant in the UK and Russia, according to a tally Tuesday by AFP.

The two countries have experienced not only the most new cases in Europe, but also the most rapid spread among those that have recorded more than 1,000 cases per day.

Russia has recorded 20,400 daily cases for the last seven days, or a 25 percent increase in a week, while the United Kingdom has registered 16,400 daily infections, up 70 percent, according to the tally based on official sources.

Russian and UK officials blame the Delta strain first identified in India for the vast majority of new cases.

Driven by the situation in both countries, infections in Europe are rising again, now at the rate of 56,800 new cases per day -- 21 percent more than a week ago.

Between June 12-18, this measure had hit its lowest point across the continent since mid-September, when there were around 46,000 daily cases.

On the other hand the virus continues its retreat in several other countries among the worst hit since the pandemic reached Europe in January 2020.

Some 1,820 new daily cases have been recorded in France in the last seven days, or 23 percent fewer than the preceding week, 714 in Italy (35 percent fewer) and 650 in Germany (31 percent).

The number of people dying is starting to rise again across Europe, although more slowly, with nearly 1,100 deaths recorded daily, around eight percent higher over the previous week.

But these numbers are still well below those reached at the height of the pandemic when more than 5,700 were dying daily in January.

Russia accounts for more than half of the new deaths recorded in Europe, with nearly 600 deaths daily on average for the last seven days -- or 33 percent higher than the previous week.

In the UK, there has been a near-doubling of new deaths in two weeks, from around ten daily to 17 last week.

But the number is still far below levels during the peak in January when nearly 1,250 people died every day. (AFP)

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RTHK: Bidens to visit Florida to support rescue workers

US President Joe Biden will visit the site of a deadly apartment building collapse in southern Florida later this week, the White House announced on Tuesday, as rescuers scoured the wreckage in an increasingly desperate search for survivors.

A 12-story oceanfront condominium in Surfside, a neighbourhood near Miami, pancaked into rubble in the early hours of Thursday last week, with the official death toll of 11 expected to rise as hope dwindles for 150 people still unaccounted for.

The White House said the president would visit the site with First Lady Jill Biden on Thursday to ensure state and local officials have everything they need for the rescue effort.

"They want to thank the heroic first responders, search-and-rescue teams, and everyone who's been working tirelessly around the clock," said press secretary Jen Psaki.

The first couple also wants to "meet with the families who have been forced to endure this terrible tragedy, waiting in anguish and heartbreak for word of their loved ones, to offer them comfort as search and rescue efforts continue," she said.

Residents in the part of Champlain Towers South that remained intact reported being awakened around 1:30 am (1330 HKT) on Thursday by what sounded like cracks of thunder that shook their rooms.

Rescuers who arrived in the moments after the tower came down helped evacuate dozens of residents, and pulled one teenage boy alive from the rubble.

But authorities have faced mounting anger in the days since the disaster from friends and family who have received no further news of loved ones feared trapped beneath the smoking wreckage.

Underscoring the slow pace of progress in the "painstaking, grueling" search for survivors, Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said Tuesday that the death toll had not risen overnight from 11.

Israeli and Mexican engineers and search-and-rescue specialists have joined an army of American workers at the scene, backed by cranes and sniffer dogs.

"There are currently 210 people working on the site. The urban search and rescue team has been augmented by teams from all over the state and all over the world," Levine Cava said.

"They are working throughout inclement weather. They are working as hard as they ever have."

The outlook has nevertheless grown increasingly grim, with no one emerging alive from the rubble in the aftermath.

Experts are looking at possible pre-existing critical flaws in the structure of the apartment tower.

An October 2018 report released by city officials late Friday revealed fears of "major structural damage" in the complex, from the concrete slab under the pool deck to the columns and beams in the parking garage.

Jean Wodnicki, the chair of the condo association, described "accelerating" damage to the building since then, in a letter to residents in April.

Repairs had been set to begin soon in the 40-year-old building -- but did not come soon enough.

Biden said Sunday his administration would coordinate with local officials and was "ready to provide any support or assistance that is needed."

"This is an unimaginably difficult time for the families enduring this tragedy," he said in a statement. (AFP)

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RTHK: Beijing challenges US multilateralism call at G20

The United States led calls at a G20 meeting on Tuesday for greater global cooperation in light of the coronavirus crisis as China insisted that multilateralism should not just be a slogan.

Italy welcomed foreign ministers of the Group of 20 major economies to the southern city of Matera for their first in-person talks since the start of the pandemic that has claimed nearly four million lives worldwide.

In a sharp reversal in tone from the previous US administration, Secretary of State Antony Blinken called for empowering multilateral institutions to defeat Covid-19, tackle the widening global inequality and step up the battle to arrest climate change.

"On these challenges and many others, a strong multilateral system is essential," said Blinken, closing a week-long trip to Europe.

"That's why the United States is committed to supporting effective and accountable multilateral institutions," he said.

"We must deliver results -- for our countries, our people, and the world."

Blinken called for efforts to "strengthen global health security moving forward so we can detect, prevent and respond better to future health emergencies."

He pointed to the US promise of US$2 billion for Covax, the UN-backed initiative that aims to vaccinate low-income countries, and President Joe Biden's pledge to manufacture and donate 500 million Pfizer doses in addition to 80 million doses from US stocks.

Biden has also loosened some export restrictions and patents, a reversal from his predecessor Donald Trump's "America First" philosophy that has upset the pharmaceutical industry.

Biden's vaccine initiative -- and Blinken's readiness to show up to meetings -- are designed in part to show strong US leadership in the face of a rising China, whose growing assertiveness has been identified by the new US administration as the top global challenge.

Appearing virtually at the Matera meeting, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi did not name the United States but suggested ulterior motives in the rhetoric as he called on the G20 to show "true multilateralism".

"China calls on able countries to avoid export restrictions or excessive hoarding" of vaccines, Wang said.

"Multilateralism is not a high-sounding slogan, and it cannot become gift-wrapping for the implementation of unilateral action," he said.

Wang said that Beijing has exported 450 million doses. But despite quick delivery, the Chinese-made Sinovac vaccine has come under scrutiny.

Chile, which has relied heavily on Sinovac, is considering introducing a third dose to protect against new variants, while Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi recently said Sinovac was "shown to be inadequate".

The Matera talks will prepare for a G20 leaders' meeting in October in Rome that is expected to see Biden's first summit with President Xi Jinping.

As Covid worries ease across the West, the vast majority of vaccine doses have gone into the arms of people in wealthy nations or China.

Foreign Minister Christophe Lutundula of the Democratic Republic of Congo, participating as part of an Italian push to involve African nations in G20 talks, warned that coronavirus was far from over on his continent and called for urgent measures.

In addition to immediate aid, he called for the G20 to back the capacity of developing countries to produce vaccines themselves and to help launch a continent-wide agency to encourage scientific cooperation.

The G20 must help "concretely and in detail so we move beyond speeches to urgent action on the ground," he said.

Such cooperation "will help African countries counter the shock of Covid and revive their economies for the greater good of the international community", he said.

Italian Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio, the event host, announced a Matera declaration on food security.

"It's a concrete document, an invitation to act for the whole international community," he said, stressing that 850 million people worldwide suffered from famine. (AFP)

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Last updated: 2021-06-30 HKT 03:56

This story has been published on: 2021-06-29. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Sustainable mining of raw materials from thermal springs in Chile

Mineral resources from Chile are of great importance to Germany. According to statistics from the World Bank, thousands of tons of valuable minerals are imported from the South American country every year, including raw materials for lithium-ion batteries. But their extraction causes ecological and social problems: "The use of the limited freshwater resources in northern Chile for mining regularly fuels conflicts with the local population," says Professor Thomas Kohl from KIT's Institute of Applied Geosciences (AGW). "Northern Chile is one of the driest regions on earth, but has extensive geothermal resources. With a novel type of plant, it is not only possible to generate electricity in a climate-friendly way, but also to extract drinking water and even mineral resources at the same time." The AGW team of BrineMine, a German-Chilean research project, is developing the necessary strategies and technologies.

AGW has a long history of cooperation in the field of geothermal research in Chile. Its main partner is the Centro de Excelencia en Geotermia de Los Andes (CEGA). "BrineMine demonstrates how well the cooperation between Chilean and German institutions works," says Professor Diego Morata, director of CEGA. "Sustainable development, achieved by the combination of geothermal and green mining, can benefit Europe and the Andean region alike."

First Demonstration Plant on the Upper Rhine Graben

Part of the transdisciplinary research initiative is dedicated to the geochemical and geothermal potential of thermal wells in Chile in order to identify suitable sites. A data survey is being conducted to determine the raw materials potential with a focus on the thermal fields of the Atacama Desert. In addition, the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (ISE) takes part in the BrineMine project by developing the plant technology for later industrial use. It is based on a novel process chain: First, heat from the geothermal brine is used for energy recovery. The cooled liquid, which has a relatively low concentration, is then pre-concentrated by reverse osmosis; at the same time, drinking water is obtained. The brine concentrate is then further concentrated by membrane distillation until it is saturated. "The thermal energy required for the entire process can be covered directly from the excess heat of the power plant process," explains project manager Dr. Joachim Koschikowski from ISE. "We have already set up a demonstration plant in a geothermal power plant in the Upper Rhine Graben and successfully integrated key components into ongoing power plant operations."

Optimization of Processes for Raw Material Mining

Most of the process steps are based on proven methods, but they have never been combined in this way. Detailed research is required, because, for example, both concentration and cooling increase the risk of silicate deposits. "Conventional strategies for silicate removal would greatly impair the extraction of the resources. Without water treatment, the technical plant components would be damaged," explains Valentin Goldberg from KIT's AGW. The researchers found a viable solution by changing the pH value of the brine and adding divalent cations (e.g. calcium or magnesium). "Our silicate removal method is fast and effective. Most importantly, it has no negative impact on raw material extraction," Goldberg says. The researchers describe this new approach in the Geothermics journal.

Before the first plants can be installed in Chile, further details about the process need to be clarified. In addition, specific models for economic operation are also being developed.

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About BrineMine

BrineMine was initiated in 2019 by Professor Thomas Kohl and Dr. Sebastian Held. The German-Chilean research consortium is coordinated by the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (ISE). Other project partners besides KIT are the companies Geothermie Neubrandenburg (GTN) and SolarSpring membrane solutions in Germany as well as Fraunhofer Chile and Centro de Excelencia en Geotermia de Los Andes (CEGA) in Chile. The Federal Ministry of Education and Research is funding the project with approx. EUR 1.5 million. The great interest of the Chilean industry in BrineMine became evident at a webinar hosted by the German-Chilean Chamber of Industry and Commerce, which was attended by hundreds of participants. The Chilean Ministry of Energy also provides support for the project.

Recording of webinar: https:/ / ecominingconcepts. cl/ de/ summary-brinemine-sustainable-mineral-and-fresh-water-extraction-from-geothermal-brines-in-chile

More information about BrineMine: https:/ / geothermics. agw. kit. edu/ brinemine. php https:/ / www. bmbf-client. de/ projekte/ brinemine

Original publications

Spitzmuller, L., Goldberg, V., Held, S., Grimmer, J. C., Winter, D., Genovese, M., Koschikowski, J,. and Kohl, T. (2021): Selective silica removal in geothermal fluids: Implications for applications for geothermal power plant operation and mineral extraction, Geothermics. https:/ / doi. org/ 10. 1016/ j. geothermics. 2021. 102141

Goldberg, V., Winter, D., Nitschke, F., Rath, M., Held, S., Spitzmuller, L., Budach, I., Pavez, M., Morata, D., Koschikowski J. and Kohl, T. (2021). The potential of raw material extraction from thermal brines-Successful milestones of the BrineMine project, Oil gas, DOI 10.19225/210306 https:/ / geothermics. agw. kit. edu/ downloads/ OGA_001_21_026-033_Goldberg_et_al_HP-Liz. pdf

Details about the KIT Energy Center: https:/ / www. energy. kit. edu/ index. php

Contact for this press release:

Dr Martin Heidelberger, Editor/Press Officer, Phone: +49 721 608-41169, E-mail: martin.heidelberger@kit.edu

Being "The Research University in the Helmholtz Association", KIT creates and imparts knowledge for the society and the environment. It is the objective to make significant contributions to the global challenges in the fields of energy, mobility, and information. For this, about 9,600 employees cooperate in a broad range of disciplines in natural sciences, engineering sciences, economics, and the humanities and social sciences. KIT prepares its 23,300 students for responsible tasks in society, industry, and science by offering research-based study programs. Innovation efforts at KIT build a bridge between important scientific findings and their application for the benefit of society, economic prosperity, and the preservation of our natural basis of life. KIT is one of the German universities of excellence.

This story has been published on: 2021-06-29. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
EORTC and Pierre Fabre partner to address treatment gap for stage 2 melanoma patients

Brussels, Belgium; Castres, France (29 June 2021) - European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) and Pierre Fabre today announced a strategic partnership in support of patients with resected Stage 2 BRAF-mutant melanoma. The partnership includes the planning, design and execution of a large Phase 3 study investigating the use of BRAF and MEK targeted therapies to reduce the risk of relapse in this patient population, currently under approval with authorities.

"Sadly, still today too many patients with Stage 2 melanoma have their cancer come back, even after their tumour is removed. Further understanding how effective treatments can have an impact on recurrence is essential," said Dr Denis Lacombe, CEO of EORTC. "We are pleased to collaborate with Pierre Fabre who bring strong heritage and expertise in this therapeutic area, to make a true difference to people living with Stage 2 melanoma."

"Collaboration between Pierre Fabre and EORTC is the perfect match between our medical and clinical capabilities and a leading global network in oncology research. Our strong complementary expertise have potential to transform patient care in melanoma", said Dr Deborah Szafir, EVP, Head of Medical and Patient Centricity Division at Pierre Fabre. "Our strategic partnership on a pioneering Phase 3 study confirms Pierre Fabre's R&D commitment to oncology and particularly in skin cancers. Through our growing expertise in BRAF and MEK inhibitors, we aim to strengthen our support for patients with skin cancers."

Pierre Fabre has a long-standing commitment to the melanoma community and takes a unique holistic approach to skin health through combined expertise in oncology, dermatology, and dermo-cosmetics. EORTC, a network uniting 2,800 clinical cancer research experts across the globe, shares Pierre Fabre's commitment to improving the standard of cancer treatment for patients.

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About Melanoma

Melanoma develops when unrepaired DNA damage to skin cells triggers mutations that may lead them to multiply and form malignant tumours.1 There are about 324,000 new cases of melanoma diagnosed worldwide each year, approximately half of which have BRAF mutations, a key target in the treatment of metastatic melanoma.2,3,4 By 2025, cases are expected to increase to over 340,000.5

About EORTC

European Organisation for the Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) is an academic clinical research organisation which unites clinical cancer research experts across the globe to define better treatments for cancer patients to prolong survival and improve quality of life. Both international and multidisciplinary, EORTC's Network comprises over 2800 collaborators involved in cancer treatment and research in more than 740 institutions across 30 countries. Conducting translational research, phase 2 and 3 trials, EORTC offers an integrated approach to therapeutic strategies and quality of life. EORTC Headquarters, a unique international clinical research infrastructure, is based in Brussels, Belgium, from where its various activities are coordinated and run.

For further information, please visit the EORTC website: http://www. eortc. org

About Pierre Fabre Oncology

The Pierre Fabre group has been committed for more than 3 decades to improve the lives of patients with cancers for which there are limited treatment options. Oncology is one of Pierre Fabre's main R&D and commercial priorities, with a focus on targeted therapies, biotherapies and immuno-oncology. The company is actively working in a variety of cancer types, including melanoma, colorectal cancer, lung cancer and breast cancer as well as pre-cancerous conditions including actinic keratosis. In the specific area of melanoma, Pierre Fabre combines a strong heritage and expertise in dermatology and dermo-cosmetics, coupled with expertise and global capabilities in oncology, to bring a differentiated offering to patients and the healthcare community.

About Pierre Fabre

Pierre Fabre is the 2nd largest dermo-cosmetics laboratory in the world, the 2nd largest private French pharmaceutical group and the market leader in France for products sold over the counter in pharmacies. Its portfolio ranges across several medical franchises and international brands, including Pierre Fabre Oncology, Pierre Fabre Dermatology, Eau Thermale Avene, Klorane, Ducray, Rene Furterer, A-Derma, Naturactive and Pierre Fabre Oral Care.

In 2020, Pierre Fabre generated 2.3 billion in revenues, 65% of which came from international sales.

Established in the South-West area of France since its creation, and manufacturing over 95% of its products in France, the Group employs some 10,000 people worldwide. Its products are distributed in about 130 countries.

Pierre Fabre is 86%-owned by the Pierre Fabre Foundation, a government-recognised public-interest foundation, and secondarily by its own employees through an international employee stock ownership plan.

In 2020, Ecocert Environment assessed the Group's corporate social and environmental responsibility approach in accordance with the ISO 26000 sustainable development standard for the 2nd consecutive year and confirmed its "Excellence" level.

For further information, please visit the Pierre Fabre website at http://www. pierre-fabre. com @PierreFabre.

References

[1] Neoplasma. 2016;63(4):510-7. doi: 10.4149/neo_2016_403.

[2] American Cancer Society. What Causes Melanoma Skin Cancer. Available at: https:/ / www. cancer. org/ cancer/ melanoma-skin-cancer/ causes-risks-prevention/ what-causes. html . Accessed June 2021.

[3] International Agency for Research on Cancer. Melanoma of skin. Available at: https:/ / gco. iarc. fr/ today/ data/ factsheets/ cancers/ 16-Melanoma-of-skin-fact-sheet. pdf . Accessed June 2021.

[4] Klein O, et al. Eur J Cancer 2013;49:1073-1079.

[5] Melanoma UK. 2020 Melanoma Skin Cancer Report. Available at: https:/ / www. melanomauk. org. uk/ 2020-melanoma-skin-cancer-report . Accessed June 2021.

This story has been published on: 2021-06-29. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Research on MRI Biomarkers may aid in evaluating treatments for peripheral nerve disease

DETROIT - Jun Li, M.D., Ph.D., professor and chair of the Department of Neurology at the Wayne State University School of Medicine, recently received a $246,172 R-21 grant from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop new strategies for assessing appropriate treatments of peripheral nerve diseases.

Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease (CMT) is one of the most common inherited peripheral nerve diseases, affecting nearly 126,000 people in the United States and 2.6 million people worldwide, according to the NIH. CMT causes progressive muscle weakness, painful foot deformities and difficulty walking. As the disease progresses, weakness and muscle atrophy occur in the hands, creating difficulty with fine motor skills.

According to Li, the goal of the project is to advance the study of disease progression of CMT with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) biomarkers in hopes of expanding basic research to clinical trial readiness.

"Although there are promising treatments for CMT, evaluations of potential treatments are hindered by a lack of responsive biomarkers," said Li. "Our research aims to focus on nerve MRI methods that we have developed to offer important information and improve our ability to monitor disease progression in patients through MRI-based biomarkers of CMT."

Through the nerve MRI methods that Li and his research team have developed, they can directly image the pathology of interest within nerves themselves, which will offer complementary information and improve the ability to monitor disease progression in patients with CMT.

"Published results from our labs indicate that sciatic nerve magnetization transfer ratios (MTR), which are sensitive to myelin content changes from dysmyelination and axonal loss, relate to disability across CMT subtypes," said Li. "Our additional preliminary data indicate that nerve MTRs are responsive to disease progression."

The research team hopes these studies will provide them with new methods to better evaluate potential treatments for CMT, ultimately moving them to clinical trials more quickly.

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Richard Dortch, Ph.D., associate professor of imaging research at the Barrow Neurological Institute at Dignity Health St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix, is the project's co-principal investigator.

The project number for this National Institutes of Health award is 1R21TR003312-01A1. For more information, visit https:/ / reporter. nih. gov/ search/ 6aKhoI0mwEycTh9IlKrkOg/ project-details/ 10187113 .

About Wayne State University

Wayne State University is one of the nation's pre-eminent public research universities in an urban setting. Through its multidisciplinary approach to research and education, and its ongoing collaboration with government, industry and other institutions, the university seeks to enhance economic growth and improve the quality of life in the city of Detroit, state of Michigan and throughout the world. For more information about research at Wayne State University, visit research.wayne.edu.

This story has been published on: 2021-06-29. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
China has been the biggest auto market in the world for many years and thanks to many favorable policies, Chinas new energy vehicle (NEV) and intelligent and connected vehicle segments also saw significant progress in the past several years. By virtue of their rapid development, NEVs and smart vehicles have become the development engine of Chinas automotive industry, giving the industry important opportunities.

And also, driven by the countrys carbon peak and carbon neutrality goals, along with other plans in the said emerging segments, Chinas auto industry will definitely have a better development in the coming years.

Several days ago, Wang Chuanfu, chairman and president of BYD Company, predicted that NEV sales in the biggest auto market will gain a share of 70% among all new vehicles sold in 2030, and that Chinese auto brands have taken the lead over foreign brands in technologies.

Photo credit: GWM

Wei Jianjun, chairman of Great Wall Motor (GWM), hold similar opinion. In NEV segment, Chinas vehicles have much more advanced technologies while Chinese brands have caught up with, or even outperformed foreign brands in intelligent vehicle segment. Chinas auto industry has ushered in a better era, the executive said at the companys 2025 strategy launching ceremony.

But Chinese auto brands must enhance their advantages within 3 to 5 years if they want to surpass foreign brands in true sense and local auto brands only have one chance to surpass, the executive added.

Wei Jianjun delivering a speech at the strategy launching conference; photo credit: GWM

For all these opportunities, GWM want to grasp them to strengthen its competitiveness and be a leader in emerging segments. Thus, the top SUV and pickup manufacturer in China set up an annual sales target of 4 million vehicles for 2025, and new energy vehicle (NEV) sales will account for 80% of its annual sales. In 2025, the automaker expects its revenues will be RMB 600 billion ($92.858 billion) and in the next five years, its cumulative R&D investment will be up to RMB 100 billion ($15.476 billion).

GWMs annual sales have surpassed 1 million vehicles for 5 consecutive years. Even in 2020 when COVID-19 hit the industry hard, the automakers annual sales increased by 4.8% to 1,111,598 vehicles. Last year, its achieved overall revenue of RMB103.283 billion.

In the coming years, GWM will carry out comprehensive and thorough innovation and transformation based on four strategic positions, including global layout, big investment in research and development, great enterprise transformation and large-scale user operation, to build sustainable competitiveness and accelerate the transformation to a global technology-driven mobility company.

Integrated Pack Technology; photo credit: GWM

Apart from expanding its R&D, production and sales footprint across the world, GWM also makes continuous efforts in branding, technology and talents. As part of its 2025 strategy, the company will invest a total of RMB 100 billion in R&D in the coming 5 five years to strengthen technology advantages and offer more environment-friendly, smarter and safer products. For this goal, GWM will attract talents all over the world. By 2023, it aims to have 30,000 R&D staff, 10,000 of which will work on software development. Besides, GWM aims to become carbon neutral in 2045.

For all its six brands, GWM Pickup, positioned as a pickup leader, aims to be one of the TOP 3 pickup makers around the world; Haval, as a top SUV maker, will continue to work on economical SUV models; WEY, as a next-generation smart vehicle brand, is committed to offer smart user experience; ORA, as a brand the female likes most, will focus more on urban mobility; Tank expects to be NO.1 off-road vehicle brand worldwide; Shalong, as a luxury and smart BEV brand, aims to create superlative ride experience.

In terms of products, the first product of Shalong will start sales in 2022 while its ORA brand aims to be the best-selling NEV brand in 2023 with global sales over 1 million vehicles.

Currently, GWMs development cycle can be as short as 11 months. In this year, GWM will launch more than 10 new models, which will increase to more than 60 models in 2023 with an annual production and sales of 2.8 million vehicles. By 2025, GWM will offer more than 50 NEV models.

As for production, via the adjustment of energy structure and the application of low-carbon process, GWM will have its first zero-carbon factory and establish its own circulatory and renewable system for automotive supply chain to maximize economic, environmental, and social benefits.

Wei Jianjun pointed out that the next five years are vital for auto industrys transformation and Great Wall Motor is well prepared to accelerate its pace in the new track.
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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Update: 29-06-2021 | 12:19:27

On the afternoon of June 28, provincial Fatherland Front Committee (FFC) held a conference to announce provincial People's Committees Decision No. 1606/QD-UBND dated June 21, 2021 on promulgating the regulation for receiving, managing, distributing and using money and goods mobilized, voluntarily contributed to Covid-19 prevention and control at provincial Exhibition and Convention Center. The event was attended by Vo Van Minh, Permanent Vice-Secretary of provincial Party Committee, Chairman of provincial People's Council; Nguyen Van Loc, member of provincial Party Standing Committee, Head of provincial Party Committees Mass Mobilization Commission, Chairman of provincial FFC.

Joining hands in pandemic prevention and control

Speaking at the conference, Mr. Loc said that in response to the All people fight against COVID-19 call of the Presidium of the Vietnam Fatherland Front Central Committee, provincial Fatherland Front Committee has also launched the call of "All people fight against COVID-19" and received enthusiastic response from many businesses, agencies, organizations and individuals. As of June 28, individuals, organizations and businesses in and out of the province supported and registered to support VND 250 billion in cash and kind to the local fight against COVID-19.

Leader of Becamex IDC presents a symbolic board in support of Covid-19 testing for 1 million people, worth about VND 70 billion to provincial FFC

He acknowledged, thanked and praised contributions by individuals, organizations and enterprises to the local Covid-19 prevention and control. So far, provincial FFCs Relief Committee has promptly allocated and supported VND14.25 billion from organizations and individuals for localities with Covid-19 cases in the province to carry out the fight against the pandemic.

With all the goods received, provincial FFCs Relief Committee has also coordinated with provincial Red Cross to allocate them to isolation areas and hospitals in order to support people and anti-Covid-19 forces. District-level FFCs and member organizations have also organized many activities in line with their functions and tasks, joining hands with the province to well implement the local COVID-19 prevention and control. Accordingly, the FFCs of districts, towns and cities in the province have also received more than VND 3.22 billion along with many goods for the fight against the pandemic, including necessities, medical supplies, antiseptic water, face masks, rice, noodlesfor quarantine areas; mobilized the owners of the local lodging facilities to reduce rental charges for workers affected by the epidemic... with a total value of more than VND 776 million.

Further calling for resources to support fight against pandemic

In order to promptly organize the distribution of goods and money voluntarily contributed to the fight against COVID-19 in accordance with the law, provincial People's Committee, on June 21, issued the Regulation on receipt, management, distribution and use of money and goods mobilized and voluntarily contributed to Covid-19 prevention and control under provincial People's Committees Decision No. 1606/QDUBND dated June 21, 2021.

According to this regulation, money and goods donated by organizations and individuals to the Relief Fund for Covid-19 prevention and control will be used to purchase Covid-19 vaccines, ventilators and medical supplies for Covid-19 prevention and treatment; support isolation areas and those who directly get involved in Covid-19 prevention and control, but have difficult circumstances (medical staff, armed forces, members of anti-Covid-19 Steering Committees at all levels, community anti-Covid-19 groups). Provincial FFC has also asked for provincial Party Committees opinion in case of visiting and supporting localities affected by Covid-19 pandemic and transferring money to the Vietnam Fatherland Front Central Committee (at request).

He added that Covid-19 pandemic is still happening very complicatedly with quick and dangerous spreading. The entire Party, people and army are still continuing acting drastically in the spirit of "fighting the epidemic like fighting the enemy", well implementing the "dual goals" of pandemic prevention-control and socio-economic development. Frontline anti-Covid forces such as medical staff, army-police forces, community anti-Covid-19 groups, and volunteers... are working very hard with dangers.

In the face of the situation, provincial FFC has continued calling for joint efforts, material and spiritual support of the whole province to support the local Covid-19 prevention and control. Provincial FFC committed that all the contributions will be used for the right subjects, for the right purposes, in a timely and complete manner, contributing to the highest efficiency in the local fight against the pandemic.

At the conference, the province awarded the certificates of merit to more than 30 units and businesses for their contributions to the local Covid-19 prevention and control fund. Typically, Becamex IDC Corporation supported Covid-19 testing worth about VND 70 billion for 1 million people. Thai Binh Investment Joint Stock Company, provincial Labor Union, Binh Duong Business and Development Joint Stock Company, Phat Dat Real Estate Development Joint Stock Company also nearly donated VND20billion, VND7.2 billion, donated VND2billion, VND2 billion...to the fund, respectively. Thus, as of June 28, the total amount of donations and registrations to support the local Covid-19 prevention and control was more than VND250 billion.

Reported by Hong Thuan-Translated by K.T
China urges Japan to treat "comfort women" issue in honest, responsible manner

Xinhua) 08:22, June 29, 2021

Photo taken on Oct. 15, 2020 shows a "comfort women" statue in Berlin, capital of Germany. The statue was built to commemorate the more than 200,000 girls and women from 14 countries and regions, so-called "comfort women," who were sexually enslaved by the Japanese military during World War II. (Xinhua/Shan Yuqi)

UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women mentioned in her report that during World War II, the Japanese troops conducted mass rape in Nanjing of China, and forcibly recruited "comfort women" in many countries.

The South Korean representative also expressed concern over the "comfort women" issue, saying that stigmatizing the victims and letting the perpetrators go unpunished are all harming the victims again and will aggravate their suffering.

GENEVA, June 28 (Xinhua) -- China on Monday urged Japan to treat the "comfort women" issue left over from history in an honest and responsible manner at the ongoing 47th session of the UN Human Rights Council.

China also urged Japan to honestly face up to and reflect on its history of aggression, stop denying and beautifying that part of history, and observe its international human rights obligations.

Speaking at the Interactive Dialogue with the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, Jiang Duan, minister of the Chinese mission to the United Nations in Geneva, said that the "comfort women" issue is an irrefutable historical fact that cannot be denied.

During Monday's Interactive Dialogue, Dubravka Simonovic, UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, said her thematic report was on rape as a grave, systematic and widespread human rights violation, with a focus on States' responsibility to prevent it, and to change the prevalent rape culture, the culture of impunity for perpetrators, and stigmatization and lack of access to justice for victims.

The Special Rapporteur also mentioned in her report that during World War II, the Japanese troops conducted mass rape in Nanjing of China, and forcibly recruited "comfort women" in many countries.

"However, to this day, many in Japan are trying to deny the horrifying crimes committed by the Japanese militarist aggressors, including the Nanjing Massacre and forced recruitment of 'comfort women', in an attempt to deny and even beautify the history of aggression," Jiang said.

"This is a serious violation of human rights of the people in victimized countries and will surely be condemned by justice and conscience," he added.

At Monday's Interactive Dialogue, the South Korean representative also expressed concern over the "comfort women" issue, saying that stigmatizing the victims and letting the perpetrators go unpunished are all harming the victims again and will aggravate their suffering.

Photo taken on Dec. 13, 2019 shows the national memorial ceremony for the Nanjing Massacre victims at the Memorial Hall of the Victims of the Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders in Nanjing, capital of east China's Jiangsu Province. (Xinhua/Li Xiang)

(Web editor: Shi Xi, Du Mingming)
National spirit behind China's success in fighting COVID-19, poverty

Xinhua) 08:30, June 29, 2021

BEIJING, June 28 (Xinhua) -- In the run-up to its centenary this year, the Communist Party of China (CPC) demonstrated its exemplary governance capability by leading the Chinese people in efficiently containing the COVID-19 outbreak and eliminating absolute poverty in the world's most populous country.

The national spirit behind both the victory over poverty and the strategic outcomes of COVID-19 control offers a glimpse into the Party's strong leadership and the nation's solidarity and strength.

Members of a military medical team head for Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province, Jan. 26, 2020. (Xinhua/Cheng Min)

SPIRIT OF FIGHTING COVID-19

In early 2020, a previously unknown virus wreaked havoc in Hubei Province, prompting the Chinese government to take unprecedented measures to curb its rapid spread, including sealing off the hardest-hit provincial capital, Wuhan.

Defying the gloomy predictions of many foreign observers, China in just three months reduced new cases from thousands each day to zero. The Chinese leadership later attributed the success to the people's fighting spirit, which puts people's lives first and values nationwide solidarity, sacrifice, a respect for science, and a sense of purpose for humanity.

China has shown strong solidarity throughout the battle. With a mature mobilization system, China ensured that even villagers in remote mountains were aware that everyone must act as one to defeat the virus. Hundreds of millions of Chinese people answered the government's call to wear masks, stay at home and forego festive activities during the Spring Festival, the most important holiday of the year for Chinese people. Public cooperation helped China build a people's "Great Wall" against the virus.

Medical staff and resources were poured into the worst-affected cities. At the peak of the epidemic, one in 10 intensive care medics in China was working in Wuhan. Backing the nationwide mobilization was science. China swiftly erected makeshift hospitals, set up quarantine facilities and made mask-wearing compulsory. Medical treatment, rapid contact tracking and mass nucleic acid testing all contributed to the efficient control of the epidemic in a short period of time in China.

Openness and internationalism have also been features of China's fight against COVID-19 since the very beginning. Often neglected by China critics is the fact that China began to regularly update the World Health Organization and relevant countries on the new disease as early as Jan. 3, 2020.

Through the course of its intensive and wide-ranging emergency humanitarian aid, China has supplied more than 350 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines abroad, including donations to more than 80 countries.

In retrospect, the country's national spirit in combating COVID-19 has underlined the CPC's inherent people-centered philosophy, along with a globalist touch fitting into China's call for the construction of a global community with a shared future.

Poverty relief assistants Liu Ying (1st L) and He Changle (2nd L), and village officials help carry melons planted by villagers in Dongqin Village, Congjiang County of southwest China's Guizhou Province, Nov. 11, 2020. (Xinhua/Yang Wenbin)

POVERTY ALLEVIATION SPIRIT

In early 2021, China announced that it had eliminated absolute poverty, after lifting its remaining 98.99 million rural residents out of poverty over the past eight years.

The announcement marked a complete victory in China's long-running campaign to end poverty. Since the late 1970s, China has lifted more than 770 million rural residents out of poverty due to continuous poverty relief efforts.

The great cause has contributed to the powerful national spirit, which also encompasses unity, innovation, bravery, dedication to the people, and targeted and practical approaches to challenges.

The spirit of the Chinese people has helped boost national morale and pool wisdom to tackle poverty in the country's poorest areas, helping China realize its goal on schedule despite the headwinds of the pandemic.

The accomplishment is a further testament to the CPC's commitment to the people. By positioning the fight against poverty as a top policy goal, the CPC has again shown that it is striving to ensure no disadvantaged groups are left behind in China's economic take-off.

Flexibility and ingenuity were highlighted in the process. China adopted a targeted poverty-relief approach and local authorities rolled out specific anti-poverty measures to suit local conditions. China has also offered to share its experience with other countries fighting poverty.

China's national spirit will continue to inspire Chinese people in their pursuit of better lives and the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.

(Web editor: Guo Wenrui, Du Mingming)
Baihetan hydropower station begins operation

Xinhua) 08:32, June 29, 2021

Aerial photo taken on June 27, 2021 shows the dam of Baihetan hydropower station in southwest China. Baihetan hydropower station, the world's second largest in terms of total installed capacity, was officially put into use in southwest China, with two generating units in operation on Monday. (Xinhua/Jiang Wenyao)

KUNMING/CHENGDU, June 28 (Xinhua) -- The first two generating units of the world's largest hydropower station under construction was put into operation on Monday, contributing to the country's green development and carbon-neutrality goals.

The Baihetan hydropower station is located on the Jinsha River, the upper section of the Yangtze River in southwest China, with an investment of 220 billion yuan (about 34.07 billion U.S. dollars).

With construction started in 2017, the hydropower station, which transmits rich power resources in the west to energy-consuming regions in east China, marks a major step in the country's utilization of clean energy.

Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday sent a letter to the station, offering his congratulations on the launch of operations of its first two generating units.

As a major project in China's west-east power transmission program, the hydropower station is the largest and most technically challenging hydropower project under construction in the current world, said Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission.

He expressed the hope that all builders and relevant parties would advance the station's follow-up work, and make greater contributions to achieving the country's carbon-peak and carbon-neutrality goals and promoting the comprehensive green transformation of economic and social development.

The hydropower station, which straddles the provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan, will have a total installed capacity of 16 million kilowatts. It will be equipped with 16 hydro-generating units, each with a capacity of 1 million kilowatts, the largest single-unit capacity in the world.

In the station's underground powerhouse, the first two such units are running steadily. All units are scheduled to be operational in July 2022 and will generate an average of more than 62.4 billion kWh of electricity every year, according to the China Three Gorges Corporation (CTGC), which built the station.

Upon completion, Baihetan will become the world's second-largest hydropower station in terms of total installed capacity, second only to the Three Gorges Dam project in the central province of Hubei.

When in full operation, the Baihetan project is expected to save approximately 19.68 million tonnes of standard coal and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 51.6 million tonnes, sulfur dioxide by 170,000 tonnes, and nitrogen oxides by 150,000 tonnes annually.

In recent years, China has accelerated the low-carbon transformation of its energy consumption structure.

According to a white paper on China's energy development, in 2019, the country's consumption of clean energy such as natural gas, hydropower, nuclear power, and wind power accounted for 23.4 percent of its total energy consumption, an increase of 8.9 percentage points over 2012.

The construction of the project has overcome several technical difficulties.

"The generator rotor -- a core component of the units -- weighs 1,955 tonnes, and can spin at 111 revolutions per minute and still remain stable, which ensures the long-term safe operation of the units," said Chen Hao, an engineer with the CTGC.

The Baihetan Dam is an ultra-high double-curvature arch dam with a maximum height of 289 meters and an arc length of 709 meters.

"All the core technologies of the Baihetan hydropower station are independently developed. The operation of the first generating units marks a breakthrough in China's construction of large-scale hydropower projects," said Lei Mingshan, chairman of the CTGC.

(Web editor: Shi Xi, Hongyu)
UNDERSTAND CHINA: Why is the socialist system so successful?

People's Daily Online) 14:00, June 29, 2021

It's hard to truly and fully understand a country without first appreciating the nature of its own political system and unique path towards development. On this topic, People's Daily Online has got you covered with our series of multi-faceted and in-depth conversations with foreign and domestic thought leaders on the subject of domestic and international politics, discussions that can hopefully help to clear some of the air between China and those who may still have a false impression of the country and its people.

In this episode, the first person we spoke to was Stephen Perry, chairman of Britain's 48 Group Club. On Dec. 18, 2018, Perry was awarded with a China Reform Friendship Medal in Beijing during a conference marking the 40th anniversary of China's reform and opening-up, honoring the dedication and effort made by both him and his father, founder of the London Export Corporation, to strengthening China-UK ties.

Next, we heard from Sun Jisheng, the current vice-president of China Foreign Affairs University (CFAU). Her research mainly focuses on international relations theory, particularly the role of language in diplomatic relations, in addition to Chinas foreign policy. The politics of discourse and culture, as well as the subject of American politics, have also been widely covered in her research.

Check out the full episode to see what insights Stephen Perry and Sun Jisheng exchanged with each other to grasp a better understanding of China.

(Web editor: He Zhuoyan, Du Mingming)
How China has achieved long-term social stability

Xinhua) 08:35, June 29, 2021

BEIJING, June 28 (Xinhua) -- In about one month, Guangdong Province, a manufacturing hub in south China, contained a recent resurgence of local COVID-19 infections, once again highlighting Chinese efficiency in tackling the raging virus.

The global pandemic is a new test for the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC), the world's largest political party with nearly 92 million members to celebrate its centenary. And the CPC made it. China took the lead in controlling the epidemic and restoring the economy.

Tourists visit the site of the Zunyi Meeting, a watershed event in the history of the Communist Party of China (CPC), in Zunyi City of southwest China's Guizhou Province, May 3, 2021. Official data showed 230 million domestic tourist trips were made during the five-day Labor Day holiday, up 119.7 percent from last year. (Xinhua/Tao Liang)

Since founding the New China, the CPC has led the nation to ride out various major internal and external tests and accomplish tremendous and historic achievements through the arduous and consistent efforts of all ethnic groups.

Rapid economic development and long-term social stability are described as two "miracles" that the CPC has realized over the past seven decades.

Before 1978, the country experienced major tests, such as the War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea (1950-1953) and the Tangshan earthquake in 1976. Since the reform and opening-up policy began over 40 years ago, China underwent the Asian financial crisis in 1997, the Yangtze River flood in 1998, the SARS epidemic in 2003, and the global financial crisis in 2008, among other hardships.

Under the strong leadership of the CPC, China surmounted all these difficulties and obstacles in its development process.

Besides eliminating absolute poverty, the country has tried various means to expand employment in recent years amid challenges both at home and abroad. From 2016 to 2020, China created more than 60 million jobs.

Students are seen during a spring campus job fair in Xining, capital of northwest China's Qinghai Province, March 24, 2021. (Xinhua/Zhang Long)

The guarantee for China's long-term social stability lies in socialism with Chinese characteristics, of which the leadership of the CPC is the defining feature and the biggest strength.

The picture of political and social stability, economic development, and ethnic unity in China are in sharp contrast to aggravating social divisions and political upheavals in some countries due to their systematic ills and selfish partisan interests.

Dedicated to serving the people wholeheartedly, the CPC has always put people's interests first, improving people's livelihoods while developing the economy, fighting poverty and epidemics, and sticking to the goal of prosperity for all. The country is to realize the goal of building a moderately prosperous society in all respects this year.

Besides income increases, Chinese citizens enjoy other tangible development benefits, such as access to better education, medical care, and a safe environment. For example, a "toilet revolution" in recent years has helped farmers bid farewell to shabby latrines and use flush toilets like city dwellers.

The CPC has attached importance to the relationship between reform, development, and stability. Everyone has an increasingly strong sense of gain, happiness, and security in China. Through endeavors such as advancing rule of law and building a "safe China," China has been widely recognized as one of the safest countries worldwide.

A farmer harvests wheat in the fields of Qianzhuanmen Village, Fucheng County, north China's Hebei Province, June 13, 2021. China reaped another bumper summer harvest in 2021.(Xinhua/Zhu Xudong)

Meanwhile, the country's improved social governance on the principle of collaboration, participation, and mutual interests has also contributed significantly to social stability.

The world is undergoing changes unseen in a century. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerates this evolution. Under such a complicated and uncertain international situation, the CPC will further advance reform, development, and stability to comprehensively build a modern socialist country.

As the CPC upholds and improves Chinese socialism and modernizes the state governance system and capacity, China will continue its miracle of long-term social stability, which is also a significant contribution to global development.

(Web editor: Guo Wenrui, Hongyu)
Chinese envoy visits Kaunda's funeral home, signs book of condolences

Xinhua) 09:01, June 29, 2021

Photo taken on June 28, 2021 shows the funeral home of Zambia's first President Kenneth Kaunda, in Lusaka, Zambia. Chinese Ambassador to Zambia Li Jie on Monday visited the funeral home of Zambia's first President Kenneth Kaunda and wrote a message of condolences. (Xinhua/Zhao Yupeng)

LUSAKA, June 28 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Ambassador to Zambia Li Jie on Monday visited the funeral home of Zambia's first President Kenneth Kaunda and wrote a message of condolences.

In his message, the Chinese envoy eulogized the former president whom he described as "an old friend, a good friend and a real friend of China".

"He has made outstanding contributions to the China-Zambia all-weather friendship," Li said.

According to him, the spirit of the former Zambian president will inspire the younger generation of Chinese and Zambians to work together to build a community of shared future for the peoples of the two countries.

Speaking later when he addressed the bereaved family, the Chinese envoy outlined the great contribution of Kaunda to the strengthening of the strong ties between the two countries.

He said the former president worked with the founding leaders of China in building strong relations which have culminated into miracle achievements such as the construction of the Tanzania-Zambia Railway (TAZARA) that connects Zambia and Tanzania.

He recalled that Zambia was the first country in the southern African region to establish diplomatic ties with China.

China, he said, will continue working with the Zambian side in ensuring that the relation established by Kaunda continues to blossom.

The Chinese envoy further said Kaunda's death was not only a loss to Zambia and Africa but also to China as well.

Kaunda's daughter, Cheswa, thanked the Chinese envoy for the visit, saying it shows the strong bilateral cooperation that exists between the two countries.

She said the family was touched that the Chinese government decided to join in the mourning of the former president.

Kaunda, 97, died on June 17, and the government has announced a 21-day mourning period. The body of the former president was currently on a countrywide tour of all provincial headquarters.

It will culminate in a state funeral that will be held on July 2 at the National Heroes Stadium in Lusaka, the country's capital.

Kaunda led Zambia from 1964 when the country got its independence from Britain to 1991.

(Web editor: Shi Xi, Hongyu)
Abuse of indigenous children in Canada horrific: Chinese envoy

Xinhua) 09:29, June 29, 2021

Video: Zhang Jun, China's permanent representative to the United Nations, says on June 28, 2021 that the recently exposed abuse of indigenous children in Canada at boarding schools that led to the loss of over 4,000 lives "is shocking and horrific." (Xinhua)

"We cannot let this dark page stay in history books only. We urge the Government of Canada to earnestly fulfill its responsibility to let the world know the truth, and to give justice to the victims, so as to prevent the recurrence of such tragedies," says Zhang Jun.

UNITED NATIONS, June 28 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese envoy said Monday that the recently exposed abuse of indigenous children in Canada at boarding schools that led to the loss of over 4,000 lives "is shocking and horrific."

Members of the Cowessess First Nation do a ceremonial smudge at the site of unmarked graves near a former indigenous residential school in Saskatchewan, Canada, on June 27, 2021. (Photo by Amru Salahuddien/Xinhua)

Addressing the UN Security Council open debate on children and armed conflict, Zhang Jun, China's permanent representative to the United Nations, said that "the protection of children is the responsibility of all states and governments, and should be the top priority under any circumstances."

"There is still a long way to go in this respect," the ambassador said.

"We cannot let this dark page stay in history books only. We urge the Government of Canada to earnestly fulfill its responsibility to let the world know the truth, and to give justice to the victims, so as to prevent the recurrence of such tragedies," said Zhang.

(Web editor: Shi Xi, Hongyu)
China enhances support for revolutionary martyrs' families

Xinhua) 09:44, June 29, 2021

BEIJING, June 28 (Xinhua) -- China's Ministry of Veterans Affairs has urged further enhancing the support for revolutionary martyrs' families to ensure they receive the benefits they deserve and foster a society where heroes are respected.

Local authorities should give priority to family members of revolutionary martyrs when formulating relevant support policies and strengthen registration and data collection in order to keep abreast of their situations, the ministry said in a statement.

It required more efforts to reach out to those family members on routine visits and establish a mechanism for regular contact with them to effectively address their problems in work and life.

It also called for social participation in furthering the support for such families and pragmatic efforts to boost their sense of honor and fulfilment.

(Web editor: Shi Xi, Hongyu)
Iran urges parties in Vienna talks to "make decisions" on revival of nuke deal

Xinhua) 10:30, June 29, 2021

TEHRAN, June 28 (Xinhua) -- The Iranian spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Monday urged the parties in the Vienna talks to make their decisions on the revival of the 2015 nuclear deal, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

"We have made and announced the decisions we should have made, and now it is the turn of the parties (in Vienna talks) to make their own decisions," Saeed Khatibzadeh said in his weekly press conference.

Asked if the agreement on the JCPOA has been postponed to the next Iranian government, Khatibzadeh said "it does not matter in which government and within what time span the agreement is reached."

Iran and the P4+1, namely Britain, China, France, Russia and Germany, with the United States indirectly involved, have had six rounds of negotiations in Austrian capital Vienna since April aimed at reviving the JCPOA.

Despite progresses in the negotiations, the parties have announced that some "serious" differences have not been bridged.

At the end of the latest round of talks, the Iranian senior nuclear negotiator, Abbas Araqchi, said that it was the time for the parties to make their "decisions" over the remaining issues.

The U.S. government under former President Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA in May 2018 and unilaterally reimposed sanctions on Iran. In response, Iran gradually stopped implementing parts of its commitments to the agreement from May 2019.

(Web editor: Guo Wenrui, Hongyu)
Xi says China, Russia will firmly move ties forward

Xinhua) 10:59, June 29, 2021

Aerial photo taken on Feb. 21, 2021 shows a China-Europe freight train departing from Chengdu International Railway Port in Chengdu, southwest China's Sichuan Province. The first China-Europe freight train linking Chengdu and Russia's St. Petersburg departed from Chengdu on Feb. 21. (Chengdu International Railway Port Administrative Committee/Handout via Xinhua)

BEIJING, June 28 (Xinhua) -- Under the guidance of the China-Russia Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation, the two countries will continue to make concerted efforts and firmly move forward despite difficulties and obstacles ahead, Chinese President Xi Jinping said on Monday.

Xi made the remarks while holding talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin via video link in Beijing.

The idea of enduring friendship, which has been established in the treaty, conforms to the fundamental interests of the two countries as well as the themes of the times of peace and development, Xi said.

He also said the treaty is a vivid example of fostering a new type of international relations and building a community with a shared future for humanity.

(Web editor: Shi Xi, Hongyu)
Expert says China-Russia cooperation brings positive energy to world landscape

Xinhua) 13:28, June 29, 2021

MOSCOW, June 29 (Xinhua) -- Close China-Russia cooperation adds positive energy to the world landscape that is undergoing geopolitical turbulence and drastic changes, a Russian expert on China has said.

Lyudmila Matsenko, member of the Central Board of the Russia-China Friendship Association, made the remarks in a recent interview with Xinhua after Chinese and Russian presidents issued a joint statement Monday to extend the China-Russia Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation.

Matsenko said that the extension of the key pact, which was signed 20 years ago, is of "great importance" as it defines the nature of the development of bilateral ties.

"It is on the basis of this document that a Russian-Chinese strategic partnership has been built and an unprecedentedly high level of Russian-Chinese relations has been achieved," she said.

The expert described Russian-Chinese coordination as an important factor in maintaining the balance of power and global stability in the context of multiple challenges, including the breakdown of arms control agreements, and higher risks of conflict in different parts of the world.

"The model of equal, respectful and effective relations that China and Russia have been able to build is very much attractive for many countries in the world," Matsenko said.

China and Russia, she noted, are implementing joint projects in various fields, while their political, trade, cultural and educational ties are being strengthened.

Matsenko congratulated the Chinese people and members of the Communist Party of China (CPC) on the upcoming 100th anniversary of the founding of the party.

"China demonstrates an impressive example of successful socio-economic development," she said, applauding the country's achievements.

Despite the pandemic, China has completed the task of eradicating absolute poverty, which was "an outstanding success" for the CPC, Matsenko said.

The Russia-China Friendship Association, she said, is making every effort to promote people-to-people and cultural exchanges between the two countries, and has established close and comprehensive interaction with Chinese partners.

(Web editor: Shi Xi, Hongyu)
Xinhua issues research report on CPC's political commitment

Xinhua) 13:40, June 29, 2021

An art performance titled "The Great Journey" is held in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC) at the National Stadium in Beijing, capital of China, on the evening of June 28, 2021. (Xinhua/Huang Jingwen)

BEIJING, June 28 (Xinhua) -- New China Research (NCR), the think tank of Xinhua News Agency, on Monday released a research report on the political commitment of the Communist Party of China (CPC) ahead of the Party's centenary.

Titled "People First: Political Commitment of the Century-old Communist Party of China," the report examines the development of the CPC from a party of 50-plus members to the world's largest political party boasting over 91 million members. It notes that the process has become one of the most noteworthy political phenomena.

When Western academic theories cannot explain the success of the CPC, new research paradigms should be established to seek answers from the Party's own theories and practices, according to the report.

The report has three chapters: "why have the Chinese people chosen the CPC," "how does the CPC represent the people" and "what contributions does the CPC make to human progress."

The CPC enjoys the wholehearted support of the broadest possible majority of the people, which has not changed with the passage of time, the report says.

The CPC has made clear its commitment to its founding mission, adopted a tried-and-true democratic system, built a relationship of trust between the Party and the people, and formed an effective supervision system, the report says.

The report says that from the perspective of the political advancement of mankind, the secret to the CPC's success in making China increasingly prosperous and strong can provide other countries with a useful reference for party building and state governance.

The report encapsulates the secret of the CPC's success in five English letters: ABCDE, and stresses that the CPC does not seek to export China's model, nor does it ask other countries to follow in China's footsteps.

Poverty relief assistants Liu Ying (1st L) and He Changle (2nd L), and village officials help carry melons planted by villagers in Dongqin Village, Congjiang County of southwest China's Guizhou Province, Nov. 11, 2020. (Xinhua/Yang Wenbin)

A| All for the People

Standing on the people's side represents the fundamental political stance of the CPC, and the past 100 years saw the CPC make serving the people the starting point and ultimate purpose of all of its actions and institutional design.

B| Blueprint Drawing

The past 100 years of the CPC is a history of continuous hard work. The CPC is adept at making long-term strategic plans based on the people's interests, setting goals for each stage of development, and translating a blueprint into reality with force and tenacity, like a hammer driving a nail.

C| Capacity Building

The governance capacity of the CPC is multifaceted and covers all fronts. Its capacity building concerning political awareness, theoretical competence, organization and conduct in particular attracts global attention.

Aerial photo taken on April 13, 2019 shows a container wharf at Qinzhou port in south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. (Xinhua/Cao Yiming)

D| Development Shared

The CPC is working on the formulation of an action plan to promote common prosperity, under which more development outcomes could be shared by all the people in a fairer way. Efforts such as jointly pursuing the Belt and Road Initiative and promoting South-South cooperation also attest to the CPC's vision for promoting shared and common development worldwide.

E| Effective Governance

Be it everyday governance or emergency responses, human resources, as well as technological, material and financial resources, can always be effectively brought together across regions and sectors under the CPC's leadership.

Chinese and foreign scholars believe that the vision of a community with a shared future for humanity is a major theoretical innovation that goes beyond the differences of country, race and system in improving the global governance system and promoting sustainable development and the progress of human society. It is in the fundamental interests and meets the universal expectations of the international community, says the report.

File photo shows experts of the Chinese medical team and local medical staff posing for a photo amid the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazzaville, capital of the Republic of the Congo, May 26, 2020. (Xinhua)

The CPC explores ways to solve multiple prominent challenges facing the international community and develop a community with a shared future for humanity from three dimensions: promoting peace built by all, development beneficial to all, and mutual learning among civilizations, according to the report.

Full Text: People First: Political Commitment of the Century-old Communist Party of China

(Web editor: Shi Xi, Hongyu)
Experts call for honest assessment on U.S. pandemic response: WSJ

(CGTN) 13:52, June 29, 2021

A pedestrian walks past a memorial installation for those who died of COVID-19 outside Green-Wood Cemetery in New York, the United States, on June 14, 2021. (Xinhua/Wang Ying)

American experts called for an all-round honest evaluation on the country's pandemic response as people are losing their trust in either science or government's handling on the COVID-19 crisis, according to an opinion article from Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on Sunday.

Two experts, Martin Kulldorff, who is a biostatistician and epidemiologist, also a professor at Harvard Medical School and Jay Bhattacharya, a physician and economist, and a professor at Stanford Medical School shared their views on WSJ that the country needs a thorough review, free from conflicts of interest that may help people to rebuild their faith on experts.

According to the article, the senate and private foundations are mulling over setting up commissions to examine issues such as the virus origins, the early response to the epidemic and equity issues.

Two experts suggested there are four major sections of the country's pandemic response that must be included in the evaluation: public health measures, treatment of COVID-19 patients, vaccine development and applications, and the discourse and censorship of scientific debates.

They emphasized that the commission in charge of the evaluation shouldn't get involved with the origin of the virus, which could be distracting from evaluation and better left to other investigative bodies.

The commission can't be "dominated by virologists, immunologists and epidemiologists," said the experts. They also encouraged to include people with expertise in oncology, cardiovascular disease, geriatric and pediatric medicine, psychology, psychiatry, education and much else.

They also advised to include a wider group of people to join the commission, such as patients and public members who were affected like artists and business owners. Also members who "have expressed diverse views, including those who advocated against lockdowns and who championed different treatments and vaccine recommendations" must be included, said the article.

Anyone who are paid by government or pharmaceutical companies to be currently involved in the pandemic response are strongly advised to be excluded. People who have worked with tech companies on censoring are also excluded, according to the article.

Considering 600,000 death because of COVID-19 in the U.S. and on-and-off lockdowns, the collateral damages of the broken trust are not limited to the fields including epidemiology, virology and public health, but also scientists such as oncologists, physicists, computer scientists, environmental engineers and even economists, according to the experts.

(Web editor: Zhong Wenxing, Hongyu)
Biden faces tough path to challenge China's B&R Initiative: U.S. media

Xinhua) 14:42, June 29, 2021

(From L to R, Front) Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, U.S. President Joe Biden, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, (From L to R, Rear) European Council President Charles Michel, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, stand for a photo in Carbis Bay, Cornwall, Britain, on June 11, 2021. (Andrew Parsons/No 10 Downing Street/Handout via Xinhua)

Biden's endeavor has been met with a degree of skepticism and wariness from both experts and officials who worry that wealthy Group of Seven (G7) may lack the unity and commitment to challenge China's most successful and influential economic projects.

WASHINGTON, June 29 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Joe Biden has embarked on a gargantuan mission of rebuilding the United States both in image and infrastructure out of both domestic needs and his desire to contain China, according to a news piece reported by the U.S. magazine Newsweek on June 24.

But Biden's endeavor has been met with a degree of skepticism and wariness from both experts and officials who worry that wealthy Group of Seven (G7) may lack the unity and commitment to challenge China's most successful and influential economic projects.

U.S. President Joe Biden addresses a joint session of Congress in Washington, D.C., the United States, April 28, 2021. (Melina Mara/Pool via Xinhua)

"I view the Build Back Better World initiative as a really good first step, and something that's good in principle," David Sacks, research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Newsweek. "But I think that there are a lot of questions about our ability to implement it and to put our money where our mouth is."

The G7 countries announced the launch of the Build Back Better World initiative, a global infrastructure development plan they said would meet the tremendous needs in low- and middle-income countries.

(Web editor: Shi Xi, Hongyu)
Sinovac vaccine 'well tolerated, safe and induced humoral responses' in minors aged 3-17, to boost public confidence on herd immunity

(Global Times) 15:32, June 29, 2021

A health worker prepares a dose of Sinovac vaccine at a vaccination site in Manila, the Philippines on March 31, 2021. (Xinhua/Rouelle Umali)

The world's first trial results on minors aged 3-17 showed China's inactivated COVID-19 vaccine produced by Sinovac had good safety, tolerability, and immunogenicity in youths aged 3-17 years, the Global Times learnt from Sinovac on Tuesday.

Observers believe the results will inspire the ongoing trial of other COVID-19 vaccines in children younger than 17years and boost public confidence to give shots to children younger than 17 years in the race to reach herd immunity. But the observers have also agreed caution should be taken to evaluate the long-term effects of the vaccine on children's development.

"CoronaVac is well tolerated in children and adolescents aged 3-17 years, and induces a strong immune response, which is very encouraging. We will further carry out large-scale, multi-ethnic population studies in order to provide valuable data for immunization strategies for children and adolescents," Gao Qiang, general manager of Sinovac, said.

The trial results were published on The Lancet Infectious Diseases on Tuesday, the world's first trial results on minors aged 3-17.

Results showed neutralizing antibody titres induced by the 3?0g dose were higher than those of the 1?5g dose. The results support the use of 3?0 g dose with a two-immunization schedule for further studies in children and adolescents, according to the Lancet report.

China has authorized the emergency use of the COVID-19 vaccine manufactured by Chinese firm Sinovac for children aged between 3 and 17, Sinovac Chairman Yin Weidong told the media in early June. "But when the vaccine will be put into [emergency] use, and starting from what age in the group has yet to be decided," he said.

Zeng Yixin, deputy director of the National Health Commission, confirmed in an interview with Xinhua News Agency in early June that people aged between 3 and 17 will start receiving vaccines after approval. China's vaccination scheme will be promoted from the high-age group to the low-age group. China's vaccination drive has previously covered people aged 18 and above. The oldest people to be inoculated are over 100 years old.

The double-blind, randomized and controlled phase I and II clinical trials were conducted among healthy children and adolescents aged 3-17 years old at Hebei Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Zanhuang, North China's Hebei Province. Vaccine (in 0?5 mL aluminum hydroxide adjuvant) or aluminum hydroxide was only given in two doses on day 0 and day 28, according to the trial results.

In the combined safety profile of phase 1 and phase 2, adverse reactions within 28 days after injection occurred in 56 of the 219 participants in the 1?5?g group, 63 of 217 in the 3?0?g group, and 27of 114 in the alum-only group were respectively 26 percent, 29 percent and 24 percent.

Most adverse reactions were mild and moderate in severity. Injection site pain was the most frequently reported event, accounting for 13 percent of the total adverse reactions.

In the phase I clinical study, the positive conversion rate of neutralizing antibodies in children and adolescents reached 100 percent, 28 days after the vaccination of two doses of low-dose or medium-dose vaccine. While in the phase II clinical study, 28 days after the full course of immunization, the positive conversion rate of neutralizing antibody in the low and medium dose groups was 96.8 percent and 100 percent.

No neutralizing antibodies were detected in the placebo group, the report said.

The study also found that after two doses, the immune response in children and adolescents was better than in adults aged 18-59 and elderly people aged 60 and above. Age plays an important role in vaccine-induced antibody response, and immune response increases with age.

(Web editor: Zhong Wenxing, Hongyu)
Iron and steel exports to the EU reached 713,000 tonnes in the first five months of this year, up five times year-on-year, reported the General Department of Customs.

The whole country exported 4.88 million tonnes of iron and steel with a value of US$3.61 billion in the first five months of this year, a sharp increase of 61.6 per cent in volume and 117 per cent in value over the same period last year.

The EU, China, Cambodia, Malaysia and Mexico were the five largest import markets for Vietnamese iron and steel products.

Iron and steel exports have enjoyed many advantages as the demand for steel in many markets has increased strongly for many months, the Viet Nam Steel Association (VSA) told au tu (Viet Nam Investment Review) newspaper.

Exports to the EU have increased by five times over the same period amid the impact of the EU - Viet Nam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA), which has been in effect for nearly 10 months.

Many enterprises have taken advantage of opportunities to boost exports through trade facilitation.

The EU is known as a market that requires products to meet very high and strict standards. The sharp increase in exports partly shows Vietnamese enterprises have standardised production and satisfied the needs of consumers with high demands.

After only five months, Vietnamese steel exports to the EU has more than doubled compared to exports in the whole of last year.

Iron and steel exports reached 9.86 million tonnes, worth nearly $5.26 billion last year, but exports to the EU were only 309,000 tonnes, worth $235.5 million.  VNS
Xi, Putin announce extension of key China-Russia treaty during video talks Beijing and Moscow agreed on Monday to extend the China-Russia Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation to boost the high-level development of bilateral ties, and they also pledged to jointly uphold real multilateralism and safeguard global strategic security and stability. President Xi Jinping and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin announced the extension of the treaty, which was signed by the two countries 20 years ago, in a joint statement in their talks via video link. The treaty has laid a solid legal foundation for the long-term and healthy development of China-Russia relations. During the online talks, Xi said the concept of the friendship for generations established by the treaty conforms to the fundamental interests of the two countries as well as the theme of the times to promote peace and development. It is also a vivid practice of building the new type of international relations and a community with a shared future for mankind, Xi added. Today's China-Russia ties are "mature, stable and solid" and can withstand the test of changes in the international landscape, he said, adding that the two countries support each other on issues related to their respective core interests with effective strategic coordination, and have safeguarded their shared interests. They have also developed fruitful pragmatic cooperation as well as close coordination on international affairs, jointly safeguarding real multilateralism and international fairness and justice, Xi said. As the world enters a period of turbulent change and human development encounters multiple crises, Xi said close cooperation between China and Russia has provided positive energy to the international community, and has set an example for a new type of international relations. China is confident that guided by the spirit of the treaty, the two neighboring countries will remain focused on developing bilateral ties regardless of possible challenges, he said, adding that the country firmly supports Russia in taking strong measures to safeguard its long-lasting peace and security. Putin extended congratulations to Xi, who is also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, on the 100th anniversary of the CPC's founding on July 1, and expressed his hope that China, under the leadership of the CPC, could make new achievements in socioeconomic development and play a more important role in international affairs. The Russian president said his country is satisfied with the unprecedented high-level development of bilateral relations as well as the nations' all-around, steady bilateral cooperation. The extension of the treaty will lay an even stronger foundation for the long-term development of Russia-China relations, he added. Moscow stands ready to work with Beijing to strengthen strategic mutual trust, develop even closer strategic coordination, continue to support each other's efforts to safeguard their respective national sovereignty and territorial integrity and respect each other's system and development path of their own choice, Putin said. Both countries emphasized the need to jointly uphold the international system with the United Nations at the core as well as the international order underpinned by international law, according to a news release issued after the talks. They also pledged to oppose external interference in domestic affairs under the guise of "democracy" and "human rights", as well as unilateral sanctions. The two countries agreed to jointly promote peace, development, fairness, justice, democracy and freedom, intensify solidarity and coordination to cope with common challenges, and advance the building of a community with a shared future for mankind. They stressed jointly opposing stigmatizing and politicizing the COVID-19 pandemic and virus origin tracing, and pledged to strengthen vaccine cooperation, maintain close high-level exchanges, expand bilateral trade and advance the synergy of the Belt and Road Initiative with the Eurasian Economic Union. The two countries also vowed to work together to oppose politicizing sports, and Moscow supports Beijing in hosting successful Winter Olympic Games in 2022. While underlining the need to comprehensively plan and promote the development of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, they also expressed concerns over the security situation in Afghanistan caused by the United States' speedy withdrawal of its troops from the country, and stressed the need to jointly uphold regional peace, security and stability.


Wang Yang, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) National Committee, visits an exhibition on the eighth CPC National Congress in Beijing, capital of China, June 28, 2021. (Xinhua/Li Xiang)

Members of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) organizations have been urged to pool their strengths so that the CPPCC can better play its role as a political advisory body in the new era.

Wang Yang, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the CPPCC National Committee, also urged the CPPCC members to strengthen their ideals and conviction through learning the history of the CPC.

Wang made the remarks on Monday when visiting an exhibition on the eighth CPC National Congress held at the auditorium of the CPPCC National Committee in September 1956.

He said the CPPCC will continue to rally strength and build solidarity across all sectors of society to make contributions to the accomplishment of the CPC's missions in the new era.

The exhibition, launched ahead of the 100th anniversary of the CPC's founding, displayed more than 120 pictures, nearly 100 documents and nearly 50 items of the CPC's eighth national congress.

The congress was the first national congress of the Party after the founding of New China, during which an array of major decisions concerning economic, political, cultural and diplomatic policies were made.
GENEVA, June 28 (Xinhua) -- A senior Chinese diplomat on Monday criticized the crimes of genocide by the United States and other Western countries, urging the international community to carry out comprehensive, impartial and in-depth investigations into all crimes of genocide and to eradicate racism, racial discrimination and other legacies of genocide.

Speaking at the Interactive Dialogue with the UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, Jiang Duan, minister of the Chinese mission to the United Nations in Geneva, said that genocide is a universally acknowledged severe international crime and the devastating impacts of genocide is still felt today.

In the United States, Jiang said, native American Indians were expelled from their land and slaughtered during the so-called Westward Expansion in nearly 100 years after the country was founded. Their population dwindled from 5 million at the end of the 15th century to 250,000 at the beginning of the 20th century.

Today, American Indians are living in isolated and desolated Reservations in the United States, he added.

Jiang pointed out that in Canada, over 150,000 indigenous children were forcibly sent to residential schools for assimilation, and at least 3,200 were abused to death.

"This is only the tip of the iceberg in the number of indigenous people who died of genocide in Canada," he said.

He further said that other western countries also committed severe crimes of genocide and crimes against humanity in colonizing and invading other countries.
BEIJING, June 28 (Xinhua) -- China's Ministry of Veterans Affairs has urged further enhancing the support for revolutionary martyrs' families to ensure they receive the benefits they deserve and foster a society where heroes are respected.

Local authorities should give priority to family members of revolutionary martyrs when formulating relevant support policies and strengthen registration and data collection in order to keep abreast of their situations, the ministry said in a statement.

It required more efforts to reach out to those family members on routine visits and establish a mechanism for regular contact with them to effectively address their problems in work and life.

It also called for social participation in furthering the support for such families and pragmatic efforts to boost their sense of honor and fulfilment.
Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin Photo: CGTN

Chinese President Xi Jinping held a video meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday. They issued a joint statement and announced to extend the China-Russia Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation. Article 9 of the treaty, which was signed in July 2001, says "When a situation arises in which one of the contracting parties deems that it is confronted with the threat of aggression, the contracting parties shall immediately hold contacts and consultations in order to eliminate such threats."

Western media outlets often describe China-Russia relations as a "quasi-alliance." But neither China nor Russia has ever officially accepted such a description. They define their ties as partnership, rather than alliance. They both reiterate that their relations are at the best in history and are a model for intergovernmental relations in the 21th century.

The joint statement issued by the two heads of state on Monday included a handful of new content. It says that Russia needs a prosperous and stable China; China needs a strong and successful Russia; and the two countries see each other as a prioritized partner, and they will further deepen collaboration and cooperation in fields of politics, security, military, economic and trade.

The joint statement expressed a common stance on arms control and mentioned many related issues, such as criticizing the US withdrawing from a series of related key international treaties and deploying anti-missile systems in the world. The statement also advocates countries to pledge not to be the first to deploy weapons in outer space.

Both countries agreed to uphold common values of humanity, including peace, development, fairness, justice, democracy, and freedom. This was the first time for the two heads of state to jointly define common values of all humanity. The two sides have also expressed their opposition to interference in other countries' domestic affairs under the banner of so-called democracy and human rights, and to unilateral sanctions.

For a certain period of time, some political and media elites in Washington have been very interested in driving a wedge between China and Russia. However, what they have hyped has reflected their surprisingly low-level vision as they completely cannot understand the strategic support behind the increasingly strong China-Russia ties.

The joint statement issued on Monday noted the two countries' core diplomatic ideas. For example, a community with shared future for mankind, and the collaboration between the China-initiated Belt and Road Initiative and the Eurasian Economic Union were mentioned. Meanwhile, both countries oppose the moves to stigmatize and politicize others taking advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic and the investigations into virus origins. Besides, China expressed its firm support to Russia's resolute measures to maintain its development and stability in the long term.

It is not only an illusion but also a chimera of Washington that it can sow discord between Beijing and Moscow to facilitate its campaign to suppress the latter two separately. The comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era between China and Russia is not a temporary one aiming to withstand pressure. Instead, it has incorporated the true ideals of the two countries for the major power relationship in the 21st century, aligning their long-term fundamental interests. Such a partnership has also unleashed the abundant geopolitical advantages and potentials of the fact that China and Russia are each other's largest neighboring country. Therefore, this partnership is unbreakable.

In other words, those forces that want to destroy China-Russia relations are too insignificant to take China-Russia ties as their target.

Western media is fond of discussing which side is dominant in the China-Russia relationship and which side is more in need. The reason is simple: The alliance of the US and other Western countries is dominated by Washington, and the alliance is essentially at the service of the US' hegemonic strategy - the US gives allies some sweetness such as "providing protection" as little reward. By contrast, China and Russia are equal in their comprehensive strategic partnership. The highly coordinated needs to maintain such equal cooperation and safeguard the two countries' respective profound interests are beyond understandable for Westerners who hold tight onto their own values.

For example, neither China nor Russia will tell the other side how to deal with relations with the US or any other third country, not now and not ever. But the US will impose its will on its allies in terms of ways to handle relations with China and Russia, which will even cause conflicts. China and Russia are not only as coordinated as the US and its allies on major global issues, but also more able to coordinate their positions in many cases.

The world is more secure in peace and stability because of China and Russia's comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era. Now hegemony is counterbalanced, while fairness and justice have strong support. China-Russia relations have never been used to create geopolitical turmoil. The two countries have never threatened third parties. It is really no exaggeration to say that China-Russia relations are a model of international relations in the 21st century.
Afghan security force members are seen on a military vehicle during a military operation in Zhari district of southern Kandahar province, Afghanistan, June 22, 2021. [Photo/Xinhua]

The security situation in Afghanistan has been worsening with each passing day since the United States commenced its troop withdrawal from the country on May 1. Yet, it seems the worst is still to come as the irresponsible US decision is leaving a huge security vacuum that plays right into the hands of the Taliban and other extremist actors.

Over the past month, the Taliban has been stepping up military activities and seized more than 70 districts. In the latest development, it occupied Khash District in the northern Badakhshan Province on Wednesday.

The militant attacks and fighting among various factions have pushed Afghanistan into an abyss of violence and created a humanitarian disaster.

On Saturday, three explosions outside a secondary school for girls in western Kabul alone killed at least 50 people and injured over 100 others.

Afghanistan has paid a costly price for the war the US launched against it in revenge for the Sept 11 terrorist attacks in 2001. It is estimated that 66,000 Afghan troops have been killed, and over 2.7 million people have been displaced.

Now, 20 years later, the Taliban, instead of being beaten, has only gained in strength while Afghanistan has been plunged ever deeper into crisis.

When US President Joe Biden told visiting Afghan President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani on Friday that the US troops may be leaving but support for Afghanistan is not ending, it was hardly convincing to either the Afghan leader or its people. After all, the US goal of pulling out troops by the Sept 11 deadline itself lays bare the US intention to disentangle itself from the quagmire it has created in Central Asia.

With the US halfway toward its goal of total withdrawal, not only are intra-Afghan negotiations experiencing setbacks and the security situation deteriorating, but also the country's economic and humanitarian situation is getting increasingly precarious.

Even though the White House touts its commitment to a lasting peace in Afghanistan, the grim reality shows that by invading the country first and then leaving it in a big mess, Washington only cares about its own political and security needs, not about the future of Afghanistan and its people, or that of the wider region.

In the final analysis, it is Washington's penchant for intervention that has sowed the seeds of turmoil and instability in Afghanistan, and created the current security black hole that will cast a long shadow over both Afghanistan and the region in the years to come.

What is happening in Afghanistan shows the country is still a breeding ground for terrorism despite the two-decade US war. While the US needs to reflect upon its interventionist policy, the international community needs to do more to push the reconciliation process in Afghanistan.
"We never felt far from home," said Henry Perez, a retired colonel of Cuba's air force, when he shared his training experience in China in the 1960s.

Produced by Xinhua Global Service
An art performance titled "The Great Journey" is held in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC) at the National Stadium in Beijing, capital of China, on the evening of June 28, 2021. (Xinhua/Huang Jingwen)

BEIJING, June 28 (Xinhua) -- New China Research (NCR), the think tank of Xinhua News Agency, on Monday released a research report on the political commitment of the Communist Party of China (CPC) ahead of the Party's centenary.

Titled "People First: Political Commitment of the Century-old Communist Party of China," the report examines the development of the CPC from a party of 50-plus members to the world's largest political party boasting over 91 million members. It notes that the process has become one of the most noteworthy political phenomena.

When Western academic theories cannot explain the success of the CPC, new research paradigms should be established to seek answers from the Party's own theories and practices, according to the report.

The report has three chapters: "why have the Chinese people chosen the CPC," "how does the CPC represent the people" and "what contributions does the CPC make to human progress."

The CPC enjoys the wholehearted support of the broadest possible majority of the people, which has not changed with the passage of time, the report says.

The CPC has made clear its commitment to its founding mission, adopted a tried-and-true democratic system, built a relationship of trust between the Party and the people, and formed an effective supervision system, the report says.

The report says that from the perspective of the political advancement of mankind, the secret to the CPC's success in making China increasingly prosperous and strong can provide other countries with a useful reference for party building and state governance.

The report encapsulates the secret of the CPC's success in five English letters: ABCDE, and stresses that the CPC does not seek to export China's model, nor does it ask other countries to follow in China's footsteps.

Poverty relief assistants Liu Ying (1st L) and He Changle (2nd L), and village officials help carry melons planted by villagers in Dongqin Village, Congjiang County of southwest China's Guizhou Province, Nov. 11, 2020. (Xinhua/Yang Wenbin)

A| All for the People

Standing on the people's side represents the fundamental political stance of the CPC, and the past 100 years saw the CPC make serving the people the starting point and ultimate purpose of all of its actions and institutional design.

B| Blueprint Drawing

The past 100 years of the CPC is a history of continuous hard work. The CPC is adept at making long-term strategic plans based on the people's interests, setting goals for each stage of development, and translating a blueprint into reality with force and tenacity, like a hammer driving a nail.

C| Capacity Building

The governance capacity of the CPC is multifaceted and covers all fronts. Its capacity building concerning political awareness, theoretical competence, organization and conduct in particular attracts global attention.

Aerial photo taken on April 13, 2019 shows a container wharf at Qinzhou port in south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. (Xinhua/Cao Yiming)

D| Development Shared

The CPC is working on the formulation of an action plan to promote common prosperity, under which more development outcomes could be shared by all the people in a fairer way. Efforts such as jointly pursuing the Belt and Road Initiative and promoting South-South cooperation also attest to the CPC's vision for promoting shared and common development worldwide.

E| Effective Governance

Be it everyday governance or emergency responses, human resources, as well as technological, material and financial resources, can always be effectively brought together across regions and sectors under the CPC's leadership.

Chinese and foreign scholars believe that the vision of a community with a shared future for humanity is a major theoretical innovation that goes beyond the differences of country, race and system in improving the global governance system and promoting sustainable development and the progress of human society. It is in the fundamental interests and meets the universal expectations of the international community, says the report.

File photo shows experts of the Chinese medical team and local medical staff posing for a photo amid the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazzaville, capital of the Republic of the Congo, May 26, 2020. (Xinhua)

The CPC explores ways to solve multiple prominent challenges facing the international community and develop a community with a shared future for humanity from three dimensions: promoting peace built by all, development beneficial to all, and mutual learning among civilizations, according to the report.
China's Foreign Ministry on Tuesday called for Japan to issue a clarification and correction after a senior official called the Taiwan region a "country."

Spokesperson Wang Wenbin said the remark, made by Japan's Deputy Defense Minister Yasuhide Nakayama, was erroneous and a serious violation of the principles of the four political documents including the China-Japan Joint Declaration.

He added that the comment breached the promise, repeatedly made by the Japanese side, of "not regarding Taiwan as a country.

"China demands Japan immediately issues clarifications to ensure that such a thing will not reoccur," Wang said.

The spokesperson added that the Taiwan question concerns the political foundation of China-Japan ties and the basic credibility between the two countries as well as 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.

(With input from Xinhua)
German Chancellor Angela Merkel Monday continued to make the case that a face-to-face summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin is the best way to address regional issues with him, days after other European leaders rejected her proposal for such a meeting. Merkel, along with French President Emmanuel Macron, proposed the summit idea during a European Union meeting in Brussels. Eastern European leaders, particularly members who share borders with Russia, rejected the proposal, saying such a meeting would reward Putin for recent aggressive Russian behavior such as cyberattacks or the deployment of troops on the border with Ukraine. The EU leaders instead agreed to establish guidelines and conditions for a future summit.

Speaking Monday during a virtual meeting between the French and German parliaments, Merkel once again defended the proposal, saying it is better for EU leaders to talk directly to the Russian president instead of discussing issues amongst themselves.



"The relationship between Russia and the European Union is really not good at the moment, but even during the Cold War, people talked to each other," Merkel said. "So, I think silence is not conducive to solving the problems." Merkel did say that the discussions about how future summits might be held were helpful and bring the EU one step closer to holding a meeting.



Merkel pointed to U.S. President Joe Biden's one-on-one summit with Putin earlier this month and said confronting Russia face-to-face can also result in cooperation on some issues.



KremIin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters last week that "President Putin was and remains interested in establishing working relations between Moscow and Brussels."
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged allies Monday to maintain a focus on defeating the Islamic State group, with a particular focus on countering its affiliates in Africa.

"We've made great progress because we've been working together, so we hope youll keep an eye on the fight, keep up the fight against this terrorist organization until it is decisively defeated," Blinken said in Italy Monday at the start of a meeting of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS. He said coalition efforts had produced "significant achievements," including virtually ceasing the movement of foreign fighters into Iraq and Syria.

Blinken noted that 10,000 ISIS militants are being detained by Syrian Democratic Forces, calling the situation "simply untenable" and calling on governments to repatriate their citizens for rehabilitation or prosecution.

The top U.S. diplomat announced US$436 million in additional humanitarian aid for Syrians and communities in surrounding countries that have been hosting Syrian refugees. He said the money would go toward providing food, water, shelter, health care, education and protection.

The United States launched a coalition effort, now involving 83 members, aimed at defeating the Islamic State group in 2014 after the militants seized control of a large area across northern Syria and Iraq, and in 2019 declared the militants had been ousted from their last remaining territory.
According to the source, Kim had gained weight due to work-related stress, drinking, smoking and a high-fat diet, leaving him alarmingly short of breath.

The North Korean propaganda machine has already been trying to make hay from the obese leader's weight loss.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un went on a diet retreat in the provinces to lose weight at the urging of close aides, a source claimed Monday.

The semi-official story making the rounds is that North Koreans "expressed worries about his health as he gained excessive weight," the source added. "On April 15, the birthday of regime founder Kim Il-sung, the family of an anti-Japanese partisan fighter sent a letter to Kim to ask him to 'lose weight and take some rest,' while saying that his good health is the 'biggest wish' of the country and the people."

The story goes that Kim demurred at first, saying, "How can I take a rest as I've done nothing for the people?" But he finally gave in when close aides like politburo member Ri Pyong-chol weighed in as well.

Kim had not been seen in public for about a month and looked noticeably slimmer when he chaired a series of Workers Party meetings in mid-June.

In one preposterous clip shown on state TV, a North Korean expressed dismay at Kim's "emaciated" appearance.
South Korea has decided to develop an interceptor system like Israel's "iron dome" to protect Seoul from North Korea's long-range artillery and rocket launchers.

South Korean officials were apparently impressed that the Israeli system intercepted some 1,000 missiles fired from occupied Palestinian territories with over 90 percent accuracy last month.

The Defense Acquisition Program Administration said it decided to go ahead with the project in a meeting chaired by Defense Minister Suh Wook on Monday. The project will kick off next year with a view to completion by 2035 and a budget of W2.89 trillion (US$1=W1,132).

It will harness technologies like the Navy's Haegung interceptor missile and the U.S.' miniature hit-to-kill missile.

North Korea deploys about 1,200 long-range artillery pieces near the border, and an estimated 340 are pointed directly at Seoul.

The military defended itself against complaints that deploying the shield in 15 years' time might be too late. "We can't import the Israeli iron dome system because we have a different security situation and need to develop our own," a military source said. "Instead, we decided to complete development and deployment of our own system about two years earlier than you would normally expect."
New Braunfels, TX (78130)

Today

Partly to mostly cloudy with scattered showers and thunderstorms overnight. Low 74F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 50%..

Tonight

Partly to mostly cloudy with scattered showers and thunderstorms overnight. Low 74F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 50%.
New Braunfels, TX (78130)

Today

Thunderstorms likely this evening. Then a chance of scattered thunderstorms overnight. Low 74F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 70%..

Tonight

Thunderstorms likely this evening. Then a chance of scattered thunderstorms overnight. Low 74F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 70%.
Woburn, MA (01801)

Today

Mostly cloudy. Periods of rain early. Low 56F. Winds NNE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%..

Tonight

Mostly cloudy. Periods of rain early. Low 56F. Winds NNE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%.
With millions flooding into Howard County from the American Rescue Plan, opportunities for infrastructure upgrades, back pay, and the chance to counter the economic impact brought on by COVID-19 abound. So how will it be spent?

While the city and county have yet to nail down what the combined over $50 million will be spent on, Howard County Commissioner Paul Wyman said a full announcement that will include a list of county projects that will utilize the funding is being finalized and is expected to be released in the next week.

But it appears one of the items Howard County officials hope to use the money on is for broadband infrastructure. Last week, a request for proposals for a broadband upgrade was approved by the Howard County Board of Commissioners, which marks the first public announcement of an ARP-funded project.

The goal with the broadband project is going to be to provide either a wireless or fiber option for the underserved areas of our community, Wyman said. So were anticipating some good projects and hopefully be able to get that accomplished.

Wyman said the broadband project would use approximately $1.5 to $2 million of the countys estimated $16 million in total ARP funding, though he said it possibly could exceed that estimate.

As for the city, according to Kokomo Mayor Tyler Moore, officials still are working on a list of possible projects to make use of the funding. The city is receiving $19.8 million.

In addition, Moore pointed to the possibility of receiving funds from a Regional Economic Acceleration Development Initiative (READI) grant to increase economic growth and development. Regions across the state have the opportunity to receive disbursements for up to $50 million through the Indiana Economic Development Corporation.

Moore said that reimbursing the city for certain lost revenue is something that is being considered, in addition to reimbursing small businesses, homeowners, nonprofits, and other agencies.

Moore also said that funds possibly could go toward the proposed downtown hotel and conference center, as well as the long-sought industrial park.

Funds from the American Rescue Plan can be spent in several ways. The federal stipulations are as follows:

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 to respond to the public health emergency with respect to the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) or its negative economic impacts, including assistance to households, small businesses, and or aid to impacted industries such as tourism, travel, and hospitality;

 (to respond to workers performing essential work during the COVID-19 public health emergency by providing premium pay to eligible workers of the metropolitan city ... that are performing such essential work, or by providing grants to eligible employers that have eligible workers who perform such essential work;

 for the provision of government services to the extent of the reduction in revenue of such metropolitan city ... due to the COVID-19 public health emergency relative to revenues collected in the most recent year of the metropolitan city. ..

 to make necessary investments in water, sewer, or broadband infrastructure.

One city that does have a finalized plan in place is the city of Muncie, which recently released a 10-page document detailing how its funding will be spent by the city.

For example, Muncie has a summary of how the entirety of its disbursement of $31,700,000 will be spent, broken into two allocations, one for the 2021 year and another for 2022 to 2024. Both allocations address city budget shortfalls, with a total of $6,550,001 set aside. $2 million is going to nonprofit organizations, and another $2 million is going to the small business and tourism sector.

For the 2022 to 2024 allocation, another $900,000 is going toward projects to aid tourism, travel, and hospitality and support health and wellness. That disbursement is broken down specifically in the ordinance: $300,000 will go toward the development of a private skate park, $100,000 for Tillotson Park, and $500,000 for the construction of splash pads and water play structures in neighborhood parks.

Another $2 million of Muncies ARP funding will be used to combat substance abuse and for behavioral health treatment. Specifically, the plan read, the funding will be used to develop an inpatient substance abuse treatment and rehabilitation center.

According to the plan, a committee will be created, consisting of community members selected by the president of the Muncie Common Council to establish criteria for eligibility and permitted uses for the funding.

The City of Kokomo has received roughly $9.9 million, or half of the $19.8 million allotment, of its ARP funding. Howard County has received $8,016,602 in its first allotment of ARP funding.
The fate of a proposed solar farm intended to be located in eastern Howard County still is to be determined following last weeks meeting of the Howard County Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA).

Held at the Kokomo Event and Conference Center due to increased attendance, members of Emerald Green Solar, a subsidiary of ENGIE, an international energy company, further detailed its plans for the solar farm to both the BZA and attendees. Following the public comment portion of the meeting in which residents provided both support and pushback of the project, BZA Board Member Frank Faulkner made a motion to approve the solar companys request for a special exemption, though, ultimately, a second never was made, effectively tabling ENGIEs efforts.

As such, ENGIE will attempt to move forward with the special exemption again at next months BZA meeting on July 27, according to Tom Green, ENGIEs director of development.

We still think this is a great project, and we think that the benefits for the community are very positive, Green said. And were going to try to answer as many questions as we can and move forward.

While the project entails leasing 2,000 acres of land, Green told the BZA that about 1,300 acres of land actually would hold solar panels. Along with the panels, native grasses and other flora would be planted, along with federally-required fencing around the panels. A tree line would be planted around the project as well.

During the over two-hour meeting last week, Emerald Green Solar and other ENGIE representatives detailed the project, which they said would net approximately $30 million in revenue after abatements for the county, $19 million of which would go to fund Eastern Howard School Corporation, during the course of its 30- to 40-year lifespan.

After its lifespan expires, the project would be decommissioned, guaranteed by a decommission bond, which also could be used in the event that the company goes under.

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The project would take about a year to complete and would generate around 300 to 500 jobs for local workers over the course of building the project, officials said.

It was with this information that the business agent for Carpenters Local 615, Chet Fincher, expressed his support.

Putting 300 or so workers to work in Howard County is a big deal, Fincher said. Cass Countys building. Miami Countys building, Tipton County, Grant County. Howard County needs to get on board with this. With all the money thats going to be generated for the local economy through all the hotels, restaurants, and everything, we feel is a win-win.

Along with Fincher, other members of the community expressed support, like Sandra Chapin, the manager of the Greater Kokomo Economic Development Alliance, while a backdrop of some opposing Greentown residents donned red shirts emblazoned with Stop Big Solar in Howard County.

The opposition continued, as some residents questioned and derided specific details of the project, including the fact that the expected construction jobs would not be permanent. They also questioned the safety of the solar panels themselves and argued that Howard County does not have an ordinance pertaining specifically to solar farms.

Brad Semon, an eastern Howard County resident and vocal opponent of the project, provided BZA members with a binder of independent research collected, which he said was gathered while working with college professors, real estate appraisers, and others.

ENGIE is not required to adjust the proposal or request for the special exemption before being heard again at next months BZA meeting held on July 27.
The northeast corner of the courthouse square has been undergoing a transformation as brick is laid, concrete poured, and pedestals placed.

The construction is the beginning of what will become the Womens Legacy Memorial, a years-long project led by Howard County Veterans Memorial Corp. President Jerry Paul. The new memorial will allow passersby to visit the small park-esque area that will feature three life-sized bronze sculptures of women standing atop the pedestals marked faith, honor, and duty.

Paul has been fund raising for the $500,000 project for more than five years, and to see it coming to fruition now is a dream come true. And its coming together just as he imagined it in his head.

Its like having a dream that you dont think can happen, and then youve got the right people that are involved. A lot of people think that you designed something. And they dont realize that you might design something, but somebodys got the end result, he said. The designer is not the builder, and you just hope you have the right people. I have the right people. Theres going to be nothing like this in Indiana.

Paul was drafted in the U.S. Army in 1968 and went on to serve as a U.S. Army specialist 5th class in Vietnam from 70 to 71. He was the recipient of a Meritorious Service Medal for the work he did as a crew chief on a medivac helicopter.

While he served his country in the 60s and 70s, hes served his community in the decades since. And this isnt his first go-around with a monument. Paul was the driving force behind the Blue/Gold Star Family Memorial that was installed at Veterans Memorial Park in 2015. That monument features a life-sized man, woman, and child and symbolizes the separation families face when loved ones are deployed.

Now, with the help of community donations and a $50,000 matching state grant, hes giving women a monument thats entirely their own. Its something thats not seen often, he said, and something thats long overdue.

It really acknowledges womens achievements in their past, present, and future. Its not a cure-all for our past and our marginalizing women, but its a teaching moment. We hope that not only is it going to be a beautiful addition to the courthouse, but its going to be something that everybody will appreciate what were doing, recognizing women, he said.

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The three life-sized women who will grace the pedestals are Rosie the Riveter, who represents working women; a woman of color modeled after the first female African-American fighter pilot in the history of the U.S. Air Force, Shawna Rochelle Kimbrell from Lafayette; and a modern-day female soldier with a musket and a prosthetic leg to symbolize the physical and emotional sacrifice of servicewomen.

With Paul, theres no question whether hes a veteran. He wears his Vietnam veteran hat proudly, and his truck is wrapped in the American flag. But when it comes to women veterans, he said theyre much quieter about their time in the service. He hopes the memorial inspires women to wear their service proudly.

There are so many women who youd never know they were in the military. They dont wear any kind of garb like it do. My truck screams veteran. But women dont do that, and I want women to be empowered and be proud of their service, he said. When somebody says, Oh, youre in the service? I want women to look them in the eye and say, Yeah, theres thousands of us, and were proud of what weve done. I want to send the message that women sacrificed too.

As for the woman of color whos represented, he hopes the memorial will help recognize the two glass ceilings those women have to go through, while the working woman represents every women in America who works and serves her country in that way.

The accomplishments of women, Paul said, are rarely acknowledged, and he hopes the Womens Legacy Memorial will help right a wrong in history when it comes to the marginalizing of women.

None of us got on this earth without going through a woman first. Why would we not honor women? This is like seeing Mothers Day every day, he said. Why would we not honor them? Theyve been marginalized their whole life.

Renowned sculptor Benjamin Victor, who was the artist behind the Blue/Gold Star Family Monument, also was commissioned for this project. Victor is the only living artist to have three works in the National Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol.

Construction on the memorial will continue this summer, and Paul plans to have it dedicated on Friday, Aug. 6, during First Friday.
Healthy Indiana Plan participants no longer can lose their Medicaid health coverage for failing to comply with the employment mandate championed by Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) last week notified Indiana officials the federal government has revoked the state's authorization to require able-bodied, adult Healthy Indiana Plan (HIP) members to work, search for a job or participate in community service at least 20 hours a week as a condition of receiving state-supported health coverage.

According to a letter from Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, director of the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Indiana's HIP employment mandate "risks significant coverage losses and harm to beneficiaries" and does "not promote the objectives of the Medicaid program."

She also noted the broad exemptions to the "Gateway to Work" requirement, coupled with the time and paperwork needed to report work hours, made it more likely than not the mandate would "influence the behavior of a very small number of individuals, while risking coverage loss for many."

"The state has not presented information to suggest that withholding safety net benefits, such as Medicaid coverage, from otherwise eligible beneficiaries has led to increased employment or other positive outcomes for low income and vulnerable individuals," Brooks-LaSure said.

"Individuals must be healthy in order to work, and consistent access to health coverage and care is vital to being healthy enough to work."

That's an about-face from the agency's position during the administration of Republican President Donald Trump when Holcomb's Medicaid work requirement was hailed as a potential national model by then-HHS Secretary Alex Azar.

"Healthy, fulfilling lives require not just health coverage, and health care, but also a sense of purpose, often obtained through work," Azar said. "It recognizes that Medicaid can become a pathway out of poverty, paving the way for better, long-term health for all enrollees."

At the time, CMS was led by Seema Verma, a Hoosier consultant who helped design the Healthy Indiana Plan in 2015, during the administration of Republican Gov. Mike Pence, as an alternative to traditional Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

Even though a voluntary HIP job training component failed to attract many participants when Pence was governor, Verma in her CMS role quickly authorized the HIP work mandate when Holcomb submitted it for federal approval five months after taking office in 2017.

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Holcomb said Monday he's disappointed the federal government has withdrawn approval for Gateway to Work, which he said "had the potential to help so many Hoosiers."

"We'll continue to support the health and well-being of Hoosiers, and our participants will receive much needed job training and career support to help them transition from Medicaid to full employment," Holcomb said. "With our growing economy, we need every able Hoosier to join the workforce."

The HIP work mandate has been on hold since November 2019, initially due to ongoing legal challenges and later because of the need for all Hoosiers to maintain health coverage amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

WATCH NOW: Riding Shotgun with NWI Cops  Patrolling Lowell with Cpl. Aaron Crawford

Brad Woodhouse, executive director of the Protect Our Care national health care advocacy organization, said he's grateful the HIP work requirement won't be coming back so long as Democratic President Joe Biden is in the White House.

"These burdensome paperwork requirements approved by the Trump administration were meant to boot people off the rolls, which was particularly heartless during the dual public health and economic crises facing Americans," Woodhouse said.

"Rather than find ways to rip health care away from Americans during a pandemic, the Biden administration is making health care more affordable and leading the effort to fight the virus."

Aside from scrapping the work requirement, the Biden administration did not otherwise alter the 10-year renewal for HIP, authorized last year by the Trump administration, that will keep HIP in business until at least Dec. 31, 2030.

Federal letter withdrawing approval for Healthy Indiana Plan work requirement

Get to know these new Indiana laws enacted in 2021
INDIANAPOLIS, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Retirement Services President Sandy McCarthy announced the hire of Mike Domingos who joins OneAmerica in a critical new leadership role designed to accelerate the company's latest phase of growth and amplify its commitment to the retirement business.

As head of distribution, Domingos will lead the Retirement Services (RS) sales, business development and sales support teams across all market segments.

"Mike will be instrumental in furthering a vision and strategy for distribution in line with our multiyear plan, which is intently focused on strategic and significant growth and enhancing customer and distribution partner relationships," said McCarthy. "Mike brings a wealth of industry experience across all market segments, as well as a passion for empowering people and driving processes to enable growth."

McCarthy added, "Mike is a wonderful fit with the OneAmerica values and culture, which keep people at the center of our strategy."

Prior to joining OneAmerica, he served as the head of sales and strategic relations at Prudential Retirement, a business unit of Prudential Financial, Inc. Domingos will start at OneAmerica on July 12.

"This is an exciting time to join OneAmerica as the company continues to build upon the recent momentum of its retirement business and to grow and invest strategically," Domingos said. "I look forward to working with an exceptional team at a values-driven organization to deliver great service and solutions that enhance our advisor, sponsor and participant experiences."

Domingos' team will include those responsible in five key segments: core market sales, mid and large market sales, specialty market sales, business development and sales support.

OneAmerica provides record-keeping for plans in asset classes of all sizes for clients related to 401(k), Tax-Exempt, Governmental, Combo Plans, ESOP, Defined Benefit, Cash Balance and Pension Risk Transfer.

OneAmerica is the marketing name for the companies of OneAmerica. Products issued and underwritten by American United Life Insurance Company (AUL), a OneAmerica company. Administrative and recordkeeping services provided by McCready and Keene, Inc. or OneAmerica Retirement Services LLC, companies of OneAmerica which are not broker/dealers or investment advisors.

Support Local Journalism Now, more than ever, the world needs trustworthy reportingbut good journalism isnt free. Please support us by making a contribution. Contribute

About OneAmerica

A national provider of insurance and financial services for more than 140 years, the companies of OneAmerica help customers build and protect their financial futures. OneAmerica offers a variety of products and services to serve the financial needs of their policyholders and customers. These products include retirement plan products and recordkeeping services, individual life insurance, annuities, asset-based long-term care solutions and employee benefit plan products. Products are issued and underwritten by the companies of OneAmerica and distributed through a nationwide network of employees, agents, brokers and other sources who are committed to providing value to our customers. To learn more about our products, services and the companies of OneAmerica, visit oneamerica.com/about-us/companies-of-oneamerica.

Contact:

Rachel Faulkner Perez

Rachel.FaulknerPerez@oneamerica.com

317-403-1781

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SOURCE OneAmerica
FISHERS, Ind., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Verista, a leading business and technology consultancy dedicated to serving the people and the patients of the life sciences industry, recently named Susan Najjar as Vice President, Marketing. In the newly created role, Najjar will be responsible for the company's marketing and go-to-market strategies, ensuring that Verista's cross functional teams, spanning the enterprise, are strategically aligned in support of the ongoing demands and opportunities of their clients within the life sciences sector.

In her new role as VP of Marketing, Susan Najjar will focus on the ongoing development of the Verista brand.

As a member of the Verista executive leadership team, Najjar's marketing team will drive marketing analytics, research and reporting. Critical to this newly created role will be Najjar's focus on the ongoing development of the Verista brand and elevation of the company's digital marketing platform.

Prior to joining Verista, Najjar was Global Marketing Director, Market Access, Patient Support, Patient Safety and Phase IV Solutions for Labcorp. She previously served as Global Marketing Director for Sciformix and Thermo Fisher Scientific and held management positions with Sun Microsystems and Deloitte & Touche Consulting.

"Sue has a compelling background, with extensive marketing leadership experience and the ability to drive marketing strategies designed to create great experiences for both our colleagues and our clients," says Manny Soman, CEO, Verista. "With her leadership strengths and marketing and engineering background, Sue will certainly impact Verista's market visibility and brand."

Najjar earned a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering and a master's degree in biochemical engineering from Tufts University. She went on to obtain her MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management.

About Verista

Verista offers transformative business and technology solutions to the life science industry, enabling its clients to improve lives. Verista was launched in 2020 by bringing together three trusted firms: Clarke Solutions, Covex LLC, and Acquire Automation. Verista acquired Hawkins Point in 2021. Verista's clients trust the company's 500+ experts to deliver consistent, safe, and high-quality results across the product development lifecycle. Verista, a holding of private equity firm Lightview Capital, is based in Fishers, Indiana, Wayne, Pennsylvania and Westford, Massachusetts. For more information, visit www.verista.com.

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About Lightview CapitalTM

Lightview Capital is a leading private equity firm focused on providing its portfolio companies deep industry knowledge, insightful experience, and active resources to unlock growth and drive value. Lightview Capital's approachable investment style combines deep operational and financial experience with an entrepreneurial spirit that delivers measurable results. For more information, visit https://lightviewcapital.com/.

CONTACT: Patty Pologruto, patty@altitudemarketing.com

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SOURCE Verista
Press Release

June 28, 2021 Villanueva: Workers must be the centerpiece of economic recovery Senator Joel Villanueva underscored the importance of ensuring the welfare of workers affected by the pandemic as the Senate labor committee started deliberations Monday into several proposed measures. Villanueva's committee tackled bills on media workers welfare, occupational safety and health standards for workers in the movie and television industry, service incentive leave, registry of skilled workers in barangays, and expansion of prohibited acts of discrimination against women in the workplace. "We are discussing these bills today within the context of the pandemic and the country's unemployment rate of 8.7% in April 2021 which translates to 4.14 million Filipinos without jobs. Pero kailangan na po nating umaksyon ngayon. Kailangan po at tingin ko importante po na pagusapan at i-discuss ang mga panukalang ito. At higit sa lahat, kailangan po nating aksyunan ang pangangailangan ng ating bayan post-pandemic. Ang ating mga manggagawa po dapat ang centerpiece ng ating economic recovery. I believe that these bills are aligned and consistent with that direction," Villanueva said. The labor committee chair highlighted the importance of organizing skilled workers at the grass roots level, similar to a program he implemented during his time as TESDA secretary. "Halos ganito po ang layunin ng inilunsad natin noon sa TESDA, young TESDA Specialista Program kung saan ginugrupo natin ang mga skilled workers, binibigyan po sila ng mga "nurturers" para malaman ng buong komunidad at mai-market ang skills nila," Villanueva said. The lawmaker also expressed his commitment to work on stamping out acts of discrimination against women in the workplace, which is contained in Senate Bill No. 2093 which he filed in March this year. The bill prohibits the following acts: * Favoring a male over a female employee with respect to assignments and dismissal solely on account of gender * Denying employment or statutory benefits to women by reason of gender The bill also seeks to penalize not only employers, who commit any of the prohibited acts of discrimination, but also employees or persons "who aid or abet in the commission of such acts." Villanueva said the labor committee would continue to scrutinize the position papers sought from resource persons on the bills which were deliberated on, "taking into consideration the realities of the pandemic that we are facing." "Your Committee on Labor, Employment and Human Resources Development will remain your reliable partner in ensuring the safety and welfare of our workers, especially during this unprecedented pandemic," he said. "We look forward to discussing the following issues during TWG or perhaps if we call for another hearing because we will be collaborating with other members of this committee."
Press Release

June 28, 2021 Villanueva: Defining legal bounds of arming anti-crime civilians the 'real challenge' Framing the proper protocol and defining the legal bounds on rules of engagement are just some of the difficulties Sen. Joel Villanueva sees if the government adopts a proposal to arm anti-crime civilian groups. "When private individuals are allowed to bear arms for missions reserved for officers of the law, there is the challenge of defining the protocols they should follow," Villanueva, chair of the Senate labor committee, said. Training, he added, is essential and at the same time costly. "Police officers are taught and trained for years to observe rules of engagement. Who will provide that costly education to what would essentially become urban CAFGUs?" Villanueva said. Both President Duterte and Philippine National Police (PNP) chief Guillermo Eleazar backed a proposal to arm anti-crime volunteers as a means of self-protection against crimes. Villanueva said this proposal needs serious study and instead pushed for more "official boots" on the ground in the crime-fighting arena. "I share the belief of many experts that more police patrols, more officers pounding the beat, and increased police visibility will curb crimes better than guns in the hands of civilian groups. We should invest in smart policing," he said. "A CCTV network has greater deterrent value than licensed vigilantes roaming the streets. A responsive 911 system that can scramble policemen to scenes of crime in minutes and not in ages will send the message that crime will be stopped and the public will be protected." The senator said he believes that peace and order is "one government function that should not be privatized or deregulated because, on paper, there is no shortage of military and civilian uniform personnel under arms, who number at least 400,000." "The call that more civilians be deputized to carry out police work is already answered by current firearms laws that allow professionals like lawyers, CPAs, cashiers, bank tellers, religious workers, engineers, business to own and carry one if their work or business makes them a high risk targets of criminals," Villanueva said. "Two in every three firearms in the country are unregistered. But of the 1.2 million registered firearms, close to half, or 540,000 are in responsible civilian hands. It is illicit guns that enable criminals, and to deprive them of their tools of trade, the police should launch a drive against gun trafficking."
Press Release

June 29, 2021 Buy more effective vaccines, Drilon tells Galvez

'Filipinos deserve the best vaccine,' Drilon adds Senate Minority Leader Franklin M. Drilon urged the government to prioritize the purchase and use of vaccines that have high levels of efficacy, lamenting that Filipinos are being short-changed when it comes to getting the most effective vaccines. "Kapag buhay ng Pilipino ang nakasalalay, hindi pwede ang 'pwede na'. We need to buy the most effective vaccines," Drilon said in a statement Tuesday. "When it comes to the life of millions of Filipinos and the future of the country, there should be no price tag. We can buy the most expensive vaccines with high efficacy. We should not short-change our taxpayers. But we are a fool to buy more expensive vaccines with doubtful efficacy," Drilon said. Drilon said Vaccine Czar Carlito Galvez should open his eyes and set aside his personal preference, or that of the administration, for Chinese-made vaccine Sinovac now that the country has more access to different brands of vaccines. "It is about time for Sec. Galvez to look at this objectively and listen to health experts. I have not heard of any doctor or any member of the medical profession that recommends Sinovac over Pfizer, Moderna or AstraZeneca. Bring me one, Sec. Galvez, aside from Health Secretary Francisco Duque III," Drilon said. Drilon cited reports in other jurisdictions that used Sinovac as its main vaccine such as Indonesia, where it was reported that a relatively high number of vaccinees, especially members of the health care sector, have caught COVID-19 despite being vaccinated with the China brand of vaccine. "That is very alarming because as it appears now, Sinovac is the vaccine of choice by the government. We want to prevent the situation that is happening now in Indonesia. We are not promoting any brand. What we are saying is, Filipinos deserve the best vaccine, especially frontline doctors and nurses who are exposed to the virus," Drilon said. He added that these reports about Sinovac "do not augur well for a country that has high vaccine hesitancy." Drilon said that he can understand that it was Sinovac that was immediately available to the Philippines at the time when negotiations with Pfizer did not immediately materialize into agreements - for which the government was only to blame. However, now that the country has access to more and better vaccines, Drilon said the government should make it a policy to prioritize the purchase and distribution of vaccines with high levels of efficacy. Pfizer has shown an efficacy rate of 95 percent while Sinovac's vaccine has recorded an efficacy rate of anywhere from 65 to 91 percent based on clinical trials in countries like Brazil. Besides, Drilon pointed out that Pfizer's price is quite lower than Sinovac which has been established to be less effective than the other brands. "That's a basic logic: why choose a vaccine that is less effective yet more expensive over a vaccine that is more effective but less expensive?" Drilon asked.
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.
Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita and US secretary of state Antony Blinken held talks Mondy in Rome that focused on means to strengthen the strategic partnership existing between Morocco and the United States.

The two officials, who were both participating in the ministerial meeting of the global coalition against Daesh held in Rome, seized the opportunity to hold their first face-to-face meeting since the advent of the new US administration.

They also discussed the coming deadlines regarding bilateral relations as well as regional issues in which Morocco plays a key role, particularly with regard to the Middle East and the Libyan crisis.

The US Secretary of State had highlighted Moroccos key role in fostering stability in the Sahel and Libya during a phone talk he had held with Bourita last April and had then welcomed the strategic, strong, and enduring partnership linking the two countries.

Blenken had also commended the far-reaching reforms spearheaded by King Mohammed VI and his efforts in addressing challenges relating to climate change as well as his leadership in promoting renewable energies and the green economy.

The US official had encouraged Morocco to help promote green economic growth and development in Africa.
Iranian President-elect Ebrahim Raisi will be inaugurated on August 5 following his landslide victory during the 13th presidential elections held on June 18.

The swearing-in ceremony will take place after a confirmation by the Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, Teheran Times reports citing state-run news agency IRNA.

The confirmation according to the media reports will take place two days before the inauguration.

Head of the judiciary, and close to Khamenei, Raisi beat his three challengers with 17,926,345 votes out of a total of 28,933,004 ballots. He is taking over from incumbent and reformist Hassan Rouhani who led the Islamic Republic during two terms, the limitation set by the Constitution.
The UAE has asked Italy to withdraw its military jets and forces from a military base in the Gulf country by July 2, an Italian source told Reuters, in an apparent reaction to the European countrys opposition to a missile sale deal to the Gulf country. The source who asked not be named told the agency both countries are trying to defuse the crisis.

The European country, a member of NATO, has used al Minhad air base, which hosts aircraft from various nations, for flights to Iraq, Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa and the Indian Ocean.

Italy irked the UAE early this year after it said it botched the sale of 20,000 missiles worth more than 400 million euros ($485 million) in 2016 under the center-left government of Matteo Renzi, in light of Romes commitment to bringing peace to Yemen and protecting human rights, Reuters notes.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE had led a Pan-Arab coalition in Yemen backing President Mansour facing opposition from Houthi rebels. The campaign has caused the death of more than 10,000 people and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people.

This month, Italy summoned the UAE envoy to Rome to protest against the Gulf countrys refusal to allow an Italian military plane carrying 40 journalists to cross its airspace on its way to Afghanistan.
The grandson of the late former President Daniel Arap Moi has been accused of disobeying orders for a DNA test in a case where he is being sued for child support.

Consequently, Nakuru Senior Resident Magistrate Benjamin Limo has summoned Collins Toroitich Kibet to appear in person to defend himself over accusations of contempt of court.

Mr Moi was required to appear at the Lancet laboratories in Nakuru on June 18 for a DNA test to confirm the paternity of two children alleged to be his by his former wife Gladys Jeruto Tagi.

He, however, failed to turn up, prompting Ms Tagi, through her lawyer David Mongeri, to return to court accusing him of contempt of court.

In her contempt proceedings, she sought to have Mr Moi jailed for six months for disobeying court orders.
The Nairobi Metropolitan Services(NMS) has been dealt a blow in its quest to replace the Langata cemetery.

Since November last year, the NMS has been locked in negotiations with the Kenya Forest Service (KFS) with a view to partitioning part of the forest adjacent to Langata cemetery to serve as a new burial ground.

However, Badi says that KFS is playing hardball as it does not want to decrease tree coverage and green spaces in Nairobi.

This has forced the Major General Mohamed Badi-led administration to look at another option that would see Nairobians travel outside the city to bury their loved ones.

If KFS doesnt come on board, we have land available which is under our control. We have a standby area towards Kangundo Road which is over 10 acres. So, if we decided to utilise the land, people will be forced to travel 15 kilometres outside Nairobi, said Badi.

The NMS boss said they are still trying to convince KFS by pledging to plant trees to compensate for the land being sought from the forests agency.
Police in Mwea West Sub-county in Kirinyaga have arrested two people suspected of killing their lovers over claims of infidelity.

Confirming the incidents, Mwea West Sub-county police commander Stephen Okal said the first incident occurred in Ciagiini village where 19-year-old Jacklyn Wawira stabbed to death her 25-year-old boyfriend, Eric Gitonga.

Reports indicate that the suspect, who is said to be a form two dropout, and her boyfriend, a petrol station attendant, had a heated quarrel over infidelity.

The confrontation turned into a fight where the girl picked a kitchen knife and stabbed her boyfriend to death. The suspect carried out the attack in her grandmothers compound where she has been staying.

We have managed to recover the murder weapon and the lady is being held at Kiamaciri police station, Okal said adding that investigations were ongoing.

Elsewhere, a man was arrested in Kariko-ini village of Kangai ward, Mwea West for allegedly killing his 28-year-old wife.

Mwea West Sub-county police boss Stephen Okal said the couple fought over cheating claims leading to the fatality.

According to sources, the suspect, Antony Murage, suspected that his wife, Esther Wanjiku, was cheating on him.

The man has been accusing the wife of cheating. During a verbal exchange over the issue, the man became aggressive, took a kitchen knife and stabbed the lady several times, the source told K24.

The police boss said: We are holding the suspect at Kiamaciri police station, and as soon as the investigation is over, we will give more details.
[June 29, 2021] Cannae Holdings, Inc. Announces Termination of Previously Announced $75 Million Forward Purchase Agreement and New Equity Backstop Commitment of Up to $200 Million in Trebia Acquisition Corp. and System1 Business Combination Cannae Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:CNNE) ("Cannae" or the "Company") today announced that the Company, in conjunction with the announced Trebia Acquisition Corp. (NYSE: TREB, TREB WS) ("Trebia") and System1 ("System1") business combination, has terminated its previously announced $75 million forward purchase agreement and agreed to an equity backstop commitment of up to $200 million in the combined company with 50% of this commitment being applied against the first $200 million of Trebia stockholder potential future redemptions and the next $100 million applied against Trebia stockholder potential future redemptions beyond $200 million, if any. Cannae will retain its approximately 15% indirect economic interest in the outstanding founder shares of Trebia. William P. Foley, II, Chairman of Cannae, commented, "We are very excited to participate in the combination of Trebia and System1 given the opportunity set that we see ahead for the combined company. System1 is differentiated in the digital marketing sector given its significant scale and diversification across the full spectrum of advertising verticals. This has allowed the company to deliver impressive growth across multiple industry verticals and market environments. Given the company's position and outlook, I am pleased that we have the opportunity to partner with this exciting business." Transaction Overview The transaction is anticipated to provide approximately $175 million1 of cash to System1's balance sheet2. These proceeds will be used to continue to fund System1's growth initiatives, invest in System1's RAMP platform, and for acquisitions. The $518 million of cash held in Trebia's trust account is backstopped by the $200 million equity commitment from Cannae, together with $218 million of the Bank of America debt commitment, which will be utilized as a backstop for potential future redemptions by Trebia public stockholders. This, in conjunction with the potential for management to roll additional equity, creates a 100% backstop for potential future redemptions.

Holders of a significant majority of equity of System1 and Protected.net have committed to roll their equity into the combined company.

The post-money enterprise value of the combined company is $1.4 billion at the $10.00 per share price 2 .

. Michael Blend, System1's Co-Founder & CEO, and Tridivesh Kidambi, its CFO, will continue in their current roles along with the rest of the System1 executive team.

Michael Blend will remain Chairman of the Board of System1 and will be joined by William P. Foley, II and Frank R. Martire, Jr. after the transaction closes. System1 expects to add up to 4 more directors in the upcoming months. The boards of directors of both System1 and Trebia have approved the proposed transaction, subject to, among other things, the approval by Trebia's stockholders and satisfaction or waive of the other conditions stated in the definitive documentation. Additional information on Cannae's $200 million equity backstop agreement will be provided in a Current Report on Form 8-K to be filed by the Company with the Securities and Exchange Commission and available at www.sec.gov. Additional information about the proposed transaction, including a copy of the business combination agreement and investor presentation, will be provided in a Current Report on Form 8-K to be filed by Trebia with the Securities and Exchange Commission and available at www.sec.gov. The transaction is expected to close in Q4 of 2021. About Cannae Holdings, Inc. Cannae Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: CNNE) is engaged in actively managing and operating a group of companies and investments, as well as making additional majority and minority equity portfolio investments in businesses, in order to achieve superior financial performance and maximize the value of these assets. Cannae was founded and is led by investor William P. Foley, II. Foley is responsible for the creation and growth of over $140 Billion in publicly traded companies including Fidelity National Information Services (News - Alert) (NYSE: FIS), Fidelity National Financial (NYSE: FNF), and Black Knight, Inc. (NYSE: BKI). Cannae's current principal holdings include Dun & Bradstreet Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: DNB), which recently completed a successful business transformation and IPO. Cannae holds approximately 76 Million shares of Dun & Bradstreet (News - Alert) or an ~17.7% interest. Cannae's second principal holding is Ceridian (NYSE: CDAY), which Foley transformed from a legacy payroll bureau into a leading cloud-based provider of human capital management software. Cannae owns 12 Million shares of Ceridian representing an approximately 8.0% interest. Cannae also holds approximately 54 Million shares, or approximately 7.5% of Paysafe (NYSE: PSFE), as well as 8.1 Million Paysafe warrants. About Trebia Acquisition Corp. Trebia Acquisition Corp. is a blank check company 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 entities. The company was founded by William P. Foley, II and Frank R. Martire, Jr. on February 11, 2020 and is headquartered in New York, NY. For more information, please visit: https://trebiaacqcorp.com. About System1 System1 combines best-in-class technology & data science to operate the world's most advanced Responsive Acquisition Marketing Platform (RAMP). System1's RAMP is omni-channel and omni-vertical, and built for a privacy-centric world. RAMP enables the building of powerful brands across multiple consumer verticals, the development & growth of a suite of privacy-focused products, and the delivery of high-intent customers to advertising partners. For more information, visit www.system1.com Forward Looking Statements This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements regarding our expectations with respect to the combination of Trebia and System1 and our expectations with respect to the future performance and anticipated financial impacts of the proposed business combination, the satisfaction or waiver of the closing conditions to the proposed business combination, and the timing of the proposed business combination. Forward-looking statements are not historical facts, involve a number of risks and uncertainties and are based on management's beliefs and assumptions based on information currently available. Because such statements are based on expectations as to future financial and operating results and are not statements of fact, actual results may differ materially from those projected. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. This press release should be read in conjunction with the risks detailed in the "Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Information," "Risk Factors" and other sections of our Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Annual Report on Form 10-K and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. 1 Assuming $325mm of debt

2 Assuming no redemptions by Trebia Stockholders View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005585/en/

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Russian Supreme Court upholds recovery of $2 bln from Tatfondbank ex-chair

 TASS, Yegor Aleyev

10:29 29/06/2021

MOSCOW, June 29 (RAPSI)  The Supreme Court of Russia has dismissed an appeal filed by ex-chairman of Tatfondbank Robert Musin and seven other persons former in control of the bank against recovery of 141.3 billion rubles (about $2 billion) from them, according to court records.

The claimants sought to overturn the ruling of the Tatarstan Commercial Court of September 2020 and rulings of appeals and cassation instances.

The Deposit Insurance Agency earlier demanded to collect the funds from eleven ex-top managers of the bank. However, the application was granted in part. Moreover, in March 2020, the Tatarstan Commercial Court suspended the 141.3 billion-ruble debt proceedings initiated by Tatfondbank against Musin. The claim was suspended until a judicial act on the application of the Deposit Insurance Agency (DIA) seek is taken.

In late February 2020, the bank filed a petition to put a 141.3 billion-ruble debt of Musin on his list of creditors demands.

The same month the court ordered the seizure of assets held by Musin and ten other former managers of the bank totaling 96.7 billion rubles (about $1.5 billion).

The court ruling also prohibited the Federal Service for State Registration, Cadastre and Cartography (FSSRCC) to register transfers of ownership of several premises and land plots belonging to defendants.

A petition filed by Russias State Corporation Deposit Insurance Agency (DIA) to introduce interim relief was satisfied in part: the agency demanded to seize in total assets worth 141.39 billion rubles (about $2.3 billion).

In substantiation of the claim, DIA cited the facts evidencing that the persons in control over the bank committed actions aimed to defraud it of its assets, in particular, to form simulated debts, replace valuable assets with unrealizable ones; purchased non-marketable securities; transferred liquid assets in trust of an affiliated organization and made other dubious deals.

Besides, the persons in control of the bank failed to undertake measures aimed to prevent Tatfondbank bankruptcy, the DIA statement reads. As a result, the financial standing of the bank has been seriously undermined, what was the reason, the claimant believes, of the situation where it could not meet the demands of its creditors.

Earlier, the Tatarstan Commercial Court has extended the procedure of sale of property of Musin for six months.

On July 18, 2018, the court granted a motion of Tatfondbank and declared Musin bankrupt.

Before that, the court initiated a procedure of restructuring Musins debt. The DIA sought 16.7 million rubles ($255,000) from the banker.

Notably, Musin is charged with embezzlement. According to investigators, in August 2016, employees of the bank provided false data to the Central Bank of Russia to obtain a credit and subsequently embezzle the funds. Later, the money was transferred to the accounts of affiliated companies.

Investigators believe that overall damage in criminal cases against Musin reaches 50 billion rubles (about $765.6 million). Thirteen cases over abuse of office opened against Musin are allegedly connected with embezzlement of 18 billion rubles ($275.6 million) belonging to Tatfondbank.

Criminal prosecution

In July 2019, the Investigative Committee reported that Musin would stand trial on charges of abuse of office.

According to investigators, in December 2016, Musin siphoned liquid collateral security amounting to more than 20 billion rubles ($315 million) prior to the appointment of temporary administration in the troubled bank. Thus, he caused damage in the form of credit outstandings worth over 7 billion rubles to Tatfondbank, the statement reads. Over 19 billion rubles have not been returned, investigators claim.

There are 517 volumes in the case against Musin. Moreover, investigators believe that the defendant was involved in other crimes. The total damage caused by Musins actions is estimated at more than 53 billion rubles (nearly $835 million), according to the Investigative Committee.

A court has seized his assets worth more than 4.2 billion rubles.
Belgium extradites alleged participant of 1996 assault on Chechen school

 flickr.com/

15:55 29/06/2021

MOSCOW, June 29 (RAPSI)  Belgium has granted extradition of Ali Ozdamirov, an alleged assailant on a school in Russias Republic of Chechnya in 1996, a statement on the website of the Prosecutor Generals Office reads.

According to investigators, the accused, being a military chief at school in one of the Republics villages, created an organized military group to embezzle money allocated for wages and educational grants.

On April 24, 1996, the gang members committed an armed assault on the school. They took 40.6 million pre-revaluation rubles from the directors cabinet. As a result of the shooting, the school head died and one more employee was injured, according to the statement.

Ozdamirov escaped and was put on the international wanted list.




Arrest warrant issued for ex-director of Navalnys foundation in absentia

 RAPSI, Vladimir Burnov

17:37 29/06/2021

MOSCOW, June 29 (RAPSI)  An arrest warrant was issued in absentia on Tuesday for Ivan Zhdanov, a former director of the foundation established by Alexey Navalny, which had been declared extremist by court, as part of a case over deliberate non-compliance with court decisions, the Moscow Nagatinsky District Courts press service told RAPSI.

Zhdanov is to be placed in detention for one month after his arrest.

Earlier, he was put on the international wanted list. He could face up to two years in jail if convicted.

Last November, Moscows Simonovsky District Court upheld a 100,000-ruble fine ($1,400) imposed on Zhdanov for refusal to delete a video record released by Navalnys foundation defaming businessman Alisher Usmanov.
Institution of Russias Human Rights Commissioner gains supreme international status

 RAPSI, Vladimir Burnov

11:50 29/06/2021

MOSCOW, June 29 (RAPSI)  The Institution o Russias Commissioner for Human Rights has been granted the highest international status, according to the Federal Ombudsman Tatiana Moskalkova.

The Russian Ombudsman has been accredited with A status. Such reaccreditation happens twice a decade, she stated.

This international status gives the Ombudsman a right to participate in the meetings of the United Nations Organization (UN), Moskalkova added.

The Institution o Russias Commissioner for Human Rights has an extensive route plan for developing of international cooperation and national law concerning human rights and freedoms as well as strengthening of human rights guarantees in Russia, she pointed.




Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin's Regular Press Conference on June 29, 2021

2021/06/29

CCTV: Yesterday, President Xi Jinping held a video conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The two heads of state issued a joint statement, officially deciding to extend the China-Russia Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation. How do you assess this meeting? What's your expectation of China-Russia relations looking ahead?

Wang Wenbin: The meeting is the second virtual interaction between President Xi and President Putin since the beginning of this year. The two heads of state affirmed the important significance of the Treaty of Good-neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation between China and Russia and officially decided to extend it. President Putin expressed warm congratulations on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China. The two sides made top-level designs on practical cooperation in various fields and held in-depth exchange of views on major international issues of common concern, reaching important new consensus.

Head-of-state guidance is the most fundamental guarantee for the steady and sustained development of China-Russia relations. Under the strategic guidance of President Xi and President Putin, the China-Russia relations for a new era stand at their historical best. On the basis of strong political mutual trust, mutual understanding and traditional friendship between the two peoples has been deepened. Following the principle of win-win cooperation, the two sides accommodate each other's interests and concerns and have fruitful cooperation in such areas as hi-tech, space, aviation and nuclear energy, which has given a strong boost to development and rejuvenation in both countries and significantly improved peoples' well-being.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the signing of the China-Russia Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation. Our two countries are committed to developing a comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination with everlasting friendship. The past two decades are just the prologue. We are convinced that good-neighborliness and friendship is the mainstream public opinion in both countries and mutual benefit represents the consistent direction of bilateral cooperation. Guided by the two heads of state and the spirit of the Treaty, China-Russia relations and bilateral cooperation in various sectors will see greater progress and deliver more outcomes, which will contribute to fostering a new type of international relations and a community with a shared future for mankind.

Reuters: Japan's deputy defense minister on Monday spoke of the growing threat posed by Chinese and Russian collaboration and said it was necessary to "wake up" to Beijing's pressure on Taiwan and protect the island "as a democratic country." What's the ministry's comment on this?

Wang Wenbin: China deplores the erroneous remarks by the senior Japanese government official, and has lodged solemn representations with the Japanese side.

Some Japanese politicians, in disregard of the fact of China's peaceful development, unjustifiably point fingers at China's socioeconomic development and normal national defense building, portray China as a threat, and openly stoke big-power confrontation with the sinister motive to find excuses to break free from the military restrictions imposed on Japan over crimes of aggression committed by Japanese militarism in history. This is extremely irresponsible and dangerous.

The politician in question flagrantly refers to Taiwan as a "country" on multiple occasions, severely violating principles set out in the four political documents including the China-Japan Joint Statement and its solemn and repeated commitment of not seeing Taiwan as a country. We ask Japan to make crystal clarification, and ensure that such things won't happen again.

There is but one China in the world, and Taiwan is an inalienable part of China's sacred territory. The Taiwan question bears on the political foundation of China-Japan relations, the basic trust and good faith between the two countries and the international rule of law and justice. We seriously urge the Japanese side to earnestly honor its commitment, be prudent in words and actions, avoid undermining China's sovereignty in any form and refrain from sending any wrong signal to the "Taiwan independence" forces. I would like to stress that China's will and determination to safeguard national sovereignty, security and unity is unshakable. China must and will be reunified. This is an unstoppable historical trend.

Macao Monthly: It is reported that on June 28, Michael McCaul, the Republican lawmaker on the Foreign Affairs Committee of the US House of Representatives said through his spokesperson that he opposed the Ensuring American Global Leadership and Engagement Act to be reviewed this Wednesday, which means the Committee will likely advance the bill this week with only Democratic support. The Ensuring American Global Leadership and Engagement Act was adopted by the US Senate on June 8 with the intention to boost the country's ability to compete with China in science and technology. What is China's comment?

Wang Wenbin: China has expressed its solemn positions on relevant act passed by the US Congress. The act disregards facts, plays up strategic competition with China, slanders and smears China's development path and its domestic and foreign policies, and interferes in China internal affairs and undermines China's interests with regard to China's sovereignty and territorial integrity. China firmly opposes that and will steadfastly safeguard its interests.

How the US develops and enhances its own competitiveness is its own business. However, the US should not make an issue out of China, nor should it view China as an imaginary enemy. The worst enemy of the US is itself. What the US lawmakers should focus on is to get its own house in order.

The Chinese side urges relevant US legislators to abandon zero-sum mentality and ideological prejudice, stop conducting political manipulation of China-related issues, cease reviewing and advancing relevant China-related negative act, and delete relevant negative clauses. They should contribute more to promoting China-US relations and mutual trust and cooperation, so as to create favorable conditions for bilateral cooperation in important areas.

Reuters: Australia has filed a formal complaint to the World Trade Organization over China's duties on bottled wine imports, the WTO confirmed on Monday, and gives both sides 60 days to confer on the subject. What's China's stance on resolving this conflict and does China expect a formal dispute panel to be set up?

Wang Wenbin: I'll refer you to the competent authorities. I would just like to reiterate that China abides by WTO rules and handles matters accordingly.

Xinhua News Agencey: An academic report: Xinjiang  understanding complexity, building peace by Eurispes  Istituto di Studi Politici Economici e Sociali, Centro Studi Eurasia-Mediterraneo and Istituto Diplomatico Internazionale has recently been published. Fabio Massimo Palandi, an Italian scholar of international relations and author of the report, said that he saw with his own eyes in Xinjiang the full religious freedom enjoyed by ethnic minority groups including Uyghurs and found no sign of the so-called allegations of "forced labor" and "genocide". He pointed out that Western accusations on Xinjiang are unfounded. Does China have any comment on this?

Wang Wenbin: I have also taken note of this academic report which was penned by independent researchers and signed by dozens of world-renowned academics, political figures and journalists. Fabio Massimo Palandi, the Italian scholar of international relations who authored the report, said that some Western think tanks, scholars and media have invented false reports and accusations on Xinjiang, causing a grave negative impact. These individuals and institutions are openly anti-China. Their false reports were packaged as independent reports, based on which some Western governments imposed groundless sanctions on Xinjiang. Their purpose is not to protect human rights in Xinjiang, but to suppress and contain China. Precisely for this reason he and other scholars decided to write a report as objective and independent as possible to help the world see how Xinjiang was once plagued by terrorism and separatism and how the Chinese government adopted highly effective counter-terrorism and de-radicalization measures on the basis of rule and law, respect for human rights and protection of the lawful rights and interests of those concerned.

Apart from this report, I've also noted a recent article by Tom Fowdy, a British political and international relations analyst, which laid bare the hypocrisy of Western countries and media in their attitude towards the treatment of Muslims. On one hand they show no remorse for the crimes committed by the US and its allies in the Islamic world over many years; on the other they keep wantonly accusing China of the so-called human rights abuses in Xinjiang and hyping up the matter. They even attempt to inveigle Islamic countries into criticizing China. Such double standard is absurd and unreliable.

I'd like to stress that facts speak louder than words. The lies on Xinjiang fabricated by a few will eventually be exposed by the truth and fact of Xinjiang's rapid social and economic development and harmonious coexistence of people of all ethnic groups.

Beijing Media Network: It is reported that the prime minister's office of Ethiopia declared a unilateral ceasefire in Tigray region starting from June 28. What is China's comment?

Wang Wenbin: China welcomes the declaration made by the Ethiopian government of a unilateral ceasefire in Tigray region to ensure the normal operation of farming and humanitarian relief work there. We sincerely hope that people in Tigray region and the rest of Ethiopia will enjoy peace and stability, and achieve development and prosperity. We support relevant parties in Ethiopia in realizing national reconciliation through political dialogue. We believe that Ethiopia has the wisdom and capability to properly handle its internal affairs.

Reuters: Italian Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio said on Monday that"We are a strong trade partner with China, we have a historic relationship, but it is absolutely not comparable, and it does not interfere with, the alliance of values we have with the United States." What's the ministry's comment on this and does this stance affect China's ties with Italy?

Wang Wenbin: Italy is China's comprehensive strategic partner. In recent years, China-Italy relations have been growing in a sound and steady manner. The two sides have worked hand in hand to fight COVID-19 and promoted practical cooperation and various forms of cultural exchange, bringing tangible benefits to both peoples. As two ancient civilizations, China and Italy have a relationship rooted in history and founded on popular support. We believe it will maintain steady development going forward.

Shenzhen TV: A recent New York Times report indicates that the Chinese vaccines may not be very effective at preventing the spread of the virus in Chile. What is China's comment?

Wang Wenbin: I stated our position on this issue yesterday. Relevant allegation is nothing but distortion of facts and sensational accusations.

A leading official from Chile's health authorities said in response that he regretted to hear statements that Chile has problems with vaccination, which is not true. He said it really bothers him that some people out there should say the Sinovac vaccine has not worked in Chile without having any scientific information to back that up, and demanded that those statements be corrected. The Chilean government has stated on many occasions that facts show that the Sinovac vaccine is safe and effective.Chilean medical experts believe that had there not been mass vaccination supported by the Chinese vaccine, the consequences would have been catastrophic. Chilean netizens agree that the smear against the Chinese vaccine is bias-motivated, and that Sinovac's vaccine has worked well in Chile.

We hope that relevant media and politicians will respect facts and the opinions of the Chilean government and people, refrain from misleading the public, and make concrete contributions to promoting the accessibility and affordability of vaccines in developing countries rather than the opposite.

The Paper: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in an interview during his trip to Europe that the goal of the United States is to support a free and open system that was established after World War Two. Besides, the US State Department published a readout saying that Secretary Blinken and leaders of European countries discussed Transatlantic cooperation in addressing China's coercive economic practices and attempts at undermining the rules-based international order. What's your comment?

Wang Wenbin: China has always been an advocate of world peace, a contributor to global development and a defender of the international order. China's development adds to the force for world peace. I would also like to stress three points:

First, the US is the biggest saboteur of the international order. The US willfully withdraw from treaties and organizations and wantonly imposes illegal unilateral sanctions and military coercion on other countries, causing grave harm to international and regional peace and stability and seriously violating international law and basic norms governing international relations.

Second, the "rules-based international order" claimed by the US is, in essence, a hegemonic order in which the US dominates the world. The overwhelming majority of countries in the world, including US allies, do not agree with such an order. It is echoed and followed by only a handful of countries.

Third, there is only one system in the world, and that is the international system with the UN at its core. There is only one set of rules, and that is the basic norms governing international relations based on the UN Charter. The international order should not be a hegemonic one dominated by the US, and international rules should not be made by the US or a small bloc led by the US. Countries should uphold the universal values of peace, development, fairness, justice, democracy and freedom, practice true multilateralism, promote democracy in international relations, and jointly build a community with a shared future for mankind.
Herbert Algernon Liverman, Jr. 88, of Mechanicsville Maryland, passed away June 20, 2021 in the comfort of his home. He was born August 8, 1932 in Plymouth North Carolina to Herbert Liverman, Sr. and Leta Liverman (Tripp). Herbert was one (1) of two (2) children and he started school in 1938 and finished High School in 1951.



Not long after he graduated high school, he joined the U.S. Navy and served his country proud for 4 years before he was honorable discharged in 1955. He met the love of his life Cecily Liverman (Strickland) at a pub and together they spent many years of blissful marriage. The love Herbert had for Cecily had no bounds. It was rare to see one without the other and he treasured every moment with her right up until her passing on July 17, 2001.



Herbert's second marriage was to Mary Liverman (Winkelman), they met playing cards with friends and married on November 2, 2002. They were very happy with each other during this time. Mary passed away September 17, 2015.



Herbert was well known in the community. He worked in construction from 1957 to 2002 helping build and repair roadways and bridges and though his job he made many life-long friends though the years. Herbert moved to Maryland in 1972, purchased 30 acres in Mechanicsville and built his own house in 2002.



To know Herbert was to know a very kind and selfless, hardworking man with a heart of gold. When he wasn't spending time with his family, he could easily be found enjoying a nice cool breeze on a warm summers evening. Sitting with a fishing rod, line in the water, listening to the sound of waves and birds singing their songs. He started fishing with his Dad at the age of seven and stopped fishing at the rip age of 86. He was loved by many and will be greatly missed by everyone that had the pleasure of meeting him.



Farrah Mariani (Nurse/Caretaker/Friend) cared for Mary first and then Herbert, for the last eight years. Farrah provided comfort and support to them in their final days and was by Herbert's bedside when he passed.



Family will receive friends at Brinsfield Funeral Home & Crematory at 30195 Three Notch Road, Charlotte Hall, MD 20622, Tuesday June 29, 2021 from 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm.



Condolences to the family may be made at www.brinsfieldfuneral.com.



Arrangements by the Brinsfield Funeral Home & Crematory, P.A.
Supernova 2018zd, marked with a white circle on the outskirts of galaxy NGC2146, is the first example of a new, third type of supernova predicted 40 years ago. Composite image with data from the Hubble Space Telescope, Las Cumbres Observatory and other sources. CREDIT Joseph Depasquale, STScI

An international team of astronomers has observed the first example of a new type of supernova.

The discovery, confirming a prediction made four decades ago, could lead to new insights into the life and death of stars. The work is published June 28 in Nature Astronomy.

"One of the main questions in astronomy is to compare how stars evolve and how they die," said Stefano Valenti, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Davis, and a member of the team that discovered and described supernova 2018zd. "There are many links still missing, so this is very exciting."

There are two known types of supernova. A core-collapse supernova occurs when a massive star, more than 10 times the mass of our sun, runs out of fuel and its core collapses into a black hole or neutron star. A thermonuclear supernova occurs when a white dwarf star -- the remains of a star up to eight times the mass of the sun -- explodes.

In 1980, Ken'ichi Nomoto of the University of Tokyo predicted a third type called an electron capture supernova.

What keeps most stars from collapsing under their own gravity is the energy produced in their central core. In an electron capture supernova, as the core runs out of fuel, gravity forces electrons in the core into their atomic nuclei, causing the star to collapse in on itself.

Evidence from late spectrum

Supernova 2018zd was detected in March 2018, about three hours after the explosion. Archival images from the Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope showed a faint object that was likely the star before explosion. The supernova is relatively close to Earth, at a distance of about 31 million light years in galaxy NGC2146.

The team, led by Daichi Hiramatsu, graduate student at UC Santa Barbara and Las Cumbres Observatory, collected data on the supernova over the next two years. Astronomers from UC Davis, including Valenti and graduate students Azalee Bostroem and Yize Dong, contributed a spectral analysis of the supernova two years after the explosion, one of the lines of evidence demonstrating that 2018zd was an electron capture supernova.

"We had a really exquisite, really complete dataset following its rise and fade," Bostroem said. That included very late data collected with the 10-meter telescope at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, Dong added.

Theory predicts that electron capture supernovae should show an unusual stellar chemical spectrum years later.

"The Keck spectra we observed clearly confirm that SN 2018zd is our best candidate to be an electron capture supernova," Valenti said.

The late spectrum data were not the only piece of the puzzle. The team looked through all published data on supernovae, and found that while some had a few of the indicators predicted for electron capture supernovae, only SN 2018zd had all six: an apparent progenitor star of the Super-Asymptotic Giant Branch (SAGB) type; strong pre-supernova mass loss; an unusual stellar chemical spectrum; a weak explosion; little radioactivity; and a neutron-rich core.

"We started by asking 'what's this weirdo?' Then we examined every aspect of SN 2018zd and realized that all of them can be explained in the electron-capture scenario," Hiramatsu said.

Explaining the Crab Nebula

The new discoveries also illuminate some mysteries of the most famous supernova of the past. In A.D. 1054 a supernova occurred in the Milky Way. According to Chinese records it was so bright that it could be seen in the daytime for 23 days, and at night for nearly two years. The resulting remnant -- the Crab Nebula -- has been studied in great detail. It was previously the best candidate for an electron capture supernova, but this was uncertain partly because the explosion happened nearly a thousand years ago. The new result increases the confidence that the event that formed the Crab Nebula was an electron capture supernova.

"I am very pleased that the electron capture supernova was finally discovered, which my colleagues and I predicted to exist and have a connection to the Crab Nebula 40 years ago. This is a wonderful case of the combination of observations and theory," said Nomoto, who is also an author on the current paper.

###

The research is part of the Global Supernova Project, led by Professor Andrew Howell at UCSB and Las Cumbres Observatory. Additional co-authors are: Curtis McCully and Jamison Burke, Las Cumbres Observatory and UCSB; Jared Goldberg and Chengyuan Xu, UCSB; Schuyler Van Dyk and Gagandeep Anand, California Institute of Technology; Keiichi Maeda, Kyoto University; Takashi Moriya, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan; Nozomu Tominaga, Konan University, Kobe, Japan; Griffin Hosseinzadeh, Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian; Iair Arcavi, Tel Aviv University, Israel; Peter Brown, Texas A&M University; Jennifer Andrews, Christopher Bilinski, G. Grant Williams, Paul Smith, Nathan Smith and David Sand, Steward Observatory, University of Arizona; Alexei Filippenko, UC Berkeley; Melina Bersten and Gaston Folatelli, Instituto de Astrofisica de La Plata and Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina; Patrick Kelly, University of Minnesota; Toshi- hide Noguchi, Noguchi Astronomical Observatory and Koichi Itagaki, Itagaki Astronomical Observatory, Japan. The work was partly supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and NASA.

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Some exoplanet searches could be missing nearly half of the Earth-sized planets around other stars.

New findings from a team using the international Gemini Observatory and the WIYN 3.5-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory suggest that Earth-sized worlds could be lurking undiscovered in binary star systems, hidden in the glare of their parent stars. As roughly half of all stars are in binary systems, this means that astronomers could be missing many Earth-sized worlds.

Earth-sized planets may be much more common than previously realized. Astronomers working at NASA Ames Research Center have used the twin telescopes of the international Gemini Observatory, a Program of NSF's NOIRLab, to determine that many planet-hosting stars identified by NASA's TESS exoplanet-hunting mission [1] are actually pairs of stars -- known as binary stars -- where the planets orbit one of the stars in the pair. After examining these binary stars, the team has concluded that Earth-sized planets in many two-star systems might be going unnoticed by transit searches like TESS's, which look for changes in the light from a star when a planet passes in front of it [2]. The light from the second star makes it more difficult to detect the changes in the host star's light when the planet transits.

The team started out by trying to determine whether some of the exoplanet host stars identified with TESS were actually unknown binary stars. Physical pairs of stars that are close together can be mistaken for single stars unless they are observed at extremely high resolution. So the team turned to both Gemini telescopes to inspect a sample of exoplanet host stars in painstaking detail. Using a technique called speckle imaging [3], the astronomers set out to see whether they could spot undiscovered stellar companions.

Using the `Alopeke and Zorro instruments on the Gemini North and South telescopes in Chile and Hawai'i, respectively, [4] the team observed hundreds of nearby stars that TESS had identified as potential exoplanet hosts. They discovered that 73 of these stars are really binary star systems that had appeared as single points of light until observed at higher resolution with Gemini. "With the Gemini Observatory's 8.1-meter telescopes, we obtained extremely high-resolution images of exoplanet host stars and detected stellar companions at very small separations," said Katie Lester of NASA's Ames Research Center, who led this work.

Lester's team also studied an additional 18 binary stars previously found among the TESS exoplanet hosts using the NN-EXPLORE Exoplanet and Stellar Speckle Imager (NESSI) on the WIYN 3.5-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory, also a Program of NSF's NOIRLab.

After identifying the binary stars, the team compared the sizes of the detected planets in the binary star systems to those in single-star systems. They realized that the TESS spacecraft found both large and small exoplanets orbiting single stars, but only large planets in binary systems.

These results imply that a population of Earth-sized planets could be lurking in binary systems and going undetected using the transit method employed by TESS and many other planet-hunting telescopes. Some scientists had suspected that transit searches might be missing small planets in binary systems, but the new study provides observational support to back it up and shows which sizes of exoplanets are affected [5].

"We have shown that it is more difficult to find Earth-sized planets in binary systems because small planets get lost in the glare of their two parent stars," Lester stated. "Their transits are 'filled in' by the light from the companion star," added Steve Howell of NASA's Ames Research Center, who leads the speckle imaging effort and was involved in this research.

"Since roughly 50% of stars are in binary systems, we could be missing the discovery of -- and the chance to study -- a lot of Earth-like planets," Lester concluded.

The possibility of these missing worlds means that astronomers will need to use a variety of observational techniques before concluding that a given binary star system has no Earth-like planets. "Astronomers need to know whether a star is single or binary before they claim that no small planets exist in that system," explained Lester. "If it's single, then you could say that no small planets exist. But if the host is in a binary, you wouldn't know whether a small planet is hidden by the companion star or does not exist at all. You would need more observations with a different technique to figure that out."

As part of their study, Lester and her colleagues also analyzed how far apart the stars are in the binary systems where TESS had detected large planets. The team found that the stars in the exoplanet-hosting pairs were typically farther apart than binary stars not known to have planets [6]. This could suggest that planets do not form around stars that have close stellar companions.

"This speckle imaging survey illustrates the critical need for NSF telescope facilities to characterize newly discovered planetary systems and develop our understanding of planetary populations," said National Science Foundation Division of Astronomical Sciences Program Officer Martin Still.

"This is a major finding in exoplanet work," Howell commented. "The results will help theorists create their models for how planets form and evolve in double-star systems."

Notes

[1] TESS is the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, a NASA mission designed to search for planets orbiting other stars in a survey of around 75% of the entire night sky. The mission launched in 2018 and has detected more than 3500 candidate exoplanets, of which more than 130 have been confirmed. The satellite looks for exoplanets by observing their host stars; a transiting exoplanet causes a subtle but measurable dip in the brightness of its host star as it crosses in front of the star and blocks some of its light.

[2] The transit technique is one way of discovering exoplanets. It involves looking for regular decreases in the light of a star that could be caused by a planet passing in front of or "transiting" the star and blocking some of the starlight.

[3] Speckle imaging is an astronomical technique that allows astronomers to see past the blur of the atmosphere by taking many quick observations in rapid succession. By combining these observations, it is possible to cancel out the blurring effect of the atmosphere, which affects ground-based astronomy by causing stars in the night sky to twinkle.

[4] `Alopeke & Zorro are identical imaging instruments permanently mounted on the Gemini North and South telescopes. Their names mean "fox" in Hawaiian and Spanish, respectively, reflecting their respective locations on Maunakea in Hawaii and on Cerro Pachon in Chile.

[5] The team found that planets twice the size of Earth or smaller could not be detected using the transit method when observing binary systems.

[6] Lester's team found that the exoplanet-hosting binary stars they identified had average separations of about 100 astronomical units. (An astronomical unit is the average distance between the Sun and Earth.) Binary stars that are not known to host planets are typically separated by around 40 astronomical units.

More information

This research is presented in the paper "Speckle Observations of TESS Exoplanet Host Stars. II. Stellar Companions at 1-1000 AU and Implications for Small Planet Detection" to appear in the Astronomical Journal.

The team is composed of Kathryn V. Lester (NASA Ames Research Center), Rachel A. Matson (US Naval Observatory), Steve B. Howell (NASA Ames Research Center), Elise Furlan (Exoplanet Science Institute, Caltech), Crystal L. Gnilka (NASA Ames Research Center), Nicholas J. Scott (NASA Ames Research Center), David R. Ciardi (Exoplanet Science Institute, Caltech), Mark E. Everett (NSF's NOIRLab), Zachary D. Hartman (Lowell Observatory & Department of Physics & Astronomy, Georgia State University), and Lea A. Hirsch (Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, Stanford University).

NSF's NOIRLab (National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory), the US center for ground-based optical-infrared astronomy, operates the international Gemini Observatory (a facility of NSF, NRC-Canada, ANID-Chile, MCTIC-Brazil, MINCyT-Argentina, and KASI-Republic of Korea), Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO), Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), the Community Science and Data Center (CSDC), and Vera C. Rubin Observatory (operated in cooperation with the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory). It is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with NSF and is headquartered in Tucson, Arizona. The astronomical community is honored to have the opportunity to conduct astronomical research on Iolkam Du'ag (Kitt Peak) in Arizona, on Maunakea in Hawai'i, and on Cerro Tololo and Cerro Pachon in Chile. We recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that these sites have to the Tohono O'odham Nation, to the Native Hawaiian community, and to the local communities in Chile, respectively.

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NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough and ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Thomas Pesquet concluded their spacewalk at 2:37 p.m. EDT, after 6 hours and 45 minutes.

In the ninth spacewalk of the year outside the International Space Station, the two astronauts installed and deployed a new ISS Roll-Out Solar Array (iROSA) on the far end of the left (port) side of the station's backbone truss structure (P6).

Kimbrough and Pesquet successfully removed the array from its position in the flight support equipment, maneuvered it into position, connected the electrical cables, and released it to extend the solar array to its fully deployed position at the 4B power channel. After deployment, Pesquet also retrieved an articulating portable foot restraint (APFR) to bring inside the space station.

During two spacewalks June 16 and 20, Kimbrough and Pesquet installed and deployed a new array on 2B power channel also on the port 6 truss. Both new solar arrays are providing good power generation. Each new iROSA is expected to produce more than 20 kilowatts of electricity.

NASA is augmenting six of the eight existing power channels of the space station with new solar arrays to ensure a sufficient power supply is maintained for NASA's exploration technology demonstrations for Artemis and beyond as well as utilization and commercialization.

This was the ninth spacewalk for Kimbrough, the fifth for Pesquet, and the fifth they conducted together. Kimbrough has now spent a total of 59 hours and 28 minutes spacewalking, and Pesquet's total spacewalking time is 33 hours exactly.

Space station crew members have conducted 241 spacewalks in support of assembly and maintenance of the orbiting laboratory. Spacewalkers have now spent a total of 63 days, 7 hours, and 41 minutes working outside the station.

In November 2020, the International Space Station surpassed its 20-year milestone of continuous human presence, providing opportunities for unique research and technological demonstrations that help prepare for long-duration missions to the Moon and Mars and also improve life on Earth. In that time, 244 people from 19 countries have visited the orbiting laboratory that has hosted nearly 3,000 research investigations from researchers in 108 countries and areas.

On-Orbit Status Report

United States On-orbit Segment (USOS) Extravehicular Activity (EVA) #76 - ISS Roll-Out Solar Array (IROSA) 4B Install: Today, EV1 (Thomas Pesquet) and EV2 (Shane Kimbrough) performed a 6-hour and 45-minute EVA and completed the following tasks with the support of Space Station Remote Manipulator System (SSRMS) operations provided by M1 (Megan McArthur) and M2 (Mark Vande Hei) for the IROSA 4B Install EVA:

Release IROSA from the Flight Support Equipment (FSE)

Install IROSA on the Port 6 (P6) 4B Mast Canister

Connect IROSA Electrical Connectors

Deploy P6 4B IROSA

Retrieve Articulating Portable Foot Restraint (APFR) 3 and Return Intravehicle (IV)

Ground teams confirmed that the P6 4B IROSA is performing nominally and supplying power to the 4B power channel. A full characterization of the P6 4B IROSA capability will be performed in September during Equinox testing. At full capability, the P6 4B IROSA is expected to provide up to 20kW of power in addition to the ~8kW of power provided by the legacy P6 4B ISS Solar Array totaling ~28kW for the 4B power channel. The P6 4B IROSA is the second of six IROSA installations planned for station upgrades. The next set of IROSAs are will be delivered to the ISS on Cargo Dragon SpaceX-25 which is planned to launch in 2022.

Payloads

Confocal Space Microscopy: The crew routed the thermal container cables for the Confocal Microscope and the ground performed a checkout of the connectivity. The Confocal Space Microscope is a JAXA facility that provides fluorescence images of biological samples aboard the ISS. Confocal Space Microscopy uses spatial filtering techniques to eliminate out-of-focus light or glare in specimens whose thickness exceeds the immediate plane of focus. With the Confocal Microscope, data can be obtained on the fundamental nature of cellular and tissue structure and functions in real-time.

Oral Biofilms in Space (OBiS): The crew hydrated the OBiS Assembly session Packs 17-20 with Fluid Bag 2 into the Fluid Chamber and restowed into the Microgravity Experiment Research Locker Incubator (MERLIN) for incubation. Fluid Bag 2 is a fluid medium containing chemicals designed to promote bacterial growth along with oral care bioactives within the Fluid Chamber. OBiS studies the effect of gravity on the behavior of oral bacteria, including the structure of the bacterial community, and changes in bacterial response to common oral care agents. The findings could support development of novel treatments to fight oral diseases such as caries, gingivitis, and periodontitis. The investigation also could provide insights into how microgravity affects the microbiome of other mucosal surfaces in the body.

Plasma Krystall-4 (PK-4): The crew executed two Run 4 operations by catching clouds of particles inside the PK-4 chamber using the PK-4 Human Computer Interface (HCI) software on the European Physiology Module (EPM) laptop. PK-4 is a scientific collaboration between ESA and Roscosmos performing research in the field of "Complex Plasmas". Complex Plasmas are low temperature gaseous mixtures composed of ionized gas, neutral gas, and micron-sized particles. The micro-particles become highly charged in the plasma and interact strongly with each other, which can lead to a self-organized structure of the micro-particles, so-called plasma crystals. Experiments in the facility aim to study transport properties, thermodynamics, kinetics and statistical physics, non-linear waves, and instabilities in Complex Plasmas.

Systems

Waste and Hygiene Compartment (WHC) Urine Receptacle (UR) and Insert Filter (IF) Remove & Replace (R&R): The crew completed routine maintenance to R&R the UR/IF. Following the R&R, the crew cleaned the WHC power supply, reactivated WHC, and performed a leak check to close out the activity.

Cargo Dragon Operations: The crew performed cargo operations for Cargo Dragon SpaceX-22 (SpX-22). SpX-22 undock is scheduled for July 6th to return cargo and payloads to the ground.

Completed Task List Activities:

Photo/TV Node 1 Cable Swap

WHC [KTO] and Solid Waste Receptacle R&R

Today's Ground Activities:

All activities are complete unless otherwise noted.

IROSA 4B EVA Ground Commanding & Support

Post-EVA ISS Configuration Commanding (In Work)

Look Ahead Plan

Saturday, June 26 (GMT 177)

Payloads:

APEX-07 Harvest (NASA)

OBiS Bag3 (17-20) Initiation (NASA)

PK-4 HD Pack and Closeout (Joint)

ISS HAM Pass (NASA)

SlingShot Control Box Install (NASA)

Systems:

EVA Debrief

EVA Recovery Activities

SpX-22 Cargo Operations

Cygnus Departure OBT

Sunday, June 27 (GMT 178)

Payloads:

Repository Urine and Blood setup (NASA)

Systems:

Crew Off-Duty

Monday, June 28 (GMT 179)

Payloads:

Slingshot Bracket and Deployer Install (NASA)

Microbial Tracking -3 Sample Collect (NASA)

InSPACE-4 Historical Photo (NASA)

Industrial Crystallization Single Chamber Swap (NASA)

RTPCG-2 Plate Load 2C1

Behavioral Core Measures Test (NASA)

EML Argon Gas Valve Configuration and Open (joint)

Systems:

EVA Recovery Activities

NG-15 Departure Preparations

SpX-22 Cargo Operations

Today's Planned Activities:

All activities are complete unless otherwise noted.

Confocal Space Microscopy Cable Reconfiguration, Cable Connect, and Cable Check

Health Maintenance System (HMS) ISS Food Intake Tracker (ISS FIT)

IROSA 4B Install EVA

SSRMS IROSA 4B EVA Support

Antimicrobial Coatings Touch

HMS Spaceflight Cognitive Assessment Tool for Windows (WinSCAT) Test

MERLIN OBiS Assemblies Removal, Flow Reconfiguration, and Biofilms Session Pack Insertion

Network Attached Storage Hard Drive Reseat

Dragon Cargo Transfer

IFM WHC UR/IF R&R

Post-EVA Activities (In Work)

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Caribbean

C uba said its three-shot Abdala vaccine against the coronavirus had proved 92.28% effective in last-stage clinical trials.



The announcement came just days after the government said another homegrown vaccine, Soberana 2, had proved 62% effective with just two of its three doses.



Hit by the pandemic, our scientists at the Finlay Institute and Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology have risen above all the obstacles and given us two very effective vaccines, President Miguel Diaz-Canel tweeted.



The announcement came from state-run biopharmaceutical corporation BioCubaFarma, which oversees Finlay, the maker of Soberana 2, and the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, the producer of Abdala.

Both vaccines are expected to be granted emergency authority by local regulators shortly.



Cuba, whose biotech sector has exported vaccines for decades, has five coronavirus vaccine candidates.



The Caribbeans largest island is facing its worst COVID-19 outbreak since the start of the pandemic following the arrival of more contagious variants, setting new records for daily coronavirus cases.



The Communist-run country has opted not to import foreign vaccines but to rely on its own. Some experts said it was a risky bet but it appears to have paid off, putting Cuba in position to burnish its scientific reputation, generate much-needed hard currency through exports and strengthen the vaccination drive worldwide.



Several countries from Argentina and Jamaica to Mexico, Vietnam and Venezuela have expressed an interest in buying Cubas vaccines. Iran started producing Soberana 2 earlier this year as part of late-phase clinical trials.



Cubas authorities have already started administering the experimental vaccines en masse as part of intervention studies they hope will slow the spread of the virus.



About a million of the countrys 11.2 million residents have been fully vaccinated to date.



Daily cases have halved in the capital, Havana, since the start of the vaccination campaign a month ago, using Abdala, according to official data.

Cuba has reported a total of 169,365 COVID-19 cases and 1,170 deaths.






Caribbean

A n investigation has been launched following an incident which 10 Haitian children were found in a hotel room in the Berbice region.



According to a government statement  the children, five boys, and five girls, did not have in their possession passports or any other form of identification.

When questioned by police, one of the children said they were transported to Guyana from neighbouring Suriname by speed boat and were dropped off at the hotel on, June 14.



A spokesperson for the group also told police the person who deposited them there, took their passports and all personal belongings.



It has long been suspected that there is huge trafficking in persons and human smuggling ring, including children, taking place in the Region and Guyana is being used as a transit point in this racket, which includes Cubans, Nigerians and Haitians, among others. This is the latest manifestation of this nefarious racket at work which seems to be operating on a daily basis.

The statement added that the governments of Brazil and Suriname have expressed concern over the situation.



The statement also said that the Government has already engaged the Cuban Ambassador to Guyana on this issue and it is believed that these persons, including children, are being trafficked to various parts of the world.

Recently, the police arrested a number of Haitians, Nigerians, and Cubans.



It was then discovered that several of them did not have entry stamps in their passports in relation to Guyana.



In the circumstances, the Government of Guyana feels compelled to inform the relevant international agencies dealing with human trafficking and smuggling of persons, including children. In this regard, we will engage the United Nations Humans Rights Council, the International Organisation for Migration, and INTERPOL and requests their urgent intervention and assistance.



The government also announced plans to review its immigration protocols and impose such lawful restrictions and conditions that it considers necessary in the circumstances.






Parul University, Gujarats leading private university, has selected Dell Technologies infrastructure solution to facilitate seamless online learning to more than 30,000 students enrolled in different programs.

The university implemented a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solution that enables compute, storage, and networking functions to be decoupled from the underlying infrastructure, improving efficiency and lowering costs. Built on Dell EMC PowerEdge servers, the HCI solution delivers agility, scalability, and simplified IT management. With online learning becoming a norm amidst the pandemic, Parul University needed an infrastructure through which they could allow their students to attend classes online, while ensuring top-notch data security. The university also needed a scalable and elastic solution that would have the ability to accommodate future online learning needs.

Srinivas Rao, senior director, System Engineering, Dell Technologies, said, The advancements in digital technologies has transformed education. Online instructions and learning from anywhere are becoming more prevalent. With our end-to-end solutions, we were able to address Parul Universitys need to migrate their physical server workload into the HCI environment and offer seamless online education. Now, the university has a scalable and elastic solution, equipped to accommodate future workload requirements for education of the future.

With the deployment of Dell Technologies HCI, the university system administrators started receiving insights such as proactive alert, back-up, and resource forecasting. allowing the technical team more time for innovation. The implementation of Dell OpenManage Software helped the university manage the entire infrastructure using a single console and the entire setup remotely with the iDRAC Enterprise solution.

Snehal kumar Darji, Chief Technology Officer, Parul University, said, The situation that unfolded early last year forced educational institutions to deploy new-age IT solutions for flexible online learning. We did deploy new infrastructure, however the costs incurred by us was higher than expected. We analyzed the existing learning model and decided that an on-premise IT setup seemed to be the right solution for us. Adopting HCI solutions from Dell Technologies has made us future-ready. We are early adopters of online learning and instruction infrastructure and this has undoubtedly helped us provide seamless digital learning to our students.
Kinan, a leading developer and manager of real estate in Saudi Arabia, has selected Yardi technology to streamline and digitalise its commercial operations and provide a better customer experience.

Kinan has chosen Yardi as its technology partner to manage 10 retail properties in six cities across Saudi Arabia, a portfolio that consists of approximately 350,000 sq m GLA.

The company will be implementing Yardi Voyager for property management and accounting; Lease Manager CRM to help automate the full lead-to-lease cycle; Yardi Advanced Budgeting & Forecasting for accurate reporting and improved decision making; Yardi Inspection to gain real-time data and enhanced inspection management; CommercialCafe to improve tenant experience with a self-serve portal and mobile app; and Yardi Orion Business Intelligence, a mobile-enabled platform that provides a holistic view of assets.

"I am pleased to announce that Kinan will implement Yardi as the property and assets management system for our retail projects across Saudi Arabia," said Konrad Kolankiewicz, chief operating officer, malls and retail at Kinan. "We believe that the use of this innovative real estate platform will allow us to improve the quality of our work with a direct impact on business strategy and efficiency."

"We are pleased to welcome Kinan as our latest client based in Saudi Arabia," said Neal Gemassmer, vice president of international for Yardi. "As the Middle East continues to further digitalise real estate management, Yardi is committed to playing an important role in helping our clients meet their business objectives." -- TradeArabia News Service
General Motors Africa and Middle East (GM AMEO) continues to be a key advocate in inspiring passion for future STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) leaders in the region as it accelerates towards its all-electric future.

Its most recent efforts see GM collaborating with the Arab Youth Centre  a platform established to realise the vision of Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan  Deputy Prime Minister of Presidential Affairs, to nurture the next generation of Arab leaders and support innovation in the region, for its Technology Fellowship Programme. To date, over 22,000 individuals have benefitted from Arab Youths programmes from across 21 countries within the region.

The Technology Fellowship Programme provides aspiring STEM Arab youth with the opportunity to gain knowledge and guidance from experts within the diverse spheres of technology and digital. The global automaker recently held its first session on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), internship programs, future mobility, connectivity and safety. Participants in the session, of which 45% were from the GCC and 60% were female, got first-hand insights into the power of DEI for an organisation to move forward, exciting technological developments shaping the mobility industry today and GMs role in driving this change.

We are excited to partner with Arab Youth Centre to continue inspiring a generation of Arab youth who will help lead the technology and digital space in the region and help shape it to better serve our communities, said Luay Al Shurafa, President & Managing Director of GM AMEO.

Technology is revolutionising the automotive industry like never before and GM is at the epicenter of this evolution. With 40% of our workforce currently in STEM-related roles in the Middle East, we have the expertise and the scale to continue driving towards our all-electric future. However, none of this would be possible without our incredible team of engineers, locally and globally, who are the driving force behind GMs vision of zero crashes, zero congestion and zero congestion. Supporting and expanding STEM education amongst the next generation is fundamental in achieving this goal, continued Al Shurafa.

Saeed Al Nazari, Director General of the Federal Youth Authority and Chief Strategy Officer of the Arab Youth Center stressed that the future is for youth who possess the skills needed to make a difference to society enabling them to innovate and create new solutions and concepts. These developments will power future communities, evolve various aspects of daily life, including smart and sustainable mobility, the use of IoT and AI applications.

Through our programmes and initiatives, Arab Youth Centre aims to empower the youth and provide them with skills that allow self-development and success  both on a personal and professional front, as well as play a vital role in the economic and social development of our society, he added. Hence why we have partnered with GM  the leader in innovative mobility solutions. Through our cooperation in the Technology Fellowship Programme, we are equipping future STEM leaders with the insights on the skills needed for them to benefit from digital career opportunities which will account for 90% of the overall jobs, as per the Future of Jobs Report by the World Economic Forum.

At GM, we place a huge emphasis on our support of STEM programs in seeking to foster economic growth and sustainability among communities in the region and worldwide. Alongside our collaboration with the Arab Youth Centre, we are also running a Hybrid Internship Programme where university and college students in the UAE have the opportunity to work closely on new and exciting projects in collaboration with GM AMEO throughout the year, added Monica Hernandez, HR Director at GM AMEO.

To date, GM has held over 27 strategic partnerships, 15 collaborative events, and has hired nearly 40 aspiring students through its STEM related programs since 2016. This is represented into its current workforce in the region of which 40% are in STEM related roles and continue to deliver on GMs, and the regions, vision.

GM has been a great innovator in the auto industry for over 100 years, pushing the limits of transportation and technology. Today, the company is in the midst of a mobility revolution and with a vision of a world with zero crashes, zero emissions and zero congestion, GMs goal is to create a safer, better and more sustainable world through mobility and technology.

The company has recently announced significant investments and milestones in this space; including a $35 billion investment to bring 30 new electric vehicles (EV) by 2025 spearheaded by the introduction of GMC Hummer EV, Chevrolet Bolt EUV and Cadillac LYRIQ. In addition, GM has introduced its versatile Ultium Battery platform which provides the building blocks for everything, from mass market to high performance vehicles, further reinforcing its position as a leader in future mobility.

At GM, we have a desire to save lives, to create a healthier planet for our children and to give back precious time to our customers. This is something that guides the business decisions we make every day, both globally and here in the Middle East, said Gary West, Managing Director OnStar & Future Mobility GM AMEO. We are actively working to build this world, by delivering on the three pillars of future mobility: one, we are committed to an all-electric future, two, we are the only company with a fully integrated solution and to produce self-driving vehicles at scale and three delivering connected car services. Were excited about the future and nurturing the right STEM talent to be a part this era of future mobility.-- TradeArabia News Service
Changes are taking place in the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) region that impact energy efficiency, with reforms being implemented by governments that include electricity and fuel pricing increases and the launch of new energy efficiency programmes.

Since the early 2010s, the Mena region has witnessed a substantial decrease in government subsidies, particularly for electricity tariffs and fuel pricing. What are the impacts on Mena businesses and residents? How can businesses best transform these changes into an opportunity to save costs? And how can regional government best prepare and encourage its residents to be more energy efficient?

A webinar titled Energy Efficiency in Mena: Status and Outlook will be held on July 6, which will answer these questions and cover the Mena buildings, industrial and transportation sectors, presenting an overview of energy efficiency developments, as well as recommendations for businesses and policymakers.

The panelists include:

Dr Rasmi Hamza, CEO at Jordan Renewable Energy & Energy Efficiency Fund (JREEF);

Said Mouline, CEO at the Moroccan Agency for Energy Efficiency (AMEE); and

Sherein Abdalla, Technical Evaluation Department Manager, Egyptian Electricity Regulator (EgyptERA).

The webinar will be moderated by Alex Malouf, Director of Corporate Communication at Schneider Electric MEA.

The latest white paper on the same topic will be presented. Speakers from various Mena countries will discuss their country's current energy efficiency market.

The white paper will be presented by Elif Kara, Associate at CEBC & Ridah Sabouni, Mena Managing Director at Energetics.

The paper is intended to first serve as a resource for the Mena private sector, providing guidance to help Mena businesses best adapt for these announced reforms and future to-be-determined reforms.

Second, the paper is also intended to be an aid to help Mena governments effectively prepare and provide guidance to its citizens and businesses to best cope with the impacts of energy subsidy reforms. -- TradeArabia News Service
SCAT Airlines, one of the largest carriers in Kazakhstan, and Sabre Corporation, the leading software and technology company that powers the global travel industry, have announced a new strategic partnership, building on Sabres other achievements in the central Asian region.

Under the new agreement, SCAT Airlines will migrate to Sabres passenger reservations system, SabreSonic. It will also leverage Sabres industry-first Commercial Platform to help maximize revenue and create a differentiated brand experience for travelers. By delivering real-time, customer-centric offers to the airlines customers, Sabres technology will help SCAT achieve its ambitious plans to lead the recovery and future growth of travel in Kazakhstan.

As we navigate the new travel environment, its very important for us to be agile and able to deliver personalised offers to our customers at the right time and through the right channels, said Vladimir Denisov, president, SCAT Airlines. Our new agreement with Sabre is an essential pillar in our strategy, providing us with modern reservations technology, intelligent revenue management and scalable platform capabilities, which will help enable us to unlock new opportunities, provide best-in-class customer experience and maximize profitability.

Also, part of the agreement, SCAT will adopt Sabres Revenue Optimizer to help maximize revenue streams in this challenging environment. Pre-Covid-19, pricing and availability depended on large volumes of historical booking and pricing data. However, the pandemic has created an unprecedented change in supply and demand, making this data less reliable. Revenue Optimizer will help SCAT adapt to changing conditions based on the latest real-time information.

Given the current environment and pressure on the travel industry, it is more important than ever for airlines to use robust and intelligent technologies to forecast, analyze and optimize operations and revenue streams, said Dino Gelmetti, Vice President EMEA, Sabre Travel Solutions. Sabre plans to enhance its presence in Kazakhstan and provide SCAT Airlines with the capabilities to achieve profitable growth and to pioneer the future of travel. Todays announcement demonstrates SCATs forward-looking approach and Sabres deep commitment to supporting the global aviation industry.

This investment in robust core technology demonstrates advancements in SCATs strategy to create seamless, elevated experiences for travellers while improving operational efficiency and long-term growth. - TradeArabia News Service
IBTM Wireds closing keynote on Day One, Dr Ayesha Khanna, Co-Founder and CEO of ADDO AI, has highlighted the critical role AI will play in events going forward.

While customers still want the same things as pre-pandemic  personalisation, value, efficiency and connection, these will be delivered through enhanced AI and technology made possible in part by the huge acceleration of digitisation as a result of the pandemic.

Khanna highlighted that in integrating AI and tech into the customer experience, it is essential to look deeply at the most important thing; customers and their business needs and how technology can help us better understand them.

With businesses such as Apple and Facebook investing heavily in AI technology, personalisation is becoming ever more sophisticated. For example, emotion AI uses tiny cameras to understand and interpret viewers emotions through their voice and pre-conscious emotional responses to ads. This builds a deeper profile of customers in order to personalise their online experience. This kind of technology has huge potential for the personalisation of events, allowing organisers to make them more bespoke, immersive and engaging than ever.

During her session, Khanna raised a number of points, including that AR technology is being tapped by brands including Apple as the next big thing  this technology is going to be key in enabling planners to create more interactive, experiential and continuous events. Microevents could become a norm, using non-human influencers and/or chatbots to help maintain year-round engagement.

While AI is still quite piecemeal, there is a real opportunity to make virtual events totally immersive. It can be daunting and hard to know where to start, but Khanna makes the point that You dont need to be a technologist, but be open to new technology, be excited by it and be very responsible with it. Learn and embrace it! The future of MICE events is undoubtedly human, but with the integration of exciting new technology.

Ali Turner, Managing Director of Eight PR and Marketing and Oscar Cerezales, Global Executive Vice President of MCI Asia Pacific, discussed what the industry trends are likely to be for the next six to eight months in the Asia Pacific region.

Cerezales made the point that certain destinations are more agile and adaptable, learning faster than the others. These are destinations that arent purely thinking in terms of when will be the recovery but rather thinking Whats next. Theyre not just waiting to see what happens, theyre scenario planning and using those learnings to create partnerships and plan for a new future.

Asia Pacific in general is ahead of the other regions when it comes to recovery, thanks to a combination of culture  theyre quite pragmatic and tackle problems quickly and in a connected way. The governments think long-term and dont see our industry as tourism but more through the lend of economic and social development.

Looking to the future, more corporates and associations will follow a hub and spoke event structure which means that destinations arent being selected because of their value chain, but as a result of analysis of the end goal/s of an event and how they can help the organisation achieve that.

Delegates feel increasingly comfortable with a digital experience, but its not always enough. There will still be a good number of big events with large in-person attendance, but there will be more smaller hybrid events. You may have an activation of thousands of delegates, but instead of having 2,000 people in the same venue, youll have teams of 50 to 100 delegates all over the world.

Ultimately, the world is changing. There are no new trends, just old trends that have been accelerated due to covid. To pull out one as an example, sustainability will be key, but the new reality means that destinations need to be look at it more broadly than previously, especially in terms of legacy and social transformation. Destinations need to think about their value proposition and what is their role in the future of a hybrid world.

A cohort of masters students from the Lee Kuan Yew Centre of Innovative Cities, Singapore University of Technology & Design (SUTD), re-imagined what the industry would look like in 2023. Poon King Wang, Director, Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities SUTD, and Asha Suresh, Ng Teng Fong, SUTD Scholar, explored the students trio of ideas to re-invigorate the MICE industry.

Talking through the students first idea, entitled MICEpolis, Suresh explained that it was borne out of the idea that in the future, collaboration between different industries and specialisms will be the key to success. Envisioned as an incubator for start-ups, MICEpolis would build a community of venture capitalists, researchers and industry professionals all working together to put Singapore on the map. Suresh summarised it as an eco-system of various industry players and stakeholders collaborating to expand and scale their project to develop more interactive hybrid events to capture new audiences.

Combining different industries was at the heart of the second concept, Cruiseferences. Re-thinking the traditional conference space, partnering with the cruise industry could pave the way to highly experiential luxury conferences. King Wang pointed out that events on cruise ships also have the advantage of being enclosed, risk mitigated, and socially distanced.

Merging the MICE sector with an industry that has seen amazing growth  the gaming industry, was the idea behind their final idea  MICE mischief. Providing a different way to network and do business with the added benefit of combatting zoom fatigue, incorporating gaming into an event can bring a whole new dimension to the experience. Weve taken what was just functional and made it fun and frivolous. Once you make something fun and frivolous, you potentially find new experiences that could be profit making.

During the last 18 months, our sense of what is possible has expanded. When looking to the future, as King Wang points out, its important to consider not only the relationship between digital and physical, but also between MICE and other sectors, to determine how different industries can work together to create new and exciting possibilities. - TradeArabia News Service
Help India!



As part of Indias first in-situ slum redevelopment project in a public-private partnership, Kathputli Colony in Shadipur, Delhi, is being developed as a mall and a set of luxury flats. The colonys residents, who are Kathputli artists, consented to be a part of the redevelopment deal after a hard struggle. In this TCN Ground Report, we look at the impact of Covid-19 on these artists, many of whom are now taking to labour work.

Shadab Farooq | TwoCircles.net

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NEW DELHI  People used to perceive us as artists, but once our homes were demolished, they began to see us as poor, and now, amid the Covid-19 pandemic, they see us as beggars, fifty-year-old Rehman Shah, a traditional magician from Kathputli Colony, currently residing in a transit camp at Anand Parbat in West Delhi, told TwoCircles.net.

Rehman Shah said that with both comic speech and sleight of hand, street magic used to be a matter of attracting an audience and holding their attention.

Shah said that nobody wants to see street magicians up close these days because of the fear that coronavirus has created and the social distancing rules.

As part of Indias first in-situ slum redevelopment project in a public-private partnership, Kathputli Colony in Shadipur, Delhi, is being developed as a mall and a set of luxury flats. The colonys residents consented to be a part of the redevelopment deal after a hard struggle.

People living in a makeshift camp near Anand Parbat in West Delhi are awaiting their turn to be housed. The makeshift camp is a temporary home of the capitals best traditional puppet artists, magicians, acrobats, and musicians.

Rehman Shah, who has represented India in several countries, has decided to leave the colony and end his long wait for a home.

Its pointless to wait if the authorities are unable to provide you with basic necessities like water and food. We are not permitted to perform on the streets. We do not have access to one-time food. How will we survive if they wont let us work?, asks Shah. It is preferable to depart from here then to perish, he added.

Lucky Bhat, 32, a puppetry artist from the Kathputli Colony, currently residing in Anand Parbat, is doing daily wage work to support and feed his family during these difficult times. Lucky is the son of Sangeet Natak Akademi Puraskar winner Pooran Bhat.

My father and I perform internet shows. It isnt enough to cover our expenses, Lucky Bhat said. A small Facebook pages viewership is different from what were used to seeing. I began doing labour work because I was hopeful that at the end of the day, I would have 150 rupees in my pocket.

Before the Covid-19 outbreak, Lucky moved his son, Niketan Bhat, 4, from a government school to Happy Senior School, a private school in Kirti Nagar. I dropped out of school when I was in tenth grade in order to pursue my art full-time. I have realised the penalty of being uneducated in these times. It is important for Niketan to receive the best education possible, he said.

Ramesh Bhat, 50, used to design all of the puppets himself when the colonys puppetry artists travelled to other countries for shows. Ramesh Bhat, a designer who has been bedridden for two years due to anaemia and respiratory difficulties, hasnt been able to make a single puppet.

Ramesh Bhats daughter Anju, 20, a puppeteer and mehndi artist, took on the responsibility and began completing home chores through the neighbourhood. I didnt have any other choice. We used to have two meals a day when I first started performing domestic chores. As the disease spread, others in the neighbourhood began to suspect us, and my madam fired me.

As a result of the challenges, Anjus younger brother, Sumit Bhat, 15, went to work in a tobacco factory in the Delhi suburbs. I used to play the dhol, but I no longer do. It is preferable for me to work just in the factory, Sumit said, adding, I am paid Rs. 300, which provides medicines for my father and dinner for my family.

Walking with high hopes through different and difficult chores, when Sumit leaves for the factory in the morning, Anju also leaves the house and roams around the nearby areas with mehndi sticks and asks people to get the mehndi done.

Anju aspires to be a fashion designer and has begun saving for admission to a private design course.

On good days, I am able to earn upto 100 rupees but there are days when I get no penny and only pain after the day ends, said Anju.
As regular readers will know, we have been following the remarkable efforts of Jason Capra and Vintage Wings Inc. in resurrecting combat-veteran Douglas C-53 Skytrooper 41-20095 over the past few years. They have successfully returned this once-tired and forlorn airframe from its executive transport guise, ground-bound and one foot in the grave at Beach City, Ohio to the magnificent, authentically outfitted beauty she is today in her new home of Franklin, Pennsylvania.

Capra and his team of dedicated volunteers have performed a near-miracle in resurrecting this aircraft on a shoe-string budget  and in such rapid order. They have gone deep into her systems and structure to restore the aircraft back to fully-airworthy condition, complete with a wholly authentic interior. Interestingly, since those working on the aircraft spent so much time in Beach City, Ohio preparing the Skytrooper for her ferry flight to Franklin, where the formal restoration would take place, the aircraft gained the unofficial nickname, Beach City Baby amongst the crew a name which stuck.

As already noted, Jason Capra wanted to return this aircraft to as close a rendition of her WWII operational appearance as practical. He and his team delved deeply into the aircrafts history, discovering a number of WWII period photographs from her service in North Africa and Sicily. As a result, they chose to repaint the aircraft in a livery representing the paint scheme she wore in North Africa at the close of 1942/early 1943. During his research, however, Capra never found evidence of the aircraft having worn nose art. Even so, he felt the need to give the aircraft a sense of individuality, the kind which a nickname or nose art can imbue. Furthermore, he also had a strong desire to pay tribute to Beach City Babys more recent history, and the efforts of countless volunteers who have breathed new life into the aircraft, saving her from a likely date with a scrappers bulldozer. Since the aircraft never wore nose-art during her wartime career, Jason Capra decided he could choose a new design which both reflected the period-authenticity he was seeking, but which also helped tell the story of the aircrafts new life as Beach City Baby. By placing this new nose-art only on the aircrafts port side, so the starboard side would still portray a wholly accurate rendition of her wartime past, he felt he had found an adequate compromise between the sometimes conflicting concepts of strict accuracy and period authenticity. To help him with this problem, Capra chose well-known artist Chad Hill, who has significant experience creating and painting nose-art designs, both new and old, for high-profile warbirds. Chad got to work on finding a solution to this problem a couple of years ago, creating the design for Beach City Babys new nose art which involved a traditional WWII-era pinup style portrait featuring the likeness of Jason Capras fiancee and the name Beach City Baby in a period correct font and style.

With the aircraft nearing completion, Capra decided recently that it was time to apply Beach City Babys finished nose-art design on the aircraft, so Chad Hill made the journey to Franklin last week to start the process. He began his work on Friday, June 25th and completed painting the design two days later. The end results are shown below and should speak for themselves while the name may be new, the look has a marvelous air of period-authenticity to it. We love the result and have to say bravo to all concerned  it will be marvelous to see Beach City Baby back in the air and taking part in air shows across the country!
After a significant effort over a number of years, we are happy to report that the Temora Aviation Museum successfully performed a test flight with their English Electric Canberra TT.18 WJ680 on June 27th, 2021. One of 11 aircraft in The Royal Australian Air Forces (RAAF) 100 Squadron Temora Historic Flight collection, returns to flight after an 11-year hiatus, last flown on 5th June 2010. The flight took place at the museums home airport in Temora, New South Wales, just 150 miles or so north west of Australias capital city of Canberra. Outside of NASAs fleet of three WB-57 Canberras, WJ680 is presently the only currently airworthy example of the breed anywhere in the world, although that will hopefully change in the not-too-distant future, with at least one other example under restoration to fly in the USA (B.6 XH567 at Lampson Field, Lakeport, California).

As reported in the museums recent newsletter, after a three-year restoration process, the Temora Aviation Museum Engineering Team, led by Chief Engineer Andrew Bishop, and supported by RAAF 100SQN, have successfully converted the highly corrosive cartridge start engines to electric start engines, ensuring the longevity of this aircraft.

The return to service of this aircraft makes it once again the only airworthy Canberra Bomber in Australia, and the RAAF and Temora Aviation Museum are honored to have been able to ensure her return to the sky.

Test pilot Darren Buster Crabb had not flown the aircraft since 2008, but he had this to say after his first flight, The engineers have done a fantastic restoration, and through our ground school I was able to re-affirm all of the numbers and put them into practice during the first flights.

When the conversion pilot Mark Binskin was asked about his first flight, he said, I was naturally a little timid with it to start off with, but it is a beautiful aircraft to fly, with plenty of performance, and when you consider it was built in the late 1940s, it really is a great design! It is an absolute honour to be selected to fly this vintage jet, owned and operated by RAAF 100SQN.

The Temora Aviation Museum and RAAF 100SQN Temora Historic Flight intend on displaying this aircraft publicly at the next Aircraft Showcase in Temora, scheduled for October 9th & 10th, 2021.

A video of the first flight is available below.

The English Electric Canberra design dates back to the late 1940s. It has an all-metal, semi-monocoque fuselage with a cantilevered wing and, oddly enough, a wooden vertical stabilizer. English Electric, Avro, Short Brothers and Handley Page manufactured 900 examples in their UK factories from 1948, while the Government Aircraft Factory built 49 in Australia. The U.S. Air Force also bought the Canberra as a replacement for the Douglas A-26 Invader medium bomber. They selected the Glenn L. Martin Company to modify the design and manufactured them in the USA as the Martin B-57. Martin built 403 B-57s.

As many readers will know from previous articles at WarbirdsNews, the Temora Aviation Museums Canberra TT.18 served in the RAF as WJ680. She entered service in December 1955 as part of 551 Wing RAF Bomber Command, based at RAF Gutersloh in Germany. However, in February 1956 she suffered damage in an accident which resulted in a 12 month removal from service. Shortly after her repairs and return to 59 Squadron, the aircraft again suffered extensive damage from a bird strike during a low level training mission, damaging the canopy, engine cowlings, tailplane and the wooden fin fitted to the UK-built machines.

Repaired yet again, the aircraft was reassigned to a UK based maintenance unit where she remained in storage for ten years. In 1967, WJ680 left storage for conversion by British Aerospace to TT.18 standard, carrying the Rushton-designed target-towing system. However, following the rework, she again entered storage, this time until 1971. In December 1972, the unlucky Canberra was involved in yet another incident, which resulted in the navigator ejecting for safety reasons. More repairs followed and she returned to service with RAF 7 Squadron on target towing duties, flying with them until 1980, this time without incident. She then returned to British Aerospace at Salmesbury for major servicing.

After the overhaul, WJ680 joined 100 Squadron where she remained on strength until December 18th, 1991, the date of her last flight in RAF service. She then went into open storage at RAF Wyton until the British Ministry of Defense sold her to Ron Mitchell in 1992. In 1994, now on the British registry as G-BURM, the Canberra made her first air display under civilian ownership, flying at Duxford.

The Temora Aviation Museum acquired WJ680 in May 2001. Upon acquisition, the Museum repainted her to represent a Canberra flown by Royal Australian Air Force 2 Squadron during the Vietnam conflict. The aircraft is maintained in excellent condition and remains to this day the only flyable English Electric Canberra in Australia.

Many thanks to Phil Buckley/Down Under Aviation News, Temora Flyers Inc. and Matt Scott for the image and video clips.
Chinese President Xi Jinping holds talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin via video link in Beijing, capital of China, June 28, 2021. (Xinhua/Xie Huanchi)

BEIJING, June 28 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a joint statement Monday, officially deciding to extend the China-Russia Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation.

The announcement came during talks between the two heads of state via video link.

Hailing the upcoming 20th anniversary of the signing of the treaty, Xi said in Beijing that the treaty has established the idea of enduring friendship, which conforms to the fundamental interests of the two countries as well as the themes of the times of peace and development.

The treaty is a vivid example of fostering a new type of international relations and building a community with a shared future for humanity, he said.

Xi referred to the current China-Russia ties as "mature, stable and solid," able to "withstand the test of any change in the international situation."

The two sides firmly support each other on issues concerning each other's core interests and have carried out effective strategic coordination, strongly safeguarding the common interests of the two countries, he said.

The outcomes of pragmatic cooperation, with increasing quality and quantity, are quite fruitful, he added.

Noting their close coordination in international affairs, Xi said the two countries have jointly safeguarded real multilateralism as well as international fairness and justice.

"China and Russia have injected positive energy into the international community and set an example of a new type of international relations through their close cooperation, as the world is entering a period of turbulence and change and human development is confronted with multiple crises," Xi said.

He called on the two sides to fully summarize their experiences of past success and make top-level design for new objectives and tasks in cooperation across various fields, so as to inject new meaning into the treaty.

"Under the guidance of the treaty, the two countries will continue to make concerted efforts and firmly move forward despite the difficulties and obstacles ahead," he said.
All 204 peacekeepers from the first echelon of the 16th Chinese peacekeeping engineering contingent to Sudan return to China on June 26, 2021.

BEIJING, June. 29 -- Two hundred and four peacekeepers from the first echelon of the 16th Chinese peacekeeping engineering contingent to Sudan successfully arrived at Zhengding Airport of Shijiazhuang, Chinas Hebei Province on June 26, local time, by the PLA Air Forces aircraft after the 10-month peacekeeping mission.

The 16th Chinese peacekeeping engineering contingent to Sudan consists of service members from a brigade of the 82nd Group Army under the PLA Central Theater Command. They were deployed to the peacekeeping mission areas in Darfur, Sudan in August 2020 and then successively completed more than 290 construction tasks such as the upgrade and rectification of the UN-African Union Hybrid Operation in Darfur (UNAMID) Super Camp in Al Fashir and humanitarian relief.

The return of the contingent marks the end of the peacekeeping operations of the Chinese peacekeeping engineering forces in Darfur, Sudan. It is reported that the second echelon members will finish their journey home in the near future.
BEIJING, June 29 -- The exhibition of the Chinese military in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China(CPC), themed on "Marching Forward under the Banner of the Party was held on June 28 at the Military Museum of the Chinese People's Revolution. General Xu Qiliang and General Zhang Youxia, both members of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and vice chairmen of the CPC Central Military Commission, visited the exhibition.

Members of the CPC Central Military Commission General Wei Fenghe, General Li Zuocheng, General Miao Hua and General Zhang Shengmin also visited the exhibition.

The thematic exhibition reviews the glorious history of the Party's creation and leadership of the people's military, and highlights the great practice of Xi's leadership in advancing the cause of strengthening the military in the new era, which vividly reflects the bravery and loyalty of the people's military who always obeys and follows the Party.

The exhibition displays more than 1,580 relics, more than 800 photos, and a significant volume of historical documents, graphs and video clips. The exhibition will be open to the society for a long time as a basic display of the military museum.

During the visit, General Xu and General Zhang pointed out that it is necessary to give full play to the educational function of the thematic exhibition and guide the military personnel to draw strength from it.
Three converts, originally from Fardis, are accused of educating in a deviant way about Islam. Their relatives live under threat. The visa of a nun working at a leprosy hospital caring for Christians and Muslims for 26 years has not been renewed. Bishop Mathieu is still waiting to take possession of the diocese.

Tehran (AsiaNews)  As Irans ultra-right-wing new president Ebrahim Raisi is set to make his first moves, the fate of religious freedom, especially with respect to Irans Christian community, is increasingly a source of concern.

According to some sources, the Islamic Republic is cracking down on Christians, as evinced by the indictment last May of three converts from Fardis, Alborz province, under Article 500 of the Iranian Penal Code.

The three are the first people to go on trial since the amendment to the law introduced last February, reports International Christian Concern, a Christian and minority rights advocacy group.

According to available information, local authorities accuse Amin Khaki, Milad Goodarzi and Alireza Nourmohammadi of engaging in propaganda that educates in a deviant way contrary to the holy religion of Islam.

Witnesses say that last November police raided and searched the homes of the three men and seized various religious (Christian) material.

In early 2021, the authorities questioned some family members, but the affair seemed to end there, without further development, except the three men were forced to sign a pledge not to meet in person or online.

However, the three men were recently charged and put on trial a few days ago. Meanwhile, their families continue to face threats and restrictions.

Catholics too have been subjected to repressive restrictions. Earlier this month, the authorities refused to renew the visa of Sister Giuseppina Berti, a 75-year-old nun who spent the last 26 years of her life working in an Iranian leprosy hospital treating patients.

The nun was one of the two religious sisters working in Isfahan; the other is Sister Fabiola Weiss, 77, who is now alone. Together they constituted the only Catholic presence in the area.

Since their arrival, the two missionaries worked in hospitals treating the sick, whether Christian or Muslim, trying to bring comfort to everyone regardless of their religion.

The obstacles the Catholic Church faces is further evinced by its limited size with only two Assyrian-Chaldean archdioceses, an Armenian diocese, and a Latin archdiocese.

In most places there is only one priest, with no prelates. Even one has been appointed, they have to wait permission to take up their post. This is the case of Bishop Dominique Mathieu, who was appointed in January and is still waiting to take possession of his diocese.

Many fear that Raisi's rise could boost the crackdown on Christians, seen in some cases  especially Evangelicals and Protesters  as enemies of the state and threats to national security for alleged ties to the United States and the West.
by Nirmala Carvalho

People from different denominations are behind the celebration, set for the feast day of Saint Thomas the Apostle, the countrys first evangeliser according to tradition. The event is designed to stress that Christianity is not a foreign religion in India, as Hindu extremists claim. For Father Joseph, Any effort to undo this great civilisational contribution is tantamount to negating the very foundation of India itself.

Mumbai (AsiaNews)  On 3 July, the feast day of Saint Thomas, Christians of all denominations will also celebrate Indian Christian Day (Yeshu Bhakti Divas) for the first time.

The event, which is the brainchild of members of the countrys various Churches, is meant to highlight the fact that Christianity is not a foreign religion in India.

The date, 3 July, was chosen because it is traditionally observed as St Thomas Day, the day celebrating Saint Thomas the Apostle who came to India in 52 AD and brought the message of Jesus. It is historically accepted that Saint Thomas was martyred near Chennai in 72 AD.

Thus, for the Days promoters, By marking it in 2021 and every year henceforth, we, as followers of the Lord Jesus, can preserve our identity within Indias cultural heritage, while uniting with all those who wish to celebrate it, irrespective of language, custom, creed, region or religion.

With the celebration of Indian Christian Day, the promoters of the initiative also want to launch a Decade of Celebration (2021-2030) to honour the 2,000th anniversary of the earthly mission of the Lord Jesus Christ whose teaching and principles of life have helped shape and transform India and the world.

Verbite Father Babu Joseph, a former spokesman of the Catholic Bishops Conference of India (CBCI), is in favour of the initiative, welcoming it since it is the work of a group of members belonging to different Christian denominations.

In his view, choosing the feast day of Saint Thomas signals a positive move towards overcoming the apparent differing opinions on the history of the Saint Thomass arrival in India.

To further the project, Fr Joseph would like to see UNESCO recognise some of Indias ancient churches, and have some publications highlight Christian contributions in the history of India.

This would be an important step in making Christianity as part of Indian history and ethos, he said. In fact, In light of attempts by some right-wing organisation to create the impression that Christianity is foreign to India, it is necessary to highlight its antiquity in the country.

Christianity is part and parcel of Indian history for the last 2,000 years and has given birth to many indigenised forms of Christian life. Any effort to undo this great civilisational contribution is tantamount to negating the very foundation of India itself.

Christianity has introduced new social teachings which worked as catalyst in several social reform movements and has been instrumental in introducing modern education.
by Thanh Thao

The pandemic has forced Vietnams agricultural sector to upgrade. Cooperatives have adopted new strategies to guarantee a stable income for farmers even during the fourth wave.

Ho Chi Minh (AsiaNews)  In Vietnam the fourth wave of COVID-19 has affected the agricultural sector and the production of tropical fruits, but at the same time, it has stimulated innovation.

Traditionally, agricultural products are consumed on a seasonal basis because of limited refrigeration capacity. Nevertheless, to avoid waste caused the coronavirus, farmers have adopted new strategies to sell their products locally and internationally.

In An Nhon, a town in ong Thap province, agricultural cooperatives have obtained more than a thousand hectares of land to cultivate longan (a typical tropical fruit) for export.

The Islands of Bach Vien and An Hoa export almost 32,000 tonnes of fruit per year, but even with the epidemic, the longan was sold at a high price, explained Le Van Hung, director of an agricultural cooperative in An Hoa, because we met all production standards and obtained several certifications.

Cao Lanh district has dedicated 40 per cent of its territory to mango and other products, part of a pilot project for the reorganisation of local agricultural production.

Vo Viet Hung, director of the Me Xeeng Mango cooperative, told AsiaNews how they started selling mango online.

In order to sell goods online, the cooperative set up its website to bring information about mango trees to customers.

It is thanks to the transparency in production and the quality of mangoes that we have managed to guarantee a stable income for farmers even during the pandemic.

In Long An province however, climate change had negatively impacted pitaya (dragon fruit) production even before COVID-19. Many cooperatives have been forced to sell the products at reduced prices due to oversupply.

Some farmers in Chau Thanh district did manage to sell at normal prices thanks to high production standards. The use of pesticides and fertilisers is controlled and cooperatives keep a register to trace products place of origin.

In the province residents want the government to do more to connect locals with each other and create a stable and sustainable production chain.
by Li Qiang

On July 1st, the country stops for the celebrations. The regime glorifies the economic recovery from the Covid crisis. The problems are external: Japan ready to protect Taiwan; India sends 50,000 more soldiers to the border with China; Indonesia opens a maritime base with US help. Xi is left with Putin's support (for now).

Beijing (AsiaNews) - We must "forever trust, love, and contribute to the CCP". This is the invitation (order) that Xi Jinping made today to the Chinese people as he awarded 29 members of the CCP with the "July 1st medal".

The day after tomorrow, China will come to a standstill to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the party's foundation. The Chinese president is touting confidence, boasting a stable economic recovery from the coronavirus crisis. The celebrations, however, come at a time of growing external pressure, and not only from the US, with which Beijing is engaged in a tough political, economic and technological standoff.

Speaking yesterday at the Washington-based Hudson Institute, Japans Deputy Defense Minister Yasuhide Nakayama said it was necessary to "wake up" to Chinese pressure on Taiwan and "protect" the Taiwanese democracy. Tokyo has recently increased its support for Taipei, overcoming fears of a possible retaliation from China.

Reunification with Taiwan is the only explicit objective contained in Xis plan for the "rejuvenation of the great Chinese nation". Beijing considers the island a "rebel" province and does not rule out reconquering it with the use of force.

The situation is no less tense on the Himalayan front on the border with India. The Chinese foreign ministry yesterday asked the Indian government to take measures to ease tension along the frontier. According to Bloomberg, Delhi has recently sent 50,000 additional soldiers to garrison the provisional border (Line of Actual Control), bringing the number of troops there to 200,000.

The two Asian giants share a 3,488 km border in the rugged Himalayan region, over which they fought a brief but bloody conflict in 1962. Delhi claims large sections of Aksai Chin (which the Chinese obtained from Pakistan). Instead, Beijing makes claims on the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. On 15 June 2020, Indian and Chinese troops clashed in the Galwan valley, between Ladakh and Chinese Aksai Chin: 20 Indian soldiers died, along with an unknown number of Chinese soldiers.

The news is no more comforting for Beijing on its southern flank either. On June 25, Indonesia and the United States laid the groundwork for the construction of a training center for the Indonesian Coast Guard. It will rise on the island of Batam, the capital of the Indonesian province of the Riau islands, a few tens of kilometers from the strategic Strait of Malacca.

The facility will be completed within a year and will not house US forces. According to the Indonesian government, there are no specific reasons behind the choice of Batam as the location of the new center.

Several analysts think differently. Indonesia is implementing a naval strengthening program, partly aimed at tackling Chinas activism in the waters around the Natuna Islands, included in the Riau province. The Chinese are not making territorial claims on this Indonesian archipelago of 272 islands, but are claiming the right to exploit its fish-rich waters, a fact that is met with strong opposition from Jakarta. The Natuna are located on the southwestern edge of the South China Sea, which Beijing claims for nearly 90%. Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Taiwan, with the support of the United States, oppose China's territorial claims.

The only apparently quiet sector for the Chinese is the northern one. China and Russia yesterday extended a twenty-year treaty of friendship and cooperation signed in 2001 until 2026. The two countries join forces in the face of the geopolitical challenge launched by the Biden administration. In the long run, however, problems such as the creeping Chinese "colonization" of eastern Siberia risk creating tensions between Beijing and Moscow.
After the Angelus, Francis noted that the day after tomorrow will be the day for Lebanon in the Vatican. He urged the faithful to pray so that the country may recover from the serious crisis it is going through. The Pope also called on the faithful to pray for Pope Benedict who today celebrates 70 years of priesthood.

Vatican City (AsiaNews)  Pope Francis addressed the crowd, a few thousands for the Angelus, gathered in St Peters Square, for the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul.

In his address, the pontiff said that only a free Church is a credible Church, and her freedom comes from Jesus. This Church is A Church that is weak, yet finds strength in the presence of God. The image of a Church set free and capable of offering the world the freedom that the world by itself cannot give: freedom from sin and death, from resignation, and from the sense of injustice and the loss of hope that dehumanizes the lives of the women and men of our time.

The celebration of the feast of Saints Peter and Paul is, in a certain sense, the celebration of the Catholic Church. It is the day in which archbishops receive their pallium, a sign of dignity and fidelity to the successor of Peter. It is the day in which a delegation from the Ecumenical Patriarchate participates in the solemn Mass for the patron saints of Rome in St Peter's Basilica. It is the day in which the statue of Saint Peter is dressed in pontifical robes and the pope is told: tu es Petrus.

Peter and Paul were the two pillars of the Church, Francis said. They were two witnesses of faith. But At the heart of their story is not their own gifts and abilities; at the centre is the encounter with Christ that changed their lives. They experienced a love that healed them and set them free. They then became apostles and ministers of freedom for others.

Peter and Paul were free because they were set free. The two apostles, Francis told the crowd that They were not admirers, but imitators of Jesus. They were not spectators, but rather protagonists of the Gospel. They believed not in words, but in deeds. Peter did not speak about mission, he lived the mission, he was a fisher of men; Paul did not write learned books, but letters of what he lived as he travelled and bore witness. Both spent their lives for the Lord and for their brothers.

At the same time, they provoke us, challenge us. How often, for example, we say that we would like a Church that is more faithful to the Gospel, closer to the people, more prophetic and missionary, but then, in practice, we do nothing! It is sad to see that many speak, comment and debate, but few bear witness. Witnesses do not lose themselves in words, but rather they bear fruit. Witnesses do not complain about others and the world, but they start with themselves. They remind us that God is not to be demonstrated, but shown, by ones own witness; not announced with proclamations but shown by example.

Like Peter, the Pope said in his homely, we are called to be set free from a sense of failure before our occasionally disastrous fishing. To be set free from the fear that paralyzes us, makes us seek refuge in our own securities, and robs us of the courage of prophecy. Like Paul, we are called to be set free from hypocritical outward show, free from the temptation to present ourselves with worldly power rather than with the weakness that makes space for God, free from a religiosity that makes us rigid and inflexible; free from dubious associations with power and from the fear of being misunderstood and attacked.

Jesus nonetheless loved Peter and was willing to take a risk on him. He encouraged Peter not to give up, to lower his nets once more, to walk on water, to find the strength to accept his own frailty, to follow him on the way of the cross, to give his life for his brothers and sisters, to shepherd his flock. In this way, Jesus set Peter free from fear, from calculations based solely on worldly concerns. He gave him the courage to risk everything and the joy of becoming a fisher of men. It was Peter whom Jesus called to strengthen his brothers in faith (cf. Lk 22:32). He gave him  as we heard in the Gospel  the keys to open the doors leading to an encounter with the Lord and the power to bind and loose: to bind his brothers and sisters to Christ and to loosen the knots and chains in their lives (cf. Mt 16:19). All this was possible because Peter himself had been set free.

Paul too was freed. He was set free from the most oppressive form of slavery, which is slavery to self. From Saul, the name of the first king of Israel, he became Paul, which means small. He was also set free from the religious fervour that had made him a zealous defender of his ancestral traditions (cf. Gal 1:14) and a cruel persecutor of Christians. Set free. Formal religious observance and the intransigent defence of tradition, rather than making him open to the love of God and of his brothers and sisters, had hardened him: he was a fundamentalist. God set him free from this, yet he did not spare him the frailties and hardships that rendered his mission of evangelization more fruitful: the strain of the apostolate, physical infirmity (cf. Gal 4:13-14); violence and persecution, shipwreck, hunger and thirst, and, as he himself tells us, a painful thorn in the flesh (cf. 2 Cor 12:7-10).

We too have been touched by the Lord; we too have been set free. Yet we need to be set free time and time again, for only a free Church is a credible Church. Like Peter, we are called to be set free from a sense of failure before our occasionally disastrous fishing. To be set free from the fear that paralyzes us, makes us seek refuge in our own securities, and robs us of the courage of prophecy. Like Paul, we are called to be set free from hypocritical outward show, free from the temptation to present ourselves with worldly power rather than with the weakness that makes space for God, free from a religiosity that makes us rigid and inflexible; free from dubious associations with power and from the fear of being misunderstood and attacked.

Let us ask, today in this celebration but afterwards as well: to what extent do our cities, our societies and our world need freedom? How many chains must be shattered and how many doors long shut must be opened! We can help bring this freedom, but only if we first let ourselves be set free by the newness of Jesus, and walk in the freedom of the Holy Spirit.

After the Marian prayer, Francis noted that the day after tomorrow the Vatican will host a day for Lebanon, urging the faithful to pray that the country may recover from the serious crisis it is going through.

Lastly, the pontiff invited the faithful to pray for Pope Benedict who today celebrates 70 years of priesthood.
by Vladimir Rozanskij

In 1997 the country emerged from a bloody civil war. The celebrations mark the enduring power of Emomali Rakhmon, the "eternal president". The current challenges of globalization and the pandemic. The Tajik government still denies the spread of the coronavirus.

Moscow (AsiaNews) - Celebrations for National Unity Day were held in Tajikistan, limited last year due to the Covid-19 pandemic. On June 27, 1997, the country emerged from a bloody civil war when the then head of the Tajik state Emomali Rakhmon (still in office) and opposition leaders Said Abdullo Nuri and Khodzi Akbar Turadzonsod signed the agreement "for the restoration of peace and national harmony". The signing took place in Moscow, in the presence of former Russian President Boris Yeltsyn.

The "eternal president" Rakhmon was thus able to congratulate the inhabitants of Tajikistan, 24 years after the agreement which also marks his perennial power. He had already been in command since 1992, immediately after the end of the USSR, being one of the leaders of the Soviet Communist Party who later disappeared. At 68 years of age (he was born two days before Vladimir Putin), Rakhmon can aspire to breaking many records of longevity in power, also given the absence of any form of opposition.

Rakhmon's message was posted on the presidential website. The Tajik leader recalled the dramatic moments of the civil war, fought in the early years of the countrys independence from the Soviet Union, in which between 30,000 and 60,000 people died.

He underscored how "tens of thousands of mothers have lost their children, many wives their husbands. More than a million of our fellow citizens have become refugees, inside and outside our borders ".

Rakhmon explained that the most terrible threat of those dark days came from the fact that we risked destroying the Tajik nation; our young state could disappear and our history could end in nothing. The president said emphatically that "the main merit and decisive role in guaranteeing peace and security, mutual understanding and national unity belongs only to the people of Tajikistan".

The message warned of the dangers associated with the "unpredictable conditions" of today's international society. He also noted that throughout the planet there is an "ever increasing complexity of the economic and political situation", with the spread of pandemic infections and the ungovernable process of globalization. Faced with such challenges, the task of the Tajik people cannot be considered complete.

Moreover, the negotiations that led to peace in 1997 were very long and tiring, with eight rounds of meetings that lasted for four years. Rakhmon instituted the National Unity Day with a decree of May 22, 1998. Since then it has been celebrated with great solemnity, except last year, when the authorities organized small celebrations due to the pandemic (although denied by the leadership).

Yet Covid-19 has begun to make itself felt in Tajikistan and throughout Central Asia, already hit by peaks of extreme heat and widespread drought. The Tajik government is trying to contain the, but as in all the previous months the trend remains the denial of the spread of the virus, downgrading most of the cases to "abnormal forms" of pneumonia or other diseases.
Its not really going to affect us because we stopped offering the to-go cocktails to concentrate on our inside operations, Benkert said. If were allowed to offer it, we certainly will, but Im not going to be putting up a fight.
When company president Antoinette Bruno confirmed that the ride would be dismantled and relocated, she said it wouldnt operate this summer. But Trimpers Rides said Its baaaaack!! in a Facebook post on Saturday with an accompanying photo of its 149-foot-tall (45-meter-tall) Ferris wheel.
Chrysalis is the futuristic-looking, bright green outdoor amphitheater in Symphony Woods with lawn seating that was built in 2016. Color Burst Park is a brand new, flexible outdoor rectangle off Mango Tree Road that can pivot from serving as a skating rink in winter to a splash fountain in the summer (with jets of colored water at night) to a venue for small, intimate spoken word performances. When the $137 million New Cultural Center opens in 2024 in Symphony Woods, it will include three theaters, dance studios and rehearsal spaces, supplementing the existing theaters and galleries at Howard Community College.
The jurys verdict will determine whether Ramos goes to prison or is committed indefinitely to a psychiatric hospital. Ramos would be sent to the states maximum security facility: Clifton T Perkins Hospital Center. While research shows that defendants found insane spend more time, on average, in the hospital than they would in prison, the former offers the possibility of release if doctors and the courts deem the person is no longer a danger.
She played video of the shooting captured on newsroom cameras. The footage showed Ramos slide a barricade under the side door of the newsroom. It showed the beam of a flashlight mounted to his shotgun reach the front glass doors and the muzzle flash as he shot his way in. One victim was shown after being shot, others were seen on camera before they met the same fate. It also showed staffers trying to open the barricaded side door and others fleeing over an injured colleague.
We are focused on getting guns off the street but it only takes one criminal with a gun for the results to be tragic, Buckley said in the statement. This was a horrific outcome for the kind of everyday gun violence that many cities across America see. Annapolis is sadly not immune.
Taizier Griffin, 18, of Cecil County, left, and Brian Anderson, 19, of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, right, with their attorneys, Malcolm Ruff, second from right, of Murphy, Falcon & Murphy, and co-counsel, State Senator Jill P. Carter, at a press conference to announce a lawsuit against the Ocean City police department over the violent arrests of the two teens earlier this month in vaping incidents. Their arrests on the boardwalk, with two other young men, were captured on cellphone videos that went viral. The attorneys are calling for the officers to be suspended without pay and investigated for criminal charges such as assault. June 29, 2021 p9 (Amy Davis)
His son grew up poor in Baltimore, raised by his mother. The father the boy had only briefly known became the father he visited on Wednesdays at the old Maryland Penitentiary. My mother took me to see him until I was 18, and then I went as often as I could after that, Robert D. Smith said. During prison visits, he told me that I was going to be different from a lot of kids, but I didnt know what he meant by that.
In my trips to Europe, I fell in love with all the great transportation options available locally and throughout the continent. I have taken several of the high speed trains: Frances TGV, Germanys ICE and Spains AVE. Ive taken the Thalys from Paris to Brussels and the Eurostar from London to Paris. Ive taken local public transportation in most of the Western European capitals and other cities. The key is connectivity. When the train approaches a lake, you transfer to a boat and when approaching a mountain you transfer to a funicular. European public transportation is heavily subsidized as part of public policy as roadways are less common and parking almost impossible. In Europe, everyone takes public transportation. It is not a matter of class or income. Some local transportation systems are more basic and remind me of the Baltimore streetcar system. An example is the Amsterdam tram. This kind of system does not require the same degree of engineering, construction and dislocation. Bringing the streetcar back to Baltimore would be a relatively easy proposition.
Mexico & Banderas Bay Area News



Vallarta Azteca to Represent Mexico at Event in Russia



The Vallarta Azteca Folkloric Group will represent not only Puerto Vallarta but also Mexico in World Folkloriada 2021, an international folklore festival set to take place July 3-10 in the Republic of Bashkortostan, Russia. Puerto Vallarta, Mexico - The Vallarta Azteca folkloric dance group will be going to Russia for World Folkloriada 2021, an event organized by the International Council of Organizations of Folk Festivals (CIOFF) and supported by the United Nations Organization for Education and Science and Culture (UNESCO), that's set to take place July 3-10.



The Republic of Bashkortostan will host this event, which will welcome more than 2,500 participants, including dancers, musicians and artisans from more than 60 countries.



The Vallarta Azteca Folkloric Group, directed by Juan Antonio Salcedo Padilla, who is a member of CIOFF Mexico, will represent not only Puerto Vallarta but also Mexico, as they present a special program of dances from the states of Hidalgo, Nayarit and Jalisco, accompanied by Mariachi music.



"I am so proud that my group is the representative of both our city and our country in this event that will take place in Russia. Our group is made up of 37 talented people, including musicians, dancers and directors from Puerto Vallarta," Salcedo said.



"It is with great pride that our group has been chosen to represent Mexico, because the selection process is rigorous. In addition to skill and talent, they take into account the preparation, enthusiasm and characteristics of the group, and on this occasion they recognized all of these qualities in the young people of Puerto Vallarta," he added.



Salcedo stressed that the preparation is comprehensive since the members of the group are students who, in addition to having a good grade average must exemplify good behavior to be selected as part of the group that travels to represent Mexico.



Ufa, capital of Bashkortostan, Russia, is the city where the inauguration will take place, on Saturday, July 3, with the parade of the delegations and an artistic presentation from all continents. The festival performances are scheduled to take place over 8 days in 35 municipalities of Bashkortostan.



The first World Folkloriada was held in Netherlands in 1996. After that, Japan, Hungary, China, Republic of Korea and Mexico were the organizers of this event.



You can learn more about World Folkloriada 2021 by visiting



During the event, updates will be posted regularly on the



Source: Vallarta Opina - The Vallarta Azteca folkloric dance group will be going to Russia for World Folkloriada 2021, an event organized by the International Council of Organizations of Folk Festivals (CIOFF) and supported by the United Nations Organization for Education and Science and Culture (UNESCO), that's set to take place July 3-10.The Republic of Bashkortostan will host this event, which will welcome more than 2,500 participants, including dancers, musicians and artisans from more than 60 countries.The Vallarta Azteca Folkloric Group, directed by Juan Antonio Salcedo Padilla, who is a member of CIOFF Mexico, will represent not only Puerto Vallarta but also Mexico, as they present a special program of dances from the states of Hidalgo, Nayarit and Jalisco, accompanied by Mariachi music."I am so proud that my group is the representative of both our city and our country in this event that will take place in Russia. Our group is made up of 37 talented people, including musicians, dancers and directors from Puerto Vallarta," Salcedo said."It is with great pride that our group has been chosen to represent Mexico, because the selection process is rigorous. In addition to skill and talent, they take into account the preparation, enthusiasm and characteristics of the group, and on this occasion they recognized all of these qualities in the young people of Puerto Vallarta," he added.Salcedo stressed that the preparation is comprehensive since the members of the group are students who, in addition to having a good grade average must exemplify good behavior to be selected as part of the group that travels to represent Mexico.Ufa, capital of Bashkortostan, Russia, is the city where the inauguration will take place, on Saturday, July 3, with the parade of the delegations and an artistic presentation from all continents. The festival performances are scheduled to take place over 8 days in 35 municipalities of Bashkortostan.The first World Folkloriada was held in Netherlands in 1996. After that, Japan, Hungary, China, Republic of Korea and Mexico were the organizers of this event.You can learn more about World Folkloriada 2021 by visiting their website, and by following Folkloriada2021 on Facebook. During the event, updates will be posted regularly on the Vallarta Azteca Facebook page, so families, friends and fans can follow the event closely.



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Lauren Hough

Lauren Hough is the author of Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing. She writes about her experience growing up as a member of the Children of God cult, also known as the Family. After leaving the cult for good at age 15, Hough continued high school and eventually joined the Air Force, but was discharged at age 23 for being gay. Hough spends the next decade working on and off at a gay bar, along with a number of other jobs. For ten years, she works as a cable technician in Virginia until, at age 37, she sells her house and travels to Texas in a Winnebago van. Currently living in Austin, Texas, Hough works at a gay bar while continuing to struggle with PTSD and anxiety.

Hough is a strong and opinionated writer. She often writes critically about the United States government, especially when discussing her time in the...
Duluth, MN (55816)

Today

Scattered thunderstorms during the evening. Mainly clear skies after midnight. Low 73F. Winds NW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 70%..

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Scattered thunderstorms during the evening. Mainly clear skies after midnight. Low 73F. Winds NW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 70%.
Comment Policy Calaveras Enterprise does not actively monitor comments. However, staff does read through to assess reader interest. When abusive or foul language is used or directed toward other commenters, those comments will be deleted. If a commenter continues to use such language, that person will be blocked from commenting. We wish to foster a community of communication and a sharing of ideas, and we truly value readers' input.
Mark Hudak, an attorney for Hillsborough, previously said the town prides itself on its rural, woodsy feel, and rules are in place so neighbors dont have to look at your version of what you would like to have, and you dont have to look at theirs.
Its essential to make sure we have transparency and accountability to have democratic elections. I think its great we are able to get this done before the next election, Savidge said. Its rather shameful to have these people hiding behind a separate committee or organization. If they want to be making these attacks ... I think they need to be upfront about it.
Safe Streets is a program run through the citys Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement that employs ex-offenders to use their street credibility and experiences to mediate conflicts and reduce violence. The programs employees explicitly do not work with police or share information, as part of offering a safe space for people who may be engaged in crime. The goal is to reduce violence. The outreach workers are instructed to steer clear of crime themselves.
Under his presidency, Johns Hopkins has expanded its collaboration with city schools, including by establishing the $54-million Henderson Hopkins School in East Baltimore; launching the HopkinsLocal program to support Baltimore businesses in the wake of the 2015 unrest after the death of Freddie Gray from injuries sustained in police custody; and investing in science, technology, engineering and math programs at Margaret Brent Middle School and Barclay Elementary School.
Ferguson was arrested Saturday and has also been charged with a weapon violation. He is being held without bond at the Howard County Detention Center. Ferguson does not have an attorney listed on online court records.
Born in Baltimore and raised in Roland Park, he was the son of Alexander Yearley, a patent attorney, and his wife, Helen Durant Church, a homemaker. His father died when he was in school and his grandfathers assisted in helping raise him and his siblings.
You provided no evidence that [Assistant U.S. Attorneys] Schenning and Wise intentionally disclosed grand jury information to the media in an effort to harass, degrade, and embarrass your clients or that other Department employees were responsible for the disclosures, the Department of Justice attorney wrote to Bolden. OPRs review of media reports relating to this matter revealed numerous possible sources of the information and yielded no evidence indicating that the [U.S. Attorneys Office] was responsible for the disclosure.
According to a memo sent to the commission, it must have a plan to present the council by Oct. 1. The deadline troubled some of the commission members, according to meeting minutes  compounded by the delay in U.S. Census data reaching the commission. According to the minutes, it will be mid-to-late August before the commission receives the data in legacy format.
I think [the student member of the board] is a great way for students to voice their opinions, [but] I think an opinion is much different than a vote in something as critical as what do we do in a pandemic, she said.
Vaccines at the popular outdoor venue, which has been closed to concerts since the early days of the coronavirus pandemic last year, will be administered by the Howard County Department of Fire and Rescue Services Mobile Integrated Community Health team and Howard County Health Department nurses, according to a news release from the county. All three vaccines approved by the Food and Drug Administration  the two-dose Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, as well as the single-dose Johnson & Johnson  will be available.
The missive from Department of Natural Resources Secretary Jeannie Haddaway-Riccio in the Sunday Capital defending her refusal to act to rein in overharvest of crabs is inexcusable. Given the hard data cited in the column by Senator Winegrad, the secretary attempts to obfuscate things by attempting to use the tired old excuse about the natural variability of recruitment in blue crab populations. She states that such drastic declines should not be cause for concern unless low recruitment is sustained over a period of time. Well, it has been!
Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan's special aide on religious affairs has said ulema (body of Muslim scholars) fully support the statement of the country's Prime Minister regarding women's hijab and dress.

During a press conference on Sunday, the special representative Hafiz Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi said that Islam is the protector of women's rights, adding that Imran Khan's remark about hijab was legal and in accordance with Holy Quran and Sunnah.

Further defending the PM, Ashrafi said that Khan's remarks about women's clothing were targeted by some elements for political reasons, Business Recorder reported. The representative said that the Quranic order about hijab was equally applicable to men that they should keep their eyes down.

This comes as human rights groups in Pakistan had called on Imran Khan to publicly apologise for making controversial remarks on sexual violence, for which he pinned the blame on the woman's attire.

At a press conference held last Thursday, at least 16 civil society organisations, including the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), the Women's Action Forum, Tehrik-e-Niswan, Aurat March, and the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research, among others, have strongly condemned Imran Khan's troubling remarks linking women's attire to rape.

"This is the second time that the Prime Minister has reduced sexual violence to an act of 'temptation.' This is dangerously simplistic and only reinforces the common public perception that women are 'knowing' victims and men 'helpless' aggressors. For the head of government--a government that claims to defend the rights of women and vulnerable groups--to insist on this view is simply inexcusable," the HRCP statement read.

Earlier, in an interview with Axios', the Pakistan PM had said: "If a woman is wearing very few clothes it will have an impact on the men unless they are robots. It's common sense."

"...I said the concept of 'purdah'. Avoid temptation in society. We don't have discos here, we don't have nightclubs. It is a completely different society, way of life here. So if you raise temptation in society to a point -- all these young guys have nowhere to go --- it has a consequence in the society," he also said.

This comes two months after Imran Khan's comments on sexual violence drew severe backlash, where he had said that the rise in such violence in Pakistan, particularly against children, was caused due to "fahashi" (vulgarity).

Khan's latest controversial remarks have led to an outpouring of furious comments on social media which netizens termed as "victim-blaming".

(ANI)

Also Read: J-K: Pakistani terrorist and top LeT commander killed in encounter with security forces in Srinagar
In a dramatic U-turn, former Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) and Pakistani cleric Mufti Azizur Rehman on Monday denied sexually assaulting one of his students and told a judicial magistrate that he was being pressurised by the police to admit to the crime.

This comes after last week, Deputy Inspector General of Police (DIG) investigations Shariq Jamal Khan had told Dawn that the cleric had confessed that the incident's video, which went viral on social media a few days ago, had featured him and was secretly filmed by the student who was being sexually abused.

Rehman further said that he was afraid and worried once the video went viral on social media and his sons had attempted to threaten the student and stop him from mentioning the incident to anyone, according to Jamal Khan.

"I released the video statement because I did not want to leave the madrassah. The madrassah administration had already told me to leave," the DIG quoted him as saying. "I am very ashamed at what I did," he added.

"I made the student a target of my lust with the lure of passing him [in his exams]," the Pakistani cleric admitted to the police.

However, on Monday, Rehman redacted the earlier statement that was attributed to him by the police. He told the Judicial Magistrate Rana Rashid Ali that the seminary had conspired against him and the police were pressurising him for a confession, Dawn reported.

After recording his statement, the magistrate sent the accused on judicial remand for 14 days. The court also sought a report from the police on the challan of the case at the next hearing.

The North Cantonment police had on June 17 registered the FIR on charges of sexual assault and criminal intimidation against Mufti Rehman on the complaint of a student of Jamia Manzoorul Islam, Lahore.

The police had later produced him before the local court and sought seven-day physical remand, which was approved by the magistrate.

A harrowing video clip of him allegedly sexually assaulting one of his students was widely shared on social media earlier this month.

The student had said Rehman sexually abused him, while the cleric's sons started blackmailing and threatening to kill him.

The incident sparked outrage on social media, with many calling for the former JUI-F leader to be arrested. Pakistan's civil society members are questioning the silence of religious parties after police nabbed the cleric for sexually assaulting one of his students.

On Twitter, #muftiazizurrehman was among the top trends in Pakistan on Thursday with netizens calling for action against the JUI-F cleric and criticising religious parties for their silence on the incident.

(ANI)

Also Read: Pakistan's gas crisis deepens as companies halt supply till July 5
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
US Foods is required to send notice of the settlement to each of the 114 applicants not hired for the night selector positions. Eight women who applied for full-time positions are eligible to receive at least $6,382 each. The applicants for the part-time positions are eligible to receive at least $1,023 each, according to the agreement.
Urban districts might be less likely to open for full-time in-person learning, in part because of higher COVID-19 community rates, and these districts generally include more students of color, the study authors wrote. Further, rates of COVID-19 hospitalization and mortality have been higher in communities of color, and districts serving a larger share of these students might have faced more significant public health challenges as they made decisions about reopening schools.
Patients can buy from recreational stores but would have to pay, in some cases, around 30% more in taxes. With Illinois market beholden to very few suppliers, its prices are already twice or more than that of other states, making it prohibitively expensive, Preston said.
The Eritrean soldiers, accused by witnesses of some of the wars worst atrocities, left the towns of Shire, Axum and Adwa but it was not immediately clear where they were going or whether the retreat was temporary. The information ministry of Eritrea, described by human rights groups as one of the worlds most repressive countries, did not immediately respond to questions.
After verifying the account, and after Keeler told her story to The Associated Press, a new team of police and prosecutors on Tuesday obtained an arrest warrant, charging Ian Cleary, 28, of Saratoga, California, with sexually assaulting Keeler when they were students at Gettysburg College in 2013. Police say they had not yet located him, and arent sure where he is. So its still not clear whether Keeler will see the case go to trial.
According to the company, Nelk sold $50 million in Full Send merchandise last year and could surpass $70 million this year. Merch is sold in limited edition drops, so hype remains high. Cohen, at Tubefilter, said of the tens of millions of dollars being made: These numbers are really high but if you look at the very top echelon of YouTubers and online video stars, this is what theyre able to do.
After being booed and jeered the week before at a conservative conference in Florida, Pence appeared to have a newfound sense of swagger as he delivered his strongest rebuttal to date of Trumps continued insistence that he could have unilaterally overturned the results of the last election. Many of Trumps supporters continue to blame Pence for Trumps loss, even though he had no power to overturn the results.
The cameras often are mounted on police cars. But some departments have reported problems with that arrangement, noting the system may record addresses or other useless numbers, and may flag hits for vehicles going in the opposite direction, too late to stop them. So some officials prefer to mount the cameras on light poles, traffic light poles, or other stationary sites.
One day a man who was lost asked for help finding his way back to a halfway house. She gave him water and granola bars, spent more than an hour talking with him, and was able to find out where he was supposed to be. There was also a teen interested in social justice who stopped by at his moms suggestion.
Lawmakers couldnt find agreement on the bill earlier this month but are expected to return later this summer to smooth out their disagreements. A big stumbling block has been a measure in the bill that would have set a timeline for the phaseout of the Prairie State Generating Station in southern Illinois, which got big investments from several Chicago-area communities. Those suburbs have resisted the phaseout. Unions, meanwhile, dont like Pritzkers proposal to lower carbon emission limits on natural gas plants, which could lead to shutdowns of those plants ahead of a 2045 closure deadline and job losses for their members.
Right now, while our outbreak remains in very good control locally, even with the delta here, theres not a reason to adjust that (CDC) guidance, Arwady said. I dont want to rule out that this could be something that could be a recommendation again in the future  But right now, I think we are feeling good about where we are. The most important thing of course is to get vaccinated.
The settlement, reached last week, will address several problems identified in the system, including the lack of adequate access for people with limited English skills and the failure to automatically update the rolls when voters move. It will also stop registration information for people who arent eligible to vote because of age or citizenship status from being automatically sent to the elections board, the organizations said.
CCTV: Yesterday, President Xi Jinping held a video conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The two heads of state issued a joint statement, officially deciding to extend the China-Russia Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation. How do you assess this meeting? What's your expectation of China-Russia relations looking ahead?

Wang Wenbin: The meeting is the second virtual interaction between President Xi and President Putin since the beginning of this year. The two heads of state affirmed the important significance of the Treaty of Good-neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation between China and Russia and officially decided to extend it. President Putin expressed warm congratulations on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China. The two sides made top-level designs on practical cooperation in various fields and held in-depth exchange of views on major international issues of common concern, reaching important new consensus.

Head-of-state guidance is the most fundamental guarantee for the steady and sustained development of China-Russia relations. Under the strategic guidance of President Xi and President Putin, the China-Russia relations for a new era stand at their historical best. On the basis of strong political mutual trust, mutual understanding and traditional friendship between the two peoples has been deepened. Following the principle of win-win cooperation, the two sides accommodate each other's interests and concerns and have fruitful cooperation in such areas as hi-tech, space, aviation and nuclear energy, which has given a strong boost to development and rejuvenation in both countries and significantly improved peoples' well-being.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the signing of the China-Russia Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation. Our two countries are committed to developing a comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination with everlasting friendship. The past two decades are just the prologue. We are convinced that good-neighborliness and friendship is the mainstream public opinion in both countries and mutual benefit represents the consistent direction of bilateral cooperation. Guided by the two heads of state and the spirit of the Treaty, China-Russia relations and bilateral cooperation in various sectors will see greater progress and deliver more outcomes, which will contribute to fostering a new type of international relations and a community with a shared future for mankind.

Reuters: Japan's deputy defense minister on Monday spoke of the growing threat posed by Chinese and Russian collaboration and said it was necessary to "wake up" to Beijing's pressure on Taiwan and protect the island "as a democratic country." What's the ministry's comment on this?

Wang Wenbin: China deplores the erroneous remarks by the senior Japanese government official, and has lodged solemn representations with the Japanese side.

Some Japanese politicians, in disregard of the fact of China's peaceful development, unjustifiably point fingers at China's socioeconomic development and normal national defense building, portray China as a threat, and openly stoke big-power confrontation with the sinister motive to find excuses to break free from the military restrictions imposed on Japan over crimes of aggression committed by Japanese militarism in history. This is extremely irresponsible and dangerous.

The politician in question flagrantly refers to Taiwan as a "country" on multiple occasions, severely violating principles set out in the four political documents including the China-Japan Joint Statement and its solemn and repeated commitment of not seeing Taiwan as a country. We ask Japan to make crystal clarification, and ensure that such things won't happen again.

There is but one China in the world, and Taiwan is an inalienable part of China's sacred territory. The Taiwan question bears on the political foundation of China-Japan relations, the basic trust and good faith between the two countries and the international rule of law and justice. We seriously urge the Japanese side to earnestly honor its commitment, be prudent in words and actions, avoid undermining China's sovereignty in any form and refrain from sending any wrong signal to the "Taiwan independence" forces. I would like to stress that China's will and determination to safeguard national sovereignty, security and unity is unshakable. China must and will be reunified. This is an unstoppable historical trend.

Macao Monthly: It is reported that on June 28, Michael McCaul, the Republican lawmaker on the Foreign Affairs Committee of the US House of Representatives said through his spokesperson that he opposed the Ensuring American Global Leadership and Engagement Act to be reviewed this Wednesday, which means the Committee will likely advance the bill this week with only Democratic support. The Ensuring American Global Leadership and Engagement Act was adopted by the US Senate on June 8 with the intention to boost the country's ability to compete with China in science and technology. What is China's comment?

Wang Wenbin: China has expressed its solemn positions on relevant act passed by the US Congress. The act disregards facts, plays up strategic competition with China, slanders and smears China's development path and its domestic and foreign policies, and interferes in China internal affairs and undermines China's interests with regard to China's sovereignty and territorial integrity. China firmly opposes that and will steadfastly safeguard its interests.

How the US develops and enhances its own competitiveness is its own business. However, the US should not make an issue out of China, nor should it view China as an imaginary enemy. The worst enemy of the US is itself. What the US lawmakers should focus on is to get its own house in order.

The Chinese side urges relevant US legislators to abandon zero-sum mentality and ideological prejudice, stop conducting political manipulation of China-related issues, cease reviewing and advancing relevant China-related negative act, and delete relevant negative clauses. They should contribute more to promoting China-US relations and mutual trust and cooperation, so as to create favorable conditions for bilateral cooperation in important areas.

Reuters: Australia has filed a formal complaint to the World Trade Organization over China's duties on bottled wine imports, the WTO confirmed on Monday, and gives both sides 60 days to confer on the subject. What's China's stance on resolving this conflict and does China expect a formal dispute panel to be set up?

Wang Wenbin: I'll refer you to the competent authorities. I would just like to reiterate that China abides by WTO rules and handles matters accordingly.

Xinhua News Agencey: An academic report: Xinjiang  understanding complexity, building peace by Eurispes  Istituto di Studi Politici Economici e Sociali, Centro Studi Eurasia-Mediterraneo and Istituto Diplomatico Internazionale has recently been published. Fabio Massimo Palandi, an Italian scholar of international relations and author of the report, said that he saw with his own eyes in Xinjiang the full religious freedom enjoyed by ethnic minority groups including Uyghurs and found no sign of the so-called allegations of "forced labor" and "genocide". He pointed out that Western accusations on Xinjiang are unfounded. Does China have any comment on this?

Wang Wenbin: I have also taken note of this academic report which was penned by independent researchers and signed by dozens of world-renowned academics, political figures and journalists. Fabio Massimo Palandi, the Italian scholar of international relations who authored the report, said that some Western think tanks, scholars and media have invented false reports and accusations on Xinjiang, causing a grave negative impact. These individuals and institutions are openly anti-China. Their false reports were packaged as independent reports, based on which some Western governments imposed groundless sanctions on Xinjiang. Their purpose is not to protect human rights in Xinjiang, but to suppress and contain China. Precisely for this reason he and other scholars decided to write a report as objective and independent as possible to help the world see how Xinjiang was once plagued by terrorism and separatism and how the Chinese government adopted highly effective counter-terrorism and de-radicalization measures on the basis of rule and law, respect for human rights and protection of the lawful rights and interests of those concerned.

Apart from this report, I've also noted a recent article by Tom Fowdy, a British political and international relations analyst, which laid bare the hypocrisy of Western countries and media in their attitude towards the treatment of Muslims. On one hand they show no remorse for the crimes committed by the US and its allies in the Islamic world over many years; on the other they keep wantonly accusing China of the so-called human rights abuses in Xinjiang and hyping up the matter. They even attempt to inveigle Islamic countries into criticizing China. Such double standard is absurd and unreliable.

I'd like to stress that facts speak louder than words. The lies on Xinjiang fabricated by a few will eventually be exposed by the truth and fact of Xinjiang's rapid social and economic development and harmonious coexistence of people of all ethnic groups.

Beijing Media Network: It is reported that the prime minister's office of Ethiopia declared a unilateral ceasefire in Tigray region starting from June 28. What is China's comment?

Wang Wenbin: China welcomes the declaration made by the Ethiopian government of a unilateral ceasefire in Tigray region to ensure the normal operation of farming and humanitarian relief work there. We sincerely hope that people in Tigray region and the rest of Ethiopia will enjoy peace and stability, and achieve development and prosperity. We support relevant parties in Ethiopia in realizing national reconciliation through political dialogue. We believe that Ethiopia has the wisdom and capability to properly handle its internal affairs.

Reuters: Italian Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio said on Monday that"We are a strong trade partner with China, we have a historic relationship, but it is absolutely not comparable, and it does not interfere with, the alliance of values we have with the United States." What's the ministry's comment on this and does this stance affect China's ties with Italy?

Wang Wenbin: Italy is China's comprehensive strategic partner. In recent years, China-Italy relations have been growing in a sound and steady manner. The two sides have worked hand in hand to fight COVID-19 and promoted practical cooperation and various forms of cultural exchange, bringing tangible benefits to both peoples. As two ancient civilizations, China and Italy have a relationship rooted in history and founded on popular support. We believe it will maintain steady development going forward.

Shenzhen TV: A recent New York Times report indicates that the Chinese vaccines may not be very effective at preventing the spread of the virus in Chile. What is China's comment?

Wang Wenbin: I stated our position on this issue yesterday. Relevant allegation is nothing but distortion of facts and sensational accusations.

A leading official from Chile's health authorities said in response that he regretted to hear statements that Chile has problems with vaccination, which is not true. He said it really bothers him that some people out there should say the Sinovac vaccine has not worked in Chile without having any scientific information to back that up, and demanded that those statements be corrected. The Chilean government has stated on many occasions that facts show that the Sinovac vaccine is safe and effective.Chilean medical experts believe that had there not been mass vaccination supported by the Chinese vaccine, the consequences would have been catastrophic. Chilean netizens agree that the smear against the Chinese vaccine is bias-motivated, and that Sinovac's vaccine has worked well in Chile.

We hope that relevant media and politicians will respect facts and the opinions of the Chilean government and people, refrain from misleading the public, and make concrete contributions to promoting the accessibility and affordability of vaccines in developing countries rather than the opposite.

The Paper: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in an interview during his trip to Europe that the goal of the United States is to support a free and open system that was established after World War Two. Besides, the US State Department published a readout saying that Secretary Blinken and leaders of European countries discussed Transatlantic cooperation in addressing China's coercive economic practices and attempts at undermining the rules-based international order. What's your comment?

Wang Wenbin: China has always been an advocate of world peace, a contributor to global development and a defender of the international order. China's development adds to the force for world peace. I would also like to stress three points:

First, the US is the biggest saboteur of the international order. The US willfully withdraw from treaties and organizations and wantonly imposes illegal unilateral sanctions and military coercion on other countries, causing grave harm to international and regional peace and stability and seriously violating international law and basic norms governing international relations.

Second, the "rules-based international order" claimed by the US is, in essence, a hegemonic order in which the US dominates the world. The overwhelming majority of countries in the world, including US allies, do not agree with such an order. It is echoed and followed by only a handful of countries.

Third, there is only one system in the world, and that is the international system with the UN at its core. There is only one set of rules, and that is the basic norms governing international relations based on the UN Charter. The international order should not be a hegemonic one dominated by the US, and international rules should not be made by the US or a small bloc led by the US. Countries should uphold the universal values of peace, development, fairness, justice, democracy and freedom, practice true multilateralism, promote democracy in international relations, and jointly build a community with a shared future for mankind.
You are here: Arts

As a traditional folk art in Huangzhong District, Xining, Qinghai Province, barbola is a national-level intangible cultural heritage that requires brilliant skills.

Ye Qilian, 44, from Xining, lost all her fingers and was disfigured in a fire when she was five. Cutting patterns hindered her barbola learning.

The biggest difficulty to me is cutting patterns with scissors because I have to use two hands, Ye said.

At the beginning, I randomly used something to help me. Then I found tools suitable for me like a small iron, tweezers or something having weight to fix the patterns when cutting, she added.

In addition to usual practice, Ye began to learn the sketching, painting, paper-cutting and needle techniques of diverse kinds of embroideries from others in 2009.

A perfect barbola work requires superb skills and also means a heavy workload, said Ye.

She needs to spend more effort than others in finishing a qualified work.

To break through in barbola, she spent half a year to mak six-meter-long The Night Revels of Han Xizai, a famous painting depicting a Southern Tang (937-975) banquet.

After years of painstaking research, Ye eventually became a barbola master.

Her works went on display at various embroidery exhibitions in Qinghai.

Ye said her embroideries were recognized widely, which brings her extra income aside from the living and nursing allowance for the disabled.

She was also invited to be a barbola instructor by some companies. She said she never thought her insistence on her hobby could change her life.

A 13-year barbola career has fixed her, said Ye.

With help from the local government, Ye established her studio in 2020.

She hopes to see the embroidery skills inherited and more disabled people start a new life through barbola.
A woman walks past the International Monetary Fund (IMF) headquarters in Washington, D.C., the United States, March 30, 2021. [Photo/Xinhua]

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva on Monday announced her proposal to appoint Li Bo, currently deputy governor of the People's Bank of China (PBOC), as IMF deputy managing director.

Georgieva made the announcement to the IMF Executive Board about three weeks after she said Deputy Managing Director Zhang Tao intends to conclude his service when his five-year term expires in August. Li's proposed appointment is to be effective Aug. 23.

"Mr. Li brings extensive experience in central banking and law," Georgieva said in a statement, noting that during Li's more than 14 years of service at the PBOC between 2004 and 2018, he held a variety of senior positions, including as head of the legal and regulation department, and of two monetary policy departments.

"While at the PBOC, he was instrumental in supporting and implementing several important reforms and policies, including state-owned banking reform; anti-money laundering legislation; and establishing a macroprudential policy framework for China," Georgieva continued.

Li has also served in a number of other public sector positions in China. He was the vice chairman of the All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese from 2018 to 2019. He went on to serve as vice mayor of Chongqing Municipality from 2019 to 2021, overseeing the city's financial sector development, international trade, and foreign direct investment.

Li returned to the PBOC in April 2021 to take up the position of deputy governor.

Li received his undergraduate education from Renmin University of China in Beijing. He also holds an M.A. degree in Economics from Boston University, a Ph.D. degree in Economics from Stanford University, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.

Prior to joining the PBOC, Li was a practicing attorney with the New York law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell for five years.

The IMF managing director is assisted by a first deputy managing director and three deputy managing directors, according to the institution's official website.

In March 2020, the IMF Executive Board approved Georgieva's appointment of Geoffrey Okamoto, a former U.S. Treasury Department official, as the IMF's first deputy managing director, succeeding David Lipton, who took up the position in September 2011. The multilateral lender's second-highest ranking official has traditionally been an American.

The other two deputy managing directors are Antoinette Monsio Sayeh, former Minister of Finance in Liberia, and Mitsuhiro Furusawa, former Vice Minister of Finance for International Affairs in Japan.
China's Ministry of Veterans Affairs has urged further enhancing the support for revolutionary martyrs' families to ensure they receive the benefits they deserve and foster a society where heroes are respected.

Local authorities should give priority to family members of revolutionary martyrs when formulating relevant support policies and strengthen registration and data collection in order to keep abreast of their situations, the ministry said in a statement.

It required more efforts to reach out to those family members on routine visits and establish a mechanism for regular contact with them to effectively address their problems in work and life.

It also called for social participation in furthering the support for such families and pragmatic efforts to boost their sense of honor and fulfilment.
You are here: China

The Communist Party of China (CPC) has maintained regular contacts with more than 560 political parties and political organizations from over 160 countries and regions around the world, according to a CPC official.



Guo Yezhou, deputy head of the International Department of the CPC Central Committee, cited the statistics at a press conference held to mark the 100th anniversary of the founding of the CPC on Monday in Beijing.

"The CPC has made friends all over the world," said Guo.
The history of the Communist Party of China (CPC) over the past 100 years has been the history of the trials, tribulations and achievements of the Chinese people.



The founding of the CPC in 1921 was the great event of the 20th century in China. The party's chief founders such as Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao espoused Marxism, drew enormous inspiration from the Bolshevik Revolution and answered the call from Lenin and the Communist International to form communist parties.

The Long March and the struggle against the invasion and expansion of imperialism were all noteworthy episodes which culminated in the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. The yoke of imperialism was finally thrown off and democratic revolution was elevated and transformed into socialist revolution.

No one who learns about the Long March of the CPC can fail to be deeply impressed by the dedication, steadfastness and courage shown by Chinese Communists on their epic journey. As I have been to Yan'an in northwestern China and seen its remoteness and beauty, the work done by the CPC to gather, organize and educate its forces for the victorious 1949 revolution strikes me as all the more extraordinary.

There have been many significant achievements since the founding of the CPC, which laid foundations for the development of a modern industrial society.

From our vantage point in the 21st century, it can be claimed with confidence that one of the events of global importance in modern China's development was Deng Xiaoping's initiation of the reform and opening-up process in 1978, which helped China turn into the world's foremost economic and political powerhouse.

The transformation of China's economy  not least its infrastructure  has been on a scale unseen anywhere else since the most dynamic periods of the Industrial Revolution. In addition, China's industrial and technological transformation has not been at the expense of any section of the population at home or abroad.

Since 1949, the CPC has pursued economic development strategies intended to benefit the mass of working people and their families. The overall result is that average life expectancy has doubled to almost 80, and since 1978 more than 850 million people have been lifted out of extreme poverty.

It was possible to introduce the reform and opening-up policies and amend them in the light of subsequent experience. It is one of the great strengths of the CPC that it has set and pursued long-term aims while also showing the flexibility to amend shorter-term objectives and targets. Not allowing theory to become dogma has also enabled the CPC to engage with the international economy, adjusting policies in accordance with external shocks such as the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent recession in major economies.

When facing new problems, the CPC will respond with swift and thorough policies, such as measures to stamp out corruption and tackle the economic and social inequalities between the largely rural interior and the more developed urban and industrial regions. Thus, the CPC has shown itself capable not only of recognizing problems, but also of taking resolute action to rectify them.

Now, China is assisting other countries and peoples to accelerate their own economic and social development through the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Belt and Road Initiative.

I have been to China six or seven times, often for extensive travel to different villages, towns, cities and provinces. I have met and talked with many Chinese people. My abiding impressions have been of a society undergoing breathtaking changes, but doing so in a planned and orderly way. I've witnessed many examples of a vast, trained and educated working class in the process of development.

Particularly impressive have been the technological innovations and applications, not least those designed to produce and safeguard a cleaner, safer environment. From urban planning and housing to waste management and renovation in the countryside, I have seen the results of this determination to pursue green development.

China's stunningly successful drive to combat the COVID-19 epidemic provided the world with an example to follow. China's performance reflects its priorities and values of the government and system. The CPC prides itself on staying close to the people, being part of the people, having its deep roots in the mass of the people and implementing strategies and policies that are "people-centered."

Continuing to fulfil that aspiration will enable the CPC to achieve its goal of building a modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, harmonious and beautiful.

Robert Griffiths is a former Senior Lecturer in Political Economy and History at the University of Wales and currently the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Britain.

Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors only, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.

If you would like to contribute, please contact us at opinion@china.org.cn.
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A senior Chinese diplomat on Monday criticized the crimes of genocide by the United States and other Western countries, urging the international community to carry out comprehensive, impartial and in-depth investigations into all crimes of genocide and to eradicate racism, racial discrimination and other legacies of genocide.

Speaking at the Interactive Dialogue with the UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, Jiang Duan, minister of the Chinese mission to the United Nations in Geneva, said that genocide is a universally acknowledged severe international crime and the devastating impacts of genocide is still felt today.

In the United States, Jiang said, native American Indians were expelled from their land and slaughtered during the so-called Westward Expansion in nearly 100 years after the country was founded. Their population dwindled from 5 million at the end of the 15th century to 250,000 at the beginning of the 20th century.

Today, American Indians are living in isolated and desolated Reservations in the United States, he added.

Jiang pointed out that in Canada, over 150,000 indigenous children were forcibly sent to residential schools for assimilation, and at least 3,200 were abused to death.

"This is only the tip of the iceberg in the number of indigenous people who died of genocide in Canada," he said.

He further said that other western countries also committed severe crimes of genocide and crimes against humanity in colonizing and invading other countries.
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Iran has yet to decide on the extension of an earlier agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Saeed Khatibzadeh, the Iranian spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said on Monday.

"The agreement with the IAEA was to address some of the agency's concerns within the framework of a parliament's bill. We agreed not to collect the cameras, but not to provide the agency with information and what is being recorded," Khatibzadeh said.

Asked if there is an expiration date for clearing the IAEA's camera data installed in some Iranian nuclear facilities, he said that Iran has not made any decision about the cameras and agreement with the agency.

Iran's Strategic Action Plan to Counter Sanctions was passed by Iran's parliament in December 2020, requiring among other measures the Iranian government to stop implementing the Additional Protocol to the Non-Proliferation Treaty by Feb. 23, in case the U.S. anti-Iran sanctions were not lifted.

The IAEA and Iranian officials reached a temporary understanding in February to keep the IAEA's monitoring cameras under Iran's supervision for a period of three months up to May 24, and deliver the records to the agency only after sanctions on the country are lifted.
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Rocket fire targeted a U.S. military base in Syria's eastern province of Deir al-Zour on Monday evening, state news agency SANA reported.

The targeted base is located in the al-Omar oil field in the eastern countryside of Deir al-Zour, SANA said, without providing further details.

Meanwhile, the pro-rebel Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the attack caused damage and burned cars in the base, without any mention of casualties.

The Britain-based watchdog noted that pro-Iran fighters were behind the rocket fire.

Following the attack, areas under the control of the pro-Iranian fighters in the al-Mayadin city in Deir al-Zour witnessed several explosions, which appeared to be retaliatory shelling from the targeted U.S. base in the al-Omar field, said the Observatory.

The exchange of fire comes after the United States carried out a missile strike at 1 a.m. on Monday on pro-Iranian fighters' positions in the eastern countryside of Deir al-Zour near the Iraqi border, killing five.

Washington claims that pro-Iran militiamen are responsible for attacks against U.S. positions in Iraq.
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U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday discussed bilateral relations and regional issues with visiting Israeli President Reuven Rivlin.

Biden, at the beginning of their meeting in the Oval Office, reaffirmed U.S. "unwavering commitment" to Israel's self-defense, adding "Iran will never get a nuclear weapon on my watch."

Biden said he would be hosting Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett at the White House "very soon," and voiced support for the normalization of relations between Israel and other countries in the region.

Rivlin is due to retire next month after the end of his seven-year term.

The role of the president in Israel is mainly ceremonial with little executive power. The president of Israel is elected for seven years and cannot serve more than a single term.

Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid told U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Rome on Sunday that "Israel has some serious reservations about the Iran nuclear deal being put together in Vienna," according to a statement issued by the Israeli foreign ministry.

Lapid said on Monday that his country reserves the right to act against Iran's nuclear program "anywhere and anytime."

Washington and Tehran have had six rounds of indirect negotiations in Vienna since April aimed at restoring the nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

A senior State Department official said last week that the two sides still have serious differences over the issue.
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Ethiopia, Kenya, and South Sudan on Monday reiterated their commitment to advance the implementation of a mega infrastructure project in the East Africa region, also known as the LAPSSET Corridor Program.

Starting at Lamu, Kenya, the Lamu Port-South Sudan-Ethiopia-Transport (LAPSSET) Corridor Program, is the region's largest and most ambitious infrastructure project, bringing the three countries together with key projects that include ports, highways, railways, oil pipeline and airports.

In her opening remarks during a high-level ministerial meeting on Monday in Ethiopia's capital Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian Minister of Transport Dagmawit Moges said that infrastructure provision is Africa's top priority as the continent is moving toward integration and that African states need to closely work together to achieve that goal.

"As Ethiopia, Kenya and South Sudan have a common goal that aims to attain economic growth and prosperity, narrowing our common infrastructure gap should be our common concern. And this can only be achieved through regional consensus and committed action," said the minister.

Kenya's Cabinet Secretary for East African Community and Regional Development, Adan Mohammed, said Africa is challenged by unemployment, especially among the youth, low levels of intra-African trade and industrialization, and inefficient agriculture.

"The other major issue which is the subject of why we are meeting today is the poor infrastructure that links the continent of Africa together. And that is why we believe that LAPSSET and similar programs will play a very big role reversing these challenges that we are facing today as a continent," said Mohammed.

"For Africa to realize its potential of regional integration through transformative regional infrastructure, harmonization of monitoring policies, standards, the removal of tariff and non-tariff barriers, improving business climate must be the continued areas of focus for all of us on the continent," he said.

The South Sudanese Director General of Road Transport and Safety, Lado Tongun Tombe, said that the project would connect landlocked South Sudan to other areas within the region.

The Executive Secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, Vera Songwe, hailed the multiple roles played by the LAPSSET program, not only in facilitating trade and economic connectivity but also in the promotion of cultural integration and peace, especially among the border communities of the region.

She said the project would contribute to job creation on which the continent would work strenuously after COVID to address the ever-growing unemployment rate on the continent.

Raila Odinga, AU High Representative for Infrastructure, said LAPSSET would play a significant role in the implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area. Speaking during a press conference, Odinga said Africa requires partners like China in the development of such infrastructure projects.
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China on Monday urged Japan to treat the "comfort women" issue left over from history in an honest and responsible manner at the ongoing 47th session of the UN Human Rights Council.

China also urged Japan to honestly face up to and reflect on its history of aggression, stop denying and beautifying that part of history, and observe its international human rights obligations.

Speaking at the Interactive Dialogue with the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, Jiang Duan, minister of the Chinese mission to the United Nations in Geneva, said that the "comfort women" issue is an irrefutable historical fact that cannot be denied.

During Monday's Interactive Dialogue, Dubravka Simonovic, UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, said her thematic report was on rape as a grave, systematic and widespread human rights violation, with a focus on States' responsibility to prevent it, and to change the prevalent rape culture, the culture of impunity for perpetrators, and stigmatization and lack of access to justice for victims.

The Special Rapporteur also mentioned in her report that during World War II, the Japanese troops conducted mass rape in Nanjing of China, and forcibly recruited "comfort women" in many countries.

"However, to this day, many in Japan are trying to deny the horrified crimes committed by the Japanese militarist aggressors, including Nanjing Massacre and forced recruitment of 'comfort women', in an attempt to deny and even beautify the history of aggression," Jiang said.

"This is a serious violation of human rights of the people in victimized countries and will surely be condemned by justice and conscience," he added.

At Monday's Interactive Dialogue, the South Korean representative also expressed concern over the "comfort women" issue, saying that stigmatizing the victims and letting the perpetrators go unpunished are all harming the victims again and will aggravate their suffering.
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Australia's Health Minister Greg Hunt has declared that the country is on "high alert" with coronavirus spreading in the community.

As of Tuesday afternoon, there had been 30,562 confirmed cases of COVID-19 reported in Australia, and the numbers of locally and overseas acquired cases in the last 24 hours were 25 and seven respectively, according to the latest figures from the Department of Health.

Several capital cities of the country's eight states and territories have been thrust into lockdown to prevent the spread of the virus, with more than 10 million people subject to stay-at-home orders.

Of the new cases confirmed on Tuesday, 19 were in Australia's most populous state of New South Wales (NSW).

"We are obviously on high alert and high watch," Hunt told reporters on Tuesday afternoon.

He announced that Australia has surpassed 7.5 million administered COVID-19 vaccines, which includes over 5.95 million first dose vaccinations, or 28.9 percent of the population, and over 1.47 million second dose vaccinations or 7.1 percent of the population.

"We have over 4.4 million Australians over the age of 50 or 51.3 percent of the over 50s population that have been vaccinated, 60 percent of over 60s, and 68.5 percent of over 70s, our most vulnerable group," he said.

Despite some calls for the international arrival cap to be lowered amid the current outbreaks, Hunt urged states to accept as many residents and citizens into hotel quarantine as they can.
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The global organic feed market size is estimated to be valued at USD 6.8 billion in 2019 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 6.8% from 2019 to reach a value of USD 10.1 billion by 2025. The increasing instances of animal product contamination due to pesticides and insecticides, rising demand for organic food products, growing organic livestock farming, and adaption of organic farming practices by farmers due to the increasing health concerns among consumers are some of the key factors that are projected to drive the growth of the global organic feed market. Developing countries in Asia Pacific and South American regions are projected to create lucrative growth opportunities for organic feed manufacturers in the coming years.

By type, the cereal & grains segment is projected to dominate the organic feed market during the forecast period.

The cereals & grains segment is estimated to account for the largest share, on the basis of type, in the organic feed market in 2019. Cereals and grains include wheat, corn, and barley. The high growth in the Asia Pacific region is attributed to the increasing awareness about the benefits of feeding organic cereals and grains to livestock, to maintain their nutrient requirements and enhance their growth, and fulfill the rising demand for organic food. High availability of cereals and grain crops in Europe and Asia Pacific due to the increasing organic farmland practices in most of the countries in the region is also one of the key factors driving the growth of the segment.

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By livestock, the poultry segment is projected to dominate the organic feed market during the forecast period.

The poultry segment, on the basis of livestock, is estimated to account for the largest share in the organic feed market in 2019. The poultry industry is the largest and also the fastest-growing sector that witnesses high organic production. Poultry meat is consumed across regions, and unlike beef and swine, it does not have any religious constraints. The increasing concerns about animal health and the rising awareness pertaining to the benefits of organic feed feedstuffs have contributed to the growth of this market. Due to the increase in organic poultry production and the rise in demand for organic meat, the meat producers are focusing on investing in organic rearing of livestock to produce meat, dairy, and other by-products from animals.

North America is projected to be the largest market during the forecast period.

North America is projected to be a key revenue generator for organic feed manufacturers due to the increased demand in the US. North America witnesses various key players operating in the organic feed market. These include Cargill (US), SunOpta (Canada), and Purina Animal Nutrition LLC (US). The demand for organic feed products remains high in the poultry segment in the region. The US is among the largest producers and consumers of corn, wheat, and soybean at a global level. These ingredients are majorly used in the feed industry, as they increase their nutrient quotient. Due to the rising consumer preferences for natural ingredients, the demand for these ingredients is projected to increase in the coming years.

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In Canada, some of the small scale players are focusing on offering organic feed for poultry, swine, and ruminants. In Mexico, the demand for organic poultry products, such as eggs and poultry meat, is projected to create lucrative opportunities for organic feed manufacturers. Milk is also projected to increase the demand for organic feed products among ruminant livestock, as consumers opt for organic dairy products in the region. Thus, North America is projected to offer high growth prospects for organic feed manufacturers in the coming years.

This report includes a study of marketing and development strategies, along with the product portfolios of leading companies, in the organic feed market. It consists of the profiles of leading companies, such as Cargill (US), BernAqua (Belgium), Country Heritage Feeds (Australia), ForFarmers (Netherlands), SunOpta (Canada), Ranch-Way Feeds (US), Aller Aqua (Denmark), Purina Animal Nutrition LLC (US), Scratch and Peck Feeds (US), Cargill (US), K-Much Feed Industry Co., Ltd (Thailand), The Organic Feed Company (UK), B&W Feeds (UK), Feeddex Compaies (US), Country Junction feed (US), Green Mountian Feeds (US), Unique Organic (US), Kreamer Feed (US), Yorktown Organics, LLC (US), and Hi Peak Feeds (UK).
Market Research Future has published a Cooked Research Report on the Diphenylamine Industry Trends Research Report - Global Forecast till 2025

Market Definition and Growth Factors:

Also, the increasing application of DPA in nitrocellulose-based explosives pertaining to its antioxidizing property is also expected to fuel the growth of the global market. Lubricants are produced with the help of advanced additives that enhance the efficiency of the engine and exhibit properties such as high durability, cleanliness, and strength. The moving components are always in contact with air (oxygen), which results in degradation of the lubricants. Oxidation is a common process and arises when the lubricating oil chemically reacts with oxygen to form oxidized products, which result in sludge and deposit formation, corrosion of engine parts, and wear and tear of moving parts. To ensure easy functioning of vehicles and inhibit oxidation of lubrication oils, a class of chemicals known as antioxidants are used. Antioxidants control oxidation by preventing oil breakdown and thickening, which helps the engine to run smoothly for a long period. The most commonly used antioxidant is diphenylamine (DPA), which reacts with the free radicals generated by oxidation and prevents oxidative decomposition of the lubricating oil. Diphenylamine falls under a class of radical scavengers that stop chain propagation by blocking or reacting with free radicals created in the initiation step of oxidation. Diphenylamine is a viscous, lightweight hydrocarbon that is soluble in oil. Diphenylamine antioxidants are produced by reacting DPA with an olefin of the desired functional group. These antioxidants have low vapor pressure and water solubility, which are essential in protecting engines. Due to the superior antioxidant synergism of the antioxidants in the oil system, DPA and alkylated DPAs are considered as ideal solutions to enhance the durability and performance of engines. Also, they enhance the antioxidant efficiency and offer the required alkalinity.

Diphenylamine Industry Trends is estimated to be valued at USD 527.7 Million by 2025 and record a CAGR of over 4.06% during the forecast period. The growing demand for DPA as an antioxidant in lubricants is expected to be the primary factor driving the growth of the global Diphenylamine Industry Trends.

Furthermore, the antioxidant properties help to increase the shelf life of engine oils and provide maximum oil compatibility. Thus, the increasing demand for DPA in the lubricants used in automobiles owing its excellent antioxidant property is expected to boost the growth of the global market during the forecast period. Furthermore, single-base nitrocellulose propellants are hygroscopic in nature and are most susceptible to degradation. To avoid the accumulation of degradation products, stabilizers such as DPA are most commonly used in nitrocellulose-containing propellant powders and explosives. Due to the excellent antioxidizing property of DPA, it is used as a stabilizing compound in mono-, di-, and tri-base propellants of missiles and explosives. It has the potential to bind with the degradation products, which develop during long-term storage such as NO, NO2, and HNO3 to extend the storage time. Thus, due to the antioxidizing property of DPA and highly unstable nature of nitrocellulose-based materials, the demand for DPA to inhibit the degradation of explosives is increasing, which is projected to boost the growth of the market during the forecast period.

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However, diphenylamine is a chemical compound from the third European Union (EU) list of priority pollutants. In studies carried out on laboratory animals, DPA has proved to be slightly toxic by the dermal, oral, and inhalation routes and has been registered under the Toxicity Category III (second lowest of four categories). It can cause severe irritation to the eyes and affect the liver and kidneys on long exposure. It targets the red blood cells and can result in abnormal erythropoiesis in the spleen, and thus congestion of the spleen and hemosiderosis. It is not likely carcinogenic based on the evidence. However, an impurity of technical grade DPA, diphenyl nitrosamine is regarded as a probable human carcinogen. Diphenyl nitrosamine is produced when DPA comes in contact with high temperature. Moreover, there is a tolerance level set by the US EPA10 ppm for apples and 0 ppm for milk and meat. The DPA residue levels obtained were far below 10 ppm, and thus in 1997, the EPA approved the reregistration of DPA and determined that the assessed tolerances met the safety standards under the Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA). However, in 2012, the European Food Safety Authority concluded that the study has not provided authentic information to ensure safe consumption of DPA in apples and pears. Thus, the European Commission restricted the usage of DPA in the European Union. In March 2014, the European Commission reduced the allowable tolerance level of DPA on imports to 0.1 ppm. Thus, the health risks and stringent EPA regulations pertaining to DPA are likely to hamper the global market growth during the assessment period.

Kay Players:

Market Research Future (MRFR) recognizes the following companies as the key players in the global Diphenylamine Industry Trends:

BASF SE (Germany),

Huntsman International LLC (US),

LANXESS (Germany),

The Lubrizol Corporation (US),

Merck KGaA (Germany),

Seiko Chemical Co. Ltd (Tokyo),

Eastman Chemical Company (US),

Duslo a.s. (Slovakia),

SONGWON (South Korea),

Nantong Xinbang Chemical Technology Chemical Co, Ltd (China),

Jiangsu Feiya Chemical Industry Co. Ltd (Austria).

Key Findings of the Study:

The Global Diphenylamine Industry Trends was valued at USD 397.6 million in 2018 and is expected to register a CAGR of 4.06% to reach around USD 527.7 Million by the end of 2025 .

was valued at and is expected to register a to reach around . Based on application, the antioxidant segment held the largest share of 2% by value in 2018 and is expected to register a CAGR of over 4.5% during the forecast period.

and is expected to register a during the forecast period. By end use, the automotive segment is estimated to be the largest segment of the global aluminum oxide market, which accounted for 7% value share in 2018.

value share in 2018. The Asia Pacific market accounted for the largest share of 2% by value in 2018.

Segmental Analysis:

According to MRFR analysis, the global Diphenylamine Industry Trends has been segmented based on application, end use, and region.

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By application, the global Diphenylamine Industry Trends has been categorized into antioxidants, fungicide, and chemical intermediates, and others. Among these, the antioxidant segment accounted for the largest share of over 59.2% by value in 2018, predominantly due to the large-scale adoption in nitrocellulose-based propellants, explosives, and gun powders, which are essentially unstable materials that decompose on aging with the evolution of oxides of nitrogen. The decomposition is autocatalytic and can lead to failure of the ammunition or untimed explosions. Antioxidants control the oxidation of lubricants and ensure smooth functioning of engines for a long period. The antioxidant property of DPA increases the operational life of engine oil by reducing breakdown that can result from the formation of sludge. The chemical intermediate segment is expected to register a CAGR of over 3.5% during the forecast period.

On the basis of end use, the global Diphenylamine Industry Trends has been classified into automotive, agriculture, cosmetics & personal care, general industry, plastics and rubber, and others. The automotive segment accounted for the largest share by value in 2018 due to the use of DPA as an antioxidant in lubricants, and other functional fluids such as engine oil, hydraulic fluids, metalworking fluids, compressor oil, gear oil, refrigeration oil, transmission fluids, and turbine oil, among others. The growing production of automobiles is propelling the demand for lubricants for the efficient functioning of engines, which consequently is expected to drive the demand for DPA as an antioxidant.

Regional Analysis:

Geographically, the global Diphenylamine Industry Trends has been segmented into Asia-Pacific, Europe, North America, Latin America, and the Middle East & Africa. As per MRFR analysis, Asia-Pacific was the dominant regional market, accounting for the largest share of over 55% in 2018 and is expected to register a CAGR of over 4.5% during the forecast period. Asia-Pacific is followed by North America, which accounted for the second-largest share of the global foundry coke market in 2018. The North American market is expected to exhibit a share of around 20% in 2018. The Latin America and the Middle East & Africa markets are also likely to witness moderate growth during the forecast period, 20192025.

Browse key industry insights spread across 449 pages with 177 market data tables & 24 figures & charts from the report, Diphenylamine Industry Trends: Information by Application (Antioxidants, Chemical Intermediate, Fungicide and Others), End-Use (Automotive, General Industry, Agriculture, Plastics & Rubber, Cosmetics & Personal Care and others) and Region - Forecast till 2025 in detail along with the table of contents @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/diphenylamine-market-4550
Market Definition:

Bromine is a component that exists as red fluid at room temperature. It is the third biggest halogen bearing component with nuclear number 35. Bromine is broadly utilized impetus and reactant for generation of an assortment of items, for example, biocides, agrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, disinfectants, colors, fire retardants, and photographic synthetic substances among others. Dead Sea is considered to have the significant wellspring of bromine, though the U.S. Additionally, Israel are the significant makers on the planet. The developing interest for bromine and its subordinates from the end-client ventures, for example, aviation, cars, oil and gas, material, pharmaceuticals, and beauty care products among others is considerably driving the development of the market.

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However, the danger of substitution alongside the ecological concerns identifying with the use of bromine is the significant restrictions in the development of the market. Nonetheless, the developing utilization of organobromides as a fire resistant in different end-user such as hardware, car, oil, and gas is required to add to the development of the section. Additionally, the exacting fire security guidelines all through the globe are foreseen to help the section development further. Also, developing interest for organobromides as biocides, particularly from the agrarian economies, is another factor driving the development of the section.

Competitive Analysis:

Some of The Major Companies in The Global Bromine Market Include:

Albemarle Corporation

Israel Chemicals Limited

Chemtura Corporation

Tata Chemicals Ltd

Tosoh Corporation

Gulf Resources Inc.

Hindustan Salts Limited

TETRA Technologies, Inc.

Honeywell International Inc.

Perekop bromine

Industry News:

In 2019, Global speciality chemicals company ICLs Industrial Production division (ICL-IP) announced its strategic agreements with its Asian customers to expand the capacity of bromine compounds. The agreements will look to increase the production capacity of its TBBA bromine compound by up to 25,000mtpa.

Segmentation:

The global Bromine Market Share is segmented into derivatives, application, and end-user industry.

On the basis of the derivatives, the market is segregated into clear brine fluid, organobromines, hydrogen bromides, and others.

The market by the application is further categorized into mercury emission control, flame retardants, oil and gas drilling, water treatment, BHR flow batteries, pesticides, and others.

On the basis of the end use industry, the market is segregated into automotive, oil & gas, agriculture, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, textiles, and others.

Browse key industry insights spread across 118 pages with 48 market data tables & 13 figures & charts from the report, Bromine Market Research Report: Derivatives (Organobromides, Clear Brine Fluid, Hydrogen Bromide), Application (Flame Retardants, Oil And Gas Drilling, Mercury Emission Control), End-Use (Automotive, Oil & Gas)  Forecast Till 2023 in detail along with the table of contents @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/bromine-market-1500

Regional Analysis:

Regionally, the bromine market is segmented into the Americas, Asia Pacific, Europe, and Middle East & Africa. Of these, Asia is required to be the quickest developing region at an empowering CAGR. Largest population coupled with the expanding industries in the developing countries is fundamentally driving the development of the bromine market in the region. Additionally, the developing agribusiness and the automotive industries in countries such as India and China, is expanding the demand for bromine. Besides, the developing interest from the oil and gas industry is adding to the demand of the product resulting to robust growth of the market in this region.

North America is estimated to remain predominant region in the market and is required to hold its strength during the estimate years. The developed industries such personal care, car, and pharmaceuticals among other is emphatically influencing the market development. The European area is relied upon to show a moderate development and is for the most part determined by a well-created car and restorative industry. In addition, the developing oil and gas boring exercises for the most part in Russia are required to flood the market development.
Market Research Future has published a Half-Cooked Research Report on the Global Aerospace Foams Market.

Market Synopsis

According to MRFR analysis, Aerospace Foams Market was valued at USD 5.42 Billion in 2018 and is projected to register a CAGR of 6.8% during the forecast period, 20192025.

The growth in the number of passenger traffic due to the rising per-capita income and emergence of low-cost airlines are fueling the growth of the commercial aircraft segment, which in turn, is expected to contribute to the growth of the global Aerospace Foams Market Share in the coming years.

Pricing and Regulatory Analysis

In 2018, the aerospace foams were priced between USD 2.5 and USD 5 per square meter across the globe.

Several aviation-based international governing authorities such as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), National Qualifications Authority (NQA), and Aircraft Information Management Systems (AIMS) have framed safety requirements for airlines and aircraft structures.

By Application

Aircraft Seats: The segment accounted for the largest share of the global market in 2018 and is expected to continue the similar trend during the forecast period. The growth in the number of passenger traffic across the world is boosting the manufacturing of new commercial aircraft. Also, the growing safety regulations and standards for aircraft seating are propelling the growth of the segment.

Interior Panel Structures: The segment held the second-largest share of the global market in 2018. Aerospace foams help in dampening the sound & vibration and also in thermal & electrical insulation of the interior panel structures.

Floor Coverings: Foams help to meet mechanical performance requirements and the stringent aviation regulatory standards in floor coverings

Flight Deck Pads: Flight deck pads are largely used for general aviation and military aircraft applications.

Electrical Components: Foams play the role of preventing the electrical components from entangling and keeping in place, while at the same time protecting the electrical components from thunderstorms, and lightning shocks.

By End-Use

Commercial Aircraft: The segment held the largest share of the global aerospace foam market in 2018 and is expected to register the highest CAGR during the forecast period. An increasing number of air passengers in the developing countries of Asia-Pacific due to rising per-capita income and the surge in low-cost carriers in the regions are propelling the growth of the segment and thus boosting the growth of the global commercial aircraft market.

General Aviation: The segment held the second-largest share of the global aerospace foams market in 2018. It includes two-seat training aircraft, utility helicopters, intercontinental business jets. According to the General Aviation Manufacturers Association (GAMA), there were more than 446,000 general aviation aircraft across the globe as of 2018, of which over 211,000 aircraft were in the US and over 136,000 aircraft in Europe. The fuselage, bulkheads, and wings of the general aircraft are made with light-weight composites, manufactured using polymer foams.

Military Aircraft: The rise in military expenditure is likely to drive the demand for aerospace foams for military aircraft manufacturing in the coming years. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the military expenditure across the globe rose to USD 1.822 trillion in 2018, representing an increase of 2.6% from 2017. The five major countries in 2018 were the US, China, Saudi Arabia, India, and France, which together accounted for around 60% of global military spending. As per the report published by SIPRI, the military expenditure in the US was USD 649 billion in 2018 and is projected to reach USD 799 billion by 2022. Chinas military expenditure in 2018 was USD 250 billion, and Indias military spending was USD 66.5 billion in2018.

SEGMENTATION

By Type

Polyurethane Foam: The segment held the largest share of the global aerospace foams market in 2018 owing to its low cost and superior performance characteristics over other types of foams such as closed-cell structure, high rigidity, resistance to water and fire, and excellent durability. Polyurethane foam is finding increasing demand in the manufacturing of aircraft seating, floor covering, flight deck pads; passenger cabin walls; aircraft ceilings; overhead stowage; interior aircraft class dividers; aircraft galleys; and lavatories. It is also preferred in the manufacturing of Boeing BMS 8-133.

Polyethylene Foam: Polyethylene foams also finds applications in aircraft manufacturing due to its excellent thermal and chemical resistance properties.

Melamine Foam: Melamine foam is generally used for its excellent thermal and acoustic insulation property in the interior sidewall panels of aircraft.

Metal Foam: Metal foams are largely preferred for military aircraft due to its excellent mechanical strength on account of its configuration that includes hollow metal spheres.

Polyimide Foam: Polyimide foams are extreme temperature resistant and non-flammable, along with being light-weight and durable. This led to its widespread use in F110 engines, F135 engines, B-2 engine, F-117 engine, F-22 engine, missile structures, and fifth- & sixth-generation engines.

Others: The others segment includes PET Foam, PVC Foam, Specialty High-Performance Foam, Polymethacrylimide (PMI) Foam, Polyetherimide (PEI) Foam, Polyethersulfone Foam (PES) Foam, Polyphenylsulfone (PPSU) Foam, and Polyvinylidene Fluoride (PVDF) Foam

Browse Full Report Details @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/aerospace-foams-market-8492

By Region

North America: The expanding aerospace industry in the US due to increasing passenger traffic and the presence of major aircraft manufacturers are driving the demand for aerospace foam in the region.

Europe: The presence of leading airline manufacturers such as Airbus, AltiGator, ArianeGroup, and United Aircraft Corporation, among others in the region are contributing to the demand for aerospace foams.

Asia-Pacific: The most opportunistic market, owing to rising per-capita income and emergence of low-cost aircraft.

Middle East & Africa: The favorable geographic location is boosting the growth of the aerospace industry, which in turn is expected to drive the demand for aerospace foams.

Latin America: The region is expected to register positive growth in the coming years owing to the growing aerospace industry.
Market Research Future has published a Half-Cooked Research Report on the Global Cryogenic Insulation Market.

Market Synopsis

According to the MRFR analysis, Cryogenic Insulation Market is expected to reach over USD 3.7 Billion by the end of 2025 at a CAGR of 7.2%.

Cryogenic insulation is used to reduce or eliminate the energy loss from the cold storage tanks and transfer lines. Cryogenic insulation effectively controls a systems environment and helps in maintaining economic effectiveness. Cryogenic insulation are high-performance materials such as polyisocyanurate, polyurethane, expanded foams, fiberglass cellular glass, polystyrene, and aerogel. The growing demand for cryogenic equipment in the food & beverage and medical industries coupled with increasing demand for liquified natural gas (LNG) and various industrial gases is expected to drive the growth of the cryogenic insulation material market during the forecast period.

Pricing

The price of the cryogenic insulation varies according to material type. The average price of cryogenic insulation ranges from USD 1,500/ton to 13,800/ton.

SEGMENTATION

By Material Type

PU/PIR: The segment accounted for the largest share of the global COVID 19 Impact on Cryogenic Insulation Market and is projected to witness moderate growth during the forecast period. The high demand for PU/PIR insulation is attributed to low thermal conductivity, fire resistance, moisture resistance, and good workability. PU and PIR are widely used for insulating cold storage buildings, pipelines, storage tanks, and valves in various industries. Furthermore, the high vermin resistance enables its use in the food & beverage and medical industries.

Polystyrene: The polystyrene segment is expected to witness moderate growth during the forecast period. Polystyrene is mostly preferred for cryogenic insulation applications in the areas of high moisture exposure.

Cellular Glass: Cellular glass is widely used for insulating piping, fittings, tanks, and equipment operating in the temperature ranges of -268C to 480C. It is widely preferred in the chemical industry and ground chilled piping systems. The cellular glass segment is expected to witness healthy growth driven by its superior properties, chemical resistance, and corrosion resistance.

Others: The others segment includes perlite, fiberglass, aerogel, and elastomer foams. This segment is expected to witness fastest growth during the forecast period owing to the high demand for aerogel for pipeline insulation.

Browse Full Report Details @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/cryogenic-insulation-market-8494

By End-Use Industry

Energy & Power: The segment dominated the global cryogenic insulation market in 2018 and is expected to witness significant growth during the forecast period. The growth is primarily attributed to the increasing demand for liquefied natural gas (LNG) as a fuel, favored by government policies encouraging a cleaner energy mix. The US and China accounted for over 60% of the global LNG consumption.

Food & Beverage: The segment is expected to witness healthy growth driven by increasing demand for cold storage and frozen food transportation. The long-term outlook of the food & beverage segment is expected to remain positive backed by socio-economic trends such as economic growth, urbanization, changing demographics, population growth, and increasing disposable income.

Medical: The medical segment is expected to witness moderate growth driven by increasing healthcare spending. According to the World Health Organization, in 2016, the global spending on health was USD 7.5 trillion and average per capita health expenditure was USD 1,000. The spending on healthcare in the low- and middle-income countries is expected to be 6%, and 4% in high-income countries during the forecast period.

Chemical: Increasing investment to increase the production capacities of various chemicals across the globe, particularly in Asian countries such as China and India, is expected to augment the growth of the global cryogenic insulation market.

Others: The others segment is expected to witness moderate growth during the forecast period.
Coronado, CA (92118)

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Partly cloudy. Low around 65F. Winds NW at 5 to 10 mph..

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Coronado, CA (92118)

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Litchfield (06759)

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Partly cloudy this evening, then becoming foggy and damp after midnight. Low 56F. Winds light and variable..

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American Medical Response transported a 16-year-old West Haven male from the scene to Yale New Haven Hospital where he was treated for multiple gunshot wounds, police said. The victim was listed in stable condition.
The UConn Board of Trustees voted in early June that it would require students to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 for the fall semester. Yale University, the University of Hartford, Wesleyan University and the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system have also announced vaccination requirements for the upcoming semester. Albertus Magnus College in New Haven announced Tuesday that it would require mandatory vaccinations for all students, faculty and staff who will be on campus this fall.
Some families had hoped their visit to the site near the 12-story building would enable them to shout messages to loved ones possibly buried inside the pile. As they returned to a nearby hotel, several paused to embrace as they got off the bus. Others walked slowly with arms around each other back to the hotel entrance.
In May, the condo association submitted plans asking for approval of a temporary parking plan in order to move forward. But their request went unanswered for more than a month. The delay, according to the Miami Herald, prompted the condo building manager, to accuse the town of holding us up as the association sought to accelerate the towers overhaul, which included repairs to a concrete slab under the pool deck and planters that experts are now pointing to as an initial point of failure that preceded the building collapse.
Now, he is heading off to the private sector for the Manhattan-based public relations firm Prosek. Previously known as Jacobs and Prosek, the firm was created by former Greenwich Time editorial page editor Dan Jacobs, who left journalism in 1990 to start the company in the basement of his Stratford home. After he hired Jennifer Prosek and placed her name on the firm, the company expanded sharply to the point that it has offices in Los Angeles, Boston, and London. Today, the firm represents blue-chip clients like Goldman Sachs and has more than 230 employees - a long way from the Stratford basement.
Its disgusting how we operated in secret, with the building closed, and we are going to force major policy reforms when the bill hasnt seen the light of day for more than three weeks, Candelora said in an interview. There are so many implications to this bill  not just to police and enforcement, but to employment, to places where they are going to be allowed to smoke. Businesses that are open to the public need to address this issue  congregate living, group homes, public housing. Theres going to be problems here.
The culture/climate issues with racial undertones were also present regarding diversity in hiring,' DAgostino wrote. So much so, that [Jonathan M.] Daube, former president at MCC, felt the need to oversee the search processes because he said this was the only way the college would diversify. Of the eleven witnesses, seven spoke about Dr. Daubes efforts to increase diversity in hiring at MCC, and his efforts were met with calls for a vote of no confidence.
Ohio Attorneys: Registration, Fees Due by Sept. 1

Ohio attorneys must register for the 2021-2023 biennium by Sept. 1.

Ohio attorneys must register for the 2021-2023 biennium by Sept. 1.

Ohio attorneys are reminded to register for the 2021-2023 biennium by Sept. 1. Online registration on the Attorney Services Portal opens July 1.

Ohio Supreme Court Office of Attorney Services Director Gina Palmer said all attorneys on active, corporate and emeritus pro bono status, as well as those temporarily admitted as a military spouse attorney, must register with Attorney Services and pay the registration fee by Sept. 1.

The fee is $350, except for emeritus pro bono status attorneys, who pay $75.

Those failing to register and pay the fee on time or within a late registration period will be suspended, Palmer said, noting that the $350 active registration fee has not increased since the 2007-2009 period.

The 45,101 Ohio attorneys required to register can expect to receive a packet of registration materials in early July containing instructions on how to register and a form to verify the accuracy of their contact information, including current residence, office, email address, and service email address.

Attorneys can register online or by U.S. mail. Online registration is strongly encouraged since the payment and registration are processed immediately and a confirmation is sent by email. Mail-in registrations take longer because data must be entered manually by staff.

Fees may be paid online by credit card or e-check, while mail-in registrations must be paid by check or money order.

Another advantage to online registration is that the Interest on Lawyers Trust Accounts (IOLTA) and the Interest on Trust Accounts (IOTA) information will not need to be re-typed. Through the Courts collaboration with the Ohio Access to Justice Foundation, IOLTA and the IOTA section on the online attorney registration portal has been amended to increase ease of use.

For the convenience and security of attorneys registering online, the full account number will be masked and pre-populated on the registration form, so they can be confirmed or updated. Attorneys adding a new Ohio IOLTA-IOTA account must input the entire account number as required by the attorney registration rule.

Due to the limited space on the paper form, up to three accounts are displayed on the form, so attorneys with more than three accounts must attach a separate sheet of paper with the additional account information.

The attorney registration biennium runs from Sept. 1, 2021 to Aug. 31, 2023. Mailed registrations will be deemed timely if postmarked on Sept. 1 or earlier. Online registrations must be completed by 11:59 p.m. EDT Sept. 1 to be deemed timely.

Attorneys who successfully complete the process will receive confirmation by mail. Attorneys who register for active status will receive a bar card, which has been redesigned with the Courts new logo. Cards may take up two weeks for delivery, so attorneys should register early to ensure timely receipt of their card.

Attorneys have a continuing obligation to keep the Supreme Court apprised of their most current residence, office and email addresses to ensure registration and other materials are timely received. Attorneys may update their own records online or email the changes directly to Attorney Services.
In Japanese aesthetic philosophy, Wabi-sabi means finding beauty in things imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. Jim Law, owner of Linden Vineyards in the Blue Ridge Mountains, describes this wine as unintentional and based on a spontaneous decision in the cellar. This blend of vidal blanc, viognier and semillon is unique and delicious, offering notes of melon, beeswax and stone fruits with hints of pepper on the finish. Perfect with fish, shrimp or scallop dishes. ($28, Syds Fish Pig Cafe, Norfolk)
Many Democratic leaders and activists have denounced the charges, calling them a racist attempt to intimidate Lucas, the president pro tempore of the Virginia Senate. As the first Black person and first woman to hold that job, she is one of the states most influential politicians. In her nearly three decades in office she has been a vociferous critic of her Republican peers and pushed heavily for legislation that has transformed Virginia into one of the most liberal states in the South.
The record is clear that when their actions came to light, Scott Taylor acted swiftly to oust the rogue employees that may have violated the peoples trust  and he called on law enforcement to hold them accountable, attorney Diane Toscano said Monday in an email on his behalf. Scott Taylor served this community and his country with distinction and integrity as a U.S. Navy SEAL, in the Virginia House of Delegates, and the United States Congress. The actions of a few rogue employees do not change his accomplishments.
In its filing to the U.S. Supreme Court asking them to hear the case, the seven-member board said the policy was a way to legitimately accommodate their transgender students while striving to be sensitive to the legitimate privacy concerns of all their students using the same bathrooms.
The law, which takes effect Thursday, is considered a work in progress because its still against the law to both buy and sell pot, except by medical prescription. Its also still illegal to use it in public or while driving.
There was a dead whale that was out in the York River, and we worked with the stranding team at Virginia Beach, we had to tow the whale across the river to, they call it Gilligans Island over here, and move it up on the island so I guess it could just decay, Bart said.
William & Mary is an old school founded during the era of slavery, but unfortunately there is much misinformation about slavery. For many years there was a notion that on these big plantations enslaved persons were happy, but really enslaved people were everywhere in every part of this countrys economy, she said. It wasnt widely known, she added. Teachers didnt know it and couldnt teach it.
Lubbock, TX (79409)

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Scattered thunderstorms early, then mainly cloudy overnight with thunderstorms likely. Potential for severe thunderstorms. Low 71F. Winds SE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 70%..

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Scattered thunderstorms early, then mainly cloudy overnight with thunderstorms likely. Potential for severe thunderstorms. Low 71F. Winds SE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 70%.
During investigation, a statement of the complainant's account and a copy of the fake cheques were obtained, the police said. (Representational image)

New Delhi: Two persons were arrested for allegedly withdrawing Rs 97,500 from the bank account of BJP MP Sakshi Maharaj using fake cheques, the Delhi Police said on Monday.

The accused have been identified as Dinesh Rai (30) and Nihal Sinha (27), both residents of Patna in Bihar, the police said.

They said a case of cheating and forgery was registered at Parliament Street police station on a complaint that someone had withdrawn Rs 97,500 from BJP MP Sakshi Maharaj's bank account using three fake cheques. The original cheques were with Sakshi Maharaj and the accused had also forged his signature.

During investigation, a statement of the complainant's account and a copy of the fake cheques were obtained, the police said.

Sinha was traced to Patna and arrested during a raid. ATM cards of different banks were recovered from him, a senior police officer said.

On Sinha's instance, Rai was also nabbed from the city. A fake cheque and debit cards were recovered from his possession, the officer said.

During interrogation, it was found that Rai was the kingpin of the racket. He arranged the fake cheques and gave them to Sinha. They used to present these cheques at banks and would get the money credited to different accounts. Later, they would withdraw the money from these bank accounts, the officer said.
The court directed state government to inquire as to whose negligence led to the deaths at RUIA Hospital. (DC)

VIJAYAWADA: Andhra Pradesh High Court on Monday heard a petition on deaths of Coronavirus patients at the RUIA Hospital in Tirupati.

Counsel for petitioner Y. Balaji sought to point out that though the deaths had occurred due to negligence on part of government and hospital officials, no FIR has been registered as yet. Further, there is no clarity on how many people died due to shortage of oxygen.

Counsel also pointed to inequality in payment of ex-gratia. While Rs.1 crore had been announced for victims of LG Polymers in Visakhapatnam, it is only Rs.10 lakh for those who died at RUIA Hospital.

The High Court agreed with petitioner's contention that a case should be registered into deaths at the hospital and investigated. The court directed state government to inquire as to whose negligence led to the deaths at RUIA Hospital.

The High Court adjourned hearing on the petition for two weeks after asking the government, police and hospital to file their counters.
On Monday, Delhi recorded 59 fresh COVID-19 cases, the lowest so far this year, which took its infection tally to 14,33,993. (Representational Photo: AFP)

New Delhi: With daily COVID-19 cases in the national capital showing a declining trend, the Delhi government on Monday asked private hospitals with 100 or more beds to scale down the number of oxygen beds reserved for Covid patients to 30 per cent of their total capacity.

For hospitals with less than 100 beds, the government left it to them whether they want to reserve any beds for Covid patients.

On April 18, when Delhi and the rest of the country were battling a ferocious second wave of the pandemic, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government had issued an order directing all private hospitals and nursing homes to reserve at least 80 per cent of their beds for Covid patients.

In its order, the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) said, "It has been observed that there are 22,220 vacant Covid beds and there is a rising demand for non-Covid beds for treatment of non-COVID patients."

"Hence, keeping in view the large number of unoccupied Covid beds, the competent authority decided that in private hospitals with 100 beds or more, the number of reserved oxygen beds may be reduced to 30 per cent of the total capacity or three times the occupancy as on June 16, whichever is more," it said.

Private hospitals with less than 100 beds can take a call on whether they want to reserve any beds for Covid patients, according to the order.

"Furthermore, the keepers of nursing homes issued temporary registration for COVID-related treatment will reserve 100 per cent of their bed capacity for the same," the order stated.

In case there is a rise in the number of COVID-19 cases in Delhi, "the keepers of all private hospitals/nursing homes providing Covid-related treatment shall immediately augment the number of COVID beds", it added.

During the second wave, Delhi witnessed an acute shortage of hospital beds and hospitals scrambled to ensure a steady supply of oxygen for patients.

On Monday, Delhi recorded 59 fresh COVID-19 cases, the lowest so far this year, which took its infection tally to 14,33,993 while two more fatalities pushed the death toll to 24,967, according to health department data.

The city has a positivity rate of 0.10 per cent. Out of the total 23,698 beds for Covid patients, only 1,015 are occupied, the data showed.
VIJAYAWADA: The All India Handloom Rights Forum (AIHRF) sought Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy to order a vigilance inquiry into the alleged corruption in Andhra Pradesh State Handloom Weavers Cooperative Society (APCO). AIHRF president, Bandaru Jwalanarasimham, on Monday said AIHRF wrote a letter to the Chief Minister seeking his help to weavers by providing government welfare schemes directly by restraining corruption in APCO.

Jwalanarasimham, in the letter, informed the Chief Minister that retired IAS officer Ajay Kallam on several occasions had mentioned about the corruption and illegalities prevailing for the past 10 years in APCO. He recalled that last year the CID found Rs 2 crore cash, silver and gold ornaments and valuable documents during checks in the house of former APCO chairman in Kadapa district which reflected huge corruption and illegalities in the society.

Jwalanarasimham said that auditing was not held in APCO for the past seven years. He said the price of products were high in APCOs 126 outlets across the state compared to private shops which caused a decrease in sales in APCO. He demanded that Jagan Mohan Reddy conduct an audit in APCO, review the prices to initiate measures to revamp APCO and further to order vigilance inquiry into corruption.

Meanwhile, the AP Government Nurses Association (APGNA) sought the state government to provide an insurance scheme to contract and outsourcing nurses to help their families. APGNA state president G. Manjula Devi and general secretary R. Siva Kumari lamented that nurses were the worst sufferers due to the pandemic crisis as many nurses died of Covid-19 while performing duties in government hospitals. They said contract and outsourcing nurses were rendering services similar to regular nurses, but they were barred from health protection and other benefits.

The two APGNA leaders lauded Jagan Mohan Reddy for giving top priority to filling vacant posts in the medical and health department in the job calendar. They requested the Chief Minister to provide a government insurance scheme and pay revision to contract and outsourcing nurses working in state hospitals.
HYDERABAD: The GHMC on Tuesday approved a Rs 5,600-crore budget for 2021-22, in its first-ever Council meeting held online due to the pandemic. Though the budget was approved by Mayor Gadwal R. Vijayalaskhmi, the meeting drew dissent from Opposition corporators for not giving them time to speak on the budget.

Opposition members raised public grievances which were unaddressed over the years and objected to the allocation of funds and their expenditure. Corporators alleged that the civic officials ignored key initiatives like improving the sanitation, allocation of funds for slum development, malaria and dengue eradication among several others. A corporator alleged that the GHMC spent only about Rs 7 crore for dengue and malaria eradication of the Rs 10 crore given by the state government.

After assuming charge on February 11, the first GHMC council meeting was held virtually from 10.30 am followed by its first ordinary meeting. As many as 156 members including corporators and ex-officio members participated. It was not streamed live to mediapersons.

The meeting began with the swearing-in of Lingojiguda Congress corporator Darpally Rajashekar Reddy, who took oath in the presence of the Mayor and new TPCC president A. Revanth Reddy. Speaking on the occasion, Revanth Reddy expressed displeasure over the works taken up on the catchment areas of the Musi and said they were ill-planned.

Describing Hyderabad as the heart of Telangana, Revanth Reddy said the state would do good only when the city did good. He lambasted the government for not taking steps to safeguard nalas, prevent and remove encroachments on them. These encroachments were the prime causes for the flash floods which occurred in October last year, he said.

The TPCC chief said the corporation never took measures to improve the stormwater networks. "While the police have installed CCTV cameras in every nook and corner to curtail crime, why is the GHMC not installing CCTV cameras at nalas and water bodies to save them from the encroachments," he asked.

Gudimalkapur corporator Devara Karunakar (BJP, Gudimalkapur) asked why the corporation had allocated Rs 306 crore for planting saplings (Haritha Haram), for which there was little accounting when was no money given for slum development. He also pointed out that the GHMC said it had borrowed Rs 1,224 crore for the 2BHL project while GHMC commissioner D.S. Lokesh Kumar has put the figure at Rs 1,039 crore.

Mehdipatnam corporator Mohammed Majid Hussain said that authorities did not submit data of the actual amounts spent during the previous financial year. He said authorities did not utilise the funds properly and the allocations on the operational and maintenance works including sanitation were not up to the mark.

He said that the GHMC had removed garbage bins and hired additional vehicles to carry away the garbage. Despite an increase in garbage generation, the GHMC cut down the provision for additional vehicles to Rs 75 crore from Rs 150 crore.

He said that the government had allocated about Rs 10 crore to the entomology wing for dengue and malaria eradication programmes, but the GHMC had spent Rs 2.78 crore for malaria and for dengue Rs 4.46 crore. This works out to rs 2.78 per citizen for malaria eradication and Rs 4.45 for dengue eradication. This means the corporation has spent the cost of one anti-mosquito coil for a whole year," he added.

Uppal corporator M. Rajitha (Congress) said the party did not get time either to speak on the Budget or public related issues. Condemning the virtual meeting, she asked why there were Covid-19 protocols in place only for the GHMC corporators but not Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao and minister K.T. Rama Rao. "Why is the government running away when asked to address the public grievances? We demand that the government hold a physical meeting but not virtual meetings for effective and accountable administration," she added.

Meanwhile, the size of the budget is marginally up by the revised estimate of Rs 5,600 crore. The GHMC expects about Rs 1,850 crore, which is about 32 per cent of the total budget, from property tax receipts. About 22 per cent (Rs 1,224 crore) will be mobilised through loans. And Rs 1,022 crore is expected to come from user charges and other fees. It expects about `Rs crore through grants.

The GHMC panel said it would get Rs 190 crore from the fee collected from people for regularising their properties. Nearly 25 per cent of the GHMC's budget would be spent on development of roads and footpaths. It allocated Rs 360 crore for the green budget. The civic body recently passed a resolution, making it mandatory to spend at least 10 per cent of its budget for various greenery initiatives.
The committee observed that property buyers are facing problems in getting bank loans as registration values are much lower than market values. (AFP Photo)

Hyderabad: The stage is set for a steep hike in registration values of lands and properties across Telangana state very soon. Official sources said the registration value of houses, flats, vacant plots, agriculture lands and commercial properties would be increased in the range of 30 per cent to 400 per cent depending on the location.

The Cabinet sub-committee on resource mobilisation headed by finance minister T. Harish Rao and comprising ministers K.T. Rama Rao, Vemula Prashanth Reddy, Chief Secretary Somesh Kumar, stamps and registrations inspector-general V. Sheshadri and heads of various departments on Tuesday recommended that the government hike registration values of agriculture, non-agriculture lands and residential, commercial properties in tune with hike in market value over the past eight years.

Registration values were last revised in 2013 in undivided AP, leading to wide gap between government value and market value of lands and properties in the subsequent years following the real estate boom. The new rates are likely to come into force from August 1.

After bifurcation of the state in 2014, Andhra Pradesh had revised registration values seven times, sources said. The Cabinet committee which met at the Dr Marri Channa Reddy Human Resource Development Institute (MCRHRDI) here on Tuesday to discuss the issue, pointed out that the registration value in Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra was 7 per cent, and in Tamil Nadu 7.5 per cent.

The committee noted that due to non-revision of registration values in Telangana state over the past eight years, the gap between government value and market value of lands and properties had increased significantly and it should be narrowed down by hiking registration values.

It said several lakhs of land and property registrations were done at a value over and higher over government prescribed rates and in HMDA limits alone it was noticed that 51 per cent registrations were done in this manner in 2019-20.

The committee observed that property buyers are facing problems in getting bank loans as registration values are much lower than market values. Besides, due to the construction of irrigation projects and launching of new schemes to promote agriculture, the value of agricultural lands across the state had increased sharply.

Similarly, due to the flow of new investments and industries, the land and property values around Hyderabad witnessed a sharp rise and all these factors warrant the state government to hike registration values in tune with market values.

The committee has decided to submit its report to Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao by incorporating these recommendations for his final approval.
Hyderabad: Despite being impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, banks in Telangana state have registered a growth of nearly 10 per cent in dispensing loans during 2020-21. Total advances grew by Rs 56,621 crore or 9.92 per cent during the year," said SBI deputy managing director Om Prakash Mishra, who is president of the State-Level Bankers Committee (SLBC).

Total advances of all banks stood at Rs 6,27.039 crore.

For the current financial year, the SLBC has an annual credit plan outlay of Rs 1,86,035 crore. Of this, the share of the priority sector is Rs 1,43,954 crore, which is 77.38 per cent of the credit outlay.

Of the total outlay, 49.2 per cent will be channelled into the agriculture sector with a target to disburse loans worth Rs 91,541 crore. For the micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) sector, loans worth Rs 39,361 crore (21.16 per cent) will be extended.

Releasing the SLBC report, finance minister T. Harish Rao said despite Covid financial crisis, the state government had transferred Rs 7,360 crore Rythu Bandhu into the accounts of over 61 lakh farmers within a week. He asked bankers not to adjust or divert Rythu Bandhu amount for previous crop loan arrears of farmers towards payment of interest on crop loans.

Banks have seen a higher growth in deposits at 18.05 per cent in the last fiscal year, as compared to growth in advances.

According to an SLBC press release, bank deposits have grown by Rs 87,469 crore during FY 20-21, with total deposits standing at Rs 5,71,909 crore. Of this, banks have lent Rs 41,200 crore during Kharif and Rabi crop seasons, while the industry received term loans amounting to Rs 16,816 crore.

The minister asked bankers to expedite sanctioning of crop loans as Kharif agriculture activity has picked up across the state and help farmers to purchase seeds and fertilisers on time.

"All banks together have disbursed Rs 1,03,126 crore to borrowers under priority sector, achieving 84.04 per cent of annual targets," the SLBC statement said.

Under the Pradhan Manthri Mudra Yojana Scheme, banks have disbursed Rs 6,445 crore against a target of Rs 5,197 crore.

The finance minister urged bankers to extend more Mudra loans to small traders.

He said the state government has taken steps to administer the Covid vaccine to entire banking staff in the state soon.
VIJAYAWADA: Several key proposals have been approved at the State Investment Promotion Board (SIPB) meeting chaired by Chief Minister Jaganmohan Reddy here on Tuesday. Among other decisions, the board decided to allot 860 acres of land to Jindal Steels to set up a steel plant in Nellore district.

At the meeting, the chief minister directed the authorities to ensure companies provided 75 per cent employment to locals. He also emphasized on environment protection.

The board approved the allotment of land to Jindal Steel Andhra Ltd at Thamminapatnam for the setting up of an integrated steel plant. It would have an annual production capacity of 2.25 million metric tonnes. This would be done at a total investment of `7,500 crore. The company would provide employment for 2,500 people in four years.

Also, the board approved extension of the deadline to June 2022 for the setting up of St Gobain Industry in Visakhapatnam district. The company had sought an extension due to the prevailing covid conditions and promised to invest Rs 2,001 crore in the state in three phases.

The board has given its approval to Pitti Rail Engineering Components Ltd at Kopparthi near Kadapa for manufacture of electrical, locomotive and industrial infrastructure-related material at an investment of Rs401 crore. This could create direct employment to 2,000 people, it was stated at the meet.

Similarly, the board gave its nod for Neelkamal Ltd at Kopparthi which is planning to invest Rs 486 crore for manufacture of furniture and other household items, by employing around 2,000 people.

Also, the board approved the expansion of Greentech Industries in Naidupet area of Nellore district, which supplies steel and iron products to companies such as Ford, Hyundai, Volkswagen etc.

GreenTech, which has invested Rs 750 crore will invest another Rs 627 crore for its expansion and provide an additional 2,200 direct jobs.

The board also gave its approval for Ammayapper Textiles Pvt. Ltd in Chittoor district. It would invest Rs 30 crore and provide 90 per cent jobs to women.

Besides these, the board approved construction of a mega retail park for textiles and garments on five acres at Tadepalli, Guntur district by investing Rs 194.16 crore.

The retail parks will be housing around 900 units and provide direct employment to nearly 5,000 people. This will be a hub for national and international business. It is estimated that about 70 per cent of the sales made in the state comes from here. Each store is expected to generate around Rs 11 crore in business annually.

Deputy chief minister (revenue) DK Das, finance minister Rajendranath, Panchayat Raj minister PR Reddy, energy minister Srinivasa Reddy, agriculture minister Kannababu, industries minister Goutham Reddy, municipal administration minister Botsa Satyanarayana, labour minister Gummanuru Jayaram, chief secretary Adityanath Das, industries special chief secretary Karikala Valaven, agriculture special chief secretary Poonam Malakondaiah, revenue special chief secretary Rajat Bhargav, finance principal Secretary SS Rawat, transportation principal secretary Krishna Babu, energy secretary Srikanth, forest and environment secretary Vijaykumar and industries commissioner Subramaniam were among the officials present.
HYDERABAD: Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) chief and Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao had set two targets for ministers and party leaders for the upcoming Huzurabad Assembly bypoll.

The first one is to defeat the BJP with a decent majority and second is to ensure the Congress does not retain its deposit, according to official sources in the TRS.

Sources said Rao reviewed Huzurabad bypoll issue with a few ministers and senior party leaders on Monday.

In the meeting, the Chief Minister asked them to work hard to ensure that Congress lost deposit in the very first election it would fight under the leadership of new TPCC chief A Revanth Reddy.

He felt since Huzurabad bypoll is a straight fight between the TRS and Etala Rajender (BJP), the Congress has no role in this bypoll and hence the TRS should win and the Congress should lose its deposit. The Chief Minister said that each mandal in Huzurabad Assembly constituency should be monitored by a minister and five MLAs who would be assisted by party MPs, MLCs, ZP chairpersons, ZPTCs, MPTCs, municipal chairpersons, councillors, sarpanches and ward members from village-level to district level.

Ministers T. Harish Rao, K.T. Rama Rao and Planning Commission deputy chairman B. Vinod Kumar will monitor the bypoll at state-level and coordinate with all in-charge ministers and leaders involved in the bypoll.

In the meeting, the comments of Congress MP Komatireddy Venkat Reddy reportedly came up for discussion who wished new TPCC retained at least deposit in Huzurabad bypoll. Against this backdrop, the Chief Minister reportedly felt that it would be easier to make the Congress lose its deposit if proper strategies were worked out and executed effectively in the run up to the bypoll.
Along with the Central and state governments, the Supreme Court has been playing an important role in monitoring the management of the situation arising out of the six-week-long Covid-19 second wave between the middle of April and the end of May. Through its order of April 30, the Supreme Court bench of Justices Dhananjay Y. Chandrachud, L. Nageswara Rao and S. Ravindra Bhat had been actively directing the Central and state governments on the supply of liquid medical oxygen in the last week of April and the first week of May, and the availability of beds for critically ill patients in hospitals, as well as the availability of vaccines and their proper distribution across the country.

Though Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government has claimed credit for its decision on procuring vaccines directly and then allocating them to the states, announced by the PM in a televised address on June 7, the suggestion actually came from the highest court after scrutinising the Centres policy of acquiring 50 per cent of the vaccines at a set price and leaving the remaining 50 per cent to be negotiated by the state governments and private hospitals with the manufacturers.

The Supreme Court in its April 30 order had said: Prima facie, there are several aspects of the vaccine pricing policy adopted by the Central government which require that policy to be revisited. The court went on to add: Prime facie, the rational method of proceeding in a manner consistent with the right to life (which includes the right to health) under Article 21 would be for the Central government to procure all vaccines and to negotiate the price with the vaccine manufacturers. It concluded with a judicious note of warning: While we are not passing a conclusive determination on the constitutionality of the current policy, the manner in which the current policy has been framed would prima facie result in a detriment to right to public health, which is an integral element of Article 21 of the Constitution.

The court also noted that individuals and communities had turned to the social media for help and that through the online networks people had tried to help those in distress either by finding the medicines or hospital beds needed. And here comes the acerbic observation: However, it is with deep distress that we note that individuals seeking help on such platforms have been targeted by alleging that the information posted by them is false and has only been posted on the social media to create panic, defame the administration or damage the nations image. It went on to say: We do not hesitate in saying that such targeting shall not be condoned, and the Central government and state governments should ensure that they immediately cease any direct or indirect threats of prosecution and arrest to citizens who air grievances or those who are attempting to help fellow citizens to receive medical aid.

It is indeed a matter of shame that during a time of extreme distress, the Central and state governments had taken adversarial positions against the people, and the Supreme Court was forced to tick off the authorities and warn them against intimidating people. This is a judgment that should become an integral part of any account of Covid-19 in India, and political leaders in positions of power should hang their heads in shame.

It was after this chastening tone by the Supreme Court that the Central government, through the solicitor-general and its other law officers, has been filing affidavits informing the court about the availability of vaccines, a crucial part of the fight against the pandemic. Most of the vital information on the availability of the vaccines has not been shared by the government with the people. The daily press conference that the health ministry officials hold are used as a propaganda forum to trumpet the number of vaccinations that had been administered that day, and the total figure of those vaccinated. The other key figures like the number of new infections, the total number of those who have been infected since January 2020, and the Covid-19 death toll are relegated to the background. There is a vague promise that there will be enough vaccines available and that by December 2021 the entire adult population of the country, which amounts to 93-94 crore people, would be vaccinated. On May 16, the Union health ministry told the court that 216 crore Covid-19 vaccines would be available, but in its affidavit filed on June 27, the government revised the figure to 135 crores, and details were given of the share of each of the vaccines available or to be made available in the market.

The information about the availability of vaccines keeps changing simply because the government is still negotiating with foreign vaccine makers like Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson and Johnson, and there is no clarity as yet on the outcome. It is understandable that the foreign manufacturers are bargaining hard, which is a shameful thing, and the government is in a helpless situation. That is why it wants to do make do with the vaccines available in the country, which have been developed and manufactured in India like Covaxin, or those which have been developed outside the country like Covishield and Sputnik V and are manufactured in India. But transparency has not been a virtue of the Modi government. There has been a continuous attempt to paint a picture of normality in abnormally stressful and distressful times.

The Prime Minister might be under the illusion that he is keeping panic under control, but he is only adding to uncertainty and anxiety among the people. He should have used his monthly radio talk Mann ki Baat to share information about the Covid-19 situation in the country and the difficulties that the government and people are facing. Unfortunately, even democratically elected leaders in India have the bad habit of hiding the truth from the people. It is in this kind of dubious situation that the Supreme Court is performing the yeoman service of compelling the government to share facts, to share information, something that the government should be doing on its own. The Supreme Court is thus ensuring the flow of crucial information to the people in this time of crisis.
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Conventional bank clerks to be transferred to digital divisions



By Lee Min-hyung



Korean banks are buckling down for digitization by accelerating their closure of branches nationwide. The move is also aimed at cutting fixed costs to free up money to invest in burgeoning digital businesses.



Industry sources say the shuttering of branch offices will increase in the coming years, as the pandemic-induced growth of online transactions results in a digital paradigm shift in the banking sector



The nation's four major commercial lenders  KB, Shinhan, Hana and Woori  plan to close 159 branches this year alone. The plan has already been confirmed, and chances are they will increase the number if profitability worsens at other "offline" branches in the latter half of the year.



KB Kookmin Bank tops the list as it plans to close 50 branches by the end of the year, followed by Shinhan Bank with 46, and Hana Bank and Woori Bank that are also set to shutter outlets by 28 and 35, respectively.



Industry sources say banks have no choice in order to increase profitability and focus more on expanding their presence in the digital banking sector.



"More than half of all employees at banks are working at their branch offices, but most of them will be rotated to newly-established, digital-related divisions in the foreseeable future," a banking industry source said.



"Fewer people visit branches as mobile banking platforms replace the latters' traditional work at a rapid pace. To state it bluntly, banks will be less and less likely to hire conventional bank clerks amid the digital paradigm shift. Banks also want to slash their workforce by expanding voluntary retirement programs."



Another official from the industry said more bank clerks will be left with the dilemma over whether to extend their careers at the wholly-new, digital divisions.



"The days are gone when bank clerks wanted a lifetime job at a single company, so more young people in their late 30s and early 40s will consider voluntary retirement seriously as they seek new careers at other firms," the official said.



Data from the Korea Federation of Banks showed that the number of employees at the major banks is on a rapid decline. The number of staff from the aforementioned four lenders, as well as Standard Chartered Bank Korea and Citibank Korea, came in at 66,317 as of the end of March this year, down 1,244 from the end of 2020.



The quarterly drop is already close to a full-year decline of 1,570 seen in 2020, according to data from the federation. The number of bank branches is also declining sharply. The six lenders ran a total of 3,515 offices as of the end of the first quarter, down 31 from the end of 2020. The number rose to 3,834 at the end of 2018, but has dropped by around 300 in less than three years.



The Financial Services Commission (FSC) is holding internal discussions to ensure that a certain number of bank branches remain open so that the elderly, many of whom are not as digitally-savvy as younger Koreans, will not be forced to travel long distances to find one.



The overseer aims to slow down the trend by urging banks to check in advance how many customers will have difficulty conducting financial transactions if these branches are shut down in particular areas.



The FSC is also considering introducing a series of state-run financial education programs for the elderly, so they can make financial transactions using their smartphones.



"We are holding internal discussions before taking specific action," an official from the FSC said. "Digital banking is an inevitable trend, while at the same, protecting those in the grey area is also a crucial task. But nothing specific has been fixed for now. We will keep working with banks to minimize the impact on consumers."



Last month, FSC Vice Chairman Doh Kyu-sang also underscored the need for watchdogs to enhance their financial education programs for the elderly due to the rapid rise of digitization and online transactions.








South Korea plans to set aside 33 trillion won ($29.2 billion) for its new round of extra budget aimed at fighting the aftermath of COVID-19, which includes the payment of stimulus checks to households in the bottom 80 percent income bracket, ruling party officials said Tuesday.







The decision was announced following a consultative meeting between the ruling Democratic Party (DP) and the government, held earlier in the day at the National Assembly. The government plans to finalize drafting the new round of COVID-19 response supplementary budget, the second of its kind so far this year, and submit it to the National Assembly for approval within this week.







According to details announced by the DP's policy committee chief Rep. Park Wan-joo, the two sides agreed to pump in a total of about 36 trillion won in a new round of COVID-19 response assistance package. On top of the 33 trillion-won extra budget, to be solely financed by this year's excess tax revenue, the government will reallocate 3 trillion won from this year's existing budget to bankroll the 36 trillion-won extra spending, Park noted.







Nearly 16 trillion won of it, the DP official said, will be distributed as COVID-19 relief funds, including the "COVID-19 coexistence public assistance payment," a type of stimulus checks that will benefit households in the bottom 80 percent income bracket, according to DP officials.







More than 1 trillion won will be allocated to finance a cash-back reward program that will benefit all credit card users regardless of their income levels.







The aid package also includes comprehensive assistance payments to small businesses hit hard by the country's antivirus measures, such as forced business restrictions.







The new round of COVID-19 response spending will separately include about 5 trillion won earmarked for the country's vaccination campaign as well as other disease prevention measures, officials said. (Yonhap)






By Bahk Eun-ji







The number of COVID-19 cases linked to a gathering of language instructors working at private academies in Gyeonggi Province has increased to 132, according to health authorities and provincial government, Monday.







The authorities said that six foreign language instructors who work at institutes in Seongnam, Bucheon, Goyang and Uijeongbu in the province were infected with the virus after attending a gathering at a bar near Hongik University in western Seoul on June 19.







The infected instructors then transmitted the virus to students and colleagues at the academies and their family members, with the cumulative number of confirmed cases growing to 132  54 in Seongnam, 28 in Goyang, 19 in Bucheon and 23 in Uijeongbu.







The authorities are examining if those who tested positive are infected with a variant, considering the fast speed of transmission that surpassed 130 cases in six days since the first case was confirmed on June 22.







Also under investigation is whether the six instructors made plans to gather together at the bar or ran into each other by chance.







Private gatherings of more than four people have been banned since early this year under social distancing regulations.







Besides the instructors, 16 others who visited the bar have also tested positive for COVID-19.


Prime Minister Kim Boo-kyum speaks during a meeting on the government's response to COVID-19 at the government complex in Seoul, June 29. Yonhap



Mandatory outdoor mask rules for those who have received their first shots of COVID-19 vaccines could be reintroduced if the country sees a rise in new coronavirus variant cases, the prime minister said Tuesday.



Starting Thursday, South Korea plans to allow people administered with their first vaccine doses to travel outdoors without masks, as part of the government's new COVID-19 guidelines emphasizing incentives for vaccinated people.



Prime Minister Kim Boo-kyum, however, stated that the government "cannot but make mask wearing rules mandatory again" in the case new COVID-19 variant cases rise, amid concerns over a steady rise in cases of the highly contagious Delta variant.



During the period from June 20-26, the number of confirmed cases of strains from Britain, South Africa, Brazil and India came to 267, bringing the cumulative number of confirmed cases of variants to 2,492, health authorities said.






A medical worker in a booth takes a nasal sample from a man at a coronavirus testing site in Seoul, June 28. AP-Yonhap



South Korea's daily new virus cases remained in the 500s for the second day in a row Tuesday on fewer tests, but the loosened vigilance against the pandemic may trigger a further rise in new infections amid a steady increase in cases of COVID-19 variants.



The country reported 595 more COVID-19 cases, including 560 local infections, raising the total caseload to 156,167, the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) said. The latest figure was up 94 from the previous day.



The country added two more deaths, raising the death toll to 2,017. The fatality rate was 1.29 percent.



The daily caseload may rise down the road amid increased activities and loose antivirus measures.



A set of revamped distancing rules will be implemented next month as the country's vaccination program gathers pace.



Under the loosened rules, restaurants and cafes will be allowed to open till midnight from the current 10 p.m., and bars and other nightlife facilities will also resume their operations.



The ban on gatherings of five or more people is to be lifted to six people until July 14 in the capital area before the limit will be extended to eight.



No restrictions will be placed on other areas after the first two weeks of next month.






Lee Yoo-lim, president of the Seoul branch of the YWCA, speaks during an interview with The Korea Times at Seoul YWCA headquarters in Myeong-dong, central Seoul, June 22. Korea Times photo by Choi Won-suk



By Jung Da-min



The women's empowerment movement is facing new challenges in the digital era. With the fast-paced development of digital technologies, a generational shift and other social changes stemming from various factors, not least of which is the COVID-19 pandemic.



Among many other factors, the pandemic situation has especially accelerated the digitization of society, as more communities have adopted contactless or remote communication methods through online channels for their routine activities. Working from home and taking online classes have become more common along with such changes, but this has had a negative impact on women's economic activities, says Lee Yoo-lim, president of the Seoul branch of the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), a global non-governmental organization.



"It seems that the burden of childcare for working mothers has increased considerably since the pandemic started, as the situation in which they work from home and take care of their children who take online classes has been prolonged," Lee said in an interview with The Korea Times at her office in central Seoul, June 22.



According to an online survey of 3,007 working mothers conducted late last year by the government-run Korean Women's Development Institute, 20.9 percent of respondents said they quit their jobs last year between March and November as they felt more pressure not only at work but at home as well. In many cases they mentioned they quit because of their employers or their spouses who asked them to quit their jobs to focus on childcare.





Members of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions stage a small rally in front of Cheong Wa Dae in Seoul while holding posters depicting women working in various professions, many of whom have faced difficulties during the COVID-19 pandemic, in this March 8 photo, to mark the 113th anniversary of International Women's Day. Yonhap



Lee also said many women in their 20s working in the face-to-face services industry have lost their jobs during the pandemic. At the same time, an increased number of young women in their 20s and 30s committed suicide last year compared to previous years, according to the Ministry of Health and Welfare. While the government said it would continue its analysis to determine the fundamental cause for such an increase, experts said economic difficulties many women faced seem to have been a major factor.



"What we are especially concerned about with the pandemic situation is that many relationships have collapsed, while forming new relationships has become more difficult," Lee said. "As the sense of community has been greatly damaged and weakened among people, civic organizations like us are urged to make more efforts to help restore communities so that members of the communities will be able to support and take care of each other."



Women are also facing other difficulties due to increasing online sex crimes targeting them, Lee said, such as those involving spy cameras and illicit filming.



"The country's legal system lacks protections for women against online sex crimes and many Koreans still see such crimes as trivial," Lee said. "Compared to other serious crimes like murder or robbery, sentences for online sex crimes are very weak and the victim protection system is still very poor, while the victims are experiencing a series of damaging effects in their lives related to personal information disclosure and associated social stigma which could even lead to them losing their jobs."





Lee Yoo-lim, president of the Seoul branch of YWCA, speaks during an interview with The Korea Times at her office in Myeong-dong, central Seoul, June 22. Korea Times photo by Choi Won-suk



A generational shift and newly emerging gender conflicts also add to the difficulties women are facing, she said.



Lee said although gender equality has seen more achievements in recent years with growing voices from women's empowerment movements, this has also brought a backlash among young men who consider themselves as victims of those movements.



"Many young men these days tend to think that they are being discriminated against by policies supporting women. They say they feel uncomfortable about being considered as potential assailants against women while they are not given the same policy benefits extended to women in employment," Lee said.



Lee said such conflicts are unavoidable when a society is undergoing big changes to achieve gender equality. She said the role of the civic sector is to encourage more conversations among different gender groups, while politicians and the media are urged not to foster gender discord by framing social issues as gender conflicts.





People leave notes on a commemorative wall to honor a woman who was murdered near Gangnam Station in Seoul in this May 18, 2016, photo. Korea Times file




Greg Engle, right, at his landlord's 60th birthday party, or "hwangab," in Hongcheon in 1980, after drinking "way too much apple moonshine." / Courtesy of Greg Engle



By Greg Engle



I was a Peace Corps Tuberculosis Control Volunteer in 1980 and 1981, right up until the Peace Corps closed its program in Korea after 15 years.





Greg Engle's TB control office at the Hongcheon health center, 1980. / Courtesy of Greg Engle

Following 10 weeks of language, cultural and job training at the Sejong Hotel in Chuncheon, my wife Maureen and I were sent to Hongcheon, Gangwon Province. I was a tuberculosis control worker, and Maureen worked in the maternal child health ward of the county health center.



Our ability to speak Korean was only slightly better than Koreans' ability to understand us or believe that an American could speak or even attempt to speak Korean. One day, while registering a halmoni (grandmother) as a TB patient, I asked her a series of basic questions, with her daughter serving as interpreter, although both of us at least thought we were speaking Korean. The halmoni kept tugging on her daughter's skirt. Finally the daughter asked her mother what she wanted, and the old woman asked, "Where did you learn to speak English?"



After a year of living in rural Korea I came away with three strong impressions: First, Koreans are extremely hospitable to Americans. They taught me it was better accepting their sincere hospitality than resisting it. Americans value being independent and not imposing on other people, but cross-culturally, that's not an approach that generates trust and friendship.



Greg Engle's musical tribute to Peace Corps Korea





Second, Koreans are very hardworking. Our health center was across the street from a brickyard. Each day, out my office window, I could see the young and old making bricks by hand. Outside our rented room, a new house was under construction, and women as old as my grandmother were carrying heavy loads of bricks on large wooden frames up to the second story of the new house, day in and day out, tirelessly. The basis of Korea's economic miracle, I thought, was those old women making and carrying bricks. They inspired me whenever my energy and resolve were flagging.



The third factor that really impressed me was the determination of Korean parents to get their children the best education possible. The students were dutifully responsive to their parents' efforts, hopes and wishes, studying hard to achieve their educational goals. They were hungry to learn English, and naturally, an American seemed to them like a prime opportunity. Not a day went by when at least one student  often many more  asked me if I would "English conversation" them. I wish Americans and students around the world were so determined and insightful. When giving remarks on development around Africa, I have emphasized the absolute importance of education in the development process and pointed to Korea as a glowing example of its success.





Greg Engle, right, visits the Korean Folk Village in Icheon in 1981 with Baek Moo-hyun, second from left, a doctor at the health center where Engle worked who now runs a plastic surgery clinic in Seoul, and Engle's wife Maureen, second from right. / Courtesy of Greg Engle



I joined the U.S. Foreign Service after leaving the Peace Corps and Korea. As a diplomat, I often thought about Korea and how it changed me, positively influencing the way I represented the United States. Sometimes I wondered what my life and diplomatic service would have been like had I not lived and worked in a Korean community.



I would not have been as effective and informed as a diplomat. I would have lacked both a working-level knowledge and awareness of the development process, beyond the confines of a bustling and prosperous capital city. In the early 1980s, Seoul was not like the rural areas only miles away, and many people in Seoul were not personally aware of the differences. This was also true in many African countries.



If I hadn't continued to watch Korea's economic success after I left, I would have had less faith that a country could develop so quickly and extensively. In many developing countries, citizens and foreign observers  including development workers  sometimes became discouraged with the rate of progress and started to lose hope. With greater optimism, I could direct their attention to Korea's development and the obstacles it surmounted as it became a global economic powerhouse. Many local experts were well aware of Korea's impressive development and the role of education in its success.



Ethiopians told me Korea was their development model and were prioritizing education as a national goal. When I was country director in Ethiopia, Korea had its own "Peace Corps" (KOICA) there. I was proud that American Peace Corps Volunteers and KOICA Volunteers designed and implemented joint projects. We were still working and growing together, as we were when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Korea.



Without my Korea experience, I would not have had a clear impression of what "hard work" meant in the development process. In my experience, Korea harnessed that cultural attribute more effectively in the cause of development. I perceived less of a "dependency syndrome" and the steady refrain, "You have to do something for us." If I hadn't served in Korea, I might have fallen victim to this way of thinking that could stand in the way of these countries' viable, stable development.



Some of the ways Korea affected and shaped me were more subtle, but no less profound. Koreans' veneration for older people was explicit. How they cared for older relatives was admirable and made an impression on me. After completing my Peace Corps service, I lived across the street from a retirement home. Often I would see elderly parents walk out of the building with their adult children and wave as their children drove away. It was sad to see and was something I might not have noticed had I not lived among Koreans.





Greg Engle and his wife Maureen, right, meet with Dr. Baek Moo-hyun and his wife Kim Mi-sun, left, during the 2018 U.S. Peace Corps Volunteers Revisit to Korea program. / Courtesy of Greg Engle




South Korea's envisioned anti-artillery interceptor system differs from Israel's Iron Dome and requires more advanced technologies in order to defend against long-range artillery from North Korea, the arms procurement agency said Tuesday.







The Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA) spokesperson Col. Suh Yong-won made the remarks when a reporter asked why the development cost for the Korean version is far higher than that of the Iron Dome.







South Korea on Monday approved the 2.89 trillion-won ($2.56 billion) project to develop an interceptor system like the Israeli system with its own technologies by around 2035.







Israel successfully developed the air defense system through a four-year project worth 230 billion won, and it has been in service since 2011.







"The Iron Dome responds to rockets fired by militant groups, such as Hamas and irregular forces sporadically. Some parts of the system will bear similarities, but what we are going to build is designed to intercept long-range artillery pieces by North Korea, which requires a higher level of technologies given the current security situation," Suh told a regular briefing of the defense ministry.







"We will try to minimize the cost when mass producing the system," he added.







Seoul said the envisioned interceptor system is expected to better defend the country's core facilities and key military and security infrastructure against long-range artillery threats from the North.







Pyongyang deploys around 1,000 artillery pieces along the Military Demarcation Line separating the two Koreas, including 240-millimeter multiple rocket launchers, most of which are directly aimed at Seoul and the metropolitan area, according to military officials. (Yonhap)






Outgoing U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) Commander Gen. Robert Abrams on Tuesday vowed to continue supporting the "ironclad" alliance between South Korea and the United States, describing his time here as a "personal honor and privilege."







Abrams made the remarks during an honor guard ceremony hosted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Won In-choul ahead of USFK's change of command slated for Friday, according to the military.







Expressing gratitude to "28,500 men and women of USFK for their service and dedication away from home for the peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula," Abrams said he will continue to "actively support and back the alliance."







The U.S. general said his "time as a member of the ironclad ROK-U.S. alliance was a personal honor and privilege, and full of indelible memories," adding that he is "certain this alliance will emerge greater and stronger going forward." ROK stands for South Korea's official name, the Republic of Korea.







Won said Abrams showed "tremendous leadership during the extremely difficult circumstances of COVID-19 to maintain the utmost ROK-U.S. combined defense posture," and asked for his continued support for the advancement of the alliance.







Abrams led the USFK since November 2018.







Gen. Paul LaCamera, who most recently served as Army Pacific commander, will replace Abrams to lead the USFK. The USFK commander also heads the United Nations Command and the South Korea-U.S. Combined Forces Command. (Yonhap)


A group of activists holds a rally in Seoul, July 7, 2020, demanding punishment of some U.S. Forces Korea soldiers accused of unruly behavior on the U.S. Independence Day the previous week. Yonhap



More than 300 police, government officials and officers of the U.S. military police will be deployed to Haeundae Beach in the southeastern city of Busan to prevent disorderly misconduct during the U.S. Independence Day holiday, the foreign ministry said Tuesday.



Starting later this week, they will conduct joint patrols on and around the most popular beach in Korea, including 16 officers from the U.S. Army Military Police and 14 officials from the foreign ministry. The rest will be police and local government officials, according to the ministry.



The joint patrols come after U.S. soldiers were criticized for engaging in unruly behavior, such as going maskless, heavy drinking and setting off firecrackers, around the beach area on their Memorial Day holiday in May and the Fourth of July holiday last year.



"We, as the ministry, intend to participate in the activity so as to help minimize the inconvenience and complaints for our people under the COVID-19 situation," a ministry official said.



"We also thought that it was necessary to make efforts to ultimately promote Korea-U.S. relations by positively setting the relationship between our people and the U.S. forces in Korea," the official said.



A separate patrol squad, without the U.S. participation, will also work on and around the Gwanganli Beach, another tourist hot spot in the coastal city, during the period.



The Haeundae ward office has decided to maintain the ban on gatherings of five people or more on the beach during the three days to prevent crowding, in exception to the government's plan to ease the limits for non-capital areas starting July 1.



In July last year, some USFK members and foreigners came under public criticism for holding maskless parties and setting off firecrackers on the beach amid the pandemic. Few of them were held accountable.



The Haeundae Ward office has warned it will fine U.S. soldiers if they violate the distancing and other rules during the Independence Day period.



The USFK has said it will not tolerate any behavior that violates Korean laws, vowing to take measures to help maintain public order during the holiday period. (Yonhap)




The Cabinet on Tuesday deferred the planned deliberation process for the new Air Force chief nominee, sparking speculation that additional verification could be required to determine whether he properly handled a sexual harassment case involving cadets.





Air Force Lt. Gen. Park In-ho / Yonhap




A court sentenced former Busan Mayor Oh Keo-don to three years in prison Tuesday for sexually assaulting female employees at work, broadening the interpretation of injury to include psychological trauma.







The Busan District Court convicted him of sexually assaulting two female employees using his power and injuring one of them. He was arrested in court.







"This is a workplace sexual assault case in which the accused used his superior position" for his crime, Judge Ryu Seung-woo said.







The judge rejected Oh's claim that he has been suffering from dementia and has cognitive problems.







While the former mayor expressed remorse for his action during the court process, he has claimed that his abusive behavior was one-off and not intentional.







He resigned as the leader of the nation's second-largest city on April 23 last year after admitting to his misconduct.







The timing of his admission and subsequent departure stirred controversy, as it was a week after the April 15 general election, a move widely seen as a political maneuver designed to protect his party, the ruling Democratic Party, from potential fallout.







Early this year, the Busan District Prosecutors Office charged him on four counts, including attempted indecent assault, inflicting injury and false accusation. At the final argument last week, prosecutors recommended a seven-year prison sentence for the former mayor. (Yonhap)






A son-in-law of National Intelligence Service Director Park Jie-won has been standing trial on charges of smuggling drugs into the country and abusing them, legal sources said Tuesday.







The 45-year-old, who is a senior executive at Samsung Electronics, was indicted in April for allegedly bringing ecstasy and hemp from Seattle in May 2019 and injecting and smoking the drugs in July and August of that year, the sources said.







The allegations have not been previously reported.







Three other people are implicated in the case, including a 29-year-old woman who has been charged with abusing the drugs with Park's son-in-law at a motel in Seoul's Gangnam Ward.







The woman was previously convicted of drug-related charges and received a suspended prison sentence in 2017.







The son-in-law attended a hearing at the Seoul Central District Court







on June 18, his first time appearing before the court during the trial, according to the sources.







He has not informed his company of the proceedings and continued to work as usual, they said. (Yonhap)






Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong will face a formal court trial on charges of illegally taking propofol injections, according to sources Tuesday.







The Seoul Central District Court has decided to hold a trial on the issue, at the request of the state prosecution service, they added.







Early this month, prosecutors indicted the de facto leader of Samsung Group, now in jail for bribery and corruption, on a "summary offense" in connection with his alleged use of propofol, which is illicit to prescribe or consume in Korea other than for the purpose of specific treatments.







Prosecutors have sought a fine of 50 million won ($44,200).







A summary indictment is a measure taken on minor crimes.







Gyeonggi Nambu Police Agency recently delivered the results of its probe into the allegation of Lee's additional propofol use to the prosecution. That is a reason why prosecutors changed their position to request a formal trial, as they leave the possibility open for seeking a heavier punishment against Lee, the sources said.







Lee is suspected of having excessively and illegally taken the anesthesia drug at a plastic surgery clinic in Seoul in 2017-2018.







He has denied the allegation, arguing that he used propofol "normally" in accordance with a doctor's prescription. (Yonhap)






Former Prosecutor General Yoon Seok-youl speaks during a press conference at the Yun Bong-gil Memorial Hall in southern Seoul, June 29. Yonhap



Yoon Seok-youl officially launched his high-profile presidential bid Tuesday, four months after he stepped down as prosecutor general, vowing to rebuild justice and the rule of law.



Yoon announced the declaration to run in the March 9 presidential election at his first official press conference since his resignation in March, held in southern Seoul.



"With common sense as my weapon, I will definitely rebuild the free democracy and the rule of law that have fallen apart, as well as the value of justice, that could reverberate through different eras and generations," Yoon said.



He mounted attacks on the Moon Jae-in administration to make his case for entering the presidential race.



"This government not only privatizes power but also tries to extend its reign to plunder the nation," Yoon said. "I can no longer sit and watch it."



He said the country needs to stand up and resist the reign of the "corrupt and incompetent" ruling force, adding, "I am ready to sacrifice and dedicate everything for the people and the future of the nation.



"We must succeed in taking back (the presidency) ... and the people and political groups who agree on this must join forces," Yoon added.



Yoon's entry into the presidential race had been widely anticipated as he has taken the lead in various opinion polls on presidential hopefuls since late last year following his much publicized feud with the justice ministry over the prosecution reform drive.



His opinion poll ascent has captured the imagination of the conservative opposition bloc seeking to take down Moon's progressive administration and reclaim the presidency in the upcoming election.



Yoon hinted at his interest in joining the primary elections of the main opposition People Power Party (PPP) to pick its candidate for the presidential race.



"In terms of political philosophy, I share its thoughts," he said in response to a relevant media question.





People watch former Prosecutor General Yoon Seok-youl speaking on TV set up at Seoul Station in central Seoul, June 29. Korea Times photo by Choi Won-suk
Former Prosecutor General Yoon Seok-youl speaks during a press conference at the Maeheon Yun Bong-gil Memorial Museum in Seoul, Tuesday, to announce his presidential bid. Korea Times photo by Bae Woo-han



Yoon declares presidential bid; hints at joining PPP



By Kang Seung-woo



Former Prosecutor General Yoon Seok-youl announced Tuesday that he will compete in the next presidential election in a bid to stop the "corrupt and incompetent" Moon Jae-in administration from extending its rule.



While urging people agreeing with him to combine forces, Yoon hinted that he could join the main opposition People Power Party (PPP). The 60-year-old also vowed to rebuild justice and the rule of law.



Yoon is now a front-runner in many opinion polls among potential presidential hopefuls, who will take over from President Moon in May 2022. The presidential election is scheduled to take place, March 9 next year.



Yoon held his first official press conference in Seoul since his resignation from the top prosecutor post in March to unveil his political ambitions.



"This government not only privatizes power but also tries to extend its reign to plunder the nation," Yoon said during the press conference held at the Maeheon Yun Bong-gil Memorial Museum  the Korean independence activist known for setting off a bomb at a Japanese imperial army celebration that killed several dignitaries.



"I can no longer sit and watch it."



Yoon said the country needs to stand up and resist the reign of the corrupt and incompetent ruling party, adding that he was ready to sacrifice and dedicate everything for the people and the future of the country.



"We must achieve a change of administration  the people and political groups who agree on this must join forces. Otherwise, the people will suffer for a long time, and the country will be a completely corrupt nation, which would be an indelible mark on the people and history," Yoon said.











People watch former Prosecutor General Yoon Seok-youl's press conference at Seoul Station, Tuesday. Korea Times photo by Choi Won-suk



After resigning from the top prosecutor post due to his feud with the government over "prosecutorial reform" and a series of politically sensitive investigations targeting corruption among key ruling bloc figures, Yoon has emerged as a potential presidential candidate for the opposition bloc. This has raised speculation that he may join the PPP, although he was involved in a special prosecutor team that played a key role in impeaching former President Park Geun-hye, the former leader of the Saenuri Party, a predecessor of the PPP.



Yoon did not deny the possibility of joining the conservative main opposition party, saying he shared its political philosophy.



"In terms of the value of freedom, I am on the same line with the PPP," he said.



"Regardless of whether to support the PPP, if they are people who think about running the country based on intelligence and commonsense, they will agree with the value of a free democracy."



As PPP Chairman Lee Jun-seok is currently not considering "preferential treatment" for the former top prosecutor, Yoon is expected to delay joining the party as much as possible to gain leverage.



Yoon also said, "With common sense as my weapon, I will definitely rebuild a free democracy and the rule of law that have been torn apart, as well as the value of justice that can reverberate through different eras and generations."





Supporters of former Prosecutor General Yoon Seok-youl surround him as he leaves the Maeheon Yun Bong-gil Memorial Museum in Seoul, Tuesday, after announcing his presidential bid. Joint Press Corps


Kim Jae-yun, a former three-term lawmaker from the liberal bloc, was found dead on a road in southern Seoul on Tuesday, apparently after falling from a building, police said.





Kim Jae-yun, a former three-term lawmaker from the liberal bloc, was found dead on a road in southern Seoul on Tuesday, apparently after falling from a building, according to the police. Yonhap




Korea's parliament on Tuesday adopted a resolution condemning Japan's plan to dump contaminated water from its destroyed Fukushima nuclear plant into the sea.







During its plenary session, the National Assembly passed the resolution, which also calls on Tokyo to take sufficient measures to ensure the safe disposal of radioactive water at the Fukushima plant.







The resolution was prepared by ruling and opposition parties after the Japanese government announced a decision in April to start releasing massive amounts of radioactive water stored in tanks at the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant in two years.







"The National Assembly of the Republic of Korea strongly condemns the Japanese government's unilateral decision to release Fukushima's contaminated radioactive wastewater into the sea and urges the immediate withdrawal of the decision," the resolution said.







"The National Assembly will never tolerate any action by the Japanese government that could harm the health of our people," it said, asking the Seoul government to devise effective countermeasures and take an active diplomatic response.







The resolution then asks Tokyo to choose the method for treating radioactive water through close consultations with neighboring countries, including Korea.







It demands that the Japanese government scientifically and thoroughly verify the safety issues related to the contaminated Fukushima water and the South Korean government participate in the IAEA's joint investigation team to ensure transparent disclosure of the contaminated water treatment process. (Yonhap)


LH employees suspected of creating firm for property speculation



The real estate speculation by some employees of state housing developer Korea Land and Housing Corp. (LH) has had a tremendous impact on Korean society. The incident inflicted a crushing defeat on the ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) in the April 7 mayoral by-elections in Seoul and Busan. However, the scandal seems to be far from over. "Dozens of current and former LH employees, their relatives and acquaintances are suspected of founding a company to handle speculative property transactions," Nam Gu-jun, the chief investigator, told reporters Monday.



Nam did not elaborate further, saying the investigation was still underway. However, his brief remarks were more than sufficient to shock the public. Individual acts of speculation by LH officials and their relatives were bad enough but forming and running a company for such purposes is an entirely different story. These people not only reaped personal gains using inside information obtained while carrying out official duties, but also pursued illicit gains in a systematic and organized way.



More than 3,000 suspects, including 77 former and present LH employees, are under investigation over their alleged property speculation. The government and law enforcement agencies should sternly punish those found to have committed a crime and confiscate all illegal profits. They also need to review measures to prevent such massive irregularities from the ground up. The current reform plan  which calls for, among others, sharply trimming the state-run corporation's functions and workforce and banning all ranking LH officials from finding jobs related to their business after retirement  falls far short of severing the ever-sneaky chain of corruption, as shown by the company suspected of use in their illegal speculative ventures.



More fundamentally, the government should come up with ways to cut off possible conflicts of interest at the source. For example, policymakers need to look back on whether the government or state enterprises should develop housing complexes by monopolizing all related powers and information, by mobilizing all legal and administrative means. In the long term, the government will have to leave the main part of housing supply to the private sector while focusing on a more public role, such as providing housing welfare for the poor. This is a way to enhance economic efficiency and reduce the possibility of corruption.


Former top prosecutor throws hat into the ring



Former Prosecutor General Yoon Seok-youl has declared his bid for the presidency. In a press conference Tuesday, he said that he will do his best to block the ruling party's attempt to extend its rule and ensure a change of government.



His declaration marked the virtual start of the presidential race with less than nine months left before the March 9, 2022, poll. It came three months after he stepped down as top prosecutor to protest the Moon Jae-in administration's drive for prosecutorial reform amid a conflict over a series of politically sensitive corruption investigations into key ruling bloc figures.



Yoon promised to restore the values of fairness and common sense that have been damaged by the liberal government and the ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK). He also stressed the need to uphold the rule of law to promote freedom and democracy.



In addition, Yoon strongly denounced the Moon government for being too "arrogant" and "impudent" in making his case to run as an opposition candidate. "This government not only privatizes power but also tries to extend its reign to plunder the nation," he said. Yoon vowed to stand up and resist the reign of the "corrupt and incompetent" administration.



His harsh words reflected his disillusionment with the Moon government which had done everything it could to prevent him and the prosecution from investigating core members of the ruling elite over allegations of corruption and law violations. President Moon appointed Yoon as the prosecution chief in recognition of his anti-corruption investigations, particularly into former President Park Geun-hye who was impeached and then jailed for corruption and abuse of power in 2017.



But, Yoon invited the rage of the powers that be because he targeted Moon's confidants, including former Justice Minister Cho Kuk, over their alleged corruption, influence peddling and election rigging. Yoon was thrown into a severe conflict with the government which tried to remove him from his position because he was digging up dirt on corrupt officials and politicians.



Nevertheless, he has continued to top the list of most favored presidential candidates mainly thanks to his image as a crusader against corruption. People's frustration at the arrogant, self-righteous and hypocritical ruling elite has also contributed to his high popularity. According to a Korea Society Opinion Institute survey commissioned by local radio station TBS, 32.4 percent of respondents chose Yoon as their most preferred presidential hopeful, followed by Gyeonggi Province Governor Lee Jae-myung  a member of the DPK  with 28.4 percent. Lee plans to announce his presidential bid Thursday.



Now that Yoon has thrown his hat into the ring, making his political debut after serving 26 years with the prosecution, he first needs to ease concerns, especially among his critics, that his presidential bid following his resignation could damage the political neutrality and independence of the prosecution.



He should also prove his capability as a potential leader of the country, as one of his weak points is the lack of a political career. So he must launch a well-organized campaign and recruit staff well-versed in politics and public relations.



Yoon must also submit to a rigorous vetting process to verify his leadership qualifications. In addition, he should clear up some suspicions surrounding his wife who was allegedly involved in manipulating Deutsch Motors' share prices and receiving undue sponsorship from corporations for her business. He also needs to clarify allegations that his mother-in-law set up a geriatric care hospital and received doctor's fees from the National Health Insurance Service through illegitimate means.



Then, Yoon will soon have to reveal his position on whether and when he will join the main conservative opposition People Power Party (PPP) to participate in a primary to select its presidential candidate. During the conference he only hinted at joining the PPP. He needs to work hard to help the opposition bloc field a single candidate to increase the chances of an election win.



Most importantly, Yoon should suggest concrete policy options to restore fairness, justice, the rule of law and democracy. And then he must present his vision for creating a better future for the people and the nation. Fair and free competition is also key to making a big difference.




By Jang Daul





Severe heat waves are currently devastating the United States, with California recording the highest temperature of 54 degrees Celsius. It seems that rare extreme weather events are happening a lot more often.



Yes, these are due to climate change which increases the severity and frequency of natural disasters. While the world still struggles with the COVID-19, the climate is worsening day by day.



Considering the role and responsibility of Korea, the world is waiting to see how much President Moon Jae-in will strengthen Korea's 2030 greenhouse gas emissions reduction target and what concrete plans will be announced to reach the goal of 2050 carbon neutrality.



However, a June 16 speech at the National Assembly by Song Young-gil, chairman of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK), raised serious doubts about whether Korea will not only come up with an ambitious enough, but also achievable, climate action plan.



Firstly, Song said we need to "lower the global average temperature by 1.5 degrees Celsius." It shows that he might not clearly understand what the 1.5 degrees target means. Climate change is nearly irreversible. We cannot "lower" but only limit the increase of the global average temperature and now the world aims to hold it below 1.5 degrees Celsius.



I hope it was a mere slip of the tongue even though it was not his first time. Otherwise, it is quite frightening to have a ruling party leader who does not understand climate science and the global climate regime at this time of a climate emergency.



Secondly, Song claimed that small modular reactors (SMRs) and nuclear fusion could play important roles in achieving carbon neutrality. Here, again, he demonstrates his lack of understanding of the current global climate regime.



There is a given fixed carbon budget required to hold the increase in global average temperatures below 1.5 degrees Celsius. It means we need to act now and curb emissions by half within eight years, as emphasized by Song in his speech.



However, the SMRs and nuclear fusion are not commercially available now  they are as yet unproven technologies. Even without mentioning various concerns around their safety, economics, waste problems, non-proliferation and public acceptance issues, their contribution to the required drastic reduction by 2030 will be close to none, and to the 2050 carbon neutrality goal, very uncertain.



A few statistics also show that Song's stance on renewables and nuclear power is far from reality. According to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), around 250 gigawatts of renewable capacity was added in 2020. It was a record-breaking addition despite the economic slowdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic.



The newly added nuclear fission capacity in the same year was 5.5 gigawatts while almost equivalent capacity was permanently shut down according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. And obviously, there was no added capacity for nuclear fusion or SMRs in 2020.



The average share of renewables among the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) members in 2020 was 32 percent. The key developed countries have already proven that a higher renewable share is possible  82 percent for Denmark, 47 percent for Germany, and 45 percent for the United Kingdom and Spain in 2020.



The 100 percent renewable electricity system is a not easy but achievable future and already many countries including Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Portugal and Spain have already set 100 percent renewable electricity targets before 2050 with concrete plans.



Research (Sovacool et al.) published in Nature Energy in October 2020 analyzed the global datasets of national carbon emissions and renewable and nuclear power production across 123 countries over 25 years. The researchers found that there was a negative association between the scales of national nuclear and renewables expansion. In other words, nuclear and renewables development tend to crowd each other out.



The Ministry of Environment recently disclosed preliminary greenhouse gas (GHG) statistics for South Korea. In 2020 the total emissions were 649 million tons, a 7 percent decrease from 2019. The decrease of coal and increase of renewables in power generation resulting from the climate and energy policies of Moon Jae-in administration were major drivers of the reduction.



To meet the globally required GHGs emission reduction level by 2030, Korea needs to continuously cut its total emissions by around 7 percent every year. To do so, with the limited time and resources, the ruling party needs to support the government to focus not on false solutions such as investing in SMRs and nuclear fusion, but on correct solutions.



The globally accepted faster, safer, cheaper and more publicly acceptable solutions are faster and bigger deployment of renewables, more investment in flexible resources to supplement the intermittency of renewables, and a faster phase out of fossil fuel-fired power plants and internal combustion engine vehicles.



With the power given to his position as a ruling party leader of the world's 10th largest economy and one of the major carbon emitting countries in the world, Song needs to lead his party with a correct understanding and appropriate solutions.





Jang Daul (daul.jang@greenpeace.org) is a government relations and advocacy specialist at Greenpeace East Asia Seoul Office.


In this April 14, 2020, file photo, the "Like" logo is shown on a sign at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. A federal judge has dismissed antitrust lawsuits brought against Facebook by the Federal Trade Commission and a coalition of state attorneys general, dealing a significant blow to attempts by regulators to rein in tech giants. AP-Yonhap



A U.S. judge on Monday dismissed the blockbuster antitrust action against Facebook filed last year by federal and state regulators, helping lift the value of the social media giant above $1 trillion for the first time.



Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court of Washington, DC dismissed the cases filed in December by the Federal Trade Commission and more than 40 states, which could have rolled back Facebook's acquisition of Instagram and the messaging platform WhatsApp.



The federal lawsuit "failed to plead enough facts to plausibly establish a necessary element... that Facebook has monopoly power in the market for personal social networking services," the judge said in a 53-page opinion, while allowing authorities the opportunity to refile the case.



In lawsuits filed in December that were consolidated in federal court, U.S. and state officials called for the divestment of Instagram and WhatsApp, arguing that Facebook had acted to "entrench and maintain its monopoly to deny consumers the benefits of competition."



The judge issued a separate opinion dismissing the case by the states, saying attorneys general had waited too long to bring the case for the acquisition of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014.



The judge said the FTC complaint "says almost nothing concrete on the key question of how much power Facebook actually had... it is almost as if the agency expects the court to simply nod to the conventional wisdom that Facebook is a monopolist."



The federal agency based its case on a "vague" assertion that Facebook controlled more than 60 percent of the social networking market, but the FTC "does not even allege what it is measuring."



Boasberg wrote that "the market at issue here is unusual in a number of ways, including that the products therein are not sold for a price... the court is thus unable to understand exactly what the agency's '60 percent-plus' figure is even referring to, let alone able to infer the underlying facts that might substantiate it."



Still he ruled that "this defect could conceivably be overcome by re-pleading," allowing the federal agency the possibility of refiling the action.



Facebook shares surged after the decision, lifting the company's market valuation above $1 trillion for the first time.





In this Dec. 18, 2020, file photo, an illustration shows the logos of Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft displayed on a mobile phone and a laptop screen in London. AFP-Yonhap
The next-generation Galaxy Watch incorporating a new operating system (OS) and a joint platform with Google is set to provide users a more seamless experience between the watch and Android smartphones. Courtesy of Samsung Electronics



By Kim Bo-eun



Samsung Electronics offered a sneak peek into a new operating system (OS) Tuesday that will be incorporated into its next-generation Galaxy Watch to be launched in the coming months, which will have a platform built with Google.



The company unveiled the "One UI Watch" OS at a virtual event held for the World Mobile Congress 2021 that kicked off in Barcelona, Spain, Monday (local time). Samsung was the only participating firm from Korea, with the country's three telecom companies and LG Electronics not taking part this year



The platform developed with Google offers a more seamless experience between the watch and Android smartphones. The new Galaxy Watch will be introduced at Samsung's Unpacked event in August.



With the latest collaboration, Samsung appears to be aiming to catch up with Apple in the global market for smartwatches. Samsung has used its own OS for its smartwatch models but had lacked content compared to the Android app ecosystem.





Patrick Chomet, Samsung's executive vice president and head of the customer experience office and mobile communications business, introduces the One UI Watch OS in a virtual event for the World Mobile Congress 2021 that kicked off in Barcelona, Spain, Monday (local time). Courtesy of Samsung Electronics
A woman wearing a Chanel bag / Korea Times file





By Yoon Ja-young







People are lining up in front of Chanel stores upon rumors that there will be price hikes next month. Luxury brands, including Chanel, have usually raised prices steeply after such rumors  which is suspected to be one of their business tactics.







The number of people lining up in front of the Chanel store within Lotte Department Store in downtown Seoul on Monday morning appeared to be as twice as long as usual, according to Yonhap news agency. A department store staff member reported that the line was long enough to surround the building.







The rush follows rumors that Chanel Korea will raise the prices of its major items by up to 12 percent next month. Chanel does not officially confirm whether there will be a price hike, but numerous postings can be found about Chanel's planned price hikes in online forums focusing on luxury goods. One person claimed online that her shopping assistant in the United States told her about the price hike plan. Others responded by posting comments that they also heard similar rumors.







It is reported that the price of Chanel's classic medium-sized flap bag, which carries a price tag of 8.64 million won ($7,641) in Korea, will be raised by around $1,000. The bag will cost close to 10 million won after the hike.







While some people say they are not interested in buying Chanel products anymore citing the exorbitant price tags, others say they plan to do an "open run," which refers to customers lining up before opening hours to rush inside as soon as the store opens to grab the items they want.







People line up to enter a Chanel store inside Lotte Department Store in Sogong-dong, Seoul, June 29. Yonhap





It is not the first time Chanel has raised prices in recent months. It raised the prices of a few items earlier this year, following two price hikes in May and November of 2020. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic and the price hikes, Chanel Korea saw its operating profit jump 34 percent to 149.1 billion won last year.







Kim Yae-ri, professor of Digital Marketing at Sejong Cyber University, said that the pandemic seems to have added to the phenomenon.







"People try to satisfy their desires through diverse forms of consumption, but now they have these channels restricted due to the pandemic," she said.







"For instance, traveling overseas used to be one of the channels, but now it is blocked. People thus seem to be turning more to luxury goods, which they see as symbols that represent their identity."







The professor said she believes luxury brands are aware of this.







"They know that people will purchase their goods even if they raise the prices," she said.







Korea is the world's seventh biggest luxury goods market as of 2020.


A smartphone with the Huawei and 5G network logo is seen on a PC motherboard in this illustration picture taken Jan. 29, 2020. Reuters-Yonhap




Smoke billows above the Syrian town of Ariha in the rebel-held northwestern Idlib province during reported bombing by pro-government forces, Syria, June 28. AFP-Yonhap



Pro-Iranian militias exchanged fire with a U.S.-led coalition in eastern Syria Monday, a war monitor and the coalition said, in an escalation after deadly U.S. air strikes in Iraq and Syria the previous night.



U.S. forces "were attacked by multiple rockets" in eastern Syria, but there were no casualties and personnel "conducted counter-battery artillery fire at rocket launching positions", said coalition spokesman Wayne Marotto on Twitter.



The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor reported shell fire by Iran-backed militias against the U.S. base in eastern Syria's Al-Omar oil field, and said the coalition fired heavy artillery at the militia-controlled town of Al-Mayadeen in response.



The exchange of fire came just hours after Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared that U.S. air strikes on pro-Iran fighters in Iraq and Syria on Sunday night sent a "strong message" not to keep attacking U.S. forces in Iraq.



The U.S. air strikes were the second such deadly raid on pro-Iran targets since U.S. President Joe Biden took office, and have sparked fears of a new U.S.-Iran escalation amid faltering efforts to revive Tehran's 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.



"This action in self-defense... sends a very important and strong message," Blinken told reporters on a visit to Rome.



"I would hope that the message... will be heard and deter future action," he added, referring to repeated attacks against U.S. interests in Iraq that Washington blames on pro-Iran groups.



Iraq's Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhemi decried the strikes as an "unacceptable violation of Iraqi sovereignty and Iraqi national security," while Damascus condemned a violation against both nations.



The Hashed al-Shaabi, an Iraqi paramilitary alliance that includes several Iranian proxies and has become the main power broker in Baghdad, said the strikes killed four of its fighters in the Qaim region, near the border with Syria.



The fighters were stationed there to prevent jihadists infiltrating Iraq, the group said, denying that they had taken part in any attacks against U.S. interests or personnel and warning they had "the legal right to respond... and hold the perpetrators accountable on Iraqi soil".



The Pentagon said the strikes targeted operational and weapons storage facilities at two locations in Syria and one in Iraq, all near the common border, used by militias engaged in drone attacks against U.S. interests in Iraq.





U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken attends the ministerial meeting of the global coalition on Syria and Islamic State, Rome, June 28. Reuters-Yonhap



'Flagrant violation'



Kataeb Hezbollah and Kataeb Sayyid al-Shuhada, two Iraqi Shiite armed factions, were among the "several Iran-backed militia groups" that had used the facilities, the Pentagon said.



The Observatory, which relies on a network of sources inside Syria, said seven fighters were killed in the strikes and at least six more were wounded.



The targets included an arms depot near Albu Kamal, a Syrian border town on the Euphrates River, the Observatory said.



Syria's state-run SANA news agency said one child was killed, while its foreign ministry condemned the raid as "a flagrant violation of the sanctity of Syrian and Iraqi territory".



U.S. interests in Iraq, where 2,500 American troops are deployed as part of an international coalition to fight the jihadist Islamic State group, have been targeted in more than 40 attacks this year.



The vast majority have been bombs against logistics convoys, but rocket fire and drones packed with explosive have also been used.



Some attacks have been claimed by pro-Iran factions hoping to press Washington into a full withdrawal, leaving Baghdad  which counts both Washington and Tehran as allies  caught in the middle.



Iraq's foreign ministry said that the government was proceeding with investigations to "prevent any escalation", while Kadhemi re-emphasised his country's "refusal to be an arena for settling scores".



French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian reaffirmed "France's support for the stability and sovereignty of Iraq", but deplored the "unacceptable attacks... against the interests" of the anti-IS coalition.



Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah "strongly" condemned the air strikes.



"What the U.S. warplanes have done is a blatant attack on sovereignty... the region will not enjoy stability... until U.S. forces are expelled" from Iraq and Syria, the pro-Iran group said.





In this June 14, 2020, file photo, mask-clad members of the Hashed al-Shaabi paramilitary force take part in a military parade in the southern Iraqi city of Basra. AFP-Yonhap
The Palm View apartment complex was established by the Actors Fund for low-income disabled workers in the entertainment industry.
Every Little Blessing Preschool (ELB) is seeking a new Executive Director. Established in 2017, ELB is a family-focused early intervention program for children with Down syndrome and similar developmental delays. As the leader of ELB, you understand what it takes to inspire a team of educators to ensure quality throughout the school. Responsibilities include: managing day-to-day operations, providing support and resources for students and families, and seeking funding opportunities.

ELB currently serves children ages 18 months to six years utilizing a reverse inclusion model. To learn more about the school visit: https://everylittleblessing.org/

Qualifications Required:

- Bachelors degree in education or related field

- Texas Teaching Certification

- Child Care Director License

- Experience with individuals with special needs

- At least 3 years of teaching experience

Experience preferred:

- Masters Degree in education or related field

- Grant writing

- Understanding nuances of Down syndrome

- Comfort with fundraising

- Community outreach

Click apply to submit a letter of interest and resume with the Subject: Every Little Blessing. Salary commensurate with experience and includes healthcare and dental insurance.

ELB is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.

Every Little Blessing is a 501(c)(3) supporting organization of the El Paso Community Foundation.

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Varonis Systems, Inc. Other Existing work authorization required for United States Direct Hire, Full-Time ****** See below Not specified Computers - Other

Unspecified from anywhere

English - Fluent

See below See below English

No cover letter requested g469cNO5dn9qCHAMoulsAH6dxdJIFP / Latpro-3801487 Jun-27-2021 North Carolina, 27560


ENGINEERINGJuniper Networks in Durham, NC seeks Systems Engineer: Collaborate with Product teams to design & develop demonstrations in Juniper Cloud Labs. Conduct webinars for our sales teams to show them how to demonstrate our products & solutions. Telecommuting Allowed. Mail single-sided resume (must reference job code #52877) to: Juniper, Attn.: MS A.4.411, 1133 Innovation Wy., Sunnyvale, CA 94089.

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Digital Media Planner & Buyer sought by Vertical3 Media LLC in the Miami, FL metro area. Oversee all digital & traditional media planning, incl strategy dvlpmt; dvlpmt of digital media plans across all channels & campaigns; plan dvlpmt & creation; optimize different KPIs; maintain exc. relationships w/ publishers, clients, & partners; monitor digital landscape & identify trends/partners for future campaigns; & create business proposals for prospective clients based on their individualized goals. Reqs bach deg in Mktg, Advtg & 12 mos exp in the position sought. Working knowl of campaign mgmt, incl setting up, tracking & optimizing campaigns on digital advtg tools such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads & DSPS, as well as tags &; tracking codes for digital campaign's measurement. Mail resumes to: Juan Jose Nunez, Vertical3 Media LLC, 5901 SW 74th St, Ste 307, Miami, FL 33143 or email jjnunez@vertical3media.com. EOE.

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Financial Aid Counselor

About Tulsa Community College

Tulsa Community College is committed to creating equitable and inclusive work environments to support the success of the full range of our employees.

We believe that employees who feel valued and respected will create policies, programs, practices and services to effectively meet the needs and exceed the expectations of our increasingly diverse student populations.

We encourage candidates to apply who have demonstrated capacity to create inclusive work environments, to work effectively on increasingly diverse teams, and to serve the increasingly diverse college community.

We are committed to hiring and retaining a racially diverse, culturally competent staff at all levels of the organization who not only reflect the demographics of our students, but also continue to deepen their skills and competencies to serve the full range of our community.

Job Summary:

Supervise and lead the campus financial aid office and serve as the chief liaison between financial aid and other campus constituencies. Provide advice and assistance to students and families applying for financial assistance including federal aid, institutional scholarships, and educational awards.

Campus: Southeast

Classification: Staff

Position Type: Full-time

Curricular:

If Faculty, Contract Length:

Job Code Number: 4639F-6-21

Minimum Qualifications:

Bachelor's degree in Higher Education, Educational Leadership, Counseling and Student Personnel or related field.

One year experience working in financial aid.

Experience working with Federal Title IV regulations, policies and procedures related to financial aid.

Personal computer skills.

Ability to perform duties on one's own initiative with minimal supervision.

Ability to interact effectively with a diverse student population and all college service areas.

Preferred Qualifications:

Master's degree in Higher Education, Educational Leadership, Counseling and Student Personnel or related field.

Supervisory experience.

Starting Salary Range: $18.03 - $20.56

Work Schedule:

Monday-Thursday 9:00 am  6:00 pm

Friday 8:00 am  5:00 pm

Posting Date: 06/07/2021

Closing Date:

Open Until Filled: Yes

Special Instructions to Applicants:

Advertised Department: Financial Aid

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Student Success Center Hourly Assistant

Student Success Center

Salary: $12-$14 per hour (Part-time; No Benefits)

The Student Success Center Hourly Assistant reports directly to the Testing Center/Student Success Center Coordinator. The part-time Student Success Center Hourly Assistant provides support for students, faculty, staff and administration in the day to day operations of the Student Success Center to include the Testing Center. This is a part-time hourly position with no benefits. Scheduled to work up to 19.50 hours a week with a flexible work schedule. Some Saturdays maybe required. Applicants must have a minimum of an Associates degree. A Bachelors Degree in Education is preferred. Experience working in a testing center of lab environment is preferred. Proctor tests for students. These include make-up exams, students with accommodations, and students from other schools.

Position is security sensitive and subject to Texas education Code 51.215, which authorizes the employer to obtain criminal history record information.

Closing Date: Open till filled. Review of qualified applicants to begin immediately. Apply Online at URL: https://lamarpa.peopleadmin.com/postings/2424 or

Visit www.lamarpa.edu and click on Jobs@LSCPA to see a complete job posting listing. Include your resume, copies of your transcripts, and three professional references with their contact information. To be considered, all documents that are required must be received. Member The Texas State University SystemTM

An Equal Employment Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer

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Description

At Liberty Mutual, our purpose is to help people embrace today and confidently pursue tomorrow. Thats why we provide an environment focused on openness, inclusion, trust and respect. Here, youll discover our expansive range of roles, and a workplace where we aim to help turn your passion into a rewarding profession. Liberty Mutual has proudly been recognized as a Great Place to Work by Great Place to Work US for the past several years. We were also selected as one of the 100 Best Places to Work in IT on IDGs Insider Pro and Computerworlds 2020 list. For many years running, we have been named by Forbes as one of Americas Best Employers for Women and one of Americas Best Employers for New Graduatesas well as one of Americas Best Employers for Diversity. To learn more about our commitment to diversity and inclusion please visit: https://jobs.libertymutualgroup.com/diversity-inclusion We value your hard work, integrity and commitment to make things better, and we put people first by offering you benefits that support your life and well-being. To learn more about our benefit offerings please visit: https://LMI.co/Benefits Liberty Mutual is an equal opportunity employer. We will not tolerate discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, age, disability, veterans status, pregnancy, genetic information or on any basis prohibited by federal, state or local law. ** Bilingual (Russian & English) Sales Representative MUST live in CONNECTICUT ** $5K Sign On Bonus for new candidates that have an active P&C or active Life license! *To qualify for the Sign-On Bonus, Applicants must be new (not applied in the past 6 months) and apply by 9/1/2021 and start by 11/1/2021 to qualify. Bonus will be scheduled on day 30 for next period pay out date. There is a 1 year payback clause if your employment is terminated prior to your first year anniversary Do you want to join a Fortune 100 company where youll be rewarded for developing new clients, discovering new markets and providing customers with the products they need? As a Liberty Mutual field sales representative, youll enjoy a diverse, supportive environment, along with a competitive compensation program, including base salary, uncapped commissions and a bonus structure, and comprehensive benefits. Field sales representatives also receive ample opportunities for recognition and rewards, including earning awards, bonuses and recognition trips. In this full-time role, youll also stay ahead of the curve with industry-leading, paid sales training and mentorships with successful colleagues. We encourage you to apply and bring your expertise if youre a: Passionate salesperson : Youll use your knowledge and enthusiastic work ethic to generate prospects and sell Auto, Home and Life Insurance products within an assigned territory

Competitive go-getter : Ready to earn uncapped commissions and bonuses? Youll have your chance while engaging in friendly (and rewarding!) competitions with your sales team and the opportunity to win recognition awards

People person : Using your interpersonal skills and market insight, youll identify and cultivate prospective clients, and tailor products and services to meet the needs of existing customers

Relationship builder : Youll play the long game, building strong relationships within local community and organizations, and maintaining open lines of communication for future sales opportunities Experience Previous employment in sales where you have successfully turned prospects into customers

A state insurance licenseor willingness to earn one with Liberty Mutuals training and supportin Property & Casualty, Life, and Accident & Health Skills Effective written, oral communication and presentation skills

Well-developed persuasion and negotiation skills

Great interpersonal skills and a proven ability to build rapport with prospective and existing customers

Effective time management and organizational skills Knowledge Ability to learn insurance coverage and underwriting guidelines

Familiarity with finding, building and growing leads and customer base Education A Bachelors degree or equivalent



Requirements

See job description.








Job Details Level Experienced Job Location Fruitvale Office - Oakland, CA Position Type Full Time Education Level Master's Degree Salary Range $60,000.00 - $72,000.00 Salary/year Description Role: Under the supervision of the Regional Mental Health Programs Director and the Clinical Supervisor, the Clinician has the primary responsibility for the providing direct mental health services to children birth through five years old and their families. Services include: assessment; development of a family centered treatment plan; providing developmentally appropriate mental health treatment; coordination of care with child welfare workers, parents, foster parents, and other collaterals; maintaining a written record of treatment, including initial assessments and treatment plans. Duties and Responsibilities: Direct client care in home or the community for children birth through five years and their families

Be linguistically and culturally competent

Attend appropriate meetings, which include weekly group supervision, staff meetings, trainings and supervision

Obtain consent for treatment from the child welfare worker, where appropriate

Monitor eligibility and obtain authorizations where appropriate.

Through regularly scheduled sessions, provide psychotherapy, intensive clinical case management, and crisis intervention, to assigned children and families. Work with various modalities including individual, dyadic, and family therapy. Conduct assessments, diagnosis, and treatment plans in collaboration with clients, caregivers, and other providers. Provide appropriate mental health services.

Meet yearly productivity requirement

Submit CQRT paperwork to QA team by due date

Have an expected yearly chart approval rate

Meet all EPSDT contractual expectations; including all documentation needs, timeliness of progress notes (within 24 hours of service provision), and meet all programs expectations of effective chart management.

Follow regulatory guidelines, mandated reporting, and program/agency protocols in performing duties

Abide by all provisions of the ABW personnel manual

Perform any other duties as directed. Qualifications MSW, MA, PhD or PsyD from accredited school of social work or psychology. Must be licensed or registered with BBS or BOP.

Bilingual in Spanish required.

Excellent clinical and writing skills.

Direct experience working with diverse racial and ethnic populations

Understanding of basic theoretical and developmental principles of infant, early childhood, and family mental health

Ability to understand psychological assessment reports; psychological assessment experience a plus for psychologist applicants

Must have a car and good driving record

Understand and desire to work with a strength-based mental health approach

Knowledge, understanding, and willingness to work with interdisciplinary approaches and partnerships

Understanding DSM, DC: 0-3R, and treatment plans

Ability to work independently and to work as a member of a team

Excellent organizational, computer and communication skills.

Ability to pass various background checks needed to work with children Work Environment While performing the duties of this job, the employee regularly works in an office setting. Physical Demands 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. While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to use hands and fingers to handle, feel, or operate objects, tools or controls, and reach with hands and arms. The employee is frequently required to stand, talk and hear. Position Type/Expected Hours of Work This is a full-time position. Days and hours of work are Monday through Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. (subject to change, with supervisor approval, to meet the business needs). Travel Local travel to various worksites is required. Work Authorization/Security Clearance Employees must pass a background check and receive TB and health clearances prior to employment. A Better Way is committed to workforce diversity. Qualified applicants will receive full consideration without regard to age, race, color, ethnic background, religion, gender, sexual orientation, HIV-status, national origin or disability. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.




Description

The Dallas ISD Board of Trustees on Jan. 28 adopted three calendars for the next two school years, with the majority of schools set to have a traditional calendar. Click the appropriate calendar below to see your campuses schedule for the 2021-2022 School Year: Base Calendar

Intersession Calendar

School Day Redesign 1

School Day Redesign 2 Provide students with appropriate learning activities and experience designed to help them fulfill their potential for intellectual, emotional, physical, and social growth. Enable students to develop competencies and skills to function successfully in society. Assist and support building principal to ensure on-site administration and execution of the district's educational programs, policies, and regulations and quality instruction for all students in a safe and healthy environment. Develop and implement lesson plans that fulfill requirements of the district's instruction curriculum program and show written evidence of preparation as required.

Prepare lessons that reflect accommodations for differences in student learning styles.

Present subject matter according to guidelines established by Texas Education Agency, Board of Trustee policies, and administrative regulations.

Establish efficient classroom management procedures.

Establish and maintain standards of pupil behavior.

Establish a system of student evaluation within the guidelines prescribed in state law or adopted by the school district.

Continually evaluate and record various aspects of students' progress and report to parents as needed and required.

Teach within the course of study for the subject area at the grade level as prescribed in state law or adopted by the school district.

Understand and plan lessons leading to subject area objectives and assume the responsibility for written lesson plans for substitutes.

Provide a variety of planned learning experiences using a variety of media and methods in order to motivate students and best utilize available time for instruction.

Identify pupil needs and cooperate with other professional staff members in assessing and helping students resolve health, attitude, and learning problems.

Be available for counseling with students and parents before and after school.

Share the responsibility of interpreting the educational programs to the community through such activities as open house and PTA meetings.

Plan and coordinate the work of aides and other paraprofessional and student teachers (when applicable).

Participate cooperatively with the principal to develop the system by which he/she will be evaluated in conformance with the district's uniform guidelines for evaluation and assessment.

Keep accurate records of student information; compile, maintain, and file all reports, records, and other documents required by the school and district.

Regular and punctual attendance at the worksite is required for this position. SUPERVISORY RESPONSIBILITIES: None PHYSICAL DEMANDS: While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to sit; use hands to finger, handle, or feel objects, tools, or controls; and talk or hear. The employee frequently is required to reach with hands and arms. The employee is occasionally required to stand and walk. The employee must routinely lift and/or move up to 10 pounds. Specific vision abilities required by this job include close vision, distance vision, and color vision. WORK ENVIRONMENT: The noise level in the work environment is usually moderate. Travel throughout the district is integral to this job. A remote working environment /alternate work arrangement is not an option for campus-based employees/campus-based positions because regular and punctual attendance at the worksite and performing all duties at the worksite are essential job duties for all campus-based personnel.



Qualifications

The requirements listed below are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required of this job: Bachelor's Degree from an accredited university

Valid Texas teacher certificate with required endorsements for subject and subject level assigned.

Demonstrated general knowledge of curriculum and instruction.

Demonstrated knowledge of various routine tasks, duties, and procedures and the ability to follow specific instructions with little or no previous experience.

Demonstrated flexibility to cope with the challenges of a rapidly changing world.

Demonstrated willingness to remain current with the latest developments in the profession.




Deputy County Attorney: Park County Attorneys office has an opening for a deputy county attorney. We are seeking an attorney to assist with criminal and civil matters with our dynamic professional attorneys and support staff. We offer a competitive salary and benefits.

Deputy County Attorney: Park County Attorneys office has an opening for a deputy county attorney. We are seeking an attorney to assist with criminal and civil matters with our dynamic professional attorneys and support staff. We offer a competitive salary and benefits.

Park County provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability or genetics. In addition to federal law requirements, Park County complies with applicable state and local laws governing nondiscrimination in employment in every location in which the company has facilities. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.

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Videos



Duties



Summary This position is at the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) in the Office of Examination & Insurance (E&I). This position serves as the Critical Infrastructure Division Director. Learn more about this agency



Responsibilities As the Critical Infrastructure Division Director, you will: Provide subject matter expertise in credit union technology critical infrastructure to identify, prevent, respond, and mitigate the growing risks arising from threats and impacts to the nation's credit union and financial services technology infrastructure.

Identify and assess systemic operational risks that could degrade or interrupt the credit union system and lead to a loss of public confidence in the credit union system or national economic security concerns.

Provide direct supervision to Information Systems Officers attached to the Office of Examination & Insurance.

Coordinate and serve as project lead and subject matter expert in the development of examination policy, procedures, and industry guidance associated with technology critical infrastructure protection and cybersecurity.

Collaborate internally and externally to update, maintain, and manage industrywide crisis communications protocols associated with events that could impact public confidence in the credit union system or the broader financial services critical infrastructure.



Travel Required Occasional travel - Once normal business operations resume, travel may be required to attend meetings, conferences, and site visits. Supervisory status Yes Promotion Potential None Job family (Series) 2210 Information Technology Management Similar jobs Directors, Information Technology Systems

Information Technology Specialist (It Specialist)

Information Technology Systems Directors



Requirements



Conditions of Employment You must be a U.S. Citizen.

Suitable adjudication of background/security investigation is required.

A probationary/trial period may be required.

Drug testing is required.

This is an essential continuity position.

A supervisory probationary period may be required.



Qualifications Specialized experience is the experience that has equipped you with the specific knowledge, skills, and abilities to successfully perform the duties of the position, and that is typically in or related to the work of the position to be filled.



All applicants applying for the CU- 15 level must have at least one full year of specialized experience equivalent to the CU/GS- 14 level obtained in the private or public sector.



Specialized experience for this position is defined as experience:



1. Developing, evaluating, and implementing cyber security and critical infrastructure policies as it relates to financial institutions; and

2. Evaluating governance issues; and

3. Evaluating technology controls, threat information and emerging technologies in cybersecurity as it relates to the financial services technology infrastructure; and

4. Providing advice and guidance to a team and senior level officials on critical infrastructure risks and industry practices.



Applicants must also possess IT related experience demonstrating EACH of the four IT Specialist competencies AND one year of specialized experience as described below:



1. Attention to Detail - Is thorough when performing work and conscientious about attending to detail.

2. Customer Service - Works with clients and customers (that is, any individuals who use or receive the services or products that your work unit produces, including the general public, individuals who work in the agency, other agencies, or organizations outside the Government) to assess their needs, provide information or assistance, resolve their problems, or satisfy their expectations; knows about available products and services; is committed to providing quality products and services.

3. Oral Communication - Expresses information (for example, ideas or facts) to individuals or groups effectively, taking into account the audience and nature of the information (for example, technical, sensitive, controversial); makes clear and convincing oral presentations; listens to others, attends to nonverbal cues, and responds appropriately.

4. Problem Solving - Identifies problems; determines accuracy and relevance of information; uses sound judgment to generate and evaluate alternatives, and to make recommendations.



You must meet the qualifications for this position by the closing date of this announcement.

Please note, all experience statements (i.e., duties, specialized experience, or occupational assessment questionnaire) copied from this announcement and pasted into your resume will not be considered as a demonstration of your qualifications for this position.



YOUR RESUME MUST provide specific details as to how your experience meets the specialized experience and support your responses to the online questionnaire as described in the vacancy announcement. When describing your experience in your resume, please be specific. We will not make assumptions regarding your experience. Please ensure that your resume includes the grade (if you are a current or previous federal employee), month, and year that you began and ended for each position held or that position may not be credited toward meeting the specialized experience requirement. Full-time employment will be assumed unless otherwise stated on your resume. Part-time employment will be prorated in crediting experience. Failure to provide details will result in an ineligible rating.



Your resume must also support your responses to the online questionnaire. Failure to provide support may result in a lower rating and/or you may be excluded from consideration. Your latest resume submitted for this vacancy announcement will be used to determine qualifications and supersedes previous submissions.



Education Education is not required for this position nor may it be used to qualify.



Additional information SALARY: Pay will be set within the advertised pay range to align with the selectee's skills and experience and the requirements of the position.



Pay will be set using NCUA's compensation policy. The salary range shown is NCUA's Local Pay Rate (LPR) which includes the locality rate for the Alexandria, Virginia geographical area. Please click here to review all salary ranges based on locality.



EXCEPTION: If you are a current non-supervisory NCUA employee and are selected for reassignment into a supervisory position, you may receive up to a 10% salary increase, not to exceed the National Pay Rate (NPR) of the pay grade. Management will consider your current salary in relation to the duties and responsibilities of the new position.



SELECTIVE SERVICE: If you are a male applicant born after December 31, 1959, you must certify that you have registered with the Selective Service System or are exempt from having to do so under the Selective Service Law. You may register or check the status of your registration by visiting the Selective Service website at: (see application details) .



This position is not in the bargaining unit.



NOTE: Effective January 1, 2010, OPM must authorize any employment offers we make to current or former (within the last 5 years) political Schedule A, Schedule C, or Non-career SES (political) employees in the executive branch. If you are currently, or have been within the last 5 years, a political Schedule A, Schedule C, or Non-career SES employee in the executive branch, you must disclose that to the point of contact listed on this vacancy announcement.



Illegal drug use by individuals working for or on behalf of the federal government, whether on duty or off duty, is contrary to the efficiency of the service and in direct violation of the Controlled Substance Act and the Drug-Free Workplace Act.



Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the NCUA's current posture will not require employees to perform official travel or work onsite at NCUA offices any earlier than August 30, 2021. This date may be extended.



If it becomes necessary for NCUA to request on-site work, NCUA may solicit volunteers for the assignment. Management reserves the right to request employees to perform on-site work in exigent circumstances.



Individuals who must relocate for this position, may be approved or required to begin work temporarily in their current geographic location prior to relocation to the permanent duty station advertised in this vacancy announcement.



NCUA IS A COMPETITIVE SERVICE FEDERAL AGENCY.



NCUA uses E-Verify, a web-based system, to confirm the eligibility of all newly hired employees to work in the United States. Learn more about E-Verify , including your rights and responsibilities.



More than the number of positions listed may be filled through this vacancy announcement Read more



How You Will Be Evaluated You will be evaluated for this job based on how well you meet the qualifications above. First, your application package will be reviewed for completeness (resume, completed assessment questionnaire, and supporting documentation). You will not be considered if you fail to submit all the required documents as outlined in this vacancy announcement.



Second, if you have a complete application package, your resume will be reviewed to determine if you meet the basic qualifications and specialized experience requirements (see "Qualification" section). You must provide specific details in your resume as to how your experience meets the specialized experience.



Third, your resume and supporting documentation may be compared to your responses to the assessment questions. The numerical rating you receive is based on your responses to the questions. If upon review it is determined that your resume and supporting documentation do not support your responses to the questions, your numerical rating may be adjusted and you may be excluded from consideration for this position.



The self-assessment questions have been developed to evaluate your competency in the following areas: Information Systems/Network Security

Manages Human Resources

Oral Communication

Writing



Reference Checks: Reference checks will need to be conducted prior to an offer of employment for the top candidate(s) for this position. The reference checks will need to be conducted with current and former supervisors, if applicable, as a part of NCUA's selection assessment process.



If you are found to be among the top qualified candidates, your application will be referred to the selecting official for employment consideration. To preview the application questionnaire, please click here: (see application details)



Overstating your qualifications and/or experience in your application materials or application questionnaire may result in your removal from consideration. Cheating on the online assessment may also result in your removal from consideration. Read more



Background checks and security clearance

Security clearance Top Secret Drug test required Yes Position sensitivity and risk Special-Sensitive (SS)/High Risk Trust determination process National security



Required Documents To apply for this position, you must provide a complete application package which includes:

1. Resume

2. Other supporting documents: Cover letter, optional

Most recent SF-50 or Notification of Personnel Action showing you are/were in the competitive service and the highest grade or promotion potential held (if applying as a status candidate with current or former Federal Service)

DD-214, SF-15 Form, and VA letter, or certification of expected discharge or release from active duty for veterans for consideration under veteran hiring authorities.

Non-competitive appointment authority documentation, if applicable.

Interagency Career Transition Assistance Program documentation, if applicable (e.g. Certification of Expected Separation, Reduction In Force separation notice, or Notice of Proposed Removal; SF-50 that documents the RIF separation action; and most recent performance appraisal.)

Most recent performance appraisal, optional CURRENT AND FORMER FEDERAL EMPLOYEES:

Current and former federal employees must submit a Notification of Personnel Action, or SF-50, that indicates grade, status, tenure, and the full performance level (FPL) of the position held. Please do not submit an SF-50 for a cash/time off award.



Note : Current permanent NCUA employees are not required to submit a Notification of Personnel Action (SF-50). The status will be confirmed by the Agency.



VETERANS:

If you wish to receive consideration under an applicable Veteran's authority such as VEOA, 30% or more disabled vet, etc., you must submit a copy of your Veteran's documentation including a DD-214 (member 4 copy preferred, however, the documentation provided must contain dates and character of service), along with a VA letter, SF-15 , etc., if applicable. If you are a current active duty service member, please submit an official statement of service from your command.



Note: If you are a current active duty military member who does not have a DD-214 and is claiming preference under the Veterans Opportunity to Work (VOW) Act, you must submit certification from the Armed Forces indicating that you will be discharged or released under honorable conditions from active duty within 120 days from the date on the certification. Certifications must be on letterhead from the appropriate military branch and include the following information: military dates of service and expected discharge or release date, the character of service, military rank, type of discharge, and date when terminal leave will begin. Certifications must be signed by, or by the direction of military members' military personnel offices, unit commanders, or higher headquarters.



CTAP/ICTAP: Federal employees seeking CTAP/ICTAP eligibility must submit proof of their eligibility: Copy of agency notice;

Most recent performance rating; and

SF-50 noting current position, grade level, and duty location or Certification of Expected Separation, Reduction In Force separation notice. Note: To be well-qualified and exercise selection priority for this vacancy, displaced Federal employees must be rated well-qualified or above on the rating criteria for this position. For additional information, click CTAP .



Benefits A career with the U.S. Government provides employees with a comprehensive benefits package. As a federal employee, you and your family will have access to a range of benefits that are designed to make your federal career very rewarding. Opens in a new window Learn more about federal benefits . Review our benefits Eligibility for benefits depends on the type of position you hold and whether your position is full-time, part-time, or intermittent. Contact the hiring agency for more information on the specific benefits offered.



Fair & Transparent The Federal hiring process is setup to be fair and transparent. Please read the following guidance.



Equal Employment Opportunity Policy The United States Government does not discriminate in employment on the basis of race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy and gender identity), national origin, political affiliation, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, genetic information, age, membership in an employee organization, retaliation, parental status, military service, or other non-merit factor. Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) for federal employees & job applicants Read more



Reasonable Accommodation Policy Federal agencies must provide reasonable accommodation to applicants with disabilities where appropriate. Applicants requiring reasonable accommodation for any part of the application process should follow the instructions in the job opportunity announcement. For any part of the remaining hiring process, applicants should contact the hiring agency directly. Determinations on requests for reasonable accommodation will be made on a case-by-case basis. A reasonable accommodation is any change to a job, the work environment, or the way things are usually done that enables an individual with a disability to apply for a job, perform job duties or receive equal access to job benefits. Under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, federal agencies must provide reasonable accommodations when: An applicant with a disability needs an accommodation to have an equal opportunity to apply for a job.

An employee with a disability needs an accommodation to perform the essential job duties or to gain access to the workplace.

An employee with a disability needs an accommodation to receive equal access to benefits, such as details, training, and office-sponsored events. You can request a reasonable accommodation at any time during the application or hiring process or while on the job. Requests are considered on a case-by-case basis. Learn more about disability employment and reasonable accommodations or how to contact an agency. Read more Legal and regulatory guidance Financial suitability

Social security number request

Privacy Act

Signature and false statements

Selective Service

New employee probationary period


Ph.D. student Olivia Kline releases blue orchard bees into a controlled habitat for a research project. Working with undergraduate student Yannik Dwyer, Kine is investigating the effects of various native plant species on the health of native blue orchard bees. Her research advisor is Neelandra Joshi, associate professor of pollinator health, fruit entomology, IPM and pesticide toxicology.
Magnolia, AR (71754)

Today

Mainly clear. Low near 65F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

Mainly clear. Low near 65F. Winds light and variable.
Magnolia, AR (71754)

Today

A few passing clouds, otherwise generally clear. Low around 65F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

A few passing clouds, otherwise generally clear. Low around 65F. Winds light and variable.
On the 16th of June, the third Africa Fintech Festival (AFF) was hosted by Mauritius Africa Fintech Hub (MAFH), an event concept launched by the Africa Fintech Network (AFN) in 2018. With the theme of Fintech, Sustainability, and Innovation  The power trio to fast-forward Africas growth, the Virtual Conference was seen as a watershed in bringing key members of the industry together for good, creating opportunities for all the stakeholders to better understand and dive into the Pan-African Fintech movement happening right now.

The festival saw nearly 1000 registrations from 67 countries across the globe. Leaders, change-makers and innovators in Africa discussed trends, threats, regulations, successes and opportunities throughout the Fintech network. All stakeholders in Fintech and related disciplines, including banks, entrepreneurs, SMEs, universities, financial service providers, IT firms, investors and regulators attended the AFF 2021. The morning sessions were opened by speeches including representatives of the MAFH, AFN, British Government and EDB where a wide range of topics including privacy, blockchain, user behavior, amongst others were discussed.

In this context the traditional panels gave way to a one-on-one live thirty minute interview. Mr. Ian Valentine, Principal Consultant of Huawei Mauritius, was asked his opinions on the Digital Transformation of traditional banks in the region

Can the Banks Survive? Interviewed by Mr. Mark Israel, Founder and CEO of Aetheis Ltd, and former regional CTO for Microsoft, topics ranged from the use of Hybrid Cloud systems, the design of Apps for a Mobile First strategy, and the use cases for Artificial Intelligence. In a statement after the interview, Mr. Valentine summarized The pace of change for Fintech in Africa and the demand for new innovation in the region presents a serious challenge for the traditional Banking Sector. As a new wave of applications, services and service providers enter the market, boosted by decentralized blockchain based technologies, the banks must decide to Surf that wave or Sink.

He continued

I believe this wave of change will be fundamentally good for the banks which choose to transform their ICT architecture and business processes. They can rapidly evolve to address the specific needs of each country and offer new services and products alongside the tradition functions of customer service and local compliance. Banks who embrace these trends and technologies have a unique opportunity to pull ahead of their competitors and grow on a continent-wide basis.

Mr. Michal Szymanski, CEO of Mauritius Africa Fintech Hub stated that,

With Huawei participating in this journey, they brought their copious expertise to the Fintech ecosystem, which is clearly going through an ICT revolution. The financial landscape is shifting, business models are evolving and many organisations are now viewing Fintech as a key driver of future growth. He also added that Huaweis perspective on the future of the traditional banking sector was well received and motivated engagement and discussion. We look forward to even greater knowledge sharing, expertise, and collaborations with Huawei, where together we can accomplish even more in Africa.

The Africa Fintech Festival is a great occasion to highlight Mauritius as a pioneer for the continent, in the Fintech space, and to explore who is doing what, influencing its development.

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The relaxed mandate comes as New Jersey continues to outpace much of the country in vaccinations, with 67% of adults fully vaccinated. Fifty-seven percent of adults nationwide are fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
This will be the 34th year for the annual festival, which was canceled last year due to statewide restrictions on gatherings due to the pandemic. It is billed as the largest free Celtic festival in North America.
PennEast, a consortium of natural gas companies, first proposed the pipeline in 2014. The company ultimately took New Jersey to court to acquire state-controlled land for its project. PennEast argued the commissions greenlighting of its project allowed it to take New Jersey to court and to use eminent domain to acquire state-controlled properties. The Supreme Court agreed.
The man told investigators that Gerlach told him she tried to get the teen into the YMCA, but they would not accept him because he wasnt an adult. The man said that in his past six years living at the homeless encampment, he had been the victim of numerous thefts, and described it as a dangerous place.
Dorney and Reader said that if local police wanted to pad municipal coffers with fines, they would be able to do a more effective job of it with the current equipment, where multiple officers could be hooked up to the same device, stopping driver after driver.
I dont think theres any limitations to what the technology can accomplish here if the board wishes it to be done, said Rob Hodges, an anesthesiologist. I in particular wish to participate in every single meeting but there are days when I cannot come because Im on call, Im in the hospital. ... To get full participation of the citizens, we need to have full participation virtually.
Shapiro in March joined 18 other state attorneys general calling on U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to close the loophole in the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives interpretation of federal gun law that allows people prohibited from having guns to buy 80% receivers, which are gun frames that are 80% complete and can be assembled into working untraceable firearms. The U.S. attorney generals office has since proposed rule changes.
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: kavide (kavide), : bagua

 : Guo Wenguis interference in the election exposed-----"Tongwumen" in-depth investigation

: BBS  (Mon Jun 28 02:54:44 2021, )



On April 28, federal investigators executed a search warrant at the

Manhattan apartment and offices of Rudy Giuliani, Trump's personal lawyer,

seizing cellphones, computers and other electronic equipment.The move is

said to be aimed at furthering the criminal investigation into Mr Giuliani's

involvement in Ukraine.

Giuliani has been implicated in a series of illegal actions in Ukraine, in

violation of the Lobbying Disclosure Act.It follows Revelations that he

interfered in the US presidential election by pressuring Ukrainian officials

to indict Mr Biden and his son Hunter in a corruption case involving

Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company.

While the search warrant is not an explicit allegation of wrongdoing by

Giuliani, it suggests the investigation has entered a new phase, according

to The New York Times.In the reports, the "three hard drives" that allegedly

contained evidence of Mr Hunt's wrongdoing were repeatedly mentioned.

The statement about the "three hard disks" was firstly from the rich exiled

businessman Guo Wengui.In late September, Guo claimed to have explosive

material on Hunter Biden, the son of presidential candidate Joe Biden,

including evidence of secret deals in China and Ukraine and a sex tape with

abuse scenes.

A week before the US election, Guo's GTV and G-News began to spread videos

and photos of Hunter taking drugs and having sex with several women, with

the intention of depicting Biden as a man who deals with money and has no

morals, so as to affect Biden's ability to win votes.

Guo's moves have been interpreted as an attempt to woo former President

Donald Trump and "surrender" to him.He has also worked with Bannon, a former

White House strategic adviser, to recruit "whistleblowers" like Yan to

assist Trump in his new China strategy.Unfortunately, Trump failed to win re

-election in the general election, which made Guo Wengui "lose his wife and

lose his troops".

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is investigating Guo Wengui, a

wealthy Chinese businessman living in exile in the US, about how he financed

his US media activities and how he worked with Bannon, the Wall Street

Journal reported.If Guo is found to have illegally interfered in the U.S.

election, he could be sent to an immigration court to be deported.

According to the legislation passed by the U.S. Congress, illegal voting

interference by an alien in a manner that violates the U.S. Constitution,

state constitutions, and other laws of the United States, and any activity

that threatens the national security or public safety of the United States,

may constitute grounds for deportation by the executive branch.An alien who

is deported may leave the country on his or her own accord, or ICE may force

him or her to leave the country through coercive measures such as arrest,

detention, and transport.



--

 :WWW  mitbbs.com [FROM: 50.]


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International

Australian Deputy PM fined for not wearing mask

Canberra, Jun 29 (IANS) | Publish Date: 6/29/2021 1:31:06 PM IST

Australian Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce has been fined A$200 ($151) for failing to wear a face mask inside a petrol station in New South Wales (NSW) state. Joyce, also the leader of the National Party of Australia, confirmed the incident of breaching coronavirus restrictions,reports Xinhua news agency.

I went into the Caltex service station. I was going to the airport, fuelled the car up with fuel, went in, 30 seconds later, A$200 it cost me, because I didnt wear one of these (masks), he told Sky News Australia on Tuesday. NSW police said they were called to the petrol station by a member of the public and issued the fine to a 54-year-old male after reviewing the security camera footage.

That person was apologetic and cooperated with police being firm and fair, deputy commissioner Gary Worboys told reporters.

Police are rostered 24/7 right across the state and they will take action, and certainly the incident at Armidale is clear evidence that police will investigate and take action. It comes a week after Joyce was returned as the Deputy Prime Minister after a successful leadership challenge against former Nationals leader Michael McCormack.

The governing coalition government in Australia is formed by the Liberal Party and the National Party, with the leader of the later serving as the Deputy Prime Minister.

Joyce previously served as the Deputy Prime Minister from 2016 to 2018 when he resigned after being accused of sexual harassment, an allegation he strongly denied.
Regional

Mnp Govt college teachers to boycott online exams, classes

Correspondent IMPHAL, Jun 29 | Publish Date: 6/29/2021 1:25:29 PM IST

Teachers of government colleges in Manipur on Tuesday reiterated their decision to boycott online exams and classes as the deadline to implement their demands is set to expire.

The college teachers have been pressing the state government to issue orders adopting the 7th UGC Pay and Regulations, 2018 by June 30. The state government had already agreed to adopt the same three months ago.

The threat to boycott the online exam and class boycott stir from the Federation of Government College Teachers Associations (FEGOCTA) Manipur came up after there was no positive response from the state government despite a reminder submitted to the education minister, chief secretary and others concerns on June 21 last.

The decision to boycott online classes and examinations in the government colleges including those in Dhanamajuri University in the event of failure on the part of the state government to issue the order was reaffirmed by an emergency general body meeting of the federation on June 28, FEGOCTA stated in a statement.

The FEGOCTA insisted that the state government must issue the orders adopting the 7th UGC Pay and Regulations, 2018 as per the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed between the state government and FEGOCTA on March 6, 2021.

On June 21, 2021 a reminder letter was submitted to the state education minister, chief secretary and other concerns to issue the orders by June 30, it added.

The GBM insisted that the higher education department headed by the state education minister must take the sole responsibility in case of disturbance on ongoing online classes and examinations from July 1, 2021.

The orders should be issued latest by June 30, 2021 as 7th UGC Pay cash payment is to be given from July, 2021. The GBM also condemned the failure of the government to implement the national policy of UGC in Manipur since November 2, 2017.

Such failure has been despite the 5th FEGOCTA agitations and 4th cabinet approvals since 2019, the statement asserted.

The government college teachers in Manipur have deep sense of demoralization and mental harassment due to discrimination, repeated betrayals and delaying tactics, the teachers body alleged.

As citizens of a democratic country, the college teachers have the moral, democratic and constitutional right to demand and protests against the injustice and discrimination, FEGOCTA stated.

The other states of India including BJP ruled states of Assam, Arunachal Pradesh and Tripura had already implemented national policy of UGC before the first Covid-19 pandemic, the statement claimed.
State

NSF demands fee waiver in schools; urges govt to implement no work, no pay policy

DIMAPUR, JUN 29 (NPN) | Publish Date: 6/29/2021 1:14:19 PM IST

Naga Students Federation (NSF) has urged the state government to issue an official order regarding fee waiver by all schools. This should be issued in line with the successive court orders, NSF added.

In a representation to school education principal director Shanavas C, NSF president Kegwayhun Tep and general secretary Siipuni Ng Philo said that the lockdown in the wake of Covid-19 pandemic caused untold hardships to the entire populace and the education sector had been impacted severely, threatening to throw the future of students into jeopardy.

It feared that a majority section of Naga society would be left with no resources at their disposal to meet their day-to-day requirements. NSF, however, said it was convinced that the future of students and society could not be compromised despite the raging pandemic and that every possible effort should be taken by all stakeholders in a bid to salvage the situation.

During a threadbare discussion with the principal director, NSF also alleging that most teachers employed by the State government were neglecting their duties even when online classes were on. It therefore, urged the government to strictly implement the no work, no pay policy.

NSF said that the PD assured them that steps in the right direction would be taken by the department and the government at the earliest.

Meanwhile, NSF appealed to all educated youth, particularly in rural areas where lack of access to technology have largely hampered teaching-learning process, to play a proactive role in imparting education to the student community affected by the ongoing shutdown of educational institutions. It also appealed to parents of students who are economically sound to pay off the school fees of their wards on time so that the continuous cycle of teaching-learning process remained unaffected.

Further, the federation extended its sincerest appreciation towards the Catholic community of Nagaland and all other educational institutions for having come forward to help the needy students in the form of fee waiver during the previous academic year.
Every storm accompanied by lightning is dangerous, but it can be mainly hazardous in a busy airport environment. Amid all the movement and technology, both staff and passengers are prone to danger.

Airport Lightning Risk Index

A meteorologist with Vaisala, Chris Vagasky, told AccuWeather National Reporter Bill Wadell: "Lightning heats up the atmosphere to hotter than the sun's surface and it packs thousands of times more electricity than the outlets on the wall that you would plug your phone or computer into."

A weather data measurement firm, Vaisala, has developed an Airport Lightning Risk Index that can compute how much every airport in the United States is affected by lightning. The index takes the number of departure and landings at an airport and multiplies that by the density of lightning in that region.

Also Read: Electrifying! This Unusual Lightning Looks Like a Dinosaur

The Top Five Airports

The top five airports on the index are all located in only two states, one of which has long been referred to as "the lightning capital of America."

The following five U.S. airports have both so much lightning and so much flight activity, According to Vaisala.

5. Dallas Love Field

4. Miami International Airport

3. George Bush Intercontinental Airport (Houston)

2. Orlando International Airport

1. Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport is the airport in America that is most likely to experience lightning strikes, according to Vaisala's list.

Of the top 10 airports at risk of lightning, seven are situated in Florida and Texas, which isn't surprising, again, bearing in mind Florida has long been regarded as the lightning capital of America, although a new report reveals Oklahoma is edging out the Sunshine State coming to lightning density per square kilometer.

However, Vagasky told AccuWeather not to anticipate a clear lightning capital to be named in the near future. Vagasky said whether one is going to beat the other and just be the lightning king for the remaining period of time, you can't actually say that. Vagasky thinks there's going to be too much fluctuation between the two. And they're going to be fighting it out.

On the other edge of the list, most of the airports less likely to experience lightning activity are in California. It's also worth bearing in mind America is not the top lightning capital all over the globe, as that distinction goes to Singapore.

Lightning

When it comes to natural occurrences, lightning has likely been the most observed throughout the ages. It has been studied, worshiped, and feared.

Lightning is an outcome of static electricity and has been noticed in intense forest fires, volcanic eruptions, heavy snowstorms, in large hurricanes, surface nuclear detonations, and even in the exhaust of large turbine engines.

However, it is most usually seen in thunderstorms. Ben Franklin usually gets the credit for making a conclusion that lightning is based on the theory of static electricity.

Related Article: It's Alive!: Lightning Played an Important Role in Creating Life on Earth

For more news, updates about lightning and similar topics don't forget to follow Nature World News!
On the 25th of June, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) made an announcement that their Facts Sheets for Pfizer/BioNTech and the Moderna Covid-19 vaccines now include info concerning "myocarditis" and "pericarditis."

Pericarditis and Myocarditis

Including such words on the sheets was not actually a surprise. After all, two days before, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) had discovered a "likely association" between the vaccines and infrequent occurrences of pericarditis and myocarditis among younger people, as per Jemima McEvoy writing for Forbes.

So now the FDA Fact Sheets say that the two mRNA vaccines may bring "high risks of pericarditis and myocarditis, especially following the second dose." It's essential to keep in mind that pericarditis and myocarditis after the Covid-19 vaccines are still just like barely cooked steak: very scarce.

As the scientist wrote back on the 13th of June for Forbes, so far, there have been less 300 verified cases of pericarditis and myocarditis among more than 150 million fully vaccinated people in the United States. of course, Inflammation is rarely a good thing. Generally, you don't wish that one of your body parts will become inflamed as in "today would be very much better if my butt cheeks were inflamed."

Also Read: COVID-19 Vaccine Efficacy vs. Effectiveness: What's the Difference?

Heart Inlammation After Covid-19 Vaccination

Nevertheless, to date, most of these infrequent cases of heart inlammation after Covid-19 vaccination have not been serious.

Timothy Wong, MD, MS, Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) and Director of the UPMC Heart and Vascular Institute Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Center explained: "Most frequently there is some severe chest pain for some days and then symptoms will rapidly taper off. Some of the patients have been recommended anti-inflammatory medications, some have just made use of over-the-counter ones, and some have not used any medications to recover."

Wong also highlighted that in the cases that he has witnessed, saying even though there is inflammation, the functioning of the heart has remained OK. Measurements of the ability of the heart to pump blood like the ejection fraction were in the usual ranges.

FDA Warnings

In addition to chest pain, other likely symptoms of pericarditis and myocarditis include unusual heart rhythms or shortness of breath. Wong advised that If you notice any such symptoms after taking the Covid-19 vaccine inform your doctor.

It may not be the outcome of the vaccine and other things may be going on, so it is crucial to "be aware of one's self" and to have your doctor to examine your situation. Presently, the FDA warnings cover just the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna Covid-19 mRNA vaccines. This doesn't automatically imply that such concerns are unique to the mRNA vaccines.

Wong accentuated that by comparison, "there have been relatively small number doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine administered."

Related Article: Capillary Leak Syndrome, Blood Clots Linked to Life-Threatening Side Effects of AstraZeneca Vaccine

For more news, updates about the side effects of Covid-19 vaccine and similar topics don't forget to follow Nature World News!
Much of western Canada, which is known for its sweater weather, is sweating due to the heat wave.

Record Breaking Canadian Heat

On Sunday, Canada set a new national heat record when the temperature in a tiny hamlet in British Columbia hit almost 116 degrees Fahrenheit, shattering an 84-year-old record by over 3 degrees, and dangerously hot weather is predicted to last for many more days.

"This is a huge shock to a Canadian - this seems like Las Vegas or India, not Vancouver," Chris Johnson, a criminal lawyer, remarked on Monday as temperatures inside his home reached 90 degrees Fahrenheit.

Possible Climate Impact

Experts warn that while tying any single weather event to climate change takes rigorous attribution study, heat waves are becoming more common, longer-lasting, and hazardous throughout the planet. The early date, severity, and duration of this storm might all be attributed to rising global temperatures, according to David Phillips, a senior climatologist at Environment Canada, a government organization.

Mr. Phillips spoke to climate change and the well-documented impacts of human behavior such as carbon emissions on the globe, saying, "It's our grandparents' heat waves, but it's different now because of the human component."

Related Article: US Braces For 'Apocalyptic' Summer Due to Record-Breaking Drought and Heat Waves



Public Health Concerns

Mr. Phillips emphasized the hazards of extending the heat overnight to the public's health. He explained, "We know those evening temperatures are where individuals die from heat waves."

The sweltering temperatures have imposed additional public health burdens at a time when many Canadians are finally enjoying the summer due to the relaxation of coronavirus restrictions and the opening of new restaurant patios, beaches, and parks. The authorities now have to deal with both the loosened restrictions and keeping citizens calm.

Canadians aren't the only ones who are hot. The same high-pressure system that has baked the area has also brought record-breaking temperatures to the northwest, including 112 degrees in Portland, Oregon, on Sunday.

Agriculture

Emily Jubenvill, co-owner, and manager of Enderberry Farm, a farm in the northern Okanagan Valley that grows organic veggies, said she and her husband planned to avoid the heat by going to the fields 3 a.m. Tuesday to harvest vegetables. "Things are maturing faster under the stress of the heat, so we aren't able to harvest as much," she explained, warning that the flavor of crops such as lettuce may become quite bitter if subjected to high temperatures.

According to Environment Canada, Canada's previous national heat record was 45 degrees Celsius, or 113 degrees Fahrenheit. Still, on Sunday, Lytton, a hamlet of fewer than 300 people approximately three hours east of Vancouver, hit 46.6 degrees Celsius, or 115.9 degrees Fahrenheit.

Breaking Local Records

Under the high-pressure heat dome, other communities in southern British Columbia, such as Victoria, Kamloops, and Kelowna, are smashing local records, with temperatures expected to reach well over 100 degrees through Wednesday.

Previously, on July 5, 1937, Midale and Yellow Grass, both in rural Saskatchewan, held the Canadian record for the hottest temperature, at 113 degrees.

According to Mr. Phillips, the climatologist, western Canada's "desert heat" contrasts with the steamy "jungle heat" seen in eastern portions of the nation, similar to temperatures and humidity experienced in Florida or the Gulf of Mexico.

Heat Waves in Canada

Heat waves have increased from two per year in the 1960s to six per year by 2010, according to the 2018 National Climate Assessment, a scientific assessment produced by 13 government agencies in the United States. Heat wave season has also grown 45 days longer since the 1960s, according to the research.

Also Read: Megadrought 2021: The Worst Drought Suffered by the US West in 1,200 Years

For more climate and weather updates, don't forget to follow Nature World News!


Rainstorm brought about severe flooding, a bus accident, and landslides in Hong Kong. Road accident led to the death of one person, flights were delayed, and court hearings, schools, and vaccination drives were suspended briefly after the Hong Kong weather department issued the first "black rainstorm" warning alert of the year 2021 on Monday.

Black Rainstorm Weather Warning

The pounding rain caused a fatal accident in the Sheung Shui town in the north district of Hong Kong, claiming the life of the bus driver. The driver lost control of the car and crashed it into the tree because the roads were slippery after the rainfall, police said. No passenger was in the vehicle during the accident.

Heavy torrential rains lashed portions of Hong Kong, prompting landslides in many regions which brought about traffic and suspension of activities.

Hong Kong Stock Exchange made an announcement that it will stop its trading for the morning session on Monday until the highest "black rainstorm" weather warning is called off. Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited (HKEX) said in a statement that all its main products and derivatives markets (and also Stock Connect trading) will begin trading in the afternoon after the downgrading of the warning alert.

Also Read:Lake Charles Slammed: Flash Flooding Emergencies Declared in Louisiana, Texas

Rainfall in Hong Kong

HKEX said: "Trading will start on the first half hour at least two hours following the cancellation of the Black Rainstorm Warning." In Hong Kong, a black rainstorm warning is the greatest alert of three levels of rainstorm warnings after red and amber.

The Hong Kong observatory issued the warning after over 70 millimetres of rainfall was recorded in many regions, and rainfall was beyond 150 millimetres in several districts of Hong Kong. Visuals revealed thick muddy water rushing out of hillside onto South Lantau Road close to Upper Cheung Sha Beach and flooding the roads following a landslide.

Traffic was blocked for hours prior to the halting of the water spurt. The excess rain also led to the seeping of water into houses and offices. The black rainstorm, which stayed in effect for less than three hours, was downgraded at 11.05 am to a lower level of warning of red before being substituted with the lowest level of amber.

Cancellation of the Amber Warning

The amber warning was also cancelled at 12:30 pm, reported Radio Television Hong Kong, public broadcasting service.The HKEX said assuming the black rainstorm warning continues till 12 noon, all the trading sessions would be discontinued for the day.

But trading will begin at 1:30 pm local time, following the updated forecast. Over 200 millimetres of rain lashed on portions of Lantau Island, Lamma Island and the western part of Hong Kong while other places received not less than 70 millimetres of rainfall.

At 8am on Monday, a landslide was reported in the largest Lantau Island in Hong Kong, blocking traffic. Four other landslides were reported in Cheung Chau Island, according to South China Morning Post.

Related Article: Record Rainfall Causes River Levels to Rise, Flood Risk in Northeast China

For more news, updates about black rainstorm and similar topics don't forget to follow Nature World News!


On Saturday (June 26) morning, a great white shark ( 6- to 8-foot-long) bit the right leg of a man, 35, body-boarding off Grey Whale Cove State Beach in San Mateo County, California.

The Incident

Though the bite was "serious," the man was able to find his way to shore, Bay Area news site SFist reported. There, a fisherman whose name is Thomas Masotta heard the injured man screaming for help; Masotta formed a tourniquet with straps from his backpack and then called the officials, Tracking Sharks reported.

According to the informational website TrackingSharks.com, this is the number 39 shark attack bite in 2021 worldwide and the 20th in the United States. It's the only known report of a great white shark bite in California; most of the U.S. attacks took place in Florida (14) and Hawaii (five).

The five attacks that were deadly happened outside of the U.S. This great white shark appears to have bitten down on the victim's leg before letting go of its grip, something a shark might do when it notices the human is not its choice of prey, Live Science previously reported. Paramedics took the bitten man to the trauma unit of San Francisco General Hospital, TrackingSharks reported.

Also Read: Ocean's Extremely Hot Causing Great White Sharks to Find Other Habitat

Great White Shark

Though Cal Fire made a tweet that the man was initially in "serious condition," he was discharged from the hospital that same day, said TrackingSharks. The shark that bit the man this weekend was possibly from a distinctive population of great whites that inhabit off the U.S. West Coast.

Though great white sharks are seen across the world, they are more concentrated off South Africa, the North Atlantic, Australia/New Zealand, and Northeastern Pacific, according to an ocean conservation organization, Oceana.

The West Coast great whites live in a secluded population that assembles off the coast of California and Guadalupe Island, which is about 240 kilometers (150 miles) off the west coast of Baja California, Mexico, said Oceana. The great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias), is also called the white pointer, white shark, or simply great white.

Pacific Gyre

As per Oceana, these animals spend half of the year around the California coast and the remaining half migrating far offshore close to what is referred to as the Pacific Gyre (likely to feed or reproduce) and at times to the Hawaiian archipelago.

Though such attacks are frightening, they are uncommon and losing your life because of one is even less common.

In fact, during an average human's lifetime, their chances of death from a shark attack are 1 in 3.75 million, as per the University of Florida's International Shark Attack File (IFAS). Compare that with a lifetime chances of death from a car accident, which is 1 in 84, IFAS said.

Related Article: Great Whites in California Now Reaching Healthier Numbers

For more news, updates about great white sharks and similar topics don't forget to follow Nature World News!


It's hotter than it's ever been before in the Pacific Northwest and you'll have to pardon the locals for not being completely ready over the weekend.

Temperature Exceeds 95 Degrees Fahrenheit

In a location where most households aren't equipped with air conditioning, temperatures exceeded 95 degrees Fahrenheit, then 100, then 105 F in what has turn into the most threatening heat wave in Washington history.

One week before Independence Day, nature's untimely barbecue celebration stuck the Northwest straight into the coals. In Seattle, residents had never felt heat like the kind which enveloped the city Sunday. Emerald City's temperatures topped out at 104 degrees F, a new all-time high for a place that's more usually thought of for its rain than its heat.

Even at its coolest, the temperature never reduced below 73 F, a record-high that is minimum for Seattle. On Monday, temperatures in the city surpassed this new all-time high, soaring to 108 F. In Everson, Washington, situated around 100 miles north of Seattle, the heat proved so intense that roads and sidewalks buckled.

Also Read: Record-Breaking and Dangerous Heatwave Will Hit US West Coast in Long-Standing Drought

Residents Prone to Danger

State officers shared pictures of the cracked roadways, which made the streets dangerous and caused detours. In Yakima, situated in the southeastern portion of the state, other Twitter users shared pictures of sidewalks buckling under the heat and sticking out of the ground.

A professor at the University of Washington, Dr. Kristie Ebi, told AccuWeather National Reporter Bill Wadell that she was particularly worried for high-risk residents of the region, like the elderly.

"We're well below 50% of individuals who have access to air conditioning," she said. "I was somewhat surprised a couple of years ago when we experienced a heat wave...I was the only one who owned an air conditioning, no one else did."

Seattle's prior record high of 103 F was set on July 29, 2009, before Sunday and Monday's rotisserie. The same day on which high-temperature records were also set in Shelton and Olympia. These two cities also experienced all-time records fall on Sunday, too, with Olympia getting to 105 and Shelton maxing out at 107, as per the National Weather Service.

Traders Affected by the Harsh Temperature

The harsh heat ushered residents indoors and shut down businesses as officials encouraged people to stay out of the sun's wrath.

Kevin Darras, of IAMDARRAS, deals on custom-made T-shirts at Seattle's well-known Pike Place Market , he told Wadell on Sunday that the weather made a direct impact on his sales.

Darras said: "The crowds are here, but they're dispersing early. So we have to get here, get set up, get comfortable, and put effort to make some sales," It's clearly affecting sales - probably cut in half. Still fortunate to be down here and enjoying the weather. Even though it's hot, we're staying cool."

Related Article: US Braces For 'Apocalyptic' Summer Due to Record-Breaking Drought and Heat Waves

For more news, updates about temperature and similar topics don't forget to follow Nature World News!
PRESIDENT Emmerson Mnangagwa yesterday imposed a Level 4 lockdown with immediate effect for the next two weeks, which will see the suspension of intercity movement, except for distribution of medication.

This follows a surge in COVID-19 cases across the country since the onset of the third wave three weeks ago.

Prior to the pronouncement of the lockdown, many areas, especially in small cities declared hotspots across the country, had already been placed under localised lockdowns as a measure to control the virus.

In a statement yesterday, Mnangagwa reduced business operating working hours, with industry ordered to decongest workplaces to 40% and all companies directed to observe the World Health Organisation COVID-19 guidelines.

Following a recent surge in COVID-19 cases, and subsequent to the localised lockdown measures introduced in places such as Kwekwe, Kariba and Chinhoyi, we are now stepping up our efforts by introducing the following additional enhanced Level 4 measures, Mnangagwa said.

Level 4 enhanced lockdown measures which take immediate effect will run for the duration of two weeks, and will be reviewed thereafter.

On Monday, Zimbabwe recorded 842 new cases and 13 deaths, with an average of 727 cases per day for the past week.

As of June 28, Zimbabwe had recorded 47 284 confirmed cases, including 37 949 recoveries and 1 749 deaths. By yesterday afternoon, a total of 764 248 people had been vaccinated against COVID-19.

National recovery rate dropped to 80% from 94% recorded at the beginning of this month. As of June 27, Zimbabwe had 353 hospitalised cases.

Mnangagwa, however, said all commercial transport would remain operational to allow the economy to continue running with all the people obliged to strictly adhere to COVID-19 protocols.

He also said travellers coming from countries with Alpha and Delta COVID-19 variants would be quarantined and tested at their own expense.

The Delta variant has caused a lot of human carnage suffering in India, where close to 5 000 deaths have been recorded in a day in one of Asias most populous countries.

The variant spread to other countries last week, and United States President Joe Biden expressed fear that the variant would cause untold deaths in the worlds most powerful nation.

Those deported back to Zimbabwe will be subject to self-quarantine, or will be quarantined in identified places. Travellers with fake COVID-19 documents will attract custodial sentences, Mnangagwa said.

He said the COVID-19 vaccination blitz would be rolled out in the border towns and cities, tobacco auction floors, Grain Marketing Board depots, cotton marketing depots, major construction sites, peoples markets such as Renkini in Bulawayo and Mbare in Harare and all hotspots.

Ministers and parliamentarians will be dispatched to their constituencies to disseminate information, especially on the vaccination programme, the President said.

As we continue to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, I call upon the whole nation to continue observing the WHO protocols, as well as to embrace the free vaccination programme that is availed by the government, to protect all our people.

The new development comes after neighbouring South Africa, which was on Level 2, moved back to Level 4 lockdown on Monday as the country struggles against the third wave of COVID-19 infections. Newsday


Fast-rising comedian and actress, Madam Boss (real name Tarisai Cleopatra Chikocho-Munetsiwa) who is about to hit the one million mark on Facebook, says she will continue working hard in order to grow her brand.

Madam Boss who has 992 000 followers on Facebook recently made her debut TV appearance when she appeared on SABC1s UBettina Wethu last week. She is also set to appear on a Nigerian film that she featured in some months back as well as a Netflix film, Bad Bishop which is expected to be shot in South Africa in September this year.

Her acting stints seem to be paying off for her as she continues to scoop endorsement deals and the RwandAir brand ambassador deal is the latest. In April she was appointed an Ingwebu Breweries brand ambassador.

Speaking through her manager, Fanwell Masunungure, Madam Boss who rose to fame with her housemaid skits, said she is grateful to the Lord for making her a successful woman.

Featuring on one of the most-watched programmes on SABC was a very emotional moment for me, looking at how far Ive come. Im grateful to God, my family and fans as these are the people whove never let me down even when the going gets tough, said Madam Boss.

She paid homage to Bekezela Becky Dube, a lady who runs Becky Casting Agency in South Africa for elevating her. Becky has been very instrumental in the promotion of Madam Boss acting career as they have been clinching several roles for her on international TV productions.

The Bad Bishop role is a huge opportunity for me and Id like to give a huge thanks to Bekezela Dube who is the founder of Becky Casting Agency. This lady gave me a chance to cross borders and kept on encouraging me whenever the going was tough.

Id like to thank her as she has boosted my brand in so many ways, she said.

The Madam Boss brand that relies heavily on social media, is one that has interestingly stayed clear of controversy despite efforts in some circles to drag the brand into the mud. This, Madam Boss said, was due to her management team that always ensures the brand keeps a clean record.

My team of managers, my husband Mhofela and Fanwell Masunungure have worked so hard to keep the brand clean and safe from scandals. This has made the brand one that attracts corporates with the latest being RwandAir. This is a first of its kind as there has never been any influencer in the history of Zimbabwe to sign such a deal with an airline. Chronicle
FORMER PetroZim Line (Pvt) Limited general manager Catherine Katsande was last year wrongly convicted of fraud, the High Court has ruled deprecating the initiation of criminal proceedings in cases having the elements of a civil dispute in order to get favourable results.

Katsande was in August last year jailed for an effective 60 months after being wrongfully convicted of fraudulently awarding to a local company, tenders for the supply of equipment worth US$2 million during her tenure.

But on appeal, a two-judge bench of the High Court comprising Justices Pisirayi Kwenda and Benjamin Chikowero absolved Katsande of any criminal conduct after the prosecution conceded that the matter was purely a civil case that had been given criminal contours.

Allowing the appeal by Katsande, Justice Kwenda said a civil dispute arising out of a contractual breach could not be converted in a criminal offence to get favourable results.

The concession by the State is proper, said Justice Kwenda after the prosecution told the court that they were in agreement with Katsandes legal counsel that remedies were available for any breach of contract.

In this regard, criminal law has no place here, particularly that she misrepresented that Kaltred had no capacity to deliver.

Security was provided and if at some stage complainant felt the performance was due, should have approached the civil court for redress. The appeal is allowed and conviction be and is hereby set aside.

The case exposed a growing tendency in business circles to convert their civil disputes into criminal.

But courts have always frowned upon this practice and condemned the practice of misleading the courts and manipulating the nature of dispute in clear attempt to exploit the judicial proceedings for settling scores.

Katsande (55), was convicted of six counts of fraud and sentenced to 90 months imprisonment before 30 months of the jail term was conditionally suspended.

The trial magistrate also fined the company that was awarded the tenders, Keltrade (Pvt) Limited $53 000 for the same offences.

The court heard that that PetroZim Line (Pvt) Limited was incorporated in 1988 by Lonmin and the then National Oil Company of Zimbabwe (Noczim) to transport fuel from Mutare through the Feruka pipeline to Msasa in Harare.

According to the companys tender procedures, goods and services had to be supplied before payment was processed. In exceptional instances, the board finance committee had to first approve payments.

The court heard that on June 24, 2013 Katsande authorised a payment of US$159 925 after Keltrade had submitted a quotation indicating that it had capacity to supply a gearbox for 10 gate valves.

The money was paid before Keltrade supplied the goods.

On September 24 of the same year, she also authorised payment of US$610 640 to Keltrade after it indicated that it had capacity to supply two skid pumps.

Again on December 9, 2013, Katsande advanced US$363 860 after Keltrade presented a quotation indicating that it was able to supply two ethanol centrifugal pumps.

The money was paid before the supply of the pumps. In February 2015, Katsande also authorised payment of US$91 082 after Keltrade gave her a quotation for the supply of drag resistant spares.

In the same month, Katsande is said to have given permission to payments of various amounts to Keltrade without following laid down procedures.

In March 2015, Katsande was instructed to purchase goods from MIS Solutions, but she disregarded the recommendation and gave the tender to Keltrade. Herald
DISGRUNTLED nurses working at public hospitals have joined hands with teachers to register their displeasure over poor working conditions in a campaign dubbed Burn The Fraud.

The virtual Burn The Fraud campaign was launched by the Amalgamated Rural Teachers Union of Zimbabwe (Artuz) last week, where teachers burnt their payslips in protest over low salaries against a high cost of living.

The protest comes at a time when the poverty datum line has been pegged at $40 000, almost double what most civil servants, including teachers and nurses, are earning per month.

Zimbabwe Nurses Association president Enock Dongo yesterday told NewsDay that nurses had joined the protest.

Nurses are not well remunerated. Salaries are far below our expectations. As we speak, we are in poverty, and struggling to report for work and make a good living as a working class. It is unfortunate that government has made its workers paupers, he said.

This has contributed to poor service delivery in our health delivery systems at our hospitals because when someone is demotivated, you dont expect them to perform to their maximum expectations, and the people who will suffer are the patients.

In 2020, nurses and senior doctors crippled public hospitals when they embarked on a nationwide strike demanding United States dollar-denominated salaries in the midst of the devastating COVID-19 pandemic.

Artuz president Obert Masaraure added: Nurses and other civil servants have expressed a keen interest to join the (Burn The Fraud) campaign. We are re-designing our organising strategy to accommodate all progressive civil servants to achieve more impact.

He said teachers, who used to get between US$520 and US$550 in 2018 were now earning a measly equivalent of US$150 per month.

The payslips, therefore, represent fraud. Last week, Public Service minister Paul Mavima ruled out the possibility of bringing back US dollar salaries. Newsday
This plan includes the planting of 20 trees for a life-affirming monument in a destination park made for all New Yorkers to enjoy, in the shadow of the symbol of New Yorks resilience and openness, Bennett said. The location was chosen in an open process by using input from the local community and 23 leaders representing hundreds of thousands of essential workers.
Todays resumption of in-person arraignments is yet another facet in our continuing goal of full resumption of normalized court operations in both the city and state, said Lucian Chalfen, the Office of Court Administrations chief spokesman.
We are pleased to reach an amicable resolution of this legacy matter, read a Fox statement released Tuesday. Fox News Media has already been in full compliance across the board, but cooperated with the New York City Commission on Human Rights to continue enacting extensive preventive measures against all forms of discrimination and harassment.
A 23-year-old counter worker tried to usher him out, but the barefoot man started throwing haymakers and wrestling with one worker before slashing a second worker with a small knife he held in his fist, video shows.
The driver was zipping north in the Utica Ave. bus lane in a 2018 BMW 440i sedan when he struck a BMW SUV whose driver was turning left onto Farragut Road in East Flatbush about 7:30 p.m. on Monday, cops said.
I was outside. They were arguing with my friends, making real deadly threats, and I was getting scared. So I posted, and told him, What do you want to do? Zaman said, according to court documents. He started walking toward me and violated my personal space, so what I did, I let off four shots on him with a revolver.
Lloyd, a father of two, went in and out of the burning building to pull people out. He ran out of oxygen, became disoriented and called for help, but the flames were so intense that his colleagues couldnt find him.
I was sitting right there. There were nine or 10 shots. The blue Mercedes with the open door is his, said one witness, who wouldnt give his name. He was faceup, lying in the street dead. He was shot many times.
At this time, due to some additional legal matters at hand, Im not able to give a full formal statement at this time. But very briefly though, I do want to give my condolences to the Floyd family, Chauvin said. Theres gonna be some other information in the future that would be of interest, and uh, I hope that things will give you some peace of mind. Thank you.
Any chance I can take you to dinner? Calk asked Scaramucci on Jan. 9, 2017, after flying into New York from Chicago for a meeting with the Tiger Team on Jan 10. 2017. The Tiger Team vetted candidates for jobs in Trumps cabinet during the transition.
Chico, who was described in the release as the victims biological mother, was detained for questioning the same day and later charged with the senseless killings. The suspect was being held on $2 million bail pending a court hearing scheduled for Wednesday, jail records show.
According to The Associated Press, Shannon Keeler has long claimed she was sexually assaulted by Ian Cleary, 28, in her dorm room when the two were enrolled at Gettysburg College. Keeler went to police hours later and was examined at a hospital but prosecutors later told her that it was to prosecute cases when the victim had been drinking and the rape kit was later lost.
Despite the similarities between the two 12-story towers  both of which were built in the early 1980s by developer Nathan Reiber of Nattel Construction  many of Weinstocks neighbors say their condo is better maintained and does not have the structural problems the south building had.
Nick Doefler, public information officer for the Mutual Aid Agency in Coal City, told NBC Chicago that no injuries had been reported and the evacuations were ordered because of the excessive smoke.
This Fourth of July, many Americans are going to celebrate with family and friends not just our independence but also emerging freedom from the pandemic, said Krispy Kreme marketing chief Dave Skena. Were making these gatherings the sweetest parties of the summer with patriotic doughnuts and a fireworks-worthy deal.
The night before the accident, Costlows wife, Vera, had shown up at Steves door around 2 in the morning as white as a ghost and told him that Costlow was home naked on the floor and screaming that he was Jesus and that they are going to crucify me, according to prosecutors. Vera also told Steve that Costlow had called her the devil and that he was hearing voices, and said she feared for her own safety.
A huge part of the 12-story Champlain Towers South crashed to the ground early Thursday morning in a shocking scene that was caught on video. The cause of the partial collapse is under investigation, but documents suggest the waterfront building had serious structural damage and was in urgent need of repairs.
Its heartbreaking to sit in court and watch a victim, who has been sexually abused by someone who is supposed to be caring for her, testify on the stand, Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren said. Thats why Im so proud of the work that our prosecutors do to hold these offenders accountable, stand up for the victims, and send these predators away for life.
This is the one that will determine the future of New York City and the strength of our recovery, the mayor said Tuesday. It has to be a recovery for all.
The initial results did not take into account absentee ballots  more than 130,000 have been returned, according to the Board of Elections  and they did not include the elimination tables that determine the winner in the citys new ranked-choice system.
U.S. Central Command said last week that its well past 50% done packing up Bagram, and the rest is going fast. American officials have said the entire pullout of U.S. troops will most likely be completely finished by July 4. The Afghan military will then take over Bagram as part of its continuing fight against the Taliban  and against what many in the country fear will be a new eruption of chaos.
The comment appeared to be an attempt by Biden to assure Israelis  whose government is in flux following the recent ouster of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu  that he can play hardball with Iran and wont accept its proxy wars in the region even as he seeks to revive the 2015 nuclear deal that Donald Trump scrapped as president.
Wed just go up to a local bed-and-breakfast by ourselves, to make sure we had a romantic time to just get away and hang out with each other, the president said. Im not complaining. Its part of the deal. But this life prevents it.
The case involves people who had been previously deported and, when detained after re-entering the United States illegally, claimed that they would be persecuted or tortured if sent back. One man is a citizen of El Salvador who said he was immediately threatened by a gang after being deported from the U.S.
The decision is based on the fundamental principle that nobody should be discriminated against for determining for themselves who they are and how they identify in the most essential aspects of their being, Angelita Baeyens, VP of international advocacy and litigation for RKF Human Rights, said in a statement. That such a foundational principle is reaffirmed by the Court on the anniversary of Vickys death makes it part of her legacy to us all.
In the years since the Picasso was taken, experts and officials were convinced it never left Greece because it was impossible to sell or go on display. The 1939 portrait was given to the National Gallery by the Spanish master as a tribute to the Greek peoples resistance to Nazi Germany during World War II and had a personalized inscription.
Speaking to local media, Montero said that, These types of laws are the ones that make history and those that can really change a country, because they are the ones that allow many people to live happily, without fear, without guilt and with all their rights guaranteed, without any discrimination.
This approach is a trap for the United States, but one Biden can readily avoid. He can capitalize on the opportune coincidence of new governments in both Israel and Iran to implement a pause in the re-entry negotiations for extended consultations with Israel and Arab allies. He could use, say, six months to gauge whether there is any change for the better  or the worse  in Irans international performance, not just in nuclear matters, but in its support for terrorism and conventional military belligerence across the Middle East.
New Yorkers elected David Dinkins our citys first African-American mayor in 1989 hoping his promise to ease racial tensions would reduce the violence they seemed to provoke. During his inaugural address, Dinkins pledged to be the toughest mayor on crime this city has ever seen. Yet, in the eyes of many New Yorkers, whites in particular, his policies did not match his rhetoric. An inadequate response to riots in Crown Heights and other events diminished his credibility. As part of his effort to repair the damage, he appointed NYPD veteran Raymond Kelly police commissioner, who years later would be the chief proponent of the Bloomberg administrations unconstitutional stop-and-frisk regime. Even though crime began to drop while Dinkins was still in office, as more cops began to take to the streets, his weak reputation on public safety was a major reason he lost his bid for a second term.
No one  I mean no one  who said they supported the president and voted for him twice, who dismissed Trumps nakedly racist and divisive rhetoric and policies, who defended his lies and lying, who just this January said, No, I have no second thoughts in doing what I did in supporting him, is in any position to help recover the partys image and integrity.
But her work extended beyond Sparks tearjerkers. She was an executive producer on The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants in 2005 and returned for its sequel in 2008. In 2010, she was a producer behind Ramona and Beezus when the Beverly Cleary adaptation hit screens.
While I am not behind the closed doors of this very layered & personal yet public conversation  all I can do is share from my heart on what Ive heard, read and seen in the media, the letter went on. The conviction and desperation of this plea for freedom leads me to believe that this person I once knew has been living without compassion or decency from those in control. To a woman who has worked under conditions and pressure unimaginable to most, I promise you she deserves all of the freedom possible to live her happiest life. My heart goes out to Britney. She deserves all the TRUE love and support in the world.
Leakes said this was the first time she has spoken out about her husbands current health battle. Im sure hell be home in about a week or so. He had to have a surgery.
He was grateful  very grateful  to be on General Hospital and have that job for so many years, his son said. He went to work with no ego. He just wanted to show up, do the best work he could and have fun.
Shortly before the finals at the South Point hotel-casino in Las Vegas, Ernandez revealed on Instagram that she had designed her own gown in honor of Pride month, and all of those who dont get a chance to spread their colors.
Man, there are a bunch of you clam diggers out there in the 407  enough to inspire consecutive columns! And since Im keen on them myself  I slurped my first raw clam years before I ever tried an oyster, shucked fresh on a boat off Long Islands North Shore  I, too, am eager to see if this scares up a few clam bars we didnt know about.
We have structural engineers that are constantly keeping lasers on the pile and on the remainder of the building thats still standing, he said. Every time we lift a piece with the crane, they monitor to make sure that theres no effect somewhere else on the pile that could jeopardize our members.
Since 1972, Floridas no-fault law has required drivers to buy personal injury protection policies, commonly known as PIP. Those PIP policies, which provide up to $10,000 in coverage, can go toward medical, disability and funeral expenses, and can be used whether or not the other driver has insurance.
Even if a vaccine requirement was in place, a cruise line like Royal Caribbean, expects to sail with at least 10% children under the age of 12, and therefore could not apply for the vaccine alternative from the CDC. Celebrity Cruises, though, caters to more adults in general, so it was able to go that route.
Tripoli, Libya (PANA) - Libyan Prime Minister of the Government of National Accord Abdelhamid Al-Dbaiba Monday discussed during talks with high-level Moroccan officials "Libyan-Moroccan relations and ways to strengthen fraternal ties between the two brotherly peoples"
The group is expanding its North American operations

( ) announced the further expansion of its North American operations with the acquisition of Cali Holdings Inc. for US$76.1mln (55.1mln) in cash.

Cali is a flooring distributor with organic annual growth of 17% for the past five years via its online B2C customer acquisition model, data-driven analytics, a consultative sales team and direct delivery capability, alongside B2B channels.

The acquisition of Cali will be immediately earnings-accretive, the UK flooring group said.

For the 12 months ended 30 April, Cali generated unaudited total revenues of US$171.6mln (124.3mln) with underlying earnings (EBITDA) of US$13.8mln (10.0mln).

It also had US$27.8ml (20.1mln) of net debt, which was repaid on completion.

Victoria said the integration of Cali with its existing business will expand US distribution operations, which currently makes US$33mln of yearly sales. The US flooring market is worth US$29bn.

The acquisition also gives Victoria access to the intellectual property and online management experience of Cali, which it will leverage to partner with its key retailers to speed up growth in its existing UK, European, and Australasian markets.

Victoria has now invested a little over 160mln in the current financial year to add approximately 27mln of EBITDA to the group, said executive chairman Geoff Wilding in a release.

We continue to have substantial amounts of capital to deploy and are in active discussions with additional high-quality opportunities to grow our business. Therefore, shareholders can expect further acquisitions."

Analysts at house broker Peel Hunt said the price tag looks very attractive and was helped by the vendor needing to complete quickly.

The addition of Cali should provide a strong platform in the US for further acquisitions, and also brings digital capabilities that can be incorporated elsewhere in the group, they noted.

Shares rose 4% to 1,036p on Wednesday at the opening bell.
A look at the major movers on the London market on Tuesday

( ) has linked up with UBS Global Wealth Management for its newly launched Emerging Market Sustainable Finance Fund.

The news has lifted shares in the currency and derivatives manager by 4.08% to 102p.

The company said: "This represents a new collaboration... as both managers seek to provide innovation in sustainable investments via exposure to emerging market local currencies...

"The fund aims for an attractive, reliable return, with the additional benefit of daily liquidity. Fund size at launch will be approximately US$750mln."

2.45pm: boosted by talks over licence dispute

PLC ( ) has gained ground after some progress towards settling a dispute in Mozambique.

The company is at odds with the country's government over the ownership of a mining licence, concession 4623C, and unless it is settled, it plans to refer the matter to the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes.

But it has now held a virtual meeting with the new title holder of the licence, TZM Resources S.A., to tell the business it could lose its investment in the licence depending on the outcome of the dispute.

While noting it was a dispute between Pathfinder and the state, the two sides agreed to keep a dialogue going and to explore alternative solutions to resolve the issue.

Pathfinder said these alternatives included TZM retaining the licence and compensating Pathfinder for its loss.

Pathfinder chief executive Peter Taylor said: "We believe the opportunity to resolve this matter and the consequences of failing to do so are clear to the Government of Mozambique and to TZM. Whilst we reserve our position with respect to the treaty claim, constructive dialogue with TZM is a positive development and we will continue to engage with them."

Pathfinder shares have put on 9.59% to 0.79p.

12.53pm: Tasty shares on the menu after its restaurants benefit from pent up demand

( ) is living up to its name after a positive update.

Shares in the restaurant group, whose brands include Wildwood and dim t, have climbed a tasty 5% to 6.3p.

It said 49 of its 54 sites are now reopened after lockdown, with the six week period to 27 June showing strong like for like growth compared to the same period in pre-pandemic 2019.

It said: "Trading has benefitted from significant pent-up demand, and we are encouraged by the initial strength of our overall trading performance despite the restaurants having restricted capacity due to social distancing.

"The bard believes that, as a result of international travel restrictions, increased disposable income and a general strong desire to go out, trade will remain robust throughout the summer months."

Takeaway and delivery sales performed well during the most recent lockdown and throughout the first half, despite the restaurant re-opening.

It is taking measures to combat a number of issues faced by the sector, not least supply chain disruption, recruitment problems, wage inflation and the reintroduction of business rates.

On rents it has agreed reductions with landlords on more than 80% of its estate and is continuing to negotiate with the remaining landlords and other creditors to settle any outstanding debts.

11.25am: Lamprell slumps on proposed US$150mln fundraising amid liquidity problems

Oil and gas services group ( ) has lost a quarter of its value after it said it needed to raise up to US$150mln by the end of the third quarter.

Otherwise it warned it might not be able to meet its contractual requirements and in that case "a material uncertainty exists in respect of the company's going concern position."

It is in talks with banks to borrow US$90mln and plans a short term fundraising depending market conditions and the outcome of the negotiations. But if the bank talks fail - and while approval is expected it points out there is no certainty of success - it will need to raise equity for the full amount.

Meanwhile it is deferring payments to creditors to preserve liquidity.

It had net cash of US$112mln at the end of the year but this has fallen sharply during the course of 2021, leaving it short of funds to complete its current projects and invest in the business. In particular it needs funding for two International Maritime Industries rigs being built in Saudi Arabia, which will reach their peak working capital requirements in the second half of the current year.

The company has been making strategic moves to increase its business in renewables, and in its twice delayed results it said revenues had risen 30% and its net loss fallen from US$183.5mln to US$53.4mln.

But news of the liquidity problems has seen Lamprell slump 24.89% or 6.9p to 51p.

10.18am: Appreciate goes into reverse after falling profits and slow start to the new year

It may be too early to think of Christmas for most of us who are probably still struggling with how to manage this summer.

But gift voucher specialist ( ) has little choice.

And the signs are not good, with its customers planning to spend last year's unused Christmas vouchers rather than taking out new savings plans, meaning that the company is expecting a worse performance than previously forecast.

It said: " As stated in our year-end trading update on 29 April 2021, the Christmas Savings' order book has been held back by COVID19 restrictions impacting facetoface agent activity during the crucial renewal and recruitment period, combined with higher levels of unspent paper vouchers (up by 6.4mln compared to last year) due to shopping restrictions, which customers appear to intend to use towards Christmas 2021, rather than starting a new savings plan

"Whilst initiatives to recruit Christmas savings' customers continue, the order book is now predicted to be around 14% down following the continued COVID-19 uncertainty, having quoted around 11% lower in April."

Overall it said trading in the first 12 weeks of the current financial year had been slower than anticipated and continued to be impacted by the pandemic, with customer buying and spending patterns taking time to return to normal levels.

Billings were higher than the same period last year, but that was when lockdown hit businesses hard. Compared to 2019, they were down 8.6%.

The news came as Appreciate reported a fall in full year profits from 7.7mln to 1.3mln after costs including redundancies and stock impairments.

So Appreciate's shares have failed to live up to their name, falling 13.17% or 5.2p to 34.3p.

9.11am: Gold mining group glitters after it buys out partner in South Korea

( ) is flying high after it took full control of the Gubong and Kochang gold mines in South Korea.

It is buying out the 50% owned by Southern Gold by issuing up to 200mln shares at 3.6p each. The total price being paid is US$9.945mln.

An initial 50mln shares have been given to Southern, but Bluebird can elect to pay US$7.5mln in cash or partly in cash to settle the outstanding amount if that is considered more advantageous.

Bluebird said it expected the value of the gold projects to increase significantly as further progress is made towards gold production, notwithstanding the current higher gold price.

Chief executive Colin Patterson said: "I am pleased that we have finally waded through the lengthy legal structure and wording of the various documents and delighted that at a pre-deal market capitalization of 13mln the Company has just doubled the assets of the business for a cost of approximately 7mln.

"Now that all ownership issues have been resolved and funding is in place the BMV team can move on with construction; although COVID-19 restrictions will slow down our efforts we do have plans to start construction preparatory tasks within the next couple of months."

Bluebird shares have soared 24.24% to 4.1p.

8.26am: Avacta says its lateral flow test can detect Delta variant better than rivals

( ) is in demand after it said a study showed its lateral flow test can detect the Delta variant which is fast becoming a major strain of the COVID-19 virus.

The company said that its AffiDX antigen lateral flow test outperformed two similar tests that are commercially available in Europe, albeit in a small sample size.

The clinical data for Avacta's test showed 100% sensitivity for identifying infectious individuals, while one of the other tests detected half the positive cases and the other none.

Avacta chief executive Dr Alastair Smith, said: "[The Delta variant] is spreading rapidly on a global scale and therefore the ability of the test to detect this variant is paramount to our commercial roll-out.

"In comparison with other lateral flow tests on the market, Avacta's rapid antigen test demonstrates better clinical performance...

"This excellent performance and ease of nasal sampling, coupled with the fact that the AffiDX test has been developed in the UK, is based on UK technology and is manufactured in the UK are huge selling points for customers in Europe."

Avacta shares have added 5.75% or 11.9p to 185.9p.

Elsewhere PLC, which makes components and systems for the energy, medical and industrial sectors, has climbed 7.12% or 28.5p to 428.5p after its Stainless Metalcraft division received planning permission for a new training school at its Chatteris site in Cambridgeshire. Construction work on the site is due to begin imminently.

The centre, which will be funded through a 3.16mln grant from the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority, will provide training across a range of vocational subjects for between 80 and 130 apprentices a year.
Metal Tiger is interested in 40.79mln Southern Gold shares, representing about 19.1% of the companys issued share capital, and 7.28mln two-year A$0.18 warrants

( ) said Southern Gold, in which it holds a 19.1% stake, has agreed on a share swap deal with Bluebird Merchant Ventures (BMV).

Southern Gold is to exchange its 50% joint venture interests in the Gubong and Kochang projects in exchange for up to 200mln shares in BMV at a deemed issue price of US$0.05 a share.

At current exchange rates, Southern Golds stake will be worth roughly A$13.2mln, which Southern Golds managing director, Simon Mitchell, pointedly noted is more than double the companys enterprise value (market capitalisation adjusted for debt).
's ( ) chairman Andrew Bell joins Proactive London's Katie Pilbeam to discuss beginning drilling programme at its 80%-owned Luanshimba copper-cobalt project in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The programme is for an initial 2,000 metres of reverse circulation drilling, in 20 or more holes of 60-100 metres, and may be extended.
's ( ) Paul Haywood joins Proactive London's Katie Pilbeam after spudding the WR-B1 well at the West Rustavi field in the Republic of Georgia.

Haywood explains that the well is being drilled to target the West Rustavi Middle Eocene reservoir and will include an 800 metre horizontal section.

It is intended as a production well with a target of 2.1mln barrels of recoverable oil and gas resources. He says this all marks a 'really exciting time' as the firm's first new well based on 3D seismic data captured in 2019.
The exchange has blocked the ability for UK customers to make withdrawals using bank cards and directly into bank accounts, leaving them with few options to convert their crypto into fiat cash

UK customers using the Binance crypto exchange have had their ability to make cash withdrawals suspended following the platform's ban by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) on Monday.

Overnight, Binance disabled withdrawals for UK customers using bank cards after previously suspending the ability to make withdrawals directly into bank accounts.

The suspension of card withdrawals also follows a decision by the Faster Payments network, which rapidly processes money transfers, to suspend Binance payments on Monday night.

While the FCAs ban does not prevent UK Binance customers from buying and selling crypto, as digital currencies are currently unregulated, the suspension of bank and card payments leaves them with few options to withdraw their crypto funds as fiat cash.

The exchange will also be required from Wednesday to warn UK users on its website and app that it is not authorised to operate in the country, which is unlikely to increase new investors to join.

The payment suspensions came as the FCA said on Monday that Binance cannot conduct any "regulated activity" in the UK.

The FCA has also issued a warning about its website, Binance.com, and adverts promising high returns on crypto-based investments.

Britains action follows action by other regulators against the firm. Japan issued a warning to consumers three days ago over Binance, while authorities in the US and Germany had both expressed concerns recently.

The UK has also taken previous actions to bring the sector in line, with all UK-based crypto firms having to comply with Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorist Financing laws and register with the FCA in order to operate legally since January 10.

Based in the Cayman Islands, Binance is the worlds largest crypto exchange, with around 1.1 trillion worth of transactions processed each year.

In early afternoon trading on Tuesday, Bitcoin was up 0.5% in the last 24 hours at US$34,940.
Marvels primary focus for the remainder of the field season is to complete resource growth drilling ahead of the upgraded JORC resource, which is expected towards the end of the September quarter.

The company has concluded 2,100 metres of a planned 3,000 metre diamond drilling program with results pending.

s ( ) (FRA:GR2) multi-element soil geochemistry and ground magnetics programs have highlighted several drill-ready targets at the Tabakorole Gold Project joint venture in southern Mali.

Around 4,267 soil samples and 5,300-line kilometres of high-resolution ground magnetics have been collected as part of an ongoing regional exploration program.

The targets exhibit a similar geochemical signature to the Tabakorole deposit, being anomalous in gold, arsenic and tungsten.

All soil samples were subjected to fire assay for gold and an ultra-low detection 48-element analysis to establish the pathfinder element anomalism in the broader Tabakorole structural corridor.

The project is held under two separate joint ventures - the ( ) JV (MVL 80% interest) and the ( ) plc JV (MVL currently 51%).

Results reinforce prospectivity

Speaking to the results, managing director Phil Hoskins said: We already have a large and growing resource at Tabakorole, expected to exceed 1 million ounces when upgraded, following this seasons drilling.

We recognised, however, that the continued growth of the project would come from additional gold discoveries, an outcome we were confident of achieving, with the project being located in a prospective structural setting proximal to the Bannifin Shear Zone.

These soil results reinforce that prospectivity, delineating numerous targets with strong coincident multi-element anomalism across the 392 square kilometre landholding, including several Tabakorole 'lookalike' signatures.

The high-resolution ground magnetics provides the structural data to deliver robust targets and increased confidence in making new discoveries.

Targets within five regional trends

Mineralised pulp samples returned from recent Tabakorole drill programs were also analysed using a portable XRF to determine the deposit signature.

The soil geochemistry outlined more than 40 discrete targets exhibiting multi-element anomalism within five regional trends:

The Groot Trend - these targets are within the same structural trend as Tabakorole;

Agard Trend - these targets sit on the southern boundary of the Tabakorole structural corridor;

The Astro Trend - this is a continuation of the Asgard trend, however, the main anomaly appears to represent an instrusive body, which is anomalous in tungsten and tellurium;

The Wakanda Trend - this trend sits on the northern margin of a very large granite batholith and targets are anomalous in arsenic, which supports tungsten and tellurium; and

Several targets have been found within close proximity to the Tabakorole resource, exhibiting a similar signature.

Next steps

Marvel Gold expects to have completed around 9,000 metres of RC or diamond drilling by August 2021, aimed at growing the resource past 1 million ounces.

To date, the company has concluded 2,100 metres of a planned 3,000-metre diamond drilling program with results pending.

Targets generated from the soil geochemistry and geophysics will be followed up with mapping and rock chip geochemistry where outcrop is encountered.

Structural data from the high-resolution ground magnetics will also be used to prioritise targets for drilling, anticipated to begin in Q4 2021.

Marvels primary focus for the remainder of the field season is to complete resource growth drilling ahead of the upgraded JORC resource, which is expected towards the end of Q3 2021.
The company's definitive feasibility study is on track for release in the September quarter of 2021.

Culverts on the Abujar site access road under construction.

( ) has completed the process plant layout as part of its rapid progress towards development and production at Abujar Gold Project in central west Cote dIvoire, which is set to be West Africas next gold mine.

The African gold explorer has engaged Primero Group, a wholly-owned subsidiary of ASX-listed NRW Holdings Limited ( ), to undertake the engineering design and procurement for the mine.

Targeting first gold in 2022

Tiettos managing director Dr Caigen Wang said the company had achieved very good progress on three parallel fronts.

He said: The DFS is on track for completion in September for a potentially significant increase in open pit reserves based on an imminent new mineral resource estimate update, early stage mine development, engineering design and procurement are well advanced and diamond drilling for a new 50,000 metre drill campaign is ongoing.

All of these areas will give great news flow for the weeks and months ahead while we target delivering the first gold pour at the Abujar gold mine in Q4 2022.

Development highlights

Perth-based electrical engineering company, ECG, has been constructing the 90kv grid power extension design and tender of long lead items.

Construction of a 22-kilometre site access road linking the national highway to the Abujar processing plant site is also progressing well.

Three-quarters of the overall 22-kilometre road has been constructed, leaving only one quarter to be built in the next two months.

Tiettos site team recently hosted representatives from more than a dozen mining contractos, bidding for the Abujar open cut mining services contract.

The companys definitive feasibility study is on track for release in the September quarter of 2021.

Tietto expects strong news flow to continue for the weeks and months ahead.
Besides having some highly prospective projects in Western Australia, Sipa also owns Aelikongo Nickel-Copper project in Uganda, which is shaping as an important recent nickel sulphide discovery.

Sipa Resources Limited ( ) (FRA:SPO) is ramping up activities across the companys Western Australian project portfolio and will shortly begin a second drilling program at the Murchison Gold Project.

Murchison Gold Project

Sipas Murchison Project covers about 470 square kilometres of prospective greenstone lithologies close to the mining centre of Meekatharra.

Earlier in March this year, Sipa completed its first drill program at Murchison and will shortly start a second program, with on-ground preparation currently underway.

The upcoming ~3,500 metres aircore program will concentrate on existing mineralised trends on E51/1888 identified in historical drilling, in areas that were not able to be accessed in Sipas program earlier this year due to wet conditions.

Contractors have been confirmed, clearing of access tracks is underway and drilling is expected to commence in early July.

The company also completed the acquisition of three tenements from ( ) and all the three tenements acquired are now fully granted, enabling groundwork to be planned.

Paterson North Project

Sipa is the manager and operator of the Paterson North Project and is progressing the project in partnership with Rio Tinto Exploration.

The company recently completed a major heritage survey in preparation for geophysical surveys and it cleared the access tracks required for a large gradient array IP (induced polarisation) survey which is scheduled to start in early July.

Sipa will combine results from the IP survey with existing target areas identified in previous airborne EM (electromagnetic) surveys to generate drill targets for future drilling programs.

Barbwire Terrace Project

Barbwire Terrace Base Metals Project involves an innovative joint venture with petroleum explorer and operator Buru Energy Limited ( ).

Sipa has already executed e Heritage agreements relating to the Barbwire Terrace Project tenements thus paving the way for the grant of the tenements which is expected in early July.

The planning underway for heritage surveys ahead of gravity surveys and drilling.

Warralong Project

The Warralong Project is prospective for intrusion hosted gold in the north Pilbara region in a look-alike structural setting to recent discoveries in the district.

The company has executed heritage and access agreements, and the grant of the tenements is expected within the next month.

Upon grant, the relevant clearances will be obtained for drilling that has already been planned.

Wolfe Basin

Both tenements in Wolfe Basin have now been granted and detailed mapping of the target horizon across the project area will shortly be undertaken.

Mapping will focus on key elements of basin architecture that may have influenced the location of mineralisation.

Mapping will be followed up with a dipole-dipole IP survey scheduled for July ahead of additional drilling on existing targets, as well as any additional targets identified in the upcoming work.

At Wolfe Basin, the first drill program intersected base metals up to 2.9% lead and 0.5% copper with extensive areas remaining to be tested along more than 40 kilometres long prospective horizon.
Southern Gold subsidiary International Gold Private Ltd will receive up to 200 million BMV shares in exchange for the Gubong and Kochang joint ventures.

The deal will see Southern Gold hold an approximate 30% interest in BMV once all shares are issued.

( ) (FRA:UH4) has finally reached an agreement with ( ) to offload its Gubong and Kochang joint venture projects in the Republic of Korea.

Southern Golds wholly-owned Singaporean subsidiary, International Gold Private Ltd (IGPL), will receive up to 200 million shares in BMV, and BMV will secure full ownership of the Gubong and Kochang projects.

It brings to an end a period of uncertainty surrounding the two projects, which previously had been half-owned by IGPL and BMV respectively.

BMV elected to acquire the 50% it did not own in November last year, but the window to purchase lapsed and the parties have been exploring alternative arrangements since.

"Very valuable equity interest"

Southern Gold managing director Simon Mitchell said: We have effectively agreed to a share swap deal where we will exchange our subsidiarys 50% interest in the two (Kochang and Gubong) joint ventures for an approximate 30% interest in BMV once all shares are issued.

The value of this position will be more easily ascertained by investors, given BMVs listing on the LSE, with a current deal value of approximately A$13.2 million at current exchange rates.

In other words, the value of the shareholding in BMV will constitute more than 200% of our A$5.9 million enterprise value given our March 31, 2021, cash balance of A$9 million and market capitalisation of A$14.9 million.

The BMV shareholding will be a very valuable equity interest and I expect it to significantly increase in value as BMV advances the Kochang and Gubong projects towards their stated near-term objective of gold and silver production.

As a new and significant shareholder of BMV, our current intent is not to sell small parcels of shares into the market, which would be detrimental to the share price, but to allow the company to grow and advance into its next stage of development.

Deal details

BMV originally elected to acquire the 50% interests held by IGPL when IGPL did not support BMVs proposed call to mine each project in mid-2020.

Now, BMV and IGPL have agreed to settle the matter, which will see BMV will either issue to IGPL 200 million BMV shares at US$0.05/share or issue at between 50 million and 200 million BMV shares and pay IGPL US$0.05 per BMV share it does not issue, for a deal value of US$10,000,000.

The transaction will be completed in two tranches with the first tranche being the issue of 50 million BMV shares, within BMVs headroom capacity, on the date when IGPL will transfer its joint venture interests to BMV and the second tranche being the payment of US$7.5 million or the issue of 150 million BMV shares or partly one and partly the other at BMVs election.

These BMV shares would be issued through an approved prospectus offering, a process expected to take approximately four months but for which up to six months has been allowed.

From the completion date, BMV will be free to advance both gold development projects on a sole cost and risk basis, while Southern Gold also retains the right to nominate an appointee to the BMV board if IGPLs retained shareholding in BMV is in excess of 15%.

Southern Gold said it did not expect it would exercise this right.

The agreement allows BMV up to six months to complete the second tranche of the transaction.

If it fails to do so then US$7.5 million plus interest must be paid by BMV to IGPL within a further six months; this liability cannot be satisfied by the issue of BMV shares.

If BMVs prospectus is not approved within the six month period through no fault of BMV, then it can still settle the US$7.5 million plus interest liability for shares, in the most likely scenario within 30 days of the approval of BMVs prospectus.

If BMV is at fault in failing to complete the transaction within the initial six months or fails, regardless of cause, to make the payment required to be made within the additional six month period, if it applies, then IGPLs security will become enforceable.

- Daniel Paproth
The company believes the new principal investigators clinical experience in psychedelic-assisted therapies will help develop its evidence-based and scalable clinical services for patients with major mental health concerns.

Emyria Limited ( ) has appointed consultant psychiatrist Dr Eli Kotler as principal investigator for its upcoming clinical trial on MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for treatment-resistant Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), known as EMDMA-001.

The appointment complements Emyrias growing team of consultant psychiatrist advisors such as retired naval veteran and consultant psychiatrist, Dr Richard Magtengaard.

Moreover, the appointment builds Emyrias clinical experience in psychedelic-assisted therapies as it seeks to develop evidence-based and scalable clinical services for patients with major mental health concerns in partnership with Mind Medicine Australia.

Has shown great promise

Emyrias managing director Michael Winlo said: Were delighted that Dr Eli Kotler will be working with our clinical team as Principal Investigator on this pivotal trial.

MDMA-assisted therapy has shown great promise for difficult to treat Post Traumatic Stress Disorder patients.

However, these treatments are resource-intensive requiring fit-for-purpose facilities as well as specially-trained psychotherapists and clinicians.

Pivotal clinical studies

Winlo added: Along with our partner Mind Medicine Australia, Emyria has been working on building both the clinical delivery and data capture infrastructure required to support and improve these

treatments so they can become safe, accredited, cost-effective, accessible and evidence-based options for those patients who need them most.

We hope this will be the first of many, pivotal clinical studies helping evaluate the safety and

efficacy of known and novel psychedelic-assisted therapies targeting a range of major mental health concerns.

Trial to start in third quarter 2021

Dr Kotler is an experienced consultant psychiatrist specialising in trauma and addictions and has extensive research experience as a principal and co-investigator with novel neuropsychiatric therapeutics.

As Principal Investigator, Dr Kotler will assume responsibility for the conduct and delivery of the EMDMA-001 clinical trial which is anticipated to start in the third quarter of 2021.

Emyria intends to develop other, scalable psychedelic-assisted services with Mind Medicine Australia and is scoping opportunities to licence and evaluate novel compounds utilising Emyrias unique data-backed care delivery and drug development model.
Elixinol intended to acquire CannaCare but a review of the German cannabis market has seen both parties enter a Termination and Withdrawal Agreement.

The company is pleased with the progress of its US and Australian operations.

( ) (OTCQB:ELLXF) (FRA:E8M) and German-based CBD business CannaCare Health GmbH have mutually agreed to terminate a share purchase agreement following a changing German cannabis market that revealed financial concerns.

Elixinol will be reimbursed 360,000 by CannaCare to cover costs incurred to date; the acquisition was first announced in mid-March this year.

The two parties have entered a Termination and Withdrawal Agreement, effective immediately, meaning Elixinol will not pay CannaCare the 3 million it agreed to as part of the acquisition deal.

Changing market dynamics

Elixinol global CEO Oliver Horn said the companys due diligence raised concerns around the rapidly changing German market dynamics.

CannaCare is a leading brand in the German retail market with a strong distribution footprint and is well-positioned for growth, however, over the recent months the German market has become increasingly competitive, and the additional investment required to achieve profitable growth exceeds our current risk appetite.

We have therefore taken the difficult decision in the best interest of our shareholders to discontinue the transaction process.

CannaCare will now be able to realise opportunities that would not have been aligned with our strategy.

Weve built very strong relationships with the CannaCare Health team and will continue to evaluate joint opportunities in the future as they arise.

As well as being no longer be required to pay CannaCare 3 million, CannaCares Frank Otto will not join Elixinols board, shares will not be exchanged and CannaCares management team will not join Elixinol.

Global strategy remains on track

Horn said that the termination would allow the company to focus on its other arms, as it looks for further partnership opportunities.

Separately, we are pleased with the progress in our US and Australian operations following significant transformation efforts and we are continuing to foster the building momentum, he said.

We also benefit from a healthy balance sheet and are evaluating other growth opportunities in our existing markets.

Elixinol will now focus on building its e-commerce capabilities to ensure a direct consumer relationship has been rewarded, with e-commerce accounting for 33% of total group revenues in financial year 2020, up from 26% in FY19.

This trend has continued into the first quarter of FY21, whereby e-commerce accounted for 40% of total group revenues.

Last month, Elixinol Wellness chair Helen Wiseman said the company was firmly focused on revenue growth and improving profitability outlined the companys strategy.

Our key markets for FY2021 will continue to be the US and Europe for Elixinol, and Australia for Hemp Food Australia (HFA).

In the US, we have adjusted the business and now have a strong team that is well-positioned to drive growth, while being ready to take advantage of any opportunities presented as a result of the market consolidation.
The company, through VSPC, plans to sell LFP and LMFP into under-serviced but rapidly growing markets outside of China.

LIT is well served by the VSPC's management team, who between them, have developed some of the most advanced cathode active materials

( ) ( ) (FRA:3MW) has strengthened the management team of its wholly-owned VSPC Ltd, with the appointment of mining and energy specialist Merrill Gray to the board.

Gray brings to the board 30 years of experience in the mining and energy sectors, including production, project development and corporate management.

Having spent the past 15 years involved in innovative energy technologies, leading hydrogen, renewables and circular-economy (bioenergy) companies, she will now guide VSPCs definitive feasibility study and global expansion plans.

VSPC develops advanced materials for lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), including lithium ferro phosphate (LFP) and lithium manganese ferro phosphate (LMFP) cathode powders.

Heralding the next stage of commercial development

Lithium Australia managing director Adrian Griffin said: "The company welcomes Merrill Gray to the team.

Her appointment, along with that of Phil Thick (a non-executive director of Lithium Australia) and Stuart Tarrant (CFO of Lithium Australia), heralds the next stage of the company's commercial development.

We aim to hone our edge as an ethical and sustainable developer of high-performance materials for rapidly developing battery markets globally."

Move to cobalt- and nickel-free batteries

Lithium Australia is well served by the VSPC's management team, who between them, have developed some of the most advanced cathode active materials available and expanded VSPCs intellectual property and patent portfolio.

Mike Vaisey (previously VSPC's manager of battery materials) is handing over the reins to Gray but will continue in a consulting capacity, helping to maximise VSPC's intellectual property value.

The need to reduce reliance on critical battery materials in the interests of safety, cost and longevity means LFP has become the fastest-growing sector of the battery market.

In March 2021, the production of LFP batteries in China eclipsed that of all nickel/cobalt variants, including NCM (nickel-cobalt-manganese) and NCA (nickel-cobalt-aluminium).

VSPC is well placed to offer an alternative supply chain for LFP, a market currently dominated by Chinese producers (only 2% of LFP is produced outside China).

LIT, through VSPC, plans to sell LFP and LMFP into under-serviced but rapidly growing markets outside of China.

VSPC has both LFP and LMFP cathode powders available for commercial testing and enquiries from cathode producers are welcomed.
Net proceeds of the recent SPP will be used to settle the purchase of 300,000 pounds of natural uranium concentrates which the board believes is strategically aligned with preparations for the companys flagship Lance Project to transition to low pH ISR operations.

The company's SPP raised A$2 million and this followed a A$13.4 million placement to institutional and high net worth investors.

( ) ( ) (FRA:P1M) non-executive director Mark Wheatley has demonstrated his confidence in the companys uranium strategy by participating in a recent share purchase plan (SPP).

The SPP was completed on June 23, raising A$2 million and this followed a A$13.4 million placement to institutional and high net worth investors.

Strong demand for the SPP necessitated a scale-back of valid applications from eligible shareholders in line with the guidelines provided in the SPP booklet.

Valid applications were scaled back to the SPP maximum of A$2 million on a pro-rata basis.

Wheatley acquired 30,534 shares in a direct interest, increasing the number of securities held after the change to 391,860 shares.

Physical uranium purchase

Net proceeds from the capital raising will be used to settle the purchase of 300,000 pounds of natural uranium concentrates (U3O8) concentrates at a price of US$31.35 per pound, which is reflective of the prevailing uranium spot price.

Peninsula's board believes the acquisition of physical uranium is strategically aligned with preparations for the companys flagship Lance Project to transition to low pH ISR operations.

The acquired uranium inventory may ultimately provide a source of funding for the restart of operations at Lance following a final investment decision.

PEN believes that holding uncommitted uranium inventories at a time when there is a strong and continued push by the US Government to support nuclear power generation and the domestic production of critical minerals like uranium, enhances its ability to successfully participate in expanding market opportunities.

Settlement is due in June 2021 and the uranium will be stored at the Cameco facility in Ontario, Canada.
The award indicates the Australian Government recognises the national significance and potential economic contribution of FYI Resources WA-based high purity alumina project.

FYI says the Major Project Status designation demonstrates its project's potential.

FYI Resources Ltds (ASX:FYI) (OTCMKTS:FYIRF) (FRA:SDL) $269 million high purity alumina (HPA) project has secured Major Project Status and been endorsed as a project of national significance by the Australian Federal Government.

Major Project Status helps companies access extra support, coordination and information services from the Major Projects Facilitation Agency, which acts as a single entry point into the Australian Government regulatory approvals pathway.

The award also opens doors to prospective financing support and provides additional confidence for stakeholders and financers who are invested in the HPA plays development.

Minister for Industry, Science and Technology, Christian Porter, approved the WA-based HPA assets Major Project Status designation.

Investors responded positively to todays award, with FYI shares trading 7.7% higher at 55.5 cents just before market close on Tuesday.

Award demonstrates projects significance

Speaking to the recognition, FYI Resources managing director Roland Hill said: We are delighted to receive the formal recognition from the Australian Federal Government for our innovative and fully integrated HPA project.

The MPS demonstrates the significance of our project. The importance of the status should also assist in providing confidence for international and ESG investors by providing increased assurance in our development pathway.

Government highlights potential

This isnt the first time FYIs work has garnered government attention: in September 2019, WA Premier Mark McGowan and the WA Department of Jobs, Tourism, Science and Innovation awarded the company Lead Agency status.

FYIs ultimate goal is to become a producer of 4N and 5N high purity alumina to service the rapidly developing high-tech product markets.

A versatile material, high purity alumina is sought after for its superior properties and unique qualities. It is corrosion and scratch resistant, has high brightness, has the ability to withstand extreme temperatures and is used in the production of lithium-ion batteries.

Commenting in an official media release, Minister Porter said the High-Purity Alumina project is expected to support 200 people during construction and 140 ongoing staff over the life of the project.

The project will use an innovative process for producing the high-purity alumina which is expected to have a lower environmental footprint than the traditional production.

Not only will it improve global supplies of alumina, with forecast export revenue of $6.8 billion, but the project will also provide a raft of economic and job benefits for regional communities in Western Australia.

Minister for Resources, Water and Northern Australia, Keith Pitt, said the project complements the Governments Critical Minerals Strategy.

The project will process up to 198,000 tonnes of high-purity alumina within the initial 25-year project timeframe, with an annual production capacity of 8,000 tonnes per annum, and will supply directly to China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Europe, and North America.

In addition, it supports Australias policy to have more downstream processing capabilities developed locally."
The company has entered an agreement to lift its interest in the Napie Gold Project to 90% with Perseus Mining, a producer and developer, taking a 5.1% equity holding.

( ) has received strong validation of its strategy through an agreement with proven West African gold developer and producer Perseus Mining Limited ( ) ( ) ( ) to exchange its 39% interest in the Napie Gold Project for an equity holding of 5.1%.

It means Mako will own 90% of the Napie project in the West African Birimian Greenstone Belts, which host more than 70 gold deposits in excess of one million ounces.

The company plans to deliver a maiden mineral resource estimate later this year as drilling results continue to validate its methodical approach.

Perseus a cornerstone investor

Makos managing director Peter Ledwidge said of the deal: We are pleased to welcome proven West African gold developer and producer Perseus as a cornerstone shareholder in Mako.

"They have proved to be supportive JV partners at Napie and we look forward to their ongoing support as a shareholder of Mako.

Validates strategy

The transaction validates Makos systematic exploration and growth strategy that aims to extend existing high-grade mineralisation, test multiple high priority regional prospects and to support a future maiden mineral resource estimate.

In addition, it is an endorsement of Makos 100%-owned Korhogo Project, located about 30 kilometres from Barricks Tongon Mine, and Makos exploration/management team.

Ledwidge said: The consolidation of the Napie Gold Project to 90% ownership is a major milestone for Mako, simplifying the existing JV and providing our shareholders with a clearer path to the commercialisation of this asset.

"This transaction removes uncertainty around the future JV milestones and project equity/funding and is a testament to the Mako team for their exploration success at Napie and strategy to unlock further value.

Deal details

Under the agreement, Mako will acquire Perseus existing 39% interest in Napie and exchange it for an initial equity consideration and two deferred milestone payments.

That equity consideration will see Perseus become a cornerstone investor in Mako itself with a 5.1% holding.

The two milestone payments are contingent on the delineation of a 1 million-ounce measured and indicated resource (representing a minimum of 25 million tonnes at a minimum grade of 1.25 g/t gold) at Napie, and the first sale of gold dore or ore extracted from Napie.

Most recently, Mako expanded the Tchaga prospect at Napie with further reverse circulation (RC) and diamond drilling returning up to 17 metres at 3.06 g/t gold from 129 metres and 9.85 metres at 6.63 g/t from 213.15 metres, including 2 metres at 30.15 g/t.

- Daniel Paproth
Drilling at American Rare Earths La Paz asset has led the company to a potential new rare earths orebody discovery as a resource upgrade progresses.

American Rare Earths Ltds (ASX:ARR) latest exploration campaign at the La Paz Rare Earths and Scandium Project in Arizona, USA, has turned up a suite of promising results that could contribute to a mineral resource upgrade.

The rare earth element (REE) and magnet rare earths explorer drilled nine holes for 682 metres at its flagship asset in March this year, working through its wholly-owned subsidiary, Western Rare Earths.

Promisingly, results indicate all assayed drill holes, including those explored in the previously undrilled southwest area, produced REE grades higher than the cut-off and deeper than the original resource.

Broadly, the assays point to a possible new orebody discovery to the southwest, while a series of twin drill holes confirmed the assets potential following a 2011 drilling campaign.

With a resource upgrade underway and the 2021 drilling results in tow, American Rare Earths anticipates a robust increase in the size of the La Paz mineral resource.

Map of the La Paz rare earths play's location.

A lucrative campaign

American Rare Earths managing director Keith Middleton said the company was incredibly pleased with the enormous potential indicated by the recent drilling results.

So many positives have come of this campaign, including higher grade assays to depths four times the maiden resource, an additional new ore body opportunity within the claim control tenancy, high-value scandium ubiquitous to the maiden REE resource area and new areas to the southwest, elevated grades of high-value magnet metals and heavy REEs compared to the 2011 drilling, along with the opportunity to upgrade the resource in size and grade.

The company continues to make good progress toward its goals: cementing itself as a key player in the development of critical high-value scandium and rare earths, building scale to meet critical US demand and maximising shareholder value.

Building on decade-old results

Ten years on from the program that helped establish a maiden mineral resource at La Paz, American Rare Earths has confirmed and built on the REE results with an exploration program.

Within the companys drilling campaign, six out of nine holes were drilled as twins of select holes explored back in 2011, providing ARR with the opportunity to compare and confirm the historical data.

Positively, the 2021 campaign confirmed the previous findings and returned higher average REE grades, drilling four times deeper than the program explored 10 years before.

Overall, ARR found the average total rare earth element (TREE) grade was 398 parts per million  an increase of 6.4% on the maiden resource.

Map indicates the location of the nine 2021 drill holes explored at La Paz.

Potential new orebody

In addition to the six twin holes, American Rare Earths drilled two reconnaissance diamond core holes within La Pazs southwest region  an area which had not been drill tested until March.

Drill hole LP21-03 intersected REE mineralisation zones similar to the maiden resource area, showing an average TREE of 377ppm over 14.8 metres using a 300ppm TREE cut-off.

Promisingly, drill hole LP21-04 shows the more favourable REE mineralisation of the two holes, showing an average TREE of 401ppm over 48.6 metres using the same cut-off grade.

With the favourable results shown in the second reconnaissance drill hole, ARRs subsidiary intends to stake additional claims and plan further exploration in the area to determine the extent of REE mineralisation.

A magnetic market

As American Rare Earths prepares to upgrade the resource at its flagship asset, magnet rare earths are increasingly coming to the fore in a range of growth industries.

The electronics, auto manufacturing and defence sectors are turning to this class of rare earths to further innovate their offering, meaning these materials are becoming highly sought after.

In its latest exploration campaign, ARR has confirmed magnetic rare earths  praseodymium, neodymium, dysprosium and terbium  make up around 27% of the projects TREE.

Managing director Middleton continued: Government and industry leaders speak of acceleration of those industries that must have rare earths. These include offshore wind, electric vehicles, phones/tablets, air conditioners and the reduced carbon new-energy economy.

North American and European leaders openly speak of the need to develop rare earths supply chains and stockpiles, ex-China, to feed critical defence industry technologies.

With a never-before-seen convergence of market pull and government push happening on a global scale, these are genuinely exciting times.

Next steps

Following the drilling developments, ARR continues to focus on its mineral resource upgrade.

The company will update the market on this program once its JORC study has been completed.

Meanwhile, American Rare Earths is reviewing its exploration plans in a bid to develop a renewed campaign that furthers La Pazs potential.

ARR is completing a GAP analysis at the rare earths asset to identify the steps needed for a scoping study and then a Preliminary Economic Assessment.

The company has also engaged and retained lab expertise and consulting services to secure metallurgy guidance as it continues to develop its strategy at La Paz.
The work, via two drill campaigns, has been focused on the eastern margin of the orebody, where significant veins have been encountered

In the Main Zone veining program, highlight intercepts included 174 g/t gold over true width of 0.49m from 388.7m depth in one hole

Mandalay Resources Corporation ( ) ( ) (FRA:R7X2) has reported encouraging exploration drill results from its Bjorkdal operation in Sweden, which augur well for mining higher gold grades within the current life-of-mine plan.

The work, via two drill campaigns, has been focused on the eastern margin of the orebody, where significant veins have been encountered.

In the Main Zone veining program, highlight intercepts included 174 grams per ton (g/t) gold over true width of 0.49 metres (m) from 388.7m depth in one hole. The same hole also hit 8.85m of 6.1 g/t gold from 106m depth.

Meanwhile, in the Lane Zone veining campaign, Mandalay hit 25.3 g/t gold over a true width of 1.03m in one hole from 51.8m depth. In another hole, 226.0 g/t gold over a true width of 0.21m from 269.8m depth.

"We are very encouraged by the high grades within veining to the east of the mine and by the strong indications of major extensions to two previously mined high-grade skarn lenses. Results from these two programs support Mandalays primary objective of elevating gold grades within the sites current life-of-mine plan," said Dominic Duffy, CEO of Mandalay in a statement.

"Building upon the success of these two campaigns, exploration efforts will test another eastern extension, as well as following-up on the targeting of the skarn mineralization sitting above the veining.

"This drilling aims to gain sufficient information to support a mining concession application that will cover the extended veining. Beyond these targets, significant extension potential also exists within the Aurora Zone and surrounding veins, which will also be a major focus of underground exploration efforts at Bjorkdal in the near future."

Mandalay also noted that the potential for vein extensions and upgrading have been supported by extensional drilling started in late 2020 by the Bjorkdal Deeps Drilling campaign and continued through the Lake Zone Infill and the Main Zone Extension drilling programs this year.

The metals miner has producing assets in Australia (Costerfield gold-antimony mine) and Sweden (Bjorkdal gold mine). It also has projects in Chile and Canada under care and maintenance, closure or development status.

Contact the author at giles@proactiveinvestors.com
Phase I of the 5,000m drill program will consist of about 20 drill holes for initial 3,000m to be completed over an eight-week period

It has identified near-surface bulk-tonnage and high-grade vein-hosted silver-rich polymetallic targets centered on and adjacent to the historically exploited West and East Dome areas

Corp (CVE:NUAG) (OTCQX:NUPMF) (FRA:3N7A) has commenced an initial discovery drill program at the Carangas Silver Project in Bolivia.

The company said it has identified near-surface bulk-tonnage and high-grade vein-hosted silver-rich polymetallic targets centered on and adjacent to the historically exploited West and East Dome areas.

Phase I of the 5,000-metre (m) drill program will consist of about 20 drill holes for an initial 3,000m to be completed over an eight-week period. Contingent on the success of initial results, follow-up drilling will complete the budgeted 5,000m program.

New Pacific said the Carangas exploration camp and support facilities are now fully operational and the Projects Bolivian drill contractor has commenced drilling with a single diamond drill rig.

Drill core samples will be sent to ALS Global in Oruro, Bolivia for preparation and to ALS Global in Lima, Peru for geochemical analysis. The company will announce results as they become available.

We are excited by the potential offered at the Carangas Project located on La Ruta de la Plata (the Silver Road), which hosts outcropping silver mineralization and historically exploited high-grade silver veins. We look forward to sharing the results as they become available, said CEO Mark Cruise in a statement.

The Carangas Project consists of two exploration licenses covering an area of 6.25 square kilometers (sq km) and 100%-owned by the companys Bolivian joint venture partner. New Pacific has entered into a mining association agreement with the Bolivian partner, under which New Pacific is required to cover 100% of the future expenditures on exploration, mining, development, and production activities in return for 98% economic interest in the Project.

Contact the author: patrick@proactiveinvestors.com

Follow him on Twitter @PatrickMGraham
Venngo is Canadas most widely recognized of private group discounts and employee perk programs, with over 1.25 million Canadians already accessing its merchant perks, offers, and digital content

Marble Financial's MyMarble is the first and only AI-powered financial wellness technology solution available to Venngo members

( ) ( ) (FRA:2V0) said it is expanding its consumer reach by entering into the employee wellness space through a deal with Venngo, the leading provider of group and employee perks in North America.

The company has announced the launch of a new marketing program with Venngo, Canadas most widely recognized of private group discounts and employee perk programs, with over 1.25 million Canadians already accessing Venngos merchant perks, offers, and digital content.

Marble Financial's MyMarble is the first and only AI-powered financial wellness technology solution available to Venngo members, providing Marble with an excellent opportunity to assist even more Canadians in improving their financial health and allowing Marble to increase brand awareness further and accelerate its member growth.

According to the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada, a growing number of employers across Canada recognize the importance of financial wellness. It was found that 43% of Canadian employees are distracted by their finances, contributing to 7,521 hours of lost productivity each year. This data proves the need for solutions like MyMarble to be readily available to employers and employees looking for relief through financial wellness solutions.

Marble said this presents it with an excellent opportunity to become a leader within the employee wellness space as Venngos first financial wellness technology solution provider that supports Canadians to reach their financial goals.

At Marble we focus on nourishing the confidence of as many Canadians as possible to redefine themselves more broadly, said Rich Elliott, director of Marketing at Marble in a statement.

Through partnering Venngo, a leader in employee perk programs, it opens up a fantastic multi-stream marketing channel for Marble to reach over a million of highly motivated and budget-savvy consumers. This is a segment we have seen some of our most successful and loyal members, Elliott added.

Venngo has over 18 years' experience as a pioneer in providing discount programs to employers and its employees, helping them connect with their favourite brands at the best prices. An exclusive MyMarble program and pricing will be featured on Venngos platform, providing a meaningful, results-based AI solution for consumers to achieve financial goals, relieve stress, and improve productivity for their employers.

Were excited to be partnering with Venngo to help provide their customers with MyMarbles valuable financial wellness solutions, said Karim Nanji, Marble CEO. By providing Venngos 1.25 million members with access to our financial technology software, we will be able to continue Marbles mission to empower even more Canadians reach their financial goals.

Marbles proprietary MyMarble platform utilizes the power of machine learning, data science, and artificial intelligence, in leveraging its proven data-driven strategies through technology solutions Inverite, Score-Up, Fast Track and Maestro to engage in and navigate a clear path towards financial wellbeing and a meaningful credit score, since 2016.

Contact the author at jon.hopkins@proactiveinvestors.com
Ascendant Resources (TSE: ASND  OTCQX: ASDRF) CEO Mark Brennan joined Steve Darling from Proactive to share news the company has added to their resource at the Venda Nova deposit within the Lagoa Salgada project in Portugal. This new update incorporates the results from a recently completed three-hole drill program.

Brennan talks about the addition to the resource and where they were able to step out to. He also shared with Proactive this will also be part of the Preliminary Economic Assessment that is currently underway.
"The United States of America is still run by its citizens. The government works for us. Rank imperialism and warmongering are not American traditions or values. We do not need to dominate the world. We want and need to work with other nations. We want to find solutions other than killing people. Not in our name, not with our money, not with our children's blood."

Molly Ivins
A Place for All Conservatives to Speak Their Mind.
English star Benedict Cumberbatch has been roped in for the adaptation of "Dungeons & Dragons".

The 44-year-old joins the cast of the upcoming big screen project that includes Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, and Rege-Jean Page, reports aceshowbiz.com.

"After narrating the animated film, Benedict couldn't not be in the film version. Filming has been in the UK too, so it was convenient for him travel-wise," a source told The Sun newspaper.

This is not the first time Cumberbatch is featuring in a fantasy adaptation. He previously has voiced Smaug and Sauron in Peter Jackson's "The Hobbit" trilogy.

"Dungeons & Dragons", which is set to be released in 2023, has been shooting on locations such as the Wells Cathedral in Somerset, Alnwick Castle in Northumberland and Carrickfergus Castle in Ireland, where Rodriguez was spotted on a scooter in costume on her way to the castle.


Actor Sidharth Malhotra returned to a film set in the city after a couple of months on Monday, and will resume the shoot of his upcoming film "Thank God" in July. "It's been a long wait and I have been looking forward to getting back to the hustle-bustle of film shoots. Elated to shoot again and see the happy and creative flow of energy that was truly missed," Sidharth said. The actor's outdoor schedule before this saw him visit Lucknow for the shoot of "Mission Majnu". He is currently also gearing up for the release of his war action drama "Shershaah".




The Uttar Pradesh government has moved the Supreme Court challenging the Karnataka High Court order, which granted protection from arrest to Twitter MD Manish Maheshwari in a case connected with a viral video of attack on an elderly man in Ghaziabad

The Karnataka High Court on June 24 granted protection to Maheshwari in an FIR lodged by the Loni Police in Ghaziabad. Meanwhile, Maheshwari, has also filed a caveat, seeking an opportunity to present his case before the top court passes any order.

The Ghaziabad police had issued notice to Maheshwari, asking him to appear at the Loni Police Station for questioning in the investigation connected with the viral video of the assault on an elderly Muslim man.

The matter is connected with the circulation of a video in which the elderly man, Abdul Shamad Saifi, said that he was allegedly beaten by some young men who forced him to chant "Jai Shri Ram" on June 5. The police claimed that the video was shared to incite communal discontent.

On June 15, the Ghaziabad police had booked Twitter Inc, Twitter Communications India, news website The Wire, journalists Mohammed Zubair and Rana Ayyub, besides Congress leaders Salman Nizami, Maskoor Usmani, Shama Mohamed and writer Saba Naqvi.

The police had rejected Twitter India officials request to carry out questioning via video conferencing.

According to the police, the accused were unhappy with the amulets sold to them by Saifi, a resident of Bulandshahr district, and ruled out any communal angle in the matter. The Ghaziabad police had issued a statement with facts of the incident, yet the accused did not remove the video from their Twitter handles.

Saifi purportedly claimed he was attacked by some young men and forced to chant "Jai Shri Ram". But police said Saifi has not made any such allegations in his FIR lodged on June 7.


A group of people created ruckus in Rohtas Nagar and vandalised a government vehicle, claimed Delhi deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia, who was on an inspection visit to the area where a new school building is being constructed. Sisodia in a tweet alleged that the BJP is behind the incident. "Today, the BJP workers and goons opposed to the construction of a school in Rohtas Nagar vandalised the building. They vandalised my government vehicle, and misbehaved with female teachers and the workers and engineers involved in construction work. Why are BJP workers opposed to education and construction of schools?" Sisodia asked in his tweet. The Delhi government is constructing new buildings of a school in Rohtas Nagar, Babarpur, Karawal Nagar, Rohtas Nagar and Gokalpur. Delhi health minister Satyendar Jain, who was accompanying Sisodia during the inspection visit, also blamed the BJP for creating violence and opposing construction of a new building of school. "No matter how hard the BJP tries to stop us, we are not going to stop. Even if BJP makes thousands of such attacks, it cannot scare us. We have vowed to serve the people of Delhi and no one can stop us from doing this," Satyendar Jain tweeted.




Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, the first two jabs authorised for emergency use against Covid-19 by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), produce immune responses that are both strong and potentially long-lasting, finds a study.

While both vaccines performed well in clinical trials, and have been widely credited with reducing disease, concerns remained over how long immunity induced by the mRNA-based shots will last.

The study, led by researchers from the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis showed that nearly four months after the first dose people who received the Pfizer vaccine still had so-called germinal centers in their lymph nodes churning out immune cells directed against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19.

The team found that even three weeks after the first dose, all 14 participants had formed germinal centers with B cells producing antibodies that target a key SARS-CoV-2 protein. The response expanded greatly after the booster shot and then stayed high.

Even 15 weeks after the first dose, eight of 10 people still had detectable germinal centers containing B cells targeting the virus.

"Germinal centers are the key to a persistent, protective immune response," said Ali Ellebedy, Associate Professor of pathology and immunology, of medicine and of molecular microbiology.

"Germinal centers are where our immune memories are formed. And the longer we have a germinal center, the stronger and more durable our immunity will be because there's a fierce selection process happening there, and only the best immune cells survive," Ellebedy added.

Moreover, vaccination led to high levels of neutralising antibodies effective against three variants of the virus, including the Beta variant from South Africa that has shown some resistance to vaccines.

Vaccination also induced stronger antibody responses in people who had recovered from SARS-CoV-2 infection compared to those who had never been infected. Among people without prior exposure to the virus, antibody levels rose slowly after the first dose and peaked one week after the second.
Rocket fire targeted a US military base in Syria's eastern province of Deir al-Zour, state media reported on Tuesday.

The targeted base targeted on Monday evening is located in the al-Omar oil field in the eastern countryside of Deir al-Zour, Xinhua news agency quoted the state media report as saying, without providing further details.

Meanwhile, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights watchdog group said the attack caused damage and burned cars in the base, without any mention of casualties.

The war monitor noted that pro-Iran fighters were behind the rocket fire.

Following the attack, areas under the control of the pro-Iranian fighters in the al-Mayadin city in Deir al-Zour witnessed several explosions, which appeared to be retaliatory shelling from the targeted US base in the al-Omar field, said the Observatory.

The exchange of fire comes after the United States carried out a missile strike at 1 a.m. on Monday on pro-Iranian fighters' positions in the eastern countryside of Deir al-Zour near the Iraqi border, killing five.

Washington claims that pro-Iran militiamen are responsible for attacks against US positions in Iraq.
Kington, UK -- (SBWIRE) -- 06/29/2021 -- Negative Quantity on Hand (QOH) or Negative Inventory in a QuickBooks data file happens when there are not enough items in stock. This could be because entering sales transactions were entered before entering purchase transactions.



Negative Quantity on Hand shows up on the balance sheet, but will mainly show on the Inventory Valuation Detail report with negative numbers in the Quantity on Hand (QOH) column. This could also result in data becoming damaged to the point that the file must be rebuilt entirely, the Cash-basis balance sheet becomes out of balance, vendor reporting is incorrect and Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) and profit amounts are incorrect.



According to John Rocha, E-Tech's Technical Service Manager, this can also be caused due to employee negligence. "Operators sometimes neglect to enter Item Receipts, hence QuickBooks cannot calculate an average cost-of-goods-sold (COGS) when it's sold if there is negative quantity," he said.



The way to prevent Negative Inventory from happening is to set up inventory items with an opening balance, using non-posting estimates and sales orders to track sales with no inventory, using pending invoices to enter sales with no inventory and setting preferences to warn of potential problems.



"You can also withhold permissions, which is the easiest way to prevent employees from making mistakes. Setting the date lock allows you to prevent users from entering transactions that they perhaps forgot to enter before month-end, and posting pre-dated Item Receipts and Invoices," Rocha said.



E-Tech offers a repair service to fix all instances of negative inventory in the file. The service will analyze the source data file to identify the items and dates the quantity on hand (QOH) went negative and then fix all occurrences of negative inventory.



The repaired file will not have negative inventory and will verify correctly in QuickBooks. There may be a change to the COGS and Inventory Asset account balances after the repair. There will also be a change to the Opening Balance Equity account that will be used to add the inventory adjustments.



For more information on E-Tech's QuickBooks Negative Inventory Repair service, visit https://quickbooksrecovery.co.uk/quickbooks-file-data-services/quickbooks-negative-inventory-repair/.



About E-Tech

E-Tech is the leading service provider of QuickBooks File Repair, Data Recovery, QuickBooks Conversion and QuickBooks SDK programming in the UK and Ireland. In their 20 years plus of experience with Intuit QuickBooks, they have assisted over 1000 satisfied customers with their requirements. E-Tech UK covers US, UK, Canadian, Australian versions which include Reckon Accounts, and New Zealand versions of QuickBooks through PC and Mac platforms.



For media inquiries regarding E-Tech, individuals are encouraged to contact Media Relations Director, Melanie Ann via email at Melanie@e-tech.ca.



To learn more about the company, visit: https://quickbooksrecovery.co.uk/.



Media Contact

Melanie Ann

E-Tech

61 Bridge St.

Kington HR5 3DJ

Melanie@e-tech.ca

www.quickbooksrecovery.co.uk
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Spain's URE makes amateur radio magazine archive available

URE has digitized their old magazines from 1949 to 2020 and made the PDF's available for everyone to download from their website



The magazines for each year are combined into a single PDF file, the 1949 PDF contains the 5 issues from August of that year while later years contain 11 issues.



A translation of the URE post says:



At the last meeting of the Board of Directors we have formally taken note of the completion of a work that a priori may seem inconsequential: all the copies of our magazine have been digitized. We would therefore like to place on record the real importance of this gesture.



Having adopted the agreement of its publication, the Association shows once again its generosity and willingness to contribute to the collective of the world radio amateur. Its partners, represented by the Board of Directors, are the only ones who have the legitimacy and the right to dispose of their documentary heritage and to decide how it is managed. The documentary collection of URE is perfectly guarded and safe for future generations of amateur radio, making it clear that no one has our history because no one has 72 years of existence. On our website they were already available to all the last 44, the period from 1977 to 2021. These publications are now completed with the remaining 28, from 1949 to 1976.



When we came to the URE directive, this task was marked as one of the objectives to be achieved; as a result of this impulse and especially of the effort of several colleagues of our staff, the most numerous publication saw the light in August 2019 and this was reported at the time



That announcement already set the next milestone that today, almost two years later, culminates this hard work. It goes without saying that it is precisely the oldest journals that have been the most laborious because they are bound and it is essential to preserve their integrity. Here we must also thank the partners who have collaborated with a loose copy, which has facilitated the work.



Digitization will give our history greater visibility and, above all, will allow the universalization of this information. So enjoy reading our publications and their content. It is a satisfaction for us to see the interest they arouse and to be able to offer them now to all radio amateurs. However, we want to record that this decision does not imply the waiver of the rights held by the URE over its publications, in terms of intellectual property, copying, reproduction, etc.



And we do not stop here, we are currently immersed in the task of carrying out an indexing and search system for articles that will undoubtedly be a valuable tool, but that is another story.



PDF's are available in the Download Area of the URE website

https://www.ure.es/descargas/?categoria=revista-ure-anos-completos&orderby=nombre



Source URE Spain's national amateur radio societyhas digitized their old magazines from 1949 to 2020 and made the PDF's available for everyone to download from their websiteThe magazines for each year are combined into a single PDF file, the 1949 PDF contains the 5 issues from August of that year while later years contain 11 issues.A translation of the URE post says:At the last meeting of the Board of Directors we have formally taken note of the completion of a work that a priori may seem inconsequential: all the copies of our magazine have been digitized. We would therefore like to place on record the real importance of this gesture.Having adopted the agreement of its publication, the Association shows once again its generosity and willingness to contribute to the collective of the world radio amateur. Its partners, represented by the Board of Directors, are the only ones who have the legitimacy and the right to dispose of their documentary heritage and to decide how it is managed. The documentary collection of URE is perfectly guarded and safe for future generations of amateur radio, making it clear that no one has our history because no one has 72 years of existence. On our website they were already available to all the last 44, the period from 1977 to 2021. These publications are now completed with the remaining 28, from 1949 to 1976.When we came to the URE directive, this task was marked as one of the objectives to be achieved; as a result of this impulse and especially of the effort of several colleagues of our staff, the most numerous publication saw the light in August 2019 and this was reported at the time https://www.ure.es/revistas-de-ure-antiguas/ That announcement already set the next milestone that today, almost two years later, culminates this hard work. It goes without saying that it is precisely the oldest journals that have been the most laborious because they are bound and it is essential to preserve their integrity. Here we must also thank the partners who have collaborated with a loose copy, which has facilitated the work.Digitization will give our history greater visibility and, above all, will allow the universalization of this information. So enjoy reading our publications and their content. It is a satisfaction for us to see the interest they arouse and to be able to offer them now to all radio amateurs. However, we want to record that this decision does not imply the waiver of the rights held by the URE over its publications, in terms of intellectual property, copying, reproduction, etc.And we do not stop here, we are currently immersed in the task of carrying out an indexing and search system for articles that will undoubtedly be a valuable tool, but that is another story.PDF's are available in the Download Area of the URE websiteSource URE https://tinyurl.com/SpainURE
Bojador (Occupied Zones), June 29, 2021 (SPS) - The Moroccan occupying forces continue their ongoing policy of aggression against the Saharawi activist Sultana Sidbrahim Jaya and her family, using all the repressive apparatus at her disposal.

According to a source from the Sahrawi activists in the occupied areas, the Moroccan security forces have increased their presence this Sunday, restricting the siege imposed on the family for 223 consecutive days, closing the streets to prevent visits to the family's home. , considered a liberated fortress of Western Sahara.

In this context, the activist Sultana and her sister, Al-Uara, continue their heroic resistance on a daily basis, creating slogans against the occupation and waving the flag of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, before the ears and sight of the repressive hordes of the Moroccan occupant, who continue to try to snatch the flags that the family has installed as an ornament on the roof of their house. SPS

125/090/TRA
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This is an American tragedy, Shai said. And then when we have Florida, and then we have the Jewish community, so in all circles, we felt that theres a commitment to come and help to come and express our solidarity and sympathy, and to do as much as possible to alleviate a little bit of the pain and sorrow that your Americans encounter.
After further consideration with my family, we have decided to remain in Orlando, where I will continue my service as Chief of Police, he wrote. I am no longer in the hiring process for the position of Chief of Police in the City of Fort Lauderdale.
A. Perhaps, but my belief is the collapse was more complicated than just issues related to concrete repair, Tolchinsky said. Certainly, the cost of having a firm perform these repairs is going to skyrocket. This is based on the level of data and certifications that will likely be needed to be provided to boards and governmental agencies to perform this work. Also, the high demand for building materials and the lack of skilled workers given the tight labor market will make it harder to find concrete repair firms.
Since the collapse, Gov. Ron DeSantis, Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava and other officials have called for an expeditious search for what caused the collapse. Cause for the collapse could come from the unfit material used during the construction of the building that progressively deteriorated throughout the years due to the neglect of the Building Association/Management, and in the end resulting in the collapse of the building, the lawsuit says.
Prosecutors in January charged her with illegally accessing the computer system Nov. 10. Authorities have accused her of sending a message on an internal Department of Health multi-user messaging account. Its time to speak up before another 17,000 people are dead. You know this is wrong. You dont have to be part of this. Be a hero. Speak out before its too late, the message said.
As business leaders in South Florida, we each represent a critical thread in the vibrant tapestry of organizations working together to support our communitys education, health and economic infrastructure. One of our essential responsibilities as Broward County champions is to be at the forefront of the diversity, equity, access and inclusion (DEAI) movement to create an inclusive and welcoming South Florida for all. DEAI is more than a once-a-year celebration or acknowledgment; I am calling on each of us to ensure the DEAI ideals are interwoven into our very existence as institutions. By promoting workplace and community authenticity year-round, we can help make Fort Lauderdale a freer and more equal place to live, work and play.
The pandemic is bad  all minuses. Car accidents and deaths are on the rise. The state, county, and cities all have lots of pandemic money from the federal government, so lets find a plus in all of this  actually two pluses that will help everyone. Lets put unemployed people to work on streets and highways that need their white and yellow markings to be redone. Some have just about disappeared and others are so bad that in darkness or rain, no markings can be seen to keep people in their lanes.
Jose Arcadio DN, the main suspect in the acid attack on his ex-girlfriend and a friend of hers on 12 January in Cartama, has now been convicted of another crime while he awaits trial.

It is the third case that El Melillero has been tried for while being held in custody.

In the latest court appearance, he was found guilty of participating in a robbery in a villa in Benalmadena, where other members of the gang tied up the owner and put a gun to his wife's head to steal money and jewellery.

The judge handed down a sentence of 21 months in prison for robbery, three months for reckless driving in the getaway car and another three months for driving without a licence.

This sentence is added to the two years in prison he faces, for threatening an employee of a Torremolinos restaurant with a gun and the seven months in prison that were imposed on him in the past February for mistreating a previous partner.

In addition, he remains in custody awaiting trial for the alleged acid attack on Sandra and Cristina.

Related articles: Click here
The possible increase in the rate of Covid-19 infections among young people was one of the main concerns of the Ministry of Health experts after the end of the Spain's state of alarm. And time has shown that they were right.

The number of coronavirus infections has skyrocketed in the age group between 15 and 29 years in recent weeks, with the 'macro outbreak' originating in Mallorca due to end-of-year trips being the prime example with close to a thousand people infected.

Faced with this scenario, some regions - including Andalucia - plan to bring forward the vaccination of the under-30s in the coming days. It is a strategy that countries such as France and the United Kingdom have already implemented.

The biochemist Jose Manuel Bautista, a professor at the Complutense University and one of the first experts who asked the World Health Organization to recognise that the coronavirus is also transmitted by air, considers a "priority" to accelerate vaccinations among young people: They are highly mobile, especially in summer, and it has been shown that the more the virus runs, the worse it is for everyone. This transmission must be stopped.

Once the large risk groups have been vaccinated, Bautista is in favour of opening the vaccination campaign to anyone who is of legal age.

The professor of genetics and director of this area at the University of Malaga, Eduardo Rodriguez Bejarano, believes that it is absolutely necessary to open the vaccination campaign among the young: Viruses mutate very quickly. The more opportunities you give them, the more they mutate. It already happens with the flu.

Bejarano also highlights the importance of accelerating vaccination "in countries other than the first world", where SARS-CoV-2 will mutate at ease as long as there is no group immunity.

The low risk perception that young people have often causes a relaxation of the necessary measures to avoid infections and, combined with the appearance of the Delta variant and the almost zero vaccination coverage among those under 35 years old, have caused an increase in cases in this age group and also in the cumulative incidence rate, which has risen for three days after the downward trend that began in April.

In Malaga city the rate has increased by almost ten points in just three days, and as the mayor, Francisco de la Torre, warned this Monday: "It is a consequence of the number of infections in recent days, which we have to stop altogether."

The latest update from the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention placed Spain as the second country in Europe, only behind Portugal, in infections and positivity rate, with about one hundred cases per one hundred thousand inhabitants.

Sources close to the Ministry of Health acknowledge that the Junta de Andalucia plans to expand the vaccination agenda to those under 30 years of age, although the lack of doses is now the main obstacle to accelerating the jabbing of the age group. The campaign remains generally stagnant in people born up until 1985, although some health districts such as Malaga - Guadalhorce have been giving jabs to people born up until 1988 for almost two weeks.

The need to complete the second dose AstraZeneca vaccinations among sexagenarians, and the Janssen supply problem, which has provided fewer vaccines than contracted, have complicated things in recent days.

Regional government sources said, At the moment there is nothing agreed, but the matter is on the table," who admit that the 'macro outbreak' in is worrying the Junta, that wants to avoid at all costs the possibility of something similar happen in Andalucia.
The new Covid-19 variant, christened as Delta by the World Health Organization, is spreading throughout Spain and although in the country as a whole it remains at a percentage lower than 5 per cent, in some regions it even exceeds 10 per cent in sequencing tests, according to the latest 'Update of the epidemiological situation of the variants of SARS-CoV-2, published this Monday (28 June).

But the bad news is that the data refers to week 22 of the year  between 31 May and 6 June  because it takes almost a month to sequence the positive samples of Covid-19.

Therefore, in all probability, the actual percentage of Delta cases in Spain is now much higher.

According to the Ministry of Health document, the Delta variant (B.1.617.2, is its scientific name) presents a very irregular distribution throughout Spain, so that, although its presence is still very low or nil in some regions, in others  it does not specify in which ones  it progresses rapidly, reaching percentages even higher than 10 per cent in random samplings.

During a press conference appearance on Monday (28 June), the head of Spain's Centre for the Coordination of Emergencies and Health Alerts (CCAES), Fernando Simon went a little further and said that the average in the country remains at "3 to 4 per cent" , but increases to "up to 15 per cent" in certain areas. "There is still a lack of data, but we know that it is rising in presence," he said.

The Delta variant has become the great threat to the return to the new normal. The most serious warning was given last week by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), which warned that this strain will account for 70 per cent of infections in the European Union in early August and up to 90 per cent by the end of that month. In its report, the body warns that this mutation of the virus is between 40 and 60 per cent more transmissible than the Alpha variant and that "it may be associated with a greater risk of hospitalisation."

The ECDC urged countries to accelerate their vaccination schedules. Those who have received a single dose of the two-dose vaccines are less protected against Delta than against other variants, regardless of the type of vaccine. But full vaccination does provide protection against Delta similar to that offered against other variants, it said. According to a study published in The Lancet, one dose of both the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines is 32 per cent effective against this variant, but with two doses, the efficacy of AstraZeneca increases to 60 per cent and that of Pfizer, up to 88 per cent. There is still no reliable data on the efficacy of the Janssen and Moderna vaccines against this variant.

Along with Delta variant, the CCAES has listed other strains of interest in the latest update that, for now, have a lesser impact but may in the future: Epsilon (Californian), Zeta (Brazilian), Eta ( Nigerian), Iota (New York), Kappa (another Indian variant) and two without names, one from the United Kingdom and another from Colombia.
In a speech on last Wednesday, Javier Faus, president of Catalonia's Economic Circle, expressed support for the pardons granted to leading Catalan separatists this week, adding "it's the moment to get to work... We have been paralysed for ten years".

Perhaps now, as a new phase of relations between Madrid and Barcelona begins, Catalan secessionists ought to listen to their region's business world, and contemplate the impact that large-scale capital flight would have on an independent Catalonia.

Top Catalan banks have long been nervous about secession. Two weeks after the illegal independence referendum of October 1 2017 (1-O), El Pais reported that, before an identical vote in November 2014, Sabadell president Josep Oliu spoke in private with Catalonia's then-president, Artur Mas. Oliu warned Mas that if his pro-independence government pursued secession, Sabadell would leave Catalonia. The paper's source claimed that Mas didn't take the warning seriously, partly because he was convinced a Catalan Republic wouldn't be ejected from the EU.

The story's revealing for two reasons. First, it shows that political instability is anathema to banks and that, for Catalan financial institutions, stability is dependent on operating within the Spanish and European markets. Oliu was the first banker to speak out in public immediately after 1-O, assuring his customers that Sabadell would do everything possible to keep operating "within the framework of the EU and ECB Banking Supervision".

Three years later and under a different Catalan president, Oliu followed through on his warning to Mas. On October 5 2017, four days after the referendum, Sabadell transferred its registered office from Barcelona to Alicante. The next day, Spain's second largest bank, La Caixa, moved to Valencia and Gas Natural relocated to Madrid. They sparked an exodus: throughout the remainder of 2017, over 3,000 corporate refugees left Catalonia, registering bases in less fraught environments.

The other telling aspect of Oliu's 2014 warning to Mas was the latter's refusal to take it seriously, or as indicative of a wider corporate nervousness. As such, it's a perfect example of the independence movement's arrogant myopia: we WILL achieve independence, no matter what it costs or what damage Catalonia sustains in the process. As long as there is no answer to the question of how a newly created republic would remain in the EU, though, the biggest Catalan companies will remain poised to relocate, if they haven't already moved their registered offices.

The prisoners left jail this week with a banner reading 'freedom for Catalonia' - no doubt inspirational for their supporters, but unsettling for a business world hoping that the pardons will foster harmony between Madrid and Barcelona, not further discord. If Pere Aragones, the region's new pro-independence president, takes Catalonia's corporate ambassadors seriously, he'll already be doing better than his predecessors.
The Disappointed Idealist

Opinion columnist Zach Freeman says Abbotts petty and reckless use of his veto power is often self-serving and hurts his constituents.
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Catholic Charities celebrates 25th annual Diaper Drive

Elaine Haskins / Elaine Haskins Shown, from left, are staff members from Catholic Charities Counseling and Adoption Services, in addition to members of the local advisory board: Amanda Maicki, Vicki Metzger, Marcy Ferraraccio, Joe Haas, Ben Blakley III (advisory council), Nanci Mattison and Libby Gray (advisory council).

DuBOIS  July will kick off the 25th annual Diaper Drive held by Catholic Charities Counseling and Adoption Services.

For 25 years, the agency has supported choosing life through its many efforts to support pregnant mothers and their babies, according to Director Nanci Mattison.

The Pregnancy and Parenting Support Program provides families with supportive counseling, information on healthy pregnancy, as well as parenting education, said Mattison. The program is part of a state-funded program known as Real Alternatives, which also recently celebrated its 25th anniversary of providing services to women in Pennsylvania.

The agency, said Mattison, employs six dedicated and committed Pregnancy and Parenting Support Program Counselors, who assist clients throughout a wide geographical area, including all of Clearfield, Jefferson, Elk, Cameron and McKean counties. The program is open to all pregnant women regardless of income who are residents of Pennsylvania. She said women who are pregnant, as well as women with infants less than 1 year old, can enroll in the program and then receive support services through their infants first birthday.

While the program focuses on the fundamentals of parenting and parenting education, community resources and referrals, material assistance is also provided to clients in the form of diapers, wipes, baby toiletries, formula, baby food and gently-used or new clothing, said Mattison. Many clients are first-time parents with no family support in the area and rely on the supportive and compassionate counseling provided to them.

Over the years, Mattison said the program has grown to include group classes to promote healthy interaction with baby such as a Mommy and Me music class in which parents are encouraged to sing and happily interact with their baby. The agency also has engaged in a collaborative effort with the Penn State Extension Office Eat Smart/Move More to provide healthy meal choices and exercise for moms, as well as partnering with the Pennsylvania of Department of Transportation Car Seat Safety program.

The past year was a difficult year for friends, co-workers and families within our local communities, many who were already struggling, said Mattison. When the pandemic hit and our state went to lockdown, our pregnancy and parenting staff were considered essential workers. Without skipping a beat, agency staff began brainstorming how they could continue serving clients while keeping themselves and their clients and their families safe.

Within a 24-hour period, Mattison said staff came up with a plan to continue to provide the much-needed supportive services for families, Mattison said. Staff continued to meet with clients remotely via Zoom or by phone contact. This provided the emotional support and connection that many of their first-time parents needed, as well as the other families who would have the otherwise been totally isolated.

Staff was also able to continue to provide material assistance in the same form that they always had  diapers, formula, baby clothing, car seats and other necessary baby items to families by arranging a curbside pickup for families on designated days.

Through these changes, staff was able to serve approximately 125 to 150 families per month, said Mattison.

It is said that it takes a community to raise a child, said Mattison.

Over the past 25 years, the DuBois and surrounding communities have solidly supported the agencys efforts in generously supporting and contributing to the agencys efforts in generously supporting and contributing to the agencys Diaper Drive, said Mattison.

Mattison noted that churches of all denominations have participated as well as various service organizations such as the Knights of Columbus, student organizations and more.

The agencys local advisory board has acted as cheerleaders for staff and the program and has worked to educate the community on the services provided as well as promote the yearly drive, said Mattison. This year the communitys support means more than ever.

For more information or to donate, contact Catholic Charities at 814-371-4717, email at nmattison@cccas.org or visit their website at info@ccas.org.
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MBABANE - Some police officers stationed at Mpolonjeni Police Post have been accused of selling alcohol at the cop shop.

This allegation was made by some residents of Mpolonjeni when addressing issues of alleged non-competence of the police post. The police post, which is located within the Mpolonjeni Shopping Complex, according to the residents, does not serve their needs adequately. They also alleged that some of the officers were involved in corrupt activities. The community members made thse allegations during a community meeting held at Moyeni on Sunday.

A number of issues were discussed during the meeting and they included the current crime rate and hijackings taking place in the area. Raising the police post matter was *Thabo, who said he had it in authority that some officers based at the police post were allegedly selling alcohol. The burning issue here is the police post which does not help us in any way. I know them and I have seen alcohol being sold and they do it all the time, claimed Thabo. He further alleged that police officers at the police post were either rude or very slow in following cases. Another community member, who raised a similar concern, said the reason they had a high crime rate in the area was because the police allegedly failed to do their job properly.

We might as well join the rest of the protesters in the country and burn that police post. I have experienced bad service from that police post and this is the reason people get away with crime, alleged the community member. After a week-long observation by this publication, it was noted that the police post closed at exactly 6pm. This formed part of the concerns tabled by the community members. Another concern was that there was no vehicle allocated to the police post.

Complained

The Mpolonjeni community complained that some crime scenes could not be attended to because of the lack of cars. I could count a few incidents where the police could not come because there was no car to help us, said one community member. When reached for comment, Mpolonjeni Bucopho Sabelo Hadzebe said he did not know about the meeting. I was not officially informed about the meeting yet I would have loved to be part of the discussions. I have come to know that the issues that were discussed there were valid and true, said Hadzebe. He further acknowledged the high crime rate and the issue of the police post not being helpful. We are indeed under attack from dangerous thugs who not only break into houses, but hijack cars now.
MBABANE  Lawyers have pledged assistance to those who were arrested during the protest marches that took place over the past weekend.

Secretary General of the proscribed Peoples United Democratic Movement (PUDEMO) Wandile Dludlu confirmed that there were lawyers who had agreed to assist those who were arrested during protest actions. Dludlu said the lawyers include Mzwandile Masuku, Thulani Maseko and another one he identified as Kunene. Dludlu was responding to questions on why his cellphone number was posted on social media. He said the number was posted so that people could contact him in case they were arrested and he would contact the lawyers and inform them about the people who had been arrested.

He said the lawyers had volunteered to help where they could. He said these were emaSwati lawyers who could see the situation outside. He said PUDEMO was in solidarity with emaSwati, hence if one was caught in a certain situation, they tried to assist where possible. He said they did not want a situation where someone was arrested and did not have a lawyer because that would allegedly cause the Tinkhundla System taking advantage of those who did not have lawyers. When contacted, one of the lawyers, Human Rights lawyer Thulani Maseko, confirmed that they had agreed to assist those who were arrested. However, Maseko neither confirmed nor denied that they would provide their service for free. When asked about the trending campaign termed #Kungahlwakwenile, Dludlu said as PUDEMO, they were not behind it or part of it. He said he only read about it on social media.

interpretation

Nonetheless, Dludlu said their interpretation was that the Tinkhundla system was unsustainable. This was an expression of deep anger and frustration of emaSwati, he said. He said COVID-19 made the situation dire and the fact that government failed to provide help to the people, they had lost hope hence the anger expressions. He said government failed to listen to the people instead it instigated war against the protesters. He said there were assumptions that emaSwati were scared of war while that was not the case. He said some of the actions to be taken by the people were unknown and unpredictable because they did not need to ask for permission from anyone to express their anger. He said government should not rule by imposing fear to the people because that was an unsustainable route.

When contacted about the campaign, Chief Police Information and Communications Officer Superintended Phindile Vilakati said it was not their responsibility to respond to anything written on social media. She said as police, they knew their duty and would continue executing it throughout. Vilakati said for the police to respond to whatever the protesters posted on social media would cause them to go on with the protest actions. She said as the police, they would not always respond to what protesters were saying but they were only going to do their work.
MANZINI  The cost of the carnage caused by violent protests in the country is said to be over E1.8 million, so far.

However, this is an inconclusive amount as the value of the products is still being calculated in the various constituencies. According to the Chief Police Information and Communications Officer, Superintendent Phindile Vilakati, the total cost of the damage in the two shops looted at Siphofaneni is E291 000. One of the shops had items valued at E174 000 stolen when it was pelted with stones and broken into during the violent protest that left the rural town looking like a warzone. During the skirmish, one of the shops, which belonged to a Pakistani national, Ahmid Hassan, was vandalised and looted.

Emptied

The shop had almost all its contents emptied by people believed to be the protesters, while its owner was asleep inside. The vandals pelted the shop window panes with stones before gaining entry to take some of the items in stock. Outside Hassans shop were stones and rocks which were supposedly used to pelt the window panes and also break the door in order to gain entry. Vilakati said the other shop had goods valued at E117 000 stolen.

She also said the horse and trailer truck that was transporting an excavator was valued at E1.4 million. In this incident, the horse was smouldered into ashes with debris of the frame lying on the ground. What remained intact was its chassis which anchored a few charred debris and the remnants of its engine. As much as its trailer was not severely damaged as its tyres were still intact, the excavator it was transporting was scorched save for the boom, arm and bucket.

Vilakati further said a truck in Mbabane had items worth E75 000 plundered during a protest. She said police were still computing the carnage in the other constituencies. The challenge we are facing is computing the value of some of the destroyed structures, she said. Worth noting is that in some roads signage in the constituencies and guard rails were uprooted and set alight in the motorways such that it blocked traffic. Also, buildings were pelted with stones while the Eswatini Government Revenue offices and the Eswatini Government Home Affairs offices at Siphofaneni were set alight; but the fire was extinguished before their contents were destroyed.

Meanwhile, Vilakati extended a plea to the citizenry, and those behind the protests, to refrain from torching trucks as some transported combustible items which posed a danger to the public, inclusive of the protesters.

She also emphasised that it was a crime to destroy peoples property.
Omans Ministry of Health has signed a country plan for strategic cooperation with the World Health Organisation (WHO), seeking to realize a health effect from policies, strategies and national plans and enhance Omani societys health.



The Sultanate is considered the first country in the Middle East to complete the development of a strategy related to the new consultative methodology at Middle East level, reported Oman News Agency (ONA).



The strategy outlines aspects of technical cooperation to respond to priorities and requirements of the Sultanate towards the realization of national health policies and sustainable development goals.



The agreement was signed by Dr Ahmed Mohammed al-Saeedi, Minister of Health, and Dr. Jean Jabbour, WHO Representative.



Dr Ahmed underscored the significance of close cooperation between the Sultanate and the WHO.



On his turn, Dr Jean Jabbour said that this strategy is the outcome of concerted communication between the WHO and the Sultanate through the international organizations experts and the Health Ministrys officials over the past two years.



This is the fourth strategy of its kind developed by the two sides for the period 2021-2025. It coincides with the Tenth Five Year Plan of health development aimed to carry out the 13th year working programme and the Middle East Vision 2023 for achieving the three millennia objectives and sustainable development goals.



The country cooperation strategy is distinguished for its flexible timeframe which fits with country plans in a manner that is envisaged by United Nations authorities. It accommodates changing scenarios of countries like emergencies and recurring catastrophes. It also represents the main point of access for national support plans, as well as national action plans and programmed budgets.
Trend Micro Incorporated, a global cybersecurity leader participated at the first Qatar Economic Forum held last week to increase awareness of cybersecurity in the country.

The forum convened participants from the worlds leading experts and decision-makers in the fields of finance, economics, investment, technology, energy, education, sports, and climate.

During the forum, Trend Micro executives reiterated the companys commitment to bring innovations and protect Qatari organisations in the evolving threat landscape, as technologies such as blockchain, AI and IoT are now coming into the mainstream.

Greg Young, Vice President of Cybersecurity, Trend Micro, participated in a panel discussion titled Post-Blockchain Identity: What is the Next Generation of Security?. He said Presently, the system identities are perceived as either good or bad, but with the advent of blockchain technology, the health and posture of these identities will be effectively scrutinised. With a timely risk assessment mechanism for systems identities, devices and individuals, it will put forward a strong stance for mitigating cyber threats in the future.

In 2020 alone, Trend Micros innovations blocked more than 10 million threats in Qatar. These included email threats, malicious URL attacks, malware attempts as well online related banking threats.

Hybrid work environments and distributed workforces are offshoots of the new digital age, said Assad Arabi, Managing Director, Trend Micro Gulf Cluster. With the threat landscape evolving day by day, blockchain is the much-needed technology of the future that will not only prevent unauthorised access to data through encryption but will effectively mitigate cyber threats leading to a surge in the confidence and integrity of data transmitted through it. Trend Micro is at the forefront of bringing new-age technologies to secure organisations in the country and enhance their security posture.

This year the Qatar Economic Forum welcomed a global delegation of influential voices in business, finance, and economic policy, as they prepared a blueprint for the next stage of international growth. It housed 100 + speakers and advisory board members, 500+ delegates and 2000+ global attendees.

-- TradeArabia News Service
President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov held talks with President of Kyrgyzstan Sadyr Japarov, who was in Ashgabat on an official visit.

In the course of the one-on-one meeting followed by the talks with participation of the two delegations, the heads of state discussed a wide range of issues relating to the Turkmen-Kyrgyz cooperation in the political, trade, economic and humanitarian spheres. The sides also exchanged views on the current regional and international issues of mutual interest.

The Turkmen-Kyrgyz talks in an expanded format finished with a ceremony of signing bilateral documents.

The President of Turkmenistan hosted an official dinner in honor of the distinguished guest in the hall of official receptions of the presidential palace complex Oguzkhan, where the leaders of the two countries exchanged speeches. Upon completion of the program of the two-day official visit, the President of Kyrgyzstan departed from Turkmenistan.

 TURKMENISTAN.RU, 2021
New Delhi, Jun 29 (UNI) External Affairs Minister Dr S Jaishankar has not met any Taliban leader as claimed by some media reports, sources said here on Tuesday.

As per the reports which are circulating in social media, Dr Jaishankar had met Taliban leaders Mullah Baradar, Khairullah, Sheikh Dilawar and have assured that future relations with India will not be governed by Pakistan's will.

We have seen some reports on social media which claim that the External Affairs Minister has met some Taliban leaders. Such reports are completely untrue, baseless and mischievous," the sources said.

Dr Jaishankar had visited Doha on June 9 and June 15 where he had met with the Qatari Foreign Minister and the National Security Advisor, as well as US Special Representative on Afghanistan reconciliation.

The fast pace developments are taking place against the backdrop of the US President Joe Biden announcing the withdrawal of American troops from the war-torn Afghanistan on September 11, almost 20 years after it attacked the country to eliminate militant organisation Al Qaeda and overthrow Taliban.

The Taliban, which has rejected to recognise the democratically elected Afghanistan government is becoming stronger day-by-day by attacking the Afghanistan forces and now rules over many districts of the country.

The Indian government has so far not recognised the Taliban.

Talibans main office is located in Doha since 2013. The Qatar government has organised Intra Afghan Dialogue or Afghan-Taliban talks in September last year which was attended by an Indian delegation led by

MEAs Joint Secretary for Iran-Pakistan-Afghanistan J P Singh.

UNI ACL-PS1957
New Delhi, Jun 29 (UNI) Union Home Ministry on Tuesday handed over Jammu air base drone attack case to the National Investigation Agency ((NIA).

The NIA will re- register the case and officially take over it today.

Earlier, National Security Guard (NSG) and NIA were jointly investigating the case. Jammu Police had lodged an FIR on terrorism charges.

NIA had sent its team from Srinagar office to the Jammu Air Force station early Sunday morning to collect some primary evidences from the blast sight. Later, evidences were sent to Delhi for forensic tests, an official in the NIA said.

The investigative agencies, probing into Jammu air base attack, on Monday said that the preliminary findings suggested that it could be a handiwork of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terror group and the use of sophisticated RDX pointing out at likely involvement of Pakistans state actor in this blast.



In a first-of-its-kind terror attack in the country, drones were used to airdrop explosives at the Indian Air Force (IAF) base in Jammu which led to two low-intensity blasts in the wee hours of Sunday, leaving two IAF personnel injured. The low-intensity blasts took place around 0140 hours at the high-security zone of the Air Force Station in Jammu.

UNI AKS GK 1050


Dark and Quiet Skies for Science and Society Santa Cruz de La Palma, Canary Islands, Spain, 3 to 7 October 2021 Venue: Teatro Circo de Marte A webcast will be available to listen and send questions via chat.

Please check this website regularly for updated information.

Application deadlines:

15 July 2021 - Deadline to propose an abstract and to apply for financial support to travel

15 August 2021 - Registration deadline for those attending in person at La Palma

15 September 2021 - Registration deadline for those attending online

Background



Since millennia the silent and ordered beauty of the night sky has inspired humankind in all its intellectual and emotional expressions: poetry, philosophy, religion and science. The knowledge that we acquire from the study of celestial phenomena not only provides a deeper understanding of our place in the Universe, but also leads to technological progress. It is therefore in the interest of many sectors of society to enable astronomy and cosmology to benefit from access to the sky, free of anthropogenic interference. Moreover, beyond science and technology, the pristine spectacle of the starry night sky has been inspirational to humankind since prehistoric times and this world cultural heritage should be zealously protected.

As requested by the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) and Spain are organising a Conference on "Dark and Quiet Skies for Science and Society". As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Conference could not take place in 2020 and an online Workshop was held from 5 to 9 October 2020 to discuss initial findings and draft recommendations. Following the online workshop and the comments received, the working groups of the Scientific Organising Committee (SOC) produced a report in January 2021. Recommendations from this report were presented to the Scientific and Technical Sub-Committee (STSC) of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space in April 2021. This report represents the most up-to-date and authoritative analysis of the impact on astronomy by three classes of interference: artificial light at night (ALAN), the large number of low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite trails, and radio-wavelength emission. The involvement of COPUOS is particularly important since it is the natural international forum where these matters should be brought to the attention of the space community.

Presentations, videos and the report of the online workshop of October 2020 are available via this webpage.

Objectives

The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs and Spain, jointly with the International Astronomical Union (IAU), are announcing a Conference hosted by the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) at Santa Cruz de La Palma, Canary Islands, Spain from Sunday 3 October to Thursday 7 October 2021.

The Conference will focus on the implementation of recommendations, in particular identifying both the technical and political actions needed for their effective realization, as well as which stakeholders and partners would need to collaborate to implement a satisfactory solution for the preservation of a dark and quiet skies. The programme of the Conference includes invited talks as well as contributed papers selected through a call for abstracts.

Programme

The high-level programme is available through this link.

Registration and Call for Abstracts



Interested parties are requested to apply here.

The deadline to propose an abstract and to apply for funding is 15 July 2021.

Working Language

The working language of the Conference will be English.

Sponsorship

The Office for Outer Space Affairs and the Government of Spain are organising the Conference with the International Astronomical Union (IAU). It is supported by the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias.



Sponsorship of the Conference is still open to other interested entities. Interested parties may contact unoosa-events@un.org.

Expected Participants

The Conference addresses private industry involved in technology development that potentially emits light or radio signals interfering with astronomy, astronomers, and urban planners. The Office of Outer Space Affairs strives to support gender mainstreaming in its programmes and is also committed to ensure a balanced representation from different perspectives. Applications from female applicants are particularly encouraged.

Financial Support

Within the limited financial resources available, a limited number of selected participants will be offered financial support to attend the Conference. This financial support will defray the cost of travel (a round trip air-ticket - most economic fare - between the airport of international departure in their home country and La Palma) and/or the room and board expenses for the duration of the Conference. Financial support from the United Nations will only be considered for individuals selected as speaker and who are presently living in a developing country. For the list of developing countries, please refer to the annex of the World Economic Situation and Prospects 2020 report.

Participants will be selected on a competitive basis, depending on their place of origin and relevant professional or educational background. Successful applicants will be notified of the outcome within two weeks after the deadline to apply for financial support.

Life and Health Insurance

Health insurance cover is necessary for each of the selected participants attending physically in La Palma and is the responsibility of the candidate or his/her institution or government. UNOOSA will neither assume any responsibility for life and major health insurance, nor for expenses related to medical treatment or accidental events.

Contact Information

For additional information, please contact: unoosa-events@un.org
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Customs tariffs have long been hailed as multipurpose instruments used not only for fiscal purposes but also for furthering national development goals and promoting industrialization processes. The methods of designing Customs tariffs so that they could be put to work in supporting the national development agenda were discussed during an online workshop conducted for the General Directorate of the Gabon Customs on 21 June 2021.

The workshop was organized with the support of the EU-WCO Programme for Harmonized System in Africa (HS-Africa Programme), in cooperation with the Commission of the Economic Community of Central African States (CEMAC). It brought together a group of experts of the Gabon Customs, and representatives of Customs administrations of Cameroun, the Republic of the Congo, the CEMAC Commission and the WCO.

In his presentation, a representative of the Gabon Customs explained that the intention was to create additional subdivisions beyond those of the CEMAC Common External Tariff to identify products of the wood and lumber industry with different value addition levels. Gabon has been pursuing a policy of industrialization of the wood production chain, and the distinction between different categories of wood depending on their degree of manufacture would need to be established in the tariff to create the required incentive mechanism.

Experts from Customs administrations of Cameroun and the Republic of the Congo shared their perspective on how the structure of national tariffs could be adapted to such policies, based on their administrations experience. To ensure a consistent and harmonized approach to this matter within the region, further discussions will be held at the upcoming meeting of the CEMAC Nomenclature and Tariff Committee. Participants thanked the HS-Africa Programme for creating a platform for the exchange of experience on the matter and fostering the best practice for sharing.

For more details, please contact capacity.building@wcoomd.org.
On 28 June 2021, the WCO Secretary General, Dr. Kunio Mikuriya, met with the Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN), Mr. Antonio Guterres, at UN Headquarters in New York City. The UN Secretary-General acknowledged the important role played by Customs, and the two leaders agreed to strengthen collaboration between both organizations in support of global recovery.

Secretary-General Guterres appreciated the WCO's contribution to facilitating the cross-border movement of vaccines, enhancing security to combat terrorism, supporting economic development through technology-based trade facilitation and working closely with many UN agencies. He also acknowledged the progress made by the global Customs community in relation to gender equality and diversity. He emphasized the fact that the visibility of Customs had been further heightened as a result of the global pandemic and expressed his willingness to continue working with the WCO, offering further support in this respect.

Secretary General Mikuriya explained that the WCOs priority was to assist its Members in facilitating and securing the global distribution of vaccines by ensuring the integrity of the supply chain, while protecting the health and safety of citizens through the organization of global operations, in collaboration with the relevant UN agencies to detect counterfeit, fake, substandard or falsified medicines, vaccines and medical supplies. He also stressed the importance of digitalizing paper-based procedures and supporting the development of E-Commerce in a sound manner while avoiding its exploitation by organized criminals and terrorist organizations. Dr. Mikuriya shared his support for the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals and reiterated the WCO's commitment to contributing to the post-COVID-19 recovery by supporting legitimate trade.

At the end of the meeting, both leaders agreed on further cooperation to achieve common goals.
SURFSIDE, Florida - A woman from Louisiana is among the dozens of missing individuals first responders are searching for in the rubble of Florida's partially collapsed Champlain Towers South condo building, WWL-TV reports.

The 12-story residential building, located in the city of Surfside, is the site of an ongoing search and rescue operation since the building's partial collapse Thursday.

As of Saturday evening, 40-year-old Cassondra Billedeau-Stratton is reportedly one of 130 individuals who remain unaccounted for.

A Kenner native who is known to family and friends as 'Cassie' is an actress, model, and fitness instructor with a significant social media following, according to WWL-TV.

Strattons husband, Mike Stratton, is a well-known Democratic strategist and attorney in Denver.

He released a statement through his law firm, saying, Thank you to everyone who has reached out and is keeping Cassie in their thoughts and prayers, but most of all to the brave men and women working around the clock in unimaginable conditions to bring her and others home. Our family is forever grateful. Cassie is a wife, mother and true friend to so many. She brings a vivacious love of life to everything she doeswhether as an actress, model or Pilates instructor. Thank you again for your continued prayers.

Stratton reportedly works in both Miami and New York and her blog, Chic Living 365, features information related to trends in fashion and life in Miami.

The Times-Picayune New Orleans Advocate reported that Strattons sisters and mother made it to Miami via private plane with help from Republican Whip Steve Scalise.

Scalise reportedly said, "The whole community is rallying behind Kerry and Cassie.

Strattons sisters remain hopeful that their beloved sister will be located safely.

One of her sisters, Necole, explained what she bases her hope on, saying, She is a strong, strong fighting warrior. We are still hopeful and know the fighting power of our God.

At this point in the rescue efforts, a total of five people have been confirmed as dead.

But as officials mourn the loss of these individuals, they remain hopeful that rescue efforts will result in the discovery of survivors.

"We are working around the clock, and we have hope," Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said Friday night.

On Saturday evening, officials say 130 people are accounted for while 156 remain unaccounted for.
Halls Sophie Garner-MacKinnon has been named the 2020-21 Gatorade Connecticut Softball Player of the Year, according to a release from Gatorade. Garner-MacKinnon is the first Gatorade Connecticut Softball Player of the Year to be chosen from Hall High School.
Police Seek Suspect in Walmart Theft

By West Kentucky Star Staff

PADUCAH - The Paducah Police Department is requesting the public's help with identifying a woman suspected of stealing merchandise from Walmart on Irvin Cobb Drive.An employee told officers the suspect pushed over $1,000 worth of merchandise out of the store without paying.Anyone with information on the identity of the suspect is asked to contact the Paducah Police Department at 270-444-8550. Information can also be provided anonymously through West Kentucky Crime Stoppers by texting WKY and your tip to 847411 or by downloading the WKY Crime Stoppers app.
Water Tower Mural Celebration Today

By West Kentucky Star Staff

MCCRACKEN COUNTY - McCracken County Judge-Executive Craig Clymer will hold an event today to celebrate the completion of the United We Stand water tower mural.The celebration will take place on the north lawn of the McCracken County Courthouse at 12:10 p.m.The event will include remarks from Clymer, Paducah Mayor George Bray, Reverend Dr. Bernice Belt, and Paducah-McCracken County NAACP President J.W. Cleary.Clymer shared his appreciation for everyone who donated to the project. He said he hopes the mural counters any divisive or negative misconceptions created by the confederate flag located across the interstate in Reidland's Confederate Park.He said, "The mission is to counter any divisive, negative image created by the Confederate flag by displaying a larger, more visible, positive image of racial unity: A black and white arm shaking hands surrounded by the United States flag and the words "United We Stand." It is a message to the approximate 36,000 travelers daily on I-24, as well as our citizens that in our county all races are equal and united."
Union City Man Held on Arson Charge

By West Kentucky Star Staff

UNION CITY - A Union City man remains in jail on charges of aggravated arson.According to KYTN, Obion County General Sessions Judge Jimmy Smith, ordered 45-year-old Joseph Lee Morris to be held without bond during his video arraignment.Morris was arrested by a TBI Special Agent Fire Investigator, and the Obion County Sheriffs Office, on June 21st.He was charged following an investigation into a house fire, during the morning hours of May 30th on Clifford Rives Road.Five people were inside the home, with all able to escape without injuries.A preliminary hearing has been scheduled for Morris on June 30th.
Independence Day will be extra special this year for many reasons. Like many other things in life, you dont really understand the importance of something until you cant experience it. On Sunday, I will have a whole new level of appreciation for celebrating our wonderful country.
From July 9-11, the dance drama Princess Zhaojun will return to the capital. [For China Daily]

The story of Wang Zhaojun, a beautiful princess from the Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220), is well-known in the country.

As a symbol of bridging cultures, the princess married the chief of the Xiongnu people, a powerful nomadic tribal group in northern China in conflict with the Han Dynasty at that time. Her marriage, ordered by the Han emperor, brought peace to her country.

Wang's story has been adapted into various art forms. In 2016, the China National Opera& Dance Drama Theater turned Wang's story into a dance drama, titled Princess Zhaojun, which featured the company's star dancer-choreographer Tang Shiyi in the lead role.

Since then, the dance drama has been staged nationwide and internationally, and made its New York debut in 2019. From July 9-11, the dance drama will return to the capital.

"I can still recall vividly when we went to North China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region to collect material for the dance drama. There are stories, paintings, sculptures and cultural relics showing the story of Wang Zhaojun. She is a woman who made a great sacrifice for her country and she also had romance with the man she married yet never met. All those details helped us to portray the role," says Tang.

Born in Yongzhou, Hunan Province, Tang, 30, started learning traditional Chinese dance at the age of 6 before receiving a scholarship to study at the affiliated middle school of the Beijing Dance Academy. She graduated from the academy in 2010 and now is the principal dancer of the China National Opera & Dance Drama Theater. She has won many top national awards, including two at the Tao Li Cup, the top honor for young Chinese professional dancers. In 2011, she made her choreographic debut with a dance drama, The Flowing Dance From Tang Poetry, which combined three classic Chinese poems from the Tang Dynasty (618-907)  Spring, River, Flower, Moon, Night by poet Zhang Ruoxu; Song of Everlasting Sorrow by poet Bai Juyi; and Sword Dance by poet Du Fu.

From July 9-11, the dance drama Princess Zhaojun will return to the capital. [For China Daily]

"I have spent most of my life dancing and I believe that traditional Chinese dance, which contains so much history, culture and Chinese philosophy, is very captivating and inspiring. It's very expressive and tells a lot beyond words," says Tang.

One of the most touching moments in the dance drama, as Tang says, is the ending, when Wang looks back on her life.

"Most of the people who accompanied Wang Zhaojun to travel to the Xiongnu tribe had died. She missed them and her home. She held a handful of earth she took from her home and she felt less alone," says Tang. "Though I couldn't talk to her or go back to her time, I share her feelings as a woman. I am deeply touched whenever I dance that part of the performance."

"We all have the experience of traveling far away from home, to study or to pursue our career dream. The story of Wang Zhaojun is still related to our lives today," says the dance drama's choreographer and director Kong Dexin.

Wang Zhaojun is one of the three dance dramas by the China National Opera & Dance Drama Theater, which will tour more than 20 Chinese cities for over a year to celebrate the 100th birthday of the founding of the Communist Party of China.

Besides live performances, artists from China National Opera & Dance Drama Theater will go to art schools and local communities to give workshops and dance classes for children and seniors.

From July 9-11, the dance drama Princess Zhaojun will return to the capital. [For China Daily]

The other two dance dramas are Li Bai, following the life of the legendary Tang Dynasty (618-907) poet Li Bai, and Confucius, which follows the great Chinese sage traveling to 14 states with his students to spread his ideas.

Confucius, also directed by Kong, said to be the 77th-generation direct descendant of Confucius, premiered in 2013 and has been staged over 300 times worldwide. Kong says that what Confucius values is derived from humanity and great love.

Premiered in 2017, Li Bai features director Han Baoquan and dancer Hu Yang performing the leading role. It depicts the poet's passion, talent and persistence.

According to Tang Ying, vice-president of the China National Opera & Dance Drama Theater, the three dance dramas have been streamed on social media platforms both at home and abroad beside live performances, generating a new wave of discussion on the beauty of Chinese culture among art lovers from all over the world.

"From the way of telling stories, choreography to the costumes, stage designs and music, we want to showcase the typical artistic aesthetic from ancient China, through which audiences can better understand Chinese culture," says Tang.

From July 9-11, the dance drama Princess Zhaojun will return to the capital. [For China Daily]

(Source: China Daily)
Click the photo and watch the video.

More than 80 years ago, Edgar Snow, a journalist from the United States, came to China's Shaanxi Province and became an important witness to Chinese history. In his book Red Star Over China, he recorded one of the most important periods of contemporary China  the Long March.

During the Long March, the Women Red Army undertook multiple responsibilities. In addition to fighting in fierce battles and participating in intense marches, they were also experts in medical care and food cultivation and worked to rescue the sick and wounded.

When the troops stopped for breaks, they organized activities such as singing, dancing and playing instruments to boost the army's morale.

The Women Red Army used their unique tenacity to fight desperately against the harsh environment and made outstanding contributions to the victory of the Chinese revolution.

Their stories set a glorious model for China's young generations and are inspiring millions of women nowadays.

(Source: chinadaily.com.cn)
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-28 21:28:22|Editor: huaxia

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People visit the Piazza di Spagna in Rome, Italy, on June 28, 2021. All regions of Italy on Monday become the so-called "white zone," with the lowest level of anti-coronavirus rules in the country's four-tiered system. People are no longer required to wear face masks outdoors except for large gatherings. (Photo by Alberto Lingria/Xinhua)

ROME, June 28 (Xinhua) -- All regions of Italy on Monday become the so-called "white zone," with the lowest level of anti-coronavirus rules in the country's four-tiered system.

People are no longer required to wear face masks outdoors except for large gatherings. But masks are still mandatory on public transport, in all public offices and indoor spaces.

Masks are "strongly recommended" in the presence of the vulnerable, such as the elderly, according to the technical-scientific committee advising the government on the coronavirus emergency.

Health Minister Roberto Speranza announced the move on Friday after signing a specific decree allowing all regional authorities to lift restrictions on the base of the positive pandemic trends.

The latest monitoring report from the National Health Institute (ISS) showed a coronavirus incidence lower than 50 cases per 100,000 inhabitants in all of Italy's 20 regions and autonomous provinces for more than three weeks.

However, health authorities remained watchful of the spread of the coronavirus variants across the country, and especially of Delta and Kappa variants, which accounted for 16.8 percent of all new infections here in June against 4.2 percent in May, according to the latest ISS report.

"A growing number of outbreaks of the virus variants, and especially the Delta variant, are being registered in Italy, and they show a faster transmission rate and/or the ability to partially elude the immune system defence," the ISS stated.

The ISS noted that the circulation of the Delta variant was pushing up cases in other countries where the vaccination campaign has already reached a large portion of the population, and therefore advised on "extensive tracking and sequencing of cases."

Speranza also urged "caution and prudence" in light of the new variants.

Meanwhile, the ISS said pressure on the public health system was low, with an average 4 percent occupancy of beds in intensive care units in all regions.

As of Monday, over 17.7 million people or 32.9 percent of the population in Italy are fully immunized, while 49.8 million vaccine doses have been administered.

Overall, the country has counted over 4.2 million coronavirus cases, including 4 million recoveries, 127,472 fatalities, and more than 57,000 current active infections, with 782 new cases over the last 24 hours. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-28 22:54:18|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, June 28 (Xinhua) -- In the run-up to its centenary this year, the Communist Party of China (CPC) demonstrated its exemplary governance capability by leading the Chinese people in efficiently containing the COVID-19 outbreak and eliminating absolute poverty in the world's most populous country.



The national spirit behind both the victory over poverty and the strategic outcomes of COVID-19 control offers a glimpse into the Party's strong leadership and the nation's solidarity and strength.

Members of a military medical team head for Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province, Jan. 26, 2020. (Xinhua/Cheng Min)

SPIRIT OF FIGHTING COVID-19

In early 2020, a previously unknown virus wreaked havoc in Hubei Province, prompting the Chinese government to take unprecedented measures to curb its rapid spread, including sealing off the hardest-hit provincial capital, Wuhan.

Defying the gloomy predictions of many foreign observers, China in just three months reduced new cases from thousands each day to zero. The Chinese leadership later attributed the success to the people's fighting spirit, which puts people's lives first and values nationwide solidarity, sacrifice, a respect for science, and a sense of purpose for humanity.

China has shown strong solidarity throughout the battle. With a mature mobilization system, China ensured that even villagers in remote mountains were aware that everyone must act as one to defeat the virus. Hundreds of millions of Chinese people answered the government's call to wear masks, stay at home and forego festive activities during the Spring Festival, the most important holiday of the year for Chinese people. Public cooperation helped China build a people's "Great Wall" against the virus.

Medical staff and resources were poured into the worst-affected cities. At the peak of the epidemic, one in 10 intensive care medics in China was working in Wuhan. Backing the nationwide mobilization was science. China swiftly erected makeshift hospitals, set up quarantine facilities and made mask-wearing compulsory. Medical treatment, rapid contact tracking and mass nucleic acid testing all contributed to the efficient control of the epidemic in a short period of time in China.

Openness and internationalism have also been features of China's fight against COVID-19 since the very beginning. Often neglected by China critics is the fact that China began to regularly update the World Health Organization and relevant countries on the new disease as early as Jan. 3, 2020.

Through the course of its intensive and wide-ranging emergency humanitarian aid, China has supplied more than 350 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines abroad, including donations to more than 80 countries.

In retrospect, the country's national spirit in combating COVID-19 has underlined the CPC's inherent people-centered philosophy, along with a globalist touch fitting into China's call for the construction of a global community with a shared future.

Poverty relief assistants Liu Ying (1st L) and He Changle (2nd L), and village officials help carry melons planted by villagers in Dongqin Village, Congjiang County of southwest China's Guizhou Province, Nov. 11, 2020. (Xinhua/Yang Wenbin)

POVERTY ALLEVIATION SPIRIT

In early 2021, China announced that it had eliminated absolute poverty, after lifting its remaining 98.99 million rural residents out of poverty over the past eight years.

The announcement marked a complete victory in China's long-running campaign to end poverty. Since the late 1970s, China has lifted more than 770 million rural residents out of poverty due to continuous poverty relief efforts.

The great cause has contributed to the powerful national spirit, which also encompasses unity, innovation, bravery, dedication to the people, and targeted and practical approaches to challenges.

The spirit of the Chinese people has helped boost national morale and pool wisdom to tackle poverty in the country's poorest areas, helping China realize its goal on schedule despite the headwinds of the pandemic.

The accomplishment is a further testament to the CPC's commitment to the people. By positioning the fight against poverty as a top policy goal, the CPC has again shown that it is striving to ensure no disadvantaged groups are left behind in China's economic take-off.

Flexibility and ingenuity were highlighted in the process. China adopted a targeted poverty-relief approach and local authorities rolled out specific anti-poverty measures to suit local conditions. China has also offered to share its experience with other countries fighting poverty.

China's national spirit will continue to inspire Chinese people in their pursuit of better lives and the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. 
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 02:33:27|Editor: huaxia

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Chinese President Xi Jinping holds talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin via video link in Beijing, capital of China, June 28, 2021. (Xinhua/Ding Lin)

-- The treaty is a vivid example of fostering a new type of international relations and building a community with a shared future for humanity.

-- Under the guidance of the treaty, China and Russia will continue to make concerted efforts and firmly move forward despite the difficulties and obstacles ahead.

-- China and Russia have injected positive energy into the international community. The two sides have set an example of a new type of international relations through their close cooperation, as the world is entering a period of turbulence and change, and human development confronts multiple crises.

BEIJING, June 28 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a joint statement Monday, officially deciding to extend the China-Russia Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation.

The announcement came during talks between the two heads of state via video link.

Hailing the upcoming 20th anniversary of the signing of the treaty, Xi said in Beijing that the treaty has established the idea of enduring friendship, which conforms to the fundamental interests of the two countries as well as the themes of peace and development.

The treaty is a vivid example of fostering a new type of international relations and building a community with a shared future for humanity, he said.

Putin said the treaty demonstrates the willingness of enduring friendship between the two peoples. The relevant principles and spirit established by the treaty have played an important and unique role in the long-term and sound development of Russia-China relations.

"Russia is satisfied with the unprecedented high level of current China-Russia ties as well as comprehensive and steady development of bilateral cooperation," he said.

The treaty extension will lay a more solid foundation for the long-term bilateral ties development, Putin said.

"On the treaty's basis, China-Russia relations have developed rapidly in various fields, covering politics, the economy, and culture over the past 20 years. The relationship between the two countries has also upgraded to a comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for the new era," said Li Ziguo, director of the Department for European-Central Asian Studies of the China Institute of International Studies.

Chinese President Xi Jinping holds talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin via video link in Beijing, capital of China, June 28, 2021. (Xinhua/Xie Huanchi)

FIRMLY MOVING TIES FORWARD

"Under the guidance of the treaty, the two countries will continue to make concerted efforts and firmly move forward despite the difficulties and obstacles ahead," Xi said.

He referred to the current China-Russia ties as "mature, stable, and solid" and able to "withstand the test of any change in the international situation."

The two sides support each other on issues concerning each other's core interests and have carried out effective strategic coordination, safeguarding the common interests of the two countries, he said.

The outcomes of pragmatic cooperation, with increasing quality and quantity, are fruitful, he added.

He called on the two sides to comprehensively summarize their experiences of past successes and create top-level designs for new objectives and tasks in various fields to inject new meaning into the treaty.

The two sides agreed to continue maintaining close high-level exchanges, strengthening vaccine cooperation, expanding bilateral trade, and expanding cooperation in low-carbon energy, digital economy, agriculture and other fields and promote the alignment of the Belt and Road Initiative with the Eurasian Economic Union.

"The secret to the strong development of bilateral ties lies in upholding the principles of mutual respect, equality, mutual benefit, and win-win cooperation, and not targeting any third party. Practical cooperation also provides a strong impetus for the development of ties," Li said.





WARM CONGRATULATION

The Russian president warmly congratulated the Communist Party of China (CPC) on its 100th anniversary of founding, saying that Russia cherishes the history of exchanges with the CPC and is willing to strengthen inter-party exchanges.

It is hoped that China will continue to make new achievements in economic and social development and play a more significant role in international affairs under the leadership of the CPC, Putin said.

Xi expressed appreciation for the congratulations and support to the CPC centennial from Putin and various fields in Russia. He said that China firmly supports the strong measures taken by Russia to maintain its long-term stability and firmly supports Russia in managing its own affairs.

Putin vowed to continue deepening strategic mutual trust and strengthening strategic coordination with China. He said they should continue to firmly support each other in safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity and respect each other's chosen systems and development paths.

He also called for deepening practical cooperation, increasing people-to-people exchanges, and strengthening coordination in international affairs to advance bilateral ties.

In the joint statement, Russia speaks highly of China's concept of building a community with a shared future for humanity, referring to the concept as "being conducive to enhancing global solidarity and jointly tackling challenges."

Russia supports the "Global Initiative on Data Security" proposed by China, and the two countries vowed to formulate feasible measures in tackling threats in international information security, according to the joint statement.

The two sides oppose the politicization of sports. Russia supports China's hosting of the Beijing 2022 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, the statement said.





UPHOLDING TRUE MULTILATERALISM

Noting their close coordination in international affairs, Xi said the two countries have jointly safeguarded true multilateralism and global fairness and justice.

"China and Russia have injected positive energy into the international community. The two sides have set an example of a new type of international relations through their close cooperation, as the world is entering a period of turbulence and change, and human development confronts multiple crises," Xi said.

The two heads of state pledged to jointly and firmly safeguard the international system with the United Nations as the core and the international order based on international law. They also pledged to protect global strategic security and stability, support and practice true multilateralism, oppose interference in other countries' affairs under the guise of "democracy" and "human rights," and resist unilateral coercive sanctions.

Both sides agreed to jointly promote the common human values of peace, development, equity, justice, democracy, and freedom, strengthen solidarity and coordination, and work together to tackle common challenges and promote building a community with a shared future for humanity.

The two sides also voiced opposition to stigmatizing and politicizing acts regarding the COVID-19 pandemic and virus origin tracing.

During the talks, the two heads of state also expressed concern about the recent acceleration of the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan by the United States and NATO and the increasingly complicated and severe security situation in Afghanistan, vowing to jointly maintain regional peace, security, and stability. 
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 03:55:10|Editor: huaxia

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ADDIS ABABA, June 28 (Xinhua) -- The Ethiopian government announced late Monday a unilateral ceasefire in the country's conflict-hit northernmost Tigray regional state.

The Ethiopian government, in a statement published by state-affiliated Fana Broadcasting Corporate (FBC) and other state news outlets, said the move followed a request by the Tigray regional state interim administration.

The unilateral ceasefire is said to facilitate humanitarian assistance, peaceful livelihood in the region as well as agriculture activities amid the approaching rainy season.

Since the early hours of Nov. 4, the Ethiopian government has been undertaking military operations against the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), which used to rule Ethiopia's northernmost Tigray regional state.

"Fighters loyal to the TPLF, who are presently dispersed in the desert will return to peace if conditions are made conducive for it, the Ethiopian government has accepted the Tigray interim administration's request for ceasefire positively," the statement read.

"For the farmer to till the land peacefully, for the aid work to be distributed free from military pressure, for TPLF remnants to return to peaceful road, an unconditional unilateral ceasefire has been declared from June 28 to last until the end of farming season," the statement added. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 04:27:26|Editor: huaxia

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UNITED NATIONS, June 28 (Xinhua) -- In the wake of attacks on humanitarians in Ethiopia, a UN spokesman on Monday said that such raids are assaults on the people they serve.

"Attacks on humanitarian workers aren't just attacks on those individuals, tragic and horrific as it is, it is an attack on the people they are there to serve and it is unacceptable," said Stephane Dujarric, the chief spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

The United Nations does not have any armed security to protect humanitarian workers, Dujarric said.

In the latest attack, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) said government troops raided its Mekelle office in the embattled Tigray region and took down its communication satellite equipment.

"The responsibility to protect humanitarian workers falls squarely first and foremost on the government and also on all parties involved in this conflict," the spokesman told reporters at a regular briefing.

"We condemn any and all attacks on humanitarian workers and assets and remind again all parties of their obligations under international humanitarian law," he said.

"Members of the Ethiopian National Defense Forces entered our office in Mekele, Tigray, Ethiopia today (Monday) and dismantled our VSAT equipment. This act violates UN privileges and immunities and the rules of International Humanitarian Law regarding respect for humanitarian relief objects. I condemn this action in the strongest terms," said Henrietta Fore, executive director of the UN Children's Fund.

She asked all parties to the conflict to respect and protect humanitarian agencies and not search, confiscate or interfere with humanitarian relief operations and access to those in need.

"UNICEF's priority in Tigray, and across Ethiopia, is to help the most vulnerable children, including the 140,000 children already facing famine-like conditions. We are not, and should never be, a target."

Last week, three workers for Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF) were killed in Tigray.

Guterres over the weekend was shocked by the murders and said it was unacceptable and an appalling violation of international humanitarian law.

Guterres called for the perpetrators to be found and severely punished, Dujarric said.

The UN chief wanted an independent and swift investigation into the incident, an immediate end to the fighting and urgent steps to peacefully end the conflict. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 04:51:23|Editor: huaxia

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WASHINGTON, June 28 (Xinhua) -- The International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva on Monday announced her proposal to appoint Li Bo, currently deputy governor of the People's Bank of China (PBOC), as IMF deputy managing director.

Georgieva made the announcement to the IMF Executive Board about three weeks after she said Deputy Managing Director Zhang Tao intends to conclude his service when his five-year term expires in August. Li's proposed appointment is to be effective Aug. 23.

"Mr. Li brings extensive experience in central banking and law," Georgieva said in a statement, noting that during Li's more than 14 years of service at the PBOC between 2004 and 2018, he held a variety of senior positions, including as head of the legal and regulation department, and of two monetary policy departments.

"While at the PBOC, he was instrumental in supporting and implementing several important reforms and policies, including state-owned banking reform; anti-money laundering legislation; and establishing a macroprudential policy framework for China," Georgieva continued.

Li has also served in a number of other public sector positions in China. He was the vice chairman of the All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese from 2018 to 2019. He went on to serve as vice mayor of Chongqing Municipality from 2019 to 2021, overseeing the city's financial sector development, international trade, and foreign direct investment.

Li returned to the PBOC in April 2021 to take up the position of deputy governor.

Li received his undergraduate education from Renmin University of China in Beijing. He also holds an M.A. degree in Economics from Boston University, a Ph.D. degree in Economics from Stanford University, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.

Prior to joining the PBOC, Li was a practicing attorney with the New York law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell for five years.

The IMF managing director is assisted by a first deputy managing director and three deputy managing directors, according to the institution's official website.

In March 2020, the IMF Executive Board approved Georgieva's appointment of Geoffrey Okamoto, a former U.S. Treasury Department official, as the IMF's first deputy managing director, succeeding David Lipton, who took up the position in September 2011. The multilateral lender's second-highest ranking official has traditionally been an American.

The other two deputy managing directors are Antoinette Monsio Sayeh, former Minister of Finance in Liberia, and Mitsuhiro Furusawa, former Vice Minister of Finance for International Affairs in Japan. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 06:26:34|Editor: huaxia

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WASHINGTON, June 28 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday discussed bilateral relations and regional issues with visiting Israeli President Reuven Rivlin.

Biden, at the beginning of their meeting in the Oval Office, reaffirmed U.S. "unwavering commitment" to Israel's self-defense, adding "Iran will never get a nuclear weapon on my watch."

Biden said he would be hosting Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett at the White House "very soon," and voiced support for the normalization of relations between Israel and other countries in the region.

Rivlin is due to retire next month after the end of his seven-year term.

The role of the president in Israel is mainly ceremonial with little executive power. The president of Israel is elected for seven years and cannot serve more than a single term.

Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid told U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Rome on Sunday that "Israel has some serious reservations about the Iran nuclear deal being put together in Vienna," according to a statement issued by the Israeli foreign ministry.

Lapid said on Monday that his country reserves the right to act against Iran's nuclear program "anywhere and anytime."

Washington and Tehran have had six rounds of indirect negotiations in Vienna since April aimed at restoring the nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

A senior State Department official said last week that the two sides still have serious differences over the issue. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 09:22:50|Editor: huaxia

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CARACAS, June 28 (Xinhua) -- Venezuelan health authorities on Monday launched a mass vaccination drive against COVID-19 in Caracas, the capital of the country, using the Abdala vaccine developed in Cuba.

"The arrival in Venezuela of these first doses is the realization of the decision of the Cuban people to collaborate with the peoples of the region in the fight against the pandemic," said Pedro Almendares, the local representative of vaccine-maker BioCubaFarma.

Recently Cuba signed a contract with the Venezuelan Ministry of Health for the purchase of 12 million vaccines, which will gradually be delivered to the South American country by October, said Almendares.

The agreement between the two nations will facilitate the immunization of 4 million Venezuelans, as the Abdala vaccine requires three doses per person.

In the first shipment, "30,000 doses of vaccines arrived that will make it possible to immunize 10,000 people between the ages of 19 and 80," he added.

In clinical trials, Abdala, one of five vaccine candidates in national production in Cuba, was applied to treat worrisome coronavirus variants such as those that emerged in Britain and South Africa, with results showing over 92 percent efficacy, according to Almendares.

In Caracas, the vaccine was being applied to thousands of residents at the Ciudad Tiuna housing complex. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 13:20:37|Editor: huaxia

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MOSCOW, June 29 (Xinhua) -- Close China-Russia cooperation adds positive energy to the world landscape that is undergoing geopolitical turbulence and drastic changes, a Russian expert on China has said.

Lyudmila Matsenko, member of the Central Board of the Russia-China Friendship Association, made the remarks in a recent interview with Xinhua after Chinese and Russian presidents issued a joint statement Monday to extend the China-Russia Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation.

Matsenko said that the extension of the key pact, which was signed 20 years ago, is of "great importance" as it defines the nature of the development of bilateral ties.

"It is on the basis of this document that a Russian-Chinese strategic partnership has been built and an unprecedentedly high level of Russian-Chinese relations has been achieved," she said.

The expert described Russian-Chinese coordination as an important factor in maintaining the balance of power and global stability in the context of multiple challenges, including the breakdown of arms control agreements, and higher risks of conflict in different parts of the world.

"The model of equal, respectful and effective relations that China and Russia have been able to build is very much attractive for many countries in the world," Matsenko said.

China and Russia, she noted, are implementing joint projects in various fields, while their political, trade, cultural and educational ties are being strengthened.

Matsenko congratulated the Chinese people and members of the Communist Party of China (CPC) on the upcoming 100th anniversary of the founding of the party.

"China demonstrates an impressive example of successful socio-economic development," she said, applauding the country's achievements.

Despite the pandemic, China has completed the task of eradicating absolute poverty, which was "an outstanding success" for the CPC, Matsenko said.

The Russia-China Friendship Association, she said, is making every effort to promote people-to-people and cultural exchanges between the two countries, and has established close and comprehensive interaction with Chinese partners. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 14:07:22|Editor: huaxia

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CANBERRA, June 29 (Xinhua) -- An Australian scientist who has worked in the Wuhan lab said that the lab was "more routine" than portrayed in the media.

"It was a regular lab that worked in the same way as any other high-containment lab," Danielle Anderson said in an interview with Bloomberg. "What people are saying is just not how it is."

Anderson, 42, started collaborating with the biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in central China in 2016, where her last stint finished in November 2019.

Describing her work on Ebola in the lab as realization of her "life-long career goal", the virologist shared details of the lab different from Western media reports.

The lab, she said, has the highest bio-safety designation, as well as strict protocols and requirements to contain pathogen being studied.

She also said that one has to go through complicated procedure when exiting the lab, including chemical shower and personal shower. She was even inspired by the lab's method to make and monitor disinfectants and introduced the system to her own lab.

Anderson said that her colleagues looked after her during her stay there. "We went to dinners together, lunches, we saw each other outside of the lab," she said.

Bloomberg reported that Anderson was "dumbfounded by the portrayal of the lab by some media outside China, and the toxic attacks on scientists that have ensued."

Some Western media reports said that three researchers from the Wuhan lab were hospitalized with flu-like symptoms in November 2019, but Anderson said no one she knew at that time was ill.

People in the lab are required to report symptoms that correspond with the pathogens handled. "If people were sick, I assume that I would have been sick -- and I wasn't," said Anderson. "I was tested for coronavirus in Singapore before I was vaccinated, and had never had it."

The scientist who has worked with some renowned virologists for years knew well that pathogen could escape from a lab, but she was convinced that no virus was made intentionally to infect people and released deliberately. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 14:59:53|Editor: huaxia

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The Argentine government on Sunday called for national unity to overcome the pandemic, as it mourned more than 92,000 people who died from COVID-19 in the country.

"We are here to remember each of the people who were fatal victims of the pandemic. Each of them had a name, a life," said Argentine President Alberto Fernandez during a ceremony held at the Kirchner Cultural Center of Buenos Aires.

"This is a ceremony of recollection and reflection," he said when attending the ceremony along with representative from various sectors of society, including essential workers and provincial governors.

"With this pandemic, we are witnessing a true cataclysm that is plaguing humanity. The millions of deaths have shocked the entire world, as well as the almost 100,000 deceased in our own country," he added.

Argentina has reported 4,393,142 cases and 92,317 deaths from COVID-19 as of Saturday.

Produced by Xinhua Global Service
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 15:30:35|Editor: huaxia

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Passengers walk in the Hankou Railway Station in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province, April 8, 2020. (Xinhua/Xiao Yijiu)

"It was a regular lab that worked in the same way as any other high-containment lab," Danielle Anderson said in an interview with Bloomberg. "What people are saying is just not how it is."

CANBERRA, June 29 (Xinhua) -- An Australian scientist who has worked in the Wuhan lab said that the lab was "more routine" than portrayed in the media.

"It was a regular lab that worked in the same way as any other high-containment lab," Danielle Anderson said in an interview with Bloomberg. "What people are saying is just not how it is."

Anderson, 42, started collaborating with the biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in central China in 2016, where her last stint finished in November 2019.

Describing her work on Ebola in the lab as realization of her "life-long career goal", the virologist shared details of the lab different from Western media reports.

The lab, she said, has the highest bio-safety designation, as well as strict protocols and requirements to contain pathogen being studied.

A train safety crew member holds a placard to remind passengers of scanning the QR code for real-name registration and wearing masks on a train of Metro Line 4 in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province, March 28, 2020. (Xinhua/Cai Yang)

She also said that one has to go through complicated procedure when exiting the lab, including chemical shower and personal shower. She was even inspired by the lab's method to make and monitor disinfectants and introduced the system to her own lab.

Anderson said that her colleagues looked after her during her stay there. "We went to dinners together, lunches, we saw each other outside of the lab," she said.

Bloomberg reported that Anderson was "dumbfounded by the portrayal of the lab by some media outside China, and the toxic attacks on scientists that have ensued."

Some Western media reports said that three researchers from the Wuhan lab were hospitalized with flu-like symptoms in November 2019, but Anderson said no one she knew at that time was ill.

People in the lab are required to report symptoms that correspond with the pathogens handled. "If people were sick, I assume that I would have been sick -- and I wasn't," said Anderson. "I was tested for coronavirus in Singapore before I was vaccinated, and had never had it."

The scientist who has worked with some renowned virologists for years knew well that pathogen could escape from a lab, but she was convinced that no virus was made intentionally to infect people and released deliberately. 
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 15:51:55|Editor: huaxia

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MAHMUD-E-RAQI, Afghanistan, June 29 (Xinhua) -- Security forces in fresh operations targeting Taliban militants in Tagab and Alasay districts of Afghanistan's northeastern Kapisa province early Tuesday killed 11 insurgents, provincial police spokesman Abdul Shaeq Shurash said.

In the operations backed by fighting planes 20 more militants were injured, the official added.

The operations will last until the said districts are cleared from the militants, the official said.

Taliban militants who have intensified activities and reportedly overrun more than 70 districts since the start of the U.S.-led forces withdrawal from Afghanistan in May have yet to make comment on the casualty report. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 16:01:08|Editor: huaxia

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China on Monday urged Japan to treat the "comfort women" issue left over from history in an honest and responsible manner at the ongoing 47th session of the UN Human Rights Council. #GLOBALink

Produced by Xinhua Global Service
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 17:54:18|Editor: huaxia

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ABU DHABI, June 29 (Xinhua) -- Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid landed in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on Tuesday on a first visit by a senior Israeli official to the Gulf Arab country.

Lapid's office said in a statement that Lapid flew with a delegation that includes Foreign Ministry Director-General Alon Ushpiz and other officials.

During his two-day trip, Lapid will inaugurate the Israeli embassy in the UAE's capital Abu Dhabi and the consulate in Dubai, according to his office.

Lapid, the centrist leader of the Yesh Atid party, was the driving force behind the forming of Israel's new cross-partisan coalition government. He serves as foreign minister and alternate prime minister.

Israel and the UAE signed a U.S.-brokered normalization agreement in September 2020. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 18:23:21|Editor: huaxia

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DUSHANBE, June 29 (Xinhua) -- The people-centered philosophy and excellent governing capability of the Communist Party of China (CPC) are key to China's stunning achievements in the past decades and will lead the country to new development miracles, a veteran Tajik politician has said.

In a recent interview with Xinhua, 87-year-old Azimqul Nasimov, secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Tajikistan, praised China's achievements in cracking down on corruption, improving the wellbeing of the Chinese people, containing the COVID-19 epidemic and eradicating absolute poverty.

As the CPC marks its centenary, Nasimov said, "we see how China is moving towards its goal with leaps and bounds thanks to the hard-working Chinese people and the leadership of the CPC."

He noted that "China is on the right path, for the benefit of the people and for the creation of a just and fair society by eradicating absolute poverty."

Commenting on bilateral ties, Nasimov said, "China and Tajikistan maintain very good relations."

"There are a lot of Chinese working in Tajikistan," Nasimov added. "The Chinese are here to help us build road transport infrastructure and many other projects."

As a communist, Nasimov said that he is proud of the achievements made by his comrades in China, voicing hope that his party and the CPC will continue to work together to carry out an increasing number of in-depth inter-party exchanges and cooperation, jointly respond to various challenges and promote the progress of mankind. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 18:45:43|Editor: huaxia

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ISTANBUL -- Turkish police launched widespread operations to capture 47 suspects over their alleged ties with a network believed to be behind a coup attempt in 2016, local media reported Tuesday.

Acting upon the order of the Chief Public Prosecutor's Office in Istanbul, operations have begun simultaneously in 24 provinces, the state-run Anadolu agency said. (Turkey-Coup-Arrest)

- - - -

MINSK -- Belarus on Monday suspended its participation in the Eastern Partnership initiative of the European Union (EU) due to the bloc's recently imposed sanctions against the country.

Head of the EU Delegation to Belarus Dirk Schuebel was summoned to the Belarusian Foreign Ministry Monday and informed of the suspension, said the ministry in a statement. (Belarus-EU-Sanctions)

- - - -

MAHMUD-E-RAQI, Afghanistan -- Security forces in fresh operations targeting Taliban militants in Tagab and Alasay districts of Afghanistan's northeastern Kapisa province early Tuesday killed 11 insurgents, provincial police spokesman Abdul Shaeq Shurash said.

In the operations backed by fighting planes 20 more militants were injured, the official added. (Afghanistan-Operations-Militants)

- - - -

JALALABAD, Afghanistan -- Six Taliban militants have been confirmed dead and three others injured as their mine exploded prematurely in Shirzad district of Afghanistan's eastern Nangarhar province on Monday, provincial government spokesman Atahullah Khogiani said Tuesday.

A group of Taliban militants were going to plant mine on a road in Kodikhil area of the restive Shirzad district on Monday night but the device exploded prematurely killing six insurgents on the spot and injuring three others, the official said. (Afghanistan-Blast-Taliban) Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 19:32:35|Editor: huaxia

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WINDHOEK, June 29 (Xinhua) -- Namibia will recruit more health professionals as an urgent measure to battle the third COVID-19 wave that is currently plaguing the southwestern African nation, an official said Tuesday.

The health ministry in an advert has since invited registered health professionals that include medical officers, specialists, physiotherapists, lab technicians, and social workers, among others, the ministry's executive director, Ben Nangombe said.

"We are inviting registered health personal both from Namibia and anywhere else in the world to hand in applications," he said, adding that Namibia's health system, like any other system, was not built for this type of pandemic.

According to Nangombe, Namibia is facing a difficult situation as a country.

Currently, Namibia's hospitals are full to the brim with COVID-19 patients and as of Tuesday, the country's biggest state hospital has suspended outpatient services in order to convert the department into a facility for patients awaiting bed availability and placement. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 19:33:47|Editor: huaxia

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HONG KONG, June 29 (Xinhua) -- Hong Kong's Center for Health Protection (CHP) reported one new imported case of COVID-19 on Tuesday, taking the total tally to 11,921.

The CHP has identified the source of an untraceable case reported last week, ascertaining that the 27-year-old patient contracted the virus through three imported cases found earlier. There were altogether 42 new cases over the past two weeks, including two infections related to imported cases.

Hong Kong's vaccination program starting in late February is picking up pace as the number of daily jabs has topped 50,000 for four days in a row.

Nearly 2.18 million residents have taken at least one shot of the COVID-19 vaccine, accounting for 32 percent of eligible groups, with 1.43 million people fully vaccinated. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 19:42:01|Editor: huaxia

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WUHAN/HOHHOT, June 29 (Xinhua) -- This year marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC). But how do China's younger generations see Party members?

REASSURING, RESPONSIBLE

"Living in China under the leadership of the CPC makes me feel secure. This is my deepest feeling after the COVID-19 epidemic," said Li Jing, a 39-year-old Wuhan local.

Li contracted COVID-19 in 2020. "The city was locked down on Jan. 23 last year and, to be honest, I was very afraid at the time," she said. "But soon, medical personnel were sent from across China to help us, which gave me much reassurance."

"I felt relieved when I was admitted to a makeshift hospital. The Party and the country gave us the confidence and hope to win the battle against the virus," she said.

Li, an illustrator, drew cartoons of the medical staff around her. Her drawings portray health care personnel seeing patients, delivering meals, disinfecting the hospital, performing nucleic acid tests and teaching patients to square dance to help them relax.

Yang Guang, a young deliveryman in Wuhan, thinks the CPC is the embodiment of responsibility.

"I'm from a village in the city of Xiangyang, Hubei Province. During the epidemic, Party members in our village were first responders. They took turns taking temperatures and registering passengers at checkpoints," he recalled.

"It was during the Chinese New Year, and the Party members did a lot of work and hardly rested," he said. "Party members are a group with a strong sense of social responsibility."

SUPPORTER OF CHANGE

Thanks to the CPC, remarkable changes have taken place in the hometown of Hasisarga, a 30-year-old ethnic Mongolian in Saihannur Village, West Ujimqin Banner, Xilingol League, north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.

"The pastoral areas are vast and remote, so building infrastructure used to take a lot of time. But now, the roads are better and we have easy access to electricity and water. We also have Wi-Fi and 4G internet. It's the best of times," she said.

"These changes have taken place here thanks to the Party's policies on poverty alleviation and rural vitalization," she said.

Hasisarga said cameras have also been installed to help herders keep an eye on their cattle and sheep. Better sheds have been built, which has significantly reduced incidences of frostbite and death in cattle and sheep during adverse weather.

A total of 1,124 people formerly registered as living below the poverty line have been lifted out of poverty in the banner. The average net income of its registered poor people increased to 22,122 yuan (about 3,426 U.S. dollars) last year, up from about 4,050 yuan in 2015.

"We have distinctive foods, beautiful scenery and unique traditions on the grassland, so I make short videos of the magnificent views and our life and share them online," she said.

Xu Xiaomeng traveled more than 850 km to Suzhou City in east China's Jiangsu Province from his hometown in central China's Henan Province 17 years ago. For him, the CPC is like a pilot flying him toward his dream.

"From having to share a room with several workers to owning an apartment, and from being just myself to starting a family, we have now settled down in the city and are leading a happy life," said Xu, 37, head of an art troupe in Suzhou.

Xu established the art troupe in 2010. It is made up of migrant workers in Suzhou and Shanghai. They work during the day and play guitar and sing at night.

The group has released more than 30 songs over the years. The songs are about the changes in their lives and the happiness they feel after becoming city residents is keenly felt.

"These are the results of the CPC's unremitting efforts to deepen reform and opening-up and improve people's livelihoods. We are thankful that the Party and the country have given us, the ordinary people, the opportunity to realize our value and live happy lives," he said.

FAITH IN THE PARTY

"My grandpa's faith in the Party has deeply influenced me," said Wang Linlin, a student at Beijing Foreign Studies University, who wants to become a Party member.

"I grew up under the care of my grandfather, a Party member and a veteran of the War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea," she said. "He used to tell me stories about how Party members joined the front line to safeguard peace, risking their own lives," she said.

He told me that my generation was lucky to be born in a time of peace with no worries about food and clothing, she said. "He believed that such good days were brought to us by the Party, and he was very proud of being a CPC member," she added.

"I think it's remarkable that the Party has led the Chinese people to eliminate absolute poverty. Looking at the war that my grandpa saw and the time that we're living in, I'm more than determined to join the Party," she said.

By the end of 2019, there were 22.26 million CPC members aged 35 and under, accounting for 24.2 percent of the total number of CPC members.

Wang thinks that it would be a great honor to become a Party member. "It means joining a group of talented people who have ideals, ambitions and a strong sense of mission, and you should become a more capable person and strive to build a better society," she said.

"In the age of the internet, people are paying attention to the social needs and interests of vulnerable groups. I hope that I can do my part to help more people, to serve them, and make contributions to social development," she said. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 19:52:48|Editor: huaxia

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A police officer is on duty at a checkpoint to prevent construction workers from leaving in Bangkok, Thailand, June 29, 2021. To curb rising infections, Thailand decided to ban restaurant dine-in services and gatherings of more than 20 people in Bangkok and nine other provinces, in addition to the previously announced sealing-off of construction sites. These measures will remain for 30 days starting from Monday. (Xinhua/Rachen Sageamsak)

BANGKOK, June 29 (Xinhua) -- Thailand registered 4,662 new COVID-19 cases on Tuesday, down from the previous day's figure of 5,406, according to the country's Center for the COVID-19 Situation Administration (CCSA).

With nearly two weeks of average daily infections above 3,000, the Southeast Asian nation's tally now stands at 254,515.

The country also reported 36 deaths on Tuesday, taking the death toll to 1,970.

More than 70,000 cases have been reported in Bangkok, where the worst outbreak of COVID-19 infections originated in April.

To fight the latest surge in infections, Thailand has reimposed the dine-in ban in Bangkok and neighboring provinces after lifting it one and a half months ago.

Bangkok Governor Aswin Kwanmuang said on Tuesday that the capital will add 4,400 beds for patients with slight symptoms or no symptoms from early next month.

As of Monday, Thailand has administered over 9.4 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine, with around 4 percent of its population fully vaccinated, CCSA data showed. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 19:54:41|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, June 29 (Xinhua) -- China's national observatory Tuesday renewed a yellow alert for rainstorms across vast stretches of the country.

From Tuesday afternoon to Wednesday afternoon, heavy rains and rainstorms are very likely in southeast parts of the Sichuan Basin and provincial-level regions, including Guizhou, Yunnan, and Guangxi, the National Meteorological Center said.

The center warned that some areas in Jiangxi, Zhejiang, and Guangxi would experience downpours with up to 180 mm of rainfall in 24 hours.

Some regions will see thunderstorms, strong winds, and over 80 mm of hourly precipitation, the center said.

The center advised local authorities to remain alert for possible flooding, landslides, and mudslides and recommended halting outdoor operations in hazardous areas.

China has a four-tier color-coded weather warning system, with red representing the most severe, followed by orange, yellow, and blue. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 20:03:05|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, June 29 (Xinhua) -- Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, will attend a grand gathering celebrating the CPC centenary at Tian'anmen Square in Beijing on Thursday.

Xi, also Chinese president and chairman of the Central Military Commission, will deliver an important speech at the event that will begin at 8 a.m.

The event will be broadcast live by China Media Group and on www.xinhuanet.com. It will also be broadcast simultaneously by television and radio stations across China, as well as on news websites and new media platforms. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 20:08:44|Editor: huaxia

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Photo taken on June 29, 2021 shows the site of a bomb explosion in Jalalabad, capital of Nangarhar province, Afghanistan. Four people were injured as a bicycle bomb rocked Jalalabad city, the capital of Afghanistan's eastern Nangarhar province on Tuesday, provincial government spokesman Attaullah Khogiani said. (Photo by Saifurahman Safi/Xinhua)

JALALABAD, Afghanistan, June 29 (Xinhua) -- Four people were injured as a bicycle bomb rocked Jalalabad city, the capital of Afghanistan's eastern Nangarhar province on Tuesday, provincial government spokesman Attaullah Khogiani said.

According to Khogiani, militants planted the explosive device in the cavities of a bicycle and detonated it, and the blast occurred in the 7th precinct of Jalalabad city on Tuesday afternoon, injuring the four civilians.

In the meantime, a doctor at a Jalalabad-based hospital on the condition of anonymity said that 12 people, all civilians, who were injured due to the blast had been taken to his hospital.

No group has claimed responsibility for the incident yet. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 20:45:11|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, June 29 (Xinhua) -- The award ceremony of the July 1 Medal, the highest honor in the Communist Party of China (CPC), was held Tuesday morning at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.

President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the CPC Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, presented the medals to outstanding CPC members.

A total of 29 people received the honor, including three who were awarded the medal posthumously, and 22 of them attended the ceremony.

The recipients are:

Ma Maojie, known for her heroic contribution to the campaign to cross the Yangtze River during the Chinese People's War of Liberation;

Wang Shumao, a role model in safeguarding the country's rights and interests in the South China Sea;

Wang Zhanshan, a war hero who participated in the War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea and other battles;

Wang Lanhua, a community worker rendering volunteer services at her residential community;

Ai Aiguo, a skilled and innovative welder;

Shi Guangyin, an exemplary individual who leads efforts in afforestation and combating desertification;

Lyu Qiming, a renowned composer whose works include many revolution-themed songs;

Ting Bater, a paragon of hard work who spent decades helping improve the lives of herders in border areas;

Liu Guijin, a veteran diplomat who made outstanding contributions to promoting Sino-African friendship;

Sun Jingkun, a veteran and a village official dedicated to improving people's living standards;

Memetjan Wumer, a village official in Xinjiang dedicated to safeguarding ethnic unity and opposing ethnic separatism;

Li Hongta, a Party loyalist known for his great moral integrity and a keen sense of responsibility;

Wu Tianyi, a doctor who blazed a trail in the study of altitude sickness medication;

Xin Yuling, an expert physician in thoracic surgery;

Zhang Guimei, a teacher working for female education in poverty-stricken mountainous areas;

Lu Yuanjiu, a pioneer of automation science and technology;

Chen Hongjun, a young soldier of the People's Liberation Army who died defending the country's borders in 2020;

Lin Dan, a community worker who serves residents wholeheartedly;

Zhoigar, a guardian of the country's borders on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau;

Zhou Yongkai, a former official who devoted himself to poverty reduction and local development;

Chai Yunzhen, a hero of the War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea. Chai passed away in 2018;

Guo Ruixiang, a Red Army veteran who had participated in several revolutionary struggles;

Huang Dafa, known for his remarkable contributions to China's anti-poverty campaign;

Huang Wenxiu, a village official who died in 2019 on the frontline of China's war against poverty;

Huang Baomei, an outstanding representative of textile workers who strived for the goal of "making clothes for the Chinese people";

Cui Daozhi, a criminal investigation expert and a role model police officer;

Lan Tianye, a well-known performance artist;

Wei Deyou, a retired worker of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps who safeguarded the border area for more than 50 years;

Qu Duyi, a veteran journalist who worked for Xinhua News Agency. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 21:23:41|Editor: huaxia

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NAIROBI, June 29 (Xinhua) -- The World Bank said it has approved 14 billion shillings (about 130 million U.S. dollars) additional financing to help Kenya facilitate affordable and equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines.

The lender said in a statement released on Monday that the financing will enable Kenya to procure more vaccines through the African Vaccine Acquisition Task Team (AVATT) initiative and the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) facilities.

Keith Hansen, World Bank country director for Kenya, said the additional funding comes at a critical time when Kenya is making concerted efforts to contain the rising cases of COVID-19 infections and accelerate the deployment of vaccines to a wider population.

"The upfront financing for the acquisition of COVID-19 vaccines will enable the government to expand access to more Kenyans free of cost," Hansen said.

The financial assistance will also be used for vaccine safety surveillance, training for health workers, and advocacy and communications activities to encourage COVID-19 vaccine uptake.

The East African nation has so far confirmed 282,884 total COVID-19 cases, 124,588 recoveries and 3,612 deaths as of Monday. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 22:08:31|Editor: huaxia

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MOGADISHU, June 29 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations' top relief official in Somalia has appealed for funding to help millions of people in need of life-saving assistance in the country.

Adam Abdelmoula, humanitarian coordinator for Somalia said the funding crisis has left 5.9 million vulnerable persons at risk of losing access to some or all of the life-saving and protection services they desperately need in the country.

"Humanitarian partners can barely meet the basic needs of hungry families, desperate communities and displaced women and children," Abdelmoula said in a statement issued in Mogadishu on Monday evening.

The UN official said the alarming low funding is jeopardizing life-saving assistance to millions in Somalia and warned that if action is not taken to address this funding gap, the cost could be catastrophic.

He said humanitarian needs have increased significantly in 2021 but the funding to respond to these needs is the worst in six years.

According to the UN, some 2.9 million people remain displaced from their homes; 2.8 million will need urgent food assistance by September; a million children are malnourished.

The UN, which said almost half the Somali population needs humanitarian aid, revealed that the situation has been aggravated by a double climate disaster - drought in some parts of the country and flooding in others - and the impact of political tensions, COVID-19 and the worst desert locust infestation in years.

"We rely on the generosity of our donors to ensure the needs of the most vulnerable Somalis are addressed. I implore donors to stand with families in Somalia and avert a disaster by fully funding the humanitarian response," Abdelmoula said.

He said despite the dire situation, only 26 percent of the 1.09 billion U.S. dollars funding needed for the 2021 Somali Humanitarian Response Plan has been provided. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 22:31:59|Editor: huaxia

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LUSAKA, June 29 (Xinhua) -- Zambia saw a decline in daily COVID-19 deaths in the last 24 hours, with the youngest victim being one year and two months, its health ministry said on Tuesday.

The country recorded 47 new deaths in the last 24 hours, the lowest in recent days since the outbreak of the third wave.

Kennedy Malama, Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Health in charge of Technical Services said the baby boy was HIV-positive who was not on treatment while the oldest was an 86-year-old female with a history of hypertension and a previous stroke.

The total deaths now stand at 2,138 with 1,441 classified as COVID-19 deaths and 697 as COVID-19 associated deaths.

The country also recorded 2,395 new cases during the period out of 9,952 tests done bringing the cumulative cases to 152,056.

A total of 1,869 patients were discharged bringing the total recoveries to 128,310. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 22:38:50|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, June 29 (Xinhua) -- China's national observatory Tuesday renewed a yellow alert for rainstorms across vast stretches of the country.

From Tuesday afternoon to Wednesday afternoon, heavy rains and rainstorms are very likely in southeast parts of the Sichuan Basin and provincial-level regions, including Guizhou, Yunnan, and Guangxi, the National Meteorological Center said.

The center warned that some areas in Jiangxi, Zhejiang, and Guangxi would experience downpours with up to 180 mm of rainfall in 24 hours.

Some regions will see thunderstorms, strong winds, and over 80 mm of hourly precipitation, the center said.

The center advised local authorities to remain alert for possible flooding, landslides, and mudslides and recommended halting outdoor operations in hazardous areas.

China has a four-tier color-coded weather warning system, with red representing the most severe, followed by orange, yellow, and blue.

The center also renewed a blue alert for severe convection weather, forecasting that parts of Inner Mongolia, Liaoning, Hebei, Beijing, Tianjin, Shandong, Anhui, Jiangsu, Jiangxi, and Zhejiang would experience thunderstorms, strong winds, and hail from Tuesday evening to Wednesday evening.

The Ministry of Water Resources and the China Meteorological Administration also issued an orange alert for mountain torrents. The ministry warned of a high possibility of these torrents occurring in parts of Jiangxi and Guangxi from Tuesday evening to Wednesday evening. They are also likely to occur in parts of Zhejiang, Hunan, Guizhou, and Yunnan.

Local authorities should enhance disaster prevention work such as real-time monitoring and early warning and evacuation, the ministry and the administration said. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 23:02:19|Editor: huaxia

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Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) Senior Undersecretary Rafael Yabut (3rd L) and Tan Qingsheng (2nd R), charge d'affaires of the Chinese embassy in the Philippines, attend the groundbreaking ceremony of the Kaliwa Dam project in Rizal Province, the Philippines on June 29, 2021. (Xinhua/Rouelle Umali)

by Yan Jie

MANILA, June 29 (Xinhua) -- Trina Reyes, 34, who lives in Makati City of Metro Manila, felt joyful as the much-awaited Kaliwa Dam Project broke ground on Tuesday in Rizal province in the Philippines.

For Reyes and the other 13 million Metro Manila residents, unexpected water supply cut-off was their constant headache.

"Life is hard without water because water is everything. We have experienced water shortage, especially during summer, and it is really inconvenient," Reyes, a worker at a call center and a mother of a toddler, told Xinhua.

However, the Kaliwa Dam Project, officially named the New Centennial Water Supply Project on the Kaliwa river, located about 35 km northeast of Metro Manila, would hopefully end Reyes' frequent nightmare of a water outage.

The project, which China Energy Engineering Corporation will construct, would help meet the increasing water demand of Metro Manila by supplying some 600 million liters of water per day. The project is expected to be completed by June 2025.

"Anything that will sustain the water supply in Metro Manila is a welcome development. It feels good to have a steady supply of water in the faucet. The project is a boon to us," said Reyes.

Vince Dizon, Philippine Presidential Adviser on Flagship Programs and Projects, said the commencement of the Kaliwa Dam Project signifies a decades-long dream finally coming true.

He expressed his gratitude to Chinese friends and partners to help turn this dream into reality.

"We can say better late than never. It could not come at a better time when we desperately need an additional water supply for Metro Manila," Dizon added.

Rafael Yabut, Senior Undersecretary of Philippine Department of Public Works and Highways, regarded the Kaliwa Dam Project as one of the flagships of the "Build Build Build" Program under President Rodrigo Duterte's administration.

Yabut said the project will benefit Metro Manila substantially and boost the local economy and livelihood dramatically by creating job opportunities, improving transportation networks, and developing eco-tourism based on preserving the area's beautiful natural environment.

"They're not doing the construction only. (The project) will also help the area. I think this will be a multi-purpose project not only promoting water supply but also, more importantly, the echo-tourism project," Yabut added.

Olivia De Leon, mayor of Morong town where the Kaliwa dam is located, is looking forward to witnessing the project's completion.

"We are looking forward to the success of this big project. Maybe that will be the time when the people, who can have access to safe and clean water, will say that we are the beneficiaries of this dam," De Leon said. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 23:11:54|Editor: huaxia

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ADEN, Yemen, June 29 (Xinhua) -- At least three Yemeni people were killed in a ballistic missile attack launched by the Houthi rebels against the country's oil-rich province of Marib on Tuesday, a government official told Xinhua.

"Two ballistic missiles fired by the rebels landed on Marib city, leaving three civilians including a child killed," according to the local official who asked to remain anonymous.

Nearly 13 other civilians including children were injured as a result of the ballistic missile attack, the official said.

Marib's local authority confirmed the attack in a brief press statement saying that the attack targeted a densely populated area.

The Houthi rebel group controlling Yemen's capital of Sanaa made no comment regarding the attack.

The Iran-backed Houthi rebels began in February a major offensive against the Saudi-backed Yemeni government army to capture the province of Marib.

Several rounds of UN-brokered negotiations between Yemen's warring sides and other relevant parties failed to produce any agreement of cease-fire.

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 recognized government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi out of the capital Sanaa. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 23:32:59|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, June 29 (Xinhua) -- The renovated site of the "Red Building," once the main campus of Peking University and a key location in the history of the Communist Party of China (CPC), reopened to the public on Tuesday.

Visitors to the building in Beijing will be able to enjoy a themed exhibition celebrating the 100th anniversary of the CPC's founding.

The exhibition features 1,357 cultural relics and employs new-media technologies such as holograms to demonstrate the Party's early revolutionary activities in Beijing.

Built from 1916 to 1918, the building was named after its red brick walls and tiled roof. It witnessed several of China's major historical events, including the New Culture Movement and the May Fourth Movement, both of which greatly contributed to the early spread of Marxism in the country and the founding of the CPC.

In history, the Party's pioneers, including Li Dazhao, Chen Duxiu and Mao Zedong, carried out revolutionary activities in the building.

The room 119 in the southeast corner of the building's first floor, which is now the director's office of the Peking University Library, served as a former working site of Li Dazhao, where the communist complied prominent articles and introduced Marxism theories into Chinese universities.

From 1918 to December 1922, Li Dazhao once worked in the office which covers about 50 square meters. After the May Fourth Movement, several symposiums were held in the office to carry out debates on the theoretical problems of Marxism and to establish a research society on Marxist theories.

In 1920, Li Dazhao met the Comintern's representative to China in the office room to study the establishment of the CPC. In October 1920, Li initiated the establishment of an early organization of the CPC in Beijing, named "the communist group."

"The integration of the exhibition and the architecture helps to tell the history more thoroughly," said Hong Maien, chief designer of the exhibition.

Qin Suyin, an expert in scene restoration, said that there are over 550 original cultural relics on display, including the original version of "My View of Marxism," written by Li Dazhao and published in September 1919 on "La Jeunesse," a magazine considered at the center of the New Culture Movement in China.

In a room on the first floor of the "Red Building," a replicated scene shows students of Peking University preparing banners and slogans for the parade in the May Fourth Movement.

One student visitor said that reviewing past events within such a historical setting is a good way for visitors to learn the history of the Party.

"We young people should keep in mind the revolutionary history of the CPC and treasure the good life we have today," he said. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 23:33:30|Editor: huaxia

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BERLIN -- Germany's economy is bound to lose 25 billion euros (29.7 billion U.S. dollars) this year due to supply shortages mostly caused by shipping problems, the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel) said on Tuesday.

Industrial production could be at least five percent higher if production materials and intermediate products were available in sufficient quantities accounting for approximately one percent of Germany's gross domestic product (GDP), according to IfW Kiel. (Germany-Economy-GDP)

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ATHENS -- Two paintings by Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian that were stolen from the National Gallery in Athens in 2012 have been recovered by Greek police, officials announced here Tuesday.

Picasso's "Head of a Woman" and Mondrian's "Stammer Windmill" were stolen on Jan. 9, 2012 along with an early 17th century sketch attributed to Guglielmo Caccia, the Greek national news agency AMNA reported. (Greece-Art)

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JAKARTA -- Six people were killed as a passenger ship with dozens of people on board went down in the water off Bali Island of Indonesia on Tuesday and the evacuation has been under way, a rescuer and a senior police officer said.

The KMP Yunice ship with 41 passengers and 15 crew members sank before reaching its destination of Gilimanuk seaport in Bali on Tuesday evening, Head of Operation Affairs of Search and Rescue Office in East Java Province I Wayan Suyatna told Xinhua via phone. (Indonesia-Ship-Sinking)

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LUSAKA -- Zambia saw a decline in daily COVID-19 deaths in the last 24 hours, with the youngest victim being one year and two months, its health ministry said on Tuesday.

The country recorded 47 new deaths in the last 24 hours, the lowest in recent days since the outbreak of the third wave. (Zambia-COVID-19) Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 23:55:59|Editor: huaxia

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YAOUNDE, June 29 (Xinhua) -- A measles outbreak has killed four people in Cameroon, according to a report on Tuesday by the expanded immunization program of the country's Ministry of Public Health.

About 200 people are infected with the disease, according to the ministry. Seven out of the 10 regions of the Central African nation have been affected by the outbreak.

"Seventy-eight percent of victims are aged between nine months and nine years," the report said, stating that the East region, as well as the Center region where the capital Yaounde is located, have the highest number of suspected cases.

Authorities have appealed to parents to vaccinate their children against the disease.

In 2019, the government organized a national vaccination campaign to stop an outbreak of the disease after more than 3,000 suspected cases were reported and 17 people died. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-30 00:28:21|Editor: huaxia

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ADDIS ABABA, June 29 (Xinhua) -- The African Union (AU) has disclosed the deployment of a four-day Peace and Security Council mission in the Central African Republic (CAR) to observe the current situation in the country.

The delegation, which arrived in CAR's capital Bangui on Monday, is expected to conduct the four-day field mission until Thursday in line with the Council's mandate to promote and enhance peace, security and stability on the continent, according to an AU statement issued late Monday.

The delegation consists of representatives from members of the PSC including Algeria, Burundi, Cameroon, Chad, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria and Senegal.

The mission, among other things, is expected to evaluate the implementation of the Political Agreement for Peace and Reconciliation (PAPR-CAR) that was signed between the CAR government and 14 arms groups in Addis Ababa, capital of Ethiopia, back in February 2019, it was noted.

The mission was deployed following the presidential and legislative elections, which the AU said has contributed to the promotion of relative institutional stability, safeguard constitutional order, and deepening of democracy in the country.

The team is expected to gather first-hand information on the prevailing political, security, economic, social and humanitarian situation on the ground, including the status of progress in the implementation of the political agreement.

According to the AU, the information gathered during the field mission will be instrumental in shaping the Council's decisions regarding the required next steps in supporting the government and people of CAR in its efforts to find lasting solutions to the plethora of challenges facing their country.

The AU delegation is scheduled to hold consultations with the country's stakeholders, including senior government officials, political parties, religious leaders, civil society organizations as well as armed groups

It will also meet with African diplomatic community, representatives of the G5+ members that are the UN, EU, AU, Economic Community of Central African States, World Bank, China, France, the United States and Russia. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-30 02:07:49|Editor: huaxia

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KUWAIT CITY, June 29 (Xinhua) -- Kuwait registered on Tuesday 1,718 new COVID-19 cases, raising the total infections in the country to 354,851, the Kuwaiti Health Ministry said.

The ministry also announced 18 more fatalities, taking the death toll in Kuwait to 1,961, while the tally of recoveries rose by 1,767 to 334,445.

A total of 18,445 COVID-19 patients were receiving treatment, including 288 in the intensive care units, it said.

The Kuwaiti government on Monday called on residents to receive the anti-coronavirus vaccines, citing that the COVID-19 pandemic requires concerted efforts of all to defeat it. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-30 02:44:47|Editor: huaxia

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RAMALLAH, June 29 (Xinhua) -- Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday slammed the previous normalization agreements that some Arab countries reached with Israel.

"The agreements to normalize relations recently signed by Israel with some Arab countries are an illusion that will not succeed," Abbas said, adding that peace and security "will only be achieved" at the end of the Israeli occupation.

He made the remarks in an online speech at the opening of a conference.

Abbas also said that peace with Israel can only be achieved by the recognition of the Palestinian people's legitimate rights, mainly the rights of freedom, independence, and establishing a Palestinian state."

"We agreed to sign painful historic peace agreements, recognized the state of Israel under the United Nations resolutions 242 and 338, and signed the Oslo accords in 1993," Abbas said, adding that Israel has violated these agreements.

In September last year, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain signed separate normalization agreement with Israel. Later, Morocco and Sudan followed in their footsteps. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-30 04:19:10|Editor: huaxia

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WASHINGTON, June 29 (Xinhua) -- American biotechnology company Moderna said Tuesday its COVID-19 vaccine showed promise in a lab setting against coronavirus variants, including the highly contagious Delta variant first identified in India.

The results came from vitro neutralization studies of sera from eight participants one week after they received the second dose of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine.

The vaccine produced neutralizing titers against all variants tested, including additional versions of the Beta variant, scientifically named B.1.351 which was first identified in South Africa; three lineage variants of B.1.617 which was first identified in India, including the Kappa (B.1.617.1) and the Delta variant (B.1.617.2); the Eta variant (B.1.525) which was first identified in Nigeria; and the A.23.1 and A.VOI.V2 variants first identified in Uganda and Angola, respectively, according to Moderna.

"These new data are encouraging and reinforce our belief that the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine should remain protective against newly detected variants," said Chief Executive Officer of Moderna Stephane Bancel.

These data were submitted as a preprint to bioRxiv, and have not yet been peer-reviewed. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-30 04:47:11|Editor: huaxia

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WARSAW, June 29 (Xinhua) -- The foreign ministers of Poland and Estonia, Zbigniew Rau and Eva-Maria Liimets, met on Tuesday to discuss the economic ties between the two countries.

"The trade between our two countries has increased more than fourfold since the day we joined the EU together", Rau said at a joint press conference. "And we believe this is not the end."

The two ministers discussed joint infrastructure projects, including Rail Baltica and Via Baltica, that should improve mobility in the entire region of the Baltics. Another topic was the synchronization of the Estonian power grid and the grids of the other Baltic countries with the rest of Europe.

Poland and Estonia have also underlined their commitment to shoring up their cyber defenses and increasing cooperation in the field of IT.

"Over the years the relationship between our countries has developed extremely well," Liimets said. "Poland and Estonia think alike in many areas, and are willing to work together, both bilaterally as within international and multinational organizations." Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-30 05:25:55|Editor: huaxia

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SANAA, June 29 (Xinhua) -- Yemen's Houthi militia on Tuesday claimed responsibility for launching two ballistic missiles at military targets in the government-controlled Marib city.

"The missiles targeted the Sahn al-Jen camp and the 3rd Region camp at noon (on Tuesday)," Houthi military spokesman Yehya Sarea said in a statement aired by the Houthi-run al-Masirah TV late Tuesday night.

Medics and residents of Marib said earlier that "a Houthi missile hit a residential area, killing three people, including a child."

The Iran-backed Houthis started a major offensive against the Saudi-backed Yemeni government troops to capture the oil-rich province of Marib in central Yemen.

Marib hosts nearly 2 million internally displaced people, as the ongoing civil war has killed tens of thousands of people and taken the Arab nation to the brink of famine, according to the aid agencies.

The United Nations has warned that the offensive on Marib could lead to a major humanitarian catastrophe.

A recent round of the UN-brokered negotiations between Yemen's warring sides has failed to produce a cease-fire agreement.

Yemen has been mired in a civil war since late 2014 when the Houthi militia seized control of several northern provinces and forced the internationally recognized government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi out of the capital Sanaa. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-30 05:56:30|Editor: huaxia

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KHARTOUM, June 29 (Xinhua) -- Sudan on Tuesday signed an agreement with the World Bank (WB) to receive a grant of 100 million U.S. dollars for fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, Sudan's Council of Ministers said.

"The signing of the agreement marks a turning point in Sudan's battle against COVID-19," Sudanese Health Minister Omer Al-Najeeb was quoted as saying in a statement.

It is the first grant for Sudan after its name was removed from the list of sanctions by the WB International Development Association, he noted.

The WB Country Director Ousmane Dione said the grant comes as part of reducing the transmission of infection, preventing death toll from the virus, and speeding up the economic recovery in Sudan, according to the statement.

Sudan has so far reported 36,620 COVID-19 cases, according to a report issued by the Sudanese Health Ministry on Monday. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-30 05:58:22|Editor: huaxia

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TEHRAN -- Iran's current administration is not in a rush to push for the negotiations to revive the 2015 nuclear agreement before the new government takes power in August, the spokesman for the outgoing Rouhani administration declared on Tuesday.

"If what we have in mind is ensured, there will be no delay, but if it is not, the continuation of the negotiations will be adjourned to the next government," spokesman Ali Rabiei said in a weekly press briefing, official news agency IRNA reported. (Iran-Vienna talks-JCPOA)

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JERUSALEM -- Eight Israeli passengers were removed on Tuesday from a flight to Russia after they tried to use foreign passports to circumvent the Israeli government's ban on all citizens to travel to a high-risk destination for COVID-19.

The eight people were handed over to the Israeli police for further investigation, said a joint statement issued by Israel's Health Ministry and the Population and Immigration Authority. (Israel-COVID-19-Russia Flight)

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JERUSALEM -- Israeli military said on Tuesday it has concluded a joint training exercise with the United States and Britain involving Israel's stealth F-35i fighter jets.

The drill called "Tri-Lightning 2" was held jointly by the Israeli Air Force, the U.S. Marine Corps, and Britain's Royal Air Force, the Israeli army said in a statement. (Israel-US-UK-Air Drill)

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SANAA -- Yemen's Houthi militia on Tuesday claimed responsibility for launching two ballistic missiles at military targets in the government-controlled Marib city.

"The missiles targeted the Sahn al-Jen camp and the 3rd Region camp at noon (on Tuesday)," Houthi military spokesman Yehya Sarea said in a statement aired by the Houthi-run al-Masirah TV late Tuesday night. (Yemen-Houthis-Missile Attack) Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-30 06:04:39|Editor: huaxia

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WASHINGTON, June 29 (Xinhua) -- The COVID-19 vaccination in the United States is slowing down while the highly transmissible Delta variant has spread to nearly every state, fueling experts' fear about potential COVID-19 spikes.

The 7-day average number of administered COVID-19 vaccine doses per day has decreased by 55.3 percent from the previous week, according the latest weekly report of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

About 46.4 percent of the U.S. population is fully vaccinated against COVID-19, and 54.2 percent of the population has received at least one shot as of Tuesday, CDC data show.

Roughly 154.2 million people are fully vaccinated. But some states -- such as Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and Wyoming -- have low vaccination rates.

The White House has confirmed the country will not hit U.S. President Joe Biden's goal of getting 70 percent of American adults to receive at least one COVID-19 vaccine shot by the Fourth of July.

Amid the slowdown of vaccination rates, the infections caused by variants, especially the highly contagious Delta variant which was first recognized in India, are climbing.

The proportion of the Delta variant infections for the 2-week period ending June 19 is expected to increase to 20.6 percent nationally and be higher in some regions, according to the CDC.

The figure was only 2.8 percent in the 2-week frame ending in May 22, and increased to 9.5 percent in the 2-week frame ending in June 5, CDC data show.

The infections caused by the Delta variant now account for one fifth of the newly diagnosed COVID-19 cases in the United States, according to the CDC.

The variant is expected to become the dominant coronavirus strain in the United States, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky warned.

In Los Angeles County, the pace of Delta's spread has prompted officials to reinstate mask guidance for public indoor spaces -- regardless of vaccination status.

The new, voluntary mask guidance is needed until health officials can "better understand how and to who the Delta variant is spreading," the county's department of public health said.

Experts are concerned the variants could cause a resurgence of COVID-19 in the fall if the unvaccinated population do not take actions in a timely manner.

The mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, which are made by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, appear to hold up against the Delta variant, according to White House chief medical advisor Anthony Fauci.

The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine was 88 percent effective in preventing COVID-19 symptoms in the Delta variant two weeks after the second dose of the vaccine, he said.

U.S. Officials repeatedly urged Americans to get vaccinated as soon as possible. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-30 06:33:43|Editor: huaxia

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SANTIAGO, June 29 (Xinhua) -- Some 68.02 percent of Chile's target population of about 15 million inhabitants, that is 10,340,278 people, has been fully vaccinated against the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), the Ministry of Health said Tuesday.

Some 82.18 percent of the target population has received the first dose, the ministry said in a statement.

In all, 22,471,652 doses have been applied since Chile launched its vaccination drive earlier this year.

Minister of Health Enrique Paris urged young people to get vaccinated, "because this way they protect their lives and that of their families and friends."

In the meantime, self-care measures "are still the most effective (way) to prevent new infections," he added.

As of Thursday, it will be the turn of 17-year-old adolescents to get vaccinated, followed by 16 to 12 year olds.

Chile hopes to immunize the entire target population by midyear, as part of its strategy to achieve herd immunity. At the same time, scientists are studying the possibility of applying a third dose of a vaccine to boost immunity.

On Tuesday, the South American country reported 2,648 new cases of COVID-19 and 35 more deaths in one day, raising the total caseload to 1,553,774 and the pandemic death toll to 32,489. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 00:28:17|Editor: huaxia

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HARARE, June 28 (Xinhua) -- There is need to depoliticize the ongoing global fight against the COVID-19 pandemic and give room to scientific research in the quest to find a solution to the global pandemic, Zimbabwean Information Minister Monica Mutsvangwa said Monday.

She condemned some Western countries that are trying to politicize the origin of COVID-19 by pushing for the investigation of the origin of the virus, saying such an attitude kills goodwill in scientific collaboration.

"Political fingerprinting and accusations that stigmatize nations and communities have no room in the fight against pandemics that threaten collective humanity," the minister said in an interview with Chinese media.

"Injecting Sino-U.S. rivalry and other forms of geopolitical and ideological prejudices only poison the atmosphere while undermining objective scientific research as the only viable tool to stem the pandemic," she said.

She said diplomacy should create conducive conditions for scientists to do their work, adding that the experience of the spread of COVID-19 and the constant mutation of variants serve to highlight the vital nature of international cooperation in fighting the disease.

"As the world grapples with COVID-19 variants, the suffering populace needs solutions emanating from objective scientific research as opposed to score-mongering accusations and opinionated diatribes," Mutsvangwa said. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 10:15:32|Editor: huaxia

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HARARE, June 28 (Xinhua) -- Zimbabweans were urged to take vaccines against COVID-19 amid surging cases, state broadcaster ZBC reported on Monday.

Two highly contagious COVID-19 variants -- the Beta variant first detected in South Africa and the Delta variant first reported in India -- dominated COVID-19 cases in Zimbabwe, the report said.

"We urge our people to continue following the guidelines, but most importantly people should get vaccinated," Raiva Simbi, Deputy Director of Laboratory Services in the Ministry of Health and Child Care, was quoted by ZBC as saying.

"If ever the country is to return to normalcy, then we should all get vaccinated," public health analyst Itai Rusike was quoted as saying.

Zimbabwe has as of Monday recorded 46,442 cases and 1,736 deaths, according to the statistics from the health ministry. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 17:48:50|Editor: huaxia

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LUANDA, June 29 (Xinhua) -- The Southern African Development Community (SADC) has set a 12-million-U.S.-dollar budget for the deployment of an alert force in support of Mozambique, Angolan Foreign Minister Tete Antonio said here Monday.

Antonio was speaking in the ambit of an extraordinary virtual meeting of the Council of Ministers of the SADC, which was held in compliance with a decision of the Extraordinary Summit of the Heads of State and Government of the SADC held in Maputo last week.

In Maputo, the summit approved the deployment of a "force mission" to help Mozambique combat terrorism and violent extremism in its northern region.

On Monday, Antonio highlighted that the council "was tasked with working on the budget of the force that should be in place to support the sister Republic of Mozambique."

The budget is subdivided into items and sources of financing, said the minister, adding that the sources of financing for this force are made up of a contingency fund and contributions from member states.

He said the meeting has also determined that, due to the situation facing many countries in the region, recourse could be made to the organization's reserve fund, "to ensure that there are no delays in carrying out this mission."

The top Angolan diplomat highlighted the mandatory nature of contributions, saying it is "a matter of survival for the region."

"We all have to be aware that the region is under threat, with a crisis in Mozambique and we all have to respond to it promptly," he stressed.

"The situation in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique is a serious situation, which the organization has to deal with immediately and the deadline for contributions has been set for July 9," he said.

Armed groups have been terrorizing Cabo Delgado, the northernmost Mozambique province, since 2017, with some attacks being claimed by the Islamic State. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 18:18:24|Editor: huaxia

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KAMPALA, June 29 (Xinhua) -- The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has approved a one-billion-U.S. dollar loan to finance Uganda's response to the COVID-19 crisis over the next three years.

The international financing institution in a statement posted on its website late on Monday said the pandemic has caused economic and social strife in the East African country leading to a reversal of anti-poverty gains, deterioration of fiscal balances, and put pressure on external buffers.

The institution said the approval enables the immediate disbursement of about 258 million dollars to start on the response and help sustain a post-crisis inclusive recovery.

"Reforms will focus on creating fiscal space for priority social spending, preserving debt sustainability, strengthening governance, and enhancing the monetary and financial sector framework," the statement said.

IMF said some sectors of the economy are experiencing mild recovery, with economic growth in the financial year 2021/22, which starts on July 1, expected to reach 4.3 percent before returning to pre-pandemic rates of 6-7 percent in the medium term.

"The outlook remains highly uncertain, with risks tilted to the downside, including from a resurgence of tighter containment measures linked to higher COVID-19 positivity rates," the statement said.

The country is currently under a partial lockdown that was instituted to contain the rapid spread of the pandemic. Economic experts warn that stringent containment measures are likely to negatively impact economic recovery efforts.

The new IMF financing comes over a year after the institution through an emergency fund loaned Uganda 491.5 million dollars to help contain the effects of the pandemic. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 19:37:13|Editor: huaxia

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GABORONE, June 29 (Xinhua) -- Botswana on Monday night suspended all liquor licenses with immediate effect, as a precautionary measure against the surging of COVID-19 infections in the southern African country.

"The suspension of the sale of alcohol is based on the evidence that consumption of alcohol increases the risks posed by COVID-19 due to its negative effects on the adherence to COVID-19 protocols," Malebogo Kebabonye, Botswana's Director of Health Services, said in a notice.

All liquor outlets in Botswana shall therefore remain closed and alcohol shall not be sold or consumed in public places until further notice, said Kebabonye.

Botswana has recorded 69,680 cases and 1,125 deaths related to the pandemic while 63,932 people have since recovered from the deadly disease.

Meanwhile, Botswana has inoculated at least 157,288 people with a first dose while 84,280 have been fully vaccinated. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-30 00:55:49|Editor: huaxia

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NAIROBI, June 29 (Xinhua) -- Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta on Tuesday announced extension of night curfew by 60 days while pledging to ramp up vaccination against COVID-19 amid surges in western parts of the country.

Speaking at a televised address in the capital Nairobi, Kenyatta said extension of COVID-19 restrictions including night curfews, a ban on public gatherings and limited attendance to houses of worship, will boost efforts to contain the pandemic.

Kenyatta said night curfew in 13 western Kenyan counties deemed the newest coronavirus hotspots will be maintained from 7 p.m to 4 a.m. until July 31.

He said that curfew in the rest of the country will be observed from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. for the next two months while houses of worship are expected to adhere to one third physical attendance capacity rule.

Kenyatta said the ban on political gatherings shall remain in force for the next 60 days as the country grapples with virus surges that have slowed down flattening of the curve.

He said all visitors to Kenya will be required to be in possession of a negative COVID-19 test certificate acquired not more than 96 hours prior to their arrival in the country.

The Kenyan leader said that the hospitality industry will be required to adhere to public health protocols aimed at curbing the spread of coronavirus while the number of attendance to funerals, weddings and traditional rites of passage will not exceed 100 persons.

He said that visits to hospitals will be limited to one person for every admitted patient as Kenya intensifies efforts to turn a corner on COVID-19 pandemic since the first case was reported in the country in mid-March 2020.

Kenyatta said the government aimed to vaccinate 10 million adults by December, adding that it had established capacity to inoculate 150,000 people daily from August.

He said that Kenya has negotiated for 13 million vaccine doses from Johnson & Johnson while the first consignment will be delivered in August.

"Using these vaccines and others in the pipelines, this is how we will vaccinate over 10 million Kenyans by Christmas 2021 and 26 million by the end of 2022," said Kenyatta.

He said the government planned to vaccinate an additional four million young adults by June 2022 if a vaccine for underage population is registered soon, adding that the ultimate goal is to inoculate 30 million people and achieve herd immunity.

Kenyatta said Kenya plans to set up a plant for filling and packaging COVID-19 vaccines to pave the way for its deployment to other African countries.

The COVID-19 caseload in Kenya rose to 183,603 on Tuesday after 719 people tested positive to the virus from a sample size of 7,608 while cumulative fatalities stood at 3,621.

Total recoveries from the virus stood at 125,388 while the number of vaccines administered in the country stood at 1,334,749 as of Tuesday. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-30 03:57:15|Editor: huaxia

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CAIRO, June 29 (Xinhua) -- Egypt's Taba and Marsa Matrouh international airports received certificates of health accreditation by the Airports Council International (ACI), raising the number of Egyptian airports recognized as safe to 11, said the Egyptian Ministry of Civil Aviation on Tuesday.

The certificate recognizes each airport's "commitment to prioritizing health and safety measures" in accordance with the recommendations and guidelines of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the ACI, the ministry said in a statement.

The two certificates, issued on June 28, will expire a year later.

The other nine Egyptian international airports that have received the same ACI certificate include Cairo, Hurghada, Sharm el-Sheikh, Marsa Alam, Borg el-Arab, Luxor, Aswan, Sohag and Assiut.

"Thus, Egypt becomes one of the first countries in Africa and the Middle East in terms of the number of airports obtaining this certificate," said the statement.

Egypt suspended all international flights on March 19, 2020, as a precautionary measure against the COVID-19, and resumed them on July 1, 2020, in a bid to revive the declining tourism. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-28 21:57:17|Editor: huaxia

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BANGKOK, June 28 (Xinhua) -- Thailand has been ready to kick off the Phuket Sandbox campaign on Thursday to open the resort island to vaccinated international visitors, Yuthasak Supasorn, governor of the Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) said Monday.

Hotels and other tourism-related venues throughout the island province have been prepared for the reopening campaign whereas up to 80 percent of Phuket's residents, including those hired in hotel and tourist industry, will have been vaccinated against COVID-19 by Wednesday, Yuthasak said.

An estimated 400 to 500 foreign tourists are scheduled to arrive in Phuket on Thursday and many more are expected to follow at later dates, he said.

Under the Phuket Sandbox program, foreign tourists will be allowed to enter and move freely on the island, provided they are fully vaccinated against the virus and tested negative. They can travel to the rest parts of Thailand after staying on the island for 14 nights.

The move comes as Thailand is struggling to contain a months-long surge in infections. On Monday, the country reported 5,406 COVID-19 cases, the third highest daily tally since the pandemic began, raising the total case tally to nearly 250,000. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 13:01:21|Editor: huaxia

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VIENTIANE, June 29 (Xinhua) -- Laos recorded a trade deficit of 54 million U.S. dollars in May 2021, according to the latest information from the Lao Trade Portal website.

Laos' exports in May totaled 425 million U.S. dollars and imports totaled 479 million U.S. dollars, according to the report.

Laos' main export products are copper ore, bananas, mixed gold (gold bars), cassava, clothes, raw coffee, sugar, rubber, fruit (watermelons, passion fruit and tamarind) and sawn wood.

The main imported products are vehicles (other than motorcycles and tractors), electrical devices and equipment, diesel, mechanical equipment (other than motor vehicles), steel, steel products, magnetic steel, beverages (water, soda, energy drinks), auto parts (including glass and chains), plastic products, fertilizer and food factory waste.

China remained the top export destination for Laos, followed by Vietnam and Thailand.

The main countries for imports are Thailand, China, and Vietnam.

These figures did not include earnings from the export of electricity. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 13:20:17|Editor: huaxia

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PHNOM PENH, June 29 (Xinhua) -- Four persons were killed and one injured in an intense fire early Tuesday inside a house in Phnom Penh, capital of Cambodia, the National Police said.

The blaze broke out at the ground floor of a three-story building in Daun Penh district at 4:30 a.m. local time, the police said, adding that firefighters took one and a half hours to bring the flames under control.

"Four men were pronounced dead in the fire and one sustained a minor injury," the National Police said on its website.

Two cars and seven motorcycles were also completely destroyed. The cause of the blaze is under investigation, the police added. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 14:07:52|Editor: huaxia

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JALALABAD, Afghanistan, June 29 (Xinhua) -- Six Taliban militants have been confirmed dead and three others injured as their mine exploded prematurely in Shirzad district of Afghanistan's eastern Nangarhar province on Monday, provincial government spokesman Atahullah Khogiani said Tuesday.

A group of Taliban militants were going to plant mine on a road in Kodikhil area of the restive Shirzad district on Monday night but the device exploded prematurely killing six insurgents on the spot and injuring three others, the official said.

Taliban militants have not made comments. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 20:01:32|Editor: huaxia

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NEW DELHI, June 29 (Xinhua) -- India's Supreme Court Tuesday refused to stay the Delhi high court decision that allowed the Central Vista Redevelopment Project in the national capital - New Delhi to go on, officials said.

Last month Delhi high court dismissed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) that sought suspension of the construction activity in the capital citing the COVID-19 pandemic.

"The bench said that despite the project contractor reporting compliance with the COVID-19 protocol, the petitioners chose to pursue the PIL for reasons best known to them. We record that the findings of the high court are possible views. No interference is called for with the high court order," said the top court.

Central Vista Redevelopment Project envisages constructing a new triangular Indian Parliament House, a new residential complex that will house prime minister and the vice president, as well as several new office buildings and a central secretariat to accommodate ministry offices. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 21:46:06|Editor: huaxia

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BANGKOK, June 29 (Xinhua) -- Thai employees impacted by the one-month ban at restaurants and construction sites will receive 2,000 baht (about 62.30 U.S. dollars) as additional compensation, a government official said.

Affected employees will receive half-wage compensations, which equivalent to half of their salaries, and the additional extra 2,000 baht on top, government spokesman Anucha Burapachaisri said on Tuesday.

The government has prepared some 7.5 billion baht (about 235 million U.S. dollars) to cover such expenses in support of these employees.

More than 690,000 employees, who are covered by social security, will benefit from the government's relief package, he said.

However, employees without social security coverage will not be given the half-wage pay but are eligible to receive 2,000 baht from the government, Anucha said. Enditem
Source: Xinhua| 2021-06-29 17:56:11|Editor: huaxia

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MINSK, June 29 (Xinhua) -- Belarus on Monday suspended its participation in the Eastern Partnership initiative of the European Union (EU) due to the bloc's recently imposed sanctions against the country.

Head of the EU Delegation to Belarus Dirk Schuebel was summoned to the Belarusian Foreign Ministry Monday and informed of the suspension, said the ministry in a statement.

Belarus considers it "unacceptable" to use sanctions as an instrument of pressure on an independent state, and is forced to take concrete steps as a response to the actions that threaten the country's national security and are detrimental to the economy and citizens, the statement added.

EU representatives involved in the introduction of restrictive measures against Belarus will be prohibited from entering the country, the ministry said, and more restrictions are being planned.

Partially in response to the diversion of a commercial flight to Minsk last month, the EU announced new sanctions against 78 individuals and eight entities in Belarus on June 21.

The Eastern Partnership is a joint initiative involving the EU, its member states and six Eastern Partner countries, namely Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. Enditem
Xi Jinping Sends a Congratulatory Letter to President of the Cambodian People's Party Samdech Techo Hun Sen on the 70th Anniversary of the CPP's Founding

2021/06/28

On June 28, 2021, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Xi Jinping sent a congratulatory letter to President of the Cambodian People's Party (CPP) Samdech Techo Hun Sen on the 70th anniversary of the CPP's founding.

Xi Jinping said in the congratulatory letter that on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the CPP's founding, I would like to extend warm congratulations to President Hun Sen, the CPP and the Cambodian people on behalf of the CPC and the Chinese people, as well as in my own name.

Xi Jinping pointed out that for a long time, the CPP has been uniting and leading the Cambodian people in advancing the cause of national construction and development, making positive contributions to regional stability and prosperity. China, as always, will support Cambodia in pursuing a development path that suits its national conditions. I believe that under the right leadership of President Hun Sen, the CPP will continue to make new and greater contributions to the prosperity of Cambodia and the happiness of the Cambodian people, as well as to regional peace and development.

Xi Jinping stressed that China and Cambodia are staunch friends and a community with a shared future. Bilateral relations have been enjoying high-level development. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the two sides have pulled together and helped each other, vividly illustrating the unbreakable and everlasting friendship between China and Cambodia with concrete actions. The CPC attaches great importance to the friendly cooperation with the CPP. I am willing to work with President Hun Sen to strengthen the political guidance for the relations between the two countries and between the two parties, deepen exchanges and cooperation between the two parties and in other fields, and promote the building of the China-Cambodia community with a shared future, so as to bring benefits to both countries and the two peoples.
opinion

The Attorney-General, the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) and the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) secretariat have filed their notices of appeal on the High Court judgment.

Though BBI supporters, and especially the Solicitor-General Ken Ogeto and BBI lead lawyer Paul Mwangi, have insisted that their appeals will be successful, I believe it will be an uphill task for the appellants to make any meaningful dent to the High Court judgment.

What winning looks like

A meaningful court win for BBI and its promoters is one that allows the amendments to go to a referendum. What then would the appellants need to do to get this outcome? To begin with, the High Court was presented with 17 issues to determine. After determining those issues, the court made 18 declarations against the BBI constitutional amendment process.

The court also made one substantive order against BBI - that is, an order permanently stopping IEBC from undertaking any process that would advance the BBI bill. That includes any process relating to planning or holding a referendum on BBI bill.

Each of the 18 declarations is separately sufficient to support the final High Court order that IEBC should not hold BBI referendum. This means that for the appellants to succeed at convincing the Court of Appeal that the BBI referendum should be permitted, they must prove the High Court was wrong on all the 18 declarations it made. If, for example, the appellants were successful at reversing 17 out of the 18 declarations, BBI referendum would still not be greenlighted.

An example here would help. Declaration number 14 states that the section of BBI bill that allocated 70 constituencies is unconstitutional because that is a constitutional duty of the IEBC. Even if the appellants convinced the Court of Appeal on all the other issues but were unsuccessful on declaration number 14, it means that BBI bill cannot go to the referendum. This is partly because - as has been correctly confirmed by Parliament - if one section of or a process used in relation to the bill is unconstitutional, it brings down the entire bill.

Multiple reasons

But there is still more that the appellants must do to reverse each of the 18 declarations. Appellants must convince the Court of Appeal that each reason/finding of the High Court used to support corresponding declaration is wrong. Instructively, in most instances, the High Court judges provided more than one reason (or violation) to support each of the ultimate declaration they made.

This was the case, for example, in the High Court's declaration that the absence of a legislation or legal framework to govern the collection, presentation and verification of signatures and the conduct of referenda for the bill made the BBI attempt to amend the constitution flawed. The High Court provided at least five reasons to support this declaration. One, that a legal framework was required to guide the process of amending the constitution through a popular initiative. Two, that the different pieces of laws that the IEBC and BBI promoters claimed to have been relying on were not sufficient to regulate the process. Three, that the administrative procedures that IEBC claimed to have used to verify the BBI signatures were illegally made - and for at least three reasons. Four, that in any event, IEBC failed to follow the mandatory requirements in those administrative procedures. To be successful in reversing this declaration, the appellants would need to convince the Court of Appeal that the High Court was wrong on all the separate reasons (violations) it anchored this declaration on.

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An uphill task

Moreover, several adverse declarations and findings were made because those supporting BBI never provided evidence at the High Court to show that the violations that petitioners had raised were untrue. Findings based on failure to provide supporting evidence are nearly irreversible at the Court of Appeal. This is because, with limited exception, appeal courts rely entirely on evidence that was before the High Court. If there was no evidence, there is no evidence.

In the end, those still promising a BBI referendum "soon" may get the Court of Appeal to agree with them that the High Court was wrong on one or two of its declarations. But they will face an uphill task in trying to reverse all the findings of the High Court to get the greenlight they need to have a referendum.

And even then, there will still be a Supreme Court to go to.

The author is a constitutional lawyer.
Dar es Salaam  Some lead activists yesterday called for increased push for the revival of the new constitution writing process.

The call was made yesterday during the Policy Forum breakfast debate under the theme: Tanzania's sixth phase government: Is this the right time to revive a discussion about the Constitution.

Presenting a paper, a board member of the Tanzania Constitution Forum (TCF), Mr Deus Kibamba, said reasons that forced ex-President Jakaya Kikwete to initiate the process were still in existence.

"They include amendment of the Zanzibar Constitution of 1984 made in 2010; the recent post-election challenges and differences in aspirations between citizens and leaders," he said, adding: "In a country with matured democracy like the UK, the government resigned after the Brexit referendum. However, this is not a tradition in Africa, despite higher differences in aspirations."

He said the process should be revived to give room for providing strong security to the document whose minimum security has attracted legislates to contravene articles of the document. "These are those who once came with the idea to try and force the ex-President to remain in power even after expiry of his second term in office. The motive was triggered by the security weaknesses of the constitution," he argued.

According to him, the process stalled in 2014 due to dirty politics and the country's immaturity in the process that made those behind the process to overlook important issues like dispute mitigation measures during the process.

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"The President should own the process and pick a team of experts who will harmonize issues from the Second Draft Constitution and those in the Proposed Constitution," argued Mr Kibamba.

Ms Rosemary Mwakitwange of the Vuguvugu la Katiba (Vuka) said pressure should be applied for the authorities to revive the process.

Ms Gwendoline Charlotte said Tanzanians were scared of the process as it touched sensitive issues like the Union between Tanganyika and Zanzibar and that most of them had lost hope on the process, suggesting that levels of patriotism should be increased.

Mr Francis Garatwa from Chadema said citizen mobilization was important instead of waiting for the President's activation, noting that demand for the document should be differentiated from the need for independent electoral commission.

Mr Gosberth Mutalemwa said despite observed demands for the document, important question was whether citizens have been living the present constitution and if they will be ready to live the new document.

"It doesn't make sense whether someone enjoying a status quo will easily allocate funds for reinstatement of the process. We have recently, heard CCM's Ideology and Publicity secretary Shaka Hamdu Shaka saying the new constitution isn't a priority, do you think this is going to work?" she questioned.
When Admiral Francis Akpan asked me to review his book - AN ADMIRAL's COMPASS - I did not feel suited for the task. But he persisted. Now, having read the book, I thank him for this honour. It is a peep into the fertile mind of a professional soldier; a leader, scholar, patriot, strategic and stimulating thinker. His thoughts surge like restless waves across a sea of topics, even as he sails a steady course to articulate the imperatives of Nigeria's maritime strategy and maritime security; and their concomitants.

Though it is not wise to judge a book by its cover, one can safely judge this book by its title. An Admiral's Compass: Reflections on Leadership, Military Strategy and Maritime Security is informative and authoritative. It distils Admiral Akpan's rich experience: at sea and ashore, at home and abroad, in and outside naval service, which he shared with generations of naval and military officers in lectures delivered over a period of fifteen years. The lectures are not dated. Some readers may have difficulties in putting them in a broader context, especially as his opinions on some of the recurrent subjects appear to have mellowed over time. That is not unusual. Maritime strategic thoughts evolve and practice of maritime strategy change with time. The central message, that the navy and all maritime agencies involved with maritime security must learn to adapt to change, is constant.

Admiral Akpan offers strategies for the Nigerian Navy to be effective as the vital agency in the formulation of maritime strategy and the lead organization for maritime domain awareness and maritime security. The leadership of such a navy at the centre civil agencies and military authority interactions, must be nimble and change with the changing times while holding fast to their unchanging principles. An Admirals' Compass makes the case for leaders with cross-generational vision, operational excellence and professionalism to enable naval officers and seamen - retired and serving - to continue to sail Onwards Together; and, in collaboration with all other maritime stakeholders, join hands to serve the country they all love. This book should be a regular companion for every naval officer, especially those in high-level command; and for anyone with interests in maritime strategy and maritime security.

About the Author

Before undertaking a detailed review of the book, let me give a brief sketch of Admiral Francis Akpan in order for the reader to better contextualize his works. I first met Admiral Akpan in South Africa in early 2001 - courtesy of the late Commodore Guy Amadi Ikwechegh, a man with whom Akpan shared a kindred spirit: as a fine officer, quintessential gentleman, scholar and statesman. Captain Akpan, as then was, was serving as Nigeria's Defense Attache in South Africa. That posting further enhanced his early exposure to the grand strategy and affairs of state.

Earlier in his career, Akpan had served as Aide de Camp to Late Vice-President Admiral Augustus Aikhomu and enjoyed a vantage view of what constitutes national interest, power and principles in the military and civil domains. Later, while serving in the ECOMOG Naval Task Force, he and his generation of naval officers experienced at first hand, the uncharted waters and political storms of naval involvement in peacemaking, peace enforcement and peacekeeping in Liberia and Sierra Leone. They saw our Navy at its full stretch: projection of force and national power at sea, enabling our diplomacy, and engaging in military policing duties. This book captures snippets of those tasks.

The delicate mix of military duties, civil governance and diplomatic engagements in the course of his career must account for his strong and patriotic grasp of naval, national and international affairs; and nurtured him into a mature, deliberate and strategic thinker. While in the Navy, it was generally accepted that the future of the Navy would revolve around officers like him. That hope was amply vindicated by his illustrious service. That career was most lamentably and maliciously cut short in his full stride as a Flag Officer Commanding. Yet, his continuing engagements in our military circles and affairs; and occasions such as this, validate his patriotic zeal and the enduring legacies of his meritorious service.

It was my privilege, when I served in the then National Maritime Authority (now NIMASA), to formalize the collaboration between NIMASA and the Navy. We began with the Hydrographer of the Navy. Years later, Admiral Akpan, as Flag Officer Commanding Western Command engineered the visionary expansion of that collaboration. His efforts culminated into a comprehensive Memorandum of Understanding between the Navy and NIMASA. That MoU provides a strong platform for intra-sectoral collaboration and interagency cooperation, along the lines that Akpan insists, should drive our nation's maritime governance.

Chapter 1 : Introduction to Maritime Strategy and Security

Though the subtitle of the book is reflections on military strategy, this chapter and most of the book deals with maritime strategy, which is not synonymous with naval or military strategy. However, navies are a very integral part of the maritime world. As John B. Hattendorf noted: "On one hand, the navy is linked to the full range of activities in national defense; on the other, it is tied to the entire spectrum of civil activities relating to the sea. A maritime strategy is the comprehensive direction of all aspects of national power (including military and naval) to achieve specific policy goals in a specific situation by exercising some degree of control; at sea".

In this Chapter, Admiral Akpan dissects the components and contents of maritime strategy and the maritime security; and their imperatives for the Nigeria Navy as the guardians of our waters, as the force charged with the seaward defense of the nation. The Navy is also required to help coordinate and enforce all maritime laws. As such, it vital to efforts to identify and respond to all scenarios of threats and challenges in our maritime domain. The threats may be political, social and/or economic. They may be from internal or external sources: interstate, multinational or even extracontinental; from traditional to non-traditional, conventional or asymmetric.

Nigeria is yet to fully blend its framework for coordination of our various maritime stakeholders, institutions and agencies. There are gaps in integrating maritime policy, foreign policy, defense policy, security policy and grand national strategy; and challenges in their smooth implementation. The current situation of maritime agencies working at cross purpose is suboptimal and could negate the required clarity in our picture of the maritime domain. ~//n

Effective Maritime safety and security is contingent on the quality of our Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA). That is, the complete situational and threat awareness of ones' domain. It requires Command, Control, Communication, Information and Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance. The Nigerian Navy is severely underfunded. It cannot, acting singularly, assure our full MDA. Some maritime agencies possess significant financial resources but none is in as vantage a position as the Nigerian Navy to provide leadership on our MDA. Therefore, we need a well-designed, coordinated and collaborative effort as well as a national discussion on these matters in order to generate the widest consensus on policy and architecture; as well as popular ownership of the process, financing and effective implementation of our maritime domain awareness.

Chapter Two: Surveillance Systems and Maritime Security in Nigeria

Surveillance is a major building block for maritime governance. Effective surveillance requires integration and presentation of information and data from different sources; and their timely exchange and sharing with and between competent national authorities. Modern systems would typically combine the abilities of RADAR, Cameras, Satellite, Vessels, Aircrafts - manned and unmanned. Commonly used systems in merchant shipping safety and security include AIS - Automatic Identification System and LRTS - Long Range Tracking System.

In the last 15 years, Nigeria has invested in various surveillance systems, including the Coastal Maritime Surveillance System of the now defunct Presidential Committee on Maritime Security and Safety; Regional Maritime Awareness Centres, established by the US Government and domiciled with the Nigeria Navy. There is also the Deep Blue Project of NIMASA and the Falcon Eye Project from Nigeria Navy.

The Nigeria Navy Falcon Eye Project receives special mention for its vast scope and structure. It is an integrated surveillance, monitoring and control system that covers beyond our EEZ and extends domain awareness to include the Gulf of Guinea. It gives our Navy the capacity to deploy aerial and maritime assets, to complete the operational circle of detection to intervention in a short time. Other surveillance systems, including the ATR 42 Maritime Patrol Aircrafts of the Nigeria Airforce and the Total Radar Coverage of Nigeria project domiciled in Nigeria Airspace Management Agency, should give an enhanced picture of our maritime domain. The author opines that it is essential that the Nigeria Navy leads other maritime stakeholders, with a robust system like the Flacon Eye Project, in view of the multifaceted security challenges in our maritime domain.

Chapter Three: Peace Keeping and the Navy - An African Perspective

This Chapter explores the concepts of peacekeeping, peace enforcement, peace-making, peace building and conflict prevention. It surveys the antecedents of peacekeeping in Africa. It highlights continental and sub regional efforts for peace and security in Africa and concludes that there are weaknesses in mechanism for conflict prevention, management and resolution.

The author reviews the military, policing and diplomatic roles of navies; and is persuaded that African Navies can facilitate peacekeeping operations - especially where they have operational readiness, flexibility, capacity for self-sustenance at sea and mobility. Arguably, the Nigeria Navy largely met these criteria in peacekeeping operations in Liberia and Sierra Leone, where it was part of the ECOMOG Naval Task Force. (ENTF)

Despite the relative success of the ENTF, there are obvious constraints to Naval involvement in peacekeeping in Africa, especially the divides along the lines of Anglophone, Francophone and Lusophone States. There is also the need for more joint exercises between African Navies so that procedural and tactical differences can be eliminated. Equally important, expanded interaction will lead to the evolution of systems standardization, exchange of intelligence as it pertains to the continent's maritime environment, safety and security.

Peacekeeping operations are trending more towards multinational than unilateral undertakings. For African Navies this will entail deliberate efforts for rationalization, standardization and interoperability of forces and equipment. This in turn, could someday lead to an African Maritime Force that should be capable of advancing continental interests.

Chapter Four: Maritime Strategy and Security - National Discuss

This chapter re-emphasizes the key concepts of maritime strategy ad security that had earlier been discussed in Chapter 1. There is the additional emphasis on the need for a national discuss of the issues involved because such discussion brings clarity to objectives and coherence to strategy. National dialogue connects political goals with the military; and vice versa. Most of all, it fosters commitment and consensus on devoting adequate resources for the pursuit of the agreed course. Furthermore, there will be a greater understanding of maritime strategy maritime security and related policies

Chapter Five: Piracy and Terrorism in the Gulf of Guinea

Piracy is "the act of boarding any vessel with the intent to commit theft or and other crimes, with the intent or capability to use force in furtherance of that act"; while "terrorism is the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes". The Gulf of Guinea is a zone of immense economic and strategic importance to Nigeria. It is currently the most pirate infested area in international shipping. The consequences for Nigeria are grave. Piracy and terrorism thrive when conditions ashore permit; especially under a weak state, corrupt governance structures and institutions; and a welcoming environment. These are common conditions in most countries in the Gulf of Guinea. The Navy and other agencies must develop options and strategies to combat the twin evils of piracy and terrorism.

Chapter Six: Maritime Environment

This chapter explains the maritime environment; the arena within which the Navy seeks operational excellence. The world's maritime environment is largely shaped by meteorological and weather factors, astronomical and oceanographic factors. They have impact on Navies; on their vessel design, performance and maintenance; and on seamanship amongst others. Economic activities within the maritime environment include exploitation of the vast chemical, mineral and energy resources, oil and gas industry activities; and harnessing of the abundant food resources of the sea. Equally significant is the use of the sea to link the world through transport and communications.

The oceans and seas are the source of prosperity. They are also the stage for economic and military threats. That is why the naval approach to maritime defense and strategy involves defensive and offensives actions that could determine the survival of the nation. The Navy, in cooperation with other agencies and institutions must preserve that wealth and the maritime environment in order to achieve the nation's maritime objectives and make the ocean safe for sustainable development; for our time and generations unborn.

Chapter Seven: Maritime Domain Awareness as a Vehicle for Effective Naval Operations

The subject of maritime environment, maritime domain awareness, military strategy and maritime security are revisited. The recurrent and emergent maritime domain threats from within the nation state, terrorism, transnational criminals and pirates; as well as environmental pollution and illegal migration are discussed again, especially as there are yawning gaps in fusion of information and intelligence between government agencies.

Implementation of International Ship and Port Facilities Security Code gave great impetus to MDA. Its provisions for Long Range Identification and Tracking and the fitting of transponders for Automatics Identification System on Vessels; as well as the Ship Security Alert Systems were major innovations for MDA. For the Navy, in this new era, the path to operational excellence will include leadership through partnership with the whole gamut of stakeholders; Ministry of Defence, Defence Headquarters, other services, Nigerian Ports Authority, Ministry of Transport, Nigerian Maritime and Safety Administration, Nigeria Customs and Excise, Nigeria Immigration Services etc.

Chapter Eight: Funding Options for Effective Nigeria Navy Transformation

The Navy's budgetary appropriations are inadequate. In some years past, the actual releases were extremely low. New funding options should be pursued, but without exposing the Navy to indignity or indiscipline. Funding for Nigeria Navy Transformation Project (NNTP) falls far below the minimal requirements to impact on the operational efficiency for its matrix of short, medium and long-term projections. Every aspect of the pillars of Navy Transformation needs more funding. New options and strategy recommended include increasing linkages between Nigeria Navy and other maritime stakeholders, along the lines of the South African Navy and the Department of Fisheries of South Africa. In our case, collaboration with Nigerian National Petroleum Company and International Oil Companies could be a means, if properly structured, to finance capital acquisitions of platforms and funding of naval operations. Also, serving and retired officers could devote more efforts to educating policy makers and parliamentarians on the needs of the Navy. This is with the view to overcome the "sea blindness" and ignorance of the operating environments and affairs of the Navy. They will also help to ensure better follow up on resolutions taken in the interest of the Navy.

CHAPTER 9: Enhancing Professional Training in the Nigerian Navy to Confront Current Security Challenges

This last section of the book, the author called: The Admiral's Navy. He posits training at the heart a navy. The author argues that training guarantees improving one's capability, capacity and performance. The Nigeria Navy personnel must be trained and fit for purpose: with professionalism, expertise, sense of responsibility and corporateness to confront our current national security challenges. They should be ready for the conventional and unconventional scenarios. Our navy must accomplish their war and peacetime functions with equal competence and distinction.

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Professional training in the Nigeria Navy is embedded in the Nigeria Navy Act, Armed Forces Act and various training policies. Navy Training Command (NAVTRAC) and its later amendments as per NNO01/06 of 2016; liaison with NDA, Naval War College, National Defense College are all designed to meet the needs of the service and its operating environment. As a result the Navy continues to do well in Sea exercises with foreign navies and routinely outclass those of our neighbouring states.

However, in order to be more relevant to our nation's needs, the Navy must prepare for a paradigm shift - towards weapon and boat handling in our shallow inland and coastal waters. It must also deal with issues of inadequate structural and infrastructural facilities; insufficient skilled and competent instructors and the attitude of personnel.

Chapter 10: Human Resource Management and Military Professionalism: Challenges and New Approaches

Human resource management is a strategic enabler of professionalism. The Navy imparts professionalism, discipline, customs, ethics and traditions that are common to all members of the military, through training. These virtues underline and give effect to the power of command and control. They are foundational to leadership in any military service. In the final analysis, for an army, there is no substitute for leadership at all levels. For that reason, leadership is a major subtheme of this book. The military leader must exemplify courage, intelligence, experience, discipline and decisiveness. The Navy provides solid preparations and training in the art and science of leadership and expects that officers must reflect the core values of the Navy in their commands, ship and establishment.

The author recommends for the Navy, a fundamental change in attitudinal approach to training. It must be technology conscious and also strike the right balance between theory and practice. Foreign training and better equipment are essential. The continuation and facilitation of the various international fleet exercises in the Gulf of Guinea should be encouraged. The exercises not only help promote maritime domain awareness and security in the area; but also provide opportunity for the Nigeria Navy to measure itself against some global benchmarks.

Chapter Eleven: Developing the Next Generation of Naval Leaders

The author quotes US Admiral Michael Mullen: "Everything starts and ends with leadership... .nothing is of much consequence if we do not have sound leadership in place to enact them". The task for the Navy, is to reconcile the symbiotic relationship between training, education and experience and develop leaders that can meet the challenges of the 21st century. This is imperative because operational command of the future will gravitate towards joint leadership. National and international security will be more reliant on interoperability and cooperation among services; and armed forces. More engagements will involve Military Assistance to Civil Authority and Military Assistance to Civil Power. Therefore, officer development must recognize that operational command at Flag Rank demands much more than sea command. Exemplary leadership is key to any efficient and professional service. Effective command demands - All round leaders.

Conclusion

An Admiral's Compass - leads one through Nigeria's maritime strategic thinking and maritime security issues. The growing insecurity in our maritime environment underscores the urgency for effective domain awareness, greater capacity to confront and respond rapidly to threats and challenges. This book is the author's contribution to his call for a national discussion on these issues; to create consensus around policy priorities, implementing structures, funding and investment in organizations, training and equipment for robust protection of the Nigeria's maritime space. Beyond that, An Admiral's Compass is informative, authoritative and points the true north for readers and leaders that value and demand vision, professionalism and mature judgment in those charged with duties and responsibilities as guardians of our maritime space.

... Agu, MFRF is a former Director-General, National Maritime Authority (NMA), now Nigerian Maritime and Safety Administration, (NIMASA)
President Filipe Nyusi, addressing the nation on 24 June, warned that the third wave of the Covid-19 pandemic is now striking the country, and it could prove more violent and more severe than the first or second waves. He pointed out that in some countries faced with the third wave, the health system had collapsed due to a lack of beds for Covid-19 patients. However, he stressed that all efforts would be made to ensure that does not happen in Mozambique and to prevent the third wave from spreading across the entire country.

Of particular concern was the western province of Tete, second only to Maputo in terms of number of cases. Tete is where the health system is under most strain. "We don't have many beds in Tete", President Nyusi said, so the Ministry of Health wants to turn the new hospital that he inaugurated in the Chingodzi neighbourhood of Tete city in late May, into a Covid-19 treatment centre. But beds alone are not enough, and the President pointed out that "we don't have many health staff in Tete either".

Mozambique is made more vulnerable by the appearance of multiple strains of the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, including the Delta variant, and by the low level of vaccination. To date, less than two per cent of the target figure of 16 million adults have been vaccinated. There is a worldwide shortage of Covid-19 vaccines - particularly since the major supplier, the Serum Institute of India, has stopped exporting vaccines because of the Covid-19 disaster in India itself.

President Nyusi stressed that the government is working to acquire more vaccines. But while these efforts are underway, it is crucial that citizens strictly follow all the preventive measures against Covid-19 recommended by the health authorities.

The virus was now spreading rapidly because many people had neglected preventive measures. "We have forgotten the disaster that struck us in January and February (at the height of the second wave)", President Nyusi said. When the government relaxed some of the Covid-19 restrictions in May, "many people thought this meant the end of the pandemic", he added.

There had been a general neglect of preventive measures. Parties and other social events had been attended by hundreds of people in violation of government decrees on the pandemic. Similarly, the limitations on the number of people allowed to attend weddings, funerals and religious services had been ignored. Businesses had also ignored social distancing guidelines, with crowds outside banks or bakeries.

"We have avoided the collapse of the health system, we successfully reopened the schools, and we are gradually reopening the economy", he continued - but all these gains could be undone by the third wave unless citizens took prevention seriously.

President Nyusi had harsh words for the police and for other state bodies, such as the National Inspectorate of Economic Activities (INAE), who enforce the Covid-19 restrictive measures. He accused them of "falling asleep" because they had not implemented the government's decisions. He added that he was not asking the police to beat up citizens, but he did expect them to hold offenders responsible for their actions.

President Nyusi announced that existing restrictive measures will remain in place, but in some areas will be tightened. Thus, the overnight curfew in force in most cities and towns will be extended by an hour. The curfew will start at 22.00 instead of 23.00, and last until 04.00.

The government once again shut the beaches. No sports, games or parties will be allowed on any beach, although citizens will be allowed to walk on the beaches.

The measures announced by President Nyusi once again close down theatres, cultural centres, and the like. Any exception to this rule must be authorised by the Ministry of Justice. The President said this measure was because, over the past month, large crowds had attended events in these places.

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Attendance allowed at religious services or any other meeting has been cut to 40 in enclosed spaces and 80 in the open. Restaurants must close no later than 20.00, rather than the previous 21.00. Bottle stores must close by 15.00 rather than 17.00. Shopping centres may open from 09.00 to 18.00 on weekdays but must close by 15.00 on Sundays and public holidays.

President Nyusi said that to avoid queues, government offices will only attend to citizens, for such matters as issuing documents, if they book in advance. He also encouraged public and private institutions to allow their staff to work from home where possible.

"Let us adopt the new ways of living", he declared. "Let us embrace technology to solve the problem of Covid-19'.
A man passes by a destroyed tank on the main street of Edaga Hamus, in the Tigray region, in Ethiopia, on June 5, 2021.

The former ruling party in Tigray said it has taken back control of the regional capital Mekele. The city had been under the control of Ethiopia's federal government for eight months.

Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) said Monday that they were back in control of Mekele, the capital of Ethiopia's Tigray region.

The major turn of events comes after eight months of intense fighting in the region - with Ethiopia's federal government also calling for a unilateral cease-fire.

What we know so far

Residents in Mekele reported rebel forces entering Mekele, while interim government officials appointed by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, left the city.

"The capital of Tigray, Mekele, is under our control," a spokesperson for the TPLF told Reuters news agency.

The Tigray rebel fighters, have called themselves the Tigray Defense Forces (TDF), were reportedly greeted with cheers in the city.

"TDF has taken control of the city," news agency AFP quoted an interim government official as saying. "They have entered. The city is celebrating. Everybody is outside dancing."

Abraham Belay, head of the interim administration, said, "the government has the responsibility to find a political solution to the problem," adding that some members within Tigray's former ruling party were willing to talk with the federal government.

It remains unclear how many interim government officials have remained in their posts.

There have been no immediate comments from neighboring Eritrea, whose soldiers have been accused of committing atrocities in the conflict.

Ethiopia declares cease-fire

After the arrival of rebel troops, Ethiopia's government said it declared an "immediate, unilateral" cease-fire in its Tigray region.

It was unclear whether the cease-fire would be enforced or respected, as the offer came from the interim government in Tigray - with many officials now having left the capital city.

In a statement, the federal government said the cease-fire "will enable farmers to till their land, aid groups to operate without any military movement around and engage with remnants (of Tigray's former ruling party) who seek peace," adding that efforts to continue to bring Tigray's former leaders to justice will not stop.

Ethiopia said the cease-fire would last until the end of the farming season in Tigray in September.

The government ordered all federal and regional authorities to respect the cease-fire.

Neither the TLPF nor the TDF immediately responded to the cease-fire announcement.

UNICEF accuses govt. troops of targeting office

The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) accused the Ethiopian government of destroying its satellite equipment in the Tigray region on Monday.

UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore said on Twitter that the act "violates UN privileges and immunities and the rules of International Humanitarian Law regarding respect for humanitarian relief objects."

Fore also said that UNICEF and other humanitarian aid programs "are not, and should never be, a target."

Fore said UNICEF was responsible for helping 140,000 children in "famine-like conditions."

What happened in Ethiopia?

Fighting between the federal troops and Tigrayan soldiers began on November 4, 2020 after Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed ordered a military response to an attack on federal army camps in Tigray.

The Nobel Peace Prize laureate blamed the attack on the TPLF, but the TPLF denied any responsibility. The local group called the accusation a pretext for an "invasion."

Abiy rejected calls for peace talks, as his army shelled and advanced on Tigray. He consideredmilitary operations "complete" on November 28, 2020.

The federal government took over the Tigray government soon after the fighting began and placed their own figures in leadership roles.

Eritrean troops were accused of killing hundreds of civilians in the November bloodshed. After initial denials, Abiy admitted Eritrean troops had crossed into Tigray and suggested they may have taken part in what they were accused of. Abiy met with Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki and Afwerki agreed to pull its forces out.

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But the UN said there was no evidence of withdrawal and AFP obtained government documents that showed Eritrean troops looting and blocking food aid. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said last week that there were "credible reports" that Eritrean soldiers were still in Tigray.

An Ethiopian airstrike in a Togoga village killed 64 people and injured 180 last Tuesday, in the latest chapter of violence in the conflict. While the Ethiopian military said the strike was aimed at rebels, the UN called for an urgent investigation.

The ongoing conflict has triggered a massive humanitarian crisis, with more than 300,000 people facing famine in Tigray, according to the UN. Refugees have spilled into neighboring countries, including Eritrea.

kbd/rs (AP, AFP, Reuters)
analysis

Pressure from the public and political opposition is growing, but police reform in South Africa is unlikely to happen anytime soon. An attempt in May by Parliament's Portfolio Committee to discuss changes needed to 'fix' the South African Police Service (SAPS) was cancelled at short notice, with no reasons given.

More telling is the number of official reports in the past decade highlighting key challenges and presenting practical options to improve policing. These include the National Development Plan (2012), Khayelitsha Commission of Inquiry Report (2014), Marikana Commission of Inquiry Report (2015), White Paper on Policing (2016), State of Democratic Policing Report (2017) and more recently, the Panel of Experts Report on Policing and Crowd Management (2018).

These apparently lie gathering dust with no independent verification of whether their recommendations have been implemented, and if so, to what effect. Meanwhile, the SAPS faces an ever-deepening crisis.

Reports on internal battles in the SAPS' top leadership and the underlying weaknesses that characterise the police are prevalent. Since the 'serial crises of top management' were first identified by the National Planning Commission in 2012, many functions of the SAPS have deteriorated.

In Gallup's 2019 global Law and Order Index, South Africa scored fifth lowest of 142 countries

Since then too, serious, violent and organised crime has escalated, as evidenced by the 37% increase in murder and 43% rise in armed robberies. According to Gallup's 2019 global Law and Order Index, South Africa scored fifth lowest out of 142 countries. Only Liberia, Gabon, Venezuela and Afghanistan fared worse.

According to Yale Law School's Dr Monica Bell, meaningful and effective police reform requires accurately identifying the 'theory of the policing crisis and its solutions'. The extent of the crises in the SAPS is well documented, but a lack of information means we don't know whether the recommendations are adequate for reform of policing in South Africa.

Finding a universally accepted definition of 'police reform' can be difficult. But a committed group of experts officially appointed for this purpose could agree on a common understanding in the South African context.

Resistance to change would probably come from within the SAPS itself. Police organisational cultures are not traditionally open to change. And concerns relating to performance assessments and accountability, and the impact of these on career prospects, no doubt also dampen police enthusiasm for reform.

Given the extent to which top SAPS leadership is part of the crisis, the reform process must include authoritative parties from outside. Of course, carefully selected untainted SAPS members would participate in such a government-led initiative that should also involve suitably qualified people from various sectors.

Because police leaders are part of the crisis, the reform process must include authoritative outside parties

The National Development Plan indicates how this could be done. It recommends a National Police Board with multi-sectoral and multi-disciplinary expertise to set standards for police recruitment, selection, appointment and promotion.

Ultimately, police reform is about improving effectiveness. In diverse and democratic contexts, achieving this is more likely when the police have attained an acceptable level of public legitimacy. Legitimacy, in turn, is reliant on public trust and confidence in law enforcement. This is probably the greatest challenge to any police reform process. 'Very few reforms will "stick" unless a foundation of community trust is established,' says Professor Laurie Robinson from George Mason University.

An article in the Association for Psychological Science journal defines legitimacy broadly as 'the belief among people in a society that those in power deserve to rule and make decisions influencing the lives of others.' On policing more specifically, legitimacy is described as 'the judgments of ordinary people about the authority of the police to make discretionary decisions with respect to enforcing the law and maintaining social order.'

In a 2019 paper on police reform, the Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance (DCAF) explained that the process 'aims to transform the values, policies and practices of police organisations so that they can perform their duties with respect for democratic values, human rights and the rule of law.'

President Cyril Ramaphosa should take a strong stand to kick-start the reform process in the SAPS

The paper says there's no single model for police reform and that every reform process must reflect its own context. However, it does recognise two core goals common to all such endeavours: 'improving police capacity and effectiveness, and improving the integrity and accountability of the police.'

But more importantly, on the question of how to carry out police reforms, the DCAF paper says it requires coordination between multiple stakeholders. Government should initiate and actively support the effort and encourage other stakeholders to do the same.

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The process should also include consultation with and involvement of oversight institutions, civil society organisations and the public. And, as Dr Andrew Faull of the Institute for Security Studies argues, strong leadership and the involvement of skilled technocrats will be crucial for the success of such a reform process.

Improving policing will inevitably require associated interventions in other parts of the criminal justice system. President Cyril Ramaphosa has already taken decisive steps to strengthen the National Prosecuting Authority, starting with the appointment of prosecutions head Advocate Shamila Batohi, followed by other senior staff. However, the NPA's ability to establish the rule of law and public safety depends almost entirely on the cases sent to it by the police.

Ramaphosa should take a strong stand to kick-start the reform process in the SAPS. It will undoubtedly be a difficult and time-consuming process but must be done without further delay. The safety and well-being of 60 million people living in South Africa depend on it.

Johan Burger, Consultant, Justice and Violence Prevention, ISS Pretoria
A Zimbabwean receives a COVID-19 vaccine jab at Wilkins Hospital - Zimbabwes main vaccination center in Harare on May 12, 2021 when things were still on course. Then shortages began.

analysis

The abrupt arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic has shaken the world, creating havoc for economies and social fabrics and taking heavy tolls on lives and livelihoods. Many rich nations have procured and vaccinated a critical mass of their populations. Many have reopened their borders for "business as usual".

At first sight, the situation looks dire for Africa. The regional office of the World Health Organisation (WHO) recently released a statement saying that 90% of countries in Africa would miss the target of vaccinating 10% of their populations by June 2021.

Are these warnings a sign of grim despair? Or are they a call to action?

I would argue that they are a call to action.

But what actions can realistically be taken by African countries, considering the odds stacked against us?

In my view there is a lot we can - and should - do, given that mass vaccination for Africa is not imminent.

African countries are at various stages of the pandemic. In formulating national policies, governments must incorporate good practices derived from lessons learnt so far to strengthen their health systems. Critical policy elements should include preparedness and response components.

What can be done

African countries should resort to time-honoured public health practices originating from the continent.

Take the astute scientific observations of the 1976 Ebola epidemic in Zaire. This taught us that by knowing the transmission modes we can successfully stop the epidemic from spreading when we break the chain of transmission through isolation of a positive case followed by surveillance. This was successful without any recourse to vaccination.

Secondly, good hunters know they can catch prey when they have studied its habits. We know that the virus responsible for COVID-19 is mainly transmitted by air. Like good hunters, we should exploit this knowledge and break the chain of transmission of the virus by viable options at our disposal.

For example, we can reduce the source of transmission at the outset by instituting some form of lockdown or quarantining all subjects who test positive for COVID-19. South Africa's lockdown strategy showed promising success at at the outset of the outbreak, but did not pan out when it was intermittently relaxed.

The practice of social distancing by keeping a distance of at least two metres from one another has worked to a large extent in the west. This may be difficult to practise throughout Africa. This is because overcrowding is common in big cities and in villages there are extended families living in one home.

We can also protect ourselves by properly wearing a respiratory mask to cut the risk of transmission. Numerous scientific studies in many parts of the world bear testimony to the utility of wearing a mask in closed spaces, healthcare facilities and crowded places with shared air spaces. However, the usefulness of masks can be compromised by non-availability of non-respiratory types or inadequate training in their proper use, leading to recurring waves.

Thirdly, sound public health policy would save lives and reduce illnesses. The practices set out above must be incorporated into existing or new policies on preparation and response to resonate with the WHO International Health Regulations criteria.

And all countries should have contingency plans with adequate medicine and life-supporting facilities. One key component is ensuring oxygen supply since the great majority of COVID-19 deaths are due to lack of adequate and timely access to oxygen.

Fourth, we must introduce surveillance at the most basic levels to permit the early recognition and reporting of COVID-19 cases, through training of community healthcare workers.

Citizens must be empowered through education and community leadership to recognise a cluster of cases before the disease has time to spread in institutions or communities. Citizens act responsibly when they are provided with the right information. They will feel that they are contributing towards the national good of public health protection and not just for their own self-interest.

Education must be in local vernacular to target the population at risk, including frontline workers and people with medical conditions with increased vulnerabilities. We must dispel misinformation that negates the public health measures through classic information education and communication methods to include role model figures like artists, tribal chiefs and other community leaders.

It is therefore incumbent on all national governments, nongovernmental organisations and educational institutions to inculcate self-isolation, wearing of masks and practising personal hygiene.

The vaccine quest must continue

We cannot give up the quest for vaccines as they have contributed to significant progress in controlling many diseases on the continent. Examples include a reduction in meningitis in the meningitis belt through the MenAfriVac initiative and the eradication of wild poliomyelitis throughout the continent.

African governments should explore vaccine diplomacy at all levels. This should include supporting waiving of intellectual property rights and the transfer of technology to expand local vaccine production beyond Egypt, Senegal and South Africa. Coupled with these efforts, we should also promote uses of traditional medicines to relieve the severity of the disease.

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And national governments must move away from overdependence on the precarious supply of the COVAX alliance to proactively pursue bilateral arrangements, foster public private partnerships and procure their own supplies by earmarking the budget.

Currently, COVID-19 vaccination highlights the gap between the haves and have-nots and widens the social inequity gap. This theme must be pushed in all international forums to galvanise support for Africa.

Mass vaccination for the continent and the rest of world will become a reality when there is a push for global control as has been done for the eradication of poliomyelitis and measles. These are diseases that are indiscriminately transmitted between the haves and have-nots, just like COVID-19.

Africa has remained resilient in the face of pandemics before. It needs to rise to the challenge again.

Deoraj Caussy, Epidemiologist, part-time lecturer, Open University of Mauritius
Insurgent groups; Jama'atu Ahlul Sunnah lid Da'awatu wal Jihad (JAS, better known as Boko Haram), Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP) and Jama'atu Ansarul Muslimina fii Biladis Sudan (Vanguard for the Protection of Muslims in Black Africa, also known as Ansaru) are competing with one another in a mass membership drive among the ranks of bandits terrorising most of the North West and part of North Central states, Daily Trust reliably gathered.

Locals, security sources and experts who spoke with our reporter said the push is already yielding fruits for the insurgent groups with some prominent bandits declaring allegiance to the terrorist groups or consenting to a close working relationship; sharing intelligence and logistics support among themselves.

States worst hit by the intractable rural banditry are; Niger, Kaduna, Zamfara, Katsina, Sokoto and Kebbi. The states share boundaries and are easily navigated through large swathes of unmanned forests.

The six states have 249,143 square kilometres of landmass, an area more than the size of the United Kingdom. Most of the landmass is ungoverned, with a significant part occupied by inaccessible forests and rural communities.

Investigation by Daily Trust revealed that there are at least three active Islamic insurgent groups operating in the banditry-ravaged states, and pushing for deeper roots.

An expert on the insurgency and researcher at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change in London, Audu Bulama Bukarti, told Daily Trust at the weekend, that the "Boko Haram's infiltration of the criminals in the North West is extremely dangerous on several levels".

Department for States Services (DSS), the agency in charge of intelligence gathering and internal security did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

For a long time, security sources said, Boko Haram, ISWAP and Ansaru have been struggling for space within the expanse of land covering these states. The terrorist groups are in active moves with the aim of benefitting from the chaos created by bandits, especially in the worst-hit states.

A recent report by the International Crisis Group (ICG) pointed out that since late 2019, ISWAP and Ansaru have started taking credit for attacks in the North West. In October last year, according to the report, ISWAP claimed responsibility for an attack on Nigerian troops in Sokoto.

"Many Nigerian security and other independent local sources interviewed by Crisis Group corroborate that amid the breakdown of stability in Zamfara and elsewhere, two Boko Haram offshoots are making inroads into the the region, where they are forging tighter relationships with aggrieved communities, herder-affiliated armed groups and criminal gangs," the report released last month reads in part.

The recruitment drive

Informed sources confided in this newspaper that for a long time, the Abubakar Shekau-led Boko Haram and ISWAP have made a deliberate policy of setting up presence in the North West states and Niger to benefit from the confusion created by the unruly activities of bandits and divide the attention of security forces whose concentration was on the groups' hotbed of Borno and Yobe states.

Ansaru, which had hitherto maintained sleeper cells following bursting of its main cell in Okene, Kogi State, is said to have pioneered this collaboration by co-habiting closely with bandits under the leadership of Dogo Gide, around Kwiambana Forest in Kaduna State.

A senior political leader from the zone had last year told our reporter that Dogo Gide had collaborated with Ansaru elements to hoist a telecommunication booster in one of the rocky formations in the Birnin Gwari Forest to aid communication with the outside world.

A source familiar with Gide, who craved anonymity for fear of being targeted, said the man, who commandeers huge followership among bandits has been working with Ansaru for some three years.

"Ansaru has been based in the North West since its formation in 2012, but they have recently been trying to make a comeback. Part of their plan is recruiting the criminal elements and residents in the North West. That is why they have been releasing preaching in Fulfulde and offering microeconomic loans to local farmers," Bukarti told Daily Trust.

In a recent audio clip of a conversation between Gide and an unidentified man who called in relation to the abduction of students of Federal Government College, Birnin Yauri, the bandits' leader could be heard alluding to his relationship with Islamic insurgents. In one video clip, he referred to himself as "Abu Abdallah", in a naming pattern typical of Boko Haram and similar terror groups.

Though Daily Trust cannot independently verify the veracity of the audio, a source who had interfaced with Gide in the past confirmed the voice to be his.

But contrary to some of his claims in the audio clip, a security source said Gide has no established relationship with foreign insurgents.

Daily Trust gathered however that Gide's claim to religion was based on his relationship with Ansaru, whose leaders respect him because of his vast network and control over most of the armed Fulani youths.

In its report, Crisis Group said ISWAP, which has been developing cells in much of northern Nigeria is also building the capacity of several smaller radical groups in the North West, particularly by offering livelihood support, including monthly stipends, to some of their members.

Sources on ground in Niger, Kaduna and Zamfara, said the insurgents infiltrated the ranks of the bandits through offers for logistics and intelligence support, as well as Islamic messaging.

At various times, the terror groups also sent out special emissaries to woo the bandits into their fold. They reportedly make use of preachers who emphasise fault lines of injustice and unfair treatment allegedly meted on herders.

A security operative in Zamfara said only recently, gunmen believed to be insurgents arrived Dunburum Forest in Zurmi Local Government of the state in seven Hilux vans. They were hosted by a bandits leader, known as Alhaji Shingi and have set up their own camps in the forest.

The hot spots

Boko Haram elements, Daily Trust authoritatively gathered, have taken camps in Wawa Forest in Niger State, converting a lot of wallowing bandits from nearby Zamfara into their own fold.

A Fulani man who has relatives living in the area said the insurgents set the rules among residents and hold court to hear disputes and pass judgments.

The insurgents in Wawa neighbouring areas are controlled by Gide, which extends into Dangulbi Forest in Zamfara and areas around Zuru in Kebbi State. Gide was the one who brokered the deal that led to the release of Kagara schoolboys and teachers abducted in February.

Ansaru's presence, according to sources, is mostly around Kwiambana Forest in Birnin Gwari to other nearby forests in Igabi and Giwa Local Governments of Kaduna State, as well as Shiroro and Kagara areas of Niger State.

In Zamfara and Sokoto states, the insurgents are said to have wooed some of the bandits through the supply of arms and ammunitions from nearby Niger Republic, thereby endearing themselves to the bandits terrorising places like Sabon Birni and Isa in Sokoto and Zurmi in Zamfara, and parts of Katsina State.

However, some of the bandits were said to have rebuffed entreaties by Boko Haram emissaries to the area.

Bandits' leaders applying 'Shari'a' law

Some of the bandits' leaders who are said to have accepted the evangelical missions of the insurgents are said to have started enforcement of strict Islamic codes in their domains.

Some of them, Daily Trust gathered, have banned vices such as fornication, use of intoxicants and cattle rustling in their domains.

In his recorded telephone conversation, Gide repeatedly mentioned that he has a Qur'anic school in which he enrolled the abducted students.

He also threatened to convert them into fighters and marry off the girls to his men, in what was similar to Boko Haram and ISWAP modus operandi.

In the area between Zurmi in Zamfara State and Kagara, in Sokoto State, another renowned bandit, Turji, is said to be applying the same tactics as locals said rumours of him aligning with terrorist groups is ripe.

"He has fixed prayer times and has preachers preaching in the community. He has also chased out all those selling drugs and engaging in all forms of lascivious acts," said a source in one of the neighbouring communities.

He said Turji may soon declare for Boko Haram fully even as men from his gang had recently moved in large numbers to join fighters belonging to Gide camp in a new camp springing up in Dangulbi Forest.

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It is unclear what is the motive of the combined forces.

Alliance extremely dangerous - Expert

In his reaction Bukarti, who has studied the Islamic insurgency in the Sahel region closely, said the incursion of Boko Haram and similar groups to other states outside the North East is a dangerous move that should be halted by the authorities.

"Firstly, Boko Haram can give groups moral justification for their killings and criminality," he said.

"If a criminal that has been massacring people and abducting them starts to believe that what he is doing is not a crime but a Jihad, he will get even more brutal and cruel. Secondly, enlisting in Boko Haram will allow criminal groups to recruit young people who might not have otherwise joined them."

Bukarti also expressed fears that Boko Haram can transfer its skills of making weapons such as improvised explosive devices to the criminal gangs they are linked with and boost their weapon supply.

"On Boko Haram's part, a link with the criminal elements in the North is a fulfilment of its expansionist ambitions. The relationship can also give Boko Haram access to the kidnapping industry in the North West as well the cattle rustling and mining ones. This will boost Boko Haram's finances," he said.

The researcher said the Nigerian government must take quick steps to stop the terrorist groups in their expansionist agenda.

"For Nigeria, this alliance is extremely dangerous. That is why government must work flat out to disrupt it. Continuing to deny in the face of clear evidence will only allow the criminals and terrorists time to consolidate their relationship.

"If that happens, the situation in the North West will get even worse and, in addition to the human cost, Northern Nigeria's economy will take a serious hit," he explained.

Spokesperson of the DSS, Peter Afunaya, did not respond to the request for comments on this story. He did not answer repeated calls and did not reply to two text messages sent to him by this reporter.
The Independent Petroleum Marketers Association of Nigeria (IPMAN) is neither planning to go on strike nor planning to shut fuel stations nationwide, its National President, Sanusi Fari, said on Monday.

The Independent Petroleum Marketers Association of Nigeria (IPMAN) is neither planning to go on strike nor planning to shut fuel stations nationwide, its National President, Sanusi Fari, said on Monday.

In a statement issued in Awka and signed by the association's National Secretary, Chidi Nnubia, he said that the public should dismiss any information regarding the planned strike.

The association's National Public Relation Officer, Yakubu Suleiman, had threatened in Abuja on Monday that IPMAN would go on strike and shut fuel stations nationwide beginning from Tuesday because the police laid siege on its secretariat.

Mr Suleiman alleged that some police officers laid siege on IPMAN's National Secretariat last Friday for undisclosed reasons.

He said that aggrieved IPMAN members and officials at states, zonal and depots levels, held series of meetings and threatened to shut filling stations if the issue was not properly addressed.

Mr Suleiman also advised government and security agencies to "halt impunity in the downstream sector of the petroleum industry".

IPMAN's National President, Mr Fari, however, urged petroleum dealers and the public to ignore Mr Suleiman's position.

He also advised the public not to engage in panic buying of petroleum products.

"We wish to inform the general public that our members have no plans to shut down any petrol station in the country as there is no reason to take such action.

"Our members are directed to disregard a publication by some persons whose stock in trade is to sabotage the efforts of the Federal Government and the PPMC to provide uninterrupted supply of petroleum products nationwide.

"We ask the general public to ignore any information emanating from any unscrupulous individuals attempting to hijack the association for their selfish and profiteering adventure.

"Those individuals lack the capacity to call off our services as they are illegally parading themselves as officers of the association in total disregard and disobedience of a Supreme Court judgment of Dec. 14, 2018.

"We enjoin the public to go about their normal activities as we continue to support the Federal Government through the Ministry of Petroleum Resources and NNPC to ensure availability of petroleum products across the country," Mr Fari said in the statement.

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The IPMAN president condemned attempts by some groups within the association to blackmail the government by calling out marketers for a nationwide protest.

Mr Fari said IPMAN was working harmoniously with sister organisations including the National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas (NUPENG) workers and the National Association of Road Transport Owners.

He added that IPMAN was also working in harmony with the Petroleum Tankers Drivers unit of NUPENG to ensure adequate supply of petroleum products nationwide.

Mr Fari stressed that any aggrieved member not satisfied with the Supreme Court order should return to court and not resort to an empty threat that might make the motoring public to engage in panic buying of petroleum products.
As the war against Boko Haram peaks, the operations of a French humanitarian organisation, Agency for Technical Cooperation and Development (ACTED), have been suspended in Nigeria's northeast, the country's epicentre of terrorism.

Borno state Governor Babagana Zullum suspended the charity following a security incident in Maiduguri, the state capital, after its staff were caught carrying out shooting training for its personnel.

ACTED, headquartered in Paris, is reported to have found itself in hot water after local authorities were alerted by concerned residents near the hotel where the training was taking place.

The governor's spokesman Isa Gusau said in a statement that the police found toy guns and other firearm simulators in the training hall.

Residents reported to officials that they heard gunshots from the hotel, prompting government officials to report the matter to local police.

On arrival, the police found three toy pistols while two trainers, both Nigerians, have been held as the incident is investigated.

"Pending the outcome of the police investigation, Governor Zulum has directed sealing of the hotel and suspension of ACTED from any humanitarian activity in Borno state," he said.

"Governor Zulum acknowledges and deeply appreciates the roles of credible NGOs which have been providing critical humanitarian interventions in different parts of Borno."

Although ACTED has yet to officially comment on the issue, some of its personnel confirmed that the simulation took place in order to prepare staff in case of security incidents. The iNGO has cited previous security incidents, including kidnapping of its staff in 2020 and a break-in at its offices, as examples where workers have found themselves in dangerous situations in the country.

This is not the first time the charity has found itself in trouble with an African government. In April 2021, authorities in Niger suspended ACTED's activities in the Diffa region, the epicentre of insurgency in the country. The government accused it of having "questionable and subversive connections with a terrorist organisation".

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Suspicion

Nigeria's action, however, follows long-standing suspicion that some international NGOs, especially those with French connections, were rendering assistance to Boko Haram. In May 2019, the Nigerian army accused humanitarian organisations operating in the troubled northeast region of aiding the terror group.

The army spokesman at the time, Sagir Musa, however, declined to name the humanitarian organisations that were suspected of giving aid such as food items to terrorists. He confirmed that a top Boko Haram militant was arrested while receiving food from a humanitarian organisation based in the northeast region.

The fighter, identified as Muhammed Modu, was arrested by Nigerian troops on May 26.

He described the development as "a security breach" and urged humanitarian agencies to desist from compromising Nigeria's national security and efforts to fight terrorism.

The army had in 2020 shut down the regional offices of a prominent NGO, Action Against Hunger, the global non-profit focused on providing food aid. It accused the group of supporting terrorists. It also closed four offices belonging to Mercy Corps, another non-profit in the troubled northeast region.

ACTED, first established in Kabul, Afghanistan, is present in 37 countries, where it responds to emergencies and crises.
Saif Al Islam Gadhafi, son of the late Libyan autocrat Moammar Gadhafi, hasn't been seen in public since his rebel captors released him from detention in 2017. But he appears now to be mulling a run for the presidency of the war-torn north African country in elections the United Nations and Western powers are pressing for in December.

The prospect of Saif figuring in the elections is unnerving Western diplomats and international democracy advisers, who say Libya's troubled peace process has enough major obstacles to overcome without Gadhafi's son, a highly polarizing figure, getting involved.

"What I hear is that he is more vengeful than conciliatory," says Mary Fitzgerald, a researcher and associate fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalization, King's College London. Fitzgerald, a former Irish Times newspaper reporter, covered the 2011 Libyan civil war that ended with Moammar Gadhafi's ouster and death.

Saif, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court on war-crime charges, has been talking via intermediaries with Western media. A major U.S. newspaper has conducted a formal interview with him, which is slated for publication next month, intermediaries say.

"It is still rather unclear whether he is actually putting himself out there as a candidate. I will believe it only when I actually hear him or see him in video make that pitch," Claudia Gazzini of the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank, told VOA.

Hafed al-Ghwell, a Libyan-American and senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, says he doesn't think Saif has made up his mind. "But if he does, I think he will have significant support," he adds.

Saif's candidacy would likely prove popular in the desert south of the country and among former Gadhafi loyalists -- and he might be able to persuade many ordinary Libyans, exhausted by a decade of strife, that he is the best bet for a stable future, say observers.

Risks

But his candidacy also risks triggering more violence. Earlier this year, pro-Gadhafi media in Libya claimed General Khalifa Haftar, a warlord who rules eastern Libya, and his son, Saddam, were plotting to kill Saif. Haftar has presidential ambitions. Some Islamists at the forefront of the 2011 uprising are also deeply opposed to a return of a Gaddafi family member.

"There are certainly many, not only Islamists, who would kill him for his role during the revolution, if there is a chance," reckons Wolfgang Pusztai, who served in Libya as Austria's defense attache between 2007 and 2011, and is a senior advisor at the Austrian Institute for European and Security Policy.

There has been considerable talk in Libya since 2017 that Gadhafi's second son, who during the last years of his father's rule presented himself as a reformer, might one day try to stage a political comeback. Freed in June 2017 after six years as a prisoner of a militia in the town of Zintan, 136 kilometers southwest of Tripoli, Saif, aged 48, has been maneuvering behind the scenes.

Some Libyans say he could have saved his country much pain if he had split from his father on the eve of the 2011 uprising, which friends say he did seriously consider. If he had, it might have brought his father down without any fighting, they agree. The victorious rebels sentenced Saif to death in 2015 but a Tripoli court overturned the sentence and ruled there should be a new trial. Saif is believed still to be in Zintan.

Three of Saif's brothers were killed in 2011 an another two are in jail, in Libya and Lebanon. His sister Aisha lives in Oman in exile. His adopted sister Hana is married to one of his confidants and lives in Egypt.

Since 2011, Libya has been ensnared in dispute and violence with rival governments, militias and warlords, backed by a variety of foreign powers, battling for mastery.

Encouraged by the U.N. and Western powers, Libyan rivals agreed last March to a provisional administration, the Government of National Unity, GNU, to run the country until parliamentary and presidential elections are held on December 24. The temporary government's mandate runs out then.

Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken joined foreign ministers from 17 states, including Russia and Turkey, which both have military forces present in Libya, at a conference in Berlin to urge Libya's parliamentarians and factions to keep to the election timetable and to pass an election law. The European Union has warned it would consider imposing sanctions on any Libyan leaders who obstruct the process.

Hasty elections

But some observers fear the U.N. and Western powers may be in too much haste and might be repeating what they see as a mistake in 2012 in pressing for elections too early after Gadhafi's ouster. Critics say there has been too much focus on a date for the elections and not enough on the process and what is needed to have elections, if they are to be widely accepted in Libya as legitimate.

Talks are deadlocked on an election law and over whether a referendum should be held first on a draft constitution, which would delay elections for months, if not longer.

"On elections, we are still at a standstill as regards to a consensus on which elections to have," says Gazzini.

"Despite the strong show of support for Presidential and Parliamentary elections in December voiced by the participants of the Berlin conference, Libyan constituencies remain divided on this. Plus there are some local stakeholders who are still pushing against," she adds.

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Mary Fitzgerald worries especially about holding an election for a president. "I think the idea of presidential elections is dumb anyway, and internationals should have nipped it in the bud sooner. Parliamentary, yes, but presidential without checks and balances in a place like Libya? I do acknowledge the need for parliamentary elections but presidential elections are such a bad idea," she told VOA.

Former Austrian defense attache Wolfgang Pusztai says there are few good alternatives.

"Elections in December are not a very good option for Libya, but unfortunately there is no better one. The main obstacles on the way to elections are the lack of consensus about a constitutional basis for these elections and the disagreement about the way the president shall be elected. The main challenges for the elections themselves are the dire security situation in several parts of the country, including the greater capital region," he told VOA.

But Pusztai believes a president -- or better still a three-person presidential council -- is needed. "A country in crisis like Libya needs a strong leader to overcome difficulties, at least for an interim period. This must not be confused with a dictator. The last 10 years have already clearly demonstrated how far a weak leadership can get."
In this interview with the MD/CEO, Dutchess Energy Limited, Ms. Olatimbo Ayinde, an active player in the petroleum industry for over 15 years, she speaks on her experience during the marginal oil bid process organised by the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR), the situation in the downstream sector and other topical issues.

Your company, Dutchess Energy Limited, emerged as one of the successful bidders of the last oil marginal field, tell us what was the experience going through the bid process?

We went into the bid exactly about a year ago. For us, the process was quite exciting and good enough, we were successful amid many other competitors. We put in our application and as revealed by the DPR, so many of us applied for the bid offer. Thereafter, upon rigorous evaluation by the DPR, 540 companies were shortlisted.

After that, we went through a more rigorous commercial and technical bid phase. We submitted the economics of our chosen fields, and also made known our plans for the host community in our chosen geographical location. Basically, whatever fields you were interested in, we had to purchase and review the data as provided by the DPR and also show our financial capabilities to execute our field development plan.

At this point, it became even more exciting because you had to now approach the banks, try to raise money, leverage on your financial capabilities and it was very daunting as there was a time limit of 45 days.

As it turns out, the award was given to us exactly a year after we entered into the bid process.

You said the DPR followed due process during the bid exercise. So, how will you judge the role of the DPR in the process?

Oh, for the first time, I would say that we had a process where the DPR was very transparent. We were expecting the usual kind of bids process we have seen in the past but this was very different. There was a time span that was designated for each process and there were no extensions. The entire process was cast in stone. That meant you had to be well- prepared. There were no cutting corners with this one. I mean, you just knew you couldn't just get any information outside of the usual. All information was available on the website and they followed everything and dates to the letter.

So, how do you think you would be able to operate successfully in this sector with demand for huge financial resources?

In this sector, it is a lot of investment that you have to put in depending on your terrain. There are different terrains, there is land, swamp, shallow offshore and deep offshore. I'm almost certain for most of the fields, regardless of your terrain, you will be looking from about $50 million to $200 million to hit first oil. Regardless of terrain, it is quite a huge investment. There are different ways of financing, for example via the banks or private equity. If you go the bank route, you may look at reserve based lending, in which case you must have proven and verifiable reserves or straight debt financing, where you may be required to have other sources of income. Unfortunately, the banks are not really interested at this time to lend aggressively to the sector as they like to come in after you have hit first oil, they may then consider reserve based lending.

So, most of us awardees would be looking at private equity, where we will get technical partners to farm-in to the assets and we are able to give up some percentage. By law, we are not allowed to give anyone else more than 49% of the asset. Which means that you as an indigenous partner will hold onto 51% of the asset and will always be the majority.

What gives you the confidence that you can transit to the upstream sector?

We have been in the petroleum industry for over 15 years. We've participated actively in Marine Logistics subsector, moving large volumes of petroleum products from one place to the other. I'm someone who likes to say that I came from the sea to land. We then ventured into the downstream sector. We have been able to go through the entire value chain and it has been a wonderful experience. Behind all of that, is the upstream which completes the entire value chain of the oil and gas sector. We as a company have been waiting for this opportunity for 15 years.

The world including Nigeria is moving into alternative energy and for Nigeria, we are looking more of a gas for cleaner energy. So there is quite a bit of transition taking place in the downstream. I believe that our strength in the downstream and mid-stream will give us an added advantage as we venture into the upstream.

Some experts, including your humble self believe that there is the need to change the narrative in the petroleum sector. How do you want to go about achieving this worthy goal?

First of all, I would like to emphasize that there is not a lot of people of my gender in the petroleum industry. We have been few that have participated or played actively in all sectors. I want them to see that this is not a male-dominated only business. There are few women players in the upstream, but with this exercise, hopefully there are more openings for women participation. I'm hoping that with my coming into this sector, it is showing that there is a lot of good prospects for the women folks in the industry.

A lot of people have expressed difficulty in raising finances in this sector. What is your take on this?

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First of all, it is good for you to understand why people are finding it difficult to raise funds. Some unusual things have happened in this sector. For example in the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic on April 20, 2020, the price of oil nosedived to $0 and then it went even lower to -$35 until it was pegged by the New York Stock Exchange. Prior to this time, oil was trading at very low levels, WTI was trading at $20 and Brent, which affects us in Nigeria, was trading at $25. Before now, oil was seen as very stable and unshakable.

On that unfortunate day (April 20, 2020), the price of crude WTI crude oil nosedived to -$35 per barrel, which meant at some point, you were paying someone $35 per barrel to take your oil. Now, if you consider the cost of exploration, production and in places like Nigeria with community disruption & expenses, bringing production cost in most cases from between $18 - $25 per barrel, you will see that for quite a while they were trading at a huge loss and when the sector loses money, the Banks are badly hit. Even though oil is now trading at $70 per barrel, the low prices of oil in recent times has been a major obstacle in funding. Hopefully as time goes on, their wounds would heal and memories will fade, provided oil remains stable and trades above $50 per barrel.
The legalisation of drugs is a common debate topic around the world, particularly with softer substances such as marijuana. While potentially addictive, the cannabis plant's healing properties mean that many people advocate its use as pain-relief rather than to solely seek pleasure.

The focus of much of this debate in the last year has been Africa. Countries such as Rwanda and Morocco have formally allowed the use of medical marijuana, while in South Africa the use, possession and cultivation of the plant is set to be decriminalised. Nigeria is another nation considering legalisation, however there is also fierce opposition to a law change there.

It begs the question: could legalisation be about to sweep the continent? If so, what are the problems and benefits that it could bring?

The argument against

Much of the argument against legalising the drug is not so much about the act of smoking it, rather the ability to differentiate between safe and dangerous samples.

Olakunle Idowu, a professor of pharmaceutical chemistry, spoke to news site The Conversation recently about how countries should only legalise drugs if they are confident that dangerous quantities are not available.

To be more specific, the danger he refers to comes from the THC element of the plant. While it reacts with receptors that flood the brain with endorphins, causing that famous 'high', those same receptors trigger addictive behavior, similar to the neurological process behind problem gambling and compulsive shoplifting.

Identifying plants with a high amount of THC, rather than CBD, which is associated with medical benefits, is key to keeping users safe. However, Professor Idowu feels that Nigeria doesn't have the facilities to test the plants to know for sure.

A related problem is the health risks that come with smoking the herb. Even smoking 'safe' samples regularly increases the risk of developing a psychotic illness, such as schizophrenia. This risk is higher the younger a person starts smoking, and it could also inflame underlying asthma or respiratory problems, and even contribute to lung cancer.

To add to this, it's obviously dangerous to perform many activities while under the influence of marijuana, including driving a car or operating heavy machinery.

The argument for

Nigeria is also the home to several powerful pro-marijuana arguments, one of which came from the Governor of Ondo State, Arakunrin Rotimi Akeredolu in an address to the Nigerian government in June. Akeredolu stressed the need for the country to shake off its 'archaic' way of thinking and embrace the benefits of cannabis cultivation.

The governor made the case for both the medical and economic benefits of marijuana, saying they outweigh the negatives. He talked about how its controlled cultivation was a potential 'multi-billion-naira industry' that could stimulate the troubled Nigerian economy. Akeredolu's recent trip to Thailand was a case in point: there, he said, the country is cultivating the plant in a safe and environmentally-friendly way for commercial use. Morocco, too, sees legalisation as a way to boost its agriculture industry and tackle drug traffickers.

Akeredolu's argument is backed up by the proven medical benefits of cannabis. Various studies show that it helps to reduce chronic pain, nausea and even the symptoms of serious conditions such as Multiple Sclerosis (MS). In May, Nigeria's House of Representatives announced its intention to discuss the legalisation of Indian Hemp for these reasons, a move seen by many as the first major step towards full legal validation for the drug.

The dual economic and medical boost that legalisation could bring is an attractive prospect to many African countries who are struggling through the worst pandemic in a century. In five years' time, we could see further legal changes across the continent.

How marijuana legalisation is spreading across Africa

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The legalisation debate isn't just confined to the likes of Nigeria and Morocco. Even countries with incredibly strict laws are seeking to taking advantage of a growing global legal marijuana market.

The Ugandan government, for example, is said to have spent over a quarter-0f-a-million dollars on high-quality cannabis seeds for cultivation in a bid to make a profit on its exports, while Zimbabwe, Lesotho and Zambia have all allowed the commercial use and export of the plant.

If such ventures are successful, then it's likely that neighbouring countries will follow suit, eager not to miss out on this earning opportunity.

According to a 2019 Africa Hemp and Cannabis report, Africa makes up only 11% of the world's market, meaning there is plenty of potential for it to extend its influence.

While law changes to allow commercial use would still fall short of full public legalization, the hope for campaigners is that African authorities are slowly changing their stance towards marijuana, leading to a new cannabis-friendly Africa.
Men of the Imo State Police Command have rearrested an inmate of the Owerri Custodial Centre, who reportedly formed a gang of kidnappers after he escaped from the centre on April 5.

The inmate, identified as Eze Kelvin, was said to have been rearrested on 26/6/2021 and transferred to the anti-kidnapping unit of the command.

A statement signed by the Media Adviser to the state Commissioner of Police, CSP Mike Abatam, said the suspect confessed to have escaped by some gunmen suspected to be members of the outlawed Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB) who overran the facility and freed more than 1844 inmates.

Kelvin, aged 30 years, was said to be residing at Orji in Owerri North LGA of Imo State, but he is a native of Uga in Aguata LGA of Anambra State.

The statement said among the items recovered from him was an Ash colour Highlander SUV vehicle with Reg. No. RLU 192 TY.

Abatam said his interrogation led to the arrest of three other members of his gang in their hideout in Enugu State.

The names of the members were given as Rapheal Nnamdi, 28, who was said to be an ex-convict from Ozu Okizu in Oyi LGA of Anambra and Johnson Ahanonu, 36, an escapee of Imo correctional Home from Obilibi Mbeiri Mbaitoli LGA of Imo State.

The statement said they also confessed to have kidnapped one Ozuzu Ekelezie, Osuji Gladjoan, and Onwuauaka Ugonna - all resident in Owerri.
Abuja  In the wake of possible importation of the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Federal Government has added South Africa to the list of countries where foreign travellers coming into Nigeria have been banned.

In May, the federal government had decreed that any person who has visited Brazil, India, or Turkey within 14 days preceding travel to Nigeria, shall be denied entry into Nigeria.

It said the regulation, however, does not apply to passengers who transited through these countries.

Secretary to the Government of the Federation SGF and Chairman of the Presidential Steering Committee PSC on COVID-19, Mr Boss Mustapha disclosed this during Monday's briefing of the PSC.

"In addition to these three countries, the PSC has also shifted its focus on some African countries. South Africa, Zambia, Rwanda, Namibia and Uganda fall in this category", he stated.

Details later...
The Federal Government has extended the ban on travellers from Brazil, India and Turkey due to the rising COVID-19 cases in those countries by one month.

It has also added travellers from South Africa to the list.

The Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF) and Chairman of the Presidential Steering Committee (PSC) on COVID-19, Boss Mustapha, said this on Monday in Abuja at the national briefing of the committee.

Daily Trust reports that the government in May barred travellers from Brazil, India and Turkey due to rising COVID-19 cases in those countries, saying that they ban shall be subjected to review after an initial period of four weeks.

The SGF who said that the PSC has been reviewing these restrictions and is of the opinion that they should remain for another four weeks before it is further reviewed, also said that South Africa, has however, been added to this category once more.

"A few weeks ago, we announced additional measures to be met by passengers arriving from Brazil, Turkey and India. This action was due to the prevalence of variants of concern and the dangers associated with importation of the such virulent strain.

"The PSC has been reviewing these restrictions and is of the opinion that they should remain for another four weeks (one months) before it is further reviewed. South Africa, has however, been added to this category once more," Mustapha said.

While saying that the PSC has been monitoring global developments on COVID-19 with particular focus on variants of concern, he said that government has escalated surveillance and risk communication.

He added that the PSC has similarly paid close attention to the issue of vaccination, especially matters relating to access and acquisition of vaccines.

"The PSC wishes to encourage members of the public not to lower their guards yet because we continue to see spikes in some countries (including African countries) and the emergence of variants of concern in several jurisdictions where the third wave has occurred," he said.

Emirate flight crisis

Speaking on the controversy on the Emirate Flight crisis, the SGF said that the PSC updated its position on the issue of emirates flights in and out of Nigeria.

According to him, the relevant ministries continued to review developments and concluded that any decision to fly the Nigerian route by an airline is a business decision.

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He said, "In all circumstances, however, conditions placed on such flights must conform with international civil aviation standards and must not be discriminatory and must respect our sovereignty."

Focusing on other countries

Mustapha also said that in addition to the banned countries, the PSC has also shifted its focus on some African countries, including South Africa, Zambia, Rwanda, Namibia and Uganda.

"South Africa for example, recorded over 100,000 cases in the last one week while 20,000 was recorded in the last 24 hours.

"The four major variants of concern are now classified as Alpha (UK), Beta (SA); Gamma (Brazil) and Delta (India). The Delta variant which has wrecked devastating havoc, is not yet found in Nigeria hence the need to tighten our borders and be more vigilant.

Passport ban of violators

The SGF said that about six months ago, travel documents of some inbound passengers to Nigeria were barred for a period of 6 months for violating government COVID-19 protocols.

"We have received several appeals from those affected while we counselled on the importance of compliance with rules and regulations. The six-month period of ban for the first batch of 100 is almost complete and we use this opportunity to reassure Nigerians that sanctions will be imposed on violators of measures put in place to protect them and safeguard our nation," Mustapha said.
South Africa has recorded over 100,000 cases in the last one week, and 20,000 cases in the last 24 hours.

The Nigerian government on Monday added South Africa to the existing list of countries where inbound non-Nigerian passengers are temporarily banned from entering the country.

Nigerian passengers from there are also expected to fulfill some stringent conditions before they are allowed into the country.

The announcement, which was made by the chairman of the presidential steering committee (PSC) on COVID-19, Boss Mustapha, was said to be in response to the spike in COVID-19 cases in the African country.

Mr Mustapha, who doubles as the secretary to the government of the federation (SGF) noted that the prevalence of variants of concern in South Africa and the dangers associated with importation of such virulent strains to Nigeria made the decision inevitable.

Earlier restrictions

The Nigerian government, on May 2, 2021 announced a temporary ban on non-Nigerian passengers who have been in Brazil, India or Turkey within 14 days of intended arrival into Nigeria.

"South Africa, has however, been added to this category once more," Mr Mustapha said.

He said his committee has been reviewing these restrictions and agrees they should remain for another four weeks before it is further reviewed.

"A few weeks ago, we announced additional measures to be met by passengers arriving from Brazil, Turkey and India.

"This action was due to the prevalence of variants of concern and the dangers associated with importation of such virulent strain.

"The PSC has been reviewing these restrictions and is of the opinion that they should remain for another four (4) weeks before it is further reviewed," he said.

South Africa

Mr Mustapha said South Africa was added to the list due to the increase in COVID-19 cases and also the presence of delta variants causing havoc around the world.

He said the delta variant is not in Nigeria hence the need to tighten the country's borders and be more vigilant.

According to the PSC chairman, South Africa has recorded over 100,000 cases in the last one week, and 20,000 cases in the last 24 hours.

Other African countries on watch list

He said the PSC has also shifted its focus on other Africa countries like Zambia, Rwanda, Namibia and Uganda.

In South Africa's Gauteng province, the most populous part of the country, COVID-19 patients are waiting for hours, even days, on stretchers in accident and emergency wards before being found a bed, a report on the Guardian shows.

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This has led authorities in South Africa to impose new restrictions to stem the sharp rise in COVID-19 cases.

South Africa's rising cases are part of a resurgence across Africa, with a peak expected to exceed that of earlier waves as the continent's 54 countries struggle to vaccinate even a small percentage of their populations.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has repeatedly appealed for vaccines for Africa, saying a fast-surging COVID-19 third wave is outpacing efforts to protect populations, "leaving more and more dangerously exposed".

"Africa is facing a fast-surging third wave of COVID-19 pandemic, with cases spreading more rapidly and projected to soon overtake the peak of the second wave the continent witnessed at the start of 2021," Matshidiso Moeti, WHO regional director for Africa, said recently.

Ms Moeti said the third wave is "picking up speed, spreading faster, hitting harder."

As of 20 June, which is 48 days into the new wave, Africa had recorded around 474,000 new cases- a figure 21 per cent higher than the increase for the same period in the second wave.

At the current rate of infections, the WHO estimates that the case numbers will surpass the peak of the second wave by early July.

African countries have recorded over 5.4 million cases and almost 145,000 deaths, according to data from worldometers.com, a platform providing statistics on the situation of COVID-19 around the world.
The report estimates that through the end of 2020, the conflict in the North-east will have resulted in nearly 350,000 deaths, with 314,000 of those from indirect causes.

Insurgency-related conflicts claimed the lives of almost 350,000 lives in the North-eastern part of Nigeria up till the end 2020, a new report of the United Nations Develop Programme (UNDP) has said.

The report said insurgency directly resulted to the death of 35,000 people in three states in the region, while an estimated 314,000 people died "from indirect causes" in the entire North-east region.

Since 2009, the North-east has been the theatre of the violent campaigns of the Islamic extremist group, Boko Haram, its breakaway group, the Islamic State's West Africa Province (ISWAP), and counter-insurgency forces.

PREMIUM TIMES had reported that the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), in an August 2019 report, said insurgency activities of extremist Islamic groups had led to the death of an estimated 35,000 persons in Adamawa, Borno, and Yobe states.

The UNDP confirmed, in its latest report released on June 24, 2021, that "national data" showed that "conflict has directly resulted in the deaths of 35,000 people in the states of Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe as a result of battle or one-sided violence since 2009'.

"The report estimates that through the end of 2020, the conflict in the north-east will have resulted in nearly 350,000 deaths, with 314,000 of those from indirect causes," the UNDP Resident Representative, Mohamed Yahya, said in a statement.

The statement gave the major highlights in the report entitled, 'Assessing the Impact of Conflict on Development in North-east Nigeria'.

According to Mr Yahaya, the findings in the report showed that "for each casualty caused directly by insurgency, an additional nine people, primarily children, have lost their lives due to a lack of food and resources - and more than 90 per cent of conflict-attributable deaths are of children under the age of five".

He said critical aspect of progress and development, including Gross Domestic Product (GDP), poverty, malnutrition, infant mortality, education, water availability and sanitation, might not return to pre-conflict levels in the region even by 2030.

The report further noted that the economic destruction brought by the insurgency "has dismantled already fragile health and food systems with less than 60 per cent of health facilities in Adamawa, Borno, and Yobe states are fully functional, while a quarter is either destroyed or non-functional."

"Without continued investment in development as a long-term solution, the protracted conflict in North-east Nigeria will continue to impact other parts of the country and the entire Sahel region," Mr Yahya said.

More highlights

The report added that for every year that conflict continues, infants and children are the most impacted - with about 170 children under five years die daily - and by 2030, it is estimated to grow by 240.

It said women and children make up 80 per cent of the displaced population in the North-east and have limited options for work and survival, including difficulties accessing resources.

In 2020, findings from the report estimates that 1.8 million students were out of school who would have been enrolled if not for conflict.

It said by 2030, in the 'Conflict scenario', the average Nigerian in the BAY (Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe) states will have had a full year (20 per cent) of education less than expected in the No-Conflict scenario.

As of 2019, 81 per cent of people living in Yobe, 64 per cent in Borno, and 60 per cent in Adamawa suffer from multidimensional poverty, a measure that accounts for deprivation with respect to standards of living, health, and education, the report says.

Recommendations

The report findings suggest that to overcome the conflict, development efforts need to be focused on the stabilisation of affected areas through a community-level approach that enhances physical security and access to justice, rehabilitation of essential infrastructure and basic service delivery as well as the revitalisation of the local economy such as market stalls, schools and police stations.

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It added, "There is a need for international partners and national stakeholders to ensure that funds are invested not only on life-saving and humanitarian needs but also mid-and long-term development priorities in order to enable Nigeria to achieve the SDGs and attain the AU 2063".

Conflicts in the region has led to massive internal displacement with more than 1.8 million Nigerians displaced in Adamawa, Borno, and Yobe states, with the vast majority (nearly 1.5 million) located in Borno, according to data from the UN.

Recently, the United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS) said in a report in June, that it had collated an estimated 1,366 incidents involving explosive hazards from January 2016 to April 2021, in the North-east region.
Metlobo  Farmers have been advised to prepare well in advance for the ploughing season.

Speaking in an interview following an agricultural community service day in Metlobo on Saturday, Mmathethe/Molapowabojang legislator, Dr Edwin Dikoloti said an early start would enable a farmer to plan and structure implementation thereby ensuring successful or better yields.

Planning would help limit unnecessary delays and stoppages during the implementation phase, said Dr Dikoloti, who is also health and wellness minister.

He said early ploughing also secured soil moisture thereby preventing crop failure.

The minister said timing was important because should there be a long period between ploughing and sowing, weeds would regrow, leading to the land needing to be ploughed a second time.

The best time to plough, he said, was shortly after rain when the soil was moist but not too wet.

Dr Dikoloti warned against ploughing a dry field saying it could encourage wind erosion with serious consequences.

Stating that delays resulting from equipment malfunction could be costly, he said farmers should master dozens of skills including routine farm machinery repair and maintenance to avoid wasting valuable time and favourable weather conditions.

Dr Dikoloti said imparting skills to farmers would go a long way in transforming lives and enhancing food security in Botswana.

As part of the day's activities, African Agriculture's Agricultural Equipment Service Centre provided servicing of tractors and other farming implements free of charge.

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In a separate interview, the Ministry of Agricultural Development and Food Security's Mr Brian Mhaladi said 1 868 hectares were ploughed year in and out in the Metlobo extension area with 74 tractors registered.

He encouraged the farming community to employ modern technologies and apply appropriate methodologies to increase production. Stressing the importance of eating nutritional food, Mr Mhaladi said farmers should also focus on nutrition.

School going children did well academically if they ate well, he stated.About the Integrated Support Programme for Arable Agriculture Development (ISPAAD), he said it was introduced to address challenges facing arable farmers and the inherent low productivity of the sub sector.

Mr Mhaladi said through the programme, the ministry spent P78 million in the Mmathethe/Molapowabojang constituency during the 2019/20 ploughing season.

He stressed the need to strike a balance between the amount of money spent and the yield.

Mr Mhaladi said smart agriculture remained paramount to revolutionise the agricultural sector and transform the economy as well as improve food production.

<i>Source : BOPA</i>
Ms Mohammed urges the Nigerian youth to be proud of their country.

United Nations Deputy Secretary-General, Amina Mohammed, has charged the Nigerian youths to stop condemning their country despite its many flaws.

A statement by a UN National Information Officer, Oluseyi Soremekun, said Mrs Mohammed made the call while addressing students at the Baze University, Abuja, last Thursday.

"You have got education, you have the tools, and you have a huge future ahead of you, and you are condemning yourself before you start on that journey. Do not do that! Be proud of Nigeria, your country; do not condemn her and do not lose hope," Mrs Mohammed said.

Mrs Mohammed who was recently reappointed for a second five-year term also urged those who perceive there was more bad than good in Nigeria to have a rethink because, according to her, "If you will your country that way, that's the direction it will go. Even if it is not so good, you need to will it to succeed, because the success of this country is yours. If you fail, we will have conflict after conflict."

"If you think Nigeria is worse than better, then how are you going to turn it around?" Mrs Mohammed asked, stating further, "If you do not want to build this nation, I do not know where you want to go. I can assure you the world is not ready to take 240 million Nigerians. Therefore, let's think about how to salvage it together."

On young men and women "who are quick to compare Nigeria with other countries", the Deputy Secretary-General urged them "to compare Nigeria with other countries with equal population and that had independence at the same time".

"Do not compare apples with oranges," she added.
The President of Liberia, H.E. Dr. George Manneh Weah has expressed sadness at news of the unfortunate demise of former Information Minister, Emmanuel Bowier. Bowier is reported to have died over the weekend following a protracted period of illness.

The Liberian Leader described the renowned statesman as a trendsetter who contributed immensely to the country's political history, as well as to its arts and cultures. Bowier served as Information Minister under former President Samuel Doe.

Before his death, he was an active participant in national discourses on the future of the country. The former Minister, who was widely read, used his platforms to provide historical references in order to serve as a guide for how current affairs should be handled.

President Weah conveyed his sympathy to the Bowier family and all those impacted by his death. He urged them to take solace in the Lord.
press release

Washington, DC: On June 28, 2021, the Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) approved a 36-month arrangement under the Extended Credit Facility (ECF) for Uganda in an amount equivalent to SDR722 million (200 percent of quota or about US$1 billion) to support the post-COVID-19 recovery and the authorities' plan to increase households' incomes and inclusive growth by fostering private sector development.

Approval of the ECF arrangement enables immediate disbursement of about US$258 million, usable for budget support. This follows Fund emergency support to Uganda under the Rapid Credit Facility (RCF) in May 2020 of SDR361 million (100 percent of quota or US$491.5 million, see Press Release No 20/206 ).

Uganda's economy was hit hard by the COVID-19 crisis. Decade-long gains in poverty reduction were reversed, fiscal balances have deteriorated, and pressures on external buffers have intensified. A mild recovery is underway in some sectors, with economic growth in FY 21/22 expected to reach 4.3 percent before returning to pre-pandemic rates of 6-7 percent in the medium term. The outlook remains highly uncertain, with risks tilted to the downside, including from a resurgence of tighter containment measures linked to higher COVID-19 positivity rates.

The authorities' program, enshrined in the third National Development Plan (NDPIII), is built around the principles of private sector-led inclusive growth and public sector reforms to strengthen governance and transparency. It envisages multi-year fiscal consolidation while increasing priority and high-quality infrastructure spending. The program will include reforms to increase domestic revenue, foster public sector efficiency and strengthen governance while preparing the ground for sound management of oil revenues. The program will strengthen the monetary policy and financial sectors frameworks while fostering development, including through financial inclusion.

At the conclusion of the Executive Board's discussion, Mr. Tao Zhang, Deputy Managing Director and Acting Chair, made the following statement:

"Uganda's economy has been severely impacted by the COVID-19 global pandemic, which reversed decade-long gains in poverty alleviation and opened up fiscal and external financing gaps. The authorities' program, supported by a new arrangement under the Extended Credit Facility, focuses on keeping public debt on a sustainable path while improving the composition of spending and advancing structural reforms to create space to finance private investment, foster growth and reduce poverty.

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"Fiscal consolidation, appropriately based on both revenue and expenditure measures during the first year of the authorities' program, seeks to stabilize the public debt ratio while increasing social spending, including for vaccines. The implementation of the authorities' Domestic Revenue Mobilization Strategy, better management of public investment, control of domestic arrears and advances in cash management will support the fiscal strategy.

"Prudent debt management is important to reduce vulnerabilities, particularly given Uganda's moderate risk of debt distress. Every effort should continue to be made to seek concessional financing and pursue relief under the Debt Service Suspension Initiative. Contingency plans put in place would help mitigate risks.

"An accommodative monetary policy stance remains appropriate and the exchange rate should continue to function as a shock absorber. Efforts to increase central bank independence should also be sustained. Flexible use of banks' capital buffers should be considered to address uncertainties surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. Close attention should be paid to minimizing financial stability risks, including through strict adherence to accounting and prudential standards, and modernizing the banking resolution and emergency liquidity assistance frameworks.

"Advancing governance reforms remains crucial to support transparency and private sector development. The authorities have made progress in publishing information on audits and the use of COVID-19 funds, but further work is necessary to enhance the AML/CFT framework and strengthen the accountability of high-level officials. Promoting human capital development and financial inclusion, including through wider credit bureau coverage and collateral requirements will further support the authorities' inclusive growth agenda. Accelerating digitalization would enhance these efforts."
Odunayo Eweniyi, 27, spoke to Africa Renewal's Damilola Ogunbiyi about her upbringing, managing business as a young woman, and gender equality.

Twenty-seven-year-old Odunayo Eweniyi is making waves in Nigeria as a successful tech start-up specialist. She is also known for advocating for the empowerment of girls and women having helped to raise about$1.1 million in support of the #EndSARS movement--a youth-led activism against police brutality in her country. She has also launched two women's empowerment non-profits, Feminist Coalition and Wine & Whine Nigeria.

Ms. Eweniyi is the co-founder of several tech start-ups, including Piggyvest, FirstCheck Africa and PushCV. For this, she has been featured in some major international publications, including being listed in TIME100NEXT, The Bloomberg 50 and Vogue's 12 women leaders that changed the world in 2020.

Her childhood

Ms. Eweniyi was born in Abeokuta, Ogun State, South West of Nigeria. She earned a Bachelor's degree in computer engineering from the Covenant University, also in Ogun state.

Her parents were university professors and so she and her three younger siblings had access to books.

On how her parents treated their children, she fondly remembers: "There were words of affirmation and not a lot of judgment. So, we grew up being confident and creative."

At an early age, no one, not even her parents or siblings, thought Ms. Eweniyi would eke out a living in business. She had an affection for the computer and books, which signaled at the time that, like her parents, she would likely move into academia. She liked the technical aspects of things.

Now, she says, "I am the Chief Operations Officer for all our companies. I have now almost abandoned the technical aspects and moved into business and finance."

On her first job

Ms. Eweniyi first job was as a social media manager for Somto Ifezue, the man with whom she would later cofounded PushCV. The company was their first big break, having raised sufficient venture funding.

"The idea behind PushCV was that as at 2009 there were at least 380 people for every job advertised in Nigeria. That meant sorting through hundreds of CVs. Employers at the time had to look through the first 10 or 20 applications, conduct interviews and move on, leaving most applications unattended to. At PushCV, we created a system where job applications are pre-screened and the best 10 applicants are identified and referred to employers for interviews," she says.

Ms. Eweniyi had gained significant experience working as a social media manager at SAJ Parolz Ent, as a junior editor at TechCabal, editor-in-chief at Tech Point, and as a founding writer at Zikoko; these experiences were central to her success at PushCV.

Not too long after PushCV, she joined Joshua Chibueze to co-found PiggyVest, an online savings and investment platform with more than two million customers currently.

On doing business in Nigeria

Ms. Eweniyi finds excitement in what she does despite the challenges of doing business in Nigeria. "It's a lot of work to start and grow a business in this climate. Some of the challenges include the regulations and a lack of adequate infrastructure," she says, maintaining that, "We know for sure that there is talent in Nigeria."

She proposes clear regulations and for government to "move out of the way so we can work. I like rules and when they are clear, you know what is right and what is wrong. The problem we have is that a lot of the rules are grey, and innovation moves faster than regulations."

On dealing with sexism

Like many women around the world, Ms. Eweniyi has fought her fair share of battles against sexism and systemic exclusion of women from economic opportunities. She says: "Some people didn't think that women could run companies; some managers wouldn't hire a woman because they fear she would get pregnant or get married and not be able to focus on her work. So, we have a net result of women being left behind."

She acknowledges having faced "systemic exclusion: when people have conversations about the sector that I should work in and have included everybody else except me, intentionally or unintentionally."

However, she is relieved that, "That has changed now, but it happened quite a lot in the early days. I dismantled that by speaking up, because a lot of the time sexism isn't always in your face, and you kind of start asking what's up? Is it because I am a woman, was that sexism or am I crazy? And then you figure out how you're going to react to it."

On helping other women

Ms. Eweniyi feels a sense of responsibility to help other women along the way, which was why she established the Feminist Coalition. "I just feel a sense of duty in that I am one woman who's had it relatively easy. I have a strong support system and I think that there's been a healthy amount of luck involved in where I am today. Where we started from, where the journey has gone--right place, right time, and all that.

"My co-founders are probably the best I could have met because they don't hold me back. They allow me to be the full expression of who I am and so did my parents, so did my siblings. So, I have gone through life surrounded by people who allowed me to be who I am. It doesn't seem like that for all women, but it should.

"For me, the mission is that all women should be included, and I feel I have a responsibility to bring more women in. As a woman, if you've somehow been able to keep the door open for yourself and move in and get all of the things that traditionally or historically women haven't been able to get, you kind of have a responsibility to hold that door open for the generation of women behind you.

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"Since the launch of the Feminist Coalition in October 2020, there hasn't been any shortage of character assassination efforts," she says, adding: "But that doesn't mean that the women who are successful are going to stop working. The journey into the future might be painstaking, but it's going to be steady, and I think that's how women can look at whatever sector they are trying to get into. Women need to stay steady, know who they are and where they are going."

On her future plans

Ms. Eweniyi is excited about her future and she's not slowing down anytime soon. "I think that you have to keep the mentality to keep achieving. There is a lot left to do. I must do as much as I can in this space so I leave it in a slightly better shape than I found it. But then, I am just one person. We are now in finance. Hopefully, we'll go into the mass market and then into education. There is a lot to be done there. I'm still hungry. The only challenge is how many hours there are in a day. I just hope that we have the time."

Message to young Africans

"My dad used to say, 'nobody is coming to save you; you're going to have to save yourself!' It's unfortunate for young Africans, but that's our reality. That's where we are. However, every win that we get will be hard fought," she says, adding: So, just get ready. The results of the next few years will be because of the actions we take or don't take today. It just means we have to try. So, go in there and do your best."
The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) have vowed to ramp up efforts at unravelling actual owners of the country's oil and gas assets as well as ensuring contracts transparency in the sector.

Group Managing Director of the corporation, Mallam Mele Kyari, who spoke at a stakeholders' workshop on the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) Annual Progress Reporting (APR), convened by NEITI, noted that his commitment to beneficial ownership in the industry was unwavering.

Kyari, who was represented by the corporation's Group General Manager, Governance, Risk & Compliance, Mr. Chris Akamario, said the NNPC will make sure that banks both at the local and international levels are involved in the renewed attempt to embrace the culture of openness in the sector.

"We are going to continue to work with NEITI to deepen beneficial ownership disclosure in Nigeria's oil and gas sector, beyond statutory ownership in the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) records.

"We are also going to work with NEITI to implement contract transparency in the sector and cooperate with NEITI to broaden Nigeria's annual progress reporting in line with the requirements of the global EITI," Kyari stated.

Stressing that both organisations have come a long way in the EITI implementation journey, he stated that the symbiotic relationship between the two entities was informed by the strategic positions they both occupy in the country's oil and gas sector.

He added: "We are confident to say that our engagement with NEITI is leading us to the place Nigerians want us to be. With the support of NEITI, we are able to close out on most of the outstanding issues in our operations which have become recurring decimals in past NEITI audit reports."

In his comments, Executive Secretary of NEITI, Dr. Ogbonnaya Orji urged Nigerians and stakeholders in the country's oil, gas and mining sectors to celebrate key achievements, progress and milestones that have been recorded and exemplified by the annual progress reporting.

"The essence of this gathering is to broaden the scope of EITI annual progress reporting in Nigeria. The APR is about reporting, showcasing and celebrating the good work being done by various government agencies, civil society organisations and companies that are contributing to deepening reforms in Nigeria's extractive industries.

"We acknowledge that there are challenges, but we need to document, report and celebrate our efforts and key milestones in the process of addressing these challenges so as to build trust, earn investors' confidence and attract desired investment into our economy," Orji stated.

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Also speaking, EITI Anglophone Country Manager, Dr. Mike Uzoigwe, explained that the APR provides the opportunity for stakeholders to evaluate how EITI implementation is transforming the operations of member countries extractive landscape.

The Director General, National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency (NOSDRA), Dr. Idris Musa, in his comments, noted that his agency will work to deepen EITI reporting in Nigeria.

"We can now track and report our own gas flare, we are no longer depending on third party data and record," he said.

Director, Mining Cadastre Office (MCO), Mr. Mustapha Yusuf, noted that the organisation now has an online-based system that has decentralised the agency's operations and integration with other relevant Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs)

He stressed that this has led to an improvement in revenue generation from the sector, informing participants that his agency has already commenced implementation of beneficial ownership and mainstreaming in line with the global EITI standard.

Speaking on behalf civil society, Ms. Faith Nwadishi, commended NEITI for convening the meeting on EITI annual reporting, noting that the meeting represents a unique innovation in the country's EITI implementation.
Two journalists were last week attacked by officers of the Liberian National Police while carrying out their journalistic work.

As a result of that, the Reporters Association is calling on the Police to effect an immediate investigation into the matter.

"The Leadership of the Reporters Association of Liberia ( RAL) has in the strongest terms condemned the act of violence against it members, Trojan Kiazolu of FABRIC FM and Hannah Geterminah of the Daily Observer Newspaper by some officers of the Liberia National Police on Friday, June 24, 2021, in Monrovia," the statement released late last week said.

The reporters were video recording an incident in which a police officer was preventing another from taking photo in public space. The lady's dress was torn.

"As the leadership of the Reporters Association of Liberia, we are calling on the Leadership of the LNP to swiftly handle the situation as the RAL will not hesitate in reverting to legal redress," it said.

"The RAL sees the continuous attacks on journalists in Liberia as unbecoming and a calculated attempt to silence the press in Liberia. In this light, the leadership of the Reporters Association of Liberia is calling on the government of Liberia to address all of PUL and RAL complaints before it since March 2020," it further added.
analysis

Deputy State Security Minister Zizi Kodwa has acknowledged that he and other ANC leaders could have done more to avoid creating the perception that he was involved in wrongdoing, but he was adamant that the money he received from a former EOH executive was not in exchange for influencing tenders.

Deputy Minister of State Security Zizi Kodwa appeared at the Zondo Commission on Monday to testify about his relationship with former EOH executive Jehan Mackay, who allegedly played a leading role at the tech giant while it made large donations to the ANC and paid multiple party leaders while it bid on government tenders.

Kodwa testified that he met Mackay in 2013 and the pair became friends. In 2015, Mackay gave Kodwa R1-million and Kodwa used R890,000 of it to purchase a Jeep vehicle. Kodwa, who was then the national ANC spokesperson and an NEC member, said he was struggling financially at the time.

"I confirm this was a loan from a friend and no strings attached. I obtained it at a time of financial difficulty and would not have been able to secure a bank loan," Kodwa testified.

Mackay offered to help him with a loan. Although Mackay sent...
Nairobi  The Kenya National Highways Authority (KeNHA) has announced the temporary closure of two roads in Nairobi.

For motorists using Mombasa Road, Capital Centre mall access will be closed for 20 days starting Monday, June 28 to Saturday, July 17.

Motorists using the ramp from Waiyaki Way to Forest Road will have to seek alternative routes as the ramp will be closed for 34 days from Monday, June 28 to Sunday, August 1.

KeNHA Director General Eng Peter Mundinia said the closures are necessary to facilitate the construction of the Nairobi Expressway.

"We apologise for any inconveniences that may be caused as we endeavour to provide an efficient, safe and reliable road network," Eng Mundinia said.

Once complete, the Nairobi expressway is expected to reduce congestion in the Nairobi Central Business District and improve economic activity.

The project is being undertaken by China Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC) on a public-private partnership (PPP) basis and is estimated to cost Sh59.9 billion.

In the past few months, sections of Uhuru Highway and Waiyaki Way have been closes temporarily as works on the Expressway, which links the Jomo Kenyattta International Airport to the Nairobi-Nakuru highway, go on.

It is projected that the elevated highway will be completed early 2022 as construction is estimated to be progressing at 60 meters per day from both ends.

The expressway will comprise both a four-lane and six-lane dual carriageway with 10 interchanges.
Nairobi  The Teachers Service Commission (TSC) has called a meeting with all teacher trade unions for a new Collective Bargaining Agreement.

TSC boss Nancy Macharia said the talks will be held Tuesday at the Safari Park Hotel in Nairobi.

Kenya Union of Post Primary Education Teachers (KUPPET) Secretary-General Akelo Misori confirmed attendance of the meeting, saying the agenda is the 2021-2025 Collective Bargaining Agreement.

Misori had earlier on written to the Commission's CEO expressing concerns over the delay in finalizing talks on a new CBA, which was planned to be signed before July 2021.

The new Kenya National Union of Teachers (KNUT) Secretary General Collins Oyuu also said they had received an invite from the TSC, to discuss teachers' matters.

TSC had made a proposal to the Salaries and Remuneration Commission (SRC) to have a basic salary increment of between 16 percent and 32 percent; with classroom teachers getting the higher perks.

The 16 percent rise in basic pay should be for teachers in administrative grades (C4 to D5) who reaped big from the 2016-2021 CBA. Classroom teachers in lower grades (B5 to C3) are to be awarded an increment of 30 percent; if the TSC proposals are adopted.

Early this month, SRC chairperson Lyn Mengich issued a statement indicating that they were still on with the CBA negotiation process and that the commission was looking into submissions made by the TSC regarding teachers' proposals on salary review. The commission had pledged to communicate by June 20.

Union officials however, said there is still uncertainty ahead after the national treasury failed to factor in teachers' salary increment in the Budget.

Treasury allocated over Sh588 billion to the Ministry of Education in the 2021/2022 financial year budget, no monies were allocated to finance the 2021-2026 CBA.

The current CBA is set to expire on June 30, but TSC has not made any counter offer to the one that teachers unions made.

The unions are pushing for the implementation of the new CBA, even as the country transitions to the Competency Based Curriculum.
Nairobi  The government says it is prepared to offer two Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCSE), Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCPE), and one Grade 6 national examinations next year.

Education Principal Secretary Julius Juan said the Ministry of Education is capable of administering the two national exams and assured that the Kenya National Examinations Council (KNEC) will run registration for the exams in due course.

KCPE candidates are scheduled to sit the exams between March 7, 2022, and March 10, 2022, in the reorganized school calendar, while KCSE candidates will start their tests the following day and complete them on April 1, 2022.

The delay in the administration of the exams was occasioned by the COVID-19 pandemic which led to the suspension of in-person learning for nearly seven months.

The PS has assured parents and basic education institutions that the Primary and Secondary school capitation would not be affected by the reduced term dates.

He said the new 2021-2022 revised fee structure for secondary schools will not in any way affect the smooth running of schools.

Jwan maintained that the tuition money disbursed to national county and extra- County secondary schools would not be reduced even as he urged High School Principals to adhere to the revised fee structure.

On Elimu scholarships, Jwan said that more than 700 pupils applied out of which 210 were shortlisted and 126 picked after the interviews. He said the government was still committed to the 100 percent transition from Primary to Secondary schools.
Nairobi  Chief Justice Martha Koome has appointed a three-judge bench to hear and determine two petitions challenging the decision of President Uhuru Kenyatta's refusal to appoint six judges.

The trio- Justice James Wakiaga, George Nduru, and William Musyoka have since held a preliminary session on the two petitions one filed by Katiba Institute and another by Nakuru-based Benjamin Magare Gikenyi.

The bench directed the petition to be consolidated.

President Uhuru Kenyatta appointed 34 judges out of 41 who were recommended by the Judicial Service Commission (JSC) for appointment, citing intelligence reports indicting them on a number of issues which he did not disclose.

The six left out are Justice Aggrey Muchelule, Weldon Korir, George Odunga, Prof Joel Ngugi, Mombasa chief Magistrate Charles Kinango and High Court Registrar Judy Omange who were previously by the JSC and their names recommended to the president for appointment.

The decision by the president to leave out the six has been challenged by the two petitioners who argued that the president acted unconstitutionally and in a biased manner by rejecting the nominees.

High Court judge James Makau has since issued an order stopping the formation of a Tribunal to investigate the six.

In his ruling, the judge further halted any investigations arising from the decision of the president pending hearing and determination of the petitions.

The decision of the president was condemned by among others, the Law Society of Kenya (LSK) and Judicial Service Commission which urged him to reconsider his decision.
Nairobi  Chief Justice Martha Koome has called for a bottom-up approach in the delivery of justice, saying it is the only way the judiciary can serve Kenyans effectively in an accountable manner.

Speaking in Mombasa during the second Annual Tribunals' Symposium, the CJ said the system will ensure most cases are dealt with at the lower courts to reduce backlog.

She further pointed out that the bottom-up approach will ensure that the creation and adoption of an innovative Case Management System respond to the needs of Kenyans and does not cause unnecesary delay.

"What I envisage is shared responsibility by all the Magistrates, Kadhi's Courts, Tribunals, Superior courts all the way to the Apex Court. So that the experience a litigant should have before the Supreme Court should be the same across the board in all the courts and tribunals," Koome said.

She revealed that the Judiciary is mulling the introduction of after-hours court sessions to accelerate cases.

"We hope to see innovations in time, which will include sitting even after hours between 5.00pm and 8.00pm. Some of the impediments we are talking about is why a court cannot sit, especially now with technology, between 5.00pm and 9.00pm, " she said.

She further reiterated the role played by the small claims courts in the dispensation of cases which she says will ensure Kenyans are served well.

"Opening of more small claims courts will help reduce the distance that litigants travel to access justice and provides an expeditious procedure that a matter is finalized within 60 days. No court should stay in a trial beyond three years and an appellate court should take one year for an appeal," she added.

The Small Claims Courts are subordinate in the structure of the court system in Kenya under Article 169 (1) of the Constitution with a monetary jurisdiction of matters not exceeding Sh1 million.
Nairobi  The newly elected Kenya National Union of Teachers (KNUT) Secretary General Collins Oyuu has pledged to mend the broken relationship between the union and their employer Teachers Service Commission (TSC) so as to restore proper industrial relations.

Oyuu said the frosty relations between the union and TSC have greatly affected the union, including failure by the employer to remit their dues, hence crippling the union.

He accused his predecessor Wilson Sossion of the union's woes. Sossion resigned at the weekend to focus on his political career in Parliament where he serves as a nominated MP.

"We couldn't negotiate with TSC or sit at a roundtable with them, and even as we speak we have secured a meeting with them so that we come up with that industrial harmony that has been lacking for the past five years and maybe that could bring KNUT back to its feet," said Oyuu.

Oyuu also announced plans to boost the membership of the union after losing thousands.

He noted that the membership of the union had shrunk to 15,000 members from 200,000.

Oyuu explained that most of the members had not withdrawn from the union formally, saying they had only received less than 30 copies of those who officially withdrew.

He said the meeting with TSC set for Tuesday in Nairobi is crucial in ensuring the law is followed on the alleged withdrawal from the union.

"For those who didn't follow the law I believe they are still members of this union, if TSC agrees then we shall get back the membership," he said.

Oyuu becomes the seventh KNUT Secretary-General and will hold the seat for the next five years.

He was elected unopposed during the national polls held Saturday.

He will be deputized by Hesbon Otieno who also served under Sossion and was elected unopposed.

While announcing his resignation on Friday last week, Sossion said he shall remain loyal to the union.

"In the interest of KNUT continuity and its membership, I hereby on June 25, 2021 bow out of KNUT leadership honorably. I shall remain loyal to KNUT and will always be available to advice and support the leadership of the union," said Sossion.
Jos  The Plateau State Governor, Simon Bako Lalong, has explained why his administration removed 532 names of some Civil Servants from the state payroll.

The State Head of Civil Service, Engr. Sunday Hyat who gave the reasons while addressing journalists in Jos said some civil servants altered some information related to their records.

He said the action was by law a criminal offense and this popped up some issues as a result of the implementation of biometric exercise, "That was why some people could not get their salaries due to unmatched data".
Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai on Monday said he had briefed President Muhammadu Buhari on his administration's rightsizing policy, which had put him at loggerheads with the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC).

Governor El-Rufai also clarified that the Kaduna State Executive Council had not approved the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed by government representatives at the May 20th conciliation meeting with the NLC.

He said government representatives had made it clear at the meeting that whatever they signed required the approval of the State Executive Council, adding that he had informed the Federal Minister of Labour on the position.

A statement issued by Governor El-Rufai's Special Adviser on Media and Communication, Muyiwa Adekeye stated that it would seek accountability for NLC's actions in the state by setting up a Judicial Commission of Inquiry to look into the May 2021 strike action.

"It is trite that an MoU is not a legally binding document. The content of the MoU shows that there is no congruence between the progressive aspirations of the Kaduna State Government and the misguided sense of entitlement of the NLC which does not even believe in equality amongst its own members," it stated.

The statement noted that El-Rufai had assured President Buhari that his administration was determined not to allow a repeat of the "pains, economic losses and the restraints of freedom that the NLC inflicted on the people of Kaduna State", adding that it is hiring "over 10,000 staff because rightsizing obliges the government to continuously recruit teachers, doctors, nurses and other qualified staff to provide vital services."

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Speaking on NLC's renewed threat of strike action, the governor said the union had demonstrated that it did not believe in equality among its own members by describing the transfer of one of government's employees to a place where other civil servants were serving as victimisation.

"KDSG employees are serving with dedication in Birnin Gwari Local Government Area, amidst all the challenges. Yet, the NLC describes the transfer of one KDSG employee to Birnin-Gwari LGA as victimisation, as if other staff who have been loyally serving in the same area are lesser humans or permanent victims. KDSG rejects this unfair denigration of the very people that the transferred employee claims to lead," it stated.

He said the state government has not yet disengaged any state civil servant but had dispensed with the services of 99 political appointees so far, adding that "only the 23 local government councils and the agencies associated with the local government system such as SUBEB and the Primary Health Care Board have released staff."
Islamic Development Bank Commits To Support Gambia's Development Process

The President of the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB), Dr Bandar Hajjar, has noted that his-led bank is committed to supporting The Gambia's development process, a State House press release dated 25 June 2021, indicated.

Dr Hajjar revealed this while paying a courtesy on President Adama Barrow on Friday at his hotel in Makkah, Saudi Arabia.

The State House release said the courtesy call was part of the President's week-long official engagements in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

"Following their meeting, Dr Hajjar expressed his gratitude for the opportunity to discuss collaboration prospects with the President to build on the 41 years of partnership between the two parties. He noted that the Bank is committed to supporting The Gambia's development process. Dr Bandar further stated that the IsDB's priority interventions in The Gambia are centred on human capital development and improving the investment environment to attract more international investors into the country," it stated.

Mamburay Njie, Minister of Finance and Economic Affairs, who was in the meeting, said the courtesy call was crucial as it will allow the Gambian authorities to take stock and assess what The Gambia has been doing with the Bank, the release stated.

"He said the IsDB supports projects in agriculture, energy, transportation, and education, with many students benefiting from undergraduate and graduate programmes. He said the IsDB is currently funding six (6) projects in The Gambia all of which have a significant impact on the country's socio-economic development.

"Njie said the country is looking forward to new areas of collaboration with the Bank, with an emphasis on health and infrastructure, to examine how to improve the country's relation with the Bank. While praising the Bank for its assistance through the years, he noted that all of the initiatives had been successful," the press release indicated.
Tunis/Tunisia  Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi, on Monday, called on the COVID-19 Scientific Committee to hold an urgent working session to find ways to stop the spread of new variants of the virus.

He urged them to consider various possible means, including extreme decisions and measures to preserve citizens' health, a Prime Ministry statement said.

The PM was speaking during a virtual meeting on Monday morning with governors of Greater Tunis, the health minister and security leaders to ensure the necessary coordination.

Mechichi also gave his directives to launch an investigation into the rallies and demonstrations organised on Sunday and to enforce the law and the measures taken by the national committee to combat the coronavirus.

The PM instructed Acting Minister of Justice Hasna Ben Slimen to launch an investigation at the Public Prosecutor's Office regarding the death of a police officer by the coronavirus, who died outside Ibn El Jazzar hospital in Kairouan, according to the same source.

Videos and pictures were posted on Sunday on social media, showing a person dying outside Ibn El Jazzar hospital.
Tunis/Tunisia  Tunisia is participating for the 8th consecutive year in the Mobile World Congress (MWC), the world's largest trade fair for the mobile phone and telecoms industry, to be held from June 28 to July 1, 2021, in Barcelona, the Export Promotion Centre (CEPEX) said Monday in Tunis.

The national stand houses 5 companies and 2 startups selected following a call for applications launched in collaboration with the startup Tunisia programme.

These operators offer their know-how in various fields such as Cloud Computing, digital marketing, mobile applications, solutions for telecom operators, the Internet of Things (IoT), IP telephony, payment solutions, control and monitoring of mobile networks, says the centre.

The technopole of Sfax (one of the Tunisian exhibitors) accompanies the participation of 5 startups, Smart Tunisia is present with Foundation Tunisia for Development, as part of the promotion of Tunisia as a technological destination and as a hub for startups, according to CEPEX.

After a session cancelled in February 2020, due to the global health crisis, MWC21 will start as a hybrid event.

Participants will be able to attend in person or online. The organiser predicts that this edition will receive one-third of the regular attendees (35,000 face-to-face compared to 109,000 for the last one in February 2019), with thousands more expected to attend online.

A series of virtual and hybrid events and workshops are on the programme of this event where 300 exhibitors and 600 speakers are expected to take part, according to the organisers. They will focus on various themes: automotive, financial technologies, manufacturing, mobile IoT, Edge Computing, healthcare with 5G...

In this global health context where the pandemic has accelerated the entry into the digital world of many companies, connectivity remains the major topic to be addressed at this show as well as the deployment of 5G.

By 2025, the total number of 5G connections will reach 1.5 billion worldwide, compared to only 5 million in 2019, according to CEPEX, citing a contribution from Juniper Research.
Tunis/Tunisia  The works of the 4th International Construction Exhibition "Libya Construction Expo", held in Tripoli (Libya), from June 28 to July 1, 2021, started on Monday, in the presence of Libyan and Tunisian senior officials and a strong Tunisian delegation of businessmen, business leaders and heads of professional organisations.

Tunisia participates in this event with 150 Tunisian companies, against 135 Libyan companies, 14 Turkish companies, 4 Egyptian companies, one Emirati company and one Saudi company.

Supervised by the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Sfax (CCIS) and several representatives of professional organisations, including the Tunisian Association of Engineers, this delegation essentially covers the sectors of construction, building, building materials, ceramics, real estate and sanitary equipment, architectural services, studies and consulting...

Tunisian and Libyan officials were unanimous in stressing the need to strengthen cooperation between the two countries and to encourage businessmen from both countries to reinforce their partnerships and exchanges. They also stressed the importance of removing obstacles that could hinder the strengthening of bilateral relations between the two countries.

Tunisian Minister of Trade and Export Development, Mohamed Bousaid and Libyan Minister of Industry and Metals, Ahmed Abu Aissa have, in this regard, affirmed that all agreements and decisions signed by the Heads of Government of both countries are being implemented.

Bousaid also called for a new partnership approach based on integrated cooperation, common interests and mutual opportunities, considering that "the creation of new partnership opportunities requires the strengthening of economic integration, the improvement of the business climate and the revision of trade agreements between the two countries.

According to Bousaid, "the two countries would also benefit from facilitating trade at the border crossings of Ras Jedir and Dhehiba and exploring mutual economic development opportunities such as renewable energies, free zones, banking and customs facilities, transport, construction and reconstruction.

He also welcomed the resumption of the dynamics of joint economic events and the pace of Tunisian exports to Libya which reached 830 million dinars during the first 5 months of 2021 against 440 MD during the same period of 2020.

For his part, Libyan Deputy Minister of Economy and Trade, Souhail Abu Chiha, said that the reconstruction file is the priority of the Libyan government, affirming the creation of 4 reconstruction funds in the regions affected by the war.

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He stressed that the Libyan private sector and Tunisian and foreign partners participating in the exhibition could contribute to reconstruction projects.

For his part, Libyan Minister of Housing and Construction Abu Bakr Al-Ghawi affirmed the unceasing need for reconstruction in Libya, affirming the Libyan government's commitment to future generations and the resumption of reconstruction projects that have been delayed by the difficult situation the country has been going through during the last decade.

He stressed that the competition will be open in all transparency to Libya's partners.

The Tunisian Minister of Public Works, Housing and Infrastructure commended the strong Tunisian presence at the exhibition, calling for the acceleration of road and free zone projects between the two countries to access the African market together.

The "Libya Construction Expo" is organised from June 28 to July 1, 2021, in Tripoli, by the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Sfax (CCIS) in collaboration with the Tripoli International Fair.
Tunis/Tunisia  Acting Minister of Agriculture, Water Resources and Fisheries Mohamed Fadhel Kraiem stressed the importance of reflecting on a new food system in Tunisia in light of the challenges the country is facing, such as climate change and water resources scarcity, according to a press release from the Department of Agriculture.

This involves adapting and finding other solutions to provide food at preferential prices to all Tunisians, he said at the closing of the National Concertation on Food Systems, noting that Tunisia has achieved self-sufficiency in the production of dairy products, white meat, vegetables and fruit.

However, the country still imports 50% of cereals intended for consumption, 60% of which are intended to meet fodder needs, according to the same source.

The food security index in Tunisia is improving, he added, adding that Tunisia ranks 59th among 113 countries, according to the world food security index published in December 2020.

The minister, whose words are reported in the statement, explained this progress by the evolution of production and productivity, as well as by the implementation of diversified agricultural development programmes, the preservation of natural resources, the extension of irrigated farming and the diversification of competitive products.

Regarding the quality and safety of agricultural products, the Minister said that Tunisia is working to ensure food safety, quality of food products and animal feed to ensure the health of humans and animals and prevent health risks.

This meeting is organized within the framework of the preparation of Tunisia's contribution to the World Summit on Food Systems that the UN plans to hold in September 2021.
The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) has started operationalising the incremental export incentive scheme, which will see some exporters retain up to 100 percent of the qualifying portion of their earnings, as it seeks to drive export-led growth.

All gold producers, the central bank said, who deliver gold to Fidelity Printers and Refiners, Zimbabwe's sole authorised gold buyer, above their monthly average, will be allowed to retain 80 percent on the incremental export scheme.

RBZ said large scale gold producers who qualify for the incentive will be allowed to export directly gold equivalent to the incremental portion so they can secure loans to support production.

Exchange control director, Mr Farai Masendu said the central bank had put in place a robust monitoring framework to ensure compliance, warning that any breach of the regulations shall result in heavy penalties.

The punishment for breaching regulations, Mr Masendu said, could entail disqualification of both the exporter and the authorised dealer from participating in the incremental export incentive scheme.

Under the incremental export incentive scheme, the retention threshold only applies to the incremental portion of the export receipts; calculated as the excess of an exporter's earnings above an entity's monthly base.

The central bank yesterday issued an exchange control circular, which sought to operationalise the policy measures earlier announced by the ministry of finance and economic development.

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According to the central bank, the main objectives of the incentives are to promote economic growth by driving an exponential increase in exports, diversification and competitiveness.

The current export retention level stands at 60 percent, the bank said, but retention can reach 80 percent for all exporters under the incentive scheme and 100 percent for entities in special economic zones.

Further, retention on incremental receipts may also be 100 percent for exporters listed on the Victoria Falls Stock Exchange (VFEX), an affiliate of the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange main board.

The export retention, before the establishment of the export incentive scheme, was pegged at 60 percent for all exporters, including those licensed under special economic zones and VFEX. This means entities that do not qualify for the export incentive or whose receipts equal or fall under the monthly base, 60 percent will be retained in forex accounts and 40 percent sold to the RBZ.

"Authorised dealers are advised that applications for the granting of incremental export incentive shall be submitted to the exchange control exports dashboard," the bank said in the circular.

The bank said the objective was to boost productivity by firms currently engaged in exporting business as well as encourage companies that are not exporting to venture into exports.

The bank also said it sought to drive sustainable growth in exports, fine tune policy on export receipts retention thresholds for direct benefit to exporters and to encourage firms to list on VFEX or participation on Victoria Falls Offshore Finance Centre.

Given that many exporters have many authorised dealers the recommended amount of the incremental export shall be realised the following month after assessment and verification by exchange control.
Tanzanian Opposition leader Tundu Lissu has said he is ready and willing to return to the country and work with President Samia Suluhu Hassan.

The Chadema vice chairman has been living in exile in Belgium since last year's after he lost the presidential election to the late President John Magufuli.

Mr Lissu, who was speaking in Nairobi on Saturday during the launch of his new book on democracy in East Africa, said that he had already placed phone calls to the new Tanzanian leader and asked for a meeting.

Mr Lissu said his focus, should he get a physical meeting with President Samia, would be on the expansion of the democratic space.

He said that for the new President to succeed, a change in the constitutional order, granting more freedom to opposing voices with divergent opinions, was key and a sacrifice he believed the new leadership can make for all.

"I did place a call to President Suluhu two days after she was sworn in and the call was picked by her personal assistant, whom I asked to inform the President that I would be happy to sit down with her and discuss the way forward for Tanzania and how we can reform our country. But I am still waiting for a response.

"Even our party leadership of Chadema, led by the chairman, placed a request to the President, which was replied after a week, but we are still waiting for a response for a meeting," he said.
"A woman is like a tea bag; you can't tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water," said Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan in Dodoma on June 8.

This quote, attributed to former US first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, has held true for the Tanzanian leader, who is marking her 100 days in office this week after taking over following the death of President John Pombe Magufuli in March.

President Samia, 61, took over a country that was being treated as a pariah due to Covid denialism after the late president announced that the coronavirus had been vanquished in the country in April 2020, and stopped publishing Covid-19 data.

She inherited a dying economy, hard-hit by the vagaries of the coronavirus and a deeply divided nation smarting from a highly contentious result of a general election in which the ruling Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM) had swept the board, leaving just a vestige of opposition.

Being the first woman to be president in Tanzania and East Africa, the bar is quite high for Mama Samia. But, 100 days on, observers say she has done well. Indeed, the more hot water she seems to be dipped in, the stronger she is becoming. Tanzanians have in the past few weeks been circulating a popular cartoon on social media, which portrays the president as her own "man".

From the outset, the president was faced with five major problems: reversing the sentiment around Covid-19, saving the economy, repairing political and civil society relations, empowering women and youth and promoting foreign relations. So, she hit the ground running.

Under her, there have been notable changes in foreign policy (from isolationism to multilateralism), in the Covid-19 policy, in tax and investment policies, and regional integration efforts.

Covid-19

On Covid-19, the president mooted a presidential task force to advise the government on how to deal with the pandemic and its impact. The team, over a month ago, handed in its report recommending release of data on infections and deaths to give Tanzanians and the world a clear picture of the impact of the pandemic, vaccination and implementation of preventive measures such as social distancing, wearing of protective gear and observing hygiene.

The president is expected to roll out Covid data any time soon. This has been one of the conditions the International Monetary Fund (IMF) before the release of a $571 million loan to tackle the challenges of the pandemic.

President Samia has started putting into effect the recommendations piecemeal but officials say plans to implement the entire report are in top gear. Last month, she stressed the importance of wearing facemasks.

"I request you to wear masks. This pandemic has no respect for your health," said President Samia in Dar es Salaam.

The government is seeking to revitalise emergency plans for disaster response, and Dodoma will participate in decision-making and implementation of regional and international resolutions adopted by the East African Community, the Southern African Development Community, the African Union and the World Health Organisation.

The government will allow the use of Covid-19 vaccines listed by the WHO and the National Immunisation Technical Advisory Groups and the Tanzania Medicines and Medical Devices Authority will advise and control the vaccination drive. Already, the government has allowed foreign embassies and firms to vaccinate staff.

After Tanzania expressed its interest in joining Covax, the global vaccine-sharing facility, the government last weekend warned of a third wave of Covid-19 and directed that precautions be taken.

Director of Prevention in the Health ministry Leonard Subi quoted monitoring reports carried out by the ministry as well as interaction between Tanzanians and other nations. Deputy Health minister Godwin Mollel said the government has been keeping Covid data all along.

Politics and governance

President Magufuli's anti-corruption crusade, emphasis on hard work, fractious relations with multinational mining giants and significant investments in major public works, won praise from some quarters. But it also came with a severe narrowing of political space. The resultant deep political divisions were exacerbated by the disputed October 2020 election, in which Magufuli won 84 percent of the votes cast. It is this political crisis that Mama Samia inherited.

Two leading opposition politicians, former presidential candidate Tundu Lissu, who is exiled in Belgium and ACT-Wazalendo chief Zitto Kabwe have expressed hope that the government will change course under Samia's leadership.

"Tanzania will return to international and regional fold under her presidency. That misguided isolationism that defined Magufuli is untenable. It was costing the country dearly," said Mr Lissu.

Her calm and calculative mien, in contrast with Magufuli's abrasive "bulldozer" character, has won her admiration, with hopes high that she will heal the divisions in the country.

When she took over office, she promised to call the opposition to dialogue, heralding a new era of tolerance.

She also went on to take the chair of the CCM, shattering the sentiment in some quarters that the party hardliners would not give her an easy time. But she has moved to build a political base within the ruling party before any major policy shifts.

The president has also made headway in mending fences broken by her predecessor on the human rights front. Her early days in power have seen, among other things, the release of scores of Tanzanians who spent years in detention without trial under Magufuli for non-bailable charges ranging from money-laundering to economic crimes and terrorism.

Prominent lawyer Fatma Karume has had her licence to practise reinstated by a judiciary that initially debarred her for being too critical of the Magufuli regime.

But some of these changes have elicited cautious optimism. The laws Magufuli used to effect these decisions are still in place.

Although power play, rumblings of discontent and other intrigues within the CCM haven't yet come to light, pundits say they will inevitably do before the next general election in which she is expected to defend her seat.

There is also growing pressure especially from the political opposition for the resumption of a constitutional reform process, which was controversially scrapped before Magufuli took power in 2015 and then ignored during his reign.

Opposition politicians, clerics, civil society actors and other citizens have demanded the resumption of the constitutional review but recently CCM dismissed the call, saying it is not a priority. But political analysts say it is just a matter of time before the party Mama Samia leads changes that stance.

Socioeconomic challenges

Tanzania's economic growth over the past two decades has averaged seven percent. But this fell more dramatically to 4.7 percent in 2020 from 6.9 per cent in 2019. There have been job losses in the formal sector, while hundreds of thousands of people are likely to have been pushed below the poverty line. Dr Magufuli's response to the Covid-19 pandemic was described as "distressing" and "baffling". There have been noted declines in production, consumption and exports.

In May, President Samia unveiled a grand plan for economic transformation in the next five years, emphasising empowerment and job creation.

"We will continue the good work achieved during the previous administrations, change where necessary but with a view to promoting efficiency and productivity, guided by the national, regional and party manifestos," she said.

"Last year, our nation managed to enter the middle-income category, where the per capita income increased to $1,080 from $1,036. It is a great achievement, but more effort is needed to accelerate the economy," she said.

Diplomacy

The president's approach of meeting personally with the heads of state and organisations has shown her plan to open up and strengthen Tanzania diplomatic relations and reinforce her political influence across the region and beyond. Starting from the early days of her administration she indicated that she would pursue economic partnerships.

From holding meetings with key players in the global economy to recent visits to Uganda Kenya and Mozambique, she has been repairing ties with the outside world.

On June 23, President Samia was in Maputo on a two-day State visit where she attended a SADC Heads of State and Government Summit to discuss regional integration, cooperation and development. Key issues discussed included the region's response and support to Mozambique in addressing terrorism, regional food and nutrition, security, gender and development, and progress in the regional response to HIV/Aids and the Covid-19 pandemic.

In her two-day state visit to Kenya in May, she and President Uhuru Kenyatta witnessed the signing of a deal to deliver natural gas from Dar es Salaam to Mombasa by pipeline and resolved to clear trade hurdles to increase cross-border trade by removing non-tariff barriers.

She has met Uganda's Yoweri Museveni twice; in April in Entebbe for the signing of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline deal and in Dar es Salaam in May to sign the Host Government Agreement for the project.

She says her target is to regain the trust of investors by tackling the hurdles that they face in doing business.

Other meetings in the president's diplomatic charm offensive involved a recent virtual one with IMF executive director Kristalina Georgieva, which unlocked a $571 million loan. The IMF is said to be already processing funding to cushion Tanzania against the effects of Covid-19.

On April 19, President Samia met with Mara Warwick, the World Bank's country director to Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe, at State House Dodoma and pledged her cooperation with the Bretton Woods institutions.

"The World Bank is supporting Tanzania in improving social services such as education and health, and in improving the infrastructure," she said.

Ms Warwick said the World Bank had approved loans to the tune of $4.9 billion for supporting various development projects in the country, making Tanzania among the leading recipients of the Bank's funding.

Culture, youth and gender agenda

Another area where Mama Samia, a mother of four, has conspicuously deviated from the approach of her predecessor is in instigating empowerment initiatives for women and youth, which she has proved with her public appointments. The president appointed the first female Clerk of the National Assembly, Nenelwa Mwihambi, in what she described as a bid to strike a stronger gender balance in one of the main pillars of the state. The Deputy Speaker, Tulia Ackson, is also a woman. She also appointed 13 women among 28 new High Court judges, lifting the gender ratio to 40 female judges out of 86.

An unprecedented number of entertainers and under-30s were incorporated in the latest appointments of district commissioners that she named on June 19. They include popular hip-hop musician Nickson Simon John aka Nikki wa Pili, Bongo movie actor Juma Chikoka and former Miss Tanzania Basila Mwanukuzi. Another model, Jokate Mwegelo, was retained.

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"No nation can make progress without contributions from women," President Samia told a meeting of women in Dodoma.

At a public rally in Mwanza she said she was willing to give youth leadership opportunities "because it is the youth who are now running this nation."

Just this week, the Samia administration announced that secondary school dropouts in Tanzania will be offered an opportunity to resume studies in alternative colleges, as part of a shift away from a disputed Magufuli policy under which pregnant girls were expelled from school.

"We are offering an alternative path to education to all children who missed their education for any reason, including those girls who got pregnant while in school, through our Folk Development Colleges," Leonard Akwilapo, a senior official at the Ministry of Education, told Reuters.

What sets Tanzania apart

Tanzania is often seen as a beacon of peace and stability in East Africa. It is not exposed to the political tensions and civil unrest that have beset neighbouring countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Burundi, Kenya and Uganda. The attempt to build a unified nation is reflected in the creation of non-ethnic political institutions and civil service. It is seen in the marginalisation of chiefly power, and spreading Kiswahili as a unifying non-colonial national language.

Investors have improved their outlook on Tanzania since Samia directed her administration to fast-track delayed investments. They include a $30 billion liquefied natural gas project involving Equinor ASA, and a $3 billion joint venture with a Chinese company to develop an iron-ore and coal mine.

Her plan to improve the investment climate to attract investment has been music to the ears of investors who had been rattled by the Magufuli administration, which reviewed some laws and regulations. In late May, when he visited Tanzania recently Africa's richest man Aliko Dangote praised Samia's leadership in trying to transform Tanzania into an investment destination of choice.

"The president wants more investors in the country in order to create more jobs and improve the national economy. We pledge to continue investing massively in Tanzania," a statement from State House said after the meeting on May 26.

Mr Dangote joined a growing list of prominent personalities in the business, economic and political circles who have expressed confidence in the Tanzanian leader's administration.

"The political and economic transformation we are witnessing in Tanzania has not been experienced before," said Peter Mathuki, EAC Secretary General. "Tanzania is a giant that has now woken up. This is now the next superpower in the region."

By Luke Anami, Bob Karashani, Dorothy Ndalu, Bloomberg
The National Agency for Campaigns against Drugs Abuse (NACADA) is grappling with innovative drug peddlers who've turned to online marketing of drugs to evade arrests during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Peddlers are now using social media platforms even as the pandemic slowed down Nacada operations to curb drugs and substance abuse.

Nacada says some drug and substance users have retreated back to their homes, where they have been using drugs in the presence of their children.

It is a new trend that has sent Nacada to the drawing board to find mechanisms of recovering the lost gains.

The agency's board chair Prof. Mabel Imbuga on Saturday said some people have been consuming alcohol even past curfew hours, in some bars, in total disregard of COVID-19 protocols.

"To address these COVID-19 related challenges, the authority is working with all key players including the Ministry of Interior and other security and law enforcement agencies to address related offenses," Imbunga said.

She was speaking at an event organised by Nacada to mark the International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking.

This year's theme is 'Share Facts on Drugs, Save Lives'- which highlights the need for evidence-based approaches to equip the public with tools to inform choices and effective services.

The agency has achieved much in reducing the demand for drugs and substances through the positive parenting programme, the chairperson said.

The programme targets parents and empowers them with knowledge on drugs and how to help an affected family member.

"The life skills programme which has been piloted in over 84 primary schools has empowered young pupils with knowledge on alcohol and drugs and also elicited good debate on drug use amongst pupils and teachers," Prof. Imbuga said.

NACADA has helped 10 counties to set up treatment and rehabilitation centres.

The counties include Bomet, Kisii, Kwale, Mombasa and Nyeri. Others are Kisumu, Kakamega, Taita Taveta, Nakuru and Lamu.

Prof. Imbuga said that the rehab centres have been critical in enhancing uptake of treatment services at the local level.

"The regular training of addiction professionals including their certification has ensured that the country has a pool of resource persons to provide evidence-based interventions to persons with substance use disorders," Prof. Imbuga said.

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NACADA Chief Executive Officer Victor Okioma said the authority was adopting a set of new standards.

They include the introduction and implementation of a scientific approach to research in the war against the menace.

Okioma said the development of this document is timely to guide the implementation of prevention programs within families, schools, workplaces, media, and our communities.

He said one of the greatest milestones that Nacada has achieved is the development of the National Standards on Alcohol and Drug Use Prevention.

"The standards aim to improve the delivery of programs, interventions, and policies in Kenya to produce positive outcomes for the targeted populations. It accentuates our commitment to Evidence-Based Interventions (EBIs) combating alcohol and drug abuse challenges in Kenya," Mr. Okioma said.

Recent surveys by Nacada have shown that Miraa (khat), tobacco, alcohol, bhang, and glue are the most abused drugs and substances in the country.
Nairobi residents could have to soon travel outside the capital to bury their loved ones.

This as the Nairobi Metropolitan Services' (NMS) search for a new cemetery land within Nairobi to replace the Lang'ata cemetery increasingly proves futile.

NMS has been in negotiations with the Kenya Forest Service (KFS) since last year November to have the government agency excise part of its forest adjacent to Langata cemetery to serve as a new burial ground.

Towards this, the Major General Mohamed Badi-led administration had even set aside a budget of Sh150 million in the current financial year towards the undertaking to get the 67-acre land.

Despite negotiations still ongoing, Badi now says KFS appears not keen to lose part of its forest to serve as a burial site, as will decrease tree coverage and green spaces in Nairobi.

However, he disclosed should the negotiations fail then the county has a 10-acre land along Kangundo Road that can act as an alternative site in a worst-case scenario.

"If KFS doesn't come on board we have land available which is under our control. We have a standby area towards Kangundo road which is over 10 acres. So If we decided to utilize the land, people will be forced to travel 15 kilometers outside Nairobi," said Badi.

Nonetheless, the NMS boss pointed out that they have not fully settled on the Kangundo land because of its location as it would be an extra burden for those intending to bury their loved ones.

"The biggest challenge with KFS is they don't want to decrease their tree cover and as such, it will be very difficult to convince KFS," he said.

In 2017, City Hall failed in its attempts to convince KFS to part with the forest land near the Langa'ata cemetery with the agency rejecting the request to swap the filled-up cemetery with the forest land.

The 100-acre Lang'ata cemetery has been full for 20 years.

This has forced families to bury their loved ones in shallow graves, failing to meet the recommended six feet depth.

Appeals by City Hall for residents to embrace cremation have fallen on deaf ears with the numbers of burials rising as cremations dip.

This forced City Hall in 2019 to warn residents that they could be forced to transport their loved ones to rural homes for burial if they do not embrace cremation.

Kenya has only 18 cremation centres which are mainly used by people of Asian origin.

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The best-known crematoriums are in Nairobi including Lang'ata, Hindu, and Kariokor crematoriums.

Lang'ata cemetery is divided between a "permanent" and "temporary" section with most poor city residents choosing to bury their family members in a temporary grave which get flattened every five years to make room for more bodies.

Permanent graves for adults at Lang'ata cost Sh30,000, Sh4,000 for children and Sh2,000 for infants. Non-city residents part with Sh40,000.

It has been a long journey to have an alternative graveyard in Nairobi with the search dating back more than 10 years ago.

In 2009, the defunct Nairobi City Council lost Sh283 million in a 48.5-acre cemetery deal in Mavoko whose actual value was just Sh24 million.

The saga saw a number of senior national government and county council officers implicated in the scandal with the late John Gakuo and former local government Permanent Secretary Sammy Kirui charged and subsequently jailed.

In the financial year ending June 30, 2017, City Hall set aside Sh221 million for the purchase of a 120-acre land for burial in Kitengela, Kajiado County.

In the 2018/2019 financial year, City Hall again set aside Sh200 million for the acquisition of an extra 200 acres of land to serve as public cemetery but nothing came out of the plan.
A court in the USA says it will not seek a death sentence for a suspected Kenyan-born serial killer.

The Dallas County District Attorney's Office on Thursday said that instead, it will seek a life sentence for Billy Kipkorir Chemirmir.

According to CBS 11 News, Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot filed paperwork in 2019 with the intention of seeking the death penalty but that changed after he had a meeting with the families of victims.

In a statement to the news outlet, Creuzot said:

"At that time, it was explained that the Dallas County Criminal District Attorney's would request two jury trials, with the goal of securing two life sentences without the possibility of parole. If that goal is achieved, this office will ask the court to order that the sentences be served consecutively. In effect, there will be no chance for Mr. Chemirmir to die anywhere except in a Texas prison."

Creuzot's statement did not offer an explanation.

Chemirmir who comes from Kabunyony village, Eldama Ravine in Baringo County, accused of killing numerous elderly women at assisted facilities in Texas, is facing 18 capital murder charges while civil suits accuse him of murdering eight more women.

So far, authorities have charged Chemirmir, a former healthcare worker, in connection with the deaths of 18 elderly people in Dallas and Collin Counties between 2016 and 2018.

However, he has been accused of killing 24 people from April 2016 through March 2018.

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According to authorities, Chemirmir would allegedly dress as a maintenance worker or health care aid to get into homes and kill his victims, whose deaths largely went uninvestigated at the time because they were assumed to have been natural causes due to their advanced ages.

He has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers said the cases against him are largely circumstantial.

But authorities said they had a mountain of evidence against him, including surveillance video, DNA evidence, and even an eyewitness account of a 91-year-old woman who survived one of his alleged attacks.

Investigators reportedly found jewelry, cell phones, and other belongings of the victims in Chemirmir's apartment when it was searched in 2018.

If he is convicted, he will become one of the most prolific serial killers in Texas history.

In Texas, capital murder carries either automatic life imprisonment without parole or the death penalty with prosecutors reserving the death penalty for offenses deemed heinous.

Chemirmir, who moved to the US in the 1990s after marrying an American citizen has been described as a loner.

Soon after Chemirmir's arrest in 2018 following suspicion that he could be a serial killer, his family and neighbours in Eldama Ravine described him as quiet and humble.

In the US, those who knew said he lived a life of exclusion.

"He didn't want to mix with other Kenyans in Plano and he rarely attended Kenyan functions," said a Kenyan who only wanted to be identified as Sam.
A storm is brewing within the United Democratic Alliance (UDA) pitting incumbents and aspirants eyeing the same seats ahead of the 2022 General Election.

At the centre of the fresh tussle is an alleged scheme to lock out strong aspirants from various seats also being eyed by party's bigwigs.

According to a source within UDA's Secretariat, the party associated with Deputy President William Ruto is being driven by sitting lawmakers who are jostling for party positions in order to guarantee their nomination certificates.

The source claimed the MPs have brought their loyalists to be constituency and ward coordinators in order to use them to gain contacts from the public and create a grassroots network with the coordinators being accused of frustrating aspirants in different counties.

Even though the party's leadership has been assuring members that they will conduct party grassroots elections, according to the source, all indications show that they will appoint party officials who might be people proposed by sitting legislators through boardroom deals using their closeness to the DP and the Party secretariat.

The source claimed most of the current MPs have been frustrating their competitors by making sure the aspirants do not meet and when they attempt, they allegedly use their influence to send police to scuttle the meetings.

"So far, the party secretariat has been crisscrossing the country assuring aspirants that the nominations will be free and fair but that just sounds good on paper; how the party achieves this remains to be a mystery," said the source.

"I say this because the same players who mismanaged the Jubilee nominations have been imported into UDA and signs are already there that there is nothing new they bring to the table."

The source cited the schemes to be in high gear in Nairobi County where divisions and infighting have been going on for the last two weeks over the gubernatorial seat with a sitting senator and a businesswoman claimed to be behind the machinations.

The same scenario has also unraveled in Nakuru, Mombasa, Kiambu, and Nyeri Counties with aspirants now mulling decamping to smaller parties as plan B should they be locked out.

"If UDA does not put its house in order, it will suffer the same fate that Jubilee Party and ODM have been suffering. It will just be another vehicle for transporting leaders into office."
opinion

This project is a "gigantic folly". It has no purpose. This quote and paraphrase summarise the sentiments of those in Britain back in 1895 who heard of the plan to build a railway line from Mombasa to Kisumu on the shores of Lake Victoria. The liberal MP Henry Labouchere said lyrically, if mockingly, of the plan: "What it will cost no words can express. What is its object no brain can suppose, Where it is going to nobody knows, It is clearly naught but a lunatic line."

The phrase 'Lunatic Line', later adapted to 'Lunatic Express', evokes a wild dash towards nowhere for no purpose other than to satisfy the urgings of a sick mind. And yet, people would soon learn that there was a 'method to the madness'. It now became possible to transport agricultural produce and other goods between Mombasa and the hinterland of Kenya and Uganda. Towns began to mushroom along the railway. And as soon as it reached Kisumu, shipping services across the lake began. A project criticised by parliament, derided by the public, and mocked by talking heads of the time, had begun to increase trade, create small businesses, ease movement of people and goods, spur agricultural growth, etc.

More than a century later, the same kind of hostility faced the standard gauge railway (SGR). Many commentators questioned its purpose. Today they ask: Where are the returns on the investment? Echoing the talking heads of a century ago, they call the SGR a white elephant with zero value. But as the Lunatic Express showed, development is an all-encompassing concept that includes trade, ease of movement of people and goods, access to services, etc. You cannot depict it by use of a simple equation showing an investment of X amount of dollars over Y period of time equals a return of X amount of dollars. In due course, the SGR will spur efficiencies, trade, direct and indirect jobs, small businesses, travel, etc.

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But saying the SGR is a worthwhile investment is not the same as saying that its extra-budgetary expenditure is okay. Many observers believe that the extra cost of billions of dollars went into the pockets of cartels in cahoots with government. And this brings me to the point of today's argument which is: mega projects and attendant debt are per se not the problem. The problem is corruption; high-capital projects that do not spur growth or development in the sense described above.

No country can grow without investment in infrastructure. China undertook huge infrastructure projects while moving millions of people out of poverty. US President Joe Biden proposes to spend billions on infrastructure. To pay for these kinds of projects, countries must borrow.

The question is whether a country uses the money it borrows prudently, and for projects that spur growth in the medium to long term. So the feverish debates in Kenya about debt and the debt ceiling are totally misplaced. What should concern us is corruption and white elephants.

The writer is a Nairobi-based political commentator
Kenyan leaders are ready to work closely with the Republic of Somaliland to build trade and social networks in the region.

Mandera Senator Mohamed Maalim Mahmoud says Somaliland has become a key ally of Kenya in seeking peace and security in the Horn of Africa.

He spoke at the Presidential Pavilion in Hargeisa, Somaliland, at a banquet hosted by Somaliland President Muse Bihi on the eve of the Commemoration of Independence of Somaliland from Britain on the 26th June 1960.

Mahmoud who was part of a strong Kenyan delegation of leaders and business people who graced the official opening of the expanded Berbera Port said Somaliland has made great strides despite lacking international recognition.

"I and other members of the Kenya delegation are extremely elated to be in Somaliland and to witness and celebrate with the people of Somaliland in two momentous occassions this week," said the Senator.

"The first one is the Inauguration of the first phase of the expansion and modernization of the Berbera Port and launch of its second phase. That was a monumental infrastructural feat for Somaliland and our Eastern Africa Region as a whole," he added.

He said Kenyans share Somaliland's happiness and pride in this milestone achievement which will boost regional trade and investments and our overall goal of regional economic integration and shared development and prosperity.

"The second happy moment of our visit is to participate in the celebration of your independence from Britain on 26th June 1960."

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"This auspicious occasion is of great significance not just to the people of Somaliland but also to all of us, Somali Speaking people. It marks the day when the first free and independent flag by a Somali people was hoisted."

He said that whilst Somaliland's history as a nation and a people may have been chequered and with challenging and sometimes traumatic experiences, there are exceptional good aspects of the country's history that are quite remarkable.

"As a leader from one of the five Somali territories, the NFD which shares with your people the unique bond of a cultural space, I can state that your gallant contributions and successes are acknowledged and makes all Somali speaking people proud."

The senator at the same time said Kenyan leaders will offer themselves to assist and support the talks between Somaliland and the Federal government of Somalia so that an amicable solution that is a win for both parties is realized.

"In the meanwhile, we urge for resumption of the talks as soon as Somalia gets done with her elections to enable dialogue and negotiation between two parties with legitimate mandates."
A convict on Monday died at Kisii Central Police Station hours after failing to raise a Sh8,000 fine to secure his release.

Mr Josphat Nyangeso, 45, had been arraigned at Kisii Law Courts and charged with dealing in alcoholic drinks without licence. He pleaded guilty and ended up in custody after he failed to raise the fine.

While confirming the incident, county police commander Francis Kooli told Nation.Africa that the man had complained of stomach and head pains.

"He was arrested on Friday but started complaining of pains on Saturday. We took him to Kisii Teaching and Referral Hospital (KTRH) where he was treated and discharged," he said.

He added: "On Monday, he complained again and we rushed him to the same facility but unfortunately he was pronounced dead on arrival."

His family now wants authorities at the police station to explain why their kin was kept there despite being unwell.

His wife, Ms Jack Nyangeso, said they had no idea he was ill until after his death.

"When my husband was arrested he was in good health but I was shocked when I learnt of his death. We went to KTRH and established that indeed he had died," she said.

She alleges that her husband succumbed to injuries he sustained after some officers assaulted him during arrest.

The incident comes just two days after another convict died at Rioma police station in unclear circumstances.

Chaos erupted in Rioma township after irate residents engaged police officers in running battles while demanding justice for the deceased.
The Court of Appeal has allowed two law lecturers to join the Building Bridges Initiatives (BBI) legal battle as friends of the court during the hearing of four appeals filed a High Court judgment that blocked a plan to change the Constitution.

A three-judge bench allowed Prof Charles Manga Fombard from Pretoria and Prof Migai Akech (Kenyan) to join the case and help the court determine the issues in dispute, in a ruling that is a big blow to the respondents popularly referred to as the Linda Katiba movement.

The two law experts are against some findings of the High Court, such as the declarations that the Constitution has a basic structure and that some parts are unamendable.

In a ruling delivered by Justices Daniel Musinga, Roselyne Nambuye and Fatuma Sichale, the court directed the two law experts to present their respective briefs in the proceedings by way of written arguments limited to 30 pages each.

The documents should be filed and served by 9am Tuesday.

"Considering the public importance of these appeals, it is in the interest of justice that all the opposing views are well considered before the court makes its determination, one or the other," said the judges.

Any of the respondents desirous of filing responses to the arguments by the two scholars will be at liberty to do so within 24 hours.

Since some of the respondents had opposed the joinder of the scholars on claims that they are not impartial in the dispute, the appeallate court said it was necessary that they be given an opportunity to advance their arguments for the court's consideration in order to settle the question of their perceived bias.

"After all, the Court is not bound by their views," said the court.

Hurdles against people's power

In their separate court papers, the two scholars argue that the High Court erred and misapplied the applicability of the basic structure doctrine and eternity provisions in the Constitution.

They will make submissions on the constitutionality of the BBI-Constitution of Kenya Amendment Bill (2020) that proposed 74 amendments. They will also make arguments on the several aspects of the process that led to the Bill being advanced to a popular initiative.

They will further submit arguments on limits to the amendment powers set out in Article 255 -257 of the Constitution.

Prof Akech, in his brief, says the High Court introduced hurdles against the people's power to amend a Constitution.

He says the court made this difficult, cumbersome and expensive by ruling the amendment process should involve four steps, including making of a people's constituent assembly.

The associate professor of law at the University of Nairobi School of Law also says that contrary to the High Court finding, the 2010 Constitution was the outcome of a political settlement.

Hence, he says, the amendment should be open to the people and their representatives through similar settlements particularly given that the settlements may need to be renegotiated from time to time.

"Political settlements on Constitutional reform or amendment initiatives should be encouraged. It is difficult to justify a claim that the people cannot amend the provisions of the Constitution that in significant aspects was the outcome of a political settlement," says Prof Akech.

He argues that the proposal to amend the Constitution should be open to the people to either endorse or reject through a referendum.

"The courts should therefore view political compromises such as the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) and the resulting Constitution of Kenya Amendment Bill 2020 from this perspective," he says.

Prof Akech explains that "the Bill seeks to amend the Constitution to address important governance challenges on which Kenyans remain divided, particularly the system of government, which contributed significantly to the divisive Presidential elections of 2013 and 2017".

Vagueness

Prof Fombard says that the High Court introduced Constitutional vagueness by declaring that the Constitution has a basic structure, which meant there are unamendable sections.

He says the vagueness could set a precedent that is dangerous to the survival of the Constitution, constitutionalism and the law of law. Further, the adoption of the basic structure doctrine may see conflict among the three arms of government.

"Adoption of the basic structure in Africa could, in some situations, create a gridlock which may provoke unnecessary conflict and a temptation to alter the Constitution through extra constitutional means," says Prof Fombard.

He says courts should focus on strategies to enhance the constitutional amendment procedure provided for in the Constitution rather than "taking a leap into the unknown world of India's basic structure doctrine and its imponderables".

"Such judicial adventurism is counterproductive to the positive strides made in many countries such as Kenya and South Africa to interpret the Constitution in a progressive manner, " says Prof Fombard.

Among the arguments and perspectives he intends to introduce in court are theoretical and practical problems of judicial imposition of the Basic Structure doctrine.

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He is a professor of law and head of the African Comparative Constitutional Law unit, Institute for International and Comparative law in Africa (ICLA), faculty of law university of Pretoria.

AG's response

The Attorney-General, through lawyer Maurice Ogosso, was not opposed to the joinder of the two scholars, noting they will provide the court with additional information and perspectives that will assist in determining the appeals.

"The applicants have demonstrated their specialised knowledge and expertise in the subject matter before the court, that will enrich the decision-making process. To this end, the Attorney-General supports the joinder of the proposed amicii, (friends of the court)" says Mr Ogosso.

Also not opposed to the joinder was the BBI National Secretariat, President Uhuru Kenyatta's handshake partner Raila Odinga, the Speaker of the National Assembly and the Senate.

The four were all in agreement that both lecturers will provide the court with additional information and perspective that will assist in determining these appeals.

They also said both lecturers have demonstrated their specialized knowledge and expertise in the subject matter before the court and will enrich the decision making process.
Six people arrested over suspicious activities at a public beach in Mombasa County will remain in police custody for 15 days to allow investigations into an alleged terror link.

Ridhman Issack, Jamal Abdi, Mohammed Bare, Abdimalik Noor, Abdiraffi Sheikh and Saad Ibrahim Salat were arrested at Nyali Sun Africa public beach on Saturday.

Police reports indicate that the six, who are in the custody of Anti-Terror Police Unit (ATPU) officers, had erected a Somalia flag at the beach and were holding a celebration that appeared suspicious.

Their nationalities are yet to be established.

"The suspects had erected the Somalia flag and were singing Somali jubilation songs," Corporal Gideon Wambua said when the group was arraigned before Senior Resident Magistrate Rita Amwayi on Monday.

The investigation

In an affidavit, Mr Wambua informed the court that he was investigating the six for the offence of being members of a terrorist group.

The detective also wants to establish the group's reason for erecting a foreign flag in the country and why the six chose to take their celebrations to a public beach on a weekend.

Mr Wambua informed the court that the ATPU wrote to the National Registration Bureau for authentication of the identification documents the suspects were found with.

According to the police report, only four of the six people had identification documents.

"We have also forwarded mobile phones that were recovered from the suspects to the ATPU headquarters for analysis," said the officer

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What police found

The suspects were also found with a camera, which they used to take pictures at the time of the arrest.

The camera, Mr Wambua said, will also be forwarded to Nairobi for analysis.

"The suspects' place of abode is yet to be established. We are yet to record statements from crucial witnesses," he added, also noting that the suspects' relatives were yet to be found.

"We are following intelligence to make more arrest and establish if there is any link with other terror groups," he also said.

The magistrate ordered the suspects detained at Port Police Station.

Kwale suspect

The arrest of the six arrest came about five days after a terror suspect was gunned down in Kwale County.

According to the police, the suspected Al-Shabaab fighter and his accomplices were planning to attack a security establishment within the county to acquire firearms.

During the raid in Bombo, by an elite team of officers, other suspected terrorists suffered gunshot wounds.

The police recovered weapons including an AK47, bullets, a laptop, a flash drive, nine mobile phones. They also found materials used for making explosives such as magnesium metal powder, rubber water bottles and three electric bulbs, and a note listing targeted areas.

Detectives have mounted a search for the suspects who escaped with gunshot wounds.
A section of leaders and residents from Nyandarua and Laikipia counties have said that sections of the Irish Potato Regulations 2019 are punitive to farmers in the region.

The law, passed in 2019 and currently being implemented in the country, requires growers, transporters, dealers and processors to register with the counties, failure to which they faced up to Sh5 million fines or three years' imprisonment or both.

The rules also punish unregistered farmers with one-year imprisonment or Sh500,000 or both, for growing a scheduled crop.

But leaders led by Nyandarua Governor Francis Kimemia have said that some sections of the regulations are oppressive to farmers especially from his county, which is known for high Irish potato production.

The county boss has said that the new rules could affect the country's bid to achieve food security as they could discourage farmers from producing food.

"We should stop bothering and harassing our farmers with all these regulations. We only agreed on the 50kgs packaging and that is what should be implemented and followed to the letter. The other regulations should be implemented when we have enough factories, not now," said the governor.

The law also demands that potatoes be packaged in approved clean material that allows for flow of air, and not exceeding 50kg. Failure to use unregistered pest control products also attracts up to Sh500,000 in fine.

"No person shall operate any premises as a collection centre unless the premises are registered and designated as a collection centre by the respective county government," the rules read in part.

However, Mr Kimemia insists that farmers are not ready for the regulations.

"We are going to meet with other governors from potato-growing counties to discuss regulations that our farmers will follow. For now, let's only implement the 50kg packaging rule and stop harassing our farmers," he said.

The law also demands grading of potatoes based on shape, variety, quality and size, among other things. Exporters will be required to register with the government.

Selective application

At the same time, farmers and traders from the region have called on the government to enforce the 50kg rule on packaging in other counties that grow potatoes. They have lamented that the stringent measures to cap the packages at 50kg seem not to apply to transporters from devolved units outside Laikipia and Nyandarua.

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They say they have observed that transporters ferrying the produce from other counties such as Narok, Nakuru and Meru were not being inspected.

"While here the regulations are followed right from the farm where the Irish Potatoes are harvested, packaged and weighed, in the other counties, not much is being done. Farmers here are suffering because of that," noted Mr Henry Chege, a trader at Nyahururu Municipal market.

Farmers lamented that their produce is rotting at home as buyers opt to get their supply from other counties.

"We are pleading with the government to make sure that the laws on Irish Potato packaging apply to other counties," said Ms Jane Wambui, a farmer at Gatimu area.

"Irish potatoes are very perishable so when traders delay, we risk making total losses after investing in the herbicides and labour the potatoes require," she added.

The State Department for Crop Development, Agriculture and Food Authority, Agricultural Council of Kenya, National Potato Council of Kenya and County Governments are mandated to implement the new regulations according to The Crops Act 2013.
Operations at Keroka Sub-County Hospital in Nyamira were paralysed Monday after health workers staged a go-slow to protest police harassment during curfew hours.

The demo came after a nurse was allegedly roughed up by officers who were enforcing the curfew in Keroka town on Sunday at 7:30pm.

Led by union officials, health workers at the facility took to the streets to condemn the act.

"It is unfair for essential workers like doctors to be mishandled when they are in the line of duty. The victim was harassed at the gate when he was leaving for home," said Kenya National Union of Nurses (KNUN) branch secretary Bernard Kerosi.

The victim, Mr Samson Mariba, sustained head and leg injuries during the incident and is currently recuperating at the facility.

Nurses in the region have raised concern over mistreatment of health workers by police officers as they enforce a dusk-to-dawn curfew.

They say they are being restricted from effectively performing their duties during the curfew period despite presenting proper identification to the police.

The union is now demanding that the police respect health workers.

"The curfew was not meant to restrict doctors from performing their duties. Police must respect health workers. Our colleague was attacked with rungus (clubs)," said one of the nurses.

Last month, local police officers also came under fire following the death of a four-month-old baby whose family said it could have been avoided had they not been blocked at a curfew roadblock in Keroka town.

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The child's family had hired a taxi to take the baby and her mother, a 16-year-old, to the hospital but they were stopped at the police roadblock some minutes after 10pm by officers who questioned why the taxi was operating past curfew hours.

The child later died. A month later, suspects are yet to be brought to book.

Hotspot zones

A fortnight ago, the ministry of health revised curfew hours for 13 counties in the Western region from 10pm to start at 7pm.

The counties are; Busia, Vihiga, Kisii, Nyamira, Kakamega, Kericho and Bomet. Others are Bungoma, Trans Nzoia, Kisumu, Siaya, Homa Bay and Migori. The counties were collectively declared Covid-19 hotspot zones.

"That the curfew within the hotspot zone shall be observed between 7pm and 4am daily," Health Secretary Mutahi Kagwe said in a statement.

In a revised notice, CS Kagwe said the curfew exempts essential and emergency service providers in the hotspot zones.

Area Sub-County Police Commander Robert Ndambiri said investigations are ongoing to establish what happened when the nurse was allegedly clobbered.

"We are yet to identify the suspects but we are following crucial details to ensure justice is administered" said the police boss.

Interior CS Fred Matiang'i has previously directed police officers to be less aggressive when enforcing Covid-19 restrictions after outcry from Kenyans over excessive use of force.

"We are going to persuade people to be compliant. We already have a challenge (pandemic), we do not want to worsen it by looking like we are aggressive or harassing wananchi," said Dr Matiang'i.
Kenya's road to ensuring people with disabilities' rights began not with a big march but a ripple in the disability movement in colonial times. In 1959, just a week to the end of the seven-year state of emergency, a 26-year-old visually-impaired Kenyan defied prejudice against disability to tie the knot with a white woman in Nairobi.

The earth-shaking move had, however, been set in motion by the establishment, the previous year, of the Association for the Physically Disabled of Kenya , which engages in mobility aids, therapy and economic empowerment.

A year later, the country's first disabled persons' organisation, Kenya Union for the Blind, was formed. Disability would eventually be given a firm place in the national agenda on January 15, 1964, with a march by KUB members to Harambee House, the national seat of power.

In 1980, the country's first National Year for the Disabled culminated in a harambee that raised Sh20.8 million. Through trustees appointed by then-President Daniel arap Moi, the National Fund for the Disabled of Kenya, which was formed the following year, used the funds to buy Rehema House, in Nairobi's city centre. More properties were later bought, including New Rehema House and Rehema Place, whose rental income funds its programmes. The sitting President is the fund's patron.

More progress would be made in the "African Decade of Persons with Disabilities" (1999-2009). In December 2003, then-President Mwai Kibaki, barely out of the wheelchair following a road accident, signed the first ever law advocating the rights of PWDs, The Persons with Disabilities Act 2003. A momentous feat of Lincolnian proportions, it laid down measures and policies for PWD inclusion in all social spheres.

Assistive devices

Through the National Council for Persons with Disabilities, which the Act established, services rendered include providing assistive devices, educational assistance and economic empowerment. Five years later, President Kenyatta, who was Finance minister at the time, allocated a historic Sh200 million to set up the National Development Fund for Persons with Disabilities, which funds the council's programmes.

In 2010, the tax exemption policy for PWDs was enforced. It applies to the first Sh150,000 monthly, or Sh1.8 million annual, income.

Inclusion of disability as a cross-cutting agenda in performance contracting guidelines for state agencies is a big plus too.

However, the Act alone is no 'cure all' for PWD issues. For example, the five per cent allotment of jobs in the public and private sectors for PWDs is still only on paper.

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With a growing demand for services, the resources accorded to the council don't match its huge mandate and mainstreaming disability in public amenities is a challenge.

Public buildings

Deadlines for adapting public service vehicles and public buildings to accommodate PWDs (which were two and five years, respectively, from the date the Act went into operation) are long overdue.

A study by the Open Institute's Ability Programme in 2019 found that only 19 per cent of Nairobi buildings had above 61 per cent of basic and quality disability access.

In the political scene, despite the constitutional assurances, the table remains above the reach of PWDs. While nominated seats are a step forward, the electorate and structure of our political system still bars them from engaging in competitive politics.

Also, the Act is yet to be in tune with the Constitution. While it puts the PWDs employment threshold at five per cent, the Constitution calls for its progressive implementation.

Signing the Americans with Disabilities Act 1990, President George H. W. Bush proclaimed that PWDs could "now pass through once-closed doors into a bright new era" and the "shameful wall of exclusion" could fall.

An amendment Bill of our PWD Act offering a clearer interpretation of disability rights is at the Attorney-General's office for review before being taken to Parliament. It's the hope of the more than six million PWDs that President Kenyatta will, once again, make history by signing it into law. Disability inclusion is national inclusion.

harunassan@gmail.com.
Addis Abeba  The Federal High Court Lideta Branch 3rd Constitutional and Anti-terrorism Bench has today sentenced Private Mesafint Tigabu to life in prison. The body guard of the late General Seare Mekonnen, was named as the main suspect in the June 22, 2019 assassination of General Seare Mekonnen, the then Chief of staff of the National defense Forces of Ethiopia, and Major General Gezai Abera.

The court arrived at a guilty verdict on Private Mesafint Tigabu and gave an alternative appointment to June 18, 2021 to hear the defendant's sentence in mitigating circumstances. At the last hearing, the prosecutor asked the court to sentence Private Tigabu to death after stating the aggravating factors such as abuse of responsibility and making deals to commit crime.

The defense team on its part argued that their client has no criminal record and therefore it is unlawful to sentence him to death. The defense team also cited their clients health conditions, good behavior, his Six year service to the defense forces as well as his family responsibilities and asked the court to reduce the sentence.

After hearing both sides, the court sentenced Private Mesafint to life in prison for 'assassinating the nation's defender of sovereignty' and putting into consideration the possible consequences of his actions on the country. AS
Air Seychelles will be headed by a Seychellois national as of July 1, part of the changes that accompany a transitional agreement between former majority owner Etihad Airways and the government of the island nation, the Ministry of Transport said on Monday.

Sandy Benoiton will succeed Remco Althuis, who had been appointed as the chief executive of Seychelles' national airline in September 2018.

Benoiton who is currently the airline's chief operations officer until June 30, has been with Air Seychelles for more than two decades.

The director of policy and strategy at the transport ministry, Magalie Essack, said that in this phase of negotiations with Etihad Airways, there is a transitional agreement that has been signed in regards to the chief executive and the chief financial officer.

"It states that the mandate of the CEO and the CFO employed by Etihad Airways will end on June 30, 2021. With the appointment of the new board, members are expected to undertake an exercise to relook at how a new CEO and CFO will be appointed," said Essack.

The Ministry of Transport said that Etihad's management contract has also been terminated, but that Althuis will remain as the CEO until June 30.

Also appointed is Tyrian Gendron as the new chief financial officer. He replaces Michael Berlouis as of July 1.

In April, the Etihad aviation group sold its 40 percent holding in Air Seychelles to the government and will no longer be a shareholder in the now state-owned airline. Seychelles received a 79 percent discount on the total liability that Air Seychelles owes Etihad."

Air Seychelles had owed $72.3 million to Etihad; with the 79 percent write-down, Seychelles will pay $11.34 million. A total of $71.5 million is still owed to bondholders.

Air Seychelles, the national airline of Seychelles, an archipelago in the western Indian Ocean, was established in 1978 and began long-haul service in 1983.
Gaborone  President Dr Mokgweetsi Masisi will on Thursday host guests to observe at national level, the centenary of Botswana's founding president, Sir Seretse Khama.

An Office of the President news release says President Masisi will make a statement on the occasion in remembrance of Sir Seretse Khama who led the country to independence from British colonial rule and became its first head of state in 1966.

The occasion, themed "Living the legacy 100 years on", will be held at Parliamentary Grounds.

According to the release, the iconic internationally renowned statesman, Sir Seretse Khama, is best remembered for his commitment to the principles of democracy, peace, self-reliance, development and national unity.

It further states that the compassionate Sir Seretse Khama also played a significant role in southern Africa's liberation struggle against white minority regimes of the time.

"He was one of the founders of the Southern African Development Community, SADC. Sir Seretse was also a staunch advocate for international relations and diplomacy," it says.

It was during his tenure, at the height of the liberation struggle in the sub-region, that Botswana was often referred to as an island of sanity in a sea of chaos, the release says.

Source : BOPA
Addis Abeba  Reports of the take over of Mekelle city by forces formerly loyal to the TPLF which have since renamed themselves as Tigray Defence Forces (TDF) were coming out of Mekelle this afternoon. Addis Standard learned from residents of Mekelle that the city roads are overwhelmed by celebrating residents as the city was taken over by TDF.

Hours after the reports, local media reported that Chief Executive of Tigray's Interim Administration, Abraham Belay (PhD) announced that his administration has asked the federal government for a ceasefire agreement to provide a timely political solution to the plight of Tigray farmers. Abraham explained the need for a ceasefire ahead of the summer farming season, a better delivery of humanitarian aid to those in need and seeking a political and timely solution.

In a nine-point request to the federal government, the interim administration noted that it made the proposal last week, following intensive discussion with regional leaders, Tigrayan intellectuals, businessmen and religious leaders. He pointed out that some in the fighting force out there are currently seeking a way to peace and it was important to give these forces a chance.

Earlier today tensions were at their peak in Mekelle city as the local television, Tigray Tv ceases its transmission today in the afternoon. A staff from the local TV who wanted to stay anonymous also confirmed to Addis Standard the termination of the TV transmission and said that the employees were told to leave the station. Another resident of Mekelle told Addis Standard that residents are hastily evacuating the roads to their houses and businesses including shops, hotels and banks were closed at the moment.

Residents also told Addis Standard the troops loaded in trucks were seen being rounded up in parts of the city. Later in the evening, residents told Addis Standard that the city is rocked by people chanting. Addis Standard also spoke to Etenesh Nigusie, an official in the Interim administration, who was limited only to state that 'the city is calm'. Further efforts to reach other Interim administration officials were unsuccessful.

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This comes days after reports of flare ups in the region over the past days featuring an airstrike that claimed the lives of civilians. The spokesman of the ENDF said that the only combatants, not civilians, were struck in the airstrike. It is also remembered that the EU and the US condemned the attacks while also reiterating calls for an immediate ceasefire in the region and unhindered humanitarian access.

The request of the interim administration was followed by a declaration of a ceasefire by the federal government. In a statement released late afternoon, the Prime minister's office said "It is believed that there are forces within the scattered rebel forces who are willing for a peaceful resolution," adding "The government has accepted the interim administration's proposal."

The statement concluded by explaining that the investigation against the leaders of TPLF would proceed, while declaring " The government has announced an unconditional ceasefire that will last until the end of the farming season effective as of June 28, 2021." Federal and regional institutions were instructed to follow suit, reminding that measures will be taken on those who try to use this opportunity for ill purposes. AS
Dar es Salaam  Government will spend at least $470 million to purchase COVID-19 vaccine and bailout sectors that were severely hit by the coronavirus pandemic.

This was stated on Monday June 28, 2021 by President Samia Suluhu Hassan in Dar es Salaam when she met Editors and Journalists at the State House in commercial capital Dar es Salaam.

In addition, the President said Tanzania has registered for COVAX facility package and it will administer COVID-19 Vaccine in the near future.

"We have $470 million to order vaccine and equipment to use in the fight against Coronavirus," she said.

She added that the vaccine will be voluntary to give citizens the opportunity to choose what is best for them; she did not however give the specific dates.

The president did not name the exact vaccine the country was set to procure given the fact that many countries have developed jabs for the killer virus which has brought global economies to its knees.

Recently the government that it had officially applied for a $571 million (about Sh1.3 trillion) loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to help in mitigate economic challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Tabling the government's Sh36.3 trillion 2021/22 budget in Parliament on June 10, 2021, Dr Nchemba told the House that the requested funds were a low-interest loan aimed at tackling the social and economic impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic.

IMF officials in Dar es Salaam and Washington were also quoted by Reuters as confirming about the existence of talks with the government - noting, however, that Tanzania would have to provide information on Covid-19.
The Minister says Nigerians have rights to travel to Dubai but that UAE will not be allowed to discrimate against citizens.

The Federal Government on Monday said flights to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are yet to resume due to discriminatory nature of protocol introduced by the United Arab Emirates, UAE.

The Minister of Aviation, Hadi Sirika, made the remark during the briefing by the Presidential Steering Committee on COVID-19 in Abuja on Monday.

Mr Sirika, who explained that the protocol appeared to be targeted at only Nigerians, added that it was discriminatory and not backed up scientifically.

He explained that UAE was insistent that all passengers intending to visit its country must use Emirates Airline or spend two weeks in the alternative carrier's country before gaining entrance to Dubai.

The minister dismissed insinuations that the continuous delay in the resumption of flights was ego related.

He, however, said that talks were ongoing to resolve the matter.

According to him, Emirates in particular and other airlines, including KLM, gave some conditions that were not acceptable to Nigeria because they don't make scientific sense.

"After review, some of the airlines, especially KLM, saw sense with what Nigeria presented which is that you can do the test 48 hours to 72 hours before you leave and do another test on arrival.

"Emirates at that time wanted us to do the test 48 hours before boarding and 48 hours is not yet the incubation time.

"They expect us to do a rapid test at the airport and then fly seven hours later and do another test in Dubai and then follow us to our hotel or our accommodation and do another test.

"That dragged on and in the interest of our people and cordial relationship, even though it is a commercial decision for the airline to take at any point in time, we ceded and accepted that we would do those tests that doesn't make scientific sense to us at the expense of our people and our monies.

"We accepted what Emirates presented and proceeded even though KLM and other airlines saw our reasons and rationale and towed the lines of Nigeria.

"In this case, Emirates insisted again that in addition to the test on arrival and other tests, that Nigerians cannot fly to UAE except through Emirates airline.

"And that if we choose to do so through other airlines like Ethiopia, Qatar, Turkish or other airlines, we must remain in the country of that airline for two weeks if we are Nigerians before we continue to Dubai.

"Meaning that if I buy my ticket in a free market which Nigeria and UAE practices, if I buy a ticket on Ethiopian Airline, that means I must remain in Addis Ababa for two weeks whether I have a visa or not before I proceed to Dubai.

"So, they insisted that we must fly by Emirates and majority of Nigerians are petty traders and the ticket of Emirates in this case may be higher than other airlines," Mr Sirika explained.

He stressed that civil aviation was being guided by agreement and international convention.

"It is only one aviation and we found this position to be discriminatory against our country and it is not acceptable.

"We thought we could take it diplomatically and we have been meeting and exchanging ideas because at some point, they said they are being hard on Nigerians because there are fake results.

"And I said there are fake results in UAE, Germany, UK, USA, all over the world, there are fake results but Nigeria went ahead to put measures in place to detect fake results.

"So, we have gone the extra mile plus if you look at the rate of infection and the rate of people catching COVID-19 in Nigeria, we are far less than many other countries in the world which UAE did not apply that principle upon.

Mr Sirika said that the total number of deaths in Nigeria might be 3000 and in one day, 3000 Italians died or British and they were still being allowed to go direct to UAE.

"Even Ghanaians, Nigeriens and other African countries can go to Dubai directly; so the protocol is country-specific and it is not acceptable by the agreement and convention that we signed with UAE.

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"So, this is the position, it has nothing to do with ego, it is a fact that we cannot be isolated as the only country that they will apply this to.

"In one of our discussions, they said it is also the same case with South Africa, I want to put it on record that South Africa as a country wrote and demanded that the condition be applied upon them.

"So, it is their own choice but it is not the choice of Nigeria that we should be excluded and discriminated against.

"We are still talking with them and we would likely escalate the matter and I am sure that we would resolve it soon.

Mr Sirika, however, apologised to passengers, saying, "we are aware that some have to travel for medical reasons while some have to resume work, some are students and even holidaymakers.

"We believe that you have the right to travel to Dubai and you will do so and for the sake of the international convention, we cannot be discriminated against," he explained.
Namibian power developer Natura Energy last week said it signed a strategic agreement with London-based power plant developer, owner and operator Globeleq Africa Limited (Globeleq) to co-develop an 81MW TeraSun Energy Solar PV Power Park initiative in the Erongo region town of Arandis.

The N$1 billion TeraSun Energy project aims to market and sell competitively priced electricity to large power users across Namibia through

the national transmission grid. The TeraSun Energy solar power park,

which will be the largest ever built in Namibia to date, will be situated in the town of Arandis, a location that enjoys one of the best solar irradiations in the country and has a potential to generate over 227 700 megawatt-hours per annum, enough to power over 68 000 average Namibian homes for a whole year. This completely private investment will be structured through multiple power purchase agreements with large power users for the supply of energy up to 25 years, according to individual customer requirements.

To date, Natura Energy has been developing the TeraSun Energy project completely independently. The strategic agreement signed with Globeleq represents a major boost for the project to move forward. Current planning sets construction commencement date in the third quarter of 2022.

This agreement brings Globeleq's immense experience and track record to the TeraSun Energy project. Globeleq's has established itself as a company that already has over 1400MW of power generation plants in operation across 28 projects in sub-Saharan Africa, with a further 305 MW under construction and 2 000MW in active development. Globeleq is supported by its shareholders; the development finance institutions of CDC Group Plc of the United Kingdom and

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Norfund of Norway.

Since 2002, Globeleq has been addressing Africa's need for sustainable and cost-effective power. This aligns with Natura Energy's vision to contribute to Namibia's energy independence and infrastructural development agenda.

According to a statement the

TeraSun Energy Solar PV Power Park initiative is developed to operate

within the new Modified Single Buyer (MSB) regulatory framework of the Electricity Control Board. This new regulation allows independent power producers (IPPs) to sell electricity to large power users locally and internationally across the NamPower transmission network.

In the MSB regulatory framework, market players are known as Contestable Customers and Eligible Sellers. Contestable Customers are all the Regional Electricity Distributors (REDs), the City of Windhoek and all NamPower customers that are connected to NamPower's transmission network. These Contestable Customers will be allowed to purchase electricity from IPPs such as TeraSun Energy via bilateral transactions for up to 30% of their annual energy purchases.

The motivation for this policy change in Namibia, is a drive for both electricity self-sufficiency and price competitiveness.
The Namibia Revenue Agency (NamRA) has exempted Value Added Tax Import on all medical oxygen tanks that are donated to the State. According to a NamRA statement, the ruling was taken in response to a governmental call for the private sector to assist in the shortage of medical oxygen tanks due to the escalating number

of Covid cases. "We believe that the move will encourage institutions, including the private sector to donate the same product to the nation to save the lives of those who are in desperate need of oxygen in various hospitals of the country," read the statement from NamRA spokesperson Melanie Tjijenda. Goods donated to the State are

specified as exempted for the purpose of Section 13 under Schedule V of the Value Added Tax Act. NamRA recently approved the request for exemption after a local company stated its intention to donate oxygen tanks to the health ministry.

The Namibia Chamber of Commerce and Industry (NCCI), in conjunction with Namibia's private sector, last week handed over the first 21-tonne tank of oxygen to the government via the health ministry. The donation formed part of the private sector's emergency response to support the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic currently ravaging the country with a high number of cases and increasing fatalities. "The private sector, led by the NCCI, launched an immediate response to tackling the current shortage of medical oxygen to mitigate and minimise the effects of the pandemic in the country to restore the supply of critical oxygen for the treatment of Covid-19 patients in our state and public health facilities," said NCCI president Bisey /Uirab in a statement.

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/Uirab added that through an assessment, spearheaded by the NCCI and supported by the health and finance ministries, the most urgent need that was identified to fight the pandemic is the supply of bulk oxygen into Namibia.

He noted that the first 21-tonne consignment load was sourced from Kryogas and arrived on Thursday morning. The initial tonnage of liquid oxygen will be used to fill up the bulk storage tank at the Katatura State Hospital, with the remaining amount being distributed to other hospitals in critically short supply. Said /Uirab: "The NCCI continues to mobilise support from within the Namibian private sector to ensure we are in a position to offset the shortfall through sponsorship and donations towards the costs and logistics surrounding critical oxygen supply into our country. We are informed that as it stands, the current medical oxygen shortfall in Namibia is between 150 and 180 tonnes per month. This is over and above the capacity being provided by the current supplier".
Moses Magadza

"The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is one of the key drivers that can position Africa as an economic powerhouse," declared the President of Botswana Mokgweetsi Masisi while officially opening the 49th Plenary Assembly Session virtually yesterday (Friday 25 June 2021).

"However, it is important to underscore that the successful implementation of

the SADC integration agenda is a prerequisite for the true realisation of the AfCFTA," he continued.

Masisi stressed that domestication of AfCFTA at national level was "central to (its) effective implementation".

AfCTA was agreed upon in 2018 and came into force in January this year. It seeks, among others, to catalyse inclusive and sustainable development through boosting intra-Africa trade, while giving Africa a united and thus bigger voice in global trade negotiations.

The SADC PF brings together 15 national parliaments, 13 of which are represented at the ongoing Plenary Assembly Session. The Plenary was scheduled to run for three says under the theme: 'Leveraging the AFCTA for post-Cocid-19 economic recovery in Southern Africa: The role of the SADC Parliamentary Forum and National Parliaments'.

Masisi expressed hope that

negotiations within the framework of AfCTFA would "move beyond trade in goods and services, and take into consideration other issues, such as intellectual property rights, investment and competition policy", which he said directly impact on trade flows.

"They need to be further ironed out

to ensure the Free Trade Area operates without hindrances," he cautioned.

He hailed the coming into force of the AfCFTA as "the most significant milestone in Africa's integration agenda" and sounded upbeat that the resultant market of close to 1.27 billion people and a combined Gross Domestic Product of over US$2.5 trillion would deepen regional economic cooperation in Africa.

The Botswana head of state saluted the region's parliamentarians for helping member states respond and mitigate the impact of the ongoing global Covid-19 pandemic but said their work remained cut.

"The role of Parliamentarians has been key in ensuring effective responses to Covid-19. You have been critical in our engagement with communities and

your sound advice to governments provided the best possible measures to put in place in the fight against Covid-19," he said.

He said as the SADC region angles for the benefits of the AfCFTA, the role of MPs would "even be more critical during the rebuilding of national economies".

In that regard, Masisi enjoined the region's MPs "to move beyond political boundaries and put our nations, our region and our people first, for a quick economic recovery to take effect".

While acknowledging the fact that Covid-19 had wreaked havoc regionally and globally, the President enjoined the MPs to remain united and not allow "temporary circumstances to define the future of our region".

He added: "Our common set of values that always bind us together - unity - peace - development, remain the foundation of our success and the pillar of our strength, even in the darkest hour of our time." Speaking at the same occasion, SADC PF Secretary General Boemo Sekgoma, said the hosting of the Plenary in spite of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, "demonstrates the resilience of the Forum as supported by all Member Parliaments, and embodies its determination and commitment to promoting inter-parliamentary cooperation and diplomacy".

Turning to key recent achievements of the Forum, Sekgoma said work was ongoing in developing SADC Model laws that member states can adapt or adopt as they see fit. "As we meet, two Model Laws are nearing finalisation.

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They are the SADC Model Law on Gender Based Violence, and the SADC Model Law on Public Financial Management," she said.

She expressed optimism that the regional soft laws and others developed before them, would "contribute to the legal ecosystem of the SADC Region, and reinforce good governance, accountability and transparency, which are the hallmarks of parliamentary activity". She said it was hoped that with Covid-19 likely to have a continuing impact on the lives of SADC consumers, the SADC Model Law on Public Financial Management would ensure that the rights of consumers are protected within the digital economy, "in which they will perform multiple transactions on-line".

She added: "Forum strives to uphold socio-economic inclusion of all segments of the SADC population, without discrimination, and assist Parliaments enact laws that are inclusive, purposeful, and responsive to the needs of the SADC citizenry."
The contribution of the agriculture, forestry and fishing sectors to the gross domestic product (GDP) expanded in the first quarter of 2021, accounting for 8.3%, compared to a share of 6.6% recorded in the corresponding quarter of the preceding year.

According to the recently released report from the Namibia Statistics Agency (NSA), the GDP level at current prices stood at N$45.8 billion, compared to N$45.3 billion in the same quarter of 2020.

"At sub-sector level, the highest contribution was recorded in livestock farming with a share of 4.9%, followed by fishing with 2.6%, while forestry recorded the least contribution to GDP of 0.3%," reads the latest report.

The agriculture sector is the backbone of the Namibian economy as its biggest employer, and has over the years been one of the significant sectors that have contributed to national coffers. The sector remains a crucial engine due to its nature of creating a source of income, food security, foreign earnings and the provision of raw material to the manufacturing industry.

The sector has, however, been challenged with natural disasters such as the recurring drought in certain areas, as well as the devastating locust outbreak that destroyed valuable grazing land. For Q1 2021, the locust outbreak was reported in January 2021 in some parts of the country.

The report further stated that the livestock subsector was impacted by the foot and mouth disease (FMD), which resulted in restrictions and a ban on the movement of animals within Kavango East and West, the four O's as well as Kunene and the Tsumkwe constituency in the Otjozondjupa region.

NSA Statistician-General Alex Shimuafeni said the domestic economy fell into a deeper recession, recording a contraction of 6.5% during the first quarter of 2021, compared to a decline of 2.5% recorded in the corresponding quarter of 2020.

He stated that real GDP stood at N$31.9 billion in the first quarter of 2021, and when compared to N$34.2 billion in the corresponding quarter of 2020, represents a decline of N$2.2 billion. In nominal terms, GDP stood at N$45.9 billion in the quarter under review, relative to the N$45.3 billion posted in the same quarter of 2020. This shows that the size of the economy shrunk by N$0.6 billion.

Shimuafeni added that Namibia's earnings from exporting agriculture, forestry and fishery commodities amounted to N$531.2 million for the first quarter of 2021, compared to N$575.9 million in the first quarter of 2020, registering a decline of 7.8%.

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On the import side, the import bill amounted to N$762.7 million for the first quarter of 2021, compared to N$773.1 million in the first quarter of 2020, registering a decline of 1.3%.

"For the period under review, Namibia recorded a trade deficit in the sector products to the tune of N$231.6 million, compared to a deficit of N$197.2 million registered in quarter one of 2020. The deterioration in the trade balance is owed to the drop in the value of the export of forestry products that declined by 68.7% during the review period," explained Shimuafeni.

According to the High Economic Intelligence (HEI) analysis over the past five years, the primary sectors contributed 16.8% on average to GDP. The mining and quarrying sector contributed around 10% on average to GDP between 2016 and 2020 on the back of a very good performance of the mining and quarrying activities.

The analysis stated that agriculture reached its peak in 2020 and contributed 9% to GDP, which was attributed to the good rainfall received, and the bumper harvest for cereal crops.

It further recommended that Namibia introduces measures through policies such as improved insolvency and restructuring procedures in order to revive the economy.

"Promote competition to enable the exit and entry of firms to help curb market power, build local capacity for the domestic market for inward linkages (agriculture sector), support displaced workers by gradually refocusing policy support from retention to reallocation, and accelerate digitalisation," advised the HEI.- mndjavera@nepc.com.na
Experts in the health sector have enjoined the federal government and other stakeholders to pay more attention to sexual and reproductive health during COVID-19 and other public health emergencies response and recovery processes.

They made the call yesterday during a panel discussion organised by Pathfinder International at the 37th annual general meeting and scientific conference of the Association of Public Health Physicians of Nigeria in Abuja.

Dr Amina Dorayi, Country Director, Pathfinder International Nigeria, said there is need to recognize the central role reproductive health and family planning plays on the individual and community, adding "When we don't pay enough attention or support to sexual and reproductive health, everything suffers."

She said, "At every level and in every situation, especially now during this pandemic, we must create time, resources and opportunities to respond to the needs of every individual, and by extension the community.

"We must not derail resources from the essential sexual and reproductive health services in the response to either an epidemic or pandemic

"We must maintain a certain health system proactiveness to sexual and reproductive health whether we are in a pandemic or not."

She said Pathfinder International Nigeria in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, trained health workers to strengthen their capacity to respond to the pandemic.

She said some things government should have done differently during the pandemic include, effective use of SMS, better collaboration with traditional rulers and building trust with the community.

A youth advocate, Emitomo Nimisire, said an effctive strategy for pandemic response must include gender-responsive and youth-friendly policies.

Alhassan Yahaya, Chairman, Advocacy Working Group (AWG) said the media was utilized in creating awareness on family planning and other reproductive health measures during the pandemic.

Dr Ibrahim Alhassan, Director Public Health, Nasarawa State Ministry of Health, said the economic status of the populace should be factored into measures such as lockdowns to achieve the desired response.
Kaduna  The Joint National Assembly (NASS) Committee on Land Transportation has viewed with dissatisfaction the manner in which both Federal and State governments encroach on lands owned by the Railway Corporation.

The member representing Zaria Federal constituency and Chairman, Joint Committee on Senate and House of Representative on Land Transport, Tajudeen Abbas, stated when he led members on an oversight visit to the Railway Property Management Corporation (RPMC) in Kaduna.

"The major challenge that RPMC have been able to intimate us about is the issue of encroachment by both federal and state governments and it has been a thorn in the flesh.

"We assure them that, all those states and all those properties they have problems with, we are in a good position to assist if they are able to give us all the details once we get back to the National Assembly."

He said, "We will articulate all those issues and then we will begin to see the affected States government one after the other. At the end of the day we should be able to help the company in resolving some of those issues.

"We are satisfied with the report that has been given to us and we are also satisfied with the performance of the management of this company. They have done exceedingly good in terms of financial prudence, issues that have to do with litigation and issue of maintenance and other valuable property of Nigeria Railway Corporation".

Tajudeen also expressed satisfaction with the management of RPMC in the area of financial prudency and overall management of the company.

On his part, the Managing Director (MD) of the Railway Property Limited, Mr. Timothy Zalanga said that they are turning around the railway sector.

"I would like Nigerians to see action. We are turning around the railway sector and by extension the property of railway, we are making sure that we increase the assets base of the corporation by investing more of corporation money in building structures for the corporation".

"We have been friends of the NASS, they are quite supportive and we will continue to explore the opportunity they have given us, to make sure that some of the challenges we outlined to them are addressed and they have promised that they will look into those things".

The Committee also visited the Inland Dry Port at the station.
The Sokoto High Court has granted bail for N55 million to the five management staff of the Sokoto State Primary Staff Pension Board who allegedly diverted over N500 million.

The money was meant for the payment of pension and gratuities of some retired teachers in the state.

The officials included Abubakar Aliyu, Hassana Moyi, Haliru Ahmad, Kabiru Ahmad and Dahiru Muhammad Isa who were Secretary, Director of Finance and Supply, Deputy Director of Finance and Supply, Accountant and Cashier of the board respectively.

The Presiding Judge, Justice Muhammad Muhammad, granted them bail in the sum of N55 million each with one surety in like sum who must be a resident of Sokoto and owned a landed property within the state.

Earlier, counsel to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Sa'ad Hannafi had objected to the bail application on the ground that some of the defendants were a flight risk.

While defending his bail application, counsel to the defendants, A Y Abubakar argued that the defendants "are responsible men and woman as well as responsible civil servants of the state."

The Zonal Head of EFCC, Usman Bawa Kaltungo in an interview with Daily Trust alleged that the staffers used forged vouchers, withdrew and shared monies meant for the payment of pension and gratuities of primary school teachers in the state.

According to him, the money was withdrawn in trenches.

The case was adjourned till July, 26 for the commencement of hearing.
The Akwa Ibom State Police Command has said it is ready to prosecute Uduak Akpan, the murder suspect who raped and killed job seeker, Miss Iniubong Umoren.

The Police Public Relations Officer, SP Odiko Macdon, said on Monday in Uyo that with the autopsy result of the deceased, the police has what it takes to prosecute the murderer.

While denying claims that the case had been taken over by the Department of State Security, Macdon stated that only the police was empowered by law to handle such cases.

He explained that Akpan alongside the soldier who murdered one Enobong Jimmy, and the Church Founder, Ukachukwu Christopher who beat his wife to death had been officially remanded in the Nigeria Correctional Service and would be arraigned in court soon.
Kaduna  Two students of the Kaduna State College of Education, Gidan Waya, Jema'a Local Government Area of Kaduna State, have been shot dead.

The deceased met their untimely end while protesting a hike in school fees with their colleagues, when security operatives made attempt to disperse them forcefully.

Our correspondent also gathered that the second victim identified as Emmanuel Nathan was rushed to Sir Patrick Ibrahim Yakowa Memorial Hospital in Kafanchan, but died later from the gunshot wound.

Speaking with Daily Trust, one of the protesters, who preferred anonymity, said they came out to protest over the increase of school fees in the state-owned institution but met security operatives outside the college.

The student said they found it extremely hard to cope with the previous school fees that ranged between N25,000 to N33,000 and wonder what would happen with the present increment to N75,000.

He said most of their parents were disengaged primary teachers, local government/state workers, and peasant farmers who struggled to survive and appealed to Governor Nasir El-Rufa'i to rescind his decision to enable them afford education at that level.

The Secretary General, Students Union Government (SUG) of the College, Ishaya Yitem, said the protest was organised at a time when the school authorities had been engaging the state government over the issue.

Confirming the incident to our correspondent during a press conference, National President of the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS), Sunday Asefon, said he gathered that two students were killed during the protest.

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Asefon, who said NANS will relocate its national congress to occupy Kaduna to protest tuition increases in the state, called the increments "Insensitive, unreasonable and unrealistic."

The students' body gave Kaduna State governor 21 days until the date of its congress to pacify Nigerian students on the increase in school fees.

He said NANS rejected the recent spate of 1000% increment of schools fees and other related fees in state-owned tertiary institutions in Kaduna.

When contacted, the Provost of the College, Professor Alexander Kure, who confirmed the protest, said he was yet to establish reasons for the development.

The State Police Public Relations Officer, ASP Muhammed Jalige, in a press statement, said the students who re-converged and blocked the Gidan Waya - Kafanchan Federal Highway became "unruly and riotous".

"At a point, the protesters blocked the convoy of a military sector Commander injuring him and one other. The situation resulted in a fracas where three protesters were injured in an attempt to use minimal force to disperse the riotous students. The victims were taken to the hospital for medical attention but unfortunately, one person died while receiving medical attention."
United Nations  When the UN's annual report on Children and Armed Conflict was released last week, it was expected to "name and shame" some of the world's worst human rights violators - particularly the abusers of children.

But these violators were protected- and never stigmatized--despite the hundreds of children killed by warring parties in ongoing conflicts, particularly in Yemen, Syria and Myanmar, involving the US, Russia and China as arms suppliers, triggering criticism from UN watchers and human rights organizations.

Jo Becker, Children's Rights Advocacy Director at Human Rights Watch, told IPS: "We continue to be disappointed that the Secretary-General (SG) is not using the "list of shame" to hold all parties accountable for their grave violations against children".

The message he is sending to the Saudi-led coalition regarding their operations in Yemen is that "as long as they kill and maim fewer children than they did the year before, they can stay off the list".

"We also saw in the case of Myanmar how disastrous it was to remove the Tatmadaw (the country's armed forces) from the list while they were still recruiting and using children; the number the following year tripled".

The SG should not make listing decisions based on his hopes for future improvement, but based on the facts on the ground, said Becker.

His repeated failure to base his list, on the UN's own evidence, betrays children and fuels impunity. "Now that his second term as Secretary-General is assured, he should abandon that approach and ensure his list reflects the facts. And the UN Security Council should insist that he list all violators, without exception," declared Becker.

The oil-blessed Saudi Arabia, which is leading a coalition in the military conflict in Yemen, is a longstanding political and military ally of the US- which along with the UK, China, Russia and France- is armed with veto powers in the Security Council.

Russia provides political and military support to war-ravaged Syria while China, one of the largest arms suppliers to Myanmar, has undermined Security Council attempts to impose an arms embargo in the conflict-ridden country.

Ian Williams, President of the New York-based Foreign Press Association (FPA) and author of 'UNtold: The Real Story of the United Nations in Peace and War', told IPS Guterres has adopted a human rights profile that is low enough to be subterranean.

History suggests that one of the few weapons open to the SG and the UN collectively is "naming and shaming", he said, pointing out, it is also true that many member states -- like the 57-member Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) that refuses to support the Uighurs, are also shamelessly unprincipled in the face of power -- but an ethical and forthright SG, as the tribune for the UN Charter, could turn the tide.

"If Guterres is more concerned about posterity than his pension--and if he wants to make the history books rather than the footnotes- he should take his cue from Dag Hammarskjold, speak truth to power. And avoid chartered aircraft," said Williams, a former President of the UN Correspondents' Association (UNCA).

Various models of SG-ship have been tried, he pointed out, but none of them are entirely successful.

"Kofi Annan tried the nice approach. Ban Ki-moon tried being nice in public, firm in meetings with heads of state, and furious in private with the gratuitous insults they heaped upon him", said Williams.

Perhaps the most hard-hitting comments came from Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch (HRW): "Guterres's first term was defined by public silence regarding human rights abuses by China, Russia, and the United States and their allies," he said, referring to the three veto-wielding permanent members of the UN Security Council.

"With his re-election behind him, Guterres should use the next five years to become a strong vocal advocate for rights. His recent willingness to denounce abuses in Myanmar and Belarus should expand to include all governments deserving condemnation, including those that are powerful and protected."

Since taking office in January 2017, Guterres has rarely criticized or called for accountability by specific governments or their leaders, said Roth.

Guterres "adopted a non-confrontational approach toward former US President Donald Trump's efforts to sideline human rights by undermining multilateral organizations like the UN and embracing authoritarian leaders."

He adopted a similar approach to crimes against humanity in Xinjiang by China's government, now the UN's second biggest financial contributor, after the US, and to war crimes by Saudi Arabia in Yemen, complained Roth.

HRW also said Guterres has been reluctant to criticize abuses by Russia's government, which has frequently used its veto power in the Security Council to block human rights-related resolutions on Syria and elsewhere. Guterres should also exercise stronger leadership against the global pushback on women's rights, it added.

According to Watch List on Children and Armed Conflict, the Secretary-General removed the Saudi and Emirati-led coalition from his annual list of child rights abusers last year, despite the UN finding that it was responsible for killing and maiming 222 children in Yemen in 2019.

At the time, he had vowed to re-list the coalition if it failed to sustainably decrease violations.

"As the UN's latest report shows, the Secretary-General's decision to remove the Saudi and Emirati-led coalition from his shame list last year sent a clear message that parties can get away with killing children," said Adrianne Lapar, director of Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict.

"If the Secretary-General does not immediately reconsider his decision and return the coalition to his list, he seriously undermines international efforts to protect children in war and emboldens warring parties to be more abusive against children."

Meanwhile, Save the Children, a leading humanitarian organization for children, pointed out that 194 Yemeni children were killed and maimed in 2020, but the UN Report on Children and Armed Conflict again fails to hold perpetrators to account.

But despite the killings in Yemen in 2020, according to UN verified data, the Saudi and Emirati led coalition gets a green light to continue destroying children's lives in Yemen, the organization said.

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"In a disheartening decision, the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres again failed to include the coalition in this year's 'list of shame'."

It was taken off the list last year, with a commitment by the Secretary General to relist them unless there was a 'sustained significant decrease in killing and maiming'. By not relisting the coalition, Guterres sends the message that reducing the number of child casualties to about two hundred is 'good enough' progress, Save the Children said.

Matthew Wells, Deputy Director of Thematics for Amnesty International's Crisis Response Programme said Guterres, "who has just been given another five-year term; must become bolder and more courageous in prioritizing human rights and calling out perpetrators, including on children and armed conflict."

Together with the Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, he should commit publicly to applying the same standard irrespective of perpetrator or context - producing a complete list based on evidence and objective criteria, something he has failed to do again this year.

Next year, he must follow the criteria laid out in 2010; the Saudi Arabia-led coalition and Israeli military, among others, will again prove a key test.

For their part, UN member states must demand a credible list. Why have teams on the ground put themselves in danger to document violations that get ignored?, asked Wells.

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New York  As the global gathering for gender equality, the Generation Equality Forum, kicks off in Paris on June 30, 2020, IPS conducted an exclusive interview with Katja Iversen.

Iversen is a leading global influencer on leadership, sustainability, and gender equality, an executive advisor to Goal 17 Partners, UNILEVER, Women Political Leaders, and others. She was also on President Macron's G7 Gender Equality Advisory Council in 2019.

The Generation Equality Forum, convened by UN Women and co-chaired by the Presidents of France and Mexico, comes when the COVID-19 pandemic threatens to reverse global progress on gender equality.

The forum is expected to affirm bold "gender equality investments, programs, and policies and start a 5-year action journey, based on a Global Acceleration Plan for Gender Equality which will be launched at the Forum," according to a media statement.

Iversen spoke extensively about the need for women to be included in decision-making, the role of the private sector, and how the world is on a tipping point.

"If we want to see positive development for both people and planet, we - in short - need more women in power and more power to women, in the economy and politics," Iversen said. "The upcoming Generation Equality Forum, hosted by UN Women in collaboration with the governments of France and Mexico, comes at a pivotal moment and provides a great opportunity to catalyze progress. I want to see the whole world reacting to the clarion call coming out of Paris this week".

She stressed that now was the time to act because "we see a destabilizing and widening inequality gap in the world. We also see a growing conservatism and pushback on women's rights, including sexual and reproductive health rights (SRHR). And very concretely, we see skyrocketing increases in gender-based violence, enhanced misogyny, women carrying even more of the unpaid care work, as well as alarming rates of girls dropping out of school, and women leaving the labor force".

She spoke about the need to involve the private sector in creating a more gender-equal world.

"The private sector is a lead employer of women, women are consumers, and we will not see gender equality, nor a sustainable world at large if the private sector does not commit to change. Luckily more and more companies are stepping up to the plate and investing in sustainability and gender equality," she told IPS.

She and Goal 17 Partners, a network of executives and entrepreneurs integrating the UN's Sustainable Development goals into business practices, are working with new companies who are getting engaged in the SDGs, including SDG 5 on gender equality and women's empowerment. Together, including UN Foundation, UN Forum on Business and Human Rights (BSR), UN Women, they have been shepherding commitments to Generation Equality.

"There is a tremendous need AND potential, not least for small- and medium-sized enterprises, whether we are talking women's leadership, equal pay, parental leave, financial inclusion, diverse, inclusive and harassment-free workplaces, or health and education. Investing in the various aspects of gender equality is both the right and economically the smart thing to do, research shows".

Regarding research, Katja Iversen spoke to IPS about the need for better and more data and research: "Decision-makers, whether in governments, funding institutions or private sector, need to invest in and get more and disaggregated data. If we don't know the details of how many or where girls and women live and die, work and want to go to school, give birth or care for the sick, whether they are rich or poor, we won't get the right policies, programs, or investments that can drive the needed solutions."

She pointed out that according to UN Women, less than 25 percent of national COVID decision-making bodies have women included.

"It is too easy to cut resources from people who are not at the decision-making tables. We urgently need to get many women into leadership, including the COVID response and recovery efforts. All evidence shows that when more women are included in decision making, there is a more holistic approach and both societies and people fare better."

In that regard, she highlighted some transformational, political commitments that will be put forward at the Generation Equality Forum, including from the vast network of Women Political Leaders, which count thousands and thousands of women ministers, mayors, parliamentarians, heads of states, and leaders from the private sector.

"I believe we will see some real game-changers," she said.

Iversen expressed concern about the strong need for further funding, not least for women's organizations on the frontline. It is linked to the recent and severe cuts to gender equality and sexual and reproductive health that could badly affect women and their health, especially in vulnerable communities.

"Adding to what happened during former US President Donald Trump era, the cuts we see right now from several countries, including the UK, will have devastating effects for girls, women, and gender equality, including for the most marginalized in emergency and humanitarian situations," she told IPS. "The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), for example, estimates that with the 130 million GBP (180 million USD) the UK wants to withdraw from the Supplies Partnership, UNFPA could have helped prevent around 250,000 maternal and child deaths, 14.6 million unintended pregnancies and 4.3 million unsafe abortions."

IPS: UNFPA and its partners estimate the significant health service disruptions by COVID 17 could result in 47 million women in low- and middle-income countries going without contraceptives. How do we deal with this loss of access to the most basic SRH services, especially now that the second wave of Covid-19 is disrupting health services again in many parts of the world?

KI: The shift of staff and funds away from maternal and reproductive health services due to the COVID response is devastating, and it will have ramifications for years, if not decades. We know from Ebola that maternal mortality went up, that access to family planning went down, and that girls and women paid the price in both lives and livelihood. Unfortunately, the evidence is mainly anecdotal as women's health is not documented and measured the same way as other health services, just as there, in general, is a tremendous lack of sex-disaggregated data, including on key Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) indicators and in COVID infections and deaths. This time - under the COVID pandemic - the gaps in SRHR services, shifts in resources, and cutbacks on services must be documented - in data and stories.

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IPS: In many countries, the removal of the tampon tax (or period tax) has been at the forefront of equality of access to SRHR. What other key issues do you think we must focus on to ensure equity of access to SRHR and greater bodily autonomy?

KI: I am thrilled to see SRHR and bodily autonomy being a priority of Generation Equality and to see countries like Denmark, France, Burkina Faso, and UNFPA, etc., lead on this.

A woman's right to decide on her own life and body is a fundamental human right. Bodily autonomy for girls and women - in all their rich diversity - is political, social, economically, and health-related. It is about having the power and agency to make choices over our own body, fertility, and future, living a life free of violence and coercion in both the private and public sphere, deciding who to have sex with and how to love. It's about the right to decide whether to get children - or not - about having a health system that supports this with the full range of SRHR services readily available, affordable, and accessible. Bodily autonomy ties into norms, structure, systems - and if we want equity and health for all, we need to address all of it. I am glad to see this included in the progressive Generation Equality roadmap, with strong suggestions on how to counter gender-based violence, climate change, promote economic justice and feminist movements and leadership, etc.

The world is at a pivotal moment and a tipping point. With enough people and institutions reacting to the Clarion Call from the Generation Equality Forum in Paris, I believe we can make it tip the right way.

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Following a deluge last Tuesday, the roof of the National Assembly leaked so much that the entrance to the chambers of the Senate and House of Representatives was flooded. The flooding also affected the area where journalists were stationed in the edifice.

As a result, plenary for that day was delayed as National Assembly workers were mobilised to clear the flooded entrance for the legislators to gain access to their offices and the chambers.

The sight shocked not a few Nigerians, just as it embarrassed the nation in no small measure. No Nigerian was pleased with that sight, especially when considered against the huge amount of money spent on the construction of the National Assembly. How is it possible that a building of that status would be allowed to dilapidate to the point of leaking? This just emphasises the issue of our poor maintenance culture in the country. Public institutions and infrastructure built at great cost are left to rot without periodic maintenance as required.

At the National Assembly, it is not just the roof that is in a state of dilapidation. A visit to this national monument reveals that virtually all the facilities, services and supporting infrastructure are in varying states of decay. The walls are cracking; the paint washing off, and many other facilities have broken down. The dome of the National Assembly which can be viewed from afar and which symbolises the authority of the legislature in our democratic government is in a sorry state.

Yet huge sums of money are appropriated annually for the maintenance of the edifice, a development that is causing Nigerians to ask questions. Where did all the money go to? Why did the legislators allow the facilities and infrastructure to deteriorate to this level without taking action? What is the maintenance section of the National Assembly doing about the state of facilities in the edifice?

The explanation given by the Chairman, Senate Committee on Services, Senator Sani Musa, to the effect that responsibility for the renovation of the National Assembly had been given to the Federal Capital Development Authority (FCDA) amounts to buck-passing. The question is why was there no oversight exercise over the FCDA all these years by the National Assembly to ensure that the agency does the job assigned to it?

Oftentimes, we hear the lawmakers talk about their welfare and the need to improve it. Sadly, that is not the case with the building housing them. We have not heard them complain about the state of the structure.

The National Assembly should take this incident as a wake-up call to put its house in order, especially as regards the poor state of its working environment. It is ironical that while it makes laws for the good governance of the country and performs oversight functions on how agencies under the executive arm of government conduct their businesses, the National Assembly has not found it necessary to do the same diligence on its own official working environment. This is, to say the least, not just gross negligence of duty but a regrettable example of misplacement of priority which the National Assembly would do well to rectify going forward.

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The immediate task now is to repair the leaking roof as we are now well into the rainy season with more rains expected ahead which may lead to even greater flooding. This should be handled by the maintenance unit of NASS immediately while arrangements for major renovation works should also commence expeditiously. Nigerians have a lot of problems seeking the attention of their lawmakers and we would not want a situation where sitting would be suspended because the National Assembly is not habitable.

Furthermore, we call on all government agencies to maintain their structures. Tax payers' money was used to construct them and it will not be fair to allow the buildings to rot away. That also goes for vehicles. We must imbibe maintenance culture and protect buildings and other necessary tools needed for the development of this country.
The federal government will engage 206 independent monitors to track the effectiveness of the National Social Investment Programmes (N-SIP) in Lagos state, said Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, Hajiya Sa'adiya Umar Farouk.

She stated this during the flag off of the distribution of engagement letters and devices (tablets) to the trained monitors in Lagos.

Farouk said each of the 206 monitors would be paid N30,000 monthly totalling N360,000 annually, and N74.2 million for all from June 2021 to May 2022.

N-SIP was created by President Muhammadu Buhari in 2016 with the mandate of lifting citizens out of poverty through a number of social interventions which include the job creation programme - N-Power; National Home-Grown School Feeding Programme (NHGSFP); Conditional Cash Transfer Programme (CCT) and the Government Enterprise and Empowerment Programme (GEEP).

The Ministry had flagged off the training of 5,000 independent monitors for the NSIP in Abuja in February 2021.

Farouk who was represented by the Permanent Secretary of the ministry, Mr. Bashir Nura Alkali explained that the devices are equipped with an application that will be used to report on monitoring activities of the monitors.

Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu noted that over 6,800 people have since the commencement of the programme in Lagos State continued to benefit from regular cash transfer in four bi-monthly cycles under CCT.
The murder of Usifo Ataga, the CEO of Super TV on July 15 has been trending since it was discovered. The family has been distressed by the rumours being peddled. Beneath their grief are many unanswered questions.

Since the murder last week of Usifo Ataga, the 50-year-old CEO of Super TV allegedly by his 21-year-old lover, Chidinma Ojuwku, there have been dozens of news reports making all sorts of claims.

Social media has been flooded with several revelations and conspiracy theories over the gruesome murder of Ataga, and most of it has been harming his family, the family had said.

Ataga, who was first declared missing on Sunday, June 13 in Lagos, was discovered dead soon after. The suspect, a student of the University of Lagos, Chidinma, claimed she had stabbed him multiple times in a drug-fueled attack.

Since she confessed to the media, while being paraded before the press by the police, unsubstantiated reports have emerged, which the family say have been uncomplimentary to them while they are grieving.

Some social media posts have mocked the Ataga family, while others indicted the widow, Brenda Ataga.

The family has now issued a statement urging those behind the malicious social media publications to refrain from publishing falsehood that impinges negatively on the integrity of the deceased, his wife and children.

The statement signed by Olusegun Jolaawo, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), on behalf of the Rickey Tarfa & Co, solicitor for the family, on Sunday in Abuja demanded privacy and asked those who have useful information on the case to approach the police rather than peddling rumours on social media.

"It has become apparent even to the most undiscerning reader that from the variety and inherent malice in most of the said publications, that they are planted to embarrass and malign Usifo Ataga, Brenda Ataga and the family, and to serve as a smokescreen to enable the perpetrators of the heinous crime to cover their tracks," Jolaawo said.

"We hereby admonish the publishers of these stories to employ whatever shreds of decency and decorum they can find in themselves to desist from their false and misleading stories and let the investigating authorities carry out an effective investigation in the hope of apprehending the perpetrators of this heinous crime and their accomplices. We know that Chidinma Adaora Ojukwu has been arrested and we know that investigation is continuing. Our client is however convinced that there is much more to this than is already apparent from the police investigation," he added.

The statement added, "Our client hereby demands that the false publications and the several ordinarily unrelated stories and pictures of late Michael Usifo Ataga and Brenda Ataga be pulled down with immediate effect failing which our client shall take prompt and appropriate action to seek redress for the apparent instances of libel and slander as appropriate."

In another statement, the brother of the deceased, Isi Ataga, said the false reports will have a long term impact in the lives of his brother's children.

"His children will grow up to read unkind and thoughtless words from thousands of people who have joined the lynching party in the press and the blogosphere," he said.

He expressed concern about their ageing parents having to cope with the vicious murder of their son and the stories that have trailed it.

The alleged murderer, Ms Ojukwu, a 300 level student at the University of Lagos confessed to having murdered Usifo at a service apartment where she and Usifo had gone for a tryst after she claimed that they had both consumed hard drugs. She claims they have been in a sexual relationship for four months and she had been provoked by the victim trying to force himself on her when she was not in the mood.

Despite her detailed confession, it is clear that the Ataga family are not entirely convinced.

"We, the Ataga family, are grateful to the Nigeria Police for pursuing the investigation, however, like you, we have many unanswered questions. Somethings don't add up," Isi said. "The more you add to the false information in the press and on social media, the harder it is for the police to do their work and fully solve this case. The harder it is for the grieving family to recover from the loss of their beloved son."

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Even the lawyers suggest that they don't buy into Ms Ojukwu's narrative when in their statement they suggested that there might be more than one person involved in the murder.

Many people have doubted that Ms Ojukwu could have committed the crime alone as Mr Ataga was in good physical form before his murder.

The suspect said she acted alone and no other evidence has indicated the involvement of a third party.

Until the police conclude their investigation and the matter goes to court, speculations will always continue as to what truly transpired on July 15 between Mr Ataga and Chidinma Ojukwu.

For now, both the family of the victim and the suspected murderer are struggling to come to terms with the incident of that day that will change the cause of the lives of both families forever.
jos  The Independent Petroleum Marketers Association of Nigeria (IPMAN), on Monday, reversed its earlier decision to shut down filling stations in the country following attacks on its National Secretariat last Friday by the police.

The group said no reason was given by the police on the clampdown on their Secretariat.

This development, according to IPMAN National Secretary, Alhaji Danladi Garba Pasali, came after the federal government, Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and National Assembly intervened on the matter.

Pasali said the intervention by the Presidency, NNPC, National Assembly, the Police headquarters, some officials, and the Minister of Justice, on Monday, forced the group to reverse its decision, calling on all members to halt the planned shutdown of the filling stations.

However, the South West Zonal chapter of IPMAN yesterday distanced itself from the planned nationwide strike directed by the leadership of the association over the invasion of its National Secretariat by security operatives.

To this end, IPMAN South West zone has directed its members to ensure hitch-free business activities at all the depots in the region.

The IPMAN chairman in the zone, Alhaji Dele Tajudeen Lamidi, who spoke with journalists on Monday in Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital, said the zonal leadership of the association was boycotting the directive of its national leadership because of "serious reasoning which could result in devastating effects on the economy of the country as a whole."

National Public Relations Officer of IPMAN, Yakubu Suleiman, had disclosed in an interview with journalists in Jos on Sunday that the body might shut down all filling stations and cut down supplies should the federal government and IGP fail to address attacks by the police on their members.
The House of Representatives is considering a bill which seeks to create a Hydrographic Survey under the Nigerian Navy with the mandate to be in charge of survey and charting of waterways.

The Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency, NIMASA, on Monday, expressed opposition to the Hydrographic Survey bill.

The agency opposed the bill over what it called "apparent militarisation" of the yet to be created agency.

The position of the agency was presented by the Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Transportation, Magdalene Ajayi, at the public hearing on the bill organised by the House Committee on Navy.

NIMASA, at the hearing, adopted the position of the ministry of transportation.

The bill, sponsored by Yusuf Gagdi (APC, Plateau), who is also the chairman of the committee on Navy, seeks to create the agency, under the Nigerian Navy, with the mandate to be in charge of survey and charting of waterways.

The bill was introduced on 23 July, 2020 and passed for second reading on 8 December, 2020.

Mrs Ajayi said, "hydrography is important to both military and civil authority, but the bill seeks to make hydrography the primary responsibility of the Navy".

She said, "There seems to be an apparent militarisation of the proposed agency. Hydrography as a discipline is subject to both military and civil authorities worldwide. Hydrographic services are relevant to naval authority, to commercial shipping entities.

"The present bill appears to situate the subject as of primary interest only to the Navy, leading to an error, in our view, in establishing a national agency as an arm to the Nigerian Navy. The emphasis is National.

"Appointment of the hydrographer of the nation under section 5 'shall be subject to the provision of the armed forces Act'. The implication of this, and other related provisions in our laws, is that a non-military person cannot be appointed as the hydrographer of the nation, no matter how eminently qualified that person is. It is, therefore, in the opinion of the ministry of transportation that it will have negative consequences on a national agency.

"The agency should be set up as an open institution in collaboration between the military and civil authorities, in order to attract the best professionals, wherever they may be."

She added that the bill conflicts with some functions of NIMASA.

Responding to the position of the Ministry of Transportation, the Hydrographer of the Navy, Chukwuemeka Okafor, a rear admiral, said "hydrography is too vital to the national security of the country, hence, the agency cannot be domiciled with any civilian agency".

He noted that the data that are collected mostly have implications on defence.

He added that the country is losing out due to lack of proper charting of waterways.

"Hydrography has national security implications, during a hydrographic survey on a particular body of water, a huge volume of information is acquired from that area, only a small percentage of this is released as civil hydrography, other information that facilitates military operations in that area are kept in a restricted area, and released to the appropriate arms of the military for national defence.

"Saying this without prejudice that there is nothing like civil and military hydrography, once you deploy a sensor in the water, the sensor will capture every information about that body of water, and when that information comes to the shore, the office where it is processed will analyse, the civil and defence information. It will be a huge National Security mistake to domicile this agency in the arms of a purely civil institution."

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The office of the Surveyor-General also made a case that the agency should be under its control.

The Surveyor-General of the Federation, Adeniran Taiwo, while speaking at the hearing, welcomed the bill but noted that his office should superintend over the proposed agency.

"The Office of the surveyor General of the Federation should superintend over this proposed Agency. This is in line with the provision of the Survey Coordination Act CAP. S17 LFN 2004," he said.

The chairman of the committee said the recommendation of all the agencies will be attached to the bill when it is transmitted to the president if passed by the lawmakers.
Police in Lilongwe have netted Former Governor of the Reserve Bank of Malawi (RBM) Dr. Dalitso Kabambe and DPP's leadership contender, who was on the run in connection with K4.3 billion he authorised to be transferred to an FDH Bank account.

Police national spokesperson James Kadadzera has confirmed the cops have arrested the former governor and is being held at Lingadzi Police sub-station in Area 18, Lilongwe.

Said Kadadzera: "It is true we are holding in our custody at Lingadzi police station a former governor of the Reserve Bank of Malawi in connection with some matters that we are investigating."

Other former senior RBM officials were arrested yesterday and are still in police custody.

It is reportedly in hiding following revelations that he authorised the transfer of K4.3 billion to FDH Bank account number 1024883104001 the night before the Malawi Electoral Commission (MEC) announced results of the court-sanctioned Fresh Presidential Election.

The FDH bank account is held in the name of Chief Elections Officer, which corporate governance experts and commentators faulted.

Police have arrested former Deputy Governor Henry Mathanga, who is currently involved in a legal challenge for constructive dismissal.

Arrested as well are retired Director Rodrick Wiyo of Financial Markets and a Senior Dealer/Manager Leah Donga who is also named in the forensic audit of the bank as having a hand in the abuse of Covid-19 funds.

Kabambe, a Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) presidential hopeful is said to have given an excuse to for not reporting to the National Police Headquarters in Lilongwe today.

Previously MEC defended its position when this obscure account existence was revealed saying: "The nation should be informed that this amount was duly authorized by the Accountant General.

"These amounts were meant to facilitate payment of printing of ballot papers and other bills for electoral activities, and allowances for security officers, polling staff and other service providers during the polling exercise."

Nyasa Times understands that more arrests are underway at the Treasury, Malawi Electoral Commission and DPP officials.

Former Minister of Finance Dr Goodall Gondwe is said to be on the list of those to be picked in the next 48 hours.
Tunis/Tunisia  The full lockdown will extended for an extra week in Siliana starting Monday, the local committee to fight natural disasters said.

The decision was made during a meeting Monday in the wake of the deterioration of epidemiological situation.

Governor Abdelrazek Dkhil said the 8 pm - 5 am curfew will be in force for another week. These measures exempt vital sectors and candidates sitting national exams.

These measures include a ban on travel outside the governorate, demonstrations and ceremonies and closing souks, cafes, restaurants and hammams.

Two cases of the Indian variant were detected in the region, Local Health Director Adel Hadadi told TAP.

Siliana saw 5 new fatalities over the last 24 hours, including an 11-year-old boy suffering from chronic diseases, he further said.
Saif Al  Islam Gadhafi, son of the late Libyan autocrat Moammar Gadhafi, hasn't been seen in public since his rebel captors released him from detention in 2017. But he appears now to be mulling a run for the presidency of the war-torn north African country in elections the United Nations and Western powers are pressing for in December.

The prospect of Saif figuring in the elections is unnerving Western diplomats and international democracy advisers, who say Libya's troubled peace process has enough major obstacles to overcome without Gadhafi's son, a highly polarizing figure, getting involved.

Saif, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court on war-crime charges, has been talking via intermediaries with Western media. A major U.S. newspaper has conducted a formal interview with him, which is slated for publication next month, intermediaries say.

"It is still rather unclear whether he is actually putting himself out there as a candidate. I will believe it only when I actually hear him or see him in video make that pitch," Claudia Gazzini of the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank, told VOA.

Hafed al-Ghwell, a Libyan-American and senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, says he doesn't think Saif has made up his mind. "But if he does, I think he will have significant support," he adds.

Saif's candidacy would likely prove popular in the desert south of the country and among former Gadhafi loyalists -- and he might be able to persuade many ordinary Libyans, exhausted by a decade of strife, that he is the best bet for a stable future, say observers.

Risks

But his candidacy also risks triggering more violence. Earlier this year, pro-Gadhafi media in Libya claimed General Khalifa Haftar, a warlord who rules eastern Libya, and his son, Saddam, were plotting to kill Saif. Haftar has presidential ambitions. Some Islamists at the forefront of the 2011 uprising are also deeply opposed to a return of a Gaddafi family member.

"There are certainly many, not only Islamists, who would kill him for his role during the revolution, if there is a chance," reckons Wolfgang Pusztai, who served in Libya as Austria's defense attache between 2007 and 2011, and is a senior advisor at the Austrian Institute for European and Security Policy.

There has been considerable talk in Libya since 2017 that Gadhafi's second son, who during the last years of his father's rule presented himself as a reformer, might one day try to stage a political comeback. Freed in June 2017 after six years as a prisoner of a militia in the town of Zintan, 136 kilometers southwest of Tripoli, Saif, aged 48, has been maneuvering behind the scenes.

Some Libyans say he could have saved his country much pain if he had split from his father on the eve of the 2011 uprising, which friends say he did seriously consider. If he had, it might have brought his father down without any fighting, they agree. The victorious rebels sentenced Saif to death in 2015 but a Tripoli court overturned the sentence and ruled there should be a new trial. Saif is believed still to be in Zintan.

Three of Saif's brothers were killed in 2011 an another two are in jail, in Libya and Lebanon. His sister Aisha lives in Oman in exile. His adopted sister Hana is married to one of his confidants and lives in Egypt.

Since 2011, Libya has been ensnared in dispute and violence with rival governments, militias and warlords, backed by a variety of foreign powers, battling for mastery.

Encouraged by the U.N. and Western powers, Libyan rivals agreed last March to a provisional administration, the Government of National Unity, GNU, to run the country until parliamentary and presidential elections are held on December 24. The temporary government's mandate runs out then.

Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken joined foreign ministers from 17 states, including Russia and Turkey, which both have military forces present in Libya, at a conference in Berlin to urge Libya's parliamentarians and factions to keep to the election timetable and to pass an election law. The European Union has warned it would consider imposing sanctions on any Libyan leaders who obstruct the process.

Hasty elections

But some observers fear the U.N. and Western powers may be in too much haste and might be repeating what they see as a mistake in 2012 in pressing for elections too early after Gadhafi's ouster. Critics say there has been too much focus on a date for the elections and not enough on the process and what is needed to have elections, if they are to be widely accepted in Libya as legitimate.

Talks are deadlocked on an election law and over whether a referendum should be held first on a draft constitution, which would delay elections for months, if not longer.

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"On elections, we are still at a standstill as regards to a consensus on which elections to have," says Gazzini.

"Despite the strong show of support for Presidential and Parliamentary elections in December voiced by the participants of the Berlin conference, Libyan constituencies remain divided on this. Plus there are some local stakeholders who are still pushing against," she adds.

Former Austrian defense attache Wolfgang Pusztai says there are few good alternatives.

"Elections in December are not a very good option for Libya, but unfortunately there is no better one. The main obstacles on the way to elections are the lack of consensus about a constitutional basis for these elections and the disagreement about the way the president shall be elected. The main challenges for the elections themselves are the dire security situation in several parts of the country, including the greater capital region," he told VOA.

But Pusztai believes a president -- or better still a three-person presidential council -- is needed. "A country in crisis like Libya needs a strong leader to overcome difficulties, at least for an interim period. This must not be confused with a dictator. The last 10 years have already clearly demonstrated how far a weak leadership can get."
French President Emmanuel Macron speaks during the Proposed High Level Seminar on the manufacturing of vaccines in Africa at the at University of Pretoria Future Life Campus in Pretoria, May 28, 2021 (NB NB - this is a non-derivative licence, do not crop this pic - Renee)

Istanbul  Leaders of Turkey and France are pledging to ease tensions after months of trading insults, but tensions between them remain over their competing interests in Africa.

French foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian declared Turkey and France are in what he described as "recovery period" after the French and Turkish President met on the sidelines of the NATO summit earlier this month and pledged to resolve their differences.

French President Emmanuel Macron and Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan had engaged in a war of words as the two leaders competed for international influence. Sinan Ulgen of the Istanbul-based Centre for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies says there has been a diplomatic breakthrough but he voices caution.

"We can talk about a reset with France, but it's a question about how deep that reset will go. This is part of a broader reset that Turkey has been trying in terms of its foreign relations with the West. However, none of the areas of disagreement with France have been resolved," said Ulgen.

Libya remains a crucial point of tension. France and Turkey backed rival sides in the Libyan civil war, and Paris is at the forefront of an international call for the withdrawal of Turkish troops from the north African country. Last year, Turkish and French warships almost clashed off the shores of Libya over French claims that Turkey was violating a Libyan arms embargo. But Ulgen says both sides now recognize the need for diplomacy.

"There is realization both Ankara and Paris that some progress can be achieved, if the two are less confrontational and work diplomatically towards some sort of negotiated formula," says Ulgen.

A Turkish presidential advisor has suggested France and Turkey could extend cooperation beyond Libya to the rest of Africa to contain China's growing influence.

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Ankara is building up its presence on the continent, especially in the Sahel region. But Turkish moves to develop ties with former French colonies like Niger and Mali is causing alarm in Paris, says Jalel Harchouai, a senior fellow at the Geneva-based Glob

Harchaoui says the Sahel could become an increasing point of tension rather than cooperation.

"There is a real rivalry," he said. "There is an actual competition in the Sahel. Because Turkey wants to be present militarily, it is already very present diplomatically, and it's very ambitious commercially. We are talking about a time horizon of fifteen years or thirty years. So if France sees an adversary in that, I think that France [is] correct because there is not enough room for both former colonizers of the area."

For now, both French and Turkish Presidents appear interested in downplaying their differences. But that could change with next year's French presidential elections, where the role of Islam in French society is a campaign issue.

Erdogan portrays himself as a defender of global Muslim rights and has in the past accused Macron of Islamophobia -- an issue Erdogan also uses for leverage in majority-Muslim African countries, much to Paris' unease.
Algiers  President of the Republic, Abdelmadjid Tebboune received, Monday at the headquarters of the Presidency of the Republic, presidents of the El-Moustakbel Front Party, Abdelaziz Belaid, and El Bina El Watani Movement Party, Abdelkader Bengrina, and this, within the framework of the enlarged political consultations for the designation of the new government, said the Presidency of the Republic in a statement.

As part of the political consultations for the designation of the new government, the President of the Republic, Abdelmadjid Tebboune received President of the Front El-Moustakbel, Abdelaziz Belaid, accompanied by members of the national office of the party, and President of the Movement El Bina El Watani, Abdelkader Bengrina, at the head of a delegation made up of members of the national office of the Movement , "said the statement.

The meeting took place in the presence of Director of Cabinet at the Presidency of the Republic, Noureddine Bardad-Daidj, Secretary General of the Presidency of the Republic, Mohamed El Amine Messaid, and adviser to the President of the Republic responsible for legal and judicial affairs, Boualem Boualem.
Tunis/Tunisia  Pak-Africa Friendship Day was celebrated by the Embassy of Pakistan on June 26, 2021 in Gammarth (Tunis Northern province).

The event was attended by representatives of the Tunisian Chamber of Commerce & Industry, official guests from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Municipality of Tunis and Gammarth and civil society and media representatives.

In his remarks on the occasion, Chief Guest Riadh Essid, Director General of the America Asia-Pacific Division, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Tunisians Abroad, Republic of Tunisia, recalled the valuable support provided by Pakistan for Tunisia's independence and since then collaboration and cooperation between the two countries has been increasing.

He pointed out in this regard, that the 3rd Session of Bilateral Political Consultations had been held in the course of this year, and that Minister of Foreign Affairs Othman Jerandi is expected to pay a visit to Pakistan to co-chair the 10th Session of the Joint Ministerial Commission, scheduled to be held in Islamabad in October 2021.

Taking the floor on the occasion, Charge d' Affaires (a.i.) of Pakistan to Tunisia Shafiq Ahmed affirmed that Pakistan is willing to develop trade with Tunisia, considered a Gateway to Africa, and is keen on establishing triangular cooperation between Tunisia-Pakistan and third African countries.

He Indicated in this regard, that Pakistan's diplomacy had shifted focus from geo-politics to geo-economics, noting that the new vision of transformed Pakistan was centered on economic security.

He further said that the great potential for economic opportunities in Africa has been tapped through the Government's "Engage Africa Initiative, aimed to step up trade, investment and economic interaction with African countries.
In the Lagos Judicial Division Holden at Lagos On Friday, the 14th day of May, 2021

Before Their Lordships

Chidi Nwaoma Uwa

Tunde O. Awotoye

James Gambo Abundaga

Justices, Court of Appeal

CA/L/174/2019

Between

Federal Republic of Nigeria Appellant

And

Chief Mike Ozekhome (SAN) Respondent

(Lead Judgement delivered by Honourable Chidi Nwaoma Uwa, JCA)

Facts

The Appellant approached the Federal High Court, Lagos, seeking an ex-parte order of interim attachment and to freeze for a period of 120 days, an account belonging to and operated by the Respondent's law firm domiciled with Guaranty Trust Bank Plc. By the said application and lone evidence of the Appellant, the court made an interim order freezing the Respondent's account. Thereafter, the Respondent filed an application before the court to discharge the interim order made.

The grounds for the application to discharge the order were stated as - (i) suppression of facts; and (ii) non-compliance with the rules of court and judicial authorities regulating the grant of ex-parte applications by the Applicant. The Appellant opposed the application by way of counter-affidavit, further affidavit and written address, while the Respondent reacted by filing a further affidavit and written address. The court heard arguments of parties on the application, and delivered its ruling, setting aside the interim order freezing the account belonging to and operated by the Respondent's law firm.

Dissatisfied with the ruling of court, the Appellant appealed the decision to the Court of Appeal. Though the Respondent argued a Preliminary Objection/Preliminary Point along with his argument on the issues for determination, the Court of Appeal did not countenance the submissions in respect of thereof and deemed the objection as abandoned for failure to comply with the rules of court on filing of Preliminary Objection.

Issues for Determination

The issues for determination for resolution of the appeal were:

1. Whether having regard to the facts and circumstances of this case, the court below has the requisite jurisdiction to set aside its own order of interim attachment before the expiration of 120 days granted to the Appellant to conclude its investigation.

2. Whether having regard to the facts and circumstances of this case, the learned trial Judge was not in error when, in setting aside its own order, relied on the evidence that the sum of N75 million received by the Respondent was for services rendered but failed to rely on the evidence of the Appellant showing that the said sum were proceeds of the unlawful activities of the Respondent's clients and his cronies.

3. Whether the lower court was not in error when it held that Legal Practitioners are excluded from the definition of Designated Non-Financial Institution contained in Section 25 of the Money Laundering Act, 2011 (as amended), and not under obligation to comply with the provision of Section 10 of the said Act.

Arguments

Arguing the first issue raised, the Appellant submitted that the jurisdiction of the court to set aside its own order or an order of a court of co-ordinate jurisdiction is rare and special. Relying on the authority of EFCC v FAYOSE (2018) LPELR-44131(CA) 67-69, the Appellant argued that the lower court was wrong to have set aside its own order which it made with requisite jurisdiction, without evidence, misrepresentation or suppression of facts before it. Responding to the argument on this issue, the Respondent submitted that a court of law has the inherent power to set aside its decision or that of a court of co-ordinate jurisdiction on the ground of misrepresentation, suppression of material facts, or where irregularly granted - AGHA v COMMISSIONER FOR LOCAL GOVERNMENT (2016) LPELR-40544(CA). Counsel argued that the Appellant failed to show how the ruling of the lower court amounted to denial of fair hearing, and occasioned miscarriage of justice. He posited that the decision of the lower court on the ex-parte application was given without jurisdiction ab initio, and ought to have been set aside even without an application by the Respondent; more so, an ex-parte application does not operate in perpetuity.

On the second issue, counsel submitted on behalf of the Appellant, that the lower court was in error when it ignored the evidence presented by the Appellant, which established the unlawful source of the sum of money transferred by the then Governor of Ekiti State to the Respondent, but relied on the evidence of the Respondent that, as at the time the money was transferred to the Respondent, the account of the erstwhile Governor was unfrozen. Counsel posited that the fact that the account which housed the proceeds of the alleged unlawful act was not frozen, cannot be a ground for the Respondent to receive, retain, use and/or take possession of funds which he ought to have known was proceed of unlawful activities, relying on Section 15 of the Money laundering Prohibition Act, 2011 (as amended). Opposing the Appellant's submission on the issue, the Respondent argued that the decision of the Federal High Court, Ado-Ekiti, which was the extant decision at the time the account was unfrozen, was to the effect that the sum of N75 million paid to the Respondent was for his professional fees for services rendered. He argued that it is not the law that a legal practitioner should enquire about the source of the money from which his professional fee is paid, especially from a State Governor. More so, a legal practitioner is entitled to his fees - GUARANTY TRUST BANK PLC & ANOR v UDOKA ANYANWU ESQ. (2011) LPELR-4220(CA).

Regarding the third issue, the Appellant argued that the lower court was wrong when it held that legal practitioners are excluded from the statutory list of Designated Non-Financial Institutions, contrary to the provisions of Section 25 of the Money Laundering Prohibition Act, 2011 (as amended). Counsel submitted that the role of the court is to interpret the law, and not to amend it. Counsel urged the court to interpret Sections 10 and 25 of the Act in line with the intention of the law makers. Responding to this submission, the Respondent argued that the provisions of Section 25 of the Money Laundering Act does not apply to legal practitioners. Counsel relied on the decision in FHC/CS/CS/173/2015 REGISTERED TRUSTEES OF THE NIGERIAN BAR ASSOCIATION v A-G FEDERATION & CBN, where the provisions of Section 192 of the Evidence Act was relied on, in holding that the said Section 25 of the Money Laundering Act does not relate to legal practitioners and same was declared null and void.

Court's Judgement and Rationale

Deciding the first issue, the court held that a court has the inherent power to set aside its decision or that of a court of co-ordinate jurisdiction, under special circumstances. Where a court makes a decision without jurisdiction or where the decision is afflicted by another virus capable of rendering the decision ineffective, null and void, the court can invoke its inherent jurisdiction or power to set same aside - UBA PLC v MAGAMA NIGERIA LIMITED & ANOR. (2013) LPELR-20685(CA). A court of law can set aside, vary or discharge its ex-parte order under the circumstances provided for in decided authorities. In this case, the evidence before the court showed that the money was paid into the account of the Respondent from an unencumbered account of the Governor; thus, the lower court found that the Respondent did not commit any infraction to warrant his account being blocked and frozen by the Appellant. The application by the Respondent for an order setting aside the earlier order of court freezing the Respondent's account showed that there was misrepresentation of facts, non-disclosure and suppression of material facts by the Appellant, in securing the interim order to freeze the account operated by the Respondent's law firm. The Appellant failed to disclose to the lower court, that at the time of the ex-parte application, there was an order of court in place which unfroze the account of the then Governor of Ekiti State before the sum of money was transferred to the Respondent's law firm. It follows that the interim order of attachment or forfeiture to freeze the account of the Respondent's law firm was made without jurisdiction, and rightly set aside by the court. The application to set aside the order was also in line with the rules of court, which allows a party to apply to have the issuing court set aside its ex-parte order within seven days. The court held further that the allegation of lack of fair hearing by the Appellant, was unsubstantiated.

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Resolving issue two, the appellate court held that the decision of the Federal High Court, Ado-Ekiti which unfroze the account of Mr. Ayodele Fayose, from which the professional fee was paid to the Respondent, was a subsisting and binding decision at the time the ex-parte order was made. Though the Appellant alleged that the decision was perverse, it was not set aside. By implication, it remains the law, valid and binding, vacating an earlier order of court on the subject on the basis that the court acted without jurisdiction. Further, the court held that a legal practitioner is entitled to his professional fees for services rendered, and such fee cannot rightly be labelled as proceeds of crime. It is not the law that a legal practitioner will go into enquiry, before receiving fee from his client. There was nothing on record to show that the funds received by the Respondent's law firm was pursuant to an order of court, or Proceeds from unlawful activities.

Deciding the third issue, the court relied on the decision of REGISTERED TRUSTEES OF THE NIGERIAN BAR ASSCOCIATION v A-G. FEDERATION & ORS - FHC/CS/173/2015. The court held that legal practitioners are excluded from the definition of designated non-financial institutions as contained in the Money Laundering Prohibition Act (which the court held was inconsistent with Section 192 of the Act). This decision defines the law until same is set aside - AKINTOGUN v LPDC (2014) LPELR-22941.

Appeal Dismissed; Ruling of the lower court Affirmed.

Representation

U.U. Buhari Esq. for the Appellant.

Ejike Onuoha Esq. for the Respondent.

Reported by Optimum Publishers Limited, Publishers of the Nigerian Monthly Law Report (NMLR)(An affiliate of Babalakin & Co.)
The Ogun State Attorney-General and Commissioner for Justice, Mr. Akingbolahan Adeniran, has said that the training of the State Task Force on Human Trafficking with other relevant Agencies, was an additional advantage to eradicate the high rate of human trafficking, especially across the State's border areas.

Adeniran made this known during a one-day workshop on "The Basic Knowledge and Skills in Assisting Victims of Human Trafficking", held at the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology Conference Room, Oke-Mosan, Abeokuta, the State capital.

The Commissioner said that it is imperative to collaborate with relevant Ministries, Department and Agencies (MDAs), Non-Governmental Organisation (NGOs) and Security Agencies to tackle the high rate of trafficking, adding that the teamwork would further strengthen the efforts to solve problems relating with human trafficking.

Also Speaking, the Special Adviser to the Governor on Legal Matters, Mr. Olumide Mustapha, said working together with the law enforcement agency is a strategy adopted to fast-track the dispensation of justice to the victims of human trafficking, noting that with a lot of public sensitisation on sign's to watch out for during the process of trafficking, would also go a long way in reducing the menace.

He said issues on human trafficking would now get fast dispensation of justice, for the fact that the alteration of the Constitution has expanded the scope of the National Industrial Court (NIC) to take up child related matters that have to do with human trafficking, adding that cases with NIC were resolved much quicker than that of any other court.

In her submission, the Country Lead for Child First Welfare Foundation of Nigeria (CFWFN), Mrs Peju Osoba, said their role is to get mentors with a similar experience to mentor the victims out of the traumatic experience, saying that the NGO has been able to support over 200 victims of human traffickers.

She said that now that the NGO is part of the Ogun State Task Force on human trafficking, it would drastically reduce the sharp practice to the barest minimum, stressing that the kind of training and infrastructure put in place to assist the victims of human trafficking, would also encourage all the major stakeholders to join hands in the fight against human trafficking in the State.
THE Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission, RMAFC, has revealed that a new Revenue Allocation Formula among the three tiers of government (federal, states and local governments) would be ready before the end of the year.

Chairman of the commission, Engr. Elias Mbam, revealed this while receiving members of the National Assembly Service Commission, led by Engr. Ahmed Khadi Amshi, in his office, in Abuja, according to a statement by Chris Nwachukwu, the agency's spokesman, yesterday.

Engr. Mbam said a comprehensive review to ensure a more equitable distribution of the accrued revenue into the Federation Account to the three tiers of government would commence in July and would be concluded before the end of 2021.

He added that the formula for the sharing of federation revenue to the various states and local governments would also be reviewed.

The RMAFC boss also disclosed that the review of remuneration for political and Judicial officeholders would equally take off as soon as the Federal Government released funds for the exercise.

Engr. Mbam described RMAFC as one of the 14 executive bodies contained in the 1999 constitution as amended and saddled with the statutory function of reviewing from time to time the RAF and principles in operation to ensure conformity with changing realities alongside monitoring appropriate revenue accruals to the Federation account by the revenue generating agencies.

In his speech, Engr. Amshi pledged the collaboration of the National Assembly Commission in the area of manpower development, considering that RMAFC has the same organizational structure as the National Assembly.

He appreciated RMAFC in its mandate of boosting the revenue generation of the Nation and its equitable distribution to the three tiers of government.

Under the current revenue sharing formula, the federal government takes 52.68 percent, the states 26.72 percent and the local government councils, 20.60 percent with 13 percent derivation revenue going to the oil nine producing states.

Vanguard News Nigeria
No fewer than 20,000 rice farmers have benefited from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Anchor Borrowers Programme in Bauchi State.

Dr Yahaya Adamu, the State Chairman Rice Farmer Association of Nigeria (RIFAN), disclosed this at the CBN fair for promoting financial stability and economic development on Monday in Bauchi.

He said that 20,000 farmers benefited from farm inputs under the scheme as part of the empowerment programme for farmers in the state.

Adamu said that the inputs included assorted fertiliser, pesticides, high-yield seeds as well as technical know-how to operate in farms.

"With the Initiative of anchor borrowers' programme, rice farmers have been encouraged to bridge the deficit in rice farming in the country.

"Rice farming received a boost across all the states in the country by supplying rice to milers in pyramids.

"Very soon rice farmers would begin to export the commodity to other countries of the world," he said

The RIFAN chairman said that rice farmers have changed the old model of farming to business oriented farming because of the large hectares of farm land acquired through the anchor borrowers scheme.

Adamu commended the Federal Government for initiating the scheme to support not only RIFAN but all farmers across the states.

In his remarks, Mr Osita Nwanisobi, CBN Fair Team Lead, Director, Corporate Communication Department, said the objective of the fair was to create awareness on promoting financial stability and economic development.

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"CBN wants to build the financial system of the country that is safe, sound and in line with the best possible financial practices.

"The bank is ever ready to listen to the people of Nigeria in order to know how best to serve them with the aim of improving the financial base of their businesses, particularly the small and medium-scale businesses.

Nwanisobi pointed out that the CBN was committed to developing financial interest in order to grow the country's economy through the various intervention programmes which have been made easily accessible to the public.

He urged the participants to speak out in order to assist the CBN to know the areas of the intervention that need to be improved upon for effectiveness.

On his part, Mr Idris Haladu, the CBN branch Controller Bauchi, represented by Malam Adamu Mele, Head of Banking at the Fair, said the bank would avail opportunities for small scale and medium businesses to operate and access facilities.

He assured that the CBN would continue to open its doors for Nigerians to come and make enquiries on the interventions available to the public for accessibility.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that participants at the CBN fair included farmers, small business groups, government officials, traders, contractors among others.

Vanguard News Nigeria
The Director, Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) Mr. Sarki Auwalu, has reiterated the commitment of the organisation to support investments in the oil and gas industry to the benefit of all stakeholders.

Auwalu stated this when a delegation from Portland Gas in company with their technical partners from Turkey, Negmar Shipping Investment paid him a visit in his office in Abuja to foster collaboration and explore business opportunities with DPR, specifically in the area of gas development.

A statement by Head, Public Affairs of DPR, Mr. Paul Osu, quoted Auwalu as reassuring the delegation of the department's commitment to creating opportunities for investments and enabling businesses in the Nigerian oil and gas industry.

Auwalu reiterated the federal government's declaration of the, 'Decade of Gas,' as very timely, stressing that it will open an array of investments for Nigeria's gas resources, including gas to power, gas to people, gas-based industries, autogas and other gas infrastructure development.
Birnin Kebbi  In continuation of its efforts in the fight against unemployment and youth restiveness, Khadimiya For Justice and Development Initiative graduated another set of youths on different skills in Argungu.

Speaking at the event, Attorney-General of the Federation, Alhaji Abubakar Malami(SAN) said he placed premium on job creation, considering its role in making youths self-reliant.

The Minister, represented by the Chairman National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons Abubakar Usman, said from inception Khadimiyya Foundation has successfully trained more than 2,000 youths on different skills across the state, and will continue to accord priority attention to wealth creation through its various interventions on youths' empowerments.

Abubakar Malami, while congratulating the graduands, urged them to put what they learned to use to benefit themselves and society.

He said the Federal Government will continue to formulate policies and programmes that are aimed at checkmating the prevalence of banditry activities and insecurity in some parts of the country.

Bashir Garba Illo, the Founder of Bashir Garba Illo Foundation, said of the about three million people in Argungu, over 60% of them are youths.

According to him, it informed their decision to lift some of these youths out of poverty by equipping them with different skills.

He said he was inspired with various interventions of Khadimiyya on youth and hence his decision to collaborate with Khadimiyya for his little contributions on the fight against unemployment.

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In a welcome address, Managing Director Achono Global Resources, Alhaji Aminu Sakaba stated that it was not the first time they are organising skills acquisition for youth under the sponsorship of the Minister of Justice Abubakar Malami(SAN) and Bashir Illo, as one was organised for over 100 beneficiaries in Gwandu Emirate.

He thanked the AGF for his support, the Emir of Argungu, Local Government Chairman and Principal GTC for making facilities available throughout the programme.

The skills the beneficiaries got include animal husbandry, feed making, food processing, car wash, hair shampoo, perfume and air refresher among others.

He said the two foundations were planning to organise the same programme in Yauri and Zuru emirates.

The Emir of Argungu Alhaji Sama'ila Muhammad Mera, CON, represented by Magajin Gari Alhaji Aminu Musa, thanked Abubakar Malami, Khadimiyya and Bashir Garba Illo for the intervention and expressed readiness to support initiatives aimed at assisting the youths.

Vanguard News Nigeria
The African Development Bank Group's (AfDB) shareholders have shown strong support for the Bank's proposals to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic as the continent faces the possibility of a third wave of infection amid poor vaccine access.

This emerged from the 56th Annual Meetings of the Bank Group. The three-day event included the 47th meeting of the Governors of the African Development Fund, the Bank's concessional lending arm.

Part of the proposal, according to a statement, was that the Bank act as a conduit for International Monetary Fund (IMF) special drawing rights, which it would then on-lend to African countries.

AfDB Group President Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, proposed an African stability mechanism, modeled on a European one, to act as a firewall against external shocks.

Adesina also pledged that the Bank would strengthen support to African countries as they tackle the pandemic's economic and health impacts.

Looking ahead, Adesina said the Bank would invest heavily in domestic vaccine manufacturing and in Africa's healthcare system, noting that only 51 per cent of public health facilities have basic water and sanitation, and only 31 per cent of healthcare facilities have electricity.

The president underlined the fact that Africa imports 60-70 per cent of its pharmaceutical drugs.

On the final day of the meetings, Adesina said: "The lives of 1.2 billion people in Africa are at risk... we must give hope to the poor, the vulnerable, by ensuring that every African, regardless of their income level, gets access to quality healthcare, as well as health insurance and social protection."

Ghana's Finance Minister and Chairperson of the AfDB Board of Governors, Kenneth Ofori-Atta, cautioned at the start of the meetings that Africa risked being left behind as a result of the pandemic and was "staring down the possibility of a lost decade, where its economic trajectory pulls further away from that of the rest of the world."
Monrovia  Rev. J. Emmanuel Bowier, the fiery former minister in late President Samuel Kanyon Doe's government has died.

Rev. Bowier succumbed to death after a long battle with diabetes, close family members confirmed to FrontPageAfrica Sunday.

He was pronounced dead at the Fidelity Clinic in Monrovia.

He leaves to mourn his wife, Mrs. Ruth Bowier, and four children - Joyce, Faith, Tayenoh and Willie.

He was 71.

In recent years, Rev. Bowier made his name as one of Liberia's noted and reliant historians.

He served in recent years as a lecturer at the Foreign Service Institute at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

He was a stern critic of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and the current Weah-led government and once predicted a fallout between President George Weah and Madam Sirleaf just as the fallout between former Presidents Edwin J. Barclay and William V.S. Tubman in 1955.

Rev. Bowier had often advised officials of the Weah-led government to focus more on building the image of the government rather than back biting each other.

He has often admonished President Weah to seek counsel from people who have had experience in handling issues of government and people have vast knowledge on running a government.

"In short, you have children running the system because they think like children. It is only children who have the behavior of paying debt when someone does something to them. That is the problem with the government today," he said in an interview with FrontPageAfrica.

Rev. Bowier, who is famous for his history lecture series on many radio stations in the country, often expressed concern about the trending socioeconomic issues of the country.

He is also on record for saying that at age 80, he would become the President of Liberia for which the Liberian people will ask him to rule them.

"Ten years from now, I will still be standing, because I promised to be the President of Liberia between now and when I reach 80 years old. And when I am President, I intend to develop this country, empower the people, and let them enjoy and rejoice in the Lord. Therefore, from now on, we should all work together to make this country a better place so that when I am 80 years old, this country will be much better than what it is now."
Monrovia  In an effort to alleviate multiple constraints school administrators, students, and parents encounter for the printing of test and examination papers at various public and private schools in western Liberia, Bomi County Senator Edwin Melvin Snowe has presented a huge consignment of electrical appliances and stationery to ten high schools in the county.

Senator Snowe over the week end presented a set of brand new dell computer, several ream of sheets, generator, lazer jet printer with separate ink and cartridges, voltage regulator and extension coil each to students, teachers and administrators at the various high schools in the county.

The beneficiaries include: C. H. Dewey Public High School (AM and PM), St. Dominic Catholic High School, Anderson Weamah United Methodist High School, and United Pentecostal High School.

The rest are: Mano Central High School, St. Mugaga Catholic High School, Getrude Yancy High School, Sass Town High School, and Suehn Mecca Public High School.

Making the presentation at the respective campuses of the institutions, Senator Snowe disclosed that the initiative was a "thank you" gift to the beneficiaries for their efforts applied to ensure his ascendancy at the Liberian Senate during the December 8, 2020 senatorial election.

He pointed out that the gesture is also the first of three phases of appreciation to citizens of the county in both the educational and health sectors for his overwhelming victory.

He observed that for too long, schools in the county have been struggling to draw or print out test and examinations for their respective students, and as such, the items donated will help ease the mountainous challenges parents, teachers and students normally go through on a periodic basis.

Senator Snowe added that some parents are most often compelled to go the extra mile to give their children extra money, apart from their tuition or registration fees, to pay for the printing of their tests or examinations on their respective campuses.

He emphasized that in some instances, school administrators are constrained to either commute from the county to Monrovia, or are charged exorbitant amount by commercial typists to print the test or examination papers of their students.

According to him, the donation of the stationery and electronic appliances to the various schools will also minimize the risk and stress these school authorities go through on a regular basis just to ensure that the test or examination papers of their respective students are finalized in a timely manner.

Senator Snowe indicated that the move is also intended to buttress government's and partners' efforts to improve the country's educational system by avoiding the leaking of test or exams at these commercial typing centers before it is administered to the students.

"Sometimes last year, there were issues here where you have to take your test to Monrovia to print because, there were no computers. We came before and made a computer and printer available. During the campaign we came to speak to the students and we were informed that rogue came and broke into your offices and took away the computer and other things. Besides that, we have made this a part of our thank you tour to extend thanks to the people of Bomi for a peaceful election and electing us as your Senator".

"We have ten senior high schools in the entire county and none of those schools have computers or printers to draw test for our students. Most time you either go all the way to Monrovia or a commercial typing center to type or draw your test. So today, we have commenced our thank you tour and we have come with printer, generator, stabilizer, extension coil and others to help you print your test".

Not part of 15K

Senator Snowe was quick to point out that the funding used to purchase the items donated did not come from the US$15,000 that was given to each Representative and Senator for legislative engagement by the Government of Liberia (GOL).

He clarified that the funds did not also come from County or Social Development Funds.

According to him, the items were purchased with his personal money.

"All of these things I am giving you today is from my own money as your Senator; it is not the government money or the US$15,000 that you hear people talking about in Monrovia. It is my own resources from my pocket to the people of Bomi County".

Senator Snowe told students at the C. H. Dewey High School that his share of the US$15,000 will go directly towards the completion of the auditorium project which was initiated by fallen Bomi County Representative Tarnue Cooper.

He, however, commended his colleague Senator Morris Saytumah for also reportedly promising to contribute the amount of US$5000 towards the project.

He maintained that though the money is not enough to ensure the full completion of the project, he is optimistic that the amount will ensure that substantial portions, including roofing of the project are completed with the money.

Take preventive measures

Senator Snowe, however, used the occasion to challenged authorities of the various schools to continue to sensitize their students on the prevention and danger of the Coronavirus pandemic in Liberia.

He encouraged the school authorities to enforce all of the health protocols on the respective campuses, including social distancing and the adequate and compulsory wearing of nose mask by the students, school administrators and teaching staff as well as visitors.

"This morning I was at the John F. Kennedy Medical Center and what I saw was heartbreaking. People were lying outside on the floor, no oxygen. The hospital was out of bed. And so, I want to encourage all of you the students to please wear your nose mask. If we don't prevent or help ourselves, we will die".

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Take the vaccine

Senator Snowe further encouraged the beneficiaries to turn out en masse and take the vaccination against Covid-19.

He, however, promised to provide the amount of L$200,000 and 100 bags of rice to the first 200 students and 100 adults that will take the vaccination at the government hospital in the county.

He called on the citizens to desist from spreading rumors and speculations over the vaccination that is being administered across the country.

"I have taken two doses of the vaccination along with my 86 years old mother, my security and driver at the JFK. If this thing (vaccine) could kill, I will not take it myself or carry my ma (mother) that I love so much to take it. So, I want to appeal to you the students-you are going to school to expand your knowledge-don't let anybody fool you that the vaccine is not good and it is killing people. Go and take your vaccination".

In separate remarks, the students and school authorities commended Senator Snowe for the gesture.

They recalled that the items donated are among series of donations Senator Snowe has contributed towards the improvement of Liberia's educational system in the county.

They, however, promised to use the items donated for the purpose intended.

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Monrovia  As the Coronavirus pandemic continues to rage hell in Liberia, the Political Leader of the People's Liberation Party (PLP) has blasted at President George Manneh Weah for his alleged failure to hold accountable those in charge of Covid-19 testing at the Roberts International Airport (RIA) for their "criminal negligence" in executing their assigned tasks and responsibilities.

Dr. Cassell is also the President/Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Dr. Cassell Foundation and the Kwenyan Security Firm operating in Liberia.

As of June 24, 2021, Liberia had about 1142 confirmed cases of Covid-19, according to the National Public Health Institute of Liberia (NPHIL).

Dr. Cassell noted that it is not enough for the Liberian Chief Executive to hold an emergency cabinet meeting and instruct the health ministry to come up with regulations and protocols to combat against the pandemic and leaving those responsible for the increase in the number of Covid-19 cases in the country to go with impunity.

His assertions were contained in a statement released in Monrovia over the week end.

Dr. Cassell maintained that the "crucial and decisive action" that appears to be missing on the part of President Weah is his alleged failure to hold the COVID-19 testing company stationed at the Robert's International Airport accountable for engaging in practices that are characteristic of criminal negligence".

He emphasized that these alleged acts have resulted not only to increased incidents and death rates, but it has overwhelmed the country's poor and very limited healthcare system or infrastructure.

"To protect the public from further reoccurrence, this act of gross criminal negligence on the part of the management of the COVID-19 testing company should be fully punishable of the law and replaced with a reputable and trustworthy company".

Bribing their way through

Dr. Cassell claimed that some travellers, especially those coming into the country from "hot zones" of the pandemic, including India are allegedly offering bribe to enter into Liberia via the Roberts International Airport.

He added that this is unfortunate and disappointing for such an ugly scenario to be happening in Liberia as a country with poor healthcare infrastructures and many of its citizens who cannot afford the cost of food, let alone medical services, a public health crisis of this magnitude can quickly result to devastating medical complications and significant loss of lives.

"It is very unfortunate but yet so real that while we've made so much progress in containing the incident rate of COVID-19 over the past several months, which in large has been due to lessons on interventions (testing and contact tracing) learned from the past Ebola epidemic in Liberia; however, when those healthcare interventions and public health measures are compromised by greed on the part of COVID-19 testing company, as evidenced by reliable and credible sources, to where individuals traveling back from countries such as India that is considered "hot zone" are bribing their way out of undergoing testing for fear of a positive test result, it has consequently resulted to a catastrophic effect on the lives of the public as we're witnessing today".

Wickedness

Despite a spike in the new COVID-19 variant, Dr. Cassell further blasted at members of the 54th National Legislature for awarding themselves the amount of US$30,000.00, with half of the amount already received by them.

Members of the Liberian Legislature recently received the amount of US$15,000 each for "legislative engagement" from the Government of Liberia (GOL), through the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning.

But the move has been heavily criticized by civil society actors and others on grounds that despite the huge salaries and allowances being paid Representatives and Senators in Liberia, the money dubbed "legislative engagement" should have been diverted to the struggling health sector in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic.

"As we all know so well, the incident rate of the new strain of the COVID-19 virus has taken a toll in our nation over the past several weeks and has claimed the lives of several individuals".

"What this means is, 30 senators and 73 representatives will receive a combined total of US$3,090,000.00 which could have been allocated to properly manage the COVID-19 surge and to acquire oxygens and beds for hospitals which have been depleted and so desperately needed.

This behavior of gross insensitive and lack of empathy for the sick and dying citizens of our country at the hands of these selfish politicians is inexcusable and shall be judged by history", Dr. Cassell stated.

Prioritize citizens' health

Dr. Cassell stressed that the health of the public and the quality of lives of Liberians should be the primary responsibility of the government, and as such, it should be treated and prioritized as such.

He added that it is an "unfortunate predicament, as the vulnerable population and poor citizens of our nation are being re-victimized by another failure of our government to enforce the necessary public health regulations that could have prevented the spread of this new strain of COVID-19".

He emphasized that the most vulnerable Liberian citizens are at greatest risk of dying from this deadly disease due to "unaffordability and inaccessibility to the needed medical services".

PLP Mobile Clinic

Dr. Cassell, however, pointed out that considering the "gross disregard of the current government and politicians to enact policies that would address the public health and medical challenges of the country at this time", the PLP will launch a mobile clinic in the country very soon.

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According to him, the move will be his party own minimum way of making additional interventions in the health sector during this critical period in the history of the country.

"The PLP Mobile Clinic will be headed by professional nurses, physician assistants (PAs) and other volunteers. Their focus will be helping our disadvantaged people, who cannot afford high medical costs as they are the vulnerable population. Additionally, in the coming days, the PLP will be donating several medical supplies to hospitals and clinics to help address the current public health crisis in our nation".

Dr. Cassell stressed that the lives of Liberians, foreign visitors and dignitaries are not to be bargained with for political, financial gains and/or special interest groups.

"I strongly condemned the behaviors on the part of both the current administration and legislatures as they are inhumane, cruel, ego-centric, greed driven, and at worst, what has gotten our country in the current deplorable state".

Follow health protocols

At the same time, the PLP Vision Bearer has called on Liberian and others to continue to observe the health protocols put in place by the relevant authorities, including the compulsory and adequate wearing of nose mask and social distancing in a bid to defeat the deadly virus from Liberia.

He, however, prayed for God's saving grace and healing hands upon Liberia and its people during this historic public health crisis.
Salala  The stories of these women are heart wrenching: The Salala Rubber Corporation, a subsidiary of a massive European Agricultural Corporation named SOCFIN, owned by two of Europe's Billionaires- Bollore (French) and Fabri (Belgian) has for decades, grabbed not just the land of these poor communities but their wealth, culture, history and community driven entrepreneurship.

This aggressive imperialist investment has left many crippled in different ways: a single mother uprooted from her small farm; a mother of three abandoned by the father of her children and a pregnant mother expecting her third child abandoned by her boyfriend, just to name a few. Cumulatively, successive Liberian Government have failed them and left them to the mercy of a powerful corporation.

It was therefore a bit of relief for 112 indigenous women who have had to live rough as a result of the operations of the Salala Rubber Corporation (SRC) in Margibi and Bong Counties, Liberia. The struggling women were dislodged without mercy, from their livelihoods to make way for the expansion of the Plantation, owned by Socfin.

The Women, from eight project affected communities in the SRC Concession area are grateful beneficiaries of a micro finance loan scheme provided by the Natural Resources Women Platform (NRWP) under the "Bread for All" COVID-19 support program. Bread for All is an NGO based in Switzerland.

The eight targeted communities included Jorkporsu, Kollen-Dapolo, Diakia Town, Blomu, Dede-Ta 1, Dade Ta 2, Kuwah-ta and Moneytai, all located in Margin County.

Beatrice Kollie, 24 years old, with three children, is from Doakai Town. Beatrice had been involved with small rice farming (from-hand-mouth) as a means of livelihood. But due to the labor intensity and unsustainable nature of the farm, she had to abandon the faming work. She said the loan scheme could not have come at a better time as it gives her some hope. She showered praises on the Women Platform and her partner for the loan - after starting a small fish business. "I want to thank you people for helping us with money to sell and I also want to ask that you please increase the money in the second phase."

Comfort Graham is from Kollen Town and has lived all her life there but was uprooted from her small farm, which was her only means of survival, by the SRC operations. She's a single mother with seven children and would later venture into selling on a credit basis, known locally as "sell pay."

"I used to take flour, sugar and other materials on sell-pay to bake bread for sale." She said since she got the loan from NRWP she does not credit goods anymore. She's very thankful to NRWP for the loan and pray for continuation of the project "so that the women can wake up and do something along with the men." Adding, "Let me bless God first because it was through God we got this money from you people."

Launching the loan scheme earlier on May 20, 2021 in Cinta Township, near the Salala Rubber Corporation in Margibi County, NRWP's Project lead and gender specialist, Windor B.K. Smith said the purpose of the engagement was to first educate women on business ideas and then empower them to get involve in small business initiatives.

"At the end of the meeting every woman will receive the amount of L$4,250.00 each as micro loan to start a small business," she announced.

Ms. Smith encouraged the women to believe in themselves and do whatever it takes, to work with available resources to address issues they are faced with.

She challenged recipients of funds to repay so as to enable them benefit from phase two of the program. Saying, "but don't forget to pay back your loan."

As part of the exercise, a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was signed between NRWP and the micro loan recipients. Each of the women who received the loans were issued identification cards to keep weekly record of repayments.

Ms. Smith emphasized that everyone must pay back the loans to enable the continuation of the project.

During the engagement, she also drilled the women on the different kinds of businesses that one can take advantage of.

She named palm oil, fish, charcoal, peanut, among others that can be bought and sold on each of the community market days to earn fast profits.

At the close of the meeting, participants elected officers from the eight communities to head the micro loan project.

Each of the women leaders elected are responsible to recollect the micro loans in each of the communities and present same to the treasurer for safe keeping and transfer later to the micro loan focal person.

"I am encouraging every one of us who are about to receive the loans today to get involve into business and be able to pay back the loans within the three-month period given you. In this way, the program will extend to the next phase," said recipient Kerma Sackie.

Queita George said: "We want to thank you people for helping us. We promise to pay back the money in time."

Sonnie Cooper is a mother of three children from Kollen Town. Her children's father abandoned her and has had to scramble to keep her children alive. With the loan money, Sonnie only wants to focus on business since farming in the community is not profitable due to the lack of land space. "I don't even know what to tell you people but to say thank you because I never had anything doing again. I used to have a small business but the farming work made me to go out of money, so, I want to tell you people thank you again."

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Finda Bengo is from Blomu. She's expecting her third child. According to Finda, her boyfriend ran away and left her with the pregnancy and the other kids. She has been struggling alone to manage herself, the unborn child and the two children. Her two children are out of school because she cannot afford their school fees. She used to work on SRC plantation as a security guard but lost her job.

For Finda, petty business has been her area. So, the loan will add value to her existing petty business. "I want to thank you people for the loan. I will use the money to add my business up and when we complete the loan payment, I pray that you people add the money up because things are expensive in the market."

Of the 112 women from the eight targeted communities, 19 came from Kolleh-Dapolo, 12 from Kuwah-ta, 20 were from Blomu, and 22 came from Doakai Town. Another 12 women were selected from Jorkporsue, while 13 came from Money-tail Town, six from Dedee-ta-1 and eight persons were also selected from Dedee-ta-2 respectively.
Monrovia  In early May this year, infectious disease scientist, Dr. Dougbeh Christopher Nyan, alerted Liberian health authorities and predicted the possibility of "circulating COVID-19 variants from India coming into Liberia," but authorities may have ignored warnings from the acclaimed scientist.

During his COVID-19 public awareness, Dr. Nyan warned that "with trade and movement of people between India-China and Liberia, we could get the double-mutant Indian [SARS-CoV-2] variant coming here [Liberia]."

"The government has been too relaxed, and now needs new strategies, implementation, monitoring and enforcement of the public health regulations in Liberia for this COVID-19 pandemic to be defeated," Dr. Nyan said during two separate interviews on Liberia Public Radio-TV and Focus on Liberia TV this week.

He emphasized that Liberia's national pandemic response and vaccination roll-out plans be redesigned, made transparent and include professional expertise in order to mount an effect fight against COVID-19 in Liberia.

Asked by journalist on FOL-TV as to whether he is willing to go back to Liberia to assist, Dr. Nyan again offered to help with the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic in Liberia and hopes government will respond this time.

There has been numerous speculations that Dr. Nyan's previous offers to develop Liberia's COVID-19 testing kits and help with the pandemic response have been rejected by the Liberian government because of his critical expert scientific review of the country's pandemic response as well as his stance against corruption, constitutional violations, and human rights abuses in the West African country.

An acclaimed scientist, medical doctor and inventor, Dr. Nyan is also a political activist who has advocated for democracy and social justice in Liberia over the years against past and the present government(s).

In the past three weeks, Liberia has experienced an astronomical spike in COVID-19 cases, registering about 50 to 75 cases at one time, and having one of the highest rates of infection in the West African sub-region.

Recent reports revealed that up to about a hundred COVID-19 positive patients who entered the country several days ago could not be accounted for, while treatment centers are exceeding capacities in a already weak health care system where health workers lack protective equipment and are underpaid.

"The international airport which is the first line of surveillance and pandemic defense is very porous and lacks rapid testing capacity, thus letting in possible COVID-19 -infected travelers into the country without proper mechanism for contact-tracing," Dr. Nyan noted.

He stressed the need for rapid testing at the airport so that arriving travels who test positive can be immediately isolated and committed to treatment and monitoring.

Noting recent statements of politicians, Dr. Nyan emphasized that, "this national and global COVID-19 health emergency should not be turned into a political carrot by politicians who are now enticing each other, while the ordinary people and voters are dying."

The award-winning scientist added that, "we need to adopt a collective patriotic approach that is devoid of politics and supported by a good budgetary allocation so as to defeat the pandemic."

The Liberian scientist who in May this year accurately predicted the current wave of COVID-19 infections in Liberia also said that, "the $15,000.00 given to each lawmaker for constituency engagement could have been used for the pandemic response and other pressing social issues in the country."

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Addressing public hesitancy during his vaccination awareness campaign in Liberia in early April and May this year, Dr. Nyan emphasized that "the vaccines are safe, efficient, and free and I encourage every eligible person to take the COVID-19 vaccine."

"We [population] need to be vaccinated in order to break the transmission of the virus [COVID-19], and prevent being infected by the COVID-19 variants that are circulating," he added.

Dr. Nyan is the globally acclaimed inventor of the US patented multiplex infectious disease diagnostic test, the "Nyan-Test," which has won numerous awards and recognitions. He is an NIH-trained infectious disease scientist and serves with Maryland Medical Reserve Corp in the US pandemic response. He is Chief Medical and Scientific Officer of his biotech start-up company, Shufflex Biomed.
Monrovia  The National Integrity Forum of Liberia has called on the Liberian media and Civil Society actors to muster the courage and launch a robust fight against corruption in Liberia.

The Acting Chairperson and Chief Executive Officer of the Public Procurement and Concessions (PPCC), Attorney Roseline Kowo described the media as reliable partner to work with in the expulsion of corruption in the society.

She said when the media join forces with other robust and integrity civil society institutions to fight corruption; it will help other government's integrity entities like the General Auditing Commission (GAC), Public Procurement and Concessions (PPCC), and the Liberia Anti-Corruption Commission (LACC) to be strong in fighting corruption.

She described the media and civil society actors as the first battle frontline in the fight against corruption in Liberia.

"If we have the media working with us to fight corruption, our country Liberia will be develop especially when the media continue to expose this ugly act of corruption," she said.

Speaking Wednesday in Monrovia at a one-day media and civil society organizations engagement forum on anti-corruption, the NIF boss noted the collaboration of the National Integrity Forum and media and CSOs is to always remain constructively engaged with strategies and action in the country.

The one-day round-table discussion held under the theme, "In union strong, success is sure; we will over all prevail", brought together national stakeholders including media executives representing various media institutions, civil society actors, international partners and government officials.

The Chief Executive Officer of the PPCC further stressed that the NIF needs investigative journalism and good practices which according to her will come to the public in a balance form to enhance the fight against corruption in all sectors.

She also calls on civil society organizations to increase their monitoring mechanisms and report corruption cases and create the space to encourage citizen's participation in the anti-corruption process in the country.

"The Media and civil society organizations, what we need from you is critical thinking and actions; we need constructive engagement and we will also work with you in the fight against corruption in this country." Atty. Kowo stressed.

Atty. Kowo said it is about time that stakeholders across the country exert collective efforts to strengthen proactive engagement aim at enforcing transparency and Accountability for a good governance system.

She also called on members of the NIF to lead by examples and join the fight and be robust as well.

"The institution will only preach the standards of integrity but also members of the NIF must lead by example in the public; this will encourage other citizens to follow suit in the fight against corruption,"

She however admonished citizens across the country to take ownership in the fight against corruption, adding that the student community including religious leaders and community leaders are key in achieving the goals of the National Integrity Forum.

"Let us work collaboratively or take action now so as to buttress the effort of the Pro-Poor Agenda for Prosperity and Development." She averred.

The National Integrity Forum was established in May of 2020 as a collaborative effort of integrity-based institutions in government, civil society and business to assist in the fight against corruption through dialogue to rectify the unbearable effects of corruption and promote a culture integrity in Liberia.

"Thanks for all of these recommendations made to the NIF, we can assure you they will put somewhere else without use but we will work with them to strengthen our fight against corruption in this country. Atty. Kowo lamented.

Atty. Kowo said the NIF aims at promoting an opportunity for state and non-state actors concerned with issue of integrity and the fight against corruption to exchange views on building integrity systems and fight corruption in Liberia.

"The institutions were of the conviction that the united they were, the stronger the interventions will be for the fight. Also, the National Integrity Forum seeks to achieve by providing a forum that promotes integrity standards in the effective collaboration, coordination and review." She added.

The PPCC boss further stressed that the institution is intended to support the fight against corruption in a holistic, systematic and sustainable manner and recommend effective policy promulgation, coordination and implementation mechanisms to advance good governance.

Also speaking as representative of the Civil Society Organizations, Accountability-Lab Executive Director Lawrence Yealue said it is difficult for national government to realize the workings of the CSOs in the national governance system.

According to him, CSOs are partners in progress to national government contrary to the perception of some public officials who he said termed the CSOs are anti.

"We are not watchdog but we want to be critical voice in every part across the country." Mr. Yealue noted.

Also making an official statement on behalf of the Liberian media, the Editor-In-Chief of the Heritage Newspaper, Augustus D. R. Bortue expressed optimism that the National Integrity Forum takes immediate or gradual actions following the stakeholder meeting.

He also admonished the NIF to establish a networking system which will include the media, CSOs and lined institutions involved from national government.

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"The media remains committed to promoting your workings and we pray that these kinds of discussions be held frequently to strengthen the fight against corruption in Liberia." Mr. Bortue said.

For his part, the Executive Director of CENTAL, Anderson Miame described corruption as a virus and called on all state actors to join the fight.

He CENTAL stands ready to work every sector that is ready to fight corruption.

The Forum comprises a Steering Committee and a Technical Committee. The thirteen-member Steering Committee is a collegiate body made up of the heads of member institution and is the highest decision-making body of the institution.

The institution is also headed by a Chairperson and assisted by a Co-Chairperson from one of the institutions, the leadership of the Committee is charged annually by being rotated among the various member institutions.

The founding members of the National Integrity Forum were the Public Procurement and Concessions Commission (PPCC), Governing Commission (GC), Ministry of Justice (MoJ), Civil Service Agency (CSA), Internal Audit Agency (IAA), General Auditing Commission (GAC), Liberia Anti-Corruption Commission (LACC) and the Center for Transparency and accountability in Liberia (CENTRAL) and later, the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) and the Law Reform Commission (LRC), respectively.
It was a quiet, yet well attended event. The movers and shakers of the Nigerian Polity and the Diplomatic Community, including the former President of Liberia, Madam Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who delivered the Guest Lecture, converged at the Shehu Musa Yar'Adua Centre, Abuja last Friday, at the 60th Birthday Colloquium to celebrate 'Nigeria's precious gift to the world', Ms Amina J. Mohammed, the fifth Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations who was recently reappointed for a second term, and turned 60 on Sunday, June 27, 2021. Ms Mohammed is the first Nigerian to be appointed (and reappointed) as UN Deputy Secretary-General, and the second African woman ever to be appointed to that role. She was chosen, according to the UN Secretary-General, not only because she is highly competent, but also because she has a strong background in global affairs, development, diplomacy, human rights and humanitarian action. Amina served as the Senior Special Assistant to President Obasanjo on MDGs, and is a stickler for upholding the rule of law, the 16th goal on their list. Onikepo Braithwaite and Jude Igbanoi were also present at the Colloquium. On behalf of our Chairman & Publisher, Prince Nduka Obaigbena, the Managing Director of Thisday, Eniola Bello, and all of us at This Day, we wish you a happy 60th birthday Amina. Nigeria is proud of you

About Amina

Ms Amina Jane Mohammed, can be described as one rare Nigerian who was born with a silver spoon from a privileged background. But, unlike many of her ilk, she braced herself to take up the daunting challenge of positively affecting lives, changing her environment, uplifting the less privileged, and against all odds, getting the requisite education and skills to actualising her selfless vision and dreams. She has brought Nigeria and projected her nation and her gender positively, on the global scene.

The story of her life goes back six decades, having been born in Kaduna of a Gombe Fulani father, a Veterinarian (the first from Northern Nigeria), and a Scottish mother. She is first of five all female sibling, a mother of six children, and also, a grandmother.

It was comical 'war' between the Governors of Gombe and Kaduna States, who both laid claim to Amina as their citizen. The world however, won the 'silent war' as the United Nations and the global community exercise superior claim to Amina's citizenship without lifting an arm. Amina is actually indisputably Nigeria's gift to the world.

Governor El Rufai's claim was premised on the fact that Amina was born in Kaduna and grew up there, while Governor Inuwa Yahaya's claim is premised on the fact that Amina's father, Dr Inuwa Mohammed, is an indigene of Gombe State. However, the contention should actually be between Nigeria and the UN, both of which Amina has served selflessly and with candour.

The event which was hosted by Centre for Policy Research and Development Solutions, an NGO founded by Amina, had as theme, 'Overcoming the Challenges of Africa's Transformation'.

Present at the event were the Governors of Ekiti, Plateau, Gombe, Kaduna, Borno and Bauchi States, while the Chief of Staff to the President, Prof Ibrahim Gambari represented President Muhammadu Buhari. Other notable personalities that graced the occasion, were Africa's richest man and multi-entrepreneur, Alhaji Aliko Dangote, the Catholic Bishop of Sokoto Dioceses, Mathew Hassan Kuka, the United States Ambassador to Nigeria, Mary Beth Leonard, Niyi Adebayo, Osagie Ehanire, Mariam Katagum, Ministers Zainab Ahmed, Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN, Rotimi Amaechi, Niyi Adebayo, Mariam Katagum, and Pauline Tallen, amongst others.

A documentary depicting her journey from childhood through to the UN to hold the second most powerful position, was aired to the august audience, and many opined that it was a celebration of a truly remarkable woman.

Inuwa Yahaya's Keynote

In his keynote address the Gombe State Governor, Inuwa Yahaya, described Amina as an extraordinary person. He said, 'looking at what she has achieved in all her endeavours, she is worth celebrating. Her father is a typical Fulani man who studied Veterinary Medicine, and married a Scottish woman, and the product is Amina. She attracted a world-class hospital to Gombe.

'It is exciting that her reappointment as UN Deputy Secretary-General, coincides with her 60th birthday. I see Amina as a special and golden gift to the whole world, trying to make the world a better place. Today's theme is very apt. If we plan big, we have the capacity to transform Nigeria. Amina can be a part of that transformation. We are proud of her in Gombe, we give her our support and solidly stand by her in all she is doing.'

Almajiri Initiative

A representative of the Almajiri Initiative which she pioneered in 2011, said of her 'She is a mother to us. We reached out to her when we needed a voice, and she responded and spoke out on our behalf'.

El Rufai's Intervention

In his remarks, Kaduna State Governor, Nasir Ahmad El Rufai said: 'I stand here as her Governor. She may be of Gombe origin, but she was born in Kaduna and grew up in Kaduna. We have a better and superior claim to Amina than Gombe.

'We appreciate all that she has done to put Kaduna, Nigeria and Nigerian women on the global map. I believe in giving women opportunities, and bring out the best in them. I have a woman as Deputy Governor, and she was encouraged by Amina. Amina, you have changed and inspired so many young girls, which you may not even know.

'I pray Amina, that we will celebrate your 100th! Why not? Especially with advancement in medicine. But, I am not sure I will be here, because I take too many risks and create a lot of crisis.'

Emir of Gombe's Intervention

The Emir of Gombe who was represented by the former Minister of FCT, Aliyu Modibbo, said: 'Amina's father was a pioneer Veterinarian, and first Director of Livestock. Gombe people were so proud of his achievements, that the then Emir, my father turbaned him the first Sarkin Fulani of Gombe. Please, Amina, while you hold this enviable position at the UN, help bring the issue of pastoralism and nomadism to the purview of the UN. The UN must help find lasting solutions to nomadism. Today, pastoralism is endangered in Africa, and we look up to the UN through you to intervene'.

Chairman, Governors' Forum

Ekiti State Governor and Chairman of the Governors' Forum, Kayode Fayemi showered encomiums on the celebrant, describing her as having 'demystified power to the point of casualising it'.

He said: 'In all positions she has held, it has always been about, what value she has been able to add.

'Her reappointment speaks more of her value as human being.

'I met her in the civil society community, and she became the focal person in the development of millennium goals. After serving as Minister in Nigeria, she moved to the UN, and she does it so effortlessly, like there is no pressure.

'60 is the new 30; Amina doesn't look older than 30. The best is yet to come for her. Its not about the title or the office, but ability to impact. Amina, the Governors Forum looks forward to working with you.'

Prof Gambari Delivered President Buhari's Goodwill Message

President Muhammadu Buhari described Amina as 'a purpose driven technocrat, working to achieve millennium development goals.

'She has served four Presidents in various capacities, including poverty alleviation, millennium development goals and environment. Nigeria's loss is now a huge gain to the world. Amina has helped the UN in achieving 50/50 gender parity. She is a mother of six, and she leads from the front in every task she handles. Today, she is the second African and the first Nigerian to hold that office as UN Deputy Secretary-General; she may become the first Nigerian UN Secretary-General. All Nigerians are proud of her. She is a gift to the world', President Buhari said.

The Guest Lecture by President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

One of the highlights of the event, was the lecture delivered by the former President of Liberia, Mrs Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who was Guest Speaker of the day. She commended Nigeria, as having a reputation for energy and resilience. Africa's first female President expressed her feelings asking herself 'what else could I have done as President?'

President Sirleaf described Amina as 'A force of nature, a consensus builder. Its usually unnecessary to disagree with her. The speed of the UN re-election, is a recognition of what Amina has done'.

In sharing her experiences in the monumental battle against the Ebola Pandemic in Liberia, Madam Sirleaf noted that the Covid-19 virus has exposed the deep inequalities between the rich and the poor countries. That Covid also exposed racism.

She commended African leaders for standing together to bring an end to despotism in The Gambia, and preventing military takeovers in other African countries.

She said 'Today, the world faces a new challenge with Covid and its new variants. Vaccination may not solve the pandemic and poverty, and new variants will appear. But, for now vaccination remains the answer. Statistics show that so far, less than 13% of the world population has been vaccinated, and Africa has less than 1% of that.

She commended the leadership roles the South African President, Ramaphosa and Alhaji Aliko Dangote have played, in battling the Covid-19 pandemic in Africa.

Gender Equality

On the challenge of gender inequality in Africa, Sirleaf said 'Amina is a storm. Amina is a champion in overcoming the obstacles against her gender, while climbing to the top. But, there is still a strong disparity in gender power and rights, and Africa looks up to icons like Amina to close this gap'.

Sirleaf asked thought provoking questions 'Why have we not had woman Governor in Nigeria? What will it require? When will we have another African female President?'

Trust

Speaking about Youths in Africa, she said the Youths are disappointed in our leaders, justified or imagined. She stated that African leaders should learn to earn the trust of the Youths, in order to create a better future for the continent. She expressed the strong view that, the majority of our Youths possess the ability to bring about the much desired change.

Institutions

She said 'Amina brings an uncommon passion to the issue of climate change. She exemplified this, and displayed the character of an amazon in the various capacities she has served'.

The former Liberian President on behalf of Liberian women, presented a hand-woven quilt to Amina. The mural has on it, the logos of all the organisations Amina has worked in.

The Chat

The day came to an end with a live interview with the celebrant by Aljazeera's Folly Bah Thibault. The invigorating fast-paced interview, saw Folly take on Amina Mohammed on sundry issues about her life, vision and future.

About Amina's Passion

She said 'I work to promote the rights of women and young people'. She confirmed to the audience, Folly's reminder of how she once walked from Kaduna to Zaria, a distance of 76km, in protest of her father refusing to allow her go abroad for further studies.

Coming from a family of all girls, Amina said she never saw that as a challenge in any way. She said 'After all, I am still Amina Mohammed!'.

She pointed out that in all the places and capacities she has worked in, working in public service has been most impactful and brought the greatest fulfilment for her. According to her, this is where she has been able to help formulate policies that changed things.

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Nigeria's Debt Relief

Perhaps her greatest fulfilment, is in helping to secure a huge $4 billion debt relief for Nigeria, at $1b per annum.

Ogoni Clean Up

On her efforts in championing the environmental clean up of the Niger-Delta region, she said it was all about preventing more spillages and breakages.

On SDGs

On her passion and efforts at Sustainable Development Goals, she was quite clear about her passion for the girl-child and their education. She said 'I wrote a letter on 'Day of the Girl'. In the famous letter, she said 'Be fearless. Be bold. Be courageous, but study hard. Let your voice be heard, and pursue your dreams'.

Africa is risking the opportunity of preparing young people for the future. Our leaders must invest in young people.

'We pass through education, education doesn't pass through us. We need to co-create the future with our young people. Whatever happens today, Nigeria, can and will make it.

'When I came to the UN, we had six African women at top positions and I felt challenged, but today, we have 19 women.

'Faith in God makes all things possible. This is what I tell my children and grandchildren. Many things fail, but God doesn't.'

Aspirations

Any Presidential ambition? Folly asked Amina. In her usual subtle manner, Amina said 'I may not be there, but there are many Nigerian women who are able and capable to take up such position.

'For me, my work has always been to better lives in Nigeria. I would like to come back home to Nigeria, after my time at the UN. I recount receiving many congratulatory messages when I got appointed as the UN Deputy Secretary-General, but I know many of them were happy because in their minds they felt 'yes, we have got her out of the way.'

Passion for Lives and Humanity

It could be recalled that when the UN Head Office in Abuja was bombed, Amina took it upon herself, and went in her car driving from one house to the other, calling our doctors to come to the hospitals to attend to patients who were badly wounded in that attack by Boko Haram insurgents.

Conclusion

The video of the occasion saw many world personalities congratulating and wishing Amina Mohammed a happy 60th birthday, including Nigeria's former President Olusegun Obasanjo under whom she served as Special Adviser on SDGs. President Obasanjo remarked: 'When the story of our nation is told, you'll occupy a place of honour'. Also featured were high calibre personalities like the famous music icon Angelique Kidjo, Zainab Bandawi, Mo Ibrahim, Natali Keeman and many others

The congratulatory message from the United Nations Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres summed up the totality of Amina's personality. He said 'Amina is wonderful, committed, and she brings passion to whatever she does'.
Dar es Salaam  Muhimbili National Hospital (MNH) said on Monday that the National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF) owed it money, but disputed the figure reported on social media.

MNH said in a statement signed by its spokesperson that a report circulating on the social media platform JamiiForums claiming that NHIF was yet to pay Tanzania's biggest referral hospital Sh30 billion in outstanding bills for services rendered to the fund's members were inaccurate.

"It is true that NHIF owes MNH, but the reported figure is inaccurate. The MNH administration would like to clarify that the hospital has signed a contract with the fund to serve its members, and NHIF has been cooperative in servicing its debts.

"NHIF usually meets with other stakeholders to address any pending issues or challenges related to the provision of services to its members. Being among NHIF's major stakeholders, such opportunities have been made available to MNH," the MNH statement said.

It added that NHIF members continue to be served at both MNH and Mloganzila Hospital.
Dar es Salaam  Members and other stakeholders of the media fraternity have expressed optimism that the government does have good intentions after all regarding mass media organs in the country.

This comes about following the decision by President

Samia Suluhu Hassan to lift the ban on some online media practitioners whose operating licences had been revoked some time ago, thereby restoring press and related freedoms.

According to observers, the first 100 days of President Hassan's leadership as Head of State have

restored trust and confidence in the media across the board.

A former Chairman of the Tanzania Editors Forum (TEF), Absalom Kibanda, told The Citizen that new hope in the media fraternity is brought about by some decisions made by the sixth-phase government of Tanzania's first-ever female President that include assurance to review the Media Services Act (Number 12 of 2016), and lifting the ban on some mass media outlets.
The swearing-in and subsequent release of the official portrait of our first female president wrote a great story both in our hearts and "herstory" books. Fate had it in store for Tanzanians that the country's very first female vice president would also become its first female president.

When images of the first Cabinet meeting circulated on social media, many women's rights advocates, myself included, felt that a female president wouldn't be happy with a male-dominated cabinet. Expectations were high that changes were in store, especially after some women's rights were trampled on in the past six years.

The nomination of the Vice President kicked off the Sixth Phase Government's appointments. To all intents and purposes, the appointment of a man to that position was deemed okay. The endorsement of a male prime minister meant that 13 men in a row have consistently held the powerful position since independence. Similarly, we have now had 11 men in a row holding the chief secretary's position since 1962.

President Samia Suluhu Hassan's reassuring statements about her capability to lead, her insistence on men and women having the same leadership mind, and her call for female leaders to be respected were seen as an essential trigger for Tanzanians to shun gender stereotypes on women in leadership. The appointment of the first female economic advisor, the first female clerk of the National Assembly and the second female Foreign Affairs minister signalled an inclination to disrupt the narrative and promote women's leadership role in male-dominated sectors.

Other appointments, however, depicted little change, if any.

Four female ministers and 19 male ministers served in the late President John Magufuli's last Cabinet. This has changed slightly, with the number of female ministers increasing to five, and male ministers falling to 18. Magufuli left behind five and 21 female and male deputy ministers, respectively. This has also changed slightly, with President Hassan appointing six and 20 female and male deputy ministers, respectively. The appointment of a deputy minister for gender affairs is welcome, although gender issues need their own ministry instead of being squeezed into the Health ministry, which already had too much on its plate. The number of female permanent secretaries has remained at four, while the number of male permanent secretaries has dropped from 21 to 20.

There is a serious rollback with regard to women deputy permanent secretaries, with only five and 19 female and male office-bearers, respectively, appointed. Magufuli left behind 11 and 18 male and female deputy permanent secretaries, respectively. This means that the number of female deputy PS's has been slashed by six. There are no changes with regard to regional commissioners, who remain at five and 21 females and males, respectively.

There are ministries with no women visible. In such ministries, the positions of minister, deputy minister, permanent secretary and deputy permanent secretary are all held by men. Ministries monopolised by men include Legal and Constitutional Affairs, Fisheries, Energy, Works, and Home Affairs.

However, the news has not all been grim. The appointments of regional administrative secretaries (RAS's) saw four more women being appointed, bringing the total to 12 female RAS's out of 26. The appointment of judges and ambassadors also ensured that at least 30 per cent of those appointed were females. Unfortunately, a problem still persists with regard to the appointment of females to the boards and top leadership positions of state entities. These posts are still male-dominated.

While it is important that male and female appointees are qualified, there is usually greater emphasis on qualification when it comes to women, and this suggests a lack of qualified women to hold such positions. It also suggests that the government is blind to the unique challenges women face, and that deliberate efforts are not being made to look for qualified women.

The President's meeting with women in Dodoma meeting sent out conflicting messages. President Hassan said she was ready to attain the 50:50 agenda, but said in the same speech that she was not sure if she would ever surpass the 46 percent female nomination she made in appointing RAS's.

While it is concerning for the President to have massive appointment powers, it is equally concerning when such appointments are not guided by gender and social inclusion norms. Until the President's appointing powers are reviewed, preferably through a new constitution, a clear threshold should be set and adhered to in practice to ensure that men and women, including those with disabilities, are appointed. In order for us to continuously challenge ourselves and the government's progress towards inclusive governance, we also need government communication to include information on the gender, age, disability, location, etc, of appointees. Without that, everyone is left to make assumptions, as was the case with the recently released list of district commissioners. A section of the media reported that the number of female district commissioners appointed was 45, the Minister for Regional Administration and Local Government posted on social media that the number was 44, while my own counting put it at 40.

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Therefore, 100 days down the line, it is clear that expectations that the decades-long situation of women being shut out of key leadership positions would be reversed were misplaced. It is apparent that while the presidency is a powerful institution, legal loopholes, patriarchy and party politics seem even more powerful. Going forward, President Hassan should raise the bar higher, and institutionalise the need to avail both men and women equal opportunity to lead, make mistakes and improve. Women should not be assessed through a different criterion with the presumption that they are not qualified, may not deliver, and or would be engaged in endless squabbles. Deliberate efforts should be made to promote the role of women in leadership with a view to attaining inclusive governance.
Mbeya  The Mbeya Resident Magistrate's Court has court acquitted Chadema cadre, Mdude Nyangali, after prosecution failed to provide evidence.

Mdude was facing charges of trafficking 23.4 grams of heroin in 2020.

Related stories: Missing Tanzanian opposition activist 'Mdude Chadema' found alive

The court dismissed evidence presented by prosecution against Nyangali regarding allegations of possession of drugs being invalid.

Resident Magistrate Zawadi Laizer told the court on June 28, 2021, that she had gone through all the evidence presented in court saying that one day before the search Nyagali was in custody without his phone and house keys in police hands.

On June 21, this year Judge Laizer adjourned the reading of the verdict saying she had adjourned it for reasons beyond her control and noted that the verdict would be read on June 28, 2021 (today).

>>Activist 'Mdude' reveals attempt to flee to Kenya

>>Tearful Mdude says he will not flee the country
Arusha  The African Court on Human and People's Rights (AfCHPR) has dismissed an appeal by four people convicted of drug trafficking by a Tanzanian court.

The four - three Tanzanians and an Iranian - were in 2016 convicted by the High Court of Tanzania and sentenced to 25 years in jail.

The applicants, Yahya Zumo Makame and three others - two other Tanzanian nationals and an Iranian national - were ordered to pay a fine of Sh1.4 billion in total.

They later appealed their conviction and sentence to the Tanzania Court of Appeal which dismissed the appeal in its entirety.

In their appeal to the African Court, the applicants contended that their right to fair trial in Tanzania had been violated.

Specifically, they alleged that the legal system in Tanzania only permits one appeal from a decision of the High Court.

In their view, this was contrary to Articles 3 and 7 of the African Charter on Human and People's Rights and other international protocols on civil and political rights.

They also alleged that the fourth applicant, Mohamed Gholumgader Pourdad - an Iranian national - could not understand the proceedings for lack of an interpreter.

The court then had to decide as to whether the absence of a court in Tanzania that is of a higher jurisdiction that the Court of Appeal denied them more room for appeal.

The court said the absence of higher judicial structures in Tanzania above the Appeals Court was not a violation of the African Charter in the context of the case.

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Furthermore, the Arusha-based judicial organ analysed all the grounds of appeal as filed by the applicants together with the counter-arguments raised by the State.

Given the manner in which the Court of Appeal dealt with the applicants' appeal, the Court found nothing which could merit its intervention and, therefore, dismissed the applicants' allegations.

It also considered whether the acquittal of one of the accused persons by the domestic courts amounted to the application of "double-standards" which prejudiced the applicants' right to fair trial.

The court noted that the matter was also evaluated by the Court of Appeal but, further, that from its perusal of the record, there was nothing warranting its intervention.

In absence of translation services, the African Court - while confirming the accused person (an Iranian national) could not understand the language of the Court proceedings - he was represented by a counsel.

Having found that the Respondent State (Tanzania) had not violated any of the applicants' rights, the Court dismissed the claims for reparations and ordered each party to bear its costs.
The Federal Government has again barred travellers from South Africa.

It also extended the ban on travellers from Brazil, India and Turkey by one month due to the rising COVID-19 cases there.

The Secretary to the Government of the Federation and Chairman, Presidential Steering Committee on COVID-19, Boss Mustapha, said this in Abuja yesterday at the briefing of the committee.

He asked Nigerians not to lower their guards yet as "we continue to see spikes in some countries (including African countries) and the emergence of variants of concern in several jurisdictions where the third wave has occurred".

He added" "The four major variants of concern are now classified as Alpha (UK), Beta (SA); Gamma (Brazil) and Delta (India). The Delta variant which has wrecked devastating havoc, is not yet found in Nigeria hence the need to tighten our borders and be more vigilant."

He said the government had received several appeals from some inbound passengers to Nigeria barred for six months for violating COVID-19 protocols.

"The six-month period of ban for the first batch of 100 is almost complete and we use this opportunity to reassure Nigerians that sanctions will be imposed on violators of measures put in place to protect them and safeguard our nation," Mustapha said.
Leader of the All Progressive Congress (APC) in Zamfara State and former Governor, Alhaji Abdulaziz Abubakar Yari and other chieftains of the party have agreed to welcome Governor Bello.Matawalle of Zamfara State into the APC.

Yari who was together with chieftains of the party from Zamfara such as former Governor Mamuda Aliyu Shinkafi ,Senator Aliyu Ikira Bilbis ,former Speaker Sanusi Rikiji among others, assured hundreds of the party faithful at Arewa House Kaduna on Monday, that with their population and Matawalle's authority, his coming to the party will add value to the APC in Zamfara State.

While assuring the teeming members of the party that they would never allow anything harmful in the party, Yari expressed hope that the defection of Matawalle from the PDP would be of immemse benefit to the APC.

Accrding to him, the meeting of the party stakeholders from the 14 local government areas of the state was convened in Kaduna to see how every member of the party would be treated fairly.

"As party loyalists, all the stakeholders have accepted the circumstances we found themselves and we are ready to welcome Governor Matawalle."

"We hope Matawalle's coming into APC will be of benefit as well as add value to the party in the State. We will not take any position without our people's consent, and that is why we invited all the stakeholders to take a stand. We will not decide on anything that will not be of benefit to the party as well as the state."

"We agreed that the Governor is coming with authority while we have the population in the state. So we hope and pray that his coming to the part will be beneficial and will add value to the party in the state. So, he is welcome."

"We welcome Matawalle to the APC. We hope his coming will be a good development and add value to the party in the state. As a party, we need as many people as possible to make the party bigger. We held this meeting to inform our people of our decision of accepting for the Governor to be in our party."

"I kicked against his joining the party initially because of the nature of the way the information reached us but whatever my reason are because of my people. Some of our people who I am representing are against his joining our party because they believe it would affect the oneness of the party."

"We are welcoming him because it shows that we are doing the right thing and APC is well built in Zamfara state. Our performance in Zamfara, Bauchi, Kano, Borno and Lagos states is one of the things that attracted him. We hope it would come with a success for the party in future elections," he said.

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0n his quest to be the APC National Chairman, Yari said was the people that choose him as their leade.

"It is not self appointment. My aspiration is still in top gear, his ( Matawalle) joining APC will not jeopardize it. If the zoning favours my zone then it is 100%. Two things I am bringing to the party are reconciliation and unity."

"I'm still pushing to be APC National chairman because I know I can do better than most of the people as former state party secretary, state party chairman, House of Representatives member, two terms governor and chairman Governors Forum," he said.

Earlier during the meeting, the party members reiterated their support and loyalty to the party leadership and vowed to continue working for the progress of the APC.
AT the 22nd teleconference meeting of Nigerian Governors Forum, the 36 states governors took a decision to borrow N2 trillion out of the total N11.34 trillion cumulative balance in the account of National Pension Fund, NPF.

This represents a whopping 17.6 percent of what workers in public and private sectors of the Nigerian economy have saved for more a decade to sustain themselves after retirement. The stated purpose for this and N15 trillion additional borrowing from other sources is for "infrastructural development" in states.

There isn't any doubt that all the states in Nigeria have huge infrastructure deficits. Very few roads are passable everywhere in Nigeria, except in Abuja metropolis.

Pipe-borne water reaches less than five percent of the people in the best of the 36 states. Health facilities are as few as they are poor. The vast majority of Nigerians are outside of the national electricity grid, with those served living more in darkness than in the light of the staccato of power supply. Given this huge infrastructure gap, any talk of looking for funds to bridge it is more like saying the obvious.

But the reality of poor and decayed infrastructure in the states is mostly due to the corruption and incompetence of political authorities administering the states than lack of funds. Not only do the governors, down the line to the least political office holders and the bureaucrats steal the money, they have proven grossly incompetent in managing and maintaining infrastructural projects inherited or even executed by themselves.

Governor Seyi Makinde of Oyo State on September 5, 2019, in an obvious reference to the administration that preceded his, stated via his verified Twitter handle, as follows: "What we met on ground is a situation where a project for which money is allocated, gets only about 10 per cent of the total funds for execution. Because as we were told, 50 per cent goes back to the governor, 30 per cent to the appointee who allocated the project out of which 10 per cent goes to the governor's wife."

The grave allegation above by a sitting governor merely echoed what everyone knows about the pillage that is going on in Nigeria. Where government projects get value at all, they rarely get more than 10 percent of real market value.

This general practice in present day Nigeria is an inversion of First Republic corruption of pocketing 10 percent of project cost while 90 percent went on the actual project, according to the allegations levied against politicians of that era by the military putschists.

Now it is 90 percent in the politicians' pockets, 10 percent on the project. This is the reality against which we must see the plan by governors to borrow from the Pension Fund and other sources. This issue of corruption is perhaps the most compelling reason why the filthy fingers of the governors must not be allowed in the workers' pension savings.

Second, the competence level among state governors is so low that few of them can demonstrate even a modest capacity to invest in infrastructural projects that can pay for themselves, self-sustain and pay long term dividends to their states. Just to increase their internally generated revenues in any substantial manner has proven to be rocket science to these state CEOs who are satiated with the handouts from Abuja.

Third, the Pension Act of 2004 and the Pension Reformation Act of 2014 prohibit borrowing from the pension funds. Besides the illegality of it, it is absolutely immoral for the governors who fail to remit pension deductions of their workers to seek to borrow from the funds contributed by others, mostly by private sector and Federal Government workers. In some states, the pension deficit is as much as 12 years backlog.

Fourth, not less than 30 out of the 36 states have found it burdensome to pay back the loan given by the Federal Government between 2016 and 2018 to support them in paying backlog of workers salaries in their different states. This is so even after the facility was rescheduled for repayment for over a period of 30 years. Several representations have been made to the Federal Government by the governors requesting suspension of the monthly loan deductions.

Those who can't pay back a combined facility of less than N700billion are the very ones requesting for a loan of N17 trillion! Fifth, and related to fourth above, is the question of what happens to the pension benefits of workers if the states become bankrupt and unable to pay back the loan. Except for three or four states, about 80 percent of states' revenue comes from statutory monthly allocations from Abuja, much of which comes from oil revenue.

We all know what is happening to oil internationally and how it has become less reliable as a guaranteed income. Even in jurisdictions like the United States where sub-national governments get most of their revenues from taxes, public entities have been known to go burst.

According to one report, "In 2016, more than 60 cities in the US did not have enough money to pay all of their bills, racking up a grand total of $335.4 billion in unfunded municipal debt ... " (See link: https://www.lovemoney.com/galleries/91578/us-cities-that-went-bankrupt). If gold rusts, what will happen to iron, as the saying goes? It gives little comfort to say that the loan will be secured by the Federal Government or even the Central Bank of Nigeria. Signing Irrevocable Standing Payment Order with the Federal Ministry of Finance by which loan liabilities are deducted at source from federal allocations answers none of the queries raised herein.

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It is our belief that much can be done by way of bridging the infrastructure deficits in states if the governors and other political authorities would drastically lessen corruption, improve transparency in the financial processes of their states, be more creative in the drive for IGR, and look more in the direction of projects that are both socially beneficial and economically viable.

There's a lot of potentials in the creative use of Public Private Partnership. Borrowing and increasing the debt burden is the line of least resistance. In the instance to borrow from the hard savings of poor workers in Nigeria, the plan should not be supported by the Federal Government and the workers who own the money should vehemently resist the illegal and immoral move.

Laoshe is former Member and Deputy Whip (AD) of the House of Reps, while Kawonise is former infomation Commissioner , Ogun State

Vanguard News Nigeria
The elite gathered at the Yaounde residence of the late former Prime Minister on June 26, 2021 to condole with his family and pay tribute to the fallen political icon.

The Cameroon People's Democratic Movement (CPDM) of the North West Region, led by their Regional Coordinator, Philemon Yang on June 26, 2021 lauded the multifaceted legacy their former leader and also former Prime Minister, former Vice President of the Senate, Simon Achidi Achu has bequeathed to humanity as whole. Simon Achidi Achu who was born in Santa on November 5, 1934 died in the United States of America on May 4, 2021. His mortal remains will be flown into the country this week for final burial to take place on July 3, 2021.

In prelude to the arrival of the mortal remains and the burial, the North West CPDM elite paid tribute to him for his numerous exemplary impacts in politics, administration and humanitarian actions. In the funeral ceremony highly animated by traditional dances from the seven Divisions of the North West Region, all mourners went back home with something positive to learn and probably implement from the rich experience of Achidi Achu's sojourn on earth.

The leader of the CPDM in the North West Region, Grand Chancellor of National Orders and former Prime Minister Philemon Yang in his opening statement said, "We have come as the CPDM elite of the NW, to celebrate a man who is very special." He said Achidi Achu demystified politics, was a man who chose to be very pragmatic and practical, made people to understand that politics was not complicated and a man of tremendous sophistication. Within the CPDM, Philemon Yang disclosed, Achidi Achu manifested great militancy, believed in the party and was a permanent militant, did not have a list of enemies, practised harmony, showed bravery with the believe that nothing could defeat him. Achidi Achu, Yang further said, was a man chosen by history and he fitted the historical circumstances. In sum, Achidi Achu was, "Simple and pragmatic, wise and kind", Philemon Yang concluded.

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Other speakers during the ceremony had pertinent topics to present about the life and impact of Simon Achidi Achu. Senator Regina Mundi who doubles as member of the CPDM political bureau talked on who Achidi Achu was. The Minister Delegate to the Minister of External Relations in charge of Relations with the Commonwealth, Felix Mbayu presented Achidi Achu as an iconic political figure. He said,

The funeral service started with a devotion by Reverend Pastor Philemon Nfor who dwelt on creating a positive impact. Jude Tetang Achu, expressed the appreciation of the family.
External Relations Minister, Mbella Mbella received in audience the Acting Ambassador of the United States to Cameroon, Alexander Laskaris on June 25, 2021.

The Minister of External Relations, Mbella Mbella on June 25, 2021 granted an audience to the Charge d'Affaires a.i (Acting Ambassador), Alexander Laskaris, of the Embassy of the United States in Cameroon. Alexander Laskaris has been sent to Cameroon by his country to perform the duties of an Ambassador pending the designation of a new head of mission.

Talking to reporters at the end of the audience which was purposely a courtesy visit, the US diplomat said that he discussed health and security issues with the Minister of External Relations besides other bilateral ties between the two countries. "This is my forth visit to Cameroon and this will be my longest visit but unfortunately, I will only be here for a brief period of about a month. I am delighted to have met with the Minister," he stated. Cameroon and the United States, he noted, have strong collaboration in the domains of health and security which includes combating terrorism, violence, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and other diseases.

Alexander Laskaris further stated that he spent a lot of time talking about Covid-19 with the Minister of External Relations. "We agreed that there has to be a partnership both foreign and Cameroonian. We think within Cameroon, there has to be a partnership between the government and traditional leaders, religious leaders and above all, the people who take the health care decisions for Cameroonians like they do for the Americans, which is the mothers. So, if we can get the government, the traditional and religious leaders and our mothers to promote vaccination and social distancing, hopefully, we can overcome this pandemic of Covid-19," he stated.
The Nigerian Institute of Building (NIOB) has said that the recent collapse of 40-year old 12-storey Champlain Towers South condominium complex near Miami, Florida, U.S.A should be a wakeup call for owners of similar structures in Nigeria, particularly those located in coastal areas.

Champlain Towers South condominium is located at 8777 Collins Avenue, Surfside, Florida. Just steps away from Champlain Towers South's private pool deck are the sandy beach and the Atlantic Ocean. The housing units boast incredible oceanfront views or spectacular views of inter-coastal waterway with the city in the background. Year-round sea breezes help keep the temperatures moderate in the summer and pleasant in the winter months. It is located near some of the best shopping Miami has to offer, as well as the famous Miami nightlife. Unfortunately, it collapsed when the residents were asleep.

Nigeria is not immune to building collapse, but none has been as horrendous as Champlain Towers South condominium's. Investigators are yet to unravel what caused it but the condos' residents association fingers the builder's neglect of early warning. This proved deadly, as the body count rises in the search for survivours.

"All things living and non-living wear out with age, your homes included. There comes a time when the building starts losing its structural strength and outer sheen," said Makaan, a real estate resource.

"Ideally, the average lifespan of any concrete structure is 75-100 years. But, it is considered that the average life of an apartment is 50-60 years while of a house it is 40 years. Independent home ages much slower than an apartment building, where the amenities and common services are shared among the society residents. Their lifespan can be improved by carrying out regular maintenance.

Homes age because they are structures made of a combination of elements that degrade with time. "Put together, the environmental impact and the human usage both do their share of damage. Apart from this, poorly designed homes degrade faster anyway.

"Things which are under constant usages like water pipelines, power cables and other allied services gets degraded over time and worn out after a fixed period of time. Apart from this, window and door openings, poor construction quality, waterproofing, painting, layouts of plumbing also result in ageing of a home before time.

"However, independent home ages much slower than an apartment building where the amenities and common services are shared among the society residents."

A recent colloquium at the Getty Center concluded that "the average life span of a conventionally built building (masonry and wood) is about 120 years. But for modernist buildings (reinforced concrete and glass curtain wall) it's half that: 60 years."

Miami-Dade County has orders an audit of old buildings to prevent this type of tragedy.

According to the National President of Nigerian Institute of Building, Bldr. Kunle Awobodu, there are lessons to be learned from the Florida collapse, considering the fact that there are buildings of such stature in Nigeria's coastal areas. "Surfside, Florida is a coastal area and is subjected to the effect of strong wind, effect of water and artesian pressure- that's what happens in the ground especially in the coastal areas."

He said the lesson to be learned here is the need for subsidence, a deliberate survey of buildings to establish if they are sinking or not. "There is tendency that when a building is in sandy soil, part of it may be sinking and may not be noticeable to the naked eye. Then it should serve as warning. So, we need to be taking regular building survey, every five years."

He also referred to a report of building survey that was conducted in 2018, where the residents drew attention to "concrete that was falling off and some cracks in the building and so on. So the building had given some tell-tale signs that were not immediately responded to due to the fact that it would cost them about $9.1 million to effect such repairs. The question now is why the residents were not evacuated?"

He said when a tragedy such as this happens in an organised society, "some people will be held responsible. Look at it now, law suits have commenced and the law is very effective. The lesson we should learn here is that negligence should not be excused based on sentiments."

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He said there is need for building condition survey in all buildings, stating that "buildings are actually meant to last for many years but there is nothing stopping you from assessing their condition occasionally to ensure everything is still intact."

He also advised residents to speak up and follow through to ensure repair work is done. "So, the lesson learned is for tenants and residents to go beyond alerting the owner of the building about possible deterioration and to observe the repairs to be carried out and even write to the government agency in building control."

On their part, the Nigeria Institute of Structural Engineers (NIStructE) has resolved to wait for the outcome of investigation being carried out by the U.S. authorities.

The President of the Institute, Engr. Dr. Kehinde Osifala, said "The building was built about 40 years ago on a reclaimed land. There would definitely be a lot of lessons to learn from the collapse, but let us wait for the results of the investigation before we know the actual cause(s). From there we can draw conclusions and lessons to learn from the collapse."
Ousainou Darboe, the UDP secretary general and party leader, has said that the newly cold store at the Serekunda Market built by the Kanifing Municipal Council (KMC), under the leadership Talib Ahmed Bensouda demonstrates how the United Democratic Party government will be like when they win the December 2021 presidential elections.

He added that the UDP government will aim to care for the people's wishes and also by bringing lot of developments in the country.

"My government will aim to deliver the wishes of the Gambian people."

Lawyer Ousainou Darboe was speaking over the weekend as he was welcomed by the mayor of KMC Talib Ahmed Bensouda at the Serekunda Market, where a newly built cold store for businessmen and women is already in use.

"This new development at the Serekunda Market by the Kanifing Municipal Council (KMC), under the leadership of UDP's Talib Ahmed Bensouda demonstrates how the United Democratic Party government will be like when they win the December 2021 presidential elections," Darboe said.

"The UDP government will aim to care for the people's wishes and also bring lot of developments in the country."

According to him, he was invited by Talib to the newly launched Serekunda Market cold store, saying it reminded him of Yahya Jammeh's constructing of the Arch 22.

"When Talib took me to the newly launched Serekunda Market cold store, it reminds me of 1996, when Yahya Jammeh was constructing the Arch 22. I told them that the money they were putting in the Arch 22, with cements and nails, those could have been used to establish some cold stores across the country, so that our women (wives and sisters) going to the farms can have a cold and cool place to store their harvested goods hence all cannot be sold at once," he told Gambian women, who are mainly the beneficiaries of the said cold store.

He added that this kind of ideas are one of his aims for the Gambian women especially those farming.
The board of directors and senior management of the Gambia Revenue Authority (GRA), under the chairperson of Madam Lucy Faye Jagne have promised to address the concerns and constraints that the GRA regional staff are grappling with across the country.

The board chair said actions will be taken to address their pressing matters immediately after the board returns to Bnajul.

She made this assurance during a field visit to all the regional offices across the country.

The concerns that were raised by regional tax office managers, include: lack of office space, internet connectivity, borehole at some places, fuel allowances, air-conditioning, lack of care takers, lack of custom personnel, mobility, lack of refurbishment of old buildings and electricity power outage among a host of others.

Madam Lucy Faye Jagne, while responding to some of these concerns, said the welfare of GRA staff is among the board and top management's priorities.

She acknowledged that there is a need for them to work in a conducive environment as they are doing a great service for the country in revenue collection.

She reminded that one of the purposes of their tour was to meet the regional staff, interact with them and get first hand information regarding issues affecting their working condition.

The GRA board chair also reminded the staff about the protection of the GRA's image, saying it is paramount as GRA is a highly respected corporate institution.

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She also used the opportunity to commend the bilateral relations among the sister security organs in the provinces, saying for GRA to collect maximum revenue, it needs peace and stability in the regions.

She went on to commend the GRA staff for the commitment, dedication and hard work in ensuring that GRA meets their both monthly and yearly targets over the years.

"We also want to encourage you to do well, so that we can all share the credit at the end of the year," she said, further reminding that despite coronavirus of last year, GRA was able to register tremendous revenue performance.

"We are all excited with that performance."

She encouraged them to keep up the momentum in making GRA proud and endeavour to replicate the last successes.

For his part, Commissioner General Yankuba Darboe also promised that the concerns raised by tax managers or custom managers would be addressed as soon as the delegation returns to Banjul.

Gambia on track to host the OIC Summit - Barrow tells OIC SG

IsDB president pays a courtesy call on Barrow
Peace Ambassadors - The Gambia (PAG) a voluntary non-profit peace education and advocacy organisation observer reports have indicated improvement in some aspects of Independent Electoral Commission(IEC) operations resulting in fewer instances of malfunctioning equipment as compared to the first week of the registration exercise.

Bubacarr Sambou, PAG President said during a press conference held at its office in Kanifing last Thursday that registration officers are following most of the registration procedures.

However, Mr Sambou said while most registration centers open on time, PAG observers noted that some registration officials report to registration centers late and close earlier than the stipulated time.

He also said that enforcement of Covid-19 safety protocols remain lax, adding that their observer reports also showed a decline of registration staff present when centers were opened.

He further said that 140 of 158 observer reports showed that centers were accessible by all registrants while 18 of 158 reports showed that centers were not accessible with applicants required to climb upstairs to register, which potentially posed a problem for some persons with disabilities.

PAG observers also noted a decline in the adherence to Ministry of Health and World Health Organisation Covid-19 safety guidelines.

He added that PAG observers also witnessed fewer instances of disruption, intimidation and harassment at some registration centers.

He said other critical incidents of note reported by PAG observers included turning away of registrants by IEC officials even when they were in the queue before 5:00pm; IEC registration officials reporting to registration centers late; and the unsuccessful attempts of under aged registrants to register using the Seyfo and Alkalo attestation.

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PAG therefore encouraged IEC to employ concrete measures to address the issues of registration centers closing by 5pm or earlier when there are people still in the queue.

It also encouraged security personnel to consistently enforce the Covid-19 regulations at various registration centers assigned in order to ensure the public is protected during the conduct of the voter registration exercise.

They admonished political parties to adhere to IEC regulation stipulated in its recent public statement to have only one agent per center. It finally encouraged party supporters to stop spreading false information, hate speech and violent actions during this period.

PAG trained and deployed 53 observers and 6 coordinators across the country to observe the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) voter registration exercise.

Peace Ambassadors - The Gambia has since 2006 monitored every election held in The Gambia including presidential, parliamentary and local government elections.
El- Shaddai Academy, a lower basic school in Bajulinding village, Kombo North District, West Coast Region on Saturday 26 June 2021 graduated sixty-seven pupils from various grades.

The school graduated 48 pupils from nursery three (3) and 19 pupils from grade six (6). El-Shaddai LBS was established in 2012 with an enrolment of five pupils but now has four hundred and forty- seven (447) students.

The graduation was characterised by music making the ceremony exciting. Pupils demonstrated skills and knowledge they gained from the school as well as other general social and political knowledge in the society.

They also displayed their ITC skills, fluency in English language, understanding of citizens and citizen rights among other matters.

In his statement, Tunde M.M. Ogunimu, chief executive officer of TAKE-M Transformation Organization cum guest speaker commended the administration of El-Shaddai Academy for its good work towards providing quality education for children.

He said parents have a key role to play to ensure the school attains its sustainable development goals in future. He therefore urged them to support the school so that their children continue to have better education.

"Despite parents are paying school fees; there is a need for them to support the school. You (parents) should take ownership of the school," he said.

He further urged parents to invest in their children so that the children will be of benefit to them in the future.

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He went on to urge parents to train their children well and appealed to pupils to take responsibility of their education.

In a sideline interview, Shine Marie Mendy, director of El-Shaddai expressed delight with the successful implementation of the prize and certificate giving ceremony.

She said the ceremony aimed at manifesting the academic activities of the school to parents and the entire public to ensure all know the efficiency of the school in terms of giving quality education.

"The prize giving ceremony will also encourage children who are awarded prizes and encourage children who were not opportune to get prizes and work harder," she said.

She expressed delight with parents and teachers collaboration in the school. She urged both parties and teachers to continue the momentum to ensure nonstop harmony and mutual understanding in the educational facility.

Ms Mendy advised teachers to continue their hard work and children to focus on their education to ensure the school attain its objectives in the near future.

Ebrima Jass, assistant head boy thanked the school's leadership for guiding them while commending parents for support to their children and the school.

Jabou Sidibeh, described El-Shaddai Academy as a good school. She said children of the school can speak good English, spell words correctly, and read as expected.

However, she urged the school's administration to extend the school to junior and senior secondary in order to opportune more children to complete their career in the school.
Africa's malaria control strategy is to advance following a new study.

The study by the Kenya Medical Research Institute (Kemri) Wellcome Trust Research Programme comes as Kenya seeks an alternative malaria treatment given the emergence of resistance to Artemisinin-based Combination Therapies (ACTs) in South East Asia.

The researchers sought to compare standard treatment regimens against double and triple drug combinations to determine their safety, tolerability and the ability.

"This is tremendous progress. We now have viable prevention and treatment options to consider and evaluate (TACTs) in the advent of ACT resistance in Africa," said Dr Mainga Hamaluba, the head of clinical research at the programme and the lead investigator in the trial.

"The safety, tolerability, and efficacy of arterolane-piperaquine-mefloquine versus arterolane-piperaquine and artemether-lumefantrine was checked," she added.

"The study demonstrated that in the event of resistance to current ACTs in Africa, triple artemisinin combination therapies (TACTs), rather than double therapies with ACTs can potentially be used safely to prevent, delay or manage uncomplicated malaria in this setting," said a Kemri official who sought anonymity as he is not authorised to speak to the press.

Uncomplicated malaria

This means that the deployment of the TACTs would delay the development of antimalarial drug resistance due to the decreased chance of resistance to each individual drug.

Scientists at the research facility also believe that the possibility of the multidrug-resistant malaria parasites spreading to the Indian subcontinent and to Sub-Saharan Africa as has been the case with chloroquine and sulfadoxine- pyrimethamine (Fansidar) is an ongoing concern.

Experts say this is compounded by the lack of good alternatives for treatment of what they refer to as "uncomplicated malaria".

In addition, novel antimalarial compounds that would be used to develop new drugs to combat the multidrug-resistant parasites are not likely to be registered within the next five years.

Dr George Njoroge, the chief scientific adviser at Kenyatta University Teaching, Referral & Research Hospital and a member of the Kemri board praised the findings.

"This is a well-designed study that clearly established that administration of fixed dose combination of arterolane-piperaquine-mefloquine was non-inferior to the standard of care in treatment of uncomplicated falciparum malaria in Kenyan children," he said.

The use of fixed dose combination in infectious diseases such as HIV/Aids and Hepatitis C virus has performed remarkably well in patient who develop resistance to mono or dual therapies.

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"Through the combination of multiple drugs, chances of developing resistance to that therapy are tremendously reduced," the chief scientist explained.

Fever clearance

According to the World Health Organization, malaria is caused by Plasmodium parasites. The parasites are spread to people through the bites of infected female Anopheles mosquitoes.

The treatment of the disease with single drugs, such as chloroquine, sulfadoxine/pyrimethamine or mefloquine, has led to the emergence of resistant Plasmodium falciparum parasites that lead to the most severe disease.

Artemisinin-based combination therapies are currently recommended by WHO for the treatment of uncomplicated P falciparum malaria.

Artemisinin and semisynthetic derivatives, including artesunate, artemether and dihydroartemisinin, are short-acting antimalarial agents that kill parasites more rapidly than conventional antimalarials, and are active against both the sexual and asexual stages of the parasite cycle.

Artemisinin fever clearance time is shortened to 32 hours as compared with two to three days with older agents.

To delay or prevent the emergence of resistance, artemisinins are combined with one of several longer-acting drugs, which permit elimination of the residual malarial parasites.

As per the most recent World Malaria Report released in 2020 by WHO, there were 229 million cases of malaria in 2019 compared to 228 million in 2018. The estimated number of malaria deaths stood at 409,000 in 2019, compared with 411,000 in 2018.
As the Chinese Embassy in Banjul observes the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China, the ambassador of the People's Republic of China to The Gambia, H.E MA Jianchun has stated that china will engage The Gambia on new needed infrastructural projects at the end of this year.

Delivering a speech on the reception at the event that was held at the Sir Dawda Kairaba Jawara Conference Center on Thursday, he said: "We will guarantee the quality and completion time of the existing projects. The road and bridge projects in the URR will be completed in August 2021. The Chinese agricultural experts are now assisting Gambians in improving rice verities, advancing agricultural technology and training agricultural talents. After more than two years efforts, they have got certain achievements on SAPU experimental area in CRR, and have welcomed a pretty good harvest recently."

To alleviate the impact of Covid-19, Ambassador MA further stated that his government will continue to provide food aid to the country this year, while adding that after relieves of traveling restrictions, they will resume people-to-people exchange with Gambia in order to provide more opportunities for both youth and women to visit China and boost up their capacity.

He continued that since the founding of the People's Republic of China, the Chinese people have fostered unbreakable friendship with Africans. He said China-Africa cooperation has become a model of cooperation among developing African countries' political parties and governments to explore ways of supporting Africa's development, share experience in governance, and jointly build a community with a shared future for mankind.

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"China calls on political parties in all countries to join hands and become builders of world peace, contributors to global development, and defenders of the international order."

The Chinese ambassador reiterated that more than 2,000 years ago, an ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius observed that one should make friends with people who are upright, sincere, and well-informed, stating that the CPC keeps on promoting exchanges with political parties of other countries to share ideas on enhancing party competence and state governance.

"As a Chinese saying goes, a stone taken from another mountain may serve as a tool to polish the local jade. In the new era, the CPC will continue to engage in dialogues, exchanges and cooperation with the people and political parties of other countries."
A committee of the Mandera County Assembly has recommended the relocation of three security camps from a disputed piece of land, claiming that the owners were duped into entering into a deal with the national government.

The Lands, Housing and Physical Planning committee wants the camps relocated within six months to allow the land owners to start developing their plots.

The committee, chaired by Ms Halima Billow Omar, also recommended a waiver of all accrued land rates since 2015.

The disputed piece of land, comprising of 281 plots, was first occupied by the National Youth Service (NYS) in 2014.

The team had been dispatched to work on the security wall along the Kenya-Somalia border.

A few months later, the Rapid Deployment Unit (RDU) and the Kenya Defence Forces (KDF) also set up their camps on the piece of land.

Petition by land owners

Through Warankara MCA Ahmed Gabnan Ali, residents petitioned the county assembly demanding their plots back.

On April 5, 2018, Mr Ali sought a statement from assembly's Lands committee chairperson regarding the occupation by the security forces of legally owned plots in Barwaqo Location.

The disputed land was surveyed in 2010 by Frontier Engineering Company and locals were allocated plots between 2011 and 2013.

In 2014, the Mandera county government, in consultation with the national government, allowed temporary camping for NYS personnel engaged in building the security wall.

Keep off Al-Shabaab

The wall was to be built along Kenya-Somalia borderline in order to keep off Al-Shabaab militants.

In the same year, more security personnel were deployed due to increased terror attacks.

The assembly established that the Mandera county government consented on the national government's request without consulting the residents.

Mr Adan Hussein, the Mandera Lands CEC, told the county assembly committee that the security forces were to stay on the land for a limited period.

Plot owners were issued with request letters from the county government but the same did not indicate for how long the security teams would stay on their land.

The Warankara MCA claimed for the past six years, the security agencies have continued to sit on the land, displacing 280 residents.

The camps are also on land meant for a municipal market, three mosques, a health centre, a library and a police post.

The Seventh-day Adventists (SDA) church and a fire station are also among facilities which have lost land to security agencies.

Occupation temporary

The county government declined a request to compensate the plot owners on grounds that the occupation was temporary and that alternative land was being sought for the security agencies.

The county Lands minister said that after several surveys the disputed land was found to be an ideal place to set up security camps.

"Barwaqo was the most suitable site for temporary security camps due to its proximity to the Kenya-Somalia border where the threats emanated from unlike Shafshafey, another area we had proposed," Mr Hussein is quoted as having told the committee.

He said Mandera county government only facilitated the writing of the letters which were distributed by the local chief.

Land rates

Since 2015, plot owners have continued to pay land rates in order to claim ownership.

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While appearing before the committee, Mr Sabriya Hussein Mohamud said they learnt of the occupation of their plots from their chief who issued them with letters requesting for temporary occupation.

Mr Rashid Adan Kullow said he has been unable to develop his three plots that are adjacent to the camps due hostility from the security officers.

"The area near the camps is very risk and due to intimidation and fear of security forces, I cannot settle on my land. I stay in a rented house," he said.

The plot owners claimed they were never consulted over the temporary occupation of their plots by the security forces.

The Warankara MCA applauded the assembly committee's decision, calling for a speedy relocation of the security camps.

"Justice has been served and the security camps have to be relocated to allow the residents develop their plots for their own benefit," he said.
Gambia recently joined the rest of the world to commemorate World Refugees Day.

This year's event was held at Refugee Soforai in Sibanor, Foni, and was graced by the Ministers of the Interior, Basic and Secondary Education, Agriculture as well as the United Nations and diplomatic heads in The Gambia. It was also witnessed by representatives of refugee population residing in both rural and urban areas.

The event was facilitated by Gambia Food and Nutrition Association (GAFNA). The commemoration also marked the inauguration of two important projects that are located in Manyina and Sibanor villages, hosting poultry processing and preservation plants and a solar reticulation water system.

"The theme of this year's refugee day was "Together we can achieve, together we can learn."

Lamin Sanneh, Governor of West Coast Region said the day marks a remarkable event in Foni Sibanor, adding that the day is a day of reflection as well as created to build emphasis on lives of refugees to recognise their resilience in order to build and bring together peace among people.

Yusufa L. Gomez, executive director Gambia Food and Nutrition Association (GAFNA) said his office has been in partnership with UNHCR for more than a decade, and has since implemented projects geared towards the welfare of refugees residing in 81 villages in Foni, part of Kombo East of West Coast Region and in the Greater Banjul Area of The Gambia.

According to Gomez, the commemoration demonstrates the strong bond of partnership and support that exists between UNHCR and other development partners in their drive to make refugees feel at home since their arrival in The Gambia.

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Monique Ekoko, UNHCR representative in the sub region said: "today, we are here to witness millions who have fled their homes running for their lives." She added that people would continue to flee from human right violations. According to her, the world global refugees report indicates 79.5 million people who have fled their homes.

She expressed the office's readiness to collaborate with partners to reach local integration and improve lives and peaceful co-existence within communities.

Sulayman Kujabi, Commissioner of Immigration for West Coast Region said The Gambia Immigration Department (GID) is in solidarity with refugees on the day in celebrating their courage, wisdom, resilience and diversities. He noted that as a government security institute responsible for immigration and security management, they directly oversee the work of the Gambia Commission for Refugees by providing leadership and advice. He said this has strengthened the capacity of GID officers and other sister security forces in the area of asylum procedures.
In an audience with the Secretary General of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, Dr. Yousef Bin Ahmad Al-Othaimeen, President Barrow assured him that The Gambia is on track to host the forthcoming OIC Summit to be held in The Gambia in 2022.

The President also affirmed his dedication to the OIC's commitment to combatting terrorism and extremism.

Shortly after his meeting with the President, Dr. Al-Othaimeen thanked the President for granting him audience, describing him as an "understanding and gracious" man who is committed to the realization of issues related to the development of the Umah. He said his conversation with the President focused on peace, security, and the Umah's anti-terrorist position, which the President fully supports.

He praised the President and government for their efforts in ensuring the Summit's success, and stated that the OIC will be there to support The Gambia throughout the process.
Abuja  Nigeria has accidentally discovered an additional 206 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves while in search of crude oil, Minister of State Petroleum, Mr Timipre Sylva, said on Saturday.

Speaking in Abuja, Mr Sylva noted that the discovery of an additional 600 trillion cubic feet would enable the country to achieve the level of development expected of one rich in oil and gas.

Explaining the discovery, he said: "We were looking for crude oil but accidentally found gas. The belief is that if we aim to look for gas dedicatedly, we will find up to 600 trillion cubic meters of gas."

As at 2017, Nigeria had 187 trillion cubic feet of proven gas reserves, ranking ninth in the world and accounting for about three percent of the world's total natural gas reserves.

According to the Department of Petroleum Resources, the West African nation recorded a marginal increase in gas reserves, peaking at 203 trillion cubic feet in 2020, before the accidental discovery this year.

Big transition

Mr Sylva noted that the country is gradually transitioning from gas to renewable fuel and that this will be accomplished once it fully capitalises on benefits associated with gas.

"We are transiting ... that is why we are talking about gas. We are seeing gas as a bridge to renewable fuels. We came from coal, which is solid, to crude oil, and are now moving to gas and then to renewables."

The minister said it is worrying that the use of gas has not expanded.

"We have not used gas to drive our cars and only a few people use it to cook. We have not used gas to generate electricity or fire fertiliser-blending plants, so why should we abandon it and move to renewables?"

He noted the need to address lack of knowledge about gas use at sub-national level, especially in rural areas.

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"The federal government cannot just dump cylinders there," he said.

Even with the abundance of gas, many Nigerians still do not have access to electricity, a sector that is supposed to be driven by gas.

National campaign

The minister said Nigeria has reduced gas flaring by 97 percent, hence the need to promote, explore and expand the domestic and international market for the product.

In a national gas use campaign, the government has devised three strategies to create awareness on the need for every home to use Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) for cooking.

Mr Dayo Adeshina, programme manager of the National LPG Expansion Plan in the office of the Vice president, said Sunday that the first step is an awareness campaign targeting the government and the people.

"We need the State governments to first understand what we are doing. If they don't, we are dead on arrival. We need to meet market women, traditional rulers, artisans and other people," he said.

"The best way is to have collaborative efforts at the sub-national level. We intend to start with two states in each geo-political zone."

Speaking in Abuja, Mr Adeshina said Lagos and Abuja have had their initial engagements with the government, which he noted should also partner with industry players as they are the providers of the gas.

The official said another strategy is partnering with the industrial sector on infrastructure, especially on safety, because of the perception that gas is a dangerous fuel.

The industry must use high quality equipment that meets international standards, he said, adding "there is the need to change the way things are done".
Under the theme "healing is a journey", on the evening of June 25, Divine Akimana in partnership with Rwanda National Commission of UNESCO (CNRU) and Kigali Public Library launched her poetry book that tackles her journey and mental health issues.

The book is called "Scars That Shape Up" where the author refers to scars as the struggles people go through, adding that they impact their present and as well help them plan for their future.

The event gathered different book lovers and literary activists.

Book talk - healing is a journey

Scars That Shape Us contains 97 poems divided into two parts; mental health and activism. The author said that she was inspired by her pain and the hunger for justice. She tackled mental health issues because she went through similar experience, adding that she wrote the poems as a way of therapy but later realized that they were relevant to most people.

Talking about activism, she said that she loves women and children and despises seeing them suffering.

"There is a poem (The Forsaken) I wrote in 2018. There was a war in South Sudan and a lot of children were dying. I address this poem to the UN asking them what they were doing to stop the war and why were children being killed; bleeding in the streets for reasons they didn't even have a crew about. The least I could do was to call for help through poetry," she said.

Let us not mock them

She revealed that she is passionate about mental health awareness and create awareness especially among people who do not understand why others can commit suicide.

"There are those who would even whip the body of someone who has committed suicide because they take the incident as cowardice. They don't realise that when someone decides to commit suicide, it's because they are in pain. Let's not mock them, let's understand them and tell them that it's okay to speak up and cry because they are in pain," she said.

"We all have broken hearts that we are trying to mend and getting someone to help is our dream."

When asked about the challenges she faced with her book, she said that it had been hard for her to share her pain in the first place. Similarly, it was challenging to publish the book due to publishing houses' rejections and financial constraints.

She revealed that she went for self-publishing and got support from friends, family, and Rwanda National Commission for UNESCO.

JerOme Kajuga, the Director of Culture, Social and Human Sciences at RNRU said that it was their responsibility to support her.

"One of our aims is to enhance the culture of reading and writing in Rwanda. When we read Divine's book and realised that it could help different people and that she was a young woman with the culture of writing, it was our responsibility to support her because she would be an example to other writers and would let them realise that it's possible to publish. She is not our beneficiary but our partner because she is doing something in the line of what we do,' he said.

He revealed that so far they have launched three books since January and are open for more.

Venting - a tremendous step towards healing

Francine Nkurunziza, Divine's mother told The New Times that she loved her daughter's book because she was able to talk about her painful real-life experience.

"In our culture, most people don't like to talk about their feelings or address their problems but Divine was able to express what she has passed through. I see this book as something that will help other children with the same issues," she said.

She added that it's time for people to rethink the culture (but not kill it), stop fearing, and talk about their issues.

"I have never agreed with Divine that suicide can be caused by scars and wounds one could have, but as I talked with her and other different people, I figured out that it's true because a healthy person can't commit suicide," she said. "So, it's worth it that someone opens up and talks about their problems. There might be someone else to help them out. However, they have to be careful of who they talk to."

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Silver Busobozi, a teacher at Green Hills Academy and lecturer at Akilah College who has taught Divine at Eden International School and has edited her book, said that Divine's book is a mirror of what the older generation should be doing to the young one.

"We have a lot of issues related to mental health and children are not being given room to be listened to. Parents are just caring about the academic results of their children without knowing that their holistic nature matters the most," he said.

"When you read through Divine's work and the symbolism behind what its title stands for, she voices that pain and silence that has not been reciprocated to. It's like an appeal that society has to attend to and create a space for the young ones to have their mental health issues attended to and addressed."

Sandra Nadege Uwayezu, a poetess who had been working with Divine, recited for the audience some of the poems in the book. She thanked her for writing the book, adding that her poems have been helpful and relevant to her.
PRESIDENT Samia Suluhu Hassan is the first female president in the country and first ever woman chairperson of the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM).

She was elected unanimously by members of the Party's national congress on April 30, 2021 in the political capital of Dodoma after CCM Central Committee of the National Executive Committee expressed confidence in her leadership, saying, she is the right person to fill the vacuum left by her predecessor, the late President John Magufuli.

On Friday of April 30, 2021 Ms Samia was elected the new CCM national chairperson by 100 percent after garnering 1,862 total vote casts.

The landslide victory was announced by member of the party's Central Committee (CC) and National Assembly Speaker Job Ndugai during the ruling party's extra-ordinary meeting held at the Jakaya Kikwete Convention Centre, thus becoming the first female chairperson of one of Africa's oldest political parties.

Announcing the results, Mr Ndugai said the members were 1,876 and legal votes cast was 1,862, noting: "There were no votes against he, thus Ms Samia has garnered all the 1,862 votes, which is equivalent to 100 percent of votes cast."

Prior to her endorsement, CCM Deputy Secretary- General for Zanzibar, Dr Abdallah Juma Mabodi told members of the CCM extraordinary congress that the party's CC fielded Samia's name to NEC to be voted as the party chairperson, because it had no doubt with her strength and ability to lead the party.

"Based on the fact that the party chairperson is a national leader, who reflects the image of the party to the public and is aware of the sensitivity of the post, the CC proposed her name because she is highly experienced on various leadership issues at national and international level," Dr Mabodi said.

He further said Ms Samia has demonstrated good leadership qualities within CCM and during the entire time, she served as a senior leader in the Union and Zanzibar governments.

"She served as vice-chairperson of the Constituent Assembly and Vice-President in the period of five years...she also showed great maturity, ability, professionalism and competence within a short time, after she was sworn in as the sixth phase president," Dr Mabodi pointed out.

Elaborating, the CCM Deputy Secretary- General for Zanzibar said the Central Committee has no doubt about her integrity, truthfulness and her affection to the party, adding: "She is also loyal and a strong supporter of the Zanzibar revolution, union and peace. Samia is also a guardian of democracy and a good patriot."

Her political carrier begun in 2000, when the CCM chair was elected as a member of the Zanzibar House of Representatives for Special Seats, and appointed as Minister by President Amani Abeid Karume.

She was the only highranking woman minister in the cabinet. In 2005, she was re-elected and appointed minister, while in 2010, she contested and won by more than 80 percent and represented Makunduchi constituency.

In 2014, the then president of the Union Government, Dr Jakaya Kikwete appointed her as Minister of State in the Vice-President's Office responsible for Union Matters.

In the same year, she was elected as the Vice-Chairperson of the Constituent Assembly that was tasked to draft the country's new mother law.

In July 2015, the CCM Presidential candidate, the late Dr Magufuli named her as his running mate during the 2015 general election, making her become the first female running mate in the party's history and the first female Vice- President in the country.

Ms Samia was nominated for the second time as Dr Magufuli's running mate again in the 2020 General Election, and continued serving as Vice- President after her party won a landslide victory.

She served in the position for hardly five months before she was sworn in as Tanzania's first female president, since independence following the death of her predecessor, Dr John Magufuli.

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The 61-year-old Head of State, who was the only candidate, was unanimously elected by an extraordinary party congress held in the political capital Dodoma, which was broadcast live on radio and television.

Since her inauguration on April 6, her style of leadership made different political analysts to shower her with praise that she is a capable leader that would steer the party to implement its manifestoes and achieve goals.

Wherever President Samia has been conducting meetings with different groups as the head of state, as CCM Chairperson, she has consistently insisted that she is ready to defend democracy and fundamental freedoms.

Take the recent meeting in Mwanza region with the youth, she also announced that she will meet with opposition leaders and as well expressed her willingness to attract foreign investors.
HAVING the fifth President Dr John Pombe Magufuli passed on in March this year, Tanzanians, as it is the nature of human beings, might have developed a state of 'fear of the unknown.'

Researchers define fear of the unknown as the tendency to be afraid of something you have no information about on any level.

The fear or rather a state of uncertainty that might have engulfed some individuals is justifiable given the fact that it was the first time for the State to lose its sitting President since independence.

The fear of the unknown, undoubtedly, might have gripped ordinary Tanzanians on what was likely to transpire after Magufuli's death. Likewise, traders and investors on their part might have had some doubts with regard to the sustainability of business and investment climate.

Tanzania is known to be a haven of peace. Individuals who thought that the country could derail into any sort of instability after the death of the late President Magufuli were undoubtedly wasting their time.

There is no doubt that losing the sitting Head of State and government, in other countries, is dangerous. Contrary to Tanzania, its citizens have, all along, been peaceful people who respect their leaders and the country's constitution.

Respecting the country's constitution is one of the factors that propelled the country towards peaceful leadership transition. Having being sworn in as the sixth Head of State, President Samia began by clearing all doubts that some individuals had, including preaching the message of unity and peace, knowing that peace is pre-requisite for development.

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A quick observation shows that in just 100 day-period that President Samia has so far served she has successfully continued to carry the country's development agenda in her shoulders.

She has continued to implement strategic projects initiated by the fifth phase government, improving business and investment climate and expanding civic space.

As we report today work is in progress in all segments of Standard Gauge Railway (SGR), Nyerere Hydro Power dam in Rufiji and all other social service provision projects such as energy, water, health, education, roads and port expansion.

Under President Samia, traders and investors have started giving testimonies of improved business environment with experts in diplomacy saying Tanzania now reclaims its rightful place in the international stage.

With President Samia, we can authoritatively state Tanzania has a brighter future. What is required of us as Tanzanians is to support the Head of State and her government.
PRESIDENT Samia Suluhu Hassan has intervened in the past setups that have kept women off from the main decision-making processes in the government or private sectors as a result of historical and traditional unsubstantiated reasons.

Women, despite forming a big percent of the country's population have for decades been left behind in several sectors, and going by the national statistics account for 51.4 per cent have been low in representation in the key leadership posts.

In her government, there have been several campaigns to empower them especially in politics and other income generating activities so that they also wholly support in nation building.

In the program, the government adopted several policies to address what isolates them and widen gender gap in the country and that got the blessing of President Samia Suluhu Hassan.

To implement the policies, just 100 days in office after taking power from her predecessor the late President John Magufuli, in several occasions, she has made several speeches that she would appoint more women to various leadership positions, provided they have unquestionable integrity, competence and required education level.

To reinforce that she has warned other government officials against judging women who have capacities to man different posts by gender, insisting that ability to fulfill a task is what ammeters.

Leading by example in her appointment, Ms Samia has recently appointed Nenelwa Mwihambi as a National Assembly Clerk, a post has never been held by a woman.

Since she rose to power in March this year, she has appointed 26 Regional Administrative Secretaries, where 12 of them are women, equivalent to 46 per cent.

The President also stated that efforts to empower women will make a ratio of 50/50 to balance gender equality. It has been 26 years since the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing was held in 1995 and coming up with the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, where 189 governments expressed commitments to implement women's rights, including increasing their numbers in power and decision- making bodies.

Recently, while addressing women at the Jakaya Kikwete Conventional Centre, in Dodoma President Samia said women also play a key role in national development.

Recalling the struggle for independence in the country and outside, President Samia noted that women played a great role to see into it that their countries became independent.

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According to studies on performance of boards of directors in different companies, it was found out that in firms, whose leaders were women performed well in comparison to those manned by men.

"However, when a woman does a wrong thing it is perhaps, she lacked skills and that is why we have the Vocational Educational and Training Authority (VETA) that is entrusted to impart technical skills in the public ... it should also ensure that women get the needed skills to hold higher positions in various sectors," she said. As the world fights against the Covid-19 crisis, first female President of Mauritius, Dr Gurib-Fakim, who is Biodiversity Scientist, was quoted as having said that countries led by women have recorded a small number of cases and deaths-an indicator that women are good leaders of their countries, especially during crisis.

Equally, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) call for women's equal participation and leadership in political and public spheres so that all achieve the SDG goals by 2030.

However, according to a report by UN Women, women serve as Heads of State or government in only 22 countries globally and some 119 countries have never had women as leaders, where in addition just only 10 countries have ever had women as Heads of State, and 13 countries have female Heads of Government.
THE use of compressed natural gas (CNG) in vehicles is set to increase further following the launch of gas trucks that would bring about new development in the transport sector.

The gas truck introduced by Scania Tanzania Limited is high technology and comes with a euro 6 engine ideal for the local market and especially for the transportation industry as it is both economic and environmentally friendly.

The Minister for Energy, Dr Medard Kalemani said at the launch of CNG Scania Truck in Dar es Salaam over the weekend said Scania has shown a strong commitment to the use of natural gas resources.

"Scania as an investor has seen and grabbed the opportunity of making use of the CNG in trucks that will reduce costs and environmental damage," he said.

He added that it was high time for government institutions to embark on using CNG on vehicles to reduce costs as well as protect the environment.

At the same time, he urged the Tanzania Petroleum Development Corporation (TPDC) Managing Director, James Mataragio, to buy CNG system cars as soon as possible as they had already started the process of procurement.

"The TPDC Managing Director told me that they are planning to buy a new car shortly. I want you to buy a car that uses a CNG system and I will come to inspect it myself. It is not possible for you to own gas and not use it," said Kalemani.

Speaking during the event, Scania Managing Director, Ms Johanna Said, said the truck is the high technology that suits the Tanzania market and especially for the transportation industry as it is both economic and environmentally friendly.

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Ms Said said natural gas will continue to play an important role in the transport system especially with the infrastructure being consistently increased.

The introduction of CNG trucks will not only create more jobs for Tanzanians but also reduce the use of foreign exchange that would have been gone for oil importation. What is hindering other countries to embark on such projects is the lack of investment in infrastructure which in Tanzania the most of the investment is already made, with the gas pipe into Dar es Salaam and the mother station already placed at Ubungo.

"For the transporters, the use of CNG for trucks is cheaper. For example, our studies show that the cost per month can be reduced by 12 per cent during the first four years of the vehicle when operating at 85 000 km per year," she said.

The local fuel is more than 20 per cent less expensive and the price level is also more stable compared to the imported fuel. "In parallel, we are working with partners and government for the biogas alternative, where you with the same vehicle and same infrastructure could also rapidly scale up in areas outside of Dar es Salaam," she noted.

Ms Said promised that Scania Tanzania will bring more cars that have a CNG system by February next year as part of supporting President Samia's efforts to attract more investors in Tanzania in various sectors.
IT is an undisputed fact that President Samia Suluhu Hassan's 100-days in office has shown the capacity of walking the talk, especially on implementing national development projects.

President Samia was sworn into office on March 19, this year following the death of former President John Magufuli, who was promoted to Glory on March 17, 2021.

The new Head of State, in her first speech, described her departed predecessor, the late Dr Magufuli, as 'a patriotic leader, who sacrificed himself to serve his people.' "We all witnessed his good will and thirst for bringing changes and great development to our country.

We are all witnesses of how he managed to change the image of the country with actions and by his strong and unwavering leadership," she pointed out, while addressing the nation through a live-televised programme.

Dr Magufuli died of heart complications at Mzena Hospital in Dar es Salaam, where he had admitted since March 14 this year. He was first briefly admitted to the Jakaya Kikwete Cardiac Institute (JKCI) on March 6 this year and subsequently discharged, only to be rushed to hospital nine days later after feeling unwell.

According to President Samia, the late Magufuli translated his wishes and great vision for the country through plans, strategies and implementation of mega projects.

"It was lucky to be his Vice-President. He was a leader who didn't get tired of teaching and instructing practically how he wanted things to be done. He taught me many things; he mentored and prepared me enough," she explained. She added: "I can confidently say that we have lost a strong, patriotic and visionary leader, who loved development and a true revolutionary African son.

Actually, Dr Magufuli was a catalyst in several changes, and his death has left a big gap." However, she called upon Tanzanians to remain calm and patient while building unity and solidarity during this hard time.

"I assure you that we (leaders) are well organized to ensure that we proceed from where our departed fellow leader stopped," she said, while promising to follow the country's Constitution which she promised to protect. She further said Tanzania has been blessed with a good treasure of leaders and strong principles of nationality, brotherhood and unity coupled with discipline of the national security forces.

President Samia assured the nation that the country remains in safe hands under her leadership. Addressing mourners during the state funeral for Dr Magufuli at Dodoma's Jamhuri Stadium, President Samia said the late Head of State had mentored her adequately to accomplish all the wishes that he had in mind for the country.

"He made strong mentorship to all of us in the government before his surprise demise and I want to assure the nation that I am now competent enough to implement the wishes he had with the same vigour, zeal and pace," she told the nation.

The president said the country and Africa has lost a great leader, patriotic, Godfearing, pro-poor and true Pan-Africanist who dedicated his life to develop his country and lift the lives of his people.

"Death is a big secret in the life of a human being, it is true that all of us will one day return to our creator, but we never saw or expected this sudden loss of our president, especially during this difficult period, we're overburden by his demise, it is very difficult to withstand this big loss," she mourned.

"The late President Magufuli was loved by many, this is vindicated by the big turn up of leaders from different countries, as well as regional and continental bodies, who have come to join hands with us as we say goodbye to our late leader. We're very grateful to you all." "When I informed him that I was going to a tour in Tanga Region, he told me that Samia you shouldn't be worried, I am progressing well, go and inspect the implementation of the CCM manifesto as we pledged to the citizens, pass my greetings to them, tell them I love them so much," disclosed the Head of State.

"These were his last words to me, I never knew those words would be his goodbye to me and the Tanzanians, I never knew I won't receive his phone call again," grieved President Samia. President Samia said while Dr Magufuli's death was a huge loss to Tanzanians, nothing would go wrong in his absence, insisting there was no cause for alarm.

She insisted the country remains strong under her, and vowed to implement all projects initiated by her predecessor Dr Magufuli as planned. "For those of you doubting that this woman will be able to be the President of the United Republic of Tanzania, I want to tell you that standing right here is the President of the United Republic of Tanzania, who is biologically a woman." "I want to reiterate that I am hard working and confident to serve you, therefore, be assured that I will deliver to your expectations," she stressed, assuring the international community that Tanzania was still intact with every nation and will continue extending her bilateral ties with them.

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At this point she again paid tribute to her predecessor Dr Magufuli for having given her an exposure when he was sending her to represent him in different international occasions, where she obtained enough diplomatic experience worldwide.

President Samia said Dr Magufuli, throughout his presidency, mentored his aides and showed the best way to lead the nation and serve the citizens. The president assured Tanzanians that in collaboration with her Zanzibar counterpart, Dr Hussein Ali Mwinyi, they will work hard towards attaining the country's economic development as per her predecessor's vision.
REGIONAL Commissioners (RCs) and Regional Administrative Secretaries (RASs) who are working for the six phase administration under President Samia Suluhu Hassan, have a task to prove their worth for their appointment by helping the Head of State bring development in the country.

From their position, President Samia demands hard work as they have been trusted to serve their positions. This is in line with the notion that national development depends on hard work and commitment from everyone, and that the appointees should set a good example by dedicating their efforts on bringing changes.

She said "You have earned our trust, therefore you have to understand the huge responsibilities that are ahead of you, and all that is needed is to work hard," said the President recently when swearing in ten RC's.

She equally demanded creativity and hard work from RCs and RASs, for the country to attain development and economic growth it envisions.

She said they should also be the champions of the industrialization drive being implemented by the government with the aim of boosting national economy, creating employment and value addition to the raw materials being produced in the country.

"RASs are the heads of public services at the regional level, they also provide a link between the local government authorities and central government, I expect them to be creative and dedicate all their efforts in pushing forward the country's development agenda," she said.

The Head of State also called on the appointees to properly supervise implementation of development projects in their areas of administration, especially by adhering to the laws of the land and guiding principles instead of applying unnecessary force to collect government taxes.

The list of new RCs and their work stations in brackets are Maj Gen Charles Mbuge (Kagera) Brig Gen Wilbert Ibuge (Ruvuma), Stephen Kagaigai (Kilimanjaro), Makongoro Nyerere (Manyara), Amos Makala (Dar es Salaam), David Kafulila (Simiyu), Rosemary Senyaule (Geita) and Queen Sendiga (Iringa), Mwananvua Mrindoko (Katavi) and Omar Mgumba (Songwe).

The new lineup also includes Aboubakar Kunenge who becomes the Coast Region boss from Dar es Salaam. Others are Anthony Mtaka (Dodoma), Zainab Telack (Lindi), Eng Robert Gabriel (Mwanza), and Juma Homera (Mbeya), and Martin Reuben Shigella (Morogoro).

Brig Gen Marco Gaguti becomes the Mtwara RC, Amb Batilda Burihani (Tabora), Joseph Mkirikiti (Rukwa), Dr Binilith Mahenge (Singida), Dr Philemon Sengati (Shinyanga), and John Mongella (Arusha).

The former Iringa and Tabora Regional Commissioner, Ally Hapi has been appointed the new Mara boss, while Adam Malima who was in Mara has been transferred to Tanga, while Thobias Andengenye and Marwa Rubirya have been retained to their current positions in Kigoma and Njombe respectively.

President Samia marks 100 days in the office, since she was sworn in to the position in March 19th this year, following death of the former Head of State, the late John Magufuli on March 17, 2021 in Dar es Salaam.

The President has also increased a number of women in government leadership posts as she appointed 46 per cent of women in the new lineup of RASs.

President Samia noted that she had increased the number of the female RASs because they have the ability to perform better as men, adding that the government has high trust in them.

"I believe that they will work hard, they shouldn't be considered as women but appointees, who are there to push and supervise implementation of development projects in their areas," she explained.

Going forward, Ms Samia maintained that she would continue appointing various leaders to different posts regardless one being in the opposition party, so long as one is capable of bringing development.

However, she warned against gender discrimination among the appointees, insisting that they should love and respect each other for the greater interest of the country and national development.

"You have to work on challenges facing Tanzanians in your areas of administration... we will be watching you closely," she told the RCs and RASs present at the event.

In another development, the Head of State disclosed the reason behind her recent promotions of two Police Officers to the rank of Commissioners of Police.

A list of new RASs who took oath of office and assigned posts by the President included Ambassador Batilda Buriani (Shinyanga), however she was later on promoted to a Tabora RC following the changes that saw the then Mwanza RC Albert Chalamila being sacked.

Other RASs who were sworn in include Rodrick Mpogolo (Katavi), Dorothy Mwaluko (Singida), Dr Athumani Kihamia (Arusha) Eng Mwanaisha Tumbo (Coast Region) NgusaSamike (Mwanza), Hassan Rugwa (Dar es Salaam), Dr Fatuma Mganga (Dodoma), Musa Chogero (Geita), Pili Mnyema (Tanga) and Prisca Kayombo (Simiyu).

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On June 19, this year, the Head of State appointed 139 district commissioner in a fresh shake-up that is predominated by majority youth. In the appointment the president named at least 45 female commissioners and six professional members of the press.

The president also picked artists, politician and other groups in the society. President Samia also reallocated some District Commissioners. Political scientists and academicians said the newly appointed DCs need Commitment, respect for the rule of law and general good governance.

They said upholding freedom of speech while being ethical and compassionate were some of the key characteristic for good the DCs. The Minister of State in the President Office who is responsible for Regional Administration and Local Government (PO-RALG), Ms Ummy Mwalimu said the DCs should unfailingly observe integrity - and be positively creative.
COMMITMENT expressed by President Samia Suluhu Hassan to bring together all Tanzanians regardless of their political inclinations is indeed real and not mere words in serving the nation.

In particular, this is evidenced by her actions fulfilling her promises to have an inclusive government, where all Tanzanians whether one is in the opposition party (ies) taking part in bold decisions in the country.

When addressing the National Assembly for the first time in April 2021 after taking power, President Samia expressed her commitment to take initiatives to bridge the gap between the government and opposition parties and defend democracy and fundamental freedoms.

She also promised to make appointments at various government posts, including sourcing competent leaders not only from the ruling party-Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), but also from the opposition parties.

Such a promise that was considered as a dream became true in one of her recent new appointments, when she walked her talks after appointing Ms Queen Sendiga as the Regional Commissioners for Iringa Region, taking over from Ally Hapi, who was transferred to Mara region.

In politics, Queen was a member of CCM until 2014, when she decided to shift and join the Alliance for Democratic Change (ADC), one of the small opposition parties in Tanzania. In the 2015 General Election, she contested for Kawe Constituency Parliamentary seat through ADC party, but became unsuccessful.

Queen, who is the ADC's National Deputy Secretary General could not give up as in the 2020 General Election race and was elected by her party to run for the presidency in Tanzania, being among two women including Ms Cecilia Mwanga of Demokrasia Makini to vie for the post through opposition parties.

Furthermore, in defending independence and democracy, the president also pledged to meet and hold talks with opposition leaders to see how best they will conduct their political activities for the benefit of our country.

"Democracy, individual freedom and freedom of the press are important to foster development and peace. For the interest of protecting democracy, I intend to meet with all political party leaders to discuss how they can best conduct their political activities for the benefit of our country," pointed out the President.

In her address to the nation through the National Assembly, the President equally pledged to protect freedom of the people as well as the media.

He said that freedom and democracy were the foundations of peace in the country, which in turn stimulate political, economic and social development.

However, President Samia noted that there is no democratic freedom that is not protected and governed by laws, procedures and regulations.

Therefore, in addition to democracy and the freedom of the people, she urged Tanzanians to be steady, while carrying out their activities in accordance with the provisions of the country's laws.

Immediately after the president's address, the opposition expressed their readiness to meet her, especially the Chama cha Demokrasia na Maendeleo (Chadema) party, being the country's main opposition party, clarifying to have received a letter from the State House inviting them for a meeting.

Here Chadema's Secretary General John Mnyika had written on his Twitter that on April 20, 2021, they received the national Chairman's response letter out of their request to meet the president, and the President had accepted to also hold consultations and they were waiting for the meeting date.

Though the Civic United Front (CUF) Secretary General Haroub Shamis is quoted to have said not receiving any invitation letter to meet with President Samia, he is on record that it was leaders of the Political Parties Council, who had communicated with the opposition party.

According to him, the Political Parties Council meeting Samia brings political parties onboard is intended to deliberate on issues that would be tabled for the Head of State.

He disclosed in one of daily newspapers that CUF's national chairman, Prof Ibrahim Lipumba, wrote to the president advising her on four key issues.

Such issues included the need to improve the country's democracy and rule of law; promotion of human rights; rebuilding the economy that has been devastated by Covid-19 and involvement of experts in fighting Covid-19. Mr Shamis is also quoted as having said that through the letter, the president was also advised on means of accessing low interest loans for the implementation of development projects such as the Julius Nyerere Hydropower Project (JNHPP) and the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR).

In what is considered as working on the advice of such an opposition political party, within three weeks of being in power, the President formed a committee of experts to advise her on the status of Covid-19 in the country and necessary steps to take to keep people safe.

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ACT-Wazalendo Deputy Secretary General for the Mainland, Mr Joram Bashange, is also quoted to have said that the party has a lot to be tabled before the Head of State, who would, hopefully, give them enough time before the meeting.

According to Mr Bashange, the party was not aware of the way she would use to meet them, either directly or through the Political Parties Council under the Office of Registrar of Political Parties, or other institutions.

He further said that a meeting of a Political Parties Council was also expected to deliberate on amending different laws, including the Political Parties Act.

Equally, the Deputy Registrar of Political Parties, Mr Sisty Nyahoza was reported to have confirmed that his office was organizing a meeting of the Political Parties Council expected to take place soon.

He was, however, quick to point out that such a meeting has no relationship with the President's meeting with opposition political parties.

"It is a coincidence that the President is planning to meet top leaders of political parties at a time when we were organizing a legal meeting of the council," he said.
Commissioner of Police (CP) Christophe Bizimungu has arrived in Bangui after being appointed as the new Chief of the Police component under United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA).

He succeeds French national, Major General Pascal Champion, who has headed the component for two years, having assumed the office in 2019.

Bizimungu takes command after acquiring a long experience as commander of Police both in the country and abroad.

His arrival in Bangui on Sunday, June 27 was announced by the peacekeeping mission on its Twitter handle.

"He comes to share his many years of experience from the Rwandan Police in order to contribute to peace and stability in the Central African Republic," reads part of the tweet.

Bizimungu has been working as the commandant of the National Police College based in Musanze, among other previous duties.

Forces from Rwanda, one of the largest troop contributors - both military and police - to MINUSCA are widely commended for doing an outstanding job in ensuring security and restoring peace in different nations.

A lawyer by training, Bizimungu previously served as Director of Criminal Investigations Department in Rwanda National Police.

The department was disbanded after the creation of Rwanda Investigation Bureau which took over many of its duties.

Bizimungu has also worked as head of military prosecution in Rwanda Defence Force, before he was redeployed in Rwanda National Police.
The country has 2,148 cells and currently, all but 50 have a health post.

The Ministry of Health is edging closer to achieving its target of having at least one health post in every cell of the country, as only 50 cells currently remain without a health post.

A cell is just above the smallest administrative unit in the country's local government structure.

The health posts, which are just below health centres, are expected to deliver basic medical services, including non-complicated births and other primary healthcare services.

In its Strategic Plan unveiled in 2018, the ministry made it clear that it wants to put focus on having at least a health post in every cell by 2024, in order to improve citizens' access to health services.

By that time, only 831 health posts had been built across the 2,148 cells that make up the country.

However, three years down the road, majority of cells in the country have health posts, and efforts are continuing to reach out to more.

Speaking in a media interview on Sunday, June 27, Dr. Daniel Ngamije, the Minister of Health said:

"In the whole country, cells that don't have a health post are not many. Currently, the number of cells that don't have these services don't exceed 50."

"What we want to do now is putting more effort in making sure those that don't have such services will get them. For those that already have these facilities, we want to ensure that they provide a full package of primary healthcare services," he added.

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He highlighted the importance of such facilities in the lives of citizens.

"We always have between 5,000 to 7,000 citizens who access treatment from health posts. It is clear that there is a need for us to remember the lives of children, parents and all people in general so that we bring near them primary healthcare services," he said.

Ngamije made the remarks while in Kirehe district, where he was participating in the launch of a new health post built with support from S.C Johnson Inc, an American multinational company that manufactures household cleaning supplies and other consumer chemicals.

SC Johnson has been an important partner in the ministry of health's efforts to improve and equipping of health posts, in a bid to advance universal health coverage.

With collaboration from SC Johnson, a total of 64 health posts have been constructed and equipped, of which 10 are of second generation (offering maternity services and dental and ophthalmology services).

According to information from the Ministry of Health, SC Johnson has also donated 60,000 doses of Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine for inoculating Community Health Workers and Rwandans in general.

Dr. Herbert Fisk Johnson, the Chairman and CEO of SC Johnson, is currently on a visit to Rwanda to inspect some of the projects his company funds.

Kirehe residents undergo Covid 19 vaccination exercise.
A new novel by the Ethiopian author Maaza Mengiste, titled The Shadow King, captures the valuable contribution of the gallant heroines who were part of the national army that defeated the invading colonial Italian army in Ethiopia 85 years ago.

The protagonist is a young woman called Hirut. One of her only treasured worldly possessions is a rifle she inherited from her father. Now orphaned and working as a servant as Ethiopia prepares for an invasion from Italy, Hirut keeps her weapon close by and recalls how her father taught her to aim and shoot.

An emblem of comfort, power, and independence, Hirut's rifle is a symbol of her future as an extraordinary soldier. As the battle between Italy and Ethiopia intensifies, Hirut demonstrates integrity, resilience, and determination in the face of brutal treatment and imprisonment.

After the loss of her parents, Hirut has come to live with the beautiful, formidable Aster and her husband Dejazmach Kidane, a former friend of her mother's. Hirut's relations with her new guardians are complex.

When news arrives that the Italian army is preparing to invade Ethiopia, Kidane leads an army of soldiers in the resistance.

The rifle was too big for the small crate so Hirut kept it tucked into the pile of straw and blankets that she uses as a mattress. On those nights when she is at her most tired, she sleeps so she can feel the rile by her side and pretend it is her mother's arm.

Aster comes across Hirut's gun when she is searching for her missing necklace in the servants' room. After the Emperor Haile Selassie declares that all weapons become property of the Ethiopian soldiers, Kidane and Aster seize Hirut's prized rifle.

True emperor of Ethiopia

The rifle, a Wujigra, has five grooves in the barrel, marks that Hirut's father said helped him count the Italians he killed.

There is one bullet left for the Wujigra. Her father made her promise to keep the two separate until she was in real danger. "... my child, you hold it like I've taught you and you aim it at the heart like I've shown you and you must fear nothing except leaving your enemy alive," he said to her.

Kidane informs Hirut that he needs to keep the gun because war is coming. "... We're going to war and we need all the weapons we can get." he tells her.

"My father gave it to me. He said to always keep it near me," Hirut, who is not keen to surrender her weapon, says.

"If we don't gather every weapon in this country, we'll lose before the war begins," Kidane says.

"... The emperor himself told everyone to contribute their weapons. He said it himself, on the radio. We all have to do it. Even your father would do it if he were alive."

On October 3, 1935, the Italian commander Emilio De Bono enters Ethiopia with his soldiers by crossing the Gash River. There are reports of planes dropping leaflets telling Emperor Selassie's people to rebel against him. The leaflets say that his cousin, Iyasu, is the true emperor of Ethiopia.

Women fighting on the frontline

On top of heavy artillery the Italian planes are dropping bombs and mustard gas. They are targeting civilians.

Selassie orders his army to let the enemy in so the world can see which country is the aggressor.

Selassie's wife, Empress Menen, addresses the nation on radio calling on the women to take action against the aggressors.

Aster's pleas to Kidane to let the women fight on the frontline fall on deaf ears as he insists that women will only ferry supplies, cook, care for the wounded, and bury the dead.

Aster is determined to go on the frontline and she tells one of the women simply known as the cook thus: "We women won't sit by while they (Italians) march into our homes... "

Against the might of an Italian army equipped with more advanced artillery, Kidane's army boasts a powerful drive and superior knowledge of the land. Hirut begins to make crucial decisions and devises a plan to be certain that hope among their army sustains.

"She has always understood the shifting terrains of truth. She knows that it is belief that makes a thing so," writes Mengiste in her novel that was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize.

Shadow King's trusted guard

Kidane's army registers successes abut also suffers devastating losses near Debark. Selassie leaves for England and his order to Kidane is to settle his camp permanently in the mountains surrounding Debark. He is to help protect this territory while the emperor gathers weapons and assistance from abroad.

Each finely drawn, emotionally complex character in The Shadow King must navigate the conflicts and blurred lines between political duty and personal responsibility. Col Carlo Fucelli, head of the Italian army, leads his soldiers with paternalism and bravado but cannot bring himself to admit how much he depends on the care and tenderness of Fifi, the Ethiopian woman whom he loves. Fifi and the cook come to live with Fucelli in his camp.

No one has discovered that Ferres is the stunningly beautiful woman named Fifi; once known as Faven. She spies on the Italians and sends messages to the Ethiopian army. Ferres provides special services for only the richest Italian army officers at astonishing price.

Minim is a young musician who plays the krar, a five-or six-stringed bowl-shaped lyre. Minim, a slightly built modest peasant farmer looks like Emperor Selassie. With Selassie abroad, Kidane asks Minim to become the Shadow King, hence the title of the book, to boost the morale of the soldiers.

Hirut helps disguise Minim, who acts, dresses and rides a horse like Emperor Selassie. Hirut herself becomes the trusted guard of this Shadow King. She is dressed as a Kebur Zebegna, a member of the emperor's elite army. A rifle Aklilu took from an Italian is on her back.

Fucelli constructs a new prison in the cliffs of Debark. Known as the Butcher of Benghazi, Fucelli is killing captured Ethiopians by throwing them off the cliffs of mountains.

The Ethiopians are scared of burials. They are burying their dead at night without ceremonies because Churches have become easy targets for the Italian planes. Cemeteries are also deliberately bombed. Priests are arrested for praying over fresh graves. The priests are thrown over the cliff.

Fifi and the cook keep a ledger with names of the dead that they will read out when the war ends.

Throughout the epic, elegiac The Shadow King, interwoven with Hirut's journey are the moving stories, fraught memories, and hard-won battles of other soldiers, both Ethiopian and Italian.

Alongside Hirut, the magnificent Aster fights for her own rightful place in the army, teaching the women how to make gunpowder and refusing to be undermined by Kidane.

As Kidane's army prepares to surround the Italians, the Shadow King and his female guard step forward onto that highest mountain peak and gaze below. The army looks up and grows silent, awed by the presence of Emperor Haile Selassie.

The army looks toward Hirut, their new image of mother Ethiopia, the one who represents all the women who have survived the war to raise their guns and fight or rush onto the battlefield to carry the wounded.

Hirut jumps into the line of gunfire and swerves around it. She smells the tang of spilled blood and the suffocating aroma of new flowers. She spins in the chaos, pushed by instinct, guided by something else not her own.

Hirut is captured by the Italians. Aster is also arrested and undressed. They are both imprisoned in a single-roomed jail. The seminude photographs of Hirut and Aster are developed. They are made into postcards and passed out to Fucelli's men. They are sent to newspapers. The photographs of the women are distributed to shops in Asmara and Addis Ababa, in Rome and Calabria, in officer's clubs in Tripoli and Cairo.

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Influence of women warriors

After receiving the message from Ferres to attack, Kidane orders his army to ambush the Italian camp. Hirut and Aster help the ambushing Ethiopians in the attack. Seifu grasps Fucelli's head and arches his neck. Kidane is wounded and dies thereafter. Hirut says a prayer over Fucelli, asks God to damn him to eternal fire.

The Shadow King is a gripping, exhilarating depiction of female warriors. As she grew up, author Maaza Mengiste heard stories about the Second Italo-Ethiopian War and imagined heroic battles fought by brave men. But the reality of those stories was even more moving and extraordinary. After researching the war on a Fulbright fellowship in Italy, Mengiste learned that her own great-grandmother had fought in that battle.

Like Hirut, Mengiste's great-grandmother was at first denied her rightful access to a gun and forbidden from fighting. But after successfully suing for access to her father's gun, Mengiste's great-grandmother enlisted in the army and proudly demonstrated her patriotism in war.

An epic, elegiac novel about the majesty and influence of women warriors during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, The Shadow King lifts to the forefront the unassailable power of women's courage and prowess in conflicts throughout history.

"The story of war has always been a masculine story," writes Mengiste, but this version of the story has never been the reality.

The 448-page novel that was published by W. W. Norton and Company in 2019 is divided into three sections: invasion, resistance and returns. With gorgeous, lyrical language, a heroic protagonist, and a panoramic historical story wrought with sympathy for the characters on both sides, The Shadow King is an extraordinary second novel of uncommon scope, emotion, and power.

A spectacular work of literature tracing the chaos of war and the complexity of human relationships, The Shadow King reminds readers, above everything else: "Women have been there, and we are here now."
Three staffers of medical charity group Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), who had been working in the troubled Tigray region of Ethiopia, have been found dead, the organisation has confirmed, suspecting wartime killings.

MSF said in a statement that it was "deeply saddened" by the "brutal murder" of its staff.

It identified them as Maria Hernandez, a Spanish national who had been working as an emergency coordinator; Yohannes Halefom, an assistant coordinator; and Tedros Gebremariam Gebremichael, an MSF driver. The latter two were Ethiopian.

MSF said it lost contact with the workers on Thursday afternoon. The bodies were found near their empty car on Friday.

"No words can truly convey all our sadness, shock and outrage against this horrific attack, nor can words soothe the loss and suffering of their families and loved ones, to whom we relay our deepest sympathy and condolences" MSF said in a statement on Saturday.

"We condemn this attack on our colleagues in the strongest possible terms and will be relentless in understanding what happened. Maria, Yohaness and Tedros were in Tigray providing assistance to people and it is unthinkable that they paid for this work with their lives"
Spread for drying on three black polythene sheets in Simon Wanjohi's farm in Kiamwathi village in Nyeri County are dark brown insects.

Not far from the black sheets is a wire mesh placed on a raised platform, which hosts another set of insects - also drying.

Adjacent to the wire mesh structure are two greenhouses, in which the farmer keeps fish. One hosts a hatchery and the other two ponds where he keeps some 3,000 catfish.

"The fish in the greenhouses thrive because of these insects - the black soldier flies. They are the lifeline to my fish business," says the farmer.

It's been a week since Wanjohi harvested the produce from one of the ponds on his Sywan Urban Aquaculture Centre, which he started three years ago.

The farmer sundries the insects and feeds them to the fish, what has helped him bring down the cost of production by up 50 per cent, he says.

He feeds the fish the black soldier flies larvae for four days in a week and the rest of the days he offers them pellets he formulates on the farm.

He rears the insects inside a greenhouse in tens of black crates and feeds them on rotting banana peels, oranges and avocados for the development of larvae.

"Eight kilos of the waste produce a kilo of black soldier larvae. We feed them for 10 to 12 days so that they have maximum content of crude protein of 47 to 57 per cent for our fish," he says.

Lower production costs

Wanjohi says he embraced the insects after finding commercial feeds expensive. Also, sometimes he would end up with substandard rations. A kilo of commercial rations goes for between Sh125 and Sh200 depending on the stage of growth of the fish.

Fingerlings feeds are the most expensive.

"I have reduced my production costs by 50 per cent by using the insects. Besides, this shows the future of waste management is in fish farming. I want to solely feed the fish red worms and black soldier fly."

Once he harvests the insects, he dips them in hot water to kill any pathogens since they feed on waste. He feeds the fish twice a day - at 10am and 4pm.

"After three to four days of sun drying, I pack them as feeds. My goal is to produce them in bulk so that I can start selling to farmers rearing fish, pigs and chickens."

Inside the two greenhouses that sit on part of his three-quarter acres, Wanjohi rears the catfish.

"I choose catfish over tilapia because it has more flesh and few bones, what makes good fillet. Greenhouse ponds are best for rearing catfish because they thrive even during the cold season."

Wanjohi uses the recirculation system to breed his fingerlings. This involves use of plastic tanks that host the fish at different stages of growth until they are ready for sale. "

I start selling the fingerlings when they are two inches, a length they attain at about two months. Each goes at Sh10."

His farm produces between 10,000 and 15,000 fingerings per month. However, this is done only when the weather is favourable.

"During the cold season, it is difficult to hatch fingerlings due to the low temperatures."

Criteria

Wanjohi, a trained social worker, identifies fish to breed (shooters) inside the pond by picking those that mature faster.

The ponds that are at least a metre deep for good quality water are subdivided into three compartments, making it easier to grade the fish.

His hatchery is inside a small greenhouse covered with a dark polythene sheet.

"Breeding the fingerlings starts with identifying mature female fish from the pond and injecting it with a hormone to hasten ripening of eggs, which are then extracted by squeezing the body."

Thereafter, they take the male fish and remove the sperms by splitting it open.

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"We then fertilise the eggs with the sperms and place them inside the propagation unit where temperatures should be between 28-30 degrees Celsius. After 24-36 hours, the eggs will start hatching. They start feeding after the yoke forms a fingerling," he explains.

To achieve maximum production in fish farming, he states that farmers must ensure there is quality water with the right pH.

"The environment has to be favourable for the development of fish. A farmer should ensure that there is no ammonia in the water and the pond has the right amount of oxygen," says Wanjohi, who adds he has invested Sh2 million in the project though his initial capital was Sh500,000.

Serah Mutahi, who works with Kenya Fisheries Services, says it costs Sh243 to raise a fish to maturity.

Wanjohi says he sells a kilo at Sh450 but after value addition - filleting - it goes for Sh850. He has opened an eatery where they make fish samosas that go at Sh50 each, fish soup at Sh50 as well as prepare meals such as ugali, rice and chips with fish as an accompaniment.
President Paul Kagame on Saturday, June 26, was received by his Congolese counterpart Felix Tshisekedi, in Goma, capital of DR Congo's North Kivu Province, as he paid a reciprocal visit following the latter's visit to Rubavu.

On Friday, Tshisekedi was received by Kagame at La Corniche One-Stop Border Post.

The two Heads of State then proceeded to tour the City of Rubavu and assess damages caused by recent earthquakes which followed Nyiragongo volcanic eruption.

Meanwhile, in Goma, the two leaders will visit areas damaged by the Nyiragongo volcanic eruption and also holding bilateral talks.

Mount Nyiragongo in eastern DR Congo, is one of the world's most active volcanoes.

It erupted last month, sending panicked Goma residents in disarray as they fled to other places in their country as well as into Rubavu District on the Rwandan side.

Besides the damage caused by the eruption in Rubavu and some other areas of Rwanda, Goma city which is closer to the volcano was hit harder.

Reports indicate that the eruption claimed more than 20 lives in the neighbouring country and displaced about 400,000 people.

Last month, an evaluation of the situation by the Rwanda Environment Management Authority (REMA), following the eruption of Nyiragongo, ruled out an explosion of gas on Lake Kivu.

While in Goma, Rwanda and DR Congo delegations are going to sign bilateral agreements to further strengthen the two countries' diplomatic ties.
President Uhuru Kenyatta on Saturday unveiled the Sh10 billion Kenya Marine Fisheries Socio-Economic Development Project. The government seeks to improve the income of fishing communities along the Kenyan coast.

President Kenyatta said the opportunity provided by the project must be exploited to generate investments, create jobs, increase tax revenues and improve local livelihoods.

He emphasised the need to commercialise the country's marine resources for the benefit of Kenyans by creating well thought strategic national systems to ensure landing of more than 300,000 metric tonnes of fish annually and create at least 60,000 jobs in the next 10 years.

The World Bank-supported project, which seeks to create over 60,000 new jobs in the fishing sector, will benefit 19 sub-counties in Kwale, Mombasa, Kilifi, Tana River and Lamu counties.

Covid-19 recovery efforts

Speaking at the launch of the projects, the President said the project is part of the government's post Covid-19 recovery efforts, adding that the initiative, to be rolled in five years, will lead to sustainable utilisation of Kenya's marine fisheries resources.

"When completed, we expect this project to contribute to sustainable exploitation of Kenya's marine fisheries. This represents a new dawn in the development of the coastal region; and it is a key pillar in my administration's job and wealth creation agenda," the President said.

The President also outlined several other interventions the government is implementing to expand opportunities for employment and wealth creation in the emerging blue economy sector.

He listed the creation of a dedicated office to deal with oceans and the blue economy, the revival of Liwatoni Fish Port and the government's plan to set up a fish processing factory in Lamu as some of the ongoing projects in the fisheries sector.

Training of seafarers

On capacity building in the sector, the President said the government had designated the Bandari Maritime Academy to be the centre of excellence in training of seafarers and fisherfolk.

"Building the capacity of our fishers to world standards is an essential part of this effort. The enhanced management framework, under the Oceans and Blue Economy Office should ensure that fishing vessels licensed to operate in our waters provide job and training opportunities for our fishers and young people," the President said.

Coast Governors Hassan Joho (Mombasa), Salim Mvurya (Kwale), Amason Kingi (Kilifi), Dhadho Godhana (Tana River) and Fahim Twaha (Lamu) hailed the project is a new frontier in improving the livelihoods of fishing communities and spurring growth of related industries in the region.

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Mombasa Governor Ali Joho said the lives of the coastal people were closely intertwined with fishing. He called for investments and policy reforms to ensure the sector benefits more people.

Kwale Governor Salim Mvurya, who is also the chairman of Jumuiya ya Pwani- a regional grouping of the six Coastal counties, called for the integrated development and exploitation of the blue economy and other sectors such as agribusiness, infrastructure, tourism, education and training.

The event was attended by Cabinet Secretary for Agriculture, Livestock, Fisheries and Co-operatives Peter Munya, his Treasury counterpart Ukur Yatani and chairman of the blue economy initiative Gen. (Rtd) Samson Mwathethe among other senior government officials.
Prime Minister Moustafa Madbouli said on Monday the state is supporting all efforts to expand the establishment of new universities. This trend has led to increasing the number of governmental, private and non-profit universities, the premier said.

Madbouli's remarks came while chairing a meeting on following up the executive steps for establishing a new HQ for Senghor University in New Borg el Arab City in Alexandria governorate.

Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research Khaled Abdel Ghaffar attended the meeting alongside Finance Minister Mohamed Maait and Board Chairman of Senghor University Hani Hilal.

Madbouli said the state is deeply interested in backing Senghor University in Alexandria, highlighting the pivotal role played by the university in promoting cooperation with African countries.

Cabinet Spokesman Nader Saad said it was agreed during the meeting to start taking executive steps to establish the new HQ of Senghor University in New Borg el Arab City beside the Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology.

A cooperation protocol will be signed to start the implementation of the project within the coming period, noted the spokesman.
Health Minister Hala Zayed in a cabinet meeting on Sunday 27/6/2021 said Egypt is scheduled to receive 1.9 million coronavirus vaccine doses through the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) in July.

Attending the meeting, chairman of the Egyptian Drug Authority (EDA) Tamer Essam also confirmed the country will receive the contracted 20 million doses of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine by the end of the year.

Earlier this month, Egypt received 210,000 Sputnik V doses and is planning to manufacture over 40 million doses of the Russian vaccine in Cairo.

Zayed, during the meeting with Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly, said Egypt has the raw materials required to manufacture 10 million doses of China's Sinovac.

Additional raw materials are scheduled to arrive in the country during the coming two weeks that are enough to produce 7.5 million doses, Zayed added.

Egypt received the first shipment of raw materials to produce Sinovac doses in May. The government plans to produce 40 million doses of the vaccine in the first year.

Late in May, head of the Egyptian Authority for Unified Procurement Bahaa El-Din Zidan said Egypt contracted with the African Export-Import Bank to import 20 million Johnson & Johnson vaccine doses.

So far, Egypt has vaccinated almost 5 million citizens against the pandemic, according to Presidential advisor Mohamed Awad Tag El-Din, through over 400 centres distributed nationwide.

Ahram Online
Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi and King Abullah II of Jordan discussed on Sunday 27/6/2021 means to enhance economic and commercial cooperation and investments among the three countries.

This comes as the three leaders held a tripartite summit in Baghdad, the fourth round of talks between the three countries to promote cooperation mechanisms and reinforce political consultation on regional issues.

Enhancing the trilateral ties aims to establish a new stage of strategic integration among the three countries that is based on joint developmental goals undergirded by firm historic and social ties, a statement by the Egyptian Presidency said.

The leaders also discussed intensifying consultation and coordination among the three countries on important regional issues, in light of successive international and regional developments.

These developments require cooperation among the three countries so that they can face the joint challenges and dangers, the statement read, especially amid the regional interference that threatens Arab national security.

They also agreed on the need to continue cooperating in the fight against terrorism and extremist thought.

El-Sisi, during the summit, affirmed Egypt's keenness to protect Arab water security and welcomed Jordanian and Iraqi support for the Egyptian position on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) issue.

The GERD issue is a top priority for Egyptian policy as it poses a direct threat to all aspects of Egyptian national security, the statement read.

El-Sisi underscored Egypt's unwavering stance on the necessity of reaching a legally binding agreement on the filling and operation of the dam.

During the summit, the leaders discussed a number of regional issues of mutual concern, especially developments in the Palestinian cause.

They reiterated support to the Palestinian people to obtain their legitimate rights, including the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in accordance with the relevant international resolutions.

The leaders also hailed the recent Egyptian efforts that led to the de-escalation and declaration of ceasefire in the Gaza Strip as well the Egyptian initiative for the reconstruction of the strip.

This comes over a month after Israel and Palestinian factions agreed on an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire in Gaza. The ceasefire ended 11 days of Israeli airstrikes that killed more than 250 and injured thousands of Palestinians in the enclave.

El-Sisi affirmed the need for concerted efforts among the nations of the Arab world and the Middle East to address the challenges facing the region and restore stability.

The three leaders agreed on intensified efforts to reach a comprehensive political settlement within the framework of preserving the unity, independence and territorial integrity of the countries of the region.

El-Sisi voiced support for the implementation of strategic projects in cooperation with Jordan and Iraq, especially on the political and security levels.

This affirms the keenness of the three countries to maintain the momentum of cooperation, El-Sisi said, amid their awareness of the current circumstances due to the coronavirus pandemic and its economic implications.

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El-Sisi also held a separate meeting with King Abdullah II, during which the president expressed his aspiration to continue the ongoing coordination between the two countries on the bilateral level and the trilateral level with Iraq.

El-Sisi also affirmed Egypt's support to the development path in Jordan led by King Abdullah and to the procedures the king takes to preserve the security and stability of the kingdom, a separate statement by the Presidency read.

El-Sisi voiced Egypt's full solidarity with Jordan, noting that Jordan's security is an inseparable part of the Egyptian national security.

They discussed cooperation between Egypt and Jordan especially in energy files, counter-terrorism and reviewed means to increase trade exchange between the two countries.

Ahram Online
press release

Egypt's highest appellate court this month confirmed 12 death sentences, including for several high-profile Muslim Brotherhood leaders convicted in an unfair mass trial for participating in the 2013 Rabaa sit-in.

This is the first time death sentences have been upheld for high-profile opposition leaders, including a former member of parliament and an ex-minister who served in late former President Mohamed Morsy's government. Dozens of others have ended up on death row after similarly unfair, politicized proceedings.

Egypt cannot afford more executions. The country has been locked in a political crisis, with grave abuses by security forces now making daily news. Carrying out more executions will undermine prospects for any future transitional justice efforts to heal the country. Under President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's government, Egypt has been executing people at an unprecedented rate, making it the world's third-worst country in terms of numbers of executions in 2020, according to Amnesty International. In October and November alone, Egyptian authorities executed at least 57 men and women, 49 of them in just 10 days. These included at least 15 men convicted in cases of political violence after unfair trials.

The spree of executions continued into the first half of this year, with at least 51 executions. Nine were executed during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, when those on death row would have felt relatively safe, knowing that executions are traditionally put on hold; one was 82 years old. The examples of this state-sponsored savagery go on and on.

Eradicating opposition

In a nutshell, Sisi's government has been on a mission to eradicate all forces of potential opposition stemming from Egypt's nationwide 2011 uprising. To cut to the usual deceptive narrative: yes, there have been violent terrorist attacks that killed and wounded security forces and members of the public, and those responsible should face fair trials and go to prison.

But these scores of executions are, more than anything else, the product of a relentless effort by Sisi's security establishment to reshape Egypt's political and social spheres according to the government's own autocratic vision. Sisi's government has almost uniformly co-opted the judicial system. The constitution and fundamental laws have been amended, and new laws have been introduced to circumvent due process guarantees or remove them altogether.

Egyptian authorities have appointed special judges to the so-called terrorism courts, and they have issued hundreds of death sentences. They do not shy away from making clear where they stand politically, denigrating all opposition and praising the army and security forces. Sisi's government also introduced amendments in 2017 to undermine the independence of the top appeals court, a once highly respected institution that acted as a check on many flawed criminal trials.

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Sisi's government has instrumentalized the judiciary to imprison and execute political dissidents and to aggressively raise the costs for dissent, sending the message that criticizing or opposing the government can literally cost people their lives. The Rabaa death sentences are the "natural" price for those who challenged the military overthrow of Morsy that Sisi led in 2013.

Morsy himself died in detention in 2019, completely isolated from the outside world, having been denied medical treatment. The same thing happened to Essam el-Erian, another senior Muslim Brotherhood leader who died in custody last year.

And let's not forget that in Rabaa in August 2013, security forces killed an estimated 1,000 largely peaceful pro-Morsy protesters in a matter of hours. By the end of the Rabaa sit-in dispersal on 14 August 2013, security forces seized just over a dozen guns and only about a handful of Muslim Brotherhood members were killed during the dispersal.

This was an extraordinarily violent assault that was anything but an operation to pinpoint the few armed protesters amongst tens of thousands of peaceful ones. The subsequent Rabaa trial was likewise anything but a fair effort to identify and prosecute those responsible for unlawful violence.

Amr Magdi Researcher, Middle East and North Africa
A BULAWAYO man was arrested Saturday in Gweru after he was found in possession of US$2 710 in counterfeit notes.

Midlands provincial police spokesperson Emmanuel Mahoko confirmed the arrest of 23-year-old Tinashe Kanengoni.

His two other accomplices are still at large.

Mahoko said Kanengoni was found in possession of fake notes after he tried to make a purchase at pharmacy at Chirandu shopping centre in Senga, Gweru on 26 June 2021 at about 1800 hours.

"Circumstances are that on the 26th of June 2021, the accused Tinashe Kanengoni of Nketa 7, Bulawayo disembarked from a Toyota Mark X motor vehicle at the business centre and bought Sophlex syrup at Sante-Plus pharmacy," the police spokesperson said.

"He used a USD$100 note and was given USD$90 change. He rushed back to the vehicle which had two other occupants. The till operator Kumbirai Brian Chereti, a male adult immediately realised that the note was fake, rushed outside and jumped onto the bonnet of the motor vehicle before it could take off.

"Upon taking off, the driver tried to swerve the motor vehicle to throw him off the bonnet and in the process the vehicle fell into a ditch. Two occupants including the driver disembarked the motor vehicle and fled away. One suspect, Tinashe Kanengoni was apprehended by members of the public who reported the matter to ZRP Senga Police," Mahoko said.

After the police officers attended the scene, and searching the vehicle, four different vehicle number plates, $2 710 of fake US dollars comprising of 25xUS$100, 3xUS$50, $2xUS$20 and 2xUS$10 were recovered.

"Investigations are in progress. The other two suspects are at large while Kanengoni is in police custody. He will be taken to court soon to answer charges of fraud," said Mahoko.

He has appealed to members of the public who might have information on the whereabouts of the other suspects to inform the police.

Members of the public who were defrauded by criminals using fake money were also invited to approach Senga police station and assist in investigations.

"We would also like to urge businesspeople to closely check the cash they are given before processing transactions."
Blog

The growing insurgency in Northeast Nigeria is negatively impacting the lives and health care of residents in the region, particularly mothers and their infants, who lack adequate care and face life-threatening food shortages. The insurgency has also worsened health issues such as malaria and malnutrition and has adversely obstructed access to clean water.

In a December 2020 report, UNICEF says that more than 400,000 children in North East Nigeria are currently at risk of severe acute malnutrition (SAM) and without treatment, and 75,000 are likely to die this year. UNICEF adds that an estimated 10.6 million people -- including 6.2 million children and 1.2 million people living in inaccessible areas -- need humanitarian assistance in the North East.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), malnutrition is the single greatest threat to the world's public health. A recent UNDP report assessing the impact of conflict in North East Nigeria found that it had led to a food crises and as a result over 288,000 children in Borno, Adamawa and Yobe were found to be suffering from SAM.

In addition to state government efforts, non-profits and international relief organisations are providing humanitarian assistance and medical aid to individuals and communities displaced by the conflict.

"The conflict in Borno State has worsened malnutrition because most people are being displaced from their communities and have lost their sources of livelihood," said Ugochukwu Ugwu, a nutrition officer with the Justice Development and Peace Commission (JDPC), an organisation that visits communities in the state to respond to their nutrition needs. "When we meet those who are severely malnourished or moderately malnourished, we refer them to outpatient therapeutic centres where they can be given intensive treatment," he said.

Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders [MSF] is also responding to the nutritional challenges of residents despite security threats. Trained teams from MSF have been running mobile clinics to provide basic health care to children under-16 years of age suffering from malnutrition in rural communities outside Maiduguri. These include Dusuman, Musari and the Ahmed Grema Camp for displaced people in Shuwari. "Our medical teams provide emergency treatment, surgery, malnutrition treatment, maternity and antenatal services, vaccinations, and the prevention and treatment of malaria and other diseases", Isa Ibrahim, the head of MSF's mobile team, said.

MSF started working in Borno state in 2014 to respond to the growing needs of displaced persons as a result of the insurgency. In 2019, the MSF mobile team treated more than 10,000 patients, mostly children, for malnutrition across several mapped out communities in the state. In 2020, the team provided a total of 6,881 consultations on malnutrition for children living in villages outside Maiduguri. Of this number, 71 children have been treated for SAM and 190 children for moderate acute malnutrition.

According to Ibrahim, some neighbourhoods such as Zabarmari are too insecure for the team to visit. This makes it difficult to provide people in the area with humanitarian assistance and medical care. Zabarmari is the community outside Maiduguri where more than 100 rice farmers were beheaded in November 2020 by Boko Haram terrorists, which caused global condemnation and outrage.

In situations like these, Ibrahim says MSF employs a simple yet effective method to provide children with essential healthcare and treatment for malnutrition. The team goes to a community and ask community leaders to select three to five people who can read and write to work as focal persons for the organisation. After the selection, the individuals are trained and taught basic patient-care skills. They are also provided with tools to carry out simple tests such as malaria rapid diagnostic tests, malnutrition screening, weighing, temperature measurements and the mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC) for affected children in the community.

In addition, since March this year, MSF has been engaging seven community mobilisers from the host communities and three Community Health Extension Workers (CHEWs) -- a clinician, drug dispenser and supervisor as auxiliary staff who work from Monday to Friday every week and are paid incentives monthly. The mobilisers inform and educate mothers and caregivers about the activities of the MSF and how they can benefit from it.

However, in difficult cases where a child's condition is serious or hard to determine, the focal persons and auxiliary health workers call the MSF team for advice or make referrals to Gwange Pediatric Hospital, the organisation's central clinic in the city. Ibrahim says MSF provides local transportation for the guardians or caregivers of the children to bring them to the clinic for treatment and after being treated, they are taken back to their communities.

This health intervention is producing positive results as children suffering malnutrition have received treatment and their parents provided with nutrition advice and how to respond when cases arise, Ibrahim says. For instance, more than 1,529 consultations on malnutrition have been carried out since April 2021 out of which 160 cases were referred to the MSF-run clinic for proper treatment and management.

Ibrahim says this way, children living in hard-to-reach villages and rural communities have access to basic health care when they need it.

"If not the use of focal person in affected communities, access to health will be difficult for them because not everyone will like to be there because of the (security) challenges," Abdulkareem Yakubu, MSF's field communication officer, says of the success of the technique.

Ibrahim added that MSF's use of focal persons and auxiliary staff to work in communities is novel for the organisation's work and this was devised due to heightened security issues in the area. But thrice a week, MSF staff visit the communities to deliver drug supplies, supervise their activities and assess progress.

Building sustainable interventions requires an end to conflict

The spike in insurgency in the region is causing a strain on the works of the nonprofit in accessing the communities. However, Ibrahim says that this challenge has been largely solved because of the experience and skills acquired by the focal persons, community mobilisers and auxiliary health workers they engage with to work in these communities. "Most of them live in the communities with their families, so it is easier to engage with their people," he said.

As MSF continues its interventions in the face of growing security challenges, the sustainability of their work is also a concern for residents and experts who say the government needs to do more to complement their efforts.

Dr. Laz Ude Eze, a public health expert said while ad hoc interventions by NGOs are invaluable, they are at the same time not sustainable in communities they work. He adds that the only thing that is sustainable is achieving food security in the state and across the country. "It is better to prevent malnutrition from occurring in the first place through food security and doing that involves many things because there is a high level of poverty and this drives malnutrition too," he said, adding, "Solving the problem of insecurity in the state will also help farmers to achieve food security."

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Eze, who is also a Sustainable Development Consultant, says that raising public health awareness especially among mothers in the rural areas will help them know the combination of local foods and supplements that have high nutritional value to avoid malnutrition. "This should be driven by the local and state governments, with deliberate and intentional actions," he said, adding, "The school feeding program of the Federal Government, for example, was targeted towards fighting malnutrition, but the implementation has been poor."

Most residents have lost their livelihoods and cannot go to the farm to produce what they eat as a result of the conflict, and as a result most of them depend solely on NGO interventions, which is not sufficient enough.

In addition to developing sustainability models that enhance continuity in the works of the NGOs such as MSF and others operating in the region, the government needs to intervene and allocate more funds to local organizations on ground as a way of reaching more vulnerable communities in the state.

While questions of sustainability remain, MSF's adaptation to providing nutrition and healthcare access to children in hard-to-reach areas by training select community members is proof that even within ongoing conflict, those who need care the most can, and should be reached.
Correspondent

Construction work on a project in Mount Pleasant was suspended last week following serious concerns over the loss of a wetland crucial for surface and ground water availability for the New Parliament Building in Mount Hampden.

The Infrastructure Development Bank of Zimbabwe (IDBZ) has commenced construction of properties on land west of ART Farm.

The site, which is part of the headwaters of the Gwebi River, is sandwiched between Mount Pleasant and Mount Pleasant Heights, Harare.

Construction work at the site has been underway for several weeks with grading of access roads demarcating the area for development of residential properties.

Construction workers have been draining the deep mature wetland through abstraction by water bowsers ahead of commencement of building.

But the development has triggered off alarm bells among various stakeholders, who are questioning how approval was granted.

The construction is likely to impact the headwaters of the Gwebi River, which feeds Lake Manyame - one of the critical sources of water for Harare, surrounding communities and downstream residents.

Against the background of mounting concern over the loss of the wetland due to the proposed development, there was a site visit last week by a team made up of representatives from the Upper Manyame Sub-Catchment Council (UMSCC), officials from the City of Harare, the Zimbabwe National Water Authority (ZINWA) and IDBZ.

UMSCC, which says it was never consulted and was hitherto unaware of the development, initiated the site visit.

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It is concerned that in the near to long-term future, the development could result in the drying up of the Gwebi River.

Engineer Wensley Muchineri, the CEO of UMSCC told The Herald: "We asked them to suspend the operation with immediate effect because as UMSCC, we were not consulted and were not aware of it.

"When one is constructing a development near a wetland, one applies to the Catchment Council. In this case, this was not done and we raised a red flag. We asked them to stop. We are reducing our instruction to IDBZ in writing."

UMSCC is a statutory water management body established by an Act of Parliament, Water Act of 1998 (Chapter 20:24).

It is made up of diverse stakeholders consisting of domestic ground water users, commercial farmers, small-scale commercial farmers, resettled farmers, large-scale farmers, small-scale miners, large-scale miners, rural district councils, urban town councils, industries and other deemed groups. The Herald understands that previously ZINWA submitted a report to IDBZ with its recommendations for the IDBZ to follow.

Apparently these recommendations are yet to be acted upon. An Environmental Impact Assessment certificate has conditions outlining recommendations requiring adherence to by the IDBZ. On June 15, The Herald approached the IDBZ for comment.

After noticing the prolonged absence of official comment from the IDBZ, on June 22, 2021 the paper followed up with a phone call, and then as advised an email to an official identified as P Zvobgo, said to be the interface with the media. Still, there has been no response on the Mount Pleasant development and the likely impact on the capital's primary source of water.
The African Development Bank (AfDB) shareholders have shown strong support for proposals to tackle Covid-19 as the continent faces a possibility of a third wave amid poor vaccine access.

This emerged from three-day annual meetings of the bank which ended last Friday.

The meetings included the 47th meeting of the Governors of the African Development Fund, the bank's concessional lending arm.

Part of the proposal is that AfDB, the continent's only development finance institution with an AAA credit rating, act as a conduit for International Monetary Fund (IMF) special drawing rights, which it would then on-lend to African countries.

AfDB president Dr Akinwumi Adesina proposed an African stability mechanism, modelled on a European one, to act as a firewall against external shocks. Dr Adesina also pledged that the bank would strengthen support to African countries as they tackle the pandemic's economic and health impacts.

Going forward, Dr Adesina said the AfDB would invest heavily in domestic vaccine manufacturing and in Africa's healthcare system, noting that only 51 percent of public health facilities have basic water and sanitation, and only 31 percent of healthcare facilities have electricity. The president underlined the fact that Africa imports 60-70 percent of its pharmaceutical drugs.

Dr Adesina said: "The lives of 1,2 billion people in Africa are at risk... we must give hope to the poor, the vulnerable, by ensuring that every African, regardless of their income level, gets access to quality healthcare, as well as health insurance and social protection."

Kenneth Ofori-Atta, Ghana's Finance Minister and Chairperson of the African Development Bank Board of Governors, cautioned at the start of the meetings that Africa risked being left behind as a result of the pandemic and was "staring down the possibility of a lost decade, where its economic trajectory pulls further away from that of the rest of the world." He said the African Development Bank should take a leading role in the continent's recovery.

"Our bank, distinct in its role, has to be at the centre of Africa's build-back through targeted support to tackle Africa's development challenges and lay the foundation to respond to future challenges," Ofori-Atta said.

To date, less than 1 percent of Africa's adult population has been fully vaccinated against Covid-19, even as Africa confronts new variants and fast rising cases while the continent's health and economic responses are hampered by tightening fiscal constraints.

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The meetings comprised closed-door discussions between the governors (finance ministers and central bank governors of the regional and non-regional member countries of the bank), and knowledge events on healthcare, debt sustainability and climate change.

In attendance were IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva, World Trade Organisation director general Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, and United Nations Deputy Secretary General Amina Mohammed. Former United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who is President and Chairperson of the Global Green Growth Institute, was also among the panelists.

Green growth was high on the agenda. In a panel discussion, Alok Sharma, British Member of Parliament and Conference of the Parties (COP) 26 President, said it was vital that developed countries deliver on a US$100 billion commitment to tackling climate change.

Patrick Verkooijen, chief executive of the Global Center on Adaptation, lauded the Africa Adaptation Acceleration Program, a joint initiative between the GCA and the AfDB to mobilize US$25 billion to accelerate climate change adaptation across Africa.
A Zimbabwean man who is one of the three suspects, two of them foreigners, believed to be part of a vehicle smuggling and carjacking syndicate in the SADC region, has been rearrested on fresh charges.

Brian Mabika (29) had been granted $20 000 bail by the High Court last Thursday and was rearrested by detectives from the CID Vehicle Theft Squad (VTS) soon after depositing the bail.

He was rearrested over three fresh charges of car thefts which he allegedly committed in Zimbabwe in 2019.

Mabika remains in custody with his two other accomplices -- a South African, Mpswati Obed Lucar (33) and a Zambian identified only as SA Kalengo (36).

They were recently arrested in Mainway Meadows, Harare, after they were found in possession of two cars -- a Range Rover Evoque (registration number HZ 33CN GP) and a Toyota Fortuner (JH 81 HR GP), both worth nearly R1 million.

The vehicles are suspected to have been stolen in Namibia before being smuggled to South Africa and then Zimbabwe.

It is believed the suspects wanted to eventually smuggle the two cars into Zambia.

Mabika's wife, Sikholisiwe Zondo (27) of Hatfield, Harare, was also arrested last week after she hired the Toyota Fortuner at CE car rental in Namibia, before surrendering it to her husband for smuggling.

They tampered with the vehicle chassis numbers and fixed a fake registration number plate in South Africa before smuggling the two cars into Zimbabwe en route to Zambia, using the fake documents.

On the new charges, investigations carried out so far have revealed that on October 26, 2019 at Holiday Inn, Mabika who was in the company of his three accomplices including two South African nationals, hatched a plan to steal a white Toyota Hilux at a car rental in the city.

They then hired the vehicle for six days at a fee of US$150. The suspects deposited US$300 and were given the vehicle and later disabled its tracking system.

Mabika and his accomplices did not return the vehicle but smuggled it into Zambia after manufacturing fake documents. A report was made to the police.

The vehicle is still in Zambia and police are making efforts to return it to the owner.

On October 26, 2019, Mabika and his accomplices also went to another car rental in the city where they allegedly hired a black Ford Ranger for six days and paid US$300 as deposit before tampering with the tracking system, again.

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They then disappeared and the vehicle, valued at US$85 000, has not been recovered.

On the third count, it is alleged that on June 5, 2019, the complainant arrived from South Africa while driving a silver Isuzu KB250 in the company of one of the suspects, Charles Mpofu, when they booked at a lodge in the city.

The following morning at around 6am, Mpofu asked for the car keys from the unsuspecting complainant alleging that he wanted to go to Norton with Mabika for some business and would return the vehicle on the same day.

They were given the car but disappeared and a report was made to the police.

On June 17, 2019 detectives from the CID VTS received information that the vehicle was in possession of a Ruwa man and they went to his house where they ambushed him.

They arrested him and said he had bought the vehicle from Mabika and Mpofu.

Mabika was later arrested while Mpofu disappeared.
Raymeg Holdings Limited, a corporate member of Zimbabwe Commercial Rabbit Breeders Association (ZICORBA), this month started distributing pure rabbit breeds to ZICORBA members as efforts to improve the country's rabbit genetic stock gather pace.

The launch of the programme, expected to distribute about 2 000 pure breeds over 12 months, coincided with the first anniversary of ZICORBA, which is the only collective voice of rabbit farmers in Zimbabwe.

ZICORBA was launched in July 2021.

To date, ZICORBA members in Masvingo, Mashonaland East and Midlands have received the pure breeds. The breeds were imported from South Africa recently under a Government approved and supervised programme.

Commercial rabbit production, which is fast gaining ground in Zimbabwe, has significant potential to generate foreign currency earnings for the country. Potential export markets for rabbits include China and the US.

ZICORBA has also secured a niche for rabbit meat on the local market where demand is expected to soar to more than 25 tonnes per month valued at US$1 million.

Raymeg executive director, Mrs Paidamoyo Nyamakanga said recently that the distribution of the pure breeds would continue in Bulawayo and Matabeleland provinces.

"The programme is aimed at broadening the participation of rabbit farming amongst our people, to improve livelihoods, create employment and to contribute to the country's gross domestic product".

ZiCORBA vice president, Mr Orbert Nyakabau, thanked Raymeg for supporting the association's agenda to improve the country's rabbit breeding genetic pool.

The Zimbabwe Commercial Rabbit Breeders Association (ZICORBA) marked its first anniversary this month with a number of achievements under its belt, making it one of the most successful and vibrant farming groups in the country since Independence in 1980.

In just 12 months, ZICORBA has struck strategic partnerships with a number of other rabbit farmers associations in Africa, including Botswana, Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa and Uganda.

ZICORBA has, in its first year of existence, wooed local businessmen to invest in what was previously a neglected sub-sector. This has turned rabbit farming into one of the most coveted and burgeoning enterprises in Zimbabwe.

At the behest of ZICORBA, private investor Raymeg Holdings invested in Zimbabwe's first export certified rabbit abattoir, which is one of the biggest in Africa.

The abattoir has a capacity to process 2,5 tonnes of rabbit meat per day. And plans are afoot to set up rabbit pellet-making and rabbit skin processing plants in Harare.

ZICORBA's first president Regis Nyamakanga said when launching the organisation last year, they were fully aware of the huge effort it would take to grow the rabbit industry in Zimbabwe, especially following the outbreak of Covid-19.

"When we launched ZICORBA, we were under no illusion that it was going to be a 'walk-in-the-park'. We knew that we had to contend with the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.

"Memories were still fresh in peoples' minds about the collapse of a rabbit association that had been formed in Zimbabwe a few years back. We also knew that the prevailing economic challenges in Zimbabwe would militate against our efforts at starting something new. But we were determined to forge ahead.

"Against this background, we took a deliberate position to craft a strategy of breathing life back into the rabbit farming sub-sector. The strategy is anchored on three key pillars -- Production, Processing and Marketing.

"We developed a detailed action plan that we have been implementing with sufficient gusto," the ZICORBA chief said.

"To date, we have established ZICORBA Chapters in each of the country's 10 provinces. Each ZICORBA Chapter has a seven-member executive lead by a Chapter president. At the national level, we have a national Executive led by the national president.

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"The national and provincial leadership were elected at the Association's Annual General Meeting (AGM) and in terms of our constitution, which was developed and approved by paid-up members of ZICORBA," he said.

ZICORBA employs 14 full-time staff, including the national coordinator; 10 provincial coordinators and youth ambassadors, a communication officer, a website master and a training coordinator.

"Although our members pay joining fees and monthly subscriptions, we took a deliberate position, which was endorsed at the Association's AGM, that this money would not be used for the next two years.

"We convinced our corporate members, Raymeg Holdings Private Limited (Raymeg) and Midesha Private Limited (Midesha) to fund the Association's activities for 24 months," Mr Nyamakanga said.

The ZICORBA leadership negotiated with stock feed companies namely Agrifoods, National Foods and Capital Foods for discounts on rabbit pellets for the benefit of its members. This helped in lowering the cost of production.
Municipal Reporter

The flyover complex at the south-west corner of central Harare has not been repaired or attended to 15 years since engineers identified serious damage to the concrete on the edges that has exposed reinforcing steel to rust with Harare City Council just ignoring the problem and hoping for the best.

On Monday last week the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (ZLHR), represented by Mr Tinashe Chinopfukutwa, wrote to Harare City Council's director of works and copied the letter to the Ministry of Local Government and Public Works and the acting town clerk, asking what was being done to prevent the flyover complex collapsing and causing injury to motorists and pedestrians.

So far the only public comment from Harare City Council is from spokesperson Mr Michael Chideme who yesterday said the council was establishing whether the flyovers are managed by council or Government, The complex of three flyovers was built before independence by the city council.

"We are instructed by our client that in 2006 the City of Harare contracted engineering consultants to inspect and report on the defects on the Simon Mazorodze, Lytton and Fidel Castro Road (formerly Charter Road) flyovers.

"We are advised that the City of Harare engineers together with the consulting engineers carried out an inspection of the three flyovers on Thursday, September 21, 2006 and another detailed inspection of Friday, September 29, 2006," reads the letter from the lawyers.

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The lawyers said the defects were brought to the attention of the City of Harare and a more detailed inspection was proposed in order to work out what had to be done to rectify the defects.

"Sadly, we are advised that the City of Harare has not taken any steps from 2006 to date to rectify the defects thereby exposing the public to danger in the event of collapse or failure of these structures. Therefore, we are kindly enquiring on the action that the City of Harare is taking in order to renovate the said flyovers and eliminate the hazard posed by these defects to the residents of Harare," reads the letter.

The ZLHR said the inspection observed a number of anomalies including spalling (a form of flaking) of concrete, which have exposed rusted reinforcing steel bars in the beams at several places.

The defect is prevalent on beams in the middle at several locations, where "laitance and efflorescence from ingress of moisture is severe".

"This coincides with the gravel median island of the dual carriageway, suggesting that the island and deck slab are pervious along the centre," reads the letter.

"We are advised that the aforementioned defects occur on the outer beams and the adjacent inner beams suggesting that the rusted reinforcement bars are no longer contributing to the load bearing capacity leaving only the four central beams bearing the load of the two traffic lanes on Abel Gamal Nasser Road (formerly Rotten Row)."

The flyover complex was divided into three simple flyovers, According to the letter, at the Lytton Road flyover, the main defect manifesting is the ingress of moisture at joints between the precast beams while at Fidel Castro Road flyover the main defect is the ingress of moisture at the joints, particularly on the outer edge beams.
Senior Court Reporter

URBAN Grooves musician EX-Q born Enock Munhenga and Zimdancehall crooner, Carrington Simbarashe Chiwadzwa, known in music circles as Nutty O, were yesterday granted $5 000 bail each in the case in which they allegedly tendered fake Covid-19 certificates at Robert Gabriel Mugabe International Airport upon return from South Africa.

Harare magistrate Mr Dennis Mangosi granted them bail after noting that they were not flight risks.

Mr Mangosi said Munhenga and Chiwadzwa presented themselves to the police, which is not consistent with people who harbour intentions to flee from the court's jurisdiction.

They were not asked to plead to the fraud charges when they initially appeared in court last week.

Prosecutor Mr Anesu Chirenje had opposed bail saying they were flight risks.

Mr Chirenje had said the two were likely to face a custodial sentence, which might induce them to flee.

The State had claimed to have a strong case against the duo given that there are five witnesses expected to testify against them.

Munhenga and Chiwadzwa, who were represented by lawyer Mr Raymond Savanhu, told the court that they went to the police station on their own after being called by police.

"They came on their own when they were called by police and the police have indicated that they have no problem when they are given stringent bail conditions. They did not generate any certificate and they were tested in South Africa.

"That certificate was shown to South African officials and they had no problems with it. They managed to board a flight to Zimbabwe. The officials from Zimbabwe cannot say its fake when they did not generate the certificates," said Mr Savanhu.

The musicians allegedly used the certificates on June 8 this year to travel from South Africa that were detected to be fake at RGM International Airport.

Munhenga and Chiwadzwa are expected back in court on July 19.
Tunis/Tunisia  Representative of the World Health Organisation (WHO) in Tunisia Yves Souteyrand, on Monday, said the COVID-19 vaccine is only part of the solution; it will not be enough on its own to contain the pandemic in Tunisia.

He was speaking on the fringes of a meeting held by the health committee at the House of People's Representatives (French: ARP).

Souteyrand told reporters Tunisia has relied on the coronavirus vaccine, which is not enough to contain the virus on its own.

Tunisia should beef up preventive measures, especially since the batches of COVID-19 vaccines are received in a gradual manner, which could affect the vaccination drive and the number of people vaccinated, he said.

The WHO representative called to reinforce the application of the health protocol in each sector and awareness campaigns as well as the incitement of citizens to strictly respect preventive measures.

He also warned against the dangerous laxity in the application of these measures in Tunisia.

The country has so far obtained 604,000 doses of vaccine under the COVAX initiative, he indicated, which according to him is below expectations, set at 750,000. Another 140,000 doses will be delivered to Tunisia in the coming days.

Tunisia will obtain additional quantities of COVID-19 vaccines, estimated at 324,000 doses within the framework of the COVAX initiative, he added.
Tunis/Tunisia  Political parties, organisations and national figures announced Monday the creation of a the Front for the Referendum to call for changing the political regime and the electoral law in force.

General Coordinator of Soumoud coalition Houssem Hammi told a press conference the front will call for the organisation of a popular referendum to change the political system in Tunisia.

Conflicts and mis-functioning between the two heads of the executive, the political deadlock and the absence of any solutions to the socio-economic crisis require a change in the political system, he further said.

Hammi said Soumoud will launch, in collaboration with attending national organisations and figures, a citizen petition calling for changing the political system. A tent will be set up as of Monday afternoon in Habib Bourguiba avenue to collect signatures.

"The political regime in place proved to be a failure; Tunisians must have the last word," he added.

Houssem Hammi said Soumoud Coalition is currently conducting consultations with political actors and national organisations with the goal of expanding this initiative.

National organisations like Soumoud, the Tunisian League for Citizenship, Bardo Sit-in Coordination Moultazimoun Coalition, joined the Front for the Referendum initiative.

The front brings together political parties, including Machrouu Tounes and Beni Watani, and national figures, mainly Chawki Tabib, Kamel Jendoubi and Radhia Jerbi.
Tunis/Tunisia  During a plenary session of the House of People's Representatives (HPR) devoted to the hearing of Acting Minister of Justice Hasna Ben Slimane, deputies asked questions about the three alleged assassination attempts of the President of the Republic.

The MPs also raised the issue of lifting the immunity of some deputies who are the subject of suspected corruption.

Answering questions from MPs, the minister specified that the Public Prosecutor voluntarily took up the investigation into "alleged" Kais Saied assassination attempts, due to their seriousness, ensuring the closure of the first file relating to the poisoning of the Head of State with bread, for lack of evidence.

The second case concerns the suspicious letter sent to the Presidency of the Republic. The investigation into this case is still ongoing although the results of technical tests are negative, the minister said.

Regarding the third case relating to the "alleged" assassination attempt of Saied, the Acting Justice Minister stressed that his department will launch an investigation on this issue.

The Public Prosecutor's office instructed the Public Prosecutor at the Court of Appeal to initiate the necessary investigations, under the provisions of article 23 of the code of criminal procedure, he said.
Tunis/Tunisia  Minister of Foreign Affairs, Migration and Tunisians Abroad Othman Jerandi is visiting Italy on June 28 and 29 to take part in the Ministerial Plenary of the anti-Daesh Global Coalition in Rome.

He will also attend the meetings of the foreign and development ministers of G20 countries, currently chaired by Italy.

The Ministerial Plenary of the anti-Daesh Global Coalition is an opportunity to reaffirm the importance of solidarity and the need to combine efforts against this scourge, the Department of Foreign Affairs said in a statement.

The meetings to be held within the framework of the G20 will examine issues of multilateral cooperation, governance in the fight against the pandemic, development in Africa and food security in the world.

Jerandi will hold during his visit a series of meetings with his counterparts, aiming to bolster bilateral relations and discuss regional and international issues of common interest, the same source said.
Tunis/Tunisia  A 60-year-old man has died of Coronavirus in the past 24 hours in the governorate of Medenine, bringing the total number of deaths to 658, Local Preventive Health Director Zayd Anz told TAP.

The region also recorded 67 more infections during the same period, taking the count to 16,745 in the region, including 15,269 recoveries since the outbreak of the virus.

The results of genetic sequencing carried out at the Pasteur Institute in Tunis on samples taken from a number of COVID-19 patients located in the governorate of Medenine showed the presence of the Nigerian variant in a patient who transited through the country's Libyan borders, Anz said.

The official stressed that the Nigerian strain of the virus is less dangerous than the English one, saying that efforts are being made to prevent the entry of the Indian variant into the region, especially via irregular migrants passing through the region.
Tunis/Tunisia  The National Union of Tunisian Journalists (SNJT) voiced deep concern over the Presidency of the Republic's recourse to military justice to prosecute bloggers for social media posts.

This is a restriction on freedom of expression and a setback to the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution, the SNJT said in a statement.

The President of the Republic should ensure that fundamental rights and freedoms are respected and not limit their use, the statement said.

The SNJT reaffirmed its total rejection of the use of military justice to track the voices opposing the policy of the Presidency of the Republic, considering it a threat to freedom of expression.

These practices remind us of totalitarian and military regimes, which jeopardise the achievements of the revolution, including freedom of expression, the statement said.

The union stressed that defamation and slander are not part of the freedom of expression. It is everyone's right to bring a case to court: civil justice and not military justice, especially when the parties to the case are civilians.

Blogger and human rights champion Amina Mansour said the military prosecutor's office convened her over a social media post, in which she criticised the President of the Republic.

She stated that she did not undermine the dignity of the President of the Republic, nor did she make any defamatory remarks against him.

Several arrests and complaints have been made recently against bloggers, some of whom have been brought before the military justice system for posts on social media.
A citizen who has reached the mature age of 18 years without a voter's card is an alien in his own country. Such a person cannot take part in determining how a country is governed.

It is an irony that Gambians in the Diaspora who are according to the Minister of Finance contributed over 9000 million dalasis in remittances are taking the IEC to court in defence of their right to be registered as voters.

On the other hand, the IEC is registering claimants who are qualified to be registered just at their door steps but some are yet to decide to get voter's cards.

This is a general registration of voters. All voters' cards are expired. Each Gambian citizen 18 years and above should get registered without any hesitation. The voter's card is more important than the ID card and passport.

The authority to decide who manages the affairs of the country depends on you if you have a voter's card.

Get your card before 11th July 2021, otherwise you will not participate in deciding who will be President, National Assembly member, Chairperson, Mayor, Mayoress or Councillor.
Mayor Ahmed Talib Bensouda last Thursday inaugurated a new market in Tallinding called Gilifity Kunda Market worth 3.5 million.

Speaking at the inauguration, Mayor Bensouda said his council knows the importance of a market which was why they pushed for its construction in the municipality.

"The council is here for you and these works are done from your money (tax), so you have to pay your tax for the works to continue," he said.

Mayor Bensouda said his council will construct eight (8) more new markets in 2021 and that other markets will undergo maintenance before the end of 2021.

In a gathering dominated by women, Mayor Bensouda reminded the people of the markets he had worked on so far, including Serekunda, LatriKunda Sabiji, LatriKunda German, Bakau and Tallinding Gilifity Kunda markets.

Fatou Bah, speaking on behalf of the beneficiaries, expressed their gratitude to the mayor and his team.

"We do not regret voting mayor Bensouda into the office," he said.

For his part, Modou Bah said a market is important in the country as it provides employment for the people. He also called on the mayor to assist them with a health center as it is one of the challenges the community is facing.

The opening of the market was celebrated in a grand style as women and men wore uniformed African attires.
U.S. Defense Attache and Senior Defence Official Colonel Michael Lee made his first visit to The Gambia on Monday June 21, and met with representatives of the Gambian government and armed forces to discuss areas of cooperation and opportunities for U.S. assistance.

A press release from the US Embassy dated 25 June 2021, stated that Col. Lee was accompanied by Commander Jack Conley, Chief of Office of Security Cooperation.

The release said together with Ambassador Paschall, the delegation met with Minister of Foreign Affairs Mamadou Tangara, leading to a discussion about security challenges facing The Gambia and the region, identifying key areas of cooperation.

"During a meeting with Defense Minister Sheikh Omar Faye, the group discussed the excellent performance of Gambian Armed Forces members at U.S. military academies, upcoming joint military exercises, and the importance of controlling Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing. The Gambia and the United States share an understanding of the risks of IUU fishing, which poses a grave risk to the continued livelihood of Gambian artisanal fishermen and women," it stated.

The release further indicated that the delegation also met with Commodore Madani Senghore, Commander of The Gambia Navy and Major General Mamat O. Cham, Deputy Chief of Defense Staff of the Gambia Armed Forces as part of their effort to identify areas of cooperation.

"At a reception hosted by Ambassador Paschall, the delegation met with Her Excellency Vice President Isatou Touray, who was representing His Excellency President Adama Barrow. The delegation discussed the importance of Gambian-American bilateral relations.

"All branches of The Gambian Armed Forces have a strong relationship with the U.S. Department of Defense. Col. Lee's visit was one of many engagements aimed at enhancing the United States' support for strengthening and reforming of The Gambia's security sector," the release stated.
The Gambia High Commission to the United Kingdom, on Saturday 19 June 2021, bade farewell to the out-going High Commissioner, His Excellency Mr. Francis Blain, at a ceremony held at the High Commission's conference room in London.

The farewell ceremony came on the heels of his retirement as High Commissioner. High Commissioner Blain has served as The Gambia's High Commissioner to the United Kingdom since 2018. It was during his time The Gambia re-entered the Commonwealth of Nations which received huge endorsement from Gambians and members of the international community. High Commissioner Blain worked hard in ensuring that the strong bond of friendship between The Gambia and the United Kingdom is strengthened based on shared values.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, International Cooperation and Gambians Abroad of the Republic of The Gambia seizes this opportunity to commend High Commissioner Blain for the tremendous service he has rendered to The Gambia during his stint as High Commissioner. The Ministry will miss him in London and in the Foreign Service at large. Best wishes for a peaceful and enjoyable retirement home.

The Gambia High Commission to the United Kingdom, on Saturday 19 June 2021, bade farewell to the out-going High Commissioner, His Excellency Mr. Francis Blain, at a ceremony held at the High Commission's conference room in London.

The farewell ceremony came on the heels of his retirement as High Commissioner. High Commissioner Blain has served as The Gambia's High Commissioner to the United Kingdom since 2018. It was during his time The Gambia re-entered the Commonwealth of Nations which received huge endorsement from Gambians and members of the international community. High Commissioner Blain worked hard in ensuring that the strong bond of friendship between The Gambia and the United Kingdom is strengthened based on shared values.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, International Cooperation and Gambians Abroad of the Republic of The Gambia seizes this opportunity to commend High Commissioner Blain for the tremendous service he has rendered to The Gambia during his stint as High Commissioner. The Ministry will miss him in London and in the Foreign Service at large. Best wishes for a peaceful and enjoyable retirement home.
Veteran freedom fighter Osman Abdella Biluh, head of Public Affairs at the Ministry of Local Government passed away on 27 June at the age of 69.

Veteran fighter Osman Abdella joined the Popular Liberation Forces in 1970 and served his people and country with strong dedication in various capacities in the pre-independence period and as a member of the Central Committee of the EPLF.

After independence, veteran fighter Osman Abdella served his country and people in various capacities at the Ministry of Local Government.

Veteran freedom fighter Osman Abdella Biluh is survived by his wife and 7 children.

His funeral service was conducted today at 4:00 PM at the Asmara Martyrs Cemetery.

Expressing deep sorrow on the passing away of the veteran fighter Osman Abdella, the Ministry of Local Government expresses condolence to his family and friends.
A 52-year-old man from northern Namibia, who admitted he stabbed his girlfriend and mother of his two children, was sentenced to an effective 34 years behind bars by Oshakati High Court acting judge David Munsu.

Andreas Petapeta Mbwale, who was 47 years old when he killed Petrina Wokaulu in a fit of jealousy over a suspicion she was cheating on him, was sentenced to 30 years for murder on a guilty plea.

He was further sentenced to four years on a guilty plea of arson and 12 months on a guilty plea of malicious damage to property.

He was also sentenced to 18 months imprisonment for a conviction of assault to do grievous bodily harm and six months on a conviction of assault by threat.

It was, however, ordered that sentences on the assault and malicious damage to property convictions run concurrently with the murder and arson convictions, leaving him with 34 years.

The charges emanate from an incident on 11 December 2016 when Mbwale assaulted Wokaulu with a stick and threatened to assault the so-called person with whom she cheated.

On 12 December 2016, he again assaulted the victim with a stick and stabbed her several times with a knife and also hit another person, whom he accused of facilitating the affair between the victim and her so-called lover, on the head, causing her injuries.

He, thereafter, set fire to the hut of the person he suspected of having an affair with the victim and further destroyed his other properties to the value of N$8 515. The incidents happened at Otjaandjamwenyo village in Ruacana constituency.

The victim was from Otjihambyi, Angola.

According to the judge, the offences committed by the accused are serious and deserve severe punishment. What is aggravating is the fact that the murder was committed in a domestic setting, the judge said.

He said Mbwale killed his girlfriend by beating her with a stick and stabbing her with a knife several times.

"The reason for the callous crime is because he suspected her having an affair," he said, and continued: Society looks upon the courts to pass fitting sentences to those who make themselves guilty of heinous crimes. The sentence should send a clear message - not only to the accused but to would-be-offenders that domestic violence in any form will never be tolerated.
USA-Citizens of Lofa County based in the United States of America are urging the Weah led government to protect the people of Lofa votes in the December 8, Special Senatorial and Representatives by-elections.

The group said the protection of the votes of the people of Lofa County will restore their constitutional rights guarantee under Article 45 of the revised constitution of Liberia.

Article 45 of the 1985 constitution of Liberia guarantees every citizen the full protection of the law and the right to freely elect their representatives or leaders. The provision also guarantees equal participation.

In a release dated Monday, June 28, 2021, signed by J. Patrick Flomo, Dr. Sakui Malakpa, Stephen Jensen and Robert Gaygay indicated that if the government of Liberia genuinely believes in representative government and the rule of law and reveres the constitution as the sacred document of the Republic, she must take the action necessary to bring this issue to immediate resolution.

"Anything short of this tells us this government does not believe in our representative constitutional government and therefore does not deserve the people's trust"

The group asserted that government of Liberia has, by all accounts thus far, nullified the voice of the people of Lofa County by denying them full senatorial representation without explanation nor a declarative statement regarding when this crisis will end.

The believes government created this constitutional crisis and bears the full responsibility to resolve it with all deliberate speed adding "We the people of Lofa County, are constitutionally entitled to two senators, and we do here petition you (the government) to fulfill your constitutional responsibility."

According to them, Lofian deserve nothing less, but a full Senatorial representation effectively immediately to put an end to the problem it (Government) brought upon itself.

The provision also allowed each political subdivision vis-a-vis county to have two senators as well as representatives based on districts' population.

On December 8, 2020, the people of Liberia exercised their constitutional rights to elect their senators. It is now 201 days and counting since the midterm election and all counties are constitutionally represented by two senators EXCEPT Lofa County.

"We, the people of Lofa County, regard this as a violation of our rights to full constitutional representation," the statement said.

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It is the responsibility of the government to certify anyone according to the constitution who wants to stand for election for public office.

On December 8, 2020, the National Elections Commission (NEC), the constitutionally independent organ of the government charged with exercising the laws governing Liberian elections, presented a slate of certified candidates to the people of Lofa County to stand for the midterm election.

Based on NEC certification, the people of Lofa County went to the poll on December 8, 2020 and made a choice.

NEC made a public declaration of the election by proclaiming a winner. And yet, 160 days and counting, Lofa County is not fully represented in the Liberian Senate.

"The question is no longer a partisan question but that of full legislative representation for the county. The release continues "We urge you to form a united front and to use the influence of your positions, endowed upon you by the people of Lofa County to serve their needs."
A Zimbabwean man, charged together with his girlfriend for unlawful possession of elephant tusks, has saved his co-accused from further legal woes after telling the court she knew nothing of the ivory.

Marry Sibanda, will not go to prison for possession of elephant tusk thanks to her boyfriend Ryan Ndlovu, who spared her from possible long-term imprisonment of 10 years or a hefty fine of P50,000 for the offence.

The couple was initially indicted together for illegal possession of two elephant tusks that the state alleged were found in their possession in Tonota on January 27, 2021.

However, the offence took a different twist last week when Ndlovu exonerated Sibanda.

Ndlovu told the court Sibanda knew nothing about the ivory leading the prosecution to make an application for charges against Sibanda to be withdrawn.

Ndlovu told the court he led the police to where he had hidden his loot on the outskirts of Tonota.

However, Ndlovu and Sibanda pleaded guilty of entering Botswana illegally at an unknown date in 2019.

In mitigation, Ndlovu implored Chief Magistrate Mareledi Dipate to show mercy because he did not waste the court's time and the country's resources by pleading not guilty to both offences.

"I was promised P35,000 by the person who gave me the tusks to sell them to prospective buyers. I plead with the court to be lenient with me and in case I am told to pay a fine, it should pass a fine that I can afford to pay. I promise the court that I will never have any brushes with the law again," Ndlovu said.

However, Ndlovu was reprimanded by the magistrate after he pleaded with the court to assist him in acquiring a Botswana passport and work permit so that he can regularise his stay and find employment.

Dipate told Ndlovu what he was asking the court was not mitigation, and outside the mandate of the court

Sibanda also pleaded with the court for mercy adding the harsh economy in Zimbabwe had forced him to enter Botswana illegally.

"When sentencing me, may the court take into account that I left my disabled mother in Zimbabwe who is also taking care of my children," she said.

Magistrate Dipate ordered the couple to be further remanded in custody until their sentence on July 8, 2021.
Ongwediva  The governor of Oshana, Elia Irimari said the region has finally received approval to put up earth dams to harvest flood and rainwater to boost agricultural production.

"We have approval from the Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Land Reform in this regard and we are looking forward to seeing these plans actualised," the governor said in his state of the region address recently.

The governor, who in the same address highlighted limited water infrastructure for agriculture, as a challenge, said access to water is vital for increasing food security.

Irimari, since his days as a councillor of Ondangwa Urban, has been advocating for communities to harvest water to boost agriculture.

During an interview with New Era, he said the need for community earth dams emanated from meetings with

the communities calling on the government to provide them with water especially for use during the drought seasons.

The governor said the earth dams will not only boost agriculture but will also serve as a source of water during the drought seasons.

He said the thousands of reported livestock that perished to drought in the recent years did not die because there was not enough grazing.

"The grazing was there, but the water was not sufficient," said Irimari.

The envisaged earth dams will be put up at a central point, particularly in areas close to flood plains so that they receive sufficient water inflow.

Irimari is encouraging community members to make use of the earth dams once they are in place.

In addition to providing food for themselves, he said farmers can produce enough to sell to their communities and thereby create an income for themselves.

In terms of potable water, the governor said the region has potable water in many parts.

However, due to the increasing population, the water pressure in some areas is very low because the pipes used to disseminate water previously were too small.
South Sudan will be holding a two-day National Energy Conference on June 29 and 30 to showcase its seismic data from the 14 newly discovered oil blocks to potential prospectors.

The event, which will be inaugurated by President Salva Kiir, will feature a variety of speakers, both physically and virtually, as South Sudan attempts to demonstrate to the world that peace has finally returned to the country following the September 2018 peace agreement.

South Sudan is estimated to have 3.5 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, the third-largest in Sub-Saharan Africa, 70 percent of which are unexplored. In 2019, South Sudan discovered 14 new oilfields, the majority of which were in the Upper Nile State.

The event, which will be held in Juba for the first time, comes after the country launched its first-ever Oil and Gas Licensing Round on June 22, which was attended by industry executives and international stakeholders.

A Licensing Round allows the country concerned to offer exploration acreage for leasing by exploration and production companies to acquire seismic data or drilling wells, in return for a fee.

Petroleum Minister Puot Kang Chol told the gathering that the oil licensing is proof of the growing stability in the country and that the government wants to open up the oil and energy sector for new investments.

"The Ministry of Petroleum has identified new exploration blocks with potential hydrocarbons for investors, operators, and other parties. We are inviting genuine investors and as mentioned in our Petroleum Act, we will try our best to be transparent," said Mr Chol.

South Sudan has been on the global radar for corruption in the oil sector since its independence in 2011, with various international human rights organisations accusing the country's leadership of allowing the military elite to loot the sector at the expense of citizens.

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According to a recent World Bank report, South Sudan's oil sector has the potential to remain the primary driver of growth, with estimated oil production of 62.1 million barrels in the 2019/2020 fiscal year, a 26.5 percent increase from 49.1 million barrels in the 2018/2019 fiscal year.

Before the civil war broke out in 2013, South Sudan was producing 350,000 barrels per day, but later dropped to about 130, 000 barrels per day as most of the oil fields in the Upper Nile and Unity states were shut down.

However, following the signing of the peace agreement in Khartoum in September 2018, South Sudan and Sudan joined forces to provide security and open the Unity State's most productive oil fields.

Currently, the country produces between 175,000 and 230,000 barrels per day, but experts believe that if security is guaranteed, South Sudan has the potential to produce 500,000 barrels per day.
An acute oxygen shortage at Kakamega County General Teaching and Referral Hospital has forced relatives with patients to carry their own cylinders to save their loved ones.

An insider at the facility who sought anonymity told the Nation patients have to supplement the biting oxygen supply at the hospital.

Last week, six families were asked to bring oxygen cylinders so their loved ones could be admitted, pointing to the crisis gripping the Lake region where health facilities have run out of oxygen.

"The available oxygen cylinders at the facility are empty. Of the six families, only one was able to supply the oxygen cylinder to save the life of their loved one," disclosed the insider.

Those unable to afford the oxygen cylinders are forced to turn to other facilities.

"I know of a case where a patient was asked to pay a deposit of sh20,000 to get bed space at a local hospital. They were told to look for another Sh50,000 for treatment," she said.

The source also raised concerns over testing kits at the referral hospital, saying they are to expire next month.

Covid-19 patient died

Last week, a Covid-19 patient died while waiting to get a bed at the hospital's isolation centre.

At the Intensive Care Unit, only three beds have oxygen supply.

The isolation centre has 20 patients; including seven on supplemental oxygen and two on ventilator support.

Two patients are in ICU while seven are admitted at the hospital's burns unit, which has been converted into an isolation centre.

Kakamega County has reported 24 deaths this month following a surge in infections, especially in Lurambi, Kakamega town.

In Kisumu County, 88 deaths have been recorded in June, while at least 10 people have died of Covid-19 in Homa Bay County, 23 in Kericho, 12 in Bomet and seven in Busia in the same period.

The infections in Kakamega are linked to the high number of people travelling into and out of Kakamega town from the neighbouring Vihiga, Bungoma, Siaya and Busia counties.

Lake Region Economic Bloc (LREB) Chairman Wycliffe Oparanya, who is the Kakamega governor, and the bloc's Health Pillar Director Rosemary Obara revealed that oxygen supply is still a major challenge for hospitals in the region.

According to Dr Obara, Siaya County, which has been supplying oxygen to most hospitals in the lake region blo,c is now over-stretched.

Out of the 14 counties in the bloc, only Kisii, Siaya, Trans Nzoia and Kericho have oxygen supply plants, Dr Obara said.

"Kisumu County, for instance, depends on Siaya and Kisii to get oxygen," she said. "Right now they are restricting the supply to other counties," she stated.

During the bloc's 7th summit held at Ciala Resort in Kisumu on Friday, Mr Oparanya admitted the region is experiencing acute shortage of oxygen.

He said there will no longer be any Covid-19 referral restrictions in the Lake region hospitals as the bloc renews efforts to tame the rising cases.

"Going forward, we have agreed that there will be no restrictions and patients will be admitted to any hospital within the bloc," he said.

He said the county had procured a new oxygen manufacturing plant from France to improve supply at the general hospital and the level four facilities in the region.

"We have an oxygen plant that can produce 300 litres of oxygen per minute, but we have imported another with a capacity to produce 1000 litres per minute," said Mr Oparanya.

Vaccination drive

The governor also disclosed that Kakamega County had run out of vaccines and could not proceed with the second phase of the vaccination drive.

"The reluctance forced us to surrender 5,000 doses to a neighbouring county," he said.

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The county vaccinated 24,120 people in the first phase of the campaign.

Apart from Nandi, which was not included in the list of counties to be affected by the new Covid-19 regulations, other members of the bloc are Kisumu, Migori, Kakamega, Bomet, Siaya, Busia, Homa Bay, Kisii, Vihiga, Trans Nzoia, Bungoma, Kericho and Nyamira.

The 14-member counties also agreed to share data on the status of Covid-19 in the region through the Committee of Eminent Persons chaired by Prof Khama Rogo.

To boost the fight against the virus, the five LREB governors at a meeting last Friday said they will engage Health CS Mutahi Kagwe this week to allow them to directly import rapid testing kits to intensify their capacities. "PCR tests take more time to test and may not be ideal for fighting the virus, which is building up at a faster rate,' said Mr Oparanya.
Walvis Bay  Namibia's runaway infection rate, numerous deaths and the search for a miracle against the third wave of Covid-19 have turned demand

for Ivermectin into a gold mine for black market peddlers of the parasitic medicine.

The drug, believed to be effective against Covid-19, has forced desperate Namibians to fork out as much as N$1 500 to get their hands on Ivermectin.

Tablets are being sold for as much as N$1 500 for 20 tablets on the informal market, while pharmacists all over the country are charging about N$20 per

tablet or N$195 for 10 tablets.

Ivermectin for animals in liquid form, according to Agra, costs about N$90; however, Namibians have been paying as much as N$800 for 50 millilitres on the black market.

A deadly June has seen Namibia record 615 deaths in the month so far, with over 1 000 new positive cases recorded every day.

Several medical aid funds yesterday indicated they are not paying for Ivermectin, even if a medical doctor prescribes it to use it against Covid-19.

The medication is used to treat many types of parasite infestations in animals.

In humans, this includes head lice, scabies and river blindness, among others.

In veterinary medicine, it is used to prevent roundworms, threadworms and other parasites.

However, Namibians from all walks of life have been advocating for the use of the drug to treat Covid-19. Namibians are queuing up at farmers' retailers, such as Agra, to buy the animal medicine.

A group of 30 doctors in Namibia earlier also appealed to the health ministry and the Namibia Medicines Regulatory Council (NMRC) to approve ivermectin as a Covid-19 therapy.

Walvis Bay couple Andre and Willmien van Zyl, who contracted Covid-19 earlier this year, claimed they bought 20 Ivermectin tablets for N$1 500 from a South African supplier. "We used it for at least two weeks by just taking it with milk. We had no side effects and felt much better within those two weeks," the van Zyl couple said yesterday.

The couple said they used the medicine with other medication that was prescribed by their doctor.

A Rehoboth woman who also contracted Covid-19 says that she paid N$700 for 20 tablets. She, however, did not state where she bought them.

"The pharmacy refused to sell them over the counter to me and my doctor was reluctant to prescribed Ivermectin to me but I found someone who sold it to me," she said. She, however, said she had to consult her doctor at a later stage, as she developed nausea, nose bleeding and heavy stomach cramps.

A Walvis Bay man anonymously told New Era that a relative, who works in Windhoek, bought Ivermectin, meant for animals, on a large scale and sold it to him for N$500 a bottle.

"We have not taken it yet, as no one in my family tested positive for Covid-19," he said.

Various other Namibians also shared on social media that they went the unconventional route to obtain the drug, as they could not get it without a prescription.

Various pharmacists and doctors yesterday expressed their concern over the use of Ivermectin as a treatment for Covid-19 and warned Namibians not to take it without consulting their medical doctors.

Pharmacies all over the country yesterday indicated they charge about N$25 for a tablet - by prescription only.

City Pharmacy pharmacist Nadia von Liewitz said they sell 10 tablets for $194 00.

"This is only when it is prescribed by a medical doctor. However, there has been a demand for it overall. We get about 10 scripts per day," she said.

Pharmacist Andy Anderson from Jere-Dean Pharmacy in Rehoboth yesterday said there has been a huge interest in Ivermectin from residents of the Covid-19-ravaged town.

"We, on several occasions, had people enquiring how they should take the tablets. This clearly shows that there is a demand and a black market for it. The concern is whether these are genuine medicines or a knockoff of the brand," he said.

A Walvis Bay pharmacist yesterday also expressed his concern over the use of Ivermectin, saying an unnecessary hype was created around the medicine that has now created a black market for it.

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"The black market is a hype. You will not believe it. People buy it on the street and sent me pictures of it, asking how they should take it. It is absolutely ridiculous and the current pricing is so manipulative," he said.

Meanwhile, the Namibia Medicines Regulatory Council last week said there is no data to support the use of Ivermectin to treat Covid-19.

The registrar of medicines, Johannes Gaseb, said the council consulted independent experts in relevant fields both locally and internationally, adding that available studies are insufficient, used differing dosing regimens and included various concomitant medications.

Drugmaker Merck & Co Inc, who manufactures Ivermectin, in February, said its analysis of available data does not support the safety and efficacy of its anti-parasite drug for the treatment of Covid-19.

"[There is] no meaningful evidence for clinical activity or clinical efficacy in patients with the Covid-19 disease, and a concerning lack of safety data in most studies. We do not believe that the data available supports the safety and efficacy of ivermectin be yond the doses and populations indicated in the regulatory agency-approved prescribing information," the company stated.
The health ministry yesterday said it would give as many Namibians as possible the first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine while government awaits the arrival of ordered shots.

"The majority of the second doses will be given as soon as the next consignment is received in July," said the ministry's executive director, Ben Nangombe, in a statement yesterday.

He said this is in accordance with the World Health Organisation (WHO) guidance, in case of limited vaccine supply.

Nangombe said the country to date received 197 200 doses, of which 135 058 were administered, leaving the country with only 62 142 doses as of Thursday.

So far, Namibia has only inoculated 23 541 people with the full two doses of the available Sinopharm and AstraZeneca vaccines.

The Lady Pohamba Private Hospital in Windhoek, who on Thursday ran out of the Sinopharm vaccine, yesterday said it is closing its vaccination centre, as government has run out of doses.

"It should be noted that the first dose of the vaccine already offers some degree of protection against severe disease, hospitalisation and death. Thus, vaccinating as many people as possible with the first dose will lead to the protection of the larger proportion of the population against severe illness," he added.

Over the last two days, the country recorded 100 deaths and 2 951 new Covid-19 cases, bringing the number of Covid-19 deaths and related deaths to date at 1 445

and 86 649 cumulative confirmed cases.

According to the latest statistics, Namibia's death rate is higher than that of the US at its worst point in 2020.

By Sunday, the total number of people vaccinated with the first doses stood at 117 668, while those vaccinated with the second doses stood at 23 54.

Despite having free access countrywide, Namibians have been reluctant to take up the vaccinations since the government's programme started in mid-April.

A survey, released earlier this month, on perceptions of inoculation by Afrobarometer, found that close to two-thirds (63%) of Namibians believe prayer is more effective than a vaccine in preventing Covid-19 infections.

However, Nangombe yesterday said it has been observed that more Namibians now understand and have an appreciation of the importance of vaccination and they are now turning up in numbers at vaccination sites.

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"Engagement with public, religious, private entities as well as individuals has been intensified," Nangombe said.

Nangombe said the ministry is expecting 40 800 doses of AstraZeneca from the Covax facility beginning of next month, 120 000 doses of AstraZeneca from the AstraZeneca Europe mid-July, 150 000 of Sinopharm doses early next month, 100 000 doses of Sputnik light from Gamaleya Institute early next month and 250 000 of Johnson & Johnson doses from AVATT early August.

Furthermore, Nangombe warned those circulating fake news against vaccination, saying such a move is a threat to the country and has contributed to the worsening of the Covid-19 situation in the country.

"In terms of the public and environmental health act and the public health regulations, spreading false information regarding a public health threat is a punishable offence. Those engaging in such an act must, therefore, face the full penalty of law," Nangombe said.

He said all Namibians have a duty to report to relevant authorities any person to the Namibian police or the health ministry.

He added that a WhatsApp number will be established for members of the public to report incidents of false information and fake news.

"Those who are campaigning against the vaccination want the nation to believe that the current increase in the number of new infections, hospitalisation and deaths is caused by or is a result of vaccination.

This is simply not true," Nangombe said.

He said rather the disease has spread because members of the public have failed to comply with public health measures put in place to suppress the spread of the pandemic.

Also, he said there is emerging evidence that the rise in cases is due to newer and more transmissible Covid-19 variants.
A nurse prepares a bed for a suspected case of Ebola in the isolation unit at Bwera hospital, Kasese district, located near the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo on 3 September 2018.

Ongwediva  With the surge of new cases across the country, the Namibian Nurses Union is demanding the health ministry to allow nurses to claim more than the prescribed 40 hours overtime per month.

In an interview with New Era on Monday, NANU acting secretary general, Junias Shilunga said with the increased Covid-19 cases, nurses are now forced to work up to 100 hours because there is critical shortage of nurses in the health facilities.

"Our understanding is that nurses are forced to work more than 40 hours due to the critical shortage of nurses in our health facilities. This issue is also due to the huge influx of patients during this time of the Covid-19 pandemic," said Shilunga.

"Considering the urgency of this and the ever increasing challenges our healthcare system is currently facing in the midst of this pandemic, we will highly appreciate if we can receive your response in the next 14 days," said Shilunga further.

The unionist said the concerns were particularly raised in Kunene, Omusati and Otjozondjupa that during the last weeks saw an increased number of Covid-19 cases and a lack of mortuary space.

He said allowing nurses to claim more than 40 hours would motivate and boost the morale of the frontline nurses who have sacrificed their lives to fight the deadly pandemic.

Shilunga said the nurses have far too long compromised themselves to work more than 40 hours because there is no one to attend to the patients.

He said the situation becomes even worse when some nurses go on leave or in isolation as the numbers of nurses exposed continue to increase.
Senior Court Reporter

CRYSTAL methamphetamine, commonly referred to as mutoriro in street lingo, is a dangerous drug derived from methylenedioxymethamphetamine which was already listed in Part II of the Schedule in the Dangerous Drugs Act and so anyone found dealing in the drug or even just possessing it is liable for prosecution.

Giving this detail, along with the fact that methamphetamine is a scheduled drug in terms of the Eighth Schedule of the Medicines and Allied Substances Control Act, prosecutor Mrs Netsai Mushayabasa, representing the State, told a court that any application based on the false information that crystal meth was not listed as dangerous should fail.

She was responding to Anisha Brenda Gumbo's application for revocation of her placement on remand on charges of dealing in dangerous drugs charges after being found in possession of crystal meth on the grounds that it was not listed as a dangerous drug.

"It is State's response that crystal meth is a dangerous drug named as methylenedioxymethamphetamine in Part II of the Schedule in the Dangerous Drugs Act and therefore the accused person's conduct of being found in possession of such is criminal offence and there is reasonable suspicion that she was dealing in the drug.

"The chief ingredient in the crystal meth is methamphetamine. Methamphetamine is a derivative of methylenedioxymethamphetamine which is a dangerous drug in terms of the Dangerous Drug Act under Part II of the scheduled drugs," she said.

Mrs Mushayabasa said the drug is called crystal meth because of the form in which it appears, which is crystal like.

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In an application prepared by lawyer Mr Admire Rubaya, Gumbo argued that crystal methamphetamine was not listed in the Schedule of Dangerous Drugs Act and that it could not be classified as a dangerous drug simply because politicians and members of the general public wanted to refer it as dangerous.

The State alleges that crystal methamphetamine that the accused was allegedly found in possession of is a dangerous drug yet there is no such drug listed in the Schedule of Dangerous Drugs Act.

A drug does not become dangerous in terms of Criminal Law Codification and Reform Act simply because the general populace, the State and or politicians want it to be treated as dangerous drug.

A drug can only be dangerous in terms of the law if it is one which fits into the definition of dangerous drug in terms of Section 155 of the Criminal Law Code which provides that dangerous drug means any coca bush, coca leaf, raw opium or cannabis plant, prepared opium, prepared cannabis, cannabis resin or a scheduled drug. Crystal methamphetamine does not fit in the above.

A perusal of Part 1 of the Schedule to the Dangerous Drugs Act shows that there is no drug known as crystal methamphetamine or crystal meth or mutoriro in vernacular, she said.
Chief Court Reporter

FORMER PetroZim Line (Pvt) Limited general manager Catherine Katsande was last year wrongly convicted of fraud, the High Court has ruled deprecating the initiation of criminal proceedings in cases having the elements of a civil dispute in order to get favourable results.

Katsande was in August last year jailed for an effective 60 months after being wrongfully convicted of fraudulently awarding to a local company, tenders for the supply of equipment worth US$2 million during her tenure.

But on appeal, a two-judge bench of the High Court comprising Justices Pisirayi Kwenda and Benjamin Chikowero absolved Katsande of any criminal conduct after the prosecution conceded that the matter was purely a civil case that had been given criminal contours.

Allowing the appeal by Katsande, Justice Kwenda said a civil dispute arising out of a contractual breach could not be converted in a criminal offence to get favourable results.

"The concession by the State is proper," said Justice Kwenda after the prosecution told the court that they were in agreement with Katsande's legal counsel that remedies were available for any breach of contract.

"In this regard, criminal law has no place here, particularly that she misrepresented that Kaltred had no capacity to deliver.

"Security was provided and if at some stage complainant felt the performance was due, should have approached the civil court for redress.

"The appeal is allowed and conviction be and is hereby set aside."

The case exposed a growing tendency in business circles to convert their civil disputes into criminal.

But courts have always frowned upon this practice and condemned the practice of misleading the courts and manipulating the nature of dispute in clear attempt to exploit the judicial proceedings for settling scores.

Katsande (55), was convicted of six counts of fraud and sentenced to 90 months' imprisonment before 30 months of the jail term was conditionally suspended.

The trial magistrate also fined the company that was awarded the tenders, Keltrade (Pvt) Limited $53 000 for the same offences.

The court heard that that PetroZim Line (Pvt) Limited was incorporated in 1988 by Lonmin and the then National Oil Company of Zimbabwe (Noczim) to transport fuel from Mutare through the Feruka pipeline to Msasa in Harare.

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According to the company's tender procedures, goods and services had to be supplied before payment was processed. In exceptional instances, the board finance committee had to first approve payments.

The court heard that on June 24, 2013 Katsande authorised a payment of US$159 925 after Keltrade had submitted a quotation indicating that it had capacity to supply a gearbox for 10 gate valves.

The money was paid before Keltrade supplied the goods.

On September 24 of the same year, she also authorised payment of US$610 640 to Keltrade after it indicated that it had capacity to supply two skid pumps.

Again on December 9, 2013, Katsande advanced US$363 860 after Keltrade presented a quotation indicating that it was able to supply two ethanol centrifugal pumps.

The money was paid before the supply of the pumps. In February 2015, Katsande also authorised payment of US$91 082 after Keltrade gave her a quotation for the supply of drag resistant spares.

In the same month, Katsande is said to have given permission to payments of various amounts to Keltrade without following laid down procedures.

In March 2015, Katsande was instructed to purchase goods from MIS Solutions, but she disregarded the recommendation and gave the tender to Keltrade.
Director Army Public Relations

The Zimbabwe National Army is deeply saddened to announce the death of one of the country's illustrious sons and decorated general, Major General Clever Shadreck Chiramba (Retired) who passed on at Parirenyatwa Hospital on 27 June 2021.

He was 66.

The late Major General Chiramba, whose Chimurenga name was 'Simangaliso Gumede', was born on February 2, 1955 in Chivi District. He did primary education at Jenya Primary School in Chivi from 1961 to 1968 before proceeding for secondary education at Temeraire Secondary School in Mashava from 1970 to 1971.

He could not complete his secondary education at Temeraire as his parents could not afford to pay school fees due to the racially discriminative system that marginalised the black majority.

Having dropped out of school, the late general was forced to seek employment in Gweru at a tender age. While working as a general hand, he enrolled with the Central African Correspondence College to continue with his education as a part time student during period 1973 to June 1974.

It was during that time that he came face to face with the racial brutality from the white colonial regime which manifested itself through inhuman treatment at work places and squalid living conditions in the then so called African Townships.

Spurred by the need to end colonial subjugation, Major General Chiramba, among other young black cadres, joined the liberation struggle in June 1974 when he crossed the border into Botswana through Plumtree. Some of the comrades that the late general was among when they crossed into Botswana included Paul Hamadziripi and Steven Nyamande.

Their group was subsequently conveyed to Zambia and later to Tanzania where they commenced military training at Morogoro Training Camp. It was at Morogoro that he met and trained together with the current Commander Defence Forces, General Philip Valerio Sibanda until November 1974. After distinguishing himself during the initial training, Major General Chiramba was among the few selected to undergo cadet light artillery weapons training in Ukraine, between November 1974 and October 1975, during the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics era. Upon completion of training in Ukraine, the late Major General returned to Morogoro Camp where he was later deployed to the front.

He operated in Mt Darwin under the Nyombwe Detachment in the Nehanda Sector, initially as a 60mm mortar operator and later as a logistician up to 1978. He was subsequently promoted to become a member of the ZANLA General Staff, responsible for operational logistics at the rear, a position he held until cease-fire in 1979. Just before independence in 1980, the late general was attested into the Zimbabwe National Army on 16 April 1980 and was commissioned as a colonel.

The late general played an instrumental role in the integration of the former warring parties to form the Zimbabwe National Army. After integration, he was appointed commanding officer Mashonaland Services Corps from 1981 up to December 1983. Later, in 1984, he was appointed commander Bulawayo District until 1985 when he was appointed deputy commander 5 Infantry Brigade.

Major General Chiramba was to remain with 5 Infantry Brigade until January 1988, when he was posted to 3 Infantry Brigade as acting commander.

In December 1988, he was appointed commander Engineer Corps, a post he held until March 1990 when he bounced back to 3 Infantry Brigade as commander. He was later appointed commander 5 Infantry Brigade in 1993 before he was subsequently promoted to the rank of brigadier general in 1994.

He remained with 5 Infantry Brigade until the end of 1996 when he was posted 2 Infantry Brigade as the brigade commander.

The late Major General commanded 2 Infantry Brigade up to 1998. Following the outbreak of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, he was seconded as deputy managing director Senga Senga Mines in the Central African country, a post he held until 2004 when he retired from the Zimbabwe National Army. In recognition of his illustrious career as a general officer in the Zimbabwe Defence Forces, the late general was promoted to the rank of major general from his last date of service in the organisation.

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During his service spanning for more than two decades, he did several military courses, among them, the standardisation course at the Zimbabwe Staff College in 1983, Senior Officers' Signals Course at the School of Signals in 1984, National Defence Studies Course in India in 1989 and the Command and Staff Course at the Zimbabwe Staff College in 1992.

In recognition of his selfless and exemplary service to the nation, the late general officer was awarded the Liberation Medal, Independence Medal, Ten Years' Service Medal, Long and Exemplary Service Medal, Mozambique Campaign Medal, Democratic Republic of Congo Campaign Medal and the Grand Officer of the Zimbabwe Order of Merit Award.

At the time of his death, Major General Chiramba was pursuing farming ventures in Karoi as he had been allocated a piece of land during the Land Reform Programme. He had become a successful farmer specialising in soya beans and maize crop production.

Major General Chiramba is survived by wife Beatrice, eight children and fourteen grandchildren.
Bulawayo Bureau

THE National Railways of Zimbabwe (NRZ) has achieved a major innovation breakthrough after its engineers successfully managed to convert two Diesel Electric 6 (D6s) locomotive models to mainline locomotives.

The development is expected to help tackle capacity challenges on traction power at a time when the company was battling operational constraints and goes a long way in reducing hiring costs for the organisation.

NRZ public relations manager, Mr Nyasha Maravanyika, yesterday said his organisation had been hiring locomotives at a cost of US$1 500 per day, which is not sustainable for the business.

"NRZ engineers, mainly in our traction and rolling stock together with related sections, realised the need for the organisation to curtail its locomotive challenges and resorted to the conversion of its D6s locomotives to mainline locomotives, which ultimately will reduce hiring costs for the rail entity," he said.

"The organisation has been hiring locomotives at US$1 500 per day and this intervention of the conversion project of D6s to mainline locomotives costs RTGS$100 000, thus presenting huge savings for the NRZ as this is a once-off payment and maintenance free."

Mr Maravanyika said the conversion project has so far seen the NRZ engineers equipping two D6 locomotives (1606 and 1609) out of the targeted nine with Programmable Logic Controller (PLC).

"PLC is a transition gear that enables them to switch speeds, thus, making them run long distances at an alternating speed with more load compared to the normal D6 models, which are mostly used for shunting purposes only in our yards because they have a constant speed," he said.

The locomotive conversion team is made up of 10, including engineers, electricians and draughtsmen and these need about a month to work on the two locomotives so far converted for use.

The two locomotives (1606 and 1609) have since been deployed on the mainline with the former operating in the Lowveld ferrying sugar and the latter doing sub-run tests between Harare and Gweru, said Mr Maravanyika.

In executing the project, the engineers faced a number of challenges that included difficulties in sourcing material parts to convert the locomotives since the D6s are old model locomotives. There was also lack of confidence from the previous management and serious doubt by the users who are train drivers.

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"Initially when one of the engineers came up with the concept the previous management did not give them a chance to implement the idea, only for the new acting general manager and her management to endorse the project. With that, the engineers look forward to converting the remaining seven D6s," said Mr Maravanyika.

"Train drivers also initially treated this concept as a ruse, thinking the old models would need close monitoring and evaluation.

"But the project has so far been successful with the locomotives being deployed into the system to increase our capacity in terms of traction power."

Locomotive 1606 is the oldest among the D6 locomotives having been manufactured in 1965 with an axle generator and transition cards of which most of these components are now obsolete.

It is in this context that engineers resolved to change the components of the traction motors to a PLC during the conversion.

The conversion project is the first of its kind by NRZ and it is hoped that the initiative presents a plethora of opportunities for increasing capacity in terms of traction power, and reducing hiring costs, as well as equipping the D6 locomotives with flexibility for utilisation on shunting and mainline duties.
The Government of Japan has provided a grant to Liberia to extend emergency aid in the COVID-19 response as

well as improve the Cold Chain system in the country.

Speaking at the launch of the two projects, the Ambassador of Japan Himeno Tsutomu said health and nutrition are keys to human security and as such the people of Japan are pleased to launch the projects that will strengthen the delivery of routine health services in health facilities, communities during COVID-19 and improving cold chain management worth US$2,499,900:00.

The Ambassador pointed out that these two programs funding are part of Japan's support to the Government of Liberia's efforts to manage the COVID-19 pandemic through partnership with United Nations Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF).

Amb. Tsutomu states that the projects seek to strengthen routine health services in health facilities and communities, which will be implemented by UNICEF in Montserrado and Margibi Counties and will benefit over 43,000 children and 12,000 pregnant women in over 150 communities.

"While improving the cold chain program will equip 190 health facilities with cold chain equipment and train 245 technicians and health workers to provide services for over 400,000 beneficiaries," he pointed out.

He noted that since 2020 the Government of Japan has provided UNICEF with a total of US$ 2.7 million to support the critical delivery services to the women and children in Liberia.

The Japanese Ambassador emphasized that the Government of Japan's main thematic priorities have remained EPI/Polio, Cold Chain system strengthening, provision of Health, WASH, Nutrition and Birth registration services to the most vulnerable population in the country.

Also speaking, the UNICEF representative to Liberia, Laila Gad said UNICEF will continue to work closely with the Government of Liberia, UN agencies and partners, to ensure the health system in the country is well equipped and health workers are well trained to respond appropriately to the threats of COVID-19.

She said with the Japanese funding, UNICEF will continue its support to the Government of Liberia in its efforts to combat COVID-19 through the provision of cold chain equipment, strengthening the health system and building the capacities of the service providers.

She intoned that the leadership the Ministry of Health has provided as enable them to reach not less than 50,000 children under 5 years to access basic health services and also in collaboration with the County

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Health Teams through which "we have been able to work together to conduct an assessment of over 600 health facilities to identify what the cold chain equipment means to the country. "We hope that through continuing this partnership we will be able not to only mitigate the end of corona virus, but other health pandemic, but this will contribute to strengthening the health system in Liberia," she added.

For her part, the Minister of Health, Dr. Willemina Jallah applauded the Japanese government for this milestone contribution, adding, "This cold chain will help us to integrate many projects in the health sector."

"We know that this partnership will continue because COVID-19 is having a devastating impact on the health sector and the delivery of essential public health services in Liberia," Min. Jallah explained.

She stated that with a 40 percent overall decline in health facility utilization, thereby impacting access to critical services such as immunization, birth registration and nutrition, which are all provided within health facilities, and support being provided by Japan is" very timely, and will go a long way to support the ongoing COVID-19 response as well as strengthen the resilience of the health system."
Graduates and relatives of the Booker Washington Institute (BWI) living in the United States have identified with their school back home in Liberia, donating Ten Thousand United States Dollars to help repair damages the Institute suffered recently due to a violent rainstorm on May 16, 2021.

Under their umbrella association the BWI National Alumni Association of North America (BWINAANA), the graduates reached the decision after getting a detailed briefing from the BWI Principal, Attorney Harris Fomba Tarnue, about the extent of disaster.

A release from the BWI administration says places destroyed included dormitories, trade shops and central main library; and since the disaster happened, there has been no national intervention after numerous media awareness, official communications and SOS publicity.

The President of the BWI Alumni Association in the US, Mr. Eric Harris, had earlier called to express the association's concern and assure the administration of effort to do everything to help bring relief to the school in the wake of the destruction.

BWI Principal Harris Fomba Tarnue confirmed receiving the donation when he addressed a cross-section of selective invitees, BWI family and Liberian-based graduates at the occasion marking the 92nd anniversary, Founder's Day held

Saturday June 26, 2021 on the main campus in Kakata, Margibi County under the theme "BWI @92: Shifting the State of TVET towards 21 st Century Skills Acquisition". The 92 nd Founder's Day was a low-key event due to the prevailing Corona Varius pandemic in Liberia.

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He said the donation was going to go a long way in relieving the Institute of the shock of the disaster in the face of a dire national economic situation.

BWI alumni in the United States have over the years undertaken numerous projects on the campus including the renovation of the school clinic, donation of a prototype mini ambulance, scholarships for needy students and development of agricultural programs.

The BWI Alumni Association in the US is one of the strongest Liberian associations anywhere outside the country.

With some of its members aging, the association has embarked on a farsighted program to encourage and recruit children of BWI graduates in the US to participate in the activities of the association with the view to getting them fully involved in its running.

Each year during the last weekend of June, BWI graduates and their families in the US gather to commemorate the Institute's founding anniversary which is a big event in Liberia itself.

Since its founding in 1929 during the administration of President Charles D.B. King, BWI has produced a Liberian vice president in Bennie D. Warner, Senators, Members of the House of Representatives, Ministers of government and some of the country's best technocrats.
Lawmakers of the Collaborating Political Parties (CPP) are to face serious political actions if they support the establishment of a commission to review the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Reports instead of the establishment of the war and Economic Crime Court.

The Secretary General of Liberty Party (LP) and of the CPP, Martin Kollah said the party has resolved to institute serous penalty against any of their lawmakers who will go contrary to the mandate of the party.

Speaking on the Truth Birth fast show in Paynesville, Mr. Kollah said, the legislators are now contemplating diverting what majority of Liberians want (establishment of a war and economic crime court) to the establishment of a Commission to Review the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

He said CPP is in full support of the establishment of war and economic crime court, emphasizing that every lawmaker of the Collaborating Political Party is under obligation to adhere to the CPP's mandate.

Kollah who is also the Chief of Office Staff of Montserrado County Senator, Abraham Darius Dillon expressed serious rejection to the plan by the Legislators to delay in working to ensure that the court is established.

According to Mr. Kollah, it is surprising for the CDC led Government to not be in full support of the War and Economic Crime court that has been expressed by the people of Liberia.

The CPP Secretary General told the media that the Coalition for Democratic Change (CDC) came to power on the expressed will of the people to establish the war and economic crime court something that made 14 out of the 15 counties to have voted for the CDC to take on state power .

Mr. Kollah furthered that President George Weah will be greatly remember in the history of Liberia if he work to ensure that the war and economic crime court is established.

He said the CPP Will do all with in its reach to ensuring that the people of Liberia especially the victims of the 14 years civil war receive justice through the proposed war crime court of which they voted president George Weah and the CDC led Government.
SHALOM Inc has conducted two Consultative Meetings with relevant Government Ministries, especially those with Divisions on Nutrition.

The SHALOM team was able to conduct the consultative meetings with the Ministry of Agriculture Food Security and Nutrition Division including the Ministry of Health Division on Nutrition.

Speaking during their respective meetings on June 9 and 10, 2021, the Executive Director of SHALOM, Kunue Massally gave the overall objective of the consultative meeting, separately at the two occasions.

He said basically the gathering was intended to review a Research that was conducted by a consultant who was contracted by Irish Aid due to the nutrition status in Liberia.

According to him, the participants were able to focus on findings conducted from of the Research that could be used in future interventions across the country as a means of striving to reduce malnutrition.

Mr. Massally further disclosed that the highlights gathered advocacy points to the attainment of result of the Research, as a means of coming out with the rightful messages on Nutrition.

He additionally indicated that participants at the two meetings were able to listen to authorities of the Ministry of Health-Nutrition Division and that of the Ministry of Agriculture-Food Security and Nutrition Division on prospects and challenges of the two Divisions.

According to him, the Nutritional Research that was conducted by the consultant highlighted the increased of stunting due to several factors including inaccessibility of roads, among others.

He said the government has committed itself through the Pro-Poor Agenda for Prosperity and Development in reducing stunting to 22% by 2023.

Mr. Massally said because it is imperative on the part of the Liberian government to formulate policies to have a national legal framework that will be able to do their work by looking at the underlining causes of stunting and the linkages that included WASH and other cross-cutting areas, among others.

Also speaking, the Director of Nutrition at the Ministry of Health, Dr. Anette Brimah Davies indicated that her Division looks forward to partners including WaterAid for stronger collaboration in the area of advocacy as a means for Nutrition to be apriority.

She said with the fact that Nutrition has been captured into the National Agenda, shows that the government has ownership for nutritional activities in Liberia.

Dr. Davis wants partners to work collaboratively with the Division of Nutrition to develop nutritional messages.

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She further pointed out that there is a need for agriculture to be attractive in an effort to produce more food as a means to address stunting across the country.

For his part, the Training Director at the Ministry of Agriculture, Raphael Collins expressed thanks and appreciation to the partners for such a vital gathering in finding ways and means to address the nutritional problems.

He said the Agriculture Ministry is open for collaborations in other to formulate programs with the objective of addressing those constrains that the Ministry is confronted with.

In a separate meeting, the Director for Food Security and Nutrition at the Agriculture Ministry, Sam Yoryor however pointed out that logistical support and training as well as road connectivity are key constraints hampering availability of nutritional food on the markets.

During the two separate Meetings, both Agriculture and Health Ministries highlighted the lack of budgetary allocation and logistics as major challenges they are facing, among others.
Tunis/Tunisia  Minister of Foreign Affairs, Migration and Tunisians Abroad Othman Jerandi underlined during his participation in the meeting of Foreign Ministers of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS held Monday in Rome, the importance of embedding the Coalition's action in a global multilateral approach involving governments, organisations and the civil society.

The aim, according to him, is to enhance the preventive approach by tackling the factors conducive to the emergence of terrorism, radicalisation and violent extremism.

Quoted in a Foreign Affairs Department press release, Jerandi explained that preventing the phenomenon of terrorism requires a comprehensive concept of sustainable development, strengthening countries' capacities to overcome poverty, ensuring social integration and combating the marginalisation of large groups of the population.

Jerandi also pointed out the need to adapt ways to combat terrorism to digital and technological progress, especially as terrorists use virtual space and social networks to recruit young people and raise funds.

Although Daesh is almost defeated in Syria and Iraq, it continues to pose a threat to countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, he added.

He called in this regard, for boosting regional and international cooperation to put an end to conflicts and establish a climate of stability in crisis areas, reaffirming Tunisia's commitment to do its utmost to combat terrorism, radicalisation and violent extremism and consolidate human values.
Next time you hop on a bus, you'll want to shout: "Open the windows!"

Every day millions of people in South Africa have to take a taxi, bus or train to go places. In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic how risky is this? No one knows for sure. But we ran some tests that we hope shed light on this.

We used a carbon dioxide (CO2) meter as a proxy to measure how much of each other's air we're breathing while we travelled repeatedly on different public transport modes in Cape Town. The science behind this approach is in its infancy. What we did falls far short of a scientific study that could be published in a peer-reviewed journal, but we hope that it's nevertheless interesting and useful.

A CO2 meter measures the prevalence of carbon dioxide in a given space in parts per million (ppm). Since people exhale CO2, this meter can be used to estimate how much of other people's air we are breathing. The more of each other's air we breathe, the more likely we are to catch or transmit viruses that can be transmitted by droplets, such as Covid-19, tuberculosis, influenza and even common colds.

Studies have used these readings to calculate the odds of acquiring tuberculosis on public transport in South Africa. A 2013 study found that "Environmental risk, reflected in the rebreathed fraction of air, was highest in minibus taxis and lowest in trains ... Among daily commuters, the annual risk of tuberculosis infection was projected to be 3.5% - 5.0% and was highest among minibus taxi commuters."

We took readings of CO2 concentration every two minutes, and noted the number of windows open, the number of passengers, and other important factors - such as whether people were wearing masks, and the weather conditions. We travelled in pairs, and wore two masks at all times, including one KN95 mask.

We took eight taxi trips, two train trips, five Golden Arrow bus rides, and six Amaphela (cockroach) trips.

Outside, in the suburbs of Cape Town, the CO2 meter registers a reading of about 485 ppm. Over 26 minutes, the relatively small GroundUp office (approximately 32m2), with five people wearing masks and three windows open, averaged readings of 559 ppm, with a low of 525 ppm and a high of 593 ppm.

Exactly what a safe level is before you're breathing in your fellow passengers' germs in large amounts isn't precisely known. For one thing traffic can increase the CO2 substantially and this has no relation to the risk of catching an infectious disease. But, based on discussions with scientists, 800 ppm is a good threshold to try to keep below. Above 1,000 and you're getting a bit worried. Above 1,500 is bad. Above 2,000 is terrible.

Minibus taxis

We took eight minibus taxis over three days. The first day, 14 June, was unseasonably warm, and we travelled from Rondebosch to town and back. The other two days were colder with some rain.

Our first trips were on a route with a number of stops (the green lines in the graph). One trip, the taxi had between seven and nine people in it at any one time, and three windows were open. The low reading was 575 ppm, the high was 803 ppm and the average was 751 ppm for a 24 minute journey.

On our way back we waited for the taxi to fill for 16 minutes with the door open. Levels remained low. When we set off there were 22 people in the minibus (yes, dangerous for other reasons) - at this point the meter read 828 ppm. The low reading was 541 ppm, the high was 989 ppm, and the average reading was 703 ppm across a 48 minute journey.

After a promising start, we faced winter's reality on 17 June (pink lines). The Cape Town to Gugulethu ride had 16 people inside, and all windows were closed due to the torrential rain. While the readings were low (683 ppm) while passengers were getting on, as soon as the door closed, readings quickly rose above 2,000 ppm, peaking at 2,875 ppm. The average reading for the 16 minute trip was 1,946 ppm. The other trip that day was a brief eight minute trip between Claremont and Rondebosch with just eight people inside - the average reading was 673 ppm. No windows were open, but this is a 'short-stop' route and so the door opens frequently.

On 22 June, we took four more minibus journeys (blue lines).

The 'best' trip of the day was between Rondebosch and Cape Town. The average reading on this trip was 673 ppm, with nine people in the minibus. There were windows open for most of the time we were in the taxi, and at 18 minutes into the trip, the meter showed 592 ppm. But at 20 minutes the windows were closed and readings shot up. By the time we finished our 34 minute ride, the meter showed 1,551 ppm.

Our next trip was the worst of this study - Cape Town to Sea Point. There were 18 people in the minibus, and all windows were closed against the rain. As we entered, the meter read 783 ppm - and then went through the roof. Six minutes in, readings peaked at 3,175 ppm. Despite some people leaving, levels remained high - the average for the trip was 2,246 ppm.

The eight minute trip from Sea Point to Camps Bay had just six people inside. Windows were closed to start (our initial reading was 1,363 ppm), but opened at four minutes. At departure, our meter read 877 ppm.

The final trip of the day was from Camps Bay to Cape Town. There were between seven and nine people in the minibus during this trip, and all windows were closed as the rain persisted. We saw three people not wearing masks, and one of these was sneezing and coughing. Readings rose steadily to above 2,000 ppm during this 22 minute journey, averaging 1,641 ppm.

Trains

As we recently reported, taking a train nowadays is a disheartening experience - low passenger numbers, long waits for trains, sparse security.

But if you're worried about Covid-19, and live and work on one of the lines that still operates, this may be the safest form of public transport.

On both journeys, windows were open. On the way in, there were only five people in the carriage and readings peaked at 557 ppm; on the return, there were 21 people in our carriage at its fullest, and readings peaked at 646 ppm over the 38 minute journey. Apart from three relatively brief unscheduled stops between stations outside Salt River and Woodstock, the train took just two minutes between stations.

Amaphela

Amaphela, or cockroaches, are sedan cars typically used for short journeys between townships and shops.

Across our six phela journeys, there were between three and five people in the car. We noted that drivers on three journeys did not wear masks. In general, windows were open. On the trip with the highest measured level (906 ppm), the windows were mostly closed, and the driver had stopped to buy gwinya at the point where the measurements spiked.

Buses

Our first Golden Arrow bus trip was encouraging - it had only eight people in it (a noon journey), and some windows were open. Readings were consistently low - averaging 545 ppm over the 48 minute trip between Gugulethu and Mowbray.

The next two trips were quite a different story. It was a rainy day and upon entry to the 1:20pm Nyanga-Khayelitsha bus, we registered 1,242 ppm. There were forty people on board, windows were closed, and the majority of people were not wearing masks. Four more people joined the bus and we set off. Levels remained above 1,000 ppm for the entire journey (averaging 1,482 ppm), with a peak reading of 1,782 ppm.

The next bus trip that day, from Cape Town to Gugulethu, was worse, with an average reading of 1,831 ppm. At its fullest, there were 60 people on board - at the point where readings went over 2,000 ppm, there were 50 people on the bus. Windows were closed throughout. Many were without masks, chatting freely. This was a 54 minute journey.

The last two bus journeys were fortunately taken in better weather conditions. The Wynberg-Nyanga trip only had 11 people in at most, and windows were open. The readings averaged 643 ppm over a half hour journey with a brief peak of 808 ppm. However, we noted a few people not wearing masks. One of these people was coughing and sneezing, each blast like a gunshot in the night.

The Nyanga-Town bus was more full - 25 people at peak, and an average of 21. Just four windows were open as we got on, but more were opened 12 minutes into the journey, as readings hit 800 ppm. The average reading on this trip was 710 ppm.

Comparison

Our results compare reasonably well with the 2013 study, "The lowest carbon dioxide levels were observed in trains (mean = 1,000 ppm); intermediate levels were recorded in buses (mean = 1,150 ppm); and the highest levels were documented in taxis (mean = 1,800 ppm)."

Our mean taxi reading was 1,236 ppm, and our mean bus reading was 1,042 ppm. However our mean train reading was just 551 ppm as we took just two trips, and passenger numbers were very low on those journeys - The 2013 study took readings in 2011, while Metrorail was still functional. All the trains that have been denuded of windows are now pandemic assets - lowering the likelihood of Covid-19 transmission is the one good thing to come of the vandalism.

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But for buses and taxis it's important to note that the rides were highly variable. You could get lucky and ride in a relatively empty vehicle with windows open in the morning, and a few hours later be squeezed like a sardine between two coughing, sneezing people, with the windows closed.

Conclusions

Our study is journalistic, rather than scientific; strict inferences from our data are ill-advised.

We couldn't say whether CO2 levels in a particular mode were affected by the use of masks, but it certainly made us feel safer when we could see general compliance. Also, we can only make tentative guesses about the effect of exhaust fumes on our readings.

Nevertheless, it's clear that so much depends on the weather. The trips that recorded high levels of carbon dioxide concentrations were all when there was rain. Understandably, very few people will tolerate being rained on for a 54 minute-long bus ride.

When people open windows, carbon dioxide concentrations drop rapidly, usually to acceptable bounds. "Open windows, all the time" needs to be our golden rule on public transport, no matter what the weather. (They probably don't need to be completely open.) Perhaps the windows on buses and taxis could be fitted with devices that keep the rain from coming in when the windows are open.

After completing these trips, these reporters watched the EFF's march on SAHPRA (we were on journeys during Magashule's protest). The massed crowds and suspicious demands on an independent regulator didn't trouble us nearly as much as the footage of the many dozens of busses carrying supporters in - and nary a mask in sight. We don't need a carbon dioxide meter to know the high risk of transmission.

Thanks to Dr Gareth Kantor and Prof Robin Wood for advising us, as well as the people with Greenflag Association. Thanks to Dr Greg Kew for lending us his CO2 meter. We were inspired to do this by Kantor's article in the Daily Maverick describing an aeroplane journey.
Luanda  The Multisectoral Commission for the Prevention and Fight against Covid-19 meets this Tuesday with the political parties represented in Parliament to address issues related to the Presidential Decree on the Situation of Public Calamity.

The Parliament has four political parties and one coalition, namely MPLA, UNITA, CASA-CE, PRS and FNLA.

In a statement sent to Angop on Monday, the commission explained that the meeting was the result of non-compliance by the parties with the rules on mass political events in public spaces.

According to the commission, for some time now, political parties have been organising mass events with their militants, friends and sympathisers, in several arteries of the city and outlying areas, which essentially call into question the observance of biosecurity rules laid down in Presidential Decree 150/21 of 8 June.

The decree establishes that mass political activities should only take place with a maximum of 50 people, in Luanda, while in the other provinces they may take place in the presence of 100 people. The violation of this assumption is liable to a fine.
Benguela  The provincial governor of Benguela, Luis Nunes, asked Monday in this city for a more active participation of the people of Benguela in the management of the several administrative processes in favour of the common welfare.

According to Luis Nunes, who was speaking at the presentation ceremony of the new municipal administrator of Benguela, Paula Correia, work should be done with all and for all, in order to solve the various problems that still affect the community.

"The unconditional support of the population to the new administrator is of capital importance to raise Benguela to the level it deserves. This will only be possible with the support of the residents in identifying and defining strategies to solve the social problems that affect the population", he emphasised.

The governor assured, on the other hand, that he would continue to bet on gender to administer the province, given the skills, technical and leadership capacity that women have shown over the years.

Luis Nunes took the opportunity to highlight the work done by the outgoing female administrator, for her performance and knowledge during her mandate at the mother municipality of the cities.

Meanwhile, the new Benguela municipal administrator, Paula Mariza Correia, said that the current social conjuncture still conditioned the execution of some projects, but she believes that with union and solidarity of the citizens it will be possible to overcome difficulties.
Gaborone  Mrs Botswana, a pageant that prides itself as a brand that is into healthy marriages and families, on Saturday grabbed the bull by its horns and engaged its top 30 finalists on issues of intimacy, a topic regarded a taboo by some sectors of the society.

The event, which was held in Gaborone, was part of the lineup of sessions to be undergone by the contestants before the finale scheduled for September 4.

The pageant organisers engaged Dr Thusang Gure, a general practitioner popular for being vocal on sexual intimacy topics.

The founder and national director of MRS Botswana, Kgalalelo Lesetedi said the organisation hosted the session with Dr Gure after realising that many marriages were broken due to issues of intimacy.

Lesetedi said the plan was to include the spouses, but due to COVID-19 regulations, only wives took part. She said wives and husbands alike needed to be empowered on issues of intimacy to reduce infidelity in marriages.

The contestants were also capacitated on baking, sewing and cooking skills as well as social issues affecting marriages and homes.

She further noted that the wives would have a three-night boot camp, which would be limited to the top 14 finalists.

She said it was at the boot camp that they would intensely engage on issues affecting homes and marriages.

In his session, Dr Gure advised wives to open up on issues of intimacy and engage their spouses.

He said happy marriages were based on open communication, adding that it was important for spouses to know each other's 'love language', saying such would help nourish and nurture their love and marriages.

MRS Botswana finale will be held in Gaborone on September 4, and the winner will leave for South Korea to the MRS Universe on November 28.

Source : BOPA
The Former National Secretary of the All Progressive Grand Alliance (APGA), Dr. Sani Shinkafi, says he has defected to the All Progressives Congress (APC) to support Gov. Bello Matawalle to rebuild Zamfara.

Shinkafi who was the APGA governorship candidate at the 2019 general elections in Zamfara, disclosed this at a news conference in Gusau on Tuesday.

Recall that the National leadership of APC received Matawalle and some federal and state lawmakers to the party on Tuesday.

"I am joining Matawalle in APC, with the APGA structure in the state and 14 local government areas (LGAs) of the state."I am not joining APC for material gains. I am joining Matawalle to develop my state."I am leaving APGA not because I don't like the party, but I am leaving APGA in order to join Matawalle in the APC to rebuild Zamfara State," he said.

"I was invited by Governor Bello Matawalle himself to join him in the APC, and as such, I see no reason why I should not join him," he explained.

Shinkafi maintained that he was one of the founding fathers of APGA and he had been in the party for 19 years and rose up to the rank of national secretary of the party.

"I am not forcing anybody to defect to APC among my supporters, I will continue to relate with those who chose to remain in APGA because of our long-existing relationship,
Letlhakane  Stockman's Choice and Voorslaag Auction auctioneer, Mr Nico Vos says the local small stock industry is experiencing a boom in good quality stock.

Speaking at an auction held at Redbull Crush in Letlhakane on Saturday June 26, Mr Vos said there was a positive vibe in the local small stock industry, attributable to President Dr Mokgweetsi Masisi's small stock initiative.

He noted that the acution, now in its sixth year had grown in leaps and bounds and had attracted buyers from as far as Norway. The auction was the brainchild of Boteti small stock breeders, who used to travel to South Africa to buy genetics, and who now needed to create a market for themselves.

Auctions, he said, were very important as they gave farmers's cattle, livestock and fould and their products being cattle, exposure to a broader base of buyers.

Mr Vos explained that there were three types of auctions namely stud, commercial and weaner or slaughter animal auction, adding however, weaner or slaughter animal auction had not yet started in Botswana due to lack of competition from major feedlots.

The lack of competition was due to the fact farmers preffered to take their animals directly to butcheries and feedlots

However, he said, Stockman's Choice was planning to start slaughter and weaner auctions. He said if the Government could allow farmers to export their weaners to South Africa, soon there would be need for local and South African feed lotters to compete for weaner and slaughter animals.

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He noted that a Boer goat doe, belonging to Mr Faheem Kala of Bushra Stud fetched an impressive P60 000, while a Kalahari Red Buck from the same farm fetched P33 000. Further, a number of small stock being comprising Boer Goat and Kalahari Red were sold in excess of P20 000, with one Boer goat buck fetching P29 000.

Mr Vos said a doe with three kids, bred by Mr Keitumetse Modori, was sold for P54 000.

He said the aim was to have farmers from Zimbabwe, Zambia, Namibia and Angola buy in Botswana. They now needed the Government to facilitate quarantine facilities for the export market, and that such facilities were needed in Tlokweng, Francistown and Ghanzi.

One of the organisers, Mr Peter Van Den Heever said local breeders were at a level where they could supply the export market.

Source : BOPA
The Federal government is coming up with policies to ensure that all health sector procurements by local manufacturers are patronised.

Government said the move would encourage local manufacturers and help Nigeria to achieve medicine security as well as boost the country's economy. The Permanent Secretary of the Federal Ministry of Health, Mr. Abdulaziz Abdullahi, who made the pronouncement in Sagamu, Ogun State, weekend, said the Federal government was set to assist local manufacturers.

Abdullahi, who spoke during the official visit to Emzor's ultramodern WHO-compliant factory, said to assist manufacturers, the government needs to, by way of waivers, constitutions and taxes, see that the local products can compete globally.

"It will come up with a policy such that all health sector procurements by local manufacturers must be patronised.

"There's a need for us to collaborate with PPP in such a way that all manufacturing procurements should be known and a certain percentage should be reserved for them."

He said the government was prepared to support and encourage the investment, and as such, the Global Fund Country Executive Secretary was present.

"I believe that Emzor should be among the few local manufacturers that should be encouraged to key into this financial donors and world bank support," he assured.

Speaking on the contribution of the pharmaceutical sector to Nigeria's GDP, the Director, Food & Drug and Services, Federal Ministry of Health, Mrs Bukola Ajayi said with what Nigeria has been doing in the health sector, the sector will experience massive contributions to the economy.

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"In the past three to four years, we have had leaders that provided rebates on raw materials, the percentage was written off on raw materials' interests. "Then, we have executive orders that put in place for us to patronise local content, those are government policies that are affecting the pharmaceutical industry positively.

"Recently, the CBN was encouraging pharmaceutical industries with soft loans of less than 10 percent in single digit loans. The Bank of Industry, BOI, too has been helping industries. I believe with these, it's just a question of time before we start seeing the impact," Ajayi said.

The Executive Director at Emzor Pharmaceutical, Uzoma Ezeoke, said the Sagamu factory was the fourth the company would establish.

"In Lagos, we have three factories and this one was not so much about the timing but imperative. "Internationally, quality in our industry is tied to processes which means, one process closing to another.

"Certain products have to be manufactured in dedicated units, you can't mix them up. So, we needed enough space. This facility sits on 60 hectres and everything is set up to an international standard," Ezeoke added.

Vanguard News Nigeria
Abuja  The CEO of BSTAN Homes, Dr. Becky Olubukola has said Nigeria would require about N58 billion to solve its 25 million housing deficit.

She made this revelation when her company unveiled its four brand ambassadors in Abuja.

She said the country's ever growing population has made shelter a major necessity for many Nigerian families.

According to her, the housing sector has a capacity to increase by over 35 percent the GDP of the nation if that sector is nurtured.

Olubukola, whose company is presently developing 11 major housing projects across the country also urged the federal government to address the gap in accommodation, attributing the lack of shelter as one of the reasons fueling the increase in banditry and insecurity in the country.

She noted that several nations that are stable across the world have ensured that they take care of their shelter and housing development which has helped their economy in addition to boosting their nation.

"A child that is homeless can't acquire good education, a family or young man that is homeless can't think of any other thing beyond becoming a bandit or hoodlum. Therefore, if we really want to get it right as a nation, shelter is one major aspect that our nation needs to look into," Olubukola said.

The member of Council of Registered Engineers of Nigeria (COREN), described the provision of shelter as the most important needs of Nigerians, saying that 50 per cent of a family problem is solved, if accommodation is taken care of.

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In sustaining tradition that began in 2016, BSTAN offered ambassadorial endorsement deals for four persons, including eight-year-old Miss Amanda Chielohye, who was signed as the first kiddy ambassador.

Other brand ambassadors are comedian Mc Papi, (Osazee Samuel Aikhionbare), MC Shortcut and MC Da Music (Dennis Obinna Nwoye).

The previous ambassadors of BSTAN Group include Nwankwo Kanu, Sola Sobowale, Monalisa Chinda, Ejike Asiegbu, Paul Play Dairo, Femi Branch, Yewande Adekoya, Jaiye Kuiti, Lala Muyideen, Funsho Adeolu and Ayo Adesanya.

BSTAN said its brand ambassadors were signed on as the Face of the Home Titan to deliver houses to Nigerians with as little as N5milion.

The two-year ambassadorial deal includes monetary benefits, in addition to a plot of land each worth N35 million at one of BSTAN prime projects, Casablanca Estate in Life Camp, Abuja.

Amanda's mother, Mrs. Chioma Chieloyi said she was super excited because her daughter has made her proud for being picked as one of the company's brand ambassadors.
Dar es Salaam  President Samia Suluhu Hassan has said that she will receive a special audit report of the Central Bank of Tanzania for a period of three months from January to March 2021.

The President was speaking on Monday June 28, 2021 during her meeting with Editors and Journalist at State House Dar es Salaam.

"Today is Monday, tomorrow I will have a meeting with CCM's National Executive Committee (NEC) and then on Wednesday I will receive the reports although it has taken some time to prepare," she said.

On March 28, this year President Samia ordered the Control and Auditor General (CAG) Charles Edward Kichere to conduct a special audit on all the money that was released by BOT between January and March 2021.

The President was speaking after she had received the CAG and the Prevention and Combating of Corruption Bureau (PCCB) reports for the year 2019-2020 at State House Chamwino, Dodoma.
The Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality is expected to start "formalising" about 140 informal settlements across the city this week

Dozens of shack dwellers from Area 11, Gunguluza in Kariega, were seen queuing on Monday to check whether their homes have been included in the municipality's database.

It follows the demolition of about 60 shacks in the area at the weekend that were deemed to be unoccupied. From Thursday, the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality is expected to start documenting in order to "formalise" about 140 informal settlements across the city.

Mayco Member for Human Settlements, Masixole Zinto, said: "A budget of R300 million will be used to bring services to 140 informal settlements such as water and sanitation. We have decided to formalise the informal settlements but no further invasion of land will be allowed in the city. We will evict those invaders from the land."

Area 11 development committee chairperson, Siyabonga Stemele, said he had told residents that the demolition was out of the committee's hands. "If you don't stay in your shack for a long time, it will be demolished, especially if it does not have furniture," he explained.

Resident Nokulunga Menta, who had joined the queue, said she had not been living in her shack for over six months because she was worried about bringing her newborn son to a home without access to water, a toilet and electricity. "Many people are relieving themselves in the bush and in storm water drains ... and this means the area is unhygienic for a baby," she said.

Ward 45 Councillor Siphiwo Plaatjies said, "The area is overpopulated. The municipality is trying to make sure the sites and [residents] are verified. We agreed with land planning and Human Settlements that streets will be tarred in that area in order to service the people."

Plaatjies warned that residents who have title deeds on the municipality's database and who are found to be occupying shacks, could have their shacks destroyed. "The municipality cannot allow people to have two houses. If the municipality finds out you don't stay in your shack, it will create a space for another person by removing your shack from the area," he said.
"It is untenable that the poorest and most vulnerable children should have to foot the bill for budget reallocations" says Katharine Hall

Children's Institute is asking Parliament to increase the Child Support Grant by at least R10 in October.

The organisation says the current grant amount of R460 is too little to cover the cost of minimum basic nutrition for a child.

The Standing Committee on Appropriations appears to back the increase.

The Children's Institute has asked Parliament to increase the Child Support Grant (CSG) by a "meagre" R10 in October to mitigate food price hikes and offer some protection against child hunger and malnutrition.

According to Katharine Hall of the Children's Institute, at the moment the value of the grant buys even less in 2021 than it did in 2020. "As it is, the CSG is too small to cover the cost of minimum basic nutrition for a child," said Hall.

The CSG, which is the smallest of all the grants, is currently at R460 after being increased from R450 in April 2021. Many believe that the grant should at the very least be aligned with the national food poverty line, which was R585 in 2020. Even this should have been increased to at least R600 this year, said Hall.

She said that while a R10 increase is not enough, it would be immediately feasible and "essential to offer some protection against child hunger and malnutrition". The Child Support Grant is also usually increased by R10 in April and October each year.

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According to the Treasury's 2021 Estimates of National Expenditure, there will be a decrease in spending on social grants amounting to R36 billion over the next three years, despite an estimated increase of 300,000 grant beneficiaries per year. The budget document states that the decrease follows the "cessation of social assistance due to the Covid-19 pandemic" but assured that "R22.5 billion was expected to be transferred to SASSA over the medium term".

In its submission to the Standing Committee on Appropriations, the Children's Institute asked Parliament to ensure that the National Treasury allocates an additional R1 billion for the grant.

"It is untenable that the poorest and most vulnerable children should have to foot the bill for budget reallocations by making grant sacrifices, especially when South Africa is also battling an ongoing epidemic of child malnutrition," Children's Institute said in its submission.

Chairperson of the Standing Committee on Appropriations, Sfiso Buthelezi, said that low economic growth, debt, and the impact of Covid-19 has necessitated budget cuts across all departments. He said that the committee welcomed the call to increase the Child Support Grant. Buthelezi said that the Committee has urged the Department of Social Development to prioritise the CSG despite the constraints of its budget cuts.

Buthelezi added that the Committee would engage with the National Treasury "to find lasting solutions around the funding of children, and orphans in particular".
By Ismail Musa Ladu

These are dark times for Uganda.

Government has shut down the economy in resonse to the deadly second wave of coronavirus (Covid-19) that keeps mutating and in the process, has claimed several lives since May 2021.

Prominent figures such as the executive director of Private Sector Foundation, the late Gideon Badagawa and Kampala City Traders Association (Kacita) chairman, the late Everest Kayondo lost the battle to Covid-19 last week. About 846 people have so far died due to Covid-19.

The rising death toll ploughing through the country's workforce, a highly burdened banking industry drowning in trillions of restructured loans with razor- thin hope of timely repayments.

A peaking debt burden with an arguably blindly optimistic taxman hoping to collect Shs22.2 trillion from decrepit businesses struggling to remain afloat. A frustrated, sick and tired population.

The more-transmissible and potentially deadlier variants of Covid-19 that have sent the country into another lockdown are likely to set the economy back. In short, economic recovery is going to take a big setback.

Hopeless transport sector

Angry, frustrated and disappointed Ricky Rappa Thomson, chief executive officer Safeboda Uganda will not lift a finger of action during these 42 days of lockdown.

The transport sector especially Boda boda riders are one of those prohibited from travelling unless they are carrying cargo.

They also fell victim to the first lockdown. Safeboda last year forced by the economic conditions occasioned by the virus laid off over 50 per cent of their staff. Some were told to go for unpaid leave.

Only months after resumption of operations following the easing of lockdown last year, the company was still struggling to find its footing.

Initially at about 400 workers globally, Safeboda had trimmed its staff to 200 employees and that has been the story since March 2020.

Today, the story repeats itself but this time, Mr Thomson will not lay off his staff.

"I receive about 50 phone calls a day and more than half of those are stranded riders with no hope, no food yet many mouths to feed. They ask me for money because they do not have anything to eat and I send it as long as I have something to offer," he narrates.

That is no long-term solution

Ricky recalls that whereas people had some savings in the first lockdown, this second lockdown has found many high and dry as they were just starting to recover.

"I cannot lay off any staff because they will be stranded. They will not have what to do. We instead decided that those with annual leave take it during these 42 days as we await hopefully news of opening up the economy," he says.

Mr Thomson fears for a grim and uncertain future for the ride hailing company in Uganda if the situation is not overturned. There lies no hope in government's economic bailout plan to distribute money through mobile money.

Safeboda employs more than 10,000 riders in Uganda, most of whom are youth.

Scared informal sector

Youthful Shakira Mastula, a saloonist in downtown Kampala, is also at a loss of words during this lockdown. During the first lockdown, she would move to her customers' houses where she plaited their hair for just enough money to feed herself and pay her expenses.

Now, the movement even on foot is too restrained that she fears to walk long distances; but what she fears the most is death!

"The virus this time is real, people are dying everywhere. I fear to step outside to other people because you do not know if they have Covid-19 and might spread it to you. Hospital bills are enormous, I would not be able to afford them," she says adding she will continue nibbling at her savings until the situation relaxes.

Even Mr Gordon Katimbo, Hilton Highschool headteacher, one of the sectors that called for the opening of the economy is now reluctant. He says everyone is scared to physically engage in fear of contracting the virus.

The school resorted to online teaching but as a consequence had to cut 31 teachers out the 54 because not all of them could be absorbed.

Hustling hospitality industry

Ms Jean Byamugisha, on the other hand is grateful that during this second lockdown, hotels have been left to operate under strict Standard Operating Procedures which has enabled them to keep earning some revenue.

The mood is so somber in the country. As the private sector cries for relief, those in the public sector, especially decision makers are disoriented.

Disoriented country leaders

The second lockdown has in many ways thrown off balance even the planners of the economy at the Ministry of Finance whose primary role includes formulating policies that enhance overall economic stability and development of the country.

When the second lockdown was instituted, the National Budget for the financial year 2021/2022 had already been delivered. And therein was no mention, let alone planned anticipation for a second lockdown of the economy as a result of another wave of the coronavirus disease.

During a sideline interview of a post budget dialogue organised by Ministry of Finance, Uganda Revenue Authority, SEATINI-Uganda and Civil Society Budget Advocacy Group among other stakeholders, Mr Patrick Ocailap, the Deputy Secretary to the Treasury describes the second shutdown as an"interruption".

He said: "The second lockdown is an interruption because it will disrupt the growth of the economy, something we did not plan for. Our hope is that this lockdown will not last long."

He continued: "Measures to open the economy after the 42 days should be put in place so that the population returns to work otherwise where we will get money to treat the Covid-19 patients because that needs resources?"

Importantly, he stressed the need to have the economy open up again once the 42 days are up, saying measures must be instituted to allow the population resume normal economic activities while observing standard operating procedures for as long as the pandemic exists.

He also disclosed that Shs1billion has been earmarked for specifically the micro and small enterprises, majority of whom according to Mr Julius Mukunda, the executive director of CSBAG, have had their businesses ravaged for far too long even in the last one and half years of the pandemic.

According to Mr Mukunda, Uganda Development Bank (UDB) caters for the interest of the "industry big boys and girls", leaving the micro, small and even some medium enterprises to bleed to death. This is well corroborated in several surveys some of which have been conducted by SEATINI - Uganda, Economic Policy Research Centre (EPRC) and Private Sector Foundation, the private sector apex body in the country.

But before the micro and small business are handed part of the Shs1billion, Mr Ocailap said they will have to learn to eventually formalize and form groups to have access to the funds because this is not a grant but a revolving fund.

In a presentation at the Post Budget virtual meeting, deputy Governor of the Bank of Uganda, Dr Michael Atingi-Ego, noted that although the government didn't think about the second lockdown, there is nothing much to be done now that it is already upon us.

He described it (second shutdown) as downside risk, implying there will be certainly a loss in investment as a result of the action. He was also afraid that should the wave fail to be contained, then the economy's capacity to soldier on will eventually be stretched to the limit, a situation whose outcome can only be one way--caving in.

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Although he supervises commercial banks, he says the solution for businesses lies in the financial market where they should be able to raise patient capital rather than accruing it from the commercial bank whose design is not meant for such nature of transactions.

As for the National Planning Authority, executive director, Dr Joseph Muvawala, the second lockdown has simply intensified their frustration as planners. This is because the available resources could be channeled towards dealing with containment measures of the pandemic, leaving nothing for the implementation of the National Development Plan III. Already, lack of funds to implement the country's blue print has been a fixture that he says frustrates their agenda.

Possible solutions

But with wails from even those supposed to steer the country into recovery, what is next for Uganda, in this quagmire expected to span years?

Dr Fred Muhumuza, an economist and Makerere University lecturer, says this is not the time to panic. The country ought to slow down.

"This is a medium to long term thing. The virus is not going to go away in the next six months or one year and its impact is not going to go away in the next two to three years. We need to slow down and ascertain whether we need money and for what. Are there things we can avoid? Government needs to get into that mood and cancel most of the long term ambitious projects so they do not put a strain on the revenues that are not there. Otherwise, they will be forced to excessively borrow which will also cause destabilisation. We should manage with what we have and know that recovery is not around the corner," he advises.
Amid a spike in Covid-19 infections and related deaths, President Mnangagwa has called upon the nation to continue observing the World Health Organisation (WHO) protocols as well as to embrace the free vaccination programme that has been availed by the Government to protect the populace.

In his condolence message on the death of Major General (Retired) Clever Shadreck Chiramba who succumbed to Covid-19 related illness at Parirenyatwa on Sunday, the President said the country should not drop its guard as the current third wave of the pandemic has resulted in a surge in infections countrywide as well as related deaths.

"The country continues to lose many lives to Covid-19 related illnesses in the wake of the Third Wave which the country is currently experiencing. Sadly, we have also lost our decorated soldier and veteran of the liberation struggle, the late Major General Chiramba under similar circumstances.

"The surest way of minimising further loss of lives and the spread of the deadly disease rests with all of us observing the stipulated WHO health protocols as well as strict adherence to the preventive measures which Government has put in place including the accelerated vaccination programme underway," he said.

The country is currently under various levels of localised lockdowns as Government puts in place interventions to curb the spread of the contagion that has claimed thousands of lives on the continent and across the globe and disrupted lives and livelihoods.

Some of the WHO protocols include, washing hands, wearing face masks and social distancing.

The President, who is also the Commander in Chief of the Defence Forces, described Major General Chiramba as a distinguished Zimbabwean who served his nation with pride and honour.

"Major General Chiramba leaves a record of distinguished national service to Zimbabwe. He participated in the liberation struggle and served in the Zimbabwe National Army until his retirement from military service, both of these roles, he served with utmost dedication, commitment and unquestionable loyalty which earned him medals of honour, bravery, loyal service and excellence," the President said.

After his retirement, Major General Chiramba went into farming, passionately and patriotically contributing to the country's quest to achieve food self-sufficiency.

"On behalf of Government, the ruling party, Zanu PF, the Zimbabwe Defence Forces, my family, and indeed in my own behalf, I wish to express my heartfelt condolences to the Chiramba family, especially his wife Beatrice and the children, on their sad loss of a loving husband, father and mentor.

"May they rest assured that they are not alone during this dark hour of grief because Major General Chiramba was no longer theirs alone but belonged to all of us. May his dear soul rest in eternal peace," said the President.

Born on February 2, 1955 in Chivi District in Gude village, Maj-Gen Chiramba did his primary education at Jenya Primary School from 1961 to 1968.

He left the village for Mashava where he did Ordinary Level through correspondence.

Maj-Gen Chiramba was to later join the liberation struggle, which led to the independence of the country in 1980.

He was later attested in the ZNA where he rose to become a Major-General until his retirement from active service in 2004.

Maj-Gen Chiramba led the Two Infantry Brigade during the DRC campaign under the auspices of the SADC Allied Forces.

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The military intervention, which was code-named "Operation Sovereign Legitimacy" was meant to ward off rebels, secure the DRC territory, and to protect civilians.

In the war, combined African forces from DRC, Zimbabwe, Angola, South Africa and Namibia were pitted against Western sponsored insurgents from DRC and other elements.

The operation ultimately helped the country to regain its authority and sovereignty.

Burial arrangements for Maj-Gen Chiramba will be announced in due course.

Mourners are gathered at House Number 52, St Andrews Road, Hatfield, Harare.

He is survived by wife, Beatrice Chiramba nee Pawandiwa, eight children and 16 grandchildren.
Beitbridge  Toppick Investments, a wholly Zimbabwean owned company, has ploughed US$5,5 million into irrigation infrastructure for the highly integrated Zhovhe Farm 83km west of Beitbridge town.

Managing director Mrs Saliwe Marema told stakeholders during a recent tour of the farm by the Minister of State in charge of monitoring and implementation of special agriculture and related programmes Davis Marapira, that his company has so far constructed a 7km pipeline to their new citrus project.

In addition the investment has seen 68 000 orange trees imported and now being planted with the company planning to increase the number, in phases, to 277 000 trees.

"We are planting 68 000 trees and have so far constructed a 7km water pipeline from Zhovhe dam to the farm. This will feed our orange orchard and the irrigation pivots on the winter, maize, soya beans sections.

"In addition to the pipeline we have since 2015 acquired 17 irrigation pivots which have come in handy during our last wheat and maize crops planted under the command agriculture element," said Mrs Marema.

She said the company had also invested in fish farming, livestock production focusing on goats, sheep, poultry, cattle, and a processing plant for most crops and products from the farm.

The firm is looking at reaping rewards from the citrus products in the next five years.

Mrs Marema said in the long term, Toppick was considering diversifying to the production of dairy cattle and related products.

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"The market for citrus is big in the country and our aim is to produce for the local and export market," she said.

Mrs Marema said since the beginning of operations around 2014, Toppick had invested US$15 million in various businesses across the country, including the integrated farm, two lodges, three service stations, two funeral parlours and various corporate social responsibility activities.

The company plans to construct a clinic in the Whunga area.

Speaking during the same event, the organisation's chief operations officer Mr John Mudau, said the firm had employed over 200 people from Beitbridge district and more would be hired to take care of the citrus plantation.

"We are running an integrated farm with over 1 000 cattle, 400 goats (Boer and Matabele breeds), 500 sheep, 24 floating cages with the capacity to carry 2,4 million fingerlings of fish, and 1 500 Sasso chicken," said Mr Mudau.

"In the last two farming seasons, we managed to deliver 1 200 tonnes of wheat and 800 tonnes of maize to the Grain Marketing Board. We are hoping that with the aid of the new irrigation infrastructure, in the next farming season we will have even bigger yields."
ZANU PF has put a stop to the ongoing house demolitions around the country after engaging the relevant Government ministries saying the ruling party values the right to shelter.

After meeting Local Government and Public Works Minister July Moyo and National Housing and Social Amenities Minister Daniel Garwe, the ruling party resolved that an all stakeholder meeting to iron out the challenges that residents are facing was the best way forward.

Addressing the media after meeting the Government ministers, Zanu PF Secretary for Administration Dr Obert Mpofu said the party and its leadership are against the ongoing demolitions of houses which have left people exposed to weather vagaries.

"The party and its President and First Secretary Cde Dr Emmerson Mnangagwa, as well as the entirety of leadership, uphold the right to shelter and human dignity.

"As such, the current wanton demolitions in urban and peri-urban areas must stop forthwith while the processes to resolve the associated challenges are in motion. An all stakeholders meeting will be convened soon to discuss similar matters in areas affected," he said.

Instead of wanton demolitions of houses as was the case in Melfort in Goromonzi, Cde Mpofu said the party supports the concept of regularising illegal houses to preserve the right to shelter.

"The party stands supportive of the ongoing regularisation programme of residential stands being undertaken by the Housing and Social Amenities Ministry across the nation to mitigate housing shortages," he said.

Cde Mpofu said the special meeting was convened following the ongoing demolitions in Mashonaland East province, Melfort area in the past week, and other parts of Harare which have led to the unwarranted loss of shelter and income of the affected families.

He said the ruling party was also vehemently against land barons that continue to parcel out land illegally.

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"We have warned and continue to warn individuals engaging in land baron activities which involve the illegal parcelling out of State and council land without authority to stop those activities immediately. We call upon the law to take its course for non-compliant individuals," he said.

Cde Mpofu said Minister Garwe attended the meeting physically while Minister Moyo attended via the phone and was agreeable to the outcome of the meeting.

"The party during the meeting was informed that the developer for Melfort area, Messers Rodgers Pote, Aurther Chidenhe and Life Majingura of Vintage Properties and Eastwinds Association fraudulently acquired a development permit and this position was affirmed by the court on December 4, 2020.

"This nullifies all the activities which were done under this developer," he said.

Cde Mpofu was flanked by the party's secretary for finance and acting political commissar Cde Patrick Chinamasa and other top party and Government dignitaries.
Health Reporter

Zimbabwe's efforts at reducing the incidence of tuberculosis (TB) have begun to pay off following the declaration by the World Health Organisation (WHO) that the country had transitioned out of the top 30 high TB burden countries in the world.

The global health body last week released updated lists of high burden countries for TB, HIV-associated TB and multidrug/rifampicin-resistant TB (MDR/RR-TB) for 2021-2025.

According to Global Tuberculosis Report 2020, between 2015 and 2019, incidence per 100 000 population per year declined by an estimated 18 percent in Zimbabwe.

"WHO has officially communicated with the ministers of health of Cambodia, the Russian Federation and Zimbabwe, to inform them about their country's transition out of the list of 30 high TB burden countries and to recognize their success in reducing the burden of TB disease in recent years.

"Between 2015 and 2019, incidence (per 100 000 population per year) fell by an estimated 22 percent, 25 percent and 18 percent, respectively, in the three countries," said the health body.

WHO said it would establish a 'global TB watchlist', consisting of the three countries transitioning out the global list of 30 high TB burden countries, since they still warranted continued attention and remained a priority in terms of support from the organisation.

Zimbabwe was among the top eight African countries in the World's top 30 countries heavily burdened by TB, TB/HIV and multi-drug resistant TB with the most affected groups being women in the reproductive age group (15 years to 44 years) and men.

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In March, Vice President and Minister of Health Dr Constantino Chiwenga said the Government had made significant progress in reducing the TB incidence rate from 242 per 100 000 in 2015 to a rate of 199 per 100 000 in 2019. He encouraged collaboration between HIV and TB health service provision continued to be of importance as the country's TB epidemic is largely HIV-driven.

The country is however still highly burdened by TB/HIV and multi-drug resistant TB.

The WHO lists provide a focus for global action on TB, HIV-associated TB and drug-resistant TB in the countries where progress is most needed to achieve the targets set in End TB Strategy, the political declaration of the United Nations (UN) high-level meeting on TB held in 2018 and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). They also help to build and sustain national political commitment and funding in the countries with the highest burden in terms of absolute numbers or severity and promote global monitoring of progress in a well-defined set of countries.
The First Lady, Amai Auxillia Mnangagwa recently unveiled a national call centre, providing gender-based violence (GBV) victims and survivors with a solid care package in the wake of a surge in domestic violence cases.

The helpline is a brainchild of Amai Mnangagwa, who has taken the bull by its horns and pledged to play a significant role in curbing domestic violence.

The toll-free number is 575 and the National Gender Based Violence Call Centre was set up in her office, whereby victims will be swiftly connected to police Victim Friendly Unit (VFU) or counselling services as appropriate.

By yesterday, the call centre was operational with callers getting required assistance from the agents who linked them to various service providers.

The development comes amid worrying statistics which showed an increase in reported GBV cases, including psychological, physical, sexual and all other forms of domestic violence.

Analysis of date between March and May 2020 found that intimate partner violence (IPV) was the most frequently reported form of GBV as 69,5 percent of identifiable perpetrators were intimate partners.

This prompted the First Lady into action and she traversed the length and breadth of the country speaking out against GBV while encouraging victims to report such cases to family elders, the police and village heads.

This also led to the birth of the 575 national call centre which is set to be a game-changer. People assisted on the national gender-based violence toll free line include those with marital problems who are stressing each other through violence and also those being sexually abused including minors.

Service providers working together with the National call centre include the Zimbabwe Republic Police (ZRP) Victim Friendly Unit, the Adult Rape Clinic, Zaoga for counselling, Musasa Project, Ministry of Women Affairs, Community, Small and Medium Enterprises Development, Padare Men's Forum, among others.

When someone calls, an agent will listen carefully to determine the nature of the problem and assist the caller if there is no need for escalation. The agent determines the nature of support required basing on the caller's need. When there is need for escalation, the agent will transfer the caller to the relevant service provider.

The First Lady said it was her wish to see victims and survivors of gender-based violence being assisted adding that the initiative will assist victims in accessing services to aid them in their circumstances.

"We saw it fit to rope in other service providers and have a coordinated approach in fighting GBV. There are services that the National call centre 575 cannot provide to victims, but which are available to other stakeholders. The callers are referred to relevant service providers. I strongly urge people going through difficulties in their marriages to seek counselling and solve their problems without using violence. Violence in the home does not augur well for our young children. We must never use violence because it gets us nowhere. Violence in all its forms must be condemned," she said.

National director of Padare Enkundleni Men's Forum on Gender Mr Walter Vengesai expressed gratitude at the birth of the National call centre 575.

"We are happy and we welcome the new call centre 575 provided by the First Lady and hope that it will help those in need and survivors of gender-based violence. We have faith that this will make services accessible to everyone.

"This is a free number and anyone can call anytime so we are grateful for the work that the First Lady is doing in ensuring that women, men and children are protected against GBV and those that are survivors also get the necessary services that they require.

"Padare is going to come as one of the service providers for the perpetrators and survivors of GBV who need our services and would have been referred from the national call centre," he said.

Ms Precious Taru, the executive director of Musasa Project said she was thankful to the mother of the nation for her solution-based approach.

"We hope the challenges of violence that we have been witnessing will end and people will get help through that number. It's a toll-free number that anyone can call anytime at any place. The national helpline will address the challenges of congestion where people struggled to get through to us. As Musasa Project we are very happy and excited to be part of this programme because we have always been assisting women, but we are seeing that we are coordinating in a way that will give women a comprehensive package of care. We shall link every woman who visits us with the national call centre," she said.

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The ZRP Victim Friendly Unit, represented by Chief Superintendent Jessy Banda was full of praises for the First Lady and encouraged those in need to make use of the facility.

"We welcome this development by the First Lady on the establishment of the national GBV call centre. We encourage victims of gender based violence to make use of the toll free number. Through this 575 facility, they will be able to be transferred to the ZRP victim Friendly Unit where matters concerning domestic violence and sexual violence are dealt with," she said.

Chief Supt Banda said the toll-free number had also made it possible for those without money to get access to justice. The advent of the national gender based violence call centre 575 which is part of the First Lady's solutions-based approach is expected to reduce domestic violence cases countrywide.
THE Vocational Training Authority (VETA) and Korean International Cooperation (KOICA) on Monday inked a deal aimed at enabling youth in the country to acquire employability skills.

The agreement intends to carry out a project at a cost of 5.3 million US dollars (about 12bn/-). The project, dubbed 'Youth employment and skills for development in Tanzania' will be run for three years.

VETA in collaboration with the German Development Agency will be implementing the project, according to KOICA Tanzania Country Director Mr Kyucheol Eo.

"We are pleased to partner with VETA to support around 4,000 young people in Tanzania become employable and employ themselves so that they can fulfill their dreams. The project will be implemented in the regions of Lindi, Dodoma and Manyara," The KOICA Director highlighted during the project signing ceremony in Dar es Salaam.

He said that through the project, KOICA will also develop and run an entrepreneurship programme for other VETA students in the three regions, whereby one of the important aspects will be providing capital to startups by teams of students who won entrepreneurship challenge.

For his part, VETA Director General Dr Pancras Bujulu, expressed his appreciation for the support from KOICA, saying that the support came at a right time when more interventions to provide tailor made short courses linking graduates with the job market and employers were needed.

"There are graduates lacking skills and experience to match with the needs in the job market, therefore for them to receive internships, or apprenticeships will increase their employability skills needed by employers," he argued.

Dr Bujulu said that the programme will run for three consecutive years from 2021 to 2023 where after gaining skills, youth, in their groups, will be engaged in a contest to find best projects for being incubated and supported for taking off.

He said skills for the country's ongoing strategic projects will be a target since more personnel are needed in the areas like wielding, plumbing and masonry.
WOMEN'S ability to overcome poverty, cope with shocks and improve their well-being have been taking the central role in economic empowerment endeavours in the country.

The chances for Tanzanian women in decision-making bodies have been minimal largely rooted in cultural norms despite making up a huge portion of the country's population.

When women realize their economic goals, whether it's growing a business, improving their home or investing in training or education, they're more resilient and able to provide for themselves and their families.

According to national statistics, women account for 51.4 per cent of the population, but their representation in the key leadership post was minimal.

Yet, globally, women continue to trail men in formal labour force participation, land and property ownership, and access to financial services, like credit and savings.

In recent years, there were several campaigns to empower the group to have more presence in both politics and income generation activities.

The government's policies and programmes were initiated to empower women and reduce the gender gap in the country. The government's programmes and policies have also received significant political will from the national top leaders.

President Samia Suluhu Hassan has proved this within just 100 days in office after she took over following the death of President John Magufuli.

President Samia in her several speeches promised to appoint women to various leadership positions provided they have unquestionable integrity, competence and required education level.

The Head of State has been keen on spotting capabilities in women, the qualities that proved that women have great potential in carrying out their responsibilities.

When appointing from different posts, the President has been emphasizing gender parity and warned her appointees against propagating gender discrimination in their areas.

She also insists on the ability and fulfilment of the responsibilities that each one of the appointees must play in boosting the national economy to achieve the 2025 targets.

Recently, the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Industry and Trade Mr Doto James called for the society to support women entrepreneurs to fully participate in production activities for Tanzania to realize anticipated sustainable industrial economic development.

Mr James insisted that it was the duty of every concerned citizen to ensure that women entrepreneurs are accessing their rights of not only doing business but also access to available opportunities and basic understandings of tax payment rules and formalizing their businesses, the move which he said will lift the country's economy.

"Tanzanians at large must support women to grab business opportunities available, markets, loans and how to grow business," Mr James said in dares Salaam Yesterday.

He was opening training for Women entrepreneurs from different parts of the country organized by Equal Opportunities for all Trust Fund (EOTF) He highlighted that women must also be supported to establish small scale processing industries and attend local, regional and international trade fairs so that they can access markets, increase earnings and subsequently, grow the country's industrial economy.

Mr James highlighted that women are an important part of the society who must be prioritized to access education, decision-making platforms and economics if we are to build a successful industrial economy.

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"Women entrepreneurs are mostly in Farming, fishing, artisanal and small scale mining as well as handcrafts, and these sectors do play a major role for producing raw materials for major industries," Earlier, EOTF Chair Person Ms Anna Mkapa informed the permanent secretary that the training encompassed women entrepreneurs from all over the country, to build their trading capacities as the Dar es Salaam International trade fair kicks off this coming weekend.

She said that EOTF is focusing on supporting women, for apart from facing several setbacks, they form a major part of the population of up to 53 pc of Tanzanians.

The training goes with the theme of Women entrepreneurs' war against poverty, ignorance and diseases, she said.
Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia has urged all residents of Ghana to partake in and cooperate with Census Enumerators and their Field Officers as the Ghana Statistical Service undertake the two-week-long 2021 Population and Housing Census which began on Sunday, 27th June 2021.

He has also urged respondents to provide accurate information to the Enumerators to enable the compilation of accurate data to inform policy formulation and planning for the country's development.

Dr Bawumia made the call when officials of the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) visited him at home to conduct a census of him and his household as part of the national exercise on Monday, June 28, 2021.

The GSS is mandated by law to conduct a head count of all persons resident in Ghana every ten years, and provide Government and researchers with insight into the trends and dynamics of the population.

"The benefits to be derived from the Census data is enormous, and the outcomes of the Census exercise will guide our development plans, implementation, monitoring, evaluation and reporting, particularly with African Union's Agenda 2063, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), i.e. Agenda 2030 and National development agenda.

"Therefore, I call on everybody not only to be part of the exercise, but also, provide a more credible and quality data for our dear country and make use of the Census call centre to ensure that all persons are counted.

Reminding the country that the Census is "both a legal obligation and a civic responsibility", the Vice President urged persons who have either refused to provide responses or requested for payment from Census Enumerators to avail themselves and refrain from demanding money or other favours before providing the required information.

"The census is an inclusive, non-discriminatory, non-partisan, national activity and I urge all persons in Ghana, including non-Nationals to fully participate in this important activity by presenting themselves and their families to be counted appropriately.

"The Census aims at achieving complete coverage and quality data. The objective of complete coverage, aligns perfectly with the "Leave No One Behind" agenda of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To this end, the cooperation of all the populace is paramount."

Concluding, Vice President Bawumia emphasized:

"I have just been counted. You should also get counted for our national good. You count, get counted!"
Addis Abeba  Yesterday the Federal High Court Lideta Branch, First Constitutional and Anti-Terrorism Bench was scheduled to conduct hearings on the conduct of the prosecutor's witness hearing against the defendants in Jawar Mohmmed's file. While Ten of the defendants on the file did not appear in court, the defendants listed 1-4 on the file; Jawar Mohammed, Bekele Gerba, Hamza Adane and Dejene Tafa sent a letter explaining to the court that they will no longer attend the court hearing.

The hearing had previously been postponed to a further date as the defendants didn't appear at the court and due to the court's order to postpone today's hearing to avoid possible security threats related to the election campaigns. The defendants have repeatedly expressed unwillingness to attend the hearing citing malpractices in the justice system and requested a two years long appointment until the next hearing.

At yesterday's hearing, the prosecutor argued that the defendants' decision not to attend their hearing is against the law. It also suggested that they should be forced to appear before the court or the hearing should proceed in their absence.

While admitting that the court's order should be respected, the defense team explained to the court that they learned of their clients' decision at the hearing. However, they expressed their objections to the prosecutor's recommendation of forcefully bringing their clients to court. "There's no reason to bring them by force while we all know where they can be found," the lawyers said. Referring to the recent rearrest of a senior member of Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) the lawyers said, "Our clients are discouraged by the repeated dishonour of court orders witnessed by the rearrest and disappearance of OLF leaders."

The lawyers further argued that it is improper to see the cases without the presence of the defendants and asked the court to give them a chance to speak to their clients.

In response to this, the prosecutor complained that the court proceedings should follow necessary legal processes instead and the cases must be seen accordingly, insisting that the prison administration should be ordered to bring the defendants to court.

The court then ordered the defense team to finalize their arguments by July 5, 2021 and for the defendants to appear in court on July 6, 2021.AS
press release

A training on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) reporting, aimed at familiarising journalists and reporters with different writing techniques to ensure a fair, accurate, and inclusive reporting of LGBTQ stories and related issues, was held yesterday, at the Media Trust in Port-Louis.

Representatives of various local media houses attended the one-day training funded by the European Union. This initiative was a joint collaboration of the Young Queer Alliance(YQA), the Collectif Arc-en-Ciel (CAEC), and the Media Trust.

The training was held in the context of the European Union funded project "Strengthening the inclusion and social acceptance of LGBTQIA+ persons, through policy and mindset changes, in Mauritius and Rodrigues", being implemented by the YQA and the CAEC. It was supported by the Equality Rights in Action Fund (National Democratic Institute).

The objective of the training was to encourage the press and the media to further bring to light LGBTQ issues, LGBTQ people and their human stories as well as give them the opportunity to express themselves on the day-to-day issues in society.

Themes that were covered during the training include: definition of key concepts in relation to LGBTQ, the situation in Mauritius, and the work being carried out by local LGBTQ organisations, amongst others.
ADDIS ABABA - The government of Ethiopia is carrying out the third phase green legacy initiatives nationwide having finalized preparations for the campaign.

Various states have started the third phase of the green legacy campaign. For instance Oromia state is set to plant 4.3 billion seedlings in this round green legacy initiative, according to State Agriculture Bureau.

Oromia State Agricultural Bureau Deputy Head Endalkachew Teferi told Ethiopian Press Agency (EPA) that all the necessary preparations have been finalized in a bid to realize the main objective of the campaign .

The past two phases were accomplished with great success combining with active participation of the society, he said.

Accordingly, from among 3.2 billion planted seedlings during the past two phases over 84 percent of them were prolific. This year, over 1.9 billion holes have been prepared to plant the saplings in collaborating with concerned bodies. He also indicated that over 468, 000 hectares of land has been made ready for the saplings and over 280 million saplings have been so far planted prior to the campaign.

Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples (SNNP) Government Communications Affairs Bureau Head Senait Solomon on her part said that following the nationwide green legacy initiative themed: "Let's adorn Ethiopia," the state is set to plant over 1.5 billion seedlings this round. Accordingly, over 1.3 billion seedlings have been prepared and over 479 million holes have been dug, she noted.

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This year's campaign has already been launched and over 215 million seedlings have been already planted , she indicted.

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed (Ph.D) called up on Ethiopians to actively participate in the national planting program and leave their legacy on the efforts geared towards realizing the vision of coming up with green, beautiful, fabulous and prosperous Ethiopia.

"As this is a timely national call for change, all Ethiopians have to leave their fingerprint on the green legacy targeting at ensuring Ethiopia's Prosperity," the premier underlined.

It is to be recalled that Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta who came to Ethiopia for working visit also planted tree seedlings at Entoto Park, one of greenery and beautification projects of the country. According to the Premier, one billion seedlings have been prepared for neighboring countries as part of making the tree planting drive regional.
Recently, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has revealed its world investment report as of the 2021 fiscal year. And the report stated that Ethiopia has collected USD 2.4 billion from FDI despite 6 percent reduction due to the impact of the pandemic by 2020.

According to the report, Global Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) flows fell by 35 per cent in 2020, reaching USD 1 trillion, from USD 1.5 trillion in 2019. Absorbing a 6 percent drop in inflows to USD 2.4 billion, Ethiopia remained the Largest Landlocked Developing Countries (LLDC) recipient of FDI in Africa.

The decline in African LLDCs was more pronounced than in other African countries (-17 percent), reflecting the landlocked economies' vulnerability to border closures and other measures affecting logistics, the report asserted.

Absorbing a 6 per cent drop in inflows to USD 2.4 billion, Ethiopia remained the LLDC recipient of FDI in Africa. The pandemic and political instability weighed on the economy and on FDI inflows, despite the Ethiopian Government's new investment promotion strategy targeting livestock, fisheries, energy and manufacturing.

The report further emphasized that FDI to East Africa has dropped to USD 6.5 billion, a 16 percent decline from 2019. Accordingly what Ethiopia has achieved in attracting FDI is inspirable. Ethiopia, despite registering a 6 per cent reduction in inflows to USD 2.4 billion, accounted for more than one third of foreign investment to the sub region.

Although the Ethiopian economy suffered from the pandemic, especially in hospitality, aviation and other services, it still grew a substantial 6.1 percent. The manufacturing, agriculture and hospitality industries drew the highest shares of investment in 2020.

The Government initiated a program to facilitate foreign investment in the manufacturing of personal protective equipment (PPE), and several Chinese firms have already started production. The program can also be considered as one of the pushing factors to facilitate the FDI. Comparing FDI performance of some African countries the report announced that Uganda decreased by 35 percent to USD 823 million, compared with USD 1.3 billion in 2019 and FDI to Somalia increased marginally (4 percent) to USD 464 million.

As in previous years, inflows were concentrated in some large LDCs. The top five recipients (Cambodia, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Mozambique and Myanmar, in that order) accounted for more than half of FDI to the group and the top 10 (adding the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Senegal, the United Republic of Tanzania, Mauritania and the Lao People's Democratic Republic) for over three quarters, the report added.

As to the report, FDI inflows to the 33 African LDCs increased by 7 per cent to USD 14 billion, accounting for more than 60 percent of all inflows of LDCs. As a result, African LDCs performed better than Africa as a whole, where FDI inflows declined by 15 percent. Inflows exceeded USD 1 billion in five African LDCs, and USD 500 million in another five.

In Ethiopia, the largest African LDC recipient of FDI, flows were down 6 percent to USD 2.4 billion. Although economic growth remained positive in 2021, the economy felt the effects of the pandemic in tourism and industries related to global supply chains.

On the other hand, while Zambia attracted the most (USD 11 billion in three deals), followed by Ethiopia (USD 4.4 billion in three deals) by value, Myanmar has attracted the most (eight deals, totaling USD 1.7 billion) whereas Angola, Guinea and the Lao People's Democratic Republic attracted six deals each by number.

The pandemic aggravated structural weaknesses that affect development in general in LDCs (WIR20). Most LDCs avoided major virus outbreaks despite their limited domestic resources and weak health-care capacity; however, future outbreaks, especially if the vaccine roll-out in LDCs continues to be delayed, could once again depress FDI.

Moreover, FDI in the 39 LDCs still considered commodity dependent will remain subject to fluctuations in commodity prices, most of which have not recovered to their pre-pandemic levels. Uncertainty related to a recovery in tourism is also a major issue for selected LDCs (e.g., Bhutan, Cambodia, Ethiopia, the Lao People's Democratic Republic and the United Republic of Tanzania) (WIR20).

One of the salient cases of reforms accelerated by the pandemic is that of Ethiopia, where the aim of regulatory changes has been to involve more foreign investors in efforts to achieve a sustainable recovery.

To that end, an Investment Proclamation was adopted at the beginning of the pandemic (in April) shifting to a negative-list approach and authorizing the Ethiopian Investment Board to revise the list of activities prohibited to foreign investors.

In addition, in September, the Government adapted a new investment regulation, opening certain segments of transport to foreign investment, including railway transport and cold-chain and freight transport. In other segments, the permitted share of foreign investors was raised to 49 percent.

Restrictions on foreign ownership were also lifted in cement manufacturing, education and management consultancy. The regulation also relaxed the restrictions on the engagement of manufacturing firms in retail trade and electronic commerce.

The report also encourages program and policy shifts coupled with investment incentives provided by different countries in order to mitigate the pandemic coupled with supporting the investment. As it was illustrated in the report Ethiopia has also adopted policy measures to respond to the crisis. For example, Ethiopia the initiated program adopted by the Ethiopian Government to assist foreign investors in establishing facilities to manufacture personal protective equipment (PPE) was amongst the other.

Ethiopia opened up all industries to foreign investment of at least USD 200,000 for a single project. It also allowed foreign investment in certain transport services, the report asserted.

Various financial and fiscal incentives have been designed to encourage investment in the health sector. In addition, government procurement can be introduced to support local producers. In Ethiopia, for example, government procurement provides a 25 per cent price advantage to local pharmaceuticals manufacturers, compared with international suppliers.

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Meanwhile, Ethiopian Investment commissions 9 Month performance report indicated that the commission was able to attract 2.05 billion USD from foreign direct investment in the past 9 months. This will actually indicated the FDI performance in the year 2021 will be increased.

Various promotional and diplomatic works that has been done in collaboration with sector institutes and embassies all over the world were mentioned as the reasons for achieving this result adding that the new One Stop Shop (OSS) online service is also the other result achieved in the past nine months of this fiscal year.

According to the report, the amendment of policies and proclamations also brought a solution in solving investor's problems. From the attracted investments 58 percent manufacturing, 5 percent agriculture and 37 per cent is service and from the commission plan 70 percent is achieved as the report mentioned. 137 new investors also took their investment license in the past 9 months.

Owing to the fact that FDI is one of the most striking features of the global economy today, Ethiopia has been undertaking different reform activities in this area during the past three years. Accordingly, the Commission is working jointly with the government, investors and other stake holders for better result in the future.
ADDIS ABABA-The Lamu Port-South Sudan-Ethiopia-Transport (LAPSSET) Corridor Project, which aims to connect Ethiopia, Kenya and South Sudan via road, rail, air and petroleum pipeline said to demonstrate substantial infrastructural progress and it is in a good shape to enhance connectivity among the three countries.

The above remark came at the High Level Regional Meeting held yesterday at the UN Conference Centre.

Addressing the meeting, Ethiopia's Transport Minister Dagmawit Moges said that the main section of Ethiopian side of the project is near to completion as the 92 km express road is completed, the Moyale one stop center inaugurated and preparation of necessary legislations are completed.

The minister further stated that Ethiopia is desirous to utilize the newly-inaugurated Lamu Port with a view to diversifying port alternatives. Ethiopia plans to double the current 17 million tons annual import-export freight to 32 million tons in ten years and the inclusion of Lamu Port has a pivotal role for the success of the goal.

By the same token, Kenya-East African Community and Regional Development Cabinet Secretary Adan Mohamed said that Lamu Port is able to handle some of the biggest ships in the world with the capacity of more than 12,000 TEUs. Two expansion parts of the port are set to operational by October 2021.

Adam claimed that Kenya has registered tremendous progress in the expansion of critical infrastructures and has continued to do so.

South Sudan's Director for Budget at the Ministry of Finance and Planning, Scopas Malak G. Buli for his part stated that South Sudan is working for the realization of the project and attaches unwavering commitment till completion.

African Union High Representative for Infrastructure, Raila Odinga noted during the discussion that the dream of regional and continental integration become real through interstate infrastructural connectivity and LAPSSET is among the key projects to realize AU's vision of integrated Africa.

Following the discussion, the three countries established a string committee for the smooth coordination of the project's activities.

LAPSSET was launched in March 2012 in Lamu Port, Kenya with the presence of Ethiopian, Kenya and South Sudan leaders, it was learned.
Ethiopia is relentlessly working to successfully repatriate its citizens who have so far been suffering from illegal migration outcomes. The returnees from Saudi Arabia and other countries are also being provided with a number of job opportunities to lead life at home.

Since illegal migration has grown and spread accompanied with vacillated mechanisms, countries have to come up with firm cooperation to respond to the challenges that migration poses for them and communities of origin, host countries and communities, as well as migrants and their families. To this end, there has to be greater cooperation with a view to acting collectively to pursue international cooperation on basic goals such as reducing illegal migration, eliminating deaths and abuses in transit, and curbing the proliferation of smuggling and organized crimes.

As addressing illegal immigration is difficult without having a well-coordinated national and international effort, Ethiopia has currently capitalized on ways that help convincingly slash illegal migration.

Awareness creation about the dangers of illicit migration through innovative wakefulness campaigns targeting the youth is also of paramount importance in mitigating, even abolishing if possible, the serious repercussions of illegal migration.

Yes, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in collaboration with the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, regional states as well as other concerned bodies has been uncompromisingly working to create ample job opportunities, come up appealing environment for those being repatriated.

Getting the roots of the problem that could trigger migration dried is a timely and relevant measure that requires close cooperation with the international community.

Undeniably, most illicit migrants lack access to basic rights and social protections and are frequently the victims of exploitative labor practices. Migrants who are subject of a great deal of political controversy, in many Arab countries are calling for tough action to return to their country of origin. That is why Ethiopia equally weighs the issue of citizens with its burning national agenda.

Cognizant of the fact that illegal immigration has had an aggravating effect on the displacement of citizens; Ethiopia has been applying a wide range of measures to deal with the phenomenon of dishonest exodus including restrictive controls via working with other countries to meet basic requirements of sovereignty, security and its integrity.

Besides, there are measures striving for solutions to either proactively prevent illegal migration altogether or to minimize the problems resulting from a continued illegal stay of citizens.

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The negative upshots of illegal migration can of course be controlled by a consolidated cooperation among authorities of the host countries. It is safe to say that controls at the borders and in the country form a tightly meshed network, as they are relatively frequent, cooperation and the exchange of data among the various players has to be well amalgamated.

Ethiopia is expected to maintain direct bilateral contacts to countries in the form of projects and the most promising practical approach is fortifying cooperation as comprehensively and painstakingly as possible with these countries.

Even mechanisms are being taken place on borders with a view to reducing smuggling or containing crimes.

In sum, preventing and combating illegal migration has emerged as one of the major issues in Ethiopian domestic policy since recently. That is why Ethiopia avails itself of a range of instruments to deal with the phenomenon of illegal migration. Some initiatives are, however, not simply restrictive, but rather proactive to either prevent illegal migration completely or to minimize the problems resulting from a continued illegal migration.
ADDIS ABABA - Out of the 15 identified Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) projects in the metropolis, the construction of two BRT lanes have been commenced and are progressing well, so disclosed Addis Ababa City Administration Transport Bureau.

The two BRT lanes with an outlay of 3.8 billion Birr are being built in a bid to modernize transportation system in the city, it was learnt.

The lanes are from Jemo to Winget and from Torhayloch to Qerra, which have been constructed with an outlay of 2.2 billion ETB and 1.5 billion Birr respectively, and are expected to be finalized within two years, he underscored.

Approached by The Ethiopian Herald, Bureau Head, Eng. Sitotaw Akale said that the process to construct the remaining 13 projects is also waiting for final approval from pertinent bodies.

"As the BRT lanes are constructed only for bus transportation, no traffic congestion won't be observed and this will help the capital realize swift, accessible, secured and safer transportation," he added.

According to Sitotaw, road corridors planned to be constructed in the coming 10 years are: from Hayat-Tulu Dimtu, and Entoto- Jemo in all directions to easily connect places and help residents travel from every corner of the city without difficulties.

"Upon completion, the projects will provide residents with economic advantage with much lesser time saving petroleum costs," he added.

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"In relations to railways expansion, the administration has been conducting research to avoid challenges from which residents are suffering. Generally, regarding 10 years plan, the city administration has targeted to construct 200 km road infrastructure development that can incorporate both bicycle and pedestrian walkways side by side other infrastructural development."

Meanwhile, the city administration has rented some 500 private mass transport buses to meet the ever-soaring transportation demand. The city has 10,000 taxes, 10,000 lada taxies and nearly 1,000 Mass transport buses. Using these vehicles, city administration has been providing transportation service for 3 million residents per day. Hence, there is significant progress in transportation service.

Some 400 supportive Mass transport vehicles are also providing residents with transportation service supplementing the existing vehicles.

To make swift and accessible transportation service, the bureau has commenced new buses procurement process. This year the administration is heading to import 500 buses and has planned to import some 3,000 Mass transport buses within two years. This combined infrastructural development will realize city's swift inclusive transportation, he said.

"The newly imported buses will start providing transportation service in Ethiopian New Year. This will significantly helpful combined with existing vehicles to realize swift transportation service in the city."

"As road safety is not the only duty of the drivers and relevant actors, the bureau has created conditions to include road safety in education curriculum with a view to teaching students at all levels about it," he added
Ideas Party of Democracy leader, Hebert Chamuka says his party is ready to challenge Zanu-PF and the two main opposition parties, MDC Alliance and MDC-T in the 2023 elections.

IPD, a relatively new and little-known party has been on a drive to mobilize for voters in rural Zimbabwe, which have become havens for the ruling Zanu-PF over the years.

The two main opposition parties are at loggerheads over the use of the name MDC, which, according to analysts, may weaken their chances against Zanu-PF.

In an interview with 263Chat, Chamuka said his party is not afraid of anyone and is ready to stand toe to toe with the parties that command huge followings.

"As a party, we are doing our thorough homework and are laying the critical groundwork. We have been mobilizing our supporters and encouraging them to be in the party's structures so that it is easier for accountability.

"We are very aware of the threat posed by Zanu-PF and the two MDCs, but that is not much of our worry. We can never rule out that they are bigger than us but we are not here to add numbers. We can beat anyone and we are going to cause an upset," Chamuka said.

He said despite the numerous new parties coming up, his project is unfazed by their existence.

"We will not lose any sleep over new, smaller parties because to us, they are not that significant, we want to target the big boys and see how far we can go. But our intention is to win something," a bullish Chamuka said.

In the 2018 elections, over 100 political parties took part while 23 presidential elections were contested by 23 candidates with President Emmerson Mnangagwa while his arch-rival, Nelson Chamisa came close in second.

The opposition leader, Chamuka weighed in on the current demolitions saying they expose Zanu-PF's underhand dealings in parceling out the land.

"Zanu-PF is responsible for these demolitions, this must stop. They do this towards every election and it has become their modus operandi, it's a bad habit that leaves thousands of people stranded. We want better ways of governing, which as IPD, we are promising," he added.

As part of its voter mobilization program, the party has been donating foodstuffs to the needy in the Southern parts of the country.
Cape Town  South Africa's top court gave the country's former president, Jacob Zuma, a verbal tongue-lashing on Tuesday for his defiance of the law and ordered him to report to police within five days to serve a 15-month prison sentence for contempt of court. There is no appeal against the order.

In a judgement delivered at the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg, Justice Sisi Khampepe, the acting deputy chief justice, accused Zuma of "outlandish" behaviour when he refused to obey a court order to appear before a commission of inquiry into high-level government and private sector corruption.

"[I]f we do not intervene immediately to send a clear message to the public that this conduct stands to be rebuked in the strongest of terms," the judge added, "there is a real and imminent risk that a mockery will be made of this Court and the judicial process in the eyes of the public.

"The vigour with which Mr Zuma is peddling his disdain of this Court and the judicial process carries the further risk that he will inspire or incite others to similarly defy this Court, the judicial process and the rule of law."

Responding to the court's decision, one of Zuma's daughters, Dudu Zuma-Sambudla, said her father was "in high spirits and has no fear". Referring to a government ban on gatherings under coronavirus regulations, she pledged that "Lockdown Or No Lockdown We Will Escourt (sic) You To Serve Your Time."

The court order stipulates that if Zuma fails to report to a police station within five days, the minister and national commissioner of police must ensure that he is committed to prison within another three days.

Justice Khampepe leads the court at present because the outgoing chief justice, Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng, is on long leave pending retirement, and the deputy chief justice, Justice Raymond Zondo, is heading the commission whose subpoena Zuma has defied. Nine judges heard the case, seven of whom agreed to imprison the former president.

Khampepe, South Africa's most senior woman judge, was born in Soweto, earned her first law degree at the University of Zululand and a master's degree from Harvard Law School before returning to South Africa to practise labour law.

When she was appointed to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1985, she came with a reputation as a feisty, no-nonsense defender of black workers and unions. After serving in the National Prosecuting Authority, she was appointed a judge in 2000 and to the Constitutional Court in 2009  by then-President Zuma.

Delivering the judgement on Tuesday, she said the apex court was in a "precarious position... on account of a series of direct assaults, as well as calculated and insidious efforts launched by former President Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma, to corrode its legitimacy and authority.

"It is disappointing, to say the least, that this Court must expend limited time and resources on defending itself against iniquitous attacks," she added. "However, we owe our allegiance to the Constitution alone, and accordingly have no choice but to respond as firmly as circumstances warrant when we find our ability to uphold it besieged."

After outlining why the apex court had to dispose of the case itself, instead of allowing the matter to go through lower courts, Justice Khampepe said:

"On the evidence placed before this Court, there can be no doubt that Mr Zuma is in contempt of court... the extent of the breach has not been challenged by Mr Zuma who, instead, has taken to multiple public platforms upon which he has affirmed the extent of his non-compliance. Those public utterances impliedly confirm not only that he is aware of the order and its contents, but also that he stridently elects to remain in defiance of it."

She said "scurrilous and defamatory aspects" of Zuma's public statements justifying his defiance had informed her reasoning on an appropriate sanction for his behaviour.

"What is the appropriate sanction? For I am not in the habit of playing my cards close to my chest, let me, at this earliest opportunity, state that Mr Zuma has earned himself a punitive sanction of direct and unsuspended committal."

She said the corruption being investigated by Zondo's commission "is a cancer that threatens our constitutional order and the human rights to which it seeks to give meaning..." and Zuma's "inflammatory statements intended to undermine this Court's authority and portray himself as a victim of the law" were "scandalous".

"It is unbecoming and irresponsible of a person in Mr Zuma's position to wilfully undermine the law in this way. Mr Zuma had every right and opportunity to defend his rights, but he chose, time and time again, to publicly reject and vilify the Judiciary entirely.

"I have already detailed the lengths to which this Court has gone in this matter to safeguard Mr Zuma's rights despite his insolence towards this Court. Consequently, there is no sound or logical basis on which Mr Zuma can claim to have been treated unfairly or victimised by this Court. His attempts to evoke public sympathy through such allegations fly in the face of reason. They are an insult to the constitutional dispensation for which so many women and men fought and lost their lives...

"[T]he position in which Mr Zuma finds himself is of his own making and has nothing to do with the violation of any of his rights. And his attempt to equate legitimate legal processes with a witch-hunt is dangerous, unfounded and intolerable....

"Mr Zuma is no ordinary litigant. He is the former President of the Republic, who remains a public figure and continues to wield significant political influence, while acting as an example to his supporters. This leads me to the final point and exceptional feature of this matter that justifies the punitive sanction that I impose: the unique and special political position that Mr Zuma enjoys as the former President. He has a great deal of power to incite others to similarly defy court orders because his actions and any consequences, or lack thereof, are being closely observed by the public. If his conduct is met with impunity, he will do significant damage to the rule of law...

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"Mr Zuma's conduct that led to and has persisted throughout these proceedings is all the more outrageous when regard is had to the position that he once occupied. Although Mr Zuma is no longer President, his conduct flies in the face of the obligation that he bore as President. It is disturbing that he, who twice swore allegiance to the Republic, its laws and the Constitution, has sought to ignore, undermine and, in many ways, destroy the rule of law altogether."

The leading South African anti-corruption campaign group, Corruption Watch, described the court's judgement as "momentous" and "historically significant". Karam Singh, head of legal and investigations at the group, said: "For the first time in South Africa, we are seeing a former head of state held directly accountable by way of a prison sentence, for his refusal to submit himself to the commission or to the jurisdiction of the ConCourt in this matter. Indirectly this speaks to his culpability in presiding over a period of state capture that has had lasting and damaging effects on the country."
The federal government has slammed a travel ban on passengers arriving from five African countries as part of measures to mitigate a potential third wave of COVID-19.

The countries are South Africa, Uganda, Rwanda, Namibia and Zambia.

The Chairman of the Presidential Steering Committee (PSC) on COVID-19, Mr. Boss Mustapha, at a press briefing yesterday in Abuja, also announced the extension of measures taken a few weeks ago, denying entry into Nigeria to passengers who had visited Brazil, Turkey and India within 14 days preceding their arrival to the country.

Mustapha said the ban on a visit from those countries would now be extended by another four weeks before it is subjected to further evaluation.

Mustapha, who is the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, said the decision was warranted by concerns and the dangers associated with the importation of such virulent COVID-19 strains to Nigeria.

He expressed concern that South Africa for example, recorded over 100, 000 cases of COVID-19 infections in the last week while 20,000 was recorded in the last 24 hours.

He urged members of the public not to lower their guards yet because of reported spikes in some countries and concern over the third wave in some countries.

The PSC listed the four major variants of concern across the world as Alpha (United Kingdom), Beta (South Africa), Gamma (Brazil) and Delta (India).

He reiterated that the six-month ban imposed on the first batch of 100 Nigerian travellers that violated the COVID-19 protocols is almost complete.

He reassured Nigerians that although the PSC had received appeals from some of the inbound passengers, whose travel documents were barred, sanctions will be imposed on violators of measures put in place to protect them and safeguard the country.
AFRICA'S ability to respond to future pandemics will depend on making investments in health and education, and governments must immediately intensify efforts to avoid further crises.

"Ebola was a signal," John Nkengasong, head of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told participants in a virtual session on healthcare held during the African Development Bank's 2021 annual meetings.

"We can also look at Covid-19 as an indication that something more severe will come if we do not strengthen our health defences," he said.

The annual meetings are unfolding against the backdrop of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, which has exposed the lack of access to primary healthcare for most Africans, as well as over-reliance on imported medicines.

Nkengasong, along with other health and disease experts, spoke in a knowledge session titled 'Building Africa's Healthcare Defence System'.

He urged four steps: workforce development, manufacturing capacity of diagnostics, vaccines and treatment, institution building, and partnerships with the private sector. The Africa CDC has been instrumental in the continent's fight against Covid-19

Matshidiso Moeti, the World Health Organisation's regional director for Africa, emphasised the WHO's partnership with the AfDB and regional governments.

The WHO and its partners in Covax, the worldwide initiative aimed at equitable access to Covid-19 vaccines, are also cooperating with a South African consortium, including corporations, universities and the Africa CDC, to set up a pioneering technology transfer hub for mRNA vaccine technology.

"This important public-private partnership is an important step to building the infrastructure and human resource capacity to contribute to closing the gap in access to vaccines on the continent," Moeti said.

"I see the African Development Bank playing a critical role on this journey alongside the African Union and the African CDC."

AfDB president Akinwumi Adesina underscored the bank's engagement with the issue.

"We must give hope to the poor and the vulnerable by ensuring that every African, regardless of their income level, gets access to quality healthcare, as well as health insurance and social protection," he said.

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James Scriven, chief executive officer of IDB Invest, the Inter-American Development Bank's private sector institution, offered lessons from Latin America, which he described as the fastest-growing region for generic pharmaceuticals.

He said: "Now is the right time to strengthen pharma-manufacturing capability in emerging countries, and support business models that can expand the reach and supply of medicines and healthcare."

Former World Bank president Jim Kim, a vice chairman and partner with Global Infrastructure Partners, said a holistic approach that would harness community workers and improved infrastructure would be crucial.

He called on the private sector to be a partner in building Africa's healthcare defences.

"You cannot end extreme poverty if you are neglecting the investments in health and education that are so critical to economic growth," said Kim.

He urged a return to basics, adding: "It's not one thing. It's the health workers, it's hospital beds, it's making sure you can provide oxygen, and then it's going to be production capacity for these vaccines, and this all has to happen very quickly." - AfDB News
NAMIBIA has recorded 650 deaths linked to Covid-19 in the past month, and 281 deaths in the week from 20 to 27 June only due to Covid-19.

Meanwhile, Katutura Intermediate Hospital has created a waiting area for patients desperately in need of a hospital bed.

Namibia's current daily new confirmed Covid-19 cases and deaths per million people has surpassed that of South Africa (SA), India, Brazil and the United States (US).

This is according to the Johns Hopkins University's Covid-19 data from yesterday's seven-day average extracted from the university's Covid-19 data repository.

This dashboard shows that Namibia currently records 648,87 positive cases per million people, whereas South Africa stands at 254,31 per million people.

Namibia is fifth in Africa in terms of the number of new infections per million people, and sixth in terms of deaths per million people.

Brazil, which has been battling the Gamma variant, is currently recording 331,11 positive cases per million people.

Meanwhile, the United Kingdom (UK) saw its peak per million at 881,31 in early January, and the US around the same time recorded 753 positive cases per million people, while SA's highest rate was 321,07.

This is despite the fact that Namibia's testing and vaccine efforts are ahead of South Africa's.

South Africa tested 0,9 people per 1 000 people, whereas Namibia tested 1,41 people per thousand on 23 June.

In terms of fully vaccinated citizens, Namibia leads with 0,91% of its population while 0,81% of South Africans have received their jabs.

Minister of health and social services Kalumbi Shangula on Friday told The Namibian that Namibia has only been able to identify the presence of the Beta variant in the country.

The Alpha variant of the virus was initially detected in the UK, the Beta variant in South Africa, Gamma in travellers from Brazil, and the Delta variant was discovered in India.

The Delta variant has been detected in 14 countries across Africa, including Botswana, South Africa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda.

Windhoek-based infectious disease specialist Dr Gordon Cupido believes the current wave of new infections should peak in the next week or two, while hospitalisation and deaths can be expected to peak by the third week or end of July.

Cupido and lung specialist Dr Willie Bruwer say a fourth wave could be expected at around early to mid-October.

"Beta should make Delta less contagious now. Immunity wanes after three to six months, which is when Gamma will strike," Cupido yesterday said.

MORE CAPACITY

Due to being overwhelmed, Katutura Intermediate Hospital has converted its outpatient department into a designated holding and oxygenation area for patients waiting for bed availability and placement.

This was announced in a memorandum issued to staff members of the hospital yesterday by the medical superintendent of the Katutura hospital, Dr Nelago Amagulu.

Therefore, the hospital has suspended its outpatient services along with surgeries classified as not urgent.

As of last month, the national state referral hospitals, Windhoek Central Hospital and Katutura Intermediate Hospital, will no longer perform any operations unless they are urgent.

NO SINOPHARM, FEW ASTRAZENECA DOSES

Moreover, the country has completely run out of the first and second doses of the Chinese-manufactured Sinopharm, with the Ministry of Health and Social Services waiting for new arrivals next week.

Moreover, there were no first doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine at the various health facilities The Namibian called yesterday.

The country has received a total of 197 200 vaccine doses, of which 141 209 have been administered.

The cumulative number of people who have received a first dose stands at 112 773, and 22 285 have been fully vaccinated.

In a statement yesterday, executive director of health and social services Ben Nangombe said the ministry will continue to vaccinate as many people as possible with first vaccine doses, while the majority of second doses would be administered as soon as the next consignment is received next month.

"This is in accordance with the WHO's guidance in the case of limited vaccine supply. It should be noted that the first dose of vaccines already offer some degree of protection against severe disease, hospitalisation and death," he said.

Namibia is procuring vaccines through various platforms, including the Covax facility, which is set to deliver 40 800 AstraZeneca vaccines early next month.

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Namibia is also expecting another batch of 120 000 AstraZeneca vaccines through AstraZeneca Europe by mid-July.

Other vaccines expected in early July are 150 000 Sinopharm and 100 000 Sputnik Light vaccines from the Gamaleya Institute.

Namibia is also expecting 250 000 doses of Johnson & Johnson vaccines from Avatt early in August.

Nangombe said Namibia is, however, yet to acquire information on exactly how many doses it is set to receive, and that this would trigger the process of paying for vaccines.

He said global vaccine supply has been a challenge despite the country having entered into a committed purchase agreement with the Covax facility, provided a financial guarantee and reserved funding for doses.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned that Africa needs at least 20 million AstraZeneca vaccine doses within the next six weeks to get a second round of shots to people who've already received their first.

Despite progress, just over 1% of Africa's population has been fully vaccinated and needs another 200 million doses of any cleared Covid-19 vaccines to vaccinate 10% of the continent by September.
The Senate will, on Thursday this week, debate the report of its joint committees on Petroleum (Upstream, Downstream and Gas) on the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB).

Senate President, Ahmad Lawan, disclosed this on Tuesday after the chairman of the panel, Senator Mohammed Sabo (Jigawa South West), submitted the committees' report.

He mandated the Joint Committee to provide lawmakers with copies of the bill ahead of its consideration to enable them to study its content.

Lawan said, "We will be considering the report on Thursday.

"We have today, tomorrow and Thursday to look at the report so that when we consider the report, we will be doing so on the basis of what we have been able to read from this very important report."
Nigeria has an estimated 10,193,918 children out school.

The Minister of State, Education, Chukwuemeka Nwajiuba, said that Nigeria has the highest number of Out-of-School Children in sub-Sahara Africa.

Mr Nwajiuba stated this during the inauguration of "Better Education Service Delivery For All (BESDA)", in Katsina on Monday.

He announced that Nigeria had an estimated 10,193,918 children out school.

According to him, "the current challenges affecting the Nigerian education system has left much to be desired, the system is characterised by high illiteracy level, infrastructural decay and deficits."

"We have inadequate number of qualified teachers, inadequate infrastructural facilities/resources and poor funding," he added.

Mr Nwajiuba congratulated the Katsina State governor, Aminu Masari, on his giant strides to reposition education in the state.

He said "this is a clear demonstration of leadership quality and personal commitment to education as well as the passion to revitalise the sector to develop the abundant human capital of the state."

The minister stated that BESDA focuses on 17 states, "13 of which are in the North-west and North-east geopolitical zones, and Niger, Oyo, Ebonyi and Rivers.

In his remarks, Governor Masari commended the Federal Ministry of Education and the Universal Basic Education Commission "for their foresight and commitment in evolving laudable programmes for the development of the education sector in particular and the development of society in general."

The programme started in 2018. (NAN)
The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) has expressed concern over the recently instituted demolition of illegal structures by some local authorities.

Informal traders in Harare and Chitungwiza most of whom eke a living through vending had their vending demolished by council over the past two weeks.

In a statement, ZCTU secretary general Japhet Moyo said the resultant demolitions was a result of mismanagement of the economy.

"The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) is greatly disturbed by the continuing demolition and destruction of informal businesses which has affected a huge number of desperate Zimbabweans. The demolition of the so called illegal structures continues unabated without any slight consideration of the consequences on the affected people, especially women and children.

"By its mismanagement of the economy in pursuit of political ends, the Government has created mass unemployment. As formal sector unemployment has risen, more and more people had to move into the informal trading sector to earn some sort of livelihood," said Moyo.

With COVID-19 wreaking havoc, Moyo said the Government had been demolishing structures without providing solutions.

"Previously the Government encouraged the growth of the informal sector and allowed informal traders and vendors to carry out their activities. The authorities largely turned a blind eye to vendors and traders operating in violation of bylaws. The destruction of structures that house thousands of vendors is being done without providing any alternative.

"While covid-19 has caused great suffering among Zimbabweans, the government of Zimbabwe is rubbing salt on the wounds through destruction of their only means of survival. Why they do this in the midst of Covid-9 and winter is a mystery. It borders on sadistic mannerism.

"The wrecking of the informal economy sector will have serious detrimental economic effects at a time the economy is already in a parlous state. Apart from drastically increasing unemployment, the campaign will have a detrimental knock-on effect upon the formal economy," said Moyo.

He added "The City Councils, various Government Ministers, and Government officials have advanced a whole miscellany of reasons for this operation. In general, the official explanations have been confusing, and occasionally at variance with each other.

"The timing and magnitude of the 'clean-up' operation has led to much speculation as to whether there are in actuality other reasons than those officially proclaimed."
Meeting in Rome yesterday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged allies to maintain focus with a particular attention on countering its affiliates in Africa.

The fight against Islamic Terrorist Group (ISIS), has moved to a different level following the holding on June 28, 2021 in Rome of a meeting of foreign ministers from over 80 countries to map out new strategies aimed at defeating the Islamic State Terrorist Group. The Global Coalition meeting was co-chaired by the Italian Foreign Minister and International Cooperation, Luigi Di Maio and United States Secretary of State, Antony Blinken. In addition to the foreign ministers, the meeting also witnessed the presence of NATO Secretary-General, Jens Stoltenberg, EU foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell and a number of representatives from some African countries invited as observers.

Speaking during the meeting, the U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken urged the 83-member alliance against Islamic State to step up its focus on operations in Africa, while working to prevent a resurgence of the militant organization in Iraq and Syria, "Ensuring the enduring defeat of ISIS also means effectively confronting ISIS threats outside of Iraq and Syria, in places where ISIS has recently focused its efforts," he said.

Blinken also announced an additional aid package to refugees in Syria and new sanctions against a senior leader of an affiliate known as the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara. The group, operating along Niger's border with Mali, has been targeting civilians, fueling concerns that local self-defense militias are engaging in the fight against the jihadists, the International Crisis Group said last month.

Italian Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio, co-hosting the gathering, also called for a stronger focus on Africa, "Even if the Daesh (Islamic) threat in Iraq and Syria remains central to the Coalition's task, we cannot avoid tackling its global ramifications especially in the African continent, and specifically in Sahel whose stability is crucial for Europe and the broader Mediterranean," Di Maio said.

During the brainstorming exercise, the stakeholders also discussed ways to sustain pressure?on ISIS remnants in Iraq and Syria, and to counter ISIS networks elsewhere, including in Africa. They also assessed priorities for the Coalition's lines of effort related to stabilization, foreign terrorist fighters, counter-ISIS financing, and counter-messaging efforts. The Global Coalition against ISIS which has 83 members today, was put in place in 2014 by the US.
The federal government has announced a ban on travellers arriving from five African countries as part of the measures for mitigating a potential third wave of COVID-19.

The countries are South Africa, Uganda, Rwanda, Namibia and Zambia.

The Chairman of the Presidential Steering Committee (PSC) on COVID-19, Mr. Boss Mustapha, announced the measure yesterday at a press briefing in Abuja.

He also announced the extension of measures taken few weeks ago, denying entry into Nigeria for passengers who had visited Brazil, Turkey and India within 14 days preceding their arrival to the country.

Mustapha said the ban on visit from those countries shall now be extended by another four weeks before it is subjected to further evaluation.

Mustapha, who is the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, said the decision was warranted by the prevalence of variants of concern and the dangers associated with the importation of the such virulent strains to Nigeria.

He expressed concern that South Africa for example, recorded over 100, 000 cases of COVID-19 infections in the last one week while 20,000 was recorded in the last 24 hours.

He urged members of the public not to lower their guards yet because of reported spikes in some countries and the emergence of variants of concern in several jurisdictions where the third wave has occurred.

The PSC listed the four major variants of concern across the world as Alpha (United Kingdom), Beta (South Africa), Gamma (Brazil) and Delta (India).

He reiterated that the six-month ban imposed on the first batch of 100 Nigerian travellers that violated the COVID-19 protocols is almost complete.

He reassured Nigerians that although the PSC had received several appeals from some of the in-bound passengers, whose travel documents were barred, sanctions will be imposed on violators of measures put in place to protect them and safeguard the country.
Abraham Belay, chief executive of the Interim Administration of Tigray, which was appointed by the Ethiopian government in November 2020 as caretaker administrator of the province in place of the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front.

announcement

Addis Ababa  Today, the Tigray Provisional Administration has requested the Federal Government to enact a humanitarian ceasefire in the Tigray region. The provisional administrations request came after due consideration of the needs on the ground and following the consultations with academics, business community and religious leaders and elders from the Region.

The Federal government understands that the people of Tigray, especially those in the rural areas, have suffered greatly. Battling desert locust, the COVID19 pandemics, the displacement and interruption of farming activities due to the criminal cliques instigation of violent conflict have left many in the region exposed to untold suffering. Thus, the Federal government believes that the current challenge in the Tigray Region needs to be addressed expeditiously given the risk of humanitarian crisis confronting our people.

Despite the Federal government's effort to facilitate unfettered humanitarian access, humanitarian workers still face challenges to reach all areas in the region to deliver urgently needed humanitarian assistance to those in need and avert potential risk of serious food insecurity. Moreover, while efforts are underway to provide agricultural inputs to the farmers, it has been difficult to ensure that all farmers in the region are able to plant during this farming season. It is essential that the planting season ahead is not disrupted lest farming communities will miss it with grave consequences for their livelihoods. There is also an urgent need to accelerate the return of internally displaced persons to their place of origin. This is a challenge that needs to be addressed as soon as practically possible.

In light of the foregoing, the Federal government has decided to address the above challenges in a forthright, frank, and bold manner. Accordingly, it has decided to enact a Unilateral Humanitarian Ceasefire (pause in military activities), which takes immediate effect as of today 28th June 2021 with a view to addressing the above-mentioned challenges. The Federal government has decided to do so with the conviction that this measure will help ensure better humanitarian access and strengthen the effort to rehabilitate and rebuild the Tigray region. Therefore, all Federal and Regional civil and military institutions have been ordered to implement the ceasefire in accordance with the directions set out by the Federal Government.

However, it should be understood that this measure taken by the Federal government is in no way designed to allow impunity, as this would severely harm the cause of justice and sustainable peace. It should be abundantly clear that the Government will ensure full accountability for crimes committed, whoever might be responsible for the atrocities. The Federal government takes this opportunity to call upon all stakeholders, both domestic and international, to assist in the full and effective implementation of the humanitarian ceasefire. The magnitude of damage caused by the enemies of peace is indeed enormous and rehabilitating the region certainly requires the concerted effort of all stakeholders.

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The Federal government would also like to underscore that the aforementioned step is being taken in recognition of its heavy responsibilities in ensuring that the people of Ethiopia work together, in order to realize a united, democratic, and prosperous Ethiopia.

The successful completion of the 6th National Elections in Ethiopia has clearly demonstrated the strong commitment of the Ethiopian people to decide on their own fate and destiny through a democratic and peaceful process. Standing in line for hours and staying late through the night, Ethiopians from all walks of life have sent a strong signal that they are ready to work together to build a stronger, united, and democratic Ethiopia, removing the seeds of discord and division sown within the Ethiopian body politic.
The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has approved the release of 50,000 metric tonnes of maize to 12 major producers to control the price of the commodity.

The bank said yesterday that the latest rollout of the commodity from the Strategic Maize Reserve (SMR) under the Anchor Borrowers' Programme (ABP) to companies would be the third intervention by the CBN in recent times.

It stated that the release of the grains is aimed at checkmating the activities of middlemen hoarding the product to cause artificial scarcity.

CBN spokesman, Mr. Osita Nwanisobi, confirmed the release of the grains in a statement yesterday and expressed optimism that the release would crash the price of maize, reduce pressure on the market, and make the product directly available to feed producers, thereby reducing the price of poultry feed.

He added that as part of the bank's financing framework, the CBN would continue to facilitate the funding of maize farmers and processors through the ABP commodity association, private/prime anchors, and state governments, Maize Aggregation Scheme (MAS) as well as the Commercial Agricultural Credit Scheme (CACS).

According to the statement, the identified recipients of the grains included Premier Flour Mills, Crown-Olam, Grand Cereals, Animal Care, Amobyn and Hybrid Feeds.

Others are Obasanjo Farms, Zartech, Wacot, Sayeed Farms, Pandagri Novum and Premium Farms.

Reacting to the development, the National President of the Maize Association of Nigeria (MAAN), Dr. Bello Abubakar, urged middlemen to desist from taking advantage of the supply gap to hike the price of the commodity.

He assured the people that farmers will maintain reasonable pricing regime of the products.

The apex bank had while responding to the activities of middlemen earlier in January, released 300,000 metric tonnes of maize, a move which led to the reduction in the price of the commodity.

Also, the bank, in a renewed move to address the rising cost of food prices in the market partnered with the Rice farmers Association of Nigeria (RIFAN) to distribute 27,000 metric tonnes of rice paddies directly to millers last week.

The direct allocation from RIFAN warehouses across 16 states of the federation followed the earlier sale of paddy aggregated as loan repayment under the ABP to millers from the rice pyramids unveiled in Niger, Kebbi, Gombe and Ekiti States.

Earlier in February, maize farmers had criticised agitations by some groups for the importation of the commodity, describing it as a calculated attempt to further hinder maize production in the country.

They, however, said with current improvement in local production capacity and funding support from the CBN, under its Anchor Borrower Programme (ABP), as well as expectations that the COVID-19 pandemic will be better managed globally, the country should be able to achieve at least 25 million metric tonnes (MMT) before the end of the year.

They added that in the short-term, the price of maize, which had hit the roof in recent times, will drop within three to four months with the modalities put in place to achieve price reduction.

Also, the National President of MAGPAMAN, Dr. Edwin Oche, had stated that the CBN's massive investment in ABP had boosted maize production from eight million metric tonnes to about 20 million metric tonnes within three years.

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He said local farmers had the capacity to grow enough maize to support both industrial use and local consumption.

He had said: "Today, we shouldn't have been discussing this if not for the challenges encountered during the COVID-19 pandemic.

"If not for the advent of COVID-19 that affected food chains and production as well as agriculture as a whole both locally and internationally, we will not be talking about the price increase in maize per bag. We will not be talking about the increase in feeds, flour and all the derivatives from maize and others.

"It's a global issue and as an association, we are dealing with it and strategically looking at the ways to ameliorate the problem by engaging the federal government and CBN and other partners to ensure we come out of it."
The President of the Youth of Churches United for Christ, Pastor George Flomo has urged President George Weah to take the lead in taking the COVID-19 vaccine publicly.

Pastor Flomo said it will be prudent for the president to take the courage and take the COVID-19 Vaccine publicly as a means of motivating more Liberians to take the vaccine seriously .

Speaking over the weekend in an interview with this reporter, the Liberian youth advocate said it is unfortunate that president Weah will not take the vaccine as a leader of the land, but is encouraging the citizens to take it when he should be the one setting the example for others to follow.

According to him, the refusal by President Weah to take the COVID-19 Vaccine has created more doubts especially for the ordinary Liberians who are move by the action of their leaders particularly the youthful populists.

He described president Weah's action for not taking the COVID-19 Vaccine as disservice to the people of Liberia who are depending on him for direction in term of leadership

Pastor Flomo said the wave of the COVID-19 that is taking away the lives of many Liberians, is yet to be accepted by some Liberians only because of the way the Government is proceeding with its information dissemination .

He used the interview to urged President Weah and all of his officials to take the lead by taking their vaccine as a means of building trust into the health system and the ongoing process.

The youthful advocate said many of those who are within the various communities are somehow confused because of misinformation regarding the COVID-19 Vaccine that it is responsible for the increase in the number of cases and deaths, something he said has created more disbelieves in the minds of Liberians.

He challenged the Ministry of Health to be vehement in providing the rightful information to the public and announcing those public officials who have been vaccinated.
Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry renewed the necessity of ending foreign interference in the Syrian territories and internal affairs as a condition for realizing a permanent peace in the war-ravaged country.

Shoukry made these remarks as he delivered Egypt's word at a ministerial meeting on Syria, currently in session in Rome on the fringe of a global ministerial meeting on coalition against Daesh terrorist organization, Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ambassador Ahmed Hafez said.

In his speech, Shoukry covered the various dimensions of the long-standing Syrian crisis and the impact of the terrorist groups controlling some areas in Syria along with the suffering of refugees and displaced people in light of tough economic conditions.

He also highlighted the hegemony of some regional powers which occupied parts of Syria under claims of defending the alliance against terrorism, noting that such powers are trying to impose demographic changes on the ground, incite sedition and send mercenaries and fighters from the areas of conflict in Syria to other countries.

The Egyptian top diplomat urged the international community to shoulder its responsibility to work out a swift solution to the political crisis in Syria based on relevant UN Resolution No.2254.

He also underscored the efforts of UN peace envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen which aims at reaching out tangible results to end the suffering of Syrians.

Shoukry also reiterated the need for making a progress on the political track so as to help Syria return to its normal regional and international position.

Meanwhile, the Egyptian foreign minister pointed out that a solution to the Syrian refugees crisis will remain far as long as the country has not reached any stability so far, urging a continuation of support from the international community and hosting countries to the Syrian refugees.

Time is now ripe to end the long suffering of Syrians, Shoukry noted, adding that saving Syria is a necessity for the coming generations which have not seen nothing but damage and war over the past decade.

(MENA)
The Egyptian Agency Of Partnership For Development (EAPD) has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Comoros National Agency for International Cooperation (ANCI).

This came during a meeting held between EAPD Secretary General Mohamed Khalil and a visiting Comoran delegation that included Director General of ANCI Fatoumia Ali Bazi and the Comoran ambassador in Cairo, the Foreign Ministry said in a press release Monday.

The meeting took up aspects of cooperation between the two agencies within the framework of efforts exerted to support the Comoros to realize the sustainable development goals and the African Union Agenda 2063.

The two sides reviewed development activities and exchanged views on proposed programs and projects that can be implemented in the Comoros through capacity building and visits by experts as well as cooperation in the field of health.

(MENA)
press release

New York  - "Members of the Ethiopian National Defense Forces entered our office in Mekele, Tigray, Ethiopia today and dismantled our VSAT equipment.

"This act violates UN privileges and immunities and the rules of International Humanitarian Law regarding respect for humanitarian relief objects. I condemn this action in the strongest terms.

"UNICEF's priority in Tigray, and across Ethiopia, is to help the most vulnerable children, including the 140,000 children already facing famine-like conditions. We are not, and should never be, a target.

"I ask all parties to the conflict in Tigray to abide by the rules of war and to respect and protect humanitarian agencies. Parties to conflict must not search, confiscate or interfere with humanitarian relief operations, must allow access to the populations in need, and must protect children at all times."
Abuja  The price of crude oil continued its rally yesterday with Brent, Nigeria's oil benchmark, nearing $77, before receding later in the day on the back of data indicating an increase in COVID-19 cases in Asia, one of the world's biggest fuel consumers.

This is coming as the Western Zone of the Independent Petroleum Marketers Association of Nigeria (IPMAN) has directed all depots and petrol stations to ignore the threat of a strike by the national body and ensure free flow of the distribution of petroleum products in the South-west.

Brent hit a more than two-and-a-half-year high earlier in the session, climbing to $76.60, its highest since October 2018, but later retreated to $75.98 a barrel later in the day. West Texas Intermediate (WTI), the United States crude, was 10 cents, or 0.1 per cent, lower at $73.95 a barrel.

The rise in the price of the commodity comes in a week the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and its allies, OPEC+, is scheduled to meet to discuss the possibility of easing supply and allowing members pump more oil.

On increasing oil prices, the commodity is rising for the sixth week as fuel demand has continued to rebound on strong economic growth and increased travel, while crude supplies remain tight as OPEC+ maintains production cuts.

From May to July, OPEC+ has been gradually easing those curbs, adding 2.1 million barrels per day (bpd) to the market and will again meet on July 1, with observers betting that the cartel could decide to add further barrels in August.

On the demand side, the key factors OPEC+ will have to consider are strong growth in the United States, Europe and China, bolstered by vaccine rollouts and economies reopening.

But rising COVID-19 cases in Asia have put a modest dampener on the outlook as Indonesia is battling record-high cases, Malaysia is set to extend a lockdown and Thailand has announced new Covid-related restrictions.

Also, Iran and the United States are expected to resume indirect talks on reviving a pact over Tehran's nuclear work. An agreement could lead to a lifting of U.S. sanctions and more Iranian crude on the market.

Physical oil markets are screaming for more supply as prices are rising in the North Sea, the key region that's central to the value of many oil transactions, while differentials for Nigerian grades have also made notable gains.

The major challenge to opening the taps may be Saudi Arabia, OPEC's top producer, which has so far proceeded cautiously as the oil market's structure continues to indicate tighter inventories and the global oil market calls out for a substantial increase in supplies.

The 23-nation OPEC alliance has restored roughly 40 per cent of the almost 10 million barrels of daily production it shuttered when demand collapsed last year.

Rising prices have been a dilemma for Nigeria whose additional revenues from crude oil have been continuously wiped out by payment of subsidies, which the NNPC put at about N94 per litre as of last week.

However, the rising price of oil coincided with questions over the revelation by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) in April that it was set to deduct N111.966 from that month's revenues, due in May.

Data from the national oil company's presentation to the Federation Account Allocation Committee (FAAC) obtained by THISDAY showed that N61.966 billion was eventually debited for the month, with zero remittance to the joint account.

It wasn't clear why the corporation was unable to contribute any funds to the Federation Account for that month despite subtracting just N61.966 billion instead of the earlier disclosed sum of N111.966 billion.

But when contacted for clarification, the NNPC told THISDAY that it wasn't within its remit to make comments on the matter, directing that the ministry which oversees the distribution of the country's monthly allocation (Ministry of Finance, Budget and National Planning) should be in the right position to throw light on the matter.

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Ironically, in a month that the NNPC deducted N126.2 billion, which is May revenues, distributed in June, it made a contribution of N29.647 billion to the joint Federation Account.

On Monday, THISDAY exclusively reported that the corporation would make another N114.2 billion deduction from the joint fund in July from June revenues, having already withdrawn the sum of N126.2 billion for May, for what it called payment for subsidies.

Similarly, it deducted N25.374 billion in February, N60.396 billion in March, N61.966 billion in April, while N126.298 billion was deducted in May, more than quadrupling the first debit of N25.374 billion.

Group General Manager, Public Affairs of the NNPC, Dr Kennie Obateru, when asked to comment on the issue, responded: " Please, obtain the information you seek from the appropriate federal government ministry as the NNPC is not best suited to divulge such information."
An unidentified student of the Kaduna State College of Education, Gidan Waya, in Jema'a Local Government Area of the state, was yesterday shot dead while protesting alongside others against an increase in school fees by the state-owned institution.

The deceased had joined his colleagues, who were protesting over a hike in school fees, when security operatives made attempt to disperse them.

One of the protesters, who preferred anonymity, said they came out to protest over the increase in school fees when they met security operatives outside the college.

Meanwhile, Governor Nasir el-Rufai has reacted to the killing of the student protester.

A statement yesterday by the state Commissioner for Internal Security and Home Affairs, Mr. Samuel Aruwan, stated that the governor has commiserated with the family of the deceased.

It said: "The Kaduna State Government is awaiting full reports on Monday's protest by students of the Kaduna State College of Education, Gidan Waya.

"In the preliminary report received so far, one student lost his life and some others were wounded, while three security personnel also sustained injuries.

"The Governor of Kaduna State, Malam Nasir el-Rufai, condoled with the family of the student that lost his life and wished the students and operatives who sustained injuries speedy recovery. The government of Kaduna State also wishes to debunk reports that it deployed security operatives to suppress protesting students. KDSG is awaiting briefings to enable it to understand the circumstances surrounding the unfortunate violent incidence in Gidan Waya."
The Nigerian Army yesterday said 12 insurgents and two soldiers were killed when troops clashed with terrorist groups, Boko Haram and the Islamic State for West African Province (ISWAP) in Borno State.

A statement said troops of 152 Task Force Battalion in conjunction with the air component of Operation Hadin Kai on Sunday killed the 12 terrorists, who attempted to infiltrate the Forward Operational Base at Bula Yobe in Borno State.

The statement by the Director, Army Public Relations, Brig. Gen. Onyema Nwachukwu, said the terrorists attacked the location via an unsuspected crossing point, but were repelled by the vigilant troops.

"The land troops, in their usual dexterity swiftly and decisively engaged the terrorists, subsequently forcing them to retreat, having lost initiative.

"The troops sustained the firefight and successfully neutralised 12 terrorists with several others fleeing with gunshot wounds," it said.

The troops captured one gun truck, one self-propelled Gun-9, one Dushika gun and one mounted QJC Machine Gun. Other items captured are one light machine gun and five AK 47 rifles.

"Sadly, during the encounter, two soldiers paid the supreme sacrifice, while five others sustained varying degrees of injury and have been evacuated by the air component of OPHK to a medical facility, where they are currently receiving medical attention," it said.

The army stated that the general area within FOB Bula Yobe was calm and under the control of troops while further exploitation by the resilient troops was ongoing.

It said the Chief of Army Staff, Maj. Gen. Faruk Yahaya, had lauded the troops for their synergy and quick response, which is in tandem with the ongoing rejigging of the counter-terrorism operations in the North-east.

He charged the troops to maintain the tempo and hold their ground, to deny the terrorists freedom of action.
Keetmanshoop  The murder case of a senior police officer from the Women and Child Unit has been postponed to 13 August 2021 in the Keetmanshoop Magistrate's Court.

Appearing before magistrate Illge Rheent, detective warrant officer Morgan Plaatjie has been charged on counts of murder and attempted murder.

Public prosecutor Marlon Adams during proceedings objected to the granting of bail, citing that it will not be in the interest of the public that bail should be granted to the accused.

Another reason, according to Adams, for the State refusing bail at this stage is that police investigations are still continuing. The accused can, however, lodge a formal bail application to the court if he prefers to do so.

//Kharas regional crime investigations coordinator Chrispin Mubebo last weekend informed New Era that Plaatjie allegedly murdered his ex- girlfriend, Yvette Louw (38), in Tseiblaagte, Keetmanshoop, by inflicting multiple stabbing wounds on her body.

"The suspect continued to stab Louw's boyfriend Hannes Jansen several times on his body; however, not fatally," he added. Jansen's condition is said to be stable after being treated and released from the Keetmanshoop State Hospital.

Mubebo explained the suspect and victim were in an abusive relationship, and a protection order was issued to them not to visit each other's houses.

The accused will remain in custody, and police investigations continue.
The mysterious death of 22-year-old University of Namibia student Mukuve Frederick Kanyanga has sent shockwaves through communities in the Mukwe constituency of the Kavango East region.

Kanyanga's body was discovered floating in the Okavango River near the Kapako village on Thursday last week.

Kavango East regional councillor Damian Maghambayi on Friday issued a statement expressing shock and disbelief about the incident.

"The mysterious death of Mukuve brought shockwaves among communities of Mukwe. Similar incidents are common in the area where his lifeless body was found," he remarked.

Rumours have suggested that the incident was linked to ritual killing. Maghambayi cautioned communities and the family to remain calm and allow the police to conduct their investigations.

Kanyanga's sister Justa Kalyangu last spoke to him on Sunday last week, when he arrived at Divindu from Rundu. He was supposed to have accompanied a friend to a funeral at a village near Divundu.

"When we spoke he said he is coming to the funeral. I thought it was the funeral of our relative but he came for a different funeral. He was not at the memorial service or the funeral. I called him the next day and he did not pick up his phone," said Kalyangu.

During the following days, she kept calling Kanyanga's phone, which was ringing but not being picked up. Kalyangu told The Namibian that on Monday 21 June, she approached the Mukwe police to report a missing person. The same day she also put out a missing person's post on social media.

"They only asked that we give them a picture and all his details. Thereafter nothing happened. I asked some family members to help me search for him on Tuesday 22 June.

"On Thursday morning I went to the police to ask that they issue us a search warrant so that we can search the houses. That is when I received a call that the person we are looking for has been found in the river," added Kalyangu.

She added to Maghambayi suspicions that people are dying and going missing mysteriously in the area.

"We need investigators from other regions to come help our police here. Over 18 people have died or have gone missing in this area over the years and no investigations are done," she said.

Kavango East governor Bonifasius Wakudumo also expressed condolences to the family and the residents of the region.

The governor has encouraged the youth in the region to be very mindful when choosing friends.

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"We must be cautious of the friends that you have, because you never know what is inside a person.

"When you move in a group of people the family must know who you are with because if anything happens they will not hesitate to contact the colleagues you said you were with," said the governor.

Kavango East acting regional commander, deputy commissioner Vilho Kalwenya said the police have interrogated the group of friends the deceased was with before his disappearance.

"We cannot reach a conclusion of arresting anyone because there isn't any evidence that suggests an arrest," he said.

Kalwenya added the police are doing their best in their investigations.

He cautioned the community members to stop spreading unsubstantiated rumours about ritual killings.

"The post mortem will tell us the cause of the death. Those who are spreading unsubstatiated rumours on the issue should prove to us because the autopsy is not concluded, people are already making conclusions," he said.
FURNITURE retailer, Nictus Furnishers will be providing capital to local manufacturers to boost their production, as part of its empowerment initiative, the company announced this week.

In addition to funding, the retailer will also stock locally manufactured products for sale to its wide market.

The company explained in a press release yesterday that it had embarked on an empowerment programme that supports small local entrepreneurs with capital to fund their manufacturing operations in addition to having their products sold at Nictus Furnishers' Windhoek branch.

As part of the programme, local furniture manufactrers will be prioritised.

The programme is aimed at supporting local manufacturers, as the country faces a funding gap at the start-up level, and enable them to compete with foreign brands.

Some entrepreneurs have, however, blamed the limited access of retailer's space for their products, making it difficult for customers to find and purchase their products.

Nictus' chief executive officer, Francois Wahl, said the programme is a collection of efforts that can solve many of the hurdles that Namibian entrepreneurs face.

"Entrepreneurs do not only get their products housed by a recognised brand like Nictus. They are also able to get access to capital that is specific to what their business needs to compete with big names," he added.

One of the local entrepreneurs to take up the initiative is Petrina Ashipala, the owner of Meme wOmabean Bags, a company that creates a type of furniture known as bean bags.

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Ashipala described the initiative as what every entrepreneur needs, especially during this pandemic that has changed how a lot of people do business.

She said the partnership will introduce her products to a wider customer base and in turn increase product output, sales volumes and overall business growth.

Access to market is what every business need, she said.

More private initiatives are coming on board to facilitate entrepreneurship in the country and add value.

Manufacturers who wish to sell their products in Nictus Windhoek branch or want funds for their manufacturing process can email: [email protected] and apply.

The approval process can take about three months, after all assessments have been done on the products.
Tunis/Tunisia  Minister of Foreign Affairs, Migration and Tunisians Abroad Othman Jerandi met in Rome with Norway's Foreign Minister Ine Marie Eriksen Soreide.

The talk took place on the sidelines of a joint meeting of the G20 Foreign and Development Ministers.

Jerandi and Ine Marie Eriksen Soreide discussed the Security Council agenda for next July, the Foreign Ministry said in a press release, including the possibility of raising the issue of the Grand Renaissance Dam and coordinating positions with the remaining member states.

They also said there is need to provide humanitarian corridors in Syria and expressed the hope to see the Security Council issue resolutions to facilitate the passage of humanitarian convoys.

The Norwegian minister said her country is following closely the process of democratioc transition in Tunisia and is ready to support it.

Jerandi also had a talk with Cabinet Secretary for Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Kenya Raychelle Awuor Omamo. The meeting turned on the importance of coordinating stances on issues on the Security Council agenda, mainly the state of play in Libya and the Grand Renaissance Dam.

Raychelle Awuor Omamo said she endorses Tunisia's proposal of a direct coordination among member African countries on current issues.
analysis

Many of the ICC's greatest triumphs have been in prosecuting war criminals in the eastern Congo. Yet relentless violence there continues.

The eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is a region fabled for its verdant rainforests and rare wildlife. Unfortunately, it is equally notorious for being the theatre of some of the country's fiercest violence, particularly during the Second Congo War (1998-2003). Because of this latter attribute, it also has the distinction of being one of the main regions on which the International Criminal Court (ICC) has focused its attention and extensive resources.

Since the Congolese government referred the situation to international tribunal in 2004, the court in The Hague has issued arrest warrants for six individuals and convicted three. Thomas Lubanga Dyilo was, in fact, the first ever person arrested under an ICC warrant in 2006 and the first convicted by the court in 2012. The former head of the Union des Patriotes Congolais (UPC) rebel group was found guilty of conscripting child soldiers and using them to fight in hostilities. He was followed by Germain Katanga who became the ICC's second ever conviction in 2014. The former leader of the Forces de Resistance Patriotique d'Ituri (FRPI) was found guilty on five counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity as an accessory to the 2003 massacre in the village of Bogoro. Finally, former militia leader Bosco Ntaganda was found guilty of 18 counts of war crimes - including rape, murder and the use of child soldiers - in July 2019. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison, the most severe sentence handed down by the ICC so far.

Since it began investigating the eastern Congo, the ICC has expended vast resources prosecuting those deemed to be responsible for violence. In trials that have lasted several years, it has called hundreds of witnesses to the stand and spent hundreds of millions of dollars.

Given that the Rome Statute, which established the court, declared that a key goal was to "put an end to impunity for the perpetrators of these crimes and thus to contribute to the prevention of such crimes", one would expect the ICC's colossal focus on the eastern DRC to have led to a reduction in violence in the region. Yet this does not seem to have been the case. Fighting has largely continued unabated. In the last few years, hundreds of people have been killed and thousands have fled. At the end of this April, UNICEF reported that there had already been 175 grave violations since the start of the year, including the recruitment of children into armed groups, killing and sexual violence. "Every day, children and their rights are undermined through relentless violence and grave rights violations," said the humanitarian agency's senior coordinator for the region.

Following the roots

Why have the high-profile prosecutions of war criminals, some leading to long prison sentences, not deterred others following in their footsteps? One reason could be that the ICC has been going after the wrong people. The court has thus far targeted militia leaders guilty of war crimes and has largely treated the conflict as being driven by ethnic rivalries. Many analysts, however, suggest that violence in the region is part of much wider dynamics that have their roots in the colonial and post-colonial administration of the DRC and involve factors including corruption, marginalisation, resource inequality and economic exploitation. As the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the DRC noted in 2003, "despite the ethnic appearance of the conflict, its root causes are of an economic nature".

Indeed, there are many interested parties in the eastern Congo's conflict beyond armed groups. For instance, competition for the control of resources such as gold mines has long been a defining feature of life and violence between militants, yet a 2015 investigation found that just 2% of net profits from illegal resource exploitation in the DRC ends up in the hands of armed groups.

Others that benefit from the insecurity include transnational criminal networks, neighbouring states, and multinational corporations. A UN Expert Panel in 2003 named 29 companies associated with "elite networks" in the DRC and listed 85 companies deemed to have breached OECD guidelines. Profits from the illegal extraction - and the associated violence and human rights abuses - have flowed to governments in Rwanda, Zimbabwe and Uganda as well as to mining companies, arms dealers and other businesses in the likes of Switzerland, Russia, Kazakhstan, Israel, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany.

A paper by Global Witness has highlighted how foreign businesses in Ituri province made payments to rebel groups and provided them with the facilities to exploit natural resources. It concluded that "the trade in natural resources still underpins some of the most serious violence in eastern DRC". Multinational corporations have also been implicated in high-level corruption by bribing corrupt leaders in exchange for access to the Congo's natural resources.

Follow the money

The ICC is well aware of these underlying dynamics. In fact, before issuing its indictments in the DRC, the then ICC Prosecutor Louis Moreno Ocampo himself noted that "there is general concern that the atrocities allegedly committed in the country may be fuelled by the exploitation of natural resources there and the arms trade, which are enabled through the international banking system". He added that "if the alleged business practices continue to fuel atrocities, these would not be stopped even if current perpetrators were arrested and prosecuted."

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When it came to issuing indictments, however, the ICC simply targeted those directly involved in mass atrocities. This focus has obscured and absolved the wide network of more powerful actors facilitating, driving and profiting from the Congolese people's misery. This approach has been mirrored in its trial of the Lord's Resistance Army's Dominic Ongwen in which I am currently representing the victims. The ICC's focus on one prominent individual rather than deeper factors again means that many powerful people and organisations will avoid justice.

So far, many of the ICC's greatest successes have been in convicting armed leaders from the eastern Congo. Yet despite the vast amount of time, expertise and resources spent on the region, its activities appear to have done little to reduce violence there.

The Rome Statute declares that the "most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole must not go unpunished". Nearly 20 years after it began operations, it is high time for the ICC to rethink what those "most serious crimes" really are.

Anushka Sehmi is a lawyer from Kenya currently representing victims before the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the case of The Prosecutor v. Dominic Ongwen.
analysis

The European Union recently added rooibos (red bush) tea to its register of products with a protected designation of origin. The iconic tea is the first African product to receive such status in the EU, and the 40th from a non-EU country.

Rooibos is in good company - this is the same kind of protection given to champagne, prosciutto di Parma, feta and many other iconic foods. This designation contributes to a product's global standing, and is likely to have benefits - economic and beyond - for the region.

Protected status is given to products whose quality is strictly linked to the local area and peculiar manufacturing techniques.

Rooibos is obtained through the infusion of dried leaves or stems of Aspalathus linearis. The plant grows in Cederberg, a mountain region with a fertile soil north of Cape Town, and in harsh microclimate conditions with hot dry summers and wet winters. Once harvested, the bushy plant is grown following a specific process to produce a tea that is fruity, woody, spicy in taste and naturally caffeine free.

Cafe de Colombia was the first ever non-EU product protected under this scheme in 2007, followed in 2011 by others such as Indian tea Darjeeling and Chinese green tea Longjing cha.

Part of the EU legal framework for protecting regional foods is that they have acquired a strong reputation among consumers. Favourable climates and centuries-old manufacturing techniques rooted in their designated areas have contributed to this renown.

These protected designations identify "products with a story". Rooibos tea is now one of them. Its new EU status will "signal its unique quality to consumers, not only in Europe but all over the world", Western Cape Minister of Agriculture Ivan Meyer said.

Authenticity matters

Such legal protection matters, as attempts to misappropriate the rooibos brand have occurred in the past. In 2013 a French company tried to register the trademark "rooibos" for skincare products in France (one of the health benefits of this tea is its rich antioxidant content that may improve skin health).

The new EU designation is likely to offer rooibos producers and farmers a valuable market advantage, because only infusions produced in the local area north of Cape Town and according to specific rules can be labelled "rooibos". This ensures that tea produced in other areas cannot be sold in the EU - one of the biggest markets in the world - under the name rooibos/red bush. Evocative uses of such designations by third parties (for example, "Rooibos kind", "Red Bush type", "Rooibos style" or "Red Bush imitation") are also prohibited.

This brand monopoly in the EU will arguably enhance the economic development of the Western Cape and the whole of South Africa. The region already produces an average of 14,000 tonnes of rooibos per year, and in 2019-20 expanding global demand resulted in an increase to about 20,000 tonnes.

The South African Rooibos Council estimated that the total rooibos sales in 2020 equalled 6 billion cups of tea - close to one cup per human on Earth. It also reported that half the production is consumed locally, whereas the other half is exported to more than 60 countries. In 2019, the biggest export markets were Germany (28%), Japan (22%), the Netherlands (9%) and the UK (8%).

The global herbal tea market is growing at 7% per year. With rooibos' new EU status, not only is the global demand for this product expected to increase, related sectors, such as agritourism, are also likely to benefit. In 2021, an EU report revealed that European food products listed on the EU register of all protected geographical names generated in 2017 an estimated sales value of 77 billion (66 billion).

As the example of Darjeeling tea shows, premium pricing and more robust revenues often follow geographical name protection as a result of consumers' recognition of the product's quality. This is exactly what farmers and the entity that manages the rooibos brand (the South African Rooibos Council) now expect.

Beyond economics

The rooibos EU designation could also contribute to further promoting South African gastronomic heritage and genetic resources. As Mogale Sebopetsa, head of the Western Cape Department of Agriculture, put it, "in this way, we safeguard our heritage for posterity".

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The use of the dried leaves and stems of rooibos as a tea was first reported in 1772, although Khoisan indigenous people from western South Africa have been consuming the drink made with rooibos for centuries. The name itself derives from the Afrikaans language, meaning "red bush" and referring to the plant's red-brown leaves.

Employment could be boosted, too. As confirmed in the rooibos council report, the rooibos industry is already the biggest employer of people from the rural provinces of South Africa, with direct income and employment given to more than 8,000 farm labourers, and many others in the supply chain (processing, packaging, retailing). With more production and international sales in sight, this trend will probably increase.

Enrico Bonadio, Reader in Intellectual Property Law, City, University of London and Magali Contardi, PhD candidate, intellectual property law, Universidad de Alicante
Addis Abeba  The Federal High Court, Lideta Branch, First Constitutional and Anti-Terrorism Bench today decided to hold prosecutor's witnesses hearing against the defendants in Eskeinder Nega's file in open sessions.

In December last year, the Federal High Court, Lideta Branch, First Constitutional and Anti-Terrorism Bench ruled against the prosecutor's request for behind a curtain witness testimony on the grounds that it will violate the rights of the defendants.

In March 2021, Prosecutors appealed at the Federal Supreme Court Cassation Division to overturn the decision by explaining that holding the witness hearing in an open session poses a threat to the witnesses. The Supreme Court ended up referring the case back to the Federal High Court because the prosecutor could not make the case for the claims. At today's hearing, the defendants complained about the lengthy trial as well as treatment by the prison administration.

The Federal High court again ruled against the prosecutors request to hold the prosecutors hearing in a closed door and behind the curtain sessions. The court stated that the prosecutor's witness hearing will be held on July 15, 16, 21, 22 and 23. AS
analysis

Science festivals across the world attract millions of visitors every year. They are typically busy, buzzing events: visitors stroll through interactive displays, enjoy science-themed shows and popular science talks and take part in hands-on workshops.

These events appeal to different groups of people for different reasons. For adults, they provide rare - and valued - opportunities to talk directly to scientists while learning in a leisure context. For students visiting with their schools, there is often a focus on science learning, inspiration and sometimes getting advice about science careers.

Science festivals form part of an expanding global range of events designed for public engagement with science. This science engagement format has been adopted in South Africa with support from pan-African and South African science policies.

But what is the appeal for the scientists whose participation is key to festivals' success? Some studies have examined scientists' willingness to engage with public audiences, but this research was done almost exclusively in the developed world. For example, one study found that scientists who participated in the Madrid Science Fair wanted to improve public interest in and appreciation of science. They also hoped to promote a general culture of science in society. A Swedish study, meanwhile, found that scientists participated in science festivals primarily for personal reasons such as improving their communication skills.

We wanted to understand what motivates scientists in South Africa to participate in science festivals - or deters them. This is important for two reasons. First, because science communication of the sort that happens at these festivals benefits society by bridging the gap between scientists and non-experts. It brings science to people and demonstrates how science can be a positive force for change.

Second, scientists usually participate at festivals as volunteers and have to invest significant time in preparing and contributing. It is vital to understand the factors that encourage or deter scientists' participation, as well as the perceived benefits and risks that may affect their future involvement. That's what our new study, the first of its kind to explore the participation of scientists in an African science festival, set out to do.

We found, among other things, that scientists enjoyed informing, exciting and inspiring the public. They also recognised the value of being role models, getting school children and students interested in science. Some of the barriers they identified included time constraints and a lack of institutional support and recognition for public engagement.

Driving factors

Our study focused on Scifest Africa, which has been held annually in South Africa since 1996. In 2020, it moved online, as did many other science festivals around the world, because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Forty scientists who participated in the festival in 2019 took part in an online survey.

One key finding was that scientists are mainly motivated by the objectives of informing, exciting and inspiring the public. As one respondent said:

Normally, the public does not know the science that we do. Scifest Africa is a good platform to make your science known to the public.

Scientists also said they were driven by a sense of duty, given that they work with public funding. A respondent suggested that since "research is paid using taxpayers' money, the public has a right to know how their money is being used".

Another finding was that South Africa's apartheid legacy inspires a strong moral obligation among scientists to give something back to society. One of the respondents told us:

Today, science communication can also be done by black people, e.g., we can be the ones who are explaining, teaching and demonstrating science to white people.

Black women scientists in particular identified being role models as a key motivating factor for taking part in the festivals. A respondent suggested that "many black girls are afraid of studying science because they think it's too difficult", and that her engagement as a role model may help.

Other motivating factors included improving their own communication skills and finding it rewarding to engage with the public.

Barriers

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When it came to barriers or deterrents, many respondents mentioned time constraints. Others were concerned that their institutions neither recognised nor supported public engagement work. A respondent said:

It is time-consuming and demanding to man an exhibition, but we are not paid for this and no one accounts for the productive time lost.

Some respondents complained that institutions didn't generally provide training opportunities to equip scientists with effective public dialogue skills.

Our findings offer practical insights to help festival funders and organisers to sustain and expand scientists' participation.

They highlight the need for universities, research institutions and other science engagement entities to build expertise and provide continuous support to improve scientists' participation.

Mpfareleni Rejoyce Gavhi-Molefe, Mathematical Scientist & AIMS House of Science Manager, African Institute for Mathematical Sciences; Eric A. Jensen, Associate Professor in Sociology, University of Warwick, and Marina Joubert, Science Communication Researcher, Stellenbosch University
A former political prisoner has scratched out his own image on a monument to the "Upington 26" in protest at the lack of progress in the area.

Zonga Mokgatle, now 62, was one of 14 Paballelo residents sentenced to death in 1989 after the murder of a municipal policeman. The use of the "common purpose" doctrine by the apartheid state sparked international protests and the sentences were overturned on appeal in 1991.

Three were given prison terms. Mokgatle was sentenced to 12 years. Justice Bekebeke (the current provincial director-general of the Northern Cape) and the late Xolile Yona were sentenced to 10 years each. All were later granted amnesty.

Mokgatle is now employed as a cleaner by the municipality. "I pick up condoms, [sanitary] pads, dead dogs, and papers. That's my work."

On Tuesday he inked out the image of his face on the Upington 26 monument. Along with Former uMkhonto weSizwe soldier Happyboy Gusha, and fellow trialist Sarel Jacobs, now a driver at the local municipality. He posted the action on social media.

"I didn't fight to get a monument," says Mokgatle. "I fought to get a better life... which is a decent job."

He says he and Jacobs were promised promotion by executive mayor Micheal Segede.

Gusha said: "We can't allow men from death row to pick up papers."

The mayor did not pick up his phone or respond to an sms or a voicemail message. Spokesperson Patrick Williams had not responded to our calls, messages and an email by the time of publication.

In 2019 another former death row inmate, Albert Tywili, died in poverty in Paballelo.
It has been confirmed that president Hage Geingob has signed the Financial Institutions and Markets (FIM) Act into law.

This brings the tedious process to push through legislation that took over 10 years to finalise to an end.

Ministry of finance spokesperson Tonateni Shidhudhu has confirmed that the president has indeed signed the code which seeks to consolidate and harmonise the laws regulating financial institutions, financial intermediaries and financial markets in Namibia.

Gazetting this, however, still remains.

"We have already submitted to the Ministry of Justice for gazetting. Last week, they indicated it will be gazetted this week," Shidhudhu said.

It is still not clear when the possible effective date for the application would be, however, the Namibia Financial Institutions Supervisory Authority (Namfisa) last week said after gazetting it would notify the industry and stakeholders.

After this the regulator would activate the FIM Act implementation plan, which would see formal consultations of drafted regulations issued under the act.

In 2019, the regulator's chief executive officer (CEO) Kenneth Matomola said all regulations and standards to be issued were only waiting for lawmakers to pass the bill into law.

The law will bring the current regulatory framework up to date to ensure that market and systemic risks are effectively deterred and managed, and that the industry contributes optimally to national development objectives.

Moreover, the legislative framework will balance, among other things, business growth, domestic, economic and financial market development, as well as the risk-based supervision framework for the industry.

Fprmer finance minister Calle Schlettwein described the laws governing this interconnected sector, some as old as 50 years, as archaic.

Currently, supervision of non-banking financial institutions is undertaken through various stand-alone laws, such as the Pension Funds Act of 1956, the Usury Act of 1968, the Unit Trusts Control Act of 1981, the Stock Exchanges Control Act of 1985, the Medical Aid Funds Act of 1995, and the Short-term and the long-term insurance acts.

The non-banking financial sector, of which the asset base is about twice the size of the gross domestic product, standing at N$339,8 billion by the end of last year, plays a key role in the country's economy and the stability of the financial system.

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In line with the current Namfisa Act, it would also be under this law that the regulator would ensure consumer protection by enforcing the laws under its administration and the ongoing consumer education initiatives.

Several benefits of the FIM Act include the simplification of insurance policy contracts, which would now need to be written in plain and simple language.

Former finance minister Calle Schletwein has said international bodies, such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank Group and the parliamentary standing committee on economics, natural resources and public administration, as well as the non-banking financial sector were all consulted to provide inputs on the code.

Some analysts and pension specialists have over the last few years said the FIM Act could have negative consequences for the pension industry, and ultimately the amount of money people receive as payouts during their retirement years.

The non-banking sector includes pension funds, friendly societies, microlenders, asset managers, unlisted investment managers, special purpose vehicles, collective investment schemes, linked investment service providers, stock exchanges, medical aid funds, insurance brokers and agents.

It is often said that the current laws also do not encourage innovation and entrepreneurship, as they have failed to enhance the deepening of the financial market to create more business opportunities.

It appears the tide has finally turned.
analysis

In a 'resounding victory' for the family of Ahmed Timol, who died in police custody 50 years ago, a court ruled that the prosecution should go ahead. Other families now hope for justice.

First published in the Daily Maverick 168 weekly newspaper.

The failure of former security policeman Joao Rodrigues to obtain a permanent stay of prosecution for the murder of teacher and activist Ahmed Timol nearly 50 years ago is a "resounding victory" for the survivors and their families.

Apartheid perpetrators can no longer claim that age and infirmity, or political interference, or that the failure of the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), prejudices their rights to a fair trial, the Foundation for Human Rights (FHR) said in a joint statement with the Timol family on 22 June. Other civil society organisations, lawyers and the ANC also welcomed the judgment.

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On 21 June, the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) dismissed the appeal by Rodrigues (82), opening the way for his criminal trial to begin on 12 July - unless he appeals to the Constitutional Court.

But, in what is possibly more important for the country as a whole, Judge Aubrey Ledwaba reiterated an earlier call...
The main trial of Ernst Lichtenstrasser (60), accused of killing two senior managers at the Namibian Institute of Mining and Technology (NIMT) in Arandis, was again put on hold yesterday, as he cannot attend court proceedings.

The section for trial awaiting inmates at the Windhoek Correctional Facility is on lockdown until 9 July, which means no trial awaiting inmates can attend court proceedings or consult with their legal representatives.

Judge Christi Liebenberg postponed the matter to 26 July Windhoek High Court before. The matter was supposed to resume yesterday after his legal aid lawyer Albert Titus had to go in isolation after having been in contact with a Covid-19 positive person. The trial was also delayed after a witness, Abel Nyambe, learnt at the last minute about the passing of his sister.

Lichthenstrasser pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder, two counts of possessing a firearm without a licence, and further charges of possessing ammunition without a licence, defeating or obstructing the course of justice, theft and the unauthorised supply of a firearm and ammunition at the start of his trial.

He did not provide a plea explanation, and Titus confirmed the pleas and told the court his client will make use of his constitutionally guaranteed right to remain silent and put the onus on the State to prove every allegation against him.

The prosecution alleges that Lichtenstrasser, a former lecturer at the Tsumeb campus of NIMT, shot and killed Eckhardt Mueller and Heinz Heimo Hellwig, who were the executive director and deputy director of NIMT, respectively, at Arandis in April 2019.

Mueller and Hellwig were killed when they were gunned down at the entrance of the NIMT offices at the Erongo mining town.

It is alleged that before the tragic shooting, Lichtenstrasser was employed at the Tsumeb campus of the institution for a couple of years, which was close to his residence at Otavi and was unhappy about a decision to transfer him to the Keetmanshoop campus.

However, it is stated the two victims were steadfast in their decision about the transfer, despite his remonstrations.

Lichtenstrasser remains in police custody at the section for trial awaiting inmates at the Windhoek Correctional Facility.
Laetitia Bam Day Hospital in KwaNobuhle, Kariega, was without clean running water since Thursday. The water was restored late on Monday following interventions by members of the National Education, Health and Allied Workers' Union after staff threatened to protest.

A staff member, who asked not to be named, told GroundUp that water supply has been intermittent in recent weeks. "When we want to relieve ourselves, there is sometimes no water to flush the toilets," she said.

"We are the biggest clinic in KwaNobuhle and the only one that operates 24-hours. Water should be a priority in this institution."

Dozens of patients were seen seated in the clinic's yard near the gates where a concrete slab for a Jojo tank installation is underway. For nearly a month, taps in parts of Kariega and Gqeberha have been dry.

Treatment Action Campaign provincial chairperson Thembisile Nogampula said, "Water is one of the essential sources that we need on a daily basis, more so in public healthcare facilities. We went to the municipal office in Gqeberha last Friday because nurses were threatening to down tools."

In response to questions about the water outage at the clinic, Eastern Cape health department spokesperson Sizwe Kupelo said that the district was procuring PVC tanks "to ensure there's some form of storage of water and we will then truck water in from other areas when required". Kupelo did not give further details.

Municipal spokesperson Mthubanzi Mniki said in a statement that Kariega's water disruptions were a result of critical planned maintenance work at the weekend.

He said water tankers are being deployed to assist residents and apologised for the inconvenience it caused.
Maputo  The Council of Ministers of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) on Monday approved a budget of 12 million US dollars to put into motion the SADC Standby Force that will support Mozambique in the struggle against terrorism in the northern province of Cabo Delgado.

The Council of Ministers, chaired by Mozambican Foreign Minister Veronica Macamo, met in extraordinary session, in virtual format, to analyse the financial requirementS for the Standby Force.

The spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry, Antonio Macheve, told reporters the meeting was held "in order to analyse matters related to implementing decisions taken by the SADC summit held last week in Maputo".

The Angolan Foreign Minister, Tete Antonio, cited by the "Voice of America" radio station, said the money will come from a SADC contingency fund plus a seven million dollar contribution from the member states. All the money should be provided by 9 July.

SADC understood that the region was under threat and that the contributions were "a matter of survival", Antonio said. He added that detailed plans for the SADC intervention are to be drawn up by technical committees in the next few days,

The final communique from last week's summit said the leaders "approved the Mandate for the SADC Standby Force Mission to the Republic of Mozambique, to be deployed in support of Mozambique to combat terrorism and acts of violent extremism in Cabo Delgado".

The communique gave no details of the Standby Force Mission. However, in April a SADC Technical Mission recommended the immediate dispatch of an intervention force of almost 3,000 troops to Cabo Delgado. The detailed proposal was for three light infantry battalions of 630 troops each, two special forces squadrons of 70 troops each; two attack helicopters; two armed helicopters; two surface patrol ships; one submarine; one maritime surveillance aircraft as well as other logistical support. Whether the SADC leaders have accepted this proposal, in whole or in part, is not yet clear.

Meanwhile, according to a report from the Bloomberg agency, Rwanda plans to deploy troops to assist Mozambique.

"There are plans to deploy, but plans are not finalized yet," Rwanda Defence Force spokesman Ronald Rwivanga told Bloomberg by phone last Thursday.

However, neither the Mozambican authorities nor SADC have said anything about a possible Rwandan military intervention.
Maputo  The Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM), the second largest opposition party in the country, on Monday announced the criteria for anyone wishing to stand as a candidate for the party's president at the MDM Congress scheduled for December.

The MDM's founder and president, Daviz Simango, died of illness in February, and since then the party has been led by its General Secretary, Jose Domingos. The main business at the December Congress will be the election of a new leader.

The Party's Political Commission announced that those wishing to stand for the President must submit their nomination papers by 30 September.

All candidates must be duly identified members of the party, who are up-to-date on payment of their membership dues. They must be Mozambican citizens who are over 35 years old, and must have been members of the MDM for at least five years. They must be "recognized and active" as militants of the party.

All candidates must have a good reputation as men or women of integrity, who have never been sentenced to a prison term longer than two years. They must have studied in secondary education up to at least 12th grade.

Announcing these requirements in the central city of Beira, regarded as an MDM stronghold, the Coordinator of the Political Commission, Maria Virginia, said the motto of the Congress will be "For a stronger MDM, inspired by the ideals of Daviz Simango".

So far, only one person has declared his intention to stand for the MDM presidency. He is university lecturer Silverio Rongane, who is an MDM deputy in the Mozambican parliament, the Assembly of the Republic.

Other names mentioned as possible successors to Daviz Simango, are his older brother Lutero, who is currently head of the MDM parliamentary group, the current general secretary, Jose Domingos, and one of his predecessors, Luis Boavida.
The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), in its bid to moderate and control the prices of maize in the market, has approved the release of 50,000 metric metric tonnes of maize to 12 major producers, from strategic maize reserve (SMR) under the Anchor Borrowers' Programme (ABP).

The release of maize to the companies, which is the third of such releases, is intended to check the activities of intermediaries who hoard the product and cause artificial scarcity.

A statement obtained from the CBN showed the listed recipients of the grains as; Premier Flour Mills, Crown-Olam, Grand Cereals, Animal Care, Amobyn and Hybrid Feeds. Others include Obasanjo Farms, Zartech, Wacot, Sayeed Farms, Pandagri Novum and Premium Farms.

Confirming the release of the grains, the CBN spokesman, Osita Nwanisobi, expressed optimism that the release would crash the price of maize, reduce pressure on the market and make the product directly available to feed producers, thereby reducing the price of poultry feed in the country.

As part of the bank's financing framework, Nwanisobi said the CBN would continue to facilitate the funding of maize farmers and processors through the Anchor Borrowers' Programme (ABP) commodity association, private/prime anchors, state governments, maize aggregation scheme (MAS), and the commercial agricultural credit scheme (CACS).

Also speaking on the development, the national president of maize association of Nigeria (MAAN), Dr. Bello Abubakar, urged middlemen to desist from taking advantage of the supply gap to hike the price of the grains. He also assured that farmers in Nigeria would maintain reasonable pricing of the products.

Recall that the CBN, responding to the activities of middlemen in January 2021, released 300,000 metric tonnes of maize, which forced the substantial reduction in the price of maize.

Similarly, the bank, in a renewed move to address the rising cost of food prices in the Nigerian market, collaborated with the rice farmers association of Nigeria (RIFAN) to distribute 27,000 metric tonnes of rice paddies directly to millers nationwide on Thursday, June 24, 2021.

The direct allocation from RIFAN warehouses across 16 states of the federation followed the earlier sale of paddy aggregated as loan repayment under the Anchor Borrowers' Programme (ABP) to millers from the rice pyramids unveiled in Niger, Kebbi, Gombe and Ekiti states.
Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), has been arrested.

Abubakar Malami, Attorney-General of Federation, announced this at a press conference in Abuja on Tuesday.

Details of his arrest are still sketchy but the Federal Government was said to have worked with Interpol.

The IPOB leader had fled the country after a Federal High Court in Abuja granted him bail in 2017.

Kanu is facing charges bordering on treasonable felony.

Justice Binta Nyako of a Federal High Court in Abuja, who granted Kanu bail on health grounds, had barred the IPOB leader from granting press interview while on bail.

The judge also gave a stern warning to the defendant not to participate in any rally or be found in a crowd of more than 10 persons in the course of the bail.

But Kanu flouted all the bail conditions and eventually fled abroad, from where he incited his followers.

While abroad, IPOB floated the Eastern Security Network (ESN), which the police blamed for the violence upsurge in the South East.

But while the group denied responsibility, Kanu cheered the attackers on, especially through social media.
On Sunday the President announced that restaurant table service is once again prohibited because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Waiters and restaurant staff are once again left without an income.

We spoke to a waiter who has lost his job for the second time due to the pandemic. He has a one-year-old baby to support.

The Western Cape government has asked for the UIF TERS scheme to reopen to help businesses that cannot operate under the increased restrictions.

For the second time, Tatenda has lost a restaurant job because of the pandemic.

"I almost cried when President Cyril Ramaphosa announced the ban on Sunday night," says Tatenda, who only wants his first name used.

He was working as a manager at Riverine Rabbit before it closed after the first lockdown last year. He then started to waiter at The Shop in Sea Point and at Bao Down in Cape Town. Bao Down is currently closed after level 4 restrictions came into effect on Sunday. The Shop says it will not reopen.

Tatenda was working two shifts a week at each restaurant, from 5 to 10pm, making between R300 and R500 a day.

His wife gave birth to a boy during the hard lockdown in March 2020. "He came at the time I had lost my income," says Tatenda. "My wife is working, but living on a single income is difficult. We are renting a one-bedroom flat in Goodwood for R6,800. We need R3,000 to pay the person who is helping with the baby and money for baby diapers, formula, electricity and groceries."

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"I was hoping to buy groceries this week when I got paid. We were looking forward to this week's earnings to cover other expenses," he said.

Tatenda feels the restrictions are too harsh. He thinks if social distancing rules were strictly enforced, alcohol banned and the space well ventilated, restaurants could have continued operating.

"Waiters are depressed. They are now sitting at home with no source of income. The morale is low. The government could also assist restaurants with relief funding to avoid closing down of restaurants," he said.

On Monday, Western Cape Minister of Finance and Economic Opportunities David Maynier called for the national government to provide support for businesses whose operations are limited or shutdown by the adjusted Level 4 restrictions.

He said he had written to Minister of Employment and Labour Thulas Nxesi to re-open the UIF Covid-19 Temporary Employer-Employee Relief Scheme (TERS) scheme.

"Many businesses, particularly in the hospitality and liquor sectors, have already been hard-hit with significant job losses during the Covid-19 pandemic. Wine farms, restaurants and coffee shops cannot survive on takeaways alone. Two weeks of no income for these businesses, as well as cinemas, gyms, casinos, conferencing venues and theatres, will have a direct and sudden impact on people's livelihoods, their ability to pay salaries, rent and buy food," said Maynier.
Namibians need to invest in sectors and industries that grow the domestic economy, according to the water and agricultural minister, Calle Schlettwein. The former finance minister who is now at the helm of the agricultural ministry said the economy needs to be revived after the devastating effect of the Covid-19 pandemic and owing to the impact of the lockdown measures on various sectors in the primary, secondary and tertiary industries.

"Water and agriculture are two sectors where Namibians could and should invest to secure food and water availability," Schlettwein recently shared on social media.

The Namibia Statistics Agency (NSA) last week stated that in real terms, the agricultural sector recorded a decline of 2.8% in the first quarter of 2021, mainly due to the livestock subsector that contracted by 7.5% in real value-added.

During his recent familiarisation in the Erongo region, the minister said large investments in infrastructure and in operational capacity and expertise are needed to secure water provision to communities and industries in Namibia's harsh environment. "During my visit to the Erongo region, I appreciated that all three of these aspects need attention," he said.

When in Erongo, Schlettwein visited mines and applauded some of them that are venturing into agriculture, educational activities, and nature conservation.

Among them, he mentioned the B2Gold, located in the north-central part of Namibia, saying it is a company that takes its social responsibility seriously by engaging the community in a manner that ensures that benefits outlast the life of the mine.

"It is very impressive that the B2Gold Otjikoto Mine is not only carrying out its mining mandate successfully but it has incorporated agricultural activities and educational programmes," Schlettwein noted after his visit to the mine.

Over the past 10 years, NamWater with government support has committed investments of over N$1 billion in the creation and upgrading of water infrastructure in the Erongo region, particularly the central coast infrastructure that serve the local authorities of Walvis Bay, Swakopmund, Henties Bay, and Arandis as well as the numerous mines in the vicinity.
Under the governorship of Dr. Dalitso Kabambe, the Reserve Bank of Malawi (RBM) used fictitious and twisted rules and regulations to authorize and justify payments deemed by the Office of the Auditor General (AG) as suspicious and illegal.

Nyasa Times also understands that using the same distorted legal provisions, the Central Bank issued letters of credit to companies without due diligence, procured contracts against procurement laws and paid FDH Bank huge sums of money.

The AG's audit forensic audit, released a few days ago, indicates that between January 1, 2019 and June 30, June 2020, RBM - under the stewardship of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) presidential hopeful for the 2025 General Elections, irregularly issued letters of credit to Mulli Brothers Limited (MBL) to supply fertilizer to the Government of Malawi.

In their key findings, the auditors state that RBM did not follow necessary risk mitigation procedures in issuing Letters of Credit for supply of fertilizer to the Government of Malawi, a development that left the central bank financially exposed.

To cover up the syndicate, a senior RBM official staged an invitation to MBL through an e-mail dated October 22, 2014, where the company was supposed to be guided MBL on how to access the facility for the 2014/15 Farm Input Subsidy Programme (FISP).

This was despite the fact that RBM directors had overruled the Central Bank's deputy governor Henry Mathanga's advice to issue the said letters of credit.

On the other hand, RBM made an upfront payment of 60 percent to a certain company only identified as Mitra, which was also dubiously awarded two contracts of K1 billion and K757 million contrary to RBM policy.

Furthermore, the audit report discloses that K9.7 billion was siphoned in January 2020 through dubious purchase of overpriced materials for the Prisons Department worth US$18 million.

"K2.2 billion went out for building maintenance, rentals, school fees allowances, recall of diplomats, but there are no supporting documents for these transactions. K4.1 billion paid to the Pensions and Gratuity Account without an approved funding instruction from government. FDH Bank is connected to this," the audit reads in part.

Because of these irregularities, the report says K6.5 billion went to FDH Bank between December 2018 and December 2020, which auditors found suspicious.

There were further K3.9 billion costs payable to FDH Bank, which were not disclosed to the board for approval.

An additional USD$769 million was disproportionally channeled through FDH Bank while K27 billion was paid to top managers who are retiring, who in turn, gave K7 billion to the then governing DPP.

Sadly, K2.8 billion paid to various law firms of which auditors did not trace any supporting documents.

The report says the auditors followed up on several allegations by whistleblowers, including Human Rights Defenders Coalition (HRDC) led by its chairerson Gift Trapence, which alleged abuse of office in the procurement of information and communications technology hardware for a Flexcube upgrade at RBM with Mitra, the supplier allegedly awarded two contracts worth K1 billion and K757 million contrary to RBM policy that restricts award of two big contracts to the same company.

The report also says RBM also ignored several red flags such as Mitra's requirement that RBM pay 60 percent of the contract sum upon placing orders for the equipment despite RBM's clear instructions in the bidding document that they would only enter into a contract with a vendor who would receive full payment upon delivery.

The forensic audit also probed how Ministry of Homeland Security was allegedly embroiled in a corruption scandal that saw K9.7 billion siphoned from the Prisons Department through RBM in January 2020 through purchase of overpriced materials worth $18 million from the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The report indicate that RBM was allegedly stealing huge sums of money using the country's embassies and a review of transactions between January 2019 and June 2020 to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs noted transactions made for building maintenance, rentals, school fees allowances, recall of diplomats and others amounting to K2.2 billion. However, there is no documentation for the said transactions.

Other suspicious payments found include payment of K4.1 billion to the Pensions and Gratuity Account without an approved funding instruction from government. This, according to the auditors, is connected to payments through FDH Bank plc.

Some of the findings surround RBM's market interventions between December 2018 and December 2020 with auditors querying a treasury note programme with Afrexim Bank in 2018 and 2019 and K6.5 billion payments made to FDH Bank plc.

The auditors said RBM did not disclose details of a $30 million proposal to the board, including that the key objective was to fulfil International Monetary Fund (IMF) requirements over its reserve levels.

Reads the report in part: "Furthermore, costs payable to the local custodian bank for the securities (FDH Bank) totaling K3.9 billion were also not disclosed to the board for approval nor presented for ratification by the board.

"... According to the Tripartite Agreement and Custodian Agreement, RBM was responsible for and would assess for reasonableness, the fees and costs of FDH bank. However, there was no evidence that RBM assessed FDH Bank's fees and costs for reasonable and value for money."

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The report also highlights disbursement of $769 million for market interventions which the auditors say was disproportionally chanelled through FDH Bank inconsistent with its size.

According to the report, the auditors also noted that the timing of the transactions coincided with the time when Malawians were awaiting the results of the Presidential Election following the polls on 23rd June 2020.

"Notably, the poll results were declared on 27th June 2020 with a change in government," reads the report in part.

This has prompted the Fiscal Police to pounce on Kabambe for alleged abuse of office when was he on the driving seat of the Central Bank.

The National Police spokesperson James Kadadzera said the police will give more details later, including the day and time the suspect is expected to appear before the court.

In spite of all the exposed rot, DPP continues accusing the Tonse Alliance administration of persecuting its rank and file using law enforcement agencies.

But the new administration insists it is stamping out on corruption and abuse, a key Tonse Alliance campaign promise.

Kabambe is also embroiled in a legal battle with government over the legality of his demands for terminal benefits from his job estimated at K1 billion.
In many sub-Saharan African countries the plight of albinos leaves much to be desired. This group of people continues to face systematic attacks and discrimination based on certain myths and superstitious believes.

It will be difficult to estimate the exact number of individuals with albinism, especially children, who have been the victims of brutal attacks and murder in the name of witchcraft, superstition, and wealth.

It is in the news that the Association of The Gambia Albinos (AGA) recently commemorated the International Albinism Day.

It was in December 2014, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution that June 13th every year to be recognised for Person with Albinism.

This day is set aside to discuss the fundamental rights, issues, challenges and to speak against discrimination with Person with Albinism.

Gibairu Janneh, president of the Association of The Gambia Albinos renewed call for an end to the widely held misconceptions held in many communities regarding stigma and discrimination associated with Persons with Albinism.

It is disheartening to state that some of these people experience inhuman treatment even in our communities just because of their body colour.

This has even led to the killings of Albinos for spiritual purposes in many parts of Africa.

We must always bear in mind that as children of Adam and Eve, we are all created equally. Certainly, we may have certain qualities as human, but that should be a room to stigmatize or discriminate others.

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Meanwhile, the stigma and atrocities affecting the albino communities to some large extent may be attributed to lack of education about albinism and ignorance. However, there is need for more sensitisation on the plight of albinos in the country.

It is sad to note that even in some schools, persons with albinism are not given the required tools to participate in the learning process. This is indeed alarming and discriminatory in the strongest term.

The Gambia is well known for its peaceful harmonious co-existence. Let's continue to manifest that spirit of brotherhood, as a nation of believers.

Always remember that a change in skin tone doesn't change the individual. Get to know them for their identity and not for what they look like.

Good Morning Mr. President Sport is now a business
The Gambia Ports Authority this weekend clarified that it has no intention of acquiring the KGV or Banjul Mini Stadium as part of a 38,000 square meters extension plan.

The management of the Authority further explained the approximately 38,000 square metres contiguous zone within the main Port premises covering residential properties, have been earmarked for acquisition following a Cabinet decision in 1993.

"The need for the expansion of the Port of Banjul on the landside is the most feasible and cost effective technical solution as recommended in various studies since 1984," it said amidst confusion created last week about unauthorized acquisition and expansion of businesses into areas without city council approval.

GPA management maintained that Banjul is a tributary which attracts siltation with the ebb and flow of the tide. Thus reclaiming the sea for expansion is not technically advisable due to the hydro dynamics in the estuary of Banjul.

However, the lands and structures targeted by the said planned expansion are owned in perpetuity; thus the acquisition is through negotiations with the beneficiaries after valuation is prepared.

"The owners are accorded financial compensation for both the land and the structures and alternative plots allocated at Bakau Katchikally are meant to facilitate the relocation of family residences for heritage purposes," their statement explained.

"The Muslim High School and VTC, the GTTI Banjul Annex were proposed for sale by the various schools' authorities and owners, following studies indicating that enrolment figures have dropped significantly and some of the buildings no longer had the required structural integrity for their intended purposes," said the Authority.

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Studies conducted have also considered the relocation of the Port along the southern coastline of the country at locations between Bijilo and Tujereng.

According to the GPA, this is not cost effective based on the traffic forecast. To construct the breakwater alone to have the sheltered anchorage would cost in excess of $500 million, not mentioning the required jetties, terminals and ancillary civil infrastructure.

"This is why the decision factor was to expand the Port in its present location in Banjul for the next Management," it further clarified.

With a grant support to the tune of $3 million from the AfD, the GPA partnered with Banjul City Council (BCC), Kanfing Municipal Council (KMC) and West Coast Region (WCR) to roll out an Integrated Port City Development Plan as well as the Spatial Planning of the Greater Banjul Area.

Meanwhile, the empty container terminals at Bund Road are private property that the GPA said it rented from their owners for use as storage sites for an overwhelming volume of cargo. This cargo could otherwise not be stacked within the already congested space available within the main operational zones.

Ministry of Fisheries generates over D400M

UTG staff agree on sit down strike from Thursday, no exams
James F. Gomes, the minister of Fisheries, Water Resources and National Assembly Matters has informed the lawmakers that, a combined total of D461,621,022.01 (four hundred and sixty-one million, six hundred and twenty-One thousand and twenty-two dalasis, one butut) has been generated in the fishing industry since 2017.

The Fisheries minister, who appeared before the deputies at parliament on Monday after his summon last week, explained the issues concerning his ministry.

"A total of 12 fish processing establishments and three fish mill plants are established in the country from 2017 to date, the activities of industrial fishing have created employment for 2,809 Gambian youths of which 2,124 are deckhands and 685 as fisheries observers," he said.

The minister details the statistics as: Total revenue from fishing licence: 141,370,412.59; total revenue from 10 per cent landing 209,121,472.25; total revenue from arrested vessels 31,760,000.00; total revenue from Senegalo-Gambian Agreement 7,539,738.01 and total revenue from EU-Gambia SFPA 71,829,399.16.

The minister further stated that a total of 186 fish landing sites operate in small scale artisanal fisheries sub-sector of which 10 are located within the Atlantic Coast and over 14,000 artisanal operatives are engaged in fish drying, smoking, marketing and distribution.

He said this number does not include the young women and youth involved in loading and unloading fish from the boats. Similarly, a combined total of 4234 fishermen are operating in the sub-sector.

He explained that the fisheries sector of the Gambia is one of economic and social importance in that it provides sustainable livelihoods, proteins of high nutritional value and revenues for both fishing and non-fishing communities.

He added that fisheries contribute 12 per cent to GDP and the livelihoods of over 200,000 Gambians are critically dependent on it and its related activities. It is the third largest sector after agriculture and tourism in the country.

Toastmasters International visits Gambia

KGV, Banjul Mini Stadium not part of 38,000M square GPA acquisition
Rwandans are predicting that this afternoon's press conference to be hosted by Prime Minister Edouard Ngirente will, among others, result in stringent Covid-19 restrictions.

Ngirente's address comes at a time the country is witnessing an eruption in daily recorded Covid-19 cases.

Earlier this month, Rwanda recorded a sharp rise in new Covid-19 infections, a scenario that had been contained since February.

Health authorities attributed this to the nationwide vaccination campaign that kicked off in March this year.

More recently, however, the authorities say that there was increased laxity to comply with the pandemic protocols, which, in part, led to a surge in cases.

To contain the situation, the public has been called to participate in the ongoing vaccination programme as well as ensure that all preventive measures are observed.

At least more than 4 percent of the country's population has been vaccinated, and officials are targeting 60 percent by end of next year.

Next month, the country is expected to receive a consignment of 600,000 Covid-19 jabs to boost its inoculation drive.

As it stands, 37,384 cases of Covid-19 have been reported in the country since March last year, 757 of the cases were reported in the last 24 hours.

The positivity rate, according to data from the Ministry of Health, stands at 11 percent.

427 patients have lost their battle against the virus, while a total of 35 are struggling for their lives in critical condition.

eashimwe@newtimesrwanda.com

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Parliament Tuesday afternoon granted the Prime Minister's last-minute request to postpone the appearance of Infrastructure minister Amb. Claver Gatete for questioning over mismanagement issues in two key government agencies.

Gatete was set to appear before a virtual plenary session of the Chamber of Deputies today, June 29, to respond to concerns related to the performance of water and electric utilities.

The two agencies, Water and Sanitation Corporation (WASAC) and Rwanda Energy Group (REG), are under Gatete's docket.

Prime Minister Edouard Ngirente was Tuesday afternoon set to announce a new raft of national coronavirus measures at a news conference. Ngirente chairs the national Covid-19 taskforce set up early last year in response to the virus outbreak.

"Based on the request of the Prime Minister, the plenary session of the Chamber of Deputies has deferred the appearance of the Minister for Infrastructure who was due to provide a verbal explanation on longstanding issues in WASAC and REG," the Lower House posted on its Twitter account.

No new date has been announced for the minister's appearance.

MPs say WASAC and REG have continuously been characterised by issues pertaining to mismanagement and operations, with concerns around idle assets recorded over several years among major issues.

According to the media office at the Chamber of Deputies, Gatete was expected to respond to the concerns during a virtual plenary sitting.

In November last year lawmakers singled out WASAC for what some referred to as abysmal performance over the previous five financial years (from 2014/15-2018/19), which earned it a disclaimer audit opinion from the Office of the Auditor General of State Finances.

A disclaimer of opinion is issued when an auditor is unable to complete the audit report due to the absence of financial records or insufficient cooperation from management of the concerned body.

At the Rwanda Energy Group (REG), parliamentarians expressed concerns over public asset mismanagement cases, which made it impossible for the parastatal to be audited for the fiscal year 2017/2018 and 2018/2019.

editor@newtimesrwanda.com

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The Minister for Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Vincent Biruta, arrived Tuesday in the southern Italian town of Matera for the G20 ministerial meeting.

According to Rwanda's Foreign affairs ministry, Dr Biruta was received by his counterpart Luigi Di Maio.

The ongoing G20 Foreign Affairs Ministers' Meeting in Matera, the first face-to-face meeting of the ministers in two years thank to the Covid-19 pandemic, is one of the gatherings organised as part of G20 Leaders Summit 2021, due to take place in Italy in October.

Rwanda was invited to the G20 ministerial meeting as the current chair of the NEPAD Heads of State and Government Orientation Committee.

The creation of African Union Development Agency-NEPAD (AUDA-NEPAD), formerly known as NEPAD Planning and Coordination Agency, was one of the key issues at the heart of the structural reform of the African Union, led by President Paul Kagame. The objective is to improve the Union's impact and operational efficiency.

The ongoing G20 Foreign Ministers' Meeting features two sessions. One is focused on global governance and multilateralism as a key tool to address major global challenges and promote a sustainable and resilient recovery, while the other is devoted to the relations with the African continent, with a specific focus on sustainable development.

About G20 Leaders Summit

The Group of Twenty (G20) Leaders' Summit brings together the world's largest economies, with this year's edition slated for October in Rome, Italy.

It will be the sixteenth meeting of its kind.

For this year, the G20, under the Italian Presidency, will focus on three broad pillars of action: People, Planet, and Prosperity.

Within the three pillars, the forum aims to take the lead in ensuring a swift international response to the COVID-19 pandemic; ability to provide equitable, worldwide access to diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines while building up resilience to future health-related shocks, according to organisers.

The G20 is made up of 19 countries and the European Union. The 19 countries include Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, France, India, Indonesia and Italy. Others are Japan, Mexico, the Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the UK, and the US.
A new Ministerial Order governing cannabis and its products in Rwanda was gazetted on Monday, June 28, creating a framework for the growing, processing and medical use of cannabis in the country.

Marijuana or weed as it's popularly known is a multi-billion dollar industry and believed to be among the most valuable cash crops from an economic value perspective.

Below we name the top 10 highlights in the Ministerial Order including requirements for sector stakeholder.

1. Licensing for operations

Individuals and firms interested in any of the processes relating to cultivation, distribution and use of cannabis will be required to apply and receive prerequisite licensing by competent authorities and must only undertake operations at places of business of those establishments or at such other places as may be approved by the competent authority.

According to the law, eligible persons for the activities related to cannabis provided for by the Order are investors or any other persons committed to performing any activity of cultivation, processing, importation, export and use of cannabis and cannabis products, for medical or research purposes.

2. Not for recreational purposes

The new order does not in any way have provisions for cultivation, processing or use of cannabis for recreational purposes in the country.

Persons found to use, cultivate or sell marijuana outside the set order will be considered to be handling narcotics which is punishable by law.

3. Medical use only

The new ministerial order has provisions for medical use of cannabis and cannabis products in the country but noted that it can only be made on condition that they are prescribed by a specialist medical doctor.

For this purpose, the order specifies that a specialised medical doctor is one whom the Ministry of Health has given, in writing, the authority to prescribe cannabis and cannabis products for use by a patient.

4. Types of licenses

According to the ministerial order, the cannabis value chain will have specific roles with up to eight licenses and permits required.

Types of licenses and certification include; cultivation license; import permit for seeds, genetic materials and other planting material; export permit for seeds, genetic materials and other planting materials.

Other licenses and permits include; cannabis and cannabis products processing license; cannabis and cannabis products import permit; cannabis and cannabis product export permit.

Other certifications and permits are finished cannabis and cannabis products registration certificate and research license.

The licenses provided will have a validity of a period of a renewable 5 years renewable.

5. Security checklist

According to the new order, operators of activities related to cannabis and cannabis products will be required to provide a security plan to the Rwanda National Police for approval.

The said security plan will go to prove that the operator of activities related to cannabis and cannabis products will take appropriate measures and put up security installations.

Among the elements of the security plan include; having double-layered fencing; ensuring patrol control in between the two layers of the fence; hiring a licensed private security service company that must be securing outside 24 hours per day, seven days a week.

The facility will also be expected to have security lighting, video surveillance cameras, watchtowers, intrusion detection, system and communication control room.

The firms will also be required to prove that the staff and any other persons authorized to enter the facility wear personnel protective equipment without pockets that are kept in a designated area.

6. Security of cannabis farm

The security of the cannabis plantation and processing facility of cannabis and cannabis products is provided in a coordinated framework with three layers, namely the inner, middle and outer layers.

The inner layer security is the responsibility of the licensee and the licensed private security service provider he or she employs. The middle layer and outer layer security is the responsibility of the Rwanda National Police.

The key security stakeholders include; an operator of activities related to cannabis and cannabis products, a private security service company, the Rwanda National Police, the Rwanda Defence Force, public institutions in charge of issuing licenses, and decentralized administrative entities ensure that security requirements are respected.

7. Suspension of a license

If and when a license holder is found to be non-compliant with the provisions stipulated in the order, the competent authority will be at liberty to suspend the license.

An operator whose license has been suspended may appeal to the competent authority within a period of one month from the date of notification of the decision of suspension of the license.

8. Administrative fines

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Operators of activities related to cannabis and cannabis products who are found in violation of the license conditions could also be subject to fines imposed by authority of not less than Rwf1,000,000 and not more than Rwf50,000,000 that will be deposited on the account of the competent authority.

In case of repeat offence the administrative fine could be doubled.

9. Traceability and reporting

Firms and individuals of activities related to cannabis and cannabis products will also be expected to document the entire supply and value chain processes of cannabis and cannabis products and make them available to authorities when requested.

The licensee will be required to report to the competent authority in accordance with the requirements set up.

10. Transport

Transportation of cannabis products will only be done by an operator of activities related to cannabis and cannabis products or a licensed transport company authorized by the Rwanda National Police.

The product will be required to be transported in a manner ensuring that quality is maintained and it is traceable by a cargo tracking system throughout transportation.

cmwai@newtimesrwanda.com

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BUA Group Chairman and President of the newly inaugurated France Nigeria Business Council, Abdul Samad Rabiu, greets President Emmanuel Macron of France at the inauguration of the French Nigeria Business Council in Versailles, France.

French President Emmanuel Macron has inaugurated the France-Nigeria Business Council.

The Council is a private sector initiative to enhance business relations between the two countries with Abdul Samad Rabiu, Founder/ Chairman of Nigeria's BUA Group, as its inaugural President.

The newly-inaugurated council also has Gilbert Chagoury of Chagoury Group, Mike Adenuga of Globacom and Conoil, Aliko Dangote of Dangote Industries, Tony Elumelu, Chairman UBA & Heirs Holdings, and Herbert Wigwe, CEO, Access Bank as the Nigerian members of the council.

The largest French companies, including Dassault and Total Energies, are also members of the council.

Speaking at the inaugural meeting of the council in Paris on the sidelines of the Business France Summit in Versailles, France, Abdul Samad Rabiu thanked President Macron for his vision in creating the French Nigeria Business Council.

He said is had led to a reset in the business relationship between Nigeria and France and had created a viable platform for business from both countries to partner and improve business ties.

According to Abdul Samad Rabiu, "Nigeria is blessed with numerous potentials for French companies to do business across different areas, notably solid minerals, and mining, on to manufacturing, agriculture, associated equipment, power, food processing and even in the business of associated equipment or infrastructure for the value chains of these sectors.

"Where French businesses have formerly been risk-averse or outrightly unable to do business with Africa's largest economy, they can now be assured of a platform through which they can penetrate and mutually grow the market.

"Where Nigerian companies had not seen French companies or the French market as a viable destination due to a lack of information, they can now be sure of a platform to facilitate this.

"This is all thanks to President Macron's foresight and vision."

He also thanked President Macron for appointing him to be the first President of the France-Nigeria Business Council and pledged to use the platform to create better opportunities for businesses on both sides.

It would be recalled that French Minister for Foreign Trade and Economic Attractiveness, Franck Riester, had in April announced that the Chairman of BUA Group had been appointed Chairman of the France Nigeria Investment Club.
The Interim Administration of Tigray region has requested the federal government to make a ceasefire agreement in a manner of humanity and in a way that does not cause further damage, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Abraham Belay, told ENA.

According to him, the federal government has been requested to reach a ceasefire agreement and provide a timely political solution to the situation that would help farmers in Tigray resume their farming activities as well as supply humanitarian assistance to the needy without difficulty.

The interim administration made the request last week after a series of consultations with representatives of the regional councils, bureaus and zonal leaders, the people of Tigray, Tigray scholars, businessmen and religious leaders on the current situation in the region, he noted.

Nothing that the complex problem posed by the TPLF terrorist group to the region and the country is not only military but also political, economic and social, Abraham said various solutions have been taken so far by the federal government and the interim administration of Tigray.

He added that in addition to enforcing the law, efforts have been made to identify the culprits and bring them to justice in order to resolve legal issues.

Reminding that the steps being taken by the interim administration and the federal government, the CEO further expressed the need to consider political alternatives and take remedial actions.

He further added that if the farmers in the region do not start farming this summer, the seed season will pass and they will face challenges to live under poverty for the years to come.

According to him, the group is impeding humanitarian activities, the distribution of seeds and fertilizers to the farmers being carried out by the government and aid agencies.

He further stated that the Ethiopian government has spent more than 100 billion birr for aid, sustaining government services and construction of infrastructure in recent months in the region noting that this has a significant impact on the country's overall economy.

According to Dr. Abraham, further talks have been held with the government on the need for additional political options to ensure that humanitarian assistance is delivered, farming is resumed and the displaced return home safely.

With this in mind, a nine-point request is submitted to the Federal Government, he added.

He said the ceasefire agreement would enable the farmer to resume farming activities, facilitate humanitarian aid and relief supplies to the needy and repair the homes of the displaced.

He pointed out that some of the forces in the desert are now looking for a way to peace. He explained that it is important to give this force a chance.

The terrorist group has been engaged in various destructive activities he said adding that "It hinders access to food aid, kills aid workers."

The focus of the government so far was to attain the election and secure the will of the people and these have been accomplished peacefully. Hence, we believe that the government should focus on addressing key challenges of the country.

"Most of the TPLF force has been surrendered, killed and reached a point where it is useless. However, few of them have been causing damages on the people by forcing the people and using them a cover for the war. Therefore, as the terrorist destructive forces has been much more weakened by the recent military actions, some of the remnant of the force are also preparing to engage in media campaign by starving the people," he elaborated.

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He further stressed on the need for political solutions to the problems. "The government should seek a political solution for the people of Tigray, not the TPLF, which is indifferent to the people," the government should be more open-minded and provide political solutions.

He explained that the request to the federal government for a ceasefire is to protect the public's interest.

"In order to create conducive environment for the people to be part of the solution, we demand on behalf of Tigray and all peace loving people that the federal government to make a cease fire on the basis of humanity and in a way that it would not create additional damage" the CEO said.
A curfew has been imposed across Swaziland (eSwatini) as pro-democracy protests intensify and unconfirmed reports say absolute monarch King Mswati III has fled the kingdom.

The Swazi Acting Prime Minister Themba Masuku announced on Tuesday (29 June 2021) there would be an immediate curfew between the hours of 6pm and 5am.

He said in a statement, 'All offices must be closed by 3:30pm to allow workers to get home safely. Essential workers will be required to produce a permit when travelling at night. No one is expected to be in the streets after 6pm.'

Schools will be closed with immediate effect, he said.

Last Thursday Masuku, speaking on behalf of the King, banned all protest marches but they continued unabated.

There have been reports across the kingdom of violence between police and protestors. Live ammunition has been fired by police and there are reports across social media of injuries among protestors.

Swaziland is not a democracy. King Mswati rules as an absolute monarch. Political parties are banned from taking part in elections and the King chooses the Prime Minister and government cabinet ministers as well as top judges and civil servants. Groups advocating for democracy are outlawed under the Suppression of Terrorism Act.

In his statement, Masuku warned protestors, 'Our security forces are on the ground to maintain law and order.'

On Tuesday morning the South Africa Broadcasting Corporation and other media outlets published unconfirmed reports that King Mswati had fled Swaziland.
The United States Embassy in Swaziland (eSwatini) is to stay closed on Wednesday (30 June 2021) in reaction to the civil unrest sweeping the kingdom and a curfew imposed by the Swazi Government.

In a 'security alert' published on social media it stated, 'Civil unrest continues in eSwatini, including the burning and looting of stores, cars and businesses.'

Pro-democracy campaigners have been marching across the kingdom, especially in rural areas, delivering petitions at local government offices.

Swaziland is not a democracy and is controlled by King Mswati III as an absolute monarch. Political parties are banned from taking part in elections and the King appoints the Prime Minister and cabinet ministers. Groups advocating for democracy are outlawed under the Suppression of Terrorism Act.

Last week Acting Prime Minister Themba Masuku, speaking for the King, banned all protest demonstrations. This was largely ignored and protests continued. They want widespread political reforms and the right to elect their own Prime Minister.

On Tuesday (29 June 2021), Masuku announced a curfew from 6pm to 5am to take place with immediate effect.

Following this the US statement said, 'All fights out of KM111 international airport have been suspended until further notice.'

It added, 'Internet service is expected to degrade as Internet Service Providers have been told to shit down. Cell phone service is still available but data services (WhatsApp) will be spotty if existent at all.'

It added the US Embassy would remain closed through Wednesday 30 June 2021. Embassy staff have been directed to stay at home.
The eSwatini government on Tuesday dismissed reports that King Mswati III had fled the country following the violent, pro-democracy protests that escalated on Monday.

Though admitting the protests had caused a "situation" in the country, acting Prime Minister Themba Masuku told a virtual press conference the King, Africa's last total monarch, was in the country.

"His Majesty King Mswati III is in the country and continues to lead in working with government to advance the Kingdom's goals," Masuku told a virtual press conference.

King Mswati III, however, was not present at the briefing.

"The government will update the nation on interventions on the current situation as the day progresses."

Claims of the King's fleeing were first reported by South Africa's national Broadcaster SABC and picked up by various international media.

The Swaziland Solidarity Network, a pro-democracy lobby, later said the King had left the country amid the chaos. Lucky Lukhele, its Coordinator told the Nation that the King had "fled in his private jet to an unknown destination". Swaziland News also reported that his jet was seen flying from Matsapha Airport.

ESwatini government spokesperson Sabelo Dlamini further said "the reports about the king fleeing are completely untrue and fake".

The protests, in which leading chain store OK Foods was torched and looted, flared up several days ago after the monarchy and government issued a decree banning the delivery of petitions that called for democratic reforms.

The army was reportedly deployed to areas of unrest on Monday night after trucks - some of them belonging to South African companies - were torched over the weekend and shops were looted in the rural town of Siphofaneni.

The Economic Freedom Fighters [Eswatini] condemned the deployment of the army "to unleash violence towards innocent citizens..."

The party said the pro-democracy protests escalated after dozens of students marched to eSwatini's Parliament to demand justice for a young man believed to have been killed by the police.

Thabani Nkomonye's body was recently found in a field in Nhlambeni, about 10km outside Manzini. Colani Khulekani Maseko, the president of the Swaziland National Students' Union, said they were demanding the end of police brutality and a multi-party democracy "in which the police are accountable to the people and not only to the king".
BUA Group Chairman and President of the newly inaugurated France Nigeria Business Council, Abdul Samad Rabiu and President Emmanuel Macron of France at the inauguration of the French Nigeria Business Council on the sidelines of the Choose France Summit in Versailles, France, Monday.

BUA's Abdul Samad Rabiu is appointed inaugural president of the France-Nigeria Business Council.

French President Emmanuel Macron has inaugurated the France-Nigeria Business Council - a private sector initiative to enhance business relations between the two countries.

The council has Abdul Samad Rabiu, Founder/Chairman of Nigeria's BUA Group as its inaugural President.

The newly inaugurated council also has Gilbert Chagoury of Chagoury Group, Mike Adenuga of Globacom and Conoil, Aliko Dangote of Dangote Industries, Tony Elumelu, Chairman UBA & Heirs Holdings, and Herbert Wigwe, CEO, Access Bank as the Nigerian members of the council.

The largest French companies including Dassault, Danone, Axens, Ponticelli and Total Energies are also members of the council.

Speaking at the inaugural meeting of the council in Paris on the sidelines of the Business France Summit in Versailles, France, Mr Abdul Samad Rabiu thanked President Macron for "his vision in creating the French Nigeria Business Council which has led to a reset in the business relationship between Nigeria and France and has created a viable platform for business from both countries to partner and improve business ties."

According to Mr Abdul Samad Rabiu, "Nigeria is blessed with numerous potentials for French companies to do business across different areas, notably solid minerals, mining, manufacturing, agriculture, associated equipment, power, food processing, and even in the business of associated equipment or infrastructure for the value chains of these sectors".

"Where French businesses have formerly been risk-averse or outrightly unable to do business with Africa's largest economy, they can now be assured of a platform through which they can penetrate and mutually grow the market. Where Nigerian companies had not seen French companies or the French market as a viable destination due to a lack of information, they can now be sure of a platform to facilitate this. This is all thanks to President Macron's foresight and vision."

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Mr Abdul Samad Rabiu also thanked President Macron for appointing him to be the first President of the France-Nigeria Business Council and pledged to use the platform to create better opportunities for businesses on both sides.

On his part, President Macron, praised the BUA Chairman and newly appointed president of the council for having confidence in French businesses which led to a partnership for BUA's new 200,000barrels per day refinery.

He also pledged his government's support to facilitating better dialogue amongst the Nigerian businesses present and their French counterparts.

It would be recalled that French Minister for Foreign Trade and Economic Attractiveness, Franck Riester, had in April announced that the Chairman of BUA Group had been appointed Chairman of the France Nigeria Investment Club.
Uncertainty in Ethiopia's Tigray After Militants Take Control

The Ethiopian government has declared a cease-fire in the Tigray region following a takeover of the Tigray capital Mekele by the Tigray People's Liberation Front.

The major turn of events comes after eight months of intense fighting in the region. Residents in Mekele reported rebel forces entering Mekele, while interim government officials appointed by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, left the city.

This comes as Ethiopia awaits the results of the recently held election which did not include voting in Tigray and several other areas.
Swaziland Pro-Democracy Protesters Shot, Killed

As weeks-long protests spread throughout eSwatini, acting Prime Minister Themba Masuku announced a dusk to dawn curfew across the kingdom. Although a number of media houses, led by South Africa's public broadcaster, the SABC, reported that King Mswati III had left the country, the government denied it.

Demonstrations against the authoritarian monarchy have escalated since the shooting in the eye of a student in mid-May. Swazi Media Commentary reported that marches took place in at least 10 locations, mainly in rural areas despite a ban placed by the king on pro-democracy demonstrations.

The government-supporting eSwatini Observer reported that protesters tried to invade acting Prime Minister Themba Masuku's residence. It also said the country's police chief blamed a member of Parliament for "chaos" at another protest.

Swaziland News reported that the MP was one of two pro-democracy legislators whose arrest has been ordered by the king. However, a local human rights lawyer said the police allegedly refused to carry out the arrest, and that the king had to order the army to do so.

Latest reports indicate that as many as 19 people have reportedly been shot dead, allegedly by the military during the pro-democracy protests in Swaziland (eSwatini). The Communist Party of Swaziland has said that five people have been certified dead at the Mbabane Government Hospital in the Swazi capital. It added that more than 50 people were admitted to the hospital with gunshot wounds.
Will Muammar Gaddafi's Son Vie for Libya's Top Job?

Saif Al Islam Gaddafi, son of the late Libyan autocrat Muammar Gaddafi, hasn't been seen in public since his militant captors released him from detention in 2017. But he now appears to be mulling whether to run for the presidency of the war-torn north African country - elections that the UN and western powers are pressing for in December 2021. "Saif's candidacy would likely prove popular in the desert south of the country and among former Gaddafi loyalists - and he might be able to persuade many ordinary Libyans, exhausted by a decade of strife, that he is the best bet for a stable future," observers have said.

However, his candidacy also risks triggering more violence. In early 2021, pro-Gaddafi media in Libya claimed that General Khalifa Haftar, a warlord who rules eastern Libya, and his son, Saddam, were plotting to kill Saif. Haftar has presidential ambitions. Some Islamists at the forefront of the 2011 uprising are also deeply opposed to a return of a Gaddafi family member.
South Sudan Hopes to Woo Prospectors at Energy Conference

South Sudan is holding a two-day National Energy Conference on June 29 and 30, 2021 in Juba, to showcase its seismic data from the 14 newly-discovered oil blocks to potential prospectors.The event, which will be inaugurated by President Salva Kiir, will feature a variety of speakers, both physically and virtually, as South Sudan attempts to demonstrate to the world that peace has finally returned to the country following the September 2018 peace agreement. The event comes after the country launched its first-ever oil and gas licencing round on June 22, 2021, which was attended by industry executives and international stakeholders.



Petroleum Minister Puot Kang Chol, told the gathering that the oil licencing is proof of the growing stability in the country, and that the government wants to open up the oil and energy sector for new investments. South Sudan is estimated to have 3.5 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, the third-largest in Sub-Saharan Africa, 70% of which are unexplored. In 2019, South Sudan discovered 14 new oil fields, the majority of which were in the Upper Nile State.
?? En vivo | La presidenta del Consejo de Ministros, @VBermudezV, brinda entrevista al programa Ampliacion de Noticias de @RPPNoticias, para informar a la ciudadania sobre temas de relevancia nacional. pic.twitter.com/qTh8G36y09




In an interview with RPP radio and TV station, she affirmed that the transfer of power will be a transparent process, including information for new authorities and citizens.





Thus, the outgoing administration will provide information on the situation at the time it took over, as well as details on what it did and the situation at the end of its term.





The Cabinet chief affirmed that, in accordance with the rules adopted by the Comptroller's Office, the administrative transfer will be made through a platform provided by said institution and will involve an evaluation of the outgoing administration, projects, and relevant information.

In addition, every Monday and Friday at a press conference, two ministers will report on the situation of their sectors, in order to ensure a transparent process.





Vaccination





Bermudez highlighted the COVID-19 vaccination teams' commitment and emphasized that the immunization process is the result of joint efforts by the Executive Branch, regional and local governments, and experts.





She noted that the system has been organized in such a way that vaccination cannot stop, setting up a schedule until the end of the year, so that the new authorities can continue with the changes they consider necessary.





In this sense, the Prime Minister indicated that a large batch of vaccines is expected to arrive in the second half of July.





(END) VVS/CVC/RMB




YEREVAN, JUNE 29, ARMENPRESS. US President Joe Biden congratulated Armenia on successful snap parliamentary elections.

Congratulations to the people of Armenia and Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on successful parliamentary elections. Our partnership with Armenia is one of shared values and cooperation on democratic reform and conflict resolutionwe are committed to strengthening that partnership, Biden said on Twitter.
YEREVAN, JUNE 29, ARMENPRESS. Armenian and Iranian businessmen put a beginning for talks aimed at boosting the commercial ties during the Armenia-Iran business forum launched in Yerevan on June 29.

A delegation of Iranian high-tech companies have visited Yerevan on the sidelines of the forum.

Rhyton Solutions company director Masoud Hassani told reporters that they are in Armenia for the first time, but noted that there has already been cooperation.

IT cooperation has already been in Armenia, they have ordered programs in us, and we have implemented them. We can implement bigger programs after this forum in different formats, he said, adding that they will have a number of meetings with the IT companies in Armenia.

Another representative of the Iranian delegation Emade Askaria said they plan to further raise the cooperation between Iran and Armenia.

We want to start a production in Armenia, and then to enter into the global market together with the Armenian companies. This forum is attended by 10 Iranian and 40 Armenian companies, I hope we will reach beneficial agreements today, the Iranian delegation member said.

Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan
YEREVAN, JUNE 29, ARMENPRESS. The EU Council gave the go-ahead for the signing of three neighbourhood aviation agreements  with Ukraine, Armenia and Tunisia  as well as an air transport agreement with Qatar. These agreements will open up the air transport market, offering new opportunities for both consumers and operators. Through more efficient connectivity, they will promote trade, tourism, investment and economic and social development, the EU Delegation in Armenia said in a statement.

The Council is now ready to sign four important aviation agreements that will improve market access for airlines and enhance connectivity and freedom of movement for citizens. At the same time, they will ensure the highest level of safety and security and provide for a level playing field.

The three neighbourhood agreements will remove market restrictions in relation to the EUs neighbouring countries and associate these countries with the EUs internal aviation market, as they will adopt EU aviation standards and implement EU aviation rules.

The agreement with Qatar will open the market equally with all 27 member states, upgrading the rules and standards that currently exist for flights between Qatar and the EU. This is the first such agreement between the EU and a Gulf country.

All four agreements contain robust environmental, social and fair competition clauses with strong enforcement mechanisms to avoid any distortions of competition or other abuses.

The decisions on Ukraine, Armenia and Qatar enable application of the agreement on a provisional basis, pending the completion of the procedures necessary for its entry into force.

The four agreements are expected to be signed in autumn 2021. Every agreement will then need to be ratified by each member state, the Union and the other party, the statement reads.
YEREVAN, JUNE 29, ARMENPRESS. OSCE Chairperson-in-Office, Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde has once again called on Azerbaijan to release Armenian prisoners of war, resume the negotiations under the auspices of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs and achieve a political settlement.

During a press conference today, commenting on the view that the Armenian society is disappointed with the OSCEs passive position during the 2020 Nagorno Karabak War and asked whether she shares the view of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev who says that the NK conflict is solved, Ann Linde said: I dont agree that the OSCE doesnt make a lot of efforts for the conflict settlement, for what is happening in Nagorno Karabakh. I have a special representative who is very active. I personally met with him yesterday to discuss the situation. We have an OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairmanship, co-chaired by US, Russia and France which try to make very positive steps, she said, adding that the Co-Chairs, however, had a limited access to the region last year because of the pandemic and other reasons.

The OSCE Chairperson-in Office reminded that in mid-June there was an agreement to return 15 Armenian prisoners of war from Azerbaijan, and Armenia provided Azerbaijan with maps aimed at facilitating the demining works. According to Mrs. Linde, this is a welcoming step aimed at strengthening trust.

With my statement I have called on Armenia, Azerbaijan to take a positive step by releasing all remaining detainees and resume the negotiations under the auspices of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairmanship, and also to find a political solution with the engagement of Andrzej Kasprzyk, because there is no peace agreement yet, Ann Linde said.

Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan
YEREVAN, JUNE 29, ARMENPRESS. Speaker of Parliament of Armenia Ararat Mirzoyan and Speaker of the State Duma of Russia Vyacheslav Volodin held a telephone conversation at the initiative of the Russian side, the Armenian Parliament told Armenpress.

The Russian State Duma Speaker congratulated the Armenian Speaker of Parliament on the convincing victory of the Civil Contract party in the June 20 snap parliamentary elections and wished future success.

The officials discussed issues in the agenda of joint interest.

Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan
YEREVAN, JUNE 29, ARMENPRESS. Minister of Defense of Armenia Vagharshak Harutyunyan visited Erebuni Airport in Yerevan on June 29, where the Head of the Aviation Department of the Armed Forces of Armenia, Colonel Gagik Aslanyan and the Commander of the Russian military base, Colonel Alexander Petrov presented the aviation equipment and their technical characteristics.

As ARMENPRESS was informed from the press service of the Defense Ministry of Armenia, the head of the Defense Ministry got acquainted with the capabilities of military aircrafts in the cockpit. Vagharshak Harutyunyan was also presented with some samples of military aircraft armament.

The current state of cooperation between the military aviation forces of the two countries, the course of joint combat duty and the upcoming programs were discussed during the visit.
YEREVAN, JUNE 29, ARMENPRESS. Marija Pejcinovic Buric, Secretary General of the Council of Europe sent a congratulatory message to caretaker Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan on the successful conduct of the parliamentary elections.

As ARMENPRESs was informed from the Office of the Prime Minister, the message runs as follows,

Dear Mr. Prime Minister,

I congratulate you on the successful holding of the June 20 snap parliamentary elections. I welcome the fact that international observers, including the delegation of our Parliamentary Assembly, assessed these elections as competitive and generally well organized.

It is important that the election results showed the unconditional support of the Armenian people to the reform policy under your leadership. Now that the election campaign is over, it is time to focus on a constructive dialogue with political parties and civil society. In this regard, I reaffirm the readiness of the Council of Europe to continue to support Armenia in the reform process, based on the criteria of human rights, democracy and the rule of law. "
YEREVAN, JUNE 29, ARMENPRESS. The "Armenia" Alliance will be a radical opposition in the parliament, ARMENPRESS reports, the second president of Armenia, leader of the "Armenia" Alliance Robert Kocharyan stated this at the first general meeting of the Armenia Alliance.

We have become a parliamentary opposition and have enough power to implement part of our goals, Kocharyan said.

Robert Kocharyan noted that as institutional radical opposition, they will act in the limits of the Armenian law, returning the faith to parliamentary opposition to the people. Because in the recent years the parliamentary opposition made deals with the authorities. Today we need to return the faith of the people and as a radical opposition, we will do that working day and night, Kocharyan said.

At the same time, Kocharyan thanked the 270 thousand citizens who voted for them. He also added that the results of the elections were surprising for them, since they expected other results.
Anti-government protesters in Colombia have toppled a statue of Christopher Columbus in the coastal city of Barranquilla.

The figure of the European explorer, after whom Colombia is named, was dragged from its plinth with ropes and vandalised.

The demonstration marked two months since the start of a nationwide protest movement calling for social reform.

Indigenous activists see Columbus as a symbol of colonialism and oppression.

The mayor of Barranquilla said those responsible would be brought to justice.

The Columbus statue is the latest to be pulled from its pedestal as part of the anti-government protests which have been sweeping through the country.

One of the first to fall was that of the 16th Century Spanish conquistador Sebastian de Belalcazar in the south-western city of Popayan in September.

Sebastian de Belalcazar was a Spanish conquistador who founded the city of Popayan in 1537

A group of Colombians from the Misak, Nasa and Pijao indigenous groups said that they had toppled the statue after putting Belalcazar on trial and finding him guilty of genocide, enslavement, torture, rape and stealing their ancestral lands.

Since then, another statue of Belalcazar in the city of Cali has also been toppled.

The statue of Belalcazar in Cali was pulled down in April

In the capital, Bogota, members of the Misak indigenous group demolished a statue of Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada, the Spanish conquistador who founded the city in 1638.

Members of the Misak indigenous group marched after toppling a statue of Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada

A statue of Queen Isabella of Castile, who sponsored Columbus's 1492 voyage of exploration during which he first set foot in America, also recently became a target of Misak indigenous protesters in the capital, Bogota.

A statue of Queen Isabella was daubed in red paint in June

Colombia's ministry of culture has since removed the statue of Queen Isabella and another one of Christopher Columbus nearby "for safety reasons".

Indigenous groups have been prominent in the protest movement which has rocked the country in recent months.

As well as being decimated by the Spanish conquistadors during colonial times, Colombia's indigenous groups have more recently been caught in the middle of the country's decades-long armed conflict.

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Even after the signing of a peace agreement between the left-wing Farc rebels and the government in 2016, indigenous groups continue to be targeted by right-wing paramilitaries and dissident rebels who oppose the peace agreement.

More than 20 indigenous rights defenders have been killed this year according to a tally by peace institute Indepaz, and the indigenous groups are demanding that more be done to protect them.

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Iraqi fighters mourn comrades killed in US strikes Mourners march with a banner showing (L to R) Iraq's slain Hashed al-Shaabi commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, other slain members of the group and Iraq's top Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, during a symbolic funeral in the Iraqi capital

Thousands of members of Iraq's Hashed al-Shaabi paramilitary alliance gathered in Baghdad on Tuesday to mourn comrades killed in US air strikes along the Syrian border.

The American raids early Monday sparked an exchange of fire between pro-Iranian militias and the US-led coalition in eastern Syria, and heightened fears of a new US-Iran escalation amid ongoing efforts to revive Tehran's 2015 nuclear deal with major powers.

With chants of "death to America" and "vengeance for the martyrs", the Hashed members massed in Freedom Square near the Iraqi capital's high-security Green Zone where the US embassy is located.

Security forces were deployed in large numbers, sealing off the Green Zone after a string of recent incursions by armed groups backed by Washington's arch-enemy Tehran.

Several high-ranking Hashed figures took part in the symbolic funeral, including its top commander Faleh Al-Fayyadh and Hadi al-Ameri, head of one of its main factions, the Badr Organisation.

Many off the mourners, accompanied by vehicles packed with armed men, wore black and held up signs reading: "Attacks on the Hashed must speed up the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq."

Others carried pictures of the revered Iranian general Qasem Soleimani and Hashed's former second-in-command Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who were killed in a US drone strike near Baghdad airport early last year.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitoring group said Tuesday that nine fighters were killed in the strikes near the Albu Kamal district on the Syrian side of the border, updating an earlier toll after two of the wounded had succumbed to their injuries.

The group earlier reported that a weapons store had been destroyed.

- 'Strong message' -

The Hashed, most of whose commanders are backed by Tehran and which has become the main power broker in Baghdad, said four of its fighters were killed in the Qaim region near the border.

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The fighters were stationed there to prevent jihadists infiltrating Iraq, the group said, denying they had taken part in any attacks against US interests or personnel and warning they had "the legal right to respond... and hold the perpetrators accountable on Iraqi soil".

The Pentagon said the strikes targeted operational and weapons storage facilities at two locations in Syria and one in Iraq, all near the common border, that had been used by militias engaged in drone attacks against US interests in Iraq.

US forces were subsequently "attacked by multiple rockets" in eastern Syria, but there were no casualties and personnel "conducted counter-battery artillery fire at rocket launching positions", coalition spokesman Wayne Marotto said on Twitter.

American forces in Iraq, where 2,500 US troops are deployed as part of an international coalition to fight the jihadist Islamic State group, have been targeted in more than 40 attacks this year.

Monday's strikes were the second such deadly raid on pro-Iran targets since US President Joe Biden took office.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared that the US air strikes on pro-Iran fighters in Iraq and Syria sent a "strong message" not to keep attacking US forces in Iraq.

Iraq's Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhemi condemned the strikes as an "unacceptable violation of Iraqi sovereignty and Iraqi national security" and warned against any escalation.

ak/hj/par/fz
Peru's ex spy chief Vladimiro Montesinos has served 20 years of a 25-year sentence in a maximum security prison

Peru's feared ex-spymaster Vladimiro Montesinos, known as the "Rasputin of the Andes," is in the spotlight after being caught trying to manipulate the outcome of June 6 presidential elections from prison.

In recordings released last week, Montesinos instructs retired military commander Pedro Rejas to arrange bribes for judges on the national electoral jury to proclaim Keiko Fujimori the winner over rival Pedro Castillo.

Corruption-accused Fujimori is the daughter of Montesinos's old boss, ex-president Alberto Fujimori, himself in prison for graft and rights abuses.

The younger Fujimori, who alleged vote fraud as Castillo took the lead in the ballot count, risks an imminent trial on corruption charges that would be delayed until after her term if she were to win the presidency.

Montesinos, 76, has served 20 years of a 25-year sentence in a maximum security prison on a naval base for arms trafficking and corruption committed during Fujimori's presidency.

On Saturday, ex-lawmaker Fernando Olivera revealed seventeen recordings exposing Montesinos's alleged bid to interfere in the presidential vote.

The navy and prison authority have confirmed the authenticity of the recordings and launched an investigation.

- 'Trying to help' -

In one recording, Montesinos is heard telling Rejas to "make them understand, the father or the girl -- I don't know whom you are talking to -- that... we are trying to help in a common objective" referring to the Fujimori duo.

"What do I gain?" he continues. "Nothing... I am simply trying to help because if not they will screw themselves, the girl will end up in prison."

The younger Fujimori said she listened with "indignation" to the calls "from a man who betrayed all Peruvians."

She has always maintained that Montesinos had acted behind her father's back, and has vowed to pardon her parent if she becomes president.

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Peruvians have been made to wait more than three weeks for the results of the deeply polarizing election that had rightwing Fujimori neck-and-neck with rural school teacher Castillo, a leftist trade unionist.

According to the count, Castillo received 50.12 percent of votes -- some 44,000 more than Fujimori.

The United States, European Union and Organization of American States have all said the election was free and fair.

But Fujimori has cried foul, demanding a review of thousands of votes by the national electoral jury, which is still under way. The jury will ultimately declare a winner.

- Right-hand man -

The man who released the recordings, Olivera, is the same who in 2000 released a video showing Montesinos bribing an opposition MP to join Fujimori's ruling party to give it a majority in Congress.

That video was the catalyst for the impeachment of Alberto Fujimori and forced Montesinos to resign.

Montesinos was Fujimori's right-hand man during his 10 years in power from 1990 to 2000, converting the secret police into a political arm of the president's party and leading a merciless fight against Maoist rebel group the Shining Path.

Arrested in 2001 after months on the run following the video's release, Montesinos was sentenced to a quarter-century in prison.

He had previously served jail time in the 1970s for his involvement in the presentation of classified information to the CIA on Soviet armaments acquired by Peru, and for falsifying a signature to travel abroad.

fj-ljc/pb/rsr/mlr/bfm
Voters in the Brisbane-based electorate of Stretton will head to the polls next month following the death of popular state Labor MP Duncan Pegg.

The by-election will be held on July 24, the Electoral Commission of Queensland announced on Tuesday.

Nominations are now open and will close at noon on July 7.

Mr Pegg died from cancer earlier this month, just shy of his 41st birthday, following an 18-month battle.

He was first elected in January 2015 and was remembered in parliament as a gentleman of politics with friends on both sides, and a true champion for his community who even learned Mandarin to better communicate with constituents.

Mr Pegg's long-time staffer James Martin was announced as the party's candidate before the MP died.

The Liberal National Party has nominated former Queenslander of the Year and police officer Jim Bellos.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has met Catalonia's new pro-independence regional head for the first time as the central government sought to improve ties after pardoning nine jailed separatist leaders.

The two agreed that negotiations between both governments on the region's political conflict would resume in September in Barcelona while acknowledging the significant differences that still remain between them.

"This negotiation will not be easy because we will not give up," Catalan head of government Pere Aragones, who took office last month, told reporters after the meeting in Madrid, adding that any solution reached at the negotiations had to be validated in a vote by citizens.

"Let no one be confused: we will approach this with full determination to defend a referendum for Catalonia and an amnesty," he said, referring to the more than 3000 separatists currently under legal investigation.

Sanchez, who opposes independence, had previously ruled out both demands.

"The government cannot make sense of Catalonia without Spain, or Spain without Catalonia," the central government's spokesperson Maria Jesus Montero said at a separate news conference, adding that both sides were conscious about their opposing views on the independence issue.

An unauthorised referendum on a breakaway in 2017 led to a short-lived declaration of independence and Spain's worst political crisis in decades.

Separatist leaders were convicted and sentenced to lengthy prison terms on a variety of charges.

Sanchez pardoned them last week in what he said was a goodwill gesture to kickstart negotiations on the Catalan issue.

However, Spain's Court of Auditors is requesting the return of about 5.4 million euros ($A8.6 million) from 40 former Catalan officials due to their alleged role in promoting Catalonia's independence bid abroad, including some pardoned leaders, according to a court report published by several newspapers on Tuesday.

Story continues

The court has not issued any ruling on the potential misuse of public funds by them but its interim request implies that they need to deposit the demanded amount, according to the reports.

If they could not do so, their assets would be seized.

A court spokesperson said the document was not public yet.
Westminster Presbyterian Church in Auburn will host its third annual Interfaith LGBTQ+ Pride Service at 7 p.m. Wednesday, June 30.

Themed "Rejoice, Rebirth, Reclaim," the service will feature live music and a diverse selection of community voices.

"Through the rhythm of joy, rebirth and restoration, strangers shall become friends. Together, we will light candles. Pray. Talk. Speak poetry. Tell stories. Dance to music. You don't want to miss this incredible convergence of wisdom, spirituality, and an outpouring of love. All are welcome, whether religious or not, whatever your spiritual or cultural tradition," the Rev. Patrick Heery of Westminster said in a news release.

The service will be held in person at the church, 17 William St., Auburn, and livestreamed at facebook.com/westminsterauburn. It is free and open to the public. Parking is available in the lot beside the church, Court Street and the downtown Auburn parking garage. The event will be interpreted in American sign language, and the church has accessible and gender-neutral facilities.
A 13-year-old girl is facing assault and child endangerment charges in the family court system in connection with an attack last week on Auburn school district property.

Auburn Police Department Chief Shawn Butler said the girl and her parents were served with an appearance ticket on Monday night and will be summoned to Cayuga County Family Court "in the near future." The unnamed juvenile defendant was charged with third-degree assault and endangering the welfare of a child, both misdemeanors.

The arrest stems from an incident caught on video by a bystander on Wednesday around 6 p.m. at Holland Stadium, which is behind Auburn Junior High School. In a video that was widely shared on social media on Saturday, one girl can be seen dragging another girl by the hair before forcing her to the ground in an area outside the stadium. She then repeatedly hits and kicks the girl, and stomps on her head.
Buttigieg acknowledged that the I-81 project isn't just about infrastructure.

"All the other issues we talk about  jobs, safety, prosperity, racial injustice  cannot be separated from transportation," he said. "Every decision about transportation is necessarily a decision about justice."

He recognized the mistakes of the past involving highways that cut through cities and often affected Black and Brown neighborhoods. He said I-81 needs to be reimagined to "better meet Syracuse's needs and reconnect those communities."

Gillibrand and Schumer, who support the community grid proposal, highlighted legislation they support to ensure that communities are reconnected and local residents are hired for jobs related to the I-81 project. Both senators are advocating for the bills to be included in President Joe Biden's American Jobs Plan, which seeks to address infrastructure and other issues.

When Biden unveiled the American Jobs Plan, he singled out I-81 as a project to "redress historic inequities and build the future of transportation infrastructure."
BEIRUT (AP)  Lebanon's energy ministry Tuesday increased gasoline and fuel prices by 35%, a move that could lead to a sharp increase in prices of most commodities in the crisis-hit country.

The hike came days after caretaker Prime Minister Hassan Diab granted approval for financing fuel imports at a rate higher than the official exchange rate, effectively reducing critical fuel subsidies.

Lebanon is going through an unprecedented economic and financial collapse, coupled with a monthslong political deadlock over the formation of a new government.

The developments pose the gravest threat to the small countrys stability since the end of its civil war three decades ago. The World Bank has said the crisis is among the worst the world has seen in 150 years.

Fistfights and shootings have erupted at some gas stations over the past weeks as frustrated citizens lined up for hours to fill up their tanks and the shortages have led to protests around Lebanon.

Electricity cuts last for much of the day, and people have had to turn off private generators for several hours to ration fuel. Last week, the economy ministry raised the price of subsidized bread by 18%, the fifth time it was raised in a year.
British luxury SUV manufacturer Land Rover has paused production of Defender and Discovery in Slovakia due to the semiconductor crisis. With this, Land Rover has joined the list of automakers that have been affected by the global chip shortage. Earlier this year, several auto manufacturers around the world have been forced to stop production temporarily because of supply chain issue.

(Also Read: Range Rover Sport SVR performance SUV launched at 2.19 crore)

Land Rover's Nitra factory in Slovakia produces Defender and seven-seater Discovery. This is the latest JLR factory to be impacted by the chip shortage, reports The Times.

Earlier in 2021, JLR halted its production lines at Castle Bromwich and Halewood plants in the UK. This impacted production of the Jaguar XE, XF and F-Type, along with Land Rover Discovery Sport and Range Rover Evoque.

The auto manufacturer has not given any timeframe for the reopening of the plant. The Slovakian facility has an annual production capacity of 150,000 units. Due to the production halt, wait time for the Land Rover Defender is expected to increase significantly. Currently, the SUV's waiting period is nearly a year.

Talking about the chip crisis earlier this year, Jaguar Land Rover CEO Thierry Bollore said that the auto company's aims to procure its own electrical components directly from the producer. However, that effort has been impacted by the global chip crisis.

During the pandemic last year, demand for personal electronic goods increased significantly. This resulted in massive demand for the microchips resulting in the chip producers channelling their resources to the electronic industry semiconductor production. After the reopening of economies around the world, the auto industry started facing a shortage of semiconductors.
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Fire managers 'turn corner' on Rafael Fire after weekend of work on backburns

Rachel Gibbons, Arizona Daily Sun A Mormon Lake Hotshot lights a fire line in the backburn area for the Rafael Fire on FR 538. The wildfire has reached nearly 78,000 acres and backburn efforts are underway to stop the fire before it reaches populated areas. Rachel Gibbons, Arizona Daily Sun Fire burns the forest floor and dead trees along FR 538 Saturday morning in the backburn area for the Rafael Fire. Rachel Gibbons, Arizona Daily Sun A dead pine tree burns as fire crews light fuel ahead of the Rafael Fire in an effort to prevent it from spreading toward Flagstaff. Rachel Gibbons, Arizona Daily Sun Mormon Lake Hotshots light fire lines in the backburn area for the Rafael Fire on FR 538. Rachel Gibbons, Arizona Daily Sun A Mormon Lake Hotshot patrols the fire line in the backburn area for the Rafael Fire on FR 538. Rachel Gibbons, Arizona Daily Sun Fire burns the forest floor along FR 538 Saturday morning in the backburn area for the Rafael Fire. Rachel Gibbons, Arizona Daily Sun Smoke fills the forest Saturday morning as fire crews backburn along FR 538 in an effort to contain the Rafael Fire burning in and around Sycamore Canyon.

The air was thick with smoke, so much so that it was impossible to see more than a dozen feet in any direction. Across the road, flames inched their way across the ground in irregular patches, burning largest only after finding a stump, fallen tree or particularly large clump of duff.

That was the scene along Forest Road 538 southwest of Flagstaff over the weekend as firefighters worked to block the growth of the nearby Rafael Fire by igniting areas of the forest ahead of the fire.

As of Monday, that fire had grown to more than 77,000 acres and was just shy of 50% containment. Fire managers now consider the blaze, which had put huge portions of Flagstaff and Coconino County at risk of evacuation just last week, largely contained in the north and eastern sections.

We're turning the corner on it, Deputy Incident Commander Jeff Andrews told press Monday. There's a lot of work, a lot of moving parts still, but we're turning the corner and we're feeling comfortable.

In large part, that's due to the burnouts operations firefighters have conducted in those areas.

Wearing a short beard and a smoke-laden yellow fire shirt, Mormon Lake Hotshot Bryor Nittmann has been one of 100 or so lighting those burns, less than a mile ahead of the main body of the fire.

We're doing well; we're tired, but we're doing well, Nittmann told a group of reporters Saturday.

The Mormon Lake Hotshots have been working the fire since June 21, when rather than heading off to fight the Backbone Fire, fire managers decided they were needed closer to home, Nittmann said. Since that time, the crew had been prepping the area to be burned.

Firefighters cut back brush, smaller trees and low branches to ensure their own fire doesnt climb up and cause problems. Many of those cut branches and trees lay just on the far side of the road from the burnout.

Once the fire is out, firefighters or other forest service personnel will be back out, chipping those materials and spraying them into the burned area, one small step that can help the area recover, said fire spokesperson Bill Morse.

But Saturday, after days of preparing the area, Nittmann and several of the other hotshots that make up the crew stood watching the blaze burn.

The crew planned to patrol their several-mile section of the road for the duration of the burn, making sure nothing went wrong and ensuring any embers that made it across the road didnt kick up into a larger spot fire.

They were helped somewhat by the nature of the forest to their backs. The section of the forest they worked on has been through several recent fires and some forest restoration projects, meaning there is already less fuel to worry about than there could be, Nittmann said.

Most recently, the Whiskey and Saber Fires of 2019 were both managed by the Coconino National Forest in a way to improve forest health in the area.

Those burns and other forest restoration efforts across nearby sections of the Coconino and Kaibab National Forests have been crucial to success in countering the Rafael Fire, said Deputy Incident Commander Andrews.

Those treatments have allowed them to quickly get their own fires on the ground in critical areas, Andrews said.

Without that, in a year like this, it's a much different scenario. You know, the perimeter lines [would not be] where they are right now and we could easily be back-to-the-wall in Flagstaff, Kachina Village, all of the communities on the southwest side of the town, and really in the interior of Flagstaff itself, Andrews said.

In that way, Nittmann said local fire officials have been fighting the Rafael Fire for the last 15 years.

Hometown crew

This is Nittmanns ninth season fighting fires, primarily on the Coconino National Forest.

He said it feels a little different to be fighting on this stretch of forest, one he and many other members of the Mormon Lake Hotshots know so well.

The emotional investment is definitely different on this one than really any other that Ive been on ,just because I grew up hiking and horn hunting and doing all kinds of stuff in this canyon, Nittmann told the Arizona Daily Sun. It is emotional.

Growing up in Flagstaff and attending Coconino High School, Nittmann said he and friends have hiked down to Taylor Cabin in the middle of the Sycamore Canyon Wilderness Area.

Working as the hometown crew also has its perks, mainly that rather than living out of a tent at a spike camp, Nittmann has been able to go home each night.

What weve been doing is unheard of on a type one incident, he said. We've been able to go home at night, which is huge as far as family time. Thats a big benefit of at least getting to see the family, but you know, we work 16-hour days, so there's not a lot of time on the fringes.

Looking forward

While areas of the fire to the north, west and east are largely contained, fire managers are less sure of the southeastern section of the fire closest to Sedona and work may continue in that area.

Still, as managers have gained control over the Rafael Fire, firefighters' work has started to evolve from one of containment to mopping up parts of the fire that have already burned, Andrews said Monday.

Its often tedious and dirty and hard work as firefighters enter burned areas to extinguish hot spots with water, shovels and fire axes, Andrews said. It can also be one of the most dangerous times for firefighters.

There's a lot of trees that have burned up, they're not as stable as they were, Andrews said. After the flaming front has moved through, we've got a lot of logs, stumbles, twigs, organic material that's burning.

After peaking at about 600 personnel working the fire, that number is expected to slowly drop throughout the next week.

A Burned Area Emergency Response team also arrived within the last day. It is their responsibility to examine the impacts of the fire once it is out, often looking at how severely the fire burned and how that could affect the local watershed.

Given the current monsoon season, Andrews said there is particular concern about the potential impacts from Sycamore Canyon, especially as it appears there was high-severity burns throughout much of the canyon.

We are concerned about downstream effects in the areas of really everything in that Sycamore drainage area down towards Clarkdale, Cottonwood, Camp Verde. There are significant concerns about that, especially as close to the monsoon as we are, Andrews said.
Most recently, the Whiskey and Saber Fires of 2019 were both managed by the Coconino National Forest in a way to improve forest health in the area.

Those burns and other forest restoration efforts across nearby sections of the Coconino and Kaibab National Forests have been crucial to success in countering the Rafael Fire, said Deputy Incident Commander Andrews.

Those treatments have allowed them to quickly get their own fires on the ground in critical areas, Andrews said.

Without that, in a year like this, it's a much different scenario. You know, the perimeter lines [would not be] where they are right now and we could easily be back-to-the-wall in Flagstaff, Kachina Village, all of the communities on the southwest side of the town, and really in the interior of Flagstaff itself, Andrews said.

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In that way, Nittmann said local fire officials have been fighting the Rafael Fire for the last 15 years.

Hometown crew

This is Nittmanns ninth season fighting fires, primarily on the Coconino National Forest.

He said it feels a little different to be fighting on this stretch of forest, one he and many other members of the Mormon Lake Hotshots know so well.
Its not just Colorado, said Ben Laws, manager of Pyro City. We see people from Nebraska, we see people from Montana, we see people from all over coming to buy.

Other cities, including Boise, Idaho, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, are working to ban personal fireworks while keeping their public displays, where safety precautions are often stronger and firefighters are on alert.

In North Dakota, where more than two-thirds of the state is in extreme or exceptional drought  the two worst categories  some areas are passing local bans. In South Dakota, where conditions are somewhat less dire, the governor is fighting the federal government to hold a fireworks display at Mount Rushmore.

A show that draws tens of thousands of people to Lake Tahoe, Nevada, near the California state line, was originally canceled for the second year in a row, but organizers later decided to mount a smaller, safe fireworks experience." Holding fireworks shows over water is one of the safer ways to celebrate, said Balch, the professor.

The industry urges people lighting their own fireworks to follow local restrictions, pick a flat location a safe distance from homes, have a water source at hand to douse used products and dispose of them carefully.
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Call 281-422-8302 or email david.bloom@baytownsun.com to wish someone a happy birthday. We will print your birthday wish on Page 2 of The Sun.

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China's top epidemiologist Zhong Nanshan said in an interview with Xinhua that building an immune barrier is urgently needed to combat the highly contagious delta variant of COVID-19.

Zhong said the resurgence of the virus in Guangzhou, capital city of south China's Guangdong Province, was the first time that China had to cope with the delta variant spreading in the community.

The variant, which was first identified in India, has a shorter incubation period than other variants and the infected individuals experience longer recovery periods.

"Guangzhou has made some achievements in combating the variant, but other regions should take necessary precautions," said Zhong.

INITIAL ACHIEVEMENTS

A total of 153 cases were reported in Guangzhou from May, but no new local cases have been reported since June 19.

The city has been removed from China's list of areas at medium-risk for COVID-19, local health officials said on Saturday.

Zhong said both provincial and city-level disease control departments carried out timely and high-quality epidemiological investigations after receiving a case report on May 21.

The gene sequencing of all 153 cases in Guangzhou has now been carried out. The results show that the cases are homologous and the transmission chain is clear. These efforts provide data support for authorities to judge the situation and implement control measures, he said.

"Considering the high viral load and highly contagious nature of the delta strain, we clarified that anyone who was in the same space, unit or buildings as a patient up to four days before the onset of the disease was a close contact," said Zhong. "Due to the change in the definition of close contacts, different management methods have been adopted."

He said that Guangzhou has used big data to track people of concern, including those who have been to medium-risk areas and close contacts of new cases.

"These new, innovative and more targeted anti-virus methods have enabled us to control the resurgence in a quick manner," said Zhong.

IMMUNE BARRIER URGENCY

"The delta strain has high viral load and short incubation period, which makes it twice as contagious as ordinary COVID-19," said the top epidemiologist.

He said that to strike a balance between economic development and efforts to combat the delta variant, it is necessary to accelerate the pace of vaccination and build an immune barrier in the population.

Zhong said preliminary analysis of more than 100 patients in Guangdong showed that Chinese vaccines are effective in preventing the development of pneumonia and severe infection. He urged more people to get vaccinated.

As of Thursday, more than 1.1 billion vaccine doses have been administered on the Chinese mainland.

"We need 80 percent or more of the population vaccinated in the country to build an immune barrier," he said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping explained his vision for a community with a shared future for mankind at the 19th Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2017. Four years later, there are two important reasons why now is the time to discuss the next steps.

First, the post-Cold War unipolar world era is over. American unilateralism reached its peak under former President Donald Trump, and a new multipolar world is now emerging. In this situation, an understanding of the conceptual framework of the international system - a community with a shared future for mankind - is necessary.

Second, a careful look at the existing patterns of international cooperation may reveal that the building blocks, on which a vision of a shared future should be developed further, already exist.

Take a look at the global system. Should the evolution of the international system rely on an all-encompassing global framework, such as the United Nations (UN), or should it be based on a set of alliances, partnerships and regional arrangements? Right now, all these types of multilateral cooperation co-exist.

New partnerships of states are emerging. Some of them are based on shared values and "like-mindedness" - a fashionable term expressing ideological proximity and shared geopolitical interests. It is important that these groupings understand their responsibilities - not only to their members, but also to the international system as a whole.

Geopolitical calculations or values-based considerations should not be allowed to create instability or even undermine the international system. Global stability and balance are among the necessary conditions for the future progress of us all.

This highlights the importance of the UN, a truly global and universal organization. The founding principles of the UN, the universality of its membership, its programs, funding and agencies and, importantly, its unique global convening power, are indispensable.

The UN should be strengthened to address the problems of our era more effectively. The state of the planet today provides ample needs and opportunities for global cooperation. Overcoming the COVID-19 pandemic is priority No. 1 for all. At the same time, the world is facing a triple planetary crisis of global warming, declining biodiversity and pollution. These problems can be resolved only by global action, and the UN is the indispensable forum for such action.

Naturally, leadership is required. It is encouraging that the United States and China are seeking common language on global warming. The whole world should encourage them to lead. The UN system should provide an effective framework for their action. This is a basic building block towards a globally shared future.

The second reason for an in-depth international discussion about China's vision of a shared future is found in the existing successful models of international cooperation and the new opportunities they provide.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is an important example. The progress it has made so far already offers significant experience as well as opportunities for the future. Take the example of the progress of the BRI in Africa. With the signatures of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Botswana in January this year, a total of 46 out of 55 African countries are participating in the BRI.

The cooperation includes a whole range of economic activities, such as infrastructural development, modern telecommunications, additional manufacturing industries and banking, as well as more traditional activities such as commodities and agriculture.

There is much potential in all areas of economic cooperation. Naturally, the policy choices and development priorities of African countries will be decisive. It is encouraging that African countries are strengthening their cooperation through the African Union under new arrangements such as the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).

The future of the BRI in Africa will vitally depend on the aspirations of African countries, their development needs and their trading arrangements such as the AfCFTA. Moreover, African countries are already cooperating with a variety of partners. One of them is the European Union (EU), which has well-established ties with Africa and is also considering the necessary innovations for the future.

Should the needs and visions of African countries and Chinese and European contributions to African development converge? Should they aim at developing a "triangular relationship" based on African priorities, with effective cooperation involving both China and the EU?

Admittedly, this may seem like a long shot today, but new forms of cooperation will be increasingly relevant in the future. Seen from the European perspective, the European Partnership Agreements that the EU has concluded with many African countries have to be constantly reviewed in order to support industrial value creation and economic and social development in the countries concerned.

These agreements should protect infant industries and allow the successful functioning of the AfCFTA. At the same time, the projects developed within the BRI have been inspired by a similar philosophy.

It would be natural for the Chinese and European approaches to converge, based on the policy priorities of African countries and their development needs. Africa is the continent of the future and a large part of the vision of a shared future for mankind depends on the level of success in Africa.

The evolving realities of international cooperation - both global and region-specific  will define the realization of the vision of a shared global future. No individual country can succeed unilaterally. Unilateralism was thankfully short-lived.

The alternatives of cooperation and partnership already exist and are being tested, with new opportunities constantly opening up. China's vision of a community with a shared future for mankind provides strong incentives as well as valuable practical experience. They must be used for the benefit of all.

From CGTN

(Danilo Turk is former president of Slovenia, president of the World Leadership Alliance - Club de Madrid, and non-resident senior fellow of Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. )
Female giant panda Man Yuan walks to a customized birthday cake and gifts at Xining Panda House in northwest China's Qinghai Province on June 27, 2021. Staff customized cakes and decorated the house for giant panda Man Yuan and her sister Qi Guo as a celebration of their fifth birthday. (Photo/ China News Service: Ma Mingyan)










La Vista police say they have evidence that may place a missing boy outside his apartment the day he disappeared.

Ryan Larsens DNA has been confirmed on an umbrella that someone found on the grounds of the Southfield Apartments, where he lived, Police Chief Bob Lausten said. The umbrella was Ryans, and he was carrying it the day he disappeared, Lausten said. The weather that day was damp, and a trace of rain was recorded at Eppley Airfield, according to the National Weather Service.

The umbrella was turned into police three to four days after Ryan disappeared, Lausten said.

Ryan, who has autism, slipped away from classes at La Vista West Elementary School about noon May 17. His 12th birthday has come and gone since then.

Authorities already had reason to suspect that Ryan had headed home because surveillance video of someone who appeared to be Ryan placed him across the street from his apartment complex about 1:30 p.m. that day. Lausten said Ryan didnt have a key to his apartment, but a family member was expected home about 2 p.m.
The money that Lawrence and Daychief stole was intended to help Native American victims of domestic and sexual violence. The Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General will continue to root out these schemes, to help ensure that victims of crime are given the help that they need, said Douglas B. Bruce, Special Agent in Charge of the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General Denver Field Office.

In court documents filed in the case, the government said that the purpose of the Lame Deer-based Coalition is to help Native American victims of domestic and sexual violence. The Coalition receives funding from the U.S. Department of Justices Office on Violence Against Women, which provides grants for victim services.

The government alleged that while serving as the Coalitions executive director, Lawrence received a travel advance in November 2017. Lawrence claimed $1,826 in travel money for a trip to Las Vegas. Lawrence claimed she drove, which provided more money due to payment for mileage, when in fact, Lawrence flew, which cost significantly less money. Lawrence spent money on a trip to Las Vegas, which was never approved by the OVW, nor would it ever have been approved.
Smith in April 2019 was accused of assaulting two women in Mandan and leading police on a chase to Bismarck. He was arrested after a six-hour standoff at a Bismarck residence. He pleaded guilty to felony aggravated assault and terrorizing in Morton County, and felony fleeing and reckless endangerment in Burleigh County. He is still on probation from that incident, court records show.

The gun shop hasnt had incidents like this since opening at the South Washington location in 2013, owner Darryl Howard said. He turned over video surveillance footage to police.

The vehicle backed into the shop and had to propel over a substantial curb before hitting the storefront, Howard said. Also missing is a wall hanging Howard believes may have fallen into the vehicle.

Howard keeps a record of all the firearms in the shop that includes serial numbers. Transferring the stolen guns through a dealer would be difficult, he said. Its illegal to alter the serial number on a firearm or to buy one on which the serial number has been altered. Some of the more valuable firearms in the shop were bypassed in the burglary, Howard said.

Nothing crazy was stolen, he said.

Police estimated there was $2,500 damage to the shop. That estimate wont dent it, Howard said, adding that a substantial portion of the storefront was damaged. The shop was open for business Monday, however.

Reach Travis Svihovec at 701-250-8260 or Travis.Svihovec@bismarcktribune.com

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SIOUX FALLS, S.D.  South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem announced Tuesday that she will join a growing list of Republican governors sending law enforcement officers to the U.S. border with Mexico.

Noem's announcement that she will send up to 50 South Dakota National Guard troops to Texas comes as the GOP ramps up a political fight with President Joe Biden over border security. The issue has drawn a host of prominent GOP figures: former President Donald Trump was expected to travel to the border this week and Republican governors from Florida, Nebraska and Iowa have all committed to sending law enforcement officers for border security.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott this month announced plans to build more barriers along the border.

Abbott's new push has been criticized as political theater, but he has defended the plan, saying the number of border crossers remains high. The governor said he will use $250 million in state money and crowdsourced financing for the barriers, although the timeline and cost for the push are unclear. It also faces potential court challenges from the federal government.
Theres been years of under-the-radar relations between Israel and the UAE, and we are now enjoying the fruits of the infrastructure of peace that weve built in the last decades, said Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Lior Haiat.

On Wednesday, Lapid will inaugurate Israels consulate in Dubai and visit the site of the World Fair's Expo in Dubai, which will open in October. Lapid is also due to meet with members of the expatriate Jewish community residing in Dubai.

The UAEs move to formalize ties with Israel marked the first time in over two decades that an Arab state had normalized relations with Israel. It paved the path for a similar announcement by Bahrain, and later by Sudan and Morocco in rapid succession.

Soon after its pact with Israel, the UAE scored U.S. authorization for the sale of 50 advanced F-35 fighter jets, which would make it only the second country in the Middle East, after Israel, to acquire them.

Meanwhile, Palestinians across the political spectrum have slammed the UAEs ties with Israel in the absence of peace talks or concessions toward a two-state solution.
The latest North Dakota coronavirus news: testing, test results and vaccines.

Citizen Portal

People who have registered for COVID-19 testing through TestReg.nd.gov now can access results for tests completed after June 10 through a new state service.

The Citizen Portal created by the Health Department and North Dakota Information Technology makes test results available to view, download and print in a single location. To use it, people need to create or use an existing NDLogin to associate it with their registration account. An NDLogin is an account that can be used to access multiple online services provided by state government.

The Citizen Portal provides North Dakotans access to their COVID-19 test result reports when and where they need them, said Nicole Brunelle, the Health Department's chief nursing officer. Being able to access these results for travel, employers, medical procedures, etc., as needed is a service we are excited to make available."
Courts do not spend a lot of time on eviction hearings, LeMay said. The larger counties usually proceed by cattle call and if the defendant/tenant doesnt show up the complaint is granted without questioning the plaintiff.

I would have to estimate that at least 90% of all filings (in the past year) resulted in eviction and also a money judgment, LeMay said. Some judges are taking it upon themselves to say no to evictions, but they are the minority.

LeMay said the low-income clients his organization serves typically dont know how to navigate the court system or understand that there is help available to do so.

If they come to us, we can look at it and do a motion to reopen, if the eviction warrants it, or vacate the judgment, he said.

How affordable is housing in the state's major rental markets?

The average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in North Dakota is $841. According to state data, renters occupy 30% of the state's housing units. A household would have to earn more than $33,000 per year to afford the average rent and utilities for a two-bedroom without paying more than 30% of its income on housing.

Are evictions expected to create a surge in homelessness?

Its hard to say how much homelessness will increase in North Dakota once the CDC moratorium ends. LeMay said there are too little resources being put into a much bigger problem and already evictions and eviction lawsuits are tracking at least as high this year as last year. One indication of the scope of the problem is recent census data showing that about 8,000 state residents were concerned they could be evicted within two months.
Noem, a potential presidential contender, drew a distinction between her decision to send the National Guard and other governors who are sending state police officers.

The border is a national security crisis that requires the kind of sustained response only the National Guard can provide, she said in a statement. We should not be making our own communities less safe by sending our police or Highway Patrol to fix a long-term problem President Bidens Administration seems unable or unwilling to solve.

But Democratic state Sen. Reynold Nesiba said the fact Noem is using a donor to pay for the deployment shows it is not a real priority for the state, but instead gives her political cover. He said he was looking into whether using a private donation to fund the deployment is legal.

This could set a dangerous precedent to allow anonymous political donors to call the governor and dispatch the Guard whenever they want, he said.

The federal government usually pays for National Guard deployments to other states. When troops respond to an in-state emergency, they are paid from state government funds, according to Duke Doering, a historian with the South Dakota National Guard Museum. He said he had never heard of a private donor funding a deployment.
Despite the common threads in the experiences of neurodivergent members of our community, each persons experience is unique. For instance, my husband has ADHD, and he is prone toward vivid and compelling mind-wandering. Meanwhile, some others with the same diagnosis can experience more hyperactivity than attention deficit. In my husbands case, his neurodivergence also involves intense, unstoppable emotional empathy. The notion of neurodiversity encourages us to see his experience as a combination of strengths and challenges instead of just a disorder.

Many other North Dakotans of all ages, genders, races and ethnicities are neurodivergent as well. The diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder and ADHD were originally based on symptoms commonly seen in developing boys. Unfortunately, this has biased our nations understanding of autism and ADHD and has led many neurodivergent girls to escape notice. Many girls and women are neurodivergent, and some of them need accommodations and support. Its key to embrace that neurodivergence can look different in female individuals, and to meet their needs too.
I went to see my doctor the other day for a COVID-delayed physical. Instead of talking about what ails me, he wanted to talk about what ails us. A dystopian country. The Babel of misinformation. The lack of trust in everybody and everything.

And how did Dr. Fauci become the enemy? he said. My doctor is politically moderate and ambidextrously smart. After much steam had been let off, I wanted to say, Enough with American vitals  what about my own?

Trust in institutions  government, the press, religion, big business  is at or near record lows. My own profession, journalism, has been kicked to the cellar of disdain. Almost 40% of Americans have little or no confidence in newspapers, according to Gallups annual surveys  up from 24% in 2000.

But the press, where free speech and all its cacophonous chaos reside, has been a punching bag for some time. More shocking is that about 50% distrust our electoral system, according to a Morning Consult survey. Diminished confidence in elections is among the worst of the many awful legacies of Donald Trump.

But underlying these cynicisms and suspicions is a truly sad development: The United States is becoming a mean country.
The House of Representatives passed the PRO Act, the most significant compulsory union membership expansion bill in decades, by a 225-206 vote on Tuesday. The Protecting the Right to Organize Act, or PRO Act, of 2021 would force millions of workers to pay union dues against their will, cripple freelance work, erase free speech and privacy rights, skew elections in favor of unionization, and radically increase the federal governments intervention into everyday workplace disputes.

Here are the facts you need to know.

What does the PRO Act do?

The 2021 PRO Act amends the National Labor Relations Act to reshape relations between employees, employers, and labor unions. As it stands, the main components of the bill are:

1. Forcing workers to pay union dues by striking down right to work laws nationwide. The PRO Act would deny workers in any unionized workplace the right to choose not to pay a share of union dues  even if they dont want to join the union. The bill contains a so-called fair share provision that mandates all employees in a bargaining unit shall contribute fees to a labor organization for the cost of representation, collective bargaining, contract enforcement, and related expenditures as a condition of employment. Such fees, which often amount to approximately 70% of total union dues, are predictably unpopular. In the first year after the Supreme Court Janus decision, which allowed public sector workers to opt out of such payments, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) lost 98 percent of its agency fee-paying members, and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), lost 94 percent of their agency fee-paying members.

Labor unions justify this practice by citing the free rider problem: They claim that non-unionized employees reap the benefits of union membership without contributing anything in return. However, unions could eliminate this problem by negotiating members only contracts  and non-unionized employees may not feel well-served by the agreement their colleagues union thrust upon them.

The PRO Act would also obliterate federalism by striking down right to work laws from coast to coast, and beyond. A total of 27 states and the U.S. territory of Guam have passed right to work laws. Striking them down would harm economic dynamism and the decisions Americans have made to vote with their feet, as seven of the 10 fastest-growing states in the United States are right-to-work states. The PRO Act represents yet another attack on states rights, said Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, R-Iowa, a right-to-work state. Sweeping, top-down federal legislation seldom holds the right answer for the whole country and always ignores the principle of subsidiarity.

2. Decimating independent contractors, which harms female workers. The PRO Act could hold damaging implications for freelancers and independent contractors. The bill intends to force industries that rely on independent contractors, like Uber and Lyft, to hire workers and give them the same benefits as employees. This will reduce the number of people working as independent contractors  but one new definition could eliminate whole categories of freelance work.

The PRO Act changes the definition of independent contractor by replacing the current definition with an ABC Test that dates back to the 1930s. The central plank says that someone can only be classified as an independent contractor if the service is performed outside the usual course of the business of the employer. But freelance writers engage in the usual course of a websites business by writing; actors engage in the usual course of a movie studios business by acting. Under the bill, publishers would either have to hire every author who produces an article for their outlet  or cut ties with them.

The same dilemma played out when California passed Assembly Bill 5, which limited freelance authors to writing 35 articles per outlet. Golden State voters passed Proposition 22 last November to fix the most glaring problems of the law, but the remedy does not apply to all industries.

The majority of freelancers worry the PRO Act will hurt them, and harming freelancers ability to work impacts society at large. Upworks 2020 Independent Workforce Report found that three out of four independent contractors say they now earn the same amount of money, or more, than they did from their previous employer. And 79% told the Bureau of Labor Statistics that they do not wish to return to working for others as an employee. In fact, more Americans choose to work as independent contractors (6.9% of the U.S. workforce) than willingly join a private-sector union (6.3%).

Furthermore, a war on freelancers is a war on women. Two-thirds of U.S. freelancers across industries are female, according to PayPal. Im facing a painful truth: The man I prayed would become president could sign a piece of legislation that would kill my career as a freelance writer, wrote Judi Ketteler in her recent NBC News op-ed, I backed Biden and the Democrats. But their pro-union bill could kill my career. Possibly foreseeing these problems, the PRO Act includes an amendment from Florida Democrat Stephanie Murphy asking the GAO to study the bills impact on freelancers  but by then, the damage will have been done.

3. Removing free speech and privacy rights from workers. The PRO Act could subject workers to harassment by union organizers on the workplace, by phone, or at their doorstep. The law requires employers to give union organizers a list of employees home addresses, work locations, shifts, job classifications, and, if available to the employer, personal landline and mobile telephone numbers, and work and personal email addresses before a union election. It also deprives workers of requisite information by denying employers right to hold a mandatory meeting informing employees of the consequences of unionization for the firm overall.

4. Tilting elections in favor of labor unions. The PRO Act seeks to increase union membership, which has fallen by half since the 1980s. Only 6.3% of U.S. workers in the private sector choose to belong to a union; the rate is more than five times higher for public-sector unions (which President Franklin D. Roosevelt believed should not exist). The bill would allow federal bureaucrats to set aside an election the union loses if, in their sole discretion, the employer has committed a violation of this Act or otherwise interfered with a fair election. (Emphasis added.) Current law calls for a new election, which the union may lose a second time.

The bill also allows union representatives to select their voters by organizing micro-units instead of asking all employees to vote. Any group of people in a community of interest could form a union for their own department. This could lead to unions cherry-picking workers who would vote to unionize without having to conduct  and lose  a general workplace election. The change would deprive all workers of a voice, even though reduced productivity and artificially higher wages impact every employee.

The bill further skews elections toward labor unions by changing their venue. Currently, union elections take place at the workplace to maximize turnout. The PRO Act allows ballots to be cast offsite, or even by mail. At the request of the labor organization, the Board shall direct that the election be conducted through certified mail, electronically, at the work location, or at a location other than one owned or controlled by the employer, it says. This potentially reduces turnout and opens the door to questioning election results.

Finally, if the union and management fail to agree on negotiations, the bill halts the bargaining process and imposes mandatory arbitration. Outside parties will impose a deal on parties, binding for two years, depriving voters of the right to vote to ratify (or reject) the deals terms.

5. Dramatically increasing federal intervention in workplace disputes  even against innocent parties. The PRO Act expands the economic damages that could be inflicted on corporations if they are ruled to have violated NRLB standards and allows individual employees to sue independently, as well.

Those new penalties could fall on innocent parties. The PRO Act would allow the federal government to punish a franchise for the actions of its franchisees. Under the Obama administration, the National Labor Relations Board attempted to loosen the criteria for joint employer to anyone exercising indirect control as part of 2015s Browning-Ferris Industries of California, Inc. That would allow the government to hold McDonalds responsible for the actions of every one of its managers or franchise owners nationwide. Under the Trump administration, the NLRB overturned the order, replacing it with a final rule reinstating the normative understanding of the franchisee-franchiser relationship last February.

The bill also renders third parties subject to secondary boycotts by unions. To maximize pressure on an employer, union organizers may choose to boycott, or picket, third parties that happen to have a relationship with the employer  including its vendors, suppliers, or stores that carry the employers product.

What is the PRO Acts current status?

The bill, introduced by Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia, passed the House on March 9. Five Republicans  including three co-sponsors  voted in favor of the bill, while one Democrat opposed it. However, the Democrats margin of control in the Senate cannot overcome a Republican filibuster. Clearing the evenly divided Senate requires getting rid of the filibuster for sure, or finding some way around it, said Rep. Andy Levin, D-Mich. Some Democrats have considered including some (but not all) of the PRO Acts measures in a Senate budget reconciliation package, which requires only a majority vote. Senate Democrats have also discussed abolishing the filibuster, as they pledged to do during the election; however, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-WV, has said he would oppose any such measure.

How does the PRO Act fit in with the Biden administrations overall relationship with unions and his labor policy?

Although hes never held a blue collar job, Biden has long deemed himself a union man. Labor unions contributed $27.5 million to Bidens presidential campaign as part of their $65 million in total contributions to Democratic candidates in the 2020 election cycle. Biden was also the top recipient of campaign donations from teachers unions. As president, Biden has rolled out an aggressive, whole-of-government union promotion effort, which may have crossed the lines of legality. He fired Trump appointee Peter Robb from the National Labor Relations Board, although his term did not expire until November. The PRO Act, which Biden has announced he would sign, would be the most ambitious piece of the agenda to date.

All of us deserve to enjoy Americas promise in full  and our nations leaders have a responsibility to deliver it. That starts with rebuilding unions, Biden said. They are critical to strengthening our economic competitiveness.
The ratio between working aged adults and retired individuals in China was 6 to 1 in 2007. That ratio is expected to reduce to 2 to 1 by 2040. Chinese society is now aging faster than it can churn out new workers. []

Last month, China announced that it would allow couples to have up to three children, an increase from the two children allowed per couple previously. Prior to 2016, China had a one-child policy, which was instituted in 1980 and enforced by the National Health and Family Planning Commission. It legally restricted most couples to only one birth, with some notable exceptions. For example, rural families were allowed to have two children if the first was a girl, and urban families were allowed to have a second child if the parents were both single children.

As many nations became concerned with population growth in the 1970s, China initially reacted by initiating a Late, Long, and Few birth control campaign, which cut its fertility rate by half from 1970 to 1976. However, the fertility rate eventually leveled off after this dramatic decrease. With a population still battling food shortages, Deng Xiaoping, who was under pressure to establish legitimacy having recently inherited the leadership of China from Mao Zedong, formalized and introduced the one-child policy in order to control the quickly growing population of China , which was almost 1 billion at the time. The problem with Chinas draconian population control policy is that it attacks the human persons intrinsic dignity based on his identity as a creature made in the image and likeness of God. This approach also fails to alleviate impoverished conditions. As Acton Senior Research Fellow Michael Mattheson Miller points out, such thinking is based on the fallacy that the economy is a zero-sum game, in which more people means less wealth to go around. But wealth can grow  and more humans can equal more wealth creation and more poverty alleviation. Theres a reason God commanded Christians to be fruitful and multiply (Genesis 1:28).

By enforcing the one-child policy, the Chinese government committed various human rights violations, including forced late-term abortions and sterilizations. In addition to violating the dignity of the human person in these ways, several demographic issues have arisen. For instance, gender imbalance emerged due to the preference for sons, which led to an increase in female babies being killed, abandoned, and placed in orphanages. In 2016, there were 33.59 million more men than women in China. Oftentimes, many families who violated the one-child policy had undocumented children, creating struggles for these children in obtaining an education or job. The fertility rate, birth rate, and rate of natural increase (the birth rate subtracted by the death rate) all declined as a result of Chinas policy. This explains Chinas rapidly aging population. Chinas median age was recorded at 32 years in 2005 but is estimated to be about 45 years by the year 2050. This has disastrous implications for the Chinese workforce. The ratio between working aged adults and retired individuals in China was 6 to 1 in 2007. That ratio is expected to reduce to 2 to 1 by 2040. These statistics give an indication of the possible reasons China is now allowing couples to have up to three children.

A Chinese Communist Party governing body said on May 31 that implementing the [three child] policy and its relevant supporting measures will help improve Chinas population structure, actively respond to the aging population, and preserve the countrys human resource advantage. Chinese society is now aging faster than it can churn out new workers, threatening bankruptcy of state pension funds. The demographics have shifted so much that the countrys own Central Bank has recommended allowing the Chinese people to have as many children as they want. According to some reports, this may be official law as soon as 2025.

Chinas grand population experiment has proved an exercise in the futility of massive state overreach into peoples lives, which inevitably yield unintended consequences worse than the problems big government intended to solve in the first place.
"The delinquency rates we're seeing due to Covid are enormously higher than what we saw in the Great Recession," she said.

While a typical year sees 1,400 to 1,600 new foreclosure cases filed in court in Erie County, there were only 500 in 2020 because of the moratorium.

"Not only do we expect to see an increase because of Covid, but there would also be the backlog of cases hitting the courts at the same time," Lockhart said.

Then there likely will be a second wave, stemming from tax foreclosures, that will come in a separate surge later, because municipalities can't file papers until a homeowner is at least two years late.

"Next year, were going to see a lot of foreclosures filed, and thats when well see a lot people leaving their homes," said Jordan L. Zeranti, managing attorney at the law center for the Zombies Initiative.

Kearns said he plans to ask the courts to create a special division just to deal with the anticipated flood of filings.

"This is why we have to be proactive," Kearns said. "We want to get these municipalities prepared to use the tools, to make sure theyre not caught off guard."

Zombies
Fisher hopes to spark more robust Catholic ministries across Western New York, while also shoring up the finances of area churches and planning for a continuing decrease in the number of priests available for celebrating Masses and presiding at weddings and funerals.

To help accomplish those goals, a diocese task force charged with leading an effort known as the Road to Renewal released a draft proposal that would group 161 parishes into 36 families.

The groupings, based mostly on geographic proximity, are just recommendations and may change as church leaders seek more input, Fisher said in a recent interview with The News.

Nothing is in concrete at this point, said Fisher.

Fisher said he has not prescribed any church or school closings.

Ultimately, though, he wants Catholics to think beyond the boundaries of their own parishes in figuring out how to best operate.
"People are fearful for the future of the city, people are fearful for the future of their families, people are fearful for the future of their children," he added.

The mayor started the next portion of his campaign with the promise of an "all star team" that will "knock on every door" in the city, raise enough money to compete and even engage in the debates he refused during the primary. And in a sign of the divisive campaign that may lie ahead, he was joined on the stage by three Council members  Christopher P. Scanlon of South, Ulysees O. Wingo Sr. of Masten and Joseph Golombek Jr. of North. Former Mayor Anthony M. Masiello also stood with Brown.

Parties, progressive groups to counter any business-backed write-in for Brown Following a push by Buffalo's business community to urge Mayor Byron W. Brown to wage a write-in campaign for November's general election, supporters of India B. Walton say they can play that game, too.

Still, the mayor starts his effort with opposition from his own Democratic Party, as Erie County Chairman Jeremy J. Zellner again made it clear the organization will back Walton.

"Mayor Brown is well within his rights to pursue a write-in candidacy, and we are grateful for his many years of service to this community," Zellner said in a Monday statement. "But the Democratic Party listens to the will of Democratic voters, and today India Walton is our candidate for mayor of the city of Buffalo."

In her own statement, Walton hinted at the course she may navigate in coming weeks.
The biggest challenge of the year was not knowing how the pandemic was affecting children, she said.

While more than 77% of New York teachers are women, about 27% of superintendents are women, according to the New York State Council of School Superintendents. Moritz is part of the council's women's initiative encouraging women to move forward in administrative roles, a role she plans to continue.

Rabey has spent 29 years in education, the last 11 as superintendent in Depew.

He noted in his letter of resignation that he oversaw the implementation of more than $68 million in capital projects and the transformation of health insurance to save millions of dollars. Meanwhile, students now are offered 10 Advanced Placement courses and 19 college credit courses and every student has access to an iPad or Chromebook with wireless service on nearly all school buses.

He was superintendent of Lake Shore Central for five years. Rabey's career also included being a special-education teacher at Pioneer Central in Yorkshire, principal of Warsaw Central High School and director of secondary education in the Lancaster Central School District.

Rabey is not getting out of the field of education.
The rebound has begun at Explore & More  The Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Museum.

A $250,000 grant arrived in May from KeyBank in partnership with the First Niagara Foundation, jumpstarting the museum's recovery from its pandemic woes.

+3 Hit hard by pandemic, Canalside attractions seek help The Buffalo and Erie County Naval & Military Park and the Explore & More Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Children's Museum are running out of money.

"It was a game-changer for us," said Michelle Urbanczyk, Explore & More's CEO.

The money allowed the museum to hire four educational staffers and fill four administrative positions.

The museum is also using the money to extend its days of operation to Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. And the museum is expected to open Tuesdays beginning July 12 for campers and other groups, with Sunday openings expected later in the summer.

$500,000 grant announced for Explore & More Children's Museum Explore & More Childrens Museum is now $500,000 closer to meeting its fundraising goal for the new museum coming to Canalside. KeyBank and its partner, First Niagara Foundation, on Thursday announced the donation toward construction of the four-story museum. It is through the generosity of KeyBank and many others that this community will see this remarkable facility completed this

In January, Urbanczyk warned that Explore & More could run out of money by March, saying, "we're desperate at this point." The pandemic prompted the museum to slash more than half of its staff, open the museum only three days a week and put in place Covid-19 safety protocols as attendance plummeted.

But the museum, which raises 98% of its funds, kept its doors open with the help of the federal government's Paycheck Protection Program and local businesses.
The City of Niagara Falls wants a judge to prevent a state arbitrator from ruling on the city's enforcement of a residency law for high-ranking police officers.

A captain and four lieutenants were charged this year with violating a city law requiring employees to live within city limits, according to court papers.

Afterward, two retired, two moved into the city and one accepted a demotion to police officer.

On May 17, the Niagara Falls Captains and Lieutenants Association sent notice to the city and to the state Public Employment Relations Board demanding binding arbitration on the matter for the officers who retired or moved into the city.

The city responded June 8 with a lawsuit against the union, seeking a court order preventing state arbitration.

"It's not a negotiable item. It's the law," Mayor Robert M. Restaino said Monday.

The city's contract with the Niagara Falls Police Club, the union for police officers, exempts its members from the residency law if they were hired before September 2016.

However, there is no such exemption in the city's contract with the Niagara Falls Captains and Lieutenants Association, commonly referred to as the "brass union."
Durst said the last time he spoke with his brother was in 1999 and he had last seen him in Texas at a nephews wedding in 2001.

About two weeks after the wedding, Robert Durst fatally shot neighbor Morris Black in Galveston, where he had gone to hide out from New York authorities after they reopened the investigation into Kathie Dursts disappearance.

Robert Durst was acquitted of murder after testifying that he killed Black in self-defense. He served jail time for chopping up Black's body and tossing it out to sea and for jumping bail.

While he was on the lam in that case, he showed up outside his brothers Westchester home, Douglas Durst said he learned.

Robert Durst was later recorded in a jail phone call in essence plotting to kill his brother, Douglas, Lewin said in arguing that jurors should hear about him showing up at his brother's home.

He has compared the way he feels about Douglas to the way he felt about Kathie, Lewin said. Our argument and position is that is what he did, he killed her.

Robert Durst twice showed up outside his brother's house in 2008, including once when he was wearing a ski mask and fled after a security guard drew his weapon, Lewin said.
But Democratic state Sen. Reynold Nesiba said the fact Noem is using a donor to pay for the deployment shows it is not a real priority for the state, but instead gives her political cover. He said he was looking into whether using a private donation to fund the deployment is legal.

This could set a dangerous precedent to allow anonymous political donors to call the governor and dispatch the Guard whenever they want, he said.

The federal government usually pays for National Guard deployments to other states. When troops respond to an in-state emergency, they are paid from state government funds, according to Duke Doering, a historian with the South Dakota National Guard Museum. He said he had never heard of a private donor funding a deployment.

This kind of floors me, when youre talking about a private donor sending the Guard, that doesnt even make sense to me, Doering said.

The South Dakota National Guard is expected to deploy for 30 to 60 days, Noem said, while the other states involved are sending law enforcement officers for roughly two-week stints.
The surge in homicides and gun violence this year, in Buffalo and in cities across the country, sends a clear message: We need police. The men and women who sign up to wear a badge and fight crime are societys best hope for protecting ourselves from law-breakers who have little regard for human life.

Police are not perfect. Some hide behind the badge to act irresponsibly or criminally. Officers need to be trained properly and held accountable for their actions on the job. But the defunding the police movement tends to paint all officers with the same brush. Creating broad and cynical stereotypes  whether about police or people of certain races, ethnicities, religions or social classes  is always unfair and counterproductive.

President Biden convened a meeting at the White House last week to address the national spike in homicides. Biden announced a plan to crack down on illegal gun sales and to allow localities to use $350 billion from the American Rescue Plan to hire more police officers and invest in new law enforcement technologies. Thats a fitting response to what is happening on the countrys city streets.

Homicides set historic highs across the country in 2020, caused by myriad factors. The onset of the coronavirus pandemic meant cutbacks in community policing, with fewer officers able to walk the streets.
I am an actively engaged Catholic and am opposed to abortion. But I strongly object to the position taken by the U.S. Catholic Bishops at their recent gathering to deny the Eucharist to Catholics in public office who violate church teachings. My objection has nothing to do with abortion, but everything to do with excluding and punishing those who are judged to be in error.

I have found in life that WWJD? or What would Jesus do? is a good guide to living in the world and being in relationship with others. It seems very clear to me that Jesus did not turn away those who were not traditionally observant Jews or those who were sinners. All were welcomed to his table, perhaps particularly sinners. At the Last Supper, Jesus said to his disciples, This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me. It is hard to imagine that he would have withheld that offer for bad behavior.

Imagine how Catholics who come to mass only at Christmas and Easter would feel if they were told that they could not receive the Eucharist without seeking absolution because they violated church teaching that attendance at weekly mass is an obligation.
Dr. Catherine McCuaig

New President of Canadian Dermatology Association

New President of Canadian Dermatology Association

OTTAWA, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Canadian Dermatology Association (CDA) is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Catherine C. McCuaig to the position of CDA President, effective June 28, 2021.



Dr. McCuaig brings to the Association her impressive leadership experience as seen in the Society for Dermatology of Montreal as president for nine years, chair of the Atlantic Dermatology meeting 2014, co-chair of the Canadian Lymphedema Framework, and fellowship director Sainte Justine UHC since 2013. In addition, Dr. McCuaig has spearheaded two multidisciplinary clinics in epidermolysis bullosa and lymphedema for children in Montreal. Dr. McCuaig has also authored over one hundred peer reviewed articles as well as 10 dermatology textbook chapters.

Dr. McCuaig earned her medical doctorate at Queens University, Kingston. She completed her residency training at University of Toronto, dermatology at McGill University, with a pediatric fellowship in dermatology and laser under Dr. James Rasmussen at the University of Michigan. Dr. McCuaig is currently a pediatric dermatologist at Sainte-Justine University Hospital Center, and a clinical professor at the University of Montreal.

As President, Dr. McCuaig plans to focus on enhancing the life long dermatology medical specialty training in Canada. I will work to ensure that education for residents and practicing dermatologists remains at the forefront of our Association.

Through the pandemic, we have learned how privileged we are to live in Canada, thanks to its public health care system, and governments that aid those in needEvermore, we have learned how important it is to support each other, and grow through the exchange of ideas, practical tips, and knowledge in dermatology, said Dr. McCuaig. In addition, I will work hard to help the CDA be more active on social media platforms, as well as help to promote our specialty to our colleagues, media, and Canadian public.

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Dr. McCuaig begins as President, Canadian Dermatology Association for a one-year term, effective June 28, 2021.

ABOUT THE CDA

The Canadian Dermatology Association, founded in 1925, represents Canadian certified dermatologists. The association provides easy access to a reliable source of medical knowledge on dermatology. CDA exists to advance the science and art of medicine and surgery related to the care of the skin, hair and nails; provide continuing professional development for its members; support and advance patient care; provide public education on sun protection and other aspects of skin health; and promote a lifetime of healthier skin, hair and nails. By doing so, CDA informs and empowers both medical professionals and the Canadian public. To learn more about what the work CDA does visit dermatology.ca and join the conversation on twitter.com/CdnDermatology, facebook.com/CdnDermatology, or instagram.com/canadiandermatologyassociation/.

MEDIA CONTACT

Sandra M. Hamway, Interim Manager, Marketing & Communications

media@dermatology.ca

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/e25c6d89-0f79-4b12-83ec-d849e1535bc0








It's been more than one month since Tina Proulx received a second dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. But while other fully vaccinated Canadians venture out from their pandemic cocoons, the double-lung transplant recipient mostly stays put.

Proulx, who takes medication that keeps her body from rejecting her new lungs while suppressing her immune system, isn't sure how much protection she gets from two jabs of a COVID-19 vaccine.

But she hopes there'll be a way to boost that immunity in the future.

Recent small studies from the United States and France suggest that while regular, two-dose series of mRNA vaccines don't produce many COVID-19 antibodies in organ transplant recipients, a third dose can elevate antibody levels in some, potentially offering higher levels of protection. Toronto's University Health Network is conducting its own randomized trial study, with results expected next month.

Canada's National Advisory Committee on Immunization currently recommends a two-dosed series, preferably of an mRNA vaccine, for immunosuppressed individuals. But the agency said in a recent statement it "continues to closely monitor emerging evidence."

Proulx said just knowing scientists are evaluating how vaccines work in immunocompromised people gives her hope. And she wouldn't hesitate to get an extra dose if Health Canada authorized it.

"I'll take a third, a fourth, a fifth, I'll take as many doses as they need me to," the Ottawa resident said. "Anything to get that same confidence everybody else has."

Proulx, now 38, was diagnosed at 19 with pulmonary hypertension, a condition in which blood vessels in the lungs are narrowed, causing the heart to work harder to circulate blood. She lived with the condition for years before receiving a new set of lungs in 2015.

When COVID-19 first started circulating last year, Proulx's doctor told her there was a 30 to 50 per cent chance she wouldn't survive if she caught the virus. And while vaccines have helped slow transmission, Proulx said knowing she's likely not as protected as others gives her "a lot of concerns."

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Dr. Deepali Kumar, a transplant infectious disease physician at UHN, said that's a worry facing many of her patients, who need to be more cautious until scientists get a clearer understanding of vaccine effectiveness among the immunocompromised.

The U.S. study, which involved just 30 participants who received different vaccines at varying intervals, showed eight had no antibodies after two doses, but they developed some following a third shot. Six others who had some antibody activity after a two-dose series, saw those levels amplified by an extra jab.

The French study, which doled out Pfizer-BioNTech on a set schedule, saw boosts in antibody prevalence among 67 of 99 transplant recipients one month after their third dose.

While the studies show promise, Kumar said more research is needed.

UHN's trial involves 120 participants, 60 of which received a third Moderna vaccine two months after dose 2, while the other half got a placebo. Kumar hopes the systematic approach to UHN's study will offer additional insight.

But, she added, antibody levels don't necessarily reflect how protected a person is.

"That's the big gap," Kumar said.

"It would make sense that if antibodies are lower, protection is also lower. But one of the problems is ... we don't have an antibody level to say, 'OK this level will protect you.' We don't have that number."

COVID-19 vaccines also seem to generate T-cell responses, Kumar said, and those, like antibodies, help stave off the virus.

T-cell levels are harder to measure, said Steven Kerfoot, an immunologist with Western University, and most studies won't include them.

"A real immune response is large and complex," he said. "Your T-cells are different than my T-cells. So it's not a simple test."

Kerfoot said that while the third-dose studies showed boosted antibodies among some participants, it didn't work for everyone. That means many will likely still be susceptible even after a potential third dose.

Proulx said organ transplant recipients have always had to rely on those around them to protect themselves, noting that COVID-19 community transmission drops as more people are vaccinated.

While Proulx's life hasn't changed much since she got her second dose last month  she and husband Joel still rely on curbside pick-up rather than venturing into stores or restaurants  she's looking forward to being able to see friends and hug her mom, which she hasn't done in 16 months.

As provinces start to reopen, Proulx said she's not as concerned as she was when previous lockdowns were lifted.

"It has been very, very difficult watching other people move on when we've basically been in Phase 1 (of restrictions) this entire time," she said. "But there are a lot of people vaccinated now and if we can control the spread amongst everybody else, that puts transplant patients in a better place."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 28, 2021.

Melissa Couto Zuber, The Canadian Press
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Thanh Kim Vu was watching a TED Talk about how it was difficult to get connected to politics and government. Undeterred, she did a quick Google search for how she could get more involved in her community and landed on the application for the Civic Leadership Academy (CLA). "I'm so glad I did, too," she said.

Thanh was part of cohort four of the CLA, a free course designed for residents who are ready to take the next step in being community leaders and improving the quality of life in all of Charlotte's neighborhoods. During this academy, participants grow in their leadership, analyze issues using data, connect with decision makers and other Charlotte leaders, and learn how to make a difference in their communities.

For Thanh, one of the most interesting sessions was focused on Charlotte history. "I'm a native Charlottean, but learning about Brooklyn was new to me. Brooklyn was a thriving Black community with families of all socioeconomic backgrounds until urban renewal destroyed it all for the beginnings of uptown. This class opens the discussion of gentrification and affordable housing that continues today," she said.

One of the biggest takeaways from the CLA for Thanh was that part of making our city a better place is working together and sometimes asking hard questions. "We have a lot of people, organizations, communities that want to do better and improve our city. I learned that we can't do everything on our own and we need each other, and that's okay. I learned that learning starts with sometimes uncomfortable questions and discussions," she said.

Thanh decided to take what she learned in the CLA and put it into practice by joining both the Keep Charlotte Beautiful (KCB) board and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Community Relations Committee (CRC). "I applied for KCB as I've always been interested in sustainability, and I actually participated in a composting pilot program through the city. I applied for CRC because, after all of the violence and hate crimes against Asian Americans, I wanted to be a part of a group that works towards ensuring everyone knows they are welcome in this city. I hope I can do well in both roles to improve conditions for our environment and for our community," she said.

For those that want to become more civically engaged, the first step is learning where you can start, Thanh emphasized. "If you are interested in getting involved, be open to learning! There are so many programs and different organizations, such as CLT Aviation Academy, CMPD Citizens' Academy, Catawba Riverkeeper, the Charlotte Young Professional Mixer, Share Charlotte, or even your local HOA," she said. "Maybe it's as small as picking up litter in your neighborhood on your daily walks or learning how to properly recycle It can be easy to think our actions do not have a direct impact on change. That's why I encourage folks to join other groups or organizations and attend learning events."

Applications for the next round of the Civic Leadership Academy are open until August 1, 2021. The Fall 2021 CLA will be held virtually  participants must commit to missing no more than three sessions. To review the workshop schedule or to apply, click here.

Applications must be received by August 1, and sessions begin September 21. For additional information, contact Philip Freeman at philip.freeman@charlottenc.gov or 704-336-1303.






ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP)  The man who killed five people at a Maryland newspaper was delusional and believed the state's judicial system was conspiring with the Capital Gazette to persecute him and ruin his life, his attorney told a jury Tuesday, trying to make the case that Jarrod Ramos is not criminally responsible for the crimes due to mental illness.

Hours after hearing that, jurors saw photographs of the dead from shotgun blasts in their own newsroom. They saw Wendi Winters collapsed in a hallway after she had just charged at Ramos with a trash can. They saw Gerald Fischman crumpled under his desk. They saw Rob Hiaasen dead in his cubicle. They also saw John McNamara dead at the back of the newsroom. Rebecca Smith died later at a hospital.

Jurors also saw a security video of the attack, as well as an officer's body camera video, showing Ramos emerging from under a desk in the newsroom and police officers later leading him out.

Three years and a day after the attack on the newspaper, the second phase of a trial started for Ramos, who pleaded guilty  but not criminally responsible  to the June 28, 2018 slayings. The plea is Maryland's version of an insanity defense.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 29)  President Rodrigo Duterte did not mince words in challenging Senator Manny Pacquiao to expose government offices and officials allegedly involved in corruption.

Duterte took offense at Pacquaio's claim that the current administration was more corrupt than its predecessor.

"I'm challenging him. Ituro mo ang opisina na corrupt at ako na ang bahala. Within one week may gawin ako. Maglista ka, Pacquiao, na sinasabi mong two times kaming corrupt. Ilista mo yung mga tao at opisina at dapat nilista mo na noon at ibigay mo sa akin," he said during his weekly televised briefing on Monday.

[Translation: I'm challenging him. Point to the corrupt offices and I will take charge. I'll do something within a week... Make a list, Pacquiao, because you're saying we're twice as corrupt. List the individuals and the office. You should have made a list before and given it to me.]

Duterte said previously, Pacquiao had nothing but praises for him as President. He dared the senator to prove the corruption allegations as true, because if not, Duterte said, it would prove that Pacquiao was just politicking.

The President also warned Pacquiao of what he would do if the lawmaker failed to prove his allegations.

"If you fail to do that, I will campaign against you because you are not doing your duty. Do it, because if not I will just tell the people, do not vote for Pacquiao because he is a liar," said Duterte.

Duterte earlier called out Pacquiao after the latter's comments on the West Philippine Sea.

"Apparently, this guy has a very shallow knowledge," the President had said.

Both politicians belong to the PDP-Laban party, with Duterte as party chairman and Pacquiao as president.

READ: PDP-Laban adopts resolution urging President Duterte to run for VP in 2022
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 29)  Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque said there is no policy yet on arming civilians, an idea floated last week by President Rodrigo Duterte to help police in crime prevention.

He is open to the idea pero wala pa naman pong finality. At siguro the best view expressed so far is the view of PNP Chief (Philippine National Police chief Gen. Guillermo) Eleazar which I share, that kailangan intindihin naman natin na kapag ang mga volunteer groups ay mayroong banta sa buhay nila eh mayroon din silang karapatan na depensahan ang kanilang mga buhay, Roque said in a briefing.

[Translation: He is open to the idea, but theres no finality yet. And maybe the best view expressed so far is that of PNP Chief Gen. Guillermo Eleazar which I share, that we need to understand that when there are threats to the lives of the volunteer groups, they also have the right to defend themselves.]

He also assured that if it will become a policy there will be a corresponding training to be given to everyone. But for now, Roque said, it is speculative to discuss the matter.

Eleazar earlier said arming civilian organizations to help in the fight against crime is meant to protect the groups and not meant to encourage vigilantism.

However, a few lawmakers have opposed the idea. Senator Panfilo Lacson earlier warned that issuing firearms to civilian groups may only result in more crime, while Senate Minority Leader Franklin Drilon noted that what can solve the countrys growing problems on criminality and its main drivers -- poverty and hunger - is good governance, not guns.

Speaking to CNN Philippines The Final Word, Commission on Human Rights Spokesperson Atty. Jacqueline Ann de Guia said there is no need to implement such an idea since the PNP is competent enough to do its job.

We believe highly that the Philippine National Police is more than competent to do their job not to unduly burden citizens who may be well-intentioned, but at the end are not qualified, not properly trained, not properly screened, she explained, adding that one cannot expect civilians to learn overnight all protocols in the proper handling of firearms.

To prevent crime, De Guia said the police should be heard and must show the public that they can serve and protect the people. She added that if authorities think they lack the numbers, they should do more hiring instead of giving the responsibility to civilians.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 29)  Travelers who have been fully vaccinated overseas against COVID-19 shall undergo shorter quarantine period effective July, the countrys pandemic task force has announced.

In its latest resolution, the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases said individuals who have completed their COVID-19 vaccination abroad and have stayed exclusively within green countries or low-risk ones 14 days prior to their arrival will be subject to a seven-day facility-based quarantine.

They will be strictly monitored for symptoms while under a week-long quarantine, according to the IATF, then asked to self-monitor for another seven days. Passengers must undergo RT-PCR testing on their fifth day under quarantine in the accredited facility, the task force added.

Kung sakaling magnegatibo, kailangan pa ring kumpletuhin ang pitong araw ng facility quarantine," IATF and Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque pointed out. "At kung sakali namang magpositibo, kinakailangang sundin ang prescribed isolation protocols.

[Translation: Should they test negative, they still need to complete the seven-day facility quarantine. And should they test positive, they need to observe the prescribed isolation protocols.]

The testing requirement will undergo review 30 days after its implementation, added Roque.

After seven days of facility quarantine, travelers will receive a quarantine certificate from the Bureau of Quarantine wherein their vaccination status is also indicated.

The IATF earlier shortened the mandatory quarantine for fully vaccinated inbound travelers who have received COVID-19 shots in the Philippines. However, they were only supposed to get swabbed if they exhibited flu-like symptoms during their seven-day stay in a quarantine facility.

Roque said fully vaccinated passengers, whether they finished their inoculation here or abroad, must always have with them proof of vaccination status.

For those who got fully vaccinated in the Philippines, they must bring their vaccination cards which should be verified prior to their departure from the country.

They must also secure a certificate from the Department of Information and Communications Technologys certification vaccination record portal, or the city health officer who administered the full vaccination.

Meanwhile, individuals who completed their inoculation outside the country must present official documents stating they have been vaccinated.

The traveler must either get the documents validated with the Philippine Overseas Labor Office, or present an international certificate of vaccination.

The documents must then be presented to the dedicated Bureau of Quarantine representative in the Department of Transportations one-stop shop for re-verification, added Roque.
(CNN)  A federal court has dismissed the Federal Trade Commission's antitrust complaint against Facebook, saying the agency had failed to provide evidence for its claim that the social media giant holds a monopoly in social networking.

In an opinion published Monday afternoon, Judge James Boasberg of the US District Court for the District of Columbia held that the FTC "failed to plead enough facts to plausibly establish ... that Facebook has monopoly power in the market for Personal Social Networking (PSN) Services."

Boasberg wrote that the FTC did not do enough to back up its assertion that Facebook holds a "60%-plus" share of the social media market.

Facebook's stock ended Monday up more than 4% following the news, pushing the company's market value above $1 trillion for the first time.

The FTC had alleged that Facebook violated the nation's anti-monopoly laws by acquiring nascent startups like Instagram that it perceived as a threat to its dominance, and by preventing others from plugging into Facebook's services.

"We are pleased that today's decisions recognize the defects in the government complaints filed against Facebook," the company said in a statement.

The FTC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The decision is a setback for antitrust regulators who had asked for a breakup of the company. But while the judge dismissed the FTC's complaint, he declined to dismiss the case overall, saying the issues with the FTC's lawsuit could be addressed if the agency filed an amended complaint.

Boasberg's ruling  a respite for Facebook in the midst of constant scrutiny from regulators around the globe  immediately prompted further calls for Congress to update the nation's antitrust laws.

"Today's development in the FTC's case against Facebook shows that antitrust reform is urgently needed," tweeted Rep. Ken Buck, a leading Republican on the House Judiciary Committee. "Congress needs to provide additional tools and resources to our antitrust enforcers to go after Big Tech companies engaging in anticompetitive conduct."

Last week, the committee advanced a package of landmark bills that would empower antitrust regulators at the FTC and the Justice Department to break up Big Tech platforms such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google.

Critics of Facebook, including House lawmakers in a groundbreaking report last summer, had accused Facebook of targeting small startups such as Instagram early on in those companies' lifecycles, believing they were a threat to Facebook's power. That so-called "buy-or-bury" strategy allegedly helped Facebook maintain its status as a top-tier social networking company.

In a separate decision, Boasberg dismissed entirely a similar antitrust suit against Facebook brought by dozens of state governments, saying they waited too long to challenge Facebook's Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions, which were completed in 2012 and 2014, respectively.

"We are reviewing this decision and considering our legal options," said a spokesperson for New York Attorney General Letitia James, one of the leading state AGs on that case.

In their lawsuits, the states and the FTC had also alleged that Facebook acted anti-competitively by denying competing apps access to the social media giant's platform. Boasberg wrote in Monday's opinion that there is nothing illegal about Facebook having a policy of preventing interoperability with third-party apps. He acknowledged that while Facebook could possibly have violated antitrust law in executing its policy, the lawsuits came too late to be applicable.

This story was first published on CNN.com, "Facebook hits $1 trillion market cap after federal court dismisses FTC antitrust complaint."
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 28)  A factory worker in Valenzuela City received his two-day salary in centavo coins.

The worker sought help from Valenzuela City Mayor Rex Gatchalian on Monday after getting his 1,056 pay in five and ten centavo coins.

Gatchalian met the worker and the representative of Next Green Factory to discuss the complaint. The owner of the company will be summoned in their next meeting as he is out of town.

Mayor REX reiterates that industry workers should be treated accordingly and not be demoralized, the Twitter post of the Valenzuela City government reads.

In a separate statement, Gatchalian said he will face the owner of the company on Wednesday together with the worker who complained to him.

"Sending a company representative won't cut it for me. I'll see to it that we get to the bottom of this "cruel and unusual" labor practice and deal with it accordingly," Gatchalian said.

According to a circular issued by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas in 2006, coins in denomination of 1 to 5 can be accepted as payment in amount not exceeding 1,000.00.

Coins in denomination of 1 centavo, 5 centavos, 10 centavos, and 25 centavos can be used to pay an amount not exceeding 100.00, the circular added.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 28)  The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology on Monday warned against the volcanic smog seen over Taal Volcano, which may cause health problems to nearby residents.

Phivolcs said the volcanic smog or vog  a type of air pollution  is a result of the volcanos continued emission of sulfur dioxide gas.

It said it observed high levels of such gas emission from the Taal main crater over the past two days, along with steam-rich plumes that have gone up as high as three kilometers.

The vog, Phivolcs explained, can cause irritation of the eyes, throat and respiratory tract. The severity of the effects depends on the gas concentrations and duration of exposure, it added.

Should SO2 (sulfur dioxide) gas emission continue at the same rate or increase, and atmospheric conditions promote the formation of vog, communities surrounding Taal Lake are advised to take necessary precautions, it said.

The agency noted those with health conditions, such as asthma, lung disease and heart disease, as well as the elderly, pregnant women and children should exercise a heightened level of caution.

If exposure to the vog cannot be avoided, the public is advised to take the following steps:

- Limit your exposure. Avoid outdoor activities, stay indoors, and shut doors and windows to block out vog.

- Protect yourself. Cover nose, ideally with an N95 face mask.

- Drink plenty of water to reduce any throat irritation or constriction.

- If belonging to the particularly sensitive group of people above, watch over yourself and seek help from a doctor or barangay health unit if needed.

- If serious effects are experienced, call the doctor or the barangay health unit.

Phivolcs also reminded that the Alert Level 2 (or increased unrest) prevails over Taal Volcano. This means the threat of sudden steam or gas-driven explosions and lethal accumulations or expulsion of volcanic gas may occur anytime and threaten areas within the Taal Volcano Island.

As such, the agency said venturing into the island must remain strictly prohibited.

RELATED: Phivolcs warns of possible Taal Volcano eruptions but says not as serious as January 2020 incident
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 29)  The government continues to monitor 21 areas outside Metro Manila which are still considered places "of concern" due to rising COVID-19 cases.

The Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases announced on Tuesday that 21 areas will remain under modified enhanced community quarantine until July 15.

READ: NCR, Rizal, Bulacan to remain under GCQ 'with some restrictions' until July 15

These include cities of Iloilo, Cagayan de Oro, and Butuan which have been logging high hospital bed occupancy rates over the past weeks.

Speaking to CNN Philippines' The Source, Health Undersecretary Rosario Vergeire said that the situation in areas under MECQ will be further monitored so the local governments can get the assistance that they need.

Vergeire noted that more than 30 cities and municipalities in Visayas, Mindanao, Central Luzon and Southern Luzon were flagged last week as "areas of concern," but healthcare utilization rate has gradually improved in some of those places.

Meanwhile, she stressed that the situation in Metro Manila remains fragile, and the capital region must return to its pre-surge level of only over 300 COVID-19 cases from the current 666 daily average.

"Ang kundisyon sa NCR is still very fragile. Hindi ito ang oras para maging complacent tayo dahil nakikita na nating bumababa ang mga kaso. Napaka porous ng ating borders, ng interzonal, and we know that cases are increasing in other parts of the country," Vergeire said.

[Translation: The condition in NCR is still very fragile. This is not the time to be complacent just because we see the cases declining. Our interzonal borders remain porous and we know that cases are increasing in other parts of the country.]

In its report on Monday, the OCTA Research group said Metro Manila has a 4.83 average daily attack rate, with 36% hospital bed occupancy, 45% bed occupancy, and 32% mechanical ventilator occupancy, "all within safe levels."

The attack rate, which tracks the day-to-day increase or decrease in cases, means less than five people per 100,000 population become ill after specified exposure to the virus. OCTA said this puts Metro Manila under the "moderate-low risk area" classification.

Metro Manila, Rizal and Bulacan will remain under general community quarantine "with some restrictions," while Laguna and Cavite will be under GCQ but "with heightened restrictions" until mid-July.

The ban on travelers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates has also been extended until mid-July while the Philippines monitors the threat of the highly transmissible Delta coronavirus variant.

Vergeire advised the public to comply with health standards and get their COVID-19 shots if they are eligible, to prevent the spread of the virus.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 29)  The Department of Health has recommended ways vaccination sites can improve their operations to prevent a repeat of a lapse in a COVID-19 inoculation procedure recently in Makati City.

Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire told CNN Philippines' The Source that the incident involving a volunteer nurse who failed to push the contents of a syringe into the arm of a vaccinee in Makati was "purely a human error." The local government says it has conducted a probe into the matter.

RELATED: DOH confirms, probes COVID-19 vaccination negligence

"We want to emphasize that although this is a human error, we still cannot justify this and this cannot happen again," Vergeire said.

"Amin pong napagbigyang abiso ang ating local governments and our vaccination sites, our healthcare workers vaccinating that they should always be cautious, they should always be aware, kailangan laging chine-check ang bawat step ng proseso," she stressed.

[Translation: We already advised local governments and our vaccination sites, our healthcare workers vaccinating that they should always be cautious, they should always be aware, always check every step of the process.]

Vergeire said an overseer must be assigned to monitor all the activities in each vaccination site. Inventories must also be done at the end of the day to check if all doses were used.

Work shifts could also be limited to just eight hours so vaccinators get enough rest.

Vaccinators can also show the contents of the syringe to the vaccinee before and after the inoculation to prove that the doses have been used up, she said.

Vergeire, however, advised the public not to assume that there will always be malpractice in vaccination sites. But everyone is encouraged to report similar incidents so they can "investigate and immediately rectify."

"Let's not crucify the healthcare worker, nagkakamali tayo lahat (we all make mistakes)," she said.

"Although these errors are non-justifiable, 'wag nating isiping nangyayari sa lahat ng babakunahan (let us not assume that this happens to all who will get their shot)," she added.

Robert Mendoza, who heads the Alliance of Health Workers, called on the government to also address the plight of "demoralized" health workers who have not received their benefits despite their efforts during the pandemic.

"Maraming dismayado, demoralized kasi hindi naibibigay ng tama sa oras at tingnan ang special allowance, hazard duty from December up to the present ay hindi pa naibibigay," he told New Day.

[Translation: Many workers are dismayed, demoralized because they do not receive their special allowance on time, their hazard duty from December up to the present has not yet been released.]

Vergeire said the incident in Makati should serve as a warning to all vaccinators to exercise caution during inoculation. She also thanked the vaccinee who took the viral video for showing a gap in the process that needed improvement.

Over 10 million COVID-19 shots have been administered in the country since March, with at least 2.52 million Filipinos completing their vaccination.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 29)  President Rodrigo Duterte on Monday said that running for vice president in the 2022 elections is not a bad idea, and that he may do so if there is space for him.

Its not at all a bad idea, and if there is space for me there siguro pero kung wala akong (maybe, but if there is no) space [for me] and everybody is crowding up wanting to be one, vice president, sila na lang muna kasi tapos na ako (I'll just allow them since I am done already), he said during his weekly address.

He also noted that there are things he would like to continue but did not specify what those are. He said this will be dependent on the presidential candidate he will support in the upcoming polls.

Earlier, Duterte resisted the call of his PDP-Laban party for him to run for vice president in the 2022 polls, saying that he is ready for retirement. However, Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque clarified this does not mean yet that he is rejecting their call.

The chief executive also said that while it is a good idea, he said he will not vie for the second highest post in the country if House Majority Leader Martin Romualdez does the same.

Duterte is known for flip-flopping on his statements. In 2015, he repeatedly said he will not join the presidential race, but he filed his candidacy at the last minute and eventually won the 2016 election.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 29) The Philippines is set to receive one million doses of AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines from Japan, with the donated shipment expected to arrive next month, the country's ambassador said on Tuesday.

"One million doses of AstraZeneca vaccines from Japan are expected to arrive in Manila tentatively on July 8," Japan's Ambassador to the Philippines Kazuhiko Koshikawa announced through his social media account.

Koshikawa added that the nation is "working double time" so that the donation reaches the Philippines without delay.

Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III revealed in a Senate inquiry earlier this month that the Philippines is among the countries receiving vaccine donations from Japan. The East Asian nation also pledged donations to Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand.

Latest government data show that the country had already administered more than 10 million vaccine doses. The government earlier targeted to inoculate up to 70 million Filipinos by the end of the year.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 29) - Senator Manny Pacquiao on Tuesday took on President Rodrigo Duterte's challenge for him to expose corruption in government, as he stood by the credibility of his allegations.

"Tinatanggap ko ang hamon ng Pangulong Rodrigo Duterte [I accept President Rodrigo Duterte's challenge]," Pacquiao said in a statement.

In a televised address Monday night, the President chided Pacquiao - a long-time ally - after he claimed the current administration is more corrupt than its predecessor.

The two are top officials of the ruling Partido Demokratiko Pilipino-Lakas ng Bayan (PDP-Laban) party. Duterte is the party chairman while Pacquiao is acting president.

If the boxer-turned-senator fails to prove his claims, Duterte said this would only show he is a "liar" and is simply politicking. Pacquiao, however, maintained he is telling the truth.

"Mawalang galang po mahal na Pangulo, ngunit hindi ako sinungaling [With all due respect Mr. President, I am not a liar], " he said.

"Dalawang bagay ang kaya kong panghawakan. Hindi ako tiwali at hindi ako sinungaling [I can assure you of two things. I am not corrupt and I am not a liar]," he continued.

Pacquiao also noted that it was the President himself who acknowledged the nation's persisting corruption problem in a speech in October last year.

"In his own words, sinabi niya na [he said], 'I will concentrate the last remaining years of my term fighting corruption kasi hanggang ngayon hindi humihina, lumalakas pa lalo [because it's becoming more serious],'" he said.

The senator then issued a warning to Health Secretary Francisco Duque III, saying he'll start with exposing the misuse of funds within the Department of Health amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

While he was "disheartened by these baseless accusations," Duque said they are ready to cooperate.

"While we are disheartened by these baseless accusations from our government officials, we submit ourselves to inquiries from legislators as this is a part of the checks and balances in our government," he said in a statement. "I have always been a champion of good governance and the DOH has always been transparent with regard to our fund utilization."

The Health chief added that loans to fund vaccine procurement have already been explained to the Senate and that these go directly to vaccine manufacturers from the funding agency. He also said the budget for the implementation of the Universal Health Care Law and other services amid the COVID-19 pandemic were rationally used.

Palace: Falling-out 'rather obvious'

In a Malacanang briefing, Presidential spokesperson Harry Roque acknowledged the growing rift between Duterte and Pacquiao.

"I think it's rather obvious that the relationship between the President and Pacquiao is not as cordial as it was," Roque said.

Earlier this month, Duterte also called out the senator for criticizing his stance on the West Philippine Sea issue.

But asked if Duterte wants Pacquiao out of PDP-Laban, Roque said the President recognizes it is "a party of the Pimentel family."

Sen. Aquilino "Koko" Pimentel, the PDP-Laban's executive vice chairman, recently said he believes Pacquiao would be a "good choice" for the party's standard bearer in the 2022 polls. Pimentel has also said both Duterte and Pacquiao should meet to settle their issues.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 29) - The country logged 4,479 new COVID-19 cases on Tuesday, bringing the nationwide tally to 1,408,058, the Department of Health's latest bulletin showed.

Of the total, 50,037 or 3.6% are active or people currently sick, with 90.4% experiencing mild symptoms, 4.4% asymptomatic, 1.5% critical, 2.1% in severe condition, and 1.54% having moderate symptoms.

Meanwhile, the death toll rose to 24,557 or 1.74% of the nationwide tally after 101 more patients lost their lives to the disease. The recovery count also jumped to 1,333,464 or 94.7% of the total cases after 6,471 more got better.

The DOH said nine duplicates were removed from the nationwide tally, including seven recoveries.

It added that 28 cases previously tagged as recoveries have been validated to be active cases while 75 previously reported as recoveries were reclassified as deaths.

All laboratories were operational on June 27, but 14 laboratories were not able to submit their reports on time. These contribute, on average, 5.4% of samples tested and 6.5% of positive cases, the DOH said.

The daily positivity rate or percentage of people who tested positive stood at 10.7% based on 32,044 tests done on June 27. The World Health Organization recommends that positivity rates be below 5% as bigger numbers may indicate high transmission.

Malacanang on Tuesday announced Metro Manila, Rizal, and Bulacan will remain under general community quarantine (GCQ) "with some restrictions" until July 15. Also under GCQ but with "heightened restrictions" until mid-July are Laguna and Cavite.

Meanwhile, the Department of Foreign Affairs reported 21 new COVID-19 cases among overseas Filipinos, bringing the total cases abroad to 20,773.

On the other hand, 27 more Filipinos abroad have recovered from the disease, as the recovery count reached 12,261. The death toll has climbed to 1,229 after two more patients abroad succumbed to the coronavirus.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 29) - Philippine National Police Chief Guillermo Eleazar has ordered an investigation on "fixers" offering to move up the COVID-19 vaccination schedule of individuals willing to pay.

This directive to the PNP's Criminal Investigation and Detection Group came a day after the Pasig City government said it caught two fixers asking for fees in exchange for allowing people to jump the vaccination line.

In a statement on Tuesday, the PNP chief said he has ordered the CIDG to look into the scheme not only in Pasig City but also in other local government units.

"Maaaring hindi lang sa Pasig nangyayari ang ganitong modus at dapat ay matuldukan agad ito [It's possible this scheme is not only being done in Pasig. This has to be stopped]," Eleazar said.

He added that police will closely coordinate with LGUs to prevent more incidents of such illegal operation.

On Monday, Pasig Mayor Vico Sotto said they are set to file a formal complaint against the two apprehended fixers before the National Vaccination Operations Center.

"Nakapila nang maayos ang mga tao. Ang tagal nag-aantay ng schedue, tapos magpapasingit kayo nang ganon ganon lang tapos pagkakakitaan niyo pa? Hindi pwede 'yun," he said on Facebook.

[Translation: People are lining up properly. They waited a long time for their schedule, and then you'll just let others skip the line in exchange for money? That can't happen.]

"May dalawa na tayong nahuli pero alam ko meron pa. Good luck sa inyo kung nahuli ko kayo [We already caught two people, but I know there's more. Good luck to you if I catch you]," he added.

Eleazar meanwhile appealed to Filipinos to patiently wait for their scheduled vaccination. He also urged the public to immediately report to authorities any information they might have on these vaccination fixers.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 29)  The Olongapo Prosecutors Office has junked again the motion for reconsideration filed by the National Bureau of Investigation against Ronnel Mas, the teacher who was arrested without a warrant after allegedly offering a 50 million reward to anyone who can kill President Rodrigo Duterte.

Acting provincial prosecutor JT Leonardo Santos denied the motion for reconsideration for lack of probable cause.

"It is not that a crime has not been committed that the case has been dismissed. It is the insufficiency of evidence to prove that indeed the respondent is the perpetrator of the crime," he wrote in a resolution dated June 22.

Santos added that the NBI failed to provide enough evidence that it was Mas who owned the Twitter account @RonPrince_, who offered the bounty over the social media app. He said the NBI also submitted a CD of Mas' supposed confession to the media, but it was not authenticated.

"The complainant has failed the required quantum of evidence required in a preliminary investigation," he said.

The prosecutor said the NBI can refile the case with sufficient documents and evidence to establish probable cause.

The NBI arrested Mas without a warrant in Sta. Cruz, Zambales on May 11, 2020 over the Twitter post. He was brought to the bureau's headquarters in Manila where he reportedly confessed to the media and apologized for his tweet.

This is the third time the NBI lost in its attempt to charge the public school teacher with inciting to sedition. Santos in February also dismissed the complaint for lack of probable cause.

In June 2020, an Olongapo court dismissed the first inciting to sedition charge. Judge Richard Paradeza of the Olongapo City RTC Branch 72 ruled that Mas was illegally arrested and ordered his release.

Mas' lawyer Dino de Leon said the third loss should be a sign for the NBI to finally accept defeat.

"They should already stop harassing Teacher Ronnel. The officers concerned should be reminded that President Duterte's term is about to end, but their administrative and criminal accountabilities for their illegal actions remain. I urge then to observe the rule of law and to move on," he said in a statement.
" " Conal Byrne, Rachel Ghiazza, James Kim and Heather Taylor join The Future of Podcasting panel moderated by Jason Hirschhorn during the Tribeca Festival 2021 at Spring Studios, June 13, 2021 in New York City. Bryan Bedder/Getty Images

Podcasting was developed in 2004 by former MTV video jockey Adam Curry and software developer Dave Winer. Curry wrote a program called iPodder that enabled him to automatically download internet radio broadcasts to his iPod. Several developers improved upon his idea, and podcasting was officially born. Curry himself has gone on to host several popular podcasts, the most recent of which is a show called No Agenda.

Right now in the U.S., podcasting is free from government regulation. Podcasters don't need to buy a license to broadcast their programming as radio stations do, and they don't need to conform to the Federal Communication Commission's (FCC) broadcast decency regulations. That means anything goes  from four-letter words to sexually explicit content. Copyright law does apply to podcasting, though. Podcasters can copyright or license their work  Creative Commons is just one online resource for copyrights and licenses.

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Although several corporations and big broadcast companies have ventured into the medium, many podcasters are amateurs broadcasting from home studios. Because podcasters don't rely on ratings as radio broadcasters do, the subject matter of podcasts can range from the refined to the silly to the excruciatingly mundane. Podcasters often cater to a niche group of listeners. By podcasting consistently on one subject, podcasters not only assert their expertise on the subject matter but also draw a loyal and devoted group of listeners.

Consider a few popular podcasts: Welcome to Night Vale is a show that updates you on the completely fictional yet rather eerie town of Night Vale. Or listen to the Mortified Podcast, in which adults read directly (and often awkwardly) from the pages of their teenage diaries. There's a full spectrum of politics podcasts. You can listen to news from around the world.

Podcasts are also used for informational and educational purposes  self-guided walking tours, talk shows and training are all available through podcasting.

Podcasting has become a profitable business. In its 2019 State of the News Media Report the Pew Research Center found that about 50 percent of U.S. adults had listened to podcasts, half of those within a week before they were surveyed. Many podcasts are supported by advertising, or by patrons who gain access to an ad-free podcast fee in return for a donation. Although large, traditional media companies leverage their brand and reputation for publicity, independent podcasts also achieve success using the same model. Advertising networks make it easier for advertisers to find shows that reach their target markets.

Some independent podcasts have been working together to form their own media collectives, including Pushkin Industries, Radiotopia from PRX and Panoply. In the 2020s, however, larger media and tech companies have begun purchasing successful individual podcasts or collectives with the intent on making them exclusive properties. Spotify acquired Gimlet in 2019. In 2020, Amazon purchased Wondery. In 2021 Apple announced an update to its podcasting app that provides access to its own premium podcast subscriptions.
The first step of the regulation was scheduled to take effect in October.

It would have boosted the overtime threshold by $5,000 from the federal threshold to about $40,600 a year, and then again in October 2022 to $45,500 a year.

When Wolf won regulatory approval for it last year, he called it an important victory for thousands of workers and absolutely the right thing to do.

Only a few states have overtime eligibility thresholds higher than the federal minimum.

Labor unions had backed the expansion of overtime eligibility, even though it typically applies to salaried managers at nonunion businesses. But Wolfs agreeing to repeal the expansion stunned officials at the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO.

Rick Bloomingdale, the labor federations president in Pennsylvania, said he told Wolf when they met Monday that 190,000 people just got screwed out of overtime pay.

Bloomingdale said, Wolf told him that House Democrats had insisted on the $100 million in so-called level-up school funding in the budget deal, and that House Republicans, in exchange, had insisted on the repeal of the overtime expansion regulation.
Carlisle

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Carlisle

Carlisle restaurant scene bouncing back after pandemic throws industry for a spin

Jason Malmont, The Sentinel Market Cross Pub & Brewery on North Hanover Street on Carlisle, offers outdoor seating for meals and drinks.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic may be winding down, some of its effects on Carlisles restaurant scene are likely to stick around much longer.

Increased popularity of outdoor seating, better food sales and a tighter labor market are hallmarks of the pandemic that many downtown restaurants say are continuing to change the business even after virus-wary customers have returned.

Borough restaurants interviewed by The Sentinel reported a steady increase in customers over the past two to three months as COVID-19 vaccination rates have risen and cases of the virus have declined; most are close to being back to their pre-pandemic hours, with a common limiter being slow hiring.

Were still on the upswing. Outside seating has still been doing great, said Joe Frantz, Market Cross Pubs front-of-house manager.

Destination Carlisle unveils "S.O.S.: Save Our Smalls" initiative to assist businesses and nonprofits, frontline workers The goal of the program is to raise $20,000 over the next three months, which will allow the organization to help about 65 businesses.

Were definitely seeing more people, said Cassie Fourlas, general manager at Molly Pitcher Brewing Co. But were still avoiding the standing-room-only crowding situation.

More and more restaurants are approaching their full pre-pandemic hours. Market Cross Pub, for instance, is still scheduled to close at 11 p.m. on nights that it wouldve stayed open until 1 a.m. pre-pandemic, Frantz said; but if enough people are there, hours will be extended.

At this point, well stay open to midnight if [the business] is there, Frantz said. Were not quite [back to full hours] yet, but its on the horizon.

Guests still flock to outdoor seating, which most restaurants expanded during the pandemic, and give it preference even more than would be expected for the weather, restaurants said.

The outdoor seating is still the most popular. Were finding we really dont need our second floor as often because people use the outside capacity, said Alexis Davenport, general manager at Grand Illusion.

Establishments that were primarily focused on drinks before the pandemic also said food sales have remained elevated, possibly due to Pennsylvanias policy last year. During the height of the pandemic, in an effort to limit crowding in bars, Gov. Tom Wolfs administration issued an emergency order that alcohol could only be served with a meal.

Even after they took that rule away, people are still ordering more food, Davenport said.

Were definitely selling more food that we did before, Fourlas said, to the point where lunch sales at Molly Pitcher are now stronger than they were pre-pandemic, and the restaurant seeks to hire two more cooks.

Making its Mark: Hot-Chee Dog marker unveiled in downtown Carlisle The unveiling was held on the 83rd anniversary of the restaurant founded by Charlie and Mary Kollas.

But hiring has been slow, and the lack of kitchen staff is the main barrier to the restaurant resuming its full pre-COVID hours, Fourlas said. Other restaurants likewise said they had taken months to get to a full complement of employees for positions that would normally take a fraction of that time to fill.

We have a lot of new, fresh faces, Frantz said; although job applicants have become more plentiful, it was rough in March, he added.

Trepidation among restaurant workers is understandable. A University of California, San Francisco study published earlier this year indicated that line cooks had the highest rate of excess mortality associated with COVID-19 out of any profession, estimated at a 60% increase in mortality tied to the pandemic.

Federal data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics also indicates that turnover in the food service industry remains elevated. A record-high 5.6% of the industrys employees quit a job in April, with much of the turnover attributed to the post-pandemic hiring boom that has given workers more leverage.

Some local restaurant workers said familiarity with the industry is whats keeping them on board.

Theyre more like a family to me, so Id rather not get up and leave just because of the pay, one downtown Carlisle restaurant employee said of their co-workers, acknowledging that they totally could jump ship for more money in the current labor market.

Fourlas said Molly Pitcher has gradually raised wages for kitchen staff with the intent of having a $15 per hour wage floor, in order to attract new employees and with the expectation that this will become the new federal minimum wage in the near future.

Were getting everyone as close to $15 as possible, she said, so that the venue doesnt face a wage shock in the future.

Although some observers have claimed the additional $300 per week in federal unemployment benefits through the pandemic stimulus package is keeping potential new employees on the sidelines, the effect has not been demonstrable thus far in Pennsylvania, according to federal data.

The most recent round of extra unemployment benefits began to hit bank accounts in January. But hiring for the leisure and hospitality industry in Pennsylvania was strong in the following month, with 15,000 jobs added in February, seasonally adjusted, the biggest uptick since September 2020, according to BLS data, with steady increases since.

However, Pennsylvanias total payroll in the leisure and hospitality sector, which includes most restaurants and hotels, stands at 460,000 as of May, still 116,000 employees under where it was in May of 2019.

Federal data also suggests that wage gains may be solidifying. Average hourly earnings for the leisure and hospitality sector in Pennsylvania have risen every month so far in 2021, a virtually unheard-of phenomenon in a volatile industry sector.

Jason Malmont, The Sentinel Hook and Flask Still Works is located on North Hanover Street in Carlisle.

Jason Malmont, The Sentinel Diners enjoy outdoor seating at North Hanover Grille in Carlisle.

Jason Malmont, The Sentinel The Gingerbread Man on South Court House Avenue in Carlisle offers outdoor seating.
Guests still flock to outdoor seating, which most restaurants expanded during the pandemic, and give it preference even more than would be expected for the weather, restaurants said.

The outdoor seating is still the most popular. Were finding we really dont need our second floor as often because people use the outside capacity, said Alexis Davenport, general manager at Grand Illusion.

Establishments that were primarily focused on drinks before the pandemic also said food sales have remained elevated, possibly due to Pennsylvanias policy last year. During the height of the pandemic, in an effort to limit crowding in bars, Gov. Tom Wolfs administration issued an emergency order that alcohol could only be served with a meal.

Even after they took that rule away, people are still ordering more food, Davenport said.

Were definitely selling more food that we did before, Fourlas said, to the point where lunch sales at Molly Pitcher are now stronger than they were pre-pandemic, and the restaurant seeks to hire two more cooks.

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The state Department of Health reported two new probable cases of COVID-19 for Cumberland County Tuesday.

Tuesday's report included 21 total test results, with two probable cases. Comparing just the number of negative tests (19) and confirmed positive tests (zero), the county saw 0% of its tests come back positive.

There were nine patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in the county in Tuesday's report (up one from Monday), with zero in an intensive care unit and one on a ventilator.

In data updated Monday evening, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says 126,905 people have been fully vaccinated in Cumberland County, or 50.1% of the county's total population of 253,370. For the county's vaccine eligible population of people ages 12 and older, 126,896 people have been fully vaccinated, or 57.8% of that population. CDC data is current as of 6 a.m. on the day it is posted.

The Health Department confirmed Tuesday there were 162 additional positive cases of COVID-19 in the state, bringing the statewide total to 1,211,869.

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County numbers in the southcentral region (for June 29):
Upon arrival, police found the woman dead and a man at the scene was conscious and walking around with a gunshot wound to the face.
Several hundred devotees from surrounding states arrived throughout Sunday, culminating five days of prayers, chants and other rituals at outdoor fire altars. More than 20 priests took part, wearing yellow or saffron vestments around their waists; most were visiting from other North American temples.

The Sri Venkateswara Temple is much smaller than its massive prototype, a temple by the same name in the southern Indian city of Tirupati. Still, this Pittsburgh suburb has become a pilgrimage destination for Hindus throughout North America and a landmark in the growing landscape of Hinduism in America. There are now hundreds of temples across the country, and about 1 percent of American adults now identify as Hindu, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center report.

Kalathur Raghu, one of the temples founding members, recalled a much smaller ceremony on a chilly November day in 1976 to dedicate the new temple. I think none of us expected to get to this level when we started, he said.

The temple is dedicated to Venkateswara, considered an incarnation of Vishnu, a deity associated with protection and preservation who is also known by Govinda. The stone murti, or statue, of Venkateswara stands at the holiest spot in the temple. Images of other deities stand nearby, such as those of Lakshmi, goddess of prosperity, and Bhoodevi, goddess of the earth.
Dear Editor:

For decades, the intellectual disability and autism service system has been underfunded and understaffed. COVID has stretched the system to its limits.

The system is collapsing.

Across the state, providers are closing programs, reducing services and are unable to take people off waiting lists because we cannot sustain the revenue loss and increased expenses of COVID.

AND, services cannot be delivered without staff.

The state of Pennsylvania entrusts the care of people with intellectual disabilities and autism to provider organizations. The state is fiscally responsible for these life sustaining services. Providers are at the mercy of a state reimbursement system.

When our government makes the choice to underfund a system that provides support to defenseless people, it is making a value statement!

As a mother to two young men who are non-verbal and have intellectual disabilities, I fear for their present and their future.

I fear for how they will be treated when I am no longer here to advocate for them.
The death last weekend of a Kansas City teenager underscores the dangers of the towering bluffs at Johnson's Shut-Ins State Park, a state parks official said Tuesday.

Mariah Brielle "Elle" Schramm, 18, died of an apparent head injury Saturday afternoon after slipping atop the rocky bluffs and falling into the Black River.

The drop there is some 50 to 60 feet and a popular spot for people who trespass to gain access to the bluffs and jump into the river, said Col. Tom Dresner, chief ranger with the Missouri State Parks.

Signs warn people to stay away from the bluffs, he said.

"As attractive as (the bluffs) may look, it's against the law to be up there and we're going to continue to enforce that," Dresner said. "We write tickets for no trespassing."

Witnesses told park rangers that Schramm "seemed to indicate she was hesitant" to jump. About 3 p.m. Saturday, "she ended up losing her footing and slipping and hitting the rocks on the way down," Dresner said.

The water is deep there and if someone were to jump far enough away from the bluffs, they can avoid hitting rocks, Dresner said.

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SPRING VALLEY, N.Y. (AP)  Six people are facing charges ranging from arson and manslaughter to filing a false instrument and criminal impersonation in connection to a fire at an assisted living facility in a New York City suburb earlier this year that killed a firefighter and a facility resident, authorities said Tuesday.

Rockland County District Attorney Thomas Walsh declined to go into specifics at a press conference, but said a father and son, Nathaniel Sommer and Aaron Sommer, were both facing manslaughter, assault and arson charges in connection to the March 23 fire at the Evergreen Court Home for Adults in Spring Valley, New York.

Walsh said the Sommers were arraigned on Tuesday morning and due back in court on July 2. No attorney information was immediately available for them.

Two other men who Walsh said worked in the town's buildings department at the time of the fire were charged with filing false documents and falsifying business records, while a woman who worked at the facility was facing a misdemeanor charge of reckless endangerment and another man faced a misdemeanor criminal impersonation charge.

Asked for more information, Walsh said, We don't want to get into any details until the matter has been presented to the grand jury and perhaps not even until the trial."
The organization overseeing Catholic schools in the United States gets a new chief executive this week as it seeks to rebound from its biggest one-year enrollment drop since the 1970s.

Amid the pandemic, more than 200 schools closed permanently, and enrollment at the 5,981 remaining schools fell by 6.4% -- or more than 111,000 students  for the 2020-2021 academic year, according to the National Catholic Educational Association.

Total enrollment was about 1.63 million, down from a peak of more than 5.2 million in the early 1960s.

On Wednesday, the NCEA installs a new president and CEO, Lincoln Snyder, who served as superintendent of schools for the Diocese of Sacramento, California, since 2015. Based on trends in that diocese, where enrollment is up 3% from September 2019, Snyder is cautiously optimistic that many Catholic schools nationwide can slow or stop the enrollment decline in the coming year.

Economic hardships caused by the pandemic forced some families to pull their children out of Catholic schools because they couldnt afford the tuition, Snyder said. But in Sacramento, he said, those losses were offset by an influx of families new to Catholic schools who were attracted by the systems educational strengths and its handling of the pandemic.
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But the legalization of marijuana may prompt employers to make some changes. They might decide not to look for convictions related to cannabis during background checks. Testing for cannabis is tricky because of how long it can stay in a persons system. As a result, Latsko said, some employers may choose to drop it from drug-testing panels.

If its legal to possess, you could have done it on your own time and yet its still in the system. There is no real good test about the impairment of marijuana, he said.

While the law has changed, that doesnt necessarily mean the views of hiring managers have, Latsko said. He noted that there may be generational differences of opinion and social stigma around cannabis.

Companies likely will watch their peers to see how they respond to the legalization of marijuana, Latsko said, looking to see who will be the first mover making a dramatic change.

If there starts to be this snowball effect of organizations that drop testing for this and it seems to be getting groundswell among social media, popular media, what have you, then, of course, other people are going to jump on the bandwagon, he said. That may then sway even more states or even the federal government to consider the issue a little more closely.
A warning letter emblazoned with an Albemarle County Police Department logo and placed on a car parked in the Grayrock subdivision near Crozet is a fraud, police officials say.

Police are investigating the letter, which was signed by the summons division of the police department. That division does not exist.

On Monday, the department received a report of what appeared to be an official [police] letter placed on a citizens car in the Grayrock subdivision, near Jarmans Gap Road in Albemarle County, police said in a statement Tuesday. The Albemarle County Police Department would like to inform the community that there is no summons division within [the department] and this fraudulent notification is a work of fiction.

The letter is a warning that police had received noise and nuisance complaints about the car being parked for long periods on subdivision property, according to a copy distributed by police.

Any possible future encounters will require this vehicle to have verification of residence in this neighborhood, the phony warning states. If fishing on the ponds, the same proof of residency will be required as these are private areas of the Grayrock Community.
RICHMOND  A unique Virginia law dating to 1938 that allows hunters to go on other landowners property without permission to retrieve hunting dogs continues to raise hackles throughout parts of the state and could be put in jeopardy by a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

Right to retrieve has been causing strife for more than a decade between hunters who use dogs to track their quarry  most often deer  and landowners onto whose property the dogs sometimes stray.

Its likely to continue to do so. On Monday, the Virginia Board of Wildlife Resources in a special meeting voted to defer any action on part of a resolution that would have asked the General Assembly to consider amending the law to add a landowner notification requirement under certain circumstances, while also affirming the right to retrieve.

I dont think theres much this board has to do with whether or not the General Assembly is going to consider a statutory amendment, said board Chairman John Daniel. I think this is clearly going to be an issue in the General Assembly.
With the techniques we have developed, we should be able, at some point, to manipulate molecular signals that control embryo formation, and this should lead to generating embryo-like entities containing all tissues and organs, including the anterior brain, Bernard Thisse said.

That doesnt mean that the researchers will be making their own mice.

The goal is not to make a full mouse. I would not like to do that, Bernard Thisse said. If you want to have a full mouse, you take a male and a female and do it naturally.

In a human, there is no way we want to make a baby. We may want to make something that goes through the same development process and develops organs and tissues and processes that it is amenable to experiment and medical applications, but we do not want to create an individual. We dont want to have a fully developed animal, but something different.

The difference between science fiction and horror movies can be a fine line and often are one and the same. The researchers said scientists, theologians and communities need to continue to discuss the ethics of science that, at some point, will be able to create whole individuals, animals and humans.
Cruel race practices rather than critical race theory or cultural race theory is the correct terminology for the cruel treatment enslaved Africans and their descendants have experienced for more than 500 years in the lands of the indigenous peoples of North America that Europeans invaded.

In the 21st century, Americans of African descent have greater power than in past centuries. And more Americans, especially young Americans of other races and ethnicities, are joining with them in condemning their ancestors for cruel and inhumane treatment of Americans of African descent. They are demanding that the truth be told, in schools and beyond schools, about the cruelties white people practiced on them. These include slavery, legal segregation, Jim Crow, lynching, disfranchisement and the legacy of systemic racism that continues to exists, accounting for inequities in economics, education and health for Americans of African descent.

Every American has a right to know the truth about the history of race in America, which has been propelled by the doctrine of white supremacy embraced by people of European descent, and which began in Virginia in 1619 when kidnapped Africans were enslaved and brought here.
Yes. I will do my part to conserve household energy usage, even if I'm uncomfortable in my home.

No. It is too hot to conserve household energy usage.

I already conserve, even before ERCOT requested it.

Maybe, depending on the reason ERCOT provides and whether or not I am home during that time.

Vote

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Tamil Nadu: Foul-smelling foam wash ashore near Rameswaram, fishers suspect chemicals from MV X-Press Pearl

by Sidharth MP

June 29,2021 | Source: DNA India

Fishermen in the Rameswaram region of Tamil Nadu's Ramanathapuram district have reported foul-smelling foam and what appears to be polluted water along the coast. Foam and thick-looking polluted mixtures on the surface of water are seen in images and videos. Fishermen in the region suspect that it could be something to do with the X-Press Pearl shipping disaster that happened off the Sri Lanka Coast. According to Cinnathambi, Coordinator of the traditional fishermen federation, the unusual foam and suspected pollutants are being washed along the shore over the last two days, in the Pamban-Gulf of Mannar region. He adds that such foam is spread almost 50-100 meters in the seawater and it spans a length of several kilometers along the coast. When asked if this was the usual foaming that occurs during the rough seas and monsoon, he told Zee Media that there were also what appeared to be bits of plastic washing ashore. He added that the fishing community was in a state of fear over these suspected pollutants, which did not appear to be weather-related foaming/churning.



The preliminary suspicion among the fisher community points towards the MV X-Press Pearl, which sunk off the Sri Lankan Coast (between Colombo and Negombo), despite successful firefighting efforts by the Indian Coast Guard and Sri Lankan authorities. Fears remain over the contents of its containers and the environmental impact that it could pose for the region. There were several reports of tons of plastic pellets having washed onto Sri Lankan shores, besides the long-term impact of the chemicals being carried hundreds of kilometers way owing to the wind, ocean currents etc. When it caught fire, the container ship was carrying 1486 containers containing chemical cargo, classified under International Maritime Dangerous Goods (IMDG). The ship caught fire around the last week of May and sunk in the first week of June. Among other chemicals, the IMDG cargo consisted of highly inflammable Nitric Acid, Methanol, Methyl Acetate, Sodium Hydroxide and Polystyrene beads. It must be noted that the distance between Rameswaram in Tamil Nadu and the location of sunken ship (off Sri Lanka) is barely 240 kms. It is understood that researchers from the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute, Mandapam collected samples from the adjoining region that showed this suspicious foam. Zee Medias attempts to reach the institute were not met with a response yet. The story will be updated once an official from CMFRI responds.

 2021 Diligent Media Corporation Ltd.
Pakistan: Call for ban on foreign trawlers at Makran coast

by Behram Baloch

June 29,2021 | Source: Dawn

While terming the Chinese and inter-provincial trawlers hunting at Balochistan coast illegal, the NP chief said they were depriving the local population of their livelihoods besides depleting marine resources. The National Party had been staging protest demonstrations in every tehsil of Gwadar district for the past several days against the hunting by foreign trawlers, Dr Malik said, adding that the government had paid little attention to the grievances of the local people. He said genocide of marine life could not be accepted. While expressing serious concern over allowing foreign and other provinces trawlers for fishing at Makran coast, the NP chief said: All illegal hunting permits should be revoked immediately and foreign and inter-provincial trawlers should be banned for fishing at Balochistan coast. Talking about the provincial government, he said the Balochistan coastal belt seemed to have become a hub of extortion mafia due to poaching. Maritime and fisheries department had become blind and deaf as they were unable to hear the masses voice, he said, adding that it seemed they were unaware of the issue of depriving locals of their livelihoods. Dr Malik said people at every forum, including the Senate of Pakistan, were protesting against the anti-people and anti-Balochistan moves. He said the positive effects of China-Pakistan Economic Corridor were nowhere to be seen in Balochistan, but the adverse effects of governments policies on the marine life and peoples livelihood were visible to everyone.

 2021, Dawn
Karnataka: Hundreds of fishermen tried to jump into the sea to protest the construction of a port in Uttara Kannada district

by Nolan Pinto

June 29,2021 | Source: India Today

Hundreds of fishermen jumped into the sea in Karnatakas Uttara Kannada district to oppose a private ports construction and save their houses from being demolished by the private port company. The incident took place on Saturday after the port company deployed workers with JCB machines (earth movers) to oust the fishermen and raze their houses on the land it has acquired for port construction. The local administration had to deploy over 300 police personnel to bring the situation under control and stop the fishermen from jumping into the sea. The Andhra Pradesh-based private company, Honnavar Port Private Company Limited, had acquired 93 acres of land from the state government to build a port at Rs 600 crore. ALSO READ: Lakshadweep residents on hunger strike to protest against draft regulations However, the fishermen allegedly had encroached upon over 200 acres of land in the area and were not agreeable to the ports construction as they feared loss of their homes as well as livelihood.



Honnavar Port Private Company Limited claimed to have secured all necessary permits to construct a greenfield port under public-private partnership at Honnavar. At the Maritime India virtual Summit 2021, the CEO of Honnavar Port Private Limited, Suryaprakash, said that all necessary clearances from different departments and agencies had been secured to begin construction. The company wanted to start construction of breakwaters and jetty and deployed workers with JCB machines. ALSO READ: Indian climate activist gets prestigious UN land conservation award However, the situation got out of hand when the fishermen jumped into the sea to protest the demolition of their houses. Other local fishermen also arrived at the Tonka beach to lend their support. Rama Moger, state president of fishermens association, argued that constructing a port is supposed to be the government's job and not left with any private organisation. He says that for the past three months, fishermen have been protesting against the port construction project. Rama Moger added that the High Court had also given a temporary stay regarding the construction, stating that forest land should not be diverted. The next court hearing is on July 30. With the petition pending in the High Court, the government should not take this up. We from the fishermen association condemn this work that is taking place, Rama Moger said.

 2021 Living Media India Limited.
India: Extreme rainfall in June may lead to longer flood duration, warn experts

by Vivek Mishra

June 29,2021 | Source: Down To Earth

The arrival of monsoon  marked by extreme and untimely rainfall in June  has flooded major rivers like the Ganga and Yamuna as well as their tributaries. This has caused floods in several states such as Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Uttarakhand experienced cloudburst and floods in 2013. This is the first time since then that north India is seeing heavy rainfall in June. The rains have led to severe flood-like conditions in the region. Global warming, urbanisation and loss of traditional flood control reservoirs may be among the reasons behind the anomaly, according to experts and researchers. Down To Earth analysed the data for June month (2010-2021) from various meteorological departments (sub-division). India witnessed record rainfall in June 2021, excluding the 2013 rainfall. This worked as a catalyst for the flood-like conditions in various parts of the country. Himalayan rivers of Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar reached near danger mark in mid-June. States such as Gujarat and Goa in the western region and Assam in the northeastern region are already experiencing floods. Several villages situated on the banks of the gushing rivers have experienced loss of life and property. Situated near Sharda river in UP, Manpur Karhiya is a village with a population of 20,000. Bikau Nishad from Manpur said floods in June have occurred after 20 years. The release of water in Banbasa (Uttarakhand) inundated our fields. I cultivated gourd in a six-acre field, which is now spoiled. The situation is similar for other farmers. The government has not extended any help till now, he said.



Several regions of UP and Bihar witness floods every year in August. This year, flooding started early from mid-June. Bihars Kosi region is already flooded with water. UP has the highest number of flood-affected people, according to official data. At least 63 villages have been flooded, and 18,620 people affected. Gandak (Bihar), Ganga, Sharda and Ghaghara (UP) are flowing about 0.12 m to 0.57 m above the danger level, according to a report by the National Emergency Response Centre. Ganga near Badaun district; Sharda in Lakhimpur and Kheri; Ghaghara in Ayodhya and Barabanki are gushing above danger levels. Between June 21 and June 24, Desang river flowed through the Sibsagar district of Assam and Rishikesh river in Uttarakhand, flowing above high flood level (HFL), the Central Water Commission tweeted. Ghagra river in the Ballia district has been flowing at a high flood level too. The CWC did not, however, mention Uttarakhand floods in their flood bulletin. Earlier in May this year, Gujarat, UP and Bihar witnessed heavy rainfall due to cyclones. In May, Gujarat received 1,130 per cent more rainfall, while the Kutch and Saurashtra region received 1,476 per cent more rainfall, according to India Metereological Department. Similarly, rainfall departure in Bihar, eastern and western UP was 359 per cent, 467 per cent and 325 per cent respectively. He added that heavy rainfall lashed Nepal and other valley regions as well. This has led to rivers overflowing in India. Narayani River (Nepal), known as the Gandak river in Bihar, has also been flowing at a dangerous flood level. Similarly, heavy rainfall in Uttarakhand has resulted in flooding UPs Sharda river.



On June 24, the IMD forecasted that monsoon in UP and central India may become weak. It added that Assam and other northeastern states, which are already facing the brunt of heavy rainfall, may witness even more rainfall in the next few days. Dinesh Mishr, who works on the history of flood, drought and famine, said: People tend to forget these disasters soon. Bihar is devastated by flooding every year in May and November. To say that floods in June are a new thing is wrong. Sometimes, it starts flooding even in May as well. There is no iota of doubt that climate change is real. The government tries to hide these facts. DTE analysed the data for major floods of the last decade: as many as 12 major floods had occurred, accruing a huge loss to life and property. Untimely and heavy rainfall leads to devastating flash floods. In a paper published in Earth System Journal (April 14, 2021), lead author Anja Katzenberger warned how with just a one-degree Celsius rise in global warming monsoon rainfall can increase five per cent. Another research in Nature said the average rainfall is decreasing with the weakening of the monsoon cycle in central India. But extreme or excessive rainfall is rising. The reasons behind both of them could be similar. The rise in the magnitude and intensity of the El-Nino effect, change in land use and air pollution could be the reason behind extreme rainfall. The report warned that extreme rainfall events can increase by 10 to 30 per cent in Central India.



High flood mortality: A big concern



Floods are considered the worst ecological disaster due to the death and devastation caused. DTE, in an earlier analysis of flood mortality in India, found that Uttarakhand recorded the highest mortality due to floods: As many as 24,000 Indians died in floods in a decade (2008-July 23, 2019). According to research published in an international journal over flood mortality which occurred between two decades (from 1995 to 2005): Like China, India saw a sharp rise in the number of floods decade-on-decade, but unlike China, Indias flood mortality increased, with 90 floods claiming 15,860 lives in 2006-2015, up from 13,660 lives lost in 67 floods the previous decade. If India could emulate China in terms of reducing flood deaths, the declining global trend in flood mortality seen over the past decade could perhaps be extended. Experts consider forecasting as a major tool of management to avoid the damage caused by floods. But there are challenges: Water is a state subject and hence, the Centre as well as the states do not easily come to a consensus over water management. Concerns are being raised over the loss of life and property due to recurrent extreme rain events in Uttarakhand.



On May 5, 2021, the Central Water Commission tweeted: Upon receiving a request from J&K, flood forecasting for Jhelum river was started from May 2019. If requested by the Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh governments we will be willing to do the same. Sharad Jain of the National Institute of Hydrology told DTE, The flash floods in Chamoli have indicated that flood forecasting should be done throughout the year. We need to be ready with certain standards. We need to be on alert as soon as these thresholds are crossed. We are practising this in coastal areas. But can these floods sustain for a longer duration? Sharad said it cannot be answered clearly. But yes, due to poor drainage system (ponds and natural reservoirs) these floods do sustain for a longer duration now, he said.

 Down To Earth 2021
Personnel

Executive order covers diversity, inclusion, equity and accessibility for federal workers

An executive order issued last Friday directs the federal government to ramp up diversity training, rethink the use salary history as a basis for pay determinations and supply gender non-conforming and non-binary and transgender feds with employee credentials that reflect their current names, pictures and pronouns.

The sweeping order calls for a strategic plan to set standards and identify strategies for advancing diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility and eliminating equity barriers within 150 days. It'll be updated at least every four years. The order also instructs a review of current policies for the collection of feds' demographic data and potentially modify it for more expansive collection.

The Biden administration doesn't require agency chief diversity officers in the order, but recommends that government agencies "seek opportunities" to establish such positions.

The government is also tasked with improving the pipeline of minority candidates into government through partnerships with historically Black colleges and universities and other institutions of higher learning with concentrations of Hispanic, Asian-American and Pacific-islander students, as well as students from Native American tribes. Additionally, the government is charged to explore partnerships with institutions that serve people with disabilities  just one aspect of the order that looks to attract people with disabilities to government service.

"This executive order will help in our efforts to recruit, retain, and honor the most effective workforce, one in which federal employees from all backgrounds and walks of life feel included and valued," newly confirmed Office of Personnel Management Director Kiran Ahuja said in a statement. She added that, " "these types of efforts are best practices for major employers across sectors seeking to stay competitive in the marketplace."

Diversity training push

Diversity training was a flashpoint in the Trump administration after the former president issued an executive order banning certain types of diversity and inclusion training for feds, contractors and federal grant recipients. Biden repealed the order soon after taking office.

The new order affirms the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion training that instills "knowledge of systemic and institutional racism and bias against underserved communities," and increase "understanding of implicit and unconscious bias."

The order also sets the stage for the Office of Personnel Management and the Defense Department to provide "comprehensive gender-affirming care," through the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program and the Military Health System as part of push for healthcare equity.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology is tasked with an update of federal employee identification standards to make sure that employee ID credentials "account for the needs of transgender and gender non-conforming and non-binary employees" and tells agency heads to update standards to include non-binary gender options. The order also directs agency heads to "explore opportunities to expand the availability of gender non-binary facilities and restrooms in federally owned and leased workplaces."

It also tells the director of National Intelligence to mitigate barriers in security clearance and background investigation process for LGBTQ+ employees, "in particular transgender and gender non-conforming and non-binary employees and applicants."

This article first appeared on FCW, a Defense Systems partner site.
Cyber

FBI wants more help from hacked companies

The FBIs cybersecurity investigations would be more successful if cybercrime victims were more forthcoming, Director Chris Wray told Senate appropriators on Wednesday.

"If we don't solve the riddle of how to get the private sector promptly and transparently working with us -- and more and more companies, I should say, are doing that all the time -- but if we don't make that sort of the norm, we're going to have a heck of a time winning this conflict," Wray said at a budget hearing. Although he did not endorse any specific proposal, he told lawmakers that "anything that helps provide more incentive for that to happen, I think is a step in the right direction."

Cybersecurity is a significant part of the FBI's budget request. The bureau wants $40 million in new funding for cyber investigations in support of 155 new positions.

"A huge part of that will be going very much to the ransomware campaign that we're working on," Wray said. "We did about 1,100 different kinds of disruption actions against cyber adversaries last year. I'm talking about arrests, criminal charges, convictions, dismantlement [and] disruptions."

Wray said the FBI was going after "the entire criminal ecosystem" around ransomware heists, including not just the actual perpetrators but also helpers and infrastructure providers. "We're trying to go after the money," Wray said.

"We've got to take a little bit of our page out of the counterterrorism strategy book, everybody working together focusing on prevention and disruption, and that's what we're trying to do," he added.

The director reiterated the FBI's guidance for targeted companies not to pay ransoms to hackers, but also said that "the most important thing is that [victims] reach out and connect  with us as quickly and transparently as possible."

The bureau's fiscal year 2022 budget proposal also includes $15 million in new money to support 22 new jobs to help the FBI improve its own cybersecurity.

"Those funds will help us secure our infrastructure and limit vulnerabilities that threatened the FBI's mission," Wray said.

This article was first posted to FCW, a sibling site to Defense Systems.
I recently read a letter describing the wonderful care received at Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center in Corvallis.

Its wonderful that this patient appreciated and acknowledged the fantastic care they got! This same letter also made me wonder if Samaritan is going to be able to keep providing patient care experiences like that. At both the Corvallis and Albany hospitals, new contracts with the Service Employees International Union have been negotiated for several months, with no end in sight.

Members of SEIU include certified nurses aides, housekeepers, nutritional services, emergency room technicians, sterile processing and many other classifications besides these. They are some of the lowest-paid workers in the hospital, but their jobs are essential to the running of these hospitals.

Samaritan doesnt seem to have any desire to retain these essential workers, though. This self-insured company that has the ability to control the prices of the medical care it provides has stated that it once again wants to raise the cost of the insurance and deductibles to their employees, while providing only a few pennies for a raise.
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The Denver Police Department is investigating after a juvenile was shot overnight in the Washington Park West neighborhood.

Police said the shooting happened before 1 a.m. Tuesday in the area of South Lincoln Street and East Ohio Avenue, blocks from the Interstate 25/Broadway light rail station.

The victim was found suffering from a gunshot wound and taken to a hospital. The victim is expected to survive their injuries, police said.

Police have not released any information about what led to the shooting.

No arrests have been made and no suspect information is available as of Tuesday morning. The investigation is ongoing, police said.

Anyone with information is asked to call Metro Denver Crime Stoppers at 720-913-7867. Tipsters can be anonymous and are eligible for a $2,000 reward.
A Weld County man was arrested Monday after stealing a tow truck and ramming it into concrete poles outside of the Greeley Police Department headquarters, the Weld County Sheriffs Office announced.

Deputies said 37-year-old Rudy Salazar is being held in the Weld County Jail on five counts of attempted first-degree assault and one count each of aggravated motor vehicle theft, criminal mischief, violating the terms of his parole and driving under the influence.

The incident began at 8 a.m. when the sheriffs office received a report that Salazar stole a tow truck and was under the influence of narcotics.

Immediately after, the sheriffs office received numerous reports of a tow truck crashing into multiple vehicles and non-moving objects.

At one point, Salazar veered into the wrong lane of traffic and crashed into multiple oncoming cars while driving between 37th and 32nd avenues toward downtown Greeley, deputies said.

Salazar eventually reached the police headquarters at 2875 W. 10th St., arriving as two officers were leaving in their personal vehicles. Salazar crashed into one of the officers vehicles and narrowly missed the second, deputies said.

Salazar then drove the tow truck toward the security gate for the police headquarters' parking lot. But he struck the control panel first, stopping the tow truck on concrete poles.

After coming to a stop, Salazar exited the tow truck, crawled under the security gate and ran toward the headquarters building, but was detained by officers before he got there, deputies said.

Salazar and the officer he crashed into were taken to a hospital with minor injuries, deputies said.

The sheriffs office is investigating the incident. Anyone with information is asked to call Det. Jerry Porter at 970-400-2889.

Tipsters can also call the sheriffs office at 970-356-4015 or Northern Colorado Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477 to remain anonymous and be eligible for a $2,000 reward.
Another tech company citing the culture in Denver as its main motivator announced expansion plans that could bring up to 250 jobs in the coming years.

Melio provides an app-based payments platform for small businesses in the U.S. Its currently headquartered in New York, with a research and development facility in Tel Aviv, Israel, and employs more than 300.

Its the second company in two weeks confirming expansion plans in metro Denver after being offered job-creation tax credits from the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade.

Really the culture and the people in Colorado were the best fit for Melio, said Shai Fortuna, general manager of the New York operations, in an interview.

They care about the right things we care about when it comes to diversity, company culture and we want to continue to grow in the right environment.  Seeing the different companies active there and the tech talent around, it was the best fit for us.

OEDIT offered up to $5.6 million in job-growth tax credits if Melio creates the estimated 250 jobs. The average wage for those sales and customer support positions is $82,000.

Last week, Australian fintech company Finder confirmed its opening a Denver operation and creating up to 198 jobs statewide in the coming years.

Melio also cited the large conglomeration of small businesses in Colorado, its target client. State statistics show 98% of businesses in the state are considered small, and 44,740 new businesses were formed in the first quarter -- a record.

Colorado brings a vibrant small business ecosystem, strong talent pool and strategic geographic benefits that will enable Melio to better connect with our growing user base across the U.S.," said Matan Bar, Melio co-founder and CEO. This new office in Colorado along with our continued expansion in New York will help Melio on its mission to keep small business in business and provide our users with free, simple and secure payment solutions.

Fortuna said Colorados central location will help Melio better respond to West Coast clients.

Its also important that people within the company want to relocate there, Fortuna said.

The companys hiring for Colorado positions begins Tuesday.

Colorado is the best place to run or start a business and to live work and play, said Gov. Jared Polis in a statement. We continue to attract and grow world-class entrepreneurs and workers. These new jobs that are being created in our backyard are a strong addition to Colorados thriving tech sector and our resilient economy.

Melio was also looking at locations in Arizona, Nevada and Texas.

Weve been really happy with the level of cooperation from the government officials, locals and the other companies in Colorado, Fortuna said. Theyve all been helpful and supportive with our inquiries. ... That supportive, collaborative and welcome environment is a huge differential.
Tecnotree has landed a digital transformation contract with MTN Group covering several African markets.

The five-year agreement will see the Finnish vendor providing software support solutions to MTNs local units in Benin, Cote dIvoire, Eswatini, South Sudan and Zambia. Using the new solutions, the operators will be able to provide their customers with cloud-based services.

TeleGeography notes that the deal forms part of MTNs Ambition 2025 strategy, and follows the groups recent confirmation of its plans to use Open RAN technology to modernise its networks so that it can swiftly expand its 4G and 5G coverage across its footprint.

Working with its partners Altiostar, Mavenir, Parallel Wireless, TechMahindra and Voyage, MTN aims to deploy Open RAN across its African network by the end of 2021.

The groups Head of Technology Innovation Charles Molapisi said: With the Digital BSS Suite 5 adapted to the Tecnotree cloud, we aim to accelerate the growth of the company with a faster time to market, while continuing to deliver an immersive customer experience and superior digital operations.
Government efforts to use the success of popular communications services as a source of new tax income have continued. The latest example is a reported 10 percent tax on the earnings of mobile money agents in Ghana.

According to the GhanaWeb news service, members of the Mobile Money Agents Association of Ghana (MMAAG) are passing on the new costs to customers with an increase in the price of cash-out services that is to begin on 1 July.

A statement was issued earlier this week by the association asking the general public to take note of the new charges and pleading with them to cooperate with MMAAG members in their various shops.

The charge increase follows an emergency meeting on 25 June. The Association had complained about a back-door increase in taxes imposed on telecommunication companies by the government, thereby forcing them to pass on the charges to their customers.

According to the MMAAG, the government has ordered the telecommunication companies to deduct 10 percent extra from the cash-out service wallet. The MMAAG has pointed out that this tax needs to be added to operational costs, not to mention any other potential costs from armed robbery and fraud. Thus, they said, since the government has not heeded their concerns, they will pass all the costs on to their customers.

This is the latest in a series of attempts by a number of governments to impose new taxes on telecommunications companies. As we reported yesterday, the government of Pakistan plans to introduce a tax on mobile phone calls, but in recent years countries as diverse as Uganda, Nigeria and Indonesia have tried to introduce new or additional taxes on various telecommunications players, from OTT companies to MNOs.
Al Yah Satellite Communications (AlYahsat), a satellite communications company in Abu Dhabi, has set an indicative price range for its initial public offering which shows it could raise up to 2.976 billion dirhams ($810 million) in the IPO.

According to a press release from the State investor Mubadalas satellite company, the offer price range has been set at Dh2.55 to Dh3.05 per share ($0.69  $0.83). The final offer will be announced on July 9 and the listing is expected to take place on July 14.

UAE satellite operator plans to sell a minimum of 731.9 million shares to a maximum of 975.9 million shares, indicating it may raise at least 2.23 billion dirhams to a maximum of 2.976 billion dirhams.

Mubadala, the United Arab Emirates state-owned investment company, will remain a majority shareholder in Yahsat. Around 30% of Yahsats shares will be made available to individuals and other investors in the UAE, as part of the UAE retail offering, and to qualified institutional and other investors, as part of the qualified investor offering.

It is expected that the Shares will be admitted to trading on the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange (ADX) on 14th July 2021, subject to market conditions and obtaining relevant regulatory approvals.

Ali Al Hashemi, Chief Executive Officer of Yahsat said: We believe that we have established a strong and proven operational and financial track record over the years which, coupled with the ever-growing adoption of technological solutions and promising prospects of the space industry in Abu Dhabi and the UAE more broadly, provides a compelling proposition for potential investors. We look forward to their participation in Yahsats growth story.

Established in 2007, Yahsat is one of the largest providers of satellite communications services in the world in terms of annual revenues, Mubadala has said. It also owns satellite phone operator Thuraya.
Qatar Free Zones Authority (QFZA), the Ministry of Transport and Communications (MOTC), and Google Cloud announced yesterday bolstering their strategic partnership to include establishing a new Center of Excellence training facility and new Google office in the State of Qatar.

According to Al Sharq Newspaper, this step comes following a previous announcement about establishing a Google Cloud region in Qatar allowing new and existing customers and partners to run their cloud data from Qatar. These notable initiatives constitute an extension of the strategic collaboration agreement signed between QFZA and Google Cloud in 2020, which aims at supporting the continued growth of the technology sector investments in Qatar.

The report said that the Center of Excellence provides free, hands-on training in Google tools and technologies for both individuals and businesses seeking to expand their technology skills and succeed in an increasingly digital world.

The objective of the training facility is to foster innovation in the State of Qatar using the latest technologies and tools offered by Google. The Center will also serve as an incubator for high-potential startups and a hub for research to address digital transformation challenges.

The physical Center of Excellence space will open its doors in Doha later this year. Once launched, the learning center will be a hub of innovation and learning and incorporate workshops, lectures, training, and mentoring on digital skills in addition to research to address digital transformation challenges.

Google Cloud has officially been established in Qatar, and Qatar Free Zones will host the new office in Msheireb Downtown, Doha.
Statement by Minister Coveney at the UNSC Open Debate on Cyber Security

Statement

Thank you Madam President. My congratulations to Estonia on a successful Presidency of the Council.

My thanks also to the High Representative for her valuable insights.

I welcome this timely discussion, the first of its kind at the Security Council.

Speaking last year, the Secretary-General called on States to bring order to what he called the Wild West of cyberspace.

While welcome progress has been made at the UN in recent months, the cyber security challenges faced by States continue to grow, endangering international peace and security.

I would like to focus my remarks today on three areas:

- challenges and opportunities;

- the need for States to implement measures agreed at the UN;

- and the importance of a values-based approach to this issue.

Firstly on the challenges and opportunities.

Digital and communications technologies continue to drive economic growth and transform how we live, communicate and work.

Innovation is key to addressing some of todays critical global challenges, including climate change. It also facilitates important advances in medical research, improves access to education, and enhances the capabilities of our peacekeepers, helping them to keep safe.

Over the past year, the pandemic has highlighted our increasing reliance on Information and Communication Technologies, bringing people together at times when they had to stay apart, while at the same time exposing our vulnerabilities.

I speak from recent experience on this last point. Irelands public healthcare systems were subject to a very damaging ransomware attack last month that impacted on critical medical services.

An attack of this kind during a global pandemic is appalling. Unfortunately, Irelands experience is not isolated internationally.

Malicious cyber activity, including crippling ransomware attacks, cybercrime, intellectual property theft and the spread of disinformation and hate, has surged in recent years.

Critical infrastructure is increasingly being targeted.

Ireland is gravely concerned that this activity poses a threat to international peace and security.

Existing security challenges are being compounded by cyber threats, such as the vulnerability of nuclear-weapon command and control systems to cyberattacks. This adds fresh urgency to the need to make progress on nuclear disarmament.

We cannot allow cyberspace to be unconstrained by rules or laws, where malicious actors operate at will.

International disputes in cyberspace must be resolved by peaceful means.

This Council must send a clear message of support for a peaceful and secure global cyberspace built on consensus and mutual trust.

Turning to my second point, Ireland welcomes recent progress at the UN on agreeing the framework for responsible state behaviour in cyberspace.

States have now reaffirmed that existing International Law, particularly the UN Charter, provides a strong, rules-based foundation for all approaches to cyber security.

Ireland supports efforts aimed at promoting deeper understanding among States on the application of international law to cyberspace.

We will soon publish our national position, and encourage others to do likewise.

Responsible State behaviour is, of course, also critical.

All UN member States have agreed to be guided by the eleven voluntary norms of State behaviour in cyberspace.

We now need to work on promoting understanding and implementing these norms, building on the foundation of international law, to strengthen global cyber security. This will reduce the potential for conflict and improve international relations.

Confidence-building measures, including dialogue, build trust and reduce tensions between States. I know that is stating the obvious, but it does need to be said.

We welcome the leading role played by regional organisations in this regard, including the OSCE. Ireland and our EU partners are committed to supporting capacity-building initiatives.

In a highly interconnected cyberspace, no country is safe until all countries are safe. Surely, COVID-19 has taught us that.

We also remain committed to tackling the global digital divide. Online access for all will be a key element in the delivery of the Sustainable Development Goals in the next decade.

My third point is that maintaining international peace and security in cyberspace must be human-centric and values-based.

Ireland supports a safe, secure, and accessible cyberspace where human rights and fundamental freedoms apply, both on and offline.

We strongly reaffirm the applicability of international human rights law to States' actions in cyberspace.

The protection of civilians remains an overarching priority in all aspects of our work. In this regard, Ireland is committed to ensuring respect for international humanitarian law in cyberspace.

It is a sad fact that the gendered violence experienced by too many women and girls is now frequently accompanied and magnified by online violence and cyber threats.

This makes it all the more important that we, as leaders, all leaders, consciously promote the participation of women in UN processes, decisions and policies on cyber.

We need to work harder to overcome the gender digital divide.

Ireland has consistently advocated for the inclusion of a broader range of expertise in UN discussions on cybersecurity and capacity-building.

Governments, together with those who drive and lead on technological innovation, have the responsibility to maintain a safe and free cyberspace.

The contributions of civil society, technical experts, academics and the private sector have enriched past cyber discussions at the UN. To date, their engagement has been far too limited, in our view, on the cyber security issue.

We also support initiatives, including the Paris Call for Trust and Stability in Cyberspace, which bring State and non-State stakeholders together with the shared objective of promoting peace and security.

We must all work together to reach better shared solutions.

Madam President,

To conclude, Ireland will continue to support constructive, multilateral, and multi-stakeholder approaches, built on consensus, to strengthen cyber resilience worldwide.

We call on all States to behave responsibly, in full compliance with International Law, and to implement the normative framework.

We value the role of the Security Council in preventing conflict and promoting peace and security, including in cyberspace.

And we urge all States to build on the achievements made at the UN in recent months.

In this way we can ensure a more secure and peaceful global cyberspace for everyone to benefit from.

Thank you.

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If you ask Washington State swimmer Taylor McCoy how she came to adopt the backstroke as her specialty, she might talk initially about the chicken and the egg. Does she like that stroke because shes good at it? Or is she good at it because she likes it?
After being unable to host any events for the last two years due to COVID-19, the Coffee County Arts Alliance has something special planned fo
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP)  Disney Cruise Line is postponing its first test cruise since the pandemic brought the cruise industry to a standstill after a handful of participants had inconsistent test results for COVID-19, the company said Monday.

The Disney Dream had been scheduled to set sail Tuesday from Port Canaveral, Florida, with 300 employees who had volunteered for the simulation cruise. But the trip was postponed until next month, pending approvals, because a small number of employees had inconsistent results for COVID-19, which is considered positive by the CDC," Disney said in a statement.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, had approved the cruise lines request to conduct a two-night test cruise.

The federal government is starting to allow cruises to sail again, but only if nearly all passengers and crew are vaccinated against the virus. Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill banning business from requiring proof of vaccination, so cruise lines must prove the effectiveness of their COVID-19 safety protocols on test cruises.
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Holley said legislation to put minimum requirements on auto insurance, numerous bills limiting access to abortions, and expanding alcohol sales in the state are some of the highlights of his career.

Holley said hes proud to have helped the state go from an anti-business climate to a business friendly one.

Weve made a concerted effort to really change our image to a pro-business state, he said.

Hes also sponsored product liability and food safety bills  not always the flashiest bills, but important ones.

Ive found out over the years that good legislation is not necessarily the popular legislation, Holley said.

He chairs the Senate Government Affairs Committee and has been a fixture on the General Fund budget committee. Holley is a retired Troy University administrator.

In 2017, Holley was one of the senators behind a bill to create the Legislative Services Agency, putting the non-partisan professionals who provide legal, fiscal and bill-drafting services to lawmakers under one agency to make the Legislature more efficient.
Coffee, Geneva, Houston and Pike counties were all listed as very high risk as of June 24. In each county, the goals were met for testing and the percentage of positive cases but the number of new cases was not declining.

Barbour, Covington, Dale, and Henry counties are all listed as low risk.

Even with low numbers, an upward trend needs to watched, Kirkland said.

People should use the risk indicator to determine what precautions to take to protect themselves and others around them, especially if they are unvaccinated, Kirkland said. Vaccinated or not, if youre in high-risk county, Kirkland recommends you wear a mask, reconsider gatherings or postpone events until your countys numbers go down again.

The goal is to keep transmission rates down so that new variants can never gain a foothold. And, yes, getting vaccinated will also keep variants down.

Its also one of the best things you can do when we have these types of trends, Kirkland said. It helps protect you, but it also goes a long way to helping protect others around you, too. Its a two-way street with the protection.

Peggy Ussery is a Dothan Eagle staff writer and can be reached at aussery@dothaneagle.com or 334-712-7963. Support her work and that of other Eagle journalists by purchasing a digital subscription today at dothaneagle.com.

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Shes a rock star, Garcia told the Herald. And on top of that a super mom.

-

LEON and CRISTINA OLIWKOWICZ

Leon Oliwkowicz, 80, and his wife Cristina Beatriz de Oliwkowicz, 74, lived on the 8th floor of the condo tower for several years, according to Venezuelan journalist Shirley Varnagy, a close friend of their family.

They had already sent their children to live in the U.S. from Venezuela, and then joined them as the economic and political crisis worsened in their native country, said Rabbi Moshe Perlstein, dean of the Yeshivas Ohr Eliyahu-Lubavitch Mesivta, an Orthodox Jewish School in Chicago where one of their daughters, Leah Fouhal, works as an office manager.

Perlstein flew to Florida to support Fouhal after the disaster as she waited anxiously to learn her parents' fate. Late Sunday, authorities announced that their bodies had been recovered.

On Friday, she was there and she was standing a few blocks away, and smoke was coming from the (collapsed building). And she tells me, I just hope Ill be able to bury my parents instead of their ashes... And then, thank God she was able to bury her parents, not the ashes, he said.
Graham said the museum, which closed in July 2019 for the renovations, was demolished down to the bare studs. People who remember the old building will recognize little except a Thomas Hart Benton mural, some artifacts and a recreation of Trumans Oval Office, he said.

After starting in the new 3,000-square-foot Grandview Hall entrance, visitors first see Truman giving a speech in 1945 when he was running as Franklin Delano Roosevelts vice president. FDR died only 82 days into that term, leaving the world wondering, who is this farmer from Missouri who is taking over the free world? Graham said.

The exhibits try to answer that question. The first gallery shows Trumans life in Missouri before he entered politics, from his childhood on a farm to his service in World War I to his failed haberdashery and his connection to Kansas City political machine boss Thomas Pendergast.

The previous museum had showcased Trumans political life and presidency and relegated his personal life in Missouri to the basement. Now, his story is told in a more linear way.

Now you can truly weave through his boyhood into the presidency and beyond," said Kelly Anders, deputy director of the museum.
MONTGOMERY  Alabama House Speaker Mac McCutcheon said Monday he will not seek reelection next year.

McCutcheon, 68, said in a statement that he is stepping away from politics to spend time with his family and to do some traveling with his wife.

Its been an honor and a privilege to represent the people of District 25 in the House and the citizens of the State of Alabama as speaker, but after four terms its time to go home, McCutcheon said.

McCutcheon, a Republican from Monrovia, is a former police officer and crisis negotiator. He was first elected to the House in 2006. He served as the chairman of the influential House Rules Committee, which decides what bills come up for debate, from 2012 to 2016.

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McCutcheon came to the helm of the House at a time that the state was being battered by scandals.

McCutcheon was selected as speaker in 2016 to replace former House Speaker Mike Hubbard, who was removed from office after being convicted on ethics charges.

In his statement, McCutcheon noted that it was a difficult time to say the least.

A year later in 2017, the House of Representatives began impeachment hearings against then-Gov. Robert Bentley. Bentley later resigned.
These employees go through hours of training to keep stores safe and prevent the sale of liquor to minors. Dollars and cents aside, if you look at this from a health and safety standpoint Alabama is better off with state regulated ABC stores controlling liquor sales than private retailers.

Speaking of private liquor stores, you can expect a big jump in their numbers. If you consider all the grocery stores, convenience stores, other retail chains such as Walmart and Target, along with the additional package stores that will pop up if liquor sales are privatized, liquor outlets in the state could increase from around 850 currently to more than 2,100. While there would not literally be a liquor store on every corner, it sure might feel like it.

Furthermore, studies and common sense indicate that the more stores you have selling liquor, which will come with privatization, the more liquor you are going to sell. More sales mean more consumption, and more consumption means more health and safety problems. Alcohol is not just another commodity and buying it should not be as easy as buying milk and bread. Data from the CDC says 95,000 people die annually due to excessive drinking. No drug kills as many people each year as alcohol.
The donation had been announced by Japan's Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi last Friday.

It will be the second donation from Japan after the first batch of 966,320 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine on June 16.

A majority of the first batch, or 806,000 doses, had been given to Ho Chi Minh City for its mass inoculation program, the biggest in Vietnams vaccination history.

Between June 19 and 27, the city had vaccinated 710,773 people.

The Health Ministry said the vaccine batch from Japan "has arrived at a perfect time to help Vietnam contain Covid-19."

Vietnam aims to procure 150 million doses of vaccines to cover 70 percent of its population this yearat an estimated cost of VND25.2 trillion ($1.09 billion), the Health Ministry had announced earlier.

As of Tuesday, it had received almost 4.5 million doses: 2.5 million of AstraZeneca vaccine doses via the Covax mechanism; more than 400,000 secured through a contract to buy 30 million AstraZeneca vaccine doses by Vietnam Vaccine JSC (VNVC); almost one million doses donated by Japan and 500,000 doses of Sinopharm vaccine gifted by China.

Almost 3.5 million of Vietnams 96 million population have been vaccinated against Covid-19 and 172,994 have got two shots.

Apart from Vietnam, Japan also announced a gift of a million doses to Taiwan and is making plans to give the same to Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.

As planned, from mid-July, Japan will donate 11 million doses to countries in Southeast Asia and Southwest Asia as well as the Pacific Ocean's islands via the Covax facility.
A local woman shows up a coupon to get into Binh Thoi market in HCMC's District 11 following a new scheme to limit the number of people gathering at once in wet markets, June 26, 2021. Photo by VnExpress/Quynh Tran.

The Health Ministry confirmed 95 local Covid-19 patients on Tuesday morning in eight localities and more than half are in HCMC.

The southern metropolis recorded 58 cases. Of them, 47 had contact with Covid-19 patients, one is linked to the cluster at Son Ky Market in Tan Phu District, two to Binh Dien wholesale market in District 8, five related to a church cluster in Go Vap District and for the other three, the source of transmission is yet to be determined.

The south central Phu Yen Province got 18 cases who had contact with Covid-19 patients. The Mekong Delta province of Long An that borders HCMC registered eight cases, including four linked to previously-confirmed patients, three linked to Binh Dien market. The remaining one has unclear infection source. Bac Giang Province in the north registered four cases in areas that have been isolated. The north central Ha Tinh Province reported three cases, with two linked to previously-confirmed patients and one with unclear transmission source. Its neighbor Nghe An Province got two cases related to Covid-19 patients. The case in the Mekong Delta's Tra Vinh is related to the cluster at Binh Dien market while the one in Vinh Long Province, which is also in the delta, is a woman from its neighbor Dong Thap Province and it is still unknown why she got infected.

More than two months into the new wave, Vietnam has recorded 12,788 local infections in 48 of its 63 cities and provinces.

Bac Giang has the highest number of infections, at 5,667, followed by HCMC with 3,494.

Vietnam has recorded 16,136 infections ever since the pandemic started, including 14,358 community transmissions and the rest imported.

The country has administered nearly 3.5 million Covid-19 vaccine shots, fully vaccinating nearly 173,000 people with two shots.
People line up to be vaccinated against Covid-19 in HCMC, June 24, 2021. Photo by VnExpress/Huu Khoa.

Vietnam recorded 94 new local Covid-19 cases Tuesday noon, and HCMC continued to account for more than half, the Health Ministry announced.

54 cases were recorded in HCMC, 14 in Hung Yen, 11 in Bac Giang, eight in Ha Tinh, three in Bac Ninh, two in Hai Phong and one each in Dong Thap and Lang Son.

25 cases in HCMC had close contact with previously confirmed patients, while 20 others are linked to a company in Binh Thanh District. Two others are associated with the Son Ky market in Tan Phu District and one is linked to the Binh Dien market in District 8. Six cases are being contact traced.

Nine cases in the northern province of Hung Yen are linked to a company in Yen My District, while the other five are being contact traced.

All the cases in the northern Bac Giang and the north central Ha Tinh are already contained within quarantine zones and locked down areas.

The cases in the northern province Bac Ninh are linked to existing outbreaks at the Khac Niem industrial park in the eponymous ward and an area of Tien An Ward.

The cases in Hai Phong and the Mekong Delta's Dong Thap are close contact cases.

The case in Lang Son, a 26-year-old woman, is linked to the Quang Chau industrial park in Bac Giang.

More than two months into the new wave, Vietnam has recorded 12,882 local infections in 48 of its 63 cities and provinces. On Tuesday alone, 189 cases have been recorded, including 112 in epicenter HCMC.

Bac Giang has the highest number of infections in the fourth wave, at 5,678, followed by HCMC with 3,548.
The research team of the University of Hawai'i's School of Life Sciences, led by Professor Tung Hoang, have received a $3-million contract from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency in the U.S. Department of Defense to create a vaccine against melioidosis, or Whitmore's disease.

The awarding of the contract was announced on the universitys website.

Melioidosis is an infectious disease that spreads to humans through cuts in their skin, consuming contaminated water or inhaling particles containing the bacterium Burkholderia pseudomallei.

Its symptoms include fever, pneumonia, abscesses and inflammation of the brain and joints. The disease is frequently misdiagnosed as tuberculosis. It is known to cause various types of infection, including pulmonary, localized, bloodstream and disseminated infections, all of which can be fatal. The diseases mortality rate is 40 percent.

UH researchers have studied Burkholderia pseudomallei for more than 10 years.

They discovered two specific surface proteins that allow the bacterium to attach to human cells for infection. Without these proteins, the bacterium is much less infectious.

These findings were released in a March 2021 study published in Nature Communications.

"This finding was significant because unlike most viruses, which have less than a dozen proteins, bacteria have thousands of different proteins. Its like finding a needle in a haystackfinding which ones are important for infection and disease, and which ones can be used for an actual vaccine candidate," Hoang was quoted as saying on the university website.

He said his team has used the two proteins to create a vaccine and their study showed 100 percent effectiveness in mice. Unvaccinated mice died within five days, while 100 percent of vaccinated mice survived for at least one month, which was the duration of the study. Based on this finding, they submitted an application to the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

Whitmore's disease was first diagnosed in Vietnam in 1925, though sufficient knowledge of the illness is still lacking.

Around 10,000 cases are reported worldwide each year, mostly during the rainy season, around half of which prove fatal. There has been no vaccine against the disease so far.

Tung Hoang is a full professor at the Department of Microbiology at the UH. He received his Bachelor of Science Degree in Biochemistry from the University of Calgary, Canada, in 1994.

He earned a thesis-based Master of Science Degree in Microbiology and Infectious Diseases at the University of Calgary in 1996. After working for one year, he entered the Ph.D. program at Colorado State University, specializing in Bacterial Genetics, and earned his Ph.D. three years later in early 2000. He has published 13 papers after his Ph.D. and received two years of postdoctoral fellowship support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research, and Minister of Fisheries and Oceans of Canada.

He joined the faculty in the Department of Microbiology at UHM, as an Assistant Professor in 2002 and later became a full professor.
Even prior to the 2014 outbreak of hostilities, Yemen was the poorest country on the Arabian Peninsula. Today, the United Nations says that Yemen is "the world's worst humanitarian crisis." Sadly, this is a man-made disaster, caused by a war between Yemens Houthi rebels on one side, and on the other, the internationally recognized government of Yemen and the Saudi-led Coalition.

The crisis was sparked by the Houthis attempt to topple the internationally recognized government of Yemen and has resulted in the proliferation of conflict and instability. Almost seven years of war have led to an economic collapse and erosion of basic services. About two thirds of the countrys 31 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance, and 5 million are facing a high risk of starvation.

Yet despite the suffering, and repeated international calls for a ceasefire, the Houthi rebels refuse to stop fighting. One reason for this intransigence is the fact that Iran supports their war effort.

Iran-based, Houthi financier Said al-Jamal operates a network of front companies, intermediaries, and vessels that smuggle Iranian fuel and other commodities to customers willing to evade U.S. sanctions. The operation brings in tens of millions of dollars, and a significant amount of these proceeds goes to the Houthis, thus financing the war and prolonging misery in Yemen. Some of the money also helps fund the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Forces destabilizing activities in Yemen and elsewhere in the region.

Helping to stop the flow of money to the Houthis, the U.S. government imposed sanctions on Said Ahmad Muhammad al-Jamal on June 10, along with 11 other individuals and companies and a vessel, related to this illicit network. This means that all property under U.S. jurisdiction belonging to the designated persons is blocked, and U.S. persons may not engage in transactions with them.

The United States is working to help resolve the conflict in Yemen and bring lasting humanitarian relief to the Yemeni people, said Secretary of State Antony Blinken in a written statement.

It is time for the Houthis to accept a ceasefire and for all parties to resume political talks. Only a comprehensive, nationwide ceasefire can bring the urgent relief Yemenis need, and only a peace agreement can resolve the humanitarian crisis in Yemen. The United States will continue to apply pressure to the Houthis, including through targeted sanctions, to advance those goals.
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Tentatively set for Nov. 16, active registered voters would only vote yes or no on the General Obligation Bond Question that would authorize the school district to issue up to $150 million in general obligation, in one series or more, for the purpose of financing the acquisition, construction, improvement or equipping of school facilities.

Mask policy future

Trustees will also revisit concerns regarding mask policies when they discuss waiving attorney-client privilege to reveal two legal opinions. It could give the district options for writing its own mandates for face coverings in schools.

The matter stems from a suggestion offered by Trustee Candace Wines for the districts legal counsel to look into the financial consequences faced by the school district if the board decides in the future to deviate from state directives issued by Gov. Steve Sisolak for Covid-19 mitigation policies.

The last update before school ended excluded students nine years old and younger from wearing masks in buildings or on school grounds but required them for children who were mainly in the fourth and fifth grade.
A judge in Indiana has placed an injunction on the state stopping the financial assistance ordering the reinstatement of payments. Last week workers in Maryland and Texas joined Indiana in taking their state's governor to court over the decision to end federal pandemic unemployment benefits.

Starting in early May, Republican governors across the US announced that their states would no longer participate in the federal unemployment programs set up last year to help those laid off due to the pandemic. Only two of the 27 Republican state governors have bucked the trend following most Democrat-led states in continuing the unemployment payments until they expire in September.

Likewise, a handful of Republican state legislatures are pushing Democrat governors to follow suit. So far only Governor John Bel Edwards of Louisiana has announced he will end his states participation at the end of July after reaching an agreement with the State Legislature.

Indiana judges decision could bode ill for other states

When granting a preliminary injunction on Indianas suspension of the enhanced unemployment compensation programs on Friday, Marion Superior Court Judge John Hanley said that the harm created by terminating the benefits far outweighed any risks to the state while the lawsuit is pending resolution. "A loss of housing or medical care and the inability to provide food, shelter and adequate childcare for a family constitute irreparable harm pending resolution of this cause of action and are not adequately compensable by an award of damages," Judge Hanley wrote.

Judge Hanly said that there was a "preponderance of evidence" to demonstrate Governor Eric Holcomb violated state law which says that the state must procure all available federal insurance benefits to citizens." Governor Holcomb announced in May that Indiana would stop federal enhanced unemployment payments starting 19 June.

Speaking to Yahoo Money Andrew Stettner, an unemployment insurance expert and senior fellow at the Century Foundation said "The decision by Judge Hanley was a breakthrough, as many states have similar state law provisions that could be brought up in court." He added "I expect more judges to be sympathetic to the facts in the cases."

Lawsuits currently pending in Texas and Maryland

Through Facebook two separate groups of jobless aid recipients, Texas Unemployment Updates and Unemployment Petition and Peaceful Protest, filed a temporary restraining order on Thursday. The 30,000-plus members among the two groups say that Governor Abbott did not have the legal authority to take the decision on his own, but that it should be determined by the Texas Workforce Commission.

A judge denied the temporary restraining order on Friday over concerns that the litigants didnt have standing but that perhaps standing would exist with the Texas Workforce Commission. Attorney David Sibley intends to file an injunction to reinstate unemployment payments which ended 26 June for around one million Texans.

The Unemployed Workers Union, an advocacy group organized by the Peoples Power Assembly to help people obtain benefits, on Thursday filed a class-action lawsuit in Baltimore Circuit Court against Governor Larry Hogan's order to end the federal programs 3 July. The group is also seeking to secure benefits for people whose cases have been pending in the states claims system. The attorney representing the workers, Alec Summerfield, said that he wants a hearing on the motion for an injunction early this week.
Citing the need to get people back to work because of labor shortages, blaming overly generous federal unemployment benefits, 26 states have chosen to suspend federal pandemic unemployment compensation early. Workers in three states have not taken the decision lying down, filing lawsuits against their governors to continue payments, potentially more court filings could be on the way.

A judge in Indiana, the first state to face a lawsuit over ending benefits prior to the 6 September national expiration date, placed a temporary injunction on Governor Eric Holcombs order to cease participation in all four federal jobless benefits programs. Marion Superior Court Judge John Hanley in his ruling on Friday said that the harm on workers created by terminating the benefits far outweighed any risks to the state continuing to pay them while the lawsuit is pending resolution.

"Indiana should notify the US Department of Labor immediately of its continued participation in the CARES Act programs pending further action by this Court," Marion Superior Court Judge John Hanley wrote.

Texas and Maryland join workers in Indiana in suing over ending unemployment benefits early

On Thursday lawsuits were filed against Governor Greg Abbott of Texas, along with the Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, and Governor Larry Hogan of Maryland. As in Indiana the plaintiffs allege that the governors did not have the legal authority to order cutting off unemployment benefits that are paid with federal dollars. In the case of Indiana, state law requires that all available federal insurance benefits to citizens" must be procured.

Judge Hanly wrote that there was a "preponderance of evidence" to demonstrate Governor Eric Holcomb violated that state law when he ordered his state to stop payment of federal benefits starting 19 June. Andrew Stettner, an unemployment insurance expert and senior fellow at the Century Foundation told Yahoo Money "The decision by Judge Hanley was a breakthrough, as many states have similar state law provisions that could be brought up in court."

"I expect more judges to be sympathetic to the facts in the cases," Stettner added.

Travis County District Judge Dustin Howell denied the Texas workers petition for a temporary restraining order on Friday over concerns that the litigants didnt have standing but that perhaps standing would exist with the Texas Workforce Commission. Attorney David Sibley intends to file an injunction to reinstate unemployment payments which ended 26 June for around one million Texans.

The Unemployed Workers Union, an advocacy group organized by the Peoples Power Assembly to help people obtain benefits filed a class-action lawsuit on Thursday in Baltimore Circuit Court against Governor Larry Hogan's order to end the federal programs 3 July. Our position is that this order is illegal. And a threat to the public welfare, the attorney representing the workers, Alec Summerfield said.

Summerfield wants a hearing on the motion for an injunction early this week. "I hope the court will be prudent here and handle the situation correctly and well hear from them on Monday, either a scheduling order or just an update." The decision will affect nearly 250,000 people, according to the labor department.

The lawsuit in Maryland differs in that it is also seeking to secure benefits for people whose cases have been pending in the states claims system.

Floridians saw the extra $300 a week on top of other unemployment compensation they were receiving cut off on Saturday. Florida and four more of the other 26 states that are ending benefits early chose to only end the $300 booster to jobless benefits, keeping the other federal programs. The Florida AFL-CIO petitioned Governor Ron DeSantis to reverse his decision to stop the $300 weekly federal unemployment supplement. If the Governor does not, the union said it would consider legal action against DeSantis.

26 states will end one or all of the federal unemployment programs set up during the covid-19 pandemic beginning 12 June.

Federal unemployment programs that will be stopped in some states before 6 September expiration date:
In late May, the CDC released guidance that masks do not need to be worn outdoors so long as physical distancing is possible. More recently, as the World Health Organization (WHO) releases new information on the delta variant, the CDC may have to rethink its decision, especially as it relates to areas where vaccination rates are low.

Delta variant and new mask mandates

On 25 June, WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom assured the international community that his organization is closely following and researching the delta variant. In his comments, he stated that Delta is the most transmissible of the variants identified so far, has been found in at least 85 countries, and spreading rapidly among unvaccinated populations.

To slow the spread of the delta variant and to make it harder for new strains of the virus to emerge, Dr. Tedros stated that it is now more urgent that we use all the tools at our disposal to prevent transmission.

During the same media press conference, the WHO Assistant Director-General, Dr. Mariangela Simao, warned even those who have received a covid-19 vaccine could still be susceptible to infection by the delta variant. For individuals to help slow the spread, even those who are a part of the two percent globally that have received their shots need to continue to use masks consistently, be in ventilated spaces, hand hygiene, respiratory etiquette, the physical distance, avoid crowding.

What have scientists confirmed about the delta variant?

New science on covid-19 and the variants are coming out every day. The WHO reviews these reports and studies carefully and provides guidance once the information has been vetted.

The organization has stated that the delta variant is more transmissible than the alpha variant, which emerged in the United Kingdom. However, there is no evidence that those infected with delta are contagious for a longer period of time. This variable, the time a person would transmit the virus, poses a serious threat to our understanding of the virus as quarantine and social isolation timelines would need to be adjusted to stop the spread. At this point, with the delta variant, it does not look like that guidance will need to be modified.

The CDC has stated that they assume that the delta variant is more contagious but has not identified a figure to associate with the hypothesis. The organization has also reviewed the evidence indicating that delta may be more resistant to some therapeutics, including monoclonal antibody treatments. As far as vaccines are concerned, the CDC has stated that the vaccines available may be slightly less effective in preventing infection.

What states are susceptible to the growing spread of the delta variant?

Both the CDC and the WHO have warned that areas with unvaccinated people face a greater risk to the delta variant. In the US, around 53% of the population is at least partially vaccinated. The rate is higher for adults, where the average stands at around 66%. Only children between the ages of twelve and seventeen can receive a vaccine, leaving a sizable amount of the population ineligible.

More concerning is that when looking at the entire population, twenty-four states have vaccinated less than half of their population, meaning that the delta variant could begin to increase community transmission in these areas at an alarming rate.

However, fifteen states have already met the Presidents goal of having at least seventy percent of adults partially vaccinated by the Fourth of July. Although, in four states -- Mississippi, Louisiana, Wyoming, and Alabama -- this number is less than half.
Wang Yang, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) National Committee, visits an exhibition on the eighth CPC National Congress in Beijing, capital of China, June 28, 2021. (Xinhua/Li Xiang)

BEIJING, June 28 (Xinhua) -- Members of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) organizations have been urged to pool their strengths so that the CPPCC can better play its role as a political advisory body in the new era.

Wang Yang, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the CPPCC National Committee, also urged the CPPCC members to strengthen their ideals and conviction through learning the history of the CPC.

Wang made the remarks on Monday when visiting an exhibition on the eighth CPC National Congress held at the auditorium of the CPPCC National Committee in September 1956.

He said the CPPCC will continue to rally strength and build solidarity across all sectors of society to make contributions to the accomplishment of the CPC's missions in the new era.

The exhibition, launched ahead of the 100th anniversary of the CPC's founding, displayed more than 120 pictures, nearly 100 documents and nearly 50 items of the CPC's eighth national congress.

The congress was the first national congress of the Party after the founding of New China, during which an array of major decisions concerning economic, political, cultural and diplomatic policies were made.

[ Editor: WPY ]
Photo released on June 27, 2021 by the China National Space Administration (CNSA) shows wheel ruts left by Mars rover Zhurong. The CNSA on Sunday released new videos and images of the country's Mars probe Tianwen-1 landing on and exploring the red planet. The videos show the landing rover deploying its parachute and descending to the Martian surface, and its Mars rover Zhurong driving away from its landing platform and moving over the land. The images include the Martian landscape and the ruts left behind by the rover. (CNSA/Handout via Xinhua)

BEIJING, June 27 (Xinhua) -- The China National Space Administration (CNSA) on Sunday released new videos and images of the country's Mars probe Tianwen-1 landing on and exploring the red planet.

The videos show the landing rover deploying its parachute and descending to the Martian surface, and its Mars rover Zhurong driving away from its landing platform and moving over the land.

The images include the Martian landscape and the ruts left behind by the rover.

As of the morning of June 27, the orbiter of the Tianwen-1 mission has been operating around Mars for 338 days, and its Earth-Mars distance is approximately 360 million km.

The Mars rover Zhurong has been working on Mars for 42 Martian days and has driven a total of 236 meters.

Zhurong will continue its movement, detection, and scientific exploration missions as planned.

The orbiter will continue to operate in a relay orbit, providing relay communication for the rover's scientific exploration while conducting its own scientific detection operations. Enditem

[ Editor: SRQ ]
GUANGZHOU, June 29 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese naval fleet on Tuesday returned to a military port in Zhanjiang, south China's Guangdong Province, after concluding escort missions in the Gulf of Aden and the waters off Somalia.

The 37th naval escort fleet, comprised of missile destroyer Changsha, missile frigate Yulin and supply ship Honghu, weighed anchor on Jan. 16 at a port in the southern city of Sanya.

The last 165 days saw the fleet escort 64 Chinese and foreign ships, and sail more than 90,000 nautical miles.

[ Editor: WXL ]
MOSCOW, June 29 (Xinhua) -- The China-Russia Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation has contributed to bilateral ties and global stability, and its extension conforms to the fundamental interests of both countries and provides guidance and impetus for the long-term growth of bilateral relations, according to Russian officials and experts.

Chinese President Xi Jinping held talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday via video link. The leaders issued a joint statement, officially announcing the extension of the treaty.

Commenting on the talks between the two heads of state, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the video link "reflects the special and trusting nature of the relations between our two countries."

Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of the Russian State Duma or the lower house of the parliament, pointed out how Russia-China ties were fundamental to maintaining global stability and tackling international challenges through an approach that takes into account the interests of each country.

He added that the partnership between the two countries demonstrates how relations are built on honesty and appreciation of both sides' national interests and development.

Alexei Mukhin, director general of Russian think tank the Center for Political Information, told Xinhua that for the general public, the talks demonstrated that even during difficult times, Russia and China have managed to maintain a balanced relationship.

"Russia and China have a long history of good relations," he said, adding that "it is obvious that we have much more in common with China now than with our Western partners," he said.

Commenting on the extension of the treaty, Sergei Luzyanin, professor at Moscow State Institute of International Relations, said it evolves in accordance with emerging challenges and threats, and it is by no means static.

"The treaty is very necessary and important for both sides, it looks to the future and ensures strategic stability and security for our countries in this complex world," he said.

Andrey Karneev, professor and head of the School of Asian Studies at Russia's Higher School of Economics, observed that the treaty fostered deeper Russian-Chinese cooperation on a wide range of both international, bilateral and regional issues.

"Relations have come a long way in these 20 years," Karneev told Xinhua, adding that the partnership was initially based on a certain outline for cooperation and eventually reached a mature state.

"Figures showing trade and economic interaction reflect this, and figures on the bilateral exchange too. This is largely due to the role of this treaty," he added.

Yevgeny Zaitsev, head of the Center for Russian-Chinese Studies at Russia's Lomonosov Moscow State University, said that the treaty has contributed to global development and remains relevant.

"All the main provisions laid down in the treaty have fully retained their relevance and positive effect not only for Russian-Chinese relations but also for the world community as a whole," Zaitsev told Xinhua.

[ Editor: WXL ]
The enterprises of Group DF International, the Austrian holding, owned by Dmytro Firtash, continue to operate, despite the sanctions imposed after the decision of the NSDC by the decree of the president of Ukraine against Firtash and one of the group companies.

"First of all, the group declares that we and our businesses operate as normal and fulfill and will continue to fulfill our obligations both to consumers of our products and to tens of thousands of employees and their families," according to the appeal of the group to its counterparties, partners and employees of the member enterprises of Group DF available to Interfax-Ukraine.

The group stated that it is aimed at fulfilling contractual obligations for the supply of products and the provision of services to all of its businesses, including nitrogen, titanium, gas, logistics, and port.

"Our businesses are contributing to the growth of export of Ukrainian goods abroad ... We will continue to develop our businesses in Ukraine and in other countries where the group operates," the statement says.

At the same time, the group assured that it will continue to provide stable work for more than 50,000 employees of the enterprises, paying decent wages and providing social guarantees.

The group expressed confidence in the injustice of the imposed sanctions, but declined to comment on the NSDC decision.

As reported, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky, by the decree of June 24, approved the NSDC's decision to impose personal sanctions, in particular, against Ukrainian businessman Firtash.
A serviceman of the Armed Forces of Ukraine was wounded by a bullet on Monday evening as a result of shelling by Russian-occupation forces in the Novotoshkivske area in Donbas, the Pivnich (North) task force said.

"Today, on June 28, at about 20:30, in the area of responsibility of the Pivnich task force, the Russian-occupation forces violated the ceasefire and carried out targeted firing of the positions of the Ukrainian defenders from small arms near the village of Novotoshkivske. After providing first aid, the soldier was transported to a hospital. The condition of the serviceman is of moderate severity," the task force said on Facebook said on Monday evening.

It is noted that officials of the brigade and the operational response group of the Military Law Enforcement Service of the Armed Forces of Ukraine are working at the scene.

Earlier, the press center of the Joint Force Operation headquarters said that Russian-occupation forces have not violated the ceasefire in Donbas from the beginning of Monday, June 28.
Kuleba instructs Ukrainian embassies in India, Singapore to check info on fire of vessel with Odesa sailors near Sri Lanka

Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Dmytro Kuleba urgently instructed the embassies in India and Singapore to check information about fire of the MSC MESSINA vessel near Sri Lanka, which had Ukrainian sailors on board.

"Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba instructed the Ukrainian embassies in India and Singapore to immediately check the situation on the MSC MESSINA vessel, whose crew members may include Ukrainian citizens," Ukrainian Foreign Minister Oleh Nikolenko said on his Twitter page.

According to the Seafarers Journal portal, a ship called MSC MESSINA suffered fire in engine room in the area of Sri Lanka, on board of which there were sailors from Odesa.

"According to social networks a 20-year-old sailor from Odesa burned down in the engine room. This was his second voyage. The rest of the crew are on the disabled vessel," the publication said.

The incident took place on June 25, from that moment the crew has been without communication.
As a result of a fire on board MSC MESSINA in the Indian Ocean, a citizen of Ukraine died, Spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Oleh Nikolenko said.

"On behalf of Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba, the Ukrainian Embassies in India and Singapore promptly clarified the situation on the MSC MESSINA vessel. It became known that on June 25, at a distance of 425 nautical miles from Port Blair on the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, a fire broke out in the engine room of the MSC MESSINA container vessel, as a result of which a citizen of Ukraine born in 2001 died," Nikolenko told Interfax-Ukraine on Tuesday.

According to him, the vessel with 28 crew members on board, including 26 Ukrainian citizens, was heading from Colombo (Sri Lanka) to Singapore.

"The fire was extinguished by the crew and with the help of several vessels located in the area of the incident. Other sailors were not injured as a result of this incident. Their condition is satisfactory," the spokesperson said.

He said MSC MESSINA is currently being towed to Singapore. Estimated arrival date until July 4.

"The body of the deceased Ukrainian sailor has already been delivered to Singapore. Preparations for his repatriation have started. The case is under the special control of the Ukrainian Embassy in Singapore," Nikolenko said.
The Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine has passed a law allowing to resume the work of the High Qualification Commission of Judges (HQCJ) of Ukraine. A total of 293 MPs voted for relevant bill No. 3711-d on amendments to the law on the judicial system and the status of judges and some laws on resuming the work of HQCJ.

According to the law, the High Qualification Commiss ion of Judges consists of 16 members, eight of whom are appointed from among judges or retired judges. The High Qualification Commission of Judges of Ukraine is considered plenipotentiary, provided that at least 11 members are appointed to its composition.

Members of the commission are appointed by the High Council of Justice for four years based on the results of a competition.

The contest committee holds a competition for the position of a member of the HQCJ in two stages: selection of candidates based on the results of consideration of the documents submitted by them, the results of a special check, relevant information from open sources and interviewing the selected candidates and determining the list of candidates for recommendation to the High Council of Justice.

The members of the contest committee are appointed by the High Council of Justice. The subjects of the formation of the contest committee are the Councils of Judges, Prosecutors, Lawyers and the National Academy of Legal Sciences represented by the Presidium. The composition of this commission consists of three persons from among the judges or retired judges, proposed by the council of judges; one each from the councils of prosecutors, lawyers and the National Academy of Legal Sciences. At the request of the contest committee to ensure its activities, additional experts, specialists from international and foreign organizations may be involved, which, in accordance with international or interstate agreements, over the past five years, at their own expense, provide Ukraine with international technical assistance in judicial reform and/or preventing and combating corruption.

At the same time, MP Serhiy Vlasenko (from the Batkivschyna faction) during the discussion of the amendments to the bill repeatedly said the bill is "dubious from the point of view of the Constitution."

"This law will not bring any improvement to the judicial system," Vlasenko said.
The German engineering company Horsch has opened an official representative office in Ukraine (the village of Velyka Soltanivka, Kyiv region), and total investments in the project amounted to EUR 5 million, Minister of Agrarian Policy and Food Roman Leshchenko has said.

"Ukraine for Horsch is the market number one for the export of grain and row-crop seeders. And now the German manufacturer of the premium segment of agricultural machinery has invested EUR 5 million in the official representative office in Ukraine. First of all, this is an increase in jobs, training of farmers, investments in technology, local content, logistics solutions and improving the quality of services provided," he wrote on Facebook on Tuesday.

He said that at the opening of the representative office in Ukraine, the world first presentation of a fully robotic seeder with remote control took place.

"This level of trust and the image of the company's owners in relation to our country is undoubtedly inspiring! We get advanced technologies, exchange of experience and partnership with industry leaders! And this better speaks of the prospects of Ukraine through the eyes of our international partners," the minister said.

According to the data on the Horsch Facebook page, Ukraine is consistently one of the three main export markets of the company, and it has representative offices of a level similar to Ukraine only in France, the United States, the Russian Federation and China.

According to the engineering company, the representative office is built to provide Horsch dealers with uninterrupted access to spare parts as well as customer support. At the same time, the place for it was chosen with the prospect of further expansion. On a plot of 15 hectares there are 3,300 square meters of premises: central office, spare parts warehouse, marketing hall, conference rooms, seminar rooms. In this area, Horsch also admits the possibility of building a plant for manufacturing the company's equipment and an IT center.

According to the data on the manufacturer's website, Horsch Ukraine was founded in 2009 in the village of Polkovnyche (Kyiv region), and in 2011 the company launched a central spare parts warehouse, from which it dispatches spare parts throughout Ukraine.
KYIV. June 29 (Interfax-Ukraine)  To prevent crisis processes in the dairy industry of Ukraine, it is necessary to adopt a national program for the development of dairy farming and milk processing industry, the implementation of which will allow increasing the number of cows, production and processing of milk by 2030, Head of the Union of Dairy Enterprises of Ukraine Vadym Chaharovsky said at a press conference at Interfax-Ukraine on Tuesday.

"It is necessary to adopt a national program for the development of dairy farming and milk processing industry. We have already developed a concept for this program, and its main indicators are as follows: an increase in the number of cows to 2.3 million heads, an increase in milk output to 10 million tonnes, it is real, not the figure that our statistics gives, the growth of milk processing up to 8 million tonnes, while last year we processed 3.5 million tonnes," the head of the union said.

According to him, the industry can achieve such indicators if it receives UAH 45 billion of government support for the period 2021-2030, similar to the practice existing in other countries.

At a press conference, Head of the Supervisory Board of CJSC Kulykivske Moloko (Kulykivka, Chernihiv region) Anatoliy Didur said that Ukrainian dairy products are uncompetitive and are being squeezed out of the Ukrainian market by imported ones, mainly produced by the EU. According to him, EUR 69 billion will be provided by the EU to the dairy industry support program for 2021-2027, and an increase in government support for Ukrainian milk producers and processors could increase the competitiveness of Ukrainian products.

In addition, the head of the union said that to overcome the crisis in the industry, it is necessary to conduct a special investigation into the growth of imports of dairy products to Ukraine, as well as introduce retaliatory safeguard measures against its exports from Belarus, which in 2016 joined the embargo imposed by the Russian Federation on the Ukrainian dairy products.

Chaharovsky said that milk producers and processors need a number of laws to be passed by parliament to stimulate the development of the dairy industry.

"It is necessary to amend the laws on quality and safety, where to define milk falsification as food fraud, and amend the Criminal Code, which criminalizes the falsification of dairy products," Chaharovsky said.

He also noted the need to adopt a law on the main provisions of food trade, which provides for a fair distribution of the added value created by milk processing enterprises by the state, as well as the abolition of the current law on milk and dairy products.

"We need to help MPs in the near future to adopt bill No. 5425-d, which will return 20% VAT on dairy raw materials. It is also necessary to amend bill No. 5600 regarding household land plots, because in our opinion, its adoption will force the villagers keeping cattle to cut this livestock, because they will not be able to procure feed for themselves," the head of the union said.

In addition, Chaharovsky announced the need to unite all public industry associations into one powerful lobbying organization.

"The practice, when multidisciplinary organizations lobbied and pushed some bills, ended. It showed that some laws were adopted against the wishes of the dairy industry. Therefore, we declare today that we will create a powerful organization that will lobby for the interests of our industry," Chaharovsky said.
A 3D-printed Facebook logo is seen placed on a keyboard in this illustration taken (Photo : REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo)

A U.S. judge on Monday dismissed federal and state antitrust complaints against Facebook Inc that sought to force the social media company to sell Instagram and WhatsApp, saying the federal complaint was "legally insufficient."



Facebook shares rose more than 4% after the ruling. The share price rise put Facebook's market capitalization over $1 trillion for the first time.



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The dismissal was the first big blow to state and federal lawsuits against Big Tech firms last year seeking to rein in alleged abuses of their massive market power.



Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said the FTC failed to show that Facebook had monopoly power in the social-networking market but said the FTC could file a new complaint by July 29.



He also dismissed a lawsuit by multiple U.S. states, saying they waited too long to challenge the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp in 2012 and 2014 respectively. The judge did not invite the states to refile their complaint.



A spokesperson for the New York Attorney General's office said it was "considering our legal options."



Facebook had asked for the lawsuits to be dismissed.



Regarding the FTC lawsuit, the judge wrote: "Although the court does not agree with all of Facebook's contentions here, it ultimately concurs that the agency's complaint is legally insufficient and must therefore be dismissed."



A Facebook spokesperson said: "We are pleased that today's decisions recognize the defects in the government complaints filed against Facebook." An FTC spokesperson said the agency was "closely reviewing the opinion and assessing the best option forward."



A bright spot for the FTC in the opinion was the judge's saying that the agency was "on firmer ground in scrutinizing the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, as the court rejects Facebook's argument that the FTC lacks authority to seek injunctive relief against those purchases."



The FTC and a big group of states filed separate lawsuits last year that accused Facebook of breaking antitrust law to keep smaller competitors at bay by snapping up rivals, such as Instagram for $1 billion and WhatsApp for $19 billion.



JUDGE FINDS FLAWS IN MARKET SHARE CLAIM



The federal government and states filed a total of five lawsuits against Facebook and Alphabet Inc's Google last year following bipartisan outrage over their social media clout in the economy and the political sphere.



The judge said that the FTC did not adequately support its assertion that Facebook has more than 60% of the market. But Boasberg said the agency could potentially fix the issue in a refiling.



The judge also criticized portions of the FTC's case regarding its refusal to allow interoperability permissions with competing apps.



Republican Senator Josh Hawley criticized the court's decision on the FTC lawsuit as "deeply disappointing."


A visitor looks at a memorial at the site of the arrest of George Floyd, who died while in police custody, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S (Photo : REUTERS/Eric Miller/File Photo)

Nations should "start dismantling racism", set up reparations programmes and prosecute law enforcement officials for unlawful killings of people of African descent, the U.N. human rights chief said on Monday.



Michelle Bachelet, in a global report sparked by the murder of African American George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis in May 2020, said police use of racial profiling and excessive force is entrenched in much of North America, Europe and Latin America.



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Structural racism creates barriers to minorities' access to jobs, healthcare, housing, education and justice, she said.



"I am calling on all states to stop denying, and start dismantling, racism; to end impunity and build trust; to listen to the voices of people of African descent; and to confront past legacies and deliver redress," Bachelet said.



The report called for creating victim compensation programmes and national reparations programmes, including payments, with input from affected communities.



Jamil Dakwar of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) welcomed the recommendations. "This historic report provides a blueprint for the United States and other countries to begin reckoning with the long history of systemic racism that permeates through policing and other state violence and structural discrimination against Black people," he said.



Bachelet welcomed a "promising initiative" by U.S. President Joe Biden in signing an executive order in January to address racial inequity.



At least 190 people of African descent have died worldwide at the hands of law enforcement officials in the past decade - most of them in the United States, the report said.



"With the exception of the case of George Floyd, no one was held accountable," Mona Rishmawi, who supervised the report, told a news conference.



It selected seven "emblematic cases", including that of Floyd. A judge sentenced former police officer Derek Chauvin on Friday to 22-1/2 years for his murder, video of which galvanised the international Black Lives Matter protest movement.



Other victims include an Afro-Brazilian boy, 14, shot dead in an anti-drug police operation in Sao Paulo in May 2020 and a Frenchman of Malian origin, 24, who died in police custody in July 2016.



"One (Brazilian) mother in particular said to us 'you always talk about George Floyd. Every day we have a George Floyd here and nobody talks about it'," Rishmawi said. "We realised that we were only touching the tip of the iceberg."



Racism is most prevalent in countries linked to the former trade of an estimated 25-30 million Africans for enslavement or colonialism, resulting in large communities of people of African descent in countries such as Belgium, Brazil, Britain, Canada, Colombia, France and the United States, the report said.



"There is today a momentous opportunity to achieve a turning point for racial equality and justice," Bachelet said.


The brand logo of Alphabet Inc's Google is seen outside its office in Beijing, China August 8, 2018. Picture taken (Photo : REUTERS/Thomas Peter)

Denmark's media industry is banding together to negotiate payments for news with Google and Facebook, the first attempt in Europe to collectively pursue claims with the tech giants.



Representatives of 29 Danish media companies, including state broadcaster DR, partly state-funded TV2, as well as most major newspaper publishers, will gather on Friday for their first meeting.



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"We believe that a collective management of our rights will make for the best and most fair value regarding big tech's use of our content," Stig Orskov, chief executive of media company JP/Politikens Hus, told Reuters.



Negotiations with Google and Facebook will begin after Friday's meeting, Orskov said. Talks with other tech companies, such as Twitter could follow, he added.



The move comes after a change in the EU copyright directive last year will make sharing platforms such as Google and Facebook have to install filters to prevent users from uploading copyrighted material, such as news.



Facebook and Google both face negotiations over how much they can post of a link from news media and whether they should pay for it.



"It's not content made for free usage," Anders Krab-Johansen, CEO of Berlingske Media, a Danish media house and founding member-to-be of the collective, said.



"That's some Californian misunderstanding," he added, referring to the U.S. tech giants' home base.



The inspiration for the initiative partly comes from the music industry, Orskov said, referring to musicians collectively negotiating rights with music streaming services such as Spotify.



There was controversy earlier this year in France when some media were left out of the union negotiating with Google.


Renowned Egyptian businessman and ex-owner of Mehwar satellite channel Hassan Rateb was arrested on accusations of funding unlicensed excavation of antiquities, according to an official statement early on Tuesday.

Rateb, 74, is accused of providing millions of Egyptian pounds to an illegal excavation gang allegedly led by former MP Alaa Hassanin.

Police arrested Hassanin and 17 member of his gang last week along with 201 antiquities in a warehouse in Old Cairo.

A judge at a southern Cairo court ordered on Saturday renewing the detention of Hassanin and three others for 15 days pending investigation into the case.

The stealing, unlicensed excavation, spoiling, and smuggling of antiquities is punishable by hefty fines and tough prison sentences in Egypt that amount to life imprisonment (25 years in prison).

Rateb in 2017 officially accused Hassanin of defrauding him of $3 million in commercial transactions but later withdrew his complaint to the police after Hassanin seemingly returned the money, according to local reports.

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Hanafi Gibali, speaker of Egypt's House of Representatives, referred on Monday a draft law aimed at banning citizens from having dogs and dangerous animals without a prior licence to the Agriculture and Animal Wealth Committee for study.

The bill, drafted by the Chair of the House's Local Administration Committee Ahmed El-Sigini, states that citizens can not have or hold dogs without a prior license from the veterinary medicine directorate.

The draft law also requires veterinary medicine directorates to hold electronic and paper registration files for licensed dogs, containing information including the name of the dog's holder, his/her place of living, and detailed description of the licensed dog," adding that "each licensed dog should have a serial number, displayed on a tag around its neck.

In addition, dogs will be required to wear muzzles and be restrained by a leash while in public.

El-Sigini said the House's Local Administration Committee has received many letters from citizens, complaining about dogs attacking them and their kids. "Everywhere on the streets of Cairo and other major cities, you will find stray dogs running around housing buildings, scavenging garbage for food, and trying to bite citizens, particularly children," said El-Sigini, adding that "these dogs, unsanitary and dirty, have become a big danger, and so the bill comes to bring this phenomenon under control.

On the other side, said El-Sigini, the ownership of pets also has to be regulated. "The media has repeatedly reported about private dogs attacking people and causing them serious injuries, and so the possession of this kind of dogs and other dangerous animals has also to be regulated," said El-Sigini.

El-Sigini said his proposed law on the ownership and handling of dangerous animals and dogs are consistent with international agreements signed by Egypt.

The draft law also mandates current owners acquire a license within six months of the laws passage, which will cost between EGP 1,000 to EGP 15,000.

The minimum age for ownership will be 16 years of age.

Owning a dog without a licence will be subject to a prison sentence ranging from three months to one year, and a fine ranging from EGP 50,000 to EGP 100,000.

Article three of the proposed bill defines dangerous animals as those which could cause serious harm or damage to man's body or health. As for animal holders, they are the ones who own, hold, keep, shelter, breed, or guard animals on a permanent or temporary basis.

The article states that the word "handling" will include all operations related to the selling, importing, exporting, exchanging, borrowing, displaying or transporting dangerous animals and dogs.

The article states that holders or owners of dangerous animals will be banned from walking them in public places. "They will be required to take all the necessary precautions that their dangerous animals be vaccinated against diseases specified by the concerned minister (the minister of agriculture)," said the article. Holders will be also required to provide healthy food for their animals and in adequate quantities.

The article states that scientific research centres and institutions, animal parks, and circuses will be also required to get a licence before holding dangerous animals.

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Tunisias Foreign Minister Othman Jerandi and his Norwegian counterpart Ine Marie Eriksen Sreide discussed on Tuesday the possibility to bring the issue of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) on the table of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) session in July.

Both officials met on the sidelines of the meetings of foreign and development ministers of the Group of 20 countries in Italy.

They also discussed coordinating stances with other UNSC member states on the GERD issue, the Tunisian foreign ministry said in a statement.

Egypt and Sudan have recently sent two separate letters to the UNSC urging the international body to intervene by holding an emergency session.

This comes as Ethiopia has reiterated its plans to implement the second phase of dam filling next month. Egypt and Sudan, however, have warned against such step before a legally-binding deal is reached among the three countries on the filling and operation of the mega dam.

They urged the UNSC to dissuade Ethiopia from proceeding with filling the dam without reaching a legal deal with downstream countries.

Egypts Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry in media statements this week affirmed that the UNSC would be the last option available within the diplomatic framework.

Jerandi also discussed the GERD issue with Shoukry on the sidelines of the ministerial meeting of the Global Coalition against Daesh, which is being held on Monday and Tuesday in Rome.

Shoukry and Jerandi agreed on continuing coordination on regional issues and coordinating stances with other UNSC members so that they urge the GERD dispute parties to resume consultations.

These consultations should aim to find a fair and permanent solution to the issue, which would secure the interests of all parties and their rights to the Nile water, they agreed.

The Egyptian and Tunisian ministers affirmed the need to bilaterally coordinate in light of the UNSCs possible role in the GERD issue, especially as Tunisia is currently a non-permanent member of the council.

Shoukry in remarks to Kelma Akhira TV program on Saturday said Egypt hopes that the UNSC behaves in a way that enhances Egyptian and Sudanese efforts to reach a legally binding deal on GERD.

Shoukry said Egypt will have exhausted all peaceful means if Ethiopia does not abide by the UNSC reaction on the GERD issue.

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Two Egyptian courts on Tuesday sought the religious opinion of the country's Grand Mufti on preliminary death sentences handed down to 27 members of the terrorist-designated Muslim Brotherhood group terrorism-related charges.

The first case involves 16 defendants who are charged with murdering three policemen and wounding others.

The case dates back to 2015 when the defendants blew up a police vehicle carrying over 50 policemen who were en route to Rashid police station in Beheira governorate, west of the Nile Delta. Three policemen were killed, while 36 others were injured.

The prosecution accused all the defendants of joining a banned group established in violation of the law, and of knowingly joining a Brotherhood- affiliated armed group, with the first defendant separately accused of operating a banned group and its armed affiliates.

Five other defendants were charged with financing an extremist group and providing it with weapons and ammunition, while another nine were accused of participating with others in premeditatedly murdering three police personnel and injuring 36 others.

The prosecution also charged two of the defendants with incitement to commit attempted murder, sabotage and destruction acts, and use explosives, while accused 12 of possessing weapons and explosives, and five of possessing automatic rifles and ammunition.

The second case involves 11 defendants accused of shooting a 38-year-old police corporal to death while leaving his friend's house in a village in the northern Egyptian governorate of Beheira in 2014.

The religious opinion of the mufti is non-binding, but is a necessary procedure before issuing a death sentence in Egypt, according to the countrys code of criminal procedure.

Both courts have set 29 July for the final verdict against the defendants.

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Egypt will introduce paper-based exams for high-school students in July, in a U-turn on what the state has announced before of providing a hybrid system of digital and hard-copy modules of the exams that determine university prospects based on grades obtained.

"The electronic exam platform will be closed so that the students can focus on reading the questions and answering in the paper sheets," Egypts Education Minister Tarek Shawki told a press conference on Tuesday, almost less than two weeks before the start of high school final exams, which is known locally as Thanaweya Amma.

The country's Ministry of Education is printing 192 exam models for all bifurcations' subjects as the exam will no longer be standardized, according to Shawki, who added that around nine million bubble sheets are being printed.

Slightly over 600,000 students are set to take the current year's Thanaweya Amma exams, which are due by 10 July for science division's students and 11 July for literature division.

Going back on online exams comes against the backdrop of growing fears among students' parents of going through power outages during the exam.

Egypt was planning to only introduce online exams for high-school students, but due to concerns over the online exams, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi has directed the government to facilitate procedures for holding Thanaweya Amma exams and providing hard-copy system alongside the online system before today's decision.

"The decision aims to avoid any risks or concerns," the minister told the media after the presser.

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More than 16,000 Ethiopian refugees living in camps in eastern Sudan have had their shelters damaged by storms, the United Nations said Tuesday.

Several weeks of strong winds, heavy rains, and hailstorms have razed tents, swept away belongings and destroyed infrastructure in the settlements of Um Raquba and Tunaydbah, said UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency.

The storms began in late May, and are expected to intensify further during the rainy season, which runs from June to October, UNHCR spokesman Boris Cheshirkov told reporters Geneva.

The agency is in a race against time to repair and reinforce the shelters, and ensure that affected families have access to clean water and functioning latrines.

"Nearly 4,000 out of 10,000 individual family tents have been damaged," Cheshirkov said.

"We are replacing blankets and sleeping mats and replenishing food supplies. Distributions of 2,500 emergency shelter kits -- ropes, wooden poles, and bamboo sticks -- are under way to help those most impacted to reinforce their tents.

"A total of 10,000 emergency shelters kits are planned for distribution with an additional 5,000 in reserve."

UNHCR is working on building and maintaining some 60 kilometres (40 miles) of roads to both camps to ensure access to them and around 15 host community villages throughout the rainy season.

Drainage systems are being dug at the two settlements to mitigate the risk of further flooding.

More permanent shelters called tukuls -- small round huts made from mud bricks and thatch, typical of the region -- are planned.

"But we can only start building them after the rainy season is over, when the bricks will be able to dry properly," said Cheshirkov.

Last year, heavy seasonal rains affected hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people and refugees in Sudan.

UNHCR is calling for $182 million to meet the protection and basic needs of the Ethiopian refugees until the end of the year.

So far, 46 percent of the required amount has been received.

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Rebel fighters in Ethiopia's war-hit Tigray seized control of more territory on Tuesday, one day after retaking the local capital and vowing to drive all "enemies" out of the region.

The rebels' gains and militant rhetoric cast doubt on whether a unilateral ceasefire declared Monday by the federal government would actually lead to a pause in the nearly eight-month-old conflict that has killed thousands of people and pushed hundreds of thousands to the brink of famine.

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, winner of the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize, sent troops into Tigray last November to oust the northern region's former ruling party, the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF).

He said the move came in response to TPLF attacks on federal army camps, and promised that victory would be swift.

But on Monday his military suffered a dramatic reversal when rebels known as the Tigray Defence Forces (TDF) reclaimed the regional capital Mekele, only about a week after launching a major counter-offensive.

They followed that on Tuesday by entering the town of Shire, about 140 kilometres (90 miles) northwest of Mekele, according to a UN security source and a security assessment document seen by AFP.

The news has prompted street celebrations in multiple locations as federal soldiers, their Eritrean allies and members of an Abiy-appointed interim regional government have fled their posts.

A statement overnight from Tigray's pre-war government hailed the TDF advances and called for its fighters to press further.

"The government of Tigray calls upon our people and army of Tigray to intensify their struggle until our enemies completely leave Tigray," it said.

The International Crisis Group, a conflict prevention organisation, said Tuesday that the TDF was "now in control of most of the region, including major towns".

The TDF achieved its gains "mainly through mass popular support and capturing arms and supplies from adversaries," said senior analyst William Davison.

- Rebels march on -

Communications were cut throughout Tigray on Tuesday, making it difficult to verify multiple reports of troop movements.

But by Tuesday afternoon UN officials had confirmed TDF forces were in Shire.

"The population has taken to the streets in droves. Huge crowds line the main routes and movement is somewhat difficult," a UN security assessment document said.

Shire is home to hundreds of thousands of displaced Tigrayans, and the assessment noted that humanitarian operations continued even after the first four vehicles carrying TDF forces arrived from the east.

More TDF fighters were expected to reach Shire later in the afternoon and evening.

For months the TDF did not hold any major cities and towns, but its leaders have repeatedly boasted that they were regrouping in remote rural areas.

Its current offensive was timed to coincide with Ethiopia's highly anticipated national elections, which took place June 21 in much of the country -- though not in Tigray -- and were expected to deliver Abiy a comfortable victory.

- 'Difficult' road to peace -

The brutal war in Tigray has been marked by massacres, widespread sexual violence and other abuses.

The United Nations has also warned that roughly 350,000 people face starvation.

The World Health Organization on Tuesday reiterated concerns about access to health care in the region, warning of potential outbreaks of cholera, measles, malaria and yellow fever.

In announcing its ceasefire Monday, the federal government said it would last until the end of the current "farming season" and was intended to facilitate agricultural production and aid distribution while allowing rebel fighters "to return to a peaceful road".

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Monday he had spoken with Abiy and was "hopeful that an effective cessation of hostilities will take place".

China, France and the United Arab Emirates all issued statements Tuesday welcoming the ceasefire.

Britain, the United States and Ireland have called for an emergency UN Security Council public meeting, which could happen on Friday, diplomats said.

The Security Council has failed to hold a public session on Tigray since the war erupted, with many African countries, China, Russia and other nations deeming the crisis an internal Ethiopian affair.

Throughout the fighting, Abiy has benefited from the backing of soldiers from neighbouring Eritrea and Ethiopia's Amhara region, which borders Tigray to the south.

These forces' involvement "will complicate a blanket application of a temporary ceasefire, which so far appears to be a mostly unilateral move by the federal government", said Connor Vasey, analyst with the risk consultancy Eurasia Group.

Should discussions on a possible political settlement actually go ahead, they "are likely to be difficult and protracted", Vasey said.

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The African Union has warned that the European Union's non-recognition of AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccines manufactured in India risks disadvantaging people who received jabs in Africa.

Under new rules to take effect on Thursday, the EU will do away with the need for quarantines and further testing for travellers immunised with Covid-19 vaccines recognised by the European Medicines Agency (EMA).

These travellers will receive a digital Covid certificate showing their vaccination status.

But the EMA does not currently recognise Covishield -- a copy of the AstraZeneca jab made in India which has been widely distributed to African states through the Covax vaccine scheme.

In a joint statement released Monday, the African Union (AU) and the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention said the rules "put at risk the equitable treatment" of people vaccinated in Africa.

"These developments are concerning given that the Covishield vaccine has been the backbone of the EU-supported Covax contributions to the AU Member States' vaccination programmes," the statement added.

The EMA did not respond to a request for comment from AFP.

However, European Commission spokesman Adalbert Jahnz said that individual EU governments may decide to allow entry to travellers who have received jabs recognised by the World Health Organization (WHO), which includes Covishield.

He nonetheless added that Covishield "is an issue that we are looking at in more detail".

The EU-wide Covid certificate comes into force on Thursday.

With some 5.4 million reported cases and around 141,000 deaths among its nearly 1.3 billion people, Africa is still the world's least-affected continent after Oceania, according to an AFP tally.

However, several African countries such as South Africa and Zambia are experiencing a rapid rise in cases, raising fears about hospital capacity.

Matshidiso Moeti, the WHO's Africa director, called the situation "incredibly concerning" at a press briefing last week, and characterised the continent's third virus wave "the worst yet".

Concern over the EU's new travel rules also comes as the continent is largely falling behind in the global vaccination drive.

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Soldiers from Eritrea withdrew from three key towns in Ethiopia's Tigray region on Tuesday, a day after Tigray fighters took control of the regional capital from retreating Ethiopian forces and Ethiopia's government declared a unilateral cease-fire. Tigray forces vowed to chase ``enemies'' out of the region, signaling no immediate end to the fighting.

The swift turn in the nearly eight-month war has left people scrambling to understand the implications for the region of 6 million people as communications links were largely cut. People in close contact with witnesses who confirmed the withdrawal spoke on condition of anonymity for their safety.

Eritrean soldiers, accused by witnesses of some of the war's worst atrocities, left the towns of Shire, Axum and Adwa but it was not immediately clear where they were going or whether the retreat was temporary. The information ministry of Eritrea, described by human rights groups as one of the world's most repressive countries, did not immediately respond to questions.

``We don't yet know if they are withdrawing'' from Tigray altogether, the acting U.S. assistant secretary of state, Robert Godec, told the House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs. He said the U.S. had seen no statement from Eritrea, nor from the Tigray fighters, saying they are committed to the cease-fire.

Tigray's former leaders said they control the regional capital, Mekele, after ``what appears to be a significant withdrawal of Ethiopian national defense forces from Tigray,'' Godec said.

The Tigray leaders, who have waged a guerrilla war since November after a political falling-out with the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, in a statement overnight called on supporters to ``intensify their struggle until our enemies completely leave Tigray.''

The spokesman for the Tigray forces, Getachew Reda, could not immediately be reached. An Ethiopian military spokesman did not answer the phone.

The arrival of Tigray forces in Mekele on Monday was met with cheers after the interim regional administration, appointed by Ethiopia's government, fled following some of the most intense fighting of the war in Africa's second-most populous country.

Tigray fighters on Tuesday moved into Axum and Shire, a town that in recent months saw the arrival of hundreds of thousands of people fleeing intimidation in western Tigray and is a key staging area for humanitarian aid.

Tigray forces are now in control of much of the region after a major counteroffensive with mass popular support, International Crisis Group analyst William Davison said in a statement.

Preventing growing famine conditions in the region ``has to be the priority of the TDF's leadership, given their forces are now in a position to facilitate access to many previously hard to reach areas,'' Davison said, urging Ethiopia's government not to sabotage the urgent humanitarian efforts.

Major questions remained about the fate of the more than 1 million civilians that the United Nations has said remain in parts of Tigray that have been hard, if not impossible, to reach with aid. The United States has said up to 900,000 people now face famine conditions, in the world's worst hunger crisis in a decade.

That famine ``is entirely man-made,'' the acting U.S. assistant secretary of state said.

Sarah Charles, assistant to the administrator for the United States Agency for International Development, told the Washington hearing that the next week or two will be consequential. She urged Ethiopia to lift a ``communications blackout'' on Tigray and said forces from the neighboring Amhara region who have occupied western Tigray must lift checkpoints on key roads for aid delivery.

U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters Tuesday that ``the impact of the current situation on the humanitarian operations in the region remains unknown right now.'' Operations have been ``constrained for the past few days due to the ongoing fighting.'' The airport in Mekele was closed, and routes to deliver aid were not open, he said.

Ethiopia has said the cease-fire is in part for the delivery of aid but will last only until the end of the crucial planting season in Tigray _ which is in September.

In Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa, people said they weren't sure who to believe amid the battlefield claims, and hoped for peace.

``It's the innocent children, farmers and the poor people that are at the front of the war and are suffering,'' resident Biruk Dessalegn said.

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According to the Israeli foreign ministry, Yair Lapid will be inaugurating Israel's Embassy in Abu Dhabi, meeting with senior Emirati officials, including Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, and attending a trade expo where Israeli companies are exhibiting technology. The ministry described it as a ``historic visit`` to the Gulf kingdom.

Israel and the UAE established full diplomatic relations last year under the Trump administration, after the two countries signed the U.S.-brokered ``Abraham Accords.'' The UAE was joined by Bahrain in normalizing ties with Israel, becoming the third and fourth Arab states to sign peace deals with Israel, after Egypt and Jordan.

In the nine months since the two countries signed the normalization agreement at the White House, Israel and the UAE have signed extensive trade and cooperation deals, and bilateral trade is already expected to have exceeded $354 million. More than 200,000 Israeli tourists have traveled to the UAE, the Foreign Ministry said.

Lapid took office as Israel's foreign minister after Israel's new government was sworn in earlier this month. The Yesh Atid party leader struck a power-sharing deal with Naftali Bennett, who became Israel's prime minister at the head of a coalition of eight diverse parties, ranging from Jewish ultranationalists to a small Islamist party.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had repeatedly scheduled and postponed a visit to Abu Dhabi due to the coronavirus pandemic, but ultimately cancelled the visit ahead of the March 23 elections due to a diplomatic spat with neighbouring Jordan.

Netanyahu reportedly forbade members of his government from traveling to the UAE until he had a chance to make a state visit, according to Israeli media reports.

Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Lior Haiat told reporters after Lapid had departed for Abu Dhabi that the pace of bilateral cooperation between the two countries has been ``unprecedented.''

``There's been years of under-the-radar relations between Israel and the UAE, and we are now enjoying the fruits of the infrastructure of peace that we've built in the last decades,'' Haiat said.

Israel and the UAE had long maintained clandestine security ties before normalizing relations last year due to their shared concerns about regional arch-enemy Iran.

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Overlooking war-battered Gaza from the tenth floor of a tower block, Palestinian human rights lawyer Raji Sourani has a new bundle of files -- on victims of last month's Israel aggression on Gaza.

For years, he has been building cases in the Israeli-blockaded enclave to be submitted to the International Criminal Court.

The 66-year-old lawyer has already filed dozens of cases with The Hague-based court since 2015, after the Palestinian Authority ratified the court's Rome Statute.

The cases represent Palestinian victims of war crimes committed by Israel, according to the lawyer.

For Sourani, the ICC chief prosecutor's announcement in March of a full investigation into the situation in the Israeli-occupied territories was a day of hope.

Israel dismisses the ICC as a "political body" and says that it is carrying out its own probe into alleged war crimes perpetrators.

Sourani, who founded the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in 1995, said an ICC investigation will allow victims to restore their "dignity" and see "proper justice".

- 'Dreamers' -

"We are dreamers, because I mean, if you look around us, the fact is it's so sad, so bad. It's totally unbalanced," he said, weighing up his legal struggle against the might of the Israeli state apparatus.

Sourani and his team of 60 document everything they can to try to prove Israel deliberately targets civilians in its war against Gaza.

The Israeli occupation army blames Hamas for deliberately placing military targets in densely populated areas.

His list is long; from the Israeli blockade since 2007 to victims' accounts of the 2014 Gaza assault, to the suppression of the 2018 "Great March of Return" protests when Palestinians demanded the right to go back to homes their families fled or were expelled from during Israel creation in 1948.

Now, he has added the latest Israeli assault in Gaza.

Photographs of destroyed buildings, detailed lists of victims, reports on missiles used by the Israeli army, mapping of bombed locations; his painstaking work is stored in dozens of filing cabinets.

- 'Send us to the Stone Age' -

The lawyer, who studied in Egypt and Lebanon, said the last conflict was lopsided.

Israel is "the mighty army in the Middle East, the one challenging Iran, Hezbollah, and bombing Syria," he said, waving to the devastation its bombardment wreaked on Gaza, a crowded territory of two million people.

The May 10-21 aggression killed 260, according to Gaza authorities.

In Israel, 13 people were killed, including a soldier, by rockets fired from Gaza, the police and army said.

The Israeli army, which calls Hamas a "terrorist" organisation, denies targeting civilians and insists it does all it can to avoid "collateral damage".

Not enough, according to Sourani.

"Wars are between armies," he said. "Civilians must be avoided."

Sourani listed family after family killed in Israeli strikes.

"Is Hamas the Shorouk Tower, the Hanadi Tower, the Jala Tower?" he asked angrily, naming commercial and residential tower blocks reduced to piles of smoking rubble because Israel claimed they housed Hamas bases.

"What have the water pipelines to do with Hamas? What has the electricity, the sewerage system, to do with Hamas?" he said, referring to infrastructure impacted in the conflict.

To those who argue Israel has the right to self-defence against Hamas rockets, the lawyer points to a power imbalance: One side has fighter jets, while the other side is a population under blockade.

"Gaza is the largest open-air prison," said Sourani. "They want to send us to the Stone Age."

- 'Justice for all' -

Sourani said that when he spent three years in Israeli jails, he used "every minute" to study Hebrew and humanitarian law.

"I have lived my whole life under occupation. No one can say that the Israeli occupation is just," he said.

In his book-lined office sits a bust of Robert F. Kennedy -- a human rights award in memory of the late US senator's belief that individual moral courage can overcome injustice.

Sourani, who received the award in 1991 along with Israeli lawyer Avigdor Feldman, is proud of the honour -- but said he was disappointed that Joe Biden, then US vice president, had also received it in 2016.

"We want people who defend what Robert Kennedy said -- justice for all," he said, criticising Biden over his insistence on Israel's right to self-defence.

"We don't want to see anything more than the rule of law, justice and dignity for the victims we represent," he said.

"We have no personal wish for revenge, but I think Palestinians are entitled to justice and dignity."

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Iran halted its crucial supply of power to Iraq, fueling fears of protests Tuesday amid instability following the resignation of Iraq's electricity minister.

Cash-strapped Iran has put pressure on Iraq's government to release payments for power after falling into arrears. The development comes with months of scorching summer temperatures still to come, and ahead of much anticipated federal elections.

Electricity Minister Majed Mahdi Hantoosh submitted his resignation Monday amid popular and political pressure over repeated power outages across the country. Provinces across the country's south _ where temperatures currently average 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) _ are shortening working hours citing extreme heat.

A call for protests in the oil-rich province of Basra, often the stage of power-related demonstrations, was distributed across social media giving the government until 6 p.m. Tuesday to restore power.

``Or else we will escalate and all of Basra's streets will be cut off, and we will teach the officials a lesson they will never forget,'' it said.

Iraq's reliance on Iranian energy imports has geopolitical consequences and has been a source of ongoing tensions with the U.S. Washington has conditioned successive sanctions waivers _ enabling these imports to continue _ on Iraq becoming more energy independent.

The stakes are high for Iraq's government as electricity outages have routinely led to violent protests, particularly in the south. Federal elections are slated for Oct. 10, the first since mass anti-government protests swept the country in 2019.

Outputs from four cross-border electricity tie-lines from Iran to Iraq were at zero on Tuesday, according to Ministry of Electricity data seen by The Associated Press. The total cuts began this week, a ministry official said. The official requested anonymity because they are not authorized to brief media. In past weeks supply has fluctuated.

Gas and electricity imports from Iran often meet up to a third of Iraq's power demands.

``Iraq relies on Iranian energy imports heavily, especially in peak summer months,`` said Yesar al-Maleki, Gulf analyst at the Middle East Economic Survey.

``Gas imports from Iran range from 1.5-1.8 billion cubic feet per day. Now, we see generation in the south collapsing below 1 (gigawatt), meaning not just these lines are offline but even gas flow is down.''

Iran feeds gas into Iraq through two pipelines used to power plants in Basra, Samawa, Nasiryah and Diyala. Generation from these plants also plummeted, suggesting supply from Iran in these plants is also low.

The impact has been immediate.

In Basra, the province requires 4,000 megawatts but is currently receiving 830 MW. ``It is a catastrophe,'' said al-Maleki.

The cuts will deprive Iraqis of power to run hospitals, businesses and homes as temperatures rise.

With calls to demonstrate growing louder, many fear a repeat of violent protests that swept Basra in 2018. These also coincided with Iranian power cuts over non-payment issues.

Iraq owes Iran $4 billion for energy imports. The country' economic crisis has caused delays in part, but even for money earmarked to pay for imports a complex payment scheme designed to evade U.S. sanctions has slowed down transfers.

Through the scheme, Iraq is unable to pay Iran directly for the imports, but can pay for goods, medicines and other expenses related to Tehran's diplomatic mission and Iranian companies working in Iraq. Recently, Iraq purchased vaccines for Tehran.

But Iran has complained the money is trickling in too slowly.

Provinces across Iraq, meanwhile, took precautions and shortened working hours to cope with rising temperatures. Basra, Najaf, Diwanieh and Diyala shortened working days from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m.

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Israel's top diplomat Yair Lapid opened the first embassy in the Gulf during a trip to the United Arab Emirates on Tuesday, nine months after they signed a normalisation deal.

"The opening of the Israeli Embassy in Abu Dhabi with the Emirati Minister of Culture and Youth," he tweeted with a photo of himself and UAE minister Noura al-Kaabi cutting a ribbon in the blue and white of the Israeli flag.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken welcomed the opening as "historic".

Lapid's visit and the opening of the first Israeli embassy in a Gulf state are "significant for Israel, the UAE, and the broader region", he said in a statement.

Israeli ministers have previously visited the UAE, but newly appointed Lapid became the most senior Israeli to make the trip, and the first on an official mission.

"Israel wants peace with its neighbours. With all its neighbours. We aren't going anywhere. The Middle East is our home. We're here to stay. We call on all the countries of the region to recognise that. And to come talk to us," Lapid said during the opening ceremony.

Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Lior Haiat denied Lapid was snubbed by his opposite number at the embassy opening, insisting that he would meet "five ministers in less than 30 hours".

Since their US-brokered normalisation agreement was signed last September, Israel and the UAE have signed a raft of deals ranging from tourism to aviation and financial services.

During his visit, Lapid will also inaugurate a consulate in Dubai.

Lapid's trip comes nearly a year after the nations moved to normalise ties, and it follows a string of visits by Israeli officials that were planned then scrapped over issues including the Covid pandemic and diplomatic scuffles.

In March, a planned official visit by Israel's then-prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was cancelled due to a "dispute" with Jordan over the use of its airspace, according to Israeli officials.

Netanyahu, replaced as prime minister by Israeli nationalist Naftali Bennett in a coalition government cobbled together by Lapid weeks ago, had already postponed a February visit to the UAE and Bahrain over coronavirus travel restrictions.Orit Farkash-Hacohen, now science and technology minister, reportedly also had to cancel trips.

In August 2020, former White House senior adviser Jared Kushner and Israeli national security adviser Meir Ben-Shabbat made history by flying to Abu Dhabi on an El Al plane from Israel.

That was feted by both sides as a breakthrough in efforts for peace in the Middle East, marked by the El Al jet touching down adorned with the word "peace" in English, Arabic and Hebrew.

The normalisation accords Israel struck with the UAE weere followed by deals with Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan last year.

Also on Tuesday, Bahrain appointed its first ambassador to Israel.

Lapid is a centrist former television presenter who tenaciously hammered together Israel's new coalition, ending Netanyahu's more than decade-long tenure as prime minister.

He has sought to break from his rival's policies, saying Monday that Netanyahu's government had taken "a terrible gamble" by focussing only on ties with the Republican party in Washington.

*This story was edited by Ahram Online.

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The Lebanese army will start offering tourists helicopter joyrides this week in a bid to boost the coffers of one of the crisis-hit country's key institutions.

An economic crisis that the World Bank describes as likely one of the world's worst since the 1850s has hit the Lebanese military hard, leaving it struggling to pay troops enough to live on.

In an announcement on its website, the army said it would be offering civilians the chance to see "Lebanon... from above" with 15-minute flights.

The joyrides on board the army's Robinson R44 Raven helicopters would start on Thursday and would be open to passengers aged three and above.

Up to three people would be allowed aboard per flight, which costs about $150 and is to be paid in cash.

The aim is "to encourage Lebanese tourism in a new way, in addition to supporting the air force," a military source told AFP.

The economic crisis has eaten away at the value of soldiers' salaries and slashed the military's budget for maintenance and equipment.

Towards the middle of last year, the army said it had scrapped meat from the meals offered to on-duty soldiers, due to rising food prices.

Lebanon has been without a functioning government since a massive blast in Beirut in August last year killed more than 200 people and ravaged swathes of the Mediterranean port city.

Politicians have failed to agree on a new cabinet line-up even as foreign currency cash reserves plummet, causing fuel, electricity and medicine shortages.

Earlier this month, France hosted a donor conference at which 20 nations agreed to provide emergency aid to Lebanon's military.

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The UN Security Council on Tuesday will hold its first formal public meeting on cybersecurity, addressing the growing threat of hacks to countries' key infrastructure, an issue Joe Biden recently raised with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.

At their summit earlier this month in Geneva, the US president set out red lines for Russia, which is often accused of being behind major hacks. In this case, he laid out 16 "untouchable" entities, ranging from the energy sector to water distribution.

"This is the generic list of critical infrastructure which every country has," said one European ambassador who specializes in cybersecurity.

"In the United Nations first committee, we already have agreed in 2015, which is six years ago, that we are refraining from malicious cyber activities against each other's critical infrastructures as UN member states," the diplomat said.

Tuesday's meeting, called by Estonia which heads the Council for the month of June and is a leader in the fight against hacking, is itself being held online, at a ministerial level.

The Security Council has addressed the subject in the past, but only informally, both in public or behind closed doors.

- 'Innovative approach' -

"It is not something where we can sort of put our head under the sand and say it doesn't exist," said another diplomat, who also requested anonymity.

"It is a new issue and in the Security Council, as always, it is difficult to bring anything new" after 76 years of dealing with more traditional aspects of peace and security, the official added.

A briefing by Undersecretary General for Disarmament Izumi Nakamitsu is due to open the meeting.

The aim of the videoconference, Estonia said, is "to contribute to a better understanding of the growing risks stemming from malicious activities in cyberspace and their impact on international peace and security."

"Cyber is a dual use domain, we are in a complex situation which is not similar to other international security topics," said the ambassador.

"So it is not the usual arms control topic where you can sign a treaty and then just verify," the ambassador added. "You have to have a more innovative approach," something the diplomat said the meeting would hopefully point to.

Several US companies, including the computer group SolarWinds, the Colonial oil pipeline and the global meat giant JBS have recently been targeted by ransomware attacks, where a program encrypts computer systems and demands a ransom to unlock them.

The FBI has blamed the attacks on hackers based in Russian territory.

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Indian police have filed preliminary charges against senior Twitter officials over an inaccurate map of the country, an official said Tuesday, in the latest escalation between the US firm and New Delhi.

Uttar Pradesh state police said the criminal case was filed against two Twitter India officials late Monday following a complaint from the local head of a Hindu nationalist group that the US firm's website showed the disputed Kashmir region as an independent country.

The map was already taken down from Twitter's "Tweep Life" career section after an uproar by social media users on Monday against the micro-blogging site.

A police official told AFP that Twitter's India head Manish Maheshwari and another senior employee were being investigated for breaching India's IT laws and causing public mischief.

"This act has hurt the sentiments of Indians, including me," Praveen Bhati from Bajrang Dal, a militant Hindu group, said in his complaint.

The government has taken a tough stance against any perceived distortion of India's borders in recent years, particularly over the depiction of Kashmir that is partly ruled by India and Pakistan but claimed in full by the South Asian arch-rivals.

Twitter has been locked for several months in an acrimonious row with New Delhi over new rules for social media companies operating in India.

The regulations require firms to remove and identify the "first originator" of posts deemed to undermine India's sovereignty, state security or public order.

Social media companies and privacy activists fear the vagueness of the rules means they could be forced to identify the authors of posts critical of the government.

WhatsApp is challenging the rules in court, fearing that it will have to break its system of encryption that prevents anyone other than the sender and receiver from reading messages.

The government has said that failing to comply could strip tech companies of the legal protection granted to intermediaries in India.

In what could be a test case, earlier this month police charged Twitter with serious criminal offences for hosting a video that showed a Muslim man being assaulted.

Police have accused Twitter of stoking sectarian tensions and summoned Maheshwari to attend investigations, who has however procured court protection from arrest.

Last month, Indian police visited Twitter's offices in Delhi and Gurgaon after the firm labelled tweets by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party's national spokesman as "manipulated media".

Twitter responded by accusing the government of "intimidation tactics".

Last week, India's IT minister had his Twitter account briefly locked after he posted a video containing music that breached US copyright law.

Ravi Shankar Prasad called the move a "gross violation" and said it showed how his "calling out the high handedness and arbitrary actions of Twitter... clearly ruffled its feathers."

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Russia on Tuesday reported its highest daily coronavirus death toll and Australia locked down major cities as the highly infectious Delta strain has caused mayhem around the world.

Fears grew over major sporting events like Euro 2020 and the Olympic Games, even as an AFP tally showed the world passed the milestone of over three billion Covid-19 vaccines administered.

At least 3.9 million people have died from Covid-19 and the pattern of vaccinations globally is highly uneven.

According to the AFP count, high-income countries as defined by the World Bank have administered an average of 79 doses per 100 inhabitants.

In low-income nations, the figure is just one shot per 100 people.

Russia reported 652 coronavirus fatalities over the past 24 hours, with a record-high number of daily deaths -- 119 -- in Saint Petersburg, which is due to host a Euro 2020 quarter final on Friday.

Health Minister Mikhail Murashko said 151,000 people in Russia are currently in hospital with the coronavirus.

In further bad news, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov admitted that Moscow's goal of vaccinating 60 percent of the population by the end of summer was unattainable.

Russia has also introduced mandatory shots for some groups of citizens to counter scepticism.

Meanwhile, foreign ministers from the Group of 20 major economies stressed the need for greater global cooperation.

"Multilateral cooperation will be key to our collective ability to stop this global health crisis," US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi did not name the United States but suggested ulterior motives in the rhetoric as he called on the G20 to show "true multilateralism".

"China calls on able countries to avoid export restrictions or excessive hoarding" of vaccines, Wang said.

Western leaders have pledged to donate one billion doses to poorer countries.

- Australia locks down -

In Australia, public anger is growing at the slow pace of vaccinations.

The Delta variant has pushed Sydney, Perth, Darwin and Brisbane into lockdown, meaning a total of more than 10 million Australians are confined at home.

But so far, less than five percent of adults are believed to have received both vaccine doses.

Brisbane resident Nicola Hungerford, 57, said she expected lockdowns to keep happening "until the government gets their bloody act together" on the vaccine rollout.

"It shows how little respect they have for people," she told AFP.

- Human tragedies -

The speed of transmission of the Delta variant has fuelled concerns over ongoing or upcoming sporting events.

On Tuesday, Germany urged the British government to reduce the number of fans allowed into Wembley stadium for the final Euro 2020 matches.

"I think it's irresponsible for tens of thousands to gather in close proximity" in countries where the Delta variant is spreading, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer told Germany's Augsburger Allgemeine newspaper.

UEFA and the British authorities have said some 45,000 supporters will be allowed to attend a game between England and Germany on Tuesday afternoon, equivalent to 50 percent of capacity.

Attendance will be increased to 75 percent, or more than 60,000 fans, for the semi-finals and final at Wembley.

The Delta variant was first identified in India, which suffered a vicious wave of coronavirus that overwhelmed hospitals and crematoriums at its height in April and May.

Now, bodies buried hastily along the banks of the Ganges river by families who could not afford funeral pyres have started to re-emerge as flooding dislodges them.

"It was really sad to see poor people burying their loved ones in an undignified manner, but the rising water level has made it worse," Sonu Chandel, a boatman, told AFP.

India authorised the emergency use of Moderna's Covid-19 vaccine on Tuesday as it seeks to ramp up inoculations.

It is the fourth to be approved by New Delhi after Oxford-AstraZeneca's Covishield, Covaxin -- developed by Indian firm Bharat Biotech -- and Russia's Sputnik V.

The United Arab Emirates, which has mounted an intensive Covid vaccination campaign that has produced some of the highest inoculation rates globally, announced curbs on unvaccinated people in the capital Abu Dhabi.

Abu Dhabi will allow only vaccinated people in many public places, including schools, malls and restaurants, from August 20.

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Spain's prime minister met Tuesday with the chief of Catalonia for the first time since his government pardoned nine separatist leaders of the affluent region's separatist movement.

Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez sat down with Catalan regional president Pere Aragones for two and a half hours at the Moncloa palace, the seat of Spain's government.

The Spanish leader had warned that the road to normalizing relations with Catalonia's separatists would be a long one. As expected, the meeting was more about getting the sides to talk again.

Aragones repeated his demand for an authorized referendum on independence, as well as a complete amnesty for all those facing legal trouble for their roles in the region's illegal 2017 secession bid. Sanchez had previously said that a ballot on independence by a region is unconstitutional and that the way forward is satisfying the Catalans' needs by focusing on social and economic issues.

``The first meeting with Pedro Sanchez has shown how far apart our positions remain and the evident differences that exist to resolving the conflict,'' Aragones said afterwards.

But, Aragones added that the two leaders agreed that delegations from their respective governments will meet in September to start ``a new round'' of negotiations.

Last week Sanchez's government pardoned the nine separatists who had spent over three years in prison for instigating the 2017 secession bid that threw Spain into crisis.

Spain's government hopes the meeting with Aragones helps further mend relations with the nation's northeastern corner surrounding Barcelona where roughly half the voters support pro-secession parties.

Sanchez, a Socialist, has made rebuilding bridges with the separatists a main goal of his left-wing coalition government. He and the separatists agreed to open talks in February 2020. But the issue of the imprisoned separatist leaders was a major stumbling block, and Sanchez had not met with a separatist leader since then.

While Sanchez has been accused by Spain's right-wing opposition of appeasing radicals who want to rupture Spain, the meeting comes with political risks for Aragones as well. Aragones, who became the new regional leader of Catalonia in May, is being pressured to make another unilateral attempt at secession by his hard-line cohorts.

Despite the pardons, the legal plight of some separatists is not over. Some are still on the run from Spanish law after fleeing to other European countries, and Spain's National Accountability watchdog said Tuesday that it will ask former Catalan officials to pay back millions of euros that they used to promote the secessionist cause abroad.

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Foreign investments in Egypts treasury bills (T-bills), one of Egypts key debt instruments, recorded close to EGP 350 billion (about $22.5 billion) by the end of May, according to the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE).

New data published by the CBE on Tuesday showed that foreign investments in Egypts T-bills has seen a gradual increase since January, when they recorded EGP 298 billion (around $19 billion).

The data also demonstrated that Egypts current $40.5 billion of net international reserve (NIR)  recorded by the end of May  covers the countrys commodity imports for the upcoming six to seven months.

The CBE said that Egypts NIR in hard currency increased to $13.9 billion by end of April 2021.

The data also showed that the domestic liquidity jumped by 14.2 percent by end of April to reach EGP 5.1 trillion (about $325.5 billion).

The International monetary Fund (IMF) expected Egypts real GDP growth to rebound significantly in FY2021/2022 to 5.2 percent, up from the projected 2.8 percent for the current FY2020/2021, according to the International Monetary Funds (IMF) Mission Chief for Egypt Celin Allard.

Allard made her comments during a press briefing the IMF held on Monday marking the completion of Egypts 12-month $5.4 billion stand-by agreement (SBA) loan.

Egypt maintained its position as the largest recipient of FDI inflows in Africa, albeit with a significant 35 percent reduction in 2020 to $5.9 billion, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) updated report on FDI inflows to Africa.

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I often visit the Egyptian Pavilion at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The images of Ancient Egypt have been engraved in my mind since I was a child. Statues of the lion-headed Sekhmet put up against the wall. Sekhmet, the warrior goddess, led the pharaohs to battle and protected them in the afterlife. Her breath created the desert. Sekhmet resembles my grandmother, Olga Vukovic. Do you know where the Sun rests? In the eyes of the lionesses. My grandmother had yellow, lion eyes, too. I called her Doda.

My grandfather, a test pilot, Aleksandar Vukovic, lived in that same Egypt in the 1940s. He fought in the infantry at Al-Alamein. He didnt understand English. He grew to love the Arabs. There is a picture with his cat-like eyes glowing above his galabia.

In fact, Egypt is full of beautiful mystical concepts and images. The scarab, or the dung beetle, came out through the nares of Osiris, buried in Abydos. The scarabs two wings symbolise the night eye and the day eye. It is the only creature without higher consciousness that finds direction using the stars. It can pull up to 1000 times its own weight and is the strongest being in the world. As the face of the god Khepri, it pushes the sun disk across the sky.

I am contemplating the beautiful Nut, showered with stars. Arched over the world, she sheltered and protected it. Nut is the frontier between the powers of chaos and those of order. At night, she swallows the sun. In the morning, she gives birth to it.

Thomas Mann wrote that in Egypt, babies start babbling about death upon their birth. Egyptian wall paintings, however, exude a love of nature. They depict cows and dates, and many different fish, ducks, ibises, and frogs, and papyrus... Painted with affection, they all swarm in some sort of Nile paradise. Egyptians cherished everything that flourished under the all-seeing eye of Horus. They refused to part from the illuminated world. Therefore, we are not discussing a civilisation of death, but rather a civilisation of endless life.

Thirty dynasties within three empires. Furniture decorated with the mother-of-pearl. Gloves of henna. A small Coptic cross tattooed on the wrist. Al-Azhar University. Apple flavored shisha and coffee with cardamom. Dates in milk. Boris Karloff in The Mummy. Nilometers. Confrontations of the European tomb robbers in the nineteenth century. Egyptian abbots. Mary of Egypt, buried by a lion. Teahouses where waiters with scarabs under their tongues serve candied scorpions. Landscapes wiped out by a flash of light.

In Ancient Egypt, makeup was worn by both men and women. The boomerangs whistled, attracting wild geese. The shrieking of dog-headed baboons saluted the Sun, which had various names depending on the part of the day.

Egypt isnt merely a fantasy, but memories as well. Egypt is also Cairo, the limitless city I see from the plane while drifting above it.

High up in the sky, the houses resembled beer caps. Cars looked like beads. The Nile seemed like the Danube. One brown neighborhood after another. The buildings unfinished yet populated. The roofs posed as storage for all kinds of things.

Ive never seen traffic more hectic, as if people drove with the intention to kill. I am befuddled as to how I managed to stay alive. I strolled the bazaars where Naguib Mahfouz used to listen to his stories. Highways were emerging between the minarets. Television antennas were sticking out from the graves in the City of the Dead. I stared at the wondrous balconies, high cut gates, shops selling galabias, bread, coffee pots, scarabs, boxes with inlaid mother-of-pearl, sandals... I smoked hookah on a boat sailing the Nile and fell in love with chicken with cumin. The ruins of Cairo reminded me of Havana, only these actually were more ancient.

Ibn Khaldun said that the ordinary man is not capable of seeing what he can imagine. In Cairo, to the contrary, one can see more than he can imagine.

I always wanted to come to Giza The pyramids were purple in the shade, but outside they were as bright as the sun. The shadows were gloomy, though everlasting. I felt lightheaded  not from the heat, but from the glare.

I was staring at the sphinx as if I were about to realise something. Its mournful dire eyes revealed agony and intensity. The facial expression was menacingly serene. The camel behind me grunted and sneered, then knelt down. It was growling as if it were rinsing its throat, roaring, and snarling, leaving behind droppings like olives. It was half-serpent, half-girl, a sea monster transformed into a horse. It seemed to me that the Sphinx wasnt stranger a creature than a camel.

I gazed at the Fatimid-Ayyubid-Mamluk city with a thousand minarets. The light was flickering. Everything was melding together. And everything was smiling. I recalled the names of Allah.

I walked into the Egyptian Museum, a red building with a dome. It was exuberant. Mummies exposed their teeth through a convulsed, miniscule smirk. The sarcophagi were as big as ships. The brown dwarf Seneb sat beside his white wife. The lions on the Narmer Palette had giraffe-like necks. I visited Tutankhamuns chambers. Id never before seen that amount of gold, aside from the movie Mackennas Gold. I was particularly impressed by the pharaohs sandals. Howard Carter brought Ducic into the tomb of Tutankhamun. Inside the tomb, the poet felt like Columbus.

Cairos night was endless. Music came from all directions. At midnight, boys played ball in a bare park. Families sat on blankets on the bridge over the Nile. Cold air and sleep were awaiting.

I asked the taxi driver to take me to Mena House, the old hotel next to the pyramids, where Churchill and the Prince of Wales stayed. As if it were Sarajevo City Hall  as if the hotel had been built in Miami.

I visited the South. It was scorching hot. The plain was faded by the sun. The shade was more valuable than any kind of insight. The Temple of Hatshepsut could have even impressed Frank Lloyd Wright with its geometric modernity. I noticed Rimbauds signature in a temple in Luxor. I saw the effaced Colossi of Memnon. I came to the Valley of the Kings with a sour stomach that I had treated with coal.

I sat on the deck, inhaling the scent of the Nile River. The sun was turning into bronze dust. I was gazing at the fog and the powder of the distance, there, across the undisturbed water. The names of the boats were: Crown Jewel, Crown Emperor, Sunray, Mirage A horse by the name of Azer pulled my carriage around the town of Esna. In the middle of the town, there was a temple dug into the ground, dedicated to the Divine Potter, the ram-headed Khnum. The temple was shrouded and perfectly preserved, with an abundance of birds around. We sailed out once again. Cows and frowzy palm trees went past us one after the other. Domes and castles, mudbrick settlements, everything drifted. I spat into the holy River Nile. I sputtered onto Heraclitus evanescence. We docked. We sailed away.

I remembered the black and white photos of Tito and Nasser, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the Aswan Dam. I bought spices from the stands on Aswan Street under naked light bulbs. The Sphinx was on the 100-pound note, the Scriber on the 200-pound one. I bought expensive fragrant saffron. Afterwards, I found tiny bugs in it.

That same year, the Olympic flame allegedly came to Africa for the first time. It was paraded through the streets crowded with people, mostly men. The flame had already passed by the time I walked out on the street with my redheaded cousin. The busses, vans, cafes, all packed with men  entire stadiums so to speak, shouted and hissed after her. Lidia proudly perked up, smiling in triumph:

Two of my books, Tesla: A Portrait with Masks and Millennium in Belgrade, have recently been published in Cairo. Agora Publishing House has just published the Tales of Yusuf Tadrus, a novel by Adel Esmat, the Egyptian author who won the Mahfouz Medal for literature.

I spoke to my American students about the resemblance between Mahfouz and Ivo Andric regarding their quiet narrative tone and belief in wisdom that connect them. We analysed Midaq Alley and its Mexican film adaptation. We watched interviews with Mahfouz and discussed Saniya Afify  who wants to get married  and Hamida, whos behind is a dome of perfect femininity. Mr. Kirshas weakness for hashish and boys, the pious Radwan Hussainy, the terrifying Zaita  who makes cripples  and the unfortunate affectionate Abbas, whom the British soldiers beat to death. As well as of the colonialism in the background of the story.

For more arts and culture news and updates, follow Ahram Online Arts and Culture on Twitter at @AhramOnlineArts and on Facebook at Ahram Online: Arts & Culture

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This week, as part of an ambitious diplomatic scheme to rework inter-Arab relations, President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi made a rare visit of an Egyptian head of state to Iraq. It is the first visit to Baghdad by an Egyptian president in 30 years, the statement issued by the press office of President Al-Sisi noted.



Al-Sisi arrived in Baghdad to take part in a joint summit with his Iraqi counterpart, in the company of the Iraqi prime minister, and King Abdullah of Jordan, arguably one of Egypts closest Arab allies today. The three-way summit of the leaders of Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan is not the first between the heads of these three states. During the past two years, the three have been slowly but surely building a new coalition of the willing, designed to create room for economic and security coordination, largely at Cairos initiative.



Despite worry over Covid-19 the three leaders met in August 2020 in the Jordanian capital. And according to Egypts top diplomat Sameh Shoukri, they plan to soon convene again in Cairo.



We are talking about two things that are happening in parallel. First, we are talking about the economic opportunities available to Egypt and Jordan in the reconstruction of Iraq. Second, we are talking about how Egypt and Jordan can support Iraq, traditionally one of the more important Arab countries but which, during the last couple of decades, has been prey to other countries attempts to build their hegemony, especially Iran and Turkey, said an informed government source.



This is why it was important for President Al-Sisi to go to Iraq despite the fact the security logistics were tough to manage.



Egypt, he added, is not going to Iraq to pick up a fight with either Iran or Turkey but rather to work with Jordan in emphasising the Arab presence there.



Al-Sisis participation in the three-way summit in Baghdad this week, according to Mohamed Ibrahim, deputy director of the influential Egyptian Centre for Strategic Studies, sends a significant message about Egypts commitment to be there for Arab countries.



According to government sources, the message is not directed exclusively to the regions non-Arab neighbours, but is also being sent to those Arab capitals pushing for Israel to get a free ride across the Arab region despite the absence of a fair and sustainable political settlement to the Palestinian cause.



We have promoted peace with Israel since the signing of the Egyptian peace treaty in 1979. But to allow Israel to cut through the Arab region without offering Palestinians even the basics of statehood is something else altogether, said one source.



According to Ibrahim, Egypt is as heavily involved in trying to re-start negotiations that could pave the way towards a peaceful settlement of the Palestinian cause as ever. If we dont do this, we risk instability, he explained.



Government officials say Egypt has been engaged in intense communication with both Israel and the Palestinians since Cairo managed to mediate an end to Israels 11-day war on Gaza. There has been an intense exchange of visits during the past weeks and they will continue, said one. He added that the goal of current communications is to start a reconstruction operation in Gaza which requires coordination between the Palestinian Authority, Israel, and donors.



It is an issue over which Cairo is closely coordinating with Doha. Only this week, explained the official, Egypt managed to get Israel to agree to allow fuel to be delivered to Gazas power plant. It was Qatar that paid for the fuel, and Egypt that secured Israeli permission for its delivery.



Egyptian officials argue the new rapport with Doha is an extension of Cairos approach towards Baghdad: it is designed to serve economic and security objectives. Avoiding an eruption of anger in Gaza over tough living conditions, they argue, is a prime Egyptian objective given the shared border Egypt has with the Strip.



Meanwhile, new diplomatic postings were announced last week. Egypt is sending a new ambassador, Amr Al-Sherbini, to head its diplomatic missions in the Qatari capital, ending four years of limited diplomatic ties between the two countries.



In June 2017, along with three Arab Gulf states  Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain  Egypt imposed a diplomatic and economic embargo on Qatar, accusing it of financing activities that harmed their domestic security.



Today, Egypt is turning a new page with Qatar after having settled its security concerns, said Ibrahim.



This new page, according to Egyptian officials, will include significant economic cooperation.



During a visit to Doha earlier this month, Foreign Minister Samir Shoukri handed Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani an invitation from President Al-Sisi to visit Egypt. While the date for the trip has yet to be fixed it should happen sooner rather than later, say government officials.



The rapprochement with Doha could help push forward slowly improving Egyptian-Turkish relations. According to a concerned official, Qatars close alliance with Turkey, and improving relations with Egypt, will help improve relations between Cairo and Ankara.



According to officials managing the Libya file, however, it is unrealistic to expect a major breakthrough in relations with Turkey as long as Ankara remains determined to keep Islamist militias and military troops in Libya.



During his participation in the Berlin II Conference on Libya earlier this month, Shoukri insisted that it is not enough for Turkey to pull out the militias but it must also pull out its own troops in line with relevant UN Security Council resolutions.



Egypt has also invested heavily in upgrading relations with Libya. In June alone, there have been four high-level visits between officials of the two countries aimed at trying to formulate a working plan for the agreements and memoranda of understanding Prime Minister Mustafa Madbouli signed in Tripoli during a trip in April.



In the coming few days, Libyan Prime Minister Abdel-Hamid Dbeibeh is expected to visit Cairo to pursue more cooperation.



Economic and security cooperation will be high on the agenda. While Egypt does not expect to get the lions share of business in the reconstruction of Libya it will participate in sufficient mega projects to allow the return of the close to three million Egyptian expatriate workers forced out of jobs during the peak of political and security tensions in Libya.



Egypt, say officials, is now perceived as a stabilising factor in Libya as it works to stop potential military confrontations between Khalifa Haftar and the LNA in the east, and military groups in the west.



I think it is fair to say that as far as Egypt is concerned there is a need to redefine the objectives of inter-Arab relations in a way that is a lot more pragmatic, argued Ibrahim. The time has come for a different concept of Arab relations. It is not that pan-Arabism is being consigned to the past, just that its definition is crying out for upgrading to meet the interests and challenges of Arab countries.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 1 July, 2021 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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Underlining the commitment of their countries to further deepening relations, the leaders of Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan met this week for the first time in Baghdad amid efforts to transform Iraq into a stable and functioning country.

Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi, Jordanian King Abdullah, and Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi noted that the one-day summit on Sunday had succeeded in establishing a framework for stronger tripartite cooperation.

In a final declaration, the three leaders said their countries were committed to using all resources at their disposal to establish strategic relationships that would lay down concrete steps for long-term cooperation.

A statement released after the summit set out a series of measures intended to achieve this goal, including boosting economic and vital ties, achieving resources integration, and doubling trade exchange.

The three leaders also pledged to reinforce coordination between their security and intelligence apparatuses in countering terrorism and cyber security and denying safe havens and media platforms to hostile elements.

The summit was originally slated for March but was rescheduled twice following a train accident in Egypt that killed 19 people and after reports of royal palace turmoil in Jordan.

For months, the three countries have been trying to hammer out a long list of cooperation agreements in the fields of energy, health, construction, reconstruction, agriculture, pharmaceuticals, and food.

Al-Sisi, Abdullah and Al-Kadhimi laid special emphasis on ambitious plans to build a power grid, a gas network, an oil pipeline, and a land route that would connect their three countries and facilitate their integration.

Through the proposed three-way partnership, both Egypt and Jordan hope to translate their newly revamped relations with Iraq into concrete plans and institutions, probably through an economic grouping between the three countries, which have a combined GDP of nearly $570 billion.

Egypt and Jordan are already key trade partners with Iraq, although they rank lower than Iran and Turkey, which have the lions share of Iraqs huge imports totaling more than $40 billion annually.

Egyptian exports to Iraq amount to nearly $600 million a year, with sales including foodstuffs, textiles, pharmaceuticals, ceramics, and appliances. Many Egyptian exports to Iraq are exempted from levies under old bilateral agreements.

Jordans annual exports to Iraq have hit some $400 million, and the kingdom receives preferential treatment, with nearly 400 Jordanian commodities exempted from customs duties by Iraq.

Both Egypt and Jordan also receive cheap Iraqi oil, and on Sunday the three leaders said efforts would be doubled to build a 1,700km oil pipeline linking Basra to Aqaba on the Red Sea.

The scheme, proposed in 2014, had an initial capacity of 150,000 barrels per day at a cost of $18 billion. It is expected to be expanded to include a link to Egypt.

With oil prices set to head higher and Iraq expected to embark on a reconstruction programme, Egypt and Jordan are eyeing Iraqs economic potential and seeking to expand business with Iraq.

Cairo has already proposed an oil-for-reconstruction pact with Baghdad, under which Egyptian companies will be able to participate in building projects in Iraq in return for oil.

The summit put the reconstruction of Iraq at the centre of the three countries ambitious integration plans, with Egypt primarily hoping to find a strong foothold in Iraqs reconstruction programme.

Cairo also hopes to implement 15 previous agreements varying between housing, construction, transportation, water resources, mining, and irrigation.

Only a few days before the summit, Iraq unveiled plans for a huge residential project in Baghdad, which it hopes will lure foreign investment and labour.

Iraqs National Investment Commission (NIC) has announced plans to build the integrated housing and service facilities on a 400 square km area near Baghdads international airport.

The NIC did not give an estimated cost for the proposed Al-Rafeel City but said it would accommodate some one million people and also provide more than 100,000 jobs.

The Iraqi cabinet gave final approval to the project on 24 June.

Reports in the business media in the region have suggested that Iraq might be able to borrow from international financial institutions for the building projects under consideration.

From the political perspective, the tripartite summit could carry a greater meaning in demonstrating Arab support for Iraq and in particular for Al-Kadhimi, whose efforts to ensure stability in Iraq face roadblocks at home and abroad.

The summit allowed Al-Kadhimi to present himself at home as a major player on the regional stage and provided him with valuable new opportunities to bolster his stature as a strong leader.

Jordans King Abdullah told journalists last week that he plans to ask US President Joe Biden during an upcoming visit to Washington to lend his support to Al-Kadhimi and his government.

The Jordanian monarch was quoted as saying that he will urge the Biden administration to help Iraq be fully rehabilitated and reintegrated in the region.

It is not clear if King Abdullah has any specific plans for bringing Iraq back into the Arab fold, but Al-Kadhimi has indicated that his efforts to revamp ties with Egypt and Jordan could be turned into a concrete alliance.

The US welcomed the historic visit of Al-Sisi and Abdullah to Iraq and described it as an important contribution to strengthening regional stability.

Al-Kadhimi suggested earlier that he would propose plans for a New Levant to the Baghdad summit, a project based on linking Iraqs oil potential with Egypts and Jordans population and economic advantages.

The summits final declaration made no mention of whether the leaders had discussed the idea, but in an article in the London-based Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper on Sunday, Al-Kadhimi called for closer Arab coordination.

It is high time to declare loud and clear that we the Arab people deserve to recall our common bonds and origins to support each other and to rise up to confront the challenges of tomorrow, Al-Kadhimi wrote.

Going forward, one of the key uncertainties over warmer Egyptian and Jordanian relations with Iraq is the way in which Iran will look at a larger Arab alliance that includes Iraq.

This underlines once again Irans increasing influence in Iraq, which peaked after pro-Iran militias and political groups consolidated their power in the country in recent years.

Iran now tops Iraqs trade partners, with exports that amount to $12 billion and plans to boost future bilateral trade to $20 billion in order to keep the Iraqi market a major destination for Iranian goods and to keep Iraq itself under Iranian control.

While the Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq grouping could be a linchpin for a larger regional Arab economic alliance, Iran is expected to do its best to torpedo Iraqs rejoining the Arab framework and its return as a regional power.

Just a few days before the Baghdad summit, Irans newly elected president Ebrahim Raisi sent an invitation to Al-Kadhimi to visit Tehran as soon as he takes office in August.

A hardliner who is known to be trusted by Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and closely aligned with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Raisi is likely to increase the pressure on Al-Kadhimi to slow down the rapprochement with the Arabs.

Many Iraqis also fear that Irans proxies in Iraq will resort to using their power base, including their factions in the government and parliament, to block the new Arab alliance or even stronger Arab ties with Iraq.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 1 July, 2021 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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Yemen is witnessing escalation on all fronts despite reports of an imminent peace deal. Last week, fighting flared up in oil-rich Maarib as the Houthi militia launched a three-pronged attack on the government forces controlling the region. The Coalition for Support of Legitimacy launched multiple air raids on Houthi forces west of Maarib in response. The weekend fighting left more than 100 dead, mainly Houthis.

Maarib is the only northern part of Yemen under the control of the internationally recognised government. The rest of the north has been in Houthi hands since the Iran-backed militia deposed the legitimate government in 2014. The Saudi-led Coalition started a war in 2015 that freed the south of Houthi control. But the legitimate government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi suffered many setbacks and does not enjoy very much popularity in the war-torn country.

In a Saudi effort to bring all parties around the Hadi government to focus on fighting the Houthi rebels, Riyadh mediated an agreement between the government and the Southern Transitional Council (STC) at the end of 2019. The STC aspires to independence for Southern Yemen but has agreed to take part in the gradual efforts to rein in the Houthis. The implementation of the Riyadh agreement was suspended this weekend as a protest by the STC to increased Muslim Brotherhood influence in the Hadi government. The most recent government included the Brotherhood-affiliate Islah Party. On Saturday, the militia arm of the Brotherhood attacked a demonstration in Shabwa organised by southerners.

The breakout of heavy fighting and political struggle is not confined to Yemen. Houthi rebels have intensified drone and missile attacks on southern Saudi Arabia since the Maarib battle started earlier this year. In recent weeks, not a day has passed without the coalition announcing that its air defences destroyed bomb-laden drones or ballistic missiles launched from Yemen across the border into Saudi Arabia. The Houthi and Iranian media talks of dozens of drones and missiles being launched over the last few days, especially after the coalition intensified its bombing of Houthi militias in Maarib.

The current wave of conflict coincides with the UN and the US working on a peace settlement to end the war in Yemen. UN Special Envoy to Yemen Martin Griffiths and US Envoy Tim Lenderking have been talking to all parties in the hope of starting a political process. With Oman now active in the mediation, messengers between Riyadh, the Omani capital Muscat and Sanaa are racing to start a peaceful reconciliation

This week, Reuters reported that Yemens warring parties are thrashing out terms for a peace deal that would extricate Saudi Arabia from a costly war and help alleviate a devastating humanitarian crisis, two sources close to the talks and a Houthi official said. The report noted that talks between the Saudi-led Coalition and the Houthis are focused on steps to lift a blockade on Houthi-held ports and Sanaa Airport in return for a promise from the rebels for truce talks. According to a Houthi source, their leader Abdul-Malik Al-Houthi made a commitment to an Omani delegation that visited Sanaa this month to enter into ceasefire discussions immediately after the blockade is lifted, in line with the latest proposal from UN Envoy Martin Griffiths.

In what looked like an American attempt to help the peace efforts, Lenderking said for the first time that the US recognises the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels as a legitimate actor and accepts the idea that both sides in the conflict are responsible for violence. He made the remarks during a webinar organised by the National Council on US-Arab Relations on Thursday.

As one Saudi academic put it, this could be the flare before the end of war and the start of political settlement in Yemen. The Americans are involved in tough negotiations with the Iranians about reviving the nuclear deal, he told Al- Ahram Weekly. They have not completely ignored Irans meddling in the region. For example, they are targeting Iran-backed militias in Iraq and Syria. They may look lenient on the Houthi militia in Yemen, but that is not actually the case. It seems to be part of the Vienna talks.

That optimistic tone is not shared by others who believe that the US is shifting its focus away from the region. The new American administration is focusing on China, Russia and the Indo-Pacific region. According to those commentators, the Middle East is no longer that important for the US, which provides regional powers with the opportunity to sort out their issues on their own.

A Gulf source close to decision-making circles downplayed the chances of a breakthrough via the political route. He acknowledged the UN and American involvement in consultation with Saudi Arabia, but cast doubt on the prospect of Omani mediation efforts bearing fruit, accusing the Houthi rebels of reneging on promises. The present Omani role is different from the role Oman played seven years ago helping the US and Iran to reach the nuclear deal. He noted that at the time there was no war between Washington and Tehran, and neither had border proximity to the Sultanate. Those were talks between two states, what is more, while present talks involve a militia that is a proxy for Iran.

Asked by the Weekly if the issue is Saudi Arabia agreeing to direct dialogue with the Houthis, the source reiterated that Saudi Arabia and the Arab Coalition would recognise Houthi as part of the Yemeni landscape and would definitely be a party of any peaceful settlement. But he stressed that so far, it is up to the Yemeni factions including the Houthis to come up together and reach a political reconciliation towards a lasting peaceful solution. Unless the rebel militia lays down arms and accepts the political track it will be futile to engage with them. The coalition does not want to continue with the war, but Iran is encouraging their proxy to keep the fire on.

What is clear is that all parties are wary of the prolonged military conflict with its disastrous humanitarian consequences. Yet it seems every party is trying hard to improve its bargaining position in any upcoming negotiations by scoring advances on the ground. How long this manoeuvring will continue is not clear. In the course of it, millions of Yemenis continue to suffer.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 1 July, 2021 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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The Libyan Political Dialogue Forum (LPDF) reconvened at the UN headquarters in Geneva on Monday to discuss consensus formulas. These target pending differences on the Constitutional Basis for the general elections scheduled to be held on 24 December, which most foreign and domestic stakeholders want to see on time. On Saturday, 26 June, the LPDF Advisory Committee concluded a three-day meeting in Tunis. The UN Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) reports that the committee reached consensus formulas on many of the outstanding issues and will submit its recommendations to the LPDF for consideration and appropriate decisions at its upcoming meeting on 28 June in Switzerland. UNSMIL noted the positive atmosphere filled with a spirit of compromise that characterised the advisory committees meeting and seemed optimistic that the LPDF plenary would adopt its recommendations by 1 July, so that the elections could be held on time. The advisory committee members met again in Switzerland before presenting their proposal to the LPDF plenary.

Libyan sources speaking to Al-Ahram Weekly on Monday believe that some of the differences are still too sharp to overcome. They anticipate that the UNSMIL will press for a vote on the consensus formulas submitted to the LPDF plenary in order to finalise the decision. They suggest that the purpose of this mechanism is to pre-empt the House of Representatives  which is also meeting at this time, in Tobruk  in order to discuss the Constitutional Basis for the elections as well as the annual budget for this year.

According to those sources, as of Monday when the report was submitted, the controversy has centred on the form of the legislature and, therefore, on the nature of the constitutional basis required for the elections. Libya currently has a unicameral legislature (the House of Representatives, currently based in Tobruk) but some are pushing for a bicameral system which would include a senate based in Tripoli. Another difference concerns whether military officers can run for office. Indeed, some quarters in Libya question the need for a constitutional basis at all, given the existence of a draft constitution put together and adopted by the Libyan Constituent Assembly in 2017.

In his remarks to the opening session of the LPDF plenary in Switzerland on 28 June, UN Special Envoy for Libya Jan Kubis appealed to participants to overcome your differences and any trust deficit, focus your deliberations in the following days on reaching the largest possible consensus, and work constructively to bridge the remaining gaps through compromise. Noting the need to meet the 1 July deadline in light of the timeline for the election stipulated by the Libyan roadmap, he said that leaving Switzerland at the end of this week without a decision is not an option. Therefore, should consensus not be possible, you will need to agree on a mechanism to reach a decision through a vote on identified proposals, as you did in the past. He added that the outcome of their meeting would be transmitted to the House of Representatives and to the High Council of State to give them a last opportunity to carry out their responsibilities. The wording implicitly reproaches these two bodies for failing to do so, so far.

The above-mentioned sources predicted that even if the LPDF members overcome differences and/or agree on a mechanism for reaching a decision, the process will run up against a wall. They believe that those who lost out as a result of the selection of the executive authority in February will attempt to obstruct or invalidate the voting process.

UNSMIL did not disclose the substance of the advisory committees recommendations or even mention the outstanding issues needing to be resolved. But it did make reference to the Berlin II Conference on Libya which concluded on 23 June. The conference conclusions underscored the need for the national presidential and parliamentary elections scheduled for 24 December 2021 to take place as agreed on in the roadmap adopted by the LPDF and for their results to be accepted by all.

The same point also stressed that all foreign forces and mercenaries need to be withdrawn from Libya without delay and the security sector reformed and placed firmly under unified, civilian authority and oversight. The document noted that Turkey was the sole participant to introduce a reservation on this point. According to diplomatic officials familiar with the meeting, Ankara voiced its objection after Egypt reaffirmed its position in favour of the point.

It is noteworthy that neither UN Special Envoy for Libya Jan Kubis nor UNSMIL Coordinator Raisedon Zenenga were present at the meeting of foreign ministers of countries concerned with the Libya question. Nor did the foreign ministers of Russia, China or Morocco attend, even though they had been invited. Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita explained that the reason he declined the invitation to attend Berlin II had to do with differences with Germany and with the Berlin processs approach to handling the Libyan question. It is worth noting that Lavrov didnt attend, but Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Vershinin, did, and China was also represented at a high level.

While noting how significantly the situation in Libya had improved since the first Berlin Conference on Libya on 19 January 2020, the conference conclusions stated that more needs to be done to address and resolve the underlying causes of conflict, consolidate Libyan sovereignty, build on the progress made, and restore peace and prosperity for all Libyans. In addition to calling for removing foreign forces and mercenaries and security sector reform, the conclusions stated, A transparent and fair allocation of resources across the country must be ensured. Human rights violations and abuses as well as violations of international humanitarian law must be addressed and a process of inclusive, comprehensive and rights-based national reconciliation and transitional justice needs to begin. Unfortunately, no progress has been made on any of these issues.

Now that it has a new executive and an interim Government of National Unity (GNU), which received the House of Representatives vote of confidence in March, Libya has been included as a full participant in the Berlin Process. Prime Minister Abdel-Hamid Dabaiba participated, as the representative of GNU, so did the interim Libyan Foreign Minister Najla Mangoush. The two presented an initiative called The Stability of Libya, outlining a plan for full implementation of the ceasefire agreement signed by the 5+5 Joint Military Committee (JMC) in Geneva in October 2020. It included a timetable for the removal of foreign forces and mercenaries from Libya, opening the coastal road and reunifying the military establishment and other sovereign institutions. The initiative made no mention of elections, although the GNU had reaffirmed its commitment to the roadmap adopted by the LPDF which calls for presidential and parliamentary elections on 24 December 2021.

In a joint press conference with his Libyan counterpart Najla Mangoush, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas stressed the need for a balanced, step-by-step withdrawal of foreign fighters and mercenaries, making sure neither side can gain the advantage. He indicated that guarantees were still not in place to ensure such a process.

On the whole, Maas felt satisfied with the outcome of the conference even if the path ahead was not entirely smooth. Several security and logistical issues still pose an obstacle to holding the elections safely. Maas added that he would not like to see elections that were poorly prepared and did not include everyone but that he had faith that the GNU would do all it could to organise the elections on time.

Foreign Minister Mangoush was optimistic on the subject of foreign fighters. We have had progress in terms of mercenaries, so you know hopefully within coming days, mercenaries from both sides are going to be withdrawing and I think this is going to be encouraging, she said in the press conference. She added that, in the next stages, the focus would be on the timetable for the withdrawal of the foreign offices and then how to dismantle local militias or incorporate them into official security institutions.

The House of Representatives has postponed a vote on the national budget to 5 July as it awaits the GNU to clarify spending needs and possible cuts commensurate with the time remaining until the end of the year. Once the House receives the results of the LPDF session on the Constitutional Basis, it will deliberate that as well.

Meanwhile, GNU Prime Minister Abdel- Hamid Dabaiba, at the head of a ministerial delegation, arrived in Cairo on Tuesday evening to meet with Egyptian officials and reconvene the joint Egyptian-Libyan committee for the first time in 10 years. The two sides are expected to sign a raft of new agreements that aim to strengthen bilateral relations and promote reconstruction and the restoration of stability in Libya.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 1 July, 2021 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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Back in September 2020, there were some positive statements by Turkish officials towards Egypt, and these led many people to believe that relations between the two countries could be restored.

In the following months, the rate at which such statements occurred gained momentum, capped by statements by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan himself. At the same time, the Turkish government hinted that it would open a new chapter in its relations with other Arab countries, namely Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and with European countries with whom its relations had almost hit rock bottom. France and Greece come to mind in this respect.

However, all the attention was given to Ankaras relations with Cairo, and Middle East observers started speculating about the possible timing of the normalisation of relations between the two countries and the nature of the understandings that would provide the basis for it. These included what concessions each of the two governments would accept in order for such an outcome to come true.

Expectations ran high, and the statements coming out of Ankara in the first few months of 2021 left the impression that the normalisation of relations with Cairo was almost a done deal.

While the Turkish government regularly made positive statements about the benefits that would accrue once relations with Cairo were restored, Egypt remained silent, however. This silence from the Egyptian authorities confounded many as to the reasons for it. Were the Turks exaggerating the prospects of restoring relations with Cairo, or was there a joint understanding between the two governments on a timeline for their restoration?

The fact of the matter is that Cairo was not quite sure of the true motives behind the Turkish overtures. Misgivings and a lack of trust in Turkish policies and their true intentions characterised the Egyptian reactions. Probably, this was also the reason why Cairo waited so long before announcing that a round of political consultations with Turkey would take place in early May. The announcement was also made at very short notice.

Cairo hosted the first round of the consultations, and it was expected that the next time such consultations or political talks were held Ankara would be the venue.

The official statement that came out of these consultations said that the two countries would review their results and act accordingly on the following steps to be taken. It was understood that a meeting on the level of the foreign ministers of the two countries would probably follow and with it the nomination of ambassadors. The statement went on to say that the talks had been frank and had covered both the bilateral relations between the two countries and regional questions on the situations in Libya, Syria and Iraq.

Two regional developments followed the political consultations. One week later, Israel launched a military attack against the Gaza Strip that lasted for 11 days until Egypt and other international powers successfully pushed for a ceasefire. The other development that has had a direct bearing on Egyptian-Turkish relations has been the situation in Libya and the manoeuvring by pro-Turkish groups, particularly the Libyan followers of the Muslim Brotherhood, to exempt Turkey from withdrawing its forces from Libya as per the ceasefire agreement of 23 October last year in the context of the Libyan Joint Military Commission, commonly known as the 5+5 Commission.

Things came to a head at the Berlin II Conference on Libya that was jointly hosted by the German government and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on 23 June. The Turkish delegation to the conference decided to take exception to the paragraph demanding the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Libya.

The reservation goes to show, from an Egyptian point of view, that Ankara is playing a double game. On the one hand, it is making overtures to Egypt expressing its willingness to normalise relations with Cairo, but on the other hand it is not making the concessions required to normalise relations with Egypt. It should not be lost on whoever makes decisions in Ankara that Egypt will not move forward one inch in the nascent process of normalisation with Turkey before the withdrawal of all Turkish forces from Libya along with the Syrian militias contracted by the Turks to fight in the country. To believe otherwise would be counterproductive.

Today, the process of restoring relations between Cairo and Ankara to their pre-2013 level is on hold until Turkey makes up its mind on its strategic priorities in the Middle East and North Africa, being either expansionism or coexistence with the leading Arab and regional powers. To think that Turkey would be able to persist in its expansionist policies while improving its standing with Egypt is a non-starter.

From the outset, there have been serious doubts about how genuine Turkey is in opening up to Egypt and other leading Arab powers. Was it too credulous to believe that Ankara, given the Islamist ruling party in Turkey, would just relinquish the policies of the last ten years and start a new chapter with the leading powers in its neighbourhood? I guess it was always a long shot to believe that this could be the case.

The litmus test for improved relations with Egypt is whether Turkey will withdraw its forces from Libya or not. If the latter proves to be the case, relations between Egypt and Turkey will remain the same, being tense, implicitly confrontational and expressing a fierce regional rivalry across the board from Libya in the west to Iraq in the east and passing through Syria.

It is up to Turkey to decide whether it wants to coexist peacefully with its neighbours or whether it wants to keep rocking the boat by pursuing policies aiming to secure strategic footholds in various parts of the Middle East and North Africa region, whether through maintaining a permanent military presence and/or through its Muslim Brotherhood proxies and other groups.

The future of Egyptian-Turkish relations looks murky, and hoping they will see brighter days under the present Turkish president will be next to impossible unless there is a complete overhaul of Turkish foreign policy in the region. This is something that looks improbable under the present circumstances.

The writer is former assistant foreign minister.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 1 July, 2021 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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It seems the fourth Gaza war is not over yet. Hostilities could resume at any time as a result of new circumstances in Palestinian politics. Reconciliation efforts have just run up against a wall again after a short period of calm and near solidarity between Fatah and Hamas during the war and its aftermath. The circumstances in Israel are also new. After more than a decade under Benjamin Netanyahu, the country has a new coalition government made up of eight Israeli factions, one of which is Palestinian in identity and affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, just like Hamas in Gaza. Whether in Palestine or Israel, the situation could not be more fragile. Neither can afford to resume a war the wounds of which are still gaping. Yet neither is inclined to reassess their difficult circumstances.

In Palestine the crux of the problem is the confusion between a legitimate government in Ramallah and another authority that rests on force of arms in Gaza. It is hard to say whether either is truly committed to advancing the Palestinian cause. It could be that while the Palestinian Authority (PA) is trying to re-establish its primacy as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, Hamas feels that the best way to sustain its popularity is to keep the cause ablaze. So it plays with fire, literally, by launching incendiary balloons into Israel  and the latter has retaliated with extreme force.

On the Israeli side, the new government, which hinges on a Knesset majority of a single seat, knows that it has no chance of survival unless it has enough time to achieve the minimum aims of each of the eight coalition partners which hail from the far left to the far (Arab and Israeli) right. All they have in common is the desire to keep Netanyahu out of power forever. Apart from that, their calculations are complicated, especially in the light of Egypts continued efforts to prevent a resumption of hostilities and to promote its initiative to transform the truce into an enduring ceasefire. The main instruments to this end are the reconstruction of Gaza, prisoner exchange negotiations, securing a halt to missiles from Gaza and other measures that make life easier for both sides. This seemed possible when, following a security evaluation, Israel allowed a limited resumption of commercial exports from Gaza, a measure that remains conditional upon the preservation of security stability.

However, the resumption of war versus a more durable ceasefire is not solely contingent on the Palestinians and Israelis. This is because the war between them is actually three intricately interrelated wars in one. The second is the war between Israel and Iran, the terrain of which extends from Iran to Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the Gulf and the Gulf of Aden, to the Mediterranean. The weapons in use range from fighter planes and missiles to cyberattacks. The missiles that Hamas used during the fourth Gaza war were versions of the Iranian Badr missile, which suggests that other Iranian missiles, as well as drones, could also come into play. Tehrans intervention in Gaza is a way to retaliate against the continued strikes and cyberattacks against Iranian targets, from the Natanz nuclear facility to the bases and facilities of pro-Iranian Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), Hizbullah and other such organisations in Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. That Iran is currently engaged with the US in an attempt to revive the Iran Nuclear Deal has not reduced the intensity of the Iranian-Israeli war. In fact, both sides are using it as a means to leverage negotiations or to their advantage. After all, both war and negotiations are ultimately political tools for attaining ulterior ends.

As though the Iranian factor has not complicated the Palestinian-Israeli conflict enough, a third war has taken it to new thresholds because it is unfolding all across the region. This war pits the forces of stability, which have been fighting to restore order after a decade of the anarchy and destruction wrought by the so-called Arab Spring, against the forces of instability which seek to perpetuate revolutionary anarchy. The former forces are striving to attain their ends by means of extensive reform processes at home and defusing hotspots abroad, in Libya, Sudan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and, of course, Palestine. The destabilising forces use radical ideologies and extremist groups as their weapons, relying on the Palestinian cause as an instrument to stoke the widespread anger that fuels anarchy. The former camp includes Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries that have endorsed stability as an aim and reform as a goal. The latter is spearheaded by Iran, which relies on subordinate Shia groups, Islamist organisations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, and various other groups in the countries that were swept by upheaval, which has not yet subsided. It is no coincidence that Iranian-made missiles are used by both Hamas and the Houthis in Yemen as well as Hizbullah in Syria and Lebanon. Israel, at present, is not a force for stability. Nor can it be as long as it persists in settlement expansion in the West Bank, inflaming hatred between Jewish and Arab citizens in Israel, attacking Islamic holy sites, threatening Arabs with evacuation and catering to violent Jewish extremist groups, all the while ignoring the fact that six Arab countries have made peace with Israel while many more have signed the Arab Peace Initiative.

Perhaps there is little new in these three interwoven wars, at least considering what the crisis-ridden, war-plagued Middle East is used to. Perhaps it is a matter of course that certain regional forces are keen to perpetuate this condition and intensify tensions, taking advantage of the USs gradual withdrawal from the region after its failed attempts at state building in Iraq and Afghanistan where it tried to apply a special kind of democratic project that only succeeded in tearing these countries apart. Nevertheless, the profound reform processes underway in several leading Arab powers, with the emphasis on rapid and extensive social and economic development, have worked to counter the destabilising dynamics. This, in turn, throws into relief the need for profound reform at the regional level. Its a process that must, first, take as its primary building block the Arab nation state, in light of the authenticity and cohesiveness of its borders, identity, history and future. Secondly, it must engage the principle of non-intervention in the domestic affairs of other states. Thirdly, it must espouse the pursuit of peace and regional cooperation. In fact, considerable progress has already been made in this regard, to which testify the Abraham Accords and the Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum, both of which are founded on new and unprecedented bases for regional relations. Fourthly, the reform must step up efforts to resolve this regions chronic problems. This includes, of course, the Palestinian question which, as recent history tells us, might seem to subside for a while but will always flare up again. It also includes the problems of ethnic and religious minorities, particularly acute in Iraq and Syria, in the framework of the civil nation state. Fifthly, it will do well to take the initiative that Egypt is currently pursuing, with considerable support from Saudi Arabia and other Arab states, as a platform for a much broader drive than just securing a ceasefire.

The writer is chairman of the board, CEO and director of the Regional Centre for Strategic Studies.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 1 July, 2021 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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To continue the magic of the Pharaohs, let us go to the popular mastaba (tomb) of Ti of the Fifth Dynasty at the site of Saqqara. Ti was a nobleman who was the overseer of the sun temples of the Pharaoh. The entry to his tomb is down a sloping area to a courtyard. At the bottom of the shaft off the courtyard was the burial chamber of Ti.

In the rooms on the first level are depictions of Ti in this life, along with offering scenes for the next life. Over in the corner of his chamber, there is a cut in the wall. A statue of Ti was placed behind this, and the slit gave the deceased the ability to look out on his mourners and watch how they were keeping up his burial cult.

This viewing would have been entirely at Tis discretion; he did not have to come back from eternity. If the next life was pleasant enough and the proper tribute continued on Earth, then the ancient Egyptian religion did not demand that Ti make a visit to this world.

Also at Saqqara is a very popular and ornate tomb, that of the noble Mereruka. Visiting it means jumping forward in time by 200 years, but this 32-room palace for the dead justifies that leap.

Mereruka was a Sixth Dynasty vizier and priest of the Pharaoh Teti, whose pyramid cult he served. In fact, Mererukas mastaba is only about 150 feet from the entrance to Tetis pyramid. He and his family have the largest mastaba in Saqqara. As we look around, there are scenes of hunting, goldsmiths, and furniture-making. The large hall with pillars is a feature that will be repeated as we travel south in all ages of tomb building.

It is tempting to stop here and build up evidence that would paint a picture of how the people lived and worked at the time this monument was produced. But that will have to wait for another journey into the past. Now we must begin a Nile river journey south. The ancients would travelled on the Nile in a romantic little bark, but modern man is in more of a hurry.

On this voyage, our first stop is at Beni Hassan. This is geographically considered to be in Middle Egypt and is off the standard tourist route. But since it was an important town from the time of Cheops in the Old Kingdom through the Middle Kingdom, it is a site not to be missed.

The rock-cut tombs of the nomarchs, men like local governors of provinces and the towns inside those areas in ancient times, are built on high cliffs. Before the Department of Antiquities put in stairs to reach them, the climb was brutal. But looking around the vista after arriving at the top, the view is worth the effort, at least for the living. It was the family of the deceased that had to keep up the cult of the dead in ancient times if the departed was to receive his proper position in the afterlife.

There is a formality and pattern to the tombs on this cliff as with other aspects of ancient Egyptian life and culture. Some of the scenes on the walls of the tomb of Khnumhotep are reminiscent of the Old Kingdom tombs at Saqqara even though they were painted 800 years later. A few years ago, you could hardly tell what was on the walls, but the recent cleaning has given a wonderful perspective.

A similar scene of hunting in the marshes found in the tomb of Mereruka at Saqqara can be found here in what is clearly a traditional motif. But as we look around the chamber, it is also possible to see scenes that reflect more action and freedom of movement than the reliefs from the Old Kingdom. Here we see animated wrestling scenes, a special theme at Beni Hassan that did not appear prior to this point in the Middle Kingdom.

What fun these men seem to be having, competing against each other in this sport of strength and cunning. You can almost hear the sound of hot flesh as they tear at one another for position. I wonder if this is a game, or perhaps a competition meant to settle an argument.

A few years ago, two families used to bring donkeys to the tourist boats for the tourists to ride up to the cliffs at Beni Hassan. These families fought each other for business to the extent that one family member was killed and a blood feud was declared on the other. The battle was so severe that the Department of Antiquities forbade either family from serving tourists with donkeys. It was an extreme situation. But who knows, maybe the wrestling scenes on the walls of this tomb mean more than we might think at first glance.

A scene on the wall of the tomb also depicts a visit by 37 Asiatics dressed in brightly coloured fringed robes. Each has a beard, and their dress and facial hair distinguish them from the nomarchs to whom they are paying tribute. The name of the leader of this group is written in hieroglyphs and reads Epsha. People who study the Bible have connected this man with the prophet Abraham. It is possible that they are one and the same. But there is a need for more research before a positive identification can be made.

One of the elements of the tribute is visible, showing a caravan bearing quantities of eye paint to give to the nomarch. The strong columns and open space of the tomb give a sense of a presentation hall for the living. There is a vitality that seems to infuse this room within a hill. There are also pillars cut inside the room of the sort seen at Mererukas tomb at Saqqara.

Exploring further: The next stop is the home of the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten. Since he established his capital away from ancient Egypts previous administrative centre, it takes a while to get to Amarna, the present name of Akhenatens city.

When it was inhabited by the royal court of Akhenaten and his legendary wife Nefertiti, it was called Akhetaten, or the horizon of the sun. Sometimes visitors to the site are disappointed, as the broad plain may look as if nothing ever happened here. But upon taking a closer look, the outlines of a magnificent and self-contained city can still be seen, its perimeter marked by boundary stela such as the one at Tuna Al-Gabal.

The area within the 14 stela that outline the city is about 100km square or 66 square miles of territory. The majority of the built part of Akhetaten is here and covers about 10 square miles.

The bodies of Akhenaten and Nefertiti themselves have never been found. Most of the remains of Amarna art have been destroyed. But between the north and south cliffs that contain the rock-cut tombs of the nobles, there is a wadi, or depression between the cliffs, which acts as a path for the rain from the violent storms that drench the area without warning every 100 or 200 years. When water runs down the wadi, it destroys everything in its path.

It is through this cut in the hills that Akhenaten chose to build his and Nefertitis tomb. The terrain that leads up to the tomb is barren and rock-filled. It is necessary to walk 5.5km to reach the desolate location that Akhenaten selected as his final earthly resting place. And when you arrive and enter the sacred area, you can see that it is a rather small tomb that has been hacked to bits by unknown persons intent upon destroying everything having to do with the Pharaoh and his wife.

In their minds, this was the proper penance for the religious turmoil caused by Akhenaten when he forced his god, the Aten, on the people of Egypt and suppressed the pantheon of gods that the ancient Egyptians had worshipped for more than 1,000 years.

Initially, Egyptologists began work at Akhetaten in the royal areas. On the northern side of the town, there is the former palace of Nefertiti, now surrounded by wire fencing to keep visitors off its mud-brick walls. Akhenaten and other Pharaohs used mud-brick buildings for their homes on earth, but built in stone for the monuments to eternity that were their tombs.

In the centre of the city to the south of Nefertitis palace, we find the Great Temple of the Aten. The pits in front of the Temple used to contain trees to shade the royal worshippers as they came to bring tribute to the god. It was the royal family that received the grace that was given by Aten, as it seems that Akhenaten restricted access to the Aten to the royal family alone.

If you were not one of his children or his wife, then you could only worship the Aten through the family. This restriction helped bring down the cult of the Aten. The god was too exclusive. He needed to be accessible to the people, not kept from them.

In this area, there is the central palace of Akhenaten and Nefertiti. This dirt expanse was once the location of the Window of Appearances in which you can imagine Akhenaten and Nefertiti distributing gold necklaces to their loyal retainers who had done a special service for the family. These broad collars had the same shape as the gold collars in Mererukas tomb, showing the motif carried forward in Akhenatens reign 1,200 years after it was first introduced in ancient Egypt.

The more recent excavations at Amarna have been in areas once inhabited by the artisans that worked and lived in the city.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 1 July, 2021 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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Egypt was never as close to the edge of the abyss as it was eight years ago. On the eve of the 30 June 2013 Revolution Egypt was on the verge of economic collapse, a process that had begun in January 2011 and continued as the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) tightened its grip on power. State institutions were under threat, with the one exception of the army which stood up to all attempts to undermine the state and sacrifice it for the sake of the pipedream of an Islamic caliphate.



Egypts collapse would not just have been economic. The social fabric of the country, its regional role, and cultural identity were all being shredded.

The MB, like all contemporary Islamists, had no idea of how a state is run. Instead, it set about dismantling the state under the illusion that it could be replaced by a larger version of itself.A report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in September 2013 identified serious concerns about the authoritarian nature of MB discourse and the threat this posed to Egyptian identity, national unity, national security, freedom, and democracy.Under the MB Egypt was on its way to becoming, at best, a quasi-state, at worst, a failed one.Late sociologist Sayed Yassin published an article in Al-Ahram on 28 March 2013, summarising the social climate under the MB. Yassin argued that the policies of despair had cast a shadow over both the public and political elite, poisoning the social climate at a time when the country was facing serious crises that had resulted from the political classes inability to make the right decisions at the right time. Given the failure of the opposition political elite to present well thought-out alternatives to resolve the crises, Yassin called for a firm confrontation of these policies of despair. Due to the failure, or rather incompetence, of the MB to address this since they are the main cause of the situation, the people stepped up with an effective remedy of removing the MB from power.AT A NEWS CONFERENCE on 6 May 2012 in Luxor, MB member Mohamed Morsi, then a presidential candidate, made rosy proclamations: Our reform programme will lift Egypt up within 100 days.Morsi counted five main crises facing the country: traffic, security, bread, rubbish collection, and fuel. He said that the MB was not clambering to be in government, which he characterised as a liability not a prize. He claimed he and his group had made deals with oil companies to pump $200 billion into Egypt which would create giant projects to replenish state coffers, revive the economy, and provide new jobs.The MBs so-called Renaissance Project included increasing the number of tourists from 12 million to 20 million in a short time, and had a declared focus on improving living conditions in Upper Egypt. It weaved its promises into a slogan during the elections: We bring good to Egypt.Yet withing a year of the MB coming to power the economy was on the brink of collapse. There was no sign of the promised Egyptian people did not see the MBs renaissance on the horizon after a year, let alone after 100 days. The public came to understand that the MB had spun a mirage in order to seize power.THE IMMINENT COLLAPSE was gauged by international financial institutions. During the one year of MB rule Egypts credit rating had plunged into negative territory. Five months after the MBs removal from power following the 30 June revolution, when the people took to the streets in unprecedented numbers, Egypts credit rating was back in positive territory.When credit ratings fell again in May 2016, the move was quickly redressed by launching economic reforms and liberalising the exchange rates. Since then, the stable rating of Egypts economy has been maintained, even in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic.Egypts GDP growth rate began to rise, reaching 5.6 per cent before the Covid-19 pandemic. Unemployment dropped to 7.3 per cent compared to 13.3 per cent in 2013. GDP rose from LE1.7 trillion to LE6.4 trillion in 2020, and is expected to reach LE7.1 trillion in 2021. In January 2013, foreign currency reserves had dropped to $13.6 billion. After the June Revolution, foreign currency reserves began to increase. By January 2014 they had reached $17.1 billion, and by October 2016, just before the decision to float the pound, reserves had reached $20 billion. They continued to rise, to $45.4 billion by 2019, then fell back to $39.2 billion as a result of the pandemic. They are now back to $40 billion plus.ECONOMIC IMPROVEMENTS have allowed the state to forge ahead and build what is essentially a new republic.This new state, as envisioned by President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi, has no room for slums: Egyptians deserve better than areas of concentrated substandard accommodation which bring with them serious social, economic and security concerns.So began the epic campaign to eliminate slums, starting with the creation of the Informal Settlements Development Fund. Efforts began in areas that posed the greatest threat to citizens, and resulted in Asmarat, Gheit Al-Enab, Tal Al-Aqareb, Ahaleena and Bashayer Al-Kheir. The result of the campaign was an end to a chronic headache, a success that was recognised by UN-Habitat in April 2021when it launched a regional programme for the elimination of slums inspired by the Egyptian example.The new state was also determined to eliminate haphazard construction and expand the land available for housing away from the Nile valley. Accordingly, it set out to construct new urban centres to global standards, including the New Administrative Capital, Alamein, Galala and Damietta Furniture. The goal, according to the New Urban Communities Authority affiliated with the Ministry of Housing and Construction, is the construction of 44 new cities across the country.Simultaneously, the state launched a groundbreaking project to develop the Egyptian countryside, where 57 per cent of the population lives in villages and their dependencies. As part of the comprehensive presidential Decent Life initiative, LE500 billion has been earmarked for improvements to infrastructure, and health and other across rural Egypt.Such development required a radical overhaul of transport networks. The national roads project is unlike anything Egypt has seen before, in terms of both the number of new roads constructed, and the quality and speed of their execution. The project has seen the length of the highway and main roads network increase to 30,500km, compared to 23,500km in 2014.

Another feature of the old state that needed to be erased were the regular power cuts that afflicted domestic households and cause factories to close. Today, Egypt enjoys an electricity surplus which it exports. It is home to some of the largest power plants in the world, and has ventured into the world of alternative energy. On top of this, gas discoveries are leading the way not only towards self-sufficiency, but making Egypt a regional energy hub.The new state understands that the most important pillar on which it stands comprises its citizens, whose health and education are of vital importance. One could not talk about a new state as long as an estimated 22 per cent of its population had hepatitis C. The president launched the 100 Million Health campaign, screening 60 million Egyptians, and the country is now on the verge of eliminating hepatitis C.More presidential health initiatives followed. School children have been screened for obesity and stunting, and ambitious plans are underway to end waiting lists for surgical operations and breast cancer screening. Most notably, the state began to implement long overdue universal health insurance.This focus on the health of Egyptians is reflected in a 183 per cent increase in the budget for healthcare which has grown from LE33 billion in 2013 to LE93.5 billion in 2020.In 2014, President Al-Sisi launched the initiative Towards an Egyptian Society that Learns, Thinks and Innovates. This included the creation of the Egyptian Knowledge Bank in 2014, the largest digital library in the world. As with healthcare, the budget for education reflects the priority the state gives to this sector. The budget of the Ministry of Education has increased by 146 per cent, from LE64 billion in 2013 to LE157 billion in 2020.IN 2020 THE NEW STATE RANKED 19 out of the top 20 economies in the world according to the IMF, and is the second largest Arab economy. In February 2021, the British news website lovemoney.com predicted Egypt will jump to seventh place by 2030.In the field of education Egypt jumped 11 places in the Global Knowledge Indexs rankings of pre-university education. Egypts standing also improved in technical education: it advanced 23 places in one year. In the Quality of Roads Index it jumped 90 places to reach 28th in 2019 after ranking a dismal 118 in 2014.On the Governance Effectiveness Index, Egypt moved up nine places between 2015 and 2020. It also jumped 12 places on the Institutions Efficiency Index, and five places on the Intellectual Property Index. In 2020, the National Project for Digital Transformation also rose in the Digital Inclusion Index issued by the Roland Berger Foundation. Egypt is now one of the top ten fastest growing countries in terms of digital inclusion.DOWN WITH THE RULE OF THE SUPREME LEADER, the chant voiced by millions that heralded the emergence of the new state, encapsulated the publics refusal of the MBs political exploitation of religion and attempts to impose its reductionist version of Islam.President Al-Sisi has underlined the importance of rejuvenating religious discourse and regaining Egypts moderate religious tone and tolerance.





The state has worked steadily to eliminate the possibility of sectarian strife being used to fragment society. It restored all the churches burned down by the MB, removed the burden of the Humayun Decree, and issued Law 80/2016 to regulate the construction and renovation of churches. It also built the largest cathedral in the Middle East, the Cathedral of the Nativity of Christ, in the New Administrative Capital, alongside Al-Fattah Al-Alim Mosque. The president also ended the hesitation of his predecessors in attending Christmas celebrations at St Marks Cathedral in Abbasiya.



In the field of politics, the number of Coptic MPs was 39 in the 2015 elections and 37 in the 2020 elections, compared to 12 in 2011 and 10 in 2010.







FOREIGN POLICY has evolved in line with progress on the home front and now reflects the solid ground on which the new republic stands.



Egypt, which for a long time appeared intent on retreating from a leading regional role and looked almost isolated immediately after the 30 June revolution, advanced rapidly to restore international relations across the globe and recover its standing in international organisations. Countries openly hostile to Egypt for years after the revolution have recently de-escalated their criticisms.



Egypt was able to single-handedly fight terrorism, and is model to follow on this front. It does not allow anyone to threaten its security or that of its citizens. When the terrorist Islamic State group dared to slit the throats of Egyptian citizens in Libya the response was immediate and exacting. When the threat from mercenaries in Libya drew closer, Egypt drew a red line from Sirte to Jufra, a move that helped get Libya back on to a constructive political track.



Egypts return to the African fold has been marked by an increasing warmth in relations with African states. Meanwhile, relations with major world powers have been stripped of any suspicion of dependence. Egypt succeeded in diversifying its sources of armament which surprised everyone.



Egypts ties now are based on common interests and complete parity. Cairos decisions are no longer contingent on any regional or international party. Thus has Egypt returned to being an epicentre for political resolutions of regional issues and crises.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 1 July, 2021 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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Coming Together, a dual exhibition of paintings by Georges Bahgory and Jordanian artist Fady Dawoud, is currently showing at Picasso gallery in Zamalek.

The exhibition brings together two artists belonging to two completely different generations, the senior Georges Bahgory and the younger Jordanian Fady Dawoud, who has matured artistically. Bahgory shows watercolours, mostly completed in 1996, in addition to some older works. Bahgory started his life as a cartoonist in Egyptian magazines and excelled with his distinguished style, during which time he dealt with many issues.

Influenced by these caricature experiments, he began drawing the children of the neighborhood, who play and stand outside houses. Bahgory travelled to Paris hoping to enrich his experience and present it to the world, and his success was unparalleled as he made thousands of drawings and sketches, and his works received critical acclaim. Sometimes he enriches the surface of the painting with thick colour pastes, but at other times he makes his point with soft, thin colours; he sees in the dark forms of his characters a meaning conveyed by a specific expression. On every visit to Egypt, the Paris-based artist gives an exhibition and meets with his friends to discuss the most recent techniques and ideas. The artist gave dozens of exhibitions all over the world, for which he won many prizes, including the first international prize for caricature in Rome in 1985 and 1987.

The exhibition is on display until 13 July.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 1 July, 2021 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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To avoid the damage  drought and flood  that Sudan encountered during last years filling of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dams (GERD) reservoir, Sudans Foreign Minister Mariam Al-Sadiq hinted this week that Khartoum may be willing to accept a partial agreement on this years filling, due to begin in a matter of days. It is a step which, as recently as April, Khartoum had rejected alongside Cairo.

At the time both downstream countries demanded a comprehensive, legally binding agreement covering all the operations of the dam, and said Ethiopias filling of the reservoir in the absence of such an agreement was a clear violation of international law and a threat to regional security and peace.

Al-Sadiq said in an interview with Saudi Arabias Al-Hadath channel that the partial agreement that Khartoum was considering had previously been proposed by the AU and is also supported by the US, the EU, and the UN.

Political analyst Amr Al-Shobaki says there were indications of this partial agreement and that Sudan would likely agree to it.

The unilateral filling of GERD will impact heaviest on Sudan, and a filling-focused agreement will help Sudan contain the fall-out, Al-Shobaki told Al-Ahram Weekly. But it would, he warned, be at best a short-term expedient, a postponement of a solution.

Ahmed Al-Mufti, a Sudanese expert on international law, told Al-Ghad TV channel that a partial agreement would be a catastrophe, no matter what the conditions Sudan hopes are attached.

Ethiopia will complete the filling and not abide by the conditions, but it will gain legitimacy, nonetheless, said Al-Mufti, a participant in the Nile Basin Initiative negotiations held between 1994 and 2012.

Sudans foreign minister said any partial agreement must come with four guarantees: commitment to a time limit of six months between the signing of the partial agreement and a final agreement; negotiations picking up from what has been previously agreed rather than starting from scratch; effective international mediation led by the AU and including the US, EU and UN and a clear mechanism to punish any intransigent or procrastinating party.

The guarantees sound fine in theory, but I would question Ethiopias commitment to them given its history of intransigence, says Al-Shobaki.

Professor of political science Mustafa Kamel Al-Sayed doubts that Ethiopia will either commit to the guarantees or show the flexibility needed during the six-month timeframe to reach a final agreement.

Ethiopia will not accept the quartet of international mediators. Addis Ababa has never wanted the involvement of parties whose support for its position is not assured. Nor is it likely the international parties will accept the guarantees. They are, after all, as keen on their relations with Ethiopia as they are with Egypt and Sudan, Al-Sayed told the Weekly.

Al-Sayed believes that Sudans proposal of a partial agreement will be viewed by Ethiopia as proof that its intransigence has paid off.

Should Ethiopia proceed with a second filling of GERD, its reservoir will hold twice the 7 bcm capacity of the Sudanese Roseires dam which is just 15km away. According to Al-Mufti, Sudan and Egypt will then be in no position to do anything but bend to Ethiopias will since Addis Ababa will have effectively built a water bomb.

But will Ethiopia, which is currently holding elections, be more flexible if Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed secures a popular mandate? Al-Sayed predicts there will be no change in its position, and Al-Shobaki believes any change is doubtful.

It is theoretically possible that Ethiopias position will change after the elections, but this depends on pressure being exerted on Addis Ababa, says Al-Shobaki.

While Al-Shobaki believes that failure to reach a final agreement at the end of the six-month timeframe will still leave the all options open for Egypt and Sudan, Al-Sayed argues by then it will be too late, and GERD will be a fait accompli.

During a meeting with members of the House of Representatives Defence and National Security Committee on Monday, Egypts Minister of Defence and Military Production Mohamed Zaki stressed that the military is prepared to carry out tasks assigned to them to protect the homeland against any harm.

Addis Ababa argues that GERD is a matter of Ethiopian national sovereignty. In April Ethiopias Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Dina Mufti said it was unacceptable for Egypt and Sudan to use historical accords setting shares of Nile water as reference points during negotiations.

The Anglo-Ethiopian treaty, signed in 1902 between the United Kingdom, representing Egypt and Sudan, and Ethiopia, represented by emperor Menelik II of Abyssinia, prohibited any Ethiopian construction on the Blue Nile that would affect the rivers natural flow. The same treaty granted sovereignty of the then Sudanese Benishangul region, where Addis Ababa has been building the controversial dam since 2011, to Ethiopia.

If Ethiopia does not recognise the 1902 treaty, it will be the most affected due to the previous sovereignty of Sudan over the GERDs region, Al-Shobaki said.

Following an Egyptian letter to the UN Security Council over the GERD sent earlier this month, Al-Sadiq said on Sunday that Sudan would be sending within hours a letter to the UN body to oblige Ethiopia not to proceed with filling its Blue Nile dam without reaching a legal deal with downstream countries.

The one thing the Security Council will propose is a return to the negotiating table, Sudanese expert Ahmed Al-Mufti said, adding that in light of Ethiopias procrastination the only pressure tool for bringing Addis Ababa back to talks is Khartoums claim for sovereignty over the region on which the GERD is built.

However, according to Al-Shobaki, it is unlikely Sudan can claim its sovereignty over the region in the meantime.

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GERD: Back to the Security Council



Doaa El-Bey , Wednesday 30 Jun 2021



Both Egypt and Sudan are rallying international support for their positions over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam



With the flood season inching closer without any breakthrough in talks over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), Egypt and Sudan sent separate letters this month asking the UN Security Council to hold a session to address the issue. Meanwhile, several parties are hinting loudly that there is a possibility of reaching a partial or interim agreement.



The Security Council is capable of defining sound technical principles to run rivers in a way that protects the interest of all parties without causing great damage to downstream countries, said Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukri.



Egypts top diplomat stressed that Cairo cannot accept sustaining any damage from GERD, whether the second filling is completed or not.



We will not compromise our water rights. We will use all the appropriate tools at the appropriate time, he added.



After an emergency meeting held in the Qatari capital Doha at the request of Egypt and Sudan on 15 June the Arab League also called on the Security Council tohold an urgent sessionon GERD.



Ali Al-Hefni, a former deputy to Egypts foreign minister, pointed that by referring the issue to the Security Council for a second time, Egypt is escalating the issue.



We adhered to African Union-sponsored talks till the end, he told Al-Ahram Weekly, adding that Cairo is now keen to explain its stand and gain diplomatic support from different countries.



Taking the issue to the Security Council was only done after things had come to a standstill under the AU, he explained. The step was taken after deliberations and communications with states that will have a say in the matter. We know who will support us and who will not, Al-Hefni added.



Samir Ghattas, head of the Middle East Forum for Strategic Studies and a former MP, believes the referral to the Security Council has come too late and with little preparation and coordination with the powers that have a say in that matter.



What are we after? A strong resolution that will stop the project altogether according to Article 7 of the charter, or mere recommendations? he asked.



Ghattas says the Security Council is unlikely to propose anything beyond the involved parties return to the negotiating table, and questioned whether there had been adequate consultations with the five permanent members of the council who can veto any resolution.



Egypt requested the first open session on GERD in June 2020. During the session the council urged Ethiopia, Egypt, and Sudan to reach a consensus and warned against unilateral actions.

Two weeks ago, Sudans Foreign Minister Mariam Al-Sadiq Al-Mahdi officially asked the council to hold a session as soon as possible to review developments in the GERD dispute. She asked the international body to urge parties not to take any unilateral actions, and called on Ethiopia not to go ahead with the second filling of the dam since it would aggravate the conflict and threaten regional security.



Al-Mahdi warned that if Ethiopia went ahead with the second filling of GERD, it would endanger the safety of millions of Sudanese citizens. The letter also included details of Sudanese efforts over the past year to reach a legally-binding agreement through the AU-sponsored negotiations that reached a deadlock in April due to a lack of political will by Ethiopia to reach an agreement that meets the needs of the three countries.



Ghattas believes any partial, rather than a comprehensive and legally binding agreement covering the filling of the dams reservoir and its operation, will impact catastrophically on the GERD file, though he does not rule out that Sudan may push for a partial solution.



Sudans foreign minister has tied any partial agreement to four guarantees: commitment to a time limit of six months between the signing of the partial agreement and a final agreement; negotiations picking up from where they left off rather than starting from scratch; effective international mediation led by the AU and including the US, EU and UN, and a clear mechanism to punish any intransigent or procrastinating party.



Such an agreement will allow Addis Ababa to go ahead with the second filling with the blessing of Khartoum and allow it to procrastinate for another six months of AU-led negotiations, or possibly till the next flood seasons when another filling is due, said one diplomat speaking on condition of anonymity.



A meeting of the AU bureau last week left little room for hope that AU-led negotiations will bear fruit. The meeting ended without any recommendations or calls for the three countries to return to negotiations.



That meeting  held virtually  had been expected to discuss developments in the GERD file in depth. Instead, Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi briefly informed virtual attendees about the outcome of previous negotiations. Sudan boycotted the meeting.



Meanwhile, irrigation ministers from Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan held three-way talks last weekend, their first meeting since tripartite negotiations reached adeadlock in April. No outcome to the meeting was disclosed.



Why are we pushing for AU-led talks or a Security Council role when either of the two main investors in Ethiopia, Saudi and UAE, could play a more effective role? asks Ghattas.



*A version of this article appears in print in the 1 July, 2021 edition ofAl-Ahram Weekly



https://english.ahram.org.eg/News/416279.aspx
KYODO NEWS - Jun 29, 2021 - 19:54 | All, Japan

The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the death sentence given to a 74-year-old woman dubbed "black widow" for murdering her husband and two common-law partners with poison in western Japan between 2012 and 2013 to inherit money and escape debt.

The top court rejected an appeal by Chisako Kakehi in line with prosecutors' demands, saying her crime was premeditated and cruel, clearing the way for her death sentence to be finalized soon.

"Her motivation for financial gain leaves no room for leniency," Presiding Justice Yuko Miyazaki said.

Kakehi's lawyers had demanded earlier this month another psychiatric evaluation for her, claiming her dementia has gotten progressively worse, and she does not understand that she has been taking part in a criminal trial.

The justice said the defendant had strong intent to kill as she conducted the same kind of crimes four times in six years and that capital punishment is inevitable despite her old age, upholding the death sentence handed down by the Osaka High Court and the Kyoto District Court.

According to the latest ruling, Kakehi murdered her 75-year-old husband Isao Kakehi and common-law partners Masanori Honda, 71, and Minoru Hioki, 75, and tried to kill her acquaintance Toshiaki Suehiro by having them drink cyanide between 2007 and 2013.

Suehiro, from whom Kakehi borrowed about 40 million yen ($362,000), survived the 2007 attack but died in 2009 at the age of 79.

The killings in western Japan drew public attention, with the media portraying her as a woman who preyed on wealthy and elderly men.

Kakehi, who registered with a matchmaking service, married or was associated with more than 10 men and inherited about 1 billion yen, but she eventually fell into debt following her attempts to speculate in stock and futures trading.

Related coverage:

Japan's "black widow" serial killer sentenced to death
KYODO NEWS - Jun 29, 2021 - 20:41 | All, Japan, Coronavirus

Japan will donate around 1 million coronavirus vaccine doses each to Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand from this week, the government said Tuesday.

Japan is set to fly batches of the vaccine developed by Britain's AstraZeneca Plc to Malaysia and Indonesia on Thursday, while the Philippines and Thailand will receive their doses on July 8 and July 9, respectively.

The move brings the total number of countries and regions supplied by Japan to six, including Taiwan and Vietnam, which were respectively provided with batches of 1.24 million and 1 million doses earlier in June.

Tokyo, which will send a total of 1 million extra doses to Hanoi on Thursday and July 8, also plans to offer an additional 1 million to Taipei.

According to Japan's Foreign Ministry, only around 6.5 percent and 4.9 percent of the populations of Malaysia and Indonesia, respectively, have been vaccinated. Both countries are currently experiencing a resurgence of cases.

Infections have also been increasing in the Philippines and Thailand, where the vaccination rates are around 2.5 percent and 5 percent, respectively.

Separately, Japan will provide from mid-July a total of about 11 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to countries in Southeast Asia, South Asia and the Pacific islands through the U.N.-backed COVAX global vaccine sharing program.

Related coverage:

Japan to donate millions more AstraZeneca vaccine doses across Asia

1 mil. COVID-19 vaccine doses donated by Japan delivered to Vietnam
KYODO NEWS - Jun 29, 2021 - 13:55 | All, World, Japan

Japan is behind other major countries in the field of cyber capabilities, including a military strategy pertaining to cyberspace, a British think tank said, putting the country in the lowest tier among 15 countries surveyed.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies said in its cyber capabilities assessment report released Monday that Japan is in the third tier along with countries like North Korea, Iran and Indonesia, behind second-tier countries China, France, Israel, Russia and Britain.

"A sustained cyberattack on the country's infrastructure would be highly compromising, especially since national cyber resilience is still at a developmental stage," the IISS said.

Japan is reliant on the United States in cyber intelligence and will likely remain so in any kind of offensive response to cyber threats in the future, partly due to constitutional constraints on offensive military capability, it said.

"Japan still does not have an official military cyber strategy or an official military doctrine pertaining to cyberspace," it added, calling the country's resilience planning "rather limited" despite efforts for enhancement driven by security concerns surrounding the upcoming Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics.

As for the private sector, "the major obstacle to improving cyber resilience is the lack of willingness among companies to share information regarding cyber incidents," it said.

The report said the United States, the only country in the first tier, retains "a clear superiority over all other countries" in terms of information and communications technology empowerment, though it is "not a monopoly position."

China's cyber defense remains weak compared to the United States, and cyber-resilience policies for its critical infrastructure are in the early stages of development, the report said.

Given the country's growing industrial base in digital technology, however, "it is the state best placed to join the United States in the first tier," it said.
KYODO NEWS - Jun 29, 2021 - 23:07 | All, Japan

Japan's top government spokesman on Tuesday called on the international community to help secure the return of victims of North Korean's past abductions in an online symposium at the United Nations.

"The abductions issue is a critical issue concerning the sovereignty of Japan and the lives and safety of Japanese citizens...we will do our utmost without missing any opportunities to ensure that all abductees return home as soon as possible," said Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato.

"I strongly hope this symposium will intensify momentum within the international community to demand the resolution of the abductions issue as a global issue," he said.

The symposium, which Japan co-hosted with the United States, the European Union and Australia, saw family members of Japanese nationals abducted by North Korea in the 1970s and 1980s deliver heartfelt testimonies highlighting their plight, along with relatives of American, Romanian and Thai nationals also believed to have been taken by the North.

"The DPRK is responsible for countless human rights abuses including these abductions and we will continue to work closely with our friends and our allies including Japan to resolve these longstanding injustices," said U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield, using the acronym of North Korea's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Kato, who serves as Japan's minister in charge of the abductions issue, reiterated that Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga is willing to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un without preconditions in order to break the deadlock in bilateral relations.

The Japanese family members who made appearances were Takuya Yokota, the younger brother of Megumi Yokota, who was kidnapped on her way home from school in Niigata, a city on the Sea of Japan coast north of Tokyo, at the age of 13 in November 1977, and Koichiro Iizuka, the eldest son of Yaeko Taguchi, who was abducted around June 1978 when she was 22.

Japan officially lists 17 nationals as having been abducted by North Korean agents but suspects their involvement in many more disappearances.

While five were repatriated in 2002, Japan continues to seek the return of the remaining 12. Of the 12, Pyongyang claims that eight, including Megumi Yokota, have died and four others never entered the country.

Symposiums on the North Korean abduction issue had been held every year in May at the U.N. headquarters in New York, but the event was not organized last year due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Earlier this month, the North Korean delegation to the United Nations released a statement in protest at the online symposium, saying the issue of the abductions of Japanese nationals has already been resolved.

Related coverage:

1 yr after Yokota's death, little progress in abductions by N. Korea

Relatives call for N. Korea abductees' return after Japan-U.S. summit

Japan lost track of key North Korean liaison officer several years ago
New Delhi:

The father of Army Major Aditya Kumar, booked by the Jammu and Kashmir Police in the firing incident in Shopian, has moved the Supreme Court seeking quashing of the FIR against his son.

Lieutenant Colonel Karamveer Singh said his son, a Major in the 10 Garhwal Rifles, has been "wrongly and arbitrarily" named in the FIR as the incident relates to an Army convoy on bonafide military duty in an area under the AFSPA, which was isolated by an "unruly and deranged" mob pelting stones causing damage to military vehicles.

The plea, filed through advocate Aishwarya Bhati, said the intention of his son was to save Army personnel and property and the fire was inflicted "only to impair and provide a safe escape from a savage and violent mob engaged in terrorist activity".

The unruly mob was requested to disperse and not obstruct military in performance of their duties and not to damage government property but when the situation reached beyond control, a warning was issued to disperse, the plea said.

As the unruly behaviour of the "unlawful assembly" reached peak and when they got hold of a Junior Commissioned Officer and were in the process of lynching him to death, warning shots were fired fire to disperse the violent mob and protect public property, it submitted.

Singh also referred to last year's incident of a mob lynching of DSP Mohd Ayub Pandith to apprise the top court about the situation in the state and the condition in which Army officials were working to control violent mobs in Kashmir.

"The petitioner is constrained to file the present writ petition for quashing of FIR, directly before this court in view of the extremely hostile situation on the ground, whereby an FIR has been registered by local police against the son of the petitioner, who is a service Army officer and was performing bonafide duties as directed by the Union of India.

"The manner in which the lodging of the FIR has been portrayed and projected by the political leadership and administrative higher-ups of the State, reflects the extremely hostile atmosphere in the State. In these circumstances, the petitioner is left with no other viable option but to approach this court under Article 32 of the Constitution for protection of Fundamental Rights of his son and himself, enshrined under Article 14 & 21 of the Constitution," the plea said.

The petitioner has sought directions to issue guidelines to protect rights of soldiers and adequate compensation so that no Army personnel is harassed by initiation of criminal proceedings for bonafide actions in exercise of their duties.

It has also sought registration of FIR against persons involved in the terrorist activities which had caused damage to property of the government.

The FIR was registered against the personnel of 10, Garhwal unit of the Army including Major Kumar under sections 302 (murder) and 307 (attempt to murder) of the Ranbir Penal Code.

Two civilians were killed when Army personnel fired at a stone-pelting mob in Ganovpora village in Shopian, prompting the chief minister to order an inquiry into the incident.

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Sonamura:

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday hit the Left-rule Tripura government claiming that the state remained underdeveloped and lacked employment opportunities due to 25 years of left misrule during his election rallies at Sonamura and Kailashahar.

PM Modi addressing a rally at left bastion Sonamura asserted that the Centre has been constantly working to develop North East India. State Chief Minister Manik Sarkars Dhanpur Assembly constituency falls in the Sonamura sub-division.

Tripura people remain underdeveloped due to misrule of left parties for the past 25 years, said PM Modi.

He added,People do not know how backward they are. You all have been hypnotised by the Left. Change your fortune by voting for BJP.

PM Modi to appeal the youths of the state mentioned about increasing unemployment ratio in the state. February 18 election is not being contested by the BJP but by the eight lakh unemployed youth and government employees who have been deprived of 7th pay commission, added the prime minister.

The BJP and IPFT campaign slogan for Tripura Assembly election is Cholo Paltai (Lets Change).

Also read: BJP announces names of 6 more candidates for Tripura polls



PM Modi also criticised the Sarkar-led Tripura government for not spending Central funds allocated to the states. The state government is not able to spend funds given by the Centre for peoples welfare. Out of every Rs 100 spent in the state, Rs 80 is given by the Centre, added PM Modi.

To woo voters the PM Modi also mentioned that his government has launched Rs 1,300 crore National Bamboo Mission to utilise the huge bamboo resources of the state.

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New Delhi:

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Thursday hit back at the Congress over the Rafale deal, accusing it of "seriously compromising" country's security by seeking details of armaments purchased along with the aircraft.

Jaitley also advised Congress chief Rahul Gandhi to "learn" from former defence minister Pranab Mukherjee "lessons on national security."

"Your party was stigmatised when you were in government because of allegation of corruption. Now the new act is, let us manufacture an allegation of corruption against the NDA. So when you couldn't find anything, you said please disclose the price of the Rafale deal," Jaitley said while replying to the debate on the budget.

"I charge the Congress of seriously compromising India's security Mr Modi has run a clean government for last 4 years, so let us manufacturer a crisis, let us manufacture an issue. And the manufactured issue is, please tell me the details of the Rafale deal," the finance minister said in the Lok Sabha referring to the demands by the Congress to make public details of the government-to-government deal to buy 36 Rafale fighter jets from France.

Defending the government's decision against making the break-up of the nearly Rs 58,000 crore deal public, Jaitley said when UPA was in power, then defence ministers Pranab Mukherjee and A K Antony had on 15 occasions told Parliament that giving out such details would be against the interest of national security.

He said one of the questions then related to missiles being procured from Israel.

He said the Congress president should go to Mukherjee and "get lessons on national security."

Rahul has been targeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the 2016 deal to buy 36 Rafale fighter jets. "What is the price that the Prime Minister has spent on Rafale," Gandhi had asked on Tuesday.

Jaitley said security pacts were inherent part of defence transactions "because when you disclose the details of the price, you can give an approximate price, but when you give those specific details, you are giving details of the weapon system that you possess, and the capacity of the weapon systems which you don't want to inform the enemy."

Shashi Tharoor (Cong) told Jaitley that his party was not seeking details to compromise national security but only demanding transparency.

Also read: Defence Ministry says allegation of coruption in purchase of Rafale jets unfounded



Saugata Roy (TMC) and some Congress members demanded that Rahul be allowed to speak as Jaitley had referred to him in his speech.

But Speaker Sumitra Mahajasn said till the time the finance minister does not yield, she cannot allow the Congress leader to speak.

Amid acrimony between Congress and BJP members, Jaitley said the opposition had raised the issues it wanted and now he should be allowed to complete his speech.

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New Delhi:

Samsung may launch its flagship phone Galaxy S9 and S9+ ahead of the Mobile World Congress 2018 in Barcelona which is scheduled from February 26.

The Galaxy S 9 and S 9+ will have a direct competition with Apples iPhone X.

Price:

Samsung has priced both Galaxy S 9 and 9+ quite aggressively. While one of the variant that has 4GB RAM and 64 GB of internal memory and the other with 4GB RAM and 128 GB storage.

The price will hover around Rs 56,000 for the S9 whereas the S 9+ is poised to come with 6 GB RAM and 64/256/512 GB ROM.

The price of S 9+ could be as high as Rs 58,900.

Design:

Users and fans of Samsung may not have much reasons to cheer when it comes to the design as Samsung has kept things quiet as the focus is on the internals rather external.

Both S9 and S 9+ will be available in Lilac Purple, Midnight Black, Titanium Gray, and Coral Blue colours. A full bezel screen is expected.

Launch date and expected specifications:

Set to launch at February 25, pre-orders are expected to start at March 2. Powering the phone is Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 845, the Samsung Exynos 9810 will power the gadget in markets other than US and China.

The bezel less phone will run on Android Oreo with Samsung UI on top.
New Delhi:

More than 5 lakh students did not appear for Uttar Pradesh board examinations on the first two day following the strict measures initiated by the Yogi Adityanath-led government to check copying in the exams.

The UP-Board examination for class 10 and class 12 commenced on Wednesday and will continue till March 12.

On the first day of examinations on Wednesday, over 1,80,826 students did not appear. It included over 53,100 high school and over 1.27 lakh intermediate students, Deputy Director Education Vikas Srivastava told PTI.

An Education Department official said this number was due to the number of measures initiated by the state government, including installation of CCTV cameras in exam halls and using STF and local intelligence to check activities of education mafia.

A total of 66,37,018 students were registered to appear in this years UP board exam. These include 36,55,691 appearing for class 10 exams and 29,81,327 students for class 12 exams.

In Hardoi, 11,141 students--3,065 of high school and 8,076 of intermediatewere absent, in Azamgarh 8,842 students--6,754 of intermediatewere absent, Jaunpur 6,330 students--4,516 of intermediateand Gonda 6299 students--4376 of intermediatedid not appear for the exams.

In Firozabad, 5,214 students were absent, Mainpuri 4,922, Hathras 5,567, Moradabad 6,034, Gorakhpur 4,193, Sant Kabir Nagar 5,160 did not appear for exams.

Last year, the overall pass percentage for Class 10 was recorded at 81.18 per cent and in Class 12, 82.62 per cent students were declared successful.

Over 60.61 lakh candidates--34.04 lakh for Class 10 and 26.56 lakh for Class 12 were registered for the high school and intermediate exams in 2017.

However, due to strict measures 5.94 lakh candidates left the exams and 1,862 examinees were caught copying.

With a view to clamp down on cheating in the state board examinations, the state government this year took help from the Special Task Force (STF) and local intelligence agencies to keep an eye on the education mafia.

The objective was copying free examinations and preventing the education mafia from doing mischief, Deputy Chief Minister Dinesh Sharma said.

He said the government had taken the help of the STF and local intelligence agents in doing away with education centres infamous for mass cheating. The number of examination centres have also come down from over 12,000 to 8,500.

The deputy chief minister, who also holds the portfolio of the secondary education department, had made it clear that no unfair means would be tolerated and anyone found copying or promoting it would be dealt with strictly.

We have studied all the possible ways and means of unfair means during the examinations. Those appearing in an exam impersonating someone else or involved in changing answer sheets before they reach evaluation centres will not be able to do so. Effective measures have been taken, Sharma told PTI.

The measures to prevent cheating include frisking students before they enter the examination halls, dividing centres in sectors, appointing administrative officers as sector magistrates and issuing prohibitory orders within 100 metres of the centre.
New Delhi:

Union minister Giriraj Singh has been named in a case of grabbing land belonging to a dalit in his native Bihar, police said on Friday.

The FIR against Singh and 32 others was lodged on February 2 by the order of a Special SC&ST court where the complainant had filed an application under Section 156(3) of CrPC seeking directions to police for registering a case against the accused, SHO of Danapur police station in Patna district Sandeep Kumar Singh told PTI.

Singh, BJP MP from Nawada, is Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises.

The complainant, Ram Narain Prasad, a resident of Asopur village, alleged that the accused grabbed a land parcel of two acres and six decimal that he owned. He claimed he was abused when he protested their action.

"As per the court order, an FIR has been lodged under relevant sections of the IPC and also the SC/ST Act. Further investigations are on", the SHO said.

The registration of the land grab case prompted Tejashwi Yadav, Leader of the Opposition in the Bihar Assembly, to demand the resignation of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar as the BJP was an ally of his party JD(U).

"Nitish Kumar ji, don't hesitate. Speak up, awaken your inner voice and morality and rush to the Governor's House with your letter of resignation. Your dearest friend Giriraj Singh has grabbed three acres of land belonging to Dalits", Yadav said in a tweet.

Yadav's tweet was an obvious dig at Kumar for having resigned as chief minister last July after Tejashwi Yadav's name cropped up in corruption cases including benami land deals. Tejashwi, RJD chief Lalu Prasad's son, was then the Deputy Chief Minister.

Kumar had also walked out of the 3-party Grand Alliance, which included the RJD and Congress, and formed government with the BJP.

In another tweet, Yadav also took potshots at Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Kumar Modi, who has been coming up with disclosures of alleged benami land transactions involving Lalu Prasad's family.

"Where are you, master of disclosures and rumours Sushil Modi? Your favorite Union minister Giriraj Singh has grabbed land belonging to Dalits. Why is SuMo keeping quiet? Do you have a share in the land?" Yadav said.

Meanwhile, reacting to the development, BJP spokesman Rajiv Ranjan said Giriraj Singh is a law abiding citizen and will present his side of the story before the court when the time comes. Attempts by some people to politicize the issue is deplorable, he said.

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New Delhi:

Congress MP Renuka Chowdhury on Thursday threatened to file a privilege motion against Kiren Rijiju for tweeting a video of Prime Minister Narendra Modis sarcastic jibe on her but the union minister said he was only referring to how he (Modi) was not annoyed despite a vexatious laugh.

This is highly objectionable and I am going to file a privilege motion (in Rajya Sabha), Chowdhury told reporters minutes after Rijiju posted the video of the prime ministers remarks on her in Rajya Sabha yesterday on his Twitter handle.

According to the union minister of state for home, the opposition Congress has been saying that Modis remarks were breach of privilege but the Rajya Sabha chairman (M Venkaiah Naidu) remarked that such behaviour is unbecoming.

I am only referring to how the prime minister didnt get annoyed. Despite such vexatious laugh by Renuka Chaudhary, the PM didnt get irritated, he said.

While replying to a debate on the motion of thanks to the Presidents address in the Rajya Sabha, Modi had claimed the concept of Aadhaar was mooted in 1998 by the then home minister L K Advani, who spoke about a universally used national identity card.

Also Read: Prepare for new forms of terrorism, insurgency, says MoS Kiren Rijiju

As Modi sought to shear the previous Congress government of the credit for Aadhaar, Chowdhury burst into a guffaw, drawing disapproval of Chairman Naidu.

If you have some problem, go to a doctor, please, an irritated Naidu told Chowdhury.

Smiling broadly, Modi requested Naidu not to restrain the Congress MP.

It is for the first time after the Ramayana serial that we are having the good fortune of hearing such laughter today, Modi said without elaborating, but apparently hinting at a negative character in the serial.

Chowdhury had also said she did not wish to respond to Modis remarks, adding he had denigrated the status of a woman.

Also ReadL: PM Modi slogan for Tripura election 'Chalo Paltai; says 25 years Manik-rule has left state underdeveloped

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Indore:

The proposed release of controversial film Padmaavat in Indore on Wednesday has been deferred, office-bearers of a film association said.

The film distributors and theatre owners in the city had two days back, agreed to screen the film today after the state government assured to provide adequate security cover.

The release of Padmaavat in Indore, which was to happen today, has been put off. Right now, we cannot exactly tell when it will be released here, director of Central Circuit Cine Association (CCCA), O P Goyal, told PTI.

He did not specify why the release of the film has been deferred.

A special show of the film was held for Karni Sena leaders and activists in the city last night. However, the organisation continues to object to the film alleging distortion of history.

After watching the movie, MP Karni Sena in-charge Raghu Parmar told reporters, History has been distorted in the movie.

The movie depicts the character of erstwhile Chittor ruler Ratan Singh as weak (as compared to the Alauddin Khilji), he added.

Also Read: Ranveer Singh-Deepika Padukone to get married this year? Here's the truth

The film shows that queen Padmavati went to Delhi to free her husband from Khiljis captivity, although there is no historical evidence to prove it, he said.

We warn Sanjay Leela Bhansali to stop making films by way of distorting history, Parmar said.

Theatre owners in Madhya Pradesh had last month decided not to screen filmmaker Sanjay Leela Bhansalis period drama starring Deepika Padukone, Shahid Kapoor and Ranveer Singh following large-scale protests and bandhs in several places.

On January 23, two days before the nationwide release of Padmaavat, the Supreme Court had refused to modify its earlier order, which had cleared the decks for its screening. Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh had petitioned the apex court to modify its order and stop the release of the movie.

The film is based on the 13th century battle between Maharaja Ratan Singh of Mewar and Sultan Alauddin Khilji of Delhi.

Also Read: Deepika Padukone overwhelmed to get reward from reel-life 'Baba' Amitabh Bachchan

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New Delhi:

Joint security forces have gunned down a CPI-Maoist commander in an encounter in Chhattisgarhs Dantewada district, police said on Thursday.

Dantewada Additional Superintendent of Police (ASP) Gorakhnath Baghel told the media that the Naxal commander was killed in an encounter on Wednesday late hours.

A anti-insurgency operation on intelligence inputs was launched by Special Task Force (STF) District Reserve Guard (DRG) in border areas of Dantewada and Bijapur districts on Wednesday afternoon in Dokapara forest under Kirandul police station jurisdiction, added the ASP.

Baghel added that Maoist cadres on indiscriminately opened fire at the anti-insurgency team as they approached closer to the Naxal camp.

Security forces retaliated to the Maoists with full force. Gun battle between Maoist and forces lasted for more than an hour, said a DRG officer.

Also read: Gadchiroli Police exchange fire with naxals in Maharashtra's Kumadpar forest area; 3 rifles, Maoist literature recovered



He added, Maoist cadres taking benefit of dark and dense forest managed to escape. During search operation after the gunbattle they found a body of a Naxal cadre and .303 rifle from the encounter site.

The killed Maoist was later identified as Naxal commander Ungami alias Chakraji. He led the Jan Militia of the left wing extremist outfit in the region.

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New Delhi:

Bangladesh's ex-premier and opposition BNP chief Khaleda Zia was sentenced to five years in jail in a corruption case.

Zia, 72, was sentenced by the Special Court-5 in the capital , Dhaka, in connection with the embezzlement of 21 million takas (USD 252,000) in foreign donations meant for the Zia Orphanage Trust.

In the same case, her son Tarique Rahman and four others have been sentenced to 10 years in jail. The ex-premier on November 30, 2014 lost her last ditch effort to evade the graft trial as the Supreme Court turned down her second 'leave to appeal' petition challenging her indictment and asked her to face trial in the lower court.

The high court earlier validated the trial in the lower court which on March 19, 2014 had indicted Zia on two graft charges brought by the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC).

The ACC alleged that the two charities, the other being the Zia Charitable Trust, existed only on paper and a huge amount of money was misappropriated in the name of the two organisations while Zia was premier during the BNP's 2001-2006 government.

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Mumbai:

Actor Kangana Ranaut on Thursday dismissed rumours that there was a romantic sequence involving Rani Laxmibai in her film Manikarnika, saying those spreading such stories are actually defaming the queen.

Brahmin group Sarv Brahmin Mahasabha from Rajasthan has raised objection over the film, alleging it features a romantic scene between Rani Laxmibai and a British East India company agent.

Kangana, who is in the city to shoot for the film, said the crew is hurt by such allegations.

It is very lowly (neech baat) to even think like that about Rani Laxmibai. We cannot even think like that, the kind of things they are saying. What they are saying is actually defaming. There is nothing like that. It is idle talk and I dont know why it is being said, the actor said.

Kangana said the film has been written by K V Vijayendra Prasad, who also penned Baahubali.

We are hurt and upset. The writer of the film, Vijayendra Prasad has named his daughter Manikarnika. We are hurt that such things are being said about Rani Laxmibai, she added.

Also Read: Deepika Padukone, Ranveer Singh, Shahid Kapoor-starrer Padmaavat release deferred in Indore

The objections against the film come close on the heels a similar controversy involving Sanjay Leela Bhansalis Padmaavat, which a faced protests by Rajput groups.

Now, Sarv Brahmin Mahasabha has raised concerns over Manikarnika. The Mahasabhas president met with Rajasthan Governor Kalyan Singh, yesterday demanding that the filmmaker be directed to give an affidavit that there is no such scene in the film.

Meanwhile, Prasad has assured fans that there is no such scene in the film that would do a disservice to the memory of the brave queen.

The films title is Manikarnika, because it is her name. Her parents named her that because she was born in Kasi and the Manikarnika Ghat there is very famous. Even I named my daughter Manikarnika, so you now know how much I respect Rani Laxmibai, he said in a statement.

The producers of the film, Kamal Jain and Zee Studios have also clarified that their film shows Rani Laxmibai in the most respectful manner.

Also Read: After Padmaavat, Kangana Ranauts Manikarnika in trouble as Brahmins threaten stir

The film is slated to release on August 3.
New Delhi:

The Staff Selection Commission (SSC) has released Delhi Police Constable Result 2016 on its official website - ssc.nic.in. Candidates must clear their cache or open ssc.nic.in in a private window to check their results.

Earlier, the Staff Selection Commission had organized the Delhi Police Constable Result 2016 CBT written examination for the recruitment of male and female candidates for the post of Temporary Constables in Delhi Police from 5th December 2017 to 8th December 2017 across the country.

STEPS TO CHECK SSC Delhi Police Result 2017

1: Visit the official website of SSC at ssc.nic.in

2: Click on the list that says Scores of candidates in computer-based written examination of Temporary Constable (Executive)  Male and Female in Delhi Police Examination 2016

3: Click on the click here link under the Write Up column, adjacent to DELHI POLICE EXAMINATION 2016

4: A statement released by SSC will open up in front of you

5: Now click on the link that says https://164.100.129.99/constable2016_marks/ to check your marks

6: Enter your Roll No/Registration No/PEMT No along with your Registration Password, press submit and check your result
Bhojpur:

A class VIII student who had gone to attend natures call in open field in Bihars Bhojpur district was gang raped by six youths on January 31, police said on Thursday.

The incident came to light after the teenage victim along with her parents lodged a complaint with the police at Bhojpur woman police station on Wednesday.

Police said, six youths aging between 18 years and 25 years had abducted the girl when she had gone to the fields on January 31 night for open defecation.

A women police officer said that the victim told them that her perpetrators had filmed the crime and uploaded the video on a social networking site.

She added that her perpetrators had threatened her of dire consequences if she reported the incident to anyone or police.

The victims family told us that they learnt about the incident late as they were in Kolkata and on returning they learnt about the assault, said a police officer posted at the women police station.

Police said they have identified the accused as Krishna Yadav, Rakesh Kumar, Mithilesh, Guddu, Rahul Kumar and Sumeram.

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New Delhi:

The US hails India's contributions in Afghanistan and looks forward for more ways to work with New Delhi to promote economic growth and securityin the war-torn nation, a senior Trump administration official has said.

The US and India share economic and humanitarian interest in Afghanistan, Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan told members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during a Congressional hearing on Afghanistan.

India has allocated more than USD 3 billion in assistance to Afghanistan since 2001.

"India further strengthened ties with Afghanistan, with the signing of a development partnership agreement last\ year. We appreciate these contributions, and we look forward for more ways to work with India to promote economic growth and security in Afghanistan," Sullivan said.

But at the same time, Sullivan said the Afghan crisis cannot be resolved without improvement in ties between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

"Indians want to do business in Afghanistan, and ultimately as we've urged (Afghan) President (Ashraf) Ghani,\ the bilateral relationship between Pakistan and Afghanistan has to improve. If that does, then we think that there is a viable future economically for Afghanistan," he said.

"The key, in my opinion, is the relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan. If we can't solve that, this problem\ isn't going to go away. And it's in Pakistan's interest to solve the situation in Afghanistan as well," Sullivan said.

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According to the Health Ministry data, India's cumulative vaccination coverage exceeds 32.85 crores, more than 48.01 lakh vaccine doses administered till 7 pm Tuesday, July 20.. More than 8.95 crores vaccine doses administered in the age group 18-44, so far: Union Health Ministry. One day earlier, India surpassed the United States in terms of the total number of COVID-19 vaccine doses administered, the Union Health Ministry noted..

On Tuesday, India reported 46,148 new Covid-19 cases, 58,578 recoveries and 979 deaths in the last 24 hours as per the Union Health Ministry. Active cases in the country further declined to 5,72,994. Stay tuned for updates.

The officials of the National Health Mission's (NHM) Assam chapter said that from April 1 to June 26, in all 34 children succumbed to Covid-19. "Out of the total of 2,80,504 Covid positive people, 34,606 (12.33 per cent) were children in the age group of 0 to 18 years. Further analysis showed that out of the total of 34,606 children, 5,755 were less than 5 years of age, while 28,851 were in 6 to 18 years age group," a senior NHM official said.

World Corona Watch: The other worst countries with over 3 million cases are Brazil (18,448,402), France (5,832,490), Turkey (5,414,310), Russia (5,408,744), the UK (4,771,289), Argentina (4,423,636), Italy (4,258,456), Colombia (4,187,194), Spain (3,792,642), Germany (3,734,830) and Iran (3,180,092), the CSSE figures showed. The overall global Covid-19 caseload has topped 181.3 million, while the deaths have surged to more than 3.93 million, according to the Johns Hopkins University.

Andhra Pradesh relaxes COVID-induced curfew; check details

Mamatas kingdom goes under COVID-induced lockdown till July 15

Chardham Yatra will not start from July 1, HC orders!
U.S. troops in northeast Syria came under rocket fire Monday night after Iran-backed militias vowed revenge for U.S. airstrikes earlier that day in Iraq and Syria, a sign that fighting may be evolving into sustained confrontation.

Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi condemned the US airstrikes on paramilitary Hashd Shaabi positions near the country's border with Syria. A statement by his office on Monday said that al-Kadhimi's comments came during the extraordinary session of the Ministerial Council for National Security held to address the repercussions of the US airstrikes, reports Xinhua news agency.

The council, headed by al-Kadhimi, "strongly condemns the US bombardment that targeted the positions on our border with Syria, stressing that this attack represents a flagrant violation of Iraqi sovereignty", the statement said. The airstrikes represent "an aggression and violation of national sovereignty and a clear departure from international norms and conventions", the Ministry said.

For its part, the Hashd Shaabi said in a statement that the US aircraft conducted airstrikes at 2 a.m. on Sunday on three outposts on the Iraqi side of the border with Syria and four paramilitary members were killed in the attack.

Chicago shooting: 2 people dead, 15 injured in separate shooting in Chicago

Iran Nuclear Program: Israel reserves right to act, says Foreign Minister

Sweden: Authorities to relax domestic COVID-19 restrictions
Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said that his country reserves the right to act against Iran's nuclear program "anywhere and anytime". Lapid, who is also the Alternate Prime Minister, told a meeting of his centrist Yesh Atid party on Monday that he clarified this policy to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken during their meeting in Rome on Sunday, as per reports.

Lapid and his partner in Israel's cross-partisan coalition, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, oppose the emerging renewed nuclear deal. Lapid said Israel wishes to discuss these issues within "a direct professional conversation" with the US.

During the first meeting between the two leaders since Israel's new government was sworn in on June 13, Lapid told Blinken that Israel has "quite a few reservations" about the Iran nuclear deal being drafted in the Austrian capital Vienna.

On June 20, Bennett had said Ebrahim Raisi becoming the new Iranian President was a "final wake-up call" for the world powers not to renew the the 2015 nuclear deal. The Prime Minister said that Raisi's victory is "perhaps a last-minute signal before returning to the nuclear agreement to understand with whom they are doing business and what kind of regime they are choosing to strengthen".

Sweden: Authorities to relax domestic COVID-19 restrictions

Iran calls for parties to make decisions on revival of nuclear deal

India-Dubai Journey: Emirates Expecting to resume flights from July 7
Kathmandu, June 29

The national flag carrier, Nepal Airlines Corporation, has replaced Thai Airways as the official carrier of the letters and parcels Nepalis send to any countries in the world except India.

The Department of Postal Services says it had assigned the Thai company the task considering its wider international network, but it has been disrupted since March 2020 as the company stopped regular flights to Kathmandu.

To fill the vacuum, the department signed an agreement with the NAC on Tuesday. The departments Director-General Aabha Shrestha Karna and the NAC General Manager Dim Prakash Paudel signed the agreement that will come into effect from July 1 representing their sides.

Speaking on the occasion, they claimed the deal would save millions of rupees that the department was paying to the international airline.

The department has assigned Air India to transport letters and parcels from the country to India.
Kathmandu, June 29

Nepal has climbed to the third position on the list of the countries contributing the largest number of peacekeeping troops to the United Nations.

Nepal is only behind Bangladesh and Ethiopia in this respect.

Nepali Army spokesperson Santosh Ballav Pouyal says 5,154 Nepali blue helmets are mobilised in 12 peacekeeping missions in various conflict-hit countries of the world currently. Of them, 176 are women.

Likewise, 1,550 Nepali women soldiers have served the UN peacekeeping missions before this.

In total, 122 countries are contributing their troops to peacekeeping missions at the call of the United Nations.

The ranking changes due to the reduction in the number of troops contributed to UN peacekeeping missions by other countries and the increase of our troops. At present, the number of troops from Rwanda has decreased and we have climbed to the third position from the fourth, the army spokesperson says, adding that the United Nations has asked for additional 450 soldiers from Nepal.

The NA has already expressed commitments to sending up to 10,000 soldiers to the peacekeeping missions if required and demanded by the UN.
In a diverse country like Nepal that accommodates a large variety of castes, creeds, customs and opinions, the judiciary, being an integral part of the governance system of such a diverse nation, should reflect the diversity in itself too. But, when we talk about gender diversity specifically, we find that the Nepali judiciary is dominated by only a specific gender group.

In Nepali society, the nature of being argumentative is generally associated with men, and the bench which is already dominated by men, perceives female lawyers as being too less argumentative which creates a professional barrier for female lawyers that can lead to alienation of women from the legal profession. Similar kinds of other gender stereotypes and other variables of gender-based discrimination may aid to sustain existing gender apartheid in judiciary.

However, with so many women studying law with a determination to serve the countrys judiciary, it must change. Concerned government agencies need to introduce and implement effective policies to effect this transformation.

Gender justice in the justice system

Participation and diversity are directly proportional to judicial empowerment, impartiality and quality of judgments. Judiciary will not be trusted if it does not reflect the composition of society. According to the 2019 data recorded by the UNDP, womens representation in the judicial branch of the government in Nepal is only 3.8 per cent; that also includes bailiffs and law clerks.

File: Sushila Karki, the first woman chief justice of Nepal

According to the data of the Judicial Council Secretariat, there are 394 judges in all tiers of the judiciary in Nepal, out of which only 14 are women, which is only 3.55 per cent of the total. The council in its appointments often ignores the principle of inclusiveness prescribed by the constitution of Nepal, 2015, according to which, vulnerable groups like women, Madhesis, Tharus, Janjatis, Muslims and other marginalised groups need to be included in the bodies of the state that also includes the judiciary. But, we have examples where these principles were ignored and judicial appointments were flooded by male appointments.

For example, in 2016, the council recommended names of 80 persons for different designation in courts, out of which only four were women and other marginalised groups covered only 18.5 per cent of the total appointments. However, the legal roster had a considerable number of applications of women, Madhesis, Tharus, Janjatis and other marginalised groups. The irony is that Sushila Karki was the chief justice of Nepal then, the first woman to hold the high office. Statistics clearly show that women are not prioritised for judicial appointment despite their availability.

According to 2011 census, Khas Arya men constitute only 14.44 per cent of the population of Nepal, but they make up more than 85 percent of judges in the country. It is a matter of serious concern that a gender group that is already at the pinnacle of the so-called dominant class is dominating the judiciary of a country whose constitution very scrupulously has made provision for appointments on the basis of principle of inclusion.

Need for reforms

File image: Supreme Court of Nepal

There arises a very relevant question on why we need such kinds of gender-based representation in the judiciary. During a research work performed by the International Commission of Jurists, the researchers talked to female civil litigants and criminal defendants about their experience. They opined that they found women judges with more strong reasoning capacity in the issues of womens human rights.

The lack of inclusion of women is also directly associated with active reporting of sexual or gender-based offences in which survivors do not feel comfortable while taking their case to the court which is already staffed by male judges. When judges will be from different backgrounds, groups and genders, they will certainly deal with cases from their respective experiences. When a woman comes to the court for the trial, it is obvious that there should be a female judge on a bench to adjudicate the matter as she will be more aware of the hardship that women go through in their daily life.

There could be a whole different perspective in the same judicial decision that was rendered by a male judge as it is illustrated by the Feminist Judgment Project, in which hundreds of female law professors rewrote judicial decisions from a feminist perspective. Therefore, there is a need of women to sit as a judge in a bench to bring resilience in pervasive masculinity in the judiciary. Thus, we need to look for a more inclusive judiciary in all aspects of inclusion and in special reference to gender variables to ensure legitimacy in the eyes of the public, to ensure the quality of judgments and to ensure fairness in overall judicial procedures for each and every citizen, from any sexual group. An inclusive judiciary ultimately paves the way for an empowered judiciary.
Description

GET INVOLVED! GET HEARD! GET A SAY!

Mason Tillman Associates is pleased to announce the upcoming virtual business community meetings to discuss the Nassau and Suffolk County Disparity Study. Get information on upcoming Nassau and Suffolk County government contracts, learn best practices for applying for these contracts and get a chance to ask your questions directly to the county. This study is so important because it not only highlights any disparities in contracts awarded by the county but it gives small business owners a platform to voice their opinions and get heard. Register for this free event today and get involved and make a difference!

June 29th @ | 10AM - 12PM | or | 4PM - 6PM |

Visit nassausuffolkdisparitystudy.org to register and for more information.
Congress

House Dems press for 3.2% pay raise for feds

Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), wants feds to get a 3.2% pay raise in 2022 government funding legislation.

Connolly and 17 other Democrats sent a letter to leaders of the House Appropriations Committee on Monday urging them to include the 3.2% raise in the FY 2022 appropriations bill that covers federal employees' pay rates.

"Unfortunately, the federal government has a history of chronic underinvestment in its most valuable asset  the federal workforce," the letter states. "In recent years federal employees have been subject to multiple pay freezes, hiring freezes, and lost pay as the result of sequestration-related furloughs."

The letter cites data from the Federal Salary Council, the advisory committee which makes recommendations on locality pay, showing that feds had an average pay gap of over 20% compared to their private sector counterparts in 2020.

The Biden administration budget calls for a 2.7% pay hike for feds. A House Appropriations subcommittee approved that proposal last week in the markup of the Financial Services and General Government funding bill.

The bill was marked up by the full Appropriations committee on June 29, and no amendment was offered to push the higher pay raise.
Voluntary Refunds Fall Far Short - Consumer Watchdog Calls for Full Accounting and Repayment with Interest

LOS ANGELES, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- While the vast majority of Californians drove far less last year, most California insurance companies continued to charge pre-pandemic auto insurance rates, reaping a windfall of about $5.5 billion, according to an analysis by Consumer Watchdog. Newly published 2020 data show that accident claims plummeted as cars idled in driveways, but insurance companies failed to reduce rates accordingly.

Consumer Watchdog Logo (PRNewsfoto/Consumer Watchdog)

As a result, insurance companies' average return on net worth  a measure of profitability that includes premiums and investment income  was more than twice what California law allows last year.

Since April of 2020, Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara has issued four bulletins directing insurance companies to refund overcharges, and in March set an April 30, 2021 deadline for companies to repay outstanding 2020 refunds. Insurance companies were allowed to calculate for themselves what they owe. As a result, the top 15 auto insurance companies, representing 70% of the market, have only repaid approximately $1.9 billion for 2020, less than half of what they overcharged California consumers.

"Asking insurers to calculate their own refunds hasn't resulted in consumers getting what they're owed. Insurance companies are hanging on to billions of drivers' dollars that should be helping Californians get back on their feet as we emerge from the pandemic. The Insurance Commissioner must require companies to refund past overcharges in full, with interest, and make sure rates are not excessive going forward," said Carmen Balber, executive director of Consumer Watchdog.

Data on 2021 overcharges is not yet available. However the pandemic has continued to affect the economy and traffic patterns and accident rates were not what they were before March of 2020, indicating that insurance companies owe consumers billions more for the first six months of 2021. Companies have so far repaid less than $100 million for 2021.

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Proposition 103 Mandates Refunds for Excessive Rates

The Insurance Commissioner has the power  and the obligation  under voter approved Proposition 103 to require companies to refund these overcharges. Prop 103 requires all auto, home and business insurance companies to maintain rates that are neither "excessive" nor "inadequate." Companies are also required by law to open their books and justify their rates. A longstanding formula prohibits insurance companies from collecting excessive profits. Proposition 103 made the office of Commissioner an elective post and gave the Commissioner full authority to order refunds.

"Many Californians are struggling to pay their bills in the aftermath of the shutdown. Insurance companies cannot be allowed to keep billions in illegal overcharges," said Balber.

Analysis Based on 2010-2020 Industry Data on Profits, Claims

Consumer Watchdog's analysis is based on profit and loss data compiled from insurers' annual statements by the California Department of Insurance and the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. The data reflect the sudden and catastrophic impact the virus shutdown had on Californians and the economy: accidents and projected claims payouts fell dramatically as most people and their cars sheltered in place.

California auto insurance company loss ratios  the percentage of each premium dollar that the insurance company reported in claims  averaged 52.7 cents for every premium dollar charged in 2020. That was a drop of 11.8% from the average 64.5 cents for every dollar charged in 2019. Consumer Watchdog calculated the difference between the amount of premiums insurers collected in 2020, and what they should have collected to be consistent with 2019 loss ratios. The non-profit citizen organization concluded that insurers overcharged California motorists by about $5.5 billion last year.

For example, California's largest auto insurance company, State Farm, reported a loss ratio that was 22.1% lower in 2020 compared to 2019. That means State Farm policyholders were overcharged by about $1.2 billion in 2020. According to a review of reports it filed with the Department of Insurance, State Farm has voluntarily returned just half that amount, $613.4 million in refunds to policyholders.

See the calculations. https://www.consumerwatchdog.org/california-auto-insurance-covid-loss-ratios

An actuarial analysis by AIS Risk Consultants reviewed California auto insurers' return on net worth, which is a measure of profitability that includes premium and investment income, between 2010 and 2019. It estimates that in 2020, the average return for all insurance companies doing business in California was a whopping 16.6% for personal automobile insurance. That amount is more than double the maximum permitted rate of return of 7% set under Proposition 103 regulations, which determine whether a rate is excessive. 16.6% is also approximately four times insurers' average return on net worth over the prior decade.

See the calculations. https://www.consumerwatchdog.org/california-auto-insurance-covid-profits

Actual experience makes clear that the lower that insurance companies' loss ratios go  the more of each premium dollar they keep for themselves (as they did with 2020's 52.7% loss ratio)  the higher companies' return on net worth climbs. This relationship is shown in the graph seen here. https://www.consumerwatchdog.org/sites/default/files/2021-06/CAPPAPONWGraph.pdf

Read Consumer Watchdog's letter to Commissioner Lara in April, 2020, urging him to place a moratorium on approval of any new rate increases until the end of the pandemic.

https://www.consumerwatchdog.org/insurance/state-insurance-commissioner-ricardo-lara-should-stop-all-auto-insurance-rate-increases

Commissioner Lara's bulletins urging insurance companies to refund policyholders can be found here. http://www.insurance.ca.gov/0400-news/0100-press-releases/2021/release030-2021.cfm

Reports by insurance companies on how much they have voluntarily refunded their customers can be found here. http://www.insurance.ca.gov/0250-insurers/0300-insurers/0100-applications/rsb-forms/2020/2020-3-submissions/index.cfm

Read more about voter-approved Proposition 103's protections against insurance company overcharging and other abuses here.

https://www.consumerwatchdog.org/insurance/insurance-reform-proposition-103-saved-ca-drivers-154-billion-report-says

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SOURCE Consumer Watchdog
DENVER, June 28, 2021 /CNW/ - BellRock Brands Inc. ("BellRock" or the "Company") (CSE: BRCK.U), an industry-leading cannabis consumer packaged goods ("CPG") multi-state operator, is providing an update on the status of the filing of its annual and interim financial statements, accompanying management discussion and analysis and related CEO and CFO certifications for the financial year ended December 31, 2020 (the "Annual Filings") and the fiscal quarter ended March 31, 2021 (the "Interim Filings"), respectively. At this time, the Company cannot confirm the anticipated filing date, but the Company is continuing to work diligently and expeditiously with its auditors to complete the Annual Filings and the Interim Filings as soon as possible. In the interim, the Management Cease Trade Order granted by the British Columbia Securities Commission on May 3, 2021 remains in place.

BellRock Brands logo (CNW Group/BellRock Brands Inc.)

The Company intends to follow the provisions of the Alternative Information Guidelines set out in sections 9 and 10 of National Policy 12-203  Management Cease Trade Orders so long as the Annual Filings and Interim Filings are outstanding, including the issuance of bi-weekly default status reports in the form of news releases similar to this release.

The Company confirms as of the date of this news release that there has been no material change in the information contained in the default announcement issued on May 3, 2021 or the status updates issued on May 17, 2021, May 28, 2021 and June 11, 2021, respectively, and there is no other material information concerning the affairs of the Company that has not been generally disclosed.

About BellRock Brands

BellRock Brands is a national cannabis house of brands and intellectual property focused CPG operator that possesses one of the industry's broadest branded product portfolios. BellRock consists of two iconic cannabis brands, Mary's Medicinals (a pioneer in the Health & Wellness segment since 2013) and Dixie (a market-leading cannabis-infused edibles brand since 2010). BellRock also includes two growing California-based brands, Rebel Coast and Defonce. BellRock's CBD portfolio includes the brands Mary's Nutritionals and Mary's Tails. With 11 brands and over 200 SKUs, BellRock reaches nearly every key consumer group and addresses the needs of a diverse cannabis consumer base. The BellRock manufacturing and distribution footprint continues to expand and currently spans nine states, and the Company owns or manages production facilities in its largest markets. For more information, visit www.bellrockbrands.com.

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Forward-Looking Information and Statements

The information provided in this press release may contain "forward-looking information" and "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of applicable securities laws. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, made by the Company (or its predecessors) that address activities, events or developments that the Company expects or anticipates will or may occur in the future are forward-looking statements, including, but not limited to, statements preceded by, followed by or that include words such as "may", "will", "would", "could", "should", "believes", "estimates", "projects", "potential", "expects", "plans", "intends", "anticipates", "targeted", "continues", "forecasts", "designed", "goal", or the negative of those words or other similar or comparable words. Forward-looking statements may relate to future financial conditions, results of operations, plans, objectives, performance or business developments. These statements speak only as at the date they are made and are based on information currently available and on current expectations and assumptions concerning future events, which are subject to a number of known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from that which was expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements, including, but not limited to, risks and uncertainties related to: (i) the regulation of the medical and recreational marijuana industry in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Latin America and other countries in which the Company may carry on its business; (ii) the ability of the Company to obtain meaningful consumer acceptance and a successful market for its products on a national and international basis at competitive prices; (iii) the ability of the Company to develop and maintain an effective sales network; (iv) the success of the Company in forecasting demand for its products or services; (v) the ability of the Company to maintain pricing and thereby maintain adequate profit margins; (vi) the ability of the Company to achieve adequate intellectual property protection; (vii) the availability of financing opportunities, risks associated with economic conditions, dependence on management and conflicts of interest; and (viii) other risks described from time to time in documents filed by the Company with securities regulatory authorities, including the Company's listing statement dated October 31, 2020.

The forward-looking statements contained herein are based on certain key expectations and assumptions, including that: (i) the MCTO will remain in place; (ii) the Company will file the Annual Filings and Interim Filings on or before the dates specified herein; (iii) there will be no material adverse competitive or technological change in condition of the Company's business; (iv) there will be a demand for the Company's products that the Company has accurately forecast; and (v) there will be no material adverse change in the Company's operations, business or in any governmental regulation affecting the Company or its suppliers.

With respect to the forward-looking statements contained herein, although the Company believes that the expectations and assumptions on which the forward-looking statements are based are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on the forward-looking statements as no assurance can be given that they will prove to be correct. Since forward-looking statements address future events and conditions, by their very nature they involve inherent risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially from those currently anticipated due to a number of factors and risks, including the risks described above. Consequently, all forward-looking statements made in this press release are qualified by such cautionary statements and there can be no assurance that the anticipated results or developments will actually be realized or, even if realized, that they will have the expected consequences to or effects on the Company.

The cautionary statements contained or referred to herein should be considered in connection with any subsequent written or oral forward-looking statements that the Company and/or persons acting on the Company's behalf may issue.

The Canadian Securities Exchange has neither approved nor disapproved the contents of this news release.

SOURCE BellRock Brands Inc.

Cision

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MONTREAL, June 29, 2021 /CNW Telbec/ - BTB Real Estate Investment Trust (TSX: BTB.UN) ("BTB" or the "REIT") announces the acquisition of an industrial property located at 6000 Kieran Street in Montreal, Quebec.

Acquired for the price of $15.25 million (excluding transaction costs) and with a total leasable area of 99,000 square feet, the property is entirely leased to Kore Outdoor Inc., a global leader in the manufacturing of high-quality paintball products, ranging from paintballs and gear, marketed to all levels of play, from entry-level to competitive market segments.

Picture of 6000 Kieran Street, in Montreal (CNW Group/BTB Real Estate Investment Trust)

Kore Outdoor Inc is a conglomeration of some of the most prominent brands in the paintball industry, spread over eleven locations, in four countries. Producing billions of paintballs annually, they are famously known for their popular brands such as: Tippmann, Empire, Spyder, Vforce, JT and G.I. Sportz, to name a few. Located in Montreal, Kore is the largest manufacturer of paintballs in the world.

ABOUT BTB

BTB is a real estate investment trust listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange. BTB is an important owner of properties in eastern Canada. As at June 29th, 2021 BTB owns 65 retail, office, and industrial properties for a total leasable area of approximately 5.4 million square feet. As of March 31st, 2021, BTB's approximate total asset value is approximately $924M.

BTB'S OBJECTIVES

Generate stable monthly cash distributions that are reliable and fiscally beneficial to unitholders; Grow the Trust's assets through internal growth and accretive acquisitions in order to increase distributable income and therefore refund distributions; Optimize the value of its assets through the dynamic management of its properties in order to maximize the long-term value of its properties and therefore, its units.

BTB offers a distribution reinvestment plan to unitholders whereby the participants may elect to have their monthly cash distribution reinvested in additional units of BTB at a price based on the weighted average price for BTB's Units on the Toronto Stock Exchange for the five trading days immediately preceding the distribution date, discounted by 3%.

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For more detailed information, visit BTB's website at www.btbreit.com.

BTB Fiducie d'Acquisitions et d'Exploitation Logo (CNW Group/BTB Real Estate Investment Trust)

SOURCE BTB Real Estate Investment Trust

Cision

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LOS ANGELES, June 28, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The 18th Annual World Congress of the Society for Brain Mapping and Therapeutics (SBMT) will be the first major medical association to hold a large in-person convention in the state of California after the State's reopening of the economy by the honorable Governor Gavin Newsom on June 15th. The program is jointly sponsored by Saint Louis University School of Medicine and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine providing more than 20 hours of Continuing Medical Education accreditation. Attendees must be vaccinated or have a proof of negative COVID19 tests. Face coverings are optional for fully vaccinated attendees with a proof of vaccination record but mandatory for unvaccinated or partially vaccinated attendees.

15th Annual World Congress for Brain Mapping and Therapeutics (PRNewsfoto/Brain Mapping Foundation,Societ)

"We were the first medical association to shut-down the convention last year and announce the pandemic. Now, we are the first to hold an in-person and virtual (optional) convention in the state of California after its reopening", said the executive director of SBMT, Dr. Vicky Yamamoto.

The 18th Annual World Congress of SBMT will have close to 900 presenters and 10 keynotes including the Honorable Congressman Ro Khanna, Drs. Robert Hariri, Deepak Chopra, Martin Mortazavi, Andre Machado, Saleem Abdulrauf, Jason Cormier, Qin Wang, and John Adler. The convention will cover Parkinson's Disease, Alzheimer's Disease, brain cancers, spinal disorders, neuro-ophthalmology, neuro-optometry, neurotrauma and military medicine, neuro-psychiatric disorders, neurophysiology, neuroradiology, nanoneuroscience, AI and predictive modeling, stem cell and cellular therapeutics/immunotherapy, COVID-19 brain, virtual and augmented reality, neurovascular disorders, healthcare policy and neuro-engineering. The scientific program includes two bio-skill/cadaver labs for skull base surgery and spine surgery training.

"NASA, Department of Defense and National Lab scientists are amongst elite teams presenting at the world class scientific convention, which is also aimed at fast tracking neurotechnology and neuro-therapeutic development" said a founding chairman of the board and CEO of SBMT, Dr. Babak Kateb.

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The program is made possible by generous support of the following organizations and companies, which will be at the exhibition hall: Fulgent Genetics, Hsieh Family Foundation, Chopra Foundation, Brain Mapping Foundation, Bill and Lee Wood Charitable Trust and Foundation, Brain Technology and Innovation Park (BTIP), Celularity, Mind-Eye Institute, Applied Neuroscience Inc, Medtronic, Orthofix, Legally Mine, AiM Med Robotics, Inspectra Thermal Solutions, Novocure, Telethon France, Olympus Medical , Portola Pharmaceuticals, Cognionics, Penumbra, Stryker, Boston Scientific, Raymond James Wealth Management, Cereset, BrainScope, Globus, MiRus Med, Nextim, National Skull-Base Foundation and many other industry leaders in the field and organizations.

To register at this world class convention please visit: https://worldbrainmapping.site-ym.com/events/register.aspx?id=1524448&itemid=f524bd56-4b57-4273-b01a-9e0046a0155a

For More information about SBMT please visit:

www.WorldBrainMapping.Org

Media Contact: SBMT PR Team 310-500-6196 or email: Melodi Sadri melody.sadri@brainmappingfoundation.org

Cision

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SOURCE Society for Brain Mapping and Therapeutics
Canadian Fiber Optics, Alberta-based rural internet service provider, privately funds Canada's first residential 10 Gigabit fiber optic network to support local community organizations, businesses and families, supporting jobs and spurring economic growth.

VALLEYVIEW, AB, June 29, 2021 /CNW/ - Canadian Fiber Optics (CFOC) today announced the launch of Canada's fastest residential internet network through its Northern Lights Fiber (NLF) brand by offering 10 Gbps speeds to Valleyview's residential, business and industrial customers. Thousands of times faster than what is currently offered in most rural communities, the first customers will enjoy blazing fast internet late summer.

Canadian Fiber Optics Logo (CNW Group/Canadian Fiber Optics)

Canadian Fiber Optics, privately funds Canada's first residential 10 Gigabit community in Northwestern Alberta.

"We are very excited to be launching Canada's fastest residential internet in Valleyview, Alberta." stated Arjen Kaput, Co-founder and CEO of CFOC and NLF. "The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the need for everyone to have access to reliable and affordable high-speed internet. The whole community has been very supportive and great to work with and that has accelerated our decision to introduce 10Gbps technology which we believe is a game changer for our industry. Our rural communities deserve access to the very best technology available and today's announcement proves that rural Albertan communities can become connectivity and technology leaders in Canada."

"Reliable connectivity plays a critical role in the modern economy and for economic recovery and growth in Alberta," Service Alberta Minister Nate Glubish said, on hearing of the launch. "This project from Canadian Fiber Optics means that for the residential and business communities of Valleyview, new opportunities are available in education, innovation, and growth. Every investment that helps overcome the urban-rural divide is important and I'm excited to see this project move forward."

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"We are thrilled that CFOC, an Alberta based rural broadband provider, is globally connecting the residents and businesses of our active and bustling northern Alberta community, the Town of Valleyview. It has been a long time coming!!" said Mayor Vern Lymburner. "CFOC will not only speed up connectivity services for all existing businesses and residents alike with no interruptions or slow service through a 10 Gbps fiber optic network, it will also set our community up for growth opportunities enabling local and global commercial and industrial companies the ability to compete at international levels. Here's to our future as the Town is ready for all opportunities  we are open for business!!"

Trevor Ilg, a town resident states "Valleyview is incredibly fortunate to have a company providing this level of broadband speed to our community. It is future proofing the entire Town, giving us the ability to attract new technology and businesses, and greatly improve the services needed by the hospital, schools and college. Work is no longer based on location but on access to data and we are now able to be a part of that!"

About Canadian Fiber Optics

Canadian Fiber Optics is a builder, owner, and operator of fiber optic networks, providing high-speed internet and connectivity solutions to communities, businesses and industry in Western Canada. Based in Calgary, Alberta with offices in Grande Prairie, Alberta and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, CFOC has deep roots in rural communities across the prairie provinces. Their passion lies in connecting rural Canada to high-speed fiber internet so communities and industry can continue to grow and thrive.

Interested in learning more about all our community and industrial projects or in connecting your rural community, business or industrial site to our fiber network? Contact us at info@canadianfiberoptics.ca or contact Jodi Bloomer-Kaput, Co-Founder and Chief Business Development Officer, jodi@canadianfiberoptics.ca to set up a call or meeting.

Related Links

https://canadianfiberoptics.ca/

www.lightupvalleyview.ca

SOURCE Canadian Fiber Optics

Cision

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(Bloomberg) -- Australia has imposed lockdown on a third regional capital as the delta variant spreads nationwide. Hong Kong banned flights from the U.K. amid rising infections.

Mixing doses of Covid-19 vaccines from Pfizer Inc. and AstraZeneca Plc creates a strong immune response, according to results from a University of Oxford study, a finding that could enable greater flexibility in the use of scarce supplies.

Britain reported the most new cases since January that were fueled by the delta variant first identified in India. Even so, an end to restrictions in England is very likely to go ahead on July 19, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson said.

Meanwhile, Singapore is grappling with how to reopen as rival financial center Hong Kong presses forward with easing travel restrictions for vaccinated residents. Indonesia will start offering Covid-19 vaccination to those aged 12 to 17 years old.

Key Developments:

Global Tracker: Cases top 181.2 million; deaths pass 3.9 millionVaccine Tracker: More than 2.97 billion doses administeredThe last-and-only foreign scientist in Wuhan lab speaks outU.K.s Johnson ready to lift Covid rules despite rise in casesThe best and worst places to be as the world finally reopensHeart problems, blood clots and other vaccine fears: QuickTake

Indonesia to Start Vaccinating Teens (8:00 a.m. HK)

Indonesia will start offering Covid-19 vaccination to those aged 12 to 17 years old, after last week extending the inoculation to all adults in order to curb a worsening virus resurgence.

The food and drug regulator has issued an emergency use of authorization for Sinovac vaccine to be applied on teens, President Joko Widodo said in a press briefing on Monday.

Malaysia Unveils $36 Billion Package (7:50 a.m. HK)

Malaysia unveiled a 150 billion ringgit ($36 billion) package to help people through a nationwide lockdown that was extended for a second time with Covid infections still elevated.

The plan includes a 10 billion ringgit direct fiscal injection and will result in the government disbursing 10 billion ringgit in cash aid to the people by the end of the year, Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin said on Monday. The announcement marks the fourth stimulus package announced by the government this year.

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U.S. Says Dont Travel to UAE, Uganda (5:45 a.m. HK)

The U.S. increased its travel warning for the United Arab Emirates and four African countries to the highest risk level, telling residents not to go to those nations because of Covid-19.

The UAE has one of the worlds highest vaccination rates, but daily new cases have continued to hover around 2,000 since March. Liberia, Mozambique, Uganda, and Zambia have all experienced recent outbreaks and were put in the same Level 4 category as the UAE, according to a State Department statement.

The revisions follow updated guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has also led to the lowering of advisories for countries such as Mexico, Canada, Japan and Ireland.

Biden to Mark Independence From Virus (5:11 a.m. NY)

U.S. President Joe Biden and his White House are planning a slate of travel and events this weekend -- including a barbecue for more than a thousand people -- to celebrate his administrations progress combating the pandemic, though the country fell short of his July 4 vaccination goal.

While coronavirus infections and deaths have fallen dramatically since Biden took office, thanks to an expansive vaccination campaign, the White House fell short of its goal of 70% of U.S. adults receiving at least one shot by July 4. As of Monday, 66.1% of adults had gotten at least one shot.

The country is still recording more than 11,000 cases of Covid-19 per day, on average, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But thats a better than 95% reduction since U.S. cases peaked on Jan. 10. There have been 287 deaths per day from the disease, on average, for the last seven days.

South Africa Official Death Toll Tops 60,000 (2:30 p.m. NY)

South Africas official death toll from Covid-19 has passed 60,000, the National Institute of Communicable Diseases said. Over the last 24 hours 138 deaths from the disease were reported, bringing the total to 60,038, the NICD said in a statement on Monday.

South Africas actual number of deaths from the virus could exceed 170,000, according to excess death studies by the South African Medical Research Council, which tracks the number of deaths above the historical norm in weekly reports.

Abu Dhabi to Keep Unvaccinated From Malls (1:30 p.m. NY)

Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, will restrict access to some public places like schools and restaurants unless people are vaccinated. It takes effect Aug. 20.

The Abu Dhabi media office said the decision came after 93% of target groups had been vaccinated. It covers shopping centers, restaurants, recreational facilities, resorts, nurseries, schools and universities. Children under 15 are exempt.

U.K. Reports Most Cases Since January (11:15 a.m. NY)

The U.K. reported 22,868 new Covid-19 cases, the most since Jan. 30, according to its latest update. The number of reported deaths stayed low, with three more reported within 28 days of a positive test. More than 84% of adults in the U.K. have had one vaccine and nearly 62% of adults have had two.

England is very likely to see the end of pandemic restrictions on July 19, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Monday, despite the surge in infections fueled by the delta variant first identified in India.

Mixing Doses Found to Offer Strong Protection (11:10 a.m. NY)

Mixing doses of Covid-19 vaccines from Pfizer Inc. and AstraZeneca Plc creates a strong immune response, according to results from a University of Oxford study, a finding that could enable greater flexibility in the use of scarce supplies.

A mixed schedule of the Pfizer shot followed by the Astra vaccine, and vice versa, resulted in high concentrations of antibodies against Covid-19 when given four weeks apart, researchers reported Monday in the Lancet medical journal.

Scotland Reports Record Number of Cases (10:30 a.m. NY)

Scotland reported a record 3,285 new cases of coronavirus during the last 24 hours, the biggest daily increase since the start of the pandemic.

That exceeds the previous daily record of 2,999, which was reported last week, according to official figures from the devolved Scottish government, which is responsible for health.

Johnson Sees End to English Curbs in July (8 a.m. NY)

England is very likely to see the end of pandemic restrictions on July 19, Johnson said, despite a surge in infections of the new delta variant.

Hospitalization and death rates remain relatively low as the U.K.s vaccine program progresses, Johnson said, adding that it would be sensible to take a few more weeks to analyze the infection patterns and deliver more second vaccine doses before lifting the curbs.

With every day that goes by its clearer to me and all our scientific advisers that were very likely to be in a position on July 19 to say that really is the terminus, and we can go back to life as it was before Covid as far as possible, Johnson told reporters Monday.

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(Bloomberg) -- Hedge funds and asset managers are increasingly turning to Japanese startups, attracted by some eye-popping past returns in the long-overlooked sector.

Asian hedge fund firms including Pleiad Investment Advisors and global investment giants like T. Rowe Price Group Inc. and Baillie Gifford are providing late-stage growth capital to the nations most promising ventures, according to fund managers at the companies.

Theyre emboldened by surging share prices of startups that went public in recent years, along with renewed government efforts to promote digitalization and entrepreneurship. With just six unicorns, the worlds third-largest economy has struggled to produce new companies that have global ambitions like Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tesla Inc.

There was a real lack of institutional investors that were focused on late-stage, pre-IPO opportunities, said Michael Yoshino, formerly of Soros Fund Management and TPG Capital, who is Pleiads co-chief investment officer. More foreign investors are starting to look into Japan and look at this space. Thats because the competition is less intense, and therefore valuations are more compelling.

Hong Kong-based Pleiad, which oversees $3 billion, last year started a private equity arm headed by two former bankers at Wall Street firms. Known as Minerva Growth Partners, its mission is to help Japanese startups reach a scale that can draw money from global institutions.

Minerva has so far raised 15 billion yen ($135 million) for its maiden fund and plans to back at least eight companies over two years, said Yoshino.

T. Rowe Price has invested in more than three such deals, starting with a 2018 private financing round for cloud accounting and human resources software provider Freee K.K., said Archibald Ciganer, Japan equity strategy fund manager who oversees $6 billion at the U.S. firm. It plans to make one or two private investments in Japan each year.

Read more about Freees surge since its 2019 IPO

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Praveen Kumar, who oversees Baillie Giffords more than $2.5 billion in small Japanese stocks, has made two investments and recently held a call with two U.S. peers curious about such opportunities.

Baillie Gifford and T. Rowe Price have been looking at startup deals in Japan for at least five years. Ciganers mandate allows him to invest in private companies that will ideally go public within 18 months and reach at least $300 million in market value once listed.

Kumar, based in Edinburgh, has no such constraints. Still, even larger private financing rounds in Japan tend to seek only $10 million to $20 million, hardly justifying the costs of due diligence work, he said.

Japans government has been encouraging the development of new technology companies to counter the effects of an aging and shrinking population. Progress has been slow.

The Asia-Pacific region has minted more than 200 private firms now valued above $1 billion, out of 729 globally, according to CB Insights. The largest of Japans six unicorns ranks 291st. Indonesia, with an economy just over one-fifth the size of Japans, is home to four unicorns, all ranking higher.

Historically, a small venture capital industry and Japanese banks reluctance to lend to fledgling companies have hamstrung startups, said Ciganer. Japanese ventures also mostly focus on the domestic market, in part because of a lack of English proficiency, he added. That caps their growth potential, capital needs and appeal to international institutions.

The language and cultural barriers also make it difficult for overseas investors to do research on startups and guide them in business development, said Yoshino.

Read about Womenomics authors new fund for Japanese startups

Given the shortage of pre-IPO funding, many Japanese ventures have gone public on the Mothers market of the Tokyo Stock Exchange at an early stage. The small-company board is known for its low entry barriers, but also a retail-dominated investor base.

Once listed, companies often get stuck with a market value below $300 million and limited trading volume -- too small to attract global investors, said Kensuke Murashima, an ex-Morgan Stanley banker who heads Minerva alongside former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. technology deal-maker Kei Nagasawa.

The duo speak from experience. Nagasawa became chief financial officer of Mercari Inc., Japans first unicorn. At Morgan Stanley, Murashima advised on landmark mergers and IPOs, including those of Line Corp. and Mercari.

In the past five years, big Japanese corporations search for growth, technology and ways to fend off potential competition have spurred the domestic venture capital industry, according to Kumar and Ciganer.

Other market entrants include Hong Kong-based hedge fund firm Anatole Investment Management, which joined an August 2020 financing round for e-commerce and payment company Hey Corp. Another payment services provider, Paidy, raised money in 2019 and earlier this year from investors including Soros family offices and Hong Kong-based Tybourne Capital Management.

Investors have been enticed by past successes. Raksul Inc., a printing company that raised money from investors including Fidelity, has tripled its share price since going public in May 2018. Mercaris shares have more than doubled from the end of 2019. Freee has jumped five times since its December 2019 IPO.

The groundswell of promising companies got an extra push from Covid-19. The pandemic heightened how far the country has fallen behind in areas including e-commerce, cashless transactions and work-from-home infrastructure. Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga set up a Digital Agency to implement top-down reform.

Certainly with Covid and the digitalization policies that the government is looking to implement from this fall, it is really putting Japan on the map for a lot of investors, said Yoshino.

(Updates with comparison to Indonesia in the 12th paragraph)

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More than 100 companies contribute to first 'state of play' analysis of F&F industry sustainability actions

SINGAPORE, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The first collective Sustainability Report by the fragrance and flavor industries  published on World Environment Day on 5 June - shows positive results against a series of commitments made by companies.

The International Fragrance Association logo

The 2020-21 Sustainability Report (ifra-iofi.org/report) is published by The International Fragrance Association (IFRA) and the International Organization of the Flavor Industry (IOFI). It outlines the state of play in five Focus Areas that form part of the IFRA-IOFI Sustainability Charter  a collective commitment to raise the bar across the industries, which was launched in July 2020 and now has 126 signatories. A third of these signatories are from the Asia-Pacific region.

Asia-Pacific plays an integral role in the end-to-end global supply chain and research and development (R&D) activities of the fragrance and flavor industries. The Asia Pacific region is a key supplier of raw materials, being the largest producers of mint, cedarwood, patchouli, other spices, and herbs. Extracts of these materials are essential ingredients in the manufacturing process of personal care, hygiene and sanitizing products. These products are widely consumed across the Asia-Pacific region and beyond.

With the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for such products maintained good growth driven by the awareness of consumers on the need to maintain hygiene, at a personal level as well as at home, to reduce the chances of infection. Across the value-chain, it is creating new markets and job opportunities, and propelling workforce upskilling, with safe use and sustainability as key considerations as the market grows.

As such, it is heartening that the results show that more than two in every three companies who responded to a survey, representing more than 90 per cent of the F&F market, are already addressing the sustainability challenges outlined in the five Focus Areas:

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On responsible sourcing , more than 70 per cent of respondents and the vast majority of the market engage in dialogue with farmers and communities, with most of the market having advanced human rights, labor standards and biodiversity action plans.

The environmental footprint of the F&F industries is relatively small with three in four respondents, and more than 90 per cent of the market, having a global environmental strategy, implementing eco-design measures and acting to reduce consumption and waste.

On employee well-being , the F&F industries show high standards on employee well-being and offering a rewarding labor environment, including equal opportunities, diversity and inclusion, and training. The vast majority of the industries' employees benefit from this high standard.

On product safety , the F&F industries are at the leading edge, and the results show more than 90 percent of respondents engaging in dialogue with downstream customers on product stewardship.

On transparency and partnerships, more than three in four respondents have a global responsive governance strategy in place, including all the largest companies.

Launching the report, Sven Ballschmiede, IOFI Executive Director, said:

"The results in the report show a high level of maturity in the industries on sustainability across all five Focus Areas. It has been a long, collective effort to develop the Charter but the results in this report show we are in a good place as the F&F industries."

"We will continue to support companies and work collectively to deliver the tools and partnerships for progress in upcoming reports."

Martina Bianchini, IFRA President, added:

"Sustainability is an imperative for all industries, and not least the F&F industries, which are rooted in nature. With the publication of this Sustainability Report, we have reached a significant milestone on our sustainability journey  but our work goes on to expand uptake of the Charter, raise awareness, and work with customers, partners and stakeholders to design the safe and sustainable products of the future."

The results in the 2020-21 Report will form the baseline for future reports, allowing the industries to track progress. The Report also highlights a series of collective actions taken since the launch of the Charter eleven months ago, as well as partnerships and initiatives undertaken by IFRA and IOFI on behalf of the industries.

The Charter continues to be open to signatories from fragrance and flavor companies around the world. Signatories will provide data on progress in 2021 ahead of the publication of the next report in mid-2022.

For more information on the Charter, go to ifra-iofi.org.

About the International Fragrance Association

The International Fragrance Association, founded in 1973, represents the interests of the fragrance industry worldwide. IFRA comprises seven multinational Regular Members and 21 national associations in four global regions representing hundreds of small and medium-sized fragrance ingredient manufacturers, as well as supporting members. Its mission is to promote the safe use of fragrance for everyone's enjoyment.

Fragrances are a key platform technology used by consumer goods companies  for fine fragrances, personal care products, household care and more.

IFRA's flagship safe use program, the IFRA Standards, applies safety management measures based on scientific assessment and the evaluations of an independent Expert Panel. The program is at the heart of the IFRA Code of Practice, which applies to all IFRA members globally, including members of IFRA's 21 national associations. The Code also requires members to abide by local, national and international regulation, and to apply good manufacturing practices.

SOURCE The International Fragrance Association (IFRA)
DALLAS, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Gardner Capital , a private equity firm specializing in multifamily housing and renewable energy development and investment, announced today that it has secured a funding commitment from the GCRE Impact Fund to support electric vehicle (EV) adoption for the recently completed development, Gala at Fate. The community is in Fate, Texas, approximately 26 miles east of Dallas.

Located in Fate, TX, Gala at Fate will have Electric Vehicle charging stations installed for its residents.

Soft funding from the GCRE Impact Fund will pay for the installation of EV charging stations at the new community. It will also provide tenants access to EV charging at significantly reduced rates.

"Gardner Capital will be providing Gala at Fate residents with access to EV charging stations at favorable prices," said Michael Gardner, Founder of the GCRE Impact Fund and CEO of Gardner Capital. "Promoting EV adoption in the DFW Metroplex, specifically in the City of Fate, while delivering real savings to our tenants, is one of the reasons we launched the GCRE Impact Fund. We look forward to continuing to provide additional capital to this innovative and impactful Fund and hope it inspires others to offer alternative and creative funding options."

Gardner Capital remains focused on developing projects that deliver material economic value for low to moderate income families. The company will be installing the first Level 3, ultra-fast charging station in the City of Fate, which is only the third high-capacity EV station available in Rockwall County.

Located at 359 E. Black Oak Lane, Fate, Texas, Gala at Fate has a total of 185 units. Amenities include a resort-style swimming pool, fully appointed clubhouse with a fitness center and club room.

The development was made possible through multiple financial and other partners, including CREA and Citibank .

About the GCRE Impact Fund

Launched in 2020, the GCRE Impact Fund provides low interest soft loans and grants to initiatives that focus on upward mobility, renewable energy, EV adoption, or initiatives focused on investment in otherwise underserved markets. The Fund is expected to commit more than $500,000 annually for programs that align with the Funds investment goals and guidelines. For more information or to inquire about funding opportunities, please visit GCRE Impact Fund - Funding Page.

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About Gardner Capital

Gardner Capital is a private equity firm with multiple operating businesses focused on affordable housing and renewable energy development, tax credit syndication, as well as real estate-related investments, joint ventures and capital partner structures. The firm has offices in St. Louis, Dallas, Houston and Orlando. Since 1992, Gardner Capital has placed more than $3 billion of equity in affordable housing and related investments. In recent years, Gardner Capital added a rapidly growing national platform for solar development and investments, expanding its commitment to renewable energy and sustainability across its investment platform. Additionally, the firm launched multiple alternative investment funds focused on renewable energy and EV adoption, upward mobility and investments in underserved markets. We are committed to investing in communities, creating upward mobility, and improving the wellbeing of families by developing, investing and raising capital for affordable housing and clean energy-related businesses. For more information, visit www.gardnercapital.com.

Company Contact:

Mike Koehler

Chief of Staff and Director of Solar Development for Gardner Capital

(314) 561-6065

mkoehler@gardnercapital.com

Media Contacts:

Amy Power/Stacey Gaswirth

The Power Group for Gardner Capital

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SOURCE Gardner Capital
MONTREAL, June 29, 2021 /CNW Telbec/ - A group of investors led by Champlain Financial Corporation ("Champlain") announces the acquisition of Enjay Converters Ltd ("Enjay")

CFC Logo (CNW Group/Champlain Financial Corp.)

Co-Founded in 1983 by Mr. Jay Cassidy and based in Cobourg, Ontario, Enjay produces unique, quality food-contact grade packaging products for the retail, supermarket, and food processor markets. Enjay's products are sold across North America.

Mr. Cassidy along with Enjay's other management shareholders will be staying on as both shareholders and managers to steer Enjay through its next phase of growth and development with the assistance of Champlain's resources and networks.

The financial terms of the transaction have not been disclosed.

ABOUT CHAMPLAIN FINANCIAL CORPORATION

Champlain Financial Corporation, a Canadian private holding company based in Montreal, Quebec, operates a private diversified investment portfolio, currently with a series of investments throughout Canada and United States. Champlain's core focus is to serve as a value-added financial partner in providing equity capital and growth management expertise for small and middle-market companies that are eager to grow locally and abroad by providing them equity, funding and management expertise. Champlain currently manages 8 food related platform investments, Enjay now becoming the 9th.

ABOUT ENJAY CONVERTERS

Co-Founded in 1983 by Jay Cassidy, Enjay has grown over the years into an industry leading player in its specific niche in the food-contact grade packaging sector. Enjay manufactures and distributes cake boards, cake/party boxes, cupcake stands and liners, disposable piping bags and other related products destined to the in-store bakeries of major grocery retail chains, independent bakeries, food processors and other distributors catering to the food sector. Approximately 70% of Enjay's products are manufactured in Canada with the rest sourced from Asia, the United States and Europe.

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www.champlaincanada.com

www.enjay.com

ENJAY Logo (CNW Group/Champlain Financial Corp.)

SOURCE Champlain Financial Corp.

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GSK Singapore has signed an Advance Purchase Agreement with the Government of Singapore for sotrovimab

Sotrovimab is currently undergoing review by the Singapore Health Sciences Authority (HSA) under the Pandemic Special Access Route (PSAR) for interim authorization

Announcement follows the emergency use authorization (EUA) granted to sotrovimab by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and a positive scientific opinion by the European Medicines Agency's (EMA) Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP)

SINGAPORE, June 30, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- GlaxoSmithKline Singapore and Vir Biotechnology announced an agreement with the Government of Singapore for the supply of sotrovimab, an investigational single-dose monoclonal antibody, for the treatment of patients with COVID-19 who do not require oxygen supplementation and who are at risk of progressing to severe COVID-19.

GSK Singapore has signed an Advance Purchase Agreement with the Government of Singapore for sotrovimab

"We are proud to have entered into this agreement with Singapore to supply sotrovimab. This is another example of Singapore's role in the global innovation ecosystem and their commitment to invest in innovation," said Mike Crichton, SVP Specialty and Primary Care Therapy Area, GSK. "As variants continue to arise, vaccines together with the availability of safe and effective monoclonal antibody treatments have the potential to increase the chance of ending the pandemic. We're committed to partnering with the government of Singapore to make this important treatment option available to its citizens and to be part of its long-term solution to manage COVID-19."

"We are very pleased to be working with the Singapore government to ensure that patients who are ill with COVID-19 have access to the most recent therapeutic options," said Phil Pang, chief medical officer of Vir Biotechnology. "Sotrovimab was designed from the beginning to combat COVID-19 as it evolved, and, based on our most recent in vitro data, we are heartened to see that it appears to retain activity against all circulating variants of concern."

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GSK Singapore has submitted an application under the Pandemic Special Access Route (PSAR) for sotrovimab to the Health Sciences Authority of Singapore (HSA). Sotrovimab is currently undergoing regulatory review for interim authorization under the PSAR.

The PSAR application includes submission of data from an interim analysis of efficacy and safety data from the Phase 3 COMET-ICE (COVID-19 Monoclonal antibody Efficacy Trial - Intent to Care Early) trial, which was stopped early by an independent data monitoring committee in March due to evidence of profound clinical efficacy. Results of the interim analysis, based on data from 583 randomised patients, demonstrated an 85% (p=0.002) reduction in hospitalisation or death in those receiving sotrovimab compared to placebo, the primary endpoint of the trial. The PSAR review will also consider the medicine's quality and safety data. COMET-ICE final results will be available later this year.

Preclinical data suggest sotrovimab targets a conserved epitope of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein which is less likely to mutate over time. Data from several in vitro studies demonstrated that sotrovimab maintains activity against multiple circulating variants of concern, including the Alpha (B.1.1.7), Beta (B.1.351), Gamma (P.1), and Delta (B.1.617.2) variants, based on in vitro data from live virus and pseudotyped virus assays. The clinical impact of these variants is not yet known. Data collection and analysis is still ongoing.

On 26 May, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to sotrovimab. The European Medicines Agency's (EMA) Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) has issued a positive scientific opinion following the referral of sotrovimab to the CHMP under Article 5(3) of Regulation 726/2004. The CHMP opinion under Article 5(3) can now be considered by the national authorities in EU member states when taking evidence-based decisions on the early use of the medicine prior to marketing authorisation.

GSK and Vir are in discussions with other governments to explore similar supply agreements, as countries accelerate their vaccine and therapeutics programmes against COVID-19.

About GSK

GSK is a science-led global healthcare company with a special purpose: to help people do more, feel better, live longer. For further information please visit www.gsk.com/about-us.

GSK cautionary statement regarding forward-looking statements

GSK cautions investors that any forward-looking statements or projections made by GSK, including those made in this announcement, are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. Such factors include, but are not limited to, those described in the Company's Annual Report on Form 20-F for 2020 and any impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

For Media Inquiries (Singapore): Allyanna Anglim Allyanna.x.Anglim@GSK.com

SOURCE GSK
Theres something a little counter-revolutionary about high-end gaming machines made by suit-and-tie PC businesses. The idea of Lenovo, makers of the ThinkPad, building a gaming machine worthy of comment feels a little weird, and yet the Legion 5 Pro is just that. The Walmart-exclusive model that Im testing costs $1,530, pairing AMDs Ryzen 7 5800H with NVIDIAs GeForce RTX 3070 graphics. Powerful and affordable? Thats almost revolutionary.

Rounding out that spec list is 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD. Mercifully, both components are user upgradeable. That piddly drive will barely hold more than a couple Calls worth of Duty before youre reaching for an external drive. But these are the sort of smart compromises that Lenovo opted for to keep the price down, letting you add more RAM and storage as needed.

And then theres the screen, a 16-inch, 165Hz QHD, X-Rite Pantone-validated IPS display with the new, taller 16:10 aspect ratio. At 500 nits, the panel can hold its own in bright light compared to many of its rivals, and the matte screen reduces the risk of glare. Watching 4K video on this thing is a very pleasant experience and Ive enjoyed working from this device the past week or so that Ive been using it. It certainly makes you want to spend hours at a time staring at gigapixel images of, say, Paris, which I definitely didnt spend a long time doing this week (cough).

Review image of the new Lenovo Legion 5 Pro (2021)

Lenovo wasnt looking to pull up any trees with this design, which is little more than a refinement of what went before. Its not as thin or light as its rivals, and looks better in a dark room lit only by the glow of an RGB keyboard and the odd Nanoleaf panel. But if youre buying it as a desktop replacement thatll spend 90 percent of its time plonked on the same desk, its fine. Oh, and the aluminum chassis is rock solid, giving you confidence on those occasions when you do need to take it somewhere. That matte gray paint job, while very business forward, hides a multitude of palm sweat-based sins, but will attract every speck of dust in a three-mile zone.

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The Legion 5 Pros chunky chassis also means that youll find an excellent supply of I/O running around its deck. You get four USB-A (3.2 Gen 1) sockets, two USB-C (3.2 Gen 2) connections, HDMI, Ethernet and a 3.5mm headphone / microphone jack, as well as the proprietary power port. On the right-hand side, youll also find a hardware camera mute button, which replaces the dedicated hardware shutter from previous versions.

Even after several days of use, using Lenovos TrueStrike keyboard remains a pleasant but weird experience. The keys have a depth of 1.5mm, but Lenovo uses soft landing switches to make each actuation feel a little deeper than that. Every time you hit a key, youre expecting the hard jerk of a mechanical keyboard, only to find a pillowy end and bounce back up. Its like filling your shoes with water on a hot day and then stepping into them: Its very useful, but your brain is telling you that somethings amiss here.

It's worth noting that Lenovo took advantage of the Legion 5s bigger deck size to include a numerical keypad. The company says that the numpad itself is full size, but to my eyes and fingers, it feels a little squashed compared to a regular external PC keyboard. The RGB backlighting is perhaps appropriately muted, but can be set to four different lighting zones when required. The trackpad, meanwhile, is perfectly functional, and the bigger size is welcome given how tight previous models have been.

Bad image from a bad webcam.

I have less to say about the machines 720p camera, which is the very definition of serviceable. Light blooms, everythings uncomfortably fuzzy and the overall effect is that of most 60s TV shows when theyd get the Vaseline-smeared lens for close-ups. If youre looking to make a living from streaming, or youre a professional Zoom-call-haver, buy an external device. Poor webcam aside, Lenovo gets props for offering a dedicated camera disconnect button since there wasnt room in the space-starved lid for its customary shutter.

None PCMark 10 3DMark (TimeSpy Extreme) Geekbench 5 ATTO (top reads/writes) Lenovo Legion 5 Pro 16 (AMD Ryzen 7 5800H 3.2GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 8GB, 140Watt TDP) 6,871 4,899 1,411 / 7,416 3.19 GB/s // 2.54 GB/s ASUS ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition (AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX, AMD Radeon RX 6800M) 6,992 5,189 1,457 / 7,691 2.8 GB/s // 1.5 GB/s Surface Laptop 4 15 (AMD Ryzen 7 "Surface Edition' 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, Radeon Graphics) 6,620 512 1,048 / 6,551 1.9 GB/s // 985 MB/s MSI GS66 (2021) (Intel Core i7-10870H, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, NVIDIA RTX 3080) 5,639 4,538 1,247 / 6,505 3.1 GB/s // 2.9 GB/s

Benchmarks dont tell the whole story, but the Legion 5 Pro comes in close enough to machines priced a couple hundred bucks more. When playing demanding AAA games like Cyberpunk and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, I got between 50 and 60fps with the settings appropriately tweaked. Naturally, youll lose a little bit of that when you enable ray tracing, but it can handle hard work relatively well. The Legion 5 Pro has three pre-set performance modes which can be set inside the Vantage utility, or cycled through when you hit Fn+Q. One neat addition is that the power button will change color depending on which mode youre in: Auto offers a white glow, Quiet a cool blue, and Performance an angry red.

Using a machine like this for general productivity work is a bit like taking an F-150 to buy a box of cereal, but its more than possible. After all, if all youre doing is crunching documents, writing term papers, poking at spreadsheets and using Slack, this has more than enough. When transcoding a 28.2GB UHD H.265 video file to 1080p, Handbrake was able to crunch through it at over 40 fps, making it sturdy enough for even halfway professional video editors.

The Legion 5 Pro uses a dual-fan system which pushes hot air out of its chassis through a quartet of exhausts. Two vents at the back are complemented by one on each side, and if youre not blessed with huge amounts of room, beware. Leave your hand, mouse, gamepad or drink next to one of those vents for too long and they will become uncomfortably warm. Playing Cyberpunk and Shadow of the Tomb Raider was kicking out enough heat that I wondered if I could make smores.

Review image of the new Lenovo Legion 5 Pro (2021)

This problem is exacerbated with the aluminum underside of the chassis which gets too hot to touch. After a couple hours of gaming, I picked up the machine to move it somewhere else and damn: I thought Id pulled a baking sheet straight out of the oven. Its not hot enough to burn you, but its not something you wanna touch if you value not being in pain.

Its also impossible to sugarcoat the sheer noise that this machine makes when the fans spin up. This thing is noisy  noisy enough that youll need to dial your speakers up to drown it out or grab a pair of headphones to claw back some of that immersion. This is an occupational hazard of gaming laptops, but its worth noting that this system is loud.

Another tick in the not ideal column is battery life, and despite packing an 80WHr battery, it will not last long when removed from an outlet. Our standard battery rundown test loops a video until the computer dies, with the brightness set to 65 percent and all battery-saving tech disabled. It managed to last for four hours and 43 minutes while using the integrated Radeon graphics, which is fine in the gritted-teeth sense of the word. Certainly, while you can handle a few emails or some light browsing while sat on your couch, this is not a device you can take away from a socket for a full working day without fuss.

One of the reasons that the Legion 5 Pro is compelling despite some of its flaws is its price, which is something. Lenovo has managed to undercut several of its competitors here, and theres no wonder its only intermittently on sale right now. If you want a machine from Alienware with similar specs (the romantically-named M15 Ryzen Edition R5 Gaming Laptop) itll cost you $1,900. For that, youll get a Ryzen R7 5800H (same as here), RTX 3070 with 8GB RAM (same as here), 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD (same as you get the idea).

Review image of the new Lenovo Legion 5 Pro (2021)

If getting RTX 3070 graphics is a dealbreaker, you could opt for the Razer Blade 15 Base Model with a 15.6-inch FHD display, 10th-generation Intel Core i7-10750H CPU, 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD. You will, however, have to pay $2,000 for the privilege, which may be a non-starter for some. ASUS also offers the ROG Strix G15  an all-AMD version of which we reviewed a few weeks back  with an RTX 3070, priced at $1,800. If you were looking for a machine in that $1,500-or-so bracket, you could get the $1,600 Razer Book, with a Core i7-1165G7 processor and Intel Iris Xe graphics. Alternatively, for $1,500 Acers Predator Triton 300 SE packs a Core i7-11375H CPU and NVIDIAs RTX 3060 GPU, which seems like a fairly reasonable deal all things considered.

Despite all of the chaos that has so far made up the current decade, were seeing a new dawn of AMDs high-er end chips winding up in gaming laptops. This Ryzen 7 5800H can beat (select) Intel chips in a number of benchmarks, and you can expect to see it crop up in a number of other machines across this year. And while wealthier buyers may be tempted by a far pricier machine with RTX 3080 graphics, the 3070 here shouldnt make you feel like a second-class citizen.

There is lots to like about this machine, although the snips made to push the price down are sure to rankle some. The battery life is well below par, the thermals could do with refinement, and the webcam would look retrograde on even a five-year-old machine. But, if youre going to stick this on a desk, keep it constantly plugged in to power and never do more than the odd Zoom, does any of that matter?
By Franca Quarneti, via El Planteo.

In Mexico, the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN) approved the decriminalization of the adult or recreational use of marijuana.

Thus, with 8 votes in favor and 3 against, the General Declaration of Unconstitutionality (DGI) was approved to invalidate five articles of the General Health Law that absolutely prohibit the recreational use of cannabis.

This way, the Court again obliges Congress to create a regulatory framework for adult consumption of the plant.

Context for the decriminalization of marijuana in Mexico

Lorena Beltran, CEO of the Mexican cannabis company CannabiSalud, told El Planteo that, In order to explain what happened today it is important to remember that, since October 2018, its been unconstitutional to prohibit people from possessing and using cannabis for personal purposes.

However, the processes to obtain permits of this nature have been too bureaucratic: one had to request this permit from COFEPRIS, which was generally refused. With this refusal, youd return to a judge. And, eventually, a jurge would grant you a protection that would ensure COFREPIS could not deny your request, she added.

And she explained: It takes many months for COFEPRIS to respond, obtain protection and be able to make use of this right. However, this discussion and the vote in the Supreme Court of Justice took place today. Therefore, COFEPRIS can no longer deny you your permits ".

The resolution comes after the failure of the Mexican Congress to legislate on the issue in the last two years. In fact, on April 30, the deadline that the Court had imposed on Congress to regulate adult consumption expired for the third time.

In addition, according to Infobae, the SCJN was a pioneer in recognizing that the adult use of cannabis is a matter of individual autonomy protected by the right to free development of the personality. From that resolution, the Upper House and the Lower House were forced to legislate on the subject.

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Related: Morocco Legalizes Cannabis Cultivation And Commercialization

Today is a historic day for freedoms. After a long journey, this Supreme Court consolidates the right to the free development of the personality for the recreational use of marijuana , declared Arturo Zaldivar, the presiding minister of the Court, once the project was approved.

And now?

After the decriminalization of cannabis, the people of Mexico will be able to smoke marijuana and take it with them, but not without first requesting permission from the Federal Commission for the Protection against Sanitary Risks (COFEPRIS).

In this regard, Lorena Beltran assured, The process that we have been carrying out will be shortened. COFEPRIS has to give you the immediate positive for the possession and consumption of cannabis for personal purposes .

But beware, warned the entrepreneur. If you do not have this permission, the penal code applies as it is.

Related: Argentina Presents Cannabis, Hemp Industry Bill: Here's Everything You Need To Know

Likewise, Judge Norma Lucia Pina, who presented the bill, clarified that in no case is it authorized to import, trade or supply marijuana. In other words, for now, a recreational cannabis market will not be created in Mexico.

Thus, these guidelines will govern following the publication of the DGI in the Official Gazette of the Federation, and while Congress does not legislate in this regard.

Definitely, today it was won. It is a great step for Mexico. Today the right to free development of the personality is respected. Thus, direct or indirect pressure is also placed on the National Congress to regulate all activities, such as commerce and the cannabis industry in general in Mexico,  concluded Beltran hopefully.

Photo via El Planteo.

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 2021 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.
A top Mexican official reiterated on Monday a ban on the use of cryptocurrencies in the countrys financial system.

Arturo Herrera, Mexicos finance minister, said cryptocurrencies arent legal tender assets and arent treated as currencies within the countrys current regulatory framework.

Those bans are not expected to be lifted in the short term, Herrera said during a presentation to the Financial Action Task Force, a global anti-money laundering group.

The announcement comes after a Sunday pronouncement by billionaire Ricardo Salinas Pliego, a noted bitcoin bull, that he was working to make Banco Azteca the first bank in Mexico to accept the cryptocurrency. Salinas is chairman of Grupo Salinas, the banks parent company.

Herreras comments werent explicitly tied to Salinas pledge, but came within hours of the businessmans announcement.

Herrera said his secretariat will publish a four-page communique detailing the governments position.

Related: Bitcoin Gathers Upside Momentum; Faces Resistance Near $40K

In a joint statement, the Central Bank of Mexico, the finance secretary and the National Banking and Securities Commission specified that cryptocurrencies are neither legal tender assets nor currencies under the current legal framework. In addition, they warned about the risks of using cryptocurrencies.

The document consists of four pages and was characterized by Herrera as unusually extensive.

The three entities reiterated the warnings they issued in 2014, 2017 and 2019 about cryptos risks as a form of exchange, store of value or other form of investment.

In addition, the document said that financial institutions in Mexico are not authorized to deal with virtual assets such as bitcoin, ether, XRP and others, in order to maintain a healthy distance between these and the financial system.

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Financial institutions that conduct or offer operations with virtual assets without an authorization will be in violation of the regulations and subject to applicable sanctions, the report added.

Mexico is the headquarters of Bitso, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in Latin America. In May, the company raised $250 million in its Series C funding round and reached a $2.2 billion valuation.

The statement on Monday affirms that the government has not authorized the collection of deposits from the general public through technological schemes related to blockchain or distributed registries, known as stablecoins.

In May, Bitso CEO Sergio Vogel said on CoinDesk TVs First Mover program the exchange, which has 2 million users, has seen a sharp increase in demand for dollar-linked stablecoins.

Bitso didnt immediately respond to CoinDesks requests for comment.

Related Stories
DUBLIN, June 29, 2021--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The "Prospects for Public Infrastructure Projects, Middle East and Africa" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

This report provides a detailed analysis of the prospects for an acceleration in public infrastructure investment, including a listing of key projects.

Many governments across the region are attempting to step up investment in infrastructure to support the recovery from COVID-19 disruption and also as part of ambitious strategic plans to promote the private sector, improve connectivity and enhance competitiveness.

In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), spending of at least 8.2% of GDP will be needed to meet the infrastructure goals by 2030, according to the World Bank, but infrastructure spending over the past decade has averaged just 3% of GDP.

Infrastructure financing has come mostly from public sector funds, but government finances have been hit hard by the impact of COVID-19 pandemic and the slump in oil prices in 2020, creating a requirement for regulatory frameworks and policies to attract greater private investment. When taking into consideration the five key factors, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Egypt are considered to have relatively good prospects for accelerating infrastructure investment.

Sub Saharan Africa has significant infrastructure needs, but despite the huge opportunities for investment, funding remains insufficient. Most governments in the region have had to use limited resources to provide COVID-19 support policies. The immediate requirements to deal with both economic and humanitarian crises has generally prevented governments from being able to focus policies on infrastructure investment, but efforts to boost growth will be stepped up.

This will be driven by ongoing investment in infrastructure and the expansion of oil production, as well as expansion in the energy sector, in order to achieve sustainable social and economic development milestones, which will help make individual countries more resilient. Tanzania stands out as having good prospects for accelerating infrastructure, along with Cameroon, Ghana and Kenya.

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Given the increased focus on infrastructure investment as a potential path to generate growth momentum to support the recovery from the COVID-19 crisis, the publisher has assessed the potential for governments to succeed with such efforts as well as illustrating scenarios reflecting this

Scope

This report provides an overall assessment of governments'/countries' potential to move forward with (accelerate) their public infrastructure works by considering a series of key factors: the size of the pipeline of projects in each country, the composition of this pipeline in terms of stages of development, the political momentum behind infrastructure investment, the state of the government's finance, and the economic recovery outlook.

It also provides analysis based on the publisher's construction projects showing total project values and analysis by stage of development from announcement to execution.

The analysis of the size of the project pipeline includes all public and public-private partnership projects as tracked by the publisher (including roads, bridges, railways, airports, ports, power, water and sewage infrastructure construction projects). It also provides an analysis by all projects at all stages of development from announcement to execution.

The top infrastructure construction projects in tender, award and execution stages are listed by sector and value.

It also lays out scenarios ("scheduled", "risk", and "accelerated") to illustrate the possible variation in the potential for spending on the pipeline of projects

Reasons to Buy

Assess all major markets in the region based on their prospects for accelerating infrastructure investment.

Gain insight into the key policies and issues that will impact the prospects for public infrastructure projects.

Review scenarios of potential spending on the project pipeline, and access a listing of the key projects being tracked.

Plan campaigns by country based on specific project opportunities and align resources to the most attractive markets.

Public Infrastructure Prospects

Can governments across the region accelerate infrastructure investment to offset COVID-19 disruption?

Algeria - Prospects for accelerating pipeline

Angola - Prospects for accelerating pipeline

Bahrain - Prospects for accelerating pipeline

Cameroon - Prospects for accelerating pipeline

Egypt - Prospects for accelerating pipeline

Ethiopia - Prospects for accelerating pipeline

Ghana - Prospects for accelerating pipeline

Iran - Prospects for accelerating pipeline

Iraq - Prospects for accelerating pipeline

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/c3wiwb

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005767/en/

Contacts

ResearchAndMarkets.com

Laura Wood, Senior Press Manager

press@researchandmarkets.com



For E.S.T Office Hours Call 1-917-300-0470

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OTTAWA, ALGONQUIN TERRITORY, ON, June 29, 2021 /CNW/ - Strengthening access to culturally safe health services is integral to building a stronger and more culturally inclusive and supportive society. Racism resulting from Canada's colonial history remains embedded in Canada's health systems and continues to have catastrophic effects on First Nations, Inuit and Metis communities.

Increasing access to health services for Indigenous Peoples that are safe, respectful and culturally sensitive is a priority for the Government of Canada. Joyce's Principle, named in memory of Joyce Echaquan from the Atikamekw Nation in Quebec, aims to guarantee to all Indigenous Peoples the right of equitable access to health and social services, as well as the right to enjoy the best possible physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health.

Consistent with Joyce's Principle, Canada recognizes that Indigenous individuals have "the right to access, without any discrimination, all social and health services" and that "Indigenous individuals have an equal right to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health," as outlined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The Government of Canada is committed to the co-development of distinctions-based health legislation and affirms its commitment that this legislation will be informed by the spirit and elements of Joyce's Principle. It has also pledged to support healthy and safe Indigenous communities and foster health systems free from racism and discrimination where Indigenous Peoples are respected and safe, and where access to culturally relevant mental health and wellness services is improved through the Federal Pathway to Address Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and 2SLGBTQQIA+ People.

Today, the Honourable Marc Miller, Minister of Indigenous Services, and the Honourable Patty Hajdu, Minister of Health, announced specific funding allocations of $126.7 million over three years, first announced in Budget 2021, to support efforts to address racism in Canada's health systems. This includes:

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$33.3 million to improve access to culturally safe services, with a focus on services for Indigenous women, 2SLGBTQQIA+ people, persons with disabilities and other marginalized groups who may experience intersecting discrimination. This includes expanding support for Indigenous midwifery and doula initiatives and strengthening funding for national Indigenous women's organizations, as well as regional and grassroots organizations.

$46.9 million to support the changes to health systems through the integration of cultural and patient safety at all levels, as well as through increased Indigenous representation in health professions.

$37.8 million to improve supports and accountability by providing distinctions-based funding to Indigenous organizations for new Indigenous patient advocates that will allow Indigenous patients to more safely navigate federal and provincial health systems.

$8.7 million to provide federal leadership, which includes convening national dialogues like this one today to advance concrete actions to address anti-Indigenous racism in Canada's health systems, and leading by example by evaluating and improving Indigenous Services Canada's programs and practices to ensure more culturally responsive and safe services.

Quotes

"By engaging in these necessary conversations, by taking a stand against instances of racism against Indigenous Peoples, by confronting the truth togetherhowever uncomfortablewe can continue to address past wrongs and make things right for the future through action. Today's National Dialogue ends with concrete actions to build health systems that recognize traditional knowledge, health systems that respect Indigenous ways of being and that are culturally safe for Indigenous Peoples. Together, we can make meaningful and lasting change for Indigenous Peoples and all Canadians."

The Honourable Marc Miller

Minister of Indigenous Services

"True systemic change requires a deep willingness to share power. It also requires humility to admit when we are not doing enoughand I can say unequivocally, as a government, we are not doing enough. Federal, provincial and territorial governments need to address the jurisdictional issues around Indigenous health funding, governance, and program and service delivery. Only then can we achieve health equity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Peoples. I am eager to work with Indigenous Peoples and their governments to tackle these issues."

The Honourable Patty Hajdu

Minister of Health

Quick facts

The two previous National Dialogues in October 2020 and January 2021 with National Indigenous Organization representatives, Indigenous health professionals, health system partners, and provincial and territorial representatives were the first steps in addressing anti-Indigenous racism in health systems.

The National Dialogues, together with extensive work already undertaken on this issue including through the Ignored to Death report, the In Plain Sight report and the findings of the Val-d'Or investigation on systemic racism, identified many root causes, exacerbating factors and gaps that need to be addressed.

The June National Dialogue on Anti-Indigenous Racism (June 28 to 29, 2021) is an opportunity to pursue collective actions related to increasing Indigenous representation in postsecondary health education, cultural safety and humility training, traditional approaches to health, and safe patient navigation.

Associated links

Government of Canada actions to address anti-Indigenous racism in health systems

Joyce's Principle

Federal Pathway to Address Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and 2SLGBTQQIA+ People

Implementing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Canada

Stay connected

Join the conversation about Indigenous peoples in Canada:

Twitter: @GCIndigenous

Facebook: @GCIndigenous

Instagram: @gcindigenous

Facebook: @GCIndigenousHealth

Twitter: @Min_IndServ

You can subscribe to receive our news releases and speeches via RSS feeds. For more information or to subscribe, visit www.isc.gc.ca/RSS.

SOURCE Indigenous Services Canada

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Ocean Tomo's acquisition of Veris Consulting expands the firm's Financial Expert, Management Consulting, and Advisory services beyond its historical focus on Intellectual Property matters. The combined firm comprises more than eighty professionals, with multiple globally recognized experts.

CHICAGO, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Ocean Tomo, LLC ("Ocean Tomo"), in partnership with Bow River Capital ("Bow River"), announced today the acquisition of Virginia-based financial forensics firm, Veris Consulting. Founded by industry stalwart Larry Johnson, Veris Consulting is led by an experienced team including Michelle Avery, Jon Couchman, and Ed Buttner.

Intellectual Capital Equity(R)

Ocean Tomo's acquisition of Veris Consulting expands the firm's Financial Expert, Management, and Advisory Services

Veris Consulting expands Ocean Tomo's platform of services, adding several testifying expert witness professionals to Ocean Tomo's team of intellectual property damages experts. The combined firm provides industry-leading litigation consulting capabilities addressing economic damages, financial forensics, accounting and auditing standards, disputes and insolvencies, and corporate investigations, in addition to management consulting and advisory services. Concurrently, the addition of Veris Consulting deepens the firm's scope of engagements involving breach of contract, fraud, valuation, and bankruptcy, among other areas.

"Veris' experience in complex accounting and auditing matters, as well as litigation and corporate investigations, adds a complementary service offering to Ocean Tomo's traditional focus on intangible assets," explains Ocean Tomo CEO James E. Malackowski. "The financial forensics team at Veris Consulting is highly sought after by state insurance department regulators, outside counsel, and liquidators, both domestic and international," Malackowski notes.

Combined, Ocean Tomo and Veris Consulting work with more than 80% of the AM Law 100 firms.

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Commenting on the transaction, Bow River Capital Director Bo Sutton, added, "The Veris Consulting team is called upon by some of the nation's most prestigious organizations to support consequential and complex corporate investigations, assisting counsel representing public company audit committees, and working with top government entities. Veris is engaged in the most notable high-profile corporate investigations, including the nation's largest Ponzi scheme to date."

"Law firms, corporations, and federal agencies highly value Veris' deep specialized expertise, particularly in highly complex financial reporting issues, insolvency causes and measurements, and corporate investigations of potential wrongdoing," explains Veris Founder Larry Johnson. "We saw in Ocean Tomo the same depth of expertise, best-in-class team, and fantastic reputation. This is an ideal partnership."

Malackowski is quick to cite published studies of litigation trends released earlier this year that highlight a projected increase in contract and commercial disputes, insurance, antitrust, and regulatory investigations noting that "with the addition of the Veris team, Ocean Tomo is well positioned to address the most significant matters of concern to corporate counsel".

He further adds "The Veris acquisition represents the first step in our strategic vision to build the preeminent litigation support services firm and we anticipate further announcements building on this leadership position."

About Ocean Tomo

Established in 2003, Ocean Tomo, LLC provides Financial Expert, Management Consulting, and Advisory services related to intellectual property ("IP") and other intangible assets; corporate accounting investigations; regulatory and reporting obligations; solvency and restructuring; and contractual or competition disputes.

Practice offerings address economic damage calculations and testimony; accounting investigations and financial forensics; technology and intangible asset valuation; strategy and risk management consulting; mergers and acquisitions; debt and equity private placement; and IP brokerage.

Intangible assets comprise 90 percent of business value but are also subject to significant impairment due to enterprise and regulatory compliance risk. Ocean Tomo assists clients  corporations, law firms, governments, and institutional investors  in realizing Intellectual Capital Equity value broadly defined.

About Bow River Capital

Founded in 2003, Bow River Capital is a private alternative asset management company based in Denver, Colorado, focused on investing in the lower middle market in three asset classes, including private equity, real estate and software growth equity. For more information on Bow River, please visit www.bowrivercapital.com.

Kristi L. Stathis

Ocean Tomo

+1 773 294 4360

kstathis@oceantomo.com

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SOURCE Ocean Tomo LLC
OmniSci Earns Prestigious Industry Recognition

WASHINGTON, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- OmniSci, the pioneer in accelerated analytics, has been named the best Big Data Reporting and Analytics Solution of 2021 as part of the annual SIIA CODiE Awards. The CODiE Awards recognize the companies producing the most innovative business technology products across the country, and around the world.

OmniSci (PRNewsfoto/OmniSci)

"Our team is thrilled by the recognition from the SIIA CODiE Awards," said Nohyun Myung, Vice President, Global Solutions Engineering & Customer Success, "It demonstrates the value of our product for those looking to better analyze enormous data sets through geospatial visualization."

OmniSci is the leading open platform at the convergence of analytics, data science and location intelligence workflows. The technology can query and render tens of billions of rows of spatiotemporal data within milliseconds, making large complex data sets interactive, visual operations. OmniSci provides insights at the speed of curiosity.

"Congratulations to all of the 2021 Business Technology CODiE Award winners," said SIIA President Jeff Joseph. "The products honored this year hold a particularly special place in the distinguished history of the CODiEs. Many of these winners literally helped business survive, and even thrive, as the global business community transitioned to remote status due to the pandemic. All those honored today demonstrate the resilience of this dynamic industry. Innovation continued even in the face of an unprecedented challenging year."

The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), the principal trade association for the software and digital content industries, announced the full slate of CODiE winners during an online winner announcement June 22 in light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Acknowledged as the premier awards program for the software and information industries for over 35 years, the SIIA CODiE Awards are produced by the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), the principal trade association for the software, education, media and digital content industries. OmniSci was honored as one of 46 winners across the 43 business technology categories, including two categories in response to COVID-19.

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The SIIA CODiE Awards are the industry's only peer-reviewed awards program. The first-round review of all nominees is conducted by software and business technology experts with considerable industry expertise, including analysts, media, bloggers, bankers and investors. The scores from the expert judge review determine the finalists. SIIA members then vote on the finalist products, and the scores from both rounds are tabulated to select the winners.

Forty-three awards were given this year for products and services deployed specifically for B2B software, information and media companies, including the Best Overall Business Technology Product, awarded to the product with the highest scores of both rounds of judging.

More information about the Awards is available at: siia.net/CODiE.

Details about the winners are listed at https://history.siia.net/codie/2021-Winners

About the SIIA CODiE Awards

The SIIA CODiE Awards is the only peer-reviewed program to showcase business and education technology's finest products and services. Since 1986, thousands of products, services and solutions have been recognized for achieving excellence. For more information, visit siia.net/CODiE .

About OmniSci:

OmniSci is the pioneer in accelerated analytics. The OmniSci platform is used in business and government to find insights in data beyond the limits of mainstream analytics tools. Harnessing the massive parallelism of modern CPU and GPU hardware, the platform is available in the cloud and on-premise. OmniSci originated from research at Harvard and MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). OmniSci is funded by GV, In-Q-Tel, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), NVIDIA, Tiger Global Management, Vanedge Capital and Verizon Ventures. The company is headquartered in San Francisco. Learn more about OmniSci at www.omnisci.com.

OmniSci Media Contact:

adardinger@nextpr.com

SIIA Communications Contact:

SIIA@methodcommunications.com

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SOURCE OmniSci
(Bloomberg) -- OPEC and its allies debated a potential output increase, delaying preliminary talks between ministers by a day to allow more time for a compromise before a critical meeting on Thursday.

The coalition, led by Saudi Arabia and Russia, is considering whether to continue reviving more crude supplies, a move that could ease the upward pressure on prices as global demand bounces back from the coronavirus pandemic. Possible supply hikes are being discussed for August or September, Kazakhstans Energy Minister Nurlan Nogaev told reporters on Wednesday.

Moscow is considering making a proposal to hike output, but Riyadh has signaled it prefers a gradual approach. Its not the first time the two leaders have gone into the meeting with different stances -- and they tend to hash out a compromise. One delegate predicted the same would happen this time.

Kazakhstans minister said he will argue in favor of an increase and the group will decide how to proceed on Thursday. Delegates said some producers have discussed extending the overall time-frame of the deal, which is due to expire in April, to the end of next year.

OPEC countries are cautious with regard to output-increase strategy amid oil market challenges, Kuwaits Oil Ministry said in a statement on Wednesday. Any decision the organization will take will be in the interests of producers and consumers.

As oil prices have climbed to the highest level in around 2-1/2 years, analysts widely expect the group to tap some of the vast capacity it shuttered last year. The average expectation is for an increase of 550,000 barrels a day -- roughly 10% of the volume that remains idle.

Brent crude rose 0.7% to $75.31 a barrel at 2:24 p.m. in London. While the global benchmark is down this week amid growing concern about a more contagious variant of the virus, it is still up about 45% this year. The price increase, part of a broader rally in commodities, has stoked fears of inflation.

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The choice OPEC+ now faces is whether to consolidate those gains and allow prices to stabilize, or to let prices rise further, attracting mounting ire from consumers, analysts at Standard Chartered Plc, including Sudakshina Unnikrishnan, said in a note Tuesday.

More Time

The 23-nation alliance had been due to convene its advisory body, the Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee, on Wednesday. That session will now take place on Thursday, the same day as the main policy meeting.

Delegates said it was to allow more time for talks. According to an official letter, Russias Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak sought the delay because of presidential commitments.

Russia, which faces less budgetary pressure to sustain high prices than many of its Middle Eastern allies, wants OPEC+ to boost production, according to people familiar with its oil policy. Riyadhs position isnt currently aligned with Moscow, delegates said.

OPEC+ was forced to postpone events as recently as December, when a similar split between Riyadh and Moscow caused the group to delay talks by two days. It ultimately found a compromise, agreeing on a modest production increase.

In recent months, Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman has urged the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and its partners to adopt a cautious approach in resuming output. He recently argued that this is paying off.

Some OPEC nations fear that the potential restart of exports from fellow member Iran could lead to a new glut, and believe the alliance needs to prolong supply restraints to the end of next year. Tehran is seeking an accord to remove U.S. sanctions on its petroleum sales, though the process has stalled.

Oil inventories will start accumulating again next spring if OPEC+ fully restores its shuttered supplies, according to data presented on Tuesday at the groups Joint Technical Committee.

Stockpiles will swell to stand 181 million barrels above their 2015-2019 average by the end of 2022, the data suggests. The glut would be significantly larger if supplies rebound from Iran and other currently constrained producers, according to the JTC.

(Updates with talks extending deal beyond April in fourth paragraph and data on inventories in last three paragraphs.)

More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com

Subscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.

2021 Bloomberg L.P.
Associated Press

As shockwaves spread across the country from the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, corporate America took a stand against the lies that powered the mob. Dozens of big companies, citing their commitment to democracy, pledged to avoid donating money to the 147 lawmakers who objected to Congress' certification of Joe Biden's victory on the false grounds that voting fraud stole the election from then-President Donald Trump. Six months later, many of those companies have resumed funneling cash to political action committees that benefit the election efforts of lawmakers whether they objected to the election certification or not.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Segra International Corp, a leading cannabis agriculture technology company, is pleased to announce its first successful export of Verified Segra Stock Cannabis plantlets to the Biopharmaceutical Research Company (BRC), one of the first groups in the USA to receive approval from the DEA to cultivate Cannabis for scientific research purposes.



This shipment marks a tremendous milestone in the evolution of the US cannabis industry, as it represents one of the first imports of live Cannabis plants to a federally licensed US cultivator. In recent months, the DEA has issued a select number of licenses to several groups in the US to allow for the cultivation of Cannabis for scientific research purposes. BRC, based in California, is among the first companies granted a license and is now operational. Segras Verified Segra Stock plantlets will provide BRC with standardized and validated starting materials produced through plant tissue culture and backed by extensive agronomic data and Cannabis plant pathogen screening.

BRC works with research groups studying Cannabis and Cannabis flower to understand the plant in a scientific and federally regulated environment. Under the federal licensing regime, BRC is only allowed to source genetics and starting material from DEA-compliant or federally legal sources.

Segra's Verified Segra Stock guarantee means our plantlets are DNA fingerprinted and pathogen-free with virtually no risk of pathogen introduction to the receiving grow facility. Starting with this input material is critical to effectively grow replicable crops, something highly valued by researchers who are studying the finished product of the Cannabis plant and its derivatives," said Jamie Blundell, CEO of Segra International. "Furthermore, Segra's VNTR DNA Fingerprinting technology allows BRC to order plantlets and cultivars with certainty, knowing they are receiving the same input material with each shipment. The application of VNTR DNA fingerprinting technology can be used throughout the supply chain for track and trace purposes, from plantlet to flower, translating this certainty to researchers who can study the same product repeatedly."

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"At BRC, we are focused on developing federally compliant active pharmaceutical ingredients for federally compliant researchers examining the therapeutic effects of Cannabis" said George Hodgin, CEO of Biopharmaceutical Research Company. "We're fortunate to be working with Segra to offer our clients a wide range of clean, high-quality Cannabis of specific chemical expressions and flower types to help them better understand the applications of the Cannabis plant."

Learn more about Segra's services and premium cultivars by viewing the 2021 Cultivar and Services Catalogue.

About Segra:

Segra is an agriculture technology company offering plant tissue culture, plant genomics, and pathogen detection services to accelerate the advancement of the cannabis industry. The company's proprietary technologies empower its clients to drive financial performance and mitigate risk while exploring the next frontier of optimized cultivation practices for the rapidly evolving cannabis consumer. Segra has developed industrial-scale laboratories to produce Verified Segra Stock, robust, and DNA-fingerprinted Cannabis plantlets for licensed producers globally. Segra has assembled a world-class team of specialists in agronomy, molecular genetics, plant tissue culture, and regulatory compliance to support this vision. Learn more at segra-intl.com or by viewing the 2021 Cultivar and Services Catalogue .

About Biopharmaceutical Research Company

BRC is a specialty pharmaceutical company that holds several DEA Registrations across the entire value chain of Cannabis and is pioneering the federally legal Cannabis space in the USA.

Forward-Looking Information:

This news release includes statements containing certain "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities law ("forward-looking statements"). Forward-looking statements are frequently characterized by words such as "plan," "continue," "expect," "project," "intend," "believe," "anticipate," "estimate," "may," "will," "potential," "proposed" and other similar words, or statements that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" occur. These statements are only predictions. Various assumptions were used in drawing the conclusions or making the projections contained in the forward-looking statements throughout this news release. Forward-looking statements are based on the opinions and estimates of management at the date the statements are made and are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. The company is under no obligation, and expressly disclaims any intention or obligation, to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as expressly required by applicable law.

CONTACT: For Further Information: Carson Otto Carson.otto@segra-intl.com




NEW YORK, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Shelter Acquisition Corporation I (the "Company"), a special purpose acquisition company 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, today announced the pricing of its initial public offering of 20,000,000 units at a price of $10.00 per unit. The units will be listed on The Nasdaq Capital Market and trade under the ticker symbol "SHQAU" beginning June 30, 2021. Each unit consists of one share of Class A common stock of the Company and one-half of one redeemable warrant. Each whole warrant entitles the holder thereof to purchase one share of Class A common stock of the Company at a price of $11.50 per share. Once the securities comprising the units begin separate trading, the shares of Class A common stock and warrants are expected to be listed on The Nasdaq Capital Market under the symbols "SHQA" and "SHQAW," respectively.

Shelter Acquisition Corp.

Led by Chairman and Chief Investment Officer, Jack Chandler, and Chief Executive Officer, Christopher Keber, the Company intends to concentrate on identifying businesses that provide technologically innovative solutions to the real estate industry.

Citigroup and Wells Fargo Securities are serving as the joint book-running managers for the offering. The Company has granted the underwriters a 45-day option to purchase up to an additional 3,000,000 units at the initial public offering price to cover over-allotments, if any.

The offering is being made only by means of a prospectus. When available, copies of the prospectus may be obtained from: Citigroup Global Markets Inc., Attn: Prospectus Department, c/o Broadridge Financial Solutions, 1155 Long Island Avenue, Edgewood, NY 11717, by telephone at (800) 831-9146; and Wells Fargo Securities, Attention: Equity Syndicate Department, 500 West 33rd Street, New York, New York, 10001, at (800) 326-5897 or email a request to cmclientsupport@wellsfargo.com.

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The registration statement relating to the securities became effective on June 29, 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.

The offering is expected to close on July 2, 2021, subject to customary closing conditions.

Cautionary Note Concerning 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 offering discussed above will be completed on the terms described, or at all, or 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 Securities and Exchange Commission ("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.

Contacts

Company Contact:

Danion Fielding

danion@shelteracq.com

Whitney Topping

whitney@shelteracq.com

Media Contact:

shelteracq@prosek.com

Cision

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SOURCE Shelter Acquisition Corp.
LONDON, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Markel Corporation (NYSE: MKL) announced today that Simon Wilson will become the next President of Markel International, a wholly-owned subsidiary. He will succeed William Stovin who has led the Markel International division since 2008. The transition is part of a planned succession that will fully take effect no later than January 1, 2022, pending regulatory approval.

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Stovin joined Markel as part of the acquisition of Terra Nova Holdings, Ltd. in 2000. The deal was part of a long-term strategy to expand Markel's footprint beyond North America to become a global player in specialty insurance. Toward that end, Stovin played a leading role in helping Markel expand to more than 60 insurance offices in 16 different countries. Under Stovin's leadership, gross written premiums profitably increased at a compound annual growth rate of roughly seven percentmore than doubling the size of the division.

"Markel is a truly remarkable company, and having the opportunity to help expand it to new frontiers has been a great honour. I will always admire this organisation, and I know that Markel International will be in great hands under Simon's leadership," Stovin said.

Robert Cox, President and Chief Operating Officer of Insurance Operations for Markel, commented, "Our global expansion was one of the most important decisions in Markel's history, and William deserves significant credit for making it a success. His disciplined approach to profitably growing our wholesale business while also establishing and expanding our international retail operations has laid the foundation for tremendous growth in the future, and I'm confident that Simon will leverage this foundation to successfully lead our international operations in achieving our profitable growth goals."

Wilson comes to the position with nearly 20 years of experience scaling the international operations of large specialty insurance organisations. He joined Markel in 2010 to spearhead international business development, and he was the primary architect of the National Markets division with operations in Europe and Canada, which profitably grew from $121 million to $402 million in annual gross written premium over the last decade. Wilson currently serves as the Managing Executive of Global Strategy for Markel. Prior to joining Markel, he led the Lloyd's Asia platform in Singapore.

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"I'm honoured to have been selected for this role, and look forward to building upon William's legacy. Markel seeks to be a leader in each of our pursuits, and our 90-year history has proven that the best way to do this is through deep expertise and exceptional service. Our commitment to understand our customers' needs while exceeding their expectations will continue to be at the forefront of our minds as we further scale our international operations," Wilson said.

Wilson will report to Cox and work from the London office. Stovin will remain with the company in an advisory capacity into next year.

About Markel

Markel Corporation is a diverse financial holding company serving a variety of niche markets. The company's principal business markets and underwrites specialty insurance products. In each of the Company's businesses, it seeks to provide quality products and excellent customer service so that it can be a market leader. The financial goals of the company are to earn consistent underwriting and operating profits and superior investment returns to build shareholder value. Markel is a registered trademark of the Markel Corporation. Visit Markel on the web at markel.com.

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SOURCE Markel Corporation
Sharp's industry-leading solutions lead to 20+ years with Sourcewell

MONTVALE, N.J., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Sharp Imaging and Information Company of America (SIICA), a division of Sharp Electronics Corporation, is excited to announce that it has been awarded another four-year national contract with Sourcewell for copiers, printers and multifunction devices with related supplies, accessories and services.

Sourcewell Awarded Contract

Sharp has brought value to Sourcewell participating entities for more than 20 years and continues to provide state-of-the-art office equipment and professional displays for today's tech-driven workspace on a nationwide level.

"It is an honor to be recognized and awarded this contract by Sourcewell," said Erica Calise, Director of Marketing, Government and National Accounts, Sharp Imaging and Information Company of America. "We are focused and committed to providing simply smarter solutions that deliver superior productivity, performance and ease-of-use to Sourcewell participating entities. We look forward to continuing to offer our range of innovative technology solutions to Sourcewell participating entities through 2025."

Sourcewell is a member-focused public cooperative of more than 50,000 participating agencies, including local government, educational and non-profit organizations, throughout the United States that operates as a public entity under legislative authority. Sharp's national contract with Sourcewell offers volume pricing on Sharp's complete line of award-winning digital multifunction printers, professional displays, AQUOS BOARD interactive whiteboards and customized software solutions.

"Sourcewell is very excited to continue our longstanding relationship with Sharp. Our participating entities continue to benefit from the unique features and capabilities that Sharp solutions provide and excellent service based on Sharp's exceptional direct branches and national dealer network," said David Duhn, Sourcewell Supplier Development Supervisor. "Together, Sourcewell and Sharp's technology solutions offered on Sourcewell's contract award will have an advancing impact on the effectiveness and efficiencies of government and education agencies across the country. We look forward to working together and growing this contract beyond all expectations."

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Sourcewell's contract enables organizations to reduce the time and expense of the purchasing process, as well as receive national volume pricing, same-day order processing and prompt delivery from Sharp.

To learn more about Sharp's Sourcewell contract and the customer benefits from this award, please visit contract.sharpamericas.com/sourcewell

About Sharp Electronics Corporation

Sharp Electronics Corporation is the U.S. subsidiary of Japan's Sharp Corporation. Sharp is a worldwide developer of one-of-a-kind home appliances, networked multifunctional office solutions, professional displays and smart office technologies. Sharp has been named to Fortune magazine's 2020 World's Most Admired Company List, a ranking of the world's most respected and reputable companies.

About Sharp Imaging and Information Company

Sharp Imaging and Information Company of America, a division of Sharp Electronics Corporation, strives to help businesses achieve Simply Smarter work through technology that is smart and easy to use. The aim of the Simply Smarter Workplace strategy is to accelerate collaboration, improve efficiencies, digitize workflows, and increase information security. Sharp's expansive line of products and solutions include interactive displays such as the award-winning Windows collaboration display and AQUOS BOARD interactive display, commercial displays, security-first laptops, desktop monitors and a full suite of multifunction copier and printer solutions.

For more information on Sharp's business products, visit our website at business.sharpusa.com.

Become a fan of Sharp business products on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram and watch us on YouTube .

Peppercomm for Sharp

Paul Merchan

212.931.6172

PMerchan@Peppercomm.com

Cision

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SOURCE Sharp Electronics Corporation
TOMTOMS ADVANCED MAPPING TECHNOLOGY POWERS THE ALL-NEW NISSAN QASHQAI

TOMTOMS ADVANCED MAPPING TECHNOLOGY POWERS THE ALL-NEW NISSAN QASHQAI

TOMTOMS ADVANCED MAPPING TECHNOLOGY POWERS THE ALL-NEW NISSAN QASHQAI

Nissans new ProPILOT with Navi-link driver assistance uses TomToms enriched ADAS map for safer and more efficient driving



All-New Qashqai becomes latest Nissan model in Europe equipped with over-the-air map updates and connected services including real-time traffic powered by TomTom

AMSTERDAM, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- TomTom (TOM2), the mapmaker and location technology specialist, today announced that drivers of the all-new Nissan Qashqai in Europe will benefit from TomToms advanced mapping technology and connected services. TomToms cutting-edge maps will support the new Nissan Qashqais upgraded ProPILOT with Navi-link driver assistance, as well as the NissanConnect infotainment systems built-in navigation.

The next generation of ProPILOT automates vehicle steering, acceleration and braking within a single lane on highways, helping drivers maintain a safe distance to the car in front. The updated system can adapt the car's speed according to additional external circumstances. When the car crosses to a lower speed limit zone on the highway, the Nissan Qashqai uses its sensors to read road signs and draws information from TomToms advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) map to slow itself to the appropriate speed. The new ProPILOT with Navi-link also uses TomToms enriched map data to adjust the speed for approaching curves or exit ramps that have a tighter radius.

Sensors can only see what is visible. If a sign is missing, a truck is in the way, the weather is bad, or if there is a sharp bend in the road over the next hill, sensors alone are not sufficient to provide adequate feedback to the vehicle, said Antoine Saucier, Managing Director, TomTom Automotive. The TomTom ADAS Map supports more comfortable, efficient and safer driving, by providing high quality information on gradient, lanes, curvature and speed limits to advanced systems like Nissans new ProPILOT with Navi-link.

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TomTom will provide the new Qashqais NissanConnect infotainment system with an innovative over-the-air map update solution. This technology combines the reliability of TomToms in-car map data with the freshness of a smartphone app, by automatically updating relevant parts of the map. This ensures that the map is always up to date, with no interaction required from the driver. It detects when updates are available, and downloads and installs them in the background, via the various user-friendly methods (USB, Wi-Fi hotspot, etc.).

The new Qashqai is equipped with an array of exciting new features normally only found on models in premium segments, said Marco Fioravanti, Vice President, Product Planning, Nissan Europe. "TomToms innovative and up-to-date mapping technologies provide seamless location support for some of these new features, offering new Qashqai drivers an even more convenient, smooth and secure driving experience.

As with the latest Nissan LEAF, Navara and JUKE, all-new Qashqai drivers will also enjoy TomToms maps for navigation as well as its array of connected services. The NissanConnect display screen, the new high-definition, fully electronic 12.3 inch TFT multi-information screen and the new 10.8-inch head-up display will give drivers easy access to industry-leading real-time traffic information, speed cameras alerts, fuel prices and weather information and online search.

Wi-Fi is a registered trademark of Wi-Fi Alliance

About TomTom:

At TomTom were mapmakers, providing location technology for drivers, carmakers, enterprises and developers.

Our highly accurate maps, navigation software, real-time traffic information and APIs enable smart mobility on a global scale, making the roads safer, the drive easier and the air cleaner.

Headquartered in Amsterdam with offices in 30 countries, TomToms technologies are trusted by hundreds of millions of drivers, businesses and governments worldwide.

www.tomtom.com

For further Information:

Public Relations:

tomtom.pr@tomtom.com

Investor Relations:

ir@tomtom.com

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/ff669005-292d-40ab-9da8-555ac1393b67

The photo is also available via AP PhotoExpress.




FROM STAFF REPORTS

The current version of the Constitution of Virginiathe seventh in the commonwealths historybecame effective half a century ago, at noon on July 1, 1971. It replaced a constitution that had been in place since 1902.

The new document marked an important step forward for all Virginians, according to a news release from the Library of Virginia.

We have a special opportunity during this anniversary year not only to celebrate the advances that the Constitution of 1971 embodies, but also to ask ourselves whether further adjustments might be necessary to meet the challenges of the 21st century, stated the news release.

The library is inviting the public to join the conversation about how the constitution can help Virginians address the challenges of the 21st century.

To celebrate the documents 50th anniversary, the library will host several events: a three-day exhibit featuring Virginias four constitutions, a panel discussion and a workshop for educators.
Vaccines will be available on a first-come, first-served basis. The clinics will be held rain or shine.

In addition, each health department plans to offer weekly immunization clinics for children in July. The schedule hasnt been set for August yet, Cass said, but probably will follow the same rotation.

Full-day immunization clinics will be held on Mondays in Spotsylvania, Tuesdays in Fredericksburg and Wednesdays in Stafford. Additional full-day clinics are scheduled on Tuesdays in King George and Wednesdays in Caroline.

A report published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention earlier this month said there was a substantial decrease in immunizations for children and adolescents from March to May 2020. Even though doses increased later that summer and fall, there wasnt enough to achieve catch-up coverage, the report stated, placing U.S. children and adolescents at risk for vaccine-preventable diseases.

The study group encouraged health care providers to check the records of their pediatric and teenage patients and contact those who are behind schedule.
The Montpelier board of directors and the MDC have shown critical leadership in creating equitable governance of a site that is not only the ancestral home of James Madison, but also of hundreds of people enslaved by the Madison family, Edmondson said. The National Trust strongly supported this proposal, and we worked with both parties over the past year to achieve this new level of partnership. We commend both The Montpelier Foundation and the Montpelier Descendants Committee for working together to achieve this breakthrough.

The vote on bylaws came during the week of Juneteenth, and followed a May 27 resolution saying the foundation board affirms its commitment to collaborate with the Montpelier Descendants Committee to achieve structural parity with descendants at all levels of the organization.

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Montpelier President and CEO Roy Young praised the difficult yet important work by the board and committee.

The May 27 resolution and bylaws vote were crucial steps forward and a substantive commitment to our partnership, Young said. [W]e look forward to future conversations with MDC to find ways to increase our collaborations and contribute to our Whole Truth History as a site of former enslavement, a presidential plantation, and the place the United States Constitution was conceived.
Northeast Community College in West Point will have a nurse aide class in West Point beginning in July.

The class (NURA 1110/21SU & CRN #30886) will take place July 13-Aug. 11, in the Northeast Extended Campus, 202 Anna Stalp Ave., Room 207, in West Point. The class will take place in a hybrid format. Lectures will be offered virtually online. Clinicals will meet from 4:30-9:30 p.m. Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Kara Chase is the instructor.

This course is designed to meet the Nebraska Health and Human Services System training requirements for nurse aide certification and employment in long-term care facilities. It combines classroom lecture and laboratory application for the development of basic skills needed to provide safe, effective, and caring services to the elderly or chronically ill patient of any age, in a long-term care facility.

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Upon completion, students are eligible to take the state written and practical skills exam. After successfully passing the examination and completing the application procedure, their name will be placed on the basic nurse aide registry at the Nebraska Health and Human Services Regulation and Licensure, Credentialing Division.
Special Fremont City Council meeting, 6 p.m., Fremont Municipal Building, 400 E. Military Ave. The meeting is open to the public also will be available via audio/video conference. The link and instructions are provided on the agenda that is posted in the agenda section of the citys website at www.fremontne.gov. The regular council meeting will follow.
"They could either deliver them or bring them on Sundays; They could bring them in during the business hours during the week or they could order them on Amazon and have them delivered directly to us through," she said. "So we had them coming in that way as well."

Webb said members of Good Shepherd were able to bring diapers in to the church or donate money, which would then be used to buy diapers for the drive.

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"They were so willing to give, and especially that last week, we had a push," she said. "We had donations given, money donations that we were able to go out and purchase diapers then."

On Friday, the almost 30,000 diapers were delivered to Lutheran Family Services.

"We're just super thankful," Program Manager Michelle Padilla said. "Since over the last year with COVID and the flood back-to-back on that, we just depleted a lot of our materials that we give out or have people earn in our incentives program."

With the annual event, Padilla said Lutheran Family Services is always appreciative of the churches' donation, which she called "crazy" this year.

"I wasn't sure that they'd be able to do it this year because of everything that's been happening," she said. "But they did, they pulled it off and they did it well."
American independence is due in part to African Americans

Like the U.S. Constitution, the final version of the Declaration never uses the word slave. But African Americans loomed large in the first draft, written by Thomas Jefferson.

In that early draft, Jeffersons single biggest grievance was that the mother country had first foisted enslaved Africans on white Americans and then attempted to incite them against their patriot owners. In an objection to which he gave 168 words  three times as many as any other complaint  Jefferson said George III had encouraged enslaved Americans to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them.

Numerous other white Southerners joined Jefferson in venting their rage at the mother country for, as one put it, pointing a dagger to their Throats, thru the hands of their Slaves.
Status: Rough working notes  me thinking aloud. Speculative, and likely contains errors, misconceptions, and omissions; thoughtful, informed comments are welcome. Intended for a general scientifically curious audience, not requiring much detailed specialist background.

It is sometimes said physics is nearing its end  closing in on a theory of everything  because we understand so much about the basic rules governing the particles and forces in our universe. This is like asserting that computer science ended in 1936 with the Turing machine, computing's theory of everything. Of course, that's not what happened. Rather, the invention of the Turing machine opened a new creative frontier, enabling an extraordinary profusion of new ideas.

Science is going through a similarly exciting transition today. Until recently humanity worked with matter much like we did computing prior to Turing, using a patchwork of bespoke tools and ideas. But now we understand the fundamentals of how matter works: we have a fantastic theory describing the elementary particles and forces, and we're getting increasingly good at manipulating matter. And so we're beginning to ask: what can we build, in principle? Not just in a practical sense, with the tools that happen to be at hand, but in a fundamental sense: what is allowed by the laws of physics?

Of course, this implies a whole world of questions: What qualities are possible in matter? Can we do for matter what Turing and company did for computation? Can we invent new high-level abstractions and design principles for matter, similar to what people like John McCarthy and Alan Kay did for computing? What design space is opened up when we control matter as well as we control pixels on a computer screen? What beautiful new design ideas are possible?

Most of the matter in our everyday experience is constructed from just three particles: protons, electrons, and neutrons. These can be used to build an astonishing array of different things: diamonds; human beings; galaxies; black holes; iPhones. With sufficiently good tweezers and a lot of patience you could reassemble a human being into a bicycle of comparable mass; and vice versa.

So, what else can we build from protons, electrons, and neutrons** Martin Rees has pointed out that we humans tend to engage in particle chauvinism, often assuming that what we think of as ordinary matter is all there is to matter. Indeed, I've engaged in just such a chauvinism in asserting above that we understand the fundamentals of how matter works. However, based on what we currently suspect about dark matter, so-called ordinary matter may actually be rather unusual, the exception rather than the rule. Nonetheless, in the absence of a good understanding of dark matter I shall continue to engage in particle chauvinism, and restrict myself in this essay to ordinary matter. Indeed, I shall go further and restrict the discussion (mostly) to protons, electrons, and neutrons. ?

It seems likely we can build things that would astonish us, things going radically beyond anything we can even conceive of today, much less build.

Consider that ten million years ago conscious minds were absent from the earth, except in quite primitive forms. Might there be forms of matter possible which are as different from anything familiar to us today as consciousness is from a rock** Some people don't believe consciousness is a property of matter. There are limited senses in which that is reasonable: certainly, matter is a substrate, and aspects of consciousness may be independent of the details of that substrate, in a matter analogous to the way an algorithm has an existence independent of the computer it runs on. Nonetheless, I don't think there is much serious reason to doubt that consciousness is a property that emerges out of ordinary matter.?

What might those forms be?

One way to explore the what can we build? question is to look at different maps of matter. Probably the best known such map is the periodic table, showing all the different types of atoms which make up most of the matter in the world around us. But there's many other maps of matter. There's phylogenetic trees, which show the relationship between different types of life. There's maps of the different types of stars, of the different phases of matter, of all the proteins we've found. And many more.

In these notes we'll go on safari through several such maps of matter. We won't go too deep into any individual map  everything I discuss could be (often has been) the subject of PhD theses, or even an entire field. Instead, we're going to look rapidly at several different ways we explore matter. The purpose is to discern some general principles that can help us explore in generative ways.

When I began writing these notes I had a whimsical question in mind: is there a single, unified map we can use to understand all of matter? I hoped the attempt to make such a unified map would give me some insight into the question what can we build, in principle? And so, as I wrote the notes I toyed with multiple ways of making a unified map. Eventually, I realized matter is too rich and variegated for a really good unified map to be possible. What's more, to do even a passing job these notes would need to be a hundred times longer! Nonetheless, I found the attempt stimulating. And so at the end of the notes I show a single diagram which encapsulates many of the ideas for exploration developed in these notes. It's grossly incomplete, but hopefully interesting and generative.

The strangest places in the periodic table

The physicist John Wheeler once stated a useful principle to guide research: In any field, find the strangest thing and explore it. One great thing about maps is that they suggest strange things. This is true even when the map itself is familiar, like the periodic table. We can ask ourselves: where are the strangest places in the periodic table? And then challenge ourselves to explore those places.

One candidate for the strangest place in the periodic table is the most recently discovered chemical element, oganesson. It's the heaviest known element, with an atomic number of 118. It's highlighted below with a red circle in the bottom right** Image adapted from images due to users Double sharp and Offnfopt on Wikipedia.:

Oganesson was discovered in 2002 by a team of scientists headed by Yuri Oganessian, after being predicted in 1895 by Hans Peter Jrgen Julius Thomsen. It was made by using calcium ions to bombard a target of californium atoms, at very high speed. Only a handful of oganesson atoms have ever been observed  around a half dozen, with several of those observations regarded as unconfirmed.

We don't know much for sure about oganesson  the handful of atoms observed decayed too quickly to get much idea of what oganesson does. Despite this, intensive theoretical studies have been done, and some surprising predictions made. Oganesson is in the final column of the periodic table, and these are of course the noble gases, highly non-reactive gases like helium and argon.

At least, that's the story we learn in high school chemistry. In fact, oganesson confounds these expectations. Theoretical calculations suggest oganesson is likely to be a solid semiconductor at standard temperature and pressure, not a gas. Furthermore, it may be significantly reactive, unlike the other noble gases** Clinton S. Nash, Atomic and Molecular Properties of Elements 112, 114, and 118 (2005). Note that the other noble gases are at least somewhat reactive (disodium helide, anyone?)  Wikipedia's discussion is a good place to start  but oganesson is predicted to be significantly moreso..

There is a standard argument for why noble gases are non-reactive gases  the gist is to understand the electron orbital shell structure, the number of electrons in each, and why full shells are particularly stable and lead to non-reactive elements. What you learn from oganesson is that some of the principles underlying that argument can't be quite right. I must admit, I haven't worked through the details of how the standard argument breaks down (beyond quickly skimming the above paper); nonetheless, it's extremely useful to have a little flag in my head saying that the standard argument about electron orbitals and noble gases actually breaks down for some elements. That argument is often presented as being based on universal principles, but those principles are not, in fact, universal.

And so one benefit of exploring oganesson is that it improves other parts of your understanding of matter, even if only by informing you of limits to that understanding. And it pokes at you: the periodic table has the shape it does because of those underlying principles. If those principles break down, should the shape of the periodic table be changed? And that in turn suggests a different question, one about human psychology and understanding rather than the principles of nature: what are the best alternative ways of visualizing the elements? Are there better ways than the standard periodic table? Just for fun, let me show you a snapshot from Wikipedia's page of alternative periodic tables:

I have a biologist friend, Laura Deming, who has pointed out what she calls the biological flywheel** Laura Deming, Sequencing is the new microscope (2018). Incidentally, searching on biology flywheel also yields this stimulating essay on a different kind of flywheel, in synthetic biology.. The flywheel works like this. As we get better at biology, we discover more and more biological processes  all sorts of amazing proteins and other molecular nanomachines** Animation of a kinesin protein walking along a microtubule. By Wikipedia user Jzp706 :

When we discover such a machine, and start to understand the principles it operates by, that in turn becomes part of humanity's toolkit for making more discoveries. It's a kind of bootstrap or flywheel generating more progress. Here's some examples, quoted in Deming's essay:

If you look at the most important techniques in biology, in the second half of the 1900s, theyre all driven by tools discovered in biology itself. Biologists arent just finding new things - theyre making their new tools from biological reagents. PCR (everything that drives PCR, apart from the heater/cooler which is 1600s thermodynamics, is either itself DNA or something made by DNA), DNA sequencing (sequencing by synthesis - we use cameras/electrical detection/CMOS chips as the output, but the hijacking the way the cell makes DNA proteins remains at the heart of the technique), cloning (we cut up DNA with proteins made from DNA, stick the DNA into bacteria so living organisms can make more copies of it for us), gene editing (CRISPR is obviously made from DNA and with RNA attached), ELISA (need the ability to detect fluorescence - optics - and process the signal, but antibodies lie at the heart of this principle), affinity chromatography (liquid chromatography arguably uses physical principles like steric hindrance, or charge, but those can be traced back to the 1800s - antibodies and cloning have revolutionized this technique), FACS uses the same charge principles that western blots do, but with the addition of antibodies.  If youd asked a physicist in the early 1900s how wed figure out the complicated, tangled structure of DNA, hed probably say to look at it with a microscope. Sequencing has become the new microscope. Its easier for us to cross-link, fragment and sequence a full genome to figure out its 3-dimensional structure than it is for us to figure that out by looking at it head-on. We used to rely on photons and electrons bouncing off of biological sample to tell us what was going on down there. Now were asking biology directly - and often the information we get back comes through a natural biological reagent like DNA. Which we then sequence using motors made from the DNA itself!

Many recent examples of this biological flywheel may be seen in the development of the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines for Covid-19. Here's one: historically, vaccines have typically been developed by delivering inactivated fragments of the virus they protect against. The human immune system learns to recognize and destroy those fragments, and this provides protection against the underlying disease. But the messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines for SAR-CoV-2 use a different approach. Instead of delivering inactivated virus, they simply deliver mRNA inside the body, and then rely on human cells to use the mRNA in vivo to manufacture the spike protein characteristic of the disease. In some sense, they're using the machinery inside the human body to eliminate one complex step in the vaccine manufacturing process. This greatly simplifies the design and manufacture of the vaccine.

There are similar flywheels all through science, and they drive a lot of discovery. One virtue of exploring the periodic table is that it's another example of such a flywheel. As you explore you unlock new substances and new understanding: the discovery of uranium helped lead to plutonium; that helped lead to curium; that helped lead to californium; which in turn played a role in the discovery of oganesson. It's a flywheel of exploration and discovery:

It's perhaps a little too tongue-in-cheek, but I think there's at least a grain of truth in saying much of science has really been about discovering these flywheels, a kind of flywheel flyweel.

Extending and escaping our maps

Let's come back to the map we were exploring, the periodic table. Another good question to ask is: can we extend the map? And going even further: is there stuff that could never be on the map, even if we extend it?

I'm going to mostly focus on the second question. The first question is, of course, a great question. There's many people working on making new elements, and lots of exciting questions. What are the ultimate limits of the periodic table? Is there some upper limit on the atomic number? There's disagreement on this question: according to Wikipedia, there are proposals that it ends at element number 128, 137, 146, 155, and 173.

It perhaps sounds strange that we have such a disagreement. In fact, it's in part a reflection of some flexibility in what we mean by atom. In some sense it's important that an atom be a reasonably stable, bound system. But stability is a matter of degree: even relatively common elements like uranium are unstable, decaying into other substances, like thorium. Indeed, if proton decay occurs, then in some sense all atoms are unstable.

And so the disagreement about the possible number of elements depends in part on how stable you require a system to be to qualify as an atom. I wouldn't be surprised if in the far future we can cram far more than 173 protons together into a nucleus-sized region; the only in-principle limit I can think of is fermi pressure. But such pseudo-atoms won't ordinarily be very stable (though perhaps we can find clever ways of stabilizing them)!

What about things which aren't on our map (the periodic table) at all? Can we get entirely off the periodic table?

Of course, we can. Indeed, depending on whereabouts you are in the universe, atoms may actually be a relatively uncommon (or unstable) form of matter.

For example, the sun is often described as being made up of hydrogen and helium, with trace amounts of other elements. That's true near the surface of the sun, which is at a temperature of about 6,000 Kelvin. But as you go inward the sun gets far hotter, eventually rising to millions Kelvin. That increasing temperature rips the hydrogen molecules and even the hydrogen atoms apart  they ionize, meaning that the single electron is ripped apart from the single proton. And so inside the core of the sun it's no longer really hydrogen atoms, but rather a giant sea of protons and electrons, largely unbound to one another (together with a lot of ionized helium, as well). In the core it doesn't make sense to say the sun is made of atoms.

Of course, we can get far more exotic. Inside a neutron star for the most part you won't find any atoms (though there are some ionized atoms near the surface). A neutron star is formed from the collapse of a supermassive star  so massive that the gravitational forces crush the electrons into the nucleus, where they merge with the protons to form neutrons. And you end up with an incredibly dense sea of neutrons and other, potentially more exotic, particles** Neutron stars may not just contain a sea of neutrons, but also other even stranger states of matter. A stimulating discussion may be found here.  a liter of neutron star has a mass of on the order of a hundred billion tonnes. If you somehow lived inside a neutron star you wouldn't think in terms of atoms at all. Rather, you'd need patterns made out of neutrons. I wonder if it's possible to do that in a stable way** The astronomer Frank Drake apparently proposed a nuclear chemistry in a 1973 interview (which I haven't read, and wasn't able to find online). The idea was later fleshed out into the science fiction novel Dragon's Egg by Robert Forward.? Less speculatively, we can take away that it's actually a provincial point of view, a kind of atomic chauvinism, to regard atoms as typical, the fundamental constituents of matter as so many of us are taught when growing up.

The flywheel of design imagination

So far, we've been concentrating mostly on types of matter found in nature, like neutron stars. But we can turn this around, and ask questions about design: what kinds of matter configuration can we stabilize in principle? In other words, instead of looking for naturally occurring substances, let's ask the question: what types of matter do the laws of physics enable us to design? In this designer's viewpoint you ask how you can engineer reality to fit what you want. And the emphasis isn't so much on the engineer as on what you want. Because it turns out that figuring out what is possible requires immense imagination.

This design point of view is very different than the naturalistic view of matter, where you continually explore what occurs naturally, with relatively minimal interventions. And this designerly point of view leads to very deep questions:

What patterns of matter can we stabilize, in principle? What patterns cannot be stabilized, by any means?

What patterns of matter and fields are possible, in principle? How can we create them? What patterns are impossible?

Are there fundamental new design abstractions we can invent for matter? In some sense the notion of an atom (or the plasmas inside the sun, or the ribosome inside our cells) are design abstractions supplied by nature. Can we find new ones ourselves?

Even a very simple question like What pattern of static electromagnetic fields can we create? is actually a pretty great question. And then: can we build a universal device to create that field? And we can ask analogous questions for other types of matter and fields.

Many non-designers think of design as relatively unimportant. Once on Twitter an experienced programmer and manager made the following comment about design in the software realm:

Honestly, I have a hard time taking the idea of a Designer as a whole job seriously. Like you lay out buttons and text? That's it?

Now, what does it mean that (visual) design is lay[ing] out buttons and text? It seems a little like claiming that Shakespeare was merely laying out letters of the alphabet in a particularly well-chosen fashion. There is some sense in which that's true. But the point of design, as with Shakespeare and great writing, is to discover powerful higher-order ideas. Those ideas are then reflected in the layout. In fact, the very best designers invent amazing new abstractions. This is true in both the physical world and the software world. Consider Alan Kay** In A Conversation with Alan Kay (2004). on the importance of powerful design ideas in physical construction:

If you look at software today, through the lens of the history of engineering, its certainly engineering of a sortbut its the kind of engineering that people without the concept of the arch did. Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves. I would compare the Smalltalk stuff that we did in the 70s with something like a Gothic cathedral. We had two ideas, really. One of them we got from Lisp: late binding. The other one was the idea of objects. Those gave us something a little bit like the arch, so we were able to make complex, seemingly large structures out of very little material, but I wouldnt put us much past the engineering of 1,000 years ago.

Design at its best is all about the discovery of such powerful ideas, like the arch, late binding, software objects, and so on. I greatly admire Bret Victor's work, and one of the thing Victor does better than almost anybody is create new visual abstractions, abstractions made from pixels. To what extent can we do the same for matter?

Of course, at the level of everyday objects, this is a commonplace activity  obviously, we've had inventors and designers for millenia! But starting from a fundamental level  asking what design possibilities are latent within the laws of physics  is a much more recent development.

Personally, I first began to understand this with Alexei Kitaev's late 1990s invention of topological quantum computing** Alexei Y. Kitaev, Fault-tolerant quantum computation by anyons (1997).. Ordinarily, a quantum computer is a terribly fragile device  the quantum information can be destroyed by a single stray photon or atom. You need to use elaborate ways of stabilizing the quantum information, using ideas like quantum error-correcting codes.

Kitaev had a different idea. Speaking very roughly, he asked whether there might be a stable phase of matter that wanted to quantum compute. That is, in something like the same way that liquids like to flow, superconductors like to superconduct, Kitaev's phase of matter would be a material that naturally liked to quantum compute.

Simply posing the question  asking whether such a phase of matter is possible  is already an audacious act of imagination. But then Kitaev used a bundle of very clever ideas to design a relatively natural and plausible system which would form a phase of matter that naturally quantum computed.

Of course, this design-oriented approach isn't solely due to Kitaev. It can be seen in many other examples. You can see it in Frank Wilczek's invention of anyons and of time crystals, for instance** See, for example, Frank Wilczek, Quantum Mechanics of Fractional-Spin Particles (1982), and Frank Wilczaek, Quantum Time Crystals (2012).. And in the creation of negative index of refraction materials. And in many other places. Kitaev's idea is shockingly audacious and technically brilliant, but it's also merely part of a broader shift to a design point of view in the foundations of physics. Outside physics, this design point of view is of course already present in many parts of science  the synthesis of drugs by chemists is one example. And, of course, it's at the heart of much engineering and invention. What I'm emphasizing here, though, is the shift in viewpoint from design within some extant realm of available materials and tools, to design which takes as its starting point the fundamental laws of the universe.

When a certain type of person hears this they respond you're talking about Phil Anderson's concept of emergence** P. W. Anderson, More is Different (1972).! They're not wrong, exactly, but it's a shallow response which misses much of the point. I'm not (for the most part) talking about the kind of emergence that has been studied in the past in physics. That still adopts a naturalistic point of view, trying to understand the objects extant in the universe, or which can be made using relatively obvious interventions (e.g., discovering superfluids by lowering temperature).

Of course that does indeed turn out to be a good source of emergent phenomena, and has been the traditional approach of condensed matter physics and (much of) chemistry  things like superfluidity, superconductors, and many other striking emergent phenomena have been discovered that way. But the shift to a design point of view goes much further, to a place very different from how we have historically approached physics. It asserts that there are a large number of striking emergent phenomena latent inside fundamental laws, and that many of those cannot be discovered merely by exploring the natural world, and asking what materials there are; nor through obvious interventions like lowering the temperature. Rather, they require tremendous design imagination to invent. Inventing topological quantum computing was one such example: although certainly inspired by past naturalistic discoveries, like the fractional quantum Hall effect, it also had an enormous imaginative component.

Put another way: the conventional use of emergent has a rather passive flavour. What I'm talking about is a much more active imaginative stance, the kind of stance taken by people like Bret Victor or Satoshi or Picasso.

Over the long term, I believe there's a fair chance physics will end up principally as a design science: really about developing new levels of abstraction in the physical world. People like Kitaev, Wilczek, and even John von Neumann (with his work on cellular automata, universal constructors, and self-replication) will all look to have been working on taking first steps up from the fundamental laws. They're understanding what qualities it is possible to build into matter, understanding if there are composable abstractions, and so on.

This shift of point of view changes our relationship to matter to what Herb Simon called the sciences of the artificial. I believe that retrospectively it'll be viewed as one of the most important shifts in science in the 20th and 21st centuries.

As I write this, I realize I'm struggling to clearly articulate what I believe design is really all about, or why it matters. At the cost of some repetition, let me take another shot.

Part of the trouble is that the word design is often used to mean essentially making things pretty or making things useable.

Those are valuable endeavours, but they're not what I mean.

At its deepest, design is about inventing entirely new types of objects and of actions. It's the type of thinking that results in someone conjuring up the rules of chess; or inventing topological quantum computing; or in developing the polymerase chain reaction. In each case we take the rules of reality and find latent within them some other very different set of rules, a set of rules for a new reality, one that generates beautiful patterns of its own.

I first got seriously interested in design after seeing Bret Victor's work in 2012, and thinking I want to do that. But also, at the same time: what is he actually doing? I then spent many years trying to understand how designers invent powerful new objects and actions and abstractions** A partial summary of my thinking may be found in Thought as a Technology (2016).. It was far more difficult than I anticipated; I now believe it's one of the hardest and deepest things human beings do, and currently only a handful of people in the world are really good at it. Furthermore, it's a skill almost entirely different from the skills scientists usually learn** There is, however, some considerable overlap with mathematics, especially the art of finding fundamental new mathematical definitions..

Are powerful design ideas invented or created? Certainly, they're not arbitrary. They're much more like mathematics: we have a set of basic rules, and can then discover powerful patterns latent in those rules. In that sense we may call it Plato's design flywheel, or the flywheel of design imagination** I realize I'm leaning heavily on the flywheel analogy in these notes  flywheels here, flywheels there, flywheels everywhere. It's perhaps a geographic hazard  I live in Silicon Valley, where many entrepreneurs and investors are obsessed with finding flywheels to generate growth. Still, the discovery flywheel is a genuine pattern in science, and a useful pattern to be on the lookout for. But it's still just one heuristic for how discovery works, and there are many other powerful heuristics.: we start with the basic laws governing matter, and explore around them, eventually developing powerful new principles. Those, in turns, open up new worlds to explore. And, in my opinion, it's quite likely that will happen in an open-ended fashion, an endless frontier of new worlds.

Phylogenetic trees and the shape of biology

Let's take a look at a very different type of map, the phylogenetic tree or phylogeny. You've perhaps seen phylogenies in relation to the coronaviruses, including the SARS-CoV-2 virus which caused the Covid-19 pandemic** Image from Li, Liu, Yang et al, Phylogenetic supertree reveals detailed evolution of SARS-CoV-2 (2020) (license):

Such trees show the evolution of a genome over time** I'm speaking loosely here. As I understand it, the nodes in phylogenies are typically at the species (or higher) level  they don't usually represent single genomes.. In some sense, all life on earth can likely be put into a single giant phylogenetic tree, going all the way back to the beginning of life** There are of course some caveats that may complicate the tree structure, e.g.: (1) if life originated multiple times on earth; and (2) horizontal gene transfer (and related ideas like endosymbiosis).. It'd be a fun project to visualize as much of that as possible  you can imagine an online viewer that would let you zoom in and out, view at multiple levels of abstraction, and extend and revise the phylogeny, as appropriate.

Phylogenies are useful for many reasons. In the context of SARS-CoV-2, epidemiologists can use them to keep track of the way the virus is changing and spreading. For instance, an article by da Silva Filipe et al** Ana da Silva Filip et al, Genomic epidemiology reveals multiple introductions of SARS-CoV-2 from mainland Europe into Scotland (2020). used a combination of phylogeny and epidemiology to estimate that SARS-CoV-2 was introduced to Scotland on at least 283 separate occasions, during February and March 2020, and that the introductions came from mainland Europe (not China). In a sense, phylogeny is a kind of macroscope, letting you see the whole Covid pandemic** The term macroscope comes from a remarkable book by Joel de Rosnay, The Macroscope (1979).. That macroscope motivates you to ask questions about how the structure of the virus (and of the pandemic) has changed; that, in turn, helps suggest and perhaps answer other important questions: are vaccines as efficacious against all variants; do we need additional booster shots; and so on. Phylogenies are a way of seeing.

Phylogenetic trees have been used to do even more interesting things. Here's one of the most famous phylogenies ever:

It's out of a famous 1990 paper by Woese, Kandler, and Wheelis** Carl R. Woese, Otto Kandler, and Mark L. Wheelis, Towards a natural system of organisms: Proposal for the domains Archaea, Bacteria, and Eucarya (1990). That paper built on earlier work by Woese and collaborators, e.g., Carl R. Woese and George E. Fox, Phylogenetic structure of the prokaryotic domain: The primary kingdoms (1977).. Prior to that paper, biologists divided life into two broad classes: the prokaryotes and the eukaryotes. Historically, the eukaryotes have usually been defined as organisms whose germ line cells have a nucleus, while prokaryotes do not. What Woese et al did was point out that a better classification is possible. They went down to the molecular level, and used molecular evidence to make inferences about the phylogeny. The quote below captures the flavour of their argument  you don't need to understand all the details, the point is that they're using molecular reasoning to make broad inferences about the structure of the tree of life.

[Note that what Woese et al call eubacteria we today call bacteria, and what they call archaebacteria we today call archaea. Indeed, today's terminology is suggested later in this paper.] It is only on the molecular level that we see the living world divide into three distinct primary groups. For every well-characterized molecular system there exists a characteristic eubacterial, archaebacterial, and eukaryotic version, which all members of each group share. Ribosomal RNAs provide an excellent example (in part because they have been so thoroughly studied). One structural feature in the small subunit rRNA by which the eubacteria can be distinguished from archaebacteria and eukaryotes is the hairpin loop lying between positions 500 and 545 (18), which has a side bulge protruding from the stalk of the structure. In all eubacterial cases (over 400 known) the side bulge comprises six nucleotides (of a characteristic composition), and it protrudes from the "upstream" strand of the stalk between the fifth and sixth base pair. In both archaebacteria and eukaryotes, however, the corresponding bulge comprises seven nucleotides (of a different characteristic composition), and it protrudes from the stalk between the sixth and seventh pair (18, 19). The small subunit rRNA of eukaryotes, on the other hand, is readily identified by the region between positions 585 and 655 (E. coli numbering), because both prokaryotic groups exhibit a common characteristic structure here that is never seen in eukaryotes (18, 19). Finally, archaebacterial 16S rRNAs are readily identified by the unique structure they show in the region between positions 180 and 197 or that between positions 405 and 498 (18, 19). Many other examples of group-invariant rRNA characteristics exist; see refs. 2, 18, and 19.

It's shocking we missed archaea for so long. It's almost embarrassing: we thought the bacteria and archaea were largely of the same kind, when it turns out they're shockingly different from one another. It's a little like being an explorer and mistakenly thinking the Americas and East Asia are the same place. If you thought that it would cause you to miss an awful lot, to put it mildly.

Woese et al put it this way:

As the molecular and cytological understanding of cells deepened at a very rapid pace, beginning in the 1950s, it became feasible in principle to define prokaryotes positively, on the basis of shared molecular characteristics. However, since molecular biologists elected to work largely in a few model systems, which were taken to be representative, the comparative perspective necessary to do this successfully was lacking. By default, Escherichia coli came to be considered typical of prokaryotes, without recognition of the underlying faulty assumption that prokaryotes are monophyletic. This presumption was then formalized in the proposal that there be two primary kingdoms: Procaryotae and Eucaryotae (15, 16). It took the discovery of the archaebacteria to reveal the enormity of this mistake.

Implicit in all this is the claim that phylogeny is a better approach to classification (or definition) than structure or morphology. In what sense is this true? After all, classification on the basis of structure makes sense: whether a cell has a nucleus or not is a very important and interesting question. But the phylogenetic question is more fundamental. For one thing, if you know which part of the phylogenetic tree you're on you can answer the question about the nucleus. Structure is a consequence of phylogeny, not the other way around. And so this approach to definition and classification is deeper than the old prokaryote / eukaryote distinction.

Phylogeny also helps explain in what way biology is different from ordinary matter. In some sense it's strange that we treat biology as a subject apart, considering biological systems separately as a special form of matter. Of course, if we could put carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen etc atoms together in just the right way, we could just make a lifeform. It doesn't in principle matter whether this is done through reproduction or by using (say) a kind of super-STM to painstakingly assemble the atoms.

The answer lies in phylogeny and the tree of life. If you were to draw the analogue of a phylogenetic tree for a rock, it would be uninteresting, a single node, with no ancestors:

It's the selection (and variational) pressures acting on the phylogenetic tree which separate biology from other matter. You can view the complete phylogenetic tree  the tree of life  as a way of boldly exploring the space of matter. It's not the complete space, but it is a very large and interesting space** Indeed, there's some sense in which whatever human beings ultimately make is a product of the phylogeny, although it would be a stretch to say it should appear on the tree of life. Insofar as human beings obtain universal control over matter, the tree of life may be (loosely) regarded as exploring the entire space of matter.. Do this kind of exploration for a few billion years and you can explore a lot!

This is also the origin of the biological flywheel: evolution has spent a few billion years creating a giant tree of life. We now get to reverse engineer this enormous reservoir of interesting devices that biology has created, effectively using the tree of life as a source of ideas and principles for understanding matter. One way of viewing biology is that it's the search for interesting structure inside the phylogeny  it's like discovering a gold mine of extant great ideas about matter.

Analogously, imagine that instead of inventing computers ourselves we first learned about computers through contact with an alien civilization. Perhaps the alien civilization is extinct, but in their archaeological ruins we found the equivalent of a trillion trillion lines of code in their programming languages (or whatever they use to control their computers). Computer science for us would become an archaeological study, an exploratory dig through the alien code, understanding small ideas at first, and then gradually pulling deeper ideas out.

Indeed, modern computer programming is beginning to have this flavour: programmers today are in contact with a gigantic body of open code through services such as GitHub, StackOverflow, and so on, not to mention any private codebase they may have access to. The science fiction author Vernor Vinge has written of a far future where programmer-archeologist is the most important occupation, the ability to extract meaning from the vast corpus of extant code:

Programming went back to the beginning of time So behind all the top-level interfaces was layer under layer of support. Some of that software had been designed for wildly different situations. Every so often, the inconsistencies caused fatal accidents. Despite the romance of spaceflight, the most common accidents were simply caused by ancient, misused programs finally getting their revenge The word for all this is mature programming environment. Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more significant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy

Returning to phylogeny, the Woesian revolution is merely part of an ongoing story. Here's a depiction of the tree of life from 2015** Laura Hug et al, A new view of the tree of life (2016). Via Noah Olsman.. It's based on genomic sequences from roughly 30,000 different species  itself a tiny fraction of all the species on earth.

One striking thing about this diagram: it doesn't show three domains of life, but rather two, with the archaea and eukaryotes together. It's an ongoing problem to decide whether to use two domains (the eocyte hypothesis) or the Woesian three-domain system. The classification above lends support to the eocyte hypothesis, although the authors caution:

The two-domain Eocyte tree and the three-domain tree are competing hypotheses for the origin of Eukarya; further analyses to resolve these and other deep relationships will be strengthened with the availability of genomes for a greater diversity of organisms.

One beautiful thing in this phylogeny: humanity barely shows up. We humans are, in fact, inside the opisthokont clade, itself a single point in the bottom right. That single point includes not just human beings, but all animals, and even the fungi (which are more closely related to animals than they are to plants). In the tree of life, the 100 or so billion human beings who have ever lived are barely visible. Carl Sagan has spoken movingly of the pale blue dot, emphasizing the smallness of earth and humanity when viewed in cosmological terms, a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. We humans are, equally well, a pale point of genetic possibility, a tiny leaf on the immense tree of life.

In what sense is any of this fundamental?

I began these notes by talking about the supposed end of physics, and making a case that we're initiating a new phase in physics (and science), one based on an ongoing discovery of qualitatively new possibilities latent in matter, based on the fundamental laws of physics.

The obvious skeptical response to that claim is to say that while this is all certainly interesting, it isn't as fundamental as the search for the basic particles and forces.

I used to believe that. But over time I've gradually come to think it's wrong. The reasons are somewhat complicated, and not reducible to any single example. Rather, it was exposure to a whole variety of different examples.

One example is public key cryptography, a beautiful set of cryptographic ideas discovered in the 1960s and 1970s. These ideas may be viewed as in some sense merely applications of Turing's basic theory of computing. But the ideas are so self-contained and elegant that it seems to me rather a fundamental new field. Yes, it's grounded in Turing's theory, but it has its own internal logic.

In the TV shows Dr. Who, the central character, the Doctor, lives and works inside the TARDIS, a device which superficially resembles a 1960s London police box** Due to user zir (zir.com) on Wikipedia.:

In fact, the TARDIS is really a machine able to bend time and space. And among its many qualities, it's bigger on the inside than on the outside** I must admire the Dr. Who scriptwriters' ability to save money on exterior location shots, incidentally coming up with a beautifully generative driver of clever plot points. . And so the interior contains all sorts of control rooms, bedrooms, even a swimming pool.

Science works surprisingly similarly. Apparently tiny innocuous details sometimes open up to yield beautiful, broadly applicable principles. For instance, the CRISPR technology for programming biology came in part out of work on how to manufacture yoghurt more reliably.

Furthermore, those beautiful broad principles may be partially decoupled from the underlying laws out of which they emerged. There are many possible universes, with physics very different from our own, in which the laws of public key cryptography** Though curiously, it's not yet clear how well public key cryptography works in our universe. Quantum computers are likely to break the most widely-used public key cryptosystems; classical computers are often regarded as unlikely to be able to do such a break (though it's never been proven). In this sense it's likely there are other laws of physics under which public key cryptography works better than in our universe. and of CRISPR hold. In this sense the laws of physics may actually be less important than we think, a relatively unimportant substrate, much like it matters less which computer you are using than which operating system.

Another test of this point of view comes from biology. It's true that biology contains many deep ideas  it's difficult not to be awed by the way DNA replicates, or the way a ribosome or CRISPR works. But it's tempting to retort oh, but biology is just something local to the earth, and so in some sense is provincial. It's not like physics or chemistry or mathematics or even computer science, which are much more universal.

Again: that was something I believed for a long time. But it's also wrong. Insofar as there are beautiful principles behind biology  ideas like evolution by natural selection, or the many amazing mechanisms inside the cell  those principles are true (and amazing) everywhere in the universe. It doesn't matter if, say, evolution by natural selection isn't actively operational in some particular locale. It's still an absolutely remarkable principle that is true everywhere.

To know the fundamental laws of nature without understanding the extraordinary principles hidden within them seems lame. It would be like knowing the rules of chess  the basic moves which the pieces may make  without understanding any of the higher-order principles which govern the game. It's in the latter, in both chess and science, that the most interest lies. And that is particularly true of those higher-order principles which are in considerable degree decoupled from the underlying laws.

Summary map

Let's look at a few of the maps we've been examining:

Some pieces of this were only implicit in the earlier discussion. In particular, four dichotomies underlay much of the discussion: between stable and unstable matter; between equilibrium and non-equilibrium matter; between biological and non-biological matter; and between designer and naturalistic matter** I can't help but ponder the management consulting question: what happens when you make up two-by-twos from these? I've done so, and then tried putting different types of matter in different quadrants. The results are strangely compelling, though I'm not yet quite sure what to make of them..

It's striking the extent to which different sides of these dichotomies involve different kinds of expertise. And that being expert on one often means not being very good at others. For instance, many physicists are terrific at thinking about equilibrium matter, but no good at thinking about design. And so they focus on equilibrium, and don't think about design.

More broadly, this is all still very much a bespoke patchwork. We think of all these subjects as quite different: an expert on CRISPR might well say oh, I don't know anything about nuclear reactions. And yet both a nuclear physicist and a CRISPR expert are in some sense just moving protons, neutrons, and electrons around. Are there unifying abstractions which can be used to help merge some of these superficially different fields?

Part of the trouble, in my opinion, is that we don't have a single universal platform for manipulating matter. This is a beautiful thing about computing: we have a single platform (the Turing machine) which can be used to implement any computational process. But CRISPR, for instance, is very different from the kind of colliders used to make oganesson. Think about that latter process: to make oganesson we collide just the right atoms at just the right energies. And we have to hope for quite a bit of luck. It's a thoroughly bespoke process. And to get a genuine universal constructor for matter you need a device which can do not just that, but which can also make black holes and neutron stars; which can do everything CRISPR can do; and so on. It's a tall order.

Still, that's the arc of science. We're gradually developing machines with ever greater degrees of universality. Tools like CRISPR and bioreactors are pretty great steps in this direction, for instance. And people like John von Neumann, Eric Drexler, and David Deutsch have all considered variations on the idea of universal assemblers. Can we build such universal construction devices, so we can put everything on a single footing, no longer taking the bespoke approach? Can we make it so matter not only has affordances, it has a universal set of affordances? Is it possible to develop interfaces between what currently appear to be separate fields? What's your CRISPR-to-graphene API? There's a tension too: as we develop more general-purpose tools like CRISPR and bioreactors we in some sense unify previous methods for making matter. But we also open up new worlds.

Still, developing more universal methods of construction is only a small part of the overall problem. What qualities are possible in matter? And what are the most striking higher-level principles, unifying abstractions which can be used to help merge some of these superficially different fields?

In software engineering there is an observation known as Conway's Law** Melvin E. Conway, How Do Committees Invent? (1967)., applicable to organizations that design systems:

Any organization that designs a system... will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.

Elsewhere, I have argued that there is a kind of scientific analogue of Conway's Law** Michael Nielsen, Neural Networks and Deep Learning (Chapter 6) (2015).:

... fields start out monolithic, with just a few deep ideas. Early experts can master all those ideas. But as time passes that monolithic character changes. We discover many deep new ideas, too many for any one person to really master. As a result, the social structure of the field re-organizes and divides around those ideas. Instead of a monolith, we have fields within fields within fields, a complex, recursive, self-referential social structure, whose organization mirrors the connections between our deepest insights. And so the structure of our knowledge shapes the social organization of science. But that social shape in turn constrains and helps determine what we can discover. This is the scientific analogue of Conway's law.

You see this in the fact that our maps of matter are not just maps of nature; they're also maps of the human social organization of science. You see this, for instance, in the periodic table: there are scientific groups which are experts on particular columns of the periodic table, say, the halogens. This social division of labour reflects an underlying principle in nature. Certain principles govern the halogens which aren't operable for other elements; the groups can leverage those principles to develop a particular type of expertise. In a similar way, the tree of life reflects both nature and the human social organization of science: the principles which separate (say) plants on the tree of life are also leverage points for a division of labour.

Every once in a while, of course, we re-organize these maps as we change our understanding of the underlying principles. When Woese and collaborators understood the importance of archaea, that triggered a re-organization of biology into the three-domain system; that conceptual re-organization in turn triggered a re-organization (still partial and ongoing) of the social systems of biology.

Further complicating this picture is a tension between naturalistic discovery and imaginative design. This is perhaps most easily illustrated through my story of discovering computing through an alien civilization's computer code. At first all the action in computing would be among the archaeologists exploring the code. It'd be a golden age of discovery. Quite likely there would be tension between the archaeologists and the hackers trying to use those ideas to build their own systems. The hackers would mostly be (very slowly) re-discovering things already done much more effectively inside the alien codebase. It'd no doubt seem rather pedestrian to the archaeologists.

That's a fanciful story. But in fact there's a similar tension between naturalistic discovery and imaginative design in many existing sciences. Right now in many fields many of the deepest ideas are coming from the naturalistic side. But over the long run, my bet is on human imagination, and that of our descendants.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Laura Deming, Adam Marblestone, and Kanjun Qiu for helpful conversations.
The top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan has not ruled out conducting air strikes against the Taliban if the insurgents press on with their campaign to seize territory across the war-torn country.

The Taliban has taken control of dozens of districts from government forces in recent weeks, raising concerns that the Western-backed government in Kabul and the Afghan security forces may collapse after U.S.-led international forces complete their withdrawals by September 11.

U.S. General Austin Miller said at a news conference in Kabul on June 29 that he has informed the Taliban that air strikes are linked to the militant groups actions.

"The best way to stop [U.S. air strikes] -- and I've actually told the Taliban -- is to stop the offensive operations and air strikes go zero as we go forward. I still have the authority to support and defend the Afghan security forces and certainly defend ourselves as well," Miller said.

Millers comments drew a warning from the Taliban, with spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid telling RFE/RL that U.S. forces have no right to bomb Afghanistan after May.

He was referring to a May 1 deadline the previous U.S. administration had agreed with the Taliban to withdraw American forces from Afghanistan.

If they bomb, they will face dangerous consequences. Then they will be responsible for starting the war," Mujahid said.

Fighting has surged across Afghanistan since early May when the U.S. military began its final withdrawal of troops, with the Pentagon estimating the Taliban now controls 81 of the countrys 419 district centers.

Miller described the overall security situation as "not good.



That's something that's recognized by the Afghan security forces and they are making appropriate adjustments as we move forward."

Afghan government forces have launched offensives to regain ground lost to the Taliban, with the Defense Ministry saying on June 29 that three districts in the northern provinces of Faryab and Balkh provinces were retaken by government forces following days of heavy fighting with insurgents.

According to the statement, the army was also making progress in retaking two other districts in the central province of Ghazni and in Parwan Province, north of Kabul, while operations against militants continued in Balkh.

Officials and other sources said that Afghan forces also made advances in Kunduz and Takhar provinces, in the north.

Last week, the Taliban seized Afghanistan's main border crossing with Tajikistan and pressed an offensive on the northern cities of Kunduz and Mazar-e Sharif.

On June 28, four districts in the Ghazni and Paktika provinces fell under Taliban control.

From 18 districts in Ghazni, I think seven districts in total have fallen to the Taliban, Khoddad Irfani, a local lawmaker, told TOLOnews.

Officials were also quoted as saying that Taliban fighters launched an overnight attack on the provincial capital, also called Ghazni.

"The situation in Ghazni is changing. Most of the lost areas in the outskirts are being taken back by the Afghan forces," said Abdul Jami, a provincial council member in Ghazni.

The city lies on a highway linking Kabul with the southern province of Kandahar.

With reporting by TOLOnews, AP, AFP, and dpa
Housing prices in the West are over the moon | Writers on the Range
Early analysis of the preliminary draft of maps for the state Senate and House show that there will be plenty of competition, mostly between incumbents, and often within the same party.

What was released by Colorado's legislative redistricting commission on Tuesday is only a "starting point" map, like the preliminary draft congressional map released last week, and it will be changed in the coming months.

The maps were produced by the commission's staff, based on the several redistricting criteria required, including approximately equal population, compactness and contiguity of districts, abiding by the 1965 Voting Rights Act, respecting communities of interest, existing political subdivisions and natural boundaries, as well as promoting competitiveness where possible.

The commission will soon begin touring the state to collect public input on the preliminary draft maps, in order to make final adjustments.

The maps were also created using imperfect data, like the congressional maps, because the U.S. Census Bureau is late delivering the data required for redistricting to the states. The Census Bureau has said the final data will be ready in August. Because of the delay, the commission has used survey data and estimates to draw the preliminary draft maps.

House

In the House, the maps as drawn would see at least eight pairs of incumbent Democrats, including some of the most powerful members of the legislature, face off against each other in primaries.

The most notable of those matchups would see Joint Budget Committee Vice-Chair Julie McCluskie, D-Dillion, running against Rep. Dylan Roberts. The Eagle Democrat chairs the Business Affairs and Labor Committee and carried some of the most impactful bills of the 2021 legislative session, including the Colorado Option health care bill signed into law by Gov. Jared Polis earlier this month.

The proposed maps would also put Democrats up against a wave of incumbent-on-incumbent primaries across traditionally blue hotbeds in the Denver metro area and Boulder.

In Jefferson County, Rep. Lisa Cutter of Littleton and Rep. Kerry Tipper of Lakewood have been drawn into the same district. In Arapahoe County, Rep. Meg Froelich, D-Greenwood Village, and Rep. David Ortiz, a Littleton Democrat who rounded out his first legislative session with a tweet describing his colleagues as family. Should the maps hold (Ortizs property bumps up against the border of the district he and Froelich are set to share), Ortiz will be fighting against a member of that family for his future as a state lawmaker.

The best families are the ones you dont get to pick for yourself. Proud to be a part of this diverse and amazing crew of freshman legislators. Its been an honor and privilege getting to learn and grow together.  SINE DIE!#coleg #copolitics #sinedie pic.twitter.com/NjmNpzugQB  David Ortiz (@DavidDOrtizCO) June 8, 2021

Other sitting House Democrats drawn into the same district include:

Assistant Majority Leader Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez of Denver and Rep. Alex Valdez, a Denver Democrat who chairs the Energy and Environment Committee;

Reps. Dominique Jackson of Commerce City and Naquetta Ricks of Aurora;

Reps. Kyle Mullica of Northglenn and Yadira Caraveo of Thornton;

Reps. Edie Hooton and Judy Amabile, both of Boulder;

Rep. Matt Gray of Broomfield and Finance Committee Chair Shannon Bird of Westminster, both of whom drew primary threats after voting to kill a Democrat-backed pre-trial reform effort in the waning days of the legislative session.

In rural Colorado, Republicans who hold six seats have been drawn into three districts. That would pit Rep. Richard Holtorf of Akron against Rep. Rod Pelton of Cheyenne Wells. On the Western Slope, Rep. Marc Catlin of Montrose and Rep. Matt Soper of Delta have been drawn into the same district.

In central Colorado, Rep. Ron (Loren) Hanks of Canon City is in the same district as Rep. Stephanie Luck of Penrose.

Two more sets of incumbent GOP lawmakers have been drawn into the same districts, though term limits will spare those House Republicans from an incumbent-on-incumbent primary.

In Colorado Springs, the preliminary maps put Rep. Andy Pico and term-limited Rep. Terri Carver into the same districts. The same goes for Douglas County, where term-limited Rep. Kim Ransom of Littleton would be in the same district as Rep. Mark Baisley of Roxborough Park.

The proposed maps would see only one incumbent-on-incumbent showdown should both lawmakers win their primaries. The new House District 38, straddling Interstate 25 south of Longmont, would pit rookie Reps. Tracey Bernett, D-Longmont, and Dan Woog, R-Erie, against each other.

One of the more interesting maps is for House District 41, currently represented by Rep. Iman Jodeh, an Aurora Democrat. The map shows a district that stretches from Aurora to northeastern Colorado, a traditionally red stronghold, including Fort Morgan, Sterling and all the way to the Colorado-Nebraska state line near Julesburg.

Then theres roughly a dozen districts where its open season, where there are no incumbents. That includes the new House District 41 in southeastern and south-central Colorado. The district starts just east of Kim, in Las Animas County, moves north into Crowley and west into Pueblo County, then slips around the north end of Pueblo and then heads west to Westcliffe, in Fremont County.

House District 57 is northwestern Colorado, but its current incumbent, Rep. Perry Will, R-New Castle, has been drawn into a district that includes most of Mesa County except for Grand Junction.

In terms of which party benefits the most, Republicans should be cheering. Currently, the House is a 41-24 Democratic advantage. Using party registration, the 2018 Attorney General's race and 2020 U.S. Senate race election outcomes, and counting as competitive the districts with a 5 percentage point margin or less, the House preliminary draft map would lead to between 31 and 35 solid Democratic districts, between 25 and 31 solid Republican districts, and between 3 and 5 competitive districts.

Senate

In the Senate, term limits means that a lot of the lawmakers drawn into the same districts wont mean big changes. But thats not true for everyone.

The most interesting may be in the new Senate District 21, where JBC Chair Sen. Dominick Moreno, D-Commerce City, is in the same district as Republican Sen. Kevin Priola of Henderson.

In Colorado Springs, Sen. Pete Lee, a Democrat, is drawn in the same district as Republican Sen. Larry Liston.

Like in the House, a district just south of Longmont would also see an incumbent-on-incumbent general election matchup if both lawmakers advance through a primary. The new Senate District 32 pits Sen. Sonya Jaquez Lewis, D-Longmont, against Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer, R-Brighton. Both were just elected to their first terms in 2020.

Then theres Senate District 32 in Denver, home to both Sens. Chris Hansen and Robert Rodriguez, and both are nowhere near the end of their terms in office. Rodriguez runs again in 2022, Hansen in 2024.

One item on Republicans wish list has been to make the Eastern Plains more compact; previously Senate District 35, represented by Republican Sen. Cleave Simpson of Alamosa, stretched from the San Luis Valley to southeastern Colorado and north to Kiowa County.

The southeastern Colorado seat as envisioned by the preliminary map would be represented by Sen. Paul Lundeen of northern El Paso County, and in order to keep the population numbers up, draws from eastern Colorado Springs and eastern Douglas County.

Other districts where incumbents are drawn together:

Sens. Jeff Bridges, D-Greenwood Village and Chris Kolker, a Centennial Democrat who just finished his first year in the legislature.

Democratic Sens. Faith Winter of Westminster and Rachel Zenzinger of Arvada. Zenzinger is term-limited in 2024; Winter is interested in running for the new Congressional District 8 seat.

Republican Sens. Chris Holbert of Douglas County and Jim Smallwood of Parker are in the same district, but Holbert is term-limited in 2022.

There are no incumbents in at least two Senate districts as proposed by the new maps: Senate District 15 in eastern Douglas County; and Senate District 19, which includes Columbine and Littleton. The incumbent in the area is Sen. Tammy Story of Conifer, whose district may have gotten a lot redder and which would make re-election in 2022 more difficult.

Using party registration, the 2018 attorney general's race and 2020 U.S. Senate race election outcomes, and counting as competitive the districts with a 5 percentage point margin or less, the map would lead to between 19 and 21 solid Democratic seats, between 13 and 15 solid Republican seats and between zero and two competitive seats.
Colorado Springs, CO (80903)

Today

Some clouds this evening will give way to mainly clear skies overnight. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 59F. Winds N at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Some clouds this evening will give way to mainly clear skies overnight. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 59F. Winds N at 5 to 10 mph.
Colorado Springs, CO (80903)

Today

Some clouds this evening will give way to mainly clear skies overnight. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low around 60F. Winds WNW at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Some clouds this evening will give way to mainly clear skies overnight. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low around 60F. Winds WNW at 5 to 10 mph.
Colorado Springs, CO (80903)

Today

Partly cloudy skies. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low near 60F. Winds NW at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Partly cloudy skies. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low near 60F. Winds NW at 5 to 10 mph.
The Arvada police officer killed in an ambush last week received a heros farewell at Flatirons Community Church in Lafayette on Tuesday morning, three months after the church gave a similar sendoff to a Boulder officer.

Those who took the podium to share memories of officer Gordon Beesley painted a picture of a warm-hearted man devoted to his family, who naturally made people around him laugh.

Its impossible to separate Gordon the police officer from Gordon the person, said Arvada Police Chief Link Strate. And thats because his character and his personality shone through in everything he did.

Pastor Jim Burgen of Flatirons Community Church said the thin blue line, a symbol widely used as a signal of support for law enforcements role in protecting public safety, is akin to a sunrise. He also made the comparison at officer Eric Talleys funeral. Talley was killed in Marchs massacre at Boulders southside King Soopers.

Its the thin blue line of light between the darkness and the daylight, Burgen said.

Before the eulogies, law enforcement officers placed dozens of blue roses in vases flanking the stage to represent each agency present as other officers walked past Beesleys casket to salute him. A memorial sat on display with a patrol motorcycle and an American flag with Beesleys personal mantra to always look for the good in things and people.

Beesley was fatally shot June 21 in an ambush in Olde Town Arvada while responding on foot to an unrelated call, according to police.

Beesley spent 19 years with the Arvada Police Department working as a patrol officer, in the traffic division on his motorcycle, and later as a school resource officer at Oberon Middle School.

Warning triggered hunt for Arvada gunman minutes before shooting

Gordon noticed the kid nobody else noticed. Made them feel special, Burgen said.

He said Beesley spent time building and repairing bicycles to give away to kids at school, and each Tuesday and Thursday morning he went to the home of a student with special needs who couldnt ride to school by himself so they could ride together.

A talented musician, Beesley would also dress up each holiday season and play Christmas songs at school, Strate said.

It hurts my soul to have to use past tense when talking about Officer Beesley, said Amanda Gelow, a student at Oberon who spoke in a video shown at the service.

She didnt have many friends in middle school and looked forward to spending time with Beesley, she said.

I find myself questioning, why did God always pick the good ones? But I can find no better answer than, when you pick flowers, which ones do you pick?

More of Beesleys friends, family and fellow officers shared a flood of fond memories, whether about Beesley adopting his beloved dog or swapping jokes and advice about life as new fathers.

Laughs echoed through the room when Burgen shared a story about how Beesley met his wife when she had recently broken up with another boyfriend, and he was a goateed, mutton-chop-side-burned, motorcycle-riding musician.

I'm not sure how long this raw emotion and sadness will last. The pain can be overwhelming. But I promise you, his memory won't invoke that in us forever, Strate said. His memory will be a blessing. His memory will help guide us to be more like Gordon.

You not only humanized our badge. You made us better people.

Beesley left behind his wife and two teenage sons, whom Beesleys friends and colleagues said he was proud of and talked about constantly.

According to Arvada police, the only official way to make donations to Beesleys family is through the Colorado Fallen Hero Foundation, which will accept donations through July 21.

The outpouring of affection for Beesley on Tuesday provided a sharp contrast to the circumstances of his death.

Authorities say the man who shot Beesley had expressed hatred for police and targeted him because he was an officer. A video clip released Friday shows the man pulling into a parking lot and then running toward Beesley, firing when Beesley turned in his direction. The gunman, identified as Ronald Troyke, was shot and killed by a bystander who intervened, Johnny Hurley; investigators believe Hurley died from mistaken police gunfire.

After the eulogies Tuesday, a dispatchers voice came over a loudspeaker calling Beesleys end of watch.

All cars be advised, this is the final call for  Officer Gordon Beesley, badge number 0219. Officer Beasley was fatally shot while responding to a call for service on June 21, 2021, after serving the citizens of Arvada for 19 years. He was an outstanding officer and amazing person, and will be deeply missed, she said.

Officer Beesley, you are clear for end of watch. Rest in peace, Gordo  we'll take the beat from here. Code one cleared on channel one.
Broadband infrastructure, cost issues hobble state expansion efforts

Infrastructure and affordability emerged as the main challenges that states face in expanding and improving broadband during a June 23 panel discussion hosted by The Pew Charitable Trusts.

For starters, the Federal Communications Commissions minimum speed requirements are in need of an update, panelists said.

As long as we continue to use a backward-looking metric of 25 megabits down and 3 megabits up as the definition of broadband, then our federal agencies are going to continue to put us in this bowling alley lane of where we can put investment and build infrastructure. Thats a problem, said Teresa Ferguson, director of federal broadband engagement at the Colorado Broadband Office.

West Virginia State Sen. Robert Plymale said that the pandemic made it obvious that the standard speed wasnt even high enough to do anything. We found that we were so woefully underserved that I cant find an area of West Virginia that is properly served.

Four U.S. senators agreed, stating in a March 4 letter to the leaders of the Agriculture and Commerce departments, FCC and the National Economic Council that our goal for new deployment should be symmetrical speeds of 100 megabits per second (Mbps), allowing for limited variation when dictated by geography, topography, or unreasonable cost.

Another part of the problem is affordability, Plymale said, because even where access is available, residents cant afford it.

Ferguson said the cost problem plagues Colorado, too, which also has large swaths of rural residents. She said federal help is crucial: The states cant print enough money to be able to fix this infrastructure problem ourselves. We cant even fix, in some ways, the affordability issue because its too large.

Tamarah Holmes, director of the Office of Broadband at Virginias Department of Housing and Community Development, said theres been a disconnect between federal and state governments.

Were three times more efficient than the federal programs in terms of our investments and the number of folks we get connected, Holmes said. A main reason why is because the federal agencies work in silos, she added.

For example, Holmes said, FCCs Rural Digital Opportunity Fund awarded funding to areas Virginia was already investing in. As a result, the state is now working to figure out how providers that provisionally won the rights to provide service to locations through the RDOF auction can legally forfeit those awards without penalty. RDOF will provide about $20 billion over 10 years to support broadband in rural areas.

The state of West Virginia may be eligible for over $2 billion in broadband funding between what the state legislature is doing, between what FCC is doing, between what [the National Telecommunications and Information Administration] is doing, Appalachian Regional Commission, so on and so forth, Linville said. If $2 billion cant solve this problem, weve got a problem, and the problem isnt just the money.

Another concern is the fact that many municipalities have only one broadband provider. As a result, residents must use what that single company offers. Absent competition, providers have no incentive to invest in better or faster infrastructure.

How can we put forward policies and proposals and projects which ultimately result in competition in this space -- because Americans and West Virginians like to be able to choose who we want to do business with, Linville said.

Neighboring Virginia has invested $140 million in broadband through a variety of resources, including the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act and the Tobacco Region Revitalization Commission. Last month, Gov. Ralph Northam and General Assembly leaders put broadband at the top of their list of five ways to invest funding from the American Rescue Plan.

Despite the disconnect between state and federal governments, the experts agree that they need one another. Linville said hed like to see changes to how feds structure funding by mandating the outcome, rather than how distribution happens.

Likewise, Virginias Holmes would like to see greater use of block grants, which give local governments more control over how they use the money than categorical grants.

Theres no one-size-fits-all with addressing the digital divide, she said. Each state has different issues, and so wed like the funding [in general] to be block granted to us so that we have the flexibility to address our issues of our digital divide.
BERLIN (AP)  Berlin's museums authority is moving forward with plans to return to Nigeria artifacts known as the Benin Bronzes, saying Tuesday that it aims to make substantial handovers next year.

The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, an authority that oversees many of Berlins museums, said its board gave the foundation's president, Hermann Parzinger, formal permission to conduct negotiations on returning pieces that are in its collection.

That followed a wider decision at the end of April for German museums to work on a restitution plan with museums and authorities in Nigeria.

A British colonial expedition looted vast numbers of treasures from the royal palace of the Kingdom of Benin in 1897, including numerous bas-reliefs and sculptures.

While hundreds of artifacts ended up in the British Museum, hundreds were also sold to other collections such as the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, which has one of the worlds largest collection of historical objects from the Kingdom of Benin, estimated to include about 530 items  including 440 bronzes.
Students are smart. If they sometimes develop new opinions as a result of their history classes, it is not because we push them in a particular direction. Students are perfectly capable of reading a bombastic nationalistic speech by Mussolini and hearing the echoes in modern political discourse. Those students who are aware of efforts in Georgia and elsewhere to restrict voting and to allow state legislatures to overturn electoral results they dont like may very well connect those changes to the tightening grip of authoritarian parties in the 1920s and 1930s. And I have no doubt that when we study the Beer Hall Putsch the next time I teach my class on Hitlers Germany, students will want to talk about the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and wonder about its long-term implications. They will raise questions about ongoing GOP efforts to whitewash that history and to reject the label of insurrection.

Radically conservative politicians want to limit the ability of teachers to talk about structural racism because it may lead their sons and daughters to question the racism still embedded in the U.S. Will they also forbid teaching classes on the rise of 20th-century fascism and totalitarianism because the facts make them too uncomfortable?

History does not repeat, but we can certainly learn from the past. It offers us keys to understanding our present and future. We need to call out politicians who try to control the history we teach to cloak their own lack of commitment to democratic institutions. They may want to ask themselves why they fear the conclusions that those who study the past may draw.

Christine Adams is a professor of history at St. Marys College of Maryland, a fellow at the American Council of Learned Societies and a Spring 2021 Newberry Library residential fellow. This was written for the Baltimore Sun.

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Steven Cumberbatch, the man who killed a woman in Danville in July 2008 and was sentenced to 40 years in prison, has been extradited to Colorado to face charges for the slaying a woman in Denver in 1994.

Cumberbatch, 59, has been charged with two counts of first-degree murder in connection with the Dec. 7, 1994, death of 36-year-old Rita Desjardine, a news release from the Denver District Attorneys Office stated.

Officials did not disclose when the suspect was transported to Colorado.

Her body was found in a motel room in Denver on the morning of Dec. 7, 1994. According to a Denver Police Department online cold case file, Desjardine had been staying at a transient hotel and was beaten to death before being discovered by housekeeping staff.

Denver police never gave up finding her killer, but the case remained unsolved until July 2018, when the departments crime lab got a lead connecting Cumberbatch to DNA evidence at the scene, the Denver District Attorneys Office reported.

A witness had reported seeing a man matching Cumberbatchs description leaving the motel room before Desjardines body was discovered, the news release stated.
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REIDSVILLE  Reidsville Police Department investigators arrested a local man after discovering marijuana, a stolen AR-15, cash and more at his home here on Monday.

Armed with a search warrant, officers arrested Isaiah Ogunyemi at a residence at 20 Circle Drive and charged him with possession of a firearm by a felon, possession of a stolen firearm, maintaining a dwelling for controlled substances, possession with intent to sell and deliver marijuana, possession of marijuana paraphernalia and driving while license revoked, officials said in a news release.

Ogunyemi is being held in the Rockingham County Detention Center on a $50,000 secured bond and is due to appear in Rockingham County District Court on July 7.

The search came after a long investigation, the release said. And investigators are seeking two other men in connection with Ogunyemi, who kept 1.5 pounds of marijuana, a stolen AR-15 with a 50-round magazine, a Glock pistol and $2,011 dollars at the residence.

RPD officers have active warrants for Broderick Lamont Brown for possession with intent to sell and deliver marijuana and possession of marijuana paraphernalia.

They also have active warrants for Zaquain Martin for maintaining a dwelling for controlled substances and possession of a stolen firearm.
EDEN  When investigators stepped onto the front porch of a residence here late Sunday night, they found two people dead and a third wounded by gunshots.

Rockingham County sheriff's investigators discovered the double homicide at 160 Dan River Church Road, a modest duplex on the bucolic country lane.

Victims are Eden residents Alexander "Alex" Michael Grubbs, 29, and Jordan Lee Gwynn, 27, who both lived at the house where they were found, a spokesman for the sheriff's office said in a news release.

Rebecca Fisher Gwynn, 26, also a resident, was listed in critical condition at an area hospital on Tuesday morning, according to the release.

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No arrests have been made. And the sheriff's office has not said whether it has identified suspects in the case.

Investigators believe that the group of victims was gathered on the porch around 9:50 p.m. Sunday when one or more suspects fired shots from the woodline next to the house. The sheriff's office is calling the shooting a targeted crime.
Law enforcement officials in Tennessee say Cadogan contacted a woman in Kingsport, Tennessee, he had met online, told her he had strangled his girlfriend in a dispute over another man and asked her to help him dispose of the body and the car.

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Cadogan then drove to Tennessee thinking the woman would assist him, but she was cooperating with law enforcement.

Carter County deputies stopped and arrested Cadogan. He is being held without bail.

Cadogan will be charged in High Point with first-degree murder and felony concealment of death, according to police.

High Point Police Department Lt. Matt Truitt said either state or local officials will travel to Tennessee to pick up Cadogan.

The first step is seeing if the N.C. Department of Public Safety is going to pick him up. Their timeline is between 10 and 30 days, Truitt told The High Point Enterprise.

If the Department of Public Safety is not going, we will go as soon as we can get it scheduled, probably within two weeks.

Police say no other suspects are being sought in Delgados killing.

Cadogan doesnt have a criminal record in High Point, Truitt said.

His only encounter with law enforcement came about through a traffic accident.
All four teenagers graduated from local high schools in 2020. Jones, a Southwest Guilford graduate from High Point, went on to attend college at West Virginia University. The others graduated from Northwest Guilford.

Zach Williamson, who was from Greensboro, attended Guilford College where he played mens lacrosse. In a statement on Facebook, the college called his death a tragic loss for his family and the entire Guilford community.

Family and friends shared in that sentiment as they remembered Jones and Williamson on Monday.

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Bob Jones, father of Jeffrey Jones, said hearing stories and memories of his son was a comforting and beautiful experience.

Jones called his son an all-American patriot.

He loved his country, Jones said. Just a super, super kid. Never met a stranger. He was just a loving kid.

To honor his sons memory, Jones plans to put together scholarships for Southwest Guilford students in Jeffreys name.

But for now, while he and his family continue to grieve, Were going to take it day by day, Jones said.

Several folks sharing memories took a moment to encourage the crowd to not drink and drive.
One reason for that is the cost: The city would spend roughly an extra $200,000 to hold two elections, one in the fall and one in 2022.

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Collicutt said, filing will be in December if they can get me their districts by Nov. 17. If they cant, it pushes them into January.

The Greensboro city attorney has estimated it could take up to 12 weeks to redraw districts if necessary.

For months the city has discussed the possibility of a delayed election after it became clear that the census data would be delayed because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

And the General Assembly bill, which won bipartisan support, has been working its way through the legislature for weeks as municipalities across the state sought guidance.

This bill was not a surprise, Collicutt said. This first was introduced over a month ago and has gone through the normal committee process.

Several City Council members have said they were reluctant to support delaying the election because they felt voters elected them for a clearly-defined four-year term. But they said during recent meeting discussions that a delay could become inevitable. Now, its state law.
Late in the afternoon, rescue officials sounded a horn for a second time during the days work, signaling an approaching storm with lightning. Workers temporarily evacuated.

Authorities said its still a search-and-rescue operation, but no one has been found alive since hours after the collapse on Thursday.

The pancake collapse of the building left layer upon layer of intertwined debris, frustrating efforts to reach anyone who may have survived in a pocket of space.

Authorities meet frequently with families to explain what they're doing and to answer questions. They have discussed how DNA matches are made to help identify the dead, how next-of-kin will be contacted and explained in extreme detail how they are searching the mound, the mayor said.

With that knowledge, Cava said, families are coming to their own conclusions.

Some are feeling more hopeful, some less hopeful, because we do not have definitive answers. We give them the facts. We take them to the site," she said. "They have seen the operation. They understand now how it works, and they are preparing themselves for news, one way or the other.
WASHINGTON (AP)  The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the government can indefinitely detain certain immigrants who say they will face persecution or torture if they are deported to their native countries.

Over the dissent of three liberal justices, the court held 6-3 that the immigrants are not entitled to a hearing about whether they should be released while the government evaluates their claims.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the court that those aliens are not entitled to a bond hearing.

The case involves people who had been previously deported and, when detained after re-entering the United States illegally, claimed that they would be persecuted or tortured if sent back. One man is a citizen of El Salvador who said he was immediately threatened by a gang after being deported from the U.S.

An immigration officer determined that the immigrants had a reasonable fear for their safety if returned to their countries, setting in motion an evaluation process that can take months or years.
RALEIGH  North Carolina hospitals that were stretched to their limits during the coronavirus pandemic have seen a dramatic decrease in the number of COVID-19 patients this spring.

But now hospitals say theyre struggling with another health crisis, one that predates the pandemic but has been made worse by it, and theyre asking the states political leaders for help.

People with behavioral and mental illnesses are increasingly ending up in the emergency rooms of North Carolinas medical hospitals, which are ill equipped to treat them. In December, 20% of patients discharged from an emergency room in the state were diagnosed with a behavioral health problem  up 7.5% from a year earlier. Thats according to data compiled by the N.C. Healthcare Association, which represents the states hospitals.

The increase was much higher for children. Nearly 1 in 10 children treated in a hospital emergency department in December were diagnosed with a behavioral health problem, up 70% from a year earlier, according to the association.
Can we change the subject now?

After all, it has been more than a year since George Floyd gasped his last, desperate breaths under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer.

It has been more than a year since an unprecedented wave of multi-racial protests erupted across the world in response.

It has been more than a year since our own protests in downtown Greensboro raised the same issues and expressed the same pain, outrage and anguish.

It has been more than a year since a few bad actors used the protests as an excuse to vandalize businesses, including Black-owned shops and even the International Civil Rights Center & Museum.

It has been more than a year since the three words Black Lives Matter expressed simply and eloquently what so many Americans either didnt understand or wouldnt accept about the anxiety, frustration and outright fear many Black Americans feel in their encounters with police.

It has been more than a year since Greensboros City Council and police department reflected on what they could do to repair community trust and confidence in local policing.
Saturdays crowd gathers around one of three statues unveiled on Saturday at Selmas Veterans Plaza.
News_release

UC San Diego Health is now offering a verifiable digital vaccine record to its patients who have or will receive a COVID-19 vaccine. These secure online records, otherwise known as a SMART health card, can be accessed directly from the MyUCSDChart patient portal.

The SMART Health Card offers those who have received a COVID-19 vaccine or tests from UC San Diego Health an easy way to digitally share their health documentation, said Christopher Longhurst, MD, chief information officer at UC San Diego Health. As an alternative to the paper card, the SMART Health Card cannot be lost or damaged. It is secure and protects the privacy of patient information.



UC San Diego Health is the first health system in the U.S. to adopt the SMART Health Card for direct patient access. Patients and employees of UC San Diego Health have access to the new verification system as well as members of the public who utilized a UC San Diego vaccination or testing station and who signed up for a MyUCSDChart account.

The information contained in the digital vaccine record follows all HIPAA privacy guidelines. Patients can use the digital vaccine record for medical purposes or to verify their vaccination status to safely return to work, school and travel.

The SMART Health Card is the same specification used by the State of California and will work in concert with the states system, said Longhurst. This system is also being used by a large number of organizations across the U.S. and is rapidly becoming the standard for digitally verifiable vaccine records.



The digital vaccine record was designed through a collaboration with VCI, a coalition of public and private organizations working to standardize digital verification of clinical information.

Through the MyUCSDChart portal, patients can either generate a QR code for vaccines and COVID test results or download a PDF record of vaccine doses that can be securely and privately shared with outside entities if a patient chooses.

UC San Diego Health patients can learn more about access their digital vaccine record through MyUCSDChart by visiting: health.ucsd.edu/coronavirus/Pages/vaccine.
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The Montana Highway Patrol move to Boulder will now be sometime in August, an official said.

The move had been planned for June, but has been delayed due to light construction at the former Montana Developmental Center campus, MHP Sgt. Jay Nelson said recently in an email. He added the new move would now likely take place in the first two weeks of August.

Nelson said in March the new main administration building needed some minor sprucing up, such as increasing security at the entrance, but nothing extravagant.

He recently told the Boulder Monitor that the administration building would be upgraded to meet FBI standards in order to handle criminal justice records and MHP was working on lining up contractors during a construction crunch.

Officials announced earlier this year the Montana Highway Patrol (MHP) headquarters would move from rented space at 2550 Prospect Ave. in Helena, which is adjacent to Interstate 15, and go 30 miles south to state-owned property in Boulder.

There would be about 25 employees involved in the first phase of moving.
A Montana man who pleaded guilty to firing into a crowd at a northern Idaho bar last year has been sentenced to up to 15 years in prison.
Prosecutors said in recent court filings that the Nevada Department of Corrections has provided the court with undisputed medical and pharmaceutical evidence establishing the execution will not result in unconstitutional pain or suffering  "indeed, it is likely to result in very minimal to no pain.

Floyds lawyers say the state wrongly maintains the alternatives they have suggested are not legitimate options because Nevada law provides only for lethal injection and the Department of Corrections has been unable to get a barbiturate.

But they said the Supreme Court has made it clear that an inmate seeking to identify an alternative method of execution is not limited to choosing among those presently authorized by a particular states law. They said both of Floyds proposed alternatives are well-established in other jurisdictions.

Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah authorize execution by firing squad, they said. Texas, Georgia and the U.S. government have recently used pentobarbital in executions.
Advocates for School Trust Lands filed a notice of appeal recently with the Montana Supreme Court. No other documents supporting the appeal have been filed as of Tuesday. Attorney Roy Andes said he had no further comment.

The 1985 Montana Supreme Court Decision Department of State Lands v. Pettibone found the state acquires a partial water right when water is diverted or developed on state trust lands. In applying Pettibone to its lease agreements, the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation also began claiming partial water rights in situations where the point of water diversion begins on private lands, according to the lawsuit. Typically the water is piped to a stock tank or for irrigation on the state land from an adjoining private parcel.

House Bill 286, which saw significant bipartisan support from the 2019 Montana Legislature, reversed that practice and directed DNRC to rescind roughly 140 partial water rights it had claimed.

The lawsuit contended House Bill 286 harmed the DNRCs ability to negotiate lease terms and diminished the values of state trust lands.
Colin Stephens, president of the Montana Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said the second provision has already generated some confusion. In one judicial district, a judge who has been presiding over one of Stephens' cases for two years appears to be under the impression that the recusal can be waived by the prosecutors, though Stephens doesn't read the new law that way.

Stephens also said the campaign contribution provision could scramble a number of his cases. In Gallatin County District Court, Stephens represents a client in a dependency and neglect case related to a death penalty case before Judge Peter Ohman. Stephens had planned on donating to Ohman's re-election, but with the new law, Ohman's recusal would complicate his case and his client's life.

"If Judge Ohman had to leave that case, it would be a dumpster fire," Stephens said.

Assistant Attorney General Aislinn Brown, representing the state in the matter, argued the plaintiffs had not met the burden of showing irreparable harm done if the sections of SB 319 were to take effect Thursday. She dismissed concerns of a mass recusal of judges who had received campaign contributions from attorneys in their district, saying the new law only applied to cases that were filed on or after July 1.
"The history of this litigation has given us reason to be skeptical of the representations by the Legislature and its counsel in this matter," the order states, referencing the Montana Attorney General's Office as the Legislature's counsel. " Here, the Legislature has failed to to bear its 'heavy burden' of persuading this court that it will not simply reissue the same subpoena to McLaughlin should it be dissatisfied with the results of its efforts to obtain the sought-after materials without litigation."

A spokesperson for the Attorney General's Office said in an email Tuesday the ruling "defied common sense."

"Its striking that the Supreme Court is escalating the situation while the Legislature continues to seek negotiation for the release of public records," the spokesperson said. "There is no reality in which the Supreme Court justices can reasonably claim to be impartial and unbiased judges in a case involving their own employee and communications  it simply defies common sense."
In the declaration, the ministers concurred that advancing these goals requires the collective and coordinated leadership and action at the global level and a people-centered approach,.

"The G-20 is well positioned to provide such leadership, while promoting an inclusive approach with all stakeholders, private and public, and pursuing ambitious yet concrete and actionable programs, the declaration reads.

The Group of 20 nations account for more than half the world's population and some 80% of its GDP.

The declaration also recognizes the need for "accelerating the adaptation of agriculture and food systems to climate change."'

Beyond the differences and distances among some countries present at the G-20 table, we are all in agreement on climate change, sustainability, on the great issues that today can only be resolved with global cooperation, Di Maio said.

But there were some sharp exchanges involving some of the major powers during the day.

Arriving, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said it was important that we sit together in this round with countries like Russia and China, and that we openly address the fact that we do not think much of their vaccine diplomacy.
The Legislature did pass a good, bipartisan, tax credit bill for developers to build workforce housing. Sadly, our right wing Gov. Greg Gianforte vetoed it, saying in his veto letter the state already gets federal tax credits and Section 8 funding. He failed to mention the long waiting list for Section 8 housing. We need state government to step up for Montanans. Thats the role of government. The governor praised bad, land use bills passed by Republicans that would ease regulations that cut costs for developers. I dont want affordable housing that risks public health and safety. As I write this, tragic news is breaking about the condo building collapse in Florida. Years of structural damage and officially ignored engineering recommendations look like the cause. Regulations protect people.

Finally, the governor said affordable housing credits would pose an unanticipated risk to fiscal stability. Listen friends  our state faces a much greater fiscal threat in stifled small businesses and lack of worker housing. This, when Republican tax bills gave the super wealthy and big, out-of-state corporations tax treats that reduce our state revenues by $100 million each biennium. One bill alone gives 80% of the tax cut to the top 20% of Montanans.
DECATUR  The Washington Post on Tuesday published a story that Archer Daniels Midland Co. sold a grain storage plant valued at millions of dollars to Sonny Perdue for $250,000 weeks after he was named U.S. agriculture secretary.

The transaction in February 2017 was for a plant in South Carolina, the paper reported.

ADM, which has its North American headquarters in Decatur, "sold the land at a small fraction of its estimated value just as it stood to benefit from a friendly secretary of agriculture," the Post reported.

A company spokeswoman told the Post that the deal with negotiated before President Donald Trump was elected and not sold at a discount.

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The food processing company was based in Decatur until 2014, when the international headquarters moved to Chicago.

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The eyes and ears of every farmer, every grain trader, every food processor, and every grain importer will be on the USDA lock up at 11 a.m. Wednesday.

The National Agriculture Statistics Service at that time will release its data for the number of acres of corn and soybeans planted by farmers this year. And the number will MOVE the market.

With both corn and soybean prices seemingly topping out, but with very tight stocks and strong demand, grain traders are nervous as cats on the proverbial hot tin roof. An increased number of acres of both corn and soybeans will be needed to meet projected demand for the next marketing year beginning in September.

That would not typically be a problem, but two issues are in the way of that. Earlier this year farmers indicated their intentions to plant fewer acres than the market thought were needed, and that fueled prices on their recent trajectory.

But Mother Nature also felt fewer acres were needed and has provided a drought that has been the most serious in nearly a century. Much of the drought affecting the Corn Belt is focused on the Dakotas and Minnesota where 19% of corn acres and 23% of soybean acres are concentrated. Expected substantial cuts in their yields will cut deeply into overall U.S. corn and soybean production and there would be insufficient stocks to fill domestic and foreign demand.

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Grain traders do not want to be caught on the wrong side of the market, should Wednesdays acreage number be too low for comfort and be forced to increase their positions as the market is throttled upward. And they dont want to be overly stocked, should acreage be abundant and extra grain not needed.

Farmers are the same way. They have had one of the most unanticipated opportunities to sell into a rising market than ever before. Many sold early, not expecting to see corn and soybean prices double. And they dont want to be shut out of another opportunity, should USDA acres be relatively low in the wake of drought-shortened yields.

The northwestern half of the Corn Belt is the region that is suffering from a lack of rain. But suddenly the 8-, 9-, and 10-inch rainfall moving through Central Illinois in the past week also has a detrimental impact on yields where drainage is overburdened. Ponds hidden in fields will rapidly cut yields as the crop is cooked in hot standing water.

With all the variables that exist going into the report, traders have tried to protect their interests. Compared to the 91.1 million acres of corn USDA forecast in March, the market is expecting between 92 and 95.8 million acres. For soybeans, USDA projected 87.6 million acres in March, and traders have ramped that up to 88 to 90.6 million acres for Wednesday's report.

Ironically, the grain traders will have to decide whether to push prices because of acreage or because of weather adversities.

Thats why they earn big bucks.

Stu Ellis is an observer of the Central Illinois agriculture scene. In addition to his weekly column, you can view his From The Farm and Harvest Heritage reports on WCIA 3 News.

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DECATUR  Dwayne Bryant didn't mince words when he spoke at the Peace Summit held at The Salvation Army on Monday.

American is too dumb for its own good, he said, after showing the attendees the statistics for screen time in the United States. African-Americans spend an average of seven hours a day using social media and watching TV; whites, five hours.

Black males, he said, read far fewer books than any other group and are more likely, as students, to fall behind. The reason, he said, is that they don't see adult Black males reading, and kids pay far more attention to what adults in their lives do than they do to what they say.

What I do speaks so loudly that no one can hear what I say, Bryant said.

The Peace Summit is the first of what organizers hope will be quarterly meetings to address issues in Decatur with action, said Keyria Rodgers. She is director of Millikin Universitys Criminal Justice Department, instructor of criminal justice, director of the Teen Justice Diversion Program, grant administrator for Adult Redeploy Illinois, and a member of several boards including Court-Appointed Special Advocates and the Boys and Girls Club of Decatur.

This is the introduction to the Decatur Peace Hub, she said. This is about identifying ways to figure out what it is that Decatur needs and what are we missing?

The partnership of Millikin University, the Global Restorative Justice Partnership and The Salvation Army, sponsored by Illinois Humanities, will form a core group with three main things to focus on, at least at first: police and the community; community and support groups to fill needs such as mental health resources; and youth and community, that will include a youth council and safe places to gather. The three goals are the result of brainstorming sessions held on Monday.

I think everybody's sick and tired of going to summits where you meet and feel good for the day and then that's it, she said.

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Deloyde Sanders' group came up with the idea for a youth city council who could advise the Decatur City Council on youth concerns and needs, while Nichole Hill's group said adult mentors are needed for young people.

Instead of 'us' vs. 'them,' it needs to be 'us,'  said Nichole, 14. It needs to be 'we,' the community as a whole.

Bryant is an author and speaker who has appeared on Oprah Winfrey's show, hosted the Unity Breakfast for former President Obama's Presidential Library and is CEO of Inner Vision International. His particular area of expertise is law enforcement and community relations, and to illustrate that, he asked a group of young people who were there to act as if they were hanging out after school. He played the role of a police officer who had received a report to be on the lookout for a large Black male wearing a blue shirt. He stopped the group and patted down one of the young men, taller than the others and wearing a blue shirt. The young man pushed his hands away, reflexively, and Bryant told the gathering that the youngsters had no way of knowing the officer had received that report, and the officer didn't explain, but their reactions to being stopped, questioned, and searched were often the catalyst for escalating conflict between citizens and police.

When he asked the people in the audience if the officer had the right to pat down the young man, nearly all said no, but he said under the law, he actually did.

Officers know the law, he said, and you, young, beautiful people, don't.

Generational cycles have to be broken, Bryant said, and people of all races need to break unhealthy habits and work together to solve conflicts.

Will we take these lessons and harness the power and keep them, or will we go back to our divisions? he said.

Contact Valerie Wells at (217) 421-7982. Follow her on Twitter: @modgirlreporter

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The Peace Summit, held at The Salvation Army on Monday, is the first meeting of the Decatur Peace Hub, which will address needs in Decatur with action and quarterly meetings to check on progress.
SHELBYVILLE  Briar True of Neoga was found guilty of speeding in a Shelby County Circuit Court bench trial stemming from his having hit and killed an 84-year-old pedestrian while traveling at a speed estimated between 82 and 98 mph.

True, 26, was convicted June 16 by Judge Martin Siemer. Free on bail, True faces maximum penalties of up to a year in jail and a fine of up to $2,500. A sentencing date hasn't been set.

The incident occurred around 5 a.m. on June 4, 2020, on Illinois Route 16 near the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Visitors Center. The posted speed limit in that zone in 45 mph.

State Police said Sidney K. Manning was struck and killed by the westbound vehicle while crossing the road to gain access to a Lake Shelbyville walking path near his home.

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Shelby County States Attorney Nichole Kroncke said True had first been booked on preliminary charges of driving under the influence after cannabis was detected in his blood. But Kroncke said she had no choice but to dismiss that count as the level of cannabis turned out to be far below the minimum necessary for a DUI prosecution.

And for a charge of reckless homicide or reckless driving, speed alone is insufficient for that charge; thats what the case law in Illinois says, Kroncke added. But it was just a horrible incident.

The collision was investigated by the State Police which used what Kroncke described as complicated crash reconstruction variables and methodology to understand how the incident unfolded. Brian Scott and Steve Coady, crash reconstruction experts, testified at Trues trial.

Contact Tony Reid at (217) 421-7977. Follow him on Twitter: @TonyJReid

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The walk-in clinic is for patients ages 12 years and older. A photo ID or insurance card is recommended. The patient must return to the MCHD on July 21 for second dose.

A parent or legal guardian must be present with the minor. If someone other than a parent or legal guardian will bring the child, the Permission/Proxy Form will need to be filled out and signed by the parent or legal guardian. The form must be brought to the clinic. The form can be found at https://bit.ly/3vWaxzO.
Lawyers for an Illinois man sentenced to 130 years for a murder when he was 16 years old are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to clarify how life sentences for juveniles should be reevaluated. That's in light of recent decisions by the high court against that practice.
Illinoisans with expired driver's licenses will have until January 1 to renew them, an extra five months from the last deadline set.

The Secretary of State's office has given drivers leeway in renewing their licenses and identification cards during the COVID-19 pandemic. The offices were closed off and on in 2020, and staff are working through a backlog.

Long lines and social distancing protocols at driver services facilities meant some could be forced to wait outside, a dangerous prospect in the summer heat.

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Illinoisans will now have until the new year to renew their licenses and to try to avoid waiting in line. Secretary of State Jesse White urged people to delay their visits, but to be prepared to wait outside if they do. White also encouraged the public to visit www.cyberdriveillinois.com to see if the service they need can be done online.

As long as they're eligible, residents can buy license plate stickers, get a duplicate driver's license or ID card and renew their driver's license or ID cards online.

Expired IDs and those that expire through December will be valid until Jan. 1, 2022. The extension does not apply to commercial driver's licenses or CDL learner's permits.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed a bill into law Friday allowing the extension.

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This years celebration of the Fourth of July provides a particularly apt occasion for considering the health of our republic.

Opinions vary. One friend thinks that democracy as we used to know it in America is in extreme peril. Another believes that things are no worse now than they were in the '60s. (I assume he means the 1960s, not the 1860s.)

And a third maintains that Americas commitment to democracy endures and that the institutions originated by the Founders have succeeded in keeping our nation on track.

I hope he is correct, but, at best, its a close-run thing. Liberals and conservatives who are still committed to the values we celebrate on the Fourth of July should be concerned.

Some of this concern stems from the remarkable events of the past five years. Normal presidents dont behave in ways that result in two impeachments in one term. Normal presidents dont alienate our allies and cozy up to autocrats. Normal presidents dont prefer the dubious declarations of one of our chief adversaries over the findings of our intelligence agencies. Normal presidents dont refuse to perform a peaceful transfer of power when they lose an election. And then theres Jan. 6.

For many Trump supporters, his abnormality is part of his appeal. Fair enough. But nearly two-thirds of Republicans still believe that Biden won the presidency only because of voter fraud. There is no evidence of this. But whether youre from the left or the right, this fact cannot bode well for the health of the republic and the principles we celebrate on the Fourth of July.

We should be equally concerned about the fact that Trumps false contention that he won the election is piping energy into efforts to implement state laws that make it both harder to vote and easier for state legislatures to overturn the outcomes of legitimate elections. In fact, the Republican leadership of my home state  Texas  has been at the forefront of this effort to quash voter participation and increase its control over elections.

Other concerning states rights efforts  that is, anti-federal government  are developing in Texas, as well. Gov. Greg Abbott has announced plans to build a border wall with tax money and private donations. He and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey sent a joint letter to the governors of 48 other states requesting them to send law enforcement staff and resources to protect the border. So far, Nebraska, Florida and Iowa have responded.

This is mostly political theater. But Texas HB 2622 isnt. As one of a host of other bills expanding gun rights in Texas, it directs police and other state and local entities to refuse to enforce federal gun laws. Abbott signed HB 2622 on June 18. Eight other states have passed similar laws. In Missouri a police agency can be fined $50,000 for enforcing certain federal laws.

This is called nullification, the dubious legal theory that states retain the right to ignore any federal law that they believe violates the Constitution.

The most notorious test of this theory occurred in 1832, when South Carolina, led by President Andrew Jacksons vice president, John C. Calhoun, declared the protective Tariff of 1828 unconstitutional and therefore null and void in that state. South Carolina was preparing to take up arms when the issue was defused through compromise.

But the courts have never looked kindly on nullification, favoring instead the Constitutions Supremacy Clause, which says that federal law takes precedence over state law.

So, of course, HB 2622 is political theater, as well. If its challenged in court, its likely to lose. Still it is ominous and sobering when at least nine states pass legislation that rejects a long-standing constitutional principle essential to our national unity.

I suspect its no coincidence that the federal laws they choose to subvert have to do with firearms.

Heres to the birth of our exceptional republic and its continued well-being! But lets take notice that a significant portion of our nations citizenry is in a divisive, anti-democratic, anti-unionist mood reminiscent of the decades before the Civil War. Happy Fourth of July!

John M. Crisp is an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service. Email jcrispcolumns@gmail.com.

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He made his second visit to Fort Bliss since it opened in March and said more services and staffing have been added, including case managers who have helped get children released to relatives in the U.S. or placed in licensed facilities more quickly.

In transcripts of interviews done by attorneys and filed in federal court in Los Angeles last week, migrant children described their desperation to get out of Fort Bliss and the other large shelters set up by the Biden administration.

The children were interviewed from March to June by attorneys monitoring a longstanding settlement governing custody conditions for migrant children.

Some of the children said they did not know if anyone was working to reunite them with their families, giving them anxiety. Others did not have enough access to a mental health counselor, had trouble sleeping because lights were kept on at night and were avoiding meals because the food smelled foul. Several said they spent their days sleeping and had been in the facilities, like Fort Bliss, for more than a month.
Others, after handling the pandemic well with effective controls, hung back in the inoculation race but are now sprinting to catch up as new variants threaten. Singapore has become the first Southeast Asian nation to distribute at least one shot to more than half its population. China has fully vaccinated 80% of adults in Beijing and distributed more than 1 billion doses overall, more than a third of the global total, leaning on a tried-and-tested top-down approach with the July 1 centenary of the Communist Party on the horizon.

Strongmen leaders have been among the worst, too inflexible to bow to science and fact and loathe to deliver bad news. Russia is one such mess. Despite a pioneering COVID-19 shot, deep-rooted vaccine hesitancy has gotten worse with time, not better. Rather than prioritizing inoculations, officials including President Vladimir Putin  never seen in a mask  signaled all was well. It left the country vulnerable to the delta variant-fueled third wave now tearing through Moscow, which was forced last week to mandate jabs for service-sector workers. India, too complacent after its first wave ebbed, has paid an even higher price. The reality of the late stage of this pandemic is, first, that theres no end to the cycle of surges and lockdowns without vaccinations. There must be a concerted push to get vaccines to the developing world soon  and not by backloading donations, as the Group of Seven nations appeared to do earlier this month. At-risk, jab-hesitant weak spots in the West will need to be tackled. And investment is critically needed in logistics and health care structures that can, in everyones interest, continue monitoring once the pandemic fades from headlines.
The Islamic Republic of Iran, as it calls itself, is not a republic, but it is Islamic.

Here are two definitions to make the point before moving on to a larger point.

A republic is defined by dictionary.com as a state in which the supreme power rests in the body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by representatives chosen directly or indirectly by them. Irans elections put supreme power in religious leaders, not the people. In previous elections when there were public demonstrations in opposition to the government, the people were jailed, or murdered by the regime.

Radical Islam is a system of beliefs founded on interpretations of the Koran made by political leadership that seeks to impose those beliefs on its citizens and the rest of the world, by force if necessary. At least, thats my definition, based on sermons from hardline mullahs in Iran and elsewhere, along with personal observations about how those beliefs are put into practice.

Obviously not all Muslims agree on everything, especially when it comes to politics. Neither do Christians and Jews, for that matter, but Christians and Jews are not known for wanting to eliminate nations they dont like or for forcibly imposing their will on others.
Elections in Hickory and Long View have officially been pushed back to next year.

On Friday, Gov. Roy Cooper announced in a statement that Senate Bill 722, which would delay municipal elections in towns or cities where candidates are elected from districts, will become law.

Cooper said he would allow it to become law without his signature. In North Carolina, bills become law if the governor does not take action on them within 10 days.

Cooper acknowledged the need to change election dates in light of delayed census numbers needed for redistricting but he also said decisions about local elections like these should involve more open discussion and public input.

The law extends the terms of current officeholders in the affected cities until the elections can be held and winners certified and seated next year.

How elections will and will not change this year

Many Catawba County elections will still be held this year.

Elections in Newton, Conover, Claremont, Maiden, the town of Catawba and Brookford are all still happening as scheduled. Filing for these races begins on Friday.
Populists disregard for experts through the pandemic has been exceedingly calamitous. Ignoring the advice of public health officials, Bolsonaro resisted calls for locking down Brazil. Mexicos president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador continued to go to political rallies where he would hug and kiss attendees unmasked. President John Magufuli of Tanzania claimed there was an herbal remedy for COVID, despite the lack of scientific evidence supporting his claim. And Donald Trump discouraged, even ridiculed, mask wearing, suggested that COVID-19 was not as bad as the flu, and touted hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure. Bolsonaro, Lopez Obrador, Magufuli, and Trump all contracted COVID themselves, and Magufuli died. In general, the United States, Brazil, Mexico, India, Russia, and other countries led by populist leaders have not fared well during the pandemic, having among the highest rates of COVID cases and death rates among countries in the world.

The pandemic left populist leaders exposed. Expert advice can be ignored at not only ones own peril, but at the peril of entire nations for those countries governed by populists. There are not always simple solutions to complex problems. Hydroxychloroquine did not save us nor did the virus simply disappear as Trump said that it would. Keeping infection rates low, as some countries have, necessitated a multi-pronged strategy involving lockdowns, quarantining, contact tracing, and the widespread use of masks, among other measures. Most important in the long run to containing COVID will be the administration of vaccines that have gone through proper scientific trials to test for efficacy and safety. The pandemic has demonstrated just how important deferring to experts can be  it is not an exaggeration to say that it can be a matter of life and death of epic proportions.
" " Conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot were sentenced to being hanged, drawn and quartered, though historians say the practice of tying limbs to four horses and spurring them to run in four different directions was never done in England. Instead, bodies were quartered after death. Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Let's say you're the king of England in the 13th century. You enjoy absolute power and authority, but only if you can keep your grip on the throne, and there are all sorts of plotting pretenders and rebellious radicals keen on toppling your reign and seeing you dead.

So, what can you do to scare them off? You can't post a bunch of threatening Tweets (heck, the printing press is still a few centuries away). But maybe, just maybe, you can devise a form of punishment so twisted and sadistic that only a lunatic would even entertain the thought of committing high treason.

That's how historians believe medieval monarchs came up with the wildly violent execution method known as hanging, drawing and quartering. If you've seen the film "Braveheart," then you've had a (nauseating) taste of just how torturous and cruel the practice was. The Scottish rebel William Wallace was hanged, drawn and quartered in 1305 (accused of being a traitor to King Edward I) and in the movie we see him disemboweled  his abdomen cut open and his intestines removed  while still very much alive. And that was only one part of the ordeal!

" " William Wallace (immortalized in the movie "Braveheart") is dragged (or "drawn") to his execution at Smithfield where he will be hanged, disemboweled and quartered, in 1305. Culture Club/Getty Images

From the 13th century all the way until the 19th century, hundreds of Englishmen convicted of high treason were sentenced to die by this very public and grisly display of absolute power, including rebels like Wallace, political terrorists like Guy Fawkes and Catholic martyrs who refused to recognize the authority of the Church of England.

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Drawing First, Then Hanging and Quartering

Richard Clark is the creator of the excellent history website Capital Punishment U.K. and the author of "Capital Punishment in Britain." He says that hanging, drawing and quartering was the "ultimate" punishment, but that the name creates some confusion.

Here's the actual text of the English law (on the books until 1870) outlining the death sentence for anyone convicted of high treason:

"That you be drawn on a hurdle to the place of execution where you shall be hanged by the neck and being alive cut down, your privy members shall be cut off and your bowels taken out and burned before you, your head severed from your body and your body divided into four quarters to be disposed of at the King's pleasure."

The "drawing" part actually comes first, and it involves the convict being tied to a type of sled that's "drawn" or dragged behind a horse all the way from the prison to the gallows. For many centuries, that journey was a full 3 miles from Newgate Prison in London to Tyburn, a remote locale outside of the city whose name became inextricably linked with public executions.

"It was probably a good three-hour drag," says Clark, and the streets would have been packed with riotous crowds jeering and throwing garbage at the poor sap as he prepared to meet his maker in the worst manner possible.

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Hanged Until 'Mostly Dead,' Then Comes the Really Bad Part

Fans of "The Princess Bride" know that there's a big difference between being "all dead" and "mostly dead," and so did medieval executioners. After being dragged to Tyburn, the condemned man was hung from a rope (from a gallows or just a tall ladder), but not dropped the necessary distance to snap his neck. After a few terrifying minutes of near-asphyxiation, the man was cut down while only mostly dead.

Boy, did he wish he was all dead! Because what came next was absolute madness. As the law dictated, his "privy members" were cut off first  that means (ahem) his penis and testicles  and tossed in a roaring fire. Next, his abdomen was slit open from groin to sternum and his intestines were pulled out.

"At what point people lost consciousness and died, exactly, we'll never know," says Clark, but if the "de-privying" and disemboweling didn't do the trick, the next part certainly did  the man's heart was cut from his chest and also burned.

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Quartering as a Publicity Stunt

In England, the final step of hanging, drawing and quartering was to cut off the condemned man's head and then "quarter" his remaining corpse by carving it into four pieces. According to graphic medieval drawings, that basically meant cutting off the legs and arms.

Clark says that the severed limbs were parboiled in a blend of spices designed to preserve the flesh for as long as possible. That's because the dead man's body parts would next be taken on a "publicity tour" of sorts to let everyone know what happens to people who challenge the authority of the king.

"One of the main points of doing all of this was to demonstrate the absolute power of the monarchy," says Clark. "Because there was no media or newspapers back then, the quartering could distribute the body parts to the surrounding towns as a warning."

" " On June 19, 1535, monks of the London Charterhouse were executed at Tyburn. They were drawn, hanged and quartered for refusing to accept King Henry VIII as the supreme head of the Church. The Print Collector/Getty Images

The severed head was the sternest warning sign of all. The heads of prominent traitors like Wallace and Fawkes were placed on spikes on London Bridge or the Tower of London.

What about the practice of quartering a victim's body by tying his limbs to four horses and spurring them to run in four different directions? Clark says that was never done in England, but there's evidence that the French indulged, at least as torture. In 1610, King Henry IV of France was assassinated and the perpetrator, a man named Francois Ravaillac, was publicly tortured to reveal his accomplices. In addition to being scourged with hot pincers and molten lead, he was "torn to pieces by four horses," according to a report.

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A Contemporary Account of a 1782 Execution

The very first person to be sentenced to hanging, drawing and quartering in England was a pirate named William Maurice in 1241, but there are scant details about his crimes or his execution. Even the famous executions of Wallace and Fawkes lack much information beyond a few surviving illustrations.

But in 1782, a naval clerk named David Tyrie was convicted of high treason for selling information to the French, and this time there were newspapers around to record the event for posterity. Tyrie's execution is believed to be the last time that the three-part death sentence was carried out in full, and it drew a blood-thirsty crowd of 100,000 to the British coastal town of Portsmouth. The Hampshire Chronicle reported Aug. 31, 1782:

"After hanging exactly twenty-two minutes, he was lowered upon the sledge, and the sentence literally put in execution. His head was severed from his body, his heart taken out and burnt, his privities cut off, and his body quartered. He was then put into a coffin and buried among the pebbles by the sea-side; but no sooner had the officers retired, but the sailors dug up the coffin, took out the body, and cut it in a thousand pieces, every one carrying away a piece of his body to shew their messmates on board. A more dreadful, affecting execution was perhaps never seen."

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Why The Ugly Practice Ended

Over time, Clark says, "the more gruesome parts of the punishment were omitted," as with the executions of the five men convicted in the Cato Street Conspiracy in 1820. Although the men were sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered in the traditional grisly fashion, the sheriff of London didn't want to tie up traffic with a long procession and the executioners devised a more efficient way of choreographing the killings, says Clark.

The five were hung for 30 minutes to ensure they were completely dead. Then they were laid one by one in coffins conveniently placed atop the gallows. At the head of each coffin was a raised block upon which each man's head was removed by a trained surgeon or butcher. In this more "civilized" version of the execution, the severed head was raised to the crowd along with the pronouncement, "This is the head of a traitor," but the rest of the body was left intact.

By the mid-19th century, there just weren't as many acts of rebellion, says Clark, plus Victorian-era Londoners started taking a "not in my backyard" stance on public executions.

"The gentrification of places like Tyburn and Newgate had taken place by then and people didn't want that kind of thing happening in their neighborhood," says Clark. "They no longer found these kinds of horrific punishments something they wanted to see."

In 1870, the sentence of hanging, drawing and quartering was officially removed from English law as part of the Forfeiture Act of 1870.

Now That's Not Much Better "For the sake of decency," says Clark, women convicted of high treason were spared a death by hanging, drawing and quartering. They were burned at the stake instead.
The natural instinct of a dairy farmer is to prioritize the cows. Commonly, cows are the first to eat, first to receive fresh bedding, and even the first to get a pedicure in the form of a hoof trim. While dairy cow comfort is second to none, it is critical to care for the health of yourself and the farms employees, especially as we endure elevated temperatures.

The importance of employee safety was discussed in a recent Dairy news and views podcast by Iowa State University Extension and Outreach. Melissa ORourke, a farm and agri-business management specialist and extension dairy team member, shared why farm supervisors must talk about heat illness with their employees.

According to the Center for Disease Control, more than 700 people die from heat-related causes in the United States each year. ORourke stated that most of these deaths could have been prevented with better awareness and precautions.



Signs of heat stress

Heat stress can come about by either environmental conditions or extreme physical labor that raises the internal body temperature. Anyone can experience the effects of heat, but those more at risk include employees that are older, overweight, or suffer from heart problems.

Initial signs of heat illness include rashes, cramping, fainting, and exhaustion. Although these symptoms are not severe, they can lead to more serious issues if not resolved. People with these conditions should move into a cool area and drink plenty of water.

Heat strokes are a more severe consequence of hot weather that can cause permanent disability or death. ORourke said, Heat strokes occur when the body becomes unable to control its internal temperature.

She warned that supervisors and employees must watch for common signs of heat stroke including dry skin, chills, hallucination, profuse sweating, dizziness, headache, throbbing, and slurred speech. If any symptoms are noticed, 911 should be called immediately and the person should be moved to a cool area to be sponged or bathed in cold water.



Enforcing safe habits

ORourke shared, Farm owners and supervisors should manage the employee working conditions where the heat stress might occur. Employees should drink an adequate amount of water and wear breathable clothing.

Additionally, to lessen the chance of heat illness, supervisors and employees should collaborate to alleviate the workload. Employees that are new to hot temperatures may need to be exposed in short increments. Otherwise, physically exhausting tasks should be saved for cooler parts of the day, like morning or night.



Supervisors can hang posters around the farm and hand out cards to employees with advice on heat illness. These resources can be found in multiple languages at osha.gov/heat. More articles, videos, and training resources can be found here.



Just as there is no I in team, not one supervisor can resolve heat stress risks. By working together, managers and employees can monitor each other and watch for signs of heat illness. Just like you do with your cows, prioritize the health of yourself and your employees.





To comment, email your remarks to intel@hoards.com.

(c) Hoard's Dairyman Intel 2021

June 28, 2021
New Delhi, Jun 29 (PTI) The government has permitted imports of potatoes from Bhutan without licence till June 2022, a move which would help boost domestic supply of the kitchen staple.

The imports were earlier allowed without licence only up to January 31, 2021.

'Import of potatoes... is allowed from Bhutan without license upto June 30, 2022,' the Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT) has said in a notification.

Potato imports otherwise fall in the restricted category, which means that an importer requires a licence from the DGFT for the inbound shipments. India imported potatoes worth just Rs 24.17 lakh in 2020-21 as against Rs 10.97 lakh in 2019-20. PTI RR ABM ABM
Mumbai, Jun 29 (PTI) A doctor wanted in connection with a bogus vaccination drive case registered at the Kandivali police station in Mumbai surrendered before the police on Tuesday, a day after a sessions court rejected his anticipatory bail application, an official said.

Deputy Commissioner of Police Vishal Thakur said Dr Manish Tripathi was arrested after his role was established in the crime but refused to elaborate.

Tripathi is one of the six accused whose name had cropped up in the 'bogus' vaccination drive conducted at a housing society in suburban Kandivali last month. Police had already arrested six persons in connection with the case.

The official said Dr Tripathi reached the Kandivali police station in the afternoon and surrendered himself.

A Special Investigation Team (SIT) is probing the case now, he said. In his pre-arrest bail application filed before the sessions court in Dindoshi on June 22, Dr Tripathi had stated the main accused in the case is a private hospital but the Mumbai Police are trying to protect its owners who are 'powerful and politically well-connected'.

In a complaint submitted to the police, Hiranandani Heritage Residents Welfare Association (HHRWA) had claimed that its members were cheated during a vaccination camp organised on its campus by some persons who claimed to represent a private hospital.

The residents had claimed that they couldn't find their details on the CO-WIN app and were issued certificates in the name of three different hospitals. They had also expressed fear that the vaccine administered to them could be spurious.

The FIR was registered at the Kandivali police station on June 17 for conducting an unauthorised vaccination drive for 390 people on May 30.

Subsequently, similar FIRs were registered in Versova, Khar, Borivali, Bhoiwada and other areas of Mumbai. Police suspect some of the accused were common in these incidents. PTI ZA NSK NSK
People of a certain generation will likely remember the moment when Saddam Husseins capture was announced at a news conference by US administrator Paul Bremer.

The former Iraqi President stood trial that lasted nearly three years before he was executed on December 30, 2006 after being convicted of crimes against humanity by the Iraqi Special Tribunal for the Dujail massacre. The massacre involved the killing of 148 Iraqi Shi'ites in the Iraqi town of Ad Dujayl in 1982 in retaliation for an assassination attempt against Hussein.

IRAQ - UNDATED: (FILE PHOTO) Saddam Hussein poses in an undated photo. Officials say the United States is offering a $25 million reward for any information leading to the capture of ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein or proof of his death. (Photo by Getty Images)

Where and when was Saddam Hussein executed?

While the exact time of the execution remains debated it is generally agreed that Saddam Hussein was executed sometime between 6 am and 6.10 am on December 2006 at a joint Iraqi-American military base called Camp Justice. Located in Kazimain, a north-eastern suburb of Baghdad, Camp Justice was likely the safest place in Iraq for the execution given the high profile status of Saddam Hussein.

According to some Iraqi officials, the Americans were not keen on carrying out the execution immediately and wanted to wait another fortnight. However, the Iraqi government provided all the paperwork they had asked for and so the execution was scheduled for December 30, 2006.

Technically, it wasnt the Americans who executed Saddam Hussein but rather the Iraqi government that had been formed following the fall of the dictator. To be clear, Saddams fall was a direct result of an American-led coalitions war against Iraq. Americas rationale for going to war was to remove a regime that developed and used weapons of mass destruction, that harboured and supported terrorists, committed outrageous human rights abuses, and defied the just demands of the United Nations and the world. However, the Geneva Convention grants certain rights to Prisoners of War and prevents revenge-style execution. So, Saddam was tried not by the invaders but rather by the government in a country that he once ruled with an iron fist and for crimes committed on Iraqi soil. His trial was held in an Iraqi court and not an American one. As a result, while he remained in custody of the US Army, he had to be formally handed over to the Iraqis for carrying out the execution. It has been also reported that no American representatives were present at the time of Saddam Husseins execution.

Story continues

What happened to Hitlers body after he died?

Saddam Hussein is filmed after his capture in this footage released December 14, 2003. U.S. troops captured Saddam Hussein near his home town of Tikrit announced U.S. administrator in Iraq Paul Bremer on Sunday, in a major coup for Washington's beleaguered occupation force in Iraq. Pictures of the month December 2003. REUTERS/Handout FR05090005 THI

How was Saddam Hussein executed?

As President of Iraq, Saddam Hussein was also the commander of the Iraqi military. So when he was handed down the sentence, he requested to be executed by firing squad rather than by hanging as it was the lawful military capital punishment. The court denied this request.

On the morning of December 30, 2006, Saddam Hussein was made to walk to the gallows. He was reportedly carrying a copy of the Quran that had been with him throughout his trial. Saddam was said to have shown no remorse for his actions and was executed by hanging sometime between 6 am and 6.10 am. Reports suggest that there was a crack heard when the trapdoor under his feet opened up. This indicated the breaking of the neck. He was suspended for a few minutes as is practice and a doctor listened with a stethoscope for a heartbeat and confirmed his death.

Where was Saddam Hussein buried?

Following the execution, Saddam Husseins body was taken to Al-Awja, near Tikrit, in Iraq where he was buried on December 31, 2006. Al-Awaja was Saddams birthplace and where his family members including his sons Uday and Qusay were buried.

Saddam was buried in an octagonal domed building inside a family plot in Al-Awja that he had commissioned in the 80s to celebrate religious festival. However the tomb was destroyed in the fight between ISIS and the Iraqi State military forces. There is some debate about whether Saddams body was exhumed before the strikes and taken away elsewhere or it was destroyed along with the tomb. There is, of course, no way to confirm this given the chaos that had ensued before and after the battles.

What happened to Hitlers body after he died?
CONCORD  Samara Chapman was awarded the $2,000 Dana Conner Richardson Memorial Scholarship recently. The scholarship is presented annually by Habitat for Humanity Cabarrus County and the Richardson family in memory of Dana Conner Richardson, the late associate director for the organization.

I knew a little about the scholarship, and then Mr. Richardson explained it a lot more when I went to accept it, said Chapman, who received the scholarship from Brent Richardson, husband of the late Dana Conner Richardson. This means a lot to me, especially with the way she (Richardson) gave back to the community.

Chapman, a recent A.L. Brown High School graduate, will attend the University of North Carolina at Charlotte next fall where she plans to major in computer science.

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Since 2011, Habitat for Humanity Cabarrus County and the Richardson family have partnered to award scholarship funds annually to one or more students of Habitat Cabarrus homeowners and their families in memory of Dana Conner Richardson, the late associate director for Habitat for Humanity Cabarrus County.
MATTOON  Lake Land College will host a court reporting First Steps class on Wednesday, July 28, from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. in Webb Hall, room 081.

The class is a free three-hour introductory course and is open to anyone interested in learning about the court reporting profession.

Attendees will learn about the career opportunities available to court reporters, as well as have the opportunity to gain experience on the industry-standard steno machine.

The class will also allow attendees to ask questions and explore the possibility of pursuing a career in court reporting.

One-third of our court reporters are already eligible for retirement, which means we will likely have to replace more than 400 employees in the next 10-15 years, Tammy Bumgarner, the director of court reporting services in Springfield, said.

Those interested in attending the First Steps class are asked to register at ilcrs.com/firststeps.

This class will also help to prepare students for the new Court Reporting Technology Degree special admission program at Lake Land College. The introduction of the program follows the increased high demand for court reporting and closed-captioning professionals throughout the nation.

The program will train students for careers in the judicial setting as either official or freelance court reporters. The program also provides students with the option to attain a captioning specialization, which prepares students for careers providing captioning for broadcast television and internet programs and working with the deaf or hard-of-hearing population by providing an accurate word-for-word text translation in education, civic and corporate settings.

Lake Land College will be hosting a virtual information session for this program Sept. 1. Instructors for the program will be available to answer questions, and all are welcome to attend. To register, visit lakelandcollege.edu/visit/.

Requirements for application to the program include admission to Lake Land College and completion of an interest survey, English and grammar exam and a timed typing exam. Those interested must complete a Laker Profile at lakelandcollege.edu/enroll/ and submit an intent to enroll at Lake Land College indicating the Academic Program (major) as AAS.CRT.TRK. The next cohort of students will begin in Spring 2022.

Interested students may begin the program with a typing speed of 40 words per minute. Keeping up with the pace of regular speech, the program is designed to train students on a specialized 24-key shorthand keyboard used by court reporters and captioners called a steno machine. Rather than typing out each word, letter for letter, as on a traditional keyboard, stenographers spell out syllables phonetically on a steno machine. This form of specialized shorthand allows court reporters and captioners to capture speech with near complete accuracy.

Students will purchase or rent-to-own a steno machine.

Upon graduation, students will be prepared to sit for the Illinois Certified Shorthand Reporter (CSR) or the National Court Reporters Association (NCRA) Registered Skilled Reporter (RSR) and Registered Professional Reporter (RPR) certification exams.

For more information about the special admission Court Reporting Technology Degree program, contact Lisa Earp, business instructor/director of court reporting/program coordinator office professionals, at learp@lakelandcollege.edu.

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MATTOON  A 21-year-old volunteer firefighter from Mattoon has died from injuries in a crash.

Illinois State Police District 10 reported that the incident occurred as firefighter Mehdi Mourad, a volunteer with the Wabash Fire Protection District, was responding in his personal vehicle to a crash at about 4:31 p.m. Sunday on Interstate 57 at milepost 184.

"We are saddened to announce the passing of one of our firemen last night," the Wabash Fire Protection District posted on its Facebook page Monday morning. "Please keep his family, friends, and our department in your thoughts and prayers during this unimaginable time"

Police said Mourad lost control of his car and rear-ended a sport utility vehicle driven by a Centralia woman. It was stopped on the right shoulder of I-57 southbound at about milepost 188 with its hazard lights activated due to severe weather in the area.

Mourad was trapped in his vehicle and had to be extricated, police said. Mourad was taken to an area hospital, where he succumbed to his injuries.

Police said the woman, 54, and her passenger, a 12-year-old girl from Centralia, were taken to an area hospital for treatment of non-life-threatening injuries.

Wabash safety officer Gary Kepley said on Monday that Mourad, who asked to be called "Matt" by his fellow firefighters, had just officially joined the fire department five days before the crash and he had been responding to just his second call for service at the time.

Kepley said Mourad was from Morocco and attended Lake Land College on a student visa, like his brother before him. Kepley said he has been in contact with Mourad's family.

"He had relayed to the family how excited he was to be on the fire department. He was going to be a great asset to this department, we could tell," Kepley said, adding that Mourad impressed them with his willingness to help after they met him two months ago at the station. "He just had a passion to get on a fire department and that young man showed up here, not knowing any us, and asked if he could apply, which says a lot about his character to walk into the unknown."

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Lake Land reported that Mourad was studying automotive technology there. He worked part-time as an international student aide and as a student assistant to the Lake Land College Police Department.

Faculty and students all liked him, and he made friends everywhere he went," said Kim Hunter, coordinator of the International Studies Program. "He was a wonderful credit and asset to the college. Mehdi was everything a Laker would want to be.

Lake Land President Josh Bullock said the college community was deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Mourad.

We extend our heartfelt condolences to the family, friends and colleagues of Mehdi Mourad, Bullock said.

Mourad began an internship at KC Summers Auto Group in Mattoon in June 2021. He also raced at the Coles County Dragway, both as a representative for Lake Land and in his own vehicle. He won two Novice Street Winner awards there.

Everybody at the track loved him, said adjunct automotive instructor Scotty Adams. He was a great guy that didnt know a stranger. I only knew him about two months, but he made quite the impression in the time that he was here. Automotive technology instructor Kevin Miller echoed Adams sentiments, saying Mourad was always positive and full of energy and was a great student.

"On behalf of CCD, we give our thoughts and prayers to the Mourad family," the dragway posted. "Mehdi is from Moracco and joined the CCD family this year. He always had a smile on his face. He will truly be missed by those he touched at CCD."

Lake Land reported that Counseling Services will have staff on hand to provide grief counseling to students as needed, as well as after-hours resources if requested.

Kepley said a visitation will be held 10 a.m.-noon Saturday at Johnson Funeral Home in Effingham, followed by a funeral service and by burial at a Neoga cemetery. He said Wabash Fire plans to organize a funeral procession and asks that any memorials for Mourad be left at the fire station at 3287 Lake Road near Lake Paradise.

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This settlement is another step in that direction, Juul said.

The attorney generals office said that most of its documents in the Juul legal complaint will be made public Thursday and housed in a depository maintained by a North Carolina public university.

These documents will increase transparency around Juuls marketing and research and will help prevent this kind of epidemic from happening again, according to the attorney generals news release.

Pre-trial hearing

The Durham Superior judge ruled May 19 in favor of several pre-trial motions by the attorney generals office regarding Juuls actions. He said the company should face sanctions that could run into the millions of dollars.

According to The News & Observer in Raleigh, the judge determined Juul had violated the Unfair or Deceptive Trade Practices Act  which can carry an up to $5,000 fine for each violation  thousands of times.

North Carolina was the first state to sue Juul over accusations that it targets underage youths with its products.
In addition to hanging out at the Clemmonsville Road/Stratford Road intersection, Fisher also visits a few breweries in town. And, he said, his DJ business is finally beginning to pick back up again. But he said that business on Clemmonsville Road is so good that he actually has had to cut back on other jobs and is thinking of expanding his hours here. He said he hopes to soon extend his hours at the Clemmonsville Road location into the evening.

Justin Cohen and fiancee Racheal Rosie operate The Dapper Bean part time. Like Fisher, Cohen  a musician  wasnt getting a whole lot of work during the height of the pandemic. He and Rosie, a veteran waitress, had a false start with a malfunctioning trailer last July, but they got back in business with a new trailer in November and have been going steady ever since. They are originally from New Hampshire but had been living in California for the past four years before moving here to be closer to Cohens parents in Mocksville. We were inspired by some friends who have Red Whale Coffee in California, Cohen said.

We love coffee, and we love going to coffee shops, Rosie said.

The Dapper Bean carries a full line of hot and cold espresso drinks, including lattes and cappuccinos. It exclusively uses Black Powder Coffee, a roaster in Mooresville, and even has the company make it a special blend.
Sturdy is white as are the people he is accused of assaulting.

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Christina Howell, spokeswoman for the Forsyth County Sheriffs Office, said the new charge came about because the sheriffs office continued to investigate. Howell said the extent of the boys injuries allowed the sheriffs office to upgrade the charge from simple assault to assault, inflicting serious injury. She said she was not aware of any additional charges.

Sturdy did not answer his phone Monday when a Winston-Salem Journal reporter called seeking comment, and it did not appear that a voice-mail system had been set up.

Nova Tempest, Oliva Pugh and their then-17-year-old brother were headed to a dental appointment on the morning of Dec. 3, Tempest and Pugh told the Winston-Salem Journal in a Zoom interview last year. Tempest was trying to get Pugh and their brother to back-to-back dental appointments, one at 11 a.m. and another at noon.

Tempest had just gotten off the highway onto Lewisville-Clemmons Road and driven through a traffic light when, according to Tempest and Pugh, they noticed Sturdy coming in front of them and slamming on the brakes. He was driving a blue PT Cruiser, they said.

Then he had the attention of everyone in the vehicle, Pugh said.
Abbott has pledged a $250 million down payment to resume construction of the wall. Governors in Florida, Arizona and Nebraska have dispatched law enforcement officers to Texas to support local officers and the border patrol.

What frustrates and contributes to the anger many Americans feel toward their government is that solutions exist, but many politicians refuse to apply them. Recent TV interviews with migrants have shown they were motivated to come because they believed President Biden is making it easier for them to be admitted.

Harris recent speech in which she said, Do not come, do not come had about as much credibility as Bill Clintons denial of sex with Monica Lewinsky.

There are critics who say this is part of a plan by Democrats to import new voters and make the party a permanent majority. That may be part of it, but I suspect another reason is to undermine the values and traditions that built and have sustained this country from the beginning. There are those secular progressives who speak and behave as if they hate America and would be happy to see it brought down to the level of other countries or destroyed outright. What better way to do this than to dilute those values and traditions by importing foreigners?
As do ours.

Relatives of known residents have streamed to the site, some to shout messages to loved ones possibly buried deep inside the pile.

We are just waiting for answers. Thats what we want, Dianne Ohayon, whose parents, Myriam and Arnie Notkin, were in the building, told The Associated Press. Its hard to go through these long days and we havent gotten any answers yet.

Part of the frustration for those waiting is that the rescue effort is taking so long. But it must be done deliberately. If there is a void space, we want to make sure were given every possibility of a survivor, Alan Cominsky, chief of the Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Department, said. Thats why we cant just go in and move things erratically, because thats going to have the worst outcome possible.

Needless to say, the more time that passes, the less likely it is that any further survivors will be found. Still, we hope.

We hope and worry and wait.

Of course, its natural to ask why such a thing would happen. We might expect it in other countries, but not on the beachfront in a well-to-do Florida community.
Take-out orders and drive-thru windows are nothing new in the food service industry. A positive of such is convenience  a downside for families is remembering and satisfying everyones desired dining preferences.

Enter family meals  just like what most family meals are like, with the same options for all.

With the emergence of the COVID-19 virus more than a year ago, limiting what restaurants could do in forms of service, some establishments have focused on developing a menu that appeals to the family unit. These meals are tailored for working parents  whether from home or in the office  and provide nutritional and tasty dining options for reasonable prices.

The family meals featured in this issue of L Magazine are from Copal Mexican Cuisine, MoMo Pizzeria & Ristorante and Villa Amore Italian Restaurant & Wine Bar. These meals are geared to serve four individuals and are for pickup at the restaurants.

Copal

Copal Mexican Cuisine owner Rebeca Lopez didnt know what to do when the COVID-19 restrictions hit last spring. How to keep her restaurant afloat?
And when vaccination began, health officials featured community members, including the veteran, getting the shots and talking about the importance of the vaccine.

Mona Zuffante, Winnebago public health administrator, said one of the tribes most elder elders told how she was able to finally meet a grandchild born during the pandemic after getting vaccinated.

Health officials connections in the community also helped. Danelle Smith is a Winnebago Tribe member and grew up in Winnebago. Zuffante is a longtime resident and a Native American. Many health system employees are part of the community.

The tribe opted to get its vaccine directly through the Indian Health Service, Smith said, and never ran out of shots. With its own ultra-cold storage on-site, it could take large shipments of vaccine.

Smith said more remains to be done to reach the 30% of residents who still are not vaccinated. Zuffante said health officials will continue to work with those who are hesitant, taking vaccine to homes or giving shots after hours if need be.

The longer we continue our vaccine campaign, the more receptive (theyre) going to be, she said.
Wythers said Williams was simply following his brother, accepted responsibility for what he did, "and I think he is genuinely sorry for the events of that night."

Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Woods called the suggestion that Dante Williams didn't know the others had guns or that anyone would get hurt laughable.

She said it was controverted by video evidence, which showed him beside the others, who clearly had guns.

"What I have mostly heard is excuses," Woods said.

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She said early July 31, 2018, when Brandon heard three intruders breaking into their Belmont home, she headed up to the main floor, where two of her kids and their grandmother were in their bedrooms.

Before Brandon could get to the girls, one of the would-be robbers, Patterson, unloaded his gun down the dark stairwell that headed to Brandon and Robertson's basement bedroom, hitting Brandon.

In February, a jury found Patterson and Damon Williams guilty of murder, two counts of attempted robbery and a firearms conspiracy for what happened. Dante Williams pleaded guilty on the eve of trial.
Kaye said organizing in front of the Governor's Mansion and across from the Capitol each week is symbolic, given the role of both in the state's death penalty law.

The front of the Capitol says: justice, mercy, wisdom, she said. We've decided to drop off mercy. That used to be important; it's not anymore, so we stand with the Capitol on one side and the Governor's Mansion on the other side, to remember that mercy is part of what this government has set out to do.

The most recent person to be executed in Nebraska was Carey Dean Moore by lethal injection on Aug. 14, 2018. Moore had been convicted of murdering two cab drivers in Omaha in 1979, a crime he committed when he was 21. At the time of his execution, he was 60.

He had been on death row for forever, Kaye said. He was no danger to anybody. Even the families of his victims were not calling for him to die.

Nebraska has 12 men on death row, including Aubrey Trail who was sentenced to die earlier this month for the murder and dismemberment of Sydney Loofe.

While the state has continued to sentence people to death for the most heinous of murders, state officials have acknowledged that they are not able to obtain drugs to administer lethal injection.
Despite an engineer's warning of major structural problems, a town building official told board members their Florida high-rise condominium was in very good shape almost three years before it collapsed, according to minutes of that meeting released Monday.
It follows on a police accountability package passed last summer that included a statewide ban on the use of chokeholds. Several lawmakers with the People of Color and Indigenous Caucus said ahead of the debate that the bill didn't go nearly far enough, while stopping short of saying they would vote against it.

Democratic Rep. Carlos Mariani, of St. Paul, chairman of the House public safety committee and one of the top negotiators on the bill, agreed it didn't go far enough but urged lawmakers to approve it anyway and to keep pushing for deeper change. He blamed the Senate GOP majority for blocking stronger action.

This is a mighty bill, Mariani said. And yet as meaningful as all these provisions and more are, it also lacks, in my opinion, the necessary weight of accountability to respond to the persistent use of deadly force by licensed police officers that have produced a steady stream of killings of Black and brown people in Minnesota.
La Vista police say they have evidence that may place a missing boy outside his apartment the day he disappeared.

Ryan Larsens DNA has been confirmed on an umbrella that someone found on the grounds of the Southfield Apartments, where he lived, Police Chief Bob Lausten said. The umbrella was Ryans, and he was carrying it the day he disappeared, Lausten said. The weather that day was damp.

The umbrella was turned in to police three to four days after Ryan disappeared, Lausten said.

Ryan, who has autism, slipped away from classes at La Vista West Elementary School about noon May 17. His 12th birthday has come and gone since then.

Authorities already had reason to suspect that Ryan had headed home because surveillance video of someone who appeared to be Ryan placed him across the street from his apartment complex at about 1:30 p.m. that day. Lausten said Ryan didnt have a key to his apartment, but a family member was expected home at about 2 p.m.

La Vista police had been hoping that enhancement of the video by the FBI would confirm that person was Ryan, but Lausten said Monday that the enhanced video didnt provide the confirmation authorities were seeking.
Davis, now 67, is serving a 25- to 50-year term.

El-Kasaby said the case is a tragedy. He said the state had a chance to help the girl when Domkpo got her away from Davis.

The victim in this case was failed by both her mother and the state, El-Kasaby said.

And by Davis and Domkpo.

Now a young woman, the girl told officials that Domkpo, who is 42, eventually demanded sex from her in return for his intervention.

The victim disclosed Kokou made her give him sex for getting her out of her previous sexual abuse situation, Omaha police detective Melissa McDermott wrote in an affidavit.

Dompko joined the rare but not unprecedented ranks of sexual deviants who rescue victims from one predator only to further prey on them. McDermott wrote that Dompko assaulted the girl multiple times over a year and gave her money and gifts to try to keep her quiet.

Eventually, the girl disclosed what was happening to a school counselor  and Omaha police were contacted.

El-Kasaby took issue with a probation officers characterization that Dompko blamed the girl for his assault of her.
Thompson, who was sitting on his porch when he was shot, was taken to a hospital, where he died.

Police said they found seven shell casings at the shooting scene. Reports indicated that a vehicle matching the one registered to Trejos father was seen in the area around the time of the shooting. A search of the vehicle turned up a disposable nitrile glove that had DNA from Trejo and one of his associates on it as well as gunshot residue, Killion said.

"It just seems so weird. So random," Shelrina Thompson said Tuesday in a phone interview. "I was just so shocked to get a call saying, 'Your dad's been shot.' Why would anyone want to shoot him?"

Larry Thompson grew up in Kansas City and graduated high school in 1980. He retired at age 56 after working for the Kansas City Water Department, a railroad and a construction company, his daughter said.

In addition to his daughter and one grandson, he is survived by three sisters.

"He loved cars and loved people," Shelrina Thompson said. "For as a short a time that he was there in the (Omaha) community, he had a large impact and he made a lot of friends. I've been hearing from a lot of people up there."
A record-high number of job vacancies and continued high turnover caused "staffing emergencies" to be declared Monday at two more prisons.

The declaration at the 518-inmate Lincoln Correctional Center and the 439-inmate Diagnostic and Evaluation Center means that staffing will shift immediately to two 12-hour shifts a day from three eight-hour shifts a day. That will allow required security posts to be filled with fewer employees.

Two other state prisons, the 1,000-inmate Tecumseh State Prison and the 1,250-inmate State Penitentiary in Lincoln, have been operating under staffing emergencies for more than a year in what has been described as a "short-term" solution to the lack of personnel.

Those staffing emergencies were expected to expire before the end of 2020, but Corrections Director Scott Frakes said Monday that a "slowdown" in hiring has forced the continuation, and expansion, of the emergencies.

We are feeling the effects that many other industries and businesses are experiencing currently, nationally and across Nebraska," Frakes said. "This is a very tight job market, especially in Lincoln."
The driver killed in a crash Saturday afternoon on Interstate 80 near the Greenwood exit has been identified as 25-year-old Ryan Hughes of Lincoln, according to the Nebraska State Patrol.

At about 2:30 p.m. a westbound Toyota 4-Runner left the interstate and crashed into a creek near mile marker 422. Emergency crews attempted life-saving measures on the lone occupant, but Hughes died at the scene.

State Patrol spokesman Cody Thomas said Tuesday he didn't have any additional information about the crash.

Hughes was born in Norfolk, graduated in 2014 from Lincoln's North Star High School and studied at Southeast Community College to become a radiology technologist, according to his obituary.

Reach the writer at 402-473-7237 or lpilger@journalstar.com. On Twitter @LJSpilger

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He also cited sensationalist media pundits for stirring needless alarm over CRT, which members then pass on to their pastors. Indeed, Fox watchers at liberal Media Matters for America found Fox News has mentioned critical race theory almost 1,300 times from January to mid-June.

Pastors only have their members for one hour a week, Stetzer quipped. Fox News has them for maybe 30 hours a week.

Thats a big challenge, but worth it, especially for an organization to which multitudes look for guidance as it tries to build on its own diversity.

Interestingly, the statement by the conventions right wing didnt say much about what CRT is, either. CRT, in simplest terms, was created by legal scholars in the mid-1970s as a scholarly lens or framework that seeks to understand the role that race and racism have played in American history and society.

But, outside of academia, that frame for inquiry and debate has been transformed into a terrifying Marxist-inspired child-indoctrinating menace  catnip for cable-TV pundits.

Recently, CRT has been vilified by politicians from the Trump White House to local school boards as a radical, un-American and racially divisive menace.

Against that backdrop, the Rev. Litton, who is white, has his work cut out for him. His election sent reassuring signals of reconciliation, including his nomination for president by the Rev. Fred Luter, the only Black pastor to serve in the post. The vote by the largest turnout the convention has seen in decades was close, but decisive. Here, it appeared, was the leader that the denomination needs to calm the waters in these turbulent times  and he has a lot of waters to calm.

Clarence Page writes for the Chicago Tribune.

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More than 62,500 Dreamers work in healthcare, according to the bipartisan nonprofit New American Economy. Now consider that our rural and rapidly aging state currently faces significant shortages of nurses, emergency medical technicians and pharmacists. It would be unfortunate to lose even a single one of these essential workers because of partisan deadlock in Washington.

The Farm Workforce Modernization Act would give similar legal protections to long-time undocumented farmworkers, while ensuring that our farmers have a steady labor supply. There are around a million undocumented farmworkers nationwide, including nearly half of all farmhands. This act will benefit our agriculture-heavy state.

I know how vital these workers are to the economy because my father was one. A migrant from Chihuahua, Mexico, he worked tirelessly on American farms -- picking apples, oranges and alfalfa -- and, later, in a Nebraska meatpacking plant. Over his career, he supplied dinner table staples to thousands of American families. In return, he received a pathway to citizenship, thanks to Ronald Reagans 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. Our U.S. senators can help give todays farmworkers and Dreamers their chance at the American dream.
Truth is not something you vote on, contrary to George Will's startling statement ("The contradiction of K-12 education," June 20): "In 2022, multitudes of parents are properly going to take their anger about all this to the polling places" (if they can find one, I might add).

Their anger may be less about the truth of history than the disregard for a myth. That can be painful. If Texans voted on their common view of the Alamo, they would be denying the fact that slavery was at the heart of that "liberation" movement. Mexico opposed slavery. The same can be said about the denial of "American exceptionalism" by the 1619 Project.

Mythical claims about history are easily made up and hard to dislodge. Following the rigorous standards of historical research, historian Natalie Zemon Davis tells us that a true history is written with regard to publicly available fact written in a way that others, commanding the same facts, would agree to the interpretation. In other words, just because some lawyer says wearing a mask is akin to Nazi atrocities does not make it so.

In her book "A Passion for History," Davis issues a warning to herself: "Watch out, Natalie, you're being taken over by a romantic fantasy." That should be a warning to all of us.

David McCreary, Lincoln

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Even before the state completed its investigation, Wishau frequently criticized Garbade and her coalition for their efforts to combat perceived issues of racism in Burlington.

School board members complaint

In his complaint filed Friday, Wishau accuses Garbade of racism or race discrimination for her racist comments posted on social media.

Among the social media posts he cites, all purport to be authored by a group that includes Garbade and other people, making it unclear who specifically was responsible for the messages. Some date back to nearly a year ago when Burlington teacher Melissa Statz was publicly criticized for discussing with her students the Black Lives Matter movement for racial justice.
RACINE  The man facing allegations he tried to hang a woman in his basement had his case bound over for trial on June 23, despite an attempt by the defense to paint the evidence as flimsy.

Ryan Lee Carter, 38, is charged with attempted first-degree intentional homicide, aggravated battery, false imprisonment, attempted strangulation/suffocation and six counts of misdemeanor bail jumping.

Alice Rudebusch, court commissioner, found there was sufficient for the case to move forward for trial. An arraignment was set for July 15.

Allegations

Deputies from the Racine County Sheriffs Office were dispatched to South Beaumont Avenue, in Dover, on June 9 after a woman alleged that Carter had tried to hang her and intended to hang himself in his basement.

As deputies approached the house they saw the victim and Carter. He was reportedly yelling at the deputies, saying he did nothing wrong and the woman was lying, according to the criminal complaint.

The woman told deputies that she and Carter had been in a relationship for approximately nine months.

She alleged that Carter had spent the night doing cocaine and watching pornography, according to the criminal complaint. In the morning, he began drinking vodka before becoming angry and violent, she told investigators.

The woman reportedly claimed that Carter punched her in the chest and arm, held her down on the ground and tried to pour vodka in her mouth, and then dragged her down the stairs to the basement where she could see two electrical cords, tied into nooses, hanging from the ceiling.

The woman said she tried to get away, but Carter grabbed her and forced her to stand on a box while he put her head into the noose, she alleged, before saying she was able to free herself.

Carter alleges that none of the events as the woman stated them are true.

However, according to law enforcement, at the time of the alleged altercation, there was a no-contact order in place wherein Carter was supposed to have no contact with the woman.

Evidence scant

Deputy Carlson, of the Racine County Sheriffs Office, testified about the investigation. He told the court the victim had a red mark on her neck and that was the extent of her injuries.

Noah Michael Wishau, who represents Carter, questioned the deputy about the evidence in the case and brought into question the credibility of the victim.

Deputy, you stated (the woman) had no other physical injuries? Wishau asked. She stated she was punched in the shoulder and chest. Were there any visible injuries on her shoulder or chest?

No, Carlson replied.

She stated she was dragged down into the basement. Were there any scuff marks, or any physical evidence of any of that? Wishau asked.

No, Carlson replied, before confirming that the only mark on the womans body was on her neck.

Further, when the woman was finally able to escape, she did not go far  just to the front yard where she waited for law enforcement.

Among the statements made by the woman to law enforcement was that she was pregnant with twins. She was transported to the hospital where staff confirmed she was not pregnant and had not been pregnant.

So were here today on the word of the victim, who also told you she was pregnant with twins, and also had a strike on her neck, and thats it? Wishau asked.

Correct, Carson responded.

Jennifer Tanck-Adams, assistant district attorney, then confirmed with Carlson that the mark on womans neck was consistent with where a mark would be if someone was hanged.

However, when asked by Wishau if there was any evidence of how that mark got there  allegedly that she was forced into the noose  other than the womans allegations, Carlson replied, No.

Despite the testimony, Rudebusch did bind the case over for trial.

Carter remains in the Racine County Jail. His bail is set at $100,000.

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1. Yes. Its a common-sense bill that should be implemented. Pass it without changes.

2. Yes. The bill should pass, but some of its stipulations should be modified or dropped.

3. No. Unless significant changes are made, it doesnt deserve lawmakers support.

4. No. The original bill is dangerous. Democrats should walk out again to block it.

5. Unsure. Its had to say without knowing what final form the bill would take.

Vote

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OMAHA  A Kearney man has been sentenced to 13 months in federal prison for distributing methamphetamine in Kearney.

Gordon Marcellus, 56, was sentenced Friday in U.S. Federal District Court in Omaha on one count of meth distribution of more than 50 grams in Kearney on May 17, 2019. On that day law enforcement served search warrants at three Kearney residences in the 1800 block of Avenue B where they found narcotics at each location.

The case was part of a joint investigation involving members of the Central Nebraska Drug and Safe Streets Task Force. In addition to Marcellus, three others were arrested in the case.

Court records say Marcellus will be allowed to participate in a residential treatment program.

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Jennifer Burbach, 36, J.C. Hunt, 43, and Geoffrey Mazankowski, 46, all of Kearney, were arrested for felony possession of meth.

Charges against Mazankowski were dismissed in August 2019, without prejudice, which means they could be refiled.

Burbach was convicted of attempted possession of methamphetamine, and possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia, both infractions. She was placed on two years probation.
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In 2012, she earned her masters degree in nursing, with an emphasis in gerontology, from the University of Nebraska Medical Center. She is board certified as well.

Gifts of the elderly

Schiel knows that caring for older people is different from tending to younger people. Their bodies dont respond the same way. Medications dont work the same way, she said.

Many older people should probably see their primary care providers more often than they do, but it is difficult to coordinate plans and rides to the clinic, she said.

Some adults have difficulty getting out of their homes to see their doctors, especially those who have difficulty with mobility, dementia or are at a higher risk of infection. Sometimes, they live in a rural area, or their vision is impaired, and their family has to arrange transportation to a doctors office, she said.

In her new role, she does physical exams, prescribes medications and more. She can order lab tests and therapy just like when you go to your own doctor, she said. She does geriatric consults, where she meets with relatives of elderly patients to listen to their concerns and answer questions.
I really like what he said is this: from the bottom out and the middle out. And that is so important, lets make sure that we include everyone in our economy, said state Sen. Brad Pfaff, D-Onalaska.

It connects the dots, Pfaff said, echoing Evers. It demonstrates that whats happening in Washington D.C. has a real world impact here at the local level. And it also demonstrates the fact that in order for us to make sure we can control to grow our economy we need to make sure that we include all different facets of it.

Its all interconnected, he said.

The impact the pending infrastructure plan will have on La Crosse and other local communities will depend on working between state and local governments, officials emphasized, another plug for a unified effort.

La Crosse Mayor Mitch Reynolds said that hes confident the work the city is already doing on rebuilding roads and improving other infrastructure will be supplemented by the plan, and will aid local governments juggling the different aspects of supporting a community.
"The Daily Beast should only be in print so that you can line a bird cage with it. That's it," Van Orden said.
The Tribune emailed and left a voicemail for the La Crosse Republican Party Tuesday afternoon inviting comment on Bidens visit but did not receive an immediate response.

Individuals were stationed on a roadside closer to the La Crosse Municipal Transit Facility, holding banners and signs asking Biden to stop the proposed Line 3 Pipeline Replacement Project in Minnesota.

Water protectors and climate activists have been calling on President Biden to step in and protect our air water and climate from the dangerous pipeline, Sierra Club of Wisconsin chapter director Elizabeth Ward said in an email to the Tribune. We need infrastructure that prioritizes frontline communities, creates millions of family-sustaining jobs, cuts climate pollution in half by 2030, and advances gender, environmental, Indigenous, economic and racial justice. We have no time to waste.

Ward noted decisions made now will affect the direction of society and the health of the earth for decades to come, and said this is President Bidens opportunity to turn his commitments into reality and go big rather than negotiating small with Republican politicians who have repeatedly proven they have no interest in addressing the scale and scope of the nations most pressing crises.
MADISON, Wis. (AP)  Wisconsin legislators were set Tuesday to begin taking the final votes on the 2021-23 state budget.

The Assembly was scheduled to vote on the $87 billion spending plan on Tuesday. The Senate was expected to follow suit on Wednesday and send the document to Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, who can use his partial veto powers to rewrite the document or kill it outright.

Here are some highlights of the budget as it currently stands:

TAX CUTS

Bolstered by rosier revenue projections, Republicans inserted $3.3 billion in income and property tax cuts into the budget. The provisions include $2.7 billion in cuts for people who earn between $24,000 and $264,000 annually and nearly $650 million in local property tax cuts for schools and technical colleges. The budget would backfill that lost revenue with state aid. Residents would see a property tax bill but schools would come out even.

K-12 SCHOOLS
LONDON (AP)  Britains new health secretary said Monday he is confident that England is on track to remove the country's remaining coronavirus restrictions on July 19, stressing that the rapid vaccination rollout is breaking the link between soaring infection numbers and serious illnesses and deaths.
NEW YORK (AP)  The Democratic primary for mayor of New York City was thrown into a state of confusion Tuesday when election officials retracted their latest report on the vote count after realizing it had been corrupted by test data never cleared from a computer system.

The bungle was a black mark on New York Citys first major foray into ranked choice voting and seemed to confirm worries that the citys Board of Elections, which is jointly run by Democrats and Republicans, was unprepared to implement the new system.

The disarray began as evening fell, when the board abruptly withdrew data it had released earlier in the day purporting to be a first round of results from the ranked choice system.

That data had indicated that Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, a former police captain who would be the citys second Black mayor, had lost much of his lead and was ahead of former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia by fewer than 16,000 votes.

Then the Board of Elections tweeted that it was aware of a discrepancy in its report on ranked choice voting results. It didnt initially explain what that discrepancy was, even as it pulled the data from its website.

Just before 10:30 p.m. it released a statement saying that 135,000 ballot images it had put into its computer system for testing purposes had never been cleared.

The Board apologizes for the error and has taken immediate measures to ensure the most accurate up to date results are reported, it said in a statement.

The results initially released Tuesday, and then withdrawn, were incomplete to begin with because they didnt include any of the nearly 125,000 absentee ballots cast in the Democratic primary.

The Associated Press removed Tuesdays vote update from its published vote count after the board pulled the results.

Adams campaign, which had publicly pointed out the vote discrepancy shortly after the faulty count was released, said in a statement that it remained confident he would ultimately prevail.

The publicized vote totals had included an unexpected jump in the number of ballots counted Tuesday compared to the number counted on the day of the primary.

Garcia said in a late afternoon news conference, before the numbers were withdrawn, that she was confident she had a path to victory, but wasn't counting any chickens before they've hatched.

Later, her campaign issued a statement saying The BOEs release of incorrect ranked choice votes is deeply troubling and requires a much more transparent and complete explanation. Every ranked choice and absentee vote must be counted accurately so that all New Yorkers have faith in our democracy and our government.

Elections officials had planned on conducting another round of ranked choice analysis on July 6 that would include absentee ballots. A note posted on the Board of Elections website indicated it would try posting accurate results without absentee ballots Wednesday.

New York Citys primary went into a state of suspended animation a week ago while officials prepared to give the public its first look at results from the citys new ranked choice voting system.

Under the system, voters could rank up to five candidates in order of preference.

Since no candidate was the first choice of more than 50% of voters, a computer on Tuesday tabulated ballots in a series of rounds that worked like instant run-offs.

In each round, the candidate in last place was eliminated. Votes cast for that person were then redistributed to the surviving candidates, based on whoever voters put next on their ranking list. That process repeated until only two candidates were left.

Besides Adams and Garcia, civil rights lawyer Maya Wiley was also still within striking distance of victory.

When voting ended June 22, elections officials only released results showing who voters put down as their first choice for the job. In that count, Adams had a lead of around 75,000 votes over Wiley with Garcia close behind in third.

Wiley was critical of the BOE, saying the chaos Tuesday is not just failure to count votes properly today, it is the result of generations of failures that have gone unaddressed.

New York City's Board of Elections, which operates independently from City Hall, has long had a reputation for mistakes and mismanagement.

Ahead of the 2016 election, it mistakenly purged tens of thousands of voters from voting rolls. In 2018, voters had to wait in line for several hours at some polling places over equipment issues.

In 2020, it struggled to process applications for absentee ballots and initially sent many voters ballots with return envelopes printed with the wrong people's names on them.

The Democratic primary winner will be the prohibitive favorite in the general election against Curtis Sliwa, the Republican founder of the Guardian Angels.

Either Adams or Wiley would be the second Black mayor of New York City, and either Garcia or Wiley would be the first woman mayor.

Adams, 60, is a moderate Democrat who opposed the defund the police movement and said that under his leadership, the city could find a way to fight crime while also combating a legacy of racial injustice in policing.

He was previously a state senator before becoming Brooklyns borough president, a job in which he lacks lawmaking power, but handles some constituent services and discretionary city spending.

Garcia, 51, is a city government veteran who ran as a nonideological crisis manager well-suited to guiding New York out of a once-in-a-century pandemic.

Garcia ran the department of sanitation from 2014 until leaving last September to explore a run for mayor. De Blasio also tapped Garcia to run an emergency food distribution program during the coronavirus pandemic after earlier appointing her interim chair of the citys embattled public housing system.

She earlier served as chief operating officer of the citys department of environmental protection, responsible for water and sewer systems.

Wiley, 57, served as counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio and previously chaired a civilian panel that investigates complaints of police misconduct. A former legal analyst for MSNBC, she ran as a progressive who would cut $1 billion from the police budget and divert it to other city agencies.
We use euphemisms to soften reality. We do it all the time when forced to discuss things we would rather not discuss or even acknowledge. Death comes to mind.

Ive completed an exhaustive study and determined that death affects one out of one human beings. Still, wed rather not talk about it  or we try to make it a bit more digestible. After all, it sounds much nicer to say hes passed away than hes dead.

Employers are good at this. Were going in a different direction is much more polite than Youre fired.

Much of our interaction with our kids is laced with euphemisms. When my daughters were young, I found myself adopting certain euphemisms into my daily lexicon.

I can remember, when I worked for the Justice Department office in Philadelphia, excusing myself from an important meeting by saying, I need to find the potty. 

The problem with euphemisms is they can be used to deceive others and even ourselves. History is replete with state-sanctioned euphemisms designed to camouflage the truly horrible. For example, the Final Solution made for better propaganda than the plainly stated and horrific systematic murder of six million Jews.

Today in the United States, discussions about hot-button issues such as abortion are often lessons in euphemistic gymnastics, performed with amazing skill and dexterity in the White House briefing room.

Recently, a reporter asked President Joe Bidens press secretary, Jen Psaki, a very direct and simple question. Does the president believe a 15-week-old unborn baby is a human being?

The answer ought to be just as simple, especially for anyone who is aware of ultrasound technology.

Instead, Psaki answered, Are you asking me if the president supports a womans right to choose? He does.

That wasnt the question  and Psaki knew it. But to answer yes would have been an admission of what an abortion is and what it entails.

Its much easier to couch support for a barbaric procedure in terms such as, a womans right to choose and reproductive rights.

You can change the language but you cant change reality.

It seems weve crossed yet another weird sociological and moral threshold when the leader of the free world, for purely political reasons, refuses to admit that a 15-week-old unborn baby is human. For an administration that often scolds its critics for failing to consider science, it seems more than willing to ignore biological reality.

If youre interested, WebMD offers this description of an unborn 15-week-old:

Look closely, and youll be able to see a network of fine blood vessels forming. Babys muscles are getting stronger, and they are testing them out by moving around, making fists, and trying out different facial expressions.

That certainly sounds like a human to me.

The reason the reporters question was relevant and posed to Psaki in the first place was that in the fall, the U.S. Supreme court is scheduled to hear arguments on Mississippis ban on most abortions after 15 weeks. In the past, the president, through spokespeople, has called such prohibitions on abortion an assault on womens rights.

Such language has been part of the abortion debate for decades. Proponents of legal abortion would like you to believe that what is at stake in the Mississippi case and other similar cases is a womans right to choose. Theres nothing new about this defense, of course.

What is new is that we know a lot more about unborn babies than we did in 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade.

We know that some 62 million abortions have been performed in this country since 1973 and we can clearly see, through scientific innovation, the humanness in an unborn baby.

But for Psaki to admit than a 15-week-old unborn baby is human would be to admit that abortion and the administrations support of it really isnt about choice at all, no matter how much it tries to euphemize its way around the issue.

Because if it is, then we inevitably have to answer the question, What choice have we really made?

Rich Manieri, a Philadelphia-born journalist and author, is a professor of journalism at Asbury University in Kentucky. He was previously an LNP | LancasterOnline deputy Opinion editor. His column is distributed by the Cagle syndicate.
I want to thank the School District of Lancaster for valuing equity and inclusion for all students and school community members.

The school board recently voted unanimously to adopt a resolution for LGBTQ equity and inclusion. The resolution provides action steps that include much of the work the district has already done, such as implementing guidelines for transgender and nonbinary students and the creation of a districtwide equity policy.

Its understood that LGBTQ youth face higher rates of bullying, harassment and even severe violent attacks. As a further result, rates of mental illness and suicidal ideation are also higher.

As a community, we must face this head-on. Our LGBTQ students, staff and family members have always been here, and they deserve to learn, teach and participate as their whole selves.

Its also been made clear by the new presidential administration that Title IX protections under the U.S. Department of Education are inclusive of sexual orientation and gender identity.

By leading with love, equity and inclusion for every member of our school community, we will foster a positive environment for learning and student achievement.

Therefore, I call on other Lancaster County school boards, the Lancaster Township Board of Supervisors and the Lancaster County Board of Commissioners to adopt similar resolutions for equity and inclusion, and to adopt or revise policies to be inclusive of all races, abilities and gender identities/expressions.

Now is the time to come together and say yes to providing equitable environments for student learning and success across the commonwealth.

Kareena Rios

Lancaster Township

School District of Lancaster

school board member

Editors note: If you or someone you know is in crisis and needs immediate help, contact the following organizations:

 National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, suicidepreventionlifeline.org, 800-273-8255.

 Those who are deaf or hard of hearing can contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline via TTY at 800-799-4889.

 Lancaster Crisis Intervention, 717-394-2631.
Gabon Mortgages Its Future, Locking Up Massive Land Area into Nature Parks for $150 Million

June 28, 2021 (EIRNS)The otherwise nondescript nation of Gabon made history last week as the first African country to get paid to preserve its rainforest. At the end of an arduous, four-year process of conforming, on June 24, the Norwegian government distributed a $17 million payment, with the fantastic sum of $150 million still in the wind. The payment was allocated under the UN-initiated Central African Forest Initiative (CAFI). While not technically a part of UN climate czar Mark Carneys over-hyped climate offset scheme, this deal provides a window into the process, and will likely serve as a model.

In June 2017, under the CAFI program, the nation of Gabon signed a Letter of Intent with the nation of Norway, and the Multi Partner Trust Fund of the United Nations Development Program, under which Gabon would agree to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 50% below the 2005 level, as well as agree to perform a series of milestoneswhich ultimately saw Gabon creating 13 national parkseffectively locking up the vast majority of its land area, prohibiting logging and other access to resources. Only at the end of the long process would Gabon get paid. That final milestone (or, maybe better, millstone) was passed in 2019, with an announcement at the Climate Action Summit in New York. For all its efforts and sacrifices, Gabon would receive $150 million over the next 10 years (assuming continued compliance). The June 24 $17 million payment was the first evidence that its years of sacrifice would amount to anything at all.

First established in 2015, the CAFI brought together European governments, specifically Norway, France, Germany and the U.K., along with six central African (rainforest) countries, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, the Central Africa Republic, Cameroon, and both D.R. Congo, and the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville). The rationale behind CAFI was the reduction of carbon emissions. The year before had seen Norway sign a deal promising $150 million to Liberia, a model which CAFI then extended across the mid-section of the entire continent. In 2019, timed with the signing of Gabon in New York, a similar deal worth $65 millionbetween France and the Republic of Congowas announced in Paris. There are likely similar efforts afoot in South America and the Indo-Pacific, the other rainforest regions of the world, which need to be investigated.

However, the idea that Africa needs to reduce its carbon emissions is farcical on the face of it, something which is slowly dawning on African leaders, as more and more evidence of this type of exploitation emerges. Africas total greenhouse gas emissions are 4% of the global total, yet CAFI used that global mantra to convince these six Low National Income (LNI) countries to mortgage their future with the promise of mere pennies.

The other hidden force at play here is the elusive carbon market. Norway, which now owns the Gabonese forests for the next ten years, now has an amount of carbon offset equivalent to three times the national output of the entire United Kingdom. (The Gabon deal is celebrated for setting a floor price of carbon at $10 per certified ton.) Could Norway, for example at some date in the futureput this asset (or a derivative based on it) up for sale, to be bought by a carbon-belching airline or steel foundry? If they did, and got a higher price for it, would Gabon see any of the profits?

These are the questions currently weighing down the heads of Mark Carney and friends in Davos, Switzerland. The weight may yet draw them down to Hell.
The search continues for survivors of a building collapse near Miami, Florida on June 24. At least 11 people died when parts of the 12-floor-building fell. And 150 remain missing.

As each day passes, the chance of finding people alive in the building known as Champlain Towers South decreases.

Now people who live nearby in Champlain Towers North are wondering if they should leave. North was built in 1982, one year after South, by the same company, using the same materials and a similar design. Just one block away, the nearly 40-year-old building has also faced the same seawater and salty air as South.

Some who live in Champlain Towers North feel their building is safer than the South building. They say their building does not have the same structural problems that were described in the Souths 2018 engineering reports. The report says the South building had major structural damage and needed extensive repairs.

Charles Burkett is the mayor of Surfside, the town that is home to the two buildings. He said a quick inspection of the North building done after the Souths collapse did not show any problems. But that did not make everyone feel safe.



Rebecca Weinstock owns an apartment in Champlain Towers North. She was in New York when South fell. Im petrified of returning, she said.

Weinstock said she will only return if two independent building engineers, not from Florida, agree the building is safe.

Philip and Nora Zyne said about 25 percent of North residents have left the building, but they are staying in their fifth-floor apartment. Im not worried at all right now, Philip Zyne said. But he added that he wants a full engineering and scientific review of the building.

Most residents of the North tower also told the Associated Press that they want a full inspection, but they are not leaving. And the United States government is offering temporary housing aid to residents of the North building who choose to leave.

Salomon Gold has been one of the leaders of the buildings resident organization for 20 years. He said he and the others always worked to keep the building safe. He compared the two buildings to two similar airplanes made by the same company. He said just because one crashes does not mean the other will. We are in good shape, Gold said.

Burkett, the Surfside mayor, said a detailed inspection of the North building started on Tuesday. The town is also starting inspections of other older buildings.

He does not see a reason to tell people to leave the North building. He did, however, say he understands why people might want to leave.

Esther Drachmann said her husbands 91-year-old mother lives in the building. She and her husband took the older woman to their home.

She said her husbands mother would not be able to get out in time if residents had to leave quickly. Drachmann said the woman would return if inspectors say the building is safe.

Leaders of other cities in South Florida are also working to find out if older buildings in the area have been keeping up with repairs and inspections.

Im Dan Friedell.

Dan Friedell adapted this story for Learning English based on an Associated Press report. Hai Do was the editor.

We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments section, and visit our Facebook page.

____________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

structural adj. relating to the way something is built or organized : relating to the structure of something

apartment n. a usually rented room or set of rooms that is part of a building and is used as a place to live

petrify adj. very afraid or frightened of something

resident n. someone who lives in a particular place
Many companies are making changes to their offices to help employees feel safer as they return to work after more than one year of coronavirus restrictions.

Some are improving office air systems or are moving desks farther apart. Others are removing desks and building more conference rooms for employees who work at home but come in to the office for meetings.

Steelcase is an office furniture company based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It says research shows half of companies around the world plan to redesign their office space this year.

Natalie Engels works as a designer at the architecture business Gensler. She said the past year has made people think, Why do we go to an office?

Not every company is making changes and Engels noted that they do not have to. She tells her customers to remember what worked well and what did not before the coronavirus health crisis.

But designers say many companies want to make employees feel safe and energized at the office. This is especially the case as some businesses report a labor shortage.

The food and drug company Ajinomoto redesigned its North American headquarters near Chicago last year based on those concerns.

Ajinomotos employees returned to work in May. The building had wider walking spaces and glass divisions between workspaces. This was to give workers more room and to make them feel more secure.

To improve mental health, the company added a relaxation room. A test kitchen was set up for online presentations. In addition to that, a cleaning crew disinfects the offices two times a day.

Ryan Smith is the executive vice president of Ajinomoto North America. He admits the efforts might be too much, but it could help those who have concerns about returning to work in the office. Smith estimates 40 percent of the new headquarters design was changed.

Shobha Surya, an employee at Ajinomoto, is energized by the space.

She said, The office gives you a balance of work and home life. She said it was easier to keep her attention at the office now and she is happy to be working with her co-workers again.

Lise Newman is with the architecture business SmithGroup. She said when employees are asked what they miss most about office work, they say socializing and working with colleagues.

Companies are trying to build relationships between employees by having more social areas. Some have areas that look like a coffee shop.

Newman said, Companies are trying to create that sense that this is a cool club that people want to come into.

Mark Bryan is a designer at M+A Architects, based in Columbus, Ohio. He expects that, in the future, an office will have different places to work in on any given day. Some workers might choose a small, private room. And others might choose a table in the office eating area.

Some office changes show the new mixture of working from home and at the office.

Based in New York, Valiant Technologies provides technical support and other services to businesses. It is letting its employees work mostly from home. Employees request a desk if they want to come into the office.

The company has removed desks and has put more spaces between the remaining ones. Employees leave equipment in safe storage areas.

Not every design change will stay. Steelcase brought back some employees last summer. They pushed tables in the cafeteria far apart from each other and only permitted one person to sit at a table. Steelcases chief Jim Keane said it made the space so sad that no one wanted to sit there.

He said he learned that workspaces need to be safe but they also need to be inspiring. He said, People are actually going to expect more from offices in the future.

Im Gregory Stachel.

Dee-Ann Durbin reported this story for The Associated Press. Gregory Stachel adapted it for VOA Learning English. Mario Ritter, Jr. was the editor.

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Words in This Story

desk  n. a piece of furniture that is like a table and often has drawers

furniture  n. chairs, tables, or beds that are used to make a room ready for use

architecture  n. the art or science of designing and creating building

relaxation  n. a way to rest and enjoy yourself

customer n. someone who buys goods or services from a business

club  n. the place where the members of a club meet

colleague n. a person who works with you; fellow worker

cafeteria  n. a place (such as a restaurant or a room in a school) where people get food at a counter and carry it to a table for eating

inspire  v. to make (someone) want to do something: to give (someone) an idea about what to do or create
Several American states have proposed new legislation and policies controlling how the history of race and slavery is taught in public schools. Some single out The New York Times 1619 Project as misrepresenting U.S. history.

The project argues that 1619 could be considered as the nations birth year. That was when the first slave ship arrived in colonial Virginia. It says doing so requires us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.

Conservative lawmakers and officials in several American states, however, see that as a problem.

In early June, the Board of Education in the state of Florida voted to ban the teaching of the 1619 Project and critical race theory. Critical race theory is an idea of how racism and white supremacy have shaped U.S. society, laws and policies.

The board said the project distort[s] historical events. The board added that teachers may not define American history as something other than the creation of a new nation based largely on ideas from the Declaration of Independence.

The education publication Chalkbeat says lawmakers in Arkansas, Michigan, Missouri and North Dakota have also tried to pass policies preventing the teaching of the 1619 Project.

The teaching of 1619

Nikole Hannah-Jones is the creator of the 1619 Project. She said it is not supposed to replace what schools traditionally teach. But it is supposed to ask people to think about what came from slavery.

Since its release in August 2019, the project has been used in history and social studies classes across the country including Chicago, Illinois, and Washington, D.C.

Rebecca Millner teaches U.S. history at Eastern High School in Washington, D.C., and uses several essays from the project in the class.

Good luck to not wanting to teach about the legacies of slavery and systemic racism and have kids get a good handle on U.S. history, she said. I dont know how districts are doing that."

Last year, students from her class organized a day-long event based around the 1619 Project. Students planned a museum-like experience to teach the school and community members about the ideas behind the project.

Some students dressed and acted as famous Black activists. Other students read poetry. The school musical group sang old songs first sung by enslaved people.

At one station, students drew or wrote their feelings in answer to sayings from the project. At another, students filled out family trees. One station served as a memorial.

Christian is a Black student at Eastern High. With the school marching band, he played drumbeats to show how enslaved people used beats to secretly communicate with each other. The presentation, he said, showed how some music has roots in enslaved Black people.

Everything that we have nowadays, it was formed back when we were in a harder time. The central message of the day was to not let history go untold or unseen, Christian said.

Millner said the ideas central to the 1619 Projectthat slavery was important to the founding of the country and that African Americans fight for freedom is good for the whole countryare not new. But she said the way the information is presented in the project reaches students better than books and other resources.

The 1619 Project connects those messages in such a powerful way for students, she said.

Rebecca Coven is an English and social studies teacher at Sullivan High School in Chicago. The school has mostly Hispanic and Black students. She said the project shows students the importance of perspective when it comes to writing history. The 1619 Project is almost entirely written by Black writers.

It gets us to think about who gets to write history, and how does that story determine what we know about the world, Coven said. Many times, she added, students learn about slavery from a white perspective.

With that in mind, students in Covens second-year English class wrote their own version, called The 1619 Project: Sullivan Edition.

Instead of writing about the impact of slavery and racism on the entire nation, the class focused on their impact in Chicago.

Students wrote about the root causes of social problems like the wealth gap, inequality in education and Americas large prison system. The students' project includes discussions and surveys with students and school officials about racism and other issues. It also contains poetry and drawings.

With this project I wanted students to understand how slavery created a social hierarchy that still impacts our institutions today, Coven said.

Raymon is a student in Covens class. He wrote about the historical reasons why Black Americans are less trusting of the health care system and less likely to get the COVID-19 vaccine.

He said spreading knowledge of these issues could help create change. It is important to learn about the unfortunate history instead of trying to paint America as this perfect place, he said.

Adu is another student in Covens class. She thinks there is a connection between states trying to ban the 1619 Project and George Floyds murder and the nationwide protests for racial equality.

They dont want us to know the effects of slavery are still going on, Adu said. When George Floyd was killed, that kind of showed that even though slavery is over this is the remnant of it.

Im Dan Novak.

And I'm Caty Weaver.

Dan Novak reported this story for VOA Learning English. Hai Do was the editor.

Editors' Note: The Sullivan High School in Chicago has mostly Hispanic and Black students. An early version of the story did not correctly reflect the students' population.

Quiz- Students Use 1619 Project to Learn Legacy of Racism, Slavery Start the Quiz to find out Start Quiz

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Words in This Story

distort  v. to change (something) so that it is no longer true or accurate

legacy  n. something that happened in the past or that comes from someone in the past

district n. an area established by a government for official government business

perspective  n. a way of thinking about and understanding something (such as a particular issue or life in general); the angle or direction that a person uses to look at an object

determine  v. to officially decide (something) especially because of evidence or facts, or to establish (something) exactly or with authority

survey  n. an activity in which many people are asked a question or a series of questions in order to gather information about what most people do or think about something

hierarchy  n. a system in which people or things are placed in a series of levels with different importance or status

institution  n. an established organization

remnant  n. the part of something that is left when the other parts are gone
Brazils president is sending troops back to the Amazon to enforce laws against cutting down trees and other land clearance activity. The redeployment comes just two months after troops withdrew from the area.

President Jair Bolsonaro ordered soldiers to go to the states of Para, Amazonas, Mato Grosso, and Rondonia through the end of August. The order was announced on official Brazilian media Monday. It did not report about the number of troops to be deployed or the cost of the operation.

Vice President Hamilton Mourao told reporters earlier this month that the deployment could be extended beyond two months with the arrival of the dry season. That is the time when people burn the forest to clear land for farming and raising animals.

Amazon deforestation has slowly increased for several years. It rose very fast after the 2018 election of Bolsonaro, who had repeatedly called for the development of the rainforest.

This will mark the third time that Bolsonaro has sent troops to the Amazon. Thousands of soldiers took part each time. But, environmental experts say the military was poorly prepared for such work and had limited effect.



The MapBiomas Project is a group of nonprofits, universities, and technology companies that studies Brazilian land use. The group said 98.9 percent of deforestation activities last year were illegal. But, MapBiomas noted that the government ordered fines in just five percent of the deforestation cases.

Marcio Astrini is with the Climate Observatory, a network of environmental nonprofit groups. He called the latest military deployment a smokescreen," suggesting that the government deploys troops to create the appearance that it is fighting deforestation.

He noted that a successful program financed by the Norwegian and German governments to fight Amazon deforestation was suspended in 2019. It has not been restarted.

The government has adopted a series of measures that simply destroys the states monitoring capacity, like stopping environmental fines, Astrini said. He added that Brazilian officials have also ceased destroying machinery used for illegal tree removal.

The Amazon destruction has led to protests around the world. American President Joe Bidens administration recently urged Bolsonaro to take strong action against illegal land clearing as part of efforts to fight climate change.

The Associated Press spoke to several Brazilian government officials on the condition that they not be identified. They told the AP that talks had stopped between the U.S. and Brazils environment ministry. One of the officials said that the redeployment was ordered in part to show the U.S. that Brazil has good intentions on the issue.

I'm Caty Weaver.

Debora Alvares reported this story for the Associated Press. Hai Do adapted the story for Learning English. Caty Weaver was the editor.

___________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

adopt - v. to begin to use

monitor - v. to watch, observe

capacity - n. ability to do something

intention - n. the thing that you plan to do
When Shireene Hale first heard that Rep. Priscilla Giddings, R-White Bird, was deleting controversial posts and comments from her Facebook page, she was sure it was a public records violation.
A Lompoc man killed Monday in single-vehicle crash just south of Santa Maria following a pursuit with Vandenberg Space Force Base security per
Royal Canadian Air Force Sergeant Michael Fuller (center), an operations flight chief with the 18th Space Control Squadron, displays the citation to accompany his Chief of the Defence Staff Commendation award with his fellow Canadian exchange officers, Lt. Col. Justin Boileau (left) and Warrant Officer David Panth (right), at the front-gate sign of Vandenberg Space Force Base on June 15, 2021. Fuller received the award, which recognizes deeds or activities performed beyond the demand of normal duty, for his actions when responding to a local vehicle accident that took place July 14, 2020.
People disagree about U.S. history, but it's not like we have 3,000 or 15,000 different histories in this country, Griffith said. For the most part we have one contested history and what we really need is for every American to have some understanding of it.

A key question playing out in School Board rooms around the country right now, however, is who gets to decide what that understanding looks like. Griffith pointed to the Fordham report itself as proof that compromise can be reached, as people on the team that produced it cover the entire spectrum of reasonable opinion.

They were still able to agree to this document, which is 400 pages long, he said. If we can do that, other people can do it. You're not going to get everything you want out of such a process (as an individual) but without compromise, we're going to wind up teaching nothing.
A conservative law firm is challenging the legality of absentee ballot drop boxes in a lawsuit filed Monday in Waukesha County Circuit Court.

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, representing two Wisconsin voters, seeks a ruling declaring that there are only two legal ways to cast an absentee ballot in the state: by sending it in the mail or by delivering it to a municipal clerk. If WILL is successful, initiatives like ballot drop boxes and "Democracy in the Park" events would be barred.

It's the latest in a string of lawsuits stemming from the 2020 election, in which President Joe Biden defeated former President Donald Trump by about 20,000 votes in Wisconsin. The lawsuit does not challenge those results, focusing instead on the administration of upcoming elections in 2022. WILL argues that the Wisconsin Elections Commission gave faulty advice to clerks by encouraging them to use drop boxes in elections held during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Joint Finance Committee co-chair Rep. Mark Born, R-Beaver Dam, countered that Assembly Republicans delivered on their promises to keep spending in check, cut bureaucracy and fund the state's priorities while delivering tax relief.

The GOP budget funds priorities "in a way that's affordable for you and your families," said Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester.

Taking advantage of an unexpected revenue windfall, the budget as written by Republicans includes about $2.7 billion in income tax relief by bringing the state's third income tax bracket  which applies to individuals making between $23,930 and $263,480 per year  down from 6.27% to 5.3%. Estimates from the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau show that 74% of the total tax decrease would apply to people earning more than $100,000 per year (about 18% would apply to people making more than $300,000).

"This surplus was built by the people of Wisconsin, by our workforce, by our businesses, by our communities. Thats why were going to focus on sending a large part of that surplus back to those folks instead of growing government," Born said.
With strong support from the community, Hufcor workers and their union, Communications Workers of America Local 84811, are fighting to keep the jobs in Janesville. Baldwin has emerged as a vital ally in that struggle.

The senator has met with Hufcor workers and will do so again this week. Now she is using her position to amplify their stories and to challenge the hedge fund to change course.

In a recent letter to Andrew Nikou, the founder and CEO of OpenGate, Baldwin wrote, I have met with Janesville workers who face pending layoffs and they shared stories with me about the pain the plants closure will cause them, their families, and the community in Wisconsin. Jesse Arnt shared his cancer diagnosis with me and how he and other workers are dependent on the health benefits their current manufacturing jobs provide. Other workers have shared their fears of being unable to provide for their children or pay for their college education. I encourage you to meet with these workers as well so you have a better understanding of why their years of hard work should be respected.

With appropriate bluntness, the senator described the threat that hedge funds pose when they swoop into historic manufacturing communities, buy up factories and then outsource the work.
Whats at stake is survival of civilization as we know it.

Lorin R. Robinson is a writer and former chair of the journalism department at University of Wisconsin-River Falls.

Share your opinion on this topic by sending a letter to the editor to tctvoice@madison.com. Include your full name, hometown and phone number. Your name and town will be published. The phone number is for verification purposes only. Please keep your letter to 250 words or less.
KENOSHA  The Wisconsin National Guard, which serves under the orders of the Wisconsin governor, says that it fulfilled all requests for assistance we received via official channels for assistance to put down riots after Jacob Blake was shot by a Kenosha police officer on Aug. 23.

Take advantage of this great offer! Just $3 gives you full access for 3 months to exclusive content from The Journal Times and journaltimes.com. The incredible deal won't last lo

Both the National Guard and Kenosha Mayor John Antaramian are saying that the guard, since it isnt a standing army, couldnt have mobilized much faster than it did to Kenosha last summer. It takes time for them to get down here, Antaramian said in an interview Friday morning. The Guard responded. The governor responded. Everyone responded well.

Still, top Wisconsin conservatives are charging that Gov. Tony Evers did not act strongly enough to discourage violence and looting. They also allege that he delayed in deploying the Guard, a claim refuted by the governor, the Guard and Antaramian.

When asked if the Guard shouldve responded more quickly last summer, Antaramian said Friday I dont know that they couldve, adding that every request for more Guardsmen was met.

U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil, and Rebecca Kleefisch  the former lieutenant governor and a possible 2022 gubernatorial candidate  while speaking at a June 19 Lincoln Day Dinner at The Italian American Club in Kenosha did also call into question that his comments within hours of the shooting inflamed the unrest.

2022 matters

How preventable was the violence, destruction and two deaths in the days following Jacob Blake being shot last August? Its a question that will be brought up repeatedly on the campaign trail as Gov. Tony Evers seeks reelection in 2022.

The prevailing narrative also could have an impact on Donald Trumps reputation as Republican leadership wrestles with how to deal with the dividing but energizing ex-president who outperformed expectations in Kenosha while still losing Wisconsin in the 2020 election.

The gist of it

The Wisconsin National Guard, which serves under the orders of the governor, says that it fulfilled all requests for assistance we received via official channels for assistance to put down riots after Jacob Blake was shot on Aug. 23, according to an email from Maj. Joe Trovato.

Still, leading Wisconsin conservatives are charging that Evers did not act strongly enough to discourage violence and looting. They also allege his statement within hours of the shooting inflamed the unrest which followed.

Tonight, Jacob Blake was shot in the back multiple times, in broad daylight, Evers tweeted Aug. 23. While we do not have all of the details yet, what we know for certain is that he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country.

In an interview at the Lincoln Day Dinner, Johnson said of the tweets: All I know is, Gov. Evers his statements were not helpful at all. I would term those as inciteful (sic). He didnt show any leadership. He didnt tell people we werent going to allow this to happen.

We are going to make Tony Evers a one-term Democrat, Kleefisch said during a speech at the Lincoln Day event.

Republicans have been rallying support within their base by vilifying Evers response to riots in Kenosha last summer, blaming him for not calling in the National Guard sooner and in greater force. Stirring negative sentiment toward the current governor could be instrumental in unseating him at the ballot box in 2022.

After the first night of rioting, Evers called for a limited mobilization of the National Guard.

According to the Wisconsin National Guard:

On Aug. 24  i.e., less than 24 hours after Blake was shot by Kenosha Officer Rusten Sheskey  there were 125 National Guardsmen on the ground in Kenosha.

By the next night, the night of the Kyle Rittenhouse shootings, there were 250 National Guardsmen bolstering crowd control with the many southeast Wisconsin law enforcement officers that were called into Kenosha.

On Aug. 26, the calmest night of the four since Blake had been shot, there were 500 Guardsmen active in the city. This was the night in which arrests picked up; even as protests became nonviolent, law enforcement moved quickly to arrest individuals and groups who broke off from the main crowd.

On Aug. 27, there were 750 Guardsmen in Kenosha.

On Aug. 28, there were 2,000; 800 of those came from the National Guards of Michigan, Arizona and Alabama, reportedly because Evers was now accepting outside help after having rejected it previously.

Phone calls

Steil said that Kenosha leaders had been begging for more help that wasnt coming fast enough. Steil said in a recent speech that, on Aug. 24, he received a previously unreported phone call from Antaramian, Sheriff David Beth and then-Police Chief Daniel Miskinis where they asked the congressman: What is the federal government able to provide specifically?

Steil said he replied by calling the White House and  after being put on hold and bounced around the White Houses switchboard  speaking with Trump directly.

According to Steil, Trump said: Youre calling me, but your governor hasnt called me, to which Steil replied: I cannot explain to you my governors actions, but I can tell you the people of the City of Kenosha need assistance.

Eventually, that conversation and others led to Mark Meadows, who was then Trumps chief of staff, having now-infamous and highly publicized conversations with Evers on Aug. 25 and 26.

On Aug. 25, Meadows said on Fox News that Evers had rejected federal help. The next day, after two people were killed and a third seriously injured by Rittenhouse, Evers reportedly accepted the aid. However, that aid reportedly mainly consisted of coordinating other states National Guards bolstering Wisconsins  conversations that had already begun without help from Washington, according to Evers office.

According to an email from an Evers spokeswoman: The Trump Administration did not speak to the governor until Tuesday (Aug. 25) afternoon  2:45 p.m. call with Meadows, 3:15 p.m. call with President Trump  well after the governor had already authorized the Wisconsin National Guard, declared a State of Emergency in response, and announced he would be doubling the Guard presence in Kenosha to 250 members on Tuesday night.

When asked via email: Is it accurate to say that Donald Trumps words/actions had any effect on how many troops were sent to Kenosha and how quickly they arrived? Trovato, the spokesman for the Wisconsin National Guard, replied: All troops that served in Kenosha last summer did so in a state active duty status, meaning they were all under the command and control of the Governor. The out-of-state troops responded under an Emergency Management Assistance Compact request from the State of Wisconsin and then fell under the command and control of the Governor. No National Guard troops served in a federalized status. All National Guard troops mobilized at the direction of Gov. Evers.

Added the governors spokeswoman: To date, the only assistance that has been provided by the federal government in our response has been additional FBI and U.S. Marshal support.

During Fridays interview, Antaramian said that, during that Aug. 24 phone call with Steil, he and Kenoshas other leaders were seeking more equipment and funds as they waited for more Guardsmen to arrive.

Credit to whom?

The emcee of the June 19 Lincoln Day Dinner, Brian Schimming  executive director and chief operating officer of the Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority under then-Gov. Scott Walker, hes also been a radio host and lobbyist  said at the event: What it took to get help for Kenosha was the call from that guy (pointing to Steil) to the president of the United States.

To applause from the Lincoln Day Dinner crowd, Steil said in his speech: Ultimately, through the presidents actions, he (Trump) really, truly helped the City of Kenosha.

This is a narrative contested by the Evers administration, noting in particular that Trump neither publicly nor directly ordered any troops or resources to Kenosha. The only federal officers known to have been in Kenosha were a smattering of FBI agents and U.S. Marshals; all National Guard troops serve under states, despite the name implying they are national.

Amid the unrest, the National Guards leaders seemed uninterested in what Trump was saying.

On Aug. 25, Trump tweeted that Evers should call in the National Guard to Kenosha even though hundreds of citizen-soldiers were already there.

Then, during a news conference on Aug. 26, a reporter asked the adjutant general of the Wisconsin National Guard, Maj. Gen. Paul Knapp: Are you worried about the president tweeting about it as if its his decision, that it will escalate tensions here? Knapp replied: I dont worry about the presidents tweets.

What brought an end to it?

What actually brought an end to the violence is up for debate.

Steil and others have said that the show of force as well as the arrests of well more than 100 alleged agitators successfully put down the riots.

Making arrests in particular individuals from outside the community whore coming to Kenosha to cause disturbances, Steil said, was a difference-maker. Once those criminals knew that they risked arrest for their behavior and once there was a police and law enforcement force of scale necessary to enforce the rule of law, public safety was re-established by Wednesday evening.

Others, including Antaramian, have said its more complicated than that.

There was fear of more violence spawned by the Rittenhouse shootings as well as the typical winding down of high emotions  riots rarely last more than a couple of days, even in extreme cases. Antaramian said that the beginnings of community conversations between young protesters and local authorities also helped deter violence.

Its a combination, the mayor said.

Steil conceded that Evers making statements calling directly for an end to the unrest after the Rittenhouse shootings were very important in ending the violence.
Fitchburg seventh-grader Maya Jadhav, the only representative from Wisconsin in the National Spelling Bee semifinals, was one letter shy of making it to finals.
The watchdog groups said Tuesday that the agency took a piecemeal approach to decide on locating the production at Los Alamos and the Savannah River Site, where nearby communities are already underrepresented and underserved.

The environmental risk of there being an accident at either location causing the release of radioactive materials is real, and it would have significant consequences to the surrounding environment and communities, said Leslie Lenhardt, an attorney with the South Carolina Environmental Law Project, which is representing the groups.

A spokesperson for the nuclear agency declined to comment, citing policy on pending litigation.

The efforts to bolster the nuclear arsenal have spanned multiple presidential administrations, with the Biden administration reviewing modernization efforts begun during the Obama years that continued under Donald Trump's presidency.

Critics of the plan are worried about lagging deadlines and bloated budgets on top of security concerns and the risks of nuclear waste and contamination. Some have argued the U.S. doesn't need the new plutonium cores.
No one has been pulled out alive from the ruins since the first hours after the building fell. Rescue workers have had to move cautiously amid the precarious pile of debris.

Those first responders are breaking their backs trying to find anybody they can, Gov. Ron DeSantis said Tuesday.

Alfredo Lopez, who lived on the sixth floor of the condominium complex, in a portion that remained standing, bristled at complaints that crews werent working hard enough or fast enough.

When we got out there that night, I could see nothing but ambulances and fire trucks and police cars," he said. "Perhaps they didnt get in there soon enough because they didnt know what the hell was going on, like none of us.

A seven-member search and rescue team from Mexicos Jewish community is using for the first time a $23,000 suitcase-size device that uses microwave radar to see through 40 feet of shattered concrete and can detect signs of breathing and heartbeats. The team has also used dogs to sniff for victims.

We are hopeful for a miracle, said Ricardo Aizenman, one of the rescuers from Cadena International. It's happened before, he said. People can live up to 15, 16 days with only water, drops of water."
SUVA, Fiji (AP)  A growing coronavirus outbreak in Fiji is stretching the health system and devastating the economy. It has even prompted the government to offer jobless people tools and cash to become farmers.

The Pacific nation got through the first year of the pandemic without any significant outbreaks and just two virus deaths.

But an outbreak of the highly contagious delta variant two months ago has grown to the point where Fiji is adding about 250 new cases each day.

The government has so far resisted calls for a lockdown, in part to try and protect an economy which had already shrunk by 19% last year after international tourism evaporated.

Nearly half of all jobs were connected to tourism in the island nation thats known for its white-sand beaches, clear water and welcoming people.

Business-wise, its very bad, said George Bernard, who owns a business servicing fire extinguishers. He fears life will never be the same. Im just trying to survive, he said.

A vaccination campaign is in full swing but has been hindered by misinformation that vaccines are unsafe or even evil. So far, about 29% of the population of just under 1 million have gotten their first dose, while 2% have been fully vaccinated.
WEYAUWEGA  Wisconsin is famous for cheese, and one of its dairies is claiming a new feat.

Weyauwega Star Dairy this week unofficially broke its own record for the worlds longest piece of string cheese at 3,832 feet, WLUK-TV reported. Gerard Knaus 85-year-old father, Jim, set the original record in 1995. The Knauses beat their 1995 record in 2006 with a piece about 2,000 feet long.

Were just adding onto his record, Gerard Knaus told the station. Thats all were doing.

To do that, the cheesemakers needed a good slice of Weyauwegas more than 1,700 residents. Standing seven feet apart, on a shut-down Main Street, residents of the northeastern Wisconsin town grabbed a piece of the potential record as it was uncoiled from a trailer pulled by a tractor Thursday.

Ive never seen this before and I want my piece of string cheese, said Allen Robbert, who lives about 10 miles away.
ESSER funds will be paid out to districts in three installments with different expiration dates. ESSER I funds, a total of $174 million statewide, must be exhausted before the end of September 2022; ESSER II funds, a total of $686 million statewide, must be exhausted before the end of September 2023; and ESSER III funds, a total of $1.5 billion  20% of which must be reserved by districts specifically to mitigate learning loss due to COVID  must be spent before the end of September 2024.

The amount a district is set to receive through ESSER is based on the Title I funding formula, which means districts with higher enrollments will receive more federal funds during the 2020-24 grant period, something that could spell trouble for smaller rural districts.

ESSER in Madison

The Madison School District is scheduled to receive $70.6 million over the course of the three payment installments. The districts first installment, ESSER I, was approximately $9.2 million and has already been exhausted as of the end of the 2020-21 school year. District planning for the use of funds from ESSER II and III has been put on hold as the administration awaits more information on how the state budget will affect eligibility.
Both Biden and Baldwin emphasized that the infrastructure plan is not the last stop for them, as they also anticipate passing a number of other key items on their agenda using a Senate procedure known as budget reconciliation that would allow them to work around a possible Senate filibuster that has stymied other Democratic plans.

Balancing act

Some more liberal members of the party have urged Biden to push for a Democrats-only reconciliation bill at least as large as his previously stated $4 trillion goal, while some more moderate members have signaled theyd want a much smaller number. With the Senate deadlocked 50-50, with ties broken by Vice President Kamala Harris, the White House cant afford to lose a single vote.

As Biden trumpeted the deal in public, the White House also furiously worked behind the scenes to keep it on the tracks.

Senior West Wing aides have had calls this week with more than 60 Democratic and Republican members and chiefs of staff and other aides, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Tuesday aboard Air Force One en route to Wisconsin. And she said the White House was going along with the timeline outlined by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who has said he wants to have both packages on the floor for debate next month.
UW Health is seeking people at risk for Alzheimers disease, but with no signs of it, to study an experimental drug like one approved this month amid hope and controversy.

The UW study drug is an antibody infusion targeting amyloid, a sticky protein associated with Alzheimers that forms plaques between brain cells, disrupting their function.

The Food and Drug Administration this month approved Aduhelm, a similar drug by the company Biogen, leading some advocates to applaud the first new treatment for Alzheimers in nearly 20 years. But some scientists advising the FDA resigned, saying the $56,000-a-year therapy hadnt been shown to slow the disease. House leaders on Friday announced an investigation into the approval and the pricing of the drug.

The debate, coming as Eli Lilly said last week it plans to seek approval for a similar drug, underscores the need to study other drug candidates to see which work best, said Dr. Cindy Carlsson, a UW geriatrician and director of the Wisconsin Alzheimers Institute, who is heading up the UW portion of the new study.
The tragedy, which is still unfolding as the death toll rises, has caused ripples of fear in condos dwellers up and down the coast, and inland as well. If a failure like this could happen in a building constructed in 1981, what might happen in older buildings or those with delayed or shoddy maintenance? Champlain Towers South condo was in the process of doing the legally required 40-year structural check-up when it buckled.

Hundreds of thousands of condo residents, perhaps even millions around the country, deserve to know exactly what happened in Surfside. They need to understand what can be done to prevent another collapse, and they need to know that as fast as possible. They need an honest, open  and urgent  investigation of how our condo safeguards went so catastrophically, lethally wrong. ...

To start, though, we need seamless cooperation with Surfside, Miami-Dade County, the state government and the federal government  regardless of which party holds the top offices. Thursday, County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava signed an emergency order, followed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who declared a state of emergency in the county, freeing up the flow of federal money and resources that President Biden has indicated would be forthcoming. Thats a baseline of cooperation, and were glad to see it.
I was disappointed with the special report An explainer: What is critical race theory? Instead of explaining what critical race theory is, the report was a critique of Republican efforts to deal with the issues raised by the ideas associated with the theory.

Because critical race theory is so controversial, it would be helpful if journalists would sort through the various ideas and concepts so that the public could understand what is or is not being advocated. After all, it is one thing for schools to inform students that some people believe certain ideas, but quite another to advocate them. For instance, it would be educational to acquaint students with what George Wallace said in support of racial segregation without advocating agreement.

The issue is murky because every time opponents criticize some idea that critical race theory supporters have advocated, the supporter then claims thats not what critical race theory is. The article mentions -- negatively -- the new Texas law that bans any of 10 concepts from public school curriculums. Anybody who reads the list of concepts would agree they have no place in an American school.
JEROME  Shoveling dirt into the air, representatives from across Jerome County participated in a groundbreaking ceremony Monday morning.

The currently vacant lot will soon be home to the first of several commercial and industrial buildings, called Northbridge Junction. Near the Flying J Truck Plaza, the location provides easy access to I-84 and Highway 93, said Chris McKay, investor representative.

McKay is with IronVista Development Group, the developer from Utah.

This fills a need that isnt available around here currently, he said.

Representatives from Jerome 20/20 Inc., Southern Idaho Economic Development, Business Plus, Jerome Chamber of Commerce, Crossroad Points, and Peterson Brothers Construction were in attendance. Jerome County commissioners also attended along with Idaho Rep. Laurie Lickley.

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The first building will be 79,404 square feet and feature 14 dock-level doors. Construction is expected to be completed by the Fall of 2022. McKay said as soon as the first building reaches 75% occupancy, construction will begin on the next larger building.

The buildings could house light manufacturing or distribution and logistics, said Connie Stopher, executive director of Southern Idaho Economic Development.
TWIN FALLS  This years only Idaho showman at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show at Lyndhurst Mansion in New York may not have won Best in Show, but she gained copious amounts of knowledge, an experience of a lifetime, and got to sit only two seats down from Martha Stewart.

I met a girl from Arizona that I had been texting, and she snuck us in to watch the groups, Briana Balderas recalled of Sundays showings. Even though the very top prestigious people were able to go in and watch, she gave it to me so we got to go and watch.

Sitting in the VIP area as waiters passed around drinks while live music played enhanced the experience even more for them, Briana said, plus it allowed them to watch the finale on Sunday.

We got to watch the Working Group, the Sporting Group, the Terrier Group, and then we got to watch Best in Show, she said.

Instead of flying to New York to compete, Briana, her mom Kristen Balderas, dad, grandmother, and show dog Teagan, road-tripped from Twin Falls to Tarrytown. They took in the lush greenery of the plains, the roar of Niagara Falls  Shoshone Falls is better Briana said  and the grandeur of Lyndhurst Mansion during their whirlwind trip.
A jury is seated and the trial is underway for Ammon Bundy and Aaron Schmidt in connection with their arrests at the Idaho Statehouse last summer.

Both were arrested on Aug. 25, 2020, in the Lincoln Auditorium at the Idaho Capitol after authorities said they refused to leave the room when it was being cleared. Both men were later banned from the Statehouse for a year. Bundy was arrested again the following day, though that trespassing charge was later dropped. Bundy was also arrested twice on the same day in April during the legislative session for violating his yearlong ban.

Jury selection began early Monday morning at the Ada County Courthouse in Boise and lasted into the afternoon. Opening statements began later in the afternoon, with Ada County Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Whitney Welsh speaking first.

Welsh told the jury that this case and related charges are the result of two people deciding the rules dont apply to them. She said that both men were asked to leave but did not do so. Welsh added that Bundy had to be physically removed by members of the Idaho State Police and did not participate in the booking process at the Ada County Jail.

Welsh asked the jury to find the two men guilty of the misdemeanor charges and said the state has sufficient evidence to prove the charges.
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP)  Alabama House Speaker Mac McCutcheon said Monday he will not seek reelection next year.

McCutcheon, 68, said in a statement that he is stepping away from politics to spend time with his family and to do some traveling with his wife during retirement.

Its been an honor and a privilege to represent the people of District 25 in the House and the citizens of the State of Alabama as speaker, but after four terms its time to go home, McCutcheon said.

McCutcheon, a Republican from Monrovia, is a former police officer and crisis negotiator. He was first elected to the House in 2006. He served as the chairman of the influential House Rules Committee, which decides what bills come up for debate, from 2012 to 2016.

McCutcheon came to the helm of the House at a time that the state was being battered by scandals.

McCutcheon was selected as speaker in 2016 to replace former House Speaker Mike Hubbard, who was removed from office after being convicted on ethics charges. McCutcheon, known for his affable demeanor, had promised to depart from the authoritative style of his predecessor.

The days of the imperial speakership are over, McCutcheon said at the time.
EDITORS NOTE: The Martinsville Bulletin will report court proceedings in Henry County and Martinsville district and circuit courts, except some juvenile cases and traffic citations other than DUI. Claims in civil suits may be reported, except in custody cases. The newspaper does not omit any names that qualify to be included. The information is compiled from court documents by the Bulletin.

Henry County General District Court

Devon Alexander Pilson of Martinsville was convicted of shoplifting-third offense and sentenced to 30 days in jail, with 25 days suspended, and ordered to pay a $100 fine plus costs. The offense happened Oct. 2.

A judge dismissed but may later reopen a charge of grand larceny and breaking and entering to commit assault and battery against Teresa Smart Milligan of Axton.

Landon Alpha Boyette of Madison Heights was charged with DWI first offense and was found guilty of an amended charge of DWI second offense. The defendant was sentenced to 30 days in jail, license suspended for 3 years, ordered to complete VASAP and to pay a $500 fine plus costs. The offense happened Oct. 4.

Martinsville General District Court
L.A. County officials announced in a Monday news release, two weeks after California Gov. Gavin Newsom lifted the mask mandate, that theyre recommending residents wear face coverings indoors in public places regardless of vaccination status until the health department can better understand how and to [whom] the Delta variant is spreading. The locality is the only one to break away from the CDC.

Anderson said the VDH is not aware of local health districts that have expressed similar interests but the subject is just being broached because of the new WHO guidance and L.A. Countys decisions.

More discussion likely will be had by health professionals across the country in the coming weeks about masks, even for those who are fully vaccinated, Anderson continued.

Chesterfield Health District isnt considering a change to mask guidance and will follow the state, said spokesperson Brookie Crawford. So will Richmond, Henrico and Chickahominy health districts.

Crawford added that to prevent infection by the Delta variant, we encourage everyone to get vaccinated as soon as possible and advised people who arent fully vaccinated to continue wearing a mask and social distancing.

Caitlin Hodge, spokesperson for Chickahominy Health District, said that while the health department is aware of only 2 confirmed Delta variant cases within the area, the increasing numbers are an important reminder that COVID-19 remains a serious public health matter and people should remain vigilant.

Staff writer Mel Leonor contributed to this report. Sabrina Moreno is a reporter for the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Reach her at smoreno@timesdispatch.com or 804-649-6103. Follow on Twitter: @sabrinaamorenoo
Clyde is one of those Fanone fought to save. Though there are photos of the lawmaker trying to barricade the House chamber against invaders, he is also one of those who has downplayed the severity of the attack, even likening it to a normal tourist visit. He joined 20 other Republicans in voting against awarding police the Congressional Gold Medal.

Fanone, who has been an outspoken critic of efforts to whitewash the riot, spotted Clyde at the Capitol and stepped into an elevator with him. He told The Washington Post that he greeted the lawmaker and extended a hand. I knew immediately he recognized me by the way he reacted. He completely froze. He just stared at me.

Fanone says that instead of accepting the proffered handshake, Clyde produced a cellphone and began thumbing through apps. When the doors opened, he says, Clyde bolted like the car was on fire.

There is something viscerally disgusting in this lying coward sprinting away from a handshake. But all of us need to be clear on one crucial point: Clyde is not some bizarre outlier but, rather, the beating heart of a GOP in thrall to Trump.
Neurofeedback loop: The EEG is recorded and the participant receives an instant feedback from his/her attention level captured by the alpha rhythm through a computer game, allowing to train the brain to concentrate. Credit: UNIGE

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) affects about 7% of children, with a two out of three chance of persisting into adulthood. This neurodevelopmental disorder is characterized by concentration difficulties, increased distractibility, impulsivity and hyperactivity. Today, ADHD is treated with pharmaceutical drugs that may have unwanted side effects. This is why scientists from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and the University Hospitals of Geneva (HUG), Switzerland, explored a new technique called 'neurofeedback," which enables ADHD patients to train their attention, based on instant feedback from the level of their brain activity. The team of neuroscientists found that not only did the training have a positive effect on patients' concentration abilities, but also that the attention improvement was closely linked to an enhanced response from the brainthe P3 wavewhich is known to reflect integration of information in the brain, with higher P3 amplitudes indicating greater attention towards detected targets. The findings are open-access and have been published in the journal Clinical Neurophysiology.

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) develops in childhood and leads to numerous difficulties with attention, concentration and impulsiveness. It has genetic associated with environmental causes, and is characterized by a deficit in dopamine, a neurotransmitter involved in executive functions. "These disorders persist for the most part into adulthood and lead to problems in relational and socio-professional functioning, making it easier for people with this disorder to turn to alcohol or drugs," notes Marie-Pierre Deiber, a researcher in the Department of Psychiatry at UNIGE Faculty of Medicine and at the HUG Division of Psychiatric Specialties.

Today, ADHD is treated with medications that increase the concentration of dopamine, which improves the patient's attention. As the disorder is often accompanied by depression, anxiety or even bipolar disorders, treatment is generally combined with psychotherapy. "However, pharmaceutical treatments can be accompanied by significant side effects, such as nervousness, sleep disturbance, but also an increased risk of developing other psychiatric disorders or cardiovascular diseases," explains Roland Hasler, a researcher in the HUG Division of Psychiatric Specialties. "This is why we wanted to investigate a completely non-pharmacological and non-invasive treatment based on the principle of neurofeedback."

Sending the brain its own signals

Neurofeedback is a type of neurocognitive intervention based on the training of "real-time" brain signals. Using an electroencephalogram (EEG) with 64 sensors, the scientists capture the electrical activity of cortical neurons and focus their analysis on the spontaneous Alpha rhythm (with frequency around 10 Hertz), coupling its amplitude fluctuation to a video game that the patients can control with the power of their attention. "The aim of neurofeedback is to make the patients aware of the moments when they are no longer attentive. With practice, brain networks then "learn" to reduce attentional lapses through neuroplasticity," explains Tomas Ros, researcher in the Department of Basic Neurosciences at UNIGE Faculty of Medicine and at the Centre for Biomedical Imaging (CIBM). To do this, the patient's EEG is connected to a computer that displays the image of a space shuttle. When the patient is in an attentive brain state (low Alpha rhythm), this makes the space shuttle move forward. But as soon as the patient is distracted or loses attention (high Alpha rhythm), this stops the space-shuttle movement instantly. Faced with the stopping of the space shuttle, the patient realizes that he/she was no longer paying attention and refocuses to restart the shuttle.

Training the brain to focus without medication?

To measure the effects of neurofeedback training, the Geneva team administered an attention test to 25 adults with ADHD, and 22 neurotypical adults. The results showed that, at baseline, ADHD patients made more mistakes and had a more variable reaction time than the control participants, in line with a signature of impaired attention. After 30 minutes of neurofeedback training, the participants took the attention test again.

"The first finding was that stimulus detection and response variability were improved, indicating attentional enhancement," says Marie-Pierre Deiber. "But what interested us most was the impact of the neurofeedback training on the P3 component, which has previously been shown to be reduced in ADHD, and directly linked to the neurocognitive processing of the stimulus." The higher the amplitude of the P3, the more efficient the processing of the stimulus is, and the more accurate the response to the attention task. "The amplitude of the P3 increased significantly after neurofeedback training, and was directly associated with a reduction in the number of errors made by the patients," reports Tomas Ros.

This study firstly shows that a single 30-minute session of neurofeedback can induce short-term plasticity in the brain and encourages attentional improvements in ADHD patients. Secondly, it supports the existence of an electro-physiological marker of attentional processing in ADHD. "Thus, the P3 could be a cerebral signature that would allow us to better understand the neurocognitive mechanisms of ADHD," says Nader Perroud, professor in the Department of Psychiatry at UNIGE Faculty of Medicine and at the HUG Division of Psychiatric Specialties. Finally, as the effects are evident in the short term, the scientists plan to carry out a neurofeedback treatment based on multiple training sessions, in order to observe whether the brain's plasticity is strengthened over time. "The ultimate goal is to enable patients to learn to concentrate without medication and to be able to train their brain in the comfort of their home," concludes Tomas Ros.

Explore further Cognitive-behavioural therapy particularly efficient in treating ADHS in adults

More information: Marie-Pierre Deiber et al, Electrophysiological correlates of improved executive function following EEG neurofeedback in adult attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Clinical Neurophysiology (2021). Marie-Pierre Deiber et al, Electrophysiological correlates of improved executive function following EEG neurofeedback in adult attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,(2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.clinph.2021.05.017
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

A new study looking at national opioid mortality, hospitalization and emergency department visits in Canada has found a nearly six-fold increase in opioid-related deaths between 2000 and 2017.

The study by University of Waterloo researchers is the first publication to assess the growth of Canadian opioid-related deaths during this time period at a national level. Researchers used comprehensive national databases and discovered two distinct trends in opioid-related mortality. First, the number of Canadians dying because of opioid use steadily increased from 2000-2015. Second, after 2015, opioid-related mortality increased rapidly.

"In 2016, the Public Health Agency of Canada began collating data on opioid-related mortality," said Wasem Alsabbagh, a pharmacy professor at Waterloo and lead author on the study. "We had some understanding of trends at the provincial level prior to 2016, but no comprehensive picture of trends across the country. Our research fills this gap in Canada's opioid mortality reporting by examining trends nationally from 2000 to 2017."

The researchers looked at death databases maintained by Statistics Canada. They used data from all provinces and territories, examining all opioid-related death. In addition, opioid use that led to hospitalizations or emergency department visit were captured using data from the Canadian Institute of Health Information. Alsabbagh and the research team analyzed the data using computer modelling to identify patterns.

Twenty Canadians died of opioid-related causes for every million people in 2000. By 2017, that number increased to 118.3 and there was a rapid growth of 52 percent between 2016 and 2017. Current estimates from the Public Health Agency of Canada lead the researchers to suspect that the number of deaths per million Canadians is much higher today, especially given the COVID-19 pandemic.

The study identified significant regional variations both in opioid mortality rates and hospitalizations. British Columbia and Alberta had the highest mortality rates and hospitalizations, followed by Ontario, Nova Scotia, Manitoba and Saskatchewan. The lowest were observed in New Brunswick, Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador and Prince Edward Island. The study also links information from numerous databases, allowing for new observations about trends in specific circumstances.

"We saw a significant increase in the percentage of all-cause mortalitydying from any causein those discharged after an opioid-related hospitalization," said Alsabbagh. "Between 2000 and 2011, the percentage of all-cause mortality went up from 3.9 percent to 7.4 percent one year after being discharged from an opioid-related hospitalization. This tells us we need to provide more robust substance use disorder treatments for those who survive opioid-related hospitalizations."

The large scope of the projectexamining nearly 20 years of medical administrative datarequired an interdisciplinary team, which included Alsabbagh, Feng Chang, Martin Cooke, Susan J. Elliott and Meixi Chen. The study was published in the journal Addiction.

More information: Mhd. Wasem Alsabbagh et al, National trends in population rates of opioidrelated mortality, hospitalization and emergency department visits in Canada between 2000 and 2017. A populationbased study, Addiction (2021). Journal information: Addiction Mhd. Wasem Alsabbagh et al, National trends in population rates of opioidrelated mortality, hospitalization and emergency department visits in Canada between 2000 and 2017. A populationbased study,(2021). DOI: 10.1111/add.15571
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

With the growing prevalence of chronic pain, depression, anxiety, and other symptom-based conditions, physicians and the healthcare systems for which they work are increasingly considering how to augment the care they can provide within the limited time allotted for patient appointments.

According to Regenstrief Institute Research Scientist Kurt Kroenke, M.D., writing in the Journal of General Internal Medicine (JGIM), collaborative care can and should play a major role targeting the treatment of symptoms and functional decline, both too frequently marginalized in medically oriented care delivery.

Collaborative care is a team-based model in which the patient's primary care physician is assisted in the management of specific health conditions (for example depression, anxiety or pain) by a care manager (often a nurse supervised by a physician specialist) with advanced expertise in the management of those conditions who provides care virtually.

Care managers help patients process information provided by their primary care physicians. For example, care managers can review treatment options, helping patients decide which option they prefer.

"We at Regenstrief and others have extensively studied utilizing collaborative care to provide behavioral treatments, education and care follow-up to patients with depression, anxiety and pain and we have found that it works," said Dr. Kroenke, a professor of medicine at Indiana University School of Medicine, an internationally respected pioneer in symptomology and the co-developer of the depression and anxiety scales most commonly used in primary care. "Collaborative care works because it provides patients with needed support between physician visits, augmenting medical practice via telephone or another telecare modality, making it easy for patients to fit into their schedules."

Collaborative care is becoming more common. Dr. Kroenke is currently exploring the use of collaborative care for substance abuse disorders.

"Perhaps the major reason that collaborative care hasn't gained traction outside of some large, integrated healthcare systems with multiple clinics, is because insurance companies typically have not covered augmenting physician care via telephone," said Dr. Kroenke. "But this barrier has eroded during the pandemic as telecare has been reimbursed by Medicare as well as insurance companies. And expanded use of telecare during the pandemic has also taught us to deliver virtual care more effectively and efficiently."

In addition to describing the collaborative care model and highlighting its application to patient care, "Canons of Collaborative Care" by Dr. Kroenke and Andrea Cheville, M.D., of the Mayo Clinic, provides principles for implementing collaborative care in real world clinical practice.

Explore further Utilizing telecare to motivate depressed individuals who take opioids into treatment
Colorized scanning electron micrograph of a cell (blue) heavily infected with SARS-CoV-2 virus particles (red), isolated from a patient sample. Image captured at the NIAID Integrated Research Facility (IRF) in Fort Detrick, Maryland. Credit: NIAID

Two doses of CoronaVac are safe and provoke a strong antibody response among children and adolescents aged 3-17 years, according to a randomised controlled trial of 550 young people published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal.

More than 96% of children and adolescents who received two doses of the vaccinemanufactured by Sinovacdeveloped antibodies against SARS-CoV-2. Most adverse reactions were mild or moderate, with pain at the injection site the most commonly reported symptom.

Qiang Gao, of Sinovac Life Sciences Co, Ltd, China, said: "Children and adolescents with COVID-19 usually have mild or asymptomatic infections compared with adults; however, a small number may still be at risk of severe illness. They can also transmit the virus to others, making it vital to test the safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines in younger age groups. Our finding that CoronaVac was well tolerated and induced strong immune responses is very encouraging, and suggests that further studies in other regions, involving larger, multi-ethnic populations, could provide valuable data to inform immunisation strategies involving children and adolescents."

The authors conducted a randomised, double-blind, controlled phase 1/2 clinical trial of CoronaVac in healthy children and adolescents aged 3-17 years in Zanhuang County, China. Between October 31 and December 2, 2020, 72 participants were enrolled in phase 1, with 480 participants enrolled in phase 2 between December 12 and December 30, 2020. The vaccine (either 1.5g or 3g per dose) or a control was given by intramuscular injection in two doses, at day 0 and day 28. In studies involving adults aged 18-59 years and people aged 60 years and older, participants received two doses of 1.5g, 3g, or 6g, with 3g doses suggested for use in further research.

Among the 550 participants who received at least one dose of vaccine or the control, adverse reactions within 28 days occurred in 56 (26%) of 219 participants in the 1.5g group, 63 (29%) of 217 in the 3g group, and 27 (24%) of 114 in the control group. Most adverse reactions were mild or moderate, with pain at the injection site (13%, 73/550 participants) the most commonly reported symptom. Only one serious adverse reactiona case of pneumoniawas reported in the control group; however, this was unrelated to the COVID-19 vaccination.

In phase 1, 100% of participants in both the 1.5g and 3g groups (27/27 and 26/26 participants, respectively) generated antibodies against SARS-CoV-2. Stronger immune responsesdetermined by the amount of antibodies produced that can neutralise the virus, expressed as geometric mean titre (GMT) - were detected among the 3g group compared with the 1.5g group (GMTs of 117 and 55, respectively). In phase 2, 97% (180/186) of participants in the 1.5g group produced antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, compared with 100% (180/180 participants) in the 3g group. Participants in the 3g group again produced a stronger immune response that those in the 1.5g group (GMTs of 142 and 86, respectively). Similar to findings for other vaccines that increasing age is linked with reduced immune responses, the authors note that immune responses among children and adolescents were higher than those in adults aged 18-59 years and elderly aged 60 years and older (GMTs of 44 and 42, respectively).

No significant differences in immune response were detected in an analysis by age group, with more than 93% of those in the 1.5g and 3g groups aged 3-5 years, 6-11 years, and 12-17 years producing antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 (with GMTs ranging from 78 to 146) at day 28 after the second dose. In each age group, there were significant differences in GMTs between the 15 g and30 g groups after the second dose, except in the group aged 12-17 years old in phase 1.

Based on their results, the authors recommend two 3g doses of the vaccine for children and adolescents aged 3-17 years.

The authors acknowledge some limitations to their study. T cell responseswhich play an important role in SARS-CoV-2 infectionswere not assessed in the study, though these have been investigated in related studies. The study involved a small number of participants and all were of Han ethnicity, highlighting a need for larger studies in other regions and involving multi-ethnic populations. Long-term safety and immune response data were not available, though participants will be followed for at least 1 year. Owing to the small number of participants in the study, the results should be interpreted with caution as it was not possible to draw strong statistical conclusions.

Writing in a linked Comment, Professor Bin Cao, of the China-Japan Friendship Hospital, China, highlights the need to include children in immunisation campaigns, explaining: "Herd immunity against COVID-19 is the prerequisite to end this pandemic, either through vaccinations or natural infection. Most estimates placed the threshold at 65-70% of the population gaining immunity, mainly by vaccination. However, widely circulating virus variants and persistent hesitancy on vaccine make this threshold difficult to reach. (...) Thus, the calculation has to be revised upward and children must be covered in the immunisation campaign."

In calling for longer follow-up assessments in children, Professor Cao also emphasises the vital importance of determining the safety of vaccines in younger age groups, saying: "While vaccinating children is essential to reach herd immunity and limit the severity of COVID-19, safety should be the paramount factor to be considered before COVID-19 vaccines can be rolled out in younger children."

Explore further One vaccine dose enough for COVID-19 survivors

More information: Bihua Han et al, Safety, tolerability, and immunogenicity of an inactivated SARS-CoV-2 vaccine (CoronaVac) in healthy children and adolescents: a double-blind, randomised, controlled, phase 1/2 clinical trial, The Lancet Infectious Diseases (2021). Journal information: Lancet Infectious Diseases Bihua Han et al, Safety, tolerability, and immunogenicity of an inactivated SARS-CoV-2 vaccine (CoronaVac) in healthy children and adolescents: a double-blind, randomised, controlled, phase 1/2 clinical trial,(2021). DOI: 10.1016/S1473-3099(21)00319-4
Top: The device is small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. Credit: Associate Professor Yuta Nakashima

A microfilter device that can easily separate and capture trace amounts of cancer cells in blood has been developed by a Kumamoto University research group. The palm-sized device is expected to contribute to the development of new cancer diagnostic technologies based on cancer cells in the blood, such as early detection by blood test, postoperative management, and recurrence monitoring.

The blood of people with cancer contains trace amounts of cancer cells (CTCs) that have detached from the primary cancer site. However, the amount of these cells is only a few per milliliter, whereas red or white blood cells number in the billions, making it very difficult to separate and detect them. Although devices for detecting CTCs have been developed in the past, they require expensive equipment and reagents, which has been a bottleneck for their practical application.

The unique microfilter device developed by the Kumamoto University research group can easily and inexpensively separate and capture CTCs without any large equipment. The device is dynamically and three-dimensionally deformed by the fluid force when blood is pumped through it. It also utilizes nucleic acid aptamers, which bind specifically and firmly to target molecules. This enables both size-selective and affinity-selective separation and capture of tiny cancer cells.

While evaluating the device, researchers demonstrated that it could capture cancer cells even at a concentration of just five cancer cells in one mL of healthy blood. Since there are about five billion (red and white) blood cells in a mL of blood, the device proved to have a very high detection capability. Researchers also found that almost no blood cells were adsorbed by the microfilter, achieving a blood cell removal rate of more than 98%. It also had a high selective detection capability. Furthermore, in a comparative evaluation, they proved that the device was able to detect cancer cells with higher accuracy than existing devices.

When blood flows over the microfilter, cancer cells in the blood bind to the nucleic acid aptamer. The hydrodynamic force of the blood opens the slits of the filter and the blood cells flow away, leaving the cancer cells on the filter. Credit: Associate Professor Yuta Nakashima

"This work demonstrates that our micro-filter device can accurately detect trace amounts of cancer cells in blood," said Associate Professor Yuta Nakashima, who led the study. "We expect it will be adopted for cancer diagnosis and treatment, including for early diagnosis of cancers that cannot be detected by imaging like CT and PET scans, postoperative follow-up, recurrence monitoring, and tailor-made treatments. In the future, we plan to use blood samples donated by cancer patients to verify the practical and clinical application of the method."

Explore further Researchers develop micro-fluidic probe to isolate cancer spreading cells

More information: Soichiro Fukuyama et al, Detection of cancer cells in whole blood using a dynamic deformable microfilter and a nucleic acid aptamer, Talanta (2021). Soichiro Fukuyama et al, Detection of cancer cells in whole blood using a dynamic deformable microfilter and a nucleic acid aptamer,(2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.talanta.2021.122239
US drugmakers and distributors go on trial in Central Islip, New York before a jury for the first time accused of stoking an opioid addiction epidemic that has left more than half a million Americans dead from overdoses.

US pharmaceutical firms accused of stoking a two-decade epidemic of opioid addiction that has seen 500,000 die from overdoses stood trial before a jury for the first time Tuesday.

The suit launched by two counties in New York state charges the leading drugmakers and distributors with earning huge profits by pushing highly addictive prescription opioids like Oxycontin that cost local authorities billions of dollars for social services in dealing with the fallout from the epidemic.

"This case is about one thing: corporate greed," the suit says.

The drug makers and distributors "put their desire for profits above the health and wellbeing" of the citizens of the counties, the suit said.

On trial are firms including Actavis, Cardinal Health and Amerisource, dominant powers in the US healthcare industry.

The initial complaint also included Purdue Pharma, whose involvement in the case has been paused due to bankruptcy, and Johnson & Johnson, which is no longer part of the lawsuit after announcing a settlement over the weekend, among others.

Civil and criminal charges have been launched in front of judges around the country against the firms, with some of those cases resulting in negotiated settlements for heavy damages.

The case that opened in Central Islip, New York Tuesday will be the first in which the companies will be judged by a jury of citizens, who could, if convinced of their guilt, award the counties massive damages that could create a framework for similar suits and jury trials all around the country.

"The evidence is going to show that the manufacturing defendants misled doctors and patients by claiming that the risk of addiction was rare," said Jayne Conroy, who represents the Long Island county of Suffolk, one of the two counties named as plaintiffs in the suit.

"The opioid epidemic didn't happen by accident. It happened because of a calculated decision in boardrooms across the country to decide to try to make a blockbuster drug... that everyone knew was addictive, and cause death," said Hunter Shkolnik, representing Nassau County.

On the eve of the trial four major pharmacy chains including CVS and Walgreens were dropped from the list of defendants because they had reached settlements with the state, according to news reports.

The trial is taking place in a university auditorium because the courtroom is not large enough to contain all of the defendants and their attorneys.

It is expected to last six to eight weeks.

Explore further J&J and other drugmakers go on trial over US opioid crisis

 2021 AFP
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Although James Toussaint has never had COVID-19, the pandemic is taking a profound toll on his health.

First, the 57-year-old lost his job delivering parts for a New Orleans auto dealership in spring 2020, when the local economy shut down. Then, he fell behind on his rent. Last month, Toussaint was forced out of his apartment when his landlordwho refused to accept federally funded rental assistancefound a loophole in the federal ban on evictions.

Toussaint recently has had trouble controlling his blood pressure. Arthritis in his back and knees prevents him from lifting more than 20 pounds, a huge obstacle for a manual laborer.

Toussaint worries about what will happen when his pandemic unemployment benefits run out, which could happen as early as July 31.

"I've been homeless before," said Toussaint, who found a room to rent nearby after his eviction. "I don't want to be homeless again."

With coronavirus infections falling in the U.S., many people are eager to put the pandemic behind them. But it has inflicted wounds that won't easily heal. In addition to killing 600,000 in the United States and afflicting an estimated 3.4 million or more with persistent symptoms, the pandemic threatens the health of vulnerable people devastated by the loss of jobs, homes and opportunities for the future. It will, almost certainly, cast a long shadow on American health, leading millions of people to live sicker and die younger due to increasing rates of poverty, hunger and housing insecurity.

In particular, it will exacerbate the discrepancies already seen in the country between the wealth and health of Black and Hispanic Americans and those of white Americans. Indeed, new research published June 23 in the BMJ shows just how wide that gap has grown. Life expectancy across the country plummeted by nearly two years from 2018 to 2020, the largest decline since 1943, when American troops were dying in World War II, according to the study. But while white Americans lost 1.36 years, Black Americans lost 3.25 years and Hispanic Americans lost 3.88 years. Given that life expectancy typically varies only by a month or two from year to year, losses of this magnitude are "pretty catastrophic," said Dr. Steven Woolf, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and lead author of the study.

Over the two years included in the study, the average loss of life expectancy in the U.S. was nearly nine times greater than the average in 16 other developed nations, whose residents can now expect to live 4.7 years longer than Americans. Compared with their peers in other countries, Americans died not only in greater numbers but at younger ages during this period.

The U.S. mortality rate spiked by nearly 23% in 2020, when there were roughly 522,000 more deaths than expected. Not all of these deaths were directly attributable to COVID-19. Fatal heart attacks and strokes both increased in 2020, at least partly fueled by delayed treatment or lack of access to medical care, Woolf said. More than 40% of Americans put off treatment during the early months of the pandemic, when hospitals were stretched thin and going into a medical facility seemed risky. Without prompt medical attention, heart attacks can cause congestive heart failure; delaying treatment of strokes raises the risk of long-term disability.

Much of the devastating public health impact during the pandemic can be chalked up to economic disparity. Although stock prices have recovered from last year's declineand have recently hit all-time highsmany people are still suffering financially, especially Black and Hispanic Americans. In a February report, economic analysts at McKinsey & Co. predicted that, on average, Black and Hispanic workers won't recover their pre-pandemic employment and salaries until 2024. The lowest-paid workers and those with less than a high school education may not recover even by then.

And while federal and state relief programs have cushioned the impact of pandemic job losses, 11.3% of Americans today live in povertycompared with 10.7% in January 2020. A federal eviction moratorium, which has helped an estimated 2.2 million people remain in their homes, expires June 30. Without protection from evictions, "millions of Americans could fall off the cliff," said Vangela Wade, president and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Justice, a nonprofit advocacy group.

Being evicted erodes a person's health in multiple ways. "Poverty causes a lot of cancer and chronic disease, and this pandemic has caused a lot more poverty," said Dr. Otis Brawley, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who studies health disparities. "The effect of this pandemic on chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes, will be measured decades from now."

Nineteen million adults recently have had trouble putting food on the table. The inability to afford healthy foodwhich is usually more expensive than salty, starchy farecan cause both short-term and long-term harm. People with low incomes, for example, are more likely to be hospitalized for low blood sugar toward the end of the month, when they run out of money for food.

In the long term, food insecurity is associated with an increased risk of diabetes, high cholesterol, hypertension, depression, anxiety and other chronic diseases, especially in children.

"Once the acute phase of this crisis has passed, we will face an enormous wave of death and disability," said Dr. Robert Califf, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, who wrote about post-pandemic health risks in an April editorial in Circulation, a medical journal. "These will be the aftershocks of COVID-19."

Less wealth, poorer health

American health was poor even before the pandemic, with 60% of the population suffering from a chronic condition, such as obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure or heart failure. These four conditions were associated with nearly two-thirds of hospitalizations from COVID-19, according to a February study in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

Deaths from some chronic diseases began rising in lower-income Americans in the 1990s, Woolf said. That trend was exacerbated by the Great Recession of 2007-09, which undermined the health not just of those who lost their homes or jobs but the population as a whole. Still, the Great Recession, and its resultant health effects, did not affect all Americans equally. Black people in the U.S. today control less wealth than they did before that recession, while the gap in financial security between Black and white Americans has widened, according to a Nonprofit Quarterly article published last year. And the unemployment rate among Black workers did not recover to pre-recession levels until 2016.

Researchers have developed a better understanding in recent years of how chronic stresssuch as that caused by poverty, job loss and homelessnessleads to disease. Unrelenting stress causes inflammation that can damage blood vessels, the heart and other organs.

Research shows that people with low incomes live an average of seven to eight years less than those who are financially secure. The richest 1% of Americans live nearly 15 years longer than the poorest 1%.

People who are poor tend to smoke more; have higher risks of chronic illnesses such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, kidney disease and mental illness; and are more likely to become victims of violence.

The stress of the pandemic also has led many people to smoke, drink and gain weight, increasing the risk of chronic disease. Fatal drug overdoses spiked 30% from October 2019 to October 2020.

Jennifer Drury, 40, has struggled with substance abuse, particularly prescription painkillers, since her 20s. She blames the isolation and stress of the pandemic for causing her to relapseand leading several of her friends to fatally overdose.

"Idle time is not good for addiction," said Drury, who fell behind on rent and was evicted from her previous home. She said drug dealers are never far away, especially at the New Orleans motel where she and her husband are now staying. "Drug dealers don't care about pandemics."

Women losing ground

The American Rescue Plan, which provides $1.9 trillion in pandemic relief, was designed to help displaced workers and cut child poverty rates in half. The actual benefits of the law may prove less sweeping.

Twenty-five states have opted to cut off additional federal unemployment payments, citing concerns that such generous benefits pay people more to stay home than to work.

Many women say they would like to return to work but have no one to take care of their children. Nearly half of child care centers have closed and others have reduced the number of children they serve.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis concluded that "economic recovery depends on child care availability." A March report from the National Women's Law Center estimates "women have lost a generation of labor force participation gains," which could leave them and their children financially disadvantaged for years.

Ruth Bermudez is one of millions of women who have left the workforce in the past year. Bermudez, who was laid off from her job as a behavioral health caseworker in New Orleans last year, said her child care needs have prevented her from finding work. The care of her 6-year-old daughter became her full-time job after the pandemic closed schools.

Although her daughter has returned to class, Bermudez said school shutdowns due to COVID-19 outbreaks have been frequent and unpredictable.

"I had to be the teacher, the lunch lady, the school bus driver, all at one time," said Bermudez, 27. "It is exhausting."

Life-altering evictions

James Toussaint had just two weeks to find a new place to live after a judge ordered him evicted. His family was unable to take him in.

"I've got family, but everybody has their own issues and problems," said Toussaint, who had to throw away all his clothes and furniture because they had become infested with bedbugs. "Everyone is trying their best to help themselves."

Toussaint is now renting a room in a boarding house with no kitchen and a shared bathroom for $160 a week. He's had to buy cleaning supplies with his own money in order to sanitize the bathroom, which he said is often too dirty to use.

Sharing communal space is often unsanitary and increases the risk of being exposed to the coronavirus, said Emily Benfer, a visiting professor at Wake Forest University School of Law. Even moving in with family poses risks, she said, because it's impossible to isolate or quarantine in crowded homes.

Benfer co-wrote a November study that found COVID-19 infection rates grew twice as high in states that lifted moratoriums on evictions, compared with states that continued to ban them. About 14% of tenants have fallen behind on rentdouble the rate before the pandemic.

Toussaint's annual lease expired during the pandemic, leaving him to rent on a month-to-month basis. While some states require landlords to show "just cause" for eviction, Louisiana landlords can evict tenants for any reason once their annual lease has expired.

Property owners have filed for more than 372,000 evictions during the pandemic in just the five states and 29 cities tracked by Princeton University's Eviction Lab. A growing body of evidence shows that eviction is toxic to health, causing immediate and long-term damage that increases the risk of death. Studies show that evicted people are more likely to be in poor general health or have mental health concerns even years later.

"This singular event alters the course of one's life for the worse," Benfer said. "If we don't intervene" to prevent mass evictions when the moratorium ends, "it will be catastrophic for generations to come."

Eviction's harms can be measured at every stage of life:

When pregnant women are evicted, their newborns are more likely to be born early or very small and have a higher risk of dying in the first year. Women who are evicted are more likely to suffer sexual assault, Benfer said.

Kids who are evicted are at greater risk of lead poisoning from substandard housing, Benfer said. They're also more likely than others to be hospitalized.

Evicted adults report worse mental health and are more likely to be hospitalized for a mental health crisis, studies show. They also have higher mortality rates from suicide. Although the causes of addiction are complex, research shows that counties with higher eviction rates have significantly higher rates of drug- and alcohol-related deaths.

People who are evicted often move into substandard housing in neighborhoods with higher crime rates. These homes are sometimes plagued by mold and roaches, lack sufficient heating, or have plumbing that doesn't work. Landlords have no incentive to make repairs for tenants who are behind on their rent, Benfer said. In fact, tenants who request repairs or report safety hazards risk eviction.

Although middle-class Americans take their kitchens for grantedand rely on them to cook healthful mealsmore than 1 million homes lack complete kitchens, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

New Orleans doesn't require that rental units include stoves, said Hannah Adams, also a lawyer with Southeast Louisiana Legal Services. Toussaint's new room is equipped with a microwave and small refrigerator, but no sink, oven or stove. He washes dinner dishes in the bathroom. His landlord doesn't allow residents to have electric hot plates, so most of his meals involve cold cereal, deli sandwiches or meals he can heat in the microwave. His doctor has urged Toussaint, who is borderline diabetic, to lose weight, eat less salt and starch, and stop smoking.

Toussaint, who lived on the street for two years, said he's determined not to return there. He hopes to apply for disability insurance, which would provide him with an income if his arthritis prevents him from finding steady work.

Woolf said he hopes Americans won't forget about the suffering of people like Toussaint as cases of COVID-19 decline. "My worry is that people will feel the crisis is behind us and it's all good," Woolf said. His research connecting four decades of declining economic opportunity with falling life expectancy shows "we are in really big trouble, and that was true before we knew a pandemic was coming."

The pandemic doesn't have to doom a generation of Americans to disease and early death, said Dr. Richard Besser, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. By addressing issues such as poverty, racial inequality and the lack of affordable housing, the country can improve American health and reverse the trends that caused communities of color to suffer. "How the pandemic will affect people's future health depends on what we do coming out of this," Besser said. "It will take an intentional effort to make up for the losses that have occurred over the past year."

2021 Kaiser Health News

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC
Moderna's shot is the fourth to be approved by New Delhi after Oxford-AstraZeneca's Covishield and Covaxin, and Russia's Sputnik V.

India authorised the emergency use of Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine on Tuesday as it seeks to ramp up inoculations in the wake of a record-breaking surge in infections and deaths.

The vast nation of 1.3 billion people was hit by a massive spike in coronavirus cases in April and May that pushed the healthcare system to breaking point.

Moderna's shot is the fourth to be approved by New Delhi after Oxford-AstraZeneca's Covishield and Covaxinwhich was developed by Indian firm Bharat Biotechand Russia's Sputnik V.

"I am pleased to inform that an application received from Moderna through an Indian partner of theirs, Cipla, has been granted EUA (Emergency Use Authorisation)," Vinod K. Paul, a member of government advisory body NITI Aayog, said at a health ministry briefing.

Paul added that the approvalthe first for an mRNA vaccine in Indiawould pave the way for other foreign-made shots to be imported into the country, with efforts to get Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson doses ongoing.

Modern's chief executive Stephane Bancel said the authorisation would mark an "important step forward in the global fight against the pandemic".

"We are committed to making our COVID-19 vaccine available around the world," he added in a statement by the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company.

A small number of Sputnik V shots were imported into India after the drug was approved in mid-April, but the majority are expected to be manufactured within the country, like Covishield and Covaxin.

India said two months ago that it would fast-track the approval of vaccines manufactured outside the country that have already been granted emergency use authorisation by major regulators such as the US Food and Drug Administration.

The government has been under pressure to speed up its flagging inoculation drive by allowing the import of foreign-made shots such as Pfizer and Moderna.

"We should have as many vaccines and alternatives as possible," said Dr. Rakesh Mishra, the former director of research body the Centre for Cellular Molecular Biology, who welcomed the approval.

Anant Bhan, a senior researcher in health and bioethics, said that the Moderna vaccinewhich needs to be stored at minus 20 degrees Celsius (minus four Fahrenheit)was unlikely to be for mass use due to its cold-chain requirements and higher price tag.

Rival jabs like the Covishield vaccinewhich is the main shot used in Indiacan be kept at normal refrigerator temperatures of between two and eight degrees Celsius (36-46 Fahrenheit).

"It's primarily going to be used in the private health sector largely present in the cities. There, they can manage and build to meet some of its storage requirements," Bhan told AFP.

"It is a welcome decision but the question is also what it means in terms of access, number of doses and price point. We will have to wait and watch for that."

More than 329 million doses have been administered since the mass coronavirus vaccination programme kicked off in mid-January.

But just six percent of India's adult populationor 57 million peoplehave received both doses of a two-shot regime.

India has the world's second-highest number of infections, with more than 30 million cases and nearly 398,000 deaths.

 2021 AFP
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Fertility patients who have a poor response to ovarian stimulation represent a stubborn challenge in IVF. Few eggs are collected, success rates are low, and several treatments are usually needed to achieve pregnancy (if at all). Clinical guidelines indicate that increasing the drug dose for stimulation or applying any of several adjunct therapies are of little benefit. Now, however, a study assessing two cycles of ovarian stimulation and two egg collections in the same menstrual cycle may yet provide a real advance for predicted poor responders in IVF.

A randomised trial performed in Spain has found that this double stimulation approachknown as "DuoStim"is just as efficient as two conventional stimulations in different cycles and importantly reduces the time to pregnancy in a group of patients who rarely have time on their side. "This is of great clinical utility," said Dr. Maria Cerrillo Martinez, presenting the study results at ESHRE's online annual meeting on behalf of her colleagues at IVIRMA in Madrid. Dr. Cerrillo added that this was the first randomised trial to compare the efficiency of single-cycle DuoStim with two conventional treatments in separate cycles.

The study took place throughout 2017 and 2020 in a total of 80 IVF patients scheduled for embryo testing (PGT-A for chromosomal normality). All were aged over 38 and their reproductive history and ovarian reserve tests predicted a low response to ovarian stimulationwith few eggs collected and a likely poor outcome. They were randomised to two conventional cycles of stimulation or to DuoStim, and results were significantly in favour of the latter.

While the initial "laboratory" response to stimulation was comparable between the two groups in terms of eggs collected and healthy embryos developed, there was a significant difference in the average number of days it took to develop a chromosomally normal embryo ready for transfer. The DuoStim group reached this point in an average of 23 days from the start of stimulation, while the conventional two-treatment group took an average of 44 days. There was also a trend towards higher fertilisation and blastocyst-formation rate in the DuoStim group.

Since the earliest days of IVF treatment, whether in a natural or stimulated cycle, treatment has always involved a single attempt in a single cycle. Stimulation has always been with fertility hormones known as gonadotrophins with the aim of producing multiple eggs for collection and fertilisation. The idea of stimulating the ovaries twice in the same cycle has seemed counterintuitive, but, says Dr. Cerrillo, the concept is quite in tune with the biology of the ovary.

"Classically," she explained, "only one cohort of follicles has been recruited in the early 'follicular' phase of the cycle. However, we know from data in other species that stimulation in the second 'luteal' phase of the cycle was also possible. So some women having fertility preservation before cancer treatment and with little time to spare were stimulated as soon as they came to the IVF unit, and they usually responded normally. It's the same principle behind DuoStimthat we can recruit a cohort of follicles on any day of the cycle."

So far, the benefits of a dual stimulation strategy seem to be concentrated on time to pregnancy and the generation of several eggs in a treatment group usually associated with very few. Studies so far have also found that fewer patients have dropped out of treatment programmes because of the shorter time required.

So far, guidelines for IVF have described DuoStim as only of experimental application, but, says Dr. Cerrillo, "we think it's a great alternative for predicted poor responders who might otherwise have difficulties reaching blastocyst transfer from just one egg pick-up". She added that her own clinic in Madrid now has DuoStim experience in more than 500 patients. "Hopefully, the experimental recommendation will change with more data like ours being published."

Dr. Cerrillo emphasised that the dual stimulation strategy was so far applicable mainly to a group of patients whose ovarian reserve testssuch as AMHindicated a poor response to stimulation. "But we also need to consider the most relevant marker of prognosis, patient age. So the patients we're looking at are those with poor ovarian reserve, who are often at an older maternal age," she said.

"So if the patient is a good responder, we may not need more eggs or more embryosand dual stimulation would not be necessary," explained Dr. Cerrillo. "However, it may be a good alternative in poor responders, in fertility preservation patients with time constraints, or even in egg donors, whose aim is to maximise the number of eggs retrieved in a single treatment."

Explore further Previous infection with COVID-19 does not affect the chance of success in IVF

More information: Presentation 0-111, Tuesday 29 June 2021: The DuoStim strategy shortens the time to obtain an euploid embryo in poor prognosis patients: a non inferiority, randomized controlled trial
Credit: Berthold-Losleben et al.

Emotion regulation is an essential aspect of mental health and wellbeing. In fact, past studies have found associations between poor emotion regulation and several psychiatric disorders, including bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder and complex post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

During their everyday life, humans can regulate their negative emotions in different ways, most of which do not require any conscious cognitive engagement. For instance, they might take a bath, step outside for fresh air or listen to music.

Researchers at Radboud University Nijmegen in The Netherlands, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), and University Hospital Aachen, Germany have recently carried out a study aimed at investigating the effects of a short-term musical training on implicit emotion regulation. Their paper, published in BMC Neuroscience, specifically examined whether musical training helped people to reduce the negative emotions elicited by unpleasant or disgusting odors.

"At the time of conception, my colleagues and I worked in the same department in Aachen," Nils Kohn, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told MedicalXpress. "The project was born out of our curiosity for emotions and the power of mood induction that is harbored by music. Mark Berthold-Losleben, being more of a trained musician than myself, was the perfect person to discuss this with."

Kohn, Berthold-Losleben and their colleagues decided to investigate whether, in a controlled environment, music could change people's emotional responses to unpleasant smells. They focused on olfaction because previous studies found that odors can consistently lead to emotional responses.

Their paper draws on previous knowledge about the stability of olfaction and its neuroanatomical connections, which was gathered by their research group in the past. In addition, it builds on Kohn's theoretical interpretation of how implicit emotion regulation works.

"In the first draft of our paper, we also wanted to explore implicit emotion regulation among professional musicians and/or composers," Berthold-Losleben said. "Therefore, we initiated a cooperation with the school for music and dance in Cologne to recruit participants. Unfortunately, most musicians didn't meet our schedule or the study's inclusion criteria. Another problem was that professional musicians, or at least those we tried to recruit, did not like the positive auditory stimuli as much as non-professionals did. We assumed that this was because of their professional and therefore more complex approach to music. Maybe our stimuli were too well-known and boring to them."

To investigate the effects of musical training on implicit emotion regulation, Kohn, Berthold-Losleben and their colleagues designed a simple experiment in which they paired negative olfaction (eliciting a negative emotion) with positive music to create four different combinations of stimuli. They then recruited 31 healthy participants to take part in their experiment.

Essentially, participants were either exposed to an odor similar to rotten eggs or to no odors at all. Simultaneously, they either listened to an excerpt of classical music or to a neutral range of tones.

"We then added three weeks of passive listening to classical music as our musical intervention for participants and re-did the test," Kohn explained. "In the task, subjects had to always rate how disgusting the smell was, how they liked the music and how they felt in general. This was done while the subjects lay in the fMRI scanner."

Overall, the findings gathered by the researchers suggest that listening to music two times per day for three weeks can reduce negative emotions elicited by a bad odor, particularly if one hears music again. In other words, music could improve wellbeing and help people to regulate negative emotions elicited by an external stimulus.

If they were also applicable to individuals with psychiatric disorders, the findings gathered by this team of researchers could have important implications. For instance, they could highlight the value of musical interventions for increasing stress resilience and helping people with affective disorders to better regulate their emotions.

"Patients suffering from affective disorders like depression often find themselves in an endless circle of sameness," Berthold-Losleben said. "Once confronted with triggers that lead to negative affect, they react with negative emotions/feelings, negative body experiences and negative thinking. All of that itself can trigger a new negative affect. These patients tend to end up in a negative circle or spiral which it is difficult or impossible to get out of."

The overreaching goal of the work by Kohn, Berthold-Losleben and their colleagues is to devise simple musical interventions for people with depression or other affective disorders, which are easy to implement and could improve their ability to regulate negative emotions. Firstly, however, they had to gain a better understanding of emotion regulation and of the stimuli that can elicit or reduce negative emotions.

"We are now trying to initiate a collaboration between Radboud University Nijmegen and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim to continue this line of research, as I'm still very interested in what challenges our abilities to regulate ourselves in our daily life and what can support us," Kohn said. "Music would truly be such an easy, powerful and supportive tool for emotion regulation."

Explore further Aggressive music related to anxiety in men

More information: Short-term musical training affects implicit emotion regulation only in behavior but not in brain activity. BMC Neuroscience(2021). Journal information: BMC Neuroscience Short-term musical training affects implicit emotion regulation only in behavior but not in brain activity.(2021). DOI: 10.1186/s12868-021-00636-1

 2021 Science X Network
Credit: Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

When Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge upgraded its face masks for staff working on COVID-19 wards to filtering face piece 3 (FFP3) respirators, it saw a dramatic fallup to 100%  in hospital-acquired SARS-CoV-2 infections among these staff.

The findings are reported by a team at the University of Cambridge and Cambridge University Hospitals (CUH) NHS Foundation Trust. The research has not yet been peer-reviewed, but is being released early because of the urgent need to share information relating to the pandemic.

Until recently, advice from Public Health England recommended that healthcare workers caring for patients with COVID-19 should use fluid resistant surgical masks type IIR (FRSMs) as respiratory protective equipment; if aerosol-generating procedures were being carried out (for example inserting a breathing tube into the patient's windpipe), then the guidance recommended the use of an FFP3 respirator. PHE has recently updated its guidance to oblige NHS organisations to assess the risk that COVID-19 poses to staff and provide FFP3 respirators where appropriate.

Since the start of the pandemic, CUH has been screening its healthcare workers regularly for SARS-CoV-2, even where they show no symptoms. They found that healthcare workers caring for patients with COVID-19 were at a greater risk of infection than staff on non-COVID-19 wards, even when using the recommended respiratory protective equipment. As a result, its infection control committee implemented a change in respiratory protective equipment for staff on COVID-19 wards, from FRSMs to FFP3 respirators.

Prior to the change in respiratory protective equipment, cases were higher on COVID-19 wards compared with non-COVID-19 wards in seven out of the eight weeks analysed by the team. Following the change in protective equipment, the incidence of infection on the two types of ward was similar.

The results suggest that almost all cases among healthcare workers on non-COVID-19 wards were caused by community-acquired infection, whereas cases among healthcare workers on COVID-19 wards were caused by both community-acquired infection and direct, ward-based infection from patients with COVID-19but that these direct infections were effectively mitigated by the use of FFP3 respirators.

To calculate the risk of infection for healthcare workers working on COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 wards, the researchers developed a simple mathematical model.

Dr. Mark Ferris from the University of Cambridge's Occupational Health Service, one of the study's authors, said: "Healthcare workersparticularly those working on COVID-19 wardsare much more likely to be exposed to coronavirus, so it's important we understand the best ways of keeping them safe.

"Based on data collected during the second wave of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in the UK, we developed a mathematical model to look at the risks faced by those staff dealing with COVID-19 patients on a day to day basis. This showed us the huge effect that using better PPE could have in reducing the risk to healthcare workers."

According to their model, the risk of direct infection from working on a non-COVID-19 ward was low throughout the study period, and consistently lower than the risk of community-based exposure.

By contrast, the risk of direct infection from working on a COVID-19 ward before the change in respiratory protective equipment was considerably higher than the risk of community-based exposure: staff on COVID-19 wards were at 47 times greater risk of acquiring infection while on the ward than staff working on a non-COVID-19 ward.

Crucially, however, the model showed that the introduction of FFP3 respirators provided up to 100% protection against direct, ward-based COVID-19 infection.

Dr. Chris Illingworth from the MRC Biostatistics Unit at the University of Cambridge, said: "Before the face masks were upgraded, the majority of infections among healthcare workers on the COVID-19 wards were likely due to direct exposure to patients with COVID-19.

"Once FFP3 respirators were introduced, the number of cases attributed to exposure on COVID-19 wards dropped dramaticallyin fact, our model suggests that FFP3 respirators may have cut ward-based infection to zero."

Dr. Nicholas Matheson from the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge, said: "Although more research will be needed to confirm our findings, we recommend that, in accordance with the precautionary principle, guidelines for respiratory protective equipment are further revised until more definitive information is available."

Dr. Michael Weekes from the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge, added: "Our data suggest there's an urgent need to look at the PPE offered to healthcare workers on the frontline. Upgrading the equipment so that FFP3 masks are offered to all healthcare workers caring for patients with COVID-19 could reduce the number of infections, keep more hospital staff safe and remove some of the burden on already stretched healthcare services caused by absence of key staff due to illness. Vaccination is clearly also an absolute priority for anyone who hasn't yet taken up their offer."

More information: Mark Ferris et al, FFP3 respirators protect healthcare workers against infection with SARS-CoV-2, (2021). Mark Ferris et al, FFP3 respirators protect healthcare workers against infection with SARS-CoV-2,(2021). DOI: 10.22541/au.162454911.17263721/v1
A medical worker collects a nasal swab sample during a mass screening for coronavirus at North Sumatra University Hospital in Medan, North Sumatra, Indonesia, Monday, June 28, 2021. The world's fourth most populous country has seen COVID-19 infections surge in recent weeks, putting pressure on hospitals and has added urgency to the government's plan to inoculate 1 million people each day by next month. Credit: AP Photo/Binsar Bakkara

Indonesia needs to urgently increase medical care, testing and vaccinations as the number of new infections in the country has rapidly increased and left it "on the edge of a COVID-19 catastrophe," the Red Cross said Tuesday.

The group said its coronavirus hospital in Bogor, outside of Jakarta, was "overflowing" and emergency tents had been set up to be able to house more patients. It was a similar scene at other hospitals near the capital, including in at the Bekasi city hospital that had 90% of its beds filled.

"We are seeing record number of infections, but every statistic is a person who is suffering, grieving or struggling to support the people they love," Sudirman Said, secretary general of Indonesian Red Cross, said in a statement. "Our medical teams are providing lifesaving care, with hospitals full to the brim and oxygen supplies critically low."

The surge in Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous nation, is being blamed in part on the delta variant of the virus, which was first spotted in India and is thought to be more contagious. Indonesia reported more than 20,600 new cases on Monday and more than 400 deaths.

Indonesia has seen more than 2.1 million cases since the pandemic began and more than 57,500 deaths, both the most in Southeast Asia.

Less than 5% of adults in the nation of 270 million people have been fully vaccinated. The Red Cross called for global action so countries like Indonesia can get the vaccines they need.

A bed it rolled out from an emergency tent erected to accommodate a surge of COVID-19 patients at a hospital in Bekasi, West Java, Indonesia, Monday, June 28, 2021. Credit: AP Photo/Achmad Ibrahim

A medical worker treat patients inside an emergency tent accommodating a surge of COVID-19 patients at a hospital in Bekasi, West Java, Indonesia, Monday, June 28, 2021. Credit: AP Photo/Achmad Ibrahim

Patients sit inside an emergency tent erected to accommodate a surge of COVID-19 patients at a hospital in Bekasi, West Java , Indonesia, Monday, June 28, 2021.Credit: AP Photo/Achmad Ibrahim

A patient its assisted to an emergency tent erected to accommodate a surge of COVID-19 patients at a hospital in Bekasi, West Java, Indonesia, Monday, June 28, 2021. Credit: AP Photo/Achmad Ibrahim

Explore further Indonesia hits record of over 21,000 daily virus infections

 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

In the first study of its kind in the UK, researchers examined language in Welsh-English bilingual children with Down syndrome and found no evidence of additional difficulties compared to monolinguals.

Findings dispel the myth that exposure to two languages may cause problems for children with Down syndrome.

The publication is part of early career researcher Dr. Rebecca Ward's work in the Department of Linguistics at Bangor University. Rebecca says:

"It is really exciting to be able to share these positive research findings. Hopefully this can lead to a move towards a more inclusive approach when it comes to bilingualism, and will affirm families' decisions to pursue bilingualism even if faced with hesitancy from others."

The study, published in the Journal of Communication Disorders, is the first group study in the UK to investigate bilingualism in children with Down syndrome, and one of very few studies internationally.

Dr. Eirini Sanoudaki, Senior Lecturer in Linguistics, who led the project, explained:

"It is a privilege to pioneer this field of research, and to make a real impact in people's lives. Families and health professionals were previously unsure due to absence of evidence about bilingualism. I have been receiving messages from Wales and across the world asking for advice; these positive results will provide some of the certainty needed."

Researchers compared a group of bilingual children with Down syndrome to a group of English monolinguals, and found comparable performance in English, as well as considerable skills in Welsh.

One family who was involved in the project were Amanda and her son Morgan. Amanda said: "When Morgan was born his brother had just commenced Meithrin (Welsh language nursery). We hoped the brothers could attend school together, but weren't sure if this was the right path for Morgan especially as English is our home language. Local professionals cautioned against it, feeling it would be too confusing for him and hinder his progress. We contacted organizations specializing in Down's syndrome for additional opinions. The conclusion they drew was to give it a try, as there didn't seem to be evidence out there to support this. This is what we did and Morgan has coped very well with both languages. Having this research evidences how we feel it's gone, and will help families having to make a similar decision in future."

The Down's Syndrome Association was partner and collaborator in this project. Julian Hallett, services development manager, says:

"Every child or adult should be supported to express themselves in a way that reflects their culture, family life and community. We are seeing many more examples of individuals with Down's syndrome living life bilingually and it is great to have this research to more fully describe peoples' experiences.!

The collaboration is continuing, with a new project led by Dr. Sanoudaki exploring bilingual development in autistic children with and without Down syndrome.

Explore further Bilingualism as a natural therapy for autistic children
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

A review of published research found no clear advantage to surgery with existing robotic platforms, which are costly and increase operation duration. The authors suggest that with refinement, competition, and cost reduction, future versions have the potential to improve clinical outcomes. The findings are published in Annals of Internal Medicine.

Robotic surgery is a form of minimally invasive surgery that aims to overcome the limitations inherent to both laparoscopy and open surgery. However, the description of current platforms as "robotics" is a misnomer because they lack any automation, but rather are surgeon-controlled devices. The initial cost of the most prevalent robotic platform is at least $1.5 million, plus additional costs associated with training and maintenance. In order to provide value, robot-assisted surgery must demonstrate clinical benefit to justify the steep financial burden.

Researchers from the University of Texas, Houston reviewed 50 published randomized controlled trials comprising more than 4,800 patients to assess the quality of evidence and outcomes for robot-assisted abdominopelvic surgery compared with laparoscopy, open surgery, or both. The majority of studies showed no difference in intraoperative complications, conversion rates to open surgery, and long-term outcomes. Overall, robot-assisted surgery had a longer operative duration than laparoscopy, but no obvious difference was seen versus open surgery. While robot-assisted surgery is proven safe and effective, the authors conclude that it currently has no clear clinical benefit given its considerable cost and lack of improvements over conventional surgeries.

More information: Naila H. Dhanani et al, The Evidence Behind Robot-Assisted Abdominopelvic Surgery, Annals of Internal Medicine (2021). Journal information: Annals of Internal Medicine Naila H. Dhanani et al, The Evidence Behind Robot-Assisted Abdominopelvic Surgery,(2021). DOI: 10.7326/M20-7006
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Russia on Tuesday reported its highest daily coronavirus death toll and Australia locked down major cities as the highly infectious Delta strain has caused mayhem around the world.

Fears grew over major sporting events like Euro 2020 and the Olympic Games, even as an AFP tally showed the world passed the milestone of over three billion COVID-19 vaccines administered.

At least 3.9 million people have died from COVID-19 and the pattern of vaccinations globally is highly uneven.

According to the AFP count, high-income countries as defined by the World Bank have administered an average of 79 doses per 100 inhabitants.

But in low-income nations, the figure is just one shot per 100 people.

"The world is failing," warned WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

"We are facing a two-track pandemic, fuelled by inequity," the World Health Organization chief said Tuesday.

The WHO said it was supporting the five remaining countries yet to start their COVID-19 immunisation campaigns: Burundi, Eritrea, Haiti, North Korea and Tanzania.

Russia reported 652 coronavirus fatalities over the past 24 hours, with a record-high number of daily deaths119in Saint Petersburg, which is due to host a Euro 2020 quarter final on Friday

Health Minister Mikhail Murashko said 151,000 people in Russia are currently in hospital with the coronavirus.

In further bad news, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov admitted that Moscow's goal of vaccinating 60 percent of the population by the end of summer was unattainable.

Russia has also introduced mandatory shots for some groups of citizens to counter scepticism.

Meanwhile, foreign ministers from the Group of 20 major economies stressed the need for greater global cooperation.

"Multilateral cooperation will be key to our collective ability to stop this global health crisis," US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi did not name the United States but suggested ulterior motives in the rhetoric as he called on the G20 to show "true multilateralism".

"China calls on able countries to avoid export restrictions or excessive hoarding" of vaccines, Wang said.

Western leaders have pledged to donate one billion doses to poorer countries.

Australia locks down

In Australia, public anger is growing at the slow pace of vaccinations.

The Delta variant has pushed Sydney, Perth, Darwin and Brisbane into lockdown, meaning a total of more than 10 million Australians are confined at home.

But so far, less than five percent of adults are believed to have received both vaccine doses.

Brisbane resident Nicola Hungerford, 57, said she expected lockdowns to keep happening "until the government gets their bloody act together" on the vaccine rollout.

"It shows how little respect they have for people," she told AFP.

Human tragedies

The speed of transmission of the Delta variant has fuelled concerns over ongoing or upcoming sporting events.

Germany urged the British government to reduce the number of fans allowed into Wembley stadium for the final Euro 2020 matches.

"I think it's irresponsible for tens of thousands to gather in close proximity" in countries where the Delta variant is spreading, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer told Germany's Augsburger Allgemeine newspaper.

UEFA and the British authorities allowed 45,000 fans to attend a game between England and Germany on Tuesday, or about 50 percent of capacity.

Attendance will be increased to more than 60,000 for the semi-finals and final at Wembley.

The Delta variant was first identified in India, which suffered a vicious wave of coronavirus that overwhelmed hospitals and crematoriums at its height in April and May.

Now, bodies buried hastily along the banks of the Ganges river by families who could not afford funeral pyres have started to re-emerge as flooding dislodges them.

"It was really sad to see poor people burying their loved ones in an undignified manner, but the rising water level has made it worse," Sonu Chandel, a boatman, told AFP.

India authorised the emergency use of Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine on Tuesday as it seeks to ramp up inoculations.

It is the fourth to be approved by New Delhi after Oxford-AstraZeneca's Covishield, Covaxindeveloped by Indian firm Bharat Biotechand Russia's Sputnik V.

The United Arab Emirates, which has mounted an intensive vaccination campaign that has produced some of the highest inoculation rates globally, announced curbs on unvaccinated people in Abu Dhabi.

The Gulf state's capital will allow only vaccinated people in many public places, including schools, malls and restaurants, from August 20.

Explore further Russia drops vaccination target amid record deaths

 2021 AFP
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

The Kremlin on Tuesday conceded that Russia would not reach its 60 percent vaccination target by the end of summer as the country registered its highest daily death toll.

Russia has grappled with a recent spike in infections spurred by the highly contagious Delta variant while struggling to get its citizens inoculated.

An official government tally reported 652 coronavirus fatalities in the country over the past 24 hours, topping a record that was set in December last year.

A record-high number of daily deaths119was also reported in Russia's second city Saint Petersburg, which is due to host a Euro 2020 quarter-final on Friday.

Over the past few weeks, Saint Petersburg and the capital Moscow have faced an influx of new cases, with authorities re-introducing virus restrictions and moving to boost a sluggish vaccination drive.

Speaking at a televised meeting of Russia's coronavirus taskforce, Health Minister Mikhail Murashko said that the "situation is tense, especially in large cities".

He added: "182,000 hospital beds are allocated, 151,000 patients are receiving treatment."

There has, however, been a "significant increase" in Russia's vaccination rate, he said.

In recent weeks, the government has pulled out all the stops to ramp up Russia's vaccination drive, which has been faltering despite free jabs being available since December.

As of Tuesday, 22.2 million out of a population of about 146 million had received at least one dose, according to the Gogov website, which tallies COVID figures from the regions and the media.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov conceded on Tuesday that it "will not be possible" for Russia to reach its vaccination target and get 60 percent of the population immunised by autumn.

- Situation 'extremely difficult'

"Only this week the number of those wishing to get vaccinated has more or less started growing," Peskov told reporters.

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin had said that the more contagious Delta variant first identified in India accounts for 90 percent of cases in the capital.

To curb the spread of infections, the mayor ordered Moscow businesses to send home 30 percent of unvaccinated employees and restaurants to only allow inside patrons who have been inoculated or infected in the past six months.

"The situation in Moscow remains extremely difficult," Sobyanin said at the government meeting Tuesday, adding that new infections remain at a "very high level".

Moscow also became the first Russian city to introduce mandatory vaccinations, requiring at least 60 percent of service industry workers to be fully inoculated by mid-August.

At least a dozen Russian regions have followed suit, requiring certain groups of citizens to get one of Russia's four jabsSputnik V, EpiVacCorona, CoviVac and the one-dose Sputnik Light.

But polls show that the Russian population remains sceptical of homegrown vaccines, and the Kremlin maintains that inoculation in Russia is voluntary.

Nationwide, infections grew by 20,616 on Tuesday, bringing Russia's caseload to nearly 5.5 millionthe fifth-highest worldwide, according to an AFP tally.

With 134,545 deaths from the virus, Russia has the highest toll from COVID-19 in Europeeven as authorities have been accused of downplaying the severity of the country's outbreak.

Under a broader definition for deaths linked to coronavirus, statistics agency Rosstat at the end of April said that Russia has seen at least 270,000 fatalities.

Explore further Moscow, Saint Petersburg post record daily virus deaths

 2021 AFP
An online study involving 154 volunteers measured the importance of visual cues to communication for people with normal hearing and hearing loss (image: Linda M. Thibodeau et al./Ear and Hearing)

The use of transparent masks during communication increases comprehension of speech by about 10% for people with hearing loss and people with normal hearing, according to a study published in the journal Ear and Hearing.

The study was conducted at the University of Texas in Dallas (U.S.), with the participation of Regina Tangerino, a professor at the University of Sao Paulo's Bauru Dental School (FOB-USP) in Brazil, and with support from Sao Paulo Research FoundationFAPESP.

"Our findings show that wearing a transparent mask can facilitate communication for everyone, minimizing stress and improving interaction. Protection obviously has to be the primary concern, and no clear models with proven effectiveness are sold in Brazil right now," Tangerino told.

In the U.S., she explained, two models of mask with a see-through portion in the mouth area have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). "One of our aims is calling attention to the importance of the topic," she said.

The study began early in the pandemic, in 2020, when the group posted on the internet a set of videos lasting 40 minutes, with Tangerino voicing several utterances against background noise without a mask, wearing a mask with a clear mouth panel, and wearing an opaque fabric mask.

The study used 154 volunteers recruited via social media or by email. They were divided into three groups based on whether they had normal hearing, or confirmed or suspected hearing loss (with or without cochlear implants or hearing aids). They were invited to watch the videos in a quiet place and to type what they understood after each sentence. They also had to rate their level of confidence in responding and how intensely they had to concentrate to understand what was said. Each volunteer's score was computed at the end.

On average, the volunteers in all three groups correctly understood 83.8% of the sentences spoken without a mask, 68.9% of utterances with a see-through mask, and 58.9% with an opaque mask.

"The difference of 10 percentage points [between the latter two averages] is statistically significant. This benefit applies to more than just comprehension: the participants also felt more self-confident and were able to follow what was said with less effort when the see-through mask was used," Tangerino said. "In another study, conducted in the UK with 460 participants, the researchers noted that opaque masks influenced fatigue, anxiety and emotions in both listeners and speakers."

Visual cues

To find out if the difference in comprehension between transparent and opaque masks was due to visual cues such as lip reading, acoustic differences between the recordings, or the tendency for some masks to muffle sound, a follow-up study using audio only was conducted with 29 volunteers, who were not told which sentences were recorded with or without a mask.

"In this case, the average performance was actually worse for sentences spoken with a clear mask than with an opaque mask, confirming the significance of visual cues in the first study. They helped listeners surmount the problem of muffled sound when a mask is worn," Tangerino said.

Production of transparent masks certified by ANVISA, the national health surveillance agency, should be incentivized in Brazil, she added. Currently, the only see-through type available is a vinyl mask, considered insufficiently effective to block transmission of the novel coronavirus.

Explore further Face masks making things tough for the deaf

More information: Linda M. Thibodeau et al, Communicating During COVID-19, Ear & Hearing (2021). Linda M. Thibodeau et al, Communicating During COVID-19,(2021). DOI: 10.1097/AUD.0000000000001065
Walmart said Tuesday that it will start selling its own private brand of insulin at much lower prices than competing products.

Insulin prices have skyrocketed in recent years, making it unaffordable for some Americans with diabetes, according to CBS News.

"We know many people with diabetes struggle to manage the financial burden of this condition, and we are focused on helping by providing affordable solutions," Dr. Cheryl Pegus, executive vice president of Walmart Health & Wellness, said in a company news release.

Just three companiesEli Lilly, Novo Nordisk and Sanoficontrol 99% of the market, and there are no generic versions of the drug available.

Walmart's insulin will cost $72.88 per vial and $85.88 per FlexPen, which is 58% to 75% lower than other insulin products on the market. That will save patients $101 per branded vial and $251 per package of branded FlexPens, the company said in a statement, CBS News reported.

Novo Nordisk will make Walmart's private brand insulin.

In Walmart's statement, the American Diabetes Association's (ADA) chief executive officer said the group welcomed "all affordable solutions" to managing diabetes.

"Diabetes often comes with high medical costs, estimated around $9,601 per person per year," ADA CEO Tracey Brown told CBS News.

In response to the Walmart announcement, the nonprofit JDRF said more needs to be done to ensure everyone with diabetes has access to affordable insulin.

"The rising cost of insulin is a fundamental issue faced by those living with diabetes, and JDRF applauds this new effort," the JDRF said in a statement. "No one should die because they can't afford their insulin."

The steep rise in insulin prices has been criticized by patients and lawmakers. Some patients say that difficulty affording insulin has forced them to ration the drug or make risky decisions.

Explore further WHO push to tackle rampant rise of diabetes

More information: Visit the American Diabetes Association for more on the Visit the American Diabetes Association for more on the skyrocketing costs of managing diabetes.

 2021 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
The Minister for Defence, Simon Coveney, T.D., has today 28 June 2021, welcomed the publication of the Department of Defence and Defence Forces Annual Report for 2020.

The Annual report reviews the performance of the Department of Defence and the Defence Forces during 2020. Performance is reviewed against each of the strategic goals as set out in the Department of Defence and Defence Forces Strategy Statement 2017  2020.

A new Programme for Government was agreed in June 2020 and contains a number of significant commitments in respect of the defence sector.

2020 also saw the establishment of the Commission on the Defence Forces, tasked with carrying out a comprehensive review of the Defence Forces in accordance with the Terms of Reference approved by Government. The Department of Defence will engage with the Commission and it will have the commitment and support of everybody in delivering on a challenging agenda.

Minister Coveney said: This Annual Report provides a comprehensive record of the extensive range of policy approaches, activities and operational outputs undertaken throughout the year. 2020 was a year we will remember for the COVID-19 pandemic and this report exemplifies the proactive and cooperative approach taken by my Department, the Defence Forces and Civil Defence in supporting the country in difficult times.

I wish to thank the staff of the Defence Organisation for their work throughout 2020 and I look forward to continuing to work closely with the Secretary General and the Chief of Staff and their respective personnel, civil and military, to deliver on our new Statement of Strategy 2021-2023. I also look forward to the outputs from the Commission on the Defence Forces and the Organisational Capability Review of the Department.

The Secretary General of the Department of Defence, Jacqui McCrum, added: The Defence Organisation has a unique civil military structure. During 2020 both military and civil branches have worked together cohesively to successfully achieve our objectives and I would like to thank each and every one of our staff both at home and abroad. The realisation of all of the commitments covered in the Annual Report required enormous effort and flexibility by all of the staff in the Defence Organisation and they are to be highly commended and thanked for their significant contribution to the national effort during the unprecedented events of 2020.

Chief of Staff for the Defence Forces, Vice Admiral Mark Mellett concluded: The Annual Report 2020 provides a comprehensive record of the extensive range of operational outputs undertaken throughout the year at home and overseas against the backdrop of the shock of the COVID-19 pandemic. I am so proud of our soldiers, sailors, airmen and women. I would like to thank each member and their families for their loyalty dedication and commitment. I would also like to thank our colleagues in the Department of Defence for their continued support as together we enable Oglaigh na hEireanns to strengthen the nation by inspiring pride and leading excellence.
Minister of Foreign Affairs of Belarus V.Makei meets the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Kyrgyz Republic

On June 29, 2021 the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Belarus, Vladimir Makei, met with the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Kyrgyz Republic, Azizbek Madmarov.

The interlocutors discussed topical issues of Belarusian-Kyrgyz cooperation and outlined steps for its further development with an emphasis on increasing mutual trade turnover.

On the same day, Minsk hosted the next round of Consultations between the Ministries of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Belarus and the Kyrgyz Republic with the participation of the First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Belarus, Aleksandr Guryanov, and the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Kyrgyz Republic, Azizbek Madmarov.

During the consultations, the delegations discussed a wide range of topical issues of bilateral relations, including political, trade and economic, cultural and humanitarian cooperation of the parties in the integration organizations (the EAEU, CIS, CSTO) and international platforms (UN, OSCE, etc.).

The parties expressed satisfaction with the state of the Belarusian-Kyrgyz relations in bilateral and multilateral formats, confirmed their mutual intention to assist in their development, as we as discussed the practical aspects of the preparation and holding of the upcoming joint events.

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The American Red Cross continues to experience a severe blood shortage that is negatively affecting blood product availability across the country. Donors of all blood types  especially type O  are urged to make an appointment to give now and help ensure hospital shelves are stocked with blood products over the Fourth of July holiday and beyond.

In addition, while summer is traditionally a time when blood donations decline, this year is particularly challenging as many Americans receive their vaccinations and resume summer activities after more than a year of limited interactions and travel, leading to lower donor turnout. The need for blood doesnt take a holiday break  patients still depend on lifesaving transfusions.

Donors are needed now to prevent further delays to patient care. Schedule an appointment to give blood now by using the Red Cross Blood Donor App, visiting RedCrossBlood.org, calling 1-800-RED CROSS (1-800-733-2767) or enabling the Blood Donor Skill on any Alexa Echo device.
With over two decades of public defense work under her belt and experience implementing new approaches to legal representation, Ann Miller has a career-long track record of innovative public service.

Miller, the managing attorney of the Tribal Defenders Offices for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, was recently selected as the 2021 recipient of the American Bar Associations Dorsey Award.

The national recognition is bestowed by the associations Government and Public Sector Lawyers Division annually to honor an outstanding public defender or legal aid lawyer.

Public defenders stand next to the accused every day. We have the unique opportunity to offer services to our clients who are often marginalized by poverty, addiction and mental illness, Miller said in a phone interview this week.

For her, reliable legal defense for community members means not only having competent representation in the courtroom, but treating each defendant shes representing as a whole person in the context of their community.

Doing that offers solutions to people so that we can possibly make some impact on their lives, she said.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP)  An organization that represents thousands of racehorse owners and trainers is accusing New Mexico regulators of violating their civil rights.

The New Mexico Horsemens Association announced Tuesday that it is suing the state Racing Commission in federal court, saying it had no other recourse because the commission barred the group and its members from contacting any commissioners or attending its regular public meetings.

The commission limited communication after the horse owners sued in December to stop the panel from using purse money to cover operating costs at the states five privately owned racetracks.

The commission also voted this year to prohibit group members from contributing 1% of their purse winnings to the association and ending the contribution of starter fees that fund medical expenses as well as fees that go toward advocacy efforts. That prompted another legal challenge by the association in state district court.

Commission Chairman Sam Bregman said in a statement Tuesday that it was the horse owners group that was violating the law.
My high school history teacher was a racist. How do I know this? It was near the end of the school year when our American history class had an informal discussion on the sit-in demonstrations and other civil rights protests that were then in the news. He chimed in: "Well, how would feel if you were sitting at a counter eating lunch when a big black (N-word) came in and plopped down beside you?"

Some of us were surprised but not shocked. After all, we were all raised in a nearly all-white small town in Colorado and most of us had learned both at home and at school all about the "inferiority" or folks with skin darker than ours. And I shared more than a few racist jokes.

Naturally, the history we were taught was the whitewashed version of our nation's past  manifest destiny, white man's burden, the whole mythology. Over the years, at least I hope, much of this has changed. That's why I find it difficult to comprehend why so many white, Republican politicians are weighing in about the evils of so-called Critical Race Theory.
As an alumna of NCSSM-Durham, Metzger understands that parents may have hesitations about sending their high school juniors away to a college-like experience so young. She wants parents to understand how important the safety of the students is to the faculty and staff of NCSSM is as they go through the process of applying to the program.

You know it wasnt sight unseen, said Metzger. We visited, we met people and we understood that it wasnt as if we were going to be turned loose. You still have quite a lot of supervision. You live on a hall with a community coordinator. A community coordinator actually lives in an apartment at the end of your residence hall. Every night you had to check in. You also had to check in again whenever curfew was. Students dont have have a car, thats one of the things you have to give up and thats tough when youre 16  So, its a real mix of independence, you know, with supervision to make sure youre safe and healthy.

Im just grateful to my parents for understanding that that was the best path for me to give me the freedom to do that. It was something that I really wanted. Im sure it was a hard to let your let your child go, but you have a lot of breaks and you have the summer to come home. So its more like a college experience, but with almost like a second set of parents on campus to take care of you.
Another violent night in Chicago left two people dead and at least 15 others injured in two shootings, the Chicago Police Department said Monday.

At least 11 people who were standing outside in the South Artesian Avenue area were shot around 11 p.m. Sunday. Three men "emerged from an alley and fired shots into the crowd," police said in an online statement.

Keep scrolling for a gallery of photos from Sunday's shooting scene in Chicago

One woman was pronounced dead at the University of Chicago Medical Center with a gunshot wound to the chest, police said. Four other women between 24 and 57 were also shot and are listed in fair or good condition at hospitals.

Six men, ranging in age from 21 to 42, are also being treated at various hospitals for gunshot wounds mainly to the leg and torso. Their conditions range from good to serious.

In a separate shooting, a woman was killed and five men were being treated for gunshot wounds at hospitals after a black SUV drove past the area where they were standing on East 71st Street and began shooting, around 8:45 p.m., police said.
A suspension of passenger flights is imposed if five or more passengers arriving from one place test positive on arrival for a particular coronavirus variant, or a relevant virus mutation within a seven-day period.

A ban is is also triggered if 10 or more passengers from one place are confirmed to be infected with the coronavirus via any tests, including tests conducted during quarantine, within a seven-day period.

The U.K. reported more than 22,000 new cases of the coronavirus on Monday, while more than 66% of the population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.

Hong Kong, which for months imposed a 21-day quarantine for arrivals from most countries and implemented strict social-distancing regulations, reported three new cases of the coronavirus on Monday. It has confirmed a total of 11,921 cases since the pandemic began.

The U.K. flight ban comes as Hong Kong is looking to relax quarantine measures for most other countries, including the U.S. and Canada.

Several other countries, including the Philippines and Indonesia, also face flight bans to Hong Kong.

Last week, the World Health Organization said the delta variant is the most transmissible variant identified to date and said it is spreading in at least 85 countries.

Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
This is the first time this building has been expanded since 1996, Riess said. Weve added a considerable amount of staff since then. As you can imagine, everything that we take, we have to document, catalogue and keep for a certain amount of time so we were quickly running out of space.

Riess said the jail is the seventh largest county jail in the state, and houses local prisoners and federal inmates. The current jail population is 220, about 30 away from the jails maximum capacity. Of this population, there are 143 federal inmates, which the county earns income from housing.

We talked about this quite a bit last year during the campaign. The federal government pays us to house our inmates for them, and they pay us pretty well, Riess said. Were down right now because bureau of prisons just opened back up within the last couple weeks so we have a number of inmates that have been sentenced and are being shipped out.

This large jail population, however, hasnt resulted in any major COVID-19 outbreaks, thanks to the strict policies that the jail has been following.

We took some flack over (these policies), but ultimately I think it was the right call, Riess said.
A jury acquitted Sahouri of the charges in March.

Most police department and sheriffs office policies instruct their officers when to activate their body-worn cameras, according to the In Focus review. Often, officers are instructed to record all of their interactions with the public unless there are privacy concerns, such as recording inside a persons home. Few, if any, agency policies in Iowa spell out repercussions for officers who dont turn on their cameras when they should.

New technology would remove some of that discretion  with cameras activating as soon as emergency lights turn on, a gun is drawn or a Taser is powered up. A new system by Axon has the capability to livestream the officers interaction with supervisors or dispatch staff, which could provide backup or a second opinion in fraught moment, the Washington Post reported.

Last July, a Shenandoah police officer who pursued a man on a bicycle and allegedly struck the man with the side of his patrol vehicle to end the chase failed to activate his body camera to record the arrest.

The officer did not have time to initiate his camera as the arrest occurred very quickly once he exited his vehicle, Shenandoah Assistant Police Chief Thomas Johnson said in response to a request for video of the incident.
Vodacom announced that it is starting the next phase of the development of its super app, VodaPay, and is onboarding merchants onto the platform through Mini Programs.

Already partnered with around 70 merchants in South Africa, Vodacom aims to create an all-in-one shopping platform  a one-stop digital mall.

The mobile network operator is developing the platform in partnership with Alipay and according to the chief officer of Vodacom Financial Services, Marian Cassim, they hope to launch at the end of August 2021.

Merchants that are already partnered with Vodacom for integration into the VodaPay app include Makro, Builders Warehouse, Clicks, Edgars, Game, Exclusive Books, KFC, Petzone, and Bookings.com.

Users will be able to access each merchants own digital storefront, browsing through catalogues and making payments within the app.

The company also plans to roll out a bridging finance micro-loan service. This will allow users to take out a loan to complete a purchase through the app.

The amount of credit available upon checkout is determined by the users credit score as calculated by Vodacom, similar to its existing airtime credit service.

VodaPay will be available to users from any mobile network, though Vodacom users will enjoy zero-rated data charges while using the app.

With the development of a platform like VodaPay, Vodacom aims to transition from a telecom operator to a digital technology services company, CEO Shameel Joosub stated during the media briefing.

Asked which markets Vodacom hopes to target with VodaPay, Cassim said that in time it is meant to target every single segment in South Africa.

As a start we will be focusing on the high-value segments, predominantly the smartphone-enabled customers  your mid-to-high value segment.

However, there are plans to expand the app to offer services aimed at lower-income users with features such as creating bank accounts and offering a store of value.

Regarding the Mini Programs initiative aimed at merchants, Vodacom said that it allows shops to quickly develop a storefront in VodaPay.

This is similar to developing a stand-alone mobile app, but Vodacom promised it would be faster and that developers will be able to deploy to Android and iOS from a single codebase.

According to Cassim, Mini Programs can be developed, approved, and deployed to VodaPay in as little as a few hours.

Other merchants may take as long as a few months to develop their Mini Program, depending on their existing ecommerce capabilities.

Once on VodaPay, merchants can perform targeted marketing to their desired audiences.

Cassim emphasised that they will provide ample support to new merchants during the onboarding process, including an in-house team on standby for merchant support.

Now read: Netflix Mobile plan launched in South Africa
Microsoft has provided clarity on its Windows 11 minimum system requirements, saying that they are considering reducing them.

Facebook reached $1 trillion in value after a court case arguing that it has monopolised social media was dismissed.

Hackers tricked Microsoft into certifying malware masked as a system driver.

China is making progress towards establishing a central bank digital currency (CBDC), paving the way for other nations to follow.

Samsung has introduced its new Watch interface, called One UI, which will take significant advantage of its collaboration with Google.

Here is what is happening in the tech world today:

Windows 11 minimum system requirement update: When Windows 11 was announced, the minimum system requirements were set at Intel 8th-Gen or AMD Zen 2 processors. Any computer dating to before 2017  the release year of Intel 8th-Gen  would therefore be unable to run the new OS. Windows has provided clarity on this, with a blog post stating the company will test to identify devices running on Intel 7th generation and AMD Zen 1 that may meet our principles. If they adjust the minimum requirements, the compatible devices would extend back to 2016, when Intel 7th-Gen was released.

Facebook reaches $1 trillion value: A recent court case accusing Facebook of monopolising social media has been dismissed in the US, Reuters reported. After the court ruled in Facebooks favour its share price rose by 4%, which saw it climb to a $1 trillion market cap for the first time. The case against the company aimed to force it to sell Instagram and WhatsApp on the basis that it controls 60% of the social media market.

Microsoft mistakenly certified a malicious driver: Hackers were able to trick Microsoft into certifying a rootkit, a type of malware, disguised as an official Windows 10 driver. The earliest trace of the rootkit dates back to March 2021. According to The Verge, it allows for hackers to capture virtually all the data on an infected device. The company has stated that it is working on solving the problem, and says that the driver is circulating primarily in gaming environments.

China accelerating progress towards establishing CBDC: Reuters reported that China is accelerating its progress towards establishing a digital currency for its central banks, with the Peoples Bank of China leading the project. US officials recently voiced their scepticism on CBDCs, but this stance will likely change if China establishes a digital currency as a CBDC will allow for a huge social infrastructure.
b. A study be performed at UVDS to investigate the presence of forever chemicals, also known as PFAS, at the Whitehall Lane facility. Forever chemicals were found present at the companys Clover Flat facility in all groundwater and leachate samples taken and this was a study commissioned by the company itself. We believe waste materials are frequently transferred from one UVDS facility to the other, making the presence of PFAS at the Whitehall Lane a distinct possibility. These chemicals are leaching into our water table.

Fires at waste facilities are a very real. There are two such examples, recent and local, one in Marin/Sonoma and one in Oakland. Our neighborhood is engaged in extensive fire mitigation, costing tens of thousands of dollars. We have had Cal Fire, Napa Fire and our insurance companies all tour our neighborhood to make prioritized recommendations. We are also members of the Mt. Veeder Fire Council, and some have contributed money to the development of fire strips above the Valley Floor.
Local

Family Trauma

New Napans mourn loss of their Great Danes

Submitted image Cookie, one of the Ervin's Great Danes. She and another Great Dane, Penny, both died while being transported to Napa by a pet delivery service. The Ervins want to know why their pets died. Penny, one of the Ervin's Great Danes. She and another Great Dane, Cookie, both died while being transported to Napa by a pet delivery service. The Ervins want to know why their pets died. Submitted image Bill Ervin with Penny, his Great Dane. Earlier this month Penny and a second Great Dane named Cookie died while being transported from Michigan to Napa. The family wants to know why. Submitted image Penny, the Ervin's Great Dane. This was taken when she was a puppy. Submitted image Cookie, one of the Ervin's Great Danes, as a puppy. Submitted image Kristin Ervin with Penny, one of the Ervin's Great Danes. Penny and another Great Dane, Cookie, both died while being transported to Napa by a pet delivery service. The Ervins want to know why their pets died. Submitted image Inside the van that was to take Cookie and Penny from Michigan to Napa.

Bill and Kristin Ervin were 15 minutes from arriving for the first time at their new home in Napa when they got the news that no pet owner ever wants to hear.

Their two dogs, Great Danes named Cookie and Penny, were dead.

Even worse, theyd died while with a pet transport company that the couple had hired to personally drive the dogs from the Ervins former home in Michigan to Napa.

The driver, a man they knew as Shawn, could not explain what happened to their beloved pets.

This was the nightmare of all nightmares, said Bill Ervin.

Their dogs were loving, loyal members of their family, said Kristin Ervin. They would literally follow us from room to room. They were the best dogs we ever had  just the sweetest.

Two Great Danes on the move

The Ervins move to California started simply enough. The couple was relocating to Napa, where theyve signed on as realtors with Keller Williams Real Estate. (This past week they rented a home in Sonoma). To make the move, they needed help transporting their three pets, a cat, and the two Great Danes.

Weighing 115 and 132 lbs., and stretching as tall as six feet, its not like the Cookie and Penny could ride in the back seat of a car during a cross country move, said Bill.

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On the internet, Kristin found a company called VIP Pet Delivery. After talking to owner Rachel Cottrell, of Topeka, Kansas, Kristin thought shed found the right help.

Two people would ride with the dogs, making sure they traveled safely, Cottrell reportedly told Kristin. A cargo van would allow enough room for their two giant crates and bedding. Because the dogs were so big, Kristin was told theyd be the only transport for the journey.

"I love that, Kristin recalled thinking. That sounds perfect.

Plans were made to drive the two 6-year old dogs and their cat Nelly. In total, it would cost $2,750, half of which the Ervins paid upfront.

Then the plans changed.

About 10 days before we were to leave, (Rachel) said she was exposed to COVID and they didnt want to risk it.

Instead, Cottrell reportedly suggested another driver. Hes a veterinarian, and one of my best drivers, Cottrell reportedly told Kristin.

Im thinking OK if shes saying this is one of her best drivers. Still, she asked to see photos of the van and the travel set up.

On Mon., June 7, the transport van arrived at the Ervins home.

The driver, said to be named Shawn, didnt look old enough to be a vet, thought Kristin. That was a red flag, she said.

When Kristin asked him how to spell his first name, He looked at me and hesitated, before spelling the first name as Shawn instead of Sean.

Kristin then asked Shawn how long the trip would take.

He said, Im not sure.

That was a bit odd, said Kristin, but when she suggested they share locations on their phones so they could track him, Shawn agreed.

The Ervins set up the crates and travel supplies for the dogs. They gave Shawn some anti-anxiety travel medicine for the dogs, who had recently been to their vet and were in good health.

And that was it, said Kristin. Unbeknownst to the family, that was the last time theyd Cookie or Penny.

After Shawn left, the Ervins noticed something odd: Shawn had turned off his phone tracking.

Instead, Cottrell provided periodic updates to the Ervins.

She told the couple that Shawn was in Texas, which baffled the couple. They thought hed be taking Highway 80 west, a more direct route.

By Wednesday, The dogs and cat were in Phoenix and making good time, to Napa.

Yet the worst was to come.

On Friday, as they drove their rental car from the airport to Napa, a man who said his name was Jack Nakomoto Sr. called the Ervins.

Nakomoto Sr. said he was the drivers father.

Both of your dogs died, said the caller, abruptly.

They smelled real bad and they were cremated, at a facility in San Bernardino, Nakomoto Sr. reportedly told the Ervins. He said his son, who the Ervins thought was named Shawn, was too upset to talk to the Ervins directly.

I was in shock, said Kristin.

We were very shaken at that point, said Bill.

It sounded very suspicious, they said.

Youre lying, Kristin remembered thinking. Had Shawn sold the dogs? Left them somewhere? Overdosed them with the anti-anxiety medication?

The cat had survived. Nakomoto Sr. told the Ervins that other drivers would bring their cat to Napa from San Bernardino.

Nellie arrived safely.

What happened to Cookie and Penny?

The family has since contacted Riverside County Animal Services. A case has been opened. The Ervins have also contacted an attorney.

Cottrell could not be immediately reached to comment on this story. VIP Pet Deliverys website and Facebook page have been disabled. The Nakomotos could not be immediately reached to comment on this story.

However, in an interview with ksnt.com of Topeka, Kansas, Cottrell told the news station, I really f***ed up, I messed up for lack of better words, she said. I wish I wouldve never hired anyone else but my family to do anything else for me.

Adding to the trauma and confusion, it turns out that the dogs had yet to be cremated.

That was great news because then we could find out how they died, said Bill. Results from a necropsy are expected in the coming weeks.

The most disturbing thing is that we never received a call your dogs are in distress, said Bill. If they had known, they would have done whatever it took to go to the dogs or get help.

The Ervins said they also have other suspicions. They think Cottrell was going to drive the dogs herself but decided to outsource it to yet another company. They dont believe the driver was the real Shawn.

We just want her to never ever have the opportunity to transport animals again and run that kind of business and the people who transported them to be out of business, Kristin said.

So that no one ever has to have this kind of experience, Bill said.

This case is somewhat similar to that of a Napa family who in 2018 sent their German Shepherd, Gunnar, to a trainer in Contra Costa County. Gunnar died in that trainers care.

The trainer was sentenced to two years in state prison in 2020 for four counts of animal cruelty. He also was ordered to pay $60,000 damages to Gunnars owner.

Photos: What happened to Cookie and Penny?
"We're very lucky that we have city-centered growth policies in this county and understanding, cooperative city and town governments who understand why city-centered growth is important to all of us," Supervisor Diane Dillon said. "But if we did not have the agreements we have in place, it would be a totally different picture."

Still, county officials at a Planning Commission earlier this year raised the question of whether the state Department of Housing and Community Development would approve a county housing plan that depends largely on another jurisdiction. And, they noted, the city of Napa faces its own housing mandate challenge.

One question is how ABAG arrived at the 1,000-plus housing mandate for the unincorporated county. The short answer seems to be that the formula is complicated.

This is a giant black box, Dillon said. Everybody who sits there kind of feels that way. We go through it and try to make sense of it  even for professional planners, its a challenge.

One factor is land use. Another is equity, with a California Tax Credit Allocation Committee map coming into play. The statewide opportunity map is supposed to show areas that would support positive economic, educational and health outcomes for low-income families.
Veverkas complaint alleged that CalVet employees ordered him not to communicate with politicians and leaders, threatened to terminate him if he told the truth to a state oversight body, and blocked him from meeting a state senator preparing a bill about CalVet. The veterans agency denied all of the allegations.

Ex-Yountville Vets Home chief: State axed me for airing campus safety concerns Former Yountville Veterans Home Administrator Donald Veverka says he was fired by the state Department of Veterans Affairs for airing concerns

After being hired as administrator in April 2014, Veverka said he reported various problems at the Veterans Home to his supervisor, including all but one of seven elevators being out of service in the Yountville homes skilled nursing center, and numerous broken heating and air conditioning service  some not working for several years.

In his lawsuit, Veverka also reported telling supervisors of leaky roofs and poorly heated living quarters, which caused staff to install space heaters in violation of fire safety codes. One resident burned his feet on a space heater and required skin grafts, the former administrator alleged.

Veverka took his complaints about years of neglect and deferred maintenance at the Veterans Home to a supervisor, local politicians, and the Little Hoover Commission, a state oversight body that described the facility as a crumbling crown jewel in a 2017 report.
Like many of the dozens of Venezuelans The Associated Press spoke to this month in Del Rio, 27-year-old Lis Briceno had already migrated once before. After graduating with a degree in petroleum engineering, she couldnt get hired in the oil fields near her hometown of Maracaibo without declaring her loyalty to Venezuelas socialist leadership. So she moved to Chile a few years ago, finding work with a technology company.

But as anti-government unrest and the pandemic tanked Chile's economy, her company shuttered. Briceno sold what she could to raise the $4,000 needed to get to the U.S.

I always thought Id come here on vacation, to visit the places you see in the movies, Briceno said. But doing this? Never.

While Central Americans and others can spend months getting north, most Venezuelans reach the U.S. in as little as four days.

This is a journey theyre definitely prepared for from a financial standpoint, said Tiffany Burrow, who runs the Val Verde Border Humanitarian Coalitions shelter in Del Rio, where migrants can eat, clean up and buy bus tickets to U.S. cities.

They first fly to Mexico City or Cancun. Smugglers promoting themselves as travel agencies on Facebook claim to offer hassle-free transport to the U.S. for about $3,000.
Keeler had discussed her experience in the AP story that detailed the frequent reluctance among prosecutors to file charges in campus rape cases. Authorities had told Keeler it was difficult to prosecute cases when the victim had been drinking, she said. The rape kit was later lost or destroyed.

The affidavit filed along with the warrant accuses Cleary, then a junior and a goalie on the ice hockey team, of following Keeler home from the party, sneaking into her room and sexually assaulting her. Keeler did not even know his name. As he apologized and fled, Keeler texted friends on campus OMG please Help me," the documents said.

The Gettysburg Police Department had reopened the case last year after Keeler showed them a flurry of messages that appeared to come from Cleary's Facebook account. Police got a search warrant for the account, and matched it to Cleary through the cellphone number, according to the affidavit. Adams County District Attorney Brian Sinnett, whose office had filed few rape cases involving adult victims since 2013, supported the charges.

Washington lawyer Laura Dunn, who represents Keeler, said she hopes the case inspires authorities to be more responsive to sex assault victims. She wonders what's next.
The state ran its own program using $1.4 billion in funds, while local governments were given $1.2 billion to oversee their own systems.

But only about 10% of the 54,520 tenant applicants to the state-run program have so far received assistance totaling $61.6 million, according to June 23 state data. Locally run rent relief programs, including those in the Sacramento region, also struggled to distribute millions of dollars in relief.

Lawmakers negotiated with Newsom and other stakeholders in recent weeks to lengthen the deadline and improve the program to keep potentially hundreds of thousands of Californians in their homes past July 1.

"We are sitting on over $4 billion of rental assistance that could go to folks who are struggling. The idea that we could turn on the eviction spigot in three days when we could help these folks is not one that I think makes sense," Assemblyman David Chiu, the San Francisco Democrat who wrote the law, said during a Monday committee hearing.

Tenants are also still obligated to pay 25% of their rent between September of last year and Sept. 30 of this year. Landlords can additionally pursue "just-cause" evictions, meaning they can request a tenant to leave due to complaints of property damage, nuisance or noise issues and criminal activity.
Thats not exactly the Harris approach these days. In fact, her blunt advice for the Central American poor to stay put was reminiscent of her generally pro-police responses to law enforcement excesses while she was attorney general.

So could Newsom and Harris ever face off in a presidential primary? Their mutual campaign manager, Dan Newman, did not respond to emails seeking to ask him about that possibility.

For sure, it would be entirely unprecedented for two top politicos from the same state to vie for the same partys nomination for president. It could set up a situation where they split what amounts to a pro-California vote, letting someone else slip past and get the nomination.

Right now, Harris is best positioned to win the next Democratic nomination race, whenever and however Biden leaves the Oval Office. But she could be weakened in a primary by alienating the partys left, which demonstrated its clout by keeping Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders a prominent candidate for most of the last decade.

Newsom, of course, could also opt to play the waiting-his-turn game again and spend years in the Senate if he took the Feinstein seat.

Theres a lot uncertain here for both Harris and Newsom, but the possibilities are entertaining, at the very least.

Thomas D. Elias writes the syndicated California Focus column. He is author of the book, The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Governments Campaign to Squelch It.
Editor's note: Usually we run Ken Morris' Cooking for Comfort column on Tuesday's Food section and then on Friday we run Dan Dawson's suggestions for wine pairings for Ken's recipes. This week, however, Dan outdid himself, met the deadlines for the Food pages and so here are the dynamic wine duo of Napa Valley, side by side.

Hang onto todays food section, folks, because our Fourth of July food and wine theme will carry you well into the fall. Grillin and barbecue is the rule rather than the exception for the next three months, and Kens sweet-looking recipes will satisfy your senses as many times as you prepare them.

My wine-pairing job is easy this week as the recipes are easy matches, and while I could do the job with 5,000 taste buds tied behind my back, Ill give my usual 100% effort.

But first: Fourth of July Wines: Dan, your thoughts

 Wine is fine and beer is dear. If beer is your beverage of choice on The Fourth, youre not alone. Hefeweizen and fish tacos, pale ale and the barbecue chicken, IPA and flank steak? You betcha.
Gov. Andy Beshear speaks at a May press conference held at Floyd Central High School, partially to announce a $34 million investment in the completion of the Minnie-to-Harold connector, a road which will significantly reduce travel time between Pikeville and Hazard.
Turkey to provide Ukraine with corvette and drones

US Embassy: We honor the tremendous partnership between the US and Armenia

7 people killed in Nigeria militant attacks

Deputy Director of IAEA to visit Iran

Tech week Artsakh 2021 conference kicks off in Stepanakert

UN Committee calls on African countries to share experiences in combating migration

At least 29 people killed in plane crash in Philippines

Iranian Deputy FM appoints Ambassador to UK

Biden does not rule out Russia's involvement in new cyber attack

Plane crashes in south of Kazakhstan

89 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia: 5 citizens die

Nikol Pashinyan congratulates Joe Biden on US Independence Day

Armen Sarkissian sends congratulatory message to US President Joe Biden

96 illegal migrants rescued off coast of Tunisia

Yerevan hands over minefield maps to Baku in exchange for return of 15 POWs

Frank Pallone says they discussed US role in Armenian POWs release

ECHR refuses to reopen case on death of Yasser Arafat

Russia reports on destruction of 5 terrorists

Karabakh emergency service: 4 more remains found, retrieved

Armenia opposition member: Azerbaijan is going to take UNESCO to places Baku wants to

2 people injured in Syria

Turkey, Russia exchange Syrian soldiers, militants

Armenia acting PMs latest fabrications on Artsakh not agreed with Minsk Group co-chair countries, says Ashotyan

Pashinyan to Lukashenko: Armenia-Belarus ties will continue as benchmark for interstate relations development

Newborn boy found on Gyumri street

Albania allocates $9.7m to purchase Turkey drones

I Have Honor bloc member: Last snap parliamentary elections will be another period of hell for Armenia, Artsakh

Armenia ombudsman: Azerbaijan authorities conduct is open contempt for entire international community

Caucasus Heritage Watch calls on Azerbaijan to stop destroying Armenian cemeteries

Armenia acting deputy PM Avinyan attends EBRD online meeting

Israel carries out airstrike at weapons manufacturing site in Gaza

Catholicos Aram I addresses Pope Francis on issue of Armenian captives in Azerbaijan

Avagyan: Authorities should ask Russia peacekeeping commander to talk with Azerbaijan to return convicted Armenians

US troops depart from their main Afghanistan base

Armenias Sarkissian to Belarus Lukashenko: Friendship of our peoples will still be basis for increasing cooperation

Two new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Zas: Situation in southern Armenia does not comply with CSTO charter provisions

125 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Biden announces several key nominations

UK teen allegedly kills 2 sisters in deal with the devil

Armenia high-tech industry acting minister meets with Catalonia parliament speaker

Newspaper: Armenia outgoing legislature majority faction MPs are dissatisfied

EU to allocate over 1.5bn to Armenia for five programs

Newspaper: It is known who will head Armenia "I Have Honor" bloc parliament faction

Global food prices soaring at their fastest rate

Hikmet Hajiyev's slip of the tongue - "Zangezur corridor" in exchange of a land route for Armenia towards Russia

Bloomberg: US asks Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan to accept refugees from Afghanistan

Armenian bailiffs killed in Sochi posthumously awarded Order of Courage by Putin

Armenian court to continue examination of appeal against arrest of doctor Armen Charchyan on July 6

Turkey reaches no agreement on Kabul airport issue

French military neutralizes several ISIS leaders in Sahel

Putin, Macron discuss Nagorno-Karabakh

Baku court sentences 2 Armenian POWs to 4 years in prison, 12 captives to 6 months in prison

Bishkek offers Baku to create Council in "5+3" format at level of Presidents of Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan

Ambassador: US ready to provide support to peaceful normalization and reconciliation of Azerbaijan and Armenia

Man detained in Afghanistan for carrying explosives in musical instrument

Armenia government sets up inter-agency commission to eliminate consequences of drought or water scarcity

Armenia Shirak Province deputy governor sacked

Cyprus authorities change rules of entry for tourists

Karabakh emergency situations service: Remains of another Armenian soldier found in Fizuli region

'Armenia' bloc representative: Many police officers from Yerevan voted in Shurnukh and other villages of Syunik Province

'I Have Honor' bloc also applies to Armenia Constitutional Court regarding results of snap parliamentary elections

Mitsubishi Electric president resigns amid document forgery scandal

'Armenia' bloc representative: Petition submitted to Constitutional Court for impossibility of judge's participation

Erdogan: Turkey will maintain its presence in Azerbaijan and take what belongs to it

French government denies concealment of radiation levels in Pacific Ocean after nuclear tests

Boeing 737 cargo crew rescued after falling into water

Digest: EU commissioner to visit Armenia; Armenians discover 97kg heroin, Turkey citizen detained

Old school in Geghhovit village of Armenia's Gegharkunik Province being renovated

Yerevan Police solve loan office robbery case

India confirms 400,000 deaths from COVID-19

Russia FM says there is significant progress in talks over Iran's nuclear deal

Boeing 737 cargo crashes near Honolulu

Sham trial continues in Baku, prosecutor demands sentencing 12 Armenian POWs to 2 years in prison

Armenia acting PM dismisses Vayots Dzor Province deputy governor

Armenian analyst: Armenia needs to understand what it can offer China through One Belt One Road project

Over 100 organizations urges Biden to stop using drones

Armenia Constitutional Court registers Zartonk party petition to invalidate snap parliamentary election results

Attorney: The two grounds for keeping Armenian doctor Armen Charchyan under arrest no longer exist

Dollar still dropping in Armenia

Lawyer Aram Vardevanyan to represent Armenia bloc at Constitutional Court

Armenia acting Deputy PM visits construction sites in Yerevan

YouTube deletes video about hate speech against Armenians posted by Turkey President's spokesperson

Armenia acting justice minister receives Kazakhstan Ambassador

European Commissioner plans visits to Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia

Four new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

IMF sharply raises its forecast for US economic growth to 7%

Fan Yong: We work to draw Chinese investors to Armenia

Body implementing proceedings completes case of Armenian doctor Armen Charchyan, sends it to court

Macron warns of American-style culture dangers

Armenia Shirak Province village veterinarian commits suicide

Facebook to start warning some users that they may have seen extremist content

July in Armenia will be as hot as in June, says chief meteorologist

China ambassador to Armenia: We are waiting with pain in our hearts for return of captives

Both Armenia and Azerbaijan are included in Belt and Road Initiative, says China ambassador to Yerevan

China envoy to Armenia refutes Azerbaijan media report

US worries China is building over 100 new ICBM silos

Armenia State Revenue Committee discovers 97kg heroin, Turkey citizen detained

Armenian captives 'trials' continue in Azerbaijan

Chief meteorologist: June heat in Armenia is absolute record-breaking in meteorological monitoring history
The United States supports a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and believes that Israel needs to support Palestinian economic opportunities, White House said in a statement on Monday following the talks between US and Israeli Presidents Joe Biden and Reuven Rivlin.

The leaders discussed recent developments in Gaza and the West Bank and the US President noted the importance of Israel taking steps to bring calm, stability, and support to broader economic opportunities for the Palestinian people.

President Biden reaffirmed that a negotiated two-state solution remains the best path to lasting peace. The leaders discussed the importance of intensifying efforts to enhance the role of moderate positions and promote the idea of coexistence, while weakening the positions of extremists who advocate hatred and violence.

The presidents of the two countries discussed the many challenges facing the region, including the threat posed by Iran. Biden assured President Rivlin that the United States remains determined to counter Iran's malign activities and terrorist support among the forces under his control, which have destabilizing consequences for the region. They also discussed the possibilities for strengthening peace and stability in the Middle East and beyond.

The statement said that Biden, through Rivlin, conveyed an invitation to Prime Minister Naftali Bennett to meet with him shortly at the White House and confirmed that the US administration looks forward to working closely with the new Israeli government on many important issues on the bilateral agenda.
A man faces up to 20 years in prison for jumping out of a moving plane at Los Angeles International Airport, ABC reported.

The incident occurred during a flight from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City.

According to the TV channel, the passenger arrived in Los Angeles two days before the incident. During his stay on the aircraft, he was restless, constantly looking around and twitching in his chair.

When the plane began to enter the runway, the man began to panic and ask the stewardess to release him. The man tried to get into the cockpit and then jumped out of the plane using the emergency ramp. The man fell on the airfield, breaking his right leg. Later, he was detained and taken to the hospital, where he was provided with the necessary medical assistance.

Doctors found out that the Mexican was under the influence of methamphetamine. He is due to appear in federal court this week.
Residents of several villages in Shirak Province of Armenia have closed off the Yerevan-Gyumri motorwayat the Beniamin village sectiondemanding that the authorities immediately resolve their irrigation water problem.

The situation is tense at the closed part of the motorway, as hundreds of cars have built up there.

Those in charge at the Shirak department of the Union of Water Users of Armenia have come to speak with these protesting villagers, and they assure that this issue will be settled today.

Farmers demand a final solution to this issue.

The police have not yet managed to persuade the protesters to reopen the road.

Movses Manukyan, head of the agriculture department at the Shirak provincial hall, told Armenpress that this is not the first year that the local farmers have an irrigation water problem due to drought.
YEREVAN.  In Strasbourg, I had a 40-minute conversation with the head of the Azerbaijani delegation, Samad Seyidov; the issue of [Armenian] prisoners of war was discussed. And to all my arguments that the Armenians in Azerbaijan are prisoners of war and that Baku violates international law, the Third Geneva Convention on prisoners of war, that Azerbaijan has in fact spat on the trilateral statement of November 9 of last year, Seyidov was responding that there were no prisoners of war in Azerbaijan. Naira Zohrabyan, a member of the outgoing Armenian parliament and of Armenias delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), told this to a press conference on Tuesday.

According to her, the aforementioned head of the Azerbaijani delegation to PACE had started claiming that the Armenians currently in Baku are "terrorists" because they allegedly committed "terrorist acts" in the territory of Azerbaijan. "He was making a delusion, and suddenly stated that we had deceived them. In his words, the maps handed over to them on the 97 thousand [land] mines in the Aghdam region correspond to reality by only 50 percent, whereas the rest is fake," Zohrabyan added.

However, as the Armenian outgoing MP noted, Seyidov said that Baku, as a gesture of goodwill, is ready to discuss the possible return of Armenian captives, but only if the Armenian authorities sign an agreement and recognize the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, which will include 75 percent of the Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) territories that were occupied during the 44-day war last fall. "Until Armenia recognizes the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, we must forget about the prisoners of war," said Naira Zohrabyan, quoting the head of the Azerbaijani delegation to PACE. Moreover, she drew attention to the fact that the Armenian side does not have any Azerbaijani prisoners of war.

In connection with the abovementioned, the Armenian politician called on the Europeans to impose sanctions on the family members of the President of Azerbaijan; in particular, on their bank accounts.
Acting Minister of High-Tech Industry of Armenia Hayk Chobanyan yesterday met with Vice-President, Policy and Regulation and Head of Europe, Russia and CIS of GSMA Daniel Pataki on the heels of MWC Barcelona 2021, which is taking place from June 28 to July 1.

As reported the Ministry of High-Tech Industry, Chobanyan reported that Armenias tech firms have always participated in and highly appreciated the importance of MWC Barcelona. The acting minister touched upon the challenges of transformation of the sector and the new reality conditioned by the pandemic.

Pataki presented the activities of GSMA, which covers several areas, including the consolidation of sector-specific representatives in one place, standardization, technological cooperation and the opportunities for cooperation of decision-making politicians.

Acting Minister Chobanyan presented the main areas of activities of Armenias Ministry of High-Tech Industry and underscored the adoption of a new strategy on development, the implementation of which will raise the countrys economy to a new level for growth.

The parties attached importance to the need for development of partnership and agreed to consider the priorities for implementation of mutually beneficial projects in the sector.
OSCE Chairperson-in-Office, Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde has once again called on Azerbaijan to release Armenian prisoners of war, resume the negotiations under the auspices of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs and achieve a political settlement. This is what Linde said during today's press conference, commenting on Armenpress news agency's view that the Armenian society is disappointed with the OSCEs passive position during the 2020 Nagorno Karabakh War.

Asked whether she shares the view of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev who says that the NK conflict is solved, Ann Linde said: I dont agree that the OSCE doesnt make a lot of efforts for the conflict settlement, for what is happening in Nagorno Karabakh. I have a special representative who is very active. I personally met with him yesterday to discuss the situation. We have an OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairmanship, co-chaired by US, Russia and France which try to make very positive steps, she said, adding that the Co-Chairs, however, had a limited access to the region last year because of the pandemic and other reasons.

The OSCE Chairperson-in Office reminded that in mid-June there was an agreement to return 15 Armenian prisoners of war from Azerbaijan, and Armenia provided Azerbaijan with maps aimed at facilitating the demining works. According to Mrs. Linde, this is a welcoming step aimed at strengthening trust.

With my statement I have called on Armenia, Azerbaijan to take a positive step by releasing all remaining detainees and resume the negotiations under the auspices of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairmanship, and also to find a political solution with the engagement of Andrzej Kasprzyk, because there is no peace agreement yet, Ann Linde said.
In the process of searching for, retrieving the remains of Armenian servicemen from the territories now under Azerbaijani control, as well as returning the captives and detainees, the relevant units of the Artsakh Ministry of Internal Affairs are ready for any move, even in the presence of bad interpersonal and ethno-ethnic relations and attitude of the adversary. Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) Minister of Internal Affairs Karen Sargsyan told about this to Azat (Free) Artsakh.

"To be honest, in the first days of the search operations, an apparent inimical attitude was clearly observed in the adversary [i.e., Azerbaijan]. [But] after that, when the meetings became more frequent, there was a change in those relations, which only benefited our work," he added.

Referring to the work of the Artsakh State Commission on Prisoners of War, Hostages and Missing Persons, which has been functioning under his chairmanship since April, Sargsyan assured that all efforts are being made to re solve the main task on the agenda.

"The tasks of search and return of captives, missing servicemen, volunteers and reservists are on the main agenda of our activity; we make every effort in this regard. However, I must mention that this task has a covered and uncovered side. Moreover, there is more done that was on the uncovered side. This is probably the most difficult topic for each of us psychologically. The work is just as hard and difficult," Karen Sargsyan said.
The EU Council gave the go-ahead for the signing of three neighbourhood aviation agreements  with Ukraine, Armenia and Tunisia  as well as an air transport agreement with Qatar, as reported Armenpress news agency.

These agreements will open up the air transport market, offering new opportunities for both consumers and operators. Through more efficient connectivity, they will promote trade, tourism, investment and economic and social development, the EU Delegation in Armenia said in a statement.

The Council is now ready to sign four important aviation agreements that will improve market access for airlines and enhance connectivity and freedom of movement for citizens. At the same time, they will ensure the highest level of safety and security and provide for a level playing field.

The three neighbourhood agreements will remove market restrictions in relation to the EUs neighbouring countries and associate these countries with the EUs internal aviation market, as they will adopt EU aviation standards and implement EU aviation rules.

The agreement with Qatar will open the market equally with all 27 member states, upgrading the rules and standards that currently exist for flights between Qatar and the EU. This is the first such agreement between the EU and a Gulf country.

All four agreements contain robust environmental, social and fair competition clauses with strong enforcement mechanisms to avoid any distortions of competition or other abuses.

The decisions on Ukraine, Armenia and Qatar enable application of the agreement on a provisional basis, pending the completion of the procedures necessary for its entry into force.

The four agreements are expected to be signed in autumn 2021. Every agreement will then need to be ratified by each member state, the Union and the other party, the statement reads.
Armenian News - NEWS.am presents the daily digest of Armenia-related top news as of 29.06.21:

OSCE Chairperson-in-Office, Swedish FM Ann Linde has once again called on Azerbaijan to release Armenian prisoners of war, resume the talks under the auspices of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs, and achieve a political settlement.

She reminded that in mid-June there was an agreement to return 15 Armenian prisoners of war from Azerbaijan, and Armenia provided Azerbaijan with maps aimed at facilitating the demining works. According to Mrs. Linde, this is a welcoming step aimed at strengthening trust.

With my statement, I have called on Armenia, Azerbaijan to take a positive step by releasing all remaining detainees and resume the negotiations, Ann Linde noted.

Gallup International Association in Armenia has announced post-election survey results.

According to a poll conducted after the snap parliamentary elections in Armenia on June 20, a total of 35.8% of citizens had voted for the ruling Civil Contract Party, while 24.2% of the respondents voted for the "Armenia" bloc, and 6.8% for the "I Have Honor" bloc.

38.7% of the respondents unequivocally believe that the elections were fair and transparent, 20.1% answered "rather yes than no," 18.8%"rather no than yes," 17.9%"definitely no," and 4.5% could not respond.

The OSCE Chair-in-Office, Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde congratulated the acting PM Nikol Pashinyan on his victory in the snap parliamentary elections.

According to the final results of the vote count by the Central Election Commission, Nikol Pashinyan's Civil Contract Party got 53.91% of the votes.

"Looking forward to working with Armenian government & wish you success in continued democratic reforms. stands ready to support," Linde noted.

US President Joe Biden has also congratulated Pashinyan.

Our partnership with Armenia is one of shared values and cooperation on democratic reform and conflict resolutionwe are committed to strengthening that partnership, Biden tweeted.

The "trial"based on fake criminal casesagainst 27 Armenian captives is underway in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan.

The Azerbaijani authorities are grossly violating all international law on the rights of captives, as well as the points of the trilateral agreement reached on November 9, 2020, one of these points being the return of all captives.

With the purpose of ensuring several anti-records for sound and adequate understanding of the reality, the Azerbaijani authorities continue their buffoonery and the trials against Armenian prisoners of war, but all this seems too little for the Aliyev regimes buffoons.

According to the Azerbaijani media, lawyers have filed a motion with the court to launch a criminal case against former Armenian defense minister Davit Tonoyan and former Chief of the General Staff of the Armenian Armed Forces Onik Gasparyan and interview the defendants as witnesses.

"The convicts have declared that they agree with the motion. The state prosecutor has declared that the motion contradicts Articles 318 and 207 of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Azerbaijan, saying that the court considers the criminal cases on the ground of the presented allegations; if during the trial the complicity of the person with the crime is established, the issue needs to be separated in a separate proceeding and considered separate from the allegation," Azerbaijani presses added.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi discussed the return of refugees to Nagorno-Karabakh.

The parties discussed the return of refugees and temporarily displaced persons to Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding territories, in accordance with the statement on ceasefire in Nagorno-Karabakh signed on November 9, 2020, by the leaders of Armenia, Russia, and Azerbaijan.

As of Tuesday morning, 116 new cases of the coronavirus were confirmed in Armenia, and the total number of these cases has reached 224,967 in the country, the National Center for Disease Control and Prevention informed Armenian News-NEWS.am.

Also, four more deaths from COVID-19 were registered, making the respective total 4,514 cases.

Meanwhile, Artsakh [Nagorno-Karabakh] has confirmed three COVID-19 news cases, bringing the total number to 908.

The initial round of Goldmoney Asian Rapid ended with Levon Aronians victory. The Armenian chess grandmaster scored 10.5 points and made it to the quarter-final, exceeding Chinese Ding Liren by one point.

On the third day of the tournament, Aronian defeated Iranian Alireza Firouzja (FIDE) and Russian Daniil Dubov, tied the matches with Chinese Hou Yifan, Russian Vladislav Artemiev, and American Wesley So.

Goldmoney Asian Rapid is the seventh stage of Meltwater Champions Chess Tour organized by Magnus Carlsen. The total prize fund is $1,600,000,000, and the prize fund for Goldmoney Asian Rapid is $100,000.
The European Union might lift travel restrictions for citizens of Armenia. As reported the diplomatic source of RFE/RL in the European Council, the EU Presidency has offered to include Armenia in the list of countries, the citizens of which can visit the Schengen area for tourism, as well as Switzerland, Norway, Iceland and Lichtenstein.

The issue is expected to be considered and put up for a vote during the session of EU ambassadors. Nevertheless, its up to the discretion of the EU member states to implement the recommendation.

For instance, when the European Council included Georgia in the list of safe countries in July 2020, several European countries decided to open their borders for citizens of Georgia, but the Czech Republic didnt observe the recommendation, taking into consideration the anti-epidemic situation in the country.

At this moment, 15 states and regions are in the green zone of the EU, including the US, Israel, South Korea and Singapore. The list is updated once every two weeks.

According to diplomatic sources, the EU Presidency recommends adding another ten countries to the list, including Armenia, Azerbaijan, Moldova and Kosovo where, according to European experts, the anti-epidemic situation has improved. If the proposal is approved by EU ambassadors and is then approved by EU member states, citizens of Armenia will only have to submit a negative coronavirus test result to cross the border or verify that they have gotten vaccinated against the pandemic with a vaccine registered in the territory of the EU.
Secretary General of the Council of Europe Marija Pejcinovic Buric sent a congratulatory message to acting Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan on the successful conduct of the parliamentary elections, the Department of Information and Public Relations of the Office of the Prime Minister of Armenia reported.

The message reads as follows:

Dear Mr. Prime Minister,

I congratulate you on the successful holding of the June 20 snap parliamentary elections. I welcome the fact that international observers, including the delegation of our Parliamentary Assembly, assessed these elections as competitive and generally well organized.

It is important that the election results showed the unconditional support of the Armenian people to the reform policy under your leadership. Now that the election campaign is over, it is time to focus on a constructive dialogue with political parties and civil society. In this regard, I reaffirm the readiness of the Council of Europe to continue to support Armenia in the reform process, based on the criteria of human rights, democracy and the rule of law. "
Japan minister says Taiwan needs to be protected

Japan's State Minister of Defence Yasuhide Nakayama questions whether the decision of many countries, including Japan and United States, to follow a "one-China" policy would stand the test of time. File photo: AFP

Japan's deputy defence minister has warned of a growing threat posed by Chinese and Russian collaboration, saying it is necessary to "wake up" to Beijing's pressure on Taiwan and protect the island "as a democratic country."



Speaking to the Hudson Institute think tank, State Minister of Defence Yasuhide Nakayama questioned whether the decision of many countries, including Japan and United States, to follow a "one-China" policy that has recognised Beijing over Taipei since the 1970s would stand the test of time.



"Was it right?" he asked at the online event, referring to how future generations will judge policymakers on the issue. "I don't know."



Nakayama said democratic countries had to protect each other and noted that he had in the past referred to Taiwan as a "red line."



"So we have to protect Taiwan as a democratic country."



Nakayama said Japan and Taiwan were geographically close, and added that if something happened in Taiwan it would affect Japan's Okinawa prefecture, where US forces and their families are based.



Nakayama highlighted growing threats posed by China in space, in missile technology, in the cyber domain and in nuclear and conventional forces, and said that under President Xi Jinping's leadership it had "aggressive, aggressive ... thought and will."



"So wake up. We have to wake up," he said.



Beijing was quick to react, accusing Nakayama of making "erroneous" claims.



"We deplore the erroneous remarks by the senior official of the Japanese government, and we have lodged solemn representations," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin, adding that Nakayama had "falsely accused" China over "normal national defence developments."



"This is highly sinister, dangerous and irresponsible. This politician also openly called Taiwan a country, in serious violation of the China-Japan joint statement," Wang said at a regular media briefing.



"We urge the Japanese government to make a clarification and ensure this will not happen again." (Reuters)
Microsoft Azure customers worldwide now gain access to the Flight Info API to take advantage of the scalability, reliability, and agility of Azure to drive application development and shape business strategies

LONDON -- (BUSINESS WIRE) --

OAG, a leading provider of air travel data and insights, today announced the availability of its Flight Info API in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, an online store that provides applications and services for use on Azure. OAG customers can now take advantage of the productive and trusted Azure cloud platform, with streamlined deployment and management.

Flight Info API is the latest product launch for OAG Metis, the companys Azure-powered open platform for enabling a combined and configurable view of high-value flight information. The API holds the richest version of OAGs schedules data, including unique seats data derived from a new data model. The API provides travel technology companies, online travel agencies (OTAs), metasearch, and other stakeholders in the travel management ecosystem access to data that can help them differentiate, react faster, and scale quicker.

OAGs solutionsdirectly sold and marketed by Microsoft resellers around the worldprovide broad-scale access to reliable flight information to our customers, said Nick Dearden, Chief Technology Officer at OAG. OAG continues to deliver innovative solutions that help our customers access the most current flight information, now available in the Microsoft Azure cloud.

Through Microsoft Azure Marketplace, customers around the world can easily find, buy, and deploy partner solutions they can trust, all certified and optimized to run on Azure, said Sajan Parihar, Senior Director, Microsoft Azure Platform at Microsoft Corp. Were happy to welcome OAG solutions to the growing Azure Marketplace ecosystem.

The Azure Marketplace is an online market for buying and selling cloud solutions certified to run on Azure. The Azure Marketplace helps connect companies seeking innovative, cloud-based solutions with partners who have developed solutions that are ready to use.

About OAG

A leading global travel data provider, OAG has been powering growth and innovation in the air travel ecosystem since 1929. Headquartered in the United Kingdom, OAG has global operations in the United States, Singapore, Japan, Lithuania, and China. For more information, visit www.oag.com and follow us on Twitter @OAG Aviation.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210628005264/en/

CONTACT:

For more information, press only:

Chrissy Azevedo, Corporate Ink for OAG, pressoffice@oag.com
Racial, economic justice are topics of talk with Shriver Center CEO

CARBONDALE, Ill.  Southern Illinois University Carbondales Paul Simon Public Policy Institute will host a virtual conversation with Audra Wilson, president and CEO of the Shriver Center on Poverty Law, at 11 a.m. Wednesday, July 7.

Wilson and John Shaw, institute director, will discuss Wilsons and the Shriver Centers advocacy for economic and racial justice.

Wilson was named top executive of the Chicago-based Shriver Center on Poverty Law on June 1, 2020. The 54-year-old center, according to its mission statement, seeks to build a future free from poverty and racism, where everyone has equal power under the law.

Before leading the Shriver Center, Wilson served as executive director of the League of Women Voters of Illinois. She also chairs the Cook County Commission on Womens Issues, and previously served as deputy chief of staff for U.S. Rep. Robin Kelly, D-Matteson. She has served as a policy adviser for several federal and state candidates for elected office, including former President Barack Obamas U.S. Senate campaign.

Audra Wilsons powerful and persuasive advocacy for economic and racial justice is rooted in more than two decades of high-level policy and political experience in Illinois and across the country, Shaw said. She works tirelessly every day to amplify the voices and tell the stories of people and communities that are seeking hope and justice.

The event is part of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institutes Understanding Our New World virtual conversation series with policy experts, political analysts, government and private sector leaders, reporters and authors. Attendance is free and open to the public. Registration is required at paulsimoninstitute.org/event-information. At registration, guests may submit a question for Wilson.

The Paul Simon Public Policy Institute is a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank at SIU Carbondale promoting better politics and smarter government and preparing students for careers in public service.
If ever there was a summer to celebrate  this is it. Americans will be soaking up the fun all season long at beaches, backyards, front porches and rooftops. And you just may be looking for some adult beverages to add a little extra sparkle to your soiree. But many of us want our libations a bit less boozy and less caloric  these days. The good news is that theres a walk-in fridge worth of lighter options to try this summer.

Related: These cans, ranging from wine spritzers to kombucha concoctions, are full of ingredients you actually benefit from.

Alcoholic beverages arent regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), so theyre not required by law to include a Nutrition Facts Panel. But many new brands are providing this information, either on the package or online, to help health-minded consumers make better decisions. And you can always use the ABV listed to help you figure out boozy a drink is. ABV stands for alcohol by volume and all types of alcohol will list that on the packaging. The higher the ABV, the higher the calories. For example, a regular beer will range between 5% and 7%, while a double IPA can clock in at 9.1% ABV. Light beers range from 3.8% ABV to 4.2%.

Lets look at the better-for-you sips to load into your cooler this summer:

Wine

The process of making wine is ancient, but new technology has made it possible to make lower sugarand therefore lower calorie  wines in recent years. One company that has perfected the process is FitVine. They ferment their wines to dry, instead of leaving residual sugar, which drops the sugar content to less than a gram of sugar per bottle. This proprietary process also lowers the tannins and histamines in the wines, making them more suitable for people who are sensitive to histamine. We like FitVines prosecco, which clocks in at just 92 calories per 5-ounce pour and is perfect for toasting to any occasion.

Avaline (Courtesy Avaline)

You probably know Cameron Diaz for her roles in classic rom coms, but she also recently launched a wine brand called Avaline with her friend and entrepreneur, Katherine Power. Avalines bright and crisp sparkling rose, made with organic grapes, has 1g of sugar and 113 calories per glass.

Story continues

Seltzers, spritzers and other canned cocktails

The market for canned cocktails has exploded in recent years. The category started with seltzers and has grown to include drinks made with myriad boozy options.

If youre a fan of Brazilian caipirinhas, dive into a can of Novo Fogos sparkling caipirinha cocktails, in original lime, mango and lime, or passion fruit and lime. Each petite 200ml packs a punch with just 128 to 135 calories and 10g of carbs. Serve straight out of the can or over ice.

Another fun canned option is Loverboys Spritz, which they call an aromatic cocktail. These gluten-free blends of juice and orange wine (wine made from orange peels thats filtered for a neutral flavor) have a slim 100 calories and 2g of sugar per picnic-friendly can. We like the juicy Peach Mango flavor, but it also comes in Blueberry Lemon and Passionfruit Guava.

Volley (Courtesy Volley)

If tequila is more your thing, serve up a Volley, made with 100% blue agave tequila, plus sparkling water and real organic fruit juice (mango, lime, ginger or grapefruit) and is a reasonable 5.25% ABV. Each gluten-free, no sugar added can clocks in between 100 to 110 calories, depending on the flavor.

For those of us who scratch their heads at the appeal of hard seltzers like White Claw, there are some fab new wine-based spritzers on the market. Usual combines Brut sparkling wine with Japanese yuzu, a citrus fruit that brings a whole load of tartness and astringency. A sleek silver can contains 7.25% ABV, 71 calories and 2.2g sugar.

Hoxie (Courtesy Hoxie)

Hoxie has fun options for us wine drinkers too. They blend sustainably grown grapes with water, botanicals and fruit to create palate pleasing combinations like Watermelon-Chili and Lemon Ginger Rose. Each 90-calorie, 250ml can of Hoxie has 3g of added sugar, 4g of carbs and is vegan and gluten-free.

Beer

A standard, 12-ounce beer usually comes in at about 150 calories, while a craft beer with a higher ABV can be upwards of 250 calories. Light beers are notorious for being light on flavor as well as calories, but some newcomers are definitely tastier than the norm.

If youre looking for some extra benefits with your light lager, check out Flying Embers Active Ales Lions Mane Lager. This crisp and slightly fruity 4.2% ABV brew has just 85 calories, plus functional benefits from Lions Mane mushrooms. Its brewed with USDA organic malt and rice syrup and wont keep you from your early morning run tomorrow.

For a lighter brew that you can pick up at virtually any grocery store, we like Bud Light Lime. Its brewed with real lime peels and packs a citrusy punchperfect to wash down guacamole and chips at the beach.

Cider fans should give Original Sin Brighter Times Cider a try. At 6% ABV and 185 calories, youl get all of that appley flavor in a super crisp, not too sweet package. Its made with freshly pressed New York apples, plus passion fruit, orange and guava juice, and goes extremely well with anything grilled.

Hard kombucha

Millennials favorite feel-good drink has plenty of spiked  and probiotic-boosted  versions. Regular kombucha ferments tea with yeast and juice, which creates negligible amounts of alcohol. To boost that, hard kombucha goes through a secondary fermentation process with additional sugar and another strain of yeast, converting that sugar into various levels of alcohol (from 3 to 8% ABV).

Related: Nutritionist and TODAY columnist Keri Glassman explains why you should make fermented foods like kefir your new BFFs.

Boochcrafts organic hard kombucha clocks in at 7% ABV. We like the tangy Grapefruit-Hibiscus flavor, which has 170 calories and 2g sugar per 12-ounce can. Aqua ViTeas After Glow is less boozy at only 5% ABV  so you can still get up for that early morning hike. The Ginger Blue flavor combines blueberry and ginger juice with the kombucha base and has 150 calories and 7g of sugar per 12-ounce can.

DIY light cocktails

The typical cocktail you order at a bar is made with syrups and added sugar and can rack up hundreds of calories in just one drink. But you can shake up your own craft cocktail at home with healthier mix-ins. Weve been playing around with Spare Food Cos elixirs, which were created by Adam Kaye, the former chef at Blue Hill, and use surplus local ingredients that would normally be wasted. We paired 6 ounces of their probiotic Cucumber and Lime tonic (60 calories) with an ounce of gin (74 calories) and a squeeze of lime for a super refreshing patio sipper.

Spare Tonic (Courtesy Spare Foods)

Another at-home drink you can easily stir up is a michelada. Combine your fave light beer, plus an ounce of mezcal (we like Gem and Bolt or Dona Vega), plus V8 juice for a zesty take on a bloody mary.

Drink made with beer, tomato juice and spices, garnished with salt on the edge of the jar in Guatemala is called Michelada. (Getty Images)

Cheers to all your summer celebrations! Keep it fun and remember to stay hydrated and drink responsibly.
Roy Rogers was fishing in Keene Creek Reservoir near Ashland, Oregon, on the night of July 11, 1963, when he found something wrapped in blankets, bound with wire and weighed down to keep it hidden, according to officials.

It was the body of a 2-year-old boy whose identity has remained unknown until now, the Jackson County Sheriffs Office said in a news release posted on Facebook. A DNA match recently revealed the toddler was Stevie Crawford, who was born Oct. 2, 1960, in New Mexico.

After the case went cold in August 1963, the files were archived for the next 45 years until Jackson County Sheriffs Office detective Sgt. Colin Fagan discovered 11 boxes labeled old Sheriff cases in 2007, according to authorities. Fagan asked Jim Tattersall, special investigator, to go through the boxes and Tattersall found the case.

Officials said Stevies body was exhumed from Hillcrest Memorial Park cemetery in August 2008 to take a DNA sample but the case went cold when there were no matches in the Combined DNA Index system. A composite image of the toddler was then created using the DNA by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 2010, according to the news release.

The sheriffs office said it received a tip through Facebook and deputy Medical Examiner detective Christian Adams continued the investigation. Adams worked with Oregon State Police and submitted a DNA sample of the boy to Parabon NanoLabs to find potential leads, according to officials.

Parabon NanoLabs searched GEDMatch, an open-source DNA repository, and discovered Stevies two potential siblings, authorities said. The half-brother of Stevie said in an interview with investigators that he had a younger sibling with Down syndrome, who was born in New Mexico and went missing. Investigators found a birth certificate and confirmed Stevie as the boy who was found dead by the fisherman.
The South Carolina Department of Education is putting $20 million into arts programs, coming from federal funds meant to help schools recover educational time loss from the coronavirus.

The education department announced Tuesday that it is partnering with the South Carolina Arts Commission to provide more arts educations with money provided by the federal American Rescue Plan.

The plan is meant to get the nation running again after the pandemic shut much of it down.

South Carolina received $2.1 billion from the plan, according to the education department. Most of that went directly to school districts, but some was set aside for state-level activities to address learning loss, summer enrichment programs, and comprehensive after school programs.

The art commission proposed an initiative to help schools fill learning loss gaps in the arts, use arts as part of core subject areas and provide art-based summer and after-school learning opportunities throughout the state.

The art commission will implement its plan over the next three years and hopes to better integrate arts in schools, get kids learning about art early and allow high schools to gain job credits for the art industry, according to a statement about the funds. Part of the money will go to getting undeserved communities better art education and bettering how instructors teach art.

As a longtime music teacher, I have seen firsthand the impact that arts education can have on students, State Superintendent Molly Spearman said in the statement. The arts have a unique ability to engage students of diverse backgrounds across all subject areas which makes this initiative well suited for the receipt of these funds.
A New Hampshire man is on the mend after his 8-year-old nephew who was hunting chipmunks fired a gun and mistakenly shot him, authorities say.

The 32-year-old was shot in the head Friday but is expected to be OK, the Milton Police Department said in a Facebook post.

The man and his nephew were shooting chipmunks when a bullet fired by the 8-year-old ricocheted after killing one of the rodents, hitting the mans head, police said. He was taken to a local hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

Milton Police Chief Richard Krauss said its legal to take young children hunting and called Fridays incident truly just a freak accident, according to the Fosters Daily Democrat.

There are kids who learn how to hunt and shoot a lot younger than that, Krauss told the newspaper. Just be a little more cautious about your backdrop.

Theres no minimum age for hunting in New Hampshire  but hunters under 16 years old must be accompanied by a licensed adult whos at least 18 or older, according to the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department. The state also doesnt require youth hunters to take a hunter education course.

Teen sleeping in hammock at 12:30 a.m attacked by large bear in Great Smoky Mountains

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Abu Dhabi will soon only allow adults vaccinated against COVID-19 in public places including schools, universities, shopping centers and gyms  banning anyone who hasn't been inoculated against the virus unless they've a valid reason.

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The big picture: United Arab Emirates authorities said in a Twitter post Monday they're taking the action, effective Aug. 20, to "preserve public health" after vaccinating 93% of "target groups." Anyone in the UAE capital under 16 will be exempt from the rule, which doesn't apply to retailers selling essential goods, such as supermarkets and pharmacies.

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On Monday, the Abu Dhabi Emergency Crisis and Disasters Committee approved a restriction that would prevent people who have not received a COVID-19 vaccine to enter many public spaces. In a statement, the government's media office said the decision came "after vaccinating more than 93% of target groups in the emirate."

"The committee emphasized that the decision is part of proactive measures put in place by the emirate which also include pre-emptive testing campaigns in industrial areas and densely populated areas," the media office added.

The ban goes into effect August 20, at which point, unvaccinated residents will not be allowed in shopping centers, restaurants, cafes, gyms, museums, theme parks, resorts and sporting activities. The only public place unvaccinated people may shop are retail locations that sell "essential goods such as supermarkets and pharmacies." The ban also applies to universities, public and private schools and nurseries.

The restrictions will not apply to unvaccinated people with approved exemptions or those who are under the age of 16.

On Monday, the U.S. Department of State issued a level 4 travel advisory for the United Arab Emirates, the highest level indicating U.S. residents should not travel to the area due to COVID-19. According to data collected by John Hopkins University, the United Arab Emirates has fully vaccinated nearly 40% of its population.

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State lawmakers reached a deal on a public safety bill over the weekend, but it's gotten a chilly reception from activists and the DFL People of Color and Indigenous (POCI) Caucus.

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Driving the news: Legislators announced an agreement Saturday night that puts new regulations on no-knock warrants, requires 911 operators to dispatch mental health crisis teams to certain calls when available and helps build a database that tracks officer conduct.

It also gives pay increases for state law enforcement officers and makes tougher penalties for those who injure officers.

Yes, but: It doesn't include some of the police reforms requested by activists, like banning pretext traffic stops for minor violations and a requirement that when police kill a person, video footage is released to families within 48 hours.

What they're saying: Senate Republican Leader Paul Gazelka hailed the agreement, saying it avoided "anti-police measures."

"The recent increase in violent crime has all of us on edge, but this agreement keeps our promise," Gazelka said in a statement.

State Rep. John Thompson (DFL-St. Paul) asked Gov. Tim Walz to show some "testicular fortitude" on police reform.

"We don't need a press conference with you governor, we need a leader," he said.

Walz said the deal was "not enough," though he encouraged lawmakers to approve it. A budget deal is needed by July 1 to avoid a government shutdown.

Of note: Walz also announced some executive actions around police reform yesterday, including $15 million for community violence prevention grants and creating a policy that provides video footage to families of people killed by police within five days.

But that only applies to state agencies, not city and county law enforcement.

What's ahead: The House is set to vote on the agreement Tuesday.

While the POCI Caucus could sink the bill, Fox 9 reporter Theo Keith asked several POCI members to raise their hand if they would vote against it without some of their amendments, and none of them did.

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An aerial image of Champlain Towers South after the collapse (AP)

The collapse of a 12-storey beachfront condo in Surfside, Florida, shocked residents of nearby towers in Miami-Dade County and throughout the US.

More than 150 residents are still missing in the wreckage following Thursdays incident. Eleven people have been confirmed dead.

Images taken from the air reveal the full scale of the collapse, which President Joe Biden called an enduring tragedy for the community of Surfside.

Officials confirmed that 55 units in Champlain Towers South were destroyed, and that it was substantially full when the incident occurred.

A friend of Linda March, who died on Thursday, told reporters she was devastated to see a desk chair belonging to the Champlain Towers resident in images of the wreckage.

Belongings hang from mid-air in other images, showing air conditioning units and household furniture hanging from the partially collapsed building.

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A pile of rubble at the base of Champlain Towers South, where round-the-clock rescue efforts have been concentrated, also indicate what could have caused the incident.

According to structural engineers, the building appeared to fold-in on itself, and fell in stages  suggesting a structural failure at the bottom of the 12-storey condo.

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A contractor also revealed that he witnessed cracks around the pool area and water in the basement of the structure, which had already been surveyed for major structural damage and was days or weeks away from repairs.

Construction had already started on the roof of the building.

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It remains to be seen what caused the collapse of the beachfront building, with search and rescue efforts still to conclude, before any official instigation.

Audits of similar buildings in the area are also ongoing.

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South Africa's top court on Tuesday handed former president Jacob Zuma a 15-month jail term for contempt of court following his refusal to appear before graft investigators.

"The Constitutional Court can do nothing but conclude that Mr Zuma is guilty of the crime of contempt of court," judge Sisi Khampepe said.

Zuma, 79, is accused of enabling the plunder of state coffers during his nearly nine-year stay in office.

"This kind of recalcitrance and defiance is unlawful and will be punished," Khampepe said.

"I am left with no option but to commit Mr Zuma to imprisonment, with the hope that doing so sends an unequivocal message... the rule of law and the administration of justice prevails."

"The majority judgement orders an unsuspended sentence of imprisonment for a period (of 15 months)," she declared, ordering Zuma to hand himself over within five days.

The commission of inquiry is headed by Deputy Chief Justice Raymond Zondo.

The panel was set up by Zuma himself, under pressure over mounting scandals, shortly before he was ousted in 2018 by the ruling African National Congress (ANC).

But he only testified once, in July 2019, before staging a walkout days later and accusing the commission's Zondo of bias.

He then ignored several invitations to reappear, citing medical reasons and preparations for another corruption trial.

He presented himself again briefly in November but left before questioning, and Zondo asked to ask the Constitutional Court to intervene.

Most of the graft investigated by the commission involve three brothers from a wealthy Indian business family, the Guptas, who won lucrative government contracts and were allegedly even able to choose cabinet ministers.

Zuma is separately facing 16 charges of fraud, graft and racketeering relating to a 1999 purchase of fighter jets, patrol boats and military gear from five European arms firms for 30 billion rand, then the equivalent of nearly $5 billion.

Story continues

At the time of the purchase, Zuma was president Thabo Mbeki's deputy.

He is accused of accepting bribes totalling four million rand from one of the firms, French defence giant Thales.

sn-mgu-ten/ri
Amazon's contract Flex delivery drivers already have to deal with various indignities, and you can now add the fact that they can be hired  and fired  by algorithms, according to a Bloomberg report.

To ensure same-day and other deliveries arrive on time, Amazon uses millions of subcontracted drivers for its Flex delivery program, started in 2015. Drivers sign up via a smartphone app via which they can choose shifts, coordinate deliveries and report problems. The reliance on technology doesn't end there, though, as they're also monitored for performance and fired by algorithms with little human intervention.

However, the system can often fire workers seemingly without good cause, according to the report. One worker said her rating (ranging from Fantastic, Great, Fair, or At Risk) fell after she was forced to halt deliveries due to a nail in her tire. She succeeded in boosting it to Great over the next several weeks, but her account was eventually terminated for violating Amazon's terms of service. She contested the firing, but the company wouldn't reinstate her.

Whenever theres an issue, theres no support. Its you against the machine, so you dont even try.

Another driver was unable to deliver packages to an apartment complex because it was closed with the gate locked, and the residents wouldn't answer their phones. In another building, an Amazon locker failed to open. His rating also dropped and he spent six weeks trying to raise it, only to be fired for falling below a prescribed level.

If a driver feels they're wrongly terminated, some feel there's not much recourse, either. Drivers must pay $200 to dispute any termination, and many have said it's not worth the effort. Whenever theres an issue, theres no support, said Cope, who is 29. Its you against the machine, so you dont even try.

Inside Amazon, however, the program has been chalked up as a success, a former engineer who worked on the program told Amazon. And that bears out in the numbers. Around 4 million drivers have downloaded the app worldwide including 2.9 million in the US, according to the report. More than 660,000 people in the US have downloaded the app in the last five months alone.

Amazon said drivers claims of poor treatment and unfair termination were anecdotal and dont represent the experience of the vast majority of Flex drivers. We have invested heavily in technology and resources to provide drivers visibility into their standing and eligibility to continue delivering, and investigate all driver appeals, Spokesperson Kate Kudrna told Bloomberg.
BUCKSTOWN, Pennsylvania  The Duppstadts Country Store, sitting high on a plateau along the Lincoln Highway between Stoystown and Reels Corner, has served Somerset County residents and weary travelers since 1903. When you open the heavy wooden door and hear it creak with age, you get the sense you have entered somewhere special.

Not because it has stayed frozen in time, but because it has stood the test of time  surviving all the winds of change while adjusting and prevailing through every decade it has stood on its perch.

Twenty-month-old Aurilee Sanner, of Somerset, explores the isles at the Duppstadt General Store as grandparents Debbie and Charlie Sanner chase after her.

(Photo by Salena Zito)



From Civil War veterans stopping on their way to Gettysburg to celebrate the anniversaries marking that pivotal battle to the World War I troops on their way to the 10th Regiment of the Pennsylvania National Guard headquarters for Company C before heading to areas of conflict to todays young families shopping for necessities, this place has seen it all.

It was here both shoppers and the owners saw Flight 93 pierce the clear blue skies on Sept. 11, 2001, shaking the ground under them when it slammed into a field just over the hill in Shanksville.

Anyone in the store that day or next door at the Lincoln Cafe diner stood momentarily frozen at the sight of the black smoke rising from the crash. Many of those same people then rushed to their cars to the fire stations where they volunteered and were the first on the scene to help a clearly helpless situation.

The Duppstadt family is the third family to own the store since it opened in 1903, according to Mike Duppstadt, one of five siblings who co-owns the business. This store was started by the Williamson family, who operated it for a while before Jack and Helen Spangler bought it and called it the Clover Leaf Farm store.

Duppstadt's parents bought it in 1971 from the Spanglers.

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As I speak to him, Mike is sitting outside the store on a long wooden bench with his sister Michelle. All five siblings have full-time jobs outside of the store. He is a contractor, she is a nurse, and they rotate shifts working at the store along with nieces and nephews.

Next door, his wife Robin and their daughter Kate are handling the kitchen of the Lincoln Cafe Diner. The family just bought it in March. The cheeseburgers are arguably the best youll ever find, and theyve added a bakery case in the front of the diner with sugary raised donuts that are divine.

Only half of the small businesses in America survive five years or longer, according to data from the Small Business Association, and one in five (19.3%) are family-owned.

The impact of the pandemic on small businesses has been mixed: Nearly 200,000 closed permanently, according to a study released by the Federal Reserve. Others are still struggling to stay afloat, but some of them have benefited from earning more trust from their customers than bigger corporate entities.

Duppstadt said that was the case for them.

We closed for I think six weeks because nobody knew what the heck was going to happen," he said. "But once we did, we were busier during the pandemic than we usually were. People told us they wanted to come to a place they trusted and comfortable in, waited on by people they know. They also said they wanted to come to a place where they knew where everything came from.

That is not surprising. The Edelman Trust Barometer shows trust in large businesses has been falling for at least a decade. People still hold large businesses in higher esteem than they do the government and the media. Still, as the younger generation puts more pressure on large corporations to adhere to social justice orthodoxy, that trust is likely to suffer.

That's because more Americans feel comfortable with local businesses that traditionally stay out of political issues.

When you come to this general store, no one will lecture you  unless, that is, you dont close the screen door behind you.

Duppstadts is known for two things outside of its great hospitality: First, having just about everything you would ever need and, second, having nearly all of it made in America. From the penny candy to the fresh vegetables, milk, bacon, cheese, and eggs to the fully stocked deli. From canned groceries to clothing, shoes, sandals, steel-toed work boots, cowboy boots, and fishing gear.

Almost all are domestically produced.

There is even an entire corner dedicated to stacks of the iconic and colorful Fiestaware dinnerware made 100 miles away in Newell, West Virginia.

Duppstadt said they are not experiencing the same hiring problems as other small businesses because everyone in the family  from the five siblings down to their children  all take turns working at the store. Based on the conversations with the siblings working there, it is a labor of love.

This past Saturday marked the Duppstadts 50th anniversary since their parents opened the doors along the old Lincoln Highway. This store's prosperity was never really hurt by it not being along the interstate, because locals flood in here all day, as do travelers who prefer the back roads over the Turnpike.

Several were on their way to the national parks either at Shanksville or Johnstown or who were picking up firewood for their summer cottages and camps at nearby Indian Lake. Outside tents filled the parking lot for the 50th anniversary with children getting their faces painted, a band set to play, outdoor barbeque and free ice cream for everyone.

The Duppstadts kept their small business up with the times while remaining true to their small-town roots.

We never thought you needed to sacrifice one for the other," Mike Duppstadt said. "I think that is the secret to our success and longevity. That, and making sure everyone who walks in here is treated with kindness and respect.

Washington Examiner Videos

Tags: small business, Pennsylvania, Family

Original Author: Salena Zito

Original Location: The American 'General Store' is a symbol of enterprise and exceptionalism
Associated Press

Tiny Slovenia took charge of the worlds largest trading bloc this week, and immediately shone a harsh spotlight on one of the European Unions most vexing problems: How to accommodate increasingly vocal member countries with very different visions of Europes future. Already, nationalist governments in Hungary and Poland are worrying their more politically mainstream partners in the 27-nation EU. Then on Thursday, Slovenias return to the European stage  it took over the EUs rotating presidency for six months  was marked by concerns about the right-wing governments record on media freedoms and its failure to nominate legal experts to the fraud-busting European Public Prosecutors Office.
Members of the South Florida Urban Search and Rescue team looking for survivors in the partially collapsed 12-story Champlain Towers South condo building on Saturday in Surfside, Florida. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

A pool contractor took photos of water damage beneath the Miami condo that collapsed last week.

At least 11 people were killed in the collapse, with 150 others still missing.

Standing water was found in the same area as a "major" design flaw identified in a 2018 inspection.

Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

Shortly before the collapse of a Miami condominium last week, standing water was found in the same area as a "major error" identified in 2018 in the original design of the building, the Miami Herald reported Monday.

Eleven people are confirmed dead after Champlain Towers South partially collapsed early Thursday, with 150 people still missing.

It's still not clear what caused the collapse, but experts say a structural failure at the bottom of the building could be to blame.

A pool contractor who visited the building just two days before the collapse took photos of damage in the garage, showing cracks in concrete and wet floors in the pool equipment room.

The contractor, who remained anonymous, told the Herald he thought the amount of water at Champlain Towers was unusual. A staff member who was showing him around told the contractor that he "thought it was waterproofing issues," according to the Herald report.

"I thought to myself, that's not normal," the contractor told the Herald, adding that the staff member did not mention any structural damage in the building caused by the water.

The deepest area of standing water in the building was said to be located near parking spot 78 in the garage, which was directly under the condominium's pool deck. The Herald reported Sunday that a 2018 inspection report flagged a flaw in the building's original design, with a lack of proper drainage on the pool deck causing "major structural damage."

Mohammad Ehsani, an engineer and concrete-restoration expert, reviewed the photos obtained by the Herald and told the newspaper it was the worst damage documented in a building that he had seen.

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"You can see extensive corrosion of the rebars at the bottom of the beam. That is very serious," Ehsani told the Herald, saying the condition of the beam was a "really major concern."

Ehsani warned against rushing to the conclusion that the corroded beams were the cause of the collapse, though he said the damage captured in the contractor's photos should have prompted alarm.

"In these buildings that are asymmetrical like this one, there is a possibility that if you have one part of the building that collapses, the building does some turning and twisting," Ehsani told the Herald. "In this case, it is possible that a failure any place in this building could cause distortion to the frame of the building and could cause a collapse in any of the areas, not just adjacent [to the failure]."

Read the original article on Insider
Cinderella wearing a flapper dress, gloves, and headband, as drawn by Amit Naftali. Amit Naftali

Israel-based artist Amit Naftali has been illustrating Disney characters since his childhood.

One of his series illustrates what Disney princesses might wear if they lived in different decades.

Cinderella could've worn a flapper dress in the 1920s, and Tiana might've worn denim in the '90s.

Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

The outfits worn by Disney princesses are often as iconic as the characters themselves. So what would happen if their stories took place in different decades?

A screenshot of artist Amit Naftali's Instagram page. Amit Naftali/Instagram

Artist Amit Naftali has wondered that himself  and he's even illustrated examples. The Israel-based freelance illustrator has been drawing Disney characters since his childhood, and has now expanded his craft to draw musicians as well.

Insider spoke with the artist in June 2020 about his work, and what inspired him to draw Disney princesses in outfits that reflect the fashion of different decades.

Amit Naftali told Insider he's been drawing Disney characters since the first time he "could hold a pencil."

Amit Naftali drew Snow White dressed in 1910s attire as part of his series. Amit Naftali

"I remember I used to draw Ariel, Tarzan, and Mickey Mouse all the time," he said. "I recently just found a bunch of old drawings from when I was 4 years old or so, and it's so much fun to see how far I've come."

Back in 2018, the artist became inspired to draw Disney princesses dressed in outfits that reflected decades between 1910 and the 2000s.

Cinderella wearing a flapper dress, gloves, and headband, as drawn by Amit Naftali. Amit Naftali

According to Naftali, his Disney-themed series was "heavily inspired by the work of Steve Thompson," who he says created illustrations of princesses wearing fashion from the years their movies debuted.

"I remember seeing all of his beautiful illustrations and my mind caught on fire," Naftali said of the artist who was previously a Disney character artist and designer and currently works as a principal designer for Disney Stores, according to his Tumblr page.

Naftali began his creative process by first writing down the order of release dates for each princess movie.

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In the 1930s, Aurora might have worn a pink or blue evening gown, according to Naftali. Amit Naftali

"I decided to write down the chronological order of the princess movies  Snow White first since it came out in 1938, then Cinderella in 1950, Aurora in 1959, Ariel in 1989, and so on and then I played with the idea of matching them to the last century's decades, starting with 1910s," the artist said.

The artist told Insider that it took "tons and tons of research" to start drawing the pieces in his series.

Alongside Ariel's 1940s-inspired dress, Naftali drew seashell-shaped earrings. Amit Naftali

"I am a huge fan of history and culture, and so I knew I had to get these right," Naftali said, referencing vintage fashion. "I'm talking going over old magazines, articles, interviews, videos, etc."

However, it was also important to the artist that he connect his designs to each character's classic look so that there would be some sense of familiarity.

"I made sure to keep the general color scheme of the characters to give them a recognizable factor, and from there I was just having fun with different designs," he said. "If I had more than one design that I liked  an accessory, or another angle to the outfit  I wanted to include it in the piece too as a sketch in the background."

When asked if he has a favorite piece amongst the art he's created, Naftali said "it's a tie between Belle and Jasmine."

Just like in "Beauty and the Beast," Naftali's version of Belle wears a yellow gown. Amit Naftali

"Belle is so classy and elegant, and I love the colors and silhouette of her," Naftali said.

In his illustration, the "Beauty and the Beast" character is seen wearing a 1950s-inspired strapless dress with a sheer piece of fabric that wraps around her shoulders. She also has a short, wavy hairstyle and small yellow gloves.

However, Naftali's take on Jasmine did cause some controversy amongst his fans.

Jasmine could have worn a patterned minidress with a beehive hairstyle in the '60s. Amit Naftali

According to the artist, some people were concerned when they saw Jasmine carrying a tiger-print bag, as her character's sidekick throughout "Aladdin" is a tiger named Rajah.

"So many people got so upset over the thought that Jasmine skinned Rajah to make her purse," Naftali said. "Besides the fact that she is a cartoon character, no one actually thought of the option of it being a print, or even faux fur. The internet sure is funny sometimes."

Whereas many princesses are limited to gowns and simple dresses throughout Disney movies, Naftali draws them wearing everything from crop tops to bell-bottoms.

Like she does in the 1995 film, Pocahontas wears a mix of blue and brown shades. Amit Naftali

Pocahontas, for example, wears both in addition to a fringe jacket, turquoise jewelry, and a brown headband.

Naftali's most recent drawings honor the '80s, '90s, and early 2000s, and he has plans for one more illustration.

Of course, Mulan would likely wear shoulder pads and a statement necklace in the '80s. Amit Naftali

"I've actually sketched out an idea for the 2010s edition, and it's definitely on the way," Naftali said.

Naftali says he hasn't considered drawing numerous outfits for each decade.

Tiana might wear denim-on-denim with fresh sneakers in the '90s. Amit Naftali

Instead, the artist said he likes the ideas of each outfit "existing solemnly as a graphic embodiment of an entire decade."

In addition to Disney princesses, Naftali also illustrates musicians.

Naftali drew Rapunzel with both long and short hair, just like in Disney's movie. Amit Naftali

The best place to view Naftali's art is his Instagram account, where he shares illustrations inspired by both Disney characters and musicians like Lana Del Rey and Billie Eilish.

Read the original article on Insider
SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australia's deputy prime minister was fined for failing to wear a mask in a service station in violation of COVID-19 prevention orders, the authorities said on Tuesday, the country's most powerful person to face repercussions for non-compliance.

Barnaby Joyce, who returned as leader of the Nationals coalition partner a week earlier, was spotted by a member of the public paying for fuel without a mask in his electorate about 500 km (310 miles) north of Sydney on Monday, the police said.

The person called Crime Stoppers, an emergency hotline, and officers went to the service station where "inquiries revealed a 54-year-old man was not wearing a face mask while in the store", New South Wales state police said in a statement.

Joyce, who was not identified in the police statement, was fined A$200 ($151) for breaching a public health order by not wearing a "fitted face covering when in indoor area of retail/business premises".

A spokesman for Joyce was not immediately available for comment, but the outspoken country member confirmed the incident in an interview on Monday with News Corp-owned cable broadcaster Sky News.

He said he was on his way to the airport, realised he had forgotten to buy fuel for his partner, "fuelled the car up with fuel, went in, 30 seconds later $200 it cost me because I didn't wear one of these (a mask)," he told the broadcaster, according to a report in News Corp newspapers.

"That's life," Joyce added.

The fine adds to a list of powerful public figures who have received fines for breaching virus containment rules.

In April 2020, the New South Wales arts minister resigned after being fined A$1000 for breaching stay-home orders in the initial days of the country's anti-coronavirus response.

($1 = 1.3240 Australian dollars)

(Reporting by Byron Kaye; Editing by Himani Sarkar)
Bondi - Joel Carrett/AAP IMAGE/AP

With just one coronavirus death recorded for all of 2021, Australia, on the surface, looks like the success story of Covid-19 control.

But the more transmissible delta variant has brought a new wave of lockdowns that have again raised questions about both the country's over-reliance on tight border controls and the pace of the vaccine rollout.

Cases traced to strict quarantine hotels have allowed the new variant, first identified in India, to spread widely.

Once inside the country, Covid-19 has a good chance of spreading unchecked as Australia limps towards just 5 per cent of its population being vaccinated.

A single gold miner who is thought to have contracted the virus in a quarantine hotel is believed to be the key to clusters appearing in many major cities.

After travelling to an Alice Springs gold mine, he is now linked directly to a cluster in Darwin 1,500kms away. All miners who travelled to either locations are now in isolation, while authorities desperately attempt to trace 900 other "fly-in, fly-out" workers across Australia.

This week the countrys biggest city, Sydney, and other state capitals Perth, Darwin and Brisbane, were sent into lockdown as new outbreaks emerged, while many other Western countries are moving towards normality after vaccinating the majority of their adult population.

About 10 million Australians are now under lockdown.

The outbreak has triggered memories of the 2020 Melbourne lockdown lasting more than 100 days when health workers and contact tracers battled to suppress a second wave of infections, which killed hundreds of people in the state of Victoria.

As that nightmare came to an end, the experience seemed to reinforce the consensus that lockdowns and hard borders were temporary measures designed to buy time for the development, acquisition and distribution of effective vaccines against the coronavirus.

However, the Australian Governments handling of the vaccine has been disastrous. The Government was slow to secure a supply, slow to plan and execute distribution, and seemingly overlooked the need to prioritise health, care home, border and quarantine workers as recipients for the vaccine.

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Targets were set and missed again and again. Deadlines were moved multiple times as authorities floundered. Only 4.8 per cent of the population has now been fully vaccinated, ranking Australia below scores of other countries, many of which have much larger populations.

Critics say the Government made no serious attempt to encourage people to get vaccinated. Indeed, Greg Hunt, the health minister, fuelled fears connected to the tiny risk of clotting associated with the AstraZeneca vaccine by telling the public they could "wait for Pfizer" if they had concerns.

Sydney - MICK TSIKAS/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

On Tuesday, the Government announced that Covid vaccines will be mandatory for all care home workers and for anyone transporting airline workers. It also moved towards offering vaccines and regular Covid testing to the families and close contacts of quarantine workers.

The Government equally announced that anyone could now get the AstraZeneca vaccine, having previously limited it to older people, with the approval of their GP; a move rejected by the Australian Medical Association.

Dr Omar Khorshid, the AMA president, said the announcement took him by surprise, and Jeannette Young, Queenslands chief health officer, said: "There are some people asking to get AstraZeneca although the clinical advice is they should not."

The advice from the independent Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation that Pfizer is the preferred vaccine for under-60s due to an increased risk of rare clotting events linked to the AstraZeneca vaccine, remains unchanged.

Australia - TREVOR COLLENS/AFP/Getty Images

Mohammed Massoud Morsi, a Perth resident, told The Telegraph that he had recently attempted to book a vaccination appointment but "no booking slots" were available.

"If the rate is 2,000 people per day, it will take years. Egypt, as an example, has already vaccinated more than Australia's population. My dad has already had his two shots. No point in trying to get a booking time in Western Australia... It's pathetic," he said.

Schools and day care centres continue to operate in locked-down Australian cities despite teachers and staff not being prioritised in the vaccine roll-out.

The cluster of new cases in Bondi has now grown to over 140 cases, the biggest in the country, and Sydney will be locked down for at least two weeks, while Perth, Darwin and Brisbane are currently locked down for four to five days.

Abeer Mahendroo, a resident of Sydney, told The Telegraph that even with the slow roll-out, lockdowns could have been avoided.

"We seem to have regressed... Even Sydney now has ludicrous police enforced rules around not 'lingering' outdoors, when outdoor gatherings were allowed during the Northern Beaches lockdown... Im very disappointed," he said.

Two of the cases thought to have triggered the latest wave have been traced to quarantine hotels. They are among 10 cases to have emanated from the hotel system, which has processed about 370,000 people entering the country.

Experts say the air circulation between rooms may not have been good enough to prevent transmission of the new variant, despite travellers being housed in separate rooms.

Scott Morrison, the Australian Prime Minister, has said he will reopen borders when the country reaches herd immunity, believed to be about 80 per cent of the population vaccinated. Earlier in June he refused to commit to doing so before Christmas 2022.

On Monday, Mr Morrison cited the UK's death toll as he vowed to keep borders closed.

Police on Tuesday caught Barnaby Joyce, Australias Deputy Prime Minister, without a face mask. He was fined 110.
When Montana homeowners returned to their house last week, they found a bear looking for food inside.

The young black bear had pried open a window June 23, Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks said Monday.

Despite the homeowners efforts to bear-proof their property, the bear was able to pry open a window and enter the house, wildlife officials said in a news release. The people were not home when the bear entered.

The homeowners called wildlife officials, who then trapped and euthanized the bear.

When bears enter a home, Montana wildlife officials will euthanize them because the behavior could be dangerous to humans and the bears.

In Red Lodge, Montana, residents have reported seeing more bears in town and neighborhoods.

Wildlife officials think a drought is impacting berry crops in the area and forcing bears to look for easier sources of food.

The lack of spring moisture could affect berry crops, leading both black and grizzly bears to seek out easy food sources near homes, wildlife officials said. If those bears find nothing to eat around homes and businesses, they will move elsewhere.

Bear break-ins are not common, but they do happen.. In California, a bear walked into a Duarte home when the homeowner opened a door to let his cats inside.

In March, a mother bear and her three cubs peeled the siding off a Kings Beach home and trashed part of the basement. They also broke a gas line.

California wildlife officials have warned that if a bear breaks into your home, you shouldnt confront it.

Most bears will quickly look for an escape route, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife said on its website. Move away to a safe place. Do not block exit points. If the bear does not leave, get to a safe place and call 911.

Wildlife officials say you should follow these tips to deter bears:

Dont leave food scraps in your yard

Have a bear-proof garbage can

Dont put out the trash can until the morning its to be collected

Do not leave food in your vehicle

Do not spray bear spray near your property (It can actually attract bears once dried)

Do not feed wildlife near your home

Remove bird feeders from your yard

Store barbecue grills, pet food and livestock feed in a locked building

Tourists fed grizzly from their car at Grand Teton  and the bear had to be relocated

Bison injures hiker at Yellowstone National Park, officials say. Heres what we know

Moose charging at campsite is shot, killed by camper with a dog, Idaho officials say
Allies who spent tens of millions to get Joe Biden elected are now launching a nonprofit advocacy group aimed at promoting the president's legislative agenda, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: Unite the Country Now will swell an already formidable stable of independent pro-Biden outfits trying to get his top policy goals past recalcitrant congressional Republicans and some tough-to-wrangle Democrats.

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It also will provide an avenue for Biden's top financial supporters to step up with large contributions to a group dedicated to backing the president.

Whats new: Unite the Country Now is a nonprofit offshoot of the similarly named Unite the Country, a super PAC that dropped nearly $50 million supporting Biden's 2020 campaign.

Mark Doyle and Amanda Loveday, the Democratic operatives behind it, officially incorporated the sister nonprofit in D.C. last week.

What theyre saying: We know from previous administrations just how vital it is to educate the American people about the policies and successes of the Biden administration, Loveday told Axios in an email.

Unite the Country Now allows us to expand our efforts beyond our election work to educating Americans about how President Biden and his administration is getting America back on track, and building better opportunities for middle-class Americans," she wrote.

Between the lines: Unite the Country Now is a 501(4)(c) nonprofit, commonly referred to as a dark-money group.

As such, it will not be required to disclose its financial supporters.

Loveday told Axios it was too early to say whether the group will do so voluntarily, or whether it would, like Biden's campaign, refuse donations from certain industries or from registered lobbyists or foreign agents.

The Unite the Country super PAC received huge contributions last year from big-name Democratic donors, including Michael Bloomberg, Reid Hoffman and Jim Simons.

The big picture: Unite the Country Now joins a handful of other pro-Biden groups independently spending significant sums to promote his policy goals and try to win him key messaging battles.

Building Back Together, another dark-money group created this year with the White House's blessing, has said it will not disclose funders of its substantial pro-Biden media campaign.

The American Working Families Action Fund and Real Recovery Now! have also launched large, independent media campaigns backing Biden's infrastructure proposal.

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By Anthony Boadle

BRASILIA (Reuters) - A bill allowing commercial agriculture and mining on protected tribal reservations in Brazil advanced in Congress on Tuesday in what indigenous leaders said could be the biggest setback since their land rights were guaranteed in the 1988 Constitution.

The proposal, known as PL 490, cleared the constitutional affairs committee and headed for the lower house plenary.

Brazil's powerful farm lobby and far-right President Jair Bolsonaro have pushed for the bill, arguing that indigenous communities are blocking development of the Amazon while sitting on reservations with mineral resources and agricultural promise.

PL 490 bars recognition of indigenous lands not occupied by October 1988, favoring farmers in several ongoing land disputes. The bill would also end a ban on the use of GMO crops on reservations.

It would also allow the government to build roads and dams, tap strategic resources on reservations and allow access to the police and military without consulting indigenous communities.

"This is the worst moment since 1988 for the rights that indigenous people gained," Almir Surui, chieftain of the Paiter Surui, said by telephone from the state of Rondonia.

Surui, who made his name campaigning against hydroelectric dams that left-wing governments worked to build in the Amazon a decade ago, hopes that the Supreme Court will rule that the measure in unconstitutional and block its enactment into law.

If not, he warned of potential conflicts to come.

"There will be war because indigenous people will not allow their territories to be taken at any cost," said Surui, who heads a forum of traditional tribal chiefs called Parlaindio.

Last week, riot police used tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse indigenous people protesting against the bill outside Congress.

Protesters, including children and elders, ran for cover, many coughing their way through clouds of gas. Some shot arrows at the windows of the government's indigenous affairs agency Funai, now seen as an ally of farming interests.

(Reporting by Anthony Boadle in Brasilia; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
Protesters face off against Santa Monica police during last year's mass demonstrations. (Richard Vogel/Associated Press)

Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles and other protesters filed a federal lawsuit this week against the city of Santa Monica over its response to the mass demonstrations that followed George Floyd's killing in Minneapolis last year.

The lawsuit, which was filed Monday and seeks class-action status, accuses the city and the Santa Monica Police Department of using excessive force against protesters, arresting them without justification and subjecting them to inhumane conditions while detained.

It also alleges that the department unjustly focused on peaceful protesters while ignoring individuals who were burglarizing stores and committing other crimes nearby, and misused emergency curfew orders to clear the streets of legitimate demonstrators.

"By preemptively banning peaceful assemblies, kettling the demonstrators, subjecting them to unlawful force, arresting and detaining them tightly handcuffed on buses for hours, without access to bathrooms, water, or food," the city violated the protesters' constitutional rights, the lawsuit claims.

Constance Farrell, a spokesperson for Santa Monica, said the city was reviewing the lawsuit but had no comment on its claims.

The lawsuit is similar to a class-action suit that Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles and other protesters filed against the Los Angeles Police Department over its handling of L.A. protests during the same timeframe, in late May and early June of last year.

Floyd died in May 2020 after being arrested by Minneapolis police and pinned to the ground with a knee on his neck by since-fired Officer Derek Chauvin, who was recently convicted of murder in the case and sentenced to 22 years in prison.

Floyd's murder sparked protests across the country and world, and tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in the L.A. region to voice their outrage. Some demonstrators spiraled out of control in downtown L.A., in the Fairfax district, in Santa Monica and other areas as police in riot gear formed skirmish lines opposite protesters and others in the crowds burglarized stores and set fires.

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Curfews were established across the region, the National Guard was brought in, and police made thousands of arrests and used projectile weapons to clear the streets.

In Santa Monica, where the unrest largely occurred May 31, many boutiques and shops were burglarized. The city counted 178 incidents of nonresidential "looting," 49 incidents of vandalism, 10 assaults on officers, 18 damaged police cars, 12 arsons, 17 aggravated assaults and nine burglaries associated with the unrest that day, among other crimes.

On Oct. 21, just a few days before she retired, then-Santa Monica Police Chief Cynthia Renaud  also a named defendant in the new case  wrote in a letter to the community that the department had been "resourced and trained to handle protests and riotous activity that might erupt from within that protest," but were not prepared to deal with a third and simultaneous component: organized criminals.

"Massive groups of extremely organized individuals, who were unassociated with the protests, committing highly mobile, well-coordinated looting at multiple locations throughout the city" and had "taxed the Department's resources in the initial hours of its instigation," Renaud wrote.

Amid the chaos, police made hundreds of arrests, but many were for curfew violations, not for serious crimes including burglary or arson.

In its lawsuit, Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles claims that the Santa Monica Police Department officers and other police who took part through mutual aid agreements with the department abused their power by indiscriminately arresting people just for being outside, even when individuals who posed a greater threat to the community were not pursued and even though many of the people outside had been caught off guard by a curfew that was moved up by hours without their knowledge.

The lawsuit contains accounts of several protesters.

David Brown, a Santa Monica resident, alleges he was peacefully protesting when he was arrested on the street and struck with batons. He alleges he was taken to a makeshift jail at the Santa Monica Airport and left in a cell with no access to food, water or a bathroom for hours  then cited for a curfew violation and driven to L.A., where officers told him not to reenter Santa Monica despite living there.

"Mr. Brown wants to be able to engage in peaceful protest in the City in the future, without concern or fear that he will be arrested again, particularly by his mere presence in the City where he lives," the lawsuit states.

Kerry Hogan, another protester, alleges she was on her knees peacefully protesting and unaware that the curfew had been moved up by several hours when someone else threw a water bottle in the direction of officers and the officers opened fire on the crowd with projectiles, striking her in the ribcage as she got up to leave.

"The response from law enforcement was immediate and unwarranted, firing [projectiles] indiscriminately into the group of protestors even though a single person threw a bottle, and even though the protestors, as a group, posed no threat of immediate violence," the lawsuit claims.

As with its case against the city of L.A., Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles brought the Santa Monica lawsuit in part because it wants the federal court to step in and restrict the Santa Monica Police Department from operating in similar ways during future protests.

"BLMLA intends to assist, plan, participate in and hold similar events in the future, on its own or in conjunction with others, and fears that the same unlawful police actions in response to protests of institutional racism and police brutality will be repeated absent injunctive and declaratory relief to prohibit the practices, policies, and customs that caused the unlawful action in response to the recent protests," the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit also claims Renaud's mishandling of the protest was the reason for her departure from the department, and alleges that the department and Renaud "failed to enact necessary policies and to train officers in lawful responses to peaceful protests."

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
In the second instalment of a three-part series produced with support from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas, Forkast.News looks at how countries in Asia and along the New Silk Road may adopt the digital yuan or create their own digital currency. Part 1 was published on June 28 and Part 3 will be published on June 30.

When the first caravans carrying Chinese silks arrived in ancient Rome, it set off a female fashion craze. The wives of senators and generals had never felt or seen anything so lustrous. Like the Chinese elite, they adopted the material as a symbol of wealth and status, embroidered silk robes with gold and wore them to the grave.

China announced a Digital Silk Road (DSR) with a 2015 white paper that described a range of technology and communications projects. But it wasn't obvious what, if anything, would play the role of silk. Now it's clear that just as threads spun from the pupae of silkworms drove the growth of a global trade network, China's digital yuan may weave an enduring international system of finance. The first inroads have already been dug: Developing economies have adopted the yuan as their own, and wealthier economies in Asia and beyond are exploring their own fiat digital currency, whether they like it or not, to stay competitive with China.

Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team.

Government leaders "are looking for the light at the end of the tunnel and the train is the light; it's coming right at them," said Don Tapscott, executive chairman of the Toronto-based Blockchain Research Institute. The stakes are very high.

"If China wins with its central bank digital currency, they'll roll it out across ... Africa, into Southeast Asia," he said. "The [yuan] becomes the currency of record and that's the end of the American hegemony in the world."

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Globalising the digital yuan. SCMP Graphics alt=Globalising the digital yuan. SCMP Graphics

The DSR is an essential component of China's Belt and Road (BRI) global infrastructure plan, announced in 2013.

A project of staggering scope - though without much transparency - the BRI is China's estimated trillion-dollar down payment in development and investment initiatives that span the transcontinental routes of the original Silk Road from Asia to Europe and the maritime shipping lanes that displaced them in the late 18th-century.

A Chinese labourer at work at a construction site in the central business district of Egypt's new administrative capital 45 kilometres east of Cairo on 16 March 2021. Photo: EPA-EFE alt=A Chinese labourer at work at a construction site in the central business district of Egypt's new administrative capital 45 kilometres east of Cairo on 16 March 2021. Photo: EPA-EFE

By China's count, 140 countries have signed on. From a project management perspective, the BRI and DSR have one major headache in common: contending with outdated and often ineffectual banking systems. Beijing sees the digital yuan as a solution to this problem as well as a way to mutually reinforce the reach of both projects, said Stanley Chao, president of a Los Angeles-based firm that consults on Asian business strategies.

"In emerging markets with poor banking systems, it can take a week to clear transactions, slowing everything down and causing delays," he said. "China sees a digital currency as a solution. Payments will be instantaneous. Transaction fees will be almost down to zero because you have no middle man."

Ports in the maritime Silk Road. SCMP Graphics alt=Ports in the maritime Silk Road. SCMP Graphics

"At some point, I could see China making trade pacts where it said, 'Let's do one currency. We'll save a lot of money on transaction fees, no third-party banking system,'" said Chao. "There are countries, not only in Asia, but in Africa, Eastern Europe and South America, that might jump at the idea."

The conjecture is already a reality. In December 2019, to facilitate a US$54 billion project known as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, Pakistan announced the yuan as its new second national currency - a role long occupied by the dollar. Six months later, Turkey Telekom agreed to use yuan for import payments.

In China's view, the digital yuan would fuel a virtuous cycle: The more countries see the benefits of settling accounts in yuan, the greater the network effect in further expanding the orbit of Chinese economic influence.

Between 2000 and 2015, China's trade settlement in yuan increased from roughly zero to US$1.1 trillion, according to the National Bureau of Asian Research, close to a third of the country's total trade. But even by 2021, only 2.5 per cent of international payments worldwide were transacted in yuan, according to the CSIS China Project, compared to 39 per cent in the US dollar and 36 per cent in the euro. That leaves the yuan with an enormous amount of room to grow.

SCMP Multimedia: China's super link to Gwadar Port - a visual explainer

For many countries, developing their own fiat digital currency is more appealing than adopting China's. According to a January 2021 survey by the Bank of International Settlements - the central bank of central banks - 86 per cent of its 65 members are exploring the idea; 60 per cent have begun experiments; and 14 per cent have pilots under way.

This interest is shared among economies of every size and state of development. In October 2020, the Bahamas announced the arrival of the "sand dollar," a CBDC pegged to the US dollar.

That same month Cambodia launched the digital bakong, describing it as a "hybrid CBDC" that supports transactions in both the Cambodian riel and US dollar.

Indonesia's central bank governor confirmed in May that Southeast Asia's largest economy would launch a digital currency.

And South Korea is preparing its CBDC for a pilot test in August. Meanwhile, Singapore recently completed a five-year experiment in blockchain-based financial architecture. One of the prongs involved a cross-border payment model developed with US banking giant JPMorgan and Singapore global investment firm Temasek.

"China's CBDC was really creating some peer pressure here in the region," said Charles d'Haussy, Asia managing director of Consensys, a blockchain software firm that is working on CBDC projects for the central banks of Australia and Hong Kong. "It's a big shift in the industry [that] shows there is institutional and regulatory adoption."

Haruhiko Kuroda, governor of the Bank of Japan (BOJ), during the Paris Europlace International Financial Forum in Tokyo on Monday, November 19, 2018. Photo: Bloomberg alt=Haruhiko Kuroda, governor of the Bank of Japan (BOJ), during the Paris Europlace International Financial Forum in Tokyo on Monday, November 19, 2018. Photo: Bloomberg

Even as they move forward, however, some central banks have expressed reluctance, aware that they are being forced to chase China's lead.

In a March 2021 speech at an annual tech summit co-hosted by the Nikkei, Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda described the digital yen as an obligation more than a choice.

"Central banks share the view that it is not an appropriate policy response to start considering CBDC only when the need to issue CBDC arises in the future," said Kuroda. He also reiterated that the bank had no plans to issue a digital yen.

If Japan feels that it is being dragged into the digital age of money, it is not alone. Ten years ago, India was considered an economic and political competitor to China. But even with an economy expected to be the world's third-largest by 2030, India has failed to keep technological pace with its regional rival.

People queue up in front of an ATM to withdraw cash in New Delhi on November 30, 2016, sparked by the government's surprise announcement to scrap currency notes of 500 Indian rupees and 1,000 Indian rupees. Photo: Xinhua alt=People queue up in front of an ATM to withdraw cash in New Delhi on November 30, 2016, sparked by the government's surprise announcement to scrap currency notes of 500 Indian rupees and 1,000 Indian rupees. Photo: Xinhua

Despite having world-class technology universities and a large pool of elite programmers, the subcontinent has generally followed China's hostility to private cryptocurrencies like bitcoin without also adopting its embrace of blockchain as an infrastructure of the future. India nonetheless recognises the network effect in play and has recently - and ambivalently - stepped into the brave new world of digital currency.

In the span of a single week this past February, the Reserve Bank of India released a report stating that CBDC "poses a risk of disintermediation of the banking system," followed a few days later by the bank's governor publicly acknowledging the digital rupee is "receiving our full attention."

"Now that China and other nations are talking about central bank digital currency, India is also definitely motivated," said Nischal Shetty, founder and CEO of WazirX, one of India's largest cryptocurrency exchanges, who speaks widely on related regulatory issues. (In June, Indian authorities notified Shetty that it was investigating the use of WazirX for money laundering.)

He said the competition between India and China in CBDC is very healthy. "I want more countries around the world to experiment with [CBDCs] so that every other nation is motivated to participate," he said. Shetty predicted that India will have made substantial progress in a CBDC within two years.

A sign of China's digital yuan, or e-CNY, above WeChat Pay and Alipay signs at a counter during a trial of the Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP) at a shopping centre in Beijing on February 10, 2021. Photo: Reuters alt=A sign of China's digital yuan, or e-CNY, above WeChat Pay and Alipay signs at a counter during a trial of the Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP) at a shopping centre in Beijing on February 10, 2021. Photo: Reuters

The rapid move by central banks toward the development of CBDCs raises the question: How will the digitisation of cross-border transactions and settlements impact the role of SWIFT, the dominant global network for interbank transaction communications that has been at the centre of global currency flows since 1973?

This past February, four central banks took a first step toward deploying their digital currency in cross-border trade without using the Swift system as an intermediary. They announced a pilot project, called m-CBDC, or multiple CBDC, that amounts to a transactions bridge among the central banks of China, Hong Kong, Thailand and the UAE. The trial - intended to identify technical and regulatory pain points in commercial digital currency transactions - is being closely watched by governments everywhere.

"This is the first time you are seeing four different central banks working on building a shared infrastructure to go cross-border," said d'Haussy. "It's probably the most ambitious proof-of-concept in terms of digital currencies in 2021, after China's retail digital yuan."

A smartphone app that allows users to buy things with the digital yuan, on trial in the Jiangsu provincial city of Suzhou on December 14, 2020. Photo: Kyodo alt=A smartphone app that allows users to buy things with the digital yuan, on trial in the Jiangsu provincial city of Suzhou on December 14, 2020. Photo: Kyodo

Three months after the m-CBDC announcement, Swift released a joint discussion paper with Accenture on how it could accommodate cross-border CBDC payments and, the subtext suggested, remain relevant. Touting that it is "neutral and currency agnostic," Swift contended that "there is little advantage in reinventing the wheel."

If anything, reinventing the wheel appears very much to be the point. CBDC was prompted by bitcoin, after all, a completely decentralised form of money that anyone with a powerful computer and a lot of electricity can mine without needing a bank.

"Using a new type of money in old pipes will probably not bring all the value proposition of digital assets," said d'Haussy. "When you reinvent money, it's a good opportunity to rethink the world ecosystem."

As it happens, this is exactly what concerns the United States, the country with the most to lose from a diminution of Swift's role in the global financial order. The original story by Forkast.News can be found here. In Part Three we examine how power and privacy may change with the new money.

This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright  2021 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

Copyright (c) 2021. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
By Pedro Fonseca and Gabriel Stargardter

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) -Brazil will suspend a $324-million contract for COVID-19 vaccine from India that has mired President Jair Bolsonaro in accusations of irregularities, the health minister said on Tuesday, following guidance by the federal comptroller, the CGU.

The deal to buy 20 million doses of Bharat Biotech's Covaxin shot has become a headache for Bolsonaro after whistleblowers went public with alleged irregularities. One health ministry official said he alerted the president about his concerns.

Bolsonaro, whose popularity has faded as Brazil's COVID-19 death toll climbed past 500,000, has denied any wrongdoing, saying on Monday he was not aware of any irregularities.

But thorny questions persist, and may pose problems for him ahead of next year's presidential vote.

Health Minister Marcelo Queiroga told a news conference his team would investigate the accusations during the suspension.

"According to the preliminary analysis of the CGU, there are no irregularities in the contract but, for compliance, the health ministry chose to suspend the contract," the ministry said in a statement.

CNN Brasil had earlier reported that the ministry had decided to cancel the contract.

Brazilian federal prosecutors have opened an investigation, citing comparatively high prices of about $15 a dose, quick talks and pending regulatory approvals as red flags.

In a statement, Bharat Biotech said it had followed a "step-by-step" approach for the regulatory approval and supply contract of its vaccine in Brazil, and had not received advance payments from the health ministry.

It added that the pricing of Covaxin had been set between $15 and $20 a dose for supplies to governments outside India.

The deal is also being probed by a Senate panel investigating Brazil's handling of the pandemic.

One leading opposition senator on the panel, Randolfe Rodrigues, filed a formal criminal complaint against Bolsonaro with the Supreme Court on Monday.

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He asked the court to investigate why Bolsonaro "did not take any action after being notified of the existence of a giant corruption scheme in the Health Ministry."

($1=4.9403 reais)

(Reporting by Gabriel Stargardter and Pedro Fonseca; Additional reporting by Uday Sampath in Bengaluru; Editing by Bill Berkrot and Clarence Fernandez)
Bravo

When it comes to fashion, Leah McSweeney is never afraid to pull off some bold looks, and the same can be said about her swimwear. The Real Housewives of New York City cast member recently brought some glamour to the beach, soaking up the sun in a barely-there copper bikini. On July 2, Leah took to Instagram to show off her latest eye-catching swimsuit. The Married to the Mob entrepreneur sizzled while posing in front of a picturesque sunset view in a teeny metallic two-piece. As captured in the
A bear who broke into a California home and attacked a resident last week had to be euthanized after being shot during the incident, authorities said.

The man told the El Dorado Sheriffs Office he had to shoot the bear in self-defense Thursday inside his home in Meyers, about 100 miles east of Sacramento. The bleeding animal then fled the scene and ran into the woods, according to the sheriffs office.

Deputies tried searching for the bear but were unable to find it. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife joined the search the next morning and found the injured animal still bleeding.

The gravely wounded bear was euthanized that same day, authorities said.

An investigation determined that the homeowner acted legally when he fired his weapon.

The sheriffs office urged local residents to familiarize themselves with safety tips for bear encounters. Those tips include securing food, garbage and recycling; removing bird feeders when bears are active; cleaning and storing grills; and never feeding or approaching bears.
An empty classroom at Manor Park School and Nursery in Knutsford, Cheshire. (PA)

Absences from school due to reasons related to coronavirus have hit their highest rate since schools reopened in March.

About 374,000 pupils missed school in the last week after testing positive for coronavirus or coming into contact with a positive case, the latest figures show.

It comes amid a surge in cases across the UK as the Delta variant, first detected in India, drives infection numbers up.

Currently, children have to self-isolate for 10 days if another pupil in their bubble tests positive for the virus, but concerns are growing over the rising numbers missing school.

Read: Warning that Europe faces fourth COVID wave this summer caused by Delta variant

Meanwhile, the Department for Education has confirmed that school isolation rules could be brought to an end this autumn and replaced with regular testing.

These charts show how education is being hit by England's third wave of coronavirus.

Pupils testing positive

This chart shows the number of students in state schools who have missed school after testing positive or because they suspect they have the virus.

These charts show how the third wave is affecting children.

Since the beginning of June, the number of pupils with confirmed cases  shown in yellow  has soared to 14,900.

Meanwhile, the number self-isolating due to a suspected case  shown in blue  has hit 26,800.

Pupils having to isolate

This chart shows how the number of children having to isolate after coming into contact with a positive case has soared in the last three weeks.

These charts show how the third wave is affecting children.

At the last count, around 278,500 children were self-isolating due to possible contact with a COVID-19 case inside of school, shown by the green line.

Meanwhile, a further 56,800 pupils were self-isolating after possible contact with a positive tase outside of school  shown in green.

The soaring number of students isolating due to the bubble system has sparked a debate about whether it should be scrapped.

The new childrens commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza, is among those calling for bubble arrangements and self-isolation for school pupils to end as soon as possible.

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Watch: 375,000 school pupils absence absent over virus

She said there was an urgent need for children to get back to normal as lockdown restrictions had been a real trauma for many young people.

In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, Dame Rachel said the need for children to go in and out of isolation was a really big issue that was proving incredibly frustrating for pupils and teachers alike.

With bubbles, I think everybody would like it if we could get back to normal, as soon as possible. Obviously we have to be safe, and we have to take advice, but its very very restrictive, she said.

The experience of lockdown has been a real trauma, and I think we shouldnt underestimate it. Children are really troubled, and its right across the board.

On Monday, new health secretary Sajid Javid said he had asked for fresh advice on the issue, adding that the policy is having a huge knock-on impact on childrens education.

The worst-hit areas

This chart shows the areas in England where the numbers of students missing school due to COVID are currently the highest.

These charts show how the third wave is affecting children.

In Bolton, which has been a Delta variant hotspot though case numbers are now declining, almost a third of all secondary school pupils have been self-isolating.

Meanwhile, Middlesbrough has seen 22.1% and Blackburn with Darwen has seen 13% of students self-isolating.

Watch: Parents divided over proposals to help schoolchildren catch up
BGR

Airlines charge outrageous fees for virtually everything, but passengers might soon get their revenge. AP reports that the Department of Transportation wants airlines to refund checked baggage fees if the bags dont arrive promptly. Additionally, if airlines are unable to provide extras on flights, they will be required to refund all those fees as well.  The post Airlines might soon be forced to refund fees when bags are delayed appeared first on BGR.
Chicago police release footage of gunman with automatic weapon opening fire in morning traffic jam (CBS Chicago)

Chicago police have released shocking dash cam footage of a gunman with an automatic weapon opening fire at a traffic light.

The video shows two men jumping out of a car in stopped traffic in the Chatham area of the city before opening fire at a vehicle ahead of them.

It was all captured by a camera in the car of witness Huber Pereznegron.

I saw a man getting off the backseat with a rifle, Mr Pereznegron told CBS Chicago.

I didnt think it was real, so I didnt think much about it until a second person came out. Then I saw him with another gun.

After the shooting both men jumped back into the Red Nissan car and fled the scene.

Police responded to the incident after they were alerted by the ShotSpotter system used by law enforcement.

No injuries have been reported and no arrests have yet been made, but a car and a local business were damaged.

Mr Pereznegron said he was amazed that no one was killed in the incident.

They dont care who sees them or what they do when they go out, he said.

I dont know whats going on in their minds. This must be stopped. There were a lot of innocent people around them.
A new report says pro-democracy Chinese students fear speaking freely in Australia

Chinese pro-democracy students in Australia experience harassment and fear punishment if they speak out on sensitive issues, a new report says.

Human Rights Watch found such students feel surveilled in Australia, leading many to self-censor in classrooms.

Academics teaching China courses in the country say they have also felt pressure to censor themselves.

China's embassy in Canberra strongly rejected the report on Wednesday, calling it "biased".

It said Human Rights Watch had "decayed into a political tool for the West" and the group was "always biased on China".

The Australian government said it found the report "deeply concerning".

There has been growing concern about China's influence on local campuses in recent years, following a deterioration in relations between the two nations. Canberra is already investigating allegations of potential foreign interference.

In its report, Human Rights Watch warned that perceived pressure from China is undermining the academic freedom of Australian universities.

Australia's higher education system is heavily reliant on fee-paying Chinese students, which accounted in pre-Covid times for about 40% of all international students in the country.

There are currently about 160,000 Chinese students enrolled in Australian universities.

'Culture of self-censorship'

Human Rights Watch said it had interviewed nearly 50 students and academics in Australia and found an "atmosphere of fear" that had worsened in recent years.

Researchers said they had confirmed three cases where a student's activities in Australia had prompted police in China to visit or get in contact with their families there over their actions.

In one case, Chinese authorities also threatened a student with jail after they opened a Twitter account in Australia and posted pro-democracy messages.

Many said they feared fellow students reporting on them to the Chinese embassy.

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"Fear that what they did in Australia could result in Chinese authorities punishing or interrogating their parents back home weighed heavily on the minds of every pro-democracy student interviewed," said the report.

The students interviewed - 11 from mainland China and 13 from Hong Kong - said there had been a rise in harassment in Australia after local pro-Hong Kong protests in 2019.

The report relayed accounts where students say they were abused verbally in person and online after joining rallies or expressing criticism of the Chinese government. Some were "doxxed" - where their personal details were shared online.

In most cases, the students did not report their experience to the universities.

"[They] believed that their university would not take the threat seriously, believing their university was sympathetic to nationalistic Chinese students or gave priority to maintaining their relationship with the Chinese government," the report said.

Its author, Sophie McNeill, said university administrators were "failing in their duty of care to uphold the rights of students from China".

Tutors and lecturers have also reported facing increased pressure, the report says. HRW interviewed 22 academics at Australian universities who teach China studies or Chinese students.

More than half of those interviewed self-censored when talking about China, Ms McNeill found.

Academics perceived to be critical of the CCP or flashpoint issues such as Taiwan, Tibet, Hong Kong and Xinjian had also been harassed or "doxxed" by students and internet users supportive of the Chinese government.

The report relayed one instance where a female tutor had her details shared on Chinese social media after defending a Taiwanese student from intimidation by a mainland Chinese student.

Human Rights Watch noted that such behaviour "does not represent most Chinese students in Australia instead it is carried out by a small but highly motivated and vocal minority".

Nearly all the academics interviewed had noted an increased nationalism among their students from China since President Xi Jinping came to power in 2013, the report said.

Academics reported that on a few occasions, they had also experienced censorship from university management. Examples included instances where they were asked not to discuss China publicly or were deterred from holding China-related events.

The report quotes one unidentified academic who refused officials' request for a "sanitised" version of his Chinese Studies module when teaching students based in China online during the pandemic.

'Reports of intimidation and coercion'

For a number of years now, Australia has been debating the reach of China's alleged interference on campuses.

In the past Chinese authorities and media outlets have dismissed such concerns as smears, and the country's ambassador described as "groundless" allegations that Chinese students in Australia were being monitored for dissident behaviour.

In 2019, the Australian government set up a taskforce and new guidelines for universities to combat what it described as "unprecedented levels" of foreign interference.

Australia's Education Minister Alan Tudge described the Human Rights Watch report as "deeply concerning".

"We have already taken several actions to combat foreign interference and are working closely with the universities and we will soon be updating our university guidelines," he said in a statement.

A recent parliamentary inquiry has examined foreign interference in Australia's university sector. It is due to report in July.

Scrutiny has focused on research collaborations between Australian and Chinese universities - as well as the presence of Confucius Institutes - Chinese language and cultural centres funded by the Chinese government on Australian campuses.

Responding to the report on Wednesday, the industry body Universities Australia said it condemned all forms of coercion on campus or in the classroom.

"No student or staff member should feel constrained in expressing their views as part of the free exchange of views that is in the DNA of our universities," said chief executive Catriona Jackson.

She urged affected students to report the incidents but added that universities could not combat the issue alone and would work with the government.
Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Getty Images

Thanks to a sharp rise in crime in an affluent district in Atlanta, residents have mounted a campaign to secede from the majority Black city.

The Buckhead district is known for its luxury high-rise apartments, lavish restaurants and trendy boutique shops, but a spike in robberies, aggravated assault and larceny over the past year has left many in the community dismayed. Saying that Atlanta has abandoned them, theyve formed the Buckhead City Committee, with the goal of forming a city of their own.

Most of our residents live in fear. As a result, daily activities such as getting gas, carpooling or going for a walk are no longer done without careful consideration and concern for safety, Bill White, CEO and chairman of the committee, told Yahoo News. We have shootings in our neighborhoods every day, at all hours of the day.

White is leading the effort for Buckhead to become an independent city, and he says that while combating crime is the top priority, an under-resourced police and fire department, crumbling infrastructure and zoning issues are additional causes for concern.

In August of last year, 28 Atlanta police officers resigned and 11 retired, citing an overall lack of morale, according to the Atlanta police union. Five fire trucks in the citys aging fleet have been put out of service this year, including one truck that had to be towed from a fire because it broke down.

Crime is way up, arrests way down, White said. Nothing makes sense.

Law enforcement officers at a crime scene in Atlanta in March. (Davis Turner/Getty Images)

In May, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms described the growing trend of violence across the city as a COVID crime wave. According to police data, 2020 was Atlantas deadliest year in the past decade. Murders are up 41 percent over the past year, and while citywide robberies are down 4 percent over the past year, aggravated assaults are up 24 percent, and auto theft has risen by 31 percent.

The spike in crime rates has been especially prevalent in Buckhead, yet not all the districts residents say they feel unsafe. Michael Quirk, who has lived in Buckhead for five years and grew up just north of the area, believes a lot of the outrage is driven by fear.

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Buckhead is a safe community, with something for everyone, Quirk told Yahoo News. Crime really seems to be limited to one area of Buckhead, over by Lenox mall, so whatever can be done over there crime-wise would be great. Personally, I think a lot of [the angst] is driven out of fear, and neighbors trying to out-outrage and out-pearl-clutch one another.

A string of crimes, including multiple shootings, in the past year at Lenox Square mall in Buckhead has raised community members angst. The luxury shopping center installed metal detectors and gun-sniffing dogs at its entrance late last year. But the violence hasnt stopped. Earlier this month, on June 13, two 15-year-olds were arrested for shooting a security guard in the torso at the mall after trying to gain access to the Apple Store after hours. It was the third shooting at a metro Atlanta mall in a week, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Security barricades outside the Lenox Square mall in Atlanta on May 1. (Elijah Nouvelage/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Its these kinds of frequent incidents that are the driving force behind the secession plans. Buckhead resident Essie Scarbrough described life in the neighborhood back in 2014 as carefree, but she says the spike in crime in recent years leaves her wary of what the future holds.

I am hopeful that as Buckhead city is formed we will have faster response times and more investment in security, she said.

Buckhead used to be a little slice of heaven, another resident, Stan Stellings, said. Now its a war zone.

The Buckhead City Committee hopes that the proposed, predominantly white, new city will be able to better protect its residents with its own taxpayer-funded police force and emergency services. The committee says it has so far raised $600,000 in its lobbying effort to form a new municipality.

With a population of 87,000, Buckheads median household income is $85,000, compared with metro Atlantas $59,948 household income for its 524,000 residents. The districts racial makeup is 78 percent white, 11 percent Black, 7 percent Hispanic and 6 percent Asian. Metro Atlanta, by comparison, is 51 percent African American, 41 percent white, 4 percent Hispanic and 4 percent Asian, according to the most recent census data.

The rise in crime in the district, coupled with the swell of many nonresidents into the area, has many residents considering moving out of Buckhead.

I used to love and be proud of living in Buckhead, but now [Im] disgusted and afraid, so Im moving, Marilyn Krone, who has lived there for 50 years, told Yahoo News.

Aerial view of midtown Atlanta skyline with Buckhead in the background. (Getty Images)

But critics are quick to point out that if Buckhead were to secede, it would cause a dramatic ripple effect across the city, stripping Atlanta of a huge chunk of the revenue from the tax base. Retail sales in Buckhead generate $2.9 billion annually, making up a large portion of Atlantas economy.

Another community group, Committee for a United Atlanta, says that while combating crime is an issue in Buckhead, breaking away to form a new city isnt the answer.

Buckhead residents and businesses have a legitimate reason to be upset with the city of Atlanta about crime, Billy Linville, a consultant for the group, told Yahoo News. However, we believe the best way to solve this issue is by turning out voters to elect [an] effective and accountable city of Atlanta government in November 2021.

Carving off Buckhead will have a devastating economic impact on the city of Atlantas finances and bond ratings that will weaken the future prospects of the capital city of Georgia, Linville added. A weaker Atlanta wont make Buckhead safer.

Analysts say the secession proposal faces an uphill battle, thanks to steep infrastructure costs, Linville said, and would lead to further questions about where students would receive public education.

People watch a parade celebrating Juneteenth on June 19 in Atlanta. (Megan Varner/Getty Images)

For many Black Atlanta residents, the talk of secession is a painful echo of the pre-civil-rights era. Stephanie Flowers, chair of Atlanta Neighborhood Planning Unit V, a group that oversees neighborhood associations in predominantly Black neighborhoods in the city, believes Buckheads attempt at seceding is, in part, racially motivated.

It makes me angry because the crime they are seeing in Buckhead is the same crime we on the south side have been dealing with for years, Flowers told the Washington Post. We on the south side, because of our demographics, we cant pay our way out [of it].

Republican lawmakers introduced legislation earlier this year to incorporate the city of Buckhead, and a vote is expected in 2022. Ongoing legal battles over the move could keep it tied up in court for years. Buckhead City Committee members, meanwhile, say the previous formations of cities like Brookhaven and Sandy Springs show it can be done. Since 2005, 10 new cities have been formed across three of Georgias largest counties, the Atlantic reported. With the exception of two, they have been majority white.

Former Georgia House of Representatives Minority Leader Stacey Abrams said that while the crime issues need to be solved, seceding is not the answer.

I have been a very vocal skeptic about cityhood bills designed to fracture distinct communities, Abrams told the Black News Channel earlier this month. This is not simply about a small group of people who want to do something else; this is about siphoning off resources that have been provided by the larger Atlanta community, and for one community to benefit and simply take its toys and leave is deeply problematic.

Bill White, CEO and chairman of the Buckhead City Committee, left, and his husband, Bryan Eure. (Buckhead Exploratory Commitee)

But according to White, Buckheads crime issues should be a priority for everyone, adding that if Atlanta wont address the recent spikes, the community has no choice but to seek its own remedy.

We believe safety is a universal right, he said. Losing a loved one due to crime is a pain that nobody should experience, not in Buckhead, not anywhere.

Cover thumbnail photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Getty Images

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US-POLICE-DRUGS-CRIME-RACISM - Credit: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

This story was originally published by Grist and is republished here as part of an ongoing collaboration.

Picture this: two babies born on the same day, maybe even within the same hour, at the Harlem Hospital Center in New York City. One baby, born to a Black mother, goes home to her family down the street in East Harlem. The second is taken home just a few blocks south to the Upper East Side by her white mother.

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Fast forward to these babies adulthoods, and theyve stayed close to the people and places theyve grown to love  but their ability to access things like fresh food, quality pharmacies, well-resourced schools, clean water, and even something as simple as the trees that shade their blocks are drastically different. The way their communities are policed and incarcerated is substantially different, too. As a result, the two people are expected to die roughly 19 years apart, despite living just a few blocks from one another.

A new study and interactive map from researchers at the University of California Berkeleys Othering & Belonging Institute, or OBI, demonstrate a comprehensive attempt to better understand residential racial segregation, the common phenomenon at root of these disparate inequalities, across the U.S. The study finds that, while residential segregation declined modestly from 1970 to 1990, it began increasing in 1990 and has been getting starker ever since. As a result, more than 150 large metropolitan regions in the U.S.  a whopping 81 percent of the total  are more segregated now than they were 30 years ago, according to the study.

Segregation is the invisible undercarriage of every expression of systemic racism in this country, Stephen Menendian, lead author and Director of Research at OBI, told Grist. While segregation might not explain everything with inequality, its the sine qua non of racial inequality, which has a role in all injustices.

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The studys sobering results are partially the result of careful methodological choices. Rather than relying on traditional measures of segregation like the so-called Dissimilarity Index, which measures how much movement it would take for two racial groups to become evenly distributed in a given locality, the researchers opt instead to use the Divergence Index, which measures the extent to which the demographics of a given geographic unit diverge from the broader whole of which it is a part: how the demographics of a census tract differ from those of its city, or how those of a city differ from those of a broader metropolitan area. The authors say that this better allows the study to account for Americas increasing diversity (which could lower dissimilarity scores even as segregation itself persists) as well as the increasingly regional nature of segregation.

This methodology finds that the one-time manufacturing hubs of the mid-Atlantic and Midwests Rust Belt disproportionately account for the countrys top 10 most segregated cities, with Detroit  the Blackest city in America  topping the list. Chicago, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia are not far behind. When metropolitan areas, which include cities and their connecting suburbs, are considered as a whole, New York City reigns supreme. While segregation is worst in these places, it has increased all across the country. Since 1990, the metropolitan area of Fayetteville, Arkansas, has seen the greatest increase in segregation, while cities in the West, such as Salt Lake City, Utah, and Santa Cruz, California, have also become significantly more segregated.

Segregation may have picked back up in recent decades, but its roots stretch back much further.

The real driving force behind segregation in the North and West, Menendian explained, was the real estate industry. Real estate companies have historically propagated racist beliefs that Black residents negatively impacted property values, were undesirable neighbors, and posed existential risks to communities and neighborhoods. As the government got more involved in regulating housing in the early 20th century, these ideas made their way into official policy. With that came exclusionary single-family zoning policies in places like Berkeley, California; racially restrictive zoning ordinances in cities like Baltimore, Maryland; and the nationwide practice of redlining, which denied investment to communities of color from Chicago to Miami and everywhere in between.

Segregations hold on the country has led to Black and Latino communities disproportionate exposure to environmental pollutants, which when coupled with poor health care options, unhealthy food options, as well as less access to green space and even safe jobs, culminates in a predisposition to premature death: Today Black Americans are expected to live six fewer years than white Americans.

Another new study by the conservation nonprofit American Forests found that segregation can even account for something as mundane as why affluent U.S. communities have 65 percent more trees than their poor counterparts. Closing that tree cover gap would support 4 million jobs, mitigate 57,000 tons of air pollution, and remove the equivalent amount of carbon from the atmosphere as taking 92 million cars off the road, according to the group. It would also improve health and safety outcomes in poor communities. (Tree cover has been shown to help lower blood pressure, reduce stress, and increase energy levels.)

However, Medendian and his co-authors Arthur Gailes and Samir Gambhir believe that fixes that focus on the symptoms of segregation, such as tree cover inequality, without addressing the deepening segregation itself wont make any substantial differences in disparate life outcomes.

In this particular moment of greater awareness of the extent and reality of systemic racism in the country, its important that we draw attention to what undergirds injustice, Menendian said. Segregation causes the inequalities that lead to police patrolling certain neighborhoods more aggressively, why life expectancies are lower in some neighborhoods than others, why frontline workers are disproportionately residing in certain neighborhoods, and why some people dont have access to clean air or water.

If were going to actually make progress on these inequalities we need not continue focusing on the symptoms, but the causes, he added.

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KINSHASA (Reuters) - Congo's public prosecutor has asked the Senate to authorise a formal investigation into allegations former prime minister Matata Ponyo Mapon misappropriated over $140 million earmarked to be paid out to victims of state confiscations.

The prosecutor said in a letter to the Senate president dated June 24 that payments ordered by Matata in 2011 while serving as finance minister had gone to people without valid claims to government compensation. The letter was seen by Reuters on Tuesday.

It said Matata personally benefited from the payments but did not provide evidence of this.

Matata's spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Senate earlier this month rejected a request by prosecutors to lift his immunity over allegations he misappropriated funds from a failed agriculture project.

Matata has denied those allegations and said they are part of a smear campaign against him.

The prosecutor said the $140 million was paid out under a 1977 law authorising compensation to foreign businesspeople in Congo, then known as Zaire, who had properties confiscated in 1973 and 1974 as part of an economic nationalisation drive.

Matata, who was prime minister from 2012 to 2016, enjoys immunity from prosecution in his current role as a senator.

The Senate narrowly turned down the prosecutor's request to lift his immunity over the Bukanga Lonzo agriculture project, from which prosecutors allege over $200 million went missing.

The government touted Bukanga Lonzo as an answer to chronic food shortages when it was launched in 2014, but production ceased when the South African company operating it left Congo in 2017.

(Reporting by Benoit Nyemba in Kinshasa; Additional reporting by Aaron Ross; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
For years, Connecticut police chiefs and officers have fought strongly against legalizing recreational marijuana, saying they have no reliable test to prove that a motorist has been driving under the influence of the drug.

Now, police are scrambling to review the complicated legislation and enforce the new law that takes effect Thursday with the start of the new fiscal year.

An internal bulletin that has been sent to chiefs, training officers, resident troopers, and others warns officers that the odor of cannabis' or burnt pot shall not constitute in part or in whole probable cause or reasonable suspicion and shall not be used as a basis to support any stop or search of a motor vehicle.'

The bulletin says any evidence collected improperly shall not be admissible in evidence in any trial, hearing or other proceeding in a court of this state.'

Connecticut public safety commissioner James Rovella, the states top crime fighter, admits that state police are still digesting 300 pages of regulations in a complex and highly detailed law that goes live Thursday.

Not everything is going to go right. Something is going to go boom in the night, and well address it,' Rovella said in an interview. We expect bumps in the road. Thats only logical.'

At the same time, Rovella said that officers will rely on their experience in the field, along with roll-call updates on the nuances of the new law. The comprehensive, 10-page bulletin that was released by the state Police Officer Standards and Training Council is important so that all officers will be operating under the same standards, he said.

Local police are concerned that they could potentially be flooded with calls about the nuances of where and when residents are allowed to smoke marijuana. The new law contains multiple details about changes in the Clean Air Act, including various exemptions. A nonpartisan legislative research report says smoking pot will be permitted in the same way as cigarettes at certain outdoor areas of establishments serving alcohol' and public housing projects, among others.

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While many users prefer edibles, acquiring their high through chocolate, cookies or gummy bears, old-school pot consumers still light up. In general, marijuana smokers must abide by the same laws as cigarette smokers.

Gov. Ned Lamont says he is not overly concerned about getting used to the new law, saying that police in Massachusetts have been dealing with the issue for years.

Look, were surrounded by states that have marijuana,' Lamont said. Weve learned a lot from their experience. Massachusetts has been doing this for two or three years now.'

Lamont added that police are ready to deal with a historic day Thursday when recreational pot becomes legal  just like other states.

So its not like a totally new game theyre dealing with,' Lamont said of officers. Theyre ready.'

But House Republican leader Vincent Candelora, an opponent of the measure, said police and prosecutors have not had enough time to understand the new law because it was largely written behind closed doors and the final version was released only in recent weeks. The effective date, he said, should have been pushed back to the traditional starting date of October 1 for new policy proposals.

Its disgusting how we operated in secret, with the building closed, and we are going to force major policy reforms when the bill hasnt seen the light of day for more than three weeks,' Candelora said in an interview. There are so many implications to this bill  not just to police and enforcement, but to employment, to places where they are going to be allowed to smoke. Businesses that are open to the public need to address this issue  congregate living, group homes, public housing. Theres going to be problems here.'

Candelora cited the case of two neighbors arguing recently in Norwalk  saying that police might be called to mediate disputes in densely populated cities where burning pot can be smelled nearby as the smoke wafts over the property line.

I had a phone call where a neighbor was fighting with his neighbor because they live in a very dense housing development, where the homes are 20 feet apart from each other,' Candelora said. The neighbor is smoking pot outside on their porch, and its going into the other persons house.'

While smoking pot would not be a problem in a backyard in a one-acre zone in suburbia, it is already an issue on smaller lots, he said. The smoking, he said, will end up being a problem for children being raised in cities.

Since the provisions represent a sharp change from the days that police were focused on arrests in the war on drugs, law enforcement authorities concede that they are still spreading the word about the nuances of the new law. Karen Boisvert, the administrator at the Connecticut Police Academy who outlined key points for police, wrote, This bulletin is intended to be as inclusive as possible. However, additional correspondence/training may be necessary to provide further guidance.'

Pam Hayes, executive director of the Connecticut Police Chiefs Association, said that questions about where smoking is allowed in each town should be directed to the local health authorities, not the police.

Rep. Michael DAgostino, a Hamden Democrat who helped write the law, said the general rule is that residents can smoke pot anywhere that they can smoke cigarettes, subject to local zoning regulations that could ban the substances in any particular town. Cities with populations above 50,000 must provide dedicated smoking areas, but the particular spots are entirely up to the municipality, such as a section of a park, he said.

We took Connecticuts existing Clean Air Act, and we updated it to include the smoking of marijuana, which is now legal  like cigarettes,' DAgostino said. Whatever you could do with cigarettes, you can pretty much do with cannabis now with some exceptions, depending on local rules. It will be interesting to see how the different town zoning rules evolve.'

Christopher Keating can be reached at ckeating@courant.com
By Saurabh Sharma and Rupam Jain

BALAI, India (Reuters) -Govind Pasi, a grassroots member of India's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), says he got no help from his connections in the ruling party when his wife contracted coronavirus and died at home for lack of proper treatment.

Now, he says, he is done with the party that has ruled India since 2014 and with its leader, Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

"I am heart-broken, nobody came to help us when we needed help the most," said Pasi, 45, speaking in Balai village in Uttar Pradesh state. Nearby, on the banks of the Ganges river, scores of bodies of people believed to have died of COVID-19 have washed up.

Anand Awasthi, a district vice president of the BJP, said he was aware of the death of Pasi's wife and that the party was trying to get him monetary compensation. He said there was some confusion around her death relating to whether a government database established she had COVID, but did not have details.

Pasi is among more than a dozen ground and mid-level BJP members who told Reuters they are disillusioned with the government's handling of the coronavirus pandemic that has devastated India. In addition, six state lawmakers in Uttar Pradesh have written letters criticising the government for not responding to frantic calls for help from their constituents, which Reuters has reviewed.

A high-profile national level BJP official in New Delhi said he was taking a sabbatical because of the "failings of providing basic medical care, mixed messaging on lockdowns, abysmal medical oxygen cylinder shortages and clear lack of priority".

He spoke on condition of anonymity, citing worries about a backlash for stepping out of line.

The BJP is a mammoth organisation, claiming 150 million members, and Reuters could not determine the degree to which the unhappiness has spread. But it is highly unusual for those within the party to speak out against Modi, who has dominated Indian politics in his seven years in power and whose control of the BJP has been unquestioned.

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The BJP headquarters and the prime minister's office did not respond to requests for comment.

Kailash Vijayvargiya, a senior BJP leader who is one of its nine general secretaries, told Reuters he had no knowledge of any unhappiness or dissent within the party.

"The pandemic was tough for everyone and we know some of our workers also lost their loved ones," he said. "At so many levels we have helped each other and there were times when we could not because the situation has been very difficult."

Modi, a Hindu nationalist who gets wide support in the country's majority community, has faced criticism before, including for a shock demonetisation that threw the economy into disarray and haphazard tax reform. But the shortage of hospital beds and medical oxygen in the COVID crisis and the country's stuttering vaccination programme have battered his reputation for action and competence, analysts and opposition leaders say.

Analysts say public anger over the handling of the pandemic coupled with even some disaffection in the party rank-and-file could hurt the BJP when it faces its next political test - an election early next year in politically crucial Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state and currently ruled by the BJP.

ELECTION MACHINE

The party's formidably successful election machine rests on a volunteer army of people like Pasi, grassroots workers in the countryside who know voters intimately, make sure they come out to vote and manage the election at the booth level.

Suhas Palshikar, a columnist and former professor of political science who has written extensively about the BJP, said unhappiness among these people could be critical.

"This will surely mean less voter mobilization in favour of BJP and therefore a crisis in constituencies that are borderline in terms of margin of victory/defeat," he said. However, he added that the Uttar Pradesh election was still six months away, which was "a long time in politics".

Doing badly in Uttar Pradesh would be a major setback for the BJP, analysts say, and could have a knock-on effect on the next general election, although that is not due until 2024.

According to two opinion polls last month, Modi's approval ratings have fallen to a historical low. But his ratings still remain far above leading opposition figures.

The lack of unity in the opposition would be another plus for Modi in any election, analysts say. Some of the smaller political parties have said they need to come together to defeat Modi, but the main opposition Congress party has not commented on the issue.

Meanwhile, the government has launched efforts to win back public support. As the wave of COVID infections tapered this month, Modi appeared on national television to spell out how he will tackle the pandemic and aides have launched a publicity offensive on the number of vaccinations carried out.

It was too early to say if the efforts had tempered any anger over the government's handling of the crisis.

Om Gaur, the national editor of one of the largest-selling newspapers, the independent Dainik Bhaskar, however said ground reports from 12 of India's 28 states indicated the BJP had been severely damaged by the handling of the pandemic and that "the PM has never had such a tough moment in the past seven years".

"Policy failure has enraged even those who were Modi loyalists, they continue to support his outlook on religion and nationalism, but question his ability to manage the crisis," he said.

Muralidhar Rao, another BJP general secretary, said he was not aware of any anger against Modi "whether it's in the party or among voters".

"Whatever happens in upcoming elections, that cannot and should not be discussed right now, we have to focus on vaccinating the entire eligible population and that is the main agenda."

(Reporting by Saurabh Sharma in Unnao, Rupam Jain in Mumbai, Sanjeev Miglani in New Delhi; Writing by Sanjeev Miglani; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)
Getting vaccinated againat COVID-19 has sparked some conflicts among friends and family members.(Photo: Getty Creative stock photo)

After 15 months of limiting their social interactions to small outdoor gatherings with masks and social distancing  and two COVID-19 vaccination shots apiece for herself, her husband and their teen son  Suzanne (who preferred to not use her real name for this article) and her family are finally easing up and meeting with friends and family members inside. Sort of.

While Suzanne's side of the family is fully vaccinated, most of her in-laws, who object to vaccinations on religious grounds, are not. What's more, they are lax about wearing masks, and have thus not been included in recent gatherings.

Over the past few months, the flurry of vaccinations for those aged 12 and up has resulted in relief, a relaxation of the vigilant behavior adopted during the pandemic and a rash of social invitations. But, as evidenced by the White House admitting its target of having 70 percent of U.S. adults partially vaccinated will likely miss its July 4 deadline, not everyone is rushing, or even planning, to roll up their sleeve. And so a pandemic that's already seen fissures form between those who mask and those who don't, and those who have taken COVID-19 seriously and those who have dismissed it as a threat, now ushers in its new social divide: the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated.

Stories like Suzanne's abound: The family who frets over an upcoming holiday season with one branch of the family tree iced out. The grandparent who'd rather stay home than get vaccinated and visit their new grandchild, at the request of his parents. The unvaccinated friend fuming because a wedding is open to vaccinated guests only.

At a time when a return to "normal" is touted at every turn, awkwardness, hurt feelings and a sense of being judged are leaving many relationships feeling anything but.

Robert Johnson, who owns the woodworking business Sawinery, tells Yahoo Life that his family is being "extra careful" in terms of socializing because his children are not yet vaccinated. (Both Johnson and his wife, who live in Connecticut, are fully vaccinated.)

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"We are still not accepting guests unless it has been two weeks after their second dose," says Johnson, citing a recent birthday party he hosted for his son which "strictly enforced a no vaccine, no entry policy."

Johnson admits that his family's vigilance has led to "some strain" with relatives who are unvaccinated.

"They said that we are acting so high and mighty just because we have our vaccines," he says. "And up until now, these family members refuse to talk to us. But the only way to end this pandemic is for us to trust in science."

Kayaking blog founder Steve Morrow of Gilbert, Ariz., is vaccinated, but hasn't limited his social interactions to exclude those who aren't  "personally, I don't care and will hang out with whoever," he tells Yahoo Life. But differences in vaccination status are still wreaking havoc within his social circle. His parents, who are in their 80s, refuse to be vaccinated and have made Morrow and his wife "feel uncomfortable" about their own decision, he says. He also has friends who won't meet up with anyone who hasn't had their COVID-19 shots.

"The whole situation is pretty messed up," Morrow says. "It is definitely awkward getting together with people who are on such opposite sides of the spectrum. I never imagined the vaccine would cause such a rift in our society and our friend groups. Once we get past the vaccine conversations with family and friends, hopefully we can all get along. It's such a divisive subject right now."

Is there a way through these conflicts without backing down over your personal stance? Therapist Hannah Tishman, who has addressed such fallouts with her clients in addition to witnessing them within her own social circle, recommends not letting someone's health decisions, or the boundaries they need to set, feel like a personal affront.

"Everyone has to navigate their own comfort level and to advocate for their own personal safety and feelings of security," Tishman, vice-president of operations for the New York City-based Cobb Psychotherapy, tells Yahoo Life. "That might look different for each person based on their own lived experiences, health history and personal beliefs and values. Everyone has had a different experience during the pandemic, some experiencing a higher level of trauma than others. It's important that we come from a place of understanding and not judgment when we learn of others' choices regarding their vaccinations.

"What makes one person feel safe may make another feel unsafe, and visa versa," she adds. "There are strong feelings involved as we recover from the pandemic and it can be helpful to express what makes you feel safe and your own needs to loved ones, instead of projecting what you expect from others onto them."

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Jun. 29HENDERSON  Crossroads Christian men's basketball team had the opportunity to play with alumni of the school and head coach Scottie Richardson as part of the first "Give It All, Leave It All" Basketball Game on Friday night.

Richardson has used the slogan to promote a positive basketball culture during his career, and made it synonymous with Crossroad' team since he took over the head coaching position back in 2018.

"That's been the motto for every team I've coached over the last 26 years," Richardson said. "We have a sign in our team room that the kids slap and it's on the back of our shooter shirts too. Every time they step on the floor, they're going to give it all they got and they'll leave everything on the floor."

Richardson had been wanting to do an alumni game for several years, but saw the end of the COVID-19 pandemic as the perfect opportunity to contact his former players about taking part in the event.

While Richardson loved seeing Crossroads and Neuse Christian Academy alumni under the same roof, he said the purpose of Friday's alumni game was to give his current team some valuable experience against those who developed under Richardson's system.

"I told our guys that this is better than any team camp we could ever go to," Richardson said. "These guys were in their position once upon a time running the same system and they're able to stay in contact with them. It was a special night for me just looking around the gym knowing I coached all of these guys."

A plethora of former Neuse Christian players joined past and present Crossroads athletes for Friday's event, including Daron Gipson, Jalen Gaddy and Justin Storey, who helped lead their team to a 20-10 record during the 2012-13 season by averaging 21.6, 19.6 and 13.9 points per game respectively.

Joining those three on the alumni team were Crossroads standouts Taylor Bell and Zach Murphy. The duo formed an efficient scoring tandem for Crossroads during their senior campaign in the 2019-20 season, with both of them each eclipsing the 1,000-point barrier.

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Bell, who currently plays for Wingate University's program, visits Crossroads as often as possible to educate current players about expectations at the collegiate level and cherished the chance to play against them on Friday with former teammates by his side.

"I had a lot of fun," Bell said. "There were a lot of guys that I haven't seen since I went to Neuse during my freshman year. [Murphy and I have] been talking to everyone about our past experiences and what to expect at the next level, but today we had fun rather than have a hard, serious teaching moment."

The chemistry that Bell and Murphy possessed with one another during their time at Crossroads prevailed once again on Friday night, as they put up points against the current Crossroads roster while creating scoring opportunities for their former teammates.

The current Colts initially held their own against the alumni roster with Andres Prince, Drew Rogers and others knocking down shots, but they were unable to match their opponent's fast pace and ultimately settled for a 93-79 defeat.

Rogers is thankful that he and his teammates are able to frequently interact with former players like Bell through lectures and events such as the alumni game. He said he intends to use that knowledge to strengthen his leadership skills and sharpen his on-court performance before graduating next summer.

"You have to stay in the gym and be as open as possible to accepting new knowledge," Rogers said. "We don't know it all but we have all the tools to learn and be as great as we want to be. This is something that I'll look forward to in the future, and hopefully one day I'll be able to show my kids what we built at Crossroads."

Richardson has always taken great pride in the long-standing relationships he has built with his former players, whether that involves Bell and Murphy lecturing his team or having Gipson coach Crossroads' middle school roster.

He believes that the strong culture at Crossroads will only grow stronger because of the alumni game, and he is looking forward to seeing the event continue to grow as more players graduate and return to pass down their knowledge on basketball.

"Next year we're going to promote [the alumni game]," Richardson said. "Putting my AD hat on, this could be a pretty good fundraiser, and I think this event is something that fans are really going to enjoy in the future."
Investors see the crackdown as a sign that the crypto markets are maturing, one analyst has said. Photo: Reuters

Cryptocurrencies were broadly higher on Tuesday morning, continuing to recover from an earlier slump, despite more regulatory action.

Bitcoin (BTC-USD) was up 1.6%, trading at $35,249 ($25,433). Despite recovering from a sell off in which its price fell to below $30,000, it still remains far away from its all-time high of $63,000 from earlier in the year.

Ethereum (ETH-USD), the worlds second largest cryptocurrency, was up 8%, trading at $2,158.

Cryptos had slumped amid news of regulatory crackdown in China, but since then they have been rising steadily higher. They remain unfazed by news that Britains financial watchdog issued a warning to consumers that one of the worlds largest bitcoin exchanges is not permitted to undertake regulated activities in the UK.

Over the weekend the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) ordered Binance Markets to remove all advertising and financial promotions by 30 June.

The FT reported that Binance customers are now not able to withdraw or deposit pounds using Faster Payments, one of the main UK payments systems. Binance said on its website the platform was suspended for maintenance

"The lack of access to Faster Payments represented a significant curb on UK clients abilities to move money from the exchange directly into their bank accounts," FT reported.

Read more: Why the UK banned Binance and what it means for your crypto assets

Mati Greenspan, CEO of Quantum Economics, clarified that Binance has not been banned from the UK, and the company is still free to offer spot crypto trading in the country.

He said Britons are still free to buy, sell, and hold crypto on the platform but the FCA has issued an enforcement action against Binance for offering complex products where they shouldn't have.

Bitcoin was up on Tuesday morning. Chart: Yahoo Finance UK

Investors see the crackdown as a sign that the crypto markets are maturing, and that the company will have to accelerate its process of becoming a regulated exchange, which will likely lead to increased trust among crypto traders, said Naeem Aslam, chief market analyst at Ava Trade.

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He also pointed out that despite tighter controls imposed by global financial regulators, crypto investments in India, the world's largest democracy grew from $200m to nearly $40bn in a year.

"Currently, 15 million people in India trade digital currencies, and the rise in investments demonstrates bitcoin's potential to reach new heights."

Meanwhile Greenspan also pointed out that due to the mining crackdown in China, bitcoin's hash rate is now at its lowest level in two years. The hash rate is a measuring unit of the processing power of the bitcoin network.

"There's still more than enough hash power to keep the network safe and secure, and there's no reason to think that any of this will have a significant impact on market pricing," he said.

But he added that anyone sending bitcoin across the network should be prepared to wait longer than usual.

Watch: What is bitcoin?
Dallas police are introducing a new initiative to help reduce the number of hate crimes against LGBT people and help encourage victims to come forward in a partnership with the community, according to a news release.

The Safe Place program, inspired by something similar in Seattle, relies on local businesses and organizations to volunteer as a safe place for the LGBT community. These businesses will be designated with a placard from Dallas police.

Anybody who is being threatened, has been attacked or does not feel safe can seek shelter in an LGBT-friendly business and wait for police to arrive, according to the release.

The Safe Place program has been created in a partnership with Dallas Hope Charities and the Collective Hope Coalition, hoping the initiative will help reduce crimes against the LGBT community. These designated safe places are not just for members of the LGBT community who are victims of crime or feel they are in danger, according to police, but do have an emphasis on hate crimes against the community.

Dallas police said anybody who is the victim of a crime can go into a safe place and know they will be treated fairly and with dignity.

The department said the initiative is in response to an uptick in hate crimes against LGBT people.
The search for survivors in Surfside, Miami-Dade has entered its fifth day (AFP via Getty Images)

A pool contractor who visited the site of the now collapsed Champlain Towers in Florida days before the tragedy struck said he had noticed cracked concrete around the pool and water in the basement.

The contractor, who did not wish to be named, took photographs of corroded rebar and cracked concrete around the pool area just 36 hours before half the building caved in, killing at least 11 people.

There was standing water all over the parking garage, the contractor, who asked not to be named, told the Miami Herald . I thought to myself, thats not normal.

Shocked by the buildings poor condition, he told his boss the job would be more complicated than expected. Days later, he has unsettling questions about what he saw.

I wonder if this was going on in other parts of the building and caused this collapse, he added.

As search and rescue efforts continue at the residential building in Miami-Dade, residents and local officials are demanding answers.

There was something obviously very, very wrong with this building, and we need to get to the bottom of it, Mayor Charles Burkett of Surfside, where the disaster occurred, told ABC This Week .

With still no official cause given, some in the community have begun to question how such a horrific accident could occur in a developed and wealthy country.

Buildings dont fall down in America, Mr Burkett said. That is a third-world phenomenon.

A structural engineer who inspected the garage last year told CNN he noticed damage to the buildings stucco facade and concrete balconies  although he said this was normal for an old building.

I saw cracks and deterioration of the garage and plaza level, but those are all things that were accustomed to seeing, said the engineer, Jason Borden.

(AFP via Getty Images)

There could have been construction errors or design errors or design defects, he added. There was maintenance or repairs that needed to be performed. You know, all of those things together likely contributed to what happened here.

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Meanwhile, NPR has uncovered documents showing that a Surfside building official, Ross Prieto, told a 2018 meeting of the Champlain Tower South Condominium Association that the structure was in good condition.

Structural engineer report was reviewed by Mr Prieto, the minutes of that meeting say. It appears the building is in very good shape.

According to NPR, this directly contradicted the actual engineering report, given by Morabito Consultants just five weeks earlier, which warned of major structural damage to the building.

No investigation of the collapse has yet been completed, and its still possible the disaster had nothing to do with the buildings physical condition. But as the dust settles, questions about meetings and documents like these are likely to continue.

Read More

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Just a few days after threatening to derail a bipartisan infrastructure deal, Democrats backed off from a warning on Tuesday that they would block any bill that is not accompanied by a second, massive spending package.

Two top House Democrats told reporters they support passing new infrastructure funding along with a bevy of other social spending measures that would provide free child care, free community college, expanded free healthcare, and billions in green energy initiatives at a cost that could approach $5 trillion.

But neither House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland, nor caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries of New York repeated threats issued last week that the bipartisan infrastructure bill heralded by President Joe Biden is contingent on passing the second, bigger spending bill.

I dont know that I would use the word 'contingent,' Jeffries told reporters. These are priorities that we have that are broadly shared throughout the House Democratic Caucus. I think the speaker and the majority leader have been clear about how we're going to proceed, and I expect they'll continue to be clear about how we will proceed moving forward in the weeks to come.

Hoyer also dodged tying the two bills together.

Hoyer told reporters the provisions in both measures are a priority for Democrats, who he said are unified behind Biden. But he also acknowledged the party is not in lockstep when it comes to the size and scope of the spending.

There are a number of different views, Hoyer said, but I think we will come together in support of the president's proposals.

A group of 10 Senate Republicans and Democrats and Biden announced last week they reached an agreement on a $1 trillion spending package on traditional infrastructure projects.

Biden nearly derailed the new agreement later in the day by threatening to veto the measure if the second, bigger spending package is not passed in tandem with it.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders issued similar threats.

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We will not take up a bill in the House until the Senate passes the bipartisan bill and a reconciliation bill, Pelosi said last week. If there is no bipartisan bill, then well just go when the Senate passes a reconciliation bill.

The warnings from Democrats threatened to derail the nascent deal.

Republicans accused Biden of backtracking. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina called Bidens threat extortion and said the GOPs buy-in was not based on the passage of the second, bigger spending deal that none of them would support.

On Sunday, Biden walked back the veto threat, which he said understandably upset some Republicans, who do not see the two plans as linked.

Biden said it was certainly not my intent to issue a veto threat.

Washington Examiner Videos

Tags: News, Congress, Nancy Pelosi, House of Representatives, House GOP

Original Author: Susan Ferrechio

Original Location: Democrats soften infrastructure threat
With Mount Shasta in the background, a firefighter cools down hot spots on Monday after the Lava fire swept through the area north of Weed. (Scott Stoddard / Associated Press)

Deputies with the Siskiyou County Sheriff's Office shot and killed a man they said opened fire on them in an evacuation zone of the Lava fire, authorities said.

Siskiyou County Sheriff Jeremiah LaRue told the Sacramento Bee that officers tried to prevent the man from driving into the Mount Shasta Vista subdivision on Highway 97 north of Weed after it had been evacuated from the fire Monday evening.

The subdivision is home to a large complex of cannabis farms run primarily by Hmong families.

They made contact with the driver. And at some point, the driver exhibited a firearm, a handgun, and pointed it at the officers, LaRue told the Bee.

A neighbor said he heard dozens of rounds fired in rapid succession over about 30 seconds.

LaRue did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday.

The shooting occurred against a backdrop of tension between the Sheriff's Office and the growers, including claims of racial persecution and corruption that have been been linked to the sheriff's enforcement efforts.

Siskiyou County in recent years banned or limited cannabis operations. The county doesn't allow commercial operations or outdoor grows, and has drastically limited the number of plants allowed on a property, according to the Bee. But, the news outlet says, authorities estimate that thousands of pot greenhouses are still active in the surrounding area.

The Sheriff's Office houses a dedicated marijuana eradication enforcement division, which in 2019 seized more than 60,000 illegal marijuana plants and 17,000 pounds of processed cannabis products in the county, according to its website.

The victim in the shooting has not yet been identified.

The violence Monday erupted as the Lava fire grew tenfold, swelling by Tuesday to 13,330 acres. The Sheriff's Office issued evacuation orders for the Lake Shastina and Juniper Valley areas on Monday, which remained in effect Tuesday afternoon.

Officials have also closed Highway 97 between Weed and the Juniper Lodge, about a 30-mile stretch.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer sentenced to more than 22 years in jail for the murder of George Floyd, is close to a plea deal with federal prosecutors, according to local reports.

Chauvin was referring cryptically to the deal during brief comments he made at his sentencing hearing on Friday, multiple sources told CBS Minnesota.

"Due to legal matters, I'm not able to give a full formal statement. ... I give my condolences to the Floyd family. Theres gonna be some other information in the future that will be of interest, and I hope this will give you some peace of mind, Chauvin said at the time.

As part of the plea deal on civil rights charges, Chauvin would have to explain publicly why he knelt on Floyd's neck for more than 9 minutes while both Floyd and bystanders told him he couldn't breathe.

DEREK CHAUVIN SENTENCED TO MORE THAN 22 YEARS IN GEORGE FLOYD KILLING

The answer is something Floyd's family has sought since the 2020 incident.

"What was going through your head when you had your knee on my brothers neck? Terrance Floyd asked during Chauvin's sentencing hearing.

As part of a federal plea deal, Chauvin would face up to a 25-year sentence, which he would serve at the same time as his state sentence. WCCO also reported that the deal would allow Chauvin to spend his time behind bars in a federal prison versus a state prison.

Hennepin County Judge Peter Cahill handed down the state sentence following four victim impact statements from Floyd's friends and family, including his 7-year-old daughter Gianna, his nephew Brandon Williams, who said his family "is forever broken," and Terrence Floyd.

Chauvin's mother, Carolyn Pawlenty, spoke on his behalf, saying she will always support him, believes in his "innocence," and that "the public will never know the loving and caring man he is, but his family does."

CLICK HERE FOR MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

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A 12-member jury in April found Chauvin guilty of second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter in Floyd's May 25, 2020, death. Forty-five people testified at Chauvin's trial, which lasted three weeks. The jury deliberated a little more than 10 hours before returning a guilty verdict.

Chauvin did not testify in his own defense but has claimed he is the product of a broken system.

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Tags: News, Derek Chauvin, George Floyd, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Crime, hate crime

Original Author: Barnini Chakraborty

Original Location: Derek Chauvin close to plea deal with authorities on civil rights charges in George Floyd killing
Jun. 28DENVER  Colorado Gov. Jared Polis isn't conceding defeat in the so-called Chile War with New Mexico, but he may be in need of a napkin to lick his wounds after tasting defeat in a story that literally comes out of left field.

A concession stand on the outfield concourse near the left field foul pole at Coors Field in Denver sells a variety of sausages, including a Hatch green chile and cheese bratwurst. To elbow in on territory in Colorado's state capital where the home team is called the Colorado Rockies amounts to a squeeze play victory for New Mexico chile.

But Polis refuses to surrender his claim that chile grown in Pueblo, Colorado, is somehow superior to that grown south of his state's border.

"The chile wars continue and the chile to our south remains an inferior chile," Polis insisted in a statement to the Journal. "Anyone is free to serve whatever they'd like and we urge them to serve the best chile in the world: the Pueblo chile."

Colorado and New Mexico have been engaged in a friendly competition over who grows the best chile in the world for some time now. The dispute heated up after New Mexico started issuing license plates declaring the state more than just the "Land of Enchantment," but also the "Chile Capital of the World."

The state staked its claim following a monumental win by the "Centennial State" when Whole Foods switched to selling Pueblo chile at its regional stores  except those in New Mexico.

Polis then boasted that Pueblo chile was "widely acknowledged as the best chile in the world," adding that "New Mexico stores will unfortunately not be offering the best chile and will instead keep offering inferior New Mexico chile."

"We have the best chile in the world  period," New Mexico's then-Gov. Susana Martinez fired back. "Whether you're going for red, green or Christmas, you can't go wrong with New Mexico chile. And while I enjoy a little friendly competition with our neighbors to the north, I think we all know that there's only one chile capital of the world: New Mexico."

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The war of words heated up again after Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham took office and the New Mexico Department of Tourism launched a "New Mexico True: Chile Capital of the World" marketing campaign that invaded Colorado.

Polis roasted the attack on his state.

"The fact that they have to design a promotional campaign in support of their chiles shows how superior the Pueblo Chile is," Polis said in a Tweet. "Our Pueblo chile promotes itself. Granting yourself a title doesn't simply make it true."

Lujan Grisham then sent a spicy volley back to her Colorado counterpart.

"If Pueblo chile were any good, it would have been on national shelves before now," she replied in a tweet. "If Colorado wants to go chile to chile, no question that New Mexico can bring the heat  Hatch chile is, has always been and will always be the greatest in the world."

The pandemic seems to have caused a cease fire in the Chile War. But it's back on now with New Mexico chile scoring a home run in Colorado's own ballpark.

Polis went so far as to suggest the New Mexico green chile and cheese bratwurst being sold at Coors Field was responsible for the poor play by the team that bears the name of his great state.

"The way the Rockies have been playing, it's clear they need to upgrade their chile," he said.

Alas, the Rockies, whose top minor league team is the Albuquerque Isotopes, entered play on Monday with a 31-47 record, 19 1/2 games behind the San Francisco Giants in the National League West.

Informed that New Mexico seemingly scored victory in the Chile War with a Hatch green chile and cheese bratwurst at Colorado Rockies games, Lujan Grisham spokeswoman Nora Meyers Sackett celebrated victory.

"Ha! New Mexico chile is always the winner," she replied in an email.
A 6-year-old boy died after another vehicle traveling close to 100 mph on a North Carolina highway collided head-on with the car he was riding in Saturday night, state troopers said.

The collision happened around 9:28 p.m. on Highway U.S. 74 near Sparrow Springs Road, just outside of Bessemer City in Gaston County, Trooper Ray Pierce told the Observer on Monday.

Pierce could not confirm whether the speeding vehicle was drag racing, but multiple witnesses told the Highway Patrol they saw the 2013 Audi traveling east at an extremely high rate of speed alongside a 2016 Dodge Charger, he said. The posted speed limit on the highway is 55 mph.

The two vehicles came into contact with each other near Sparrow Springs Road, causing the Audi to lose control, cross a grass median and enter the westbound lanes, where it hit a 2016 Nissan, Pierce said.

The boy and the Audi driver were taken to a hospital with life-threatening injuries, Pierce said. The boy died early Sunday morning, Pierce said.

The Audi driver remains in critical condition at the hospital.

The Nissan driver, who Pierce identified as the boys father figure, suffered minor injuries and was released from the hospital Sunday night, the trooper said.

The boy and the Nissan driver shared no blood relation, but Pierce called the driver the childs father figure.

Pierce did not identify the drivers involved in the collision.

Another driver stopped and helped the Audi driver get out of their vehicle after it caught fire, Pierce said.

Interviews are being conducted to determine if the Audi and Dodge drivers were spontaneously drag racing, which Pierce said is a plausible scenario.

We dont know 100% for sure, so we havent said that they were drag racing yet, he said. We dont want to pass judgment.

Pierce said charges will be forthcoming once troopers have conferred with the Gaston County District Attorneys Office.

Extreme speeding

Residents near the scene of Saturdays crash say they often hear and see vehicles speeding down U.S. 74.

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I do hear later at night, I do hear more motorcycles and trucks, and stuff like that racing, Zachary Brown told Observer news partner WBTV.

An investigation published earlier this month by The Charlotte Observer and The News & Observer in Raleigh found that extreme speeding  where drivers fly 20, 30, even 50 mph over the speed limit  has increased dramatically in North Carolina. Law enforcement officers have clocked some drivers going nearly 200 mph.

Speed-related crashes have claimed the lives of more than 1,800 people in the state over the past five years.

Fatal head-on collision last week

The Gaston County incident is the second one in which a child died after a head-on collision in the Charlotte area in the past week.

Allison Faith Presley, 20, of Indian Trail and her 3-year-old son, Aiden, were killed when their SUV crossed into oncoming traffic on state highway N.C. 16 in Lincoln County and collided head-on with a pickup truck early Wednesday, the Observer previously reported. The crash also injured two other people.

Presley may have fallen asleep while driving, troopers said. All occupants were wearing seat belts. Aiden was in a car seat, but troopers say it was not properly installed.
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) -The Netherlands' defence minister said on Tuesday that Russian fighter jets armed with air-to-surface missiles had harassed a Dutch navy frigate in the Black Sea earlier this month, conducting mock attacks and jamming communication systems.

The Russian actions took place over the span of five hours on June 24 and violated rights to free use of the sea, the ministry said.

The frigate, Evertsen, was sailing with Britain's Carrier Strike Group, which was carrying out a patrol in the area at the time.

Defence Minister Ank Bijleveld-Schouten called the Russian action "irresponsible".

The "Evertsen has every right to sail there," she said in a statement. "There is no justification for this kind of aggressive act, which needlessly increases the chance of accidents."

She indicated the Netherlands would raise the matter with Russia at the diplomatic level.

(Reporting by Toby Sterling; Editing by Catherine Evans and Gareth Jones)
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP)  Russian fighter jets repeatedly flew low over a Dutch navy frigate in the Black Sea last week and carried out mock attacks, the Defense Ministry of the Netherlands said Tuesday.

The incident involving the Dutch ship Zr. Ms. Evertsen happened last Thursday southeast of Crimea, the ministry said in a statement.

It came a day after after Russia said one of its warships in the Black Sea fired warning shots and a warplane dropped bombs to force a British destroyer out of an area near Crimea that Russia claims as its territorial waters. Britain denied that account and insisted its ship wasnt fired upon.

The Evertsen has been patrolling in the Black Sea with HMS Defender, the British ship that was involved in that incident.

Defense Minister Minister Ank Bijleveld-Schouten called the Russian actions irresponsible.

Evertsen has every right to sail there, she said. There is no justification whatsoever for this kind of aggressive act, which also unnecessarily increases the chance of accidents.

She said the Netherlands would speak to Russia about the incident.

The ministry said that the Russian jets, armed with bombs and air-to-surface rockets flew past the frigate between 3:30 p.m and 8:30 p.m. and were followed by disruptions to the Evertsens electronic equipment.

Russia annexed Ukraines Crimean Peninsula in 2014, a move not recognized by most countries, gaining access to its long Black Sea coast. Russia has chafed at NATO warships visiting near Crimea as destabilizing. In April, it declared a broader area off Crimea closed to foreign naval ships.

In April, Russia imposed restrictions on foreign naval movements near Crimea until November in a move that drew strong complaints from Ukraine and the West. Russia rejected the criticism and noted the restrictions wouldnt interfere with commercial shipping.

Earlier this year, Russia also bolstered its troops near the border with Ukraine and warned Kyiv against using force to reclaim control of the countrys eastern industrial heartland, where a conflict with Russia-backed separatists has killed more than 14,000 people in seven years. Moscow withdrew some of its forces after maneuvers, but Ukrainian officials say many of them remain.
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP)  The fighters now retaking parts of Ethiopia's Tigray region will pursue soldiers from neighboring Eritrea back into their country and chase Ethiopian forces to Addis Ababa if that's what it takes" to weaken their military powers, their spokesman said Tuesday, as a conflict that has killed thousands of civilians looked certain to continue.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Getachew Reda said that well stop at nothing to liberate every square inch of the Tigray region of 6 million people, nearly eight months after fighting erupted between the Tigray forces and Ethiopian soldiers backed by Eritrea.

He rejected the unilateral cease-fire Ethiopias government declared Monday as a sick joke and accused Ethiopia of long denying humanitarian aid to the Tigrayans it now pretends to care about. Ethiopia declared the unilateral cease-fire as its soldiers and hand-picked regional interim administration fled the Tigray regional capital following some of the fiercest fighting of the war.

We want to stop the war as quickly as we can, the Tigray spokesman said.

But he said liberating the region is not just about territory. If there is still a menace next door, whether it be in Eritrea, extremists from the neighboring Amhara region who have occupied western Tigray or Ethiopian forces, its about assuring Tigrayans security, he said.

The comments were sure to bring new alarm from the United States, United Nations and others who have pressed for an end to the fighting in Africa's second most populous country that has sent hundreds of thousands of Tigrayans into the world's worst famine crisis in a decade.

This week's swift turn in the war has left people scrambling to understand the implications for Tigray, as communications links remained largely cut.

Eritrean soldiers, accused by witnesses of some of the wars worst atrocities against Tigrayans, left the towns of Shire, Axum and Adwa, witnesses said, but it was not clear whether the retreat was temporary. The information ministry of Eritrea, a longtime enemy of Tigray's former leaders and described by human rights groups as one of the world's most repressive countries, did not immediately respond to questions.

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We don't yet know if they are withdrawing from Tigray altogether, acting U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Robert Godec told the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. He said the U.S. had seen no statement from Eritrea saying it was committed to the cease-fire after what appears to be a significant withdrawal of Ethiopian national defense forces from Tigray."

The Tigray leaders have waged a guerrilla war since November after a political falling out with the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who had sidelined them from influential roles in Ethiopia's government and military. An Ethiopian military spokesman did not answer the phone Tuesday.

The arrival of Tigray forces in the regional capital, Mekele, on Monday was met with cheers. The fighters on Tuesday moved into Axum and Shire, a town that in recent months saw the arrival of hundreds of thousands of people fleeing intimidation in western Tigray and is a key staging area for humanitarian aid.

Tigray forces are now in control of much of the region after a major counteroffensive with mass popular support, International Crisis Group analyst William Davison said in a statement. They are "now in a position to facilitate access to many previously hard to reach areas, he said, urging Ethiopias government not to sabotage the urgent humanitarian efforts.

But the Tigray forces' talk indicates how distrustful they are of the cease-fire," Aly Verjee, a senior adviser at the United States Institute of Peace, told AP. Of course, I think its highly irresponsible for them to say such things. It doesnt do anything for people on the brink of famine. At the same time, I understand they're motivated by deep suspicion of Eritrean forces in particular.

Major questions remained about the fate of the more than 1 million civilians that the United Nations has said remain in parts of Tigray that have been hard, if not impossible, to reach with aid. The United States has said up to 900,000 people now face famine conditions, in the world's worst hunger crisis in a decade.

That famine is entirely man-made, the acting U.S. assistant secretary of state said.

Sarah Charles, assistant to the administrator for the United States Agency for International Development, told the Washington hearing that the next week or two will be consequential. She urged Ethiopia to lift a communications blackout on Tigray and said forces from the Amhara region must lift checkpoints on key roads for aid delivery.

U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters that the impact of the current situation on the humanitarian operations in the region remains unknown right now. Operations have been constrained for the past few days due to the ongoing fighting. The airport in Mekele was closed, and routes to deliver aid were not open, he said.

Ethiopia has said the cease-fire is in part for the delivery of aid but will last only until the end of the crucial planting season in Tigray  which is in September.

In Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa, people said they weren't sure who to believe amid the battlefield claims, and hoped for peace.

Its the innocent children, farmers and the poor people that are at the front of the war and are suffering, resident Biruk Dessalegn said.

___

Associated Press writer Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report
Women and children in Tigray. Eduardo Soteras/AFP via Getty Images

The Ethiopian government on Monday declared an immediate, unilateral cease-fire in Tigray on humanitarian grounds.

Tigray is in the northernmost part of Ethiopia, with its regional government controlled by the Tigray People's Liberation Front. In November, fighting broke out between Ethiopian government forces and the TPLF, and since then, thousands of people in Tigray have been killed and many more displaced.

It has been difficult for journalists to get into Tigray, but people living there have reported gang rapes, forced starvation, and murders on the streets. Witnesses also said soldiers from neighboring Eritrea committed some of the worst atrocities, The Associated Press reports. Last week, the Ethiopian military conducted an airstrike against a market in Tigray, killing more than 60 people.

The Ethiopian government appointed an interim administration in Tigray, and on Monday, they fled Mekele, the regional capital. Ethiopian troops captured Mekele in late November, and when Tigray forces began their return on Monday, residents cheered, AP reports.

In a statement, the Ethiopian government said the cease-fire will "enable farmers to till their land" and "aid groups to operate without any military movement around," and will last until the end of planting season in September. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he is "hopeful that an effective cessation of hostilities will take place."

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BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Germany should not impose a travel ban on Portugal but limit itself to imposing testing and quarantine requirements to be in line with European Union approach, the bloc's executive said on Tuesday.

The European Commission said Germany did inform the Brussels-based executive that it now considers Portugal a "virus-variant zone" and wanted to activate emergency brake to restrict free travel to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

But it said severe restrictions on travel to and from Portugal that Berlin announced "do not seem fully aligned" with recommendations for the bloc's 27 countries meant to ease summer travel.

(Reporting by Gabriela Baczynska; editing by Philip Blenkinsop)
SEOUL, South Korea (AP)  The former mayor of South Koreas second-largest city was jailed Tuesday on a three-year sentence for sexually abusing two city employees during his tenure.

The lawyers of Oh Keo-don didnt immediately return calls and text messages asking whether they plan to appeal. Busans district court also ordered Oh to receive counseling and banned him from jobs at child welfare organizations and disability facilities for five years following the end of his jail term.

Oh, who was seen as a key ally of Busan-raised President Moon Jae-in, stepped down as the citys mayor in April 2020 after admitting he had unnecessary physical contact with a female public servant who accused him of groping her in his office. The unidentified woman said Ohs behavior caused her post traumatic stress disorder, according to her lawyers.

Oh was later separately accused of making unwanted sexual contact with another female city employee in 2018.

Ohs lawyers insisted it was unclear his behavior was responsible for the woman's PTSD. They pleaded for leniency, saying that the 72-year-old Oh made positive contributions to society and was dealing with health issues that cause cognitive impairment.

The court rejected such claims, saying it was clear that Oh abused his status while harassing the women and that his actions werent accidental or one-off in nature.

Even based on materials submitted by the defendant, its difficult to believe that the defendant has a degree of cognitive impairment that would have influenced his actions when he was committing the crimes, the court said in a statement.

Moons Democratic Party has been rocked by sexual misconduct allegations surrounding some of its major politicians.

Former Chungcheong Province Governor Ahn Hee-jung, once seen as a presidential hopeful, is currently in prison for raping his former secretary. Park Won-soon, then Seoul's mayor, was found dead of an apparent suicide in July 2020 after a female employee accused him of extended sexual harassment.

Moons liberal party lost the mayoral by-elections in both Seoul and Busan to conservative opposition candidates in April, a huge setback that analysts say possibly set the stage for an unpredictable presidential vote in March next year.
By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA (Reuters) -The U.N. investigator on human rights in Iran has called for an independent inquiry into allegations of state-ordered executions of thousands of political prisoners in 1988 and the role played by President-elect Ebrahim Raisi as Tehran deputy prosecutor.

Javaid Rehman, in an interview with Reuters on Monday, said that over the years his office has gathered testimonies and evidence. It was ready to share them if the United Nations Human Rights Council or other body sets up an impartial investigation.

He said he was concerned at reports that some "mass graves" are being destroyed as part of a continuing cover-up.

"I think it is time and it's very important now that Mr. Raisi is the president (-elect) that we start investigating what happened in 1988 and the role of individuals," Rehman said from London, where he teaches Islamic law and international law.

A probe was in the interest of Iran and could bring closure to families, he said, adding: "Otherwise we will have very serious concerns about this president and the role, the reported role, he has played historically in those executions."

Raisi's office could not be reached for comment. The office of the spokesman of the Iranian judiciary was not immediately available to comment. Irans missions to the United Nations in both New York and in Geneva did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Raisi, a hardline judge, is under U.S. sanctions over a past that includes what the United States and activists say was his involvement as one of four judges who oversaw the 1988 killings. Amnesty International has put the number executed at some 5,000, saying in a 2018 report that "the real number could be higher".

Raisi, when asked about allegations that he was involved in the killings, told reporters: "If a judge, a prosecutor has defended the security of the people, he should be praised ... I am proud to have defended human rights in every position I have held so far."

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Rehman said: "We have made communications to the Islamic Republic of Iran because we have concerns that there is again a policy to actually destroy the graves or there may be some activity to destroy evidence of mass graves."

"I will campaign for justice to be done," he added.

ARRESTS, INTIMIDATION

Raisi succeeds Hassan Rouhani on Aug. 3, having secured victory this month in an election marked by voter apathy over economic hardships and political restrictions.

Rehman denounced what he called "deliberate and manipulative strategies adopted to exclude moderate candidates and to ensure the success of a particular candidate".

"There were arrests, journalists were stopped from asking specific questions about the background of the presidential candidate Mr Raisi and there was intimidation towards any issues that were raised about his previous role and background."

Iran has never acknowledged that mass executions took place under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the revolutionary leader who died in 1989.

"The scale of executions that we hear imply that it was a part of a policy that was being pursued...It was not just one person," Rehman said.

He said there had also been "no proper investigation" into the killing of protesters in Nov. 2019, the bloodiest political unrest since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

"Even by conservative estimates we can say that more than 300 people were killed arbitrarily, extrajudicially, and nobody has been held accountable and no compensation," he said.

"There is a widespread and systemic impunity in the country for gross violations of human rights, both historically in the past as well as in the present."

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Peter Graff and Jon Boyle)
BEIJING (Reuters) - Many countries from China to Indonesia and Brazil rely heavily on Chinese vaccines to inoculate their people against COVID-19, but there are growing concerns about whether they provide enough protection against the Delta variant, first identified in India.

Below are views from China's health experts about the effectiveness of home-grown vaccines against the Delta, which is becoming the globally dominant variant, and virus preventive measures China is taking.

DO CHINESE VACCINES WORK AGAINST DELTA?

China has not provided vaccine effectiveness results against the variant based on large-scale data in clinical trials or real-world use, nor offered detailed information from lab tests, but Chinese experts are urging people to get inoculated as soon as possible.

The lack of detailed data on the Chinese vaccines against the Delta has hobbled any meaningful peer reviews by foreign experts.

Researchers found that Chinese vaccines are somewhat effective in reducing the risk of symptomatic and severe cases caused by Delta, Zhong Nanshan, a epidemiologist who helped shape China's COVID-19 response, told reporters.

It is based on analysis of infections in Guangzhou city, and Zhong told Reuters the results are preliminary and the sample size is small.

Sinovac spokesman Liu Peicheng told Reuters preliminary results based on blood samples from those vaccinated with its shot showed a three-fold reduction in neutralizing effect against the Delta.

He said a booster shot following the two dose-based regimen could quickly elicit stronger and more durable antibody reaction against the Delta. However, he didn't provide detailed data.

Antibodies triggered by two Chinese vaccines are less effective against the Delta compared with other variants, Feng Zijian, former deputy director at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told state media last week.

Feng did not provide details including the name of the two vaccines.

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The shots could still offer protection, since none of those vaccinated in southern Guangdong province, where China's first cases of the Delta variant were found, developed severe symptoms. All severe cases are from unvaccinated people.

Jin Dong-Yan, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong, said Feng's comment alone is not enough to back up the claim that Chinese vaccines are effective against severe cases, as more data is needed.

Indonesia, which has reported record daily cases recently due to a surge in the Delta variant, saw hundreds of medical workers infected by the COVID-19 despite being vaccinated with Sinovac's shot, officials said earlier this month.

It was not immediately clear, however, if the Indonesian medical workers were infected by the Delta variant.

HOW DO THEY COMPARE WITH WESTERN SHOTS?

A study by Public Health England (PHE) found in May the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was 88% effective against symptomatic disease from the Delta two weeks after the second dose.

That compared with 93% effectiveness against the Alpha variant, first identified in Britain.

Two doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine were 60% effective against symptomatic disease from the Delta compared with 66% effectiveness against the Alpha, PHE said.

There is no substantial data showing how protective Johnson & Johnson's single-dose COVID-19 vaccine is, and U.S. infectious disease experts are weighing the need for booster shots using mRNA vaccines.

HOW SEVERE WAS THE GUANGDONG OUTBREAK?

Guangdong, China's major manufacturing and export hub, became the country's biggest cluster of Delta cases since reporting its first locally transmitted Delta variant infection in May.

The Delta infections included 146 cases in Guangdong's capital Guangzhou and several cases from the southern tech hub of Shenzhen and nearby Dongguan city.

No new domestic transmissions of any variant have been reported in the province from June 22.

WHAT CHINA HAS DONE?

Guangdong, which has 126 million people, has fast-tracked its vaccination effort since the outbreak. It had administered just 39.15 million doses as of May 19, but the number shot up to 101.12 million by June 20.

Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Dongguan quickly sealed off neighbourhoods where those who were infected and their contacts visited and launched multiple rounds of mass testing, following the protocols observed during previous outbreaks.

The cities also required those travelling out of the province to show proof of negative COVID-19 test results.

Zhong, the epidemiologist, said that without effective control measures 7.3 million people in Guangzhou city would have been infected in the first 20 to 30 days after the initial case.

(Reporting by Roxanne Liu and Ryan Woo; Editing by Miyoung Kim & Shri Navaratnam)
A woman visiting Myrtle Beach from Pennsylvania woke up to a vulgar sight Monday morning.

Someone had written in large letters F*** Israel in the sand in front of the Holiday Sands hotel.

Its heartbreaking to think Jewish families waking up this morning while on vacation are subjected to this type of hatred, said Liora Rez, Executive Director of StopAntisemitism.org, whose organization received the report from the vacationer, who did not wish to speak to reporters. Were hopeful the Myrtle Beach Police will find those responsible and punish them accordingly.

The vacationer reported the message to Myrtle Beach police, Master Cpl. Thomas Vest said. Rez said the woman spotted the image and took a photo of it about 8 a.m., and Vest said police responded around 9 a.m. but by then the words had been washed away.

StopAntisemitism.org is a part of a non-profit foundation that works to hold antisemites accountable and to create consequences for their bigoted actions by exposing the threat that they present to all Americans and showing how their ideologies conflict with American values, morals, and principles, according to its website.

The group put out a social media post Monday, stating Sad to think Jewish children are waking up seeing this while on vacation with their families while tagging the Myrtle Beach police and city government Twitter handles.

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The message comes a several weeks after Israel carried out an air raid on the Gaza Strip, ending a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, the Associated Press reported.

The Israeli military said the airstrikes targeted Hamas militant facilities, the AP reported.

Thousands of protesters in major American cities took to the streets to demand an end to Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, the AP reported.

The protests came in response to a flare-up of violence that left 145 Palestinians dead in Gaza and eight dead on the Israeli side, AP reported.

The vacationer told Rez that the beach wasnt very busy when the message was on display and that it probably was only there for a couple hours. She told Rez that police took it very seriously and that they were very supportive.

Myrtle Beach Mayor Brenda Bethune said Monday afternoon that she was unaware of the incident and did not respond when The Sun News sought a statement later in the day.
Facebook has revealed its long-rumored standalone newsletter platform: Bulletin. Mark Zuckerberg announced the new project during a live audio room, saying that the project was a response to whats happening in the media ecosystem.

Bulletin will host a mix of free and paid content. Some articles will be freely available, while others will be behind a paywall, with paid subscribers getting access to extra features like dedicated Facebook Groups or special badges.

Like newsletter upstart Substack, Facebook is reportedly paying some writers upfront for their participation. Zuckerberg also said Facebook wont take a cut of writers earnings (at least initially), and will give them the ability to take their content and subscriber lists with them to a different platform.

Newsletters will have their own branding.

Interestingly, unlike previous journalism initiatives from Facebook, Bulletin primarily lives outside of the main Facebook app. The newsletter platform has its own website and branding, though it will take advantage of Facebooks distribution tools. The newsletters will be integrated into authors Facebook pages and readers can find the content in the news section of Facebooks app. Authors will also have the ability to "complement their writing" with podcasts and audio rooms, Zuckerberg said.

The initial lineup of writers includes authors like Malcom Gladwell and Adam Grant, and faces from TV like former CNN White House correspondent Jessica Yellin and former ESPN correspondent Erin Andrews. For now, its not clear when Facebook will open up Bulletin beyond its initial slate of hand-picked writers. The company describes the program as a "closed beta," but Zuckerberg said more writers would be coming onboard in "the coming weeks," including people specializing in local news. Recode previously reported that the company was eager to avoid the kind of political writers that have caused some headaches for Substack.
(Reuters) - Facebook Inc on Tuesday sued a California marketing company and its representatives as well as a Vietnam-based group of individuals in separate lawsuits for running deceptive and unauthorized advertisements on its platform.

The first lawsuit was against N&J USA Incorporated, Mohit Melwani and Vishaal Melwani, Facebook said https://about.fb.com/news/2021/06/combating-e-commerce-scams-and-account-takeover-attacks in a blog post.

The social media giant said the defendants ran misleading ads that promoted the sale of merchandise including clothing, watches and toys. As soon as someone clicked on the ads, they were directed to a third-party website to pay for their purchase.

But once the payment was completed, users either never got any merchandise or the delivered item was not what they ordered for or it was of a poor quality, Facebook said.

The company also sued a group of individuals based in Vietnam who it said "misled the victims into self-compromising their accounts" and ran over $36 million in unauthorized ads.

(Reporting by Akanksha Rana in Bengaluru; Editing by Arun Koyyur)
A hiker at an Alaska national park asked a family member for help  then rolled 150 feet down a slope.

David Shrider, 52, was on a hiking trip with five friends and family members at Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve.

His family found him dead after he tumbled down a slope and his son called 911, according to a National Park Service news release.

The parks search and rescue team recovered his body by helicopter. The official cause of death has not been determined.

Shrider was a beloved professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, according to the universitys Farmer School of Business. He graduated from Miami in 1992 and returned as a Department of Finance professor in 2004.

David was one of the most positive people Ive ever known, always sporting a smile (and often a bow tie), one person said on Facebook. You always felt better about yourself, work, life, etc after talking with him.

Shrider was named the outstanding professor by the universitys student government in 2020.

David was much loved as a valuable friend and colleague of many at the Farmer School, Miami University and the Oxford community at large, the Farmer School of Business said on Facebook. His positive impact and connection with his students was immeasurable.

Shriders death comes one month after another hiker lost his footing on a snowy slope at Wrangell-St. Elias and rolled hundreds of feet. His fall triggered a snow slide that swept him into a ravine, McClatchy News reported.

In early June, the Alaska National Guard rescued 12 mountaineers in the national park after bad weather left them stranded.

Most of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve is backcountry and remote, according to the National Park Service. Cellphone service is limited, and tourists have to take extra precautions.

There are few maintained trails and many unpaved roads within the national park.

Visitor services are limited, access can be challenging, weather varies widely, and a variety of wildlife can be encountered, the National Park Service said. Flexibility and patience are required.

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Hiker sees friend swept over cliff after triggering snow slide, Alaska officials say

Mountain climber with no rope plunges 1,000 feet in Alaska national park, officials say
SURFSIDE, Fla.  Families and friends are still clinging to hope that their loved ones may be found alive nearly a week after the collapse of a Miami Beach-area condo building.

Were not going to give up, said Sally Noriega, who has been praying for the rescue of her mother-in-law, who was in the Surfside, Florida, condominium last Thursday. We have faith in God above, and that if shes still trapped in the rubble that they will find her.

The search for survivors entered its sixth day Tuesday. There have been no rescues since early Thursday, shortly after Champlain Towers South collapsed into a pile of rubble.

Image: Partial collapse of residential building in Surfside (Marco Bello / Reuters)

Twelve people are confirmed dead and 149 people remain unaccounted for, as of Tuesday evening. First responders continue to operate in search-and-rescue mode and have not yet shifted to recovery.

About 250 emergency rescuers sifted through the rubble Tuesday, Miami-Dade fire officials said.

Rescue worker Adam Hayward said that the work is sometimes frustrating, but that he remains motivated by remembering that someone could still be alive under the rubble.

"Honestly, what keeps us going is the fact that somebody could be there," he told NBC News. "If that was my family, I'd be digging nonstop. So we're going to keep working and keep digging in the hope that the slab we move leads to something else."

Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett said he also is hopeful the continued search will lead to a favorable outcome.

He said the search "should go on until we pull every last person out of there and reunite them with their family.

Image: (Chandan Khanna / AFP - Getty Images)

Asked about not having found anyone alive since early in the rescue operation, Burkett said, Well, I guess we havent looked in the right place yet."

Even as their frustration with the slow pace of the rescue effort grows, some family members say they won't stop believing that reunions are possible.

Many relatives were allowed near the collapsed site Monday, where they shouted out the names of loved ones, hoping their voices could inspire or lift the spirits of those trapped amid the rubble.

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We are just waiting for answers. Thats what we want, Dianne Ohayon told NBC South Florida. Her parents, Myriam and Arnie Notkin, were in the building.

Its hard to go through these long days and we havent got any answers yet, she said.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., said the trip provided a little relief for people.

So many of them got solace from that and were able to see that they (first responders) are doing everything that they can, she said. As long as search and rescue teams are telling me that theres a possibility of finding someone alive, then we have to just keep moving.

At a makeshift memorial a few blocks from the building, emotions ran high. Crying uncontrollably, Ana Costa paced back and forth in front of pictures of the missing.

Im frustrated, said Costa, 59, who moved from the condo building two months ago and knows people who are now unaccounted for.

Image

She said she understands rescue workers are doing what they can to bring back her friends.

Theyve tried all of their best, day and night," Costa said. "They are doing all that they can and more.

She said that theres a small chance her friends may be alive, but that shes leaving it in the hands of a higher power.

God, she said. God can answer.

Noriega, too, is leaning on her faith as she waits for word on her mother-in-law.

"If shes already gone on, then shes with the Lord above," she said. "Our faith and our hope are sustaining us.
$50bn accidentially deposited by Chase Bank (YouTube / Fox News)

It was nice while it lasted.

Accidental billionaires gave up their entire fortune after discovering $50bn sitting in the familys bank account.

Darren James, from Louisiana, says his wife opened up her account to discover $50bn deposited by Chase Bank.

But instead of buying a new pair of shoes or, say, a private jet, the family called the bank to report the extra zeroes burning a hole on their balance statement.

"Im like, Where did that come from?" Mr James told Fox News. "And all we were thinking was whos going to be knocking on our door... because we dont know anybody with that type of money to begin with."

The father of two hoped there was some hitherto unknown rich uncle that died and bequeathed the stacks of cash, but they knew immediately it must have been a banking error.

"We knew it wasnt ours. We didnt earn it, so we couldnt do anything with it," he told the outlet.

And as a former law enforcement officer with the Louisiana Department of Public Safety, he also knew keeping the money would be considered theft.

But for a moment, they were among the richest people on the planet.

I was a billionaire for four days ... It was a cool feeling, even though you couldnt do anything with it, he told Fox. "It was a great feeling while it was there to see that many zeroes in your account ... It was pretty neat to see what it looked like."

While the cash was deposited into their account on 12 June, it wasnt removed until 15 June, Mr James said.

A spokesperson for Chase Bank said in a statement to Fox that they corrected the error.

"We had a technical glitch over a week ago impacting a limited number of accounts," the statement said. "The issue has been resolved and those accounts are now showing accurate balances."

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Reports of possible incendiary devices left on public land in North Idaho spread quickly on social media Monday, though officials with the state fire marshals office said the claims are unsubstantiated.

A since-deleted post on BigCountryNewsConnection.com stated that the Idaho Department of Lands had received reports of gas canisters with combustible devices attached found on forest land.

These devices are reportedly rigged to ignite a fire if the cans are picked up, the Clarkston, Washington, news site reported.

A Facebook post with a link to the article had been shared dozens of times Monday afternoon. That post has also been deleted.

The article cited an internal memo from the Department of Lands that agency spokesperson Sharla Arledge said was not meant to be shared publicly. The memo urged anyone who found a gas canister on public land to contact Jason Blubaum, a deputy fire marshal based in Coeur dAlene.

Blubaum called the reports, which were also shared in a popular social media post by the Spokane Tribal Police, fake news and a Facebook post telephone game.

In a phone interview, he said the claims began with North Idaho News, a community Facebook page that shares crime and other local updates. The page says it is not affiliated with any real news company.

A post on the North Idaho News page on June 20 stated, Weve had, and seen, numerous reports of someone leaving full gas cans with an ignition source in them throughout the north Panhandle on or near Forest Service roads. Tonight a lit gas can was on Government Way in Hayden. The post was shared nearly 1,000 times.

Blubaum said he has investigated one fire in the area that was determined to be an accidental ignition. He said the fire marshals office has received numerous reports of gas canister sightings, but said calling parties refuse to provide additional information about the sightings or themselves when officials follow up.

To us, its fake news right now, Blubaum said. Theres been not one (canister) seen by law enforcement or by firefighters.

Big Country News Connection also reported that a Spokane bomb squad and the areas Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms office was investigating the claims. Blubaum said that is false.
A man from Tampa, Florida, was sentenced to life in prison on Monday for sexually battering and molesting his girlfriend's 10-year-old daughter before dousing her in bleach to conceal evidence.

Jurors in court found Lewis Matthews, 43, guilty of four felonies after a three-day trial earlier in June.

"A despicable crime," said Andrew Warren, Hillsborough County attorney. "Its heartbreaking to see a victim abused by someone who's supposed to care for her. We have zero tolerance for child predators. Thats why we aggressively prosecute these cases. And that's why he'll spend the rest of his life in prison."

The charges for Matthews, who is black, include a life sentence for sexual battery of a victim under the age of 12, including five additional years in prison for tampering with physical evidence and 25 years for each of two felony charges for lewd or lascivious molestation of a victim younger than 12.

TWENTY-FOUR MIAMI APARTMENT BUILDINGS, INCLUDING TWO COUNTY-OWNED STRUCTURES, LISTED UNSAFE AFTER AUDIT

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The girl told investigators she fell asleep on the living room floor on April 13, 2019, prosecutors said. She said Matthews woke her up at around 3:30 a.m. and molested her.

The man stopped when the girl's mother heard a noise and came downstairs. Her mother was "stunned by what she discovered and dialed 911," prosecutors said.

Matthews took the girl and two other children living in the home and put them in the car, driving to the nearest gas station. It was there where he made the girl take off her clothes in the convenience store bathroom and doused her in bleach to destroy evidence. Investigators were able to recover samples of Matthews's DNA on the girl's body and the clothing he attempted to hide in the store's trash.

On the way out of the courtroom Monday, Matthews was caught on camera shaking his attorney's hand and chuckling after he was given his life sentence in prison. The victim's mother was reportedly not in attendance.

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The Washington Examiner contacted the Hillsborough County State Attorney's Office but did not immediately receive a response.

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Tags: News, Florida, Florida Man, Sexual Assault, Prison, Crime

Original Author: Kaelan Deese

Original Location: Florida man gets life sentence for molesting girlfriend's 10-year-old daughter
Exterior (PHOTO: Zat Astha/Yahoo Lifestyle SEA)

SINGAPORE  One night, after dinner at Hans Im Gluck at Orchard Road and on the way back to the MRT station, my dining partner remarked how void of a crowd this part of town is on a weekday night. Hes not wrong. Walking through the underpass that conveniently connects all the major malls in Singapore on a Tues night is, in some ways, surreal. I reckon its less due to changing dining habits and more because of rising COVID-19 pandemic numbers within the community keeping Singaporeans firmly at home.

Where I find myself at a lot these few months instead is the neighbourhood of Telok Ayer where restaurants, bars, and cosy speciality restaurants open faster than you can say travel bubble with Hong Kong. Clearly, this pandemic is doing a lot of good to the vibrant F&B scene in Singapore, as evident not just by new openings but also several revamp and restoration of existing joints, swiftly gutted from the inside and refurbished to accommodate a more contemporary, and hopefully more promising concept.

It doesnt get more promising than what Park Bench Deli (PBD) has done with their spacerenowned for their bevy of artisanal sandwiches and seating no more than 15 diners, shoulder to shoulder, cheek to cheek. Its the kind of space food critics deign to label as smallcosy, homely, anything but small, please. All that is now firmly in the past, as PBD ushers in a new era of dining with a rejuvenated 42-seater interior that now accommodates proper dine-in, all day and night.

McRib Sandwich (PHOTO: Zat Astha/Yahoo Lifestyle SEA)

The new interior is the handiwork of Dean Chew from DRAWNa space punctuated by clean lines, tables and furniture in white and brown, and a kitchen and bar that runs the length of half the restaurant floor plan. A new mise en scene naturally calls for a refreshed menu, here, curated by founder and director Andrei Drei Soe, newly-minted head chef Matt Kuhnemann, and senior chef Ben Phoon.

A refurbished interior is a good enough reason to introduce new menu options that build on PBDs sandwich philosophy that has kept the lights on since it opened six years ago. Theres a McRib Sandwich (S$10++) that sounds positively and delightfully imposing. Its a simple assembly of pork ribs topped with pickles and sandwiched between two thin slices of white bread. Theres a bold caramelised char in all of this though I wonder if it could benefit from having a bit more juiciness throughout.

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Corn Dog (PHOTO: Zat Astha/Yahoo Lifestyle SEA)

The Corn Dog (S$6++) is the kind of thing your doctor would recommend judicious refraintheres a generous slather of Parmesan Mayo here. Not that it should stop you from ordering one. But maybe just one to pair with any drinks from PBDs expanded bar program headlined by Jeremy Chua and features craft beers, natural wines, and a brief but creative cocktail program.

Grilled Cheese (PHOTO: Zat Astha/Yahoo Lifestyle SEA)

If youre new to the culinary auspices of PBD, Id recommend the Grilled Cheese (S$15++)a praiseworthy introduction to all things PBD. It is wedged between toasted sourdough, blue cheese, cheddar, and mozzarella meld into one creamy and decadent whole without it being too excessively cloying. It helps that there are slices of prosciutto that assertively cuts through all that fatty mouthfeel and pickled onions for a subtle nuance of acidity and brightness. All in all, an academically sound sandwich.

Smoked Pork Collar (PHOTO: Zat Astha/Yahoo Lifestyle SEA)

PBDs refurbishment brings proper plates of mains that need more than just hands and grubby fingersbring in the forks and knives. Cutlery in a sandwich joint? Id never! But here, its to good cause because the Smoked Pork Collar (S$28++) I tried was a proper work of art through and through. Its probably PBDs best addition since its reopening with meat that has been cooked and smoked beautifully. It comes served with grilled collard greens on top that are blanketed with opaque lardo sheets, which really elevates the entire plate to heroic proportions. Also, its enormous. This whole plate is big, almost elephantinenot that it bothers me one bit, of course.

Reeses Peanut Butter Cup (PHOTO: Zat Astha/Yahoo Lifestyle SEA)

Desserts come by way of a Reeses Peanut Butter Cup (S$10++) that will have fans of this childhood classic clamouring for a good last bite. Is it the most innovative iteration for desserts? Not exactly. But its chocolate, and what kind of monster doesn't like chocolate, am I right? However, what PBD could do is temp down the sweetness a tad and add an element of acidity or brightness to balance the whole affair.

I might be unfairly judging this dessert cup, perhaps expecting too much of a friendly and cosy sandwich shop. But with this revamp, PBD is no longer just a corner joint serving up toothsome fare for frazzled office workers. Its PBDs new age of food, and so it has to be judged and critiqued on the same level as all the other restaurants within the vicinity. Not that they have anything especially dire to worry. Loyal customers will come in droves, and if PBD stays true and continue applying the same culinary philosophy they accord to their sandwiches, I reckon theyll be here at Telok Ayer Street for a long time to come.

Instagram | 179 Telok Ayer Street, S068627

Tue to Sun lunch: 9am  10.30pm

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Cory in the House star Kyle Massey could spend time in the big house after being accused of sending pornographic material to a minor.

Massey, 29, was charged with felony immoral communication with a minor on June 14 in King County, Washington, after an unnamed 13-year-old girl and her mother first brought a lawsuit against him in 2019, according to court documents first obtained by TMZ.

The March 2019 lawsuit seeking $1.5 million alleged Massey "held himself out as a father figure" to the girl in 2018 and requested to be her friend on Snapchat, at which point, he sent her "numerous sexually explicit text messages, images and videos."

FORMER NICKELODEON STAR DRAKE BELL PLEADS GUILTY TO CHARGES OF CRIMES AGAINST MINOR

The civil proceeding stalled because the girl's lawyers didn't think Massey had enough money to make the case worthwhile, after which they filed a report with the sheriff's office, the new documents reportedly show.

Massey, who became a child star for his Disney roles on That's So Raven and its spinoff series Cory in the House, was issued a notice of arraignment on June 15 followed by an order for failure to appear deferring issuance of a bench warrant on Monday, according to documents in King County circuit court.

Representatives for Disney did not immediately respond to the Washington Examiner's requests for comment.

Massey isn't the only child star to be accused of inappropriate interactions with a minor. Former Nickelodeon star Drake Bell, known for his role as Drake Parker on Drake & Josh, pleaded guilty on Wednesday to multiple charges regarding crimes against a minor.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Bell allegedly sent inappropriate messages to a minor, who was 15 at the time. He had been out on a $2,500 personal bond since his arraignment June 3.

Sentencing in Bell's case is slated for July 12, and the accuser will be given an opportunity to make a statement.

Story continues

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Tags: News, Disney, Crime, Child Abuse, Sexual Harassment

Original Author: Carly Roman

Original Location: Former Disney star charged with felony immoral communication with minor
At least four Catholic churches on native land in Canada have burned down in the last week, following nationwide grief and outrage over the discovery of human remains in unmarked graves at so-called residential schools. (THE CANADIAN PRESS)

At least four Catholic churches on native land in Canada have burned down in the last seven days, as the nation reels from the recent discoveries of more than 750 unidentified remains, many of them children, found in unmarked graves at the countrys so-called residential schools, often run by the Catholic church.

On Saturday morning, in the province of British Columbia, St. Anns Catholic Church on the Upper Similkameen Indian Bands land went up in flames, and later that day Chopaka Catholic on the Lower Similkameen Bands land burned down as well, according to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

The RCMP said it was investigating the fires in connection with two other church fires from last week, when churches on Penticton and Osoyoos Indian Band lands burned down. No arrests have been made.

Should our investigations deem these fires as arson, the RCMP will be looking at all possible motives and allow the facts and evidence to direct our investigative action, Sgt Jason Bayda, of the Penticton South Okanagan RCMP, said in a statement. We are sensitive to the recent events, but wont speculate on a motive.

The leaders of the Lower Similkameen Indian Band said they understood the grief and rage being felt in the indigenous community and beyond in Canada, but called for processing these feelings in a more healing way.

"This is a symptom of the intergenerational trauma our survivors and intergenerational descendants are experiencing, there are supports to help deal with these emotions in a more healing way," they wrote in a statement. It is not our place to say who to worship and what historical relevance it has to our community members, we are all free to choose and it is our place as a community to support that freedom.

The fires come amid renewed scrutiny, outrage, and pain over the countrys long legacy of abusing native children at residential schools, following the discoveries in May and June of hundreds of unmarked remains across multiple facilities.

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Earlier this month, demonstrators toppled a statue of Egerton Ryerson, a Canadian public education official known as one of the architects of the residential school system, which ran from the late 19th century through the 1990s and held an estimated 150,000 children overall, intentionally separating them from their language and culture in what the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission called a cultural genocide.

At least 4,100 children died from disease, neglect, and suicide, though thats likely a massive undercount, according to the TRC.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and others have called on the Pope to make a formal apology to First Nations people in Canada.

I have spoken personally directly with His Holiness Pope Francis to press upon him how important it is not just that he makes an apology but that he makes an apology to Indigenous Canadians on Canadian soil, the PM said on Friday.

So far, the Pope has expressed his sympathies but avoided making a direct apology. The Church has said its planning an event where the Pope will his heartfelt closeness, address the impact of colonization and the implication of the Church in the residential schools, so as to respond to the suffering of Indigenous Peoples and the ongoing effects of intergenerational trauma.

Though the residential school system is over, indigenous people in Canada still face deep inequality in areas like health and access to clean water. Thousands of native women are also presumed dead or missing in recent decades, in what one report deemed a second genocide of First Nations people.

Read More

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Canada lowers flags to honor residential school children
Lesbian couples and single women in France are set to celebrate a milestone on Tuesday when parliament finally passes a bill giving them access to fertility treatment for the first time.

Under current French law, only heterosexual couples have the right to access medically assisted procreation methods such as in vitro fertilisation (IVF).

Lesbian couples and single women who want children have to travel abroad for IVF using donor sperm.

That is set to change under the new legislation introduced by President Emmanuel Macron's government, which the National Assembly will vote on after two years of often acrimonious debate.

The reform will bring France in line with several European countries, including Belgium and Spain, currently two of the top destinations for French lesbian couples and single women looking for help to conceive.

The Inter-LGBT association said it would welcome the change, which it described as a "forceps birth" after years of foot-dragging by Macron and his Socialist predecessor Francois Hollande.

- Protests fizzle -

While campaigning for president in 2017 Macron said he was "favourable" to extending fertility treatment to lesbian and single women.

But once elected, the centrist leader repeatedly put off changing the law, mindful of the mass protests triggered by a gay marriage bill in 2013 that caught Hollande's government off guard.

However, public opinion this time is squarely behind the move.

A recent Ifop poll suggested 67 percent of French people supported the measure.

Calls for protests by the largely Catholic anti-gay marriage movement yielded only a tepid response.

Under the proposed law, which was first ratified by the National Assembly in October 2019 but then held up in the Senate, France's healthcare system will cover the cost of fertility procedures for all women under 43.

The right-wing Republicans party, which has a majority in the Senate and which opposed the bill, introduced hundreds of amendments before sending the text back to the assembly for Tuesday's final vote.

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Give the dominance of Macron's Republic on the Move party and its allies in the lower house, the ballot is seen as a mere formality.

The legislation addresses several issues arising out of the massive increase in the use of fertility treatment in recent years.

It allows children conceived with donor sperm to learn the donor's identity when they become adults, ending the anonymity that donors in France have been guaranteed until now.

And it allows women in their thirties to freeze their eggs -- a procedure currently available only to women undergoing treatment for conditions that could impact their fertility, such as radiation therapy or chemotherapy for cancer.

But it stops short at legalising surrogacy, a practice used by some gay couples to have children that is still widely rejected in France.

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A vehicle lost control and crashed into a fuel tanker early Monday, causing it to roll over and spill about 9,000 gallons of fuel in the northbound lanes of Interstate 95 in Broward County, troopers said.

The fuel truck struck a light pole as it overturned, causing it to fall into the southbound lanes, which then made three cars crash. The Florida Highway Patrol has closed all northbound and southbound lanes between Atlantic Boulevard and Sample Road in Pompano Beach for the investigation and cleanup.

Helicopter video taken by WSVN showed firefighters using foam on the truck, which is on its side. The fuel truck was lifted back onto its wheels by 9:30 a.m.

The crash between the vehicle and the fuel truck happened in the northbound lanes of I-95 near Copans Road. The drivers of the fuel truck and the vehicle that collided with it were treated on scene for minor injuries. The three drivers in the other cars, on the southbound lanes, were taken to the hospital, troopers said.

Their condition is still unknown.

Use the turnpike / Powerline / 441 / Federal this morning and expect delays, Total Traffic Miami says.

This article will be updated.
By Crispian Balmer and Humeyra Pamuk

MATERA, Italy (Reuters) - G20 foreign ministers called on Tuesday for multilateral cures for global crises like the COVID-19 pandemic and climate emergency at their first face-to-face meeting in two years.

The one-day gathering in the heat-soaked southern city of Matera focused on how to improve cooperation and revive the world's economy following the pandemic and how to boost sustainable development in Africa.

"The pandemic has highlighted the need for an international response to emergencies that transcend national boundaries," Italian Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio told his counterparts from the Group of 20 major economies.

The G20 members account for more than 80% of world gross domestic product, 75% of global trade and 60% of the population of the planet. Those in Matera included the top diplomats of the United States, Japan, Britain, France, Germany and India.

However, the foreign ministers of China, Brazil and Australia opted to follow the discussions by video link, while Russia and South Korea sent deputy ministers.

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said he regretted the absence of direct counterparts from Beijing and Moscow. "When you get together, you also have to talk to each other. We need dialogue with Russia and China," he said during a break.

Heading into the meeting, Maas said he would raise his unhappiness at the way he thought China and Russia had offered COVID vaccines to boost their standing with certain countries.

"(This) is not about achieving short-term geostrategic advantages," he said.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken reiterated the need to deliver many more vaccines to poorer countries, which have so far received far fewer doses than wealthy nations.

"To bring the pandemic to an end, we must get more vaccines to more places," he said, adding that the G20 would help low-income countries address "significant debt vulnerabilities' that had been exacerbated by the coronavirus.

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MULTILATERALISM FIRST

Blinken was due to fly back to Washington later on Tuesday, ending a tour of Germany, France and Italy, during which he has underlined the desire of President Joe Biden's administration to embrace international cooperation, in contrast to previous President Donald Trump, who touted an "America First" message.

"We need to cooperate, and we need to do it effectively. Multilateralism is what makes that possible," Blinken said in his remarks to the conference, surrounded by plexiglass sheeting to prevent any possible infection from fellow delegates.

Italy, which is home to the U.N. food and agriculture agencies, pushed the importance of global food security and nutrition during the meeting and announced it would hold an additional 2-day summit dedicated to Africa in October.

"I believe that the G20 has a duty to support Africa in getting out of this difficult period and into a phase of sustained and sustainable growth," Di Maio told reporters.

Given the broad range of countries in the G20, getting agreement can be difficult, but hosts Italy said there was gathering consensus on a few core issues.

"Beyond the differences and divisions of some countries at the G20 table, we all agree that on climate change we have to cooperate. And even where there are differences, we must try with all our might to tackle climate disruption together and make our societies sustainable," Di Maio said.

(Additional reporting by Andreas Rinke in Berlin, Editing by Timothy Heritage)
Twitter fans are asking Gabrielle Union and John Cho to co-star in a romantic comedy, and both actors tweeted their full support.



"Asking, nay pleading": A fan tweeted on June 21 that she was "once again asking, nay pleading" for Union and Cho to star in a romantic comedy together.



In her response, Union shared that she has been "trying" and tagged Cho to "just say the word."

Cho replied to Union with a fist bump emoji.



Their history: Union and Cho were former co-stars in the show "FlashForward," and fans have been asking for another collaboration between the two after their show was canceled in 2010.



Journalist and producer Bim Adewunmi stated that she had asked Union about working with Cho again because she is a "Demetri/Zoeyshipper for life."

Union replied that she has "tried to put Cho in every movie [she's] ever done since 'FlashForward.'" She thinks Cho "should be in everything" and that he is the "perfect leading man."

Adewunmi asked via Twitter who would hire her to "develop this Gabrielle Union and John Cho comedy-drama about a couple who renovates a B&B in Vermont" in 2017. Union saw the tweet months later and asked how she "missed this goodness," tagging Cho.



Fan reactions: Several fans on Twitter responded with excitement and stated that they would "pay good money" for a Union and Cho romantic comedy.





Featured Images via NouTube (left) and Gabrielle Union (right)

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Game developers are speaking out about their fickle careers, which are rife with long hours, stagnation and the threat of layoffs.

Why it matters: Longtime designer Laralyn McWilliams calls this "one of the unspoken taxes of being in game dev," pointing in a Twitter thread to 10 moves in 27 years that span cities from Raleigh, North Carolina, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Seattle, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

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"It almost certainly destroys your spouse/partner's career because they have no consistency, no long track record, less opportunity for advancement. And it becomes harder and harder to make friends in new cities as you age, especially for an introvert like me."

McWilliams also shared a story about talking career advancement with a colleague: "I said, 'I burned my entire life and my husband's on the altar of game development.' I have no regrets because game dev and design is at my core ... but it's a hard road for sure.

What they're saying: An executive producer at Bungie commiserated with McWilliams over 11 moves in 22 years. "Also 'what spouse' can be the other side effect of all this," she added.

Others have found a way to enjoy long careers in one place. "It can be done," said one developer, citing 27 years in Massachusetts. Another developer at Arkane Studios called themselves "extraordinarily lucky" to have spent 30 years working in Austin.

The bottom line: The problems McWilliams points to are more complicated for immigrant developers.

Developers who come work on visas are more susceptible to having their lives uprooted when a sudden layoff occurs; many visas require them to find employment in weeks, or face deportation.

"One of the reasons myself and so many other immigrants have stayed in Montreal is the number of studios," said one programming project lead. "You can change jobs without giving up your friends, property and quality of life."

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The Republican head of the Houses China Task Force revealed new testimony that the Chinese military may have taken over the Wuhan Institute of Virology earlier than previously reported, which he said added evidence indicating COVID-19 originated in the lab.

Rep. Michael McCaul, ranking GOP member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, made the revelation during a Tuesday panel presentation organized by House Republicans on the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis.

New testimony now received by my committee reveals the Chinese military potentially took over this lab, not in January 2020 as was reported, but earlier in 2019, McCaul said. The Chinese military were actually in the facility at the time of 2017. That signals the CCP was worried about something at the lab before the world even knew what COVID-19 was. Why else would they put the Chinese military in charge?

A State Department fact sheet released in January contended Wuhan lab researchers conducted experiments involving the bat coronavirus identified by Wuhan virologists in January 2020 as its closest sample to COVID-19," and the lab has a published record of conducting gain-of-function research to engineer chimeric viruses. The fact sheet also asserted lab workers became sick with coronavirus-like symptoms in autumn 2019.

The declassified fact sheet discussed secret military activity at the Wuhan lab noting, Despite the WIV presenting itself as a civilian institution, the United States has determined that the WIV has collaborated on publications and secret projects with Chinas military. The WIV has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.

TRUMP COVID TESTING CZAR SAYS COVID-19 ORIGINATED IN WUHAN LAB

McCaul said new facts "not only point to the Wuhan institute being the likeliest point of origin, but they establish a high likelihood that the virus was man-made as well.

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He added bluntly, It wasnt natural. It was a lab.

I now feel comfortable concluding that it is more likely than not that it came from the lab. In fact, I would say that there is credible evidence  As a former federal prosecutor, I can tell you that the preponderance of the evidence that it came from the lab is very convincing, McCaul said. Unfortunately, we may never know for certain because the Chinese Communist Party went to great lengths to cover up this outbreak.

The Texas Republican said GOP members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee would release an updated origins report in July.

A 90-page September report from McCaul contended China's cover-up and the World Health Organizations fumbling of the crisis allowed the outbreak to cause a pandemic.

The report included a section pointing to a series of outstanding issues with the WIV and its BSL-4 lab that compound the ongoing debate," including the Chinese governments "military takeover" of the lab.

It is important to note the direct influence of the CCP within the WIV. The Director General of the institute is Wang Yanyi, who joined the China Zhi Gong Party, a CCP controlled minority party, in 2010. In 2018, the same year she became the Director General of the WIV, she was elected the Deputy Director of the Wuhan Municipal Party Committee, the GOP report stated. Until early 2020, the BSL-4 lab was managed by Yuan Zhiming. Yuan is the President of the Chinese Communist Party Committee within the Wuhan Branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, to which the WIV belongs. Local CCP leaders not only run the WIV itself, but also directly managed the BSL-4 lab.

The Republican report added: After the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak began, Yuan was replaced on January 31, 2020. In a possible fulfillment of the concerns raised by the French defense and intelligence services almost two decades prior, he was succeeded by Major General Chen Wei, the PRCs top biowarfare expert.

An article by the Chinese state-run Peoples Liberation Army Daily, published at the end of January 2020, claimed the tent-type mobile testing laboratory urgently launched by the Academy of Military Medicine of the Academy of Military Sciences in Wuhan began operation on the morning of January 30. The outlet said, "Members of the military medical expert group on this expedition are all the backbone forces of the Military Medical Research Institute who have been engaged in pathogen research for a long time ... and represent the high level of the military's major epidemic management level.

The South China Morning Post reported about Chens presence at the Wuhan lab in early March 2020.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

An article from August 2020 hosted on NIHs website stated, Chinas official reaction has added fuel to the fires of suspicion and contended that in mid-February, Chen Wei, a major general in the Peoples Liberation Army and a leading biological weapons expert at the Academy of Military Science, was appointed to take the helm at the WIV.

The Biden administration and the United Statess allies are largely pinning hopes for a second COVID-19 origins investigation in China on the WHO, despite the WHO-China joint study teams visit to Wuhan earlier this year that essentially dismissed the lab leak hypothesis.

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Tags: News, Michael McCaul, Wuhan Lab, Coronavirus, China

Original Author: Jerry Dunleavy

Original Location: GOP China Task Force leader says Chinese military may have taken over Wuhan lab in 2019
Ohio GOP candidate for US Senate pictured here in October 2012. Chris Maddaloni/CQ Roll Call

At least two fundraisers on GOP Senate candidate Josh Mandel's team quit over a toxic workplace, sources told the Columbus Dispatch.

Sources alleged that environment was created by his campaign finance director, Rachel Wilson, who he is dating.

Wilson reportedly berated staffers in front of others and asked them to work 12-hour days.

See more stories on Insider's business page.

At least two staffers on Ohio Senate candidate Josh Mandel's campaign quit over a toxic work environment that they say was created by his finance director whom he is dating, according to a report from the Columbus Dispatch.

Three fundraisers have quit Mandel's staff, but two among them accused Rachel Wilson, the candidate's campaign finance director, of berating staffers in front of other people and forcing them to work 12-hour days, two sources told the Dispatch.

One source told the Dispatch that Wilson "very much created a traumatic and hostile work environment."

Mandel's campaign manager Scott Guthrie told the Dispatch that Wilson and Mandel had been dating since November 2020. He declined to comment to the Dispatch on the specific allegations about the workplace.

One source told the Dispatch that Mandel and Wilson were known to openly fight in blowout shouting matches in the office in front of other staffers, saying, "They'd go out in the hallway and scream at each other."

In 2017, during Mandel's second run for Senate against Sen. Sherrod Brown, Wilson was also captured on camera shoving a Democratic party tracker, a person who attends and films events for an opposing candidate. Mandel ended up dropping out of that race in January 2018, citing a family health issue.

Mandel, a former Ohio state treasurer and state representative, is now running for the GOP primary in the open race to replace Republican Sen. Rob Portman, who is retiring in 2022.

The Mandel campaign on Tuesday said it raised $1.3 million in 2021's second fundraising quarter.

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Mandel, a staunch ally of former President Donald Trump, is competing in a crowded field with former state GOP chair Jane Timken and businessmen Mike Gibbons and Bernie Moreno, with "Hillbilly Elegy" author J.D. Vance also expected to jump into the race.

The most recent internal poll of the GOP Senate primary commissioned by Mandel's campaign in early June showed him leading the rest of the field by a wide margin, with over a third of likely GOP primary voters still undecided.

Read the original article on Business Insider
However well-meaning its intentions, the Biden administration recently set a perilous precedent by backing a waiver at the World Trade Organization that could deprive the creators of COVID-19 vaccines of their intellectual-property  IP protections.

For decades, I have worked with universities and their researchers to help get their discoveries commercialized. The waiver could presage a broader incursion by the federal government into the intellectual property rights of American universities, research institutions and companies, large and small.

The IP waiver could trigger attempts by the federal government to march in under the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act and forcibly re-license patents that emerge from publicly funded research in university labs. This would be a shame.

The Bayh-Dole Act  which then-Sen. Joe Biden voted for  was designed to promote innovation by allowing universities to own the patents on their researchers discoveries and then license those patents to companies to turn them into real-world products. Before the Act, the government owned the patents on any discoveries made with federal grant support  and 95 percent of those patented discoveries languished unused in federal repositories.

Bayh-Dole has laid the groundwork for extraordinary economic growth in cutting-edge industries, ranging from agriculture to software to biotechnology. The law has been especially important for fostering the creation, launch, and financing of more than 13,000 startup companies since 1996. Bayh-Dole has contributed to the development of more than 200 drugs  including the mRNA technology in COVID-19 vaccines  as well as technologies ranging from 5G phones, Honeycrisp apples, drought-resistant seeds and even Googles search engine. Bayh-Dole has contributed $1.7 trillion to the U.S. economy and supported 5.9 million jobs.

Bayh-Dole allows the government to assert control over a patent that resulted from federal funding only if the funded invention is not being commercialized. Sens. Birch Bayh and Robert Dole crafted the Act to permit march ins only in cases of commercial abuse and not for price control.

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Proof that the bar for federal control is high can be seen in the fact that the right has never been exercised in the four decades of the Acts existence. Petitions to march in have been made over the years, but none have succeeded. The most recent attempt was by a consortium of 34 state attorneys general  led by Xavier Becerra of California  to compel the pharma company Gilead Sciences to reduce the price of its remdesivir drug. The attempt failed, but with Becerra now ensconced in Washington as secretary for Health and Human Services, there is every likelihood that there will be fresh attempts to use march in powers.

Clearly, drug prices need to be more affordable. But IP waivers and march-ins are the wrong solutions. Such efforts would damage financing for startups that commercialize academic research discoveries.

Consider the University of Florida and the University of South Florida, where my venture capital fund has supported new delivery systems for gene therapy and an experimental cure for blindness. The UFs dorzolamide, an ophthalmic drop used for glaucoma, and FSUs metal alkoxide process for the production of Taxol, a chemotherapy drug for lung, ovarian and breast cancer, were commercialized thanks to Bayh-Dole.

What drives such innovation in the Sunshine State and around the country? Obviously, scientists love seeing their hard work result in innovations that change the way people live, work and play. But economic incentives matter, too. Scientists cant work for free. They have families, mortgages and bills to pay like everyone else.

Intellectual property isnt simply good business or a case of us vs. them. Its about the rule of law that incentivized the very American scientists whose COVID vaccines now are protecting the world. During my 40 years working in the intellectual-property arena, Ive seen the power of American university scientists, unleashed by Bayh-Dole, face many challenges. Our robust ecosystem of innovation depends on securing intellectual-property rights. Let us not march in to the labs of those whose work makes the world a safer place.

Louis Berneman, a resident of Naples, is the founding partner emeritus of Osage University Partners. He is a past president of the Association of University Technology Managers.
By Andre Paultre

PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) - Haiti will hold a constitutional referendum on Sept. 26, the same date as presidential and legislative elections, authorities said, after postponing the date twice in part because of the pandemic, an official calendar showed Monday.

Political tensions in the Caribbean nation have been running high in recent months and Haitians have expressed fear of violence going to the polls.

Violence has spiked in the capital Port-au-Prince in recent weeks as rival groups battle with one another or the police for control of the streets, displacing thousands and worsening the country's humanitarian crisis.

Elections were scheduled for Sept. 19. Postponing the referendum was done to give the health ministry time to deal with the COVID-19 crisis, Guylande Mesadieu, the president of the electoral board said in an interview.

The electoral council said in a statement that the country will implement health measures to curb the spread of the pandemic so that Haitians could cast their votes safely.

Municipal and local elections have been scheduled for Jan. 16, 2022, the calendar also showed.

It is not clear what the constitutional referendum will entail but Moise has previously said the powers of the president needed to be strengthened to break a "decades-long cycle of political crises".

The presidency was weakened in Haiti's 1987 Magna Carta.

Haitians mistrusted strong figureheads in the wake of the Duvalier family dictatorship notorious for human rights abuses and corruption.

(Reporting by Andre Paultre in Port-au-Prince; Writing by Stefanie Eschenbacher; Editing by Stephen Coates)
Harry Dunn, 19, who was killed after his motorbike crashed with a car outside a US military base in Northamptonshire in August 2019 (Family handout/PA)

The parents of teenage motorcyclist Harry Dunn are set to fly to the United States to give evidence under oath as part of a damages claim against their sons alleged killer, Anne Sacoolas.

The 43-year-old left the UK after diplomatic immunity was asserted on her behalf following the 19-year-olds death in August 2019.

Ms Sacoolas was charged with causing Dunns death by dangerous driving after her departure from the UK, but the US State Department rejected an extradition request last year.

Now, the teenagers parents, Charlotte Charles and Tim Dunn will fly to Washington DC on Tuesday ahead of the "deposition" process which is due to begin later this week.

Ms Sacoolas, who will also be required to give legal testimony by 23 July as part of the civil claim, has the option to be present when Ms Charles and Mr Dunn are deposed.

The depositions will form part of the "discovery" process in the Dunn family's claim, in which correspondence and documentation relevant to the case will be handed over ahead of a trial at the end of the year.

Dunn's mother described travelling to give evidence as "punishing and exhausting" but added: "We would travel to the end of the Earth and back if that is what it takes."

Speaking ahead of their flight, Ms Charles told the PA news agency: "We are flying out to the United States once again in pursuit of justice for our son.

"We are so grateful to the Court in Virginia for allowing our civil claim to proceed there.

"We know that is not what the US Government wanted and the insurers did their best to kick the case back to the UK."

The Dunn family's claim, brought against both Ms Sacoolas and her husband Jonathan, has unearthed a great deal of previously unheard material, such as the State Department roles held by the couple at the time of the crash.

The Alexandria District Court in the US State of Virginia heard the pair's work in intelligence was a "factor" in their departure from the UK - with the Sacoolases leaving for "security reasons".

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Asked how she was feeling ahead of her testimony, Ms Charles said: "It does not matter how much they try to beat us down.

"Our whole family are suffering intensely but to be honest we would travel to the end of the Earth and back if that is what it takes.

"It is punishing and exhausting travelling at the best of times and obviously more difficult in the middle of the pandemic, but they have required us to travel to appear at our depositions on Thursday and that is just what we will do."

The civil claim is one of a number of legal processes the Dunn family have entered into in order to secure justice for their son.

Earlier this month, the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, said the path was now clear for the UK to push for a form of "virtual trial or process" in the case.

Also speaking ahead of their flight, Mr Dunn told PA: "We loved our boy so much and are lost without him.

"Every day that goes by is getting more and more painful.

"We have never done anything like this before and don't know what to expect.

"It's obviously daunting being involved in any court case but this is all about our suffering since we lost Harry and we will do whatever it takes to get justice."
By Carl O'Donnell

(Reuters) - Members of the U.S. military who were vaccinated against COVID-19 showed higher-than-expected rates of heart inflammation, although the condition was still extremely rare, according to a study released on Tuesday.

The study found that 23 previously healthy males with an average age of 25 complained of chest pain within four days of receiving a COVID-19 shot. The incident rate was higher than some previous estimates would have anticipated, it said.

All the patients, who at the time of the study's publication had recovered or were recovering from myocarditis - an inflammation of the heart muscle - had received shots made by either Pfizer Inc and BioNTech SE or Moderna Inc.

U.S. health regulators last week added a warning to the literature that accompanies those mRNA vaccines to flag the rare risk of heart inflammation seen primarily in young males. But they said the benefit of the shots in preventing COVID-19 clearly continues to outweigh the risk.

The study, which was published in the JAMA Cardiology medical journal, said 19 of the patients were current military members who had received their second vaccine dose. The others had either received one dose or were retired from the military.

General population estimates would have predicted eight or fewer cases of myocarditis from the 436,000 male military members who received two COVID-19 shots, the study said.

An outside panel of experts advising the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said last week that reports of myocarditis were higher in males and in the week after the second vaccine dose than would be anticipated in the general population. A presentation at that meeting found the heart condition turned up at a rate of about 12.6 cases per million people vaccinated.

Eight of the military patients in the study were given diagnostic scans and showed signs of heart inflammation that could not be explained by other causes, the study said. The patients in the study ranged from ages 20 to 51.

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The CDC began investigating the potential link between the mRNA vaccines and myocarditis in April after Israel flagged that it was studying such cases in people who received the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine there, and after a report that the U.S. military had also found cases.

Health regulators in several countries are conducting their own investigations.

(Reporting by Carl O'Donnell; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights on Monday ruled that the Honduran government violated a trans woman's right to life and was responsible for her 2009 murder, according to attorneys in the case.

Why it matters: It's the first case to ask the court whether a government failed to protect a trans person. The court's ruling sets a legal precedent across Latin American, which has the highest concentration of trans murders in the world, activists say.

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Catch up quick: Vicky Hernandez's body was found the morning after the country's 2009 coup d'etat. She had been shot in the head, with first responders judging her time of death to be the middle of the previous night, when a curfew was in place that only allowed military and law enforcement outdoors.

Two other trans women reported that a police patrol car had driven up to them and Hernandez, who was a sex worker.

What they're saying: At the moment of her death there was "a context of violence, arbitrary detentions, murders and discrimination against LGBTI persons, and in particular against trans women who were sex workers," the court said, per Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, which brought the case before the court with human rights group Red Lesbica Cattrachas.

"[I]n many cases, it was members of the public forces who perpetrated this violence."

The court ordered the government to compile "comprehensive information on the violence suffered by LGBTI persons in order to assess the real magnitude of this phenomenon and, accordingly, design strategies to prevent and eradicate new acts of violence and discrimination."

The ruling, which was issued on the 12-year anniversary of her death, mandates reparations for Hernandez's family and training on anti-LGBTQ violence for security forces.

The Honduran government must also reopen its investigation into her murder, publicly acknowledge its role in her death and adopt measures to allow people to update their gender identity in documents, the court said.

A family photo of Vicky Hernandez, courtesy of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights and Cattrachas. Illustration: Annelise Capossela/Axios

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"The judgment of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in this case sheds light on structural violence in Honduras, which over the years has been strengthened by acts of discrimination against LGTTBI people, including in the justice system of justice," Indyra Mendoza, founder of Cattrachas, said in a statement.

"This structural violence has been supported by fundamentalist religious narratives, the media, and the discrimination against sexually diverse people in the political, workplace, and social spheres and has translated into their exclusion and death," Mendoza added.

"Honduras must change. The Americas must change. Justice for Vicky is justice for everyone."

The big picture: Violence in Honduras, especially against women and LGBTQ people, has driven asylum seekers to the U.S.-Mexico border.

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Photograph: Jennifer Gauthier/Reuters

The US justice departments battle to extradite Meng Wanzhou from Canada has taken a fresh turn as lawyers for Huaweis chief financial officer claimed that internal emails and bank documents prove there is no grounds to extradite her to the US.

Meng, 48, was arrested on a US warrant at Vancouver airport in late 2018, and has been battling extradition. Her detention infuriated the Chinese government and has helped drag relations between Beijing and Ottawa to their lowest point in years.

The US accuses Huawei of using a Hong Kong shell company called Skycom to sell equipment to Iran, in violation of US sanctions. It says Meng, 48, committed fraud by misleading HSBC about the companys business dealings in Iran.

But Mengs lawyers argue that documents from HSBC show that Huawei was open about its links to Skycom. In a statement, Huawei Canada said: These documents consisting of emails and other HSBC records show there is no evidence of fraud on HSBC.

They show that Huaweis control over Skycom was not kept from senior HSBC executives, that the continuing nature of Skycoms business with Huawei in Iran was not kept from HSBC executives and that internal HSBC risk assessments were made based on knowledge of the true facts.

It added: The reputational risks were managed with the knowledge of senior HSBC executives.

Huawei lawyers will now try to persuade the Canadian court to permit the internal documents to be introduced as evidence.

Government lawyers in Canada are likely to contest Huaweis interpretation of the documents and have argued that they are irrelevant to the extradition process and should be reserved for a fraud trial in the US.

Huawei has claimed that Mengs arrest was prompted by the US as part of a trade war with China launched by Donald Trump.

Mengs lawyers have been battling to gain access to the HSBC documents, first in a case in February in the UK that proved unsuccessful and then in March in Hong Kong, where it reached an out-of-court settlement with HSBC. The terms of the settlement was not published, but it appears HSBC gave Huawei access to the papers, with a confidentiality clause attached.

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But last week the Canadian courts accepted an application from Canadian prosecutors and media groups that the information could not be kept under seal  an outcome that may not in reality have disappointed Huawei, since it made it more likely the evidence would be admissible in court to challenge the extradition claim.

US prosecutors allege Meng gave a PowerPoint presentation to HSBC in August 2013 that the US claims involved untrue representations by downplaying her firms control of Skycom, describing the firm simply as a business partner. The US says Huawei in reality controlled Skycoms operations in Iran until at least 2014.

HSBC, according to the US government, relied on those and other misrepresentations in deciding to continue the banking relationship with Huawei.

HSBC cleared more than $100m worth of transactions related to Skycom through the United States between 2010 and 2014, says the US.

But Huawei argues the new documentation shows Meng did not mislead the bank, and so the basis for her extradition to the US is undermined.

HSBC had already given the internal documents to the US justice department in a bid to avoid prosecution by the US, but not to Mengs lawyers.

Related: Path to freedom narrows for detained Canadian duo caught in US-China feud

The Chinese government has sharply criticised HSBCs cooperation with the US government over the case.

HSBC has said it had no legal option but to cooperate with the US authorities. But the bank has been caught in a political quandary since it is headquartered in the UK and the bulk of its profits are made in China.

Meng has been living in one of her Vancouver homes on bail since her arrest at the citys airport in December 2018. Days after Mengs arrest, former Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig and businessman Michael Spavor were arrested by the Chinese government on espionage charges. They remain in detention.
(Bloomberg) -- A pair of Israelis accused in the U.S. of being involved in a sprawling international insider trading ring were once close associates of Muddy Waters LLC founder Carson Block before they split amid an acrimonious dispute.

Block said he was first approached by Tomer Feingold and then separately by Dov Malnik in 2010 after publishing a short-selling report on a Chinese company called Orient Paper Inc. Malnik and Feingold claimed to only have passing familiarity with one another at the time, when in fact, he said he later discovered, they were close friends.

Malnik and Feingold played significant roles in the field research and trading for some of Muddy Waters most successful early short-selling reports starting in 2010, Block said in an interview. Their work included contributions to reports on Sino-Forest Corp., the one-time Chinese forestry giant that Block and his team helped expose as one of the biggest frauds in Canadian stock market history.

However, Blocks professional relationship with Feingold and Malnik ended in early 2014 when he said he began to suspect and gather what he says was evidence that the duo were selling information from Muddy Waters reports to outsiders before publication.

Massive betrayal

It was a discovery that amounted to what Block said was a massive betrayal of my trust. They were never co-founders of the Muddy Waters brand, but through significant deceit, they integrated themselves into my business and personal life, he said.

Malnik and Feingold told a different tale in a lawsuit they brought against Block and Muddy Waters, claiming Block denied them their rightful share of the Muddy Waters brand, which they said theyd played a critical role in building.

Block and his company wrongfully alleged that plaintiffs have misappropriated information from [Mr. Block personally] and Muddy Waters LLC to engage in unauthorized trading on behalf of themselves and others, according to their 2014 lawsuit in New York.

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Block made the allegations in a private legal arbitration case, which was referenced in the New York lawsuit.

Feingold and Malnik argued they met Block on several occasions in which they agreed to publish research reports under the name Muddy Waters but then Block wrongfully asserted control over the jointly-developed brand and have excluded plaintiffs from working together.

Block said in the interview he ceased professional contact with Malnik and Feingold and halted any shared trading activities after he began suspecting they were selling information in Muddy Waters reports to outsiders.

A New York judge dismissed the case in early 2015 after being informed by lawyers on both sides that it had been, or was about to be, settled.

Block wouldnt comment on whether a settlement had been reached or provide any details on the matter. The New York lawyer who represented Malnik in that dispute declined to comment and Feingolds lawyer in the case didnt return messages seeking comment.

Geneva Office

Around the time the relationship began to sour, Feingold and Malnik set up a trading business in Geneva completely independent of Muddy Waters, according to U.S. prosecutors. It was there that between 2013 and 2017, Feingold and Malnik allegedly received confidential information about health care acquisitions and potential deals from an unnamed local securities trader allowing them to reap millions of dollars in illegal profits, according to a U.S. federal indictment unsealed in June.

In or around 2011, Malnik and Feingold each set up a shell company in the British Virgin Islands and used those entities to trade in stocks on which theyd received inside information, the prosecutors alleged.

During his trial in the U.S. last year, former Geneva trader Marc Demane Debih said the pair were both part of an international insider-trading ring that U.S., French and U.K. prosecutors have been investigating since at least 2014.

Malnik was extradited from Switzerland to the U.S earlier this month. After pleading not guilty on June 11 upon his arrival in New York to 14 charges of securities fraud and wire fraud, and one charge of concealment of a money-laundering conspiracy, Malnik changed his mind.

Under an agreement with prosecutors, Malnik, 43, pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of one count of securities fraud, for trading in the stock of Omnicare Inc. based on confidential information he received in the summer of 2015. He will forfeit $1.5 million and faces 37 to 46 months in prison under federal sentencing guidelines and a fine of between $7,500 and $5 million as part of the agreement.

I will forever regret my conduct and the impact it has had on my family and friends, Malnik said before a federal magistrate judge in Manhattan.

A lawyer for Feingold, whose current whereabouts are unknown, declined to comment.

Post-Block

After severing relations with Malnik and Feingold in 2014, Block said he was approached by FBI agents and U.S. Department of Justice officials. They asked whether large trades ahead of Muddy Waters reports made from offshore accounts allegedly linked to Malnik and Feingold were authorized, according to Block.

A spokesperson for the DOJ declined to comment. An email sent to the FBIs main press office was not immediately returned.

Block says he told the agents he had no knowledge of the trades and that they were not approved by Muddy Waters. The scope of the unauthorized trading ahead of its research reports went beyond accounts controlled by Malnik and Feingold, says Block. He said he learned of this after FBI agents showed him the trades.

While I have no window into their outside activities, the fact that they have been charged with crimes does not surprise me, said Block.

(Updates with details from the U.S. indictment in the 14th paragraph)

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By Yuddy Cahya Budiman and Agustinus Beo Da Costa

JAKARTA (Reuters) -Oxygen prices in Indonesia's capital had more than doubled and some suppliers reported shortages on Tuesday after a surge in COVID-19 cases that prompted the Red Cross to warn of a coronavirus "catastrophe" in Southeast Asia's biggest country.

Indonesia has announced record daily COVID-19 infections of more than 20,000 in recent days, in a new wave fueled by the emergence of highly transmissible virus variants and increased mobility after the Muslim fasting month.

With hospitals filling up in the capital, Jakarta, and patients being turned away, some people sought to secure oxygen for infected family members at home. The price for a tank of oxygen had jumped to $140 from the usual $50, suppliers said.

"I'm queuing here now to refill oxygen for my wife and son who are now positive with COVID-19," said Taufik Hidayat, 51, at one supplier. "I went around and it all was sold out."

Sellers in others areas in Jakarta told Reuters their stocks had also dried up.

But Sulung Mulia Putra, an official at Jakarta health agency, said a shortage at hospitals was temporary and due to distribution issues that were being resolved.

"Distributors don't have enough transport so hospitals will be helped by the police, parks agency and Red Cross to transport oxygen," he said.

Hospitals in several designated "red zone" areas have reported overcapacity, including Jakarta, with its isolation beds 93% occupied as of Sunday.

"Hospitals are full because of the case surge caused by mobility and loosening health protocol adherence, worsened also by the Delta variant," said senior health ministry official Siti Nadia Tarmizi.

In the face of the rise in cases, Indonesia's health minister is leading a push for stricter controls, sources familiar with government discussions told Reuters.

The spread of the Delta variant has prompted concerns of a crisis in the world's fourth most populous country on the scale of that in recent months in India, where the variant was first detected.

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"Every day we are seeing this Delta variant driving Indonesia closer to the edge of a COVID-19 catastrophe," said Jan Gelfand, head of the Indonesian delegation of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC).

Indonesia is banking on mass vaccinations to get on top of the virus, but only 13.3 million of the 181.5 million targeted for inoculation have received the required two doses.

Japan will provide two million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine in July, Indonesia's foreign minister Retno Marsudi said on Tuesday.

Indonesia has so far received 104 million doses of coronavirus vaccines in total. Out of its population of more than 270 million, 181.5 million are set to be vaccinated by January 2022.

Indonesia reported 20,467 more infections on Tuesday and 463 more deaths, bringing the totals to 2,156,465 cases and 58,024 deaths.

(Additional reporting and writing by Stanley Widianto and Kate Lamb; Editing by Martin Petty, Matthew Tostevin, William Maclean)
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Kea Sha Moon could hear it in her dads voice. Something was wrong.

A middle school student in her hometown of Burley had taken his life. Kea didnt know the boy, or his family. But she knew his pain. It called up memories of her own suicide attempt at age 12, and the years struggling with anxiety and sadness before that. It took her back to the bullying that amplified her mental health struggles, and the terrible cycle of cutting and starving herself to try to feel some control over her emotions.

But Kea, now 23, made it out. She hadnt died when she tried taking her own life, and she didnt want to. By high school graduation shed vanquished her darkest days, with the support of her family, the help of a therapist and years of hard work.

My mental health struggles started at such a young age, Kea said. I dont think its fair to go through life without help. You need help.

Keas experiences motivated her father, Cassia County school board member Darin Moon, to help other families struggling with mental health. In 2018, Moon and district spokeswoman Debbie Critchfield helped launch the Connect program, an initiative to get all Cassia County School District children access to free and immediate therapy.

Before Connect, it could take families weeks to get situated with a therapist. Now, a student just has to call a phone number where they can receive immediate crisis counseling, and set up an appointment with a local mental health professional. The school district pays for a handful of therapy sessions to start, and if a family needs more help, Connect can help them transition to long-term care.

We have been to the bottom, and we have hugged each other, and gotten help, Darin Moon said. We want other people who are struggling with this to know that there are better days ahead. The missing link for you is getting the professional help.

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The Cassia County School District doesnt directly facilitate the Connect program, and doesnt know which students have enrolled in therapy. That makes it hard to track the kind of data that would indicate how Connect is impacting students academic outcomes. Proponents of the program see its impact in the numbers, and the grateful calls and emails they get from parents. Since its inception at least 538 students in the 5,400-student district have accessed Connect therapists.

Weve gotten kids served who might not have ever been served, said Liza Castaneda, a counselor at Burley Junior High.

District counselors see Connect as a valuable tool to help students get help. But they say the pandemic is delaying students access to therapists, and worry about childrens transition to long-term care.

The Cassia County District Is No Stranger to Tragedy

Steve Copmann, a 26-year administrator at Burley Junior High, says hes watched student mental health needs intensify over the last two decades, exacerbated by social media. Bullying that used to end when a student got home from school is now a 24-7 digital reality. The district has suffered a handful of student suicides in recent years.

There are family life issues happening with divorce and family members dying and some of that natural stuff that happens. Then you throw in social media on top of that and icing on the cake is this whole COVID deal we have going on, and its a tragedy, Copmann said. Its tough.

In its 2018 pilot year, Connect was funded for use in three schools, by about $30,000 in private donations. In 2019 and 2020 the program expanded districtwide, funded by $200,000 in contributions by local businessman Ryan Phipps.

There are very proud people in the state of Idaho and its hard to sit here and say, Hey, my child has mental health issues. Its hard to bring that into the community  and it shouldnt be, Phipps said. Thats a big part of the reason why I said, lets talk about this. Lets do this.

Cassia County voters agreed to foot the cost of the program in a supplemental levy last year, Critchfield said. The $100,000 annual price tag evens out to about $1.50 per student, per month. The levy passed just before COVID-19 further intensified students needs.

The district sent information about Connect to students and parents during school closures, and has given out magnets with the phone number in the hopes itll be readily available when kids need it most.

But Connect saw a decline in students calling for help during the pandemic. Only 164 students called into the program in 2020, down from the 259 students who used the services in 2019.

At a time when we know mental health issues are at the highest theyve ever been in our country, were not accessing this as much as I would like to see, Moon said. I wish I had an answer for thatWe should be using it more than ever.

Cassia County School District pays Utah-based mental health company Blomquist Hale to facilitate Connect. Intake specialists answer phone calls at any hour and connect families to local providers in the Burley area. Intake calls and therapy services are available in Spanish as well as English, Blomquist Hale business specialist Gia Bower said.

The program is anonymous, so Cassia administrators dont know which students use Connect. The program doesnt track race or ethnicity of callers either, Critchfield said, so the district doesnt know how evenly students from different demographic groups are using the service. Cassia County is about 34 percent Latino.

Cassia County does know that Connect callers have an average age of 12. Girls call in twice as often as boys. And most of the families calling Connect dont have insurance.

Castaneda, the Burley Junior High counselor, appreciates that Connect provides a bridge to get families into therapy, but worries about families access to long-term care. Students without insurance, even some with Medicaid, could struggle to find a local provider if they need help beyond the districts free bank of sessions.

I just dont want that continuity of care to break. Thats my concern, because that can be a bad experience with mental health counseling, Castaneda said.

Aimee Hurst, a counselor at Mountain View Elementary, said her families have generally been able to move seamlessly from Connect to long-term care if they need it. Her concern at the moment is that a flood of mental health needs during COVID-19 has created waitlists for local therapists. Connect students who used to be able to get to in-person care quickly have told her they are facing delays. If families arent dealing with crisis situations, she suggests they try Connects telehealth services, which sometimes offer quicker access.

Crtichfield said Blomquist Hale is working with local therapists on a solution to the delays. The district is starting to see an uptick in student calls again, after the dip in 2020, and Critchfield doesnt want students to encounter long wait times for therapy  one of the issues Connect was created to avoid.

Whatever its limitations, district staff say theyve seen the benefits of the program.

One of the first students to use the program was a sixth-grader at Hursts elementary school. He was struggling with suicidal thoughts, she said, and his single mom didnt have the means to pay for therapy.

It was a huge blessing to be able to go to that mom and say: Here you go. This is one less thing you have to worry about. Just call the number, Hurst said.

This article originally appeared at Idaho Education News and is published in partnership with the Solutions Journalism Exchange

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DUBLIN (Reuters) - Ireland is to restrict indoor dining in bars and restaurants to those who are fully vaccinated or who have previously been infected by COVID-19, Prime Minister Micheal Martin announced on Tuesday.

Martin said indoor dining would not be reopened on Monday as planned but would be delayed until a new system of vaccine certification has been implemented.

(Reporting by Conor Humphries; Editing by Catherine Evans)
By Lisa Barrington

DUBAI (Reuters) -Israel's new foreign minister inaugurated its embassy in the United Arab Emirates on Tuesday and offered an olive branch to other former adversaries, saying: "We're here to stay."

Yair Lapid's two-day visit, in which he will open an Israeli consulate in Dubai on Wednesday, is the first to the Gulf state by an Israeli cabinet minister since the countries established ties last year.

The trip is also an opportunity for the two-week-old Israeli government of Naftali Bennett, a nationalist who heads an improbable cross-partisan coalition, to make diplomatic inroads despite long-stymied talks with the Palestinians.

"Israel wants peace with its neighbours - with all its neighbours. We aren't going anywhere. The Middle East is our home," Lapid said during the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the Abu Dhabi high-rise office serving as a temporary embassy.

"We're here to stay. We call on all the countries of the region to recognise that and to come to talk to us," he said.

Brought together by shared worries about Iran and hopes for commercial boons, the UAE and Bahrain normalised relations with Israel last year under so-called "Abraham Accords" crafted by the administration of then U.S.-President Donald Trump. Sudan and Morocco have since also moved to establish ties with Israel.

Lapid and his Emirati counterpart Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan discussed building on the accords to achieve peace and strengthen security in the region, state news agency WAM said.

They signed an agreement for economic and commercial cooperation, which an Israeli spokesman had earlier said would be the 12th since last year's move to forge ties.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, welcoming Lapid's visit, said Washington "will continue to work with Israel and the UAE as we strengthen all aspects of our partnerships and work to create a more peaceful, secure, and prosperous future for all the peoples of the Middle East", the State Department said.

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The regional rapprochement was deplored by the Palestinians, who want their demands for statehood free of Israeli occupation addressed first.

President Mahmoud Abbas dismissed the accords as "an illusion" and asserted that colonial powers had "implant(ed) Israel as a foreign body in this region in order to fragment it and keep it weak," according to a report on Tuesday by the official Palestinian news service WAFA.

Lapid's plane transited through Saudi airspace. Riyadh, although not having normalised relations with Israel, last year opened its skies to Israel-UAE flights.

Lapid will on Wednesday visit the site of Expo 2020 Dubai, a world fair opening in October where Israel has built a pavilion.

The UAE formally opened its embassy in Israel, temporarily located in the Tel Aviv stock exchange, this month.

Israel's Abu Dhabi embassy still has only three diplomats and a head of mission, Eitan Na'eh, yet to be confirmed as full ambassador. Its Dubai consulate is similarly located in temporary premises.

Lapid was conciliatory toward former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose attempts to organise a trip to the UAE while in office were scotched by COVID-19 restrictions and who has sought to cast his ouster by Bennett as illegitimate.

Thanking Netanyahu as "the architect of the Abraham Accords", Lapid said: "This moment is his, no less than it is ours."

(Reporting by Ari Rabinovitch and Dan Williams;Additional reporting by Nidal Al-Mughrabi'Writing by Lisa Barrington;Editing by Clarence Fernandez, John Stonestreet, Nick Macfie, William Maclean and Marguerita Choy)
TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party is set to propose to the government that it allow AstraZeneca's COVID-19 vaccines to be used in corporate inoculation programmes, news agency Jiji reported on Monday.

Japan has approved the use of AstraZeneca vaccines, but has avoided using them in its mass inoculation drive amid lingering concern over reports of rare blood clots.

(Reporting by Ritsuko Ando; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
Justin Sullivan/Getty Juul products

On Monday, North Carolina became the first U.S. state to hold Juul Labs Inc. accountable for the company's contribution to the teen vaping epidemic.

According to a copy of the final consent judgment, Juul Labs is ordered to pay $40 million to North Carolina over the course of six years as a settlement for lawsuits claiming the company's marketing fueled the state's widespread nicotine use among teens.

"For years, JUUL targeted young people, including teens, with its highly addictive e-cigarette," said Attorney General Josh Stein in a statement. "It lit the spark and fanned the flames of a vaping epidemic among our children  one that you can see in any high school in North Carolina."

"This win will go a long way in keeping JUUL products out of kids' hands, keeping its chemical vapor out of their lungs, and keeping its nicotine from poisoning and addicting their brains," he continued. "I'm incredibly proud of my team for their hard work on behalf of North Carolina families. We're not done  we still have to turn the tide on a teen vaping epidemic that was borne of JUUL's greed. As your attorney general, I'll keep fighting to prevent another generation of young people from becoming addicted to nicotine."

Getty

RELATED: Juul CEO Stepping Down Amid Growing Backlash Against Vaping

The agreement states that Juul will establish new business practices in North Carolina, including removing marketing that appeals to individuals under 21 and limiting sales to state residents. Stein said money from the settlement will also go toward programs that help and prevent e-cigarette addiction.

Juul Labs also released a statement on Monday following the settlement announcement.

"This settlement is consistent with our ongoing effort to reset our company and its relationship with our stakeholders, as we continue to combat underage usage and advance the opportunity for harm reduction for adult smokers," the company statement read. "Importantly, we look forward to working with Attorney General Stein and other manufacturers on the development of potential industrywide marketing practices based on science and evidence. In addition, we support the Attorney General's desire to deploy funds to generate appropriate science to support North Carolina's public health interventions to reduce underage use."

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RELATED VIDEO: How Vaping Sent This Teenager to Rehab: 'I Did Not Understand the Severity of It'

RELATED: Juul Bought Ad Space on Kids' Websites, Including Cartoon Network, According to Lawsuit

The organization's statement continued, "We seek to continue to earn trust through action. Over the past two years, for example, we ceased the distribution of our non-tobacco, non-menthol flavored products in advance of FDA guidance and halted all mass market product advertising. This settlement is another step in that direction."

North Carolina is among several states that have filed lawsuits against the e-cigarette giant. Last year, the Massachusetts attorney general's office filed a lawsuit that alleged Juul bought ad space on websites "highly attractive to children, adolescents in middle school and high school and underage college students" such as Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network and Seventeen magazine.

According to CBS MoneyWatch, Matt Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, said Monday's settlement is "a step in the right direction," but, "unless, and until, the FDA does act, we won't solve the problem."
By Hyonhee Shin

SEOUL (Reuters) -A former South Korean prosecutor-general announced on Tuesday his candidacy in next year's presidential election with a fierce attack on what he called the "corrupt and incompetent" administration of President Moon Jae-in.

Moon is limited to just one term under the constitution and his liberal Democratic Party has yet to nominate its presidential candidate.

Former top prosecutor Yoon Suk-youl, 60, criticised Moon's failure to curb rising house prices and accused his government of incompetence and hypocrisy.

"This regime destroyed the foundation of the country by abandoning common sense, fairness and the rule of law," Yoon told a news conference. "We have to stop the corrupt and incompetent ruling forces' attempt to extend their term and plunder people."

Moon has rejected accusations of corruption. His office declined to comment on Yoon's remarks or his presidential bid.

Moon's approval ratings have hit record lows amid skyrocketing house prices, an insider land trading scandal and deepening inequality, which contributed to his party's heavy defeat in key mayoral elections in April.

SCANDALS

A series of scandals involving Moon aides and ruling party politicians accused of abusing power to amass wealth and secure favours for their family have left the Democrats scrambling for an image make-over, while raising the hopes of political novices ahead of the election scheduled for next March.

Yoon was initially seen as a long shot. He served as a prosecutor for nearly 30 years until he stepped down in March but has no political experience. However, even before announcing his bid, Yoon has been topping polls for presidential candidates in the past few months.

In a Realmeter survey released last week, Yoon had the support of 32.3% of respondents. Lee Jae-myung, the popular governor of Gyeonggi province and a member of Moon's party, came second on 22.8 percent.

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After being appointed by Moon as prosecutor-general in 2019, Yoon took flak from the president's followers for indicting Cho Kuk, a key presidential aide and former justice minister, on a dozen charges including bribery and document fraud.

But that move boosted public support for Yoon, prompting the conservative main opposition People Power Party to court him.

Yoon said on Tuesday he shared the conservatives' political philosophy, but declined to say whether he would join the party.

The conservatives, with a 36-year-old new chief, are seeking to entice younger, centrist voters who have emerged as a key bloc amid growing disillusionment with the ruling party.

Moon's Democratic Party has two other potential heavyweight candidates - former prime ministers Chung Sye-kyun and Lee Nak-yon - though they have struggled to improve their ratings.

Gyeonggi province chief Lee, whose popularity has grown over his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, is expected to announce his presidential bid this week and to take part in a Democratic primary in September alongside Chung and Lee.

The People Power has no clear frontrunner, but is calling for Yoon and Choe Jae-hyeong, a former top auditor who resigned from his post on Monday, to join its own primary in August.

(Reporting by Hyonhee ShinEditing by Robert Birsel and Gareth Jones)
BERLIN (AP)  Germany's last troops left Afghanistan Tuesday after a nearly 20-year deployment in the country, the defense minister said.

Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer tweeted that the last Bundeswehr soldiers left Afghanistan safely Tuesday evening. She thanked the more than 150,000 troops who have served there since 2001 and said that they can be proud of this mission.

The German military said that the last troops were on their way home via Tbilisi, Georgia, and that Brig. Gen. Ansgar Meyer, the last commander of the German contingent, was on board an Airbus A400M aircraft bringing them home.

NATO agreed in April to withdraw its roughly 7,000 non-American forces from Afghanistan to match U.S. President Joe Bidens decision to pull all American troops from the country starting May 1. At the time, Germany had around 1,100 troops there.

Germanys contingent, which focused on northern Afghanistan, was the second biggest in the current Resolute Support mission after the United States'. Its last bases were in Mazar-e-Sharif and Kabul.

An historic chapter is coming to an end, an intense deployment that was exacting for the Bundeswehr and marked it, in which the Bundeswehr proved itself in battle, Kramp-Karrenbauer said.

The German parliament first approved sending the military to Afghanistan in December 2001, and the first troops arrived in Kabul in January 2002.

Fifty-nine German troops died in Afghan missions over the years.

American officials have said the entire pullout of U.S. troops will most likely be completed by July 4.

Around 750 containers' worth of equipment has been shipped back to Germany by land and air, including 120 vehicles and six helicopters, the Bundeswehr said.
Jun. 29BOSTON  A Lawrence man pleaded guilty in federal court last week to fraudulently using another person's Social Security number, authorities announced.

Manuel Maria German Familia, 30, pleaded guilty to one count of false representation of a Social Security number.

German Familia was arrested and charged on Feb. 9, 2021. His sentencing is now scheduled for Sept. 30 in federal court, according to an announcement by the Department of Justice.

According to the DOJ, German Familia admitted to fraudulently using a Social Security number that was assigned to someone else in an application at the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles in 2016.

The charge of false representation of a Social Security number carries a sentence of up to five years in prison, up to three years of supervised release and a fine of $250,000.

The investigation was conducted by Homeland Security's Investigation's Document and Benefit Fraud Task Force, a specialized field investigative group comprised of personnel from various local, state, and federal agencies with expertise in detecting, deterring, and disrupting organizations and individuals involved in various types of document, identity, and benefit fraud schemes.

Massachusetts State Police and Lawrence police assisted with the investigation.

Follow staff reporter Jill Harmacinski on Twitter @EagleTribJill.
Family members of Cameron Lamb this week sued the board that oversees the Kansas City Police Department and the detective who fatally shot him in 2019 as he sat in a pickup truck in his backyard.

It is now one of several lawsuits pending against the police board or department members. The lawsuits stem from accusations of excessive force and alleged beatings, among other things.

In the federal lawsuit Monday, attorneys for Lambs family noted that other past excessive force claims have lead to large settlements.

That includes $725,000 paid out to settle a lawsuit brought by a 15-year-old boy who, during a 2019 arrest, suffered a gash on his head, as well as broken teeth. A sergeant, Matthew Neal, has been charged with felony assault in that case.

Cameron Lambs family sues Kansas City police over his killing, seeks more than $10M

5 KC police officers face criminal charges, accused of killing, excessive use of force

The new lawsuit, which is seeking more than $10 million on behalf of Lambs children, also points to the 2013 shooting of Philippe Lora. In that case, the police board paid out $4.8 million after officers shot Lora 20 times, leaving him partly paralyzed.

Lambs familys lawsuit is one of at least two filed against Kansas City police this month stemming from past shootings.

The mother of Robert White, who was fatally shot by officers three years ago, sued June 11 over his death. That lawsuit contends that officers recklessly fired at least 17 bullets into White as he was being used as a human shield by another man armed with a gun June 14, 2018, at the Barney Allis Plaza near 12th and Wyandotte streets in downtown Kansas City.

Two other members of the police department, Officers Charles Prichard and Matthew Brummett  who were indicted last year for their parts in a widely-criticized arrest of a transgender woman  were also sued earlier this year. In that case, a man named Troy Robertson claimed the officers injured him so badly in 2019 that he now suffers from seizures and post-traumatic stress.

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In a separate case, Prichard and Brummett pleaded not guilty to third-degree assault charges in the arrest of Breona Hill, a Black transgender woman, outside of a beauty supply store in 2019. Video showed that Hills face was smashed into the concrete sidewalk during the arrest, according to prosecutors. Two lawsuits have been brought against police in that case.

Days before Robertsons lawsuit in March, Allen Jay Bloodworth, the owner of tow lot, filed a lawsuit against the police board, contending that officers violated his civil rights and killed his dog in 2019 while executing a search warrant on his property.

Other lawsuits filed against the department in the last year have stemmed from the fatal shooting of a dog in the Northland and the pepper spraying of protesters at the Country Club Plaza  an encounter captured in a video that went viral.

In the latest lawsuit, attorneys for Lambs children allege the police department has a well-documented, continuing, widespread and persistent pattern of using excessive and frequent deadly force.

The police department declined to comment on the lawsuit to ensure fairness for all sides involved.
A nonprofit conservative law firm filed a lawsuit challenging Wisconsin's use of ballot drop boxes days after the state's Supreme Court declined to hear a similar case questioning the use of absentee ballot boxes.

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty filed a declaratory judgment case against the Wisconsin Election Commission with Waukesha County Circuit Court on Monday, alleging the commission sent two memos on March 31, 2020, stating a person other than the voter can return their ballot to a drop box. This comes despite the fact returning a ballot through U.S. mail or handing the ballot envelope directly to a municipal clerk are the only available legal options.

The suit further contends a second memo from the WEC dated Aug. 19 stated, "Absentee ballots do not need to be mailed by the voter or delivered by the voter, in person, to the municipal clerk but instead could be dropped into a drop box and that the ballot drop boxes could be unstaffed, temporary, or permanent."

"A drop box is not the 'municipal clerk.' It is an unsupervised, inanimate object," the lawsuit states. "Allowing ballots to be cast by placing them into an unsupervised, inanimate object invites the fraud and abuse that the Legislature was attempting to prevent by requiring strict compliance with the requirement that absentee ballots could only be cast by the two methods allowed under  6.87(4)(b)1: (1) the U.S. Mail, and (2) handing the envelope containing the ballot in person to the municipal clerk."

TRUMP SAYS OPPONENTS 'USED COVID TO STEAL THE ELECTION,' APPLAUDS ELECTION INVESTIGATIONS IN PENNSYLVANIA AND WISCONSIN

Richard Teigen and Richard Thom, the individual plaintiffs listed in the suit, said they have standing because they are "registered Wisconsin voter[s] and ... taxpayer[s]," and they seek to have "the correct construction of those statutes declared by this Court."

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"By telling municipal clerks that absentee ballots can be cast in this fashion and by allowing votes to be cast in this fashion, WEC put votes cast by voters in jeopardy of not being counted because they are not being cast in strict compliance with the statutes," the suit contends.

The filing follows a narrow ruling by the Wisconsin Supreme Court on Friday declining to hear a similar lawsuit. In a 4-3 decision, the court tossed the case brought by Jere Fabick, a prominent Republican donor who alleged "election irregularities that arose from following WEC guidance documents," according to the majority opinion rejecting the case.

While this court must not shrink back from deciding challenging or politically fraught questions properly before us, neither should we be eager to insert ourselves at the expense of time-tested judicial norms," conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn, who sided with his liberal colleagues in the case, wrote in the majority opinion.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Hagedorn argued Fabick's case was not "cleanly presented with no obstacles to reaching the merits."

Fabick sought a ruling to stop the use of absentee drop boxes and the filling-in of missing witness address information on absentee ballots.

Washington Examiner Videos

Tags: News, Wisconsin, 2020 Elections, Voting, ballot, Voter Fraud

Original Author: Carly Roman

Original Location: Lawsuit challenges Wisconsin's use of ballot drop boxes
The Lexington-Richland 5 school board censured an outgoing member for talking publicly about a meeting that happened behind closed doors.

The school board voted 4-2 to censure former member Ed White during a Monday meeting. White had spoken publicly about discussions that happened during a June 14 executive session, sent a statement to news reporters and criticized several board members for allegedly creating a hostile work environment and pushing out outgoing Superintendent Christina Melton.

Lexington-Richland 5s policies prohibit board members from talking publicly about matters discussed in executive session, board chair Jan Hammond said during the meeting.

Our board should operate within its policies, Hammond said. We should not operate as rogue board members without consequences.

Rebecca Blackburn Hines, a school board member who voted against the reprimand, said there wasnt much point in censuring a school board member who has already resigned. White is technically still on the board until July 14, but Whites nametag and chair were empty during the Monday meeting.

Hammond accused White of making false statements about the board since Meltons resignation, but when pressed by Blackburn Hines on which of Whites comments were false, she did not elaborate.

The board has since chosen Akil Ross, a former national high school principal of the year, to serve as superintendent until the district can find a long-term superintendent. Ross, who will take over July 1, was seen at the meeting shaking hands and taking notes.

While this was the first opportunity for public comment at a board meeting  and though Meltons departure has already sparked a protest  only four people spoke during the public comment portion of the meeting.

One of those was Dutch Fork High teacher Ali Hendrick. Two other teachers in the district stood at the microphone each holding bundles of notes, artworks and more, all dedicated to thanking Melton for her time at Lexington-Richland 5.

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To say many of us were shocked after the June 14 meeting would be an understatement, Hendrick said.

However, Hendrick encouraged those listening to look past the boardroom and into the classroom, where educators are more than committed to focusing on our students.

A lot of people have mistakenly become to believe what D5 is is what happens here on Monday nights, Hendrick said, referencing board meetings which are regularly scheduled for Mondays. What happens on Monday is only part of what happens in the district.

Vote breakdown

In favor of censuring Ed White

Catherine Huddle

Ken Loveless

Jan Hammond

Nikki Gardner

Against censuring Ed White
Financial Conduct Authority logo at the agency's headquarters in the Canary Wharf business district of London. Photo: Chris Helgren/Reuters

London Capital & Finance plc (LCF) investors have submitted a new complaint about the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to the Independent Financial Regulators Complaints Commissioner.

It details alleged avoidance of compensation claims for victims of financial crime, and is the latest chapter in a long-running saga involving the former money firm.

Submitted on Friday by a group of LCF investors, the 37-page document is being overseen on a pro bono basis by law firm Shearman & Sterling.

Shearman & Sterling said that over 1,000 LCF investors have complained to the FCA concerning its conduct in failing to supervise LCF.

The firm said that this resulted in a volume of complaints that the FCA has confirmed are "over 50% higher than the historic norm".

It brings into question a "previously unseen and narrow test of causation" used to determine what compensation was paid.

Watch: LCF scandal - MPs question if FCA would meet its own standards of accountability

The causation test now invoked by the FCA is not found in the Financial Services Act 2012, the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000, the Scheme Rules or any FCA rule or guidance, says Shearman & Sterling.

The established test of causation for these purposes is whether the FCA "contributed to" investor losses.

"The applicable causation test under the statutory complaints and compensation regime for regulators is well-established and has gone unchallenged by the FCA for over a decade," said Thomas Donegan, a financial regulatory partner at Shearman & Sterling, who are representing certain LC&F bondholders.

"The FCA sought to introduce a 'solely or primarily responsible' test of causation via a consultation paper last year, but was forced to abandon its proposals after the public outcry they provoked. The FCA must now recognise the legal regime under which it operates remains unchanged and step up to its responsibilities."

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The firm said that the FCA has refused to compensate LCF investors as a whole, writing to investors over the last month with pro forma rejections.

It said that the FCA has offered no compensation for its alleged regulatory failures, receiving repeated warnings and tip-offs but failing to intervene, whilst LCF and its associated persons raised and misappropriated 237m of retail deposits.

An FCA spokesperson said: We are considering the responses we have received on our consultation on the proposed new complaints scheme.

"We have been engaging actively with stakeholders, including Shearman & Sterling and Gina Miller, and will be considering all comments before finalising our approach. In the meantime, complaints are being assessed under our 2013 Complaints Scheme.

The new complaint follows a tense back and forth between investors, LCF and the FCA in recent years.

In 2019, it emerged that LC&F raised over 236m ($287m) selling what many investors believed were fixed rate ISAs. The investment products, which were actually high-risk bonds, were advertised alongside savings accounts on comparison sites and were advertised on Google alongside searches for best ISA.

LC&F collapsed at the start of 2019 and administrators had warned that investors could get as little as 25% of their money back. The administrators warned in August 2019 that they are facing a concerted and very likely co-ordinated attempt to frustrate the administration process and investors are likely to face long delays in getting any money.

LC&F is subject to ongoing criminal investigations by both the FCA and the Serious Fraud Office.

Read more: 'Perfect storm' blamed for scandals like London Capital Finance

More than 12,000 investors have been facing uncertainty over how much they will get back and when. Regulators and lawmakers have been criticised for their slowness to act and lawyers acting for some of the bondholders previously accused them of frustrating attempts to claim compensation.

The FCA has always argued it was powerless to do anything because mini-bonds are unregulated.

A near-500-page report released in December last year concluded that there were significant gaps and weaknesses in the FCAs policies and practices that meant opportunities to stop LCF were missed and red flags ignored.

Watch: What are SPACs?
A grand jury in Arizona indicted Lori Vallow Daybell on Tuesday on a charge of conspiracy to commit murder in the death of her fourth husband, Charles Vallow.

The indictment alleges that on July 11, 2019, Daybell conspired with her brother, Alex Cox, to kill Charles Vallow, according to a Maricopa County Arizona Attorneys Office news release. On the day Vallow died, Cox called 911, saying he shot Vallow in self-defense at a Chandler, Arizona, home.

Cox could not be charged since he died on Dec. 12, 2019, from what a medical examiner deemed to be natural causes.

Complex, difficult cases of this nature take time to properly investigate and solve, Maricopa County Attorney Allister Adel said in a statement. I appreciate the tremendous number of hours the dedicated officers of the Chandler Police Department have invested, and my office is equally committed to bringing those responsible for Charles Vallows death to justice.

In the months following Vallows death, Lori moved to Rexburg to be near Chad Daybell. Chads wife, Tammy Daybell, died on Oct. 19, 2019, after Vallows kids, 7-year-old Joshua JJ Vallow and 16-year-old Tylee Ryan, vanished on separate dates in September 2019.

READ THE ARIZONA INDICTMENT HERE

The couple then married in November 2019 and fled to Hawaii, where they remained until Loris arrest in February 2020. Chad remained a free man until investigators discovered JJ and Tylees bodies buried on Chads Idaho property on June 9, 2020.

In May, a Fremont County grand jury indicted Lori and Chad on various charges, including first-degree murder, for the deaths of Tammy Daybell, and Tylee and Joshua JJ Vallow. Chad and Lori are also facing charges in relation to the destruction, alteration and concealment of the childrens bodies.

Loris case is stayed, or placed on hold, after a judge committed her to the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare. A mental health professional deemed her not competent to stand trial.

Chad is scheduled for a jury trial in November that is expected to last five weeks. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Jennifer Liewer, a spokeswoman for the Maricopa County Attorneys Office, told EastIdahoNews.com that Daybells Idaho case will run its course before she faces the charge in Arizona.
Border Force officials guide newly arrived migrants, including children, to a holding facility after being picked up in a dinghy in the English Channel - Dan Kitwood

The Home Office has ordered a major overhaul of the Border Force amid growing frustration over the failure to stem the flow of illegal Channel migrants.

The two directors general of Border Force and Immigration Enforcement are to quit their posts and will be replaced by a single supremo tasked with curbing the crossings and overhauling Britains broken asylum system.

Consultants are also said to have been recruited to investigate a merger of the two Home Office directorates as the Government seeks to regain the initiative after a doubling in illegal migrant crossings this year and the failure to deport any to safe third countries.

Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, will unveil proposed new laws next week that will deny illegal migrants the right to settle in the UK even if they are granted asylum and allow the Government to send asylum seekers abroad for processing.

The moves come as more than 200 migrants on 14 boats reached the UK across the Channel this weekend, making June the busiest month for crossings this year. It brings the total to 5,539, more than double the number at the same point last year.

Boats  which were intercepted in the Channel  are stored at a warehouse facility in Dover, Kent - Gareth Fuller/PA

It follows criticism of Border Force last month when one of its vessels, HMC Valiant, picked up Channel migrants in French waters and took them to Dover.

Ms Patel ordered an investigation into the incident, saying the British public was fed up and demoralised by the growing numbers of migrant crossings.

Paul Lincoln, director general of Border Force, told staff last Friday he was moving on after four years in the role to pursue new opportunities on secondment from the department. Tyson Hepple, director general of Immigration Enforcement, is taking up a job elsewhere in Whitehall.

A single director general would take over their roles as part of transformation changes within the Home Office to strengthen our borders and enforcement capabilities and deliver high-quality and efficient services, said Mr Lincoln.

A source said: The whole of the Home Office is going through a restructure. As part of that, they are looking at merging Immigration Enforcement and Border Force into one single directorate for borders and enforcement.

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Border Force, which is responsible for frontline border control operations at air, sea and rail ports, was part of a unified immigration agency in the Home Office until 2012 when it was separated out by Theresa May, who was then Home Secretary.

David Wood, a former director general of Immigration Enforcement, said: It was mad to break it up because it was part of one system. Its got to interact, otherwise you end up with a disconnected system.

Border Force are responsible as they arrive on our shores. If they get one and a half miles inland, then Immigration Enforcement is responsible for them. When they are intercepted, they have to hand them over to Asylum and Immigration.

You end up with barriers between different parts. Each has its own budget, its own priorities and they are not particularly connected up.

The Border Force union is also up in arms after warning its officers are being overwhelmed by the number of migrants arriving at Dover.

The ISU union said it meant Covid tests were not being completed and migrants were being held up to 24 hours in inadequate temporary tents with unsanitary conditions because of delays in handing them over to Immigration Enforcement.

The Home Office has been given four weeks to construct new accommodation to process the migrants or face being reported to the Health and Safety Executive for breaches of regulations.

A Home Office spokesperson said the changes were to ensure closer alignment between our teams, strengthen our borders and enforcement services and support the implementation of the Home Secretarys New Plan for Immigration. He said Border Force and Immigration Enforcement would remain distinct as brands and operationally.
The offence is said to have taken place at a flat along Clementi West Street 1. (PHOTO: Google Street View screengrab)

SINGAPORE  A 29-year-old man accused of fatally assaulting his sister had his charge upgraded to murder on Tuesday (29 June).

Huang Bocan, a Singaporean, and his two co-accused, Chee Mei Wan and Lim Peng Tiong, will now face a charge of murder each by causing bodily injury to 19-year-old Huang Baoying in common intention with each other.

Chee, a 41-year-old Singapore permanent resident, and Lim, a 62-year-old Singaporean, also had their charges upgraded to murder in the same hearing, where all three were produced in court via videolink. The relationship between the accused persons was not revealed in court.

The prosecution said that there are unlikely to be more charges at this point. The charge faced by each of the accused is under 302(2) of the Penal Code, which is punishable by death, or life imprisonment and caning.

The act, committed allegedly at 10pm on 4 May at a unit in a block along Clementi West Street 1, is said to have caused bodily injury which resulted in Baoying's death. She was pronounced dead at the flat a day after the alleged incident.

Huang, Chee and Lim had originally been handed a charge of voluntarily causing grievous hurt to Baoying in common intention, by hitting her with the pole on 4 May. Voluntarily causing grievous hurt carries a jail term of up to 10 years, and a fine or caning.

The prosecution later said that Huang might face more charges, including wrongful confinement and hurt.

All three will return for their next hearings on 7 September.

Stay in the know on-the-go: Join Yahoo Singapore's Telegram channel at http://t.me/YahooSingapore

Related stories:

Two more charged over death of woman allegedly hit by brother with wooden pole

Man, 29, charged for fatal assault on sister at Clementi flat

Man accused of killing sister may have charge upgraded, additional charges
An airline passenger who allegedly tried to breach a plane cockpit door before he opened an emergency exit and jumped onto the tarmac faces a federal charge for interfering with a flight crew, the Justice Department announced Monday.

Luis Antonio Victoria Dominguez, a 33-year-old Mexican national, was about to take off on a Salt Lake City-bound United Express flight at Los Angeles International Airport on Friday when he allegedly told a passenger he needed to deplane, according to a complaint filed in federal court.

Victoria Dominguez got up while the plane was taxiing to a departure runway and ran to the front of the aircraft where he started banging on the cockpit door and manipulating the locked doorknob, fighting off a flight attendant who tried to stop him, the complaint alleged.

MAN IN CUSTODY AFTER DRIVING THROUGH FENCE AND ONTO TAXIWAY AT LAX

Other passengers tried to subdue Victoria Dominguez, who opened the emergency exit door and partially deployed the emergency slide while the flight attendant called the flight deck to tell the pilots to stop moving.

Victoria Dominguez freed himself from a passengers grip and jumped out of the aircraft, breaking his right leg, the complaint stated. LAX airport police arrested and transported him to the hospital, where he underwent surgery for the fracture.

The complaint included details from an interview between federal authorities and Victoria Dominguez, who admitted to using methamphetamine before boarding the flight.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

He was coming down from all the drugs he had used the last couple of days and immediately started to doze off when he heard passengers behind him joking about the flight going somewhere other than Salt Lake City and began to panic, he told investigators.

Victoria Dominguez faces a statutory maximum of 20 years in federal prison if convicted for interfering with a flight crew. He is due to appear in federal court in the Central District of California later this week, the Justice Department said.

Story continues

Washington Examiner Videos

Tags: News, Justice Department, airlines, Los Angeles, Law Enforcement, Transportation, California, Travel

Original Author: Jeremy Beaman

Original Location: Man who allegedly approached cockpit and jumped out of plane emergency exit faces federal charge
A gunman who shot dead five people in the offices of a Maryland newspaper appeared Tuesday before a jury that will have to decide whether he spends the rest of his life in prison or a mental hospital.

Armed with a shotgun, Jarrod Ramos burst into the newsroom of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, an hour outside of the capital Washington, on June 28, 2018, where he killed four journalists and a sales assistant before being arrested.

It was one of the worst attacks on a media outlet in the United States, and sent shock waves through the country.

Charged with murder, Ramos, now 41, pleaded guilty but said he was insane at the time of the attack and not criminally responsible. He must now convince a jury that his judgment was impaired by mental problems.

At the opening of the proceedings on Tuesday, his lawyer said he suffered from, among other things, autism spectrum disorders and compulsive and delusional disorders.

"It's chilling because Mr Ramos does not believe what he did was wrong," Katy O'Donnell said, quoted by local channel WBAL-TV.

She admitted that he had spent two years preparing for his attack, had scouted out his target and even taken out a chess club membership in anticipation of being locked up for years afterwards.

Ramos had a troubled relationship with the Capital Gazette after having unsuccessfully attacked it for defamation and threatened it several times online.

He was furious at the paper for an article published in 2011 entitled "Jarrod wants to be your friend," in which the newspaper recounted the ordeal of a young woman he had harassed on the internet, and which had earned him a 90-day suspended prison sentence.

The trial is set to last 10 days.

chp/vgr/jh/ft
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is trying to blunt momentum for the bipartisan infrastructure bill by focusing on process before policy.

Why it matters: The author of "The Long Game" is once again trying to dictate the terms of congressional action by demanding Democratic leaders delink President Biden's second infrastructure plan from his first. The strategy lets McConnell gain some control of the debate, even if he ultimately supports the package.

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It also gives any wavering members or GOP opponents a reason to potentially bail on the deal.

McConnell used similar tactics to block President Obama's Supreme Court picks and President Trump's second impeachment.

The big picture: There's minimal wiggle room for Democratic leaders.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) not only have to get the bipartisan deal across the finish line, but also the partisan, "human" infrastructure bill.

Both will be an uphill battle given the dynamics of a 50-50 Senate and Democrats' four-seat majority in the House.

McConnell knows this and sees it as leverage.

The big question: Does McConnell actually have the muscle to stop this bill?

There are 10 Senate Republicans in the group that ultimately struck a deal with the White House, and only 10 GOP votes are needed to meet the Senate's 60-vote threshold to pass major legislation such as the bipartisan bill.

Five of those advocates  Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Mitt Romney of Utah, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Rob Portman of Ohio  helped negotiate the package and will almost certainly vote for it.

But as Politico's Burgess Everett first pointed out, the other five  Sens. Thom Tillis and Richard Burr of N.C., Todd Young of Indiana, Jerry Moran of Kansas and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina  could easily be persuaded against it by McConnell.

Between the lines: McConnell has long been aware Democrats were going to try to pass a partisan infrastructure bill focused on the more ambitious parts of Biden's plan  including climate change and child care provisions.

Story continues

Schumer has repeatedly said these bills would be moving on a "dual track," and McConnell, as well as other Republicans in the group of 10, previously addressed this before the deal was announced.

Go deeper: Listen to this Fox News interview from May 12, starting around the 2:18 mark.

The difference now is Biden's own comments last week that he wouldn't sign the bipartisan bill without Congress also passing the reconciliation bill.

That struck GOP dealmakers as a requirement that wasn't part of their negotiations with the White House.

While many Democratic aides are trying to say this was always their strategy, and they've been vocal about this all along  they haven't. This is clear from Biden's stunning walk-back Saturday.

And while the president has moved away from coupling the two bills, Pelosi has remained firm her chamber wont take up the bipartisan bill without the Senate also passing the reconciliation bill.

What to watch: McConnell has yet to endorse the bipartisan deal. It's unclear whether he even supports the underlying substance.

If he doesn't, then the process argument over the sequencing of the bills doesn't matter.

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In The Know is proud to celebrate Caribbean American Heritage Month. During this month, our team will highlight a wide range of Caribbean and Caribbean American-owned brands. We encourage you to support today and beyond.

Wine is something thats universally appreciated, regardless of race, gender or even socioeconomic status. And while wine consumers are so vastly diverse, the same cant be said for wine professionals. The overwhelmingly white and male-dominated industry isnt even remotely considered the picture of diversity. In fact, Black professionals make up just 2% of the drinks industry despite actually accounting for more than 13% of the U.S. population. Theres one millennial winemaker with Haitian roots, however, whos determined to shake things up for the better.

Abner Montfleury, a first-generation Haitian American winemaker, made it his mission to diversify the wine manufacturing industry with his company, Montfleur Duvin. While he launched his first wine in August 2020 and has seen massive business growth and demand ever since, the road that led him to what he dubs his passion was anything but conventional.

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Abners first foray into the professional space was completely unrelated to his current profession. After earning his psychology degree from Boston College in 2018, he actually pursued a career in higher education. Though polar opposite to where he is now, this period in his life was somewhat divine, as it led him to question his future.

My first job was working at an entrepreneurship school, he told In The Know. I was an admissions counselor, and speaking to those incoming students already had my mind thinking, What is the future? Do I want to work a nine-to-five? How long do I want to work?'

He added that this jolt of curiosity put a pep in [his] step, and after frequenting a few wine festivals while serving as an admissions counselor at the University of Maryland, he had an aha moment that motivated him to seek change in an industry that was all too homogenous.

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The one thing I noticed is that there werent a lot of people [who] looked like us  [who] either owned wine or were just there, he said, recalling the massive Black underrepresentation at the festivals. So, for me, I said, Why not be the change I was looking for?' And thus, Montfleur Duvin was born.

Credit: Montfleur Duvin

This wasnt a straight shot to success, however. He told In The Know that he put in a lot of time, research and sacrifice to get his passion from a mere dream to a realized and tangible business. One of the main difficulties he faced while trying to get his foot in the door was simply gathering the right amount of capital to get the ball rolling.

Not having the money to get the distributors, to pay for marketing or branding, he said, were top-of-mind hurdles that he had to overcome one by one. And while his new business has now officially launched and is thriving, theres still room to grow.

Right now, Im doing it all by myself, but Im realizing how important it is to create these connections because these are the people who are going to be serving your product, he said, referencing the importance of person-to-person contact while growing a business from the ground up.

For me, that was one of the challenges, but I saw it as a leg up for me because Im on the ground, he added. Im actually speaking to these owners, talking to the staff, talking to the bartenders and making sure they understand my product and my story.

With a cool, calm demeanor and a smile of certainty, he told In The Know that this fight is why he still chooses not to sell his wines exclusively online.

I use this as motivation to just continue to interact with people because I could always sell my wine online, but I think its different when you go to these places [and] meet these families and family-owned businesses, especially Black-owned businesses, he said.

This particular philosophy was a struggle to maintain, however, especially as he launched his brand in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020  a decision he admitted was a challenge.

Restaurants are shutting down. There are no wine festivals, he remembered of the time when everything temporarily changed. However, rather than allowing this unforeseen worldwide crisis to divert his business plan, he somehow found a way to make it work in his favor thanks to what he calls his handheld supercomputer  his smartphone.

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I think, unfortunately, the pandemic allowed a lot of businesses to adapt, he said. So, if you were able to adapt, you were able to survive. Just being in this predicament allowed me to pivot and just say, Alright, if I dont have a wine festival, how else can I get my product out there?'

Continuing to tout this hopeful business acumen, Abner added that the pandemic was actually a blessing in disguise.

Thanks to this persistent spirit, Montfleur Duvin officially launched in August 2020 with one white wine called Yvonne, named after Abners late grandmother, Marie Yvonne Galette Montfleury. The young entrepreneurs first instinct upon launch was to honor the matriarch of his Haitian family through what he dubs his calling.

For me, I said, Let me just think within,' he said while recalling the moment he hit a brick wall trying to think of names for his inaugural product. I named my first wine after my grandmother Yvonne to memorialize one of the matriarchs of my family.

Credit: Abner Montfleury

According to the site, Marie, who passed away on November 27, 2019, carried her spirit of living in the moment, making memories and celebrating life to the fullest extent during her time here, and her grandson wanted to embody this essence in its truest form in this wine.

I want people to celebrate life, live in the moment and continue to make memories  thats what it says on the back of the label, he added.

As the brand quickly evolved, Montfleur Duvin became a love letter from Abner to the host of Haitian women who helped raise him into the man he is today.

In my immediate family, Im the only male, he shared. I have an older sister, I have two cousins [and] a bunch of aunts, so its really [just] me. Those are the inspirational people who helped build me.

With this in mind, he named his second wine release, a red blend, after his mother Carline Joseph, and the bottles label design also features a beautiful nod to his home country of Haiti. The hibiscus flower, Haitis national flower, is printed on the front label to shine a light on his rich Haitian heritage and, as he added, continue to cement the legacy of the Montfleury name.

Credit: Abner Montfleury

Though the groundwork is complete on getting Montfleur Duvin up and running, Abner says hes just getting started. While he has plans in place to expand his portfolio and get his wines to the masses in the coming months, his key mission remains to do his part in diversifying the wine industry by leading the way for more Caribbean representation in the market. He wants to do this, however, in a manner thats steeped in organic, constant practice rather than headline-making firsts.

I want to help other people who are interested in entering the wine industry, he said. To me, its all about trying to inspire those [who] may not be able to see themselves until they see someone like them in that space. And so Im really trying to advocate for more people to get in this space, because they need people like us.

Video producer: Nicholas Rudzewick / Interviewer: Amissa Pitter / Feature Writer: Moriba Cummings

If you enjoyed this story, check out these 10 Caribbean-founded Instagram food accounts you need to follow.

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The post Meet the 25-year-old Haitian American breaking barriers in the wine industry appeared first on In The Know.
By Daina Beth Solomon

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico has sent the United States a letter that formally kicks off a joint negotiation to resolve a U.S. complaint over a disputed contract vote at a General Motors Co factory, Mexican officials said on Monday.

Workers had voted in April on whether to keep their current contract, however, halfway through Mexican officials detected "serious irregularities", including destroyed ballots and scrapped the vote.

The findings prompted the United States to ask Mexico to review the case for possible rights violations under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).

Mexico's labor ministry said last week that the union at the plant, which employs about 6,000 people in the central city of Silao, must hold a new vote before Aug. 20 or lose the contract altogether.

The letter to the United States - marks the next step in the formal USMCA complaint process - reiterated those terms, the labor ministry told Reuters.

The economy ministry confirmed that the letter had been sent.

It also stated that the goal of the remediation would be to ensure that the majority of workers at the GM Silao plant will be able to vote freely and without intimidation, the labor ministry said.

The labor ministry declined to share the original letter.

Both the U.S. and Mexican governments will have at least 10 days to come to an agreement on the remediation plan.

Labor remedies under the USMCA include revoking tariff-free access for the violating factory's goods.

In GM's case, that could mean applying a 25% U.S. pickup truck import tariff on Silao-made trucks, a move that could add thousands of dollars to each vehicle's cost.

GM has previously said it will cooperate with both governments and that it condemned violations of labor rights including actions to restrict collective bargaining.

The so-called request for review marks the first use of the Rapid Response Labor Mechanism in USMCA, which allows countries to target labor rights violations at specific factories.

(Reporting by Daina Beth Solomon and Sharay Angulo, Editing by Sherry Jacob-Phillips)
A woman shows a marijuana bud during a sit-in organised by the Mexican Cannabis Movement Planton 420 outside the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN), in Mexico City, Mexico, 28 June 2021 (EPA)

Mexicos Supreme Court has removed the countrys prohibition against the private use of recreational marijuana by calling the current laws unconstitutional.

The court ruled on Monday that adults would be able to apply for permits to cultivate their own cannabis for personal consumption with some restrictions intact on smoking in public or in front of children.

With an 8-3 decision, the court struck down the sections of the countrys laws that prohibited growing a pot plant and its consumption, a decision called historic for liberties by Supreme Court president Arturo Zaldivar.

This comes as the latest step in Mexicos path of becoming one of the largest countries to regulate marijuana usage by the public, years after the apex court ordered Congress to change the laws banning cannabis.

The bill legalising recreational marijuana remained stalled in Congress even as the court issued 30 April deadline to pass a law.

Before Mondays ruling by the court, adults could approach courts to seek permission to grow and consume cannabis since 2015. The court in 2017 ordered Congress to draft laws to create a legal cannabis market.

In March, Mexicos lower house passed the bill legalising cannabis for recreational use but it remained stalled in the Senate for final approval. The negotiations fell apart after a disagreement over the details of the law.

The bill, if approved, would establish a system of licenses for the entire chain of production, distribution, transformation and sales of marijuana. It will allow users with a permit to possess up to 28 gram and grow up to eight plants at home for personal use.

Supporters of the law say that the regulation will remove the marijuana market from the grips of Mexicos powerful drug cartels.

But some have shown skepticism that the ruling was unlikely to lead to major immediate changes as the health secretariat could still impose hurdles in the application process.

Read More

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Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove (Getty Images)

Michael Gove has dodged 50 minutes of questions about illegally-issued emergency coronavirus contracts.

MPs had sought to challenge Cabinet Office minister Gove over the awarding of 560,000 to Public First, which critics said was used to carry out opinion polling on Scottish independence.

Earlier this month, the High Court ruled use of the money was unlawful as it gave rise to an apparent bias due to its links with former colleagues of Gove and Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnsons former chief adviser.

The contract was awarded to gauge peoples opinions on Brexit issues, rebuilding the economy following the pandemic and attitudes towards the union.

During a visit to Aberdeen on Monday, Gove had denied allegations of misusing public funds and said it was the right decision to award the money for polling.

However, he chose not to answer MPs questions in the House of Commons on Tuesday, instead sending junior Cabinet Office minister Julia Lopez.

This provoked the ire of speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle, who said: I do feel sorry for the minister being set up [Lopez]. Im sorry that minister Gove wasnt here to take questions because most of them are named for him, but this house wont be taken for granted.

Watch: Police investigating Chris Whitty harassed in park

When statements are made outside here thats why Im going to continue to grant urgent questions, so lets gets used to it. The government doesnt want to come here  Im going to ensure it is heard here.

Hoyle has regularly criticised the government for making major announcements outside Parliament.

In Tuesdays debate, SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford said he had written to cabinet secretary Simon Case, the UKs most senior civil servant, to launch an independent investigation into blatant misuse of public money for political purposes.

Read more:

375,000 UK pupils absent over Covid-19 as school absences at its highest peak since March return

Boris Johnson increasingly confident of July 19 reopening and says Britons will learn to live with Covid

Story continues

Lopez said: We do not use public money for political campaign purposes.

In February, a judge also ruled that then-health secretary Matt Hancock acted unlawfully when his department did not reveal details of contracts signed during the pandemic.

The awarding of contracts is part of a wider row involving the government's conduct.

On Tuesday, health minister Lord Bethell was facing fresh calls to resign over his use of a personal email account rather than official communication channels. Hancock also faced similar accusations.

Watch: Labour calls for inquiry over use of private emails
Though state Senators fended off a bid by hardline conservatives to pull Medicaid funding from Planned Parenthood, Missouri Republicans are not done trying to remove the provider from the state health program.

Republican Senators said theyve been assured that Gov. Mike Parsons administration is likely to pursue regulatory action to eliminate the organization from any role in Medicaid.

In the House, which begins meeting in special session Tuesday to take up renewal of a critical tax that pays for the health program  passed by the Senate early Saturday  lawmakers will push separate legislation to ban payments to Planned Parenthood.

Anti-abortion politicians continue to threaten this vital health care program for people with low incomes by considering illegal defunding measures against Planned Parenthood, Planned Parenthood Advocates in Missouri said in a Monday statement.

Either course of action could land Missouri in a fight with the Biden administration, which has indicated it opposes efforts to block family planning providers from federally-funded programs. The administration has not addressed Missouris specific efforts, but some lawmakers suspect it will push back.

Im not sure the Biden administration is not looking for a state to make an example of, said Sen. Mike Cierpiot, a Lees Summit Republican.

Under state and federal law, Medicaid does not cover abortions. But Planned Parenthoods status as Missouris sole abortion provider  at its St.Louis clinic  has spurred numerous attempts by hard-right Republicans to remove the organization entirely from its role in delivering taxpayer-funded health care to low-income women.

Under Medicaid, its Planned Parenthoods 11 family planning clinics across the state provide birth control, sexually transmitted disease treatments, cancer screenings and other non-abortion services.

After a bitter impasse, the state Senate Saturday rejected the latest attempt, led by Lake St. Louis Sen. Bob Onder, to attach the ban on payments to Planned Parenthood to the renewal of the medical provider tax that generates billions of dollars for the states Medicaid program.

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Compromise language specifies that the program also does not cover the abortion pill.

After the Senate vote, Republicans rushed to declare that the state will still move to exclude the provider.

Leaders in the Missouri House and Senate are working closely with Governor Parson to put a real plan in place to, once and for all, defund Planned Parenthood in the state of Missouri, Majority Leader Caleb Rowden, a Columbia Republican, wrote in a statement on Facebook.

He and Senate President Dave Schatz, a Sullivan Republican, said in a joint statement after the vote that Parson had made a commitment to take necessary executive action that would deliver the knockout punch on Planned Parenthood funding.

Parsons spokeswoman Kelli Jones did not respond to an inquiry Monday on details of the executive action being considered. Rowden and Schatz also did not return calls for comment.

Lawmakers were unwilling to pass the Planned Parenthood ban in the tax renewal bill because termination of the tax could lead to the collapse of the states entire Medicaid program. But Republicans learned the Parson administration could instead rewrite Medicaid rules on its own in a way that would restrict an abortion provider from the program, Cierpiot said.

The good thing about that from our point of view is if the rules are found to be beyond what is possible, we can try again or try different methods, he said. I just think its a much better way to do it. Nothing is threatening funding.

How the Biden administration would respond to a proposed rule restricting the affiliates of abortion providers is unclear. Federal law prohibits states from excluding qualified Medicaid providers without reason. But the Trump administration in 2018 rescinded Obama-era guidance to states that had specified they could not exclude providers for being abortion clinics. Federal appeals courts have allowed Republican administrations in both Arkansas and Texas to cut ties with Planned Parenthood.

Its an open legal question, Missouri anti-abortion lobbyist Sam Lee said last week.

Planned Parenthood Advocates in Missouri has launched a petition asking the Biden administration to weigh in on Missouris efforts.

Were calling on the pro-reproductive health White House to make it clear every Missourian who relies on Medicaid has the freedom to choose their provider, it states.

Meanwhile, House Republicans are rushing this week to push the Planned Parenthood ban the Senate rejected on Saturday.

In addition to hearing the bill to renew the medical provider tax, which must pass by July 1 before Parson enacts drastic budget cuts, the House Budget Committee is scheduled to hear two pieces of legislation fully excluding Planned Parenthood or other abortion clinic affiliates from Medicaid and other public funding.

It is sponsored by OFallon Rep. Nick Schroer, who is among several House Republicans who have said they want to restore Onders language alongside passage of the tax renewal.

Lawmakers in 2018 and 2019 included this ban in the state budget, and the state withheld more than $1 million in payments from Planned Parenthood affiliates before the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that lawmakers could not pass that legislation through the state budget.

The Stars Jonathan Shorman contributed reporting.
New results from a laboratory study showed the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine appears effective against the more contagious Delta coronavirus variant first discovered in India, as well as other variants tested, with just a modest reduction in antibody levels compared to the original strain.

The Tuesday announcement offers the first evidence that the Moderna shot can offer protection against emerging variants that appear to have increased transmissibility and risk of hospitalization in countries around the globe.

The new analysis of blood samples from eight people collected one week after their second dose in the Phase 1 clinical trial found antibody levels were about two-fold lower when put against the Delta variant compared to the original coronavirus strain.

While the currently available COVID-19 vaccines in the U.S. are effective enough to protect against severe disease and death caused by the Delta variant, experts say the longer the coronavirus hops from one person to the next, the more chances it has to mutate into a version that could one day evade the shots defenses.

As we seek to defeat the pandemic, it is imperative that we are proactive as the virus evolves. We remain committed to studying emerging variants, generating data and sharing it as it becomes available. These new data are encouraging and reinforce our belief that the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine should remain protective against newly detected variants, Stephane Bancel, Modernas chief executive officer, said in a statement. These findings highlight the importance of continuing to vaccinate populations with an effective primary series vaccine.

The Moderna vaccine also appeared effective against the Gamma coronavirus variant first identified in Brazil, Beta variant first found in South Africa, Eta variant first discovered in the U.K., and the Kappa variant first found in India, the company said. The vaccine also appeared effective against two variants first identified in Uganda and Angola.

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A study from Public Health England found that three weeks after one dose, the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was 33% effective against symptomatic COVID-19 caused by the Delta variant. Two weeks following the second dose, which is recommended for full protection, it was 88% effective.

There isnt any published data on how the one-dose Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine fares against the Delta variant.

The most-recent evidence shows the variant is about 60% more contagious than the Alpha variant  one of the first variants of concern in the U.S. that initially emerged from the U.K. Its been causing major outbreaks in other parts of the world with low vaccination rates, sending some countries, such as New Zealand, Bangladesh and Australia, back into lockdown.

The concerning trends led the World Health Organization on Friday to recommend fully vaccinated people still wear face masks whenever possible.

The advice arrived more than a month after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gave the green light for fully vaccinated Americans to ditch their masks in most scenarios. The CDC has yet to publicly respond to the WHOs advice, but many health experts outside either agency seem to agree with erring on the side of caution.

Masks would add an extra layer of protection for the vaccinated, and even more so for the unvaccinated who are at higher risk of infection.

The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health on Monday night also recommended residents wear masks while in public indoor spaces, regardless of vaccination status, the Los Angeles Times reported. It appears to be the first local precaution in the U.S. spurred by concerns over the Delta variant.

As of Saturday, the Delta variant makes up more than 30% of the coronavirus cases in the U.S., according to Dr. Eric Topol, director and founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in California. Its presence doubles roughly every 11 days.

Nevada and Missouri are the variants current epicenters in the U.S., Topol wrote on Twitter, causing a rise in cases and hospitalizations there.

Its still early to assess the Delta hit. ... The next few weeks will be telling. Our genomic surveillance is still weak, Topol wrote. If vaccinations could be substantially increased ... wed be in great shape to reduce its impact.

The variant has been identified in at least 85 countries.
TAMPA  Montreal defenseman Shea Weber was fined the maximum allowed under the collective bargaining agreement on Tuesday for a non-call slash on Lightning right wing Nikita Kucherov.

Weber, who was assessed a $5,000 fine by the NHLs department of player safety, slashed Kucherov during the third period in the Lightnings series-opening 5-1 win over the Canadiens.

Kucherov was a moving target on the ice Monday night, also drawing a roughing penalty from Montreal defenseman Ben Chiarot.

It was the first meeting between the teams since March 5, 2020, after the league decided to implement division-only playing during this years regular season and Montreal  normally an Atlantic Division opponent  was moved to the Canada-only North Division.

The non-call fine comes less than 24 hours after NHL commissioner Gary Bettman addressed ongoing complaints about officiating this postseason.

It seems every season, its a playoff ritual for me to address some aspect of officiating, Bettman said. Lets be clear, our officials are not only the best hockey officials in the world, they are the best officials in any sport.

Bettman recognized the speed of the game makes certain calls more difficult, especially with the split-second reaction time. Yes, officials miss calls, but not as many as fans may suggest.

We dont like it when it happens. In fact we hate it, but it is the nature of the human element of calling our game, he said. And even with the human element, we have been and will continue to be at the forefront of adding technology to assist in their efforts.

Bettman reiterated that officials are constantly coached and critiqued to be held accountable. But as style of play changes from the regular season to the postseason, it impacts how officiating is perceived.

We always know that there are a handful of calls and non-calls that we wish would be otherwise. And depending on your rooting interest you will likely have even more than a handful, he said. Would we prefer that perfection is achieved? Of course, absolutely. Is it possible? Of course not.

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The Lightning and fans were particularly unhappy with a hit on Kucherov early in Game 6 of the semifinals. Kucherov took a cross-check to the back with an official nearby on the ice.

Kucherov got up and continued playing, eventually getting into an awkward collision along the boards that removed him for the remainder of the game. He was healthy enough to return for the Game 7 series finale against New York.

In the same series, Lightning center Brayden Point was called for goaltender interference on New Yorks Semyon Varlamov after he was pushed from behind by Islanders defenseman Adam Pelech. As a result, the Islanders scored on the ensuing power play to tie the score at 1-all in the first period.

And four days later, Point was pushed into Varlamov  again  this time, by Islanders defenseman Scott Mayfield.

Also against the Islanders, Lightning defenseman Mikhail Sergachev was called for interference on New York forward Mat Barzal as the two battled for the puck in the corner and Barzal fell to the ice as Sergachev cut in front to gain position on the play.

And its not just the Lightning raising an eyebrow at officiating. Teams around the league have had issues of their own throughout this postseason.

In Game 4 of the Montreal-Vegas semifinals, Canadiens defenseman Joel Edmundson cross-checked Vegas forward William Carrier in the neck. An on-ice official was looking right at the play without making a call.

In the same game, an official turned his head after Vegas Brayden McNabb punched Montreals Nick Suzuki in the head.

Contact Mari Faiello at mfaiello@tampabay.com. Follow @faiello_mari.

  

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Wall Street investment bank Morgan Stanley holds a substantial sum of Bitcoin-related assets according to a filing with the U.S. SEC.

The assets were revealed in a monthly portfolio investments report filed to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The report details investments by Morgan Stanley, one of which was Grayscales Bitcoin Trust. The bank holds 28,289 shares of the bitcoin fund estimated to be worth over $1.23 million at the time of the filing, though that number has dipped with the correction to a bit over $800,000.

The banking giant has been betting big on bitcoin this year. In January, Morgan Stanley purchased a 10.9% stake in MicroStrategy, the business intelligence firm that has been loading up on BTC.

In February, it was reported that the investment arm of the American bank was considering adding bitcoin to its list of hedges. The move followed that big $1.5 billion bitcoin purchase by Tesla.

More recently, Morgan Stanley made another move into the crypto industry by investing $48 million in the Securitize blockchain startup on June 21.

Grayscale holds more than 3% of all BTC

Institutional momentum has been the major catalyst for the 2021 crypto bull market. But there are signs that demand is starting to slow down as asset under management figures fall while outflows increase.

Grayscale is the largest institutional crypto asset manager with a total of $30 billion in assets under management according to its most recent report on June 28.

The company reportedly holds 654,600 BTC which is equivalent to 3.1% of the entire maximum supply. Its BTC trust comprises 74% of its entire crypto asset fund portfolio and is valued at $22.8 billion. MicroStrategy by comparison holds 105,085 BTC or roughly 0.5% of the total supply.

Institutional outflow slow

CoinShares has reported that there has been a massive outflow of funds from institutional bitcoin products over the past six weeks. However, its latest update revealed that they had slowed to just $1.3 million for the past week. This is down from a whopping $89 million for the previous week.

Grayscale even saw an inflow over the last week of $1.3 million in BTC as investors remain mixed over the asset. At the time of press, the asset was trading up 2% on the day at $35,180 according to CoinGecko. The psychological resistance barrier at $40,000 is its next target to break.
BANGKOK (AP)  Myanmar's ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi suffered a legal setback Tuesday when a judge denied her lawyers motion to disqualify prosecution testimony against her on a sedition charge, her defense team said.

The court, however, said it would allow the issue to be referred to the High Court and would suspend testimony until a ruling is issued. Ousted President Win Myint and the former mayor of Naypyitaw, Myo Aung, her close political allies, are co-defendants in the charge.

The court will continue to hear prosecution testimony on other charges Suu Kyi faces: that she illegally imported walkie-talkies for her bodyguards use and used those radios without a license, and violated COVID-19 pandemic restrictions on two occasions during the 2020 election campaign.

Suu Kyi went on trial on June 14 in a closed court in Naypyitaw, the capital. The ruling military junta is widely seen as using the charges to discredit her and consolidate its control. Sessions are being held weekly on Mondays and Tuesdays.

The military took power in February after ousting Suu Kyis elected government and arresting her and other top officials in her administration and National League for Democracy party, which had been due to start a second five-year term after winning a landslide victory in a general election last November.

The army has said it will hold new polls within two years of its takeover, but a conviction on virtually any charge could result in Suu Kyi being banned from running.

The sedition charge, which is sometimes called incitement, provides for up to two years imprisonment for anyone guilty of causing fear or alarm that could create an offense against the state or public tranquility. It has been law since Myanmar was a British colony, and has been criticized as a catch-all statute that infringes on freedom of speech and is used for political repression.

The plaintiff. a local Naypyitaw official, cited two statements posted on the Facebook page of Suu Kyis party as evidence supporting the sedition charge.

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Suu Kyis defense team raised an objection to that testimony, noting that all members of the partys central executive committee, including Suu Kyi, had already been arrested before the statements were posted.

San Mar La Nyunt, the defense lawyer handling the sedition case, said they raised the objection because the prosecution witnesses testimony was not in accordance with the law. After the court ruled it allowable, they asked for and were given permission to apply to the High Court.

Suu Kyi faces additional charges that have yet to be tried, among them allegedly accepting bribes, which carries a penalty of up to 15 years in prison, and violating the Official Secrets Act, which has a maximum prison term of 14 years.

Suu Kyi, 76, who has not been allowed a public appearance since her arrest, passed a message through her lawyers for the public to stay united in the face of the political situation and the COVID-19 crisis.

She also said that a doctor and a nurse are assigned to her, but that she is in good health, said another of her lawyers, Min Min Soe. Earlier in the trial, Suu Kyi had complained of a toothache.
Myanmar's multi-billion-dollar jade mines risk becoming a "slush fund" for military repression, Global Witness said Tuesday, urging consumers to boycott purchasing any jade and gemstones from the coup-wracked nation.

The country has been in turmoil since the military toppled the government of Aung San Suu Kyi, with more than 880 killed in a junta crackdown on dissent, according to a local monitoring group.

Myanmar is one of the world's biggest sources of jadeite and the industry is largely driven by insatiable demand for the translucent green gem from neighbouring China.

The mines in northern Kachin state are mired in secrecy, but help finance both sides of a decades-long civil war between armed ethnic groups and the military.

With the military taking control of licensing, the industry now risks "becoming a slush fund and source of patronage" for the junta as it looks to secure its grip on power, international watchdog Global Witness said in a report released Tuesday.

"The grip of the military on the jade sector is so strong that it would be nearly impossible to purchase jade without providing money to the generals and their allies," said Keel Dietz, the NGO's Myanmar Policy Advisor.

The group called for sanctions to ban the import of all jade and gemstones mined in the country and for companies and consumers to "avoid purchasing any jade and gems sourced from Myanmar".

Very little of the profits end up in state coffers, with most high-quality jade smuggled over the border into China.

Before the coup, 70 to 90 percent of all jade mined in Hpakant in Kachin state was smuggled over the border "without ever entering the formal system in Myanmar", Global Witness said.

"China, as the main driver of demand for jade, also has a key role to play in addressing its role in corruption and conflict linked to the trade."

- Air strikes -

The coup has also triggered an "explosion" in fighting in Kachin state between the Kachin Independence Army, which has waged a decades-long insurgency, and the Myanmar military, Global Witness added.

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In May, the military launched air strikes against the group, which later told AFP it had downed a helicopter gunship during fierce clashes in the country's far north.

The coup has also effectively extinguished any chance of reform to the dangerous and unregulated industry started by Suu Kyi's government, Global Witness said.

Thousands of illegal workers travel to Kachin state each year to buy their way into the vast open-cast mines after diggers from state-sanctioned companies leave.

They end up exploited by mafia operations that benefit kingpins and various armed groups, analysts say.

Landslides and accidents in the over-excavated hills are common, especially during Myanmar's severe monsoon season.

Last year, one landslide claimed the lives of nearly 300 miners.

"As the people of Myanmar risk their lives to stand up to the military regime, the priority for the international community right now should be bringing an end to the coup and helping ensure a democratic and legitimate government is returned to power," Dietz said.

"A crucial part of this is cutting off the financial flows to the military through targeted sanctions on their economic interests, including the jade sector."

bur-rma/qan
(Reuters) - The judge in the trial of deposed Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi on Tuesday rejected a motion to dismiss evidence central to a case that could see her jailed for up to two years for incitement, her legal team said.

Nobel Peace laureate Suu Kyi, 76, has been held in detention since the military overthrew her elected civilian government on Feb. 1.

She is accused of a series of offences ranging from bribery and violating coronavirus protocols to illegally possessing two-way radios and incitement to commit crimes against the state - allegations her lawyers reject.

Her legal team head Khin Maung Zaw told Reuters the prosecution had entered evidence he believed was inadmissible, but the judge allowed it.

The evidence includes letters the prosecution says were issued by Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) party in the days after the coup which were widely shared on social media.

One urged embassies not to recognise the junta, among several documents that Khin Maung Zaw said were signed by neither Suu Kyi nor her co-defendants, ousted President Win Myint and former Naypyitaw mayor Myo Aung.

"There is no sign on the documents. They extracted the document from Internet," he said.

"They didn't include how they extracted the documents, what tech they used to extract the documents ... they just submitted it at court. That's the reason we objected."

Myanmar has been in chaos since the military took power, with protests and strikes, bombings, killings, and civilians taking up arms against the junta.

Hundreds of people have been killed by security forces, mostly civilians, and tens of thousands displaced by fighting.

Suu Kyi's communication with the public has been via her lawyers. Legal team member Min Min Soe told reporters that Suu Kyi had urged people to "Please stay united. Please be united".

In an interview with Russian news agency Sputnik published on Monday, coup leader General Min Aung Hlaing said Suu Kyi's fate was not in his hands.

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"I am not a judge. I cannot say what will happen. I cannot give any orders on what to do with her," he was quoted as saying.

"Judges will take care of that, in accordance with the law, and then judges will decide what will happen to her, as the law requires it."

(Reporting by Reuters Staff; Writing by Martin Petty; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
(Reuters) - Myanmar's military authorities have dropped charges against 24 celebrities who had been declared wanted under an anti-incitement law after anti-government comments, army run television said on Tuesday.

Actors, sportspeople, social media influencers, doctors and teachers have been among hundreds of people listed as wanted for opposing the junta that seized power from elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi on Feb. 1.

Myawaddy television said the charges against the 24 had been dropped because their involvement "had been due to external factors".

Since taking power, the junta has struggled to govern in the face of daily anti-military protests, strikes that have paralysed official and private business and an upsurge in local insurgencies.

Reuters was unable to reach any of the named celebrities for comment.

"I am happy for them, but I worry that they will go silent after this," activist Khin Sandar told Reuters.

Nearly 2,000 people are sought on arrest warrants issued since the coup, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners activist group. It says more than 5,200 people are currently detained.

(Reporting by Reuters staff; Editing by Matthew Tostevin and Nick Macfie)
A California law allowing transgender inmates to pick the prison gender of their choice has come under fire from a womens rights group citing abuse of females by men.

In a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Womens Liberation Front accused the state of violating the constitutional rights of incarcerated women by allowing men into their living quarters to prey on women. Since the law took effect on Jan. 1, WLF has received numerous complaints of assaulted, abused, and traumatized women at the hands of male inmates transferred into their prisons, WoLF Legal Director Lauren Adams said.

TRANSGENDER SURGERY IS NOW FREE FOR MILITARY, THANKS TO BIDEN EXECUTIVE ORDER

We are working with a woman who was punched in the face so hard by a new transfer that she couldnt chew for three days. He was taken away and released back in a different yard with no restrictions, Adams said. He was her cellmate. She had to sleep with him.

Other women have been sexually abused in the past and must now contend with nude men sharing communal showers, Adams said.

One woman went in there with two naked men showering who still had penises, Adams added. It was incredibly traumatic and scary, to know for, [possibly], the rest of their lives they are going to be subjected to this.

The state currently has 273 transfer requests; 266 are from people housed at male institutions requesting to be transferred to a female institution, and seven are from people at female institutions requesting to be transferred to a male institution, according to the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. California has 1,286 inmates identified as transgender or nonbinary.

Currently, 24 male prisoners have been transferred to female institutions. WoLF theorizes that many men transferring into womens prisons are not transgender but are just trying to escape their current living situation.

A lot of these men checking the box and trying to get transfers are probably trying to save their lives. I wouldnt want to be in the mens prison, Adams said. You are giving them a way to get out of that, but now its the women who are in danger.

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Most women in state prison have been abused at some point in their lives, and many have endured sexual assaults. Having to sleep in a cell with a man or shower with them is traumatic, Adams said.

State law requires a committee to vet the transfers, but a large number of men who got through have violent pasts. For example, one male transfer was convicted of assaulting two boys aged 6 and 8. Another had multiple counts of forcible rape, and he still had his penis, Adams said.

A CDCR spokesperson told the Washington Examiner the transfer process includes a thorough review of the incarcerated persons history prior to and during incarceration, their crime, arrest and criminal history, trial and sentencing documentation, medical and mental health needs ...

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

WoLF is asking the governor to halt all new transfers and remove the inmates who have already transferred until a safety assessment can be made.

CDCR did not respond to a request for comment as of press time.

Washington Examiner Videos

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Original Author: Tori Richards

Original Location: Newsom needs to halt transgender mixing of prison populations, women advocates say
ANNAPOLIS, Md.  The gunman who shot his way into the newsroom of the Capital Gazette, a newspaper in Maryland, and killed five people there three years ago had been living as a hermit for years before the massacre, his Maryland defense team said Tuesday.

Jarrod Ramos, 41, had been angrily obsessing over a perceived slight the newspaper had printed about him and planning the attack in minute detail, his lawyer said. Ramos also surveilled the newspaper's Annapolis office and bought tactical gear, including the 12-gauge shotgun he used to carry out the attack, though he had never fired a weapon before.

He spent years plotting and biding his time, even going so far as to wait for his beloved cat to die so that he would not leave it alone when he went to jail after the shooting, the lawyer said during her opening statement.

'Story just had to be told': Slain Capital Gazette journalist's widow finishes his book

The gunman's bizarre and solitary lifestyle before the mass shooting will be the focus of his sanity trial this week in a Maryland courtroom. A jury gathered in Annapolis Tuesday to hear opening statements.

The shooting was the deadliest attack on a newsroom in U.S. history. It shook the nation and newsrooms across the country and brought widespread demonstrations of support for the Annapolis daily.

What the jury will decide

A women holds the June 29, 2018 edition of the Capital Gazette newpaper during a candlelight vigil on June 29 to honor the 5 people who were shot and killed the day before in Annapolis, Maryland. Jarrod Ramos of Laurel Md. Has been arrested and charged with killing 5 people at the daily newspaper.

The panel of eight men and four women does not have to decide whether the shooter is guilty. He has already admitted to murdering newspaper staffers Rob Hiaasen, Wendi Winters, Gerald Fischman, John McNamara and Rebecca Smith on June 28, 2018.

Instead, the jurors will have to assess whether Ramos' actions were those of a clearheaded killer or of someone suffering from such a profound mental disorder that he could not understand his actions were criminal.

A range of experts have concluded that Ramos could suffer from a number of psychological disorders, his defense lawyer said in court.

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The list includes autism spectrum disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, delusional disorder and narcissistic personality disorder.

Expert testimony will make up most of the evidence presented at the sanity phase of Ramos's trial. His defense team has the burden of proving that he is not criminally responsible for the shooting because of mental illness.

Oct. 2019: Man accused of killing 5 in Capital Gazette shooting will plead guilty but not criminally responsible, attorney says

The prosecution did not make an opening statement Tuesday, but will address the jury after the defense presents its evidence.

Ramos's lawyer, Katy O'Donnell, called the horror of the mass shooting "staggering." She told jurors the evidence, which includes surveillance video from inside the Capital Gazette office, will be difficult to watch.

Ramos "stands here before you today guilty," O'Donnell told the jury.

"Mr. Ramos is guilty, and he is also not criminally responsible."

Ramos's sanity trial is expected to continue for several days. The jury's decision will determine if he spends the rest of his life in prison or is committed to a state hospital for an indefinite period of time.

What the case will detail

In this June 29, 2018, file photo, pictures of five employees of the Capital Gazette newspaper adorn candles during a vigil across the street from where they were slain in the newsroom in Annapolis. Jarrod Ramos pleaded guilty in 2019 to all 23 counts against him in the attack at the Capital Gazette nearly three years ago, but he has pleaded that he is not criminally responsible due to mental illness.

O'Donnell told jurors that Ramos's sister will testify that he always led an isolated life and seemed not to understand personal relationships.

He has never married and never had a romantic relationship aside from a cyber relationship with a woman whose real name he never learned, his lawyer said. He has no friends, associates or coworkers, she said. His closest relationship was with his cat, Tiger.

Ramos's life had been defined by his obsessive tendencies for years, O'Donnell said.

In 2011, he pleaded guilty to harassing a woman he'd known briefly in high school, to whom he had reached out at age 30 in search of a personal relationship.

When the woman slowly stopped responding to his communications, he became enraged, sending her angry messages and calling her workplace.

A Capital Gazette staffer wrote about the case in a piece titled "Jarrod wants to be your friend." Ramos became obsessed with a single line in the story, O'Donnell said, which he believed to be inaccurate.

The story said that Ramos had messaged his high school acquaintance "(expletive) you, leave me alone," after she had stopped responding to him.

"He believed that made him look like he must be delusional and answering to voices inside his head," she told jurors. The incident kicked off a years-long campaign by Ramos to regain his reputation by suing the Capital Gazette.

His lawsuits failed and he became "consumed" with conspiratorial ideas, O'Donnell said.

"He believed that the Capital Gazette and the Maryland judiciary were conspiring to persecute him and to ruin his life and to make it impossible for him to ever have a normal relationship," the lawyer said.

Ramos lived as a hermit for the next two years, refusing to leave his apartment except for necessities, she said. For two weeks before his cat died in the spring of 2018, Ramos laid on a couch with the cat on his chest, urinating in bottles so that he did not have to move.

More: Newspaper gunman insanity trial to start in Maryland after three years

After his cat's death, Ramos decided to carry out his plan for revenge. He spent the last of his money on a lifetime membership to the U.S. Chess Federation, which he planned to use during his time in jail.

He rented a vehicle and traveled to the Capital Gazette's office on the afternoon of June 28, 2018. He barricaded the office's other exit, shot through the locked glass front door and fired a total of 11 times, killing the five staff members.

Video shown in court Tuesday showed Ramos methodically moving through the office, appearing to hunt staff members who were trying to hide. He dressed as if preparing for a military mission, wearing safety glasses and carrying a flashlight on his gun.

Ramos used a computer in the office to tweet a chilling message, a reference back to the article that triggered his rage: "F--- you, leave me alone."

He called 911 to report that the shooting was over and laid down under a desk. Police responded to the shooting rapidly and arrested Ramos within a few minutes of arriving.

Reporters with long history in their community

A visitor stands by a new memorial dedicated to the five people who died in the mass shooting at the Capital Gazette three years ago, Monday, June 28, 2021 in Annapolis, Md. The five pillars honor Rebecca Smith, Wendi Winters, Gerald Fischman, Rob Hiaasen, and John McNamara who died in the attack. The memorial includes the First Amendment in a panel. (AP Photo/Brian Witte)

The victims of the shooting and their newsroom colleagues had deep connections to their community and across Maryland.

The surviving newspaper staff's response also came to represent the perseverance of journalists in an industry already besieged by economic turmoil and partisan attacks.

On the day of the shooting, reporter Chase Cook tweeted defiantly, "We are putting out a damn paper tomorrow."

Cook and some other members of the Capital Gazette's staff, including top editor Rick Hutzell, recently announced they would take buyouts after the hedge fund Alden Global Capital bought the company that owns the Baltimore Sun and the Capital Gazette.

A new memorial dedicated Monday in Annapolis represents each of the shooting victims with a granite column. The Guardians of the First Amendment Memorial also features an inscription of the U.S. Constitution's promise to safeguard a free press.

Follow Madeleine O'Neill on Twitter: @maddioneill.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY NETWORK: Capital Gazette shooting trial: Focus on newspaper gunman's sanity
A revamped North American free trade agreement is giving factory workers new muscle to flex in Mexico, where labor unions have long been accused of shady backroom deals with employers.

The year-old United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) requires the three countries to guarantee worker rights to collective bargaining, union democracy and freedom of association.

It created a "rapid response labor mechanism" to consider complaints against employers suspected of violating the rules, with potential penalties including tariffs.

A special internet-based "hotline" set up by the United States allows whistleblowers to submit their labor allegations confidentially.

Since USMCA took effect on July 1, 2020, replacing the North American Free Trade Agreement, the United States has invoked the rapid response labor mechanism twice with Mexico.

In May, Washington asked Mexico to investigate allegations of "serious violations" of worker rights during a union vote at a General Motors plant in Silao, in the central state of Guanajuato.

The next month the United States formally called on the Mexican government to review whether workers at the Tridonex auto parts facility in the border city of Matamoros were denied collective bargaining rights.

- 'Real unionism' -

It is a reflection of the mood in the White House under US President Joe Biden, who ran for office as a champion of American workers.

The Democrat pledged to take action to ensure employees are protected from unfair competition from cheap labor in other countries.

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a leftist free-trade skeptic who took office in 2018, has also vowed to improve worker rights.

The trade deal has provided an additional catalyst for change, resulting in Mexico enacting a labor reform in 2019 demanded by US Democrats as a condition to approve the USMCA.

Mexico "needed a regulation guaranteeing that unionism was not just a lie, but a real unionism," said Leonor Quiroz, head of the ethics commission of the Coparmex business federation.

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The reform enshrined union rights, and the rapid response labor mechanism became a key to ensuring compliance.

So-called "ghost unions," born from surreptitious agreements between labor leaders and company bosses, have long favored employers over Mexican workers.

Such questionable practices are denounced by the United States as unfair competition.

- 'Troublemakers' -

In the case of the GM plant in Silao, the Mexican government suspended the vote by workers in April to approve their collective contract, after finding "serious irregularities."

It gave the union, named Miguel Trujillo Lopez, until August 20 to repeat the vote "without coercion or intimidation."

Israel Cervantes, a dissident union leader in Silao who lodged a complaint under the trade deal, said it was "shameful" that the government simply gave them more time.

He accuses Miguel Trujillo Lopez of prioritizing "the interests of the company, not the workers."

Two employees at the Silao plant, who spoke to AFP anonymously, said they had been branded "troublemakers" and threatened with being "blacklisted" by other colleagues for criticizing the union.

Quiroz said the biggest challenge for the Mexican authorities is to ensure that neither workers nor companies abuse the rapid response labor mechanism.

She also noted that it can only be used in cases when non-compliance with the rules "affects trade or investment" between the parties.

Some experts are concerned about the risk of the United States using the mechanism to "bombard" Mexican factories with complaints in order to give US firms a helping hand.

"If that happens, then it will be detrimental to trade and at the end of the day it will be detrimental for companies because they will end up doing less business," said Valeria Moy, director of the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness think tank.

Manufacturing accounts for almost 90 percent of Mexican exports, 80 percent of which go to the United States.

str-jla-dr/caw
(REUTERS)

Barack Obama has condemned Donald Trumps ongoing attempts to undermine 2020 presidential election results with a warning that the former Republican presidents campaign to contest his decisive loss  based on a whole bunch of hooey  will continue to inspire similar attempts to discredit election outcomes.

Mr Obama, speaking to a virtual fundraiser for the National Democratic Redistricting Committee with former attorney US Attorney General Eric Holder and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, said that his successors baseless claims and conspiracy theories have legitimised other attempts from GOP officials to toss out results.

What we saw was my successor, the former president, violate that core tenet that you count the votes and then declare a winner  and fabricate and make up a whole bunch of hooey, Mr Obama said on 28 June.

If we dont stop these kinds of efforts now, what we are going to see is more and more contested elections, he added. We are going to see a further de-legitimising of our democracy  and a breakdown of the basic agreement that has held this magnificent democratic experiment together all these years.

Mr Trump undermined the legitimacy of mail-in ballots for months, before a single ballot was cast in 2020 elections, while his legal team mounted a spurious legal bid to toss out millions of ballots in states that he lost, while his attorneys and allies amplified baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, or suggested that Democrats conspired to manipulate ballots to ensure his loss.

The former presidents own elections commission, campaign attorneys, the Justice Department, FBI and elections officials from both parties across the US have not found any evidence of widespread fraud.

Following an attempted insurrection at the US Capitol, fuelled by the false stolen election narrative, a right-wing lobby-backed campaign to protect election integrity and voter confidence helped draft legislation in Republican-controlled state legislatures across the US to make it more difficult to vote by rolling back mail-in ballot and early voting options and stripping election oversight from elections administrators and giving it to GOP lawmakers and Republican-appointed agencies.

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Senate Republicans blocked a sweeping voting rights bill that sought to combat nationwide voting restrictions, and the US Department of Justice has sued the state of Georgia over its elections law for violating the Voting Rights Act.

Former First Lady Michelle Obama also urged Congress to pass legislation to combat those measures before its too late.

Mr Obama said he believes that the US Senate will attempt a new vote on the For The People Act.

President Joe Biden told the fundraiser that the sacred right to vote is under assault in ways that I havent seen in my entire career, and thats what got me involved in the first place.

Its about who gets to vote and whether the vote counts, he said. And we have a system that does both with integrity and independence. But the Republicans want to do what no political party has ever tried to do: get to decide if your vote counts. Its outrageous.

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A Texas police officer fatally shot a man armed with a gun while stopping a catalytic converter theft, officials say.

Corpus Christi Interim Police Chief David Blackmon said the officer was walking through a parking lot Monday morning when he spotted a man under a vehicle cutting off a catalytic converter.

As the officer attempted to arrest him, another man approached him and pulled out a handgun, police said. The officer let go of the man and subsequently engaged the second subject and shot him, police said.

The man was taken to a hospital where he died of his injuries.

The man the officer first attempted to arrest ran away, and he hadnt been found by the afternoon, police said.

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The police officer was put on administrative leave.

Not saying they did anything wrong  its for the mental health of that officer as well as the investigation, Blackmon said. We want to make sure that we do everything properly so we put them on administrative leave. The officer will be brought back as soon as we can.

Catalytic converter theft is skyrocketing in the U.S. since March 2020, according to the National Insurance Crime Bureau. In 2020, there were an average of 1,203 thefts per month compared with 282 per month in 2019, according to the organization.

The values of the metals used to manufacture the device  platinum, palladium, or rhodium  have increased significantly, and recyclers pay $50 to $250 per catalytic converter, according to the National Insurance Crime Bureau.

Corpus Christi is a city on the Gulf Coast about 150 miles south of San Antonio.

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By Clara-Laeila Laudette and Supantha Mukherjee

BARCELONA (Reuters) - Orange, France's largest telecoms firm, will avoid using equipment from Chinese vendors when developing Europe's 5G networks, opting for suppliers such as Ericsson and Nokia instead, its chief executive said.

But the company sees no issue in working with Huawei in Africa, where the Chinese company dominates as a supplier of equipment to many telecoms operators.

"We're working more and more with Chinese vendors in Africa, not because we like China, but we have an excellent business relationship with Huawei," CEO Stephane Richard told Reuters at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Tuesday.

"They've invested in Africa while the European vendors have been hesitating."

European governments have tightened controls on Chinese companies building 5G networks following diplomatic pressure from Washington, which alleges Huawei equipment could be used by Beijing for spying.

Huawei has repeatedly denied being a national security risk.

Some countries, such as Britain and Sweden, had banned the Chinese vendors outright, while others have encouraged telecom operators to opt for European suppliers, particularly in the core parts of their networks.

"It's not only the pressure from the government - we are European citizens and share the concern," Richard said in an interview on the sidelines of Mobile World Congress. "We can't ignore the fact that the big Chinese players are close to the Chinese state."

Ericsson and Nokia have steadily taken market share from Huawei and, late last year, Orange's Belgian division decided to progressively replace Huawei equipment with kit from Nokia.

The Orange CEO also showed willingness to use gear from South Korea's Samsung, which he described as an alternative to the "China vs. Europe debate".

Samsung signed Vodafone as its first European customer earlier this month as it tries to enter a market dominated by Nokia, Ericsson and Huawei.

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"We'll need time and additional investment to build new standalone networks with multiple vendors," Richard said. "The fact is that in Europe today developing 5G networks with Chinese vendors is more and more difficult - we take this as a reality."

The Orange chief, whose third four-year mandate expires next May - shortly after France's presidential elections - has faced questions about his leadership and the success of his business ventures, particularly after a network outage that disrupted France's emergency numbers this month.

The separation of the president and CEO roles within Orange, which is still 23% owned by France's government, could be an option for Richard, who said he supported the practice of dissociating the positions - as did a majority of shareholders.

(Reporting by Clara-Laeila Laudette and Supantha Mukherjee; editing by Barbara Lewis)
More than 10 million Australians have been ordered into lockdown as coronavirus cases spread across the country, and Brisbane on Tuesday became the fourth major city to issue stay-at-home orders.

The three-day snap lockdown for Brisbane, starting on Tuesday evening, comes on top of similar measures imposed in Sydney, Perth and Darwin in recent days.

"These are tough decisions," Queensland state Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said, after Australia recorded 23 virus cases in 24 hours.

"We are having lockdowns in major cities because the overseas arrivals are bringing the virus here."

Australia has been broadly successful in eliminating local transmission through a mix of border closures, mandatory hotel quarantine for overseas arrivals and snap lockdowns.

But it is now battling flare-ups of the highly contagious Delta variant -- which first emerged in India -- as public anger grows at the slow pace of vaccinations.

Less than five percent of adults are believed to have received both vaccine doses.

Brisbane resident Nicola Hungerford, 57, said she expected lockdowns to keep happening "until the government gets their bloody act together" on the vaccine rollout.

"It's gobsmacking and they're just irresponsible. It shows how little respect they have for people," she told AFP.

As well as Brisbane, surrounding coastal regions and the small northern city of Townsville are also subject to the latest order, after an unvaccinated hospital worker spent up to 10 days travelling around Queensland while infectious.

On Tuesday morning, Perth residents woke to a four-day snap lockdown after a local cluster grew to three cases.

Shubh Singh, manager of Punjab Sweets & Curry House, backed the decision even though he expected his Perth business to lose about 50 percent of revenue during the shutdown.

"But the measures are necessary to ensure it doesn't linger for months, because a lengthy lockdown would be disastrous," he told AFP.

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"It is eerie though seeing these streets so quiet."

- Cluster concern -

The largest outbreak is in Sydney, where 150 people have tested positive for Covid-19 since mid-June, with the city's residents now under stay-at-home orders for two weeks.

A small cluster linked to an outback gold mine sent Darwin into lockdown after exposure sites were found for the first time in the northern city, which is home to a large Indigenous population feared to be more vulnerable to Covid-19.

The announcements come during school holidays for large parts of the country and are expected to cause a wave of travel cancellations, with unaffected states warning people not to visit impacted areas.

New Zealand said Tuesday it would partially reopen its travel bubble with Australia from July 5, but only with states that have not recorded any cases.

Under pressure over his government's response, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced vaccines will become mandatory for aged care and quarantine hotel workers, while the AstraZeneca jab will be available to people aged under 60 who sign an indemnity form.

Morrison's newly appointed deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce, meanwhile, was fined Aus$200 (US$150) after a member of the public reported him for not wearing a mask.

In all locked-down areas, people are generally required to stay at home except for essential work, exercise, to buy groceries or for medical reasons.

Masks are mandatory across swathes of the country.

Australia has recorded a total of just over 30,000 cases and 910 deaths in a population of about 25 million since the pandemic began.

hr/arb/qan
Two largely partisan efforts emerging in the House of Representatives could provide a preview of how each party plans to approach the 2022 election cycle.

Republicans on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis on Tuesday began informal hearings on origins of the COVID-19 virus in China, accusing Democrats of refusing to investigate signs that it could have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab after previously brushing the concerns under the rug in order to help win the 2020 election.

At the same time, the Democratic-controlled House is set to vote on House Speaker Nancy Pelosis announced select committee on the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, which could drag out the issue far into the midterm election cycle and become an election issue  a stated fear of Republicans.

History shows that each effort has the potential to become a major messaging factor in the midterm elections, as investigations into the 2012 Benghazi attack and Russias influence on the 2016 election had impacts on midterm elections in 2014 and 2018.

TOP COVID TESTING CZAR TESTIFIES CORONAVIRUS MOST LIKELY ORIGINATED IN WUHAN LAB

During Tuesdays Republican-led forum, House Minority Whip Steve Scalise and other members railed against Democrats, arguing that they failed to complete their duty.

We have a simple basic question: How did COVID-19 start? What was the origin of COVID-19? We've asked that question for more than a year and requested that the House majority hold hearings to investigate the origins of COVID-19, Scalise said. Perplexingly, Speaker Pelosi has refused to allow a single hearing, calling it a diversion.

Because they are in the minority, Republicans do not have the power to compel testimony or issue subpoenas when holding forums. But they took the opportunity to promote their own forum in press conferences and on television and noted that Dr. Anthony Fauci was invited to provide testimony but did not show up. New York Rep. Elise Stefanik summed up the effort last week in a slogan-ready rallying cry: China lied, and Americans died.

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Tuesdays forum follows a letter that Republicans wrote to Pelosi in May demanding a hearing on the origins of the virus. Congressional Democrats have so far indicated that they will wait until the intelligence community completes a 90-day review on the viruss origins ordered by President Joe Biden before taking further action.

Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, who focused in detail on emails from Fauci in the hearing, told the Washington Examiner that he was not sure how many more Republican-only forums of Tuesdays nature could be held. I hope not any because I hope that the Democrats actually do their job, he said.

As Republicans focus on coronavirus origins, Democrats are charging ahead on going it alone with a Jan. 6 investigation after Republicans last month blocked a bipartisan, bicameral Jan. 6 commission that had concessions from Democrats.

Republicans refuse to take yes for an answer, House Democratic Conference Chairman Hakeem Jeffries said in a Tuesday press conference.

Pelosis proposed Jan. 6 select committee would not only deny Republicans control over subpoenas and staff, it has no set deadline to deliver a report  differing from a commission that previously passed the House and was blocked by Republicans in the Senate, which had a Dec. 31 deadline.

That makes hearings and reports extending from the select committee likely to extend into 2022, providing fuel to various Democratic-aligned political action committees that aim to target Republicans based on their votes to object to Electoral College results on Jan. 6.

The Democratic campaign arm is happy to draw a contrast to how Democrats and Republicans are approaching Jan. 6.

House Democrats are focused on the solemn responsibility of figuring out what led to a violent insurrection at the United States Capitol that left five Americans dead. House Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene spent this past weekend at a Trump rally in Ohio furthering the Big Lie, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesman Chris Taylor said in a statement to the Washington Examiner.

Text of the select committee proposal allows Pelosi to appoint 13 members, with five of those being appointed after consultation with Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, but echoes the 2014 resolution that established the Republican-controlled select committee on the Benghazi attack.

Scalise on Tuesday declined to say if Republicans would participate in Pelosis select committee, and some Republicans who voted in favor of the bipartisan commission have indicated that they will vote against the Democratic-controlled proposal.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

But Pelosi is seriously considering appointing a Republican to the body, according to a senior Democratic aide, which could highlight divisions within the Republican Party. Two Republicans who have been outspoken on the Jan. 6 issue, Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, have not ruled out joining the committee at the direction of Pelosi but said they have not spoken to her about it.

McCarthy brushed off the possibility of Pelosi appointing Republicans. On any committee, a Democrat appoints the Democrats, the Republicans appoints the Republicans, he told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday evening following release of the resolution.

Washington Examiner Videos

Tags: News, House GOP, House Democrats, 2022 Elections, Coronavirus, Steve Scalise, Nancy Pelosi, Hakeem Jeffries, Capitol

Original Author: Emily Brooks

Original Location: Partisan House efforts on COVID origins and Jan. 6 could preview 2022 themes
Pause the confirmation process for a pair of nominees of President Joe Biden until they clarify their roles in ending the Trump administration's "original" investigation into the origins of COVID-19, a trio of Republican senators requested of leadership.

Sens. Roger Marshall, Marsha Blackburn, and Bill Hagerty on Tuesday called on Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to delay the confirmation of Bonnie Jenkins, who is under consideration to become the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security.

TRUMP COVID TESTING CZAR TESTIFIES CORONAVIRUS MOST LIKELY ORIGINATED IN WUHAN LAB

"While Ambassador Bonnie Jenkins served on the State Department Review Team for the Biden-Harris Transition Team, the Biden Administration ended an inquiry into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic that was investigating whether the virus originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology," the senators wrote in a letter. "We urge you to delay any further action on this nomination until Ambassador Jenkins answers key questions related to her role."

The lawmakers asked that Jenkins answer who she met with from the Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, whether the agency is exploring gain-of-function research, and if there were any efforts to communicate with the Chinese government on what and when it knew about COVID-19, among other things.

The senators provided a deadline of July 12 for Jenkins to answer the questions and said they would give the nominee an opportunity to answer the questions "in classified setting" if necessary.

In a separate letter to Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Menendez and ranking member Jim Risch, the senators requested a delay on the nomination of Eliot Kang for the role of assistant secretary of state for international security and nonproliferation until he responds to a series of inquiries similar to the ones sent to Jenkins.

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Kang was serving as the acting assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation when the Biden administration allegedly closed the investigation.

Kang was given a deadline of July 13.

The Biden administration was accused in May of shutting down the State Department's efforts to investigate whether COVID-19 originated in a Chinese laboratory, though the agency asserted that the initial inquiry was already completed.

"There has been incorrect reporting that the Biden-Harris administration shut down an investigation by the State Departments Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. That reporting is incorrect," State Department spokesman Ned Price told the Washington Examiner in late May. "In February and March of 2021, the teams findings were briefed to AVC and Policy Planning policy staff in the new administration. With the report delivered, the work was ended."

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Shortly after news broke of the administration folding the initial investigation, Biden ordered the U.S. intelligence community to "redouble" efforts to determine the origins of COVID-19. The assessment was given a 90-day deadline at the time, which sets up the inquiry by the end of August.

Washington Examiner Videos

Tags: News, Senate, Senate GOP, Congress, China, Coronavirus

Original Author: Mica Soellner

Original Location: Pause Biden nominees for questions on role in COVID-19 origins inquiry, GOP senators say
Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testifies on Capitol Hill on June 23, 2021.

Last week in Washington, Gen. Mark Milley made headlines. With surgical precision, the decorated general and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff eviscerated untrue and unfounded allegations about critical race theory, levied by one of my Republican colleagues.

If you have not watched, I encourage you to do so. He reminded people like me, a fellow veteran, why we raise our hands to serve this country  because we believe not only in the Constitution but also in the people we swore to defend.

In his testimony, Gen. Milley also said something that reminded me of what my commanding officer in the Air Force used to say: People are watching 

As Republican lawmakers barraged Gen. Milley and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin with highly politicized questions about race, the pair issued that same warning I heard 30 years ago up at Hanscom Air Force Base: People are watching.

Its a dire warning that has fallen on deaf ears, I fear.

'Stupid pig' and defunding military

They werent referencing the people in the hearing room, or those watching Fox News or MSNBC. They werent talking about the Twitter trolls retweeting content for clout. They meant our enemies.

I served in the Air Force as an engineer at the tail end of the Cold War era and Desert Storm. My assignment was anti-ballistic missile defense command and control design. My job was to understand how our enemies thought, predict how they were likely to attack and then design systems that would help us protect our homeland and allies.

What the American people need to understand about our enemies is this: They look for any and every vulnerability. What might start as a small crack in our national security or our nation  a throwaway comment that our military or our military leaders are weak and ineffective, for example  can quickly become a gaping hole. The opportunity to sow and foment discord is the textbook first step of the divide and conquer strategy.

Screen for racism: Military must do more to weed out white supremacists and other extremists

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Gen. Milley and Secretary Austin heard what I heard in that hearing  a damaging attempt to politicize our military, an attempt that Im sure was cheered by our enemies, both foreign and domestic, both state and nonstate actors.

In just the past two weeks, here's what we've heard from leading conservative and Republican voices: Fox News host Tucker Carlson called Gen. Milley a "pig" who is "stupid." Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida openly mocked the sacrifices our armed forces have made in past conflicts. Rep. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina suggested America looks to the Viet Cong for inspiration. And Fox News host Laura Ingraham even floated defunding the military.

Hurtful comments make us vulnerable

The irony of someone who has never served suggesting our troops go without pay or go unprotected, the same troops who defend the very right to make such absurd statements or suggestions, is not lost on me. Its not lost on my brother or many cousins whove served in the global war on terror. Its not lost on my dad who served in Vietnam. It would not be lost on my grandfather who served in Korea.

Veteran: Confront military's white supremacy head-on, or it will get worse

Those people may think theyre making innocuous comments, however hurtful, but Gen. Milley, Secretary Austin and I know better, and so does anyone who has worn a uniform. My colleagues in Congress are actively undermining our national security, aiding and abetting the enemies we swore to defend Americans against.

People are watching. We need to start acting like it.

Rep. Chrissy Houlahan is a Democrat from Pennsylvania's 6th Congressional District. Follow her on Twitter: @RepHoulahan

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: Stupid pig? Our enemies can use insults, attacks to divide and conquer
Despite the state law that was signed by the governor in April 2020, Pinellas County issued a stern warning Tuesday that personal fireworks are not legal without the proper permits.

A new state law allowing the purchase of fireworks for use on three holidays does not supersede local regulations, a Pinellas news release said.

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the law that allows Florida residents to legally use fireworks, but only for three days out of the year: New Years Day, July Fourth and on New Years Eve.

Thats a big change from the decades-old precedent that said all fireworks, defined as anything that leaves the ground or explodes, were illegal to sell or set off in Florida. Loopholes in the restrictions (such as promising you are only buying them to scare off birds from your crops) made enforcement difficult.

Police and prosecutors have found the laws hard to enforce and the State Attorneys Office for Pinellas and Pasco counties said it could only find a single person ever prosecuted for the fireworks statute, in 2006.

The 2020 law specifically notes that its not intended to supersede any local fireworks laws. It also notes that while a homeowners association can have fireworks restrictions in its legally executed covenants, an HOA board cant otherwise just pass rules to restrict your right to use fireworks. If its not in the covenants, you are free to fire away.

The bottom line is that the state legislature wrote this bill to address the reality of the situation, Orange Park retailer Superior Fireworks wrote on its blog after the law passed. People are buying and using all types of fireworks on these holidays anyway, not just the ground-based novelties and fountains, so it makes sense to go ahead and specifically allow it.

Pinellas County said its ban covers virtually all fireworks except sparklers and paper caps. Supervised public display of fireworks is allowed only with a permit from the appropriate fire district.

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Pinellas County Safety and Emergency Services reminds residents and visitors of the countys ban on the retail sale, purchase or use of fireworks, and to practice fire safety at home and with pets this coming holiday, the release says.

The news release goes on to stress the affects of fireworks on veterans coping with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and pets, who tend to get stressed and run away from home on July 4.

We did a similar press release last year, that this law does not supersede the countys ban, said Pinellas County spokeswoman Sydney Criteser. Our main purpose was to provide the safety tips. Just a reminder.
By Ammar Awad and Zainah El-Haroun

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel demolished a Palestinian shop in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Silwan on Tuesday, triggering scuffles between police and protesters who accused authorities of discriminatory enforcement of building permits in the holy city.

Palestinians seek East Jerusalem, which Israel captured in a 1967 war, for a future state. Israel deems all of Jerusalem its capital - a status not recognised internationally - and has encouraged Jewish settlement of predominantly Palestinian areas.

A bulldozer escorted by Israeli police flattened Harbi Rajabi's butchers shop in the neighbourhood which is overlooked by the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest shrine in Islam and the most sensitive site in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The shop is one of at least eight properties that residents said were slated for demolition. The residents say many have been there for decades, even from before 1967. The authorities have earmarked the land for a park and say the shops and homes have been built illegally.

Mahmoud Basit who runs the butchers told Reuters 14 family members depended on income from there. "We have no other way to support our families, said Basit, who added he would have to look for new work from scratch.

Deputy Jerusalem Mayor Arieh King said "around 20" buildings in Silwan - which Israel refers to by its Hebrew name Shiloach - had received demolition orders. Around another 60 buildings there were in violation of Israeli zoning laws, he told Reuters.

Palestinians in Silwan say it is near-impossible to get building permits. They see the demolitions as designed to drive them from Jerusalem. Disputing this, King said the municipality had approved hundreds of new Palestinian homes in Silwan.

Palestinian medics said 13 people were injured in Tuesday's confrontations in Silwan. Police said two officers were hurt by stone-throwers and that three people were arrested for disorderly conduct and assault.

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The municipality had given Palestinians until June 28 to dismantle the structures themselves. King said the land would be cleared to make way for the park and public buildings, adding that Silwan's biblical links made it "an important historical site".

Nader Abu Diab, who also received a demolition order, lives in fear of the knock on the door from municipal inspectors.

"My grandchildren ask me questions and I cant answer them. They're children. What can I tell them? That theyre going to demolish our home?" Abu Diab, 55, said.

His brother, Fakhri Abu Diab said he applied seven times for an Israeli permit to expand his home in Silwan "but it was always rejected. He added that over a hundred Palestinians could become homeless if the current round of demolitions continues.

The future of another East Jerusalem neighbourhood, Sheikh Jarrah, was one of the flashpoints at the heart of fighting between Israel and Palestinian militants last month.

(Reporting by Ammar Awad and Zainah El-Haroun; Editing by Alison Williams)
Jun. 28State District Judge Kathleen McGarry Ellenwood on Monday denied a prosecution motion that asked her to jail Rio Arriba County Sheriff James Lujan or put him on an ankle bracelet while two criminal cases against him are pending.

Special prosecutor Andrea Reeb said during a status hearing Lujan had violated his conditions of release by trying to intimidate two witnesses in one of the cases by ordering one of his deputies to ask State Police to investigate witnesses for allegedly committing perjury in recent trial, which ended in a mistrial after jurors were unable to reach a unanimous verdict.

Reeb said state police and the First Judicial District Attorney's Office told her they have no intention of investigating the two witnesses  both former deputies employed by Lujan  but the prosecutor said she intends to see Lujan is investigated for his actions surrounding the case, which she has said she intends to retry.

"I don't understand why this is happening and how an elected sheriff is able to basically direct an investigation on his own case," Reeb said. "... Now I'll have to open an investigation of whether he is retaliating against witnesses."

Lujan is the defendant in two criminal cases, both involving his friend, former Espanola City Councilor Phillip Chacon.

In one case, Lujan was charged with three misdemeanor counts of resisting, evading or obstructing an officer in connection to accusations he showed up drunk at a crime scene and attempted to take over an investigation from city police at Chacon's home in Espanola in March 2020.

Ellenwood presided over a jury trial in the other case earlier this month. Lujan faced felony charges of bribing or threatening or intimidating a witness and harboring a felon in connection to a 2017 incident, in which he was accused of helping Chacon evade police after Chacon led officers on a high-speed chase.

Reeb, the Ninth Judicial District Attorney and a special prosecutor for both cases against the sheriff, recently filed a motion asking both cases be moved out of Rio Arriba County to Santa Fe County, based in part on what she said was Lujan's undue influence over potential jurors in his role as sheriff.

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State District Judge Bryan Biedscheid agreed recently to move the case. Ellenwood scheduled a hearing in the case over which she is presiding for July.

Reeb said state police told her the agency had received a request from one of Lujan's current deputies, asking for the investigation of two of Lujan's former deputies for allegedly perjuring themselves during his recent trial in Tierra Amarilla.

The prosecutor said the alleged perjury  an inconsistency in the two witnesses' statements  is an issue that goes to the witnesses' credibility, adding it should be addressed at trial and not through a criminal investigation requested by Lujan.

"This is a direct attempt to influence my witnesses and to scare them," Reeb said, adding she was not accusing Lujan of having had direct contact with the witnesses but of violating the law and the spirit of the conditions of his release by attempting to contact witnesses through a third party, the state police.

"At some point, somebody has to say 'Enough is enough, you are not in charge here,' " Reeb said, referring to Lujan.

Lujan's attorney Jason Bowles asked the judge to deny Reeb's motion, arguing the state had not presented any proof Lujan had violated his conditions of release. Bowles said the state sent him a proposed plea agreement in the case Monday, but Lujan did not accept the offer.

In denying Reeb's motion, Ellenwood noted Bowles had said Lujan would "maintain himself in a professional manner."

"I am concerned by Ms. Reeb's allegation," the judge said. "She brings it to me as an officer of the court so I have no reason to disbelieve her, even though there is no evidence in front of me."

Ellenwood ordered the sheriff not to become involve in "any kind of investigation which would relate to his case in any manner or any witnesses relating to this case."

She said if any other incidents come up, she will consider putting Lujan on electronic monitoring or in jail.

"I hope we don't get there," she added, "but actually, Mr. Lujan, that's in your hands. ... So please do not violate any other conditions of your release."
A jury is seated and the trial is underway for Ammon Bundy and Aaron Schmidt in connection with their arrests at the Idaho Statehouse last summer.

Both were arrested on Aug. 25, 2020, in the Lincoln Auditorium at the Idaho Capitol after authorities said they refused to leave the room when it was being cleared. The two face misdemeanor trespassing charges.

In addition, both men were banned from the Statehouse for a year. Bundy was arrested again the following day, though that trespassing charge was later dropped. Bundy was also arrested twice on the same day in April during the legislative session for violating his yearlong ban.

Jury selection began early Monday morning at the Ada County Courthouse in Boise and lasted into the afternoon. Opening statements began later in the afternoon, with Ada County Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Whitney Welsh speaking first.

Welsh told the jury that this case and related charges are the result of two people deciding the rules dont apply to them. She said that both men were asked to leave but did not do so. Welsh added that Bundy had to be physically removed by members of the Idaho State Police and did not participate in the booking process at the Ada County Jail.

Welsh asked the jury to find the two men guilty of the misdemeanor charges and said the state has sufficient evidence to prove the charges.

Sam Bishop, Bundys attorney, told the jury that his client did not break any rules in the Statehouse that day. He said Bundy remained peaceful and was detained after a legislator  House Speaker Scott Bedke  didnt like that (Bundy) was there.

He was breaking no rules, Bishop said.

Schmidt, who is representing himself in court, argued that if he and Bundy are convicted, it could set a precedent to allow anyone in power to trespass people, including legislators, on any public property.

I was well within my rights to be there at the Capitol, Schmidt told the jury.

Testimony also began Monday afternoon at the end of a long court day, as prosecutors called ISP Sgt. Blake Higley.

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Higley, who works as an executive protection sergeant for ISP, told the court that a committee hearing was moved from the Lincoln Auditorium to another room in the Capitol after a spectator was arrested for refusing to leave a designated press area. Higley said that Bundy sat down in the press area when the other man was arrested, and remained there until the meeting elsewhere in the Capitol concluded. Higley said troopers were told by House Speaker Scott Bedke to clear the auditorium, but Bundy did not leave.

Higley said those in the Lincoln Auditorium were asked to leave multiple times. Bundy remained seated at the designated press area and did not even respond to troopers, Higley said. Schmidt then walked into the auditorium after the first verbal warning from troopers and did not leave, according to Higleys testimony. Both men were taken into custody and transported to the Ada County Jail.

The days proceedings adjourned at around 5:30 p.m., and the trial continued Tuesday morning at 8:30.

Higley continued his testimony, and was followed by two other members of the Idaho State Police. All three discussed the arrests and the security procedures at the Statehouse. An Ada County sheriffs deputy testified as to Bundys actions while at the jail, which police have described as nonparticipatory.

During a break with the jury excused from the courtroom Tuesday, Judge David Manweiler warned that with the current pace, the trial might stretch past the scheduled four days this week.
Citing new evidence and a need for more forensic testing, 9th Circuit Solicitor Scarlett Wilson said she needs more time deciding whether or not to press criminal charges against the jail deputies who repeatedly fired their Tasers at Jamal Sutherland, a mentally ill Black man, shortly before he died inside the Al Cannon Detention Center.

The announcement, shared by Wilsons office Tuesday in a written statement, negates previous declarations that she would make a decision about criminal charges by the end of June.

Because these outstanding items are necessary for our experts reviews, and our experts opinions are critical in my analysis, I will not make a prosecutorial decision this week, Wilson said. Both the community and the Sutherland family deserve a thorough investigation and that is exactly what we are providing.

Sutherland, 31, died on the morning of Jan. 5 after two Charleston County sheriffs deputies forcibly removed him from his cell for a scheduled bond hearing. The deputies involved in the incident were detention deputy Brian Houle and detention Sgt. Lindsay Fickett.

A report from the Charleston County Coroners Office initially ruled Sutherlands death as undetermined and said he died as a result of excited state with pharmacotherapeutic effect during subdual process.

It was later decided that the manner of death was, instead, homicide.

Charleston County Coroner Bobbi Jo ONeal said Sutherland likely died of a cardiac event. More specifically, she said it appears Sutherland died of an abnormal heart rhythm, also known as a fatal dysrhythmia.

In a June 16 press conference, ONeal said three factors contributed to Sutherlands death: Changes in Sutherlands baseline medication, the jails subdual process and an excited state, which was listed as Sutherlands initial cause of death.

For months, details surrounding Sutherlands death were unknown. But in May, Charleston County Sheriff Kristin Graziano shared graphic footage showing what happened. The release of dozens of videos came after months of mounting public pressure calling for their release.

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For a person to be held criminally responsible for another persons death, Wilson has said, the state must prove that unlawful conduct was the proximate, or direct, cause of death.

Last month, Wilson said she was seeking outside opinions from pathologist Dr. Kimberly Collins, along with seeking expert opinion and advice about use of force in a detention setting.

In her statement Tuesday, Wilson said she has since retained and consulted with Dr. Laura Labay, a board certified forensic toxicologist, to help Collins in her review

In addition, within the last week, we obtained additional evidence and conducted additional interviews that are relevant to our use of force experts review, Wilson said, declining to share specifics.

Sutherland was booked into the jail on Jan. 4 after an alleged fight at Palmetto Lowcountry Behavioral Health Center, a mental health facility where Sutherland was receiving care for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. He was arrested by North Charleston Police.

During Sutherlands encounter with the two jail officers on Jan. 5, footage shows he was sprayed twice with a chemical irritant and shocked repeatedly with a stun gun. Sutherland wailed in pain as he lay face down on the floor, at one point screaming for 34 seconds straight.

As Sutherland lay on the floor with deputies on top of him, their knees pressed into his back, Sutherland at one point can be heard saying, I cant breathe.

As medics tend to Sutherland, Houle can be heard telling medical staff members, He got Tased about probably six to eight times at least.

Oh my god, a member of the medical staff responded.

He kept fighting us through, Houle said in the video.

According to information provided by the sheriffs office after the Jan. 5 death, Houle was employed with the agency since July 2016. Fickett, who could be seen kneeling on Sutherlands back in video footage, had worked for the sheriffs office since March 2011.

They were fired by Charleston County Sheriff Kristin Graziano on May 17.

Facing questions about their employment during a May 14 press conference, Graziano said Houle and Fickett had been placed on paid administrative leave for 30 days after Sutherlands death.

The deputies then returned to work in desk jobs where they had no contact with the jail population, Graziano said at the time.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
(EPA)

Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio will step down from his position in September while the group  a far-right, self-described chauvinist gang labelled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center  focuses its efforts around local politics in the aftermath and political fallout from the Capitol insurrection.

In an interview with NPR, Mr Tarrio said he will leave his role as national chairman to focus on his Florida chapter, while other members start getting more involved in local politics, running our guys for office from local seats, whether its a simple GOP seat or a city council seat.

At least one former Proud Boys member, Joel Campbell, is running for a city council seat in Topeka, Kansas, though he told NPR that if he was to seriously pursue his political ambitions, I could not be associated with them anymore.

Over the last several years, staging political violence leading up to the 2020 presidential election and galvanised by Donald Trump after he invoked their name from the debate stage, the Proud Boys have a emerged as a fascistic, right-wing political bloc relying on street-level violence in concert with right-wing media and GOP elected officials, according to SPLC senior research analyst Cassie Miller.

They work symbiotically with right-wing media and a power structure  helmed by Trump  that is eager to clamp down on protesters and enact political revenge on progressive constituencies like Portland, she wrote.

Dozens of people with alleged ties to the group are among the hundreds of people who were arrested or under investigation in the wake of the Capitol insurrection, with several men charged with conspiring to attack the halls of Congress, fuelled by Mr Trumps stolen election narrative to forcibly overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Prominent Proud Boys members Ethan Rufio Panman Nordean and Joe Biggs were among those arrested for obstructing or impeding an official proceeding, aiding and abetting, and knowingly entering or remaining in a restricted building.

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Mr Tarrio, who was not present during the assault, was charged with two felony counts of possession of a large capacity ammunition feeding device and ordered to stay out of the nations capital after he was arrested in the city the day before the attack, after he admitted to burning a Black Lives Matter banner from a historic Black church during a violent December rally.

The citys Metropolitan Police Department had issued an arrest warrant for destruction of property, a misdemeanor offence, last month; he was arrested on 5 January after entering the capital from Miami.

Following his arrest, officers found two magazines, compatible with AR-16 and M4 rifles, in his bookbag.

Mr Tarrio admitted in comments on the right-wing social media platform Parler and on a Proud Boys-affiliated podcast that he was responsible for burning a churchs sign.

In the burning of the BLM sign, I was the one that lit it on fire, he said on the War Boys podcast last month. I was the person that went ahead and put the lighter to it and engulfed it in flames, and I am damn proud that I did.

In the days before a pro-Trump mob broke into the Capitol, Mr Tarrio promised that the Proud Boys would turn out in record numbers on 6 January but the group will be incognito without its black-and-yellow outfits, according to Parler posts included in court filings.

Later that month, he was accused of being a prolific informant for federal law enforcement since at least 2012, after court records revealed his cooperation with police while undercover, leading to prosecutions for more than a dozen people in cases involving drugs, gambling and human smuggling.

Mr Tarrio has dismissed reports that the group has struggled financially or splintered in the wake of the insurrection and revelations that he allegedly worked with police, telling NPR that chapters are all on the same page.

Read More

Trumplands war on the military: Why the ex-presidents followers have General Milley in their sights

Biden is confirming judges faster than any president since Richard Nixon

Trump July 4th rally in Alabama cancelled by concerned local officials
Giant marionettes, fantastical beasts and circus performers will form the centrepiece of celebrations to mark Queen Elizabeth II's 70 years on the throne, organisers said on Tuesday.

A Platinum Jubilee pageant is due to take place on June 5 next year, as part of four days of celebrations that also includes a military parade and church thanksgiving service.

Co-chairman of the organising committee Nicholas Coleridge said he expects the event to be a "glorious celebration" of the monarch's service to the country and the Commonwealth.

The British government has already announced a four-day public holiday weekend to mark the reign of Britain's longest-serving monarch, who turned 95 earlier this year.

And post-Covid, Coleridge said it would be "an opportunity for the country to emerge united, re-energised and renewed" after the hardships of the global coronavirus pandemic.

"It will be a reopening for the UK, a moment of national purpose to be fun, joyous and entertaining."

The Sunday pageant has been designed to tell the story of "the second Elizabethan age", 500 years after the first which was noted for Shakespeare and the discovery of new worlds.

Co-chairman Michael Lockett said it would recount "a time of rapid change and unparalleled progress" since the young princess Elizabeth became queen in 1952.

Unlike the sparsely populated streets of lockdown, when the queen herself was forced to self-isolate at her Windsor Castle home, hundreds of thousands of people are expected to join the festivities.

Performances will take in the post-war austerity of the 1950s and the Swinging Sixties of rock and roll and space discovery, then the choice to join Europe in the 1970s.

It will also include the "Big Bang" digitisation of the City of London financial centre in the 1980s, and technological changes of the 1990s to the present day and look to the future, particularly the need to tackle climate change.

Story continues

- 'Moment in history' -

"Her Majesty has been our strength and our guardian in good times and sometimes in bad times, across generations, communities and nations," said Lockett.

Pageant master Adrian Evans told reporters the "explosion of extraordinary theatre, dance, music, carnival and street art" would be a "moment in history".

As well as "monumental heraldic figures" reflecting royal history over 1,000 years, the parade will include a "hatch dragon" bigger than a double-decker bus.

Another puppet, with a horse powered by 30 cyclists, will mark the "most joyous moments" of the queen's marriage to Prince Philip, who died in April aged 99, Evans said.

Ponies, racehorses, and corgis -- the queen's favourite breed of dog -- will represent "humour and distinctive British quirkiness", and her lifelong love of animals.

The event will be privately financed by individual and corporate donors and is expected to cost between 10 million and 15 million, which Coleridge said was in line with previous jubilees going back to queen Victoria.

The queen's Diamond Jubilee in 2012 was marked by a river procession of 1,000 boats on the River Thames -- the largest flotilla in 350 years.

Beacons were also lit across the country and a pop concert held featuring acts such as Take That's Gary Barlow and Robbie Williams, Kylie Minogue, Elton John and Ed Sheeran.

Her Golden Jubilee 10 years earlier also saw a four-day-long weekend with street parties and another pop concert. The queen also toured Britain, Jamaica, New Zealand, Australia and Canada.

imm/phz/pvh
Randy Moore has been named chief of the U.S. Forest Service, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced Tuesday. Moore will be the first African American to lead the agency in its 116-year history.

The big picture: The Forest Service oversees 600 million acres of forestland. Moore is slated to begin after current Forest Service head Vicki Christiansen steps down on July 26.

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Moore has led the Forest Service's Pacific Southwest Region, which is comprised of 18 national forests in California, since 2007.

He previously served as the regional forester of the Eastern Region.

What they're saying: "Randy Moore has been a catalyst for change and creativity in carrying out the Forest Services mission to sustain the health, diversity and productivity of the nation's forests and grasslands to meet the needs of present and future generations," Vilsack said in a statement.

In his role as Regional Forester, Randy has been a conservation leader on the forefront of climate change, most notably leading the Regions response to the dramatic increase in catastrophic wildfires in California over the last decade," he added.

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A cyclist passes bay as the sun shines behind the Space Needle, Monday, June 28, 2021, in Seattle. AP Photo/Ted S. Warren

A brutal heat wave across the Pacific Northwest has sent hundreds to the hospital since Friday.

Hundreds of deaths in Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia have been linked to the excessive heat.

In such extreme conditions, all people are at risk of heat exhaustion or heat stroke, experts say.

Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

A brutal heatwave across the Pacific Northwest has sent hundreds of people to emergency rooms and been linked to hundreds of deaths in a region unaccustomed to and unprepared for such extreme conditions.

Monday marked the third day in a row of triple digits in many Northwest cities - an unprecedented sign of the impending climate crisis, according to experts. While temperatures cooled slightly along the coast on Tuesday, the relentless heat persisted inland.

While it's still too early to be certain how many of this weekend's deaths in the region were caused by the heatwave, The New York Times reported that experts are linking the extreme temperatures to an unusual spike in deaths.

Nearly 500 deaths were reported in British Columbia between Friday and Wednesday, The Times reported, which is nearly three-and-a-half times the typical number documented in the same time frame. Oregon's medical examiner told the outlet that at least 63 deaths in the last five days were attributed to the heat, and officials in Washington told the paper nearly two dozen deaths in King County alone were due to hyperthermia.

Since Friday, Washington state hospitals reported 676 emergency visits related to suspected heat illness resulting in 81 inpatient admissions, a Washington State Department of Health spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. In neighboring Oregon, 459 people have gone to emergency departments or urgent care clinics because of the heat, a state report said.

The number of heat-related hospital visits is up from Monday, when both Seattle and Portland broke temperature records set the prior day. The Portland airport logged 116 degrees Farenheit, while the Seattle airport reached 108 degrees.

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The rate of hospital visits during the current heatwave is especially concerning, in part, because of how the numbers compare to past years.

Between 2000 and 2018, state data shows that heat-related hospitalizations in Washington only twice exceeded 51.

In Portland and surrounding Multnomah County, where at least 97 of Oregon's emergency visits took place over the weekend, emergency departments typically only expect about 1 or 2 visits in that same time period, a Multnomah County spokesperson told BuzzFeed News.

"It is not unusual for the county to have zero visits for heat illness on a typical summer day," Kate Yeiser told the outlet.

A farm worker in the state died on Saturday in St. Paul, where temperatures reached 104 degrees, according to The Oregonian. The Oregon Occupational Safety and Health division has not released further details on the death but listed the preliminary incident description as "heat,'' the outlet reported.

In Bend, officials suspect that two homeless people may have died because of the heat as well, though the cause of their deaths is still under investigation, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported.

"People's bodies are stressed," Dr. Jennifer Vines, the Multnomah County health officer told Oregon Public Broadcasting. "My main message is to take this for the serious health threat that this is."

In such extreme temperatures, all people are at risk of heat exhaustion, which can result in dizziness, fainting, nausea, vomiting, and a fast and weak pulse, as well as heatstroke, which is more serious and can cause high fever, nausea, and vomiting, and a loss of consciousness. But some populations are more at risk than others, including babies and small children, pregnant women, and the elderly.

In addition to impacts on people, the heat has hit the region's infrastructure as well, causing cracks in roads and highways and even forcing a closure of two lanes on Interstate 5 near Seattle, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Read the original article on Insider
Al Seib/Pool via Reuters

For the first time in 2o years, billionaire real estate developer Douglas Durst was in the same room with his nightmare of a brother, Robert Durst, on Monday.

And he made it clear there is no love lost between them.

Hed like to murder me, Douglas Durst told jurors in Robert Dursts Los Angeles trial, adding that he so feared his brother that he hired a security team to protect himself.

The two heirs fell out in the 1990s over the family estate. Douglas went on to run the Durst Organization, a premier, century-old commercial real estate firm that built skyscrapers like One World Trade Center.

Robert, meanwhile, led a life so scandalous that it was the subject of an HBO documentary series, The Jinx, which is likely to play a key role in his murder case.

He was acquitted of murder two decades ago despite admitting he killed and dismembered his elderly neighbor, Morris Black, in Galveston, Texaswhere he was living as a mute woman while authorities reopened an investigation into the disappearance of his first wife, Kathie.

Now he is standing trial on charges he shot and killed a close friend, Susan Berman, in 2000 because she allegedly knew too much about what happened to Kathie.

Susan Knew Her Killer: Five Years in the Making, Robert Dursts Murder Trial Finally Begins

As prosecutors lay out the tangled case, Douglas Durst, 76, was brought to the witness stand to help convince jurors that his brother killed his wife and then murdered the friend who gave him a bogus alibi.

The New York billionaire said he did not relish the opportunity to testify even though, by his own admission, Robert had tormented him even when they were kids.

He treated me miserably, Douglas Durst said, according to the Associated Press. He would fight with me at every chance. He would embarrass me.

But prosecutors threatened to subpoena Douglas, so he appeared in court to recount a long-ago conversation he had with Kathie in which she said she planned to divorce Robert.

Story continues

He also testified about the call in which Robert told him that Kathie, a medical student, was missing.

His tone was very neutral, the brother told jurors. There was no great anxiety in his tone. It seemed a little strange.

Robert Durst denies killing Kathie, who was declared legally dead even though her body was never found. Her death, along with the slayings of Black and Berman, was the focus of The Jinx.

Among the bombshells in the show was evidence that Durst had written the anonymous so-called cadaver note that tipped off police to Bermans body at her Beverly Hills home. (Durst later admitted he wrote it but says he didnt kill Berman and just found her body when he stopped by to visit.)

Durst was also caught on a hot mic blurting out What the hell did I do?... Killed them all, of course. (It has since been revealed that the damning audio was edited together out of order.)

Durst was arrested just before the last episode aired, in a New Orleans hotel room, on a murder warrant. He pleaded guilty to unrelated gun charges and has been locked up ever since.

His trial began before the pandemic, then went on hiatus, and resumed this month. Durst, 78, has been dealing with several illnesses, including bladder cancer, and denied in court on Monday that he is playing up his health problems.

His head had been shaved over the weekend, exposing a scar from a brain ailment, but Durst said that was the only haircut he could get in jail.

I am not seeking sympathy from the jury, he said.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - Romania has agreed to sell 1.17 million doses of excess Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines to Denmark, the Danish health ministry said on Tuesday.

"We can do this deal because Romania is experiencing low vaccination backing and therefore wants to sell excess vaccines which they won't be able to use," Health Minister Magnus Heunicke said in a statement.

Romania has missed a goal to vaccinate 5 million people by the end of May, with just over a fifth of the population - 4.47 million people - inoculated. Vaccine hesitancy is spreading amid entrenched distrust in state institutions, misinformation campaigns and weak vaccine education.

The Danish serum institute said it expects the first vaccines to arrive from Romania this week.

(Reporting by Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen and Stine Jacobsen; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
WASHINGTON  Gwen Levi left prison last year, believing it was for good. She volunteered for several criminal justice groups and began learning how to use a computer.

On June 16, about a year after the Justice Department allowed her to serve her sentence at home because of the coronavirus pandemic, Levi was re-arrested for violating the terms of her home confinement, her attorney, Sapna Mirchandani said.

Levi attended a computer class in Baltimore four days earlier, believing she had been approved to do so. Officials at her halfway house pinged her ankle monitor and called her several times after realizing she wasn't home. But Levi had turned her phone off while in class, and her ankle monitor didn't go off, her attorney said. She was unreachable for several hours.

A Bureau of Prison report described the incident as an "escape." Levi is now at a Washington, D.C. jail, waiting to be transferred to a federal facility, where she will presumably serve the remaining four years of her sentence. She's 76.

"She was shocked, scared and confused," Mirchandani said. "What really bothers me is that when I spoke to her case manager, they don't contend that she was not where she said she was."

Advocates say Levi's re-arrest is unjust and underscores rigid home detention rules that can cause even well-intentioned inmates to fail. It's also a harsh reminder of the legal limbo she and thousands of others have found themselves in.

More: Inmates sent home during COVID-19 got jobs, started school. Now, they face possible return to prison

Levi is among the 24,000 nonviolent federal prisoners who, under the Trump administration, were allowed to serve their sentence at home to slow the spread of COVID-19 inside prison walls. But a Justice Department memo issued in the final days of the Trump administration says inmates whose sentences will extend beyond the pandemic must be brought back to prison. The Biden administration has yet to take action despite calls from advocates to rescind the memo, which they believe contradicts President Joe Biden's campaign promise to allow people with criminal pasts to redeem themselves.

Story continues

The majority of the prisoners have already finished their sentence while on home confinement, but about 4,500, including Levi, have years left to serve. Some have gone back to school and secured full-time jobs but fear the lives they've started to rebuild will soon be upended.

"The other people on home confinement are seeing what happened to Gwen, and they're scared to death," said Kevin Ring, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums. "This is going to keep happening if the president doesn't act and that's been our problem the whole time. You cannot leave these people twisting in the wind like this."

A Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman declined to comment.

Gwen Levi attends a computer class in Baltimore, Maryland. The 76-year-old was re-arrested for violating the terms of her home confinement after left her house to go to the class, believing she had been approved to do so, her attorney said.

'To send her back is absurd'

Since the Justice Department legal memo was issued in early January, advocates have been calling for Attorney General Merrick Garland to reverse it. But the administration does not believe the issue is urgent. The Justice Department said last month that inmates with years left to serve are not likely to be sent back to prison anytime soon because the public health crisis is expected to last for the rest of the year.

Still, ramped up vaccination efforts and reopening of cities have set off alarm bells among prison advocates.

In an earlier interview with USA TODAY, Levi said sending her back "would shut down down all the progress" she was making.

"We're beginning to think about things for the future. To have to go back to the past would be devastating," she said.

Levi is also in remission from lung cancer and has degenerative joint disease, hypertension and cataracts.

"If Gwen technically violated the rules, they still had a choice to make," Ring said. "Do you send a 76-year-old cancer surviving grandmother back to prison for what will cost taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars?  To send her back is absurd."

Levi was serving more than 30 years for drug conspiracy charges. Her sentence was reduced to 24 years as part of the First Step Act, a Trump-era criminal justice bill that shortened punishments for nonviolent drug crimes.

Ring said his group has asked the Bureau of Prisons to reverse its decision, but to no avail. Levi also has a pending petition for compassionate release, which her attorney fears could be jeopardized by her re-arrest.

"Her family is devastated  She's really, really worried about her mother. She said she can handle this. She can handle being in prison again, but she feels like this is crushing her 94-year-old mother," Mirchandani said.

Mirchandani also said the president should use his broad powers and grant clemency to the remaining 4,500 people who face the possibility of going back to prison. But granting clemency to thousands of prisoners just after the Biden administration unveiled an anti-crime strategy amid rising gun violence could backfire.

"It seems like a waste of human life and taxpayer dollars to call them back to prison," Mirchandani said. "It doesn't make any sense."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: COVID-19: Gwen Levi back to prison after a year on home confinement
A Washington school district sent flyers home with eighth grade students that contained information on abortions without parental consent and outlining age of consent laws for students as young as 11 years old.

The flyer is not part of our curriculum and should not have been sent home with students, Eric Hogan, Tacoma Public Schools assistant director of secondary education, told parents in an email. Previously, Planned Parenthood taught within our schools and supplied the flyer that was distributed to students.

The flyer, which was posted online by a concerned parent, advised students that they can get an abortion at any age without parental consent and purchase condoms regardless of their age.

JUDGE STRIKES DOWN IOWA LAW REQUIRING 24-HOUR WAITING PERIOD FOR ABORTION

The Planned Parenthood material also informed students about laws regarding the age of consent, with one example being that they were allowed to have sex at the age of 11 with a person who is two years younger or older than them.

It also promoted Plan B emergency contraception, noting that middle schoolers can buy it at any age from the pharmacy.

Hogan insists that the distribution of the flyers was a mistake.

We discovered a binder of curriculum materials was left behind for an incoming teacher to use for this year, and this flyer was in the binder. Not realizing the flyer wasnt approved material, the teacher sent it home with students, Hogan said.

Hogan said the unapproved materials were removed from the binder and that the school has spoken to teachers and administrators about what curriculum was approved for distribution.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Hogan apologized to parents on behalf of the school district and added that corrective action had been taken against the teacher who distributed the material.

Washington Examiner Videos

Tags: News, Abortion, Planned Parenthood, sex, Education

Original Author: Michael Lee

Original Location: School sends flyers home with eighth grade students advising on age of consent and getting abortions without permission
Millions of people in western Canada and the northwestern United States were under heat alerts Wednesday as the region baked in record-breaking temperatures and police reported scores of deaths likely linked to the scorching conditions.

The heat wave has stretched emergency services, with at least 134 people dying suddenly since Friday in the Vancouver area and hundreds more across British Columbia, according to Canadian police and the local coroner.

"The temperatures recorded this week are unprecedented - lives have been lost and the risk of wildfires is at a dangerously high level," said Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

The northwestern US state of Washington recorded at least 16 deaths related to the heat wave, including two who died of hyperthermia as their bodies overheated, county health officials said.

Soaring temperatures in California's valley, mountain and desert areas raised fears of wildfires amid windy dry conditions, with lightning storms that could spark blazes forecast across several parts of the western United States.

President Joe Biden told a virtual meeting with governors from western states that "the threat of western wildfires this year is as severe as it's ever been."

Recalling last year's record wildfires that burned more than 10 million acres (four million hectares) across the United States and caused "orange skies that looked like end of days," Biden warned that this year "could be even tougher."

Federal officials say the fire season is already outpacing last year's -- the worst on record in drought-hit California.

Around 9,000 firefighters have already been deployed to battle blazes across a dozen US states, in particular northern California's Lava Fire, which has scorched more than 17,000 acres.

- 'Whole town is on fire' -

All 250 residents were forced to evacuate the town of Lytton about 155 miles (250 kilometers) east of Vancouver after wildfires began spreading rapidly on Wednesday.

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"The whole town is on fire. It took, like, a whole 15 minutes from the first sign of smoke to, all of a sudden, there being fire everywhere," Lytton mayor Jan Polderman told Canadian broadcaster CBC News.

Footage showed fires raging on the hills overlooking Lytton and engulfing the town as locals rushed to safety under clouds of smoke.

Residents of another 241 homes in the area were issued evacuation orders by regional authorities.

The town set a Canadian high-temperature record for the third day in a row Tuesday, reaching 121 degrees Fahrenheit (49.5 degrees Celsius), the country's weather service, Environment Canada, reported.

The Vancouver Police Department said Wednesday it alone had responded to more than 98 sudden deaths since Friday, with the vast majority "related to the heat."

The Pacific coast city for several days recorded temperatures around 90 degrees Fahrenheit -- almost 20 degrees above seasonal norms.

"It's never this bad. I've never seen anything like this," said a Vancouver resident who only gave her name as Rosa.

"I hope it never becomes like this ever again. This is too much."

Others lamented that some residents were more vulnerable to the heat than others.

"I feel for those people whether they're the elderly demographic or people who live on the downtown eastside of Vancouver who don't have a cool spot to live or sleep," said river swimmer Graham Griedger.

Environment Canada said the city's heat wave would become less intense from Wednesday but unseasonably hot temperatures would persist for the remainder of the week.

- 'Won't be the last' -

Climate change is causing record-setting temperatures to become more frequent.

Globally, the decade to 2019 was the hottest recorded, and the five hottest years have all occurred within the last five years.

"We've been seeing more and more of this type of extreme weather event in the past years. So realistically, we know that this heat wave won't be the last," said Trudeau.

The scorching heat stretching to Canada's Arctic territories has been blamed on a high-pressure "heat dome" trapping warm air in the region.

Temperatures in the US Pacific Northwest cities of Portland and Seattle reached levels not seen since record-keeping began in the 1940s: 115 degrees Fahrenheit in Portland and 108 in Seattle Monday.

The premier of British Columbia, John Horgan, which includes Vancouver, said the "hottest week British Columbians have ever experienced" was having "disastrous consequences for families and for communities."

The province's chief coroner's office said in a statement it recorded 486 deaths between Friday and Wednesday, compared with 165 on average.

The heat wave has forced schools and Covid-19 vaccination centers to close in the Vancouver area, while officials set up temporary water fountains and misting stations on street corners.

Cities across the western United States and Canada opened emergency cooling centers and outreach workers handed out bottles of water and hats.

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Holyrood Scotland Scottish government - Russell Cheyne/PA

Two Bills passed unanimously by Holyrood could give Scottish courts unparalleled powers to strike down legislation from Westminster, the UK Supreme Court has heard.

Lawyers acting for the UK Government said the legislation risked Acts of Parliament being amended or repealed because of clashes with Scots law.

They argued this would be a subversion of devolution, under which Westminster remains sovereign, with both Bills having manifold and obvious competence problems.

They were passed by MSPs in March and deal with local government and childrens rights, but they were challenged by the UKs law officers for placing obligations on UK ministers.

The UK Government has said their concerns are not about the substance of the legislation, but whether the Scottish government has the legal ability to pass the Bills.

Alister Jack, the Scottish Secretary, wrote to the SNP government before the legislation was passed, pointing out the potential problems and suggesting amendments.

But John Swinney, the Deputy First Minister, dismissed the approach as menacing and a power grab.

After the legal challenge was announced during the Holyrood election campaign, Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister, said the move was politically catastrophic and morally repugnant.

Bills under the spotlight

A panel of five judges on Monday heard arguments from the UK Government about why they thought the legislation falls outside Holyroods competence.

The Scottish and Welsh governments will make representations on Tuesday on the second and final day of the hearing. A judgement will be issued at a later date.

In written arguments, Sir James Eadie QC, acting for the UK Attorney General and the Advocate General for Scotland, said: Both Bills, in slightly different ways, purport to bestow upon the Scottish courts extensive and, in part, unparalleled powers to interpret and to scrutinise the legality of primary legislation passed by the sovereign UK Parliament at Westminster.

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The Bills aim to incorporate international treaties signed by the UK into Scots law, with the first the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) (Incorporation) (Scotland) Bill.

This aims to set a legal requirement for public authorities to comply with certain standards on childrens rights and gives Scottish courts the power to decide if legislation is compatible with them.

The second is the European Charter of Local Self-Government (Incorporation) (Scotland) Bill.

However, Sir James said: There are, we submit, manifold and obvious competence problems. The relevant Bills subject Acts of the UK Parliament, both past and future, to what is in effect characterised as a superior body of law, the UNCRC and the European Charter.

In written arguments, James Mure QC, representing the Lord Advocate for Scotland, said that none of the provisions modify the law on the relationship between the powers of Westminster and Holyrood on a proper reading.
Seattle may be the most vaccinated city in the nation, but it's also the most ill-prepared metro area to weather a historic heatwave.

For years, Seattle was one of the last places you could beat the heat by flipping a switch. While around 91% of U.S. homes have air conditioning, 44% of Seattle homes come with central cooling, according to the American Housing Survey. That's the lowest in the nation, next to San Francisco and Portland, and is up from 31% in 2013.

Over the weekend, Seattle saw more hundred-degree weather than it has in 66 years. On Saturday, temperatures in Seattle soared to 100 degrees Fahrenheit before 4 p.m. and again on Sunday around 2 p.m. to a record of 104 degrees. By Monday at 11 a.m., the Emerald City had broken triple digits again at 106 degrees. Western Washington remains under an excessive heat warning until Tuesday night, when temperatures could fall back into the 90s.

For the past 72 hours, Seattleites without air conditioning of their own have had to venture out into triple-digit heat. As of Monday, the city of Seattle had opened 36 cooling centers in the city of 750,000 people. They include six senior centers, three community centers, 10 hygiene centers, and two shelters for people experiencing homelessness, along with 30 beaches, pools, spray parks, and wading pools.

Senior Centers open no earlier than 8:20 a.m. and are open no later than 5 p.m. Two shelters for homeless individualsUrban Rest Stop and the Salvation Army White Center Community Centerremain open through the earlier evening.

Online retail giant Amazon announced they would convert their meeting center in Downtown Seattle into a cooling center that will house 1,000 and remain open until 8 p.m. Monday. West Seattle Christian Church will leave its gym open as a cooling center until 5 p.m., according to their Facebook page. It will stay open until no longer needed.

Last summer, Seattle did not provide cooling centers or shelters from the wildfire smoke when COVID-19 vaccinations weren't available. This year, people will have between 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. to keep cool at one of the library's 13 branches. After hours temperatures on Saturday and Sunday remained at 75 and 81 degrees by midnight before reaching 90 degrees by 6 a.m.

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In a statement, Mayor Jenny Durkan's office confirmed the city does not plan to extend those hours beyond 6 p.m. City officials say the library system has yet to find the people or the money to keep the lights on. Last fall, Durkan pushed for a $5.8 million cut to the Seattle City Library in the 2021 city budget.

"Because we are still working toward building our staffing levels back up to pre-pandemic levels, and because we have already redeployed available Library staff, we are unable to extend Library hours past 6 p.m.," Kamaria Hightower, a spokesperson with Durkan's office, wrote. "Thanks to support from the City's Seattle Rescue Plan, we'll be increasing staffing and reopening additional libraries for more hours throughout the summer."

Temperatures rose to 117 degrees in parts of Washington Monday. Nightly temperatures may not fall below 78 degrees until 2:00 a.m in Seattle, the National Weather Service reports. The heat is severe enough that asphalt cracked under strain in West Seattle.

Masks will be required through June 30, when King County expects to lift most of its remaining COVID restrictions. Gov. Jay Inslee lifted social distancing and capacity restraints on Friday.

Over the weekend, Sound Transit announced the heatwave had slowed down Link light-rail trains because of hot rail tracks. The agency also warned of delays.

So far, city power outages have been limited. As of Monday afternoon, Puget Sound Energy Active reported 9,477 customers were experiencing 80 separate outages from Olympia to Bellingham.

Seattleites can find more information on cooling centers in their area here.



Washington Examiner Videos

Tags: News, Washington, State, Weather

Original Author: Tim Gruver, The Center Square

Original Location: Seattle lacks funds, personnel to expand many cooling centers
Somalia will hold a long-delayed presidential election on October 10, the prime minister's office said Tuesday, following months of deadlock that turned violent at times.

Prime Minister Mohamed Hussein Roble's office unveiled the timetable for indirect parliamentary and presidential elections on Twitter, saying political leaders had agreed to a roadmap for a vote after two days of talks in the capital Mogadishu.

"I commend the leaders of the council and hope the election will be a peaceful and transparent one, based on the agreed upon schedule and processes," the prime minister said.

President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed and the leaders of Somalia's five states had been unable to agree on the terms of a vote before his term lapsed in February, triggering an unprecedented constitutional crisis.

The political impasse exploded into violence in April when negotiations collapsed and the lower house of parliament extended the president's mandate by two years, sparking gun battles on the streets of Mogadishu.

Under pressure the president, commonly known as Farmajo, reversed the extension and ordered his prime minister to reconvene with the state leaders to chart a fresh roadmap towards elections.

In May, the warring leaders announced plans to commence the multi-stage election process within 60 days, helping ease political tensions.

The timetable announced Tuesday schedules elections for the upper house on July 25, and the lower house between August 10 and September 10.

Both houses are then convened and a vote for the president held on October 10.

"At least we know when the election is taking place now, I hope there will not be any other complications starting from today and the election takes place seemingly as scheduled," Abdifatah Ibrahim, who is seeking a seat in parliament, told AFP.

We have been waiting this for so long."

- 'Everyone is relieved' -

Suado Mohamed, a member of a women's association, echoed him.

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"Today everyone is relieved, and the country is prepared now to go for the election," she said.

Somalia has not held a direct one-person, one-vote election since 1969, the year dictator Siad Barre led a coup and went on to rule for two decades.

Barre's military regime collapsed in 1991 and Somalia fell into anarchy.

Repeat efforts to organise such a ballot since have been scuttled by security problems or lack of political will.

The upcoming election, like others past, follows a complex indirect model.

Special delegates, chosen by the country's myriad clan elders, pick lower house MPs while senators are nominated by state presidents and then endorsed by local legislatures.

This election was to go further in terms of inclusivity, with double the polling locations and almost twice as many delegates voting as the last election in 2017.

Women candidates will pay less to register, Roble said, in the hope of boosting female electoral participation.

Mogadishu and the states struck a deal last September paving the way for elections and a vote for the presidency by February this year.

But distrust between Farmajo and the states over key appointments to crucial election committees, fears of rigging, and concerns about securing the vote itself scuttled the plan.

Months of UN-backed negotiations failed to get the timetable back, and international sanctions were threatened if the troubled Horn of Africa nation did not hold elections soon.

The country still battles the Al-Qaeda-linked Al-Shabaab group, which controlled Mogadishu until 2011 when it was pushed out by African Union troops, but still holds territory in the countryside.

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Sophie Turner and Joe Jonas had two weddings in 2019. Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images

Sophie Turner and Joe Jonas are celebrating the second anniversary of their France wedding.

On Tuesday, the couple shared never-before-seen photos from their big day.

Turner's Instagram post included shots of her wedding dresses, their cake, and more.

Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

Sophie Turner and Joe Jonas have officially been married for two years - and they're now sharing some never-before-seen photos from their France wedding with fans.

On Tuesday, Jonas first posted a picture of himself and Turner dancing during their wedding reception. "The best two years of my life. Love you @sophiet," he captioned the shot.

The photo gives a closer look at the bodice and sleeves of Turner's wedding dress, which had previously only been seen in one photo shared by the couple.

Turner also shared her own Instagram post in celebration of the big day. "I mean f--- it, it's been 2 years," she wrote alongside the slideshow of five pictures.

The first image in her post seemingly shows Turner and Jonas walking into their rehearsal dinner. For the event, Turner wore a white sleeveless dress with strappy sandals, no accessories, and an updo hairstyle. Jonas, on the other hand, opted for a black-and-white striped suit.

Other images in Turner's post include her and Jonas embracing during a dance, her and her bridesmaids wearing matching white pajamas, and a multitiered cake that was decorated with golden cherubs.

Jonas then shared another set of photos. These images include one of him and Turner at their rehearsal dinner, an overhead view of their reception, Jonas and his brothers performing at the wedding, and more.

Earlier this year, Turner and Jonas posted unseen photos taken during their first wedding, which was held in Las Vegas, Nevada, and officiated by an Elvis impersonator.

"Happy 2 year Vegas Wedding anniversary to this big ol hunk of man meat   ," Turner wrote in the caption of her post at the time.

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Turner and Jonas didn't originally share photos or videos from their Vegas wedding. Instead, musician Diplo livestreamed the event - reportedly without the couple's permission - on Instagram.

The couple also didn't post photos or videos from their France wedding, aside from one image of them walking down the aisle.

Read the original article on Insider
South Africa's embattled ex-president Jacob Zuma, once jailed for fighting the apartheid regime, now faces another 15 months behind bars for shunning a corruption probe into his administration.

Zuma -- whose middle name Gedleyihlekisa means "one who laughs while grinding his enemies" -- started off as a herdboy and rose to become South Africa's fourth president under the banner of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party.

Charismatic and jovial, he fell from grace before the end of his second term in 2018, ousted by his own ANC party over accusations of corruption and abuse of power.

But the 79-year-old has retained a loyal network of lawmakers, officials and grassroot supporters who have continued to rally behind their former leader despite the scandals tarnishing his reputation.

They have defended Zuma's repeated snubbing of an anti-graft commission that led South Africa's top court to compel him to testify, and then hand him a year-and-three-month jail sentence for defying that order.

Zuma walked out of the panel accusing its chair, Deputy Chief Justice Raymond Zondo, of bias, despite 34 witnesses having linked him to malfeasances

His supporters maintain the allegations are politically motivated.

Zuma is no strangers to impropriety.

He also faces 16 charges of fraud, graft and racketeering relating to a 1999 purchase of weapons and gear from European arms firms when he was deputy president.

In 2006, he was taken to court for allegedly raping a colleague's HIV-positive daughter -- of which he was acquitted.

During the trial, Zuma infamously told judges he had unprotected sex with the woman and showered after intercourse to avoid catching the virus.

- Dodgy dealings -

He succeeded ex-president Thabo Mbeki in 2007 and inherited a party riddled with divisions that continued to mar his presidency.

A Zuma-led ANC faction in 2009 disbanded an elite anti-corruption body, known as the Scorpions, set up by his predecessor after it began irking the president and his allies.

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But his dodgy dealings caught up with him.

It was Zuma himself, under pressure over an emerging plethora of graft scandals, who set up the Zondo commission shortly before his ousting.

He testified only once, in July 2019, and has since ignored several invitations to reappear.

Born on April 12, 1942 in a rural hamlet in KwaZulu-Natal province, Zuma joined the ANC as a teenager, when the party was still underground, and rose through its ranks.

After a 10-year stint in prison at Robben Island for fighting white-minority rule, Zuma fled into exile and became the party's feared head of intelligence.

The anti-apartheid struggle song "Umshini Wami", Bring Me My Machine Gun, became his signature tune.

In 1999, he was elected deputy president.

A proud traditionalist, Zuma still often swaps tailored suits for traditional Zulu leopard-skin dress, taking part in ground-stomping warrior dances during ceremonies in his native village.

A teetotaller and non-smoker, he married seven times and has at least 20 children.

And Zuma's private persona is more approachable. A TikTok video posted in May showed him dancing with some of his granddaughters.

Zuma's strong family and cultural values continue to attract support, although his fan base has dwindled over the years.

At Nelson Mandela's memorial service in 2013, he was loudly booed by ordinary South Africans in front of world leaders.

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South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem Joe Raedle/Getty Images

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem is sending 50 National Guard troops to the US-Mexico border in Texas.

All expenses will be paid for by a donation from Willis and Reba Johnson's foundation, per her office.

DeSantis and Reynolds also announced plans to send law enforcement details to the border.

See more stories on Insider's business page.

Republican South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem announced Tuesday night that she's sending 50 of her state's National Guard troops to Texas.

While sharing National Guard troops across state lines is not unusual for governors, it typically involves a crisis such as a natural disaster in a neighboring state.

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Noem is one of several Republican governors answering a call from Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey for states to send resources to their Mexican borders under the Emergency Management Assistance Compact.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds both announced they will send state law enforcement details to the Lone Star State, while Noem is the only one to send National Guard troops.

Another unusual aspect of Noem's announcement is that the 30 to 60 day deployment will be "paid for by a private donation."

Ian Fury, Noem's spokesman and communications director, told Insider the donation is from Willis and Reba Johnson's foundation "to help alleviate the cost to South Dakota taxpayers."

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Officials sent from other states will be able to make arrests in Texas and Arizona.

Abbott and Doucey said drug smugglers and people leading groups of undocumented migrants need to be arrested "before they can cause problems in your state."

So far, no Democratic governors have agreed to send any troops.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Singapore's State Courts seen on 21 April 2020. (PHOTO: Dhany Osman / Yahoo News Singapore)

SINGAPORE  A man who opted to serve his Stay-Home Notice (SHN) at home but allowed movers into his home was fined $7,000 on Tuesday (29 June).

Ko Kyung Ho, a 46-year-old South Korean and Singapore permanent resident, pleaded guilty to a charge of providing false information in his SHN declaration, with one count of allowing nine movers into his household taken into consideration for his sentencing.

Ko worked in South Korea while his wife and two children, aged 12 and 18, stayed in Singapore. Ko would visit Singapore a few times a year to be with his family. According to court documents, Ko had studied English at Stanford University.

Before he returned to Singapore late last year, he and his wife engaged the service of movers to move his family's items on 26 November last year.

Ko later filled in an application to serve his 14-day SHN in his place of residence rather than in a dedicated facility.

Upon his return to Singapore on 25 November last year, he was referred to an Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA) officer who verified the details of his SHN. Another ICA officer explained to him the conditions involved for persons who opted to serve their SHN at their residence rather than a facility. Ko also had the terms and conditions explained to him.

As part of his requirements, Ko acknowledged that he would occupy a residence alone or with household members with the same travel history, and are serving their SHN in the same period.

He also acknowledged that no one who did not have the same travel history would stay in his chosen place of residence for the period of his SHN.

As part of the declaration form, he acknowledged that he could be prosecuted for false information.

Ko had not mentioned that his family members  his wife and two children  would be staying at his declared place of residence. His three family members had planned to move to his residence on 26 November.

Ko was then briefed on remaining in the declared place of residence alone during his SHN and on contacting the SHN hotline to seek approval if he needed to see a doctor or change contact details during the SHN period.

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Ko was not given any approval to allow movers or the rest of this family to enter or reside in his SHN residence.

Ko's wife and son received him at the airport and they then took separate transport to meet him at the residence. His son stayed overnight, in breach of his SHN requirements.

On 26 November, two SATS officers who were assigned to carry out house visits on persons serving their SHN were tasked to visit Ko's declared place of residence.

The two officers arrived at 2.30pm and saw Ko, his wife and two children in the living room, with house movers transferring furniture, household items, and boxes into the residence.

The officers asked Ko if he was staying alone, and Ko replied that he stayed with his wife and two children. They recorded the names of the family members and told the movers to stop work.

ICA officers later visited the residence and saw Ko and his family at the apartment, where nine movers were shifting remaining items into the place. These movers were unaware that Ko had been serving his SHN.

According to the prosecution, the movers would not have taken on the assignment had they been aware. They were at the residence for two hours and 15 minutes.

Ko was escorted to Intercontinental Hotel to serve out his SHN. According to his lawyer Adrian Wee, Ko did not contract COVID-19.

Deputy Public Prosecutor Joshua Lim sought the maximum fine of $10,000, classifying the case as "low harm and low culpability".

Wee sought a fine of $7,000. He said that on previous occasions that Ko had served his SHN, it was with his family at their residence.

This formed the basis of his expectation to serve his SHN with his family, said Wee, who added that his client now accepts that the rules had changed.

While being served by an ICA officer at the airport, Ko had showed the officer a tenancy agreement listing his wife and children as occupants.

"The submission I am making is not that he did not know that the declaration was false, but that he underestimated the truth of his declaration. He accepts that that was wrong and is completely in agreement that a penalty should be levied on him. He is filled with remorse," said Wee.

His client had not tried to deceive anyone and had kept himself isolated behind sliding doors when approached by enforcement officers.

"I am instructed to reiterate that he is very sorry for the offence. He is regretful and he is also grateful to the prosecution for how it has dealt with his matter," said Wee.

Ko could have been jailed up to six months and/or fined up to $10,000 for breaching his SHN.

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2 men sentenced in fight at Bedok North over staring incident

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TOKYO (Reuters) - Global demand of nickel used in batteries is expected to rise 18% this year from 2020, backed by strong sales of electric-vehicles (EVs) in China, Sumitomo Metal Mining, Japan's biggest nickel smelter, said on Tuesday.

Sumitomo Metal, which supplies cathode materials for Panasonic lithium ion batteries that are used in Tesla EVs, said demand of nickel used in rechargeable batteries will increase to 228,000 tonnes in 2021 from 193,000 tonnes in 2020.

Nickel is mainly used in stainless steelmaking, but is also a vital ingredient for the lithium-ion batteries used to power EVs, where demand is set to accelerate over coming years.

"Sales of EVs are growing very fast, especially in China, despite the COVID-19 pandemic," Yusuke Niwa, general manager of Sumitomo Metal's nickel sales and raw materials department, told reporters.

"The recent drawdown in LME's nickel stocks is seen to reflect rising demand for the metal used in batteries," he said, pointing to a drop by more than 30,000 tonnes over the past two months.

The company also predicted that a global nickel market surplus will narrow to 58,000 tonnes this year from 132,000 tonnes in 2020 as robust demand from the stainless steel sector will offset higher output of nickel pig iron (NPI) in Indonesia.

Global demand for nickel is seen increasing by 9.2% in 2021 to 2.58 million tonnes, while supply is expected to climb by 5.8% to 2.638 million tonnes.

During the first four months of the year, the global nickel market saw a deficit of 34,900 tonnes, the International Nickel Study Group said.

"But we expect a surplus later this year as more projects for NPI production in Indonesia will start up," Niwa said.

Japan's demand for nickel is projected to rise 15.7% to 167,400 tonnes, while supply is forecast to fall 2.4% to 165,800 tonnes.

(Reporting by Yuka Obayashi, editing by Louise Heavens)
The sudden and deadly collapse of Surfsides Champlain Towers South has sent ripples of concern through Miami-Dade County as residents living in tall buildings wonder if their condominiums and apartments are being properly looked after.

Politicians say they are concerned, too, and local governments are beginning to act.

Florida has one of nations most stringent building codes, and county rules require owners of older buildings to submit reports from licensed engineers or architects certifying a buildings safety or documenting needed repairs after 40 years, then every 10 years after that, to meet recertification standards.

But local governments are looking inward after Thursdays partial collapse at the Champlain Towers South, which was built in 1981 and had been in the middle of a 40-year renovation process when it collapsed in the middle of the night, killing at least 11 and leaving 150 unaccounted for.

We have 100-year-old concrete buildings in South Florida that have stood the test of time, said John Pistorino, the Miami engineer who authored the 40-year recertification policy. If you maintain it, and fulfill your obligation to take care of it, it will last. Problems occur when owners or condo boards resist spending money except on interior assets rather than the underside of the building.

The city of Miami Beach, whose northern border is just feet from the collapse site in neighboring Surfside, has begun doing visual inspections of the 507 buildings in the city that currently require 40-year recertifications under county law. On Friday, the city of Miamis building department announced it will request citywide inspections of all buildings six stories or taller that are 40 years or older.

Miami-Dade County dispatched two inspectors Monday to start visiting about two dozen aging apartment and condominium buildings facing violations from the county.

Miami-Dade housing complexes on list of violators

That list of alleged violators includes the county itself. On Monday, the Department of Regulatory and Economic Resources, which regulates the county building code, released a list of 24 properties that are part of an emergency audit of older buildings facing violations for not complying with the 40-year recertification process. Most of the entries involve condominium complexes, including at least portions of Jade Wind on the 1700 block of Northeast 2nd St., portions of Lake Park on the 900 block of Northeast 199th Street, and Peppermill at Kendale Lakes on the 8000 block of Southwest 149th Avenue.

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Also on the list are two county-owned public housing properties: Little River Plaza at 8255 NW Miami Court and the Ward Towers 1 building at 2200 NW 54th St. Details on the violations were not immediately available.

While Miami-Dade manages public housing complexes, funding for maintenance comes from the federal government, and county administrators say the dollars have never matched needs for the aging buildings.

The Village of Key Biscayne, where more than half of its 13,000 residents live in a condominium building, began the process Monday of compiling a list of properties that have either had 40-year recertifications, are coming due for 40-year recertifications or were built before Hurricane Andrew when the building code was weaker. Village Manager Steve Williamson and a team of village department heads will prioritize those buildings for further inspection.

The town of Surfside hired a structural engineer to investigate the cause of the collapse and check on nearby buildings.

Commissioner Eliana Salzhauer said that while the small town of less than 6,000 residents has the attention of Gov. Ron DeSantis and President Joe Biden, the town should seriously consider reforms to the recertification process  like requiring inspections take place sooner than 40 years and taking a closer look at whats happening on our beaches.

This is horrible, this is tragic, Salzhauer said at a special commission meeting Friday.

Eugenio Santiago, a licensed structural engineer and former building chief for Key Biscayne, inspected more than 3,000 buildings during his 52-year career.

Building inspectors are in a tough position because you get hired by a client to evaluate possible problems and then the owner doesnt want to spend the money or the condo association wants to save every penny and puts off repairs or sticks the report in the drawer, Santiago said. We notify building officials if we find major problems. Most people are willing to comply with needed repairs. Condo associations are supposed to set aside money for the 40-year recertification that they know can cost millions in repair and restoration work.

Yes, it is inconvenient and expensive but are you going to weigh inconvenience versus death?

Williamson, the Key Biscayne manager, said the collapse gives municipalities a chance to look inward.

The village is going to be digging deeper and looking at 75 buildings which are older than 40 years. Most of them are fully certified, Williamson said, but nine are coming up on their 40-year mark, four are coming up on their 50-year mark and four more are coming up on 60 years.

The village has also decided to begin giving notice of recertifications to buildings one year ahead of the date, then six months. The county requires notice to be given 90 days, but a wider window will help owners and associations find engineers and raise the money for eventual repairs.

Residents will have the chance to ask questions at a special village meeting Thursday night.

We take this seriously, said Williamson, who came into the job last month. We talk about structures, but in the end, its about people and making sure that they are safe.

Miami Beach Commissioner Michael Gongora, who is a condominium association attorney, proposed during a special commission meeting Monday that the city inspect its low-income senior housing after residents reported leaking and other issues at their buildings.

He said the city should hear from experts about what possible improvements can be made to the recertification process, such as requiring they be completed earlier or including a geological survey as part of the inspection. He is also interested in asking how a saturation of development or building on the coast affects building safety.

We cant make decisions in a vacuum right now, he said. Nobody really knows for sure what happened.

Miami-Dade audit of older buildings underway

Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava announced an audit of residential buildings outside city limits due for recertifications. The aging buildings that inspectors began visiting Monday are due for recertifications after 40 years, but havent obtained them and are far enough behind to face unsafe structure violations.

Miami-Dade created the 40-year recertification requirement in 1974, and Broward County adopted similar rules in 2005.

Its above and beyond the Florida building code, said Edward Rojas, who oversees permitting for Miami-Dade as county building official. Its unique to Miami-Dade and Broward.

Pistorino said the 40-year recertification policy was written after the 1974 collapse of a 30-year-old office building in downtown Miami that was leased by the Drug Enforcement Administration. Seven people died. That building failed because of concrete deterioration, Pistorino said.

Buildings are supposed to be maintained from the day they are built. You dont wait 40 years, he said. The 40-year milestone was a compromise. We had and continue to have pushback from owners who say it should be 50 or 60 or 70 years because of the costs involved. When they complain, our building officials pull out photos of the 1974 collapse and explain that this is why we have it, this is why we need the authority to enforce it with citations or evacuation orders.

There are more than 2,000 buildings overdue on certifications from Miami-Dade, Rojas said, and 24 of those are in violation and mesh with the mayors audit criteria of being residential and at least five stories tall. County inspectors are also visiting multi-family buildings with four stories, Rojas said.

Ricardo Roig, Miami-Dades assistant director for code compliance at the Department of Regulatory and Economic Resources, said county staff reviews recertification reports as they arrive. But he said the professionals hired to inspect the buildings are required to notify authorities if they find any flaws that could cause a building to collapse.

The engineer has a responsibility, if he sees an imminent danger, to notify us. And they do, Roig said. He said local governments will allow emergency repairs to begin immediately without permits if a building is facing that kind of disrepair.

He and Rojas said they didnt want to speculate on how to interpret the 2018 recertification report filed with Surfside for Champlain Towers South that identified a major error that may have led to concrete deterioration in the complex. But Rojas noted the report didnt contain the kind of language that would suggest emergency repairs were needed to address immediate danger.

I have seen plenty of these reports, Rojas said. It didnt say there was an imminent collapse happening. It did say there were deficiencies that needed fixing.

Miroslav Misha Miladenovic, an engineer and founder of the M2E firm in Miami, said the challenge often comes when an engineer gets hired by a condo board and delivers an expensive punch list of repairs needed to pass a 40-year recertification process. That bad news can be poorly received, followed by an effort to find better news.

A prudent board would listen to the engineer and do what the engineer says needs to be done, Mladenovic said. Thats not always the case. If the same board shops for an engineer that tells what they want to hear, then its not the process that doesnt work.

Are we doing enough?

Santiago said Miami-Dade is known throughout the nation for its strict building codes and the 40-year recertification process, which most cities do not require.

Forty years should be sufficient and its worked for a long time, but a lot depends on who is notified of problems and how they react, Santiago said. We ask a lot more here than anywhere else in the state. Are we doing enough? Maybe it is time to be more strict and more inclusive so that we can look more closely at more elements.

Santiago recalled one job where he warned a building owner in Hallandale Beach about cracking and structural problems and he didnt want to spend the money, so he fired me and I told the building department about what Id found.

Based on what happened in the Champlain tower collapse  where the engineering firm cited in a 2018 report the inability to get a close look at the pool deck slab and parts of the parking garage  Santiago suggested a change in the 40-year recertification rules that would require owners to allow a certain percentage of exposure to hidden areas so that inspectors can examine what is happening beneath, above or behind tile, carpet, plaster, ceilings and walls.

When a building is occupied a lot is hidden from sight, he said. If a slab has tile or carpet you cant expose the surface to see the cracks. Maybe add a requirement to remove that covering or remove a ceiling, for example.

Santiago said an inspection entails looking for major signs of distress and quantifying them.

Concrete is a material that gives you a chance to see whats happening and fix it in time, he said. Those cracks in the Surfside building should have been taken care of and not ignored. They didnt just appear in 2018. They probably started to be visible in 2011, 2012.

If I lived in a condo, Id be a little worried because what happened was so unexpected and we cant put a finger on the cause until it is investigated.

After Hurricane Andrew, the requirement that 40-year-old buildings be recertified by electrical engineers was added in 1993.

The South Florida Building Code, first adopted in 1957, is one of the most rigorous in the nation because it was written to protect structures from our aggressive environment  the salt air, the sea and hurricanes, Pistorino said.

Our rules, our standards, the safety factors in design, our requirements for workmanship, our threshold building inspection law, our product approval system, our peer-review system  it all adds up to an excellent reputation nationwide because we know the demands put on buildings in South Florida are high in our harsh conditions, he said. In the last few days, Ive been fielding calls from building and government officials around Florida who want to adopt our recertification program.

Pistorino, who will be involved in the investigation of the Champlain tower collapse, said it will be like an autopsy, like the reassembly of an airplane after a crash.

We know some of the symptoms in Surfside but we dont know the cause and its not right to speculate, he said, later adding: Im not going to yell fire in a theater. I would feel safe in a unit in one of these buildings.

This article was updated to correct the Ward Towers building included on a county list of recertification violations.
TAIPEI (Reuters) - Taiwan will discuss easing the import and export of COVID-19 vaccines with the United States when it holds trade talks with Washington this week, which will help in bringing the pandemic under control, President Tsai Ing-wen said on Tuesday.

The two sides are due to resume long-stalled trade discussions on Wednesday as Washington seeks to deepen its support for the Chinese-claimed island, and at a time when Taiwan is dealing with a cluster of domestic COVID-19 cases.

In an address from her office, Tsai said the Trade and Investment Framework Agreement talks, or TIFA, would include what she referred to as an "important" topic.

"That is to simplify the import and export process of vaccines and other medical supplies. This substantive cooperation will bring important help to our current epidemic situation. I have asked our negotiating team to go all out," Tsai said.

"If Taiwan's epidemic is brought under control and economic fluctuations are reduced, it will be a further contribution to the peace and prosperity of the Indo-Pacific region."

Taiwan is a major producer of semiconductors, a global shortage of which has reverberated around the world, though the island's domestic COVID-19 outbreak has not had a substantial impact on supplies.

The island has received a total of 4.85 million COVID-19 vaccine doses to date, including 1.24 million donated by Japan and 2.5 million donated by the United States. Japan has pledged another 1 million, while Lithuania is giving Taiwan 20,000.

Asked if the large number of doses the United States sent to Taiwan was intended as a quid pro quo to ensure access to semiconductor supplies, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters: "There should not be that suggestion. I will note that they were being cut off from access to vaccines."

U.S. President Joe Biden's administration has said China has used access to vaccines for political coercion around the world, including "disgraceful" attempts to block democratic Taiwan's ability to purchase them.

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China has denied that it tried to cut Taiwan off from buying vaccines from Germany's BioNTech SE, saying it was free to obtain the shots through Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical Group Co Ltd, which has a contract to sell BioNTech's vaccine in China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan.

A further 410,000 doses of Moderna Inc's COVID-19 vaccine will arrive in Taiwan on Wednesday, Deputy Minister of the Interior Chen Tsung-yen said earlier on Tuesday, part of its direct order for 5.05 million doses from the company.

Only around 8% of Taiwan's 23.5 million people have received at least one of the two shot regimen against COVID-19, and the government has been under pressure to speed up deliveries of the millions of doses it has on order.

When asked if a government-run research centre is in talks with Moderna to make COVID-19 vaccines, Health Minister Chen Shih-chung said the government "will not give up any opportunity" and is currently reviewing its vaccine manufacturing capacity for international companies.

"We are reviewing related capacity, willingness and division of labour domestically. That will smooth things out in a negotiation," Chen told a daily news briefing, without giving details.

Taiwan's own domestic outbreak of the virus is being brought under control, but it remains wary about a handful of cases of the highly contagious Delta variant in southern Taiwan.

The island reported 54 new domestic infections on Tuesday, down from 60 a day earlier, marking the smallest daily rise since May 15, when the government raised the alert level for Taipei and its neighbouring city in the wake of a sudden spike of domestic cases.

(Reporting by Yimou Lee and Ben Blanchard in Taipei, Additional reporting by Andrea Shalal and Michael Martina in Washington; Editing by Jacqueline Wong)
Google in Manhattan. Mark Lennihan/AP Photo

An outspoken supporter of the Thai royal family published the locations of monarchy critics on Google Maps.

He told Reuters that he and 80 other volunteers compiled hundreds of coordinates while scouring the web.

Google has since taken down the maps.

Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

Google took down several user-generated Google Maps on Monday, which were created by a Thai royalist who wanted to expose the locations of people criticizing Thailand's monarchy and King Bhumibol Adulyadej in particular.

Thai royalist activist and retired army captain Songklod Chuenchoopol, also known as "Pookem," posted a screenshot of one such map on his Facebook page. It contained the addresses and job details of hundreds of apparent anti-monarchy critics, many of whom were labeled as students.

According to Reuters, their names were also listed in the maps. Another similar document was posted on Google Maps on the same day, but could not be accessed by Insider on Tuesday.

In his post, Chuenchoopol claimed credit for the map, saying he would submit the documents to the authorities.

He called his creation a "112 map," named after Thailand's royal defamation law, which dictates that anyone who "defames, insults, or threatens" the royal family can be sentenced to three to 15 years of prison. The law is sometimes referred to as the "lese-majeste" rule.

The rule was leveled last year against dozens of activists, when thousands protested in Bangkok against the monarchy's control of billions in royal funds and the current Thai king's luxury lifestyle.

Last December, a 16-year-old boy was ordered to turn himself in to the police for dressing up like the king - in a crop top - and writing insults to the king on his body. Meanwhile, a 63-year-old civil servant was sentenced to 43 years in jail under the law in January. In one case, a man was jailed for 15 years for posting photos of the king's dog that allegedly ridiculed the animal.

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Chuenchoopol told Reuters that his maps were filled in by him and an 80-strong volunteer group, who monitored the web and social media for signs of criticism against the monarchy. According to him, it was "psychological warfare" that would discourage people from disrespecting the royal family.

He has a substantial following on social media, with more than 162,000 followers on Facebook and 44,000 on Twitter.

The right-wing activist also made local headlines last September when he was admitted to the hospital after being attacked by a group of men.

A screenshot of one of Songklod "Pookem" Chuenchoopol's maps Pookem/Facebook

A spokesperson for Google told Insider that it acted on the maps as soon as it was made aware of them on Monday.

"The issue is now fixed. We have clear policies about what's acceptable for user generated My Maps content. We remove user generated maps that violate our policies," the spokesperson wrote in an email statement.

They added that Google would continue to monitor the situation and act on other maps that violate its policies.

Human rights lawyer Krisadang Nutjarat told local news site The Voice that Chuenchoopol's maps were a violation of privacy and that the maps offered no proof of defamation.

Sunai Phasuk, a senior researcher on Thailand in Human Rights Watch's Asia division, tweeted about the removal of the maps, saying they contained hate.

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Insider has contacted Chuenchoopol for comment.

Read the original article on Insider
Tim Tebows wife shares story of near abduction to raise awareness about human trafficking (Getty Images)

Tim Tebows wife Demi-Leigh Nel-Peters has revealed how she fought off armed attackers during a possible abduction attempt in an effort to raise awareness of human trafficking.

Nel-Peters shared her story in an Instagram video uploaded to the football players Tim Tebow Foundation, which describes itself as existing to bring faith, hope and love to those needing a brighter day in their darkest hour of need.

In the video, the 26-year-old beauty queen began by explaining that one of the reasons she is so passionate about giving women all over the world a voice, and an opportunity to reach out for help is because she has also lived in fear.

Nel-Peters then recalled a moment she experienced fear, when she was on her way to an event while driving in her sponsored car shortly after being crowned Miss South Africa, only to find herself and her car surrounded by five armed men at a red light.

The day I sat at a red traffic light, all dressed up, on my way to an event, on top of the world, I was just crowned Miss South Africa a couple months ago. In my brand new car that was sponsored, it was one of my winning prizes, on my way to some fancy event, Nel-Peters remembered. And I looked to my left and I looked to my right and I saw Im surrounded by five armed men.

According to the pageant winner, she did not know how the situation could end up, but knew she had to get away, so she put up her hands and surrendered all of her materialistic things, giving the attackers everything they needed.

However, according to Nel-Peters, the moment she tried to run away, one of the men grabbed her and pulled her back into the car, before yelling at her that she was coming with them.

And at that moment, I said: No. Im not. Im not going with you. I dont care if you shoot me, if you kill me, but Im not going with you, Nel-Peters recalled, before explaining how she had punched the man as hard as she could in the throat, which gave her a brief moment to get away.

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The ordeal wasnt over yet, however, as she then recalled how she ran onto a busy avenue, at which point it was only five in the afternoon, only to find that many people refused to stop their cars and help her.

As I ran up that avenue, I knocked on about 30, 40 car windows, she continued. And do you know how many cars stopped for me? Not one. Not one person stopped to help.

And I dont know what was more terrifying, being attacked by these five armed men, or not getting any help.

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According to Nel-Peters, she kept running and knocking on car windows, until finally a 19-year-old pulled over and told her to get in.

But before she allowed Nel-Peters to enter the car, the teenager asked the beauty queen: You dont have a gun right? to which Nel-Peters responded that she was just hijacked.

And she let me into her car. And she took me to safety, Nel-Peters said, adding that if it werent for the 19-year-old, she doesnt know what would have happened to her. I dont know if those men would have followed me, grabbed me, who knows. But I try not to think about that.

Nel-Peters concluded her story expressing her gratitude for the woman who helped her, before encouraging others to be the people who help those in need.

This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it.

Be that person that leans over, and opens up your car door, and lets that person in and leads them to safety, she said.

Tebow and Nel-Peters married in Cape Town, South Africa, in January 2020, with the pair since working together to end human trafficking through the football players foundation, a goal that Tebow, who called trafficking one of the greatest evils that exists in the world today, deepened his commitment to last year through a variety of new initiatives.

In response to Nel-Peters story, numerous people praised her for speaking out and bravely sharing her own experience.

Wow, how scary and sad at the same time that most people did nothing. Thank you for sharing and fighting against human trafficking, one person commented, while another said: Thank you for sharing your story and for putting a human face to what people are facing. It does open our eyes and it does help.

Read More

Tim Tebow makes NFL comeback after signing with Jacksonville Jaguars

Super Bowl week helps 'shine a light' on human trafficking

Almost half of UK bank specialists cant spot signs of human trafficking among transactions
The COVID-19 testing czar for former President Donald Trump says the most likely origin for the pandemic was an accidental escape from a Wuhan lab, testifying Tuesday as one of four expert witnesses during a House Republican effort to get to the bottom of how the coronavirus emerged.

Brett Giroir, an assistant secretary of health and a member of Trumps White House Coronavirus Task Force, said: I assess that the most likely origin was an accidental infection of laboratory personnel from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, with secondary transmission to the local population and subsequent spread to hundreds of millions of people around the world.

Giroir, a former four-star admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, spoke Tuesday as part of a panel organized by House Republicans on the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis.

There is now an increasing body of circumstantial evidence pointing to a lab leak origin of the virus, Giroir said. The bottom line is: I believe its just too much of a coincidence that a worldwide pandemic caused by a novel bat coronavirus that cannot be found in nature started just a few miles away from a secretive laboratory doing potentially dangerous research on bat coronaviruses. Sometimes, the most obvious explanation is indeed the correct one.

A State Department fact sheet released in January contended Wuhan lab researchers conducted experiments involving the bat coronavirus identified by Wuhan virologists in January 2020 as its closest sample to COVID-19" and that the lab has a published record of conducting gain-of-function research to engineer chimeric viruses. The fact sheet also asserted the lab engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military and that lab workers became sick with coronavirus-like symptoms in autumn 2019.

The National Institutes of Healths RePORTER website said the agency provided $15.2 million to Peter Daszaks New York-based EcoHealth Alliance over the years, with $3.74 million toward understanding bat coronavirus emergence. Daszak, a key member of the World Health Organization-China joint study team earlier this year, maintained a working relationship with Wuhan lab bat lady Shi Zhengli, sending at least $600,000 in NIH funding for bat coronavirus research.

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Giroir said: It is essential that Congress provides leadership for a comprehensive, transparent, and unbiased investigation to determine the most likely origin of the virus, whether the NIH funded, directly or indirectly, or approved of, explicitly or tacitly, potentially dangerous research within the Wuhan lab, and what the U.S. can do to minimize the possibility of future pandemics and enable rapid global containment of any suspicious infectious outbreak.

He added that the WHO couldn't be relied upon for an investigation because it has no authority to do anything in China without direct approval from the Communist Party.

NIH DEFENDS DELETING GENETIC SEQUENCES OF COVID-19

The Biden administration and the United Statess allies are largely pinning hopes for a second COVID-19 origins investigation in China on the WHO, despite the WHO-China joint study teams visit to Wuhan earlier this year that essentially dismissed the lab leak hypothesis.

David Asher, who led the Trump State Departments Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance investigation into COVID-19s origins, said China should be punished for its role in the pandemic.

We should stop funding the Chinese Communist research into biology. This dangerous gain-of-function collaboration with China has to end  Weve gotta enforce our treaty compliance, that should be a focus across the board," Asher said, adding, "Sanctions  China needs to be coerced. They need to feel the pain."

Asher added: Whether the Chinese did this deliberately or not in terms of creating this pathogen  I think the chances are they were working on it and it was funded by the military, Im very confident of that  but whether they released it or not deliberately or just had an accident, I think the answer is they probably had an accident, but that doesnt matter, because they allowed it to be weaponized in the wake of its release.

The State Department concluded in April that China has engaged in activities with dual-use applications, which raise concerns regarding its compliance with Article I of the Biological Weapons Convention and that the United States does not have sufficient information to determine whether China eliminated its assessed historical biological warfare program, as required under Article II of the Convention.

Asher said: What we found truly disturbed us: that the Chinese were working on a military-supported program, which they did not declare under the Biological Weapons Convention  so they lied. It involved coronaviruses, which they said they werent working on at the Wuhan institute.

The former State Department official called for a 9/11-like commission to investigate COVID-19's origins.

Dr. Steven Quay and Richard Muller, scientists who earlier this month wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal which contended that the most compelling reason to favor the lab leak hypothesis is firmly based in science, also testified on Tuesday.

Quay, the founder of Atossa Therapeutics, said Tuesday: I believe the evidence conclusively establishes that the COVID pandemic was not a natural process but instead came from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, and that it has the fingerprints of genetic manipulation through a process called gain-of-function research.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Muller, an emeritus professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, said: "Some people say we will never know, not until China confesses or unless there is a whistleblower."

"Well, we have a whistleblower. It was the virus itself. it came here, it came out of China, it came to us, and it carried with it genetic information."

Washington Examiner Videos

Tags: News, Coronavirus, Wuhan Lab, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, China

Original Author: Jerry Dunleavy

Original Location: Trump COVID testing czar testifies coronavirus most likely originated in Wuhan lab
(Independent)

Former President Donald Trump cancelled plans to host a rally in Mobile, Alabama marking the Fourth of July after town officials denied a rally permit over concerns about it turning into a political event.

AL.com reported on Tuesday that commissioners of the USS Alabama Battleship Memorial Park denied the permit under a longstanding ban on political events at the park which began in 2012.

Mr Trump, who left the White House in January, has continued to push conspiracy theories about his election defeat and claimed that he actually won the election in the months since his term ended. At private events, he has even pushed the idea that he could be reinstated as president, according to The New York Times.

More to follow...
TUNIS (Reuters) - The Tunisian government on Tuesday extended the hours of night curfew in an effort to stop the rapid spread of COVID-19, as the North Africa country reached a daily record of cases since the start of the pandemic last year.

The curfew will begin at 8:00 p.m. and end at 5:00 a.m. starting Thursday. The government said it will ban all gatherings until July 11.

Tunisia recorded 5,251 new confirmed coronavirus cases on Tuesday, the health ministry said, while 106 more deaths were reported, taking the death toll to about 15,000.

The government faces widespread criticism, amid the slow pace of its vaccination campaign and the fullness of intensive care departments, as the prime minister rejected a new lockdown, saying the country could not afford it.

An earlier lockdown last year successfully contained the coronavirus, but caused great financial pain in a country where economic woes have undermined faith in successive democratic governments.

(Reporting By Tarek Amara; Editing by Marguerita Choy)
Jun. 28TUPELO  Three high-ranking City Hall figures will keep their jobs after Todd Jordan takes office as mayor later this week.

Jordan announced through a city spokesperson on Monday that he intends to nominate the following people to stay in their current jobs, all of which are filled by mayoral appointment, subject to confirmation by the City Council:

Don Lewis, chief operations officer

Kim Hanna, chief financial officer/city clerk

Ben Logan, city attorney

The city's incoming mayor also announced that he'll seek to place a campaign staffer in a City Hall post. Jordan intends to nominate Tanner Newman as the city's next director of Development Services.

Newman previously served as a staffer to U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker, working in a local field office as a constituent liaison. A Mooreville native, he worked with several campaigns this municipal cycle, including Amanda Angle's unsuccessful run for the Ward 1 City Council seat, and then Jordan's mayoral campaign.

Development Services is currently led by Pat Falkner, who is expected to stay on as city planner, according to Lucia Randle, the city of Tupelo communications director.

Lewis, Hanna and Logan served at their current posts through most of Mayor Jason Shelton's two-term tenure. The presence of these figures will provide significant continuity in city government, at least in the early days of a Jordan administration.

A written announcement did, however, at least keep the possibility open that these appointments are transition-oriented and may not be made for the long haul.

"These key positions will assist the Jordan administration's transition, vision-casting and establishment of priorities for the next four years," said a written announcement.

Lewis mounted his own short-lived campaign for mayor last summer but dropped his planned campaign in short order.

Placing a key campaign confidant on the city's third floor may also signal that Jordan intends to elevate the visibility and significance of the city's third floor. Shelton attempted much the same maneuver early in his own tenure as mayor.

Story continues

Development Services includes zoning and planning, building inspection, and code enforcement efforts. When he took office, Shelton looked to reorient the department to help steer economic development and residential revitalization duties, appointing Shane Hooper to lead the department in in 2014.

After Hooper's departure, however, Shelton largely reversed course.

"We're going to go back to having the mayor's office work with CDF and Three Rivers Planning and Development for economic development," Shelton said at the time.

caleb.bedillion@djournal.com
ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkish police detained at least 15 people at a small Pride march in the capital Ankara on Tuesday, Reuters footage showed, days after dozens were detained after authorities intervened with tear gas at a larger parade in Istanbul.

Video footage showed police officers dispersing those at the march, some of whom were waving rainbow flags, carrying banners and singing while walking through central streets.

On Saturday police in riot gear were among those intervening in central Istanbul, including pushing and dragging some people who had gathered for a Pride parade.

Turkish authorities have repeatedly banned Pride events in recent years. Before then, thousands of people used to take part in the parade.

(Reporting by Ece Toksabay; Editing by Jonathan Spicer)
Hemingway, Bake Off: The Professionals and Philly DA: Breaking the Law airs tonight. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images. Channel 4. BBC)

Many eyes will undoubtedly be on the England v Germany Euros match tonight come 5pm and the post match analysis that follows.

But for viewers not so inclined toward the sport, there's plenty of other things to watch.

This evening sees Susan Colman head down to Brighton on another seaside holiday, while Bake Off: The Professionals continues.

Read more: Ed Miliband rules out Strictly Come Dancing stint

Plus, a new documentary series on Ernest Hemingway kicks off on BBC Four.

Bake Off: The Professionals - 8pm - Channel 4

Liam, Benoit, Tom and Cherish - Bake Off: The Professionals (Channel 4)

Chocolate week has rolled around again for the four teams left in this heat who tackle a secret challenge.

Their patisserie skills are put to the test as they must create a house of horrors-themed showpiece - but hopefully they don't have a nightmare assembling them.

Susan Calman's Grand Week By the Sea - 8pm - Channel 5

Event Title Susan Calmans Grand Week By The Sea (Channel 4)

The comedian lands in Brighton in this second episode of the series where she's joined by Zoe Lyons.

Read more: Megan Fox's children disrupt live TV interview

She heads up the i360 viewing tower, has a game of volleyball and visits the toy museum at the south coast seaside.

Hemingway - 9pm - BBC Four

Ernest Hemingway (1899 - 1961) works at his typewriter while sitting outdoors, Idaho. (Photo by Lloyd Arnold/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

A new series on US writer Ernest Hemingway starts on BBC Four, with the first episode looking at his childhood in Oak Park, Illinois.

The programme examines the biographical events of his tumultuous life while unpacking the myths around him.

It also features readings from stars including Jeff Daniels, Meryl Streep, Keri Russell and Patricia Clarkson.

999: What's Your Emergency? - 9pm - Channel 4

Sophie Minto & Michael Patton in 999 Whats Your Emergency (Channel 4)

The South Yorkshire Police tackle difficult cases of child-on-parent abuse in this episode.

There's a mother who asks the police to take her 15-year-old into custody after he damages their home while they are also despatched to a report of a son attacking his father for the second time in three days.

Philly DA: Breaking the Law - 10.40pm - BBC Four

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Philly DA: Breaking the Law. Larry Krasner celebrates alongside his wife Judge Lisa Millett Rau after being elected Philadelphia District Attorney. (Broken Escalator/BBC)

The series continues to chart the first term of District Attorney Larry Krasner and his reforms plans.

Read more: Rev Richard Coles calls for end to 'glamorous' depiction of alcoholism on TV

His pledge to end capital punishment in Pennsylvania is tested when a police sergeant is murdered while trying to protect citizens in a robbery, and family members and the police want the men who killed him to face the death penalty.

Watch: Rylan Clark-Neal says 'mistakes' have ended marriage
Two dozen Miami-Dade County apartment complexes, including two owned by the county, were placed on a list for unsafe structure violations on Monday following an emergency audit of the area, days after a condominium building crumbled to the ground last week.

The 24 structures failed to secure required recertifications after 40 years, according to the Miami Herald, which cited county records. The inquiry was initiated roughly 48 hours after Champlain Towers South, a 12-story structure that contained 136 units, partially collapsed on Thursday and was reduced to a 30-foot high pile of rubble. The building was in the process of receiving its 40-year recertification at the time of the incident.

The Little River Plaza, which has 88 apartment units, made the list and was cited in 2015 for overdue lighting improvements that were needed in its parking lot. Similarly, Ward Tower 1 also appeared on the violation catalog. Both were erected in the 1970s and are owned and operated by Miami-Dade County authorities.

MIAMI CONDO BUILDING NEEDED $9 MILLION IN REPAIRS PRIOR TO COLLAPSE, EMAILS SHOW

Local leaders have faulted a lack of federal funding for the poor upkeep. Michael Liu, the housing director for the county, said the area is roughly $10 million short on an annual basis, which has forced authorities "to make difficult choices based on severity and threats to health and safety."

A total of 11 people have been pronounced deceased, up from nine on Monday, with over 150 still unaccounted for as fire rescue personnel continue to parse through the rubble to locate Champlain Towers South survivors, officials said on Tuesday. Questions have been raised about the cause of the collapse after several public records were released by the city of Surfside that suggested the building was in need of imminent repairs.

Crews from the United States and Israel work in the rubble Champlain Towers South condo, Tuesday, June 29, 2021, in Surfside, Fla. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky) Lynne Sladky/AP

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The structure was quoted for approximately $630,000 in electrical repairs, $254,000 in structural costs, nearly $3.2 million in remediation of the buildings facade, and $3.8 million pertaining to repairs of the garage and pool deck, according to emails from Morabito Consultants in 2018. Correspondence also pointed to failures in concrete structural slabs on the pool deck and said a lack of action could have led to extensive deterioration" in the building that dates back to the 1980s.

The failed waterproofing is causing major structural damage to the concrete structural slab below these areas. Failure to replace the waterproofing in the near future will cause the extent of the concrete deterioration to expand exponentially, the emails read.

The new records follow the public release of a report from the same construction firm that suggested major structural damage existed on the property in October 2018.

The major structural damage was in the concrete slabs below the pool deck, and there was abundant cracking in the columns, beams, and walls of the parking garage, which is under the 13-story building, Morabitos report found.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

President Joe Biden is set to visit the collapse as early as Thursday.

"The response and support we have received from federal, state and other partners over the last six days has been unprecedented  and I am deeply thankful

@POTUS will be visiting the site of this tragedy to spend time with impacted families and first responders," Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava wrote in a tweet.

The Miami-Dade Unsafe Structures Board did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Washington Examiner.

Washington Examiner Videos

Tags: News, Miami, Miami Condo Collapse, Florida, Local

Original Author: Jake Dima

Original Location: Twenty-four Miami apartment buildings, including two county-owned structures, listed unsafe after audit
Jun. 29The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is reopening the public comment period for the under the Endangered Species Act.

Public comment is now welcome through July 23. The rule was originally available for public comment from March 25 through May 24, but the USFWS decided to offer all interested parties an additional 30 days to comment.

A will also be held at 5 p.m. on July 7.

USFWS said the proposal to downlist the ae o is "based on the best available scientific information, a thorough analysis of threats and how they have been alleviated, and the ongoing commitment and proven track record of partners to continue managing for healthy ae o populations."

The ESA defines "endangered " as a species that is currently in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range and "threatened " as a species that is likely to become endangered in the foreseeable future.

"The proposed downlisting of the ae o is an example of the power of conservation partnerships between federal, state and private stakeholders under the ESA, " said USFWS in a news release. "Over the past three decades, a strong network of conservation actions throughout Hawaii has resulted in more wetland areas being managed compatible with the species' needs. The State of Hawaii has been a key partner, along with efforts on National Wildlife Refuges, to protect, manage, and conserve the significant wetland habitats and supporting ae o populations over the last 30 years."

The, is a slender and graceful wading bird with long, pink legs that occurs on all main Hawaiian islands except Kahoolawe.

The USFWS said it was originally listed as endangered in 1970 due to the destruction of its habitat, along with hunting, introduced predatory animals and disease. Ae o today continue to be threatened by non-native predators such as mongooses, cats and rats, along with habitat loss, type C botulism, and the impacts of human activities and climate change.

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USFWS has determined, however, that the "imminence, severity, and magnitude of ongoing threats do not indicate the ae o is presently in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range."

Survey data and a recent analysis indicate that the ae o population has been at the "stable to increasing " level for several decades in the eight islands where it exists, according to USFWS, and stable population trends are expected to continue into the foreseeable future, as long as predator, water level, and vegetation management continues.

If downlisted, a federal take prohibition would also be removed under certain conditions.

At least one nonprofit group, the Center for Biological Diversity, opposes the delisting of the Hawaiian stilt.

"While the Service, State of Hawaii, and community have made strides in the conservation and recovery of ae o, downlisting is premature and unsupported by the best available science, " said the center's Hawaii director Maxx Phillips in an email. "The proposed rule is in contravention of clear requirements of the Endangered Species Act as none of the required criteria for downlisting have been fully met. A variety of pressing threats, such as climate change, sea level rise, disease, and predation, continue to leave ae o in danger of extinction. Now is not the time to strip vital protections away from these incredible birds."

To submit a comment, visit, and enter docket number FWS-R1-ES-2020-0079 in the search box.

Comments already submitted do not need to resubmitted. The USFWS said its final determination will take all comments and information received into consideration.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - United Nations member states agreed on Tuesday to a budget of some $6 billion for the world body's 12 peacekeeping missions for the next year, diplomats said, narrowly averting a possible shutdown of the operations.

The 193-member U.N. General Assembly budget committee agreed to the peacekeeping budget for the year through June 30, 2022. It will be formally adopted by the General Assembly on Wednesday.

Top U.N. officials said on Monday that U.N. peacekeeping missions - most of which are in Africa and the Middle East - had been advised to start putting contingency plans in place in case a new budget was not adopted by June 30.

Some diplomats said changes to negotiating procedures, issues with logistics and tough talk pitting China against Western countries had threatened to delay an agreement.

"Our chronic inability to respect deadlines puts the entire peacekeeping architecture in unprecedented jeopardy," European Union diplomat Thibault Camelli told the budget committee on Tuesday. "Going forward, and for the future negotiations, we owe it ... to the women and men in the field who carry out the peacekeeping mandates to finish our work in a timely fashion."

Catherine Pollard, the U.N. head of management strategy, policy and compliance, told reporters on Monday that if the June 30 deadline was missed then Secretary-General Antonio Guterres could only spend money to safeguard U.N. assets and ensure the protection of the staff and the peacekeepers.

The United States is largest assessed contributor to the peacekeeping budget, responsible for about 28%, followed by China with 15.2% and Japan with 8.5%.

(Reporting by Michelle Nichols; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
KYIV (Reuters) -The Ukrainian parliament approved a draft law on Tuesday that would re-establish a special commission on appointing judges, and lawmakers said the wording of the law was in line with the suggestions of Western donors.

The commission vets prospective judges to make sure they are respectable citizens and qualified to do their jobs, but its work was suspended by a Constitutional Court ruling in 2019.

The U.S. embassy in Ukraine, which had expressed concerns over the original version of the bill, welcomed the approval as "an important step forward toward comprehensive judicial reform", adding it looked forward to the final text of the law.

Ukraine's foreign allies wanted their representatives to be involved in the re-establishing of the commission to ensure the process was transparent and honest. They also wanted their representatives to have the deciding vote on the panel against candidates they thought were unsuitable, which the original draft did not include.

During the second, final, reading, parliament approved an amendment to the bill that gives international experts a deciding vote in the selection of candidates for the qualification commission.

The United States stands ready to support Ukraine to implement the law and "realize this historic opportunity to renew Ukraine's judicial system on behalf of the Ukrainian people," the U.S. embassy wrote on Twitter.

Ukraine has committed to judicial reform as a way of tackling entrenched corruption and creating a more transparent and predictable environment for investors.

Almost 79% of Ukrainians do not trust courts and judges, according to survey conducted by think-tank Razumkov Centre in March. Only 12.4% said they trusted the courts and judges.

(Reporting by Natalia Zinets; Editing by Jon Boyle, Chizu Nomiyama and Gareth Jones)
The UN Security Council on Tuesday extended its Mali peacekeeping mission until the end of June 2022, insisting on a return to civilian rule and for elections on February 27.

The resolution drafted by France to that effect was adopted unanimously and provides for a renewed mandate for the MINUSMA peacekeeping mission at its current strength of maximum 13,289 soldiers and 1,920 police.

After announcing the end of its Barkhane mission in the war-torn Sahel state, former colonial power France had hoped to be able to increase the strength of MINUSMA by a few thousand peacekeepers but the June 30 deadline for the end of the mission came too soon for it to secure a green light from the US Congress for extra UN spending in Mali.

The resolution calls on the UN Secretary-General for a report no later than July 15 "in light of the growing level of insecurity and physical violence against the civilian populations in Central Mali," with recommendations on possibly beefing up the peacekeeping force.

It also asks the Malian transitional government to organize "free and fair presidential, as well as legislative, regional and local elections and a constitutional referendum" in February.

Finally, it stressed that the "Head of the Transition, the Vice-president and the Prime minister of the Transition should not under any circumstances be candidates for the forthcoming presidential election."

The French ambassador to the UN, Nicolas de Riviere, said the resolution contained "strong messages regarding Mali's political transition and the holding of elections on February 27, 2022."

"The organization of this election is a top priority," he said.

Mali is struggling to contain an Islamist insurgency that erupted in 2012 and which has claimed thousands of military and civilian lives.

Despite the presence of thousands of French and UN troops, the conflict has engulfed the north-central area of the country and spread to neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger.

prh/iba/jh/ft
By Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Joe Biden's latest strikes against Iran-backed militia in Syria and Iraq were not the first nor likely the last of his young presidency.

For some of Biden's fellow Democrats, the crucial question is: does the pattern of attacks and counter-attacks amount to an undeclared conflict?

If it does, they say, there is a risk that the United States could stumble into a direct war with Iran without the involvement of Congress, an issue that is becoming more politically fraught after two decades of "forever wars."

"It's hard to argue, given the pace of attacks against U.S. troops and, now, the increasing frequency of our responses, this isn't war," Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat who leads a key Senate foreign relations subcommittee, told Reuters.

"What we always worry about is that the United States slips into war without the American public actually being able to weigh in."

The two countries came close to the kind of conflict Democrats fear in January 2020, when the United States killed a top Iranian general and Iran retaliated with missile strikes in Iraq that caused brain injuries in more than 100 U.S. troops. That followed a series of exchanges with Iran-backed militias.

In the latest round, U.S. fighter jets on Sunday targeted operational and weapons storage facilities at two locations in Syria and one in Iraq, in what the Pentagon said was a direct response to drone attacks by militias against U.S. personnel and facilities in Iraq.

On Monday, U.S. troops came under rocket fire in Syria in apparent retaliation, but escaped injury. The U.S. military responded with counter-battery artillery fire at rocket launching positions.

"A lot of people suggest that the term 'forever war' is just emotive, but its actually a decent descriptor of the kind of strike we saw again (Sunday): no strategic goal, no endpoint in sight, just permanent presence and tit-for-tat strikes," Emma Ashford, a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council, said on Twitter.

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SALAMI-SLICE APPROACH

The White House has stressed that Sunday's air strikes were designed to limit escalation and deter future militia operations against U.S. personnel.

They were also legal, according to Biden.

"I have that authority under Article Two and even those up on the Hill who are reluctant to acknowledge that have acknowledged that's the case," Biden said, referring to part of the U.S. Constitution that lays out the powers of the president as commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

Brian Finucane, a former official with the Office of the Legal Adviser at the State Department, said the current administration - like others before it - do not see the episodes as part of an ongoing conflict.

He called it a "salami-slice" approach.

"They would characterize these as intermittent hostilities. We had one strike back in February and then the 60-day War Powers clock essentially was reset," said Finucane, now at the International Crisis Group.

He drew a comparison to the tanker wars with Iran in the 1980s, when the Reagan administration viewed "each round of fighting as sort of a closed event."

But experts say that view does not take into account that Iran-backed militia are waging a sustained - and escalating - campaign against the U.S. military presence in Iraq.

Michael Knights at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy cautioned that the militias' use of drones appeared increasingly dangerous, employing GPS guidance and precisely targeting U.S.-led coalition intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets, and missile defenses.

"In quantity and quality, Iraqi militia attacks on coalition points of presence in Iraq are increasing. Unless deterrence is restored, U.S. fatalities are increasingly likely," Knights said.

Beyond pushing the United States out of the region, the militias secondary goal is to signal to the United States, the Iraqi government and others their mastery of more advanced weaponry, like the explosive-laden drones, said Phillip Smyth, also at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

"They live on some of the covert actions that they're doing," he said.

Members of Congress are currently working on repealing some of the war authorizations that presidents from both parties have used to justify previous attacks in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere.

But that wouldn't necessarily prevent Biden or any other U.S. president from carrying out defensive air strikes.

After he was briefed by Biden's national security team, Murphy said he remained concerned. U.S. troops were in Iraq to battle Islamic State, not Iran-aligned militia.

If Biden is wary of going to Congress for war powers, then perhaps he needs to heed Americans' skepticism about interventions in the Middle East, he said.

"If Congress had a hard time authorizing military action against Iranian-backed militias, it would largely be because our constituents don't want it. And that's what's missing from this debate," he said.

(Reporting by Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali; additional reporting by Jonathan Landay and Patricia Zengerle; Editing by Mary Milliken and Sonya Hepinstall)
Farm worker union organizers are urging Washington state cherry growers and the governor to protect workers who are critical to the ongoing effort to save their cherry crop from record heat.

The heat wave that has hit western Washington has put the area's cherry crop in danger of sunburn and drying out if they get too hot, the Yakima Herald reported.

But members of the United Farm Workers said they've been frustrated by the emphasis on protecting the cherries, with little mention of making sure that the predominantly Latino workers are also protected from the temperatures, which were projected to reach about 113 degrees Tuesday in the Yakima Valley.

Workers may also become dehydrated and suffer heat exhaustion or heat stoke as the temperatures climb, said Elizabeth Strater, director of strategic campaigns for United Farm Workers union.

"Maybe there didn't use to be a need for urgent protection, but there is now," Strater told NBC News.

The UFW has asked Gov. Jay Inslee to issue emergency heat standards to ensure the cherry pickers and other outdoor workers are protected. She said UFW is pushing for the same standards used for military personnel while in training.

The farmworkers must have access to cold or tepid potable water, have shade relief and be given breaks that don't deduct from their wages. There should be medical help or equipment available for workers if they are overwhelmed by heat, Strater said. She said with weather intensifying each season, there is need for permanent new rules on the books as well.

A farm worker picks cherries during an intense heatwave at a Washington state orchard. (United Farm Workers)

Workers had been starting work days at 5 am or so and wrapping up earlier. In some orchards, they were starting late at night.

"All these schedule adjustments, it's really about fruit more than people," she said.

B.J. Thurbly, president of Washington State Fruit Commission, a nonprofit marketer for fruit growers, said cherry growers over the weekend and this week have started harvesting at night, bringing lights to the orchard so work can start at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. and finish early.

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He said the fruit can't be picked when temperatures rise above 85 degrees because they bruise as bins fill up and cherries are piled on top of each other.

Volunteers hand out cold water and Gatorade to laborers working in Washingtons cherry fields. (United Farm Workers)

"We're in a bind here, we have a perishable crop that is perishing before our eyes," he told NBC News.

Some farm workers are working at a faster pace in the heat to help save the crop, but shorter hours mean less money. The cherry industry pays on a piece rate, a certain amount for every pound or bin. The rates vary from farm to farm and cherry variety.

"She could hardly stand up"

A worker told Victoria Ruddy, UFW's Pacific Northwest regional director, that one farm was paying $3.50 a bin, which holds almost 25 to 30 pounds of cherries.

Ruddy said she also spoke to a woman she guessed to be in her late 20s or early 30s, who was working at about 11 a.m. Tuesday. The woman had started picking cherries at 11 p.m. Monday.

"She wanted to go home. She couldn't do any more. She could hardly stand up," Ruddy said.

"They work so hard because their wage rates are not high enough. They avoid breaking to get water or to go to the restroom. Some orchards are not letting them take water into the field," Ruddy said.

"They have to walk out of to the edge of the field in the sun, go where they eat lunch and get a drink and you are just standing there and the sun is beating on you," she said.

The heat strain on workers comes after many farm workers continued working despite the pandemic and in some places without mask protections and information about social distancing and other protocols for protection from Covid-19.

Carlos Gonzalez, 50, who picks grapes in Washington, has been getting off work at noon this week because of the heat. But he had to quit on Tuesday at 11 am because it was too hot.

On Monday, after leaving work, he was so concerned about fellow farm laborers who were still working that he bought cases of water for UFW volunteers to distribute.

He said he did it from the heart, and hopes he will be helped when he needs it one day.

A group of UFW volunteers, some of them workers, filled a kiddie pool with ice and cold drinks and drove to various fields looking for workers. Not all fields had water stations and the water is not always cold, Strater said.

"Still the same fight today"

Chelsea Dimas, a candidate for a Sunnyside, Washington, City Council seat, helped distribute water Monday and Tuesday after seeing a UFW flier asking for volunteers.

She said she comes from "a long line of farmworkers" that includes her parents and siblings and herself, who began picking cherries at age 13.

She said volunteers had a hard time finding workers Tuesday; their cars were not visible at some orchards. But in one field, after walking a way down into the orchard rows, they found about 40 workers.

"Actually, we ran out of water and so we had to call in other volunteers to bring in more supplies," she said. The workers eagerly took the cold water and held it to their faces to cool themselves. Many are wearing long sleeves and pants and other layers to protect themselves from the sun.

By 8 a.m. Tuesday, "it was already 87 degrees" and "people I talked to had already been out since 4 a.m.," she said. She said it is "sad" the community has to do the work that "when owners of orchards should be doing it themselves."

Dimas, who fell from a ladder while picking cherries leading to a lawsuit, said it was "surreal" to be back in the fields. She said her aunt was among the workers she encountered.

"The same stuff that my family and different people fought for when I was a child is still the same fight today," she said. "Everything seems exactly the same ...I literally walked back into my old life when I was 13 years old."

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Saying the officer feared for his life, Mecklenburg County District Attorney Spencer Merriweather III on Tuesday said there was not enough evidence to prosecute a deputy U.S. Marshal who fatally shot Frankie Jennings at a Charlotte gas station in March.

Eric Tillman, a senior inspector with the U.S. Marshals Service, fired three shots at Jennings on March 23 while attempting to serve multiple warrants at a gas station on The Plaza, Merriweather wrote in a letter Tuesday to Charlotte-Mecklenburg police Chief Johnny Jennings.

Tillman briefly struggled with Frankie Jennings at the drivers side door of Jennings black Mercedes, Merriweather said in the letter. During the struggle, Frankie Jennings put the car in gear and it began to move forward, Merriweather said. Tillman then saw Jennings hands reaching toward a gun in the center console cupholder, at which point Tillman fired three rounds at him.

Frankie Jennings was pronounced dead at the scene, according to the DAs letter. A loaded semi-automatic handgun was located in the center console of his car, Merriweather wrote.

An autopsy found that Jennings was killed by a gunshot wound to the chest. He also had gunshot wounds in both arms.

Given the corroborated evidence that Senior Inspector Tillman was reasonable in his belief that he and other officers faced an imminent threat of great bodily harm or death, the evidence in this case would be insufficient to prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that Senior Inspector Tillman did not act in defense of himself or another, Merriweather wrote.

Consequently, I will not be seeking charges related to the death of Frankie Jennings.

Jennings turned 32 on the day of his death.

He had six Charlotte-based warrants and seven in York County, S.C., CMPD Capt. Joel McNelly said after the shooting.

Those warrants against Jennings are in addition to three out of Carolina Beach, south of Wilmington, the Observer previously reported.

Officers fear for safety

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North Carolina law allows officers to use deadly force if they believe its necessary to protect themselves or others from death or great bodily harm.

According to Merriweathers letter, Tillman recalled that one of the warrants the officers were trying to serve on Jennings involved him trying to assault officers in Carolina Beach by dragging them with a vehicle.

Tillman said he also was aware that Jennings had warrants from Charlotte for possession of a firearm by a convicted felon and charges related to an incident in which he allegedly shot into a vehicle.

Tillman told investigators what happened as he and other officers attempted to apprehend Jennings at the gas station:

Jennings was sitting in the drivers seat of a Mercedes that was still running when one deputy grabbed him with two hands and attempted to pull him out of the car. Tillman recalled he had one hand on Jennings for a moment.

(Tillman) could see the decedents car moving forward, and he believed (Union County Sheriffs) Deputy (Tate) Mills fell to the ground on his right side, Merriweather wrote. He could see the Mercedes was going to make contact with (fugitive task force) officers who were pulling in front of the Mercedes to his left. He saw the decedents hands reaching toward a gun in the center console cupholder, and he fired his service weapon at the decedent. He recalled firing his weapon three times. The shots were very rapid.

One officer in the task force told investigators he heard someone saying gun just before shots were fired. Another said Jennings rammed his vehicle as he tried to cut him off.

According to an interview transcript, when a CMPD investigator asked Tillman why he fired his weapon, he replied: I was uh fear for ... the life of the people that the car was heading towards ... potentially for Mills, who was on the ground, and then myself and the people to my left with the firearm ... So kinna three threats at once, I guess.

Frankie Jennings fiancee

Five of the fugitive task force officers who attempted to apprehend Jennings spoke to CMPD investigators and generally corroborated Tillmans account.

But Nayja Johnson, who described herself as Jennings fiancee, stated that she was in a separate vehicle at the gas station and could see that Jennings had his left hand up and his right on the steering wheel when the shots were fired. She contended he did not own any firearms and had never seen him with a firearm. She said she had six brothers and that the gun could have belonged to any of them.

Johnson also stated that Jennings knew he was wanted and that he had been running from law enforcement for about a month.

Merriweathers letter states that several of Johnsons assertions were directly contradicted by the evidence from a video surveillance video at the gas station.

A frame-by-frame analysis of the video appears to show the decedent reaching toward the center of the vehicle with his right hand while his left hand remained up until Deputy Mills began to struggle with the decedent, the letter reads.

Moments later, an SUV blocks the camera, making it impossible to see whether Jennings was reaching for a gun when Tillman shot him.

The task force officers were not wearing body cameras and their vehicles were not equipped with recording devices, Merriweathers letter states.

Lab analysis concluded that Jennings DNA was on the trigger, grip and trigger guard of the gun found in his car.

Sister mourns brother

Jennings sister told the Observer after the shooting that she had traveled from New York to visit him. Latannya Jennings described him as laid-back person who wouldnt hesitate to give the shirt off his back to someone in need. He was an important figure to his family in his roles as father, son, brother and friend, she said.

Most of all, he was human like all of us, Jennings said during a vigil. We all bleed the same blood, red.

Her brothers life, she said, should not have been ended by law enforcement.

Staff writer Mike Gordon contributed.
CARACAS (Reuters) - Activists in Venezuela say there is little to celebrate this LGBTI Pride month, which they say is behind in South America on legislation protecting members of the LGBTI community.

Venezuela still bars same-sex marriage and child adoption by same-sex couples, among other laws that some countries in the region such as Colombia and Brazil allow.

The right to non-discrimination based on sexual orientation is only included in the country's labor, banking and housing laws.

But activists say even that is rarely enforced.

"They have no effect," said Giovanni Piermattei, 54, president of Equal Venezuela, or Venezuela Igualitaria, an LGBTI rights group. "How can you prove someone fired you for your sexual orientation?"

LGBTI stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex.

President Nicolas Maduro said last October that he would leave it to the pro-government parliament to discuss same-sex marriage. So far no bill on the issue is on the legislative agenda.

Tamara Adrian, Venezuela's first trans deputy, has been fighting in court since May 2004 for new documents for trans people such as identification and passports with their names, but there has yet to be a ruling. The 67-year-old lawyer and activist still appears as Tomas on her documents.

Adrian said that among the reasons why Venezuela is lagging behind some other countries in the region is due to the influence of the military and evangelical churches, two traditionally conservative sectors, in the government.

While there is no official data on murders of LGBTI people in Venezuela, the Trans Murder Monitoring (TMM) project documented at least 126 killings between 2008 and 2020.

The information ministry and attorney general's office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

"Yes, the state discriminates against us. There are no laws that protect us," said Aisak Ovalles, 28, a public speaking and body language teacher.

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"We still have a very long way to go (...) we are a conservative country," said Ivan Machin, a 29-year-old dancer who says police frequently harass him, accusing him of using drugs and asking if he is gay.

Pride month commemorates the June 28, 1969, uprising at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, when patrons fought back during a police raid, sparking the modern LGBTQI rights movement.

(Reporting by Vivian Sequera and Johnny Carvejal; Writing by Sarah Kinosian; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
Members of the Arcoiris (Rainbow) Lesbian, Gay, Transsexual and Bisexual (LGTB) Association, demonstrate on the International Day against Homophobia in the streets of Tegucigalpa, on May 17, 2010

A regional human rights court has ruled that Honduras was responsible for the murder of a transgender woman in 2009.

In its landmark ruling, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ordered the government to pay reparations to the family of Vicky Hernandez, 26, who was fatally shot in northern Honduras.

The country has also been ordered to enact new measures to prevent violence and discrimination against LGBT people.

Campaigners have hailed the decision as a watershed moment for Honduras.

The ruling, made on the anniversary of Ms Hernandez's death, will set a legal precedent in Latin America, however the Honduran government has not yet commented on the court's decision, and it is not clear how or when it will enact the court order.

Rights groups say Latin America is one of the most dangerous regions in the world for transgender people, and has seen a wave of violence and discrimination against the LGBT community since a coup in June 2009 which ousted then-President Manuel Zelaya.

Almost 500 transgender women were killed in Latin America between 2014-2019, according to Sin Violencia, an LGBT rights organisation in the region.

Vicky Hernandez, an HIV-positive sex worker, was shot in the head with a single bullet on the night of the coup, when a curfew was in place and only military and police were allowed outdoors.

Her body was found on a street in the city of San Pedro Sula the next morning.

Two transgender women reported that a police car had driven up to them and Ms Hernandez.

Campaigners argued that she was the victim of an extra-judicial killing, and that investigations into her death were marred by negligence. As yet, local officials have not filed an autopsy report, key witnesses were never formally interviewed, and the case was written off as a crime of passion.

In its decision, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ordered the Honduran government to continue its investigation, offer diversity training to security forces, and track violence against LGBT people in the country.

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It said that $30,000 (21,650) must also be paid to Ms Hernandez's family and that a scholarship fund for trans women be set up in her name.

"It's so significant that there will always be this memory of her," said Ms Hernandez's mother Rosa, speaking with the New York Times.

"We are always going to remember that she was the one that created a before and after."

The next challenge, campaigners say, is to ensure that the Honduran government complies with the court ruling.

"It's the first stage of the process that has been won" said Angelita Baeyens, from the US-based right group Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, which helped to fight the lawsuit.

"The fight is not over."

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Haley Illiff shared live updates of the process of removing a family of raccoons infesting her Florida apartment on Twitter (Twitter/@WolfAlice)

A graduate student living in Florida live tweeted the aftermath of discovering a family of raccoons living in her apartment.

Haley Iliff, who is working towards a postgraduate doctorate in American Religious History at Florida State University, came home from a trip to New York to discover a family of raccoons had fallen through her roof and into her bedroom  and shared the entire process of getting rid of them on Twitter.

Ms Iliffs documentation of her raccoon problem started when she came home from New York and a racoon fell through the roof above my bedroom.

She said she had been told to await professional help as the raccoon was a mother protecting her babies.

Ms Iliff posted, Humane Society couldnt help bc it was a mamma raccoon protecting her babies (probably living in our roof) so weve been waiting for someone to come since yesterday at 5pm.

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She said leaving a hole in the roof had attracted more of the neighbourhood pests to come in and make themselves at home in her bedroom.

Since the roof is open to the sky, we have a multiplying raccoon problem. last count was 5 raccoons and they found their way to the office upstairs as well, she said in an update.

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In a picture of her bedroom, Ms Iliff showcased the destruction the raccoons had caused, saying they had trashed my room, who knows what else theyll do before we get them out. No idea how much this is gonna cost me, at the very least Ill need new sheets.

Judging by the photo, the animals appeared to have left droppings on her bed and knocked over a large portion of her belongings.

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Ms Iliff acknowledged the role her supportive roommate, a fellow PhD student, played in the rescue of her beloved possessions.

A huge thank you to my roommate @WolffAmerica for saving my most treasured squishmallow, gary jerry, from what would assuredly be a slow and torturous demise, she wrote in homage to her friend.

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When the animals were gone, Ms Iliff tweeted, Ok all raccoons have been removed from the premises. i just got off work and im going to see what destruction they wrought.

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She called their farewell a raccoon exodus and described her roommate as incomparable as she shared a video of animal control taking away a total of five raccoons in a cage.

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According to the Humane Society of The United States, a charitable organisation fighting animal cruelty across the country, raccoons are known to set up home inside your walls and roofs.

If you suspect there is a raccoon living in your home, the society suggests finding out whether it is a sole adult raccoon or a family. If it is just a lone raccoon, they state mild harassment is the best method to deter it from staying in your home.

According the charity, raccoons can make a den just about anywhere in your house.

The Independent reached out to Ms Iliff for comment.

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HARARE (Reuters) - Zimbabwe's President Emmerson Mnangagwa on Tuesday imposed a dusk to dawn curfew, banned inter-city travel and cut business hours with immediate effect in response to increasing coronavirus infections.

The southern Africa nation, which has recorded more than 47,000 cases since the outbreak last year, has seen its 7-day average infection rate increasing five times to 727 compared to two weeks ago.

Mnangagwa said businesses would now open between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. while a curfew would start from 6:30 p.m. to 6 a.m. Companies would be required to only have 40% of their workforce, he said.

The measures would be in effect for two weeks, after which they would be reviewed.

Under the level four lockdown measures, travellers to or from Zimbabwe who use fake certificates for a negative coronavirus test face jail time, Mnangagwa said.

Zimbabwe has vaccinated 764,248 people and last week the government said it was expecting 2.5 million more vaccines from China to help boost its vaccination drive.

(Reporting by MacDonald Dzirutwe; editing by Grant McCool)
That evening, Horsley-Robey updated Moss via text message about riding with Rose to a wooded area of Madison Heights and what they were doing, she said.

In a matter of minutes, they were there, she testified, referring to Moss and the other two co-defendants riding in his car.

When asked why she was messaging Moss about the sexual contact by a defense attorney, she said Moss  the father of her daughter, with whom she had a relationship  had asked her to update him on where she was and what she was doing.

Horsley-Robey said she heard Rose and the other men talking behind Roses SUV but couldnt hear what they were saying. After leaving Roses SUV, she said Moss gave her his keys and told her to get in his car. He joined her in the car soon after and she drove it off, following Robinson now driving Roses SUV. She said she didnt hear any shots fired there.

The two vehicles stopped several times that night, she recalled. The first time, she pulled over behind the SUV to see Green and Robinson running from it to nearby railroad tracks.
Some states continued to push for a full cancellation of tests, including in New York, Michigan and Georgia. The Education Department denied their requests but allowed Washington, D.C., to skip exams because 88% of students were still learning remotely.

The uneven flexibility drew criticism from testing advocates who say it created a patchwork of state testing plans. With so much variation, they say, it will be difficult to get a clear national picture of the pandemics impact.

Education experts are especially concerned about students who wont appear in the new results. Those who opted out of exams are more likely to have been learning remotely, researchers say, and may be among students who will need the most help.

Lake, of the University of Washington, said shes worried about homeless students, along with students who are learning English and those who have special needs. She fears they may be among the missing kids who didnt take tests.

This is the tip of the iceberg, Lake said. These numbers are the very start of what were beginning to understand. And theres potential for these kids to continue to decline if there arent quick interventions.



Binkley reported from Boston. Associated Press writer Casey Smith in Indianapolis contributed to this report. Acacia Coronado 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.

Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
RICHMOND  Most new laws approved earlier this year by the Virginia General Assembly go into effect today.

This years session was the second year Democrats had full control of the General Assembly since flipping the House of Delegates in 2019. While marijuana legalization was one of the top issues, heres a recap of some other new laws that will affect people:

State employee raises

The budget includes money for a 5% raise for teachers, state employees, college and university faculty and employees, and state-supported local employees such as sheriffs deputies. State troopers will get an additional 3% raise, plus money for each year of service.

Death penalty

After punting on the issue in 2020, the General Assembly passed measures to make Virginia the first state in the South to end capital punishment. The death penalty ban represents a striking about-face for Virginia, the second-most-prolific death-penalty state of the modern era behind Texas. Advocates for the change, including many Democrats, said execution had been disproportionately applied to Black defendants, while Republican opponents contended the ultimate punishment still should be an option for the most heinous crimes.

Voting rights
Some Black members of Congress have told me that the law had so much that appealed to both sides that many thought it was the best they were going to get amid rising Republican power.

This time, judging by the administrations description of Bidens proposed initiative, his Comprehensive Strategy to Prevent and Respond to Gun Crime and Ensure Public Safety will focus on firearms, not drugs.

It aims to stem the flow of illegal firearms by using federal tools and resources to crack down, for example, on unlawful weapons dealers who avoid background checks.

Biden also aims to increase programs such as community-based anti-violence programs that have a good record for effectiveness, support law enforcement agencies with federal resources, help reentry programs for the formerly incarcerated and expand summer work programs for young people and violence interventions.

Will it work? I certainly hope so, although experience and a number of crime experts tell me that crime statistics have a frustrating habit of operating largely independent of the best intentions. The debate goes on, for example, as to exactly why crime dropped nationally in the mid-1990s. If politicians had the definitive answer to reducing crime, theyd all do it.
Keep school board appointed

I am not qualified to select a school board member. Nor do I have the desire or the time to learn enough about the school system and its attendant workings to be sufficiently capable of doing so. Neither do I feel the need to join the majority of Virginia localities in adding another elective contest to the docket.

Advocates of elected school boards are often activists who wish to inject their worldview or political agenda into a system that is already burdened by legislative meddling that distracts from its core objective. Assembling a school board from citizens who wish to run for office eliminates qualified individuals who wish simply to serve the community. Truthfully, the majority of voters will know substantively little about the candidates, and will base their voting choice on irrelevant factors. I do not wish to denigrate the voting public, but that is the reality.

Another hard truth is that the beliefs of the community have no place in the education system. This is especially relevant today. Education is about preparing young people for their future with fact-based knowledge, not the beliefs of a community with low vaccination rates obsessed with protection of the Second Amendment, and with a large number of citizens intent on institutionalizing their religious doctrine.
A man has admitted consuming alcohol before the truck he was driving was involved in an accident that left two elementary school children dead and three others injured near Tokyo, investigative sources said Tuesday.

Police searched the house and office of Hiroshi Umezawa, 60, who is suspected of negligent driving resulting in death and injury. Alcohol in excess of the legal limit was detected when he took a breathalyzer test following the accident on Monday.

Police said it appears he did not apply his brakes at the scene of the accident in Yachimata, Chiba Prefecture, and they are thinking of charging him with dangerous driving causing death or injury.

According to the transport company in Yachimata that he works for, Umezawa was returning to the company at the time of the accident, after delivering cargo to Tokyo.

Umezawa's truck hit a line of pupils as they were walking home from Choyo Elementary School at around 3:30 p.m. Monday, killing two boys and seriously injuring three other children, with one of them left unconscious, according to police.

Police quoted Umezawa as saying he crashed into the group of children after hitting a utility pole when he suddenly swerved to the left.
The Linn County Courthouse can only do so many evictions per day so that will also help stifle the flow a little bit, she said. However, that doesnt change the fact that right now, were looking at August. It is going to be a difficult month. I think there will be a lot of people in and out of units so we are trying to set things up so we dont see a substantial increase in our homeless population.

The county will aim to get millions of dollars from the assistance program in the hands of renters and landlords.

Like homeowners, landlords were affected by the derecho too and had to pay a lot of money for repairs and may have not been getting income during that time, Balius said. Some are in precarious situations as well, especially those smaller landowners so they are critical partners in this too.

Cedar Rapids community development director Jennifer Pratt said the city has spent about $1 million to help more than 650 households through its eviction prevention program, which provides low- to moderate-income households grappling with the impacts of COVID-19 with rent and utility payment assistance. The city launched the program last April.

The city has more than a year to spend the remaining money  about $550,000 currently allocated to Cedar Rapids, Pratt said.
The American Red Cross is asking experienced and first-time donors to take the time between summer activities to give blood or platelets to help address what it has described as a severe blood shortage that is affecting blood product availability across the country. Those available are urged to make appointments immediately to ensure that hospitals have an adequate supply for the Fourth of July weekend and beyond.

Right now, the Red Cross is working around the clock to provide blood products to hospitals responding to an unusually high number of traumas and emergency room visits, as well as overdoses and transplants, a press release from the organization stated.

As a result of the blood shortage, some hospitals are being forced to slow the pace of elective surgeries until the blood supply stabilizes, delaying crucial patient care.

Summer is typically a time when blood donations decline, but the problem has been magnified this year as many Americans receive their vaccinations and resume summer activities after more than a year of limited interactions and travel, according to the Red Cross.

The need for blood doesnt take a holiday break  patients still depend on lifesaving transfusions, the press release stated. Donors are needed now to prevent further delays to patient care.
NORFOLK  To whom it may concern: In regards to the recall of the Phillips Dream Station CPAP machine, I have since contacted my doctors office, my former Durable Medical Equipment coverage provider, the one I thought was my current DME but says now they cant be. I have contacted hospitals
"Who needs 'fireworks' when you have 'waterworks'!"



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The alarm sounded at 4 a.m. and I reluctantly dragged myself out of bed. We had a long drive ahead of us, and my husband, Led, was eager to get on the water. Before too long, our friends Chase and Courtney arrived and we were ready to hit the road. It is about two hours from our home to Lake
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Commissioner Jerry Woodruff said some of the flooring was inadvertently damaged during the renovations and needs to be replaced.

That still doesnt eliminate the fact that you have 11-year-old tile sitting in some areas, and then where the construction areas butt up against it, we are putting in new tile, Woodruff said. It is going to look pretty patched up.

Were not building the Taj Mahal over there, but my position is that this needs to be as pleasing to the employees as possible as well as functional.

Also on Monday, the board signed an agreement with Gary Trego for temporary and permanent easements as part of the Sutherland State Aid Bridge replacement project.

Trego owns property just north of North Prairie Trace Road, where construction of the new bridge is scheduled to begin this fall, according to County Highway Superintendent Carla ODell.

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She said it was the first of three easement agreements with individuals that will come before the board before the work begins.

The current narrow bridge, located just over four miles north of Sutherland, was one of 17 multiple-span concrete arch bridges built under Nebraskas state-aid program between the 1910s and 20s.
We are not a racist country, he told his Cedar Room audience, adding that hell stand up for the rights of the unborn and defend the Second Amendments right to bear arms.

Nebraska needs to keep making progress in fixing its broken property tax system, McNea said in his speech and pre-announcement interview.

He told The Telegraph he hopes to use his years of health care experience to improve processes in the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services.

That would free up more state money to apply toward property tax relief, he said.

McNea, a 1973 graduate of Bottineau High School in his home state, received his bachelors degree in biology in 1977 from Valley City (North Dakota) State College. He earned his masters in health care administration from the University of Phoenix in 2009.

After receiving his radiologic technology certificate in 1980, McNea worked for a year in Bismarck, North Dakotas state capital, before becoming radiology director at St. Andrews Hospital in Bottineau.

He met his wife in ONeill, where he held his first Nebraska job in 1986-87 as radiology director at St. Anthonys Hospital. Mel and Michelle McNea have three children and four grandchildren, with a fifth due in August.
But DeFoors office had requested that $5.7 million increase to bring its technology needs up to date and to recruit new staff after years of cuts have left it at the same funding level as in 1992, Hutcheson said.

Critics say an election-auditing bureau is duplicative, given the legal requirements for each county and the state to review election results for accuracy and investigate any discrepancies.

Under Pennsylvania election law, each county election board is bipartisan and must review 2% of ballots cast in each election to help ensure the accuracy of the count before it certifies a result.

Meanwhile, Wolfs administration piloted a statewide risk-limiting audit last year, and agreed in a 2018 federal court settlement to institute some type of enhanced statewide audit by November 2022.

Despite Trump's continued efforts to overturn the election, no county election board, prosecutor or state official in Pennsylvania has raised a concern over any sort of widespread election fraud in Novembers election.

Regardless, in December, Cutler and 63 other Republican lawmakers issued a statement urging members of Congress to block Pennsylvanias electoral votes from being cast for Democrat Joe Biden as the winner of the presidential election.
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP)  A bipartisan school-funding plan in the works for years is back in Ohio's upcoming state budget, under a compromise approved Monday by a joint legislative committee working out final details of the $75 billion spending plan.

The Republican-controlled House had included the education proposal known as the Fair School Funding Plan in its version of the budget passed in April. The plan, supported by multiple education advocacy groups, is meant to bring more reliability to annual school funding payments to districts.

The GOP-controlled Senate stripped the plan from its budget version approved earlier this month, saying its own proposal provided more money than the House plan over the next two years.

The budget approved by the House and Senate Monday night and sent to GOP Gov. Mike DeWine would provide about $10.9 billion for districts for the next two years, with an estimated per pupil cost of $7,202, according to an analysis by the Legislative Service Commission. Under the deal reached with the Senate, new per student calculations will be made in future budgets, and won't be arrived at through an automatic funding formula.
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Auburn University has the best nursing program in Alabama, according to a nursing advocacy organization.

On the site, registerednursing.org, Auburns School of Nursing is ranked number one in the state, besting 38 other colleges or universities with nursing programs in Alabama.

The organization annually determines the best registered nurse, or RN, programs in each state by analyzing current and historical pass rates of the National Council Licensure Examination, or NCLEX. Nursing students take the NCLEX upon graduation to determine competency and preparedness to enter nursing practice. All state boards of nursing across the United States use the NCLEX as a requirement for licensure.

According to the Alabama Board of Nursing, Auburn has an average NCLEX pass rate of 97.8%.

Our success in getting students to pass the NCLEX is a testament to the work of our faculty and the commitment of our students, said Auburn Nursing Dean Gregg Newschwander. Our ability to sustain a high level of success over time is gratifying.

Auburns School of Nursing, established in 1979, offers an RN-to-BSN program for registered nurses to earn a Bachelor of Science in nursing online in three semesters, a BSN program, Master of Science in nursing program in nurse practitioner and nurse educator tracks, a post-masters certificate program for registered nurses with a masters degree in nursing and a Doctor of Nursing Practice program.
Oh these are super cool.



(Also Dante was my favorite in that movie and somehow, the merch train stopped when it came to make the alebrijes hmmm at you disney)

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I would have paid good money for a decent replica of the Dante alebrijes. The ones I did see looked cheaply made.

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I love alebrijes, I have a few in my bedroom 



Wonder if Kendall Jenner will add them to the next version of her tequila label.

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I only know of these creatures because of Coco (and Im still mad at my niece for loving the damn movie so much that I had to watch it with her and then bawled for like 3hrs after ). The original ones are so interesting, but I love how they.. modernized(?) them in Coco.

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Okay this is cool.

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Learn more about LiveJournal Ratings in Hello! Your entry got to top-25 of the most popular entries in LiveJournal!Learn more about LiveJournal Ratings in FAQ

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aw cute. I had no idea the concept was from one person and are a fairly recent invention. Despite being hispanic I did not grow up with any knowledge of them. I only knew about the Cucuy and La Llorona

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I love these so much!

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Que padreee

I feel like a bad Mexican for not having any alebrijes in my house

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aw I love that they are celebrating him. Idk why I thought alebrijes were older.

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wow, I had never heard of this artist! what a cool design  i'm glad he's getting recognition.

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I read alebrijes and immediately thought of alebrijes y rebujos lol



It's cute that he's getting recognition

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I thought about the same thing! One of my favorite childhood novelas

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Que bonito!! 



I love alebrijes! My favorites are those in purple and black combinations, my Mom bought a cat-like one in Oaxaca and it's soooo gorgeous! <3

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I took an alebrije class once in Oaxaca and it was so amazing. You know they use surgical needles to get the little dots so small? I have a porcupine and his quills are made out of toothpicks. I love the ingenuity of my people.

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That sounds amazing! My boyfriend collects alebrijes and some of the pieces are so expensive but theyre worth it because of all the work hours poured into them

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The global liquefied natural gas market has recovered from the 2020 pandemic shock to energy demand. As LNG consumption and spot prices surge this year, U.S. exports of LNG are booming. In the short term, American LNG exports are set for records this year, benefiting from the highest summer spot prices in Asia in at least six years and Europes very low natural gas inventories. Those have prompted Europe to restock with natural gas following a harsh winter that drained inventories when a cold snap in April caused unusual additional withdrawals from storage.

Currently, market fundamentals point to strong U.S. LNG exports in the short term as American supply is attractive for buyers. But how attractive is American LNG in the medium and long term?

According to the Baker Institute Center for Energy Studies (CES), U.S. LNG supply will continue to be a key player on the global market in the future, thanks to three main aspects: non-oil linked pricing, geopolitical motives of energy security for buyers, especially in parts of Europe, and the desire of other buyers, especially in Asia, to switch from coal-fired power generation to cleaner-burning natural gas.

The need for diverse supplies to counter energy security risk and the desire to use cleaner-burning natural gas may well sustain U.S. LNG exports to otherwise price-sensitive customers, Michelle Michot Foss and Anna Mikulska at the Rice Universitys Baker Institute argue in a Forbes article.

Molecules of U.S. Freedom

U.S. LNG is attractive in central and eastern European countries willing to reduce their reliance on Russian pipeline gas and Russias gas monopoly Gazprom. These include Poland and the Baltic states, which have been eager to shake off Russian energy influence and continue to be strongly opposed to the Gazprom-led Nord Stream 2 pipeline project from Russia to Germany bypassing Ukraine.

Related: Oil Demand Under Threat From Delta COVID Variant The previous U.S. Administration even pitched LNG exports as molecules of U.S. freedom to be exported to the world, when it approved two years ago new projects to add additional American liquefaction and export capacity.

Non-Oil Linked Pricing

U.S. LNG suppliers have also revolutionized the pricing and term contracts by linking the price to the U.S. natural gas benchmark Henry Hub instead of to oil and allowing more flexibility in destinations and periods of term contracts. American LNG also benefited from the increasingly competitive spot market for LNG.

The oil price rally of recent months has raised global LNG prices linked to crude prices and made U.S. gas benchmark-linked supply more attractive.

While flexible terms and pricing alternatives to oil-linked contracts are points for U.S. LNG supply, the fact remains that in terms of costs, American exports struggle to compete with Qatar, and not all planned projects in the United States are sure to proceed to final investment decisions (FIDs) in the coming years.

Qatars decision to develop the worlds largest project in terms of capacity is a major challenge to the other key LNG exporters, including America, to reduce their costs.

At a long-term breakeven price of just over $4 per million British thermal units, its right at the bottom of the global LNG cost curve, alongside Arctic Russian projects, Wood Mackenzie research director Giles Farrer said when Qatar announced its massive LNG expansion project earlier this year.

Qatar is pursuing market share. This FID is likely to put pressure on other pre-FID LNG suppliers, who may find Qatar has secured a foothold in new markets, Farrer added.

Despite the higher costs and prices of U.S. LNG, for some buyers, especially in central Europe, paying more for American supply is a smaller price to pay than continuing to depend on Russia for most of their gas.

The Achilles Heel Of U.S. LNG Supply

Prices and geopolitics aside, a third  increasingly important  factor will be shaping the attractiveness of American LNG supply going forward. Major developed economies are in a race to pledge net-zero emission targets, while investors and backers of fossil fuel projects demand solid emission-reduction goals and profiles of new supply. This is where the Achilles heel of U.S. LNG exports lies, according to Wood Mackenzie.

American supply may be attractive in terms of non-oil-linked pricing or flexibility in contracts, but its carbon footprint could be a deterrent to customers, especially in Western Europe, which is increasingly looking at the emission profile of the energy it imports.

Related: How Much Oil Can Saudi Arabia Really Produce?

In the United States, developers have started to bet on showing a lower environmental impact as they compete with Qatar and Australia for global LNG export leadership.

To win customers, LNG developers are having to do more to prove their projects green credentials, says Alex Munton, Wood Mackenzies principal analyst for LNG in the Americas.

Lower 48 upstream gas production needs to lower emissions to win over buyers in the energy transition, WoodMac notes.

Itll take years of tighter control  regulation or industry-led  before US upstream gas competes on carbon intensity with global basins, Giles Farrer, Director of LNG, said.

The benefits of LNG over coal in Asia is a point for U.S. exports, but Western Europes snub of American supply because of emissions concerns is likely to change the way U.S. LNG developers plan and design their export capacity to remain competitive not only in terms of costs but also in green credentials.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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The last 18 months have seen very few large-scale oil projects moving from a prospect status into an entire regions next best thing. The Lake Albert project in Uganda is a rare exception for a year that has seen more oil-doomsaying than new FIDs, however judging by the steady stream of news coming in from the project operator, the French TotalEnergies (formerly known as Total), it is indeed happening. Ugandas first crude project intended and designed to be marketed globally, in fact, its first hydrocarbon project ever, Lake Albert will produce some 230kbpd once it reaches peak production. Whilst Western economies are arguing whether oil companies should cease all future exploration activity along the IEAs Net Zero by 2050 scenario, East Africa is shaping up to become one of the hottest exploration frontiers around the world, provided regional states manage their heretofore biggest challenge  guaranteeing the security of oilmen.

Despite abutting several current prospective oil-producing countries like South Sudan or Kenya, Uganda is still yet to produce its first-ever barrel of oil. That being said, its recoverable reserves already stand at 1.5 Bbbls and could easily see an upward increase considering that its oil-in-place is almost fivefold higher, at 6.5 Bbbls. Uganda has seen no exploration drilling since 2014, so hypothetically there might be many more discoveries coming should companies get back to spudding wells again. All the fields that form part of Lake Albert were discovered in the 2006-2010 (the subsequent 4 years saw a lot of appraisal drilling to delineate the fields), initially, the size and scope of the oil finds were relatively small. The first discovery in 2006, Mputa-1 hit a 10m net oil pay, to be followed by the subsequent Waraga-1 (27m net oil pay) and Kingfisher-1 (40m net oil pay) finds that gradually heightened the interest towards the play.

The 2009 discovery of the Jobi-Rii group of fields, assessed to hold 0.5 Bbbls of recoverable reserves, was hailed as the largest oil discovery in Sub-Saharan Africa at the time. Uganda might have seen even more discoveries over the 2010s, however, protracted disputes on upstream terms and conditions have hindered further drilling. Yet even with this, the stakeholders had enough to kickstart a hugely important project. In 2020, the erstwhile pioneer in the region, the London-based Tullow Oil sold its entire interests to the French major Total, meaning that the Lake Albert project is to be managed by the Total-CNOOC tandem. The crude produced would be shipped along the 215 kbpd East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) from Hoima to the Tanzanian port of Tanga on the Indian Ocean coast, totaling 1445km. Related: U.S. Warns Gulf Allies: Don't Normalize Relations With Assad

The projects timeline presumes that construction of the pipeline would start this year, however, the $3.5 billion megaproject presents its own challenges. Several environmentalist groups have warned that EACOP would jeopardize vulnerable ecosystems, including the Murchison Falls National Park, pressurizing banks not to finance it. The project company intended to finance at least 70% of the pipeline (some 2.5 billion) by means of banking loans, however so far only the African Development Bank committed to doing so. The IMF might find itself in an inadvertent position of financing EACOP as Uganda prepares to use part of its $900 million to help finance the pipelines construction. Interestingly, it is not the projects production costs that keep bankers afar as the assumed $11 per barrel construction cost bodes really well for future projects in the region.

The quality of the crude deserves a separate note. Its density at roughly 30-32 API and minimal sulfur content would make it ideally suited for the market conditions of today, however as often is the case with African grades there are caveats to it. The biggest problem will be the crudes pour point, which stands at 40 C, i.e. the barrels would be un-transportable without additional heating all along the way (hiking the pipeline costs beyond the usual as the EACOP is to become the worlds longest heated pipeline). The second issue lies in its waxiness, implying that refining Ugandan crude would most probably require sophisticated refining setups, which, on the other hand, might not be necessarily a problem for Chinese or Indian refiners.

The 190kbpd Tilenga contract was concluded several weeks ago as Total awarded the EPC deal to a Sino-American consortium that combines Chinas Sinopec and the US firm McDermott. Once the contract is cleared by the project partners, i.e. CNOOC (28.33%) and the Ugandan state oil company UNOC (15%), it would officially enter into force. The other part of the Lake Albert project, the 40kbpd Kingfisher field, should see its EPC contracts soon. In taking the ambitious step of launching Lake Albert in earnest only several weeks after Totals Mozambique LNG was called off on the back of insurgent attacks, the project companies are also signalling that they consider the security situation to be adequate in Uganda. Security will be the main challenge for Lake Albert, despite the deployment of some 2000 Ugandan troops in Congolese territory to help fight the ongoing insurgency in the provinces of North Kivu and Ituri.

Prime among the threats is an ISIS-linked militant group called Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), consisting largely of Uganda-born fighters hellbent on ousting President Museveni. The ADF is responsible for numerous attacks in the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo, bordering with Uganda. In terms of what exactly could the insurgents attack, it needs to be noted that the southern fields of Lake Albert, i.e. Kingfisher and the others abutting it, are only separated from the DRC by an imaginary line across the field. With prices bouncing back to positive territory and despite COVID raging across the planet, the Ugandan government has committed to holding its 2nd licensing round. Kampala offered five blocks, all of them in the Albertine Graben. Although the results are still some way from being confirmed, it seems highly likely that the Total Energies  CNOOC tandem will be taking up more acreage in Uganda.

By Gerald Jansen for Oilprice.com

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Three years ago, Europeone of the world's largest EV marketswas entirely dependent on battery imports for its electric vehicle industry. Now, Europe is in a rush to reduce this dependence with the help of local production capacity. Earlier this year, the EU said there were plans for several gigafactories that would produce some 7 to 8 million EV batteries annually. This would be more than the union's planned production. According to the European Commission's vice president Maros Sefcovic, EU carmakers would be entirely covered by local battery production by 2025.

Sefcovic may have spoken a little too soon, but EV battery news reports are pouring in these days. Volvo and Swedish battery builder Northvolt recently said they'd struck a deal to build a 50:50 battery factory in Europe by 2026. Between 2024 and 2026, the Sweden-based carmaker would use batteries produced by Northvolt at its existing factory, to the tune of 14 GWh annually. The new factory's capacity will be much higher, though, at 50GWh annually. Volvo plans to only be producing electric cars by 2030, so it would make sense to secure battery supply early on.

Renault, meanwhile, which also has ambitious EV goals, said yesterday it had inked a deal with a Chinese company, Envision, to build a battery factory in France. The facility will initially have a capacity of just 9 GWh annually when completed in 2024, but this will be expanded to 24 GWh by 2030.

Meanwhile, the French carmaker is also working on another battery front: it signed a preliminary deal with battery startup Verkor to jointly develop batteries for Renault's future electric models.

Outside the EU, Nissan announced an expansion of its EV production facility in the UK to produce more EV batteries from 2024. According to reports citing insiders, the expansion may bring the plant's capacity to that of Renault's new battery factory in France.

Northvolt earlier this month raised some $2.75 billion in a funding round that featured investors including Volkswagen and Goldman Sachs. The battery maker is now worth about $11.75 billion reportedly. It also says it has inked deals worth $27 billion with carmakers, including Volkswagen and BMW.

The European EV battery market is ripe for the picking. Thanks to ambitious EU net-zero goals, carmakers are in a rush to increase their production of electric vehicles or face penalties for the emissions footprint of their cars. Some have already pledged all-electric production within less than two decades. This means a lot of batteries.

Related: U.S. Shale Producers Stick To Output Discipline

According to the EC's Sefcovic, Europe is set to become the world's second-largest battery maker, with only China ahead of it. To this end, the EU will spend some $24 billion on funding battery production capacity construction across 12 member states, including the supply of battery minerals. There are, however, problems.

By far the biggest among these is the supply chain crunch that has been plaguing a lot of industries globally. MarketWatch cited UBS in a recent report on the topic as saying that the supply of batteries amid growing demand for EVs will lead to "regional tightness this year and global shortages by 2025."

And that's not all, because according to the Swiss bank, carmakers will need 70 percent more batteries than previously forecast if they are to meet EV targets such as a 20-percent share of sales by 2025 and 50 percent in 2030, MarketWatch also reports.

Meanwhile, however, the EU is preparing tighter environmental standards for EV batteries, which means they will become more expensive at a time when carmakers are looking for ways to make them cheaper. This will likely mean a greater subsidy burden on governments, meaning a greater tax burden on potential EV buyers. The EV equation is by no means a simple one.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

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The failure of the new U.S. Biden Administration to respond with resolve and dexterity to the first Russian tests of it in March-April 2021 guaranteed an escalation of maneuvering between Russia and the U.S. and its allies until equilibrium could be established. That escalation came to a head off the Crimean coast on June 23, 2021. In the meantime, all thought of attempting to keep Russia strategically out of a tight cooperative strategic alliance with the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) now seems to have been abandoned by Washington and Whitehall.

Moscows second test of incoming U.S. Pres. Joe Biden came with Russian (and international) monitoring of his performance at the 47th G7 (Group of Seven nations) Summit in Cornwall, UK, June 11-13, 2021; the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit in Brussels, on June 14, 2021; and Pres. Bidens meeting with Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin on June 16, 2021, in Geneva. Each of these three major performances encouraged Russia to believe that it could maintain a strong position vis-a-vis strategic posturing in relation to the U.S. and its allies.

It became clear to policy officials in the United Kingdom that it would be left to the UK to re-assert Western attitudes toward Russia, and particularly Russian expansion in the Black Sea, and for the UK to determine the strength of Russian confidence and resolve, while demonstrating that there was, in fact, a strong Western position and decisiveness facing Russia. The result was Operation Ditroite, a UK military operation planned and agreed by the Permanent Joint Headquarters (PJHQ), Britains tri-service headquarters at Northwood, near London, with the U.S., to take advantage on June 23, 2021, of the presence in the Black Sea of a Royal Navy warship visit to Ukraine.

The plan was for the warship to depart Odessa (Ukraine) and then sail through waters off Russian-occupied Crimea, some 12 miles (19km) offshore, and therefore  under UK and U.S. terms  within Ukrainian exclusive economic zone (EEZ) waters, with the destination stated as Batumi, Georgia. Inadvertently-leaked UK documents showed that a strong Russian welcome party was expected. The test, however, was to determine the actual strength of the Russian pushback, which was, in fact, to come from the Russian Navy, Russian Coast Guard, and Russian Air Force (VKS).

Russian authorities claimed that the Royal Navys HMS Defender, a 2009-commissioned Type 45, Daring-class air defense destroyer (pennant D36), entered Russian territorial waters and that, as a result, warning shots were fired over the bow of Defender. The British Government denied that warning shots had been fired by a Russian warship, but Russian-released video showed that the shots had been fired in coordination with a radio warning to Defender, although there was no evidence shown that the rumored discharge of airborne munitions ahead of Defender had taken place.

UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) documents showed the voyage of HMS Defender as an innocent passage through Ukrainian territorial waters. Defenders main armament was to be covered and the ships helicopter stowed in its hangar, in the expectation that Russia might  as it did  respond decisively. Not only, as Russian-released video footage showed, was a significant fleet of vessels on hand to attempt to divert Defender from its course  with constant radio exchanges by both sides  VKS Sukhoi Su-24 combat aircraft, maritime reconnaissance aircraft, and helicopters flew relatively close to Defender to demonstrate capability and intent.

There was a known Russian naval and air exercise underway at the time. Russia claimed that Defender had been chased out of Russian waters, but there was no evidence that the RN vessel veered from its projected course (which had been known from leaked documents in London the day before).

It was a robust set-piece theater, with each side showing complete resolution short of direct engagement, with Russia demonstrating that the reintegration of Crimea into Russia was complete, and the UK demonstrating that this was not recognized by the West.

More importantly, Western governments were exploring the possibility of reducing Russian geopolitical and energy influence over Turkey. That aspect remains central to the confrontation.

The new Southern Gas Corridor has allowed Turkey to buy more Azerbaijani gas at better prices than were available for Russian gas. Turkey received more than six bcm (billion cubic meters) of Azerbaijani gas between January and July of 2020, an increase of 24 percent compared to the same period the previous year.

Turkey has contracts to purchase more than 12 bcm from Azerbaijan, and transit infrastructure crossing Azerbaijan and Georgia allows Turkey to receive these volumes of gas with no geopolitical strings attached. These realities led to a major drop in Russian gas sales to Turkey. Turkey has also been buying more liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the United States and other sources, allowing major diversification from dependency on Russia.

During the first quarter of 2020, Gazproms share on the Turkish market dropped below 10 percent, compared to 33 percent in March 2019. The Southern Gas Corridor project aims to increase and diversify the European energy supply by bringing gas resources from the Caspian Sea to markets in Europe. The Southern Gas Corridor consists of four projects: (i) operation of Shah Deniz natural gas-condensate field (SD1 project) and its full-field development (SD2' project), (ii) the operation of the South Caucasus Pipeline (SCP project) and its expansion (SCPX project), (iii) the construction and operation of the Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP project) and (iv) the construction and operation of the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP project) (SD2, SCPX, TANAP, and TAP collectively, the Projects). The Projects have an estimated investment cost of approximately $40-billion.

Related: The EV Boom Is Coming Much Earlier Than Expected Upon completion, the SD2 project would add a further 16 bcm of natural gas a year to 10.9 bcma (maximum production capacity) already produced under SD1 project. The total length of the newly-constructed SCPX, TANAP, and TAP pipelines was projected to be more than 3,200 kilometers. The entity holding and managing the participating interests of the Republic of Azerbaijan in the Projects is Southern Gas Corridor CJSC.

As well, the construction of a large Mediterranean gas pipeline is planned, which should collect natural gas from the Mediterranean (Israel, Cyprus, Greece, and Lebanon) and whose significant resources would be supplemented with natural gas from Azerbaijan. Eastern Mediterranean (EastMed) is a 1,900km natural gas pipeline project to connect the gas reserves of the eastern Mediterranean to Greece. The pipeline would have an initial capacity to transport 10-billion cubic meters a year (bcm/y) of gas to Greece and Italy and other south-east European countries. The capacity was expected to be increased to a maximum of 20bcm/y in the second phase. The 5.1-billion ($6.7-billion) project has been confirmed as the Project of Common Interest (PCI) by the European Union. It is being developed by IGI Poseidon, a 50:50 joint venture between the Public Gas Corporation of Greece (DEPA) and US-controlled Edison International Holdings.

The energy ministers of Greece, Israel, and Cyprus signed the final agreement for the pipeline project in January 2020.

Although the Russian-Turkish marriage is on the scene, the situation on the ground is still different. Turkish multi-companies are oriented towards the West, the U.S., and Israel, but the Turkish policy is oriented towards Russia. However, Turkeys domestic capacity from production to gas transmission facilities has not been controlled by the Turkish state since 2007 because its main company, BOTAS, has been privatized.

One of the main participants in the privatization was Royal Dutch Shell. In other words, a part of BOTAS capacity, especially those for energy transmission belonged to Shell. Control over Turkish energy transmission installations is as important as who controls BTC Pipeline, given that BP is a 30 percent co-owner and that last year (2020), Azerbaijani Pres. Ilham Aliyev announced the privatization of SOCAR, a 25 percent state-owned Azerbaijani company, BTC pipeline.

Russias plans have been disrupted by a joint initiative to build a Mediterranean gas pipeline (Israel, Cyprus, Greece, the United States, and Italy) to transfer gas from the Mediterranean to Europe and to be complemented by large quantities of gas from the Caspian Sea, some of it through the Turkish port city of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean.

Meanwhile, the 1,770km BTC links the Sangachal Terminal near Baku (Azerbaijan) to the Ceyhan Terminal on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey. Dr Mamuka Tsereteli, writing for the US Middle East Institute on October 28, 2020, outlined much of the complexity  and strategic significance  of the energy distribution network which was now evolving.

From Baku, the pipeline traverses westwards to Azeri and Georgian territory and then turns southwards crossing Turkey to the Mediterranean coast. The pipeline will allow Caspian oil shipments to reach the Mediterranean coast, bypassing the Turkish straits, which are dangerously congested with oil tanker traffic. The operator of the BTC pipeline is BP. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Pipeline Company (BTC Co.) was created in 2001 to construct, own and operate the pipeline. BTC Co. shareholders are: BP (30.1 percent), SOCAR (25 percent), Unocal (8.90 percent), Statoil (8.71 percent), TPAO (6.53 percent), Eni (five percent), Total (five percent), Itochu (3.40 percent), INPEX (2.5 percent), ConocoPhillips (2.5 percent) and Amerada Hess (2.36 percent).

Currently, the key transit energy infrastructure elements with international significance include two oil pipelines connecting oil-producing fields in the Azerbaijani section of the Caspian Sea to the Georgian Black Sea port of Supsa and the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan: the smaller, 100,000 barrel per day capacity Baku-Supsa pipeline, and the larger, million-barrel capacity Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline. At present, around 700,000 barrels of oil flow through these two pipelines, supplying crude oil to Turkish, Israeli, and other Mediterranean refineries.

The BTC pipeline currently carries mainly crude oil from ACG fields and Shah Deniz condensate from the Azerbaijani section of the Caspian Sea. In addition, other volumes of crude oil and condensate continue to be transported via BTC, including from Turkmenistan, Russia, and Kazakhstan. Another important infrastructure network of international significance is the so-called South Caucasus Gas Pipeline, also known as the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum natural gas pipeline.

It started with the production of eight billion cubic meters of natural gas annually at the Shah-Deniz field near Baku. Since 2007, it has been used to export gas to Georgia and Turkey. This pipeline, and the natural gas from the Shah-Deniz field, has provided Georgia with a much-needed alternative to Russian natural gas supplies and has helped Turkey to diversify its supplies as well. This pipeline became a basis for the larger pipeline system crossing six countries: the Sothern Gas Corridor (SGC). This $45-billion project  the largest energy project in the world between 2014 and 2020  allowed the production of an additional 16 bcm a year. The largest recipient of the gas will be Italy. The system of pipelines has linked an upgraded South Caucasus Pipeline to the Trans-Anatolian Pipeline (TANAP) in Turkey, which is already bringing Azerbaijani gas to the western border of Turkey.

The first supply of gas reached TANAP in Turkey in 2018. From there, natural gas is directed to European markets via the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP), which stretches between Greece, Albania, and Italy. Initially, 10 bcm of natural gas will be exported through TAP each year, but capacity can be increased to 20 bcm. For comparison, Russia, the main supplier of natural gas to the EU, plans to export 170 bcm to Europe in 2020.

The Southern Gas Corridor will be fully operational by the end of 2020, directly connecting natural gas fields in the Caspian to EU markets for the first time. Although initial volumes will cover only about two percent of total European demand, the project has the potential to expand substantially based on increased volumes from other fields in both Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan.

The picture is different for the Turkish market. Russia traditionally dominated the Turkish natural gas market since the 1990s. In 2018, Russia sold 24 bcm of natural gas to Turkey, making it one of the most significant markets for Russias Gazprom. Two major pipelines directly connect Russia to Turkey via the Black Sea. The Blue Stream Pipeline, with a capacity of 16 bcm, was commissioned in 2005. The Turkstream pipeline has a capacity of 31.5 bcm annually and began supplying gas to Turkey in January 2020.

These two pipelines allow Russia to bypass Ukraine for its supplies to Turkey, Bulgaria, and other markets in Southern Europe, and serve not only commercial but also major geopolitical objectives of Russia aimed at increasing dependency on Russian gas in Turkey and the Balkans.

On the other hand, the Southern Gas Corridor has allowed Turkey to buy more Azerbaijani gas at better prices. Turkey received more than six bcm of Azerbaijani gas between January and July of 2020, an increase of 24 percent compared to the same period last year. Turkey has contracts to purchase more than 12 bcm from Azerbaijan, and transit infrastructure crossing Azerbaijan and Georgia allows Turkey to receive these volumes of gas with no geopolitical strings attached.

These realities led to a major drop of Russian gas sales to Turkey. Turkey is also buying more LNG from the United States and other sources, allowing major diversification from dependency on Russia. During the first quarter of 2020, Gazproms share on the Turkish market dropped below 10 percent, compared to 33 percent in March 2019.

To fully understand the energy context of the current conflict, it is important to also mention that the development of pipeline projects connecting Azerbaijan to world markets became possible with major political and diplomatic support from the United States. For more than two decades, the United States has invested significant political and financial resources in the process of strengthening the political and economic sovereignty of countries of the Caspian.

This effort facilitated the development of vibrant trade and transit between the Caspian region and the Black Sea and Eastern Mediterranean. Resource-rich Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan, as well as transit and consumer countries like Georgia and Turkey, are the major beneficiaries of the functioning and expanding pipeline, railway, highway, and port infrastructure.

Turkey acted as a close ally and partner, working closely with the United States to enhance cooperation between regional countries, improving regional connectivity, as well as the regions connectivity to the rest of the world. The conflict with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh prevented Armenia from being a part of these major international developments. A peaceful resolution of the conflict would mean major political and economic benefits to all parties involved, and first and foremost, to Armenia.

Russia has long been on a major energy offensive, not only in Europe but also in other continents.

Russias energy policy is linked to political demands and pressures. Some EU countries, such as Germany, publicly point out that Russias policy is harmful, but at the same time build major pipelines with Russia, such as the recently completed (June 4, 2021) $11-billion Nordstream 2 project.

Related: China Starts Production At Massive Deepwater Gas Field

So the question remains for Germany, why, if Russias policy is carcinogenic, does it finance such a policy? Russia and its energy aspirations are exposed to a constant counter-attack by the U.S. and the UK as well as their allies. In all of this, not only is Ukraine a key country for strategic reasons, but Bulgaria is also extremely important as a major energy hub.

The U.S. and its allies have been trying to enable the supply of both natural gas and LNG. To protect its interests, Russia seized its opportunity during the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict in 2020 and sent some 2,000 troops to Nagorno-Karabakh with an existing contingent, securing its military presence in the heart of Azerbaijan, seemingly to the detriment of the Armenian people.

Although Armenia is a member of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, Russia has not shown a willingness to help this country, which may now have to consider leaving the organization. At the same time, Russia has built a gas pipeline in Serbia to the border with Bulgaria. However, the situation in Serbia is much more sensitive than in Bulgaria because Bulgaria owns 51 percent of its oil industry, while in Serbia, Russians are the majority owners of the Serbian oil industry.

The Russian humanitarian center in the Serbian city of Nis is felt by Serbs to have been compromised. Given that Russias plan for the South Stream gas pipeline has failed, Russia is attempting to disable other subsidiary sources of gas supply and is doing everything to destabilize its opponents.

Western allies have waited a long time to react. However, attitudes, as well as positions, have changed. The US feels that it can no longer allow Russia to control Turkey as a NATO member, despite the reality that Turkey itself brought about the conditions by which it partnered with Russia in key areas. Likewise, the US and the UK as well as other leading NATO countries have relied on the EU as the main lever in limiting Russian influence in Europe.

For the past two years, Russian GRU (Glavnoe Razvedivatelnoe Upravlenie: Chief Directorate for Intelligence of the Russian General Staff) operatives, especially Unit 29155, have been expelled to several European countries, including Serbia (as well as from Mali, Ethiopia, and the Caucasus). So it should be expected that the confrontation between Russia and the US and the UK, as well as NATO, will be very much reflected in Serbia, unless the status of a proxy territory through which a possible future conflict will take place is diplomatically avoided.

Western powers will have to demonstrate in a very direct way that they are ready to use diplomacy and political pressure and force to prove to Russia that there is no room in its intentions for Russian use of military force and increasingly frequent cyber-attacks and hybrid actions.

The incident with HMS Defender in the Black Sea is only the beginning of a wider confrontation and possible conflicts.

By GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs

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Oil edged up on Tuesday after posting a loss on Monday due to demand concerns sparked by the Delta variant of the COVID-19 virus.

Chart of the Week

- Demand for gasoline, distillate, and jet fuel is on the rise in the U.S. as mobility increases.

- For the week ending June 18, the four-week average demand for gasoline was 94% of the four-week average for the same week in 2019, distillate was 98%, and jet fuel was 74%, according to the EIA.

- At their lowest points in 2020, gasoline demand fell to 56% of its corresponding 2019 level, distillate demand to 80%, and jet fuel demand to 31%.

Market Movers

- Total Energies SE (NYSE: TOT) is partnering with Uber to offer recharging points for drivers of EVs in France.

- ExxonMobil workers in Chad continue their strike.

- California Resources plunged by more than 8% after Goldentree Asset Management, which owns 10% of the company, sold shares.

Tuesday, June 29, 2021

Oil edged up on Tuesday after posting a loss on Monday due to demand concerns.

New Covid restrictions. The spread of the Delta variant is raising some red flags, with new restrictions on visits implemented in Hong Kong, Spain, and Portugal in recent days. New flareups in cases have occurred in the UK and Australia, among other places. The Delta variant could pose some oil demand risks, and oil prices have tapped on the brakes as a result.

OPEC+ optimistic ahead of meeting. OPEC+ says that the overall conditions in the oil market have significantly improved in recent months. The group was optimistic as this weeks meetings began, with a decision on whether they will ease the production cuts further expected on July 1. Related: How Much Oil Can Saudi Arabia Really Produce?

U.S. shale still showing restraint. Despite WTI hitting a two-year high, shale drillers are not rushing back with a wave of new drilling. I'm still confident the producers will not respond to the run-up in prices, said Scott Sheffield, CEO of Pioneer Natural Resources.

Anger in Texas after huge gas bills from February storm. Utilities across multiple states in the central U.S. are suffering losses related to the widespread blackout in Texas in February. Lawmakers and regulators in Minnesota, Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas, and Kansas have called for investigations into market manipulation and are exploring regulatory changes.

EU approved climate target into law. European Union countries on Monday gave the final seal of approval to a law to make the bloc's greenhouse gas emissions targets legally binding. The bloc will cut emissions by 55% by 2030.

VW to end ICE cars by 2035. German carmaker Volkswagen will stop selling combustion engines cars in Europe by 2035, but slightly later for its sales in the United States and China.

California approves 11.5 GW of new clean energy. California approved an 11.5 GW procurement package composed entirely of clean energy resources that will come online in the middle of the decade, marking its largest-ever capacity procurement ordered at once.

Shell buys BPs stake in North Sea gas field. Royal Dutch Shell bought BPs stake in the Shearwater North Sea gas field, raising its stake in the field to 55.5%.

DUCs drop 27%. The number of drilled but uncompleted wells (DUCs) in the U.S. shale patch has declined by 27 percent since the peak in June 2020, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) has estimated.

Biofuels groups urge EPA not to issue waivers. After the Supreme Court handed a victory to oil refiners in their dispute with ethanol groups, the biofuels industry is hoping the EPA will nevertheless keep waivers limited.

Russia struggling to boost oil production. Russia is having trouble reversing an oil production decline it implemented under its agreement with OPEC+. Russia has been producing some 10.42 million bpd of crude oil and condensates since the start of the month, which is lower than Mays average of 10.45 million bpd. Related: U.S. Shale Producers Stick To Output Discipline

Supreme Court rules in favor of Penn East. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of PennEast Pipeline Company in a high-profile case over eminent domain, overturning a lower court decision in favor of the state of New Jersey which sought to protect landowners.

Aramco bets on blue hydrogen. Saudi Aramco (TADAWUL: 2222) outlined plans to invest in blue hydrogen as the world shifts away from dirtier forms of energy but said it will take at least until the end of this decade before a global market for the fuel is developed.

Smaller oil sands keep pumping. Despite the push towards decarbonization, carbon-intensive oil sands operations are boosting cash flow and performing well in the short run.

Qatar: Peak gas around 2040. One of the worlds largest liquefied natural gas (LNG) exporters, Qatar, expects global natural gas demand to peak at some point around 2040. According to Qatars state-owned giant, worldwide natural gas demand still has two decades to grow.

Brazils oil boom continues. Latin Americas largest oil producer Brazil is one of the worst affected countries globally by the COVID-19 pandemic. By March 2021 petroleum and natural gas production was in decline with total hydrocarbon output falling by nearly 3% year over year to an average of 3.6 million barrels of oil equivalent per day. Nevertheless, by April operations began to recover and the countrys economically critical oil output was rising.

Natural gas prices soaring. A historic heatwave in the Pacific Northwest, along with other heatwaves in parts of the U.S., has contributed to a huge spike in natural gas prices. The August contract surged 7.3 cents higher in Mondays session, a rally that analysts at EBW Analytics Group attributed to near-term heat and corresponding strength in the physical market.

Europe natural gas prices also soaring. TTF prices for natural gas shot above $11/MMBtu in recent days. On Tuesday, Russia declined to add more gas to its pipeline system through Ukraine, another bullish spark for European gas markets.

By Josh Owens for Oilprice.com

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A number of false assumptions have continued to cloud the coverage of the ongoing re-negotiation between the U.S. and Iran of a new iteration of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)  nuclear deal  from which Washington unilaterally withdrew in May 2018. The most pertinent one  particularly after the election of new president Ebrahim Raisi in Iran on 18 June  is the false premise that politicians in Iran can be characterised as moderate or hardline. It is not possible to be a serious politician in Iran unless you absolutely believe in the core principles of those who founded the Islamic Republic, a senior source close to Irans administration exclusively told OilPrice.com. At the centre of these guiding principles is the concept of Velayat-e-Faqih, which means that all serious political and religious authority is entrusted to the Shia clergy, which makes all key decisions for Iran, provided that they have been approved by the foremost religious leader - the Supreme Leader himself [currently Ali Khamenei]  and this is then enforced by the guardians of the [1979] Revolution, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps [IRGC], he said. In practical terms, these decisions will cover everything of significance for Iran, from foreign policy, through defence policy, economic policy, and intelligence policy, to any domestic policy except the most trivial, he added. In short, there is no such thing as a moderate or hardline Iranian politician  they are all what would be termed in the West hardline  but this differentiation that began in the West has been used as a negotiating ploy in Iran ever since to get what Tehran wants simply by saying: If you dont agree with this we will not be able to control our hardliners, he underlined.

Given this, it is completely irrelevant who particularly occupies the post of president of Iran, and Raisi  widely portrayed with the hardliner moniker  is no different. Not only does all true decision making begin and end with Supreme Leader Khamenei but there are further structures in place to ensure that this remains the case and that whoever is president can do nothing to change this. Although Irans 290-member parliament (the Majlis) is an elected house its power is confined to determining non-essential matters but its decisions even on these can be overturned as all of the legislation passed by it then needs to be approved by the Guardian Council of the Constitution (the Guardian Council). This 12-member body acts in the manner of a general constitutional overseer, with half of its membership always being Shia theologians directly chosen by the Supreme Leader himself. The other six members are lawyers selected by the head of the judiciary, who is, in turn, also directly appointed by the Supreme Leader. In practical terms, then, Irans parliament has tended to deal with very small-scale domestic issues only and even these, if they relate in any way to economic or state security matters, are taken out of its hands.

This fact, though, perversely augurs well for the prospects of a new nuclear deal as the only thing that counts is what the Supreme Leader thinks, and what the Supreme Leader thinks right now is that Iran needs some economic breathing space that would come from a new JCPOA, according to the Iran source. The key economic problem facing Iran is that its foreign currency reserves now stand at around US$10 billion only [compared to about US$114 billion just before the U.S. withdrew from the JCPOA in May 2018], and its gold reserves are also now insignificant, he said. This means that the Guards [the IRGC] are facing a crunch point when it comes to funding its international network of proxies used to project Iranian influence, including in the key operational theatres right now of Yemen, Lebanon, and Syria as these people want payment in either [U.S.] dollars or gold, he added. This declining foreign currency reserves trend is set to continue, leaving Iran with zero such reserves within three months, as currently the rate of foreign currency-denominated capital flight out of Iran  and into Turkey, Dubai, Malaysia, and Spain, in particular  is running at around US$4-4.5 billion per month, according to the Iran source. There is no lifeline coming quickly from China either because, despite the big deals signed since 2019, it [China] is being very careful not to provoke the U.S. on the Iran issue by engaging in overt acts that the U.S. cannot ignore, such as sending funds to Iran that will be used to finance what the U.S. sees as terrorism, he told OilPrice.com. There is a precedent for such a degree of economic hardship leading to a reversal of major policy in Iran: back in 2013/2014, after the European Union had joined the U.S. in ramping up sanctions against Iran and the foreign currency reserves figure dropped by 50 percent in one year, Iran caved in to the demands to negotiate down the level of uranium enrichment that would be put in the final JCPOA document to the level that was finally agreed of 3.67 percent.

Related: The EV Boom Is Coming Much Earlier Than Expected

From the U.S.s perspective, the key sticking point in the JCPOA that was signed in 2015 was that the tough clauses in the original JCPOA document draft of 2014 that related to Irans ballistic missiles program were taken out by then-President Barack Obamas team due to pressure from fellow JCPOA signatories, France and Germany. These original clauses were especially designed to guard against Irans development of longer-range missiles that could hit either Europe or the U.S. directly. Specifically, the first clause was that Iran should recognize and accept the inextricable link between its nuclear enrichment program and its ballistic missile program and the second was that Iran must end its proliferation of ballistic missiles and halt further launching or development of nuclear-capable missile systems. It was the desire to have these clauses re-included in a new amendment to the JCPOA by former U.S. President Donald Trumps foreign policy team that prompted Irans refusal to do so and the U.S. withdrawal from the existing JCPOA in May 2018.

Now, though, given the growing economic pressure facing Iran  including very recent nationwide power outages and rising food shortages across the country  it appears that Iran may be finally ready to accept these tough clauses on its ballistic missile program. The signal that this is the case is the creation of a false conflict narrative that came from Iran last week, with the Iranian Parliament Speakers Special Aide for the International Affairs, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, stating that U.S. President Joe Biden should not include regional or missile issues in the JCPOA. The key to this comment, the Iran source told OilPrice.com last week, is that it conflates two separate issues  missiles in general and regional missiles  and the Iranians know very well that the U.S. does not care about Iran having some of the shorter-range ballistic missiles that it has. The U.S. thinks that the threat of an Iran having very short-range missiles will keep the Saudis more dependent on the U.S. for protection than it would be otherwise and will also continue to generate hundreds of billions of dollars of defence contracts for Washington, said the Iran source. Therefore, this statement on regional and missile issues is designed by Iran to be able to claim to its people that the U.S. gave in on Iran keeping its regional missile program, although in reality the U.S. never cared about it, provided that there is no threat to Israel, he added. This would remove the final major block to the re-engagement of the U.S. with a new version of the JCPOA, as Washington has already tentatively agreed to the removal of key sanctions in the oil, gas, petrochemicals and automotive sectors, plus some of those on Irans banking sector, provided that clauses relating to Irans medium- and long-range ballistic missile program are included in it, he concluded.



By Simon Watkins for Oilprice.com

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Indian fuel demand is beginning to improve as states begin to ease their lockdowns and refineries begin to raise run rates, Argus has reported.

The report cites India's oil minister Dharmendra Pradhan as saying economic activity has also been on the mend over the past three weeks, contributing to the fuel demand increase.

"We are confident that by the end of 2021, the fuel demand will recover to pre-pandemic levels," the official said, as quoted by FXStreet.

Refinery run rates at state-controlled companies have risen by between three and 10 percentage points, Argus wrote, citing industry insiders, adding that the increase comes amid higher prices at the pump. This suggests that refiners expect demand to continue picking up in the coming weeks despite the fact there are still movement restrictions in place and worry about yet another variant of the virus dubbed Delta Plus.

India suffered a fast and severe increase in Covid-19 cases last month, which prompted large-scale lockdowns that pressured fuel demand. Gasoline consumption alone dropped by 19 percent from April to May, Argus wrote in an earlier report, with diesel demand shedding a fifth in the period.

At the time, OPEC warned demand in India was the main drag on the expected lower-than-previously-thought global demand growth this quarter.

India is one of the biggest importersand consumersof crude oil and one of the most vulnerable to price spikes. It has called on OPEC+ repeatedly to return more barrels to global supply ever since demand began to improve, pushing prices higher.

This week was no exception: Pradhan yesterday called on the cartel to phase out the self-imposed production cuts it agreed to last year at a virtual meeting with OPEC secretary-general Mohammed Barkindo.

"We discussed recent oil market developments, trends in oil demand recoveries, economic growth forecasts and overcoming energy challenges," Pradhan said, as quoted by Oil & Gas Middle East.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

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The metals markets received a jolt late last week with the news that Russia is considering applying export tariffs to steel, aluminum, copper, nickel, and ferroalloys from this August through to at least the end of the year in order to ease metal supply and prices for domestic consumers.

Russia metals tariffs to cover copper, aluminum, nickel, and others

According to Bloomberg, the plans include a base duty rate across all products covered by the duties of 15%. However, it includes a specific minimum tariff for each metal, varying from $1,226 a ton for copper, $2,321 for nickel, and $254 for primary aluminum. In addition, each steel grade would incur its own rate, starting with HRC at $115 per ton.

As Bloomberg states, the taxes could have far-reaching implications for global metals markets.

That is particularly true at a time of tight supply for products such as aluminum.

Rusal controls about 10% of the global aluminum sector. Meanwhile, Norilsk Nickel produces about 20% of the worlds nickel. Russia is the third-biggest steel exporter, with most sales going to Europe.

Just under 10% of the European market is serviced by primary aluminum imports from Russia. Europe is not alone, either. The U.S. and consumers in the Far East all receive primary aluminum supplies. Therefore, the tariff will have an impact on physical delivery premiums in the U.S., Europe, and Japan.

Related: Can The Middle East Survive Without Oil?

Steel billet and slab suppliers are already rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of a further boost to prices if the market tightens further. Meanwhile, consumers from Turkey to the Philippines are worrying prices will rise further and deliveries extend in what is already a constrained market.

Tariffs could extend high-price run

Russia is expecting the new taxes to bring in about $2.5 billion over the initial six-month time frame.

But quite how or if it proposes to use those funds for the benefit of hard-pressed domestic consumers remains to be seen.

Ostensibly, the taxes are said to compensate consumers for rapid rises in commodity prices of between 60% and 100% over the last 12 months. It may equally be motivated by officials seeing the windfall primary metal producers are earning on exports. Seeing that, they may have wanted the state to get in on some of that.

There is no firm decision yet. Metal processors and consumers will be anxiously waiting for clarification. Many were hoping the currently elevated markets would cool as the year moved into the second half.

Russias proposed move could well postpone that into 2022.

By Stuart Burns via AG Metal Miner

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Russia is having trouble reversing an oil production decline it implemented under its agreement with OPEC+, Reuters writes, citing unnamed sources.

According to these sources, Russia has been producing some 10.42 million bpd of crude oil and condensates since the start of the month, which is lower than Mays average of 10.45 million bpd.

The reason for the decline could be related to difficulties with boosting production at older fields, other sources, also unnamed, told Reuters.

There was talk about such difficulties as early as last year when OPEC+ first agreed to take some 7.7 million bpd off the market in response to the demand destruction caused by the pandemic.

Mass sealing of oil wells is a much more serious thing than short-term idling in the Russian climate conditions, according to oil industry executive Evgeny Kolesnik, who spoke to Bloomberg in May 2020. Its by far not a given that after a well has remained shut-in for so long it will pump at the same levels as before.

Initially, the report noted, when Russia had joined OPEC members in their production control efforts, its oil companies cut a relatively small portion of production, slowly, and for a few months only. In 2020, these companies were asked to cut much deeper and much faster, as well as for much longer.



Related: Can The Middle East Survive Without Oil?

With such long production suspension, there is the risk of never being able to restart some of the wells. The longer a well sits idle, the more likely pressure changes become, as well as water content changes capable of rendering the well unusable ever again.

OPEC+ is meeting later this week to discuss the next steps in its production control agreement. Early reports said the cartel was mulling over bringing additional supply online from August in response to the fast rebound in demand.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
A key oilfield near a U.S. military base in Syrias Deir Ezzor region came under rocket attack on Monday, hours after the U.S. military said on Sunday it had carried out airstrikes against storage facilities of Iran-backed militia in Iraq and Syria.

Unidentified assailants have reportedly fired more than 8 rockets at a U.S. military base at the Al-Omar Oil Field in Syria's eastern Deir al-Zour Province, NBC News Analyst Evan Kohlmann tweeted on Monday, posting video footage that allegedly shows rockets fired in the direction of the U.S. military base near the Al Omar oilfield in Syria.

A senior commander from the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), U.S. allies that control the field, confirmed to news outlet Rudaw English that there was an attack on Monday.

It wasnt immediately clear if U.S. military personnel or forces were near the oilfield when it was attacked.

The United States said on Sunday that U.S. military forces conducted earlier in the day defensive precision airstrikes against facilities used by Iran-backed militia groups in the Iraq-Syria border region.



Related: U.S. Agrees To Lift Iran Oil Sanctions

The targets were selected because these facilities are utilized by Iran-backed militias that are engaged in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) attacks against U.S. personnel and facilities in Iraq. Specifically, the U.S. strikes targeted operational and weapons storage facilities at two locations in Syria and one location in Iraq, both of which lie close to the border between those countries, the Department of Defense said in a statement.

This is the second time U.S. President Joe Biden has directed airstrikes targeting Iran-backed militias in Syria since taking office.

The strikes were both necessary to address the threat and appropriately limited in scope, the Department of Defense added.

U.S. Forces in Syria, while under multiple rocket attack, acted in self-defense and conducted counter-battery artillery fire at rocket launching positions, Col. Wayne Marotto, Spokesman for the coalition Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR), said on Twitter on Monday.

By Michael Kern for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
Yes, that seems unfair. But typical Americans don't have to be Peter Thiel to take advantage of the Roth's tax benefits.

The rules really arent different for Peter, or any wealthy person, and the average person thats out there, says Todd Scorzafava, a certified financial planner and partner at Eagle Rock Wealth Management in East Hanover, New Jersey.

So what are those rules? Among other things, youll have to wait until age 59  to start pulling investment income out of your Roth IRA; otherwise, it may be taxed or penalized. The account also has income limits, and an annual contribution limit of $6,000 ($7,000 if you're 50 or older). Those who follow the rules  tech billionaires or otherwise  reap the Roths rewards.

How anyone might benefit from an IRA

With a traditional IRA, contributions are tax-deductible, meaning your taxable income will be lower the year you make contributions. Distributions in retirement, however, are taxed as ordinary income.

Roth IRAs are funded with money thats already been taxed, so there's no additional tax deduction on contributions. But qualified withdrawals in retirement are tax-free. This makes Roth IRAs an especially attractive option for savers with a long time horizon, Scorzafava says.
Govt-and-politics

alert

Gov. Ricketts to end coronavirus state of emergency: 'We need to get back to normal'

LINCOLN  The giant bottle of hand sanitizer was gone, as was the sign language interpreter and the charts tracking COVID-19 numbers.

Nor did anyone wipe down the podium Monday before Gov. Pete Ricketts announced that he would end the COVID-19 state of emergency declared well over a year ago  on March 13, 2020  as of 11:59 p.m. Wednesday.

He noted that hospitalizations for COVID-19 statewide are low and stressed the need to get back to normal. But as he has throughout the pandemic, Ricketts urged people to get a vaccine.

Its important for everyone to know the coronavirus is going to be with us, he said.  Thats why its important to get a vaccine. Vaccines work. We have proof of it in Nebraska.

Twenty-seven Nebraskans are hospitalized with COVID-19, Ricketts said. That number, which peaked Nov. 20 at 987, has been below 100 since mid-May and below 40 since mid-June.

The announcement, however, comes as Nebraska ended its eight-week stretch of falling cases.

A total of 266 new cases were reported for the week ending Friday, up sharply from 168 the week before, according to a World-Herald analysis of federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. Thats a one-week increase of 58%.

But the governor urged Nebraskans to keep the coronavirus risk in perspective, saying that young people are more likely to die in vehicle accidents than from COVID.

In that regard, Ricketts said his expectation is that kids will be in classrooms across the state this fall with no masks or vaccines required.

Nebraska's gap between urban and rural vaccination is widest in nation Nebraska as a whole has ranked well in getting shots into arms, but public health officials say lagging rural rates are concerning, especially with a more contagious strain of the virus on the rise.

Schools, he said, should make case-by-case accommodations for children at special risk from the coronavirus or who have at-risk family members.

He also encouraged private institutions to get back to normal with no mask or vaccine mandates.

In seeing cases increase, Nebraska follows a national trend. Cases across the country also were up 41% last week after falling for eight weeks in a row.

All but 10 states saw rising numbers for the week, including four that saw cases more than double. Four weeks ago, almost all states had falling numbers.

Cases in Nebraska, however, remain half of what they were five weeks ago and a quarter of what they were eight weeks ago. The states per-capita case rate, which was the nations fourth-lowest a week ago, still ranks 11th-lowest now and is half the national rate.

The increase in cases comes as the nation increasingly returns to normal, with sporting events and travel as well as restaurant and bar business continuing to pick up.

Nationally, concerns have arisen about the growing proportion of cases caused by coronavirus variants. The delta variant has been gaining in pockets with low vaccination rates in such states as Missouri.

Ricketts said 90% of Nebraskas current cases are caused by variants, according to the DNA sequencing thats been done. Of those, 90% still are the alpha variant that originated in the United Kingdom.

Dr. James Lawler, an executive director with the University of Nebraska Medical Centers Global Center for Health Security, said the country is likely to see an increasing divergence in cases between areas with low vaccination rates and those with high vaccination rates. Experts have been anticipating the split as variants have risen.

As a country, we really stopped dropping overall since the beginning of June, he said. And were slightly creeping up over the last week or two. I think well see that trend continue as weve essentially abandoned all non-pharmaceutical interventions (precautions such as mask-wearing and avoiding indoor crowds) and attempted to go back to normal.

The U.S., Lawler said, should take a lesson from the United Kingdom, where variants have caught on hard and cases have gone up six- or sevenfold a day and still are climbing. Most of those cases are in kids, young people and the unvaccinated.

In Nebraska, 64.8% of the 18-and-over population has received at least one dose of vaccine. While the state continues to inch closer to the Biden administration goal of having 70% of that demographic partially vaccinated by July 4, it wont hit that mark. Nor will the U.S. as a whole, with its rate as of Friday at 65.5%.

Nebraska also continues to slip on vaccination relative to the country. The states percentage of adults with at least one shot now trails the national average and ranks 23rd among states.

However, Nebraskas rate of fully vaccinated individuals  47.9% as of Monday  continues to exceed the nations 46%. The state still ranks highly in vaccinating the vulnerable 65-and-over population. Its 84.4% vaccination rate is 12th-best in the U.S.

Ricketts also announced Monday that the states contract with TestNebraska, the company that provided COVID testing for the state, will end July 31. The last day to get a test through a TestNebraska site is July 18.

TestNebraska has done 772,000 tests so far, Ricketts said. Nebraskas initial contract with the Utah-based consortium was for 540,000 tests.

The governor noted that other providers will continue to give the public access to tests.

He also encouraged local health departments to discontinue the risk dials they have been using to convey the level of virus threat in their areas.

Do you agree with Gov. Ricketts ending COVID state of emeregency?

Ricketts said most pandemic-related executive orders will expire 30 days after the emergency ends. He already canceled some, while three will remain in effect for longer. One related to telehealth will expire Aug. 27, when newly passed legislation takes effect and makes permanent the changes in telehealth coverage for mental health care.

Two related to unemployment will stay in place until next year so lawmakers will have the chance to pass Legislative Bill 567, which would make a time-saving change permanent. The bill would require the Department of Labor to look only at a workers most recent job when determining the amount of unemployment benefits.

World-Herald Staff Writers Henry J. Cordes and Sara Gentzler contributed to this report.

Our best Omaha staff photos of June 2021
For so long, any role that I got was the result of someone else saying yes to me. Now Im in this rare space where if Im doing a role, its because Ive said yes. And that is really cool. And I dont know how long that will last or when it will end, but until it does Im going to do the things that I want to do. And this is a perfect example of the kind of thing that I wanted to do. Its big and commercial. And its fun and its moving, Pratt added. We want to make big a big splash and we want people to think that this is the coolest movie theyve seen in years. And I think thats what we did.
Wigton is known by many as the unofficial historian of the med center, Gold said.

The Olsons were University of Nebraska alums and were major contributors to UNMC for a variety of initiatives.

While the building serves as a front door to the campus, it also acts as a bridge connecting the educational space with the clinical spaces, said Emily McElroy, dean of the McGoogan Library.

The facade and columns of University Hospital date back to 1917, McElroy said. The facade previously was covered, with only the top part visible from a fifth-floor roof. The facade and columns were cleaned, repainted and restored.

The space in front of the facade features a large video screen that can be used when hosting lectures, press conferences and other events.

On three floors of the building, visitors can view exhibits featuring images, items from archives as well as books from the librarys rare-book collection. Additional exhibits are slated to open in November.

Interactive displays are featured throughout the building. The displays showcase campus images, biographical information and oral histories from past UNMC leadership.
Stothert said she still sees the value a streetcar would add to development of Omahas urban core, including growth at the University of Nebraska Medical Center campus. But she said she cant offer full-throated support for the project until she and other stakeholders have a plan to pay for its construction and operations.

The project has been expected to cost at least $7.4 million a year to operate.

As originally pitched, the Farnam Street Urban Circulator would run along Farnam from 10th to 42nd Streets. It also could involve a stretch of Harney and 10th Streets. Construction could require that streets be torn up to lay the tracks.

We still dont know know how to pay for the darn thing, Stothert said.

Stothert has held to a position that if a streetcar project involves public funding, that should go to a public vote.

Noddle said he expects that if the streetcar involves public funding that normally would involve a vote, then putting the issue before the voters absolutely would happen.

But no funding plan, whether involving public, private or philanthropic dollars, has been put forward. Any streetcar project in Omaha likely would involve a mix of private and public dollars.
Nine months later, he was serving aboard the destroyer USS Gregory when it was attacked and sunk by Japanese ships in the middle of the night just offshore from Guadalcanal, in the Solomon Islands.

Uninjured in the water after abandoning ship, French helped gather about 15 wounded sailors  all of whom were White  into a raft. When it became clear the raft would drift ashore to a beach held by Japanese troops, he jumped into the water, attached a rope to his waist, and towed the loaded raft out to sea.

Even with sharks sometimes brushing up against his bare feet, French kept swimming for six to eight hours until a military landing craft picked them up.

Weeks later, French received a heros welcome in Omaha after one of the sailors he rescued, Ensign Robert Adrian, told his story on an NBC Radio drama. His story was celebrated in news stories, comic books, a calendar and even a bubble gum card.

But the Navy would not give him a medal for his valor, only a letter of commendation. French stayed in the military until the end of the war. He died in 1956, at age 37, of depression and alcoholism from untreated post-traumatic stress, family members say.
For consumers, higher gasoline prices are one element of an inflationary mix they've encountered as the economy recovers from the pandemic. Rising prices for commodities and materials have also boosted prices for such items as lumber, diapers, and meat and poultry.

The Federal Reserve is expecting many of these increases to be temporary. In an appearance before a House subcommittee last week, Fed Chair Jerome Powell cited the pass-through of past increases in oil prices to consumer energy prices as one factor behind the increase in inflation.

While prices for some commodities have reversed direction recently, oil has held its gains for the most part. On Monday, West Texas Intermediate crude fell $1.14 to $72.91 per barrel, but the price is still up 50% on the year.

The most common gas price motorists in the U.S. were likely to see was $2.89 per gallon, the same as last week, GasBuddy said.

States closest to the large Gulf Coast refinery hub had the lowest average prices per gallon, led by Mississippi at $2.71 and Louisiana at $2.72. The states with the highest prices per gallon were California at $4.27 and Hawaii at $3.96.

Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
I can't even imagine a time with more change than we're dealing with, said Kristin Dziczek, senior vice president at the Center for Automotive Research, an industry think tank in Ann Arbor, Michigan. If the union can't organize Southern battery factories, it won't be able to set wages in that business like it has done in auto manufacturing, she said.

Curry, 55, has only about a year to distance himself from the corruption and convince members he'll get the union on track. Sometime before November, members will vote to decide whether they want to directly elect their leaders instead of the current system in which leadership is chosen by delegates to a convention. If they agree to direct elections, those will have to happen before June 30 of next year.

This transition now gives Curry and this team a year basically before the convention to get a track record, to get some experience with the members about how they will lead, Dziczek said.

In his statement Monday, Curry acknowledged the challenges and said the union can handle them.

Industry is at a crossroads right now with massive changes in new innovative technologies, he said. It will be up to us to navigate through this monumental shift in mobility and manufacturing.
SEATTLE (AP)  The hottest day of an unprecedented and dangerous heat wave scorched the Pacific Northwest on Monday, with temperatures obliterating records that had been set just the day before.

Seattle hit 108 degrees Fahrenheit (42 Celsius) by evening  well above Sundays all-time high of 104 F (40 C). Portland, Oregon, reached 116 F (46.6 C) after hitting records of 108 F (42 C) on Saturday and 112 F (44 C) on Sunday.

The temperatures were unheard of in a region better known for rain, and where June has historically been referred to as Juneuary for its cool drizzle. Seattle's average high temperature in June is around 70 F (21.1 C), and fewer than half of the city's residents have air conditioning, according to U.S. Census data.

The heat forced schools and businesses to close to protect workers and guests, including some places like outdoor pools and ice cream shops where people seek relief from the heat. COVID-19 testing sites and mobile vaccination units were out of service as well.

The Seattle Parks Department closed one indoor community pool after the air inside became too hot  leaving Stanlie James, who relocated from Arizona three weeks ago, to search for somewhere else to cool off. She doesn't have AC at her condo, she said.
LINCOLN  A record-high number of job vacancies and continued high turnover caused staffing emergencies to be declared Monday at two more prisons.

The declaration at the 518-inmate Lincoln Correctional Center and the 439-inmate Diagnostic and Evaluation Center means that staffing will shift immediately to two 12-hour shifts a day from three eight-hour shifts a day. That will allow required security posts to be filled with fewer employees.

Two other state prisons, the 1,000-inmate Tecumseh State Prison and the 1,250-inmate State Penitentiary in Lincoln, have been operating under staffing emergencies for more than a year in what has been described as a short-term solution to the lack of personnel.

Those staffing emergencies were expected to expire before the end of 2020, but Corrections Director Scott Frakes said Monday that a slowdown in hiring has forced the continuation, and expansion, of the emergencies.

We are feeling the effects that many other industries and businesses are experiencing currently, nationally and across Nebraska, Frakes said. This is a very tight job market, especially in Lincoln.
LINCOLN  There are already two holes in the ground where the future Kiewit Hall will rise near 17th and Vine streets on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's City Campus.

The 181,500-square-foot facility will redefine the College of Engineering's footprint at UNL when it opens to students in the fall of 2023 as a new hub for engineering education.

On Monday, UNL ceremonially broke ground on the privately funded $97 million facility, which is part of a larger effort to renovate engineering facilities as part of a plan to grow the college from 3,200 to 5,000 students.

"It is a big day for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the state of Nebraska, and the field of engineering," Chancellor Ronnie Green told a reception inside Othmer Hall, which will connect to Kiewit Hall via skywalk.

Construction on the facility is expected to ramp up this fall as work continues at the nearby Scott Engineering Center and the Link, the subject of a partnership between the university and the state of Nebraska. The construction at the Link involves an 87,000-square-foot facility, which replaces the former 25,000-square-foot facility
The panel said that in several areas it visited its experts received confidential information and found evidence of excessive use of force by Central African Republic's military and Russian instructors.

As one example, it said a commercial truck driving to the capital, Bangui, was arriving at a temporary checkpoint on Dec. 28, 2020, in Grimari in south-central Ouaka Prefecture when soldiers appeared and ordered the driver to stop. According to eyewitnesses, as he was trying to stop, the soldiers started shooting from both sides and Russian instructors opened fire from the front, it said.

The panel said three civilians were killed and 15 were injured, including six women and a minor, many with multiple bullet wounds. Local officials found no evidence of a connection in the truck to armed groups, it said, and the Russian coordinator denied any involvement.

The panel said that during an operation against rebels backing Bozize in Bambari, the capital of Ouaka Prefecture, on Feb. 15, government troops and Russian instructors entered Al-Takwa mosque, shooting without respect to its religious nature or making any effort to distinguish between fighters and civilians. According to local sources there were 17 victims, including some fighters, but the panel said it was able to confirm that at least six people who died were civilians.
Barely a month after its recommendation, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has removed Ghana from the list of high risk, third world countries with strategic deficiencies in anti-money laundering and countering of terrorism financing.



This follows a review by FATF in February.



The European Union (EU) had hinted of removing Ghana from the list after President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo met the President of the European Council, Charles Michel, in Brussels last month.



Ghana to be removed from EU money laundering list after Akufo-Addos intervention

The EU had commended Ghana for the efforts made in implementing the action plan of the International Country Risk Guide (ICRG) in record time.



In its latest report on Friday, June 25, FATF noted that Ghana has strengthened the effectiveness of its regime of anti-money laundering and countering terrorism financing and addressed related technical deficiencies to meet the commitments in its action plan regarding the strategic deficiencies that the FATF identified in October 2018.



Ghana is therefore no longer subject to the FATFs increased monitoring process. Ghana will continue to work with GIABA to improve further its AML/CFT regime.

Source: 3news.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

Featured Video
The Cape Coast High Court has set July 14, 2021, for its ruling on the petition challenging the election of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) Member of Parliament for Assin North, Mr James Gyekye Quayson.



This follows the clearance given to the presiding Judge, Mr Justice Kwasi Boakye, by the Chief Justice, Mr Justice Kwasi Anin Yeboah, to proceed with the case.



Justice Boakye halted proceedings in the ongoing election petition case following a petition to the Chief Justice to have him removed from the case by the respondent.



But at its sitting yesterday, Justice Boakye said he had been directed to continue with proceedings since the petitioner had failed to substantiate his allegations of bias against him (judge).



He said the Chief Justice indicated that he should proceed with the case.



Legal changes



On the change in legal representation for Mr Quayson, it was revealed that he (Mr Quayson) had still not been served following the judges request to have Mr Amaliba facilitate the process in getting him served on his application to withdraw as Mr Quayson's counsel.



Justice Boakye said CI 47 permitted him to grant Mr Amaliba's application to withdraw his services from the case without having the first respondent served.



The judge also indicated that he had used applicable laws to dismiss the stay of motion filed earlier, adding that there was now no obstruction in giving a final judgement on the scheduled date.



Indecent haste



Mr Abraham Amaliba, after his application was accepted by the court, said the decision of the court to give judgement on July 14, 2021 without notice to the first respondent was an indecent haste.



He said it was only proper that the first respondent was given the needed notice to seek for legal representation since his application to withdraw his services had been granted although he (Mr Gyekye Quayson) was yet to be served.



The counsel for the petitioner, Mr Frank Davies, said the opposing counsel had unceremoniously tried to delay the case. He, however, expressed the hope that justice would take its due course.



Election petition



Mr Quayson polled 17,498 votes as against 14,793 by the New Patriotic Partys (NPPs) Ms Abena Durowaa Mensah, in the December 7, 2020 parliamentary election.



However, on December 30, 2020, a resident of Assin North, Mr Michael Ankomah-Nimfah, filed a parliamentary election petition at the Cape Coast High Court challenging the eligibility of Mr Quayson to be a Member of Parliament.



He contended that the MP was not eligible on the basis that at the time he (Quayson) filed his nomination to contest as a parliamentary candidate, he was still a citizen of Canada.







Source: graphiconline.com









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Government Statistician, Professor Samuel Kwabena Anim, has disclosed that the enumerators have already counted the homeless and short-stay population on Sunday 27th June 2021 as part of the reference night for the 2021 population census.



According to him, the enumerators on Sunday, 27th June 2021 enumerated certain target population which include those who sleep outside (homeless population) and those who were travelling over long hours.



Adding to his explanation of the Sunday, 27th June 2021 exercise on Okay FMs 'Ade Akye Abia' Morning Show, Professor Kwabena Anim said that the counting was done at the reference night to capture those people who will spend most of the night travelling.



 . . so our enumerators were at the terminal points to count them . . . including those who sleep outside (homeless population), he disclosed.



He further mentioned that the enumerators as part of their activities of the reference night for the 2021 population census counted the population at the short-stay institutions like hospitals, hostels and guest houses; indicating that the counting of people at the short-stay institutions will continue.



Professor Samuel Kwabena Anim, however, said that starting from Monday, 28th June 2021 to 11th July 2021, the counting of the household and the long-stay institutions like the boarding houses and the university halls of residence will begin.



He, therefore, pleaded with Ghanaians to make themselves available for this national exercise for the next two weeks; adding that those who intend to travel to their hometowns to be counted should rescind their decision as measures have been put in place to reach everyone in the country.



Ghanaians can go about their normal duties because they will be counted at their convenience in terms of their residence at the right time, he assured.





Watch video below





Source: Daniel Adu Darko/Peacefmonline.com









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There are concerns that the European Union's vaccine passport programme could exclude people who have been given a version of the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine that was made in India.



Most of the vaccines supplied to the Covax scheme, intended to get the jab to poorer countries, have been from India.



The head of the African Union's vaccine delivery programme, Dr. Ayoade Alakija, told the BBC's Focus on Africa programme that she hoped the EU exclusion was an administrative error.



But she said she was concerned that "what it feels like here is there's a two-tier vaccine system".



The EU is set to introduce its Digital Covid Certificate on Thursday, but only four vaccines - all made in Western countries - have been approved for inclusion.



The head of the Serum Institute of India, which is licensed to make the AstraZeneca shot, known in India as Covishield, has tweeted that he has taken the issue up "at the highest levels".

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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The United Nations has called on states to stop denying racism and start dismantling it.



At the launch of a report commissioned after the killing last year in the US of George Floyd, the UN human rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, said addressing the legacy of systemic racism was the only way to do justice to his memory.



The report describes the current global situation as untenable.



It says people of African descent suffer disproportionately at the hands of law enforcement in many parts of the world.



It says they face discrimination when seeking jobs, housing and education, and accuses governments of failing to tackle the issue.

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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Minister for Works and Housing has said Nima residents are delaying government's bid to re-develop the area to a World-Class project



He explained that homeowners fear that many may be displaced after the re-development



The growing incidence of slum development in Ghana has been the result of rural-urban migration



Minister for Works and Housing, Francis Asenso-Boakye, has blamed the slow pace of the Nima re-development project on residents' reluctance to accept President Akufo-Addos upgrade for the township, Joy News has reported.



According to him, homeowners within the area fear that many may be displaced after the re-development.



Nima re-development is still on the agenda of the government, except that there is one fundamental challenge or obstacle we need to clear, and that has to do with the engagement of the stakeholders there," he said.



The Works and Housing Minister noted that although the planned re-development has been met with agitation, his outfit is working around the clock to have an amicable conclusion.



I have started engagements with the Member of Parliament there and when I first mentioned it to him, I thought he was going to embrace it because its a good project but he tells me its not an easy matter, so we are currently putting together a team to start engagements with them," as quoted by Joy News.



As part of efforts to develop Accra, the president has indicated his commitment to upgrading the slums in Nima and Maamobi areas. The president is looking forward to transforming the over 1,039 acres of prime land in Nima and Maamobi into a world-class facility. The area located close to the Jubilee House will witness transformation without dislodging the current occupants.



The said acres of land at Nima and Maamobi will be released to developers in exchange for more befitting structures for the affected residents on the same Nima and Maamobi lands, Joy News has reported.

Source: Ghanaweb









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has accepted the request from the Ghana Journalists Association to honour four previous journalists of the year with vehicles who till date have not received any reward for their award.

President Akufo-Addo donated a made in Ghana VW sedan for the 2020 Journalist of the Year and said he felt that if the previous winners also get some, it would bring equity.



The President made the promise when the leadership of the Ghana Journalists Association (GJA) led by its President, Mr Affail Monney and some previous journalists of the years paid a courtesy call on him the Jubilee House on Monday.



President Akufo-Addo said in so far as the current winner has got it, I think there is a need to have this certain equity in seeing to it that the past winners also get, noting that I think very soon we will make sure that the four past winners which are on my lists are also duly honoured.



Intercourse



President Akufo-Addo noted that he did not perceive the intercourse between the media and the government as a way of the latter buying the former adding that I dont believe that the Ghanaian press is buyable.



He said he was not interested in buying the Ghanaian press but was keen on having a press that could serve the larger society and play its role in building a strong democratic Ghana.



Buildings



Touching on the request for a new media centre that would replace the current Ghana International Press Centre, President Akufo-Addo urged the leadership of the association to commence discussions with the Minister of Information, Mr Kojo Oppong Nkrumah.



He said it would not be out of the way to assist the association because after all the NPP one led by President J.A. Kufuor donated the building and that the NPP Two should have the possibility of building a new one.



Package



On the fiscal package for the media to cushion them from the ravages of the COVID-19, he said the isuue would be discussed by government to find some way to assist them with some fiscal measures and waivers, explaining that this was an area he would like to be guided by the Minister of Finance.



Commend



Mr Affail Monney commended the President for donating a VW vehicle for the Journalist of the year 2020 and said it had been difficult to get prizes for four others and appealed to the President for help.



Stimulus Package



He said all media houses in the country were suffering under the covid-19 pandemic and proposed that a stimulus package be extended to them in the form of waivers on spectrum and regulatory fees for the electronic media for one year and waiver of corporate tax and tax on wages of media practitioners for three months.



He also called the injection of Ghc5 million into the operations of the private media to help them recover and was of the believe that this would help bring the media to normal.



Attacks



He recognised that the attacks on journalists dominated national discourse but these attacks have subsided.

Source: graphiconline.com









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The Vice Chancellor (VC) of the University of Health and Allied Sciences (UHAS), Professor John Owusu Gyapong, says the Volta Regional capital, Ho, can remain one of the cleanest cities in the country if acts that pose as challenge to sanitation, including littering, are checked.



Prof. Gyapong said a lot of benefits had been accrued from investing in sanitation and urged the leadership of the region not to relent in its efforts.



He noted that since the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic hand washing had made a huge impact in the reduction of various sanitation-related diseases, including diarrhoea and cholera, which indicated the importance of sustaining the intervention and ensuring access to potable water for communities.



At the Graphic/Zoomlion Regional Sanitation Stakeholders Dialogue in Ho last Friday, Prof. Gyapong, who is also a Public Health Physician and Epidemiologist, called for measures to eradicate open defecation which had been linked to the contamination of ground water.



The VC of UHAS said the management of landfill sites had not been the best as it had also been linked to the contamination of water bodies, which should be of concern to all stakeholders.



Collaboration



Prof. Gyapong said the current challenges, however, presented an opportunity for tertiary institutions such as the UHAS and the Ho Technical University to collaborate in finding solutions to the menace.



He commended Zoomlion for demonstrating that it was up to the task in waste management.



He, however, expressed concern that sanitation truck operators did not prioritise waste sorting, an exercise already being implemented by students of UHAS.



The situation, he indicated, was demoralising students who had complained that their sorted waste was always dumped into the same space, rendering their efforts pointless.



Prof. Gyapong said the call for attitudinal change could not be stressed enough since it was vital to the fight.



In a four-point presentation on impact, a Deputy Director at the Ministry of Sanitation and Water Resources, Mr Kweku Quansah, reiterated that sanitation was a shared responsibility.



He said in order to win the sanitation fight, attitudinal change, better financing, infrastructural improvement and enforcement of sanitation laws were key.



Making reference to the latest Afrobarometer Score Card to track the progress of SDG performance released a fortnight ago, he said, We have improved a bit as a country in the access to provision of toilets with 33 per cent coverage.



That, Mr Quansah said, indicated that a lot of work had been done towards the eradication of open defecation.



Maintain lead



The Ho Municipal Chief Executive, Mr Prosper Pi-Bansah, indicated that the assembly had made several efforts and introduced initiatives to ensure that sanitation was improved in the municipality, including mandatory clean-up exercises.



He urged stakeholders to collaborate for the municipality to maintain its admirable lead as one of the cleanest cities.



A Senior Communications Officer of Zoomlion, Mr Adams Mahama, said the sanitation company had kept its end of the bargain in keeping the country clean, and as such it behoved other stakeholders, including the citizenry, to play their parts.



The Volta Regional Manager of Zoomlion, Mr Solomon Denyo, said there was the need to sustain education with carefully crafted communication which was sure to lead to behavioural change.



He, however, raised concerns about poor access to places in need of waste management services.



Mr Denyo said informal waste collectors had taken advantage of the situation and were disposing of waste indiscriminately.



With 14 other regions to cover, the stakeholders dialogue held in the Volta Region was the GCGLs second in a series since the maiden dialogue in Kumasi, the capital of the Ashanti Region. #GraphicCleanGH









Source: graphiconline.com









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The Greater Accra Regional Coordinating Council (RCC) has made available GH500,000 for the relocation of traders who engage in bulk breaking activities from Agbogbloshie to Adjen Kotoku in the Ga West municipality.

The money  to be used for the carting of wares to the new site  will be distributed to the onion sellers (GH300,000), cattle rearers (GH100,000), truck pushers (GH50,000) and scrap dealers (GH50,000) for further distribution to their individual members trading in the area.



The RCC has, consequently, set up a committee, comprising the Members of Parliament (MPs) for Ablekuma Central, Binduri and Garu-Tempane and representatives from the RCC and the Office of the Chief Imam to ensure fair distribution of the money.



The Regional Minister, Mr. Henry Quartey, made this known during a stakeholder engagement involving the leadership of the bulk breaking traders, the Ga Traditional Council and the RCC.



The meeting was also attended by the National Chief Imam, Sheikh Osmanu Nuhu Sharabutu, high-ranking members of the Ghana Police Service and the chief executives of the Ga West and the Ablekuma Central municipal assemblies.



Agitation



Prior to the meeting, the onion traders had rejected the new facility, chanting in Hausa: bei yi, to wit, it is not acceptable.



They cited concerns about the size of the market and the place not being conducive for their business as reasons for their position.



The police arrived just in time to foil any chances of the protest turning violent.



Mr. Quartey, however, insisted that the RCC would not change its position on the July 1 deadline for the evacuation of the traders from the Agbogbloshie Market.



He assured the traders that we will do everything in our power to ensure that this environment is made humane for you.



He said plans were underway for the construction of six more sheds, a car park and a washing bay at the new site.



In addition, he said, the government was considering re-asphalting roads in the community to improve vehicular movement in the area.



Appeal



The Chief of Amoahman, a community at Adjen Kotoku, Nii Amoah Akromansah VII, expressed appreciation to the minister for the initiative, saying it would hasten the development of the area.



He appealed for more infrastructure, including a senior high school (SHS), in the community and dormitories for existing boarding schools.



We welcome the decision by the minister to open this market. I am hopeful that the operations of the market will bring the needed development to the Adjen Kotoku community and its environs, he added.



Background



The Regional Minister last month gave bulk breaking traders at the Agbogbloshie Market up to July 1, this year to relocate to the Adjen Kotoku Market.



Mr Quartey said the move was to ensure the success of the Lets Make Accra Work initiative by the RCC.



Adjen Kotoku



The Adjen Kotoku Market is a bulk breaking market complex which was started in 2008 and completed in 2011.





It was originally built to accommodate traders in the Agbogbloshie Market to ease congestion in the area.



The project comprises a free draining platform for the loading and unloading of goods and 95 sectional storage units of approximately 30 metres square each, with secure locking facilities.



It also has an SHS, a health centre, a police station and a fire station.









Source: graphiconline.com









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Namibia has stopped giving second Covid-19 vaccine doses to prioritize those who are yet to receive their first jabs as supplies dwindle.



The health ministry said it will redistribute its remaining Covid-19 vaccine stock to areas with increased virus cases and fatalities.



The ministry said those due for their second dose will only be vaccinated in July when new stocks arrive.



The Namibian news site reported that the country had run out of the China-made Sinopharm vaccine.



The health ministry said it was expecting AstraZeneca doses in July through the Covax scheme.

Source: BBC









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The Henry Djaba Memorial Foundation (HDMF) has taken the initiative to organize the first-ever Ability Fair in Ghana for Persons with Disability (PWDs), vulnerable girls and children with special needs to showcase their unique talents, artifacts, products, goods and services.



According to the Executive Director of the Foundation, Dr. Otiko Afisah Djaba, the need for the Ability Fair has become necessary to facilitate the display of talents and provide marketing and self-employment opportunities for persons with disability.



It is also to give them access to business opportunities, access to training and job opportunities, assistive devices, technology, ICT and other services.



Speaking at the media launch of the 2021 Ability Fair held in Accra, Dr. Otiko Djaba hinted that the Ability Fair would be organized every year in order to collectively plan for a secure, independent and sustainable future for the persons with disability with good support systems and networking opportunities locally and internationally.



She said that the Fair would seek to reduce the huge barriers, challenges and misconceptions about the ability of individuals with disability, energize them, increase awareness and knowledge about their capabilities and promote disability inclusions among others.



The Executive Director of the Henry Djaba Memorial Foundation who is noted for her consistent efforts in promoting the wellbeing of PWDs, vulnerable women and children said PWDs are in a minority, they are marginalized, isolated, ignored by society, living in poverty, are dependent on charity, handouts, begging and pity. The COVID-19 pandemic has collapsed their businesses and made it more difficult for them to engage in small scale enterprises and petty trading. On a daily basis, they face discrimination, stigmatization and even their goods and services are not purchased because of their disability.



Dr. Otiko Djaba indicated that PWDs were just differently-abled human beings with human rights, just like non-disabled persons and therefore, they required amongst other things; education, healthcare, employment, and building of their capacity and financial independence.



The first Ability Fair which is being organized by the Henry Djaba Memorial Foundation in partnership with UNFPA, is scheduled for 30th and 31st July 2021 and will be held at the forecourt of the Mikaddo Pharmacy, formerly Kama Conference Centre, Osu, Accra between 9am and 4pm each day.



The theme for the Fair is: Creating Opportunities for Persons With Disability. Dr. Otiko Djaba, therefore, implored the media to support the identified champions, partners and ambassadors to whip up the public interest and participation.

The popular Kumawood movie superstar and TV personality, Nana Ama McBrown, top Hip-Life Musician, Okyeame Kwame and the immediate past President of MUSIGA, Bice Osei Kuffour were appointed as the official Ambassadors of the first Ability Fair.

Source: Peacefmonline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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The 2021 Population and Housing Census (PHC) took off across the country last Sunday night with spectacular activities to capture the attention and participation of all.



Census is the counting of the general population, including taking inventory of every individual and houses, occupied or not.



Activities heralding the enumeration in the regions included bonfires, the sounding of sirens by the security services, particularly the Ghana Police Service and the Ghana National Fire Service, street processions and sharing of information leaflets for educational purposes.



While teams were creating public awareness of the exercise, enumerators were busy from 6p.m. last Sunday and throughout the night counting people in transit and homeless households, referred to as outside sleepers, until 6a.m. yesterday.



Thereafter, the actual counting of the people, which involved taking detailed information about them, including nationality, age, level of education, marital status, number of children, place of residence and resident status, occupation, as well as religion and ethnicity, began.



According to the Central Regional Field Supervisor, Mr. Jacob Andoh, the Census Night was critical to the exercise, since it was a reference point in the collection of data.



We want to celebrate this night so well that people will remember it because when enumerators come to you on 28th June to enumerate the household, they will be referring all questions to 27th night," he added.



Daily Graphic reporters monitoring the exercise include Emmanuel Adu-Gyamerah & Biiya Mukusah Ali, Sunyani; Shirley Asiedu-Addo, Edith Mensah & Francisca Eshun, Cape Coast; Benjamin Xornam Glover, Tema; Vincent Amenuveve, Bolgatanga, and Dotsey Koblah Aklorbortu & Augustina Dzodzegbe, Sekondi-Takoradi.



Bono Region



In the Bono regional capital, Sunyani, the enumerators visited the Sunyani Regional and municipal hospitals, bus terminals, prayer camps, hotels, prisons, police cells, among other facilities, to enumerate the people on Census Night.



Some travellers approached the enumerators voluntarily to be enumerated, after which they received their certificates of enumeration.

The officials also visited about 11 other places identified as outdoor sleepers in the Sunyani municipality.



The Bono Regional Director of the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS), Mr. Amatus S. Nobabumah, urged the public to cooperate with the enumerators, explaining that the exercise had a limited time and, therefore, required the support of all to succeed.



Central Region



The Central Regional Minister, Mrs. Justina Marigold Assan, who was counted at her residence in the early hours of yesterday, said the census was of great importance to the development of communities and the nation as a whole, as data gathered would aid in development planning and the equitable distribution of national resources.



The Central Regional Statistician, Mr. Isaac Addai, said there was no need for people to change their location or travel to their hometowns to be enumerated.



The census process requires that officials visit places of residence and all structures to count and enumerate all the people who spent the Census Night in those structures, regardless of their residential status," he said.



Some residents who shared their views said they were indifferent about the exercise.



A fishmonger, Ms. Esi Praba, said: I dont see anything different from what they have been doing in past years. They will come and count us and nothing will happen.



As of 10 a.m. yesterday, Mr. Francis Mensah, a business man, said he had not met any of the census officers yet.



Tema



The Metropolitan Chief Executive for Tema, Mr. Felix Mensah Nii Anang-La, who joined the Census Night awareness creation team, urged enumerators to be diligent in their work by collecting the needed data to support national development.



A Field Monitoring Officer of the GSS, Mr. Isaac Odoom, gave an assurance that outstanding issues with regard to the lack of identification cards for some enumerators would be addressed.



The assurance came on the back of complaints by some enumerators about security threats they faced due to the lack of ID cards for them.



Upper East



In the Bolgatanga municipality in the Upper East Region, enumerators visited the Regional Hospital and other health institutions, such as the Afrikids Health Centre, on Census night to count the people.



The Regional Field Supervisor for Zone 1, Mr. Philip Adosinaba, said some people refused to give out information and urged the public to volunteer information to enable the enumerators to have access to credible data.



Some people dont want to give information, while those who want to are demanding money before they do so," Mr. Adosinaba further claimed.



The Public Affairs Officer of the Upper East Regional Police Command, Assistant Superintendent of Police Mr. David Fianko-Okyere, said policemen had been deployed across the region to ensure a smooth exercise.



Sekondi-Takoradi



In the Sekondi-Takoradi metropolis, the awareness creation exercise was extended to churches and community centres, while at hotels census officers left questionnaires for guests to complete.



Officials were also at hospitals and bus terminals to capture needed information.



Some of the officers said they did not experience many challenges during the exercise, except that some people said they were not interested in the exercise.









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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John Mahama has urged Ghanaians to make themselves available and be counted in the ongoing National Population and Housing Census.



The former president who has been part of a national sensitisation campaign launched by the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) ahead of the start of the census was among the first citizens to be counted on Monday.



Speaking to the media after being counted at his residence, Mahama explained that the data generated from the census would serve as vital statistics to guide national development.



It is necessary to know how many people live in your country accurately so you can make better provisions in terms of social amenities, in terms of how the economy is managed and in terms of how development is spread so that everybody gets a fair share of the national cake, Mahama said.



He said the census data will also help government to consider the creation of new districts and restructure the local government system.



The former president further urged Ghanaians to open their doors and welcome the enumerators when they come to conduct the census.



Please, when the census officers get to your house, welcome them and answer the very simple questions and lets have a perfect count, Mahama said.









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A younger brother of Ibrahim Mohammed also known as Macho Kaaka has been offering pointers as to why his brother was attacked at dawn on Sunday leading to his death on Monday.



In a radio interview with Citi FM on Monday evening, Zuka Adams, the brother stated that Macho Kaaka was a social activist who was interested in the wellbeing of the Ejura community in the Ashanti Region where he lived.



He said Macho Kaaka had been recording videos on wrongdoings and other issues in Ejura and posted them on social media with the hope that the menace will stop. Through that, he said Macho became very popular in Ejura but received death threats from some people who were not happy with his activism.



He said Macho went ahead and posted a video announcing the death threat against him.



Two suspects have since been picked up by the police in connection with the death of Macho, reports Graphic Online's Kwadwo Baffoe Donkor from Kumasi.



Macho Kaaka, 45, a resident of Ejura in the Ashanti Region was reportedly attacked by some people.



He died on Monday afternoon, June 28, 2021 at the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital (KATH) in Kumasi where he was receiving treatment.



The police said the suspects were arrested upon police intelligence and were currently in police custody.



They are Ibrahim Issaka also known as Anyass and Fuseini Alhassan.



They were picked on Monday night [June 28, 2021] around 10:45pm.



According to the Ashanti Regional Police Public Relations Officer, Assistant Superintendent of Police, Mr Godwin Ahianyo, the suspects laid ambush in front of the house of the deceased and attacked him when he returned home on Sunday, June 27, 2021 at about 1:30am.



They reportedly inflicted machete wounds on him. Family members also found sticks at the scene of the attack.



He was first sent to the Ejura Government Hospital and was referred to KATH where he died on Monday.



Meanwhile the police have increased their presence in the Ejura township to ensure peace and safety after they quelled a demonstration by the youth Monday night.



Following the announcement of the death of Kaaka, the youth of the town had wanted to go on a demonstration to demand justice for their compatriot.



ASP Ahianyo said police investigations will dig deeper to find out if Kaaka's attack was related to his activism and whether he was a member of the #FixTheCountry campaign as had been alleged.



Brother's account



The brother, Zuka Adams in the Citi FM interview said Macho Kaaka together with some other family member's had gathered in one family members house as part of preparations for a marriage ceremony for that family member.



He said it was when Macho left the place on his way home on a motorbike that he was attacked near his house.



He said they suspected it was "political" opponents of Macho Kaaka who attacked him and added it may not necessarily be partisan opposition political party members but it could be members within his own political party - the New Patriotic Party.



He said Macho Kaaka is a member of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) in Ejura.



Below are some of the videos Macho Kaaka posted on social media

Source: graphiconline.com









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Ghanas Speaker of Parliament has described LGBTQI+ sexuality as a pandemic worse than COVID-19.



This pandemic must be fought by all of us, he said on Tuesday, 29 June 2021 when an eight-member bipartisan committee of lawmakers, led by Ningo Prampram MP Sam Nartey George, presented to him, a private members bill to criminalise LGBTQI+ sexuality in Ghana.



I can tell you its worse than COVID-19, Mr Bagbin said, adding: Now, Im happy our beloved country, Ghana, is together in this.



The faint-hearted, he noted, will soon be stranding to come back to join the fight.



His Excellency the President has spoken, our traditional leaders have spoken, our religious leaders have spoken. Together, Ghanaians have spoken, Mr Bagbin added.



He assured Ghanaians that Parliament will work assiduously to pass the bill by the end of the year.



The bill, apart from criminalising LGBTQI+ sexuality, also seeks to ban the airing of LGBTQI+ materials on media platforms among other things.



In attendance were members of the clergy, chiefs, other religious groups and opinion leaders, who have vowed to fight the LGBTQI+ community with one voice.



Presenting the bill, Mr George expressed confidence that it will become a reference law for other African countries.





Source: classfmonline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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One of the leading members of the #FixTheCountry movement, Mr Kofi Asante Mensah, has indicated that the youth in Ghana will continue to agitate and demand better governance and development in all sectors of the economy despite the murder of one of their fellow activists.



Ibrahim Kaaka Muhammed died in Ejura in the Ashanti region on Monday following a mob attack on him.



Mr Mensah, however, noted that the youth are unshaken in their resolve to see that the country is fixed.



He told Accra FM Tuesday, 29 June 2021 that: The youth of this country are not timid.



It will get to a point that there will be violence here and there and when that time comes, theres a saying that he who has been to war before prays for the gun to hit you and he who has not seen war before prays for otherwise.



He cautioned President Akufo-Addo, members of the judiciary, legislature and the executive arms of government, as well as the Inspector-General of Police to address their issues amicably to avoid things getting a head.



If they don't heed to the pressure and demands of these youth and find a way to engage the youth in this country to address the issue, you will keep killing us, he further stated.



He also said that justice will be sought for Kaaka, adding that the unfortunate incident will not be treated as the murder of former MP J. B Danquah-Adu and Tiger Eye PI investigative journalist Ahmed Hussein-Suale.



If they think we are going to sleep and let it go like J. B Danquah, Ahmed Suale and other crimes which have not been properly handled then they must revise their note, adding: we will pursue justice and not let the matter sleep until then. It will be soon.



The agitations will continue if President Akufo-Addo does not take heed to fix Ghana, he warned.



Kaaka, 45, a resident of Dagombaline at Ejura was ambushed in front of his house when he was returning home on his motorbike at about 1:30 pm on Saturday, 27 June 2021.



He was rushed to the Ejura Government Hospital but was later referred to the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital where he died while on admission on Sunday, 28 June 2021.



The Ashanti regional police command has arrested two suspects in connection with his murder.



The police has commenced investigations to ascertain whether the murder was linked to his work as a journalist or the #FixTheCountry movement.

Source: classfmonline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.
The National Communications Officer of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Sammy Gyamfi, has said President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, former Energy Minister Boakye Agyarko and former Attorney General, Gloria Akuffo, are to be jointly and severally held responsible for the $170 million judgement debt awarded against Ghana following the termination of the emergency power purchase agreement with Ghana Power Generation Company (GPGC).



He said per the ruling by the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) Tribunal, the Akufo-Addo-led government had conceded it wrongfully terminated the contract and even assured GPGC that remedial measures were being taken to reverse the decision.



Addressing journalists in Accra on Monday, June 28, Sammy Gyamfi disclosed that all three arbitrators including Ghanas selected arbitrator held that claims by the Akufo-Addo-led government in terminating the contract did not reflect the true facts.



It is crystal clear from the foregoing facts that are contained in the arbitrary award that this huge judgement debt of $170 million has been occasioned by the criminal negligence, incompetence and recklessness of the Akufo-Addo government.



Their willful recklessness in terminating the GPGC EPA on the basis of contrived and frivolous excuses is the reason why Ghana has been slapped with this avoidable judgement.



He further noted how some records were surreptitiously smuggled into the Dr. Ahenkorah report, which is said to have recommended the termination of the contract in 2018.



For him, that must even be a subject of investigation for fraud.













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The National Democratic Congress (NDC) has called for investigations into the circumstances leading to the unlawful termination of the Ghana Power Generation Company (GPGC) Emergency Power Agreement (EPA) that has now seen Ghana being slapped with a $170 million Judgment Debt.



The judgment debt has been slapped on the Republic of Ghana to GPGC by the Permanent Court of Arbitration of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law Tribunal.



This was after GPGC dragged the government before the International Tribunal over the unlawful termination of a contract with the state which was signed by the erstwhile John Dramani Mahama government to solve power problems [dumsor] at the time.



Addressing a press conference on Monday, June 28, 2021, NDC National Communications Officer Sammy Gyamfi has described the termination of the GPGC EPA as criminal.



According to him, it is crucial that an investigation is conducted into what really led to the termination of the contract by former Energy Minister, Mr. Boakye Agyarko.



The NDC hereby calls for investigations into the circumstances surrounding the unlawful termination of the GPGC EPA, particularly the alleged so-called recommendation by the Ahenkora-Committee for the termination of the said GPGC EPA, which in our view raises issues of fraud, Sammy Gyamfi told journalists at todays Press Conference.



Meanwhile, the main opposition party is also demanding that all officials of the Akufo-Addo government who were directly or indirectly involved in the processes leading to this huge financial loss to the State are held responsible and punished for same.



Find below the full speech read by Sammy Gyamfi at todays presser:



STATEMENT DELIVERED BY THE NATIONAL COMMUNICATION OFFICER OF THE NATIONAL DEMOCRATIC CONGRESS, COMRADE SAMMY GYAMFI ESQ., AT A PRESS CONFERENCE HELD AT THE PARTYS HEADQUARTERS ON THE ISSUE OF THE USD$170 MILLION JUDGEMENT DEBT AWARDED AGAINST GHANA TO GPGC BY THE PERMANENT COURT OF ARBITRATION OF THE UNITED NATIONS COMMISSION ON INTERNATIONAL TRADE LAW TRIBUNAL.



Monday, 28th June, 2021



Theme: UNPACKING THE $170 MILLION GPGC JUDGEMENT DEBT: EXPOSING THE LIES, NEGLIGENCE AND CRASS INCOMPETENCE OF THE AKUFO-ADDO GOVERNMENT.



Good afternoon distinguished ladies and gentlemen of the media. On behalf of the National Democratic Congress, I will like to thank you for honoring our invitation at such short notice.



The purpose of this press conference is to share with you our position on the raging issue of the judgement debt of USD$170 million dollars that has been awarded against the Republic of Ghana to a company called, Ghana Power Generation Company (GPGC) by the Permanent Court of Arbitration of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law Tribunal, an issue that has set many tongues wagging in the past couple of days. We are pretty sure that by the time we are done unpacking the facts of this case in this evidence-based presentation, you will be left in no doubt about how we got ourselves into this avoidable financial loss situation and the personalities who are responsible for same.



BRIEF BACKGROUND



Friends from the media, let me start by providing a brief background to this issue in order to situate the discussion in a proper context.



As we all know, Ghana was confronted with a serious power crisis also known as Dumsor between the year 2013 and 2015 which negatively affected citizens, businesses and the economy as a whole. This problem which was not a new phenomenon was largely occasioned by a power generation capacity shortfall. The visionary Nation Builder, H.E John Dramani Mahama who was the President of the country at the time, did not seek to apportion blame but instead took full responsibility for the age-long problem and set out to address the countrys generation capacity deficit through the fastest mobilization of emergency power ever witnessed in the history of this country. The goal was not only to produce power to meet our immediate power demand as a country but to produce more power to meet our ever-increasing future power needs and more importantly, to potentially increase the amount of power we export to neighboring and other Sahalian countries for revenue.



One of such Emergency Power Agreements (EPA) that the erstwhile NDC/Mahama administration executed in furtherance of this vision was the EPA with the Ghana Power Generation Company (GPGC) for the supply of 107MW of power. The Agreement which was signed on 3rd June, 2015 was negotiated by a competent team of technical experts from the then Ministry of Power, the Electricity Company of Ghana, the Volta River Authority and the Office of the Attorney General and Minister of Justice. After this crack team of experts had negotiated the EPA and approved its contents, the EPA was approved by Cabinet and later, the Parliament of the Republic Ghana on 23rd July, 2015 with the NPP-side fully participating in the approval process, both at the Mines and Energy committee level and at the plenary.



Ladies and gentlemen, it is worthy of note that among the EPAs executed by the Government of Ghana, the GPGC EPA was the one with the most favorable terms for us as a country. Firstly, it had a capacity charge of of 4 US Cents per KW/H with GoGs payments denominated in Ghana cedis and secondly, it had the shortest duration of four (4) years. Thirdly, and more importantly, it was the only EPA under which the Government of Ghana was not required to provide any financial guarantee or standby Letters of Credit.



WRONGFUL TERMINATION OF GPGC EPA



Ladies and gentlemen of the media, the implementation of the GPGC EPA proceeded smoothly under the Mahama/NDC administration until the Akufo-Addo/Bawumia government took over the reins of power in the year 2017. On 13th February, 2018, the Minister for Energy, Boakye Agyarko wrote to terminate the GPGC EPA. The termination of the GPGC EPA, according to Boakye Agyarko, was on the instructions of Cabinet, which is chaired by President Nana Addo Danquah Akufo-Addo.



It is instructive to note that the reasons which were cited by the Akufo-Addo government as the basis for the termination of the GPGC EPA did not include any issue of excess power or excess capacity charges as government would have us believe. Rather, the reasons which were contained in Boakye Agyarkos termination letter of 13th February, 2018 and the Advice of the then Attorney General, Gloria Akufo dated 28th August, 2017, bordered on alleged non-performance of certain Conditions Precedent and Subsequent by GPGC, namely;



1. Failure of GPGC to secure a license from the Energy Commission to enable them engage in the sale of electricity in the country, in accordance with section 11 of the Energy Commission Act.



2. Failure of GPGC to secure a siting and construction permit for the project.



3. Failure of GPGC to achieve financial closure.



Distinguished friends from the media, all these claims by the Akufo-Addo government which formed the basis for the termination of the GPGC EPA were found to be contrived and baseless by the Permanent Court of Arbitration of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law. At paragraph 479 of the Arbitral Award, all the three (3) Arbitrators, including Ghanas selected Arbitrator, Professor Fiadjoe, unanimously held that these claims by the Akufo-Addo/Bawumia Government did not reflect the true facts.



The Tribunal among other things, noted that GPGC had actually secured a building permit from the Kpone Katamanso District Assembly for the Blue Ocean project and had actually applied for a commercial license from the Energy Commission, save that, President Akufo-Addo had not constituted the Board of the Energy Commission, which is the body mandated by law to issue such Licenses at the time the Agreement was being terminated.



Additionally, the Tribunal found that all the Conditions Precedent and Subsequent that were yet to be fulfilled were wholly attributable to failings on the part of the Government of Ghana and not GPGC. In short, the Arbitration Tribunal found that the termination of the GPGC EPA by the Akufo-Addo/Bawumia government was wrongful and without any lawful justification, for which reason the panel unanimously awarded damages of about USD$170 million against Ghana, inclusive of interest. This can be found at paragraph 493 of the Arbitral award.



Ladies and gentlemen of the media, it is crystal clear from the foregoing facts that are contained in the Arbitral Award, that this huge judgement debt of USD$170 million has been occasioned by the criminal negligence, incompetence and recklessness of the Akufo-Addo government. Their willful recklessness in terminating the GPGC EPA on the basis of contrived and frivolous basis is the reason why Ghana has been slapped with this avoidable judgment debt.



GoGs CONCESSION THAT THE TERMINATION OF THE GPGC EPA WAS WRONG.



Friends, it will surprise you to know that after the GPGC EPA was terminated and the company appealed to government to rescind its decision, the Akufo-Addo government acting through the Minister of Energy and his Deputy conceded that the termination was wrong and gave the company several assurances that the President and Cabinet were going to take remedial steps to reinstate the terminated EPA. Evidence of this fact is contained at paragraph 486 of the Arbitral award, and settles the fact that indeed President Akufo-Addo, the Minister of Energy at the time, Boakye Agyarko and the Attorney General are jointly and severally responsible for this USD$170 million financial loss to the State. They knew and acknowledged that they had no basis to terminate the Agreement, yet they proceeded to terminate it and failed to remedy same by reinstating the EPA.



What is even sad in all this, is the fact that Ghana is now going to pay a whopping USD$170 million as judgement debt to a private company for a deal that would have caused the nation USD$99.6 million over the full four (4)-year duration of the Agreement. That is, if the Agreement had been maintained and not terminated by the Akufo-Addo government.



FRAUDULENT CLAIMS ABOUT THE AHENKORA PPA COMMITTEE REPORT



Ladies and gentlemen of the media, the NDC has taken notice of certain false claims by the Attorney General and Minister for Justice, Godfred Yeboah Dame, and spokespersons of the Akufo-Addo government that the decision to terminate the GPGC EPA was based on a recommendation by the Ahenkora-PPA Committee that reviewed a number of PPAs executed by the previous NDC government.



Our painstaking investigation into this matter shows that, the claim that the PPA committee recommended the termination of the GPGC EPA is palpable falsehood. In fact, this claim which is contained in an unsigned report making rounds on social media was part of the defenses of the Akufo-Addo government which were outrightly dismissed by the International Arbitration Tribunal in their decision.



Friends from the media, it will interest you to know that during cross examination at the arbitration proceedings, Dr. Ahenkora, who was the chairman of the PPA committee and a key witness for the Government of Ghana, said that he could not recollect any such recommendation by the committee and dissociated himself from the AGs advice that recommended the termination of the GPGC EPA. This fact can be found at paragraph 490 of the Arbitral award. This is how much the Akufo-Addo/Bawumia government derilicted in its duty to protect the public purse.



Friends, does it not strike you as strange that Dr. Ahenkora did not bother or see the need to ask the Arbitration Tribunal for leave to refresh his memory by referring to the committees report which was the main essence of his testimony?



FALSE ASSURANCES BY GoG TO GPGC



It is also instructive to note that after the Ahenkora Committee concluded its work, officials of the Akufo-Addo government gave several assurances to GPGC that its PPA was not one of those which had been recommended for termination by the Committee. This fact is captured at paragraph 491 of the Arbitral award.



This begs the question as to how the said recommendation which formed the basis of the termination of the GPGC EPA found its way into the unsigned report of the Ahenkora-chaired PPA committee. In any case, how come that the said Ahenkora-Committee report was not signed by the Chairman and members of the committee?



Friends, as I have already indicated, our painstaking investigation into this matter shows that the said recommendation was fraudulently inserted into the draft Ahenkora report by political actors who were determined to terminate the GPGC Agreement at all cost even though they very well knew they had no lawful justification to do so and that, doing so could potentially occasion a judgement debt and financial loss to the State. We in the NDC believe that the circumstances surrounding the smuggling of the said recommendation into the Ahenkora-committee report raise issues of fraud and must be investigated.



FALSE CLAIMS ABOUT PROPRIETY OF GPGC EPA



Ladies and gentlemen of the media, we have also taken notice of desperate attempts by the Attorney General, Godfred Yeboah Dame, and some individuals to impugn the propriety of the GPGC EPA which was executed under the NDC/Mahama administration. These people have suggested that the GPGC EPA was unnecessary and its terms defective.



Friends from the media, nothing could be further from the truth than this claim. In the first place, how can the NPP who fully participated in the approval of the GPGC Agreement in Parliament, both at the Mines and Energy committee level and at the plenary, turn around to question the propriety of same?



It is important to make the point that aside the fact that the GPGC EPA was approved by Cabinet and Parliament, its terms are materially the same as all the other PPAs executed by the then Power Ministry, some of which (KARPOWER, Cenpower etc.) have been extended by the Akufo-Addo/Bawumia administration. In fact, and as I have already explained, the terms of the GPGC EPA were to a large extent more favorable to the interest of the Republic of Ghana than all the other PPAs executed at the time.



What even makes this claim ridiculous and preposterous is that the Akufo-Addo government itself has by its own conduct expressed faith and confidence in the GPGC Agreement. The government terminated the GPGC EPA and actually proceeded to make a Counterclaim against GPGC for Early Termination damages at Arbitration, by relying on provisions in the same Agreement. Why then have they turned around to question the integrity or propriety of the very Agreement they relied on for their Counterclaim? If the Akufo-Addo government thought that the Agreement was defective, why did they rely on provisions in the same Agreement for the termination and Counterclaim? And why did they not raise the issue of the impropriety of the Agreement either in the termination letter of 13th February, 2018 or at the Arbitration proceedings?



For emphasis, the GPGC EPA was approved by Parliament and its terms were very favorable to the interest of Ghana. The claim by the Attorney General, Godfred Dame that the GPGC PPA was unnecessary and defective, and his subsequent threat to refer same to the CID for investigations is nothing but a desperate post-facto face-saving gimmick, which must be treated with outright contempt.



As I have already indicated, the facts show that the USD$170 judgment debt awarded to GPGC was occasioned by the criminal negligence, complete dereliction of duty and recklessness of the Akufo-Addo government in terminating the EPA without any lawful justification and not the signing of the Agreement. Therefore, those who have to be held responsible are those who were involved in the termination of the Agreement on the basis of fictitious and contrived claims, when they knew the danger their actions could portend for this country and not those who signed the Agreement, which was approved by Parliament.



GOVERNMENTS SLOPPY AND INCOMPETENT HANDLING OF COURT PROCESSES TO CHALLENGE ARBITRAL AWARD



Distinguished friends from the media, another point worthy of mention in this discussion is the crass incompetence and sloppiness with which the Attorney Generals Department and the Akufo-Addo government handled the court processes to set aside the Arbitral award.



As you may be aware, at Arbitration, the Republic of Ghana was represented by lawyers from the AGs Department which included the Deputy AG at the time and now AG, Godfred Yeboah Dame, and a Ghanaian Law firm, Amofa & Partners. The Permanent Court of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law Tribunal delivered its final award on 26th January, 2021 after which Ghana had a 28-day ultimatum to challenge same in a court of competent jurisdiction in the United Kingdom, the seat of the arbitration. The Akufo-Addo government then engaged the services of an English law firm Omnia Strategy, which is owned by Cherry Blair, wife of Tony Blair, former Prime Minister of the UK at the expense of the Ghanaian taxpayer.



Sadly, the government of Ghana and its external solicitors went to sleep only to go to an English court on the 25th day of the 28-day ultimatum to ask for extension of time. The court magnanimously gave an eight (8)-day extension to allow our external solicitors file the appropriate processes. Subsequent to the grant of this extension of time by the Court, our external solicitor, Omnia Strategy, realizing that the Government of Ghana had a very bad case, and mindful of the damage the case could do to their enviable reputation, backed out of the case. The Akufo-Addo government once again engaged the services of another foreign law firm called Volterra Fietta at the expense of the Ghanaian taxpayer, who managed to file a process to challenge the Arbitral award on the 1st of April, 2021, twenty three (23) days after the extended deadline of 8th March, 2021 had lapsed. All the excuses which were cited by the Akufo-Addo government for the delay, mainly COVID-19 and the 2020 elections with its associated handing-over bureaucracies were dismissed as intrinsically weak by the Court and the final Arbitral award upheld.



Ladies and gentlemen of the media, the NDC is appalled and disgusted by the incompetence, sloppiness and recklessness that was displayed by the NPP/Akufo-Addo government, particularly the AGs department in the conduct of this case. The AG and her Deputy, Godfred Yeboah Dame, who led the Government of Ghanas legal team at Arbitration, very well knew that the Tribunal had set 26th January, 2021 for its Arbitral decision or award. They all became aware of the Arbitral Award against Ghana on 26th January, 2021 at which time, their party, the New Patriotic Party was in office. They knew that Ghana had only 28 days to challenge the award if we so wished and they knew that an AG or deputy AG was not likely to be in office by that time. What instructions did they give to the Solicitor General or the relevant officers of the AGs Department in their handing over notes or what arrangements did they put in place to ensure that the Arbitral award was challenged if it didnt go in our favor?



Clearly, the current Attorney General, Godfred Yeboah Dame, has proven to be very incompetent and sloppy as far as this matter is concerned. His desperate attempt to extricate himself from blame and shift blame to his former boss, Madam Gloria Akufo, and past government officials who left office about five (5) years ago, is shameful and unfortunate to say the least. In any serious jurisdiction, the Attorney General, Godfred Yeboah Dame, and the Solicitor General, who are paid by Ghanaians to defend the interest of the State in legal matters and who were actually involved in the conduct of the case, would have been held accountable or resigned by now.



RESPONSE TO FALSE CLAIMS ABOUT EXCESS CAPACITY CHARGES



Finally, ladies and gentlemen, we cannot end this press conference without responding to the false narrative about excess capacity charges that the NPP and its surrogates have been regurgitating for sometime now.



The claim by the NPP that the Akufo-Addo government is paying a lot of money for power we dont need or as excess capacity charges because the erstwhile NDC/Mahama government signed many needless take-or- pay PPAs such as the GPGC EPA is mischievous to say the least.



First and foremost, let me make the point that take-or-pay arrangements are normal insurance or financial viability provisions in Power Purchase Agreements. In fact, it is not a new phenomenon in Ghana at all. For the records, the Osono/CENIT PPA entered into by the NPP/Kufour administration was a take- or-pay agreement. Also, the Trans Tema plant that was brought into the country during the Kuffuor era was on a take-or-pay basis. Again and more instructively, the Tema LNG project recently entered into by Akufo-Addo government is a take-or-pay agreement. There is therefore nothing wrong with take-or- pay agreements per se.



Also, the NPPs claim that the country currently pays USD$1 billion as excess capacity charges as a result of PPAs executed by the erstwhile NDC regime has been proven to be false. When the minister of Finance, Ken Ofori Atta, appeared before Parliament few days ago to answer a question filed by Hon. Alhassan Suhuyini on the amount of money government has paid in excess capacity charges so far, he said in his answer that the country has paid a total of $937 million to only three (3) companies, which are Karpower, Aksa and Cenpower from the year 2017-2020. This figure comes to an annual average payment of USD$234 million when it is divided by four (4) years.



It is worthy of note that about USD$200 million of this amount constitutes the 20% standard reserve margin of ECG which is a necessity and not excess capacity. The remaining USD$34 million worth of power would have been totally wiped off if VALCO had been revived by the Akufo-Addo government or even if the AFD-funded 330KV transmission line project from Ghana to Burkina Faso which was commenced by the erstwhile NDC/Mahama administration and which would have ensured an increase in the exportation of power from 100MW to 200MW to Burkina Faso alone, had been completed by this government.



The question we want to ask those who keep disturbing our ears with this propaganda about excess capacity charges is; why has the Akufo-Addo/Bawumia government extended the duration of the Karpower PPA executed by the NDC/Mahama government from 10-20 years and that of Cenpower from 5-10 years if the claim about excess capacity charges is true?



Only recently, the Minister for Energy, Mathew Opoku Prempeh, asked for Ghana to increase its generational capacity. As we speak, a steel manufacturing company in Ghana, B5 Limited, which is currently the biggest in Africa, is operating at 30% capacity due to lack of power. Where then lies the claim that Ghana is paying for power we dont need?



Friends from the media, even if the Akufo-Addo/Bawumia government thought that the country didnt need the 107MW of installed capacity the GPGC EPA was supposed to provide or that the country could not export same for revenue as the Mahama administration had planned, the wisest thing for them to have done was to have negotiated and deferred the implementation of the Agreement, just as they claim to have done in the case of four (4) other PPAs. Terminating the Agreement on the basis of contrived reasons which they knew could not be sustained and could potentially occasion a judgement debt and financial loss to the state was not an option. After all, the maintenance and performance of the Agreement would have caused the nation only USD$99.6 million, with the possibility of the State exporting same for revenue.



CONCLUSION



In conclusion, and as I have already demonstrated with indisputable facts in my presentation, Ghana has been slapped with this judgement debt of USD$170 million as a result of the reckless and wrongful termination of the GPGC EPA by the Akufo-Addo government, and their sloppiness and incompetence in defending same at the Arbitration and in Court. The then Minister for Power, Boakye Agyarko, who wrote to terminate the Agreement and his Deputy at the time, knew and actually conceded that they had no legal basis to terminate the Agreement the way they did. They very well knew that terminating the Agreement that way could potentially occasion a financial loss to the State. Yet, they did so willfully knowing fully well what the consequences of their actions were. They failed to take advantage of the opportunity they were offered by the company to remedy the situation or reinstate the EPA as they had promised. This is why the wrongful termination of the GPGC EPA by the Akufo-Addo government and the avoidable financial loss it has occasioned the State is unpardonable.



As a party, we are very sad that all of us as Ghanaians will have to cough up this colossal amount of money, USD$170 million, which is equivalent to GHS1.2 billion cedis or 10.2 trillion Old Ghana cedis and which accrues interest daily, compounded on a monthly basis. This colossal amount could have been channeled into the construction of thousands of dormitories and classroom blocks to end the obnoxious double-track system which is undermining the quality of secondary and tertiary education in the country, or the provision hospital beds and other facilities to end the much-dreaded no-bed syndrome which is claiming so many precious lives. Alternatively, this huge sum of money could have been used to build roads and for other useful projects that would have created jobs and improved the wellbeing of Ghanaians. The perpetrators of this evil must not go unpunished.



The NDC hereby calls for investigations into the circumstances surrounding the unlawful termination of the GPGC EPA, particularly the alleged so-called recommendation by the Ahenkora-Committee for the termination of the said GPGC EPA, which in our view raises issues of fraud.



We also demand that all officials of the Akufo-Addo government who were directly or indirectly involved in the processes leading to this huge financial loss to the State are held responsible and punished for same. But in the likely event that President Akufo-Addo, the Mother Serpent of Corruption, who is himself complicit in this matter fails to act, a future NDC government will investigate this matter and ensure that those responsible for the wrongful termination of the GPGC Agreement and the avoidable judgement debt it has caused the nation, are brought to book.



We thank you for your time.



Signed,



SAMMY GYAMFI ESQ.









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The Northern Regional Secretariat of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) says Vice President Dr Mahammudu Bawumia has the potential to lead the party to victory in 2024 when given the opportunity.



According to the regional leadership of the party, Vice President Bawumia is very popular at the political front and has also demonstrated his competence that he could help the party break the eight-year political hold on power.



The Northern Regional Chairman of the party, Mohammed Baantima Samba who made this observation at the final funeral rites of the late Upper East Regional Youth Organiser, Mr Solomon Latif at Bolgatanga last Sunday said, the NPP currently wants somebody who can lead us to break the eight years string in 2024 and so far, Dr Bawumia has demonstrated his capabilities as a person who can to lead us to victory [sic].



For him, Dr Bawumia has done a great job for the government and the party especially in the 2016 and 2020 elections pointing out that he (Dr Bawumia) has increased votes from northern Ghana for the party.



Mr Samba further stressed that considering what Dr Bawumia has done for the party, it will not be difficulty for him to marshal his experiences to retain power for the party in 2024 presidential elections against the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC).



Funeral



The Upper East Regional Youth Organiser (Solomon Latif) passed on at the Tamale Teaching Hospital in on Friday, May 14, 2021, after a short illness.



Dr Bawumia and other Ministers of state as well as NPP party stalwarts, including The Interior Minister, Mr Ambrose Dery, Deputy Minister for Transport, Mr Hassan Tampuli, Deputy Minister of Works and Housing, Abdulai Abanga, Deputy Majority Chief Whip and Member of Parliament for Tolon, Mr Habib Iddrisu, Council of Elders Member, Sule Yerimia attended the funeral.



Agenda 2024



For the Northern Regional NPP Chairman, the leadership of the party in region as well as all the constituency executives had declared their support for Dr Bawumia because they believe that he could help the party improve on its electoral fortunes in 2024.



He said the time had come for members of the NPP to look beyond ethnicity and self-interest in order to support Dr Bawumia to continue the good works of President Akufo-Addo, saying many people think NPP cannot retain power after the eight years, so it is time to break the string.



He added that right now, our main agenda is breaking the eight years in 2024 and that can be achieved only if we collectively support someone who is well marketed and can unite the rank and file of the party.



Mr Samba said considering the current political dispensation, any attempt to set aside Dr. Bawumia would spell an electoral disaster for the NPP in 2024.



The Regional Chairman, therefore, called on the rank and file of the NPP to rally behind Vice President Bawumia to improve on the fortunes of the party in the next elections.



NPP tradition



On his part, the Deputy Northern Secretary of NPP, Mr Yussif Danjumah said if we want to break the eight years, then it means that we have to support the Vice President, the Northern Region NPP is solidly behind him for the utmost interest of the party.



When you look at NPP, our tradition is Danquah, Busia and Dombo. Now it is the turn of the Dombos to lead, he noted.









Source: graphiconline.com









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Former President John Dramani Mahama has once again urged all Ghanaians to make themselves available and be counted during the ongoing Population and Housing Census.



Mr. Mahama who has been part of a national sensitization campaign launched by the Ghana Statistical Service ahead of the counting was among the first citizens to be counted on Monday morning {June 28, 2021).



Speaking to the media after his interview with the census official at his residence in Accra, Mr Mahama explained that the data generated from the census would serve as vital statistics to guide national development.



It is necessary to know how many people live in your country accurately so you can make better provisions in terms of social amenities, in terms of how the economy is managed and in terms of how development is spread so that everybody gets a fair share of the national cake he stated.



Mr. Mahama also noted that the census data will also help government to consider the creation of new districts and restructure the local government system.



He urged Ghanaians to open their doors and welcome the enumerators when they come to conduct the census.



Please, when the census officers get to your house, welcome them and answer the very simple questions and lets have a perfect count.



Chief Census Methodologist Owusu Kagya gave an assurance that the law mandates and requires that all information collected would be kept confidential and solely for census purposes.









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 opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) is of the view that Ghana has been slapped with a $170 million judgment debt after the cancellation of a power purchase agreement with Ghana Power Generation Company (GPGC) due to the criminal negligence, incompetence and recklessness of the Akufo-Addo government.



According to the party, the willful recklessness in terminating the GPGC-Emergency Power Agreements (EPA) on the basis of contrived and frivolous basis is the reason why Ghana has been slapped with this avoidable judgment debt.



The state is to pay a $170 million judgment debt as a result of cancellation of the agreement. The agreement between the government and GPGC, an independent power producer, was terminated in 2018.



Speaking at a press conference at the partys head office in Accra Monday afternoon, June 28, 2021, the partys National Communications Officer, Sammy Gyamfi said a future NDC government will bring to book all individuals whose actions have caused the country to pay a $170 million judgement debt.



"The perpetrators of this evil must not go unpunished," he noted.



Background



In February 2015, the GPGC entered into negotiations with the Government of Ghana for the provision of a fast-track power generation solution.



This was to see the relocation of the GPGC Equipment from Italy to Ghana, to alleviate Ghanas then-ongoing power shortage crisis. In June 2015, Government and GPGC signed the power agreement.



In April 2017, a committee set up by the Ministry of Energy at the direction of the Presidents Office issued a final draft report. The committee set forth for consideration the option of termination of the agreement at an estimated cost of $18 million rather than the payment of an excess capacity charge of $24.9 million per annum over the contract period of 4 years.



In its Summary of Proposed Modification to PPAs of Committed Projects, the Committee noted that the GPGC Project was an:



Emergency Plant with a 5-year PPA used plant (not new) and high tariff. Major equipment has arrived at the Tema port awaiting tax exemption to clear.



The report noted that based on the 2018-2020 demand-supply capacity balance and the tariff rank of this project, the full capacity of this project will be excess and result in an estimated total cost of $115.48 Million within the duration of the PPA. It, therefore, recommended that the actual development cost of the project to date should be verified and used as a guide in negotiations for termination.



In August 2017, Attorney General Gloria Akuffo issued an opinion on the agreement in response to a cabinet directive. She noted

 It has become necessary to review the implementation of the PPAs; because should all of them be implemented as originally scheduled, it would result in the production of excess energy with its attendant cost, which would worsen the financial situation of the power sector. A review would therefore help to cut back on losses that would be incurred.

The Attorney-General noted, too, that the GPGC Project would result in costs of $115,480,000, if implemented, with its attendant high tariff. Based on her understanding of the position, the Attorney-General considered that GPGCs failure to obtain a licence from the Energy Commission left it with no capacity to enter into a PPA.





Below is the NDCs statement

STATEMENT DELIVERED BY THE NATIONAL COMMUNICATION OFFICER OF THE NATIONAL DEMOCRATIC CONGRESS, COMRADE SAMMY GYAMFI ESQ., AT A PRESS CONFERENCE HELD AT THE PARTYS HEADQUARTERS ON THE ISSUE OF THE USD$170 MILLION JUDGEMENT DEBT AWARDED AGAINST GHANA TO GPGC BY THE PERMANENT COURT OF ARBITRATION OF THE UNITED NATIONS COMMISSION ON INTERNATIONAL TRADE LAW TRIBUNAL.



Monday, 28th June, 2021



Theme: UNPACKING THE $170 MILLION GPGC JUDGEMENT DEBT: EXPOSING THE LIES, NEGLIGENCE AND CRASS INCOMPETENCE OF THE AKUFO-ADDO GOVERNMENT.



Good afternoon distinguished ladies and gentlemen of the media. On behalf of the National Democratic Congress, I will like to thank you for honoring our invitation at such short notice.



The purpose of this press conference is to share with you our position on the raging issue of the judgement debt of USD$170 million dollars that has been awarded against the Republic of Ghana to a company called, Ghana Power Generation Company (GPGC) by the Permanent Court of Arbitration of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law Tribunal, an issue that has set many tongues wagging in the past couple of days. We are pretty sure that by the time we are done unpacking the facts of this case in this evidence-based presentation, you will be left in no doubt about how we got ourselves into this avoidable financial loss situation and the personalities who are responsible for same.



BRIEF BACKGROUND



Friends from the media, let me start by providing a brief background to this issue in order to situate the discussion in a proper context.



As we all know, Ghana was confronted with a serious power crisis also known as Dumsor between the year 2013 and 2015 which negatively affected citizens, businesses and the economy as a whole. This problem which was not a new phenomenon was largely occasioned by a power generation capacity shortfall. The visionary Nation Builder, H.E John Dramani Mahama who was the President of the country at the time, did not seek to apportion blame but instead took full responsibility for the age-long problem and set out to address the countrys generation capacity deficit through the fastest mobilization of emergency power ever witnessed in the history of this country. The goal was not only to produce power to meet our immediate power demand as a country but to produce more power to meet our ever-increasing future power needs and more importantly, to potentially increase the amount of power we export to neighboring and other Sahalian countries for revenue.



One of such Emergency Power Agreements (EPA) that the erstwhile NDC/Mahama administration executed in furtherance of this vision was the EPA with the Ghana Power Generation Company (GPGC) for the supply of 107MW of power. The Agreement which was signed on 3rd June, 2015 was negotiated by a competent team of technical experts from the then Ministry of Power, the Electricity Company of Ghana, the Volta River Authority and the Office of the Attorney General and Minister of Justice. After this crack team of experts had negotiated the EPA and approved its contents, the EPA was approved by Cabinet and later, the Parliament of the Republic Ghana on 23rd July, 2015 with the NPP-side fully participating in the approval process, both at the Mines and Energy committee level and at the plenary.



Ladies and gentlemen, it is worthy of note that among the EPAs executed by the Government of Ghana, the GPGC EPA was the one with the most favorable terms for us as a country. Firstly, it had a capacity charge of of 4 US Cents per KW/H with GoGs payments denominated in Ghana cedis and secondly, it had the shortest duration of four (4) years. Thirdly, and more importantly, it was the only EPA under which the Government of Ghana was not required to provide any financial guarantee or standby Letters of Credit.



WRONGFUL TERMINATION OF GPGC EPA



Ladies and gentlemen of the media, the implementation of the GPGC EPA proceeded smoothly under the Mahama/NDC administration until the Akufo-Addo/Bawumia government took over the reins of power in the year 2017. On 13th February, 2018, the Minister for Energy, Boakye Agyarko wrote to terminate the GPGC EPA. The termination of the GPGC EPA, according to Boakye Agyarko, was on the instructions of Cabinet, which is chaired by President Nana Addo Danquah Akufo-Addo.



It is instructive to note that the reasons which were cited by the Akufo-Addo government as the basis for the termination of the GPGC EPA did not include any issue of excess power or excess capacity charges as government would have us believe. Rather, the reasons which were contained in Boakye Agyarkos termination letter of 13th February, 2018 and the Advice of the then Attorney General, Gloria Akufo dated 28th August, 2017, bordered on alleged non-performance of certain Conditions Precedent and Subsequent by GPGC, namely;



1. Failure of GPGC to secure a license from the Energy Commission to enable them engage in the sale of electricity in the country, in accordance with section 11 of the Energy Commission Act.



2. Failure of GPGC to secure a siting and construction permit for the project.



3. Failure of GPGC to achieve financial closure.



Distinguished friends from the media, all these claims by the Akufo-Addo government which formed the basis for the termination of the GPGC EPA were found to be contrived and baseless by the Permanent Court of Arbitration of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law. At paragraph 479 of the Arbitral Award, all the three (3) Arbitrators, including Ghanas selected Arbitrator, Professor Fiadjoe, unanimously held that these claims by the Akufo-Addo/Bawumia Government did not reflect the true facts.



The Tribunal among other things, noted that GPGC had actually secured a building permit from the Kpone Katamanso District Assembly for the Blue Ocean project and had actually applied for a commercial license from the Energy Commission, save that, President Akufo-Addo had not constituted the Board of the Energy Commission, which is the body mandated by law to issue such Licenses at the time the Agreement was being terminated.



Additionally, the Tribunal found that all the Conditions Precedent and Subsequent that were yet to be fulfilled were wholly attributable to failings on the part of the Government of Ghana and not GPGC. In short, the Arbitration Tribunal found that the termination of the GPGC EPA by the Akufo-Addo/Bawumia government was wrongful and without any lawful justification, for which reason the panel unanimously awarded damages of about USD$170 million against Ghana, inclusive of interest. This can be found at paragraph 493 of the Arbitral award.



Ladies and gentlemen of the media, it is crystal clear from the foregoing facts that are contained in the Arbitral Award, that this huge judgement debt of USD$170 million has been occasioned by the criminal negligence, incompetence and recklessness of the Akufo-Addo government. Their willful recklessness in terminating the GPGC EPA on the basis of contrived and frivolous basis is the reason why Ghana has been slapped with this avoidable judgment debt.



GoGs CONCESSION THAT THE TERMINATION OF THE GPGC EPA WAS WRONG.



Friends, it will surprise you to know that after the GPGC EPA was terminated and the company appealed to government to rescind its decision, the Akufo-Addo government acting through the Minister of Energy and his Deputy conceded that the termination was wrong and gave the company several assurances that the President and Cabinet were going to take remedial steps to reinstate the terminated EPA. Evidence of this fact is contained at paragraph 486 of the Arbitral award, and settles the fact that indeed President Akufo-Addo, the Minister of Energy at the time, Boakye Agyarko and the Attorney General are jointly and severally responsible for this USD$170 million financial loss to the State. They knew and acknowledged that they had no basis to terminate the Agreement, yet they proceeded to terminate it and failed to remedy same by reinstating the EPA.



What is even sad in all this, is the fact that Ghana is now going to pay a whopping USD$170 million as judgement debt to a private company for a deal that would have caused the nation USD$99.6 million over the full four (4)-year duration of the Agreement. That is, if the Agreement had been maintained and not terminated by the Akufo-Addo government.



FRAUDULENT CLAIMS ABOUT THE AHENKORA PPA COMMITTEE REPORT



Ladies and gentlemen of the media, the NDC has taken notice of certain false claims by the Attorney General and Minister for Justice, Godfred Yeboah Dame, and spokespersons of the Akufo-Addo government that the decision to terminate the GPGC EPA was based on a recommendation by the Ahenkora-PPA Committee that reviewed a number of PPAs executed by the previous NDC government.



Our painstaking investigation into this matter shows that, the claim that the PPA committee recommended the termination of the GPGC EPA is palpable falsehood. In fact, this claim which is contained in an unsigned report making rounds on social media was part of the defenses of the Akufo-Addo government which were outrightly dismissed by the International Arbitration Tribunal in their decision.



Friends from the media, it will interest you to know that during cross examination at the arbitration proceedings, Dr. Ahenkora, who was the chairman of the PPA committee and a key witness for the Government of Ghana, said that he could not recollect any such recommendation by the committee and dissociated himself from the AGs advice that recommended the termination of the GPGC EPA. This fact can be found at paragraph 490 of the Arbitral award. This is how much the Akufo-Addo/Bawumia government derilicted in its duty to protect the public purse.



Friends, does it not strike you as strange that Dr. Ahenkora did not bother or see the need to ask the Arbitration Tribunal for leave to refresh his memory by referring to the committees report which was the main essence of his testimony?



FALSE ASSURANCES BY GoG TO GPGC

It is also instructive to note that after the Ahenkora Committee concluded its work, officials of the Akufo-Addo government gave several assurances to GPGC that its PPA was not one of those which had been recommended for termination by the Committee. This fact is captured at paragraph 491 of the Arbitral award.



This begs the question as to how the said recommendation which formed the basis of the termination of the GPGC EPA found its way into the unsigned report of the Ahenkora-chaired PPA committee. In any case, how come that the said Ahenkora-Committee report was not signed by the Chairman and members of the committee?



Friends, as I have already indicated, our painstaking investigation into this matter shows that the said recommendation was fraudulently inserted into the draft Ahenkora report by political actors who were determined to terminate the GPGC Agreement at all cost even though they very well knew they had no lawful justification to do so and that, doing so could potentially occasion a judgement debt and financial loss to the State. We in the NDC believe that the circumstances surrounding the smuggling of the said recommendation into the Ahenkora-committee report raise issues of fraud and must be investigated.



FALSE CLAIMS ABOUT PROPRIETY OF GPGC EPA



Ladies and gentlemen of the media, we have also taken notice of desperate attempts by the Attorney General, Godfred Yeboah Dame, and some individuals to impugn the propriety of the GPGC EPA which was executed under the NDC/Mahama administration. These people have suggested that the GPGC EPA was unnecessary and its terms defective.



Friends from the media, nothing could be further from the truth than this claim. In the first place, how can the NPP who fully participated in the approval of the GPGC Agreement in Parliament, both at the Mines and Energy committee level and at the plenary, turn around to question the propriety of same?



It is important to make the point that aside the fact that the GPGC EPA was approved by Cabinet and Parliament, its terms are materially the same as all the other PPAs executed by the then Power Ministry, some of which (KARPOWER, Cenpower etc.) have been extended by the Akufo-Addo/Bawumia administration. In fact, and as I have already explained, the terms of the GPGC EPA were to a large extent more favorable to the interest of the Republic of Ghana than all the other PPAs executed at the time.



What even makes this claim ridiculous and preposterous is that the Akufo-Addo government itself has by its own conduct expressed faith and confidence in the GPGC Agreement. The government terminated the GPGC EPA and actually proceeded to make a Counterclaim against GPGC for Early Termination damages at Arbitration, by relying on provisions in the same Agreement. Why then have they turned around to question the integrity or propriety of the very Agreement they relied on for their Counterclaim? If the Akufo-Addo government thought that the Agreement was defective, why did they rely on provisions in the same Agreement for the termination and Counterclaim? And why did they not raise the issue of the impropriety of the Agreement either in the termination letter of 13th February, 2018 or at the Arbitration proceedings?



For emphasis, the GPGC EPA was approved by Parliament and its terms were very favorable to the interest of Ghana. The claim by the Attorney General, Godfred Dame that the GPGC PPA was unnecessary and defective, and his subsequent threat to refer same to the CID for investigations is nothing but a desperate post-facto face-saving gimmick, which must be treated with outright contempt.



As I have already indicated, the facts show that the USD$170 judgment debt awarded to GPGC was occasioned by the criminal negligence, complete dereliction of duty and recklessness of the Akufo-Addo government in terminating the EPA without any lawful justification and not the signing of the Agreement. Therefore, those who have to be held responsible are those who were involved in the termination of the Agreement on the basis of fictitious and contrived claims, when they knew the danger their actions could portend for this country and not those who signed the Agreement, which was approved by Parliament.



GOVERNMENTS SLOPPY AND INCOMPETENT HANDLING OF COURT PROCESSES TO CHALLENGE ARBITRAL AWARD



Distinguished friends from the media, another point worthy of mention in this discussion is the crass incompetence and sloppiness with which the Attorney Generals Department and the Akufo-Addo government handled the court processes to set aside the Arbitral award.



As you may be aware, at Arbitration, the Republic of Ghana was represented by lawyers from the AGs Department which included the Deputy AG at the time and now AG, Godfred Yeboah Dame, and a Ghanaian Law firm, Amofa & Partners. The Permanent Court of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law Tribunal delivered its final award on 26th January, 2021 after which Ghana had a 28-day ultimatum to challenge same in a court of competent jurisdiction in the United Kingdom, the seat of the arbitration. The Akufo-Addo government then engaged the services of an English law firm Omnia Strategy, which is owned by Cherry Blair, wife of Tony Blair, former Prime Minister of the UK at the expense of the Ghanaian taxpayer.



Sadly, the government of Ghana and its external solicitors went to sleep only to go to an English court on the 25th day of the 28-day ultimatum to ask for extension of time. The court magnanimously gave an eight (8)-day extension to allow our external solicitors file the appropriate processes. Subsequent to the grant of this extension of time by the Court, our external solicitor, Omnia Strategy, realizing that the Government of Ghana had a very bad case, and mindful of the damage the case could do to their enviable reputation, backed out of the case. The Akufo-Addo government once again engaged the services of another foreign law firm called Volterra Fietta at the expense of the Ghanaian taxpayer, who managed to file a process to challenge the Arbitral award on the 1st of April, 2021, twenty three (23) days after the extended deadline of 8th March, 2021 had lapsed. All the excuses which were cited by the Akufo-Addo government for the delay, mainly COVID-19 and the 2020 elections with its associated handing-over bureaucracies were dismissed as intrinsically weak by the Court and the final Arbitral award upheld.



Ladies and gentlemen of the media, the NDC is appalled and disgusted by the incompetence, sloppiness and recklessness that was displayed by the NPP/Akufo-Addo government, particularly the AGs department in the conduct of this case. The AG and her Deputy, Godfred Yeboah Dame, who led the Government of Ghanas legal team at Arbitration, very well knew that the Tribunal had set 26th January, 2021 for its Arbitral decision or award. They all became aware of the Arbitral Award against Ghana on 26th January, 2021 at which time, their party, the New Patriotic Party was in office. They knew that Ghana had only 28 days to challenge the award if we so wished and they knew that an AG or deputy AG was not likely to be in office by that time. What instructions did they give to the Solicitor General or the relevant officers of the AGs Department in their handing over notes or what arrangements did they put in place to ensure that the Arbitral award was challenged if it didnt go in our favor?



Clearly, the current Attorney General, Godfred Yeboah Dame, has proven to be very incompetent and sloppy as far as this matter is concerned. His desperate attempt to extricate himself from blame and shift blame to his former boss, Madam Gloria Akufo, and past government officials who left office about five (5) years ago, is shameful and unfortunate to say the least. In any serious jurisdiction, the Attorney General, Godfred Yeboah Dame, and the Solicitor General, who are paid by Ghanaians to defend the interest of the State in legal matters and who were actually involved in the conduct of the case, would have been held accountable or resigned by now.



RESPONSE TO FALSE CLAIMS ABOUT EXCESS CAPACITY CHARGES



Finally, ladies and gentlemen, we cannot end this press conference without responding to the false narrative about excess capacity charges that the NPP and its surrogates have been regurgitating for sometime now.



The claim by the NPP that the Akufo-Addo government is paying a lot of money for power we dont need or as excess capacity charges because the erstwhile NDC/Mahama government signed many needless take-or- pay PPAs such as the GPGC EPA is mischievous to say the least.



First and foremost, let me make the point that take-or-pay arrangements are normal insurance or financial viability provisions in Power Purchase Agreements. In fact, it is not a new phenomenon in Ghana at all. For the records, the Osono/CENIT PPA entered into by the NPP/Kufour administration was a take- or-pay agreement. Also, the Trans Tema plant that was brought into the country during the Kuffuor era was on a take-or-pay basis. Again and more instructively, the Tema LNG project recently entered into by Akufo-Addo government is a take-or-pay agreement. There is therefore nothing wrong with take-or- pay agreements per se.



Also, the NPPs claim that the country currently pays USD$1 billion as excess capacity charges as a result of PPAs executed by the erstwhile NDC regime has been proven to be false. When the minister of Finance, Ken Ofori Atta, appeared before Parliament few days ago to answer a question filed by Hon. Alhassan Suhuyini on the amount of money government has paid in excess capacity charges so far, he said in his answer that the country has paid a total of $937 million to only three (3) companies, which are Karpower, Aksa and Cenpower from the year 2017-2020. This figure comes to an annual average payment of USD$234 million when it is divided by four (4) years.



It is worthy of note that about USD$200 million of this amount constitutes the 20% standard reserve margin of ECG which is a necessity and not excess capacity. The remaining USD$34 million worth of power would have been totally wiped off if VALCO had been revived by the Akufo-Addo government or even if the AFD-funded 330KV transmission line project from Ghana to Burkina Faso which was commenced by the erstwhile NDC/Mahama administration and which would have ensured an increase in the exportation of power from 100MW to 200MW to Burkina Faso alone, had been completed by this government.



The question we want to ask those who keep disturbing our ears with this propaganda about excess capacity charges is; why has the Akufo-Addo/Bawumia government extended the duration of the Karpower PPA executed by the NDC/Mahama government from 10-20 years and that of Cenpower from 5-10 years if the claim about excess capacity charges is true?



Only recently, the Minister for Energy, Mathew Opoku Prempeh, asked for Ghana to increase its generational capacity. As we speak, a steel manufacturing company in Ghana, B5 Limited, which is currently the biggest in Africa, is operating at 30% capacity due to lack of power. Where then lies the claim that Ghana is paying for power we dont need?



Friends from the media, even if the Akufo-Addo/Bawumia government thought that the country didnt need the 107MW of installed capacity the GPGC EPA was supposed to provide or that the country could not export same for revenue as the Mahama administration had planned, the wisest thing for them to have done was to have negotiated and deferred the implementation of the Agreement, just as they claim to have done in the case of four (4) other PPAs. Terminating the Agreement on the basis of contrived reasons which they knew could not be sustained and could potentially occasion a judgement debt and financial loss to the state was not an option. After all, the maintenance and performance of the Agreement would have caused the nation only USD$99.6 million, with the possibility of the State exporting same for revenue.



CONCLUSION



In conclusion, and as I have already demonstrated with indisputable facts in my presentation, Ghana has been slapped with this judgement debt of USD$170 million as a result of the reckless and wrongful termination of the GPGC EPA by the Akufo-Addo government, and their sloppiness and incompetence in defending same at the Arbitration and in Court. The then Minister for Power, Boakye Agyarko, who wrote to terminate the Agreement and his Deputy at the time, knew and actually conceded that they had no legal basis to terminate the Agreement the way they did. They very well knew that terminating the Agreement that way could potentially occasion a financial loss to the State. Yet, they did so willfully knowing fully well what the consequences of their actions were. They failed to take advantage of the opportunity they were offered by the company to remedy the situation or reinstate the EPA as they had promised. This is why the wrongful termination of the GPGC EPA by the Akufo-Addo government and the avoidable financial loss it has occasioned the State is unpardonable.



As a party, we are very sad that all of us as Ghanaians will have to cough up this colossal amount of money, USD$170 million, which is equivalent to GHS1.2 billion cedis or 10.2 trillion Old Ghana cedis and which accrues interest daily, compounded on a monthly basis. This colossal amount could have been channeled into the construction of thousands of dormitories and classroom blocks to end the obnoxious double-track system which is undermining the quality of secondary and tertiary education in the country, or the provision hospital beds and other facilities to end the much-dreaded no-bed syndrome which is claiming so many precious lives. Alternatively, this huge sum of money could have been used to build roads and for other useful projects that would have created jobs and improved the wellbeing of Ghanaians. The perpetrators of this evil must not go unpunished.



The NDC hereby calls for investigations into the circumstances surrounding the unlawful termination of the GPGC EPA, particularly the alleged so-called recommendation by the Ahenkora-Committee for the termination of the said GPGC EPA, which in our view raises issues of fraud.



We also demand that all officials of the Akufo-Addo government who were directly or indirectly involved in the processes leading to this huge financial loss to the State are held responsible and punished for same. But in the likely event that President Akufo-Addo, the Mother Serpent of Corruption, who is himself complicit in this matter fails to act, a future NDC government will investigate this matter and ensure that those responsible for the wrongful termination of the GPGC Agreement and the avoidable judgement debt it has caused the nation, are brought to book.



We thank you for your time.



Signed,

SAMMY GYAMFI ESQ.







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 Former President of Ghana, H.E John Agyekum Kufuor has stated clearly that he still remembers the contribution of the grandfather of NPP Youth Organizer Hopeful, Mr Kamal Gumah to the survival of UP and NPP in the North.



Former President Kufuor narrated that Alhaji Imoro Salifu, the grandfather of Prince Kamal Gumah was the Regional Commissioner for the Upper Region in the government of Prime Minister Busia in 1969; the way and manner he used his position to improve the wellbeing of the people.



He hinted that Mr Kamal Gumahs father and grandfather fought with their everything for the party to become popular in the North.



The Former President was enthused to meet the grandson of the longest-serving constituency chairman of the party in the Upper East Region; a man who offered himself to the service of NPP and mother-Ghana.

Source: 3news.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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Greater Accra Youth Organiser of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), Moses Abor has hit hard at the Communication Officer of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), Sammy Gyamfi for politicizing murder cases in the country.



According to him, Sammy Gyamfis numerous comments on murder are doing more harm than good, so appealing to him to behave as a concerned Ghanaian citizen who cares for the welfare of the youth.



Moses Abor, in a statement, stated; Be a citizen for ONCE! Act like a concerned Ghanaian citizen who cares for the youths welfare and growth!! Think about human lives instead of cheap Political gains!!!



Read full statement below:



HON. MOSES ABOR writes TO SAMMY GYAMFI...

Your usual Politicization of murder cases rather promotes murder in this country; Take note!



It is sad that most criminals in this country always get away when they commit murder...

I have sat down to reflect on many criminal incidences that have occurred in the country where criminals have gone hidden as a result of the usual cheap Political justifications and propaganda. Same instance, I have monitored how you always politicize murder and other criminal issues recklessly, which therefore, goes a long way to motivate criminals to do more because they will be shielded by your reckless and theatrical Politicization of criminal cases in the country.



Be a citizen for ONCE! Act like a concerned Ghanaian citizen who cares for the youths welfare and growth!! Think about human lives instead of cheap Political gains!!!



Yours truly



_HON. MOSES ABOR_

GREATER ACCRA REGIONAL YOUTH ORGANIZER,NPP

Source: Peacefmonline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Actress Moesha Boduongs public repentance act has received mixed reactions from the public. While some think she has truly given her life to Christ and shun her old ways, others believe there is more to it than what meets the eye.



A school of thought has revealed that Moesha is intentionally doing all this to impress the family of a man who has promised to marry her. She has deleted all the raunchy photos on her Instagram page and has even changed her name from Moesha Boduong to Maurecia Boduong.



Kelvin Taylor, a loudmouth commentator on social medi, has added his weird opinion to the many online. The Loud Silence Media Boss in his usual cacophony made some interesting revelations on why he does not fully believe the former slay queen, Moesha Boduong has repented.



According to Taylor, he will advice Moesha to sell the Range Rover and mansion she got from selling her body to rich men before Ghanaians will believe she has repented.



He added that Moesha should revisit Dr. Obengfo to undo the plastic surgery because that is not the actual body God gave her and since she is leaving Satan for good, she should return everything that belongs to him.



This, according to Kelvin Taylor, is the only path Moesha can take to be a full born again Christian.



Kelvin Taylor also touched on certain statements Moesha made in her past life that defeats the fact that she has indeed changed for the better.



Some of this statements includes her interview with Delay where she said although she has repented, she will still date her sugar daddy and that God will understand her decision.



Watch Kelvin Taylor speak in the video below:-

Source: GC/youtube









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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Smoky skies during the Cougar Creek Fire in Washington's Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest in August 2018. Credit: Kari Greer/U.S. Forest Service

As smoky air becomes more common during Washington's wildfire season, many wildlife enthusiasts wonder: What happens to the birds?

Few studies have looked at wildfire smoke impacts on animals, let alone birds. As Washington and the larger West Coast continue to experience more massive wildfires and smoke-filled air, understanding how birds are affected by smokeand how air pollution may influence our ability to detect birdsare important factors for bird conservation.

Researchers from the University of Washington now provide a first look at the probability of observing common birds as air pollution worsens during wildfire seasons. They found that smoke affected the ability to detect more than a third of the bird species studied in Washington state over a four-year period. Sometimes smoke made it harder to observe birds, while other species were actually easier to detect when smoke was present. The results were published June 29 in the journal Ornithological Applications.

"We want to know how wildfire smoke affects birds and other wildlife, and this study is a great place to start," said lead author Olivia Sanderfoot, a doctoral candidate in the UW School of Environmental and Forest Sciences. "Smoke clearly has an impact on detection of wildlife, and that hasn't been adequately explored in the literature to date. Now we know that smoke pollution specifically affects our observations of birds and our ability to detect them."

The researchers combined data from eBird, an online citizen-science program managed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, with publicly available data from an extensive network of air quality monitors across Washington state. They were able to analyze how fine particulate matter, known as PM2.5 and a marker of smoke pollution, affected the probability of observing 71 common bird species during the wildfire seasons of 2015 to 2018. Higher concentrations of smoke affected the chances of observing 37%, or 26, of the bird species included in the study.

Sixteen of the bird species were harder to observe with more wildfire smoke, the study found. These include turkey vultures, Canada geese, two gull species, bald eagles and several other birds of prey. Many of these birds are observed circling high above the ground, so it's not surprising that people would have a harder time detecting them on smoky days, the authors said. However, 10 additional species were easier to observe when smoke concentrations were higher. These include three types of warblers, cedar waxwing, spotted towhee and California quail.

The reasons for this aren't clear and are outside of the scope of this study, but the authors lay out some hypotheses for future exploration. It could be that reduced visibility due to smoke pushes some birds lower to the ground where they can be more easily seen and heard. Or, as smoke prompts birds of prey to relocate, that could alleviate pressure on some songbirds and cause them to be more activeand thus more detectable by people.

"These behavioral changes are all hypotheticals, and we very much hope that researchers follow up on them because we have a lot to learn about how smoke affects wildlife," Sanderfoot said.

Conservation and management efforts rely on the ability to observe animals in the wild, and it's no different for birds. Air pollution clearly plays a role in detecting animals, and this paper makes the case that it should be considered alongside other factors like time of day, temperature and precipitation that all can influence observations of animals.

"If we see or hear birds more or less frequently because of smoke, that also impacts bigger inferences we make in terms of how certain bird populations are doing," said senior author Beth Gardner, an associate professor in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences. "We want to get that part right, so we first need to understand the effect of air pollution on how we're seeing birds in the wild."

The researchers chose a four-year study period that included some summers where wildfire smoke was heavy in parts of the state, and other summers where smoke was negligible. All of the species included in the study had to have had at least 750 observations recorded for the first year (2015), and all observations used were within about 20 miles (32 kilometers) of an air quality monitor in Washington.

Data from the catastrophic 2020 wildfire season was not part of this analysis, although air quality during that period was worse than in any of the years in the study. As extreme wildfire seasons like 2020 become more common, it's important to consider the influence of events like these in future studies, the researchers said.

Explore further Wildfire smoke more dangerous than other air pollutants for asthma patients

More information: Olivia V Sanderfoot et al, Wildfire smoke affects detection of birds in Washington State, Ornithological Applications (2021). Olivia V Sanderfoot et al, Wildfire smoke affects detection of birds in Washington State,(2021). DOI: 10.1093/ornithapp/duab028
The number of western lowland gorillas in Gabon, as seen in this archive picture from 2019, has fallen dramatically in the last 20 years.

A baby gorilla has been born in the wild in Gabon from two parents who grew up in captivity in Europe, in a world-first that was hailed by conservationists of the endangered species on Tuesday.

The baby gorilla is thought to have been delivered on the night of June 13 in the Bateke Plateau National Park in the southeast of Gabon in central Africa.

Its 13-year-old mother Mayombe was born in the ZooParc de Beauval in France, while 15-year-old father Djongo was raised in the Port Lympne Safari Park in southeast England.

The pair of western lowland gorillas were introduced to the Gabon park in 2019 and 2013 respectively and their mating represents a breakthrough in the complicated process of re-wilding.

"It's extraordinary news, a very significant world-first for the conservation of this species which is in serious danger of becoming extinct," Delphine Delord, assistant director of Beauval zoo, told AFP.

The Aspinall Foundation, which runs the Port Lympne Safari Park, reported the infant gorilla to be in good health.

It released photos and a video of Mayombe cradling her newborn, adding that it was "delighted to announce the first ever birth to re-wilded, captive-born gorillas."

"This is a pivotal moment for wildlife conservation and a hugely emotional day for our entire team," chairman Damian Aspinall said in a statement sent to AFP.

Almost 80 percent of Gabon is covered by forests, and primate habitation and protection programmes have been set up in its parks in recent years to boost tourism.

The number of western lowland gorillas has declined by 60 percent in the past 20-25 years, according to the Aspinall Foundation, with poaching and habitat loss chiefly to blame.

'Cruel nature'

Delord from Beauval zoo warned that the weeks and months ahead would be critical for the baby.

"Nature is cruel, anything can happen," she said. "The baby is fragile but for the moment Mayombe is holding her newborn in the perfect position and is feeding well.

"Djongo is approaching them very gently. We even saw him touch the baby on the camera traps that turn on when an animal passes.

"Male gorillas have a role to play in the development of their offspring. We're looking at the creation of a new troop here which will be boosted by the reintroduction of another female who was born in England," she added.

The Aspinall Foundation says it has released eight black rhino, 135 primates, 11 European bison, and over 70 western lowland gorillas back to the wild.

Djongo was introduced to the Bateke Plateau National Park in 2013 along with his father, Djala, a wild-born orphan who was brought to Britain in 1986 after he was found tied to a post by a uranium prospector.

Gabon, which borders the Republic of Congo and Cameroon, stopped allowing tourists to see its great apes last year fearing that humans could give the novel coronavirus to the animals.

Explore further 9 great apes get COVID-19 vaccinations at San Diego Zoo

 2021 AFP
China reels in as much as 70 percent of the global squid catch.

China has announced a temporary ban on its fishing fleetthe world's biggestfrom catching squid in parts of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans after overfishing pushed populations to the brink of collapse.

China reels in as much as 70 percent of the global squid catch, and its vessels sail as far as West Africa and Latin America to sate the growing appetite for seafood in the country.

But Chinese vessels will suspend operations in major global squid spawning grounds in the southwest Atlantic near Argentina from Thursday until September 30, and parts of the Pacific from September to November, the agriculture ministry said Monday.

The ban follows an international backlash against China's giant overseas fleet, with claims that they are overfishing and damaging fragile marine ecosystems.

Areas covered by the moratorium are breeding grounds for two of the most popular squid varietiesthe Argentine shortfin squid and the Humboldt squid.

Populations of the Argentine shortfin have been low in recent years, with the average catch by Chinese vessels in the southwest Atlantic only 50 tonnes in 2019 compared with up to 2,000 tonnes previously, according to the China squid fishing association.

"China is the world's biggest squid consumer and a depleting catch has left officials worried," said Zhou Wei, a marine ecosystem conservationist at Greenpeace China.

"Ensuring a stable seafood supply is important to ensure food security."

China's distant-water fishing fleet has over 2,600 vesselsmore than ten times that of the United States.

Nearly a third of it is engaged in squid fishing.

"A squid fishing baneven a temporary oneby China is pivotal to the health of the ocean given the sheer size of the catch," said Zhang Jihong, a marine biologist at China's Yellow Sea Fisheries Research Institute.

China's fishing industry employs more than 14 million people, and another 30 million rely on fish for their livelihood.

But as stocks at home deplete, Chinese fishermen have sailed further and become entangled in a growing number of maritime disputes.

Last year, hundreds of Chinese fishing vessels were seen around marine sanctuaries off Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands.

Indonesia has impounded scores of Chinese boats caught poaching in its waters in recent years, and clashes between Chinese fishermen and the South Korean coast guard have turned deadly.

A study last year also claimed a huge Chinese fishing fleet had been operating illegally in North Korean waters, catching hundreds of millions of dollars worth of squid.

Explore further How the Humboldt squid's genetic past and present can secure its future

 2021 AFP
Diluting of a blood sample. Credit: MPI for the Science of Light

Using real-time deformability cytometry, researchers at the Max-Planck-Zentrum fur Physik und Medizin in Erlangen were able to show for the first time: COVID-19 significantly changes the size and stiffness of red and white blood cellssometimes over months. These results may help to explain why some affected people continue to complain of symptoms long after an infection (long COVID).

Shortness of breath, fatigue and headaches: Some patients still struggle with the long-term effects of a severe infection by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus after six months or more. This post-COVID-19 syndrome, also called long COVID, is still not properly understood. What is clear is thatduring the course of the diseaseoften blood circulation is impaired, dangerous vascular occlusions can occur and oxygen transport in is limited. These are all phenomena in which the blood cells and their physical properties play a key role.

To investigate this aspect, a team of scientists led by Marketa Kubankova, Jochen Guck, and Martin Krater from the Max-Planck-Zentrum fur Physik und Medizin, the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL), the Friedrich Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg and the German Center for Immunotherapy measured the mechanical states of red and white blood cells. "We were able to detect clear and long-lasting changes in the cellsboth during an acute infection and even afterwards," reports Professor Guck, currently managing director of MPL. The research group has now published their results in the renowned journal Biophysical Journal.

Treatment of blood samples to measure physical properties of leukocytes and erythrocytes. Credit: MPL/Guck Division

To analyze the blood cells, they used a self-developed method called real-time deformability cytometry (RT-DC), which has recently been recognized with the prestigious Medical Valley Award. In this method, the researchers send the blood cells through a narrow channel at high speed. In the process, the leukocytes and erythrocytes are stretched. A high-speed camera records each of them through a microscope, and custom software determines which cell types are present, and how big and deformed they are. Up to 1000 blood cells can be analyzed per second. The advantage of the method: It is fast and the cells do not have to be labeled in a laborious procedure.

The method could help as an early warning system to detect future pandemics by unknown viruses

The biophysicists from Erlangen examined more than four million blood cells from 17 patients acutely ill with COVID-19, from 14 people who had recovered and 24 healthy people as a comparison group. They found that, for example, the size and deformability of the red blood cells of patients with the disease deviated strongly from those of healthy people. This indicates damage to these cells and could explain the increased risk of vascular occlusion and embolisms in the lungs. In addition, the oxygen supply, which is one of the main tasks of the erythrocytes, may be impaired in infected persons. Lymphocytes (one type of white blood cell responsible for the acquired immune defense) were in turn significantly softer in COVID-19 patients, which typically indicates a strong immune reaction. The researchers made similar observations for neutrophil granulocytes, another group of white blood cells involved in the innate immune response. These cells even remained drastically altered seven months after the acute infection.

"We suspect that the cytoskeleton of immune cells, which is largely responsible for cell function, has changed," explains Marketa Kubankova, first author of the research article. In her view, real-time deformability cytometry has the potential to be used routinely in the diagnosis of COVID-19and even to serve as an early warning system against future pandemics caused by as yet unknown viruses.

More information: Marketa Kubankova et al, Physical phenotype of blood cells is altered in COVID-19, Biophysical Journal (2021). Journal information: Biophysical Journal Marketa Kubankova et al, Physical phenotype of blood cells is altered in COVID-19,(2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.bpj.2021.05.025
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

A trio of researchers, one from Saint Louis University, the other two from the University of Chicago, has found that offering double-dose algebra instruction to struggling 9th grade students can lead to later benefits in collegebut only if the students are paired with helpful peers. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Takako Nomi, Stephen Raudenbush, and Jake Smith describe their study that involved monitoring the achievements of students who took part in double-dose algebra courses in 9th grade as they advanced through college.

Over the years, algebra has earned a reputation as being a difficult educational experience by many students due to its combination of math, logic and communication skills. For that reason, educators have looked for ways to help struggling students improve their results. One such approach has been named double-dose algebra, wherein struggling students simultaneously take both a standard algebra course and a follow-up course meant to reinforce lessons. In 2003, the Chicago Public School system instituted a policy that required students who did not meet certain grade levels in math to enroll in double-dose algebra. Doing so did not lead to overall improvements in state tests, but it did lead to higher scores on ACTs and a higher likelihood of students going to college. In this new effort, the research trio wondered if requiring struggling students to take double-dose courses had any longer-term impacts.

To find out, the researchers studied the achievements of Chicago Public School students as they entered and made their way through college after taking the double-dose algebra classes. In looking at the data, they found that such students who earned any sort of college degree improvedfrom 12% to 17% and from 6% to 10% for a four-year degree. But they also found that there was a catchthose students who did better also had helpful peers. In their study, they describe helpful peers as classmates who had similar struggles with algebra. They suggest their findings indicate that for double-dose algebra to be effective, school administrators need to keep struggling students together both in their algebra classes and in the follow-ups. They also note that more work needs to be done to find out if the double-dose courses are helpful for students performing at the very lowest levels.

Explore further Is algebra an unnecessary stumbling block in US schools?

More information: Takako Nomi et al, Effects of double-dose algebra on college persistence and degree attainment, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2021). Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Takako Nomi et al, Effects of double-dose algebra on college persistence and degree attainment,(2021). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2019030118

 2021 Science X Network
A jackdaw pair. Credit: Guillam E. McIvor

Male jackdaws don't stick around to console their mate after a traumatic experience, new research shows.

Jackdaws usually mate for life and, when breeding, females stay at the nest with eggs while males gather food.

Rival males sometimes visit the nest and attack the lone female, attempting to mate by force.

In the new study, University of Exeter researchers expected males to console their partner after these incidents by staying close and engaging in social behaviors like preening their partner's feathers.

However, males focused on their own safetythey still brought food to the nest, but they visited less often and spent less time with the female.

"Humans often console friends or family in distress, but it's unclear whether animals do this in the wild," said Beki Hooper, of the Centre for Ecology and Conservation on Exeter's Penryn Campus in Cornwall.

"Previous studies have found consolation-like behavior in some animals, but there is often another explanationother than consolationthat could motivate this.

"We designed this study to rule out other explanations, so we could find out whether jackdaws, which have complex social lives and life-long partnerships, would console each other.

"We found that male jackdaws could detect their partner's distress, but did not console them.

"The decreased time males spent in the nest after an attack may be for self-preservation, where they respond to distress in their partner by avoiding the nest, a potential place of danger.

Nest-box footage of a jackdaw pair allopreening (one bird preening another). Credit: Cornish Jackdaw Project

"Further work is needed to figure out why exactly males responded as they did, though."

The research team used both experimental nest "visits" of rival malesplaying the sounds of an approaching male to a female alone at the nestand recordings of males attacking nesting females in the wild.

Females became agitated after such experiences, and their returning mates clearly sensed this as their behavior changeddecreasing "affiliative" behavior and visiting the nest less regularly afterwards.

"Jackdaw pairs depend on each other for survival and reproduction, so based on current theory we would expect to see consolation after a traumatic event," said Dr. Alex Thornton.

"The absence of consolation is striking, and it challenges common conceptions about where consolation should evolve.

"It also chimes with concerns that current theory may be influenced by anthropomorphic (attributing human characteristics to animals) expectations of how social relationships work.

"To properly understand such social behavior among animals, we need to take account of the dangers and trade-offs they face in the wild."

Jackdaws are an extremely sociable and intelligent corvid species, with a similar number of neurons in their brains to nonhuman primates.

They show impressive levels of social intelligence, such as individual human recognition, and the ability to socially learn from group members about dangerous people.

The paper, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, is entitled: "Wild jackdaws respond to their partner's distress, but not with consolation."

Explore further Jackdaws learn from each other about 'dangerous' humans

More information: Wild jackdaws respond to their partner's distress, but not with consolation, Royal Society Open Science, royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.210253 Journal information: Royal Society Open Science Wild jackdaws respond to their partner's distress, but not with consolation,
The spectrum of ADF22-QG1. Credit: Kubo et al., 2021.

Using the Keck I telescope, Japanese astronomers have identified a massive quiescent galaxy in a distant galaxy protocluster known as SSA22. The galaxy, designated ADF22-QG1, turns out to be the most distant quiescent galaxy in a protocluster to date. The finding is reported in a paper published June 21 on the arXiv pre-print repository.

Massive galaxies that stopped forming stars (known as massive quiescent galaxies) are plausible progenitors of giant elliptical galaxies. Given that these objects formed stars earlier and assembled their stellar masses more quickly, they could be key to improving our understanding of the process of galaxy evolution.

In order to get more insights into the nature of massive quiescent galaxies it is also important to investigate their environments. However, these objects are mostly found in general elds or their environments are poorly explored and so far spectral characteristics of such galaxies have not yet been performed in galaxy protoclusters.

Hence, a group of astronomers led by Mariko Kubo of Ehime University inspected SSA22, a galaxy protocluster at a redshift of 3.09. Previous studies of SSA22 have shown that this large structure is an excellent place to observe the transition of starburst galaxies into quiescent ones. Kubo's team has employed the multi-object spectrometer for infrared exploration (MOSFIRE) at the Keck I telescope to search for massive quiescent galaxies in this protocluster.

"In this paper, we report the conrmation of a massive quiescent galaxy at the ADF22 eld of the SSA22 protocluster by detecting the absorption features spectroscopically with multi-object spectrometer for infrared exploration (MOSFIRE)," the researchers wrote in the study.

The observations confirmed the presence of ADF22-QG1 in the protocluster SSA22 by detecting the Balmer and Ca II absorption features with MOSFIRE. The data show that the object is a massive galaxy with suppressed star formation.

The astronomers estimate that ADF22-QG1 experienced a sudden quenching of star formation about 600 million years ago. Its current star formation rate was calculated to be less than 0.3 solar masses per year.

According to the paper, ADF22-QG1 has an effective radius of about 3,270 light years and is as a member of an extremely dense group of massive galaxies and submillimeter galaxies (SMGs) predicted as a progenitor of brightest cluster galaxies (BCGs) in cosmological numerical simulations.

"Here, we conrm a compact massive quiescent galaxy as a secure progenitor of a giant elliptical or brightest cluster galaxy (BCG) in a cluster of galaxies today," the astronomers wrote.

The study also conrmed three plausible emitters of ionized oxygen [O III] around ADF22-QG1. The authors of the paper noted that two of them are possible evidence of the interaction between the quiescent galaxy and its nearest massive galaxy.

Explore further A massive protocluster of merging galaxies in the early universe

More information: A massive quiescent galaxy confirmed in a protocluster at z = 3.09, arXiv:2106.10798 [astro-ph.GA] A massive quiescent galaxy confirmed in a protocluster at z = 3.09, arXiv:2106.10798 [astro-ph.GA] arxiv.org/abs/2106.10798

 2021 Science X Network
Banded mongooses live in social groups called troops. Researchers are using genetic tools to track movements of mongooses living in urban centers and natural areas in Botswana to gain insight into how to better model disease transmission among wild animals living across complex landscapes. Credit: Kathleen Alexander, Virginia Tech.

Under a concrete drainage culvert at the edge of a town in Botswana, a troop of banded mongoose is getting ready to leave its den. Moving from shade into light, the cat-sized animals scan the area for signs of danger and for opportunities to find something to eat in an increasingly crowded neighborhood.

Unbeknownst to them, the genetics of this troop's membersand others like themare providing researchers in the College of Natural Resources and Environment with new understandings of how and why animal behavior changes in proximity to human development and how that change can impact infectious disease spread.

The researchers used genetic tools to identify changes in movement behavior among mongooses living in urban centers and natural areas, gaining important insights into how to better model disease transmission among wild animals living across complex landscapes. Results of their study, which was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation's Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases program, have been published in the journal Ecology and Evolution.

"The question has always been how do we predict what's going to happen once an infectious disease emerges," said Kathleen Alexander, the William E. Lavery Professor in the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation. "By using systems that are tractable, we can begin to learn a lot more about how disease dynamics are shaped by host behavior and environmental drivers, including urbanizing landscapes."

One tractable system can be found with social groups of banded mongooses, also known as troops, that live across urban and natural areas in Botswana. Over the past 20 years, researchers from the Chobe Research Institute and CARACAL, a nonprofit organization co-founded by Alexander, have been observing the behaviors of mongoose troops in the natural environment of Chobe National Park and in increasingly urban centers, such as Kasane.

Botswana's banded mongooses are ideal study subjects because they live in territorial social groups across the landscape, and, in northern Botswana, are infected with a novel tuberculosis pathogen closely related to human tuberculosis.

"We're looking for dispersal behaviors and movement of mongooses that may allow disease transmission to occur between these mongoose troops," said Professor Eric Hallerman, who specializes in population genetics and is a co-author of the paper. "This species tends to live in troop structures that are resistant to immigration from other troops, so it's important to know how they are moving across the landscape and interacting."

"They're a difficult species to follow on the ground because they look so similar, unlike, for example, cheetahs, which can be individually identified by their spots," continued Hallerman, who, along with Alexander, is an affiliate of Virginia Tech's Fralin Life Sciences Institute. "You can put ear tags and other markers on them, but they often lose the marks, making it difficult to track individuals across troops. Genetic approaches provide the key to addressing these difficulties."

To do so, the researchers needed samples. "We decided that the best option for trying to capture the most genetic diversity from the troops was to collect fresh stool samples," said Kelton Verble, the paper's lead author, who completed his master's degree in fisheries and wildlife sciences at Virginia Tech in 2018. He refined sample collection processes, tracking mongooses across landscape types and collecting fecal samples from a wide variety of troops.

"We also looked at the health status of the mongooses that moved between study troops," he said. "Our previous data indicated that tuberculosis-infected animals tended not to disperse, and data from this study supports this original finding."

Genetic data obtained from microsatellite DNA markers within the genome sequence of each animal allowed Verble to not only identify individuals that had moved between troops in their lifetime, but also characterize the general genetic makeup of the various troops across the landscapehow were individuals connected and how would this influence disease transmission potential?

"With this study, we really wanted to explicitly investigate dispersal and clarify what was happening between and among troops across land type," said Alexander, who is also an affiliate of the Fralin Life Sciences Institute's new Center for Emerging, Zoonotic, and Arthropod-Borne Pathogens. "What we saw was that these urban landscapes were not only changing foraging behaviors, aggression, and den use, but also dispersal behaviors and, consequently, disease transmission potential."

The researchers discovered that mongooses living in urban landscapes were more likely to disperse to other troops in this land type, thereby increasing the chance of tuberculosis transmission. With more abundant, human-associated food sources, troops nearer to the city were also more likely to share dens and have overlapping home ranges.

"The banded mongoose is typically regarded as a philopatric species, meaning that if they're born to a troop, they stay there for life," said Verble, who is now working on a doctorate in genomics at the University of Alabama. "What we learned is that there was a lot more swapping of individuals between troops than had been recognized, which is crucial for predicting disease spread."

Such findings have implications not only for disease transmission among animals but also for understanding how zoonotic diseases, such as COVID-19, transfer from animals to humans and how urbanization might impact that spread.

"We've never been very good at predicting disease-emergence events," Alexander said. "We don't know when a pathogen will emerge, and we have trouble predicting what will happen when it does because there are so many possible influences. For zoonotic pathogens, it will be increasingly important to understand how animals interact with and are influenced by transforming landscapes and growing urban centers, information critical to advancing our toolkit for tackling public and animal health challenges."

Explore further Banded mongoose study reveals how its environment influences the spread of infectious disease

More information: Kelton Verble et al, Urban landscapes increase dispersal, gene flow, and pathogen transmission potential in banded mongoose (Mungos mungo) in northern Botswana, Ecology and Evolution (2021). Journal information: Ecology and Evolution Kelton Verble et al, Urban landscapes increase dispersal, gene flow, and pathogen transmission potential in banded mongoose (Mungos mungo) in northern Botswana,(2021). DOI: 10.1002/ece3.7487
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk said Tuesday he plans to invest up to 30 billion dollars to develop his ambitious Starlink satellite internet service.

Starlink plans to deploy thousands of low-orbit satellites to provide high-speed internet to isolated and poorly connected areas.

It has so far deployed over 1,500 satellites and by August it will be able to provide coverage everywhere in the world except the North and South Poles, Musk told the Mobile World Congress, a telecoms industry conference underway in Barcelona, by video.

The Tesla chief said he expects to invest "at least five billion dollars, and maybe as much as ten billion" in Starlink before the service has a positive cash flow.

"Then over time it is going to be a multiple of that, and that would be 20 or 30 billion dollars. It is a lot basically," he added.

Starlink is currently operating in about a dozen countries, with more being added, and it currently has just over 69,000 active users, Musk said.

"We are on our way I think to having a few hundred thousand users, possibly over 500,000 users, within 12 months," he added.

"There is a need for connectivity in places that don't have it right now, or where it is very limited."

Musk said Starlink sells its terminals for $500 even though they cost the company over $1,000 to make, so his team is working to develop a model that is less expensive. He hopes to come up with a temrinal that costs the company just $220 to $250.

"Obviously selling terminals at half price is not super compelling," he said.

Musk said Starlink had two partnerships with "major company telcos" and was "in discussions with a number" of others, without giving further details.

He said Starlink could help telecom firms meet rural connectivity requirements contained in licences for the new superfast 5G cellular networks which are being deployed around the world.

Musk's SpaceX firm, which operates Starlink, has requested authorisation from US regulator the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to deploy up to 42,000 satellites to provide the satellite internet service.

Starlink faces competition from a number of rivals including OneWeb, a broadband satellite communications company acquired by a consortium of investors comprising the UK government and Sunil Mittal-led Bharti Global, and Amazon subsidiary Kuiper.

By the end of 2020 some 5.2 billion people, or 67 percent of the global population, subscribed to mobile services, according to the GSMA, industry body which organises the annual mobile congress.

 2021 AFP
Jung-Tsung Shen, associate professor in the Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering, has developed a deterministic, high-fidelity, two-bit quantum logic gate that takes advantage of a new form of light. This new logic gate is orders of magnitude more efficient than the current technology. Credit: Jung-Tsung Shen

Research from the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis has found a missing piece in the puzzle of optical quantum computing.

Jung-Tsung Shen, associate professor in the Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering, has developed a deterministic, high-fidelity two-bit quantum logic gate that takes advantage of a new form of light. This new logic gate is orders of magnitude more efficient than the current technology.

"In the ideal case, the fidelity can be as high as 97%," Shen said.

His research was published in May 2021 in the journal Physical Review A.

The potential of quantum computers is bound to the unusual properties of superposition the ability of a quantum system to contain many distinct properties, or states, at the same timeand entanglementtwo particles acting as if they are correlated in a non-classical manner, despite being physically removed from each other.

Where voltage determines the value of a bit (a 1 or a 0) in a classical computer, researchers often use individual electrons as "qubits," the quantum equivalent. Electrons have several traits that suit them well to the task: they are easily manipulated by an electric or magnetic field and they interact with each other. Interaction is a benefit when you need two bits to be entangledletting the wilderness of quantum mechanics manifest.

But their propensity to interact is also a problem. Everything from stray magnetic fields to power lines can influence electrons, making them hard to truly control.

For the past two decades, however, some scientists have been trying to use photons as qubits instead of electrons. "If computers are going to have a true impact, we need to look into creating the platform using light," Shen said.

Photons have no charge, which can lead to the opposite problems: they do not interact with the environment like electrons, but they also do not interact with each other. It has also been challenging to engineer and to create ad hoc (effective) inter-photon interactions. Or so traditional thinking went.

Less than a decade ago, scientists working on this problem discovered that, even if they weren't entangled as they entered a logic gate, the act of measuring the two photons when they exited led them to behave as if they had been. The unique features of measurement are another wild manifestation of quantum mechanics.

"Quantum mechanics is not difficult, but it's full of surprises," Shen said.

The measurement discovery was groundbreaking, but not quite game-changing. That's because for every 1,000,000 photons, only one pair became entangled. Researchers have since been more successful, but, Shen said, "It's still not good enough for a computer," which has to carry out millions to billions of operations per second.

Shen was able to build a two-bit quantum logic gate with such efficiency because of the discovery of a new class of quantum photonic statesphotonic dimers, photons entangled in both space and frequency. His prediction of their existence was experimentally validated in 2013, and he has since been finding applications for this new form of light.

When a single photon enters a logic gate, nothing notable happensit goes in and comes out. But when there are two photons, "That's when we predicted the two can make a new state, photonic dimers. It turns out this new state is crucial."

Mathematically, there are many ways to design a logic gate for two-bit operations. These different designs are called equivalent. The specific logic gate that Shen and his research group designed is the controlled-phase gate (or controlled-Z gate). The principal function of the controlled-phase gate is that the two photons that come out are in the negative state of the two photons that went in.

"In classical circuits, there is no minus sign," Shen said. "But in quantum computing, it turns out the minus sign exists and is crucial."

When two independent photons (representing two optical qubits) enter the logic gate, "The design of the logic gate is such that the two photons can form a photonic dimer," Shen said. "It turns out the new quantum photonic state is crucial as it enables the output state to have the correct sign that is essential to the optical logic operations."

Shen has been working with the University of Michigan to test his design, which is a solid-state logic gateone that can operate under moderate conditions. So far, he says, results seem positive.

Shen says this result, while baffling to most, is clear as day to those in the know.

"It's like a puzzle," he said. "It may be complicated to do, but once it's done, just by glancing at it, you will know it's correct."

More information: Zihao Chen et al, Two-photon controlled-phase gates enabled by photonic dimers, Physical Review A (2021). Journal information: Physical Review A Zihao Chen et al, Two-photon controlled-phase gates enabled by photonic dimers,(2021). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.103.052610
One of over 7,000 lists of names from concentration camps in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. This one is a handwritten list of Serbian and Croatian women who were deported to the Jasenovac concentration camp. Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Aerospace engineering faculty member Melkior Ornik is also a mathematician, a history buff, and a strong believer in integrity when it comes to using hard science in public discussions. So, when a story popped up in his news feed about a pair of researchers who developed a statistical method to analyze datasets and used it to purportedly refute the number of Holocaust victims from a concentration camp in Croatia, it naturally caught his attention.

Ornik is a professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He proceeded to study the research in depth and used the method to re-analyze the same data from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Then he wrote a rebuttal paper debunking the researchers' findings.

Ornik's rebuttal is published in the same journal as the original article. He said the editor asked him to include a list of answers to some of the potential questions other scientists may have when they read his paper. A few weeks later, the journal placed a note on the original article stating that they do not endorse or share the authors' views, and recommended reading Ornik's paper.

"As scientists, as engineers, I think it's our duty to correct flawed and faulty science," Ornik said. "There is so much effort to get the public and policymakers to believe in the science, that when a math expert says they have proof, it brings credence to the argument. But when their claims are demonstrably not true, it's not good for science and it's not good for society. That's why it's especially important for scientists to challenge false findings when we discover them."

According to Ornik, some individuals promote the view that concentration camps either didn't exist or weren't used to kill people, or that the currently widely accepted numbers of victims have been substantially inflated. Most historians do not take the claims seriously in light of vast available data and evidence.

"For the authors of the original paper to claim that they have found mathematical proof that the list of victims of that camp was fabricated has obvious historical implications," Ornik said. "I think, to some extent the damage has already been done, but I felt the need to go on record with the assumptions, inaccuracies, and misuse of the raw museum data I found in the original research."

The paper Ornik responded to presents a novel method to identify anomalies across a set of histograms. Ornik said he does not dispute the merits of the method presented in the original paper, just its application to the Jasenovac concentration camp.

Comparison of the original outlier identification model and three models derived from it. Due to the inapplicability of its assumptions to the considered dataset, the original model has no theoretical foundation. Three alternative models are less biased to size than the original model and produce opposing results. Credit: Melkior Ornik

Ornik became suspicious of the paper's conclusions because the researchers implied in one case that a smaller list naturally has a smaller outlier score, but they compared scores across victim list sizes to claim that the one related to Jasenovac, one of the biggest ones, was problematic.

"I started looking to see if there was some sort of a bias for the size and whether they were actually more likely to assign the flag of being problematic to a larger list or not. And it turns out, despite the authors' claims, they were," Ornik said. "The bigger lists are more likely to be computed to be problematic than the smaller lists when their method is applied to the data."

Ornik, who commonly uses similar statistical analysis in aerospace applications, explained another reason that their statistical argument doesn't work.

"When you look at data, a collection of anything, and you want to figure out an outliersomething that's differentyou need to assume that all of the pieces of data come from the same source, the same distribution. Take a list of victims by birth year. It would yield a graph of the ages of each person. Say 10 percent are older than 70 years old. Now, that distribution wouldn't be true for a list of deported children, for example, because that list, by definition, is structurally different. It is also different from a list of everyone who has an identity card. Identity cards are issued only to people who are not children. Yet, the lists that these researchers worked with came from a multitude of sources and include lists of children, lists of people getting married, lists of prisoners of warthings that by definition cannot have come from the same distribution."

Another major error in the original paper, Ornik said, is that some duplicate lists were treated as two separate lists. This meant that approximately 67 percent of their entire database was actually sub-lists of the larger list.

"The 7,000-plus lists published online by the Holocaust Museum are not curated," Ornik said. "For instance, there are two lists that contain exactly the same data; one is in Cyrillic and the other one uses the Latin alphabet. But they treated them as two separate lists. There are other lists that contain the same name, but there is no way of knowing if they are the same person or two different people born on the same day with identical names. They could have removed the very egregious errors in which a list is clearly duplicated but the rest, you would need access to the original historic data."

Both the original paper and Ornik's paper, "Comment on 'TVOR: Finding Discrete Total Variation Outliers Among Histograms,'" are published in IEEE Access.

More information: Melkior Ornik, Comment on "TVOR: Finding Discrete Total Variation Outliers Among Histograms," IEEE Access (2021). Melkior Ornik, Comment on "TVOR: Finding Discrete Total Variation Outliers Among Histograms,"(2021). DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3082900

Provided by University of Illinois Grainger College of Engineering
A man cools off in the Salmon Street springs fountain in Portland, Oregon on June 28, 2021, as a heatwave moves over much of the United States.

Schools and COVID-19 vaccination centers closed Monday while community cooling centers opened as western Canada and parts of the western United States baked in an unprecedented heat wave that broke several temperature records.

Lytton in British Columbia broke the record for Canada's all-time high Monday, with a temperature of 118 degrees Fahrenheit (47.9 degrees Celsius), just one day after the village set the previous record at 116 degrees.

Temperatures in the US Pacific Northwest cities of Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington reached levels not seen since record-keeping began in the 1940s: 115 degrees in Portland and 108 in Seattle, according to the National Weather Service.

"It's a desert heatvery dry and hot," David Phillips, a senior climatologist for Environment Canada, told AFP.

"We are the second coldest country in the world and the snowiest," he said. "We often see cold snaps and blizzards but not often do we talk about hot weather like this."

"Dubai would be cooler than what we're seeing now."

The extreme heat, combined with intense drought, created the perfect conditions for several fires to break out over the weekend, and one blaze on the California-Oregon border had already burned some 600 hectares (1,500 acres) by Monday morning.

Climate change is causing record-setting temperatures to become more frequent. Globally, the decade to 2019 was the hottest recorded, and the five hottest years have all occurred within the last five years.

"Normally it's probably like, maybe 60, 70 degrees is a great dayeverybody is outside in shorts and T-shirtsbut this is... ridiculous," one Seattle resident told AFP Sunday, when the mercury hit 104 Fahrenheit. "I feel like I'm in the desert or something."

Oregon's biggest city, Portland, hit 44.4 degrees Celsius (112 degrees Fahrenheit).

Amazon opened part of its Seattle headquarters to the public as a cooling-off location Monday, with space available for 1,000 people.

Most homes in the cityusually known for its cool and wet climatedo not have air conditioning.

Residents in Portland also found refuge in cooling centers set up by local authorities, resting on mattresses and folding chairs.

In nearby Eugene, organizers were forced to postpone the final day of the US Olympic track and field trials, moving afternoon events to the evening.

'Prolonged, dangerous and historic'

Across the border in Canada, stores sold out of portable air conditioners and fans, while cities opened emergency cooling centers and outreach workers handed out bottles of water and hats as more than 160 local heat records were set, including in the ski resort town of Whistler.

Several COVID-19 vaccination clinics were canceled and schools announced they would close due to the extreme heat.

In Vancouver, officials set up temporary water fountains and misting stations on street corners, while forest and fisheries services warned of extreme wildfire risks and low lake and river water levels impacting fish.

Beaches and pools were packed while emergency services, overwhelmed with calls, warned of delays for ambulances.

Cities have opened emergency cooling centers as the mecury soars across the Pacific Northwest.

Several people without cooling at home told AFP they slept overnight in their air conditioned cars or in underground parking garages, some with their pets.

Others shared instructions on how to assemble makeshift chillers using a fan attached to a box filled with bags of ice.

Environment Canada issued alerts for British Columbia, Alberta, and parts of Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Yukon and the Northwest Territories, saying the "prolonged, dangerous and historic heat wave will persist through this week."

The NWS issued a similar warning, saying Monday the "dangerous," "oppressive" and "unprecedented" heat would stick around in the region until midweek.

"Residents are urged to stay in air-conditioned buildings, avoid strenuous outdoor activities, drink plenty of water, and check on family members/neighbors."

The scorching heat has been blamed on a high-pressure ridge trapping warm air in the region.

This heat dome poses "serious" health concerns, said Phillips, noting the last major heatwave in Canada left nearly 70 people dead in 2018.

"And it's not just a one-day wonder. It's a seven-day kind of thing," he said, with temperatures forecast to reach 47 degrees Celsius (117 Fahrenheit) or higher.

Nick Bond, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington, said the freak weather event was not entirely due to climate change, but was exacerbated by it.

"Climate change is a factor here, but definitely a secondary one," he said.

 2021 AFP
Fifth-grade teacher Amanda Cardona talks with 9-year-old Ray Urias about an assignment, Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2020, in her classroom at St. John's Episcopal School in Odessa Texas. As the nation closes out a school year marred by the pandemic, some states are now starting to release new standardized test scores that offer an early glimpse at just how far students have fallen behindwith some states reporting that the turbulent year has reversed years of progress across every academic subject. Credit: Ben Powell/Odessa American via AP

The scores from the first U.S. standardized tests taken during the pandemic are offering an early glimpse of just how far students have fallen behind, with some states reporting that the turbulent year has reversed years of academic progress.

Texas education officials offered a grim report Monday as the state became one of the first to release full results from its spring exams. The percentage of students reading at their grade level slid to the lowest levels since 2017, while math scores plummeted to their lowest point since 2013. In total, about 800,000 additional students are now behind their grade level in math, the state said.

"The impact of the coronavirus on what school means, and what school is, has been truly profound," said Mike Morath, the state's education commissioner. "It will take several years of change and support in order to help kids catch up."

Other states have shared previews of alarming results.

In Florida, officials said reading scores dropped by 4 percentage points compared to 2019, the last time the statewide tests were administered. In Indiana, state officials are warning of a drop in reading scores and a "significant decline" in math.

Experts warn that low participation rates in some regions could leave entire states with unreliable data, and that even within states there are pockets where many families opted out. In Texas, 86% of students took the tests this spring, down from a typical rate of 96%.

Still, the early results provide some of the firmest data yet detailing the effects of the March 2020 school shutdowns, the switch to virtual learning and related disruptions. They also line up with trends seen in national studies over the past year: Students are behind in reading and even farther behind in math.

Setbacks are sharpest among students of color and those from low-income families. Across all student groups, those who spent more time learning in-person had better exam scores.

"It's a little sickening to see the bottom drop out for so many kids," said Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington. "Clearly remote learning has been hitting the most vulnerable kids the hardest. It's what we were expecting, but it's still tough to see."

Morath said the results underscore the need for a strong return to in-person learning this fall. In districts with many students learning online, the share who failed to meet math standards grew by 32 percentage points. In districts with more in-person learning, by comparison, the failure rate increased by 9 points.

That divide was wider than the gaps between students based on race or income, but the data also found that white students had higher scores than their Black and Hispanic peers, and students from wealthier families had much higher scores than those from poverty.

"These are not numbers, these are children," Morath said, "and this represents how well we have supported them in their continued academic growth."

In this May 18, 2021 file photo, fifth graders wearing face masks are seated at proper social distancing during a music class at the Milton Elementary School in Rye, N.Y. As the nation closes out a school year marred by the pandemic, some states are now starting to release new standardized test scores that offer an early glimpse at just how far students have fallen behindwith some states reporting that the turbulent year has reversed years of progress across every academic subject. New York, Georgia and some other states pushed to cancel testing for a second year so schools could focus on classroom learning. Credit: AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File

He called out school districts that were slower to return to in-person learning, including in El Paso, saying they saw steeper learning setbacks compared to rural schools that reopened classrooms quickly. In El Paso Independent School District, 64% of eighth-graders fell short of math standards this spring, compared to 20% in 2019, according to state data.

The president of the El Paso Teachers Association, Norma De La Rosa, said teachers did the best they could with virtual instruction although the model prevented them from giving extra attention to children who might have needed it.

The El Paso district kept instruction online until January, when the state threatened to pull funding from schools that did not offer in-person learning. During remote learning, some families spent long stretches in Mexico and many others struggled with internet access. Given those challenges, De La Rosa said, the test results are not surprising.

Clay Robison, spokesperson for the Texas State Teachers Association, said the data show there's no replacement for in-person learning. But he also said that giving families opportunities to learn remotely probably prevented more deaths from COVID-19.

"We were in the middle of a deadly pandemic and we are sure it saved the lives of some students, it saved the lives of some school employees, it saved the lives of some members of their families and it was necessary," Robison said. "Fortunately, most Texas students and teachers lived to learn another day."

In typical years, Texas uses its annual tests to rate schools and determine whether students can move to the next grade. But state officials suspended those measures during the pandemic and said tests should be used to identify students who need the most help. All students who fell short of testing standards will be entitled to intensive tutoring next school year under new legislation passed by lawmakers last month.

In Indiana, which is expected to release test results this week, lawmakers passed a "hold harmless" bill so that poor test results won't be used against teachers or schools. The state also set aside $150 million to address learning loss, much of which is being spent on grants to expand summer learning programs.

Students across the U.S. had a year off from the federally required tests last year after the Trump administration suspended exams while the coronavirus raged. But the Biden administration ordered states to resume exams this year with new flexibility. States were told not to order students to come to school just to take tests, and the Education Department granted some states additional leeway to modify exams or test fewer students.

Some states continued to push for a full cancellation of tests, including in New York, Michigan and Georgia. The Education Department denied their requests but allowed Washington, D.C., to skip exams because 88% of students were still learning remotely.

The uneven flexibility drew criticism from testing advocates who say it created a patchwork of state testing plans. With so much variation, they say, it will be difficult to get a clear national picture of the pandemic's impact.

Education experts are especially concerned about students who won't appear in the new results. Those who opted out of exams are more likely to have been learning remotely, researchers say, and may be among students who will need the most help.

Lake, of the University of Washington, said she's worried about homeless students, along with students who are learning English and those who have special needs. She fears they may be among the "missing kids" who didn't take tests.

"This is the tip of the iceberg," Lake said. "These numbers are the very start of what we're beginning to understand. And there's potential for these kids to continue to decline if there aren't quick interventions."

Explore further As US schools resume testing, large numbers are opting out

 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Research by Vanderbilt's Latin American Public Opinion Lab found that in Haiti, the COVID-19 pandemic rallied support for the incumbent administration, even though the public's commitment to it and to democracy itself was weak before the pandemic. The paper, published in PLOS ONE, was co-authored by Noam Lupu, associate professor of political science and associate director of LAPOP, and Elizabeth J. Zechmeister, Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Political Science and director of LAPOP.

Other LAPOP surveys have found that commitment to the most fundamental tenet of democracyregular electionshas been wavering. The COVID-19 pandemic occurred during that shift, which could have created fertile conditions for decreased support for democracy in a country like Haiti, where there is high corruption and weak rule of law.

"The majority of public opinion research related to the pandemic has focused on developed, wealthy democracies. So we wanted to knowhow might a monumental health crisis shape attitudes in less developed contexts, like Haiti?" Lupu said. "Our goal was to assess whether and how the introduction of a new crisisthe COVID-19 pandemicwould shift public opinion toward the president, elections and democracy. Does the public lash out against the incumbent government, does it rally around the executive as if the pandemic were an act of war, or does it shift in deference to authority and authoritarian principles?"

To answer these research questions, the authors conducted a phone survey of a nationally representative sample of Haitians from April 23 to June 10, 2020, with 2,028 voting-age respondents. The questionnaire was structured such that half the respondents were asked 10 questions about views on the pandemic and then a set of questions on various topics that included the issues of interest: presidential approval, support for postponing elections, tolerance for coups and support for democracy. The other half of the respondents answered in the reverse order, being asked the second set of questions before being asked the 10 questions about the pandemic.

They found that considering the pandemic first modestly boosted responses that indicated presidential approval and intentions to vote for the incumbent president. This result shows that a rally effect can occur even in the most unlikely of placesan unstable context in which the president is struggling to maintain order and support. They did not find data supporting the notion that the onset of the pandemic eroded democratic attitudes, even in an unstable context like Haiti.

The authors also found evidence of increased deference toward the executive's authority, which may be an under-explored outgrowth of rally dynamics. When asked if the president ought to be given leeway to postpone elections in the face of a major health crisis, like the COVID-19 pandemic, the vast majority of Haitians agreed, and they were even more likely to do so if they answered the set of pandemic questions first.

"Then-Mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani, floated postponing his departure from office while riding a wave of approval following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, for example," Zechmeister said. "However, we find no evidence of a broader shift in democratic attitudes. Our data show that support for a democratic form of government held steady, and that the onset of the pandemic does not appear to have bolstered a broader set of authoritarian attitudes in Haiti. Our results are reassuring for those who worry that the pandemic will inevitably undermine democratic values."

Explore further As many state of emergency declarations during the first wave of the pandemic as in the preceding decade

More information: Noam Lupu et al, The early COVID-19 pandemic and democratic attitudes, PLOS ONE (2021). Journal information: PLoS ONE Noam Lupu et al, The early COVID-19 pandemic and democratic attitudes,(2021). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0253485
Eileen Kladivko collects soil samples using a hydraulic probe truck in the study fields that have been researched for more than 30 years to help farmers understand their farm management options. Credit: Eileen Kladivko

As most kids know, a big pile of mud can be a load of fun.

But not for farmers. Muddy fields mean too much water. And too much water means crops might not grow well.

Farmers often install underground drains, called tile drains, in waterlogged soils to help move the excess water away quickly. The drier soils are beneficial to their crops.

But there is one potential downside: nitrogen. In the form of nitrate, nitrogen contaminates waterways. Plus, any nitrogen that leaves the field means wasted money for the farmer, who paid for fertilizer.

How can farmers balance draining their fields with holding onto nitrogen? For starters, they can turn to a decades-long experiment out of Purdue University. Results were published in the Journal of Environmental Quality.

For 31 years, researchers have studied how different farming practices and drainage strategies affect crop growth and nitrogen loss from fields.

"Drainage is a necessary practice on naturally wet soils. So it's common on our productive soils in much of the Midwest," says Eileen Kladivko, a member of the Soil Science Society of America. "But since the soil is leaky by nature, we want to know how we can reduce that nitrate concentration and load and still have good drainage."

Water flows out of a tile drain and into a nearby ditch in Indiana. Although draining waterlogged fields improves crop growth, drainage water carries nitrate, a water contaminant. Credit: J. Frankenberger

In their latest research, scientists share how fields performed in the last 16 years compared to the prior 15 years. In particular, they focused on the effect of different degrees of drainage.

Tile drains can be placed at different distances across a field. The closer they are, the faster they can drain water away from fields.

At the study fields in Indiana, drains were spaced either 5, 10 or 20 meters apart. As Kladivko's group expected, the closer the pipes were, the more water flowed through them every year.

The concentration of nitrate in the water was the same regardless of drain spacing. But because closer drains led to more water flow, the total amount of nitrogen that left fields was higher when drains were closer together.

"The bottom line is that when the drains are closer together, they're put there for the reason of draining more water faster," says Kladivko. "So if we drain more water faster, we also drain more nitrate."

The researchers also saw that most of the nitrate that left farm fields did so during the off season, when no big crops were around to use the nutrients.

Over 31 years, the researchers changed how they managed the fields. For example, they switched from growing only corn to crop rotations between corn and soybeans. They also reduced the amount of fertilizer they applied. And they started to plant cover crops, which grow during the off season. These changes followed the latest research and mirrored current practices farmers are using.

The installation of a drainage pipe. These drains help remove water from waterlogged fields, which helps crops grow better. Credit: J. Kjaersgaard

Because of these changes, the concentration of nitrate in the leaching water today is only a quarter of what it was three decades ago. This lower concentration means that less total nitrate leaches out than in the past.

The researchers noticed another trend. In wet years, more nitrate left farm fields because more water was there to carry it away. Recent years have been wetter, likely due to the changing climate.

"The takeaway is that as hard as we try, we cannot control every aspect of our farm fields," says Kladivko.

Because a lot of nitrate left fields in the winter, some farmers could use a system called controlled drainage to make smart seasonal choices. With controlled drainage, farmers can allow fields to be wetter and drain slower in the winter when wet fields won't hurt crops. Then in the spring, they can let drains work at full-speed and drain quickly.

And, because the fastest drainage doesn't help crops grow that much better, farmers can choose wider drain spacing, which also saves money on installation.

"My message to farmers is don't over drain," says Kladivko. "Try to determine the widest possible spacing that allows for close to optimum yield."

Explore further New technology helps farmers to remove nitrates from drainage

More information: Eileen J. Kladivko et al, Longterm impacts of drain spacing, crop management, and weather on nitrate leaching to subsurface drains, Journal of Environmental Quality (2021). Journal information: Journal of Environmental Quality Eileen J. Kladivko et al, Longterm impacts of drain spacing, crop management, and weather on nitrate leaching to subsurface drains,(2021). DOI: 10.1002/jeq2.20215
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

Despite soybeans' high protein and oil content and their potential to boost food security on the continent, Africa produces less than 1% of the world's soybean crop. Production lags, in part, because most soybean cultivars are bred for North and South American conditions that don't match African environments.

Researchers from the Soybean Innovation Lab (SIL), a U.S. Agency for International Development-funded project led by the University of Illinois, are working to change that. In a new study, published in Agronomy, they have developed methods to help breeders improve soybean cultivars specifically for African environments, with the intention of creating fast-maturing lines that will bolster harvests and profits for smallholder farmers.

"It is important for producers and breeders to know when a cultivar is going to mature: that moment when a plant is at full capacity and performing its best. We were motivated to fill in gaps of knowledge around maturity timing in Africa," says Guillermo Marcillo, postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Crop Sciences at U of I, and first author on the new study.

Marcillo and his collaborators capitalized on five years of SIL performance trials, encompassing 176 cultivars and experimental lines grown across 68 African sites. The trials are part of SIL's Pan-African Variety Trials (SIL-PAT) network, currently operating across 100 sites and 24 countries.

The researchers analyzed cultivar time-to-maturity against environmental variables, including temperature, day length, and elevation, using a statistical method known as a generalized additive model (GAM). The model was able to predict soybean time-to-maturity within 10 days for cultivars planted across Africa.

"The methodology we implemented is quite innovative, introducing data-driven algorithms and conventional breeding statistics to capture interactions between cultivars and environment in different areas," Marcillo says.

It was important to use a new statistical method to analyze the multi-environment dataset, according to Nicolas Martin, assistant professor in the Department of Crop Sciences and co-author on the study.

"Multi-environment trials allow breeders to analyze crop performance across diverse conditions, but also pose statistical challenges because of unbalanced data. Modern statistical methods, including GAM, can flexibly smooth a range of responses while retaining observations that could be lost under other approaches," he says.

The researchers found environmental factors, specifically daily minimum temperature and change in day length between planting and maturity, were far more important than genotypic differences in predicting time-to-maturity.

"Our study is the first systematic quantification of the effects of these two drivers in Africa," Marcillo says. "We know how temperature and day length affect maturity timing in the U.S., Brazil, and Argentina, but in Africa it's quite a big unknown. If we sent farmers cultivars from these regions, their environments might speed up or slow down maturity quite a bit. This knowledge is a big gain for Africa."

Michelle Da Fonseca Santos, who manages the SIL-PAT trial, notes minimum temperature depends on different factors in Africa compared to soybean-growing regions in North and South America.

"Low temperature is inversely related to elevation. In North and South America, we don't have much variation in elevation, so it's easy for us to divide maturity groups by latitude," she says. "But in Africa, for example in Kenya, if we try to plant the same lines in high elevation locations, they take forever. So we might need to use different lines for different regions depending on elevation."

Time-to-maturity is only one factor breeders need to take into account when developing new cultivars for African environments. Fortunately, the GAM method is flexible.

"We focused on time of maturity in this first project, but our method can apply to many other traits of economic importance such as yield, grain quality, protein content, and oil content," Marcillo says.

The researchers credit SIL-PAT farmers and breeders for making their discoveries possible.

"We couldn't have done anything close to this magnitude without the great work of our SIL-PAT colleagues in assembling the data set. Working with the breeders in each region is almost like a love story. Doing this manually or independently would have been impossible," Martin says.

Da Fonseca Santos adds, "The database is strong because of the public-private partnershipsseed companies, processors, government agencieswe have across Africa. None of this would be possible without them. And it's all demand driven. They all come to us saying we need soybean. So, this work is beneficial on many levels."

Explore further Drones and AI detect soybean maturity with high accuracy

More information: Guillermo S. Marcillo et al, Implementation of a Generalized Additive Model (GAM) for Soybean Maturity Prediction in African Environments, Agronomy (2021). Guillermo S. Marcillo et al, Implementation of a Generalized Additive Model (GAM) for Soybean Maturity Prediction in African Environments,(2021). DOI: 10.3390/agronomy11061043
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Basic needs of disaster- and conflict-impacted refugees are often met by humanitarian relief goods and services, and until now little was known about how refugees create economic livelihood beyond immediate relief.

A new exploratory case study from Portland State University Associate Professor of Management Theodore Khoury reveals how Syrian refugees in the Za'atari camp reached beyond basic disaster relief support and leveraged social capital to create informal economic systems that helped improve their quality of life. The study, "Towards a theory of informal supply networks: An exploratory case study of the Za'atari refugee camp," is published in the Journal of Operations Management and co-authored by Ismail Abushaikha of German-Jordanian University and Zhaohui Wu of Oregon State University.

The ongoing Syrian civil war started in March 2011. Between 2012 and 2018, nearly a half million Syrian refugees passed through the Za'atari refugee camp, the world's second largest refugee camp, located in Jordan just 6 km southwest of the Syrian border. In one of the first case studies of its kind, interviews, observation data, field notes, photos and videos collected in and around Za'atari uncovered complex, refugee-led, informal supply networks that contribute to the resilience of the camp and also benefit Mafraq, the Jordanian host community.

The study dispels the notion of refugees as passive aid recipients awaiting charity, and instead asserts a refugee camp as a society with complex social systems.

"Many refugees reside in camps indefinitely and refugee regimes overlook or are incapable of supporting their development needs and ability to prosper socially and find a durable economic livelihood," says Khoury. "When a formal economy is unavailable or fails to include them, informal economies can evolve to serve them and meet these needs."

Given its city-like settings and energetic marketplaces, Za'atari is often profiled as a "success story" in the media and by relief organizations and donor countries. The researchers conducted 52 interviews, speaking with refugees, non-governmental and intergovernmental organizations (NGO and IGO) workers, Mafraq community members, and government officials. The research findings develop a theory of informal supply networks, or an aggregate of predominantly illicityet legitimatechannels and social relationships that support the economic exchange of goods and services between distinct actors or actor groups; in this case those represented by the interviewees.

"Our theory of informal supply networks offers a new approach to thinking about mass migration and refugee integration," says Khoury. "By understanding social behavior in an extreme context, we can develop more flexible humanitarian relief policy and operations that give refugees agency to create their future through economic exchange."

Supply networks started to emerge when refugees engaged in improvised, secondhand transactions, buying and selling donated relief goods among themselves and with Mafraq residents. Relief goods were also repurposed as new production materials. Refugees in Za'atari coordinated access to critical goods that fell outside the scope of relief-related activities and adopted roles of buyers, suppliers, distributors, wholesalers, retailers, traffickers and service providers. Over time, the formal and informal economic activities of all actors gave shape to the supply networks in the camp.

Three informal supply networksbuilding materials and housing, electricity and electrical hardware, and food and goodswere the case study's focus because products and services associated were critical in meeting the basic needs of refugees and therefore had practical implications for the daily lives of refugees; formal relief operations and refugee-initiated informal operations interacted to support the flow of resources in these networks; and these networks were representative of economic activities involving refugees.

The researchers captured the economic activity of each supply network by mapping the flow of materials with actor social activity and relationships. The mapping revealed where transactions occurred and in what direction; the nature of transactions were not always simple or even obvious. Three key insights led to a more critical assessment of the emergency-oriented, formal relief operations and compelled a refugee point of view:

Social ties created prior to the conflict sometimes existed between refugees and merchants or intermediaries within Mafraq, giving some refugees access to resources that others did not have

Governance for specific transactions was unique depending on the kind of goods being exchanged

Representatives of the camp authority, like security guards, routinely tolerated trafficking, recognizing the mutual development support to the host community

Data collection and network mapping uncovered three theoretical dimensions, which delineated the transactionsand their functioningwithin the informal supply networks:

Positioning of unique social capital: Social capital is defined as "resources embedded in one's social networks, [and] resources that can be accessed or mobilized through ties in the networks (Lin, 2008, p. 51)." Bonding, bridging and linking represent the three forms of social capital or relationship ties. Bonding accounts for ties that are more familiar, like family, friends and neighbors. Bridging connects actors in parallel networks, like other neighborhoods, clans and social groups. Linking captures ties characterized by differences in power distance, social status or hierarchy. The three forms of social capital defined the boundaries of Za'atari informal supply networks and also expanded boundaries beyond the borders of the campthey enabled efficient economic exchanges and cultivated trusting relationships that led to resilient supply networks. "In 2013, the refugees used to take some of the care packages and sell them in Mafraq stores [...] and buy other things that they needed, so now there is money generating in the camp and in the same time Syrian women started making food and started selling them to the employees and staff of NGOs." (Supply Chain Officer, UNHCR, 2016) "I used to work in plumbing and now I have a dairy shop [in the market street]. Once one of my friends who owns a restaurant asked me if I could bring chicken drumsticks and I got 15 kilograms of them and they were sold within 3 minutes." (Dairy Products Seller, Refugee, 2016) Governance of transactions according to specific conventions: The camp's informal economy with supply networks were all linked to the formal relief networks governed by explicit rules and policies and managed through a hierarchy: The Jordanian government entrusted camp management under UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), which in turn coordinated relief operations of other NGOs/IGOs like Portland-based Mercy Corps. In contrast, the informal supply networks were self-organized and transactions were governed by either culturally- or market-guided conventions. For example, electricity followed market-guided conventions under skilled refugees and a fee-for-service model. Building materials and housing supplies were a combination of both, where community leaders prioritized family members and others with preferential relationships while at the same time materials were sold through a profit-driven underground market agnostic to who purchased. "Refugees in Azraq Camp [in Jordan] are forced to go to the shopping malls [World Food Program Supermarkets] to buy their goods, which is very expensive, but, here [at the Za'atari refugee camp], we have more options in the market to buy from." (Perfume Shop Owner, Refugee, 2016) "Bikes from some donors were also distributed at some point and some of them [refugees] got more than necessary and then they sold them. Bikes are a major business in Mafraq now as it is widely used in the city of Mafraq and the camp as well." (Supermarket Cashier, Host Community, 2018) Legitimation of refugee-initiated economic activities: Camp security guards, often hired locally from Mafraq, felt that the citizens of Mafraq also deserved access to relief supplies; they favored the interests of refugees and locals over law enforcement, since they often came from standards of living that were at or below the level of some refugees. This stance translated into a more permeable or flexible camp border in terms of the kinds of goods that could cross the camp boundary. As a result, guards, as representatives of the camp authority, did not consistently stop the trafficking of goods across the camp border and allowed informal supply networks, as well as the traffickers inside and across the camp boundary, to be legitimated. The Jordanian government and camp authorities recognized that this informality helped sustain the livelihoods of refugees, bring positive economic opportunities to Mafraq and reduce conflict in the camp. "There are not contracts between the owners of the caravans and the users of the caravans [...]. We don't intervene in organizing the market. We intervene if there is a complaint by others. Although this is illegal [selling and renting caravans], as long as there are no complaints, or this is not making troubles for others we don't intervene." (Community Police Officer #2, Government, 2016) "They [donkeys and sheep] are allowed but we cannot bring them through the camp's main gate. It is not allowed to bring them legally, but once we have them inside the camp, it is ok." (Bedouin Refugee, 2017)

"The situations faced by refugees are beyond difficult and life in Za'atari is a far cry from the life they were forced to leave behind," says Khoury.

The study brings to light that the international policies on refugees and refugee regimes are outdated. Created shortly after WWII, these policies are poorly structured to handle large scale migration as has been seen today in Europe and Southern Asia. The study suggests that given prolonged stays in "permanent temporariness," humanitarian relief operations and host communities need to approach the condition of the refugee camp with longer term solutions in mind.

"When we value the dignity and human agency of refugees and allow for their cultural and social capital to be asserted on their terms, communities can flourish," adds Khoury. "With more thought invested into how refugees can be welcomed and integrated into communities, perhaps we can begin to shift the migration discourse into opportunities for positive social change, rather than ongoing situations of 'crisis.'"

Explore further Attitude toward diversity contributes to helping refugees become productive members of a host nation, study finds

More information: Ismail Abushaikha et al, Towards a theory of informal supply networks: An exploratory case study of the Za'atari refugee camp, Journal of Operations Management (2021). Ismail Abushaikha et al, Towards a theory of informal supply networks: An exploratory case study of the Za'atari refugee camp,(2021). DOI: 10.1002/joom.1151
LAKE GEORGE  Krantz Cottage, the Ronald McDonald House Charities family retreat located in the heart of the village, will open next month.

The retreat, which will welcome its first guests on July 17, is intended to provide a respite for families whose children are suffering from serious illness. Its the first year-round retreat operated by Ronald McDonald House Charities.

A ribbon-cutting ceremony will be held three days earlier, July 14, to mark the occasion, according to news release.

This year-round retreat is intended to provide a peaceful respite that allows families to spend time doing what matters most  being together, David Jacobsen, CEO of Ronald McDonald House Charities of the Capital Region, said in a statement.

Located at 161 Ottawa St., the two-story home was the former law office of Howard Krantz, the villages longtime attorney, who died in 2015.

The nonprofit organization, which operates more than 360 homes in over 60 countries, acquired the property in 2019 with the help of Krantzs family.
Public health officials trying to combat the confusion and hesitancy have put up billboards where the Amish travel by horse and buggy, sent letters to bishops and offered to take the vaccines into their homes and workplaces, all without much success.

"It's not due to lack of effort," said Michael Derr, the health commissioner in Holmes County, Ohio. "But this thing is so politically charged."

Some health clinics that serve the Amish are hesitant to push the issue for fear of driving them away from getting blood pressure checks and routine exams.

One local business and the organizers of a community event told the health department in Holmes County that it would no longer be welcome if it brought the vaccine to them, Derr said.

Staff members at the Parochial Medical Center, which serves the Amish and Mennonites in Pennsylvania's Lancaster County, encourage patients to get the vaccine, but many have little fear of the virus, said Allen Hoover, the clinic's administrator.

"Most of them listen and are respectful, but you can tell before you're finished that they've already made up their mind," he said.
We had them in the fridge and we started with those, said Fattore, whose congregation soon started pitching in to help. A couple of hours later, I was at Costco spending $600. Those were the first donations.

In a side room at Fattores church on Tuesday, cases of water were stacked four high, along with a large assortment of energy drinks, bottled iced coffees and bags of chips and other snacks. As volunteers packed coolers to distribute among police and emergency crews in the area, a van pulled up to offload more refreshments.

Theyre coming from another church, Fattore said. I have no idea what theyre bringing.

In the churchs parking lot, Robert Martinez and his crew of three busied themselves frying chicken tenders and Oreos in Martinezs circus-themed food truck.

Martinez said theyd brought enough to feed 350 people.

Once we got the call to come help out and do whatever we can, there was no decision to make, Martinez said. It was like, `Lets go!

The call came from Daniel and her husband, Patrick Daniel, who have a law firm in Houston. Nicolette Daniel said they traveled from Texas to Florida to offer whatever assistance they could to victims families and emergency workers.
WASHINGTON  The Supreme Court sided Tuesday with a pipeline company in a dispute with New Jersey over land the company needs for a natural gas pipeline.

Both liberal and conservative justices joined to rule 5-4 for the PennEast Pipeline Co. The 116-mile planned pipeline is to run from Pennsylvanias Luzerne County to Mercer County in New Jersey.

New Jersey Business & Industry Association Vice President of Government Affairs Ray Cantor applauded the decision, while environmentalists condemned it.

The Supreme Court made the correct decision today in reversing this harmful lower court decision, which would have irrefutably had a negative impact on the supply and cost of natural gas in New Jersey, as well as interstate commerce, said Cantor, adding New Jersey imports all of its natural gas and uses it to create more than 50% of its electric generation and to heat 75% of its homes and buildings.

NJBIA had filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court earlier this year in support of PennEast.

Environmental groups vary in grading Gov. Murphy's first 100 days Environmental groups are varied in how they grade Gov. Phil Murphy on his first 100 days.

Ed Potosnak, executive director of the New Jersey League of Conservation Voters, called the Supreme Courts decision extremely alarming and called the pipeline unneeded.
We still have other, ongoing legal challenges to this proposed pipeline, which is unnecessary and would be destructive to New Jersey lands, Grewal said, urging "the federal government to take another look at this harmful proposal.

In a statement, Anthony Cox, chair of the PennEast Board of Managers said the company was pleased with the decision.

This decision is about more than just the PennEast Pipeline Project; it protects consumers who rely on infrastructure projects  found to be in the public benefit after thorough scientific and environmental reviews  from being denied access to much-needed energy by narrow State political interests, Cox said.

New Jersey had argued that PennEast couldn't take the state to court to acquire the property it is seeking  only the United States government can. The state argued that the Natural Gas Act does not explicitly authorize private lawsuits by private parties against states. A federal appeals court sided with New Jersey while a lower court had sided with PennEast.

The case is PennEast Pipeline Co. v. New Jersey, 19-1039.

Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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BUCHAREST (AP)  At least 200 people gathered outside the Czech Republics embassy in Bucharest Tuesday to protest the death of a Roma man following an incident with Czech police earlier this month.

Video footage of the detention of the Roma man, in the northern Czech city of Teplice on June 19, shows a policeman kneeling on his neck for several minutes. The Roma man later died in an ambulance.

The incident sparked widespread condemnation about racism and discrimination allegedly faced by the Roma, whose population in Europe numbers around 10-12 million.

At Tuesdays event in Romanias capital  which was attended by dozens of Roma  some wore t-shirts brandished with the text: Racism kills. One of the protesters demands was an independent investigation into the man's death.

A man of ours  was brutally killed by the police. This is proof that brutality against Roma people exists, Banu Ionut Alin, from the civic group Aresel, told The Associated Press.

Czech police have said that the man died from a drug overdose. Official investigations are ongoing.
State Assemblyman Antwan McClellan, a former Ocean City councilman, said local representatives opposed the measure in the Assembly and Senate in what he described as a party line vote. Sen. Michael Testa voted no, along with McClellan and Assemblyman Erik Simonsen, all Republicans, but they were strongly outnumbered.

McClellan said the law infringes on local rights.

Because its Ocean City, I take it personally, he said.

Smith and Sweeney are both confident Murphy will sign the bill, and Smith emphasized that the bill will only apply to underground power lines.

Put that in all caps, that were not going to have towers. Towers drive everybody crazy, he said. He added that roads and public land will need to be restored after the project is complete.

rsted won a solicitation from New Jerseys Board of Public Utilities for the states first 1,100-megawatt offshore wind farm, set to be the largest in the country, part of Murphys plan to transition the state to renewable energy by 2024. The total project is expected to cost more than $1 billion.
This is the plan that, suddenly and without reason given to me, fell through. The reasons Ive now heard after the fact seem rooted more in stigma or misinformation than fact.

For example, the City Council cites syringe litter as an issue, but research shows that closing an SAP results in more syringe litter, not less. The City Council also cites too many out-of-town people coming to Oasis as an issue (in a tourism-based city). Yet a recent client survey showed that six out of ten clients live in Atlantic City, and over 90% travel less than 2 miles to get here.

Finally, the City Council is concerned that our program is within walking distance of a future grocery store, but the grocery store location was known since January, well before the collective plan for Oasis Drop-In to relocate.

Ultimately, my fear is that misinformation and stigma will undermine the health of people who use drugs and people who are at risk of HIV, Hepatitis C and overdose death. We provide service to clients in a fixed site location inside the Tourism District. We need the city to designate a location outside the Tourism District that our clients can walk to so we can relocate. This is a matter of life and death and leaders in Atlantic City must work with us to address the communitys concern and save this life-saving service for Atlantic City residents and all New Jerseyans.

Former Atlantic City resident Carol Harney, now of Marmora, is chief executive officer of the South Jersey AIDS Alliance.
6/26 OVW CHAINED CARNAGE PPV REPORT

By Brian Cannon on 2021-06-29 07:00:00

This is the OVW Saturday Night Special Report for Chained Carnage on Saturday, June 26, 2021.

Tonight, Mr. Pec-Tacular Jessie Godderz defends the National Heavyweight Title against The Pope Elijah Burke, and Hollyhood Haley J defends the Womens Title against Dani Mo!

In 2nd Round matchups of the Kentucky Title Tournament, Brandon Tate faces Drew Hernandez, Ryan Howe goes 1-on-1 with the Reverend Ronnie Roberts, Dimes vs. Ca$h Flo, Shannon the Dude tries to survive against Mahabali Shera, and a rivalry continues when Kal Herro takes on Tony Gunn!

Plus, the main event has the ring ropes replaced with steel chain as Omar Amir looks to regain the OVW Heavyweight Title from defending champion Ca$h Flo, and much more!

Without further ado:

Here we go

PRE-SHOW:

Eric Cornish is the ring announcer.

The Iron Bear Tom Coffey & Brandon Espinosa vs. Blanco Loco & Gustavo (w/Dream Girl Ellie).

Espy & Tom ambush Loco & Gustavo before the bell and throw Gustavo to the outside. They double team Loco in their corner and Tom splashes him. A big right from Tom and Espy tags in. He kicks Loco in the gut and hits him in the corner. Espy with the running cross body for 2. Espy hits Gustavo off the apron and yells at him. Loco recovers and kicks Espy in the midsection, then powerbombs him down. Gustavo gets the tag and fires away. All 4 men end up in the ring. While the ref tries to get Loco out, Ellie gets in and forearms and kicks Espy and hits a sunset bomb! Loco hits Tom with a forearm off the ropes, then Gustavo connects with his finisher for the 3.

WINNERS: LOCO & GUSTAVO by pinfall.

CHAINED CARNAGE:

Bryan Kennison & Steven Johnson are on commentary, Eric Cornish is the ring announcer.

KENTUCKY HEAVYWEIGHT TITLE TOURNAMENT 2ND ROUND: Rockstar Ryan Howe (w/Drew Franklin) vs. Reverend Ronnie Roberts (w/Jessica Snow).

They lock up into the corner and clean break. Howe catches him with an inverted atomic drop and sliding uppercut. He goes for the neckbreaker drop, but Ronnie reverses it. He misses the legdrop and Howe drops him. He clubs Ronnie and goes for the neckbreaker drop again. Ronnie shoves him off and they collide. Snow & Drew get on the apron and fight over the collection plate. Snow rips it away as Drew crashes to the floor and throws it to Ronnie while the ref checks on Drew. Ronnie clocks Howe in the head with it and gets the 3!

WINNER: RONNIE by pinfall.

We see an interview with Facade, that gets interrupted by AJ Daniels. He challenges him to a match with no fans and Facade says he will accept any type of match. We then see a video package of their feud.

KENTUCKY HEAVYWEIGHT TITLE TOURNAMENT 2ND ROUND: Big Money Dimes (w/Eric Banks) vs. OVW Heavyweight Champion Ca$h Flo (w/Kash Daniel).

Ca$h big boots Dimes and slams him. He goes for a chop, but Dimes grabs his hand and tries walking the ropes. Ca$h pulls him down and chops him. He chops him again in the corner, then throws him hard in the opposite corner. Dimes tries a chop back, but gets another one in return. Ca$h goes to take off the top turnbuckle and Banks gets in. Kash comes in and they lock up. Dimes grabs his protein powder, but accidentally throws it in Banks eyes. Kash gives Dimes a stunner, then Ca$h goes up and hits the Payload for the 3.

WINNER: CA$H by pinfall.

KENTUCKY HEAVYWEIGHT TITLE TOURNAMENT 2ND ROUND: The Mayan Mauler Drew Hernandez (w/Mandy Lemond) vs. Tag Team Champion Brandon Tate (w/Tag Team Champion Brent Tate).

Drew throws Tate face first into the mat, then sits him on the top turnbuckle. Tate gets off and Drew chases him around and into the ring. Tate stomps him and knocks him to the outside. Tate dives out into him. Drew grabs him and drives him into the ringpost. Back inside, Tate gets flipped out of the ring to the outside and Mandy stomps on him. Drew holds him, but Mandy accidentally smacks Drew. Tate gets in and dives out into Drew again. He rolls Drew in and goes up top, but Mandy pulls him down while the ref is distracted by Brent on the apron. Drew grabs Brandon and nails him with the Mayan Apocalypse for the 3.

WINNER: DREW by pinfall.

The Complete Package Tony Bizo (w/Womens Champion Hollyhood Haley J) vs. Mr. Juicy Luscious Lawrence.

Luscious hits Bizo into the corner turnbuckles, then slams him. Bizo knees him and pounds him in the corner. Luscious back with the butt bumps in the corner, then butt butts Bizo off the apron. Luscious goes after him on the outside and has to move Haley. It gives Bizo enough time to recover and clothesline Luscious on the floor. He rolls Luscious in and covers for 2. He goes for a Peoples Elbow, but Luscious moves. Luscious with the 10-count punches in the corner. Luscious goes up and hits a double axehandle off the top. He goes up again and hits a second one. Luscious with a powerslam off the ropes. He goes for the Luscious Legdrop, but Haley trips him up. Bizo hits him from behind. Haley interferes again, choking Luscious in the ropes. Bizo runs into a back elbow. Luscious back with some big clotheslines and atomic drops. Luscious drops him for the Swingers Party, then delivers the Rump Thumper in the corner. Bizo grabs Haleys title. With the ref distracted, Haley sneaks in behind Luscious and hits Luscious in the rocks with her sock of rocks. Bizo delivers the Bizo Bomb for the 3.

WINNER: BIZO by pinfall.

Kal Herro is interviewed and says he has faith that he beat Tony Gunn once and can beat him again to advance to become Kentucky Heavyweight Champion. Tony Gunn is also interviewed and says he told Al Snow to not have the managers out there tonight, because Kal is going to get an @$$-whoopin

KENTUCKY HEAVYWEIGHT TITLE TOURNAMENT 2ND ROUND: Shotgun Tony Gunn vs. The Fanny Pack Kid Kal Herro.

Back and forth hits and chops early. Kal with a Lou Thesz press off the ropes and then hits Gunn with some punches and a bionic elbow. Gunn drops Kal and puts his leg in a submission around his neck. Kal gets out and clotheslines Gunn to the outside. He hits Gunn on the floor, but Gunn rams him into the side of the ring, then throws him into the barricade. He exposes the concrete floor and goes for a piledriver, but Kal flips him over! Kal rolls him in and goes up top. Kal with a cross body off the top for 2. Kal then tries another quick roll-up for 2. Kal with another pin attempt for 2. Gunn knees Kal in the side of the head, but Kal catches him in a chicken wing. Gunn rams him back first into the corner to break the hold. Kal ducks a Killshot and hits a super kick for 2. Gunn gets his foot on the ropes. Kal goes for a knee to the side of the head, but Gunn ducks and rolls him up for 2. Gunn catches him and runs him into the corner, hitting him. Kal is on the top turnbuckle and tries to headbutt Gunn off. Gunn gets back up and tries a superplex, but Kal hits him off. Gunn hits the ropes and Kal falls awkwardly across the top rope. Gunn goes up again and hits a hurricanrana for 2! Kal back with a swinging neckbreaker for 2. He covers again for 2. Kal takes off his elbow pad and goes for a Killshot, but Gunn knees him and hits the Killshot for the 3!

WINNER: GUNN by pinfall.

Shannon the Dude is interviewed and says tonight he is going to shock the world and take the Lion down!

KENTUCKY HEAVYWEIGHT TITLE TOURNAMENT 2ND ROUND: Shannon the Dude (w/Michael Bennett) vs. The Indian Lion Mahabali Shera (w/Ryan Lemond).

Shera is led out by Lemond & Doug Basham with his eyes totally wrapped up. STD keeps hitting little jabs on Shera, until Shera finally takes off the eye wrap and reveals his eyes are fine. Lemond & Bennett brawl to the back. STD grabs the ref and Adam Revolver runs in and tries to hit Shera from behind. Shera hits him with the Sky High. He then grabs STD, who is trying to escape, and delivers the Sky High to him for the 3.

WINNER: SHERA by pinfall.

WOMENS TITLE MATCH: Dani Mo vs. Hollyhood Haley J (w/The Complete Package Tony Bizo) (c).

Dani controls the offense early, hitting Haley with a slam, kick to the back, and dropkick for 2. Haley comes back and chokes Dani in the ropes, then jumps across her back in the ropes. Haley with some hits and a super kick. She locks in a sleeper. Dani works up and fires back. She kicks Haley in the sides. Haley drops Dani into the turnbuckle. Dani fires back again, kicks Haley, then faceplants her for 2. Dani gets Haley up on her shoulders, but Haley claws her eyes. Bizo throws her the sock of rocks. Luscious Lawrence runs out and throws Bizo into the ringpost. Haley is somewhat distracted. She swings wildly at Dani and misses. Dani rolls her up and gets the 3!

WINNER and NEW WOMENS CHAMPION: DANI by pinfall.

NATIONAL HEAVYWEIGHT TITLE MATCH: NWA TV Champion The Pope Elijah Burke vs. Mr. Pec-Tacular Jessie Godderz (w/Shotgun Tony Gunn) (c).

They exchange side headlocks. Good back and forth early, but Gunn is interfering on the outside. He gets tossed, but Jessie throws Pope into the ringpost, injuring his shoulder. He focuses on the shoulder. Pope tries some comebacks, but Jessie stays on the shoulder. He hits Pope with a powerslam for 2. Pope back with a dropkick attempt, but Jessie holds the ropes. Jessie locks in the Adonis Crab, but Pope gets to the ropes. Pope with a boot to Jessie and takes him down. Both men are on the mat. Pope starts to fire back and takes Jessie down with some forearm shots. Pope loads Jessie up with bionic elbows. Off the ropes, Pope catches Jessie with a powerslam for 2. Jessie back with a backdrop for 2. Pope back with 3 German Suplexes. Pope with an STO for 2. Jessie shoulders Burke into the corner and sets him up top. Pope claps the ears to knock him off. Pope with a flying elbow drop. He takes down the kneepads. Pope with a double running knee for 2. Jessie elbows him in the corner, but Pope fires back. Jessie elbows the ref and shes out! Another double running knee by Pope and a brainbuster. He covers and the bell rings. The ref calls for a DQ!

WINNER: POPE, but STILL NATIONAL CHAMPION: GODDERZ.

After the match, Gunn runs back out and hits Pope from behind. Pope recovers and takes Gunn & Jessie both down!

Mr. Zero Gravity AJ Daniels vs. The Neon Ninja Facade.

The match took place with no fans before the show started tonight. Chairs and tables were involved and Facade piledrove AJ through a table. AJ came back, but in the end, Facade came out victorious.

WINNER: FACADE by pinfall.

OVW HEAVYWEIGHT TITLE CHAINED CARNAGE MATCH: Omar Amir vs. Ca$h Flo (c).

Ca$h seems very hesitant. They lock up, then Ca$h gets out of the ring and walks around ringside. Back inside, they both try to hit each other into the corner, but block it. Ca$h catches Omar with a back elbow and clotheslines him down. He kicks Omar in the head. Omar reverses a throw and Ca$h crashes into the corner. Omar charges him and gets draped across the top chain. He rolls to the floor holding his throat. Ca$h pounds Omar with hard rights across the top of his head. Ca$h rams him into the corner and Omar is bleeding! Ca$h unhooks a chain and wraps it around his fist. He goes to hit Omar, but Omar blocks it. Omar fires back, but Ca$h scoops him up and slams him. He lays the chain across Omars chest and climbs up to the second chain. Ca$h jumps off and Omar has his foot up with the chain on it! Ca$h falls to the outside. Omar brings him in and throws him face first into the corner. He throws him face first into another, then another. He goes for the last corner, but Omar gets pulled down across a chain. Ca$h grabs another chain and wraps it around Omars throat. Ca$h with a gut punch and chop. Omar catches Ca$h with a belly to belly suplex and splashes him in the corner. Omar goes up, but ca$h knocks him down across the chains. Ca$h with a Death Valley Driver for 2! Ca$h kicks him and clubs him across the back. He grabs a chain and wraps it around his fist again. He tells Omar to get up. He swings, but Omar ducks. Omar clotheslines him and hits a Rock Bottom for 2. Ca$h takes Omar back down and lays a chain across him. Ca$h climbs to the top and misses the Payload. Omar covers for 2! Omar with another corner splash. He jumps in and runs into a super kick! Omar is draped across the second rope. Ca$h charges, but Omar moves and Ca$h crashes into the chains! Omar wraps a chain around his fist and goes up top. He leaps off with a hit that takes Ca$h down. He hits the spinebuster slam for the 3.

WINNER and NEW HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION: OMAR by pinfall.

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I would say, from my own perspective, if you're going into a heavily crowded area, you don't know if somebody is not vaccinated, and so you should just bring your mask with you and keep safe, he said of individuals regardless of vaccine status.

Pritzker mentioned Israels vaccine response, noting the country had high vaccination rates but had recently reinstated indoor mask mandates and other mitigations as the Delta variant spreads.

The lessons here at home and across the world are a harbinger of what could happen here, particularly in low vaccinated areas, he said.

According to IDPH, approximately 53.1 percent of Illinoisans over age 12 were fully vaccinated as of Monday, while that number was 55.7 percent for those 18 and older and 73.7 percent for those 65 and older. For those receiving at least one dose, the numbers were 68.8 percent, 71.3 percent and 89.8 percent, respectively.

Still, Pritzker said, that left more than 5 million Illinoisans not fully vaccinated and therefore unprotected.
A Sangamon County jail inmate who died at HSHS St. John's Hospital Sunday morning did not have any evidence of injury or trauma to his body, Coroner Jim Allmon said following an autopsy Monday.

Bobby Joe Jimerson, 62, of Springfield was taken by EMS to hospital and died at 9:38 Sunday morning.

"We were able to document the absence of any injury or trauma," Allmon told The State Journal-Register. "He didn't have any injury at all that would have caused him to pass away. We found a lot natural disease process."

That left the preliminary cause of Jimerson's death as "pending additional studies," Allmon said.

Histology and toxicology work-ups could take three to four weeks to come back, Allmon said.

The death comes almost two months to the date that Jaimeson Daniel Cody, 39, died as he was being restrained by jail correctional officers.

Cody's death was listed as "restraint asphyxia in the setting of methamphetamine intoxication" and classified as a homicide.

The Divernon man, who had been arrested on Apr. 27, became unresponsive after correctional officers used Tasers when Cody resisted health checks and attempts to handcuff him, jail officials said.
K.L. Cleeton says he is fortunate to have consistent home-care workers whose services for more than a decade have allowed him to graduate from college, operate a small business and avoid a nursing home.

But Cleeton, 31, an Effingham resident who deals with a form of muscular dystrophy and whose parents are paid by the state to provide 24-hour care, told U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin many people with disabilities aren't as lucky.

"Those who do this work are held down by low wages, few benefits and too often, no voice on the job," Cleeton said Monday during a "town hall" meeting with Durbin, D-Springfield, at the headquarters of NAACP Springfield. "That leads to passionate care workers getting fed up and leaving their jobs, or even leaving the industry altogether, which is bad for consumers like me."

Cleeton was among about 20 people at the meeting who called on Durbin, D-Springfield, to help enact President Joe Biden's proposed $400 billion American Jobs Plan.

The multi-year plan, supported by both Durbin and Illinois' other U.S. senator, Democrat Tammy Duckworth of Hoffman Estates, would boost the federal Medicaid match in Illinois and nationwide to expand the number of home-care workers and boost their pay.
Under the agreement, voter registration information will be available in additional languages at driver services facilities in areas with large numbers of people who speak languages other than English, as required by the federal Voting Rights Act. In Cook County, for example, that means instructions will be made available in Spanish, Chinese, Hindi and Urdu.

The secretary of states office also agreed to no longer send the elections board registration information to people who are not U.S. citizens or who will not be old enough to vote in the next election.

Whites office also agreed to implement a system within nine months that will allow residents to automatically update their voter registration when they submit an address change for their drivers licenses or ID cards.

These may seem like technical fixes, but they add up to countless eligible voters who will now be able to register and cast their ballots in Illinois  if implemented correctly, said Abe Scarr, director of the Illinois Public Interest Research Group Education Fund, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

The other organizations involved in the lawsuit were the Chicago branch of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, CHANGE Illinois, Chicago Votes Education Fund, Common Cause Illinois and the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.
Video footage from Solano's body camera shows a foot pursuit in which the officer can be heard shouting, Drop the gun! Drop the gun, before he opens fire. Alvarez appears to drop the gun after five shots ring out and he falls to the ground.

The shootings of the teen and Alvarez, both Hispanic, put the department under intense scrutiny and raised further questions about a force that has long been dogged by a reputation for brutality and racism. While COPA did not recommend that the officer who shot Adam Toledo, Eric Stillman, be relieved of his police powers, it did recommend that Solano be stripped of his.

Shortly after the the teenager was killed, Mayor Lori Lightfoot said she had ordered the departmen t to draft an interim foot pursuit policy. Last month, the department announced a policy that, among other things, prohibits foot pursuits for minor traffic violations, and bars officers from separating from partners if they can't see the person they're chasing or if the officer or the person is injured.
MUSCATINE  There has been no word on a motion by Muscatine County for summary judgement in a lawsuit against four Muscatine County jail guards accused of using excessive force against an inmate.

According to court records, Thomas D. Overton, 64, of Rock Island, filed suit in federal court on May 11, 2020, against jail guards Dimitri Wheeler, Claude Dahm, Elijah Heath and Brayton Shalladay. The suit alleges a violation of Overtons civil rights.

Overton was a federal prisoner held in the Muscatine County Jail beginning March 13, 2018, pending a federal criminal charge of conspiracy to distribute heroin, for which Overton is currently serving four years.

According to the complaint, on May 22, 2018, Overton was fasting from sunup to sundown in observance of Ramadan. Overton said when the cells were being locked down, fasting inmates were to remain outside their cells past lockdown to be served their meals.

Overton claims as he was eating, Wheeler told him he was going to "the hole," an informal term for solitary confinement. Overton said he told Wheeler he wasnt doing anything to be written up for, went to his cell and locked the door behind him. He said about 10 minutes later Wheeler came to his cell and again told him he was going to the hole.
Rock Island police are investigating two separate shooting incidents over the weekend in which three people were wounded, Deputy Police Chief Richard Landi said.

The first shooting occurred at 8:44 p.m. Saturday in the 1300 block of 14th Street.

Rock Island Police and firefighter-paramedics were sent to 1305 14th St. to investigate a call of shots fire with a victim. The victim, a man, was sitting on the front steps of the residence when he was shot multiple times. The victim was conscious and alert when police and paramedics arrived on scene.

An occupant of the home went outside after hearing gunshots and aw a person getting into a gray SUV and leaving the scene westbound on 13th Avenue.

No arrests have been made in that case. Landi said Monday that the victim is in stable condition.

The other shooting occurred at 1:37 a.m. Sunday in the 2700 block of 5th Avenue.

Rock Island Police and firefighter-paramedics were sent to 2730 5th Ave. to investigate a call of shots fired. The address is Murphys Bar. Two people were shot on the east side of the parking lot by an unknown suspect. A scene was located that included blood and shell casings.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed into law a measure that would withhold state grants and contracts from businesses or local governments that require customers to show they've received a COVID-19 vaccine. However, an exclusion is carved out for health care facilities, and the law doesn't affect employer requirements for employees.

In the Quad-Cities, both Genesis Health System and UnityPoint Health said they were evaluating when to require the COVID-19 vaccine for its employees.

"Like many other health systems in the United States, Genesis is currently evaluating when it will make the COVID-19 vaccination mandatory for our employees, Andersen, the Genesis official, said in an emailed statement. We continue to encourage all employees to be vaccinated, and approximately 70% have been vaccinated. For employees who have questions about the vaccine, we ask them to speak with their primary care provider."

At UnityPoint Health, the company said it would not mandate the vaccine while it is under emergency-use authorization, but would reevaluate once the vaccines receive the full stamp of approval.

At UnityPoint Health, the health and safety of our patients, communities and team members is at the center of everything we do, spokesperson Ashe Simpson wrote in an email. Like many other health care organizations, as a health care system, its our policy to strongly encourage but not require team members to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. While COVID-19 vaccines are under emergency-use authorization, we will not mandate it. If and when the COVID-19 vaccines obtain FDA approval, as with all developments, our leadership will reevaluate at that time.

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America needs both of them, Durbin said. Because they deal not just with infrastructure, as we know, traditionally, but broader, thinking about the future of economic development, and how we can help families be in a position to go to work, and to have good work experience and still have a good family.

Right now, Democrats are proposing to sidestep the 60-vote threshold in the senate to pass a second bill along party lines on a simple majority in a process called budget reconciliation.

So I think we can do this, Durbin said. Negotiating back and forth right now. But I think in the next few months, well see a bipartisan bill pass. Fingers crossed that we'll do the president's package as well.

That 60-vote threshold to end debate in the senate, called the filibuster, means that most major bills, like the bipartisan infrastructure bill, will require some Republican consensus to pass through the Senate. Efforts to abolish the filibuster havent garnered the support from some conservative Democrats. Asked whether Bidens agenda could make it through a Senate with a filibuster in place, he said it would be tough.
The FTC had alleged Facebook engaged in a a systematic strategy to eliminate its competition, including by purchasing smaller up-and-coming rivals like Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. New York Attorney General Letitia James said when filing the suit that Facebook used its monopoly power to crush smaller rivals and snuff out competition, all at the expense of everyday users.

Facebook, in an e-mailed statement, said: We are pleased that todays decisions recognize the defects in the government complaints filed against Facebook. We compete fairly every day to earn peoples time and attention and will continue to deliver great products for the people and businesses that use our services.

Richard Hamilton Jr., a former prosecutor and Justice Department antitrust attorney, said the judge, while finding the FTC's arguments insufficient, gave the agency a sort of road map for how to bulk up its case in another round.

Whether government or private entity, you still need to sufficiently plead the case," Hamilton said. He noted that as Boasberg saw it, the FTC failed to demonstrate how it arrived at the claim that Facebook controls 60% of the market in social networking and how that market power is measured.
A good Wednesday to all. Humid conditions, dense fog, and light rain are on tap for the day as we bid "farewell" to the month of June. As for 
He went on to win an April 6 election against write-in candidate Tony Quiroz and was sworn in, becoming the first Black mayor of Calumet City.

After the referendum was certified late last year, two residents in Calumet City filed objections with the citys Municipal Officers Electoral Board, seeking to have Jones name removed from the February ballot.

The residents argued the referendum was effective on Nov. 3, therefore Jones was not legally qualified for the office sought at the time nomination papers were filed.

On Dec. 21, a majority of the Board agreed with the objectors arguments and found Jones name should be taken off the primary ballot.

Jones sought judicial review of the decision in Cook County Circuit Court, and a Cook County judge affirmed the Boards ruling.

His case eventually reached the Illinois Supreme Court, which ruled in Jones favor.

In March, a unanimous Supreme Court ruled that Jones name was legally placed on a February primary ballot seeking the Democratic nomination for Calumet City mayor because the referendum did not take effect until the election results were certified on Nov. 24.
Social media reliably erupted in a fury. Non-Catholic critics railed at the thought that Biden should be refused something they otherwise know and care nothing about.

Plenty of Catholics were upset, too, including Rep. Ted Lieu, a California Democrat who vocally supports a litany of other issues, like contraception and same-sex marriage, that run counter to the Churchs teachings. Still, he insists he is a Catholic.

You are hypocrites and nakedly partisan, he unironically declared in a series of viral tweets.

He chastised the bishops for not withholding Communion from former Attorney General Barr for his support of the federal death penalty and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich for being divorced and remarried, and then challenged the bishops to deny him Communion the next time he attends church.

Gigliotti, according to The New York Times, informed Lieu in a letter that his very soul is in jeopardy and that he would refuse the lawmaker Communion if he happened to attend Mass at Gigliottis parish.

Confrontation is a ministry of caring, Gigliotti added.

When it comes to the issue of abortion, Gigliotti cares  a lot. Confronting sin is not for the faint of heart.
Timm said the center received a cost estimate of at least $500,000. She said the center and its board of directors plans to raise the other $250,000 through fundraising. A last-minute bake sale last weekend raised about $1,800 with Ida Walter, a donor, matching the amount raised. Timm said three women from a local church donated $4,000 to the mobile showers, but she said the money could be used for renovations for a new building.

Timm said the Hope Center hasnt officially launched a fundraising campaign for the renovations, but people are able to donate on Facebook or through the centers website via PayPal.

During Monday's council meeting, city council member Bill Evans asked whether the distance from other services near the citys downtown would be an issue.

Timm told the Journal Wednesday that the organization has spoken with its guests about the possible move.

Everyone involved seems to be pretty receptive to this idea, and the fact that Destiny FourSquare Church is opening up to the opportunity for the Hope Center to be in their backyard so to speak is a beautiful thing, Timm said. Like I said at city council, were a tough crowd and not everybody wants that.
Governor Kristi Noem announced Monday night that up to 50 South Dakota National Guard troops are being deployed to Texas to help secure the border between the United States and Mexico.

The deployment is in response to Texas Governor Greg Abbott's request for help to respond to ongoing violations of state and federal law by illegal aliens crossing the border. Abbott and Arizona Governor Doug Ducey sent a letter June 10 to the nation's governors asking them to send "all available law enforcement resources to the border in defense of our sovereignty and territorial integrity."

The Biden Administration has failed in the most basic duty of the federal government: keeping the American people safe, Noem said in a news release. The border is a national security crisis that requires the kind of sustained response only the National Guard can provide. We should not be making our own communities less safe by sending our police or Highway Patrol to fix a long-term problem President Bidens administration seems unable or unwilling to solve. My message to Texas is this: 'Help is on the way.'
A Hamilton man was charged with two felony counts of criminal endangerment after allegedly forcing a car off the road while driving drunk Saturday night.

Zachary James Abrams, 26, appeared Monday in Ravalli County Justice Court on the felony charges and a misdemeanor count of aggravated driving while under the influence of alcohol.

A Ravalli County deputy found Abrams passed out in the drivers seat with his vehicle running on the west side of U.S. Highway 93 south of Bass Creek Road shortly after 10:30 p.m. Saturday, according to the charging affidavit.

The deputy could smell the odor of an alcoholic beverage coming from the vehicle when he first made contact with Abrams. During that initial contact, Abrams allegedly revved his engine and was instructed to turn the vehicle off. Instead of doing that, Abrams put the vehicle in drive and had to be reinstructed to place the vehicle back into park.

Abrams was unable to successfully complete the standardized field sobriety tests. The affidavit said he demonstrated an inability to follow instructions, maintain control of his body and do the tests as instructed.
The Open Lands Bond was approved by voters in 2006, allowing the county to sell bonds raising $10 million for conservation easements in the valley. To date it has conserved 7,830 acres of land, through 32 completed conservation projects, creating a network of farming and open land from Florence to Sula, creating wildlife corridors amongst sustainable agricultural operations. Four more projects to be finalized in the coming months, including Sutherlin Farms, Yoder Farms and the Triple D Ranch, will bring the total acres conserved to 9,589.

When we evaluate a project we score based on many factors including how it is managed and its current and potential value as working land for agriculture, wildlife and the preservation of clean water, says Schroeder, We are lucky to live in a valley where residents have prioritized preserving land by voting to approve this program.

The Open Lands Program would not be possible, however, without the foresight of the Right to Farm and Ranch Board which saw the need to preserve agricultural and open lands amongst growing pressure from development in the early 2000s. Today the same board works with agricultural producers and neighbors to ensure good communication about what it means to live and play in a farming community.
The next year, the company settled out of court in Chicago over bid-rigging, the Chicago-Tribune reported in 2018.

Kristin Reed, an organizer with Richmond For All  a Richmond-based education and issues advocacy group  has pushed for the end of the contract. She said she shares concerns about a for-profit company running a public school.

I think the biggest concern that I and others have is a model that treats disciplinary actions as a for-profit franchise. I dont think anybody should earn profit off of the fact that our students have some of the highest disciplinary referrals in the state, Reed said in an interview. It really bothers me to use public money for for-profit services, which means that theres always some spending were doing that doesnt go to support our kids, it goes to earn profit for shareholders, and thats inappropriate.

There havent been any reports of abuse at Richmonds Spartan Academy, and Superintendent Jason Kamras administration says theyve seen incredible results from choosing to partner with FullBloom.

Chief Academic Officer Tracy Epp, during the meeting, noted that academic scores and school climate indicators at the alternative school have improved since contracting out services.
Five teachers requested additional time to understand the new curricula in submitted comments to the board, while six teachers wrote in favor of the proposal.

According to Bearman, the implementation and training phase for school administrators and educators was supposed to begin this month, but the dates listed within the presentation were based on the vote occurring on an earlier date. He said the process will begin as soon as possible.

I cant say that we will have quite the level of trauma or difference in the following years that we had in this year, but next summer there will be something that would be an impediment to it as well, Bearman said. So just kind of seems like, in some ways, given that everything is going to reset mode, its as good a time as any.

According to Tracy Epp, chief academic officer for RPS, only grades three through 12 will see a curriculum change in the upcoming school year, while kindergarten through second grade will not get a new curriculum during the upcoming year, but at a later time. Epp said that is because of the desire for teachers in kindergarten through second grade to focus on other subject areas, such as early literacy.

Echoing Bearman, Epp said that implementing the new curriculum for the next school year would be beneficial.
Turner discovered the market on Instagram. Ever since she started selling in the spring, she said the response from the community has been a blessing, describing the vendors and attendees as a second family. Now she gets bulk orders.

Andrea Johnson has had a love for baking since middle school. She always wanted to open a bakery, but wanted it to be of something her daughter  Karma, who has a nut allergy  can eat. After some research and experimenting, she created Karmalitas Marshmallows and Confections, an artisan dessert stand specializing in marshmallow treats.

Safe Space Market invited Johnson to be a vendor, and she said she was blown away by the communitys feedback. She said word of mouth is vital for a small business, especially since many vendors at Safe Space Market, including hers, do not have a storefront or physical location. It has become a tightknit community where vendors are constantly supporting one another, Johnson said.

Just to have somebody or one person or group of people to say that Im here for you, Im on your side is monumental, she said.
On the first day of the trip, the three tried to spend the night in a caboose in Petersburg after riding 82 miles and Klotz having the one and only flat tire of the whole trip. Mosquitoes got so bad that they had to flee to a nearby motel. The clerk let all three stay for $8, provided they were out by 8 the next morning.

It wouldnt be the first time they were run off by biting bugs. Camping on a sand dune in Jacksonville, Fla., proved to be as bad an idea as sleeping in a train car.

There seemed to be more campgrounds in those days, the men said, so they regularly stopped there or the occasional motel. They guessed they must have worn the same clothes for days on end because no one carried more than a pillow-sized backpack of belongings.

They all bore the smell of the road until they took the occasional shower. The first one who came out clean would then get a whiff of the others and announce: You guys stink, Klotz said.

In Goldsboro, N.C., a policeman told them to stay off the blacktop and on the dirt shoulder along U.S. 1. They did until he was out of sight, then got back on the pavement.
By Michael Rao and Paula P. Pando

The pandemic forced our colleges  a community college and a four-year research university  to face a new reality. In just a few weeks, we switched to delivering nearly all classes and services virtually, while starting virus prevention and mitigation protocols and building new supports for our most vulnerable students.

Now we have a chance to reflect on the past year: Just as the pandemic accelerated and exposed many disparities in society, it also magnified problems of access and equity in higher education. The good news: We have seen that solutions are within reach, and all of us have an opportunity to improve economic and cultural prosperity across Virginia.

Key improvements started in 2005, when the commonwealth took an important step to simplifying transfer from two- to four-year colleges. The board of each four-year public college developed transfer and credits requirements that were the same at all institutions within the Virginia Community College System.

That is vital because two-year colleges provide broad access to higher education; most community college students hope to eventually earn a bachelors degree. Still, the system is imperfect: In Virginia, less than one-third of them ever transfer.
In fact, the Underwood Constitution led to a brief era of multiracial government in Virginia. That so horrified the states establishment that, as soon as it was able, they imposed a new constitution  with no referendum, just an official decree  that effectively disenfranchised Blacks and poor whites alike.

Botetourt County has been debating whether to move the Confederate statue in front of the courthouse. That Confederate statue is unique in that it doesnt just mourn the Confederate dead, it mourns the dark days of Reconstruction. They are only dark if you objected to the concept of Black Virginians as fellow citizens.

Of course, Virginians never were taught about that forgotten era of multiracial government in the 1880s; theres an example of history being erased.

Underwood was a pivotal figure in post-Civil War Virginia who tried to point the way to a different future  and did for a time. Yet he is not recognized today with even so much as a historical marker. And there definitely are no roads or buildings that bear his name.

Virginia owes Underwood an official apology  for teaching generations of schoolkids that he was a carpetbagger who told Northerners false tales about the cruelty of Virginians toward Negroes. And it ought to name something after him.
In the 1998 trial, Abed was found responsible for throwing a Molotov cocktail in the Corner Store along with three other members of the family: Obayda Hanafie Abed, Rayed Fawzi Abed and Fahed T. Tawalbeh.

At the time, use of a destructive device in the course of a felony carried a mandatory 30 years on top of any other prison time imposed. But after the Supreme Court partially struck down the law used to fashion their sentences, the four family members had their terms cut by 30 years and were returned to Urbanskis court for resentencing on their remaining charges.

Lee argued that the men had already overserved their sentences, and should be released after turning their lives around.

Aboyda and Rayed Abed were sentenced to terms they had already served, and both men have done well since their release last year, Lee said. Tawalbeh was also set free but has since been deported to Jordan.

But in Amar Abeds case, the judge said he was imposing the strictest punishment for the person he found most culpable in the criminal enterprise.

Urbanski acknowledged that Abed was a changed person, a rehabilitated person ... a different person now.

Nonetheless, the 4th Circuit found, he appropriately recognized that the sentencing standards demanded a proportionate punishment for the lengthy, malicious and damaging conduct in which Abed had engaged as a young man.

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Since it began work on the 303-mile pipeline though West Virginia and the New River and Roanoke valleys, Mountain Valley has encountered repeated problems with erosion and sedimentation. That has led to lawsuits by environmental groups and delays in a construction project that was supposed to be done by late 2018.

In a May conference call, executives for the pipelines lead partner said they plan to have nearly all of the construction done by September. That will provide time to obtain approvals for water body crossings in order to complete the project by next summer, the company says.

Meanwhile, it remained unclear Monday whether Virginia would require a separate water quality certification for boring under the nearly 100 waterbodies that will not crossed using the open-cut method.

Final approval for that plan rests with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. In May, FERC asked DEQ if it wanted to weigh in on the borings before a decision was made at the federal level.

Melanie Davenport, director of water permitting for DEQ, responded by saying that was a question for FERC, not the state. Virginia already issued a water quality certification for Mountain Valley in 2017, as the precursor to a federal plan that was later thrown out by the federal appeals court.
Thompson wrote in his incident report that he shot Lewis as Lewis was revving his engine and turning his steering wheel, as if he was trying to ram the trooper. But Georgia Bureau of Investigation Agent Dustin Peak testified in September that was impossible, because Lewis car battery disconnected when it hit the ditch, leaving the vehicle inoperable.

Peak testified that dash camera video shows one second elapsed between the time the trooper got out of his patrol vehicle and when he fired the shot that killed Lewis.

Johnson noted that district attorneys have great power in the indictment process and essentially can present what they want to present how they want to present it. The evidentiary standard of probable cause required for an indictment is much lower than the "beyond a reasonable doubt" required to convict someone at trial.

While grand jury proceedings are secret and people accused of crimes do not generally get the opportunity to appear before grand jurors to present their side, Georgia law does have an exception that allows police officers accused of crimes to testify before a grand jury.

Johnson said he wants to see the transcript of the grand jury proceedings: If the presentation went like the prosecution has gone thus far, we will not be surprised by what we see if there is underzealous prosecution.

Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
When Del. Nancy Guy, D-Virginia Beach, took on the issue of balloon trash this year at the Virginia General Assembly, she knew she would need to have some thick skin.

For nearly 10 years, state lawmakers who tried to ban balloon releases had dealt with snarky commentary. In 2015, Sen. Bill Stanley, R-Franklin, belittled such legislation, saying it could lead to undercover stings at childrens parties.

But effective Thursday, it will be illegal to intentionally release a balloon outdoors. The civil offense is punishable by a $25 fine per balloon. The previous version of the law allowed the release of up to 49 balloons in a one-hour period.

The law provides that if a person younger than 16 releases a balloon at the instruction of an adult, the adult is liable for the civil penalty.

Balloon releases are often used in celebrations, memorials or to raise awareness for certain causes. But latex balloons, foil balloons and plastic ribbons are a top source of debris on Virginias remote beaches, according to research by Longwood University.

Birds, turtles and other animals often mistake balloons for food, which can be deadly. Sea turtles are especially susceptible because they surface to breathe and eat where deflated balloons float on the water.
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Anne Stuhldreher directs The Financial Justice Project in the treasurers office of the city and county of San Francisco and is a fellow with the Aspen Institutes Financial Security Program, Overcharged2021@gmail.com.
" " The floodgates of the Berenda Reservoir in Chowchilla, California, were completely dry June 21, 2021. Almost three-fourths of the Western U.S. is gripped by drought so severe that it' unlike anything recorded in the 20-year history of the U.S. Drought Monitor. Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg via Getty Images

By now, you've probably heard about the historic drought gripping the Western United States. Forecasts for wildfires, water shortages and bone-dry riverbeds abound. It's a scary situation, both for those living in the region and for those who don't.

Whether you live in the Southeast or the Northwest, you might have a few questions about this megadrought and its impacts. If so, you're in luck  that's what we'll be breaking down today.

Let's start with the basics.

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What Is a Drought?

Though it may seem straightforward, it can be difficult to boil down to a simple definition  there's no magic number, be it inches of rainfall or water levels, that signals when a drought begins or ends.

"Drought can mean different things in different places," says Stephanie McAfee, an applied climatologist at the University of Nevada, Reno. "It can actually even mean different things to different people in the same place." But like many in her field, McAfee ascribes to a definition coined by the late climate researcher Kelly Redmond: Drought is "insufficient water to meet needs."

By most accounts, the current drought in the Western United States has been ongoing since the early 2000s. While it might not be the longest drought the region has ever seen ( one in the 1200s lasted more than a century), it's one of the most severe. Water levels in the Colorado Basin and Lake Mead have hit new lows; Las Vegas didn't see rain for a record-breaking 240 days between April 20 and Dec. 17, 2020.

"It's really dry," says McAfee.

" " The tall bleached "bathtub ring" is visible on the rocky banks of Lake Powell at Reflection Canyon June 24, 2021 in Lake Powell, Utah. Lake Powell is currently at 34.56 percent of capacity, a historic low. The lake stands at 138.91 feet below full pool and has dropped 44 feet in the past year. The Colorado River Basin supplies water to 40 million people in seven Western states. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

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The 'New Normal'?

The drought has gone on long enough that climatologists are considering new terminology for it. Some have proposed labeling it a "megadrought" to convey the scope of the situation. Others argue that the megadrought moniker still doesn't do this event justice. "Something that we might be looking at is actually more like aridification," McAfee says.

Aridification occurs when a region becomes permanently dryer. In other words, it marks a shift in the baseline for the amount of water that is considered "normal." As the effects of climate change play out, it seems that less rainfall in the Western U.S. might become the standard.

"I think it's accurate to say that that area, at least statistically speaking, has been drying out," says Curtis Riganti, an atmospheric scientist at the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska. "Connecting that to the dynamics of climate change I think makes sense."

As they become increasingly common, you might be wondering: What are some of the dangers associated with severe drought?

" " A tributary of the Sacramento River flows through a burn scar from the Carr Fire in Keswick, California. The largest reservoir in the California has plunged 400,000 acre-feet (the volume that would cover 1 acre to a depth of 1 foot) in April and May as the worst drought in decades grips the region, turning the area into a tinderbox. Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg via Getty Images

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An Empty Lunchbox and a Full Tinderbox

One of the most obvious risks is wildfire. We saw a series of horrific and devastating fires along the West Coast in 2020, particularly in California. This year, some areas of the Golden State have received as little as 11 percent of their typical rainfall to date, which could spark even worse burns than last year as the summer progresses. "We're already starting to see that crop up in some areas in June," Riganti says.

Another concern is food production. Agriculture is incredibly important to the economies of many Western states, including California, Oregon, Washington and Arizona. Common crops in these states  like almonds, wheat, avocados and apples  require lots of water to grow well, which can lead to shortages of those crop in times of drought. That's devastating to those states' economies.

And then there's ranching. With less rainfall in states like New Mexico, Nevada and Arizona, ordinarily lush grazing lands have suffered. "Ranchers have to bring water and food into specific areas for their cattle," says Erinanne Saffell, the assistant state climatologist of Arizona. It's contributed to a worldwide deficit in livestock feed.

But it's important to remember that drought isn't just a West Coast thing, says Riganti. Other areas are in the midst of their own drought. "I've been getting reports of crops struggling in parts of the upper Midwest," he says, "Northern Iowa, Minnesota, parts of Michigan, and then even up into parts of New England are all experiencing various levels of drought right now."

And that means everyone across the U.S. can expect to feel the effects of Western drought as it continues to ripple across rest of the country. For example, last year California wildfire smoke made it as far east as New York City and Boston, and potentially even impacted air quality in the Netherlands. On the economic side, smaller crop yields out West would likely drive up produce prices nationwide.

" " The colors in the U.S. Drought Monitor map show experts' assessments of conditions related to dryness and drought as of June 22, 2021. The map focuses on broad-scale conditions, so local conditions may vary. U.S. Drought Monitor

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Drought Mitigation Across the Nation

Despite our best efforts, human beings can't control the weather (yet). But is there anything we can do to help mitigate the effects of drought?

Yes, there is. First, don't waste water.

Water conservation is crucial to easing drought stress. If you live in a drought-prone area, simple things like turning off the water when you brush your teeth, taking a shower instead of a bath, or watering your plants at night to reduce evaporation all help save precious H2O.

Another one of the best ways to save water is to save electricity  it takes 15 of gallons (56 liters) of water in the form of coolant or steam to generate a single kilowatt-hour of power.

Second, pay attention to fire safety. "If there's a campfire ban in national forests, don't light a campfire. And if you're not allowed to shoot off fireworks for the Fourth of July, don't," says Riganti. Stick to cake rather than smoke bombs for your gender reveal party.

Third, switch up your landscaping. Planting drought-tolerant species, like aloe, lavender, artemisia or cacti, can greatly reduce your lawn's water needs. Having a less thirsty lawn means you'll have fewer thirsty people, and it can look beautiful as well. Another trick? "Mulching and composting," says McAfee. These techniques help keep soil wetter for longer, and can even produce a cooling effect on the surrounding environment.

Finally, if you live outside of a drought zone, consider buying less water-intensive foods. That could mean skipping out on almond milk, buying watermelon instead of apples, or opting for chicken instead of burgers at your next summer cookout.

None of these actions will fix the drought, but taken together they can reduce the risk that it poses to many people. "It's kind of like earthquakes," says Saffell, "We can't forecast an earthquake, but we can keep people safe from the impacts of that earth-shaking event."

Now That's Interesting On Aug. 17, 1891, "General" Robert G. Dyrenforth (who was not, in fact, a general) attempted to induce the heavens to rain on Midland, Texas, by exploding dynamite in the sky. The ensuing drizzle, witnesses later said, was likely a coincidence.
The South Carolina Arts Commission is confident in its ability to put this funding to use right away to equitably impact learning using the arts, Arts Commission Executive Director David Platts said. Our team of professionals manages existing programs, partnerships, and grant-making infrastructure for this work, which includes federal and state reporting for accountability. ARP ESSER funding from the SCDE will enable expedient and effective scaling with various arts education partners on the local, state and national levels.

The arts commission plans to focus on art integration, arts in early childhood and arts industry certification credentials for high school students, building on existing vocational training programs. The commission will also use its partners in the Arts in Basic Curriculum Project.

The project, a cooperative effort from the department, commission and Winthrop University, serves an estimated 44,000 students in 74 schools.

The commission indicated in the news release that it wants to scale the program to increase access to quality arts education, develop arts-rich learning environments, build, restore, expand and support infrastructure for arts learning at the district level and research and develop new and innovative instructional practices.
WASHINGTON (AP)  The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected a Virginia school board's appeal to reinstate its transgender bathroom ban, handing a victory to transgender rights groups and a former high school student who fought in court for six years to overturn the ban.

After learning that the high court refused to hear the board's appeal, Gavin Grimm, now 22, said that his long battle is over. We won, he tweeted. Honored to have been part of this victory, he added.

Grimm was a 15-year-old student at Gloucester High School when he was banned from using the boys bathroom. The Gloucester County School Board's policy required Grimm to use restrooms that corresponded with his biological sex  female  or private bathrooms. Grimm filed a federal lawsuit that wound its way through the courts for six years.

Grimm said that being forced to use the nurses room, a private bathroom and the girls restroom was humiliating and severely interfered with his education. He said he is heartened by his victory in court because a win in Virginia is a win everywhere.
Abbott has pledged a $250 million down payment to resume construction of the wall. Governors in Florida, Arizona and Nebraska have dispatched law enforcement officers to Texas to support local officers and the border patrol.

What frustrates and contributes to the anger many Americans feel toward their government is that solutions exist, but many politicians refuse to apply them. Recent TV interviews with migrants have shown they were motivated to come because they believed President Biden is making it easier for them to be admitted.

Harris recent speech in which she said, do not come, do not come had about as much credibility as Bill Clintons denial of sex with Monica Lewinsky.

There are critics who say this is part of a plan by Democrats to import new voters and make the party a permanent majority. That might be part of it, but I suspect another reason is to undermine the values and traditions that built and have sustained this country from the beginning. There are those secular progressives who speak and behave as if they hate America and would be happy to see it brought down to the level of other countries or destroyed outright. What better way to do this than to dilute those values and traditions by importing foreigners?
 Colorado Supreme Court rules mandatory lifetime sex offender registration violates the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment | Main | US Sentencing Commission issues big new report on "Federal Sentencing of Child Pornography: Non-Production Offenses" 

June 29, 2021

Federal plea deal on civil rights charges reportedly in the works for Derek Chauvin

This new local press piece, headlined "Derek Chauvin Closing In On Federal Plea Deal, Sources Tell WCCO," reports on an unsurprising but still interesting development in the legal sagas around George Floyd's killing. Here are the details:

Multiple sources tell WCCO that federal prosecutors are in talks with former Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin about a possible plea deal. They say Chauvin is close to reaching a deal, and that is what he was likely referring to when he made a cryptic comment to the family of George Floyd during his sentencing last week. Due to legal matters, Im not able to give a full formal statement  I give my condolences to the Floyd family, theres gonna be some other information in the future that will be of interest and I hope these will give you some peace of mind, Chauvin said prior to his sentencing. Sources suggest Chauvin was likely referring to a plea deal in the federal case against him. As part of a possible plea deal Chauvin would have to publicly explain what he did to Floyd and why. That was, of course, the question that Floyds brother poignantly asked of Chauvin at the sentencing.... Sources tell WCCO that, as part of the plea, Chauvin could get a 20- to 25-year sentence, which he would serve at the same time as the state sentence, and that he would serve his time in federal not state prison.... Former Hennepin County Chief Public Mary Moriarity says Chauvin has to be thinking about the swift guilty verdict in the state case, and that may be giving him more incentive to try to negotiate a plea deal. That is because, in federal court, there would be a substantial difference between what he would receive if he went to trial and was convicted versus what he would get if he pled guilty, and as they say take responsibility for his actions, Moriarity said. Its important to remember an earlier plea deal involving the feds in late May 2020 collapsed at the 11th hour. The U.S. Attorneys Office declined to comment, and WCCO also did not hear back from Ben Crump, the Floyd family attorney, or Eric Nelson, the attorney for Chauvin.

It is, of course, entirely right that Chauvin is far more likely to get a lower sentence (and to be able to cap his sentencing exposure) if he enters into a federal plea deal rather than going to trial on pending federal civil rights charges. But, unlike in the Minnesota system where there is a strong presumption of release after a defendant serves 2/3 of an imposed prison term, in the federal system the norm is service of at least 85% of imposed prison time. So if Chauvin's federal deal led to the imposition, say, of "only" a 20-year term, he should still expect to serve a full 17 years, whereas his 22.5-year prison term in the state system could lead to his release in "only" 15 years.

That said, this "release math" is only one part of the equation for Chauvin and his lawyers as they consider a federal plea deal. I suspect Chauvin, for a variety of reasons, would much rather spend his considerable time in the federal prison system than in state prison. Also, it is interesting to speculate whether and how a federal plea could impact any appeals Chauvin has planned for his state convictions and sentence. And, not to be overlooked, there are distinct "second look" or "early release" mechanisms in state and federal systems that could prove significant in the future (which, in turn, makes them relevant now for plea negotiations).

Prior related posts:

June 29, 2021 at 11:18 AM | Permalink

Comments

The ultimate hard question is where Derek Chauvin can safely serve his sentence without being a target for violent retribution by many other inmates. He really can't stay in P.C. (protective custody) for 20 years, so where can they safely house him for such a long sentence? One favorite prison for swapping off inmates is the North Dakota state penitentiary, which has only 600 inmates, 2/3 of whom are Native Americans!

Posted by: Jim Gormley | Jun 29, 2021 6:21:33 PM

Don't forget the new "earned time" credits under the First Step Act, which allow for up to 10 days of credit for every 30 days of participation in recidivism-reduction programming. Chauvin's federal civil-rights charge is not an excluded offense from receiving ETC, and presumably his PATTERN score (which purports to measure recidivism risk) will be low, given his age, education, and lack of prior criminal history.

The bigger issue may be whether he can earn in federal earned-time credits if he's serving his time in Minnesota custody.

Posted by: Anon AFPD | Jun 29, 2021 8:06:39 PM

There is no doubt that Minnesota his primary custody of Derek Chauvin, since he was first charged and arrested by Minnesota, long before the Feds ever charged him with violating civil rights under color of law. The Feds won't get primary custody until and unless Chaven paroled by Minnesota in about 15 years.

Posted by: Jim Gormley | Jun 30, 2021 1:19:50 PM

When I checked yesterday, I discovered that the North Dakota state penitentiary was rebuilt in 2015, and now houses about 1,500 inmates! It still might be a good place for the Feds and Minnesota to send him to serve his sentence, with minimal risk of getting assaulted or killed by other inmates. It used to be a low key place, where inmates could wear blue jeans or khakis sent in by their families (street clothes) and the inmates and guards addressed one another by their fist names. The local Kiwannas come to the gym every Friday night and bake pizzas to sell to the inmates for a few dollars each. They could eat pizzas and talk with locals from the street in the gym for a few hours. Very low key by penitentiary standards.

Posted by: Jim Gormley | Jun 30, 2021 1:26:35 PM

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 US Sentencing Commission issues big new report on "Federal Sentencing of Child Pornography: Non-Production Offenses" | Main | The Sentencing Project releases "A New Lease on Life" looking at release mechanisms and recidivism realities 

June 29, 2021

Interesting split Fourth Circuit panel debate while upholding resentencing to 52 years for violent offenses by 15-year-old

A helpful reader made sure I did not miss the interesting discussion of sentencing practices and outcomes by a Fourth Circuit panel yesterday in US v. Friend, No. 20-4129 (4th Cir. June 28, 2021) (available here). The first paragraph of the majority opinion sets the terms:

Appellant Philip Friend, who actively participated as a fifteen-year-old juvenile in a series of violent carjackings, challenges the fifty-two-year sentence imposed by the district court after a remand in this case. Our remand instructed the district court to give a more thorough explanation for its sentence, with the prospect that a more tempered sentence might also result. United States v. Friend, 755 F. Appx 234 (4th Cir. 2018). These things have now both come to pass. The offenses in question occurred long ago, but their consequences have been long lasting. Because the district court acted within its discretion in imposing the present sentence, we affirm.

And here is a key passage from the majority's extended discussion and the concluding sentiments of the majority (cites removed):

But to sum it up, it is clearly permissible for a sentencing court to weigh the gravity of the offense or the impact a defendants crimes have had on a community and to vindicate that communitys interest in justice. That after all, is the reason a defendant is before the court. An exclusive focus on one factor impermissibly vitiates the requisite individualized consideration. On the other hand, for appellate courts to micromanage sentencings and demand a district court assign equal weight to each  3553(a) factor would also disregard a sentencings individualized inquiry and toss our deferential abuse-of-discretion review to the winds. Ultimately, defendants disagreement with the district courts weighing of the sentencing factors is not enough to find the sentence procedurally unreasonable.... To find this sentence unreasonable would displace the discretion that district judges possess in setting sentences. We are a court of appellate review, not a panel of appellate sentencers. District courts are granted exceptional discretion in sentencing for a reason. They view the full criminal tableau first-hand, and they weigh the conflicting evidence and competing arguments. Their choices are not easy. When a court abuses its discretion, it is this courts duty to correct the error. But when a district court is responsive to our mandates and reasonably exercises its sentencing power, we must respect its judgment. So we do here.

Writing in dissent, Judge Floyd explains at length why he sees matters differently. His opinion starts this way:

At the age of fifteen, Philip Bernard Friend and various members of his family committed a series of extremely serious crimes. Nobody disputes the severity of those offenses or the irreparable harm that Philip visited upon the lives of his victims and their families. But this appeal tests the legality of the district courts imposition of a fifty-two year sentence on a juvenile offender. Today, the majority declares Philips half-century sentence procedurally and substantively reasonable. Because I cannot agree with the majoritys conclusion on either score, I respectfully dissent.

June 29, 2021 at 03:36 PM | Permalink

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It seems like such a waste to completely throw away the life of a juvenile offender by imposing a sentence that might as well amount to a life sentence. But I have seen cases like this before, with youngsters convicted of Hobbs Act robberies with guns -- sentences in excess of 50 years. I also saw at USP - Big Sandy in Inez, Kentucky a D.C. inmate (20 years old), who received a life sentence under 21 U.S. Code section 851, for having 3 prior felony drug convictions (but the total amount of drugs involved in the prior 3 convictions was 8 ounces of marijuana and 2 grams of heroin). Alas, these kinds of cases may cry out for and be resolved only executive clemency (a commutations). How would a person who went to prison at such a young age ever survive upon release from prison at 65+ years of age?

Posted by: Jim Gormley | Jun 29, 2021 5:38:19 PM

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Woman in handcuffs. (PHOTO: Getty Images)

SINGAPORE  A childcare centre supervisor, who was under investigation for embezzling money from a centre she formerly worked at, joined another childcare centre and committed the same offence.

Nuruljannah Ahmads later offences were uncovered after her employer read about her past crimes in newspapers and started an audit on the accounts. By then, Nuruljannah, a supervisor overseeing Star Learners childcare centre at Compassvale Bow, had pocketed nearly $80,000.

On Tuesday (29 June), Nuruljannah, 34, was sentenced to one year and 11 months' jail after earlier pleading guilty to two counts of criminal breach of trust by employees. She had managed to misappropriate nearly $80,000 in school fees paid by parents whose children attended Star Learners.

The prosecution sought at least two years jail for Nuruljannah, who appeared in court pregnant with her second child, as she had abused her position of trust reposed in her.

Misappropriated cash, omitted to record collections

Nuruljannah was hired as a supervisor of Star Learners in December 2014, after she left her previous employment.

Her job included collecting payment made by parents of the centres students. She would bring these payments, paid in cash or cheque, home for safekeeping.

Once a month, the director of the company that operated Star Learners would visit the centre to collect the cash and cheques from Nuruljannah, who would also submit a cash and cheque summary (CCS) which set out the collections for the month.

Nuruljannah also had to sign against separate payment records, and the director would check the cash collected against the records.

From 4 January 2015, Nuruljannah misappropriated cash and omitted to record the collections in the CCS. As a result, the CCS she submitted to the director tallied with the amount of money she handed over.

She would also not register new students in the centres system and misappropriated the money used for registration.

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In total, she misappropriated $78,423 between 4 January 2015 and 5 February 2016. She used the money for her personal expenses and only made a restitution of $5,434.

Embezzled from previous company

Nuruljannah committed the offences while she was under investigation for misappropriating monies while she worked as a vice-principal for Kinderland Childcare Centre in 2014. She had embezzled $9,664 from January to May 2014 and used the money for her personal expenses.

A police report was filed on 20 June 2014. Nuruljannah pleaded guilty to her charges on 5 February 2016 and was fined $10,000.

The company director of Star Learners read about her conviction in newspapers and began an audit of Star Learners accounts, whereby the offences were revealed.

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SIOUX CITY  The Sioux City school board took a vote Monday to acknowledge the continuation of Superintendent Paul Gausmans contract.

During a special meeting on Monday, the board voted 4-3 to acknowledge the automatic one-year extension of Gausmans contract. Board members Jeremy Saint, Ron Colling, Juli Albert and Perla Alarcon-Flory voted in favor of the automatic extension, and Monique Scarlett, Dan Greenwell and Taylor Goodvin voted against.

The board in recent years has annually approved a series of rolling three-year contracts, with one additional year extending the expiration date each time.

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Within the current contract, Gausmans base salary is $248,645.95. His contract was renewed in 2020 with a 2.25 percent raise in his pay and benefits package. The contract covers three years, running through 2022-23.

Director Dan Greenwell said after asking multiple times to have a discussion regarding the superintendent contract, similar to one last year, it was denied. He said the board of directors was effectively forced to approve a contract without discussion.

Scarlett said the entire board is responsible for the expiring time for the automatic renewal discussion.
SIOUX CITY -- The Sioux City Council green-lighted a resolution Monday supporting two Sioux City developers' applications for financial assistance to help address the shortage of housing for new workers.

By approving its consent agenda, the council voted in favor of Rick Bertrand, of Bertrand Construction, LLC, and David Hegarty, of RoyDave, LLC, submitting Iowa Economic Development Authority applications for the Workforce Housing Tax Credit Program (WHTC).

The goal of the WHTC program is to spur new housing growth that will help address the state's pending workforce shortage. The program provides a transferable investment tax credit of up to $15,000 per unit, as well as a refund of sales and use tax paid on the project, up to $1 million per project.

Before the vote, Mayor Pro Tem Dan Moore said the projects are "steps in the right direction" to alleviate the city's housing shortage.

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"I just want to congratulate them and thank them for developing," Moore said. "Thanks to those two projects for increasing our housing."
WASHINGTON (AP)  President Joe Biden overstated the expected employment gains Tuesday in making his pitch for a bipartisan infrastructure proposal that he said would create millions of new jobs. That might or might not have resulted from his initial plan, but there's a smaller one on the table now.

He also suggested that the package to boost roads, bridges and airports could be a solution for flight delays, glossing over recent and bigger problems of labor shortages and bad weather during the busy summer season.

A look at his claims in La Crosse, Wisconsin:

BIDEN: After months of careful negotiation, of listening, of compromising together ... a bipartisan group of senators got together and they forged an agreement to move forward on the key priorities of my American Jobs Plan. ... As a result this is a generational investment  a generational investment to modernize our infrastructure, creating millions of good paying jobs. And thats not coming from me, its coming from Wall Street.

THE FACTS: The bipartisan proposal is not forecast to create millions of new jobs, according to Wall Street, but only a fraction of that.
The 12-story condo tower that collapsed north of Miami Beach last week may prove to be the deadliest building accident in U.S. history. As of Tuesday morning, 11 residents are dead and 150 are missing.

As the search through the rubble goes on, officials and journalists are trying to piece together what went wrong. Its a matter of public interest, but its also a more urgent concern for neighbors in the high-rise buildings along South Floridas barrier islands, where every crack in the wall has taken on a new and ominous significance.

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Why did Champlain Towers South collapse? And who might share in the blame? Even a full investigation may not yield one answer, but events of the past few years offer some clues. Here are some possibilities.

The Potential Causes

The pool slab: In 2018, an inspection report prepared by engineer Frank Morabito noted a major error in the buildings design: The slab between the pool and the parking garage was flat, not sloped, causing water to puddle and corrode the concrete below. The failed waterproofing is causing major structural damage.  [F]ailure to replace the waterproofing in the near future will cause the extent of the concrete deterioration to expand exponentially.

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According to the Miami Herald, a pool contractor who surveyed the building days before the collapse photographed seriously degraded concrete in the pool equipment room, and a deep puddle of standing water in a parking spot beneath the pool.

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That would track with the testimony of Champlain Towers South unit owner Michael Stratton, who said his wife, Cassie, (now missing) told him on the phone on Thursday morning that she could see, from their fourth-floor unit, a hole near the pool. Then the line went dead.

Damage from rain, ocean water, and salty air: The local CBS affiliate tracked down a retired maintenance manager from the property who said ocean water routinely pooled in the garage and pumps never could keep up with it.

Morabitos report also documented substantial damage to concrete above ground, such as balconies. Some concrete interacts well with water (like jetties), but reinforced concrete is threaded through with rebar. This internal steel web gives concrete new structural powers, but those powers go away when the rebar gets wet, rusts, and weakens. (Corroded steel hidden inside concrete was also a problem with the Morandi Bridge, which collapsed in Genoa, Italy, in 2018.)

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But salty air and saltwater are common features to every American coastline, and theres no apparent reason why Champlain Towers South would have weathered them worse than any other building.

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Problems underground: Another suggestion is that water was the cause of the collapse in a slightly less direct way, by affecting the integrity of the earth beneath the building.

USA Today tracked down research, originally published by Italian researcher Simone Fiaschi, that demonstrated that the building was sinking into the ground as long ago as the 1990s, albeit at the slow rate of 2 millimeters per year. Sinkholes are also common in South Florida, though theyre rare on the barrier island.

Donna DiMaggio Berger, a lawyer who represents the Champlain condo association, told the Washington Post that a subsurface, structural issue likely caused the collapse. This building was on pilings buffeted by the Atlantic Ocean and the Intracoastal Waterway, she said. Weve got water coming at this thing from both sides.

The Possible Players

William M. Friedman & Associates Architects Inc. and Breiterman Jurado & Associates, Consulting Engineers: Thats the team responsible for the buildings design, 40 years ago. The flat pool slab was their idea. Those were the boom years in Miami, and shoddy construction practices abounded.

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Morabito Consultants: Did Frank Morabito grasp, and accurately convey, the extent of the damage at Champlain Towers South? Though his October 2018 report warned the board to deal with major structural damage in the near future, it did not suggest the building might be at risk of collapse. Berger, the condo lawyer, suggested to the New York Times that the condo boards failure to address the pool deck before the middle of 2021 can be read as a response to that assessment. All boards can do is rely on the advice of the professional advisers that they engaged, she said.

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On Saturday, Morabito released a statement saying that, Among other things, our report detailed significant cracks and breaks in the concrete, which required repairs to ensure the safety of the residents and the public.

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Surfside, Florida: Condo board member Mara Chouela forwarded Morabitos report to a Surfside building official, Ross Prieto, who made a guest appearance at the condo board meeting the following month and announced that based on the report it appeared the building is in very good shape, according to the meeting notes. (Prieto told the New York Post he does not recall reviewing the report.)

The Champlain Towers South Condominium Association: Even if it didnt warn of imminent collapse, Morabitos report was alarming. Why did it take the condo board more than 18 months to engage Morabito again for a 40-year Building Repair and Restoration Plan? Might it have had something to do with the fact that the repairs required an investment of $15 million divided between the associations 136 unitsmore than $100,000 in maintenance, per unit, in a building where apartments have recently sold in the mid-six figures? As recently as April, two-and-a-half years after Morabitos report, the condo board president was still trying to sell owners on the high-priced repairs. Two residents have filed suit against the condo association in the wake of the collapse.

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A neighboring building: Maybe Morabito was right to strike a moderate tone, and the board was right to delay, because conditions deteriorated rapidly after the inspection. At a press conference last week, Surfside Town Commissioner Eliana Salzhauer said that Champlain Towers residents complained about vibrations and cracks related to a much larger building under construction this year. Some of those things may have been factors, she said.

Miami-Dade County: To obtain Miami-Dades recertification for multiunit, 40-year-old buildings, owners must hire a licensed architect or engineer to assess its structural integrity, electrical system, emergency lighting, and other key features. Engineers are supposed to follow professional codes of conduct, but theres plenty of gray area between negligence and demanding tens of millions in repairs. Elsewhere, engineers hired to see owners through county regulations have sometimes simply told owners what they want to hear, and its not hard to see why: Buildings rarely fall down and no owner is going to want to hire an inspector with a reputation for nitpicking. Does Miami-Dades system have a fundamental flaw, in that its engineers are hired and paid by the very buildings they are supposed to be assessing on behalf of the public?

Climate change: To the extent flooding in the garage or soil movement underground is linked to Miamis King Tides, heavy rainfall, or rising water table, it would be possibly to connect the structural damage to the changing climate. That was the view of Salzhauer, the Surfside commissioner, who had a grim message for the town on Thursday morning: I think this is all tied to sea-level rise and our overdevelopment. And Mother Earth comes back, and the ocean comes back, and takes it.
In the year-plus that Black Widow has been sitting on the shelfit was originally scheduled to kick off the summer movie season of 2020so much has changed that its still hard to process it all. The world where the lengthening days of late spring signaled a mass migration to the multiplex seems like a faraway place in the summer of 2021. Disney/Marvel has spent that year-plus revising and re-revising its release strategy for Black Widow. Would the film have a theatrical-only window in the old pre-pandemic style, drop simultaneously in theaters and on streaming, or, like Pixars Luca, be made available only to subscribed home viewers? In the end the studio elected to combine the traditional brick-and-mortar option with a pricier-than-usual streaming one: On July 9, it will be made available to Disney+ subscribers as a premium title for an additional cost of $30 on top of their $8-a-month subscription. This dual release will test the willingness of lockdown-weary audiences to bestir themselves from their by now severely dented couch cushions to see what the trade press still calls, with touching hopefulness, an event picture.

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Can a picture still be an event? Do the activities of Scarlett Johanssons Natasha Romanoff, aka Black Widow, during a previously undocumented hole in the Marvel timeline (in between the action of Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War, if youre keeping track) hold enough interest for viewerswho for the past 15 months have been able to access ever-increasing quantities of new Marvel content from hometo get them back in theater seats, with a bucket of popcorn in one cupholder and a vat of cold soda in the other? All I know is that for this theater-loving but generally Marvel-indifferent viewer, Black Widow, directed by the Australian indie filmmaker Cate Shortland, was an unexpectedly welcome reminder of why big screens and comic book superheroes go so well together.

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By the standards of sprawling, star-packed ensemble spectacles like Infinity War or Endgame, Black Widow practically is an indie film. Yes, its a wildly expensive, globe-spanning spectacular with an action sequence virtually every 15 minutes of its two-hour-and-14-minute running time. But there is something refreshingly intimate about its focus on the story of a single character from the Marvel lineup, and a human character at thatBlack Widow is a highly trained superassassin turned crusader for justice, but as another character points out, she still needs to take ibuprofen after a particularly bruising showdown. Johansson has taken issue with the sexism that relegated her character to a supporting role in the Marvel universe, where she was sometimes reduced to an object of the male Avengers comic lust. (When Robert Downey Jr.s Tony Stark encountered her in Iron Man 2, his parting remark as she walked away was I want one, parried by Gwyneth Paltrows Pepper Potts with a crisp no.) That criticism can certainly not be made of Black Widow, which places Natasha and another woman, her younger sister Yelena (Florence Pugh), at the center of the action and wastes not a second on any hint of romantic involvement for either character. (Its been observed that the Marvel universe is a depressingly sexless place; thats not entirely true here, but the few lines of mildly naughty dialogue occur between Natasha and Yelenas parents, to their grown daughters embarrassed consternation.)

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The sisters origin story is established in a pre-credits sequence set in Ohio in 1995. Natasha, played as a child by Ever Anderson, rides her bicycle through tree-lined streets on her way home to play with her kid sister (Violet McGraw), watched over by their loving mother Melina (Rachel Weisz). Everything seems idyllic, until the girls father, Alexei (David Harbour), comes home with an urgent if cryptic bit of news: The family needs to make a quick escape to avoid some unnamed but long-feared threat. After a hair-raising (and laws-of-physics-defying) escape by plane to Cuba, theyre intercepted by Russian bigwig General Dreykov (Ray Winstone) who separates the children from their parents and from each other, sending the girls to a training facility for elite assassins.

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Twenty-one years later, we meet the adult Natasha in rural Norway, where shes hiding out from a team of federal agents led by Thaddeus Ross (William Hurt). Natasha is on the outs with both the feds and the Avengers, having just violated the Sokovia Accords (dont ask, its a whole thing). She is on her own, living in a trailer and trying to keep out of troubleuntil an encounter on a bridge with a mysterious assailant in high-tech armor leaves her with evidence that her younger sister is still alive and living in Hungary. When Natasha shows up in Yelenas Budapest flat, their shared greeting ritual is not a hug and a cup of tea but a knock-down, drag-out fight (with some nifty choreography involving mutual strangulation by shower curtain). Both women have been trained since childhood to trust no one, and it takes time for them to realize they share a common enemy: Dreykov, who has been kidnapping little girls around the world to raise them as part of a squad of mind-controlled superkillers. Yelena, formerly a member of his group, is now in possession of an antidote to the generals brainwashing technology, but in order to put it to use, the sisters must first locate their long-lost parents. This task will involve airlifting their dad out of a Siberian prison (in the middle of an avalanche, no less) and then tracking their biologist mom down at a remote farm where she tests out mind-control techniques on pigs. In the meantime, the sisters learn things about their parents that will be no surprise to anyone who watched The Americans but that shake their worldview to its core.

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Florence Pugh proves that she is the golden girl of casting directors everywhere for a reason.

The less-than-happy family reunion that anchors the movie is played in an unusual emotional register thats both more dramatic and more comic than your average Marvel film. The personal lives of the Avengers generally tend to be revealed only in glimpses of downtime between strenuous bouts of universe-saving. Once in a while there are suggestions of off-screen romantic entanglements or, in rare cases, family lives, but like seemingly every protagonist in pop culture at the moment, they are above all consumed by their work. Black Widow, on the other hand, incorporates the family story into the villain intrigue: The second half of the movie has Natasha and her family taking on the evil Dreykov as a highly dysfunctional four-person unit. In an amusing reversal of the MCU norm, its the women who run the show when it comes to both brains and fighting ability; dad Alexei (as played with endearing gusto by Harbour) fancies himself an invincible superhero called the Red Guardian but in fact is a blustering braggart whose only superpower consists in getting on his daughters nerves. Weiszs Melina is a less juicy character to play, but she also gets a few funny scenes and more than one chilling one as her characters motives conflict: Is she driven by ideological fervor, wifely devotion, scientific curiosity, or maternal pride?

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As the sisters try to piece together which parts of their briefly happy-seeming childhood were real, Johansson and Pugh exhibit real sibling chemistry, whether theyre strangling one another with that shower curtain or squabbling over drinks about what Yelena sees as her now-famous sisters poser superhero persona, the catsuit-clad, hair-tossing Black Widow. Johansson brings new layers of vulnerability and self-doubt to a character whos been given little to do but strike those poses for too long, while Pugh proves that she is the golden girl of casting directors everywhere for a reason: She can nail any emotion from grim determination to childlike neediness and explode off the screen with energy in the action sequences, all while speaking in a Russian accent that, though I cant speak to its precise fidelity to the real thing, is both credible and consistent throughout the movie. A post-credits stinger featuring Pugh and a beloved comic actress who has never before intersected with the Marvel movies leaves us with the impression that Yelena Romanoff will have a mission to fulfill in an upcoming MCU installment; I think I can say for the first time in years about a Marvel property that the next chapter cant come soon enough. Black Widow is too long, too loud, preposterously overplotted, and slightly headache-inducingall arguably features and not bugs when it comes to big tentpole blockbusters. But walking out of it I felt like summer had finallyfinally!begun.
Jenee Desmond-Harris is online weekly to chat live with readers. Heres an edited transcript of this weeks chat.

Q. Exposed for being exposed: I have been appearing in adult videos and on a cam site under a pseudonym for several years to make additional income. Recently, a co-worker from my day job came to me and revealed she has seen my adult work online. She said she would expose me to our boss unless I started doing sexual favors for her. I dont want to lose my day job. What should I do?

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A: Option 1: Lie and tell her you panicked and came clean to the boss, and that you both laughed at her for being a prude and are deeply concerned that shes a sexual predator, but are going to give her a chance to turn her life around before taking action.

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Option 2: Im not a practicing lawyer (so this isnt legal advice), but I am pretty good at Googling and I came across this FBI website that defines sextortion as a serious crime that occurs when someone threatens to distribute your private and sensitive material if you dont provide them images of a sexual nature, sexual favors, or money. Theres a number there to call. Use it. Then send the link to your co-worker and tell her youve contacted the authorities and shes in dangerous territory, and let her know you wont be the only one without a job if she goes to the boss.

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How to Get Advice From Prudie:

 Send questions for publication here. (Questions may be edited.)

 Join the live chat Mondays at noon. Submit your questions and comments here before or during the discussion.

Q. Tiny space: I own a two-bedroom, one-bath condo in the heart of a great city. The second bedroom is my office and I have a sleeper sofa there. I will sleep on it and give up my own bed when my parents visit since they have health conditions, but that isnt comfortable for more than a night.

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My sister Kay is engaged to a guy with three kids. She is struggling with her role as a future stepmom and went ahead and bribed the kids with a holiday trip to my city. I told Kay she could stay for a four-day weekend, but not to expect me to play tour guide or cook, and to bring two blow-up mattresses.

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Kay told me I needed to sleep in my office so she and her boyfriend could have privacy, or to let them sleep in my office while the kids camp out. That doesnt work because my work has security measures, I sometimes have 3 a.m. meetings, and I am not giving up my bed. What do I do?

A: Hi Kay. Youre still welcome to come visit but just a reminder to please bring the blow-up mattresses because Im going to be sleeping in my room, and the office isnt available for guests. If that doesnt work, maybe you can get a hotel and we can meet up a couple of times over the weekend. Let me know.

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Q. Confused about the person I married: I married someone who I knew for only six months. He works on a ship and I am a flight attendant. I am very attached to my mom and sister, and I speak to them every day a couple of times on video. My husband argues with me every week, saying I dont give him time. It will take me time to accept this whole change and he does not understand this. I am getting tired of arguing every day and explaining why I was on calls with my mother or sister. I even started lying about speaking with them. What should I do? I feel this behavior is very toxic and it is draining my energy.

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A: It is toxic, and Im not surprised that its draining your energy. Hes acting as if youre spending every weekend in Vegas with your friends, when youre simply keeping in touch with your family. The idea that he wants to isolate you from your loved ones is very concerning.

I think you mentioned that you only knew him for six months before getting married because part of you knows you moved too fast, and made a commitment without getting to know him. You can undo this mistake. You dont have to stay married. Be honest with your mom and sister about whats happening and see what they think.

If youre really committed to working on things, theres always counseling. And while you give that your best effort, Id advise you not to have kidsyoull just end up feeling more stuck and likely be easier to control. And under no circumstances should you let him keep you from talking to the people in your life who have known you for longer than half a year and actually care about your happiness.

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Q. Feel naive and stupid: My partner and I have been together for eight years. I have a 21-year-old stepson, who, when recently drunk, revealed some information I cant get over: His mother, Vineeta, apparently catfished my partner by using a photo of a beautiful young lady. They connected and my partner told her over the text how he is unhappy in the relationship, and how he felt an instant connection that he never felt before. He invited this woman to a hotel room. Nothing happened, as my partner eventually found out the truth about being catfished by his ex-wife.

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The fact that he was ready to cheat has shaken me; I thought I had a faithful partner to build my future with. I am devastated. I cant trust him, and I dont know who he is anymore. I think I am in denial and afraid to accept the truth.

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Please help with your perspective. I know my partner is not going to change, and will only become defensive and blame me for being in a loveless relationship. I had hinted to him before that it is inappropriate to flirt, but he says he likes to joke. He never took me seriously and avoided the conversation altogether.

A: None of the details about Vineeta catfishing or your stepson getting drunk matter. This sentencewhich you wrotehas all the answers you need: He is not going to change, and will only become defensive and blame me for being in a loveless relationship.

You said it, I didnt: He is stubborn, defensive, and considers your relationship loveless. And now hes been unfaithful, too!

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The second time you gave yourself good advice was when you said, I think I am in denial and afraid to accept and face the truth. Read that again.

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Even the worst relationships are hard to let go of, so I wont pretend this will be easy. But theres not much here to fight for here, and you should listen to the part of yourself that already knows that.

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Q: Introverted and annoyed: I got engaged more than five years ago. I did not tell anyone I was planning to get engaged except for my best friend, as I dont like drawing attention to myself and figured people would find out after it happened anyway. My dad asked if he could post a picture from the engagement dinner on social media and I said OK, since it wasnt that big of a deal to me. However, one of my cousins was upset that I did not tell her about the engagement before it happened and that she had to find out about it online. It has been years but she is still angry about it. I dont feel bad about the decision I made nor do I feel I did anything I should have to apologize for. I wish she would just let this go. What would be an appropriate response when she brings it up yet again?

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A: [Cousins name], I love you and I hate that youre hurt, but Im shocked that youre still dwelling on the way my engagement was announced years later. I made the best decision for me, it had nothing to do with you, and Im not going to apologize for it. Im going to give you three minutes right now to share all your feelings about what happened and I will listen so you can get everything off your chest, but after that, I wont discuss it again. Ready, set, go

Q. Re: Exposed for being exposed: Im baffled that someone thinks theres anything private on the internet. The letter writer should have had a plan for when the side gig was discovered. Maybe the boss and the rest of the office already knows. The letter writer should also review their company policies for outside employment clauses. Many employers require employees to disclose outside employment to head off conflict-of-interest situations.

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A: Good point. The letter writer should definitely check into that and keep it in mind when and if they get another day job.

Q. Re: Confused about the person I married: Its not toxic. The letter writer is a flight attendant, husband works on a shipit means they have less time at home together than a 9-5 office couple, and the letter writer calls different family members a couple times a day, every day, enough that he notices. The letter writer is not present. Its fine to call your family, but its not OK to ignore your marriage to have a third call with your sister in one day.

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A: I think being allowed to speak to your loved ones, as much as you want, in peace, is a key thing to consider when it comes to compatibility. For some people it might be three times a day, and for others it might be three times a year. But people who are married should be on the same page, or close, or at least refrain from antagonizing and guilt-tripping each other! Labeling this situationwhich is clearly making the letter writer deeply unhappynot toxic is not going to help them to have a happy life with their husband.

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Jenee Desmond-Harris: Thats all for today! Thanks for your questions. Remember, dont demand money from your siblings and dont demand sexual favors from your co-workers. Have a great week!

If you missed Part 1 of this weeks chat, click here to read it.

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From Care and Feeding

There are two children that live across the street from usaged 6 and 9ishwho have serious boundary issues and we dont quite know how to deal with them. They walk into our house without knocking, ring the doorbell during the day when my husband is sleeping, ask us for food and drinks (or just help themselves without asking), and ask my kids to give them their toys or money. We are very firm with them, always telling them, This is not your house; you have to knock, or You cant have our dinner, or No, you absolutely cannot have my sons bike. We are firm, but they are willful and resistant, often ignoring us when we tell them to leave, trying to grab food from the counter, rooting through my sons toy box while my son is telling them to stop, trying to grab coins out of our change tray, etc. Its a constant battle.
President Joe Biden has been getting some flak this week over recent statements he made about the Second Amendment and the right to own a cannon. The Second Amendment, from the day it was passed, limited the type of people who could own a gun and what type of weapon you could own, Biden asserted. You couldnt buy a cannon. The Washington Posts fact-checker Glenn Kessler on Monday gave Biden Four Pinocchios for this remark, while gun rights activists have been snickering. While Biden did misstate the historyspecifically, cannons were never explicitly outlawed in the Founding erahis critics, such as gun rights champions Glenn Harlan Reynolds and David Kopelare guilty of analogous distortions and are even less reliable guides to the history of the Second Amendment and gun regulation. More importantly, Bidens basic point was not particularly controversial. Guns have always been regulated, and the Founding generation always balanced gun rights and the need to promote the peace and public safety.

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While Bidens specific claim was wrong and poorly worded, he could have easily made his point by saying something like the following: At the time of the Second Amendment, there was nothing to prevent government from regulating arms, including dangerous or unusual weapons. Sir William Blackstone, one of the most important legal commentators on English law, expressly stated this principle in his Commentaries, a text that Justice Antonin Scalia quoted in his opinion recognizing an individual right to own a firearm in District of Columbia v. Heller. Indeed, Scalia in that opinion made this point himself:

Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. From Blackstone through the 19th-century cases, commentators and courts routinely explained that the right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.

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So, what about cannons? Whatever the law was at the time, there is not much evidence that private citizens were dragging cannons, howitzers, or mortars around the city of Boston, New York, or Philadelphia while Congress was debating the Second Amendment. In fact, these pieces of artillery were relatively expensive and difficult to manufacture. To be sure, some militia companies in the era of the Second Amendment, such as the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusettsa private militia unit that was legally chartered by the stateowned such items. Similarly, given the dangers of piracy, merchant vessels would have been outfitted with cannon. These facts, though, do not undermine the actual point Biden was trying to make, even if he made the point infelicitously.

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Part of the problem with such exercises in antiquarianism and originalist literalism is that they miss the larger point about trying to translate 18th century legal principles and practices into modern terms. When modern gun rights activists say that there was no law against owning a cannon in the era of the Second Amendment, they are either being presentist or disingenuous. Claiming that there was no law against something in the past does not establish that a constitutional right to own it existed; it merely describes a social practice at a particular time and place. If people had started dragging cannons around Philadelphia, it is likely the state of Pennsylvania would have passed a law regulating the practice. The reason that laws against specific types of weapons did not emerge until decades after the Second Amendment was written and similar state constitutional provisions were enacted was because America did not have a gun violence problem at the time of the Second Amendment. When the market revolution of the Jacksonian era made cheap, reliable, and easily concealed handguns widely available, states did pass laws regulating and, in some cases, banning these weapons. Although a few judges in the slave-owning South viewed these laws as impermissible violations of the right to keep and bear arms, many judges saw no problem with such laws. Indeed, even some of the Southern slave-owning judges most sympathetic to gun rights acknowledged that limits on carrying dangerous weapons in public were legitimate exercises of the states police powers. In contrast to the National Rifle Associations view that guns are what makes us free, the generation that wrote the Second Amendment had an instrumental view of guns as tools that could be used for good or bad. The Second Amendment was not Americas first freedom; the right of the people to pass laws to promote public health and safety was Americas true first freedom. Judges in the early decades of the 19th century began to refashion this 18th century right into a new judicial doctrine, the police power. Understanding the meaning of this power and its centrality to Second Amendment jurisprudence is essential to recover the real original understanding of the right to keep and bear arms, not the historical caricature advanced by gun rights advocates.

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Gun rights activists have adopted an absurd theory of the police power to support their libertarian fantasies. According to their view, the police power is like frequent flyer miles: If you dont use it, you lose it. In a variety of cases gun rights activists have interpreted the absence of a law as evidence of the existence of a right. In fact, the absence of a law typically tells you almost nothing about rights. More often the lack of regulation only demonstrates that a problem did not exist and hence there was no legislative need to pass a law. In the License Cases (1847), the Supreme Court described the scope of the police power as follows:

[The police power] is not susceptible of an exact limitation but must be exercised under the changing exigencies of society. In the progress of population, of wealth, and of civilization, new and vicious indulgences spring up, which require restraints that can only be imposed by new legislative power. When this power shall be exerted, how far it shall be carried, and where it shall cease, must mainly depend upon the evil to be remedied.

Although Biden did not get the history right in this instance, the constitutional principle he identified was uncontroversial at the time of the Second Amendment. His understanding of constitutional law in this regard is far more accurate than that of the gun rights libertarians who have mocked him. We the people acting through our representatives do have the awesome power to pass laws to regulate and, where necessary, prohibit weapons that pose a threat to public safety. One can argue over the policy merits of such legislation, but the constitutional validity of this idea should be beyond dispute.
On Saturday, Donald Trump traveled to Ohio to hold his first rally since leaving the White House. He ranted about Joe Biden and spread his usual conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, and if you werent there to see itfittingly, theres a dispute over how big the crowd waslivestreaming was an option. While the former president is still banned by YouTube as well as every major social-networking platform for helping to incite the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, on Saturday his team set up a new verified Donald Trump account on Rumble, a video platform favored by right-wing users like Dan Bongino and Dinesh DSouza.

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A long-running critic of social medias supposed (and unsubstantiated) censorship of conservatives, Trump has been sniffing around for other social media outlets since last summer when he was reportedly in talks to join Parler, a Twitter clone thats made some headway on the right, though the deal apparently never went through. Earlier this year, he tried to post on a makeshift microblogging platform that was attached to his website, though he gave up on the venture after less than a month because few people were reading it. Now it seems hes found a home on Rumble, at least for his video content, though hes only posted footage of the Ohio rally thus far. Trump currently has 348,000 subscribers on the site, a far cry from the 2.75 million subscribers he has on his currently frozen YouTube channel.

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It turns out, however, that some people have a problem with a right-wing, free speech social network signing up Donald Trump: the other right-wing social networks.

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After the Ohio rally, John Matze, the co-founder and former CEO of Parler, questioned whether Rumble gave Trump equity in the company to entice him to make an account and accused the site of being too reliant on Big Tech by using Google ads and analytics. Andrew Torba, founder of another Twitter clone called Gab that has an extreme far-right user base, accused Rumble of compromising on free speech principles by adding a clause banning antisemitism to its terms of service. On the day President Trump joined Rumble they changed their terms of service to ban hate speech with an explicit ban on anti-Semitic messages, also known as any and all criticism of Israel and/or Jewish people, Torba wrote on Gab. No mention of banning Anti-White hatred which is still allowed. Gabs terms of service do not refer to hate speech at all and only ban porn, doxing, and illegal content. Based on snapshots from the Wayback Machine, it does appear that Rumble added specific prohibitions against antisemitic messages and content to its terms of service sometime on Thursday. Back in March, however, Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski told me that the platform does not allow racism or antisemitism, so the update doesnt necessarily signal a major shift for the sites moderation policies. (Pavlovski did not respond to a request for comment this week.)

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It may seem peculiar that Torba is so fixated on Rumbles fairly standard rules around hate speech toward Jewish people, particularly given the extent to which antisemitism pervades Gab. The alleged gunman in the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh infamously had a history of posting hateful content about Jewish people on Gab before the massacre. It wasnt until after the shooting that Gab took the account down. And as Mother Jones Ali Breland reported, Torba also has a history of courting prominent antisemites for his site.

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In this case, it appears Torbas preference that social networks make room for antisemites has blended with some professional jealousy. Earlier this month, Torba participated in an interview with the extremist conspiracy theory outlet TruNews and claimed that Trumps son-in-law Jared Kushner wanted Gab to remove antisemitic users and content from the site before Trump joined. He called them Jew-haters, I called them Jew criticizers, Torba said of Kushner. Its a free-speech platform, so as long as youre not saying anything illegal, as long as youre not making threats of violence, youre allowed to speak your mind and have an opinion about things, and I was not going to compromise on that position. Theres been no independent confirmation that such a negotiation actually happened. Outlets like CNN and Bloomberg have reported that Kushner stepped in to stop Trump from joining Parler and Gab. However, these reports made no mention of Kushner specifying moderation of antisemitic content as a prerequisite for Trump setting up an account on those platforms.

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Torba started Gab in 2016 in response to allegations that Facebook was limiting the visibility of right-wing politicians. Hes characterized the creation of Gab as a principled stand against the censorship of conservatives and social justice bullying. Rumble, on the other hand, wasnt founded with a political mission in mind, but more or less fell into the right-wing alternative-platform game. Canadian tech entrepreneur Chris Pavlovski created the video site in 2013 with the intent of providing small-time creators with opportunities to monetize their content, which he felt was harder to do on YouTube. The platform mostly just hosted videos of cute animals and kids until 2020, when right-wingers began flocking to the site to upload anti-vaccine and election conspiracy theory content. Perhaps sensing the opportunity, Pavlovski has recently become more outspoken in accusing Big Tech of censorship and now actively courts prominent conservatives and intellectual dark web figures to join Rumble. Its a strategy Rumble may very well double down on: According to the sites metrics, the Trump livestream is nearing 1 million views.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.
On Oct. 4, 1918, the U.S. Army Signal Corps successfully launched, and then lost, an aerial torpedo. The Kettering Bug, as the torpedo was formally known, is an ancestor of both cruise missiles and drones, but on that day in 1918, it presented a unique challenge for the military unit responsible for launching it. As the Signal Corps interviewed farmers in the area around Dayton, Ohio, to try to find where the Bug had gone, the Corps lacked the language to explain what, exactly, the plane was. Even if they had had the terminology, the aerial torpedo program was itself top secret, and the country was still fighting the Great War.

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Some witnesses to the Bugs crash described seeing a pilot parachute out of the drone, or described its descent as the actions of a drunk or crazy pilot. But the Army did not dispute those perceptionsinstead it went so far as to say the nonexistent pilot had jumped out early and was receiving treatment in a hospital. The witnesses who led the Army to its missing drone were not trusted with the honest truth of what they had seen, as a matter of national security.

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This past Friday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a new report on unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP. (UFO was once itself a military term, but as it now carries with it the pop cultural connotation of alien visitors, the military has moved to UAP as an even less descriptive catchall term.) The report, a mere nine pages including two appendixes, does not identify the mysterious unidentified phenomenaneither as mundane human technology nor anything extraterrestrial. Instead, the report defers certainty to future investigations, asking the public to trust conclusions built on evidence that the military concedes may be the result of sensor or pilot error.

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The Pentagon in 2021 is much transformed from the Army exploring aerial torpedoes in 1918, but theres some important continuity in how it decides to disclose information and to whom. When it comes to modern military mysteries of the sky, the knowable truth exists somewhere between what the public can see, what the military can see and doesnt want to share, and what the military does not want to acknowledge that it doesnt know.

After a buildup to the report that included high-profile media coverage, as well as a call from Sen. Marco Rubio to take it seriously and have a process to take it seriously, the report lands with a dull thud. It examines 144 sightings detected by U.S. government sensors (not just video) between 2004 and 2021, and names 18 of those incidents as potentially demonstrating an unusual flight pattern. Instead of declaring them evidence of top-secret military research, foreign craft with a human origin, or alien visitation, the report simply labels them incidents for further study.

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The Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) considered a range of information on UAP described in U.S. military and IC (Intelligence Community) reporting, the executive summary reads, but because the reporting lacked sufficient specificity, ultimately recognized that a unique, tailored reporting process was required to provide sufficient data for analysis of UAP events. In other words, when it comes to documenting the unexplainable in the sky, the military simply lacks rigorous data collection.

The existing sensors on military vehicles are designed to identify familiar phenomena. It is equipment ill-suited for making observations of the unusual.

In part, this lack of data collection is the direct result of choices made by the military, primarily the Air Force. In 1969, the Air Force ended Project Blue Book, its collection of UFO sightings, after a report concluded that 90 percent of all UFO reports prove to be quite plausibly related to ordinary objects, like the many sightings that turned out to just be photographs of the planet Venus. Of the remaining 10 percent of sightings, at least half could be explained as public observation of top-secret military spy planes, though that information would not be disclosed until 1992. By collecting reports on UFOs, the Air Force had hoped Project Blue Book would detect new and novel airborne threats against the United States. What it discovered, instead, is that sometimes people would observe spy planes. After closing the project, the Air Force distanced itself from publicly responding to unusual observations in the sky, after decades of close association.

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Both the Air Force and UFOs trace their origins to the summer of 1947. On June 24, amateur pilot Kenneth Arnold reported a flying saucer near Washingtons Mount Rainer, setting off a flurry of other reports of flying saucers. Just a month later, President Harry Truman signed into law the National Security Act of 1947, which made the Air Force independent. And similarly, pilots reporting unusual sightings in the sky are as old as pilots.

Securing the sky meant looking for any new threats that might emerge overhead, seemingly out of thin air. This meant watching for new threats from hostile nations, especially as tensions rose with the Soviet Union. And [the Air Force says] over and over again, since 1948, [reporting on UFOs] just needs to become part of our normal intelligence work, says Kate Dorsch, a historian of science at the University of Pennsylvania.

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That tension, between wanting to accurately document threats while keeping military secrets, would immediately collide in Roswell, New Mexico.

On June 14, 1947, about 80 miles north of Roswell, father and son ranchers W.W. Mac and Vernon Brazel discovered the wreckage of a massive balloon. Three and a half weeks later, Mac collected what he could find and delivered it to the local sheriff. Brazel said that media stories, like that of Arnolds flying saucer sighting, prompted him to show the debris to authorities.

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When the sheriff contacted the local airbase to inquire as to the origin of this mysterious object, an intelligence officer chose to tell the press that the Army had come into possession of a flying saucer. Apparently, it was better from the Air Forces perspective that there was a crashed alien spacecraft out there than to tell the truth, Roger Launius, the former curator of space history at the Smithsonians National Air and Space Museum, told Smithsonian magazine in 2017. The lie also happened to be exactly what the public wanted to hear.

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Just a day after the intelligence officers report, the Army offered a clarifying half-truth: It identified the object as a crashed weather balloon. The full truth, declassified in 1994, is that what crashed at Roswell was a balloon from Project Mogul, a secret military program that put microphones and other acoustic sensors on balloons to detect signs of a Soviet nuclear test.

While the explanations offered for the Kettering Bug crash or the Roswell balloon may seem laughable today, we can only say that from a perspective of decades of disclosure and declassification. Even as the military acknowledges the veracity of recent sightings, complete with videos and testimony from pilots, we should be skeptical that the military is telling the whole truth about what it knows. The military can keep the nature of classified technology secret even from the pilots who observe it in action.

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Our new era of UFO sightings began with three videos leaked online. FLIR, a video filmed in 2004 and online in some form since at least 2007, was the subject of a major New York Times story in 2017 alongside GIMBAL, a video filmed in January 2015 that was released online by the To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, a UFO-hunting venture headed by former Blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge. (To The Stars also released GOFAST, another video filmed in January 2015, in 2018.)

The Pentagon has since confirmed they were real military videos. Each clip, shot from a camera attached to a military plane, shows what appears to be an object moving against the sky in an unusual way, traveling at great speed against the wind and turning at unusual angles. In the videos from 2015, the pilots can be heard reacting, too, speculating as to the nature of the objects. (Thats a fucking drone, bro.  Look at that thing! Its rotating.)

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These videos give the appearance of authoritative documents, of proof on film. But the new report treads a careful line between saying that what is visible is what happened and acknowledging the limitations of the sensors on military planes.

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Carefully, the report parses that most of the phenomena reported probably do represent physical objects, and were recorded by a range of sensors, including radar, infrared, electro-optical (think normal camera), weapon seekers, and visual confirmation (by pilots or other human observers). But it suggests that some UAPs unusual flight characteristics could be the result of sensor errors, spoofing, or observer misperception and will require rigorous analysis. The report dryly notes that The sensors mounted on U.S. military platforms are typically designed to fulfill specific missions. As a result, those sensors are not generally suited for identifying UAP. But its also worth considering that some sensor readings from the sightings are likely to remain military secrets until declassificationwhich could take a long time.

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There was a brief moment in the 1940s when the Air Force worked with Kodak to develop a camera specifically for taking pictures of UFOs. Dorsch says, Immediately, it is a total failure. They cant figure out what the technology needs, or how to make it work. And even if it could work, the Air Force was not convinced it would be worth the cost or would even be that successful. So in place of a dedicated sensor designed to detect the unidentifiable, the military has to lean on the sensors it already has on vehicles, built to find known threats.

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Thats to say nothing of the strange readings that might result if signalsvisual, infrared, or radio wavewere being actively interfered with. The report acknowledges this possibility in mentions of spoofingthe deliberate, hostile distortion of signals. If UAP sightings are the result of spoofing, that suggests flaws in the sensors the military will want to fix. Perhaps more importantly, it also suggests some other nation (or more than one) has figured out enough about American sensors to be able to fool them.

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Some of the activity depicted in the released videos, like unusual acceleration speeds of unknown objects, could also be the result of known but not disclosed sensor error. Military sensors exist to put weapons on the right targets and to protect the people and vehicles firing those weapons. Revealing sensor error means letting another country know a specific weak point in that process.

It is important to remember that while a handful of videos has been made public, this report draws on 144 incidents. The military is collecting far more information than it shares with the public, and it likely has especially mundane reasons for refusing to disclose all that it captures. For now, these 144 incidents remain mysterious as the military hopes that more deliberately collected information leads to better internal analysis.

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The report says that with better data collection, and pilots more willing to talk (work to overcome the stigma of reporting UAP was the centerpiece of a New Yorker story published in April), the Pentagon will be able to categorize all sightings into five useful categories. These are: airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, U.S. government or industry developmental programs, foreign adversary systems, and a catchall other bin. Of those, the military likely has an interest in keeping government projects secret and in confirming foreign systems before disclosing them to the public.

That even the military, with every sensor it has at its disposal, expects to still have uncategorizable sightings is an acknowledgment of the limitations of perception, not an endorsement of novel theories of aircraft. It is also a useful tool for the military, a way to publicly acknowledge a mystery it may well have the answer to, but one it deems too crucial for national security to fully disclose.

It certainly wouldnt be the first time the military, in possession of a full but embarrassing truth, sat back as the public filled in the blanks with anything but stories of error.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.
In Seattle, its well-known that you cant count on summer weather until after the Fourth of July. While our friends elsewhere plan sunny barbecues and beach trips, we expect summer to kick off with a couple weeks of gloom and drizzle, which locals lovingly call Juneuary.

But not this year. Instead, the U.S. Pacific Northwest and western Canada are experiencing an unprecedented heat wave. On Saturday, Seattle tied its all-time heat record of 103 degrees. On Sunday, we broke that record, and on Monday, we broke it again with a high of 108 degrees. Its so hot that our light rail trains are running slower because tracks are too hot, and asphalt has buckled in the heat. Portland also set a new all-time record with 115 degrees Fahrenheit, and over the weekend, countless other cities across the Pacific Northwest broke records for hottest June temperatures and all-time high records. Canadayes, the entire countryhas a new all-time high of a blistering 47.5 degrees Celsius, or around 118 degrees Fahrenheit, in Lytton, British Columbia. Naturally, people are comparing these temperatures to those in other cities known for hot summers: Las Vegas, Phoenix, Houston. Yes, those places also get hot (though if were keeping track, Portlands high record now beats Houstons, and Lyttons beats Vegas). But whats noteworthy about this heat wave is that this is wildly atypical for the region, and we are simply not prepared for such heat.

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Lets take Seattle, for instance, where the majority of homes dont have air conditioning.

For the most part, we simply dont need it; there are typically a few 90-degree days scattered throughout the summer, but theyre bearable enough if youve got a fan and some ice water to rig up a makeshift cooling system. As the weather has gotten hotter, more Seattleites have given in to the lure of cool air: Between 2013 and 2019, the number of air-conditioned homes in the area jumped from 31 percent to 44 percent, but were still the least air-conditioned metro area. Given that excessive heat kills hundreds of people a year, many people in the northwest could be at risk.

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The 56 percent of Seattleites who lack air conditioning, including me, are discovering that ye olde fan-and-ice-water trick is no match for this record-setting heat. (In fact, at some temperatures, fans are detrimental; according to a former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official, it works like a convection oven.) People are sharing other tips, like covering windows as much as possiblebut in the winter, sun comes at a premium, so many folks lack window shades. Now, people are using blankets, sheets, or even aluminum foil, but my favorite creative solution came from climate scientist Harriet Morgan, who used signs from a climate protest to keep the sun out.

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Despite these interventions, homes are still sweltering; on Sunday afternoon, my apartment reached 92 degrees. My family visited a local museum and the library to hide out from the heat, and as we blissfully walked around these cool spaces, I was grateful this heat wave didnt happen a year earlier, at a time when gathering indoors was riskier for the completely unvaccinated public. The city has opened cooling shelters, and other air-conditioned spaces, including a local funeral home, have opened their doors to those seeking refuge. In an effort to get people to safety, the Seattle Parks Department was even advertising deals from a local mall. But not all businesses could capitalize on people looking for relief. Many independent restaurants and stores here also lack cooling, leading some to close for the safety of their employees.

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News reports have been focusing on how this heat wave has brought all-time high temperatures, but another type of record has made things unbearable: the highest-ever low temperatures. Usually, Seattle evenings are chilly, so even during a heat wave, you can count on opening up your windows and letting fresh air into your house to cool things down. But recently, Seattles low early-morning temperatures have only cooled to around 73 degrees. For comparison, consider that Seattles average high temperature for June is just under 70 degrees; that means our current low is hotter than our usual high.

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If it were just one freakishly hot day, itd be more bearable, but this hot spell is relentless. Before this year, Seattle has seen just three days at or over 100 degrees since 1894. Now we have had three 100-plus-degree days in a row. As a result, many of us are having trouble falling asleep and staying comfortable; some friends have been sleeping outside, only to be woken up by the 5:14 a.m. sunrise. (Oh right, did I mention that this is the time of year we get 16 hours of sunlight? This meme sums it up pretty well.) Many others dont have a choice, particularly the roughly 4,000 Seattleites who live outside, many of whom are worried about how theyll survive the week. While cooling centers remain an option, people who are unhoused face barriers that housed people do not; for instance, leaving your belongings unattended could mean never seeing them again, and thats a risk some people are understandably reluctant to take.

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Beyond the immediate physical toll of a heat wave, it takes a mental toll, too. At first, I thought my lethargy and irritability were the result of being overheated and sticky all day, but then I remembered that I love being overheated and sticky if it means Im biking around town, hiking, or seeing an outdoor concert. Instead, though, I was stuck inside, with all the blinds drawn and still sweltering, grappling with the realization that the place I call home is rapidly changing. Some of that lethargy came from a feeling of helplessness; some of that irritability was grief and anger.

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When I first moved here from Northern California (sorry, Seattleitesyes, I am one of those people), friends asked how Id handle all the rain and chill. Just wait five years and Seattle will be the new Bay Area, I joked. Its now been seven years, and the evidence of climate change in the region have been adding up: In 2020, we, along with the rest of the Western U.S., experienced an unprecedented wildfire season. Extreme storms, bringing inches of precipitation, are taking the place of the light drizzle typical of the area. (Back in California, things are not great, either; the Russian River is drying up amid a serious drought, and the states snowpack is at zero percent of its typical levels as of June 1.) If Mother Nature was dropping hints that were living through climate change, shes no longer being subtle; this week feels like the most in-your-face incarnation of an environmental emergency. What better evidence of global warming than a record-breaking heat wave?

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As much as Id love to think this heat wave is a freak occurrence, unprecedented weather is the new normal, and this is just the beginning. So far, the planet has warmed by about 1 degree Celsius, but were still on track for another 2 degrees of warming. Some days, Im pessimistic that we can slow climate change: A recently leaked copy of the upcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report warns that we might soon reach tipping points from which the climate will never recover. Others, theres reason for hope; Congress seems on track to pass new climate legislation limiting methane emissions, and all the while, scientists and climate activists are working tirelessly toward mitigation. The biggest question of our time is whether well move quickly enough to avoid destroying our collective homeand for the 13 million Americans who were under an excessive heat warning last weekend, this heat wave brings those stakes to the forefront.

Either way, I guess I should look into buying an air conditioner.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.
Borders in Ceuta and Melilla with Morocco to stay closed for another month



All non-essential crossings between Spain and Morocco have been banned since 13 March 2020.

The Ministry of the Interior has determined that the borders that separate Ceuta and Melilla from Morocco will remain closed until 31 July as a result of the Covid-19 health crisis, according to Tuesdays Official State Gazette (BOE).

The ministry has extended an order issued on 17 July 2020 to temporarily ban non-essential travel from third countries to the European Union and Schengen zone for public order and health reasons.

The Tarajal border in Ceuta and the Beni Enzar border in Melilla have been closed since 13 March 2020, when the Spanish government declared the state of alarm and ordered the lockdown.

The only citizens that Morocco has allowed to cross the land border since then have been Spanish or EU citizens who were trapped in Morocco by the outbreak of the pandemic.


Andrej Kurucz talks about the opportunities available at the EU level to boost the innovation and research activities of Slovak companies.

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The global impact of the Covid-19 pandemic has strengthened European Unions focus on research and innovation. Slovakia still lags behind in this area and the opportunities available at the EU level may present a path to boost its innovation potential in the near future. Andrej Kurucz, Head of Slovak Liaison Office for Research and Development (SLORD) in Brussels shared his views on this topic.

What is the main mission of SLORD?

The main mission of SLORD, which was established back in 2014, is to bridge the gap between the EU institutions and the Slovak Republic, namely to stimulate the cooperation between the European and Slovak subjects of the research and innovation ecosystem. Our main focus is on monitoring the European policies and various instruments to support research and innovation, specifically on the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation  Horizon 2020 and incoming Horizon Europe Programme (2021-2027).

What kind of support can you offer to Slovak companies active in the field of R&D and innovation?

Firstly, we provide targeted and up-to-date information for the Slovak research and innovation community on the incoming calls and funding opportunities for research, development and innovation from the European resources, and particularly through Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe Programme. We are constantly monitoring and analyzing trends of the EU research, development and innovation policies.

Secondly, we provide concrete support in the preparation of the R&I projects, mainly by providing expert consultations on the EU projects, by providing targeted information on possibilities of involvement in international consortiums, by consulting services for searching for partners and involvement in the European networks.

Thirdly, we organize information days, workshops, trainings, seminars and conferences in order to improve knowledge about the Slovak research and innovation in Brussels.

Last but not least, our office offers the Slovak researchers the opportunity to use our meeting rooms to organize project meetings, seminars and trainings.

It is important to say that our services are available free of charge to all Slovak researchers and innovators (from public and private institutions, SMEs, individuals) as well as researchers coming to Slovakia.

Can you mention any specific examples of how assistance provided by SLORD helped innovative Slovak companies reach their goals?

I would highlight a Slovak SME which we helped with visibility in Brussels, provided several meetings with EU officials and organized a dedicated event. The company has been able to successfully obtain grants from several EU funding programs. We have provided expert advice and recommendations to a number of Slovak companies that have applied for the prestigious grant from the European Innovation Council or have been selected to receive the Seal of Excellence, official EU label awarded to high quality project proposals.

How would you describe the Slovak R&D and innovation landscape?

Based on the recommendations and data provided by the European Innovation Scoreboard which assesses relative strengths and weaknesses of national innovation systems, Slovakia is among Moderate Innovators.

The impact of employment and the impact of sales are the strongest innovative dimensions in the Slovak environment, where Slovakia scores above the EU average. Slovakia achieves very strong results in terms of employment in fast-growing enterprises in the field of innovative sectors, sales of new-to-market and new-to-firm product innovations, exports of medium and high-tech products, as well as the number of new holders of doctoral degrees.

On the other hand, Slovakia is facing several chronic challenges that are being solved very slowly: Slovakia reaches the lowest results in terms of finance and support - total R&D expenditure is very limited compared to other EU Member States (including V4 members), low investments in innovations, a very limited level of collaboration between public and private sectors, knowledge transfer and intellectual assets. In some cases, Slovak research and innovation ecosystem may even seem cyclical and still not open to full internationalization, whereas, in my personal view, opening up to the world would bring about a fundamental paradigm shift.

Where do you see the biggest potential for improvement?

We are witnessing a slight improvement and positive trends with the level of venture capital investments and private sector expenditures on research and development in recent times, however, both values are still limited compared to the average EU level.

The good news is that not even a pandemic has stopped the growth of some Slovak companies or innovative ideas and more and more companies coming from Slovakia are gaining significant support and recognition. I believe that framework conditions and specific schemes and measures should be created for them at the national level to enable them to increase their competitiveness and encourage their growth.

The South Moravian Innovation Centre (JIC) in Brno seems to be a great example of how to successfully combine the potential of business and academia at the regional level. Why is it difficult to replicate this kind of success in Slovakia?

JIC, from its establishment in 2003, has been able to build an effective ecosystem, connecting start-ups, investors, research and scientific centers, and public institutions  both with each other and with international organizations. It has been built on the successful concept known from the Western EU Member States and was conceived as a long-term plan. Such ecosystem provides financial and in-kind contribution to potential beneficiaries - specific financial support is even provided by the region and the City of Brno.

It is important to say that the public sector is an active player, creating attractive framework conditions that are able to support innovators and provide conditions comparable to those in the Western EU Member States. This is not an easy task  it requires a long-term vision, financial commitment and sustainability, predictable environment, experience with the EU funds (especially in the context of the usage of synergies between funds) and enthusiasm of all relevant parties.

In case of Slovakia, I guess we were not able to bring all these important components together at the same time. However, such environment is very dynamic. We are moving towards a new programming period with a new set of financial rules, so there is a chance to create such an environment.

What opportunities in research, development and innovation are currently available at the EU level?

The main instrument of the EU to support research and innovation is the incoming Horizon Europe Programme for 2021-2027. The program is designed for all entities (public and private), the non-profit sector and individuals. It represents 95.5 billion euros in current prices and stands for the third biggest program of the long-term EU budget.

Horizon Europe Programme will continue to support frontier research projects by the European Research Council (ERC), exchanges of researchers under the Marie Curie-Skodowska Actions and investments in research infrastructures (including e-infrastructures). It will directly support research on main societal challenges, strengthen technological and industrial capacities and set up missions at the EU level. In addition, it will stimulate breakthrough solutions that contribute to building an innovation-friendly market and ecosystems. It will aim to make Europe a key player in market-creating innovation through the European Innovation Council (EIC) that is relevant for private companies. The European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) will continue to focus on promoting the integration of actors with the common goal of developing innovation in research, higher education and entrepreneurship. At the same time, the European Commission proposes to extend the measures that should be targeted at the EU Member States with weaker R&I results, including Slovakia. Funding for research, development and innovation in the forthcoming 2021-2027 programming period will also come from the following programs: InvestEU, cohesion policy, European Defence Fund, ITER, Euratom and Digital Europe Programme.

Are Slovak companies sufficiently informed and prepared to take full advantage?

I cannot speak about other programs than Horizon 2020, but we see a positive trend of more and more Slovak companies submitting their project proposals to the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation. The numbers are clear; more than 60% of the total budget allocated to Slovak subjects so far goes to private companies. I am convinced that this is a strong signal that Slovak companies are also aware of the value this program offers.

It is not just about interesting financial possibilities and visibility of their results at the European level, participation on such programs brings long-term perspective, new opportunities, new bilateral and multilateral partnerships, transfer of know-how and internationalization.

From my personal point of view, the advantages of participation in the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation are concise and clear rules of participation (all in one place) and high transparency of the whole process which means that evaluation is done by independent experts under coordination of the EU executive agencies. The average project is around 3.5 million euros and lasts for five years.

How has the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic altered the innovation landscape? Do you see any potential positive effects in the longer run?

We face an unprecedented crisis in our interconnected world where health, security, and economy affect populations across borders. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has shown us that we need to have a strong research and innovation basis in every EU Member State. Health and health care have not been EUs primary focus. The current health and economic crisis have been a wake-up call  therefore, I am happy to see that the European Commission has presented its recovery plan, Europe4Health, integrated in the proposal for the next Multiannual Financial Framework for 20212027.

Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the European Commission has announced to allocate hundreds of millions of euros in emergency research funding under Horizon 2020 to help find treatments, medicines and a better strategy to combat Covid-19. In total, the EU has committed to invest 1 billion euros from Horizon 2020 under the Coronavirus Global Response initiative. To date, more than 780 million euros has been mobilized from this pledge, of which at least 350 million is to support the development of coronavirus vaccines. The new initiative HERA Incubator will provide the means to detect and suppress further mutations of the virus, as well as the development of more effective vaccines. The additional funding will contribute to increasing the capacity for monitoring and analysis of different coronavirus variants, as well as for data sharing through the strengthening of the European Covid-19 Data Platform and other existing projects and research infrastructures. The national ministries have also agreed on the first ERAvsCorona action plan which lays out ten priority short-term coordinated actions to tackle the coronavirus.

We know that sharing of knowledge and innovation is crucial and saves lives. Since the start of the Covid-19 outbreak, research and innovation has been one of our most impactful tools to tackle the disease. Specific calls dedicated to Covid-19 from incoming Horizon Europe programme will also provide solutions to major concerns of citizens, frontline workers, policy makers and industry for living with the virus in the years to come.

Originally published in Connection, the magazine published by AmCham Slovakia

29. Jun 2021 at 12:00 | Connection team
Norway returns illegally exported Roman coins to Slovakia

The illegal trade in cultural heritage items is a large-scale global problem, the Slovak Foreign Affairs Minister claims.

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Norwegian Culture Minister Abid Raja returned 44 Roman coins (antoninianus) from the 3rd century to Slovak Ambassador to Norway Denisa Koterec Frelichova. These coins had been illegally exported from Slovakia to Norway.

They were probably found in Slovakia during illegal pseudo-archaeological activities and then illegally transferred to Norway.

The return of illegally exported cultural objects abroad is carried out in accordance with the obligations of international law and on the basis of the UNESCO Convention and the Norwegian Act on the Protection of Cultural Heritage.

The illegal trade in cultural heritage items is a large-scale global problem, said Foreign Affairs Minister Ivan Korcok, as quoted by the SITA newswire. I'm very happy to have these items returned to where they belong, in Slovakia.

From our archive

From our archive Hundreds of coins found near Lucivna Read more

29. Jun 2021 at 11:31 | Compiled by Spectator staff
Nathan Bain edged his rival Nicholas "Ace" Barnsdale by another slim margin of five points in Saturday's (June 26) Hiawatha Horse Park Handicapping Challenge. That boosted Bains lead to 10 points, with plenty of action still left in the contest.

Bain struck for four winners on the 11-race card, including an ice-cold Pick 3 in Races 4 through 6, while Barnsdale correctly forecasted three winners. Bain racked 53 points on the day to Barnsdales 48. Bains overall contest lead stands at 129 to Barnsdales 119.

With 12 cards of racing remaining in the Sarnia, Ontario track's 2021 meet, the contest outcome is far from decided between the two closely-matched handicappers. Both are USHWA Youth members, respectively known for their racecalls (Bain) and journalism (Barnsdale), in addition to picking winners.

The days driving star was Tyler Borth, who swept the final three races. He won the 9th and 10th with longshots Woodmere Rio ($25.80) and West River Cindy ($18.90) and completed the natural hat trick when he steered 3/5 favorite Thee Desperado to a dominant win in the finale.

The contest  for which the $300 first prize and $200 second prize is supplied by Hiawatha Horse Park  runs every Saturday and concludes when the last race is run on closing day, Sept. 18. Follow handicappers Bain (@NBainracing) and Barnsdale (@AceBarnsdale) for their weekly Hiawatha selections on Twitter every Saturday afternoon. Barnsdale's selections also appear on the Ontario Racing "Tips from the Pros" page.

Check out Hiawatha Horse Park on Horseplayer Interactive and other ADWs.

(USHWA Canada)
For the second-consecutive year, The Meadows Standardbred Owners Association (MSOA) will produce and offer a livestream of the final of the Delvin Miller Adios Pace for the Orchids, set for July 31  this year with the participation of an influential media partner.

For the event, the MSOA has joined forces with KDKA-TV (the CBS affiliate in the Pittsburgh market), KDKA.com and the stations popular program Pittsburgh Today Live.

In the weeks leading to the event, the team will support the livestream with television commercials, social media promotions and stakeholder appearances on Pittsburgh Today Live. The digital buy will include betting sites FanDuel and DraftKings to encourage and facilitate the opening of on-line wagering accounts and betting on the Adios.

The livestream will be seen on Meadows Live! and the MSOAs YouTube and Facebook channels. Based on last years data, the livestream is expected to reach approximately 60,000 viewers across all platforms.

The show will be hosted by a team including Gabe Prewitt and Dawnelle Mock, MSOA director of marketing, and will feature a two-camera-with-teleprompter set-up, pre-produced and live interviews and tosses to The Meadows announcer Jeff Zidek and the live racing feed.

To help sponsors take maximum advantage of the large, involved audience, the MSOA has created three levels of sponsorship:

 Major Sponsor, with multimedia package: $5,000

 Race Sponsor: $1,000

 Segment Sponsor: $250

For questions or more information about the livestream or sponsorships, contact Mock at 724-470-8303 or [email protected].

(The Meadows)
State Sen. Bryce Reeves, R-Spotsylvania, introduced the following resolution, adopted in early 2021 by the Virginia General Assembly, as follows:

Commending Petes Pizza.

2021 SESSION: SENATE JOINT RESOLUTION NO. 307

Agreed to by the Senate, January 21, 2021 Agreed to by the House of Delegates, January 25, 2021 WHEREAS, Petes Pizza, one of the oldest Greek and Italian restaurants in Culpeper, has served delicious meals and helped build a strong sense of community in the area for 45 years;

and WHEREAS, Petes Pizza was founded by Pete and Eleni Katrakilis, who immigrated to the United States from Lemnos, Greece; the couple settled in Georgetown, where Pete worked at the restaurant Ikaros and learned to make authentic New York-Style pizza;

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and WHEREAS, in 1975, Pete Katrakilis was driving to Charlottesville hoping to open a pizzeria near the University of Virginia when he stopped for gas in Culpeper; after noticing a shopping center that was under construction and realizing that there were few pizza options in the area, he changed his plans, and Petes Pizza opened in Culpeper Town Square the following year;
The Culpeper Downtown Farmers Market was abuzz with activity early on a recent Saturday, despite an overcast sky and the threat of rain.

At the market information booth in the shadow of Culpeper Baptist Church Missy Vesuna with Culpeper Renaissance, Inc., handed out information about Youth Nutrition Education and Farm Fresh Dollars for Kids to locals interested in the new program.

Weve been doing well today, the children love it, Vesuna said Saturday.

Started with a grant from the Culpeper Wellness Foundation, the program provides a way for children to purchase their own produce from the Farmers Market using Fresh Farm Dollars.

Designed to raise awareness of the benefits of local produce, the program teaches children about the value of good nutrition and the importance of supporting local farmers.

Lily Durrer with the Culpeper Department of Human Services and Farmers Market Manager Nancie Howden also reached out to children on Saturday about the program, along with representatives from the Virginia Cooperative Extensions Family Nutrition Program for Youth.
An unidentified man has been transported to Regional West Medical Center after being injured in a shooting involving law enforcement officers in Bayard.

Shortly after 12 p.m., scanner traffic indicated a man who had suffered multiple gunshots from law enforcement was being transported.

Officers with the Morrill County Sheriff's Department and the Nebraska State Patrol are on scene at a residence in the 100 block of Second Street. The Nebraska State Patrol has established a perimeter that runs from First Avenue to Third Avenue. Trees at the end of the block have made it difficult to get a view of the area and where the shooting may have occurred.

Rumors had circulated on social media that an explosion, attributed to methamphetamine had occurred at a residence, but a trooper on scene said and explosion had not occurred.

Morrill County Attorney Travis Rodak confirmed that the Nebraska State Patrol is investigating. Nebraska State Patrol Capt. Kurt Von Minden said that a specialized investigation team will respond to conduct the investigation, as occurred recently when a shooting involving law enforcement officers occurred in Scottsbluff.
After what might have been a couple of the craziest years in her career, WNCC theater professor Francesca Mintowt-Czyz decided at the end of the spring semester she would be leaving her position to pursue another degree, this time in film performance.

She said the decision came partly because of what she and her students experienced through COVID, having to film performances and put them online versus performing in front of live audiences.

Directing film is not something Ive done before, and its not something I expected to do when I took this position, so I did the best I could, she said. I really wish I could have offered the students  a much more in-depth exploration of this medium, because what I had to offer them was really limited. I have done commercial work, and Ive done some short films, but I havent been directed in a film, certainly not even at the length of the things that we did here. So, I found communicating with them as actors was fine, just different to navigate.

Working with her students also re-sparked her love of learning and exploring.
Sen. Lindsey Graham is pushing for federal funding to help construct a new interstate in South Carolina, connecting I-95 to Myrtle Beach. He told The Associated Press he's formally requesting $12 million to revive a project that has been delayed for decades.

I believe it is a critical infrastructure project for the Grand Strand and the state of South Carolina as a whole," Graham said in a statement provided to AP, describing a beach resort area at the heart of the state's multi billion-dollar tourism industry.

The Grand Strand is a cash cow for the state, and I am determined to help provide a better means of transportation for those traveling to and from this tourist destination, he added.

Graham's earmark would fund right-of-way acquisition for the project, which was on a list of requests submitted to the Republican this month by the Horry County Council. Congress first required a study for Interstate 73 four decades ago, but the project has been mired in disputes over who would foot the bill.

Costs for the right-of-way acquisition have been estimated at $15 million, requiring a 20% non-federal match, so local and state officials will be responsible for the remaining $3 million, Graham said.
DENVER (AP)  Prosecutors on Monday charged a Colorado police officer with second-degree assault over allegedly putting a man in a chokehold during an arrest earlier this month.

Greeley police Officer Kenneth Amick, 48, has been placed on unpaid leave as a result of the police department's investigation into the alleged June 7 assault on Matthew Wilson, 36, police said in a statement. At the time, Wilson complained that Amick, who was wanted on a warrant, was using excessive force and asked for a supervisor, police said. Two officers also later reported what they believed to be excessive force, police said.

Amick, who has worked for Greeley police for 15 years, was removed from patrol duty while police conducted their investigation and the department later recommended that prosecutors charge him with assault, leading him to be placed on leave, police said.

Court records do not indicate if Amick has a lawyer yet and there was no answer at two telephone numbers listed for him.

As part of a sweeping police reform bill passed in the middle of protests over the killing of George Floyd, Colorado lawmakers banned police officers from using chokeholds and also required police officers to intervene if they believe excessive force is being used.
Cabrera said the theory exists not as a way to label white people as racist -- which he said is often used to paint CRT as divisive -- but rather to look at how systemic inequities have disadvantaged groups of people based on their race.

The only way youre being attacked as a white person is if youre being racist, he said. Theres nothing inherent that says white people need to feel bad. I have yet to see that as a prerequisite.

In a phone interview Friday afternoon, Peterson said the Nebraska Freedom Coalition and the Nebraska Federation of Republican Women saw an opportunity to bring the issue to NU after previously calling on the Omaha Learning Community to ban critical race theory.

While regents stay away from directing policy -- a bylaw governing the board reaffirms belief in, pledges support of, and directs all segments of the University community to sustain and follow principles of academic freedom  Peterson said regents have the final say in what NU funds and how.

The Nebraska Freedom Coalition and its various political action committees, limited liability companies and nonprofit organizations formed earlier this month, believe the board should use that power to stop critical race theory from being taught at NU.
Winston-Salem police investigated and eventually learned that Johnson had been using crack cocaine. Johnson and his wife, the grandmother, had been caring for the child while the parents were away. The mother had to work and the father had gone out of town.

Johnson had been using cocaine that he had kept in his clothes, and it is believed that the child became exposed to the cocaine while she slept on top of his clothes, Chavious said. She said family members did not know Johnson was using cocaine.

Johnson told Winston-Salem police that he had a small gathering and one of the people who attended brought a water bottle containing tequila, Chavious said.

On Jan. 3, 2020, Johnson was making baby formula using two half-empty water bottles. Johnson used the water bottle that had tequila, Chavious said.

Doctors consulted with the hospital's child abuse team, which determined that the girl had an altered mental state, difficulty breathing and dehydration and had hypoglycemia. The team concluded that exposing the girl to alcohol and cocaine was consistent with medical neglect and that the girl consuming such high levels of those two things could have led to her death, Chavious said.

The girl, who is nearly 2 years old, is doing fine, she said.
Current Affairs

S ome 2,757 private jets touched down in the Turks and Caicos Islands between January and June of this year.



According to figures compiled by Doug Gollan of Private Jet Card Comparisons, the Turks and Caicos Islands recorded the highest percentage increase of private jets in the Caribbean so far this year, although the destination was sixth in actual numbers overall.



In terms of overall private arrivals, The Bahamas topped the Caribbean with a staggering 19, 081 jets over the six-month period, followed by Puerto Rico with 4, 667 jets then the Dominican Republic with the third most private aviation arrivals 3,708 arrivals.



Costa Rica attracted 3,520 jets; St. Barts, 2,935; Turks and Caicos, 2,757; St. Maarten, 2,595; U.S. Virgin Islands, 1,843; Antigua and Barbuda, 1,219; Jamaica, 910; Guatemala, 836; Guadeloupe, 738; Stain Martin, 697; Anguilla, 619, and Barbados, 525.



The biggest loser among the top destinations appears to be Barbados, with private jet arrivals down 42.1% compared to 2019.



Caribbean private aviation arrivals to the Caribbean are up 53% in June, compared to 2019, according to WingX.



Year-to-date  through June 1, the regions private jet numbers are 1% ahead of the pre-pandemic results of two years ago. With the average private jet flight bringing over $80,000 in spending, these arrivals are critical for the local economies, Gollan said.



Meantime, a flash survey of subscribers to Private Jet Card Comparisons found nearly 30% may switch some airline flights to private aircraft amidst concerns about more domestic terror threats in the wake of the riots at the Capitol.



The research also found despite the COVID-19 testing requirements for anyone entering the U.S., more than two-thirds expect to travel internationally. Whats more, 96% of respondents who had started or restarted flying privately due to the coronavirus say they plan to continue after the pandemic ends.



Respondents to the survey, conducted from Jan. 15 to Jan. 19, were evenly split between subscribers who had been using private aviation before the pandemic and those who had started or restarted, seeking to minimize COVID-19 exposure. Research shows fewer than 2o touch points when using a private jet compared to over 700 with the airlines.



Over four in 10 respondents (41%) who are newbies said they would continue to fly privately regularly after the pandemic is over. A further 55% said they would use private aviation once in a while after the pandemic is over. Only 4% expect to stop private flights.



McKinseys analysis last year estimated there were only around 100,000 regular private aviation users in the U.S., although 1.5 million affluent households have the means. Private charters are back to 90 percent of pre-pre-COVID-19 levels, largely driven by new users. Research with private aircraft operators by JetNetIQ shows that passengers are more concerned with cleaning and COVID-19 protocols by a 3-to-1 margin over private jet costs.






Today is Monday, June 28, 2021. Let's get caught up.

Here's what you should know today: Rescuers remain hopeful about finding more survivors in the rubble of Florida condo collapse; U.S. airstrikes target Iran-backed militias in Syria, Iraq; Cardi B, Queen Latifah, Lil Nas X shine at BET Awards.

Keep scrolling for today's top stories, this date in history and celebrity birthdays.

TOP STORIES

Rescuers stay hopeful about finding more survivors in rubble

SURFSIDE, Fla. (AP)  Rescue workers digging feverishly for a fifth day Monday stressed that they could still find survivors in the rubble of a collapsed Florida condo building, a hope family members clung to even though no one has been pulled out alive since the first day the structure fell.

The death toll rose by just four people Sunday, to a total of nine confirmed dead. But more than 150 people are still missing in Surfside.
It was in October 1957, at Waimea Bay on Oahus North Shore, where he led a handful of surfers to a place where the waves can reach three stories high in the winter. The bay was said to be impossible to surf, and residents claimed nobody had tried since a young California surfer, Dickie Cross, had been killed there in 1943.

Grainy footage shows Noll catching a wave perhaps as high as 30 feet (9 meters), then somehow managing to stay standing as it pitches him some 10 feet (3 meters) or more straight down its face. From there, he moves outside and rides it nearly to the shore.

Years later, Noll would let out a cackle and an expletive as he recalled his first thought after finishing that ride: Im still alive!

From then on, there was no stopping the surfer who was instantly recognizable in his distinctive black-and-white jailhouse shorts. He started wearing them, he once said, so people would know it was him on a wave and get out of his way.

In 1964, Noll was credited with being the first person to ride a wave at Oahus Third Reef Pipeline. In 1969, at Hawaiis Makaha Beach, he rode what surfers who saw it asserted was the biggest wave anybody ever caught up to that point.
As pandemic restrictions ease, local child care centers are filling up, but just like before the pandemic, the need is still higher than the supply.

Castle Rocks Little Christian Daycare Director Barbara DeWols said the center just got to where we opened all of our rooms back up.

Director of Lil Red Barn Academy Danielle Burns said her Longview childcare center only has a few slots left in her toddler classes, and there are waiting lists for her preschool and prekindergarten classrooms. She thinks its because families are returning to work in offices instead of from home.

We are actually fuller now than we have been for quite a while, Burns said. Its different because a lot of times in the summer child care lightens up, but were as full as weve been in a little bit.

Limited availability

High demand and low supply are the norm for Cowlitz County. A new 2021 Cowlitz County Child Care Access report from the Cowlitz Community Network found there are about 12,900 children under the age of 10 in the county, and only 1,582 licensed child care spots. As of May, only 197 of those spots were open.
The U.S. Supreme Court decided Monday not to hear the final lawsuit over the Millennium Bulk Terminals, signaling the official end of the project, according to environmental activism groups and dismissing the plaintiffs arguments that the case is broader than the one terminal.

About a year ago, the states of Wyoming and Montana filed a motion for leave to file a bill of complaint against Washington in the U.S. Supreme Court alleging the denial of Millenniums application for Section 401 Clean Water Act certification discriminated against the states and unduly burdened their foreign and interstate commerce in violation of the Foreign and Interstate Commerce Clauses.

The federal government argued in a May filing that because the parent company of the Millennium Bulk Terminals project, Lighthouse Resources, filed for bankruptcy, the project is dead and there is no legal controversy for the nations highest court to consider. Even if it were not dead, federal lawyers argued the case does not meet the legal threshold under Article III of the Constitution, which limits the federal judicial power.

Supreme Court urged by feds to dismiss case tied to Millennium Bulk Terminals The federal government argued in a May filing that because the Millennium Bulk Terminal project is dead, there is no legal controversy for the nations highest court to consider.

In a June 7 supplemental brief, Montana and Wyoming argued the case is not moot just because the parent company of Millennium Bulk Terminal filed for bankruptcy.
The hot weather and limited supplies have marked an unusual start to fireworks sales in Longview and Kelso.

The cities allowed for fireworks sales to begin Monday at noon from licensed fireworks stands. Sales will be barred after July 5.

Longview Pentecostal Church runs the tent in the Fred Meyer parking lot. Pastor Perry Hanchey said last year the stand experienced a surge in demand and completely sold out on the afternoon of July 3. He said that with only about two-thirds of the normal fireworks supply available this year, it could sell out just as quickly.

A few stores over on Ocean Beach Highway, a stand for Fathers House Church is set up in the Safeway parking lot. Both tents on Ocean Beach had seen a steady supply of customers since opening for business Monday.

We tell people to come early every year, but we are going to sell clear out fast this year, said Jim Bass of Fathers House.

Both of the church stands are supplied by the nationwide seller TNT Fireworks, along with more than a dozen other stands in Longview, Kelso and Castle Rock. TNT Fireworks safety consultant James Fuller said last week the supply was going to be limited across the country.
China's sweeping ban on cryptocurrency mining delivered a blow to an industry criticised for its environmental impact, but emissions from the sector could grow as a result unless other countries follow China's lead, climate and tech experts said.

Bitcoin's value tumbled last week after China's central bank urged banks and payment firms in the country to crack down harder on cryptocurrency trading, in the latest tightening of restrictions on the sector by Beijing.

This was good news for climate activists, who have voiced concerns over the potential for the energy-hungry cryptocurrency mining industry to disrupt international efforts to rein in global warming.

Beijing's recent move has paralysed the Chinese industry - accounting for more than half of global cryptocurrency production - making it far more difficult for individuals in China to trade the digital coins.

But by cutting off access to China's power grid, with its plentiful supply of affordable renewable energy, the new restrictions could push miners towards dirtier sources of electricity, warned Pete Howson, a senior lecturer in international development at Northumbria University in Britain.

"China produces enormous amounts of cheap hydroelectricity, especially in Sichuan province - all of which is now pretty much off limits to bitcoin miners," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

'AN ENVIRONMENTAL CRIME'

Industry experts predict cryptocurrency production will pick up elsewhere as Chinese miners sell off their machines or seek refuge abroad - often in countries with less renewable energy.

"In both the short and medium-term, (the crackdown) will likely increase the emissions related to bitcoin mining," said Alex de Vries, founder of research platform Digiconomist, which publishes estimates of bitcoin's climate impact.

"Without China, which is the world's largest market for renewable energy in absolute terms, it seems unlikely miners have many opportunities to turn greener," he added.

Shota Siradze, who runs a cryptocurrency business in Tbilisi that helps would-be miners set up shop in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, said his phone started buzzing again last week after months of silence, as China's announcement prompted a rush of enquiries from foreign investors.

"People are writing and calling me, asking to find space to install huge quantities of processors," he said, adding he assumed most prospective clients had just bought servers from China.

Read more: Billions paid in cryptocurrency penalties since Bitcoins birth

Earlier cryptocurrency booms in Georgia, which uses mostly hydroelectric power, caused a spike in energy demand and rolling power outages in the breakaway region of Abkhazia, where mining was recently banned.

While some Chinese miners are selling up, others are moving out, reportedly heading to Kazakhstan, which relies heavily on fossil fuels for electricity, or Texas, where they could push up utility bills and worsen pre-existing power woes in the southern U.S. state, researchers said.

"The state is in bad shape to welcome bitcoiners," said Howson at Northumbria University.

"A few months ago, we saw outages there that left millions of people without power. Hundreds of people lost their lives. They froze to death. Bitcoin will make things a lot worse."

Cryptocurrency enthusiasts say a decentralised digital currency is worth the energy cost, which they say is relatively low, compared to other key sectors of the economy.

Bitcoin mining is currently estimated to account for about 0.3% of global electricity consumption - more than Austria on an annual basis, but about a third of that used by idle household electronics in the United States each year, according to an index compiled by Cambridge University.

Still, industry critics hope China's action will spark a global crackdown.

"It's really important now that governments take steps to ban the import of bitcoin mining machines," said Howson.

"Just like the global trade in Chinese tiger parts, bitcoin mining needs to be managed as an environmental crime."

PRICE VOLATILITY

More countries might indeed follow China's lead, as concerns about cryptocurrencies are not limited to the environment, said Eswar Prasad, a trade policy professor at Cornell University in New York.

Chinese authorities say cryptocurrencies disrupt economic order, and facilitate illegal asset transfers and money laundering. Analysts say Beijing is also worried about potential competition for the digital yuan.

Last week, the Bank for International Settlements, an umbrella organisation dubbed "the central bank of central banks", said cryptocurrencies were used for ransomware attacks and financial crimes, adding bitcoin, in particular, had "few redeeming public interest attributes".

Also read: Bitcoin rise pushes cryptocurrency ecosystem 8% to $1.43 trillion, after holding $30,000 mark

The coin can still count on influential supporters: Also last week, El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele said a law that makes the country the first to adopt bitcoin as legal tender will take effect in September.

But more broadly, China's actions are likely to be seen as a blow to the legitimisation of decentralised cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, which could further hurt the viability of the digital currencies, said Prasad.

"The key challenge that decentralised cryptocurrencies face is that they have proven to be inefficient and costly mediums of exchange and have, instead, become speculative assets," he said by email.

"Their lack of intrinsic value will leave them susceptible to enormous price volatility, making it harder still for them to fulfil their ostensible roles as mediums of exchange that are more efficient than existing payment technologies."
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has been facing technical issues for the past 2 weeks, with the satellites main payload computer malfunctioning. Shockingly, this glitch is preventing the space telescope from working. Technicians from National Aeronautics and Space Administration or NASA have been working at resolving the problems affecting the Hubble Space Telescope, but instead of solutions, they ran into even bigger trouble.  the backup payload computer that is connected to the telescope also stopped functioning.

The development was confirmed by NASA in a statement, in which it explained that the spacecraft has two payload computers  one that was set up with the Hubble Space Telescope and the other installed later in 2009. However, after NASA turned on the backup computer on June 23, for the first time since its installation, the backup computer also began to suffer from the same issues as the main computer.

Read more: The Hubble Space Telescope has been down for the past few days, NASA reports issue

According to NASA, the good news is that the Hubble Space Telescope itself and the scientific instruments used to collect data about the universe continue to be in good health and are currently unaffected by the technical difficulties that are preventing it from operating properly since the computer first stopped working on June 13.

Additional tests performed on June 23 and 24 included turning on the backup computer for the first time in space. The tests showed that numerous combinations of these hardware pieces from both the primary and backup payload computer all experienced the same error - commands to write into or read from memory were not successful, NASA said in the statement.

The space agency will continue to work on fixing the Hubble Space Telescope this week, assessing hardware components such as the Science Instrument and Command and Data Handling (SI C&DH) unit, or the Command Unit/Science Data Formatter (CU/SDF). If the team determines the CU/SDF or the power regulator is the likely cause, they will recommend switching to the backup CU/SDF module and the backup power regulator, the space agency explained.

The Hubble Space Telescope has completed 31 years of orbiting the Earth, at a height of 547 kilometres, since it was first launched in 1990. NASA says that it regularly sends back images of space and helping scientists understand the mysteries of space including the accelerating expansion of the universe, how galaxies evolve over time and the study of the atmospheres of various planets outside the solar system.
The so-called GAFAM are still targeted by the EU and US for a number of allegedly unfair practices.

Facebook won a key court case in the US this week, but the US tech industry still faces challenges at home and in the European Union in particular.

US authorities were not able to present a solid case against Facebook according to the ruling, and the social media giant has retained staunch backing from clients and consumers.

Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoftdubbed the GAFAMhave been accused of not paying enough taxes, stifling competition, stealing media content and threatening democracy by spreading false information.

As the European Union and member countries draft rules to rein them in and many other countries and US states are doing likewise, here is a global overview of the attempts to regulate the companies.

Taxation

Now that US opposition has lifted, 139 countries will haggle this week over key details of a global corporate tax deal that could affect the tech giants.

Negotiations led by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development aim at imposing a minimum corporate tax rate of at least 15 percent, and allowing countries to tax a share of profits of the 100 most profitable companies in the world.

Individual countries have already taken initiatives of their own however, with Australia, Austria, Britain, France, India, Italy and Spain directly taxing sales on some digital revenues.

Nobbling competition

The digital giants are regularly criticised for dominating the market by elbowing out rivals.

The EU slapped 8.25 billion euros ($9.8 billion) in fines on Google for abusing its dominating market position via its Android system.

Microsoft was fined 561 million euros by the EU in 2013 for imposing its search engine Internet Explorer on users of Windows 7.

Amazon, Apple and Facebook are the targets of EU probes for possible violations of competition rules.

The EU has also unveiled plans for mammoth fines of up to 10 percent of their sales on tech firms that break competition rules, and could even be broken up.

In the US, President Joe Biden has named anti-monopoly figures to prominent positions, including Lina Khan who has been confirmed to head the Federal Trade Commission.

Dozens of US states hit Google with antitrust suits in December, accusing it of abusing its monopoly on internet search and advertising.

Cases are hard to prove however, and on Monday, a federal judge dismissed a high-profile antitrust action against Facebook filed last year by the FTC and state regulators that could have rolled back Facebook's acquisition of Instagram and the messaging platform WhatsApp, saying it hadn't provided enough evidence.

Personal data

Tech giants are regularly criticised over how they gather and use personal data.

The EU has led the charge to rein them in with its 2018 General Data Protection Regulation, which has since become an international reference.

They must ask for consent when they collect personal information and may no longer use data collected from several sources to profile users against their will.

Sanctions exist outside of Europe as well. A US court fined Facebook $5 billion in May for failing to protect its users' personal data.

Fake news and hate speech

Social networks are often accused of failing to rein in misinformation and hate speech.

The European Parliament and member states agreed to force platforms to remove terrorist content within one hour.

New EU rules also forbid using algorithms to spread false information and hate speech, which some major platforms are suspected of doing to increase ad revenue owing to traffic spikes generated by reactions.

In Kenya, publishing "false, misleading or fictional information" is punishable by a $50,000 fine and/or two years of prison.

These measures remain controversial, however, with critics saying they threaten freedom of speech.

Paying for content

Finally, GAFAM are accused by media outlets of making money from journalistic content without sharing the revenue.

To solve this the EU in 2019 imposed a form of copyright law called neighbouring rights that would allow outlets to demand compensation for use of their content on online platforms.

After initial resistance, Google signed agreements with several French newspapers in November to pay for using their content, a world first.

In one of the most powerful moves to check the power of US digital giants, Australia now compels companies to pay media organisations when the platforms host the media group's content.

 2021 AFP
Tilos is 100 percent energy independent for most of the year, though that rate dips to 70 percent during the summer due to the higher energy demands of the tourism season.

In the tranquil Greek island of Tilos, a wind turbine hums over a silvery sea while scorching sun rays hit a hill lined with solar panels.

The small island of around 800 inhabitants is the first island in the Mediterranean to generate almost all of its electricity from renewable sources under a pioneering project launched in 2018.

Just 65 square kilometres (25 square miles) in size, Tilos last week was one of three islands awarded EU prizes for clean energy transition, alongside Denmark's Aero and Spain's El Hierro, part of the Canaries group.

Connected by submarine electricity cable to Kos, a larger neighbouring island in the southeastern Aegean Sea, Tilos has no shortage of sun and wind to draw upon.

It is 100 percent energy independent for most of the year, though that rate dips to 70 percent during the summer due to the higher energy demands of the tourism season, said Mayor Maria Kamma.

"This is the solution, especially for the small islands of our country," Kamma told AFP.

Spyros Aliferis, an engineer with Greek renewable energy specialists Eunice Energy, said Tilos has the country's first hybrid power station.

"It's hybrid because it combines more than one renewable energy source, wind and sun," he told AFP.

Tilos has no shortage of sun and wind to draw upon.

Tilos has no factories to speak of, just small taverns and shopsa low energy demand that made its transition to renewables easier.

The island used to get all of its electricity from a diesel oil power station on Kos.

Some locals are excited by the green initiative, which is backed by 11 million euros ($13 million) under the EU's Horizon 2020 competitiveness initiative, plus another four million from Greek private investors.

'This is the future'

"This is the future. It is good that green energy starts from such small islands, for us to be able to be independent and to free ourselves from (fossil fuels)," said Vassilis Oikonomou, a 46-year-old snack bar owner.

Others are more reserved.

"It is still early, an effort is made and we all applaud that," said cafe owner Prodromos Trikilis.

He said locals have soldiered through power surges and blackouts to get the project going, though they are less frequent as the grid is less under pressure now with the hybrid system.

A project partly funded by Volkswagen aims to replace the island of Astypalea's cars with electric vehicles.

"But if you look at it in the long run how things will be, it is worth it to be patient," he said.

The wind turbine and solar panels, donated by Eunice Energy, have a capacity of 800 kilowatts and 400 kilowatts, respectively.

"The project has been working perfectly for two years," said Aliferis, pointing to the storage batteries.

"This demonstrates that a small island can operate just on renewable energy," he said.

Other isles to follow

To the west, the island of Astypalea has taken up the challenge, hoping to cover 70 percent of its energy needs with renewables within three to four years, said Kostas Fragkogiannis, a deputy foreign minister who initiated the government project.

In early June, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis visited the butterfly-shaped island of 1,300 to promote a similar hybrid project aimed at cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 70 percent and energy costs by 25 percent.

The 10-million-euro projectincluding six million provided by the Greek stateis partly funded by German automobile giant Volkswagen and aims to replace Astypalea's cars with electric vehicles.

Locals have soldiered through power surges and blackouts to get the project going, though they are less frequent as the grid is less under pressure now with the hybrid system.

Wind turbines and solar panels will also help the islanders ditch their home diesel generators, their sole source of energy.

"In our eyes, it is a model for the world", Fragkogiannis said.

The main opposition Syriza party's local chapter criticised the move as a Volkswagen "advertising campaign" with Astypalea serving as "exotic scenery."

According to sources at the Greek ministry of energy and environment, there are similar electric vehicle plans at Chalki, a tiny island west of Rhodes, in collaboration with French auto giant Citroen.

This 26-kilometre island has also been earmarked for a hybrid power station project, with European funds. The agreement will be unveiled on Friday, a government source told AFP.

Volkswagen and Citroen are showing a greener side after they were recently charged in France in connection with the "dieselgate" emissions cheating scandal.

Other islands will be involved in the government project, though energy ministry sources said that it would only involve those not attached to the national grid, further away from Athens.

Explore further Volkswagen tests electric cars, transit apps on Greek island

 2021 AFP
The VB 10,000 crane vessel lowered a hulking chunk of the shipwrecked Golden Ray onto a dry dock barge late Saturday afternoon, setting the stage for the removal of yet one more section of the lumbering eyesore from the St. Simons Sound.
FILE - In this Feb. 13, 2012 file photo, freshman Sen. Tyler Harper, R-Ocilla, smiles as he introduces his first bill, Senate Bill 91, during Legislative Day 17 in the Senate Chambers in Atlanta. Harper announced Tuesday, June 29, 2021 that he is running for the Republican nomination for state agriculture commissioner.
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SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP)  California Republicans accused Democrats of acting unfairly Monday as state lawmakers passed a bill aimed at moving up Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom's recall date.

The conclusion is inescapable that Gavin Newsom is cheating in the recall and this Legislature is his willing accomplice," said Republican Assemblyman Kevin Kiley, who is considering running in the contest.

The proposal, now headed to Newsom's desk, would allow the recall to proceed at least 30 days earlier than under existing state law. Democrats hope to take advantage of what they view as favorable conditions for Newsom as the state moves on from the worst days of the pandemic and related restrictions.

Democratic Assemblyman Phil Ting acknowledged the bill will ensure that this recall election happens as soon as possible" and said that's something the recall's supporters should want.

Recall organizers collected 1.7 million signatures in support of recalling Newsom, and he'll face an election later this year. Without the recall, he'd next face voters in 2022 for a regularly scheduled reelection.
As conservative as Coverdell was, he teamed up with Sen. Ted Kennedy on the education overhaul known as No Child Left Behind.

If you have ever put money into a 529 savings account for a childs education, you can thank Coverdell and Kennedy for the compromise that created it.

How did a Georgia conservative and a Massachusetts liberal come together to legislate on an issue so fundamental to both?

Molly Dye, Coverdells longtime chief of staff, said the senator originally learned the Art of Getting What You Can during his 15 years in the Georgia state Senate, when he was one of just five Republicans in the 55-member chamber.

If you had an idea, you had to go and convince and talk to the person to say, Here is the concept. Heres an idea. Lets think about this, she said. That skill was learned.

Once he was in Washington, Dye said Coverdell relied on face-to-face meetings with other senators, instead of meetings between staff, to find areas where a deal could get done.

He would call the other senator on the phone, but he wouldnt discuss it on the phone, Dye said. He would say, You got a couple of minutes? Let me come see you.
Our orders for 2022 are already placed, Williams said.

Timing and transportation issues have trickled down from shipping to wholesale, further to consumer outlets like Wolfs.

Its kind of a perfect storm situation, Wolf said. Im encouraging people that we know that come here to buy their big stuff early. If they want to get it they should get it the first part of this week.

Wolf said 2021 thus far has been unprecedented.

The availability of ordering fireworks was a lot less than what it has been, and weve been doing this for 22 years, he said.

Word had been spreading by the time Wolf opened up his trailer stand Monday morning.

Sales are starting out great, he said. This morning we had customers waiting on us while the fire inspector was finishing his inspection.

Wolf stopped short of saying supply will not keep up with demand.

Our suppliers had about one-third of the supply of varieties of what we had in the past, he said. In times when weve been running low weve been able to go to our suppliers and get more stock. We were told that wasnt going to happen.
LEXINGTON  Those fleeing the law are going to have to look up now; the Dawson County Sheriffs Office has a new drone.

The drone will have multiple other uses, but Sheriff Ken Moody told the Dawson County commissioners during their meeting Thursday that two days after the new drone was put into use, it helped to find an individual who had fled law enforcement.

Deputy Tim Kostrunek is qualified to operate the drone, which features an infrared system.

During the incident, an individual trying to evade law enforcement had abandoned their vehicle on the side of the road and hid amid tall weeds.

Kostrunek put up the drone, and the infrared system quickly located the person. Deputies closed in on the area and ordered the person to come out of hiding.

Moody said the individual looked up at the drone for a moment and then came out with their hands up and was taken into custody without trouble.
In 2012, she earned her masters degree in nursing, with an emphasis in gerontology, from the University of Nebraska Medical Center. She is board certified as well.

Gifts of the elderly

Schiel knows that caring for older people is different from tending to younger people. Their bodies dont respond the same way. Medications dont work the same way, she said.

Many older people should probably see their primary care providers more often than they do, but it is difficult to coordinate plans and rides to the clinic, she said.

Some adults have difficulty getting out of their homes to see their doctors, especially those who have difficulty with mobility, dementia or are at a higher risk of infection. Sometimes, they live in a rural area, or their vision is impaired, and their family has to arrange transportation to a doctors office, she said.

In her new role, she does physical exams, prescribes medications and more. She can order lab tests and therapy just like when you go to your own doctor, she said. She does geriatric consults, where she meets with relatives of elderly patients to listen to their concerns and answer questions.
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She said she talked to about 60 people.

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Most of them were like, OK, I can contact my representative,  she said. I really didnt get much pushback.

Some white people did want to talk about what they thought was going wrong in Black communities, she said.

But when she listened and followed up with, Are you willing to have a conversation (about reparations)? The answer was yes.

One day a man who was lost asked for help finding his way back to a halfway house. She gave him water and granola bars, spent more than an hour talking with him, and was able to find out where he was supposed to be. There was also a teen interested in social justice who stopped by at his moms suggestion.

Citing Mondays U.N. report calling for reparations for anti-Black discrimination worldwide, Zola said her hunger strike was well-timed. Her next step will be to reach out to leaders of local churches and other houses of worship to try to build support for reparations.

She hopes to eventually get invitations to speak at fundamentalist churches in the South.

Zola said shes tired after her hunger strike, but all her vital signs are good and shes starting to exercise again.
The Chicago Bears addressed two depth issues but had four basic unmet depth needs before the start of free agency and all of those four still remain intact with nothing left until the start of training camp.

CHICAGO  When a barrage of gunshots rang out Sunday night along a busy commercial strip of the South Shore community, a 15-year-old ran for his life.

Even when he was shot in the leg, he was so determined to get away from the gunfire that he kept running for at least a block, according to his mother.

Whoever is outside when the (expletive) is going down is going to get shot down. Dad, mama, grandmama, kids, it dont matter, the woman told the Chicago Tribune in a telephone interview Monday. These people trigger-happy. They shoot everyone they see, innocent bystander or not.

The teen was among six people shot  including a woman who died  near East 71st Street and South Chappel Avenue shortly before 9 p.m. Sunday. Then about two hours later, and roughly 5 miles west, 11 more people were struck by gunfire in the Marquette Park neighborhood, a shooting that claimed the life of another woman.

They were the latest mass shootings to rock Chicago at a time when the city continues to struggle with violence. From Friday afternoon through early Monday morning, 77 people were shot across Chicago, seven of them fatally, according to Tribune data.
In Chicago Public Schools, for example, the resumption of in-person classes, which was staggered by grade levels, was delayed several times amid safety concerns from some parents as well as Chicago Teachers Union leaders, who often cited the pandemics higher toll in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods.

As vaccinations increased and communities around the country began to relax restrictions, access to full-time in-person learning for non-Hispanic white students increased by 36 percentage points from January to April nationwide, compared to 31 percentage points for Black students; 23 percentage points for Hispanic students and 30 percentage points for students of other races and ethnicities.

The study relied on numbers representing about 46% of kindergarten through 12th grade public school enrollment in the U.S., including data for nearly 800,000 Illinois students. The study examined what proportion of students had the choice of in-person classes, not the rate of students who actually returned.

As of May 3, the most recent state information available online, 423 of Illinois 849 school districts were providing blended or hybrid learning, 398 were fully in person and 28 were fully remote.
A COVID-19 outbreak at a Central Illinois summer camp has led to at least 85 cases of the virus among teens and adult staff, and to other cases at a nearby conference, the Illinois Department of Public Health said Monday.

The two outbreaks occurred in Schuyler and Adams counties.

At the summer camp, held in mid-June, the state health department said it was aware of only a handful of campers and staff who received COVID-19 vaccines. Masks were not required indoors, and the camp was not checking vaccination status, the agency said.

Most of the cases were among teens, IDPH Director Dr. Ngozi Ezike said in a statement.

The perceived risk to children may seem small, but even a mild case of COVID-19 can cause long-term health issues, she said. Additionally, infected youth who may not experience severe illness can still spread the virus to others, including those who are too young to be vaccinated or those who dont build the strong expected immune response to the vaccine.
There will be a new fleet of Orangeburg County Sherriffs Office patrol cars on the streets.

The office will be receiving a number of new cars after Orangeburg County Council approved the issuance of $3.5 million in general obligation bonds during a meeting last week.

The borrowing package will also allow for the renovation of the sheriffs office.

A total of 30 new patrol cars will hit the streets, according to Orangeburg County Administrator Harold Young.

The patrol cars will be equipped with the necessary equipment, radios and light bars. The total cost of the vehicles will be $1,785,000.

The older vehicles will be auctioned, Young said.

Also, improvements are planned for the law enforcement complex.

Young said the renovations will include, lighting, heating and air, carpet, a lot of stuff that should have been done for a while. Its been a minute since any of that stuff has been replaced.

Some of it is going to be moving around some office space to free up some room, including, knocking a wall down here, put a wall up there, he said.

Also during the meeting:

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WEST DES MOINES, Iowa  In the past week alone, Nikki Haley regaled activists in Iowa, Mike Pence courted donors in California and Donald Trump returned to the rally stage, teasing a third campaign for the White House.

The midterms are more than a year away, and there are 1,225 days until the next presidential election. But Republicans eyeing a White House run are wasting no time in jockeying for a strong position in what could emerge as an extremely crowded field of contenders.

The politicking will only intensify in the coming weeks, particularly in Iowa, home to the nation's leadoff presidential caucuses and a state where conservative evangelicals play a significant role in steering the direction of the GOP. Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas is slated to visit on Tuesday, and others, including Pence, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are expected to appear in July.

The flurry of activity is a sign that there is no clear frontrunner to lead the GOP if Trump opts against a 2024 campaign.

"It definitely feels early, but it doesn't feel like it's a bad idea based on the situation," said Mike DuHaime, a longtime Republican strategist. "The party has changed, the voters are changing and I think the process has changed. And I think many of the candidates have realized that."
Tropical storm force winds were already being felt in South Carolina on Monday afternoon. A weather station at Folly Beach  just outside Charleston  recorded a wind gust of 41 mph (66 kph), according to the National Hurricane Center in Miami.

At 8 p.m., the storm was centered about 50 miles (80 kilometers) southwest of Charleston, South Carolina, according to the Miami-based hurricane center said. The system was moving to the west-northwest at 16 mph (26 kph).

Danny emerged from a tropical depression off the coast earlier in the week. A tropical storm warning was posted earlier Monday for a swath of the Southeast coast from Edisto Beach to South Santee River, South Carolina.

The storm could produce between 1 and 3 inches (3 to 8 centimeters) of rain with higher amounts in some coastal areas. Forecasters said heavy rainfall could occur in some spots as far inland as north Georgia and northeast Alabama as the storm treks into the Southeast.

In Savannah, Georgia, all systems were go for Tuesday night's Savannah Bananas home baseball game as organizers eyed the storm. Officials for the collegiate summer league team planned to cover the field with tarp on Monday in preparation for the game.

"For us, being on the coast and being in Savannah, we get some nasty pop-up storms that can dump an inch of rain in just a few hours," Bananas President Jared Orton said Monday. "This one doesn't look like much more than just a nice, passing day of rain. I think we're good to go as long as the sun comes out tomorrow and it should be a beautiful night in Savannah, I would think."

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Though he still heaps praise on Trump's accomplishments, Pence has worked more recently to forge his own identity, splitting with his former boss in particular over the severity of the deadly Jan. 6 riot, which forced him into hiding but which many Republicans have sought to minimize.

That balancing act came into sharp relief Thursday as Pence delivered a speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in front of a sold-out crowd of more than 800 people during a swing through California that included meetings with donors and a headline speech at a Republican National Committee dinner.

After being booed and jeered the week before at a conservative conference in Florida, Pence appeared to have a newfound sense of swagger as he delivered his strongest rebuttal to date of Trumps continued insistence that he could have unilaterally overturned the results of the last election. Many of Trump's supporters continue to blame Pence for Trump's loss, even though he had no power to overturn the results.
Harry Rosenberg, missing in the condo building collapse, moved to Florida after a year in which he lost his wife to cancer and both parents to COVID-19.
The America the Beautiful initiative is sending a clear signal that farmers and ranchers stand alongside hunters, hikers and Indigenous peoples as heroes in our countrys shared conservation story. It says that modern conservation is not about rolling over rural communities or leaving landowners behind to meet the demands of the politically powerful. Instead, its about cooperating with each other and reaching a consensus where everyone benefits.

But while the sentiments and values guiding the initiative place it on the right track, the administration must still execute it in ways more likely to unify than divide. How the federal government will do this remains unclear, and that understandably is a source of concern not only for some private landowners but also for some lawmakers.

In Washington, personnel is policy, and the administration can help put these concerns to rest by making sure the people in the Departments of the Interior and Agriculture who oversee America the Beautiful reflect its stated inclusive values. It is important that future hires include experienced people drawn from the communities and industries that stand to be most affected by the initiative. This will show that all voices are truly being heard.
Whereas Obama appeared not to think of himself as being of color, Harris clings to it. Her journey intrigues her; Obamas didnt intrigue him. He traveled it with purpose and dignity.

Now it must worry the president to learn, as the rest of us have, that Harris seems to have no ideas. Her public remarks are flip at worst and off-the-shelf liberal at best.

What does she see as the future for America? This isnt laid out or even discernable. We need to know her vision because she is vice president to an old man  the metaphorical heartbeat away.

Harris and Biden have chosen to believe that solidarity at the top is an important message, hence the frequent references in White House announcements to the Biden-Harris Administration. In public, Harris is often at Bidens side. But she often seems to be standing there as his girl Friday, not as the second-in-command.

In his well-reported piece in The Atlantic, Edward-Isaac Dovere hunted for the real Harris and didnt appear to find her. He notes that she asks good, hard questions, like a good prosecutor, but as she dodges reporters, they arent able to ask good, hard questions of her.
Job Title: Programme Policy Officer (Social Protection & Resilience)

Organisation: United Nations World Food Programme (WFP)

Duty Station: Kampala, Uganda

About US:

United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) is the worlds largest humanitarian agency, fighting hunger worldwide. The mission of WFP is to help the world achieve Zero Hunger in our lifetimes. Every day, WFP works worldwide to ensure that no child goes to bed hungry and that the poorest and most vulnerable, particularly women and children, can access the nutritious food they need. In emergencies, WFP gets food to where it is needed, saving the lives of victims of war, civil conflict and natural disasters. After an emergency, WFP uses food to help communities rebuild their lives. On average, WFP reaches more than 80 million people with food assistance in 80 countries each year. The organization has the global footprint, deep field presence and local knowledge and relationships necessary to provide access to food and contribute to lasting solutions, especially in many of the worlds most remote and fragile areas.

Job Summary: Under direct supervision of the Resilience and Social Protection specialist, the Programme Policy Officer (Social Protection and Resilience) will be responsible for supporting technical coordination and engagement with the government to strengthen the implementation of different national and sub national social protection and resilience programmes; and ensuring that provision of strategic guidance, in line with WFPs corporate agenda, Country Strategic Plan and the Uganda National Development Plan 3 trajectory.

Key Duties and Responsibilities:

Contribute towards the development of a wide variety of projects, plans and processes, ensuring alignment with wider programme policies and guidance.

Provide project management support to specific and defined programmes and projects of considerable size/complexity, ensuring a coordinated approach with wider programmes that complies with WFP standards and procedures.

Develop and coordinate data gathering and monitoring systems ensuring that rigorous quality standards are maintained.

Research and analyse a range of policy and operational issues to inform the development of policies, programmes and activities.

Contribute to the preparation of accurate and timely reporting on programmes and activities that enable informed decision making and consistency of information presented to stakeholders.

Liaise with internal and external counterparts to ensure effective collaboration, monitor ongoing projects and highlight potential risks to project delivery.

Support the identification, development and management of potential partnerships to collaborative working leading to improved food assistance packages.

Support the capacity building of WFP staff, partners and national government to prepare for and respond to food assistance needs, e.g. through providing inputs into training materials.

Guide and supervise more junior staff, acting as a point of referral and supporting them with analysis and queries.

Ensure close coordination with Ministry of Gender Labour and Social Development, Office of the Prime Minister (OPM), Ministry of Karamoja Affairs on policy advocacy and funding opportunities relating to social protection and resilience activities in the country office.

To actively lead and extend technical assistance and advice/guidance to the implementation of government social protection programmes on policy, design and operational matters.

Oversee implementation and operations and support the secretariat coordination (internal and external) for the Sida project for effective implementation at country office. This includes acting as first level focal person between UNICEF, Government, Area Office/Field and Country office.

Support the PRO-ACT implementation and ensure WFP is positioned as a preferred partner of choice for the Government in social protection and contribute to broader donor engagement with the EU delegation (ECHO/DEVCO).

Facilitate timely access of WFP to Governments relevant policy documents, structures and institutions responsible for social protection, Disaster Risk Management and Resilience. This includes keeping the government informed on the value-addition of WFPs technical strengths in the implementation, and design of social protection programmes and systems.

Explore partnership opportunities with the Government, UN and civil society that strengthen existing capacities of WFP and Government programmes.

Ensure adherence to the national priorities and guidelines in the implementation for the National Social Protection Programmes.

Ensure timely responses to the Government queries on WFP operations and any request for support and technical assistance in the social protection and resilience portfolio.

Identify opportunities where WFP can support the Governments efforts and build/strengthen their capacities using the country capacity strengthening (CCS) approach.









Qualifications, Skills and Experience:

The applicant for the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) Programme Policy Officer (Social Protection & Resilience) job vacancy must hold an advanced University degree in International Affairs, Economics, Nutrition/Health, Agriculture, Environmental Science, Social Sciences or other field relevant to international development assistance, or First University Degree with additional years of related work experience and/or trainings/courses in Social Protection.

Language: Fluency (level C) in English language and the duty stations language.

Desired Experiences For Entry Into The Role

At least six years of experience in social protection with additional experience in implementing technical programs.

Has deepened technical knowledge through exposure to technical teams.

Has taken leadership of implementing programmes.

Has provided input into policy discussions and decisions.

NOTE: WFP does not solicit for fees or any form of payment from job applicants. Female applicants and qualified applicants from developing countries are especially encouraged to apply

How to Apply:

All candidates who wish to join the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) should apply online at the link below.

Click Here

Deadline: Thursday 8th July 2021

For more of the latest jobs, please visit https://www.theugandanjobline.com or find us on our facebook page https://www.facebook.com/UgandanJobline
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2. Coronavirus

The threat of the Delta variant has some health officials rethinking Covid-19 measures, even among vaccinated people. Experts have said vaccines like those from Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech provide high amounts of protection against the variant, but some warn breakthroughs could become more likely if the virus becomes more prevalent. Already in Los Angeles County, officials have reinstated mask guidance for public indoor spaces, regardless of vaccination status. Other parts of the world are getting even stricter. South Africa has entered at least two weeks of lockdown to combat a third wave of Covid-19 linked to the Delta variant. About 10 million Australians, including residents in four of the country's eight capital cities, are also under lockdown.
I appreciate the president saying that hes willing to deal with infrastructure separately, but he doesnt control the Congress, McConnell said at a press conference in Louisville.

The two bills had always been expected to move in tandem, and that is likely to continue as Biden drops his veto threat but reaches across the aisle for the nearly $1 trillion bipartisan package as well as his own broader package. The Democratic leaders are pressing ahead on the broader bill, which includes Bidens families and climate change proposals, as well as their own investments in Medicare, swelling to some $6 trillion.

The prospect of additional economic gains might be a way to garner public support and soothe partisan tensions. Biden also faces pressure from Democrats such as New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who told NBCs Meet the Press that the spending isnt as huge as it might seem because the sums are spread out over multiple years.
The state's 14-day average in total new cases is 88.5 per day. That number is up 14 from a month ago.

The state's number of total active cases is 522. That number is up 65 from a month ago.
Wyoming fell two positions in the education category, but the data for those scores was unchanged from the prior year.

In addition to ranking each state in the four sections, the report also compares how much progress has been made nationally over the last decade.

The good news: only one of the 16 scored metrics overall got worse between 2010 and 2019, and most saw improvement.

Everything from the percentage of children in poverty, to how many students graduate high school on time has seen some improvement in the last decade.

The only measure that got worse was the percentage of low-weight births, which increased by .2%.

But the numbers tell a different story for minority youth.

The national average for youth deaths per 100,000 is 25. For African American children, the rate is 38 per 100,000 people. For American Indian youth its 28 per 100,000 people.

The disparity follows access to health insurance. Nationally, 5% of children dont have health insurance. For American Indian youth, its 13%.

The report does not provide state-level demographic data.
Teton County Search and Rescue is experiencing severe delays because of what is shaping up to be historically bad summer traffic, Teton County Sherriff Matt Carr told the Star-Tribune on Monday. What was once a five-minute response can now take 45 minutes, particularly in the late afternoon to early evening.

Its as bad as weve ever seen it. Theres too many people, and our infrastructure has never been taken care of, said Carr, who has been with the sheriffs department since 1999.

Some of the search and rescue team members are now responding on personal and department-owned electric bikes because the traffic is so severe.

The other day, a group was hiking on a Table Mountain trail when an accident occurred in which a woman suffered an arterial bleed, a life-threatening injury. Fortunately, there was a nurse with her who applied a tourniquet.

She was very lucky that there was a nurse on the scene because we just couldnt get there, Carr said. I think they saved her life.

Because of the severity of the traffic, Teton County Search and Rescue had to call in help from Idaho and contact the U.S. Forest Service for a helicopter to reach the group.

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Montana Democratic Sen. Jon Tester, also in the group, said the package would contain money for addressing wildfires but was unclear whether raises were included. If not, Tester said raises would be addressed in next years federal budget.

This is dangerous work, folks need to be paid for it. Were going to need to hire people to do this work, he said.

Still, officials at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise said they face a potential shortage of firefighters this year because the $13 starting wage isnt enough.

Theres not technically a shortage of firefighters because we always overprepare, said Jessica Gardetto, a fire center spokeswoman with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and a former wildland firefighter. But its a concern right now. Were seeing people taking jobs at local businesses that pay the same or more than starting fire positions.

She also said the length of time firefighters spend in the field has been increasing. That can be a problem for seasonal firefighters who are college students and need to get back to class.

In the past we had fire seasons, now we have fire years, she said.
But where it is foreseeable and likely that speech will travel onto campus, a school has a stronger claim to treating the speech as on campus speech. According to Thomas, technology that enables the transmission of messages from a mall to students who might be on campus, in their homes, at the doctor, at an extracurricular game or at that same mall muddies the waters.

Its a great point, and one that the majority should have looked at in more detail, particularly with the proliferation of social media these days that have basically placed everyone within a click of being friends with strangers, privy to their deepest confidences that can be preserved for posterity with the screen shot function.

And its worth noting that we are of course talking about public schools, which are essentially an arm of the government, so the rules are somewhat different when dealing with a private institution.

But ultimately, the court was right to rule activities which would otherwise be permissible for an adult should not be forbidden to a child when they involve pure speech and expression.

If a student doesnt lose her First Amendment rights when she walks into the classroom, she certainly shouldnt lose them when walking into Starbucks.

Those of us who spent the past year watching school districts draw up lesson plans that tell students what words they can use so as not to trigger their classmates, and who have used totalitarian tactics to erase mascots and traditions should rejoice in the fact that for a brief shining moment, the government was told to back off.

Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at cflowers1961@gmail.com.

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GOVERNMENT is looking to put the framework in place for a new fuel distribution system that will affect gas prices at the pump, but Finance Minister Colm Imbert said yesterday the eventual retail costs ought not to be much different from what prevails now.
WHY do we do the things we do? Whats fuelling our choices?

Both introspective, soul searching questions are at the heart of Lisa-Anne Juliens first novel If You Save Me published by Kwela Books. The novel revolves around four men and a little girl and spans three countries: T&T, the UK and South Africa. It centres arounds Carl, a South African, London-based surgeon who performs living donor liver transplants.
Trinidadian Akil Inniss, who was stuck in the United States due to Trinidad and Tobagos border closure, will never get the chance to return home as he contracted Covid-19 and died of the virus last month.

Inniss left Trinidad a week before the borders closed in March 2020 to go to New York to seek medical attention.
The multimillion-dollar fees paid out to attorneys and firms under the Peoples National Movement (PNM) Government are no longer secret, having been revealed by Attorney General Faris Al-Rawi.

Last month, the AG was adamant that he would not disclose the fees of attorneys who do work for the State.
Sometimes the black sheep is the only one telling the truth.

As I read the Express Editorial dated Sunday July 4, that phrase came to mind.

The editorial chose to defend the Ministry of Healths medical team, unceremoniously attacked the Leader of the Oppositions stance of questioning the competence of the medical team in their response to Covid-19 over the past 15 months.
THERE is much talk about returning to normal after the pandemic. I suspect people envision the frenzied activity that had become a characteristic of modern life; the rushing here and there and getting fundamentally nowhere; the obsession with materialism and its unending push to acquire; and the pursuit of pleasure as a principal purpose producing the superficiality that abounds.
Value for money should be the guiding principle for Government expenditure, given the countrys strained expenditure during this Covid pandemic.

The unanticipated but emergency spending arising out of the visitation of Covid-19 ought to speak for itself. In this regard, therefore, the request by the police administration for $22 million for the purchase of a fleet of 80 new SUVs deserved a more studied response than that provided by the Prime Minister.
Currently, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires organizations that process consumers personal information to complete privacy impact assessments and regular risk assessments on an ongoing basis. This will soon be a requirement under Californias Consumer Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), Virginias Consumer Data Protection Act (VCDPA), and the CPA if its signed into law. Truyos PIA tool enables organizations to see what personally identifiable information (PII) it has, where it is stored, where and how it is transmitted, which applications process it, and who can access it  information that is necessary for implementing privacy controls. The tool is also dynamic and adaptive, providing conditional questions based on the specific needs of the organization, as well applicable legal, privacy and data protection risks.
For more tips like the ones below, read ZipRecruiter CEO Ian Siegels new book, Get Hired Now! You can buy it here. You nailed the job interview! Or maybe you didnt. Either way, you still
PHOENIX  Women in Arizona may soon find it a lot easier to get birth control.

On a 32-24 vote, the House on Monday approved allowing pharmacists to dispense certain kinds of contraceptives without getting a prescription. It would eliminate the need to first go to a doctor.

SB 1082 would have Arizona join more than a dozen states that already have eliminated the requirement for a prescription.

But the change, which still requires Senate ratification, does not mean women could simply walk in to a pharmacy and buy the birth control of their choice.

Pharmacists would first be required to screen would-be recipients to determine if they are candidates for the kinds of contraceptives that use hormones. That includes not just the birth control but also other hormone-infused devices, like a vagina ring and patches.

And only those 18 years and older would be eligible.

At the heart of the debate is how difficult it should be for women to avoid conception.

Pregnancy should be the decision of the woman, said Rep. Athena Salman, D-Tempe.
Public health officials trying to combat the confusion and hesitancy have put up billboards where the Amish travel by horse and buggy, sent letters to bishops and offered to take the vaccines into their homes and workplaces, all without much success.

Its not due to lack of effort, said Michael Derr, the health commissioner in Holmes County, Ohio. But this thing is so politically charged."

Some health clinics that serve the Amish are hesitant to push the issue for fear of driving them away from getting blood pressure checks and routine exams.

One local business and the organizers of a community event told the health department in Holmes County that it would no longer be welcome if it brought the vaccine to them, Derr said.

Staff members at the Parochial Medical Center, which serves the Amish and Mennonites in Pennsylvanias Lancaster County, encourage patients to get the vaccine, but many have little fear of the virus, said Allen Hoover, the clinics administrator.

Most of them listen and are respectful, but you can tell before youre finished that theyve already made up their mind, he said.
Sadovnic loved playing golf early on the weekend with his friends before joining Langesfeld on the beach, where they listened to reggaeton, lay out in the sun and swam in the ocean, said Noah Goldberg, a co-worker of Langesfeld. At night, they enjoyed going out to different restaurants and exploring.

Hugh Lumpkin, a partner in the insurance recovery group where Nicole worked, described Langesfeld as a very smart and hard-working lawyer. He said that it is a loss that goes beyond business.

We are still sad to the bone, Lumpkin said. We miss her every minute of every day."

Co-workers said she was always smiling, and after working all day long liked to walk on the beach with her dogs. Last week, she began a fitness challenge of 30 minutes of exercise every day on her balcony.

Goldberg said Langesfeld was very funny and always caring for her friends. On Wednesday, Goldberg didnt feel well and Langesfeld called and texted him at 9:45 p.m. to ask how he was feeling. The building collapsed a few hours later.

Ana Barton, a colleague who used to socialize with Langesfeld, said she and others still have hope she will be found alive.

She is the most beautiful person, Barton said.
The man who died was from Guatemala and had apparently arrived in the United States only a few months ago, said Andres Pablo Lucas, owner of Brother Farm Labor Contractor that provided workers for the nursery, including the man who died.

The man, whose name was not disclosed, died at Ernst Nursery and Farms, a wholesale supplier in St. Paul, 20 miles (32 kilometers) north of Salem, on Saturday amid sweltering temperatures. An Oregon OSHA database listed the death as heat-related.

The employee was working on a crew moving irrigation lines. At the end of the shift he was found unresponsive in the field, said agency spokesman Aaron Corvin.

Speaking in Spanish, Pablo Lucas said when workers gathered together shortly after noon on Saturday, they noticed one of them was missing. They began searching and found his body. Pablo Lucas said he didnt remember the mans name.

Pablo Lucas said the laborers often have the option to start working near sunrise when it is cooler and can stop around midday, but some want to stay regardless of the heat.

The people want to work, to fight to succeed, he said. For that reason, they stay.
Ten years ago: In the first ruling by a federal appeals court on President Barack Obamas health care overhaul, a panel in Cincinnati handed the administration a victory by agreeing that the government could require a minimum amount of insurance for Americans. Greece fended off bankruptcy as lawmakers backed austerity measures in the face of riots that left more than 100 injured.

One year ago: New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said he had a plan to cut the city police department budget by $1 billion; the announcement came a week after a defund the police protest became a full-blown occupation outside City Hall. (The City Council would approve a plan to shift $1 billion from policing to education and social services in the coming year.) Two published studies revealed that at least 285 U.S. children had developed a serious inflammatory condition linked to the coronavirus. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell became the highest-ranking Republican in Congress to encourage Americans to wear a mask as protection against the coronavirus. A divided Supreme Court reasserted a commitment to abortion rights, striking down a Louisiana law requiring that doctors who perform abortions have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals. Former police officer Joseph James DeAngelo, the Golden State Killer who terrorized Northern California in the 1970s, pleaded guilty to 13 counts of murder in exchange for a life sentence instead of a possible death penalty. Comedy writer, actor and director Carl Reiner died at his California home at 98.
Still, the depression could produce between 1 and 3 inches (3 to 8 centimeters) of rain with higher amounts in some coastal areas of Georgia and South Carolina. Forecasters said heavier rainfall could occur in some scattered spots but the region has been dry, limiting the potential threat of any widespread flooding.

Still, forecasters warned that some local flooding remained a possibility in urban areas along the coast and up to 1 to 2 inches of rain were possible elsewhere around South Carolina and in north Georgia and northeast Alabama.

Some brushed off the storm's potential impact.

In Savannah, Georgia, all systems were go for Tuesday nights Savannah Bananas home baseball game as organizers eyed the storm. Officials for the collegiate summer league team planned to cover the field with tarp on Monday in preparation for the game.

For us, being on the coast and being in Savannah, we get some nasty pop-up storms that can dump an inch of rain in just a few hours, Bananas President Jared Orton said Monday. This one doesnt look like much more than just a nice, passing day of rain. I think were good to go as long as the sun comes out tomorrow.

Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
All that goes to a key question before the high court: How far can a state go in the name of election security  especially when there is no proof of a problem  when there is evidence that minorities are more likely to be affected.

In this case, Fletcher said the record from the trial court showed that, prior to the 2016 law, minorities were more likely than non-minorities to get someone else to turn in their ballots.

The district court found that, in contrast, the Republican Party has not significantly engaged in ballot collection as a Get Out the Vote strategy, he wrote.

The base of the Republican Party in Arizona is white, Fletcher continued. Individuals who engaged in ballot collection in past elections observed that voters in predominantly white areas were not as interested in ballot-collection services.

That, in turn, relates to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. It bars enactment of any voting practice of procedure which results in denial or abridgment of the right to vote on account of race or color.
The steep price includes a guided sendoff from Ciudad Acuna, where the bulk of Venezuelans cross the Rio Grande. The hardscrabble town a few hundred wet steps from Del Rio is attractive to both smugglers and migrants with deeper pockets because it had been largely spared the violence seen elsewhere on the border.

If youre a smuggler in the business of moving a commodity  because thats how they view money, guns, people, drugs and everything they move, as a product  then you want to move it through the safest area possible charging the highest price, said Austin L. Skero II, chief of the U.S. Border Patrols Del Rio sector.

But the number of smugglers caught with weapons has recently increased in the area, and agents who normally hunt down criminals are tied up processing migrants.

The uptick in migrants crossing is purely a diversion tactic used by the cartels to carry out crime, Skero said as a group of Haitians carrying young children emerged from a thicket of tall carrizo cane on the riverbank.

Once in the U.S., Venezuelans tend to fare better than other groups. In March, Biden granted Temporary Protected Status to an estimated 320,000 Venezuelans. The designation allows people coming from countries ravaged by war or disaster to work legally in the U.S. and gives protection from deportation.
The ministry said that the Russian jets, armed with bombs and air-to-surface rockets flew past the frigate between 3:30 p.m and 8:30 p.m. and were followed by disruptions to the Evertsens electronic equipment.

The Russian Defense Ministry responded in a statement later Tuesday, saying that the military scrambled its warplanes to prevent the violation of the Russian Federation's territorial waters after the Evertsen changed course and headed toward the Kerch Strait between the Black Sea and the Azov Sea.

The ministry said that after the Su-30 fighter jets and the Su-24 bombers made flyovers at a safe distance from the Evertsen, the ship changed course and sailed away.

Russia annexed Ukraines Crimean Peninsula in 2014, a move not recognized by most countries, gaining access to its long Black Sea coast. Russia has chafed at NATO warships visiting near Crimea as destabilizing. In April, it declared a broader area off Crimea closed to foreign naval ships.

In April, Russia imposed restrictions on foreign naval movements near Crimea until November in a move that drew strong complaints from Ukraine and the West. Russia rejected the criticism and noted the restrictions wouldnt interfere with commercial shipping.
Opinion: Some letters writers say the fireworks should be cancelled because it is so dry and there have been so many fires. Share your thoughts in a letter. tucson.com/opinion
Allegiant Air on Tuesday announced a new year-round, nonstop flight to Austin, Texas, starting Nov. 18.

To celebrate, the Las Vegas-based airline is offering one-way fares on the new route as low as $39.

Now, more than ever, travelers choose to fly Allegiant because we get them from point-to-point without the hassle of layovers or connections, Drew Wells, Allegiants senior vice president of revenue and planning, said in a statement. We think they appreciate our unique brand of convenient, affordable nonstop service and were excited to offer Tulsa travelers another exciting option for their next vacation.

Austin will be Allegiants sixth nonstop destination currently served from Tulsa International Airport, joining Las Vegas (LAS), Los Angeles (LAX), Destin-Fort Walton Beach, Florida; Orlando/Sanford, Florida; and Tampa/St. Petersburg, Florida.

For the new flight, Tulsa travelers will be traveling to Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.
A Tulsa man pleaded guilty Monday to a fatal shooting after federal prosecutors reduced the charge he had been facing from first-degree to second-degree murder.

Jerod LeWayne Goolsby, 25, admitted shooting Kendale Wright, 23, in the neck July 2, 2019, at an apartment complex in the 6500 block of East 21st Place after a day of drinking led to fighting.

The plea agreement, which still would require judicial approval, calls for Goolsby to serve between 188 months and 262 months in federal prison. He had faced up to a life sentence.

We had spent time together that day drinking, and then we had a dispute, Goolsby wrote in his plea agreement. I beat him up, but the dispute continued. I went to my apartment, retrieved my pistol, returned (to) his location, and then shot him twice.

Goolsby originally was charged with first-degree murder in state court, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in McGirt v. Oklahoma in July 2020 ruled that American Indians involved in crimes within the Muscogee Nation could be tried only in federal or tribal courts.

Goolsby is a member of the Muscogee Nation, and the crime occurred within the tribes 1860s-era reservation boundaries.
Staff Photographer

I have worked for the Tulsa World from 1995-2000 and from 2005-present. I graduated from the University of Central Oklahoma with a degree in Photographic Arts/Journalism. I live in Owasso with my wife, Brandi, and daughters, Sonnie and Sarah.
Green peaches, in particular, took a big hit.

In April when we had the small, green peaches growing, they really dont tolerate 28 degrees for several hours well. It killed a lot more at that point, he said.

He also said a lot of trees bloomed less than normal, and some did not bloom at all. Some are more susceptible to frost than others in extreme cold.

Livesay wanted to make it clear: They still have peaches, just not as many. They also have an array of other fresh fruits and vegetables.

Peach prices also increased, a little less than 10%.

Once we start getting below zero degrees, it can hurt the crop. We got to minus-10 at times.

He explained any variety of crops will only produce for about two weeks. They just pick them every three days or so and wait for new ones to ripen on the trees.

Thats why its important to monitor Livesays Facebook page as some weeks could be better than others.
Coalition leaders at the start of the session laid out plans for what was to be a succession of votes, including questions of whether to rescind the earlier failed vote and vote again. Stutes said it was her intent to complete those votes and then work with Tilton on trying to complete the potential statement of the House. Rep. Bryce Edgmon, the House Rules chair, later referred to a statement of the House as nonbinding.

Rep. Tom McKay, an Anchorage Republican, said he was prepared to support the effective date provisions. But he said negotiations called for a vote on the statement of the House first. But if the other side's not negotiating in good faith and gonna play tricks," he said he was voting no.

Stutes called for a break after a number of speeches, during which she met with Tilton and legislators huddled amongst themselves. At one point, Senate President Peter Micciche and Senate Minority Leader Tom Begich were outside the House chambers, monitoring developments.

When the House reconvened, after an extended break, members took up the statement of the House, passing it 30-8, and then voted on the effective date provisions of the budget, managing 28 votes, including support from McKay and Tilton.

The House and Senate ended the special session, their second of this year, shortly afterward.
HELENA, Mont. (AP)  Another legal challenge has been filed over a new law that eliminates the Judicial Nomination Commission and allows Montana's governor to directly fill judicial vacancies between elections.

Two former Democratic state representatives  Tom Winter of Missoula and Barbara Bessette of Great Falls  filed a complaint Friday asking District Court Judge Mike Menahan of Helena to temporarily block the law and to declare it unconstitutional.

It also asks the court to prevent Gov. Greg Gianforte from appointing a replacement District Court judge in Cascade County under the terms of the new law.

A spokesperson for Gianforte said the governor does not normally comment on ongoing litigation.

The complaint argues the new law violates a provision of the Montana Constitution, which states that anyone charged with the exercise of power properly belonging to one branch of government may not exercise any power properly belonging to either of the others," unless the Constitution directly permits it.

The state constitution also directs the governor to appoint someone to fill a judicial vacancy between elections from nominees selected in the manner provided by law.
Agreeing to hear the case would give the court the opportunity to overturn a 2005 case that has been roundly criticized by conservatives. In that case, the court divided 5-4 to say that the city of New London, Connecticut, could use eminent domain to take private property and then sell it to private developers as part of an attempt to revitalize the city. The decision was written by Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who acknowledged it was the most unpopular opinion he ever wrote. Justice Antonin Scalia, who dissented, ranked it among the courts biggest mistakes. Only two justices who decided the case remain on the court: Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Stephen Breyer. Stevens died in 2019 and Scalia in 2016.

STILL PENDING: FREEDOM OF SPEECH

A book that became the Hollywood movie War Dogs is at the center of what could become a landmark First Amendment case. Shkelzen Berisha, the son of the former prime minister of Albania, says the book harmed him by falsely linking him to would-be arms dealers from Miami.

He sued for defamation and wants the justices to revisit the high bar the court has set for public figures to win defamation lawsuits. Berisha's complaint stems from a landmark civil rights-era case, New York Times v. Sullivan. As a result of Sullivan and cases that followed, public figures can win defamation lawsuits only if they can prove that the person publishing the falsehood knew the statement they made was false or made it with reckless disregard for the truth. Former President Donald Trump has complained about the high bar, and Thomas has said the court should consider overturning the case.

Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
They are extremely top heavy, Humphrey said.

Rep. Colin Walke, D-Oklahoma City, is seeking an interim study on the manner and method in which district attorneys conduct internal investigations.

The request says district attorneys offices are the only posts in state government that operate free of scrutiny.

This isnt about attacking the district attorneys or anything along those lines, Walke said. Other states have oversight statutes, and we dont. The question becomes why. If we need them, what do they look like?

Reps. Andy Fugate, D-Oklahoma City, and John Waldron, D-Tulsa, along with Sen. Jo Anna Dossett, D-Tulsa, are seeking an interim study on absentee voting.

This study will provide an overview of the existing absentee ballot process while examining ballot security, causes of ballot rejection, current options for counting legally cast ballots, and other issues, the proposal says.

Fugate said he sponsored a bill last session that dealt with curing absentee ballots that had been rejected. Reasons for rejection ranged from failure to sign the ballot envelope to lack of notarization.

The bill didnt make it through the Legislature.
A Tulsa-area state senator filed legislation Monday to lower the age for those carrying weapons under Oklahomas 2019 constitutional carry law to match the minimum voting age.

Though the Legislature isnt expected to consider such bills until next years session, at least two gun rights advocacy groups have already publicly expressed support for the measure.

Sen. Nathan Dahm, R-Broken Arrow, said in an announcement that he filed Senate Bill 1093 because of his belief that the primary function and responsibility of government is to protect individual rights. He said that under the U.S. Constitutions right to have and bear arms, a person should not have to wait until turning 21 to exercise their right to self-defense.

Reached by phone Monday evening, Dahm said there was no specific catalyst that led him to file the bill earlier that day outside of wanting it to coincide with Oklahomas official Second Amendment Day.

Ive always felt that as weve expanded rights to keep and bear arms, that that should expand to all Oklahoma citizens, including 18-year-olds, he said. He added that hes seen other states enact similar protections for 18- to 20-year-old gun owners.
In America today, immigrants are demonized. Asian Americans are assaulted. Capitol police are beaten with flagpoles. Unarmed African Americans are shot and suffocated by police. Votes are suppressed. Mass shootings take lives regularly.

Even mask-wearing amid COVID-19 illustrates our empathy problem. The message I wear a mask to protect you; you wear a mask to protect me did not resonate with millions of Americans. Neither did the social value of vaccinations. Todays notion of individual freedom has little room for empathy.

The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism, wrote philosopher Hannah Arendt.

So, what can we do to boost our collective empathy level? Empathy  or lack of it  is partially hardwired: A 2018 University of Cambridge study found that 10% of differences in humans ability to empathize can be attributed to genetic variations. But that means 90% is explained by nongenetic factors such as socialization and education. That suggests that empathy can be taught.

Stanford neuroscientist Jamil Zaki confirms this in his book The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World. The book shares research, including experiments from his own lab, showing that empathy can be strengthened through effort.
Nguyen No, a 36-year-old engineer in Nghia Hanh District, central coastal province of Quang Ngai, has embarked on an intellectual adventure with bigger dreams of creating machines and tools which offer local farmers helping hands.

Countryside living has a huge draw, yet not many people have high-paid jobs in cities to pour their heart and soul into developing new gadgets for farmers.

Humble product

Doing it for my passion is Nos response to peoples question of why he gave up his job at an international firm after a decade. The decision was a huge shock to Nos colleagues, friends and family. Only his wife supported him wholeheartedly.

I told her that grilling rice paper  Quang Ngai Provinces renowned speciality  was hard work so I would build a rice paper grilling machine.

I had worked on the project for a long time, mostly after office hours, said No.

If you earned no money, I could still support the family, his wife said, which became the motivation for him to pursue the development of a new gadget.

No researched alternatives for coal and went to South Korea to buy infrared emitters.

A controller was also developed to help users adjust temperature easily. That was how he created the 4M multifunctional griller.

I started working on it in 2014 and completed it in 2017. In that year, I quit my job to bring the machine to every rice paper making household, asking them to use it and give comments, he recalled.

It was hard.

No said he chose to start with a rice paper griller as he was unable to research something too big and complicated. He wanted to create daily tools and gadgets that make peoples lives much easier.

When I was a child, I was amazed by a double-edged plowshare that my neighbor developed which helped farmers turn up the earth of paddy fields much quicker. The rice paper griller shares the same mission to reduce cost, time and labor expenses as well as replace coal with an eco-friendly alternative, he said.

His machine has a remarkable productivity of grilling 200 rice paper sheets in an hour at VND10,000 (US$0.43).

Meanwhile, with the same amount of rice paper, two workers have to grill continuously in four hours, not to mention the coal cost of VND60,000 ($2.61).

The significant advantage of his grillers brought orders from all over Vietnam. Behind a simple product is a long journey of trials and errors.

Bigger plans

According to No, it is getting easier for young people to start up their own businesses and bring products from rural areas to bigger markets.

However, without efforts to improve, products will soon fail to satisfy users demands and get replaced by better ones.

To me, the strongest rival is the one remaining in the dark as I do not know how good they are or when they will release products that directly compete with mine, said No.

I always remind my workers to never stop creating. By stopping thinking how we can do better, we kill our business from inside, he added.

From a humble rice paper griller, Nos company now offers nine other commercial products including food dryer, meat griller and rice paper cutting machine.

He also has his own team of seven young people. Their monthly salaries range from VND7 to VND15 million ($304 to 652)  sufficient to cover their countryside lives and turn ideas into products.

No envisions his business in the next ten years. He said he never wished to win a lottery, just always wanted to see an idea spark.

Wealth is not Nos goal but products that can help a lot of people. Nos creations had received several national-level awards for their high applicability and good quality.

He is now working on a new project whose details have yet to be revealed.

Universal and eco-friendly  that was how No described the product he is nurturing.

I have ten years for an invention of my life. If I cannot make it come true, it will be a failure, he said.

As when I gave up on my job at the former company, my life goals changed. I stopped trying to make as much money as possible, instead, I devoted myself to creating new products, he said.

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Here are todays leading news stories:

Politics

-- Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh and Laos Party General Secretary and State President Thongloun Sisoulith reached consensus on cooperation orientations between the two countries in the time ahead during their meeting in Hanoi on Monday, the Vietnam News Agency reported.

COVID-19 Updates

-- The Ministry of Health reported 95 local COVID-19 infections on Tuesday morning, including 58 cases in Ho Chi Minh City, raising the national tally to 16,136, with 6,519 recoveries and 76 deaths.

-- Ho Chi Minh City continues applying social distancing measures under the municipal Peoples Committees directive No.10 from 0:00 on Tuesday, according to Vice-chairman Duong Anh Duc. The directive promulgates stricter regulations such as limiting public gatherings to three, shutting down unofficial markets, and suspending public transport.

-- Contact tracing began on Monday evening after three officers at Chi Hoa Prison in District 10, Ho Chi Minh City tested positive for the novel coronavirus earlier the same day.

-- A 57-year-old woman has tested positive for COVID-19 after completing a 21-day quarantine period at a centralized facility in the Mekong Delta province of An Giang, provincial authorities confirmed on Monday.

-- The Ho Chi Minh City Department of Health coordinated with the Department of Transport to operate 200 passenger buses to transport COVID-19 patients with mild or no symptoms.

Society

-- A man has discovered an unexploded bomb while exploiting sand along a river in the Mekong Delta city of Can Tho and reported the incident to local authorities for proper solutions.

-- A former police officer in Hanoi was sentenced to 30 months in prison for accidentally killing a young man while testing his pistol in October 2020.

-- A 42-year-old man from the northern province of Thai Binh turned himself in to police officers on Monday after murdering his wife and parents-in-law over a conflict.

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Police in District 12, Ho Chi Minh City said on Monday that they had arrested a man forrobbing a convenience store with a BB gun last week.

According to initial information, Ly Ngoc Trieu Phuong, 21, hailing from Binh Thanh District, came to a convenience shop on Dong Hung Thuan 2 Street in District 12 and pretended to buy a bottle of water and a carton of milk early on the morning of June 23.

At the counter, Phuong asked to buy a top-up phone card and when the cashier was busy scanning the goods, he put a BB gun to the cashiers head to demand VND1 million (US$43).

The gunman took away a total of more than VND1.5 million ($65) and left.

The BB gun and bullets owned by Ly Ngoc Trieu Phuong. Photo: A.X. / Tuoi Tre

Receiving the report on the robbery, police in District 12 launched an investigation into the case and managed to arrest Phuong at a hotel in the same district three days later.

Police officers also seized a BB gun and a bag containing bullets and drug paraphernalia at the scene.

Phuong later tested positive for drugs and was found to have two records of illegal use of drugs and intentionally causing injuries to other people.

The man is under further investigation on a robbery charge.

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As an effort to curb the coronavirus spread, Vietnams economic hub of Ho Chi Minh City has decided to maintain its own epidemic control measures after the social distancing period under a prime ministerial directive has expired.

The decision was announced by deputy chairman of the municipal Peoples Committee Duong Anh Duc at a press conference held on Monday afternoon, focusing on epidemic control measures.

The city would continue to apply social distancing measures as stated in its Directive 10, after the social distancing period under prime ministerial Directive 15 ended at 0:00 am on Tuesday, the official said.

This decision came as the city has recently topped the country in daily new COVID-19 infections, with more than 100 cases added every day from many new clusters.

There is no date of expiry for the social distancing period under Directive 10, so the city will continue to apply it from June 29, vice-chairman Duc said.

Directive 10, which started to be enacted by the municipal administration on June 19, requires suspension of non-essential businesses and unofficial markets, public gatherings of no more than three people, and a minimum distance of 1.5 meters between people in public.

Residents are required to stay home and only go outside to buy food and supplies, seek emergency treatment, or go to work.

On May 31, Ho Chi Minh City began implementing social distancing measures under Directive 15 within 15 days for the entire city, except for Go Vap District and Thanh Loc Ward of District 12, where the stricter prime ministerial Directive 16 was applied.

On June 14, as the epidemic situation remained complicated, chairman of the municipal Peoples Committee Nguyen Thanh Phong decided to continue applying Directive 15 for the whole city for an additional two weeks, from June 15 to June 29.

Currently, the city is accelerating its mass COVID-19 vaccination drive which started on June 19 using 836,000 AstraZeneca vaccine doses donated by the Japanese government.

As of 6:00 pm on Sunday, nearly 711,000 residents had been vaccinated against COVID-19, local authorities reported on Monday.

In a report issued on Tuesday afternoon, the Ministry of Health confirmed 102 new COVID-19 cases, including 94 domestic and eight imported infections, of which 54 were logged in Ho Chi Minh City.

The total number of coronavirus patients across the country has amounted to 16,238, including 6,519 recoveries and 78 deaths, since early 2020.

Since the pandemics fourth wave that appeared in Vietnam on April 27, the nation has documented 12,882 infections, the ministry said.

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A wrinkled face, sunburned skin and all smiles pushing his trash cart, Nguyen Thuong, 61, has become a special piece of Hoi An Ancient Town in Vietnam's Quang Nam Province.

People call him 'Crazy' Thuong as he does things like no other  wandering around town picking up garbage at night.

For half a decade, he has roamed into every corner of the touristic town to clean streets and help the locals run errands for free.

A stroke suddenly put an end to Thuongs career as a chef at a hotel in Hoi An five years ago.

After a long treatment, Thuong was discharged from a hospital with ears unable to hear and limbs paralyzed. At home, he tried to rehabilitate and started walking again slowly.

In the first days, it was a terrible pain for every step forward and he kept falling down while taking efforts to stand up.

Despite pains and difficulties, I pull out all my last strength to do exercise and regain my capability of walking, Thuong recalled.

When he finally overcame the incident, Thuong started thinking about how to pay it forward to show his gratitude for being alive again.

Seeing his hometown engulfed by plastic bags, he came up with an idea of jogging and picking up trash, simultaneously.

Many tourists and residents found him strange. Some even got angry when he reminded them not to litter.

They called me insane," said Thuong.

"My family asked me to stop yet I was determined to do something.

"I just wanted to show my gratitude not because I lost my mind.

Thuong continues the good deeds in silence, no matter what the weather is like.

Recalling the most difficult time in her life, Le Thi Bay  Thuongs wife  lost count of the times she cried knowing her husband was called crazy.

I was morose. I tried to prevent him yet he told me he felt better by going out, said Bay.

However, he was the one who assured me that you should just ignore what they say. I want to contribute to the community, dont worry."

Nguyen Xuan Phuong  Thuongs daughter  could never forget calls and messages at midnight telling her that her father was 'severely insane.'

Negative words about him hurt my family so badly," Phuong said.

"We tried to stop him but he resisted.

Finally, they learnt to understand Thuongs determination and switched to supporting him, advising him to change working hours to the early morning, from 5:00 to 8:00 am.

Besides picking trash, Thuong usually visits elder people who live alone to voluntarily help them do housework.

The mans good deeds have changed how local residents think about him.

Using the savings from selling metal scraps, Thuong bought a cart to collect and deliver more garbage to a landfill.

On the cart, he painted slogans of environmental protection with a simple aim to call for social awareness of classifying trash and reducing the use of plastic bags.

Small changes have been witnessed with more people supporting Thuong, simply by putting garbage into trash bins or keeping the roads in front of their houses clean.

Although he is not in good shape and the treatment costs his family dozens of millions of dong per month (VND1 million=US$43), Thuong refuses to receive an allowance from local authorities.

The man said he pledged to himself to do good for the community and would continue until he could no more.

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Vietnams Ministry of Health has approved Modernas COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use.

This is the fifth COVID-19 vaccine to be greenlighted by the Southeast Asian country, aside from the AstraZeneca vaccine, Russia's Sputnik V, China's Sinopharm vaccine, and the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.

According to the health ministry, importers will have to coordinate with the Administration of Science Technology and Training in organizing the evaluation of vaccine safety and effectiveness, as well as cooperate with distributors in pharmacovigilance.

They will also need to coordinate with the Ministry of Health in vaccine assessment and risk management during circulation in the country.

The health ministry added that a unit had signed a contract with Moderna to import five million vaccine shots into Vietnam.

Vietnam set a target of securing 150 million vaccine doses and vaccinating two-thirds of its population of about 98 million people this year.

The Southeast Asian nation has received nearly four million AstraZeneca shots from the COVAX scheme, direct purchase via a local company, and Japan, in addition to 2,000 Sputnik V jabs donated by Russia and 500,000 Sinopharm doses gifted by China in the year to date.

Approximately 3.5 million doses have been administered since the country rolled out inoculation on March 8, with nearly 173,000 people having completed the two-dose regimen.

As of Tuesday afternoon, Vietnam has recorded 16,238 COVID-19 cases, with 6,519 recoveries and 78 deaths, according to the Ministry of Health statistics.

The country has logged 12,882 local infections in 48 provinces and cities since a new outbreak began on April 27.

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A Hanoi court has sentenced a former police lieutenant to two years and a half in prison for unintentionally shooting dead a 21-year-old student.

The Peoples Court of Hanoi on Monday morning condemned 30-year-old Nguyen Xuan Tinh, an ex-police lieutenant, to 30 months imprisonment on charges of manslaughter.

On October 10, 2020, Tinh asked one of his acquaintances to buy him an airgun for bird shooting, according to case files.

Twenty days later, Tinh and his five friends were sitting at a cafe in Hanois Dong Da District when he boasted that he had purchased a beautiful airgun.

Tinh went home to get the gun before returning to the cafe and showing it to his friends.

He later aimed the gun at the wall edge nearly 30 meters from his place and fired a shot as a gun test.

The bullet reached N.D.A., a senior student at the University of Transport, who was sitting on the veranda next to that wall.

The student fell to the ground and was taken to hospital but he died on the way due to severe blood loss.

After the deadly gun test, Tinh handed himself to the district police and confessed his crime to them.

At the court, Tinh told the jury that the shooting that killed the student was just a careless incident, for he and the victim had no conflict.

I remembered that I had locked the guns trigger, but when I touched it slightly, the bullet was shot out, Tinh claimed.

The ex-police officer added that the student was hidden behind three or four bonsai pots, so he could not see the victim.

The mother of the student told the court that she had received VND400 million (US$17,300) from Tinh and did not claim more compensation.

She just asked the court to handle the case according to the law.

After taking everything into account, the court handed down the 30-month sentence to Tinh.

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The Ministry of Health announced 372 new COVID-19 cases and 245 recoveries across 23 provinces and cities in Vietnam on Tuesday.

Of the new infections, 11 were imported while 361 were locally transmitted, with 308 of them being detected in centralized quarantine facilities and locked-down areas.

Ho Chi Minh City continues to take the lead with 155 additional local cases.

Vietnam has registered 13,054 domestic infections in 49 out of its 63 provinces and cities since the fourth transmission wave broke out on April 27.

The northern province of Bac Giang has recorded the highest number of local infections in this round with 5,690 patients, followed by Ho Chi Minh City with 3,591 and northern Bac Ninh Province with 1,594.

By comparison, Vietnam confirmed 106 community-based cases in the first wave from January 23 to April 16, 2020, 554 in the second from July 25 to December 1, 2020, and 910 in the third from January 28 to March 25, 2021.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the Southeast Asian country has reported 16,413 coronavirus patients, including 14,624 local and 1,789 imported cases.

A total of 6,764 patients have recovered from the respiratory disease, including 245 announced on Tuesday.

Seventy-eight coronavirus-related deaths have been documented, most of which were due to serious underlying health conditions.

Thirteen provinces and cities in the country have not logged any local infections over the past 14 days.

Medical authorities have carried out 3,074,425 tests for 7,235,755 people from April 29 to date.

Vietnam has administered 3,497,104 COVID-19 vaccine shots since it rolled out inoculation on March 8.

Nearly 173,000 people have completed the two-dose regimen.

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A woman has tested positive for COVID-19 after completing her 21-day quarantine period at a centralized facility in the Mekong Delta province of An Giang.

The 57-year-old woman, who hails from An Phu District, An Giang Province, returned to Vietnam from Cambodia on May 30, the provincial Steering Committee for COVID-19 Prevention and Control confirmed on Monday.

She was brought to a centralized quarantine center in Tri Ton District following her arrival.

After completing the 21-day quarantine period, during which she tested negative for the novel coronavirus three times, she was required to undergo home quarantine for another 14 days.

On Monday, her fourth test returned positive, and she was confirmed as COVID-19 patient No. 15,950 by the Ministry of Health later the same day.

The woman has been admitted to the medical center in An Phu District for quarantine and treatment.

She is currently in stable health and does not have such symptoms as a fever, coughing, or difficulty breathing.

Her 12 direct contacts have been identified and quarantined in accordance with regulations.

Vietnam previously required international arrivals and direct contacts of COVID-19 patients to undergo a 14-day quarantine period at centralized facilities.

The period was extended to 21 days on May 5 following several cases of people testing positive for the virus after completing their 14-day quarantine.

As of Tuesday morning, Vietnam has recorded 16,136 coronavirus cases, with 6,519 recoveries and 76 deaths, according to the Ministry of Health statistics.

The country has recorded 12,788 local infections in 48 provinces and cities since a new outbreak began on April 27.

An Giang has detected only one case in this bout and has gone nine days without reporting a community-based infection.

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Following the postponement of Australias Got Talent yesterday, judge Alesha Dixon is expected to return to the UK.

But she is keen to return should the show resume.

Dixon (Britains Got Talent, Americas Got Talent: The Champions) completed 2 weeks quarantine with her family before a Sydney lockdown prevented production from proceeding with an audience.

Obviously its extremely disappointing that filming of the show has been postponed due to the outbreak of covid in Australia, but the safety of the audience, talent and crew is the priority, a representative on her behalf told The Mirror.

The production team from AGT have been fantastic and looked at every option to try and make the show work, but unfortunately its impossible to do it and keep everyone safe. I look forward to returning once it is safe to do so.

Id like to thank the fantastic team at Seven network for looking after us so well and making me feel so welcome in Australia.
Former Married at First Sight cast member Stacey Hampton has been fined $1000 after breaching COVID-19 related travel rules when she travelled from Adelaide to Melbourne on a shopping spree.

Hampton, 27, who featured in the 2020 season of the Nine reality series, was charged in April 2020 with three counts of failing to comply with a direction after travelling interstate when she should have been self-isolating.

At the time, essential travellers were allowed to enter South Australia without quarantine. Non-essential travellers needed to self-isolate for 14 days.

Including court fees, a total amount of $1676 must be paid by mid-July. Two other counts against her for the same charge were dropped.

Source: news.com.au
This week on Foreign Correspondent is Clash of the Titans a two part report by Bill Birtles on US-Chinese relations.

This month China celebrates the centenary of its ruling Communist Party.

The CCP boasts it has delivered unprecedented prosperity to its citizens but under President Xi Jinping relations with rival superpower, the US, have sunk to a near all-time low.

Presented by China correspondent Bill Birtles, this timely two-part series gains special access to both nations to explore the deeper forces pushing US-Chinese relations to the brink.

The escalating trade war between the two countries, the bitter war of words over Chinas human rights abuses against the Uyghur minority and the crushing of democracy in Hong Kong are all current flashpoints in the conflict.

But what are the historical causes underlying this widening rift?

We go inside China to hear about the Century of Humiliation  a period during which a weakened, imperial China was colonised and exploited by mainly Western powers.

We must all try our utmost to avoid any war, says cultural bureaucrat Yan He. But if it comes to that, you must act in self-defence. You must protect what is yours.

The sacking of the old Summer Palace by British and French forces during the Opium Wars has become a cautionary tale for Chinese school children.

This is evidence that if China falls behind, we will be beaten up, says author Karoline Kan. The lesson for many Chinese is that we must develop the country and be self-reliant.

In America, we look at how the loss of manufacturing jobs to China and economic decline in the rust belt states has led to an increase in poverty.

The Trump presidency ramped up the belief that China was the cause of Americas economic woes, also blaming China for the COVID pandemic, which lead to the deaths of over half a million people.

There is no end in sight in terms of the damage to the economy.China is a convenient scapegoat, says Yukon Huang, a former World Bank executive.

Equally China has been whipping up anti-American sentiment, accusing it of meddling in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and trying to block its rise to superpower status.

We will not move to the beats of villains and not put up with their wickedness, says Chinas Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs, Le Yucheng, in a rare interview.

President Biden is increasing the pressure too. Were in competition with Chinato win the 21st century, he declared.

The tensions between the Titans are set to escalate.

Thursday 1 July at 8pm on ABC.
Q+A had plans to broadcast from the Brisbane Powerhouse with Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk this Thursday.

But that was before Brisbane and parts of Queensland were thrown into a three-day snap lockdown.

It will now broadcast live from Melbourne with guest host David Speers. Premier Palaszczuk will still feature -but presumably in a virtual appearance.

Up to 12 million Australians are in lockdown, or heading that way, as four states now race to contain outbreaks of the Delta variant of COVID-19.

South East Queensland, Magnetic Island and Townsville have gone into a three day snap lockdown. Perth and the Peel region have entered a four-day lockdown. And the Northern Territory has extended its stay-at-home orders until Friday. In New South Wales, the Sydney outbreak shows no sign of ending quickly  with another 19 cases identified today  and Treasurer Dominic Perrotet has unveiled a business rescue package.

Confusion has followed the Prime Ministers announcement that Australian adults aged under 40 will finally be allowed to request the AstraZeneca vaccine, even though Pfizer is the preferred option for that age group. Scott Morrison has also announced mandatory vaccinations for aged care workers and plans to indemnify doctors against the very rare risk of blood clots. A revamped quarantine scheme will now mandate quarantine workers be both vaccinated and tested, and domestic travellers will be separated from higher-risk international travellers.

Meanwhile, when it comes to vaccinations, it seems we have fallen to the very last of all OECD countries, with only 4.75% of Australians vaccinated, as compared 45.76% in the United States.

And well look at what else is making news this week including Barnaby Joyce copping a $200 fine for not wearing a mask.

Joining David on the panel:

Annastacia Palaszczuk, Premier of Queensland

Michelle Ananda-Rajah, Infectious diseases expert

Stephen Duckett, Director of Health and Aged Care, Grattan Institute

Jennifer Hewett, Financial Review columnist

5th panellist tbc

8:30pm Thursday on ABC.

This post updates.
As Finding the Archibald concluded last night on ABC, Rachel Griffiths made a big decision.

In the Archibalds 100th year, Griffiths had been on a mission to find a portrait which, for her, sums up the changing face of Australia.

In the end, I realised one portrait alone can never talk to where weve come from, where we are or where were going. So I have two, she revealed.

She chose two portraits, linked by family.

They were 1956 winner Albert Namatjira by William Dargie and a self portrait by (grandson) Vincent Namatjira, which was highly commended by judges in 2018.

I couldnt choose between these portraits, and I realised theyre so important together. But its so appalling to think that at this time that Dargie chose to paint Albert, First Nations people were being forcibly removed from their families and were not even citizens in a country theyve had continuous culture for 60,000 years. So there was something radical about Dargie saying, This man is a distinguished Australian.

And if we jump forward, almost 70 years to have Vincent Namatjira paint his great grandfather, not as the sad First Nations man, but to paint him as The Man on his land, in his truck, is claiming Albert back and placing him within the context of what he meant for his people.

But I think this story isnt finished. I would hope that at the 150th anniversary of the Archibald, that there would have been a painting that speaks to the moment when all Australians see Aboriginal culture and history as our culture and history.

So I think we have a way to go, because were just starting to listen.
Seven has been forced to pull Australias Got Talent from its schedule due to the strict lockdown conditions in Sydney.

Filming of the Fremantle production was due to get underway this week at The Star in Sydney. Because its location was in the first 4 local government area lockdowns in Sydney producers then looked to relocate to Rooty Hill, but it too was forced to close for the two week period.

A Seven spokesperson said, Due to the current COVID-19 restrictions in Sydney, we have decided to postpone production of the new season of AGT to a date to be determined. A studio audience is a vitally important part of this much-loved show, so we have made the responsible but tough call to not go ahead for now. A big thank you to our judges  Neil Patrick Harris, Kate Ritchie, Alesha Dixon and Shane Jacobson  and our host Ricki-Lee, and we hope to see you again soon.

The postponement is disappointing, but there is a lot of great content to come on Seven across the rest of 2021, including Farmer Wants A Wife  which starts this Sunday  The Voice, SAS Australia, Big Brother VIP, more of our high-rating 7NEWS Spotlight specials, a special on William Tyrrell, the AFL Finals Series, Bathurst 1000 and, of course, the Tokyo Olympics and the Ashes Test series.

The news is particularly difficult for Neil Patrick Harris and Alesha Dixon, both of whom travelled to Australia and underwent a 2 week lockdown -now facing another if they stay for the next two weeks.

Australias Got Talent was due to screen after the Olympics, but Seven is likely to fill the void with more Spotlight specials and extended runs of other shows. Whether a completed SAS Australia now comes forward is also unclear.

The Voice is expected to be the first big show following the Olympics.
Local

Suspect wanted in fatal Tyler shooting

Dycorrian Wayne Lofton Lofton

Tyler Police detectives are looking for a Jacksonville man accused of killing one woman at a Tyler daiquiri shop this weekend.

Police said Monday, Dycorrian Wayne Lofton, 22, is accused in the death of Tylsha Brown, 46, of Katy, who was killed after multiple rounds were fired at and around New Orleans Flavors Daiquiris in Tyler late Friday night.

Lofton has an arrest warrant for a murder charge and a $750,000 bond. He is considered to be armed and dangerous. An arrest has not been made.

Police believe multiple suspects could be involved in the shooting. Brown was celebrating her birthday when she was shot and killed at the restaurant.

Tyler Police Department Public Information Officer Andy Erbaugh said detectives are narrowing their investigation and expect more charges will be forthcoming.

Police think Lofton is still in the area, Erbaugh said. He added theres no definitive answer on why the shooting happened.

Information from witnesses suggests there was a disagreement, including some yelling, and gunshots soon followed, he said.

Brown was inside the restaurant building as a bystander when she was shot, Erbaugh said.

After requesting videos from the public, Erbaugh said a couple of videos were provided. He encouraged people to send any videos over to the City of Tyler Police Department Facebook page.

He noted that one video in particular sent through Facebook Messenger was very helpful.

Jaderick Willis, 21, of Jacksonville, and Jalen Cavitt, 20, of Alabama, were both shot that night, but they are expected to recover, Erbaugh said.

This case remains under investigation, and detectives are working hard in their investigation.

Detectives have been interviewing people day and night since Friday night, Erbaugh said.

If anybody has any information on Loftons whereabouts, please contact the Tyler Police Department at 903-531-1000 or Tyler-Smith County Crime Stoppers at 903-597-2833.


She came into my life in 1972. I put aside all my baby dolls because now I had the real thing. My very own doll  also known as my baby sister.

At the age of five, I thought my whole purpose in life was to take care of baby Lynda. I didnt have much else on my agenda except to learn how to write my name so I had the time to devote. Usually it was fun to have a built-in playmate and I could ditch her if there was ever a better offer to go over to a friends house.

Against my mothers wishes, I loved to sneak into Lyndas bedroom to check on her before I went to bed. It was usually uneventful and I would catch hell if I woke her up so I just gave her a quick once over.

During one of my nighttime checks, there was some major excitement. Mom! Mom come quick! I remember running out of the room yelling. There are cigarette butts and barf all over Lyndas crib. It was the 1970s and, apparently, my sister found one of my parents giant ashtrays to be appetizing. To this day, my mom and sister deny this ever happened.

We were only at the same school during our grade school years. We shared a room for awhile, had a few fights, and bantered 24/7. I got mad and put a sticker in her hair, which had to be cut out the day before school pictures. She had spiked hair before it was a thing thanks to my hijinks. Lynda retaliated by putting Im a good reader and Top Seller (as in Girl Scout cookies) stickers on me a few times for everyone to see on Sunday when we were at church. She conveniently waited to tell me about the sticker attacks until after I returned from communion, making sure everyone saw the sticker display on my back.

During high school, it was time for Lynda to take care of me. Here is one of many examples: I was going on a date that I was dreading. Lyndas job was to leave the front door open so that anyone could see through the screen door, leave every light on in the house, and make a lot of noise. I arrived home, expecting my foolproof plan to be in place, allowing me to avoid the awkward good-bye kiss because of all the activity and no privacy. What did I find instead? My house was beyond locked up. All lights were off and there were no signs of life. My sister was hiding in the dark for hours laughing and waiting for my return. Many unpleasant words were exchanged that night.

That same summer she thought I was paying her back on a late night while she was watching a scary movie. She thought I was pulling on the basement back door pretending to be a burglar. Instead, she nearly had a heart attack when I came out of my bedroom in a daze after hearing her scream. It was a payback without even trying and we never figured out who our late-night visitor was.

After Lynda was out of college, I helped her find a job in Chicago and we lived a block apart from each other. She let me live with her for two months while I was in transition going back to school. We drove each other crazy. I put terrible songs in her head that she was stuck with for days. When people asked if we were sisters Id ask them who they thought was younger. If the person picked me as the younger sister I would yell, Nope, Im five years older. Then I would smile at my sister and Id mention how glad I was that she got the 1950's name and not me.

As my maid of honor, she hosted a bachelorette trip to New Orleans. She dressed me in a red boa, red cowboy hat with a wedding veil, and big fake tatas that she made me wear under an embarrassingly worded T-shirt. It was a payback like no other, until my wedding, when she roasted me to a crowd of all my friends and family. She has still never been married despite my urging to come in, the waters warm pleas so I have yet to give my toast roast. If the day comes, she would be smart to elope.

As weve aged, I have been relying on my sister a lot. She came to L.A. when each of my kids were born to help out and keep things running while my husband and I learned to juggle our new responsibilities.

Because she was not tied down, she selflessly gave up her Carrie Bradshaw life in Chicago and moved home when my Dad died to help my mom. She also picked up my kids after grade school every day because they were so over the many years of aftercare at their school.

She has been a second mom to my kids. Despite them referring to her as Uncle Buck (John Candys classic movie character in case you need the reference) for being so hard on them get their homework done and stay out of trouble, they adore her and know she will always have their back. She loves to tell my kids stories about my teenage years, which then yields Mom, Lynda said you were not an angel so why cant I (insert ridiculous ask here).

Lynda and I still sign every card, Love, the prettiest, smartest sister and favorite daughter and I always tell her that when we get really old, she can come live with me and I will take care of her again, like the old days. Her response every single time  absolutely not happening.

 Laura Spreck Lee

Laura Spreck Lee lives in the Midwest with her husband John, 17-year old daughter Lexie, 16-year-old son Ethan and Goldendoodle Zoey, a human pretending to be a dog. Almost an empty nester, Laura is trying to figure out her next act.
FILE PHOTO: A sign is pictured outside a Google office near the company's headquarters in Mountain View, California

By Fanny Potkin and Panu Wongcha-um

SINGAPORE/BANGKOK (Reuters) - Google took down two Google Maps documents on Monday that had listed the names and addresses of hundreds of Thai activists who were accused by royalists of opposing the monarchy, the technology company said.

Thai royalist activist Songklod "Pukem" Chuenchoopol told Reuters he and a team of 80 volunteers had created the maps and planned to report everyone named on them to police on accusations of insulting the monarchy.

A spokesperson for Alphabet's Google said by email "the issue is now fixed", and noted: "We have clear policies about what's acceptable for user generated My Maps content. We remove user generated maps that violate our policies."

A version of one of the maps seen by Reuters included the names and addresses of nearly 500 people, many of them students, together with their photos in university or high school uniforms. It had received over 350,000 views.

The faces of those named had been covered by black squares with the number 112, in reference to the article under the country's criminal code which makes insulting or defaming the monarchy punishable by up to 15 years in prison.

Neither map could be accessed when Reuters tried to open them late on Monday.

Songklod said that he and the team of volunteers sought to highlight those they accused of breaking that law.

"When each of us sees something offensive posted on social media, we put it on the map," he said. Describing it as a "psychological" warfare operation, Songklod said the aim was to dissuade people from online criticism of the monarchy.

Youth-led protests that began last year brought unprecedented criticism of the monarchy and calls for its reform both on the streets and online.

The government did not immediately respond to comment on the removal of the Google Maps or the content they contained.

Songklod, 54, a retired army captain and prominent right-wing activist, said he considered the operation targeting opponents of the monarchy a "massive success" despite the removal of the maps.

Story continues

The royalist activist said the content in them had come from public research.

Human rights groups and critics of the establishment said the maps included the private data and addresses of hundreds of people and could put them at risk of violence.

"I started to get panicked messages from young people in Thailand who had been doxxed in a royalist document on Google Maps accusing them of being anti-monarchy," said Andrew MacGregor Marshall, a Scotland-based critic of the monarchy and one of the earliest to highlight the existence of the maps.

"Its clear that young Thai people who just want democracy are facing worsening risks."

(Reporting by Fanny Potkin in Singapore and Panu Wongcha-um in Bangkok, additional reporting by Jessie Pang; Editing by Matthew Tostevin and Alison Williams)
It comes as the Delta variant, which was first detected in India, continues to spread across Britain. Photo: Robert Smith/MI News/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Travel stocks suffered on Monday as a rise in COVID-19 cases and increased restrictions took its toll on the troubled sector.

In Europe, Spain revealed that it will start to demand a negative COVID test, or proof of vaccination from British tourists who are looking to enter Mallorca, Ibiza, and the surrounding Balearic islands.

Meanwhile, Portugals government has also announced measures for UK tourists, requesting the need to quarantine for 14 days upon arrival if they are not fully vaccinated or cannot show a negative PCR test.

It comes as the Delta variant, which was first detected in India, continues to spread across Britain.

In the week since 21 June, what would have been "freedom day" in Britain, coronavirus cases are up 59% in week-on-week figures. Currently in the UK, the Delta strain, which was first detected in India, makes up more than 99% of reported COVID-19 cases, data from Public Health England (PHE) showed.

Rising cases in the UK and tougher lockdown restrictions across the globe, particularly in Asia, caused airlines to fall into the red.

Read more: How to get travel insurance amid UK rulings on red, green, and amber countries

Travel and tourism company TUI (TUI.L) was among the laggards, dipping 4% on the day, while British Airways owner IAG (IAG.L) dropped 5%, Wizz Air (WIZZ.L) shed 3.7%, Ryanair (RYA.L) was 2.8% lower, and easyJet (EZJ.L) lost 3.5%.

TUI fell 4% on the back of the negative travel news. Chart: Yahoo Finance

Optimism on the horizon for the travel industry has once again been obscured by dark clouds, as, one by one, European countries bring back in tough quarantine rules, said Susannah Streeter, senior investment and markets analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown.

EU leaders are preparing to meet this week and Germanys Angela Merkel is hoping to gain approval for a consensus on quarantine to stop the spread of the delta variant. So, its looking increasingly likely this summer will be a wash out for the industry after all.

In Asia, Indonesia is battling record high cases and a national lockdown in Malaysia is set to be extended. Thailand also announced tighter restrictions in Bangkok and other provinces.

Story continues

Australia's most populous city of Sydney plunged into a lockdown after an increase of cases involving the Delta strain, and Darwin also entered a snap lockdown with the trans-Tasman air bubble suspended until the end of tomorrow. Milder restrictions in the Wellington area of New Zealand were all extended.

Japan and Taiwan are also dealing with persistent virus cases and Singapore is subject to domestic restrictions.

Read more: EasyJet launches 12 new UK domestic routes amid staycation boom

I have stated before that resurgent COVID-19 posed the largest threat to the post-pandemic economic bounce across Asia. We are not there yet, but if we are at this point this time next month, many economic forecasts will need to be revisited for surgery, Jeffrey Halley, senior market analyst for Asia Pacific at OANDA, said.

South Africa is also tightening restrictions after seeing a sharp rise in COVID-19 cases which is threatening to overwhelm its health system. The countrys seven-day rolling average of daily new cases has doubled over the past two weeks from 10 new cases per 100,000 people on 10 June to 22 per 100,000 people on 24 June, according to Johns Hopkins University.

President Cyril Ramaphosa said on Sunday all gatherings, indoors and outdoors, would be banned for 14 days, along with the sale of alcohol, dining in restaurants and travel to or from the worst-hit areas of the country.

Watch: Should I book a holiday in 2021?
Formula 1 Driver Daniel Ricciardo in partypoker Responsible Gambling Video

June 29 2021 Will Shillibier

Australian Formula 1 star Daniel Ricciardo has appeared in a new video from partypoker, promoting responsible gambling.

"Only when we're in control are we in charge of our own race," Ricciardo in the video. "It's sometimes important to hold back, take a break and take stock. It's important to know when it's time to pit."

partypoker partnered with McLaren last month, in a multiyear deal that would see the two brands appear on McLaren Racing's Formula 1 cars.

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Ricciardo: "We Race at the Limit"

Ricciardo made his Formula 1 debut in 2011. After starting out with HRT, he moved to Toro Rosso before being promoted to Red Bull where he raced for five seasons. He spent two seasons with Renault, before moving to McLaren in 2021.

"I always remember my limits are my limits."

"In Formula 1, we race at the limit," Ricciardo says in the video. "We get the best out of ourselves. We get the best out of the car. Only then can we know we've done our best.

"Having the skill is important, but so is the ability to stay in control. That's why it's important to have the right skills and the right team around you. I always remember my limits are my limits. You push above them and you're out of control, and keeping in control is what it's all about."

partypoker and McLaren Partnership

McLaren's partnership with partypoker started ahead of last month's Monaco Grand Prix. As part of the partnership, a new activation platform called Access has been set up to provide a range of dedicated content and exclusive experiences.

Ricciardo is also set to feature in a special poker tournament, details of which are yet to be released.

Related: McLaren Racing partners With partypoker and PartyCasino

Originally from Perth, Western Australia, Ricciardo will no doubt know the rich history of poker in Australia. As of June 2021, 30 World Series of Poker bracelets have been won by Australians. Australian poker legend Jeff Lisandro has won six in total, with Australia's Robert Campbell crowned WSOP Player of the Year in 2019.

just setting up my twttr  jack (@jack)

Ricciardo isn't the only Formula 1 driver with an interest in poker and gambling, with seven-time World Champion Lewis Hamilton previously spotted playing online.

Racing driver Dani Juncadella also plays poker, attending EPT Prague in 2017, having been a test driver for former Formula 1 racing team Force India.

Related: What Are The Best Features of the partypoker Mobile App?

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Many skilled trade workers in industries such as engineering and healthcare need an Associate of Applied Science (AAS) degree, certification and license to enter the workforce, but those who wish to advance in their fields need more. A new articulation agreement between the University of North Georgia (UNG) and Lanier Technical College can help AAS-degree graduates earn a Bachelor of Applied Science (BAS) degree.

"Students can graduate with an Associate of Applied Science and earn $35,000 to $40,000 a year. But in 10 years, they still may be earning close to that same amount," Dr. Michael Rogers, assistant vice president of Academic Affairs at UNG, said. "Thanks to our articulation agreement, Lanier Tech graduates can enroll at UNG and get that bachelor's degree; then they can get that promotion, earn a higher salary and have more responsibilities."

The partnership saves those graduates time and money.

"It will maximize the courses they have already taken and shorten the time it takes to earn their bachelor's degree," he said.

The agreement allows Lanier Tech graduates to transfer their general education core courses as well as three accounting courses and one economics course. They may also transfer 21 occupational credit hours from their skilled specialty, which are normally not transferable.

"The biggest selling point is they can use those 21 credit hours toward the 120 needed to graduate with a bachelor's degree," Katie Simmons, associate dean of undergraduate programs for UNG's Mike Cottrell College of Business, said.

Lanier Tech graduates may pursue a BAS degree in technology management and select one of four concentrations: accounting, information systems, management, and marketing.

"It's a business-focused degree," Simmons said, adding it may lead to other opportunities such as graduate school or a new profession. "Some may want to teach in their chosen profession, but they need a bachelor's degree. The BAS program gives them the degree they need to teach at a technical college. They may take other courses at UNG to earn a teaching certificate if they wish to teach in the kindergarten through the 12th-grade system."

Simmons explained the average BAS student is 30 to 35 years old and has 10 years of experience in a skilled trade. Earning a BAS degree in technology management can improve their prospects. For example, a chef with an associate degree in culinary arts wants to move into corporate management with a national hospitality chain, but may need a bachelor's degree to make that move.

The articulation agreement also includes a provision for associate-degree graduates interested in a business degree. UNG will accept four Lanier Tech courses toward a Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) degree. UNG offers BBA degrees in accounting, finance, information systems, management, and marketing.

"This initial articulation agreement is the beginning of our two institutions creating additional pathways for students to achieve a bachelor's degree and even more career opportunities," Lanier Tech President Tim McDonald said. "This articulation agreement builds on the existing University System of Georgia and Technical College System of Georgia agreement, which specifies 28 Lanier Tech general education courses are eligible for transfer."
Iranian media sources have claimed that, in theory, this new drone could be programmed to fly a long distance and then land somewhere else, The Jerusalem Post informs. Iran says a new drone it has unveiled has a range of 7,000 kilometers, according to Tasnim News Agency and other reports, making it a challenge to the United States and a clear warning to Israel.

Even if the drone has not achieved such a long range in a real flight (easily far enough to fly from Tehran to Reykjavik), Iran is sending a warning message that it can strike Israel with this weapon.

Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Commander Maj.-Gen. Hossein Salami has said the new drone has a 7,000-km. range, which means it could fly from Iran or via Yemen or Syria over Israel and back to its base. Iran recently unveiled a drone called Gaza, a clear reference to the recent 11-day conflict between Hamas and Israel. It is unclear if the 7,000-km. range refers to the range of the new Gaza drone or another type. IRGC Aerospace Force Commander Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh is one of the key figures behind the drone and missile program.

The IRGC commander-in-chief, who was enumerating the countrys achievements in technology and science and also developed the field of aerospace, said today we have wide-body drones that go back and forth 7,000 kilometers and land anywhere they want, Tasnim reported.

The new Gaza drone is called the Shahed 149 and is larger than the Shahed 129, the report said. Iran may have sent a drone to Yemen that could threaten Israel, Newsweek reported in January. In May, Iran was behind the launch of a drone from Iraq via Syria into Israeli airspace. Israel shot it down.

According to Salami, the new Shahed 149 can carry 13 bombs. Until now, the Shahed 171 drone, which was a one-to-one scale [copy] of the American RQ-170, had a range of 4,400 km. and was the longest-range drone in Iran, Tasnim reported. Iran downed the US RQ-170, a secretive spy drone, in 2011 and claimed to have reverse-engineered it.

The new long-range drone supposedly can take off and land, unlike Irans kamikaze drones, which are preprogrammed to fly and hit a specific target, similar to a cruise missile. In theory, this new drone could be programmed to fly a long distance and then land somewhere else, Iranian media sources have said. In recent years, the armed forces of our country, especially the IRGC Air Force, have made extensive investments in the field of UAVs and have achieved significant achievements in this field, Tasnim reported.

A recent pro-Iran militia parade showed militias now have a variety of drones, including a Mohajer-6, an Iranian-style drone. The Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen announced new drone attacks on Saudi Arabia on Saturday as well.
The South Caucasus region has a strategic geographic position because Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia share borders with three major powers: Russia, Iran, and Turkey. Yet, the long-lasting conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan negatively affected intra-regional trade and economic integration.

However, the Second Karabakh War between Azerbaijan and Armenia has changed the regions geopolitical landscape, a leading advisor in the Center of Analysis of International Relations, (AIR Center), in Baku, Azerbaijan, Shahmar Hajiyev writes for The National Interest.

Following the forty-four-day war, Azerbaijan liberated several occupied regions and signed an agreement with Russia and Armenia on November 10, 2020, to stop the bloody conflict. That November Agreement has redrawn the regions geopolitical map as Armenia and Azerbaijan agreed to open transport links and support regional economic integration. According to the trilateral agreement, Russia became a key guarantor for the ceasefire and peace and deployed a peacekeeping contingent along the contact line in Nagorno-Karabakh and the Lachin corridor. Additionally, a Joint RussianTurkish Center for monitoring the Armenian-Azerbaijani ceasefire was launched in the Agdam region. Through this, two regional powersRussia and Turkeystrengthened their interests through their diplomatic and military presence in the South Caucasus.

Although the conflict has been resolved, the post-conflict period has been characterized by persistent challenges to stability and security as well as new opportunities for regional economic integration. Both Turkey and Russia support regional economic integration via opening transport corridors. In this regard, the Zangezur corridor is a very important transport route, and all involved parties will benefit from the project. By unblocking the Zangezur corridor, Azerbaijan will be connected with its enclave, the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic, and Turkey will be directly connected to Azerbaijan and other Turkish-speaking countries in Central Asia. Armenia could also benefit from this project, as the country will get a railway connection with Iran and Russia, the latter being its main economic and political ally. For instance, Russia has always been Armenia's leading import and export market. In 2020, about $676 million worth of goods were exported from Armenia to Russia and, during the same period, Russias share of total imports was equal to $4.559 billion (32.4 percent).

The ongoing border dispute shows the importance of border demarcation between two South Caucasian states. Even today, seven villages within the Gazakh district and Karki village of the Sadarak district of the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic of Azerbaijan are under Armenian control. During the postwar period, Azerbaijan is restoring its internationally recognized borders, and all actors should understand that the final peace treaty based on principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity is key for sustainable peace.

Following post-conflict elections, Armenias acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has won snap parliamentary elections as the Civil Contract party got around 54 percent of the vote. Political instability in Armenia triggered a crisis, but now there is hope for cooperation and resolving disputes. In a telephone conversation with Prime Minister Pashinyan, Russian President Vladimir Putin highlighted the importance of implementing the trilateral agreements signed on November 9, 2020, and January 11, 2021.

Azerbaijan is keen to expand cooperation with all regional and non-regional states and, as mentioned above, Turkey and Russia have already started the process of establishing a political and military presence in the South Caucasus. The recent visit of Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Karabakh and the signing of the Shusha Declaration will give new impulse to bilateral relations. It should be especially underlined that the Shusha Declaration envisages the deepening of military ties between the two states. It is worth noting that the main game changers during the Second Karabakh War were the Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 drones, which destroyed Armenias S-300 air defense systems and other military equipment. As noted by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, Cooperation, collaboration in defense field, defense industry field, and mutual military assistance issues are reflected in the Declaration.

Another important element of the Shusha Declaration is the Turkish decision to open a consulate in Shusha city. In fact, this declaration also opens doors to building a military base in Azerbaijan to ensure a military and political balance in the region. To be clear, the Shusha Declaration means that, if there is an escalation or attacks against Azerbaijan, Turkey will openly join the conflict to defend its ally. This message was addressed not only to Armenia, which has continued to support revanchist ideas, but also to other actors interested in the region. So far, the Shusha Declaration is the key document signed between Turkey and Azerbaijan since the Agreement on Strategic Partnership and Mutual Support was signed in 2010.

Taking into account the developments in the South Caucasus, especially after the Second Karabakh War, the constructive engagement of the United States in the region will also be significant for supporting peace efforts and economic integration. Looking back, it is apparent that U.S. regional involvement has been inconsistent. In general, U.S. policy has been mainly connected with energy issues, such as exporting Caspian energy resources to global energy markets. However, recent developments and the visit of Acting Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs Philip Reeker to the region emphasized the return of U.S. attention to the South Caucasus. While in Georgia, he noted that the United States supports the development and economy of the South Caucasus and the aspirations of the peoples of the region for a stable, peaceful, and more prosperous future.

The positive impact of the visit on ArmenianAzerbaijani relations was seen when Azerbaijan handed over fifteen Armenian detainees in exchange for maps of minefields in the Agdam region. It should be noted that Armenia and Azerbaijan made this step forward thanks to the United States constructive engagement and assistance. Washingtons closest ally in the region, Georgia, also played a significant role in this process. Unsurprisingly, Armenian Prime Minister Pashinyan emphasized that Our brothers returned to their families thanks to the efforts of Georgia's Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili, our Georgian brothers as well as our partners from the US and EU.

Today, the new geopolitical situation in the South Caucasus makes regional economic integration extremely important because sustainable peace and security can be achieved only through cooperation. The United States should also shift its regional policy by creating a mechanism for effective cooperation. The Biden administration has already sent a positive message to Azerbaijan by extending the waiver to Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act with respect to assistance to the Government of Azerbaijan. It was crucial for Azerbaijan, after the Second Karabakh War, to see a constructive U.S. approach to and engagement in the region.

There is a huge opportunity for Washington to play a more active role in ensuring stability and regional economic cooperation. For instance, opening transport links in the South Caucasus can create the backbone for a platform to enhance regional dialogue, cooperation, and partnership among the South Caucasus states. The United States should support the opening of the Zangezur corridor in the region, which will contribute to regional economic integration. The United States has already established such a platform, called C5+1, in Central Asia with the aim of increasing economic and energy connectivity and trade; mitigating environmental and health challenges; jointly addressing security threats; and advocating for the full participation of women in all aspects of the political, economic, and social lives of member countries.

Cooperation between the United States and Turkey in the region could contribute significantly to future peace and stability. The TurkishAzerbaijani partnership makes it possible to realize mega energy projects and energy cooperation in the region that meet the interests of all involved parties. Washington has always supported the Southern Gas Corridor project, which contributes to the energy security of Europe. Last but not least, if Washington wants to strengthen its position in both the South Caucasus and Central Asia, it must act quickly and adopt a more pragmatic foreign policy to decrease Russian influence in the region.
The isolated cases of Afghan government troops seeking refuge across the border in neighboring Tajikistan and Uzbekistan are now becoming a commonplace occurrence, according to officials in those two countries, Eurasianet reports. On the morning of June 27, an armed group of Taliban militants launched an attacked on a border checkpoint in Afghanistans Kaldar district, forcing 17 Afghan troops to flee, Tajikistans state news agency reported.

The troops entered Tajikistan through its Shahrtuz border outpost. The Shahrtuz district is in the very southwestern corner of the country, where the border intersects with Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. This was the second time in less than a week that Afghan troops had to seek a haven on Tajik soil. On June 22, more than 130 soldiers escaped across Shir Khan Bandar border crossing after coming under a sustained assault. As a result of the armed clash, which lasted until 9 a.m. on June 22, 134 Afghan government troops unable to withstand the offensive were forced to retreat  into the territory of Tajikistan, the Tajik security services said.

The two incidents occurred in locations roughly 70 kilometers apart. On both occasions, Tajik border personnel admitted the troops in what official statements have described as gestures of humanity and good neighborliness. Uzbekistan has taken a firmer line against escaping Afghan troops, warning them that they are violating international law by crossing the border without approval. A spokesman for the presidential administration in Tashkent said on June 28 that there had been several such attempts in the previous few days.

The only incident about which some scant details have been revealed occurred on June 23, when 53 Afghan soldiers and militiamen crossed with their weapons from Afghanistans Shortepa district, which lies along the Amu-Darya River, into Uzbekistan.

Between that and today, several more such attempts were undertaken, the spokesman, Sherzod Asadov, was quoted as saying by Interfax news agency. The last one was on June 26, he said. Asadov said that all people seeking to enter Uzbekistan have, in accordance with domestic and international law, been returned to Afghanistan. The inviolability of the border of Uzbekistan should not be questioned in any way, he said.

While adopting different policies on the fugitive troops, Uzbek and Tajik authorities are coordinating to some degree in the face of the increasingly unstable situation along the border.

The Taliban have been registering notable successes or been engaged in fierce fighting across several Afghan provinces  Faryab, Jowzjan, Kunduz, Balkh, Takhlan and Badakhshan, which variously border Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, respectively.

The Taliban (banned in Russia) appeared to have been emboldened to further their momentum following the announced drawdown of the roughly 3,000 U.S. troops that remained in Afghanistan. In April, U.S. President Joe Biden said that a pullout would last until September 11  a timeframe that he argued did not constitute a hasty rush to the exit.

There have, however, been recurrent reports that U.S. officials are seeking to persuade partners in Central Asia to provide basing options as a way of leaving U.S. forces the means to engage in military operations in Afghanistan if and when the need arises. As reported, the facility is conceived as being something along the lines of the bases at the U.S. had at their disposal in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan following the 9/11 attacks. Those bases were vacated in 2005 and 2014, respectively.

Defense officials in Uzbekistan in May indicated a marked aversion to this proposal, although it is far from certain the idea has been entirely removed from the table.

Uzbek Foreign Minister Abdulaziz Komilov on June 27 traveled with a delegation to the United States for a working visit due to last until July 4. Although the brief statement on the trip did not detail which officials are traveling with Komilov and what areas are to be discussed, it is almost certain security will feature prominently on the agenda.

An interview granted by Komilov to U.S. journalist Dennis Wholey before the trip, however, may not be seen as encouraging to Washington. He pointedly made the case that the solution to Afghanistans woes should not be sought through force. We must know about Afghanistan that there is no  military solution, he said in the English-language interview.

Komilov argued that while there could be no question of accepting a return to the kind of theocratic rule that the Taliban imposed upon much of Afghanistan in the 1990s, compromise would need to be pursued. We think that this problem must be solved on the base of mutual compromise between the existing government and the military opposition, the Taliban and others, he told Wholey.
U.S. President Joe Biden has congratulated the people of Armenia and acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on successful conduct of early parliamentary elections held on June 20.

"Our partnership with Armenia is one of shared values and cooperation on democratic reform and conflict resolutionwe are committed to strengthening that partnership," President Biden said in a Twitter post.

Last week the US State Department issued a statement congratulating the people of Armenia on their June 20 parliamentary elections.
The OSCE will continue to support confidence-building measures in the South Caucasus, Swedish Foreign Minister, OSCE Chairperson-in-Office Ann Linde said during a press conference.

Linde noted that the transfer of 15 detained Armenians by Azerbaijan to the Armenian side in exchange for maps with the location of 97,000 anti-tank and anti-personnel mines in the Aghdam district is a very important step to build confidence in the region.

According to her, the OSCE continues to take active measures to build the confidence.

"There is my special representative in the region, who is very active and with whom I held meeting just a few days ago. The OSCE Minsk Group is also continuing its activities," she further said

The chairperson-in-office also added that the OSCE will continue to take measures to find a long-term political solution to the remaining pressing issues in the region.
Belarus is suspending its participation in the European Union's Eastern Partnership initiative, the Belarusian Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Monday.

"The Republic of Belarus is suspending its participation in the EU initiative Eastern Partnership. Belarus is beginning the procedure of suspending its readmission agreement with the EU. We cannot fulfill our obligations in the framework of this agreement while under the sanctions and restrictions imposed by the EU," the statement said.

The Foreign Ministry deeply regrets that "the forced suspension of the agreement will have an adverse effect on our cooperation with the EU in countering illegal migration and organized crime."
Russias Sputnik V vaccine has demonstrated 97.8% effectiveness against COVID-19, and 100% effectiveness against severe cases of the disease in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) informed.

"The RDIF announces the data of the UAE Ministry of Health on the use of Russias Sputnik V vaccine during vaccination of the population. According to the data collected among 81,000 persons vaccinated with both doses of the Sputnik V vaccine, the effectiveness of the vaccine has reached 97.8%. The Russian vaccine has demonstrated full (100%) effectiveness against severe cases of the coronavirus," the message says.

The fund informs that the data was analyzed as of June 8, 2021.

"Official data on vaccination from the UAE also shows that Sputnik V demonstrates high safety figures. In particular, no severe side effects after vaccination were documented, no vaccination-related hospitalizations or deaths were recorded," the message says.

The Sputnik V vaccine was registered in the UAE in January 2021 in accordance with a sped-up procedure.
EU High Representative Josep Borrell believes that Russia will not modify its behavioural pattern in the near future, in his opinion, the EU has to factor this in.



"Ultimately, Russia is our biggest neighbour. It will not go away and it is unlikely that in the near future there will be a political change, leading it to modify its behavioural pattern substantially. The EU has to factor this in and develop policies that will enable to reach some form of cohabitation, protecting our interests and values and halting dynamics of escalation," Borrell wrote in his 'How to deal with Russia?' article.

Borrel also noted that the European Council invited the Commission and him to present options for "additional restrictive measures" to be ready in case Russia continues to breach International law in the EU member states.

It was noted that in the report prepared for the EU summit, the European Commission and Borrell proposed to develop their policies on Russia along three main action tracks: to push back, constrain and engage.

"In sum, the European Council conclusions set a clear direction for our relations with Russia: keeping a firm line on substance while preserving the necessity to maintain open channels of communication," the article reads.
Former UFC lightweight champion Khabib Nurmagomedov has predicted the outcome of the upcoming trilogy fight between Dustin Poirier and Conor McGregor.

During his massively successful stint in the UFC, Nurmagomedov picked up submission wins over both Poirier and McGregor in title fights.

Khabib Nurmagomedov's prediction for the trilogy fight between McGregor and Poirier is similar to his prediction of their rematch from earlier this year.

According to 'The Eagle', all Poirier has to do is survive the first round against McGregor. If 'The Diamond' manages to take the fight into the second or third round, he's likely to pick up the all-important win according to Khabib.

Having said that, Khabib Nurmagomedov acknowledged that his arch-rival McGregor is a dangerous fighter in the opening round of any fight and against any opponent in the division, SportSkeeda reporeted.

The Russian predicts that McGregor will win the first round, regardless of the final outcome.

"Like I said before, I think if it goes past the first round, well I think McGregor takes the first round. If it goes past the first, it's Poirier's."

Conor McGregor and Dustin Poirier will face off in a number one contender fight at UFC 264 on July 10. The winner of the fight will be next in line to challenge Charles Oliveira for the UFC lightweight title.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu will meet in Turkey this Wednesday, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced.

The diplomats will discuss the situation in the South Caucasus, Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Central Asia, Eastern Mediterranean, and Black Sea regions, as well as Syria and Libya, according to a statement on Monday.

Stating that issues related to the development of commercial and economic cooperation between the two countries will also be discussed, the statement added this January-April, the bilateral trade volume shot up 22.5% compared to the same period in 2020, topping $9 billion.

Cooperation between the two countries in the field of military/technical and high technology will also be evaluated, Anadolu Agency reported.

The statement also said the two top diplomats will discuss issues related to the fight against COVID-19 and the use and production of the Sputnik V vaccine in Turkey.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met with UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi to discuss issues of the return of refugees to Nagorno-Karabakh, the Russian foreign ministry said on Monday.

"The sides exchanged views on the problem of refugees, internally displaced persons and people without citizenship in the world, including amid the COVID-19 pandemic. They also discussed various aspects of the cooperation between the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and our country," it said. "The sides discussed issues of the return of refugees and internally displaced persons to Nagorno-Karabakh and adjacent regions in line with the statement of the Russia, Azerbaijani and Armenian leaders on the ceasefire and cessation of hostilities in the conflict zone of November 9, 2020.

The Russian minister drew attention of the UN High Commissioner to the necessity of invigorating efforts of the international community to ensure the return of Syrian refugees who would contribute to the post-conflict recovery in the country.

The Russian top diplomat also expressed concern over the problem of non-citizenship in the Baltic countries.

"Other topics of discussion included the UHCRs activities towards the implementation of projects of assistance to refugees and internally displaced persons who had to flee their homes amid the domestic armed conflict in southeastern Ukraine," the ministry noted. "Grandi highly appreciated Russias active role in the efforts towards resolution of global problems of forced migration and measures taken in our country to regulate legal aspects of refugees and asylum seekers.".
An accident with a truck occurred in Azerbaijans Lachin district, two servicemen were killed, according to the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry.

As a result of the accident of a "KamAZ" military truck, servicemen of extra-urgent service, namely, junior sergeant Joshgun Zeynalli and soldier Orkhan Rahimli were killed.

The leadership of the Ministry of Defense expresses condolences to the families and relatives of the servicemen who died in the accident.

A criminal case has been filed on the fact, the investigation is underway.
Turkey on Monday announced that it suspended flights from six countries as part of measures against the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a circular issued by Turkish Interior Ministry, the country suspended flights from Bangladesh, Brazil, South Africa, India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka as of July 1 and until further notice.

The ministry noted that the course of the pandemic in some countries showed a recent escalation due to the new variants of the COVID-19 virus.

In accordance with the Health Ministry's recommendations, Turkey decided to shut down its borders for any direct entries including through land, air, sea or railway from these countries.

The people arriving at Turkey from another country after having been in one of these countries in the last 14 days will be required to provide a negative COVID-19 test result conducted in the last 72 hours.

They will also be quarantined at places determined by local governorates for 14 days, at the end of which a negative test will be required one more time.

In case of a positive test result, the patient will be kept under isolation, which will end with a negative result in the following 14 days, Anadolu Agency reported.

The ministry's circular added that passengers arriving at Turkey from the UK, Iran, Egypt, and Singapore would be required to have a negative COVID-19 test result obtained in the last three days.

Of the people coming to Turkey from countries other than Bangladesh, Brazil, South Africa, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the UK, Iran, Egypt and Singapore, those who can provide a document showing the administering of a COVID-19 vaccine in the last 14 days or recovery from COVID-19 infection in the last six months will not be required a test result or quarantined.

A negative COVID-19 test result conducted in the last 72 hours before arriving at Turkey or a negative rapid antigen test conducted within maximum 48 hours after their arrival will suffice for those failing to provide the documents.
The U.S. State Department kept in force an earlier issued advisory for U.S. citizens against travel to Russia.

The statement stresses that in its list of countries as of June 28 Russian remains at Level 4: "do not travel," TASS reported.

Washington warns U.S. citizens against going to "the North Caucasus, including Chechnya and Mount Elbrus, due to terrorism, kidnapping, and risk of civil unrest," as well as to "Crimea due to Russias purported occupation of the Ukrainian territory and abuses by its occupying authorities."
Com tam Sai Gon (Sai Gon-style steamed broken rice), Com ga Hoi An (Hoi An Chicken Rice) and Com hen Hue (Baby basket clams rice) are all wonderful rice dishes that diners should not miss.

Hue clam rice

Com tam Sai Gon

If Hanoi is famous for its pho (noodle soup served with beef or chicken), or bun dau mam tom (tofu, shrimp sauce, and noodles), HCM City people is known for its broken rice, a popular delicacy.

It is not difficult to find a restaurant serving broken rice, from popular to luxury ones in the city. But gourmets prefer a sidewalk shop for the right taste of this dish.

There are many com tam Sai Gon variations, but the most delicious and favorite is com tam suon bi cha (broken rice with grilled pork ribs, shredded pork skin), topped with grilled ribs and Vietnamese-style steamed omelette with meatloaf, with slices of sweet and sour tomato, cucumber, papaya, carrot, or cabbage.

Com tam Sai Gon (Sai Gon-style steamed broken rice), Com ga Hoi An (Hoi An Chicken Rice) and Com hen Hue (Baby basket clams rice) are all wonderful rice dishes that diners should not miss.

At some restaurants, omelettes, steamed egg rolls and fried chicken are added to the dish. The broken rice is eaten with sweet and sour fish sauce and fried fragrant onion.

Com tam Long Xuyen

Com tam Long Xuyen, or Long Xuyen-style broken rice in An Giang province, is a version of com tam, which is not less delicious than Com tam Sai Gon.

The broken rice there is cooked from the rice half the size of a normal rice grain. All the ingredients on rice plates such as grilled ribs, pork skin and braised eggs are cut into small pieces.

If you have the opportunity to travel to An Giang and visit Long Xuyen, you should try this attractive specialty.

Com ga Hoi An

Com ga is a common dish, but it is a signature dish that all travelers to Hoi An want to enjoy.

Hoi An is an ancient town located in the lower reach of Thu Bon River in Quang Nam province, about 30 kilometers south of Da Nang City.

In order to make delicious Com ga Hoi An, it is necessary to choose the right materials first. Chefs will choose young chickens that are raised naturally, because the meat is not greasy but naturally sweet and chewy.

After chicken is boiled, it is shredded and mixed with salt, laksa leaves, onion, lemon and chili to create a harmonious spicy, sour, salty and sweet taste. The rice used to prepare the dish is sticky rice. It is cooked with chicken broth, turmeric and pandan leaves. The rice grains have a yellow color and typical faint fragrance, attractive to diners from first sight.

Hue clam rice

Referring to Hue cuisine, many people immediately think of clam rice, a must-try specialty for travelers to the ancient capital city. The main ingredients to make this Vietnamese rice specialty are rice and clams.

To make clam rice dish with the right taste of Hue, one needs to use the clams caught at Con Hen (Mussel Islet) and cooled white rice. Mix that rice with spiced stir-fried mussels, fried onions, star fruit, pork scratchings, roasted peanuts, fried pork skin, herbs, and chili. Com hen is eaten with clam boiled broth with Hue shrimp paste. One can use noodles instead of rice for this dish.

Com chay Ninh Binh

Ninh Binh burned rice is a tasty dish of Ninh Binh land. While burned rice in other localities is eaten with salted shredded meat, com chay Ninh Binh is used with a sophisticated prepared sauce.

This sauce has goat meat, beef, or stir-fried kidney with onions, carrots and some other spices to create a spicy taste for the burnt rice. When eating, you can dip the rice into the sauce or sprinkle the sauce on the rice.

Kim Chi
The income of the owners of villas and street-front houses has dropped dramatically over the last year because of low demand. Many owners have been told to pay tax if their revenue is over VND100 million a year.

Retail premises have been left idle

Located at the crossroads of a busy street in Linh Dam in Hoang Mai district in Hanoi, a villa with two front doors has been closed. The villa was leased to a bank which used it as a transaction site.

When the leasing contract expired, the bank gave back the premises and moved a place nearby, which was in a less advantageous position, to save money. The villa has been left idle for the last six months.

In the past, the houses in such advantageous positions were always in high demand and the rents increased because of lower supply.

The owners of front-street houses began suffering in early 2020, when Covid-19 broke out, but the effects were minor and the rents still moved up slightly.

The market segment only began suffering heavily after the second and third waves of the outbreak. Many tenants who had leased premises for retailing and running shops and restaurants gave back the premises because of poor business performance.

An analyst estimated that with the current market price, the owner of the villa in Linh Dam could earn tens of millions of dong a month.

There are numerous idle front-street houses on large streets of Hanoi, from Giai Phong to Hue and Hang Bai. The landlords are facing unprecedented challenges as they no longer have the upper hand over tenants and need to be more flexible to adapt to the new normal.

Savills Vietnam commented that the fourth outbreak with rapid spread has dealt a strong blow on the socio-economic situation and the front-street house market as well.

Do Thu Hong, the owner of a house in Hai Ba Trung district, said her 70 square meter house has been left idle for one year. The house was leased before to run an eatery, but it was given back after the outbreak.

Hong said she posted an ad on many channels, including Facebook, but she could not find anyone, though she had slashed the rent from VND70 million to VND50 million.

According to batdongsan.com.vn, the front-street house renting market segment is in the gloomiest period in the last 10 years.

The income of the owners of villas and street-front houses has dropped dramatically over the last year because of low demand. Many owners have been told to pay tax if their revenue is over VND100 million a year.

The website reported a 20 percent decrease in the demand for front-street houses last May, while the number of ads for house renting also decreased by 19 percent compared with April.

The same situation is seen in HCMC. Higher occupancy rates have been reported for the houses on streets with heavy traffic than other houses in other areas.

The decrease in occupancy rates has been seen in commercial hubs, such as Ho Tung Mau, Huynh Thuc Khang and Dong Khoi in district 1 as well.

Analysts commented that the gap between supply and demand depends on the development of the pandemic. Some tenants have given back the premises, though they had just signed leasing contracts some months ago and spent big money to set up shops. Retailers have had to change their business strategies to adapt and become more flexible in doing business by stepping up online sales.

Rents fall dramatically

Many landlords in HCMC, who initially refused to ease rents because of the Covid-19 breakout, have changed their mind recently, accepting a 20-30 percent, or even 50 percent decrease in an effort to retain tenants amid social distancing.

The leasing time is 3-5 years on average, and landlords have to commit not to raise the rents throughout the leasing time.



Hong said if the social distancing lasts a long time and the rent reductions are not be agreed to the two parties, front-street house owners will seek new tenants, prioritizing to lease houses to businesses to use as offices. This group of clients has been less affected by Covid-19 than the retail industry.

Hoang Nguyet Minh from Savills Hanoi noted that before the pandemic broke out, advantageous positions helped front-street houses easily catch the attention of people, especially tourists, so the shops had good business performance and stable growth.

Social distancing campaigns prompted retailers to boost online sales, thus leading to the sharp fall in retail premises demand. If the pandemic continues escalating, the front-street house leasing market will remain gloomy.

Landlords now are worried about tax. The Circular 40 stipulates that the leasors with annual revenue of over VND100 million have to pay 5 percent in PIT and 5 percent in VAT.

The HCMC Real Estate Association (HOREA), commenting that the taxation is unreasonable, has proposed that the threshold for taxation needs to be raised to VND200 million to encourage the development of housing for the leasing market.

The association said the taxation threshold of VND100 million is unreasonable because the taxation scheme doesnt consider deductions for family circumstances. Meanwhile, under the PIT law, the VND11 million deduction is applied to taxpayers and VND4.4 million for every independent person.

Duy Anh

Foreign retailers make quiet landing as domestic counterparts shut down Many shops hit hard by Covid-19 have had to close, but some foreign retailers have taken advantage of the opportunity to scale up their business in Vietnam.
Vietnam and Laos issued a 10-point joint statement on the occasion of an official friendship visit to Vietnam by Lao Party General Secretary and State President Thongloun Sisoulith from June 28-29.

Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong and Lao Party General Secretary and State President Thongloun Sisoulith toast the solidarity and friendship between the the two countries. (Photo: VNA)

The joint statement stated that during this visit, the two sides informed each other about the situation of each Party and each country. They exchanged and agreed on guidelines and measures to continue developing the great friendship, special solidarity, and comprehensive cooperation between Vietnam and Laos in an extensive, effective and substantive manner. They also exchanged views on regional and international issues of mutual concern.

The two sides expressed their firm belief that the cause of renewal, national construction and defence in Vietnam and Laos will continue to gain greater achievements, constantly improving the role and position of each country in the region and in the world, firmly towards the socialist path.

The two countries affirmed that the great friendship, special solidarity and comprehensive cooperation between Vietnam and Laos are an invaluable asset of the two peoples. They emphasised the goal of national independence and socialism, and affirmed to continue to stand side by side and support each other in the construction and development cause of each country.

The two sides sincerely thanked each other for the great and valuable support and assistance they have given each other during the past struggle for national liberation and unification, as well as in the reform, national construction, development and defence today.

They also agreed to continue deepening political relations to achieve greater efficiency; closely cooperate in strategic issues related to security and development of each country; maintain visits and meetings between senior leaders of the two parties and countries; and build some historical monuments of significance in the Vietnam - Laos relations.

The two countries agreed to make efforts to improve cooperation efficiency, to step up the connection of transport, energy, telecommunications and tourism infrastructure and strengthen the exchange of experience in macroeconomic management between the two countries. Preferential policies will be issued to encourage enterprises of the two countries to invest in the fields of potential and strengths of the two sides, while solutions will be synchronously deployed to increase two-way trade turnover, said the joint statement.

The two sides have closely coordinated in the prevention and control of the COVID-19 pandemic and promoted cooperation and support to each other to overcome difficulties for socio-economic development.

They continue to well implement the agreements on immigrants, consular affairs and labour between the two countries, create favorable conditions for Vietnamese in Laos and Lao in Vietnam to live, work and study in accordance with each country's law and international practices.

The two sides emphasised the importance and agreed to further strengthen cooperation on defence and security, ensuring solid support for each other, build the Vietnam-Laos border line of peace, friendship, stability, cooperation, and sustainable development as well as effectively implement the protocols and cooperation plans on defence, security and border. They also agreed to continue to make joint efforts to search and repatriate the remains of Vietnamese martyrs, volunteers and experts who died in Laos.

The two sides reached consensus on enhancing timely information exchange, close consultation, coordination, and effective mutual support at international and regional forums, strengthen coordination with Cambodia to effectively implement the Agreement between the three Prime Ministers on the Cambodia - Laos - Vietnam Development Triangle (CLV), and actively implement the Action Plan to connect the three economies of Cambodia - Laos - Vietnam by 2030, according to the joint statement.

The two countries vowed to continue to strengthen cooperation and close coordination with each other, and with relevant countries and international organisations to manage, develop, and use effectively and sustainably the Mekong River's water resource and related resources to harmonise the interests of countries in the Mekong River Basin.

They agreed to work closely together within the framework of the Mekong River Commission and other relevant cooperation mechanisms, and promote the integration of sub-regional cooperation mechanisms into the process of building the ASEAN Community as well as encourage ASEAN countries and partners outside the region to actively participate in support and investment in the Mekong sub-region.

The two sides emphasised the importance of maintaining peace, stability, ensuring security, safety, and freedom of navigation and overflight in the East Sea, and of settling disputes in the East Sea by peaceful means based on international law, including the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS 1982). They pledged to work with relevant parties to promote the full and effective implementation of the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the East Sea (DOC) and soon achieve an effective and substantive Code of Conduct in the East Sea (COC) in accordance with international laws, including UNCLOS 1982. They also reaffirmed their high consensus with ASEAN's basic positions on the East Sea as stated in the ASEAN Declaration.

Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong and Lao Party General Secretary and President Thongloun Sisoulith witnessed the signing ceremony of cooperation documents between the two countries.

The two sides highly appreciated the good results and historical significance of the visit.

Lao General Secretary and President Thongloun Sisoulith invited General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong, State President Nguyen Xuan Phuc, and senior leaders of the Party and State of Vietnam to pay an official friendship visit to Laos.

The invitation was accepted with pleasure. The specific time of the visits will be arranged through diplomatic channels.

Vietnam, Laos target more comprehensive, practical cooperation

Vietnamese President Nguyen Xuan Phuc and Lao Party General Secretary and President Thongloun Sisoulith on June 29 agreed to closely coordinate to promote cooperation between the two nations more comprehensively and practically.

During their meeting in Hanoi, President Phuc congratulated Thongloun on his election as General Secretary of the Lao Peoples Revolutionary Party (LPRP) and President of Laos.

Thonglouns selection of Vietnam for his first overseas trip after taking office demonstrates the importance the Lao Party and State attach to the great friendship, special solidarity and comprehensive cooperation between the two countries, helping to create new momentum for their close-knit, faithful and trusting ties, he said.

The Vietnamese President expressed his belief that the Lao people will successfully realise the Resolution adopted at the 11th National Congress of the LPRP and the 2021-2025 socio-economic development plan.

For his part, Thongloun congratulated Vietnam on the success of the 13th National Party Congress and the elections of deputies to the 15th National Assembly and all-level Peoples Councils for 2021-2026.

He also lauded great achievements the Vietnamese people have recorded in the process of national construction and development, and international integration, which, he said, have served as a source of encouragement for the Lao revolutionary cause.

Reviewing mutual support in the COVID-19 combat, the two leaders pledged to continue their joint efforts to cope with the pandemic, soon recover socio-economic activities and promote sustainable development.

Thongloun said the great material and spiritual support of the Vietnamese Party, State and people have significantly contributed to Laoss successes in pandemic containment over the past time.

President Phuc also appreciated the Lao sides donation of 300,000 USD to aid Vietnams COVID-19 fight, saying it reflects the fraternity between the two nations.

The two leaders expressed their delight to see the Vietnam-Laos relations thriving further despite impacts of COVID-19. Political ties have been consolidated as both sides have been striving to maintain high-level delegate exchanges and meetings, particularly after the successful organisation of the National Party Congresses and the election of new leaders in the two countries. These have contributed to help the countries find orientations and dynamics for bilateral cooperation in all areas in the new term.

The two leaders also showed their determination to effectively implement signed agreements and remained committed to strengthening partnership in security and defence, economy, trade, investment, agriculture, and education and training; and promoting locality-to-locality cooperation.

They agreed to coordinate in organising celebrations of the 60th founding anniversary of diplomatic ties and the 45th year since the signing of the Vietnam-Laos Treaty of Amity and Cooperation next year.

On this occasion, host and guest discussed cooperation between the two nations at multilateral forums, especially the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Greater Mekong Sub-region, and collaboration among Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

The Vietnamese President congratulated Laos on being elected as Vice President of the 76th United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), reflecting the increasingly growing prestige and position of Laos on the international arena.

Thongloun invited Phuc and his spouse to pay a visit to Laos at an appropriate time. The Vietnamese leader accepted the invitation with pleasure.

The Lao leader and his entourage left Hanoi in the early afternoon of June 29, wrapping up their official friendship visit to Vietnam.

Top Lao leader visits Ho Chi Minh National Academy of Politics

Lao Party General Secretary and State President Thongloun Sisoulith on June 29 talked with officials, lecturers and students of the Ho Chi Minh National Academy of Politics (HCMA) that has helped to train many key Party leaders of Laos.

Those who have undergone training at the academy have become valuable human resources for the cause of national defence, construction and development in Laos, he said.

The HCMA has significantly contributed to promoting the relationship between the two countries, the Lao leader stressed.

Thongloun Sisoulith recalled the great contributions and sacrifices of Vietnamese soldiers and people during the Lao peoples struggle for national liberation in the past, and suggested the two countries continue efforts in preserving and enhancing the bilateral ties.

HCMA President Nguyen Xuan Thang said, assigned by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) and the Vietnamese State, the academy admits nearly 500 Lao officials for training courses each year.

The HCMA will step up cooperation in the training of officials, managers and scientists, and increase policy consultations with Lao agencies, firstly the National Academy of Politics and Public Administration of Laos, considering this a leading important political task in international collaboration.

Accordingly, the two sides will focus on carrying out a project on studying the thoughts of President Ho Chi Minh and President Kaysone Phomvihane, and another building the Lao academys office in Champasak province.

On this occasion, the Vietnam News Agency (VNA) in coordination with the Party Central Committees Commission for External Relations and the HCMA organised a photo exhibition at the academy, featuring the great friendship, special solidarity and comprehensive cooperation between the two countries.

Lao leader receives President of Vietnam Fatherland Front

Lao Party General Secretary and State President Thongloun Sisoulith on June 29 hosted a reception for President of the Vietnamese Fatherland Front (VFF) Central Committee Do Van Chien and leaders of the Vietnam-Laos Friendship Association, and the Liaison Committee for former Vietnamese Volunteer Soldiers and Military Experts in Laos.

Chien thanked Thongloun as well as other Lao Party and State leaders for their attention to and creating favourable conditions for the Fronts operations and its member organisations, and friendship associations of the two countries.

While congratulating Laos on the success of the 11th National Congress of the Lao People's Revolutionary Party (LPRP), Chien said the visit, the first overseas trip of the top Lao leader, shows the close relationship between the two nations.

Member organisations of the VFF have coordinated with their Lao counterparts in organising practical activities to strengthen the solidarity between the two countries people, thus further nurturing the Vietnam - Laos special relations, Chien said, adding that they have also served as a bridge to boost bilateral cooperation across fields.

He hoped that the Lao leader will facilitate coordination in the front work between the two countries in the time to come.

Regarding Vietnams efforts in the fight against COVID-19, the VFF President said despite facing many difficulties due to impacts of the pandemic, a number of Lao organisations and businesses have supported Vietnam in the combat.

For his part, the Lao leader affirmed the importance of the Vietnam  Laos special solidarity, stressing that the bilateral relations have been developing fruitfully across fields, bringing practical benefits to the people of both nations, including cooperation between the VFF and the Lao Front for National Construction (LFNC).

He highly valued recent achievements made by the VFF, stressing that it has played an important role in mobilising, gathering and promoting the great national unity bloc.

Acknowledging great contributions and sacrifices of Vietnamese experts and volunteers in Laos during wartime, the Lao leader wished that young generations of the two countries would continue to be educated and provided with information the Laos-Vietnam combat alliance, thus improving their sense of responsibility in nurturing the great friendship, special solidarity and comprehensive cooperation between the two countries.

He hoped that, with its responsibility, the VFF and its member organisations, and friendship associations will actively coordinate and share experiences with the LFNC, and promote cooperation between local front agencies of Laos and Vietnam./.

Lao Party leader wraps up Vietnam visit

Party General Secretary and President of Laos Thongloun Sisoulith and his spouse left Hanoi on June 29, wrapping up the official friendly visit to Vietnam at the invitation of Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong, State President Nguyen Xuan Phuc and their spouses.

During the visit, Sisoulith held talks with Party General Secretary Trong, met former Party General Secretary Nong Duc Manh and former President Tran Duc Luong, held working sessions with State President Phuc, Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh and National Assembly Chairman Vuong Dinh Hue.

He received delegations from the Central Committee of the Vietnam Fatherland Front, the Vietnam  Laos Friendship Association and the Liaison Committee for former Vietnamese Volunteer Soldiers and Military Experts in Laos.

On the occasion, the Vietnam News Agency (VNA) partnered with the Party Central Committees Commission for External Relations and the HCMA to hold a photo exhibition featuring the great friendship, special solidarity and comprehensive partnership between Vietnam and Laos. On display were nearly 30 photos chosen from the VNAs national photo archive.

The two sides issued a joint statement which affirms the great friendship, special solidarity and comprehensive partnership as an invaluable common asset of the two nations and a factor ensuring their national development. The two Parties, States and peoples will take responsibility for maintaining and fostering bilateral ties in various areas, upholding the spirit of independence, self-reliance, fair and mutually beneficial cooperation, and creating favourable conditions for prosperity of each country, and for sake of peace, stability, cooperation and development in Southeast Asia and the world.

They agreed to enhance the timely sharing of information and consultations, work closely and effectively together at regional and global forums, especially within the framework of ASEAN cooperation and ASEAN-led mechanisms, the United Nations, the Greater Mekong Sub-region, the World Trade Organisation and the Asia-Europe Meeting.

Both sides underscored the importance of maintaining peace, stability and ensuring security, maritime and aviation safety and freedom in the East Sea, as well as settling disputes in the East Sea by peaceful means in line with international law, including the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

The two Party leaders witnessed the signing of bilateral cooperation agreements, including the Vietnam  Laos cooperation strategy agreement for the 2021-2030 period, the Vietnam  Laos cooperation agreement for the 2021-2025 period and other important deals.

The Lao leader invited Party General Secretary Trong, President Phuc and Vietnamese Party and State leaders to visit Laos. The Vietnamese leaders expressed their sincere thanks and accepted the invitation with pleasure.

Upon returning to Laos, Thongloun Sisoulith sent a letter to Party General Secretary Trong and President Phuc, thanking them and other Party and State leaders of Vietnam along with the Vietnamese people for their warm and respectful reception during the Lao leaders visit to Vietnam.

Sisoutlith said he appreciated the results of his talks with the Vietnamese Party General Secretary, State President and senior leaders of the Party and State of Vietnam.

He affirmed his belief that the success of his official visit to Vietnam, as well as the exchanges between senior leaders of the two parties and two countries, will contribute to the traditional friendship as well as the special solidarity and comprehensive cooperation between the two parties, countries and peoples./.

Source: VNA
Minister of Health Nguyen Thanh Long has proposed that the World Bank (WB) help Vietnamn research and produce its own COVID-19 vaccines.

At the meeting, Minister of Health Nguyen Thanh Long proposes that WB support Vietnam in COVID-19 vaccine research and production.





Welcoming Victoria Kwakwa, regional vice president of the WB for East Asia and the Pacific, and Carolyn Turk, WB country director for Vietnam, on June 29, Long thanked the WB for providing continued support to Vietnam, thereby improving local public health care, especially in the nations ongoing fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

During the meeting, the health minister also proposed that the WB provide non-refundable aid to Vietnams mass vaccination campaign and help it with vaccine research and production.

Minister Long affirmed his guests that Vietnam is one of the 44 countries which are able to produce vaccines, and one of the 39 countries recognised by the World Health Organization as having international standard vaccine management.

However, he added that Vietnam still lacks investment in this area.

The Health Minister noted that if a loan was given to the country by the WB, it would be possible for Vietnam to build a research and development center for vaccines and medical biological products. A vaccine factory would also be built to meet the Expanded Immunization Program, as well as future pandemics.

Victoria Kwakwa, regional vice president of the WB for East Asia and the Pacific, confirms that the WB will help speed up the delivery of COVID -19 vaccines to Vietnam.





Acknowledging Minister Longs proposals, Kwakwa said that it is necessary to have close co-operation among ministries and sectors in order to mobilise capital sources of the WB projects. These sources of capital, along with other forms of aid or loans, can contribute to building a new project for the Vietnamese health sector.

She also stressed that the WB will work alongside vaccine producers and the COVAX Facility to speed up the supply and delivery of COVID -19 vaccines to Vietnam.

Source: VOV
The ancient beautiful city of Hoi An in the central province of Quang Nam has been ranked second among top ten most beautiful car-free cities in the world, which was announced by Australian Traveller magazine.

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Hoi An is always a favourite destination of domestic and international tourists. (Photo: City Pass Guide)

The magazine said that motorcycles rarely appear in Hoi An ancient city; therefore, visitors can wander on small streets, purchase silks or go to the tailor shops without being bothered by motorcyclists.

Hoi An used to be a busy international trading port during the 15th century and recognised by UNESCO as a world heritage.

The ancient city is impressive with architecture designed in the French colonial period, colorful lanterns, houses and shops.

Hoi An listed among top ten most beautiful car-free cities in the world.

In Hoi An, there are many routes inside the ancient town such as Bach Dang, Nguyen Thai Hoc, Tran Hung Dao, which are not for motor vehicles. Especially for foreigners, exploring Hoi An ancient city on cyclos has been always a unique and interesting experience.

This is not the first time Hoi An has been mentioned in the rankings of prestigious international travel magazines and websites such as Tripadvisor, LonelyPlanet, and Travel&Leisure.

In the list of top ten car-free cities in the world, Hydra Island in Egypt ranked first and Rottnest Island in Western Australia.

Hydra Island in Egypt.

Rottnest Island in Western Australia.

Other most beautiful car-free destinations Medina of Fez ancient town in Morocco, Venice in Italy, Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, the ancient town in Jerusalem (Israel), the ancient town in Dubrovnik (Croatia), Princes Islands in Turkey and Fire Island in the US.

Source: Nhan Dan

More walking streets planned for Hoi An The ancient city of Hoi An plans to name Phan Chu Trinh Street as a new pedestrian area to ease traffic congestion and overloading of infrastructure.
Vietnamese Minister of Public Security Gen. To Lam led a Vietnamese high-ranking delegation to attend the first ASEAN  Russia security consultation conference, which was held online on June 28.

Illustrative image.

The event saw the participation of Gen. Patrushev Nikolay Platonovich, Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, ASEAN Deputy Secretary-General Robert Matheus Michael Tene and heads of high-level security delegations from ASEAN member countries.



Participants discussed and consulted on measures to maintain political stability and ensure security in the ASEAN and Asia-Pacific regions as ASEAN and Russia are facing difficulties and challenges for security and development.



Speaking at the event, Lam highlighted the significance of the conference, saying that it aimed to promote and deepen the ASEAN - Russia strategic partnership.



He emphasised the need to uphold the responsibility to make this initiative more practical.

Vietnamese Minister of Public Security Gen. To Lam. (Photo: VNA)

The minister urged regional countries to strengthen trust-building measures, establish effective dialogue channels for exchanging views, promptly resolve disagreements, and settle disputes by peaceful measures in order to promote win-win cooperation and sustainable socio-economic development.



Lam stressed the necessity to enhance synchronous coordination among law enforcement agencies of regional countries in sharing information and working experience, and take more measures to prevent, detect and combat emerging crimes.



In order to further deepen the ASEAN-Russia cooperation, Vietnam proposed the two sides to strengthen cooperation within the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) framework to strengthen trust and develop the ASEAN  Russia Strategic Partnership practically and comprehensively.



Lam called for stronger cooperation in traditional security issues and new security challenges such as preventing terrorism, organised crime, transnational crime, and hi-tech crime through available mechanisms and capacity building programmes for law enforcement personnel.



Attention should also be paid to considering the possibility of expanding professional information sharing between law enforcement agencies of the two sides, and developing a mechanism to coordinate ASEAN-Russia relations at the ministerial level in combating terrorism and organised and transnational crimes, the minister said.



The two sides need to further promote cooperation in combating illegal activities at sea such as terrorism, piracy, armed attacks on ships and boats by elevating cooperation in the framework of mechanisms that ASEAN plays a leading role, including the ARF, the East Asia Summit (EAS), ASEAN Defense Ministers Meeting Plus (ADMM+) and Expanded ASEAN Maritime Forum (EAMF), Lam said.



He called for global and regional cooperation to ensure security at sea, freedom of navigation and overflight, freedom of commerce, self-restraint, and no use or threat to use force, and settle disputes by peaceful solutions in accordance with basic principles of international law set forth in the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), relevant standards and recommendations of the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) and the International Maritime Organisation (IMO).



Lam affirmed that as the rotating Chair of ASEAN in 2020 and a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council for the 2020-2021 term, Vietnam is committed to contributing to promoting dialogue, cooperation and trust-building processes chaired by ASEAN, and always ready to work closely with countries in the Asia-Pacific region and other ASEAN states for a secure, peaceful and stable environment, and sustainable socio-economic development.



Vietnam believes that ASEAN member countries and Russia will always be consistent with the policy of ensuring peace and stability in the region, he said.

Source: VNA
Vietnams Hanoi capital will play host to the ninth ASEAN Competition Conference on December 1-2, the Secretariat of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), has announced.

Vietnams Hanoi capital will play host to the ninth ASEAN Competition Conference on December 1-2, the Secretariat of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN, has announced.



Themed Safeguarding competition  A post pandemic response of ASEAN competition authorities the 9th ACC conference will examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on ASEAN markets and the importance of competition in economic recovery.



It will continue the ASEAN Experts Group on Competition (AEGC)s efforts to strengthen cooperation among member states following the issuance of the Joint Statement in Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic.



Major themes of the conference would be implications of the COVID-19 pandemic to ASEAN markets and the rapid shift towards the digital economy and the risk to competition enforcement.



Delegates will also examine ways to maintain business compliance, increase the importance of competition policy for Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises in the post-pandemic era, and strengthen cooperation in anticipation of future crisis.



The 9th ACC will be organized by the Department of Competition and Consumer Protection under the Ministry of Industry and Trade of Vietnam, in collaboration with the ASEAN Experts Group on Competition (AEGC), the ASEAN Secretariat, the German International Cooperation Organization (GIZ), and the ASEAN-Australia-New Zealand Free Trade Area Economic Cooperation Support Programme (AECSP).

Source: VOV
Lin said despite Ichibans location on heavily traveled I-35, he believes locals will become its mainstay. He said he expects families to enjoy time around the hibachi as preparation unfolds in an entertaining way. He said he expects business people to entertain clients and hold meetings there as well.

Lin said he moved to Waco from Little Rock, Arkansas, where he also owned a restaurant. He said owning Fuji Steakhouse gave him the experience and insight he needed to take his ambitions to the next level.

He learned, for example, that Waco restaurants suffer a 20% to 30% drop in business during the summertime, when students leave town.

In this business, you make your money between January and May, Lin said. You hope to break even the rest of the year.

Lin said his lease on the Fuji Steakhouse building near Richland Mall expired last year, and he has been paying rent there month-to-month. He did not consider renewing his lease, saying the space was no longer adequate.

Stacey Keating, spokesperson for CBL Properties, which owns most of Richland Mall, said the Fuji building is being marketed.

Karly Elliott, who manages Texas Roadhouse on La Salle Avenue, said Ichiban, being a hibachi concept, will do well in Waco.
Sometimes even the women who come for prenatal care are afraid to deliver at the clinic, preferring their homes. Malawian women are encouraged to give birth without medical intervention; many believe emergency measures are shameful. Giving birth at home, though, can be deadly if complications arise  most women live far from clinics.

We explain to them why such a decision might have the dire consequences ... sometimes even calling their husbands and parents to try to reason with them, Kolove said.

At Ndirande and other clinics, nurses, aides and medical midwives give pregnant women ultrasounds and use equipment to monitor mother and baby. Woman can undergo cesarean sections if needed; medications are available to stop severe bleeding. Staff take courses, observe simulated births, and become licensed.

Traditional birthing attendants learn from elders who pass down knowledge through generations and use little to no medical equipment  they listen to womens bellies by placing their ears there, for example, and gather herbs to induce labor.

Malawi banned attendants' delivery work in 2007, but the practice continues; the ban's rarely enforced. Attendants such as Lucy Mbewe, 56, charge nothing. She says her work is key for women who cant afford anything else.
Carlos Don Stultz, who served 52 years in prison for killing girls in Limestone and Dallas counties, died in prison last week while waiting for word on his request for medical parole.

Stultz, 78, died of natural causes, said Limestone County Attorney Roy DeFriend, who waged a decades-long fight to keep Stultz from being released.

Stultz was denied parole at least 29 times, and each time he came up for review, DeFriend sent out the word and was joined by hundreds of Limestone County residents in protesting Stultzs release. Two years ago, Stultzs own daughter opposed his release, telling parole officials her father threatened to kill her grandmother if he were ever paroled.

Stultz was a ranch hand living in Mexia with a wife who was five months pregnant when he was convicted of killing 17-year-old high school student Kathy Jones at her Mexia home in 1969.

He also was convicted of killing 12-year-old Karen Kubat in Dallas, also in 1969. He was sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted to life after the U.S. Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional in 1972.
Brent Shehorn, owner of Lake Shore Funeral Home and Crematory, declined comment on the exhumations because he said the family requested confidentiality. Lake Shore has the current county contract to conduct burials and cremations for the indigent.

We were hired and fulfilled our duties, Shehorn said. My allegiance is to the family that hired us.

About eight McLennan County Sheriffs Office deputies stood by at Restland Cemetery June 17 when the remains were exhumed. Sheriff Parnell McNamara said they were there just to keep the peace.

However, law enforcement sources said a Louisiana man associated with the Jones family, who a source described as very radical, caused concerns when he went to the federal courthouse in Waco dressed in camouflage while trying to access government records dressed and reportedly was heard to say if things dont go his way, there may be another Timothy McVeigh.

The exhumations and reburials were completed without incident, the sources said.
In issuing its sanction against Hensley  a public warning  the commission said Hensley has refused to perform same-sex weddings since August 2016, despite the U.S. Supreme Courts decision a year earlier that established constitutional rights to same-sex marriage.

The commission said Hensley is violating the Texas Code of Judicial Conduct by casting doubt on her capacity to act impartially to persons appearing before her as a judge due to the persons sexual orientation.

Hensley, who has said she is entitled to a religious exemption, filed her claims under the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act under the backing of the First Liberty Institute, a high-profile religious liberty law firm based in Plano.

Hensley has said that she, along with most all of the countys JPs, stopped performing any weddings on legal advice from the county so as not to appear that those who chose not to perform same-sex weddings were discriminating against same-sex couples.

While most local JPs still do not perform weddings, Hensley chose to resume performing ceremonies, but only for heterosexual couples. She has said her office declines same-sex weddings because of her religious beliefs but refers those couples to Justice of the Peace David Pareya, of West, or others in the county who will officiate their weddings.

Hensley was seeking at least $10,000 in damages, including lost income when she stopped performing all weddings in response to the commissions investigation and sanction. She also asked for a declaratory judgment that the commission and its members violated her religious rights and applied for class-action status to allow any justice of the peace the freedom to decline to officiate at same-sex weddings while performing those of heterosexual couples.

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BOSTON (AP)  Family and friends are mourning the two bystanders killed Saturday afternoon by a white gunman in a Boston suburb in an attack officials are treating as a hate crime.

David Green, a 68-year-old retired Massachusetts State Police trooper, and Ramona Cooper, a 60-year-old Air Force veteran, were each shot multiple times by 28-year-old Nathan Allen after he crashed a stolen box truck into a residential building in Winthrop, an overwhelmingly white, coastal community located on a peninsula jutting into Boston Harbor, just north of Logan International Airport.

Allen, who prosecutors say drew swastikas and handwrote messages about whites being superior and apex predators," was fatally shot by police moments later. Both victims were African American.

Green's longtime friend, Nick Tsiotos, said the two had coffee together just hours before the attack. He said the retired trooper had been sitting outside his home and tried to help after hearing the crash.

According to Rollins, Cooper was shot three times in the back and Green was shot four times in the head and three times in his torso.
Still, her heart is with children.

I love children. In fact, when I was teaching, parents would bring them early for one-to-one tutoring to help them catch up. I would see the pride they had in their accomplishments. That is a really good feeling, she said. When you are teaching, you are preparing a child for the world.

I always look at the positive and not the negative. We are too critical. We always look at the negative. Look for something good in a person.

Children should set their goals high and always set new goals. We should be willing to talk to the children. They are the next generation. We have passed the gavel to them. Now they have to keep the gavel moving.

Phillips is concerned about racial tension in the countryand how it is impacting children.

We have to resolve our differences and make our differences our strengths, she said. We need to find solutions. Police need to reach out to the community. Play with the children. Talk to them. Weve got to find a way to erase some of the negative.

I wish we could talk about our problems. Problems cant be solved if you dont talk about them. There has to be a better way than what we are doing now.
WATERLOO  Police are asking for the publics help in locating a man in connection with a May homicide in Waterloo.

Police investigating the May 15 shooting death of 23-year-old Dayton Lee Matlock-Buss gathered information that 25-year-old Marcus Robert Sykes was in possession of a firearm around the time of the shooting.

Investigators believe Sykes, who is wanted on a charge of felon in possession of a firearm, may be in the Des Moines area, and he may be with Shireca Monae Wilson, 23. Wilson is wanted on an unrelated probation warrants for second-degree burglary and willful injury in Polk County.

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Sykes is described as a black male, 5 feet 9 inches tall and weighing 135 pounds with multiple tattoos. Wilson is a black female about 5 feet 1 inch tall and weighing 136 pounds with the word Faith tattooed on her chest.

Police were called to a report of gunfire in the 1400 block of Grant Avenue around 3:30 a.m. May 15 and found Matlock-Buss dead at the scene. Also injured in the shooting were 39-year-old Bobbie Lee of Waterloo and 30-year-old Shanayla Hamer of Des Moines.
Today is Monday, June 28, 2021. Let's get caught up.

Here's what you should know today: Rescuers remain hopeful about finding more survivors in the rubble of Florida condo collapse; U.S. airstrikes target Iran-backed militias in Syria, Iraq; Cardi B, Queen Latifah, Lil Nas X shine at BET Awards.

Keep scrolling for today's top stories, this date in history and celebrity birthdays.

TOP STORIES

Rescuers stay hopeful about finding more survivors in rubble

SURFSIDE, Fla. (AP)  Rescue workers digging feverishly for a fifth day Monday stressed that they could still find survivors in the rubble of a collapsed Florida condo building, a hope family members clung to even though no one has been pulled out alive since the first day the structure fell.

The death toll rose by just four people Sunday, to a total of nine confirmed dead. But more than 150 people are still missing in Surfside.

Families of the missing rode buses to a site nearby from which they could watch teams at work Sunday: firefighters, sniffer dogs and search experts employing radar and sonar devices.
Abbott has pledged a $250 million down payment to resume construction of the wall. Governors in Iowa, Florida, Arizona and Nebraska have agreed to dispatch law enforcement officers to Texas to support local officers and the border patrol.

What frustrates and contributes to the anger many Americans feel toward their government is that solutions exist, but many politicians refuse to apply them. Recent TV interviews with migrants have shown they were motivated to come because they believed President Biden is making it easier for them to be admitted.

Harris recent speech in which she said, do not come, do not come had about as much credibility as Bill Clintons denial of sex with Monica Lewinsky.

There are critics who say this is part of a plan by Democrats to import new voters and make the party a permanent majority. That may be part of it, but I suspect another reason is to undermine the values and traditions that built and have sustained this country from the beginning. There are those secular progressives who speak and behave as if they hate America and would be happy to see it brought down to the level of other countries or destroyed outright. What better way to do this than to dilute those values and traditions by importing foreigners?
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Oregon Supreme Court to consider other measures endorsed by Oregon Board of Bar Examiners.

After months of study and review, a task force of Oregon attorneys and legal educators issued a formal recommendation that the state consider other ways for recent law school graduates to show competency beyond the traditional bar exam.

This is a tremendous and historic shift in the thinking around attorney licensure, said Brian Gallini, dean of the Willamette University College of Law and a member of the task force. That the Oregon Board of Bar Examiners endorsed these proposals without any changes also shows, fundamentally, a forward-thinking recognition that the bar exam as we know it is not the only way for new lawyers to show minimum competency.

The Oregon State Bars Alternatives to the Exam task force, which formed last year to explore additional long-term options after the state granted temporary diploma privilege during the COVID-19 pandemic, recommended two alternatives to the traditional test. One is an experiential learning pathway in which students would focus on experiential coursework during their last two years of law school and submit a capstone portfolio to the state Board of Bar Examiners upon graduation. The second is a supervised practice pathway in which students would work between 1,000 and 1,500 hours under the supervision of a licensed attorney before submitting a portfolio of work to the Board of Bar Examiners to show minimum competency.

The task force recently submitted its report and recommendations to the Oregon Board of Bar Examiners, which unanimously voted to advance them to the Oregon Supreme Court. The court will now consider whether to adopt the recommendations and will make a decision within the next several months.

If the changes are accepted by the court, law graduates in the Class of 2024 could be the first eligible to choose an alternative to the test. The Oregon State Bar Association, the Board of Bar Examiners and the states law schools would have to collaborate and shift curricula to accommodate the new pathways, Gallini said.

Oregon was one of only five states to grant diploma privilege to law school graduates last year, allowing them to work without sitting for the test as long as they met certain academic requirements. The state is now leading the country as it considers alternatives to professional licensure beyond the traditional bar exam.

Willamette is already poised to adopt these changes, and students are eager to have options, he added. Last year, after they were granted diploma privilege, a group of about 20 Willamette Law graduates formed their own task force and spent hours of time they would have otherwise spent studying for the bar exam reviewing explicit and implicit bias in the use of peremptory challenges in Oregon. They collaborated on a 40-page report that calls for a significant overhaul of how the challenge is used in Oregon courts and makes recommendations about how to make change. It was recently submitted to the Oregon Supreme Courts Committee on Bias in the Oregon Justice System.

The ability to memorize facts and pass a multiple-choice test is not a predictor of what makes a good lawyer. Moving beyond the bar exam empowers law schools and the bar to train new lawyers for the 21st century in a manner that serves both consumer protection and equity, Gallini said. At Willamette, were thrilled and were ready to be on the front end of these long overdue changes to licensure.
Lubbock, TX (79423)

Today

Scattered thunderstorms early, then mainly cloudy overnight with thunderstorms likely. Potential for severe thunderstorms. Low 71F. Winds SE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 70%..

Tonight

Scattered thunderstorms early, then mainly cloudy overnight with thunderstorms likely. Potential for severe thunderstorms. Low 71F. Winds SE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 70%.
Dear Colleague,



We are very pleased to announce that 2nd International Symposium On Implementations Of Digital Industry And Management Of Digital Transformation 2021 will be held online on 10-11 December 2021.



2nd International Symposium on Implementations of Digital Industry and Management of Digital Transformation 2021, aims to create an opportunity for interacting, sharing and discussing ideas, success stories, good practices, cases, experiences, developments and foresights on worldwide Digital Industry and Digital Transformation issues.

The symposium is organized by InnoPark Konya Technology Development Zone. The symposium will be organized regularly in odd years.

Official Language of the symposium is English but, papers in Turkish will be accepted as well.

We invite researchers, scientists, experts, business leaders and innovators from universities, companies, institutions, technology providers, communities, agencies, associations and societies to submit papers, proposals for special sessions, workshops and exhibitions focusing on the following symposium topics:

 Industry 4.0

 IoT (Internet of Things)

 Big Data

 Cybersecurity

 Augmented / Virtual Reality

 Smart factories

 Simulation

 Cyberphysical Systems

 Artificial Intelligence

 Machine Vision

 Robotics

 Advanced manufacturing techniques

 Management of digital transformation

 Digital Transformation macro/micro policies

Full text symposium proceedings will be collected in an open access electronic book. Selected papers will be published in IJETIME-International Journal of Emerging Technologies, Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship.

The deadline for submitting papers and proposals is August 15,2021.

Thank you very much in advance for your interest. More details are provided in the symposium web site digitalindustrysymp.com . Please do not hesitate to contact me for further information.

Best wishes,

Prof. Dr. Fatih Mehmet Botsal

Symposium Chairman

Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Konya Technical University, Konya, Turkey

General Manager of InnoPark-Konya Technology Development Zone
Courtesy Trish Tunney

Years ago, Lonnie Payne-Clark lost his life partner, twin brother and brother's partner to AIDS. To remember them, the 68-year-old Napa, California, resident is sewing a 3-by-6-foot fabric quilt block in their honor. Payne-Clark has used small squares in shades of yellow and green to signify light and life, and he plans to incorporate gold squares in the corners with birth and death dates.

With this quilt panel, Payne-Clark, a long-term HIV survivor, will join tens of thousands of people who have contributed to the largest community art project in history: the AIDS Memorial Quilt.

The quilt is a living monument to people who have died from AIDS  a syndrome that develops after the progression of HIV, a virus that attacks the body's immune system. So far more than 700,000 Americans have died from AIDS and over 1.1 million people are living with HIV. The disease disproportionately impacts men who have sex with men as well as Black and Latino communities.

More than 50,000 fabric panels make up the quilt, commemorating upwards of 105,000 people who have died from AIDS-related illnesses. Fabric panels are personal tributes designed and created by relatives, friends and loved ones to honor those they've lost to the disease. The fabric squares can be colorful, somber, funny  decorated with stitched-on hearts, painted portraits, hand-drawn notes, favorite pieces of clothing, disco balls, and teddy bears for infants and children. Together, they reflect the human toll of the epidemic.

After being shipped to the quilt headquarters in the San Francisco Bay Area, Payne-Clark's panel will be sewn into a standard 12-by-12 block to join a patchwork of memory. Stewards of the quilt, like Payne-Clark, who is a board member for the National AIDS Memorial, say their mission is to help loved ones heal, combat stigma and raise awareness about the ongoing epidemic.

"By creating panels, I am continuing to share their stories, Payne-Clark says of his loved ones. I am keeping their names and the energy that inhabits their souls alive within me.

Healing through remembrance

Though the quilt was created decades ago, it's still a dynamic and important symbol of the battle against AIDS. On June 5, for example, Payne-Clark and other volunteers displayed 40 panels at the 10-acre National AIDS Memorial Grove in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, marking 40 years since the first cases of AIDS were reported.

Each year, selected panels are displayed by partner organizations and businesses, often as part of World AIDS Day on Dec. 1 and Pride Month in June. All the quilt's squares can be viewed online through the National AIDS Memorial's interactive digital exhibit, where visitors can search for a friend or loved one's name or browse the squares.
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DENVER  Prosecutors on Monday charged a Colorado police officer with second-degree assault over allegedly putting a man in a chokehold during an arrest earlier this month.

Greeley police Officer Kenneth Amick, 48, has been placed on unpaid leave as a result of the police departments investigation into the alleged June 7 assault on Matthew Wilson, 36, police said in a statement. At the time, Wilson complained that Amick, who was wanted on a warrant, was using excessive force and asked for a supervisor, police said. Two officers also later reported what they believed to be excessive force, police said.

Amick, who has worked for Greeley police for 15 years, was removed from patrol duty while police conducted their investigation and the department later recommended that prosecutors charge him with assault, leading him to be placed on leave, police said.

Court records do not indicate if Amick has a lawyer yet and there was no answer at two telephone numbers listed for him.

As part of a sweeping police reform bill passed in the middle of protests over the killing of George Floyd, Colorado lawmakers banned police officers from using chokeholds and also required police officers to intervene if they believe excessive force is being used.

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On Monday, the office of 19th Judicial District Attorney Michael J. Rourke charged Amick with strangulation, a form of second-degree assault.

Court records do not indicate if Amick has a lawyer yet and there was no answer at two telephone numbers listed for him.

According to police, Wilson was arrested after officers responded to a city government building where an employee said that a man was making threats to burn it down. Officers contacted Wilson at nearby city hall, learned there was a warrant for his arrest and Amick put him in handcuffs, police said.

As Wilson was being escorted outside, he became agitated and complained that his wrists were hurting and Wilson suddenly placed him into a chokehold, police said. Wilson showed ill effects from this hold, another officer tried to intervene and officers tried to calm Wilson, police said.

Wilson, who was still handcuffed, grabbed Amicks hand, which prompted Amick to strike Wilsons legs with his knees before placing Wilson on the ground to try to calm him down, police said. Officers helped Wilson back up and put him in a patrol car, police said.
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Copyright  2021 Albuquerque Journal

An unsettled weather pattern could bring flash flooding and unseasonably cool temperatures to New Mexico this week.

Scott Overpeck, meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Albuquerque, said runoff and flooding are more likely this week because soil is still soaked from last weeks rain.

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Were going to have these persistent, slow-moving storms, Overpeck said. Were going to be concerned about the burn scar flooding.

Overpeck said this weeks storms are not yet the ideal monsoon pattern, but there will still be plenty of moisture.

Albuquerque is forecast to have a high temperature of 70 degrees on Tuesday, with a 60% chance of rain.

Southeast New Mexico has the greatest chances of rain and flooding on Tuesday.

A lingering cool front that moved into New Mexico last week, along with impacts from Hurricane Enrique off the southwest coast of Mexico, have brought much-needed precipitation to the state.

I dont know whether to really call this a drought-busting rain, but its certainly having some impact, Overpeck said.

Temperatures statewide will be 15-20 degrees below normal Tuesday and Wednesday.

The metro area is expected to hit 77 degrees Wednesday, with a 60% chance of rain.

Temperatures will start ramping up Thursday, but rain chances will stay above average. Albuquerque has a forecast high of 82 degrees on Thursday and 85 on Friday, with a 50% chance of rain on both days.

Drier air and higher temperatures may start moving into the state for the weekend.

Theresa Davis is a Report for America corps member covering water and the environment for the Albuquerque Journal.
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Correction: Mondays editorial incorrectly identified the balloon passenger who survived Saturdays crash but died at the hospital. John Montoya, 61, succumbed to his injuries hours after the tragedy. The editorial also should have reported that pilot Nick Maleskis daughter is a crisis counselor at John Baker Elementary. The editorial incorrectly reported it was a son who was a counselor.

As often with tragedy, there are questions. Why did a veteran pilots hot air balloon hit a power line and plunge to Earth near a busy West Central intersection early Saturday, killing all aboard?

Presumably, a National Transportation Safety Board investigation already underway will provide answers  important for a community with a major part of its identity associated with hot-air ballooning. For now, it is time to collectively mourn the victims and acknowledge the special place they held in the community.

The ill-fated ride was a gift to Susan Montoya, 65, who was moving from her post as assistant principal at Georgia OKeeffe Elementary in the Northeast Heights to LBJ Middle School on the West Side. A balloon ride had been her dream, so co-workers purchased it for her and three guests as a farewell gift.

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Susan asked her husband, John Montoya, 61, who had worked since 2015 as a special education assistant at Sandia High, to fly with her. They invited another couple they had become friends with through work, Mary and Martin Martinez. Martin Martinez, 62, was a retired Albuquerque Police Department officer who was a sergeant in the APS police force. Mary, a Valley High School graduate, was a licensed Zumba instructor who volunteered at North Valley Senior Center and Albuquerque churches, according to her Facebook profile. She was 59.

All the deceased had ties to Albuquerque Public Schools. Superintendent Scott Elder says its an unprecedented loss for APS.

The pilot has been identified as Nick Meleski, 62, a man who has flown balloons all over the world and had a reputation built on expertise and safety. Chris Jones, a Texas-based balloon pilot, said Meleski had a wonderful skill set and had flown thousands of hours. Another colleague described him as the safest pilot and said, I cannot believe this has happened. Meleski also had an APS connection. His daughter is a counselor at John Baker Elementary.

Little is known about Saturdays flight before it struck and severed an electrical power line about 7 a.m at Central and Unser. The gondola caught fire and crashed to the ground. Only John Montoya survived the initial collision with the power line and crash, but he succumbed to his serious injuries in a hospital later that day.

The scene was both chaotic and horrific; it occurred at a major intersection and some of the first responders knew at least one of the victims. APD said multiple officers had to be sent home due to what they had witnessed. Our collective sympathies extend to the first responders, as well as the families of the victims. PNM on Monday donated a total of $100,000 to the families of the victims.

Even though we know there is inherent risk involved in hot-air ballooning, we can be forgiven if we watch those colorful dots against blue sky without thinking of potential tragedy. The most recent fatal accident here was in 2008 when one man was killed and another injured when their balloon hit a power line in Bernalillo. Power lines have been involved in five of the seven area accidents involving fatalities dating to 1979. The worst disaster in Balloon Fiesta history occurred in 1982 when propane tanks on El Globo Grande exploded, killing four people and injuring five.

The NTSB has sent two investigators to the scene. They will look at the possibility of pilot error, the balloon itself and the operating environment, a spokesman said. Families of the victims, balloonists and the community at large will be waiting for the investigation results. For now, it is time to grieve for all involved.

Im incredibly saddened to hear of this terrible tragedy, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said. My prayers are with the loved ones of those affected. In those sentiments, she speaks for all of us.

This editorial first appeared in the Albuquerque Journal. It was written by members of the editorial board and is unsigned as it represents the opinion of the newspaper rather than the writers.
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SANTA FE  Home schooling nearly doubled in New Mexico last year as thousands of parents opted out of virtual learning programs offered in public schools.

The unprecedented defection from the public school system is putting a strain on school budgets, which are rooted in student enrollment.

Parents with the time and patience to school at home said they love the flexibility of home school and have learned how to give their children a more tailored education.

We had no interest in doing virtual learning through a public or charter school, said Jennifer Fischer, 43, who moved with her partner and two sons from Los Angeles to Albuquerque during the pandemic in August.

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Raised by school teachers and experienced in teaching media classes, the filmmaker couple was not intimidated by the prospect of teaching their fourth-grade and fifth-grade boys.

For others, there was a learning curve.

It was a little bit tough at first just trying to get the schedule and the routine down, said Albuquerque homemaker Cynthia Sanchez, who home-schooled her four children, who range in age from kindergarten to seventh grade.

Both parents joined the Facebook group Homeschool Homies last summer to see what other home-school families were doing. They werent alone.

I went from getting, you know, maybe 10 requests a week to getting maybe 25 to 30 requests a day, said Sarah Candelaria, 35, who administered Homeschool Homies and a few other homeschool-focused groups.

She fielded some of the same questions over and over again: What curriculum should we use? Do we have to register with the state?

The number of children registered with the state as home schoolers nearly doubled from around 8,800 before the pandemic to around 15,400 this past school year, according to Public Education Department data. K-12 enrollment was already shrinking by around 1.1% each year following a decade of decreased births and more childbearing-aged people moving out of the state than moving to it.

The home-schooling data validates a Census survey that found home schooling doubled in New Mexico and across the U.S.

Because federal and state education funding is pegged to student enrollment, a retreat from public school systems will hit budgets. In Albuquerque Public Schools, officials anticipate a loss of as much as $53 million because of the decline in enrollment.

Home schooling increased in all but the tiniest New Mexico school districts, according to additional home-schooling data obtained by The Associated Press in a public records request.

Statewide, the increase in home schoolers accounts for more than half of the 4% decline in public school enrollment in New Mexico last year, an AP analysis shows. Thousands of students left the system by transferring to a private school. An unknown number moved out of state.

Federal pandemic aid is boosting school budgets for the next two years. But long term, enrollment is declining.

Candelaria, the Facebook group administrator, said lots of parents will stick with home schooling even as the pandemic wanes.

Sanchez is one of them. She said her children have been learning more at home than at public school.

They didnt have the time catered to them to make sure they understood the material before moving ahead, Sanchez said. I had the time available to give to the kids.

Her two daughters asked to go back to school this year so that they could be around friends. She compromised with them by allowing them to play group sports.

Fischer, the filmmaker, said her family is ready to send the kids back to public school this year assuming there are not variants or a spike in numbers.

But she hopes school districts draw on the lessons of the pandemic to offer more tailored learning to students, and more programs where students attend three days per week and home school the other two days, Fischer said.

We can expand and say even a public system needs to be more customizable and meet the needs of different learners, she said.
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Copyright  2021 Albuquerque Journal

An Albuquerque man whose robbery charge was dismissed last year has filed a lawsuit alleging that police arrested and jailed him in 2019 based on an identification process long criticized as unreliable.

Larry Francia, 44, says in the lawsuit that he was arrested when the alleged victim of a robbery identified him as the perpetrator after looking at him only briefly as he stood beside a squad car surrounded by police on the night of the robbery.

The victim looked at (Francia) briefly in the police lights, with officers around him, and agreed that (Francia) was the male who robbed him, the suit alleges. The victims degree of certainty in the identification was unclear.

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The robbery charge against Francia was dropped in February 2020, 2nd Judicial District Court records show. The lawsuit names as defendants the city of Albuquerque and two Albuquerque police officers: Paul Chavez and Chris Small. The suit seeks unspecified damages.

Albuquerque Police Department spokesman Gilbert Gallegos did not immediately respond to emails requesting comment.

On June 19, 2019, APD officers were dispatched to the 7500 block of Central after David Diaz reported that he had just been robbed by a man and a woman, according to a Metropolitan Court criminal complaint.

Diaz told police that the man walked up to him on the sidewalk, punched him in the head and demanded money, the complaint said. Diaz handed over his wallet, and the female accomplice removed $21.

Police later found Francia walking in the area, and Diaz identified him as the attacker, the complaint said. Officers arrested Francia on a charge of robbery, a third-degree felony, and booked him into jail.

The lawsuit alleges Diaz made the identification after officers positioned (Francia) in front of a police car and shined police spotlights on him.

This technique for identifying a suspect is called a show-up identification and has been criticized by judges in New Mexico and other states as inherently suggestive, the suit alleges.

Unlike a lineup or a photo array, which require an eyewitness to choose among several suspects, a show-up identification features only one suspect.

The suit alleges that the identification procedures used in this case were unreasonably suggestive and led to the misidentification of Francia as the robber.

APDs identification procedures are so unreliable that any person walking in a high-crime area at night is subject to potential for stop, arrest and jail time, merely for being at the wrong place at the wrong time, the suit alleges.
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SANTA FE  Rio Arriba County Sheriff James Lujan allegedly attempted to file perjury charges against two witnesses that testified against him during his criminal trial earlier this month, and now prosecutors say Lujan may have committed another crime.

At a Monday afternoon status hearing, special prosecutor Andrea Rowley Reeb said New Mexico State Police notified her that a Rio Arriba sheriffs deputy approached them about Lujan wanting to file charges against witnesses Cody Lattin and Ernest Saucedo, both law enforcement officers who testified against Lujan at his trial.

Lattin, a former sheriffs deputy, and Saucedo, an Espanola police officer, were witnesses in a case in which Lujan is charged with intimidation of a witness and harboring or aiding a felon for allegedly helping former Espanola City Councilor Phillip Chacon evade police. The judge declared a mistrial June 4 due to a hung jury and Lujan could be tried again.

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Reeb said she anticipates an investigation into Lujans actions that might result in additional criminal charges of intimidation of a witness. She said she assumes she will be appointed to investigate the actions because shes handling Lujans other cases.

This is now what I consider direct intimidation, she said in an interview. It blows my mind that somebody who is being tried for a case feels that he is above the law, and you can go out and do something like this.

First Judicial District Judge Kathleen McGarry said in court shes concerned by Reebs allegations and warned Lujan about interfering with his criminal cases. She said she would consider having him placed in custody if he violates his conditions of release.

State Police told Reeb they had no intention of pursuing those charges and 1st Judicial District Attorney Mary Carmack-Altwies said she wouldnt either.

At this time, nothing has been referred to us, but we do not intend to move forward with perjury charges stemming from Sheriff Lujans case, Carmack-Altwies said in a statement.

Defense attorney Jason Bowles said Reeb was grandstanding at the hearing and presented no evidence to back up her allegations.

All were acting on right now is speculation  the only thing we had was an email that a sergeant had talked to the State Police, Bowles said.

He said Lattin made two materially different statements in testimony at trial and testimony at a preliminary hearing. Lattin changed what he said concerning his knowledge of Chacons criminal charges, Bowles said.

Saucedo allegedly testified that the officers he was with during the incident with Chacon were different from dispatch records deputies discovered, Reeb said.

Were supposed to be about justice in this business, Bowles said. Were not about personal vendettas and attacks, and this isnt about winning at all costs. Its about doing justice, wherever it leads.
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EDITORS NOTE: This is the final in a series of stories on Albuquerques growing housing affordability crisis.

Copyright  2021 Albuquerque Journal

For the past year and a half, Sarah Burkhart and her husband, David, have been living and caring for her mother in her mothers Corrales home.

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But when Burkhart began to look for a space of her own a few months ago, she found herself in the middle of a competitive rental market with fewer options and available properties being rented almost immediately and for higher-than-normal prices.

Burkhart said their budget was around $1,000 to $1,200 a month, which allowed them to have more rental options than some.

I know that we operate from a place of privilege, and (for) a lot of people that have been here, $1,200 is a lot of money for rent, she said. Its a lot for us too, but its worth it and we have the ability to do it.

Burkhart, who works from home and has a flexible schedule, said she dived into the rental market, often spending her mornings checking rental websites and calling properties as soon as one became available.

It probably took two weeks and contacting a lot of places, and either not getting responses immediately or not at all, she said.  It doesnt sound like a lot, just a couple of weeks, but on some of those days that was all I did all day.

Burkhart is one of many renters and prospective renters who have found themselves in need of housing during a time in which the demand for rentals and the increase in cost of rentals is at an all-time high.

The average rent in Albuquerque is $1,009, according to a report by RENTCafe, a national apartment listing service. And wages arent necessarily keeping pace. One study suggests nearly a quarter of New Mexico renters are spending more than half their income to pay for their housing.

The cutthroat rental market is another symptom of Albuquerques rising housing costs, which have affected the homebuying market as well and threaten to undermine the regions reputation as a more affordable midsize city.

Michael Mo ODonnell, acting director of the University of New Mexico Bureau of Business and Economic Research, said the increase in rental prices in Albuquerque began at roughly the same time as the demand for and cost of housing began to rise, although rental prices had been rising before the pandemic.

He said rising housing costs push people out of the housing market and force them into the rental market  which in turn causes rent to increase as the demand for rentals rises.

I think thats the reason you now have this increased demand for rentals  because people who maybe two or three years ago would have potentially purchased a house, those people are getting pushed out of the market because those prices are now higher and higher as well, ODonnell said.

This has resulted in a rise in rental rates not seen in recent history, with some estimates of the increase reaching 7% compared with the previous year, he said.

Barbara Maddox, marketing and maintenance manager at Maddox Management, said some properties have increased in price much more than in previous years.

Maddox said the company normally doesnt raise rent until a tenant moves out. In the past, that increase tended to be 3% to 5%. But now increases on units after tenants move out are 10% to 20%, based on demand.

Maddox said demand for rentals soared beginning in February. Maddox attributes that in part to vaccine distribution, which she said may have eased some peoples concerns about moving.

They wanted to be in a better space, because, I think, we spent so much time locked up into our houses for the year that people were, like, You know what? I want to be in a better space, I want to be in a bigger space, I want to be into something that has a yard,' she said.

Maddox, whose company manages around 700 units mostly near the Central corridor, said units are moving incredibly quickly, with available units getting multiple applications within hours of listing. She said more renters are also signing leases sight unseen  an uncommon practice until recently.

While demand has kept the company busy, Maddox said she thinks supply will eventually even out demand in the future as construction picks up, though it is unlikely that rents will decrease from current levels.

Finding a home

Although Burkhart eventually was able to find a loft in Downtown Albuquerque for just under $1,000 after several weeks of serious searching, she said the experience was stressful and reminiscent of her time living in Austin in the 2000s. The higher rents combined with the increased traffic in the booming city eventually caused Burkhart to move to Irving, Texas, where she lived before moving to Albuquerque last year.

Burkhart said shes concerned that Albuquerque will only continue to get less affordable for renters.

I think people are really starting to get alarmed, and I think that its rightful that they get alarmed, she said. But I also dont know that theres anything thats going to really alleviate the situation.

During her housing search, she encountered other signs of the booming housing market like hearing stories of people renting properties sight unseen.

I think its like really crazy because people are feeling desperate that theyre even going that far to just sign paperwork without seeing a place, Burkhart said.

The increase in rents has also come as a surprise to Chris Gillooly-Kress, who is looking to return to Albuquerque after living on the West Coast for several years.

Really, what Im finding is kind of frustrating, because Im looking at sort of really small spaces and the rent just doesnt seem commensurate with what Im getting, he said.

Gillooly-Kress, 34, has lived in Albuquerque for most of his life and returned to the city last year to work as a caretaker for his sister after spending several years in Oregon.

After living with his parents for the past year, he said, he is ready to find his own place since his parents and sister moved to Phoenix last month. He said he has been searching for a place to live for several weeks.

Though Gillooly-Kress said he is excited to return to Albuquerque, the experience of finding a place to rent has been stressful.

Im a little nervous about it, he said.  (To) not be secure on where Im moving next is a little nerve-wracking, he said.

Rent consequences

The high demand and corresponding prices could have consequences for New Mexico renters.

Over the long term, we may be in a situation where these rents have increased by a percentage and wages arent necessarily able to catch up to those increases  meaning that people are going to be in positions of paying a greater percentage of their checks toward rent, UNMs ODonnell said.

A 2020 study produced by the New Mexico Mortgage Finance Authority estimates that nearly 45% of New Mexico renters are cost-burdened, meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on housing costs. And half of those renters are classified as extremely cost-burdened, meaning more than 50% of their income is spent on rent.

The study also showed that on average, renters earn significantly less than homeowners. Homeowners have a median income of $58,417, compared with renters median income of $30,817.

He said that higher rents can make it difficult for people to find appropriate housing and that renters may have to make concessions on the housing they can find rather than going with property that they would like.

Its a matter of having to kind of reassess what the landscape is in terms of whats available and what they can currently afford, rather than what they may have been able to afford in the past, ODonnell said.

The increase in rents could also further threaten renters on the verge of eviction, according to Maria Griego, economic equity director at the New Mexico Center on Law and Poverty.

Griego said that the state was dealing with the highest increase in homelessness in the country pre-pandemic and that COVID-related issues have left more renters struggling to pay rent.

Its just becoming a really untenable situation, she said.
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Copyright  2021 Albuquerque Journal

Albuquerque economic developers are setting lofty goals for stimulating job creation in the metro area, boosting the citys brand nationally and working to overcome some of its most stubbornly entrenched problems.

A first-of-its-kind five-year strategic plan commissioned by Albuquerque Economic Development was released Tuesday by AED officials. It lays out the organizations vision: That the greater Albuquerque area be known and recognized for having the highest quality of life and the most diverse, sustainable economy in the region.

Its going to be a heavy lift, said AED President and CEO Danielle Casey.

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That is a highly aspirational vision. But if we dont have one, we have no idea where we want to be someday, Casey said in an interview.  Ill be frank. I dont see this vision happening in the next five years. But that was also why this five-year strategy is really the start of moving forward for the next 20 (years).

Dale Dekker, founding principal of architecture firm Dekker/Perich/Sabatini and an AED board member, said its a pivotal moment in the states history. As critical infrastructure spending from the government ramps up, U.S. companies look to move more operations closer to home, and the country generally emerges from the pandemic, Dekker said theres a window for New Mexico to capitalize on  but it wont stay open forever.

We cant spend years figuring this out, Dekker said. Were going to have to move uber fast, and thats just kind of the way it is.

Job growth targeted

AEDs specific five-year goal is that Albuquerque rank in the top 25% of midsized markets in the U.S. for job growth. That would be a coup for the metro area, which saw just 0.7% job growth in the past five years, placing it in the bottom 25% for cities with a population of between 500,000 and 1 million people, Casey said.

AED also looked at where Albuquerque ranks on a number of metrics as compared to 10 other metro areas that compete for some of the same economic development opportunities: Dallas; Phoenix; Salt Lake City; Boise, Idaho; Colorado Springs; Des Moines, Iowa; El Paso; Omaha, Nebraska; Tucson, Arizona; and Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The plan also hones in on six target clusters of industries that already have some momentum locally and that AED leaders believe could help grow the region: aerospace, biosciences, renewable energy, digital media and film, corporate and professional services, and manufacturing. Because of its limited resources, Casey said AED will start by choosing two of those industries to focus on. A focus on corporate and professional services, for example, could include approaching firms that already operate call centers in the metro area, and working with them to relocate other departments of their business here  their marketing team, for example, Casey said, or their accounting departments.

Albuquerque does plenty well, and AEDs leaders plan to capitalize on and market the regions strengths: A high number of people with professional and doctorate degrees, the synergy of multiple national labs, a more affordable workforce, higher education institutes that want to be responsive to workforce needs and, yes, the sunny, mostly natural disaster-free, climate.

Challenges

The hurdles AED lays out arent insignificant  or new. Crime, poverty, homelessness, ineffective education and workforce preparation, and a lack of national and major publicly traded companies are just a few that made the list.

AEDs study asserts that violent and property crime in Albuquerques metro area is lower than the national average  but higher than all the other 10 cities, except Tulsa. The most recent crime statistics released by the FBI, however, show that Albuquerque outstrips the national average in both violent and property crime rates.

I think we all realize that there probably is a rational nexus between crime, poverty and (an) education system that maybe isnt performing at its peak, Dekker said.

Joe Farr, president of Duke City Commercial real estate firm and AED board chair, said it will be hard to attract new companies to relocate Downtown, for example, if crime and homelessness arent reduced.

Still, Ioanna Morfessis of IO.INC, a consultant that contributed to AEDs report, wrote in an email that, without exception, all of the 80 stakeholders she interviewed  from the public, private, educational and civic sectors  were very optimistic about the regions future.

There is a somber acknowledgement that some fundamental human issues need to be addressed, as they are root causes, especially with respect to poverty, Morfessis wrote. Yes, it is possible to work toward ameliorating this condition and it will require a sustained commitment on the part of the entire community  all sectors and over a long period of time.

Workforce, education

Albuquerques workforce offerings are a bit of a mixed bag. Barry Matherly, president and CEO of Global Hickey, the consultant that led AEDs strategic plan development, said the metro area does have a large, competitively priced workforce  a good thing for businesses that want to hire here.

One of the positive things about the region is, due to your basically lower cost of living there, people are able to get by with less, said Matherly, who is based in New York.

Albuquerques wage growth is also lower than all its competitive markets, according to data compiled for the plan.

When it comes to workers level of education, things get a little more complicated. On the one hand, Albuquerque stacks up quite well in terms of high-level and professional degrees  likely thanks mostly to the presence of New Mexicos national labs. About 2.2% of Albuquerques 25-and-older population holds a doctorate degree  more than any of AEDs 10 competitor markets.

But Albuquerques high school diploma and bachelors degree stats arent nearly as impressive. About 11.2% of Albuquerques 25-and-up population holds less than a high school diploma, according to data presented in AEDs report  or somewhere in the middle of the pack. About 17.3% hold a bachelors degree, near the bottom of the heap.

In other words, Matherly said, Albuquerque seems to be able to recruit highly educated workers just fine  but its got a big problem with churning out its own educated workforce.

The more stable pipeline is to grow up through your university system so you are producing your own talent, he said.

Matherly and Dekker both said that leaders at Central New Mexico Community College and the University of New Mexico are committed to responding to workforce needs.

Thats huge, Dekker said.  We dont have to invent that.

While Sandia National Laboratories and the Los Alamos National Lab have brought plenty of advanced degree-holders to the region, Casey said not enough of that brainpower is being transferred from the labs to the marketplace.

Innovation is off the hook, but were not commercializing it here, she said.

Industrial real estate

Available industrial real estate is another sticking point in the Albuquerque area.

Matherly, whose companys largest division provides site-selection consulting, said having available speculative space  facilities built by developers without a tenant lined up  is attractive to large companies.

It has always been the case that a ready-to-go site  just quickens the timeframe, Matherly said.

It also makes investment in a new market less risky for companies, Matherly said  an especially important quality for CEOs emerging from the pandemic.

Theres a lot of dirt at Sandia Science and Tech Park, just hanging out, Casey said.  I cant imagine that if we had speculative space at Sandia Science and Tech Park, they wouldnt be full.

Getting there

Casey, who joined AED last year after the retirement of longtime AED head Gary Tonjes, said bolstering Albuquerques reputation is a necessary step in AEDs long-term plan. She said that, during her interview for the job, she was asked what Albuquerque needed to do to attract business.

The first thing I said was, Well, lets at least start with building a national brand because I havent heard anything about Albuquerque in 10 years,  Casey said.   I dont really have an impression of it. 

Casey emphasized that the strategic plan is just one part of a yearslong process to try and spur growth in the metro area.

This is where the real work begins, she said.
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Copyright  2021 Albuquerque Journal

SANTA FE  You cant legally buy it yet, but cannabis is no longer prohibited in New Mexico when it comes to possession and home growing.

After years of debate, New Mexico became the 17th state to legalize recreational cannabis for users 21 and over Tuesday when a new law greenlighting the long illegal drug took effect.

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But the task of setting up a new weed industry from scratch is far from finished.

A virtual rules hearing on the initial batch of proposed state rules governing marijuana licensing and plant count limits stretched on for hours Tuesday and drew more than 500 attendees, some of whom raised concerns about water rights, out-of-state corporations and transparency issues.

Matt Munoz, a former University of New Mexico lobbyist who is applying for a cannabis microbusiness license, said state regulators should ensure a level playing field for local entrepreneurs.

New Mexico should not be a playground for those who have lost licenses in other states, said Munoz, who described being arrested for cannabis possession as an 18-year-old as a life-changing event.

With the new law in effect, New Mexico now allows for possession of up to 2 ounces of cannabis  or equivalent amounts of cannabis extract  and personal production of no more than six mature and six immature marijuana plants per adult.

However, the deadline for beginning commercial sales is not until April 2022, to give state officials time to craft rules that will govern the cannabis industry and begin issuing licenses for legal pot production and sales.

Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, who called lawmakers back to the Roundhouse to pass a cannabis legalization bill during a March special session, heralded Tuesday as the historic culmination of a yearslong effort.

This is a landmark day, a huge step forward both for social justice and economic development in our state, Lujan Grisham said. We are proactively stopping the disproportionate criminalization of people of color for cannabis possession, and we are building a new industry in which all New Mexicans can participate  and that will bring millions of dollars to our local communities and our state.

But there are still ample questions about how the legal cannabis industry will operate in New Mexico and about which groups  and individuals  stand to profit.

Several New Mexicans raised questions Tuesday about whether big cannabis producers would buy up water rights to the detriment of small farmers and communities.

One woman who testified said the states proposed rules set the stage for a possible water war, while others suggested imposing an in-state residency requirement for cannabis production licenses.

$2,500 license fee

Although the proposed rules discussed Tuesday could change before any are ultimately adopted, they would in their current form set the cost of both producer and retailer licenses at $2,500 annually.

Licenses for cannabis consumption areas, or designated places where adults can smoke, eat or drink cannabis products, would also cost $2,500 annually under the draft rule.

In addition, the proposed rules call for a three-tier system for cannabis producer plant limits  with a maximum of 4,500 mature plants. Larger-scale producers would face slightly higher per-plant fees than smaller producers.

The Cannabis Control Division, a newly created office within the state Regulation and Licensing Department, will review the public comments  and hundreds of written comments  in the coming weeks, said Regulation and Licensing Superintendent Linda Trujillo on Tuesday.

Final production rules must be in place before Sept. 1.

We are grateful for the extensive public engagement in this process, Trujillo said. Its heartening to see so many people engaging with the public process to stand up the adult-use cannabis industry, which will provide economic opportunities for entrepreneurs, businesses and local communities.

However, some medical cannabis patients have expressed unease about the states approach to legalization.

Larry Love, a medical cannabis advocate and longtime patient, said the proposed rules as written are vague and the proposed plant count limit could end up being too low.

There will be a shortage, Love said. It happens in every state.

Revenue forecast

Since taking office in 2019, Lujan Grisham has pitched cannabis legalization as a way to diversify New Mexicos economy, create jobs and bolster the state as a tourist destination, especially with neighboring Texas unlikely to legalize marijuana in the near future.

The law is expected to generate $20 million in revenue for the state in the 2023 fiscal year, along with an estimated $10 million for local governments around New Mexico, according to a fiscal analysis.

Once commercial sales begin, a 12% excise tax will be levied on legal weed purchases in addition to sales taxes ranging from about 5% to 9%.

Unlike in some other states that have legalized recreational cannabis for adult users, New Mexico cities and counties will not be able to opt out of the states industry.

However, local governments can reasonably limit the density of cannabis establishments and the operating hours of dispensaries under the new law, and some cities have begun adopting local ordinances dealing with zoning limits for cannabis dispensaries.
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ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.  A Colorado woman accused of robbing an Albuquerque bank made her initial appearance in federal court this week.

Keylee Rose Moore, 21, of Hesperus, Colorado, will remain in custody pending a detention hearing set for later this month, the U.S. Attorneys Office for New Mexico said in a Tuesday news release.

Moore is accused or robbing the New Mexico Bank & Trust at 3002 Louisiana NE on June 1.

The FBI in Albuquerque that day reported that the suspect, clad in a blonde wig, a black trench coat, black pants and having heavy green eye shadow, walked into the bank just after noon and handed the teller a note. The bank employee handed over an undisclosed amount of money to the woman, who left on foot.

On June 6, the FBI received a tip identifying Moore as the person who allegedly robbed the bank, the U.S. Attorneys Office said.

Moore was arrested at her home in Hesperus, west of Durango, on June 17.

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ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.  An Albuquerque pharmacy is building a new facility and plans to hire more than 20 employees with the help of state funding.

The New Mexico Economic Development Department announced Tuesday that Contigo Compounding and Infusion Pharmacy LLC is developing a new facility at 8300 Carmel NE. The pharmacy is investing $1.3 million for plumbing, electrical HVAC, windows, doors, fixtures, retail space, and patient treatment rooms, according to a news release from EDD. The facility, which will comply with all federal regulations on compounding medications, is expected to open by the end of July.

Additionally, Contigo is expected to hire 22 full-time employees over the next five years at an average salary of $65,000, according to the release.

The new developments will be supported by a $150,000 grant from the states LEDA job-creation fund allows the owners to finish work and open faster with more patient options. The business has also received assistance through the Job Training Incentive Program to offset training costs for new employees.

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PHOENIX  A woman with bizarre doomsday beliefs that Idaho prosecutors say she and her husband used to justify the killings of her son and daughter was indicted in metro Phoenix on a charge of conspiring to murder her ex-husband.

In an indictment unveiled Tuesday, Lori Vallow Daybell was charged in the 2019 death of Charles Vallow, who was killed in the Phoenix suburb of Chandler months before his son, 7-year-old Joshua JJ Vallow, and stepdaughter, 17-year-old Tylee Ryan, went missing.

Police records show he was fatally shot by Daybells brother, Alexander Lamar Cox, when Charles Vallow was picking up his son from his estranged wife. The indictment says Daybell conspired with her brother in Vallows death.

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Cox told police he killed Vallow in self-defense and wasnt arrested. He died five months later from what medical examiners said was a pulmonary blood clot.

Lori Daybell is already at the center of a complicated criminal case in Idaho, where prosecutors allege she conspired with her new husband, Chad Daybell, to kill the two children and his late wife, Tammy Daybell. The couple hold apocalyptic religious beliefs that prosecutors claim they used to justify the killings.

Lori Daybells attorney in Idaho, Mark Means, didnt immediately respond to a phone message and email from The Associated Press seeking comment.

That case against Lori Daybell is on hold while she undergoes treatment at a mental health facility. A judge had her committed this month after determining she wasnt competent to assist in her defense. Chad Daybell has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

In the investigation of Charles Vallows death, Tylee told police that she confronted Vallow with a baseball bat after she was awakened by yelling outside her bedroom door. The teen girl said she was trying to defend her mother, but Vallow took away the bat, according to police records.

Police say Cox was at the home and intervened, leading to a confrontation where Vallow hit the back of Coxs head with the bat. Cox told police that he then went to his bedroom, got his gun and demanded that Vallow leave.

Cox told police that he fired in self-defense after Vallow refused to drop the bat and came after him. In a police video, Cox told investigators that Lori Daybell and the two children had left the house shortly before the shooting occurred.

Four months before his death, Charles Vallow filed for divorce from his wife, alleging that she had become infatuated with near-death experiences and claimed to have lived numerous lives on other planets before her current life.

He also alleged his estranged wife threatened to financially ruin and kill him, according to court records, which noted that Charles Vallow sought an order of protection and a voluntary evaluation of his wife at a mental health facility.

After Vallows death, Lori Daybell and the children moved to Idaho, where Chad Daybell lived. He ran a small publishing company with his wife, Tammy Daybell, and released several of his own books  doomsday-focused fiction loosely based on the theology of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Tammy Daybell died in October 2019, and her obituary said she died in her sleep of natural causes. But authorities grew suspicious when Chad Daybell married Lori Daybell just two weeks later. Authorities later exhumed Tammy Daybells body.

Police began searching for Tylee and JJ in November after relatives raised concerns. Police say the Daybells lied to investigators about the childrens whereabouts before quietly leaving Idaho. Months later, they were found in Hawaii without the children, whose bodies were eventually found buried on Chad Daybells Idaho property.

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Associated Press writer Rebecca Boone in Boise, Idaho, contributed to this report.

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This story has been corrected to say that the charges Lori Daybell faces in Idaho in the deaths of her children are conspiracy to murder charges, not murder charges.
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When hosting her 'Drama Queens' podcast with former co-stars Sophia Bush and Bethany Joy Lenz, Hilarie Burton jokes about what would happened should he landed the Keith Scott role.

Jun 29, 2021

AceShowbiz - Actor Jeffrey Dean Morgan missed out on the chance to meet his now-wife Hilarie Burton earlier in his career after auditioning for her hit TV series "One Tree Hill".

Burton didn't cross paths with "The Walking Dead" star until they were set up on a blind date in 2009 by mutual pals and fellow actors Jensen Ackles and Danneel Harris, but they could have fallen for one another a few years earlier had Morgan been hired for the role of father figure Keith Scott, a part which eventually went to Craig Sheffer.

"When I met Jeff, he was like, 'Oh, I auditioned for that show.' I'm like, 'Wait, what?' " Burton recalled on her "Drama Queens" podcast, which she co-hosts with her friends and former "One Tree Hill" co-stars Sophia Bush and Bethany Joy Lenz (Bethany Joy Galeotti).

"My husband, Jeffrey, auditioned for Sheffer's part. He was like, 'Yeah, you know, I liked the whole gritty garage guy, that edgy thing.' "

Reflecting on the missed opportunity, the actress quipped, "Had Jeff shown up in those tight jeans that Sheff was wearing, I would have definitely had kids earlier!"

"One Tree Hill" originally ran from 2003 to 2012.

Burton, who turns 39 on Thursday, July 1, and Morgan, 55, went on to start a family in 2010 with the birth of son Gus, while their daughter George arrived in 2018. The couple wed in 2019.

When promoting her memoir "The Rural Dairies", Burton recalled her first impression of her now-husband. "When he came along, he was so sure of himself," she told PEOPLE. "I was not a girl anyone pursued. I've always been alpha. And Jeffrey was like, 'You're going to be my girlfriend.' "

"It was so nice to be pursued," the actress continued recalling. "He's a cute dude! And I liked that he knew exactly who he was. His confidence was intoxicating."
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27-year-old ballgown designer Kataluna Enriquez, who amasses over 35,000 followers on Instagram, makes history after defeating 21 other women and earning the coveted title.

Jun 29, 2021

AceShowbiz - Miss Nevada USA has crowned its winner at the South Point hotel-casino in Las Vegas on Sunday, June 27. For the first time in the pageant's history, the title went to a transgender woman.

Prior to winning Miss Nevada USA, Kataluna Enriquez was first crowned Miss Silver State USA. The 27-year-old ballgown designer amassed over 35,000 followers on Instagram. In her profile, Kataluna showed how she's proud of being herself as she called herself "transproud" and added hashtag #BEVISIBLE.

"To my pageant mommy @rissrose2 , no words can describe how much I am grateful of you. For your constant support, for welcoming me in to your home, and feeding me nothing but love," Kataluna shared on Instagram after being named as Miss Nevada USA, defeating 21 other women. "Team @misssilverstate, you are all inspiring. your love, support and sisterhood has healed many years of struggle. My times and giggles with y'all never be replaceable."

She also thanked "all the sponsors," penning, "Thank you. I couldn't have done it without your help. Huge thank you to everyone who supported me from day one." Kataluna also paid tribute to the LGBT+ community as she wrote, "My community, you are always in my heart. My win is our win. We just made history. Happy pride."

The official Instagram account of Miss Nevada USA also congratulated Kataluna for winning the title. "Congratulations to our new Miss Nevada USA @mskataluna History made!" the account wrote in the caption alongside a picture of Kataluna and former Miss USA as well as current pageant director, Shanna Moakler.

Kataluna is no stranger to winning pageant. She was the California representative in Transnation Queen USA and won the title on October 22nd, 2016 in Los Angeles. She was also among the Top 12 at Miss International Queen 2018 in addition to representing Hayward at Miss California USA in 2020.

Born in San Leandro, California, Kataluna graduated from San Leandro High School in 2011 before enrolling in the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Las Vegas, here she studied fashion design. She then launched her own fashion brand Kataluna Kouture in 2016.

Kataluna is set to compete for the Miss USA title in November.
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The Silver Bullet Band leader has countersued his band's bassist who filed for five breach of contract charges against Rock Storm Ltd., a company owned by the former, among others.

Jun 29, 2021

AceShowbiz - Classic rocker Bob Seger and his longtime Silver Bullet Band bassist Chris Campbell are heading for a legal spat over contracts and royalties.

The pair has filed suit against each other in Oakland County Circuit Court in suburban Detroit, Michigan.

Campbell and his wife, Courtney, fired off first in April with five breach of contract charges against Rock Storm Ltd. - a company owned by Seger and administered by his longtime manager Edward Andrews - and Hideout Records & Distributors Inc., which manages Seger's recordings.

Three of the counts related to tours in 2014, 2017, and 2018, and two counts address alleged unpaid recording royalties.

Seger's attorneys have now responded, denying those claims and making counterclaims against Crisco Inc., the corporate company name used by the Campbells.

Both sides are now seeking unspecified damages as well as a jury trial.

Seger and Andrews have released a joint statement, in which they claim they have "loyally supported our friend for 45-plus years", shortly after the initial lawsuit landed, which suggested Seger's accountant embezzled from all parties.

In Seger's counterclaim, the rocker's attorneys note, "Instead of suing the person who stole the money, Plaintiff is attempting to recover from Defendants. At no time have Crisco or the Campbells offered to return the embezzled funds."

Campbell, who began recording with Seger in the mid-1970s, is also claiming he's owed royalties from several album releases, but Bob's attorneys insist he was paid session fees and does not have a contract "or any legal right of any kind to royalties earned on songs recorded by Seger".
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The latest hit single from the South Korean boy group becomes the first song to land 100,000 domestic sales in five weeks on release since Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee's 'Despacito'.

Jun 29, 2021

AceShowbiz - BTS (Bangtan Boys) are still spreading the love with hit single "Butter" for a fifth week at the top of the U.S. pop charts.

The track debuted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 last month (May 2021), and no one has been able to shift it.

It's the first song to land 100,000 domestic sales in five weeks on release since Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee's "Despacito", featuring Justin Bieber, cleared 100,000 in 12 consecutive weeks in 2017.

"Butter" is just the 11th track to spend at least its first five weeks on the chart at number one.

The South Korean group, which is composed of Jin, Suga, J-Hope, RM, Jimin, V and Jungkook, celebrated their single's latest feat with a thank you note to their fans, ARMY. Through their official Twitter account, the septet wrote, "FIVE weeks in a row!! #BTS_Butter is on the top of the chart again. It's all thanks to #BTSARMY! AFBF."

BTS thanked ARMY for 'Butter' latest feat on Billboard chart.

Back in May, band member Jimin and Jungkook talked about the meaning behind their hit song. " 'Butter' is very simple," Jungkook told Variety. "It's getting warmer and will get hotter, and we hope that you can spend a fun summer with BTS."

Jimin, on the other hand, elaborated, "If you hear the title 'Butter,' you know immediately that we tried to prepare a song that's easy listening, instead of [something with] a really heavy or profound message." He added, "This is a little embarrassing, but it's something smooth like butter, that really melts into and grabs hold of you. It's a very cute song, sort of a confession."

Olivia Rodrigo's "Good 4 U" stays put at two on the new chart, while Dua Lipa's "Levitating", Doja Cat's "Kiss Me More", featuring SZA, and "Peaches" by Justin Bieber round out the top five.
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The six-hour limited series will chronicle the work of American fiction writer Douglas Preston and journalist Mario Spezi, who examined the police investigation into the deaths of 14 people.

Jun 29, 2021

AceShowbiz - Antonio Banderas is picking up a pad and pen to play an Italian crime reporter investigating the murders of a real-life serial killer.

The Oscar winner will star in the six-hour limited series "The Monster of Florence", which will chronicle the work of American fiction writer Douglas Preston and journalist Mario Spezi, who examined the police investigation into the deaths of 14 people between 1974 and 1985, and uncovered procedural mistakes.

At one point, Spezi himself was considered a suspect in the slayings, which targeted young couples enjoying romantic outings in the countryside.

The story will be adapted from Preston and Spezi's own 2006 book on the case, "The Monster Of Florence: A True Story".

Preston himself said that both the book and the series "tell the true story of our search for - and identification of - the killer and our frightening interview with him." He added, "In a bizarre turn, Mario and I were sucked into a harrowing prosecutorial vendetta, our phones tapped, followed and menaced by the police, accused of participating in Satanic rites -- which culminated in Mario arrested and charged with being the Monster of Florence himself."

"A Royal Affair" director Nikolaj Arcel will take charge of the Studiocanal project from a script he developed with "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" co-writer Anders Thomas Jensen, according to Variety. It will be filmed on location in Florence, Sardinia and Tuscany.

About the limited series, Ron Halpern, Studiocanal executive VP of global production, said, "The book is an absolute page turner; powerful, compelling, dangerous, and personal. You simply can't believe this all happened to them. We can't wait to begin production on the series in Florence and to be able to work with one of our favorite actors Antonio Banderas."

Banderas will serve as an executive producer on the show, his first TV gig since portraying artist Pablo Picasso in 2018's "Genius".
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An eight-part series developed for HGTV Canada, 'Pamela Anderson's Home Reno Project' will see the 'Baywatch' beauty teaming up with her new husband and her mother in doing the revamping.

Jun 29, 2021

AceShowbiz - Pamela Anderson is preparing to get her hands dirty for a new home makeover show.

The "Baywatch" beauty will document the renovation of her late grandmother's abandoned property on Vancouver Island in Canada in "Pamela Anderson's Home Reno Project", an eight-part series developed for HGTV Canada.

Producers at Corus Studios reveal the actress previously bought the Ladysmith pad from her grandma more than 25 years ago, after promising to keep the sprawling place in the family.

About the project, Lisa Godfrey, Senior Vice President of Original Content and Corus Studios, said, "Corus Studios is thrilled to work with Pamela Anderson and capture this incredible undertaking of her lifelong dream."

"The series speaks to our ongoing development strategy of telling unique stories with perfect balance," Godfrey added, "showcasing real-life experiences while preserving incredible transformations that spark intrigue for a wide-range of audiences on platforms around the world."

Anderson will be joined by her new husband, carpenter Dan Hayhurst, and her mother, Carol Anderson, as she revamps the rustic property using the services of local designers and craftspeople.

The series, expected to debut next year (2022), will be a return to Anderson's roots in more ways than one - she made an early TV appearance as Lisa, the Tool Time Girl, in the first two seasons of Tim Allen's DIY sitcom "Home Improvement".

News of the home makeover series came just days after it was reported that Anderson slashed nearly $2 million off the sale price of her Malibu, California mansion. The former "Baywatch" star originally listed her treehouse-style house for $14.9 million.
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The initiative on Omaze.com, which will end on July 15, is done to raise funds for 'The Midnight Sky' actor's Clooney Foundation for Justice via Charities Aid Foundation America.

Jun 29, 2021

AceShowbiz - George Clooney and his wife Amal are offering one lucky fan the chance to hang out with them at their Italian retreat overlooking Lake Como.

The couple has offered up a once-in-a-lifetime Omaze.com getaway to raise funds for the actor's Clooney Foundation for Justice via Charities Aid Foundation America.

A blurb linked to the initiative on Omaze.com features a photo of George holding a sign that reads, "JOIN US IN ITALY" and the note, "When you daydream about life after COVID-19, do you imagine: Getting together with friends. Sharing a meal, maybe a few drinks. Talking about what you're grateful for. Endless laughter. This is going to be just like that... except your friends are George and Amal Clooney. And you're joining them at their beautiful home in Lake Como, Italy!"

"You'll enjoy a meal of their favorite local foods, cheers to life and snap a photo to remember it all by. And before you ask - no this isn't a prank. Flights and hotel included."

Donations for the sweepstakes have begun and the initiative ends on July 15.

The once-in-a-lifetime offer was not the only charity work Clooney invested in. In June, it was announced that "The Midnight Sky" actor joined Don Cheadle, Kerry Washington, Mindy Kaling and Eva Longoria in co-founding The Roybal School of Film and Television Production, a film-focused high school in Los Angeles for underserved communities.

"Our aim is to better reflect the diversity of our country. That means starting early. It means creating high school programs that teach young people about cameras, and editing and visual effects and sound and all the career opportunities that this industry has to offer," Clooney said in a statement. "It means internships that lead to well-paying careers. It means understanding that we're all in this together."
SACRAMENTO, Calif. - The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is helping provide resources to help crews working on the Lava Fire burning in Siskiyou County, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced.

Newsom said California has secured a Fire Management Assistance Grant (FMAG) from FEMA as the fire has burned 13,330 acres.

The FMAG will assist local, state and tribal agencies responding to the fire with 75% reimbursement of their eligible fire suppression costs.

The Siskiyou County Emergency Operations Center was activated and Cal OES staff are onsite to support local agencies. Cal OES is using mutual aid strike teams and firefighters in their response to the fire.
Update 3:24 p.m. Tuesday - Oroville Police Department confirmed 33-year-old Jacob Matthew Nevin was killed in Tuesday's shooting in Oroville.

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OROVILLE, Calif. - Police responded to a call about an unresponsive male in a vehicle near Lincoln Blvd. and Wyandotte Ave. in Oroville, according to the Oroville Police Department.

Officers got the report at 5:27 a.m. Tuesday morning and when they arrived, they found a man in a yellow Ford Mustang who was suffering from a gunshot wound.

Medics arrived on the scene and attempted life-saving techniques but the man died at the scene. His name is being withheld at this time.

The Oroville Police Department said this appears to be an isolated incident and there is not a threat to the community.

Officers did not say they have a suspect in custody at this time.

This is an ongoing investigation and the police department requested members of the California Department of Justice to help with the investigation.

Anyone with information or surveillance footage of the area is asked to contact the Oroville Police Department.
Purely digital insurance platform ACKO, today launched a powerful digital marketing campaign on Pride Day, celebrated to commemorate the first pride march. The film communicates a powerful message, that even though we have come a long way in recognizing the LGBTQ+ (Pride) community, this does not necessarily equate to true acceptance, we still need to work on it and ensure that we can welcome one of our own if they belong to the group. The film urges us to rethink what it means to truly welcome and become an ally to the LGBTQ community.

Starring popular film & theatre actor, Neeraj Kabi, who has won acclaim for his roles in the web series Sacred Games and Paatal Lok, the film opens with four friends at a get together. As one of the friends, Rakesh Kapoor (RK), proudly shows that he has changed his profile cover picture on social media to the Pride colours in support of the community, the other friends pat him on the back, assuming that RK has now learned of his sons sexual identity. The accidental reveal leaves RK speechless as he tries to reconcile with his own conflicting actions and emotions.

The film is based on the Pride Research conducted by ACKO and YouGov in June 2021, which found that only 2 out of every 5 Indian parents said that they would be supportive if their child was part of the LGBTQ+ community. The campaign highlights this important point - Post pride, Support pride, but more importantly, be ready to accept Pride.

This campaign is a reflection of ACKOs ongoing effort to create a workplace that reflects its core values of embracing and supporting true diversity. The company is among the early and a handful of startups that extends a group medical insurance cover to include the partners of LGBTQ+ employees. ACKO prioritizes training and education programs to sensitize and raise awareness about the LGBTQ+ community and to ensure ongoing support of LGBTQ+ staff in the company.

Talking about the campaign, Ashish Mishra, Executive Vice President- Marketing, ACKO General Insurance, said, From denial to recognition, Indian society has

come a long way in terms of their attitude towards the LGBTQ+ (PRIDE) community. However, there is still a huge amount of work to be done to make sure that people are willing to accept, if one of their own is part of this community. #TalkPride Campaign is our way to progress on this front.

This campaign has been conceptualized by Leo Burnett Orchard.

We are so used to sharing our support for the LGBTQ+ community on social media. But we never take a moment to stop and think how open we will be to having someone in the family who identifies as the same. I think it is time for the country as a whole to take a step towards accepting that love is love, no matter how you choose to express it. added Pravin Sutar, Head of Creative, Leo Burnett Orchard.

Campaign credits:

Agency: Leo Burnett Orchard, Bangalore

CEO and Chief Strategy Officer - South Asia Leo Burnett: Dheeraj Sinha

CEO and Chief Creative Officer - South Asia Leo Burnett: Rajdeepak Das

Managing Director India and Chief Creative Officer Leo Burnett South Asia: Rajdeepak Das

National Head and EVP: Gaurav Dudeja

National Creative Director: Vikram Pandey

Head of Creative: Pravin Sutar

Creative Team: Geo Joseph, Suketu Gohel, Mohammad Faisal Firoz, Dilin Mathew, Akash Mohan

Account Management Team: Sriya Banerjee, Chirag Jain

Production House: Content Factory

Head and Senior VP, Prodigious: Varun Shah

Director: Puneet Prakash

Sr. Content Producer: Tanaya Barve

Associate Producer: Surbhi Bafna

Client: ACKO General Insurance

Ashish Mishra, EVP, Marketing

Shilpi Saini, Senior Manager, Content

Nitin Khanna  Senior Director, Brand
(CNN) Normally considered gentle giants, elephants are increasingly coming into conflict with humans in India, where they kill around 500 people every year.

The country is home to the world's largest population of Asian elephants, a species listed as endangered, with declining populations across its home range of 13 countries. Their forest habitats are being eroded by agriculture and infrastructure, as India's growing population of almost 1.4 billion people expands further into wild spaces.

"One of the biggest challenges in India is the fact that we have less than 5% of land set aside for wildlife, and there are millions of people who live adjacent to our protected areas or inside," says Krithi Karanth, chief conservation scientist and executive director of the Centre for Wildlife Studies, headquartered in Bangalore, southern India.

The country has over 100 national parks and around 30 elephant reserves, but many of India's 30,000 elephants live outside these protected areas and have less and less habitat to roam in search of food. That's leading them into increased contact with humans.

Night-time crop raiders

At around 10 feet tall and weighing up to five tons, an elephant eats around 330 lbs (150kg) of food per day -- mostly grass, leaves and bark. But more nutritious crops like sugarcane, rice and bananas can be especially enticing.

"A lot of the elephant encounters happen by chance," says Karanth, who was recently named a "Wild Innovator" by the non-profit Wild Elements Foundation, in a new program to support environmental projects led by women worldwide. Farmers trying to protect their crops can be accidentally killed by elephants when they try to chase them away, she says. "We've also documented a lot of deaths where people happen to be walking home at night and they just run into elephants."

India accounts for 70-80% of all recorded human deaths due to elephants in Asia, according to Sandeep Kumar Tiwari, of the Wildlife Trust of India and the IUCN SSC Asian Elephant Specialist Group.

Tiwari says around 500,000 families are impacted by conflict with elephants every year across the country, mostly by the animals damaging their crops. Between 80 to 100 elephants are killed by human-related activity each year, he adds -- some from retaliation acts like poisoning or electrocution, others from being run over by trains.

Finding ways for people and elephants to co-exist peacefully will require a concerted effort from government, conservationists and the public to come together to solve this issue both in the short- and long-term, says Tiwari.

Finding effective solutions

Farmers sometimes use light and noise to scare elephants away, but these tactics can become less effective as the animals grow accustomed to them.

Planting crops that elephants don't like to eat, such as chilis, lemons and ginger, digging trenches, and setting up alarm systems to warn people of nearby elephants can all help keep the animals away from agricultural land. Community groups can also be trained to guide elephants back towards the forest and away from crops.

Another approach is to help people in rural communities deal with the impact that elephants can have on their daily life. The Indian government offers compensation for families who have suffered losses from wild animals but receiving a payment can be a long and bureaucratic process, according to Karanth.

She has developed a program to help rural communities access the compensation. They can call a toll-free number and her staff will assess the damage and help them submit the necessary paperwork to make a claim. She says the Wild Seve program has helped families submit almost 18,000 claims and receive almost $800,000 in compensation over the past five and half years.

In the long-term, one of the most effective ways to reduce the conflict will be to restore and protect forest areas and the ancient migration "corridors" elephants travel through, says Tiwari. These strips of forest link elephants' natural habitats and preserving them means the animals have less reason to stray onto farmland.

Tiwari's organization, the Wildlife Trust of India, along with the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, and other partners, has identified 101 such corridors and is working with state and national government to protect and secure them. Designing infrastructure like roads with underpasses for wildlife can also help keep connectivity for these corridors.

In a country where elephants are seen as a sacred animal -- the incarnation of the god Ganesh -- by the majority Hindu population, both Tiwari and Karanth say tolerance for elephants encroaching on farmland is generally high. Karanth warns against complacency but is optimistic that the situation will improve.

"There is a deep religious, cultural affinity for this animal," Karanth says. "I'm hopeful that people will do more for elephants because of this affinity."
India Inc. and Republic TV have come together to broadcast the coveted India Global Forums flagship event. The India Global Forum is a hybrid event, bringing together premier political and business leaders, to set the vision and ambition for the Post-Pandemic World from 29 June  1 July. The event has confirmation from 200-plus high-profile speakers and participants from over 50 countries across the globe.

IGF (www.indiaglobalforum.com) will highlight the theme of Future.Now.  Radical Actions for the Post-Pandemic Era.

A high-powered line-up of eminent speakers includes senior Indian Cabinet ministers Dr S Jaishankar (External Affairs), Nirmala Sitharaman (Finance) and Piyush Goyal (Commerce), Nitin Gadkari (Transport) and Smriti Irani (Women, Textiles). Senior ministers and former leaders from the UK have also endorsed their participation - UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak, UK First Secretary of State and Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs Dominic Raab, UK Home Secretary Priti Patel, Executive Director, Institute for Global Change & Former UK PM, Tony Blair have also signed on the roster.



Get set for the India Global Forum 2021, exclusively on Republic, from June 29 to July 1 #FutureNow pic.twitter.com/sIIqYIc3FR  Republic (@republic) June 26, 2021









Michael Bloomberg (Entrepreneur; climate change activist and New Yorks Ex-Mayor), World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and General David H. Petraeus (Ex-CIA Director, KKR Global Institute), and Founder of the Isha Foundation, Sadhguru, are also part of the star-studded line-up.

Last years event was opened by Prime Minister Modi.

#FutureNow | Get ready for the India Global Forum 2021 - where India meets the world and the world meets India - from June 29 to July 1 only on Republic TV https://t.co/RZHKU3fdmK pic.twitter.com/t48kXg9D8b  Republic (@republic) June 26, 2021



This years India Global Forum brings with it a sense of urgency and impatience about the radical actions needed now to shape a post pandemic World. It is where the big global issues of climate change, economic recovery and opportunity, digital transformation, and tackling new age imperialist and fundamentalist threats get debated said Manoj Ladwa, Founder and CEO of London headquartered India Inc. Group  the organisers of India Global Forum.



This is the biggest and most impactful gathering on Indias globalisation anywhere in the World. It is where the enterprise of a business leader meets the power of a politician; the curiosity of a scientist meets the ingenuity of an engineer; the wisdom of experience meets the impatience of ambition. It is quite simply where India meets the world, and the world meets India.

We are therefore thrilled by this partnership with Republic TV in India that will take the ideas and ambitions of the Forum to widest possible audience. he said.



Power-packed agenda

In keeping with the #FutureNow central theme, the sessions of the Forum have been broadly divided across the following sessions:



 Climate Action

 Digital Future

 Global Business

 Economic Recovery

 Health & HealthTech

 Securing Supply Chains

 Global Leadership



From views on how the post-pandemic build back of the global economy can be used to accelerate the transition to a better and safer world and the extent and speed of change required across sectors to the Covidonomics of navigating huge new debts, unemployment and ongoing healthcare risk  a series of power-packed sessions will cover every aspect of Indias ubiquitous role in ensuring the Build Back Better goals of the worlds leading economies are in harmony with Indias growth ambitions.

As the home of the world's largest democracy, youngest workforce and one of the fastest-growing economies, India is in a unique position to use its collaborative ethos to bring together leading voices from all backgrounds, industries and geographies as drivers of vital change. And the India Global Forum is designed as a facilitator and accelerator of that collaborative approach.

Arnab Goswami, Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief said, At Republic, we see great potential in the coming together of two great democracies: the UK and India. We believe that with an exchange of ideas and collaboration of minds, this transformative relationship has a game changing future. As Indias number one news network, we are doing everything to make that happen. The purpose is to come together to ideate at this global forum on common geo-strategic, geo-political and economic interests.

I am particularly happy to be working with Manoj on this project. The level of discourse, the profile of the panels and the global outlook of this forum is going to make it a remarkable event.

Republic TV is the exclusive broadcast partner for the India Global Forum in India.
Microsoft owned LinkedIn has formally joined European Union Code Of Conduct, as a lot of job seekers and professionals have been highly active and reliant on the platform due to which the tech giant has decided to advanced the further counter hate speech online.

As explained by the social media network on their blogpost,

LinkedIn is a place for professional conversations where people come to connect, learn and find new opportunities. Given the current economic climate and the increased reliance jobseekers and professionals everywhere are placing on LinkedIn, our responsibility is to help create safe experiences for our members. We couldnt be clearer that hate speech is not tolerated on our platform. LinkedIn is a strong part of our members professional identities for the entirety of their career  it can be seen by their employer, colleagues and potential business partners.

The company noted that, "It has joined the EUs Code of Conduct on Countering Illegal Hate Speech Online, with justice commissioner, Didier Reynders, welcoming LinkedIns participation through the parent company Microsoft.

This decision is made to fight against the hate speech and a commitment to step forward and keep the user's conversations safe on the platform.
The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information and Technology has summoned the representatives of Facebook and Google in India today, to hear their views on safeguarding citizens rights and prevention of misuse of social media and online news media platforms. Earlier this month, it had summoned Twitter for representation on how to prevent misuse of social media and online news.

The government had asked social media platforms to comply with its new Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 by May 26. All platforms except Twitter had complied with the IT Rules appointing a grievance officer for complaints.
Recognizing the courage, resilience and unwavering spirit of the Indian healthcare community, Quaker has created a special film  #SalutingOurHeroes, a tribute to the Real Fit heroes for their selfless efforts in keeping numerous families safe during the tough times. Released ahead of the upcoming National Doctors Day, the film focuses on inspiring and positive stories that talk about the incredible work done by the healthcare community in helping patients find strength to recover from the trying situation caused by the pandemic.

The film opens with Michelin Star Chef and Quakers brand ambassador, Vikas Khanna, expressing his gratitude towards each member of the healthcare community, who are serving the nation extraordinarily by fighting this fight for us. The film unfolds with stories about the efforts of Real Life, Real Fit Heroes and showcases the relentless spirit of countless healthcare heroes across the country. Emotionally capturing the heart-warming stories of Real Life, Real Fit Heroes, the film features Dr. Jigmet Wangchuk, who built a Covid-specialty hospital in a remote area of Leh; Swati Bheemgaj from Bilaspur, a nurse from Bilaspur, who learned the sign language to communicate with a deaf and mute Covid patient; Manikandand, an ambulance driver from Puducherry who provided 24/7 free ambulance service to those in need and Shugufta Ara, a nurse from Srinagar, who not only helped deliver more than 100 babies of covid positive mothers but also took care of newborns.

Talking about the initiative Anshul Khanna, Senior Director, Marketing  Foods, PepsiCo India said, Our healthcare heroes deserve our deepest gratitude and admiration for risking their lives to keep us and our families safe. The #SalutingOurHeroes film is our humble gesture to salute the dedicated service, relentless efforts, and unwavering spirit of our healthcare professionals. As a tribute to our heroes, this powerful film not only showcases the feats of incredible strength of our healthcare heroes but also fills us with hope, positivity, and inspiration. Keeping true to Quakers attribute of being Fuel for the Real Fit, we continue to support the healthcare community and are providing nutritious Quaker oatmeals* to hospitals across the country. As a brand that represents Fuel for the Real Fit, Quaker will continue to stand with the healthcare heroes during these challenging times.

Sharing his thoughts, Quakers Brand Ambassador, Vikas Khanna, said, In these tough times, our healthcare heroes have continued to shine. I sincerely thank all healthcare professionals and salute them for their extraordinary service, unflagging compassion, and courage. They have braved all the odds and are truly our Real Life, Real Fit Heroes. Through this special initiative, Quaker and I, extend our collective admiration and appreciation for these healthcare heroes as they continue to fight this pandemic and keep us safe.

Talking about the film, Ritu Nakra, WPP Lead - PepsiCo Foods, India said, Putting their duty before self, our healthcare workers have risked their own lives to save countless others. The selflessness and bravery shown by them in the face of adversity is inspiring for us all. Quaker honours their courage by paying tribute to them with our short film #SalutingOurHeroes. These stories showcase the courage, conviction and perseverance of our heroes against all odds, fuelling life and health back into the nation.

As part of the #SalutingOurHeroes campaign, Quaker has partnered with leading NGO, Smile Foundation, to provide over 1 lakh oatmeals* to more than 45 government and private hospitals and medical institutions across 7 states including Delhi-NCR, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Telangana, Kerala, West Bengal, and Karnataka. Some of the hospitals engaged through this initiative include Columbia Asia Hospital, Gurugram; KEM Hospital, Mumbai; Ernakulam General Hospital, Kerala; Rukhmani Bai Government Hospital, Mumbai; and Aarvy Hospital, Gurugram.

* 1 oatmeal = 40 grams of Quaker rolled oats.

Agency Credits -

Creative Agency: Wunderman Thompson

WPP Lead - PepsiCo Foods, India: Ritu Nakra

Chief Creative Officer: Senthil Kumar

Executive Creative Director: Sumati Singh

Strategy Leads: Atishi Pradhan & Arnab Datta Chaudhuri

Creative Directors: Sumonto Ghosh & Reshna Banerjee

Account Management: Binay Mehra & Gunik Kaur Gambhir

Production House: Veeville

Production team: Manoj Nair, Wayne Bento, Dilip Kumar & Methun James

Music Direction: Gagan Baderiya
Samsung, Indias most trusted smartphone brand, teamed up with National Geographic Traveller India to showcase Galaxy S21 Ultra 5Gs 8K Video Snap prowess. 8K Video Snap lets you pull out high resolution stills from a cinematic 8K video, so you dont have to choose between capturing stills and videos. Using Galaxy S21 Ultra 5Gs 8K Video Snap feature, National Geographic Explorer and Wildlife Filmmaker Malaika Vaz captured the majestic and gentle Tiger Sharks in their natural habitat. Malaika dived deep off Fuvamulah, the shark island of the Maldives, also called the Island Paradise.

This will be National Geographic Traveller Indias first-ever underwater expedition, captured using Galaxy S21 Ultra 5Gs pro-grade camera and flagship features. The journey video can be viewed on both Samsung India and National Geographic Traveller Indias social media channels starting today.

We are excited to unveil yet another episode of an epic adventure with National Geographic Traveller India, shot using Galaxy S21 Ultra 5G. At Samsung, we believe in innovations that enable our consumers to do more. A first-of-its-kind camera with pro-grade 108MP lens and 8K video recording, Galaxy S21 Ultra 5G changes the way you shoot. With industry-first 8K Video Snap feature, photography enthusiasts now have the power to extract high-resolution stills from every second of an 8K video. The splendid marine beauty of the Shark Island in Maldives has been beautifully captured by Malaika on Galaxy S21 Ultra 5G, said Aditya Babbar, Senior Director and Head, Mobile Marketing, Samsung India.

#UncoverTheEpic

As part of the #UncoverTheEpic campaign, National Geographic Explorer and Wildlife Filmmaker Malaika Vaz uncovered the beauty of Fuvamulah, the most splendid island of Maldives. The underwater video, with spectacular scenes of the marine life and the majestic Tiger Shark, one of the most dangerous predators of Shark Island, was shot using Galaxy S21 Ultra 5G. While Tiger Sharks prey on fish, they are both gentle and curious around humans.

Using the incredible camera capabilities of Samsungs flagship smartphone, Malaika Vaz captured the magnificent underwater scene in 8K and extracted high-resolution stills from the video. The video gives an insight into what it takes to swim with one of the most efficient predators underwater.

While filming underwater in the Maldives, I was surrounded by Tiger Sharks, Hawksbill Turtles, schools of fish and corals - and I was able to capture super high resolution video footage of these species almost effortlessly. Galaxy S21 Ultra 5Gs 8K Video Snap allowed me to focus on filming sharks - with the confidence that I would never miss an opportunity for a great set of images! As a National Geographic Explorer and filmmaker, I would say that my experience of filming on the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra 5G has been beyond special, said Malaika Vaz, National Geographic Explorer and Wildlife Filmmaker.

We are thrilled to work with Samsung and National Geographic Traveller India for this unique concept. After the highly successful National Geographic magazine cover captured by Prasenjeet Yadav with 8K Video Snap feature, this first-ever underwater expedition shot on Galaxy S21 Ultra 5G is absolutely stunning. The idea is to introduce a new behaviour in the minds and hands of the consumer and to never worry about capturing the perfect still. Now shoot 8K videos and when the moment is over, grab high quality 8K stills from the video. We are delighted to see this grow, said Emmanuel Upputuru, Chief Creative Officer, Cheil India.

Galaxy S21 Ultra 5Gs Best-in-Class Camera Experience

With the most advanced pro-grade camera system, Galaxy S21 Ultra 5G users can capture stunning, studio-quality photos in various lightings and settings. 8K recording allows users to capture videos in stunning quality and turn their best candid moments into high-resolution stills with 8K Video Snap.

The combination of anti-shake technology, 10x optical zoom and both laser and dual-pixel autofocus enables the cameras to produce results that rival those of high-end DSLRs. Galaxy S21 Ultra 5G has a quad rear camera that features an upgraded 108MP pro sensor, from which users can capture 12bit HDR photos with 64 times richer colour data and more than three times wider dynamic range. For the first time on a Galaxy smartphone, users can shoot in 4K at 60fps across all lenses including the front and the four rear four lenses.
In our attempt to safeguard our privacy and freedom of speech are we missing the big picture? Is right to privacy above national interest? Charu Raizada raises these pertinent questions in conversation with Pranjal Sharma, in this episode of Mrigashira.

Pranjal Sharma is an economic analyst, advisor and author of India Automated. He leads public discourse at global and national platforms, including World Economic Forum; guides projects on economic forecasting, business intelligence and public diplomacy to interpret policy impact on industry and society.

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Listen to the podcast here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1NCIMlGz0sPrh4jZgpKha4?si=ePZhuTwGT7mKEWhjnHKHng&dl_branch=1

Should multinational private companies be allowed to question the rules of operations laid down? Would you classify Facebook, Twitter and the like as a media company or as IT company?

Every company in a free open democratic society, every organisation entity and individual has right to question the government about any law and policy that is being done or implemented in an open manner.

Lets talk about the rules and regulations which concern technology companies. There is a three-way relationship between companies, civil societies, or the consumers and the government. Now, in this contract between these three stakeholders of our society, you need to have a rules framework on how to ensure that things work in a way that everybody benefits. And it is not to the detriment of any of the parties involved. So, with that background, I think its important that in the era of the fourth industrial revolution, where technology and such linkages play such a critical role in our lives, we need to reorganise, renew and rethink the laws and the rules that govern our relationship with them earlier. If you remember, when Google came up, it was the underdog, it was taking on the Microsofts of the world. And we all supported it. But now Google is the Microsoft of the world and it is basically deciding everything for everybody  from e-commerce and the app ecosystem, to what kind of content is promoted or established. And this is the same thing which applies to other companies, which are part of the big five or six as you may include them from Twitter to Facebook, which now actually own several other services. And you know, the size allows them to buy more companies and start-ups as they happen.

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So, WhatsApp, Instagram are very important examples of how Facebook has expanded its empire. Twitter is a standalone in many ways. But still, it has from being a global square of conversations, turned into something which a lot of people have concerns about.

On the one hand, our constitution talks about freedom of speech. On the other hand, the government is asking for traceability and transparency, is that justified?

Traceability is a very important question. But lets first look at the relationship between tech companies and users. All of us have agreed to the terms and conditions of the technology service providers and devices and apps that we use. How many of us are able to understand them, which is sometimes you know, 500 words, sometimes 2,000 words? Fundamentally, its a one-sided bag, either we use it or we exit, there is no question and there is no opportunity for us to negotiate that set of conditions that we take when we are downloading an app. If WhatsApp decides these are the rules, you have to accept it, there is no accountability, you cannot question as a user, all of us can question every other product and service that we consume from other companies. If you are buying an automobile, you know those companies have an accountability.

Today, these tech giants have grown to a level where their user community is bigger than any other country in the world. So therefore, they have said that we will set the rules and governments and nations and people and users have to follow it. Now many countries which are small, do not have the power and have not been able to question them. But the European Commission has put very strict rules. The United States Congress and Senate is questioning them too. So, I think India has every right as a sovereign country to reorient its laws to ensure and define what freedom of expression is.

If we again look at how, in a democratic country, freedom of speech is enshrined in our Constitution, we have a right to living the way we want to live and expressing our views. However, those have been established through a system and an ecosystem of checks and balances between state governments, we have political leaders, we have a ruling party, we have opposition parties, we have state level institutions, we have the judiciary, we have a non-government organisation. So, if somebody tries to curb our freedom of expression, so many different bodies can come and counter it. In the case of private companies, if they set the rules, they do not want any national law to be controlling them at the fundamental level, this is what is creating the current friction between the Government of India or our country and these tech giants.

Does seeking information from platforms like WhatsApp, which are end to end encrypted, go against individual liberty? Is right to privacy above national interests?

Freedom of expression and privacy needs a balance as well. You cannot have absolute sense of privacy in an open democratic society. Absolute freedom of expression is also not allowed. You cannot stand on your own rooftop and scream and abuse your neighbour, that is not freedom of expression. Freedom of expression means that you have to respect your neighborhood, you have to respect other citizens in the society. And the very fact that you have to respect fellow citizens means that there are certain limits and curbs on you.

Second point is, what is the cost of absolute privacy? Im not saying we should not have privacy. But the question is, what type of privacy? Are we willing to forego our sense of security in favour of absolute privacy? I think thats a dialogue that the society should have. A society has to take a call at decision and choose what it accepts as privacy and what it does not accept, and when is it willing to offer and give up its privacy.

India has had a strong legacy of looking at these issues from the time that telecommunications entered India, to the time of the launch of the mobile services, to now in the times of Internet communication. When mobile phones began, you remember, anybody could buy a SIM card, and anybody could get a connection. If you remember when we all had landlines, there used to be a phone directory which had everybodys names, addresses and phone numbers. If you asked for the same in the era of mobile phones, people will say it is invasion of privacy. The whole concept of spam mails and spam messaging, etc., has ensured that we dont allow our personal, mobile communication details to be made public. But there was an era before the Internet and mobiles when we had actually allowed the government or any service provider to make our details absolutely public. And there was no question and there was no worry about it.

When the telecom revolution with mobiles began, the government started saying, well, for the sake of security, wed like to know who this person is because if you are not making the public information public through a directory, then how do I know who is using what number? All the mobile companies protested and, trust me, all of us will agree, it has made our lives better. Hundreds and thousands of crimes have been solved.

All that the government is saying today are two things. One, let us know who created the message. And I think the government has a right to question that. The second thing that the government is saying is, you should appoint officers for grievance redressal. People who are employees of the company and who can engage with the civil society, with the consumers and with the government. Remember the triangle, I talk to you about the relationship between technology companies, government, as well as consumer bodies. Some of these companies like WhatsApp and others, and Twitter, even as we speak, are still struggling to appoint the kind of officers who were employees of the company to be responsible for some of these issues. So, there might be a fake case against any of these companies, or they could be a genuine case, but either ways, the company should have a mechanism to be able to deal with that.

Internationally we have bodies like the Internet Watch Foundation funded by the global tech industry to verify content. Do we have anything like this in India?

I think we need bodies which can speak for the consumer and the civil society. Unfortunately, what has happened is that many of the non-government organisations that we see speaking for the civil society are actually funded by the large companies. A lot of that funding is opaque through more than arms length distance. So, in the end, you will see that they tend to represent consumers, but they are actually representing the tech companies. And they always push that point of view in the garb of consumer interest.

I think we need such bodies. We need people who are completely agnostic of such influences to come together and create it. Im not aware of too many of such bodies; there may be some, but perhaps they do not have the kind of influence or the profile. But I am sure that with time we will get it.

What gives me strength is the fact that if you look at the food industry, its a similar parallel comparison. The laws about what is good to eat, which calories are good, whether too much sugar is good or bad and whether a food item should be allowed to be sold in the open market, is not decided by the food companies, it is decided by the food regulators of every country. The society and the government come together to say that we think these are the rules about what is good food what is bad food; give the right information and let the consumer decide. Which is exactly what we need as far as the technology companies are concerned as well  that the government should set the rules, inform people that this is what is happening, this is what is good, and therefore, ensure that technology companies are not the ones setting the rules for the other two stakeholders, which is the society and the government.

*Edited for length and clarity

(Mirgashira is a podcast for Indian PR and Communication professionals anchored by RadhaRadhakrishnan and Charu Raizada. To listen to all episodes visit https://www.mrigashirapodcast.com/)
As part of our series on PR Conversation, we at Adgully are speaking to some of the industry leaders from both PR agencies and the corporate communications world about how PR as a business and communication tool has evolved and grown over the years. In the last 10 years, PR has taken a different dimension, especially after the entry of social media in a big way. While the PR business has grown, some of the challenges that the industry is facing have also multiplied as clients are becoming more demanding and are expecting their consultants to be on their toes to manage their brand reputation, as news today travels fast and clients are expecting quick response and action in case of a crisis situation.

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In conversation with Adgully, Kiran Ray Chaudhury, Co-founder, 80dB Communications, speaks about the profound shifts  both at the strategic and tactical levels  in the PR industry today, fighting the growing menace of fake news, her agencys approach to business development pitches and much more.

The pandemic has shifted behaviours and trends across industry. What kind of shifts have you noticed in the PR industry? What are the client expectations today and how do you manage those expectations?

The PR industry is actually at a rather pivotal point. With more and more brands leading with storytelling to engage their audiences, versus directly selling, the need for PR services did not abate during this time.

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There have been profound shifts, both at the strategic and tactical levels. PR has had the opportunity to reiterate and showcase its strategic stripes in helping brands navigate what newer narratives could look like, examine and advise on not only the reputational implications of the decisions a company makes but in some cases what those decisions could be.

Further, the scope of PR also increased exponentially to address audiences, both internal and external and to consider all mediums, traditional and digital (including social). Therefore, the complexity of these multiple avenues, coupled with nano news cycles, has required agility and quality storytelling.

Weve indexed on being extremely supportive partners and extending ourselves to deliver to the best of our ability, helping raise the bar where and when required. Our clients have reciprocated equally and we feel that in a lot of places, our professional partnerships are stronger than ever.

There is a rapid change in the way digital is approached today. How is your company helping clients to manage and handle this digital transformation?

Both traditional and digital are equally important; in fact, the pandemic has once again brought them front and center. Each medium has its own importance and has to be looked at independently and as a whole to help achieve PR objectives and build out a cohesive communications plan.

While there is often an overlap between responsibility and ownership as to where digital and social lie, our communication plans incorporate all mediums of communication that could be relevant for a brand. Were bringing digital capabilities to the table and are constantly engaging with our clients to position opportunities in the digital space, and apprising them of the latest trends. This is ever-evolving, of course.

PR consultancy teams work very closely with the clients corporate communications team on all PR campaigns and messaging. Do you also engage with CEOs of the company to get his perspective and what kind of valuable insights and ideas flow from the CEOs desk?

The CEOs vision and objective-setting are essential to ensure a successful and on-point PR campaign. Since a CEO is at the forefront of delivering his vision to stakeholders, engaging with the CEO is critical for the PR function.

In fact, today CEOs and their brands are meshed closely together, which requires that CEOs be positioned and understood for their purpose too. Building out a CEOs reputation on social media, for example, has become increasingly important and it cannot be done authentically without their involvement.

PR requires strong commitment from the leadership and senior management. We are conscious that leadership is time-starved, and hence, we are looking at delivering in a manner that makes their interventions most efficient.

With the advent of social media, news travels fast today, especially fake news. Whats your view on this and being a seasoned PR professional, how does one manage to control and curb fake news?

Fake news proliferation, its management and response has become a key aspect of PR. It also confirms the need for both brands and its leaders to build a strong credible reputation that can help withstand this menace and counteract it when required.

Fake news has been around for some time now, and with it also developing its own humour in terms of information being cited off WhatsApp being referred to as WhatsApp University. With the proliferation of channels, the ease of sharing information, and the anonymity that it offers the creator today, makes creating and sharing fake news easy and a menace to deal with!

The impact of fake news can and does erode a brands equity (Corona beer, for example) and can affect health and relationships. A recent case in point is the misinformation around COVID-19, earning it the tag of disinfodemic. Measures taken to address this also hold the answer to address it. Guy Berger, Director for Policies and Strategies, Communication and Information at UNESCOs answer was to improve the supply of truthful information and ensure it meets demand.

There are several best known methods to help deal with fake news. The first being to acknowledge it and respond to it with speed to stem its spread. This can be done by leveraging authoritative voices, providing verified facts from reliable and independent sources and using mediums that enjoy the trust of the public. Here, the role of traditional print media becomes important and its growth in India, especially that of vernacular media is also a response to this phenomenon of a rise in fake news. Today, PR professionals have at their disposal many creative ways in which information can be distributed  via text and images, audio and video to appeal to both emotion and logic.

Circling back to my earlier point of companies and leaders taking the time to build a credible reputation  people trust people, and fake news can be addressed effectively by positioning trusted faces so that ownership of the communication is also evident.

Consumers on their part are also learning to combat fake news by referencing multiple news sources and questioning the news that they read and watch, turning to trusted news sources versus readily believing random forwards and unverified digital channels.

Relationship with a journalist is an art, which comes with years of experience. In todays scenario, when all of us are working from home, what is the engagement strategy that you follow with journalists to get the best out of them?

In any professional relationship, the crux boils down to the value you provide. By understanding our clients in depth, the industry that they operate in and the global-local context, one is in a position to conduct a meaningful conversation. Further, by understanding how the media operates, being in the know of their stories and being sensitive to their pressures are important aspects for any PR professional. All the ingredients that go into building and nurturing a relationship are relevant here too, making and meeting commitments being an important one, going the extra mile, being sensitive, make for a good rule of thumb.

Not all relationships are equal, but with time and effort, many can and do move from being mere acquaintances to becoming something more meaningful.

New business pitches keep happening in the PR world. What is the difference that you bring to the table to win businesses and is there any process or methodology that you follow which helps your strategic thinking become sharper and more focused?

We take business development pitches very seriously. First impressions count! We index heavily on research (primary and secondary) into the sector as well as getting insights from different stakeholders  customers, investors, industry analysts, media to develop a particular point of view and an understanding of challenges that the brand may be facing. Our secondary research covers online information, media stories, and the companys owned media channels that provide a window into their position, tone and competitors.

We always prioritise on offering creative and out of the box ideas that showcases our bold thinking!

Business development pitches are a great way to learn about newer sectors and ideas are never wasted. There can be so much cross application and it ensures that one is in a learning mode at all times!

Finally, what is your theory when it comes to ROI on PR campaigns? There are still no standard formulae designed and endless debates keep happening on this subject. What is your thinking here and how do you work on a win-win situation with your clients to evaluate the impact of PR?

This has been a contentious topic. Calculating ROI on PR campaigns is not as straightforward even as several measures  both qualitative and quantitative  do exist. Further, measurement of PR campaigns has to be customised as per the maturity or life stage of the company, the very nature of the brand and the business objective(s) it wishes to meet.

PR is best measured on the basis of objectives met, which could range from changing an existing perception, rebuilding a new one, ongoing reputation management or simply keeping the brand in positive highlights.

We are careful in ensuring that measurement is discussed ahead of execution so that there is clarity on what success looks like and effort is directed and the impact more tangible.
Note: When I turned on The Howard Stern Show at about 7:30 yesterday morning, he began his non-stop fear of Covid, and love for the vaccinations the moment I tuned in. Imagine my surprise when he began talking about the V Is For Vaccine protest outside the Springsteen on Broadway - which was for vaccinated only. He hates the unvaccinated and fears Covid with all his heart and soul and OCD. He used to turn his cruelty into comedy. I was so annoyed, I snapped a screen shot.



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Protest Against Segregation at Bruce Springsteen Concert for "Vaccinated Only" Attendees



New York, NY - On June 26, 2021 the largest public vaccine risk education organization, V is for Vaccine, protested what they are calling discrimination and modern segregation outside the first show of the new Bruce Springsteen concert series at the St. James Theater. Springsteen's shows are open to "vaccinated only", allowing only attendees who have received the COVID-19 vaccine. Concert goers were required to show proof of vaccination for COVID-19 to enter the venue.

The protest aimed to highlight how segregating vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals is a violation of civil and equal rights, with activists holding signs that replicated protest signs from the Civil Rights era. One such sign read "Segregation is morally wrong!"

Segregation is defined as the action or state of setting someone or something apart from other people, or things being set apart. There and many reasons people do not vaccinate, including previous vaccine injury or medical or genetic predisposition to an adverse reaction.

Springsteen isn't the first performer to impose this requirement. Just last week V is for Vaccine also organized a protest at the The Foo Fighters concert on the west coast, which was the very first full capacity "vaccinated only" concert in the country.

V is for Vaccine co-founder Joshua Coleman stated, "Our goal is to point out how this medically and scientifically unjustified discrimination is setting a dangerous precedent. We are supposed to be in an age where we have moved past treating others unfairly based upon prejudices and unfounded fears. It seems in this case history is repeating itself."
A plant in Chile is affected by late-blight disease. Researchers tracked the evolution of strains of Phytophthora infestans, the pathogen that caused the Irish potato famine in the 1840s. It continues to harm plants worldwide.
North Dakota continues to suffer from drought conditions across the state, with a wide swath in the north central region in extreme and exceptional drought.

Farmers and ranchers in the Washburn, Medora, and Rugby area talked about their concerns at drought meetings on June 15-16.

Gov. Doug Burgum and North Dakota Agriculture Commissioner Doug Goehring, along with others, hosted the meetings. The officials are requesting a federal declaration for an emergency and needed input from those affected by the drought.

Paul Anderson, a farmer near Coleharbor, spoke about his low-bushel wheat crop at the meeting.

In a separate phone interview, Anderson said moisture has been extremely low at his farm, but he did receive .70 of an inch on June 19. He raises wheat, corn, soybeans and sunflowers.

Anderson said he drove around his farm in June with his crop adjuster. His wheat crop had been planted into dry conditions, but it geminated and came up out of the soil with a poor stand.

By the end of the first week in June, there were no tillers left on the crop.

I stuck a 6-inch Red Bull can next to my wheat, and the crop was only half as tall  a 3-inch wheat crop, Anderson said, pointing it out to his crop adjuster.

My (crop insurance) adjuster said he thought the wheat stand we have this year looked worse than 1988, he said.

He also sent the photo of the can and his wheat crop to Goehring, who mentioned it during the meeting.

Goehring said with crop insurance, farmers cant zero out a crop without being flagged, and it should not have to happen in a drought emergency like this year.
LEDGER, Mont.  Summers on Montanas Hi-Line are bar none. The states big, blue sky seems to stretch just a little further across the prairie in Pondera County. For Cassie Andrews, a generational farmer who calls this area of Montana home, summers may be busy but they are also a very rewarding time of year.

The month of June has been nearly non-stop for Cassie, who farms alongside her younger brother, Brett, and father, Terry. The beginning of the month had them busy scouting their spring wheat fields and the middle of June found Cassie listening to hours of podcasts in her home-away-from-home  the Apache self-propelled sprayer.

I started spraying the second week of June and I got done right before the rain, she said.

Cassie was happy to say that on the night of Saturday, June 19, her rain gage recorded a quarter-inch of moisture. The summer rain storm was enough to cool down temperatures and offer the growing spring and winter wheat a quick drink.

The rain stopped Sunday morning and we went out early this morning and the fields are already dry, reported Cassie during a phone update on Monday, June 21.

North central Montana is notorious for its wind and Cassie says this year is no exception. Wind can quickly suck moisture out of the ground, especially if it comes coupled with warm temperatures.

Its supposed to be in the mid-70s for the rest of the week, but I looked at next week and it is supposed to be in the 90s, so its going to be hot, Cassie said begrudgingly.
"In 2017 there was a good amount of spring wheat cut for hay. This year, however, a few neighbors in the area dont feel the wheat will be tall enough to justify cutting. If they do, it will not amount to much." Crop Watcher Jeremy Stoecker shares a report:
This convenience store site on the southeast corner of 48th Street and Chandler Bouelvard is now owned by one of the worlds largest restaurant franchisees.
https://www.aish.com/ci/s/First-Chief-Rabbi-in-German-Army-in-100-Years.html

An exclusive interview with Rabbi Zsolt Balla, whos just been installed as Germanys first Jewish Chaplain in over a century.

For the first time in over a hundred years, the German military has a Chief Rabbi. Rabbi Zsolt Balla, a popular congregational rabbi from the German city of Leipzig, was installed as a military chaplain on Monday, June 28, 2021. The Bundeswehr, Germanys army, hopes to have ten Jewish chaplains working alongside their Christian counterparts to provide pastoral care for German soldiers.

Before his installation, Rabbi Balla spoke with Aish.com, explaining his unique life story and sharing his hopes for rebuilding Germanys Jewish community.

Holocaust Experiences

A native of Budapest, Rabbi Ballas family kept their Jewishness a secret for years. During his early childhood in Communist Hungary, Rabbi Ballas mother never mentioned that their family was Jewish.

This decision stemmed from unimaginable trauma. After Germany invaded Hungary in 1944, Rabbi Ballas grandparents, like other Jews, were targeted for murder by the Nazis. Thanks to the kindness of non-Jewish neighbors and benefactors, they managed to evade the Holocaust that killed 565,000 Hungarian Jews.

Rabbi Ballas grandfather worked as an electrician and was much loved by his non-Jewish neighbors. During the Holocaust, they helped him hide in the attic of his workshop. Rabbi Ballas grandmother and his mother were saved by the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. Wallenberg was posted to Budapest, where he did all he could to save some Hungarian Jews. He issued Swedish protective passports to Jews  including to Rabbi Ballas mother and grandmother  identifying them as Swedish citizens. Wallenberg managed to save over 11,000 Hungarian Jews in this way. (Arrested by the Soviets at the end of the war, he died in mysterious circumstances in a Soviet prison some time after the war.)

By the end of World War II, Rabbi Ballas mother and grandmother were sheltering in a basement, hiding from the brutal fighting that engulfed Budapest. My mothers first memory in life is of a Russian soldier coming into the basement and freeing them, Rabbi Balla notes. The first three years of her life were in hiding.

Rabbi Ballas father was a staunchly atheist non-Jewish Hungarian, and together he and Rabbi Ballas mother kept quiet about their familys Jewish identity  with one exception. When he was a baby, Rabbi Ballas mother arranged for him to have a brit milah. It was an incredibly risky move in Communist Hungary. By that time, Rabbi Ballas father was serving as a high ranking official in the Hungarian military: if it got out that his son was Jewish and had had a Jewish bris, his career could have suffered.

His father didn't attend the bris so that he could have some plausible deniability in case it was discovered.

Discovering Judaism

Growing up, Rabbi Balla loved reading the Bible, entertained by its many colorful stories and narratives. In 1998, when he was nine years old, he recalls that everybody knew the (Communist) system was over and that change was on the horizon. A local Roman Catholic church announced that it would offer Bible classes, and Rabbi Balla asked to go.

Instead of agreeing, his mother explained their long-hidden family history. Rabbi Balla had a sense of coming home: I was fascinated by it, he recalls. He relished learning details about his family history and Jewish life. It was like reading a book and finding out it was about your family. He discovered that his grandfather had been a Levy.

In the 1990s, there was a great wave of returning to Jewish life in Hungary," Rabbi Balla remembers. There were three Jewish schools in Hungary alone," set up after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Rabbi Balla attended a Jewish high school that was established by the Ronald S. Launder Foundation. The school had over 300 Jewish students, all discovering Judaism for the first time.

His Jewish journey was helped by a network of Jewish summer camps run by various Jewish organizations in Hungary  particularly Camp Saravas, also run by the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation. The camp brings together hundreds of Jewish kids from across Europe to spend a summer in a Jewish environment in Hungary. I knew I was Jewish but I didnt do yiddishkeit, Rabbi Balla explains, using the Yiddish word for adopting a Jewish lifestyle. When he was 17, he decided to start incorporating more Jewish practices into his day to day life.

He began by going to synagogue each Monday and Thursday when the Torah is read, and praying with tefillin. From there, Rabbi Ballas commitment to Jewish practice grew, incorporating Jewish holidays and Shabbat. When he was 23 he enrolled in the Rabbinerseminar zu Berlin, Germanys sole Orthodox rabbinical school  an heir to a famous rabbinical academy that was closed by the Nazis in 1938. He received rabbinic ordination in 2009.

Unlike many Orthodox rabbis, with the exception of one year spent living in Israel, Rabbi Balla has lived his life in Continental Europe. That gives him a unique perspective on the needs of European Jewry.

Special Jewish Community in Germany

As he was increasing his Jewish involvement, Rabbi Balla became friends with a wide group of other young European Jews who were also discovering their Jewish identities. Many of these Jews were from the former Soviet Union. Since the end of the Soviet Union, over 100,000 Soviet Jews have settled in Germany, revitalizing Jewish life in the country.

I never thought I would marry a Russian-speaking girl, Rabbi Balla chuckles, but when he met Marina, whod moved from the Soviet Union to Leipzig with her family when she was 13, he realized hed found his life partner. Like him, Marina was determined to help nurture Jewish life in Germany. They married in 2007 and moved to Leipzig in 2010, where Rabbi Balla assumed leadership of the Synagogue Leipzig, one of only two synagogues in the German state of Saxony to survive the Holocaust intact.

The vast majority of Leipzigs 1,300 Jews today are Russian speaking, including his own children. Hes been asked why Jews live in Germany and why he stays to minister to this unique community. He answers with a question of his own.

What if about 25 years ago, God came to you and said, I have 150,000 former Soviet Jews: where should I take them?' Rabbi Balla points out that some non-European Jews might suggest that this massive community of Jews would have been better off in Israel or the US or Britain or other sites.

But God didnt ask you, Rabbi Balla notes. He put them down in Germany. Now that such a large community has put down roots in Germany, he feels an obligation and an excitement to help these Jews grow.

Moreover, Rabbi Balla points out that other places with a robust Jewish community, such as the United States, were once considered less desirable places to live a fully Jewish life. You have no idea how this is working out in the long term," he points out. I have to do all my part to help it flourish."

Challenges of Anti-Semitism

German Jews have found themselves under fire in recent years. Anti-Jewish hate crimes rose sharply last year. In 2020, there were 2,351 anti-Semitic crimes directed against German Jews. A recent German report found that neo-Nazis were responsible for most of the crimes, though Muslim immigrants have also been responsible for many attacks. One of the most high profile incidents came in 2019, when a neo-Nazi shot two people as he tried to break into a synagogue in the city of Halle on Yom Kippur.

Nazism remains a persistent problem. In 2020, Germany partially disbanded its militarys Special Commando Forces (KSK) after members were found to have made Nazi salutes and pledged allegiance to neo-Nazi precepts. In 2021, an elite police unit in Frankfurt was also disbanded after officers were found to have expressed neo-Nazi remarks and shared Nazi symbols in group chats. In 2021, a German army officer went on trial for planning attacks while posing as a Syrian refugee in order to whip up anti-immigrant sentiments.

German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer has said that anti-Jewish crimes are not only worrying but also deeply shameful against the background of our history. Germanys Minister of Defense, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, has said that she hopes Rabbi Ballas appointment will prove to be a contribution against growing anti-Semitism, extremism and populism in society.

For Rabbi Balla, Germanys anti-Semitism crisis isnt only a German problem, its part of a growing threat against Jews world-wide. He points out that American Jews too have been buffeted by the same extreme Jew-hatred that exists in Germany. It would be very dangerous to see this as only a German problem. When it comes to anti-Semitism, we are all in this boat together"

Military Chaplain

While many news reports have called Rabbi Balla the first Jewish chaplain in the Bundeswehr since the Nazis took over in 1933, he points out that in fact hes the very first Jewish military chaplain in German history whos ever served during peacetime. Previous Jewish chaplains only served in times of war.

While the number of Jews in the German army is miniscule  estimates put it at between 80 and 300 soldiers  Rabbi Balla will minister to all soldiers, helping them maintain religious traditions.

My goal is very simply to strive to establish an environment where being a Jewish soldier in the German army is as natural as in any other modern NATO country. He explains that a key part of the Bundeswehr today is for all soldiers to go through ethical training so that they will never repeat the brutality of the Nazi years. I and future Jewish chaplains in the army will have to play a very active role in this. We are all responsible for each other.
Through the Value-Added program, the governments of Alberta and Canada will invest in projects that help processors grow their sales, increase market opportunities and create jobs.

Agriculture has served as the bedrock of our prosperity and continues to be a driving force in our economy. The Value-Added program is another tool for processors that will increase investment, create jobs, and grow our economy.

Albertas agri-food sector contributes $8.5 billion in gross domestic product (GDP) and employs about 73,000 people. The sector makes high-quality products and is positioned to provide high-quality, safe food to a growing global market. We have a great opportunity to keep this vibrant sector growing.

Were focused on attracting investment to improve our value-added processing capacity and helping the agricultural sector maintain and grow its markets.

The Value-Added program will provide new opportunities for Albertas food and bio-industrial processors, who make high-quality meats, dairy, grains, baked goods, pet food, and bio-products like hemp fibre.

Albertas modernized, simplified CAP programs make it easier and quicker for farmers, ranchers and food processors to get the funds they need to update or grow their operations. To make it even easier, the programs have been condensed from 16 to 9. Funding is limited, so I encourage people to apply by the program deadlines.

Find one that fits your operation and apply at CAP.Alberta.ca.
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PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP)  As shockwaves spread across the country from the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, corporate America took a stand against the lies that powered the mob. Or so it seemed.
Looking for a way to make a difference in the lives of others? Sulphur Christian Community Coalition  SC3 for short  is a good place to start. No other organization works quite like it to mobilize the compassionate. Few organizations offer the range of opportunities for breaking the genera
SULPHUR, La. (AP)  More than 45 years ago, Anita Statum essentially stumbled into working as an election commissioner, filling in for a woman who had cancer. Unlike todays rules, the job was simply given to her.
There has been an increasingly frenzied gusher of leaks from the offices of New York Countys District Attorney, Cyrus Vance, Jr., telling breathless journalists that the grand jury is about to indict The Trump Organization, maybe as early as next week. These leaks specifically relate to the sitting grand jury (which just continued a previous one dating back to 2018). These leaks tell the public that the grand jury will indict Donald Trump any day now.

Of course, the hyper-ventilating journalists are confusing an any day now indictment of The Trump Organization (a company) with an arrest of Donald Trump as a person. Within a few hours of publication of this article, Politico and other outlets are claiming that leaks indiucate there will be no indictment, while the New York Times claims, "An indictment against the business, the Trump Organization, and a top executive, Allen Weisselberg, could come as soon as this week in Manhattan."

Cyrus Vance, Jr. (photo credit: Saffie 55 CC BY SA 3.0 license)

However, some activists crow that if Trumps business is indicted, this will trigger a financial collapse of Trumps empire. They argue that all contracts will be automatically cancelled, and loans called in because TTO is under indictment (though innocent until proven guilty). Thus, they gleefully predict, Trump will be ruined. That makes Vances leaks more damaging than Giuliani allegedly casting doubt on Bidens status as President.

New York Penal Law  215.70 Unlawful grand jury disclosure says:

A person is guilty of unlawful grand jury disclosure when, being a grand juror, a public prosecutor, a grand jury stenographer, a grand jury interpreter, a police officer or a peace officer guarding a witness in a grand jury proceeding, or a clerk, attendant, warden or other public servant having official duties in or about a grand jury room or proceeding, or a public officer or public employee, he intentionally discloses to another the nature or substance of any grand jury testimony, or any decision, result or other matter attending a grand jury proceeding which is required by law to be kept secret, except in the proper discharge of his official duties or upon written order of the court. Nothing contained herein shall prohibit a witness from disclosing his own testimony. Unlawful grand jury disclosure is a class E felony.

One of the reasons why it is a Class E Felony in New York to reveal what the grand jury is doing is to avoid people being publicly smeared if they are never in fact indicted.

Why is the D.A.s office so desperate to make the public believe that  any day now  Trump is going to be hauled off in hand cuffs? New York City is of course extremely left-wing politically.

But even without politics, if prosecutors get their name in print, get a book deal, and land a cushy job at the Brookings Institution or a big law firm, does it matter if the gambit succeeds or fails? Democrats spent four years trying various attacks on Trump with no chance of winning.

Would prosecutors bluff witnesses and defendants? Ive seen it many times. Vance could be trying to squeeze witnesses to cooperate by bluffing that he has a stronger case than he really does. The media gambit could be to flush quail out of the bushes.

How do I know that the prosecutors do not have a good case against Trump? Because (a) they keep huffing and puffing, but (b) its been five months since Trump left office. The contrast between claims they are about to indict against the fact that they keep delaying speaks volumes.

If they do indict later, this long delay is still enlightening. It is not that hard to type up an indictment. Once all the evidence is in at a level where they can say an indictment is likely, all that is left is typing. That should only take a few days.

What is Vance waiting for? My conclusion is that hes got nothing. Trumps tax returns were already in the hands of New York tax authorities for years. The courts merely allowed Vance to have his own copy  officially.

First the leaks told us that Vances office was investigating Trumps companys transactions in the 1990s. That is way outside the statute of limitations.

Then we were told that, oh, no, the focus is on whether Trump under-valued real estate for tax purposes. Small problem: The government Tax Assessor tells landowners what the property is worth and what tax you are going to pay.

Trump supposedly over-valued real estate to get loans. But lenders hire their own appraisers.

You can tell a lender how much you hope to borrow. But you dont tell them what you think your property is worth. They dont care what you think. Thats what appraisers are for.

Or Trump over-valued real estate for insurance purposes: Small problem: It doesnt matter how much you value your property at for insurance purposes. If there is a loss, the owner must prove actual loss and the actual dollar amount. What you put down on your application does not control. So, if Trump over-valued real estate for insurance purposes, he cheated himself out of higher premiums. Or maybe he playing it safe if the actual amount of actual losses that are provable turn out to be worse than imagined. (Its like suing for a billion dollars. One still has to prove the actual loss.)

But now, in the latest version, Vances office reportedly is pressuring The Trump Organizations Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg to turn on Trump. Small problem with forcing people to talk: They might have nothing to say.

Now the issue is that TTO paid the tuition for Weisselbergs grandchildren, thereby reducing the amount of taxes paid by both Weisselberg and TTO. But thats exactly what fringe benefits do and exactly why they were created. Employers and employees legally reduce the amount of taxes paid in compensating the employee. And, yes, educational tuition for the executive or his family has always been an example of fringe benefits. Sure, the rules are tricky and often must apply to all employees. A particular transaction could get disqualified. But you dont indict over that.

Almost every company in the United States compensates employees, especially executives, with fringe benefits. So if now suddenly D.A. Vance tries to criminalize that well-established practice just because people hate Trump, it is going to bring most companies in the country crashing down because executives will revolt. Thousands of Wall Street professionals and investors will grab tar and feather, pitchforks and torches, and march on Vances office. Dont mess with their fringe benefits.

To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.
Joseph Goebbels faced a significant challenge when he accepted a prominent party posting in Berlin in October of 1926. While the Nazi party had some strength in the south and north of Germany, it had virtually no support in the capital, where the Social Democrats and Communists effectively competed in elections but the public barely knew the National Socialists existed. Goebbels set out to change this by staging provocations against his political adversaries, marching his uniformed followers into their political strongholds, forcing a response, drawing their protest, and thereby winning free publicity. When the Nazis were portrayed as a growing menace in the opposition press, this only served to enhance the image of the movement Goebbels was working to build. To further publicize the movement he founded a weekly newspaper, Der Angriff (The Attack) and used it to promote the party's vision.

In no small part due to his aggressive tactics, the streets of Berlin became scenes of political violence. Communist and National Socialist activists frequently brawled, and these brawls occasionally resulted in fatalities. As the Berlin police sought to stem the violence, Goebbels denounced them as agents of "The System" that both he and his communist adversaries were seeking to destroy. Goebbels worked to discredit the police by portraying them as little more than tools of Jewish interests deployed to squelch the true German spirit while simultaneously portraying National Socialist thugs as persecuted victims of "The System" he accused the police of serving. The demonization of law enforcement was a key to weakening the hated Weimar Republic; it also legitimated the comprehensive political rejection that National Socialism represented.

Goebbels was master of media manipulation who knew how to turn even the deaths of his own followers to significant political advantage. When National Socialist activists died in street fighting they were hailed as martyrs to the cause. For Goebbels, a dead activist remained useful as a rallying point around which the movement could coalesce; the deceased could stand as an example of the selfless devotion the movement claimed to inspire. He proved to be highly adept at delivering funeral orations; one might even say he never let a death go to waste.

Despite the ultimate defeat of the regime he served, the techniques of political warfare Goebbels pioneered remain powerful and effective, especially when they go unrecognized and unchallenged. While each nation's experience is unique, there is a certain malevolent logic at work in every totalitarian critique of the status quo, and parallels are apt to suggest themselves wherever such critiques are made. The anti-Semitic denunciation of an amorphous enemy ("The System") used by Goebbels as shorthand to identify the Weimer Republic as an illegitimate Jewish imposition on a hapless Germany has its contemporary echo in the charge of "systemic racism" leveled against the United States. With everything from the American founding to the use of innocuous phrases like "master bedroom" denounced as a cleverly disguised racist impositions, "systemic racism" serves to identify a persistent, ubiquitous, and yet highly nebulous enemy -- an enemy whose depredations (which we are assured may be found everywhere and at all times) must be aggressively exposed and denounced, though the enemy itself can never be concretely defined or precisely pinned down. As grounds for protest, "systemic racism" is little more than a ready-made catch-all trotted out as needed to fuel politically useful racial paranoia which the critical racist may then wield as a weapon against anything deemed deserving of devastating condemnation. As a politico-rhetorical weapon, critical race theory bears some likeness to anti-Semitism.

The parallels do not end there. The American media's recent treatment of law enforcement also reminds one of the political climate of Weimar Germany. The portrayal of law enforcement as little more than a uniformed band of unregenerate racists reminds us of Goebbels' characterization of the Berlin police as agents of hidden Jewish interests. The deliberate defamation of law enforcement using isolated incidents cynically woven into a critical racist narrative is one of the most shameful episodes in recent American history. To those of us who remember the public appreciation heaped upon "first responders" in the wake of the attacks of 9/11, the current effort to poison the public mind against these same first responders is nothing short of astounding. Yet it makes a certain sense -- if one thinks like Goebbels. While there may be a variety of motives at work, one could surmise, for example, that if one wished to centralize political authority and saw a need to establish a national police force in place of local police forces, what better way to justify this than by denouncing the latter as irredeemable racists in need of replacement?

Then there are the martyrs. In its role as amplifier of grievance, our shamelessly politicized media can be relied upon to continue parading before the public that hallowed list of names said to belong to martyrs of systemic police racism -- names one cannot fail to notice are made up almost entirely of politically unaffiliated thugs posthumously recruited into a political cause to which they had no connection in life. These morbid commemorations remind us of the worshipful treatment of the putatively heroic martyrs of the National Socialist movement on the occasion of their deaths. Taken as episodes of political theater, these funerary performances aren't so much intended to honor the dead or comfort their families as to indict the hated enemy and incite resistance to it, an aim Goebbels would certainly recognize; he understood the value of clarity, and he well knew that the world is so much less confusing when viewed through the lens of hateful oversimplifications. And so these names have been (and no doubt will continue to be) invoked to justify, even sanctify, episodes of rioting and widespread political violence. Criminality, then, in all its spontaneous ugliness, is conflated with legitimate political protest. The original criminal act is excused if the "martyred" criminal's race serves to advance the preferred political agenda, and mob violence is then effectively encouraged to support that agenda, which may in its turn be excused as a reasonable response to an intolerable outrage. Still, the martyrs themselves often seem to be victims of tragic circumstances rather than advocates of any political program, their elevation to martyr status purely a function of their race. Criminals of color that are killed in confrontations with white police officers serve to drive the narrative that any such outcome must be a racist act, and so virtually any criminal of color that happens to meet his end as a consequence of police intervention is a candidate for the list. The exploitation of tragedy for political gain is undoubtedly a practice as old as political life itself, and Goebbels was a highly skilled practitioner of this dark art; he eagerly sought political benefit even in the death of his own political partisans, but at least, unlike the American left, he wasn't a grave robber.

Recommended further reading: Lemmons, Russel, Goebbels and Der Angriff (Lexington, 1994)

Image: Heinrich Hoffman

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Americas top military leaders have thrust themselves into the national spotlight by their overt politization and cowardly acquiescence to the radicalized Democrat Party. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley, in Congressional testimony, defended the teaching and promotion of Marxist based Critical Race Theory throughout the military. He also linked what he categorized as rampant White Rage to the 75+million supporters of President Trump. The Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Gilday, defended the Navy-wide dissemination of an anti-White virulently racist screed.

Admiral Gilday testifies (YouTube screengrab)

Further, the Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, ordered a purge throughout the military of those he considers extremists (i.e., the supporters of President Trump) while tacitly agreeing with Joe Biden that the most lethal threat to America is domestic violent extremism, in other words, the untold millions of White people that supposedly advocate nearly non-existent white supremacy.

Beyond the pandering to the radicalized Democrat party is the sheer folly of deliberately defaming and alienating an entire segment of the population. One that currently accounts for nearly 60% of all active service members. As among the tenets of Critical Race Theory is the proposition that all White people are inherently and irredeemably racist. Thus, they are predisposed to racial violence and domestic terrorism.

The generals and admirals who cannot bring never-ending wars to a close, in their self-serving scramble up the ladder, have chosen to ignore the fact that the U.S. military is dependent on volunteers and that operational readiness is their primary mission. What will they do when the enlistment and re-enlistment rates inevitably crater as they continue to force feed anti-American indoctrination on those in the active military? What will they do when they are given a command to set upon or isolate American civilians under the pretext of domestic terrorism? Or told to use their offices and advanced technology to surveil certain segments of society on behalf of Big Brother?

Will they, as generals and admirals have done in the past, refuse to carry out unlawful and unconstitutional orders and resign? Or will they, in order to protect their exalted positions, acquiesce to the demands of their masters in the hierarchy of the Democrat party?

The founders of the United States were profoundly aware of the pitfalls of a politicized professional military. In fact, the issue of maintaining a standing army was a major area of contention among the framers of the Constitution. James Madison, perhaps the most vocal proponent of a strong but limited central government, was extremely alarmed at the prospect of a standing army. Addressing the Constitutional Convention, he said: A standing military force, with an overgrown executive, will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defense against a foreign danger, have always been the instruments of tyranny at home. Those that opposed a standing army assumed that the individual states and their militias could be quickly mobilized to construct the needed military to thwart any threat from a foreign power.

On the other hand, Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 25 argued that a standing army was a necessity as relying on the states was fraught with political intrigue and potential chaos. While Hamilton conceded that a standing army could pose a threat to individual liberty, he asserted that the Constitution provided the ability to maintain a standing army and prepare defenses while preserving the necessary checks and balances to prevent the military from endangering the liberties of individual citizens. Hamiltons views prevailed over time due in large part to ever-changing military tactics, weaponry and technology.

Hamiltons assessment that constitutional checks and balances would prevail was accurate for many decades, not because of the written words in the Constitution or because of any of the occupants of the White House or Congress, but because for 200 years, until the 1990s, the senior leadership of the military resolutely maintained their oath to defend and uphold the Constitution and not allow the military to be politized by any political party.

The current overt politization and determination to ostracize and demonize over 60+ per cent of the population has also informed Americas enemies of the turmoil in the Pentagon and the indecisiveness in the White House as well as the potential inability of the United States to field a viable military force in the future. In some ways these actions are tantamount to treasonously exposing the nations military secrets to the enemy.

Apparently, Americas generals and admirals have forgotten what they studied in The Art of War, the seminal work by Sun-Tzu, a Chinese general, philosopher and military strategist who wrote in 500 B.C., It is the business of a general to be quiet and thus ensure secrecy; upright and just, and thus maintain order. Also, In all history, there is no instance of a country having benefitted from a prolonged war. Only one who acknowledges the disastrous effects of a long war can realize the supreme importance of rapidity in bringing it to a close

Order is not currently being maintained and chaos reigns among the ranks as anti-American indoctrination of active service members runs rampant. Meanwhile, this nation is still involved in never-ending wars as China inexorably marches unabated toward global hegemony.

If there were any honor among Americas current military leadership, they would resign their commissions for allowing not only the overt politization and misuse of the military to happen but also for betraying the trust of the American people who for decades have viewed the military as the most reliable and trustworthy of all the nations institutions. Over the decades until 2019, 70-80% of all Americans had a great deal of trust and confidence in the military, today it is at 56% and rapidly declining.

But there does not appear to be honor among those that wear the stars of top rank and privilege as they are vociferously defending the dishonor they have heaped upon themselves and by default upon on those patriotic and brave Americans of all races that they command.

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By promulgating abortion, Biden is in a state of mortal sin and ineligible to partake in the sacrament. He would seem ignorant of Church doctrine that the bread and wine are concretely the body and blood of Christ; the Eucharist is the Redeemer again offering Himself in death. The ritual of the Eucharist takes part in the Passion, the redemptive shedding of blood and sacrifice of His life. This is true symbolism  not merely a signifier or metaphor, but, by participating in the thing it represents, the thing itself. This understanding has been lost to the modern mind, ritual and symbol devolved to habit and superstition.

Apropos of this current controversy, I'd like to alert AT readers to the recent publication of The Vulnerary of Christ  an exposition of the symbolism of the wounds of Christ sustained during the Passion in Christian art. It is both illuminating and illuminated with the author's woodcuts. The story of his life and work is also fascinating, and I hope to pique your interest by relaying it in a little detail here.

Louis Charbonneau-Lassay, born in Loudun, France in 1871, was a keen and admired archaeologist in his locale  publishing many articles on archaeology, Christian art and symbolism  and an erstwhile member of the Brothers of St. Gabriel. Over the years, he amassed in his home  a former commandery of the Knights of Malta  a large collection of artifacts, his own woodcuts of Christian symbols, and copious notes.

Encouraged to make this store of knowledge and insight more available for the edification of the faithful by gathering his materials into a book, in 1936 Charbonneau-Lassay completed The Bestiary of Christ, whereby he showed, in the style of medieval bestiaries, how hundreds of animals partake in the pattern of Christ and thus symbolize Him. This universal approach to the conundrum of defining the indefinite is quite opposite to the early theological apophatism, whereby the divine is described exclusively in negative terms.

Forces conspired against the dissemination of his knowledge: by the time publication was arranged in 1940 in Belgium, Nazis controlled the border, and moving books across it was fraught. Ultimately, only 250 copies were sold. The remaining 250 and Charbonneau-Lassay's woodcuts were destroyed in a warehouse fire. The Bestiary was not republished until 1974, posthumously.

Undeterred, inspired by a Catholic surgeon's experiments simulating crucifixion with bodies donated to science, Charbonneau-Lassay wrote The Vulnerary of Christ and thought it an important contribution, containing "things completely forgotten today, even by members of the clergy." Having published some excerpts in articles, he died in 1946. Happily, nearly two decades later, his family determined to publish, and it seemed the world would benefit from his insights after his death. The manuscript was collected by a prospective publisher. Those materials were never seen again.

That might have been that had it not been for Gauthier Pierozak, who, in creating an online database of the works of French metaphysician Rene Guenon, was commissioned by Guenon's children to assist with his archives. Guenon was a friend of and correspondent with Charbonneau-Lassay and letters between the two revealed the structure and much of the content for The Vulnerary, enabling Pierozak to start reconstituting the book.

Pierozak also learned that Charbonneau-Lassay had bequeathed his archive of "about 50,000 files, notes, drawings, engravings, pictures" to the grand master of the Knights of the Paraclete, a Christian confraternity he'd revived in the 1930s. The archives had passed among members of the Knights until their dissolution and were now lost.

Wonderfully, Pierozak was told of the whereabouts of these archives in Italy, invited to verify, consult, and ultimately purchase them. With their aid, Pierozak faithfully reconstituted and published The Vulnerary, 71 years after Charbonneau-Lassay's death.

Image: Angelico Press.

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I recall almost nothing from fourth grade except my teacher assuring us that communism in the Soviet Union was not the problem. No, the problem was merely the dictatorship.

Id like to relive the moment to ask him if we should just ankle that Nikita Khrushchev fellow pounding his shoe on the podium. He further assured us that communism ensured fairness. I guess its all those unpredictable dictators that scuttle the end of history.

Where were you when President Kennedy was shot, was a dinner group challenge back in the day. I remember I was in fifth grade waiting outside the principals office when he, Mr. Farmer, burst through the door and shouted, Some right winger just shot the President. I still wonder if Mr. Farmer was disappointed by those trips Lee Harvey Oswald took to the Soviet Union.

My junior high years were maybe too calm, so my parents moved us from Los Angeles to the Midwest. In my rural high school, I viewed my social problems class teacher with conservative skepticism. I once pressed him on his belief in the Soviets good faith intentions regarding nuclear arms control. I simply asked him why we should trust the Russians. His simple responsetrust is all we have.

With Irans uranium enrichment in mind, leftist thinking never evolves, does it?

My conservative upbringing suffered the most in college. Professors relished describing America as jingoistic and me and several classmates as reactionary. My cousin, bless her heart, littered her conversations with both words, most likely parroting her own professors. In pre-Yelp days, if students asked whether they should take professor so-and-sos class, the five-star advice was to just say and write what the professor wants to hear.

To gear up for graduate school, I attended a forum for the launch of a new progressive university in Illinois. The assembled panel of faculty members took questions about what their future students could expect. Someone asked about the universitys mission. A faculty panelist had the raw audacity and appalling honesty to admit, We came here to teach these hicks how to think. He chuckled knowingly playing to the room. All the suddenly former Midwest hicks laughed, too.

There is a grifter mindset in the leftists reliance on brazenly borrowed glibness, rhetorical flourishes and intellectual gerrymandering. When people can so easily separate the dictator from the ideology, assume and shout that Lee Harvey Oswald was a right-wing nut and spend their educational years proving they arent hicks by saying only what teachers want to hear, its so much easier to work a room filled people exactly like themselves.

Photo credit: Chris Dodds (cropped) CC BY-SA 2.0 license

Spruce Fontaine is the pen name of an artist and retired college art instructor.

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We all know the story of Evita Peron, perhaps the most influential woman in modern Argentina. They made a Broadway play and movie about her! By the way, the movie did not misrepresent her beauty and class. She made a point to be super-elegant, because Evita knew that Latin women like their first ladies to look that way.

During President Trump's visit to Argentina and President Mauricio Macri, the local media were crazy about Melania's look. In the end, Melania Trump and Juliana Macri stole the show with their fashions. It was a duel of first ladies that Latin women could not get enough of!

Few remember Isabel Peron, who became president of Argentina in June 1974 and was overthrown in March 1976.

The common denominator with the women was Juan Peron, husband and president. Isabel Peron was VP and assumed the presidency when President Peron died. Isabel was 36 years younger than Juan Peron.

Mrs. Peron's presidency was very difficult. She was not able to form coalitions, and the country's economy went from bad to worse. Frankly, I am not sure that any other person could have done any better. Argentina's economic problems came home to roost in the mid-1970s and threw the country into years of turmoil. Her husband left her a mess and she had no chance to survive it.

Mrs. Peron was overthrown in March 1976 and eventually moved to Madrid. She turned 90 a few months ago and has stayed out of public view.

Who was the first female president of Argentina? The answer is Isabel, not Evita, Peron. No one made a play about Isabel, and that may explain why history has largely forgotten her.

PS: You can listen to my show (Canto Talk).

Image: Picryl.

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Mitt Romney prides himself on being a thorn in President Trump's side, but he is just a gnat buzzing about the leftmedia that now revere him. He's become a joke but has yet to realize that.

Romney wins the prize among the pathetic group of RINOS who think they can vanquish Trump by treating him and his supporters like pond scum. The problem with the left and the RINOS is that they assume, with no hint of irony, that they are smart and the rest of us are not. Actually, it is they who are blinkered to the point of blindness.

They take for granted their revealed conviction that Trump-supporters and the American citizens of our middle and working classes are unworthy of respect, as are all those migrants they've invited to cross our border without regard for the horrific indignities they must endure on their journey north. The Biden/Harris administration knows full well that those women and children are subjected to all manner of abuse and torture, that each migrant must pay the cartels and can enter the country only with their paid permission and wearing a bracelet to confirm that permission.

But Romney now seems to love Biden and endorses his destructive policies all around. He loves to show up on the Sunday shows and condemn President Trump. The man has no scruples, no core values.

Had Romney won the presidency in 2012, he may have been marginally better than Obama, but, like Biden, he would never have put America first. He's a born globalist, which explains his affinity for Biden and the leftmedia. He hates Trump more than he loves America.

Romney is fawned over by the hapless Chuck Todd and venal Jake Tapper, two of the most radical non-journalists who have doled out carefully constructed fake news on a daily basis for years. No wonder their ratings have crashed. Romney is happy to be one of their stooges.

Todd and Tapper (and Wallace, Stephanopoulos, Williams, Maddow, O'Donnell, etc.) are long-term de facto activists for the Democrat party and do their bidding without regard for the truth. They now embrace the vacuous Mitt Romney. He's a traitor to his declared party and to the values of the Latter-Day Saints he has long espoused: the primacy of family and country. He's a nasty piece of work.

Romney voted to expel President Trump twice  over the phone call with the new President of Ukraine and then over the possibly FBI-instigated demonstration at the Capitol on January 6. This is why he was booed at the Utah GOP convention in May. He is the Liz Cheney of Utah. He has nothing to say about the damage Biden has done so far and is doing to our country in order to please Putin and the CCP. He dismisses the notion of election fraud, made a point on Sunday to insult the great and magnanimous patriot Mike Lindell and the best mayor N.Y. ever had, Rudy Giuliani, a man whose shoes Romney is not fit to shine.

Romney is a little man, not in stature but in spirit. He is a toady of the left. How the voters of Utah fell for his conservative act is a mystery. He is as transparent as Jen Psaki, superciliously venal. As for the people and businesses the Biden administration is destroying? Pierre Delecto, his once-upon-a-time Twitter handle, does not care; he's got his massive wealth and only means to protect and grow it.

On Sunday, he said, "There is a battle going on in the world right now between the nations like China and Russia and nations that believe in democracy. If the autocratic nations can point to United States which is the birthplace of this modern democracy and can say, look, they can't run an election there that is not fraudulent, how can you possibly run it in your country?"

He seems not to realize that (1) we are a republic, and our states have rights, and (2) by supporting the Biden agenda, he is supporting China and Russia. Biden is a bought and paid for tool, a puppet of both.

Like the rest of the left and the anti-Trump RINOs, Romney made a decision to dismiss any and all evidence of election fraud early on  fraudulent ballots, ghost voters (dead or nonexistent), machine tampering, not to mention the Soros-funded Transition Integrity Project , Perkins-Coie's successful plot to alter election law in all the swing states, and Molly Ball's gleeful confessional in Time Magazine. He clearly chose as well not to read the Navarro Report or the volumes of evidence and/or sworn affidavits Giuliani has made public; thousands of people have sworn under penalty of perjury that they witnessed election fraud in numerous states. Romney blissfully ignores any information that does not comport with his certainty that the election was fair, even though Biden could not muster a crowd anywhere throughout the campaign and Trump drew multi-thousands.

There was an article about Ghislaine Maxwell where she is quoted as saying about the young girls she provided (pimped) to Jeffrey Epstein: "These girls are nothing." That is exactly how men and women like Mitt Romney, Chuck Todd, Jake Tapper, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, et al. consider those of us without massive wealth and power: irrelevant, unworthy of notice, let alone concern. They are authoritarians at heart, which explains their absurd and overly aggressive campaign to vaccinate every single person without regard for the too often catastrophic consequences. Romney is of course part of the vax-everyone crowd. Unsurprisingly, he's on the global warming hoax bandwagon, too; anything goes when it comes to controlling the masses. As with COVID, fear-mongering is the name of their game.

Romney wanted to be President Trump's secretary of state, but he was not selected because he has virtually no knowledge of foreign policy. Neither he nor any of his five sons has ever served in the military. He was not qualified for that job. But he has had it in for Donald Trump ever since he failed to get the Cabinet post he wanted, and he has exposed his dark and toxic soul.

He should beware; "it is never wise to seek or wish for another's misfortune. If malice or envy were tangible and had a shape, it would be the shape of a boomerang." Charley Reese

Caricature by Donkey Hotey, CC BY-SA 2.0 license.

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On May 20, 2021, the state of Iowa passed a law "that requires all Iowa schools to lead the Pledge of Allegiance once a day in grades 112." Governor Nordman said:

We don't pledge our allegiance to a government or a leader. We pledge our loyalty to an idea  the American idea. We pledge our loyalty to the greatest social experiment to ever happen on this planet. This is why I believe the Pledge of Allegiance is so important.

However, the law also states: "A student shall not be compelled against the student's objection or those of a student's parent or guardian to recite the pledge." Reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in schools has been a topic of controversy for a long time, and it recently became contentious at a public meeting in Silverton, Colorado when the mayor banned the Pledge.

Should the Pledge be recited? And should children be taught the Pledge of Allegiance? Here is what I wrote to a group of teachers who were discussing whether or not a child should learn the Pledge of Allegiance:

There are a lot of lies being told about the United States and its history right now. The goal is to get people to hate our country, divide us, and make our country and Western civilization fall. (I have literally heard people say this.) Our country was the first country on Earth that was created that recognized individual rights  that each individual had a right to pursue his/her own happiness as long as the rights of others were respected. Before the creation of this country, people had to live their lives for a king or some other authority. Slavery was common at that time in history, and while it took time for change to happen (as it always does), it was the idea in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal that led to the Civil War and ended slavery in this country.

I understand that some people think that teaching children the Pledge is a form of indoctrination. Indoctrination is repeating an idea or belief to someone until they believe it. As this idea or belief is repeated, no proof is given for it, and no questions or discussions are allowed. The Pledge is not indoctrination if children are taught the accurate history of our country and understand the meaning of the pledge to our flag. The United States flag is a symbol for freedom, and freedom is essential to life. It stands for individual rights, and individual rights are essential in order to pursue happiness. When I pledge to the flag, in my mind I know that I am pledging to the original ideals put forth by the founding fathers: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Therefore, it is logical to say that you're teaching children about the fidelity that the Pledge represents  the fidelity of the concept of individual rights.

By reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, Americans promise to be true to these ideals, not to take freedom for granted, and to remember the countless men, women, and children who have given their lives through the centuries so Americans can live peacefully today. When children recite the Pledge, they are given the opportunity to think about their roles as citizens, the founding principles of their country, and may be incentivized to think more about the meaning and significance of the Pledge. The Pledge can stir up curiosity regarding their country and the desire to learn more about early American history.

Only when a person understands the significance and profound meaning of freedom that America has provided can one feel a stab of pride and patriotism. However, patriotism cannot be forced upon anyone. Therefore, the recitation should not be compulsory, which means no punitive action should be taken against children who do not recite the Pledge. When I was teaching, my children recited the Pledge once a week, and its meaning was explained to them. Anyone who didn't believe in God could leave that phrase out. I had a Jehovah's Witness child who did not participate, but would sit and watch.

The Pledge is a part of our history, and teachers should consider teaching it. Once a child grows up, he is still not required to recite the Pledge, so it does no harm to learn it and to learn about our country, as no child should be denied knowledge of his own country.

Charlotte Cushman is a Montessori educator and authored Montessori: Why It Matters for Your Child's Success and Happiness, Effective Discipline the Montessori Way, and Your Life Belongs to You. She has been involved in the study of Ayn Rand's philosophy since 1970.

Photo credit: Travis AFB, CC-BY-NC 2.0 license.

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"Ready. Aim. Shoot your big toe off." That's the Michigan's GOP's new strategy heading into 2022. In his report on election fraud that was issued last week, Michigan senator Edward McBroom's Republican-controlled Oversight Committee recommended that attorney general Dana Nessel go after attorney Matt DePerno and grassroots groups such as "Stand Up Michigan" and the "Michigan Conservative Coalition."

[T]he Committee commends the efforts of the Antrim County clerk, staff, and many volunteers that corrected these errors and gave their time for the canvass and hand recount[.] ... The Committee recommends the attorney general consider investigating those who have been utilizing misleading and false information about Antrim County to raise money or publicity for their own ends. The Committee finds those promoting Antrim County as the prime evidence of a nationwide conspiracy to steal the election place all other statements and actions they make in a position of zero credibility.

Dana Nessel is among the most left-wing, incompetent, blatantly political attorneys general in the nation. Her department contributed to a horrific flood in mid-Michigan in May 2020, fighting efforts by the dam's owners to lower it to relieve pressure.

Three weeks before the 96-year-old dam failed this week amid heavy rains and caused the worst flood in Midland history, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel sued its owner, alleging it illegally lowered Wixom Lake in 2018 and 2019, killing "thousands if not millions, of freshwater mussels." "Defendants wrongfully exerted dominion over the freshwater mussels and caused their death which denies and is inconsistent with the state's right to them," state lawyers wrote in an April lawsuit. Residents impacted by the massive flood say they are dumbfounded by the state's priorities, especially since federal regulators had warned since at least 1993 the dam failed to meet safety requirements.

And this is the person Michigan Republican senator Edward McBroom wants investigating those who call for a forensic audit. DePerno has fired back, charging McBroom and company with slipshod investigating.

The Michigan Senate has refused to meet with our attorneys and team of forensic experts to review actual evidence of election fraud. Reportedly, Senator McBroom (who has been accused in the past of violating people's constitutional rights) has gone so far as to instruct the Republican caucus to not review evidence for themselves. If they don't review the evidence, they can continue to say they have seen no evidence.

As for the video we watched of windows being covered in the TCF Center in Detroit, where Wayne County's votes were counted again, grassroots Republicans are to blame:

The descent into disorder with so many extremely concerned citizens elicited responses from poll workers that seemed necessary to them at the time, such as covering windows, calling police, denying lawful challenges, and removing challengers. Those actions by both sides were not always lawful or wise, and increased the angst and fears of the untrained challengers and observers, as well as the many in the public who did not understand what was shown to them by the media. Despite these mistakes and, potentially, illegal actions, the Committee found no evidence fraudulent activities were undertaken...

And so it goes throughout the report: A repudiation of conservative grassroots activism and only mild wrist-slapping where Democrats break the law.

Citizens across the state were left confused and frustrated by the arrival of applications for long deceased family members, those who have moved to other states, or persons never present at that address[.] ... [W]hile it may not be lawful to send ballots without first receiving an application, voting this ballot is not an illegal action by a lawful voter and it is not indicative of fraudulent or illicit behavior of the voter nor of an illegitimate vote. There was no evidence presented to the Committee indicating that hundreds of thousands of absentee voter ballots were mailed to Michigan voters without previously being requested.

Perhaps there was "no evidence" because Michigan's secretary of state, Democrat Jocelyn Benson, announced in January that she was cleaning up the state's voter rolls.

[T]oday Benson made publicly available the list of approximately 177,000 voter registrations slated for cancellation because the state has reason to believe the voter has moved away from the registration address. These individuals either surrendered a Michigan Driver's License to another state or had election mail returned undeliverable to an election official prior to the 2018 election.

McBroom's report fails to even mention the 177,000.

His report is an enlightening window into Michigan politics. The establishment GOP amounts to "get along and go along." No one in the Michigan GOP calls for school choice. Michigan's electric bills are among the nation's highest, so lawmakers support windmills. And on it goes. It's a party that could win if it truly wanted to.

Image: Steve Garvie.

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The New York Times' notoriously anti-Israel columnist Nicholas Kristof recently enlightened us with a highly hopeful piece titled "How Can You Hate Me When You Don't Even Know Me?" that shows how calm, emphatic reasoning can change minds  even of the members of the KKK.

If it is possible for "Daryl Davis, a Black musician" to "hang out with Ku Klux Klan members and neo-Nazis and chip away at their racism," persuading "some 200 white supremacists to leave the Klan and other extremist groups," then ideology can be indeed defeated by reason, it gives one hope that the Times' own version of the KKK, the one focused on bashing Israel, can also be reformed. The key question is whether Mr. Kristof, who kicks Israel with a delirious abandon at every opportunity, is as amenable to Mr. Davis's calm reasoning.

Let's apply Davis's methods Kristof himself. Here is the key: "One of Davis's methods ... is not to confront antagonists and denounce their bigotry but rather to start in listening mode. Once people feel they are being listened to, he says, it is easier to plant a seed of doubt."

According to the NYT's brand of anti-Israelism, the cornerstone of anti-Israelism is the notion that Israel is a "settler-colonial" entity, that Zionist Jews invaded Arab Palestine from Europe and "settler-colonized" it. This being the original sin of the birth of Israel, everything else is derivative, Palestinian terrorism being merely the fight of the indigenous population against foreign colonialism.

Having listened to this, we follow Davis's approach: but where did the Arabs who populated Palestine come from? They descended from Arab "settler-colonizers," who, in two centuries after the death of Mohammed, burst out of the Arabian peninsula and invaded, conquered, and "settler-colonized" half of the then-known world, from Spain in the West to the border of India in the East. So if you are an Arab living outside the present-day Saudi Arabia, or a White, Black, Asian, or Latino living in America  congratulations: you are a "settler-colonizer." The staff of the New York Times, Kristof included, are "settler-colonizers," or descendants thereof, as are the overwhelming majority of academics who lament "settler-colonialism."

"Settler-colonialism" out of the way, let's turn the ear to complaints about "occupation." There were offers to partition the land going as far back as 1937  but Palestinian Arabs invariably refused to consider them, the last such attempt having been made, by Ehud Olmert, in 2009. Agreeing to the partition requires a huge psychological shift on the part of Palestinians  an acknowledgment of the most basic implication of the Arab conquests that the land belonged to someone else before Arabs were on the scene  like the Jews, who had a state there for some 1,500 years before Arabs conquered Palestine. For some reason, Palestinians simply can't bring themselves to acknowledge this very basic fact. President Clinton, desperately trying to clinch the peace deal during Oslo negotiations, was exasperated when Arafat adamantly refused to admit that Jerusalem once belonged to the Jews. Contrary to Davis's conciliatory approach, Clinton decided to meet the challenge head-on and requested the corresponding volume of Encyclopedia Britannica as a proof, but Arafat was unmoved. Facts or no facts, in their minds Palestinians remain innocent victims of Jewish perfidy, not the unfortunate heirs of Arab conquerors.

Will this application of Davis's principles of discourse change minds at New York Times? Will the NYT turn its sights on what should be the real target of its indignation  Palestinian intransigence, not Israel's defense against Palestinian terrorism? If Davis could convince 200 Ku Klux Klan members to quit, why can't some two dozen members of the Times abandon their hate of Israel? Or is it too much of a miracle to hope for, some hatreds being too deeply ingrained, deeper than the Klan's hate for the Blacks? Will it be too hard for Kristof to follow his own advice and listen to the voice of reason, not to that of his inward, irrational hate of Israel?

Image: N.Y. Times.

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I will not stop rocking: Lu Lu Small is on the mend after major hand surgery
(Image source from: thehansindia.com)

Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister YS Jaganmohan Reddy announced Disha Police Stations and Disha App after a girl called Disha was brutally raped and killed in Hyderabad. YS Jagan launched Disha App today in the presence of hundreds of women in a public meeting that was held in Gollapudi village near Vijayawada. The women police will work as the ambassadors of Disha app told YS Jagan. He wanted every woman to download Disha app which can save them when they are in trouble. YS Jagan asked the officials to create awareness on the Disha app for every woman in the state.

Close to 17 lakh people have downloaded the app and all you need is a smartphone to use it. YS Jagan said that the app is a protective shield and can save everyone who are in danger. 18 Disha Police Stations are set up by the government of Andhra Pradesh and a new law was introduced. Several public prosecutors are appointed for Disha cases and special courts will soon be set up for these cases. Disha App can be downloaded from App Store or Play Store and it works with every smartphone.

Soon after the mobile number is entered, an OTP will be received that needs to complete the login process. All the details of address, emergency contact numbers and other details are needed. All the short videos recorded will be received by the Disha Command Control room when if any woman is in danger. The staff will alert the nearest police station and the protection team will trace the woman through the location provided. 'Track My Travel' can be used for the protection of women while traveling. One can dial to 100 and 112 which are emergency numbers.
Tollywood stars returning back to Work:- The second wave of coronavirus is coming to an end and several Indian health experts warned of a possible third wave of coronavirus from October this year. There is no clarity about the new releases and when the theatres would start screening films. All the top and young actors of Telugu cinema are returning back to work with their respective films. All the top stars are heading back to action from the first week of July. Nithiin joined the sets of Maestro and he completed the pending shoots. Actors like Naga Chaitanya, Nani, Samantha, Sharwanand, Varun Tej and others commenced the shoot of their upcoming projects.

Chiranjeevi will resume the shoot of Acharya from the first week of July. Balakrishna will resume Akhanda shoot from the mid of this week. Prabhas is shooting for Radhe Shyam in Hyderabad. Allu Arjun will resume the shoot of Pushpa from July 5th and Mahesh will start the shoot of Sarkaru Vaari Paata from the mid of July. NTR and Ram Charan are sweating out for RRR now. Venkatesh will start the shoot of F3 from July 1st. Varun Tej will complete the shoots of Ghani and F3 this year. Nani will complete Shyam Singha Roy and he will join the sets of Ante Sundaraniki soon. Finally, Tollywood is back to work but the business is yet to reopen.
Samsung seems to be testing its upcoming Exynos SoC with AMD GPU. A well-known tipster, Ice Universe, has revealed that the SoC appeared in the Wild Life test. He also included a screenshot, which you can see below the article.

Samsung is testing its Exynos SoC which is backed by an AMD GPU

That chip managed to score 8,134 points in the 3D Mark test. Ice Universe also mentions that the CPU in this test is based on an A77 architecture. Results from these tests are probably way off, though.

That being said, Samsung is expected to announce its first Exynos SoC with AMD GPU this year. The chip is rumored to be called the Exynos 2200, which makes sense considering that the existing one is the Exynos 2100.

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Based on reports, that GPU will be incredibly powerful. The Galaxy S22 series is expected to debut this processor in Q1 next year. Well, at least devices in some regions are expected to do so.

As many of you know, Samsung included Exynos SoCs in European and Indian models thus far, while users in the US and China got Snapdragon variants. It remains to be seen if the company will continue with that practice, or will it change things around.

The Exynos 2100 trails behind its Snapdragon counterpart

The Exynos 2100, and a number of its predecessors, couldnt really compete with their Snapdragon counterparts. The Exynos 2100 is heating up more than the Snapdragon 888, and it causing some throttling for users.

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The performance between those two processors is well, different. It remains to be seen what will the Exynos 2200 deliver. Users are surely expecting some major improvements, and a similar experience to its upcoming Snapdragon counterpart, if not better.

That AMD GPU inside the chip will surely benefit gamers the most. It is expected to be a lot more powerful than anything else on the market. The chip itself is expected to benefit from the inclusion of this GPU in general. Well see how everything will be implemented, though.
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Bubble arrangements and self-isolation for school pupils should end as soon as possible, the new Childrens Commissioner for England has said.

Dame Rachel de Souza said there was an urgent need for children to get back to normal as lockdown restrictions had been a real trauma for many young people.

Her call came as The Guardian reported ministers are preparing to overhaul the system for schools in England when they return in September following the summer break.

The paper said an announcement may be made in the coming days to allow schools time to prepare, with the requirement to quarantine expected to be replaced with a new testing regime.

Currently children have to self-isolate for 10 days if another pupil in their bubble tests positive for coronavirus.

It has resulted in a sharp rise in pupils off school for Covid-related reasons, with the latest official figures showing 239,000 children in England missing classes  as the numbers trebled in the space of a week.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Dame Rachel said the need for children to go in and out of isolation was a really big issue and was proving incredibly frustrating for pupils and teachers alike.

With bubbles, I think everybody would like it if we could get back to normal, as soon as possible. Obviously we have to be safe, and we have to take advice, but its very very restrictive, she said.

(PA Graphics)

The experience of lockdown has been a real trauma, and I think we shouldnt underestimate it. Children are really troubled, and its right across the board.

Dame Rachel said young people, who had seen their normal childhood disrupted in order to protect older people, were now struggling with their mental health.

They have done a huge amount for us, I mean they really were the least at risk of this and theyve given up 19 weeks of their education, theyve had all this anxiety and concern and exams cancelled; theyve taken a big burden for us, she said.

The commissioner said although adults largely assumed kids are resilient, theyll bounce back, the results this year of a sweeping survey on British pupils dubbed The Big Ask showed they are telling us that they have got these worries and we need to listen to them.

The survey of more than 550,000 children, run by the office of the Childrens Commissioner, had shown mental health was the biggest concern for 20% of respondents, a figure that rose to 40% for those aged 14-17, the Telegraph reported.

A former teacher herself, Dame Rachel said she had real concern for nursey-aged children and those starting school, who were at an age when they need to be playing and learning and developing language skills but were instead stuck inside for too long.

Her warning came as official figures on Monday showed another rise in infections with almost 23,000 lab-confirmed cases  the highest daily rise since January 30.

Sajid Javid has said people will have to learn to live with Covid-19 (Jessica Taylor/UK Parliament/PA)

They came amid continuing concerns over the spread of the Delta variant with Portugal, Spain, Malta and Hong Kong announcing new restrictions on tourists from the UK.

Despite the increase, new Health Secretary Sajid Javid said there was no reason why the final stage of lockdown lifting in England should not go ahead as planned.

In a Commons statement, he said the country would have to  learn to live with the disease as there was no zero risk option.

His comments were welcomed by Tory MPs who believed they signalled a more robust approach to ending restrictions than was the case under his predecessor Matt Hancock.

Mr Hancock resigned at the weekend after admitting he had broken social-distancing rules after footage emerged of him kissing a close aide in the Department of Health and Social Care.
Coronation Street is to air a storyline highlighting the plight faced by disabled workers during the pandemic, the makers of the programme have said.

The ITV soap will show Izzy Armstrong, who is played by Cherylee Houston, trying to work from home and struggling to keep up with the workload, a statement said.

She will be threatened with dismissal if she refuses to return to work in person.

Cherylee Houston (Matt Crossick/PA)

The scenes were filmed at home by Houston, who has been shielding, and her partner Toby Hadoke, who will also play Izzys concerned neighbour Fergus.

Houston said: I have been unbelievably fortunate that my employers enabled me to continue shielding after the official shielding guidance ended in March.

Ive been so supported by ITV, but Im aware that many of my disabled peers who were previously shielding havent had that safety and have been forced to make the decision to earn money to survive whilst facing the real fear of death or serious illness through Covid.

Cherylee Houston (Coronation Street/PA)

She added: We are employees, carers, frontline workers, volunteers and a key part of every community.

The pandemic has had an incredible impact on many disabled people due to social isolation, certain services being unavailable and a lack of understanding.

Coronation Street producer Iain MacLeod said: We had to think outside the box in order to tell this story, devising new protocols and ways of scripting scenes that would allow Cherylee to film the scenes herself in her home.

It certainly helped that her partner Toby is a fabulous actor.

Despite all the technical challenges we had to overcome, this was a story that needed telling and I hope it will resonate with millions of people who have found themselves in a similar position to Izzy  and perhaps open the eyes of millions of others who had little awareness of the issues facing disabled people during Covid.
An organisation accused of ending the employment of a woman due to her belief that people cannot change their biological sex is set to return to court after losing an appeal earlier this month.

Tax expert Maya Forstater has been embroiled in a legal battle with think tank the Centre for Global Development (CGD) after her contract was not renewed in March 2019.

Ms Forstaters case is that her employment ended after she posted tweets opposing Government proposals to reform the Gender Recognition Act to allow people to identify as the opposite sex.

Ms Forstater originally took her case to an employment tribunal on the grounds that her dismissal constituted discrimination against her beliefs.

But employment judge James Tayler previously dismissed her claim, saying her views are absolutist in her view of sex.

During the employment appeal tribunal in April, she reiterated her views that biological sex is real, important, immutable, and not to be conflated with gender identity.

But following an appeal, High Court judge Mr Justice Choudhury said the original tribunal had erred in law.

Finding in favour of Ms Forstater, the High Court judge said her views may well be profoundly offensive and even distressing, but said they must be tolerated in a pluralist society.

Mr Justice Choudhury added: This judgment does not mean that those with gender-critical beliefs can misgender trans persons with impunity.

CGD described the ruling as a step backwards for inclusivity and equality for all.

On Monday evening, it announced it accepted that gender critical beliefs may be protected in law, but said it would be bringing the case back to the lower Employment Tribunal to dispute Maya Forstaters version of events.

Amanda Glassman, executive vice president of CGD, said: After careful consideration and consultation about the various legal paths ahead of us, we have decided to fight the next phase of this case back in the Employment Tribunal.

While we are disappointed in the recent ruling by the Employment Appeal Tribunal, we note that the judgment makes clear that while gender-critical beliefs may be protected, actions that harass or discriminate against trans people cannot be undertaken with impunity.

Ms Glassman continued: We will not appeal that ruling, but we will now return to the Employment Tribunal to make our case and dispute Maya Forstaters version of events.

We seek to protect our right and our obligation to maintain a workplace that is welcoming, safe, and inclusive to trans people and any vulnerable minority groups.

We stand by our values of inclusion and that all people should be treated with respect and dignity.

In the wake of Mr Justice Choudhurys ruling, Ms Forstater said: No-one can be forced to profess a belief they do not hold, like trans women are women and trans men are men, and punished if they refuse.

Im proud of the role that Ive played in clarifying the law and inspiring more people to speak up but we cant leave the burden on individuals to put this right.
WINTHROP, Mass. (AP)  Authorities are investigating whether a man who killed two people in the Boston suburb of Winthrop targeted the victims because they were Black after officials found troubling white supremacist rhetoric in the gunman's handwriting, a prosecutor said Sunday.

Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins, who identified the shooter as 28-year-old Nathan Allen, said investigators uncovered writings that express anti-Semitic and racist statements against Black individuals.

Authorities say Allen shot and killed David Green, a retired Massachusetts State Police trooper, and Romana Cooper, an Air Force veteran, after emerging from a stolen truck that he crashed into a building on Saturday afternoon. Officials have described them as innocent bystanders. Allen was fatally shot by police moments later.

This photo provided by the Massachusetts District Attorney's office shows Ramona Cooper, a 60-year-old Air Force veteran, who was shot and killed, Saturday, June 26, 202, in Winthrop, Mass. Family and friends are mourning the two bystanders killed Saturday afternoon by a white gunman in a Boston suburb in an attack officials are treating as a hate crime. David Green, a 68-year-old retired Massachusetts State Police trooper, and Ramona Cooper were each shot multiple times by 28-year-old Nathan Allen after he crashed a stolen truck into a building in Winthrop. (Massachusetts District Attorney's Office via AP)

The shooter walked by several other people that were not Black and they are alive. They were not harmed, Rollins told reporters Sunday. They are alive and these two visible people of color are not. We will continue to look and see, she said.

Rollins did not provide more details about the suspect's writings or where they were found. She cautioned that the investigation is in its early stages, but said that "these families deserve answers and we will find out what happened here.

Green retired from state police in 2016 and worked in law enforcement for nearly 40 years, said Massachusetts State Police Col. Christopher Mason. Green was shot outside his home, Mason said.

CORRECTS SPELLING OF NAME TO RAMONA NOT ROMANA This photo provided by the Massachusetts State Police shows retired Massachusetts State Police trooper David Green who was shot and killed, Saturday, June 26, 2021, in Winthrop, Mass. Family and friends are mourning the two bystanders killed Saturday afternoon by a white gunman in a Boston suburb in an attack officials are treating as a hate crime. Green, a 68-year-old retired Massachusetts State Police trooper, and Ramona Cooper, a 60-year-old Air Force veteran, were each shot multiple times by 28-year-old Nathan Allen after he crashed a stolen truck into a building in Winthrop. (Massachusetts State Police via AP)

Trooper Green was widely respected and well-liked by his fellow Troopers, several of whom yesterday described him as a true gentleman and always courteous to the public and meticulous in his duties," Mason said in an emailed statement. From what we learned yesterday, he was held in equally-high regard by his neighbors and friends in Winthrop.

A state police spokesperson said Saturday that officials are investigating whether the male victim may have been trying to engage the suspect to end the threat.

Herb Silk places flowers on a fence outside a building in Winthrop, Mass., on Monday, June 28, 2021, where an armed man crashed a hijacked truck, Saturday, June 26, 2021, then fatally shot two people before being killed by police. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)

On Sunday, mourners gathered at the scene while some residents left flowers near the destroyed building, The Boston Globe reported.

Brian Marks, who owns the building that was destroyed, told the Globe that he was in utter shock" when he saw what happened Saturday.

I rushed down and came to what, to me, looked like something out of a movie or something, he said.

Bob Harrington, who lives across from the building, said he heard loud crashes, saw the man get out of the truck and walk down the street and then shortly after heard gunshots. He then saw a woman lying on the ground, he said.
A Serbian expert has described what happened in China in the last century as the "Chinese miracle," noting the main contributors to that miracle are the Communist Party of China (CPC) and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

In the center of Belgrade, inside a classic building from the early 1930s, is the Institute of International Politics and Economics. One of its top researchers is Ivona Ladjevac. She leads the Regional Belt and Road Center, a part of the institute. She is one of Serbia's top experts on China, yet her area of expertise goes beyond Serbia-China bilateral relations. Her doctoral dissertation was about the strategic partnership between Russia and China within the global security context.

CGTN spoke with Ladjevac in Belgrade about the CPC's impacton China's development during the last century.

"Well, I have to admit that my first visit to China was in 2011. I went there full of prejudices based on the Western media, of course. I was expected to see an underdeveloped country. But when I got there, I was surprised to see the modern country with huge buildings and people who are well educated," Ladjevac said, starting our half-hour discussion.

She continued with her perspective on how the Western media show bias when reporting about China and how they are ramping up the negative stereotypes about the Chinese people and society. Her experiences in China were quite the opposite.

"All the people that I met there were very sincere, and they were very open towards me, and they wanted to share with me their knowledge."

She also labeled CPC's actions during the COVID-19 pandemic as remarkable.

"They managed to preserve the lives of their citizens, and above that, they succeeded in implementing everything that they planned. That proposal made by President Xi is something that will keep him in history as a very significant person of the 21st century."

In the end, Ladjevac sent a message to China's citizens and the CPC members: "I would like to greet the CPC members and all citizens of China happy first hundred years of existence. I believe that they will have many, many more such important anniversaries. All of them will be as successful as this one. And this year, they are celebrating under the circumstances and conditions when the poverty line and the poverty is eradicated. And I'm sure that the next anniversary will be in green and beautiful China."

(CGTN)
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The senior CBI officials are expected to arrive in the state capital on Tuesday

The ISRO spy case had erupted in 1994 in Kerala when Narayanan was arrested on charges of espionage. (Photo: ANI/File)

Thiruvananthapuram: The Delhi Special Unit of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), probing the alleged framing of space scientist Nambi Narayanan in the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) espionage case, reached Kerala on Monday.

The senior CBI officials are expected to arrive in the state capital on Tuesday as the probe team is planning to record the statement of scientist Nambi Narayanan.

The development came after CBI filed an FIR marked as classified in the Thiruvananthapuram Chief Judicial Magistrate (CJM) court accusing 18 persons including former police officials of hatching a conspiracy.

The police officials named include the then head of Special Investigation Team (SIT) that probed the ISRO scandal Siby Mathews, along with others in the team including --- A Vijayan, Thampi S Durgadutt, then City Police Commissioner V R Rajeevan and then Deputy Director, Intelligence Bureau, RB Sreekumar.

In April, the Supreme Court had ordered the CBI to look into the Justice DK Jain Committee report on senior Kerala police officials who allegedly framed Narayanan in the ISRO espionage case.

The Supreme Court also had barred the public circulation of the contents of the report.

The ISRO spy case had erupted in 1994 in Kerala when Narayanan was arrested on charges of espionage along with another senior official of ISRO, two Maldivian women and a businessman.

It had created a political storm in the state as the inner party feud in Congress was at its peak and the then Chief Minister K Karunakaran had to resign over the case.
The accused have been identified as Dinesh Rai and Nihal Sinha, both residents of Patna in Bihar

During investigation, a statement of the complainant's account and a copy of the fake cheques were obtained, the police said. (Representational image)

New Delhi: Two persons were arrested for allegedly withdrawing Rs 97,500 from the bank account of BJP MP Sakshi Maharaj using fake cheques, the Delhi Police said on Monday.

The accused have been identified as Dinesh Rai (30) and Nihal Sinha (27), both residents of Patna in Bihar, the police said.

They said a case of cheating and forgery was registered at Parliament Street police station on a complaint that someone had withdrawn Rs 97,500 from BJP MP Sakshi Maharaj's bank account using three fake cheques. The original cheques were with Sakshi Maharaj and the accused had also forged his signature.

During investigation, a statement of the complainant's account and a copy of the fake cheques were obtained, the police said.

Sinha was traced to Patna and arrested during a raid. ATM cards of different banks were recovered from him, a senior police officer said.

On Sinha's instance, Rai was also nabbed from the city. A fake cheque and debit cards were recovered from his possession, the officer said.

During interrogation, it was found that Rai was the kingpin of the racket. He arranged the fake cheques and gave them to Sinha. They used to present these cheques at banks and would get the money credited to different accounts. Later, they would withdraw the money from these bank accounts, the officer said.
The agenda of the parliamentary panel meeting is to safeguard citizens' rights and prevent the misuse of social/online news media platforms

Facebook and Google representatives were called days after Twitter officials deposed before the panel. (AFP file Photo)

New Delhi: Facebook and Google officials here Tuesday deposed before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology on the issue of misuse of social media platforms.

The panel chaired by Congress MP Shashi Tharoor had asked the officials of the social media sites to appear in-person on the issue.

While from Facebook its country public policy director Shivnath Thukral and general counsel Namrata Singh deposed before the panel, Google was represented by its country head (government affairs and public policy) Aman Jain and director (legal) Gitanjali Duggal.

The agenda of the parliamentary panel meeting is to safeguard citizens' rights and prevent the misuse of social/online news media platforms.

Earlier, Facebook representatives had informed the parliamentary panel that their company policy does not allow their officials to attend in-person meetings because of their Covid-related protocol.

But Chairman Shashi Tharoor conveyed to Facebook that its officials will have to appear in-person since the parliament secretariat does not allow any virtual meetings.

The Parliamentary Committee on IT will also summon representatives of YouTube and other Social Media Intermediaries in the coming weeks over the issue.

Facebook and Google representatives were called days after Twitter officials deposed before the panel.

In the last meeting, several members of the panel had categorically told Twitter that the rule of land is supreme not the social media platform's policies.
The controversy erupted on Monday as a user flagged Twitter for displaying a distorted India map on its website under the header Tweep Life

Twitter is already engaged in a tussle with the Indian government over the new social media rules. (PTI Photo)

Twitter India MD Manish Maheshwari was booked in Uttar Pradesh's Bulandshahr district on Tuesday amid fresh controversy over the website showing a distorted map of India. An FIR was lodged against Maheshwari along with another company official by a Bajrang Dal office-bearer's complaint at the Khurja Nagar police station. This is the second FIR that has been filed against the social media giant in UP amidst its standoff with the government.

The controversy erupted on Monday as a user flagged Twitter for displaying a distorted map of India on its website under the header 'Tweep Life'. This is the second time that Twitter has misrepresented the map of India. The map was later removed from the website after backlash from netizens. Earlier, Twitter had shown Leh as part of China.

Twitter displayed a distorted map of India on its website that showed J&K, Ladakh as separate country. (Website photo)

According to PTI, the complaint filed by Bajrang Dal stated, "The world map does not show Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir as parts of India. This is not a coincidence. This act has hurt the sentiments of Indians, including me."

The FIR has also named Amrita Tripathi, News Partnerships Head as an accused. Both Maheshwari and Tripathi have been booked under IPC's section 505 (2) (public mischief). Charges under Information Technology Act section 74 (publication for fraudulent purpose) have also been invoked in the case, as reported by PTI.

Twitter is already engaged in a tussle with the Indian government over the new social media rules. The US digital giant was slammed by the government for deliberate defiance and failure to comply with the country's new IT rules, which led to the microblogging platform losing its legal shield as an intermediary in India, and becoming liable for users posting any unlawful content.
19 Best Beach Towels of Summer 2021

19 Beach Towels for Every Kind of Guy

The AskMen editorial team thoroughly researches & reviews the best gear, services and staples for life. AskMen may get paid if you click a link in this article and buy a product or service.

Product photos from retailer site.

Summertime, and the livins easy. At least, it should be. Summer 2021 might go down as the most traveled summer in American history. OK, that might be a bit much to say now, but according to TripAdvisor, this summer travel trends are really heating up.

RELATED: Best Bathing Suits for Men

Over two-thirds of Americans (67%) are planning to travel this summer (June 1 - August 31), which is a 17% increase from those who traveled this spring (March 1- May 31). Millennials are the most excited to get back out there with the vast majority (72%) of the generation planning trips. Although many still plan to drive to their destination (43%), 19% plan to fly, up 4% from this spring, the study shows.

Additionally: Of those planning to travel, 74% of Americans will take a domestic trip and over half (53%) of Americans plan to spend more on trips this year vs. last summer, rising to 66% for millennials. Globally, Americans are the biggest summer spenders, planning to shell out 9% more than the average traveler around the world.

So what does this all mean? It means its time to up your summer game and find the best bathing suits, sunglasses, sunscreen, and yes, the best beach towels for the first summer post(ish)-pandemic.

Be it a fun beach towel, a large beach towel, a round microfiber towel, or even a standard beach towel that doubles as a bath towel you can just throw in your beach bag, below, you will find our picks for the 19 best beach towels for your next 2021 beach day, and every beach day beyond.

Best Beach Towels

Turkish Towels Striped Beach Towel

Turkish towels are the quality beach towel gold standard when it comes to drying yourself off at the beach because of their superior softness. Turkish cotton is composed of super long fibers, which makes for a stronger towel with a smoother feel. This 37-by-67 inch striped towel, from the aptly named Turkish Towels, uses absorbent Turkish cotton and is actually manufactured in Turkey. Its classic navy and cream color combo means that as it gets softer with each trip to the beach, it will never go out of style. At this price, we consider this luxury linen a major steal.

$34.98 at Huckberry.com

Brooklinen Cotton Velour Scenic Beach Towel

There is no reason you cant take that boho vibe to the beach with you. Made in partnership with artist and illustrator Isabelle Feliu, this 34-by-70 inch cotton beach towel shows off a one-of-a-kind stitch work in extra soft terry and velour blend for style and softness from the first dip of the summer until your next winter warm weather escape.

$75 at Brooklinen.com

WETCAT Turkish Beach Towel

If youre looking for a more classic take on the Turkish cotton towel, this 38-by-71 inch option from WETCAT is thinner than terry cloth yet just as absorbent thanks to its superior strands. Its lightweight design makes it the perfect towel for you grab-n-go types who want to be able to carry everything you need without any fuss. If you're in a pinch and need some space, this airy Turkish towel doubles as a beach blanket.

$21.99 at Amazon.com

Utopia Towels Classic Cabana Stripe Beach Towel

There is a reason why the iconic cabana towel is, well, iconic. This type of towel wrapped up Marlyn Monroe on Miami Beach in Some Like It Hot and kept Matt Damon dry along Italys Amalfi Coast in The Talented Mr. Ripley. Needless to say, this simple 30-by-60 inch stripe style is meant for those who want to elevate their beaching experience, without necessarily dropping a small fortune. If you ask us, this style might just be the perfect beach towel.

$46.99 at Amazon.com

Laguna Beach Textile Co Oversized Cabana Plush Towel

Whereas there is no substitute for the iconic cabana style, this updated version featuring a simple solid stipe of a coordinating color allows for the 70-by-35 inch absorbent cotton towel to remain classic while still allowing it to be distinguishable in a sea of similar singly saturated striped towels.

$39 at Amazon.com

OCOOPA Sand Free XX Large Oversized Towel

If a big beach towel is what youre after, there might be none bigger than this bad boy. At a generous 82-by-57 inches, this updated cabana stripe style made from super sand resistant microfiber fabric allows for quick drying comfort for a crew in a design easily compact enough not to weigh any one person down.

$23.99 at Amazon.com

Kassatex Capri Beach Towel

Escape the oft-copied cabana stripe all together and go for something a little more exclusive, like Capri. Made from high absorbency 100% combed Turkish cotton, this 40-by-70 inch single shade solid towel, save for a generous white border stripe, is dense, fluffy, and perfect if youre beach bound or lounging poolside.

$80 at Kassatex.com

JML Microfiber Beach Towel

If superior absorbency is what youre after, but youre looking to save some cash for an extra round at the boardwalk bar, go for quantity as well as quality. This duo from JML is crafted in microfiber fabric and is available in solid or stripes (we obviously favor the latter here). If we had to guess, it is by far the best bang for your buck on our list. Each towel measures 30-by-60 inches and with over 10,000 positive reviews on Amazon, its a safe bet that it will be money well spent. 2-pack 30-by-60 inch

$23.99 at Amazon.com

Pendleton Chief Joseph Towel for Two With Carrier

Built for two, this 62-by-70 inch beach towel shows off one of the many iconic Pendleton prints in bright colors the brand is known for. Most often seen in soft felted wool blankets in the winter, there is no reason you cant enjoy the designs by the 150-year-old family-owned weavers.

$89.50 at Pendleton.com

L.L. Bean Seaside Beach Towel

Turkish cotton makes up this bright towel from the brand known for its rich American heritage. This 36-by-68 inch fade-resistant towel is an annual favorite among L.L. Bean enthusiasts. It may not rank as high as the duck boot, but at least they are both great at keeping you dry.

$29.95 at LLBean.com

Riley Miramar Beach Towel

If only we could be on Portugals historic Miramar Beach right now (or ever, really). Whereas this beach isnt a substitute for one of Portugals most iconic Porto shores, it is a towel that will impress all of those around you so much they wouldnt be the wiser if you said thats where you got it. At an oversized 40-by-70 inches and surprisingly lightweight, this luxurious beach towel is designed with one side flat-woven, creating a smooth texture and the reverse side using traditional 2-ply loops for superior absorbency. Whats more? These beautiful towels come in junior sizes too, so even the little ones can lay on luxury when not splashing around.

$49 at RileyHome.com

Destination Summer Cape Stripe Beach Towel

Nothing says classic all-American summer like red, white, and blue. While drying off with the American flag might not be for everyone, opting for a stylish striped take on the colors of our country always looks great. This 72-by-36 inch towel is made of 100% 2-ply cotton for ultimate absorbency.

$11.99 at BedBathandBeyond.com

Hermes Les Trophees de Plage Beach Towel

If youre really looking for a major flex on the beach  and were not talking muscles  show up with this (or any) beach towel from the French design house Hermes. Featuring a playful design on the iconic Hermes Orange by the famed Parisian designer Pierre Marie, known for his maximalist designs for both the iconic fashion house as well as Parisian parfumerie Diptyque, this towel would turn heads if Hermes-Paris didnt grace the edge. At a precise 35.4-by-59.1 inches, this 100% cotton terry cloth towel is luxury at its most lushest.

$580 at Hermes.com

Matouk Leopard Beach Towel

Both absolutely fabulous and a little cheerfully cheeky, this 40-by-70 inch Turkish cotton velour beach towel features the playful Leaping Leopard design by iconic American textile house Schumacher. Famous designs from the brand have been showcased by Cornelius Vanderbilt, Saul Steinberg, Frank Lloyd Wright, Elsa Schiaparelli, and Mick Jagger while also being immortalized in movie and media moments including Gone With The Wind, I Love Lucy, and Jackie Kennedys 1962 TV Tour of the White House. The brand is so ingrained in the American lexicon, it even produced textiles for parachutes, life preservers, and other items to support the war effort during World War II and donated over 600 yards of fabric to make masks during the 2020 pandemic. Thats the history you wrap yourself up with when this is the towel you use.

$99 at Matouk.com

Revival The Peshtemal Towel

Made in Denizli, Turkey, this is arguably the most classic take on a Turkish towel. At 35-by-66 inches in size, its light, quick drying, and incredibly soft.

$39 at RevivalRugs.com

Sunflow Towel

Sure, this 27-by-54 inch towel is great, but we suggest when picking up the towel, you pick up the whole Beach Bundle. With the bundle you get the Sunflow chair, sun shade, drink holder, and the dry bag. Buy the bundle, and get the towel for free!

$35 at GetSunflow.com

Tesalate Towel Bohemian Sand-Free Towel for Two

This is another twofer. The bohemian sand-free Tesalate towel is made for two. A 63-by-63 inch two made from ultra absorbent high-performance AbsorbLite fabric, this oversized beach towel is double sided and dries in half the time of a regular towel. Also included is a hook to hang and a bag to store, this is the beach blanket your old beach towel can never be.

$99 at Tesalate.com

Sand Cloud Amor XL Towel

If that microfiber feeling isnt for you, but youre still in the market for a super sand-resistant towel, allow us to introduce you to Sand Cloud. Shown to dry three times faster than typical cotton towels, this is an extra large towel at 62-by-75 inches with an extra large pattern, and is made from organic Turkish cotton using a single weave jacquard with twisted tassel fringe.

$68 at SandCloud.com

Violet Mist Tie Dye Large Round Beach Towel

If there is ever a time for bright colors and tie-dye, its the summer, and this towel delivers. The spiral tie-dye design is shown off perfectly in a soft microfiber material thanks to the 60 inch round design. To add to the (not so subtle) hippie trend, a fridge surrounds the towel so when its out on the beach, it feels a little more beach blanket than it does a basic round towel.

$22.99 at Amazon.com

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Andy Atkinson, Katie Hundertmark and Braulio Jerez pose in this file photo from 2019. The three comprised Pitkin Area Co-Responder Teams, or PACT, working together in mental health response calls.
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HP

Dubbed the 2021 Jeep Renegade Impulse, the special edition model is limited to Italy, and has been on sale since the beginning of the month. It builds on the Limited trim level and boasts the Loki and Impulse bespoke badges on the rear doors.In addition to the exclusive logos, the Renegade Impulse is nicely equipped, getting features such as the 18-inch wheels, electrically operated and heated side mirrors, keyless entry, auto-dimming rearview mirror, 7-inch touchscreen infotainment system, dual-zone climate control, cargo drawer under the front passenger seat, and others.Jeep is offering the 2021 Renegade Impulse with the 130 1.6-liter turbodiesel , exclusively with front-wheel drive, or the 190 HP plug-in hybrid powertrain, in the 4xe specification, which brings all-wheel drive to the table.This isnt the first time the Jeep Renegade has gotten involved in the movie-making business, as three years ago, they celebrated the release of Avengers: Infinity War with the Hyper Edition, limited to Italy.There are also quite of few Renegade special edition models out there, such as the Bronze, Orange and Islander, to name but a few, as well as the Freedom that celebrated Memorial Day last month.The 2021 Renegade lineup in Italy kicks off with the Longitude, priced at 24,550 (equal to $29,280). The Limited and 80th Anniversary follow, from 27,050 ($32,262) and 29,050 ($34,647) respectively. Moreover, Jeep is offering the entire Renegade range from 159 ($190) per month throughout June.The Renegade has an MSRP of $22,850 in the United States for the Sports, going up to at least $29,770 for the Limited and Trailhawk.
Frail-looking Jamie Spears, 68, was spotted at the warehouse where he has been living in a RV. This is the man in control of Britneys life! #FreeBritney pic.twitter.com/sXUbhixCdw  Britney Fan (@BritneyEscape) June 27, 2021

Spearss father Jamie is, to put it differently, the man who pulls the strings regarding every business and personal decision she makes and who controls the entirety of her $60 million fortune. He serves as conservator for his daughter and has done so for the last 13 years, during which time he pocketed $16,000 per month in salary and an additional $2,000 a month for office space.It might come as a surprise then that Jamie Spears lives out of an RV. Its a large and complete solution , the Dutchmen Denali Fifth-Wheel, but its an RV no less.Last week, as another conservatorship hearing in Spearss case was looming, the New York Times reported that Jamie had sold the family home in Louisiana and had moved into an RV at a trailer park on the outskirts of Kentwood. Photos have since emerged to confirm the report or, at the very least, that second part.Indeed, Jamie Spears, the father of the Princess of Pop herself , lives out of his RV. The initial report claimed that the trailer park was close to a storage facility where he kept most of the Britney memorabilia hes amassed over the years.The Dutchmen Denali Fifth-Wheel, like the other Dutchmen models, comes with several floor plans and a myriad of options to choose from and get the ideal home. Regardless of the model and the number of slide-outs, a Denali Fifth-Wheel sleeps a minimum of six and a maximum of ten people and presents itself as a complete solution either for a short vacation or seasonal RV-ing and even as a permanent living solution. A used Denali Fifth-Wheel sells on average for $30,000, so it's not painfully expensive, either.While it might be surprising to hear that a multi-millionaires father, who virtually calls all the shots regarding those multi-millions, lives out of an RV, Jamie Spears is definitely not lacking comfort.
The European Space Agency ( ESA ) recently announced the launch date of the robotic arm on the ISS, and that date is July 15. The ERA will be launched at 7:18 pm CEST (Central European Summer Time) on a Proton rocket. The departure location is the Russian launch base Baikonur.As stated by the ESA, the robotic arm was designed and assembled by Airbus Defence and Space Netherlands and is 100 percent made in Europe. The robotic arm has a length of 37 feet (11.3 m) and a reach of 31.8 ft (9.7 m). It is made of carbon fiber and aluminum and is equipped with multiple cameras and lighting units.The robotic arm has a maximum speed of operations of 3.9 inches/second (10 cm/s) and a launch mass of 1,388 lbs (630 kg). It has a handling capacity of more than 17,600 lbs (8,000 kg). The ERA will be the latest robot to service the International Space Station on the Russian Space Station segment and can anchor itself to the ISS in multiple locations. It has a wide range of motion, being capable of moving forward and backward.The International Space Station already has two robotic arms: Canadarm2 and the Japanese Experiment Module Remote Manipulator System. However, none of them can reach the Russian segment of the Station.The robotic arm can handle a variety of tasks, easing the burden on astronauts and allowing them to focus on other work during their spacewalks. It can be used for transporting crew members from one external working site to another. Its cameras can also be used to inspect the outside of the Space Station. Thanks to its huge handling capacity, the ERA can also install, remove, and replace large elements on the Space Station, as well as experiment payloads. It can also transfer small payloads in and out of the ISS via the Russian airlock.
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Sick of waiting for the Mercedes-ONE to finish development, Nico decided to spend his money on the all-electric hypercar from Sveta Nedelja for obvious reasons. Unveiled at the 2018 Geneva Motor Show and subsequently renamed Nevera, this fellow is the fast-accelerating car in the world thanks to a time of 1.85 seconds to 60 mph (96 kilometers per hour). Rimac also quotes a top speed of 258 miles per hour (415 kph), which is a little better than the 250-plus miles per hour (402 kph) promised by Tesla for the all-new Roadster. Oh, and by the way, the insanity of the Nevera also includes a quarter-mile sprint of 8.6 seconds on street-going rubber shoes.The production version of the C_Two isnt exactly cheap at 2 million ($2.4 million at current exchange rates), but its definitely worth every cent because of the Bugatti Chiron-shaming acceleration figures. The secret to this crazy performance comes in the guise of a quad-motor drivetrain rated at 1,914 ponies and 2,360 Nm (1,740 pound-feet) of tire-shredding torque.Its easy to understand why Nico voted with his wallet in favor of Rimac instead of the Stuttgart-based automaker that helped him secure the 2016 title, but the Nevera isnt only a strip-slaying machine. You can also drive it for up to 340 miles (550 kilometers) under the Worldwide Harmonized Light Vehicle Test Procedure (), which is better than a Nissan Leaf with the bigger lithium-ion battery pack and the Tesla Model 3 Standard Range Plus.All told, Rimac will produce 150 units of the record-smashing Nevera.
Multiple companies attempted to revive Bugatti in the 1960s and 1970s, but as fate would have it, business magnate Romano Artioli was the man who finally managed to resurrect the brand. The EB 110 produced in Modena, Italy, of all places, laid the groundwork for the Veyron and Chiron of today.Throughout its existence, Bugatti rolled out a lot more front-engined models than mid-engine hypercars. That brings us to pixel artist Rain Prisk who imagined the Chiron with very different proportions from the real deal.More or less the sprong of a Bugatti and a V8 Vantage, the Aston Martin-inspired grand tourer looks particularly menacing with matte-black paint. The design study also sweetens the deal with Bugatti-branded calipers, Michelin rubber wrapped around twin-spoke wheels finished in gloss black, and four extremely thin light-emitting diodes on each door and front fender.As to what kind of engine hides under the hood, we can only speculate. The quad-turbo W16 from the Chiron is unlikely for many reasons, including the packaging and transaxle dual-clutch transmission. Developed by Ricardo, the heavy-duty transmission alone costs more than two C8 Corvettes.A more likely candidate for propulsion would be the force-fed V8 found in the Porsche Panamera and more exotic models from the Volkswagen Group, including the Lamborghini Urus. The problem with this engine is that Bentley uses it in the Continental GT, which is based on the Panameras platform. The in-group synergy would obviously dilute Bugatti, which is why the 4.0-liter V8 powerplant doesnt actually befit a Bugatti product.Back in the real world, the company is more focused on the successor of the Chiron at the present moment. But going forward, Bugatti may transition to electric vehicles because Porsche and Rimac are in talks for a joint venture.
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The Italian design company has already developed a completely new cab concept for the French companys trucks. According to Pininfarina, it was conceived to blend in with the environment in a quiet and intelligent way. Those words suggest it had a great concern with aerodynamics, which is more than understandable: the less drag such trucks present, the quieter and more efficient they will be. Gaussin said these Pininfarina cabs would be used in five applications. The most important ones are class 8 tractors 44 T (4x2 or). Apart from the 800-km FCET (fuel cell electric truck) and the 400-km BET (battery electric truck) options, the French truck makers said it could also offer a vehicle with 1,200 km of range if it combines fuel cells and batteries, as the video below shows.Gaussin also plans to have rigid trucks for clean and quiet distribution in city areas, construction, waste management, and even an H2 Racing Truck. In the teaser, we can see four truck designs. Neither Gaussin nor Pininfarina have revealed when these trucks will have their official introduction.The companies also have not disclosed when these new clean trucks will be delivered to customers. They are probably not in a hurry: all promises made so far are still far from reaching the market. Nikola wanted to make money both from selling fuel cell trucks and offering the hydrogen infrastructure they will need, but it is yet to present any of them.When it comes to Tesla , the Semi needs the 4680 cells to be in full production, and Elon Musk already said they would just arrive in May 2022 in the best-case scenario . Although there is no rush, Gaussin could benefit from presenting its trucks before these guys: first come, first served.
Connected to an eight-speed transaxle dual-clutch transmission that Tremec debuted in the C8 Corvette, the force-fed V6 engine features the 90-degree angle of the F154 from Ferrari and the same firing order as the 690T from Alfa Romeo. Theres also the Turbulent Jet Ignition designed for greater efficiency and output, a technology that Scuderia Ferrari rolled out six years ago in the SF15-T of racing drivers Sebastian Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen.Made from carbon fiber and lightweight composites, the MC20 is particularly light at just under 1,500 kilograms (3,306 pounds). By comparison, the midship Chevrolet Corvette in Stingray flavor tips the scales at 3,444 pounds (1,562 kilograms) with the Z51 go-faster package.Manufactured on a dedicated assembly line that combines skilled workers and high-tech robots, the Maserati Corse 20 belts out 630 PS (621 horsepower) at 7,500 revolutions per minute and 730 Nm (538 pound-feet) of torque from 3,000 through 5,500 revs. Capable of redlining at 8,000 rpm, the successor of the MC12 needs fewer than 3.0 seconds to hit 100 kilometers per hour (62 miles per hour), while the top speed is rated at more than 325 kilometers per hour (202 miles per hour) by the Italian manufacturer.Slightly more restrained in design than Ferraris brand-new 296 GTB, the MC20 will also be available as a fully electric supercar. Maserati has developed a three-motor powertrain to cut back on emissions while also improving performance, and the all-new GranTurismo will use it too.Over in the European Union, the starting price for the MC20 is a cool 215,000 or $255,715 at current exchange rates. Not including freight, U.S. pricing is $210,000 while the Brits have to shell out 187,230 ($259,090).
Not content with numbers on a piece of paper, Mat Watson of Carwow has pitted the Bavarian siblings against each other over the quarter-mile. On the first run, the M5 Touring launches horribly off the line due to the SMG box.SMG is BMW for sequential manual gearbox, although the synchromesh-equipped gears make it an automated manual rather than a true sequential. The German automaker quotes shifts as fast as 65 milliseconds for the SMG-III transmission, but as you can tell from this clip, the ZF Friedrichshafen 8HP torque-converter auto is better in every single respect.Even with a head start, the E61 cant keep up with the G22 . The race ends in 12.2 seconds for the M440i and 13.6 seconds for the M5 Touring after factoring in the head start. From 50 miles per hour (80 kilometers per hour), the difference is much smaller even though the older car loses precious feet with every upshift. Against all odds, the performance wagon manages to win the second roll race thanks to a second-gear start and slightly more revs.The emergency braking test from 70 miles per hour (113 kilometers per hour) doesnt even count because the anti-lock braking system of the E61 doesnt work. Be that as it may, theres no denying that free-breathing V10 sounds a lot better than the force-fed six of the all-paw-drive M440i coupe.Over in the United Kingdom, where Carwow is based, the next best thing after the M4 will set you back 54,670 or $75,610 at current exchange rates. The F90 M5 Competition, by comparison, starts at 102,385 or $141,545, while the E61 used to cost around 60,000 ($82,950).
You cant think of safety when driving, without considering grip. Tire grip is essential, but its not easy on the environment. During acceleration or braking, wear particles from the tire tread and the surface of the road are released. Continental , one of the largest tire manufacturers in the world, wants to minimize the impact of these particles, by upgrading tire design. In fact, it plans to switch to 100% sustainable materials for its tires, by 2050.It might sound straightforward, but the research process based on simulations of the behavior of complex polymer structures actually takes a lot of time and energy, which also increases costs. This is where a supercomputer can help. And not just any supercomputer, but the European Unions famous Joliot-Curie.Located at CEAs (The French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission) Very Large Computing Center (TGCC) in Bruyeres-le-Chatel, France, the Joliot-Curie is capable of simulating remarkably large and complex sets of data. With a processing speed of 9.4 petaflops and the ability to perform 1,000 trillion calculations per second, its known as one of the fastest supercomputers in Europe.Now, it will use its powers to help Continental perform extensive research on the decomposition of rubber polymers. Together with the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) and the Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon in France, the tire manufacturer won a research grant through the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) initiative. The grant is worth 43 million  not dollars or any other currency, but hours of supercomputer time. This is how much time the partners will get from the Joliot-Curie.The project was launched several years ago, but it is only now, with the help of this supercomputer, that it will be able to take polymer simulations to the next level, which will result in the development of innovative, sustainable materials for future tires.
Just like its American counterpart, the Royal Navy is hard at work trying to modernize its fleet. One of the ways it will do this is the so-called City Class Type 26 frigate now being built in the shipyards of BAE Systems.

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The Ducati MH900e was designed by Pierre Terblanche to honor Mike Hailwoods victory at the 1978 Isle of Man TT race. The gorgeous machine saw a limited production run of only 2,000 copies at the dawn of the 21st century, making it an extremely desirable rarity for any diehard Ducatista out there.The MH900e has to be among the sexiest machines ever conceived by the illustrious South African designer. The way its front fairing merges with the gas tank to form a single unit is downright perfect, causing several motorcycle customization enterprises to replicate this feature on their bespoke ventures.As for the Ducs technical specifications, its steel trellis framework embraces an air-cooled 904cc L-twin powerplant, with two desmodromic valves per cylinder and a compression ratio of 9.2:1. The mill can generate 75 stallions at around 8,000 spins per minute and 56 pound-feet (76 Nm) of torque lower down the rpm range.In order to reach the rear 17-inch wheel, the oomph travels via a six-speed transmission and a chain final drive. The whole ordeal translates to a solid quarter-mile time of 11.9 seconds, while the top speed is generously rated at 133 mph (215 kph).On the other hand, stopping power comes from dual 320-mm (12.6-inch) brake discs and four-piston calipers up front, accompanied by a single 220-mm (8.7-inch) rotor and a twin-piston caliper at the rear. The bikes front end sits on 43-mm (1.7-in) inverted telescopic forks, coupled with a Sachs monoshock at the back.Right, you get the idea, so lets cut to the chase. This articles photo gallery reveals an unblemished Ducati MH900e produced back in 2002, and the creature is making its way to the auction block at this very moment. You may submit your bid for this Italian wonder on Bring a Trailer until July 3, but we do hope your wallet is well-nourished, as youll need over $20k to overtake the top bidder.
RX is currently running the former RotorWay International facility in Arizona, which has been producing kit helicopters for the past 53 years. For the development of RX eTransporter, the company has been collaborating with Advanced Tactics (AT), the makers of the Black Knight Transformer eVTOL for the U.S. Army.The technology behind the new air taxi has been tested for more than a decade, with AT having produced numerous heavy-lift multi-rotor prototypes. According to RX, AT is now working on two contracts with the U.S. Air Force related to the RX eTransporter.Designed to carry six passengers on distances over 230 miles (370 km), the quad-rotor aircraft will provide plenty of legroom and charter-jet type interiors. RX is also considering an open-interior version to be used for air taxi operations, package delivery, or search and rescue operations.Unlike most eVTOLs that rely on a large wing to make the aircraft efficient, RX eTransporter uses a smaller wing to maximize natural lift. It also doesnt require a tail rotor, which considerably improves its capability.RX eTransporter will have a maximum flight time of 1.5 hours on a single charge, and it will be able to hover for over 45 minutes. This is roughly three times the amount of time regular eVTOLs can hover.The air taxi will reach a top speed of 160 mph (257 kph) and will cruise at 140 mph (225 kph). While thats not the fastest speed well get from an eVTOL, RX is not focusing on that. The design is aimed at efficiency, allowing the aircraft to carry up to 1,600 lb (726 kg) of cargo at an altitude of over 25,000 feet (7,620 meters).The company expects to obtain FAA certification later this year and plans to conduct the first flight this fall. Next year, the RX eTransporter will start testing in Alaska as an experimental aircraft.
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EV

Things don't work like that in the real world, where the 1/4-mile number of the 1,020-hp monster can be affected by factors such as the track prep and tires. Still, it's safe to say the electric nature of the machine means it won't have the hot temperature issues of internal combustion machines.Besides, itsshould enable consistent launches, while the vehicle's single-speed transmission means there's no gearshift to influence the run. For the record, the Palo Alto company explains the presence of a more complex two-speed gearbox, such as that on the Porsche Taycan , wasn't necessary. That's because the Plaid's single front and twin rear motors feature a key update compared to the Model 3/Model Y hardware they're based on, sporting carbon-fiber sleeves that allow the hardware to spin all the way to 20,000 rpm.In fact, we've brought along a sample of what happens when a Model S Plaid hits the strip. The action, which can be seen in the video below, was recently captured at the Great Lakes Dragway in Wisconsin (lens tip to YouTube label Drag Racing and Car Stuff).Despite thehaving already matched the official 1/4-mile time and on the street nonetheless (the lack of proper third-party verification does raise some questions, though), this Pearl White example only manages a 9.71s run.Even so, that's enough to see the Tesla blow the doors off a 2009 Nissan GT-R (3:18 timestamp) that had dominated the drag strip up to that point, albeit with one notable exception.You see, Godzilla, which had been gifted with bolt-on mods and sips on E85, managed to one-up a Dodge Challenger Hellcat Widebody and a tuned 2020 BMW X3 M Competition but never stood a chance against a 1980s Oldsmobile Cutlass.The G-body toy, which seems to have been heavily modified, not only one-upped the GT-R but delivered a runsadly, the camera steers clear of the scoreboardthat made us believe it could give the Tesla a hard time.
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The journey of the non-polluting Antarctic vehicle begun in 2009. It was when Prince Albert II of Monaco asked the Monaco-based automotive manufacturer Venturi to come up with an environmentally-friendly vehicle for the research stations in the Antarctic. The vehicles purpose would be to carry passengers and equipment to and from the research sites.Since then, the company has designed three versions of the Antarctica all-terrain vehicle. The latest generation was unveiled at the beginning of this month (June 1).The orange vehicle has a capacity of six people, additional room for equipment, and comes with fold-down bench seats. The vehicle can also carry a second battery that can extend the initial range of 31 miles (50 km). The driver cab is separated from the rear cabin through a tubular frame.The Antarctica vehicle is equipped with two 60(80-hp) motors that are powered by a 52.6battery pack. The battery gets charged between two and 18 hours, depending on the charging infrastructure. Because it was designed for the polar research stations, Antarctica can cope with temperatures as low as -76 degrees F (-60 degrees C).The vehicle is easy to handle, efficient, and has a very good performance. It will allow scientists to carry out their research in optimum conditions, without polluting sites where the quality of analyses needs to be accurate down to the last molecule, explains Gildo pastor, president of Venturi.The all-electric , zero-emissions rover will arrive at the Princess Elisabeth Antarctic research station this December. The Belgian scientific facility is also a zero-emission polar research station located approximately 136 miles (220 km) from the Antarctic coast.
President Biden in an op-ed published by Yahoo! News Monday pledged to do more to tackle climate change as he touted the $1.2 trillion infrastructure deal he reached with a group of bipartisan senators.

Why it matters: Biden has faced criticism from progressives over the agreement for not doing enough to address issues such as climate change. Reps. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) joined hundreds of protesters outside the White House Monday to demand the president act on the matter.

Reps. Cori Bush and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Monday rallying hundreds of young Sunrise Movement climate activists near the White House to demand that Biden work to make the Green New Deal into law. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

What he's saying: "While the bill is missing some critical initiatives on climate change that I proposed  initiatives I intend to pass in the reconciliation bill  the infrastructure deal nonetheless represents a crucial step forward in building our clean energy future," Biden wrote in his op-ed.

"It would make the largest investment in clean energy transmission in American history, modernizing our power grid to accelerate the build-out of zero-carbon, renewable energy. It would replace thousands of gas-guzzling buses with clean, electric ones  including 35,000 electric school buses. It would cap abandoned wells leaking methane gas.

"And more: The deal would deploy a nationwide network of charging stations for electric vehicles  500,000 stations in total. It makes historic investments in rail and transit that will get passenger vehicles off the road and reduce fossil fuel consumption. There's much more work to do to reach our ambitious climate goals, but the investments in this deal are critical in facilitating our transition to a clean energy economy."

Of note: Biden acknowledged that neither Democrats nor Republicans got everything they wanted in the infrastructure deal, but said this was needed in order to reach a consensus.

What they're saying: Ocasio-Cortez vowed to the protest crowd to push for Green New Deal policies. She noted that when the New Deal-era Civilian Conservation Corps was introduced, they were told it was too ambitious.
A Tennessee billionaire and high-dollar Republican donor is funding the deployment of South Dakota National Guard troops to the U.S. Mexico border.

Driving the news: South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who's gaining attention as a possible 2024 presidential contender, made a splash on Tuesday with an announcement that she was deploying an unspecified number of National Guard troops to the border in Texas. A news release said the deployment "will be paid for by a private donation."

Noem spokesperson Ian Fury told Axios the funds are coming from a foundation run by Willis Johnson, founder of automotive salvage and auction company Copart.

Fury did not specify the size of the donation, which he said "was made directly to the state of South Dakota." Fury said that, "Governor Noem welcomes any such donations to help alleviate the cost to South Dakota taxpayers."

Johnson's connection was reported first by Insider.

Neither Johnson nor his charitable group, Willis and Reba Johnson's Foundation, could immediately be reached for comment.

The foundation had net assets of nearly $29 million at the end of 2018, the most recent filing period for which annual tax records are publicly available.

Between the lines: The Oklahoma-born Johnson is estimated to be worth $2.2 billion, per Forbes.
Congratulations to the people of Armenia and Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian on successful parliamentary elections, tweeted Biden.

Our partnership with Armenia is one of shared values and cooperation on democratic reform and conflict resolution -- we are committed to strengthening that partnership, he said.

The U.S. State Department issued a similar statement the day after the snap elections, which were called to end a serious political crisis caused by Armenias defeat in last years war with Azerbaijan.

A department spokesman noted and welcomed a largely positive assessment of the Armenian authorities handling of the vote given by European observers. He also urged the Armenian opposition to accept the official election results that gave victory to Pashinians Civil Contract party.

The two main opposition groups continued to reject the official results as fraudulent, however. They both are expected to ask the countrys Constitutional Court to overturn them.

Former President Robert Kocharians Hayastan bloc, the official runner-up in the polls, has accused the European observers of turning a blind eye to violations which it said benefited the ruling party.

Pashinian insisted on June 24 that the vote was free and fair. We set a new standard, he said.

Pashinians office was quick to post Bidens tweet on its website. It did not say whether the U.S. president has sent a formal congratulatory message to the Armenian premier.

Armenias Central Election Commission reaffirmed its vote tally on Sunday.
All three officials were sacked by the governor, Hovannes Harutiunian, in the run-up to the June 20 elections won by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinians Civil Contract party.

Both school principals said over the weekend that they have challenged Harutiunians decisions in court. Arpine Nikoghosian, who ran the provincial capital Gyumris School No. 38, claimed that she was fired because of being affiliated with the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun)

Dashnaktsutyun is a key member of the opposition Hayastan bloc led by former President Robert Kocharian. The bloc finished second in the elections, according to their official results.

Also dismissed were Karine Ghazarian, the principal of a school in the Shirak village of Geghanist, and Ayvaz Sukiasian, who managed Gyumris state Policlinic No. 1. They both declined to comment on their sackings. Ghazarian said only that she has asked a local court to annul her dismissal.

Hovannes Asoyan, a Hayastan leader in Shirak, insisted that the three officials lost their jobs as a result of ongoing political persecution of the opposition groups local activists and well-known supporters.

Harutiunian, who is affiliated with the ruling party, denied that the sackings were politically motivated.

As regards dismissals and hiring of people, its a natural working process that cannot be linked to political processes, the Shirak governor told RFE/RLs Armenian Service.

Still, he did not clearly explain why he fired the two school principals and the policlinic chief.

During the 12-day election campaign Pashinian pledged to purge the state bureaucracy and wage political vendettas against local government officials supporting the opposition. Shortly after the announcement of the election results, his chief of staff, Arsen Torosian, effectively demanded that elected heads of local communities supporting the opposition step down.

Visiting Gyumri on June 23, Justice Minister Rustam Badasian said Pashinians administration is planning a systemic vetting of state officials.

Armenian media outlets reported in the following days that several provincial governors are summoning pro-opposition village mayors and pressuring them to resign.

One of those mayors claimed to have been beaten up inside the Lori provincial administration building moments after refusing to quit. Although the Lori governor, Aram Khachatrian, denied the assault, law-enforcement authorities launched a criminal investigation.

The Hayastan leadership issued a statement last week condemning the pressure allegedly exerted on the local government officials as illegal.
The EU said its decision-making Council approved separate draft agreements with Armenia, Ukraine and Tunisia allowing the three countries to join the European Common Aviation Area, a single market for aviation services.

The three neighborhood agreements will remove market restrictions in relation to the EUs neighboring countries and associate these countries with the EUs internal aviation market, as they will adopt EU aviation standards and implement EU aviation rules, it said in a statement.

This will create new opportunities for airlines and travellers and promote trade, tourism, investment and economic and social development, said the statement.

The Council also gave the green light to the signing of a similar deal with Qatar.

The four agreements are expected to be signed in autumn 2021, the EU said, adding that they will have to be ratified by all of the blocs 27 member states.

Armenia and the EU officially started negotiations on a Common Aviation Area agreement in April 2017. The EU Delegation in Yerevan said at the time that it will enable airlines to operate Armenia-EU routes without any limitations.

Armenias former government lifted virtually all restrictions for European and other foreign carriers in 2013 when it liberalized the domestic aviation market. The South Caucasus countrys air traffic with the outside world grew rapidly in the following years, with more flight services launched between Yerevan and European cities.

The current Armenian government managed to attract two low-cost European airlines in 2019. One of them, Ryanair launched flights to and from Yerevan in January 2020 while the other, Wizz Air, was due to follow suit in April 2020. However, the coronavirus pandemic forced both carriers to cancel the new flight services.

In June 2020, the EU banned all seven airlines registered in Armenia from carrying out regular flights to EU member states, saying that they do not meet international safety standards.

Armenias Civil Aviation Committee downplayed the ban, arguing that only one local airline currently flies to Europe. At the same time the government agency pledged to take serious measures to address the EU concerns about flight safety.
According to the final results of the June 20 elections released by the CEC on Sunday, Civil Contract garnered about 54 percent of the vote. Two opposition alliances led by former Presidents Robert Kocharian and Serzh Sarkisian trailed it with 21 percent and 5.2 percent respectively.

The ruling party will control a significantly larger proportion of seats in the National Assembly thanks to the two dozen other election contenders that failed to clear the legal vote thresholds to enter the parliament. The latter will not be represented in the legislature despite polling a combined 20 percent of the vote.

The CEC used a complex formula set by Armenian law to distribute the 107 seats in the new parliament. Civil Contract will have 71 seats, with the remaining 36 seats given to the two opposition forces. Kocharians Hayastan bloc will control 29 of them.

The CEC chairman, Tigran Mukuchian, confirmed that Pashinians party will be one vote short of the two-thirds parliamentary majority required for amending the Armenian constitution, calling a referendum or impeaching the largely ceremonial president of the republic.

Pashinian and his political allies have enjoyed such a majority in the outgoing Armenian parliament elected in 2018.

The formula used for calculating the distribution of parliament seats includes a requirement that the opposition minority must control at least one-third of the National Assembly. The odd total number of the new parliaments seats means that Pashinians party will get just under two-thirds of the seats.

Vladimir Vartanian, a senior member of the outgoing parliament representing Civil Contract, complained about this fact, saying that the existing legal mechanism is flawed. Vartanian did not rule out the possibility of challenging it in the Constitutional Court.

I believe that a purely mathematical approach to this matter is not the best one, he told RFE/RLs Armenian Service.

Vartanian stressed at the same time that Pashinians political team will remain in a position to enact major laws that are defined as constitutional bills and need to be backed by at least 60 percent of the lawmakers.

The opposition minority could block or at least delay their entry into force by asking the Constitutional Court to examine their conformity with the Armenian constitution.

Kocharian said later on Tuesday that his bloc will have enough parliament seats to hold Pashinians administration in check and achieve some of our goals.
Bakersfield, CA (93308)

Today

Mainly clear. Low 72F. Winds N at 10 to 20 mph..

Tonight

Mainly clear. Low 72F. Winds N at 10 to 20 mph.
The pending addition to the Davis County Courthouse and associated improvements have been bid at $430,400, which was 23% or $80,400 over the estimated budget due in large part to the inflation of costs of some building materials caused by the pandemic. Justified or not, that still is over 
Billy Preston (B.P. or Bill) Miller, age 91 of North Tazewell, VA passed away Friday, July 2, 2021 at his home. Born March 16, 1930 in Boissevain, VA he was the only son of the late Ernest and Willie Miller who were from Abbs Valley, VA. Bill was a member of Main Street United Methodist Chur
A case of the Delta variant of the COVID-19 virus has been reported in McDowell County, one of only five in the state. J.J. Rose, McDowell County Health Department Administrator, said the resident who tested positive for the variant has recovered and no other Delta variant cases have been detected.
FILE - In this May 27, 2021, file photo Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., arrives as senators go to the chamber for votes ahead of the approaching Memorial Day recess, at the Capitol in Washington. Congressional bargainers are likely to blow past their latest deadline without completing a bipartisan deal for overhauling police practices, three people familiar with the talks said Thursday, June 24, 13 months after George Floyds killing and with the shadow of next years elections lengthening over Congress work. Despite a June or bust goal set by chief GOP negotiator Scott, the Senate was expected to leave town for a two-week recess after Thursdays session without a final compromise, according to two Democratic aides who described the status of talks on condition of anonymity.
State Sends $5 Million to Oregon Coast Aquarium for Improvements

Published 06/28/21 at 6:35 PM PDT

By Oregon Coast Beach Connection staff

(Newport, Oregon)  Newport's Oregon Coast Aquarium is about to get a hefty helping hand from the Oregon State Legislature as it is set to approve $5 million from state lottery funds to help improve the buildings and the visitor experience. Senate Bill 5534 puts into action money originally approved for the aquarium in 2019, but that was rescinded during the Coronavirus-19 health crisis due to a lack of lottery bond revenue. (Photos courtesy Oregon Coast Aquarium)

According to the aquarium's Courtney Pace, it was State Representative David Gomberg who came to bat for the attraction. As a Co-Vice Chair on the Joint Committee on Ways and Means, he acted a strong advocate, citing the facility's role as an economic driver in the state's tourism business.

I have been working to secure these dollars from the first day the legislature convened, and here we are on the very last day to vote on actually committing these dollars, stated Gomberg. The Aquarium has a compelling case to make. It's a critical part of our coastal persona and it's an integral part of Oregon's tourism industry. And it's a darn fun place to visit.

The aquarium intends to use the appropriation to modify its three indoor galleries. Improvements include modifications to improve traffic flow, exhibit upgrades, new signage and interpretive materials, and an expanded touch pool to provide guests with greater access to hands-on experiences. These funds will also support the installation of new exhibits, including a live coral exhibit and a sea jelly gallery.

Carrie Lewis, President and CEO of Oregon Coast Aquarium, said this will create quite a boon to the visitor's experience.

We are honored to receive this appropriation from the State of Oregon, Lewis said. With this incredible support, we are able to fulfill our dreams of renovating our exhibits to expand our mission of creating a place that highlights our beautiful Oregon coast and inspires ocean conservation.

The allocated $5 million from the state's lottery bonds provides the Aquarium with half of the funds needed to move forward with Phase II. The Aquarium invites its supporters to help raise the remaining funds by donating via givetoaquarium.org.

Oregon Coast Aquarium is at 2820 S.E. Ferry Slip Rd., Newport, OR. aquarium.org, 541-867-3474.

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Murder Investigation and Search Closes N. Oregon Coast Park for a Time Saturday

Published 06/28/21 at 6:5 AM PDT

By Oregon Coast Beach Connection staff

(Pacific City, Oregon)  On an extremely busy day for tourism, Sand Lake Recreation Area on the north Oregon coast was closed part of the day because of a murder investigation. The Tillamook County Sheriff's Office (TCSO) and Tillamook City Police (TPD) were on scene collecting evidence while other law enforcement in the area searched for the accused teen suspect, resulting in a brief warning to residents. (Crime scene photos courtesy Tillamook County Sheriff's Office)

According to the sheriff's office, Tillamook 911 received a call at 3:34 a.m. from the Sand Lake Recreation Area near Pacific City that a shooting had occurred. First responders arrived to find a 30-year-old male who was unconscious, suffering from multiple gunshot wounds. While a Lifeflight helicopter also responded the man died at the scene.

His name has not been released at the request of family.

The suspect was quickly identified as 18-year-old Brandon Jose Zavala-Satalich, 18, of Troutdale, who had fled the scene just prior to the arrival of law enforcement. Zavala-Satalich was armed with a gun, according to the sheriff's office, and had left on foot with a female juvenile.



Brandon Jose Zavala-Satalich



This lead to a major manhunt by various law agencies for the next several hours, starting with the Tillamook County Major Crimes Team. Also called in to assist were the Oregon State Police, Manzanita Police, and K9 tracking units from Lincoln County and Hillsboro.

Three hours after the crime was reported, Zavala-Satalich was spotted again in the Sand Lake area.

At 5:28 am, TCSO Sand Lake Deputy Tom Mayne saw the suspect crossing Galloway Rd., said TCSO Undersheriff Matt Kelly. A containment perimeter was set up and searches for the suspect were underway as TCSO detectives began their homicide investigation. The female juvenile that fled with the suspect was located quickly and unharmed.

However, Zavala-Satalich escaped.

At approximately 11:20 a.m., Zavala-Satalich was captured by the K9 unit from Lincoln County along with other area deputies, found hiding in an area not far from Galloway Road where he was spotted around 5 a.m. The teen was transported to the Tillamook County Jail and booked on charges of Murder in the Second Degree and eight counts of Recklessly Endangering another person.

The female juvenile accompanying Zavala-Satalich was eventually charged as well, facing charges of Criminal Conspiracy, Hindering Prosecution, Tampering with Evidence, and Interfering with a Police Officer. She was taken into custody by the Tillamook County Juvenile Department.

TCSO said the investigation is ongoing. No motive in the shooting was released.

During the park closure, those still in the Sand Lake area were allowed to leave but not to re-enter until it had reopened.

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The Port of Beaumonts board room was packed Monday morning with local leaders and well-wishers who gathered to celebrate the appointment of its first female leader.

Georgine Guillory, a Beaumont native and commissioner with almost two decades of service, officially was seated as the boards president after being elected by her fellow commissioners  becoming the first woman to head the public board since the ports founding 113 years ago.

The appointment is Guillorys most recent barrier busted in her long career of public service and advocacy, and she took the occasion with the calm attitude her fellow commissioners praised during their comments.

Its a wonderful day, but Id like to know why it took over 100 years, she joked in an interview with The Enterprise on Monday morning.

Its the kind of comment one expects from someone who has spent most of her career in public life advocating for opportunities for women.

Guillory has first was elected to the board in 2003 as Ward 4 commissioner. She also previously served as the boards secretary treasurer for 13 years.

The same year she was first elected, she founded Pioneering Women, an organization that honors women for their community impacts in Southeast Texas and provides educational opportunities for the next generation.

Its that and other leadership experience that, in part, sets her up to take the helm while she, the rest of the commissioners and port staff navigate the ports 12 ongoing infrastructure projects and its continual campaign to secure federal funding.

But Guillory said she understands this also is a chance to create more opportunities for women and girls.

Im not going to take my position lightly, she said. I want to encourage little girls to know your voice can be heard no matter where you are or who has held the positions previously.

Guillorys first official act of business after the appointment was to call a motion for the rest of the board officer positions to officially be filled. Fellow veteran commissioners Pat Anderson was seated as vice president and Bill Darling seated as secretary-treasurer.

She was also made her first presentation of recognition  honoring outgoing President and Commissioner Louis Broussards leadership at the port through the 2020 pandemic.

Despite disrupted supply chains and global economic upheavals, the Port of Beaumont continued its record growth, reaching $20.5 million in revenue in 2020.

Guillory said she wanted to recognize the guidance and work of Broussard, one of few commissioners to have served longer than she has.

Outside of her work as a public official, Guillory also is a resource coordinator with the Catholic Charities of Southeast Texas.

The Most Rev. Curtis J. Guillory, bishop emeritus of the Diocese of Beaumont, also attended the meeting to congratulate Georgine Guillory on her appointment. Curtis Guillory retired as bishop of the Diocese of Beaumont last June.

Guillory said shes excited to see the port take a more community-oriented approach by reaching out to local schools and residents to better demonstrate the opportunities and benefits that come from one of the regions largest economic engines.

Port Director Chris Fisher said her service with the board already has created a positive effect, and hes looking forward to what her leadership will mean in the near future.

I think she brings a good perspective to what we do, not only our main objective of moving cargo, but our community and workforce interests we are heavily participating in now, he said.

jacob.dick@beaumontenterprise.com

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Witnesses told investigators that a car in which three people were killed when it was struck by a Metra train in Chicago had pulled out of a row of stopped vehicles and was crossing the tracks when it was struck
Armored vehicles move through Dhaka after the end of a deadly overnight siege by Islamic extremists at the Holey Artisan Bakery cafe, July 2, 2016.

Five years after terrorists massacred 20 diners at an upscale cafe in Dhaka, Bangladesh law enforcers say they have succeeded in controlling terror activity nationwide, although online extremism remains a concern.

Since the July 2016 attack on the Holey Artisan Bakery, the countrys drive to smash violent extremism has led to hundreds of people being thrown behind bars and an increase in cyberspace monitoring, which has raised concerns about potential infringement on human rights and privacy.

The overnight siege at the cafe in Dhakas diplomatic quarter, a posh neighborhood known for its tight security, was the South Asian nations deadliest terror attack to date.

The attack jolted the authorities into taking the terror threat seriously, said A.K.M. Shahidul Haque, who served as inspector general of police at the time and has retired from the force.

Every single member of the police realized how dangerous the militants were for the security of the country, he told BenarNews.

On July 1-2, 2016, five young members of a Bangladeshi militant group aligned with the extremist group known as Islamic State shot or hacked to death 20 civilians during their takeover of the cafe.

With the help of the people, law enforcers worked with full vigor to destroy the militants networks, Haque said. Many militants died in the operations while others blew them up to avoid arrest. Thus we destroyed their network.

In the wake of the attack, the government of Sheikh Hasina launched a crackdown aimed at eliminating the terror threat and set up a new national police agency, the Anti-Terrorism Unit (ATU), to help in that mission.

At least 85 suspected extremists have been killed and nearly 2,500 arrested during as many as 1,060 law enforcement raids carried out since the attack, authorities have said.

Three different police units have been involved in the post-attack crackdown: the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB); Counter Terrorism and Transnational Crime (CTTC), which is a unit of the Dhaka Metropolitan Police; and the Anti-Terrorism Unit.

The Global Terrorism Index list placed Bangladesh at 22nd position in 2016. Last year, Bangladesh stood at 33rd position. This means that the terror risk in Bangladesh came down, our strategy worked, CTTC chief M. Asaduzzaman told BenarNews.

Human rights concerns

However, the governments counter-terror crackdown has had negative consequences, said Mizanur Rahman, the former chairman of the National Human Rights Commission.

[T]he law enforcers have been whisking away many people on militancy charges. They are being held for days and months without an announcement, he told BenarNews.

The situation is such that nobody raises any question when a person is detained on charges of militancy. This is a dangerous situation because anyone can victimize his opponents by branding them militants, Rahman said.

The former head of the human rights body called on law enforcement agencies to announce the arrest of anyone suspected of being a militant and to carry out transparent investigations.

If the state agencies continue to detain people without announcing charges, the people could begin to not trust the state agencies. This would not be good for the country, he said.

Asaduzzaman, the CTTC chief, denied the allegation.

We do not detain any innocent people. We arrest people with specific charges and produce them before the court in accordance with the law, he said.

Online threat

Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal said the country has largely eliminated the terror threat but extremists remain a potent force online.

Everything but cyberspace, specifically social media, is in our control, they [extremists] are circulating their views from different places through social media, Khan told BenarNews.

Though we are cautious, extremists are getting a chance through social media because there is no option of controlling the social media.

Khandaker Al Moin, commander of RABs legal and media wing, said militants were trying to develop their own networks using online technology, including communications apps.

To prevent their activities in cyberspace, we enhanced our cyber monitoring cell that was established following the Holey Artisan attack. Through regular cyber-patrolling, we are monitoring the people who are trying to spread extremism using cyberspace, he said.

Kamrul Ahsan, chief of the Anti-Terrorism Unit, said police have increased training, upgraded equipment and added manpower in the years since the cafe attack.

We are successful in foiling several attempts of militant attacks. Members of different militant groups are often arrested and we recover devices that they are being used to spread their ideology in cyberspace, Kamrul told BenarNews.

In the days after the attack at the Holey Artisan Bakery, investigators revealed shocking details about how the five young men who carried out the siege had all come from well-to-do Bangladeshi families and had been educated at the countrys prestigious schools. All five were killed in a raid by police commandos on July 2, 2016, to break the siege at the cafe.

Authorities said that trend continues but that the government has launched programs to counter it.

In the radicalization process, first a young man is made motivated by militants, then he gets radicalized and then he steps toward violence and extremism, the CTTCs Asaduzzaman told BenarNews.

We have several awareness campaigns to stop young people from getting radicalized. We conduct many awareness programs in education institutes for students, teachers and guardians. We are getting good results out of that, he said.

Mobile interceptor

Earlier this month, Bangladeshs cabinet approved the purchase of a U.S. $8 million device to listen in on mobile-phone conversations and read text messages.

Tanvir Hassan Zoha, an information and communication technology expert, said a vehicle-mounted interceptor could be moved to different locations.

The interceptor takes control of all the mobile phone towers of the area where it is placed, Zoha told BenarNews at the time.

By controlling the towers, this device can access all conversations, messages, photos and videos [on mobile phones]. This device can even track conversations, messages, photos and videos exchanged via WhatsApp, Viber and other social networking apps, he said.

In 2017 when Bangladesh purchased a similar interceptor, officials said it would be used to identify and track militants.

Human rights advocates, however, have raised concerns about the new equipment, saying the government could use it to violate citizens constitutional right to privacy, and that the technology could be used to spy on the opposition and ordinary people.

It would be used to suppress political and other opponents. The government is violating peoples privacy by procuring tracking devices with public money, Badiul Alam Majumdar, a civil society leader, told BenarNews in early June.

Meanwhile, a security expert questioned the governments assertion that it has brought the extremist threat under control since that horrific night at the Holey Artisan Bakery.

There is no way to say that extremism has been eliminated. Police often found militant dens and recovered weapons and ammunition. So it is clear that the extremist groups are trying to organize and conduct attacks, retired Maj. Gen. A.N.M. Muniruzzaman, who heads the Bangladesh Institute of Peace and Security Studies, told BenarNews.

[E]xtremism, specifically online radicalization, is fully active.
Medical personnel tend to COVID-19 patients in a tent set up outside a hospital in Bogor on June 29, 2021, as infections soar in Indonesia.

The more contagious and deadly Delta variant of the coronavirus is cutting a swathe across Southeast Asia and Bangladesh, with the Red Cross saying on Tuesday that Indonesia is heading toward a COVID-19 catastrophe.

The Delta variant drove transmissions in Indonesia, Thailands capital Bangkok, and Bangladeshs capital Dhaka, while the Malaysian government indefinitely extended its latest lockdown to stem the spread of the highly infective strain.

Every day we are seeing this Delta variant driving Indonesia closer to the edge of a COVID-19 catastrophe, said Jan Gelfand, the Indonesia head of Red Cross, in a statement.

We must focus on getting vaccinations into the arms of those most at-risk and all adults everywhere to contain this virus.

In Bangladesh, officials said the Delta variant, first detected across the border in India, and the lack of COVID-19 vaccines were the cause for surging infections.

Global action is needed to give Indonesia and other countries access to more vaccines as soon as possible, Gelfand said.

Indonesias Ministry of Health said the Delta variant had been found in at least nine provinces, including Jakarta, West Java, Central Java, Bali and South Sumatra.

Its national COVID-19 task force reported 20,467 new cases on Tuesday, the third-highest daily number since the pandemic began and bringing the total number of COVID-19 infected people to more than 2.1 million. With 463 virus-related deaths Tuesday, pandemic fatalities rose to 58,024.

Almost 139,000 new cases and 2,733 virus-related deaths were reported between June 23 and 28 alone.

The variant, combined with travel during the Eid holiday, was the cause of this latest spike, said Siti Nadia Tarmizi, a health ministry official and spokeswoman for the coronavirus vaccination drive.

This variant spreads six times faster, while peoples mobility was very high during Ramadan and Eid, plus people are lax in implementing health protocols, Nadia told BenarNews.

The International Red Cross also warned that the deadly Delta variant was overwhelming hospitals and oxygen supplies, especially in Jakarta and other cities.

Dicky Budiman, an Indonesian epidemiologist at Australias Griffith University, said the government needed to impose large-scale social restrictions, calling them the only way to prevent a potential COVID-19 catastrophe.

If the government wants to prevent more victims, there is no other choice than a lockdown, Dicky told BenarNews.

Indonesia last week announced some restrictions, but services such as public utility companies, supermarkets and pharmacies were allowed to operate at full capacity under strengthened health protocols.

Lockdowns

Neighboring Malaysia, meanwhile, decided to indefinitely extend an ongoing near-total lockdown that was scheduled to end on Monday, as new COVID-19 infections had not fallen to below 4,000 a day.

The government also said on Monday it planned to allocate 400 million ringgit (about U.S. $100 million) to acquire vaccines needed to inoculate 6.4 million young people as part of a new 150 billion ringgit ($36 billion) coronavirus relief package unveiled by Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin.

Malaysia reported 6,437 new infections on Tuesday, taking the total caseload to 745,703. With 107 virus-related deaths, the pandemic death toll rose to 5,108.

Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, the Thai government shut more than 500 construction sites in Bangkok, its five adjoining provinces and four provinces in the Deep South region for a month, starting Monday, to curb infections among Myanmar and Cambodian workers.

Too many of them contracted the coronavirus, Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-o-cha said on Monday.

Close to 100,000 foreign workers, including those in food processing factories in Songkhla and Pattani in the Deep South, were infected, according to the ministry of labor and welfare.

Bangkok has the largest cluster of people infected by the Delta variant, with 331 new infections from the strain recorded last week alone, the Department of Medical Science said on Monday, according to the Bangkok Post.

While there are fewer Delta variant cases in other provinces, they are rising there as well, the department said. Nationwide, the department said Delta strain infections had risen to 12.3 percent from 9.76 percent in April.

Thailand on Tuesday reported 4,662 new COVID-19 infections, taking the total caseload to more than 254,000. With 36 virus-related deaths, the pandemic death toll rose to 1,970.

In South Asia, Bangladesh on Sunday recorded 119 COVID-19 deaths, the highest since the pandemic began, ahead of a near-total seven-day lockdown scheduled to start on Thursday. A less severe lockdown began on Monday.

The government plans to deploy troops to help ensure no one flouts restrictions. Interstate buses and trains were halted last week, and starting Thursday only the most essential service will be allowed to stay open.

More than two-thirds of new virus infections in Bangladeshs capital were from the Delta variant, the Dhaka-based International Center for Diarrhoeal Disease Research reported on June 17.

Meanwhile, the United States announced it was giving 2.5 million doses of Modernas COVID-19 vaccine to Bangladesh through the World Health Organizations COVAX facility, Washingtons envoy in Dhaka said on Saturday. A shipment is on the way, according to Agence France-Presse.

Washington has put Bangladesh on an urgent list for the White Houses delivery of COVID-19 vaccines, an unnamed White House official told AFP.

Bangladesh has a 55 percent week-over-week increase in cases, driven largely by the Delta variant, the official said.

Bangladesh reported more than 7,600 new infections on Tuesday bringing total infections to 904,436 since the pandemic began. With 112 COVID-19 deaths, the overall toll is 14,388.

Hadi Azmi and Noah Lee in Kuala Lumpur contributed to this report.
For the third time since February, Malaysias king said Tuesday that parliament must reconvene as soon as possible, although the prime minister has shown no sign he will agree to this before September.

The reiteration by the king  his second in two weeks  shows that the constitutional monarch views the legislatures suspension during a national emergency seriously, especially during a pandemic, analysts told BenarNews.

Parliament was suspended after the king, on the advice of Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin, imposed an emergency on Jan. 12 that runs until Aug. 1.

King Al-Sultan Abdullah Riayatuddin Al-Mustafa Billah believes it is essential that parliament meet soon so lawmakers can debate legislation related to the emergency declaration, the National Palace said through its spokesman, Ahmad Fadil Shamsuddin.

His Majesty is of the view that a parliament sitting should be held as soon as possible in compliance with COVID-19 guidelines and standard operating procedures set by the Malaysian government and parliament, Fadil said in a statement, after the king met with the speakers of both houses of parliament for about an hour.

This is to enable the Proclamation of Emergency and Emergency Ordinances that have been issued to be tabled in parliament as provided for in Article 150 (3) of the Federal Constitution.

The king also expressed the view that all parliamentary committees should continue sessions so there can be checks and balances to ensure governance is transparent and acting with integrity, particularly in public policy, social and financial affairs, and government expenditure, the palace spokesman said.

Many state legislatures set to reopen

Critics and lawmakers  including from the ruling coalition  had criticized parliament being suspended at a time when they said the legislature was needed most. Muhyiddin was using the pretext of containing the pandemic to ensure parliament does not meet, they had said.

They also alleged that Muhyiddin, who heads an unelected government that came to office in March 2020, was attempting to cling to power after they said he had lost the support of his razor-thin parliamentary majority.

Meanwhile, public frustration has risen against the emergency and perceived ham-handed coronavirus lockdowns. A social media campaign with the hashtag #KerajaanGagal, which means failed government, began sometime in April and continues to do the rounds on Twitter.

Malaysia is a constitutional monarchy with the king as head of state. His position is largely ceremonial, as he has to act according to the wishes of the government, but most Malaysians revere the palace as an institution.

When Muhyiddin advised the king to declare an emergency, it was unclear whether he had discussed the decision to suspend parliament  which last met on Dec. 14, 2020  with the monarch. That question remained unresolved as of Tuesday.

Still, the king has made it known he would like parliament to reconvene  first in February, then on June 16, and, now, on Tuesday.

Soon after the king and states rulers aired their views on June 16, at least four states  including from the prime ministers ruling coalition  announced dates for the reopening of their legislatures.

But the PM said he saw parliament meeting only by September at the earliest, and did not specify a date, merely saying he would act according to the constitution.

Parliament sitting is very critical now

Critics, including in the opposition, meanwhile, have lambasted Muhyiddin for not heeding the kings advice. Repeated calls by the king on one issue are unheard of, said Azmi Hassan, a retired academic.

A third call by the king is unprecedented. It has never happened before that a king had to reiterate his opinion and remind the government thrice over the same issue, Hassan told BenarNews.

Why did the king need to make a third call? It is because there is no sign that the  government is making any move to reconvene the parliament.

Opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim said Muhyiddin and his cabinet were shameless for ignoring the kings and rulers calls.

I am certain that the [king] is merely speaking up on behalf of the majority of MPs and the majority of the public, Anwar said on Facebook.

Muhyiddin will have to face the wrath of the public for ignoring the kings views, said Awang Azman Awang Pawi, a political analyst and academic at the University of Malaya.

A parliament sitting is very critical now because there are many issues that need to be discussed in Parliament like the allocation for and the management of COVID-19, the [rebuilding of] the economy  and the need to debate the emergency proclamation and the ordinances approved during that time, Awang told BenarNews.

The public would get angrier if the government decides to delay a parliament sitting.
Advocacy groups representing foreign workers in Thailands seafood industry called on the government Tuesday to ensure that employment contracts are made transparent, and to act to prevent workplace exploitation or abuses aboard Thai-owned fishing boats.

A new survey by the Fishers Rights Network found that about nine out of 10 foreign migrants working on fishing boats in Thailand had not had their contract translated or explained in a language they can understand. Tens of thousands of migrants from neighboring countries, including Myanmar and Cambodia, work in Thailands fishing sector.

At an online news conference where survey results were presented, the network and the International Transport Workers Federation (ITF) urged Bangkok to do much more to implement Convention No. 188 (C188) of the International Labor Organization. The convention, which came into force in November 2017, aims to shield employees in the seafood industry from abuses or exploitation.

Number one, we would like to call on the Royal Thai Government to effectively enforce C188 and ensure that all fishers have a copy of their contracts in their own language, Jon Hartough, the Thailand project lead at the federation, told reporters.

In addition, all port-in, port-out centers in the country should allow fishers to review and verify the contracts presented by employers at inspection, and report violations in a safe and protected space, he said.

And finally, fishers are demanding that Thai authorities enforce employment contracts provisions and protect migrant fishers rights.

Paper-thin

Thailand, in January 2019, was the first country in Southeast Asia to ratify the convention, which sets out binding requirements to protect the labor rights of people who work on fishing boats, and to address issues they face in the workplace.

Ye Thwe, the president of the Fishers Rights Network who used to work as a foreign migrant in the Thai fishing sector, also urged the government to step up enforcement of the ILO convention.

Thailand has ratified C188  but Burmese and Khmer fishers still face serious issues such as wage theft, lack of adequate food or clean drinking water on board, debt bondage, document retention and other labor abuses, he said. The Thai Government commitments are as thin as the paper theyre written on.

Labor violations are still rampant, with contracts not being followed properly, he said.

We hear often that fishers are not paid for months at a time, face dangerous conditions onboard and are not even sure of their actual salary or other provisions listed in the contract because its not in their own language, Ye Thwe said.

In 2019, some 60,000 workers from Cambodia and Myanmar were employed on Thai fishing boats, according to the Department of Fisheries.

Among the results, the survey of 520 migrant fishers working in eight Thai provinces found that 87 percent did not have a copy of their employment contract, and 89 percent had not had their contract translated or explained in a language they can understand.

Front-line workers



Current Thai labor law and labor inspections do not meet the standards outlined in the ILO convention, said Johnny Hansen, chair of the Fisheries Section at the ITF.

[T]he results presented today clearly show that significant action is urgently needed to fully protect the labor and human rights of migrant fishers in Thailand, Hansen said.

Fishers are on the front line of the global seafood supply chain and more and more consumers are demanding that the products they purchase are truly free from labor abuse or exploitation.

BenarNews asked Mesak Pakdeekong, director-general of the Department of Fisheries, to comment on the call by the labor-rights advocacy groups for more governmental action in enforcing the provisions of Convention 188.

We would definitely solve the problems but by which approach, we have to see the actual set of information. We will fix them, but let us study the details first, he said, referring to the survey by the Fishers Rights Network.

Meanwhile in Pattani, a province in Thailands Deep South where commercial fishing is a major industry, the owner of a local fishing fleet said his business complied with the law and government regulations.

The contracts with migrant workers contain their native languages, salary and were signed in front of officials. We cant hide the contract, fleet owner Surat Ratanasithorn told BenarNews.
If you'd like to leave a comment (or a tip or a question) about this story with the editors, please email us

We also welcome letters to the editor for publication; you can do that by filling out our letters form and submitting it to the newsroom.
Family and friends are mourning the two African American bystanders killed Saturday afternoon by a white gunman in a Boston suburb in an attack officials are treating as a hate crime
Community News Editor / Librarian

Jeannie Maschino is community news editor and librarian for The Berkshire Eagle. She has worked for the newspaper in various capacities since 1982 and joined the newsroom in 1989. She can be reached at jmaschino@berkshireeagle.com.
Amanda Burke covers Pittsfield City Hall for The Berkshire Eagle. An Ithaca, New York native, she previously worked at The Herald News of Fall River and the Fitchburg Sentinel & Enterprise. Find her on Twitter at @amandaburkec.
STOCKBRIDGE  As a first step toward saving the 63-acre old-growth forest at Ice Glen from predatory insects, the Select Board has approved funding to begin triage treatments for 38 ailing white ash trees, starting in July.

A long-term strategy to preserve blighted hemlocks also is underway, with $70,000 approved last month by annual town meeting voters despite concerns voiced over the possible impact of pesticide applications.

While the 400- to 500-year-old white ash trees can be treated chemically in the summer, the hemlocks require insecticide applications in the fall or spring, according to forestry specialists.

There are 100 trees that you definitely need to treat this year. Theyre in a bad place for public safety if they do die, Ken Gooch, retired director of forestry health for the state Department of Conservation and Recreation, said at last weeks Select Board meeting.

He estimated that the treatment cost for hemlocks that are thinning out at their tops, because of insect attacks, would total just below $50,000.

The board members doubled down on the need to start the rescue of the trees endangered by the emerald ash borer insects.

Some have expressed concern about pesticide use and its negative impacts, which is, frankly, legitimate, said board member Patrick White. But, the hemlocks in poor condition are going to die otherwise, and the cost of taking them out is ginormous.

Those trees risk being devoured by the invasive hemlock woolly adelgid insect, according to a detailed report prepared by Gooch, a state-certified arborist.

Stockbridge Ice Glen report The following conclusions and remarks are stated in a study for the Stockbridge Select Board by Ken Gooch, retired director of forestry health for the state Department of Conservation and Recreation:  Based on current data and past professional experience, the hemlocks in Ice Glen face a continued decline and possible demise if an immediate pesticide treatment option is not considered.  Do we do nothing and let nature take its course or find some way to intervene and stop the spread of an invasive insect, giving trees/forests a chance to survive while other methods of intervention were studied and implemented?  Ice Glen is a unique forested area with very large old growth hemlocks and towering white ash trees in a popular hiking area. A high percentage of the hemlock trees are in poor condition and without pesticide intervention this year may continue to decline. This could lead to a serious hazard tree situation in the near future causing a liability issue for the town as this is an open to the public recreation area.

The U.S. Forest Service Health Monitoring Program rates tree health by measuring foliage transparency  the amount of skylight visible through the live, normally foliated portion of the treetops. High transparency afflicting most of the hemlocks indicates potentially severe health concerns.

Goochs report describes hemlocks as a vital part of the New England forest landscape as the third most prevalent tree species in Massachusetts. Environmentally, hemlocks provide erosion protection along stream banks as well as a habitat and food source for birds and wildlife.

Loss of this native tree species could be ecologically devastating to forested areas because of the benefits it provides, he warned. Of the 351 hemlocks at Ice Glen, only one was identified as in good condition, 35 percent are rated fair and 64 percent are in poor condition.

Until now, his report noted, we have not experienced the hemlock tree mortality thats been seen to the south of Massachusetts. This is primarily due to our periods of prolonged cold winter temperatures that have killed a high percentage of the insect. But recent weather conditions and possible global warming have led to higher levels of hemlock woolly adelgid winter survival rates and more insect reproduction.

Board member Ernest Chuck Cardillo pointed out in support of immediate action, Town Meeting voted to go forward; we cant say no now.

We do have to go forward, Board Chairman Roxanne McCaffrey agreed, though she cited legitimate concerns about the effects on porcupines, which nibble on the bark of the trees.

But, as Mathieu Boudreau, chairman of the Stockbridge Agricultural and Forestry Commission, noted, low-level pesticide spraying on bark reduces any absorption into mammals to minimum to none, to the best of our knowledge.

McCaffrey asked Boudreau about a more comprehensive long-range plan to manage the forest.

What are various other steps we have to take to make sure younger hemlocks can come up and take the place of others that are going to die? she asked.

Boudreau said the first-step treatment buys us time until we come up with a significant, longer-range plan that will be as great as this forest is. Hopefully, this will show that we value the trees; its not just any old-growth forest.

Were looking at triage here, White said, with every intent of moving beyond triage once we get past September.

Grant applications, requests for proposals and private fundraising efforts are planned to extend treatments throughout the forest.

The board voted 3-0 to spend up to $7,000 for a two-day pesticide injection into the failing ash trees, as soon as possible after July 1.

Select Board members also voted to seek town membership in the national Old Growth Forest Network, a nonprofit focused on protecting and restoring old-growth forests.
Town Manager Kelli Robbins, far right, discusses an issue with the Lanesborough Select Board during its June 14 meeting. Robbins is resigning after three years on the job.
Reporter

Greta Jochem, a Report for America Corps member, joined the Eagle in 2021. Previously, she was a reporter at the Daily Hampshire Gazette. She is also a member of the investigations team. You can find her on Twitter @greta_h_jochem.
The Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield. The COVID-19 Cultural Impact Commission envisions doling out $600 million over a four-year period to aid the states arts and culture sector in helping it recover from the coronavirus pandemic.
Statehouse Reporter

Danny Jin is the Eagle's Statehouse reporter. A graduate of Williams College, he previously interned at the Eagle and The Christian Science Monitor. Danny can be reached at djin@berkshireeagle.com or on Twitter at @djinreports.
A June 17 Supreme Court ruling that favored Catholic Social Services in Philadelphia was far from the constitutional gale wind that would have reshaped how courts interpret religious liberty under the First Amendment.
Supreme Court says no right to hearing for some immigrants

The Supreme Court has ruled that the government can indefinitely detain certain immigrants who say they will face persecution or torture if they are deported to their native countries
featured

Berks County Public Libraries

Color blind patrons see world in vivid color thanks to special glasses

Berks library color blind patrons see world in vivid color thanks to special glasses
Darnella Frazier, the teenager who took the 9:26-minute cellphone video of George Floyds fatal encounter with convicted former Minnesota policeman Derek Chauvin, was presented with the "Shine A Light Moment" award at BET Awards 2021.

Actress Lauren London presented the award. Frazier was not present to accept.

Frazier, 18, was a high school senior who was with her younger cousin on May 25, 2020 when she walked to the Cup Foods store in South Minneapolis. There she saw Floyd being apprehended by Chauvin and three other officers. While pinning Floyd to the ground Chauvin knelt on his neck until Floyd lost consciousness and passed away.

Frazier posted the video later on social media, where it quickly went viral, sparking outrage among millions and bringing global attention to police violence against Black people. Frazier later testified during Chauvins trial, describing what she recorded and wishing she could have done more.

She was recently awarded a 2021 Special Citation from the Pulitzer Prize committee for her efforts in citizen journalism.

Chauvin was convicted of Floyds murder in April and was sentenced last week to 22  years in prison.

RELATED: Darnella Frazier, Teen Who Filmed George Floyds Death, Awarded Honorary Pulitzer
A report from the United Nations, human rights chief, focuses on racial injustices around the world suffered by Africans and African descendants, particularly those caused by the transatlantic slave trade, which lasted centuries. It even goes as far as urging reparations to those affected.

I am calling on all states to stop denying  and start dismantling  racism; to end impunity and build trust; to listen to the voices of people of African descent; and to confront past legacies and deliver redress, said Michelle Bachelet, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights in a video statement, according to the Associated Press.



The document brings attention to global structural racist systems and their historical impact on Black people, which are exemplified in the deaths of unarmed Black people in America and other countries at the hands of law enforcement or vigilantism.

It aims to accelerate actions by countries to stop racial injustice, bar police from getting away with human rights violations, ensure a voice for people of African descent, and create accountability for the wrongs of the past centuries.



RELATED: U.N. Chief Warns White Supremacy Is A Transnational Threat



Bachelet, who twice served as president of Chile, made clear that she felt reparations are necessary to formulate that accountability.



Systemic racism needs a systemic response, the report says. States should adopt a systemic approach to combating racial discrimination through the adoption and monitoring of whole-of-government and whole-of-society responses that are contained in comprehensive and adequately resourced national and regional action plans and that include, where necessary, special measures to secure for disadvantaged groups, notably Africans and people of African descent, the full and equal enjoyment of human rights.



This is not the first time United Nations officials have discussed reparations for the enslavement of African descendants. In 2016, the UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent released a report saying that reparations are due to turn around the effects of slavery on Black people. Others in the UN have echoed the same sentiments that nations must acknowledge their roles in the transatlantic slave trade and its impact on an entire population of people from the 15th through the 20th centuries and the continued effect.

Bachelets report was compiled after analyzing 190 deaths, the majority in the U.S., to outline how police and law enforcement are so rarely held accountable for human rights violations, the AP said. It highlighted similar patterns in other nations.



The aim is to get governments to respond constructively to inherent systems of racism and not only in America. In about 60 nations, other cases are mentioned.

We could not find a single example of a state that has fully reckoned with the past or comprehensively accounted for the impacts of the lives of people of African descent today, Mona Rishmawi, who is a leader of a non-discrimination department in Bachelets office, told the AP. Our message, therefore, is that this situation is untenable.
Two LSU Health New Orleans students put their medical training to use on a flight to Greece on Saturday (June 26).

Medical Students Heather Duplessis and Lauren Bagneris answered a call for medical professionals on the flight after the call had received no response. They examined and treated a woman onboard the flight who had grown lightheaded and fallen due to low blood sugar and heat exhaustion, the New Orleans newspaper the Times-Picayune reports.

Duplessis and Bagneris calmed the patient, cooled her down, and gave her juice and food. They also communicated with a doctor on the ground and took the womans pulse, blood pressure, and blood sugar.

LSU Health Sciences Center in New Orleans lauded the two students in a Facebook post. The patient ended up feeling much better thanks to these two talented doctors in the making and their LSU medical education. Way to Geaux Tigers! You do us proud!!! the post read.

The rising second-year students spoke with WDSU about the incident. It kind of reminds you of why they challenge us the way that they do. Its so we will be able to respond in emergency situations like this, Duplessis said.

According to WDSU, Bagneris wants to work in cardiology, heart health, and nutrition after graduation, while Duplessis wants to become an OB/GYN and focus on maternal fetal medicine.
Sprinter Gabby Thomas became a first-time Olympian and the second-fastest woman in history on Saturday (June 26).

The 24-year-old Harvard University graduate ran the womens 200 meters in 21.61 seconds, the third-fastest time in history. The only woman who has ever run faster is the legendary Florence Griffith Joyner, who set world records for the 100 meters and 200 meters in 1988.

I blacked out during that race. I know beforehand I wanted to focus on accelerating through the first 100 and keep the momentum  come off the turn feeling really good, Thomas told NBC Sports. I am still in shock. I cant believe I put up that time. Definitely has changed how I view myself as a runner.

Thomas received a neurobiology degree from Harvard and is now studying toward a masters degree in epidemiology/health care management. She studies and trains in Texas. She spoke to the The New York Times about the importance of balance between school and training in her life.

Being in school really makes me appreciate what Im doing on the track. It makes you appreciate the time. When I go to the track, this is my time to be on the track and be free, she said.



RELATED: Olympic Athlete Gwen Berry Finishes Third In Hammer Throw, Turns Away From U.S. Flag While On Podium

Thomas also said that she draws inspiration from six-time Olympic gold medalist Allyson Felix, who finished fifth in the womens 200 meters. Thomas and Felix will both compete on the 2021 U.S. Olympic Team.

She was the first person I remember watching on TV, the person who has been in the back of my head. To be on the team with her makes me want to cry, she said.
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Spearfish, SD (57783)

Today

Thunderstorms during the evening will give way to partly cloudy skies after midnight. Low 68F. Winds S at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 60%..

Tonight

Thunderstorms during the evening will give way to partly cloudy skies after midnight. Low 68F. Winds S at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 60%.
BOISE - On Monday, the Idaho Department of Lands rolled back claims that it had received reports of gas cans being found with incendiary devices attached to them, and that the devices are reportedly rigged to ignite.

"Recently there have been several reports of gas cans being found with incendiary devices attached," read a memo that appears to be from the IDL's Cory Flesher.

Word also reached Spokane Tribal Police, who also issued a warning on social media on Monday Morning that said their investigators were looking into the gas can reports. "The State Fire Marshall's office as well as our investigators are looking into it. The Fire Marshall's office has taken it seriously enough that the ATF out of Spokane has been notified. They in turn have alerted their bomb squad to the potential," reads a Spokane Tribal Police post on Facebook. The post was still available on Tuesday morning.

The IDL memo was obtained by Big Country News from a June 25 Elk River Fire Department post on social media. In a phone call on Monday afternoon, IDL Public Information Officer Sharla Arledge told Big Country News that the information was contained in an "internal memo" and never was intended to be released to the public.

Idaho County Sheriff Doug Ulmer says his office began getting calls from concerned citizens after word of the reported gas can danger began to spread last week.

Arledge said the information in the memo had been since unfounded.

Arledge asked Big Country News to remove the initial story from the bigcountrynewsconnection.com website and Facebook Page. That request was honored.

The memo was still posted on the Elk River Fire Department's Facebook page as of Tuesday Morning, and had been shared over 500 times, but has been since deleted.
WASHINGTON D.C. - On Monday, June 28, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced that Randy Moore will serve as the 20th Chief of the U.S. Department of Agricultures (USDA) Forest Service. Upon swearing in, Moore will serve as the first African American to hold the role of Chief of the Forest Service.

Randy Moore has been a catalyst for change and creativity in carrying out the Forest Services mission to sustain the health, diversity and productivity of the nation's forests and grasslands to meet the needs of present and future generations, said Secretary Vilsack. In his role as Regional Forester, Randy has been a conservation leader on the forefront of climate change, most notably leading the Regions response to the dramatic increase in catastrophic wildfires in California over the last decade. His proven track record of supporting and developing employees and putting communities at the center of the Forest Services work positions him well to lead the agency into the future at this critical time in our country.

Current Forest Service Chief Vicki Christiansen will step down from her role on July 26. Chief Christiansen and Regional Forester Moore will continue to collaborate on an intentional leadership transition between now and then as the Forest Service gears up for a tough summer of predicted elevated fire activity across the Western United States.

Moore will bring over 40 years of experience to the role. He started his career in conservation in 1978 and has been serving as Regional Forester in the Pacific Southwest Region in California since 2007 where he has responsibility for 18 national forests, covering one-fifth of the state on 20 million acres of land. Additionally, he oversees State and Private Forestry programs in Hawaii and the U.S. affiliated Pacific Islands.

Moore said, I am humbled to be selected as Chief of the USDA Forest Service, and I look forward to continuing our path into the future with our employees and the citizens we serve. We have much work to do as we contribute to our nations most pressing challenges: tackling climate change, advancing racial equity and helping the people we serve recover and heal from the global pandemic, in part through connection with our treasured public lands.
First published June 28 by KTVB.COM.

A prosecutor asked Ada County jurors during the first day of a trespassing trial to send the message to a prominent anti-government demonstrator and his associate that the laws of Idaho still apply to them.

"There are rules for a democracy," Prosecutor Whitney Welsh said Monday. "This case is about the fact that two people, Ammon Bundy and Aaron Von Schmidt, have decided that the rules just don't apply to them."

Bundy and Von Schmidt were charged with misdemeanor trespassing more than 10 months ago after refusing to leave a hearing room in the Idaho Capitol building. Bundy, who recently announced his gubernatorial campaign, faces an additional misdemeanor charge of resisting arrest.

Welsh said the arrests came in August 2020 during the special session of the Idaho Legislature. A group of people who had come to the Statehouse to oppose a proposed bill remained inside the Lincoln Auditorium after the hearing was switched to a different room.

Just after 5 p.m., she said, Speaker of the House Scott Bedke asked Idaho State Police to clear the room.

Everyone left except for the defendants, who were taken into custody, the prosecutor said.

"At the conclusion of the state's evidence, the state will stand before you and ask you to hold these two men accountable," Welsh said.

Bundy's lawyer, Sam Bishop, urged the jury to take a different view.

"You are not going to be asked to agree with what Ammon Bundy had to say or what he was doing," Bishop said. "You will be asked to defend his right to express his views."

Bishop argued that the Statehouse is open to the public and that Bundy was not breaking any rules by going to the Capitol to register his disagreement with proposed legislation, or by remaining in the hearing room.

"Ask yourself - if Ammon Bundy can be kicked out of the statehouse for any reason, who else can? Anybody," Bishop said.

Von Schmidt, who is acting as his own lawyer, echoed that sentiment, telling jurors that "there was a lot of concerned people there" at the Capitol building the day he was arrested, and arguing that he had done nothing wrong.

"You're going to see that I was well within my rights to be there at the Capitol," he said. "You're going to see that I was peaceful."

Idaho State Police Sgt. Blake Higley testified he made the announcement to leave "multiple, multiple times," telling the 18 people left inside the room that they needed to exit or face arrest for trespassing.

Ultimately, everyone left but the defendants, who were taken into custody. Von Schmidt did not resist his arrest, Higley said, but that was not the case with Bundy.

"He made himself dead weight. He wouldn't stand up, he wouldn't do anything to assist, so it took us picking him up, putting him in a roller chair to get him out of the Capitol, because he wouldn't walk," he said.

Bundy, who also led a 41-day occupation at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016, was issued a yearlong no-trespassing notice banning him from the Statehouse following his arrest. He has been arrested several more times since; once for missing his original trial date in the trespassing case, then twice more in a matter of hours for returning to the Statehouse in violation of the no-trespassing order.

The first day of the trial began with jury selection. Judge David Manweiler and the attorneys questioned members of the jury pool about what they had heard about the defendants or the case, whether they personally knew Bundy, Von Schmidt, or the attorneys, their opinions on the limits of free speech, and whether they had attended any protests at the Idaho Capitol or other statehouses around the country.

Several people were dismissed from consideration, including some who said they had already formed an opinion about the defendants and did not think they could be impartial, a worker at the Ada County Jail, a woman who said she had memory issues and would struggle to remember what was said during the trial, and another who said she would not follow the law or the judge's instruction to jurors if she did not agree with it.

Multiple potential jurors said they had heard about the arrests on the news or social media, but most agreed that they could listen to the evidence and make an impartial decision about whether Bundy and Von Schmidt are guilty or innocent.

The trial could last several days. Prosecutors have indicated they will likely call witnesses including Ada County Sheriff's Office deputies, an Idaho State Police officer, and Speaker of the House Rep. Scott Bedke. The defense signaled that they may call several state representatives to the stand as witnesses.

The trial will continue Tuesday morning.

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BIG RAPIDS  James Jim Williams greeted each person he met in the same manner: with a big, friendly smile, and a piece of candy.

It was a pair of gestures he was well known for.

Hed pass out the peppermints to the guys and always had a Hershey kiss for the girls, Jim Chapman, one of Williams best friends, recalled. Everybody knew that and it was such a fun joke. Everyone knew when he came through.

Williams, 73, of Big Rapids, died Wednesday, June 23, but to the hundreds of lives he touched over the years, he will be remembered for many things.

A CAREER DEDICATED TO HELPING OTHERS

Williams, also known as Willy by many, spent his life dedicated to keeping the community safe. For over 30 years, Williams worked for Ferris State Universitys Department of Public Safety, serving a portion of his career as sergeant.

Youre not going to find someone who was more respected and appreciated by people in the Ferris State/Big Rapids community than Jim, Mecosta County Sheriff Brian Miller said. Everybody has nothing but glowing things to say about the man.

When he wasnt in the capacity of law enforcement, Williams was educating others on the subject. He spent several years teaching the criminal justice program at Ferris State  a program he used to help shape the lives of officers for years to come.

To this day, many of the people who once sat through Williams' courses are currently in leadership roles in and around the Big Rapids area.

The list of peoples lives Jim has touched goes on and on, Chapman said. Police officers from all over the nation, who went to Ferris, are reaching out (following his death) and expressing their sympathy.

Big Rapids police chief Danielle Haynes first met Williams in 2002 when she arrived to Ferris States campus to attend the Michigan Police Corp.  a federal police academy taught by Williams and Chapman. Haynes recalled having only 10 minutes to unpack all of her belongings from her vehicle for the 20-week academy.

I can remember Sgt. Williams hovering over my Eagle Talon with a smile as I quickly unloaded a mini-fridge and ran into the dorms with it, Haynes said. It was in that moment with his subtle smile, I knew no matter how difficult and demanding the next 20 weeks would be that he would be our ally.

Big Rapids Township fire chief Jim Tubbs was another student of Williams, who recalled many fond memories of his late instructor and lifelong friend. Tubbs entered Ferris criminal justice program in the late 1990s, which helped blossom him into his current career.

Anytime you came across Jim, it was handshake and a smile, and he sent you along making you feel good about yourself, Tubbs said.

After Williams retired from Ferris State, he helped create the Public Safety program at the Mecosta-Osceola Career Center, where he taught for eight years. Tubbs recalled the day Williams contacted him to come help teach fire safety. The kids loved Williams, Tubbs said.

Hes one of those guys that once youre a friend, youre a friend for life, he explained. There was so much respect for him because of the way he handled himself. You wanted to be the best you could be when you were around him.

Miller said Williams was famous for closing time behind Shooters. Miller recalled a situation early in his career where he was working a theft case and received some help and guidance from Williams.

It was a situation of a more experienced officer who took time out to help the young guy, he said. "That's something to this day, I haven't forgotten."

JIM LOVED EVERYBODY': A FAMILY MAN

Williams, a United States Air Force veteran, was committed to his family.

On Nov. 9, 1968, he married Kathleen Kathy Williams. The couple later moved to Big Rapids from North Dakota when Williams was honorably discharged from the United States Air Force. He was awarded the Purple Heart and Air Force Commendation medal in support of his actions during Vietnam.

Jim and Kathy later had three children  Brian, Mike and Laura.

Its no coincidence his kids are the people they are, Miller said, noting Mike serves as the current Mecosta County undersheriff. They had a tremendous role model to look up to their entire lives.

Williams, a proud father, also wore another hat in his lifetime  grandfather. He was a big supporter of his grandchildren Braeden, Emma, Katie, Jenna, and Lauryn.

You didnt have to be blood-related to be considered a part of Williams family either. For those who spent time near him, they said Williams made everyone feel a little bit more safe.

I was fortunate to work alongside this mentor for a time when I accepted a position with Big Rapids Department of Public Safety, Haynes said. Even after Sgt. Williams retired from FSUDPS, we never lost touch.

One of our most unique visits occurred while my husband was deployed in 2017-18, she added. He stopped by and gave me a P-38, also known as a military can opener.

Tubbs said Williams was someone people could turn to and know Willy is here. Everything is going to be OK.

Jim was just a good guy. He was the epitome of a good guy that everybody looks to, Tubbs added.

Outside of his personal and law enforcement families, another group that was near to Williams was the Boy Scouts. Williams was active as an adult leader for the Boy Scout Troop 114 in Big Rapids.

Jim loved everybody, but he especially loved those kids, Chapman said. They would go all over (the state) on trips and youd always see him with a friendly smile.

Jim was the kind of person who saw potential in everyone and he saw the potential in me, Jeremy Mishler, a former criminal justice student and neighbor of Williams, said. Jim has this positive attitude. Its sort of an empathy and humanity that he grants everyone who has his attention.

Mishler said he was grateful to have Williams as his neighbor.

"His grandchildren and my children are right around the same age," Mishler explained. "So there were many opportunities for us to catch up on the sidelines  eating popcorn and reminiscing on the old days."

A SMILE AND A PIECE OF CANDY

For anyone who ever met Williams, they could expect at least two things as they approached him.

Hed always have a peppermint candy ready for the guys, Miller began to explain. And a small piece of chocolate for the girls. It was just something everyone knew Jim for.

Tubbs also recalled the story, but with one minor twist.

I actually got the Hershey kiss from him one time  and a peppermint, Tubbs said. But, I was to give the chocolate to my wife.

He actually messaged her and said, Make sure your husband gives you the chocolate I gave him, he added.

The candy played an important role in Williams conversations, according to Mishler.

That (piece of candy) allowed him to get what he wanted to say off, and, it gave you a minute or two to reflect on how youd respond to what he said, Mishler explained. But regardless, if you saw Jim, you knew he had a peppermint candy or piece of chocolate waiting in his pocket for you.

(Williams) would stop into the department over the years to visit while waiting to pick up his grandchildren from school, always bringing a handful of mints with him, Haynes added.

ONE FINAL SALUTE

A Mass of the Resurrection will take place at 1 p.m. Thursday, July 1 at St. Mary Catholic Church.

The family will greet friends from 2-4 p.m. and 6-8 p.m. on Wednesday, June 30 at the Daggett-Gilbert Funeral Home and one hour prior to Mass on Thursday at the church.

Memorial contributions may be made in Williams honor to the Boy Scout Troop 114, Big Rapids, MI 49307 or The Thin Blue Line of Michigan.
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NIRAMAI FeverTest is a smart software that enables screening for COVID-19 symptoms in public places, using computer vision and AI to analyse and monitor crowd compliance to COVID-19 guidelines

Deep-tech health startup NIRAMAI Health Analytix has announced receipt of research funding from CDC-UK for its new thermal screening solution. NIRAMAI is an investee of Pi Ventures, a fund backed by CDC Group (CDC, the UKs development finance institution and impact investor). NIRAMAI FeverTest is a smart software that enables screening for COVID-19 symptoms in public places, using computer vision and AI to analyse and monitor crowd compliance to COVID-19 guidelines. Analysing infrared and visual cameras across multiple hospitals, corporate offices and public places, the software offers an automated screening solution that can help control the community spread of COVID-19 - enhancing Indias preparedness to combat a third wave of the virus.

NIRAMAI FeverTest has features to help control the spread of COVID-19, including features that recognise and detect non-compliance to mask-wearing guidelines. The solution is being used by corporate sites of Morgan Stanley, Kotak Bank and multiple corporate parks of RMZ across India. FeverTest is also deployed in two major railway stations of Bengaluru in partnership with South Western Railways, enabling Railway Protection Force personnel to seamlessly scan thousands of commuters for compliance to COVID-19 protective measures.

Srini Nagarajan, MD, South Asia, CDC Group, said, NIRAMAI FeverTest is a technology that will amplify the efforts to save lives, preserve public safety and reduce the economic impact of the pandemic in India. NIRAMAIs innovative solutions will complement the national response to combating COVID-19 and we are pleased that the technology can support India in meeting the challenge head-on, bolstering the country's steps toward bringing the pandemic under control.

Dr Geetha Manjunath, Founder and CEO, NIRAMAI, said, Niramai continues to help fight COVID using technology. The financial support from CDC has enabled us to successfully pilot our AI-enabled COVID screening product at IT tech parks, schools and some hospitals across Indian cities.

Speaking of the other innovative efforts that NIRAMAI is taking to tackle the Covid challenge, Dr Geetha Manjunath added,  Women can now avail NIRAMAI breast health screening in the comfort of their homes. We have also made a significant contribution to XraySetu, the WhatsApp chatbot for Chest Xray analysis, which was developed in collaboration with ARTPARK and the Indian Institute of Science. XraySetu is a free AI-based service to rural doctors that helps screen chest X-rays.
The South African National Editors' Forum (Sanef) welcomes the government's decision to follow through on its promise to prioritise journalists in the country's vaccine rollout programme.

All categories of media workers

Journalists, as designated frontline workers have risked their lives every day for the past 16 months, working throughout the pandemic as part of their responsibility to the public.Even during the different peaks of the pandemic, they have not had the option to suspend work or work from home because of the nature of their work and the critical service they provide.They have traversed the country, going to hospitals, clinics, vaccination sites, mass rallies, press conferences etc. to reflect on the pandemic, in service to the country to ensure that the public is adequately informed.On Monday, 28 June 2021, the government informed Sanef that journalists will be next in line as soon as all media houses submit their information regarding their employees age groups and regions where they are stationed. All community media establishments around the country including freelance journalists will also receive forms that they must complete and submit to Government Communications and Information System (GCIS).Sanef particularly appreciates the governments decision to not only inoculate frontline journalists but to accommodate all categories of media workers as the government wants to target and deal with the media as a sector than a selected group.Details about the programme and what needs to be done to get the whole sector vaccinated will be forthcoming. We call on all journalists and the media fraternity to vaccinate so that the government can quickly move onto the next priority sectors.In January this year, Sanef made an impassioned plea to the National Coronavirus Command Council (NCCC) for journalists to be on the list of essential workers and be prioritised in the second phase of the rollout. Sanef also lobbied President Cyril Ramaphosa, pleading the case for journalists to be considered for vaccination. Sanef was extremely concerned that without a plan to vaccinate journalists, they will continue to get infected by the disease. The Forum argued that, like other frontline workers, journalists posed a serious threat to their families and that this had an equally daunting impact on the state of their mental health.It was observed that small newsrooms battle with the job's demands as their colleagues have been infected in the line of duty and are forced to isolate. Despite the risk, they remained committed to the cause, going beyond the call of duty as the nation struggles through these unprecedented times.Sanef wishes to thank all journalists for patiently waiting for their turn, as the government rightfully prioritised health care workers, pensioners and now educators.While many industries have scaled back operations, journalists remain needed even more now more than ever and will be out in the field to report on the now highly transmissible Delta variant, thought to be twice as contagious than the Beta strain of the virus.
Think back to your favourite robocall experience. You probably don't have one. Last week, at a dinner party, I asked the guests to recall their favourite robocall experiences. It was interesting and thrilling, not quite nobody enjoys receiving a robocall. I don't. You don't either. It is one of the few things people nearly unanimously unite behind. Why do businesses keep using the channel? Is there a better way to use it? Why do people hate it so much?

Source: Mike Meyers on Unsplash

What analysing 10 billion emails shows business leaders According to the Everlytic 2020 Email Marketing Benchmarks report, email subscribers who have been opening their messages have been more engaged with the content than ever...

We believe the channel has been abused and has untapped potential in the lead up to proper PoPIA compliance over time. Adding automated voice to multichannel automated workflows is powerful. We acknowledge that there are commercial opportunities in the existing market and we can align these with our sound ethics. There are no real local competitors of scale that offer this integrated multichannel marketing mix on integrated automation foundations. We can offer the lowest possible competitive price point in the market.

Fraud alerts. These can also be followed up with an email or SMS if the call isnt answered, using our multi-channel automation.

Policy renewals. It is in your best interest to renew in time.

Revenue collection. Whilst a customer might not want to pay, they understand the context.

Education notifications. This is a great way to ensure that students know exactly whats happening on campus.

Emergency response alerts. These will limit the loss and drive action quickly.

Membership group updates for churches and clubs, etc.

Webinar attendance. Voice prompts to remind RSVPd attendees will stimulate attendance.

Fiduciary obligation to communicate. Some industries are required by law to communicate. The channel is a great way to deliver nuanced messaging and use call routing to further explore content.

Appointment reminders. This includes chronic medication, beauticians, etc.

Yes, Everlytic offers automated voice as a messaging channel. Does this make us hypocrites? No, and I am going to make the argument for why not.Given the same message content, delivered across email, SMS, by a human being, and by an automated voice delivery mechanism: Which would you hate more? You are likely more tolerant of email, then SMS, then automated voice and you would be most inclined to acts of violence when a human being phoned you. Generally, our politeness saves lives.And this is where things start to become clearer: The more passive and easily dismissed the channel, the more tolerant we are.Email and SMS are relatively passive; depending on your notification settings, you may hear a ping but there is no immediacy or urgency to read or respond. When your phone rings, you generally answer (lets forget about Truecaller for now) because if you miss it, you miss the message and it becomes a chore, and: FOMO. A robocall is more easily dismissed than when there is a human talking to you  also, we feel guilty that we are dismissive, which adds emotional cost.There is more to it though. Aside from the factors above, our brains are highly effective, optimised pattern recognition and simplification machines. Stereotypes are shortcuts produced by the brain that use past experiences to draw conclusions and condense reasoning and understanding. What does this have to do with robocalls? Hang in there.I would venture to say that other channels are used in higher gross volume and intensity for spam or fraud than robocalls. Aside from email being more passively consumed and less intrusive, consider that it is less about the number of these messages and more about the ratio of them being spam.I cant recall receiving a single robocall I gave informed consent for (ever).Generally, either the data is bought, lead generators are used to mine their own data, or the consent is given, but it generally isnt informed  often deeply buried in contracts. The channel is also not communicated upfront. Most emails I receive after the email client has filtered out spam, are things that I either expect, want, can tolerate because I understand why someone would send it, and of course, everyone should have a Nigerian prince in their network.100% of automated voice calls Ive received have been unsolicited. It is important, however, that we avoid a trap... Consider that the ratio is high not because businesses send the current unsolicited messages; it is high because of the absence of consented, expected messaging (think about my email context).Considering all of the above, it would be reasonable to accept that the reason we hate robocalls is that they require active engagement. There is a perceived personal cost of dismissing a call, and that our brains have taught us that all robocalls will waste our time.The answer is simple: stats  more specifically the expected return of a call (yes, Im fun at parties). Simply put, the expected return is the average lifetime value of a sale, multiplied by the probability of a sale being made. As long as this expected return is higher than the cost of a call, businesses will continue to use the channel. This is also why it is generally used to promote annuity products like insurance. Debt counselling and collection is another popular use case. Same premise.I am not condemning existing tactics, though I believe businesses could optimise their expected returns by being more targeted and combining it with other channels, however, volume then becomes the challenge. There is a place for robocalls in the market, else it would have been abandoned.It is unclear what the future holds for lead generation-based automated voice in the context of the Protection of Personal Information Act (PoPIA). What we do know is that existing databases will be grandfathered in but will become stale. I would contend that the dynamics of the channel will significantly change as old data becomes obsolete and new data is accompanied by informed consent  this will change the relationship between consumers and the channel and will force businesses to change their channel strategy.I believe there is a place for automated voice in the sales and marketing channel mix. This is why we got into the business.A few reasons; some nobler than others  lets be honest.If we can provide a better service at a better rate while supporting opt-out expression from consumers  why not play?With all of this said, how do we change things? We started with a few questions; perhaps it is fitting to end with some, to which I will propose some answers.While it has tainted the channel, I dont think it has been damaged beyond repair. The channel is likely to evolve as PoPIA phases in informed consent and old datasets become obsolete. We are ready and support the evolution of the channel.Yes. Personal biases must be changed or set aside and we need to reimagine the channel, particularly in the context of contextual, consented, and personalised messaging.It has certainly changed it. It has grown from a clear need and consumer activism movement; they voted with installs. Truecaller, at its core, is a service that helps you filter out spam calls using network effects. Consider that people wouldnt report a business sending them useful messages in a context they want, need, or expect. Instead of rotating numbers to seek to outsmart Truecaller, perhaps we should get informed consent, provide valuable content, and identify our numbers on Truecaller to ensure users know it is us phoning?Here are some use cases for where robocalls can be used where the consumer expects the messaging:It is clear, then, that there is a time and a place for automated voice calls in the modern sales and marketing channel mix. Managed ethically, robocalls offer compelling commercial opportunities for organisations that would benefit from the channels immediacy.
Creative Director/Content Writer

Remuneration: negotiable Benefits: Provident fund after 3 months, Flexible working (2 days at office 3 days at home), Internet allowance Location: Johannesburg, Rosebank Education level: Degree Job level: Mid Job policy: Employment Equity position Type: Permanent Reference: #BMCD Company: Blue Moon Corporate Communications

Your visual talent is to partner with your designer on a project to shape your concept and words into a communication piece which delivers on the brief. We expect you to be visually strong, up to date with current trends and to keep the client brand top of mind.

You need to be comfortable building your own presentations in Powerpoint.

You should be a strong, confident and compelling presenter, as you will be required to present your work to the team and to client.

We want you to be curious and keen to explore fresh methods of reaching people, across all media channels.

You must be able to think, write and act in a manner inclusive of all people.

We require you to keep abreast of business trends and innovation, especially in the field of employee experience and engagement.

You should be a team player who collaborates with others to get the best results, sharing your work and ideas generously.

You must be willing to put in the hours as required, as this environment requires fast turnaround and superb delivery.

Though not essential for your application to be considered, experience in creative concept work for events will be to your advantage.

We are seeking applicants who are 25 years+ and have at least 5 years experience of writing content for organisational or corporate communications.

You should reside, or be willing to reside, within commuting distance of Rosebank, Johannesburg.

Company Description

Our clients are organisations that require us to help them communicate with their employees and other stakeholders too. They come to us because of our track record in terms of engaging employees creatively and effectively through a variety of media and tools for communication and participation that we have developed and continue to develop. As in external marketing, you will need to understand your audiences on every level and will need to develop messaging which is brand-aligned and aimed at delivery on the strategic objectives of the client, across the media channels available, as well as additional channels that we may introduce for a campaign. Core to our great work is the ability to clearly comprehend what our clients wish to achieve, through careful listening and appropriate interrogation of their objectives  asking the questions that count  in order to arrive at a mutual understanding of the deliverables.Your English writing skills are key to the success of our work, because well-crafted content underlies each element of the employee experience that we create in order to achieve understanding and engagement amongst employees. You will need to write compelling content that is engaging, interesting, easy to follow, logical, to the point and appropriate to your intended audiences in terms of its levels of grammatical sophistication and/or simplicity and accessibility.We work two days a week at our office in Rosebank, and 3 days at home, so you need to be super motivated, self-directed and able to deliver on all deadlines as scheduled and agreed.Preference will be given to EE candidates.If interested, please email us your CV and samples of your writing / concept development.Please submit your application byBlue Moon is a specialist communications and experiences creator whose expert teams provide strategic communication support and the delivery of bespoke content, media, tools for engagement and participation, and events (all capable of spanning both the digital and real-life domains). Posted on 29 Jun 16:34
As of this writing, it has been three days since the Icelandic newspaper Stundin broke the story that a key witness in the US governments case against Julian Assange had fabricated allegations against the WikiLeaks founder. And yet, somehow, Assange is still in prison.

Weirder still, not one major western media outlet outside of Iceland has reported on this massive and entirely legitimate news story. A search brings up coverage by Icelandic media, by Russian media, and by smaller western outlets like Democracy Now, World Socialist Website, Consortium News, Zero Hedge and some others, but as of this writing this story has been completely ignored by all major outlets who are ostensibly responsible for informing the public in the western world.

Its not that those outlets have been ignoring Assange altogether these last few days either. Reuters recently published an interview with Assanges fiance Stella Moris. Evening Standard has a recent article out on Assanges plans to marry Moris in Belmarsh, as does Deutsche Welle. Its just this one story in particular that theyve been blacking out completely.

And its not that the mainstream press are unaware of this story. Mainstream western reporters spend a lot of time on Twitter, and Assanges name was trending in the United States after the Stundin story broke. Tweets about the article by high-profile accounts like WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden have many thousands of shares each. Theyve all seen the article. They all know its newsworthy. Theyre just choosing not to report on it.

It reminds me of the blanket media blackout that occurred while the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons was hemorrhaging leaks revealing a US government-tied coverup in the alleged chlorine gas incident in Douma, Syria. Immensely newsworthy stories were breaking every few days on a major international scandal, yet not a peep was made about it by the mainstream press.

We got some insight into what happens in mainstream newsrooms during such bizarre circumstances when journalist Tareq Haddad leaked the emails from his editors at Newsweek refusing him permission to write about the unfolding OPCW scandal. Haddads pitch was rejected by editor Dimi Reider on the basis that other bigger outlets hadnt written about it.

Leak has been out since weekend, Reider wrote. Its certainly no scoop. Yet despite the days that passed, not a single respected media outlet  many of whom boast far greater regional expertise, resources on the ground and in newsroom than Newsweek does  have taken the leak remotely seriously. Which already yesterday made my wonder how we could or why we should.

Reider was supported by Newsweeks digital director Laura Davis, who told Haddad his pitch was being rejected because the leak found zero to no traction among publications which are highly resourced and experienced on Syria.

And thats just pretty darn convenient for the powerful, is it not? Assuming other mainstream news outlets feel the same, this means theyre all generally following the lead of just a handful of top-tier publications like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian. If just those few outlets decide to ignore a major news story thats inconvenient for the powerful (either by persuasion, infiltration or by their own initiative), then no one else will either. As far as the media-consuming public is concerned, its like the major news story never happened at all.

And thats really, really creepy.

Western mass media outlets are propaganda. They are owned and controlled by wealthy people in coordination with the secretive government agencies tasked with preserving the world order upon which the media-owning plutocrats have built their kingdoms, and their purpose is to manipulate the way the mainstream public thinks, acts and votes into alignment with the agendas of the ruling class.

You see this propaganda in the way things are reported, but you also see it in the way things are not reported. Entire news stories can be completely redacted from mainstream attention if they are sufficiently inconvenient for the mechanisms of empire, or only allowed in via platforms like Tucker Carlson Tonight and thereby tainted and spun as ridiculous right-wing conspiracy theories.

If newsworthiness and significance were what governed mainstream news media reporting, instead of the agendas of profit and power, wed constantly be hearing about the people dying in Yemen and the brutal income inequality in the United States. And the fact that the most powerful government in the world is persecuting a journalist for telling the truth would be at the forefront of everyones awareness, instead of the mountain of smears they have heaped upon Julian Assange.

I sometimes get people telling me that some news stories are meant to distract us from other, bigger news stories, like this is something the imperial narrative managers do especially on some occasions but not all the time. In reality, distraction is never not happening, because every single day the plutocratic media pull peoples attention away from the pressing issues of the moment like ecocide, poverty, oppression and mass military slaughter to get them talking about Cardi Bs baby bump and Marjorie Taylor Greenes latest doofy publicity stunt.

We are being lied to. Constantly, and in more ways than we realize. By omission, by distortion, by half-truths and by outright deception. Our minds are being actively messed with by powerful people with limitless resources to ensure their continued domination of the planet at any cost. Our very perception of reality is being assaulted on myriad fronts. Until humanity finds a way to wake itself up from its propaganda-induced coma, the abuses of the powerful will continue.

________________________

The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else Ive written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what Im trying to do with this platform, click here.

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President Trump's attorney said on Monday that Manhattan DA Cy Vance has indicated that he has no plans to charge the Trump Organization with crimes related to allegations of "hush money" payments or manipulated real estate values, according to Politico.

New York attorney Ronald Fischetti said that during a meeting last week he asked Vance's team for any details related to charges up for consideration, to which Vance's team replied that while they are considering charges against the Trump Organization and individual employees related to alleged failures to pay taxes on corporate benefits - widely reported to include cars and apartments, the potential charges only involve a small number of executives.

"We asked, Is there anything else?" Fischetti told Politico. "They said, No."

When asked if the meeting touched on allegations made by Trumps former lawyer Michael Cohen and by adult film star and director Stormy Daniels, Fischetti replied, Nothing. Not a word on that. Fischetti also said that Vances team told him they will not bring charges against Trump himself when the first indictment comes down. They just said, When this indictment comes down, he wont be charged. Our investigation is ongoing, he said.

According to the Washington Post, Vance's team is set to proceed with the charges unless otherwise persuaded not to. Fischetti says he expects them to drop this week or next.

"Its like the Shakespeare play Much Ado About Nothing," he said, adding "This is so small that I cant believe Im going to have to try a case like this."


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VANCOUVER - Environment Canada warns the torrid heat wave that has settled over much of Western Canada won't lift for days, although parts of British Columbia and Yukon could see some relief sooner.

Albert Huynh cools off in the frigid Lynn Creek water as Leanne Opuyes, left, laughs in North Vancouver, B.C., on Monday, June 28, 2021. Environment Canada warns the torrid heat wave that has settled over much of Western Canada won't lift for days, although parts of British Columbia and Yukon could see some relief sooner. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

VANCOUVER - Environment Canada warns the torrid heat wave that has settled over much of Western Canada won't lift for days, although parts of British Columbia and Yukon could see some relief sooner.

Heat warnings were posted across B.C. and Alberta, large parts of Saskatchewan, the Northwest Territories and a section of Yukon on Monday as the weather office forecasts temperatures reaching 40 C in some areas.

Sixty temperature records fell Sunday in B.C., including in the village of Lytton, where the mercury reached 46.6 C  breaking the all-time Canadian high of 45 C set in Saskatchewan in 1937.

Environment Canada warns the "prolonged, dangerous and historic heat wave" could ease as early as Tuesday on B.C.'s south coast and in Yukon, but won't relent until mid-week, or early next week, elsewhere.

Forecasters said humid conditions could make it feel close to 50 C in B.C.'s Fraser Valley, where area raspberry growers say any cooling by Tuesday may come too late for their heat-ravaged crops. One farm posted on social media that its season is likely over before a single berry has been picked.

More than a dozen school districts in the province cancelled classes Monday rather than hold them in unair-conditioned classrooms. Fraser Health said it is temporarily juggling appointments and relocating several COVID-19 vaccination clinics to reduce the chance of heat-related illnesses.

Mike Danks, team leader of North Shore Rescue, said hikes should be postponed until the temperature lowers considerably.

"My recommendation is that you do something else," he said. "This is not the day to be doing more of an extreme hike in the backcountry because there's very little shelter for you once you're out there, from the sun, and conditions are changing rapidly."

Danks said snow is thawing quickly and that creates unstable conditions.

"I really caution people against doing anything that's more than a light hike, like going down to the rivers to get some cooling," he said.

"Even when conditions are more normal, people need to be very hydrated prior to going on a hike. It's not enough just to bring a couple of litres of water with you on a hike."

Early last week, even before temperatures began to soar, crews rescued someone who passed out on the trails of Mount Hanover, Danks said, adding the person had ventured out without enough food and water. Crews then responded to another call at Crown Mountain, where a hiker had vomited and was unable to move, he said.

"We're seeing temperatures in the upper 30s and into the 40s today, which is extreme. If you factor in the amount of effort that you're going to have to put in to travel in these conditions and temperatures, it's just not worth the risk. And it's going to be the same for our members conducting a rescue."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 28, 2021.
Brandons unusual graduation season continued to chug along on Monday, with members of Ecole secondaire Neelin High School handing out diplomas to 116 students outside the Keystone Centre.

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Brandons unusual graduation season continued to chug along on Monday, with members of Ecole secondaire Neelin High School handing out diplomas to 116 students outside the Keystone Centre.

Similar to the Vincent Massey High School graduation ceremony that took place in the same location on Friday, Neelin officials opted to organize a "drive-thru" style event in accordance with the provinces latest health restrictions.

This format required students to queue up inside their family vehicles along the Keystone Centres new pavilion, where school administrators distributed diplomas, scholarships, yearbooks and other important documents at the end of the line.

Despite the brevity of each presentation, students still got the opportunity to accept their diploma in person and pose for photos in their emerald green regalia, leaving some time to reconnect with their friends in the adjacent parking lot.

This aspect was particularly important to Mackenzie Bell, who told the Sun that Monday marked the first time she has seen a lot of her friends and teachers in person since all K-12 schools in Brandon were shifted to remote learning in mid-May.

Ian Cox strikes a victory pose on a boat alongside his family during Mondays Ecole secondaire Neelin High School graduation ceremony, which took place outside the Keystone Centre in Brandon. Cox was one of more than 110 students who took part in this drive-thru ceremony, which was put together in accordance with the provinces latest health restrictions. Now that he has officially graduated from Neelin, Cox told the Sun that he plans to attend the Asper School of Business in Winnipeg. (Kyle Darbyson/The Brandon Sun)

For Bell, this represents a sour end to a chaotic academic year, during which students her age had to constantly transition between in-person and remote learning based on the provinces COVID-19 case rate.

"Dont take being in school for granted," she said when asked to provide a parting piece of advice for forthcoming graduates. "It seems like its the worst place in the world, but once youre out youre really going to miss it and youre going to want to go back."

Despite a lingering sense of melancholy about what could have been, Mondays ceremony emanated mostly positive vibes overall. Family members and friends relentlessly cheered and honked every time a new graduate ascended the outdoor stage to pick up their diploma.

TOP: Friends Caroline Caswell, Mya Hlady, Arianna Laluk, Ruby Keller and Lauren McCausland exchange hugs and celebrate after receiving their diplomas during Ecole secondaire Neelin High Schools drive-thru graduation ceremony at the Keystone Centre grounds on Monday. BOTTOM: Family members take photos as Jenna Wollman walks with her diploma during Neelins graduation ceremony on Monday. (Tim Smith/The Brandon Sun)

To Neelin principal Susan Gilleshammer, this "drive-thru" setup was completely unlike anything she has experienced since the beginning of her Brandon School Division career in 2004.

"It feels like every grad has had their special cheering section," she said "Weve had boats and cowbells and all kinds of decorations and stuff, so its been really cool."

Gilleshammer also mentioned how this years ceremony even represents a significant departure from what took place in June 2020, where graduating Neelin students were asked to physically distance inside the Keystone Centres Manitoba Room to pick up their diplomas.

Brandon Sun 28062021 Friends Caroline Caswell, Mya Hlady, Arianna Laluk, Ruby Keller and Lauren McCausland exchange hugs and celebrate after receiving their diplomas during Ecole Secondaire Neelin High Schools COVID-19 restrictions compliant drive-through graduation ceremony at the Keystone Centre grounds on Monday. (Tim Smith/The Brandon Sun)

"Last year the public health orders were a little bit different, so weve just been trying to stick within the restrictions that we have and make it as beautiful as possible," she said. "The venue has been great and the Keystone (staff) have been wonderful to work with."

While parent Shelli Ross was sceptical about whether this format could do her daughters big day justice, she admitted that the schools commitment to providing a pleasing audio-visual presentation won her over in the end.

"Once youre in it, in that lineup, and ready to graduate its a whole different feeling," she said. "The way they set it up with the music and the names coming over the radio  we just really got into it and it got emotional."

Mackenzie Bell gives a double thumbs-up as she and her family wait in line during Mondays Ecole secondaire Neelin High School graduation ceremony, which took place on the Keystone Centre grounds in accordance with the provinces latest health restrictions. After she received her diploma, Bell told the Sun she is going to attend the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in Boston to study medicine. (Kyle Darbyson/The Brandon Sun)

Graduating student Liam Dickie concurred with Ross sentiment, believing that this "drive-thru" format actually holds some advantages over a traditional graduation ceremony.

"You still get your grad, but you dont have to sit through three hours of speeches," he said.

Moving forward, Ross implores Manitoba students and parents to keep an open mind when it becomes their turn to take part in similar outdoor graduation ceremonies this summer, even if theyve already had to endure a lot of changes throughout the past academic year.

Liam Dickie wears a giant smile after officially receiving his diploma during Mondays Ecole Secondaire Neelin High School graduation ceremony. Dickie told the Sun afterwards that he plans to attend Brandon University this fall to study science. (Kyle Darbyson/The Brandon Sun)

"There is so much out of our control, so you really just have to seize the day and make the best of it," she said. "And once youre in that mindset, its all fine."

Brandons 2021 high school graduation season will come to a close today, with Prairie Hope High School hosting its own convocation outside The Firehall event venue.

 kdarbyson@brandonsun.com

 Twitter:@KyleDarbyson
OTTAWA - Indigenous leaders will visit the Vatican later this year to press for a papal apology for the Catholic Church's role in residential schools.

Pope Francis speaks from the window of his studio overlooking St. Peter's Square at The Vatican to a crowd of faithful and pilgrims gathered for the Sunday Angelus noon prayer, on June 6, 2021. THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP, Domenico Stinellis

OTTAWA - Indigenous leaders will visit the Vatican later this year to press for a papal apology for the Catholic Church's role in residential schools.

The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops said Indigenous leaders will visit the Vatican between Dec. 17 and 20 to meet with Pope Francis and "foster meaningful encounters of dialogue and healing."

Manitoba Metis Federation President David Chartrand said he will be leading a delegation of Metis leaders during a private one-hour session with the pope to ask him to come to Canada to express his apologies and his sorrow for what took place in residential schools and to begin the healing process.

"It will have a greater sense of power and truth to his feelings and his pathway to healing if he comes into the soils of Canada, and stands here on our lands," Chartrand said in an interview with The Canadian Press.

Patricia D'Souza, director of communications for the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, said her organization is involved in arranging a visit to the Vatican and discussions are ongoing.

Chartrand said the Vatican respected the nation-to-nation relationship with Indigenous Peoples and that's why there will be separate one-hour sessions with Pope Francis for each of the First Nations, Metis and Inuit delegations.

He said other delegations will be travelling from Canada to the Vatican to attend a meeting with Pope Francis on Dec. 20.

"'He will speak to the public, probably in St. Peter's  where he'll meet the entire Canadian delegation that will be coming."

Chartrand said the long-awaited apology is still important despite being too late.

"In our culture, Indigenous culture, it means a lot to us that somebody finally acknowledges that they did wrong and they need to fix that wrong," he said. "I don't care how long it takes, the healing will start there."

The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops said Pope Francis extended the invitation and is deeply committed to hearing directly from Indigenous people.

The bishops said in a statement he wants to express his heartfelt closeness, address the impact of colonization and the role of the church in the residential school system, in the hopes of responding to the suffering of Indigenous Peoples and the ongoing effects of intergenerational trauma.

The bishops did not say whether the Pope will offer an apology.

Indigenous Services Minister Marc Miller told a virtual news conference Tuesday that any act of healing requires an apology, a full recognition of harm done, which hasnt been delivered by the Catholic Church.

People expect to see Pope Francis deliver that in a full, complete and comprehensive manner, said Miller.

He said the Liberal government will continue to advocate for a papal apology to Indigenous Peoples.

Miller said the country has seen some righteous disgust with the immobilization of the Catholic Church on this matter."

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited the Vatican in 2017 and personally asked Pope Francis to apologize for the church's role in residential schools.

On Friday, Trudeau reiterated his call for the pope to come to Canada and apologize on behalf of the Catholic Church.

Trudeau made the comments after Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan announced it had located 751 unmarked graves at the site of the former Marieval Residential School, a few weeks after what are believed to be 215 bodies of Indigenous children were found in British Columbia.

Some 150,000 First Nations, Metis and Inuit children were forcibly sent to residential schools, where many suffered abuse and even death.

The findings in Kamloops and Cowessess have sparked national outrage and grief, and has led to mounting calls for the federal government and church to investigate more potential school burial sites.

In April 2009, Pope Benedict XVI invited members of a Canadian delegation composed of representatives of Indigenous communities and of Catholic dioceses and religious communities, for a private meeting to discuss their experiences with the residential schools.

Following the meeting, the pope expressed his sorrow at the anguish caused by the deplorable conduct of some members of the church and offered his sympathy and prayerful solidarity, but didn't give an apology.

In July 2015, Pope Francis apologized for the grave sins of colonialism against Indigenous Peoples of America in a speech in Bolivia.

This report was first published by The Canadian Press on June 29, 2021.



This story was produced with the financial assistance of the Facebook and Canadian Press News Fellowship.
GITWANGAK, B.C.  The Mounties say they are investigating a suspicious fire at an abandoned church in northwestern British Columbia.

The RCMP logo is seen outside Royal Canadian Mounted Police "E" Division Headquarters, in Surrey, B.C., on Friday April 13, 2018. The RCMP say they are investigating a suspicious fire at an abandoned church in northwestern British Columbia.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

GITWANGAK, B.C.  The Mounties say they are investigating a suspicious fire at an abandoned church in northwestern British Columbia.

New Hazelton RCMP say the fire was reported early Saturday morning on the Gitwangak First Nation and was quickly extinguished with minimal damage and no injuries.

Staff Sgt. Darren Durnin says in a statement that police want to know if the blaze could be linked to four recent fires at churches within Indigenous communities in the south Okanagan.

A social media post from the Gitwangak Band says the former Anglican Church in that community is no longer used and it is in "no way affiliated" with residential schools.

Two tiny Catholic churches, one outside Hedley and the other at Chopaka, were destroyed by fires early Saturday, just days after separate fires near Osoyoos and Oliver levelled Catholic churches on band land there.

RCMP east of Calgary said that they, too, are investigating a fire that appeared to have been deliberately set at a Catholic church on the Siksika First Nation early Monday. Catholic churches in Saskatoon and Edmonton were also vandalized with red paint in the past week.

The fires and vandalism come less than a month after the discovery of what's believed to be the remains of 215 children in unmarked graves at a former residential school site in Kamloops, B.C.

The Cowessess First Nation in southeastern Saskatchewan is also investigating after ground-penetrating radar indicated 751 unmarked graves at the site of the former Marieval Indian Residential School. (CFTK)

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 28, 2021.
HALIFAX - Nova Scotia will move into Phase 3 of its reopening plan on Wednesday, which eases restrictions on businesses and reopens its border to travellers from outside Atlantic Canada.

Dr. Strang, Nova Scotia chief medical officer of health, right, and Premier Iain Rankin field questions after a tour of a COVID-19 vaccination clinic in Halifax on Friday, April 16, 2021. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Vaughan

HALIFAX - Nova Scotia will move into Phase 3 of its reopening plan on Wednesday, which eases restrictions on businesses and reopens its border to travellers from outside Atlantic Canada.

Premier Iain Rankin announced Tuesday that people from the rest of Canada will be able to enter the province but will be subject to isolation requirements if they are not fully vaccinated.

"Tomorrow is an exciting day," Rankin said during a briefing, while also adding a message to the people in his province. "Let's not let up. We need to continue to get vaccinated and continue to get tested as we open up."

Beginning Wednesday, travellers from outside Atlantic Canada will have to complete a check-in form if they want to visit the province. Those who are fully vaccinated at least 14 days before their arrival in Nova Scotia won't have to self-isolate, while people with one dose will have to quarantine for seven days and will need two negative test results during that time.

Travellers who haven't had a shot will have to self-isolate for 14 days and will be subject to testing at the beginning and end of that period.

Also starting Wednesday, people from New Brunswick will be able to enter Nova Scotia without restrictions, joining travellers from the rest of Atlantic Canada who were welcomed back to the province last Wednesday.

Nova Scotia had originally stipulated that travellers from New Brunswick would need to self-isolate upon arrival because that province had opened to the rest of Canada earlier than its Atlantic counterparts. But Rankin changed the policy following protests last week on the Trans-Canada Highway at the boundary with New Brunswick that led to a daylong blockade.

Rankin thanked people on both sides of the provincial boundary for their patience, saying the time was needed to increase vaccinations. "We have an extra 100,000 doses into arms  we really needed that extra week," he said.

Dr. Robert Strang, the province's chief medical officer of health, said there will be some checks by officials at the border although they won't involve New Brunswick travellers.

"We can't pull over every single car. But if you are coming from outside of Atlantic Canada, there is a good chance you might get stopped," Strang said, urging travellers to have their paperwork in order.

Under Phase 3 of the five-stage reopening plan, businesses such as hair salons, barber shops and spas will be allowed to offer walk-in service, and retail stores will be allowed to operate at 75 per cent capacity, up from 50 per cent. Fully vaccinated long-term care residents will be allowed to welcome visitors in designated areas, and social distancing won't be required for outdoor visits. Long-term residents who are not fully vaccinated will also be permitted to visit outdoor public spaces, such as parks.

Restaurants will get one hour more of in-person dining, until midnight, and they must close by 1 a.m., although they can continue to offer takeout, delivery and drive-thru service after closing.

Indoor social gatherings will be expanded to members of a household plus an additional 10 people, who won't need to wear masks or physically distance, and outdoor gathering limits will remain at 25 people.

Meanwhile, health officials reported one new case of COVID-19 Tuesday in the province's eastern health zone, which includes Cape Breton. Nova Scotia has 51 active reported cases and two people in hospital with the disease.

The province also reported that it had administered more than 900,000 doses of vaccine. Currently nearly 73 per cent of people have had at least one dose while 20 per cent are fully vaccinated.

Strang said that even as vaccinations increase at a steady rate, other measures such as wearing a mask and social distancing will have to remain in place.

"We need to hold on to these more personal protective measures at least through July while we introduce the risk that is inherent with having more people come into the province," he said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 29, 2021.
Ottawa should stop sending millions of dollars in aid to the Ethiopian government and push for creating a no-fly zone and delivering air-dropped food aid to the people of the Tigray region, who have been under attack from the federal military for nearly eight months, advocates say.

Young Tigrayans look out from the classroom where they now live, at a camp for the internally displaced in an elementary school, in Mekele, in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia, Monday, May 10, 2021. Tigrayan advocates in Canada say Ottawa should stop sending millions of dollars in aid to the Ethiopian government, push for creating a no-fly-zone and delivering food aid by airdrop for the people of Tigray, a region that had been under Ethiopian military attack for nearly eight months. THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP-Ben Curtis

Ottawa should stop sending millions of dollars in aid to the Ethiopian government and push for creating a no-fly zone and delivering air-dropped food aid to the people of the Tigray region, who have been under attack from the federal military for nearly eight months, advocates say.

Azeb Gebrehiwot of the Association of Tigrayan Communities in Canada said Canadians should know their taxpayer money is funding the Ethiopian government, which has been committing atrocities in Tigray.

"We, Tigrayans in Canada, we are so, so disheartened by our Canadian government, because you have the U.S., European Union, the U.K. strongly, strongly speaking out against what's happening in Tigray," she said.

Gebrehiwot, who immigrated to Canada 18 years ago, said the Ethiopian government completely shut off communication in the region, preventing her from reaching her family as Ethiopian and allied forces pursued a military operation in Tigray.

The conflict has led to the world's worst famine crisis in a decade, with more than 350,000 people facing starvation, according to the UN and other humanitarian groups.

Ethiopias government on Monday declared an immediate, unilateral ceasefire in the region. The announcement was carried by state media shortly after the Tigray interim administration, appointed by the federal government, fled the regional capital, Mekele, and called for a ceasefire on humanitarian grounds so that desperately needed aid can be delivered.

Meanwhile, Mekele residents cheered the return of Tigray forces.

The ceasefire, which Ethiopia said will last until the end of the crucial planting season in September, could calm a war that has destabilized Africa's second-most populous country and threatened to do the same in the wider Horn of Africa, where Ethiopia has been seen as a key security ally for the West.

Ethiopia is one of the largest recipients of Canada's international aid. The East African country had received almost $2 billion in aid from Canada between 2010 and 2019, according to the Canadian International Development Platform, a data-collecting initiative that operates out of Carleton University.

Global Affairs Canada did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Yohannes Abraha, a former director at Ethiopia's Foreign Affairs Ministry who came to Canada last year, said the Ethiopian government started a smear media campaign and made budgetary cuts of federal subsidies for the region three years ago, which laid the ground for the conflict in Tigray that started in November.

He said the conflict has political and historical roots and there are regional factors that played a role in escalating it.

The government of the Amhara region, whose forces fought with the federal government in Tigray, resents how the Tigrayan leadership has been pushing for a strong federalist system in which states have more power, while Amhara has supported efforts to centralize power in the capital.

"The Amhara wanted a unitary Ethiopia. No federalism, no border, just a unitary and unified Ethiopia, without recognizing the different nationalities in the country, the different identities," Abraha said.

Abraha also said Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki sent his forces to fight in Tigray with Ethiopia's federal government because he wanted to be a patron of the Horn of Africa and the leadership of Tigray appeared to be the only obstacle to him as the region continued to be a safe haven for Eritrean refugees and political opposition.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who won the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize, wanted to neutralize all political powers in the country's regions, and the only region that resisted this move was Tigray, said Abraha.

"Ahmed is coming to power to become the king in Ethiopia," he said.

Ahmeds transformation from making peace to waging war has appalled many observers since the fighting in Tigray erupted. Since then, the world has struggled to access much of the region and investigate growing allegations of atrocities including gang rapes and forced starvation.

Tag Elkhazin, a senior fellow at Carleton University's Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, said Ahmed is facing more challenges than ever, but that doesn't necessarily mean he will lose power as the country awaits the results of national elections.

Elkhazin said the rise of voices in Tigray that are calling for self-determination will likely create new dynamics that can escalate the conflict.

The international community can pressure Ethiopia by stopping funding to its government and levying sanctions on those who led the military activities, including Ahmed, he said.

"This is protracted. It is not going to end today or tomorrow or in a year or two." he said. "Both parties are bent on fighting."

This report was first published by The Canadian Press on June 29, 2021.

 With files from The Associated Press



This story was produced with the financial assistance of the Facebook and Canadian Press News Fellowship.
Most of Alberta's energy wells no longer hold enough oil and gas to pay for their cleanup and the public should take them over to ensure their remaining revenue funds remediation, a new report concludes.

A de-commissioned pumpjack is shown at a well head on an oil and gas installation near Cremona, Alta., Saturday, Oct. 29, 2016.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh

Most of Alberta's energy wells no longer hold enough oil and gas to pay for their cleanup and the public should take them over to ensure their remaining revenue funds remediation, a new report concludes.

"It is a radical idea," said Regan Boychuk of the Alberta Liabilities Disclosure Project, which produced the report. "It is something akin to nationalization."

Using data from the Alberta Energy Regulator released under Freedom of Information legislation, the report estimates the overall cleanup cost for the province's 300,000 unreclaimed wells at somewhere between $40 billion and $70 billion  a figure that doesn't include infrastructure such as pipelines or pumping stations.

The Disclosure Project, which has followed the issue for years and has advised academics and government, concludes there may not be enough value left in the ground to fund the work.

The same data set from the regulator suggests that 80 per cent of Alberta's operating wells no longer hold enough oil and gas to pay for their own remediation. It also says that by the regulator's own standards, 49 per cent of oil and gas companies licensed by the regulator are insolvent, their assets outweighed by liabilities.

Still, those companies retain wells that pump and generate revenue. The report suggests the creation of an agency that would step in on insolvent companies, operate whatever wells remain and use the proceeds to fund remediation.

Boychuk points to the example of Trident Exploration, which collapsed in 2019 leaving more than 4,000 unreclaimed wells. He said those wells were still pumping the equivalent of 10,000 barrels of oil a day.

Instead of being sold to pay creditors, the report says a reclamation trust could have taken over those wells and used the revenue to clean up the sites and create reclamation jobs.

"A reclamation trust would make lemonade out of lemons like Trident," Boychuk said.

Such an agency could create as many as 10,000 jobs across the province, using skills Albertans already possess, he said.

Instead, Boychuk said, the public is paying. Between government grants to fund reclamation, unpaid taxes and outstanding lease payments to landowners, the report says Canadians subsidize energy cleanup to the tune of $4.3 million a day.

"Polluting companies must pay for their own cleanup," Boychuk said. "It's the law."

Richard Wong, operations manager for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, suggested the report's analysis is too pessimistic. He said capital investment in oil and gas is expected to increase during 2021 -- "a signal that the industry is on the road to recovery," he wrote in a statement.

"Accelerating thedecommissioningand reclamation of inactive wells and associated sites remains a priority for our industry. We continue to work with the Alberta government to advance policies and regulations which ensure substantial progress."

Thomas Schneider, a professor of accounting and finance at Ryerson University who advised on the report, said Alberta needs to do something as liabilities mount and the resource dwindles.

"In Alberta today, the regulator only collects a deposit from a company when it's deemed to be insolvent. This is absurd. We need to collect cleanup costs before a company becomes insolvent."

He said oil and gas companies should have to report all their cleanup liabilities.

In an email, Energy Minister Sonya Savage said the government has already moved to ensure wells get reclaimed.

She said companies now face a tighter evaluation of their ability to meet environmental obligations when they buy wells. The role of an industry-funded group that looks after wells for which no owner exists has been expanded.

As well, the government is introducing a new program to encourage producers to require companies to spend a certain percentage of their environmental liabilities on well cleanup each year.

Savage has said that figure could be four per cent. It remains unclear how the program would be administered or enforced.

"The report ... falls short on a number of points and completelyfailsto reflect the significant progress made by Alberta's government on addressing a number of issues it identifies," Savage wrote.

She said the reclamation trust suggested in the report would expose Alberta taxpayers to unnecessary risk.

"Implementing a public reclamation trust would create a significant risk with Alberta taxpayers having to assume the cost of liabilities."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 29, 2021.

-- Follow Bob Weber on Twitter at @row1960
EDMONTON - Family members of a woman who was killed in a hotel room say the pain they continue to feel a decade after her death is unspeakable.

Cindy Gladue is shown in an undated handout photo presented as a court exhibit. A sentencing hearing is to begin for an Ontario truck driver convicted of killing Gladue in his Edmonton hotel room in 2011. In February, a jury found Bradley Barton guilty of manslaughter in the death of the 36-year-old Metis and Cree woman. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO  Court of Queen's Bench of Alberta

EDMONTON - Family members of a woman who was killed in a hotel room say the pain they continue to feel a decade after her death is unspeakable.

Cindy Gladue's mother, cousins, and sister told a sentencing hearing for Ontario truck driver Bradley Barton that they relive her violent death every day.

"I feel broken when I see my great-grandchildren with their mothers, without my daughter and without their grandmother," Donna McLeod said in a statement read in court Monday by a representative of the family.

"I have spent every day for the last 10 years reliving the violent death of my daughter. I have become a hypervigilant grandmother, who is constantly having to know where my kids and grandchildren are at all times."

A jury convicted Barton, 53, of manslaughter in February. Gladue, a 36-year-old Metis and Cree woman, died in his room at Edmonton's Yellowhead Inn in June 2011.

It was the second trial for Barton. A jury found him not guilty in 2015 of first-degree murder, which sparked rallies and calls for justice for Indigenous women.

There was outrage when Gladue's preserved vaginal tissue was presented in court during the first trial. She was also repeatedly referred to as a "native'' and a "prostitute."

The Alberta Court of Appeal ordered a new trial and the Supreme Court of Canada agreed.

Barton testified that he had arranged to pay Gladue for "rough sex'' in his hotel room and was shocked when he woke the next morning to find her dead and covered in blood in the bathtub.

Medical experts told court Gladue had four times the legal limit of alcohol in her system.

Crown prosecutors argued that while Gladue was passed out, Barton performed a sexual act that caused a severe wound to her vagina. They said he then picked her up, dumped her in the tub and left her to bleed to death.

The Crown recommended Barton be sentenced to 18 to 20 years in prison because Gladue was "triply vulnerable" as an Indigenous woman who worked in the sex trade and was intoxicated during the sex assault that killed her.

Prosecutor Lawrence Van Dyke said serious punishment is needed, because the act that killed Gladue was extreme and "nothing short of an act of sexual brutality."

Barton's lawyer has yet to present arguments during the three-day hearing. But Van Dyke told the judge that the defence planned to ask for a sentence of five to nine years.

Throughout most of the proceeding, McLeod held her face and wept.

"Barton killed my daughter and I have attended every court I could ... some days I had to miss court because reliving the horrible death of my daughter was too physically and emotionally painful. I wanted to be there every day to show how loved she was," she said in her victim impact statement.

McLeod added that her daughter hasn't been buried in peace because a part of her body  the vaginal tissue used as evidence in the first trial  is missing.

"No one understands the feeling of losing a child in the most horrible way and not being able to put her body or spirit to rest," she said.

A cousin of Gladue said in her statement that the trauma from her death was so difficult to bear that she quit her job, faced poverty and her marriage ended.

"Many women throughout the country, including myself, are scarred by the knowledge of the intensity of violence perpetrated against her and of the unbearable pain Cindy faced in her final moments of life," a transcript of Prairie Adaoui's statement read.

"He left her alone, writhing in that bathtub. I can still feel her pain."

Gladue's sister, Marilyn Houle, wrote a poem that was also read to the court.

"This morning, as I sit here looking up at the sky, I keep asking myself, 'Why?'" Houle said.

"How long did you suffer until the morning you were called home?

"The memories I have of you will always remain in my heart as we are apart. I love you my sister. Come visit me from time to time, until we meet again."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 28, 2021.

This story was produced with the financial assistance of the Facebook and Canadian Press News Fellowship.
OTTAWA - The Liberal government's statements about its commitment to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are not enough to advance this outcome as real action is needed to push the parties in a positive direction, says an expert.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas adjusts his glasses as he listens during a joint statement with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Tuesday, May 25, 2021, in West Bank city of Ramallah. THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP/Alex Brandon, Pool

OTTAWA - The Liberal government's statements about its commitment to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are not enough to advance this outcome as real action is needed to push the parties in a positive direction, says an expert.

Rex Brynen, a political science professor at McGill University, said Ottawa should raise the cost of behaviours that undermine the two-state solution by supporting the International Criminal Court's investigation into settlement activity and military operations in Gaza.

He said that would signal to various parties that there are costs associated with their inappropriate behaviour whether that is Israeli settlement activity or Hamas firing rockets at Israeli cities.

"(Stating that) 'We support a two-state solution isn't going to move any closer to a two-state solution," he said.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke Tuesday with the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas ahead of his foreign affairs minister's visit to Jordan, Israel and the West Bank later this week.

A readout of the call said Trudeau discussed political and security developments in the region with Abbas.

The readout said Trudeau underscored his belief in the right of Palestinians and Israelis to live with dignity, without fear, and with their human rights respected, including the creation of a Palestinian state living side-by-side in peace and security with Israel.

Marc Garneaus office said last week that his visit to the Middle East aims to advance Canadas support towards the goal of a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the region and a two-state solution following a deadly 11-day war between Israelis and Palestinians last month.

The ministers visit to the region comes weeks after a ceasefire ended the war that left at least 230 Palestinians and 12 Israelis dead.

Brynen, who is a former longtime consultant to the Canadian government on Middle East issues, said Garneau will tell the leaders in the region that a two-state solution is the only viable resolution of the conflict and the parties should not take actions that compromise that solution, but these statements won't be useful.

"I don't actually think (Garneau) will do anything useful at all," he said. "I'm really cynical about visiting the Middle East and making nice statements about our commitment to a two-state solution because it's really not enough to help and no one much cares about what we think."

He said the government believes in a two-state solution but it will not do anything that would be a significant contribution to moving in that extremely difficult direction as the prospects for that solution are eroding.

Mira Sucharov, a political science professor at Carleton University, said the two-state solution is becoming more and more unlikely to happen with increased settlement building by Israel and a very little political will on the Israeli side to make any major withdrawals or even settlement freezes.

"(Israel's) incoming Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, for his part, has said that he wanted to annex parts of the West Bank," she said.

"In the course of his coalition agreement, he agreed to hold off on that. So, it's unlikely that we'll see annexation on the one hand, but it's also very unlikely that we'll see any significant change."

Israels Parliament approved two weeks ago a new rotation government led by the leader of The New Right, a right-wing political party, Naftali Bennett, and the leader of Yesh Atid, a centrist political party, Yair Lapid, ending Benjamin Netanyahu's 12-year grip on power.

Human Rights Watch called on the Trudeau government in April to take action against alleged crimes against humanity by the Israeli government, which it labelled an apartheid state in a report that accused Israeli authorities of methodically discriminating against Palestinians within both Israel and the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The Israeli government refused the report and accused the New York-based organization of harbouring an anti-Israel agenda.

Brynen said that a couple leading Israeli human rights organizations also labelled the country "akin to apartheid" because the situation is no longer a temporary one of Palestinians being denied political rights pending resolution of conflict, he said.

"It looks permanent or semi-permanent."

Sucharov said the basic question now is whether Israel is able live with the status quo.

"They've proven very much so that they can," she said.

"How to persuade Israelis who hold the lion's share of the power to seek political change is the great obstacle before us."

This report was first published by The Canadian Press on June 29, 2021.



This story was produced with the financial assistance of the Facebook and Canadian Press News Fellowship.
The Branson Board of Aldermen on Thursday (now postponed to July 28) will consider an ordinance that would require face coverings in public spaces. The aldermen might approve it, disapprove it, or approve an amended version. Would you be in favor of some form of mandatory face covering ordinance in the city of Branson?

You voted:
You have probably heard one of the biggest economic challenges today is that consumer prices are rising too slowly, as the rate of inflation is just 1.1 per cent a year.

However, the mounting cost of insurance is a glaring exception to this trend.

Check out a recent home insurance bill and you are likely to find premiums are rising by anywhere between 8 and 10 per cent, according to recent industry wide statistics and company comments. Car insurance premiums are also up about 5 per cent.

Floods in Victoria in June were the latest in a series of costly disasters to hit the insurance industry. Credit:Nine News

So, why are prices rising so much faster than inflation and what can you do to keep a lid on the price hikes?
NSW Health has been notified that fragments of the virus that causes COVID-19 have been detected in the sewerage systems at Liverpool, Fairfield and Penrith.

NSW Health is aware of people recently diagnosed with COVID-19 who are isolating in these areas, it said. Nevertheless, residents are asked to be especially vigilant for any symptoms that could signal COVID-19, and if they appear, to get tested and isolate immediately.

The Liverpool sewage treatment plant serves about 75,000 people from suburbs including East Hills, Panania, Voyager Point, Chipping Norton, Warwick Farm, Lurnea, Cartwright, Wattle Grove, Moorebank, Liverpool, Hammondville, Casula, Milperra, Pleasure Point, Holsworthy and Prestons. This catchment includes the Ireland Park sewage network, where virus fragments have been detected recently.

The Penrith sewage treatment plant covers about 97,000 people in suburbs including Cambridge Gardens, Cambridge Park, Leonay, Emu Plains, Glenbrook, Penrith, South Penrith, Glenmore Park, Jamisontown, Regentville, Lapstone, Orchard Hills, Kingswood, Castlereagh, Cranebrook, Llandilo, Sun Valley, Mount Riverview, Emu Heights, Jordan Springs, Mulgoa, Warrimoo, Blaxland and Yellow Rock, as well as the Blue Mountains National Park. This is the first recent detection for this area.

The Fairfield sewage pumping station serves about 68,000 people in suburbs including Canley Vale, Fairfield Heights, Carramar, Woodpark, Guildford West, Smithfield, Merrylands West, Yennora, Fairfield, Wetherill Park, Fairfield West, Prairiewood, Bossley Park, Bass Hill, Chester Hill, Old Guildford, Guildford, Greystanes, Fairfield East, Villawood, Prospect, Lansdowne, Pemulwuy, Cecil Hills, Kemps Creek, Cecil Park, Mount Vernon, Horsley Park and Abbotsbury.
Holidaymakers shut out of NSW or caught up in Greater Sydneys lockdown are cancelling their travel plans to regional Australia, with accommodation providers frustrated a COVID-19 outbreak has once again occurred during school holidays.

Forget Me Not Farm Cottages owner Jo Schneider, who also runs a wedding business in the Byron Bay hinterland, said her phone had been ringing non-stop for two days as people cancelled their school holiday bookings.

Byron Bay hinterland Forget Me Not Farm Cottages owner Jo Schneider said her phone has been ringing non-stop the two days as people cancel their school holiday bookings. Credit:Danielle Smith

Everyone has cancelled, its just been phone call after phone call, she said. This happened in April during the last school holidays where there was one case and they cancelled Bluesfest and we went into lockdown.

It hasnt really picked up since then. It was looking really good for the next two weeks but thats been wiped.
A man and woman have been charged after methylamphetamine worth nearly $1.5 million was allegedly uncovered inside a kettle imported to Sydney from the United States.

Border Force officers intercepted a consignment of kitchen equipment after its arrival in Sydney on April 2, discovering 9.7kg of a crystallised substance concealed within a metal kettle.

Nearly 10 kilograms of ice was allegedly found in the kettle. Credit:NSW Police

The substance was tested and returned a presumptive positive result for methylamphetamine, or ice, with an estimated street value of $1.46 million.

Detectives from the Organised Crime Squad launched an investigation with assistance from the NSW Crime Commission, who conducted a controlled delivery.
A man has died in a workplace accident at a construction site in Sydneys western suburbs.

Police said they were called to a building on Phillip Street in Parramatta about 4pm on Tuesday after reports a man had been injured.

He was pronounced dead a short time later.

A crime scene was established and SafeWork NSW has been notified.
Queensland has gone into lockdown after two new local cases of COVID-19 were recorded on Tuesday, including a woman who had been infectious with the Delta variant in the community for 10 days.

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk ordered south-east Queensland, Townsville, Palm Island and Magnetic Island into lockdown from 6pm on Tuesday to 6pm on Friday.

She said one of the cases was a casual clerical worker from the Prince Charles Hospital in Brisbanes north. The 19-year-old woman was a receptionist who worked outside the COVID ward, and Ms Palaszczuk said she had not been vaccinated.

I am absolutely furious about this, she said. We need to make sure that we are getting our population vaccinated, right across our state.
The infected Brisbane hospital receptionist who tested positive for COVID-19 before a snap lockdown was called was offered the vaccination, but Health Minister Yvette DAth says she did not take the option up.

Ms DAth told ABC Radio on Wednesday the 19-year-old receptionist, who worked at Prince Charles Hospital in Brisbanes north, had been offered the vaccine as all health workers were, but did not take up the opportunity to get vaccinated.

Queensland Health Minister Yvette DAth.

The woman was confirmed late on Tuesday to have the Delta variant as parts of Queensland entered a three-day lockdown. Her brother has also since tested positive.

When asked why an unvaccinated worker was allowed to work outside the COVID ward, Ms DAth told ABC Radio the issue was being investigated.
On Friday morning, Stephanie Bryan had her suitcases packed, ready to finally see her mother, Sylvia, who is in the final days of a lung cancer battle.

After flying to Sydney from London, she had received what she thought was the approval she needed to take a charter plane to Brisbane, where she would be able to visit Sylvia, 83, in hospital while she completed quarantine.

Stephanie Bryan is quarantined in Sydneys Amora Hotel instead of visiting her dying mother in Brisbane. Credit:Suppled

By Friday evening, pictures had been published of someone in a similar predicament  Mark Kilian, the US man who travelled to Australia to see his dying father only to be denied access by Queensland  reunited with their parent at a hospital bedside.

But, that night, Ms Bryan went to bed once again in her room at Sydneys Amora Hotel.
It only took having dinner at the same restaurant and exercising at the same gym as case 1022 for Western Australias two known community cases to get infected with the highly contagious Delta variant of COVID-19.

Australian health officials believe the variant is so contagious that fleeting contacts with a positive case at a shopping centre or a restaurant could result in infection.

A drive-through COVID-19 clinic in Perth tests residents for the virus as part of the latest outbreak. Credit:Marta Pascual-Juanola

However, the partners of the community cases in Perth have so far tested negative for COVID-19, leaving authorities scratching their heads as to the transmissibility of the virus.

Premier Mark McGowan could not provide an answer at a press conference on Tuesday and labelled the situation a complete mystery.
West Australian Premier Mark McGowan says he would support the resources sector only letting workers on site who had been vaccinated for COVID-19 if it was what the industry wanted.

His comments came as the Tanami gold mine cluster in the Northern Territory grew to 10 cases around the country and several charter flights scheduled to fly from Perth to mine sites were grounded on Tuesday in response to WAs fourth lockdown.

Rio Tinto tests its workers for COVID-19 before they fly out to remote sites across WA. Credit:Trevor Collens

Mr McGowan said he thought everyone should get vaccinated as soon as possible but mining industry workers were at a high risk given people from all over Australia were employed at sites.

He said he would get behind the industry if it wanted to make a rule around mandatory vaccination.
Chinese state police allegedly attempted to enlist an international student to spy on the Australian Muslim Uighur community, offering to pay for his university fees, and threatening his mother after he attended a pro-democracy campus protest in 2019.

Other students revealed they feared their families would be targeted by police in China, and they could be harassed by pro-Beijing peers in Australia, who they felt were monitoring what they said in classes in case they criticised the Chinese Communist Party.

A report by Human Rights Watch has found that pro-democracy Chinese international students fear they or their parents will face reprisals from Chinese authorities if they express views critical of the government while studying in Australia. Credit:Tamara Voninski

The accounts are among the testimonies of 24 pro-democracy Chinese international students and 22 academics interviewed and given pseudonyms for a new report by Human Rights Watch examining the impact of Chinese government surveillance on academic freedom at Australian universities.

Federal Education Minister Alan Tudge, who was briefed on the reports findings, said it raised deeply concerning issues and said the government was working with universities to combat foreign interference on campus.
The NSW government is encouraging people to spend up on takeaway food using their Dine and Discover vouchers in a bid to support small businesses taking a financial hit from the snap lockdown.

Treasurer Dominic Perrottet has unveiled support measures for small businesses, exactly one week after he handed down his budget which showed NSW made a strong recovery from a pandemic-induced recession.

NSW Treasurer Dominic Perrottet announced new measures for small businesses affected by the lockdown. Credit:Kate Geraghty

The business rescue package, which will cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars, includes grants between $5000 and $10,000 for small businesses and payroll tax deferral for all employers.

It follows early estimates from NSW Treasury that the lockdown will cost the states economy $850 million a week, with Sydneys already sluggish CBD likely to be further impacted.
Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size If China chooses to attack the island of Taiwan, the United States could be helpless to stop it. By the time the Peoples Liberation Army launches its third volley of missiles at the island Beijing considers a breakaway province, the US could be just learning of the attack. In a matter of minutes, Beijings Rocket Force could cripple Taiwans military, infrastructure and ports. Yet if China wanted to conquer Taiwan, the outcome could be different. Possibly completely different. Credit: China would have to launch an amphibious invasion, deploying troops along its beaches as the first step in a march towards the capital Taipei. Despite its 1.9 million-strong army, compared to Taiwans cohort of 150,000, the task of taking its island neighbour and holding it is a mammoth military challenge. Taiwans Foreign Minister Joseph Wu said on June 3 that Taipei did not anticipate a conflict was going to break out any time soon, but we are trying to get ourselves ready.

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If there is going to be a war between Taiwan and China, we will fight the war ourselves, he said. If other countries come to our aid, that will be highly appreciated, but we will fight the war for our own survival and for our own future. In this scenario, the US and its allies could respond by conducting airlifts to Taiwan. The US could also use submarines and stealth aircraft to attack Chinas shipping fleet in the Indian Ocean to cripple its economic lifelines in times of a crisis. The divergence of the two Taiwan scenarios, a Chinese military attack or an invasion, says a lot about the relative military power of the US and China, itself a barometer of the strength of the two superpowers. I told President Xi that we will maintain a strong military presence in the Indo-Pacific just as we do with NATO in Europe not to start conflict, but to prevent conflict, US President Joe Biden told a joint session of Congress in April. A month earlier, Xi Jinping had told the Peoples Liberation Army: We should persist in using combat to guide our work; step up preparations for war.

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Today, Chinas military spending is the second-highest in the world after the United States and continues to rise. Its military budget is greater than the combined expenditure of India, Russia, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The Chinese defence budget reached $324 billion this year. It has been growing by 6-8 per cent each year for the past five years but according to defence intelligence agency Janes, US spending remains miles ahead at $759 billion. China had 55 small war ships in 2020, more than double the number it had five years ago. Six large amphibious vessels have been launched, three since 2015, and a third aircraft carrier, larger than its predecessors, will soon be completed. Meia Nouwens from the International Institute for Strategic Studies said Beijing was intent on achieving primacy in the waters that surround China. China is also developing the capabilities needed to support military operations at range, said Nouwens, suggesting they could attack across large distances. Chinas focus on its region would give it a local advantage in any clash with the US.

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Loading Oriana Skylar Mastro of Stanford University has testified that China dedicates all its resources to planning and preparing for a contingency in east Asia, while the US has additional responsibilities in the Middle East, Europe and worldwide. If a conflict were to erupt in east Asia, then the Chinese military is closer to on par with the United States. Chinas military build-up is making a difference. Only a decade ago, the US would have easily dominated the Chinese military in almost any scenario, says Australian National University Professor Stephan Fruehling. I think the US now accepts it may lose a conflict  at least at the conventional level  with China. Better trained or better placed The geographic focus is decisive. The US Air Force boasts nearly 2300 warplanes in service, with another 1422 aircraft in use for the US Navy and Marines, Janes calculates.

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But all the US planes cannot be dispatched to Chinas coastline. Certainly not in the six-to-eight minutes it could take a DF-11 A rocket to cross the 130 kilometre-wide Taiwan Strait to its target. Chinas 1264 warplanes, meanwhile, are based in China. Its a similar story with troops. The USs 1.38 million active personnel are better trained and equipped than many of their 1.9 million Chinese peers  but getting them in place, and in time, to take on China would be a crucial task. There are less quantifiable aspects as well. The last time Chinese troops saw direct action was 1979 when China launched a costly month-long war against Vietnam to teach it a lesson in retaliation for Hanois actions in south-east Asia.

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Ryan Ramczyk can't really pinpoint whether he's a few blocks away, around the corner or just down the street. But the New Orleans Saints' star right tackle knows he's approaching being the player he wants to be.
German automotive parts maker ZF plans to invest around EUR 200 million and strategically consolidate its business to drive growth over the next decade as it looks to double down its focus on India, the company said on Tuesday.

It also said a Refresh India strategy' which revolves around four key areas readapt, reinforce, retain and restructure -- and supports the strategic repositioning of the ZF brand identity in the country, will aid its growth plans.

A global leader in driveline and chasis technology, among others, ZF has been in India for more than five decades, operating through eight entities, two wholly-owned subsidiaries, five JV partners, along with 14 manufacturing locations as well as a technology centre in Hyderabad.

The company last year announced the successful completion of the WABCO acquisition. WABCO is a global supplier of primarily pneumatic braking control systems, technologies and services. Besides, it also supplies fleet operators with fleet management solutions and diagnostic tools among other services.

ZF is doubling down its focus in India through a significant investment of around EUR 200 million and strategic consolidation of its business domains with renewed impetus to drive growth over the next decade, the company said in a release.

Despite the current severe situation regarding COVID-19 in India, the strongly believes in the long-term growth potential of the region. Therefore, we are launching a refresh India four-point strategy, said Holger Klein, ZF Member of the Board responsible for Asia Pacific and India, at ZF.

This includes an intensive plan to rapidly grow the company's business in one of the largest automotive markets in the world, he added.

We plan to invest around EUR 200 million in the next few years to aid this growth through product launches, manufacturing and engineering footprint expansions, hiring and other developments across all business domains, he said.

ZF already enjoys a leading position across various technology solutions in automotive and non-automotive business segments, as a preferred partner of choice, it said.

In the commercial vehicle space, the acquisition of WABCO bolsters our manufacturing and engineering capabilities to increase the content per vehicle. In this next phase of growth, we will also continue to leverage India as a global sourcing hub across four areas: R&D, majorly focusing on software development, IT and digital innovation, manufacturing and material sourcing, Klein emphasised.

The company said it is also well-positioned to shape the future e-mobility and next generation technology in the Indian market through its global portfolio, adding that it is partnering with Mahindra Racing for Formula E, supplying silicon carbide-based power electronics alongside the electric motor and transmission.

This partnership heralds' endless possibilities for future introduction of such advanced technologies in the region as these technologies get tested under the harshest conditions, he added.

Stating that the journey of in India has evolved significantly over the last few decades, it said the new and evolved brand identity of the group in the region will be accurately represented in this new phase through the Refresh India four-point strategy growth areas.

As part of this, through higher levels of localisation and a strong thrust on design-to-market-solutions, ZF aims to introduce advanced global technological solutions at an affordable value for the Indian market, it said.

Also, India will become a global hub for worldwide requirements across R&D, IT and digital innovation, manufacturing and material sourcing.

Substantial progress has been made in the recent past to utilise the Indian supplier base for child part requirements for the various divisions, the company said, adding that ZF will continue to leverage India's manufacturing capabilities by expanding its footprint in the country.

The group will set up a new manufacturing facility in Chennai along with plans to increase the utilisation of other facilities, it stated.

has divested its shareholding interest of 49 per cent in Brakes India to meet the Anti-Trust guidelines of CCI, post the acquisition of WABCO.

Furthermore, ZF Group is a majority stakeholder of WABCO India and is undertaking necessary next steps to ensure all regulatory guidelines are being adhered to. The integration of WABCO into the ZF Group is well underway and is expected to be completed by the end of the year as planned, said the release.

It also said the group will continue to unlock its innovation power in the region by investing in the overall development of its employees.

(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.)
(RIL) and Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) have signed an agreement to set up a new petrochemical complex in Ruwais, Abu Dhabi, to produce chlor-alkali, ethylene dichloride, and polyvinyl chloride (PVC).

Under the terms of the agreement, this integrated plant will have a capacity to produce 940,000 tonnes of chlor-alkali, 1.1 million tonnes of ethylene dichloride, and 360,000 tonnes of PVC annually, RIL said in a statement on Tuesday.

According to oil sector executives, it would cost upwards of Rs 30,000 crore to set up the petrochemical facility.

Chlor-alkali is used in water treatment and in the manufacture of textiles and metals. Ethylene dichloride is typically used to produce PVC. This has a wide range of applications across housing, infrastructure and consumer goods. Chlor-alkali can also enable production of caustic soda, essential for the production of aluminum.

The market for these chemicals is expected to enjoy steady growth supported by the needs of growing demand, particularly in Asia and Africa, the RIL statement added.

Among other global partnerships, RIL has joined hands with BP for oil exploration and fuel retailing business. It also has a pact with Saudi Aramco for its refinery business.

The proposed facility will be constructed in the TAZIZ Industrial Chemicals Zone, which is a joint venture between and ADQ, another arm of the Abu Dhabi government. The TAZIZ is an industrial services and logistics ecosystem that drives, supports, and enables the growth of the Ruwais Industrial Complex and Abu Dhabis chemicals, advanced manufacturing and industrial sectors.





In line with our 2030 strategy, we look forward to creating further opportunities across the entire TAZIZ ecosystem for the next generation of local industry. The domestic production of critical industrial raw materials strengthens our supply chains, said Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, minister of industry and advanced technology, United Arab Emirates. Al Jaber is also the managing director and group CEO of

The project will manufacture ethylene dichloride, a key building block for production of PVC in India. This is a significant step in globalizing Reliances operations, RILs Chairman and Managing Director, Mukesh Ambani said.

An RIL executive said this is the first step of the internationalisation push that Ambani announced during his companys 44th annual general meeting.

Tenders for the initial design of the seven TAZIZ chemicals derivatives projects have been awarded and work is ongoing. Final investment decisions for the projects and awards of related Engineering Procurement Construction (EPC) contracts are being targeted for 2022, the statement added.
Amazon Web Services, (AWS), the cloud computing arm of e-commerce giant Amazon said that Axis Bank, Indias third-largest private sector bank, has selected AWS to accelerate its digital transformation program and meet the growing demand for its digital banking services.

As part of a multi-year agreement, will draw on the breadth and depth of AWS services. This includes containers, database, and compute, to build a portfolio of new digital financial services to bring advanced banking experiences to customers. This includes online accounts that can be opened in under six minutes and instant digital payments, helping the bank increase customer satisfaction by 35 per cent and lower costs by 24 per cent.

Cloud is transforming the financial industry, said Puneet Chandok, President, Commercial Business, AWS India and South Asia, AISPL. We are delighted to help build and grow a suite of digital banking services that evolve with technology changes, introduce new payment modes, and support evolving consumer and business needs in India.

Experts said that AWS is ramping up its capabilities and competing with global rivals, such as Google Cloud, Microsoft, and Alibaba, to dominate cloud computing services.

By selecting AWS as their preferred cloud provider, Chandok said gains access to the deepest and broadest suite of cloud services to rapidly innovate and introduce new financial services. These range from easy account opening, digital lending, and instant payments for customers and businesses.

We believe AWS will enhance our agility and resilience to manage two key features that define our digital business  rapid scale and high velocity, said Subrat Mohanty, Group Executive, Axis Bank.

To date, Axis Bank has deployed over 25 mission-critical applications on AWS, including a Buy Now Pay Later product and a new loan management system to support it, Account Aggregator, Video-Know Your Customer (V-KYC), and WhatsApp Banking. Axis Bank also plans to migrate 70 per cent of its on-premises data centre infrastructure in the next 24 months to further reduce cost, improve agility, and improve customer experience.

We aim to transition 70 per cent of our infrastructure and applications on the cloud, said Subrat Mohanty, Group Executive, Axis Bank. Mohanty said Axis Bank is designing new products, crafting digital journeys, and personalizing its services to address the financial needs of its customers better. We continue to anticipate future trends and make investments ahead of time within our technology stack, said Mohanty.

Axis Bank has over 200 million customers. They are increasingly demanding new and innovative digital banking services. These include digital deposits, digital loans, and digital credit cards, to better manage their finances. To serve these consumers needs and provide new financial services digitally, Axis Bank relies on the scalability, resiliency, and agility of AWS to bring new services to market quickly while maintaining a seamless, excellent customer experience.

Using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), which gives customers the flexibility to start, run, and scale Kubernetes applications on AWS or on-premises, Axis Bank built new digital banking products. It did this using microservices that support any application architecture, irrespective of scale, load, or complexity. For example, the bank has built fully digital offerings. These include its LEAP savings account with a virtual debit card, its NOVA online current account. Also, there is OLIVE, its credit card engagement platform, which has serviced more than 3.5 million users since its launch less than two months ago.

Using Amazon DocumentDB, a durable, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service, Axis Bank runs secure financial transaction processing across its digital bank accounts. Using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud, Axis Bank will scale workloads on-demand to support 10 million daily real-time payments through Indias Unified Payments Interface (UPI). This ensures reliability and consistent performance. Last year, Axis Bank made the decision to deploy all new customer-facing applications on AWS. Today, 15 per cent of the banks applications are already on the cloud, and the bank aims to take this number to 70 per cent in three years.

Axis Bank believes building a cloud-native, design-centric engineering capability is critical to its success. To achieve this, the bank has dedicated over 800 people to its digital projects, built an in-house engineering and design team of more than 130 people. It has also established a cloud engineering practice centred on agile software development and DevOps principles.

Working with AWS Professional Services, a global team of AWS experts help customers achieve their desired outcomes with the cloud. Axis Bank has set up a cloud centre of excellence to accelerate its cloud migration and set the digital foundation for innovating new services. The firm said it is meeting strict governance, security, and regulatory compliance requirements.
Mumbai-based Ltd., which owns, develops and manages high-end hotels in larger Indian cities, is scouting for distressed hospitality assets as the declining rate of Covid-19 infections enables some parts of the country to ease movement curbs.



We certainly want to expand into the leisure side of the business. We dont have a leisure asset, Sanjay Sethi, Chalet Hotelss chief executive officer said in a Bloomberg Television interview Tuesday. Goa could potentially be a target market for us. Maybe something in Delhi and a couple of cities where were not present in right now.





The hotel chain currently has properties across Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad and Bengaluru and, like the rest of the hospitality sector, is gearing for a revival as India recovers from a deadly second virus wave in recent months that triggered local lockdowns and brought business as well as leisure travel to a halt.

Weve had a rough five quarters now since March of 2020, said Sethi, adding that his company managed to bounce back quickly after the first wave last year. The second wave hit us in March this year. It knocked the wind out of us for a couple of months. We seem to be recovering from that now.

Chalet has multiple options to fund its growth if needed, according to Sethi. Hopefully with the vaccination drive going strong now, we should be out of the woods in the next couple of quarters.
Godrej Consumer Products (GCPL) was quick to tap the emerging hygiene trend last year in the wake of the first wave, launching a series of products. The past year has been about consolidating these gains and expanding distribution footprint in rural areas.

Sunil Kataria, CEO (India & SAARC) of GCPL, explains the challenges arising out of the second wave, in an interview to Viveat Susan Pinto. Edited excerpts: How different has the consumer been in the first and second waves? There are some fundamental shifts that the consumer has made between the two waves. In the first one, the ...
Rating agency Standard and Poor's on Tuesday said state-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Ltd's (ONGC) improved outlook for the next 12-18 months will support deleveraging.

"We expect the India-based company to benefit from favorable over FY22 (year ending March 31, 2022)," S&P said in a statement.

"It is rated at "BBB-/Stable". Our 'BBB-' issuer credit rating on remains constrained by the sovereign credit rating on India (BBB-/Stable/A-3)," the agency added.

The rating agency has revised Brent crude oil price expectations for the rest of 2021 to $65 per barrel from $60 per barrel earlier. This forecast is significantly higher than about $43 per barrel that realised in FY21.

The higher crude prices, along with a modest 5-7 per cent growth in the company's production volume, should push its EBITDA up by 20-25 per cent to about Rs 85,000 crore during FY22.

"We estimate the company's debt-to-EBITDA ratio will strengthen to about 1.6x during this period, from about 1.9x in FY21," agency added.

will maintain prudent capital investments over FY22, largely funded with operating cash flows. The company showed good flexibility in scaling back investments over FY21 amid challenges due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Its capital expenditure fell to about Rs 43,000 crore in FY21 from close to Rs 55,000 crore in the previous year.

"While we estimate ONGC will spend around Rs 45,000 crore in FY22, a prolonged second wave of Covid-19 infections in India could result in lower spending," S&P said.

"The cushion in ONGC's stand-alone credit profile (SACP) assessment of 'bbb+' has increased. The company's improved and flexibility in capital spending should push its ratio of funds from operations to debt toward 50 per cent over the next 12-18 months, from about 45 per cent in FY21. This is well above our threshold of 40 per cent for a lower SACP," the agency said.
Tide, a British company focused on providing financial and administrative solutions to small businesses, on Tuesday announced its entry into India, committing a Rs 1,000-crore investment over the next five years.

The company, which plans to target the small and medium enterprises, will be hiring 1,000 people in software development, product development and field teams to help penetrate the business.

When asked about the source of funds, Gurjodhpal Singh, the chief executive of Tide India, said it has raised a funding of GBP 100 million and has been earning handsomely from its UK operations.

The company plans to help small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) right from incorporation to normal conduct of business in a compliant manner, he said, adding that it is targeting to have 2.5 million SMEs as clients in the next five years.

Further, it is planning to introduce a dedicated bank account in partnership with RBL Bank in a way that other neobanks do, and will also try to deploy its artificial intelligence and machine learning engines to aid the SMEs access working capital, Singh said.

Tide will operate from a tech centre in Hyderabad, which was started in early 2020 and already employs 200 people, and a business office in Gurugram, Singh said.

India is the first market that it has chosen to expand into and there will be other countries where the company will be taking its services, Singh said.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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Now the African Union Commission and the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) has voiced concerns around the Green Pass which does not recognise Covishield, the vaccine manufactured by the Serum Institute of India.

The African countries have received the Covishield jab from WHO-led Covax. The EU move is thus likely to elicit world-wide response as many countries like India, Russia, China, low and medium income countries (LMICs) have used vaccines that do not have European Medical Agencys authorisation.

The African Union and Africa CDC, therefore, urge the EU Commission to consider increasing mandatory access to those vaccines deemed suitable for global rollout through the EU-supported COVAX Facility, they said.

The availability of such a Certificate, with its potential to significantly facilitate free safe movement across all EU Member States and certain associated countries, is a significant step forward. However, the current applicability guidelines put at risk the equitable treatment of persons having received their vaccines in countries profiting from the EU-supported COVAX Facility, including the majority of the African Union (AU) Member States, a statement by the AUC and Africa CDC read.

So far, the Green Pass applies only to vaccines that have received EU-wide marketing authorisation.

Thus, while the vaccine (ChAdOx1_nCoV-19) produced and authorized in Europe (Vaxzervria) is included, the same formation of the vaccine (Covishield) produced under license by the Serum Institute of India (SII), is excluded. Under such regulations, persons received Covishield, despite being able to demonstrate proof of vaccination, would continue to be subject to public health restrictions, including limitations of movement and testing requirements, with considerable administrative and financial implications, the Africa CDC and AUC said.

Furthermore, given that the expressed goal for the Serum Institute of India production is to serve India and lower-income countries, the SII may not apply for EU-wide market authorisation, meaning that the inequalities in access to Green Passes created by this approach would persist indefinitely, it added.

The Covidshield vaccine, alongside the versions of the AstraZeneca/Oxford COVID-19 vaccine produced by AstraZeneca-SKBio (Republic of Korea), was one of the first available candidates considered safe and efficacious through the World Health Organisations Emergency Use Listing (EUL) process.

Both candidates received approval as early as 15 February 2021.

Amidst reports that people have taken the Serum Institute of India (SII) manufactured vaccine Covishield will face challenges in travelling to Europe, SII CEO Adar Poonawalla said on Monday that he has taken it up at the highest levels.

In a tweet from his official handle, Poonawalla said, I realise that a lot of Indians have taken Covishield are facing issues with travel to the EU, I assure everyone, I have taken this up at the highest levels and hope to resolve this matter soon, both with regulators and at a diplomatic level with countries.

He says that he hopes to resolve the issue soon.
The (ED) has summoned former Maharashtra Home Minister Anil Deshmukh to its office in Mumbai for questioning today in connection with an alleged

The investigation agency had summoned the former Maharashtra Home Minister to its office on Saturday. However, he skipped the ED summon and sought a fresh date for appearance.

Speaking to reporters outside the ED's office, Deshmukh's lawyer, Advocate Jaywant Patil had said that Deshmukh was unable to appear for questioning as he did not have any knowledge about the line of probe.

Meanwhile, Deshmukh's aides Kundan Shinde and Sanjeev Palande underwent medical checkups and were brought to the ED's office after they were arrested on Saturday in connection to the case.

The same day, the Special PMLA (Preventions of Money Laundering Act, 2002) court had sent Shinde and Palande to ED custody till July 1.

On Friday, the ED had raided Deshmukh's residences in Nagpur and Mumbai. Raids were conducted at five places.

After the raids, Deshmukh had said that former Mumbai police commissioner Param Bir Singh had made false allegations against him after he was removed from the post over his suspicious role in the

The case against the former Home Minister was registered on May 11.

An FIR was filed based on Section 7 of the Prevention of Corruption Act (Public servant taking gratification other than legal remuneration in respect of an official act) and criminal conspiracy (IPC 120 B).

The CBI had conducted raids at four premises of Deshmukh after registering an FIR against him in connection with the case and recovered incriminating documents and digital devices, sources confirmed.Param Bir Singh, in his letter to Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray, had alleged that Deshmukh had indulged in "malpractices" and asked suspended Mumbai Police officer Sachin Waze to collect Rs 100 crores every month.

Waze was arrested in March in connection with the NIA probe into the case of recovery of an explosives-laden SUV near Mukesh Ambani's house in Mumbai and the subsequent murder of Thane businessman Mansukh Hiran.

(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.)
India on Tuesday approved a fourth Covid-19 vaccine--Modernas mRNA-1273. With this, the government has cleared the path for importing Covid vaccines approved by international regulators, without bridging clinical studies. The vaccine will be made available through a tie-up with Mumbai-headquartered

is supporting Moderna with the regulatory approval for import the vaccines to be donated to India, a company spokesperson said. At this stage, there is no definitive agreement on commercial supplies, the spokesperson added.

The vaccine developed by Cambridge (Massachusetts)-based Moderna Inc has demonstrated 94.1 per cent efficacy. This will be the first mRNA vaccine to get an emergency approval in India. Unlike other types of vaccines which put inactivated germ into a body to trigger an immune response, mRNA teaches cells to make protein for the purpose.

US vaccine makers and Moderna had sought indemnity against serious adverse events following as a pre-condition for India presence. This is an immunity they have secured in other countries where they supply doses. This matter is under consideration, said V K Paul, member (health), NITI Aayog.

Paul confirmed that Modernas application for emergency use authorization of its vaccine through its Indian partner has been granted approval by the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI).





ALSO READ: Covid-19 vaccine doses given in India cross 331 million: Health ministry

This potentially opens up a clear likelihood of this vaccine being imported into India in the near future. There must be other formalities that have to be followed but a very important licensure has been given, Paul said.

On the issue of indemnity, Paul said, Indemnity issue is being addressed and being taken up for examination. Their consideration is being examined.

Meanwhile, sources indicate that is interested to import around 50 million doses of the Moderna vaccine. It is not clear how soon the supplies will begin, but sources add that much of this could be in 2022.

Apart from Cipla, US major Moderna was in discussions with other Indian firms too for partnership.



ALSO READ: Covid-19 crisis: Sputnik V, Moderna vaccines work against Delta variant

In May, the Indian regulator had released guidelines for import of Covid19 vaccines and cleared the way for private sector or state governments to import. The guidelines said that the importer or authorized agents of the foreign manufacturers would need to obtain three key permissions or licences from the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO).

These include a new drug permission under the New Drugs and Clinical Trials Rules, 2019; import registration permission under the Drugs Rules, 1945 and a basic import licence under the Drugs Rules, 1945.

Once the import licence is obtained, the importer or the authorized agent can import the vaccine and any private sector entity can procure the vaccine from them as per the national guidelines, the drug regulator had said.





All imports will have to be based on the health ministry guidelines which came into effect from May 1.

The two-dose Moderna vaccine, to be given 28-days apart, has shown an efficacy of 94.1 per cent in protecting against Covid19. This efficacy rate kicks in 14 days after the first dose. It is already approved in 40 countries including the US, Japan, Singapore, UK, Italy, Spain, Canada, Germany etc.





ALSO READ: Maldives to reopen for Indian tourists from July 15 as Covid cases decline

Storage for the medium term for Moderna vaccine is in the range of -25 to -15 degree Celsius. An unopened vial can be stored in a normal cold chain for 30 days in -2 to -8 degrees.

The government is also hopeful that the Moderna vaccine would be manufactured in India as well in future. The other international vaccine Sputnik V is being manufactured in India too. We hope that they (Moderna) should produce on Indian soil, Paul said.

The two India-made vaccines being administered currently are Covishield and Covaxin.

Our efforts to get other international vaccines such as and Johnson & Johnson are also on. We are also looking to increase availability and production of our own vaccines, Paul said.

Referring to import of Moderna vaccine, he said this was only a regulatory clearance. Let us wait to see how this opportunity would be used in accessing vaccines into our country.

On the issue of Pfizers vaccine, Paul said that multiple sessions had been held with the pharma major. Inputs are going back and forth. We are waiting to hear from them after an intensive meeting last week, Paul said.
and representatives Tuesday deposed before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology over the issue of misuse, with sources saying they were told to comply with the new IT rules, government instructions and court orders.

The panel, chaired by Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, had asked them to appear in-person at the parliament secretariat. While from its country public policy director Shivnath Thukral and general counsel Namrata Singh deposed before the panel, was represented by its country head (government affairs and public policy) Aman Jain and director (legal) Gitanjali Duggal.





ALSO READ: Twitter faces heat as FIRs registered for depicting distorted India map

The agenda of the parliamentary panel meeting was to safeguard citizens' rights and prevent the misuse of social/online news media platforms.

The sources said the representatives were conveyed that there are loopholes in their existing data protection and privacy policy mechanism, and were asked to put in place stringent safeguards to protect data privacy and data security of their users.

A spokesperson said: We always welcome opportunities to engage in dialogue with the policy makers and share details of our efforts in combating illegal content and ensuring the safety of users across our platforms.
Indias average daily vaccinations doubled in June to over 4 million from nearly 2 million in May. So far, 331 million doses have been administered in the country. The has said India is taking a distinct lead in total vaccine doses administered in the world.

While almost half of the population above 60 years of age has received at least one dose of the Covid vaccine, only 15 per cent of those in the 18 to 44 category have got one dose so far.

In the eight days following the launch of the new vaccine policy on June 21, India has administered 46 million doses. It is more than the population of Iraq, Canada, Saudi Arabia, and Malaysia. The average doses given in the period is more than the population of Finland, Norway and New Zealand, said Lav Aggarwal, joint secretary,

The government has said it would take steps to ramp up availability and production of domestic vaccines in the coming days. In the last two months, data shows more doses have been given in rural than urban areas.




The has extended the travel ban for all inbound travellers from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) until July 15, presidential spokesperson Harry Roque said on Tuesday.

"This is one of the proactive measures imposed to implement international border control because of the Covid-19 Delta variant," Roque said in a televised press conference.

The has detected the more transmissible Delta variants in the samples taken from 17 returning Filipinos, among whom a seafarer has died, the Department of Health of the said.

The Southeast Asian country initially imposed travel restrictions on India from April 29 amid the devastating second wave of the pandemic in the South Asian giant, reports Xinhua news agency.

It widened the ban to include travellers from Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka from May 7.

It also banned international arrivals from Oman and the UAE from May 15 after overseas Filipino workers who flew in from these countries tested positive for the Delta variant first detected in India.

The Philippines has reported a total of 1,408,058 confirmed cases of Covid-19 as of Tuesday, with 24,557 deaths.

--IANS

ksk/

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Technology giants and will soon publish reports, as mandated by the new Information Technology Rules, providing information about the actions they took on user complaints in India.

While said on Tuesday it will publish an interim report on July 2 as mandated by the IT rules, will publish its transparency report as required under the new IT Rules in India.

In accordance with the IT Rules, well publish an interim report for the period May 15-June 15 on July 2. This report will contain details of the content that we have removed proactively using our automated tools. The final report will be published on July 15 containing details of user complaints received and action taken. The report on July 15 will also contain data related to WhatsApp, which is currently being validated, said a spokesperson.

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The IT Rules, notified on February 25, ask significant social media intermediaries, or those with over 5 million users, to "publish periodic compliance report every month mentioning the details of complaints received and action taken thereon, and the number of specific communication links or parts of information that the intermediary has removed or disabled access to in pursuance of any proactive monitoring conducted by using automated tools or any other relevant information as may be specified".

This was among the key issues that industry wanted clarity on in the new Rules. Many intermediaries were unclear about the format of these reports. A government official told Business Standard earlier that the compliance reports should have bare minimum details, on what type of content was removed or what other action was taken.

While most SSMIs publish annual or bi-annual transparency reports and would most likely publish compliance reports in a similar pattern, there was little clarity on whether those would be compliant with the new Rules.

Another issue that SSMIs are awaiting clarity on is that of the quantum of time required before which a user needs to be informed about their content being taken down. The kind of content on which intermediaries are required to do so includes content of pornographic nature, paedophilic, infringes trademarks and so on.

The government, it is understood, will bring out a standard operating procedure on the new IT Rules in consultation with industry and stakeholders, addressing some of the concerns that have been raised by them.

In addition, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology will be soon releasing a set of "frequently asked questions" to simplify the requirements in the Rules, on similar lines as done by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting a few days ago.

While the Rules apply to all social media companies, the largest ones among these are Facebook, Google, WhatsApp, Twitter and the like.

According to data provided by the government, India has 530 million WhatsApp users, 410 million Facebook users, 210 million people on Instagram, and 17.5 million accounts on Twitter.
Noting that huge air pollution is caused by at various locations in resulting in unchecked degradation of environment, the has directed the UP pollution control board (UPPCB) to undertake special drive for remedial measures.

A bench headed by NGT Chairperson Justice Adarsh Kumar Goel asked the UPPCB to give an action taken report to the Oversight Committee constituted by NGT which is headed by Justice SVS Rathore, former Judge of the Allahabad High Court.

The tribunal was hearing a plea filed by UP resident Saroj Kumar Mishra alleging violation of environmental norms by a sugar mill at Banda Road, Powayan in Shahjahanpur.

The plea stated that ash generated from the mill and the polluted air are resulting in diseases in the area.

"The pollution is also affecting the students of Didar Singh Rana School, Takiya Road, Powayan, Shahjahanpur. The mill is required to install requisite equipments including filters to stop pollution," the plea said.

Taking note of a report filed by UPPCB on the plea, the NGT said, "The State PCB may ensure that requisite air control device is installed in the interest of health of the students in the adjoining school.

"It is a matter of common knowledge that huge air pollution is caused by such units at various locations in the State of UP resulting in unchecked air pollution beyond the prescribed norms in violation of the Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1981.

"There is thus need for a special drive by the State PCB to check the status of air pollution being caused by such units throughout the State and take remedial measures," the bench said.

The NGT said that if the Oversight Committee considers that any further direction is required, the Committee may give its recommendations to this Tribunal.

The Registry may list the report of the Oversight Committee, if and when received, it said.

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Over 37,566 fresh cases reported

India reported 37,566 fresh infections on Tuesday, taking the cumulative caseload to 30.3 million, according to central health ministry data. Less than 40,000 daily cases have been reported after a span of 102 days. The country saw 907 deaths due to the pandemic, taking the death toll to 397,637. The active caseload is at 552,659, while the total recoveries have surged to 29.4 million. As many as 329 million vaccine shots have been administered since the nationwide inoculation programme kicked off on January 16. Of these, 5.2 million were given on Monday. Read more

Pune startup develops N95 masks that can inactivate coronavirus

Thincr Technologies, a Pune-based startup, has developed a special type of N95 mask that can inactivate the coronavirus, a report in The Indian Express said. The mask has been coated with anti-viral agents known as virucides. The masks have an additional layer of woven cloth coated with a virucidal formulation that acts on the envelope of the virus. These chemicals break the envelope of the virus and eliminate its cell entry capacity. As the infectious capacity of the reduces, so does the spread of infection, said Shitalkumar Zambad, founder-director of Thincr Technologies. As many as 10,000 such masks have been distributed to government hospitals and institutions over the last two months, the report said. Read more

US epidemiologist flags Covid uptick in four Indian states

A US epidemiologist has warned that the weekly growth rate in Covid cases is starting to show a slight uptick in Maharashtra, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Delhi and it may be time to reimpose more curbs right away, a report in ThePrint said. Bhramar Mukherjee, the John D. Kalbfleisch Collegiate Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Michigan, and her team had predicted an imminent second wave in India in February. Read more

US, Kuwait deported nearly 4,000 Indians after Covid broke out

A report compiled by the external affairs ministrys Covid Cell unit has said that thousands of Indians, mostly in the US and Kuwait, were deported to the country through special flights after they completed their prison term in the past year, a report in the Hindustan Times said. The US and Kuwait alone sent back 4,000 deportees. Some Indians also returned by amnesty flights, said the report which provided details about the Vande Bharat Mission, Indias largest repatriation exercise launched last year to bring back citizens stranded abroad due to the pandemic, the report said. Read more

Third wave likely to be delayed, may hit by Dec: Govt body chief

The chief of the central government's Covid-19 working group, Dr NK Arora, has said that the third wave of Covid could be delayed until December this year, a report in Hindustan Times said. ICMR has come up with a study, which says the third wave will come late in the country, Arora said. We have a window period of 6 to 8 months to vaccinate everybody in the country, he added. The Delta Plus variant of Covid, which has stoked fresh worries over how quickly it can spread, cannot be yet linked to a third wave of the pandemic, Arora said. Read more
The Delhi Special Unit of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), probing the alleged framing of space scientist Nambi Narayanan in the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) espionage case, reached Kerala on Monday.

The senior officials are expected to arrive in the state capital on Tuesday as the probe team is planning to record the statement of scientist Nambi Narayanan.

The development came after filed an FIR marked as classified in the Thiruvananthapuram Chief Judicial Magistrate (CJM) court accusing 18 persons including former police officials of hatching a conspiracy.

The police officials named include the then head of Special Investigation Team (SIT) that probed the scandal Siby Mathews, along with others in the team including --- A Vijayan, Thampi S Durgadutt, then City Police Commissioner V R Rajeevan and then Deputy Director, Intelligence Bureau, RB Sreekumar.

In April, the Supreme Court had ordered the to look into the Justice DK Jain Committee report on senior Kerala police officials who allegedly framed Narayanan in the espionage case.

The Supreme Court also had barred the public circulation of the contents of the report.

The spy case had erupted in 1994 in Kerala when Narayanan was arrested on charges of espionage along with another senior official of ISRO, two Maldivian women and a businessman.

It had created a political storm in the state as the inner party feud in Congress was at its peak and the then Chief Minister K Karunakaran had to resign over the case.

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The Karnataka High Court on Tuesday will hear the petition of Managing Director against the notice issued by Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh Police under Section 41A of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC), asking him to physically appear before the police.

On June 24, the court heard the matter and granted interim relief to Maheshwari and directed the Uttar Pradesh Police not to take any coercive steps against him till the next date of hearing in connection with the probe into the circulation of a viral video clip of an assault of an elderly man on the social media platform.

A bench of Justice G Narendra also clarified that if Ghaziabad Police want to examine the petitioner, MD, they can do it through virtual mode. The Court listed the matter for further hearing on June 29.

The Uttar Pradesh Police on June 16, filed FIR against nine entities, including India in connection with the Loni incident.

In the FIR, the police said, "There is no communal angle to the incident in Loni where a man was thrashed and his beard was chopped off. The following entities -- The Wire, Rana Ayyub, Mohammad Zubair, Dr Shama Mohammed, Saba Naqvi, Maskoor Usmani, Salman Nizami -- without checking the fact, started giving communal colour to the incident on Twitter and suddenly they started spreading messages to disrupt the peace and bring differences between the religious communities.

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will reopen for Indian tourists from July 15.

" will start issuing on arrival tourist visas starting 15th July to tourists travelling from South Asia. Tourists require negative PCR result to enter Further details will follow accordingly," Maldives ministry said in a tweet on Tuesday.

The island nation which has been a top attraction for Indian tourists during the Covid-19 pandemic shut its borders for Indians last month.

The safety measures were put in place in view of the second wave of pandemic in India and rise in cases in other countries in the region.

India has been the second largest source market for Maldives this year accounting for 21 per cent of all arrivals. The islands have received over 400,000 tourists since start of January. Russia has been the biggest source market followed by India, Ukraine, Germany and Kazakhstan.
In the heart of south Mumbais heritage Fort precinct, a bright red building houses the unassuming offices of an enduring institution that will soon turn 200 -- Gujarati daily  Samachar.

Still going strong despite reverses in the print industry the last few years, Samachar will celebrate its 200th year on July 1 after seeing through two pandemics, two world wars, and the growth of a city thriving in myriad avatars, from a textile and mercantile hub to a buzzing financial and film industry capital.

Samachars director Hormusji Cama says that 20 years ago the conducted research and found that it is the oldest surviving publication in India and the fourth oldest in the world.

Bombay Samachar (as it was called then) started as a weekly in 1822 to primarily inform the readers about ship movements and commodities, and gradually evolved into a true city with a focus on trade that it is today. Fardunjee Marzban, a Parsi scholar, started the publication four years after the Bengali Samachar Darpan was launched, to become the second non-English newspaper published in India.

Then named 'Moombina Samachar', it was a weekly for the first 10 years, then a bi-weekly and has been a daily newspaper since 1855. The paper exchanged several hands before the Cama family took over in 1933. Cama Norton and Co. was a supplier of newsprint and ink to Mumbai Samachar, then owned by the Belgaumwala family.

The Camas had approached the court against non-payment of arrears by Belgaumwalas and sought liquidation proceedings. The court instead asked Camas to take over the newspaper and salvage it, citing the livelihoods of employees that would be lost if the paper were to shut down. The Camas agreed.

Since then the publication has steadily grown and today it boasts of the most advanced technologies available in the field of publishing. Cama, its present director and a passionate vintage car collector, insists that placing the reader in the centre is the key to the newspapers success.

As long as your content is in demand, you will be around, he told PTI.

A variety of factors led the newspaper to increase its cover price to Rs 10 per copy  Cama quips it is not just the oldest newspaper but also one of the most expensive  in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. But it continues to be supported by a loyal readership despite a dip in circulation that used to be 1.5 lakh before the pandemic.

Even with the fall in circulation, the newspaper is among the few which delivered profits in the fiscal year 2020-21, said Cama, who is also a director on the Board of The Press Trust of India, a not-for-profit private news cooperative. (PTI is owned by several newspaper shareholders, who do not receive any dividends from the companys profits, as their purpose is to ensure that the country has a thriving, independent, neutral news agency that can serve all organisations).

To limit the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, Mumbai Samachar increased the cover price by Rs 2, reduced the number of pages and imposed cost control measures like a salary cut for senior management and no emoluments at all for those at the top to ensure that the business thrives, Cama said.

He added that not a single staffer of the family of 150 people was retrenched. We do not believe in retrenching people at all. People who have given us the prime of their lives cannot be asked to go because of things beyond their control like technology changes. We train them, and they adapt, says the proud director.

The Cama family believes in giving complete freedom to the editors. Cama desists from speaking on editorial strategies, directing queries on such matters to editor Nilesh Dave. The newspaper has always been apolitical, believing in constructive criticism and focusing on positivity, Cama says. The newspaper has never been sensationalist in its coverage, Cama says, ruing the tendency among some journalists to embellish news stories for grabbing attention. When told that the bright red exteriors may lead someone to assume that it is a fiery newspapers office, Cama points out that the name of the building is Red House and it cannot be coated in any other colour.

Seated in the ground floor newsroom, Dave says he has never received a single call from the management with any request. Despite the Gujarati readership, which tends to favour the current government, the papers editorials are critical of some government policies as well, he says. Its ability to continue doing so may lie in a decision the Cama family took long ago and has followed diligently.

The proprietors do not have any other business interests beyond the newspaper, and this helps ensure the newspapers independence is never compromised. The strategy to make the reader pay for content  Cama says the reader should not value it less than a cutting chai (Mumbai lingo for half a portion of tea mostly served in a special kind of glass instead of a cup)  acts as a safety valve.

Cama says Mumbai Samachar has never sold space to quacks or those making dubious claims like curing COVID-19, while Dave says the space devoted to ads stays within 20 per cent. In the last few years, with regional language publications coming under pressure, Mumbai Samachar has started initiatives to grow its Gujarati readership and keep Gujarati theatre thriving, Dave says. He adds that such initiatives were a major driving factor for a 35 per cent growth in the newspapers circulation in the pre-pandemic days.

The other initiatives include holding Gujarati book fairs, which have led to the sale of titles worth over Rs 4 crore till now, Dave says. The newspaper had planned a mega event to commemorate the 200th anniversary, but such a celebration was not possible amid the second wave of the pandemic, Dave said.

Other initiatives, especially the unsung heroes project will continue and to mark the special anniversary, Mumbai Samachar will felicitate health workers for their stellar services in the pandemic.

Asked about the broad changes the newspaper has outlined for its new century, Cama says, We are not very ambitious and our set of values have worked well for us till now. We will continue on the same path that has made Mumbai Samachar what it is.



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The European Medical Agency (EMA) has not received any request for approval of Covishield in its vaccine certificate list, news agency ANI reported citing an EU official.

"Concerning a possible EMA authorisation for Covishield, as of yesterday, the EMA stated that it had not received a request for approval. It will examine any such request when received, as per its procedures," the official was quoted as saying by ANI.

"The EU digital certificate is meant to facilitate safe free movement during the pandemic within the region. It will serve as proof that a person was vaccinated and received a negative test result or recovered from it. It is not a pre-condition to travel," he further said.

The official also said that individual member states will have the option to accept vaccines that have been authorised by the World Health Organization (WHO). Covishield has been included in the WHO's emergency listing.

There have been multiple reports that those who have taken Serum Institute of India (SII)-produced AstraZeneca vaccine will face challenges in travelling to Europe.

The CEO of Pune-based vaccina maker, Adar Poonawalla on Monday, said, that he has taken it up at the highest levels both with regulators and at a diplomatic level with countries.
Congress leader on Monday slammed the after it announced the COVID-19 financial package, calling it a 'hoax'.

In a tweet, he said that the package, announced on Monday by finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman, could not be utilised by families to spend on food, medicines, or their children's education.

"No family can spend FM's 'economic package' on their living-food-medicine-child's school fees. This is not a package, it's another hoax!" he tweeted.

Congress leader and former finance minister P Chidambaram too hit out the Centre's new package, saying that the only answer to the ongoing crisis is to put money in the hands of the people, especially the poor and lower-middle-class.

"'Some elementary truths: Credit guarantee is not credit. Credit is more debt. No banker will lend to a debt-ridden business. Debt-burdened or cash-starved businesses do not want more credit, they need non-credit capital. More supply does not mean more demand (consumption). On the contrary, more demand (consumption) will trigger more supply," he tweeted.

He added, "Demand (consumption) will not grow in an economy where jobs have been lost and incomes/wages have been reduced. The answer to this crisis is to put money in the hands of the people, especially the poor and lower middle classes."

Sitharaman had earlier announced Rs 1.1 lakh crore loan guarantee scheme for sectors of the economy struggling to recover from the impact of the devastating second COVID-19 wave.

The finance minister had announced a Credit Guarantee Scheme to facilitate new lending among the smallest borrowers.

"Under the Credit Guarantee Scheme, we aim to reach out to 25 lakh people who are absolutely small borrowers. Loan to be given to the smallest borrowers by Microfinance Institutions. A maximum Rs 1.25 lakhs amount to be lent," she had said.

With the aim to provide further economic relief to micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the also expanded the financial support being provided under the Emergency Credit Line Guarantee Scheme (ECLGS) by Rs 1.5 lakh crore.

To revive the tourism sector, Sitharaman announced free tourist visas to the first five lakh tourists and said that financial support will be provided to more than 11,000 registered tourist guides and tourism stakeholders.

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Top headlines of the hour: Govt announces 6.3 trillion package to spur growth, Suraksha group may face legal hurdle to take control of Jaypee, Edtech upGrad set to join unicorn club with $4-billion valuation

Govt announces 6.3 trillion package to spur growth

Union Finance Minister on Monday announced the much-awaited fiscal package to revive the economy ravaged by the second pandemic wave. The Rs 6.28-trillion package included a new credit guarantee scheme for health, tourism and micro borrowers, besides expanding the Emergency Credit Line Guarantee Scheme (ECLGS) by half to Rs 4.5 trillion and extending the Aatmanirbhar Bharat Rozgar Yojana.

The new announcements include extending credit guarantees of Rs 2.6 trillion and schemes worth Rs 2.4 trillion, spread over the next two to four years.

An additional allocation of Rs 2.32 trillion has been made to develop health facilities for children. Read more

Suraksha group may face legal hurdle to take control of Jaypee

Suraksha Group which acquired Jaypee Infratech by pipping government-owned NBCC India has been in the works for four years, will result in resolution of Rs 22,600 crore of debt given by Indian lenders to Jaypee Infratech, which was sent to bankruptcy court in August 2017.

With the Jaypee acquisition, the Suraksha group, which made lenders an offer of Rs 7,736 crore, will be able to expand its footprint in north India after making inroads in Mumbais real estate market over the past year. Read more.

Edtech startup upGrad set to join unicorn club with $4-billion valuation

Temasek-backed edtech startup upGrad is in talks with global private equity and venture capital investors to raise $400 million at a valuation of $4 billion, according to sources.

The company is also planning to close two significant acquisitionsa global short-form course player and another in the executive education space--in the next two to three months. At the last fund raise earlier this year, upGrad was valued at close to $850 million. Read more

MSCI warns India, four other emerging markets against restrictive policies

Global index provider MSCI has warned India and four other emerging markets (EMs) against restrictive policies, and reiterated that any move that impedes overseas investment could lead to a downgrade.

MSCIs popular indices such as the MSCI Emerging Markets Index and the MSCI Asia Pacific ex Japan Index are tracked by funds with trillions of dollars of investments. China, South Korea, and India are among the top markets in the EM basket. Read more

NCLAT declines US firm's plea against Piramal group's bid for DHFL

The appellate insolvency tribunal NCLAT on Monday declined a plea by US-based Prudential International Insurance Holdings (PIIHL) challenging an NCLT order approving the Piramal groups bid for the debt-ridden Dewan Housing Finance Corporation (DHFL).

The NCLAT termed the plea premature, given that it approached the appellate tribunal without getting a decision on its petition filed before the Mumbai Bench of the NCLT, which is scheduled to hear the matter on Wednesday (June 30). Read more
In more trouble for Twitter, an FIR was lodged in against two senior officials of its India office over the platform putting up a distorted map of the country, while the government said it will also initiate legal action against the microblogging giant over the issue.

The Delhi Police said it has registered a case against on a complaint by the Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) for allegedly allowing access to child sexual abuse material on the platform.

It is the latest in the run-ins between and Indian authorities. While the giant is mired in a row with the central government over not following the new IT rules, India MD Manish Maheshwari was recently summoned by Ghaziabad police in UP in a probe into an objectionable video posted in connection with an assault on an elderly Muslim man.

The FIR in the wrong map issue was lodged at the Khurja Nagar police station in Bulandshahr district of on Monday evening against Maheshwari and News Partnerships Head Amrita Tripathi under Indian Penal Code section 505 (2) (public mischief) based on a complaint by an office-bearer of right wing outfit Bajrang Dal.

Twitter had on Monday removed the wrong map that showed the Union Territories of Ladakh and Jammu and Kashmir outside India, following an uproar. Charges under Information Technology Act section 74 (publication for fraudulent purpose) have also been invoked in the case, according to the FIR.

Home Minister Narottam Mishra said he has directed the state' Director General of Police (DGP) Vivek Johri to investigate the matter related to distorted map and take legal action in this direction.

Earlier, Twitter had shown Leh as part of China.

In Delhi, the police have registered an FIR against Twitter under relevant provisions of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act and the IT Act for allegedly allowing access to child pornography on the microblogging platform on a complaint by the NCPCR.

This comes days after the NCPCR, the country's apex child rights body, asked Deputy Commissioner of Police (Cyber Cell) Anyesh Roy to explain why no action had been taken against In its letter, the NCPCR had asked the Delhi Police to book Twitter in the wake of the findings of its recent inquiry in which it had found that child sexual abuse material (CSAM) was easily available on the platform. The complaint was against Twitter Inc and Twitter Communication India, the police said.

Karnataka HC adjourns proceedings

The Karnataka High Court, which was hearing Maheshwari's plea for relief in the Ghaziabad case, on Tuesday adjourned to matter till July 5 after the police urged it to defer the hearing.

Maheshwari, who lives in Bengaluru in Karnataka, was issued notice by the Ghaziabad Police asking him to report at its Loni Border police station on June 24 to get his statement recorded in the case.

The court had restrained the Ghaziabad police from initiating any coercive action against him.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
India country head Manish Maheshwari has been booked under Section 505 (2) of IPC and Section 74 of IT (Amendment) Act 2008 for showing the wrong map of India on its website, on complaint of a Bajrang Dal leader in Bulandshahr.

The issue revolves around a controversial map of India in the careers section of Twitter, which showed Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh as separate countries.

This led to angry reactions on Twitter, and the microblogging platform removed the map on Monday night.

Maheshwari filed a caveat in the Supreme Court, dated June 26, asking that he be heard before any orders are passed in any appeal filed by the Ghaziabad police against the relief granted by Karnataka High Court.

The Karnataka HC had on Thursday granted interim relief to Maheshwari in a case relating to an assault video that had gone viral on the microblogging platform. The HC had also directed that no coercive action be taken against him till Tuesday.

The court had remarked that if the Ghaziabad police wished to examine Maheshwari, it could do so virtually.

The UP police had issued a notice to Maheshwari on June 17 to report at the Loni Border police station within seven days of receiving the notice to get his statement recorded. The case relates to an ongoing complaint related to tweets on the assault of an elderly Muslim man in Ghaziabad.

on June 21 restricted tweets showing the video and images from it.
Italy set to end ban on firing workers

The Italian government is likely to end the ban of firing industrial workers, a policy that has been in place since the start of the pandemic. The move is seen as a bid to revive the economy, which had contracted as much as 9 per cent in 2020. The strategic shift in the policy comes as the country reached a key milestone this week, surpassing 50 million administered doses of Covid-19 vaccines. Italy, which has a population of about 60 million, aims to have 80 per cent of residents fully inoculated by the end of September. Read here

Let's look at the global statistics Global infections: 181,437,540 Global deaths: 3,929,857 Vaccine doses administered: 2,967,436,552 Nations with most cases: US (33,640,576), India (30,316,897), Brazil (18,448,402), France (5,832,490), Turkey (5,414,310). Source: John Hopkins Research Center

Abu Dhabi set to restrict public spaces to vaccinated people

The United Arab Emirates, a federation of seven regions including Abu Dhabi and Dubai, is planning to restrict public places to only those vaccinated against UAE currently has one of the highest inoculation rates in the world. Vaccines from Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Chinas Sinopharm are approved for use in the bloc. Access to universities, schools, nurseries, gyms and shopping centers in Abu Dhabi will be restricted from August 20, but those who have taken a jab for children aged below 15 are exempted. Read more

Three studies, one result: vaccines point the way out of the pandemic

Three scientific studies released recently offered fresh evidence that widely used vaccines will continue to protect people against the coronavirus for long periods, possibly for years, and can be adapted to fortify the immune system even further if needed. Most people immunised with the mRNA vaccines may not need boosters, one study found, so long as the virus and its variants do not evolve much beyond their current forms  which is not guaranteed. Mix-and-match vaccination shows promise, a second study found, and booster shots of one widely used vaccine, if they are required, greatly enhance immunity, according to a third report. Read here

Australia lockdowns spread amid confusion over vaccine advice

Frustration is mounting in Australia over low vaccination rates and changing advice on the AstraZeneca jab after outbreaks of the highly contagious Delta variant sent more parts of the country into lockdown. The outbreaks have grown to about 150 cases, and have forced lockdowns in four major cities and renewed restrictions in several others. Queensland imposed a snap three-day lockdown in its capital, Brisbane, and some neighbouring regions from Tuesday evening. Perth, the capital of Western Australia, began a four-day lockdown on Tuesday, joining Sydney and Darwin. Read here
By Rajendra Jadhav

MUMBAI (Reuters) -India on Tuesday cut the base import tax on to 10% from 15% for three months, the government said in a statement, as the world's biggest vegetable oil buyer tries to dampen near record high prices.

The tax cut could make palm oil more attractive than rival soyoil and sunflower oil for Indian refiners and boost imports of the tropical oil in the next three months, supporting benchmark Malaysian prices.

The lower tax rate will apply from June 30 to September 30, the government said.

The duty cut would provide a necessary respite to consumers from the high edible oil prices, said Sudhakar Desai, president of the Indian Vegetable Oil Producers' Association (IVPA).

Domestic soyoil and palm oil prices have more than doubled in the past year, hitting consumers already stung by record fuel prices and reduced incomes amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

India, which imports palm oil mainly from Indonesia and Malaysia, could buy 500,000 tonnes of additional palm oil in these three months and average monthly imports could be around 850,000 tonnes, Sandeep Bajoria, chief executive of Sunvin Group, a vegetable oil broker, said.

After the tax reduction, will be subject to a 30.25% tax in total, including 10% base import duty and other taxes.

The overall tax rate on was previously 35.75%.

Palm oil is the most widely used and imported oil in India, but is mainly for bulk buyers such as food processors and for use in restaurants. Households usually prefer soyoil, sunflower oil and rapeseed oil.

The government has cut the duty on palm oil but kept the duty structure intact for soyoil and sunflower oil, effectively making palm oil more attractive than its rival oils, a Mumbai-based trader with a global trading firm said.

(Reporting by Rajendra JadhavEditing by David Goodman and Jane Merriman)

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India and other developing nations will oppose plans by the European Union and the US to penalize imports of carbon-intensive goods to curb emissions at the global climate summit to be held in Glasgow this November.

It is the most regressive proposal with no principle of equity adhered to, Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar told Bloomberg New Energy Finances Vandana Gombar at the BNEF Summit held virtually on Tuesday. This is unfair taxation, nobody will accept it.

India will instead seek more action from European nations and the US, which have not kept their commitments on reducing emissions, Javadekar said. US President Joe Bidens administration is considering a so-called border adjustment tariff to be levied on certain carbon-intensive goods imported from countries with lax climate controls. Thats similar to plans put forth by the EU and those being discussed by the UK and Canada.

Javadekar listed Indias climate investments, including its solar power plans and 400 billion rupees ($5.9 billion) spending on increasing forest cover. The minister also criticized delays in plans to release the $100 billion in financial aid to developing nations to help them meet their climate goals. The funds that were supposed to be disbursed by 2020 have now been delayed to 2025.

India would push for more action from at the Conference of Parties or COP26 in November, Javadekar said. We are paying, we are suffering from which was caused by the reckless emissions for hundreds of years by the developed world, Javadekar said.
Indias External Affairs Minister said on Tuesday that international cooperation is the answer to the challenge posed by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Whether it is vaccines, medicines, PPE or oxygen, international cooperation is the answer to the Covid challenge. Need more, not less, Jaishankar said while addressing the G20 Foreign Ministers' Meeting here.

Foreign ministers from the Group of 20 major economies met face-to-face for the first time in two years, with host Italy aiming to push multilateral cures for global crises like the Covid-19 pandemic.

The one-day gathering in the heat-soaked southern city of Matera included debate on how to improve cooperation on an array of issues including global health, the climate emergency and international trade.

Jaishankar, in his address, said: Institutional multilateralism has been found wanting. Reforms have many forms but vaccine equity will be the immediate test. The real economy needs decentralised globalisation, including in manufacturing, food and health. Resilient supply chains must develop in parallel.

The full diversity of our planet needs more accurate reflection in global policy making, he added.

India has recorded more than 3 crore cases and registered nearly 400,000 deaths due to the virus since the beginning of the pandemic last year. Globally, the has infected over 180 million people and killed 4 million, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Italian Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio told the gathering that the pandemic has highlighted the need for an international response to emergencies that transcend national boundaries.

The G20 members account for more than 80 per cent of world gross domestic product, 75 per cent of global trade and 60 per cent of the population of the planet.

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said he would raise his unhappiness at the way he thought China and Russia had offered their vaccines to boost their standing with certain countries. (This) is not about achieving short-term geostrategic advantages, he said before the meeting.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken reiterated the importance of bringing vaccines to poorer countries that might struggle otherwise to obtain doses.
The on Tuesday posed a series of questions to the government over its setting up of a committee to look into the impact of NEET, asking if it had obtained the permission of the Supreme Court and whether the move would not violate an apex court ruling.

Abolition of the National Entrance cum Eligibility Test (NEET) is a poll promise of the ruling DMK and it had recently set up a high level committee led by retired judge of the Madras High Court, A K Rajan, to study the impact of on aspirants from the socially disadvantaged sections in medical admissions.

"Have you obtained the permission of the Supreme Court (which had upheld the NEET). Would it not amount to violation of the ruling of the apex court?" were among the questions raised by the first bench of Chief Justice Sanjib Banerjee and Justice Senthilkumar Ramamoorthy.

The bench made the observations when a PIL petition from BJP State general secretary K Nagarajan came up for hearing today before it.

The constitution of the panel appears to be an exercise in futility since the SC had made it clear that must fall in line and accept NEET, the CJ orally observed, adding, the state government must have obtained the leave of the top court before constituting the panel.

Advocate-General R Shanmugasundaram told the judges that the constitution of the committee was a policy decision of the state government in consonance with its election promise, to protect the interest of the poor students in rural areas.

"May be. But if it is contrary to the Supreme Court order, then it cannot be permitted," the bench remarked.

The judges, however, ordered notice to the state and the Central governments returnable by a week.

The petition sought to quash an order dated June 10 this year of the Secretary, Health and Family Welfare (MCA-1) department, on the constitution of the commission, saying it was 'unconstitutional, illegal, unfair' and without legal justification.

Among other things, the petitioner contended that the order passed by the state government is against the procedure encapsulated under the National Medical Commission Act, 2019.

When the Supreme Court had directed it to implement by its order dated August 22, 2017, it was not open to the state government to suggest an alternative.

As per Article 261 of the Constitution, full faith and credit shall be given to the judicial proceedings of the apex court.

The department ought to have noted that was introduced in national interest and any attempt to alter the same would derail the object and purpose of its introduction.

The purpose of forming the committee itself was illegal since it virtually amounted to seeking the opinion of the public about the judgment of the Supreme Court, the petitioner contended.

Announcing the said panel earlier this month, Chief Minister M K Stalin had said it would analyse if NEET had an adverse impact on students from backward classes and if it was so, the committee would recommend remedial measures to the government.

NEET is opposed to by almost all political parties in the state, including BJP's ally AIADMK, even as a few medical aspirants have allegedly ended their lives over the matter, either due to poor score in the test, as in the case of S Anitha of Ariyalur, or over fears about the qualifying exam.

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Helped by faster pace of credit growth, the share of Indian private in total credit rose to 36.5 per cent in the financial year ended March 2021 (FY21) from 35.4 per cent a year ago.

recorded higher loan growth compared to other bank groups. Their share in total credit was 24.8 per cent five years ago, the Reserve Bank of India said in a statement.

banks' loan growth moderated to 9.1 per cent in FY21, from 9.3 per cent in FY20. Public sector posted a loan growth of 3.6 per cent in FY21, down from 4.2 per cent in FY20. The lending by foreign shrunk by 3.3 per cent during 2020-21 as against growth of 7.2 per cent a year ago.

Overall growth of credit in India slowed down in FY21 to 5.6 per cent from 6.4 per cent in FY20 as the economy was hit hard by Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown imposed to contain its spread.

Bank branches in urban, semi-urban and rural areas recorded double-digit credit growth (YoY) in March 2021. The metropolitan branches, which accounted for 63 per cent of bank credit, recorded 1.4 per cent growth in credit, it added.
Covid-19 vaccines are highly effective in preventing severe infections or death, but patients with multiple myeloma -- a type of blood --- are immunocompromised and often on immunosuppressive therapy.

The mRNA-based and Moderna Covid vaccines evoked a lower and delayed response in them compared to healthy people, finds a study, asserting need for monitoring or continued precautions in patients with cancers.

Researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai found that almost 16 per cent of patients with multiple myeloma developed no detectable antibodies after both vaccine doses. These findings may be relevant to other patients undergoing treatment and to immunocompromised patients. The study will be published in Cell.

"This study underscores the need for routine blood tests on multiple myeloma patients after vaccination to understand their risk and potential need to continue wearing masks and socially distance until the pandemic wanes," said Samir Parekh, Professor of Medicine (Hematology and Medical Oncology), and Oncological Sciences, at Mount Sinai.

"This also calls for clinical trials to study the use of prophylactic therapies, like monoclonal antibodies, to mitigate Covid-19 risk or to use different vaccines or booster vaccinations in these patients," he added.

Repeat antibody measurements from before patients' first vaccine dose until 60 days after the second vaccination showed delayed and suboptimal responses, particularly in patients with multiple myeloma who had not contracted Covid-19 before their vaccinations.

Patients on active cancer treatment had significantly lower antibody levels after two vaccine doses than multiple myeloma patients who were not on treatment at the time of vaccination, the researchers said.

The team analysed the antibody levels of 320 multiple myeloma patients, 260 of whom received two doses of Covid-19 vaccinations, and found that 15.8 per cent had undetectable antibodies.

The multiple myeloma patients who had had Covid-19 before vaccination showed immune responses that were 10 times higher than those who had not.

--IANS

rvt/kr

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President signed a decree on Monday to dispatch Brazilian soldiers to the in a bid to curb surging deforestation, just two months after withdrawing troops from the region and days after his Environment Minister resigned.

The decree published in the country's official gazette said soldiers would go to the states of Para, Amazonas, Mato Grosso and Rondonia through the end of August. It didn't provide details about the number of troops to be deployed nor the cost of the operation.

Vice-President Hamilton Mouro told reporters earlier this month that the deployment could be extended beyond two months with the arrival of the dry season, when people burn forest to clear land.

has been ticking upwards for several years, but surged since the 2018 election of Bolsonaro, who repeatedly called for development of the rainforest.

The destruction has elicited an outcry and, more recently, an effort by US President Joe Biden's administration to urge Bolsonaro to get tough on illegal logging.

This will mark the third time that Bolsonaro has dispatched troops to the Amazon, following two Operation Green deployments, the most recent of which ended in April. Each mission involved thousands of soldiers. Still, environmental experts have said the military was ill-prepared and had limited efficacy.

In 2020, in Brazil's reached a level unseen since 2008, according to official data.

And 98.9 per cent of had indications of illegality, either done near springs, in protected areas or carried out without requisite authorization, according to data released this month by the MapBiomas Project, a network of nonprofits, universities and technology companies that studies Brazilian land use. Brazil's environmental regulator levied fines in just 5 per cent of these cases, the group found.

Mrcio Astrini, executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, a network of environmental non-profit groups, called the latest military a smokescreen that will allow the government to claim to be fighting deforestation. He noted a previously successful initiative, largely funded by the Norwegian and German governments, has been suspended since 2019.

The government has adopted a series of measures that simply destroys the state's monitoring capacity, like stopping environmental fines," Astrini said. He added that the regulator has also ceased destroying machinery used for illegal logging.

Bolsonaro's plan to send soldiers comes as the US administration has called for curbing Amazon deforestation in order to help arrest climate change. Bolsonaro has said lacks enough funds to do so on its own, despite the fact the nation did so at the start of this century.

The US has made clear it would only be willing to contribute once registers concrete progress, of which there has so far been no sign.

Talks between the US and Brazil's environment ministry have stalled, three Brazilian government officials told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorised to speak publicly.

The decision to deploy troops is partially meant to demonstrate the government's good intentions to the US, one of the officials added.

On June 23, Environment Minister Ricardo Salles announced his resignation, giving up his post amid sharp criticism of his tenure and two investigations into his actions involving allegedly illegal timber operations. He has denied all wrongdoing.

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The makers of Moderna and Sputnik V vaccines on Tuesday claimed that their shots produced antibodies against the fast-spreading Delta mutant of

Denis Logunov, deputy director of Russias Gamaleya Institute that developed Sputnik V, claimed the vaccine is around 90 per cent effective against the Delta variant, the RIA news agency reported. The shot was previously found by the researchers to be almost 92 per cent effective against the original strain of

Logunov said the Delta variant efficacy figure was calculated based on information from digital medical records and on vaccination records.

American drug firm Moderna, too, said its vaccine produced protective antibodies against the delta variant spreading in the US and many other parts of the world.

Moderna researchers tested blood samples from eight people for antibodies against versions of the spike protein from different variants, including delta, which emerged in India. The vaccine produced neutralising titers against all variants tested, the company said in a statement. The results were released on the pre-print server bioRxiv.

The protective proteins are called neutralizing antibodies because theyre capable of preventing the virus from entering cells. Compared to the quantity of antibodies produced against the main version of the virus, neutralising antibody levels against the delta variant were reduced by 2.1-fold.

Fast-spreading Delta variant forces more curbs around the world

The highly contagious virus strain that was first detected in India is becoming dominant in France and Germany, which urged more people to get vaccinated. It has also become the main variant in South Africas commercially important Gauteng province.

Also, close to half of Australias population is now in lockdown as it struggles to contain the delta variant.

Hong Kong banned flights from the UK amid rising infections, while Spain took visitors from the country off its restriction-free travel list.
By Supantha Mukherjee and Clara-Laeila Laudette

BARCELONA (Reuters) -Billionaire entrepreneur said on Tuesday that his Starlink venture was growing quickly as he forecast total investment costs in the satellite internet business at between $20 billion and $30 billion.

Without disclosing details, he also said Starlink has "two quite significant partnerships with major country telcos" that could help the SpaceX division plug the gaps in fifth-generation mobile and cellular networks.

The Inc CEO and founder of SpaceX, a rocket ship venture that seeks to colonise Mars, said investment costs before Starlink achieves fully positive cash flow would be $5-$10 billion.

"It's a lot, basically," Musk said in a video interview from California with the Mobile World Congress, the telecoms industry's largest annual gathering, which is being held in Barcelona.

Starlink, an array of low-orbit satellites offering high-speed, low-latency connectivity, is already offering a trial service and aims to cover the world, except for the north and south poles, starting in August, Musk said.

It has more than 1,500 satellites aloft and is operating in about a dozen countries, adding more every month, with Musk forecasting that total customer numbers would reach half a million over the next 12 months, from 69,000 now.

Some analysts question whether satellite internet can be a viable business model because it mainly targets remote areas, where there may not be enough people able to pay the high tariffs needed to recoup the investment costs.

Musk said he was talking to possible partners as a number of countries require operators to provide rural coverage as conditions of their 5G licences.

He also said if telecom operators have cellular stations in remote regions, they can use Starlink to allow them to connect to core networks.

The rapid spread of wireless and terrestrial broadband, along with high prices, were significant factors in killing previous low-Earth-orbit satellite ventures.

Starlink is selling terminals for half price, Musk said, adding he expects to bring down terminal costs from over $1,000 to $300-500 in the next 12 months.

"If we succeed in not going bankrupt, then that'll be great, and we can move on from there," he said.

Starlink faces competition from a number of players including Amazon.com Inc subsidiary Kuiper, OneWeb - a collapsed satellite operator rescued by the British government and India's Bharti Group.

(Reporting by Supantha Mukherjee and Clara-Laeila Laudette, additional reporting by Hyunjoo Jin in Berkeley, California, Writing by Douglas BusvineEditing by Gareth Jones, Bernadette Baum and Barbara Lewis)

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India's Serum Institute is seeking emergency authorisation in the for its Covishield jab, the BBC reported.

The move comes amid reports that Covishield is not yet eligible for the digital green certificate, an EU-wide travel pass, set to launch on July 1.

The certificate is currently for EU citizens only. Covishield is the Indian-made version of AstraZeneca's Vaxzevria jab, which has been authorised in the EU.

Covishield is manufactured in India by Serum, the world's largest vaccine maker.

The vaccines currently eligible for the green pass have all been approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA).

Serum's CEO, Adar Poonawalla, said on Monday that his company hopes to "resolve this matter soon", referring to the fact that Covishield had not yet been authorised in the EU.

The EMA told the BBC on Monday that the Serum Institute had not yet applied for authorisation.

The European Commission has left it to individual member states to decide whether to allow travellers who have received vaccines "that have been authorised at the national level or by the World Health Organization (WHO)".

Covishield was listed for emergency authorisation use in February.

BBC said it's unclear yet if the same rules will also apply to travellers visiting the EU.

India has so far overwhelmingly administered Covishield jabs - they account for more than 284 million of the 323 or so million vaccinations given so far.

Covaxin, an Indian homegrown vaccine, which has not yet received WHO approval, has also not applied for EMA authorisation. Sputnik V, which is the third vaccine approved for use in India and by the WHO, is on the EMA's list of vaccines currently under review. But it has not been rolled out yet in India due to supply delays.

At a recent meeting of G7 countries to which India was invited, India's health minister Dr Harsh Vardhan said that India was "strongly opposed to a 'vaccine passport' at this juncture".

"I realise that a lot of Indians who have taken COVISHIELD are facing issues with travel to the E.U., I assure everyone, I have taken this up at the highest levels and hope to resolve this matter soon, both with regulators and at a diplomatic level with countries", Adar Poonawalla, CEO, Serum Institute of India (SII) had said in a tweet.

--IANS

san/in

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A (EU) official on Tuesday said that the European Medicines Agency (EMA) has not received any request for approval of authorisation of the COVID-19 vaccine, Covishield.

Speaking to ANI, the EU official said: "Concerning a possible EMA authorisation for Covishield, as of yesterday, the European Medicine Agency (EMA) stated that it had not received a request for approval. It will examine any such request when received, as per its procedures."

"The EMA does not investigate new drugs on its own, unless it is asked by the relevant companies," he said.

Meanwhile, the official said the member states of the bloc will gradually lift temporary travel restrictions for people from India at their external borders, based on the developments of the health situation pertaining to the COVID-19 pandemic.

"As to travel to the EU from India, temporary restrictions on non-essential travel to the EU are currently in place from many non-EU countries, including India, due to COVID. EU Member States shall gradually lift these temporary travel restrictions at the external borders, based on developments of the health situation," the EU official told ANI.

Meanwhile, the 27-member European bloc is now introducing the EU Digital COVID Certificate, which is meant to facilitate safe free movement during the COVID-19 pandemic within the EU.

The certificate will serve as evidence that a person was vaccinated against COVID-19, received a negative test result or recovered from COVID-19. The aim of the EU Digital COVID Certificate is to facilitate free movement inside the EU. It is not a pre-condition to travel.

For this purpose, member states of the EU will have the option to accept also vaccinations that have been authorised by the World Health Organization (WHO), including Covishield, confirmed the EU official.

On Monday, Adar Poonawalla, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and owner of the Serum Institute of India (SII) assured Indians who have taken Covishield doses and are now facing issues while travelling to countries that the matter had been escalated to the 'highest level'.

"I realise that a lot of Indians who have taken COVISHIELD are facing issues with travel to the E.U., I assure everyone, I have taken this up at the highest levels and hope to resolve this matter soon, both with regulators and at a diplomatic level with countries," he tweeted.

This comes after reports that travellers vaccinated with Covishield, the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine manufactured in India by the SII, may not be eligible for the European Union's 'Green Pass'.

Europe's vaccine passport programme, which allowed recipients to travel to and from Europe with fewer roadblocks, may not recognise recipients of the Covishield vaccine.

Covishield is one of the three COVID-19 vaccines approved for use in India.

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Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, the first two jabs authorised for emergency use against Covid-19 by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), produce immune responses that are both strong and potentially long-lasting, finds a study.

While both vaccines performed well in clinical trials, and have been widely credited with reducing disease, concerns remained over how long immunity induced by the mRNA-based shots will last.

The study, led by researchers from the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis showed that nearly four months after the first dose people who received the Pfizer vaccine still had so-called germinal centers in their lymph nodes churning out immune cells directed against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19.

The team found that even three weeks after the first dose, all 14 participants had formed germinal centers with B cells producing antibodies that target a key SARS-CoV-2 protein. The response expanded greatly after the booster shot and then stayed high.

Even 15 weeks after the first dose, eight of 10 people still had detectable germinal centers containing B cells targeting the virus.

"Germinal centers are the key to a persistent, protective immune response," said Ali Ellebedy, Associate Professor of pathology and immunology, of medicine and of molecular microbiology.

"Germinal centers are where our immune memories are formed. And the longer we have a germinal center, the stronger and more durable our immunity will be because there's a fierce selection process happening there, and only the best immune cells survive," Ellebedy added.

Moreover, vaccination led to high levels of neutralising antibodies effective against three variants of the virus, including the Beta variant from South Africa that has shown some resistance to vaccines.

Vaccination also induced stronger antibody responses in people who had recovered from SARS-CoV-2 infection compared to those who had never been infected. Among people without prior exposure to the virus, antibody levels rose slowly after the first dose and peaked one week after the second.

Both Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were created with mRNA technology. Unlike most vaccines, which provide bits of viral or bacterial proteins to trigger an immune response, mRNA-based vaccines provide instructions for the body to build and release foreign proteins, such as the spike protein in the case of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

--IANS

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TP ICAP, the world's biggest interdealer broker, is launching a trading platform with Fidelity Investments and Standard Chartered's digital assets custody unit, the consortium said on Tuesday.

Institutional investors have warmed to the crypto sector this year and the platform, which is due to launch in the second half of the year, will initially allow them to trade bitcoin, with second-largest token ether to be added later.

TP ICAP, along with Fidelity Digital Assets and Zodia Custody, launched by the venture capital arm of Standard Chartered and Northern Trust in December, is seeking to make akin to that of traditional assets like stocks, bonds and foreign exchange.

The platform will offer post-trade infrastructure with a network of digital asset custodians, the consortium said in a statement, and separate execution and settlement, something widely seen as key to greater involvement of larger risk-averse investors in the emerging crypto market.

At present, crypto execution and custody services are usually rolled up in one venue, increasing credit risks. Amsterdam-based Flow Traders will provide liquidity to the platform.

TP ICAP has broadened its footprint in global capital by offering new data and analytics services and rolling out new products.

Dedicated crypto funds have seen record flows this year but major banks offering access must balance growing interest with the compliance headaches long associated with the sector and increasing scrutiny by regulators.

Still, the move is the latest endorsement of the sector by Standard Chartered, whose venture capital unit said earlier this month it will set up a separate crypto brokerage and exchange platform in Britain and Europe, with Hong Kong's BC Technology Group.

"Investor interest in this new asset class has exploded dramatically in the last six to eight months," Duncan Trenholme, co-head of digital assets at TP ICAP, told Reuters. "In most of our conversations with clients, they want a separation of custodial roles from execution capabilities which is opposite to the models that exist currently."

TP ICAP launched futures and options on CME in 2019 and now plans to launch other derivative products including total return swaps and non-deliverable forwards.

The platform is awaiting approval by Britain's financial regulator. Neither Standard Chartered nor Fidelity Investments have invested in the platform, TP ICAP said.

(This story is refiled to add dropped letters to name in headline, 9th and 11th paragraphs)

(Reporting by Saikat Chatterjee and Tom Wilson; Editing by Rachel Armstrong and Kirsten Donovan)

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The US House of Representatives on Monday passed legislation that would boost scientific research in an effort to make the US more competitive than

The US lawmakers passed two bills on a bipartisan basis to increase funding for the National Science Foundation and establish a new directorate for science and engineering to expand research opportunities, as well as authorise research funding for the Department of Energy's Office of Science, reported The Hill.

"We must significantly boost funding for science. For years, we have allowed millions of dollars of excellent research go unfunded," said House Science, Space and Technology Committee Chairwoman Eddie Bernice Johnson.

"We are at a critical juncture in our nation's history and we need to be more focused on the role of science in our society," he added.

The first bill, called the National Science Foundation for the Future Act was passed in a 345-67 vote while the second measure, titled the Department of Energy Science for the Future Act was passed 351-68. They would increase funding for the National Science Foundation and Department of Energy's Office of Science by about seven per cent annually.

Republicans also added a provision in committee to ban grant applicants from participating in talent programs associated with foreign governments of concern such as the Thousand Talents Program, which is tied to the Chinese government, according to The Hill.

"It is critical that we strike the correct balance between keeping our research enterprise open but also from protecting it from adversaries who seek to take advantage of our open system," said Republican Representative Michael Waltz.

Aside from the two bills passed on Monday, which originated out of the Science, Space and Technology Committee, separate legislation out of the House Foreign Affairs Committee is also in the works, The Hill reported.

The bill, introduced by Committee Chairman Gregory Meeks would provide temporary protection or refugee status to people in Hong Kong and Uyghurs facing human rights violations by the Chinese government and invest in manufacturing COVID-19 vaccines to promote U.S. "vaccine diplomacy" to counter Chinese vaccines, which are less effective than the ones developed in the US.

This comes after the US Senate passed a mammoth package earlier this month to provide funding for the National Science Foundation, Department of Commerce, Department of Energy and National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

The Senate legislation also includes provisions to increase diplomatic pressure on China, such as mandating a diplomatic boycott at the 2022 Olympic Games in Beijing.

In May, the Senate voted 84-11 to move ahead with the Endless Frontiers Act introduced by Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer, which seeks up to USD 100 billion over five years for basic and advanced tech research and another USD 10 billion to create new technology hubs across the country.

Under the former President Donald Trump's administration, ties between the two countries had deteriorated over issues such as human rights violations in Xinjiang, encroachment on the special status of Hong Kong, accusations of unfair trade practices by Beijing, lack of transparency concerning the pandemic and China's military aggression in various parts of the world.

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Shares of were up 6 per cent at Rs 646.85 on the BSE in intra-day deal on Tuesday after the company reported a consolidated profit after tax (PAT) of Rs 64 crore in the March quarter (Q4FY21), against a loss of Rs 7 crore in the year-ago quarter (Q4FY20).

Net sales of the company, however, declined 6 per cent year on year (YoY) at Rs 565 crore from Rs 602 crore in the previous year quarter. Reported consolidated Ebitda (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation) came in at Rs 78 crore, while margin was at 13.8 per cent against analysts' estimates of 12.4 per cent.

Graphite reported operationally healthy Q4FY21 results. For consolidated operations, in terms of segments, after five quarters, the graphite and carbon segment reported a positive EBIT (earnings before interest and tax). Consolidated operational performance was also supported by a sharp drop in raw material costs. For Q4FY21, raw material cost as a percentage of sales was at 30 per cent vs. 69 per cent in Q4FY20 and 66 per cent in Q3FY21, ICICI Securities said in a note.

The management said, during Q4 FY2021, the electrode prices started to recover from the lows, resulting in inventory gains on account of net realizable value of inventory. On the other hand, our German business operations were impacted for most part of the year due to extended lockdown, lower capacity utilization and electrode pricing having remained under pressure in the European region.

The steel industry growth is underpinned by strong demand from the end user industries such as construction and automobile. In addition, Chinas continuous focus on reducing energy consumption, abolition of VAT rebate on certain steel exports may lead to lower steel exports from China to rest of the world. These factors are expected to bode well for electric arc furnace (EAF) steel manufacturing countries and will drive demand for steel and electrode in the longer run.

Looking ahead, the management remains optimistic with the ongoing recovery in demand for electrodes and stabilization of prices. is well positioned to cater to the growing demand for electrodes and maintain its strong liquidity and balance sheet position, they said.

Despite todays gain, in the past one month, the stock of has underperformed the market by falling 15 per cent, as compared to 2.7 per cent rise in the S&P BSE Sensex.
After a sharp run up from their March 2020 low, the valuation of Indian has become a concern now, said in their Asian outlook conference for the second half of 2021. It maintains a neutral rating on Indian equities, but expects foreign direct investment (FDI) to pick up pace going ahead as the economic recovery gathers steam.

FDI in India is likely to pick up going ahead on the back of a strong rebound in growth. Any pullback in FDI, I think, will only be temporary. The governments latest stimulus measures announced Monday are marginally positive. However, relative to the economic dislocation seen in India, the package is not very large. Given the pace of vaccination, India should get to herd immunity in the first half of 2022 said Frederic Neumann, co-head of Asian economics research at

Most emerging (EMs) witnessed healthy flows for most part of FY21 as global central banks, especially the US Federal Reserve (US Fed), remained accommodative and pushed liquidity to help revive economic growth. In this backdrop, foreign portfolio investors (FPI) invested across geographies and asset classes. India, too, got its share with FPIs investing a record Rs 2.74 trillion ($37 billion) during FY21 in the Indian  the most since FY13, when they had pumped in Rs 1.4 trillion ($25.8 billion), data show.

The S&P BSE Sensex and Nifty50 logged their best financial year performance in a decade and surged 68 per cent and 71 per cent, respectively in FY21. Earlier during FY10, the S&P BSE Sensex had surged 80.5 per cent, while the Nifty50 rallied 73.7 per cent. Meanwhile, foreign holding in the Indian equity market has shot up to 27.6 per cent, much above the long-term average of 19.6 per cent, a recent Nomura report said. FIIs increased their holding in metals, cement, coal/utilities, consumer durables and industrial sectors in the last few months, while cutting their position in media and real estate sectors.

Indian markets, according to Herald van der Linde, head of equity strategy for Asia Pacific at HSBC, are seen as an alternative to China. Flows to China are usually fed out of India and vice versa. That said, the valuation of Indian appears expensive now. Last year, India got a good share of flows from north Asian regions. Besides, Covid third wave still remains a risk for the country, he said.

has pegged India's FY22 GDP growth at 8 per cent in fiscal 2021-22 (FY22) with the first half likely to be weak, led by both the direct and indirect cost of the second wave.

But we remain positive about growth prospects in the second half, by which time a critical mass of the population will be vaccinated. At the current run-rate of 6.5 million jabs a day, about 55 per cent of the overall population is likely to be vaccinated by end-2021, wrote Pranjul Bhandari, chief economist for India at HSBC in a co-authored note with Aayushi Chaudhary.
shares hit a multi-year high of Rs 377.90 after rallying 16 per cent on the BSE in intra-day deal on the back of heavy volumes in an otherwise subdued market. is a Tata Group Company in which the group company Tata Power Company holds 48.64 per cent stake, as on March 31, 2021.

The stock was trading at its highest level since 1992. It hit a record high of Rs 1,700 on March 24, 1992, the BSE data shows. In the past four weeks, the stock has zoomed 77 per cent, as compared to 1.28 per cent rise in the S&P BSE Sensex.

At 11:21 am, was trading 14 per cent higher at Rs 371, against 0.24 per cent decline in the benchmark index. The trading volumes on the counter jumped over five-fold with a combined 4.2 million equity shares changing hands on the NSE and BSE.

Nelco, on June 10, 2021, announced that the Company has received on June 9, 2021, the requisite approval from Department of Telecommunications (DoT) for transfer of the Internet Service Provider license and VSAT license from the amalgamating company i.e. Tatanet Services to the amalgamated company i.e. Nelco under the Scheme.

Accordingly, the Scheme involving the internal restructuring of the various businesses of the Company and its two wholly owned subsidiaries viz. Tatanet Services Limited (TNSL) and Nelco Network Products Limited (NNPL), has become effective on June 9, 2021. National Company Law Tribunal, Mumbai Bench (NCLT) had already sanctioned the Scheme in November 2018.

Nelco said the primary benefits of this restructuring are likely to be the listed entity on stand-alone basis will hold the VSAT license and will have the more sustainable services revenue which is recurring in nature. The Company will also be able to apply for additional licenses for new business opportunities around Satellite Communication. The enhanced net worth of the Company post amalgamation will improve its ability to bid for larger projects which require the bidder to own the VSAT license, the company said.

Nelco operates in only one reportable segment which is Network Systems consisting of SatCom Services (including equipment sale, maintenance and other allied services). The company has two wholly owned subsidiaries viz. Tatanet Services Ltd. (TNSL) for delivering SatCom services and Nelco Network Products Ltd. (NNPL) which has commenced its business operations in the last quarter of FY2020-21 by providing Inflight and Maritime Connectivity services.

Many new business models and collaborations are emerging, which provide new opportunities for the SatCom industry. Some of the next-gen technologies are also likely to move into the mainstream, Nelco said in financial year 2020-21 annual report.

The fundamentals of most of the end user sectors seem to be intact. The Company believes that the SatCom deployment in ATMs and bank branches will see a spurt in FY22 due to pent-up demand from FY21, as the expansion of banking infrastructure resumes. Many rural education projects which are in the pipeline, are likely to be rolled out during FY22. The outlook for some of the other enterprise segments like renewable energy and eCommerce looks positive due to an increasing need for reliable pan-India data communication, the company said.

Nelco further said that in-line with the global trend, the availability of HTS in the country is also likely to give a boost to the growth of the SatCom industry by increasing its ability to address newer and applications.
Aster DM Healthcare entered into a share purchase agreement with Hindustan Drug House, a partnership firm which is in process of converting into a private limited company.

Aster DM Healthcare shall invest in 86% of the paid-up equity share capital of the converted private limited company. The cash transaction is worth Rs 16.70 crore and is expected to be completed within 75 days.

The company plans to expand business into the growing pharmaceutical distribution segment by establishing supply chain and distribution network to sell into channels such as retail pharmacies, online pharmacies, hospitals and clinics.

Hindustan Drug House is into whole-sale, supply and distribution of pharmaceutical products.

Aster DM Healthcare's consolidated net profit dropped 20.2% to Rs 116.72 crore on 4.8% rise in net sales to Rs 2,390.88 crore in Q4 March 2021 over Q4 March 2020.

Aster DM Healthcare operates in various segments of the healthcare industry, which include hospitals, clinics and retail pharmacies, and provides healthcare services to patients across economic segments in various gulf corporation council (GCC) states through its various brands, such as Aster, Medcare and Access.

Shares of Aster DM Healthcare lost 0.61% to Rs 154.75 on BSE. The strip traded in the range of Rs 154.40 to Rs 157 so far.

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There have been six reports of salmonella-related illness associated with these cooked shrimps distribution, so far according to the US drug regulator.

Shares of Avanti Feeds declined 2.35% to Rs 529.50 after the company informed that certain consignments of shrimps shipped to USA were potentially contaminated for containing salmonella.

Avanti Frozen Foods (AFFPL) is a subsidiary of Avanti Feeds, engaged in processing and exports of shrimps to USA, Europe and other countries.

AFFPL was informed by CDC (Centre for Disease Control, US Government) and U.S. Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) that some of the cooked shrimp products supplied by AFFPL are identified as potential for contamination for containing salmonella in those products.

USFDA advised AFFPL to voluntarily recall the identified products processed by AFFPL between 23 October 2020 and 09 November 2020 (about 18 days) which correspond to range of products imported and distributed from late December 2020 to late February 2021. "It does not mean that all recalled products are affected and recall is only as an abundant precaution," the company said in a statement.

As per the advice of the USFDA, AFFPL issued a press release in USA recalling the relevant products from the market giving details of the products in the press release. AFFPL has taken several preventive measures and initiatives to eliminate the potential recurrence.

AFFPL further said it is engaged the services of a senior and reputed law firm to advice and represent legal matters related to this subject, if any, in USA. The company said it has sufficient "product liability insurance" coverage in the event of any claim.

"Since the extent of products under recall are insignificant, AFFPL envisages that considering the longstanding and reliable customers network in USA, the present issue may not have any stress on it," it added.

Avanti Feeds is a manufacturer of prawn and fish feeds, and shrimp processor and exporter. The company's principal products/services are shrimp feed and processed shrimp. On a consolidated basis, the company's net profit declined 19.9% to Rs 69.69 crore on a 6.1% rise in net sales to Rs 1,098.11 crore in Q4 FY21 over Q4 FY20.

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Shares of HDFC Life Insurance Company will be in focus. Foreign promoter Standard Life will reportedly sell 3.46% stake in the company through block deal at a price band of Rs 658-678 per share.

NALCO posted net turnover and net profit of Rs.8869.29 crore and Rs.1299.56 crore respectively in FY20-21 compared to Rs.8425.75 crore and Rs.138.23 crore achieved during the previous year. The net profit of the company for the financial year 2020-21 has jumped by 840% over last financial year.

RITES said that Metro Express, Mauritius has awarded additional work of consultancy services (PMC) for extension of the mainline from Rose Hill to Reduit through Ebene for an additional fee of MUR 250 millions (Rs 45 crore approximately).

Ramco Systems announced that it will provide its next-gen Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software to Aden Ports Development Company (APDC) at their Aden Container Terminal (ACT), deepening its 12-year partnership with Yemen's largest container terminal.

Great Eastern Shipping Company said that the company had delivered its 1996 built Midsize Gas Carrier 'Jag Vayu' to the buyers. The vessel was contracted for sale in May 2021.

Stove Kraft said that the company is launching or upgrading a new range of Home and Kitchen appliances products for Onam festival which includes Mixer Grinder & Wet Grinder, Pressure cookers, Cast Iron Cookware, Sleek Glass Cooktop 2, 3 and 4 Burner, Double Walled Kettle, Hand Blender, Hand Mixer, Induction Stove, Desk Lamp, Turbo Food Processor, Shears and Cutting Board.

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To produce and sell the Jasper Conran London Bed and Bath Collection

Indo Count Industries announced its new partnership with Jasper Conran O.B.E. for an exclusive bed and bath collection, launching in Spring 2022.

The range will be sold and marketed internationally under the Jasper Conran London brand, exclusively through Indo Count. Attention to detail and the integrity of the product will be central to the values of the brand. The collection will feature bold graphic prints, organic and supima cotton with a fresh and contemporary colour pallette.

Jasper Conran is a very established and well respected British designer, recognised within homewares, having had longstanding partnerships with, amongst others, British homeware brands Waterford and Wedgewood.

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Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) posted a 23.2% decline in net profit to Rs 103.78 crore on 41.15% decline in revenue from operations to Rs 338.78 crore in Q4 FY21 over Q4 FY20.

Profit before tax tumbled 28% to Rs 139.20 crore in Q4 FY21 as against Rs 193.21 crore in Q4 FY20. The company said that the reduction in operating turnover is mainly due to COVID-19 pandemic. However, the company does not expect any material impact on the carrying amount of assets and liabilities.

In respect of Tejas and Kashi Mahakal Express trains, the company has requested railway board to reconsider waiving off the fixed charges amounting to Rs 27.93 crore for non operational period of the three trains considering it as a force majeure situation as lockdown and restrictions imposed by the Government due to COVID-19 pandemic. However, IRCTC said that it has made full provisions for the fixed charges for both the Tejas trains and Kashi Mahakal express in FY 2020-21.

The company's revenue from catering segment slumped 70.1% to Rs 67.38 crore, revenue from Rail Neer segment tumbled 45.4% to Rs 27.80 crore, revenue from tourism business declined 69% to Rs 31.58 crore in Q4 FY21 over Q4 FY20.

Meanwhile, revenue from internet ticketing segment increased 9.51% to Rs 212.01 crore in Q4 FY21 over Q4 FY20.

The company's net profit dropped 63% to Rs 189.90 crore in the year ended March 2021 (FY21) compared with Rs 513.10 crore in the year ended March 2020 (FY20). Revenue from operations tumbled 65.4% to Rs 783.05 crore in FY21 over FY20.

IRCTC, a Mini Ratna public sector enterprise under the administrative control of Ministry of Railways, is the sole entity authorized by Indian Railways (IR) to provide catering services to railways, online railway tickets and packaged drinking water at railway stations and trains in India. As of 31 March 2021, the Government of India held 67.4% stake in the company.

Shares of IRCTC rose 0.12% at Rs 2,080.25 on BSE.

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Indian Railway Finance Corporation (IRFC) rose 2.22% to Rs 25.30 after the company's standalone net profit jumped 126.46% to Rs 1,482.55 crore on 38.97% rise in total revenue from operations to Rs 4,454.96 crore in Q4 March 2021 over Q4 March 2020.

During the financial year, IRFC's standalone net profit climbed 38.34% to Rs 4,416.13 crore on 17.50% increase in total revenue from operations to Rs 15,770.47 crore in FY 2021 over FY 2020.

Meanwhile, the board approved the enhancement of borrowing limit of the company to Rs 8,00,000 crore from Rs 4,00,000 crore, subject to the approval of shareholders.

IRFC is a dedicated financing arm of the Indian Railways for mobilising funds from domestic as well as overseas markets. The Government of India held 86.36% stake in the company as on 31 March 2021.

The initial public offer (IPO) of of IRFC was subscribed 3.49 times. The issue opened for subscription on 18 January 2021 and closed on 20 January 2021. The price band for the IPO was set at Rs 25-26 per share.

The stock was listed on the bourses on 29 January 2021 at Rs 25 per share, at a discount of 3.85% to IPO price of Rs 26 per share. The scrip lost 0.6% on that day to end at Rs 24.85.

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Japan stock market finished session lower on Tuesday, 29 June 2021, as concerns grew that the economic recovery will slow due to a rapid rise in COVID-19 Delta variant cases.

At closing bell, the 225-issue Nikkei Stock Average was down 235.41 points, or 0.81%, to 28,812.61. The broader Topix index of all First Section issues on the Tokyo Stock Exchange fell 16.19 points, or 0.82%, to 1,949.48.

Trading volume turnover in the 1st section decreased to 870 million shares from 904 million shares in previous session. Trading value turnover decreased to 1,968.09 billion yen from 2,142.25 billion yen in previous session.

Total 30 of 33 sectors sub-indexes on the Tokyo exchange ended lower, with worst performers were Mining (down 4.5%), Iron & Steel (down 2.7%), Glass & Ceramics Products (down 2.4%), Rubber Products (down 2.2%), Nonferrous Metals (down 2.1%), Air Transportation (down 1.9%), Oil & Coal Products (down 1.9%), and Banks (down 1.7%) issues.

The concern over the coronavirus variant offset the positive impact of the recent acceleration of vaccinations. Investors were also concerned that the Tokyo Olympics could lead to a spike in infections in Japan.

Participants also kept a close eye on the upcoming release of the Bank of Japan's (BOJ) Tankan business sentiment survey and the release of major US economic data, including the consumer confidence data, a private jobs report and a crucial monthly employment report due later this week for directional cues.

Among individual stocks, Dentsu share rose after announcing plans to sell its headquarters building in Tokyo.

SoftBank Group shares dropped after the firm said it had suspended production of its humanoid robot Pepper.

Nissan and Toyota both declined as a delay in shipments of semiconductors are weighing on auto productions.

ECONOMIC NEWS: Japan Jobless Rate Rises To 3% In May- Japan's unemployment rate rose to 3% in May 2021 from 2.8% a month earlier, hitting the highest level in five months, government data showed on Tuesday.

This was the highest reading since December 2020. A year earlier, the unemployment rate was at 2.8%. Meantime, the jobs-to-application ratio was at 1.09 in May, unchanged from the prior month and compared with consensus of 1.08.

CURRENCY NEWS: The U. S. dollar index, which tracks the greenback against a basket of its peers, was at 91.96 off levels above 92.1 seen earlier in the month. The Japanese yen traded at 110.53 per dollar, stronger than levels above 110.8 seen yesterday against the greenback.

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Nucleus Software announced that FinnOne Neo will power the consumer finance business of Tien Phong Commercial Joint Stock Bank(TPBank), one of the leading banks in Vietnam. TPFico will offer instant digital loans anytime, anywhere, powered by the advanced digital lending platform FinnOne Neo.

With its extensive API stack, omni-channel capabilities and easy configurability, FinnOne Neo will enable TPFico to offer a unique digital first experience and instant approvals for consumer loans.

The solution will allow TPFico to launch innovative loan products in minutes and automate processes end-to-end across the loan lifecycle. The market leading digital lending solution will help TPFico enhance the efficiencies of its loan acquisition team [Sales, credit, operations and product] and loan management team, minimize chances of fraud and reduce Non-Performing Loans (NPLs). With FinnOne Neo, TPFico will make faster, more comprehensive and data driven credit assessments by integrating with the wider ecosystem including the credit bureaus through APIs.

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Ramco Systems rose 3.96% to Rs 621.55 after the IT company announced that it will provide its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software to Aden Ports Development Company (APDC) at their Aden Container Terminal (ACT).

The association between the partners, which began in 2009, will see the upgrade of ACT's HR, payroll and financial accounting capabilities, modernization and digitisation of existing applications, and introduction of newer technologies and innovations such as Payroll Hub, Accounts Payable/Accounts Receivable hubs, as well as mobile apps, with a sleeker and more comprehensive dashboard.

Ramco's HR & Payroll modules will provide reporting capabilities to enable ACT's management to make on-the-spot decisions for payroll, bonus, leave and attendance, while the financial accounting module will cover items such as accounts payable, accounts receivable and the general ledger, all on a unified dashboard. The implementation of these new features will minimise manual processes and human intervention, thereby enabling the company to reduce its paper usage.

The Aden Ports Development Company has operated the Aden Container Terminal (ACT), the largest container terminal in the Republic of Yemen, since September 20th, 2012.During this time terminal throughput has increased from 260,000 TEUs to the current handling rate of over 500,000 TEUs/year.

Virender Aggarwal, CEO of Ramco Systems, said, "We are excited to further our partnership with ACT; it has been over a decade of working together, and we are happy to provide a more comprehensive service to our long-term customer. As trends such as e-commerce are being pushed to the forefront amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, we are confident that the software will enable ACT to digitally transform their operations, translating into quicker turnarounds at the port."

Ramco Systems is a next-gen enterprise software player disrupting the market with its multi-tenant cloud and mobile-based enterprisesoftware in HR and Global Payroll, ERP and M&E MRO for Aviation.

On a consolidated basis, Ramco Systems' net profit tanked 58.90% to Rs 7.45 crore on 12.55% decline in revenue from operations to Rs 149.86 crore in Q4 March 2021 over Q3 December 2020.

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Punjab leader on Tuesday left from his residence in Patiala to meet in the national capital.

has been continuously meeting MLAs, MPs and prominent leaders from Punjab at his residence from the last few days to diffuse the tensions between the Chief Minister and Sidhu.

A three-member panel had been set up by interim President Sonia Gandhi to end factionalism in the party's Punjab unit.

On Friday, the leaders who reached Rahul Gandhi's residence to attend a meeting included Vijendra Singla, Rana Gurjit Singh, RS MP Shamsher Singh Dhillon, and MLA Lakhvir Singh.

Rajya Sabha MP Shamsher Singh Dhillon while speaking to the mediapersons had said that the meeting was held to resolve infighting in the Punjab Congress and added that decisions were made to strengthen the party in the upcoming elections in the state.

Gandhi on Wednesday met many senior Punjab leaders including Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee president Sunil Jakhar, Punjab Finance Minister Manpreet Singh Badal and Harish Rawat in Delhi amid escalating infighting in the party's state unit.

Notably, Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh during his recent three-day visit to Delhi did not meet Sonia Gandhi and

The state is crucial for Congress as it is one of the few states where the party is in power and the outcome will have an impact on the party's prospects outside the state as well.

Assembly elections in Punjab are scheduled to take place next year.

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(Reuters) - Multiple users complained about an outage affecting Alphabet Inc's search engine as well as its streaming and email services, according to outage monitoring website Downdetector.

Platforms including Google, YouTube and Gmail were down Monday evening, with users complaining of difficulty in logging in and accessing the website in parts of North America, according to Downdetector.

More than a thousand users were having difficulties with the search engine at one point, the outage monitoring website showed, and users were also facing issues with YouTube TV and Drive.

The issue affecting the platforms was not immediately clear.

did not immediately respond to a Reuters' request for comment after business hours.

Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from a series of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform.

(Reporting by Aakriti Bhalla in Bengaluru; Editing by Amy Caren Daniel)

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is set to launch its first product, the ear (1), on July 27, 2021. The true wireless were earlier set to launch in June. The London-based technology startups founder recently announced on Twitter about the delay owing to some final touches before the product rollout. Nevertheless, the ear (1) finally has a launch date and it is not too far from now.

said, the ear (1) are the beginning of a long and exciting journey that will eventually expand in other product categories, including smart electronics that are expected to arrive later this year. Pei, in the blog explained the reason for choosing as the first product in Nothing's portfolio. "...we believe the earphones market was begging for differentiation, space where we can elevate design and deliver value from day one. Additionally, as an area of hyper-growth, the earphones market will provide a fertile backdrop as we strengthen our capabilities and prepare to enter new product categories."

In India, Nothing has partnered with home-grown e-commerce marketplace Flipkart for the ear (1) launch. This means, the Nothings debut ear (1) true wireless will be available exclusively on Flipkart.

For India operations, Nothing recently appointed former Samsung executive Manu Sharma, as Vice President and General Manager of Nothing India. Pei said, He (Manu) will drive the growth, business development and operations for Nothing in the country.

A month ago we announced that ear (1) would be revealed in June. Were near the finish line and there are a few things left to finalize. For this reason @Nothing ear (1) will now come out a bit later this summer. Your support and patience mean the world to us. More updates soon!  (@getpeid) June 18, 2021

Nothing earlier announced that it had raised $22 million from a clutch of investors, including GV (formerly Google Ventures), Casey Neistat (YouTube personality and Beme co-founder), Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin and Reddit Chief Executive Officer Steve Huffman. Indias entrepreneur Kunal Shah, Founder, CRED, also invested in Nothing, although the amount has not been disclosed.
The police in Uttar Pradesh's Bulandshahr district have lodged an FIR against two senior officials of India over the social media platform putting up a distorted map of India.

The FIR was lodged at the Khurja Nagar police station on Monday evening on the basis of a complaint by an office-bearer of right wing Bajrang Dal.

The map, which showed the Union Territories of Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir outside India, was noticed on Monday, leading to an uproar by netizens.

had removed that map on Monday evening.

"The world map does not show Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir as parts of India. This is not a coincidence. This act has hurt the sentiments of Indians, including me," Bajrang Dal's western UP convenor Praveen Bhati said in the complaint.

The FIR names India MD Manish Maheshwari and News Partnerships Head Amrita Tripathi as accused who have been booked under Indian Penal Code section 505 (2) (public mischief).

Charges under Information Technology Act section 74 (publication for fraudulent purpose) have also been invoked in the case, according to the FIR, seen by PTI.

The map's glaring distortion, which appeared on the career section of Twitter website under the header 'Tweep Life', had triggered a heavy backlash from netizens on Monday as they demanded strict action against the microblogging platform that has flouted various rules on multiple occasions in the past.

Earlier, Twitter had shown Leh as part of China.

(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.)
Schneider Electric and Footprint Project partner to aid disaster relief efforts by mobilizing microgrids for communities in critical need.
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Here you'll find our latest collection of Caledonian-Record reports on the coronavirus outbreak and local response, from the beginning of April. Our January, February and March stories are here: https://www.caledonianrecord.com/news/local/our-coronavirus-coverage/collection_5885178c-692e-11e
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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.

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Morehead City Rotary Club president Dr. Stephen Smith, foreground, and incoming president Barbara Johnson test out some of the 48 flags Thursday that will be flown Fourth of July at Katherine Davis Park in Morehead City as part of the Flags for Heroes program. (Cheryl Burke photo)
FILE - In this May 27, 2021 file photo, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper speaks to the gathered media after his tour of a COVID-19 vaccine clinic at the Pine Hall Brick plant in Madison, N.C. North Carolina's Senate approved a measure on Thursday, June 10, to prohibit doctors from performing abortions if a woman is seeking it because of race, sex or a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome. (Woody Marshall/News & Record via AP, File)
Boulder - Barbara Ann Keirana, of Boulder, Colo., passed away on May 12, 2021. She was 87 years old. An out of state celebration of her life will be held at a future date. Barbara's final resting place will be with her husband, Alan Keiran, at Ft. Logan Naional Cemetery in Denver. Howe Mortu
The nominations for the 48th annual Daytime Emmy Awards, presented by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS), have been announced across the childrens & animation and lifestyle categories. There are 18 animation-specific categories.

Netflix has the most nominations in the animation categories of any single broadcaster or streamer, with 19 in total. It has a good spread: ten different productions across 12 categories, including three of the contenders for best childrens animated series (Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, Hilda, and Tales of Arcadia: Wizards).

Disney Channel comes next, with 16 nominations. Half of those are for Elena of Avalor, which stars Disneys first Hispanic princess, and which won three awards last year. It is the most-nominated show in these categories this year. When we combine the nominations for Disney Channel, Disney Junior, Disney XD, and Disney+, the House of Mouse has 28 in all. In other words, the company dominates this year, as it has done in the past.
Photo: seacoastonline.com

I've often thought to myself over the years that if I ever wanted to kill someone, the best way to do it would be to drive over them.

I would wait until I found them stepping into a crosswalk and make sure that I hit them while I was turning onto the street they were crossing. I would then screech to a halt, return and scream "Oh, no, I didn't see them, I'm sorry!"



If I planned it just right, I might get away with a traffic ticket and have my insurer pay the bills.



Of course, I'm being facetious, but the thought runs through my mind whenever I watch or read a news story where a driving error results in a death and the offending driver is convicted of a Motor Vehicle Act offence because of it.

This week's sentencing of Conrad Wetten by Judge K.L. Whonnock for the death of Shinder Kirk near Nanaimo in December 2018 is another example.



Testimony heard at the trial supported that Wetten was not impaired, was not distracted by a cellphone and was not speeding or driving recklessly in the moments leading up to the crash.



Mr. Wetten was fined $1,500 and will receive six penalty points. The judge declined to prohibit Mr. Wetten from driving because he needs his driver's licence to work.



Mr. Wetten is also facing a civil suit for liability because of the collision. Depending on his collision history and coverage, it is possible that he will only pay the same amount that the rest of us contribute to ICBC for his error.

We will all share monetary the cost while family and friends share the additional emotional burden.



Most people hearing this news are likely to ask why hadn't the driver been charged with homicide?



The Criminal Code of Canada says that homicide occurs when someone directly or indirectly, by any means, causes the death of a human being.

Homicide is not an offence unless it is culpable, meaning that the death is:

Caused by an unlawful act

Criminal negligence

Causing someone to kill themselves by threats, fear of violence or deception

Wilfully frightening them, in the case of a child or sick person.

Murder is culpable homicide where the person who causes the death of a human being means to cause his death or means to cause him bodily harm that he knows is likely to cause his death, and is reckless whether death ensues or not.

However, murder may be reduced to manslaughter if the person who committed it did so in the heat of passion caused by sudden provocation.



When I originally wrote this story back in 2009, I used an example of a trial where a driver struck another vehicle and then returned to the scene to deliberately run over a passenger who had exited the other vehicle.

The offending driver was culpable and charged with criminal negligence in the operation of a motor vehicle causing death.



The maximum penalty here is the same as it is for murder, life in prison. The main difference is the minimum sentence imposed by each of these offences.

The choice of which charges to prefer belongs to Crown counsel after looking at all the evidence in the context of current case law and having decided on whether there is a substantial possibility of conviction.

Story URL: https://www.drivesmartbc.ca/viewpoint/when-drivers-kill
Photo: Contributed

By Rabbi Shmuly Hecht

For the first time in recent history, the entire world experienced a common crisis for an extended period of time.

Even as we gradually resume pre-COVID routines, it will never be the same.

Ive seen first-hand the deep toll this year of COVID has taken on individuals, young and old.

Looking back we may ask ourselves a simple question:

Do we, as human beings, have what it takes to confront this kind of adversity?

Do we have what it takes to confront any kind of difficulty that challenges us to our core?

The answer, of course, is yes.

Simply put, there is something embedded in the human psyche that, if tapped into properly, can serve as an anchor for every human being to overcome every kind of adversity, and to confront the unexpected changes we experience all the time.

The late Yehuda Avner served on the personal staff of five Israeli prime ministers. In 1977, he had a private meeting with the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, the leader of the global Chabad-Lubavitch movement.

During the lengthy conversation, Avner asked the Rebbe what exactly the role of a rebbe is.

I will tell you what Im trying to do, the Rebbe replied.

Imagine you are looking at a cupboard, and you see a candle there, but I tell you that it is not a candle  it is a lump of wax with a piece of string inside.

"When does the wax and the wick become a candle? When one brings a flame to the wick. That is when the wax and the wick fulfil the purpose for which they were created.

And that is what I try to do  to help everyone fulfil the purpose for which they were created.

At the end of the meeting, Mr. Avner asked Has the Rebbe lit my candle?

He answered, No. I have given you the match. Only you can light your own candle.

Everyone has goodness, morality and justice within them. Everyone contains a unique energy that empowers them to impact the world for the good; the purpose of their creation.

Though this Divine force within us can sometimes be dimmed and difficult to recognize, the spark always remains, and is eager to be set a flame.

It was this spark that the Rebbe sought to empower every individual to reveal.

Just as a flame will be bright and warm under all circumstances; the Rebbe believed and taught that the core essence of every person can survive under all circumstances and only needs to be revealed.

Eighty years ago, in the summer of 1941, the Rebbe and his wife arrived in the U.S. after escaping the horrors of the Holocaust. Upon his arrival, he set up a revolutionary outreach program that set the stage for the timeless traditions of Judaism to thrive and flourish in a society dominated by assimilation.

When others felt that old-school ideas needed to be refreshed and updated to fit with modern times, the Rebbe illustrated that the core values of Judaism, morality and ethics were as timeless and resilient as the flame of a candle.

Our world is changing rapidly in so many ways.

By focusing on the principles of decent human conduct, predicated on the awareness that every thought, speech and action is important to G-d and impacts the world around us, we remain anchored to an unchangeable truth.

This gives us the strength to flame the spark within us and within everyone around us into a shining light of goodness, justice and morality.

On Sunday, June 13 we observed the 27th anniversary of the Rebbes passing in 1994.

Its an auspicious time for us all to reflect on how we can increase in acts of goodness and kindness, and encourage others to do so as well. To set aside time daily for prayer or quiet contemplation on the higher purpose and meaning of life.

To ignite that spark.

In doing so we prepare our little corner of the world for an era of true world peace and tranquillity for all.

Shmuly Hecht is the director and rabbi at The Okanagan Chabad House, Centre for Jewish Life and Learning.


Eleven days after the latest Palestinian-Israel conflict our federal government sent $25M of financial aid to the Palestinians.

Not Palestine? There isn't one. Who cashes the cheque? Do they just go up and down the streets of the Gaza Strip throwing bundles of money to those that appear to need it.

Does somebody call the Hamas group and say come get your share.

We called it humanitarian support and aid.

Maybe just maybe for at least the last 70 years we should have been solving our own humanitarian problem with Canadian First Nations. Giving them clean water, and schools in rural areas that go beyond grade 7 for a start.

We can't afford to give foreign aid.

And beyond our First Nations, homeless, substance abuse, housing crisis, food banks and Canadian mental health to name just a few.

Kick us out of G7, G20, who cares.

Please Canada, look after Canadians now and in the future first and give freely when and if we ever have a surplus again.

Kenneth Warren, Kelowna


Photo: The Canadian Press

A federal judge on Monday dismissed antitrust lawsuits brought against Facebook by the Federal Trade Commission and a coalition of state attorneys general, dealing a significant blow to attempts by regulators to rein in tech giants.

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ruled Monday that the lawsuits were legally insufficient and didnt provide enough evidence to prove that Facebook was a monopoly. The ruling dismisses the complaint but not the case, meaning the FTC could refile another complaint.

These allegations  which do not even provide an estimated actual figure or range for Facebooks market share at any point over the past 10 years  ultimately fall short of plausibly establishing that Facebook holds market power, he said.

The U.S. government and 48 states and districts sued Facebook in December 2020, accusing the tech giant of abusing its market power in social networking to crush smaller competitors and seeking remedies that could include a forced spinoff of the social networks Instagram and WhatsApp messaging services.

The FTC had alleged Facebook engaged in a a systematic strategy to eliminate its competition, including by purchasing smaller up-and-coming rivals like Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. New York Attorney General Letitia James said when filing the suit that Facebook used its monopoly power to crush smaller rivals and snuff out competition, all at the expense of everyday users.

Boasberg dismissed the separate complaint made by the state attorneys general as well.
Photo: The Canadian Press

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada says several factors contributed to a 2018 runway overshoot that destroyed a Boeing 747 cargo jet at Halifax Stanfield International Airport.

In its investigation report released today, the independent agency says confusing runway instructions, an unexpected tailwind, insufficient braking on a wet runway and crew fatigue were partially to blame for the accident at 5:06 a.m. on Nov. 7, 2018.

The massive aircraft, operated by Sky Lease Cargo, had flown from Chicago and was landing in Halifax to pick up a load of live lobsters when it skidded off Runway 14 and slid down an embankment about 270 metres past the end of the runway.

The plane was wrecked and all three crew members received minor injuries, but the sole passenger  a deadheading pilot  was not injured.

The board's investigation found that a confusing notice to pilots led the crew to wrongly believe the longer of the two runways in Halifax  Runway 23  was not available for landing.

As well, the safety board concluded that the crew failed to properly account for an unexpected tailwind as they were landing in slippery conditions, and that maximum braking effort was not applied until it was too late to avoid an overshoot.

The agency also raised concerns about crew fatigue and the length of the safety area beyond the end of Runway 14.
Photo: The Canadian Press A young new Canadian holds a flag as she takes part in a citizenship ceremony on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on April 17, 2019. It will be a muted Canada Day in many parts of the country as grief and anger over the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves at former residential schools has made it hard for many Canadians to stomach the usual patriotic pomp of July 1. Rather than fireworks, parades and performances, several municipalities say they will mark the national holiday with reflection and solidarity, but Indigenous leaders, advocates and scholars say that's just the start of broad efforts needed to reframe Canada Day as a reminder of the country's dark past and present, and what it means to be Canadian. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

It will be a muted Canada Day in many parts of the country as grief and anger over the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves at former residential schools have made it hard for many Canadians to stomach the usual patriotic pomp of July 1.

Rather than fireworks, parades and performances, several municipalities say they will mark the national holiday with reflection and solidarity. But Indigenous leaders, advocates and scholars say that's just the start of broad efforts needed to reframe Canada Day as a reminder of the country's dark past and present, and what it means to be Canadian.

"I think what this country is finally realizing and contemplating and thinking about is the lived reality of Indigenous Peoples," said Terry Teegee, regional chief of the British Columbia Assembly of First Nations.

"Residential schools were in the past but it still resonates today in regards to the social issues we are dealing with."

Calls to scale back or cancel Canada Day celebrations have been mounting since the remains of what are believed to be 215 children were found at a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C., last month.

Pressure intensified last week when Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan announced ground-penetrating radar had detected 751 unmarked graves at the site of another former residential school.

The outpouring of grief has prompted communities across the country to scrap or revise their usual Canada Day festivities, including Victoria; the New Brunswick cities of Saint John and Fredericton; St. Albert, Alta.; Wilmot Township near Waterloo, Ont.; the northern Manitoba town of Churchill and the Saskatchewan cities of Melville and Meadow.

Some activists have embraced "cancel Canada Day" as a rallying cry for protests that have been planned in many parts of the country, fuelling a pitched political debate over how the country commemorates its history.

But Teegee, who represents B.C. in the Assembly of First Nations, said the goal isn't so much to "cancel" Canada Day, but to reconcile the occasion with the pain it evokes for Indigenous people who would rather not celebrate the country responsible for their systematic oppression.

Teegee said he would like to see a concerted effort to recognize Indigenous history in the 153 years of Canada's existence, but also well before colonization.

As the rest of the country wakes up to the horrors of the residential school system, Canada Day could offer a chance to reckon with how that trauma reverberates across generations, he added.

"It opens that door for conversations about the current state of affairs with Indigenous people," Teegee said.

Elmer St. Pierre, the national chief of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, and Glen Hare, the regional chief for the Chiefs of Ontario, called for July 1 to be declared a national day of mourning, while Ghislain Picard, the chief of the Assembly of First Nations Quebec-Labrador, said residential school casualties should be commemorated in Canada Day events to come.

Picard cautioned against letting public outrage subside, and allowing Indigenous issues to be sidelined.

"The truth has been told," said Picard. "It's really up to us to provide that pressure so this is not forgotten."

The tribal chair of the United Chiefs and Council of Mnidoo Mnising, which represents several First Nations near Manitoulin Island, Ont., urged for more Indigenous perspectives to be incorporated into the Canada Day fanfare. Patsy Corbiere encouraged organizers to invite Indigenous speakers, drum groups or dancers to take part in the festivities.

The focus should be on education about Indigenous people and culture rather than barbecues and flag-waving, said Corbiere.

Cancelling the holiday is not the answer, she said, suggesting that would undermine the ultimate goal of building better relationships between Canada and First Nations.

"It's about working together and grieving together and resolving things together," she said.

Mary Jane Logan McCallum, a history professor at University of Winnipeg and a member of the Munsee Delaware Nation, said there's ample precedent for efforts to ensure a national celebration tells "the other side of the story."

In the United States, some have pushed to recast Columbus Day, which commemorates the anniversary of Christopher Columbus' landing in the Americas in 1492, as "Native American Day" or "Indigenous Peoples' Day," McCallum noted.

Australia's celebration of its national holiday in January was marked by protests denouncing what some dub "Invasion Day" because of historical wrongs committed against Indigenous people.

Back at home, said McCallum, Canada's 150th anniversary celebrations ignited campaigns and demonstrations taking the government to task for what some critics characterized as attempt to gloss over the genocide of Indigenous Peoples.

Unlike then, a growing number of local authorities are starting to actually respond this year, said McCallum.

"There are these moments where people get more and more convinced of another story of Canada, and also that there continues to be a colonial relationship between the federal government and First Nations people that is inequitable."

McCallum said it's going to take more than reframing Canada Day to bring about the transformative change needed for reconciliation. "It's part of a bigger project," she said.

For David Robertson, a writer in Winnipeg and member of Norway House Cree Nation, it's become harder to ignore the fractured realities of how life in this country differs depending on your identity.

As he reflects on the tragedies of this year alone  the devastating discoveries at former residential schools, last month's attack in London, Ont., that killed a Muslim family, the racial disparities of the pandemic  Robertson says it should be clear that marginalized Canadians live in "a different country" than their more privileged counterparts.

"I think we really need to question, what country are we living in? Because I don't think it's the country that we think it is, or that we thought it was," said Robertson.

"Why not work toward creating a country that is worth celebrating?"
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Fiji issues cement price control order

29 June 2021

The Fijian Competition and Consumer Commission has issued a price control order for cement following a legal notice on 18 June by the Minister for Commerce and Trade, Faiyaz Koya, according to The Fiji Times.



"This order may be cited as the Fijian Competition and Consumer Commission (Control of Prices for the Supply of Cement Products) Order 2021," states the legal notice.



"This order comes into force on 22 June 2021.



"For the purpose of Section 39 of the Fijian Competition and Consumer Commission Act 2010, the prices for the ex-factory, wholesale and retail supply of cement products in all qualities, quantities, grades and classes in Fiji are controlled."

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A woman on 3rd Avenue called police to stand by while removed her belongings from her ex-boyfriend's house. The man said she would have to come back at a decent hour to get her belongings, that it was too late at night. The woman said she would come at a decent time tomorrow to get her belongings.

* * *

A man at 7324 Shallowford Road said a prior customer who he evicted said he wanted a refund on a room he rented. The man said he did not rent a room from him. He wanted a report made in case the man came back.

* * *



A man went into Sam's on Lee Highway and, when he returned to his car, he noticed that several eggs had been thrown at it. It is unknown who caused the damage or threw the eggs.

* * *

An employee at 2288 Gunbarrel Road said a man and woman came into the store for about 15 minutes and ran out with roughly $400 worth of items. She said she would call back in with an exact amount once they totaled it up.

* * *

Police saw a suspicious vehicle parked at 700 East 11th Street in front of the police precinct. The car was parked illegally. Police spoke with the occupants - a man and woman who said they were homeless and live within the area of the precinct. Both people were run through the information system and police didn't find any information that warranted further police action.

* * *



A woman on Walker Avenue told police she had broken up with her boyfriend and he kept stopping by her home and would not leave. While speaking to the woman, the boyfriend pulled up in his car. The officer spoke to him and told him the woman didn't want him coming over anymore and to not call or text her. The officer told the man that if his actions continued he could potentially be charged with harassment. He agreed to leave and no longer contact the woman. Then he left.

* * *

While on patrol, an officer saw a pickup truck parked in an empty lot on Aquarium Way with both doors ajar and a man that was not moving. The officer approached the man, checked to make sure he was breathing, and shortly after was able to wake him up from a nap. He gave the officer his name and said he had been drinking the previous evening and must have fallen asleep. He gave consent to search his truck and the officer didn't find anything other than a suitcase and clothing. The man consented to allow the officer to check his eyes for any signs of intoxication. Based on the officer's experience, training, and the man's behavior, the officer believed it is possible that the man has a high tolerance for alcohol and may be too intoxicated to drive legally. The officer told him to stay in his truck to sober up or have someone come to pick him up, to which the man agreed.

* * *



A man on Sunflower Lane told police his black 2008 Honda VTX 1800 had been stolen from the parking lot. He said there was no keys in the motorcycle and that it had a windshield and saddle bags attached. No suspect information could be obtained and the motorcycle was placed into NCIC as stolen.

* * *

An employee at Chattanooga Exteriors on Hamill Road told police one of their vehicles was rummaged through and power tools were likely stolen. He did not know which employee had their tools stolen and will contact police with more information.

* * *



A woman said two tires were slashed on her Honda Civic while parked in front of the Tivoli on Broad Street. There is no suspect information.

* * *

A woman on Melrose Drive said sometime during the night someone entered her unlocked 2018 Nissan Rogue and stole her wallet ant the contents of it.

* * *

A woman on East 4th Street called police to say her son left her car parked at home last night and it was left unlocked with her wallet inside. The vehicle stayed there overnight and this morning she discovered that her wallet was gone. She found some of the stolen items nearby that were in the wallet. However, several items including the wallet are gone.

* * *

A man said he was working on a house on North Concord Road and the customer became upset at his quality of work and told him to leave the area. He said he left items at the residence and asked police to escort him to retrieve them. Police escorted the man to the home where he obtained his items without incident.

* * *

A woman said that while at work at the Circle K on Old Lee Highway someone cut the catalytic converter from her 2004 Honda Element. She said where she is required to park there are no security cameras. She has not been able to get the vehicle repaired yet and could not tell officers the cost to repair it.

* * *

A woman on Wilkesview Drive said her late husband's daughter had been coming by her address multiple times since he had passed away last week. She asked police to trespass her stepdaughter from the location. Police searched the area but couldn't fine the stepdaughter. Police informed the woman if her stepdaughter returned to call the police so she would be trespassed from the home.

* * *

The manager of Pandora's European Motorsports on Highway 58 told police two people were living on their property and they wanted them to leave. Police spoke with the man and woman who said they had been living behind the business for the last couple of days and said they would leave.

* * *

A woman on West 33rd Street told police she had a resident who was intoxicated and needed to leave. The man was told to leave the property and was picked up by a woman. They left without incident.

* * *

An employee with Reese Plumbing said he was doing work on Ivy Street while he left his work truck, a Ram 2500, parked just down the street in front of the house next door. Around 12:30 p.m. he saw a man reach into the open bed of the truck and steal a concrete saw. He said the man then got into a vehicle and drove away. He said he was able to get a Tennessee tag number but it was not on file according DMV. The officer also tried running the tag number by replacing the third

letter (O) with a C,D,G, and Q, but it still came back not on file. He described the suspect as a man, approximately 35 years old, medium build and the vehicle as a black Chevy Tahoe. He said he did not have a serial number for the saw but will call back later to add it once he gets it.

* * *

Police were called to Republic Parking on Market Street where they were asked to trespass a man from the property. The officer spoke with the man and told him he would be trespassed from all Republic Parking from this day forward. The man said he was aware of this and left.

* * *

A woman at 2342 Shallowford Village Dr. was upset that the business charged her an $18 gratuity for her $93 bill. She was not made aware of the gratuity until after the bill. Police spoke with the owner who said she had already refunded the money to the woman because of the disorder she was causing in the restaurant.

* * *

Police were called to Northshore Drive where a man said sometime ago he purchased the renewal registration for his tag on a car that wasn't running. He said that now he has the car running he can't put his hands on the tag decal that he had put up in his house.

* * *

Police were called to 7324 Shallowford Road where there was an argument between a guest and the motel manager. The manager said the man tried to check into the motel but became irate when the manager asked for a $200 deposit. The man said he believed the manager was profiling him and up-charged the amount. The manager said all tenants have to place a deposit and he wouldn't let the man stay after the outburst and requested he leave. The man left without incident.

* * *



A man on West 21st Street said his work laptop was stolen out of his car. He said there were no signs of forced entry to the vehicle. He said he would attempt to get the serial number for the laptop from work.

* * *

A woman was at a residence on Rosalind Land saying her mother was there wanting her pistol back she gave her last night. The woman said she gave her mother the pistol back but she wanted ammo as well. The woman said she didn't have any ammo for the weapon. Police spoke with the mother who said she gave the pistol to her daughter last night to hold due to the assisted living facility she is living at having rules against having pistols. She said she had one shell casing in the pistol when she gave it to her daughter and she wanted it back. Police spoke with the daughter again who said she threw the shell casing away last night. Police told the mother the daughter no longer had the shell casing, and the mother left.
NOTE: This article has appeared in the last week in several in-state news websites that explains how redistricting works. Once every 10 years, right after the new census in taken, bipartisan committees at the state, county, and local levels determine what is a fair representation of the voters, altering district boundaries to establish an equal population balance. Written by a knowledgeable Lucas Brooks, here is an insight on what that means. Brooks went as far as to present a proposed model, which I have omitted, to allow readers to see what will be proposed in the coming weeks on all three levels. To see Lukas suggestions, please go to To see Lukas suggestions, please go to https://patch.com/ tennessee/across-tn/ redistricting-tennessee-how- system-works * * * WILL CHANGES OCCUR IN THE DISTRICTS? YOU BET

By Lukas Brooks

Redistricting occurs only every 10 years, so regular citizens can find it easy to miss. For those unfamiliar with the process, it can seem intentionally murky and unbalanced. However, understanding redistricting helps Tennesseans stay informed about their own representatives and if a change in their district is likely to happen.



Redistricting is the name for the drawing of new congressional, state legislative, and even city council boundaries after every U.S. census. Due to Wesberry v. Sanders and Reynolds v. Sims, two landmark United States Supreme Court cases from the Civil Rights movement, district populations, both state legislative and congressional, need to be roughly equal. If the district boundaries were not redrawn with population shifts, there would be mass representational imbalance.

For a long while in Tennessee, that was the case. For most of the 20th century until the 1960s, Tennessee used the same state legislative map while the state added 1.5 million people to the population. Until the U.S. Supreme Court case of Baker v. Carr , which jump-started the use of judicial review in order to force fair legislative representation, Tennesseans lived in districts that would have made more sense in the Gilded Age rather than the Atomic Era.

While the new maps of the 1960s rectified the immediate problems of disproportionate representation, they still made use of gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is the term for redistricting in a manner that is meant to benefit a single group or political party. The name derives from a plan early in U.S. history, in which a district was drawn to divide the support of the Federalist Party in order to create several districts more favorable to Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry's Democratic-Republican Party.

A more modern example is the case of Pennsylvania's current congressional map. In 2018, the state Supreme Court forced a redraw of the map after it concluded that the districts were drawn to unfairly benefit the Republican Party. Lines swooped in and out of Democratic suburbs and city centers, linking them with the more Republican ex-urbs and rural counties. The Pennsylvania General Assembly that drew the maps in 2010 was dominated by the Republican Party, much like the Tennessee General Assembly is today.

While a few states have made efforts to take direct control of redistricting out of the hands of politicians, Tennessee is not included in that group. The General Assembly still draws the new maps and approves them; the only check on their power is the Governor, who must sign the bill into law for it to go into effect.

Specifically, the maps are to be created in the Senate Judiciary Committee, currently chaired by Senator Mike Bell, R-Riceville, and the House Select Committee for Redistricting. Members have not yet been assigned to the Select Committee for Redistricting, and the use of such a committee represents a departure from the traditions of previous cycles.



In 2012, the House used the State and Local Government Committee, although the committee has since been split into two separate ones. Both chambers of the General Assembly are dominated by Republican supermajorities, so it is likely that the maps created early next year will favor Republicans like Tennessee's political geography already does.



Several states are facing a tight constitutional window due to the COVID-19 pandemic's effects on the national census. Tennessee only stipulates redistricting must be complete by the April 7, 2022, the candidate filing deadline for both legislative and congressional seats. Redistricting for local bodies such as county commissions and city councils have a shorter window; they must be finished by January 1, 2022.



Few restrictions placed upon the General Assembly's ability to draw the new maps and even fewer restrictions on criteria they must follow while drafting a proposal. Congressional apportionment data, the numbers that determine how many congressional seats each state retains, was released on April 26 and Tennessee kept its nine districts.



Currently, the Census Bureau estimates that they will be able to release demographic data by census blocks in mid-to-late August; this data is what all redistricting maps are built from, so the bulk of the work cannot begin without this data. Any delay, especially one that might extend a month or more past the traditional timeframe, stands to most hurt challengers to incumbents, both in primary and general election battles.



Each day between when the new maps become official and the filing deadline are days that challengers can decide to run for public office or be courted by one of the parties to do so. Incumbents are difficult to beat in any election cycle, so an already tight redistricting calendar becoming more compressed does not lend itself to the benefit of any challenger.



Beyond the filing deadline, there are few restrictions placed upon the General Assembly's ability to draw the new maps and even fewer restrictions on criteria they must follow while drafting a proposal. The legislature can redraw state legislature boundaries multiple times before the next census is conducted. For example, new district boundaries for the state House passed in 2022 could be redrawn in 2026 if political will to do so exists.

Most states only allow redistricting once a decade, after the most recent census. When actually drawing the maps, the legislators also have few criteria that guide or restrict their actions. They must abide by federal guidelines regarding roughly equal population between all districts and no district may be drawn with the intent to dilute the power of minority voters.



Unlike other states that provide clear-cut criteria about what the legislature may consider when drafting a proposal, Tennessee only mandates that state legislative committee should split as few counties as is reasonable and that there should be an attempt to preserve political subdivisions where possible.



Neither of these rules apply to congressional maps nor are they strictly enforced, as evidenced by the case Moore v. Tennessee, which challenged the state Senate map on grounds that a General Assembly Black Caucus map split fewer counties than the official map.



Chancery Court Judge Ellen Hobbs Lyle ruled in the state's favor and the Senate map was upheld. The state Supreme Court most recently overturned a map in 1983, so it is not a common occurrence. The previous court involvement begs the question of how a court challenge would play out now, considering the recent changes made to the state judiciary.



The new Court of Special Appeals, recently signed into law by Gov. Lee, would function as another appellate court for the state. The new court has original jurisdiction over matters of apportionment and redistricting. If the three-judge panel decides that any redistricting plans need to be rectified, the court must first give the General Assembly at least 15 days to try and fix their own errors. Only after these 15 days have passed without a substitute from the General Assembly may the court create an interim plan to be used in the next election.



This interim plan is bound by law to be a 'least changes' plan or one that rectifies the underlying issues with the fewest changes possible. Junaid Odubeko , an adjunct professor of election law at Vanderbilt University Law School and a partner at Bradley Arant Boult Cummings, says the receptiveness of any court  whether state or federal  to a redistricting challenge will rest upon the grounds of the complaint, which judges are assigned to hear the case, and whether the charge is against the entire plan or just a specific portion.



It is too early to tell if Tennessee's process will be as litigious as other states have been in the past few years. As anyone who has lived here long can tell, Tennessee has been growing rapidly for the past decade. The population growth is heavily concentrated in the suburbs, especially those in Middle Tennessee will be losing districts.



Knox County, for example, currently contains seven whole House districts but will have to split the seventh district with a neighboring county after redistricting. Hamilton County could retain five of the current districts and split an additional one with another county. Davidson, Montgomery, Rutherford, and Williamson counties could all gain part of a district while retaining their current number.



In West Tennessee, Shelby County currently has 14 districts but would have to split its last state house district with a neighboring county under the current census projections. The Voting Rights Act stipulates majority-minority seats are federally protected from being dismantled without good reason; unfortunately for several communities, several of these districts are severely underpopulated.



In the state house, there are 14 majority-minority districts and five are underpopulated by 5% or more. The lion's share of these districts are located in Memphis with three more in Nashville, one in Chattanooga, and one more in rural West Tennessee. Four of the most underpopulated ones are in Memphis, but the district found in Madison and Hardeman Counties has the lowest population.



For the state senate, there are only four majority-minority districts and half of them are underpopulated by more than 5%. Three of these are in Memphis, including the two severely underpopulated ones; Nashville holds the lone minority-majority senate seat that is overpopulated. In addition, the state's sole majority-minority congressional district, the 9th, is underpopulated by 5.83% or roughly 43,000 people.



While even the broad strokes of the final maps are still being discussed and debated, there are some general expectations for what the new districts will look like. Kent Syler, a professor of political science at Middle Tennessee State University and former Chief of Staff for long-time Democratic Congressman Bart Gordon, foresees more of the state's political power becoming centered in Middle Tennessee, specifically the four ring counties around Davidson (Sumner, Wilson, Rutherford, and Williamson).



These four suburban counties are the fastest-growing in the state and should all gain state house districts. The biggest losers for this redistricting cycle will likely be rural communities, as more and more political power is concentrated in Tennessee's major metropolitan areas.



In the congressional arena, Syler expects a battle of opposing pressures on the question of how to draw Nashville. The Democratic majority in the U.S. House of Representatives is quite slim, so national Republican groups have been encouraging state-level Republicans to create more favorable districts wherever they can. In Tennessee, that effort would involve splitting up Nashville among three or four rural-dominated districts.

But the Nashville business community wants to keep the 5th District centered in Davidson. Although several national political commentators, including Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report and Kyle Kondik of Sabato's Crystal Ball, expect the district to be cut up, the effort to keep the 5th intact has support from an unlikely source: the Republican congressmen from surrounding districts.



If the 5th District is split, each of the surrounding districts would gain several thousand Democratic voters. If the conservative suburbs in the ring counties keep shifting left, all those new voters could endanger the sitting Republican congressmen. The Democratic-held seat in Memphis is safe because it is a majority-minority district and is protected by the Voting Rights Act. Any effort to crack Memphis would garner unwanted attention from the Department of Justice and surely result in such a congressional map being thrown out.
A man charged with killing another man outside the Skyzoo bar on Lee Highway is on house arrest on bonds totaling $278,000.

Kristijan Mrkonjic, 29, appeared on Monday in General Sessions Court.

Prosecutor Cameron Williams said a magistrate originally set the bond at $150,000 on the first-degree murder charge. At the hearing, prosecutor Williams asked for and Judge Lila Statom agreed to raise the bond on the attempted first-degree murder charge from $50,000 to $100,000.

Mrkonjic, who is charged with first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder and traffic offenses, must be on a GPS monitor.



The total bond is $278,000. There was no argument.

He will be allowed to live in Georgia.

Witnesses said as they were leaving the bar that Mrkonjic approached Eric Grant over a woman "they both had a relationship with."

They said Grant asked Mrkonjic if he wanted to fight, then Mrkonjic replied, "Nah, Mother ------, you're gonna die" and pulled a weapon out of his waistband. He began firing, hitting Grant and a second person. Witnesses said Mrkonjic fired 13 shots. Grant died after being taken to the hospital.

Both victims were unarmed.

Police said Mrkonjic got into a pickup truck and drove off. He fled after deputies spotted the vehicle. During that chase, police obtained the license number.

Mrkonjic was listed as the owner of the vehicle.

Witnesses picked Mrkonjic from a lineup.
Politico is reporting that Ronald Fischetti, after meeting with Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, announced Vance is not planning to bring any charges against Fischettis client, Donald Trump. This is after several years of highly publicized battles for Trumps tax returns and promises of charging Trump with crimes. How many times have we heard that over the last four years?



The former DA, another Democrat partisan, and Mr. Vance hoped to weave a web of connections to hush money payments and real estate manipulations. Some Democrats even boldly stated Trump borrowed money from Russians and was in their control. The Vance farce was supposed to finally reveal that. Wasnt that what poor Mr. Mueller was supposed to do?



Now the partisan Mr. Vance has to disappoint those many progressives awaiting yet one more legal assault on Trump. One would think they would learn by now, but, alas, they just go back to the book of fables to conjure up yet another sensational accusation.



Vance says the case is ongoing. Of course it is. The leftist team working on this isnt interested in investigating Andrew Cuomos nursing home scandals, looting and destruction of private property during the peaceful demonstrations last summer or any wrongdoings by the worst mayor in NYC history.



Neither would they be interested in looking into the financial doings of Patrice Khan-Cullors, Hunter Biden, Hillary Clinton, George Soros or for that matter any other high roller with a D after their name.



Look at history. Thats the way it works with them - highly publicized, sensational charges but with no substance flooding the news about Trump. The other side gets little or no inquiries and flashy awards nobody ever heard of. Look for Ms Khan-Cullors to get one of those awards next.

Meanwhile the progressives are sharpening their knives to go after Florida Governor DeSantis.



Ralph Miller


The American Bar Association honored Hamilton County General Sessions Judge Alex McVeagh as one of its 2021 On the Rise  Top 40 Young Lawyers. Each year, the ABA recognizes 40 of the nations young lawyers who exemplify a broad range of high achievement, innovation, vision, leadership and legal and community service.

I am beyond humbled to accept an award that very few Tennessee lawyers have received, said Judge McVeagh. But I am even more grateful that the American Bar Association choose to recognize some of the innovative work being done by my colleagues on the bench and in bar, as well as the work being done by partner organizations like the Hamilton County Drug Recovery Court, Legal Aid of East TN, and the Chattanooga and Tennessee Bar Associations.

Former Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam appointed Mr. McVeagh to the bench in 2017, at which time he was one of the youngest judges in Tennessee history. Still the states youngest judge, Mr. McVeagh is proud to have worked with his four General Sessions colleagues during the pandemic, never shutting down the Court as they continued to preside over strenuous virtual and in-person dockets. Judge McVeagh also helped found and continues to preside over Hamilton Countys misdemeanor drug recovery court. Outside of the courthouse, Mr. McVeagh serves as the president of the Chattanooga Bar Association Young Lawyer Division, as the East TN Governor of the Tennessee Bar Association Young Lawyers Division, and as the TN young lawyer delegate to the ABA House of Delegates.

His out-of-the-box thinking and innovative leadership style is appreciated by many in Hamilton County, including Commissioner David Sharpe, who said, I think that not only integrity and honesty and leadership, particularly as a judge, but innovative thinking with an eye on the future is something that really sets Judge McVeagh apart from many others.

A native of Lafayette, La., Mr. McVeagh obtained his undergraduate and law degrees from Vanderbilt University, and prior to taking the bench, he worked as a litigator at Chattanooga-based Chambliss Law Firm. What a lot of people do not fully appreciate about Alex McVeagh is his incredible work ethic. When you combine that with his innate talent and charisma, you have a recipe for success," said attorney Jeff Granillo, a shareholder at Chambliss Law Firm.

Before moving to Chattanooga, Mr. McVeagh worked as head research analyst and law clerk for the Tennessee Senate Judiciary Committee and as analyst and legislative liaison for the Tennessee District Public Defenders Conference. As Tennessee State Senator Bo Watson noted, As an analyst to the TN Senate Judiciary Committee, Alex McVeagh was a key contributor to the development of public policy affecting the Judiciary. His intellect, legal insight, calm temperament and work ethic were apparent to the members of the Senate then, and, as a General Sessions Judge, they are apparent to the public today.

In 2018 and again in 2021, the Tennessee Supreme Court appointed Judge McVeagh to serve on its Access to Justice Commission. During this time, he helped start an online dispute resolution pilot program with Erlanger Hospital and Legal Aid of East TN aimed to assist healthcare providers and patients in resolving outstanding medical debt before a lawsuit is filed. He also serves on the Tennessee Supreme Courts Technology Oversight Committee, where he helped draft standards for electronic filing in all courts throughout Tennessee, and regularly reviews applications from jurisdictions across Tennessee seeking to implement electronic filing in their courts.

Judge McVeaghs positive impact to Hamilton County and the State of Tennessee has also been noticed by Governor Bill Lee, who appointed Mr. McVeagh to serve on his Criminal Justice Reform Task Force to study policies and possible solutions to reduce nonviolent jail populations and criminal recidivism, and to increase reentry programs for eligible offenders. Ultimately, some of the Task Forces recommendations were adopted as law by the Tennessee legislature in 2021.

The Chattanooga Bar Association has honored Judge McVeagh in the past as both its Volunteer of the Year and Young Lawyer Volunteer of the Year for his pro bono work and past service on the board of Legal Aid of East Tennessee. He has organized Hamilton Countys local high school mock trial competition for many years, and continues to help coordinate numerous clinics, including expungement clinics and clinics that provide free estate planning documents to military veterans, police officers, firefighters and other first responders.
Big Brother stars Memphis Garrett and Christmas Abbott shocked the BB community when they announced they began dating, although many Live Feed viewers say they saw it coming. Following a vacation to the Bahamas, he popped the question. How long did they date before getting engaged?

Houseguest Christmas Abbott to compete on this season of Big Brother. | Sonja Flemming/CBS/Getty Images

Memphis Garrett and Christmas Abbott are engaged

Big Brother 10 runner-up Memphis Garrett and BB19 finalist Christmas Abbott became close allies during BB22: All-Stars but left the house as friends. The two were both dating other people at the time but ended their respective relationships to begin dating a couple of months later.

Garrett and Abbott broke the news in an E! News exclusive and separate Instagram posts where they insisted they didnt start anything romantic until they were single. However, the two admitted they did fall for each other while in the house.

I believe this makes the 9th BB engagement (8 US + 1 CAN), right?! Im losing track! Congrats @MemphisGarrett & @christmasabbott #matchmaker  Robyn Kass (@Kassting) June 25, 2021

RELATED: Big Brother: Memphis Garretts Ex-Girlfriend Releases Shady Statement Following His and Christmas Abbotts Dating Announcement

The Big Brother stars frequently hung out together in Florida, vacationed in Mexico, and attended co-star Nicole Franzels wedding to BB18 star Victor Arroyo before moving into a house with each other in May 2021. A month later, the couple enjoyed a trip to the Bahamas, ending with Garrett popping the question.

He posted a series of four photos documenting the proposal, captioning it, She said yes!! I love this woman unconditionally, and I cant wait to spend the rest of my life with her, with a hashtag, final two forever. Abbott uploaded similar pictures, noting she didnt see it coming.

They met during Big Brother 22

The two initially met during All-Stars in Aug. 2020 when Garrett approached her in the middle of the first week to join the dominating six-person alliance, The Committee.

The supergroup went on to win almost every Head of Household competition and remained in control for the entire season. Knowing the group had to split up during the triple eviction, Garrett formed two versions of the same alliance, The Wise Guys, with one involving Abbott.

TURN THE VOLUME UP LISTEN TO WHAT CHRISTMAS WHISPERED TO MEMPHIS #BB22 pic.twitter.com/OJzgFhiD8f  hillary (@realityhillary) October 14, 2020

However, his plan didnt work, and he ended up evicted, placing fifth, as the others perceived him as the bigger threat to win. She joined him in the Jury House the following week, placing fourth. During their time in the house, many fans believed the two had a connection and thought they kissed at one point.

Although they didnt deny falling for each other while filming, the two claimed they never shared a kiss. The couple dated for six months before getting engaged.

Many fans thought they broke up at one point following a cryptic post

After they announced they began dating, the two made their first public appearance as a couple during a charity event in Florida. Garrett and Abbott documented themselves seemingly having a good time and had words for fans who approached them with hate.

Additionally, she began making frequent appearances on his Instagram Live series, Morning with Memphis. A couple of months after the two announced their relationship, many fans thought they split due to a cryptic post they shared on social media.

RELATED: Big Brother 22: Fans Think a Showmance Is Brewing Between Memphis Garrett and Christmas Abbott

Garrett posted a quote to his Instagram Story that read, Eventually, all things fall into place. Until then, laugh at the confusion, live for the moments, and know everything happens for a reason, and tagged his girlfriend with a red heart emoji. She later reposted the image.

Shortly after the breakup rumors began to circulate; the couple both denied they split with a Valentines Day post. Big Brother 23 returns July 2021 on CBS.
There arent many people who dont know the British royal family (or follow their every move, for that matter)  particularly Queen Elizabeth II, who has been on the throne for nearly seven decades.

Although we all wont have the wonderful opportunity of meeting the queen, it is still good to know the dos and donts of that meeting just in case. After all, you dont want to be the person who gives the monarch a handshake or hug without her permission, do you?

Queen Elizabeth is the longest-reigning monarch in British royal history

Queen Elizabeth | Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Born to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth in 1926, Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in Westminster Abbey on June 2nd, 1953. She is the Queen of the United Kingdom, as well as 15 other Commonwealth realms.

Queen Elizabeth is 95-years-old and has been ruling for more than 69 years, just short of (and can still beat) long-time monarchs Louis XIV who is at just over 72 years, Bhumibol Adulyadej (Rama IX), who is at 70 years, and Johann II who is only days fewer than Rama IX.

She married Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh in 47, and had four children: Charles, Prince of Wales, Anne, Princess Royal, Prince Andrew, Duke of York, and Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex. From there, Queen Elizabeth has eight grandchildren and eleven great-grandchildren  most of whom we all keep track of today.

Despite her age, the queen has maintained her royal obligations and routine travel schedules, making it more important than ever for you to remember the major rules of meeting the queen.

Queen Elizabeth allows handshake but under this one condition

Today marks the 67th anniversary of the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II at Westminster Abbey.

#Onthisday #Coronationday pic.twitter.com/A3WsqS9MWs  The Royal Family (@RoyalFamily) June 2, 2020

Although it is common practice to handshake with friends, family, professional relationships, and more  it is not common practice to handshake with the Queen.

When meeting the monarch, the rule of thumb is to only move in for a handshake if she initiates the action. This goes for any kind of touching, as it is presumed to be impolite to touch the Queen without her consent. More preferred greetings are by traditional forms, where a man may bow, and a female may curtsy  but it is not expected or required.

According to CNN, however, there is leniency since were not under the monarchs rule. In fact, they report the time when then-first lady Michelle Obama embraced the queen in 2009. The media had a field day, but the Queen shrugged it off, declaring it all rubbish.'

What you shouldnt do when meeting the Queen

With that said, there are some major rules to remember when meeting the Queen, especially what youre not allowed to do. After all, she is royalty, and you never know when you may run into royalty on your travels.

According to Bright Side, you must not do the following with Queen Elizabeth unless you dont mind being embarrassed and forced to leave: asking really personal questions, showing up empty-handed as it is a tradition that goes back centuries (although it must be appropriate like having a symbolic meaning), and offering overly-casual greetings like yo, whats up!.

Additional no-nos include addressing her majesty by her first name, sitting down, eating, or leaving before the Queen, and using French words when speaking with the Queen  or any member of the royal family, for that matter.

And although its cute to be fashionably late in the United States, by no means show up late when meeting with the queen.

While its not likely most of us will ever get the chance  at least we now know if we do  we can handshake if the Queen initiates it, and we should avoid any of the previous scenarios at all costs.

RELATED: Queen Elizabeth II Has Strict Rules When She Bathes That Her Staffers Must Follow
Eddie Van Halen, of Van Halen fame, died in October 2020, but for many fans around the world, his music and his influence on popular culture will live on forever. Van Halen, who had been a force to be reckoned with in the music business since the 70s, threw himself into his work, dedicating his life to the mastery of the guitar. As a global superstar, Van Halen left it all on stage, putting on performances that are legendary among rock music circles  and right up until the end of his life, Van Halen worked on his music. What few fans know about Eddie Van Halen, however, is that his early life was notoriously difficult. In a 2019 interview, Van Halens bandmate and good friend David Lee Roth opened up about Van Halens childhood and the experiences with racism that he faced well before becoming a rock god.

What kind of discrimination did Eddie Van Halen face as a child?

Eddie Van Halen | Paul Natkin/Getty Images

Van Halen was born in Amsterdam, Netherlands, in 1955, the son of Dutch and Indonesian immigrants. The young Eddie Van Halen was drawn to music primarily because of his parents interests in various instruments.

Although Van Halen was exposed to music at an early age, his childhood was notoriously difficult, as Roth revealed in a 2019 interview with Marc Maron. It was a big deal. Those homeboys grew up in a horrifying racist environment to where they actually had to leave the country, Roth detailed, describing how Van Halen and his family moved to California when the boy was around eight years old, but that they did not escape the judgment that came as a result of the boys mixed-race heritage.

Then they came to America and did not speak English as a first language in the early 60s. Wow, Roth noted. So that kind of sparking, that kind of stuff, that runs deep.

Eddie Van Halen became a global superstar in the 80s

You brought so much greatness to the world Eddie! Rest In Love #EddieVanHalen pic.twitter.com/Fn9vwgUfzk  Kristy Swanson (@KristySwansonXO) October 7, 2020

Van Halen eventually found a circle of friends in America, and later described how African-Americans were the ones to embrace him when he felt as though he had no one else. My first friends in America were Black, Van Halen once detailed. It was actually the white people that were the bullies. They would tear up my homework and papers, make me eat playground sand, all those things, and the Black kids stuck up for me.

In 1972, Van Halen and his brother, Eddie, formed the band that would later go on to become Van Halen. The group released their debut album in 1978, and from there, it was a meteoric rise to the top for Van Halen. Over the years that followed, Van Halens catchy rock tunes, including the classic Jump became staples in the music scene, and the band became one of the worlds all-time biggest rock bands.

Eddie Van Halens fans consider him to be one of the greatest guitar legends of all time

Even as he made hits with Van Halen, Eddie Van Halen continued to work with other artists, including Gene Simmons and Queen guitarist Brian May. Throughout the 90s and into the 2000s, Van Halen worked on interesting projects, always remaining music-focused, and never forgetting where he came from.

Upon his death in 2020, the outpouring of love from fans around the world was overwhelming  and Van Halens Indonesian fans didnt disappoint, paying tribute on social media to the one-time immigrant who had been through so much in his life.

RELATED: Eddie Van Halen Told No One About His Beat It Guitar Solo
Britney Spears father, Jamie (James Parnell Spears), amassed a startling net worth as conservator of his daughters estate. It comes as no surprise that he wants the pop icon to remain in the conservatorship. Now that her testimony from probate court is readily available for the public to read or listen to, fans want to know how much he made in the last 13 years. Did Britneys father have wealth before his daughters success?

Britney Spears family (L-R): James Jamie Parnell Spears, Bryan Spears, Jamie Lynn Spears, Britney Spears, and Lynne Spears | Kevin Mazur/WireImage

Does Jamie Spears have a job?

James Parnell Spears 2021 professional title is an American probate conservator and legal guardian. It comes with a hefty salary. Therefore, he has a job; running Britney Spears estate and controlling her daily life.

According to Forbes, Jamie makes $16,000 monthly, along with a $2,000 stipend for office space rent as a conservator. In addition to his monthly salary, Jamie receives direct profits from her performances. In 2014, he received 1.5 percent of Britneys Las Vegas residency revenue, equal to a sum of $2.1 million. The Femme Fatale tour made Jamie roughly $500,000.

What is James Parnell Spears net worth in 2021?

Forbes estimates that James Parnell Spears net worth in 2021 is approximately $5 million. The money exclusively came from his role as conservator over Britney Spears. His monthly salary alone, over 12 years, totals $2.4 million. Add in the various revenue streams from Britneys tours since 2008, and her father quickly hits that $5 million mark.

What did James Parnell Spears do before Britneys conservatorship?

(L): Britney Spears | Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images, (R): Jamie Spears | Valerie Macon/AFP via Getty Images

RELATED: Britney Spears Net Worth in 2021 Doesnt Make Sense

According to Lynne Spears (Britneys mother and Jamies ex-wife) memoir, Through the Storm, James Parnell Spears was a welder-by-trade when the couple eloped in 1976. He spent months working at oil refineries and construction sites. Lynne sometimes traveled with him in those early years, so they didnt have to spend months apart.

In the early eighties, James construction business began to flourish. So, the couple built a health spa together. The local gym became Total Fitness, and the building was right outside their Kentwood, Louisiana home. At the time, Lynne detailed in her memoir that spas were not popular. It was one of the only ones in the small town of Kentwood, and it was successful.

However, Lynne also detailed in her book the times when James neglected his business. She wrote that he overspent and left her to face the bill collectors. In 1996, after Britneys four-year stint on the Mickey Mouse Club ended, she told her parents she wanted to sing. At 13, the young girl knew she wanted to achieve her dreams, and Lynne explained that James was 100 percent on board. However, the family had no idea how they would pay to travel to auditions. James Parnell Spears hardly had any net worth at all in the years before Britneys fame.

The Spears family struggled financially before Britney rose to fame

RELATED: Britney Spears IUD Story Will Bring You to Tears, I Need Your Help She Begged the Judge

In her 2008 memoir, Lynne Spears described with agony how difficult it was to come up with the money to get Britney to auditions.

When we didnt have the money to travel to an audition, Jamie would often pull it out of a hat somehow, Lynne explained.

The pop icons first agent, Larry Rudolph, paid for the ticket to NYC for her life-changing audition with Jive Records. During Britneys audition in 1997, Lynne wrote that the family was still in the gutter financially, owing more than we were earning.

That audition was Britneys big break, and she soared to success after that moment. The 2008 memoir, Through the Storm, detailed James Parnell Spears financial disarray before Britneys first single, Baby One More Time, topped the charts in 1999. However, his daughters fame solved all of his financial problems. In 2008, he became the conservator of one of the worlds best-selling music artists.

RELATED: Britney Spears Dad: Expert Weighs in on What Will Happen to Jamie Spears After the Conservatorship Ends
Paris Hilton made headlines last year when she opened up about the abuse she dealt with at a boarding school in Utah. In her YouTube Originals documentary, This Is Paris, Hilton revealed she continued to suffer through that trauma as an adult.

Fortunately for Hilton, things seem to have improved since the release of the documentary. She shared that she no longer has nightmares like before.

Paris Hilton | Frazer Harrison/Getty Images

Paris Hilton had terrifying nightmares about her abuse

When Hilton was a teenager, she spent 11 months at Provo Canyon School in Utah, where she endured physical and mental abuse. According to the Associated Press, the staff members allegedly beat her, force her to take unknown pills, watch her shower and send her to solitary confinement without clothes as punishment.

Hilton said the experience still gave her nightmares as an adult. She said in This Is Paris, I wish I could bring, like, a camera into my dreams, and, like, show you what its like. Its terrifying. And I relive that every night. I experienced it and to this day I am still traumatized and I think the only way to have these nightmares stop is to do something about it.

In addition to speaking out about the abuse in the documentary, Hilton also testified at a Utah Senate committee hearing. She did this to support a bill that would require the government to oversee youth treatment centers more closely.

Paris Hilton reveals she does not have nightmares anymore

RELATED: Paris Hilton Felt So Much Pain In Entertainment Industry for Feeling Like a Punchline

According to Hilton, the activist work she has been doing has helped her to no longer have nightmares about her experience at Provo Canyon School.

I used to have very bad insomnia, but ever since I did my documentary and Ive been doing all of my work for my cause to help the children, its been so healing that I dont have nightmares anymore, Hilton told WSJ recently.

Additionally, Hilton shared that her sleeping hours have changed as well, saying, I probably need eight to 10 hours to feel really great the next day. My hours have changed so much; I used to be up so late at night and traveling 250 days out of the year and deejaying very late-night sets, so I used to wake up a lot later.

Paris Hilton reveals how the pandemic has changed her life

On Wednesdays, we wear pink. Today is #NationalPinkDay! If you didnt know or havent guessed yet, pink is my favorite color.  #Yas #PinkPrincess pic.twitter.com/J6ultVBtql  Paris Hilton (@ParisHilton) June 23, 2021

RELATED: Paris Hilton Reveals the Biggest Scams and Shady Practices in Clubs

This past year, Hilton has not only amped up her activist work, but she also learned to deal with the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic like the rest of the world. As such, a lot of things have changed in Hiltons life, including her appreciation for being at home.

I learned that I can stay home, that I dont need to be everywhere, because Ive always been one of those people who needs to be everywhere and then I have FOMO, she shared with WSJ. Ive learned that I dont need to be at every single event, I can just be at home.

She added, Also, just getting so much work done with the technology we have available, I just feel like Ive saved so much time. I can literally do 20 Zooms in one day, get a weeks worth of work done in one day.
Most people know Ree Drummond as The Pioneer Woman host, but the only reason she ever started that business venture was because of the man she married. Drummonds husband, Ladd Drummond, is a cattle rancher She refers to him as her Marlboro man, and her life on the ranch is what inspired her to start the blog that led to her empire.

Surprisingly, Ladd once admitted that he nearly gave up on being the 4th generation rancher that he is today  which could have meant that Ree Drummond as The Pioneer Woman might have never existed.

The Pioneer Woman star Ree Drummond with husband Ladd in 2017 | Monica Schipper/Getty Images for The Pioneer Woman Magazine

The Pioneer Woman star Ree Drummond was inspired to start a blog based on her lifestyle

When Drummond was growing up, she never thought shed settle down in Oklahoma. Born and raised in that state, Drummond had always hoped for something bigger as a child. After graduating high school, she attended college in California  and planned to continue on to Chicago for law school afterward. But then she met Ladd Drummond, and her life changed.

Drummond fell head over heels for Ladd, and she ultimately decided to stay in Oklahoma to be with him  but that meant adjusting to his cattle rancher lifestyle. The two moved into a rural home, and Drummond once recalled skunks under the porch and mice in the trash and added that such a lifestyle was a tough transition for her. Ultimately, though, that life led to Drummond launching her Pioneer Woman blog  the website that started it all.

The Pioneer Woman star Ree Drummond in 2019 | Tyler Essary/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank

RELATED: The Pioneer Woman: What Is Ree Drummond and Ladd Drummonds Net Worth?

Drummond thought there was something interesting about her life. She was raising four kids with Ladd in the middle of nowhere, and there was plenty that went into being a cattle rancher family. Drummonds blog turned into a massive success, but it turns out there was a time when Ladd considered stepping away from the cattle ranching company that his family had started.

While introducing Drummond during her Oklahoma Hall of Fame induction, Ladd revealed he once reconsidered living the life he lives now.

In an interview with a Tulsa TV station, Ladd said that while he was in college, he was considering separating himself from the family ranch, which had been in business for 130 years. Ultimately, though, he realized that caring for cattle in Oklahoma was where he needed to be.

Its a beautiful area; I love it, Ladd said. A lot of people look at it and think its flat, but you got your rolling hills, you got your creeks with your trees  Its a beautiful country. I love every bit of it.

Ree Drummond credits Ladd for all my good ideas

Ladd has been Drummonds biggest supporter since she launched her blog back in 2006. She once referred to him as her silent partner and revealed that he is where she gets all of her good ideas.

Drummond and her husband have been married for 25 years, and the two have always kept a close relationship. In the past, theyve credited the Bible for maintaining a good marriage, and they divvy up the responsibilities equally in the house. Drummond takes care of the interior (cooking and keeping the kids in line), while Ladd takes care of the exterior  maintaining the ranch and the cattle.
Ree Drummond is known for her delicious biscuit recipe. One biscuit recipe she used to make came from her mother. Although The Pioneer Woman enjoys her mothers cooking, she admits she made some updates. Heres what Drummond said about why she decided to alter her mothers biscuit recipe.

Ree Drummond invited her mom to cook with her on The Pioneer Woman

Ree Drummond with Sam Champion on Good Morning America | Lorenzo Bevilaqua/Walt Disney Television via Getty Images

During an interview with Southern Living, Drummond talks about cooking with her mother. She invited her mom to cook with her on an episode of The Pioneer Woman. The timing was perfect because her mother recently moved back to Oklahoma, which is where the Food Network cook resides.

For this episode, Drummond says her mother made some of her favorite dishes. She was so excited to have her mother on the show that she posted a special message on Instagram.

My mom is on my Food Network show tomorrow! posted Drummond. Watch to the end of this video and let me know if you can relate. Nothing like being around your mom! BTW the pizza she makes on the show is the best thing Ive ever tasted in my entire life. Yay, Gee!

Why Ree Drummond changed her mothers biscuit recipe

Food at The Pioneer Woman event | Monica Schipper/Getty Images for The Pioneer Woman Magazine

Drummond tells the publication she used to make her mothers biscuit recipe, but she decided to make some changes. She explained to Southern Living why she made the updates.

Well, I have one that I used to make that my mom made growing up, and its just a traditional, roll out the dough, cut it with a glass or a biscuit cutter, and its good, says Drummond. But now I make a little bit more of a drop biscuit that, (A.) is easier because it skips the step of having to roll; and (B.) its a little bit better. No disrespect to my mom, but I love the craggy surface of a drop biscuit.

Drummond also says the updated recipe works better with her lifestyle because there are less steps. You just kind of stir it together and plop it onto a sheet pan and bake without having to go through the step of rolling and cutting, adds Drummond And in terms of the recipe, I just kept adding more butter until it was right.

Ree Drummond describes the kitchen where she grew up

When asked about the kitchen she grew up in, Drummond describes it as a place where the family gathered for dinner each night. Despite her home being busy, dinnertime was when things slowed down and they ate together.

I had three siblings and we had a pretty busy house, says Drummond. My mom cooked dinner, basically every weeknight. And I still remember all of those dinners. Just sitting down. The kitchen had an electric stove with six burners and a microwave that was about the size of my closet. You know, microwaves used to be very large. Our countertops were black formica, which was kind of edgy. And then an entire wall of the island of the hood was cork and so my mom stuck things on there, pictures of us and newspaper clippings, and recipes from her friends.

Ree Drummond says her mother never seemed stressed out in the kitchen

Drummond says having her mother on The Pioneer Woman took her back to her childhood. The experience reminded her of how easy her mother made cooking look. According to Drummond, her mother didnt fuss and fret over preparing meals.

It reminded me just how effortless cooking was for my mom, says Drummond during her Southern Living interview. She didnt have culinary training. She just had a natural ease about her in the kitchen. I dont have any memories of my mom stressing out over dinner or being worried about food she was making for a dinner party.

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Yvonne Strahovski has said it before, but fans can have trouble believing it. The actor restated in June that she wont be returning as Hannah McKay in the upcoming Dexter revival. Speaking in a conversation on the HeyUGuys YouTube channel, she added she has no idea what will happen but is excited to see how it plays out.

Yvonne Strahovski | Jasper Savage/Hulu

Is Yvonne Strahovski returning to Dexter? She says no

Strahovskis Hannah McKay was a serial killer who started a relationship with Dexter Morgan in the penultimate season. Her last appearance on the show comes when Dexter leaves her with his son, Harrison, before driving his boat out to sea as a hurricane hits Miami. She reads about his disappearance in the newspaper, believing he died in a wreck. But he actually escaped town and went into exile in Oregon.

With the way it ended, many people expected she would come back somehow in the revival series. But Strahovski says its not happening.

Im really looking forward to it because I have no idea what theyre going to do, she told HeyUGuys. Im not part of it, so I am very curious as to how theyre going to navigate the storyline from this point forward.

Her comments come just over a month after she first confirmed she wouldnt be in the reboot. She said in a May appearance on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen that she hadnt heard anything about it. I have a theory that perhaps, um, perhaps uh Harrison has already murdered her and is following in the footsteps of his father. I dont know. I dont know anything, Strahovski added.

RELATED: Dexter Fans React After Yvonne Strahovski Says Shes Not in the Revival

Who is returning to Dexter?

For a while, Michael C. Hall was the only original actor confirmed for Dexter Season 9. But we just got word on June 28 that John Lithgow is also returning. Lithgow played The Trinity Killer, real name Arthur Mitchell, who was murdered by Dexter at the end of season 4. The fact that he died left people wondering how hell be brought back. But Deadline reports that the writing team has figured out a way to do it.

The rest of the cast of the Dexter revival includes Clancy Brown, Jamie Chung, Oscar Wahlberg, Julia Jones, Alano Miller, Michael Cyril Creighton, David Magidoff, and Jack Alcott, among others (via Digital Spy).

RELATED: Dexter: Everything the Original Cast Members Have Said About the Revival

The Dexter revival will find him living a totally new life

Announced in October 2020, Dexter Season 9 will follow Dexter, whos now going by Jim Lindsay, as he navigates life in Upstate New York. But to be clear, its not erasing what happened in the past.

Were not undoing anything, showrunner Clyde Phillips previously said on the TVs Top 5 podcast. Were not doing movie magic, were not going to betray the audience to say That was all a dream, or whatever it is. I mean, what happened in the first eight years happened in the first eight years. This is now however many years later. So were not undoing anything.

As far as the status of the reboot, Hall said in June that there are just a couple of weeks left until filming wraps.

We have about five weeks to go, he told Times Radio (via Digital Spy). I think the whole shoot would have taken five months. Its basically like were filming it as a 10-hour movie. It will be ten episodes, premiering at least in the States on Showtime on November 7.
The global Research Center Surfactants is looking for a motivated and creative Chemist (m/f/d) who can strengthen the execution of our innovation strategy. In our Research Site in Burgkirchen (Bavaria), Germany, you will be working in a synthesis laboratory and supporting innovation projects in an international environment.

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PhD in Organic or Technical Chemistry, preferably with PostDoc experience

Hands-on, solid experience in synthetic organic chemistry

Experience in automatization and parallelization is of advantage

Creative personality, thinking outside the box, and strong problem-solving skills

Excellent team player with good communication skills

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Future career growth opportunities and support of your development needs with tailored, individual trainings

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In our future electrified world, the demand for battery storage is projected to be enormous, reaching to upwards of 2 to 10 terawatt-hours (TWh) of annual battery production by 2030, from less than 0.5 TWh today. However, concerns are growing as to whether key raw materials will be adequate to meet this future demand. The lithium-ion battery - the dominant technology for the foreseeable future - has a component made of cobalt and nickel, and those two metals face severe supply constraints on the global market.

Now, after several years of research led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), scientists have made significant progress in developing battery cathodes using a new class of materials that provide batteries with the same if not higher energy density than conventional lithium-ion batteries but can be made of inexpensive and abundant metals. Known as DRX, which stands for disordered rocksalts with excess lithium, this novel family of materials was invented less than 10 years ago and allows cathodes to be made without nickel or cobalt.

"The classic lithium-ion battery has served us well, but as we consider future demands for energy storage, its reliance on certain critical minerals exposes us not only to supply-chain risks, but also environmental and social issues," said Ravi Prasher, Berkeley Lab's Associate Lab Director for Energy Technologies. "With DRX materials, this offers lithium batteries the potential to be the foundation for sustainable battery technologies for the future."

The cathode is one of the two electrodes in a battery and accounts for more than one-third of the cost of a battery. Currently the cathode in lithium-ion batteries uses a class of materials known as NMC, with nickel, manganese, and cobalt as the key ingredients.

"I've done cathode research for over 20 years, looking for new materials, and DRX is the best new material I've ever seen by far," said Berkeley Lab battery scientist Gerbrand Ceder, who is co-leading the research. "With the current NMC class, which is restricted to just nickel, cobalt, and an inactive component made of manganese, the classic lithium-ion battery is at the end of its performance curve unless you transfer to new cathode materials, and that's what the DRX program offers. DRX materials have enormous compositional flexibility - and this is very powerful because not only can you use all kinds of abundant metals in a DRX cathode, but you can also use any type of metal to fix any problem that might come up during the early stages of designing new batteries. That's why we're so excited."

Cobalt and nickel supply-chain risks

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has made it a priority to find ways to reduce or eliminate the use of cobalt in batteries. "The battery industry is facing an enormous resource crunch," said Ceder. "Even at 2 TWh, the lower range of global demand projections, that would consume almost all of today's nickel production, and with cobalt we're not even close. Cobalt production today is only about 150 kilotons, and 2 TWh of battery power would require 2,000 kilotons of nickel and cobalt in some combination."

What's more, over two-thirds of the world's nickel production is currently used to make stainless steel. And more than half of the world's production of cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, with Russia, Australia, the Philippines, and Cuba rounding out the top five producers of cobalt.

In contrast, DRX cathodes can use just about any metal in place of nickel and cobalt. Scientists at Berkeley Lab have focused on using manganese and titanium, which are both more abundant and lower cost than nickel and cobalt.

"Manganese oxide and titanium oxide cost less than $1 per kilogram whereas cobalt costs about $45 per kilogram and nickel about $18," said Ceder. "With DRX you have the potential to make very inexpensive energy storage. At that point lithium-ion becomes unbeatable and can be used everywhere - for vehicles, the grid - and we can truly make energy storage abundant and inexpensive."

Ordered vs. disordered

Ceder and his team developed DRX materials in 2014. In batteries, the number and speed of lithium ions able to travel into the cathode translates into how much energy and power the battery has. In conventional cathodes, lithium ions travel through the cathode material along well-defined pathways and arrange themselves between the transition metal atoms (usually cobalt and nickel) in neat, orderly layers.

What Ceder's group discovered was that a cathode with a disordered atomic structure could hold more lithium - which means more energy - while allowing for a wider range of elements to serve as the transition metal. They also learned that within that chaos, lithium ions can easily hop around.

In 2018, the Vehicle Technologies Office in DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy provided funding for Berkeley Lab to take a "deep dive" into DRX materials. In collaboration with scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and UC Santa Barbara, Berkeley Lab teams led by Ceder and Guoying Chen have made tremendous progress in optimizing DRX cathodes in lithium-ion batteries.

For example, the charge rate - or how fast the battery can charge - of these materials was initially very low, and its stability was also poor. The research team has found ways to address both of these issues through modeling and experimentation. Studies on using fluorination to improve stability have been published in Advanced Functional Materials and Advanced Energy Materials; research on how to enable a high charging rate was recently published in Nature Energy.

Since DRX can be made with many different elements, the researchers have also been working on which element would be best to use, hitting the sweet spot of being abundant, inexpensive, and providing good performance. "DRX has now been synthesized with almost the whole periodic table," Ceder said.

"This is science at its best - fundamental discoveries that will serve as the bedrock of systems in future homes, vehicles, and grids," said Noel Bakhtian, director of Berkeley Lab's Energy Storage Center. "What has made Berkeley Lab so successful in battery innovation for decades now is our combination of breadth and depth of expertise - from fundamental discovery to characterization, synthesis, and manufacturing, as well as energy markets and policy research. Collaboration is key - we partner with industry and beyond to solve real-world problems, which in turn helps galvanize the world-leading science we do at the Lab."

Fast progress

New battery materials have traditionally taken 15 to 20 years to commercialize; Ceder believes progress on DRX materials can be accelerated with a larger team. "We've made great progress in the last three years with the deep dive," Ceder said. "We've come to the conclusion that we're ready for a bigger team, so we can involve people with a more diverse set of skills to really refine this."

An expanded research team could move quickly to address the remaining issues, including improving the cycle life (or the number of times the battery can be recharged and discharged over its lifetime) and optimizing the electrolyte, the chemical medium that allows the flow of electrical charge between the cathode and anode. Since being developed in Ceder's lab, groups in Europe and Japan have also launched large DRX research programs.

"Advances in battery technologies and energy storage will require continued breakthroughs in the fundamental science of materials," said Jeff Neaton, Berkeley Lab's Associate Lab Director for Energy Sciences. "Berkeley Lab's expertise, unique facilities, and capabilities in advanced imaging, computation, and synthesis allow us to study materials at the scale of atoms and electrons. We are well poised to accelerate the development of promising materials like DRX for clean energy."
Amphiphilic molecules, which aggregate and encapsulate molecules in water, find use in several fields of chemistry. The simple, additive-free connection of hydrophilic and hydrophobic molecules would be an efficient method for amphiphilic molecule synthesis. However, such connections, or bonds, are often fragile in water. Now, scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology have developed an easy way to prepare water-stable amphiphiles by simple mixing. Their new catalyst- and reagent-free method will help create further functional materials.

Soaps and detergents are used to clean things like clothes and dishes. But how do they actually work? It turns out that they are made of long molecules containing a hydrophilic or water-loving part and a hydrophobic or water-hating part. When added to water, these molecules self-assemble to form giant, spherical supramolecules called micelles that get the cleaning up done by using the hydrophobic part to trap the grease.

Known as amphiphiles to chemists, these molecules have garnered much attention due to their utility in developing supramolecular materials. The synthesis of amphiphiles usually requires several reactions and purifications. In contrast, if hydrophilic and hydrophobic molecules could be simply connected without chemicals, it would be a very powerful synthetic method. In fact, some reactions that do not require any catalysts or reagents are known today. However, they have a fatal flaw: their chemical bonds are unstable in water, the very medium necessary for micelle formation!

Addressing this issue in a recent study published in Angewandte Chemie, scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech), Japan, led by Dr. Masahiro Yamashina and Prof. Shinji Toyota, have now come up with a solution using a chemical reaction known as the Staudinger reaction, in which an azide (hydrophilic part) and a phosphine (hydrophobic part) combine to form an azaylide.

Although a typical Staudinger reaction proceeds rapidly and quantitatively at room temperature, the formed azaylide readily hydrolyses into a primary amine and phosphine oxide in water. In contrast, a non-hydrolysis version of this reaction was recently found, in which a halogen atom, such as chlorine, added to an azide compound significantly improves the hydrostability of azaylide, explains Yamashina.

Accordingly, the team of scientists prepared a chlorinated azide subcomponent and mixed it with tris(p-tolyl)phosphine (PTol3), triphenylphosphine (PPh3), and tris(p-anisyl)phosphine (PAni3) to obtain the azaylide-based amphiphiles NPTol3, NPPh3, and NPAni3, respectively. They then dissolved the amphiphiles in water to observe their self-assembling behavior and found spontaneous aggregation in each case. Further measurements revealed that the aggregates were in the shape of spheres roughly 2 nm in size.

The team also prepared the corresponding non-chlorinated azaylide-based amphiphilesnNPTol3, nNPPh3, and nNPAni3and investigated the water stability of both the chlorinated and non-chlorinated azaylides. The non-chlorinated azaylides quickly disintegrated in water while their chlorinated counterparts remained stable. While the difference was clearly due to the presence of the chlorine atom, the underlying mechanism was unclear. To figure this out, the scientists performed density functional theory calculations that helped them understand the structures of the azaylides.



Finally, when tested with hydrophobic organic dyes like Nile Red and BODIPY, the team saw that the dye molecules became encapsulated by the spherical azaylide aggregates, exhibiting desirable amphiphile behavior. The azaylide formation presented in our study serves as a viable technique for on-site preparation of water-stable amphiphiles without catalysts and reagent, which can help create more such functional materials in future, comments an excited Yamashina.

The teams discovery will certainly help usher in significant advancements in the development of highly versatile functional materials, even in aqueous media.
Maryam Alsafan, a doctor who runs for local office, is the kind of movie hero we need.

The word that kept coming to mind during this movie was: impossible.

How impossible to be a female doctor in Saudi Arabia.

How impossible to care medically for a community without a paved road to your medical center.

How impossible to do anything as a woman, without a guardians permissionespecially running for municipal council.

Thats what Saudi doctor Maryam Alsafan (Mila Al Zahrani) decides to do in The Perfect Candidate, mainly to achieve her goal of getting that muddy road paved. But the movie is not a political dramamore like a twist on one. We see what campaigning is like for Maryam, but see little of her rival candidates or any shady dealings.

This is a story about the womens subculture in Saudi Arabia, unfolded by one woman testing out new liberties that she has in theory, if not in practice.

With the opening of cinemas and allowing women to drive in the Kingdom, I want to show how much effort real change will entail, said director Haifaa Al-Mansour in an interview. (On an earlier film, she had to direct from a van on the set in order to avoid mixing with men.)

Al-Mansour further explains the private world of Saudi women:

In public our entire identities are hidden, and our movements and opportunities have always been constricted and controlled. But in private, at home or in women-only gatherings, the coverings are lifted and there is that feeling of freedom and relaxation from all of the pressures we carry outside. The home is very much a sanctuary for women, and I always want to show the strong familial bonds that we have. Weddings, which are also gender segregated in the Kingdom, are another place where women can let loose and be themselves, so it is another setting that featured prominently in the film. I want to show the world what Saudi women are like when the coverings come off, when we can just be ourselves, dance and be sassy or whatever.

The story does feel very real, including real moments of sisters bickering or being silly together. Maryam is impulsive and stubborn, but also totally relatable as a highly competent, energetic professional who is still a bit naive.

I just want to work in a good place, Maryam tells her sister at one point. Ill show them what Im made of and theyll give me a better position. (Im not sure thats how it works, her sister responds.)

Unfortunately, Maryam gets zero campaign support from her dad, who is off challenging other cultural norms by touring with his band. (The significance of this might be lost on audiences unless they know that until very recently, arts of all kinds were banned in Saudi Arabia.)

With such an impossible mission, one clear lesson emerges for Christians watching Maryams story: we are not called to be successful, but to be faithful.

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As humanitarians working in systems where much change is needed, or even already underway, its not always easy to know where to begin.

We still have to start.

But is there any greater joy than watching someone else step into their own empowerment? Maryam doesnt really have help from anyone, except from her sisters, who run her campaign events, and a tech guy she enlists to help. Yet, she doesnt let the overwhelming challenge stop her.

For anyone ready to move beyond the hashtags and start supporting films by new directors with fresh stories, The Perfect Candidate is a great place to start. The film is in Arabic, with English subtitles, and earned a whopping 92 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

Originally released in 2019, its available starting today on DVD/Blueray and for streaming on AppleTV.

Laura Finch is the editor of the Better Samaritan blog, and has reviewed TV and movies for WORLD Magazine.
In the mid-1950s, Rev. Robert Schuller began preaching in a drive-in movie theater in Southern California. He melded traditions like vestments with a theology of post-war optimism and self-esteem. As his ministry grew, guest preaching in his pulpit became a mark of celebrity achievement. Three decades after his drive-in movie days, Schuller would welcome a young Mark Driscoll to the microphone to speak.

To understand the Mars Hill phenomenon, you have to understand how big churches developed in the boomer and Gen X years, how the franchising of churches led to homogenized congregational culture, and how pastors became spokesmen and CEOs. When Mark Driscoll arrived to preach at the Crystal Cathedral, he had already walked a ministry path paved by the likes of Schuller, Bill Hybels, and Rick Warrenleaders who dedicated significant time to demographic research as well as expository study.

In this episode of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, host Mike Cosper flips the tapestry of the Mars Hill story to expose the weaving of threads beneath. He explores how the identity of a church can become wrapped around one man and why a host of leaders might fall in step to protect him in order to save the institution.

Here, you can read an interview with David Di Sabatino, director of Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher.

The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill is a production of Christianity Today

Executiver Producer: Erik Petrik

Producer, Writer, Editor and Host: Mike Cosper

Associate Producer: Joy Beth Smith

Music, sound design, and mixing: Kate Siefker

Graphic Design: Bryan Todd

Social Media: Nicole Shanks

Editorial consulting: Andrea Palpant Dilley, online managing editor

Christianity Today Editor in Chief: Timothy Dalrymple

Theme song: Sticks and Stones by Kings Kaleidescope

Closing song: Crush by The Violet Burning
Image: Canva

About the series: In this series, we want to share with you the five questions Lausanne is asking as well as the most recurring answers/themes to those questions coming out of North America. We hope this series will be informative as well as catalytic. If you have additional thoughts, suggestions, or answers to the questions posed in this series, please send them to Dr. Josh LaxtonAssistant Director of Lausanne North Americawho has been compiling this list for the Lausanne Movement. His email is Joshua.laxton@wheaton.edu.

In the previous post, Part 5, we shared three answers North American church leaders gave to the following question that Lausanne Global is asking church leaders across the globe: Where is further research needed to accelerate the Great Commission?

Here are the final three areas where more research needs to be done in order for the church in North America to become more effective at participating in the Great Commission.

1.) Understanding and implementing a polycentric leadership model in leading and engaging in missions.

Polycentrism is an approach to governance where the doctrine where a plurality of independent centers of leadership, power, or ideology may exist within a single political system.

Based upon this definition, polycentrism applied to the churchs mission is different than a plurality of leadership in a local church. Polycentrism is about independent bodies coming together under a single system yet maintaining their autonomy and distinction as an organization.

This terminology may be new for many. The reason for this may be because it was introduced last year by Joseph Handley in his dissertation entitled, Polycentric Mission Leadership. Handley notes in an article appearing on the Lausanne website, During my studies, I came to believe that polycentrism provides a stronger leadership paradigm for leading missional endeavors in an interdependent, globally networked world.

Handley goes on to express:

I am convinced that a collaborative, communal approach to leadership that empowers multiple centers of influence as well as a diverse array of leaders is better suited to addressing the issues before us during this era of a globalized world, even more so now that I see the nations pulling apart from one another through tribalized reactions to the challenges we face. We need each other!

While it may be new terminology for most, the concept isnt that new. James Davison Hunter in his book, To Change the World, writes on the power of elites to influence and change culture. He notes, When networks of elites in overlapping fields of culture and overlapping spheres of social life come together with their varied resources and act in common purpose, cultures do change and change profoundly.

In a similar fashion, polycentric leadership seeks to leverage the social capital, resources, and thus power of multiple mission organizations to engage a nation, region, city, or community with the gospel.

Whether this is a new concept or term for you, we will need more research around what it is and how it is fleshed out in practice.

2.) Conducting ministry and mission in a pluralistic and ever-increasing secular-progressive culture.

Theres been so much cultural change that has transpired in the U.S. But lets not forget that Canada, which is part of North America, has witnessed many cultural changes earlier. Im sure there are times when our Canadian brothers and sisters look at what Christians here in America are dealing with and think to themselves we dealt with that fifteen years ago.

Nevertheless, North American culture as a whole, will continue moving farther away from Judeo-Christian valuesvalues that once held a prominent position in the West. In addition, the culture will grow ever-more pluralistic and secular. If they will engage in effective ministry and mission in such a cultural milieu, the church will have to learn contemporary bridge-building techniques and strategies. Therefore, the church will need to embrace research that gives them a better understanding of the idols of the current culture.

Call it our Acts 17 exercise. As Paul visited the city of Athens, he observed all the idols that were important to the Athenians. He looked for a connection point, which he found in an idol to an unknown God.

Idolatry has existed since the Fall of humanity. However, each people group, each culture, even each individual person has different idols they worship. If the church is going to conduct effective ministry and mission, both leaders and everyday believers will need to be aware of the idols in contemporary culture.

Not only will churches need to embrace an Acts 17 exercise to engage in effective ministry and mission, but they will also need more research around new evangelism models, next-generation ministry models, and new church planting and church ministry models for the 21st Century.

Its clear we live in a transitional period in North Americaboth culturally and ecclesiastically. The cultural and thus contextual changes in which we conduct ministry and mission will warrant new structures and strategies that (1) facilitate the biblical vision of what it means to be a New Testament Church and (2) the missional mandate of what it means to be the New Testament people of God advancing the Good News of King Jesus in both proclamation and demonstration.

3.) Why Evangelicalism has seemingly failed and where Evangicalism goes from here.

Theres no denying that Evangelicalism is struggling on two fronts. First, Evangelicalism as a movement is struggling in its effectiveness in engaging and reaching a secular-progressive and pluralistic culture. I believe research under point five will help with this struggle.

Second, Evangelicalism is struggling to maintain any sort of unified front not only across evangelical denominations, networks, ministries, and organizations but within many of the denominations, networks, ministries, and organizations themselves. This is hurting both our witness and our social capital.

A quick scan through the social media feeds of evangelicals can at least give some antidotal reasoning as to why Evangelicalism struggles on the unity front. However, more research should be done to uncover what has, is, and will continue to divide evangelicals moving deeper into the 21st Century.

Additionally, we not only need to know what is dividing us, but we need to know where we go from here. Is Evangelicalism doomed as a movement? For some, maybe. But I believe there is a future for evangelicals.

Like I noted before we (the culture and churches in North America) are in a transitional moment. Evangelicals need to steward this transitional moment in history by creating for themselves a defining moment missionally. To do so will require some work at least around reimagining the following, Who are evangelicals? What do evangelicals believe? And how do evangelicals go about engaging culture? Answering such questions will help create a defining moment and provide clarity for the remnant of evangelicals as we go deeper into the 21st century.

What other areas do you believe more research needs to be done in order to accelerate effective participation in the Great Commission? Please email Dr. Josh Laxton at Joshua.laxton@wheaton.edu.
When pastor Frank I. Williams thinks about diversity in the majority-white Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), he sees signs of encouragement and hope.

Over his ministry career, the New York preacher has watched voices of Black leaders and other leaders of color become more prominent in the denomination. As the new president of the National African American Fellowship of the SBC, Williams is excited about the momentum around young, diverse pastors in the SBC, particularly as a new generation of church planters.

His optimism around these pastors is justified. At this months SBC annual meeting in Nashville, SBC Executive Committee president Ronnie Floyd celebrated how majority-Black congregations in the denomination have nearly quadrupled since 1990. In all, by 2018, 22.3 percent of its churches were majority-non-Anglo, he reported.

For more than decade, the nations largest Protestant denomination has grappled with declines in membership. Yet during that time, Asian, Hispanic, and African American tallies continued to growadding more Black members and majority-Black churches than any other group.

But the 2021 annual meeting, the largest Southern Baptist gathering in 25 years, seemed to reflect a different story about its diversity.

For one thing, though the SBC does not track the race of attendees, the room of nearly 16,000 messengers was overwhelmingly white. And when race did come up for discussion, it was brought up mostly by white leaders, not in the context of diversity fueling growth within the denomination but in the ongoing debate around critical race theory (CRT).

Over the two days of business in Nashville, concerns over critical race theory were mentioned repeatedly in motions from the floor, discussions of denominational resolutions, questions posed to seminary leaders, and remarks from outgoing SBC president J. D. Greear.

Some claim that Southern Baptist efforts to address racism and promote diversity represent a capitulation of biblical principles. Others say such accusations misrepresent the SBCs approachwhich entity leaders emphasize puts the gospel above any secular theoryand hurt relationships with Black pastors.

Suspicions around critical race theory in the SBC have been swirling for the past two years, promoted by pastors and outlets affiliated with groups like the Conservative Baptist Network and Founders Ministries. The topic became a central issue dividing alliances around presidential candidates and a priority for a significant minority of messengers in attendance.

After the last annual meeting in 2019, groups started critiquing CRT as an ultimate evil, but most dont understand CRT, said George Yancey, a sociologist at Baylor University.

Any disagreement over approaches to racism, such as interpretations of Black Lives Matter or discussions of white privilege, has been conflated with critical race theory in the minds of its detractors, said Yancey, so much so that the theory has become broadly symbolic of the things they dont like, even if those elements are not central to the theory itself. Even experts disagree on the definition of critical race theory, but its a scholarly and legal framework for examining systemic racisms in various spheres of society.

It was Greear who put the mania around critical race theory in contrast with the difficulties faced by Black pastors in the SBC and their role in the future of the denomination.

We must make certain that our zeal to clarify what we think about CRT is accompanied by a pledge to fight with them against all forms of discrimination, to make clear that we stand with our brothers and sisters of color in their suffering, lamenting the pain of their past, and pledging to work tirelessly for justice in our present, he preached.

Greear also warned that if the SBC did not address a pharisaical leaven within the denomination, concerns about secondary issues over the gospel, we are going to alienate not only our brothers and sisters of color, were going to lose our own children.

That alienation has begun already. Several Black pastors left the SBC over the past year, fueled by the focus on the critical race theory debate. Yancey at Baylor said the recent exodus and attention around racial issues has put pastors of color on the defensive to explain to people why they stay in the SBC.

After three years as vice president of the National African American Fellowship, Williams now assumes leadership of the network just as pressure is mounting from inside and the outside.

He said individual pastors and congregations have to decide whether to remain with the SBC based on their own contexts and circumstances. In his case, Williams thinks back to his mentor Samuel Simpson, the late founder of two churches Williams now pastors: Bronx Baptist Church and Wake-Eden Community Baptist Church.

Simpson was a pioneering Jamaican American Southern Baptist church planter starting in the 1960slong before the recent surge in Black membership and congregations. His successful efforts to revitalize his community and foster racial reconciliation earned him the nickname Bishop of the Bronx.

Williamss predecessor also knew firsthand the challenges of working in a majority white denomination for decades.

He said to me that many pastors, going back to the 70s and 80s, questioned him about being part of this convention. He said, You can either talk about the problem or you can be part of the solution. God has called me to be part of the solution, Williams recounted.

Williams was born in St. Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean, but it was in Simpsons church in the Bronx where his faith came alive back in the mid-1990s. Under the banner of a Baptist name and a church funded by what was once the Home Mission Board, he connected with people who brought him into a robust Christian community.

Decades later, as Williams looks forward to the African American fellowships upcoming church-planting partnership with what is now the North American Mission Board, he continues to rely on Simpsons example.

He has for me has been the inspiration and the model of ministry that I still continue today: to be present, to build relationships, and when you see something thats not right, you call it out, but you do so in love, he said. You provide charity in a way that doesn't let anybody off the hook, but at the same time creates the atmosphere for change.

There were signs of such change from the stage of the Southern Baptist Convention meeting this year, where most Black leaders to take the stage had held a historic role in the denomination, such as Fred Luter, the first Black SBC president, and Rolland Slade, the first Black chairman of the Executive Committee. A member of Williamss church in the Bronx, Renee Trewick, was called out as the first African American woman to chair the board of trustees for GuideStone, the SBCs financial services arm.

I think its important to highlight those things, Williams said. It helps other people to see progress being made. It also helps the entity or the organization to recognize that its intentionality matters.

Overall, the conventions committees and trustee boards are significantly more diverse than they were just three years ago, thanks in part to Greears appointments.

Like Williams, Black leaders emphasize the work of the convention in their own lives and congregations and the importance of shared missional priorities.

Luter, when asked this month about why he remains in the SBC, remarked, Its a decision that I made back in 1986 when I became pastor of the Franklin Avenue Baptist Church. I looked at this convention, and I studied this convention, I looked at our stance at the Bible, on mission, on giving, on planting churches, on all the things that I love about this convention. Are we a perfect convention? No were not, but I believe we are doing all we can to reach the generations according to the word of God.



He worried that the recent gathering had showcased how much were getting off the main thing, the work of evangelism. Because were not doing that, the Enemy has been successful in dividing us, he said. Guys, weve gotta make the main thing the main thing.

The debates over critical race theory were not resolved at the annual meeting, but some leaders saw the election of Ed Litton, known for his racial reconciliation efforts, over Mike Stone, who has flagged concerns over woke theology in the denomination, as a sign of the denominations priorities on the issue.

I think the election of pastor Ed Litton is a major statement on where the convention needs to be. I hope that he will be a healing presence in the SBC, said Marshal Ausberry, who had served as SBC vice president and president of the National African American Fellowship while the arguments around critical race theory unfolded online.

Litton, in a segment on CNN after his election, tried to explain that Southern Baptists can recognize the reality of systemic racism without endorsing critical race theory outright.

Ausberry said there are places where critical race theory goes too far and that it cannot be a Christians worldview or ideology, but it can still be helpful.

Some will tout that the Bible is the only answer we need. If that were completely true, we would not have had slavery and racism in America! If that were true, we would not have sexual abuse in America or in churches! Because many of the perpetrators of slavery, racism, and sexual abuse have the Bible, he said. Therefore, we need tools that give us insight to identify systems of racism, prejudice, and sexual abuse. Yes, we know ultimately it is sin, but we need tools that help us to identify those detrimental and systemic behaviors that the Bible does not directly address.

Williams has a similar perspective. The Bible tells us clearly that we are all sinners, that we have iniquity in our hearts, that we all transgressed the law. Those broad categories, while they are sufficient to diagnose the overall problem, sometimes you need help to pinpoint certain areas.

Scholarly tools can help us to uncover particular impacts or particular practices that are connected to the sin of racism, he said. You can see some value in it, without it becoming your way of seeing the world, or your way of understanding your faith, or your way of determining the remedy.

A resolution stating that the convention rejects any theory or worldview that denies that racism, oppression, or discrimination is rooted, ultimately, in anything other than sin passed overwhelmingly at the Nashville meeting.

Those opposed to critical race theory and worried about its supposed influence in the denomination were disappointed that it was not called out explicitly, with messengers coming to the mics to condemn its insufficient, vague, unclear language.

On the other hand, Yancey, who belongs to a Southern Baptist church and attended the annual meeting, worried it reduces racism to a sin aspect, framing it as only an individual offense and not an institutional one.

Even with the critical race theory discussions taking so much time and attention, there are still Black pastors who see beyond the back-and-forth to the good work done by pastors within the convention. A non-Southern Baptist pastor who came to the annual meeting as a guest raved about how encouraged he was to be in a roomeven as a minoritywhen so many fellow pastors were excited to partner and support the work of Black leaders for kingdom ends.

Today, Williamss Afro-Caribbean congregations, totaling around 500 members, are not worried about the influence of critical race theory in the Southern Baptist Convention. But like people of color throughout the country, they have felt the grief of racism deepen over the past few years, as social media and cellphone videos bring cases like George Floyds to the forefront.

They are also still recovering from the aftermath of COVID-19. During the pandemic, Williams had members hospitalized on ventilators and ended up performing multiple funerals, including for his mentor Simpsons brother. His own family, his wife and daughters, all came down with the virus.

2020 was a challenging year for many churches, and our church was not exempt from that, he said. But I think it slowed everybody down to recognize how central our relationships are.

Bronx Baptist recently returned to in-person services, and Wake-Eden will do so this Sunday.
Editors note: This article will continue to be updated with reactions from India Christian leaders.

A third of Hindus in India would not be willing to accept a Christian as a neighbor. Neither would a quarter of Indian Muslims or Sikhs.

Only a third of Indian Christians are very concerned about stopping inter-religious marriage, vs. two-thirds or more of Hindus, Muslims, and the general Indian population.

A quarter of Christians say religious diversity harms India, while about half say it benefits the country.

A third of Indian Christians identify as Catholics and half identify with Protestant denominations. A third of Christians identify as members of Scheduled Castes, often called Dalits (and formerly the pejorative untouchables).

Almost all Indian Christians are very proud to be Indian, and three-quarters agree that Indian culture is superior to others.

These are among the findings of Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation, a significant new report released today by the Pew Research Center. Its conclusion, in a sentence: Indians say it is important to respect all religions, but major religious groups see little in common and want to live separately.

For its most comprehensive, in-depth exploration ever of India, Pew surveyed almost 30,000 Indian adults nationwide, face to face across 17 languages, between November 2019 and March 2020 just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit the subcontinent. The resulting survey, weighted to Indias 2011 census, is calculated to have covered 98 percent of Indians ages 18 and older and had an 86 percent national response rate.

Image: INDRANIL MUKHERJEE / AFP / Getty Images

Pew surveyed 22,975 Indians who identify as Hindu, 3,336 who identify as Muslim, 1,782 who identify as Sikh, 1,011 who identify as Christian, 719 who identify as Buddhist, 109 who identify as Jain, and 67 who identify as belonging to another religion or as religiously unaffiliated.

Christians only number 2.4 percent of Indias population, according to the 2011 census. Yet given its massive 1.38 billion people, India still ranks among the top 25 countries with the most Christians in 2020 (between Poland and Peru), according to Pews demographic estimates.

Most Indian Christian leaders interviewed by CT agreed that Pews report offers quantitative validation of their lived experience. Though in a nation as vast and complex as India, many saw areas or subsets that deserved more scrutiny so that local differences could be made even more apparent.

The report is quite comprehensive, timely, and strategic, said Atul Aghamkar, an expert scholar on urban missions in India. He cautioned the findings may represent the views of urban Indians more than rural ones.

Most findings will find agreement with anyone who lives here in India, said C. B. Samuel, a respected Bible teacher and former executive director of EFICOR (formerly the Evangelical Fellowship of India Commission on Relief). He believes the report accurately captures religion and communal relations in India in general, and noted how Northeast India, West Bengal, and South Indian states stand out when scrutinized.

Overall the report is fine and well done while it presents a view of the Hindi heartland of India as the main view, said Canon Vinay Samuel, founder of the Oxford Center for Mission Studies (OCMS) and the Oxford Center for Religion and Public Life (OCRPL). The study validates a lot of what one has known over the years, and that is encouraging.

Archbishop Felix Anthony Machado, general secretary of the Catholic Bishops Conference of India and a leader in interreligious dialoguewhich he described as the need of the hoursaid the findings reflect the reality of India in general.

The report covered a wide range of issues pertinent to the country, said Finny Philip, an Indian board member of the Lausanne Movement, but he wished that tribal religions had been surveyed alongside the six main faiths. Having long worked in Indias tribal belt, for him the survey failed to capture the rural heart of India where caste segregation runs deep.

John Dayal, a Delhi-based Christian political analyst and cofounder and past secretary general of the All India Christian Council, credited the report for its good coverage of cultural issues and said its findings were almost on the dot regarding intermarriage and closest to the reality on housing matters, which will be of use in social action to diffuse tensions.

But he also said the report failed to fully capture the extreme polarization caused by the recent election campaigns of Hindu nationalists and the resulting Islamophobia which now permeates all aspects of national intuitional and public life.

Tensions over increasing Hindu nationalism in India have caused the nation to climb the ranks of persecution watchdogs in recent years. Open Doors ranks India at No. 10 on its 2021 World Watch List of the 50 countries where its hardest to be a Christian. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom recommends India be added to the State Departments list of Countries of Particular Concern. Pew itself calculates that India has the highest level of social hostilities regarding religion among the worlds 25 most-populous countries, as well as one of the higher levels of government restrictions.

Yet Pew found that most Indians value religious pluralism and tolerance and feel very free to practice their faith, noting:

More than 70 years after India became free from colonial rule, Indians generally feel their country has lived up to one of its post-independence ideals: a society where followers of many religions can live and practice freely.



Indians see religious tolerance as a central part of who they are as a nation. Across the major religious groups, most people say it is very important to respect all religions to be truly Indian. And tolerance is a religious as well as civic value: Indians are united in the view that respecting other religions is a very important part of what it means to be a member of their own religious community.

However, most Indians say they are very different from Indians who practice other religions. For example, only 1 in 5 Hindus (19%) say they have a lot in common with Christians in India, while 3 in 5 Hindus (59%) say they are very different. Meanwhile, 1 in 4 Christians (27%) say they have a lot in common with Hindus in India, while 3 in 5 (58%) say they are very different.

Pew found that interreligious marriage in India is rare, as is conversion. Yet the issues remain highly sensitive, as seen in the continued spread of anti-conversion laws at the state level and recurring allegations of love jihad.

Only a third of Indian Christians say it is very important to stop Christians from marrying non-Christians. This is a much lower level of concern than in every other religious group, including the two-thirds of Hindus and of Indians in general who see stopping religious intermarriage as a high priority. Muslims register the most concern, with about 4 out of 5 concerned about members marrying outside their faith.

Overall, 45 percent of Hindus accept having neighbors of all other religions. Yet an equal 45 percent are not willing to accept followers of at least one other religion.

For example, 31 percent of Hindus would not be willing to accept a Christian as a neighbor. Neither would 25 percent of Muslims or Sikhs. Jains were most likely not to accept Christian neighbors (47%), while Buddhists were least likely (17%).

Among Christians, only 1 in 10 would not be willing to accept a Hindu as a neighbor (11%). Meanwhile, 2 in 10 Christians would not accept neighbors who were Muslim (17%), Buddhist (21%), Sikh (22%), or Jain (22%). Overall, Christians were second only to Buddhists with registering the least discomfort with neighbors of other religions.

Indians, then, simultaneously express enthusiasm for religious tolerance and a consistent preference for keeping their religious communities in segregated spheresthey live together separately, wrote Pew researchers. These two sentiments may seem paradoxical, but for many Indians they are not. They conclude that most Indians prefer not a national melting pot of religions but a country more like a patchwork fabric, with clear lines between groups.

Most Indians delude themselves and believe they respect other religions. In practice, this is not true, OCRPLs Samuel told CT. The gap between espoused belief and actual practice could be more starkly highlighted.

Religion continues to be important as a marker of identity, and that is encouraging in some ways, he said. But it is also true that religion has little influence on ones ethical life in India. That does not appear in the study.

Richard Howell, principal at the Caleb Institute of Theology and past general secretary of the Evangelical Fellowship of India, cautioned that the report could create an impression all is well but an in-depth analysis of the consequences of segregated living and its impact on lower castes is needed.

About half of Indians think religious diversity benefits India, while a quarter think it harms the country. Among Indian Christians, 26 percent say religious diversity harms India, while 44 percent say it benefits the country. Christians were the least likely of any religious group to say that religious diversity benefits India.

Of course, religion is not the only fault line in India. Pew also examined issues of caste.

Only 22 percent of Indian Christians identify as General Category Indiansnot belonging to any protected groupwhile 33 percent identify as members of Scheduled Castes (often referred to as Dalits, or formerly as untouchables"), 24 percent as members of Scheduled Tribes, and 17 percent as members of Other Backward Classes (OBC). A higher share of Christians identify as Scheduled Tribes than of any other religious group or the general population.

Most Indians and most protected groups dont say there is a lot of discrimination against SC/ST/OBC members in India today. Only about 1 in 5 say so, except for in the Northeast where 1 in 3 do.

And only a third of Christians say it is very important to stop believers from marrying into other castes. This is the lowest of any religious or demographic group measured, vs two-thirds of the general population saying marriage between castes is very important to stop.

While Pew finds that religious conversion is rare in India, Hindus register the most conversions while Christians register the greatest net gains. Researchers found that 0.4 percent of survey respondents are former Hindus who now identify as Christian, while 0.1 percent are former Christians.

The vast majority of Indian adults (98%) say they are currently in the same religion they were raised, with Hindus registering the most switching into and out of their religion, followed by Muslims and Christians.

Pew found that 2.6 percent of Indian adults are currently Christians while 2.3 percent were raised Christian, as well as that 0.4 percent of all Indian adults were raised as something else but now identify as Christian. Given Indias population of about 1.38 billion, that would translate to between 4.1 million and 5.5 million Christian converts.

Pew researchers noted:

In recent years, conversion of people belonging to lower castes (including Dalits) away from Hinduisma traditionally non-proselytizing religionto proselytizing religions, especially Christianity, has been a contentious political issue in India. As of early 2021, nine states have enacted laws against proselytism, and some previous surveys have shown that half of Indians support legal bans on religious conversions. This survey, though, finds that religious switching, or conversion, has a minimal impact on the overall size of Indias religious groups. For example, according to the survey, 82% of Indians say they were raised Hindu, and a nearly identical share say they are currently Hindu, showing no net losses for the group through conversion to other religions. Other groups display similar levels of stability. Changes in Indias religious landscape over time are largely a result of differences in fertility rates among religious groups, not conversion.

Pew also examined Indias Hindu converts to Christianity more in-depth:

Three-quarters of Indias Hindu converts to Christianity (74%) are concentrated in the Southern part of the country  the region with the largest Christian population. As a result, the Christian population of the South shows a slight increase within the lifetime of survey respondents: 6% of Southern Indians say they were raised Christian, while 7% say they are currently Christian. Some Christian converts (16%) reside in the East as well (the states of Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha and West Bengal); about two-thirds of all Christians in the East (64%) belong to Scheduled Tribes. Nationally, the vast majority of former Hindus who are now Christian belong to Scheduled Castes (48%), Scheduled Tribes (14%) or Other Backward Classes (26%). And former Hindus are much more likely than the Indian population overall to say there is a lot of discrimination against lower castes in India. For example, nearly half of converts to Christianity (47%) say there is a lot of discrimination against Scheduled Castes in India, compared with 20% of the overall population who perceive this level of discrimination against Scheduled Castes. Still, relatively few converts say they, personally, have faced discrimination due to their caste in the last 12 months (12%).

Philip found Pews findings on conversion to be the most surprising, including that conversions are so rare in India, that Hindus gain as many people as they lose, and that most conversions from Hinduism to Christianity happen in the South.

It will be a disappointment to the government to realize that religious conversions are rare in India, he said, and it is encouraging to know that the efforts to enact the anti-conversion laws in most of the states are futile and a publicity stunt.

Pew also examined theology and rituals in India, finding that India remains a highly religious nation with a fair amount of intermixing of beliefs and practices:

As a result of living side by side for generations, Indias minority groups often engage in practices that are more closely associated with Hindu traditions than their own. For instance, many Muslim, Sikh, and Christian women in India say they wear a bindi (a forehead marking, often worn by married women), even though putting on a bindi has Hindu origins. Similarly, many people embrace beliefs not traditionally associated with their faith: Muslims in India are just as likely as Hindus to say they believe in karma (77% each), and 54% of Indian Christians share this view. Nearly 3 in 10 Muslims and Christians say they believe in reincarnation (27% and 29%, respectively). While these may seem like theological contradictions, for many Indians, calling oneself a Muslim or a Christian does not preclude believing in karma or reincarnationbeliefs that do not have a traditional, doctrinal basis in Islam or Christianity.

Obviously, religion is something deep and one may not afford to remain on ones limited understanding, said Machado. When I, as a religious leader, talk to my own Catholic Christians, I find how little they know of the richness of their faith. But they are who they are, and God does not punish them for thatalthough I do try to create a network to learn more about their own religious faith as well as the faith of their neighbors who may belong to other faiths.

Three quarters of Indian Christians each say they consider their faith to be very important in their life, say they know a great deal about Christianity and its practices, and say they pray daily. Christians are more likely to say they pray daily than any other group surveyed, but are less likely to consider religion very important or to claim religious knowledge.

Among Indian Christians, 4 in 5 say they believe in God with absolute certainly while the remaining 1 in 5 still believe but with less certainty. Meanwhile, 68 percent of Indian Christians believe in only one God, while 24 percent believe in only one God with many manifestations. Another 5 percent believe in many gods.

Overall, 35 percent of Indians believe in only one God, while 54 percent believe in only one God with many manifestations and only 6 percent believe in many gods. Even though Hinduism is sometimes referred to as a polytheistic religion, very few Hindus (7%) take the position that there are multiple gods, noted Pew researchers. Instead, the most common position among Hindus (as well as among Jains) is that there is only one God with many manifestations (61% among Hindus and 54% among Jains).

Indians do not show the pattern of secularization seen in Europe, yet the biggest exception is Christians, wrote Pew researchers. Among whom those with higher education and those who reside in urban areas show somewhat lower levels of observance. For example, among Christians who have a college degree, 59 percent say religion is very important in their life, compared with 78 percent among those who have less education.

Additional findings of interest:

1 in 10 Indian Christians report being discriminated against in the past 12 months because of their faith. This includes 19 percent of Christians in the East and 12 percent in the Northeast, vs. 6 percent in the South.

49 percent of Indian Christians believe in Judgment Day, 48 percent believe in miracles, and 68 percent believe in angels while only 41 percent believe in demons

50 percent of Indian Christians say politicians should have a lot or some influence on religious matters, while 44 percent say none or not too much. Among Indians in general, 62 percent want politicans involved in religion while 31 percent do not.

29 percent of Indian Christians say being a Christian is mainly a matter of only religion, while 34 percent say it is only ancestry/culture and 27 percent say it is both religion and ancestry/culture.

9 in 10 Christians are very proud to be Indian, as well as to be a member of their religion.

When asked whether Indian culture is superior to other cultures, 52 percent of Christians completely agree, 26 percent mostly agree, and 11 percent disagree. Indian Christians are least likely to completely agree and most likely to disagree among the religious groups surveyed.

A quarter of Indian Christians say they practice yoga (mostly monthly or less) while three-quarters say they never do. Among Hindus and the general population, about a third say they practice yoga while about two-thirds say they never do.

Potential good news in the report for those concerned about Christian persecution in India:

A solid 4 out of 5 Hindus say respecting other religions is very important to being Hindu and to being truly Indian.

Only 49 percent of Indian Hindus supported the BJP in the 2019 elections, as did 55 percent of Hindus who say being Hindu is very important to be truly Indian. And only 30 percent of Hindus say all three: that they voted for the BJP and they believe being Hindu and speaking Hindu are very important to being truly Indian.

This would suggest that Hindutva nationalists dont represent majority opinion among Indian Hindus, and that advocates for Christian can find common allies, particularly in Indias South (where only 5 percent of Hindus say all three), Northeast (19%), West (26%), and East (28%).

Yet the biggest concern for Aghamkar within Pews findings is the clear trend toward Hindutva ideology among Indias Hindu majority and the resulting impact on religious harmony. For example, attitudes toward conversionwhether Hindus becoming Christians or Christians becoming Hindus (known as homecoming)seem to be aligning more with Hindutva beliefs, he said, based on how Hindus answered the reports questions.

Ive had a fear that communal relations in the recent past have been deeply disturbed by the polarization of politics, and the report almost affirms that, Aghamkar, with the National Center for Urban Transformation based in Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore), told CT. The recent trend of mixing Hindutva with national identity is now clearly validated.

[More] Hindus are linking their identity with religion and politics. This was not the case earlier, as many Hindus and especially urban globalized Hindus were understood as moving away from traditional religious values that tended to [delink] them from their national identity.

The identity of religious faith with politics is a recent phenomenon, said Machado. It is religion instrumentalized for vested interests.

There is a political move to exploit religious identities and create differences that can be used for gaining power, said Samuel of EFICOR, who expects tolerance will reduce further.

Philip shares these concerns about the trends toward religious segregation and defining

true Indians as Hindus and what both imply for communal harmony.

While the overlap Pew found on some religious beliefs and practicessuch as wearing a bindi, celebrating festivals, or believing in karma and reincarnationcan be used as bridge-building points to develop harmony, he believes that since tolerance is understood as segregation, ghettoing and minority targeting will be a worrying trend.

Harmony is now social distancing, said Philip.

In contrast, Aghamkar expressed encouragement that most Indians still believe in God and want to express their faith, as well as that religious tolerance seems to be still evident.

In the despondency of the day, said Dayal, it is encouraging to know that two-thirds of all communities want to live in peace with each other.

While the reports findings describe favorably the religious freedom situation in India, Christian leaders offered mixed reactions.

The survey gives the impression that there is religious freedom for everyone to practice their faith, but this is not close to the truth, said Philip. The violence against the minority has increased considerably in the last 10 years.

I dont think religious freedom is going to be looked at in India favorably in days to come unless some drastic political changes take place, said Aghamkar. International pressure would be required to bring some changes in allowing religious freedom. He wants to see more collaborative efforts launched to think nationally and bring pressure on the government to change certain policies that affects Christians.

To uphold the fundamental human right of religious freedom should be the supreme religious concern of any civilized society and every government, said Machado. Aberrations could be supervised, but the human right of religion is the first of all human rights because it is the supreme law of conscience of every human being.

The report does not come close to assessing the intensity of Hindu political hatred against Islam, the common Muslims, and their institutions, said Dayal. This is a critical issue in internal harmony and regional stability and peace.

Dayal said the report puts statistical annotations to common observations yet wishes it could help gauge religious persecution by state and non-state actors and devise responses to challenge it. There is urgent and pressing need to reverse the Islamophobia in governance and in public life, he said. There is need to devise institutions to bring communities on common platforms to discuss issues and diffuse tensions. And there is an urgent need to get religious minorities to believe that the national justice system will not sell them down the river.

I think the reports optimism about religious freedom in India is right, said Samuel of OCRPL. I think there will always be freedomnot because of a belief in it, but due to the reality of religious diversity in India that cannot be subdued or controlled. It is too diverse and too vast for any group, however powerful, to control.

However, he said, the church must continue to provide a religious and moral basis for religious freedom.

Indias religious divide and conflicts will increase rather than decrease, according to Samuel. The current direction of Hinduism in India is driven by some forces that are linked to state power, which means that one form of Hindu religious nationalism will grow rapidly and is likely to clash with other forms of Hinduism and other religions.

Yet in the area of religion itself, India has not changed much, he told CT. I have seen religious suspicion and conflict for all my life. There are always pockets of cooperation and friendship between religions, but the Bollywood view of religious harmony in India is a myth and continues to be so.

How might Indian Christians respond to this examination of religion in India?

Being a minority, the church needs to take bold steps in bringing harmony, said Philip. The church has a great history of serving and building the nation through educational and medical missions. These core missions of the church can bring transformation to a disintegrated country along religious lines.

Some careful and prayerful reflections are required of the church in India, and innovative and contextually appropriate ways may need to be explored to move forward with witnessing in India, said Aghamkar. Taking into consideration those who do not agree with Hindutva ideology  may need to be taken into consideration for Christian witness, as these are the ones that are so called open segments.

Samuel of EFICOR wants Christians to intentionally become visible in doing good.

The faithful are led by their pastor, bishop, or cardinal.  That makes it incumbent on the church and community leadership not to fall prey to the evil of bigotry, which many do, and of caste, said Dayal. It is also important for many churches to shed their preconceptions which are born of ignorance or insufficient knowledge and training in cultural demography.

A better understanding of the cultural landscape will help, he said. The survey makes it clear.

Overall, Indian Christian leaders ask for prayer.

The first item on our prayer list must be regional peace for India, said Dayal. Its religious peace depends on its relationship with Pakistan, for instance.

The second item must be for wisdom for our leadership to forsake a policy of polarization, and for restoration and strengthening of democratic institutions and [the courts], he told CT. The third item must be for intercommunal peace and harmony through the dialogue of life and in the framework of a just and secular, democratic, constitutional justice system.

The final item must be for wisdom and grace to Christian leaders to discern what is good for the people, said Dayal, and to constrict their evangelism, their social action programs, and their teaching curricula in accordance.

Philip also offered four prayer points:

Pray for wisdom for the leaders of India to develop a unified identity incorporating all communities amid growing segregation. Pray against the fear of the majority that the minority will convert the majority to their beliefs and practices. That the government will intentionally work towards communal harmony of various religious groups. That the church will become a wonderful expression of unity and harmony in the nation.

We need to be consciously praying for the clarity, direction, and cooperation within the leadership of the church to move forward and find specific ways to build the kingdom of God in India, said Aghamkar.

Additional reporting by CT editors
My friend messaged me to check on me. He knows that I came out of a severely abusive Christian family, but he had gotten a sense from something I had written on-line that I was discouraged. That was true; I was discouraged. The pain of my former abuse had intensified, and I was exhausted. I told him I was struggling with the sheer difficulty of searching for healing, of being told to simply trust that God will eventually heal me if I just keep walking toward God. I told him that it was deeply straining to keep dragging myself toward healing despite deep injuries. Star Wars fans remember the deeply burned Anakin dragging himself upward through agony. That was how I felt. I was discouraged and weary at the Just keep serving Jesus and rejoicing in him. You will find healing in service and in joy message of the church. I was still deeply bleeding, but somehow service and rejoicing would bind up my wounds.

My friend had messaged me to check on me. I had acknowledged I was discouraged. There were multiple ways my friend could have responded. He could have validated my emotions. He could have told me it was okay to rest in order to heal. He could have told me how amazed he was at my commitment to Christ and to healing. He could have told me how proud he was of how far I had already come. He could have offered help. Instead, he told me not to give up because while I appreciate the difficulty, I am encouraging you not to lay down. If you really want healing, you have to get to the Healer. Or be somewhere He can get to you. He did not know it, but a large part of the burden I was carrying was fear that the emotions I was feeling was keeping God away; after all, one of the fruits of the Spirit is joy. He is a missionary pastor, and his words were a threat of eternal death. I saw myself in that moment as a lamb trapped in brambles who had to find away to rip myself out of the thorns my abuser had pushed me into. The Shepherd in his story would not get to me. I must get to the Shepherd.

Fast forward two years later, I had decided to seek more counseling. The ministry I was part of had experienced four years of intense conflict. I had finally recognized that part of why my trauma pain was so high was that I was in an environment which was not safe, so my old injury was continually being bumped and reopened. I went to my ministry and told them I was going to seek trauma counseling, but I also requested that they address the conflict, because it would never be healthy for me to be in such heavy conflict for such an extended period. I was not the only person who had struggled with the depth of the conflict, but I was the member with CPTSD (complex-PTSD). Instead of helping me, the ministry told me I was imagining the problem. They ordered me to leave my trained trauma counselor and go to a Biblical counselor instead. I talked with multiple trauma counselors about the demand. Based on both the ministrys words and actions and on an examination of the Biblical counselors website, all four told me it would be very damaging for me to go and added that it was an unethical situation, so I refused. In response the ministry became very abusive and eventually fired both my husband and myself.

Now, my friend wrote me again to check on me. He agreed that the ministry had treated me unfairly, but he had to pray about whether to speak to his good friend who was the head of the ministry. Over and over he messaged me counseling grace and understanding from me toward those who had harmed me. Another of our friends joined him, assuring me that the ministry does good work, so I needed to be quiet and move on and simply find inner peace while my outer world was far from peace. Let us look at it slightly differently. Consider that you have a car. Your neighbor keeps siphoning your gas, so you are constantly needing to refuel. What problem should you address? The lack of fuel or the stealing? Which problem you address has a very different cost. If you continue to simply refuel, you are going to pay a high cost. If you address the neighbors illegal theft, the cost will fall on your neighbor. Now, imagine yourself as a mentor of the owner of the car. Do you counsel the owner to just keep refueling, or do you counsel addressing the theft? My friends counseled refueling. The wounds the ministry had inflicted could be ignored. I needed to focus instead on refueling my joy and peace, but I had completely run out of funds to refuel anymore. I couldnt buy or manufacture any more joy and peace, so they declared me unfaithful to God.

This led me to a crisis. I had been taught and my friends had reinforced the belief that it was worse to feel negative emotions than it was to abuse another person. Abuse could be forgiven. We can and should extend grace to the abuser. God can be and still is near the abuser. However, being discouraged, angry, bitter, etc. in response to abuse could not be forgiven because that means the abuse victim is unforgiving. We cannot and should not extend grace to the abuse victim who does not demonstrate forgiveness in the form of joy and peace and silence about the abuse, and because the victim is not drawing near to God by exhibiting godly emotions, we must assure her that God cannot be near to her. We do not need to warn abusers of the danger to their eternal souls, but we do need to warn the victim of that threat. In other words, it is a greater sin to bleed when someone knifes you than it is to knife someone. That seemed to me to be incredibly unfair. Surely that could not be what God teaches!

That sent me on a search through Scripture. I focused on the lament passages for over a year. Slowly, I began to see that Scripture itself shows a different story. One day, I remember googling bitterness and the Bible. I found page after page warning of the dangers of bitterness and how God cannot be near the bitter, but I also found one page which had some of the same themes, but was not as harsh. It was a reflection on Naomis bitterness which included Naomi declaring, Call me Mara [Bitter]. Naomi changed her very name to Bitter because life itself had been bitter to her. It was a responsive emotion that came out of deep pain that seemed to follow her everywhere she went, so she declared that the name Naomi, or Pleasant, no longer reflected her character. Yet in this moment of declaring that her very character was Bitter, Ruth made her famous declaration of faithfulness, I will never leave you nor forsake you. As I meditated on this scene, I found myself questioning, Would God be less faithful than Ruth? The answer to that can be found within the story which followed. Instead of pulling away from Mara, God, in Ruth, refused to leave her side. Then he sent a kinsman-redeemer to set things right for both Mara and Ruth. And in the end Mara declared that she was no longer Mara but was again Naomi because of those who fought alongside her to make things right.

As I reflected on Gods faithfulness to Mara, I began to reflect on two other Biblical women. Mary and Miriam also come from the same Hebrew word. Both were born into a time of deep bitterness for the Israelites, and their parents acknowledged their own bitter-woundedness even as they named their daughters, Bitter. Again I faced the question, Did God pull away from them? No! In fact, the exact opposite happened. God sent a savior both times! He came and did the work to set things right for his people who were trapped in bitterly oppressive systems from which they could not escape on their own. Miriams people were trapped in slavery in Egypt. Marys people were actually being abused by the religious leaders of their own people. Instead of drawing away from those who are bitter and who acknowledge the depth of their own bitterness, God drew closer and said Let me lead you out of your oppression under these systems. He did not offer a mere heart joy in the midst of oppression! NO!

I also reflected on Hannah. Hannah was struggling with abuse by her co-wife and with the very real problem of having no child. There were actually socio-economic problems connected to her barrenness, yet her husband, Elkanah, did nothing to keep her safe from the abuse nor the probable socio-economic harm Hannah knew she would face in old age. Instead he tried to lavish her with temporary gifts to distract her from her sorrow, but this increased the abuse from her co-wife. When she continued to weep, Elkanah condemned her. His condemnation of Hannah reverberated with my own story, because the church has told me again and again just to focus on Gods gifts and to ignore the abuse, telling me that my continued weeping is sinful. But again, in Hannah, I found something different. She refused to stop crying! She went to the temple and wept and pled to God for help. There again she was condemned for her tears; this time by the priest, Eli. Yet when she stood up to the priest for herself and for her tears, someone finally heard her and helped her. Eli stopped blaming her and blessed her instead. Only after she was heard, helped, blessed was she able to lay aside her tears.

God declared in Jeremiah 6:14, They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, Peace, peace, when there is no peace. The demand for abuse victims to have inner peace while their outer worlds are completely devoid of outer peace is both unrealistic and unBiblical. When the first Tamars father-in-law, Judah, withheld from her the provision he owed her, she did not focus on inner peace. She tricked him into granting her the outer peace she needed, and Judah declared that this action proved that she was more righteous than he. Neither Jesus nor his apostles focused on mere heart change and inner peace. They ministered to the needs of the community for outer peace. All throughout the Old Testament and again in the New Testament, God focused on the very real problems his people faced, not just on them being at peace in the middle of the oppression. Even in Heaven, Johns Revelation tells us, John saw souls under the altar crying out for outer peace. In Rev. 6:10 he wrote, They cried out with a loud voice, O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth? There is a place and a time for sorrow. There is a place and a time for lament. There is a place and a time for anger. There is a place and a time for bitterness. There is a place and a time for the impatient cry, How long, Oh Lord! The church needs to become a people who seek outer peace for the abused and oppressed, binding their wounds tightly, rather than a people who bind their wounds lightly by demanding, Inner peace, inner peace, when there is no outer peace.
Church clings to hope as 9 families missing after Champlain Towers South building collapse

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Parishioners at the Saint Joseph Catholic Church in Miami Beach, Florida, are still clinging to hope as members of at least nine families that lived in the Champlain Towers South in Surfside remain missing after its catastrophic collapse last Thursday.

We still have that faith because you never know. Weve seen it in other tragedies where the most miracles have happened, and even the most difficult situations people have survived for days. So we still have hope. We still do, Gypsy Lodos, the church's director of faith formation, told The Christian Post Monday.

Since half of the 13-story Champlain South Towers building collapsed Thursday, more than 150 residents remain unaccounted for, CNN reported. Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava also revealed Monday that at least 11 people had been confirmed dead as rescue officials indicate chances of finding more survivors are dwindling by the day. At a press conference Monday night, the mayor warned that the death toll numbers are very fluid.

Just bear with me what Im about to say, Ray Jadallah, a Miami-Dade Fire Rescue assistant chief, said during a Saturday briefing. Its going to sink in. I understand its very emotional. Its not necessarily that were finding victims. Were finding human remains.

Lodos told CP that her church, which is approximately two blocks away from the tower, has been hosting prayer vigils since the tragedy. On Sunday, she said, it was a bittersweet gathering for her community because while many multiple members who lived in the building remain missing, several others also survived the collapse.

We have parishioners who did make it out safely, Lodos said. I think were at 12. Ive been able to speak to a couple of the families and other people [who] know them. One of them was very grateful. He said God protected them, that they were guided by Jesus to go down. So they are very grateful for the parish support and glad to be alive here at church and being able to worship.

While survivors are celebrating, Lodos said many of them are still in shock and were not yet ready to speak publicly about what they endured.

More than 300 emergency personnel, including teams from Israel and Mexico, are working around the clock, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been called in to help search for survivors, The New York Times reported.

In an interview with Good Morning America Monday, Chief Andy Alvarez of Miami-Dade Fire Rescue said they are hoping to find a miracle" despite the challenge of the frantic effort to find survivors.

We have 80 workers at a time that are breaching the walls that have obviously collapsed in a frantic effort to rescue those that are still viable and to get to those voids that we typically know exist in these buildings, he said.

We have found voids within the building that weve been able to penetrate, mostly coming from underneath the basement of what used to be the garage. And we have been able to tunnel through the building. But this is a frantic search to continue to see that hope, that miracle, to see who we could bring out of this building alive, he added.

And Lodos agrees that for now, hope is what her church family has.

You know the last thing we lose is the hope  even when you know there isnt even the hope of finding them alive, or [just] the hope they are reunited in Heaven. We dont know. Only God knows the plans, she said.
Members of Congress demand IRS reverse decision denying tax exemption to Christian group

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A group of Republican members of Congress have urged the Internal Revenue Service to change their stance on denying a Texas-based Christian nonprofit tax-exempt status because the government body had deemed it too political.

In May, the IRS denied a request by Christians Engaged to be given an exemption under Section 501(c)(3), which would label the group a charitable organization and receive benefits such as tax-deductible contributions.

Rep. Chip Roy of Texas sent a letter to IRS Commissioner Charles P. Rettig last Friday, urging him to change their position on Christians Engaged and to remove all IRS employees who were responsible for that decision.

The IRS must objectively analyze applications for tax-exempt status and cannot allow political biases to creep into its decisions, read the letter in part.

We urge you to immediately review Christians Engageds application for 501(c)(3) status personally, and terminate the IRS staff involved in the flawed and politically motivated reasoning behind the determination.

Other signatories of the letter included Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida, and Reps. Burgess Owens of Utah, Bob Good of Virginia, and Lauren Boebert of Colorado.

In a statement last Friday, Roy argued that the denial of the exemption for Christians Engaged further exposed the corruption and liberal bias running rampant at the IRS.

This discriminatory action against a Christian nonprofit is an overt attack on religious liberty by a tyrannical federal government, Roy added.

Moreover, this decision comes at a time when members of both parties are trying to increase the ability of the IRS to harass individual Americans, businesses, and organizations.

Based in Garland, Texas, Christians Engaged is led by Bunni Pounds, a political consultant and conservative activist who ran for Congress in 2018 but lost in the Republican primary.

The religious organization filed for nonprofit status in 2019 and received a notice of denial from IRS Exempt Organizations Director Stephen A. Martin on May 18.

You engage in prohibited political campaign intervention, argued Martin. You are also not operated exclusively for one or more exempt purposes within the meaning of Section 501(c)(3), because you operate for a substantial non-exempt private purpose and for the private interests of the [Republican] party.

Martin also contended that the group could not receive a tax-exempt status because it worked to instruct people on what the Bible says about issues like the sanctity of life and marriage, which "generally distinguish candidates and are associated with political party platforms."

Christians Engaged has appealed the decision, with the First Liberty Institute, a conservative legal nonprofit that often handles religious freedom litigation, overseeing the appeal.

Only a politicized IRS could see Americans who pray for their nation, vote in every election, and work to engage others in the political process as a threat, said First Liberty Counsel Lea Patterson in a statement earlier this month.

The IRS violated its own regulations in denying tax-exempt status because Christians Engaged teaches biblical values.

Patterson also noted that the IRS granted a tax exemption to former first lady Michelle Obama and her activist group called When We All Vote.

In 2013, the IRS garnered national outrage when the agency admitted to having targeted conservative groups' tax-exempt applications that had the terms Tea Party or Patriot during the 2012 presidential election season.

Lois Lerner, then director of the IRS Exempt Organizations Division, apologized for the attacks, stating at the time that it was absolutely inappropriate and not the way we should do things.
National Archives task force slams Rotunda for 'structural racism, mythologizing America's founding Republican congressman says 'woke agenda seeking to revise America's history'

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A racism task force for the National Archives asserts that the United States' Founding Fathers are inappropriately laud[ed] and seeks to Reimagine the Rotunda to address the overarching system of racial bias and curb the structural racism in the federally-funded institution responsible for preserving the U.S. primary documents.

In the 105-page report completed in April 2021 and released this month, the task force detailed ways the National Archives can discuss racial inequality both internally and in customer-facing operations, contending that racism permeates all aspects of culture at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

National Archivist David Ferriero formed the task force following the death of George Floyd last year.

The task forces report cited Floyd's death in May 2020 as the backdrop that led the NARA to address racial inequality and structural racism in their institutions, alleging it unequivocally impacts how NARA staff interact with records, colleagues, and customers.

An example of structural racism emphasized in the report was found in the Rotunda, a room the task force contends lauds wealthy white men in the nations founding while marginalizing BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, People of Color], women, and other communities.

The Archives Rotunda displays the nations three primary founding documents: the original Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights. The Rotunda also highlights other elements of American history and the country's founding.

One of the actions the racism task force recommended was to Reimagine the Rotunda by recontextualizing murals and architectural elements, as well as a new exhibition that is more inclusive.

The report suggested that adding the perspective of non-white men and implementing dance or performance art in the Rotunda to invite dialogue about how the U.S. mythologized the founding era.

The report also suggested each NARA facility should add "safe spaces."

The task force realized the recommendation to re-design the central room of the flagship museum featuring the three main documents that chartered American freedom will cause dissension.

Reimagining the Rotunda will stir controversy, the document noted. Many Americans have embraced an idealized story of the nations founding as part of their personal identities. Those who interpret changes to the Rotunda as a challenge to passionately held beliefs may respond negatively.

Due to this, the task force said it would seek to add to instead of repudiate the nations origins, emphasizing that the traditional story of the founding fathers is not the whole story.

The task force concluded that it's time for NARA to encourage discussion of the difficult and divided history and embrace the complexity of the American story in the Rotunda, which they said involved including all of We the People in this space of the museum.

Its reverential, quasi-religious treatment of the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights does not adequately reflect a full history of the founding of the United States, the report said of the museums main space.

And as we are learning through the comments of staff and visitors, some find the Rotundas language and imagery exclusionary, the report continued.

The task force stated that the U.S. is reckoning with its past in unprecedented ways due to the Black Lives Matter movements role in increasing national interest in systemic racism.

The report emphasized a need for reform in accountability, resources, BIPOC recruitment and retention, training, internal reflection, outreach and external partnerships.

Conservative leaders have spoken out against the report they see as an attack on American history by the woke.

I look forward to the National Archives tearing down the rotunda and building instead a Tent of Grievances, conservative media host Ben Shapiro tweeted sarcastically.

Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee tweeted: Once again, American history is being denigrated by woke leftists. We will not stand for this. Are the leftists trying to destroy this country?

House Oversight Committee ranking member James Comer, R-Ky., told Fox News that the report is "nothing more than progressive propaganda seeking to erase our nations' history."

"America should be celebrated, not reviled  especially by our own federal government," Cormer said in a statement. "This report is a prime example of government waste. Taxpayer dollars should not be used to fund a woke agenda seeking to revise America's history."

Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., an African American who also serves on the House Oversight Committee, told the conservative news outlet that each time the political left "inappropriately uses" the term racism, "they are cheapening and lessening the real significance of the actual definition."

"One thing is abundantly clear; everything America represents is racist and evil to Democrats," Donalds was quoted as saying. "They will continue to tarnish this nation until they successfully change it. My goal is to make them unsuccessful."

Once again, American history is being denigrated by woke leftists. We will not stand for this. Are the leftists trying to destroy this country?https://t.co/RW8N3O9JxK  Sen. Marsha Blackburn (@MarshaBlackburn) June 27, 2021

The National Archive task force report comes as there has been a national debate surrounding critical race theory.

Critics contend that critical race theory is tied to Marxist critical theory and criticizes the U.S. and Western nations as being oppressive and promoting institutional systemic racism or white supremacy.

CRT teaches that systemic racism is ingrained in every aspect of American life and is a source of controversy as critics contend it divides people by race.

CRT first arose in academic journals three decades ago and is now being taught at public schools, government agencies and business training programs.

It has become a source of contention within the education system as it seeps into curriculums across the country.
Nurses protest Methodist hospital after over 150 lose jobs for refusing COVID-19 vaccine

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Over 100 protesters and counter-protesters gathered outside of Houston Methodist Hospital in Texas on Saturday in opposition to the hospital system's COVID-19 vaccine mandate that led to over 150 lost jobs.

Im running out of options for my career because of a mandatory vaccine that could affect my fertility," Keri R., a registered nurse previously employed at Houston Methodist, told FOX 26 Houston at the protest.

The hospital system, which includes eight hospitals and over 26,000 employees, set a Monday, June 7 deadline for all employees to be fully vaccinated.

Employees not fully vaccinated by then were suspended for 14 days without pay. And at the end of the suspension, those not fully vaccinated were fired or resigned.

Over 150 former employees were fired or resigned over their refusal to receive the mandated COVID-19 vaccine.

Some employees received an exemption for pregnancy, medical and religious reasons.

The hospitals April vaccine mandate made it the first major healthcare system in the United States to do so, ABC News reported.

Over 100 former employees have filed a lawsuit regarding the mandatory COVID-19 vaccine policy.

Jennifer Bridges, a registered nurse and the leading plaintiff, worked at the hospital for nearly seven years before being fired for refusing to receive the mandatory vaccine.

Bridges still has natural antibodies from already having the virus, which protects her from receiving it again.

She said they are not giving proper informed consent about the vaccine and are turning people into guinea pigs.

"I have personally witnessed horrible adverse reactions to hundreds and hundreds of people," Bridges told FOX 26 Houston on Saturday.

"It scares me because the public doesnt know the truth," she said.

U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes, Ronald Reagan appointee, dismissed the lawsuit on June 12, deeming Bridges allegations that the vaccines are experimental and dangerous false and irrelevant, according to court documents.

Bridges said they plan to continue fighting the hospital managements mandated vaccine policy in court and believes the lawsuit will reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

The COVID-19 vaccine is currently administered through an Emergency Use Authorization by the Food and Drug Administration but has not yet met the requirements to be FDA-approved since it is still in its early stages.

Dr. Marc Boom, Houston Methodist President and CEO, said around 25,000 members of the staff had been vaccinated, and he believes it is safe.

"We can now put this behind us and continue our focus on unparalleled safety, quality, service and innovation," Boom said in a statement.

"All our employees have now met the requirements of the vaccine policy and I couldnt be prouder of them, he continued. Our employees and physicians made their decisions for our patients, who are always at the center of everything we do. They have fulfilled their sacred obligation as health care workers, and we couldnt ask for a more dedicated, caring and talented team."

Boom said in a statement that unfortunately, a small number of individuals have decided not to put their patients first.

The Christian Post reached out to Houston Methodist Hospital for comment but did not receive a response by press time.

Reports have recently surfaced linking heart inflammation, especially in adolescents, to receiving the mRNA vaccine.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has maintained that the benefits of receiving the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine outweigh the risks.

A CDC safety panel reported last week, however, that there is a likely a likely association between receiving the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine and heart inflammation in adolescents and young adults.

The latest report from the CDC shows over 179 million Americans, or 54%, are fully vaccinated.

Many public and private colleges and universities require students to receive the vaccination for the next school year, which has sparked concern.

Dr. Robert Malone, who helped create some of the mRNA technology used in the COVID-19 vaccine, appeared on Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight last week to discuss his concerns about the vaccine for people who are not at high risk for COVID-19, like children and young adults.

"[O]ne of my concerns are that the government is not being transparent with us about what those risks are. And so, I am of the opinion that people have the right to decide whether to accept vaccines or not, especially since these are experimental vaccines," Malone said on the show.

For young adults, at least, Malone said he has a bias that the benefits probably don't outweigh the risks and said a proper risk-benefit analysis had not been done.

Reports have also surfaced that West Point cadets have faced harsh treatment for opting out of receiving the vaccine.

New York has implemented a universal vaccine passport system to enter participating businesses, while other states like Florida have banned vaccine passports and restrict any business or entity from requiring proof of vaccination status.
SBC Pres. Ed Litton apologizes for copying JD Greear sermon without credit

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Days after a video posted on YouTube highlighted similarities between separate sermons delivered by Southern Baptist Convention President Ed Litton and his predecessor, J.D. Greear, who both suggest that God appears to "whisper" about sexual sin in the Bible, Litton has apologized for not giving credit to Greear.

Yesterday, some questions arose about a sermon I delivered in January 2020 on Romans 1, addressing the sin of homosexuality. Specifically, there were concerns about similarities with a sermon delivered by J.D. Greear a year earlier, Litton, the pastor of Redemption Church in Alabama, explained in a statement Saturday.

  I am sorry for not mentioning J.D.s generosity and ownership of these points. I should have given him credit as I shared these insights.

The approximately seven-minute clip highlighting the similarities of the sermons delivered by Greear and Litton drew allegations of plagiarism and concerns about their theology on how sexual sins are treated in the Bible.

Twice in a row, the Southern Baptist Convention has elected a president who teaches that the Bible "whispers" about sexual sin.



Wouldn't you think that appointing leaders who preach that the Bible "whispers" about sexual sin is the wrong way to fight sex abuse? pic.twitter.com/nCtdeGLXqG  Gabriel Hughes (@Pastor_Gabe) June 22, 2021

Twice in a row, the Southern Baptist Convention has elected a president who teaches that the Bible whispers about sexual sin. Wouldn't you think that appointing leaders who preach that the Bible whispers about sexual sin is the wrong way to fight sex abuse? tweetedPastor Gabriel Hughes of First Baptist Church in Lindale, Texas, in early criticism of the sermons a week ago.

While arguing that homosexuality is sinful, both Greear, who leads The Summit Church in North Carolina, and Litton make nearly identical comments about the behavior.

Homosexuality does not send you to Hell, Greear notes in the clip. You know how I know that? Because heterosexuality does not send you to Heaven.

In his sermon, Litton notes: Homosexuality does not send people to Hell. How do I know that? Because heterosexuality doesnt send people to Heaven.

In his explanation of the similarities between their sermons, Litton said he had Greears permission to use his ideas but noted that the lack of credit was an oversight on the part of his preaching team.

Like thousands of other Southern Baptist pastors, I labor every week, preparing to stand in front of the congregation God has called me to serve. In preparation for our series on Romans, I used several resources to help me think through how to structure the series and how best to communicate the profound truths we encounter in these passages, Litton stated.

We employ a preaching team approach at Redemption Church that is comprised of eight men from our staff/congregation who meet weekly to discuss study insights, outlines, and approaches to the text. This sermon prep process includes working in the languages, consulting commentaries and books, and listening to strong communicators. In that process, I learned about my friend J.D. Greear's messages on Romans and discovered what he had recently preached resonated with the direction God was leading me and our preaching team. We often consulted his manuscripts along with other resources as we prepared."

Litton said that he found Greear's message on Romans 1 "insightful," especially "his three points of application."

"With his permission, I borrowed some of his insights and those three closing points," Litton wrote. "Our team also, with his permission, used The Summit Churchs chapter and verse breakdown of Romans as we mapped out our entire series."

The pastor further noted that his team has since done an audit of all 46 sermons in the teaching series and found similar "similar illustrations, quotes or points of application."

"One shares the same title, and one has a similar outline, Litton said.

I felt it important to address this in order to provide the truth and to take responsibility for places where I should have been more careful. I am committed to being a man of integrity and humility. I will not waver from that as I lead Redemption Church to be Christ followers and the SBC to unite around her mission."

In a statement posted to his website, Greear stated that his Romans series "got a lot of traction" as "clips and summaries of this message were shared on a number of blog and podcast sites." He called it "one of the most widely distributed messages" he ever preached at The Summit Church.

"Several months later, Pastor Ed Litton reached out and told me that he had really appreciated my take on Pauls warnings in that chapter and asked if he could use some of the content with his congregation, as well as how we had broken down our entire series on Romans at The Summit Church," Greear detailed. "I told him that whatever bullets of mine worked in his gun, to use them! My own take on these kinds of things is usually shaped by the input of many godly men and women. Ed and I have been friends for many years and we have talked often about these matters, and I was honored that he found my presentation helpful."

Greear added that "much has also been made" about his statement that Christians should "whisper about what the Bible whispers about and shout about what it shouts about.

" ... I was in no way trying to imply that sexual ethics are muted in Scripture, that we should not speak clearly about them, or that we should be embarrassed by them," Greear said. "The preceding point of that message, in fact, which was not included in the clips that got passed around, makes that abundantlyclear. In that point, I state plainly Scripture could not be clearer about these matters and that rebellion in sexual sin, as 1 Cor 6:911 states in no uncertain terms, is a matter of eternal destiny."

"When Tom Ascol and a few of the same pastors seemingly looking to trap me in my words first highlighted these things nearly two years ago, they never reached out to me for clarification, a clarification I would have been happy to supply," he added. "Some others did, and when I shared the fuller context of my words, most were satisfied, even if they still preferred I avoid the shout/whisper analogy. The redacted clip was used to imply that I was saying something that I clearly was not saying. Whether or not this was an intentional misrepresentation I cannot judge, but it was at best a negligent one."
Cancer Treatment News 2016: Pfizer Closes $14-B Deal with Medivation Inc.; Deal Details and What the Agreement Entails

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Following months of high-stakes negotiations, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer clinched a $14-billion merger agreement to acquire US biopharmaceutical company Medivation Monday.

The deal closed in at $81.50 per share in cash, which meant Medivation raked in more than twice the $6 billion value it was pegged earlier this year.

In a press release, Pfizer underlined the significance of this acquisition in making the pharma giant a world leader in oncology and cancer treatments. Both companies expressed their belief in combatting two of the most common cancers, breast and prostate, by bringing together their combined research to create accessible breakthrough medicine for patients.

What Pfizer will gain from the deal

Pfizer stands to gain from the promising cancer treatments in Medivation's pipeline, the statement said. This includes a prostate cancer treatment called Xtandi, which is projected to generate $1.33 billion in annual sales by 2020. Another contingent late-asset consideration is the future sales of a breast cancer drug called Talazoparib, which is at its late-stage trials.

These cancer drugs, according to Pfizer Innovative Health president Albert Bourla, would greatly complement Pfizer's success with its own breast cancer drug, Ibrance.

Oncology treatment continues to be one of the biggest pharmaceutical markets, hitting $80 million a year and growing. In Medivation's second-quarter earnings call, Xtandi alone reported double-digit growth, affirming the pharma giant's expectations on the blockbuster drug.

Earlier this year

Pfizer was not the only company that expressed a strong interest over Medivation. Merck and Co., Celgene, Sanofi, and Gilead Sciences, Inc., all joined the bidding for Medivation. It was put into play after Sanofi offered $52.50 per share.

Earlier this year, Pfizer was thought to split after being forced to walk away from a $150 million takeover of the company Allergan PLC, following new US Treasury rules that would greatly dent tax benefits of the deal.

Pfizer's business is two-pronged. It houses an innovative arm for new drugs and vaccines, as it is poised to do so with the acquisition of Medivation. It also has an established products business that sells older drugs, as with Pfizer's $17-million acquisition of Hospira, which brought biosimilars to its medical portfolio.

About the company: Medivation

According to a report from the Washington Street Journal, Medivation is one of the few independent biotechs that has successfully launched a cancer treatment. Its Xtandi, stands on solid footing against its rival Zytiga from Johnson & Johnson, raking in almost $2.2 billion in 2015.

This is not the first time Pfizer and Medivation got involved, though not always to the tune of medical triumph. In 2012, they worked on an Alzheimers' trial called CONCERT and failed miserably, forcing the termination of the drug's development.
Disney Likely to Offer Monetary Damage, Settlement: Lane Graves' Cause of Death Revealed in Autopsy Graves Family Grateful With Overwhelming Love and Support But Asked For Privacy

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The recent alligator attack in Walt Disney Resort involving Lane Grave continues. The Medical Examiner's office has released the cause of death of the little boy, with Disney likely to offer money as a settlement.

Graves' family from Nebraska went to Orlando's Walt Disney Resort for a vacation on Tuesday, June 14. Two-year-old Lane Grave was playing near the shallows of Seven Seas Lagoon when an alligator grabbed him and pulled him under the water.

His father, Matt Graves, quickly rushed to try and save him. He dove into the lagoon with some witnesses to fend off the alligator. He suffered from lacerations on his hands but was unable to rescue the boy. Lifeguards were then immediately summoned and dispatched in the area for a night-long search. After 16 hours of search-and-rescue operations, the boy's body was found no more than 15 yards away from the area.

Recently Conducted Autopsy Report

According to a report released by the Medical Examiner's Office, the autopsy revealed that the boy died as a result of drowing and traumatic injuries.

Matt Morgan, an Orlando attorney said, "The Walt Disney Corporation has a duty to warn their hotel guests of any dangers that they either know about or should know about".

"If Disney had knowledge that there were alligators in the lagoon and did not take steps to inform their guests of such dangers, then they could be liable," he added

In an interview by PEOPLE, a Disney spokeperson confirmed that there were signs that read "No Swimming" posted in the area but there's no signage about alligator warnings.

According to Morgan, a case against Disney is in balance regarding their knowledge of the alligator's existence in the lagoon and the lack of necessary measures to warn their guests.

Graves Family Grateful for the Public's Overwhelming Support



In the recent statement released by the Graves family, Matt said: "Melissa and I continue to deal with the loss of our beloved boy, Lane, and are overwhelmed with the support and love we have received from family and friends in our community as well as from around the country".

"We understand the public's interest, but as we move forward this weekend, we ask for and appreciate the privacy we need to lay our son to rest. Neither Melissa, myself or anyone from our family will be speaking publicly; we simply cannot at this time." he added.

In their previous statement released on June 16, Mr and Mrs Graves wrote: "Words cannot describe the shock and grief our family is experiencing over the loss of our son. We are devastated and ask for privacy during this extremely difficult time. To all of the local authorities and staff who worked tirelessly these past 24 hours, we express our deepest gratitude."

Lane Grave's funeral will be held in St. Patrick's Catholic Church in Elkhorn, Nebraska on June 19.
Is Daily Mail Bidding for Yahoo?

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Daily Mail, a parent company of one of the most popular newspapers in the UK, is reportedly in advanced talks with various private equity firms in the hope of placing a bid for Yahoo Inc.

According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, the Daily Mail & General Trust PLC's prospective bid may come in two varieties, the first one of which is when an equity partner will acquire the core web business of Yahoo while the Daily Mail will be taking over the media and news components. For the second variety meanwhile, the equity partner will still be acquiring the core web business while at the same time will merge its media and news branches with the current and existing online operations of the Daily Mail. In this kind of setup, the units subjected to the merge will then be used to form a new company, which in turn will be run by the Mail.

There actually has been little talk about Yahoo being up for sale, up until now when the Daily Mail became a player. Accordingly, other major players, Time Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. are also trying to look for its own private equity firm to work on for a bid, with the focus on Yahoo's core internet businesses.

The same WSJ report revealed that Yahoo has set the deadline for the preliminary bids for April 18, which is a few days from now.

According to multiple sources, Yahoo has already conducted initial talks and meetings with the major players in the potential sale of the company, including CBS Corporation, IAC/InterActiveCorp, and Verizon, but the same sources say that The Mail hasn't approached or contacted any of Yahoo's representatives as of this writing.

At present, the news and media properties include Yahoo Finance, Yahoo News, and Yahoo Sports.
Mitsubishi Motor Corps News: Company Confirms Mileages Tampering

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Mitsubishi Motors Corp. recently released a statement about the investigations surrounding their model vehicles.

According to CNBC, there were previous reports that accused Mitsubishi Motors Corp. of tampering with their model mileages. The company recently confirmed that they have been tampering with their mileages ever since 1991.

The case was about the Mitsubishi models also known as minicars with small engines. Many were attracted to the models as they supposedly had an exceptional mileage that were released in 2013. The inconsistent information regarding the models were brought up by Nissan, which led to the investigation of the company's past.

The issue of mileage fraud is reportedly a violation in Japan's law. It was stated that buyers are able to receive tax breaks if they possess a vehicle with good mileage.

The president of Mitsubishi Motors Corp. Tetsuro Aikawa addressed the issue in front of reports last week, explaining that they are still doing an internal investigation. He said that there is no explanation yet as to why employees decided to tamper with the mileages.

While he explained that there is still no official statement regarding what the company will do about the problem, he said, "We don't know the whole picture and we are in the process of trying to determine that. I feel a great responsibility."

However, the brand is still struggling to maintain the trust on many consumers. The company has past experiences concerning the defect in their products, such as insufficient brakes, problematic clutches, and failing fuel tanks. The lack is quality management caused the recall of around a million vehicles.

One of Mitsubishi Motor's shareholders, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) recently shared their sentiments on the issues. The MHI president, Shunichi Miyanaga stated, "Mitsubishi Motors has come a long way since past problems, so this is very disappointing. We need to think about the brand image of the Mitsubishi Group, its social responsibility and accountability for performance."
New York City 'Trophy' Apartment Units Could Sell for $250 Million Each Welcome to the residential apartments that are tagged among the priciest in the world.

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Units at the 70-floor skyscraper overlooking Central Park could sell for about $250 million each, a price that only billionaires can afford to pay.

Dubbed "One57," the residential building is still being consticle published tructed near Central Park but the price of its units has already become a hot topic, said an Associated Press arby Daily Mail. A four-story apartment in this building could cost more than twice than expensive penthouse units in other luxury condos overlooking the New York City urban park.

All these price details were revealed in the documents filed by the developer at the attorney general's office, the Associated Press added. The hefty price surely comes with luxury for the buyer as a unit comes with 16 bedrooms, 17 bedrooms, a large terrace and five balconies to accommodate family gatherings and even visiting guests.

Monthly charges for units in this building could read $45,000. That is aside from the almost $700,000 annual taxes for an apartment housed in the skyscraper.

The floor plan of the units make the apartments look like a really big house inside a tall building. "These are the trophy buildings of our era, and the foreign buyer clearly fuels this very, very high-end condominium tower market," broker John Burger told the Associated Press.

On its official website, One57 described the skyscraper as the work of award-winning architect Christian De Portzamparc. He has created a building which walls are made of glass to give owners an "unobstructed view" of New York and Manhattan at the comfort of their own homes.

The interiors of the apartment units also revealed perfectly designed homes with the help of Danish designer Thomas Juul-Hansen. One57 appears to have a new modernist approach to apartment living in the big city.

The Associated Press added that the design and engineering of the building gives unit owners with a breathtaking 360-degree view of New York. They can also look down at Central Park and other landmarks in the city from the 70-story building which first opened in 2014 but is still being completed.

It now occupies 220 Central Park and is taking shape to become the highest residential building in the area. Buyers, who are planning to spend their fortune on these trophy units, are expected to invest to this new development at the heart of New York.

Other similar developments in New York are the Central Park Tower and the 520 Park Avenue. These skyscrapers will also offer luxurious apartments units for the rich.
Nokia is Making a Comeback, Reveals New Finnish Partner

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Nokia once dominated the mobile phone market in a time when smartphones weren't introduced yet. But the Finnish multinational communications and information technology company couldn't keep up with the competition, especially when the likes of Google's Android and Apple Inc's iOS took control of the market and it resisted change.

After selling its handset unit and literally surrendering the company to Microsoft back in 2014, the phone maker is back in the fold. According to multiple reports, Nokia is about to make a global comeback and will focus on introducing new mobile phones and tablets to consumers. According to The Associated Press, the brand will be working with a recently built Finnish company called HMD Global Ltd.

The company released a statement, confirming that it will be granting HMD an exclusive global license to build mobile phones and tablets with Nokia branding for the next decade. On the other hand, Microsoft, according to a report from AFP, said that HMD Global, in partnership with FIH Mobile of FoxConn Technology, will be taking over its feature phone business in an agreed amount of $350 million. This stake is the same one it purchased from Nokia two years ago.

Nokia's attempt on a comeback this time has more chances of succeeding compared to what it did back in 2011, the reason is because the new products are reportedly going to be run by Google's Android mobile operating system. Back in 2011 when its dominance in the market was wiped away by the rapid increase in popularity of Samsung smartphones, the company made a crucial mistake by choosing the Windows mobile platform instead of Android. The experiment became a total failure. It had no choice but to sell its handset unit to Microsoft for $7.2 billion.

This time, Nokia has a rare chance to redeem itself and become a significant player in the mobile device and tablet industry once again.
Starbucks: First South Africa Branch Draws Crowds After First Week

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Last week, Starbucks opened its first South Africa branch in Johannesburg with people crowding the place for their first try of the hit brews and a week after the launch day, throngs of people are still patiently waiting in line to get their orders.

According to Reuters, Starbucks founder and chief executive Howard Schultz said, "I've never seen a line like this after a week of our opening." The Johannesburg store opened Thursday last week and it is expected the business will keep running smoothly with the number of people still eager to get their hands on the hit brand.

On Friday, Schultz also declared that the coffee chain is planning to open up to 150 stores all across South Africa. BBC News said that city socialites graced the opening day, giving their approval to the luxury brand that is the first in sub-Saharan Africa.

A lot of people even waited overnight for the store to open and #StarbucksSA became a trending hashtag on Twitter almost the entire day. Keabetswe Kgantisoe, a customer who lives about 20 miles away from Johannesburg, expressed her joy as she was one of the first hundred people who got a taste of the famous brew.

"I had my first Starbucks on holiday in England and I'm so happy that they've come here it's about time," Kgantisoe said.

Meanwhile, the first few trainees who are hoping to earn money through working with the company have completed Changing Lanes, a five-day program spearheaded by Taste Holdings that aims to train unemployed locals as they enter the workplace.

Taste Holdings is Starbucks' South African franchise partner and along with nonprofit organization Khulisa Social Solutions, it came up with the program to help resolve the widespread unemployment issue in the area.

Victor Ntshitshongo is one of the trainees who completed the course and in an article on the giant coffee chain's official website, his story of getting inspiration from the opportunity given by Changing Lanes is told.

"I'm very grateful for the opportunity that Changing Lanes and Starbucks has given me. It's one hell of a journey, I can say," he said.
Verizon Strike Update: Shares Drop as Strikers Continue to Put Pressure on White House

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Over the past weeks, Verizon has been placed in a rather tight spot and on Thursday, the White House was once again shaken to its core as strikers marched outside the building, with the assurance of various unions helping the striking employees to hopefully deliver their message to the country's highest office.

According to RT News, Verizon shares have dropped by 1.49 percent on Thursday. Previously, the company's Chief Financial Officer admitted that new businesses have been affected by the strike that started on April 13.

Around 37,000 members of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) joined the strike as most of them worked under Verizon's wireline services.

Five weeks later, the Obama administration finally placed its hand on the border and urged the telecommunications giant to settle the issue among themselves. The strikers believe that Verizon, a company that is raking up to $1.8 billion per month in profits, should not slash pay, benefits and pensions.

The company has iterated over the past weeks that the "last, best, final" offer was made on April 28, and that the ongoing strike won't really affect its service levels as it has hired 10,000 temporary employees to replace those who decided to join the withdrawing employees.

For the strikers and the unions, there was no such thing as a "best" offer as healthcare benefits for the striking workers and their families have come to an end on April 30. The march for cause continues and some outlets were able to catch the ongoing protest outside the White House on Friday.

The protesters include a huge number of service installers, meaning there are telephone, cable TV, and broadband Internet consumers who have not been reached due to the walk out.

Fortune says Verizon Communications may see a considerable drop in customers applying for cable TV and broadband service since new installations are vital in computing capital costs. With the loss of service installers, new installations will also be hampered.

The massive walk-out of workers has led to various heated exchanges between the protesting party and Verizon, including an armed confrontation in the Philippines last week between heavily armed Philippine police officers and visiting U.S. striking employees.
Whole Foods Market to Open Lower-Priced 365 Grocery Store

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It's exciting to hear when one of the most expensive grocery stores in the country opens up a branch that offers lower-priced goods, and that is exactly what Whole Foods Market is doing with the 365 concept.

The very first "365 by Whole Foods Market" will be opening in Silver Lake on May 25, according to the Los Angeles Times. The Texas-based company markets it as a "quality meets value," type of store that will target young consumers, more specifically those within the age of 18 to 34 who are looking for organic and all-natural goods, but this time on substantially lower prices.

Whole Foods Market has been hit hard by the biggest supermarkets and stores in the nation with the trend of putting more shelf space for organic food products, which is probably why the organics giant is taking the fight to them by opening a new and more affordable version of their stores.

The president of 365, Jeff Turnas said that they exhausted all possible options in order to find product efficiency since the very concept of the store is to be able to offer affordable organic and natural food without turning its back away from the very principles of Whole Foods Markets. Accordingly, the new grocery store in Silver Lake in LA will be featuring a restaurant, coffee bar, and a tea kiosk. Turnas added that they simply wanted to curate an experience that's unique to the place.

For those wondering how they could produce revenue by making a "cheaper" version of their traditional grocery stores, the company says that they're doing it by saving on the costs of labor since the number of workers are going to be reduced, while also limiting the range of products to be offered in the shelves. The idea is to put up some displays which are affordable but will still look good in the eyes of consumers.
After COVID-19 kills 60 members, church re-examines role in community

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NEW YORK  In 2020, COVID-19 moved through the congregation at Saint Peters Lutheran Church in Midtown Manhattan like an invisible tsunami, leaving a trail of victims in its wake.

At the start of the pandemic last March, Saint Peters Lutheran Church was a thriving congregation of about 250. By May, at least 39 people connected to the progressive church had died from the virus, including about 5% of direct members.

Scores more would get sick.

In virtual masses, the congregations leader, Pastor Fabian Arias, would pray for the sick and the dead, calling their names while making supplications to God. Still, the church would lose some 24% of its members to the virus in the months that followed.

There was a total loss of 60 members in that congregation to the virus, Paul Egensteiner, Bishop of the Metropolitan New York Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, told The Christian Post in an interview.

Now, as the nation re-emerges from the deadly pandemic that left hundreds of thousands dead and shuttered many churches across the country, Saint Peters Lutheran Church is trying to leave the burden of COVID-19 deaths behind and embrace the life left in its community again.

To do their jobs, many pastors in the New York Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America have been flexible and have used online tools such as Zoom to connect with members remotely, Egensteiner said. At the same time, congregants at Saint Peters Lutheran Church and across the synod are eager to come together in person as a family again.

Theres still what were experiencing a tremendous desire for people to be back in person, [to be] able to sing hymns. You cant really sing hymns on Zoom because you have everybody on different timing, so people want to be back, Egensteiner said. They want to hear their voices joined together in praise for God. They want to be able to see one anothers faces and be in community together.

While they are eager to leave the challenges of the pandemic behind, many of the churches in the New York synod, like Saint Peters, plan to use the lessons they learned from the pandemic to inform their ministry more effectively.

One of the reasons that Saint Peters lost so many members in the pandemic is that many of the members are immigrants, people of color and come from low-income households.

Some parishioners are also undocumented. Many were unable to work or access government aid during the height of the pandemic.

Whereas especially here in New York, we get a report from our governor very often about the decreasing [COVID-19 infection] rates, the increasing vaccinations. Everybody is excited about the possibilities that open up for interaction. But that is also balanced, especially in our church, and St. Peters is an example of this, of not wanting to lose the lessons that weve learned over the past year, Egensteiner explained.

[Lessons] about reaching people through remote worship but also about how this pandemic has unevenly affected communities of color, our immigrant communities, our marginalized communities, and how we as a Church are called to address those needs and respond to the inequities and the injustice that has surfaced as a result of this pandemic. So theres that balance between wanting to be back and not wanting to get back to normal. What has God shown us through this experience that reminds us of how were called to be Church at this time and address those real human issues for Gods children?

Egensteiner pointed to issues emerging as major flashpoints during the pandemic, such as food insecurity and systemic racial inequities, which his synod hopes to address in more tangible ways in the wake of 2020.

Over the course of the past year-plus, many of our churches reached out with feeding ministries. And now, there is concern to address some of the systemic reasons that people go hungry," he explained. "So hand-in-hand with our direct aid, were looking to strengthen our advocacy work. In fact, as part of our vision plan, one of the focus areas of our vision plan is advocacy to change some of the systemic issues in our society. And the other thing that were really working on is to partner congregations that maybe dont have that direct access to some of these concerns with congregations that are in the middle of those communities and neighborhoods that experience that impact."

One of the first steps to address the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on communities of color is vaccination. Egensteiner said his denomination supports congregants getting vaccinated.

Our national bishop has been very clear on advocating for vaccinations because thats how we show love for others, and thats one of our central priorities is to love all people, he said.

Despite his denominations policy, however, Egensteiner says they also respect congregants who choose not to get the COVID-19 vaccine.

We dont out people who dont get the vaccine. This one congregation, in particular, has two sections in their Sunday morning in-person worship  vaccinated people and unvaccinated people, he said. Were still welcoming unvaccinated people for whatever reason they dont want to get the vaccine but definitely encouraging people to get vaccinated to allow for more of the togetherness and activities that are important to us.

Egensteiner also acknowledged that as congregants return to the pews, they will also be paying attention to the pandemic's mental health impact by making sure pastors are healthy enough to serve.

Recently, the president of the Atlantic District of the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church convened a gathering of all our institutional chaplains to talk to them about what their work is like and to provide support because theyre often on the frontlines [helping] people who are dealing with both physical and mental health issues," the bishop said.

He said that the denomination is "providing direct support to our chaplains who then provide support to people struggling with those issues."

Egensteiner said the plan is to convene meetings in the fall covering four areas of the synod. The meetings will bring pastors together to allow them to "share their stories and their struggles."

"[I]n the Lutheran system, congregations are the most important places where direct impact on peoples lives take place," he said. "And if our pastors arent healthy, they cant provide adequate pastoral care to the people in their congregations and their communities. So were really focusing on the health and well-being of our pastors.

The New York bishop says the most critical lesson he believes all churches can take away from the pandemic is the importance of providing people with community to provide for their spiritual needs.

What we realize that were learning is we need community. We need in-person community, not just online community. And Im not diminishing the importance of online community because it has helped a lot of people. But we need that in-person community, he assured.

We need that community in whatever form  online or in-person  to be as the Church, the community that provides us with identity and meaning. That centers us in a deeper identity than the realities or the partisanship thats so much part of our world."

And that identity, he said, acknowledges that every single person, that all of creation is beloved of God.

If we can appreciate that identity together, and congregations are really good at this, they have their differences, but theyll worship together. And we take that shared identity, and we use that as a launching point to bring that message up to the world to build bridges and relationships and larger community," Egensteiner said.

"That can help us to tackle some of these systemic problems in more creative and united ways than we have been able to so far. I think that weve really learned that the Church which has this, to quote Saint Paul, the treasure of the Gospel in clay vessels, in breakable jars, must give itself away for the sake of the world because Christ has entrusted us with this message that is exactly  what the world needs to hear. And we cant be shy about that because the message that we have is as critical as it always was.
Share of children living in 2-parent homes reaches highest level in nearly 30 years: report

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The percentage of children living in a two-parent household has hit its highest point in nearly 30 years, according to a report by the Institute for Family Studies.

In an analysis of 2020 United States Census data, the conservative think tank released a report earlier this month titled Growing Up With Mom and Dad: New Data Confirm The Tide Is Turning.

According to 2020 data, 70.4% of people under 18 live in a home with two parents, while 25.5% live with one parent and 4.1% live with neither parent.

The finding on children living in two-parent homes is a slight increase from the 69.4% reported in 2010 and 69.1% reported in 2000. However, it remains slightly below the 72.5% recorded in 1990 and well below the 87.7% from 1960.

The report also drew from 2012 and 2020 data from the U.S. Department of Education's National Household Education Survey, which likewise shows increases in the presence of two-parent households for high school seniors.

This data suggests that from 2012 to 2019, the percentage of white high school seniors living in two-parent homes went from 55.8% to 59.1%, while the share of black high school seniors living in two-parent homes went from 24.3% to 29.6%.

Nicholas Zill, research psychologist and a senior fellow at IFS, wrote in the report that although certainly not out of intensive care, the supposed corpse of the two-parent family seems to be breathing new life.

All the experts agreed: the nuclear family was on its way out. The two-parent family of married mother and father bringing up their own biological children would soon be replaced by a menagerie of alternate family forms, wrote Zill.

And for more than a half-century, each years tabulation from the Census Bureau on childrens living arrangements seemed to be proving the experts right.

In comments emailed to The Christian Post on Tuesday, Zill explained that he found the increase in two-parent homes for children to be a somewhat surprising result.

He attributed the slight turnaround to multiple factors, among them marriages happening at older ages and education levels, a decline in teen childbirth and a greater awareness of benefits of two-parent upbringing.

In his analysis, Zill states that before "celebrating the turning of the tide," it's important to note that "the standard Census Bureau family trend charts underestimate how grave the condition of the two-parent family has been and still is."

"The Bureau lumps stepparent and adoptive families with both birth-parent families, making their two-parent category more inclusive than commonly understood," Zill wrote. "Furthermore, children in stepfamilies and adoptive families have experienced family disruption. The evidence is that they have higher rates of emotional, behavior, and learning problems than those residing with both birth parents."

Despite the recent uptick, the Census Bureau warned in April that the percentage of children living only with their mothers has doubled since 1968.

In 1968, 85% of children under 18 lived with two parents. About 11% of children lived with their mothers only in 1968. By comparison, 21% of children in 2020 were reported to live with their mothers only.

The number of children living with their fathers only has quadrupled from about 1% in 1968 to 4.5% in 2020.

Last November, IFS released a report based on the Census Bureaus American Community Survey, which found that in 2019, the U.S. had its lowest divorce rate since 1970.

In 2019, according to the report, for every 1,000 marriages, 14.9 ended in divorce. The figure is lower than it was in 1970, which had a rate of 15 divorces per 1,000 marriages.

The 2019 numbers on divorce were also considerably lower than the data from 1980 when the National Vital Statistics had reported a divorce rate of 22.6 divorces per 1,000 marriages.

IFS Director of Research Dr. Wendy Wang, the author of the 2020 report, told CP at the time that while the divorce rate has been declining since the 1980s, the rate has been falling much faster in the past decade.

People are getting married later in life these days, and they are less likely to rush into a marriage which they may regret later on. On the other hand, we've seen the record low marriage rate happening in the U.S., explained Wang in 2020.

College-educated adults are more likely than those without a college degree to get married, and their divorce rate is lower.
Jim Jordan blasts Microsoft over censorship of posts critical of China, Hunter Biden

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Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio has accused Microsoft of censoring posts critical of China and Hunter Biden on its search engine Bing and on LinkedIn and urging users of Microsoft Word to use "gender-neutral" language.

In a letter addressed to Microsoft President Brad Smith, Jordan said major technology companies, including Microsoft, were out to get conservatives, adding that its exertion of "editorial control over user-generated content" was "Orwellian."

He pointed to its control over the content in its platforms, including Linkedin and the search engine Bing, as examples.

Regarding Bing, Jordan said the search engine censored results about Tank Man, the famous civilian dissident from the Tiananmen Square protests.

"On behalf of the Chinese Communist Party, Microsoft has censored Bing search

engine results of Tank Man on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests  including

results for users in the United States  and has muzzled the voices of China critics on LinkedIn."

Also on Linkedin, Jordan pointed to instances in which the site censored negative news reports about President Joe Biden's son, Hunter, and a post about an "official U.S. Senate committee report" on his dealings in Ukraine, as well as posts about COVID-19's origins at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Jordan said Linkedin also "removed a post that linked to a study challenging prevailing liberal views on climate change."

The congressman also criticized House Democrats, who he argued had failed to properly examine Microsofts conduct during their investigation of competition in digital markets.

It is unclear why Microsoft has avoided significant attention from House Democrats. The Democrats investigation excluded Microsoft from significant oversight and the Democrats recently introduced bills include a definition of a covered platform that could be read to exclude Microsoft, continued Jordan.

Jordan called on Congress to, among other things, look into why Microsoft was censoring user content about Hunter Bidens alleged scandals, the possible origins of COVID-19, and other issues.

Jordan is the top-ranking Republican member of the House Judiciary Committee, with his letter coming as legislation is being considered to look into modifying antitrust laws in ways that would impact tech giants Facebook, Amazon, Google and Apple, according to CNBC.

His letter, however, is not without its critics, as the libertarian-leaning publication Reason magazine critiqued the congressman's claims, labeling them a flimsy crusade.

In a column published Tuesday, Reason's senior editor Elizabeth Nolan Brown wrote that Jordans accusations against Microsoft largely rests on a few anecdotes about Microsoft-owned LinkedIn suppressing posts about Joe Biden's son Hunter, recent executive orders, or COVID-19.

She added that while one or two posts criticizing Hunter Biden were taken down, many others were never censored, opening the possibility for other explanations for their removal.

Jordan's argument is simply that Microsoft may have made a handful of content moderation decisions he doesn't like, so federal meddling is warranted, she wrote.

Brown did agree with Jordan that it is strange that Microsoft has been so absent from today's overreaching antitrust revival.

Though Microsoft was the bete noire of antitrust zealots in the 1990s and early '00s  it has largely escaped the wrath of today's crusaders against tech companies, continued Brown.

Back then, the company had cultural cache and rising power. Today, it's still a powerhouse but it doesn't stir culture war sentiment the same way, say, Facebook and Google do.
Kamala Harris hits back at criticism over El Paso check the box trip, skipping epicenter of border crisis

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Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday visited a Border Patrol station in El Paso, Texas, for the first time since she was tapped months ago by President Joe Biden to be the administration's border czar to solve the immigration crisis.

Harris faced criticism this week for going to El Paso instead of the Rio Grande Valley where communities are most affected by the migrant surge.

For her part, Harris defended her decision to go to El Paso, telling reporters at a news conference at the airport that her trip wasn't a check the box visit to the border, as some Democratic lawmakers have suggested.

"What is happening here in El Paso ... in many ways highlights many of the facets on the issue of immigration," the vice president asserted.

She also implored people to recognize the humanity of those fleeing their home countries to immigrate to the U.S., even if they are doing so illegally.

"We have to address ... the root causes, otherwise we'll continue to see the effect [of] what is happening at the border," said Harris in her address to reporters, adding that it will take a comprehensive approach. ... "Not only do we have a reason to concern ourselves with the root cause issues, because of what we see at the border, but also because we live in that neighborhood  the Western Hemisphere."

Harris, who didn't address border security, said migrants are often fleeing violence, corruption, food insecurity, gang violence and cartels.

"Let's not lose sight of the fact that we are talking about human beings. Let's not lose sight of the fact that we're talking about stories ... that involve horrendous tales of abuse and fear and harm. Not only for folks ... in their home country experiencing that, but along the part of their migration," she added.

Other officials who traveled with Harris included Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-Texas.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, condemned Harris for visiting El Paso, which is approximately 790 miles from regions in Texas where the crisis is most severe, such as in McAllen, Texas.

Chicago, Illinois, is closer to Washington, D.C., than El Paso is to McAllen. And so shes going to where the height of the problem isnt, Cruz said on Fox News America Reports Thursday.

... Kamala, you need to go to McAllen , Cruz implored. You need to look at the children in cages that you and Joe Biden put there in a way that is endangering their safety.

Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, said Harris trip to the border is a first step, but the Rio Grande area needs her attention more and is a true picture of the border crisis.

Im glad that shes going down to the border because that is part of her job portfolio, and No. 2, yes, the epicenter is down there in the lower Rio Grande in the lower part of the district down there. If you look at the numbers down there compared to El Paso, youre not going to get a true picture of whats happening, Cuellar told Fox News.

Cuellar suggested that Harris needed to meet with local residents, city and county officials, and the brave men and women in green and in blue, our border control agents, so they dont just get a pat on the back, but they get reinforcements and support down there.

Cuellar said he has extended an invitation to Harris to visit the border with him but has yet to receive a response.

He described Harris visit to El Paso as a check the box visit and a politically safer option since it will not show the true nature of the border crisis in the Rio Grande Valley area, where conditions are most severe.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said in a statement that Harris is "ignoring the real problem areas" of the border not protected by the border wall and "are being overrun by the federal government's ill-thought-out open border policies."

"She will fail in her mission if she refuses to speak to residents of the Del Rio sector whose homes and ranches are being overrun by gangs and smugglers," the Republican governor said.

"The Vice President was named Border Czar over 90 days ago, and in that time Texans have had their homes broken into, property damaged, and guns pointed at their heads as cartels, smugglers, and human traffickers profit off the Biden Administrations reckless open-border policies," he continued. "I launched Operation Lone Star in March to combat this record-high influx of people and crime, and since then DPS has arrested over 1,700 criminals, apprehended over 41,000 migrants, and seized enough fentanyl to kill over 21 million people."

"Texas has been and continues to step up to protect Texans and Americans," Abbott said.

When Fox News Peter Doocy asked Harris why this was her first trip to the border, she snapped back, saying, "Its not my first trip, Ive been to the border many times," referring to visits she made to the border as a senator.

Congressional Republicans claim former President Donald Trumps upcoming trip to the border is what prompted Harris to visit, but the vice presidents office claims Republican pressure was not what led her to take the trip, Fox News reported.

Harris was greeted by dozens of protestors with signs proclaiming, Kamala, you know Trump won, How many little girls need to be raped for this to become a crisis, Que Mala Hates Mexicans, Kamala do you hear their screams, and Latinos for Trump.

Protestors outside Border Patrol station awaiting VP Kamala Harris. @ArmendarizDis16@ElAmerican_pic.twitter.com/mTLLRhTL4V  Informed with Anthony (@InformedAnthony) June 25, 2021

Earlier this month, former ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley slammed Harris for not visiting the border, suggesting it was a sign that clearly the vice president is fearful of visiting the southern border.

And any leader knows you cant fix what you cant see, Haley said on June 9. She hasnt been on the ground. She hasnt talked to Border Patrol. She doesnt know what is happening there.

In efforts to help solve some of the root problems of the border crisis, Harris recently visited Mexico and Guatemala, where she urged immigrants, do not come, do not come.

Guatemala President Alejandro Giammattei told "Face The Nation" that the increased border crossings have been caused partly by the Biden administration's policies.

"The message changed to, 'We are going to reunite families, and we are going to reunite children," Giammattei said. "The very next day, the coyotes were here organizing groups of children to take them to the United States. We asked the United States government to send more of a clear message to prevent people from leaving."

Harris has previously dodged questions regarding her plans to visit the southern border as pressure for her visit has built over the past three months.

On June 8, she quipped, and I havent been to Europe, when NBCs Lester Holt asked if she had plans to visit the U.S.-Mexico border.
Florida pastor, son and congregant arrested in connection with Capitol riot

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A Florida pastor, his son and a churchgoer have been charged in connection with the riot at the U.S. Capitol after authorities received tips and saw the men on security footage inside the building on Jan. 6.

Seventy-two-year-old Pastor James Cusick of Global Outreach Ministries in Melbourne, Florida, and his son, Casey, who is also a leader at the church, were arrested on Thursday, according to the Department of Justice.

David Lesperance, the director of an air conditioning contracting business who authorities say is a congregant of the church, was also arrested.

All three men have been charged with knowingly entering or remaining in a restricted building without lawful authority, disorderly or disruptive conduct and violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol Grounds.

The riot occurred on the day in which then-Vice President Mike Pence and members of Congress were set to count the electoral votes in the 2020 presidential election.

While the men were charged with trespassing, numerous videos have shown that many protesters were allowed to enter the building, and once inside were permitted to remain there by Capitol police.

Investigators say that they received a telephonic tip that the 69-year-old Lesperance was inside the Capitol's rotunda on Jan. 6, according to a criminal complaint. The FBI interviewed another witness who confirmed the claim.

On Jan. 19, task force investigators in the Tampa Bay area conducted a voluntary interview with Lesperance at his Indian Harbour Beach home. During the discussion, Lesperance allegedly admitted he and his pastor were present at President Donald Trumps speech near the White House earlier in the day and at the U.S. Capitol later.

Lesperance also told investigators that he saw law enforcement officers arriving and hitting their shields with their batons when he was in front of the Capitol. He also allegedly admitted that while he was heading to the Capitol door, he saw law enforcement officers deploy flashbang devices. Lesperance said that he took photos and videos on his cellphone while at the Capitol and later deleted the media files out of fear of negative repercussions, according to the Justice Department.

Authorities received a warrant to search Lesperances iCloud and found that the location history of his phone showed it was present at the Capitol on the afternoon of Jan. 6.

Although authorities say Lesperance refused to provide his pastors name, a public records search revealed that James Cusick is the pastor of a church about 7 miles from Lesperances home. Another charging document states that investigators had received a tip about James Cusicks alleged presence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 as early as Jan. 22. A search on Instagram revealed a picture on the churchs Instagram page of church members, including the Cusicks and Lesperance.

Authorities also found photos of Lesperance with the Cusicks before and after the riot appearing to wear the same clothes they were wearing when spotted on Capitol surveillance footage. Additionally, police body camera footage shows the Cusicks inside the Capitol.

On March 26, the FBI received a tip suggesting that Casey Cusick, his father and another individual entered the Capitol on Jan. 6.

The churchs website reveals that James Cusick holds ministerial credentials with the Association of Faith Churches and Ministers and actively works with the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem. He graduated from Rhema Bible Training College in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1979.

The pastors online profile page states that he has spent the past 20 years traveling all over Europe helping Jews make Aliyah back to Israel.

Meanwhile, Casey Cusick, the vice president of Global Outreach Ministries, graduated from Rhema Bible Training College in 2014 and spent three years in Israel.

According to Google Maps, the address listed for the Global Outreach Ministries is located in a residential neighborhood. It doesn't have the appearance of a big church but rather a home. The ministry's website states that Cusick teaches the "uncompromised truths of God's Word with passion and purpose at weekly Bible Studies."

The ministry had over 200 followers on its Facebook page, which was taken down on Friday.

The Christian Post reached out to Global Outreach Ministries for comment on the Cusicks arrest. A response is pending.

According to Florida Today, all three men made their initial appearance Thursday afternoon at the U.S. District Court in Orlando and were released on $25,000 bonds. The conditions of their release include submitting to DNA collection, surrendering passports, no possession of firearms and restricted travel.

The newspaper reports that Brevard County court records show that Casey Cusick has had past run-ins with the law, including an arrest in 2018 for disorderly conduct. The arrest report alleges that Cusick struck his wife and caused her to bleed, but adjudication was withheld.

On Thursday, the Department of Justice announced that it has arrested more than 500 people connected with the Capitol riot, including 100 charged with assaulting federal law enforcement officers. Over half of the people who entered the Capitol that day have faced misdemeanor trespassing charges.

While media reports have said that five people were killed during the Capitol riot, the lone person killed by lethal force on Jan. 6 was Ashli Babbit, an unarmed U.S. Air Force veteran who attempted to climb through a smashed door pane into the House chamber. She was shot in the neck by a plainclothes officer from inside the chamber.

Three others who reportedly died at the Capitol that day include a woman who sustained injuries after being trampled on by the crowd, an individual who suffered a heart attack, and another individual who had a stroke.

For months the media reported that Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick died as a result of injuries he suffered when responding to the riot, specifically alleging that he was hit in the head by a fire extinguisher, which was also cited by Democrats at former President Trump's second impeachment. Reports now say medical examiners "did not find signs that the officer sustained any blunt force trauma."

Sicknick, who died from a stroke on Jan. 7, reportedly told his family that he had been sprayed by an irritant, possibly bear spray. It's speculated that it might've contributed to his death, along with any other preexisting conditions.
Marijuana linked to increased risk of suicidal thoughts: study

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A National Institutes of Health study has found that using marijuana might increase the risk of suicidal ideation and attempts to self harm, even among those with no history of depression.

The study, titled "Associations of Suicidality Trends With Cannabis Use as a Function of Sex and Depression Status," was published in the journal of the American Medical Association on Tuesday. It involved face-to-face household interviews as part of the 2008-2019 National Surveys on Drug Use and Health conducted by researchers with the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The National Institute on Drug Abuse sponsored the research as part of the NIH.

What the researchers found was that men who used marijuana daily and suffered from depression had an increase in suicidal ideation from 14.9% (2008-2009) to 21.9% (2018-2019), and 10.3% (2008-2009) to 17% (2018-2019), among non-daily users.

According to the findings, women who used marijuana also appeared to have a greater associated risk of suicidal ideation than men who used marijuana.

Women who had depression and used marijuana daily had increased thoughts of suicide, from 14.5% (2008-2009) to 26.8% (2018-2019), and 12% (2008-2009) to 17.5% (2018-2019) for non-daily users.

And the risk remained for marijuana users with no history of suffering from depression.

The study did not show rising rates of suicide in every group, however. It found no significant increase in suicidal ideation among depressed men who don't use marijuana.

Of the participants with no history of depression, 9% who used marijuana daily and 7% who used marijuana non-daily experienced suicidal ideation compared to 3% who did not use marijuana.

"While we cannot establish that cannabis use caused the increased suicidality we observed in this study, these associations warrant further research, especially given the great burden of suicide on young adults, said Dr. Nora Volkow, the director of the NIDA and the senior author of the study published on Tuesday.

As we better understand the relationship between cannabis use, depression and suicidality, clinicians will be able to provide better guidance and care to patients, Volkow added.

The study also found that marijuana use has doubled among U.S. adults from 2008-2019, from 22.6 million to 45 million. Daily or near-daily use also tripled, rising from 3.6 million in 2008 to 9.8 million in 2019.

As of April, 15 U.S. states and Washington, D.C., have legalized non-medical, recreational use of marijuana by adults. Thirty-six states and Washington, D.C., have legalized the medical use of marijuana.

Researchers examined the data from four groups of people: Non-users, those who use the drug but not daily, daily users and addicts.

Individuals who used marijuana daily were defined, for the purposes of the study, as those who used it 300 or more days out the year.

Key findings include that, among people who suffer from depression, 35% of non-users had suicidal thoughts, whereas 44% of those who reported non-daily use had thoughts of suicide. Fifty-three percent of daily users with depression experienced suicidal ideation, as did 50% of those designated as marijuana addicts.

Since April, a few more states have legalized various forms of regulated adult-use of marijuana.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo enacted such a provision on March 31. Virginia's General Assembly passed legislation legalizing marijuana on Feb. 27 and approved the governor's amendments on April 7. New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lynn Lujan Grisham signed a similar bill into law on April 12. Last week, the Connecticut General Assembly passed SB 1201, which the governor signed on Tuesday.
Pastor urges President Biden to sign executive order declaring violence a public health crisis

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Calling it the No. 1 problem of the 21st century, an Illinois pastor who lost his son to gun violence in 2018, urged President Joe Biden Wednesday to sign an executive order declaring violence a national public health crisis.

We continue to call President Joseph Biden to acknowledge American violence for what it is. American violence is a national public health crisis. Violence is the No. 1 problem of the 21st century, declared Pastor Anthony Williams, who founded King International Ministry.

Williams and a team of anti-violence activists have embarked on an 11-day march for their cause from Chicago to Washington, D.C., wearing T-shirts bearing the slogan We Want to Live. He's also hoping to arrive at the nations seat of government by July 4 to promote his message.

President Biden has said that America is back, I beg to differ with President Biden. Until we address the issue of violence, then none of us are safe. So we are walking to D.C. because we wear these T-shirts, We Want to Live. We want to live safe, everyone in America. We want to live healthy, everyone in America, and we want to live without  fear, Williams said Wednesday.

His activism has already resulted in legislation in Illinois with HB 158 that was signed into law by Gov. JB Pritzker, which created the Underlying Causes of Crime and Violence Study Act that will study how to identify high-violence communities and prioritize state dollars to address issues related to violence, The State Journal-Register reported.

Violence has plagued communities, predominantly poor and distressed communities in urban settings, which have always treated violence as a criminal justice issue, instead of a public health issue, the Illinois legislation notes.

Once the study is done, the Illinois Department of Public Health and the Department of Human Services will have to submit their findings to the State General Assembly by Dec. 31, 2021.

Williams message aligns with that of the American Medical Associations Journal of Ethics which argued in 2018 that violence is indeed a public health crisis and some medical experts think it should be treated as a disease.

Violence, overall, has become a public health crisis. The three leading causes of death in the United States for people ages 15-34 are unintentional injury, suicide and homicide. These violent deaths are, more often than not, directly associated with firearms. The U.S. has a homicide rate seven times higher than other high-income countries, with homicides committed by firearms being 25 times higher than in other high-income countries, then editor Lilliana Freire-Vargas wrote.

To continue to accept violence as a normal behavior, something is wrong with the psyche of us as American citizens, Williams said.

This is not a black problem, a white problem, red problem, yellow problem. This is an American problem, he continued before suggesting that he voted for Biden because he expects him to take a stand on the issue.

President Biden, we appeal to you as American citizens, President Biden, I voted for you, sign the executive order on American violence as a public health crisis. Follow the lead of the state of Illinois, he added.
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It is very possible that Donald Trump will continue to have great political influence in the years to come. It is also possible that he will have the health and vitality to run for president again in 2024. It is even possible that he will win. But one thing is sure: Donald Trump will not be reinstated as president this year or, for that matter, any year before 2024. Sorry, but facts are facts.

Remarkably, According to a new Morning Consult/Politico survey, 29% of Republican voters said it is at least somewhat likely that Trump will be restored as president in 2021including 17% who said it is very likely.

For those wanting to dig into the data in depth, the 355 page survey has been posted online.

It states that the poll was conducted between June 4-June 7, 2021 among a sample of 1990 registered voters. The interviews were conducted online, and the data were weighted to approximate a target sample of registered voters based on gender, age, educational attainment, race, 2020 presidential vote, and region. Results from the full survey have a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.

Are the findings reliable? Should they be taken seriously?

A summary of the poll states that 77% of voters said they believe Americas democracy is currently being threatened, including 82% of Republicans and 77% of Democrats.

This certainly sounds reasonable, and is in keeping with suspicions and concerns on both sides of the electoral divide.

The poll also found that, Only 40% of Republicans said they had at least some confidence in the U.S. electoral system.

This, too, seems reasonable, if actually low.

At the same time, the poll claimed that 13% of Democrats and 17% of Independents also believe it is likely that Trump will be restored to the presidency in 2021. Really?

Could it be that the fearmongering of the left has produced these concerns? Or could it be that Trumps presence is just that ominous, with the threat of his imminent return lurking in the back of peoples minds?

The Daily Mailreported on June 25 that, The Department of Homeland Security is concerned by the theory Donald Trump will be reinstated as president in August and is monitoring extremist online communities for threats of violence, the agency's top counterterrorism official said Thursday.

John Cohen, assistant secretary for counterterrorism, stated that he was responding to the conspiracy theories sparked by reports from the New York Times' Maggie Haberman and the National Review earlier this month, that Trump is telling aides he could be back in the Oval Office by August.

The Mail also stated that, Mike Lindell, CEO of MyPillow, has also been spreading the theory publicly and claims he is the source of the claims.

Is there any truth to these claims? Is Trump himself fueling the fires of speculation? That, I do not know.

What I do know is that some Trump prophets continue to dig deeper holes for themselves, even claiming that God is delaying Trumps return to office in order to give the false impression that they were wrong in predicting his election in 2020.

In the words of Hank Kunneman, People have been saying, Why is the Lord taking so long? Why are the prophets missing it?

And what was Kunnemans answer? It's to make it look like the prophets miss it and for them to have petitions. And it's to expose, but it's to bring forth something at the exact time that will be part of the fulfillment of God. (If this sounds like last gasp, spiritual mumbo jumbo, its because it is last gasp, spiritual mumbo jumbo.)

Unfortunately, as bizarre as it may seem, there are still fervent believers hanging on to the words of these alleged prophets. (Within the last few days, a commenter on my YouTube channel rebuked me, saying, He [meaning me] rejected the prophets [meaning, those who wrongly predicted that Trump would be inaugurated on January 24] and accused the brethren standing for truth of being idolaters. He believed the lying media on the election. They are his prophets. This is a man not worthy of a platform. For a major article in Christianity Today on the failed prophecies and corrective responses to them, see here.)

So, the deceived are still being deceived, false hopes are still being stoked, and the media, especially on the left, continues to feed into the conspiracy theories, ever fearful of the ominous scepter of Trump.

The reality is that claims of election fraud will continue to be investigated, as they should be. Confidence must be restored, and there are valid reasons for concern.

Trump will also continue to snipe from the sidelines, as well as influence the news cycle and the direction of Republican politics.

But under no circumstances will he be restored to the presidency this year (or at any time before 2024).

So, dont get your hopes up and dont hold your breath. Instead, concentrate on making your own life count, get involved, as appropriate, with the current political scene, and whatever you do, remember not to look to Trump (again) as some kind of political saviorespecially with hopes of his return to the presidency this year.
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A few years ago, we were surprised to read Pew research statistics indicating that, for the first time in U.S. history, Americans felt like higher education was headed in the wrong direction. As we dug into the reasons why, tuition costs topped the list, but other factors got our attention. In particular, we were intrigued and troubled by the complaint that professors bring their social and political views into the classroom, and that colleges and universities are too concerned with protecting students from potentially offensive views.

The report went on to state that, When asked about the trade-off between allowing free speech, however distasteful, on college campuses versus protecting students from views they may find offensive, the public comes down clearly on the side of free speech. Nearly 90% indicated that its more important to allow people to speak their minds freely, even if some students find their views upsetting or offensive, than it is to ensure that students arent exposed to views they find upsetting or offensive, even if that limits what people are allowed to say.

After reading the study, we felt as though the opinions expressed therein certainly did not reflect the ethos here at Ashland University, but we werent exactly sure how to quantify how we differed from these perceptions. We decided to take some specific actions to try to counter those views. For one, we adopted our version of the Chicago Principles of free speech, so named because the University of Chicago founded them in 2014. We became the 33rd institution to take this action, and the list now tops 100. We reinforced our fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral or wrong-headed. It is for the individual members of the University community, not for the University as an institution, to make those judgments for themselves, and to act on those judgments not by seeking to suppress speech, but by openly and vigorously contesting the ideas that they oppose. A good first step.

We also borrowed from Alan Jacobs work and printed out and posted dozens of Thinking Persons Checklists that featured items like, Remember that you dont have to respond to what everyone else is responding to in order to signal your virtue and right-mindedness, hoping to foster greater civility and more vigorous dialogue. Our noted Ashbrook Scholars program had already doffed textbooks, relying instead on primary documents for their rigorous study of history and political science.

Next, we coined the phrase, Teaching students how to think, not what to think. The positive response to this tagline was immediate and overwhelming. I even had one student stop me in a hallway and say, My grandfather made me come to Ashland because he read your slogan and said any school that is committed to that ideal deserves my money! Heartened by affirming reactions all around, we applied for and were granted a trademark for the phrase. We understood the inherent limitations of the phrase, as we surely teach students what to think when it comes to certain elements of math, science, and at least bare historical facts, but liked how it expressed our disdain for inculcation.

But we soon realized how difficult it is to stand behind our aspirational how to think stance in 21st century academic life in America. The initial challenge came in the wake and undertow of the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor atrocities. Welike many universitiesdeclared this a watershed moment in our history, one that demanded immediate and sustained action. Among other initiatives, we quickly constructed a module for all freshmen on race, which included an introduction to diversity, equity, and inclusion concepts and competencies.

While our intentions seemed pure enough, the struggle to formulate a basic introduction to these concepts while holding true to our trademarked mantra was formidable. Surely we had an obligation to tell students what to think about these complex issues. There are certain indisputable facts regarding white privilege, unconscious bias, and a number of other topics seminal to an introduction like this. We, of course, teach that racism is evil. We don't offer a set of anthropological theories and leave it up to the students (except in the sense that believing anything we teach is up to the students) whether or not to think that whites are superior, blacks and Jews are inferior, etc. We reject all of those propositions outright, with no pretense of neutrality whatsoever.

But some in our community believed we had a duty to educate our students a certain way about these topics. In particular, many felt as though Critical Race Theory (CRT) should be the primary underpinning for our students understanding of these issues. Others emphasized that standard Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) theories featured certain elements all students needed to know. We decided that we could not stand by our commitment to unfettered intellectual inquiry and not present all sides to our studentsthey deserved the right to formulate their own conclusions. If teaching CRT (and/including standard DEI theory) meant nothing more than opposing bigotry as traditionally understood and applying the moral truisms most of us learned as children, then yes, of course. But this is not the case: these theories rely on a set of highly controversial and theoretical principles that are not uniformly accepted. We were fine presenting and considering the approaches outlined in CRT and DEI, but out of respect for our students and commitment to the unencumbered pursuit of truth we could not treat any of it as settled truth. In the end, we wound up with a seminar that simply outlined very basic concepts, defined them from multiple viewpoints, and was ultimately more rudimentary than many hoped and probably not all that successful. Teaching students how to think, not what to think is harder business than we knew.

Our trials with our seminar on race emphasized a crucial dilemma facing American colleges and universities. In academia today, we realize that viewpoint discrimination has become so rampant that our essential function as places where the unencumbered pursuit of truth is indeed threatened. Intellectual intolerance has grown to a point that many faculty members feel silenced, and even students who voice dangerous opinions face intimidation and even expulsion. Places like FIRE and ACTA (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni) are fighting to preserve intellectual freedom on our campuses, but their good work is often muted in academe.

Our hope is that more schools will resist the cultural pressure to simply adopt what the academic intelligentsia ratify as acceptable. The best colleges in our nation established their reputations on being places that openly challenged us, and never canceled perspectives or limited subjectsthey wrestled with them in ways that developed some of the best minds and people we have ever known. Let us rise once again to the high calling of unconstrained learning. It is hard work, but worth it.
'Fresh wave of violence' in Mozambique driven by radical jihadist extremists; children beheaded: report

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Conditions in Cabo Delgado, northern Mozambique, have seriously deteriorated over the past year, affecting children disproportionately as nearly 3,000 people have been killed and over 800,000 displaced since the violent insurgency that began in October 2017, according to a report.

Violent attacks by Islamic rebels in the Cabo Delgado province have led to the deaths of more than 2,838 people, including over 1,400 civilians, though the actual number is expected to be higher.

A report released this month by Save the Children, Plan International and World Vision showed how the extent of the conflict in Cabo Delgado has worsened in the last 12 months and how children are suffering disproportionately.

The last 12 months of Mozambiques Islamic insurgency has escalated due to increased armed conflict on villages and district capital towns, leading to casualties and grave violations against children.

Amy Lamb, director of communications for Open Doors, told The Christian Post that the fresh wave of violence in Mozambique has had a devastating toll.

Lamb said that for the first time, Mozambique was added to the World Watch List as being among the most persecuted countries because of the fresh wave of violence coming into Mozambique primarily driven by radical jihadist extremists.

A March attack on Palma, a town in the northeast of Mozambique, led to an estimated 67,848 displaced people as of June 4.

Many children affected by this attack were orphaned or were separated from their parents as they fled.

The southeastern African country is home to about 17 million Christians, which is over 50% of the population. Lamb said it's also home to one of the fastest-growing evangelical populations in the world.

Because of [the rise in Christianity], were seeing jihadist groups including those who are affiliated with the Islamic state, with al Shabab, with Boko Haram, al Qaeda, Lamb explained.

Its just organizing together in order to expand their territories throughout the African continent, and their goal is really to eradicate Christianity from this territory and, unfortunately, in some ways, its working, she continued. Even specifically from this northern part of Mozambique, an estimated 800,000 people have fled the region, and those who remain, including women, children, families, are facing starvation even if theyre spared from  violence.

Lamb said Christians in Mozambique are especially targeted with violence and believes the government contributes to this.

There is a great deal of instability, and there can even be some anti-Christian antipathy at the government level, Lamb said. So as far as the government of Mozambique, in some ways, its not helping because there are some of those antipathies even at the highest level, so when its pervasive at the lower level, its combining into a perfect storm.

The report also offers recommendations and said the U.N. and international community must, without delay, support the establishment of peace and address underlying causes of the conflict.

In March, the U.S. Army Green Berets were deployed to Mozambique to train Mozambican marines to counter the violent insurgency that has led to children as young as 12 years old being beheaded.

Lamb agrees that the situation requires the international communitys attention and said the Islamic State is struggling to gain a hold of the entire region in what she believes is the greatest wave of Islamic violence in the modern era.

It should be a matter of grave concern for the international community because it is an indication that there is an emerging caliphate throughout the sub-Saharan African region, she said. So what we saw in the devastation  thats all caliphate activity.

And whats so concerning is these groups are organizing together to create whats essentially a new Islamic State throughout the entire region, Lamb continued. So that is deeply concerning, not just from a religious freedom standpoint, but also from a democracy standpoint. Also from just the overall human rights condition of we have this one group of incredibly violent extremists who are saying  were going to take over. It should be a matter of concern for the international community because this is probably the greatest wave of Islamic violence that the modern era has seen.

Lamb called on the American Church to pray for Christians in Mozambique and for those who have been displaced.

Pray for Gods intervention in the violent attacks, and as rapidly as we have seen this wave of violence rise, that we would see it decline just as fast, Lamb added.
A man of great sensibility: the collection of Francis Gross

The French advertising magnate used his deep knowledge and expertise to build a sophisticated collection of portraits and post-war art

French businessman Francis Gross is perhaps best known for revolutionising the world of advertising during the 1980s through the Carat group  the company he created with his brother, Gilbert. During his career, he assembled not one but two great art collections: one for the company and a private one for him and his family. This collection now comes to auction at Christies and displays what Pierre Martin-Vivier, Deputy Chairman, Post-War & Contemporary Art, describes as very European  a collection built on deep knowledge and expertise that reveals a man of great sensibility and sensitivity. Gross was part of a Jewish family who arrived in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century, explains Martin-Vivier. The first business of the family was furniture and they created one of the first department stores in the city, Galleries Barbes.

Founded by Grosss grandfather, the shops became a mainstay of the Barbes-Clignancourt district in Paris. With a turnover of 100 million francs, Galleries Barbes became the largest furniture dealer of the inter-war period. Grosss father took over and Gross himself joined in the late 1960s. In 1974, he left to enter the world of advertising. He was renowned, in the words of Martin-Vivier, for being, very clever and very attractive. It was through his work in advertising that he became interested in art. His collection for his company was more bombastic and typical of the 1980s, with artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Yves Klein and Daniel Buren.

For his personal collection  and Martin-Vivier emphasises that it was very much something for him and his family  he made sure that each work was very important. Each piece represents a high point for that artist. There is a focus on the post-war and especially on Dubuffet, Nicolas de Stael and the Ecole de Paris. Portraits also form an important aspect of the collection. At the heart of the collection is Rene Magrittes La Vengeance, a work from the mid-1930s, when Magritte created many of his career-defining images. There is an extraordinary aptness that Gross collected this work; as Martin-Vivier says, Magritte started in the advertising business. And the thing is, I think Francis clearly understands an image. It represents more than a kinship of profession. This work was owned by the Belgian surrealist poet Paul Colinet, who had been at the centre of the group along with Magritte. It had been in the hands of only one American collector before Gross acquired it. Ensuring the quality of the provenance as well as the work is, according to Martin-Vivier, a hallmark of the works Gross collected.

Giacomettis Buste dhomme (Lotar II) sits within this collection as both sculpture and portrait. It depicts the photographer Elie Lotar, who came to Paris in the 1920s and was at the heart of the French cinema scene, collaborating with Antonin Artaud, Roger Vitrac, Jean Renoir, Rene Clair and Luis Bunuel. Just as La Vengeance represents more than just an example of Magrittes work, there is something larger than just the work to this sculpture. It was Giacomettis final sculpture.

For Martin-Vivier, the work that best captures the spirit of the collection is also a portrait. My favourite is clearly the Schiele drawing [The Embrace]  you can follow the pencil, you know, and the paper and you can see the genius of the artist. As with the other works, it comes from what Martin-Vivier describes as the best year of the artist, depicting two anonymous lovers in an embrace. It is a work of subtlety and delicacy, that would be selected by a man seeking out an artists artist.

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CANBERRA, Australia (AP)  Australia is offering AstraZeneca to all adults in a bid to rapidly ramp up sluggish vaccination rates as more of the country on Tuesday locked down against the spread of COVID-19.

The government late Monday agreed to indemnify doctors who administer the AstraZeneca vaccine that has been blamed for at least two fatalities from a rare blood clot complication in Australia since April.

That exceeds the single death from COVID-19 in Australia this year, and vaccine hesitancy has increased with only 5% of the population fully inoculated.

Pfizer has been the recommended vaccine for people younger than 60 since a 52-year-old woman died in May of blood clots in the brain blamed on AstraZeneca.

But supply of Pfizer, the only alternative to Australian-manufactured AstraZeneca, cannot keep up with demand.

Theres a preference for Pfizer until the age of 60. Thats a preference, Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly said on Tuesday.

Its a discussion for doctors to have with their own patients and work through their own risk and benefit in relation to that, Kelly added.

The Queensland state capital Brisbane and surrounding cities will be in lockdown for three days from late Tuesday after the government reported two new COVID-19 infections.

Sydney reported 19 new infections in that east coast city, Perth reported two new cases on the west coast and Darwin reported two new cases on the north coast. Those three cities and their surrounds are already in lockdown.

Australia has been relatively successful in containing clusters throughout the pandemic, registering fewer than 31,000 cases and 910 deaths within a population of 26 million. But the new clusters of a variant thought to be more contagious have highlighted the nations vulnerability through a slow vaccine rollout.

AstraZeneca was supposed to be the mainstay of Australias vaccination rollout free of the uncertainties of international supply chains. It was recommended for all adults until a 48-year-old woman died of blood clots in April four days after her first jab. AstraZeneca was then said to be a safe option for adults aged over 50 until the 52-year-old died.

Some epidemiologists argue the government should speed up the rollout by reducing the gap between AstraZeneca jabs from 12 to eight weeks. But some Australians are now refusing to take a second shot because of the evolving perception of the blood clotting risk.

The New South Wales state government is highlighting vaccines apparent successes in the current Sydney cluster.

Twenty-four people who attended a birthday party on June 19 became infected with the delta variant. None had been vaccinated. But six fully vaccinated health workers and an aged care worker who had received the first of two doses attended the house party and were not infected.

The early and strong indications from that party ... are, if youre vaccinated, you are much more likely to not be infected with COVID-19, Health Minister Brad Hazzard said on Monday.

State Agriculture Minister Adam Marshall said he was the only one among four government colleagues who dined together at a Sydney pizza restaurant on June 21 to become infected. An infected person had been at the restaurant earlier.

Marshall revealed he was the only one among the four who had not had a dose of vaccine because, at age 36, he was not eligible.
MATERA, Italy (AP)  A meeting of foreign and development ministers from the Group of 20 nations Tuesday ended with agreement to boost efforts to fight growing hunger in the world, worsened by the pandemic, especially in Africa, as well as climate change effects.

But there were also notes of discord, with Germany and China taking jabs at each other over vaccine policy for developing countries.

Italian Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio, who hosted the meeting, argued that assistance projects in Africa will also affect migration from the continent to Europe.

The G-20 has the duty to sustain Africa in emerging from a difficult period, he said at a closing news conference.

We must do it in a way so that in Africa, people arent forced any more to abandon their country and their territory, and I dont think anyone can carry out this battle alone, said Di Maio, who announced that Italy would host a conference in October in Rome focused on Africa.

Di Maio said that hunger on the planet has been increasing since 2014 and warned that the COVID-19 pandemic could add another 100 million people to the ranks of the hungry and malnourished. "Clearly one of the first steps to build a better world is to make sure everyone is fed,'' he said.

The one-day gathering yielded the so-called Matera Declaration, a call to action on food security, nutrition and food systems. Matera is a picturesque southern hilltop city in Italy's underdeveloped Basilicata region hosting the talks.

In the declaration, the ministers concurred that advancing these goals requires the collective and coordinated leadership and action at the global level and a people-centered approach,.

"The G-20 is well positioned to provide such leadership, while promoting an inclusive approach with all stakeholders, private and public, and pursuing ambitious yet concrete and actionable programs, the declaration reads.

The Group of 20 nations account for more than half the world's population and some 80% of its GDP.

The declaration also recognizes the need for "accelerating the adaptation of agriculture and food systems to climate change."'

Beyond the differences and distances among some countries present at the G-20 table, we are all in agreement on climate change, sustainability, on the great issues that today can only be resolved with global cooperation, Di Maio said.

But there were some sharp exchanges involving some of the major powers during the day.

Arriving, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said it was important that we sit together in this round with countries like Russia and China, and that we openly address the fact that we do not think much of their vaccine diplomacy.

Maas was referring to China and Russia providing or selling their own produced vaccines to less developed countries, although some European countries, including Hungary and San Marino, were eager to get the Russian Sputnik V vaccine. Some in the West believe China and Russia have been supplying their vaccines to poorer countries in order to bolster their power.

Neither China nor Russia sent their foreign ministers. China's minister, Wang Yi , addressed the meeting remotely and jabbed back at Maas.

China, he said, has supplied more than 450 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines to 100 countries. The Chinese minister took a swipe at Western nations, adding that countries able to supply vaccines ought to avoid restrictions on exports and excessive hording" of vaccines,

To bring the pandemic to an end, we must get more vaccine to more places, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the gathering. Multilateral cooperation will be key to stop this global health crisis.

Blinken took the occasion to tout U.S. contributions to COVAX, the U.N.-backed program to get vaccines to needy nations, which include around 500 million Pfizer doses and 80 million other doses.

Germany's Maas signaled urgency. I think the main thing now is to quickly create alternatives so that countries, regions like Africa, for example, are able to be supplied with more vaccine more quickly, he told AP. He suggested focusing on providing supply chains as well as production facilities.

The decision earlier this year by President Joe Biden's administration to return to the climate change fight and help lead it has heartened advocates pressing for urgent tackling of climate change threats. Last year, under the Trump administration, the United States became the only country to leave the 2015 agreement.

___

D'Emilio reported from Rome.
Just one day before all COVID-19 economic restrictions in Washington are set to lift, fully vaccinated people in King County can now ditch their face masks in most public spaces.

King County lifted its local mask directive on Tuesday, now adopting state-level mask guidance in line with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which said that fully vaccinated people no longer need to wear masks in both indoor and outdoor settings. Unvaccinated people are still required to wear masks indoors and adequately social distance, according to state guidelines.

The county directive, which "strongly urged" the continued use of face masks in indoor public settings, was issued in late May even as cases were declining in the state. Businesses were asked to voluntarily comply with the directive until King County reached a 70% vaccination rate. That threshold was hit on June 15, but the directive was kept in place until Tuesday as it takes two weeks for the immune system to fully respond to the vaccine.

The latest data from the county's COVID-19 dashboard shows that 79.2% of residents have received one dose of the vaccine, while 73.1% are considered fully vaccinated, having received one dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine or two doses of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine.

"Thanks to highly effective COVID-19 vaccines and decreasing rates of disease in our community at this time, vaccinated people are no longer directed to wear masks in most indoor public settings but may choose to do so at their discretion," said King County Public Health Officer Dr. Jeff Duchin in a news release. "People who are unvaccinated are at increased risk for COVID-19 along with people who do not respond to vaccine because they are immunocompromised due to underlying medical conditions. The best protection for both individuals and the community as a whole will be through more of us continuing to be vaccinated."

However, individual businesses like grocery stores may still have mask requirements, and masks are also still required on public transportation and at the airport. State Secretary of Health Umair Shah has been asking people to "respect the rules of the room" they are in and mask up if required.

"The key message is that fully vaccinated people do not need to wear masks in most situations," said Shah. "If you're vaccinated, you're protected. But if you are unvaccinated, you are not protected, and you should and you have to keep wearing your mask."

Despite the encouraging milestone, health officials are advising that residents do not throw away their masks just yet, as they may be needed again if there is another surge in cases.
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The University of Florida was roiled in the fall of 2017 when Richard Spencer tried to bring his white nationalist roadshow onto the schools campus. Hed just made his way through Charlottesville, Virginia, that summer for the Unite the Right rally, and many were worried that a Spencer-led rally could lead to violence on campus. University President Ken Fuchs initially tried to prevent Spencer from speaking, but in the end he allowed it. There was nothing he could do. The First Amendment is the First Amendment.

The University of Florida cant say we like country music, but we dont like alternative music  or in this case, we like diversity, but we dont like Richard Spencers message, Clay Calvert, a UF free speech professor and director of the schools Marion B. Brechner First Amendment Project, told The New York Times.

Spencers appearance was a clear testament to the universitys role as an impartial marketplace of ideas, but Ron DeSantis and Floridas Republican state legislature still arent convinced. Last week, the MAGA-friendly governor signed a bill mandating students and faculty at the states public universities be surveyed about the extent to which competing ideas and perspectives are presented, with a goal of ensuring students feel free to express beliefs and viewpoint on campus and in the classroom.

Its not clear what the survey will look like and what will be done with the results, but the bill has raised concerns that the GOP wants to control the discourse on campuses. In announcing the bill, DeSantis threatened to defund universities found to be indoctrinating students with what he described as stale ideology. What exactly is stale ideology? Its up to Republicans and the states Board of Education, whose chairman doesnt believe evolution should be taught as fact.

University campuses arent the only places where DeSantis is working to stifle free speech. In April, he signed an anti-riot bill to counter demonstrations around the Derek Chauvin verdict, prompting legal challenges. A month later, he signed a bill that would prevent social media companies from banning accounts of politicians running for office in the state, prompting more legal challenges. A month after that, DeSantis successfully pushed the Florida Board of Education to prohibit the teaching of critical race theory in public school classrooms, arguing such a ban would prevent the school system from indoctrinating students with toxic ideology. (The unspoken but obvious undercurrent here is that DeSantis is jockeying to be the heir to Donald Trumps bigoted political empire, possibly through a run for president in 2024.)

As weve been reminded with terrifying clarity since Trump took office, not even the most foundational elements of American democracy should be taken for granted. This remains the case in Florida, which is now legislating the former presidents assault on the First Amendment.

Rolling Stone recently spoke to Calvert, the UF free-speech professor who defended Spencers presence on campus, about the bill DeSantis signed last week, the greater landslide of anti-First Amendment legislation in Florida, and how the discourse around free speech has changed during the Trump era.

What was your reaction to this new legislation passing?

Unfortunately, I was not surprised that this made it through a conservative-dominated legislative body in Florida, particularly after the deplatforming of Trump in January by Twitter and Facebook. Florida is a very large red state that perceives free speech to be under attack, whether its on social media platforms or in public universities. Certainly there is a perception among some people that public universities lean to the left in terms of the content thats taught and how its being taught.

I think its very unfortunate because it clearly provides lawmakers in Tallahassee with a potential weapon to withhold funding from a state university in Florida, based upon results of surveys that show conservative students somehow feel unable to speak up in the classroom, or that they are not receiving a complete diversity of viewpoints. [They could say that] a university is supposed to be a diverse marketplace of ideas, and youre not allowing that to happen, so therefore, until you do better, were going to withhold this funding from you. Thats the dire scenario, the worst case scenario. The positive side might be that its simply informational. The university could say, OK, we need to think about how were doing this. Or maybe parents could say to themselves, You know, this university seems to be this, I dont want my child to go there. So we just dont know what how those data are going to be used.

What are some of the other adverse effects this bill could have, outside of the potential defunding of public universities?

Thats clearly the biggest one, in my view. The other danger is targeting particular professors. I think the potential is there  especially in some classes where youre going to be talking about controversial topics, whether its immigration or abortion or gay rights  for professors to stay away from even talking about a particular subject matter, because it may be perceived by a student in the classroom as an endorsement of that viewpoint. Critical race theory, lets say, which is obviously another issue in Florida. [A professor might say], Here are the values of critical race theory, here are the criticisms of it. But the student might simply hear, Here are the values of it, and so take it as an endorsement. So the irony might be that while the bill is supposed to ensure a diversity of viewpoints, the professors might squelch completely expressing all views because they may be perceived as endorsing one. Thats always a danger.

Theyre mandating the survey, theyre not mandating that people fill it out. Those who are going to be motivated to fill it out are going to be the ones who feel aggrieved. Most students get tons of surveys every day and are just going to say, Forget it, Im not going to fill it out. The middle kind of drops out. I think thats going to skew the results.

So these surveys could very easily wind up offering a false confirmation of Republican fears over whats happening on campus.

I think thats it. The positive side is that it does recognize that universities are supposed to be diverse marketplaces of ideas. The United States Supreme Court has made that clear  that the classroom and surrounding environs are quintessential marketplaces of ideas and thats what public universities are supposed to be. So thats where this all sounds good. I think professors and students and faculty and parents would all agree: Yes, my students should have the ability to hear all viewpoints and for them to be rationally discussed. But thats kind of the cloak under which this is being signed.

There really are plenty of layers of irony here. DeSantis helped ban critical race theory from lower schools and just a few weeks later signed a bill to guard against intellectually repressive environments.

He always uses the phrase Big Tech to discuss the other bill, the deplatforming bill. I wouldnt be surprised if now were going to get Big Education somewhere down the line.

What have you been hearing from other faulty members since the bill was signed? Whats the level of concern like?

The faculty senate met and they were against the notion of this. I think the idea is that a public university already must comply with the terms of the First Amendment. We cant discriminate against particular viewpoints. We had to allow Richard Spencer to come to campus. During the campaign, Trump Jr. came to campus. There were protests, but he was allowed to speak with Kimberly Guilfoyle on campus. That was an example of where a conservative speaker was allowed to come, and the liberal side that doesnt like him is allowed to protest him. Thats essentially what you get.

Have you noticed a lot of tension on campus since Trump took office? Is there any sense at all that some students arent happy with what theyre being taught and how its being presented?

Ive never gotten that particular impression, that its really changed much. I havent really heard any complaints. Maybe theres a perception that it has. This is maybe trying to tap into that. Are they really complaining and can we objectively measure that? Is this really legislation in search of a problem? Is this a tail wagging the dog kind of a situation? Its all political gamesmanship, really. Thats why we have this. Thats why the Big Tech legislation is there, too. Same thing with critical race theory. There are multiple pieces of legislation going through right now and its all kind of laying the groundwork potentially for DeSantis to run for president.

Do you think the faculty, like students, may also abstain from filling out this survey, or are they going to be more likely to participate so they can help prove these assumptions about biased viewpoints wrong?

I would think faculty would be the ones more likely [to fill it out]. I would certainly fill it out just to express my own views about it. I dont know one professor, at least in my college of journalism and communication, who goes in and just dictates one political viewpoint. So is this legislation in search of a problem? Maybe its going to find out theres a perception of a problem among some students. The other question is at what point does that data actually flip or do enough for lawmakers to take action? What does it have to say? Its all going to be subjective in terms of somebodys interpretation, saying 12 percent of the students, or 25 percent, or 50. Where does that come in where lawmakers say thats enough, we need to take action?

Its a pretty scary thing to leave up to the discretion of the Republicans who passed the bill, when, like you said, its mostly political gamesmanship.

Absolutely.

How do you feel like the discourse around the First Amendment has changed since Trump took office? Is there anything in particular about how free speech is being discussed that has stood out to you?

I think I think from the left, free speech is perceived as a weapon that can be used by corporations to promote themselves after Citizens United, and also that by protecting a lot of hateful speech it can be used to harm minorities. Were almost seeing a free speech flip flop from the past, where we used to think of liberals as being the supporters of free speech and protecting the little guys ability to speak up. Now, I think the perception is that protecting a wide range of hateful speech is damaging to the principle of equality.

One of the biggest misconceptions is that hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment. There is no unprotected category called hate speech. Hate speech is only not protected if its used in the context of an already unprotected category, like fighting words, true threats, and incitement to violence. But generally speaking, the First Amendment gives us a lot of protection to say a lot of offensive things.

Theres been a lot of tension between the principles of equality versus individualism. The individual side holds that everybody should be able to speak up and say what they want, even if that speech is offensive or harmful. The other [misconception] that comes up, and this is more of the problem on the right side, is that when Trump is deplatformed from Twitter and Facebook, people think thats violating his First Amendment rights. Its not. The First Amendment does not protect us from private censorship. Facebook is not the government. It may think it is, but its not.

The First Amendment is viewpoint neutral. It doesnt say good speech, bad speech. It doesnt say Republican or Democrat. Your views or you are welcome on both sides. We live in a country that is so evenly divided that we flip flop from Republicans to Democrats every 4, to 8, to 12 years. Whoever is in power now is going to be out of power sometimes, so you cant just protect what the majority likes. The First Amendment is there to protect minority-based viewpoints, dissenting views. Its certainly an interesting time.

Have you ever seen anything like what weve seen from Florida recently as far the volume of legislative action against free speech? Is there any precedent for this?

Ive never seen such a landslide of legislation come down within a matter of several months  several weeks, actually  as we have recently. Whether its ramping up punishments for protesters; whether its the Big Tech and the inability to deplatform candidates for either state or local office in the state of Florida upon penalties of massive amounts of dollars; whether its not teaching critical race theory in lower schools; whether its this legislation right now mandating surveys of students and faculty. There certainly has been a consistent drumbeat of legislation dropping in the state of Florida.

Considering this drumbeat along with the prospect that DeSantis and his kind of right-wing activism taking control of the country, how concerned are you for the future of the First Amendment in America?

I do fear for the overall state of free speech as the government slowly tries to manipulate the marketplace of ideas. Basically, thats whats happening [in Florida]. The government is intervening in many ways to manipulate and regulate the marketplace of ideas. I think its all political, it really is. Florida is a huge state, a very populous state, and its a red state, and this is simply, I think, pushback. Florida is taking a stand on these issues  whether its public universities being perceived as being or left leaning, whether its going after protesters in the streets who are in the mind of the legislature causing violence and disrupting things, whether its in grade schools with critical race theory and the idea of indoctrination. Ive never seen anything like it, and its happening very quickly. Lawsuits have already been filed against the Big Tech [bill], and I think theyve been filed against the protest bill, so some of these will shake out because we do have the First Amendment. But it is a rather scary time right now.
Marcus Davis, owner of Houston's famed chicken-and-waffles eatery The Breakfast Klub, is reopening his downtown concept Kulture.

Located next to the George R. Brown Convention Center, the restaurant originally opened in April 2018 but closed during the pandemic. It will resume business in July.

GOOD EATS: Where to get the best Southern comfort food in Houston

Kulture will reopen to the public with a whole new mission and focus, as first reported by Greg Morago at Preview. The glass-enclosed restaurant and bar in downtown Avenida Houston has a new goal to showcase chefs of color and food purveyors.

Davis will be joined by Keisha Griggs, the chef of Bocage Catering in Rice Village. Griggs will act as coordinator of the new project and has enlisted local Black-owned farms like Ivy Leaf Farms and Plant it Forward in Houston to provide ingredients.

Now known as Kulture: A Black Chef Table, the restaurant will showcase chefs who identify as Black Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) and their diverse cuisines. To make it a full circle concept, chefs will have to utilize the BIPOC-owned ingredients provided to them.

Photo: Elizabeth Conley/Houston Chronicle

"The overarching theme of each dinner is to tell the story about how African food touches every part of the world," Griggs told Preview.

According to a statement on its website, "Kulture's Black Chef Table is pleased to be a platform where the best chefs from across the United States will tell their culinary stories. The events are designed to showcase the food and spirits rooted in the African diaspora."

The vision for the restaurant is to have visiting chefs who take over for pop-up-like events for weekends, weeks, or multiple weeks, with multi-course prix fixe offerings.

The series could begin as early as mid-July, but to stay updated on Kulture's happenings, you can visit its Instagram page.

Kulture is currently taking applications for visiting chefs to host meals at the downtown spot. Customers who want to dine will be able to find the visiting chefs on its website.
His lawyer says he's a good man who lost his temper when he saw a police officer push protestors outside the U.S. Capitol and was then pushed and punched by the same cop.

Prosecutors dispute that account and want Thomas Webster kept behind bars.

They say the former Marine and retired New York City police officer from Goshen shouted obscenities at police defending the Capitol, tackled an officer to the ground without any provocation, and helped escalate the violence as a pro-Trump mob pushed against and finally stormed past the metal barricades.

The attorneys and Webster are set to appear before a federal judge on Tuesday for a hearing on Webster's request to be released from jail after more than four months in custody. Webster has been held at various detention sites since turning himself in to the FBI in New Windsor on Feb. 22.

Webster is one of 500 people arrested so far for their alleged roles in the Jan. 6 insurrection and one of 100 charged with assaulting police officers. Cases are pending in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., against nine current and former Hudson Valley residents after prosecutors recently withdrew charges against a Rockland County man who had been a 10th defendant from the region.

Five of seven charges against Webster are felonies, including assaulting a police officer with a dangerous weapon. The attack, recorded on police body cameras and largely undisputed, allegedly began with him waving a flagpole and pounding it on a barricade, which he then pushed aside to tackle an officer and straddle him on the ground.

Webster's attorney, James Monroe of Goshen, describes him in court papers as a 55-year-old, church-going father of three who poses no danger to the public or risk of fleeing that would justify keeping him in jail. He called the attack a "momentary lack of restraint," triggered by what Webster saw as the officer's excessive use of force.

"As a former U.S. Marine and member of law enforcement, defendant's moral instinct was to protect the innocent," Monroe wrote.

Unlike many other defendants, Webster isn't charged with illegally entering the Capitol and disrupting Congress as it met to affirm President Joe Biden's election victory. According to his attorney's account, Webster went to Washington alone to protest the 2020 election results, attended pro-Trump rallies on Jan. 5 and Jan. 6, and caused no trouble other than his 15-second skirmish with the officer he assaulted.

"Webster has never verbally threatened others or advocated political violence against the United States government before, during, or after January 6th," Monroe wrote. "Nor has defendant made any public statements celebrating the events of January 6th or suggested that he would ever participate in similar actions ever again."

He also questioned whether the thin aluminum pole that Webster brandished could be considered a dangerous weapon against a police officer wearing body armor.

Prosecutors deny the officer punched Webster and the notion that Webster was reacting to abuse of other protestors. On the contrary, they say he drove to Washington "armed and ready for battle," toting his old Marine rucksack, a revolver, military-style meal packs and his police-issued bulletproof vest, which he wore to the Capitol.

The crowd he joined there was anything but peaceful, Assistant U.S. Attorney Hava Arin Levenson Mirell wrote, disputing Monroe's argument that police had riled the protestors by firing pepper spray and tear gas at them. Mirell said the scene "was nothing short of a war zone."

Photos included in the court papers show a tightly packed crowd with Trump flags and American flags, pressing against metal barriers as outnumbered police officers struggled to keep the gates in place. Webster stood at the front.

The officer he tackled did push Webster and other protestors, because that is what he was ordered to do: keep protestors away from the barricades, the prosecutor wrote. Mirell argued that Webster, far from being a defender of the innocent, helped spur the crowd to break through the police line.

"It was not until defendant burst out from the crowd and began striking the barricade that chaos ensued, the rioters broke through the barricade, and the officers were forced to retreat," Mirell wrote.

Webster allegedly grabbed the officer's gas mask and helmet while on top on him, preventing the officer from breathing for 10 seconds because his chinstrap was choking him.

The prosecutor argued that Webster had proved he's "unable to control his rage," and called his conduct "significantly more violent and disturbing" than that of other riot suspects who remain in custody.

"His inability to accept responsibility for his actions speaks volumes about his willingness to engage in similar conduct in the future."

cmckenna@th-record.com

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(c)2021 The Times Herald-Record, Middletown, N.Y.

Visit The Times Herald-Record, Middletown, N.Y. at www.recordonline.com

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HILLSBOROUGH, Calif. (AP)  Fred Flintstone fought the law  and he won.

Technically, the owner of the fanciful Flintstones house in a posh San Francisco suburb settled a lawsuit with the town of Hillsborough. But the agreement will allow Fred and his friends to remain.

In a yabba dabba dispute that pitted property rights against government rules that played out in international media, retired publishing mogul Florence Fang defended her colorful, bulbous-shaped house and its elaborate homage to The Flintstones family, featuring Stone Age sculptures inspired by the 1960s cartoon, along with aliens and other oddities..

READ ALSO: Houston homes are being snatched off the market at historic speeds

The town, however, called the towering dinosaurs and life-size sculptures a highly visible eyesore and sued Fang, alleging she violated local codes when she put dinosaur sculptures in the backyard and made other landscaping changes that caused local officials to declare it a public nuisance.

An attorney for the town previously said residents are required to get a permit before installing such sculptures, regardless of the theme.

Hillsborough went to court in 2019 after Fang failed to comply with multiple stop-work orders, as well as an order to remove the features around the multimillion-dollar property with its 2,730-square-foot (254-square-meter) home. Fang counter-sued. The Daily Post in Palo Alto first reported news of the settlement on Thursday.

Eric Risberg/AP

Mark Hudak, an attorney for Hillsborough, previously said the town prides itself on its rural, woodsy feel, and rules are in place so neighbors dont have to look at your version of what you would like to have, and you dont have to look at theirs.

According to records, the settlement stipulates that the town will review and approve a survey of the landscaping improvements. In turn, Fang will apply for building permits. The town will also pay Fang $125,000, and she will drop the lawsuit  which was dismissed in state court on April 27.

No news on Barney Rubble's role in the matter.
JERRY LARA /San Antonio Express-News

If you've traveled through our city's airport, you'll know San Antonio International Airport is on top of it when it comes to safety protocols, efficiency, and timeliness.

That's one of the reasons it beat of dozens of other hubs to win the Director Generals Roll of Excellence Awards from Airports Council International World (AIC). SAT received the excellence award Tuesday.
BLANTYRE, Malawi (AP)  Prenatal services at the health clinic were free, but the motorcycle taxi fare cost more than Monica Maxwell could afford. Just four weeks before delivering her baby, she cobbled together 1,400 kwacha ($1.75) for the 50-kilometer (31-mile) round trip. It was only her third visit -- fewer than her first two pregnancies. The money she made selling tomatoes at the local market dried up due to the pandemic. Her husbands income selling goat meat also dwindled.

It was the most difficult period of our lives. We had no money for our daily survival, Maxwell, 31, said as she waited outside with other women to be seen by a medical midwife. Mostly we stayed home.

In a country where hospitals are so bare that women are expected to bring their own razor blades for cutting their babies' umbilical cords, the deepening poverty brought on by the pandemic is further imperiling women's lives.

Officials say far fewer pregnant women in Malawi are getting the health care they need amid the pandemic, with many forgoing medical visits and relying solely on traditional birth attendants, who provide emotional support and administer traditional herbal treatments but are technically banned by the government from delivering babies because of their lack of formal training. Many families cant afford clinic visits, or, like Maxwell, the transportation to get there; they also fear theyll catch coronavirus in a medical facility.

At risk are the gains that Malawi  a largely rural sliver of a country, with 18 million people  has made over the past decade to combat its poor record of maternal deaths. Malawian women face a 1-in-29 lifetime risk of death related to a pregnancy or birth, according to the United Nations Population Fund. The country has 439 such deaths per 100,000 live births  a figure it had worked to reduce from 984 per 100,000 in 2004, as women got better access to medical care, especially in emergencies.

Still, Malawi's rate is the third-highest in southern Africa. The rates are 19 per 100,000 births in the United States and 7 per 100,000 in the United Kingdom.

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This story is part of a yearlong series on how the pandemic is impacting women in Africa, most acutely in the least developed countries. APs series is funded by the European Journalism Centres European Development Journalism Grants program, which is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. AP is responsible for all content.

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Malawian hospitals also suffered staffing shortages when nurses were mobilized to treat coronavirus patients  leading to some lack of experienced personnel for births, said Young Hong, of the United Nations Population Fund.

Not only did the pandemic affect availability of manpower, it also exerted much pressure on the entire health system, including the stock out of certain medicines, equipment, basic medical supply like surgical gloves, said Hong, who noted that eight Malawian women die daily of pregnancy complications, far higher than the COVID-19 toll. This had a huge impact on the quality of maternal health service provision during the pandemic.

At the Ndirande Health Center, just northeast of the country's commercial capital of Blantyre, about 100 women visited daily for prenatal services before the pandemic. When COVID-19 emerged, that number dropped by half, and now is as low as 15 to 20 patients, said Jacqueline Kolove, a nursing officer at the clinic.

Sometimes even the women who come for prenatal care are afraid to deliver at the clinic during the pandemic, preferring to give birth at home. Malawian women are encouraged to give birth without medical intervention, and many here believe that emergency measures such as cesarean sections are shameful and a sign of weakness. Deciding to give birth at home, though, can be deadly  most women live too far away to make it in time if a dangerous complication arises.

We explain to them why such a decision might have the dire consequences ... sometimes even calling their husbands and parents to try to reason with them, Kolove said.

At Ndirande and other clinics, nurses, aides and medical midwives give pregnant women ultrasounds and use equipment to listen to the vital signs of mother and baby. A woman can undergo a cesarean section if needed, and medications are available to stop severe bleeding. Clinic staff take medical courses, observe simulated births, and become licensed.

Traditional birthing attendants learn from elders who pass down knowledge through generations and use little to no medical equipment  they listen to womens bellies by placing their ears there, for example, and gather herbs to induce labor. They say certain herbs, boiled into a dark-green liquid, can address situations such as breech babies who needs to change positions.

The government banned traditional birthing attendants' delivery work in 2007, but the practice has continued, with the ban rarely enforced. Some attendants charge nothing, and theyve seen an increase in women coming to them during the pandemic. Attendants such as Lucy Mbewe, whos 56 and estimates shes delivered 4,000 babies since 1983, say their work is key for women who cant afford anything else.

Even the colorful African cloth that is widely used to wrap babies, carry them on mothers backs or create makeshift diapers can be a potential obstacle to care, Mbewe noted. The government hospitals recommend that a woman who is going to deliver needs to carry with her at least 10 pieces of cloth, which is a deterrent to those that cannot even afford to put food on the table, she said.

At government facilities, Malawian women are even expected to bring a covering for the delivery bed, buckets for water, and sometimes candles or flashlights. Mbewe provides clothing and soap when she helps women give birth. She pays for transportation home. Some women are so grateful they return to pay her; she uses that money to care for other needy clients, she said.

But medically trained midwives say the mounting use of attendants has caused a spike in complicated deliveries, with women going to the hospital only once it's too late to save them. Mbewe says the complications are caused not by the traditional caregivers, but are attributable to expectant mothers getting pregnant at younger ages  a trend confirmed by a government report.

Midwives and health officials also say they're fighting against misinformation about the virus and vaccines that deters women from seeking proper medical care. Malawi didn't have a full social lockdown and has seen a dramatic rise in coronavirus cases, part of a surge across southern Africa. Experts believe cases are undercounted, and apprehension about the vaccine is widespread.

The Malawian government has administered less than 213,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine. And officials destroyed about 20,000 expired doses provided by COVAX, the U.N.-backed program to ship vaccines to poor countries. Across all of Africa, just 1% of the population of 1.3 billion people in 54 countries has had one dose of the vaccine, according to the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Nurses and midwives say some women fear they'll secretly be given the vaccine if they deliver at a medical facility.

They feel, as health workers, we are giving them the COVID-19 vaccine instead of oxytocin, said Kolove, the nursing officer at the Ndirande Health Center, referring to medicine that strengthens contractions and reduces the risk of bleeding. They feel we are cheating them. As a result, there are some cases where women refuse.

Medical staff also understand that they and the women they treat are at a higher risk of contracting coronavirus. The medically trained midwives try to educate women, and they take every precaution possible against the virus, even though their work delivering babies makes keeping a physical distance impossible, said Keith Lipato, president of the Association of Malawian Midwives.

We make sure that all midwives are screened and tested so that those with signs and symptoms are excused from work, and given the necessary medical treatment so that they do not infect clients and patients, Lipato said.

The precautions don't persuade many expectant mothers, though. Five months into her pregnancy, Margret Kosamu has yet to visit a health clinic. Instead, the 30-year-old has turned to a traditional birth attendant for just two visits. Her family's farming income has dropped, but it's not just an issue of money; she fears visiting a medical facility could kill her, not save her life.

One is more likely going to contract the virus at the hospital than here, she said of the attendant's care.

Lipato and other medical workers fear that the pandemic will have long-lasting effects on women's health in Malawi and beyond.

Patricia Gunde, 26, has not received any prenatal services during her first pregnancy. She prefers instead to receive the herbs her attendant says will keep her healthy and hasten labor. Gunde has no plans to get a COVID-19 vaccine.

I am afraid," she said. "I have heard many stories about it.

With the traditional birth attendant, she feels at ease because women are seen one at a time.

When the attendant brings Gunde in for care, neither wears a mask.

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AP writers Krista Larson in Dakar, Senegal, and Andrew Meldrum in Johannesburg contributed.

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Follow APs multiformat Africa news on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AP_Africa

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See the full series on how the pandemic is affecting women in Africa: https://apnews.com/hub/women-the-eyes-of-africa
Four years after Retired United States Marine Corps. Cpl Jimmie Edwards launched an effort to raise funds in his quest to move and expand the Montgomery County Veterans Memorial, state Rep. Will Metcalf, R-Conroe, announced Tuesday the park will receive $7 million from the Texas Parks and Wildlife to fund the parks next phase.

Metcalf, along with Edwards and the board members of the Montgomery County Veterans Memorial Commission, made the announcement Tuesday at the park.

The next phase of the park is to include a multi-story educational-visitors center and museum to promote education, patriotism, and commemorate and honor the service of past, present, and future Veterans. The memorial park is at Interstate 45 and Texas 105.

It has been my honor to work alongside former Montgomery County Judge and State Representative, Jimmie Edwards, in his current mission as Chairman of the Montgomery County Veterans Memorial Commission since its inception in 2017, Metcalf said. Judge Edwards and his team of incredibly dedicated volunteers on the commission have done an outstanding job getting this memorial park erected, not only for the enjoyment of Montgomery County residents, but citizens all over the state who want to come and pay tribute to those who have served or are currently serving.

Metcalf said he has worked closely with Executive Director Janeen McSwain and Director of Public Relations and Outreach Howard Wood to gather all the information needed during the budget crafting process.

With this vital funding, the commission will have the resources it needs to get the beautiful Educational Center and Museum underway so that we can put the Montgomery County Veterans Memorial Park on the map nationally, Metcalf said. Montgomery County is known for our patriotism and love of country, and this building will serve as a symbol of that love for all to see.

Edwards, who also served as county judge for Montgomery County, credited Metcalf and the commissions staff with securing the funding. The funds, Edwards noted, brings the timeline to complete the park ahead by years.

Saying we are excited is not enough, we are elated, Edwards said. 110 percent of the credit for the successful passage of this $7 million appropriation goes to Rep. Will Metcalf, Sarah Tillman Henry, district director to Rep. Will Metcalf; the Commissions Executive Director, Janeen McSwain; and our director of Public Relations and Outreach Howard Wood. They were the tip of the spear, the rest of us were in the rear with the gear, furnishing any facts, figures, information, and statistics that they needed for a successful completion of this legislative endeavor.

Wood called the announcement exciting news for Conroe, Montgomery County and veterans.

With these funds, we will expand the memorial with the addition of a multistory educational center, Wood said. The facility design will leverage our location to incorporate an emergency response center supporting our citizens and municipalities in times of need and disaster. We would like to thank Representative Metcalf and Mrs. Henry for their continued support honoring our veterans, active duty, first responders and our community.

Following unsuccessful attempts by the city of Conroe and Montgomery County, Metcalf also announced the Texas Department of Transportation will install signage for the Montgomery County Veterans Memorial Commission and adjacent Lone Star Monument and Historical Flag Park along Interstate 45.

After learning the park did not qualify for the signage from the state, Metcalf filed House Bill 1158 during the 87th Legislative Session that added an additional eligibility criterion for nonprofit attractions to be featured on TxDOT highway signage.

Fortunately following the passage of HB 1158 in the Texas House, and with the help of state Sen. Robert Nichols, R-Conroe, who chairs the Senate Transportation committee, TxDOT agreed to work with us on this matter and we were successful in finally getting signage secured, Metcalf said. Thats a huge win for us.

cdominguez@hcnonline.com
Montgomery County is sending some jail staff to help border counties with the influx of immigrants crossing into the United States.

Last week, Gov. Greg Abbott issued a statewide call for jailers to assist border sheriffs with operating detention facilities and providing jail beds for those arrested for state charges related to the border crisis.

The State of Texas will not tolerate criminal activity, which is why we are stepping up to address this crisis in the Biden Administrations absence, Abbott said. Part of our comprehensive efforts to secure the border include enforcing all state and federal laws, which is why we are calling on jailers and sheriffs across the state to volunteer support for our border sheriffs. Working together, we will secure the border and keep our communities safe.

For Montgomery County Sheriff Rand Henderson, helping southern counties is just the right thing to do.

I support what the governor is trying to do, he said noting he has visited the border. I recognize there is a crisis and there is a need. Our brother and sister agencies need the help.

Henderson said his office would send jail staff to help on the border noting the operation would not involve field staff such as patrol officers. He added several detention staff have already volunteered.

Montgomery County commissioners met for a special session Tuesday to consider a disaster declaration regarding the border crisis. However, Abbott amended his disaster declaration for 28 border counties Monday laying the groundwork to get those counties assistance from other jurisdictions prompting commissioners to hold off on approving a declaration.

After issuing the original disaster declaration, the governor met with sheriffs, police chiefs, county judges, mayors, and district attorneys from border communities at his Border Security Summit and asked for their collaboration and partnership to secure the border. Many county leaders have chosen to participate in this partnership, which is reflected in this amended disaster declaration. Additional counties will be added as local disaster declarations are issued.

I am grateful for our local partners in our South Texas and border communities who are willing to work alongside the State to keep Texans safe and secure the border, Abbott said in a press release. This amended declaration will ensure that resources and support are surged where they are needed most.

Commissioners and Hendersons willingness to help with the crisis come after the court approved a resolution in May requesting the federal government to enforce existing laws and reimburse counties for cost incurred for the failure to secure the border.

In April, Abbott sent a letter to county judges across the state asking them to send to the governors office a full and accurate estimate of the fiscal impact of the current border crisis on their respective counties. The state of Texas will use this information to formally request that the federal government pay in full for these costs borne by state and local governments. The governor also noted that the efforts of county judges can be bolstered if their commissioner courts adopt a resolution supporting the state of Texas request for federal reimbursement.

In Montgomery Countys resolution, County Judge Mark Keough notes the health, life and property of residents of Montgomery County is under imminent threat from the influx of foreign nationals unlawfully crossing into Texas from Mexico.

The resolution continues to say the illegal immigration is a violation of our sovereignty and border integrity has resulted in Montgomery County being impacted with the dangers born from illicit drugs, human trafficking and exposure to deadly transmissible diseases and thus is a direct threat to the lives and safety of Montgomery County residents.

Any further resolutions or agreement with other counties or the state will come back to the court at a future date for approval.

cdominguez@hcnonline.com
ERIE, Pa. (AP)  Three people were found dead following a fire in a northwestern Pennsylvania home, authorities said.

State police said the blaze was reported shortly after 2 p.m. Tuesday in the Greene Township home in Erie County.

Trooper Cindy Schick told the Erie Times-News that the three deceased individuals had not yet been identified.

Volunteers with several local volunteer fire companies responded and had the blaze under control within an hour.

Schick said the state police criminal investigation unit and a fire marshal are investigating.
SYRACUSE, N.Y. (AP)  A 7-year-old boy was shot in the back and two adults were injured in a shooting in Syracuse, police said.

The three victims were shot at 10 p.m. Monday on South Salina Street, Sgt. Matthew Malinowski told the Post-Standard of Syracuse.
TOKYO (AP)  Two Americans charged in Japan with helping Nissans former chairman, Carlos Ghosn, jump bail and escape for Lebanon apologized Tuesday in a Tokyo court.

I deeply regret my actions and sincerely apologize for causing difficulties for the judicial process and for the Japanese people. Im sorry, Michael Taylor, a former Green Beret said, bowing and holding back sobs.

Taylor, on trial in Tokyo District Court with his son Peter, said in response to questioning by his lawyer and prosecutors that he had been misinformed by Ghosn and his wife, Carole.

Carole Ghosn told Taylor her husband was tortured" and grilled in solitary confinement, he said. Ghosn also said he was being mistreated, Taylor said.

Taylor said he has been well treated in Japan.

I didnt know much about Japan. All I know is that the Japanese are the friendliest people Ive ever bumped into, he said.

At the outset of their trial earlier this month, the Taylors indicated they werent fighting the allegations, in Japans equivalent of pleading guilty. They were arrested in Massachusetts last year and extradited to Japan in March.

Peter Taylor, who allegedly met with Ghosn to plan the escape, also apologized to the court for the trouble he had caused.

I must apologize to the people of Japan, Peter Taylor said, bowing to a panel of three judges.

After more than 400 days in jail, I have had a lot of time to reflect. I take full responsibility and deeply apologize. I am sorry," he said.

If convicted of helping a criminal, the Taylors face up to three years in prison. Japanese trials often drag on for months, and their defense team has indicated they want the trial to finish as soon as possible. Showing remorse for wrongdoing is considered crucial for defendants hoping for judicial leniency.

Ghosn, who led Nissan for two decades, was arrested in November 2018, and charged with financial misconduct, including falsifying securities reports to under-report his future compensation, and with breach of trust in using Nissan money for personal gain.

He says he is innocent, arguing that the compensation was never decided on or paid and the expenses were legitimate for his job.

Ghosn hid in a box for musical equipment and left Japan in a private jet in December 2019. He is now in Lebanon, which has no extradition treaty with Japan.

The Taylors, who have not been granted bail, are accused of playing leading roles in that escape. Prosecutors have described details of bank transfers and bitcoin payments, alleging Ghosn paid the Taylors the equivalent of more than $1 million.

While in detention, prosecutors questioned Ghosn without a lawyer present, although he was allowed lawyers visits. Thats standard in Japan, where more than 99% of criminal cases end with guilty verdicts. Critics often point to human rights abuses in the judicial system.

Another American and former top Nissan executive, Greg Kelly, is on trial in Tokyo on charges of under-reporting Ghosns compensation. Kelly says he is innocent and was only trying to pay Ghosn legally.

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Yuri Kageyama is on Twitter https://twitter.com/yurikageyama
BATON ROUGE, La. (AP)  The Louisiana Department of Corrections has named a Black warden at one of its largest state prisons amid calls to increase diversity among the highest levels of leadership.

Kirt Guerin will supervise Elayn Hunt Correctional Center in St. Gabriel, The Advocate reported on Monday. He started his career with the department 30 years ago when he was hired as a corrections cadet at the facility.

Guerin is the fifth Black person in Louisianas history to be appointed to the highest-ranking position at one of the eight state prisons, a department spokesperson told the newspaper.

I prayed a long time for this job, for the dedicated employees that work here, and for the future of Elayn Hunt Correctional Center, Guerin said in a statement. I believe that with God all things are possible  and that the best is yet to come.

Guerin has been overlooked for promotions multiple times in recent years. Joe Buttross, who didnt have direct experience working in a prison, was chosen over him for an assistant warden opening at Hunt in 2019.

A group of Black retired corrections executives formed a committee last year to evaluate hiring and promotions. They found that the department was diverse overall, but Black people were underrepresented in high-ranking positions.

While there remains much work to be done regarding the elevation of Black employees to executive levels at the Louisiana Department of Corrections, this is certainly a step in the right direction, committee chair Larry Smith said in a statement regarding Guerins new role.

The department also announced Monday that Tim Hooper, the previous warden at the center in St. Gabriel, was transferred to oversee the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.

These two prisons are in good hands with individuals who have longstanding records and history with the Department, department secretary Jimmy LeBlanc said in a statement. Both are visionaries who will continue the critical work to reform, rehabilitate and prepare people to return to our communities.
BOGOTA, Colombia (AP)  Colombian officials say they have arrested a Romanian hacker who is wanted in the U.S. for distributing a virus that infected more than a million computers from 2007 to 2012.

Mihai Ionut Paunescu faces computer intrusion and banking fraud charges in New York, where prosecutors say he was part of a ring of criminals that developed and spread the Gozi" virus and other forms of malware that were used to steal money from bank accounts.
DENVER (AP)  Prosecutors on Monday charged a Colorado police officer with second-degree assault over allegedly putting a man in a chokehold during an arrest earlier this month.

Greeley police Officer Kenneth Amick, 48, has been placed on unpaid leave as a result of the police department's investigation into the alleged June 7 assault on Matthew Wilson, 36, police said in a statement. At the time, Wilson complained that Amick, who was wanted on a warrant, was using excessive force and asked for a supervisor, police said. Two officers also later reported what they believed to be excessive force, police said.

Amick, who has worked for Greeley police for 15 years, was removed from patrol duty while police conducted their investigation and the department later recommended that prosecutors charge him with assault, leading him to be placed on leave, police said.

Court records do not indicate if Amick has a lawyer yet and there was no answer at two telephone numbers listed for him.

As part of a sweeping police reform bill passed in the middle of protests over the killing of George Floyd, Colorado lawmakers banned police officers from using chokeholds and also required police officers to intervene if they believe excessive force is being used.

On Monday, the office of 19th Judicial District Attorney Michael J. Rourke charged Amick with strangulation, a form of second-degree assault.

Court records do not indicate if Amick has a lawyer yet and there was no answer at two telephone numbers listed for him.

According to police, Wilson was arrested after officers responded to a city government building where an employee said that a man was making threats to burn it down. Officers contacted Wilson at nearby city hall, learned there was a warrant for his arrest and Amick put him in handcuffs, police said.

As Wilson was being escorted outside, he became agitated and complained that his wrists were hurting and Wilson suddenly placed him into a chokehold, police said. Wilson showed ill effects from this hold, another officer tried to intervene and officers tried to calm Wilson, police said.

Wilson, who was still handcuffed, grabbed Amicks hand, which prompted Amick to strike Wilsons legs with his knees before placing Wilson on the ground to try to calm him down, police said. Officers helped Wilson back up and put him in a patrol car, police said.
JOINT BASE ELMENDORF-RICHARDSON, Alaska (AP)  The solemn task of sifting through rocks, twigs and ice to find human remains as small as a fingernail continued this month on a glacier north of Anchorage, nearly 69 years after all 52 members of a military transport flight were killed when the plane slammed into a mountain.

Wreckage from the plane was spotted by the Alaska National Guard in 2012 during a training mission, setting up annual trips by military officials to recover remains of the crew and passengers of the C-124 Globemaster, which was en route from Fort McChord in Washington state to Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage when it crashed in bad weather on Nov. 22, 1952. By the time a search party arrived about two weeks later, the plane was covered by deep snow and couldn't be located.

From previous recovery missions, 43 people on board the flight have been identified using DNA, dental records or fingerprints, officials said Tuesday at a news conference to discuss results of this years effort.

Crews on Saturday finished the two-week search at Colony Glacier with the intent of providing closure to more families.

They recovered over 460 bags of remains and nearly 100 bags of personal effects, said Capt. Briana Quintana, lead planner and ground forces commander for the mission. She is with Air Force Mortuary Affairs Operations based at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where the remains and artifacts will be returned for analysis.

The remains and personal effects were in good condition, likely due to the glacier, Quintana said.

Theyre being preserved pretty well in the ice, she said.

Katherine Grosso, a medical legal investigator with the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System, said crews working on Colony Glacier, nearly 50 miles (80 kilometers) east of Anchorage, have noticed it is "really dynamic, that it changes rapidly, daily.

As we participate in this mission from year to year, we find that not only does the pitch of the glacier change, but the type of material that you find on it changes, she said.

They saw a lot of silt, mud and really small portions of rock, which makes fragments of remains difficult to find, he said.

Its required a little bit more of finesse to be able to recover those, Grosso said. However, "were still finding that were able to recover quite a bit of material.

Among the personal items found on the glacier from the wreckage were two playing cards, the seven and queen of spades; a pair of shoes; a 1944 map, apparently of the Anchorage area; and two chess pieces.

These were chosen for display at the news conference because they showed the everyday items that military members on board moving from Washington state to Anchorage would have, and there was no personal identifiers on them, said the deputy planner for the mission, Capt. Lyndi Minott, also stationed at Dover.

Also found was a camera, but there was no film inside. Minott said they found film on the glacier, but it didnt contain images.

Of all the personal items recovered this year, the camera struck a chord with Minott.

Thats only because my father takes a lot of photos and loves to document our lives, she said. To have a personal effect like that found was an emotional experience.

Next year will mark the 10th anniversary of the wreckage being spotted at the toe of Colony Glacier, 12 miles (19 kilometers) downhill from where the plane hit Mount Gannett. When asked how long the military will continue to search for remains, Quintana, this years mission leader, said that decision would be made by those who outrank her.

I can say with some confidence that as long as we are finding remains out on the glacier and we have people yet to identify and bring home, we will keep looking, she said.
SALT LAKE CITY (AP)  Doug Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, is planning to visit Bryce Canyon National Park in southern Utah this week as part of a tour through southwestern states, the White House announced Monday.

Emhoff will be visiting the park on Friday as part of a Biden administration tour to celebrate the country's progress against COVID-19. Emhoff's visit comes as many U.S. states continue to experience lagging vaccination rates.
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP)  The fighters now retaking parts of Ethiopia's Tigray region will pursue soldiers from neighboring Eritrea back into their country and chase Ethiopian forces to Addis Ababa if that's what it takes" to weaken their military powers, their spokesman said Tuesday, as a conflict that has killed thousands of civilians looked certain to continue.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Getachew Reda said that well stop at nothing to liberate every square inch of the Tigray region of 6 million people, nearly eight months after fighting erupted between the Tigray forces and Ethiopian soldiers backed by Eritrea.

He rejected the unilateral cease-fire Ethiopias government declared Monday as a sick joke and accused Ethiopia of long denying humanitarian aid to the Tigrayans it now pretends to care about. Ethiopia declared the unilateral cease-fire as its soldiers and hand-picked regional interim administration fled the Tigray regional capital following some of the fiercest fighting of the war.

We want to stop the war as quickly as we can, the Tigray spokesman said.

But he said liberating the region is not just about territory. If there is still a menace next door, whether it be in Eritrea, extremists from the neighboring Amhara region who have occupied western Tigray or Ethiopian forces, its about assuring Tigrayans security, he said.

The comments were sure to bring new alarm from the United States, United Nations and others who have pressed for an end to the fighting in Africa's second most populous country that has sent hundreds of thousands of Tigrayans into the world's worst famine crisis in a decade.

This week's swift turn in the war has left people scrambling to understand the implications for Tigray, as communications links remained largely cut.

Eritrean soldiers, accused by witnesses of some of the wars worst atrocities against Tigrayans, left the towns of Shire, Axum and Adwa, witnesses said, but it was not clear whether the retreat was temporary. The information ministry of Eritrea, a longtime enemy of Tigray's former leaders and described by human rights groups as one of the world's most repressive countries, did not immediately respond to questions.

We don't yet know if they are withdrawing from Tigray altogether, acting U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Robert Godec told the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. He said the U.S. had seen no statement from Eritrea saying it was committed to the cease-fire after what appears to be a significant withdrawal of Ethiopian national defense forces from Tigray."

The Tigray leaders have waged a guerrilla war since November after a political falling out with the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who had sidelined them from influential roles in Ethiopia's government and military. An Ethiopian military spokesman did not answer the phone Tuesday.

The arrival of Tigray forces in the regional capital, Mekele, on Monday was met with cheers. The fighters on Tuesday moved into Axum and Shire, a town that in recent months saw the arrival of hundreds of thousands of people fleeing intimidation in western Tigray and is a key staging area for humanitarian aid.

Tigray forces are now in control of much of the region after a major counteroffensive with mass popular support, International Crisis Group analyst William Davison said in a statement. They are "now in a position to facilitate access to many previously hard to reach areas, he said, urging Ethiopias government not to sabotage the urgent humanitarian efforts.

But the Tigray forces' talk indicates how distrustful they are of the cease-fire," Aly Verjee, a senior adviser at the United States Institute of Peace, told AP. Of course, I think its highly irresponsible for them to say such things. It doesnt do anything for people on the brink of famine. At the same time, I understand they're motivated by deep suspicion of Eritrean forces in particular.

Major questions remained about the fate of the more than 1 million civilians that the United Nations has said remain in parts of Tigray that have been hard, if not impossible, to reach with aid. The United States has said up to 900,000 people now face famine conditions, in the world's worst hunger crisis in a decade.

That famine is entirely man-made, the acting U.S. assistant secretary of state said.

Sarah Charles, assistant to the administrator for the United States Agency for International Development, told the Washington hearing that the next week or two will be consequential. She urged Ethiopia to lift a communications blackout on Tigray and said forces from the Amhara region must lift checkpoints on key roads for aid delivery.

U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters that the impact of the current situation on the humanitarian operations in the region remains unknown right now. Operations have been constrained for the past few days due to the ongoing fighting. The airport in Mekele was closed, and routes to deliver aid were not open, he said.

Ethiopia has said the cease-fire is in part for the delivery of aid but will last only until the end of the crucial planting season in Tigray  which is in September.

In Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa, people said they weren't sure who to believe amid the battlefield claims, and hoped for peace.

Its the innocent children, farmers and the poor people that are at the front of the war and are suffering, resident Biruk Dessalegn said.

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Associated Press writer Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report
WASHINGTON (AP)  Veteran forester Randy Moore has been named chief of the U.S. Forest Service, the first African American to lead the agency in its 116-year history.

Moore, 66, replaces Vicki Christiansen, who has led the agency since 2018. The Forest Service, a division of the Agriculture Department, oversees 193 million acres of public lands in 154 national forests and 20 national grasslands.

Moore has served as regional forester in the California-based Pacific Southwest Region since 2007, where he has responsibility for 18 national forests in California and Hawaii.

He will take over from Christiansen as head of the 30,000-employee agency upon her retirement July 26. Christiansen and Moore will collaborate on what is already shaping up as a severe wildfire season in the West, where an epic drought, complicated by climate change, has made putting out fires more challenging and strained firefighting resources throughout the region.

In the Pacific Northwest, where an extended heat wave has triggered record-breaking temperatures in Oregon and Washington state, fire crews have been positioned in high-risk areas, and cities and counties have imposed burn bans.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who appointed Moore, called him a catalyst for change and creativity in carrying out the Forest Services mission to sustain the nations forests.

As a regional forester, Moore has been on the forefront of climate change, most notably leading the regions response to the dramatic increase in catastrophic wildfires in California over the last decade, Vilsack said. His proven track record of supporting and developing employees and putting communities at the center of the Forest Services work positions him well to lead the agency into the future at this critical time in our country,'' Vilsack said in a statement.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., praised Moore's selection as Forest Service chief.

California understands all too well the challenges facing our forests and Im glad a Californian will head efforts to tackle them, she said.

Arkansas Rep. Bruce Westerman, the top Republican on the House Natural Resources Committee, called Moore a seasoned professional,'' adding: I sincerely hope we can work together on mitigating catastrophic wildfires, opening up our national forests to sustainable lumber harvesting, making forests more resilient against insects and diseases and much more.''

Before heading the Pacific Southwest region, Moore was regional forester in the Wisconsin-based Eastern Region, where he oversaw forests in 20 states.

Moore started his federal career in 1978 at USDAs Natural Resources Conservation Service in North Dakota. He has worked at national forests in Colorado, North Carolina and Missouri, a national grassland in Kansas and as an administrator in Washington.

Moore's appointment comes as Congress and the Biden administration push to increase firefighter pay and convert at least 1,000 seasonal wildland firefighters to year-round workers as fires have grown more severe. President Joe Biden last week called for an increase in pay for federal firefighters, who start as low as $13 an hour.

Thats a ridiculously low salary to pay federal firefighters, Biden said. "Thats going to end in my administration.''
SANTA FE, N.M. (AP)  It's legal for people in New Mexico to possess recreational marijuana and grow those plants at home as of Tuesday, the same day regulators opened discussions on rules for the launch of pot sales next year.

The milestone was celebrated by cannabis consumers and advocates for criminal justice reform who say poor and minority communities have been prosecuted disproportionately for using marijuana. Now, the scent of marijuana no longer is an adequate cause for searching vehicles and property in New Mexico.

Recreational marijuana is now legal in 16 states and Washington, D.C., with Connecticut and Virginia set to join the list Thursday.

New Mexico joins a wave of states that have broadly legalized pot through the legislative process rather than by voter-approved ballot initiative. That has allowed for innovations such as marijuana microbusiness" licenses that will allow up to 200 pot plants at seed-to-sales cannabis operations.

Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham heralded the day as "a huge step forward both for social justice and economic development in our state.

After legalization efforts repeatedly faltered in the Democratic-led Legislature, Lujan Grisham called a special legislative session in March to tackle cannabis reforms and signed the law in April.

We are proactively stopping the disproportionate criminalization of people of color for cannabis possession, and we are building a new industry," Lujan Grisham said in a news release.

The new law allows people 21 and over to possess up to 2 ounces (56 grams) of marijuana and grow up to six plants at home, or a total of 12 per household.

Regulators held an all-day public hearing to vet proposed rules for cannabis businesses to determine future licensing fees, quality controls, audit requirements and the extent of criminal background checks for producers.

The rules they are considering would allow more marijuana crops per business  nearly three times the 1,750-plant limit for medical cannabis growers. Enrollment in the medical marijuana program has surged past 100,000 people in a state of 2.1 million residents.

Medical users at the Minerva cannabis dispensary in Santa Fe welcomed the changes that took effect Tuesday  including the elimination of taxes on personal supplies of medical cannabis.

Aurore Bleck of Santa Fe, a 70-year-old retired administrator, uses marijuana to treat nerve pain associated with her multiple sclerosis. She says the changes are likely to ease the financial strain of buying cannabis.

Im on a budget, Bleck said. Its gonna help me because I can have six plants instead of four. In the past, Ive grown a lot.

Recreational marijuana are planned to start by April 1, 2022 and will include a 12% excise tax in addition to sales taxes ranging from about 5% to 9%.

The governor and lawmakers are eager to foster a new source of revenue that can help wean a heavy dependence on the state's oil industry.

Medical stores cant sell recreational cannabis yet but are looking to expand showrooms for non-medical users.

John Mondragon, 56, of Santa Fe, ordered a cannabis-infused lemonade that helps relieve his post-traumatic stress.

Im happy that they passed it," he said of the law legalizing recreational marijuana. "Theres so many people out here with unrecognized anxiety. As they use it, it will help.

At Tuesday's regulatory hearing, officials with the state's newly founded Cannabis Control Division listened to stark warnings about overuse of agricultural water supplies and the dangers of overregulation.

A lot of these regulations will only perpetuate the illicit market," said Kristina Caffrey, chief legal officer for Ultra Health, a leading producer and distributor of medical cannabis. Do they allow legal entrance to effectively compete?

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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 Attanasio on Twitter.

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This story has been corrected to show that people in New Mexico can grow recreational marijuana at home immediately, not that it begins in April 2022.
MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP)  An infant who had been the subject of an Amber Alert in Tennessee has been found, authorities said Tuesday afternoon.

A tweet from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation said 7-month-old Braylen Hunter Clark was safe, but the search continued for his noncustodial father, Barry Medlock.
South Carolina prison officials said Monday they have reached the initial approval phase of a $6 million settlement to resolve dozens of lawsuits the Department of Corrections is facing following a deadly prison riot that killed seven inmates.

We will appear in front of the State Fiscal Accountability Authority tomorrow asking for permission to move forward with a settlement in the Lee riot cases, Department of Corrections spokesperson Chrysti Shain told The Associated Press.

The settlement was listed as the final item on the authority's Tuesday agenda, which noted the prisons agency faces a total of 81 lawsuits filed by inmates, or on inmates' behalf, in state and federal courts.

The 2018 riot raged for more than seven hours at Lee Correctional Institution in Bishopville, about 40 miles (65 kilometers) east of Columbia. Most of the slain were stabbed or slashed; others appeared to have been beaten. One inmate described bodies literally stacked on top of each other, like some macabre woodpile.

Officials have said the violence  the worst U.S. prison riot in 25 years  began as a battle over contraband and territory. Corrections officials have blamed it in part on illegal cellphones, which Department Director Bryan Stirling has said represent the greatest security threat inside prisons because they give inmates an unmonitored way to communicate with the outside world and each other, and in some cases to wage criminal acts from behind bars.

For several months leading up to the insurrection, the AP communicated with a Lee prisoner who used a contraband cellphone to offer insight into life behind bars. Describing frequent gang fights with homemade weapons, he said prisoners roamed freely, had easy access to cellphones and drugs, and were often left to police themselves.

Just after the riots, both that inmate and an attorney who frequently works in the state's prisons told the AP the illegal cellphones were frequently furnished by corrections officers themselves.

A person familiar with the agency's operations backed up those notions, telling the AP delivery trucks  which were supposed to be inspected while entering prison grounds  often ferry cellphones and other contraband.

Since the riot, numerous security improvements have been implemented, including a $1 million cell door locking system to prevent future intrusions at Lee.

New measures also include perimeter netting, scanning devices and drone monitoring to shut cellphones down. Officials still are not able to fully use the cell signal-jamming technology Stirling wants, however.

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Meg Kinnard can be reached at http://twitter.com/MegKinnardAP.
INDIANOLA, Iowa (AP)  Officials have identified the man whose body was pulled from a south-central Iowa lake over the weekend.

The body of Joshua Sweeden, 33, of Indianola. was found Sunday morning in Lake Ahquabi near Indianola, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources said in a news release Tuesday.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP)  Israels foreign minister kicked off the highest-level visit by an Israeli official to the United Arab Emirates on Tuesday, nine months after the two countries established relations in a deal brokered by the United States.

Foreign Minister Yair Lapid met the UAE's foreign minister in Abu Dhabi and inaugurated Israel's first embassy in the Gulf.

Although the visit is historic, it received little fanfare across local media. Lapid was not greeted on the airport tarmac by Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, but by a lower-ranking minister of state. Even press access for Lapids various appearances in Abu Dhabi was strictly limited to Emirati media and select Israeli outlets traveling with him.

The toned-down atmosphere surrounding his visit belies the UAE's open-arm embrace of its newfound ties with Israel. In recent months, the two countries have rapidly expanded bilateral trade and signed investment deals, including in gas, technology and other sectors. More than 200,000 Israeli tourists have traveled to the UAE, the Israeli Foreign Ministry has said. Many of those visits have been to Dubai, which is open to tourists.

Lapid's visit, however, comes just weeks after a new government in Israel was formed in a power-sharing deal that named the ideologically hawkish, right-wing Naftali Bennett as Israels prime minister.

His visit also comes less than six week after emotions ran high across the Middle East amid Israel's 11-day war in the Gaza Strip that killed 254 Palestinians, including dozens of children. In Israel, 13 people died as a result of the conflict.

Lapid told diplomats gathered at the official opening of the Israeli Embassy in Abu Dhabi that the moment represented the right to determine our fate by ourselves. Israel, he said, isnt going anywhere.

The Middle East is our home. Were here to stay. We call on all the countries of the region to recognize that. And to come talk to us, he said, according to the speech released by Israels Foreign Ministry.

The Gaza war and tensions in Jerusalem, however, have interrupted U.S.-backed diplomatic efforts to encourage more Arab states to sign normalization deals with Israel.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken described Lapids visit as significant for Israel, the UAE, and the broader region. In a statement, he said the U.S. will work with Israel and the UAE to strengthen the partnership.

The Trump administration brokered the so-called "Abraham Accords" agreement that established ties between the UAE and Israel. It was hailed at the time by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump as among their greatest achievements.

Lapids visit to the UAE was one that Netanyahu had hoped to make himself before his 12-year-run at the helm ended earlier this month. He had repeatedly tried to score a lightning trip to Abu Dhabi to boost his re-election campaign.

In acknowledgement of Netanyahu, Lapid told diplomats gathered at the Israeli Embassy that the former prime minister is the architect of the Abraham Accords and that this moment is his, no less than it is ours.

Underpinning UAE-Israel ties is a shared concern that Iran's nuclear deal with world powers did not go far enough to curb Tehran's reach in the region. Their reservations about the deal helped propel quiet ties, long before they formally announced full diplomatic relations last year.

President Joe Biden is pushing to revive and expand the nuclear accord, which Trump pulled the U.S. out of in 2018. Earlier this week, Lapid was quoted as saying that Israel has serious reservations about the nuclear deal being discussed in Vienna, but pledged Israel would make its objections privately. Its expected that Lapids conversation with his Emirati counterpart included talk of Iran.

Theres been years of under-the-radar relations between Israel and the UAE, and we are now enjoying the fruits of the infrastructure of peace that weve built in the last decades, said Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Lior Haiat.

On Wednesday, Lapid will inaugurate Israels consulate in Dubai and visit the site of the World Fair's Expo in Dubai, which will open in October. Lapid is also due to meet with members of the expatriate Jewish community residing in Dubai.

The UAEs move to formalize ties with Israel marked the first time in over two decades that an Arab state had normalized relations with Israel. It paved the path for a similar announcement by Bahrain, and later by Sudan and Morocco in rapid succession.

Soon after its pact with Israel, the UAE scored U.S. authorization for the sale of 50 advanced F-35 fighter jets, which would make it only the second country in the Middle East, after Israel, to acquire them.

Meanwhile, Palestinians across the political spectrum have slammed the UAEs ties with Israel in the absence of peace talks or concessions toward a two-state solution.

In May, tensions flared in east Jerusalem when Israeli forces clashed with Palestinian protesters and worshippers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in the final days of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. The site in east Jerusalem is holy to both Jews and Muslims.

The tensions in Jerusalem drew rare public rebuke from the Emirati government. The UAE's public statements, however, changed in tone after Hamas militants in Gaza began firing rockets at Israel. The UAE considers Hamas as an Iran-backed militant group and an offshoot of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood.

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Associated Press writer Ilan Ben Zion in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
WEST DES MOINES, Iowa (AP)  In the past week alone, Nikki Haley regaled activists in Iowa, Mike Pence courted donors in California and Donald Trump returned to the rally stage, teasing a third campaign for the White House.

The midterms are more than a year away, and there are 1,225 days until the next presidential election. But Republicans eyeing a White House run are wasting no time in jockeying for a strong position in what could emerge as an extremely crowded field of contenders.

The politicking will only intensify in the coming weeks, particularly in Iowa, home to the nation's leadoff presidential caucuses and a state where conservative evangelicals play a significant role in steering the direction of the GOP. Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas is slated to visit on Tuesday, and others, including Pence, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are expected to appear in July.

The flurry of activity is a sign that there is no clear frontrunner to lead the GOP if Trump opts against a 2024 campaign.

It definitely feels early, but it doesnt feel like it's a bad idea based on the situation," said Mike DuHaime, a longtime Republican strategist. The party has changed, the voters are changing and I think the process has changed. And I think many of the candidates have realized that.

For now, a central question in Republican politics is whether Trump, who continues to advance lies about his loss last year to Joe Biden, will run again. The former president has said he will make a decision after next year's midterms.

In the meantime, he faces mounting legal vulnerabilities, including the potential that prosecutors in Manhattan may file criminal charges against his company as soon as this week. Trump is also under investigation by a district attorney in Georgia for attempting to pressure elections officials to change results in his favor.

Still, Trump, who left office in January under the cloud of impeachment for inciting a riot at the U.S. Capitol, is flirting with a political future. Returning to the rally stage last weekend for the first time as a private citizen, Trump looked every bit the candidate as an enthusiastic crowd of thousands in Ohio chanted, Four more years!

We won the election twice," he said. "And its possible well have to win it a third time."

The specter of Trump has been especially challenging for Republicans like Pence. As a conservative evangelical Christian who was Trump's unflinchingly loyal vice president, Pence would seem appealing to many of the party's activists. But his decision to follow the constitutional process and certify Biden's win angered many in the GOP.

Though he still heaps praise on Trump's accomplishments, Pence has worked more recently to forge his own identity, splitting with his former boss in particular over the severity of the deadly Jan. 6 riot, which forced him into hiding but which many Republicans have sought to minimize.

That balancing act came into sharp relief Thursday as Pence delivered a speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in front of a sold-out crowd of more than 800 people during a swing through California that included meetings with donors and a headline speech at a Republican National Committee dinner.

After being booed and jeered the week before at a conservative conference in Florida, Pence appeared to have a newfound sense of swagger as he delivered his strongest rebuttal to date of Trumps continued insistence that he could have unilaterally overturned the results of the last election. Many of Trump's supporters continue to blame Pence for Trump's loss, even though he had no power to overturn the results.

The truth is, theres almost no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president, Pence said, adding that he would always be proud that we did our part, on that tragic day, to reconvene the Congress and fulfill our duty under the Constitution and the laws of the United States.

It's been a similar tightrope act for Haley, Trump's former ambassador to the United Nations and a former governor of South Carolina, who sharply criticized Trump after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot but has since largely avoided the subject.

At a Thursday dinner during a three-day swing across Iowa, Haley presented herself to about 500 Republican activists as a next-generation conservative figure.

Like Pence, Haley spent much of her speech praising Trump's time in office and sharing anecdotes of her work with him that lit chuckles throughout the hall, while ignoring the deadly siege at the Capitol as well as Trumps monthslong campaign to cast doubt on the outcome of the 2020 election, even though there is no evidence of the widespread fraud he alleges.

I saw firsthand as ambassador to the United Nations that Donald Trump put America first, sometimes in the most interesting of ways, she said.

Haley was also the guest on a popular conservative radio talk show Friday and headlined fundraisers for statehouse and county leaders, including Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds.

There are a lot of reasons why I love Iowa, she said. But maybe the biggest reason is that Iowa loves to elect badass Republican women.

The activity is not surprising to activists in the states that will ultimately have first say in picking their party's candidates.

It takes a while to court states like New Hampshire and Iowa," said Greg Moore, the New Hampshire state director of Americans for Prosperity, a conservative political advocacy group founded by the Koch brothers. And its fine and dandy if youre President Trump and you have a prebuilt infrastructure in the state and just have to turn the key. But for everyone else, you have to build that.

So far, polls and interviews suggest voters are a long way from picking favorites, though Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is frequently mentioned as a possible Trump successor. He is notably one of the few leading Republicans who has yet to visit Iowa this year.

At last week's GOP event in California, retiree Bob Egbert, 75, praised Trump but doubted a third run would be good for the party. Egbert likes what he sees in DeSantis and considered Pences low-key personality as a liability with voters.

I think he would be a nice, bland candidate, said Egbert, a Republican. I dont think thats what we need.

Former California Gov. Pete Wilson, a Republican, predicted a spirited contest in 2024, but declined to identify a favorite among the emerging candidates.

As for Trump?

It is, after all ... his decision. Its a decision he shares with his family, Wilson said. He is much admired. Its obvious from what has occurred he is much feared and demonized by this (Biden) administration.

___

Colvin reported from Wellington, Ohio. Associated Press writer Michael R. Blood contributed to this report from Simi Valley, California.
ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP)  A Virginia man has pleaded guilty to illegally selling ivory ornaments made from elephant tusks.

Gary Cooper, 60, of Fredericksburg, pleaded guilty Tuesday in federal court in Alexandria to the misdemeanor unlawful sale of endangered species.

According to court records, Cooper sold seven pieces of ivory worth more than $3,000 to multiple undercover agents from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over a 16-month period beginning in September 2018. He also offered dozens of other pieces, including tusks, for sale.

Prosecutors said Cooper told his buyers that he was selling off items from an elderly couple's estate when in reality he was buying ivory pieces online and reselling for a profit.

The plea agreement requires Cooper to forfeit more than 130 pieces of raw and carved ivory.

Cooper's lawyer, Caleb Kershner, said his client accepts responsibility and that the sales were motivated in part by financial difficulties in caring for his mother.

The Fish and Wildlife Service said a ban on the commercial trade in ivory from African elephants has been in place since 2016, though some exceptions are permitted.
HARTFORD, Conn. (AP)  Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont said Tuesday that he's not ready to lift the state's mandate requiring face masks in schools for the upcoming school year, saying he wants to hear more from federal health officials given the spread of the highly transmissible delta variant of the coronavirus in the U.S. and elsewhere.

The Democrat said his administration is still having conversations with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and is awaiting new guidance that's expected in a couple weeks.

Up until a couple of weeks ago, you thought, OK, we should be out of the woods by September, Lamont told reporters. But now you see the delta variant and you see what's going on in Australia, you see what's going on in Israel, you see what's going on in Britain, not to mention Arkansas and L.A. So were going to have to make up our minds on that a little bit later.

As of last Thursday, there were 43 identified cases in Connecticut of the delta variant, which was first found in India.

The issue of children being required to wear facemasks has been a contentious one among some Connecticut parents who've raised constitutional and health concerns about the mandate. A judge in May, however, upheld Lamont's emergency order requiring masks for the most recent school year. The ruling did not address any guidance on masks that may be issued for the upcoming school year. Meanwhile, a group called Unmask Our Kids CT has been holding rallies, demanding the requirement finally be lifted.

On Tuesday, Lamont continued to stress the importance of people getting vaccinated, noting the rise in the delta variant should inspire more to get the shot. While roughly 80% of adults have received at least one dose in Connecticut, Lamont noted there are still pockets of people who haven't gotten inoculated that the state continues to target.

We're taking the mobile vans there, we're knocking on doors, were doing everything we can to make it easier, he said. We're doing house calls now, door-to-door.

As of last Thursday, 95% of those over the age of 65 had received at least one dose; 85% of those between 55-64; 74% of those between 45-54; 69% of those between 35-44; 60% of those between 25-34; 56% of those between 18-24; 63% of those between 16-17; and 44% of those between 12-15.
BOSTON (AP)  A Massachusetts man has pleaded guilty to attacking a postal worker and trying to steal a package that authorities later determined contained a shipment of cocaine, federal prosecutors said.

Raymond Acevedo, 29, of Winchester, pleaded guilty on Monday in federal court in Boston to robbery, assault and drug possession charges, according to a statement from the U.S. attorney's office.
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP)  The Senate voted unanimously Tuesday to make former lawmaker and U.S. Attorney Peter McCoy the new chairman of state-owned utility Santee Cooper.

Senators wasted no time getting McCoy into his new job, with both the Judiciary Committee and the full Senate voting during Tuesdays special session. The General Assembly may not meet again for a few months.

Gov. Henry McMaster nominated McCo y in April to lead the oversight board of the utility, which provides power for more than 2 million of South Carolina's 5 million residents.

McCoy is well known a the Statehouse. He spent 10 years as a Republican in the South Carolina House, rising to House Judiciary Committee chairman. He ran a special committee that investigated the abandoned nuclear reactors at V.C. Summer north of Columbia. Then during his year as U.S. attorney, he oversaw the prosecution of two executives of SCANA, which had the majority share in the shuttered reactors.

He's already been vetted by the United States Senate and others. I think this is an easy bet, said Sen. Gerald Malloy, a Democrat from Hartsville.

McCoy takes over Santee Cooper in perhaps its most stable place in the past four years, since construction was halted on two nuclear reactors in which the utility was a 45% partner and spent billions of dollars for no return.

We have, in my opinion, turned the corner, McCoy told senators Tuesday.

Some lawmakers pushed to sell Santee Cooper to a private firm, but a deal could never get a majority of the General Assembly on board. Instead, lawmakers passed a bill overhauling the utility that McCoy will help incorporate.

McCoy will eventually be one of nine new members on the 10-person Santee Cooper board. The law passed earlier this year kicks off every board member serving before the nuclear reactors were abandoned in 2017.

It also gives state regulators more power over the utility, from requiring them to review the utilitys future plans to generate power and their forecasts for power use to requiring public hearings and a watchdog to question utility executives about rate increases. It also requires outside approval for any severance packages for executives.

McCoy promised to be independent both from McMaster, who still wants to see Santee Cooper sold to a private company, and to lawmakers who unwaveringly supported the state continuing in the power business.

Santee Cooper was created during the Great Depression to provide electricity to rural areas, which made up most of the state at the time. That service remains powerful in the minds of some legislators.

McCoy said the first thing he did when the governor nominated him was to print out the section of South Carolina law concerning the duties of Santee Cooper board member. They call for that person to act in good faith, with the care an ordinarily prudent person" would use and act in the best interest of the utility.

I've taken those with me everywhere. I read them religiously, McCoy said.

Sen. Chip Campsen urged McCoy to stay true to those principles.

If you have occasion of having elected officials try and persuade you to do something other than fulfill that fiduciary duty I encourage you to pull out that code session and stick it in their face like a cross in the face of a vampire, the Republican from the Isle of Palms said.

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Follow Jeffrey Collins on Twitter at https://twitter.com/JSCollinsAP.
COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP)  Missouri anti-abortion advocates on Tuesday continued to push Republican lawmakers to use a special legislative session on a Medicaid funding tax to also block Planned Parenthood funding.

But with only days left before GOP Gov. Mike Parson's Thursday deadline for lawmakers to renew the Medicaid tax, it seems unlikely that the Republican-led Legislature will succeed on the Planned Parenthood front.

The ultimate question by pro-life Missourians will be: did we come out of this special session, with a pro-life majority of Republicans, still funding Planned Parenthood? Missouri Right to Life Executive Director Susan Klein told the House Budget Committee during a Tuesday hearing.

The Budget Committee advanced two bills Tuesday: one to renew the tax, and one to block any government funding for Planned Parenthood.

The tax renewal only needs a vote by the full House to pass, but the Planned Parenthood legislation still would need to go to the Senate for approval if passed by the House. Senators have already left the Capitol after voting on the tax renewal Saturday.

Parson called lawmakers back to work for the last-minute session to renew the tax on medical providers, which brings in billions of dollars in state and federal Medicaid funding. He's threatened to cut at least $722 million if the Legislature doesn't act by July 1, when the state's next budget kicks in.

An effort to amend the tax-renewal bill to also block Planned Parenthood Medicaid funding failed in the GOP-led Senate last week.

Republican Sen. Bob Onder, the amendment sponsor, labeled a vote on Planned Parenthood funding as a test of his fellow Republican senators' views on abortion.

But some other Republicans decried that depiction, arguing that pairing the amendment with the tax renewal could put billions of dollars in federal Medicaid funding at risk.

Republican Senate President Pro Tem Dave Schatz and Majority Leader Caleb Rowden described the bill passed by the chamber Saturday as pro-life," even though it doesn't ban Planned Parenthood funding, because it protects health care for Missouris neediest citizens.

Playing political games with billions of dollars of Missouris Medicaid funding, would have jeopardized our state budget and health care coverage for pregnant women, poor children, and the disabled, the Senate leaders said.

Senate Republicans are already facing pushback from Missouri Right to Life, which is hugely influential in state GOP politics, for passing the tax renewal without a ban on Planned Parenthood funding.

The Senate has made it clear they're not willing to pass a pro-life bill, Klein told the House Budget Committee.
COEUR D'ALENE, Idaho (AP)  A Montana man who pleaded guilty to firing into a crowd at a northern Idaho bar last year has been sentenced to up to 15 years in prison.

Austin L. Sherper, 25, of Whitefish, pleaded guilty in April to seven felonies including aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, The Coeur d'Alene Press reported. Prosecutors said he shot 10 times at a crowd outside a Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, bar after security staffers told him he wasn't allowed inside. Two people were grazed by the bullets and treated at a hospital.

District Judge Scott Wayman sentenced Sherper on Monday to 15 years in prison for each felony. He said the prison terms would be served at the same time and that Sherper would be eligible for parole after serving at least five years in prison.

Police responded to reports of the shooting at the Iron Horse Bar & Grill around 9 p.m. on July 11, 2020. According to court documents, a man later identified as Sherper had earlier had an altercation with security staffers at the bar, who told him he was no longer allowed inside. Witnesses who were smoking outside the bar told police Sherper yelled at them as he walked past, then threatened to come back and kill them.

Prosecutors said Sherper returned to the bar in a truck and fired 10 shots at people gathered under an awning outside, emptying his handgun.

Police later found Sherper at a Coeur dAlene home and arrested him after an hourslong standoff.

During the sentencing hearing, a psychiatrist testified that Sherper had bipolar disorder and was experiencing a manic episode at the time of the shooting. Angela Lentz, Sherpers sister, also spoke to the judge, saying Sherper had been proactive about treating his mental illness since he has been in jail.

Sherper told the court he wants to take responsibility for his actions and said he recognized that he narrowly avoided a tragedy.

I think God was there that day, keeping us all relatively safe, he said.
OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP)  Most of the COVID-19 restrictions that have been in place and modified several times since last spring will be lifted in Washington state Wednesday, meaning restaurants and bars and other businesses can resume full indoor occupancy levels and physical distancing requirements will be lifted.

Since May, all of the states 39 counties have been in the third phase of a four-stage reopening plan, with indoor capacity limited at 50%. Now, businesses across the state can resume normal operations.

Anthony Anton, president and CEO of the Washington Hospitality Association, said that customer demand is high and that the biggest challenge for restaurants is hiring enough workers.

I think our restaurants are going to see a boom, he said at a news conference Tuesday. People are really excited to be back.

Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee had set the June 30 date for reopening, and the state fell short of an option that would have allowed earlier opening if if 70% of residents age 16 and older had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Even with the creation of lottery incentives with prizes up to $1 million, the statewide vaccination rate for those 16 and up is just over 68%.

Residents age 12-15 have been eligible for vaccination since last month, and more than 37% of that group have initiated vaccination, and about 28% are fully vaccinated.

There have been more than 414,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases  plus another 36,000 probable cases  in Washington state, and 5,911 deaths.

Even though Wednesday marks a new stage in our continued efforts to defeat this pandemic, we still have work to do, Inslee said in a written statement. Continued success depends on everyone getting vaccinated and encouraging any loved one who has not yet received this lifesaving vaccine to do so, and quickly.

There have already been fewer masking requirements since last month, when the state adopted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance that eased most indoor mask-wearing for fully vaccinated people. Masking rules will remain in place at health care settings  like hospitals and doctors offices  correctional facilities, homeless shelters and schools, and masks will continue to be required for unvaccinated employees who return to work indoors. And businesses can continue to choose to require masks for their customers, regardless of vaccination status.

Large indoor events of more than 10,000 people, like concerts, will still be restricted to 75% capacity unless the event does vaccination verification prior to entry and all attendees are vaccinated. Those restrictions will be reevaluated on July 31, Inslees office said.

Inslee has two days of reopening events scheduled, starting Wednesday, first at Wright Park in Tacoma and then River Square Park in Spokane. On Thursday, he will raise a Washington Ready flag on top of the Space Needle in Seattle and will also visit Pike Place Market.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP)  A mural in Kentucky that depicts Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and other Black people recently killed by law enforcement has been defaced, officials said.

The Say Their Names mural unveiled in Louisville last July was found Monday morning with light blue paint covering areas of the artwork, news outlets reported.
SANTA FE, N.M. (AP)  Republican lawmakers in the minority of the New Mexico Legislature are objecting to private negotiations with the Democratic governor regarding $1.75 billion in federal pandemic relief and how it will be spent.

On Monday the spending was discussed during a closed meeting of a panel of leading legislators, disappointing Republicans. They called for an additional session of the Legislature to debate the funding and the veto.
WEED, Calif. (AP)  Officers shot and killed a man who pulled a gun as they tried to keep him out of a complex of marijuana farms in an area of far Northern California where thousands of people were ordered to evacuate as a wildfire raged during a heat wave enveloping part of the U.S. West, authorities said.

Siskiyou County Sheriff Jeremiah LaRue told The Sacramento Bee that the man was trying to drive into the Mount Shasta Vista subdivision on Monday and pointed a handgun at a group of officers that included a sheriffs deputy and local police.

Based upon preliminary information, it appears that there might have been a couple rounds fired from the suspects firearm, LaRue said.

The officers killed the man, who was not immediately identified.

The subdivision has been converted into a huge network of marijuana farms mostly run by Hmong and Chinese families. The county has banned large-scale marijuana cultivation but thousands of pot greenhouses have sprung up. Police efforts to shut them down have been countered with claims of racial discrimination, and the families are pursuing a federal civil rights lawsuit.

Hmong people fought for the U.S. during the Vietnam War after being recruited by the CIA in Laos to fend off communist forces. After the war, many Hmong refugees moved to Minnesota, Wisconsin and California, where they settled in the Central Valley, given their agricultural background.

In recent years, some Hmong farmers moved north from central California to work in marijuana growing operations.

The violence Monday erupted as the Lava Fire grew rapidly and the sheriff's office issued evacuation orders for the communities of Lake Shastina, Juniper Valley and Mount Shasta Vista. The flames spanned nearly 21 square miles (54 square kilometers) Tuesday.

The total number of people forced to flee the area was unclear. The Sacramento Bee reported that nearly 3,000 people live in Lake Shastina and as many as 8,000 others live in the area to tend to the thousands of marijuana grows.

All evacuation orders are still in place at this time. We do not know what structures have burned down and the status of many areas, the Sheriffs Office said on social media Tuesday.

Ignited by lightning on June 24, the fire is burning brush and timber in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest north of the town of Weed, about 250 miles (402 kilometers) north of San Francisco.

At a town hall meeting on Monday, Todd Mack, fire management officer for Shasta Trinity National Forest, apologized for fire crews leaving a tiny blaze Friday that reignited an hour later and became the Lava Fire.

The expertise on the ground called it contained, Mack said of the quarter-acre blaze. There was no smoke. We patrolled it a couple of times, drove off and we were going to have resources come back."

Shasta Trinity National Forest spokeswoman Adrienne Freeman said crews had dumped thousands of gallons of water on the blaze to drown it and get into all the nooks and crannies" and used their hands to check for heat, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

Some 800 firefighters were battling the flames in rough and rocky terrain.

They faced a tougher fight because the region was under excessive-heat warnings, with high temperatures expected to range from 100 degrees (38 Celsius) to 110 degrees (43 Celsius).

It comes as an unprecedented heat wave in the Pacific Northwest broke temperature records in Seattle and Portland, Oregon, this week and moved inland Tuesday. Climate change is making such extreme weather events more likely and more intense.
SPARKS, Nev. (AP)  John Ascuaga, the son of Basque sheepherders who became a northern Nevada gambling icon after he bought a small coffee shop with a few slot machines in Sparks in 1960 and turned it into a major hotel-casino he operated for more than a half century, has died. He was 96.

Ascuaga was known for roaming the casino floor and greeting patrons personally at the Nugget that bore his name along U.S. Interstate 80 just east of Reno until it first was sold in 2013.

Anthony Marnell III, CEO of Marnell Gaming which acquired the property now called the Nugget Casino Resort in 2016, said Ascuagas family notified them of his death on Monday. The cause of death was not disclosed.

John was not only an icon in northern Nevada and throughout the region, he was one of the true pioneers in Nevada gaming and helped shape the direction of the entire state, Marnell said in a statement.

Ascuagas father moved to Idaho from Spain in the early 1900s. He was born in Caldwell, Idaho, in January 1925, served in the U.S. Army in his youth and earned degrees in accounting at the University of Idaho and restaurant management at Washington State University.

He got his start in the industry as a bellman at a lodge in Idaho where he met casino pioneer Dick Graves. Graves owned small Nugget casinos in Reno, Carson City and Yerington before opening one in Sparks in 1955 and hiring Ascuaga as a manager.

Ascuaga bought it in 1960 and soon began a variety of expansion projects that turned it into todays 1,600-room property in two towers with a convention center and multiple restaurants.

One of the first additions was a 600-seat show room, dubbed The Circus Room, where Red Skelton, Liberace, Wayne Newton, Ella Fitzgerald, George Burns and Ray Charles preformed. The opening act typically starred Bertha, an elephant Ascuaga bought from a circus museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin, for $8,000 in 1962.

Truckee Gaming CEO Ferenc Szony, the former Sands Regency CEO who was also an executive for the former Reno Hilton, said building a successful casino business outside the more established downtown Reno was quite an accomplishment.

Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak said he brought a boundless energy to work every day, transforming a small coffee shop in Sparks into a family-run gaming juggernaut of more than 50 years.

He was without a doubt one of Nevadas most prominent and successful businessmen who truly helped shape our city, added Sparks Mayor Ed Lawson.

Former Sparks Mayor Geno Martini said he was a 10-year-old eating an Awful Awful burger at the Nugget when he first met Ascuaga. He last saw him shortly after the initial sale of John Ascuaga's Nugget casino to Las Vegas-based Global Gaming and Hospitality in 2013.

He was doing what he always did and was walking around and talking to everyone, Martini told the Reno Gazette Journal.

Former Gov. Brian Sandoval, now president of the University of Nevada, Reno, said Ascuaga was a legend.

He was larger than life  a big personality, with a big heart who cared deeply for the community, his friends and his family, Sandoval said.

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This story has been corrected to show that cause of death has not been disclosed.
LONDON (AP)  British police said Tuesday that they are investigating the circumstances around the seeming harassment and intimidation of England's chief medical officer by two men in a park in central London.

The incident, which was captured in video footage and shared on social media, shows Prof. Chris Whitty struggling to get away from the pair, who appeared to be manhandling him while trying to take a selfie.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson condemned the thugs accosting Whitty, who has been one of the most prominent voices during the coronavirus pandemic.

Im shocked at seeing the despicable harassment of chief medical officer Chris Whitty, Johnson said. I condemn the behaviour of these thugs. Our hard-working public servants should not have to face this kind of intimidation on our streets and we will not tolerate it.

The 20-second video shows the two grinning men grabbing Whitty as they shout Oi oi and ask for One photo please? As the clearly perturbed Whitty attempts to walk away, the men try to grab him again.

With a line of police vans visible in the background, a voice is heard saying leave the gentleman alone before the clip ends.

London's Metropolitan Police said in a tweet that officers spoke to all those involved at the time and that their details had been taken.

We are in contact with the victim and the circumstances continue to be investigated," it said.

Home Secretary Priti Patel said she was just horrified by the incident and that officials are looking at support available to Whitty.

Its terrible to see such an important public figure, someone that day in, day out, has been serving our country in the way in which he has to keep us safe, being subject to just appalling abuse," she said on Times Radio.

It is not the first time Whitty has been forced to endure public harassment. During the pandemic, Whitty has become one of the most visible public faces , often hosting press briefings alongside Johnson and the government's chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance. While he has undoubtedly become one of the most trusted voices, he has faced the fury of lockdown skeptics.

Earlier this month, he was confronted in a street in Oxford by a man accusing him of lying to the public about the virus, while in February a man accosted him near Parliament. Both incidents were filmed on mobile phones.

Whitty brushed off the February incident, saying he was sure the person involved would become a model citizen in due course."

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Follow all of APs pandemic coverage at

https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic and https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine
SPRINGFIELD, Mo. (AP)  A prosecutor has dropped the number of people he plans to seek the death penalty against in the killing of a southwestern Missouri woman from five to three.

Lawrence County Prosecutor Don Trotter told the Springfield News-Leader on Monday that he is now only actively pursuing the death penalty against Gary Hunter Jr., Steven Calverley and Diona Park  the defendants he views as most culpable in the August death of 27-year-old Sarah Pasco.
DOVER, Del. (AP)  Delaware lawmakers on Tuesday approved a whopping $1.3 billion capital budget for construction, transportation and economic development projects, almost double the current years budget.

The spending plan is $460 million more than the record $894.4 million capital budget that Democratic Gov. John Carney proposed in January. It also dwarfs this years $708 million capital budget.

The capital budget, commonly referred to as the bond bill because it authorizes borrowing for construction projects, received unanimous approval in the Senate and a single dissenting vote in the House.

With state revenue estimates having skyrocketed since last years overly pessimistic forecasts, lawmakers appropriated $692.3 million in general fund cash to the capital budget, more than double the $260.5 million in cash proposed by Carney.

This record-setting bond bill will get Delawareans working, said Rep. Debra Heffernan, a Wilmington Democrat and House co-chair of the joint capital budget committee.

The budget, which now goes to Carney, includes $386 million for roads, bridges and other transportation projects, $229 million for school construction, $131 million for new Family Court facilities in Kent and Sussex counties, and $90 million for conservation and environmental projects. It includes hundreds of millions more for everything from prison and libraries to parks and economic development projects.

While supporting the budget, some GOP lawmakers expressed concern about the process for approving $70 million for pet projects requested by individual lawmakers through the community redevelopment/reinvestment fund.

We have a bunch of cash, and so it goes to the bond (bill), and it becomes just a big pile of come and grab it, for us 62 legislators in here for the projects that we care about in and around our districts, said Republican Rep. Jeffrey Spiegelman of Clayton. Im not sure thats necessarily the healthiest way of doing this.... I think, structurally, were just not set up to handle a flush of cash like we have now in a way that is more of a fiscally responsible manner.

Rep. Lyndon Yearick, a Magnolia Republican, was the only lawmaker to vote against the budget.

Theres no doubt that everybody in this body is going to benefit from this bill, present company included.... Weve given back zero to Delaware taxpayers in any tax relief, said Yearick, who noted that lawmakers also tacked on an additional $221 million in one-time spending for various projects in the states operating budget for next year.

One persons pork is another persons stimulus, he said, adding that many Delawareans who lost their jobs or saw their businesses closed last year because of the pandemic are still suffering.

Before addressing the capital budget, lawmakers last week approved a record-high $4.77 billion general fund operating budget for the fiscal year starting Thursday. That represents an increase of almost 5% over the current years budget and roughly $65 million more than what Carney had recommended. The $221 million supplemental budget bill for one-time expenditures brings the increase over the current years $4.5 billion operating budget to more than 10%.

Despite the significant increase in spending, lawmakers were able to set aside almost $223 million to add to a reserve fund that Carney created for budget planning purposes in 2018, bringing the current balance to $286 million. The reserve fund is separate from Delawares $252 million rainy day fund, which has never been tapped.
JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP)  Indonesia needs to urgently increase medical care, testing and vaccinations as the number of new infections in the country has rapidly increased and left it on the edge of a COVID-19 catastrophe, the Red Cross said Tuesday.

The group said its coronavirus hospital in Bogor, outside of Jakarta, was overflowing and emergency tents had been set up to be able to house more patients. It was a similar scene at other hospitals near the capital, including in at the Bekasi city hospital that had 90% of its beds filled.
Before the pandemic hit, Jacqueline Bartley, a mother of two girls and a boy, had a comfortable life. Then the 41-year-old lost her job at American Airlines, quickly spent her savings and found herself months behind on the $1,350-a-month home she rented. Until then she had never missed a rent payment.

Bartley, of Durham, North Carolina, turned to the states rental assistance program and was relieved in January to be awarded $8,100. But she says her landlord refused the money after she rejected his request to amend her two-year lease to a shorter period. The program required landlords to honor leases, among other conditions, to get the money.

She turned to a second program launched this month by the state and again was approved. Last week, she learned her landlord had accepted nearly $20,000 for back rent and three months of future payments, and agreed to dismiss his eviction lawsuit.

The news means she wont be forced from her home after the federal eviction moratorium ends July 31. But the waiting and uncertainty meant months of stress.

Its been crazy especially when you have children in school, Bartley said. Its pretty much been going by a whim. OK, am I going to have somewhere to go each month?

Millions have found themselves in situations similar to Bartleys, facing possible eviction despite bold promises by governors to help renters after Congress passed the sweeping CARES Act in March 2020.

Nationwide, state leaders set aside at least $2.6 billion from the CARES Acts Coronavirus Relief Fund to prop up struggling renters, but a year later more than $425 million of that  or 16%  hadnt made it into the pockets of tenants or their landlords, according to an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity and The Associated Press.

Its mind-boggling, said Anne Kat Alexander, a project manager with Princeton Universitys Eviction Lab. I knew there were problems but thats a huge amount of money not to be disbursed in a timely manner.

Tens of billions of dollars more in rental assistance have been delivered to states from the federal government in 2021, but that has been slow to be disbursed, too.

With the first round of funds in 2020, bureaucracy was not the only problem. Politics also played a role, with a handful of states, many led by Republicans and with a history of weak tenant protections, offering little to no assistance.

Then, there was the often onerous application process and an end-of-the-year federal deadline for spending the money, extended so late that some states had already pulled funding to use on other expenses. Some landlords refused to participate over restrictions that meant they could not evict a tenant who fell behind again after the assistance.

Congress sweeping 2020 CARES Act sent billions of dollars to states and some local governments. But it didnt mandate that any money be spent on rental assistance, leaving it to states to create their own programs and set the rules.

According to the National Low Income Housing Coalitions database of rent relief programs in 2020, Georgia, West Virginia and Tennessee, all run by Republican governors, chose not to set up statewide programs in 2020, despite having higher than average historic eviction rates. South Carolina allocated less than $14 per renter-occupied household that year.

Still, many states did scramble into action, creating massive programs to keep families in their homes  the safest place to shelter during the coronavirus pandemic. By the summer of 2020, state and local government officials launched about 530 rental assistance programs, setting aside at least $4.3 billion from various sources.

Several states were praised for programs that ran well. Illinois, Indiana, Oregon and Washington state were among more than a dozen that reported distributing every dollar of the rental assistance set aside from the Coronavirus Relief Fund by March 31.

The Center for Public Integrity surveyed about 70 state and local agencies that the National Low Income Housing Coalition identified as having set aside Coronavirus Relief Fund money for rent help in 2020. About $1 out of every $6 of that $2.6 billion wound up getting spent on other COVID-19-related expenses, such as protective equipment, police officers salaries and small-business loans.

Some states also spent millions of dollars setting up their programs, including North Carolina, which allocated around $20 million on administrative costs, and Hawaii, which spent $8 million. In the case of Hawaii, much of that went to help nonprofits scale up and rent space. The state also spent money on a software system in an effort to prevent fraud.

Diane Yentel, executive director of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, said last years funding challenges led Congress to earmark nearly $47 billion specifically for emergency rental assistance in December and March.

Some states and cities carved out some of those funds for eviction prevention and to create emergency rental assistance programs, said Yentel, whose group has been tracking the programs. But many didnt or many didnt set aside enough.

Among the biggest challenges was states failure to spend what they had allocated.

The Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency received $150 million to help renters, but returned about $96 million to the state treasury, which plugged holes in the states public safety budget. The Florida Housing Finance Corporation earmarked $250 million but returned about $99 million to the state treasury to be spent on other programs. Eighty-three percent of Montanas $50 million set aside for rental assistance went back to the state. New York ended up spending only $47.5 million of the $100 million promised for rental assistance.

In Athens, Georgia, Dylyn Price said she got about $5,800 in rental assistance but that ended earlier this year and she fears losing her home when her lease expires Wednesday.

She worries about living, once again, in a homeless shelter with her 14-year-old son.

Its a very nauseating and uncomfortable situation to be in, Price said.

___

Casey reported from Boston, Kleiner reported from Washington, D.C., and Johnston reported from Brook Park, Ohio. Casey can be reached at mcasey@ap.org. Follow him on Twitter at @mcasey1. Kleiner can be reached at skleiner@publicintegrity.org. Follow her on Twitter at @bysarahkleiner.

___

This story is a collaboration between The Associated Press and The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative newsroom in Washington.
MOSCOW (AP)  Russian authorities on Tuesday morning raided the apartments of several investigative journalists and their family members, a move that comes amid mounting pressure on Russia's independent media outlets.

Police searched the apartments of Roman Badanin, chief editor of the Proekt investigative online outlet, and Maria Zholobova, one of its journalists. Officers also raided the home of the parents of Badanin's deputy, Mikhail Rubin. Rubin was detained near Zholobova's residential building and brought to his parents' apartment.

Proekt said in its account in the Telegram messaging app that the raids occurred after the outlet promised to release an investigation into Russia's interior minister, Vladimir Kolokoltsev, and his alleged wealth. The outlet published the story shortly after the searches started.

Proekt later said that the raids stemmed from a defamation case over a 2017 documentary Badanin and Zholobova worked on for the independent TV channel Dozhd, about a St. Petersburg businessman with alleged ties to organized crime.

All three journalists were taken in for questioning after the raids and later let go. Badanin was initially reported to be a suspect in the case, but was questioned as a witness, according to a rights group involved in his defense. He told reporters after the questioning that the Proekt team believes attention from law enforcement is connected to the investigation into Kolokoltsev.

We consider these actions an attempt at censorship and at pressuring our colleagues, and demand a cease in investigative proceedings against the journalists of Proekt, Proekt said in an online statement.

Russian authorities have turned up the pressure on independent news media in recent months. Two popular independent outlets, Meduza and VTimes, have been designated foreign agents"  a label slapped on groups, news outlets or individuals that receive foreign funding. The designation implies additional government scrutiny and has a strong pejorative connotation that could discredit those that receive it.

VTimes shut down this month after being added to the list of "foreign agents," while Meduza launched a crowd-funding campaign.

Russia has used the law to levy heavy fines on U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty for failing to identify its material as produced by foreign agents. The broadcaster has asked the European Court of Human Rights to intercede.

Earlier this year Russian authorities also raided the apartment of a prominent investigative journalist, Roman Anin, and arrested four editors of an opposition-leaning student magazine.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Tuesday rejected the idea that raids targeting investigative journalists could be viewed as retribution for their work, saying that legal grounds for such actions exist. Peskov admitted, however, that the Kremlin doesn't know why police searched the apartments of Proekt journalists.

Natalia Zviagina, Amnesty Internationals Moscow Office Director, called the raids in a statement another brazen attack on independent media and freedom of expression in Russia, and part of a systematic cleansing of any critical voices exposing the malpractices of those in power in the country.

"We demand an immediate termination of all criminal libel proceedings against journalists and an end to the state harassment of independent Russian media, Zviagina said.
(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.)

Joseph M. Gabriel, Florida State University

(THE CONVERSATION) The United States, Europe and other wealthy parts of the world have already vaccinated large parts of their populations, yet vaccine rates in poor countries are lagging badly. Thats why the surprise announcement this spring that the United States will support waiving patent protections on COVID-19 vaccines is so important.

Drugmakers quickly voiced their opposition to the move, but public health advocates were elated. Waiving patent rights, the thinking goes, will give poorer countries the ability to procure low-cost generic versions of COVID-19 vaccines, even if they are produced in another country, and help them to more effectively fight a public health crisis. The European Parliament now supports the idea as well.

A patent waiver would have major implications for global vaccine production, of course. But the U.S. announcement should also be understood in the context of longstanding debates about pharmaceutical patenting in the United States.

I am a historian who has studied these debates extensively. What is clear from my work is that heated disputes about the morality of drug patenting date back to the earliest days of the American Republic, as do efforts to limit  or even ban  patents on pharmaceuticals. Support for sharply limiting patent rights on drugs, or even eliminating them altogether, is far from the radical position that some critics imply. Indeed, in many ways it is a deeply conservative one.

Establishment opposition

In the United States, the first patent on a medicine was granted in 1796 for Dr. Lees Windham Bilious Pills, which was used to treat digestive and other problems. Over the next century, drug manufacturers produced an endless flood of products protected by both patents and trade secrets. Most of these remedies could be easily assembled in a pharmacy, and some clearly helped people.

Yet these so-called patent medicines were also highly controversial. Physicians and other critics loudly denounced them because many were advertised with false or misleading claims. Physicians also recoiled at the effort to monopolize these products.

Physicians at the time believed that medical science should benefit patients, not private commercial interests, and that medical knowledge should be shared and used freely. Both patents and trade secrets interfered with this process  after all, if a pharmacist could compound a remedy cheaply, shouldnt he be allowed to do so? Restricting access to medicines based on patent rights struck American physicians as deeply unethical.

The moral critique of patenting was so strong that the American Medical Association made it a cornerstone of its first Code of Medical Ethics in 1847, declaring it was derogatory to professional character for a physician to hold a patent for any surgical instrument, or medicine.

This was no laughing matter. Conformity to the code was a requirement for licensing in many states. Violating the ban on patents could have serious professional consequences. In 1849, leaders in the medical community even tried to get a law passed prohibiting patents on drugs altogether.

This ethical framework also created the first market for what we now refer to as generic drugs. A handful of companies began to manufacture standard preparations and eschew the use of patents and trade secrets altogether. After the Civil War, these companies became the largest drug manufacturers in the country. They also began to build laboratories and invest resources into developing new products. Following World War II, these companies became massive enterprises and formed the backbone of the American pharmaceutical industry that we know today.

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Shifting gears

Yet these companies also abandoned the commitment to open science that made them wealthy in the first place. Beginning in the 1880s, a small number of American drug manufacturers began to argue for the need to patent their products. They made what today are familiar arguments, suggesting that patents were necessary to spur investment in research.

Some physicians embraced the idea  mostly younger ones who chafed at the AMAs rigid Code of Ethics  but it enraged conservative ones. They continued to denounce patents on pharmaceuticals as a form of quackery. As late as 1921, H.K. Mulford  one of the largest drug manufactures of the time  maintained the conservative position and refused to patent its products.

By the early 1950s, these debates had largely been settled. Drug companies had fully embraced patenting and, equally importantly, they had convinced the medical community to do so as well. Indeed, as historian Dominique Tobbell has argued, the two groups worked together to thwart efforts to reign in pharmaceutical patenting. By the 1980s, this powerful alliance had come to dominate government trade and regulatory policy. As a result, for the past several decades, the United States government has aggressively promoted pharmaceutical patents in the international arena. Indeed, the U.S. has led efforts to force other countries to strengthen their national patent laws in order to better defend industry profits.

Learning from the past

This is why I see the U.S.s decision to support temporarily waiving the COVID-19 patents as so significant. It signals a new willingness on the part of the U.S. government to question the supposed sanctity of drug patents and other forms of intellectual property. It also reflects years of effort by reformers to highlight how pharmaceutical patents limit access to drugs in poor countries.

Still, I believe more must be done  and fast. The United States should push for a waiver not just on the COVID-19 vaccine patents, but also all forms of intellectual property that might interfere with the transfer of the knowledge and technology necessary to manufacture these complex products. As others have pointed out, this will not, in itself, be enough to increase global vaccine production. Still, it is a necessary step because the vaccine makers are not voluntarily sharing trade secrets and know-how at sufficient scale.

In my view, we desperately need to move toward an integrated, global system of vaccine development that ensures access for everyone. Whether there is a place for patents in such a system is an open question, but I am skeptical. Physicians in the 19th century believed that patents on medicines interfere with science and harm patients. The predecessors of todays drug industry did as well. It is time for us all to remember that.

This article was updated to indicate that the European Parliament voted to back the patent waiver for COVID-19 vaccines, not the European Union.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here: https://theconversation.com/the-us-drug-industry-used-to-oppose-patents-what-changed-161319.
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP)  The U.S.'s top general in Afghanistan on Tuesday gave a sobering assessment of the country's deteriorating security situation as America winds down its so-called forever war.

Gen. Austin S. Miller said the rapid loss of districts around the country to the Taliban  several with significant strategic value  is worrisome. He also cautioned that the militias deployed to help the beleaguered national security forces could lead the country into civil war.

A civil war is certainly a path that can be visualized if this continues on the trajectory its on right now, that should be of concern to the world, he said.

Miller also told a small group of reporters in the Afghan capital that for now he has the weapons and the capability to aid Afghanistans National Defense and Security Forces.

What I dont want to do is speculate what that (support) looks like in the future, he said.

In meetings at the White House last week with President Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah  the Afghan official tasked with making peace with the Taliban, President Joe Biden said the U.S. was committed to humanitarian and security assistance to Afghanistan, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said.

But the president also said that keeping U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan defied a peace deal the Trump administration negotiated with the Taliban and that wasn't a risk he was prepared to take.

Given the timeline set by the prior administration, that if we did not withdraw our troops, U.S. men and women would be facing fire from on the ground and that was not something as the commander in chief, that he felt was acceptable, Psaki said.

Washington signed a peace deal with the Taliban in February 2020. It laid out the promise of a U.S. withdrawal and commitments by the Taliban to ensure Afghanistan does not harbor militants that can attack the United States. The details of those commitments have never been made public.

The Taliban have accused Washington of breaking the agreement, which called for all troops to be out by May 1, the date the final withdrawal began. U.S. officials have said the Taliban have made some progress, but it's not clear whether the insurgent group has kept its end of the deal.

The insurgent group issued orders to commanders against allowing foreign fighters among their ranks, but evidence continues to surface that non-Afghans are on the battlefield.

Still, Miller was insistent that only a political solution will bring peace to the war-tortured nation.

It is a political settlement that brings peace to Afghanistan. And its not just the last 20 years. Its really the last 42 years, he said.

Miller was referring to not only the U.S. war but that of Russia's 10-year occupation that ended in 1989. That conflict was followed by a brutal civil war fought by some of the same Afghan leaders deploying militias against the Taliban. The civil war gave rise to the Taliban, who took power in 1996.

American officials have said the entire pullout of U.S. troops will most likely be completed by July 4. But Miller refused to give any date or time frame, referring only to the Sept. 11 timeline given by Biden in April when he announced the withdrawal of the remaining 2,500-3,500 American troops.

Meanwhile, Taliban fighters have been over-running districts in rapid succession, many of them in the north of the country, which is dominated by Afghanistan's minorities. The north is also the traditional stronghold of many former mujahedeen leaders who have been a dominant force in Afghanistan since driving the Taliban from power in 2001 together with the U.S.-led coalition.

Several of the districts are on key roads and one is on the border with northern Tajikistan. The Taliban have issued statements saying hundreds of Afghan security forces have surrendered, most of them going to their homes after being recorded on video receiving transportation money from the Taliban.

Miller said there are multiple reasons for the collapse of these districts, including troop fatigue and surrender, psychological defeat and military defeat. But he said the escalating violence puts the country at risk of falling into a deadly civil war.

Going forward, the Afghan defense forces must focus on consolidating their strengths and establishing strategic areas and protecting them, Miller said. Losing districts to the Taliban that allows them to sever transportation and communication links threatens provincial capitals.

As we start talking about how does this all end, the way it must end for the Afghan people is something that revolves around a political solution, he said. Ive also said that if you dont reduce the violence, that political solution becomes more and more difficult.

Miller refused to say where the U.S. and its NATO allies were in the withdrawal process.

He said his time as the head of the U.S.'s military mission in Afghanistan was coming to an end, without giving a date, though the press briefing had the feeling of a farewell.

Miller wouldn't speculate on the legacy of America's longest war, saying it will be for history to decide.

The future will tell the rest of the story," he said. "What we will have to do is make an honest assessment of what went well and what didnt go so well over the years as we work forward.

___

Associated Press writer Aamer Madhani in Washington contributed.
KYIV, Ukraine (AP)  Ukrainian lawmakers on Tuesday approved a much-anticipated judicial reform, a move long sought by the West.

The Ukrainian parliament, Verkhovna Rada, voted to endorse a bill that sets up an independent panel to appoint judges. It includes a provision that gives international experts a decisive voice in selecting the nominees.

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy welcomed the bill's approval and promised to quickly sign it into law. He emphasized that the High Qualification Commission to be created to appoint judges would be formed in a way that would exclude any candidates tainted by corruption.

The Verkhovna Rada has empowered a key instrument to ensure justice in the judicial system, Zelenskyy said in a statement on Facebook.

The U.S. Embassy in Ukraine welcomed the new legislation as an important step forward toward comprehensive judicial reform.

It said on Twitter that the U.S. stands ready to help Ukraine realize this historic opportunity to renew Ukraines judicial system on behalf of the Ukrainian people.

The U.S. and the EU long have pushed Ukraine to conduct a comprehensive judicial reform to uproot rampant corruption.

Zelenskyy was elected in 2019 on pledges to combat the country's endemic graft and end a war with Russia-backed separatists in the country's east that erupted after Russia's 2014 annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula.
SUVA, Fiji (AP)  A growing coronavirus outbreak in Fiji is stretching the health system and devastating the economy. It has even prompted the government to offer jobless people tools and cash to become farmers.

The Pacific nation got through the first year of the pandemic without any significant outbreaks and just two virus deaths.

But an outbreak of the highly contagious delta variant two months ago has grown to the point where Fiji is adding about 250 new cases each day.

The government has so far resisted calls for a lockdown, in part to try and protect an economy which had already shrunk by 19% last year after international tourism evaporated.

Nearly half of all jobs were connected to tourism in the island nation thats known for its white-sand beaches, clear water and welcoming people.

Business-wise, its very bad, said George Bernard, who owns a business servicing fire extinguishers. He fears life will never be the same. Im just trying to survive, he said.

A vaccination campaign is in full swing but has been hindered by misinformation that vaccines are unsafe or even evil. So far, about 29% of the population of just under 1 million have gotten their first dose, while 2% have been fully vaccinated.

Bernard, who has heard some of the rumors, said he is in no rush to get vaccinated. Sometimes, I have second thoughts, he said.

Nazia Hussain has been selling vegetables from her roadside stall, and she uses some of the profit to help her family members who lost their jobs at supermarkets and stores in the capital, Suva.

I have been doing this so I can save some money to do some shopping for my family, she said. But business had been slow, and people had little money to spend.

Hussain said shed believed the vaccine was a good thing and had taken the jab herself.

Fijis government has delivered nearly 40,000 packages of food rations to people who have been isolating at home or are in targeted lockdown areas. It has also allowed people to spend money early from their retirement savings.

A new program starting next month offers people who have lost their jobs and have access to rural land about $200 worth of tools, planting materials and cash.

Applicant must be an aspiring crop farmer with an intention to take on full-time farming as a core activity, the program states.

During the current outbreak, 15 people have died and nearly 7% of those being tested are testing positive, indicating the virus is continuing to spread. Australia and New Zealand have sent vaccines, money and medical teams to help Fijis overburdened health system.

Fijis government has directed people in some areas, including Suva, to stay home and only go out for essential purposes. It has also imposed a nighttime curfew.

James Fong, the countrys permanent secretary for health, told reporters that a complete, nationwide lockdown would spark a socio-economic catastrophe in Fiji.

But many worry that will happen anyway if the outbreak isnt brought under control.

Our numbers are going through the roof now. We must unite against this virus, wrote Fred Wesley, the editor-in-chief of the Fiji Times. Together Fiji! United we must stand!

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Perry reported from Wellington, New Zealand.
San Antonio's COVID-19 positivity rate is ticking up, but officials say there is no need to be alarmed.

After hovering around 1 percent for weeks, the current rate stands at 3.8 percent. The 5 percent threshold is generally the rule of thumb that signals the need for tighter control on transmission.

San Antonio Metro Health Public Information Officer Cleo Garcia says "as of now there is no concern."

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She adds that the uptick is due to a decrease in testing.

Metro Health calculates the positivity rate by dividing the number of positive tests returned for the week by the total number of tests administered for that time period.

"We went from 20,000 tests two weeks ago to [around] 10,000 tests last week," Garcia adds. "When the denominator decreases, the same number of positive tests will result in a higher rate."

READ MORE FROM MADALYN: U.S. education secretary praises SAISD's 'amazing' vaccination work

Garcia points to other key indicators for progression, such as the case rate, 7-day rolling average of new cases (105) and hospital census (125), which continue to trend in the right direction.

"We have more good news to share. San Antonio has over 72 percent  1,207,057 people  who have had at least one dose," Garcia says of vaccination distribution.

The city offers a list of free testing locations throughout the city, which can be found here.
In two months, untold numbers of tenants, homeowners and small-business owners in New York who have been unable to pay their rent or mortgage during the COVID-19 pandemic will no longer be protected from eviction or foreclosure under state law.

Theres good news, though: There is a ton of money out there to stop this from happening  if only people would avail themselves of it.

And time is running out. The moratorium on evictions and foreclosures ends Aug. 31 under legislation Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed in early May. In states that dont have their own moratoriums, its more dire: People are covered under a federal moratorium that ends July 31.

Whether its one month or two, this is a state and national economic and human disaster waiting to happen. It could, though, be at least partially avoidable if people take advantage of the opportunities at hand. For that, we need government agencies and human services nonprofits to do all they can to publicize those opportunities.

The programs include the Emergency Rental Assistance Program, which is open to tenants and landlords. It provides up to 12 months worth of back rent, and either the tenant or the landlord can apply for it. It also includes up to a years worth of electric or gas utility arrears payments, and up to three months of additional rental assistance under certain circumstances. People can read about the details, qualifications and application process at https://tinyurl.com/yj5xnntp.

The state also has a host of grant and loan programs to help businesses, including a Small Business Recovery Grant Program that provides about 10 percent of a business 2019 gross receipts. Eligible expenses in some cases include commercial rents and mortgages. A rundown of state programs can be found at https://tinyurl.com/fn3t4ht3.

Whether the money the state has set aside for this, combined with various federal programs for tenants, homeowners and businesses, will be enough remains to be seen. If were to avoid a state or national crisis of homelessness or a rash of small-business failures, New York and Congress should be prepared to take further action. That includes ensuring the qualifications dont exclude people in genuine need of the assistance.

And yes, were well aware that some recovery programs have been rife with fraud. The Department of Justice says the $80 billion in estimated fraud in various pandemic assistance programs could take years to investigate and prosecute. But thats no reason for Congress and the state Legislature to balk at providing more assistance to people and businesses that genuinely need it.

All this will be academic, though, if the word doesnt get to the people who need this money that the money is there. The state needs to promote this as vigorously as it has pushed people to get vaccinated against the disease that for the past 15 months has wrought havoc on peoples health, livelihoods and lives.

It wouldnt hurt, too, if state lawmakers took the opportunity, right now, to spend some of their taxpayer-funded franking allocations to mail out information on the various assistance programs to constituents rather than save it for the usual election-season self-promotion. Want to ingratiate yourselves to voters? Tell them how to save their homes and their businesses.
California's hydropower reserves are drying up in the most literal sense. This summer, however, the fuel that normally stands in for water is also running lower than usual.

Natural gas typically fulfills two roles for California's power grid during a hot, dry summer. First, it fills in the gap left by depleted hydropower. Second, it handles much of the state's surge in electricity demand during the early evening, when solar power fades; especially important if that surge is powering a lot of air-conditioning.

READ ALSO: ERCOT has to release info about power plant outages quicker - but it may not detail what causes them

So summer is typically good for anyone selling gas out West, and this one looks especially so.

California's gas market is twitchy. PG&E Corp.'s recent announcement of maintenance on a key pipeline through the end of June caused the premium on local gas supplies to jump to its highest level since February, as Bloomberg NEF's Jade Patterson points out. It didn't help that, around the same time, power stations in California and Nevada were suddenly burning double the amount of gas compared to the previous month as a heat wave washed over the West.

PG&E has also just reclassified about 50 billion cubic feet of its gas inventory as "base" gas - which stays in the tank to maintain pressure - from the "working" gas that can actually be drawn upon to meet demand.

Net net, it looks like California may be entering the height of a particularly demanding summer with the lowest stockpile of gas in more than a decade.

One reason for this concerns prior events in another state some way, geographically and philosophically, from Sacramento: Texas.

California produces very little gas of its own, relying on imports from the Rockies, Canada (via the Pacific Northwest) and Texas (via the desert Southwest). A little of that gas then usually heads south out of California to Mexico.

When Texas suffered its devastating freeze earlier this year, the isolation of its power grid rightly came under criticism. But its natural gas network, which also failed, definitely isn't an island. Permian basin gas flows all over, to East Texas and the Gulf, to Mexico, to the Midwest - and to California.

So when Texas' gas sector seized up in mid-February, it wasn't just that state that went short. The chart below shows natural gas imports from the major regions supplying California on Tuesday, February 16 - in the depths of Texas' energy crisis - compared with the third Tuesday in February for previous years.

READ MORE: Comedian nails ERCOT impression after latest blackout warning

Gas production from the Permian that day was down by 3.4 billion cubic feet, or roughly half, compared with a week earlier; which matches almost exactly the drop in California's gas imports. Hence, California drew heavily on its stores of gas that month. Combined with an unusual draw this month due to the hot weather, low hydropower reservoirs and PG&E's reclassification, the first half of 2021 saw the biggest drop in the state's inventories in at least a decade or so.

There are two conclusions to draw. In the immediate term, California will be paying up for gas, especially if it suffers more heat waves. While shortages aren't a prospect, prices of any commodity rise when inventory drops. Assuming gas consumption in July through September is at similar levels to last year, then California has enough on hand to cover 39 days of average demand over the next few months, down from 49 days of cover at the end of last June.

The second conclusion is that, like, everything's connected, isn't it? One of the shocks arising from Texas' freeze was that its natural gas industry wasn't as reliable as believed, in part because of a feedback loop that meant gas-starved power plants couldn't supply juice to pipeline compressors, reinforcing gas shortages. Granted, this was a freak weather event, so California may not feel too worried about being tethered to those faraway fields and pipelines.

On the other hand, California's own energy policy is predicated on the likelihood that freak weather events are becoming less freakish. And Texas' grid is also showing strains this summer. Like Texas, California relies on gas showing up when it's needed, with the grid operator recently designating old gas-fired plants as critical resources to head off potential blackouts. This year has offered a timely reminder that even those aren't fail-safe, and the risks extend far beyond the Sierra Nevada.

- - -

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy, mining and commodities. He previously was editor of the Wall Street Journal's Heard on the Street column and wrote for the Financial Times' Lex column. He was also an investment banker.
Jim Watson /AFP /Getty Images

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is hosting former President Donald Trump at the Texas-Mexico border this week, offering the first real chance to drum up public donations for his recently announced border wall.

Abbott and Trump will visit Weslaco, a town about halfway between McAllen and Harligen, on Wednesday, June 30, for "a tour of the unfinished border wall" along with members of the media, state officials, and law enforcement.
In 1856, a new military establishment know as Camp Cooper was opened in North Texas.

Men stationed there in 19th century Texas had two tasks as outlined by the Texas State Historical Association: To protect settlers and monitor the nearby Comanche Indian population.

The site became headquarters for four companies of the Second United States Cavalry under the command of the notorious Lt. Col. Robert E. Lee, before he became general of the Confederate States Army.

RELATED: San Antonio rancher, author, and conservationist passes away at 67

The story goes that Lee even made one of the resident rattlesnakes on the land his personal pet at the camp.

Now the property that same camp was situated on is on the market, with Tyler Jacobs of Montana-based Hall & Hall partners leading the sale.

Prospective buyers can submit their sealed bids for the Tecumseh Ranch in Throckmorton County, northwest of Fort Worth, on July 22, hoping to scoop up more than more than 9,388 acres of land.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram outlined the extensive amenities of the historic property, including shoreline on the Brazos River, limestone benches, and mesquite flats.

According to the Telegram, as a working ranch, the land will comes with two sets of cattle working and shipping pens, a main barn, a managers house, and a replica of the "Tecumseh House" where John Alexander and Sallie Reynolds Matthews  the original owners  built in the late 1800s.

Production wise, Jacob's listing states that the land can support a ranching operation of 300 to 350 animals.

The real estate company also points out that the property is a hunter's paradise, with thriving populations of whitetail deer, turkey and quail. Other wildlife include feral hogs, raptors, and varmints.

The current owners chose to execute the sale through a sealed bid process  meaning all bids were private  because of the "significant market interest," according to Jacobs.
Marion, IN (46952)

Today

A few clouds early, otherwise mostly sunny. High around 90F. Winds WSW at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

A mostly clear sky. Low 69F. Winds SW at 5 to 10 mph.
Florida, FL (34429)

Today

Cloudy in the morning with scattered thunderstorms developing later in the day. High around 90F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 40%..

Tonight

Mostly cloudy skies. Scattered thunderstorms during the evening. Low 71F. Winds E at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 50%.
Students can create their avatars and immerse themselves in a virtual classroom where they can learn and interact.

FREMONT, CA: In collaboration with Voila Learning, Tech-AdaptiKa is delighted to announce the opening of its first avatar-based virtual reality summer school, which will be available across North America and proudly financed by both the Canadian and American governments. Every week from Monday to Thursday, from 9 a.m. to noon, English, French, and math teachers will be connected to virtual classrooms using individualized avatars to lead entertaining, educational activities with children in grades 1 to 12.

Students worldwide are still being affected by partial or complete school closures more than a year after the COVID-19 epidemic began. Millions of children will fall below the minimal reading proficiency level due to the health crisis.

During summer, Voila Learning and Tech-AdaptiKa collaborate to offer a virtual learning opportunity to make up for the missed school year. Both companies have partnered together to provide students across North America with an immersive virtual learning experience to help them catch up on necessary schoolwork.

"We want to help bridge the learning gap for Canadian and American students by creating opportunities for meaningful interactions safely. Our virtual platform allows educators to teach in a more human-centric way," said Carrie Purcell, Co-founder, Tech-AdaptiKa.

"Students can personalize their own avatars and be immersed in a classroom where they can learn and engage with their teacher and peers," said Hosni Zaouali, Co-founder, Tech-AdaptiKa. "Now more than ever, teachers are an important part of facilitating student learning, well-being, and growth.This virtual reality summer school is an innovative platform that will help support teachers, students and parents until schools can remain open in a sustainable way."

From July 15 through September 15, the Virtual Reality Summer School will be available to school boards in the United States and Canada.
Earlier this month, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumerstepped into the shoes of a server for an hour at Hunky Dory restaurant in Brooklyn, drawing attention to the fight to eliminate the federal tipped minimum wage. He donned an apron and mask to do the dangerous and difficult work of taking customers orders while a deadly virus still circulates through the state.

When Schumers initial push for a federal minimum wage increasestalled out in the Senate  ruled by the parliamentarian as ineligible to pass through reconciliation, and impossible to pass over a Republican filibuster  it wasn't just the prospect of the $7.25 per hour federal minimum wage getting its first bump in12 years that went back into purgatory.

The measure passed in the House of Representatives would also have addressed the lesser-known injustice endemic to American labor that Schumer was highlighting while slinging grilled cheese and celery soup: the persistence of an even lower minimum wage for tipped workers.

For the12 million Americans who work in jobs for which customers can offer tips for service, the federal minimum wage is just $2.13 an hour. While the law requires that any shortfall between their tips and the general minimum wage must be made up by the employer, wage theft is rampant. One study found that 17% of low-wage workers suffer wage theft in unmet tip credits, the plurality of whom work in food and drink service industries where the tipped minimum wage is in play.

These workers  disproprotionately people of color, women, parents of children and people in poverty  may also be subjected to sexual harassment and discrimination in pursuit of tips.

In writing on the tipped minimum in 2018, The New York Times editorial board noted that wage theft and harassment go hand-in-hand, as bosses can easily withhold or steal tips, especially from workers they dont like or who refuse their propositions.

Though many New Yorkers like to think of the Empire State as a progressive pacesetter for the country, New York has its own, less egregious, form of this double standard. New Yorks hourly minimum wage varies from $12.50 upstate to $15 in New York City, but the tipped-minimum counterparts are $8.35 and $10. The divergence means too many hard-working New Yorkers are still subject to the whims of customers, who are themselves suffering from COVID-19-induced financial stress, and they are reliant on employers to close the gap with complicated tip credit math.

New York states legislative session has just ended, but when lawmakers next assemble in Albany they should finally put tipped workers second-class wage citizenship in the past.

I first became aware of the odiousness of employees reliance on tips to make a living wage in 2008, when I had a conversation with a coffee shop barista about how her hourly cash tips had declined from about $5 to 50 as customers shifted from paying cash to swiping plastic. This barista and her peers hadnt just been hammered by the financial crisis and resulting recession, theyd also suffered an invisible pay cut of over $4 an hour.

Baristas arent subject to the general minimum wage, but that conversation, and the broader hardship among tip earners that it signaled, inspired me to start DipJar  a tech company manufacturing tip jars and donation boxes designed to enable one-step credit and debit card generosity.

However, the barista and I couldnt have foreseen a much bigger problem than the technological challenges of credit card tipping at the counter, which have since been largely addressed by the explosion of iPads used at point of sale, which strongly encourage tips on credit cards.

The federal minimum wage was raised to $7.25 in 2009  and then stayed there for a dozen years and counting, in spite of an unequal economic recovery and a pandemic that pushed unemployment to itshighest rate since modern measurement began.

At the time I founded DipJar, I had a naive belief that individual customers, if supported by the right technological innovations, could put missing money back in the pockets of the baristas, valets, nail techs, and hotel housekeepers who took such good care of us. Now I know that bad policy means these service-workers  some of whom get the full minimum wage under New York law, while others are still subject to the two-tier system  are being left farther and farther behind.

COVID-19 has thrown this fact into further relief, highlighting the dangers and humiliations involved in earning tips. The New York women working in service jobs  who already earn just 71% of their male counterparts wages  found that the masks theyve worn to protect their health impede their ability to earn tips, as they make it harder for customers to objectify them. They must choose between sacrtificing tips and showing their faces, which, in the words of advocacy organization One Fair Wage, makes the sexual harassment already prevalent among tipped workers now life-threatening.

These workers have also had to enforce health protocols, potentially antagonizing uncooperative customers and then relying on those same individuals to make ends meet. The Center for American Progress reports that 62 percent of all tipped workers and 76 percent of Black tipped workers said they were penalized by customers for trying to enforce social distancing and mask mandates.

Covid-19 also demonstrated that the economic hardships that make service workers vulnerable are exacerbated, not corrected, by customers who also lose the ability to tip in hard times. As asurvey by One Fair Wage found recently, tips are down an estimated 50% to 75%, while public health researchers say that restaurant work is the single most deadly profession during the pandemic.

A single minimum wage would free low-wage workers from reliance on customer capriceoften tied up with harassment and discrimination, but also reflective of their own economic hardshipto ensure they make a living wage.

While one might think eliminating New Yorks tipped minimum would put an unbearable burden on restaurants, bars, and other businesses, multiple studies have shown that employment does not suffer in states with one minimum wage. For example, an Economic Policy Institute studyfound that over almost 25 years, the sector that comprises the bulk of tipped employment actually grew faster in states where tipped workers received the regular minimum wage than it did in states with a lower tipped minimum wage.

Indeed, as COVID-19 recedes, the biggest risk now facing employers is a crisis of labor supply. The One Fair Wage survey revealed that over three-quarters of workers surveyed (76%) said they are leaving restaurants because of low wages and tipsby far the most important reason for leavingand a slightly higher percentage (78%) said that the factor that would make them stay in restaurants is a full, stable, livable wage.

New York is coming back. With post-vaccination reopening,cash is flowing into industry once again. Still, our restaurants havent beenexempt from this labor shortage, driven by substandard wages and low tips.

Many owners  joined by conservatives, like a Federalist columnistbemoaning brib(ing] workers with fatter paychecks  are advocating strong-arming workers via slashed unemployment benefits or cuts to the social safety net instead. But even if market forces push restaurants to pay more, tipped workers will be starting from a deficit as long as the tipped minimum persists.

The last time New York legislators turned their attention to our minimum wage, Gov. Andrew Cuomo looped many of the workers DipJar was designed for into the regular minimum wage regime. Still, heleft out 250,000 of lowest-paid workers, including the ones whose hardship Schumer tapped into during his time as a server.

As we wait for Congress to close the unfair, unproductive minimum wage gap nationwide, New York lawmakers should prioritize mandating a livable wage for all New Yorkers next session.

Ryder Kessler is a Democratic campaign operative and strategist. He is the founder of DipJar and served as its CEO from 2011 to 2017.
Emma Wolfe, a deputy mayor of New York City, cautions that recovery to the status quo from COVID-19 will not be enough. Our recovery has to be about more than just getting back to where we were, but about furthering our recovery for all of our communities and especially our LGBTQ communities, Wolfe said at a virtual event last week to celebrate City & States annual Pride Power 100 list. We have so much more to do. Wolfe remarked on the various successes for protecting LGBTQ people in New York City under the de Blasio administration, such as the creation of a third gender category on New York City birth and death certificates, the LGBTQ health care bill of rights, and mandating bathroom access for trans New Yorkers in city buildings. Wolfe also remarked that city policies had to struggle against the Trump administration, which she described as homophobic and transphobic. While she did honor some successes, Wolfe also called attention to addressing challenges LGBTQ youth face, with housing insecurity being a particular concern, as up to 40% of homeless youth identify as LGBTQIA. Wolfe called attention to the work of the NYC Unity Project, an initiative that centers on support for LGBTQ youth.

State Sen. Brad Hoylman, current runner-up for Manhattan borough president, continued the emphasis on celebrating historic wins as well as anticipating new challenges for the LGBT community. Hoylman, the first openly gay member of the New York state Senate, brought attention to issues at the state level. Hoylman called attention to successes like the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act, which made gender identity and expression a protected class under state law, the repeal of the walking while trans law which targeted trans women of color, and the banning of conversion therapy. Hoylman acknowledged the legacy of activists like Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, stating that they created a future where these laws could be passed. He said that the passage of the state Marriage Equality Act in 2011 did not guarantee continued progress for the LGBTQ community. Right after marriage equality, there was such euphoria and what we thought was going to be the opening of a new level of acceptance for our community. But it didn't happen in Albany until the Democrats took over. And that shows you, one giant leap forward but you know many small steps backwards that occurred, Hoylman said.

The conversation wrapped up with Melissa Sklarz, one of the first two openly trans Democratic district leaders in New York City. Sklarz talked about the willingness for older generations to be more receptive to the ideas of younger generations. It's important to learn what is happening, what people need, what is it that they see, how are [they] seeing change, how is our political system not addressing the needs of the people.  I have been a mainstream Democrat for a long time, and Im concerned that being a mainstream Democrat is not enough, she said. Sklarz echoed Wolfes concerns about housing. These concerns also addressed the needs of LGBTQ elders, who Sklarz identified as frequently forgotten by even well-meaning advocacy groups. She also called attention to a number of recent anti-trans bills nationwide. This year was declared by the Human Rights Council to be the worst year in recent history for LGBTQ state legislative attacks. Sklarz called on others to take action against legislation that discriminates against trans people. This is happening in real time. And its up to us, Pride 100, and all of our friends and allies can do more of what they can, Sklarz said.
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Background



Under the guidance and direct supervision of the Procurement Analyst/Head of Procurement Unit, the Procurement Associate provides leadership in execution of procurement services in CO ensuring their effectiveness, transparency and integrity. The Procurement Associate promotes a client-focused, quality and results- oriented approach in the Unit.



The Procurement Associate works in close collaboration with the operations, programme and project teams in the CO and UNDP HQs staff for resolving complex procurement-related issues and information delivery.





Duties and Responsibilities



Summary of job functions:

Administration and implementation of operational strategies.

Organization of procurement processes.

Implementation of sourcing strategy and e-procurement tools.

Control of CO Assets.

Facilitation of knowledge building and knowledge sharing.

1. Ensures administration and implementation of the operational strategies focusing on achievement of the following results:

Full compliance of procurement activities with UN/UNDP rules, regulations, policies and strategies; implementation of the effective internal control, proper functioning of a client-oriented procurement management system.

CO Procurement business processes mapping and elaboration of the content of internal Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) in Procurement and Logistics, control of the workflows in the Procurement Unit.

Elaboration of proposals and implementation of cost saving and reduction strategies in consultation with office management.

Provision of researched information for formulation and implementation of contract strategy and strategic procurement in the CO including tendering processes and evaluation, managing the contract and contractor, legal considerations and payment conditions, sourcing strategy, supplier selection and evaluation, quality management, e-procurement introduction.

Act as alternate to the Head of Procurement Unit.

2. Organizes procurement processes for CO, NIM/DIM projects and at the request of other Agencies focusing on achievement of the following results:

Preparation of procurement plans for the office and projects and their implementation monitoring.

Organization of procurement processes including preparation and conduct of ICs, RFQs, ITBs or RFPs, receipt of quotations, bids or proposals, their evaluation, negotiation of certain conditions of contracts in full compliance with UNDP rules and regulations.

Preparation of Purchase orders and contracts in and outside Atlas, preparation of Recurring Purchase orders for contracting of services, vendors creation in Atlas. Buyers profile in Atlas.

Review of procurement processes conducted by projects; submissions to the Contract, Asset and Procurement Committee (CAP) and Advisory Committee on Procurement (ACP).

Implementation of the internal control system which ensures that Purchase orders are duly prepared and dispatched. Timely corrective actions on POs with budget check errors and other problems.

Monitoring suppliers performance with respect to the quality and timely delivery of goods and services.

Maintenance of cost-recovery data for the procurement services provided by UNDP to other Agencies.

Organization of joint procurement processes for the UN Agencies in line with the UN reform - establishment of local LTAs.

3. Ensures implementation of sourcing strategy and e-procurement tools focusing on achievement of the following results:

Development and update of the rosters of suppliers, implementation of supplier selection and evaluation.

Mainstreaming UN values into procurement processes (human rights, gender equality, diversity, greening, etc.).

Implementation of sustainable procurement in the CO, including the green procurement.

Support to implementation of corporate e-procurement module.

Provision of advice to management and inputs related to procurement at the project formulation and budget writing stage.

4. Ensures proper control of CO Assets focusing on achievement of the following results:

Preparation of inventory reports.

Implementation of Inventory and physical verification control in the CO and projects.

Provide support on CO vehicle maintenance.

5. Ensures facilitation of knowledge building and knowledge sharing in the CO focusing on achievement of the following results:

Organization of trainings for the operations/ projects staff on Procurement.

Synthesis of lessons learnt and best practices in Procurement.

Sound contributions to knowledge networks and communities of practice.



Competencies



Core



Innovation

Ability to make new and useful ideas work

 Interprets policies and guidance within context and applies with judgment

 Anticipates obstacles and applies practical solutions

 Continually seeks improvement and agility in service delivery

 Collaborates to improve methods and delivery

Level 3: Adapts deliverables to meet client needs



Leadership

Ability to persuade others to follow

 Actively engages teams and encourages dialogue within and across teams

 Determines appropriate resources, methods, partners, information and solution

Level 3: Proactively seeks and recognizes contributions of others



People Management

Ability to improve performance and satisfaction

 Seeks and values others initiatives and expertise

 Supervises teams with consistent direction and drives team engagement

Level 3: Appropriately involves team in different stages of work and decision-making



Communication

Ability to listen, adapt, persuade and transform

 Proactively expresses insights and/or questions in order to contribute to clarity, accuracy, and focus in ones work

 Speaks on behalf of team with professionalism and integrity consistent with UN values

Level 3: Expresses information and views with adaptive reasoning and appreciation for complexity and variation



Delivery

Ability to get things done while exercising good judgement

 Demonstrates commitment to clients and quality

 Works to agreed goals dealing with challenges constructively

 Responsible for project implementation and/or team deliverables

 Ability to exercise sound judgement in delivering services and supervising teams

Level 3: Takes responsibility for addressing critical situations and delivering core value



Technical/Functional



Job Knowledge/Technical Expertise

 Understands the main processes and methods of work regarding to the position

 Possesses basic knowledge of organizational policies and procedures relating to the position and applies them consistently in work tasks

 Identifies new and better approaches to work processes and incorporates same in own work

 Strives to keep job knowledge up-to-date through self-directed study and other means of learning

 Demonstrates good knowledge of information technology and applies it in work assignments

Level 3: Implement & Manage: Exercises skills and knowledge independently, demonstrating ability to manage self and team responsibilities, in area of work



Promoting Organizational Learning and Knowledge Sharing

 Researches best practices and poses new, more effective ways of doing things

 Documents innovative strategies and new approaches

Level 3: Implement & Manage: Exercises skills and knowledge independently, demonstrating ability to manage self and team responsibilities, in area of work



Building Strategic Partnerships

 Analyzes general information and selects materials in support of partnership building initiatives

Level 3: Implement & Manage: Exercises skills and knowledge independently, demonstrating ability to manage self and team responsibilities, in area of work



Promoting Organizational Change and Development

 Documents best practices in organizational change and development within and outside the UN system

 Demonstrates ability to identify problems and proposes solutions

Level 3: Implement & Manage: Exercises skills and knowledge independently, demonstrating ability to manage self and team responsibilities, in area of work



Design and Implementation of Management Systems

 Uses information/databases/other management systems

 Provides inputs to the development of simple system components

 Makes recommendations related to work procedures and implementation of management systems

Level 3: Implement & Manage: Exercises skills and knowledge independently, demonstrating ability to manage self and team responsibilities, in area of work



Client Orientation

 Reports to internal and external clients in a timely and appropriate fashion

 Organizes and prioritizes work schedule to meet client needs and deadlines

 Establishes, builds and sustains effective relationships within the work unit and with internal and external clients

 Responds to client needs promptly Level 3: Implement & Manage: Exercises skills and knowledge independently, demonstrating ability to manage self and team responsibilities, in area of work



Promoting Accountability and Results-Based Management

 Gathers and disseminates information on best practice in accountability and results-based management systems

 Prepares timely inputs to reports Level 3: Implement & Manage: Exercises skills and knowledge independently, demonstrating ability to manage self and team responsibilities, in area of work



Required Skills and Experience



Education:

Secondary Education with specialized training in procurement.

University Degree in Business or Public Administration would be an advantage.

UNDP Procurement Certification programme would be an advantage, but not a requirement.

Experience:

Secondary Education with 7 years of progressively responsible administrative experience is required at the national or international level, including experience in public procurement.

University Degree with 4 years of progressively responsible administrative experience is required at the national or international level, including experience in public procurement.

Experience in the usage of computers and office software packages (MS Word, Excel, etc), advance knowledge of automated procurement systems, experience in handling of web-based management systems.

Language Requirements:

Fluency in Romanian and English.

Working knowledge of one or more additional languages relevant for Moldova, including Russian, Bulgarian, Gagauzian, Romani, Ukrainian or sign language would be an asset.



Disclaimer



Important applicant information



UNDP is an employer committed to gender equity and to providing equal opportunities to both male and female.



UNDP is committed to workforce diversity. Women, persons with disabilities, Roma and other ethnic or religious minorities, persons living with HIV, as well as refugees and other non-citizens legally entitled to work in the Republic of Moldova, are particularly encouraged to apply.



This is a local position, therefore only citizens of the Republic of Moldova or others legally authorized to work in the country are eligible to apply.



Please note that only applicants who are short-listed will be contacted.



Applicant information about UNDP rosters



Note: UNDP reserves the right to select one or more candidates from this vacancy announcement. We may also retain applications and consider candidates applying to this post for other similar positions with UNDP at the same grade level and with similar job description, experience and educational requirements.



Scam warning



The United Nations does not charge any application, processing, training, interviewing, testing or other fee in connection with the application or recruitment process. Should you receive a solicitation for the payment of a fee, please disregard it. Furthermore, please note that emblems, logos, names and addresses are easily copied and reproduced. Therefore, you are advised to apply particular care when submitting personal information on the web.

Vacancy End Date: 13 July 2021

To apply please address the link: https://bit.ly/3y3P7Bz
Yesterday marked three years to the day since a gunman killed five staffers at the Capital Gazette newspaper inside its offices, in Annapolis, Maryland. To mark the anniversary, the paper put portraits of the victims on its front page, in between a photo of an empty bench in a waterfront park where one of them, Rob Hiaasen, liked to hang out, and a headline noting that THEIR WORDS LIVE ON in views of Annapolis and the region that can never be erased. Inside, the paper reprinted some of these words, including a 2017 reflection, by Hiaasen, on a story about a ninety-eight-year-old local man who would sometimes sleepwalk down to the waterfront. I am profoundly jealous of every fact in this story, Hiaasen wrote, adding that he hoped one day to emulate the man. There they will find me. Sleepwalking and daydreaming among all the boats in the water. Found smiling, they will report. Yesterday, Hiaasens former colleagues and city officials and residents gathered at a different local park to dedicate a physical memorial to the victims, comprising five pillars standing sentinel before a brick wall engraved with the text of the First Amendment. Also fixed to the wall: an embossed copy of the Capital Gazettes front page from three years ago today. It carries the same five photos as yesterdays edition.

The anniversary of the shooting comes at a turbulent moment for the paper in another, very different respect. Recently, Tribune Publishing, its ultimate owner, was acquired by Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund with a long-standing reputation for sharp cuts at its titles. Alden was already Tribunes largest shareholder when, last year, Tribune closed the physical newsrooms of a number of its papers, including the Capital Gazette; then, this year, Alden moved to take full control. Initially, there was unexpected hope for the Capital Gazette: should the deal go through, it would be spun off, along with the Baltimore Sun, into nonprofit ownership anchored by Stewart Bainum Jr., a local hotel magnate. Even after the spin-off hit a technical snag, optimism persisted; Bainum set his sights on the whole of Tribune, with the goal of selling the companys other titles to other local owners, andworking with Hansjorg Wyss, a Wyoming-based Swiss billionaireeventually outbid Alden. But Wyss dropped out (reportedly after concluding that his vision for revitalizing the Chicago Tribune was a pipe dream), and the bid finally fell through. Last month, Tribunes non-Alden shareholders voted to green-light Aldens takeover, which was finalized a few days later. Immediately, Alden saddled Tribune, which had been debt-free, with nearly three hundred million dollars of it, including via a loan from another company owned by Alden. It also offered buyouts to staffers across Tribunes titles nationwide.

New from CJR: A Return to Independent Eritrean Journalism

Last week, the New York Post estimated that around a hundred staffers had taken buyouts. Several of them worked at the Capital Gazette. Rick Hutzell joined the paper in 1987 with the intention of leaving after two years to join the Associated Press and see the world, but he stayed, and rose to become the top editor. His last day was ten days ago. The buyout, he wrote, represented a chance for something new before he got too old to enjoy it. I wish I could say its all been grand, and Im headed off to retirement, he wrote. But it hasnt, and Im not. Chase Cooka reporter who famously tweeted, in the aftermath of the shooting, that we are putting out a damn paper tomorrowtook a buyout as well, as did Danielle Ohl, who chaired the papers union; she described herself as exhausted after the shooting and years of fighting on behalf of her colleagues, and called the buyout an opportunity to take care of myself so she can keep working for years to come. The thing that makes me just so angry, Ohl once said, following a prior round of buyouts in January of last year, is that we could bounce back from a mass shooting, but I do not know if we can bounce back and survive corporate ownership.

Other staffers who were at the Capital Gazette at the time of the shooting are still there. This week, theyre grappling with yet another traumatizing story: the trial of the gunman who killed their colleagues. (After initially pleading not guilty, he changed his plea to guilty, though he is now also pleading not criminally responsible by reason of insanity; starting today, the jury will begin weighing that defense.) As NPRs Chris Benderev reported for Embedded, as part of a recent series (that I profiled) about the shooting and its aftermath, Hutzell always felt strongly that his paperand not its immediate owner, the Sunshould take the lead in covering the trial, despite the complications that would inevitably arise. Phil Davis, who would normally have covered the trial, couldnt do so since he was a witness to the shooting; Cook, who wasnt in the newsroom at the time, took the story on, but then backed off it after speaking candidly with The New Yorker about the gunmans guilt. In the end, Hutzell hired a young reporter named Alex Mann, who had interned at the Gazette prior to the shooting but not been there during it, to take the lead on trial coverage. Hutzell also laid down some rules: no talking about the trial in the newsroom, due to the presence of both trauma victims and witnesses; no role for himself in stories concerning him directly. The guilty plea changed the story, but it did not end it; nonetheless, last year, the Sun moved to hire Mann away. According to Benderev, it frustrated Hutzell to think that the reporter with the best grasp of the trial would no longer be employed by his paper. The Capital Gazette having the best coverage would be a testament to its survival.

Mann now works for the Sun, but his trial coverage is also appearing in the Gazette, whose own reporter Lilly Price is on the story, too. Hutzell, of course, is no longer around to oversee it. The confluence of the trial, the shooting anniversary, and the buyouts is a coincidence (to an extent, anyway; no one forced Alden to offer the buyouts at this particular time, or at all). Once the trial is over, national attention will likely ebb away from the case again, but the economic threats to the paper will endure. So, of course, will the horrifying memories of three years ago. Yesterday, at the memorial dedication in Annapolis, Summerleigh Winters Geimer recalled that the last time she saw her mother, Wendi Winters, who was killed in the shooting, Wendi had said black and white and read all overa reference to an old newspaper joke, and the color of the outfit she was wearing. Now, Geimer said, it seems like black and white and read all over is a mean joke for a newspaper covered in blood.

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Below, more on the Capital Gazette, Alden, and local news:



Other notable stories:

ICYMI: Covering the tragedy in Surfside from near and far

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Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist. He writes CJRs newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.
In 1977, at the age of twenty-five, Seyoum Tsehaye dropped out of college to join the fight for Eritreas self-rule. He knew how to use a camera; the Eritrean Peoples Liberation Front (EPLF) tasked him with documenting the war. From the front lines, he captured the bloody struggle for freedom during its moments of honor and despair. When the EPLF revealed troubling edges, he showed that, toomuch to the dissatisfaction of his compatriots, who threw him in prison for a year without a trial. In 1991, when Eritrea declared independence, Tsehaye continued his work as a photojournalist, collecting images of his peoples first steps in a sovereign country.

By then, Eritrea, tucked in the Horn of Africa on the border of the Red Sea, had been under colonial control since the late 1800s (by Italy, Britain, then Ethiopia). Under its first president, Isaias Afwerki, the transition to independence proved difficult. Tsehaye became the founding director of Eri TV, the state broadcaster, but it was not long before he was demoted, to a position in the ministry of tourismthe powers that be didnt appreciate it when he aired coverage critical of the government. Over time, Afwerki fell deeper into totalitarianismgrowing paranoid, failing to implement a constitution, refusing to hold electionsand Tsehaye began freelancing for Setit, an independent news outlet, where he reported on womens rights, HIV, and disabled veterans. In 2001, as part of a wider push for democracy in Eritrea, Tsehaye published a piece in Setit urging the regime to support its people. Authorities responded by mandating that independent newspapers be shut down across the country. Tsehaye and other outspoken Eritreans were imprisoned.

Ever since, the press in Eritrea has been effectively shuttered: a dictatorship in which the media have no rights, as Reporters Without Borders has described it. Tsehaye has remained behind bars. But this year, a sign of hope appeared with the launch of 2001 Magazine, started by Seyoum Tsehayes twenty-four-year-old niece Vanessa.

Named for the year the Eritrean press was dissolved, 2001 was produced by Vanessa Tsehayes organization, One Day Seyoum, which advocates for the release of those imprisoned by the government. The inaugural issue reveals the challenges of Eritrean life, in pieces rendered without access to on-the-ground reporting. Were used to working with a country like Eritrea, Vanessa Tsehaye said, but we wanted to create the foundation for people who wanted to learn more.

VANESSA TSEHAYE FIRST LEARNED about Seyoum, her mothers brother, while growing up abroad, in Sweden. Her mother wanted her to know about the family back home. She would just tell us, This is this uncle; this is that aunt; they have three kids; and for himSeyoumshe just at some point was like, And hes imprisoned, but he hasnt done anything wrong. The situation was hard to understand. When Vanessa was in high school, her bafflement grew into frustration. It was then that, along with some friends, she formed One Day Seyoum, to organize against Afwerkis regimeand, as she put it, to do what I was criticizing other people for not doing.

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The idea to start a magazine came several years later, when the staffall volunteers, based around the worldwas discussing a social media campaign to profile each year of the dictatorship. It occurred to Vanessa that their research could fill a zine. In Eritrea, we dont even know when things get worse or better, because people are so scared of speaking that its really hard to get breaking news or any kind of story that could help raise awareness, she said. So we have to think quite creatively.

Through investigations, interviews, essays, art, and poetry, the resulting magazine explores a theme of Past, Present, and Future. There is a piece on Afwerki and the EPLFs earliest signs of despotism; another details the methods by which the regime has maintained a stronghold on its overseas population (namely, a dreaded 2 percent tax). A story on military conscription describes the conditions at a remote facility called Sawa, which the United Nations has deemed slavery-like. In an article called Tattoo on My Brain, Aaron Berhane, the former editor in chief of Setit, recalls driving through Asmara, Eritreas capital, after authorities announced an end to independent journalism. He describes his staff meeting for what would be the last time. Sometimes I wonder how we even survived for four years, he writes. (Berhane died in May, in Toronto, at the age of fifty-one, from COVID-19 complications.)

Given the governments ban on local reporting, 2001 relied heavily on members of the diaspora, who represent between a third and half of all Eritreans. We were able to use peoples testimony and experiences as a source, Sienna Jacob, an Eritrean-American based in London, and the issues editor, told me. Their accounts reflected the views of people who left the country at different times, yet they shared a sense of connection in their pursuit of a better life. A profile features the work of Meron Estifanos, an Eritrean journalist and activist living in Sweden, who has been a resource for refugees making the perilous journey through North Africas migrant corridors; theres a conversation with Daniela Yohannes, who created the artwork for the magazines cover. I want to confront the truths of our pasteven if violent or painfulbecause I want to understand what I am the result of, Yohannes told 2001.

A lot of the information in the magazine is quite sad and tough to read, Jacob said. But its also imaginative. I think issues like this seem hopeless and, you know, people might not think about aspiring for the future, she continued. Its important for people to realize that this isnt it, and theres things that can be done.

SEYOUM HAS NOT BEEN seen or heard from since he was detained. Vanessa has no way of reaching him, to send him a copy of the magazine or just to talk. Contacting Eritreans inside the country poses a challenge, too2001 is being sold online and in print, but anyone who might try to buy a copy inside the country would face dangerous repercussions if they were found out. Vanessa said its not worth the risk; shes focused on the audience of Eritreans abroad.

In the coming years, 2001 plans to release new issues annually. Our role is to mobilize the diaspora, Vanessa said, to create an informed and engaged diaspora to support efforts at home.

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today

Feven Merid is a CJR fellow.
DEARBORN, Mich. (AP)  Portions of Interstate 94 remained flooded and closed Monday in the Detroit area, the first major work day since a weekend storm swept the region.

State police said I-94 was improving in Dearborn and Detroit as pumps drained water from the roadway, which is below ground level in some sections. More than 6 inches of rain fell in just a few hours Friday and Saturday.

The Michigan Transportation Department was making a lot of progress with its pumping system, state police Lt. Mike Shaw said. There were areas that probably had 18 feet of water. Youre actually seeing pavement.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer planned to look at the mess.

People are suffering. This is going to be hard, she said.

Meanwhile, forecasters said more rain was possible, along with high humidity and temperatures in the 80s.

Pump failures caused basements to flood, especially in Detroit, Dearborn and the Grosse Pointe communities. Homeowners made many trips to the curb, piling spoiled possessions.

Brown water, dirty, ugly, too much smell, Dalal Al Dika said.

Dearborns fire chief, Joseph Murray, thought floods in 2014 were the worst he would see but this is definitely worse than that one.

Elsewhere in Michigan, authorities confirmed weekend tornadoes around the state. Near Port Austin, at the tip of the Thumb, an 11-minute tornado peaked at 120 mph Saturday before moving into Lake Huron, the National Weather Service said.

About the photo: A sign warns of high water on a flooded Interstate 75 at 7 Mile Road in Detroit on Saturday, June 26, 2021. (Max Ortiz/Detroit News via AP)

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
MEXICO CITY (AP)  The first hurricane of the eastern Pacific season brushed past the coastal shoulder of southwestern Mexico Monday, keeping just off shore while sweeping the coast with heavy rains and winds that raised the threat of flash floods and mudslides.

In the meantime, a tropical depression that formed over the Atlantic strengthened into Tropical Storm Danny on Monday and made landfall just north of Hilton Head on Pritchards Island just before 8 p.m., the National Hurricane Center said. The storm was quickly downgraded as it moved inland and was no longer classified as a tropical cyclone by Tuesday.

In the Pacific, Hurricane Enrique moved past the Cabo Corrientes bulge during the night, and slowed slightly as it headed toward a possible run at the southern end of Mexicos Baja California peninsula as a tropical storm by midweek.

Enriques maximum sustained winds were holding around 85 mph (140 kph) early Monday, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

Weakening is forecasted over the next several days, the center said. Enrique is expected to weaken below hurricane intensity by tomorrow, but is still expected to be a tropical storm when it moves near the southern Baja California Peninsula on Wednesday.

On Monday, the storms core was about 65 miles (105 kilometers) west of Cabo Corrientes _ the bulge on the coast south of Puerto Vallarta _ and moving north-northwest at 5 mph (7 kph).

The hurricane center said Enrique could drop 6 to 12 inches (15 to 30 centimeters) of rain, with isolated maximums of 18 inches (45 centimeters), over Colima state and coastal sections of the states of Jalisco, Michoacan and northern Guerrero.

A hurricane warning was in effect from Playa Perula to Cabo Corrientes. A tropical storm warning was posted from Punta San Telmo to Playa Perula and from Cabo Corrientes to Punta Mita.

Mexicos Defense Department has said troops were being deployed to aid civilians in advance of the storm.

The National Hurricane Center said Enrique was weakening on Tuesday as it moved into cooler waters south of Baja California. The storm was pulling drier air into its core, suppressing thunderstorm formation, forecasters said.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Only a generously funded, celebrity-endorsed NGO utterly convinced of its own rectitude would have the chutzpah to proffer advice on combating antisemitism, just weeks after it labeled the worlds sole Jewish state as the faithful reincarnation of apartheid South Africas white minority regime. True to form, that is exactly what Human Rights Watch did last week.

Not everything about HRWs analysis of the spate of antisemitic attacks targeting American Jews that erupted in tandem with Mays renewed conflict between Israel and Hamas was objectionable. The assaults were a reminder that the far right has no monopoly on antisemitism, wrote Eric Goldstein, the author of the analysis. One thing is clear, he concluded. To assault or use ethnic slurs against a Jew because of what the government of Israel may be doing is antisemitism.

While this might seem like HRW extending an olive branch to the Jewish community after years of blaming resurgent antisemitism around the world on Israeli policies towards the Palestinians, alas that is not the case. On closer inspection, HRWs institutional view of what antisemitism is and how it should be countered turns out to be a middle finger rudely thrust in our direction  so much so that its hard to know where to begin.

The choice of Goldstein to expound on HRWs understanding of contemporary antisemitism is probably as good a place as any. Why is an individual whose job title is acting executive director, HRW Middle East and North Africa Division opining about hate crimes (though he never classifies them as such) targeting a relatively small minority community in the United States? How exactly is a Middle East specialist qualified to give insight on the best practices to secure our synagogues and schools, or fighting antisemitic hate speech online, or protecting visibly identifiable Jews who are especially vulnerable to street violence, or educating law enforcement about anti-Semitic trends  or any of the other real, painful practical challenges our community is presently dealing with?

Therein lies the rub. As is the case with other recent initiatives on antisemitism policy that Ive written about (here and here), the intended beneficiary of these interventions is not the Jewish community, but the Palestinian national struggle and its influential global lobby. In that sense, Goldstein, who has a Jewish name and is an advocate for Palestinian rights, is an ideal person to front HRWs attempt to delink the latest round of Israel demonization from the antisemitism it is rooted in, which is the main goal of his analysis.

But if ones goal is to assist the Jewish community by arresting the current anti-Semitic tide, one cannot help being astonished by the issues that Goldstein ignores, and those, in turn, that he addresses.

To begin with, he mentions two of the many antisemitic outrages recorded in May around the country  the assault on Jewish diners at a Los Angeles restaurant and the savage beating of a Jewish man in Midtown Manhattan. When one reports on hate crimes, it is customary to identify the perpetrators with as much accurate information as possible, and were Goldstein writing about an assault on Jews committed by white supremacists or neo-Nazi skinheads, he likely would have no qualms about disclosing this critical fact in order to enhance readers understanding of the episode at hand.

Yet Goldsteins analysis of the May events gives the impression that the authors of these assaults were nameless and faceless, motivated only by a misguided notion of what solidarity with the Palestinian people involves. The assailants in Los Angeles were referred to merely as a group, while the attackers in New York City were simply assailants. No more detail was provided.

We know from ample coverage in the Jewish and general media that the vast majority of individuals arrested during the recent attacks, including those in Los Angeles and Manhattan, were Arab-American males, principally in their late teens or early 20s. For a mix of ideological and institutional reasons, this fact is too unpalatable for HRW to wrestle with. The organization fears being accused of fanning anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism, and is reluctant to criticize the oppressed in their struggle against the oppressor, and so this aspect of the problem is duly buried.

Again, this is because the ultimate purpose of HRWs analysis is to salvage anti-Zionism from the sewer of antisemitism. Inconvenient realities that undermine that neat division  like the aforementioned attacks, or the Islamist convoy that cruised through Londons Jewish neighborhoods threatening through a megaphone to rape your daughters, or the Muslim demonstrators in the German city of Gelsenkirchen who chanted (expletive) in ecstatic unison  just get in the way.

Of far greater concern to Goldstein and HRW are the existing initiatives to combat anti-Semitism that actually enjoy the support of the majority of the Jewish community. Goldstein agrees that the Biden administrations appointment of the State Department special envoy to combat antisemitism  a post originally created in 2004 by the George W. Bush administration  is a pressing matter, but not because antisemitism is terrorizing Jewish communities abroad.

Biden should ensure the envoy he nominates is also committed to rolling back the efforts of the Trump administration to brand vast swaths of Israel criticism as antisemitic, which ill-served the cause of combatting actual antisemitism, wrote Goldstein. Actual antisemitism, it would seem, is restricted to those incidents in which Jews are physically assaulted and racially abused. Anything more subtle  like denying the right of the Jewish people to statehood, or singling out the Jewish state for the type of social distancing that all of us personally experienced over the last year  is not antisemitism at all. Indeed, the real problem consists of those in the Jewish community who say otherwise, along with the working definition of antisemitism endorsed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance that unhelpfully includes anti-Zionist expressions as part of the rubric.

At the end of May, Goldsteins boss at HRW, Ken Roth, tweeted that it was WRONG to equate the Jewish people with the apartheid and deadly bombardment of Prime Minister (Benjamin) Netanyahus government. Make no mistake, this is the old, discredited message of Israel bad, Jews not necessarily so that the anti-Zionist left has pushed for decades  and now HRW, in the name of defending human rights, is taking the lead.

Ben Cohen is a New York City-based journalist and author who writes a weekly column on Jewish and international affairs for JNS.
The city of Akron will celebrate its 47th year of free summer dance performances in Akron city parks through the 14th annual Heinz Poll Dance Festival in late July and early to mid-August.
Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman, a Lima Republican, discusses the Senate passage of Ohio's two-year, $75 billion state budget, on Wednesday, June 9, 2021, in Columbus, Ohio. Differences in how to pay for K-12 education are expected to dominate the next stage of deliberations, with the House and Senate taking different approaches to a long-term school funding solution. The two chambers must reconcile two versions of the budget by month's end.
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In this June 2020 photo, fireworks are displayed in a temporary shop in Clinton as the July 4 holiday approaches. Though State law allows the sale of consumer fireworks in Clinton, city ordinance prohibits their use in the town. Camanche allows the discharge of consumer fireworks for a few hours July 4.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 29)  Metro Manila hospitals are now slowly allocating more beds for non-coronavirus patients as the region sees a decline in new COVID-19 cases, a health official said on Tuesday.

Yung mga COVID beds or critical care beds allocated for COVID ay dahan-dahan naming shinift for the non-COVID para ma-cater naman iyong mga non-COVID patients, Health Undersecretary Leopoldo Vega said in a briefing.

[Translation: We are gradually shifting the allocation of beds, such as critical care beds, so we can cater to more non-COVID patients.]

During the surge in infections in April and May, Vega noted that nearly 55% of government hospital beds in the National Capital Region have been devoted to patients infected by the viral illness. Even so, several medical facilities announced during this time that they could no longer accommodate virus-hit patients.

With the situation in the area improving, the independent OCTA Research group on Monday reported that NCRs hospital bed occupancy is at 36%, which is within the safe level.

However, while cases in the region are on a gradual downtrend, the Department of Health has cautioned against complacency, as it stressed the situation in Metro Manila remains fragile.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 29)  Motorists can access the Binondo-Intramuros Bridge in Manila by December this year, the Department of Public Works and Highways confirmed on Tuesday.

DPWH Secretary Mark Villar said the access ramps in the China-funded bridge are being constructed.

Undersecretary Emil Sadain said the project is already 70% complete, including the main bridge and the steel arch and support steel bowstring over the Pasig River.

Sadain added the fabricated steel box girders for the viaduct and ramp over Estero de Binondo will arrive from China in August.

The bridge that will connect the two historic districts in the country's capital is expected to accommodate around 30,000 vehicles per day. It is also seen to decongest traffic in the Jones, Delpan, and MacArthur bridges.

Sadain admitted in a Senate hearing in October 2020 that 45% of the workers in Binondo-Intramuros Bridge project are Chinese. China allotted 3.39-billion for the construction of the bridge, a part of the Metro Manila Logistics Improvement Program to solve the traffic gridlock in the region.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 29)  President Rodrigo Duterte challenged National Housing Authority General Manager Marcelino Escalada, Jr. to complete in six months the housing projects for those affected by Typhoon Yolanda.

Duterte gave the order to Escalada and then Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council Chairman Leoncio Evasco, Jr. to finish the housing projects.

Pag hindi natapos yan, maghanap kayo ng ibang trabaho. Talagang papalitan ko kayo (If they are not completed, you better find other jobs. I will replace you,) said Duterte. It was not a threat but a suggestion to them to do more because if they cannot do more, then I will look for somebody who can do more housing projects.

Duterte mentioned Evasco even though he is no longer the HUDCC chairman, a position he had held from 2016-2017. He is now the Presidential Adviser on Streamlining of Government Processes.

The President claimed that when he went to Tacloban City, Leyte, he only saw two houses built on the planned housing projects.

But despite his threat, Duterte said he trusts the abilities of Escalada.

Si Escalada, mayor pa ako ng Davao (when I was still the mayor of Davao), he can work miracles, he can work night and day, and even climb the highest mountain just to give a solution, the President said.

As of June 30 last year, the Duterte administration has yet to construct the more than 90,000 housing units intended for the victims of the super typhoon in 2013, based on the last budget hearing of the Department of Human Settlements and Urban Development and the NHA.

Only 130,317 or 59% of the total 220,680 Yolanda housing units were completed.

During the weekly IATF meeting, Duterte also asked the NHA to construct free housing for those living under bridges and near water tributaries.

Unahin ko (yung) nasa ilalim ng tulay. Kung asan man kayo naroroon, paalam ninyo at gagawa tayo ng bahay. Hindi ko lahat mabigyan kasi walang ganon karaming pera, materials, at trabahante, the President said.

[Translation: We should prioritize those living under bridges. Wherever you are, let us know and we will build a house for you. I cannot give free housing to all since we dont have enough funds, materials, and workers.]
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 29)  The Inter-Agency Task Force and the Cebu provincial government remain deadlocked on the quarantine protocols for returning Filipinos in the province.

With the stalemate, the IATF's rule of 10-day hotel quarantine and four-day home quarantine for returning Filipinos will be the standing policy in Cebu.

In a special session by the provincial government on Tuesday, Cebu Governor Gwen Garcia insisted that a three-day hotel quarantine rule must be followed if the returning Filipino yielded a negative result for COVID-19 in a swab test upon arrival.

Garcia said those who tested negative will then continue their quarantine at home for the next two weeks, after the three-day hotel quarantine.

She added their proposed three-day hotel quarantine protocol will only apply for Cebuanos, and the IATF rules will be enforced for non-Cebuanos.

"That is our request...allow us to take this responsibility into our hands for we cannot govern with what ifs. We cannot possibly hope to achieve the welfare of our constituents when it is based on a model," Garcia said.

The Cebu Governor offered their quarantine protocol as a compromise to IATF officials, who were also present in the special session at the Cebu Provincial Capitol. But the task force did not accept her offer.

IATF officials represented by chief implementer Carlito Galvez Jr., task force co-chairman and Cabinet Secretary Karlo Nograles, and Health Secretary Francisco Duque III emphasized their policy must be followed where an arriving passenger is subject to a 10-day hotel quarantine with a swab test on the seventh day.

The IATF rule also states that if the passenger tested negative on the swab test, the person is eligible to finish the remaining four days in home quarantine.

"While we laud the interventions and the initiatives of the Cebu officials, I also beg of you not to put our guards down, not to be complacent and not to think that we have been successful in defeating COVID-19," said Nograles, who pointed out the threat posed by the more contagious Delta Plus variant.

Despite the deadlock, Duque assured Garcia her proposal will still be studied by the IATF.

"Ang sinabi naman ni governor (What the governor said) is to consider their request to have a separate for Cebuanos, from those who aren't Cebuanos. This has to be deliberated upon by the IATF," Duque said.

Garcia followed President Rodrigo Duterte's order to implement the IATF rule in the province to prevent further transmission of the coronavirus, especially with the presence of more dangerous variants.

CNN Philippines Cebu correspondent Dale Israel contributed to this report.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 29) The International Criminal Court called on victims of alleged crimes linked to the Philippine governments war on drugs to voice out their concerns and expectations amid the request to investigate the Duterte administration's campaign.

Victims of the alleged crimes have the right to submit 'representations' as per the ICC legal framework; this means that victims may provide their views, concerns and expectations regarding the Prosecutor's request to the ICC Judges for their consideration, the ICC said in a statement posted on its website.

Concerned parties may fill out a form, which is available for download through the ICCs website. They may also submit representations in other formats including video and audio.

Submissions will be accepted until August 13.

The ICC, however, clarified that the process is not an application for participation in court proceedings.

Earlier this month, outgoing ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda requested for a probe into the alleged crime against humanity committed under the Duterte administrations anti-drug campaign  which, according to latest government data, saw over 6,000 people dead since 2016.

Local and international human rights groups, however, believe the death toll is much higher.

For its part, Malacanang said the ICC can do whatever it wants, but noted that case buildup may be difficult without cooperation from the concerned state.

Alam din po ng ICC (The ICC knows that) without cooperation from the state, napakahirap po ng (it will be difficult to establish) case buildup because all criminal cases -- even in the ICC and most especially in the ICC -- must present real evidence and not just newspaper reports, Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque said in a media briefing.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 29)  With President Rodrigo Duterte recently floating the idea of running for vice president in the 2022 elections, Malacanang says the chief executive still has his eyes on some unfinished business.

Sinagot po yan ni Presidente: mayroon po siyang unfinished business pagdating po sa droga, pagdating po sa korupsyon, said Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque when asked what prompted Duterte to consider running for vice president.

[Translation: The President has already answered this: he has unfinished business when it comes to (fighting) drugs and corruption.]

Sworn in as president on June 30, 2016, Duterte ran under the promise of ending the countrys drug problem in three months. He eventually extended this deadline to six months, then to three years as he miscalculated the problem.

The chief executive eventually promised a drug-free community for Filipinos before the end of his term.

RELATED: Philippines may not be drug-free by 2022, Dangerous Drugs Board admits

Roque likewise emphasized the President did say he will only consider vying for the second highest post in the land if there is space for him.

In a separate statement, House Majority Leader and Leyte Rep. Martin Romualdez agreed that Duterte needs to continue his good platforms against corruption, illegal drugs, and criminality.

For me, President Duterte is the strongest potential vice presidential candidate next year, said Romualdez. While he is keeping his options open, the solon added it is not a good decision to run against the former Davao mayor.

Duterte earlier said he will not vie for the vice presidency if Romualdez is running for the same post.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 29)  Taguig City has resumed the second-dose inoculation of its residents, a day after halting its vaccine drive due to pending issuance of a document.

In its advisory on Tuesday afternoon, the local government announced that it has reopened vaccination hubs for those who will get their second dose of Sinovac or AstraZeneca.

Vaccinees scheduled to get their second dose on June 28 and June 29 may go to the following sites until 6 p.m. Tuesday:

Bonifacio High Street - Sinovac

Venice Grand Canal Mall - Sinovac

Western Bicutan National High School - Sinovac

EMS Signal Village Elementary School - Sinovac

RP Cruz Elementary School - Sinovac

Sea Breeze Resort - Sinovac

Vista Mall - Sinovac and AstraZeneca

SM Aura - Sinovac

Inoculation of the first dose COVID-19 vaccine remains suspended, the local government said.

In an interview with CNN Philippines' The Source, Health Undersecretary Rosario Vergeire said Taguig had to suspend giving Sinovac shots on Monday until the city receives a "certificate of analysis" or COA from the vaccine manufacturer for the delivered batch. She said this document ensures that the delivered supply is of good quality.

The LGU, however, has not announced whether it has formally obtained the COA after resuming its vaccine drive.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 29)  The United States has launched a $34 million (about 1.6 billion) project aiming to fortify the Philippine energy sector, the US Embassy in the Philippines said.

Spanning five years, the US Agency for International Developments Energy Secure Philippines project will support a more competitive, secure, and resilient sector, the embassy said in a statement Monday.

The ESP will also promote the countrys key energy sector priorities and support its climate mitigation goals, it added.

Washington will work with Manila and private sector partners in improving the efficiency of energy utilities, deploy renewable energy systems and promote competition in the power sector, the embassy said. The project also aims to address energy sector cybersecurity, it added.

The U.S. government will also mobilize more than Php36 billion ($740 million) in private sector investment and help develop at least 500 megawatts of clean energy generation capacity, the statement read.

USAID Philippines Acting Mission Director Sean Callahan, U.S. Embassy Charge dAffaires John Law, and Energy Secretary Alfonso Cusi inked the memorandum of understanding during a virtual signing ceremony.

Cusi said the project will provide a wealth of opportunities for the DOE, as we reevaluate the appropriateness of our current policies vis-a-vis our countrys energy goals.

The new project's launch coincides with this year's 75th anniversary of diplomatic ties between both countries.
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Penn State skateboarders can rejoice as State College will soon build a new skate park where they can shred.

This news comes after Pennsylvania Rep. Scott Conklin announced the Commonwealth Financing Authority would allocate $250,000 for a new skate park to be built in the borough of State College.

Though the parks location and opening date have not yet been confirmed, several local skaters said a skate park in State College could benefit both students and the community.

Student Kiana Skager said a skate park will benefit students looking to occupy their time with a new sport.

I think it would be good to have something else for [college students] to put their free time into, instead of just doing classes or going to the gym, Skager (senior-sociology) said. Itd be more of a hands-on thing for them.

Curtis Trowbridge said students who want to learn how to skate in the presence of other skaters could use a local park to do just that.

When you have an audience while youre just starting out, it makes you more nervous and more hesitant to try things [because] theres a good chance that youll fall. Everybody goes through it, Trowbridge (sophomore-advertising) said. I dont think people feel comfortable with that around the general public, but if youre around another group of skaters youll be fine.

Currently, campus regulations state any use of skateboards or skateboard-like devices are prohibited. Students caught skateboarding on Penn State property will face a fine of $25.

Michael Galaini said he believes the fine is a pay to play scenario with a lot of the skaters.

The odds of being caught and paying a fine usually are pretty slim, Galaini (sophomore-mechanical engineering) said. Its not illegal if you can fork up 25 bucks.

Trowbridge said he believes a skate park will help lower the number of students fined for skating on campus and encourage more students to take up the sport.

Its inconvenient, Trowbridge said. I think a lot more people would be more encouraged to try it because [there would be] a designated area for it. Ive talked to a lot of people who want to start skating on campus but don't know when or where they should go.

Trowbridge said the park will also help to strengthen bonds between local skaters and the State College community by getting skaters off the streets and in their own space.

I think a lot of people have a negative image in their head [of skaters]. A lot of people see it as trespassing or vandalism, which doesnt represent the greater whole, Trowbridge said. Most people just want to find somewhere they can do a sport that they love. I think with a skate park, youd see a lot of people not frequent areas like downtown or campus.

However, Galaini said he does not think a skate park would keep skaters away from campus and downtown State College.

A lot of people think that if they put a skate park in the middle of [campus], then its going to decrease the amount of kids street skating. Maybe by a little  but not a lot, Galaini said. Kids are always going to street skate People want to street skate, they want to get pictures and clips of them skating on the street  not just in a park.

Galaini also said some ambitious skaters looking for recognition might be less likely to want to skate in a park.

If someone is looking to get sponsored [by] a skate company, usually theyll make video clips of them skating. And a lot of the time, those clips cant just be skate park skating, Galaini said. When you have park skating, [the conditions are tailored to skaters]  you dont get that in real life. So a lot of sponsors want to see you riding on rough ground. They want to see you being creative.

Both Trowbridge and Galaini said the skate parks proximity to campus will be important to its reception from students.

If [the skate park] isnt close to campus, its not going to be nearly as effective as everyone thinks it will be, Galaini said. No matter how cool it is Its far. You would need a car and not a lot of people have one.

To combat the problem posed by Galaini, Trowbridge said he has an ideal location in mind.

It would be accessible for students especially, and thats what we really need I think Sunset Park would be a great location, Trowbridge said. A lot of people meet there already  theres already a little community of guys that Ive met there.

MORE BOROUGH COVERAGE
State College's downtown bar the Phyrst confirmed the cancellation of Drake Bell's upcoming September performance Monday following his recent prison sentence.

Bell was initially charged with "attempted child endangerment and disseminating material harmful to children," the New York Times reported June 4. He pleaded not guilty to the charges, which relate to a girl who met him online and attended one of his 2017 concerts in Cleveland, the NYT said.

On Wednesday, the "Drake & Josh" Nickelodeon star changed his plea to guilty and will face up to two years in prison, according to the NYT.

Ryan Rosh, the Phyrst's bar manager, said most of the staff was updated about the situation after the news broke.

We found out about this situation the same way everyone else did, Rosh said.

Everyone who purchased tickets will be refunded, according to Emma Carlson, the bar's assistant manager.

Drake Bell will not be performing, Carlson said.

Bell was originally supposed to perform in State College in March 2020 until the coronavirus caused the event to be postponed to Sept. 1, 2020.

The show was then rescheduled again for April 7, 2021 and was pushed back one final time to this coming fall, specifically Sept. 21.

The Phyrst also confirmed the cancellation via its Facebook event page.

MORE CAMPUS COVERAGE
Every other Monday for the past 13 years, Linda Lorich and Sarah Goslee have spent their evenings knitting with others at the Schlow Centre Region Library in downtown State College  and the recent digital atmosphere due to coronavirus allowed more members to join.

In January 2008, Lorich and Goslee established the Schlow Knitting Club. The drop-in meetings enable knitters and crocheters to practice and learn new skills from each other.

We dont turn anybody away, Lorich said.

Since spring 2020, the coronavirus pandemic led the knitting club to switch to Zoom, according to adult services librarian Mina Youn.

Lorich said through Zoom, they cant teach new members how to knit via their computer screens, and the inexperienced knitters dont have access to supplies.

While Zoom provided some hardships, Lorich said members began to vary over the months.

Its a drop-in group, so people come and go, Lorich said. Its a very mixed group. You never know whos coming to the group.

Lorich said she remembered having people from New York City and Baltimore stop in  along with some from different countries.

Even though they may not speak fluent English, they can still join the Zoom meetings, Lorich said.

According to knitting club member Linda Fiegel, the inclusivity of the club has increased since the pandemic caused the meetings to move online.

Fiegel started attending club meetings in fall 2020 via Zoom.

When we do it on Zoom, I was still able to take care of my husband, Fiegel said.

For other members like Lorich, Zoom allowed them to still play an active role in the club without risking their safety by driving at night.

As I get older, its harder to see at night while driving, Lorich said. Having the knitting club on Zoom has helped me [with] that.

Goslee said she liked having Zoom meetings because she could finally be on time.

When in person, the Schlow Knitting Club works on projects, such as offering winter clothes to those in need.

The Eugene Brown statue  a familiar face in downtown State College that connects the Schlow Library to the CATABus stop headquarters  is known to be yarn-bombed, a phrase coined by Dj Lilly, Schlow office manager.

The members knit winter apparel like scarves and hang them on the statue with a sign indicating that anyone can take it.

We put a sign on him that says something like, Im not lost. Take me if youre cold, Lorich said. We want to make sure people know they can have it.

The group also knits squares for afghans  woolen blankets or shawls  which are donated to Warm Up America!  a national nonprofit agency providing blankets, clothing and accessories to people in need.

When meetings were held in person, materials for the clubs projects were donated or bought through Scraps & Skeins, a creative reuse store sponsored by Strawberry Fields that assists people with disabilities.

As Pennsylvania is opening from coronavirus regulations, Youn said the library plans to hold in-person group events starting in September.

Fiegel said although shes looking forward to the regulations being lifted, she doesnt anticipate Zoom going away anytime soon.

Once youve entered the world of Zoom, youll never go back, Fiegel said. I look at society now and think that we cant ever go back to one or the other. We cant go back from this.

Regardless of how the Schlow Knitting Club approaches in-person meetings, the members of the club said knitting will always have an impact on their lives.

Once you get the hang of [knitting], everything becomes easier, Goslee said. Knitting has gotten me through a lot.

MORE BOROUGH COVERAGE
Early analysis of the preliminary draft of maps for the state Senate and House show that there will be plenty of competition, mostly between incumbents, and often within the same party.

What was released by Colorado's legislative redistricting commission on Tuesday is only a "starting point" map, like the preliminary draft congressional map released last week, and it will be changed in the coming months.

The maps were produced by the commission's staff, based on the several redistricting criteria required, including approximately equal population, compactness and contiguity of districts, abiding by the 1965 Voting Rights Act, respecting communities of interest, existing political subdivisions and natural boundaries, as well as promoting competitiveness where possible.

The commission will soon begin touring the state to collect public input on the preliminary draft maps, in order to make final adjustments.

The maps were also created using imperfect data, like the congressional maps, because the U.S. Census Bureau is late delivering the data required for redistricting to the states. The Census Bureau has said the final data will be ready in August. Because of the delay, the commission has used survey data and estimates to draw the preliminary draft maps.

House

In the House, the maps as drawn would see at least seven pairs of incumbent Democrats, including some of the most powerful members of the legislature, face off against each other in primaries.

The most notable of those matchups would see Joint Budget Committee Vice-Chair Julie McCluskie, D-Dillion, running against Rep. Dylan Roberts. The Eagle Democrat chairs the Business Affairs and Labor Committee and carried some of the most impactful bills of the 2021 legislative session, including the Colorado Option health care bill signed into law by Gov. Jared Polis earlier this month.

The proposed maps would also put Democrats up against a wave of incumbent-on-incumbent primaries across traditionally blue hotbeds in the Denver metro area and Boulder.

In Jefferson County, Rep. Lisa Cutter of Littleton and Rep. Kerry Tipper of Lakewood have been drawn into the same district. In Arapahoe County, Rep. Meg Froelich, D-Greenwood Village, and Rep. David Ortiz, a Littleton Democrat who rounded out his first legislative session with a tweet describing his colleagues as family. Should the maps hold (Ortizs property bumps up against the border of the district he and Froelich are set to share), Ortiz will be fighting against a member of that family for his future as a state lawmaker.

The best families are the ones you dont get to pick for yourself. Proud to be a part of this diverse and amazing crew of freshman legislators. Its been an honor and privilege getting to learn and grow together.  SINE DIE!#coleg #copolitics #sinedie pic.twitter.com/NjmNpzugQB  David Ortiz (@DavidDOrtizCO) June 8, 2021

Other sitting House Democrats drawn into the same district include:

Reps. Dominique Jackson and Naquetta Ricks, both of Aurora;

Reps. Kyle Mullica of Northglenn and Yadira Caraveo of Thornton;

Reps. Edie Hooton and Judy Amabile, both of Boulder;

Rep. Matt Gray of Broomfield and Finance Committee Chair Shannon Bird of Westminster, both of whom drew primary threats after voting to kill a Democrat-backed pre-trial reform effort in the waning days of the legislative session.

In rural Colorado, Republicans who hold six seats have been drawn into three districts. That would pit Rep. Richard Holtorf of Akron against Rep. Rod Pelton of Cheyenne Wells. On the Western Slope, Rep. Marc Catlin of Montrose and Rep. Matt Soper of Delta have been drawn into the same district.

In central Colorado, Rep. Ron (Loren) Hanks of Canon City is in the same district as Rep. Stephanie Luck of Penrose.

Two more sets of incumbent GOP lawmakers have been drawn into the same districts, though term limits will spare those House Republicans from an incumbent-on-incumbent primary.

In Colorado Springs, the preliminary maps put Rep. Andy Pico and term-limited Rep. Terri Carver into the same districts. The same goes for Douglas County, where term-limited Rep. Kim Ransom of Littleton would be in the same district as Rep. Mark Baisley of Roxborough Park.

The proposed maps would see only one incumbent-on-incumbent showdown should both lawmakers win their primaries. The new House District 38, straddling Interstate 25 south of Longmont, would pit rookie Reps. Tracey Bernett, D-Longmont, and Dan Woog, R-Erie, against each other.

One of the more interesting maps is for House District 65, currently represented by Rep. Iman Jodeh, an Aurora Democrat. The map shows a district that stretches from Aurora to northeastern Colorado, a traditionally red stronghold, including Fort Morgan, Sterling and all the way to the Colorado-Nebraska state line near Julesburg.

Then theres roughly a dozen districts where its open season, where there are no incumbents. That includes the new House District 41 in southeastern and south-central Colorado. The district starts just east of Kim, in Las Animas County, moves north into Crowley and west into Pueblo County, then slips around the north end of Pueblo and then heads west to Westcliffe, in Fremont County.

House District 57 is northwestern Colorado, but its current incumbent, Rep. Perry Will, R-New Castle, has been drawn into a district that includes most of Mesa County except for Grand Junction.

In terms of which party benefits the most, Republicans should be cheering. Currently, the House is a 41-24 Democratic advantage. Using party registration, the 2018 Attorney General's race and 2020 U.S. Senate race election outcomes, and counting as competitive the districts with a 5 percentage point margin or less, the House preliminary draft map would lead to between 31 and 35 solid Democratic districts, between 25 and 31 solid Republican districts, and between 3 and 5 competitive districts.

Senate

In the Senate, term limits means that a lot of the lawmakers drawn into the same districts wont mean big changes. But thats not true for everyone.

The most interesting may be in the new Senate District 21, where JBC Chair Sen. Dominick Moreno, D-Commerce City, is in the same district as Republican Sen. Kevin Priola of Henderson.

In Colorado Springs, Sen. Pete Lee, a Democrat, is drawn in the same district as Republican Sen. Larry Liston.

Like in the House, a district just south of Longmont would also see an incumbent-on-incumbent general election matchup if both lawmakers advance through a primary. The new Senate District 32 pits Sen. Sonya Jaquez Lewis, D-Longmont, against Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer, R-Brighton. Both were just elected to their first terms in 2020.

Then theres Senate District 32 in Denver, home to both Sens. Chris Hansen and Robert Rodriguez, and both are nowhere near the end of their terms in office. Rodriguez runs again in 2022, Hansen in 2024.

One item on Republicans wish list has been to make the Eastern Plains more compact; previously Senate District 35, represented by Republican Sen. Cleave Simpson of Alamosa, stretched from the San Luis Valley to southeastern Colorado and north to Kiowa County.

The southeastern Colorado seat as envisioned by the preliminary map would be represented by Sen. Paul Lundeen of northern El Paso County, and in order to keep the population numbers up, draws from eastern Colorado Springs and eastern Douglas County.

Other districts where incumbents are drawn together:

Sens. Jeff Bridges, D-Greenwood Village and Chris Kolker, a Centennial Democrat who just finished his first year in the legislature.

Democratic Sens. Faith Winter of Westminster and Rachel Zenzinger of Arvada. Zenzinger is term-limited in 2024; Winter is interested in running for the new Congressional District 8 seat.

Republican Sens. Chris Holbert of Douglas County and Jim Smallwood of Parker are in the same district, but Holbert is term-limited in 2022.

There are no incumbents in at least two Senate districts as proposed by the new maps: Senate District 15 in eastern Douglas County; and Senate District 19, which includes Columbine and Littleton. The incumbent in the area is Sen. Tammy Story of Conifer, whose district may have gotten a lot redder and which would make re-election in 2022 more difficult.

Using party registration, the 2018 Attorney General's race and 2020 U.S. Senate race election outcomes, and counting as competitive the districts with a 5 percentage point margin or less, the map would lead to between 19 and 21 solid Democratic seats, between 13 and 15 solid Republican seats and between zero and two competitive seats.

This article has been updated to correct the proposed District 65 and Rep. Jackson's hometown. In addition, because of an updated address, Democratic Reps. Alex Valdez and Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez have not been drawn into the same district. Both Valdez and Gonzales-Gutierrez are the sole incumbents in their proposed districts.
This year our dine and drink business locations throughout the Gorge have suffered with closures. You can help support your favorites by purchasing take out and gift cards. Many of these business will offer curb-side delivery and some will deliver to your home. Lets keep the Gorge going strong!
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06/29/2021

Photo (c) Morsa Images - Getty Images Coronavirus (COVID-19) tally as compiled by Johns Hopkins University. (Previous numbers in parentheses.)

Total U.S. confirmed cases: 33,642,146 (33,627,131)

Total U.S. deaths: 604,179 (603,979)

Total global cases: 181,533,728 (181,198,800)

Total global deaths: 3,932,077 (3,925,198)

Masks are back in LA

Due to the spread of the Delta variant of the coronavirus, Los Angeles County has reinstated guidance for the public to wear face coverings in indoor public spaces, even if fully vaccinated.

The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health called the mask guidance voluntary, saying it is necessary until health officials can "better understand how and to whom the Delta variant is spreading."

Scientists say fully vaccinated people have a high degree of protection against the Delta variant. Even so, LA health officials say they are concerned about what might happen if the variant mutates again.

How to tell if a vaccinated person has COVID-19

While all the vaccines currently in use provide a high level of protection, there are still cases of vaccinated people testing positive for COVID-19. Scientists say the symptoms can be different from those affecting someone who has not been vaccinated.

According to researchers with the ZOE COVID Symptom Study, the biggest sign that a vaccinated person has been infected is they sneeze a lot more than usual.

"If you've been vaccinated and start sneezing a lot without an explanation, you should definitely get a COVID test, especially if you are living or working around people who are at greater risk from the disease," researchers wrote in their study.

They said vaccinated people with COVID-19 might also display typical symptoms of the virus, but they usually arent as severe as those affecting someone who hasnt been vaccinated.

Is the pandemic over? Depends on your politics

With most states reopened and COVID-19 restrictions falling by the wayside, it feels to many as though the pandemic is finally over. But is it?

A Gallup Web Survey put that question to the public and found that 62% of people believe their lives are now somewhat back to normal. But when responses were broken down by party affiliation, there was a huge divide.

The poll found that 57% of Republicans believe the pandemic is behind us, but only 4% of Democrats expressed that view. Older Americans were also more likely than young people to think the virus is now mostly over.

Around the nation
06/29/2021

Photo source: FDA Sun Hong of Montebello, Calif., is recalling all cases of Seafood Mushrooms imported from China.

The product may be contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes.

No illnesses have been reported to date.

The recalled product, sold in a clear plastic tray packed in green and clear plastic, was sold at Asian Supermarkets in California, Texas, Washington, Illinois and Florida.

What to do

Customers who purchased the recalled product should not consume it, but return it to the place of purchase for a full refund.

Consumers with questions may contact the company at (323) 597-1112, Monday  Friday, 8:00 AM  4:00 PM (PST).
Yes, a paid holiday

Yes, a holiday, but not paid (We must take a vacation day for that.)

No

Retired / Unemployed / Student or otherwise not applicable

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The Supreme Court's decision in Collins v. Yellen has garnered a fair amount of attention because it resulted in a change in the leadership at the Federal Housing Finance Agency and largely dashed the hopes of Fannie and Freddie preferred shareholders in terms of seeing a recovery of diverted dividends. But the commentary has missed the really critical implication of the decision: the Biden administration can undertake a wholesale reform of Fannie and Freddie by itself without Congress.

GSE reform has been on the Congressional agenda for the last decade. Let me say it plain: it's not going to happen short of another massive housing market meltdown. The substantive policy visions for the future of the GSEs are too far apart and there's no political upside to anyone in Congress from GSE reform: very few Americans have any idea what Fannie and Freddie do, much less appreciate how much they are saving on their mortgages because of the GSEs' existence.

So where does that leave things, if Congress is never going to reform the GSEs? There are three possible futures for Fannie and Freddie. One is status quoan indefinite conservatorship. The second is release from conservatorship without material reform. That means privatization, which had been the goal of the Calabria FHFA (something the Collins litigation helped stymie, thankfully). The third, is a release after a restructuring. It's this third option that no one talks about very much that is now clearly possible thanks to the Collins decision.

The transaction that was challenged in Collins was the third amendment to the Treasury's agreement to purchase a substantial amount of GSE stock. Treasury gave the GSEs a massive credit line and in exchange, Treasury got to sweep all of the GSEs' profits. This has turned out to be a great deal for Treasury. What we learned from Collins is that the transaction is kosher. And if Treasury can sweep all of the GSEs' profits, what else can it do? For example, could Treasury further amend its stock purchase agreement to obtain board representation at the GSEs or to restructure the GSEs' governance or impose other operating requirements? FHFA would have to sign off, but now that FHFA is no longer really an independent agency, it's hard to think that there's much of an obstacle to the right hand of the unitary executive negotiating with the left hand. Put another way, if the Biden administration wants to reform Fannie and Freddie, it has substantial ability to do so thanks to Collins.
Litchfield Township, MN (55355)

Today

Mainly clear. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low near 70F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

Mainly clear. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low near 70F. Winds light and variable.
When and where you need it! 786 Hwy. 7
Yes, I'm concerned we're going to end up back where we were last fall and winter.

I'm not concerned for the vaccinated but cases could surge among the unvaccinated, shutting things down.

I'm not concerned about a surge or shutdowns this fall.

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While the latest data shows only a marginal increase in Delta variant COVID cases in Connecticut, one researcher cautions that could be attributed to the low number of infections in the state overall.

As of Thursday, 43 cases of the Delta strain have been identified in Connecticut, and the variant comprised just 2.3 percent of samples sequenced by researchers in the previous week, according to the latest report from the Yale School of Public Health and The Jackson Laboratory. The percentage of Delta samples was down more than 4 percent from the previous week.

But Nathan Grubaugh, who heads the Yale School of Public Healths efforts to sequence samples of the virus, suggested the low percentage of cases is likely due to noisy data from the states small number of infections.

Looking at our neighbors in Massachusetts and New York, delta is 10-20 (percent), so we in Connecticut are probably pretty close to that, Grubaugh wrote in a tweet accompanying the latest report Thursday.

The variant is believed to be even more transmissible than the Alpha strain, also known as B.1.1.7, first detected in the U.K., which went into a second lockdown last winter when it quickly became the dominant strain there. Researchers now believe the Delta variant comprises the majority of the cases in the U.K., having supplanted the Alpha variant as a the dominant strain.

Public health officials in the U.S., where Alpha remains dominant, believe the country could follow a similar path as the U.K. Besides being more infectious, researchers believe the Delta strain may also be able to evade antibodies from the vaccines and from monoclonal antibody treatments, potentially rendering both less effective at stopping the disease.

But a study out of the U.K. this week showed the Pfizer-BioNTech and AstraZeneca vaccine appear to work against the variant  though the effectiveness was reduced.

Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reclassified the strain as a variant of concern, up from a variant of interest.

On Friday, Connecticuts daily COVID-19 metrics remained low, with 127 new cases found out of 28,755 tests for a positivity rate of 0.44 percent. There were two more hospitalizations, increasing the statewide total to 36. One more death brought the Connecticut total to 8,275.

The weekly variant report showed Alpha comprised 59.1 percent of cases sequenced over the past week. Iota, a variant first detected in New York, made up 18.2 percent of cases, and Gamma, the variant first detected in Brazil, made up 4.5 percent of cases. Just under 16 percent of cases were identified as variants neither of concern nor interest. Out of all the samples sequenced, 26.3 percent were found with the E484K mutation and 8.8 percent were found with the L452R mutation  both mutations found in variants of concern.

With COVID-19 cases low in the state, Grubaugh tweeted that we are not yet seeing any real impacts of Delta locally.

But, if Delta continues to become more prevalent, it has the ability to make outbreaks among unvaccinated populations a lot worse, furthering the health disparities in our communities, he wrote. As a result, we may also see an increase in total cases, as seen in the UK.

He said people who have been vaccinated should encourage others to do the same.

About 66.5 percent of Connecticut residents have received at least one dose of a vaccine, according to CDC data, while 59.5 percent are fully vaccinated.

But data compiled by the state shows that in some communities, less than 40 percent of residents have initiated vaccination, far below the state average. And new vaccinations have dropped off significantly in recent weeks. For the week ending June 19  the most recent data available  61,673 doses were administered statewide, down about 30 percent from the week before and far lower than the peak of almost 315,000 in mid-April.

Hoping to convince more people to get vaccinated, Gov. Ned Lamonts office on Friday announced the state will raffle concert tickets online and offer tickets to people who get a shot at upcoming clinics. Other states have offered lottery drawings for people who get vaccinated, and Connecticut last month offered free drinks with a meal purchase at participating restaurants for those who were vaccinated.
BLANTYRE, Malawi (AP)  Prenatal services at the clinic were free, but the motorcycle taxi fare cost more than Monica Maxwell could afford. Just four weeks before delivering her baby, she cobbled together 1,400 kwacha ($1.75) for the 50-kilometer (31-mile) round trip. It was only her third visit -- fewer than her first two pregnancies. The money she made selling tomatoes dried up amid the pandemic. Her husbands income selling meat also dwindled.

It was the most difficult period of our lives. We had no money for our daily survival, Maxwell, 31, said. Mostly we stayed home.

In a country where hospitals are so bare that women are expected to bring their own razor blades for cutting umbilical cords, the deepening poverty sparked by COVID-19 is further imperiling women's lives.

Officials say far fewer pregnant women in Malawi are getting the health care they need amid the pandemic, with many forgoing medical visits and relying solely on traditional birth attendants, who provide emotional support and administer herbal treatments but are banned by the government from delivering babies because they lack formal training. Many families cant afford clinic visits, or the needed transportation; they also fear theyll catch coronavirus in hospitals.

At risk are the gains that Malawi  a largely rural sliver of a country, with 18 million people  has made over the past decade to combat its poor record of maternal deaths. Malawian women face a 1-in-29 lifetime risk of death related to a pregnancy or birth, according to the United Nations Population Fund.

The country has 439 such deaths per 100,000 live births  a figure it worked to reduce from 984 per 100,000 in 2004. Still, Malawi's rate is southern Africa's third-highest.

___

This story is part of a yearlong series on how the pandemic is impacting women in Africa, most acutely in the least developed countries. APs series is funded by the European Journalism Centres European Development Journalism Grants program, which is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. AP is responsible for all content.

___

Hospitals also suffered staffing shortages when nurses were mobilized to treat coronavirus patients  leading to some lack of experienced personnel for births, said Young Hong, of the United Nations Population Fund.

Not only did the pandemic affect availability of manpower, it also exerted much pressure on the entire health system, including the stock out of certain medicines, equipment, basic medical supply, said Hong, who noted that eight Malawian women die daily of pregnancy complications, higher than COVID-19's toll. This had a huge impact on the quality of maternal health service.

At the Ndirande Health Center, northeast of the country's commercial capital of Blantyre, about 100 pregnant women visited daily before the pandemic. That number's now 15 to 20, said Jacqueline Kolove, a clinic nursing officer.

Sometimes even the women who come for prenatal care are afraid to deliver at the clinic, preferring their homes. Malawian women are encouraged to give birth without medical intervention; many believe emergency measures are shameful. Giving birth at home, though, can be deadly if complications arise  most women live far from clinics.

We explain to them why such a decision might have the dire consequences ... sometimes even calling their husbands and parents to try to reason with them, Kolove said.

At Ndirande and other clinics, nurses, aides and medical midwives give pregnant women ultrasounds and use equipment to monitor mother and baby. Woman can undergo cesarean sections if needed; medications are available to stop severe bleeding. Staff take courses, observe simulated births, and become licensed.

Traditional birthing attendants learn from elders who pass down knowledge through generations and use little to no medical equipment  they listen to womens bellies by placing their ears there, for example, and gather herbs to induce labor.

Malawi banned attendants' delivery work in 2007, but the practice continues; the ban's rarely enforced. Attendants such as Lucy Mbewe, 56, charge nothing. She says her work is key for women who cant afford anything else.

Even the colorful African cloth used to wrap babies, carry them on mothers backs or create makeshift diapers can be a potential obstacle, Mbewe noted. Hospitals recommend that a woman who is going to deliver needs to carry with her at least 10 pieces of cloth, which is a deterrent to those that cannot even afford to put food on the table, she said.

Women are even expected to bring bed coverings, buckets for water, and sometimes candles or flashlights. Mbewe provides clothing and soap when she helps women give birth. She pays for transportation. Some women reimburse her; she uses that money for other clients, she said.

Trained midwives say the use of attendants has increased complicated deliveries. Mbewe says the complications are attributable to expectant mothers getting pregnant younger  a trend confirmed by a government report.

Midwives and health officials also say they're fighting misinformation about the virus and vaccines. Malawi has seen a rise in coronavirus cases, part of a surge across southern Africa.

Malawi's government has administered less than 213,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine. Officials destroyed about 20,000 expired doses provided by COVAX, the U.N.-backed program to ship vaccines to poor countries. Across Africa, just 1% of the population has had one dose, according to the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Nurses and midwives say some women fear they'll secretly be given vaccines.

They feel, as health workers, we are giving them the COVID-19 vaccine instead of oxytocin, said nursing officer Kolove, referring to medicine that strengthens contractions and reduces bleeding risks. They feel we are cheating them.

Medical staff also understand the higher risks of contracting coronavirus. Staff try to educate women, and they take every precaution, even though their work makes keeping physical distance impossible, said Keith Lipato, of the Association of Malawian Midwives.

We make sure that all midwives are screened and tested so that those with signs and symptoms are excused from work, and given the necessary medical treatment, Lipato said.

Lipato and others fear the pandemic will have long-lasting effects on women's health.

Patricia Gunde, 26, hasn't received prenatal services during her first pregnancy. She prefers her attendants' herbs. Gunde doesn't plan to be vaccinated.

I am afraid," she said. "I have heard many stories about it.

With the birth attendant, she feels at ease because women are seen one at a time.

When the attendant brings Gunde in for care, neither wears a mask.

___

AP writers Krista Larson in Dakar, Senegal, and Andrew Meldrum in Johannesburg contributed.
Sen. Lindsey Graham is pushing for federal funding to help construct a new interstate in South Carolina, connecting I-95 to Myrtle Beach. He told The Associated Press he's formally requesting $12 million to revive a project that has been delayed for decades.

I believe it is a critical infrastructure project for the Grand Strand and the state of South Carolina as a whole," Graham said in a statement provided to AP, describing a beach resort area at the heart of the state's multi billion-dollar tourism industry.

The Grand Strand is a cash cow for the state, and I am determined to help provide a better means of transportation for those traveling to and from this tourist destination, he added.

Graham's earmark would fund right-of-way acquisition for the project, which was on a list of requests submitted to the Republican this month by the Horry County Council. Congress first required a study for Interstate 73 four decades ago, but the project has been mired in disputes over who would foot the bill.

Costs for the right-of-way acquisition have been estimated at $15 million, requiring a 20% non-federal match, so local and state officials will be responsible for the remaining $3 million, Graham said.

In 2017, the Army Corps of Engineers issued a construction permit covering the entire 80-mile stretch to the North Carolina border, but proponents have focused on the 42-mile southern section, which would link Interstate 95 to the Conway Bypass. The long-sought direct conduit to the beach for visitors from other parts of the country has been estimated to cost $2 billion.

Graham has long lobbied for the project, which is also supported by Gov. Henry McMaster, a fellow Republican. Other area leaders, including 7th District Rep. Tom Rice, asked McMaster to spend some of the state's federal coronavirus aid money on the project, which the governor has said he's considered doing.

The member-directed spending request, which Graham is making to the Senate Appropriations Committee, is possible for the first time in more than a decade after the revival of earmarking. Often called pork barrel spending, because lawmakers would divert funds to pet projects in their states, the practice was banished from the House and Senate a decade ago, when it was linked to corruption.

Critics thought too many projects went to a handful of powerful lawmakers and fostered a pay to play culture in which campaign contributions were often solicited from lobbyists and others.

The moratorium was enforced through the years by party rules and committee protocols, not House or Senate rules, or force of law.

Earmarks have since been restored, with a new requirement that lawmakers disclose and defend what they now call community project funding. The change came as lawmakers in both parties grew frustrated by their inability to shape spending legislation and worried that Congress has ceded too much of the power of the purse to the executive branch.

In making the request, Graham is breaking with more than 100 congressional Republicans, who are refusing to earmark as a matter of principle. Rep. Ralph Norman, Graham's fellow South Carolina Republican, has several times introduced an earmark ban in the House.

Only one other member of South Carolina's delegation, House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, has requested an earmark, asking for $44 million for ten community projects, including a water infrastructure effort in the Lowcountry and renovations at several colleges and universities.

Every person will be able to judge for themselves if these are worthwhile requests, Graham said. I believe I-73 certainly fits the bill and when completed, it will pay dividends for our state for years to come.

___ Meg Kinnard can be reached at http://twitter.com/MegKinnardAP.
Gov. Ned Lamont on Monday announced $5 million of federal coronavirus relief funding will go toward gun violence and crime prevention measures in the state.

The move comes as the state has seen a sharp uptick in shootings and other violent crime amid the pandemic, following a nationwide trend.

During a press conference outside St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, Lamont drew parallels between the pandemic and the states experience with violent crime and gun violence.

Everybody standing here today, I think our No. 1 responsibility to you is to keep you safe, keep you healthy and keep you out of harms way, said Lamont, speaking in front of a group of lawmakers and policymakers.

While Im proud that Connecticut is one of the safest states in the country, we are not immune, he said. I see whats happening in other cities and other states, and our violence is spiking up as well  in particular gun related violence.

The announcement from the Lamont administration comes a week after The White House unveiled a strategy to tackle gun crime.

The federal plan would increase enforcement of firearms dealers through the ATF, as well as provide federal law enforcement support for local police departments.

But the plan also calls for investing in community violence intervention programs and expanding summer job opportunities for teens, along with helping formerly incarcerated people get back into their communities.

He said the money will go toward creating regional data centers to enable forensic investigators to track and trace guns based on shell casings found at crime scenes, as well as tracking cars thefts  a growing concern in cities and towns.

Commissioner James Rovella, of the state Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection, said the state will also open a rapid DNA kiosk in Meriden that will run around the clock.

During the pandemic, the state saw three main issues: violent crime, auto theft and drug overdoses, said Marc Pelka, under secretary for the Office of Policy and Management.

At the beginning of the pandemic, it seemed that perhaps there would be a slowdown in criminal activity and arrests, he said. But as the pandemic wore on criminal activity rebounded, and some more sharply, he added.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., described gun violence, car theft and drug overdoses as a pathogen, and said they are the tools of a trade  a vicious pernicious trade  that sends bodies to this hospital.

He admitted the $5 million would not accomplish everything the states policy makers aspired to do, but he said it would send a message. We need much more money from the federal government to accomplish those goals, he said.

Andrew Woods, who runs the Connecticut hospital-based violence intervention program, said that over the past 20 months the organization had responded to St. Francis Hospital over 300 times for victims of violent crimes.

Aside from trying to prevent retaliatory violence, the group also works to connect families with services they might need, including home health care, he said.

But he said the programs are underfunded and understaffed.

At the scale that were operating at now, in terms of the kind of violence that were seeing play out in our communities its like drinking from a fire hydrant, he said.

He called for long-term sustainable funding for the programs.

Last fall, the governor sent state police to Hartford to assist the citys police force as the capital saw a spike in shootings.

There have been more recent shootings in the city, including earlier this month when two people were killed 20 minutes apart in what police said were unrelated shootings. One of the victims was a 56-year-old woman police said was struck by a bullet and killed in her kitchen, after a gunman fired nine shots from a rifle in broad daylight, WFSB reported.

Police have arrested one man in that case, 21-year-old Omar Ryes, charging him with murder, possession of an assault weapon and large capacity magazine as well as conspiracy to commit murder. A second man, 24-year-old Edwin Roman, is also being sought on the same charges and is still at large.

The shootings follow two other back-to-back shootings in April that took the lives of a toddler and a teenager.
ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP)  The man who killed five people at a Maryland newspaper was delusional and believed the state's judicial system was conspiring with the Capital Gazette to persecute him and ruin his life, his attorney told a jury Tuesday, trying to make the case that Jarrod Ramos is not criminally responsible for the crimes due to mental illness.

Hours after hearing that, jurors saw photographs of the dead from shotgun blasts in their own newsroom. They saw Wendi Winters collapsed in a hallway after she had just charged at Ramos with a trash can. They saw Gerald Fischman crumpled under his desk. They saw Rob Hiaasen dead in his cubicle. They also saw John McNamara dead at the back of the newsroom. Rebecca Smith died later at a hospital.

Jurors also saw a security video of the attack, as well as an officer's body camera video, showing Ramos emerging from under a desk in the newsroom and police officers later leading him out.

Three years and a day after the attack on the newspaper, the second phase of a trial started for Ramos, who pleaded guilty  but not criminally responsible  to the June 28, 2018 slayings. The plea is Maryland's version of an insanity defense.

Katy O'Donnell, Ramos' lawyer, told jurors her client "is guilty of having committed these offenses, and his act was willful, deliberate and premeditated. But, she said, mental health experts for the defense will tell them he is not criminally responsible under the law due to mental illness.

Mr. Ramos is guilty, and he is also not criminally responsible, ODonnell said.

Ramos believed that he was being intentionally persecuted, ODonnell said, after the newspaper wrote about a case in which he pleaded guilty to harassing a former high school classmate. Ramos also thought the courts were unfairly rejecting his defamation case against the newspaper, she said.

O'Donnell told the jury it will hear testimony about Ramos' own description of the events as they unfolded on the day of the shooting, as well as an eight-year backstory that led up to the attack.

We want you to understand the years leading up to this day, ODonnell said. Its chilling because Mr. Ramos does not believe what he did was wrong."

O'Donnell said jurors also will hear from mental health experts who have evaluated Ramos and determined he is mentally ill, and doctors who will testify that Ramos is autistic. He also has obsessive compulsive disorder, delusional disorder and narcissistic personality disorder, she said.

O'Donnell explained Maryland's insanity defense law to the jury: The state says a defendant is not criminally responsible for criminal conduct if  because of a mental disorder or developmental disabilities  he lacked substantial capacity to appreciate the criminality of his conduct.

Under the law, a defendant has the burden to show by a preponderance of the evidence that he is not criminally responsible for his actions.

Anne Colt Leitess, the Anne Arundel County state's attorney, deferred her opening statement until after the defense presents its case.

In the afternoon, while cross-examining a county detective who investigated the case, Leitess started delving into the depth of planning that Ramos put into planning the attack.

She asked the detective to show jurors a device known as a barracuda that Ramos used to barricade a back door so that the victims could not escape from the newsroom.

Leitess also asked Anne Arundel County Det. Jason DiPietro about a CD that Ramos sent to the author of the article about him in the newspaper that angered him. It included his plans to attack the newsroom on a day when he believed a community meeting including people from outside the newsroom would be present and his plans to make orphans of a woman's children. The meeting had been canceled that day.

Leitess asked about Ramos' purchase of a lifetime membership to the U.S. Chess Federation, four days before the shooting, in preparation for long incarceration. Police intercepted a letter he wrote to the federation in hopes of having chess materials sent to the detention center where he was confined.

The prosecution also has mental health witnesses who will be testifying.

Dr. Sameer Patel, a psychiatrist with the state Health Department who evaluated Ramos, determined that Ramos was legally sane. Prosecutors also plan to call Dr. Gregory Saathoff, a forensic psychiatrist and a chief consultant for the FBI who also has found Ramos to be legally sane.

Opening statements began one day after the third anniversary of the killings. This trial phase has been postponed repeatedly, in part due to the coronavirus pandemic.

If Ramos is found not criminally responsible, he will be committed to a maximum-security psychiatric hospital instead of prison. Prosecutors are seeking life in prison without possibility of parole.

Ramos, 41, had a well-documented history of harassing the newspapers journalists. His 2012 lawsuit, which alleged that the paper defamed him by writing about his conviction in the harassment case, was dismissed as groundless.
So what if I wear socks with my sandals? You dont like that? Then arrest me. Cancel me. Call me a deplorable. Rat me out to Anna Wintour. I dont care. I believe in freedom of fashion. I believe in rugged individualism. I believe in America, the land of the footloose and fancy-free!

All my life Ive been vilified by fashionistas, who insist that wearing socks with sandals violates the fundamental laws of fashion, puritanical podiatry and Aristotelian aesthetics. Do you want to know what really violates aesthetics? My small toe. Its a terrifying sight, and I dont want to submit myself to ridicule by publicly exposing it, anymore than I would want to expose Al Pacino or Daniel Craig by taking off their toupees.

I wear socks so I wont trigger young people. If they saw my gnarled small toe, theyd go running through the streets, screaming in terror as if Godzilla were breathing down their necks.

Everyone should wear socks with sandals because toes arent the prettiest part of our anatomy. The Kardashians, for example, can change every body part they want with cosmetic surgery and PhotoShop, from their bosoms to their butts ... but not their toes. Have you ever seen their toes? Neither have I. I rest my case.

Whenever my wife complains because I wear socks with sandals, I tell her, Youre the one who should be wearing them. Look at that big toe. (Just kidding, Dear.)

But let me get to the point of this column. Summers here, and I have something important to talk about thats a matter of national and personal security. Its a public health crisis and a public safety crisis combined: FLIP-FLOPS ARE DANGEROUS.

You should not be wearing flip-flops, especially if you work on the Ford assembly line or you operate heavy machinery or you take the subway or you have you crooked toes. Flip-floppers of America, do not send me angry emails. I speak out of concern for your safety and the safety of your big toes.

Ive written about this urgent issue before, and I wont stop writing about it. I refuse to be silenced. (Countless columnists wrote about Donald Trump week after week, so I should be allowed to write about toe protection a few dozen times.)

Im so committed to this cause Im doing a five-part series titled, The Hidden Dangers of Flip-Flops, which I know will finally win me a Pulitzer Prize unless the judges wear flip-flops and are biased. The New York Times has probably already assigned a team of investigative reporters to cover this issue with the sole purpose of denying me my prize.

Unlike the rest of you, I follow the science wherever it takes me. There is extensive research that proves flip-flops are the most dangerous shoe you can wear. Auburn University concluded that flip-flops lead to ankle, leg and foot pain. Orthopedic experts say they can cause bad posture, hammer toes, back pain, bunions, bone spurs, skin cancer and tendonitis, not to mention you could get your foot crushed racing through Grand Central at rush hour. (Plus, when Godzilla comes to town, you wont be able to run in flip-flops.)

I bet you didnt know flip-flops contribute to global warming. Theyre made from synthetic materials and are not sustainable, so follow Greta Thunbergs example and wear army boots or go barefoot.

To solve this crisis, we need a leader of Michael Bloombergs caliber. He wasnt afraid to ban Big Gulp when he was mayor of New York. But since he didnt get elected president or even vice president, we have to turn to our next best leader  Dr. Fauci, a man who recognizes the

jbreunig@stamfordadvocate.com

importance of lung AND toe protection. Now that hes solved the COVID pandemic, I urge him to support a constitutional amendment banning flip-flops. I also urge him to urge Americans to use those worthless face masks to cover up their toes when they wear sandals. (Celebrities such as Chelsea Handler are already using face masks on other body parts, but Im wont get into that again.)

At the very least, I implore our surgeon general to require a warning on flip-flops that says: Flip-flops have been known to cause foot injuries in the state of California.

This is my journalistic duty. If I can save only one big toe, my crusade will not have been in vain. Besides, it might be your toe.

Joe Pisani can be reached at joefpisani@yahoo.com.
NEW LONDON  About two dozen U.S. Coast Guard Academy swabs, as brand new cadets are known, stood in formation in a courtyard Monday. A company commander paces before them in uniform, a ceremonial sword at his hip.

Taken in by his speech about what the next seven weeks of swab summer and four years at the academy will hold for them, the swabs do not see cadre approach them from behind.

Now, turn around, the company commander tells them.

The cadre begin screaming at the swabs, ordering them in line and sending them to their dorms. As they march through the hallways, the upperclassmen make sure these new members of the military walk a very specific path.

Pvt. 2nd Class Thomas Sellers, a cadre who will be training swabs this summer, said they are getting a taste of what the next seven weeks will look like.

Right from day one, we just start training, he said. We start introducing them to nautical terms. We start sounding off from day one.

The Pennsylvania native said the purpose of swab summer is to introduce the students to a military lifestyle and make sure everyone understands the basic terminology of the branch. One thing that stuck with him from his time at swab summer, he said, was the importance of keeping ones character in check.

You never lie or anything like that, he said. You own up to any mistakes that you make, and theres going to be a lot because its a high-stress environment.

As a cadre, Sellers said his biggest goal is for the swabs to get the proper training and knowledge  and understand the Coast Guards core values.

The swabs began showing up early Monday morning. Each was given an arrival time corresponding to their training platoon, and the new students proceeded to different stations throughout the day.

In between getting their hair cut, uniforms issued and practicing drill, cadre had swabs stand up against the wall and study the Running Light school handbook. It contains the terms and rules they need to do well at the school, Sellers said. Cadets will be expected to recite any part of it by next spring.

But, he said, this day they will mostly try and memorize the Coast Guard ethos.

RaileyAnn Westervelt, a swab from Mystic, said the first few hours on Monday were going as she expected.

You cant really prepare for it, she said. You know its coming, but you dont know what its going to feel like.

Westervelt said the moment when she turned around to face the yelling cadre was intense. She said it was a challenge to look straight forward and not at them.

But she was excited.

I chose to join the Coast Guard because I love the mission, she said. I think its a career that can give me a lot of opportunities that will fit my personality really well, and I want to make some good friends.

Westervelt anticipated the next seven weeks would show her how to be part of a team and put others first.

Coming from a military family, Westervelt decided two years ago she wanted to go to a service academy, and decided on the Coast Guard Academy last October.

Summer programs last year, albeit ones that had to be done online because of the pandemic, helped her choose the academy, Westervelt said.

Its been a long road, but its been a good one, she said. If this is what you want, go for it. If they pick you, you can do it.

joshua.labella@hearstmediact.com
BRASILIA, Brazil (AP)  Accusations that Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro turned a blind eye to possible corruption in a deal to purchase coronavirus vaccines have heightened threats to his presidency, including a move to recommend slapping him with a criminal charge.

The claims have added impetus to the opposition's impeachment drive and left the Brazilian leader's allies in Congress evaluating the costs of their support.

Bolsonaro, who has been targeted by nationwide street protests in recent weeks, has called the Senate committee investigating the governments COVID-19 response a national shame aimed at undermining his administration. For two months, the nationally televised hearings have largely focused on why his Health Ministry ignored opportunities to buy vaccines while Bolsonaro relentlessly pushed hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug that rigorous studies have shown to be ineffective in treating COVID-19.

Testimony before the Senate committee last week from Luis Ricardo Miranda, the chief of the Health Ministrys import division, and his brother Luis Miranda, a lawmaker until recently allied with Bolsonaro, has turned up the heat even more.

The Health Ministry official said he faced pressure to greenlight the import of Indian pharmaceutical Bharat Biotechs Covaxin vaccine and that there were irregularities in the invoices  particularly a $45 million upfront payment to a Singapore-based company.

In March, the brothers brought their concerns to Bolsonaro, who they said promised to send the case to the Federal Police and mentioned the government's leader in Congress's lower house, a top Bolsonaro ally, as being involved.

However, the Federal Police never received any request to investigate, neither from Bolsonaro nor his Health Ministry, according to a Federal Police source with knowledge of investigations who wasnt authorized to speak publicly and declined to be named.

The secretary-general of the presidency, Onyx Lorenzoni, told reporters last week that Bolsonaro did meet with the Mirandas but claimed they presented fraudulent documents. Bolsonaro ordered the brothers investigated, he said.

Bharat Biotech has denied any allegation of wrongdoing with respect to vaccine supply, saying in an emailed statement that it adheres to the highest standards of compliance. The companys press representative didnt respond when asked why a payment would be routed through a Singapore-based company.

The case has galvanized Bolsonaros opponents and prompted protest organizers to move up their next nationwide demonstration to Saturday. The percentage of people rating Bolsonaros government bad or terrible has reached an all-time high, according to pollster Datafolha.

Seven of the 11 members of the Senate committee investigating Bolsonaro's COVID-19 response told The Associated Press that, once their inquest concludes, in August at earliest, they will vote to approve recommending Bolsonaro be indicted on the charge of prevarication. The crime entails delaying or refraining from action required as part of a public officials duty for reasons of personal interest.

Sen. Randolfe Rodrigues and Sen. Humberto Costa spoke on record with AP. Five senators spoke on condition of anonymity due to concerns that detailing plans will expose the committee to attacks from the government and its allies.

Bolsonaro on Saturday said the committee has seven scoundrels among its members. He has denied all wrongdoing and knowledge of possible corruption.

Any committee recommendation for indictment would need to be accepted by the prosecutor-general, a Bolsonaro appointee, then approved by Congress before an investigation could begin.

The committee is a big threat to Bolsonaro, but one step at a time, said Thiago de Aragao, director of strategy at political risk consultancy Arko Advice, who added the accusations have increased the pressure.

But its only a gamechanger if you have an important portion of congressmen ... shifting sides and endorsing this kind of action against him.

Last year, Bolsonaro began drawing close to the large Centrao bloc in Congress to shore up his legislative agenda and stave off risks of impeachment. In the wake of the allegations against Bolsonaro, its lawmakers have begun reevaluating the risks of backing him, according to Claudio Couto, a political scientist at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, a university.

Its still in their interest to follow the government at this moment, Couto said. But, he added, Defending a president who is very compromised is difficult for anyone. Politicians and parties wont want to associate their image with a president like that. Theres a limit to everything.

The opposition has filed more than 100 impeachment requests, but House Speaker Arthur Lira, a Centrao member, reiterated in an interview Friday with local media Jota that there aren't sufficient reasons for him to greenlight proceedings.

The Miranda brothers' Senate committee testimony fundamentally changes the debate, because at that moment the president had the duty to take some sort of measure" or explain why their claims were baseless, said Davi Tangerino, a professor of criminal law at the Getulio Vargas Foundation.

The Health Ministry signed a contract for 20 million Covaxin doses in February. However, the government hadn't yet made any payments nor were any vaccines provided due to obstacles in the health regulators approval process.

On Tuesday, the health ministry announced that the government is temporarily suspending the Covaxin contract. Comptroller-general Wagner Rosario said his office will evaluate the process by which it was signed.

Even before the Miranda brothers' testimony last week, federal prosecutors were already investigating possible irregularities in the contract, which committed the Health Ministry to pay $320 million  at a cost of $15 per vaccine dose, the most expensive of all vaccines Brazil purchased  to Bharat Biotechs representative in Brazil, according to a document sent to the AP by the prosecutor-generals press office.

The political dust has yet to settle, but the case is a sign that Bolsonaro will face additional headwinds with his reelection bid next year.

The extent of the political damage remains uncertain, newspaper O Globo wrote in an editorial published Tuesday. Concretely, the only thing one can say is the government is cornered and ever more hostage to allies.

-

This story has been corrected to show that the health ministry is suspending the Covaxin contract rather than canceling it.
Despite an engineer's warning of major structural problems, a town building official told board members their Florida high-rise condominium was in very good shape almost three years before it collapsed, according to minutes of that meeting released Monday.

The Surfside official, Rosendo Ross Prieto was quoted as making those comments at a meeting of the Champlain Towers South board on Nov. 15, 2018. That was just over a month after engineering firm Morabito Consultants issued a report describing key flaws in the structure.

The discussion with Prieto came as Champlain Towers was beginning to explore what work was needed under city and county ordinances for the building to meet a 40-year recertification that was to arrive in 2021.

The board meeting minutes say that Prieto told them in 2018 the Morabito engineering report had collected the necessary information and it appears the building is in very good shape.

A day later, Prieto told the then-town manager of Surfside he thought the meeting was a success and credited Champlain Towers with getting a good early start on the recertification process.

The response was very positive from everyone in the room, Prieto wrote in the email, also released by town officials. All the main concerns over their forty-year recertification process were addressed.

Yet there is no evidence any of the critical concrete structure work ever started, the documents show. Owners of the 136 units had been told earlier this year they would have to pay their share of a $15 million assessment  $9.1 million of which was major work  by July 1. That assessment ranged from about $80,000 for a one-bedroom unit to more than $330,000 for a penthouse.

Prieto no longer works at Surfside and efforts to locate him Monday for comment were not immediately successful. Prieto previously told the Miami Herald he didn't remember getting the Morabito report and declined to comment on the November 2018 board meeting.

The minutes were forwarded to Surfside officials on Sunday by an attorney for the board, according to the town.

The Morabito report focused attention on the pool deck, which was found to have waterproofing underneath that had failed and had been laid flat instead of sloping to drain off water. This threatened not only the concrete slab under the pool but also other structural areas.

Failure to replace the waterproofing in the near future will cause the extent of the concrete deterioration to expand exponentially, said the report, which also cited abundant cracking in concrete columns and beams.

While numerous theories have emerged, no definitive cause has been identified in Thursday's collapse of the 12-story Champlain Towers South building that left at least 10 people confirmed dead and 151 missing.

One problem that surfaced back in 2019 involved work at another building adjacent to Champlain Towers South.

We are concerned that the construction next to (Champlain) is too close, board member Mara Chouela wrote in an email to Prieto in January 2019. The construction work, she added, is digging too close to our property and we have concerns regarding the structure of our building.

Prieto responded that Surfside didn't have an official role in that issue. There is nothing for me to check. The best course of action is to have someone monitor the fence, pool and adjacent areas for damage or hire a consultant to monitor these areas, he wrote.

Champlain Towers South resident Steven Rosenthal, who lived on the seventh floor and escaped the collapse, said in a negligence lawsuit filed Sunday by his attorney Robert McKee that there were ample signs of danger.

The building board, the lawsuit says, had warnings and other sources of information years ago indicating the risk or potential indicators of severe building damage or collapse.

Rosenthal, the lawsuit adds, lost his home. He lost his personal property obtained over the years. He has been forced into a life with no home or possessions.

At least two other lawsuits have been filed in the tower's collapse, including one filed Monday by resident Raysa Rodriguez, who also argued that problems had been brought to the attention of the condo association over the years.

Rodriguez herself previously experienced issues with the deteriorating building, including on one occasion when a chunk of concrete fell out of the garage ceiling and landed behind her parked car, the lawsuit states. Her lawsuit said that she sent the association a photo showing a crack in the concrete above her parking space in the garage.

Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett said during a news conference Monday that the minutes of the building board meeting were of some concern but did not elaborate. He said the town continues to gather documentation on the history of Champlain Towers South and inspections of its structural integrity, and is posting them online as they become available.

We will be 100% transparent, Burkett said.

___

Associated Press writer Adriana Gomez Licon in Miami contributed to this report.
BRIDGEPORT  Two former Bridgeport superintendents were dismayed recently to learn the citys 54-year-old School Volunteer Association would be dissolved.

The former administrators were especially concerned about the timing of the associations end, just as the school system receives millions in federal stimulus dollars.

It concerns me, said James Connelly, who was superintendent of Bridgeport schools for 17 years until his retirement in 2000. Its incredulous to me quite frankly.

For those who know Connelly, retirement is a loose term  the Connecticut education veteran has served as interim school superintendent more than a dozen times in districts across the state.

The School Volunteer Association was set up as a private-public partnership, with administrators on the districts payroll while the association secured funding for books, supplies and programming. That was until a few years ago, when the Office of Volunteer Services was eliminated from the 2018-19 budget.

The association tried supporting itself through cash reserves and its endowment but that proved unsustainable.

Now local nonprofits will absorb several of its programs, but some people are disappointed to see the enduring group go.

Connelly called the program more than a line item in the districts budget. I always thought it was one of the spotlights, something that could be replicated from the Bridgeport Public Schools statewide, he said.

I dont know if people realize, if the board realizes, what they allowed to disappear, said Connelly.

Like Connelly, former Bridgeport educator and interim superintendent Fran Rabinowitz remembered the association fondly.

It was one of the most positive, powerful forces during my time as superintendent, she said.

Rabinowitz resigned her post as interim superintendent at the end of 2016.

She is a former state associate education commissioner and currently the executive director of the Connecticut Association of Public School Superintendents.

Current Bridgeport Superintendent Michael Testani predicted the group disbanding will not be the doomsday some may expect.

Testani told Hearst Connecticut Media this week that the district is establishing a position for a similar but expanded role to those in the Office of Volunteer Services. The new hire will both coordinate community partnerships, as well as head family engagement efforts.

Testani also had good news for fans of the School Volunteer Associations signature Read Aloud Day, which hosted its 35th annual event last fall. After association leadership said they could not find a group to manage the yearly program, the district and Joyce Goodwin, a former office employee, said theyll host the event.

But many are lamenting the loss of a program with more than five decades of history in the city.

Rabinowitz praised the tutors and mentors for supporting literacy and forming the kind of authentic relationships that make students feel cared for and engaged.

There were always more than 100 people in that room for a SVA (Student Volunteer Association) meeting, and (they were) very anxious to tell me about how wonderful the kids in Bridgeport were, said Rabinowitz.

It was that important to me that I never missed a meeting with them, because I knew what they brought to the school district, she said.

Rabinowitz said the School Volunteer Associations work is particularly vital right now, as Bridgeport schools emerge from the pandemic and students recover from school closures.

The district welcomed all students back to classrooms four days per week two months ago, and Testani estimated almost 14,000 of the districts 19,000 students were learning in person by schools end.

I understood three years ago when they (the School Volunteer Association) had to raise their own money, the budget was so tight, said Rabinowitz. But now there are ESSER ARP (Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief American Rescue Plan) funds coming from the federal government.

Connelly likewise struggled with the timing of the groups culmination.

Particularly with the needs we have now, he said, and federal funds to help us through these things, I think it would really be a shame.

Testani, who stood by the districts current path forward, was optimistic about the future of community engagement in Bridgeport schools.

Were taking the opportunity to utilize the (federal) funds to restructure, he said, to be more innovative and creative in our thinking.

The superintendent added that the Bridgeport Caribe Youth Leaders, one of the nonprofits absorbing the volunteer associations programs, has already gotten started with hiring a coordinator for an expanded tutoring initiative.

I dont think were going to miss a beat, and I think its a much more sustainable model, he said.
BRIDGEPORT  A Hartford man has been charged with raping a 12-year-old local girl police said he met on social media.

Wilfredo Morales, 20, of Sumner Street, Hartford, was charged with first-degree sexual assault, first-degree reckless endangerment, and risk of injury to a child.

During Morales arraignment Tuesday Superior Court Judge Tracy Lee Dayton ordered him held in lieu of $250,000 bond and continued the case to July 13.

According to police, on April 18, officers were dispatched to a local home after a woman complained that her foster daughter had been sexually assaulted.

During a subsequent interview at the Center for Family Justice, the 12-year-old girl related that she had met a man on Snapchat who went by the name, Savage. Police said the girl told the man she was 14 and he responded, You are young but its okay.

After several contacts the girl agreed to meet the man outside her home, police said.

Police said the man picked the girl up in a car outside her home and drove her to the end of a dead-end street where he began kissing her. He then ordered her to get into the back seat or he would hurt her, police said. The man then raped her, police said.

Police said they were able to trace the mans Snapchat count to Morales and the girl identified him as her assailant from a photograph on the account.

Police said they contacted Hartford police who located Morales in Hartford.

In the meantime, police said the girls foster mother told them the girl continued to be in contact with Morales through text messages.

On May 13, police said they interviewed Morales at the Hartford Police Department. They said Morales denied ever having any contact with the victim. However, police said he agreed to provide a DNA sample which they said was consistent with DNA material taken from the victim.
BRIDGEPORT  The head of the Bridgeport police academy has been removed from his post and placed on administrative status.

Lt. Brian Dickerson was recently implicated in an investigation city officials last week said was launched into potential employee misconduct involving an officer connected to the federal corruption scandal that sent the former police chief and ex-personnel director to jail.

Dickerson was relieved of his duties at the academy Monday even as Mayor Joe Ganims administration prepares to train a new class of cadets. A recruitment drive launched in early April was accepting applications through June 4.

Multiple police sources confirmed that they received an email from Acting Police Chief Rebeca Garcia Monday afternoon stating Dickerson was being placed on administrative status, meaning his duties have been restricted but he can come to work. They said the email provided no other details except that Sgt. Angelo Collazo would be temporarily in charge of the academy.

Collazo has been an instructor at the academy since 2010.

Larry Dorman, spokesman for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which includes Bridgeports officers union, in a statement Tuesday said, Lt. Dickerson has been placed on administrative status. As with any case of this nature, we will not make any public comment while there is an investigation.

Garcia and Ganims office did not return calls and emails for comment.

The city deferred its internal investigation of potential employee misconduct while federal authorities were conducting a criminal investigation, Rowena White, Ganims communications director, told Hearst Connecticut Media in a statement last week. This is an accepted and appropriate course of action that was intended to avoid any interference with the federal inquiry. A qualified, independent investigator has since been appointed to investigate the matter.

Although she did not name the subject of that probe, White was responding to Hearsts request for comment regarding allegations recently leveled by the Greater Bridgeport NAACP involving Dickerson.

The NAACP recently issued a public statement questioning why rookie Black police officer, Kaitlyn Edwards, was terminated. Edwards, who had just graduated from the academy and was on probation, was recently fired by Garcia for losing her badge and police identification while attending a party where two men were shot to death.

The NAACP compared Edwards situation to that of Dickerson, who is white and has been allowed to remain on the job despite allegedly playing an active part in the cheating scandal that landed former Police Chief Armando Perez and former personnel director David Dunn in prison.

Perez, who was the successful finalist of the 2018 national police chief search, and Dunn recently began prison sentences after pleading guilty to collaborating to rig the competition so that Perez would receive a five-year contract.

The 25-page federal complaint against Perez and Dunn from their arrests last Sept. 10 states that Perez asked Officer-1 and Officer-2 to help him with the application process for police chief by helping to draft his resume and cover letter, as well as preparing his written responses for the chief exam. Neither officer was named in the affidavit and no one other than Perez and Dunn has been charged with any wrongdoing relating to the search. However, multiple sources in the Police Department have identified Officer 2 as Dickerson, and so did the NAACP in its statement.

The groups statement said the NAACP is deeply concerned about recent biased personnel actions taken by Bridgeport Police Department (BPD) leadership and the unbalanced weight that has been assigned to its actions  the short-sighted termination of a young female officer of color  and a-blind eye turned to a white male officers egregious acts...

Dickerson declined comment when recently asked by Hearst Connecticut if he is Officer 2. Dickerson used to run the departments Office of Internal Affairs, which investigates officers. He was transferred by Perez to the academy in early 2019 to, the former chief said at that time, have less stressful responsibilities.

At his request, he was removed and has been reassigned, Perez had said. He did a great job and it was not an easy job because he held peoples livelihoods in his hands.

Garcia, who appointed Dickerson as head of the police academy, has also declined to comment on whether he is Officer 2.
State lawmakers and activists say a Hearst Connecticut Media Group investigation into the shadowy and often lenient world of police discipline highlighted how more reform is needed beyond the passage of last years law enforcement accountability bill.

The big problem is the police are policing themselves, said state Rep. Robyn Porter, a New Haven Democrat and judiciary committee member.

While the landmark legislation state lawmakers passed last year should help address some problems exposed by the Hearst Connecticut report, There is more to be done, Porter said.

State Rep. Steven Stafstrom, a Bridgeport Democrat and co-chairman of the judiciary committee, shared a similar outlook.

A key sponsor of last years Police Accountability Act, Stafstrom said the new law will result in significant changes and improvements in police discipline in the coming years.

What we were hearing from advocates and the public really matches up with your findings in that article, said Stafstrom. Frankly, I wish I could say I was surprised, but Im not. Thats why we made some of the reforms we did.

Still, he said, We continue to look for areas where there are gaps and deficiencies in how police departments are held accountable and how we provide public transparency.

Hearst Connecticut examined more than 1,800 internal affairs investigations by 30 local police departments in Fairfield, New Haven, Litchfield and Middlesex counties between 2015 and 2020.

About 40 percent of the internal charges were sustained, meaning misconduct was found. Only about a quarter of sustained cases drew a suspension from duty, the most serious form of punishment short of termination. About one percent of sustained cases led to an officer being fired.

Most sustained cases drew a reprimand, counseling or an order for more training  the lightest punishment available.

The investigation also found that police departments struggle with transparency. Seven departments, including Bridgeport  the states largest city  did not provide any records. Other departments omitted key details in the records they provided in response to requests through state freedom of information. And, because of vague language police often used to describe officer misconduct, its unclear if the records provided accurately reflect the total number of claims of excessive force.

This is why people are protesting across the country for police reform, Scot X. Esdaile, president of the Connecticut chapter of the NAACP. There needs to be more police accountability and police reform for officers involved in misconduct.

Police officials, however, defended how officer misconduct is investigated and how discipline is issued.

We certainly do the best we can to police ourselves, said Danbury Police Chief Patrick Ridenhour, who is president of the Connecticut Police Chiefs Association. Every department has a system of progressive discipline. If its something that can be corrected, we do training and a reprimand. If its more serious, you can get a suspension or termination.

Ridenhour noted departments must adhere to union contracts and officers can appeal to reduce or overturn punishments. He said discipline handed out by departments is often more costly to officers than it may appear.

When people see a three-day suspension, or four or five days, people think thats not sufficient, Ridenhour said. But, There is a sufficient cost to being out of work with loss of pay. A three-day suspension can cost up to $2,500. There is a significant cost, and it can be a detriment.

Different ideas for reform

Among the lawmakers and activists who believe more reform is needed, there is a range of ideas of what the next steps should be.

Esdaile said there should be independent oversight over police departments.

We have always had issues with police officers policing themselves and the internal affairs and collective bargaining [union] agreements have not made sense to us, Esdaile said. We always felt there should be an outside, non-biased organization investigating these complaints.

Porter listed a series of changes she said are needed, including not allowing fired cops to work at other departments and completely doing away with a provision last years reform legislation chipped away at: qualified immunity, which shields cops from personal liability for their actions.

We know why this stuff happens. They [police officers] are getting away with it, Porter said. They are above the law and they know that. We have to make sure people understand thats not the case.

Beyond law changes, departments and their officers need to change their mindset, Porter said. Some of this stuff you cant legislate; you have to treat people like you wanted to be treated, Porter said. There is level of respect and things need to be done in decency and order. Its still the same culture; its still us against them.

Camelle Scott, executive director of the Black Infinity Collective based in New Haven, said she has given up on seeking meaningful reform of the existing policing system.

This situation is a prime example of why reform is an inadequate response, Scott said. Abolition is the only path forward.

Abolition refers to a national movement that supports disbanding police departments and allocating the money to other initiatives, such as social programs, community building and job creation.

Some envision replacing traditional police with mental health specialists or crisis and intervention teams that would handle routine police matters. While there is debate within the movement over whether any traditional police would remain, there is general agreement that the current police state must go.

We support the efforts of community-based groups to implement reforms that reduce harm and move us closer to abolition, and we are grateful for the thoughtfulness and intentionality of groups that prioritize both harm reduction and abolition, Scott said.

Some fixes in place

Stafstrom said last years accountability bill allows municipalities to get tougher on officers and makes it easier to take away an officers certification, the state-issued license to work in law enforcement.

We had heard that from folks that its hard to fire an officer because of the grievance process, Stafstrom said. We have heard frustration from reform advocates and complaints from police chiefs and elected officials that the state labor board says no and its sent back.

The Connecticut State Board of Mediation and Arbitration, which is empowered to review punishments by police departments, can reverse discipline and even reinstate fired officers, based on a reading of union contracts that establish the rules officers operate under and state law. A Hearst Connecticut review in 2019 uncovered seven officers fired by Connecticut municipalities over the prior two years were reinstated by the mediation board.

Stafstrom said the legislation also gave more teeth to the POST [Police Officer Standards and Training] Council to decertify an officer for conduct that undermines public confidence in law enforcement on the job and off the job.

The council provides an officer the license to work in law enforcement. The council can now decertify officers for more offenses; previously a felony conviction was the most often reason applied.

The bill also created an independent state Office of Inspector General to rule on serious use of force violations and the death of suspects at the hands of officers, and local communities were given the authority to create civilian review boards with the power to subpoena police department records.

Ill be interested to see how the statistics change from 2021 to 2025, Stafstrom said.

We made reforms, and Im not saying we are done, but we made reforms, he said. In some of these instances, its incumbent on local leadership to make sure their department is accountable to some sort of civilian review board.
BRIDGEPORT  A Stratford man is accused of assaulting a woman and shooting her boyfriend before leading police on a chase to Milford Sunday afternoon.

William Santiago, 23, was charged with first-degree assault, criminal use of a weapon, illegal discharge of a firearm, criminal possession of a firearm, first-degree reckless endangerment, carrying a pistol without a permit, interfering with police and reckless driving.

During Santiagos arraignment hearing on Monday Senior Assistant States Attorney Nicholas Bove urged Superior Court Judge Kevin Doyle to set a high bond, pointing out that Santiago has an extensive criminal history.

The judge agreed and ordered Santiago held in lieu of $500,000 bond. He continued the case to July 20.

Shortly before noon on Sunday police said they received a call of a man shot on Pembroke Street and that the assailant had fled on a yellow motorcycle.

Police said when officers got to the Pembroke Street address, they found a man bleeding from a gunshot wound in his right leg and a woman covered in blood. Both were taken to Bridgeport Hospital.

Police said the male victim told them he had been asleep in his Pembroke Street apartment when he was awakened by his girlfriend, who was drenched in blood. The girlfriend told the man she had been attacked outside their apartment house, police said.

Police said the boyfriend went downstairs to confront the men who had attacked his girlfriend. During a subsequent fight police said Santiago had allegedly pulled out a handgun and shot the male victim.

Meanwhile, police said officers spotted Santiago on the yellow motorcycle and gave chase. Officers chased Santiago through the citys East Side and then onto I-95 northbound, police said. State police were called in to assist in the pursuit.

Police said Santiago eluded capture near Exit 42 when state police blocked the highway. Santiago then began driving the wrong way on I-95, police said.

They said they were finally able to capture him near Exit 39 after he crashed the motorcycle. Police said they found a handgun on Santiago.

He was treated at St. Vincents Medical Center for minor injuries, police said.
JACKSON, Miss. (AP)  Two prominent Mississippi physicians urged lawmakers Monday to put guardrails in place if medical marijuana is legalized in the state, warning that officials should be careful about making a product available that has not been thoroughly tested by the FDA  especially when it comes to children.

Meanwhile, a patient advocate told the stories of three Mississippi children who experience seizures and want to be able to access medical marijuana as a treatment. The advocate said they have tried FDA-approved pharmaceutical drugs, and none have helped.

The Mississippi Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee met to hear testimony on the effect a medical marijuana program could have on the state. Its the second time the committee has met since the state Supreme Court ruled in May that a voter-approved medical marijuana initiative is void because Mississippis initiative process is outdated.

Many lawmakers, including Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, have expressed support for the Legislature returning to the Capitol outside of the normal session to pass medical marijuana legislation and honor the will of the voters.

To do so, they need the approval of the governor. Mississippi Republican Gov. Tate Reeves said he will support a special session, but he does not want it to go on for too long, costing more taxpayer money. The governor said lawmakers need to come to a consensus on how to implement the program before returning to the Capitol.

The lawmakers gathered Monday did not discuss in detail what a medical marijuana program could look like in Mississippi, or whether they believe a medical marijuana program should exist in the state. They mostly listened to speakers, which included lawmakers from Utah and Oklahoma  two states with their own medical marijuana programs  physicians, an advocate and a business owner that sells CBD products.

Amy Smoot, a patient advocate from DeSoto County, told the stories of three families who want to access medical marijuana to ease their childrens suffering. She said one 9-year-old girls family finally went to Colorado in 2017, when no prescription drugs were working. After starting on THC oil, she has not had a seizure in three years.

Im asking that you give these children a chance, she told lawmakers.

Medical marijuana advocates were outraged after Initiative 65, a state constitutional amendment approved by voters last November, was thrown out. It would have required the Health Department to create a program so marijuana could be available to people with debilitating medical conditions. The long list included cancer, epilepsy and sickle cell anemia.

However, Dr. Jennifer Bryan, chair of the Mississippi State Medical Association Board of Trustees, said the idea of a medical marijuana program coming to Mississippi has always concerned her. She said she does not see the marijuana plant as medication, but rather a substance to be studied. Calling marijuana medication is an attempt to make it more benign than it really is, she said.

Bryan said without enough restrictions in place, she fears people will abuse the medical marijuana program in order to use the drug recreationally.

Were trying to keep guardrails on the program, but its a slippery slope, she said.

Dr. Scott Hambleton, medical director of the Mississippi Physicians Health Program, shared her concerns, saying he also wished more research had been done on the product.

Bryan said if a program is implemented, the legislature will need to make strict rules about how the product is packaged and marketed, avoiding anything that could attract children.

Mark Cash, owner of the CBD dispensary The Green Guys in Starkville, said theres a lot of misconceptions about medical marijuana. When he started selling CBD products, he had a stereotype of what his customers would be like.

As time progressed, that has drastically changed, he said. Cash said he sees clients from a wide array of socio-economic backgrounds who are looking for any means to treat their pain. People who want medical marijuana are no different, he said.

Karmen Hanson of the National Conference of State Legislatures, said 36 states, three territories and Washington D.C. have medical marijuana programs, and each place approaches the subject differently. The programs are also constantly evolving over time, she said.

This is is not a one and done situation, she said. You might enact something one year, and the next year youre going to have dozens of bills to make tweaks.

___

This story was first published on June 28, 2021. It was updated on June 29, 2021, to correct the name of the chair of the Mississippi State Medical Association Board of Trustees. She is Dr. Jennifer Bryan, not Dr. Jennifer Bryant.

___

Leah Willingham 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.
BRIDGEPORT  While the federal government has made millions of dollars available to help with recovery from the pandemic, local business owners complained to U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., on Tuesday that they havent seen any of the money.

Im listening to all this talk about all this money being around but it didnt trickle down to us, complained Debbie Sims, of the East End NRZ Market and Cafe, during a meeting of small business owners with the senator at the Burroughs Community Center.

I think the government forgot that us small businesses were in crisis, Sims said. She explained that her business is on Stratford Avenue and during the pandemic it became a resource for that community.

We applied for the grant because we wanted heaters outside because we had to continue the market in the cold and we are now in June and I still havent gotten my heaters yet. The process at the top has to change, Sims said.

We have to figure out that failure, Murphy agreed. We set this program up really fast and we werent able to build all the support structure we would like into the PPP (Paycheck Protection Program) program.

Murphy said a lot of the initial problems with the program comes from the fact that small business owners seeking money had to go to the bank to apply for the federal grants.

Banks were giving them out, it was federal money but banks were giving them out, but early on banks were calling up their big clients and that was where the money was going, he said.

Murphy said the legislation was changed to ensure the money went to minority and women-run businesses but then right-wing groups filed lawsuits claiming the process was discriminatory.

The American Rescue Plan, which was signed into law in March, provides $60 billion in small business relief, including a $25 billion Restaurant Revitalization Fund, $7.25 billion for the Paycheck Protection Program, and $15 billion for the Targeted Economic Injury Disaster Loan Advance program to help the hardest-hit small businesses.

Fred Gee Jr., of the citys Small Minority Business Enterprise, told Murphy that the rules should be relaxed so that more small businesses can access funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for COVID-19 relief.

Ive become the bearer of bad news for really good business owners who have not been able to access the COVID relief dollars because they have not been able to meet the criteria set by HUD, Gee said.

He said only 22 of the 155 business owners in the community seeking relief from HUD have qualified for the funds.

We have to provide relief to business owners at a much quicker pace than we have done, Gee said.

Catherine Marx, district director of the Small Business Administration, who attended the meeting conceded that many people who are running their own businesses are finding it difficult to fill out the applications for the relief funding.

They (the applications) are not easy but we do need to have very secure applications with a lot of documentation because it is a taxpayer funded program so we have to do everything we can to make sure we mitigate waste, fraud and abuse, she said.
SEOUL, South Korea (AP)  South Koreas former top prosecutor launched a bid to run in next years presidential election Tuesday, vowing to unseat the current liberal government that he once worked for and that he also investigated for possible corruption.

Yoon Suk Yeol tops surveys on the South Korean publics preferred future leader, and his announcement will likely heat up the race to find a successor for President Moon Jae-in, whose single five-year term has been marked by roller-coaster diplomacy with North Korea, a deepening domestic divide and varied economic woes.

Im stepping forward with a determination to change the government, Yoon said at a news conference. Ill join forces with everyone yearning for a shift in power and achieve that surely.

Yoon, who resigned as prosecutor-general in March, had led Moons push to root out corruption. But their ties soured as some of Moons political allies were investigated over corruption and other charges.

Moons supporters have accused Yoon of using the investigations to boost his political standing or thwart Moons prosecution reforms. Yoon has said the investigations were conducted in line with due procedures and principles.

While the infighting invited public criticism that Moons anti-corruption campaign was only tough on his political opponents, it also helped Yoon emerge as a potential opposition candidate as the conservatives still have no clear standard-bearer to fight against Moons governing party in the presidential election set for next March.

During Tuesdays news conference, Yoon called the Moon government corrupt, incompetent and arrogant. He said he wants to restore constitutionalism and the principle of fairness that he says have been marred by the Moon government.

Moon's governing Democratic Party hit back at Yoon, accusing him of failing to clearly explain his vision and why he is running for the presidency.

Todays announcement of his election bid is full of vagueness and self-contradiction," party spokesperson Lee So-young said. "He only focused on criticizing the government that he himself served in, and the nature and contents of liberal democracy that Yoon Suk Yeol talked about were vague.

Yoon has not joined the main conservative opposition People Power Party, though he said he shares its basic political philosophy. Some observers say Yoon may launch his own party if he maintains his current popularity.

The long-dominant People Power Party was in disarray following the explosive 2016 corruption scandal that led to the impeachment and ouster of then-President Park Geun-hye. Its popularity has revived since it elected a 36-year-old party member as its new chairman this month, sparking hopes for a generational change in local politics.

Yoons main rival is governing party member Lee Jae-myung, the governor of Gyeonggi province that surrounds Seoul, the capital.

In a public survey conducted by the Seoul-based private Korea Society Opinion Institute last week, 32.4% of respondents choose Yoon as the most suitable figure for the next president, and Lee came in next with 28.4%.

Compared with Lee, who has called for engagement with North Korea and drastic steps to reform family-run conglomerates and other establishments, Yoon's election platform is still unknown. On Tuesday, Yoon stressed the need to cooperate with North Korea and restore frayed ties with Japan, but didnt elaborate.

Whoever becomes the next South Korean president will face a slew of daunting challenges such as an increasing North Korean nuclear threat, the U.S.-China rivalry, skyrocketing housing prices and high youth unemployment.

Some critics question if political novice Yoon can withstand the expected massive political offensive by his opponents.

In 2017, former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was once a favorite to replace the impeached Park, but questions about his political competence and corruption allegations forced his abrupt withdrawal from the race. Moon then scored an easy victory in the election.
My staff and I sat down at the end of February 2020, when it became clear that COVID-19 was more than a flu, that it was something that would have a significant effect on the administration of the 2020 election. Within days, we had organized the first of dozens of weekly meetings with the leadership of the organizations of Registrars of Voters and Town Clerks to plan how we could hold a series of elections (a presidential primary, a state primary and a general election), ensure that every voter who wanted to cast a ballot would be able to make their voice heard, guarantee that every valid vote cast was a vote counted, and protect the health of voters and poll workers alike.

Ultimately, we held one of the most successful elections in Connecticut history, under the most difficult circumstances in at least a century. Connecticut had the most registered voters in our states history and, with higher than 79 percent turnout, more voters voted in 2020 than in any previous Connecticut election. More than 650,000 voters voted by absentee ballot, substantially more than ever before, and many did so for the first time. And the rejection rate for absentee ballots was less than 1 percent, a dramatic improvement over 2018.

Here is some of what we learned in 2020:

Connecticut voters embraced new voting methods, and clearly want to choose how they vote  by absentee ballot without an excuse, in-person prior to Election Day or in the polling place on Election Day. Connecticut voters spoke with their feet on Election Day 2020, and have been shouting at the top of their lungs since then. Both early voting and universal access to absentee ballots without requiring an excuse enjoy strong bipartisan support in recent polling, and every legislator in the Capitol has heard from their constituents, as I have, how important these reforms are to them.

Our local election officials do an incredible job with limited resources. My office provided more than $2 million in direct grants to towns to give them the resources they needed to handle the number of absentee ballots received, to ensure polling place safety, and to protect the integrity of our elections from hostile foreign powers intent on compromising our cybersecurity. If we move forward in implementing early voting and universal access to absentee ballots, we cannot pretend that our local election officials already have all the resources they need. They simply do not.

Connecticut voter rolls are among the most accurate in the country. Connecticuts returned election mail rate in 2020 was less than half of the national average. One hundred fifty of the 169 towns in Connecticut had less than half of the national average, and 164 of the 169 towns did better than the country at large. This is due directly to the investments that Connecticut has made in Automatic Voter Registration at the DMV, Election Day registration, online voter registration and our partnership with more than 30 other states to share voter information.

Election misinformation will be with us for a long time. A Connecticut group that has derided our voter files and the local election officials who work hard to maintain them recently filed multiple complaints with the State Election Enforcement Commission. Every one was dismissed, and the SEEC admonished the group about making frivolous claims. The way to combat misinformation is to loudly and repeatedly tell the truth. We did so in 2020 with federal and private funding, but if we expect Connecticut voters to have correct and accurate information going forward, then we have to make a commitment to public information.

The people of Connecticut care deeply about their elections. Even more impressive than the 79 percent turnout, the record numbers of registered voters, and the record numbers of voters casting their ballots is the 10,000 voters who heard that there could be a national poll worker shortage and volunteered to work at Connecticuts polls. This is a new generation of poll workers, committed to holding elections no matter the circumstances, and I am heartened by their willingness to step up when we needed them most.

The 2020 election showed how resilient the voters, election officials and voting system in Connecticut can be. We owe it to those voters to continually work to make it more flexible, convenient and secure.

Denise Merrill is the Connecticut Secretary of the State.
William Gary Kimbrel, 69, of Cullman passed to his heavenly home on June 25, 2021. A graveside service will be held 1 p.m., Tuesday, June 29, 2021, at Oak Level Cemetery. He was saved at an early age and baptized into the Baptist faith. He remained a lifelong Baptist. Mr. Kimbrel was predece
STORY LINK Pound Australian Dollar (GBP/AUD) Exchange Rate Rises as UK Consumer Borrowing Soars as Economy Reopens

GBP/AUD Exchange Rate Edges Higher on Strong UK Consumer Borrowing and Rising House Prices

Australian Dollar (AUD) Exchange Rate Sinks as New Covid-19 Cases are Found Across Australia

GBP/AUD Exchange Rate Forecast: Could an Upward Revision in the UKs GDP Boost Sterling?

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The Pound Australian Dollar (GBP/AUD) exchange rate rose by 0.3% today as UK consumers borrow again as the nations economy reopens. The pairing is currently fluctuating around AU$1.83.Sterling rose today following a new report from the Bank of England (BoE) which revealed that consumers borrowed more as consumer credit than they paid in May. This is the first time this has happened since August 2020.William Schomberg and Andy Bruce, analysts at Reuters, commented on the report:Britain has reported one of the worlds highest COVID-19 death tolls and its economy shrank by almost 10% last year, but it is expected to outgrow even the United States in 2021, helped by a fast vaccination programme and huge stimulus from the government and the Bank of England.Today also saw Nationwide report that house prices had risen at their fast rate since 2004.According to the Nationwide survey, the average price of a UK home had risen by 0.7% in June  its highest rate of growth since November 2004.Robert Gardner, the Nationwide chief economist, explains:June saw the third consecutive month-on-month rise, after taking account of seasonal effects. Prices in June were almost 5% higher than in March.With the UK economy expected to extend its recovery in July  thanks to the easing of lockdown measures on July 19  Pound investors have become more optimistic about the outlook for the UK economy.The Australian Dollar (AUD) fell this weak after new outbreaks of Covid-19 were found across Australia in what has been described as a new phase of the pandemic.Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg commented:I think we're entering a new phase of this pandemic, with the more contagious Delta strain.As a result, Aussie investors have become increasingly cautious as the Delta strain of Covid-19 threatens to derail Australias economic recovery.NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian explains:We have to be prepared for the numbers to bounce around and we have to be prepared for the numbers to go up considerably because with this strain, we are seeing almost 100% of transmission within households.In absence of any notable Australian economic data today, the Aussie has edged lower due to risk-off market mood.Australian Dollar (AUD) traders are looking ahead to tomorrows release of the latest Australian manufacturing PMI for June.Any indications of a strong performance in one of Australias largest sectors would see the AUD/GBP exchange rate edge higher.Risk sentiment will continue to influence the risk-averse Aussie this week. If Covid-19 rates fall in key economies such as the US, Europe and China, then we could see demand for risky assets such as the Australian Dollar begin to pick-up.Pound (GBP) investors will monitor tomorrows release of the latest GDP data for the first quarter. Could a surprise upward revision in the nations gross domestic product gauge further bolster Sterlings gains?

International Money Transfer? Ask our resident FX expert a money transfer question or try John's new, free, no-obligation personal service! ,where he helps every step of the way, ensuring you get the best exchange rates on your currency requirements.

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Mrs. Martha Lyndell Wilbanks, age 84, of Chatsworth passed away Thursday, July 1, 2021, at Chatsworth Health Care. She is survived by her husband, Damon Wilbanks of Chatsworth. No public memorial services have been planned at this time. Cremation services were provided by Peeples Funeral Hom
"The Undoing, a six-part HBO series filmed partly in the city of Kingston and the towns of 
Ulster County

Drug dealer gets 4-8 years in overdose death

Drug dealer gets 4 to 8 years in prison in fentanyl-related death of Ulster County man

Jamal Thompson, a New Jersey drug dealer, admitted selling fentanyl-laced heroin to a town of Rochester man, who died of an overdose.
The following items are based on information provided by officials in law enforcement and the criminal justice system.
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Michael P. Rellahan has been a staff reporter and editor at the Daily Local News since 1982. He has covered all kinds of news over the years but is now assigned to report on court and legal news, as well as Chester County government news and politics.
German sunseekers may well be able to enjoy unaccustomed lie-ins this summer. No need for them to bolt down breakfast and rush to the pool to get that towel on the sun lounger before we Brits rouse ourselves from slumber.

Why? Because Angela Merkel is doing her level best to ban British tourists not just from Germany but the entire EU.

In our country if you come from Great Britain you have to go into quarantine, the German Chancellor said at the weekend, thats not the case in every European country, and thats what I would like to see. Within hours she appeared to be getting her way.

Spain placed extra restrictions on British travellers and Portugal imposed 14-day quarantine on Britons who havent been double-jabbed two weeks before travelling, banging the final nail in the coffin of many holidays booked when Portugal was on Britains green list a few weeks ago.

Sizzle

If you had the confidence to book a fortnight in the Algarve then, this is what you may now have to look forward to, especially if you are bringing younger family members: 14 days inside your hotel room, followed by a journey straight back to the airport and another 10 days quarantine in Britain.

Its almost as if, with the sausage war resolved, Germanys Iron Lady was determined to reopen hostilities on a new front, taking the sizzle out of our summer in the process.

To many it looks like a case of sour Riesling grapes.

EU enthusiasts have long tried to reassure us the purpose of the bloc is not to allow its two biggest member states, Germany and France, to impose their will on smaller nations. They will have a hard job to convince us of that now.

Angela Merkel (left, with French President Emmanuel Macron) is doing her level best to ban British tourists not just from Germany but the entire EU

With Britain absent from the table, the Franco-German axis is growing ever more powerful.

Much as I disagree with Merkels decision to impose quarantine on British visitors to Germany  which, after all, merely echoes conditions Britain currently places on people travelling in the opposite direction  she has every right to impose it.

If she wants to use emergency powers to block entry for Britons, that is her business.

But to seek to impose a pan-European quarantine rule on British tourists is a quite different matter.

She and President Macron of France, who briefly imposed a near-complete ban on UK travellers in May, are disgracefully trying to dictate to southern European countries which are much more reliant on tourism and had been looking forward to a proper reopening of their Mediterranean resorts after last summers failed season.

In 2016, according to the Association of British Travel Agents (ABTA), UK tourists made 53 million trips to the EU, contributing 25 billion to EU economies. Spain made 7.9 billion out of UK holidaymakers.

Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has already slammed the potential ban, arguing an accelerated vaccination programme, rather than new restrictions is the answer, adding he would welcome double-jabbed Britons to his nation.

Merkels demand to make life difficult for British tourists is part of a power grab thats been going on since the 2008/09 financial crash when southern European countries were bailed out, but with onerous conditions attached.

Those countries had suffered unsustainable booms thanks to excessively loose monetary-policy set by the German-focused European Central Bank (ECB). The Euro was effectively used as a device to bring southern European economies within Germanys orbit.

At the same time, its hard not to see Merkel and Macrons efforts to banish UK tourists as part of our punishment for having the temerity to leave the EU. In their eyes we simply cant be allowed to benefit from Brexit, lest any other member state start entertaining thoughts of leaving.

If you want to get the message across that Brexit is a disaster why not target ordinary holidaymakers who have saved hard for two weeks in the sun and who now face being banished from the beaches?

Spain placed extra restrictions on British travellers and Portugal (pictured, Praia do Camilo, Lagos) imposed 14-day quarantine on Britons who havent been double-jabbed two weeks before travelling

The justification for Merkels attempt to impose a pan-European policy of quarantine on UK tourists is, of course, the idea that Britain is rampant with the Indian  or Delta variant of the Covid-19 virus. But the case doesnt stand up.

It is true Britain has recorded far more cases of the variant, but that is only because we actually look for it.

The UK sequences around half of all positive Covid samples to see which variant they are, and has done so since March. In France, for the latest week for which we have data, only 3.6 per cent of cases were sequenced, and in Germany it was just 1.2 per cent.

If they are really concerned about the Delta variant why dont they test for it properly?

Some EU countries are not carrying out any sequencing at all, so no-one has any idea what variants are in circulation in them, yet Merkel is happy for them to be included in her pan-EU travel scheme, opening the path for EU holidaymakers to travel wherever they like within the Union this summer.

Punished

It is no accident the main variants of Covid-19 are named after countries that do a lot of sequencing: Britain, South Africa, and India. We dont really know whether these variants originated in those countries  only that they were first identified there.

Britain, like India and South Africa, is being punished for doing the right thing and putting a great deal of effort into studying the spread and evolution of the virus.

That is why the World Health Organisation (WHO) has tried to dissuade the world from using geographically-based names for variants, but sadly the message doesnt seem to have got through to Angela Merkel, who wants to single out Britain for harsh treatment on the grounds that we are somehow incubating all the nastiest variants.

In 2016, according to the Association of British Travel Agents (ABTA), UK tourists made 53 million trips to the EU, contributing 25 billion to EU economies. Spain (pictured, Barcelona) made 7.9 billion out of UK holidaymakers

Of course one big difference between Britain and the EU is that many more people here have been vaccinated.

The UK has delivered 113 doses of Covid vaccines per 100 inhabitants, compared with 77 in France, 86 in Germany and 83 in Spain.

This ought to make British travellers relatively safe for admission to EU countries while the vaccines dont cut the risk of transmission altogether they certainly reduce it.

Virus

Instead, it is UK travellers who end up being forced into quarantine, while other nationals  much more vulnerable to the virus  have far greater freedom to travel in the EU.

Throughout the Brexit process, the UK Government made it absolutely clear that Britain was not leaving Europe, only the EU, and that we sought very close relations with the bloc following our departure from its political structures.

Yet what we have had instead is Berlin and Paris, in particular, trying to drive a wedge between Britain and the EU. Merkels demand for EU-wide restrictions on UK travellers at the same time as opening up for travel within the bloc is just the latest manifestation.

Angela Merkel will not be in power much longer. Shes announced her retirement.

In the meantime, her party has to fight elections, and, like so many national leaders facing elections, she has resorted to crowd-pleasing initiatives.

How she  and many others in the EU  would love it if Britain were to turn around and say: weve made a mistake in leaving the EU and please could we rejoin.

Sorry, but it isnt going to happen. What is on the table, however, is the offer of much friendlier UK-EU relations in a world where the blocs leaders dont keep trying to come up with wheezes to punish Brexit Britain by excluding our goods  and now perhaps the hundreds of thousands of Britons with bulging wallets just desperate to hit the European beaches this summer and start spending money.
Staying in a job that you don't enjoy is sometimes a necessity when you have bills to pay, but these snaps prove everyone has their limits for how much they are willing to put up with.

Diply has rounded up a selection of images from around the world that have gone viral because of the shocking behaviour of disgruntled employees - including a Wendy's staff member in the US, who used the restaurant's billboard to recommend customers go to McDonald's instead.

Another snap shows an employee comparing their colleagues to Christmas lights that don't work and aren't very bright.

Here, FEMAIL reveals some of the ways people seem to have been angling to get fired.

Diply has rounded up amusing images from around the world that show employees venting dissatisfaction with their jobs - including a takeaway restaurant employee, from the US, who tried to discourage customers by mentioning they have a cold and service will be slow

Sipping on poison! One person, from the US, was shocked to read the label on their drink had the message 'dead inside' instead of their name

Another employee, whose location is unknown, took the frustration of their job out on a sign advising staff to wash their hands by writing an unsavoury-looking response

Wishing they worked at the golden arches! An employee at Wendy's in the US used a billboard at the restaurant to encourage customers to go to McDonald's instead

Not the brightest spark! One disgruntled employee, from the US, penned a note comparing their colleagues to Christmas lights that aren't very bright and don't work

Another person, from the US, hung a calendar in their office admitting they are in only their job because the field they prefer isn't hiring

Farewell customers! An employee, believed to be in the U.S, vented problems about working at Chipotle to visitors of the restaurant

A Canadian staff member, who was fed up of their job in a supermarket, took the time to neatly stack a shelf of cereals upside down

Fed up with the small talk in their office, one employee, from the US, printed a list of responses in anticipation of any conversation their colleagues may try to start

That's the way the cookie crumbles! A baker, who lives in the UK, took the time to attach notes complaining about their job on the packaging of biscuits

One business owner, from an unknown location, found themselves in a challenging situation when their designer created a notification to vent the frustrations

Another store employee, who works in the US, explained why they hate their job on a label attached to an oven

Walking on eggshells! An employee in a fast food restaurant in the US told customers they should be mindful of how they speak to staff
He's a waiter in the Spanish town of La Bisbal dEmporda in the hills of Catalonia - yet Albert Sola claims his start in life was a rather more regal beginning, believing he was born to King Juan Carlos I.

'It's quite simple: I am the son of the king', the 65-year-old told the New York Times, explaining how his claim has made him quite the celebrity in his neighbourhood.

'The whole world comes looking for me,' he insisted, after a local newspaper article reported on him moving jobs from a pub called El Drac, which heralded him as the pretender to the throne on its Facebook page. 'I dont know if its my looks or my story, but they are convinced.'

Orphaned as a child, Albert was first raised on a farm in Ibiza, before moving to a mansion in Barcelona, and always had a sense others were looking out for him; he mysteriously received an expensive motorcycle and a car after learning how to drive.

He has spent his life probing rumours that he is the illegitimate eldest son of the scandal-hit monarch Juan Carlos, who abdicated the throne in 2014 then fled to Abu Dhabi last year amid a tax investigation.

The former King has allegedly bedded almost 5,000 women and is thought to have met Albert's then 18-year-old mother in the 1950s, six years before he married Sofia of Greece and Denmark and 20 years before he took the throne.

He's a waiter in the Spanish town of La Bisbal dEmporda in the hills of Catalonia - yet Albert Sola (pictured left) claims his start in life was a rather more regal beginning, believing he was born to King Juan Carlos (pictured right)

Albert worked at a cafeteria called El Drac, which heralded him as the pretender to the throne on its Facebook page and had a framed copy of his book jacket hanging on the wall

The former King has allegedly bedded almost 5,000 women and is thought to have met Albert's then 18-year-old mother in the 1950s, six years before he married Sofia of Greece and Denmark (pictured together) and 20 years before he took the throne

Albert was born under the rule of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, at a time when the country was extremely conservative and Catholic - meaning babies born out of wedlock were frowned upon.

As such, he was taken to Ibiza as an infant before he moved in with his adoptive family in Barcelona.

According to The Sunday Times, he first believed he had powerful links when a private helicopter arrived to pick him up during his compulsory military service so he could visit his adoptive father.

He was also anonymously gifted an expensive motorcycle and a car after passing his driving test.

Then in 1982 he visited a base in Barcelona that held local adoption records, but was told by a vague director: This was the most complex adoption in the history of this centre.

Prince Juan Carlos of Spain and Princess Sofia of Greece pose in Madrid in October 1973

Orphaned as a child, Albert (pictured) was first raised on a farm in Ibiza, before moving to a mansion in Barcelona, and always had a sense others were looking out for him; he mysteriously received an expensive motorcycle and a car after learning how to drive

Living in Mexico in 1999, Albert was told by diplomats that they thought he belonged to a powerful family.

Moving back to Spain, the waiter made a request in court to see his records and the judge in the case, Jorge Maza, asked to see him.

Albert claimed the judge told him he was the son of King Juan Carlos. Yet, the judge, who has since retired, said in an interview that he never told Albert he was the monarchs child.

As a result, Albert began to send letters to Zarzuela Palace, the royal residence, demanding a meeting with his 'father', but after more than a decade of writing, he never received a reply from the monarch.

Albert, who believes he looks very similar to the ex-King, also shared his colourful paternity claim, unverified by almost anyones standards, says the New York Times, during TV interviews and in a book.

Juan Carlos and Sofia pictured on June 23, 1988, in Hawaii. Albert has spent his life probing rumours that he is the illegitimate eldest son of the scandal-hit monarch Juan Carlos, who abdicated the throne in 2014 then fled to Abu Dhabi last year amid a tax investigation

However, hes had requests for royal DNA denied and a paternity lawsuit dismissed. Elsewhere, a spokesman for the royal family didnt respond to requests for comment for the publications piece.

But Rebeca Quintans, a Spanish author who wrote a biography of Juan Carlos, said: 'Its a case that could bring trouble for the monarchy.'

Albert first made headlines in the UK in 2012, having been inspired to share his claim after meeting Belgian Ingrid Saritau, who also insisted the former Spanish king is her father.

Ingrid said her mother Liliane Sartiau first met Juan Carlos in 1956 in France and again in 1966 in Luxembourg, where she was conceived.

In 2012, she said: 'My mum told me who my father was while we were watching the TV together.'

Initial DNA tests in 2011 showed that Albert and Ingrid were 91 per cent likely to have shared the same father.

After the joyful discovery, Ingrid moved to Girona for a year to spend time with her 'brother'.

Speaking previously about his search for answers, Albert said: 'I've no choice now but to put pressure on [Juan Carlos (pictured in 2014)]

They became very close and she said she was 'devastated' when secondary tests revealed that they were not related.

Adding to his claim, father-of-two Albert also recalled meeting a man who identified himself as a Spanish intelligence agent, and who said he believed the waiters story.

During his career, he said he had once seen a photograph of Albert as a child with Juan Carloss mother.

Despite claims to royal heritage, Albert still works in the humble environment of a restaurant - but is somewhat of a well-known face in his town, with customers looking for a snap with the kings son and local newspapers reporting on his life.

Speaking previously about his search for answers, Albert said: 'I've no choice now but to put pressure on [Juan Carlos].

'Every Spaniard has the right to know where he is from. I don't want to hurt the king or country. I wish Felipe (the current King of Spain and Juan Carlos' son) all the best.'
A creative Australian mum has tricked her son and the internet with her incredibly realistic cake that closely replicates the look of a KFC bucket meal.

Tracey, from the Central Coast in New South Wales, made the cake for her son's 34th birthday using Coles mud cakes, LCM bars, Cadbury Caramilk chocolate and Crunchy Nut cornflakes.

The cake, which had been place in the living room, looked so identical to the takeaway meal her son walked right past it.

To accompany the KFC cake, Tracey also replicated the potato and gravy using Coles ready-made buttercream icing and Caramel sauce as well as KFC hot chips using madeira cake.

Tracey, from the Central Coast in New South Wales, made the cake for her son's 34th birthday using Coles mud cakes, LCM bars, Cadbury Caramilk chocolate and Crunchy Nut cornflakes

'He goes, "Where is it?" I said, "You just walked past it",' she told news.com.au. 'He's like, "That's chicken", and I said, "No, that's your cake".'

To mimic the look of the crunchy chicken pieces, the LCM bars and pieces of white chocolate mud cake were first dipped in melted Caramilk chocolate then rolled in Crunchy Nut cornflakes.

Three $4.80 Coles mud cakes were stacked on top of each other and an original KFC chicken bucket was saved to use.

The cake took an hour and a half to assemble and Tracey spent a total of $35 on ingredients.

To mimic the look of the crunchy chicken pieces, the LCM bars and pieces of white chocolate mud cake were first dipped in melted Caramilk chocolate then rolled in Crunchy Nut cornflakes

After sharing an image of the cake to a popular Facebook group, Tracey fooled hundreds who also thought the cake was a KFC meal.

'Are you sure that's not a bucket of KFC? Amazing job,' one person wrote.

'That is insanely realistic, how you did that's phenomenal,' another said.

A third added: 'Very impressive! The best attempt I've seen of this ever, great job.'
A mother has discovered a non-toxic cleaning spray that leaves sinks and kitchen surfaces sparkling - and it will set you back just $3.40.

Posting in the Australian Facebook group, Mums Who Clean, the woman said her husband used OzKleen 'Mould Power' to clean the kitchen of their new home in South Australia with impressive results.

Unlike traditional mould killers, the budget-friendly spray - which is currently marked down from $6.85 to $3.40 at Woolworths - does not contain chemicals like chlorine, ammonia or phosphates, which means it is safe to use on most surfaces.

The product claims to 'kill mould spores' and 'prevent mould from forming', as well as eliminating '99.9 percent of household germs'.

An Australian woman was delighted when her husband cleared their new sink of mould and germs using a $3.40 spray from Woolworths

Unlike traditional mould killers, the budget-friendly spray (left) does not contain chemicals like chlorine, ammonia or phosphates, which means it is safe to use on most surfaces (right)

'We have just bought a house in SA and my partner has just taken the first load across. He is sending me heaps of photos of his cleaning antics & wanted me to post it to this group,' the woman wrote online.

She added: 'He is quite proud of himself, paid $3.50 for the cleaner and it's non-toxic.

'He even takes photos of one side cleaned and one side not cleaned so we can appreciate the difference, I think we (Mums Who Clean) are rubbing off on men too!'

Photos of the couple's sink taken before and after cleaning have gone viral, racking up 683 'likes' and more than 100 responses from delighted homeowners.

The product (left) claims to 'kill mould spores' and 'prevent mould from forming', as well as eliminating '99.9 percent of household germs'

Photos of the couple's sink taken before and after cleaning have gone viral, racking up 683 'likes' and more than 100 responses from delighted homeowners

'Love this product, my bathroom sparkles every time I use this,' one woman replied.

But others were more impressed that the woman had found a man who enjoys cleaning.

'Don't worry about the cleaner, where did you find your husband?' one said.

'Id like to purchase the product AND the husband who cleans thank you. On a budget though,' added another, while a third wrote: 'Your man is a gem.'

A fourth said: 'Bless his heart!! What a legend.'
A mother who campaigned for better diagnosis of bowel cancer after being told she had the stage 4 disease at the age of 37 has died.

Beth Purvis, from Essex, was misdiagnosed by doctors and told she was 'too young for cancer' and 'had nothing to worry about' when she began experiencing symptoms in 2016.

The mother-of-two was eventually told she had stage four cancer after taking herself to hospital when she saw 'a lot of blood' when she went to the toilet.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, she revealed the cancer spread to her brain and yesterday her family shared the news on social media she had died days after her 42nd birthday.

The statement, which was shared on her @BowelWarrior Instagram and Twitter pages where she documented her battle with the disease, read: 'It is with great sadness to let you know that Beth passed away in the early hours of Saturday morning.

Beth Purvis, from Essex, who campaigned for better diagnosis of cancer after being told she had the stage 4 disease at the age of 37 has died

Beth was misdiagnosed by doctors and told she was 'too young' for cancer' and had nothing to worry about when she began experiencing symptoms in 2016

'She was peaceful, comfortable and surrounded by family. She appreciated all your support, thank you.'

Beth is survived by her husband Richard, who she described as 'the love of her life', son Joe, 13, and daughter Abi, 11.

Fellow cancer campaigners were devastated by the news, with Deborah James among those to lead tributes to the mother-of-two.

She commented: 'Im gutted to hear this. A fellow Bowel warrior, fearless, and with passion to make a difference - love and prayers to all the family.'

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Beth announced the cancer spread to her brain and yesterday her family shared the news on social media she had died

In a short statement shared on Beth's Bowel Warrior Instagram and Twitter pages, the family announced she passed away on Saturday

Another person wrote: 'I'm so sorry to hear this. I never met Beth, but her efforts to raise the profile of bowel cancer and help people understand this terrible disease better helped me immensely through my battle with it. My thoughts are with you all.'

A third commented: 'RIP lovely Beth. Thanks for all that youve done to raise awareness of this horrible and cruel cancer, I know for a fact youll be in the VIP room in the sky being looked after by amazing people - lots of love to all the family at this very sad time.'

Beth was diagnosed two-and-a-half years after she first visited the GP with concerns about her increased constipation and blood loss, which they suggested was likely irritable bowel syndrome.

In April 2016, she saw 'blood' after going to the toilet and felt something strange, as well as experiencing pain.

Beth, who is survived by her two children Joe, now 13, and Abi, 11, was vocal about campaigning for earlier diagnosis of bowel cancer after her diagnosis

Speaking in 2019, she said: 'I felt something was stuck, when I went to wipe it away there was a lot of blood and I could feel something fleshy.'

She was taken to Princess Alexandra Hospital in Harlow for what she thought was a rectal prolapse  when the rectum slips out of the anus.

Tests showed she had polyps - pre-cancerous growths  in her bowels.

Medics then confirmed she had bowel cancer, telling her she had stage four  the most aggressive type with the lowest odds of survival.

Beth underwent surgery and rounds of chemotherapy after discovering a tumour in 2016 after going to the bathroom

HOW DOCTORS SCREEN FOR THE UK'S SECOND BIGGEST CANCER KILLER Bowel cancer screening is offered to those aged 60 to 74 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland - but not anyone younger. The main screening method is the faecal occult blood test (FOBT), which looks for hidden blood in stools. It is posted to people in the age range every two years  they then post a sample back. Bowel cancer is the UK's second biggest cancer killer - around 16,000 people die from it each year. If caught early, at stage one, patients have a 97 per cent survival rate for at least five years, but discovered later, at stage four, this falls to just 5 per cent for men and 10 per cent for women. Former Tory health secretary Lord Andrew Lansley launched a screening programme, called bowelscope, to detect signs of cancer for 55 year olds eight years ago. It was due to be rolled out nationally in 2016 - but fell foul of financial cuts. Bowel cancer screening starts at 50 in Scotland. The decision to start 10 years later in the rest of the UK has been the subject of controversy. BBC news presenter George Alagiah previously said his bowel cancer could have been caught earlier if the screening programme in England was the same as in Scotland. He was first diagnosed four years ago, at the age of 58; last Christmas he was told that the cancer had returned and its now stage four. Advertisement

She told The Sun: 'Unfortunately throughout all this, everybody kept telling me I was too young for it to be cancer. I was told I was 'far too young for that'.

Weeks later she began gruelling chemotherapy in the hope of tackling the disease and seeing her children grow up.

In October 2018, she had a large section of her rectum removed and was given a stoma, which was later reversed.

And that December, she began a three-month course of chemotherapy after a CT scan showed the cancer had spread to her lungs.

Beth was then taken back into theatre to reverse her ileostomy and get rid of her stoma. She said: 'I thought it was going to mean treatment was over.

'But three weeks after my reversal I developed a rectal, vaginal fistula - that's a hole between the two.

'Everything was coming out of the wrong place, it was awful. Then I had to have my bum sewn up.'

Following that, she underwent two operations at the Royal Brompton in London on her lungs to tackle the spread of her cancer  after doctors said they could help.

She was told she was cancer-free, but doctors warned they are 'sure it will come back' and she continued having chemotherapy to keep the cancer away.

She said: 'Before my lung ops I could only look at the short-term, I was told without chemo I wouldn't last six months.

'Doctors said they couldn't do anything, I knew it was going to kill me. I had to just make the most of life as much as possible.

'Now, things have shifted slightly and doctors can't say how long I've got now.'

Earlier this month, she said the cancer had spread to her brain, and began trying to raise funds to pay for private treatment.

On her fundraising page, she wrote: 'I need to be sure I have done everything to be there for as long as possible for my kids.

'They didn't ask to be brought into this world, I chose to bring them into this world and I owe it to them to do my best for them and be there for them as much as possible.'

Bowel, or colorectal, cancer affects the large bowel, which is made up of the colon and rectum is one of the most deadly cancers.

The mother-of-two is survived by her husband Richard, who she said was 'the love of her life' (pictured)

According to Bowel Cancer UK figures, more than 41,200 people are diagnosed with bowel cancer every year in the UK.

It affects around 40 per 100,000 adults per year in the US, according to statistics from the National Cancer Institute.

Patients have just a seven per cent chance of surviving five years if they are diagnosed with stage four. In comparison, the odds are 97 per cent for those with stage one.

Symptoms include bleeding from the bottom, blood in stools, a change in bowel habits, unexplained weight loss and abdominal pain.

On her fundraising page, Beth said she 'needed to be sure she had done everything she could to be alive for her children'

Earlier this month, she said the cancer had spread to her brain, and began trying to raise funds to pay for private treatment
The brutal 1984 murders of a Mormon mother and her toddler who were killed by a relative will be featured in a new true crime series starring Daisy Edgar Jones.

Ron Lafferty, from Utah, claimed he had received a revelation from God to kill his sister-in-law Brenda and her 15-month-old daughter Erica because of her resistance to his fundamentalist belief in polygamy.

He and his brother Dan killed Brenda, who was beaten and strangled with a vacuum cleaner cord. She and her daughter died after their throats were slashed.

The case was made famous in non-fiction book Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer, which is now set to be made into a Hulu series by Dustin Lance Black featuring the Normal People actress as well as Andrew Garfield.

Speaking about the project to Deadline, Lance-Black said: 'After so many years of work, I'm incredibly grateful to Imagine and FX for their patience with and commitment to bringing this story to screen.

'Raised in the LDS faith, my hope is that this true-crime thriller might shed light on the horrific brutalities perpetrated in the name of God in our own backyards.'

The brutal 1984 murders of Brenda Lafferty and her toddler daughter Erica, who were killed by two relatives because of their strong polygamist beliefs, will be explored in a new true crime series starring Daisy Edgar Jones (pictured, Brenda, Erica and her husband Allen)

The mainstream Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints disavowed polygamy more than a century ago, but some church offshoots still practice it and consider themselves 'fundamentalist Mormons'.

Brenda married Allen Lafferty, the youngest of eight children, raised in a Utah family that belonged to the mainstream church.

His older brothers Dan and Ron disapproved of the relationship.

For years, Ron had followed the script for successful young church members: He served a church mission in Florida and then returned to Utah to get married, have children and get a job.

Ron Lafferty, from Utah, claimed he had received a revelation from God to kill his sister-in-law Brenda and her 15-month-old daughter Erica because of her resistance to his fundamentalist belief in polygamy

He also served on voluntary councils for his congregation and the community.

But in 1982, Ron began spending more time with his brother Dan, who believed the mainstream church should have never abandoned polygamy.

Ron eventually adopted his brother's thinking and the two were excommunicated from the faith in 1983.

They joined a renegade polygamist cult called the 'School of Prophets' and Ron left behind his clean cut and well-groomed look for long hair and an unkept beard. His wife divorced him and moved with their children to Florida.

Normal People star Daisy Edgar-Jones is to portray Brenda in the new Hulu series about the murders

Mormonism explained - from why missionaries go door-to-door to its polygamous beliefs Mormonism is the predominant religious tradition of the Latter Day Saint movement of Restorationist Christianity, founded by Joseph Smith in upstate New York during the 1820s.

Mormons dedicate large amounts of time and resources to serving in their church, and many young Mormons choose to work full-time as converts, going door-to-door.

Alcoholic beverages, tobacco, coffee, tea, and other addictive substances are forbidden.

Sex before marriage and homosexual relationships are also forbidden.

Tattoos and body piercings, except for one pair of earrings on women, are discouraged.

In the 19th century, a minority of Mormons openly practiced plural marriage, a form of religious polygamy.

The center of Mormon cultural influence is in Utah, and North America has more Mormons than any other continent. Advertisement

By 1984, the brothers had become enraged by the strong opposition to polygamy by Brenda. She had agreed with the decision by Ron's wife to leave him.

Ron believed he had received a revelation from God to kill Brenda and her daughter and he showed the members of the School of Prophets a written 'removal revelation' that allegedly called for the killing of Brenda and her baby.

His case became well known after it was featured in Jon Krakauer's 2003 book about radical offshoots of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

After other members of the School failed to honor Ron's removal revelation, the brothers quit the School.

The pair then went to her apartment on July 24, 1984.

According to a friend of the brothers who was waiting for them in a car outside the house, she screamed: 'Don't hurt my baby! Please don't hurt my baby!'

At a 2001 trial for the crime, Chip Carnes, who was riding in the getaway car, testified that Ron said that he had killed Brenda, and that Ron had thanked his brother for 'doing the baby.'

Ron and Dan left the back of the apartment covered in blood, a witness said.

Allen later discovered his wife lying in a pool of blood in the kitchen and their daughter propped up against her crib.

After the murders, the police found the written 'revelation' concerning Brenda and Erica.

Ron was found guilty by a jury in 1985 and sentenced to death.

A federal appeals court in 1991 overturned his conviction because a trial judge used an incorrect legal standard to find Ron competent to stand trial. He was retried in 1996, found guilty by a jury and again sentenced to death.

Ron chose to be killed by firing squad decades ago instead of receiving a lethal injection - a choice given at the time to death row inmates.

Dan (left, in prison in 2003) and Ron (right, in a photo released in August 2019) were enraged by the strong opposition to polygamy by Brenda and decided to kill her

Utah later changed its law, allowing firing squad executions only as backups if lethal injection drugs were not available.

The last time a firing squad was used for an execution in the in the U.S. was in 2010 when Ronnie Lee Gardner was executed in Utah for the 1984 murder of an attorney during a failed courthouse escape.

Ron's lawyers had argued that he suffered from mental illness and that his death sentence was out of line with the life sentence given to his brother Dan Lafferty.

The series set among the Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-day Saints in Utah follows Garfield's devout detective as he investigates the brutal murder of a young Mormon woman, Brenda

Ron died of natural causes at the state prison in Salt Lake City in 2019.

Daisy is set to portray Brenda in the series, while Andrew will play Pyre, an elder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS).

Based on the 2003 book of the same name by Jon Krakauer, it's been adapted by Oscar-winning American screenwriter Lance Dustin Black and will be directed by British filmmaker David Mackenzie, whose credits include Hell Or High water.

Passion project: The script comes from Oscar-winning American screenwriter Dustin Lance Black who was born into a LDS family and came to prominence with the 2008 biopic Milk

The series set among the Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-day Saints in Utah follows Garfield's devout detective as he investigates the brutal murder of a young Mormon woman, Brenda.

It leads him to encounter an esteemed Utah family who are characterized by their fundamentalist LDS faith and deep mistrust of the government.

The investigation causes Garfield's character to begin to doubt his own beliefs and his church's teachings as he learns more about the murderer.
The woman who was abducted for 26 hours and 'lost count' of the amount of times she was raped by US serial killer Bobby Joe Long has discussed why she wanted to be in the front row for his execution - and says her brush with death actually 'saved my life'.

Lisa McVey, now a sheriff working in Tampa, Florida, is the subject of harrowing Netflix series Believe Me: The Abduction of Lisa McVey. The true crime film is based on real events of how a then 17-year-old McVey was kidnapped, held at gunpoint and raped for 26 hours by US serial killer Bobby Joe Long on November 3 1984.

Appearing on This Morning via video link, she detailed how she had intended to take her own life just hours before she was abducted after enduring horrific mental and sexual abuse that had begun when she was just two-years-old.

Netflix series Believe Me is true crime film is based on the real-life story of 17-year-old Lisa McVey, who was kidnapped and raped by Bobby Joe Long. She appeared on This Morning today to speak out about how she survived her 26-hour ordeal at the hands of one of America's most notorious serial killers

The Netflix film shows the harrowing ordeal in unflinching detail: Long told This Morning that she wanted to be on the front row when Long was executed in 2019, saying: 'Justice was served the day he was arrested and justice completed the day he was executed.'

Speaking on This Morning, McVey detailed how she was held for 26 hours by US serial killer - saying horrific childhood abuse had helped her survive. Right: Bobby Joe Long who killed at least 10 women in the early eighties in Florida

She told hosts Holly Willoughby and Philip Schofield that her early years were 'extremely traumatic' and she was raped by her grandmother's boyfriend from the age of 13 to 17, saying: 'She condoned it. She approved it. There were times she would stand there and watch and do nothing to protect me.'

McVey said the morning she was abducted she plotted to take her own life after she finished her shift at work at a local do-nut shop - because she'd reached such a low point.

However, fate intervened - in a terrifying way - and instead she was asked to work a double shift meaning she fell into the snare of Robert Jo Long as she was returning home by bicycle at 2am. Long bundled her off her bike and into his car.

Lisa was the only one of Longs victims to survive after he embarked on an eight-month murder spree from March 1984, and killed at least 10 women.

After she was released by her kidnapper, the teenager helped capture the killer, who was executed for his crimes in May 2019 after 34 years on death row.

She told the This Morning presenters today how she fought for her life. A stoic McVey said she turned from being suicidal to fighting to live, saying: 'I couldn't afford to allow anyone to take my life and put it in the hands of someone else, especially a total stranger to kill me.'

A stoic McVey told the presenters how she turned from being suicidal to fighting to live, saying: 'I couldn't afford to allow anyone to take my life and put it in the hands of someone else, especially a total stranger to kill me.'

Netflix fans have been left 'sickened and sobbing' after watching Believe Me: The Abduction of Lisa McVey (pictured)

Viewers expressed their outrage at how the Florida teenager, now known as Lisa Noland (pictured left in 2013), was repeatedly failed by the people around her, as they initially failed to believe her story. Pictured right: Bobby Joe Long in custody

Speaking about his subsequent arrest, she said that a female officer she had approached initally had said there were 'holes in my story' and it was only 'soft-spoken' Sergeant Larry Pinkerton who took her story seriously - and went on to get his man.

'I owe my life to him', she told the show, saying: 'If he had not believed me, god knows where I would be today.'

McVey was left naked, blindfolded and bound in her captors apartment. Bobby Joe Long, a serial killer who had mutilated and murdered eight women in Tampa, Florida. A vast police taskforce had hunted in vain to find him before he was finally taken into custody in 1985.

'When I found out he [Long] was captured, it was a whirlwind of emotions. Was it the same guy? I must knew it was him. I spoke to Larry Pinkerton about it and I said: "He is the same guy. My abductor is the serial killer.

'He asked me how I knew. I just knew, it was that gut instinct that helped me survive.'

Detailing how she had a 'front row' seat at Long's execution, 35 years after his crimes, she told the presenters. 'I was holding Larry Pinkerton's hand. It wasn't about closure for me - 35 years is a long time. I stand by this quote: " Justice was served the day he was arrested and justice completed the day he was executed.'

The true crime film (pictured) is based on the real-life story of 17-year-old Lisa McVey, who was kidnapped, held at gunpoint and raped for 26 hours by US serial killer Bobby Joe Long on November 3 1984

Netflix fans have been left 'sickened and sobbing' after watching the interpretation of Long's crimes in Believe Me: The Abduction of Lisa McVey.

Viewers expressed their outrage at how the Florida teenager, now known as Lisa Noland, was repeatedly failed by the people around her, as they initially didn't believe her story.

The film, first released in 2018 on the Lifetime channel in the US, shot up to become the UKs current No 1 film on Neftlix after being added to the streaming service earlier this week.

In one scene, Lisa tried to explain the torture she had experienced at the hands of Long to two female police officers, who appeared to not believe a word shes saying.

The teenagers own grandmother even found the story far-fetched.

Lisa was the only one of Longs victims to survive after he embarked on an eight-month murder spree from March 1984, and killed at least 10 women. Pictured, a scene from the film

After she was released by her kidnapper, the teenager helped capture the killer, who was executed for his crimes in May 2019 after 34 years on death row. Pictured, a scene from the film

Lisa previously said she knew from her past abuse that if she fought Long, it would enrage him.

'I had to learn who he was, what made him tick. If I did the wrong move, could it end my life? So literally, the night before I wrote a suicide note out, and now I was in a position where I had to save my life,' she said.

Her description of the incident, as well as her intentionally leaving evidence such as fingerprints around Longs bathroom, helped police capture the killer.

Long later admitted to killing 10 women in the Tampa Bay area and was sentenced to death.

At his execution, Lisa said she tried to position herself where he would see her, explaining: 'I wanted to look him in the eye. I wanted to be the first person he saw. Unfortunately, he didn't open his eyes.'

The film (pictured), first released in 2018 on the Lifetime channel in the US, shot up to become the UKs current No 1 film on Neftlix after being added to the streaming service earlier this week

She said that she started to cry after watching the execution, adding: 'The peace that came over me is a remarkable feeling.'

Lisa is now a deputy with the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office, the same department she helped lead to Long's arrest.

Viewers of Believe Me: The Abduction of Lisa McVey were quick to express their feelings about the film, with one writing: 'It was the hardest but most inspirational thing Ive ever watched.'

Another said: 'Good for Lisa McVey. She survived a horrifying ordeal and stopped a serial killer. I was sobbing by the end of the film. Im glad she got the happy family she wanted.'

Reaction: Viewers of Believe Me: The Abduction of Lisa McVey were quick to express their feelings about the film

A third added: 'Absolutely sobbing after watching Believe Me: The Abduction of Lisa McVey.'

A fourth wrote: 'Just watched Believe Me: The Abduction of Lisa McVey on Netflix and I am sobbing. That woman went through the most unimaginable horror as a young girl, and yet saved so many lives. Now she works in the police to protect children from sex crimes.'

A fifth penned: 'Im trying to watch Believe Me: The Abduction of Lisa McVey on Netflix and its making me feel so sick, oh my god this is horrendous.'

The film was a Canadian-American co-production starring Katie Douglas, Rossif Sutherland, and David James Elliot Anyone.
A white influencer who has had 18 surgeries to look like K-pop star Jimin has been slammed online after revealing they are 'finally Korean' after having surgery.

Oli London, 31, from London, first hit headlines in October 2018 after news broke that they had spent over 75,000 on surgeries to look like Jimin from Korean boyband BTS.

The influencer has strived to look like the singing sensation for over five years and has since spent over 100,000 ($150,000) on further surgery - most recently sharing a video from their hospital bed after undergoing eye surgery, a face lift, brow lift and temple lift.

Oli, who came out as both non-binary and transracial,' explained: 'Hey guys. I'm finally Korean. I've transitioned. I'm so, so happy. I've completed my look. I'm finally Korean guys, I have the eyes, I've just had a brow lift as well. I'm so happy.

'Finally, I've been trapped in the wrong body for eight years and that's the worst feeling in the world when you're trapped and don't feel like you can be yourself. But finally, I'm Korean, I can be myself and I'm so, so happy.'

However, it wasn't long before the post was met with a very mixed response, with some going so far as to accuse them of 'ultimate cultural appropriation.'

A white influencer who has had 18 surgeries to look like K-pop star Jimin has been slammed online after saying they now feels Korean after getting 'the eyes'

They influencer (pictured) explained how they have been trapped in the wrong body for eight years - adding that's the worst feeling in the world

The influencer took to Twitter and came out as both non-binary and transracial' (pictured)

Taking to the comments section, one person penned: 'You could have just moved to Korea and got a citizenship. This seems so disrespectful to me'

'You could have just moved to Korea and got a citizenship. This seems so disrespectful to me,' wrote one, while a second commented: 'You CAN change your gender. you CANNOT change your race.'

A third, who experienced bullying at school, took issue with the comment and explained: 'I grew up as an asian in a non asian country. Getting bullied for the way I look especially my eyes. Finally I'm somewhat happy with how I look.'

'And you really just said you're Korean because you got surgery to make your eyes as stereotypically Asian as possible? Feels weird.'

A fourth noted: 'He really just said Im finally Korean, guys, I have the eyes.....'

In a video from their hospital bed, the influencer said: 'I'm finally Korean guys, I have the eyes, I've just had a brow lift as well. I'm so happy'

Some went so far as to accuse them of 'ultimate cultural appropriation' (pictured)

However, others instead defended the influencer and congratulated them on their journey.

In response to the negative comments, one person responded: 'Or is it the absolute show of utmost respect? The man has gone through all this to be like the people he respects and loves?'

A second wrote: 'So glad you are finally feeling who you always should be Im on this journey with my now daughter she has felt the same trapped in the wrong body speedy recovery.'

It comes after Oli, who stated their pronouns were 'they/them/Korean/Jimin,' shared an Instagram post on June 16, took to Twitter and penned: 'It feels so good to finally come out as a Korean non-binary person after being trapped in the wrong body and wrong culture my whole life.'

'My new official Korean name is Park Jimin HueningKai Taeyong Imnida...I'm officially KOR/EAN.'

After a backlash from social media users regarding the claim to a different nationality, they added: 'I am Korean whether people accept it or not this is how I identify, this is what makes me happy. This is who I am. It's in my DNA.'

Speaking exclusively to FEMAIL previously, they commented on the trolling and said: 'It is sad during Pride Month, a month that celebrates diversity, equality and love that WOKE people would use my coming out and sharing my non-binary Korean identify, something that took me many years to understand and accept and took me enormous courage to share with the world - and use it as a platform to bully, degrade and dehumanise me and the LGBT community.

Oli London first hit headlines in October 2018 after news broke that they had spent over 75,000 on surgeries to look like K-pop star, Jimin from Korean boyband BTS (pictured)

Last week, they revealed that they would now be using the pronouns 'they/them/Korean/Jimin,'  the latter being a reference to K-pop star Park Jimin (pictured)

They received a backlash online after writing a post which read: 'I'm official KOR/EAN' (pictured)

One person wrote: 'I am a person belonging to the non-binary umbrella, and this offends me A LOT, being Korean is a nationality, not a gender, you are making fun of all the non-binary umbrella, the neo pronouns and the entire lgbtqa + community! really stop please' (pictured)

They continued: 'While I recognise that a lot of people don't understand how I identify, and may find it unusual - being Korean and feeling Korean is part of who I am and how I feel. And I will never allow a single woke person, bully or troll to take that away from me.'

'I have gone through extreme lifestyle changes to become who I am today and have lived in Korea, I eat Korean food everyday, use Korean skincare, have plastic surgery to look Korean and I speak the Korean language - all of this shapes me as a person and my identify as a non-binary Korean person.'

On Twitter, they posted an image of 'my new official flag for being a non-binary person who identifies as Korean,' which featured the same shapes as the Korean flag but with the rainbow colours of the LGBTQ pride flag.

But several social media users found the flag and the influencer's claims to a new nationality offensive, with several accusing them of disrespect towards South Korea.

They wrote: 'This is my new official flag for being a non-binary person who identifies as Korean' (pictured)

The influencer penned: 'I will unveil my new Korean face very very soon stay tuned' (pictured)

Taking to the comments section, one person penned: 'Playing with a flag from another country? Man. That is serious. Every flag has a history about it and he has the audacity to change it' (pictured)

'I am a person belonging to the non-binary umbrella, and this offends me A LOT, being Korean is a nationality, not a gender, you are making fun of all the non-binary umbrella, the neo pronouns and the entire lgbtqa + community! really stop please,' wrote one.

A second commented: 'Playing with a flag from another country? Man. That is serious. Every flag has a history about it and he has the audacity to change it.'

A third added: 'You may fetishize koreans but you'll never be a Korean.'

In a recent YouTube video last Monday, they explained: 'I do identify as Korean. This is my choice, my decision. It's not hurting anyone.'

Speaking to FEMAIL, they added: 'I believe Pride Month is about love and celebrating our differences and these trolls sadly stop at nothing to try and cause me harm and pain.'

'Just three weeks ago trolls even targeted my Instagram account, getting Instagram to lock me out of my account and declare me dead. All because I love and cherish Korean culture.

'These same woke people who preach about tolerance are the same people who send me death threats everyday, make up false rumours and threaten me or tell me to take my life.'

'Despite all this and the difficulties I endure at the hands of these radical woke trolls, I will always celebrate who I am and identify as Korean and embrace the Korean culture. And I will always have a deep and profound respect for Korean culture and the Korean people, who I love and adore with all my heart.'
Prince William has revealed his 'delighted' wife Kate Middleton has been appointed the sponsor of HMS Glasgow - after saying his late grandfather Prince Philip would have been 'excited and fascinated' by the skills on display at a shipyard.

The Duke of Cambridge, 39, who has joined his grandmother the Queen, 95, for Royal Week in Scotland, spoke movingly about the late Duke of Edinburgh after touring the warship under construction.

William - known as the Earl of Strathearn when north of the border - visited the BAE Systems yard in Govan, Glasgow, to meet the team building HMS Glasgow on the banks of the River Clyde.

He announced that the Duchess of Cambridge, 39, has become the sponsor of the Royal Navy frigate and will officially name her after the Queen approved her appointment to the role.

Prince William (pictured) has revealed his 'delighted' wife Kate Middleton has been appointed the sponsor of HMS Glasgow - after saying his late grandfather Prince Philip would have been 'excited and fascinated' by the skills on display at a shipyard

The Duke of Cambridge, 39, who has joined his grandmother the Queen, 95, for Royal Week in Scotland, spoke movingly about the late Duke of Edinburgh after touring the warship under construction (pictured)

William announced that the Duchess of Cambridge (pictured), 39, has become the sponsor of the Royal Navy frigate and will officially name her

William's visit to the shipyard was originally due to take place in May but Covid restrictions meant it had to be postponed.

He announced: 'Her Majesty the Queen has approved the appointment of my wife Catherine as sponsor of the superb ship we see taking shape outside - HMS Glasgow.

'I know that Catherine will be delighted to join you here in Glasgow for the naming ceremony in due course.'

On arrival at the shipyard, the duke met a group of staff in the shadow of the towering City Class Type 26 frigate.

William (pictured right) - known as the Earl of Strathearn when north of the border - visited the BAE Systems yard in Govan, Glasgow, to meet the team building HMS Glasgow on the banks of the River Clyde

William's (pictured) visit to the shipyard was originally due to take place in May but Covid restrictions meant it had to be postponed

When told that the two halves had recently been welded together, William joked: 'Who's responsible for the middle joining up?'

Impressed by the engineering challenge, he added: 'It's a real feat to be able to sandwich these two together.'

The duke also took part in a steel cutting ceremony to mark the start of the work on HMS Belfast, a City Class Type 26 global combat ship.

Before pressing a button to begin the underwater process, William told gathered staff and senior BAE Systems executives: 'It is a real honour to see the Navy's incredible new Type 26 ships under construction.

On arrival at the shipyard (pictured), the duke met a group of staff in the shadow of the towering City Class Type 26 frigate

When told that the two halves had recently been welded together, William (pictured meeting staff) joked: 'Who's responsible for the middle joining up?'

'The scale of achievement is truly staggering, and all the staff I've met here today are rightly proud of what you are doing.

'Proud not just because you are creating these cutting-edge ships, but because you are supporting the Royal Navy and the national security of the United Kingdom.'

He added: 'My family's affection for the Royal Navy is well known, and, as I saw the work taking place here today, I was thinking of my grandfather, the Duke of Edinburgh.

The duke (pictured talking with workers) also took part in a steel cutting ceremony to mark the start of the work on HMS Belfast, a City Class Type 26 global combat ship

Before pressing a button to begin the underwater process, William (pictured) told gathered staff and senior BAE Systems executives: 'It is a real honour to see the Navy's incredible new Type 26 ships under construction'

'He would have been fascinated and excited to see such advances in skills and technology being put into practice.'

Philip served with the Royal Navy during the Second World War, had a long association with the service after leaving, and also had a passion for engineering.

The Queen's late consort once said in an interview: 'The whole of our infrastructure, from sewers to power supplies and communication, everything that wasn't invented by God is invented by an engineer.'
The Miss Nevada pageant has crowned its first ever transgender winner, who will go on to compete for the title of Miss USA later this year.

Kataluna Enriquez, 27, was named Miss Nevada at Sunday's pageant, which was held at South Point hotel-casino in Las Vegas.

Next up, she'll head to Oklahoma for the Miss USA contest on November 29, where she will also be the first trans woman to vie for the national title.

Ta-da! Kataluna Enriquez, 27, was named Miss Nevada at Sunday's pageant, which was held at South Point hotel-casino in Las Vegas

What the future holds: Next up, she'll head to Oklahoma for the Miss USA contest on November 29, where she will also be the first trans woman to vie for the national title

Standing tall: Kataluna, who was emigrated to the US at age 10, recalled facing discrimination in past pageants

Kataluna was born in the Philippines and moved to the US at age 10.

She first began competing in pageants in 2016 while working as a model, but it wasn't always smooth sailing, and she revealed that one event went sour after the judges learned she was trans.

'I was asked to provide documents that were invasive, in my opinion, physically asking me to get a letter from my doctor,' she told KVVU-TV.

They did let her compete, but wouldn't assign her a roommate.

'It brought me back to the time where I felt like I was not welcome,' she said, calling it 'humiliating.'

She won other pageants, though, including Queen California, Queen USA 2016, Super Sireyna WWUSA, an international transgender pageant called Queen of the Universe  and recently, the Miss Silver State USA preliminary pageant.

'Miss Silver State was a great experience  to me it was honestly a celebration of womanhood and diversity and this celebration of being your true self,' she said.

Movin' on up! She qualified for Miss Nevada with a win in the Miss Silver State pageant

'Miss Silver State was a great experience  to me it was honestly a celebration of womanhood and diversity and this celebration of being your true self,' she said

Overcoming: At one pageant, she said things went sour after the judges learned she was trans

'We think pageantry is for women who are slim, tall and have nice teeth, but I'm not just a body, I am also a person who struggles with mental health and I am a survivor,' she said

From there, she competed in Miss Nevada, where she beat out 21 other contestants.

'Typically we think pageantry is for women who are slim, tall and have nice teeth, but I'm not just a body, I am also a person who struggles with mental health and I am a survivor,' she wrote in an essay for Newsweek.

'I grew up in poverty and have had to forge my own path. A lot of women share the same stories and I think we need to highlight that rather than focusing solely on beauty.'

Kataluna admitted she has had mixed reactions to her success, with friends and the LGBTQ+ community being supportive, but online trolls criticizing her.

'I've been told that I'm a sin and I'm taking something away from little girls,' she said. 'People have their opinions and when it comes to people calling me a man, it doesn't hurt me. I've heard that so many times.'

'I think it's about time we see a trans person on the Miss USA stage and I'd like to make that history,' she said

Sad: She used to cry herself to sleep, hoping she wouldn't wake up in the morning  but has since embraced a new outlook and just focuses on what makes her happy

Exciting: If Kataluna wins the pageant in November, she will go on to compete in the Miss Universe pageant  where she will be the second-ever trans contestant

In fact, she said, she used to cry herself to sleep, hoping she wouldn't wake up in the morning  but has since embraced a new outlook and just focuses on what makes her happy.

'Even now, people are still hurting or afraid to be their true selves, and I understand why they are afraid. That's why we need to continue having discussions and sharing our stories and our authentic selves,' she said.

'I think it's about time we see a trans person on the Miss USA stage and I'd like to make that history,' she added.

If Kataluna wins the pageant in November, she will go on to compete in the Miss Universe pageant  where she will be the second-ever trans contestant.

The first was Angela Ponce, the 2018 Miss Spain.

Boundary breaker: The first transgender contestant in the Miss Universe pageant  where Kataluna will compete if she wins Miss USA  was Angela Ponce, the 2018 Miss Spain

Aged 27 at the time, Angela was the first trans woman to rise to the top after the pageant reversed a long-standing policy that participants must be 'naturally born' women in 2012

Incredible! She earned praise for her portrayal of a flamenco dancer during the national costume portion of the competition

Explaining her broad appeal, she said: 'Who hasn't suffered from prejudice? Who hasn't had to deal with bullying?'

Aged 27 at the time, Angela was the first trans woman to rise to the top after the pageant reversed a long-standing policy that participants must be 'naturally born' women in 2012.

Explaining her broad appeal, she said: 'Who hasn't suffered from prejudice? Who hasn't had to deal with bullying?

'You can empower yourself like I have and turn something negative into your biggest strength,' she added.

'Outsiders say what I can and cannot do, what I am and what I am not,' she said. 'No, I'm sorry. To be a woman is your identity. It doesn't matter if you are white, black, if you have a vagina... if you have a penis.'

'I always say: having a vagina didn't transform me into a woman. I am a woman, already before birth, because my identity is here,' she told AFP, gesturing to her head.

*

The first! In 2019, Miss Myanmar became the first-ever openly gay woman to compete in Miss Universe (pictured at the Miss Myanmar pageant in May 2019)

Making headlines: Swe Zin Htet, then 21, came out publicly just days before taking the stage at Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta, Georgia on December 8, 2019

Opening up: She came out as a lesbian in an interview with the beauty blog Missosology (pictured at the miss Myanmar pageant in May 2019)

In 2019, Miss Myanmar became the first-ever openly gay woman to compete in Miss Universe.

Swe Zin Htet, then 21, came out publicly just days before taking the stage at Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta, Georgia on December 8, 2019.

She came out as a lesbian in an interview with the beauty blog Missosology, saying: 'I came to a full realization about my sexual orientation over a long period of time. I knew I was "one of them" way back in 2015.'

Coming out publicly isn't easy, she said, but she wants to use her platform to help LGBTQ people in Myanmar, a country also referred to as Burma.

'It is personally quite challenging but I feel that I have a greater voice and the best position to promote this cause. Some pageant fans know about it and they still support me but this is the first time I am able to talk about it in public.

'I believe that not all countries allow same-sex marriage. I want the world to accept the LGBTQ+ community and their right to choose their own path and pursuit of happiness,' she went on.

Positive change: Coming out publicly isn't easy, she said, but she wants to use her platform to help LGBTQ people in Myanmar, a country also referred to as Burma

'I want the world to accept the LGBTQ+ community and their right to choose their own path and pursuit of happiness,' she said

Meanwhile, the Miss Panama competition announced in March that it would allow transgender women 'who have completed all their legal and medical procedures' to enter from this year.

The organization responsible for the contest said the decision has been made 'after plenty of conversation and in line with the rules of the Miss Universe organization'.

Miss Universe requires that each national event allow people legally recognized as women to participate in that particular country.

And now Miss Panama 'will permit women officially legally recognized in the country,' which will 'open the door to transgender women who have completed all of their legal and medical procedures,' the organization said.
Said 'humiliating experience' when racially charged language came up at school

Chef Andi Oliver, 57, has told how she was scarred by Enid Blyton books

Great British Menu star Andi Oliver has told how she was scarred by the outdated language in the novels by late author Enid Blyton.

Chef Andi Oliver, 57, took to Twitter and recalled the 'humiliating, painful experience' when racially charged language came up in lessons which 'inspired the bullies' and made her 'scared' of playtime.

Her comments come after English Heritage decided to update the children's author's blue plaque to include criticism of her racist and xenophobic views' following a review following last summer's Black Lives Matter protests.

Andi penned: 'I'm just popping because - Enid Blyton that's why - Ok this Enid Blyton stuff.. why is it so hard for some people to understand that as a child sitting in a classroom while your fellow students barely bother to stifle their giggles and point at you with every mention.'

Great British Menu star Andi Oliver, 57, has spoken about the impact of the racist language in the novels of author Enid Blyton. Pictured, on Lorraine, 16th August 2018

Blyton wrote over 700 books and approximately 4,500 short stories but faced very little criticism during her early years. Her work, including The Secret Seven, the Famous Five, the Faraway Tree, and Noddy, has been sold more than any other children's author

Andi took to Twitter and wrote: 'I'm just popping because - Enid Blyton that's why - Ok this Enid Blyton stuff..'

She continued: 'g*****g or n***** is a humiliating painful experience, that made me scared of playtime because the words we were reading inspired the bullies and it did yes shape how I felt about myself? I liked the famous five too but it doesn't mean the woman's writing didn't scar me'.

'And I am ALLOWED TO TALK ABOUT IT! It doesn't mean I'm trying to spoil your vision or upset your applecart but it does mean that you just MIGHT have to understand it didn't feel that way for everyone and some of those apples made us sick or our stomach. 'Sorry ( no I'm not)'.

In response to the post, one social media users explained how it reminded them of being hurt by 'references to things & people being 'queer'.

Andi replied: 'It's pretty much the same! Sly little digs that feel like a punch in the guy right? Yeah the same.'

Andi wrote: 'I like the Famous Five too but it doesn't mean the woman's writing didn't scar me' (pictured)

Prolific English children's writer Enid Blyton has enchanted millions of young readers for a century with tales of adventure, ginger beer and buns, selling 600million books in 90 languages.

But Ms Blyton, whose novels have been among the world's best-sellers since the 1920s, was linked to racism in updated English Heritage information about the blue plaque on the Chessington home where she wrote her first stories while working as a nursery governess between 1920 and 1924.

The updated description on the EH website and app reads: 'Blyton's work has been criticised during her lifetime and after for its racism, xenophobia and lack of literary merit. In 2016, Blyton was rejected by the Royal Mint for commemoration on a 50p coin because, the advisory committee minutes record, she was "a racist, sexist, homophobe and not a very well-regarded writer".'

But it adds: 'Others have argued that while these charges can't be dismissed, her work still played a vital role in encouraging a generation of children to read'.

Enid Blyton (pictured in 1962), whose books have been among the world's best-sellers since the 1920s, has been linked to racism in updated Blue Plaque information produced by charity English Heritage

In 1997, a blue plaque was installed in her honour but information on the plaque provided online and via the English Heritage app

This section has been added to Enid Blyton's English Heritage page after a review in the wake of the BLM protests last year

The charity, which manages over 400 historic monuments including Stonehenge, defended the move.

Ms Blyton had critics before she died in 1968. A 1966 Guardian article accused her of racism over her book Little Black Doll - where a toy named 'Sambo' is only loved by his owner once his ugly black face is washed clean by rain. In 1960 the publisher Macmillan refused to publish her story The Mystery That Never Was, claiming it had an 'unattractive touch of old-fashioned xenophobia.

But critics slammed the website update, with the Save our Statues campaign group labelling the blue plaque guide for Ms Blyton as a 'perpetual insult'. Others also said that important historical figures are under attack from 'rabble-rousers' who want 'to denigrate British history and its figures'.

It came after weeks of warnings about the future of some of Britain's top cultural institutions, including the National Trust, being under threat from a 'woke cult'.

In the face of anger, English Heritage stood by its move and tweeted: 'We'll continue to update our website so that the story behind each plaque  and each person  is told in full'.

Members of the Enid Blyton Society say that the author's critics fail to read her stories 'in the context of the time her books were written  and that the author would have written them differently if living today.
Princess Eugenie has shared a collection of sweet photographs of son August visiting a herd of 100 life-sized elephant sculptures in London's Green Park.

The mother-of-one took her son August, who was born on 9 February, to see the herd and took adorable pictures to highlight the work of the Coexistence charity, which promotes co-existence of humans and animals.

Sharing the snaps on Instagram, Eugenie delighted royal fans with a first look at her son's adorable face.

The elephants have been spotted all around London since May when they were installed outside Buckingham Palace to bring attention to the dangers the animals faced.

Princess Eugenie, 31, shared adorable pictures of her son August with a herd of more than 100 wooden elephants in London's Green Park

Eugenie, who is the patron of the conservation charity Elephant family, said it was a 'pleasure' to share the elephants' story with the general public.

'A giant herd of 100+ elephants has arrived in Green Park to share their @coexistence.story with London this summer,' the royal wrote on her Instagram page.

'As a Patron of @elephantfamily and an honorary Matriarch its my pleasure to share this journey with you,' she added.

'Within The Tea Timers herd is a wonderful baby elephant called Assam August - and it was such a pleasure to take my August to meet him,' she said.

The mother-of-one (pictured) took her son August, who was born on 9 February, to see the herd and took adorable pictures to highlight the work of the Coexistence charity, which promotes co-existence of humans and animals

Doting mother Eugenie said it was a 'pleasure' to share the elephants' with the public on Instagram and revealed she took August to meet a baby elephant named after him in the herd

The adorable pictures showed how the mother-of-one carried her son on her hip so he could get as close to the wooden elephant sculptures as possible.

August was dressed in a cute pair of light blue dungarees, white socks and a light blue hat.

In a very relatable show of parenthood, Eugenie was all smiles, while her son August delighted fans with a grumpy frown.

In another picture, the mother brought her son close to a wooden baby elephant that had been named 'Assam August.' The doting mother was crouching on the floor so her son could be as close as possible to the beautiful sculpture.

The last picture showed Eugenie standing at the back of the heard with August in her arms.

Eugenie crouched to the floor so that her son could take a closer look at a baby elephant who shared his name today, pictured

Wearing a stylish black dress with a green floral detail, Eugenie accessorised with a pair of round binoculars.

Royal fans swooned over the adorable pictures of baby August, who is proving quite the show stealer at his young age.

'Awww look at little August grumpy face,' one said. 'How lovely! August looks just like his papa,' another said. 'He's so cute,' said another.

Eugenie shared the three pictures to bring attention to the work of the Coexistence charity, which highlights the link between wildlife and humans.

Since the herd of wooden elephants made their way to London this May, they've been spotted in several parks around the city, with the latest being Green Park.

Last week, the Duchess of Cornwall was photographed with some of the herd in St James Park.

Royal fans couldn't get enough of little August's pout after the royal shared a picture where her son's face was seen in full for the first time

Each model, put in place by IBI Logistics International, is made from lantana, an invasive weed which benefits wildlife when it is removed from protected areas.

Following their debut in central London, the elephants will be displayed in various parks across the city before going on sale for between 6,000 for a calf and 30,000 for a full grown elephant.

All proceeds will go towards supporting the work of Elephant Family, which includes securing wildlife corridors to enable safe movement for animals and people, and the expansion of national parks.

It is also hoped funds will go towards protecting indigenous and tribal knowledge.

Ruth Ganesh, creative lead and trustee of Elephant Family, said when the elephants were unleashed around London: 'Today marks the first significant step on the herd's 13,000-mile migration around the world. Over the past 18 months, many countries have gone into lockdown.

'Brought about by tragic circumstances, this great pause - coined the anthropause - is providing crucial guidance on how to best share space with animals in our crowded planet.

'The elephants are here to tell their story about the inspiring ways we can co-exist with all the other living beings that make our world magical.'
Oscar-winning actress Mo'Nique has once again sparked controversy after she posted a photo of a poorly-dressed stranger at an airport and urged women like her to 'do better'  which prompted critics to call her a 'bully' and tell her to mind her business.

The 53-year-old caused an uproar on her Instagram page last month when she hit out at the 'young sisters' she had seen wearing head coverings, pajamas, slippers, and blankets during a recent trip to the airport in Atlanta.

The The Queens of Comedy star defended the post against backlash, and now she has followed it up with a photo of a black woman wearing a bonnet, short shorts, and a tank top at the airport  insisting that women in the black community should 'do better' than this.

But her post has again been met with criticism, with commenters telling the star that her behavior is harassment and she should delete the photo.

Uproar: Oscar-winning actress Mo'Nique has once again sparked controversy after she posted a photo of a poorly-dressed stranger at an airport and urged women like her to 'do better'

'This was sent to me as an example of what were talking about that goes on in our community,' she said of the photo of the woman. 'If this is not your BEST, than do BETTER!

Positive message? Monique insisted there was 'no judgment' in her post but critics are urging her to 'unpack her respectability politics'

Mo'Nique shared the image on Sunday, showing the back of the woman's body and head as she stands at airport check-in with suitcases.

The woman's face is not visible. though she and people she knows may be able to identify her.

'Hey BEAUTIFUL QUEENS. NO SHAMING,' Mo'Nique wrote.

'If this is the BEST YOU CAN DO, NO JUDGMENT, DO YOU. This was sent to me as an example of what were talking about that goes on in our community.

'However if this is not your BEST, than do BETTER! Being that ultimately the decision either way is yours. I LOVE US 4REAL,' she concluded.

Though she wrote that the outfit was fine if it was the 'best' someone could do, it's clear from her call to 'do better' that she doesn't actually think it's acceptable  and her commenters got her critical message loud and clear.

'I have no idea whats going on in your life right now but I'm claiming deliverance because youre being hateful under the guise of toxic positivity and support. Im SO disappointed and Ive been a huge defender of yours. This is foul,' wrote Feminista Jones.

Called out: Commenters are appalled by how judgmental her post is and have called her a bully

In addition to taking issue with her judgement, many also voiced concern with taking a stranger's photo without their knowledge or permission and sharing it on the internet.

'We don't have enough compassion for people's circumstances or upbringing. We also just simply don't MIND OUR BUSINESS!!!' wrote Annagjid 'Kee' Taylor. 'We just see and judge fast in front of the world. That's not fair to be at TSA and someone sneak a picture of you only for it to land here and have to read what people THINK about you. Approach and DO EVERYTHING IN LOVE.'

'Oh girl.. Monique. Delete this,' wrote Myles Ashley Harris Jr., while several others called it 'cyber bullying.'

'This is HARASSMENT, auntie. And whose standards of Best are we trying to emulate? White supremacy is not my standard of what is best or better for me. Unpack your respectability politics. If you Love us forreal,' added J Bambii.

'This is not love, Monique,' wrote a commenter named Jazz. 'Taking a photo and sharing it on your large a** platform then shaming her and knowing other people will do the same is not love. What if someone knows her? Be careful of what you post because you never know how it may impact someone.'

'You are dead wrong for posting a pic asking for public scrutiny. One thing she is doing that we ALL should be doing is minding our business. She did not authorize this pic,' said Tiffany Nicole Chestine.

Privacy please: Many have called her out for posting a picture of a stranger without her knowledge or consent

'I'm all about presentation myself I'm a Virgo and that's how I was raised. But you never know what's going on in ppls lives behind closed doors. So I choose to judge her on the content of her character not her temp outside appearance,' commented Tanisha Thomas.

'Really girl how you say no judgement but judging make it make sense,' wrote another critic.

'Monique you have played black stereotypes on television contributing to the degradation of the perception of black people YET when people dress comfortable in public you draw the line? bye girl,' one more chimed in.

'This lady doesnt deserve to be posted on your page tho as an example of your opinion. Its ways to correct us with out putting her out there again! Shame,' commented another account.

Others call her comments 'disgusting' and said they centered on the 'white gaze,' with many telling her to get past her beliefs in respectability politics.

Pay attention! Others call her comments 'disgusting' and said they centered on the 'white gaze,' with many telling her to get past her beliefs in respectability politics

Respectability politics is the idea that if a marginalized or oppressed group engages in acceptable behavior  typically dictated by their oppressors  that they will come to be better treated by those oppressors.

For black Americans, that generally means adhering to the social standards of white society, with the hope that it will disprove racist white people's bad opinions of black people and result in better treatment and the advancement of civil rights.

Some of Mo'Nique's critics are accusing her of promoting this idea, that black women shouldn't dress like this because it reinforces racism.

Mo'Nique hasn't responded to her critics, though she did previously speak out in her own defense over a similar issue.

On May 29, she posted a video sharing a message out of 'love' addressing something she'd noticed at the airport the day before.

Controversy: Previously, Mo'Nique lambasted 'young sisters' she had seen at the airport in Atlanta wearing bonnets, head scarves, pajamas, and slippers in public

Warning: She suggested that women wearing bonnets and these kinds of outfits demonstrates to others that they have no pride in themselves

Defiant: The actress, who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 2009 for her role in Precious, warned that others have tried to 'cancel' her in the past but have always failed

'As we begin to walk through the airport, I saw so many, actually too many to count... but I saw so many of our young sisters in head bonnets, scarves, slippers, pajamas, blankets wrapped around them  and this is how they are showing up to the airport,' she said.

Mo'Nique, who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 2009 for her role in Precious, went on to accuse the women she had seen of having no 'pride' in themselves, asking: 'When did we step away from, "Let me make sure I'm presentable when I leave my home. Let me make sure I'm representing the family I created. So that if I'm out on the street, I look like I have pride in myself"?'

While the comedian insisted that her comments were not being made 'from a place of judgment,' her video sparked outrage online, with many slamming her for lecturing other black women on what they can and can't wear in public  while also pointing out that a person's outward appearance doesn't reflect the pride they feel in themselves.

Others accused her of trying to 'police black women,' with one commenter lambasting Mo'Nique for criticizing anyone who is 'going the extra length to continue to care for their hair by wearing a bonnet.'

Some also pointed out the irony in the fact that Mo'Nique was making comments about other black women's appearances, while herself dressed in a very casual bathrobe.

Cultural significance: Bonnets and head scarves are traditionally used to protect the natural hair, particularly at night, and they have a rich history within black culture (stock images)

'Like this this satire?' one person questioned. 'Youre literally in robe, no bra, hair not done talking to the PUBLIC about presentation? Please tell me this is a joke and youre trying to prove a point.'

Mo'Nique was also slammed for trying to encourage black women to 'conform to white culture and society' by restricting what they are able to wear in public.

Bonnets and head scarves are traditionally worn by black women to protect their natural hair, particularly at night, and they have a rich history and significance within black culture.

But despite the furious response to her video, the actress defiantly stood by her controversial comments, posting a second clip in which she not only defended herself, but also insisted that she will not allow any criticism to stop her from speaking out.

'For you babies that have taken offense to what I said, Im okay with that,' she said.

'Im okay with you all being in your feelings about it. Im okay with that because when you love somebody for real, I know you all will get over that.

Doubling down: Mo'Nique defended herself after facing bitter backlash for the comments

Hitting back: The 53-year-old comedian hit back at critics in a recent Instagram video, insisting that she will not be 'canceled' and that she made her comments 'from a place of love'

'And when you all say, "We will cancel your a**," well, theyve tried that, and Im still here to let you all know I love you and aint nothing you can do about that.'

The on-screen star, who launched a lawsuit again Netflix for discrimination in 2019, explained that she was simply trying to share advice with other women by 'tapping' them, something that she is grateful to have experienced from two people in her life in the past: Patti LaBelle and Margaret Avery.

Neither woman, she noted, attempted to sugar coat their words, insisting that she was appreciative of their bluntness because it helped them to have the desired impact on her life.

'Patti LaBelle had to tap me one night when we were getting ready to do a show and I was in my feelings over some s*** and that woman had to come tap me and tell me to get myself together,' she explained.

'And she didn't tell me with lollipop kisses and pancakes with syrup all over, she told me what I really needed to hear. And I was grateful for that that night because it impacted my life.'

Mo'Nique continued: 'Miss Margaret Avery, I was grateful the night she called my dressing room and she said to me, "Baby, focus on getting some more of that weight off of you because I see what you're doing."

'And Im glad that those two women loved me enough that they would go out of their way to talk to me in a way that aunties, mommas, big sisters, talk to their little sisters, nieces, grandbabies, daughters. I was grateful for that because it allowed me to think about things differently.'

She continued by pointing out that black women have fought for their right to proudly wear their natural hair, questioning why anyone would then want to cover that up.

'Remember the time when we were raising hell because they didn't want us to wear our natural hair, they didn't want us to do the things we wanted to do with our natural beauty, now why ever would you block it?' Mo'Nique said.
McDonald's has delighted nostalgic Australians with the new launch of a Birthday McFlurry to celebrate its 50 years Down Under.

Inspired by the flavours of the classic birthday cake and fairy bread, the dessert features bite-sized pieces of custard pie, mixed in with creamy soft serve, topped with caramel sauce and birthday sprinkles.

The Birthday McFlurry will be available exclusively via Uber Eats from Wednesday, June 30 for one week only, before landing in all Macca's restaurants nationwide from July 7 for a limited time only.

McDonald's has delighted nostalgic Australians with the new launch of a Birthday McFlurry

'Our new McFlurry flavour was inspired by iconic Aussie birthday party favourites to create a nostalgic and delicious dessert that will put everyone in the birthday spirit,' Amanda Nakad, McDonald's Australia marketing manager, said.

'New McFlurry flavours are always a hit with our customers, so we thought this would be a delicious way to continue our 50-year celebrations.

'In response to strong customer demand, we will also be reintroducing a much-loved and highly requested crowd favourite, the Custard Pie, giving Aussies even more reason to celebrate our 50-year milestone.'

The launch of the Birthday McFlurry and return of the Custard Pie are the latest announcements from Macca's 50 birthday celebrations in Australia.

From June until the end of August, customers will be given countless reasons to celebrate with a range of collaborations, promotions and new menu items.

McDonald's is also bringing back its highly requested crowd favourite, the Custard Pie

The new launch comes just days after the fast food chain quietly launched a new TimTam McFlurry flavour - complete with a creamy vanilla soft-serve, caramel swirls and chocolate biscuit crumbs.

Food blogger Adrian Widjonarko, from Sydney, discovered the $4 secret menu item called 'Choc Slam' McFlurry via the MyMacca's app.

'It is basically a TimTam McFlurry but they are calling it 'Choc Slam' in their system! Chocolate biscuits crumbs and caramel swirl sauce,' he said.

'You must try this! Seriously so good! I want more now. You must give this a go.'

Food blogger Adrian Widjonarko, from Sydney, discovered the $4 secret menu item called 'Choc Slam' McFlurry, which he said was 'basically TimTam'

McDonald's Australia quietly launched a new TimTam McFlurry flavour - complete with a creamy soft-serve, caramel swirls and chocolate biscuit crumbs

Adrian made a 'public service announcement' in his now-viral TikTok video after he got to taste the new limited edition dessert.

After ordering the ice cream through the app, he picked it up at the Kingsford store in the eastern suburbs of Sydney.

But Adrian quickly pointed out the McFlurry flavour is only sold at selected stores across New South Wales.

A McDonald's Australia spokeswoman confirmed the Choc Slam McFlurry is available at Fairy Meadow, Haberfield, Kingsford, Milperra, Mt Colah and Wyong.

'McDonald's is currently trialling the Choc Slam McFlurry in six NSW restaurants. The trial will run until Thursday, July 8, or while stocks last,' she told Daily Mail Australia.

'We are always listening to our customer's feedback and considering great ideas for the future.'
I have a problem with pain in my ear when I chew or grind my teeth. But is this a tooth problem?

John Grint MBE, Stoke-on-Trent.

Pain on eating cant be much fun and its important to get to the root of the issue.

The symptoms you describe are characteristic of temporomandibular disorder. The temporomandibular joint connects the lower jaw bone with the upper jaw and the rest of the head  it acts like a hinge, angling up and down. The joint can also slide forwards, allowing the mouth to open wider.

It is controlled by the masseter and pterygoid muscles, and the nerves that control these muscles are also connected to the muscles of the middle ear.

This link means that when the joint dysfunctions, it can be felt as earache. Some patients may also experience tinnitus (a ringing noise in the ears), limited ability to move the jaw, and clicking or locking in the joint.

The temporomandibular joint connects the lower jaw bone with the upper jaw and the rest of the head  it acts like a hinge, angling up and down

Typically its caused by clenching the jaw or grinding the teeth at night (known as bruxism), so the key is to stop that happening. The main treatment is to wear a bite guard, which can resolve the problem in a number of weeks.

This diagnosis would be best confirmed by your dentist, who may also refer you to a maxillofacial consultant.

You may be given a few weeks of medication to help with the pain and reduce inflammation  possibly a daily non-steroidal anti-inflammatory (e.g. naproxen). Hopefully this brings some relief.

Ive been diagnosed with polymyalgia. What exactly is it, are steroids the only option, and will it ever go away?

Mairwen Jewitt, Wolverhampton.

A common but distressing inflammatory condition, polymyalgia rheumatica (PMR) mostly affects those in their 70s or older  it is very rare in those under 50  and two to three times as many women as men.

The main symptoms, as you are only too aware, are pain and stiffness in the muscles around the shoulders, neck, hips and pelvis. Typically, this is worst first thing in the morning and after a period of inactivity.

These aches and other symptoms, such as a general feeling of not being well (malaise), fatigue, weight loss and mild fever, are due to the immune system misfiring and attacking the bodys tissues.

The causes arent known, but genes may increase your susceptibility, as may exposure to viruses and other environmental triggers.

Theres no specific PMR test  diagnosis is based on symptoms, medical history and blood tests to check inflammation levels.

The main symptoms, as you are only too aware, are pain and stiffness in the muscles around the shoulders, neck, hips and pelvis

Glucocorticoids (steroids) contain cortisone, which eases symptoms by dampening the immune response and reducing inflammation. I would like to reassure you that this is the most appropriate treatment.

Patients usually start on 15 mg of prednisolone a day. This dose will be reduced every one to two months as symptoms improve.

Corticosteroids are invaluable treatments but they can have widespread undesirable effects such as osteoporosis, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, glaucoma and cataracts. These occur because steroids can affect the gut (and nutrient absorption) and cause weight gain. The high blood pressure and eye conditions may be related to fluid retention. This is why great efforts are made to keep the dose as minimal as possible.

While I understand your reluctance to take steroids long-term, the alternatives really arent satisfactory. Ibuprofen and other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) commonly used to relieve pain and swelling are ineffective here, and physiotherapy is of no value initially  the pain and stiffness are too severe.

Other immunosuppressants, such as methotrexate and tocilizumab, are more toxic, less well researched for PMR, and are not recommended as stand-alone treatments at the present time.

Tapering the steroid dose helps ensure you are kept on the lowest possible dose to suppress your symptoms and reduce the long-term risk of side-effects.

Your practice nurse will see you regularly to monitor you and carry out blood tests, to adjust your prescription as necessary. (Patients are often advised to take daily calcium and vitamin D tablets to help protect against osteoporosis.)

The good news is that PMR usually responds rapidly to treatment, with patients experiencing a substantial improvement in their symptoms within days. Whats more, the condition often burns itself out within one or two years, after which the steroids can be stopped  although relapses can occur.

A note of caution for all patients with PMR: an intensely painful headache, scalp and jaw pain and sight problems can be signs of a more serious form of the condition, called giant cell arteritis (GCA), which can damage sight if not treated immediately with higher doses of the steroid.

So seek medical help urgently if you experience unexplained symptoms such as these.

Write to Dr Scurr

Write to Dr Scurr at Good Health, Daily Mail, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TT or email drmartin@dailymail.co.uk  include your contact details.

Dr Scurr cannot enter into personal correspondence. Replies should be taken in a general context and always consult your own GP with any health worries.
A hand-held breath pacer has been developed to treat panic attacks  thought to affect as many as one million Britons, causing symptoms such as a fast heartbeat, chest pain, feeling faint and shortness of breath.

The device, which looks like an inhaler, is being tested in two clinical trials in the U.S. with patients who suffer from panic attacks or who have had heart attacks (which can lead to raised levels of anxiety).

Current treatments for panic attacks include counselling and medication usually selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants or an anti-epilepsy drug such as pregabalin, which is thought to work by reducing the levels of the brain chemical glutamate (in turn, linked to anxiety). But the potential side-effects have driven a search for drug-free treatments.

The battery-powered device, the shape and size of an inhaler used by asthma patients (which is pictured above) is first calibrated to the normal breathing patterns of the individual  to do this, the user breathes out into the mouthpiece and inhales through the nose, several times [File photo]

The new approach is based on the understanding about how our bodies respond to stress and life-endangering events.

When we feel threatened, our sympathetic nervous system kicks in, releasing energy to prepare the body for action. This boosts the heart rate, and extra blood is sent to the muscles.

As part of this fight or flight response, breathing becomes faster and more shallow, so more oxygen can be taken in for fighting or running.

Once the danger is over, the parasympathetic nervous system takes over to restore normality.

But in panic attacks and acute stress, the body remains in alert mode. This causes a rush of intense mental and physical symptoms. People who have suffered a heart attack can experience similar symptoms (anxiety about whether their pacemaker is working is particularly common, according to the British Heart Foundation).

The new treatment slows breathing down to normal rates. Breathing exercises are recommended by the NHS for both anxiety and stress, but one of the challenges is getting it right when panic, anxiety and stress levels are peaking.

The battery-powered device, the shape and size of an inhaler used by asthma patients, is first calibrated to the normal breathing patterns of the individual  to do this, the user breathes out into the mouthpiece and inhales through the nose, several times.

During a panic attack or when anxious or stressed, the user breathes out into the device and does not stop until the last of a series of three lights comes on. They then take a breath and breathe into the device again  the process is repeated for around three minutes.

The device can also deliver scents (such as lavender) associated with relaxation.

In a trial at Lenox Hill Hospital, New York, 35 patients with panic disorders are being treated with the device. There are limited options in the management of anxiety and panic attack symptoms, say the researchers.

Our hypothesis is that it will provide a drug-free, early intervention, and long-term treatment option that will improve patients anxiety and panic attack symptoms.

In a second trial, at the Mayo Clinic, Minnesota, its being used for stress management in 100 heart attack patients. All will have the usual care for heart attack, while half will also get the device to use once a day for 12 weeks.

Sir Cary Cooper, a professor of psychology and health at Manchester University, said: Anxiety symptoms, such as breathlessness, are the same whatever the cause, whether it is general anxiety, or worrying about whether your pacemaker will work.

This device seems to be a really good idea but it should be used alongside talking therapy and other treatments.

Hormone levels could play a key role in the success rates of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), a talking therapy used for a range of conditions including anxiety and panic attacks.

Now a study published in the journal, Neuropsychobiology has shown that levels of the stress hormones cortisol and adrenocorticotropic hormone are higher in patients who do not respond to CBT.

Its not clear why, but levels could be used as markers for who may benefit.

How tree pollen could be spreading Covid particles

Pollen levels could affect how Covid spreads, new analysis suggests.

Tree pollen is already known to be a carrier of other viruses.

Working on this understanding, physicists from the University of Nicosia in Cyprus have now used computer software to demonstrate how the particles might circulate Covid-19, too.

In their digital simulation, when 100 people, some of whom had Covid, stood 20 metres away from a tree, the pollen moved through the group in under a minute, reports the journal Physics of Fluids.

This could help guide social distancing advice.

Statins can reduce the chances of early death from all causes, say researchers from University College London. The finding was based on 30 years worth of data, and showed that statins cut the risk of premature death by up to 46 per cent, reports the journal Family Medicine and Community Health.

Vaping is linked with mens problems in bed

Using electronic cigarettes has been linked to a higher risk of impotence, in a review from Tulane University School of Medicine in the U.S.

Researchers analysed more than 40 studies that looked at e-cigarettes and erectile dysfunction (ED) and concluded that the vapour from e-cigarettes may lead to damage to the blood vessel lining  known as the endothelium. This controls the dilation and constriction (widening and narrowing) of blood vessels and plays a key role in ED.

While more studies are needed as to the exact mechanism, the researchers, writing in the journal Sexual Medicine Reviews, say that e-cigarettes should be used with caution.

Kitchen remedy

The health wonders that lie in your larder. This week: Asparagus

As well as being a superb source of folic acid (crucial for the formation of new cells) and vitamin C, asparagus is a rich source of prebiotics  indigestible carbohydrates that stimulate the growth and function of good bacteria in the gut, particularly bifidobacteria, which has been shown to help with constipation and to prevent infection with bad bacteria.

Research at Sao Paulo University in Brazil suggested this boost to good bacteria can help stimulate a sluggish gut.

In a study, patients with chronic constipation who were given prebiotics had an increased frequency of bowel movement as well as a fall in clostridia bacteria, which can cause gut infections.

Do this

Turn up the volume on the radio if youre feeling lonely. Scientists from James Cook University in Singapore reviewed studies involving more than 2,000 people and found that the louder you listen to the radio, the less lonely you might feel. They suggested this was possibly because it provided a sense of companionship that is stronger than the impact of loneliness.

The actress, 36, says she keeps fit on her familys proper working farm in Devon

A-List Body

How to get the enviable physiques of the stars. This week: Carey Mulligan

Carey exuded glamour in a gold sequin gown that showed off her toned decolletage at the Academy Award. The actress, 36, says she keeps fit on her familys proper working farm in Devon.

What to try: The chest pass exercise will work muscles in the upper body and chest.

Lie on your back, knees bent and feet flat holding a weighted ball with hands at chest height. Keep lower back pressed into floor and abdominal muscles engaged.

Throw the ball up, straightening your arms, and catch the ball with straight arms.

Perform 15 repetitions, two to three sets three times a week.
Turbulence can cause small pockets of air carrying COVID-19-laden droplets to spread the virus further than the expected six feet, a new study finds.

Researchers from the University of Florida and Lebanese American University (LAU) carried out computer simulations to test how particles of the virus would travel through the air when ejected together within a cough of sneeze.

Each volume of air ejected by the cough or sneeze was called a 'puff'.

While a majority of particles would very close to the puff, turbulence in the air would shoot some particles from the puff at 'near-ballistic speeds', traveling further than six feet that most social distancing guidelines recommend.

The research, which will be published in the Physics of Fluids on Tuesday, comes as part of a bevy of studies about coronavirus, how it spread and where it came from as the pandemic nears its end in the U.S.

Researchers built a simulation of how exhaled COVID-19 particles could move after a cough or sneeze. They found that bigger particles could shoot out on their own, creating a second particle puff that travels further than others

In simulations, researchers found that majority of coronavirus particles stay within the puff after being exhaled by a person through a cough or sneeze.

Bigger particles will often come out at very fast speeds, however.

The bigger particles would often travel further than the puff would, and drag a few of the smaller particles that would rotate outside of it along with it, creating its own smaller ring shaped puff cloud.

'One of our interesting findings was that a small portion of the puff of air could detach,' said co-author Dr Nadim Zgheib, an engineering professor at LAU.

'The detached portion resembles a vortex ring-like structure and advances at relatively quickly along a direction that deviates slightly from the flow direction.'

The travel patterns of this detached puff are incredibly hard to predict, as they could end up launching anywhere for a long distance depending on how it was launched, and conditions in the environment like wind.

Smaller, ring shaped, puffs can also travel far beyond the six feet standard used for social distancing across the world.

The ring shape of the puff could also allow for the particles to spread further than they would have otherwise.

As an airborne virus, Covid primarily transmitted from person to person through exhaled particles in the air

The research builds on previous research as to how the virus spreads in the real world, and how outside factors could effects its spread.

A Cyprus based team, for example, discovered the tree pollen could have assisted with the spread of the virus after they noticed areas with higher pollen counts were experiencing higher transmission of the virus.

After reaching highs over the winter, the United States has largely gotten it's COVID-19 situation under control.

Currently, the country is averaging less than 80,000 new cases a week, a sharp decline from the over 250,000 a week the country experienced at the peak of the pandemic.

The U.S. also has not recorded more than 1,000 deaths in a single day in almost three months.
Rare heart inflammation linked to COVID-19 vaccines is more common after the second dose than the first dose, a new study suggests.

Researchers from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) found that, in the early months of the vaccine rollout, 23 military service members experienced the rare side effect, known as myocarditis, following their shots.

The U.S. military has administered over 2.8 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines, making this side effect rarer than one in 100,000.

Myocardtis was much more common after the final dose with 20 of the patients experiencing heart inflammation after getting their second shot of the Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine compared to three after the first dose.

The majority of the patients, 16, had received Moderna shots.

Still, further research is needed to study this side effect, which has been increasingly linked to male teenagers and young adults who've been vaccinated with Pfizer or Moderna in recent weeks.

The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines may cause heart inflammation in very rare cases. Pictured: a civilian gets vaccinated at a site in the Navy Yard, Washington, DC

Myocarditis - or health inflammation - may be identified through imaging of a patient's heart, showing unusual swelling of the heart muscles

As the millions of Americans who've gotten their shots now know, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines come with side effects.

Most commonly, these two vaccines - which both rely on messenger RNA (mRNA) technology - give recipients sore arms, fatigue, and headaches. These vaccine reactions tend to be much milder than symptoms from the coronavirus itself.

However, doctors have recently found that these two vaccines can cause a heart condition in very rare cases.

The condition - called myocarditis - is an inflammation of the heart muscle, leading to chest pain and abnormal heart rhythms.

Myocarditis is commonly linked to viral infections, including the coronavirus. But recent reports have shown that it may also be caused by the mRNA Covid vaccines.

Last week, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advisory group said there was a 'likely link' between these vaccines and myocarditis for young adults.

The agency has reported almost 500 cases in vaccinated adults under 30. Still, over 90 million young adults have been vaccinated - meaning the risk occurs in about 0.0005 percent of vaccinated adults in this age group.

A new study - published Tuesday - from the DoD health agency provides further insight into this rare vaccine side effect.

The DoD researchers looked at medical records for service members who were vaccinated between January and April 2021.

They identified 23 patients who sought medical attention for chest pain after receiving a jab - all of whom were diagnosed with myocarditis.

These patients include 22 in current military service and one retiree; they were mostly young men, with a median age of 25.

All were previously healthy, with no history of cardiac disease or other risk factors.

The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines both rely on mRNA technology and cause similar side effects

The service members started experiencing chest pain between 12 hours and four days after their shots.

Myocarditis was much more common after a second dose. Out of the 23 patients who experienced this side effect, 20 had it after their second dose.

The three patients who experienced heart inflammation after their first dose had previously been infected with Covid - which is likely to cause heart problems itself.

Most of the patients had received Moderna shots - 16 received Moderna while the other seven received Pfizer.

While myocarditis may lead to heart failure and other issues, patients can quickly recover with appropriate treatment.

Out of the 23 patients in the DoD study, 16 recovered within one week. The other seven were still experiencing some discomfort at the time the study was accepted for publication, on June 1.

The U.S. military has administered over 2.8 million doses of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. This makes myocarditis an extremely rare side effect, occurring in about 0.0008% of patients.

Still, more vaccine recipients have experienced this heart condition than doctors would expect to see in the general population.

That's why CDC advisors said the condition was likely linked to vaccines last week - and why health agencies are continuing to carefully monitor vaccination data.

The DoD study was retrospective, meaning that the researchers looked at health records after vaccinations occurred.

There may have been more people who experienced mild chest pain after their shots but did not seek medical attention.

Another new study from the Duke University Medical Center - also published Tuesday - identified myocarditis in four patients who received their second vaccine doses between February and April, 2021. Three of the four patients were younger men.

While it is important to study this rare vaccine side effect, scientists have so far found it to be - like other side effects - much rarer and less deadly than potential complications from Covid itself.

As the DoD researchers note in their study, as many as 60% of severe Covid patients may experience cardiac injury.

That's a much higher risk than the 0.0005% chance of myocarditis in young adults cited by the CDC.
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U.S. counties in the South and West are seeing an increase in coronavirus cases as the Indian 'Delta' variant continues to spread rapidly in undervaccinated areas.

Areas in states such as Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Wyoming are reporting between 100 and 500 cases per 100,000 people over the last seven days, according to a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

This is much higher than the national average of 23.9 infections per 100,000.

Health officials say low vaccination rates are the problem and that the virus is transmitting rapidly in undervaccinated regions of the U.S.

All five states have vaccinated fewer than 35 percent of their total populations, which is lower than the national average of 45.6 percent, CDC data show.

The states are also all reporting a rise in cases linked to the Delta variant, with some saying more than half of all new infections are associated with the strain.

Former FDA commissioner Dr Scott Gottlieb has warned that America is likely to see constrained outbreaks of the Delta variant in certain communities rather than widespread outbreaks.

'It's not going to be as pervasive,' he said in an appearance on CBS' Face the Nation on Sunday,

'It's going to hyper-regionalized. There's certain pockets of the country where you're going to have very dense outbreaks.'

Meanwhile, Los Angeles residents are being urged to mask up again - two weeks after the county dropped its mask mandate - amid concerns about the variant.

It comes as the variant continues to ravage the UK, with Delta driving an explosion of new cases, and COVID-19 infections up 75 percent from a week ago, but deaths have not risen.

Counties in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Wyoming (marked in red) reported between 100 and 500 cases per 100,000 in the last week, compared to the national average of 23.9 cases per 100,000

Arkansas has seen an average of 300 cases per day in the last week, an increase from 200 the last month, and 56% of all cases and, in Mississippi, there has been 18% increase in the seven-day rolling average of cases from 111 to 132

All five states have fully vaccinated 35% or fewer residents, lower than the national average of 45.6%, and only three counties between the five have fully vaccinated more than 50%

As of Tuesday, the variant accounts for 20.6 percent of all COVID-19 infections, up from 9.9 percent two weeks ago, according to the CDC.

Known as B.1.617.2, the Delta variant has been labeled as a 'double mutant' by India's Health Ministry because it carries two mutations: L452R and E484Q.

L452R is the same mutation seen with the California homegrown variant and E484Q is similar to the mutation seen in the Brazilian and South African variants.

Both of the mutations occur on key parts of the virus that allows it to enter and infect human cells.

Gottlieb says he believes that the massive surge in cases in the UK is a foreshadowing of what's to come in the U.S.

That means the 20 percent figure is only expected to rise.

'I think as you look across the United States, if you're a community that has low vaccination rates and you also think that there was low immunity from prior infection, so the virus really hasn't coursed through the local population, those communities are vulnerable,' he told Face the Nation .

'So, I think governors need to be thinking about how they build out health care resources in areas of the country where you still have a lot of vulnerability.'

Only three counties in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Wyoming have fully vaccinated more than 50 percent of residents.

In one of the states - Arkansas - officials report that only has 35 percent of the total population have completed their vaccine series.

Arkansas has seen an average of 300 cases per day, an increase from 200 the last month, and health officials say the Delta variant is to blame.

Currently, 56 percent of all cases in the state that undergo genetic sequencing are linked to Delta.

Health experts say low vaccination rates will help the Indian 'Delta' variant spread, which currently makes up 20% of American cases, up from 9.9% two weeks ago





Former FDA commissioner Dr Scott Gottlieb said on Sunday (pictured) he expects outbreaks of the Indian 'Delta' variant to rise in areas with low vaccination rates

'That tells us that the variant is spreading widely and that it's spreading quickly,' Dr Jennifer Dillaha, the Director of Epidemiology for the Arkansas Department of Health told Action News 5.

'My concern is that if people are not immune to it, then this variant will find them and infect them and cause illness.'

Governor Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas said hospitalizations are up 30 percent and encouraged residents to get vaccinated.

'The Delta variant is a great concern to us. We see that impacting our increasing cases and hospitalizations,' Hutchinson told Face the Nation.

'We've got to make sure we do everything we can to get the word out, which we have. We have used incentives that have not been very successful. We've obviously done marketing for our vaccines. We are educating, doing everything we can.'

In Mississippi, health officials said there a growing number of cases linked to the Delta variant.

According to WAPT, state epidemiologist Dr Paul Byers said there have been at least 60 cases associated with the variant since the fist infection was identified a few weeks ago.

The state is currently averaging 132 COVID-19 infections per day, an 18 percent increase from 111 from earlier this month.

However, less than 30 percent of the population is fully vaccinated.

'The vaccine is still effective against it, but remember that a vaccine is not 100 percent,' Byers said.

'And when you have an individual in congregate settings in very close contact and put in a place with highly infectious variants, there is a possibility of transmission.'

About 59% of the Los Angeles population is fully vaccinated, but the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health recommended that residents in the county be vaccinated against the variants

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, 59 of the population is fully vaccinated.

But the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health recommended that residents in the county, the most densely populated in the U.S., start donning masks again to protect against the variant - even as they admitted that fully vaccinated people are at little risk.

'While COVID-19 vaccine provides very effective protection preventing hospitalizations and deaths against the delta variant, the strain is proving to be more transmissible and is expected to become more prevalent,' said Public Health director Barbara Ferrer.

'Mask wearing remains an effective tool for reducing transmission, especially indoors where the virus may be easily spread through inhalation of aerosols emitted by an infected person.'

In LA county, there have been more than a million cases of Covid-19 and 24,480 deaths, while the Delta variant accounts for 5.7 percent of new cases in California.

As of mid June, there were 64 cases of the Delta variant identified in LA County, according to the Los Angeles Department of Public Health.

Additionally, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio vowed that New York City will not go into another lockdown despite the spread of the highly transmissible Delta variant, citing high vaccination rates in the city.

'We are watching the Delta variant very carefully in this city...We have a lot of information, and we're obviously watching it around the world but the difference here is a very high level of vaccination,' he said during a press conference on Tuesdy, noting that more than half of residents are fully vaccinated.

'The bottom line is right now we're winning the race against the Delta variant, but we've gotta keep winning,' he said.

The decision on whether or not the city goes back into lockdown, however, rests with Gov Andrew Cuomo, and not the mayor, who is reaching the end of his second and final term.

The virus is wreaking havoc in the UK too, where officials recorded more than 20,000 for the second day in a row

On Tuesday, 20,479 COVID-19 infections were reported , a 76 percent in the last week from the 11,625 that were recorded last Tuesday

This is a 1040 percent increase from 2,000 cases recorded in late April, when the Delta variant first took hold.

However, deaths remained low with 23 were recorded on Tuesday, which is down 14 percent from the 27 recorded last Tuesday.

MODERNA SAYS ITS COVID-19 VACCINE WORKS AGAINST VARIANTS INCLUDING THE DELTA STRAIN IN LAB TESTS

Moderna Inc says its COVID-19 vaccine works against coronavirus variant, including the rapidly spreading Indian 'Delta' strain.

The company tested blood sampes of eight patients one week after they'd gotten their second and final dose of the vaccine.

In laboratory settings in which the blood was mixed with variants, the two-dose shot generated high levels of neutralizing antibodies against all mutants tested.

'These new data are encouraging and reinforce our belief that the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine should remain protective against newly detected variants,' CEO Stephane Bancel said in a press release.

'These findings highlight the importance of continuing to vaccinate populations with an effective primary series vaccine.'

Antibody levels only fell by 2.1-fold against the Delta variant (fifth from the right), much less than among other variants, and fell the least against the Kent 'Alpha' variant (second from left)

For the study, published as a pre-print on bioRxiv.org, the team looked at how well blood samples performed against 16 virus variants, including the original strain.

Researchers took samples from eight people who participated in Phase I clinical trials in 2020 one week after their second dose.

Next, the blood sera was exposed to each variant.

Results showed the vaccine worked the best against the Alpha variant, known as B.1.1.7, which originated in the UK, with minimal changes in neutralizing antibodies compared to the original strain.

All other variants showed a decrease in neutralizing antibodies but not enough to lose protection.

Against the Beta variant which originated in South Africa and the Gamma variant, which originated in Brazil, levels of neutralizing antibodies fell by 6.9-fold and 3.2-fold, respectively.

However, against the Delta variant, levels fell by just 2.1-fold, which was less than seen among all other variants.
More white K-12 students had access to in-person learning five days a week compared to black and Hispanic students during the 2020-2021 school year, a new report finds.

In April 2021, 75 percent of white students had access to full in-person learning compared to 63 percent of black students and 59 percent of Hispanic students, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revealed on Tuesday.

Students in the South were also more likely to have access to classroom learning with 63 percent of Southern students having this option compared to only 16 percent in the Northeast.

The CDC authors say the findings highlight the need for equitable access to in-person education in the upcoming school year.

White students were more likely to have the option for in-person school last spring compared to black and Hispanic students. Pictured: Schoolchildren test themselves for Covid in Boston, Massachusetts, January 2021

Three-quarters of white K-12 students could learn fully in-person in April 2021 - only 63 percent of black students had this option

In March 2020, all schools went online. Teachers learned to do their jobs over Zoom and students learned from their bedrooms.

While the majority of schools stayed remote through the end of spring 2020, tactics changed after summer vacation.

Some school districts reopened for full-time in-person instruction in September 2020 and stayed open through the next spring while others opened slowly or remained remote.

Many of the districts that offered full-time in-person instruction were serving white students while students of color continued to learn remotely, a new report from researchers at Brown University and the Burbio School Opening Tracker shows.

Those students who did not go back to school in-person last year may face worse educational outcomes - and will need to catch up in the years to come.

For the new study, the CDC analyzed data from 1,200 U.S. public school districts representing 46 percent of overall K-12 enrollment in the country, including all 50 states and Washington, DC.

The researchers tracked district opening status from September 2020 to April 2021 using school district websites.

In order to be categorized as 'full-time in-person,' a school district needed to offer in-person instruction five days a week. Other districts were classified as hybrid or remote.

To compare in-person access rates across different demographics, the researchers used enrollment data collected by the U.S. Department of Education.

When the spring 2021 semester started, students of all races had similar access to in-person education.

The researchers found that 38 percent of white students had access, compared to 32 percent of black students and 36 percent of Hispanic students.

As the spring progressed, however, more white students gained access. The share of white students who could learn in-person increased by 37 percentage points to 75 percent total in April 2021.

Black students, meanwhile, saw a gain of 31 percentage points to 63 percent total. Only 22 percentage points of Hispanic students gained access to in-person school to 59 percent total.

Black students may be more likely to live in areas that saw higher Covid case numbers, and thus were hesitant to reopen. Pictured: A student has her temperature checked at the Walton Avenue School in New York City

The researchers found that disparities in fully in-person education 'existed across school levels and by geographic region and state.

Some states had more in-person learning than others, however.

Students in the South had the most access to in-person options with 63 percent of students in this region could learn fully in-person during the 2020-2021 school year, compared with 37 percent in the Midwest, 22 percent in the West, and only 16 percent in the Northeast.

Wyoming and Montana had the highest rates of in-person access at 100 percent of students. Hawaii had the lowest at 1.3 percent.

Younger students were more likely to have in-person options compared to older students - in line with research that shows younger children are less likely to become sick with COVID-19.

The researchers found that 39 percent of elementary school students had access to fully in-person learning in January 2021, compared with 33 percent of middle-school students and 30 percent of high-school students.

High school students were less likely to have a fully in-person option compared with younger students. Pictured: High school seniors wait to begin their graduation ceremony at Fenway Park in Boston, Mass.

Why were white students more likely to have access to in-person education this spring?

While more research is needed on the topic, the Brown University and Burbio researchers suggest a couple of contributing factors.

Communities of color tend to live in urban areas, where school districts have been less willing to reopen due to higher Covid case rates.

Black and Hispanic Americans have also been infected, hospitalized, and killed by Covid at higher rates than white Americans - causing further public health challenges for districts that serve these populations.

Even where students of color have the opportunity to attend school in-person, their families may have chosen to stay remote.

In NYC - a school district that primarily serves black and Hispanic students - all schools offered hybrid options but the majority of students elected to stay remote.

And some families are still hesitant.

A June 2021 survey from the RAND Corporation found that eight percent of black parents and six percent of Hispanic parents said they do not plan to send their children to school in-person in fall 2021.

Only three percent of white parents gave that same response.
American counties that have a state prison within their borders recorded more COVID-19 cases and deaths than other regions during the initial outbreak in spring 2020.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison analyzed county-level COVID-19 data to determine the effect prisons had on outbreaks across the country.

They found that the spread of the virus within prisons was responsible for 95,000 additional cases and 3,300 deaths.

This means counties with prison had nine percent more cases of COVID-19 and six percent more deaths linked to the virus.

What's more, there was a spillover effect they found, where even people outside of the prison were more in danger due to the prison in their community.

Researchers found that communities that included a state prison suffered from nine percent more COVID-19 cases than their peers last spring

Researchers believe that when a highly contagious virus like COVID-19 enters a prison, it quickly incubates and causes an outbreak.

Prisons often have many people cramped into small areas and poor sanitation practices, making them a prime location for virus spread.

The virus spreading among staff and inmates within prisons becomes a problem for the entire community, though, as interactions between the prisons and outside world often spread the virus with them.

'Your community is safer if your prison population is healthy,' said Jeremy Foltz, one of the study authors and a professor of agricultural and applied economics at UW-Madison.

How exactly to control these outbreaks is not certain, though.

Federal prisons attempted to limit the spread of COVID-19 by forcing prisoners to stay in their cells for 14 days at the start of April - limiting interactions between them and hopefully reducing transmission.

Researchers believe, but can not say for certain, that this is why the same correlation does not exist for federal prisons the way that it does for state prisons.

Those policies were controversial, though, as many believe increasing social isolation in prisons hurts the inmates long-term.

Eventually many prisons began to release inmates early if they were deep into their sentences or committed minor crimes.

COVID often incubated in prisons due to unsanitary and cramped conditions before spreading throughout the community

'If we're creating holistic public health policies, prisons are an important factor,' said Kaitlyn Sims, an author of the report and a doctoral student in agricultural and applied economics at UW-Madison.

'Given the unique challenges that prisons face, it's important that we pay attention to them and recognize that they need equally unique policies.'

The findings were published on June 29 in the American Journal of Public Health.

The Marshall Project has recorded 398,625 cases of COVID-19 in prisons around the country, noting that their count is likely significantly less than the true number of prisoners who got the virus.

Michigan state prisons have had the worst outbreak, with more than 69 percent of prisoners having contracted the virus at some point in the last 15 months.

The issue in Michigan prisons has attracted the attention of activist groups, who protested against the Michigan Department of Corrections in December, claiming they were not doing enough to protect prisoners.

In total, 2,714 prisoners around the country have died of the virus.
Car makers today urged the Government to go 'full throttle' to boost the motor industry in post-Brexit Britain  publishing a 12-point plan to get UK car production up to full speed and create up to 40,000 new jobs.

That includes providing 2.3million public charging points by the end of the decade, so that motorists can actually charge up the electric vehicles that ministers insist the population must drive.

It says that support for the UK's car industry will help the Prime Minister with his 'levelling up' agenda to bring prosperity to the UK beyond the borders of the M25 London Orbital, by creating the economic conditions under which it can thrive against competition from the Continent.

12-point plan for Boris: Motoring bosses called for more to boost the sector to help it recover from the pandemic and better prepare for the planned ban on new petrol and diesel cars

Highlighting that the shift to electrified vehicles is 'the biggest challenge facing the sector', it is calling for 2.3 million charge points by 2030, 60GWh of gigafactory capacity (which an expected Nissan announcement will go some way towards fulfilling), and a 'Build Back Better Fund' to help boost productivity.

And with a nod to the prospect of 'pay as you drive' road-pricing replacing traditional fuel taxes at the pumps and CO2-linked Vehicle Excise Duty, it calls on ministers to commission an independent review to consider the long-term future of fuel duty and car tax in a 'decarbonised' sector with electric cars.

Bosses stressed: 'Industry has potential to gain 40,000 jobs this decade.'

But if ministers fail to respond, in a 'worst case scenario' the UK could be left 'stranded', face 'precipitous decline' and lose 90,000 jobs  mainly outside London and the South East.

The message was delivered by motor industry bosses at the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders' annual International Automotive Summit hosted in London, which was attended by Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng, his Labour opposition counterpart Ed Miliband.

The meeting was also attended by a host of industry leaders including Thierry Bollore, chief executive of Britain's biggest car maker. Jaguar Land Rover.

This SMMT infographic has been released this morning showing the importance of the motor industry to the UK economy

The scene for the summit was set on Monday with reports that Nissan is poised to confirm plans for a massive battery gigafactory close to its Sunderland plant, in the North East of England, where the all-electric Nissan Leaf, as well as the Qashqai SUV, is built.

The plant would provide around 2,000 new jobs to supply batteries for the Japanese firm's electrified vehicles.

Both the BBC and Sky News suggested the car maker will make an announcement this week - possibly by Thursday - after news broke earlier this month that the Government was in talks with six different firms - including Nissan - to build battery production facilities in the UK.

SMMT chief executive Mike Hawes described the forthcoming Nissan announcement as 'tremdously good news'.

'It's a vote of confidence, But we need a lot more.,' he added.

Reports emerged on Monday that Nissan is due to announce this week that it intends to built a state-of-the-art battery gigafactory in the North East of England by 2024

The new facility is likely to be close to Nissan's factory in Sunderland to supply it with batteries for EVs - like the Leaf - produced there. Nissan will say it plans to build around 200,000 electric cars in the UK per year

Launching its report called 'Full Throttle: Driving UK Automotive Competitiveness', the SMMT said the automotive sector is 'an industry that warrants unambiguous backing.'

It pointed out that the automotive manufacturing sector employs around 180,000 people nationwide, contributes 15billion to the economy and is the country's largest exporter of goods, stressing also:' Cars and other vehicles take people to work and education, deliver food and goods and support our essential and emergency services, not least during the pandemic.'

Some three-quarters of people aged over 17 in England hold a driving licence, and 95 per cent of car owners agree that their car gives them 'significantly greater freedom and mobility,' It said.

Labour calls for public charger boost to end North vs South 'gulf' Labour says there is a north-south 'gulf' in available public charge points The SMMT's 12-point plan echos a new report published by the Labour Party this morning that suggests the Government needs to install another 127,000 public electric vehicle chargers across the UK by 2025 if the country is going to meet its climate change targets. Currently there are just 22,790 public EV devices in the UK - 15 per cent of the 150,000 that the Committee on Climate Change says are needed by 2025. The Labour Party warned on Tuesday that this will cause 'a gulf' between those who have off-street parking facilities and therefore access to charge points at their homes and those who will be 'locked out' of the benefits of EV ownership. The opposition's report also said that the Government's recent decision to slash the Plug-in Vehicle Grant will price some families out of electric car ownership and create 'two-tier transport Britain'. Labour promised that - if it were to gain power - it would provide long-term interest-free loans for low-income families to help purchase a new and used electric vehicle. It says it will also trial a national scrappage scheme, similar to the successful - but expensive - scheme in 2009 that helped to remove thousands of older polluting vehicles from the road and gave the motor sector a much-needed boost following the economic crisis. It adds that it would also treat the rapid installation of public chargers as a 'national infrastructure project', with availability boosted in the north of England and the Midlands in particular where there is a lack of devices. Finally, it said it would part-finance the creation of three new additional gigafactories by 2025 as part of an industrial strategy for the country's automotive sector. Commenting on Labour's report, Edmund King, president of the AA, said: 'To speed up the electric vehicle revolution, there is a long standing debate as to what comes first - the cars or the chargepoints? 'The reality is we need both to happen at the same time, with particular focus on the 30 to 40 per cent of homeowners that have no access to dedicated off-street parking. 'As well as making vehicles more affordable and increasing the number of public chargepoints, we need to ensure the cost of charging remains competitive. 'Drivers will switch to electric cars with incentives and provided recharging costs remain cheaper than filling up with petrol or diesel.'

The strategy sets out a series of bold policy proposals for this coming year and remainder of the decade, covering also the Government's ambition plans to scrap petrol and diesel cars in favour of electric only by 2030.

It says: 'The UK industry has many strengths  the diversity of its companies, its engineering excellence, innovation, a highly skilled workforce and the strength of the UK market, but the global industry is fiercely competitive, and weaknesses must be addressed if its long term success  and the benefits that come with it  are to be assured.'

A 'Build Back Better Fund' is needed to help 'revolutionise' production lines and 'overcome some of the areas where the UK lags in cost competitiveness or strategic support.'

It notes: 'Most importantly, the fund will help the sector transition to Net Zero and transform our existing manufacturing and supply-chain.

'The shift to electrified vehicles is the biggest challenge facing the sector.

'Government is already working with industry to attract additional battery manufacturing to the UK but the report calls for a binding target of 60 GWh of battery capacity be built by 2030.

'These 'gigafactories' would give British manufacturers the capability to produce up to one million electric vehicles a year and ensure tariff free access to critical markets in the EU.'

So that the public can actually charge the electric cars that ministers are forcing onto the public, the report calls for the installation of at least 2.3million charging points nationwide before the end of the decade.

It says: 'This would ensure all drivers  especially those without driveways  have the confidence to invest in the latest zero emission technologies, investment that will not just support a healthy domestic vehicle market, but which will underpin mass market automotive manufacturing in the UK and help deliver the country's climate change and air quality goals.'

The report makes clear: 'The stakes are high. In a best-case scenario with the sector transitioning successfully to a zero emissions future, with ambitious global trading terms, there is the potential to gain 40,000 new, well paid and highly skilled sector jobs by 2030.

'This would provide a significant impact in auto heartlands such as the North East and West Midlands, directly helping 'level up' the UK.'

But it also warns: 'Without the competitive conditions, however, the UK's automotive industry risks decline. In a worst-case situation, with the sector left stranded, analysis shows that around 90,000 jobs could be lost compared with the central scenario, with most of these outside London and the South East, increasing UK regional inequality.'

SMMT chief executive Mike Hawes said: 'The next few years represent a critical period for the sector.

'The pace of technological change is accelerating and the competition more ferocious. If we are to secure vehicle manufacturing in this country, with all the benefits to society that it brings, decisions need to be made today.'

He added: 'The automotive sector is uniquely placed to help this government deliver on its agenda; to level up, deliver net zero and trade globally. The Government has made clear its support for the sector in its negotiations with Europe, so now is the time to go full throttle and take bold action to support one of Britain's most important industries.'

Cllr Jim OBoyle, cabinet member for jobs, regeneration and climate change at Coventry City Council, backed the SMMT's plans to bolster the UK's automotive sector, which has a prominent position in the local community.

'A Build Back Better Fund to support the automotive industry is exactly what we need as we emerge from the global pandemic and to protect thousands of jobs in the sector,' he told us.

'It is critical that the West Midlands is at the heart of this. A third of all cars produced in the UK come from the region  which is home to Jaguar Land Rover, BMW, Lotus, and Aston Martin Lagonda.'

He added that the region is also in need of a gigafactory, with the city council set to unveil plans for its own battery production site at Coventry Airport.

'One or two Gigafactories in the North of England wont be enough to drive the EV revolution,' he said.

'If we are to protect and create tens of thousands of jobs in our world-leading automotive sector we must secure battery manufacturing in the West Midlands.'
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Flying cars will be a reality, the European boss of Hyundai insisted in a statement made this morning.

Briton Michael Cole, president and chief executive of Hyundai Motor Europe, told the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders' International Automotive Summit in London: 'Yes, it will come. Flying cars are part of our future.'

He says the technology will play a key part in reducing congestion on roads.

He pointed to Hyundai's own investment in a flying taxis project and plans for pop-up airports for electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft - the first of which could be located in Coventry before the end of the year.

Hyundai's European boss said flying cars WILL be a reality and the technology will help to reduce congestion on our roads by ferrying people on short journeys by air

In 2019 the South Korean car giant pledged to invest 1.8 trillion won ($1.5billion) in what it called 'urban air mobility' by 2025.

In January this year British firm Urban Air Port and Hyundai unveiled plans for the world's first pop-up 'Air-One' mobile airport for these vehicles located in the heart of the West Midlands city.

Hyundai is pushing for the introduction of Air-One locations after it unveiled its own flying taxi called the S-A1 - designed in collaboration with Uber - a year ago, and intends to commercialise its own flying vehicles by 2028.

Experts say the so-called 'urban air mobility' revolution is estimated to be worth almost 1trillion over the next 20 years as companies and authorities invest in eVTOL aircraft and the infrastructure required.

Mr Cole said he is excited by Hyundai's Coventry project for an airport for flying cars: 'It's an opportunity to reduce congestion by taking some of the traffic off the ground and into the air.

'We are a now a provider of smart mobility services. It shows how the pace of change is moving so quickly.'

He admitted: 'Years ago it was something I never thought we'd see.'

Hyundai in 2019 pledged to invest 1.8 trillion won ($1.5billion) in what it called 'urban air mobility' by 2025

Hyundai is pushing for the introduction of Air-One locations after it unveiled its own flying taxi called the S-A1 - designed in collaboration with Uber - a year ago, and intends to commercialise its own flying vehicles by 2028

A landing pad design revealed by Hyundai in 2019 for use by its S-A1 flying taxi that's being co-developed with ride hailing giant, Uber

Hyundai Motor UK managing director Ashley Andrew was equally upbeat about a future of flying cars, drones and taxis.

He told This is Money: 'It's often said that the automotive industry will change more in the next five years than it has done in the past 100. In fact it isn't just changing fast; it's evolving so radically that it needs a new name: the mobility industry.

'Automotive manufacturers like Hyundai are investing in the transformation of transport with autonomous driving, zero emissions power solutions, robotics, and flying taxis.'

He stressed: 'At Hyundai this isn't the work of an after-hours think tank  it's a group-wide investment to the tune of $87billion.'

Mr Andrew said: 'I've been telling my children recently that they won't recognise our cities by the time they are my age. And they certainly won't be travelling around in the same way that Dad does today.

'They think it's really 'cool' that we've recruited an expert who worked for NASA for 30 years, Dr. Jaiwon Shin, to head up Hyundai's Urban Air Mobility division and are beyond excited about the prospect of an airborne taxi service'.

But he stressed: 'It's easy to say we'll all be travelling in autonomous pods and flying through our cities in the future  it's quite another thing making it happen. But, at Hyundai, we don't operate on flights of fancy, we've got a real plan to get there.'

S-A1 is capable of vertical take-off and landing and is purposely designed for aerial ride-sharing purposes

Hyundai first caused a stir with its plans for flying vehicles in January 2020 when it unveiled its concept electric aircraft developed with Uber at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

It is designed to fly on trips of up to 60 miles and has a cruising speed of up to 180mph and can be used at altitudes between 1,000 to 2,000 feet.

In a joint statement made in Vegas in January last year the two parties said: 'Hyundai will produce and deploy the air vehicles, and Uber will provide airspace support services, connections to ground transportation, and customer interfaces through an aerial ride share network.'

The S-A1 showcased at the event is capable of vertical take-off and landing and is purposely designed for aerial ride-sharing purposes.

The concept vehicle revealed in 2020 is designed for a cruising speed up to 180mph flying at an altitude of around 1,000 to 2,000 feet above ground

The front seat is for the pilot if needed, though both Uber and Hyundai are in agreement that it wants to create autonomous air taxis in the future. This means the S-A1 could seat up to six

The Hyundai vehicle will be 100 per cent electric, utilizing distributed electric propulsion and during peak hours will require about five to seven minutes for recharging.

The electric source powers rotors and propellers around the airframe to increase safety by decreasing any single point of failure. Having several, smaller rotors also reduces noise relative to large rotor helicopters with combustion engines, which is very important to cities.

The S-A1 can be piloted, but over time the two companies say they want the air taxis to be autonomous.

The cabin is designed with four passenger seats, allowing riders to board and disembark easily and avoid the dreaded middle seat with enough space for a personal bag or backpack.

Flight hailing: The S-A1 concept electric air taxi has been co-created as part of a new partnership between Uber and Hyundai

A model of the Hyundai and Uber Elevate urban air taxi concept S-A1 was displayed during the Hyundai press conference at the 2020 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas

Vertical take off and landing means the S-A1 would be able to collect people from a variety of locations

Plans for pop-up airport for flying taxis in Coventry revealed earlier this year

British firm Urban Air Port and Hyundai in January revealed plans for the world's first pop-up mobile airport for flying vehicles located in the heart of the West Midlands city, which it said could be completed by November this year.

Called Air-One, it can be installed in a matter of days and is set to become the smallest airport ever.

It has been designed with ultra-compact dimensions so it can be implemented in towns and cities to allow electric air taxis and drones to land and charge their batteries.

Designers say the temporary sites will help to 'reduce congestion, cut air pollution, and contribute to a zero-carbon future'.

The Air-One pop-up airport is planned to be located in a former overflow car park on the other side of the A444 next to the Ricoh Arena 32,609-seater stadium

The airport itself has a landing pad that's 14 metres in diameter that, when a vehicle touches down on it, drops into a hanger where it can be charged or take on passengers

Coventry City Council and MPs backed the proposals for the zero-emissions airport, which will be located next to the city's Ricoh Arena, with the project receiving a 1.2million Government grant.

Air-One can be operated off-grid and can also be integrated with electric vehicles and sustainable public transport, the group of UK based design and 'deeptech' companies behind it claim.

As well as taking just days to put up, the design allows the airport to be easily dismantled and moved to alternative sites, as the air-mobility sector develops.

The Coventry site is designed to be located in a former overflow car park off the A444 next to the Ricoh Arena 32,609-seater stadium.

The airport itself has a landing pad that's 14 metres in diameter. That's bigger than a traditional helipad, so means it can accommodate helicopters and all eVTOLs.

It features an elevated platform. Once a vehicle has landed on it, the pad then moves down into the hanger.

Vehicles can then be pushed to different parts of the site, where they can be charged, cleaned, checked over for maintenance purposes and take on passengers.

There's also a small lit runway.

Designers say the integrated hanger could also feature a book shop or a cafe.

During the unveiling of the plans for the Coventry site earlier this year, Pamela Cohn, chief operating officer for the Urban Air Mobility Division of Hyundai Motor Group, said: 'As we advance our eVTOL aircraft programme, development of supporting infrastructure is imperative.

Coventry's pop-up airport for flying cars, air taxis and delivery drones: The West Midlands city is set to be the first in the world to get a new site specifically designed for electric flying vehicles to land, charge and pick up passengers

'Air-One is a unique project that is set to help lead the way in developing a robust, accessible and intermodal infrastructure network for future mobility.

'We are excited to be part of this partnership in the UK and look forward to working together to create community impact and opportunity through safe, affordable, and human-centred mobility solutions.'

The airport  which is around 60 per cent smaller than a conventional heliport - will be the first of more than 200 zero emission sites Urban Air Port plans to install worldwide over the next five years.

Initially, the Coventry site will be used to help the public understand the new technology, with Malloy Aeronautics, a UK-based drone developer, demonstrating the use of large cargo drones at the airport.

As well as providing solutions for reducing congestion and emissions in urban environments, the design has been developed with disaster emergency management in mind.

The airports will become a hub for rapid deployment drones and eVTOLs that, when called upon, can quickly collect and transport emergency supplies, equipment and people where needed.
The accounting watchdog has launched investigations into the auditors of collapsed lender Greensill Capital and the bank owned by troubled tycoon Sanjeev Gupta.

The Financial Reporting Council (FRC) has opened a probe into Saffery Champness, the UK's 13th-largest accountancy firm, over work it did on Greensill Capital's 2019 accounts.

The regulator is also investigating Big Four beancounter PwC for its audit of Gupta's Wyelands Bank.

The Financial Reporting Council has opened a probe into Saffery Champness, the UK's 13th-largest accountancy firm, in relation to the work it did on Greensill's 2019 accounts

Wyelands was forced to close down earlier this year after the Bank of England raised concerns about its lending practices with the Serious Fraud Office (SFO).

As well as being owned by Gupta, Wyelands lent substantial amounts of money to companies connected to the 50-year-old businessman.

The latest FRC probes come as regulators' nets close in on Gupta, his business associate Lex Greensill, and the web of firms connected to them.

The SFO confirmed earlier this year that it was 'investigating suspected fraud, fraudulent trading and money laundering in relation to the financing and conduct' of Gupta's business network the GFG Alliance, of which Liberty Steel UK is a part.

Greensill Capital, founded by Australian banker Greensill, was a major lender to Gupta's empire but collapsed earlier this year after several insurers withdrew their cover for the loans.

The implosion has left GFG Alliance teetering on the brink of administration, throwing uncertainty over thousands of jobs in Britain's steel industry.

Greensill counted former prime minister David Cameron as an adviser, and its fall from grace has raised questions about just how much access the lender was given to the top levels of government.

The firm had agreed with Saffery Champness last year that its ballooning size and complexity meant it had outgrown the auditor's services.

But several major accountancy firms including Deloitte, KPMG and BDO declined to take on Greensill as a client due to conflicts of interest or reputational concerns, the Financial Times reported.

Wyelands, named after the Welsh country estate which Gupta owns with his wife Nicola, was audited by PwC for the year to April 2019. But the beancounter resigned that November, blaming a potential conflict of interest.

Mazars took over, but in Wyelands' most recent accounts for the year to April 2020, the auditor said difficulties in identifying transactions between the bank and parties related to Gupta posed a 'significant risk'.

A Saffery Champness spokesman said the business would co-operate fully with the FRC, and added: 'Audit quality is an absolute priority for Saffery Champness and we are committed to upholding the high professional standards our clients rightly expect.'

A PwC spokesman said: 'It's understandable that there is regulatory scrutiny in situations like this. We will co-operate fully with the FRC in its inquiries.'
Serco has won a fresh contract to keep Covid-19 testing centres running.

The Government has hired the outsourcing giant to provide some test and trace services for another 12 months, with an option to extend it for six more.

Overall, the service has cost around 37billion and Serco's deal is worth as much as 322million.

Covid contract: The Government has hired outsourcing giant Serco to provide some test and trace services for another 12 months, with an option to extend it for six more

But the company cautioned the actual amount could be less, as it depends on demand for testing in the months ahead.

Serco is running around one fifth of testing centres in England and Northern Ireland, including walk-ins, drive-throughs and mobile centres. It is not responsible for laboratories where tests are processed.

The latest contract is another boost to the company, which last year was awarded NHS Test and Trace contracts worth 350million.

Rupert Soames, Serco's boss, said the testing network was now delivering an average of 51,000 a day despite a 'standing start' in March last year.

The scheme, which has been overseen by former Talk Talk boss Baroness Harding, has been criticised, however, for a raft of problems since its inception.

Soames said: 'We are proud of the part we have played in building and operating the UK's highly successful Covid-19 testing infrastructure.'

Earlier this month, Serco predicted underlying profits of 200million this year  15million more than previously forecast due to the extension of Covid-19 restrictions.

The firm has faced criticism over the large profits it has made from the pandemic and its decision to start paying a dividend to shareholders.

Bosses previously revealed they banked 400million in extra revenues from Covid-19-related services, although profits from the pandemic were minimal  at only 2million.

Despite this, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said in February it was 'outrageous' that dividends would be reintroduced this year.

'Taxpayers' money shouldn't be given to Serco's shareholders via dividends,' he tweeted.
Takeover talk continues to grip the stock market  and all eyes will be on serviced office company IWG when trading resumes today.

Reports last night suggested the firm, which owns Regus and is valued at 3billion, is a potential target.

New York based private equity firm CC Capital has held talks with the London-listed group about a possible 4billion bid in the past month, according to Sky News.illio

Takeover rumours: New York based private equity firm CC Capital has reportedly held talks with London-listed serviced office company IWG about a possible 4bn bid

That would value the 28.5 per cent stake held by founder and chief executive Mark Dixon at more than 1billion.

The speculation came after the market closed yesterday, with IWG shares down 2.3 per cent, or 7.2p, at 300.2p. But it could be a different story when trading resumes this morning. IWG is just the latest firm to be targeted with private equity also circling Morrisons (up 0.8 per cent, or 1.8p, to 234.5p).

Ultra Electronics has also been in the spotlight. Its shares rose 7 per cent on Friday after private equity-owned Cobham said it was interested in a deal.

But they slammed into reverse yesterday as investors digested a strongly-worded rebuttal from Ultra that seemingly poured cold water on the approach.

Stock Watch - Zephyr Energy Oil and gas tiddler Zephyr Energy started the week on a high after it brought in a US-based company called Cyclone Drilling to work on a new exploration well. The two firms have worked together before and Cyclone will use the same rig it used to drill another of Zephyrs sites. AIM-listed Zephyr focuses on finding oil and gas in the USs Rocky Mountains  particularly Utah. Boss Colin Harrington said the rig was well known to our drilling team and was already in Utah, meaning it would save cash on transport expenses. Shares in the group rose 12.7 per cent, or 0.8p, to 7.1p.

Cobham  bought by Advent International for 4billion last year  had said it could buy Ultra, or even that, effectively, Ultra could buy Cobham.

It indicated the two were already in talks  though it was somewhat vague about the details.

But Ultra had a different narrative. It insisted that it had only been in discussions to buy CAES, a division of Cobham, and that it had decided to walk away from that proposition. Ultra shares fell 3 per cent, or 68p, to 2232p.

The wider FTSE 250 index closed lower, falling 0.5 per cent, or 112.59 points, to 22533.42, while the FTSE 100 slid 0.9 per cent, or 63.1 points, to 7072.97.

Both were weighed down by travel stocks again  as Spain, Malta and Portugal all introduced measures to restrict UK travellers who have not had both jabs. And Hong Kong said it would ban all passenger flights from the UK from Thursday.

The latest blow to summer holidays knocked the shares of travel stocks including British Airways-owner IAG (down 5.9 per cent, or 11.08p, to 176.4p), Easyjet (down 5.8 per cent, or 55.4p, to 899.6p) and Tui (down 5.3 per cent, or 21.5p, to 384.1p).

Closer to home, City Pub Group said it was encouraged by bumper sales after it reopened 42 of its sites after the third lockdown. T

he bar owner is trading profitably and at around 90 per cent of pre-pandemic levels. Shares rose 1.6 per cent, or 2p, to 129.5p.

A 1pc fall in oil prices to $75.15 a barrel ahead of an Opec+ meeting this week also weighed on Londons big energy firms, with BP (down 3.2 per cent, or 10.35p, to 315.15p), Shell (down 3.6 per cent, or 52p, to 1398p) and Cairn Energy (down 6 per cent, or 9.8p, to 153p) all suffering.

AIM-listed Hurricane Energy, however, shot up 29.3 per cent, or 0.64p, to 2.8p after a court rejected a debt restructuring proposal that would have virtually wiped out its shareholders.

Investors had been in uproar about the plans, which would have handed control of the company to Hurricanes bondholders in exchange for forgiving debt and extending the repayment date on more. A judge said there was no urgency for Hurricane to restructure the debt now.

Elsewhere in the natural resources world, Anglo American (down 2.2 per cent, or 65p, to 2901.5p) finalised the sale of its one-third stake in an open-pit coal mine in Colombia to fellow Footsie miner Glencore (down 1.8 per cent, or 5.65p, to 309.55p).

BHP (down 0.7 per cent, or 16p, to 2144p) also holds a third of the project  and is intending to sell this to Glencore too.

And speaking of Glencore, mining minnow Ferro-Alloy Resources rose 8.5 per cent, or 2.75p, to 35.25p after chairman Sir Mick Davis  former boss of Xstrata, which merged with Glencore in May 2013  pumped another 5million into the company earlier than expected.
The City watchdog has clashed with one of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges.

The Financial Conduct Authority rebuked Binance over the weekend, forcing the firm to plaster warnings over its website telling consumers that it 'is not permitted to undertake regulated activity in the UK'.

But Binance has hit back, saying the FCA notice has 'no direct impact' on the services it provides.

Crypto crackdown: The FCA rebuked Binance over the weekend, forcing it to place warnings on its website stating that it 'is not permitted to undertake any regulated activity in the UK'

Binance offers the chance to buy and trade cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, ethereum and dogecoin.

But this activity is not 'regulated'  meaning the FCA is limited in the actions it can take against Binance.

Though its warning will not affect Binance's services, the watchdog is hoping it will sound alarm bells with consumers and make them think twice about buying crypto-currencies through the firm.

The FCA's attack on Binance is understood to relate to fears over its money-laundering and fraud controls.

All cryptocurrency firms operating in the UK must register with the FCA by March 2022, to confirm that they have sufficient checks in place to prevent their platforms being used for money laundering, fraud and terrorist financing.

But the regulator recently warned that many of the applications it has received are totally inadequate.

It revealed that Binance had withdrawn its application, putting a halt to the firm's plans to launch a dedicated UK site.

A Binance spokesman said: 'We take our compliance obligations very seriously.'
Britain is facing a 'perfect storm' of staff shortages that will hamper the recovery from the coronavirus crisis, two entrepreneurs have claimed.

Speaking to the Mail, Homeserve boss Richard Harpin said a dearth of tradesmen and women threatens the Government's 'build back better' strategy.

And with businesses from restaurants to hauliers struggling to recruit, CBI president Lord Bilimoria will today warn that an adequate supply of staff 'is critical for securing the UK's recovery'.

Demand: Richard Harpin wants ministers to expand the 'shortage occupation list', which sets out the jobs where there are not enough workers

Both are urging ministers to expand the 'shortage occupation list', which sets out the jobs where there are not enough workers.

Any job on that list can be filled by migrant workers more easily. Currently on the list are a host of jobs in the health service and care as well as science, engineering and IT.

Harpin and Bilimoria said it should be expanded to include jobs from butchers, bricklayers and welders to bathroom fitters, fencers and locksmiths.

Harpin's home emergencies company Homeserve owns the Checkatrade website which last year was used by 13m people to find tradesmen.

He said: 'Demand for skilled workers is rocketing. Construction, big tech, education, hospitality  the skills shortage is biting across the board.

Part of the problem is an exodus of European workers. Some blame the pandemic, some blame Brexit. Whatever the reason, it is a big problem for British business.

The implications are wide ranging and serious. The Government's ambitious plans to level up opportunities across British society are at risk.

It is hard to build back better when you don't have any builders. If you've tried to find a skilled tradesperson recently you will know.'

Citing a recent survey by Checkatrade, the Huddersfield-born father of three said 80 per cent of homeowners are planning to do some work on their house in the next 12 months.

'Spending most of our time at home has led to a surge in demand for skilled trades to carry out home improvements,' he said.

Harpin, 56, who set up HomeServe in 1993 and built it into a 3.3billion firm listed on the FTSE 250, urged ministers to expand the 'shortage occupation list'.

Investing in skills: CBI president Lord Bilimoria recruiting workers from overseas shouldn't be Britain's only response to labour shortages

He added: 'The list of shortage occupations, designed to identify and fast-track entry to the UK for skills in short supply, is out-of-date and falls woefully short of the economy's current requirements. This needs updating urgently.

'Across Checkatrade we see demand outstripping supply for a range of trades that don't make the list  bathroom fitters, kitchen fitters, fencers, tree surgeons, locksmiths  the list is long.

The situation is now critical. With so many skills in immediate short supply, we must go faster.

'These skilled trades are just as important to our society as IT analysts, vets and graphic designers and should be included on the list alongside them.

'This simple change is the biggest single thing we can do today to solve the skills shortfall.'

He warned that the problem was about to get worse due to tomorrow's EU Settlement Scheme deadline. EU, EEA and Swiss citizens must apply to the scheme to continue living in the UK after June 30.

Harpin warned some EU nationals  including tradesmen  may leave after the deadline.

'The situation is now critical,' he said.

Longer term, he sees apprenticeships as a key driver of improving skills in the UK.

'Getting this right could be transformational for hundreds of thousands of young people across Britain, and a UK economy in desperate need of their skills,' said Harpin.

His view is backed by Bilimoria, the founder of Cobra Beer.

In a speech to the Recruitment and Employment Confederation's annual conference today, the crossbench peer will say: 'As lockdown restrictions lift, we're seeing a surge in the demand for labour  and we know many businesses are already struggling to recruit.

'It's a big challenge, not just for individual businesses, who can't find the people they need, but also for our longer-term economic recovery.'

The 59-year-old British-Indian entrepreneur will point to the departure of overseas workers during the pandemic and the impact of the furlough scheme, which has deterred some from looking for a new job.

'We've got a perfect storm of factors coalescing,' Bilimoria will say. 'We need the Government to immediately update the shortage occupation list.

'Butchers, bricklayers, and welders for example. Businesses would also welcome a commitment to review the list annually, to keep it responsive to the ebb and flow of skill demands across the whole of the UK's economy.

'And where there are clear, evidenced labour shortages, businesses should be able to hire from overseas.

'But it's really important to stress  workers from overseas aren't, and shouldn't be, our only response to labour shortages.

'Investing in skills here, too, is vital. It's not an either/or choice. We must do both to ensure our firms have the access to people they need to succeed.'
It is 464 days since the first lockdown was announced by Boris Johnson in March last year.

This is longer than it took for the Empire State Building to be built and Robin Knox-Johnston to sail single-handedly around the world.

Yet many of Britain's biggest organisations are still blaming Covid for diabolical customer service.

'Due to coronavirus you may have to wait longer for your call to be answered,' the dreaded recorded message on the HMRC telephone line says.

On hold: Many of Britain's organisations are still blaming Covid for diabolical customer service

Banks, utility companies, government agencies: all keep customers on hold or, increasingly, insist they speak to a 'chat-bot' rather than a human.

'Customer service teams have had more than a year to adjust,' says Adam French, consumer rights expert at Which?. 'So continuing to blame coronavirus for long waiting times is a poor excuse for bad service.'

And standards have slipped. According to a Which? survey at the end of last year, British Gas took on average more than 23 minutes to answer a call, compared to just over four minutes before Covid.

Ofcom says that the average time for a broadband company to answer their helplines nearly doubled, as did the time to get through to mobile phone operators.

British Gas said it faced challenges with staff at overseas call centres working from home, such as broadband, connectivity issues, and power cuts.

But how much of the poor customer service is because companies are encouraging their staff to work from home, in a bid to slash costs?

HSBC, for instance, announced in April that it was in discussions with its 1,800 call centre staff about working from home permanently, after Unite, the union, had negotiated for the bank to offer home-working staff 300 per year to cover their home heating and electricity bills.

And the Government is consulting over the summer whether to allow workers to insist they can work from home.

Office for National Statistics figures released last week show home workers spend only six-and-a-half hours a day on work.

Easing up: ONS figures show home workers only spend six-and-a-half hours a day on work

'Customer service has never been worse,' says Martyn James at Resolver, a company that helps thousands of customers every week seek redress from companies and organisations.

'Companies just don't want to talk to their customers any more. They've actively gone out of their way to make it difficult for customers to get in touch.

'And lockdown was used as an excuse to make it worse.'

To find out how bad the situation is, Money Mail spent the last week on the phone to some of Britain's biggest utilities, banks and public sector organisations to see how quick they were to answer their phones and how working from home is affecting the staff.

In each case, the organisation was called twice at different times of the day, and the average call time was used.

Trainline

28 min 31 sec

If you want to buy a rail ticket with Greater Anglia over the phone, your call is diverted to Trainline, the third-party booking service.

Trainline says on its website: 'To ensure the ongoing safety of our team, we've had to temporarily reduce the number of staff available to take calls.

'As a result, wait times will be longer and our priority is to support those who are travelling imminently or have an urgent query.'

It's unclear why it has had to reduce staff numbers, as its call centre is in Delhi and the staff are working from home.

Worse, if you want to buy a ticket over the phone, you can't: it has to be online.

And if you don't have access to the internet, another department will call me back 24 hours later to make the booking on my behalf, the man in Delhi tells me.

'Working from home has been great!' he says. 'I've been able to give time to work and personal life.'

A spokesman for Trainline says: 'To ensure the ongoing safety of our customer service team in India, the majority are working from home which means while they can support customers, they are not able to take payment over the phone.'

HSBC

9 min 9 sec

I want to open a new account. 'All the applications for new accounts are being done online.'

Why can't I do it over the phone, I ask the man on the phone, who is working from home in Hyderabad, India.

'Because the department that does new applications, during the pandemic, is not doing them over the phone. That department is working from home.'

Some accounts still have to be opened in person, in a branch. But in truly surreal fashion.

Pamela Hall, a retired dental surgeon from Northamptonshire, has been an HSBC customer for over 50 years.

She was appointed executor for a friend who died a couple of months ago and who was also an HSBC customer. Pamela needed to open an executor's account.

After a series of frustrations, including being told the bank had minimal staff 'due to Covid', Pamela finally got an appointment at a branch 12 miles away.

'I arrived and was shown to a windowless room with a desk and a telephone and told to answer the phone when it rang,' she says. 'The whole process of opening the account was conducted down a telephone with someone in a different room.

'It was a charade, a complete waste of time: they already had all the documentation. With good security questions it would have been possible either by telephone or online.' As she says: 'How long can they use Covid for such appalling customer service?'

A spokesman for HSBC said: 'We are sorry if the customer found this new arrangement strange or inconvenient.

'To help protect customers and colleagues throughout the pandemic, where a service interaction warrants a meeting of greater than 15 minutes, the customer is placed in one room and called by a colleague who is in a different room at the same branch.'

Lloyds bank

Doesn't answer phone

Despite calling multiple times throughout the week, I received the following message after being promised I was being put through to an adviser: 'With the challenging times we are all experiencing, we are getting lots more calls than usual and have fewer colleagues to answer our phone lines.

'We are sorry but this means we can't answer your call today. You can still use our online and mobile banking services to bank from home.' It then cut me off.

If you want to open a new account, it's almost impossible, say customers. Simon Carter helps run a Scouts group in Hertfordshire.

Already a Lloyds customer, he wanted to set up a charity account for the group. After failing to get through to anyone last year, he says: 'We noticed the message on its website changed about three weeks ago to say it would take calls.

'But the chap we spoke to wasn't able to go through the application process, as they didn't have enough staff because of Covid.'

He says trying to book a slot to speak to a human is a nightmare.

'You can't complete an online form or email any details, you have to give them everything over the phone. We have asked them to phone back, so far they haven't done so.'

He adds: 'I'm hacked off. It feels as if Lloyds has shut down its charity banking arm.'

Lloyds did not want to comment directly, but insists its average call wait time is four minutes, and adds opening accounts is taking longer than usual because of increased demand.

The Passport Office

5 min 39 sec

It used to take three weeks to apply for and receive a passport. Now it's ten.

'That was before the current exceptional circumstances,' says the call centre worker from Northern Ireland, who won't tell me if he's in the office or working from home.

'We don't let customers know the source of our location.

'Thanks for calling, have a great day,' he says, before putting the phone down.

The Passport Office is currently using a mix of home workers and those back in the office, trying to work through a backlog of applications  despite last year being far quieter than normal.

Only about 4million people applied for a passport in 2020 amid a collapse in overseas travel, compared with 7million during a typical year.

A Home Office spokesman says: 'Our guidance for passport applicants to allow up to ten weeks to get their passport is in no way related to staff working from home.

'Approximately 4.5million people have chosen to delay their passport application since March 2020 and it is right that we pre-emptively advise applicants that their applications could take longer should such unprecedented demand arise.'

British Gas

26 min 20 sec

In 2019, British Gas answered the phone on average in four minutes and 19 seconds.

In October last year, that rose to a shocking 23 minutes 32 seconds.

'Being on the phone while driving can put you and others at risk,' it nannies me at one point, while I am on hold. I finally get through in 26 minutes 20 seconds.

'We're all working from home permanently. I enjoy it, to be honest,' the woman tells me from Manchester.

On my second call, another worker tells me: 'I love not having to sit in traffic. In bad traffic it could take me more than an hour to get into the office.

That's certainly a perk of working from home. And I get to pick my children up from school. I'm in no rush to go back.'

A spokesman for British Gas said: 'It's not correct to say working from home is to blame', and insisted average call wait times are 100 seconds, but that Mondays 'tend to be busier'.

Transport for London

Doesn't answer phone

Under London Mayor Sadiq Khan, TfL is experiencing a significant drop in passengers.

Last week, the Tube had just 41 per cent of passengers compared with pre-Covid levels.

But this doesn't seem to have freed up staff to deal with customers, despite all call centre workers working from home.

Kate Hare, a mother-of-four in North London, tried to register a lost smartphone her 12-year-old daughter had left on the Underground.

If you call the number for lost property, you receive the message: 'Please be aware that our services may be disrupted due to the current guidance regarding coronavirus.

'It will take us significantly longer to search for your lost item. We are unable to take your inquiry by phone at the present time.'

It then hangs up on you. She filled in an online form, but received no reply. After a few weeks, she was forced to buy a replacement for her daughter.

Finally, she received a letter last week - more than five weeks after filling in the form - saying they'd found the phone, which would have to be posted to her at swingeing rates: a 20 'admin fee' and a 9 delivery fee.

'This is lunacy,' says Ms Hare. 'I was told it was because three-quarters of the lost property staff were not back in the office.'

A TFL spokesman said lost property was being delivered to customers 'via a courier service to reduce the need for personal contact'.

HMRC

19 min 21 sec

HMRC's answer-time has almost tripled since the start of the year, to 14 minutes 41 seconds, according to the latest figures published by the Revenue itself  despite it handling fewer calls per month. It took me even longer to get through.

'We are all working from home,' says the call handler in Scotland. 'It's actually really good to be in the comfort of your own home.

'There's no commute to the office, so it's ideal, you get a longer lie-in.

'We haven't been told when we'll be returning to the office.'

DVLA

Doesn't answer phone

'When you are doing worse than the Passport Office, then you know you are in serious trouble,' says Martyn James at Resolver.

Throughout the week, the DVLA number registered as 'user busy'. There was not even a recorded message fobbing you off with a 'because of Covid' excuse.

Mr James says that when people are (miraculously) able to get through, they can wait well over an hour.

'A particular issue that people are mentioning is 'document hostages' where people have submitted key identity documents to the DVLA only to hear nothing back.

'This is particularly acute for people who are foreign nationals who may have submitted passports and other vital documents that they now can't get back home.'

One person I spoke to had his licence and passport stuck at DVLA from February until last week, saying it took DVLA weeks to acknowledge they had ever received his passport.

'It's a fiasco,' he said.

To make matters worse, DVLA workers at its Swansea headquarters have been on strike for 18 days this year.

The Public and Commercial Services union is still calling for a reduction in the number of staff expected to work from the office, claiming it is not a safe environment because of previous Covid outbreaks.

A spokesman for the DVLA says: 'Our contact centre is open during business hours but there are significant delays in contacting us due to ongoing industrial action and social distancing requirements which means that we have fewer staff than usual on site at any one time.

'We understand this is causing frustration for our customers and we are sorry for the inconvenience.'
A miner who caught the highly-virulent Indian Delta strain of Covid from a co-worker in the Northern Territory before flying into Queensland has assured the community she 'never mixed with anybody' before testing positive.

The woman outed herself as the Delta carrier on the Sunshine Coast to give locals 'peace of mind' and explain she had always worn a mask while travelling in the lead up to testing positive.

Queensland will join New South Wales, the Northern Territory and Western Australia in lockdown after recording a further two cases on Tuesday, including a 19-year-old hospital receptionist who spent 10 days symptomatic and infectious in the community.

A second miner in Ipswich has also tested positive to the virus.

The original miner travelled to Bli Bli from Dundee Forest, southwest of Darwin, where she is employed at the infected Granites gold mine.

Almost 800 miners are currently in lockdown and another 900 are isolating across Australia after an outbreak in the camp.

The woman claims she flew from the mine to Darwin on Friday June 25, and boarded a second flight directly to Brisbane.

The woman claims she had no symptoms and no reason to believe she might have contracted the virus until the next day, when she received a text from her employer informing her that a colleague had tested positive to Covid

City of Darwin, City of Palmerston, Litchfield, Wagait Shire and Belyuen Shire, and Darwin Waterfront will all stay into lockdown until Friday at 1pm (Pictured: A woman getting a Covid test in Darwin)

She claims that her normal residence is in the Dundee Forest in the Northern Territory, where she is employed as a miner at the Granites gold mine (pictured)

From there she caught a shuttle bus to Bli Bli - about an hour-and-a-half north of Brisbane on the Sunshine Coast while 'wearing a face mask the whole time'.

The woman claims she had no symptoms and no reason to believe she might have contracted the virus until the next day, when she received a text from her employer informing her that a colleague had tested positive to Covid.

Up to 900 workers who had already flown out of the mine and scattered across Australia received a similar message.

'All employees were told to get tested immediately and quarantine themselves,' she told concerned locals in the Bli Bli Locals community group.

The woman alleged she was en route to Moura - five-hours north - when the text came, but turned around and returned to the Bli Bli address to quarantine.

The woman claims to have outed herself as the latest case in Bli Bli on the Sunshine Coast to put to bed any rumours and offer locals 'peace of mind'

About 900 fly-in-fly-out workers had already travelled home to cities across Australia before the worker at the Granites gold mine near Alice Springs was told he had coronavirus

Timeline of female miner's trip to Queensland Friday June 25 - Miner travels via air from Outback Granites gold mine to Darwin - She immediately catches Virgin flight VA454, Darwin to Brisbane  2.15pm to 7.30pm - Upon arrival, she catches a shuttle bus from Brisbane to Bli Bli on the Sunshine Coast Saturday June 26 - Miner receives a text notifying her that she is a close contact of a known case, after a colleague tested positive to Covid - She remains in the Bli Bli home and quarantines until she can get a Covid test Sunday June 27 - Takes herself to Nambour Hospital to get a Covid test, before returning to Bli Bli address to isolate - Covid test confirmed as positive - Waits at home until ambulance arrives to take her to Sunshine Coast University Hospital for mandatory 14 day quarantine Advertisement

On Sunday June 27, the woman claims she drove herself directly to Nambour Hospital, still wearing a face mask, to present for testing.

She returned to self isolation and was contacted soon after to let her know that she had tested positive to the virus.

'I waited until an ambulance collected me from the residence and transported me to the Sunshine Coast University Hospital, where I will be in isolating until a negative result is obtained after a minimum of 14 days,' she said.

The woman then reiterated that 'at no point' did she mix within the community and said she would not be answering further questions relating to her diagnosis.

Queensland went into a snap lockdown on Tuesday after recording a further two community cases, including an unvaccinated hospital receptionist who travelled from Brisbane to Townsville and Magnetic Island while infectious and symptomatic.

The lockdown will last for at least three days from 6pm Tuesday, but restrictions will remain in place for the next two weeks.

Territorians in hotspots will also only be allowed to exercise for one hour a day with one other person they live with Pictured: NT officers checking on people in quarantine

Queenslanders are on knife edge with the news that the Delta strain of Covid is now in the community. Pictured: People lining up for a vaccination in Brisbane

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said the next 24 to 48 hours are critical if health workers are to stop a surge in cases.

WHERE THE EXPOSED MINERS WENT: Western Australia: 252 workers South Australia: 29 workers Queensland: 170 workers Victoria: 7 workers Tasmania: 2 workers NSW: Unknown, 1 infection Northern Territory: 754 in isolation at the mine; 24 in Alice Springs; 70 in Howard Springs Advertisement

'This a highly infectious strain and we need to get on top of this very, very quickly,' she said.

The latest concerning case is a 19-year-old casual clerical worker from the Prince Charles Hospital worked as a receptionist outside a Covid-19 ward.

Chief Health Officer Jeanette Young said she's not yet certain whether the woman was infected via an already known community cluster or a returned traveller who was taken to the hospital where she was employed.

She travelled between her home in Sandgate to Magnetic Island in Townsville at the end of last week and attended the Sunday markets in Townsville.

The woman tested positive yesterday.

The second case identified on Tuesday was a miner in Ipswich.

Masks are now mandatory in Noosa, Sunshine Coast, Brisbane, Gold Coast, Ipswich, Logan, Redlands, Moreton, Scenic Rim, Somerset and Lockyer Valley.

The mask mandate will apply for the next two weeks. Masks do not need to be worn while driving a car or outside exercising.

Only 30 people can visit people in their homes and the one person per 4sqm restriction had also been reintroduced in public places.

People visiting restaurants and cafes must be seated, and must use Queensland's check-in app on entry.

Meanwhile Darwin, Litchfield and Palmerston in the Northern Territory will remain in lockdown until Friday amid concerns the Indian Delta strain of Covid could have spread through the mine.

At least 1,500 miners have potentially been exposed to the virus - with 900 already catching interstate flights and another 750 in quarantine.

West Australian health authorities scrambled to isolate and start testing 252 contacts who flew into the state over the weekend.

Territorians are enduring their first lockdown in more than a year amid a Covid cluster

Masks are now mandatory in Noosa, Sunshine Coast, Brisbane, Gold Coast, Ipswich, Logan, Redlands, Moreton, Scenic Rim, Somerset and Lockyer Valley. The mask mandate will apply for the next two weeks. Pictured: A woman wearing a mask while exercising in Southbank

Another 177 people were identified as close contacts of the infected person and were told to isolate for 14 days, regardless of whether they get a negative test.

At least 170 workers flew directly into southeast Queensland, with two so far confirmed to have the virus and the rest waiting on test results.

Twenty-nine of the workers flew in to Adelaide, according to SA Health. So far, there is one confirmed case and 11 have tested negative.

Two workers also flew to Tasmania and are awaiting their test results, while three out of the seven who went to Victoria have tested negative so far.

It is not known how many miners entered New South Wales, but one person linked to the outbreak in the NT tested positive in New England.

The mine's 'patient zero' is believed to have been unknowingly infectious from June 18 until he tested positive.
California Governor Gavin Newsom faces angry allegations of rigging a recall election which could cost him his career over a new law which will see the contest held earlier than planned.

Newsom is set to sign off a bill passed by the California State Legislature Monday which would enable him to hold the recall up to 30 days earlier than Golden State rules currently allow.

The bill - which Newsom is almost certainly set to approve - would help the governor capitalize on a swell in his polling numbers after California finally dropped its draconian COVID-19 lockdown measures.

It allows Newsom to bypass the usual legislative review process ahead of a recall election, provided $35 million is set aside to pay for local officials to set up and organize voting centers.

But Republicans say the tactic is a dirty trick. GOP Assemblyman Kevin Kiley raged: 'The conclusion is inescapable that Gavin Newsom is cheating in the recall and this Legislature is his willing accomplice.'

'Here we go again. You know this just reeks of partisanship and we need to stop that,' Republican Sen. Jim Nielsen said.

California Governor Gavin Newsom, pictured in Los Angeles on June 15, has been accused of dirty tricks over plans to hold his recall election earlier than planned

Golden State Democrats want to try and capitalize on a polling boost for Newsom after COVID lockdown measures were lifted. People are pictured enjoying San Francisco on June 15

'It is an attempt to put a thumb on the scale, to try to obtain a partisan outcome for one side,' GOP Assemblyman Vince Fong added.

It is unclear what influence, if any, Newsom had in pushing the new bill, and his office has refused to comment on it.

California's heavily-Democrat legislature hopes that holding Newsom's recall election earlier could help save his career by encouraging voters pleased by the return to normal life to keep their governor in office.

They want the recall to take place as soon as possible, in the hopes of holding it before a scandal or downtown in Newsom's popularity harms his prospects.

Election officials warn they'll need until at least September to plan for the recall, with Newsom set to face voters before the year is out.

But some Democrats and analysts have warned holding the recall earlier could backfire. They say it may take longer to canvass liberal voters to come out and vote to keep Newsom in office.

'That really suggested maybe we dont know what were doing. Youre playing with fire by doing that,' said Joshua Spivak, a senior fellow at the Hugh L Carey Institute for Government Reform at Wagner College in Staten Island, New York.

By contrast, the 1.7 million people who voted to get Newsom out-of-office are already part of a highly-energized campaign, and are ready to hit the ground running.

Many were infuriated by California's draconian lockdown measures, which were amongst the harshest in the US. The Golden State fared little better in terms of hospitalizations and deaths than Republican states including Texas and Florida that lifted all restrictions far earlier.

Newsom was condemned over his lockdown measures - and this trip to the indoor dining room of the French Laundry restaurant in November 2020, while urging Californians to stay home

Newsom was also condemned as hypocritical and out-of-touch last November after photos emerged of him eating inside at California's famed French Laundry restaurant.

He paid a trip to the eaterie - renowned as one of the world's finest - despite urging Californians to stay at home, and was forced to issue a groveling apology afterwards.

Those gaffes energized Republicans into organizing a recall, which requires the written support of at least 12 per cent of voters who cast a ballot in the state's last governor election.

Recall supporters managed to exceed the 1.5 million signatures required by almost 200,000.

Voters will be asked if they think Newsom should be recalled. If more than 50 per cent of voters say 'Yes,' he will lose his job.

Among those in the running to take over from Newsom are Caitlyn Jenner, pictured, who is running as a Republican candidate

The ballot also asks anyone who wants Newsom recalled who should replace him, with no limit on the number of candidates who run. Whoever gets the most votes would be named as the new governor, even if they do not have a majority.

Contenders for Newsom's job include Assemblyman Kiley, who condemned Monday's legislation, as well as Olympian-turned-reality star Caitlyn Jenner.

Jenner, 71, has positioned herself as a libertarian-leaning Republican. She could follow in the footsteps of Arnold Schwarzenegger as the state's second megastar governor.

Schwarzenegger served as Republican Governor of California between 2003 and 2011. Newsom had been due to face a regular election next year.
A heartbroken mother has issued a warning to other parents after her two-year-old daughter died from swallowing a remote control battery.

Harper-Lee Fanthorpe, from Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, passed away on May 23, hours after swallowing the battery when the acid inside burnt through her food pipe.

Mother Stacey Nicklin said she did not realise her daughter had swallowed the battery until she found the remote control with a missing button battery in her bedroom.

Harper-Lee Fanthorpe, from Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, passed away on May 23, hours after swallowing the battery when the acid inside burnt through her food pip

Mother Stacey Nicklin said she did not realise her daughter had swallowed the battery until she found the remote control with a missing button battery in her bedroom

The two-year-old was being watched over by her older sister, Jamie-Leigh Nicklin-Hulme

She recalled her daughter's final words to her were: 'Mummy, I need you'.

The two-year-old was being watched over by her older sister, Jamie-Leigh Nicklin-Hulme, who said the toddlers head suddenly swung backwards before she began vomiting blood.

'She wasn't responding. She just went very wheezy, her eyes just closed and she couldn't talk back to me, like she wasn't there,' Jamie-Leigh said, as quoted by The Sun.

'It doesn't feel real, it feels like a dream.'

Harper-Lee was rushed to Royal Stoke University Hospital.

On arrival at the hospital, the two-year-old received a blood transfusion to replace the two litres lost, before she was taken into surgery.

Surgeons were unable to save the child after acid inside the battery burnt through her food pipe and damaged a major artery.

She suffered a cardiac arrhythmia during surgery and passed away.

She recalled her daughter's final words to her were: 'Mummy, I need you'

Distraught mother Stacey said that her daughter's loss had left a 'huge hole' in her family. 'These five weeks have been absolute torture, I feel so lost. The house is just so quiet,' she told the publication.

She called on parents to 'check check check' to avoid repeating such incidents.

'It's about awareness. If I can save one child or a hundred, then I've promised my baby I've done what I've done,' she said.

Earlier this year, the Government launched a campaign to raise awareness of the risks of button batteries.

North Staffordshire senior coroner Andrew Barkley said: 'There is a very clear concern about this in public health. It has affected lots of children.'
Harrowing video captured the moment a military helicopter transporting Colombian president Ivan Duque was struck by in a failed attempt to take down the aircraft.

The viral video footage shows the helicopter flying over a town in the department of Norte de Santander near the border with Venezuela on Friday.

Dozens of shots were fired at at it before safely landing at Camilo Daza Airport in Cucuta.

President Duque was accompanied by Interior Minister Daniel Palacios, Defense Minister Diego Molano, the governor of Norte de Santander department, Silvano Serrano, and several other local officials.

None of the passengers on the helicopter or flight crew were injured.

Molano on Sunday said that the plot to shoot down the helicopter may have been orchestrated by the National Liberation Army - the largest remaining rebel group in the South American nation - along with dissidents of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) 33rd Front and drug traffickers and criminals who operate in Norte de Santander and who have a presence in Venezuela.

Still image from a video filmed by a resident in Norte de Santander, Colombia, on Friday captured the moment a helicopter transporting Colombia President Ivan Duque came under fire as it approached Camilo Daza Airport in Cucuta near the border with Venezuela

Colombian President Ivan Duque (center) with Interior Minister Daniel Palacios (left) and Defense Minister Diego Molano (right) moments after the helicopter they were traveling was struck by rifle fire

Police in Colombia released a sketch of two men who reportedly opened fire with rifles belonging to the Venezuelan military

On Saturday, security forces combing the area for the suspects located the two rifles that were used in the attack. Both weapons belonged to the Venezuelan military

On Saturday, security forces combing the area for the suspects located the two rifles that were used in the attack. Both weapons belonged to the Venezuelan military.

The government has released sketches of the two male suspects they believe were involved in the shooting and are offering reward of three million Colombian pesos, about $809,000, for information that would help authorities arrest them.

Duque said the helicopter's equipment and capabilities 'prevented something lethal from happening.'

A video released by the presidency showed several bullet holes in the Colombian air force helicopter.

A helicopter which was carrying Colombian President Ivan Duque after it was targeted by rifle shots Friday

Colombia President Ivan Duque said the helicopter's equipment and capabilities 'prevented something lethal from happening

Duque said the 'cowardly' attack would not make him stop fighting drug trafficking, terrorism and organized crime.

'The message is that Colombia is always strong in the face of crime and our institutions are above any threat,' he said.

Cucuta was already on a security alert after a June 14 car bomb attack at a military base that caused 36 injuries to both members of the military and civilians.

Colombian authorities have not confirmed who was behind that attack, but have said they suspect dissidents from the now-defunct Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia guerrillas or the rebel National Liberation Army. The latter has denied being behind the attack.

In 2018, when the conservative Duque began his presidency, the government said it was investigating 'possible attacks' being planned against the president at a public event. The attacks never materialized.

A military helicopter transporting Colombia President Ivan Duque was struck by rifle fire on the fuselage last Friday
An Australian fashion designer whose creations are seen on runways around the world has been ordered to pay back $1.2million she received from her late father after she unconscientiously took advantage of his dementia.

Cristina Nitopi, who gave up a career as a counsellor to launch her label in 2007, received a series of payments totalling $3.2million from her father Egidio 'Tony' Nitopi, between 2008 and 2010.

Her brother Giuseppe Nitopi brought the action against his sister in the NSW Supreme Court, asking it to order Cristina to repay the money to the family's estate.

The court heard Tony had been suffering from dementia from October 2008 until his death in May 2014 at the age of 73 and was in a position of 'special disadvantage' during that time.

Mr Nitopi, a successful wholesaler and property developer, had left behind an estate worth $21million.

Fashion designer Cristina Nitopi was ordered to pay back $1.2million she received from her late father after she unconscientiously took advantage of his dementia

Justice Guy Parker found that Ms Nitopi, 39, 'ought to have known' of her father's disadvantage from June 2009 onwards, so that payments she received after that time were the result of 'unconscientiously taking advantage of him'.

The court heard from a close friend of Mr Nitopi's, Terence Raftery, about his conversations with his friend about the money he was giving to his daughter.

'She (Cristina) wants more money,' Mr Nitopi had said, to which Mr Raftery replied: 'What does a young girl do with all that money? I think you have given her enough'.

On another occasion, Mr Nitopi told Mr Raftery: 'Cristina needs money for her fashion label'.

'I think you have given her enough money,' Mr Raftery replied. 'She could have lived on what you've given her for the rest of her life'.

Cristina Nitopi's creations have been seen on runways around the world since she founded her label in 2007

In cross-examination Ms Nitopi explained the payments from her father were used to purchase real estate, and that she bought a total of five properties during the period, which had since been sold.

The claim by Giuseppe Nitopi succeeded in respect of six payments totalling $1.2million made to Cristina between June 2009 and June 2010, but failed on six other payments she received from her father before June 2009.

Giuseppe had earlier commenced legal action against his other sister, Rosaria, and his mother, Tina, over payments from the estate but had settled with them before proceedings commenced.

In a profile on the Catwalk Mag website, Ms Nitopi is described as having a passion for fashion from an early age thanks to her Italian background and her mother's taste.

Ms Nitopi's September 2020 Instagram post of herself as a child with her father, captioned: 'Thank you for being the best dad I could ever ask for'

'Growing up was like a fashion show always wearing new trends which her mother use to design and make for her.'

In September 2020 Ms Nitopi posted a photo of herself as a child with her father, captioned: 'Thank you for being the best dad I could ever ask for.'

There were no allegations of criminal wrongdoing made against Cristina Nitopi, her sister Rosaria or mother Tina.
A supermarket has sparked public outrage by 'mistakenly' tripling the price of face masks hours before new coronavirus restrictions were enforced.

The Australian Capital Territory made it mandatory to wear masks outdoors and public indoor settings on Monday in response to a growing outbreak in nearby Sydney.

As Canberrans rushed out to stock up on masks, shoppers were shocked to find packs of 50 selling for $120 at Supabarn Kingston in the city's south.

It didn't take long for locals to express their outrage and share photos of the price hike on social media.

Supabarn Kingston in the nation's capital were selling packs of 50 masks for $120 on Sunday night. The price has since been slashed to $40

'Didn't they make price gouging illegal? I am now boycotting Supabarn and will encourage whoever will listen to do so as well,' one person commented on Reddit.

Other Reddit users shared similar experiences.

'Friend just forked out $200 for 50 at some pharmacy. F****** insanity,' one wrote.

One Reddit user pointed out it was cheaper to buy 10 packs of five masks selling for $10.99 each.

Local community Facebook pages in the nation's capital were also flooded with angry comments.

'That's a ridiculous price,' one woman commented.

'Shameful behaviour,' another added.

The store (pictured) in Canberra's south later wound back the price hike, claiming it was a mistake

The store has also been inundated with negative Google reviews.

'How is it appropriate charging $120 for a 50 pack of masks? Other stores are charging $20-30 for the same brand. Exploiting their customers desperation at the expense of public health. Absolutely disgusting,' one man wrote.

Another added: 'Price gouging during Covid restrictions and then saying it was a mistake? Don't think so.

The widespread outrage prompted the supermarket chain to slash the price by $80.

'Things just changed so quickly last night and we acknowledge it was our mistake. The price has changed to $39.99 - we will not be making a profit,' a spokeswoman told the ABC.

'We are doing our best to keep up.'

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Supabarn for further comment.

The ACT introduced the wearing of mandatory masks in public this week. Pictured are visitors at Parliament House on Monday

Canberrans had until midnight Tuesday to adjust to the new mask rules before fines of up to $8,000 were enforced.

There are no currently active Covid cases in the nation's capital.

'The safety of our community is paramount, so we are bringing in this requirement as a proactive measure to support the strengthened travel restrictions that we have put in place,' the ACT government website states.

'This new requirement means, when people are indoors with people they dont usually live or work with, or on public transport, they must wear a face mask.'
The spread of the Delta Covid variant in Sydney schools has sparked fears the highly contagious strain is more transmissible among children than previous variants.

Monday's confirmed cases included two South Coogee Public School students. Four students at the school in the city's east have now tested positive.

Staff and more than 1,300 students at Rose Bay Secondary College have meanwhile been sent into self-isolation after a student contracted Covid-19.

Medical Journal of Australia editor Professor Nick Talley said evidence about the spread of the new variant globally indicated it may be more infectious among children than the original strain of the virus.

Scroll down for audio

Fears are growing the highly contagious Delta Covid-19 strain is more transmissible among children than previous variants. Pictured is a parent collecting children at St Charles Primary School at Waverley in Sydney's east last Tuesday

'We thought schools were not at as big a risk with the original virus - although there is a risk,' the epidemiologist told 2GB.

'But with Delta it may be a different situation.'

He pointed to recent studies in the UK which showed how the virus strain was spreading more rapidly through children than its predecessors.

'In the UK there's no doubt young children are being affected by the virus,' Professor Talley said.

'The only piece of good news is the rates of hospitalisations in the UK - in children with Covid - have not actually risen.

'So while children may get the virus and may actually get sick, the risk of them going to hospital might not be as we feared.'

Analysis from Public Health England found the Delta variant had a 60 per cent higher risk of household transmission than the Alpha virus - also known as the UK strain.

Australia's Chief Nursing Officer Alison McMillan on Monday said the Delta strain is 60 per cent more infectious than Alpha.

Staff and more than 1,300 students at Rose Bay Secondary College in Sydney's east (pictured) have been sent into self-isolation after a student contracted Covid-19

The spread of the virus in eastern Sydney schools comes as the number of sites exposed to the virus across the city swelled to more than 300.

A McDonald's, a busy bank and an entire hotel were added to Sydney's growing list of exposure sites on Tuesday morning, forcing hundreds into strict isolation.

The fast food outlet on Bondi Beach was marked as an exposure site on June 25 between 11.30am and 12pm while the Meriton Suites Hotel in Mascot is listed from all day on June 19 and June 21.

Macquarie Bank in Sydney's CBD was also exposed to Covid-19 all day on Monday June 21, while a case was linked to the Specsavers in Bondi Junction's Eastgate shopping centre.

Anyone who attended these venues is warned to isolate for two weeks regardless of their Covid test results.

A JB Hi-Fi, a popular chicken shop and 16 new public transport routes were added to Sydney's coronavirus exposure list on Monday night.

Karl's Charcoal Chicken in Marrickville has been listed as a high-risk site, while a number of train lines between Town Hall and the city's south were added as casual contacts.

Pictured: Children on Avalon Beach in Sydney's Northern Beaches. An epidemiologist pointed to recent studies in the UK which showed how the virus strain was spreading more rapidly through children than its predecessors

Monday's confirmed cases included two students from South Coogee Public School (pictured). Four students at the school in the city's east have now tested positive

Anyone who visited Karl's at G013/20 Smidmore Street on Wednesday 23 June between 12.10pm and 12.30pm must immediately be tested and self-isolate for 14 days regardless of the result.

Harvey Norman and JB Hi-Fi in the Bondi Junction Westfield were also added to the exposure list, with their contact coming on Friday June 25, the lead-up to the areas lockdown.

In Sydney's inner-west, the exposed venues include the Westpac bank in Marrickville between 2.30pm to 4pm on June 21, 22, and 23, and the Alexandria Shell Coles Express on June 26, from 10am to 10.15am.

The Westpac branch in Marrickville (pictured) has been added to the list of exposure sites, with anyone who visited on June 21, 22, and 23, between 2.30pm to 4pm, considered a casual contact

The alert also applies to those who visited two eastern suburbs shops inside Maroubra's Pacific Square Shopping Centre - Royale Poultry and Baker's Delight - on June 23, between 3.30pm to 3.40pm.

The times of concern for a previously listed venue, the Black and Gold Espresso in Roseberry, have also been extended after contact tracers reviewed information.

Anyone who attended the cafe on Friday 25 June between 10.30am to 11.30am is now considered a close contact and must immediately get tested and isolate for 14 days regardless of the result.

Those who visited First Choice Liquor in Maroubra are advised to monitor for symptoms, get tested if they develop, and isolate until receiving a negative result.

An alert has also been issued for Royale Poultry and Baker's Delight, in Maroubra's Pacific Square Shopping Centre (pictured), for those who visited the businesses on June 23 between 3.30pm to 3.40pm

The Harvey Norman and JB Hi-Fi stores inside Bondi Junction Westfield (pictured) were also added as exposure sites on Monday

Earlier on Monday, seven new venues were added to the list, including a Domino's Pizza store, a popular pub and another coffee shop.

The states health department also flagged a petrol station, a Woolworths, a Bunnings hardware store and a Coles Express.

The venues are spread throughout Sydney from the outer western suburbs to the Inner West and the Covid-ravaged east.

NSW recorded 18 new locally-acquired infections on Monday, bringing the spiralling Bondi cluster to 130 cases on the second day Greater Sydney's two-week lockdown.
A popular childcare chain has sparked outrage after encouraging parents to ask their babies for permission before changing their nappies.

Staff at Only About Children, which runs 22 centres in Victoria, have also been told to give babies a warning before washing their faces.

Workers have even put an end to demanding that babies 'stop crying' and hitting other kids.

The franchise sent a letter to parents encouraging them to wait before their child has finished playing before changing their nappy as they 'don't like to be interrupted'.

Staff at Only About Children have encouraged parents to ask their babies for permission to change their nappies (stock image)

'Ask for your baby's help, talk them through what you are doing and encourage the use of senses,' the letter read, according to The Herald Sun.

'When toddlers become mobile, nappy changing may look quite different. Continue to ask for co-operation but understand that your toddler may wish to now stand for their nappy change.'

National education manager Angela Ngavaine said staff 'involve' the babies and toddlers in the process by asking 'are you ready for a nappy change?'

'Some may look away or shake their head and so we say, "I can see you're not ready, how about I change Jack and then come back to you?'" she said.

Ms Ngavaine said staff are also encouraged to warn a child before wiping food off their face.

But Aussies have slammed the move as 'utterly ridiculous' and 'nonsense'.

Workers at the childcare centre also don't give children time outs if they engage in bad behaviour like hitting other kids

The childcare franchise sent a letter to parents encouraging them to wait before their child has finished playing before changing their nappy as they 'don't like to be interrupted'

'I wonder what a respected clinical psychologist would say about this?' one social media user wrote.

'What a joke. The worlds gone mad and to think some mothers/parents will believe this crap,' said another.

'Can I ask my toddler to cook dinner for us. Vacuum the house and do some washing. Then they can put themselves to bed,' a third comment read.

'If I had to ask and wait for my toddler son to stop playing. He would have had nappy burn from sitting too long in a dirty nappy. He never stopped playing. This is just stupid.'
A Woolworths shopper has been labelled 'pathetic' after she jumped onto a pallet of toilet paper during Sydney's Covid-19 lockdown and posted the footage on TikTok.

The footage shows a woman, 20, running up and jumping onto the pallet in the middle of an aisle at a Woolworths supermarket in Sydney.

The selfish stunt, which has been viewed over 130,000 times, left some packs of toilet paper unfit for sale when the the item is in high demand due to the current lockdown in NSW.

Footage also shows the shopper and her friends smiling after the pointless prank.

Other TikTok users were quick to call out the shopper's 'prank'.

The woman prepares to run and jump into a pallet of toilet paper in a Sydney supermarket

Her utter stupidity resulted in some of the toilet paper being damaged and left unfit for sale

'She needs to be thrown out of the store,' said one.

'Pathetic,' added another.

'Do you feel cool now?' fumed a third.

A Woolworths spokesperson confirmed the supermarket is investigating the incident.

'We have been made aware of a video on social media which appears to be in one of our stores,' a spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia.

'We are currently looking into the circumstances surrounding it.'

The new TikTok video comes as supermarkets in parts of Australia have been swamped by panic-buying shoppers.

On Monday night, Woolworths and Coles introduced a two-pack per person limit of toilet paper in NSW, the ACT and NT.

It comes after scores of customers began stockpiling toilet paper after NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian announced the 14-day lockdown on Saturday.

Woolworths managing director and CEO Brad Banducci remains baffled by the mass panic buying of toilet paper.

'Frustratingly, we currently have a two-pack per shop limit on toilet paper after we have seen a huge surge, which has lead to some shortages in-store and online,' he said in an email to customers.

'It seems the almost primordial urge to pantry stock toilet paper is symbolic of these times.

'As stated previously, we ask you to only buy what you need.'
The family of a 32-year-old woman killed in a house fire have paid tribute to the mother-of-10.

Kelly-Marie Watton was pronounced dead at the scene of blaze, which broke out on Moor Lane in Holywell in the early hours of Sunday, June 20.

On Monday her heartbroken family described her as 'the life and joy of the party' and said her death has left them 'in complete despair'.

Kelly-Marie Watton was pronounced dead at the scene of blaze, which broke out on Moor Lane in Holywell in the early hours of Sunday, June 20

In a statement released via North Wales Police they said: 'Kelly-Marie Watton, aged only 32, was one of six children, having three sisters and two brothers.

'She was the eldest child to Jackie and Paul, she was a mum to 10 very beautiful children who she loved very much.

'She was also a very much adored auntie and cousin.

'Kelly was very well-known and very well-liked, always being described as 'being the life and joy of the party'.

'She has left her whole family in complete despair and she will be forever missed.'

The tribute comes as inquest into her death was opened on Monday.

On Monday her heartbroken family described her as 'the life and joy of the party' and said her death has left them 'in complete despair'

Her death was confirmed at 2.03am, approximately half an hour after emergency services, including police, fire and rescue, and ambulance attended the scene on the Holway estate.

Ms Watton, who was the only person at the property when the blaze broke out, was found on a sofa.

She was identified by police officers using photographic identification, Elizabeth Dudley-Jones, assistant coroner for North Wales east and central, heard at Ruthin County Hall.

The inquest was adjourned to a date yet to be fixed.

North Wales Police continue to assist North Wales Fire and Rescue Service in relation to the investigation into the blaze.
The frosty relationship between NSW's Gladys Berejiklian and Queensland's Annastacia Palaszczuk has again been laid bare in a series of icy text messages between the pair.

The conversations were released under a Right To Information request and appear to show the breakdown in civil communication between the two leaders.

What started out as warm and friendly texts between the pair in January 2020 after the devastating bushfires have since descended into single-word 'thx' responses.

The two leaders have been at loggerheads over the response to Covid since the first the pandemic started, with a series of border closures between NSW and Queensland causing havoc for residents of both states.

Text messages between state premiers Gladys Berejiklian and Annastacia Palaszczuk started out warmly , as seen in this exchange from April 2020 (left). But tensions over the border closures between New South Wales and Queensland saw communications break down in increasingly terse texts, like this exchange, pictured on the right, on November 5, 2020

The two leaders (pictured) have been at loggerheads over their responses to the Covid pandemic since lockdowns began in March last year and a series of border closures between NSW and Queensland which caused havoc for locals

Ms Berejiklian has been vocal in her frustration at Queensland repeatedly shutting out its southern neighbour - but Ms Palaszczuk has been equally resolute in defending her cautious approach.

The text messages - some of which were censored before release because they contained personal or irrelevant information - reveal Ms Berejikian repeatedly mis-spelled Ms Palaszczuk's first name, using only one N instead of two, and two Ss.

The pair exchanged 20 messages between January 2020 and March 18 2021, with nine of them redacted, according to the Daily Telegraph.

They start on January 3 2020, when Ms Palaszczuk texted her NSW counterpart to offer help in the response to the bushfires hitting the NSW south coast.

'Anything more we can do to help please let me know. Cheers annastacia' she texted.

Ms Berejiklian replied: 'Thanks Anastasia[sic]. Much appreciated. We are as well prepared for tomorrow as we can be. Victoria also I'm [sic} very bad shape. Take care and stay in touch.'

Gladys Berejiklian (left) has been vocal in her frustration at Queensland repeatedly shutting out its southern neighbour - but Annastacia Palaszczuk (right) has been equally resolute in defending her cautious approach

As the Covid crisis began to spread out across the world from Wuhan in China's Hubei province, the pair swapped notes on January 31.

'I have written to the PM about more info on arrivals from Hubei province FYI,' texted Ms Palaszczuk 'Hope you are going OK. Tough year for bushfires. Kind regards annastacia.'

Ms Berejiklian replied: 'Thanks for letting me know Anastacia [sic]. We are hoping worst of season is behind us....'

When the nation went into lockdown mode in March, and Australia began holding national cabinet meetings with all the state leaders, Ms Palaszczuk again reached out to Ms Berejiklian as the pair shared their concerns over the impact of the pandemic.

'Hi, I just wanted to touch base and hope you are going ok. I think everyone is working well together. I agree with you it's tough not seeing our families. Cheers annastacia,' she wrote on April 7, 2020.

The NSW premier replied, spelling her name correctly for the one and only time during the exchanges: 'Thanks Annastacia. Kind of you to send the message. There is some comfort in knowing we are all going through this together.'

Over the winter though, the tensions began to show. As NSW dealt with localised cluster outbreaks without going into lockdown, Queensland responded by closing its border to NSW residents.

Ms Berejiklian snapped in one text: 'All I have had are questions from the media about statements you and you colleagues have made on the border.'

And on September 22, 2020, Ms Berejiklian sent another terse message: 'Hi Anastasia [sic] [redacted] My health Minister has already been in touch with yours. Thanks again.'

NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian (pictured) congratulated her Queensland counterpart on her state election win ahead of last year's opening State of Origin clash but received no reply

The NSW premier was warmer in November though after Ms Palaszczuk was returned to power in the Queensland state elections - but the border closures still rankled.

'Hi Anastasia [sic]' she wrote on November 1. 'Congratulations on your election election [sic] win. I can imagine how difficult that was during a pandemic! Hope we can work together to get our border open, Regards Gladys.'

But she was ghosted by her counterpart and the message got no response until four days later after Queensland snatched the NRL State of Origin opener 18-14 at Adelaide Oval.

Ms Palaszczuk gloated simply in a message: 'Queenslander. Great game.'

In a text to her NSW counterpart, Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk (pictured) gloated simply in a message: 'Queenslander. Great game'

Despite the chilly texts, Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk insists she and NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian (pictured) are still friendly in real-life

The NSW Premier fumed to the press at the time: 'She didn't mention borders or thanks for the congratulations. I didn't know whether to be shocked or bemused frankly.'

It would be three months of bitter battle between the two states before the border would re-open, with the NSW Premier given just 30 minutes notice of the decision.

'We are happy to reopen to all of nsw [sic] on feb1 [sic]. I will be doing a press conference in 30 mins,' the Queensland Premier texted on January 28.

The NSW premier had a one word response: 'Thx'.

Despite the chilly texts, Ms Palaszczuk insists the pair are still friendly in real-life.

'She'll always stand up for her state, I'll stand up for my state,' the Queensland premier said in February.

'Everyone tries to portray it as some sort of fight and it's simply not. It is simply not. I think it is over-reporting, we get on incredibly well behind the scenes.'

On Tuesday, her office told Daily Mail Australia: 'The Premier has a good working relationship with all Premiers. They are all focused on the serious COVID situation and keeping their states safe.

Daily Mail Australia has also contacted the NSW Premier for comment.
A middle school teacher from Washington State has come in for criticism after handing out flyers that advised students on sex and how to go about getting a abortion, without first getting the consent of parents.

The fact sheet, which was said to have been produced by Planned Parenthood, told eighth-grade kids aged 13 and 14 that they could obtain abortions 'AT ANY AGE' and without parental consent.

It went on to state they could also purchase condoms 'AT ANY AGE' and that someone could engage in sex as young as 11 so long as their partner was less than two years older than them.

For curious middle schoolers, the flyer details the age of consent and reminds them that anyone 14 or older does not need permission from a parent for STD and HIV testing or treatment.

A flyer was given to 8th graders that addressed issues of abortion, birth control, consent laws and condoms without first getting permission from children's parents

Eric Hogan, the assistant director of secondary education for the district explained in a letter sent home to parents, how the mistake was made

The school district claims that the distribution of such material was a mistake.

Eric Hogan, the assistant director of secondary education for the district said in a letter sent home to parents that the flyer was only distributed at Stewart Middle School in Tacoma and that 'corrective action has been taken with this employee.'

Further information on what punishment the teacher faced has not been shared.

'The flyer is not part of our curriculum and should not have been sent home with students,' Hogan said.

'Previously, Planned Parenthood taught within our schools and supplied the flyer that was distributed to students,' Hogan explained to Fox News.

The flyer was only distributed at Stewart Middle School in Tacoma, pictured. 'Corrective action has been taken with this employee,' according to Eric Hogan, the assistant director of secondary education for the district

'We discovered a binder of curriculum materials was left behind for an incoming teacher to use for this year, and this flyer was in the binder. Not realizing the flyer wasn't approved material, the teacher sent it home with students.'

The flyer also advised students they would be able to receive a prescription for birth control without a parent's permission and receive the emergency contraceptive Plan B without a prescription.

Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) have so far not commented on the incident.
A passenger who tried to break into an airplane cockpit last week had recently been under the influence of methamphetamine before he jumped from the moving plane in Los Angeles, authorities said Monday.

Luis Antonio Victoria Dominguez, 33, of La Paz, Mexico, broke his leg Friday when he opened the plane's emergency exit and jumped to the tarmac at Los Angeles International Airport, according to the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles.

He underwent surgery and is expected to appear in federal court this week on a charge of interference with a flight crew, which could bring 20 years in prison if he is convicted.

It was not immediately clear if he had an attorney who could speak on his behalf, NBC Bay Area reports.

Luis Antonio Victoria Dominguez, 33, of La Paz, Mexico, broke his leg Friday when he opened the plane's emergency exit and jumped to the tarmac at Los Angeles International Airport

He underwent surgery and is expected to appear in federal court this week on a charge of interference with a flight crew, which could bring 20 years in prison

Victoria Dominguez wrenched open the emergency exit door and the emergency slide deployed as the attendant called the pilots to stop the plane

Victoria Dominguez took his seat and began to doze as he 'was coming down from all the drugs he had used the last couple of days,' the criminal complaint says

A criminal complaint released Monday gave new details about the incident and Victoria Dominguez's life in the days prior.

The 33-year-old arrived in Los Angeles on Tuesday from Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, the complaint says.

His plan was to get to Salt Lake City, but he did not have a connecting flight. He spent the night at a hotel in downtown Los Angeles after drinking several beers and buying 'a lot' of crystal meth for $20, he told the FBI.

The next day, he continued to smoke the crystal meth and decided to fly to Utah instead of taking a bus, the complaint says.

He smoked more of the drug before heading to the airport Thursday but ultimately missed his flight and wandered the streets through the night.

On Friday, he missed a second flight but was rescheduled to board United Airlines Flight 5365, operated by SkyWest Airlines, to Salt Lake City.

Victoria Dominguez got away and jumped from the aircraft, missing the emergency slide and landing on the tarmac, breaking his right leg

Victoria Dominguez took his seat and began to doze as he 'was coming down from all the drugs he had used the last couple of days,' the complaint says.

The passenger sitting next to Victoria Dominguez told authorities that he kept looking around and fidgeting.

He asked her where she was going, and she said it was not his business. She said he then whispered to her that he needed to get off the plane and was going to jump out. 'I'm serious,' he said.

Victoria Dominguez, however, told the FBI that he had he heard other passengers laugh and say they were going to a different destination, the complaint says.

On Friday, he missed a second flight but was rescheduled to board United Airlines Flight 5365, operated by SkyWest Airlines, to Salt Lake City

He panicked and 'sprinted' toward a flight attendant at the front of the plane around 7pm and said he wasn't feeling well and needed to get off the flight.

The flight attendant said the plane was about to take off and they began to struggle, the complaint says.

He pounded on the locked cockpit door and tried to open it as the flight attendant prayed the pilots - who were confused by the banging - would not open the door, according to the document.

Victoria Dominguez wrenched open the emergency exit door and the emergency slide deployed, according to the complaint, as the flight attendant called the pilots to stop the plane.

He told the FBI that his panic attack potentially 'gave him the strength to open the door.' The aircraft, which had not been moving before, began to roll as Victoria Dominguez struggled with a passenger who was trying to restrain him.

It was the second disruption at LAX in two days

Victoria Dominguez got away and jumped from the aircraft, missing the emergency slide and landing on the tarmac, breaking his right leg. He was trying to crawl away from the plane when he was apprehended.

The plane was forced to return to its gate due to the incident, the airport said. It was still there hours later at 10pm before finally taking off late Friday night.

Nobody else aboard the plane was injured, according to authorities.

It was the second disruption at LAX in two days.

On Thursday, a driver plowed through a chain-link fence at a FedEx cargo facility and went onto the airfield, crossing runways as police chased the car.

Authorities claim they were tailing the man, who drove a gray Mazda hatchback with the letters 'SOS' written on the hood, as he pulled off of a highway on the airport's south side before barreling into the gate at the FedEx warehouse on FAX air grounds, according to CBS News.

Police said the driver was detained and no injuries were reported, however two runways were briefly closed.

The FAA said it had received reports of 394 cases of passengers allegedly 'interfering with the duties of a crew member' as of May 25, in 2021 - the highest number since records began in 1995.
The Biden administration is attempting to portray the Republicans as the party of 'defund the police' after they voted against the president's American Rescue Plan - which included funding for law enforcement.

The left-wing rallying call to defund the police grew after the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin, and was embraced by progressives such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

But it has frequently been greeted with incomprehension and resistance, even within Democrat groups.

On Monday White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said that the Republicans were the drivers of the move to defund the police because in March they voted against the $1.9trillion proposal even though it included $350billion for state and local governments that could be used for local police.

Jen Psaki, the White House spokesman, on Monday was asked about remarks over the weekend made by Cedric Richmond. Richmond claimed that the Republicans were defunding the police, because they refused to back Biden's $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, to help the country recover from COVID and provide funding to police departments

It was signed in March, despite every single Republican in Congress voting against it.

Fox News' Peter Doocy had asked Psaki how Cedric Richmond, one of Biden's advisors, could claim that Republicans defunded the police by not supporting the American Rescue Plan.

'But how is it that that is an argument to be made when the president never mentioned needing money for police to stop a crime wave when he was selling the American Rescue Plan?' Doocy asked.

Psaki replied: 'Well, the president did mention that the American Rescue Plan, the state and local funding, something that was supported by the president, a lot of Democrats who supported and voted for the bill, could help ensure local cops were kept on the beat in communities across the country.

'As you know, it didn't receive a single Republican vote.

'That funding has been used to keep cops on the beat.'

'Defund the Police' has become a widespread rallying cry, especially in response to the death of George Floyd. But polls show that it is not a popular or well-understood concept, and the Biden administration is trying to move away from it. Pictured: Demonstrators are seen marching around McCarren Park in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on June 7, 2020

Psaki added: 'I think that any local department would argue that keeping cops on the beat to keep communities safe when they had to - because of budget shortfalls - fire police is something that helped them address crime in their local communities.'

New York City in August cut $1billion from its $6billion policing bill.

Austin, Texas cut its police budget in August by 35 percent, with 5 percent taking immediate effect.

Seattle cut the police budget by 20 percent in December.

City councils have cut police budgets in nearly two dozen other cities, although mostly because the pandemic has battered municipal finances.

Defunding the police has not received widespread support, with both Barack Obama and Joe Biden saying they do not support the idea.

An Ipsos/USA Today poll released in March found that only 18 percent of Americans support defunding the police, and 11 percent support abolition.

About 57 percent support fully funding their own local police department, while 43 percent support redirecting some of that money to social services.

Protesters are pictured in Phoenix, Arizona, on June 3, 2020

Biden, pictured in March 2009, has said that he is not in favor of defunding the police

Biden's senior advisor Cedric Richmond is blaming Republicans for 'defunding police'

At the weekend Richmond, a senior advisor to the president, railed against Republicans on Fox News Sunday.

'Let's talk about who defunded the police,' he said.

'When we were in Congress last year trying to pass a rescue plan  I'm sorry, not the rescue plan but an emergency relief plan for cities that were cash-strapped and laying off police and firefighters  it was the Republicans who objected to it.

'And in fact, they didn't get funding until the American Rescue Plan, which our plan allowed state and local governments to replenish their police departments and do the other things that are needed.

'So look, Republicans are very good at staying on talking points of who says defund the police, but the truth is, they defunded the police, we funded crime intervention, and a whole bunch of other things.'
Spain and Greece were last night leading the resistance to Germanys demand for Europe to effectively ban British holidaymakers this summer.

EU diplomats clashed at a behind-closed-doors meeting in Brussels, with German officials pushing hard to convince other countries to quarantine all UK arrivals  even those whove been vaccinated.

Yesterday, both Portugal and Malta announced new quarantine-on-arrival rules for British holidaymakers.

However, they stopped short of German demands and exempted those who have received both doses of a coronavirus vaccine.

Angela Merkel has been pushing for EU-wide restrictions on Britons amid fears on the continent over the Indian, or Delta, variant. Pictured: Merkel talks with France's President Emmanuel Macron

Meanwhile, both Spain and Greece said they would not even require Britons to be fully vaccinated  insisting they would welcome UK tourists simply with proof of a negative Covid test.

Angela Merkel has been pushing for EU-wide restrictions on Britons amid fears on the continent over the Indian, or Delta, variant.

The German Chancellor used a summit in Brussels last week to try to strongarm fellow leaders into all imposing a 14-day quarantine for all British arrivals.

The issue is critical, with ministers here just having promised to open up foreign holidays to amber list destinations this summer  which includes most of Europe.

Greece and Spain have argued against the German proposals, with Greek tourism minister Harry Theoharis saying yesterday: There is no tightening of the restrictions for the time being.

He said his country would be increasing the number of tests we are doing at the borders, but that the plan was to continue accepting unvaccinated as well as fully inoculated UK travellers.

Yesterday, both Portugal and Malta announced new quarantine-on-arrival rules for British holidaymakers. Pictured: Holidaymakers enjoying the clear waters of the Blue Lagoon in Malta

Meanwhile in a further direct snub to Berlin, Spanish foreign minister Arancha Gonzalez Laya said her government would still welcome British citizens to spend their holidays in Spain.

Madrid announced a slight tightening of restrictions which, from Thursday, will mean unvaccinated UK holidaymakers will have to show proof of a negative test on arrival in Spain.

But crucially, no British tourists will be subject to quarantine, a huge boost for the 18million Britons who visited Spain annually pre-pandemic.

Since last month all UK holidaymakers, regardless of their vaccination status, have been permitted to enter Spain without proof of a negative test. It means unvaccinated holidaymakers travelling from this week to the Balearic Islands, which also joins the UKs green list tomorrow, will now need a negative test to enter.

Portugal went further than Spain by announcing that only fully vaccinated Britons will be allowed to enter for holidays without having to quarantine on arrival.

Meanwhile, both Spain and Greece said they would not even require Britons to be fully vaccinated - and would welcome UK tourists simply with proof of a negative Covid test

German officials pushing hard to convince other countries to quarantine all UK arrivals  even those whove been vaccinated

Britain remains ahead of France and Germany in the race to vaccinate its entire adult population

Those not fully vaccinated will have to quarantine for 14 days regardless of whether they have a negative test. It will be a blow to young adults not due to receive their second jab until after the summer. It could also kill off summer holidays to Portugal for families where parents are fully vaccinated but children are yet to receive their second jab.

The rules also mean that anyone aged 12 and over that is not fully vaccinated must quarantine on arrival in Portugal.

As Britain is not vaccinating under-18s, this would also block holidays for families with children between 12 and 17 years old.

However, the measures keep the hopes of foreign holidays alive for those that are double-jabbed. And in a further boost, the new rules will not apply to Madeira, where unvaccinated Britons will still be welcome with a negative test.

Malta yesterday, however, confirmed it is introducing the same measures as mainland Portugal, ruling out holidays for all but double-jabbed travellers.

Highlighting the split among European countries about what to do with British tourists, one EU diplomat said of the possibility of a bloc-wide ban as pushed for by Germany: This is something that cannot be done. They decided that it is up to member states to decide whether they will impose further measures or not.

Mrs Merkels official spokesman, Steffen Seibert, admitted there was little appetite for a tougher EU-wide ban, but vowed to continue pushing for it.

He said: Where this uniformity does not exist, we will continue to campaign for it. Mrs Merkel has taken a consistently hard line to border controls and is even introducing restrictions on fellow EU member Portugal after Delta variant cases surged there.

Even France, which has backed Mrs Merkels call for an EU-wide policy, supports quarantine-free travel for fully vaccinated people and accepts double-jabbed UK holidaymakers.

One EU diplomat said Mrs Merkel was looking increasingly isolated over the issue.

It came as Abta wrote to Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Transport Secretary Grant Shapps urging them to speed up the reopening of international travel.

The UKs largest travel association called for more major destinations to be added to the green list and for plans to drop quarantine for fully vaccinated Britons returning from amber countries to be fast-tracked. It also called for a fresh rescue package.
A health inspector has revealed the industry secrets every diner should know to avoid a dodgy restaurant.

TikTok user SemyKitten, an Australian health inspector who regularly makes videos about her career, filmed a foolproof guide to steering clear of dirty kitchens.

She encouraged her 11,000 followers to use three simple rules to judge the cleanliness of any cafe, pub, fast food outlet or restaurant.

Her first tip for customers is to always check if the kitchen is visible from the seating areas.

TikTok user SemyKitten, a health inspector who regularly makes videos about her unusual career, gave her followers a guide to how to spot an eatery with a dirty kitchen

The health inspector also warned that the size of the kitchen can be a good indication of how hygienic the venue is (stock image)

Surprisingly, the health inspector said the lighting in a kitchen can also pay a part in how safely the food is prepared (stock image)

'Most food shops you can actually see the kitchen and what's going on inside there,' she said.

The health inspector also warned that the size of the kitchen can be a good indication of how hygienic the restaurant is.

'If the kitchen looks really small for the amount of stuff that's in there, if there are just too many people in that kitchen for its size - don't eat there,' she said.

Surprisingly, the health inspector insists the way a kitchen is lit can also provide important clues about how safe the food is.

'If the lighting in that kitchen is bad - don't eat there,' she said.

Her final red flag is a kitchen that's crammed full of staff.

'If there are just too many people in that kitchen for its size - don't eat there,' she advised.

How to spot a dodgy restaurant 1) The kitchen is too small 2) 'Terrible' lighting in the kitchen 3) Too many people packed into a small space in the kitchen Advertisement

'The possibility of food contamination is very high and hygiene standards very low.

'All three clues must be identified for that one shop.'

SemyKitten has previously given her followers insight into how to identify which venues have been fined by health inspectors in the past.

'Every time a penalty notice is issued by a health inspector, it goes on a database which can be accessed by the general public,' she said.

Customers can simply Google 'NSW Food Authority name and shame' before clicking on the 'penalty notices' link.

'The prosecutions are the ones that are really endangering people's health,' she said.

Consumers will then be brought to a page where they can look up a particular business or search by postcode.

'Health inspectors do not penalise lightly. Treat this as a survival hack,' she said.
Fewer than one in 20 women support the replacement of mens and womens loos with gender-neutral ones, a poll reveals.

Just four per cent would be happy if restaurants, hotels, bars, theatres, cinemas, concert venues and stadiums abolished separate toilets for two sexes.

Men are almost as unenthusiastic. Fewer than one in ten support the loss of their own loos in public spaces.

But a third of those questioned said they did support having gender-neutral toilets alongside those for men and women.

A YouGov poll revealed fewer than one in 20 women support the replacement of mens and womens loos with gender-neutral ones

The findings from the poll carried out by YouGov and released yesterday suggest the rise in gender-neutral public loos is against the grain of public sentiment.

The issue has become one of the battlegrounds between transgender rights lobbyists and feminists.

Attempts to introduce gender-neutral loos in public spaces or in offices have routinely provoked protests from women who refuse to use them.

The findings, made available by YouGov online, were highlighted by plumbing retail website Boiler Central.

Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick said separate facilities were a necessity, adding that the Government intended to ensure 'women can expect a sense of dignity, security and safety

The firm said a third of the population are in support of adding gender-neutral bathrooms alongside separate bathrooms for men and women to public spaces.

According to the polling, more than half the population want to see only separate male and female facilities  52 per cent of women and 54 per cent of men.

It found Tory supporters were the most in favour of the provision of separate male and female loos alone  73 per cent against 33 per cent of Labour supporters.

Only 10 per cent of Labour supporters backed the idea of the abolition of male and female toilets in favour of gender-neutral ones.

The evidence of the unpopularity of shared facilities follows the launch of a Government review.

Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick said last autumn separate facilities were a necessity, adding that the Government intended to make sure women can expect a sense of dignity, security and safety.

In May his department said it was amending legislation to ensure new offices, shops and venues, as well as publicly-funded buildings such as hospitals, would have to have separate facilities.
A McDonald's, a busy bank and an entire hotel have been added to Sydney's growing list of exposure sites, forcing hundreds of people into strict isolation.

The fast food outlet on Bondi Beach was marked as an exposure site on June 25 between 11.30am and 12pm while the Meriton Suites Hotel in Mascot is listed all day on June 19 and June 21.

Macquarie Bank in Sydney's CBD was also exposed to Covid-19 all day on Monday June 21, while a case was linked to the Specsavers store in Bondi Junction's Eastgate shopping centre.

Anyone who attended these venues must isolate for two weeks regardless of their Covid test results.

McDonald's Bondi Beach has been exposed to the virus, with anybody who visited the restaurant on the morning of June 25 ordered to get tested and isolate immediately

NSW Health says anyone who visited Karl's Charcoal Chicken in Marrickville (pictured) on Wednesday, June 23 between 12.10pm and 12.30pm is a close contact and must get tested and self-isolate for 14 days, regardless of their test result

The Specsavers in Bondi Junction Eastgate Shopping Centre was also exposed to the virus on June 26

An IGA supermarket in Blaxland in the Blue Mountains was also exposed to the virus on June 27 from 6am to 4pm as cases continue to rise in NSW.

Public transport users were also hard hit with infected passengers travelling on 10 bus routes and six trains.

Karl's Charcoal Chicken in Marrickville has been listed as a high-risk site, while a number of train lines between Town Hall and the city's south were added as casual contacts.

Anyone who visited Karl's at G013/20 Smidmore Street on Wednesday 23 June between 12.10pm and 12.30pm must immediately be tested and self-isolate for 14 days regardless of the result.

Harvey Norman and JB Hi-Fi in Bondi Junction Westfield were also added to the exposure list, with their contact coming on Friday June 25, the lead-up to the area's lockdown.

The public health alerts issued late on Monday come after the state recorded 18 new locally acquired infections, bringing the total number of cases linked to the ever-growing Bondi cluster to 130.

NEW NSW EXPOSURE SITES Get tested and isolate for 14 days regardless of the result: Bondi Junction, Specsavers Bondi Junction Eastgate - June 26 from 3.50pm-5pm Bondi Beach, McDonald's - June 25 from 11.30am - 12pm Randwick, A Man and His Monkey Cafe - June 20 from 1pm-2.30pm Sydney, Macquarie Bank (3rd floor) - June 21 from 8.30am-6.30pm Marrickville, Karl's Charcoal Chicken - June 23 from 12.10pm - 12.30pm Get tested and isolate until a negative result: Mascot, Meriton Suites Hotel - June 19 all day, June 21 all day Double Bay, The Good Filo Express Double Bay - June 21 from 7.30am-8am Sydney, Macquarie Bank (excluding 3rd floor) - June 21 from 8.30am-6.30pm Bondi, Organic Republic Bakery - June 20 from 9am-10am, June 21 from 8.30am-9.30am and June 24 from 8.30am-9.30am Rose Bay, Domino's Pizza Rose Bay - June 26 from 1.25pm - 1.40pm Blaxland, Supa IGA Blaxland - June 27 from 6am - 4pm Advertisement

Bus and train routes declared Covid exposure sites Anyone who travelled on the following train routes at the listed times is considered a casual contact and must immediately get tested and self-isolate until a negative result is received. TRAINS: T4 Train Line from Town Hall to Sydenham on Wednesday, June 23 departed 6:25am - arrived 6:36am T4 Train Line from Sydneham to Town Hall Wednesday, June 23 departed 4pm - arrived 4:13pm. T4 Train Line from Hurstville to Wolli Creek, Thursday June 24 departed 12:47pm - arrived 12:56pm. T4 Train Line from Town Hall to Sydneham, Thursday June 24 departed 6:35am - arrived 6:40am T4 Train Line from Wolli Creek to Hurstville, Thursday June 24 departed 11:10am - arrived 11:22am. T3 Train Line from Sydenham to Town Hall, Thursday June 24 departed 3:48pm - arrived 4:02pm. BUSES: Drummoyne to Town Hall. 504 bus from Lyons Road to Stand H Park Street Town Hall, Wednesday June 23, departed 6:07am - arrived 6:22am. Town Hall to Drummoyne. 503 bus from Stand K Park Street Town Hall to Drummoyne Fire Station, Wednesday June 23 departed 4:24pm - arrived 4:43pm. Drummoyne to Drummoyne. 490 bus. Lyons Road at Formosa Street to Lyons Road Gipps Street, Wednesday June 23, departed 5:12pm - arrived 5:16pm Drummoyne to Town Hall. 504 bus from Lyons Road to Stand H Park Street Town Hall, Thursday June 24 departed 6:08am - arrived 6:25am Town Hall to Drummoyne. 500X bus from Stand K, Park Street Town Hall to Victoria Road after Lyons Street, June 24 departed 4:12pm - 4:26pm. Drummoyne to Drummoyne. 492 bus from Lyons Road to Rodd Point shops, Friday June 25 departed 4:25pm - arrived 4:30pm. Drummoyne to Drummoyne. 490 bus from Lyons Road to Rodd Point shops, Friday June 25 departed 8:42am - arrived 8:47am. Drummoyne to Haberfield. 406 bus from Rodd Point shops to Dalhousie Street before Parramatta Road, Friday June 25 departed 8:48am - arrived 8:54am. Haberfield to Five Dock. 406 bus from Dalhousie Street to Ramsey Road, Friday June 25 departed 9:23am - arrived 9:32am. Five Dock to Drummoyne. 503 bus from Five Dock shops Great Northern Road to Lyons Road at Byrne Avenue, Friday June 25 departed 9:53am - arrived 10:02am. Advertisement

Macquarie Bank in Sydney's CBD has also been exposed to the virus with those working on the 3rd floor on June 21 to go into two weeks of isolation

Sydney, Wollongong, the Blue Mountains, Shellharbour and the Central Coast are just three days into a 14-day lockdown.

Residents and anyone who has worked in Sydney in the last two weeks are only allowed to leave home to shop for food or other essential goods and services, give medical care or for compassionate needs, to exercise outdoors with a maximum of ten people, or for essential work or education.

Masks must be worn at all indoor public venues, while hospitality venues and pubs are only permitted to stay open to serve takeaway.

Households will not be allowed to have any visitors, although there are exceptions for intimate partners that don't live with each other who are permitted to visit each other's homes.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian said workers and students can only leave the house if they are unable to get educated or work from home.

Those who were at the Meriton Suites Hotel in Mascot on June 19 and June 21 are urged to get tested and isolate until a negative result

Many people were seen walking in Sydney (two women are pictured at Bondi Beach on Sunday) as the city started its two-week lockdown

Fifteen of the 18 new cases are linked to the Bondi cluster while three were acquired overseas (pictured, people in Sydney's locked-down CBD on Monday)

Ms Berejiklian said about six of the state's new cases were in isolation for their entire infectious period, while more were isolated for part of the same period.

'Unfortunately some were active in the community. As Dr Kerry Chant has told us already, the cases we are seeing today are a reflection of what may have occurred in the previous week and obviously there is a lag time,' she told reporters on Monday.

Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant said officials will need to wait 'at least another five days' to reap the benefits of lockdown.

'It is important the community understands that the numbers are not expected to decline for another five days,' she said.

With Australia on the brink of an out-of-control nationwide outbreak, the national cabinet met on Monday to discuss the unfolding situation with lockdowns and tighter restrictions being enforced around the country.

Pictured: Commuters are seen boarding a bus in Sydney as multiple train and bus routes were flagged as Covid exposure sites.

Scott Morrison later announced vaccination of aged care workers and everyone in the hotel quarantine system is to be made mandatory under a move endorsed by the cabinet.

This includes anyone who worked, either directly or indirectly, in hotel quarantine - including drivers.

In a change of policy to help the lagging Covid rollout, the Prime Minister also confirmed anyone under 60 can now get the AstraZeneca jab if they want to, despite earlier advice that younger people should get a different jab.

The decisions come as Australia's growing coronavirus outbreaks have reignited calls for vaccinations to be increased amid concern about the highly contagious Indian Delta strain sweeping across Sydney.

Sydney's soaring outbreak began when an unvaccinated limo driver transporting flight crew caught the virus and started unknowingly spreading it around Bondi.

The prime minister said the mandatory vaccines would apply to anyone who worked, either directly or indirectly, in hotel quarantine - including drivers. He is pictured visiting a vaccine manufacturing facility in February

The national cabinet decision comes as outbreaks have reignited calls for vaccinations to be increased Pictured: Staff are seen leaving Arcare Aged Care facility in Melbourne last month

Asked whether those under 40 could receive the AstraZeneca jab, as the nation waits for shipments of Pfizer, Mr Morrison said Australians could do so after seeking medical advice.

'If they are willing to go and speak to their doctor and have access to the AstraZeneca vaccine, they can do so. So the answer is yes, they can go and do that,' he said.

Mr Morrison said national cabinet has agreed on an indemnity scheme for GPs to give the AstraZeneca vaccine to Australians under the age of 60 who are willing to accept the extremely rare blood clot risk.

Indemnity schemes offer insurance cover to professionals and business owners in the event of an adverse incident caused by the practitioner's misjudgement.

'If you wish to get the AstraZeneca vaccine, then we would encourage you to go and have that discussion with your GP, and we've already made announcements to support those additional consultations with the GPs so you can have that conversation,' he said.

'And secondly, we are also providing the indemnity scheme for those general practitioners, so they can actively engage with you, and you can make the best decision for your health.'

In May, the federal government announced the Pfizer vaccine was the recommended shot for people under 50 after AstraZeneca was linked to rare blood-clotting condition thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS), which has caused two deaths in Australia.
Derek Chauvin is reportedly close to reaching a plea deal with federal prosecutors on civil rights charges over the death of George Floyd.

Chauvin, 45, was sentenced by a Minnesota state court on Friday to 22 and a half years in prison for Floyd's murder. He was convicted of the May 25, 2020 killing on April 20.

He was indicted on May 7 by a grand jury on separate federal charges that he violated Floyd's civil rights by use of excessive force during arrest.

On Monday CBS reported that a plea deal was close to being agreed, and as part of it Chauvin would have to publicly explain what he did to Floyd and why.

Derek Chauvin (left) is reportedly close to reaching a plea deal on federal charges that would force him to explain what he did to George Floyd (right) and why in court

The network reported that, as part of the plea, Chauvin could get a 20- to 25-year sentence, which he would serve at the same time as the state sentence, and that he would serve his time in federal not state prison.

If convicted in federal court, Chauvin could face life in prison.

Chauvin, a white Minneapolis police officer, was one of four officers on the scene when Floyd was arrested for using a counterfeit bill.

Chauvin pressed his knee to Floyd's throat for over nine minutes, as the black man gasped that he could not breathe.

On Friday Floyd's brother, Terrence, told Chauvin that he needed answers.

'We don't want to see no more slaps on the wrist. We've been through that already,' he said.

He then turned to Chauvin and asked: 'What was going through your head when you had your knee on my brother's neck?'

Derek Chauvin, 45, is seen in court on Friday for his sentencing. He apologized to the Floyd family before he was handed a 22.5 year sentence

Chauvin seemed to reference a potential deal when he was sentenced on the state charges.

'Due to legal matters, I'm not able to give a full formal statement,' he said.

'I give my condolences to the Floyd family, there's gonna be some other information in the future that will be of interest and I hope these will give you some peace of mind.'

Mary Moriarity, the chief public defender of Hennepin County until 2020, told CBS that Chauvin was likely swayed by the swift guilty verdict in the state case.

'In federal court, there would be a substantial difference between what he would receive if he went to trial and was convicted versus what he would get if he pled guilty, and as they say take responsibility for his actions,' she said.

Lawyer Ben Crump, surrounded by members of George Floyd's family, gestures as he talks to the media after the sentence was handed down on Friday

Chauvin is currently in a segregation unit at Oak Park Heights - Minnesota's only maximum security prison.

He will remain separated from the general prison population 'for the time being,' the Minnesota Department of Corrections said on Monday.

Minnesota inmates must serve a minimum of two-thirds of their sentence, meaning Chauvin could be released in 15 years.
Sydney's 14-day lockdown should be extended unless the city can go multiple days without any new Covid-19 cases appearing in the community, a leading epidemiologist has warned.

The city's five million residents are only three days into a 14-day lockdown as its coronavirus outbreak reached 149 locally-acquired cases overnight.

University of New South Wales epidemiologist Mary-Louise McLaws - a strong supporter of strict lockdowns who also advises the World Heath Organisation - urged Premier Gladys Berejiklian to completely stamp out the virus before opening her state up again.

'You have to go for zero [infections] and you have to have zero for a few days,' she told ABC News.

'I fully appreciate that lockdowns are horrible, they are the least acceptable approach to control.'

Scroll down for video

Empty streets are seen in the Sydney CBD on Monday. A leading epidemiologist has warned the Delta variant of Covid-19 is so contagious authorities must wait until the city's outbreak has stopped growing completely to ease restrictions

Professor McLaws said locking down entire cities was inevitable when Australia's bungled vaccination program was failing to protect its citizens against the virus.

She said the strain had mutated and adapted to the point where it could be more infectious even when contact between infected cases was less direct.

University of Melbourne epidemiologist Tony Blakely told Daily Mail Australia he agreed NSW should reach zero local cases a day before restrictions are eased in Sydney.

But he said multiple Covid-free days in a row may not be necessary.

'The key is the number needs to be zero in terms of cases that are active in the community,' he said.

'If they're in isolation for the entire time they've been infectious then they should be in a position to open up.'

Australian National University infectious disease physician Peter Collignon said he didn't believe the NSW government had left it too long by waiting until Saturday to implement the 14-day lockdown.

'Once you get past 20 or 30 a day, that's when you start getting worried,' he said.

'Low numbers of cases even in the community is usually fine to ease restrictions.'

University of Melbourne epidemiologist Professor Tony Blakely agreed NSW should reach zero local cases a day before easing restrictions in Covid-hit Sydney

NSW Deputy Premier John Barilaro on Tuesday morning said his government had 'lost control' of the spread of the highly-contagious Delta variant.

He added the outbreak - which has grown by another 19 cases overnight - may have been better handled if Sydney went into lockdown three days earlier than it did.

His view contradicts that of Ms Berejiklian who later in the day claimed the health advice she was following was 'on the money'.

About eight million Australians are currently under some form of lockdown restrictions after cases also broke out in Brisbane, Darwin and Perth.

Professor McLaws added Australia's 'leaky quarantine programs' were also to blame.

Victoria's lockdown last month stemmed from the virus leaking out of hotel quarantine in South Australia.

Queensland's latest outbreak began when a woman flew into the state from overseas and tested positive to the virus after spending 14 days in quarantine.

Mounted police on patrol at Bondi Beach in Sydney on Monday. Professor McLaws said the strain had mutated and adapted to the point where it could be more infectious with less direct exposure

Ms Berejiklian on Tuesday claimed the health advice she was following was 'on the money' given the outbreak had not surged as expected overnight

South-east Queensland, Townsville and the nearby Palm Island and Magnetic Island on Tuesday will enter a three-day lockdown from 6pm after the state recorded two new local coronavirus cases.

The additional infections include a worrying case in which an unvaccinated Covid ward receptionist travelled widely while infectious.

The 19-year-old casual clerical worker from the Prince Charles Hospital worked as a receptionist outside a Covid-19 ward.

Empty streets are pictured in the CBD in Sydney on Monday. NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian on Tuesday announced a raft of other economic support measures for the state's businesses

She travelled between her home in Sandgate to Magnetic Island in Townsville at the end of last week and attended the Sunday markets in Townsville.

The woman tested positive on Monday.

Darwin is shut down until at least Friday while Perth is in its own four-day circuit breaker with tough restrictions as of 12.01am on Tuesday.

In a late development on Monday night, two million people in Western Australia were plunged into the snap lockdown.

NEW SOUTH WALES' COVID-19 SUPPORT MEASURES The support package includes grants of between $5,000 and $10,000 for small businesses across NSW impacted by the latest COVID-19 restrictions. Also includes payroll tax deferrals for all employers and an extension of the Dine & Discover program to 31 August. Residents can now also use Dine & Discover vouchers for takeaway delivered directly to their home by the venue itself. NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian said the centrepiece of the package was the small business support grants. 'We always said we will do whatever it takes to support businesses and keep people in jobs during the pandemic and that is exactly what we are doing,' she said. Three different grants will be available: $10,000 for a 70 per cent decline in turnover, $7,000 for a 50 per cent decline and $5,000 for a 30 per cent decline Advertisement

Anyone living in the Perth or Peel regions will be under stay-at-home orders from 12.01am on Tuesday, and are only allowed out for essential reasons.

Gyms, shops, bars, restaurants and places of worship will be forced to close and all social gatherings are banned, with no one allowed to leave the metropolitan area for all but essential reasons.

Masks will also be mandatory in all indoor settings outside the home.
A drug-fueled driver who passed out at the wheel of his red Mazda on a busy highway lashed out at police when he was woken.

Brendon Ellis, 35, was found slumped in the driver's seat on the M1 between the Gold Coast and Brisbane in Queensland at 7.30am on Christmas morning, 2020.

Disturbing body-cam footage shows Ellis sleeping while pulled over and blocking a lane with the motor running at Oxenford near the Dreamworld and Movie World theme parks.

Asleep in the passenger seat is another man also out cold with his feet on the dashboard.

Witnesses reported seeing the red Mazda driving erratically at speeds up to 140km per hour down the busy motorway before suddenly grinding to a halt on the side of the road.

Brendon Ellis (pictured), 35, was found on the side of the M1 motorway on the Gold Coast after witnesses saw him driving erratically

Confronting footage shows police removing the keys before trying to awaken the driver who was disorientated and tried to start the vehicle.

'Hey mate? Hey mate, hello? 'You're parked on the bloody motorway. No, you can't drive,' the officer is heard saying.

As police try to remove Ellis from the car he lashes out, spitting at officers while dipping in out in a drug fueled rage while his passenger remains asleep.

It took three officers to restrain Ellis who resisted arrest prompting police to draw tasers yelling, 'Hands up. Taser taser. Do as you're told! Get on the ground, mate!'.

Ellis required two sets of handcuffs to be detained.

The passenger easily submitted to authorities before exiting the vehicle and lying on the bitumen cars roaring past only metres away.

Ellis was on parole at the time of the offence and pleaded guilty to seven charges in relation to his doped out highway joy-ride.

Police (pictured left) were spat on and attacked by Ellis (right) as they tried to arrest him

The court heard Ellis was under the influence of a cocktail of drugs with the magistrate describing his state as 'off his face'.

Ellis was sentenced to 15 months and is currently behind bars.

His lawyer Farshad Sarabi said outside court: 'the struggle with police was aggressive. In the end he came worse for wear'.

'He will be back in the community in September however he will have very strict conditions on him'.
Three-day lockdown will last from 6pm Tuesday to 6pm Friday

Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said she was 'furious' at the case

Her family and close friends have also reported feeling unwell

Travelled from Brisbane to North Queensland for a family holiday on June, 24

She was unvaccinated and infectious in the community for 10 days

Queensland's snap three-day lockdown was the result of an unvaccinated hospital receptionist testing positive to Covid after holidaying across the state - an ill-fated journey that has infuriated the premier.

The 19-year-old woman from Sandgate in Brisbane, who worked at the Prince Charles Hospital in Chermside, Brisbane, is believed to have been infectious from Saturday, June 19, before developing symptoms the following Monday.

She visited her local Woolworths and a gym on the Sunday before working shifts 'outside' Prince Charles' specialist Covid-19 ward on Tuesday and Wednesday last week.

On Thursday, June 24 she went to Brisbane Airport to catch a flight to Townsville for a family holiday at nearby Magnetic Island.

After three nights on the island, she returned to Townsville and attended the popular markets in Townsville's CBD on Sunday, June 27 before testing positive to the virus on Monday.

She then returned to Brisbane last Sunday. Members of her family and two friends are now also unwell.

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said she was 'furious' at the teen worker for potentially spreading the virus across the state.

'Despite the health directives that she should have been vaccinated, she was not,' Palaszczuk said on Tuesday.

'Let me say, I am absolutely furious about this.'

The ill-fated journey of the 19-year-old woman who sparked Queensland's three-day lockdown

Masked women exercising while on the Gold Coast, Tuesday, as South-East Queensland enters a three-day lockdown

From 6pm tonight, until 6pm on Friday, South East Queensland, Townsville City, Palm Island and Magnetic Island will go into lockdown

She is one of two new local coronavirus cases recorded in the state overnight forcing south east Queensland, Townsville and major islands to lockdown.

An Ipswich miner, who returned home from working in the Northern Territory, also tested positive to the contagious Indian Delta variant but authorities said early detection of the case meant the risk was low.

Meanwhile Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young said the 19-year-old holidaymaker had been symptomatic since Monday, June 21.

'That's 10 days in the community infectious... we need people to take this seriously.

'If you are unwell at all, any symptoms, you must get tested.'

South east Queensland, Townsville, Magnetic Island and neighbouring Palm Island will go into lockdown from 6pm Tuesday until 6pm Friday.

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said she was 'furious' after finding out the 19-year-old hospital worker who tested positive to Covid-19 was not vaccinated

Long queues had already formed by lunchtime on Tuesday at a Covid-19 testing clinic in Townsville in north Queensland

Australia's new Covid outbreak has left half the population in lockdown (above)

New Covid-19 clinics will also be set up on Magnetic Island and in Townsville with locals urged to get tested immediately.

Large queues had already formed at a testing centre set up at the old football stadium by lunchtime on Tuesday.

All 2,000 residents of Magnetic Island will now need to be Covid-19 tested.

The 19-year-old visited Sandgate Woolworths on Sunday, June 20 between 9.30am-10.30am before going to the Bay Health Gym from 10am-12pm.

She worked a shift at the Prince Charles Hospital from 3:00pm to 10:00pm on the Tuesday and Wednesday last week.

She then travelled with her family on VA369 from Brisbane to Townsville on Thursday, June 24, at 10:00am.

'Two of her family members who live in the same household are unwell. We are urgently testing them and one of her close friends is unwell too,' Dr Young said.

TEEN'S 10 INFECTIOUS DAYS IN QUEENSLAND Sunday, June 20, 9.30am-10.30am: Sandgate Woolworths Bay Health Gym from 10am-12pm on the same day. Tues-Wed, June 22-23: Prince Charles Hospital from 3:00pm to 10:00pm on the Tuesday and Wednesday last week. Thursday, June 24: The woman travelled with her family on VA369 from Brisbane to Townsville on at 10:00am. They were in Brisbane Airport for an hour prior and then when they landed at Townsville airport and stayed at the Cafe Brewery in the airport for an hour Thursday, June 24-Sun June 27: Magnetic Island. Sunday, June 27: Travelled from Magnetic Island back to Townsville. They went to the Sunday morning markets in Townsville City late morning, then caught VA374 from Townsville to Brisbane on Sunday, June 27, landing at Brisbane Airport at 2.55pm Advertisement

The infected 19-year-old hospital worker visited Sandgate Woolworths (pictured) while infectious

Magnetic Island (pictured) has been locked down as a result of the teen's movements

The Ipswich miner returned from The Granites gold mine in Tanami in the Northern Territory.

Dr Young said the miner was immediately tested when they returned home but the test was not conclusive.

'It was really early in their illness and we wouldn't call that a positive,' she said.

'Then we repeated the test later and at that stage it was definitely positive... I hope that that is low risk.

'We have got hold of all of the other miners across the State and we have got them in quarantine and we will be testing them but we're not out of the risk time yet with all of those other miners.'

Authorities are waiting on test results for a further 169 people who returned to the state from the NT mine where 900 people have been identified as close contacts of a positive case.

One of them was already confirmed to have the highly contagious Indian Delta variant after spending a day out and about in the Sunshine Coast while infectious.

They were potentially exposed after a Victorian worker became infected while passing through a Brisbane quarantine hotel on his way to the mine.

Queensland Chief Health Officer Dr Jeannette Young waits to speak to the media during today's press conference in Brisbane

Further restrictions will come into effect in Queensland, including a limit of 20 people at a funeral, 10 people at a wedding, and no dancing or singing.

There will be a limit of two visitors in homes in addition to people already residing there.

Restaurants and cafes will only be allowed to provide take away for home delivery.

Cinemas, entertainment and recreational venues, beauty and personal care services, and gyms will all be closed.

Dr Young also confirmed the Virgin flight attendant who had touched down on the Gold Coast on a flight from Sydney had tested positive to the Delta variant and so Queensland contact tracers were contacting everyone on the plane.

The lockdown means Queenslanders in the affected areas can only leave home for one of four reasons: essential education and work that cannot be done at home or to obtain health care services, including getting a vaccination.

Care or support of a vulnerable family member, essential shopping in your local community, or exercising with no more than one person are also permitted.

The state says hotel quarantine for international travellers is Australia's greatest single source of Covid-19, and has accused the Commonwealth of letting in too many foreigners

Ms Palaszczuk again raised the issue of the vaccination roll-out and residents returning from overseas in her press conference.

'We have a large proportion of our state unvaccinated,' she said.

'The Federal Government is in charge of supply of that vaccination and we know that it's all coming in the last quarter.

'Until that time, there is a real risk that a large proportion of the Queensland public are unvaccinated, so we should massively reduce the number of returning Australians.'

Dr Young backed up comments by the premier asking for international borders to be properly closed.

'[Overseas arrivals] are putting our community at an unacceptable risk, especially with these new strains which cannot be contained,' she said.

'[They] have proven they cannot be contained by hotel quarantine.'
Priti Patel is set to overhaul the Border Force with new a supremo in charge of stopping Channel crossings.

The Home Secretary will unveil proposed new laws next week that will deny illegal migrants the right to settle in the UK.

The two directors general of Border Force and Immigration Enforcement are expected to quit their positions.

Priti Patel, right, is set to overhaul the Border Force with new a supremo in charge of stopping Channel crossings

They will be replaced by a single supremo, The Telegraph reports.

The new appointee will be tasked with overhauling the UK's 'broken' asylum system.

Border Force was criticized last month after one of its vessels picked up Channel migrants in French waters and took them to Dover.

It comes as over 200 migrants on 14 boats reached the UK across the Channel this weekend, making June the busiest month for crossings this year.

The Home Secretary is working on laws which could see migrants sent to an offshore immigration centre, a report revealed on Sunday.

It comes as over 200 migrants on 14 boats reached the UK across the Channel this weekend, making June the busiest month for crossings this year

The legislation would allow the country to build a processing centre of this kind for the first time as the total number of migrants arriving in the UK this year has reached 5,300.

Priti Patel is in discussions with Denmark to share an immigration centre in Africa and is also set to unveil plans to crackdown on people smugglers.

According to the Times, the plans will form part of the Nationality and Borders Bill and will see asylum seekers processed outside the UK in a bid to stop migrants making the dangerous journey across the English Channel.

Denmark is said to be considering a site in Rwanda where two Danish ministers visited last month to sign off a memorandum on asylum and migration, according to the newspaper.

A government source told The Times: 'The prime minister and home secretary are determined to look at anything that will make a difference on Channel crossings.'
Schools must assume they have a sexual harassment problem and will fail inspections if they cannot show that they are tackling it, Ofsted has said.

The watchdog has launched a historic crackdown on sex abuse in schools after hundreds were accused of presiding over a rape culture by the Everyones Invited website.

In rules published yesterday, inspectors will demand to see how head teachers are preventing peer-on-peer abuse  both at school and online.

The watchdog has launched a historic crackdown on sex abuse in schools after hundreds were accused of presiding over a rape culture

By 8am on inspection day, they must provide records and analysis of sexual harassment or sexual violence, as well as sexist bullying.

Ofsted said yesterday: Inspectors will expect schools and college leaders to assume that sexual harassment, online abuse and sexual violence are happening in and around their school, even when there are no specific reports, and to have put in place a whole school approach to address them.

The rules, published in the official handbook for inspectors, will be in place from September.

It is likely to lead to some otherwise good schools failing their inspections if they are slow to respond.

It follows a major review which saw inspectors visit the schools which were named and shamed as turning a blind eye to abuse.

It found sexual harassment has become normalised for children across the country.

Julie McCulloch, of head teachers union ASCL, said the updated guidance is welcomed and schools will be totally committed to working with Ofsted to tackle these abhorrent practices head on.

Sean Harford, Ofsted national education director said: The findings from our recent review have revealed just how commonplace sexual harassment has become in schools and colleges.

So, even when there are no specific reports, schools and colleges must assume that it is taking place and plan to address it accordingly.

Julie McCulloch, of head teachers union ASCL, said the updated guidance is welcomed

We will expect schools and colleges to have created a culture where sexual abuse and harassment is not acceptable and never tolerated.

And where pupils are supported to report any concerns about harmful sexual behaviour and can feel confident they will be taken seriously.

The new rules say inspectors will also be instructed to judge how schools handle allegations and incidents of sexual abuse between children.

Ofsted will also expect schools be alert to factors that increase childrens potential vulnerability to sexual abuse.

They must understand and address the barriers that could prevent a child from reporting an incident.

And they will assess schools preventative measures, including behaviour policies, pastoral support and the relationships, sex and health education (RSHE) curriculum.

Inspectors will not investigate individual allegations of harmful sexual behaviour, but will ensure that they are reported to the appropriate authority, if this has not already happened.

Ofsted added: Where schools and colleges do have not adequate processes in place, it is likely that safeguarding will be considered ineffective.

This can impact on the leadership and management judgement and the overall grade is likely to be inadequate.
Attorneys representing Donald Trump's family business are attempting to convince prosecutors not to file criminal charges against the company, and told them that doing so could damage the firm's reputation beyond repair.

Lawyers met with Manhattan prosecutors on Monday in a last ditch attempt to dissuade them from filing charges against the Trump Organization.

During the meeting, senior officials with the Manhattan District Attorney's Office and the New York State Attorney General's Office both met with Trump defense lawyers who highlighted the damage the company could face, should an indictment occur.

The two prosecutors' offices - now working together in their probe against Trump - did not indicate whether they'd decided to press any charges.

But the collateral damage from any such allegations could spread far and wide, affecting relationships with banks and other business partners, Trump Organization lawyers are purported to have said.

Charges against the Trump Organization could come later this week

Donald Trump won't be personally charged in the Manhattan district attorney's case against the former president's business organization

The meeting to discuss 'collateral consequences' are routine in white-collar investigations when charges are near, according to the New York Times.

The meeting, conducted through video conferencing, lasted for less than an hour.

The prosecutors have not stated one way or the other if they have made a final decision on whether to bring charges against the Trump Organization which has long denied any wrongdoing, as has its long-serving chief financial officer Allen H. Weisselberg.

District attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., could well announce charges against the company and Weisselberg later this week. Weisselberg is said to have refused to flip and turn on Trump in return for easier treatment from investigators.

Donald Trump won't be personally charged in the Manhattan district attorney's case against the former president's business organization when the first indictment comes down, his attorney claimed earlier in the day.

In a lengthy and rambling statement issued on Monday, Trump called the DA's investigation 'a continuation of the greatest Witch Hunt of all time' and claimed prosecutors 'failed' to find a crime even as 'millions of dollars of taxpayer funds wasted.'

Charges are likely in connection with fringe benefits the company awarded its chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg who prosecutors were hoping might flip

His words came as an indictment against the business that made his fame and fortune, The Trump Organization, grows closer.

Ronald Fischetti, a New York attorney who represents Trump, told Politico that, at a meeting with Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance on Monday, he was told the DA's office will not bring charges against Trump himself when the first indictment arrives, which could be as soon as this week.

'They just said, 'When this indictment comes down, he won't be charged. Our investigation is ongoing,' he said.

Trump railed against the prosecution in his response.

'They will do anything to stop the MAGA movement (and me),' the former president said. 'They also know that no matter how strong our case, they will work hard to embarrass us and the Republican Party.'

He claimed the prosecution of his business organization meant other companies would see it as a reason not to station their businesses in New York.

The former president called the DA's investigation 'a continuation of the greatest Witch Hunt of all time,' in a lengthy, rambling statement

'Having politically motivated prosecutors, people who actually got elected because they will "get Donald Trump," is a very dangerous thing for our Country. In the end, people will not stand for it. Remember, if they can do this to me, they can do it to anyone! Why would anyone bring their company to New York, or even stay in New York, knowing these Radical Left Democrats would willingly target their company if viewed as a political opponent? It is devastating for New York!,' Trump said.

He also claimed to be the victim after he saved the country from COVID.

'These Witch Hunters are relentlessly seeking to destroy a reputation of a President who has done a great job for this Country, including tax and regulation cuts, Border control, rebuilding the Military, and developing the vaccine in record time - thereby saving our Country, and far beyond. Washington, D.C. and ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court, should finally stop these vicious, angry, and highly partisan prosecutors. They are a disgrace to our Nation!,' he concluded.

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance has been conducting a long-running investigation into Donald Trump's businesses

Meanwhile, Fischetti said he was told the charges against the Trump Organization and its individual employees related to alleged failures to pay taxes on corporate benefits and perks.

Those are believed to include up to $500,000 in school fees paid for Weisselberg's two grandchildren to attend Columbia Grammar and Prep School in Manhattan.

That cash is said to have been paid by both Weisselberg and Trump, as a gift to Weisselberg's son Barry, whose kids were attending the facility.

Prosecutors are believed to be probing whether those gifts should have been declared as such, which would have made them eligible for tax payments.

Charges will likely not be related to so-called 'hush money' payments that former Trump attorney Michael Cohen said were made to porn star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential campaign.

'Nothing. Not a word on that,' he said.

Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 in October 2016, a month before the election, to stop her discussing the alleged affair with Trump, which Trump denied having. The New York Times reported that, in court documents, Cohen said Trump Organization officials were involved in the payoff. Cohen pleaded guilty to eight federal charges on August 21, 2018, including a campaign finance violation, for his role in the payment.

New York Attorney General Letitia James said she was assigning two of her lawyers to work with Vance on the criminal probe while she continues a civil investigation of Trump

Nor would the charges be related to concerns The Trump Organization used misleading valuations of its properties to deceive lenders, it is claimed.

'We asked, 'Is there anything else?' Fischetti told Politico. 'They said, 'No.'

'It's crazy that that's all they had,' he added.

'They just said, 'When this indictment comes down, he won't be charged,' Ronald Fischetti, a New York attorney who represents Trump, told Politico

He noted he expects charges to be filed against the company this week or next.

Prosecutors gave Trump's attorneys a Monday afternoon to make their final case as to why the Trump Organization should not face criminal charges over its financial dealings, The Washington Post reported on Sunday.

The charges would be the first criminal allegations to emerge from Vance's long-running investigation into Trump's business work in New York.

Over the past few weeks, a grand jury has been hearing evidence about Weisselberg, with prosecutors obtaining the executive's personal tax returns. Companies can be tried for crimes, and if they are convicted or plead guilty, they would face fines and other penalties.

Letitia James, the New York State Attorney General running a civil probe, has also reportedly acquired those tax returns. James' office had been investigating whether Trump's company falsely reported property values to secure loans and obtain economic and tax benefits.

Earlier, prosecutors were also able to obtain the personal bank records of Weisselberg.

Investigators are looking at whether or not Weisselberg failed to pay taxes on benefits over the years, including apartments, leased cars and private school tuition for two of Weisselberg's grandchildren.

To that end, prosecutors have subpoenaed records from an Upper West Side private school, the Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School.

Vance is reported to be seeking records into Mercedes-Benz vehicles leased for Weisselberg and other Trump Organization employees.

They are also looking at an apartment Trump may have gifted Weisselberg in Manhattan.

Trump's company, The Trump Organization, likely to face charges on alleged failures to pay taxes on corporate benefits and perks; charges would not be related to so-called 'hush money' payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels

Meanwhile, Weisslberg's former daughter-in-law, Jennifer, has been interviewed in the probe six times and is cooperating with prosecutors.

The Manhattan district attorney's office has informed Donald Trump 's lawyers that it is considering criminal charges against The Trump Organization in connection with benefits the company awarded its chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg

She has been asked about the tuition payments, as well gifts her ex-husband, Barry Weisselberg, received from Trump, such as leased cars and an apartment on Central Park South.

It's not clear what charges Weisselberg may be facing, though experts suggest it could be grand larceny, scheme to defraud or tax fraud.

If Weisselberg is charged with tax fraud and failing to pay more than $10,000 in taxes for a single year, he could face up to seven years in prison.

Prosecutors are hoping Weisselberg will cooperate with the probe into Trump and will flip on the former president. The indictments could put additional pressure on him to cut a deal.

The issue took on a renewed sense of urgency when Vance said in April that he will retire at the end of 2021 and there is speculation his office will issue any indictments before that.

Weisselberg is still an employee of the Trump Organization. He previously worked for Donald Trump's father and has been the chief financial officer at the Trump Organization for more than two decades, and has denied all claims of wrongdoing.
A plan to destroy more than 20 hectares of pristine forest that was left unscathed in Australia's horror bushfire season to make way for a housing development has come under fire by local celebrities.

Actors Claudia Karvan and Michael Caton are among 60 prominent figures who have signed an open letter trying to prevent the controversial plan in Manyana on the New South Wales south coast.

The development would see 180 prefabricated homes built on the land, which has since become a refuge for native wildlife, by construction group Ozy Homes.

The letter was published in the Sydney Morning Herald on Tuesday and called on federal Environment Minister Sussan Ley to withhold approval for the development under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.

Australian actor Claudia Karvan (pictured) is among 60 prominent figures who signed an open letter to federal Environment Minister Sussan Ley

Pictured: Michael Caton and his wife Helen Esakoff. The Castle actor also signed the letter to stop the housing development at Manyana

'Many threatened species have been recorded on this site and it has become a refuge for fauna that escaped the flames,' the letter read.

'It is a vital source of regeneration for the surrounding incinerated Conjola National Park and a powerful source of hope and healing for the people of the South Coast, who were badly traumatised by the Currowan mega-blaze.'

The Currowan fire was so powerful it caused fire-generated thunderstorms - which happens when rising, turbulent air draws in cooler air and causes lightning and high winds - and destroyed 260,000 hectares of land.

Manyana is located on the New South Wales south coast. It came out of the 2019-20 bushfire crisis unscathed, while the surrounding areas burned

Pictured: Manyana is in the Shoalhaven Region near Lake Conjola. A development company wants to clear the land to make way for 180 homes

Locals in Manyana have put up protest signs to stop the impending development (pictured right)

The signatories want the NSW government to buy the land and create a protected conservation reserve instead.

Authors Jackie French and Markus Zusak also signed the letter in a bid to save the bush, along with politicians Kate Washington, Mark Pearson, David Shoebridge and Alex Greenwich.

Greenpeace, WWF-Australia and the Australian Conservation Foundation have signed the letter too.

The proposed development was placed under 'a controlled action' by Ms Ley last year, meaning it would be further assessed for its environmental impact.

Signatories want the NSW government to buy the land and create a protected conservation reserve instead. Pictured: Protests by locals

Pictured: Burns areas of the NSW south coast. The only remianin unburnt area is at Manyana

Ozy Homes has recently provided more documentation about its plans, with the public able to provide feedback until July 16.

'It's time for our political representatives to step up and protect this land. We urge them to think about their legacy,' Manyana Matters Environmental Association founder Jorj Lowrey said.

'The decisions they make now will have a huge bearing on whether there is anything left of native habitat and wildlife in our region for future generations to enjoy.'

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Ozy Homes for comment.
Fraudsters are swamping up to three in five Britons with scam texts pretending to be from the Royal Mail and courier firms.

The conmen are exploiting the fact that millions have switched to online shopping, making them reliant on home deliveries.

The texts are meant to fool people into handing over bank details on the pretext of a problem with the delivery and the need to pay a fee to get their delivery.

Although companies being impersonated have no legal responsibility to deal with these scams, Which? argues they should be doing more to alert the public to the dangers

A survey by the consumer group Which? of more than 2,000 people found as many as 61 per cent had received a fake delivery company text in the past year.

It said those taken in can suffer devastating financial and emotional impact, and the bogus texts can spread harmful malware.

Which? set up four new mobiles and did not share the numbers with anyone. But two received at least one scam text in a two-week period.

Scammers use computers to generate combinations of numbers and send texts in bulk using SIM farms.

Numbers can be masked or spoofed so they appear to be from a real firm.

The most prolific scam is fake texts  also known as smishing (SMS phishing)  pretending to be from Royal Mail, which make up 70 per cent of the total.

Adam French, of Which?, said: Fraudsters have bombarded Britain with scam texts on an industrial scale. Couriers and the telecoms industry must protect consumers.

A survey by the consumer group Which? of more than 2,000 people found as many as 61 per cent had received a fake delivery company text in the past year

Roughly one in three people said the scam text they received pretended to be from DHL, DPD or Hermes. One in eight scam texts claimed to be from UPS.

Which? said the bogus text messages can also spread harmful malware. Spyware known as FluBot has been circulating through a message claiming to be from the delivery service DHL, which once downloaded could access sensitive information a smartphone.

Although companies being impersonated have no legal responsibility to deal with these scams, Which? argues they should be doing more to alert the public to the dangers.

Consumers can sign up to Which?s scam alert service in order to familiarise themselves with some of the latest tactics used by fraudsters.

The consumer champion has also launched a Scam Sharer tool to help it gather evidence in its work to protect consumers from fraud.
A mother in hotel quarantine was shocked when three men suddenly walked into her room to check her fire alarm - only to discover they were in the wrong suite.

Liz Spelman, 46, who returned to Australia from Sweden, is isolated at the Meriton on Pitt Street in Sydney for two weeks with daughter Lucy, 12, and son Ned, 10.

She received a knock on her door on Sunday and went to wait 30 seconds to open the door, as is protocol, before the contractors barged in.

Liz Spelman, 46, who returned to Australia from Sweden, is isolated at the Meriton on Pitt Street in Sydney for two weeks - and was shocked when men without PPE barged in to check the fire alarm

Ms Spelman, who was on her last day of her quarantine with her two young children, was shocked by the apparent breach that could have endangered the public. Passengers are pictured above wearing facemasks arrive at Sydney Airport off on the way to hotel quarantine

'Three men came in, they were wearing masks but no other PPE. After three or four minutes they realised they were in the wrong room,' Ms Spelman told Daily Mail Australia.

Ms Spelman, who is on her last day of her quarantine with her two young children, was shocked by the apparent breach that could have endangered the public.

'They're lucky we've all tested negative. We could have been infectious, they could have been infectious,' she said.

'There's no signs on anyone's door to say they're positive.'

She said the hotel manager contacted her to offer his 'sincerest apologies' and told her the men were being tested and placed in a holding zone for the day.

The manager also said the men weren't hotel workers but instead from a third-party contractor, only further adding to the security risk, she claimed.

'It was human error, but we're shocked with this illogical response from the government,' Ms Spelman said.

The vast majority of Australia's Covid outbreaks came from returned residents infecting hotel staff who then spread the virus in the community.

Should the contractors have been infected in Sydney's ongoing outbreak, they could also have infected Ms Spelman or her children, who then could take the virus home.

Ms Spelman said her husband was part of the team advising the government on border security and believed the importance of having regional quarantine facilities to help navigate the current coronavirus climate.

She said she was exhausted by the government's inconsistencies, introducing hard borders yet having such lax rules when Australians are serving their time in quarantine.

Ms Spelman, who returned to Australia from Sweden, is isolated at the Meriton on Pitt Street (pictured) in Sydney for her two-week hotel quarantine

Meriton confirmed the contracted workers entered the occupied room for the compulsory fire testing as a result of 'human error'.

'They were all wearing face masks as per the required guidelines and entered into the room for only a matter of seconds before exiting,' it said.

'The guests in the room were on their 11th day of quarantine and had returned negative Covid test results for their day two and day seven swabs.'

The three workers were put in isolation elsewhere in the hotel until they were tested, and all returned negative results.

Ms Spelman and her children also tested negative and will be released from quarantine on Tuesday.

'NSW Health have strict policy and procedures for any isolation breach should it happen and these were fully executed,' Meriton said.
Tucker Carlson has claimed that the National Security Agency is spying on his show, in a bid to take him off the air.

The Fox News host said on Monday night that a whistleblower had approached the show the day before and informed them of the espionage.

'It is not just political protest the government is spying on,' Carlson told his viewers.

'Yesterday we heard from a whistle-blower within the US government who reached out to warn us that the NSA, the national security agency, is monitoring our electronic communication and is planning to leak them in an attempt to take this show off the air.'

Carlson pointed the finger directly at the Biden administration, and accused them of spying on him and his show to try and stem his criticism of the government.

'They did it for political reasons,' he said.

'The Biden administration is spying on us. We have confirmed that.'

The Fox News host told his viewers on Monday night that he was being spied on by the NSA. He said a whistleblower had information which could only have come from his own texts and emails. Carlson said the spying was 'scary' and demanded it stop

Tucker Carlson on Monday night claimed that the National Security Agency (NSA) was spying on his show, in a bid to force him off the air

Tucker Carlson says a whistleblower told him that he is being spied on by the NSA and that he filed a FOIA request for information:



"The Biden administration is spying on us. We have confirmed that." pic.twitter.com/LY2vmDLFTK  Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) June 29, 2021

This month The New York Times, Washington Post and CNN revealed that they had been informed by the Department of Justice that some of their reporters' records had been seized during former President Donald Trump's tenure.

As president, Trump was vehement about finding out who in government was leaking information to the press.

Carlson said he knew the whistleblower's information was correct because they had insider knowledge, that could only have come from accessing his communications.

'The whistle-blower who is in a position to know repeated back to us information about a story that we are working on that could have only come directly from my texts and emails,' Carlson said.

'There's no other possible source of that information. None.'

The NSA headquarters are pictured in Fort Meade, Maryland. Carlson has claimed that the NSA is spying on him, and described it as 'incompatible with democracy'

The 52-year-old presenter - one of Fox's biggest stars - has for several weeks been claiming that the FBI infiltrated and actively orchestrated the January 6 riots.

His claims have been denied by the FBI, but Carlson insisted that the government was infiltrating all aspects of life.

'This morning, we filed an employer request asking for all information that the NSA and other agencies have gathered about the show,' Carlson said Monday. 'We did it mostly as a formality and contact of the press office of both NSA and the FBI you don't expect to hear much back, that's the way that usually goes.

'Only Congress can force transparency on the intelligence agencies and they should do that immediately.'

Carlson said that his team have filed a FOIA request to try and find out why the NSA was spying on them

Carlson said that the NSA's behavior was unacceptable.

'Spying on opposition journalists is incompatible with democracy. They are doing it to us and again, they are definitely doing it to us, they are almost certainly doing it to others.

'This is scary and we need to stop it right away,' he concluded.

The Justice Department under former Attorney General Eric Holder in 2015 announced revised guidelines for obtaining records from the news media during criminal leak investigations, removing language that news organizations said was ambiguous and requiring additional levels of review before a journalist could be subpoenaed.

The updated policy was a response to outrage among news organizations over Obama administration tactics seen as overly aggressive and hostile toward newsgathering.

Jeff Sessions, Holders successor appointed by Trump, announced in 2017 a renewed crackdown on leaks of national security information to the media.

The actions of Sessions and his own successor, Bill Barr, are under intense scrutiny for their role in spying on reporters from several media organizations.

On June 14 the Justice Department's top national security official announced he was resigning from his position following revelations that the department secretly seized records.

John Demers will leave his position by the end of the month, a Justice Department official told The Associated Press. The New York Times reported the departure was planned months ago but now comes as the agency is facing backlash over the secret seizures.

It comes amid questions about what Demers knew about the Justice Department's efforts to secretly seize the phone data journalists and from House Democrats as part of the Trump-era aggressive investigations into leaks.
Workers in Sydney's CBD have been put on high alert and ordered to get tested even if they have 'minimal symptoms' after NSW recorded 19 new Covid cases.

Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant on Tuesday said authorities are 'particularly' concerned about workers or regular visitors to the Woollahra, Waverley, Randwick and City of Sydney local government areas.

'Clearly, during that period there was the chance that you may have inadvertently come into contact with someone who is positive, or there may well have been missing links, missing cases in that area,' she said.

'You may well have gone back to other suburbs in the greater metropolitan Sydney, or for that matter across the state.'

Dr Chant said health officials are pleading with city workers to be 'very vigilant' for even the slightest symptoms.

'Check the web sites but also get a test with the most minimal of symptoms so we don't miss any further cases,' she said.

Workers in Sydney's CBD have been put on high alert and ordered to get tested even if they have 'minimal symptoms'

Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant on Tuesday said authorities are 'particularly' concerned about workers or regular visitors to Woollahra, Waverley, Randwick and City of Sydney

Some 149 people have picked up the coronavirus locally since June 16, when the first case was reported at Bondi in Sydney's east

Of the 19 new cases of Covid recorded in NSW in the 24 hours to 8pm on Monday, 17 are linked to previous cases and two are under investigation.

One of the mystery cases lives in the eastern suburbs and the other works there.

Seven of the new cases were in isolation for their infectious period.

Ms Berejiklian praised the around 67,000 people who came forward for testing in the latest 24-hour as 'outstanding'.

Some 149 people have picked up the coronavirus locally since June 16, when the first case was reported at Bondi in Sydney's east.

Tuesday marks the third full day of a two-week hard lockdown for the Greater Sydney, Central Coast, Blue Mountains, Wollongong and Shellharbour regions.

Millions of people can only leave home for work that can't be done at home, to shop for essentials, for exercise, to seek medical care and for caregiving or compassionate reasons.

NSW Health has issued alerts for another ten venues visited by Covid positive people.

They included Specsavers at Bondi Junction, McDonald's at Bondi Beach, Macquarie Bank in Barangaroo, Domino's Pizza Rose Bay, IGA Blaxland and the Meriton Suites Hotel at Mascot.

NSW Health has also alerted commuters who travelled on various Sydney trains and buses last week and Westfield Bondi Junction - the epicentre of the latest outbreak - remains of particular concern.

More than 500 school students from South Coogee Public School are isolating after four of their classmates acquired the virus.

Another student, at Emanuel School in Randwick Sydney's east, attended school whilst infectious.

Dr Chant said health officials are pleading with city workers to be 'very vigilant' for even the slightest symptoms

Of the 19 new cases of Covid recorded in NSW in the 24 hours to 8pm on Monday, 17 are linked to previous cases and two are under investigation

On Monday evening, a positive case was also uncovered in the Rose Bay Secondary College community, with around 1300 students and teachers ordered to self-isolate until further notice.

Ms Berejiklian announced businesses will receive thousands of dollars in grants and the NSW Dine and Discover voucher program for state residents will be expanded as part of the package.

'We know that our lockdown ... has created much stress,' Premier Gladys Berejiklian said on Tuesday.

'We don't want anyone to feel stressed during this lockdown that they won't be able to manage their household situation or their business situation.'

Grants of between $5000 and $10,000 will be available to small businesses, depending on declines in turnover, during the health restrictions.

NSW residents will now have until August 31 to spend their Dine and Discover vouchers, which will also be able to be used on takeaway food orders.
The mother of three young children found dead inside a Los Angeles home has been detained for questioning as a person of interest.

The children, two boys and a girl who are all under three years old, were found inside a bedroom in their East Los Angeles home around 12.45pm on Monday after a family member called for help.

One of the children was just six months old.

Los Angeles County Sheriff's Lt Chuck Calderaro said the children were not breathing and efforts to revive them were not successful.

Their 28-year-old mother, who was at home at the time, is being questioned as a 'person of interest', Calderaro said.

Authorities would not reveal the mother's identity or comment on her mental state.

Authorities are investigating three young children's deaths in Southern California as suspicious and their mother was detained for questioning on Monday. Pictured: The home where the children were found in East Los Angeles

Neighbors were spotted embracing on Monday outside the home where the three children were found dead

One other person who was inside the home when police arrived is also being interviewed. Authorities believe that person is the one who called 911.

The children's father was not there at the time.

Calderaro said it was not immediately clear what caused the deaths and autopsies will be conducted.

There were 'no obvious signs' trauma, he said.

'At this point it's very preliminary in the investigation,' Calderaro said. 'We know the children were in a bedroom within the house. As far as cause of death that's unknown at this time and that's under investigation.'

The family had gathered at the home on Sunday for a celebration.

The children's uncle Arturo Cerezo, who arrived at the home as the mother was being taken into custody, told CBSLA: 'It's pretty hard to determine what really happened.'

'I mean, because, I know her,' he said of the mother.

'I know she would do anything for those kids, and thats whats so hard to understand what happened.'

Preliminary information revealed no prior reports of abuse or child neglect at the home, the sheriff's department said.

The kids' uncle (pictured) told CBSLA : 'It's pretty hard to determine what really happened'

Detectives were spotted working the crime scene on Monday after the bodies of the children were discovered

The children's 28-year-old mother, who was at home at the time and has not been identified publicly, is being questioned as a 'person of interest'

A Los Angeles County Sheriff's official walks near the scene after three young children were found dead in a bedroom at a residence in East Los Angeles on Monday

Supervisor Hilda Solis, whose district includes East Los Angeles, said she was 'devastated' to hear about the deaths.

'It is a horrifying situation and my office is working with the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department and Department of Children and Family Services to launch a full investigation into the brutal murder of these three innocent children,' Solis said in a statement.

'My office is also leveraging County resources to provide counseling and support for the family and neighboring residents.

'Support services are also being extended to the firefighters and first responders who were the first ones on-site and witnessed this travesty.

'Although I wish this never occurred, we must do everything possible to ensure no other child endures such a tragedy.'

The deaths come after a mother was arrested in the deaths of her three children in April in Los Angeles.

Residents watch as authorities work on the scene after three young children were found dead in a bedroom at a residence in East Los Angeles on Monday
Barnaby Joyce has been fined by New South Wales Police for failing to wear a mask, in what he called a 'funny story'.

The deputy prime minister and Nationals leader was reported to police by a member of the public while filling up at a petrol station in Armidale, in northern NSW.

The local resident called Crime Stoppers to report 54-year-old after he was inside the store for less than a minute.

Officers checked the petrol station's CCTV after being called to the site, before they confirmed he was not wearing protective gear and issued the penalty.

Joyce was fined $200 for failing to wear a mask while indoors, as is mandatory across the state.

Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce is fined by New South Wales Police for NOT wearing a mask

Mt Joyce called his brief Covid breach a 'funny story' when he relayed it to Alan Jones on Sky News.

'You'll like this story. I went into the Caltex service station. I was going to the airport. I forgot to get fuel for Biggie, fill the car up with fuel,' he said.

'Went in, 30 seconds later... two hundred bucks it cost me because I didn't wear one of these. That's life.'

NSW Deputy Police Commissioner Gary Worboys said the fine was a warning to the public that no one was above the law.

'Went in, 30 seconds later... two hundred bucks it cost me because I didn't wear one of these. That's life,' Joyce told Alan Jones

'I respect the office of the Prime Minister. It's incredibly important. But to say you have to like the person? You can, but it's not necessary', Mr Joyce (right) said of Scott Morrison (left)

'That person was apologetic and cooperated with police being firm and fair,' he said at a press conference on Tuesday morning.

'The commissioner of police has made it very clear to every police officer that, whilst we will take action, we still need to be fair in relation to people who are clearly on the edge of an order, or where they think that they might have a good and reasonable excuse.

'Police are rostered 24/7 right across the state and they will take action, and certainly the incident at Armidale is clear evidence that police will investigate and take action.'

Daily Mail Australia contacted Mr Joyce for further comment.
A couple found guilty of holding a woman captive as a slave for eight years will enjoy another night of freedom months after being convicted of the callous crime.

On Tuesday, Kandasamy held her head down and appeared to block her ears as the years of torture alleged by her slave were recounted again in open court.

Husband and wife Kandasamy and Kumuthini Kannan enjoyed a sunny Tuesday morning in Melbourne for what could be their second last time before facing the Supreme Court of Victoria for committing crimes against humanity.

The couple, from Burwood East, were bailed again on Tuesday afternoon to appear in court for the second day of their pre-sentence plea hearing on Wednesday.

Game over: Wicked slaver Kumuthini Kannan attends the Supreme Court of Victoria in what will be perhaps her last day of freedom for some time

Kandasamy Kannan continued to roam the community free as a bird despite being found guilty of holding a woman as a slave for eight years

Kumuthini Kannan and her husband Kandasamy will leave their children in the care of others after being found guilty of slavery

The pair will no doubt spend an uncomfortable evening together after Kandasamy's barrister John Kelly SC painted his partner as the ring leader of the slaver operation.

Mr Kelly told Justice John Champion it was Kumunthini who made the harsh demands of their slave and paid her peanuts for hours of labour.

During their trial, which went for more than a month earlier this year, Kumunthini had been painted as the evil slave keeper, who dominated over her pathetic husband and their slave.

Mr Kelly argued that his client played so little a role in enslaving their captive that Justice Champion might consider cutting him loose altogether.

Whatever the case, the cowardly husband made it clear that he was not prepared to take the fall for his domineering wife.

The arrogant female slaver had smiled broadly just minutes before learning her fate upon verdict on April, still supremely confident the jury had swallowed her lies.

The jury of 12 delivered its verdict after deliberating for just over a day.

Kumunthini's slave had told police she had beaten her with a frozen chicken, tossed boiling water on her legs, splashed hot tea in her face and poured curries over her head.

But Justice John Champion heard he could not take any of that into account when sentencing the couple.

Kumunthini's barrister, Dr Gideon Boas, submitted his client was not convicted of torturing the woman and that no jury would ever find 'beyond reasonable doubt' that any such torture had ever occurred.

Dr Boas, who was scathing of the slave's evidence throughout the trial, again referred to her evidence as 'manifestly flawed'.

The Kannans face anywhere up to 25 years in jail for the shocking crime.

A remorseless Kumunthini had burst into tears upon hearing the guilty verdicts in April.

Kumuthini Kannan had been allowed to roam free as a bird after convincing the judge she had no-one to look after her children

Kandasamy Kannan (right) enjoyed a walk in the sunshine with a friend in April. He had avoided going directly to jail by not organising carers for his soon-to-be orphaned children

She held her head in her hands and slumped her head into her husband's shoulders as he too was found guilty.

Kumunthini had been a beacon of arrogance throughout the epic trial, often smiling while her elderly victim gave harrowing evidence.

Despite the guilty verdict, the couple were granted bail until their pre-sentence hearing on Tuesday.

The court heard the Kannans had been so confident they would walk free, they had not discussed how their children might be cared for should they be immediately taken into custody.

So bold, they had not even told the children they had been attending court for the previous three months.

On Tuesday, Crown prosecutor Richard Maidment QC told the court the Kannans had neglected their slave severely in her last three months of captivity.

The elderly woman was found by paramedics in 2015 in a pool of her own urine and weighing just 40kg.

'In effect, she was starving to death,' Justice Champion said. 'She was in appalling condition.'

Traumatised and with serious medical conditions, the woman spent more than two months in hospital recovering - and for much of that time nobody knew her real identity.

Kumuthini Kannan had allowed her slave to starve to the point of near death before calling her an ambulance

Kumunthini had dominated over her 'pathetic' husband Kandasamy (pictured), who enjoyed a walk in the fresh air while awaiting sentence

The Case Against The Kannan Slavers Kandasamy and Kumuthini Kannan had kept the Indian woman as a slave before she was discovered with no teeth and emaciated with sepsis. They had claimed she was treated 'like a king'. The couple were both charged with intentionally possessing a slave and intentionally exercising the right of ownership over a slave between 2007 and 2015. The pair claimed they had been framed and became embroiled in an elaborate extortion attempt. The Supreme Court of Victoria heard the couple had been heard by police discussing the allegations over phone taps. 'It seems the suggestion is a letter would be produced which would suggest an extortion attempt had been made to extort 10 laks, the equivalent of $18,000 or $19,000 in order to drop the allegations,' Prosecutor Richard Maidment told jurors. The court heard their victim had no teeth when found by police in 2015. When asked why by police, her keeper claimed she had pulled them out herself and ate only mash. The woman had been enslaved after two previous visits with the family. The slave was found after she became sick and Kumuthini called her an ambulance. Paramedics found her shivering in a pool of urine in the bathroom. Advertisement

'She was in a bad way when she was found, we accept that,' Dr Boas said.

But he submitted her condition 'fell short' of becoming an aggravating factor that might earn his client a harsher sentence.

The court heard the couple had decided to keep the woman captive after she overstayed her holiday visa.

'They were in a sense all trapped unless they were all prepared to fess-up,' Mr Maidment said.

Yet four weeks later, the couple packed their bags and left the woman caged inside the family home while they enjoyed a family trip back to India.

On Tuesday, Dr Boas did his best to convince Justice Champion his client's family had been 'destroyed' by her conviction.

He painted a portrait of the evil slaver as a child of war, who had endured atrocities growing up in Sri Lanka.

Kumunthini had eventually made her way to Australia on a humanitarian visa after spending time as a refugee in Malaysia.

She then hooked-up with her cowardly husband in an arranged marriage.

Dr Boas said her marriage had caused his client a significant degree of depression, which was compounded when the pair spent time living in Canberra.

In closing the Crown case in April, Mr Maidment said the couple's payments to the woman had amounted to just $3.39 a day in exchange for childcare, washing, cleaning and preparing meals.

The court heard the woman had been effectively stranded in her captive home, unable to even use a bus or call for help from her family back in India.

Dr Boas said his client maintained her slave was treated as a 'member of her family'.

'It was conceded by the prosecution that she was treated as one of the family,' he said.

Kumuthini Kannan heads into court in what are expected to be her final moments of freedom for some time

Police believed Kumuthini Kannan (pictured) had held her captive like 'Harry Potter'

Kumuthini Kannan was found guilty of being a slave driver. She would slash her servant with a knife if she was not satisfied with her work, a jury heard

Dr Boas claimed there was likely many domestic relationships in the community that could be classed as 'slavery'.

'The fact is, it is well open on the balance of probabilities, that many of the facts that are accepted in this case suggest she was indeed part of the family. It doesn't need to be beloved or held on a pedestal, but was in someway an integrated member of this family,' Dr Boas said.

'It really reminds me of a submission I made earlier your honour about the fact there are probably plenty of domestic relationships in our community today that could fall into the category of using and possessing a slave depending on how one examined and perceived the facts with that relationship and the interactions that are part of it.'

Dr Boas urged Justice Champion not to sentence Kumunthini on anything greater than the charge she was found guilty of.

'We say she falls to be sentenced for possessing and using a slave for a discreet period ... but without any of the aggravating features alleged by (the woman),' he said.
Annastacia Palaszczuk has demanded a cut to the number of people entering Australia as Queensland becomes the fourth state to go into lockdown.

The premier said hotel quarantine is risky because staff get infected and spread the virus around the community, with 26 outbreaks from the quarantine system throughout the nation so far.

'We need a massive reduction in overseas arrivals because the overseas arrivals are bringing in these contagious strains,' she said on Tuesday morning as she locked down south-east Queensland, Townsville city, Palm Island and Magnetic Island for three days over four Covid-19 cases.

A resident wears a mask at Southbank in Brisbane as the city faces three days of lockdown

Annastacia Palaszczuk (pictured) has demanded a cut to the number of people entering Australia as Queensland becomes the fourth state to go into lockdown

'We need to get on top of this. We have seen what is happening in Sydney, in WA, in the NT and I am just urging the Prime Minister, reduce the caps.

'We are having lock downs in major cities because the overseas arrivals are bringing the virus here.

'They are going into hotels and all of our staff are having to deal with it. There are so many staff involved. The risk is real and we need to contain the virus. We need to protect Australia. We need to protect Queensland.'

Deputy Premier Steven Miles said the Queensland government believes hotel quarantine should be scrapped altogether and only the Howard Springs camp near Darwin should be used to return travellers.

'The nation only has one dedicated quarantine facility at the moment, that being Howard Springs and it is our view that that should be where international travellers return to until there are additional facilities,' he said.

Hotel quarantine is considered more risky than camp quarantine because travellers are kept in close-together rooms with no fresh air.

'I've said this before - you should not be quarantining people in hotels along the eastern seaboard,' Ms Palaszczuk said.

Mr Miles revealed 190 people were flying into Brisbane from overseas on Tuesday and said the federal government was giving too many exemptions to the border ban, allowing Aussies to leave and come back.

'Our international borders are supposed to be closed right now and yet somehow the number of people waiting to come to Australia from around the world hasn't really gone down since Christmas, despite thousands of arrivals each and every week and I think the Federal Government needs to be stricter with the exemptions they're providing to people to come here,' he said.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has written to the premiers of WA and Queensland to offer to build new quarantine facilities, after agreeing to construct one in Victoria.

A worker cleans while wearing a mask at a restaurant at Southbank, on June 29 in Brisbane, Australia

Queensland's lockdown was sparked by a 19-year-old casual clerical worker from the Brisbane's Prince Charles Hospital who worked as a receptionist outside a Covid-19 ward.

She travelled between her home in Sandgate to Magnetic Island in Townsville at the end of last week and attended the Sunday markets in Townsville.

The woman tested positive on Monday.

'Despite the health directives that she should have been vaccinated, she was not,' Premier Palaszczuk said. 'Let me say, I am absolutely furious about this.'

Sydney recorded 19 new cases on Tuesday, raising hopes the city's outbreak was not spiralling out of control.

Perth went into a four-day lockdown on Monday night over two new cases and the Northern Territory extended its lockdown imposed over five new cases.
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The parents of teenage motorcyclist Harry Dunn have emotionally vowed to 'travel to the end of the Earth and back' as they fly to the United States to give evidence under oath as part of a damages claim against their son's alleged killer.

Charlotte Charles and Tim Dunn will fly to Washington DC today ahead of the 'deposition' process to face lawyers acting on behalf of suspect Anne Sacoolas, who was charged with causing the 19-year-old's death by dangerous driving in August 2019 after she fled Britain.

Harry Dunn died when a car crashed into his motorbike outside US military base RAF Croughton in Northamptonshire. The aftermath sparked an international controversy when Sacoolas, who worked at the base for the US State Department, had diplomatic immunity asserted on her behalf - allowing her to leave the UK nine days after the crash.

Sacoolas, 43, was charged with causing the teenager's death by dangerous driving after her departure from the UK, but an extradition request was rejected by the State Department in January last year.

The suspected killer, who will also be required to give legal testimony by July 23 as part of the civil claim, has the option to be present when Mrs Charles and Mr Dunn are deposed.

The depositions will form part of the 'discovery' process in the Dunn family's claim, in which correspondence and documentation relevant to the case will be handed over ahead of a trial at the end of the year.

Mr Dunn's mother described travelling to give evidence as 'punishing and exhausting' but added: 'We would travel to the end of the Earth and back if that is what it takes.'

Charlotte Charles and Tim Dunn, the parents of Harry Dunn, arrive at Terminal 2 of Heathrow Airport, London

The parents of teenage motorcyclist Harry Dunn are set to fly to the United States to give evidence under oath as part of a damages claim against their son's alleged killer

Mr Dunn's parents will face lawyers acting on behalf of suspect Anne Sacoolas, who left the UK after diplomatic immunity was asserted on her behalf following the 19-year-old's death in August 2019

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

Speaking ahead of their flight, Mrs Charles said: 'We are flying out to the United States once again in pursuit of justice for our son.

'We are so grateful to the Court in Virginia for allowing our civil claim to proceed there. We know that is not what the US Government wanted and the insurers did their best to kick the case back to the UK.'

The Dunn family's claim, brought against both Sacoolas and her husband Jonathan, has unearthed a great deal of previously unheard material, such as the State Department roles held by the couple at the time of the crash.

The Alexandria District Court in the US State of Virginia heard the pair's work in intelligence was a 'factor' in their departure from the UK - with the Sacoolases leaving for 'security reasons'.

Asked how she was feeling ahead of her testimony, Mrs Charles said: 'It does not matter how much they try to beat us down. Our whole family are suffering intensely but to be honest we would travel to the end of the Earth and back if that is what it takes.

'It is punishing and exhausting travelling at the best of times and obviously more difficult in the middle of the pandemic, but they have required us to travel to appear at our depositions on Thursday and that is just what we will do.'

Also speaking ahead of their flight, Mr Dunn told PA: 'We loved our boy so much and are lost without him. Every day that goes by is getting more and more painful.

'We have never done anything like this before and don't know what to expect. It's obviously daunting being involved in any court case but this is all about our suffering since we lost Harry and we will do whatever it takes to get justice.'

The civil claim is one of a number of legal processes the Dunn family have entered into in order to secure justice for their son.

Earlier this month, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said Sacoolas is set to face a virtual trial over the car crash that killed Harry outside a US military base in Northamptonshire.

While the US has blocked the extradition of the US diplomat's wife to face charges stemming from the collision, the path is now clear for the UK to push for a form of 'virtual trial or process' to provide accountability and justice for Mr Dunn's family, according to the Foreign Secretary.

Mrs Charles said she and her family 'very much welcome' the latest development and are waiting to hear from the Crown Prosecution Service on what the next steps will be.

It comes after Prime Minister Boris Johnson said US President Joe Biden was 'actively engaged' and 'extremely sympathetic' about the case after a face-to-face meeting at the G7 summit in Cornwall.

Harry Dunn's parents with family advisor Radd Seiger arriving at Terminal 2 of Heathrow Airport, London

Charlotte Charles and Tim Dunn will fly to Washington DC today ahead of the 'deposition' process to face lawyers acting on behalf of suspect Anne Sacoolas

Mr Biden's first wife and daughter were killed in a road crash in 1972, while his sons Beau and Hunter survived.

Mr Raab told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: 'The US has not agreed to the extradition, but the path is clear for the legal authorities in the UK to approach Anne Sacoolas's lawyers - without any problem from the US government - to see whether some kind of virtual trial or process could allow some accountability and some solace and some justice for the Dunn family.

'I would like to see some accountability. I think the family deserve no less.'

Speaking after the meeting of Mr Biden and the Prime Minister, Mrs Charles also said: 'We are incredibly grateful that Harry's case is being taken so seriously as to be raised on the eve of the G7 meeting with so many worldwide crises going on.

'We very much hope that President Biden takes a different view to the previous administration, given his deeply personal connection to the case, having suffered loss in similar circumstances.'

Mrs Charles added: 'We are all suffering intensely as a family and really need a resolution as soon as possible and now await to hear from the CPS as to what steps they plan to take next.

'We have been working incredibly hard behind the scenes having dialogue with as many people on both sides of the Atlantic as possible and believe that these efforts will help us in our search for justice.

'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.'

After discussing the matter with Mr Biden, Mr Johnson told the BBC: '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.'
A travel company has been slapped with a $5000 fine after taking three busloads of people from Covid-addled Sydney to a zoo in regional New South Wales.

The tour group arrived at Taronga Western Plains Zoo in Dubbo, which is located five hours north-west of the city, with 128 staff and guests at about 9.30am on Monday.

About 76 of those people were not allowed to leave the Greater Sydney Region under lockdown restrictions announced on Saturday to curb the latest Covid outbreak, which grew by 19 on Tuesday.

Under the restrictions, anyone who has been in Sydney over the past 14 days is only allowed to leave home to buy groceries, seek medical care, go to work, or exercise outside.

Taronga Western Plains Zoo Dubbo (pictured) states that anyone who visited the Greater Sydney region after June 21 will not be allowed to enter the facility

Management at the zoo in Dubbo (pictured) did not let the group off the bus and called police

The NSW Government website specifically states that taking a holiday 'is not a reasonable excuse' to leave the local area.

The group left Sydney on Friday to travel around regional NSW, the day before lockdown rules were enforced.

The company owner told police he was aware that public health orders changed on Saturday, but decided to continue to tour as planned.

Staff at the zoo refused to allow the travellers off the buses and called police.

On its website, Taronga Western Plains Zoo states that anyone who visited the Greater Sydney region after June 21 will not be allowed to enter the facility.

The Covid situation in Sydney grew to 149 cases overnight on Tuesday. Pictured: A health worker in Sydney on Tuesday

Deputy Commissioner Gary Worboys said staff at teh zoo 'did exactly the right thing'. Pictured: An employee at Taronga Zoo

Deputy Commissioner Gary Worboys said: 'Staff at the zoo did exactly the right thing - they isolated the risk and alerted police.

'They did a great job to protect the local community.'

Investigations into further breaches continue.

Minister for Police and Emergency Services David Elliott said it was disappointing to see people continuing to breach the health orders.

'I would appeal to everyone to not only follow the rules but use your common sense and do your bit to help NSW beat this virus,' he said.
A truck driver who was smuggling more than 100 people across Mexico pulled over when the banging and screams of his cargo became too much to ignore.

Police who came across the scene found a man, 25, who had suffocated to death and an abandoned two-year-old boy.

It's the latest horrific discovery as hundreds of thousands of migrants from Central America cross through Mexico to attempt to illegally enter the United States - with some falling ill or dying in the desert or becoming prey to human smugglers.

The scene unfolded Monday morning in the southern Mexico state of Veracruz after the driver stopped the truck on a two-lane road and allowed more than 100 migrants, most from Central America, to get out of the freight container.

The survivors told Mexican National Institute of Migration agents that they were banging on the doors and screaming to be let out after they could longer bear the lack of air and heat inside the locked trailer.

The driver or his companion opened the door, and most of the migrants jumped out and ran off into heavy vegetation on the side of the highway that connects Ocozocoautla, Chiapas with Las Choapas, Veracruz.

A two-year-old boy, pictured, who authorities said was from Guatemala was found abandoned by the side of the road in Mexico after a human-smuggling truck stopped and most of the more than 100 migrants aboard fled. One man was found suffocated to death

An abandoned two-year-boy was among eight migrants who were found next to a tractor-trailer that was left behind in Veracruz, Mexico, on Monday. Authorities discovered the dead body of a 25-year-old man inside the freight container where 100 migrants were crammed together in their failed journey to the U.S. border

Pictured are six of the seven adult males who were ill and were unable to flee after a tractor-trailer ferrying more than 100 migrant bound for the United States border was abandoned in Veracruz, Mexico, on Monday morning. A 25-year-old man died after suffocating due to the lack of air inside the locked freight container

The National Institute of Migration agents said that the driver of the tractor-trailer finally stopped the truck after migrants banged on the doors to be released because they could no longer bear the lack of air and high temperature inside the locked cargo container

Immigration police came across the scene after the driver and his passenger also had fled.

They found the 25-year-old man, whose identity and nationality they didn't disclose.

They also found the two-year-old boy who apparently had been abandoned.

It's not clear if the two-year-old was traveling by himself, or was left by his parents who fled the scene when the cargo doors were opened.

The migrants told immigration agents that many of the people inside the trailer were feeling faint several hours before the truck came to a stop.

Eight migrants were found lying on the ground or standing near the truck. The majority escaped into the Mexican countryside.

None of the seven adults identified themselves as family members of the boy, who is apparently from Guatemala. It's not clear how authorities determined his age or nationality.

The Mexican Secretariat for Home Affairs said that the child was placed in custody of the office of State Attorney for the Protection of Girls, Boys and Adolescents.

The adult migrants were transported to a local National Institute of Migration center where they were provided additional treatment.

The Mexican Secretariat for Home Affairs said that the child, who wasn't identified, was placed in custody of the office of State Attorney for the Protection of Girls, Boys and Adolescents

Authorities have not been able to locate the driver of the tractor-trailer or the person who was accompanying him after the pair abandoned the vehicle on the shoulder lane of a highway in the southern Mexican state of Veracruz that connects Ocozocoautla, Chiapas with Las Choapas, Veracruz

Migrants await for assistance on a highway in Veracruz, Mexico, on Monday morning after they were able to jump out of a tractor-trailer where a 25-year-old man was found dead after dying from a heat-related illness

The incident comes less than a week after 240 migrants, including 61 children, bound for the United States border for found inside a warehouse in the central Mexico state of Puebla.

The United States-Mexico border region, which covers 1,954 miles, has become a pressing issue for the administration of President Joe Biden. The administration has struggled with a rise in unlawful border crossers.

In April alone, more than 110,000 single adults tried to cross illegally into the U.S. - the most in 10 years - as the Biden administration's advertised softer touch on immigration, and continued violence and a sluggish economy in Central America has lured would-be migrants.

Vice President Kamala Harris, who was chosen by Biden to lead the nation's efforts in finding a solution to the migrant crisis, inspected the border area in El Paso, Texas, last Friday.

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)

Harris had been criticized by Republican politicians and some Democrats for not visiting the border sooner.

Immigration 'cannot be reduced to a political issue,' Harris told reporters. 'We're talking about children, we're talking about families, we're talking about suffering. And our approach has to be thoughtful and effective.'

A monthly report released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection earlier this month showed that Border Patrol agents stopped 180,034 migrants in May along the southwestern border, a slight increase from 178,854 the prior month, with the increase driven largely by single adults.

From March to May more than 530,000 people were apprehended and pushed back into Mexico after attempting to cross without legal immigration documents, the June 10 report also indicated.
War hero Ben Roberts-Smith's high-profile defamation trial has been suspended because of Sydney's COVID-19 lockdown.

Mr Roberts-Smith, 42, is suing three newspapers at the Federal Court trial in Sydney over media reports alleging he was involved in war crimes, murders and bullying in Afghanistan.

He is also suing the outlets over a claim he assaulted a woman in a Canberra hotel.

The landmark trial, now in its fourth week, was due to this week hear the media outlets' defence case after Mr Roberts-Smith's legal team wrapped up its case on Monday afternoon.

However barrister Nicholas Owens SC flagged on Monday that SAS witnesses - crucial to the respondents' case - were unavailable due to border rules in Western Australia, Queensland and Victoria.

Options to progress the trial include a month-long adjournment or to hear from Afghanistan-based witnesses next week, the court was told.

Justice Anthony Besanko is expected to decide on a course of action for proceedings on Tuesday morning.

The trial has previously been told there will be testimonial evidence from 21 current and former SAS members as well as several Afghan villagers.

On Monday former Liberal politician and Australian War Memorial director Brendan Nelson gave evidence as a reputational witness for Mr Roberts-Smith, saying the soldier had been held in high regard by so many people.

'He was the subject and object of what I would regard as reverential mobs,' Dr Nelson said.

The media reports had a devastating impact, he added.

Other notable witnesses set to testify include federal Liberal MP Andrew Hastie and Mr Roberts-Smith's ex-wife Emma Roberts.

The trial was expected to run for 10 weeks before the recent COVID-19 disruption complicated matters.

Mr Roberts-Smith denies all the claims against him while the news outlets defend them on the basis of truth.

The former SAS operator's legal team argue their client is a victim of a lying campaign by journalists and failed soldiers jealous of his stellar military career and Victoria Cross.
New Zealand will restart the trans-Tasman bubble next week to states not engulfed in a resurgence of Covid cases.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern shut down travel between Australia and NZ on Saturday night after earlier suspending it for NSW.

From Monday, travellers from Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and the ACT will be welcomed back into New Zealand.

However, Australian travellers will have to produce a negative Covid-19 test before they are allowed to fly.

From Monday, travellers from Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and the ACT will be welcomed back into New Zealand (pictured family and friends reunite after the travel bubble between NZ and Australia began in April)

Australia's four other jurisdictions - NSW, the Northern Territory, Queensland, and Western Australia - won't see a return of quarantine-free travel until their Covid-19 situations improve.

All four of those places have ordered their capital cities into lockdown after reporting multiple community cases in the past week.

The door will be closed to NSW travellers until at least July 7.

Covid-19 Minister Chris Hipkins said Victoria, Tasmania, SA and ACT already fulfilled the 'green zone' requirements that would allow for the return of quarantine-free travel.

However, Ms Ardern said cabinet decided to defer openings until Monday to introduce the new pre-departure testing requirement.

'We see that as key to maintaining the confidence of New Zealanders in the bubble and ensuring that at periods of uncertainty across states, it gives us that extra layer of protection,' she said.

'That extra bit of time does allow us to get a better sense of what's happening across Australia.'

Details on how to fulfil the pre-departure test requirements are available on New Zealand's Covid-19 website.

The Ardern government slapped the whole-of-country suspension on quarantine-free travel last Saturday night.

The Ardern government slapped the whole-of-country suspension on quarantine-free travel last Saturday night (pictured family and friends reunite after the travel bubble between NZ and Australia began in April)

That move - the first since the opening of the bubble on April 21 - came in response to fears of spread from the NT gold mine case.

The original miner travelled to Bli Bli from Dundee Forest, southwest of Darwin, where she is employed at the infected Granites gold mine.

Almost 800 miners are currently in lockdown and another 900 are isolating across Australia after an outbreak in the camp.

The woman claims she flew from the mine to Darwin on Friday June 25, and boarded a second flight directly to Brisbane.

The infected woman said she didn't mix within the community and had always worn a mask while travelling.

The Northern Territory recorded two more coronavirus cases on Tuesday after an infected person attended a Zumba class and left a trail of sites throughout Palmerston.

About 900 fly-in-fly-out workers had already travelled home to cities across Australia before the worker at the Granites gold mine near Alice Springs was told he had coronavirus

Queensland went into a snap lockdown on Tuesday after recording a further two community cases (pictured woman in Queensland)

The new cases bring the total number of active cases in the NT to 10, with six active local cases, three acquired overseas and one acquired interstate.

The 25 people who were at a Zumba class in the Rex Centre in Palmerston on Saturday morning have now been ordered to get tested and go into isolation for the next 14 days regardless of their test result.

Queensland went into a snap lockdown on Tuesday after recording a further two community cases, including an unvaccinated hospital receptionist who travelled from Brisbane to Townsville and Magnetic Island while infectious and symptomatic.

The lockdown will last for at least three days from 6pm Tuesday, but restrictions will remain in place for the next two weeks.

Meanwhile NSW recorded 19 new infections as Greater Sydney enters its third day of a two week lockdown.

Mr Hipkins said any new cases could change the decision.

'We know how important the bubble is, in particular for families and businesses. But we also want to avoid a situation where we are having to respond to a case here in New Zealand,' he said.

Ms Ardern's cabinet also decided to remove restrictions on Wellington, which was at risk of community transmission after a Sydney traveller with COVID-19 visited.

Since that visit, wastewater testing and more than 2500 personal tests have failed to show up any spread of the virus.

Wellington will return to level one settings from Wednesday.
Mexico's Supreme Court instructed the government to issue permits for the recreational use and growing of marijuana after Congress failed to approve a limited legalization law.

Monday's 8-3 court ruling brings the country a step closer to creating one of the world's largest legal markets for the plant. The legislation would make Mexico, home to 126 million people, one of just a few countries - including Uruguay and Canada - to fully legalize cannabis for recreational use.

The decision adds to pressure on the Mexican Senate to approve a sweeping legalization bill that has stalled in Congress after modifications.

It's not clear when the Senate will take up a measure, which was already backed by its lower house in March.

Mexico United Against Crime, a non-governmental organization, said the decision 'does not decriminalize the activities necessary to carry out consumption' such as production, possession and transportation of marijuana.

Still, backed by the administration of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the law would mark a major shift in a country bedeviled for years by violence between feuding drug cartels.

'A historic day for freedoms,' Supreme Court Judge Arturo Zaldivar Lelo de Larrea wrote on his Twitter. 'The right to free development of the personality is consolidated in the case of recreational or recreational use of marijuana.'

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Mexican Cannabis Movement Planton 420 held a rally outside Mexico's Supreme Court on Sunday to demand the legalization of marijuana. On Monday, the court called on the government to issue permits for the recreational use and growing of marijuana after Congress failed to approve a limited legalization law

People over the age of 18 who want to carry, smoke or grow a few pot plants for their own use can ask for a government permit until any legislation is enacted, the Supreme Court said.

They would be required to abstain from using marijuana around children and refrain from driving or engaging in other risky activities while under the influence, according to the court.

It would still be illegal to have more than five grams of marijuana. Medical marijuana already was legal in Mexico - and has been since 2017.

Full legalization, if and when passed by the Senate, also would potentially open a huge market for U.S. and Canadian weed companies.

Experts say the legal recreational market could be worth billions of dollars in Mexico, where authorities seized 244 tons of marijuana in 2020.

The legalization push is partly aimed at curbing drug-related violence that claims thousands of lives each year in the Latin American nation.

More than 300,000 people have been murdered since the government deployed the army to fight the drug cartels in 2006.

DailyMail.com has reached out Mexican Congresswoman Nay Salvatori for comment.

Salvatori, an assemblywoman from the 10th district in the Mexican state of Puebla who supports the legalization for the recreational use of marihuana, had her Tik Tok account shut down in November 2020 when she posted a video of herself smoking pot.

Similar permits have existed since 2015, but are granted only to people who file for court injunctions.

Under Monday's ruling, the Health Department would be required to accept applications for permits from the general public.

The declaration issued on Monday removes a legal obstacle for the health ministry to authorize activities related to consuming cannabis for recreational purposes, the court said in a statement.

The ruling was the final step in a drawn-out court procedure to declare unconstitutional a prohibition on non-medical or scientific use of marijuana and its main active ingredient THC.

Activists of the Mexican Cannabis Movement Planton 420, show marijuana plants, during a protest demanding the regularization of marijuana outside the Supreme Court building in Mexico City on June 22

However, in a point criticized by activists, it established that health authorities must initially issue permits for cannabis use.

In 2019, the court ruled that prohibiting marijuana was unconstitutional, and gave lawmakers until this past April 30 to pass a law. In March, the lower house approved a marijuana legalization bill, but it bogged down in the Senate.

In the United States, the White House has made it clear that President Joe Biden supports the decriminalization of the recreational use of marijuana.

In April, Virginia became the 15th state to legalize marijuana for recreational use. Washington DC also legalizes marijuana for recreational use.

Meanwhile, 34 states have relaxed marijuana laws in different ways, with medical marijuana legalization and decriminalization elsewhere.

So far, 34 states and Washington D.C. have legalized marijuana in some form, including recreational use, medical use and sales

In Mexico, the bill called for individuals to be allowed to grow up to six plants, with a maximum of eight per household.

In addition, any person caught will more than an ounce of pot would face a fine.

Anyone possessing more than 12 pounds could face jail time.

In an initial ruling in 2015, the Supreme Court said 'the absolute prohibition model entails a disproportionate restriction on the right to free development of the personality of consumers'.

The Mexican government has permitted the medicinal use of marijuana since 2017 and it is allowed in a number of other Latin American countries.

However, only Uruguay allows recreational use of pot in the region.
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has publicly slapped down her deputy premier John Barilaro - after he went rogue and said the government had 'lost control' of the spread of he Indian Delta variant.

The Nationals leader is in isolation after attending a Parliament House function with unknowingly Covid-positive fellow MP Adam Marshall a week ago.

Mr Barilaro told ABC Radio on Tuesday that the government could have locked down days earlier and there was 'no question, last week we lost control of the Delta strain.'

'Hindsight is a beautiful thing, absolutely we could've gone a week earlier, three days earlier, four days earlier,' he said.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has slapped down her own deputy, John Barilaro, after he said the state 'lost control' of the Delta variant last week

John Barilaro - who is in isolation - told ABC Radio the government could've locked down a week earlier, with hindsight

Mr Barilaro said the government hadn't locked down sooner because 'that wasn't the advice' they received from chief medical officer Dr Kerry Chant's team.

'Right throughout this 18 months, we've relied heavily on Kerry Chant's team and the advice has not led us astray. But this (strain) is very different, the way it's spread'.

The comments represent a rare flash of dissent from a government frontbencher about NSW Health's approach to the pandemic and contact tracing focus.

Ms Berejiklian was asked whether she agreed with her lieutenant's comments during her daily announcement of Covid numbers on Tuesday.

Ms Berejiklian shook her head, saying she agreed with Dr Chant and the health advice, which her government had adhered to as if it was 'the letter of the law and has stood New South Wales well.

'It's early days and I don't want to regret what I'm about to say. We had anticipated potentially a surge in cases by today. That could happen in the next few days.

'But what that demonstrates to us is the health advice has been pretty much on the money.'

One government insider went further, rubbishing Mr Barilaro as 'bored and lonely in isolation.'

Greater Sydney plunged into lockdown on Saturday, one day after residents of the City of Sydney, Woollahra, Waverley and Randwick council areas were ordered to stay home.

New South Wales reported 19 new Covid cases in the 24 hours to 8pm on Monday night, just up from 18 cases the previous day.

At the weekend, Daily Mail Australia unearthed video of Ms Berejiklian declaring a month ago that the state would 'never' go into lockdown again.

However, NSW residents are far from alone in being subjected to stay-home orders.

South-east Queensland, Perth and Darwin are in lockdown or are set to be in hours.
Three more victims of the Miami condo disaster have been named, including a man whose wife and disabled stepson's bodies were recovered over the weekend, and the first person reported missing in the wake of the collapse.

The men were identified on Monday as friends and neighbors gathered at a beach near the building for a tearful evening vigil.

Frank Kleiman, 55, was identified yesterday, just a day after his wife Ana Ortiz, 46, and her adult son, Luis Bermudez, 26, who had muscular dystrophy and was unable to walk.

According to the Miami Herald, they were a newlywed couple who both belonged to the Shul of Bal Harbour synagogue and lived together on the seventh floor of the Miami condo.

Frankie's mother, Nancy Kress Levin, who fled the Cuban Revolution in 1959, also lived on that floor. Frankie's brother Jay, who worked in the garment industry, was visiting from Puerto Rico at the time of the collapse.

The families occupied the units 702 and 712, according to Miami-Dade property records. Nancy and Jay are among 150 people still listed as missing.

Also recovered on Monday was Marcus Joseph Guara, 52, who lived in the building with his wife Ana, 52, and their daughters Lucia, 11, and Emma, 4, all of whom are still unaccounted for.

Frank Kleiman, 55, (left) was identified just a day after the bodies of his wife Ana Ortiz (right) and her adult son, Luis Bermudez, were pulled from the rubble

Another victim identified Monday was Marcus Joseph Guara, 52, (right) who lived in the building with his wife Ana, 52, (left) and their daughters Lucia, 11, and Emma, 4, all of whom are still unaccounted for

Monday's third identified victim was a Costa Rican man named Michael David Altman, 50, who lived in unit 1101

Three victims were identified on Monday as friends and neighbors gathered at a beach near the building for a tearful evening vigil. Pictured: People embrace as they a vigil in honor of residents of the partially collapsed residential building on Monday evening as rescue crews continued the search for survivors

Frank Kleiman's brother Jay, pictured, was visiting the building at the time of its collapse, and is among the 150 people still unaccounted for

Meanwhile, the third newly-identified victim was a Costa Rican man named Michael David Altman, 50.

He lived in unit 1101 and was one of the first reported missing by his family to CBS Miami after they checked all hospitals. He had two children.

In the days since the collapse, friends and neighbors have gathered to mourn the victims and pray for the the 150 people still unaccounted for.

On Monday evening, a vigil was held on a nearby beach, with attendees clutching white roses and sobbing as a facilitator burned incense and played a gong.

Glow sticks and dirt laid on the sand spelled out the word 'HOPE', while down the coast at the ruins of the building, the sound of rescuers' power tools carried on through the night with no indications anyone had recently been found alive.

In front of the collapsed building, neighbors have created a memorial site, where candles, flowers and pictures of the dead and missing have been left.

On Monday, flowers left by those who came to pay their respects covered the fence at the memorial site.

In the days since the collapse, vigils have been held for the victims and the 150 people still unaccounted for. Pictured: A Monday evening beach vigil

On Monday evening, friends and neighbors of the building's occupants held a vigil on a nearby beach, clutching white roses

Glow sticks and dirt laid on the sand spelled out the word 'HOPE' during Monday evening's vigil, which was held amid ongoing rescue efforts

Pictured: People attend a vigil in honor of residents of the partially collapsed residential building on Monday evening as rescue crews continued the search for survivors

Monday evening's vigil took place at a nearby beach while down the coast at the ruins of the building, the sound of rescuers' power tools carried on through the night with no indications anyone had recently been found alive

A facilitator (pictured standing) burned incense and played a gong at the Monday evening beach vigil, which was attended by friends and neighbors

Pictured: People attend a vigil in honor of residents of the partially collapsed residential building on Monday evening as rescue crews continued the search for survivors

Over the weekend, more victims were named, including Leon Oliwkowicz, 80, and his wife Christina Elvira, 74. All remains bar those of Christina were pulled from the wrecked building on Saturday, with Elvira's discovered on Sunday.

Bermudez's father Luis Bermudez Sr paid a heartbreaking tribute to his late son on Facebook, writing in Spanish: 'God decided that he wanted one more angel in heaven. I still do not believe it. I LOVE you and will love you forever.'

He also shared a photograph of a handwritten note, which said: 'My Luiyo. You gave me everything. I will miss you all my life...I will never leave you alone.'

The victims were named as families of those still missing were taken to the site on Sunday to see recovery work - with one set of relatives screaming their loved one's name in the hope she'd hear them.

Anna Ortiz, left, and her son Luis Bermudez, right were among four new victims of the Champlain Towers condo collapse disaster named Sunday evening

Leon Oliwkowicz and his wife Christina were also identified as victims of the tower collapse on Sunday evening

Luis Bermudez's dad Luis Sr left heartbreaking Facebook tributes in Spanish saying 'I will miss you all my life'

Among those still missing after the tower's collapse are two elementary school students, according to The Miami Herald.

Miami-Dade public school district had 17 students registered to the Champlain Tower South building, the paper said, and two remain unaccounted for.

'Our hearts ache for all the impacted families especially our faculty and staff at Ruth K. Broad Bay Harbor K-8 Center who are trying to locate students that attend their school,' the post read.

Counseling services have been offered at the schools since Thursday, the Herald reported.

Relatives were bussed to the ruins of the Champlain Towers South building in Surfside, Florida, on Sunday morning. Once there, loved ones of missing student Nicole Langsfeld began screaming her name, apparently in the hopes that she might hear them and reply.

Langsfeld and her husband Luis Sadovnic are among 152 people still missing after the 12-story building collapsed early last Thursday morning. Nine people are so-far confirmed to have died, with eight of those victims identified by medical examiners.

CNN reporter Faith Karimi, who witnessed Sunday's harrowing visit, tweeted: 'Some relatives of those missing in Surfside were allowed to visit the collapse site this afternoon. (The area is cordoned off).

Relatives of Nicole Langsfeld - pictured with her husband Luis - called her name while visiting the Miami condo collapse site on Sunday, in the hopes their loved one might hear them

Nicole and Luis have not been seen since the 12-story apartment building which they lived in collapsed in the early hours of last Thursday

'Nicole Langsfeld's uncle told me when they got there, they took turns screaming out her name, hoping she'd hear them beneath the rubble.'

Karimi later shared details on Nicole given to her by the missing woman's uncle. She tweeted: 'She was funny and smart and loved animals -- all sorts of animals...She would have moved an elephant into that condo if she could.'

Hopes are beginning to fade that anyone will be rescued from the rubble alive, with four more of the nine people so far confirmed to have died named on Sunday evening.

A makeshift memorial set up near the site of the collapsed condominium was awash with flowers, candles, and pictures of the dead and missing on Sunday

A woman prays while visiting the memorial site for the victims and those missing in the tower collapse on Sunday

A woman hangs flowers on a fence on Sunday evening as people mourn at the memorial site created by neighbors where the rescue personnel continue the search for victims

Four other victims previously named are Stacie Fang, 54, whose 15 year-old son Jonah Handler was filmed being pulled alive from the rubble.

Antonio Lozano, 83, and his wife Gladys, 79, were killed, as was Manny LaFont, 54. One person whose remains were pulled from the collapsed tower has yet to be identified.

Families were bussed to the scene of the tragedy after one angry relative confronted Florida Governor Ron DeSantis about what she claimed were inadequate efforts to try and save their loved ones.

That confrontation, captured on Saturday, saw the woman said: 'It's not enough.

'Imagine if your children were in there. You are going to leave here and you are going to take a nice picture. I know you are doing everything you can, but it's not enough.'

Relatives are pictured being bussed to the recovery site on Sunday, after some complained they felt not enough was being done to try and save their missing loved ones

Explaining the purpose of Sunday's visit, a spokesman for Miami-Dade Daniella Levine Cava said: 'It is a private and deeply emotional moment for the families.'

DeSantis and other officials have stressed that crews have been working 24 hours a day since the tower collapsed, often in rainy conditions, and face the delicate task of trying to extract possible survivors from heaps of rubble without injuring them further.

Rescue teams from Israel and Mexico have joined Miami's highly skilled search and rescue teams. Surfside's Mayor Charles Burkett stressed he was still hoping for 'miracle' rescues from the rubble, saying: 'I expect miracles. I'm expecting many miracles.

'I think we all believe and expect miracles.'

Workers sift among the rubble of the site on Sunday, with workers trying to rescue any potential survivors without putting them at risk of further injury from rubble

Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett says he expects 'miracles' in the coming days as people are rescued, although hopes are fading that anyone else will be pulled out alive

Teams from Israel and Mexico are set to join highly experienced local search and rescue squads in the hopes of finding survivors

Levine Cava also sounded a note of optimism while giving the latest updates on the search Monday evening.

She said crews now had much greater access to the rubble pile, with good weather helping speed their work.

Rescues have also been able to suppress fires currently smoldering in the rubble.

Levine Cava said: 'It's an inspiration to all of us, and to people all around the world. Their work, getting a fire and the smoke under control, was very pivotal, and the good weather today, were two very positive developments in the search, and they have allowed the search and rescue effort to move forward without some of the previous challenges that we have faced

They are actively working on the trench and it actually was extremely helpful for the location of bodies

The mayor also called on the families of the missing to file police reports about their loved ones, so investigators could collect DNA samples to help identify any remains they later fine.

Leo Soto, who lost a friend in the disaster, was among loved-ones paying tributes at a makeshift shrine on Friday. It has continued to grow over the weekend

An investigation into what caused the collapse is ongoing. The Champlain Towers was undergoing repairs as part of a mandatory 40 year recertification process for the building, which was constructed in 1981.

Suspicion is currently focused on the complex's raised swimming pool, which was said to be leaking and eroding its concrete foundations, but investigators say it is too early to draw any firm conclusions.
The federal government is desperately trying to get more Pfizer vaccine doses into the country as Australians turn their noses up at the highly effective and safe AstraZeneca jab.

Health Minister Greg Hunt said on Tuesday the number of Pfizer doses entering the country each week would increase from 300,000 to 600,000 in July, adding: 'We're always working to bring forward more.'

While thousands of Sydneysiders queued for three hours to get the Pfizer jab on Monday and Tuesday, GPs around the nation sat on surplus doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is not recommended for under 60s due to a very small risk of blood clots.

Thousands of Sydneysiders (pictured) queued for three hours to get the Pfizer jab on Monday and Tuesday

Dr Jamal Rifi, who owns Belmore Medical Centre in western Sydney, said only eight people turned up to get a first dose of the AstraZeneca jab on Monday.

'To be honest, people talk about hesitancy or reluctance, it's well beyond that,' he told the ABC.

'It's a refusal of patients to have the AstraZeneca, they passed their judgement and I reckon the AstraZeneca will have no part in our rollout.'

He added: 'They're not interested. They're not coming. We're seeing the second vaccination people coming right now, but first vaccination, there's a handful.

'Even for those who are 60, 70, and 80. Yesterday we saw 50 for second vaccination and we only saw eight for first.'

Western Australia premier Mark McGowan revealed his state was suffering mass hesitancy despite a four-day lockdown due to four cases of the Indian Delta variant of Covid-19.

'There is hesitancy at the moment, our clinics are issuing very few first doses of AZ for people in that age bracket,' he said.

Mr McGowan then undermined the medical advice by arguing that people over 60 should be prioritised for the Pfizer vaccine, which is currently recommended for under 60s.

Dr Jamal Rifi (pictured), who owns Belmore medical centre in western Sydney, said only eight people have showed up to get a first dose of the AstraZeneca jab on Monday

'For those people above this age group of 60, who have not had their first dose of AZ, I just urge the Commonwealth to move towards Pfizer as quickly as we can,' he said.

The surplus of AstraZeneca doses has prompted the government to allow Australians of all ages to get the jab through the GP network.

What are the chances of dying from a blood clot after AstraZeneca? One in 1.9million had died from a blood clot after AstraZeneca when the recommendations were changed. By comparison, Aussies have a one in 33 chance of dying if they catch Covid-19, a one in 12,000 chance of being struck by lightning and a one in 55 chance of winning the Oz Lotto. Advertisement

'There's simply a recognition that the access for those who wish to make an informed consent decision can be broadened, consistent with the supply,' Mr Hunt said on Tuesday.

Some GPs reported being inundated with calls from young Australians who are happy to take AstraZeneca in a bid to end the cycle of lockdowns and border closures as soon as possible.

Mr Hunt said he 'would not put a figure' on how many young people he expected to sign up.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian said there are not enough Pfizer doses to go around in Sydney.

It comes as Australia suffers the slowest vaccination rollout in the whole of the OECD.

Some 60 per cent of Israelis, almost half of Britons and Americans and 36 per cent of Singaporeans have had two doses of the jab.

Even New Zealand, which only uses Pfizer, is now ahead of Australia, with eight per cent jabbed as of last week.

Labor leader Anthony Albanese has slammed Mr Morrison for not signing more vaccine deals last year.

'The government put all its eggs in the AstraZeneca basket and now the chickens have come home to roost,' he said on Monday.

Australia currently only has access to Pfizer and AstraZeneca while France, Germany and Italy have four vaccines and the US, UK and Canada have three.

Mr Hunt said he has always followed the medical advice of the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation when making decisions on vaccine deals.
Barefoot Investor Scott Pape has revealed how Australians can guarantee an extra $400 in their tax return.

More than 10million Australians earning up to $126,000 are already in line to receive between $255 and $1,080 in tax cuts.

However, Aussies will lose around $400 of that if they hire an accountant or tax agent, according to Pape.

Pape, who has become a household name as the Barefoot Investor for his best-selling financial advice books, said 74 per cent of workers use a tax agent or accountant, which typically costs $400.

He urged individuals to lodge their tax returns themselves as they are generally simple to do.

Pape, who has become a household name as the Barefoot Investor for his best-selling financial advice books, said 74 per cent of Aussies use a tax agent or accountant, which typically costs $400

Users simply need to link their account with the ATO website, before selecting the 'prepare' link from the online services homepage

'Now if you're a business owner, an accountant can be invaluable. Same if you have complicated tax structures like family trusts,' Pape told news.com.au.

'Yet if you're an average wage earner, it might be time to kick H&R down the block.'

Pape suggested Australian workers instead opt to use the myTax website through their myGov account.

Users simply need to link their account with the ATO website, before selecting the 'prepare' link from the online services homepage.

Then any boxes relevant to income, investments and government handouts must be selected.

Check boxes should already be pre-filled as your employer and bank should have shared information with the ATO.

The bank should have already shared the information with the ATO while the check boxes need to be pre-filled as your employer.

MyTax will estimate how much someone will receive, or how much they owe, after lodging your return.

Australians working from home during lockdown can still buy some office items at the last minute and claim them back on tax.

Tax agent H&R Block's director of tax communications Mark Chapman said last-minute purchases could be made and claimed back on tax, including a handbag or a briefcase.

Pape suggested Australian workers instead opt to use the myTax website through their myGov account

The Barefoot Investor urged individuals to lodge their tax returns themselves as they are generally simple to do

'If you use a bag for work, to carry papers or a laptop perhaps, you can claim a tax deduction for the cost,' he told Daily Mail Australia.

'That could include a briefcase, a backpack or a handbag, whichever suits your needs.'

With Australians from Sydney to Perth now in lockdown again, dining tables and studies are once again being turned into makeshift home offices.

More time spent on a vinyl chair also means more wear and tear.

Now is the time to replace a worn-out chair or work desk that wasn't designed for long hours at the keyboard.

'If the cost is less than $300, you can claim an immediate deduction,'' Mr Chapman said.

'Keep the receipt as proof of cost.'
Australians stranded around the world are furious over demands from state premiers to slash the number of overseas arrivals.

Victoria's Dan Andrews and Queensland's Annastacia Palaszczuk both put their voices behind a 'massive reduction' in Australians returning home due to outbreaks of the highly-infectious Indian Delta variant in four states.

Stranded Australians express their outrage online at the 'astounding' sentiment, insisting they had a right to return home.

'Anyone else feel like you've just been accused of bioterrorism after listening to the Queensland Premier's latest update?' a woman posted to a hotel quarantine discussion group.

Dozens of others voiced their agreement, despairing at yet another setback in their chances at making it back to home soil.

Australians stranded around the world are furious over suggestions from the Victorian and Queensland Premiers that the country should reduce the number of overseas arrivals

Victoria's Dan Andrews and Queensland's Annastacia Palaszczuk both put their voices behind a 'massive reduction' in Aussies returning home due

Stranded Australians express their outrage online at the 'astounding' sentiment, insisting they had a right to return home

'If Dan and Anastacia get their way with slashing the flight caps, there's a good chance we'll get bumped from our flight,' one woman posted to Facebook on Tuesday.

'Australia - the one country who abandoned its citizens during the pandemic,' another added.

Others pointed the finger at the PM and his bungled national vaccine roll-out for the issues plaguing Australia.

'It's now abundantly clear that Scott Morrison has no care whatsoever for the welfare of people. Either overseas or back home. He doesn't know what it means,' a man posted to Facebook.

'It raises serious questions about his world view. If he cared for the welfare of people there is no way we'd still be stuck and he would have vaccinated approaching half the population at home.'

Australia's new Covid outbreak has left half the population in lockdown (above)

Less than six per cent of Australians are fully vaccinated. Pictured is Australian swimmer Cate Campbell getting the jab in May ahead of the Olympics in Tokyo

Prime Minister Scott Morrison is under renewed pressure from some state premiers to slash international arrival caps to curb new variants entering the country.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk is concerned about her state receiving a daily average of 150 people from overseas and wants deep cuts to the cap.

'Hotel quarantine is just not the answer,' she told reporters in Brisbane.

'We need a massive reduction in overseas arrivals because the overseas arrivals are bringing in these contagious strains.'

Ms Palaszczuk, who called a three-day lockdown for most of her state, urged the PM to only allow those with 'genuine hardship' into Australia.

'The reason why we're having lockdowns in major cities is because the overseas arrivals are bringing the virus here,' she said.

'The risk is real and we need to contain the virus. We need to protect Australia. We need to protect Queensland.'

Her deputy Stephen Miles said overseas arrivals were an 'unacceptable risk' and the Queensland Government would move to 'dramatically cut' them.

'Our international borders are supposed to be closed. But every week, thousands of people are allowed to travel,' he said.

Graphs showing the seven-day average of new cases and deaths in Australia since March last year to now

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews is pushing for a three-month reduction in overseas arrivals to reduce the risk of the Delta strain.

Mr Andrews suggested halving the cap on returned travellers, arguing it is a better option than more lockdowns as the country battles various outbreaks.

'If it's a choice for me between less people coming back - and yes there will be pain with that - or locking the whole place down, that's not a difficult decision,' Mr Andrews told ABC radio on Tuesday.

Mr Andrews later told reporters that all the outbreaks were from quarantine breaches and a 'a national discussion about how many people we are letting in' was needed.

'The lockdowns and restrictions in place across the country right now are all a result of hotel quarantine breaches - which is why we need a national discussion about how many people we're letting in,' he said.

'Locking some people out is better than locking everyone down - we need a national approach to how we manage this new threat until we achieve proper vaccine coverage.'

Dozens of others voiced their agreement, despairing at yet another setback in their chances at making it back to home soil

Federal Labor Party president Wayne Swan described the vaccine rollout as 'probably the greatest public policy disaster in Australian political history.' Pictured are Melburnians queuing to be vaccinated

Despite that being easy for politicians, who are repeatedly given preferential treatment when it comes to travel during the pandemic, there are still some 34,000 Australians registered with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade as seeking a flight home - including 3,900 considered 'vulnerable'.

The incoming passenger cap is expected to be debated at the next national cabinet meeting on Friday.

More government-facilitated flights are planned in coming weeks to support their return from overseas.

On Monday night, national cabinet agreed to compulsory post-quarantine testing for returned travellers, which must occur two to three days after they leave.

Travellers who have gone through 14-day quarantine in one jurisdiction will be able to enter other jurisdictions without having to isolate again.

National cabinet also decided to ban accommodating low-risk domestic travellers next door to high-risk international arrivals.

But the hotel quarantine regime is not expected to undergo major changes even when supplementary facilities are built.

Australia's sluggish Covid-19 vaccine program was slammed on Monday as the nation recorded the slowest rollout of 38 OECD nations

Health Minister Greg Hunt said the extra steps announced on Monday were part of a 'continuous improvement' of the quarantine system, which had been effective at preventing the spread of Covid-19.

He encouraged all states and territories to help bring home as many Australians as possible.

'We recognise and respect their decisions, ultimately, but NSW has done the heavy lifting on behalf of the nation - they're continuing to do that,' he said.

'We know that we can bring home Australians, we should bring home Australians, and the critical workers - whether it's in health or medical or engineering - are fundamental to helping save lives and protect lives.'

Labor leader Anthony Albanese said the federal government had a responsibility to fix quarantine, not leave it to the states and territories.

'This government has walked away from its obligations to Australians who have been stranded overseas and it's walked away from its obligation to fix the quarantine system,' he said.
A New Zealand worker has been awarded $14,000 in compensation after he was shot in the heart with a nail gun by his colleague while working at a mattress factory.

The freak accident happened in September 2019, according to WorkSafe, when the man was working at Sleepwell, in South Auckland, a company which produces mattresses and bed bases.

Another worker had attempted to free a coil hose attached to a nail gun which was connected to an air-supply line but accidentally engaged the trigger.

As the gun recoiled, it fired a nail directly into the chest of the worker walking behind him.

A man was shot in the heart with a nail gun by his colleague at a Sleepwell mattress factory in South Auckland

The nail was lodged in the worker's heart requiring immediate surgical removal, with the man unable to return to work for three months.

'He's lucky to be alive and his ordeal could have been avoided if the company had adequately identified the risks of using nail guns and implemented clearly marked exclusion zones - areas out of bounds to other workers,' said WorkSafe's area manager Danielle Henry.

An investigation conducted by WorkSafe found the company had not marked proper nail gun exclusion zones indicating where one may be in use.

It also found that nail guns were not regularly checked to ensure they were fit for use and workers didn't have adequate nail gun training.

The company was slapped with a fine of NZ$250,000 (AUD$233,000) after failing to comply with a duty to ensure the health and safety of its workers.

In addition the company was ordered to pay the victim a reparation of NZ$15,000 (AU$14,000).
A serving police officer today admitted he 'wouldn't feel confident' reporting a crime to his own failing force.

The unnamed PC works for Greater Manchester Police (GMP), England's second largest force, which was taken into special measures last year and saw the chief constable Ian Hopkins quit 'with immediate effect'.

The officer told BBC's Newsnight 'lucky' criminals are 'literally walking the streets [and] not being arrested' at a time when GMP failed to record 80,000 crimes in 2020.

He joins a chorus of criticism from serving and retired officers who admit the force is letting down victims of crime every day.

Former GMP officer Scott Winters, who left in 2017 after 28 years of service, took them to a successful employment tribunal and agreed some of the force's failings are 'dire', 'unforgivable' and 'abysmal'.

He said: ' They are a victim of crime and they've not either had the crime recorded [or] a chance of the perpetrators being brought to justice and punished'.

Former GMP officer Scott Winters, who left in 2017 after 28 years of service, says the force is failing victims of crime and letting perpetrators walk free

GMP officers have been failing to record all crimes and accused of failing many victims in the city

One mother named Patricia discovered her daughter had been groomed and raped by a man, which drove her to try to kill herself twice. Together they went to the police to try to get the rapist arrested.

Describing what happened she told the BBC: 'We went in and the detective we spoke to already had a pile of papers on his desk and a photograph. He asked us 'is this the man in question?' and we said 'yes' and he said 'yeah, we know a lot of stuff about this man'.

'So I just thought: 'Brilliant, they already know who he is so it will be dealt with really, really well'.

But since then four different officers have been looking at the case and the evidence went missing.

She said: 'To me they are absolutely incompetent, there's no other word to sum them up. What this man did has ruined probably the best years of her life.

'It's given her such bad anxiety that she's on antidepressants. Maximum dose. She can't sleep. She's just not the girl she used to be.

'He's caused all that and he's still out there. He's not even been arrested.'

In December the force was placed in 'special measures' and the chief constable of Greater Manchester Police Ian Hopkins quit 'with immediate effect' after a damning inspection report revealed the force's officers failed to record 80,000 crimes in 2020.

Inspectors said they had 'serious cause for concern' about the way England's second biggest police force was being run after it was revealed they had not recorded a fifth of all reported crimes, meaning 'victims are too often being let down'.

Greater Manchester Police will be closely monitored and placed in what is known as the 'national oversight process' as a result of its failures around crime recording and the protection of vulnerable people, it is understood.

Only one other force - Cleveland Police - is believed to have ever been placed in these measures, the highest level of escalation.

The announcement was made this afternoon, and a Home Office source has now alleged Manchester Mayor Mr Burnham threw the senior officer 'under the bus to save his own skin.'

The insider added: 'It's no surprise that the Labour Mayor of Manchester Andy Burnham has thrown a senior police officer under the bus to save his own skin.

'This will not distract from his years of failure, and most disturbingly his inability to deliver justice for victims and survivors of the most abhorrent crimes.'

Mayor Andy Burnham, pictured with chief constable Ian Hopkins in the aftermath of the Manchester Arena bombing, has political control of the ailing force

Chief Constable Ian Hopkins is off sick and Greater Manchester Police is to be placed in 'special measures' following a damning inspection report last week that revealed officers failed to record 80,000 crimes in 2020

MailOnline has contacted Mr Burnham for comment.

It was reported earlier this week that Mr Hopkins was signed off sick as he was battling labyrinthitis, an inner ear infection that affects balance.

Now he will step down from the force after more than three decades, almost half of which was spent in the top job.

In a statement, he said: 'These are challenging times for Greater Manchester Police. The force has a long-term strategic plan to address the issues raised by the HMIC and I believe this plan should be led by a Chief Constable who can oversee it from start to finish.

Greater Manchester Police placed in 'special measures': What does this mean? Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary will put Greater Manchester Police (GMP) in what is known as the 'national oversight process' as a result of its failures around crime recording and the protection of vulnerable people, it is understood. The HMICFRS will closely monitor how England's second largest force tries to address its failings. This will involve Greater Manchester Police developing an improvement plan. A spokesperson for the HMICFRS said : 'The level of scrutiny on Greater Manchester Police has been raised and the force has been placed in the Engage stage of the HMICFRS monitoring process. 'This is due to the causes of concern raised in HMICFRS's recent reports which have highlighted the poor service the force provides to many victims of crime. 'In the Engage stage, a force is required to develop an improvement plan to address the specific causes of concern that have led to it being placed in the advanced phase of the monitoring process. 'The process is intended to provide support to the force from external organisations including the Home Office, College of Policing and the National Police Chiefs Council to assist in achieving the required improvements.' Advertisement

'Considering what is best for GMP and the communities we serve, and given my current ill health, I have decided to stand down from the post of Chief Constable with immediate effect.

'It has been an honour to serve the public for 32 years, nearly 13 of which as a Chief Officer in GMP. Throughout my career I have been committed to achieving the best outcomes for the people I serve. The decision to stand down is not one I have taken lightly but I feel the time is right.

'I was due to retire in autumn 2021 and bringing that date forward assists in the timely recruitment of my successor.

'I would like to pay tribute to my colleagues and the many dedicated officers and staff I have had the privilege of working with throughout my service.'

Mr Burnham confirmed in a statement this afternoon that he had agreed with the chief constable that he will stand down 'with immediate effect'.

He said Mr Hopkins had led the force during 'one of the most difficult periods in its history' dealing with budget cuts and 'complex threats' such as the Manchester Arena terror attack.

He added: 'In other important areas, however, the organisation has not made the progress needed. It is an important principle of policing in this country that it is operationally independent from political interference.

'I do not run Greater Manchester Police on a day to day basis. Instead, it is my job to hold the Chief Constable to account, and by extension the force for the services provided to our residents.

'At times this essential task has been made too difficult by an overly defensive culture within GMP. This needs to change if GMP is to develop the open learning culture that will allow the failures identified by HMIC to be properly addressed.

'Improvements are now overdue. So both I and the deputy mayor, whilst paying tribute to Ian's 12 years of service to Greater Manchester Police have concluded that now is the time for new leadership, and a new era in our police force.'

Mr Burnham said deputy chief constable Ian Pilling will assume the operational duties of chief constable ahead of a full recruitment process.

Asked why it was the chief constable who has stepped down and not him, he said: 'Because I do not run Greater Manchester Police.

'The police service is operationally independent from politicians and rightly so. My job is different. I have to hold the police to account for the services they provide to the Greater Manchester public, and I am here doing my job holding the police service to account.

Andy Burnham 'threw the Greater Manchester police chief under the bus to save his own skin', a Home Office source said

'The minute we were presented with evidence in the report of continuing failure on support to victims and the recording of crime, myself and the deputy mayor took immediate action.'

He added: 'It has been a difficult week for Greater Manchester Police. This is a difficult day. I have a regard for Ian too... but at the end of the day, it's public confidence in Greater Manchester Police that matters.

'And that comes from taking decisive action to make the police force accountable to the public of Greater Manchester, and that is what I am doing. I'm doing the job I was elected to do, and I will continue to do that.'

Case study: Domestic abuse victim denied support A pregnant victim called to report that an older relative was making threats of violence against her, that he was always fighting her and wanted to attack her. She confirmed that this happens regularly. The caller was clearly distressed on the telephone and sounded fearful. The pattern of behaviour is repeated and continuous. A domestic abuse-related offence of controlling and coercive behaviour should have been recorded as a crime but wasn't, no investigation was undertaken and appropriate safeguarding opportunities were missed. Advertisement

Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary will put Greater Manchester Police (GMP) in what is known as the 'national oversight process' as a result of its failures around crime recording and the protection of vulnerable people, it is understood.

But Labour Mayor Mr Burnham retains political control of the force.

Only one other force - Cleveland Police - is believed to have ever been placed in these measures, the highest level of escalation.

HMI has consistently warned GMP about its crime recording and protection of vulnerable people for nearly five years.

The move will involve much more hands-on involvement from the inspectorate, the Home Office, College of Policing, National Police Chiefs Council, with the measures to remain in place until GMP can demonstrate sufficient improvement.

In a joint statement, Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham and Bev Hughes, Greater Manchester's Deputy Mayor for Policing, Crime and Criminal Justice, said the HMICFRS report 'raised extremely serious issues with implications for the quality of services to victims that have been on-going for a number of years'.

They outlined actions being put in place to improve standards of service, including investing in more police officers and recruiting more staff for GMP's Central Recording and Resolution Unit.

A dedicated hotline, supported by Victim Support, will be available from Monday for victims who wish to make a complaint or report concerns about their treatment.

It comes after a blistering report last week found the force had significantly deteriorated in its crime recording since 2018 and was now even worse at it than in 2016, when it was rated inadequate.

It warned that GMP's services to victims were a 'serious cause for concern', and highlighted drifting, poorly-planned investigations and safeguarding failures.

The report's author Zoe Billingham said the force had 'bucked the trend' in that its performance had declined since its previous poor inspections rather than improving.

Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary has been warning GMP about its crime recording and protection of vulnerable people for nearly five years.

After the report was published, Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, who oversees the force, said he was 'confident' that 'in just a small number of days, significant progress has been made'.

That plan includes a new complaints line for people who do not feel their crime report has been dealt with properly, as well as further recruitment to a new centralised crime recording unit and a 'gold command structure' aimed at turning around the situation.

A meeting with the Home Office about the report was 'constructive', Mr Burnham's deputy Beverley Hughes had said.

The report revealed a number of damning case studies as examples of where the force had failed.

One of these detailed how a domestic abuse victim was denied support.

It revealed how the pregnant woman called to report that an older relative was making threats of violence against her, that he was always fighting her and wanted to attack her.

She confirmed that this happens regularly. The caller was clearly distressed on the telephone and sounded fearful. The pattern of behaviour is repeated and continuous.

Case study: Rape investigation not progressed A victim reported a rape by an identified suspect, and further disclosed that they had also recently been the victim of a violent domestic assault by a different suspect. The victim declined to provide a formal account at that stage as they wanted time to reflect on whether to take any investigation forward. The rape was recorded as a crime, however the domestic abuse crime was not. Following initial disclosure, no investigation plan was put in place for the rape crime and there was no investigative activity for more than four months, even though clear lines of enquiry were apparent. No contact was made with the victim after the report, either directly or through agencies (who were in contact with the victim). The most recent log entry merely states that contact needed to be made and further enquiries progressed. Tasks to review the investigation were sent to a detective inspector (28 days) and a detective chief inspector (90 days). Neither of these tasks were completed. Although the victim had some reservations about engaging in the investigation at the initial reporting stage, more could and should have been done to support and safeguard them by taking positive action. Advertisement

A domestic abuse-related offence of controlling and coercive behaviour should have been recorded as a crime but wasn't, no investigation was undertaken and appropriate safeguarding opportunities were missed.

Similarly, concerns were raised over the way a rape investigation was not progressed by officers.

The report details how a victim reported an attack by an identified suspect, adding that they'd also recently been the victim of a violent domestic assault by a different suspect.

The victim declined to provide a formal account at that stage as they wanted time to reflect on whether to take any investigation forward.

The rape was recorded as a crime, but the domestic abuse crime was not.

Following initial disclosure, no investigation plan was put in place for the rape crime and there was no investigative activity for more than four months, even though clear lines of enquiry were apparent.

No contact was made with the victim after the report, either directly or through agencies (who were in contact with the victim).

The most recent log entry merely states that contact needed to be made and further enquiries progressed.

Tasks to review the investigation were sent to a detective inspector (28 days) and a detective chief inspector (90 days), but neither of these were completed.

Although the victim had some reservations about engaging in the investigation at the initial reporting stage, more could and should have been done to support and safeguard them by taking positive action, investigators found.

An HM Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services (HMICFRS) spokesman said: 'The level of scrutiny on Greater Manchester Police has been raised and the force has been placed in the Engage stage of the HMICFRS monitoring process.

'This is due to the causes of concern raised in HMICFRS's recent reports which have highlighted the poor service the force provides to many victims of crime.

'In the Engage stage, a force is required to develop an improvement plan to address the specific causes of concern that have led to it being placed in the advanced phase of the monitoring process.

'The process is intended to provide support to the force from external organisations including the Home Office, College of Policing and the National Police Chiefs Council to assist in achieving the required improvements.'

The move comes amid growing speculation within the Greater Manchester system about the force's performance, including frustrations among MPs and within town halls.
The CCTV that filmed Matt Hancock cheating on his wife with the university friend he personally appointed to a taxpayer-funded job was moved to 'stitch him up', it was claimed today.

A senior Department of Health source believes the camera was deliberately pointed at the office door Mr Hancock was passionately kissing Gina Coladangelo against on May 6 to end his ministerial career.

The Whitehall probe into how the footage was leaked will also look into if and why the camera was switched 180 degrees during a refurb or by a whistleblower who wanted to expose the cheating minister and his lover.

But a senior Government source said today they are sure it was part of a plot to sink Mr Hancock, telling the Evening Standard: 'We all think Matt Hancock was really stitched up on this'.

Security expert David Videcette, a former Scotland Yard detective, says the camera would have been there to watch the former health secretary's 9th floor balcony, which also contained his fire exit.

But Mr Videcette believes 'someone repurposed the camera', raising the prospect that it was either physically or remotely turned 180 degrees towards the door where the colleagues were caught kissing.

He tweeted: 'The CCTV camera that caught Matt Hancock kissing in his office was there to monitor a balcony & should have been pointing in opposite direction.

'The decisions to use this space as his office have been idiotic. But the point here is this - someone repurposed the camera'. He added: 'The implications of that from a security point of view is huge.'

It raises the prospect that someone may have known that the lovers canoodled against the office door and turned the camera to get the evidence that saw Mr Hancock leave his job and his wife on Saturday.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock under the office camera (circled) that caught him in a clinch with his aide - but security experts fear it was tampered with and turned towards the door

The CCTV camera was operated by the Department of Health, adding that responsibility for security was down to the department, which was led by Mr Hancock until his resignation

Security expert David Videcette, a former Scotland Yard detective, says the camera would have been there to watch the former health secretary's 9th floor balcony (pictured), which also contained his fire exit

After allowing a month to elapse, the whistleblower approached lockdown sceptics and asked them to help sell the incendiary footage to the media

A Department of Health and Social Care investigation will now consider if the camera was swivelled around, and if so, who did it.

Documents seen by The Daily Telegraph say a Scotland Yard security review said that a CCTV camera in his office should have a 'limited field of vision' to 'ensure privacy'.

It says: 'The building has several balconies and terraces and it is proposed these will also need to be covered by security cameras.'

And a source told the newspaper that on two occasions Mr Hancock has had work done to extend his office, including expanding into an anteroom at the end of 2020, which will be looked at by the Whitehall probe launched yesterday.

Sources familiar with the ninth-floor office in Victoria Street in central London say alterations were carried out twice while Mr Hancock was health secretary, once to carve out the ante room from his office and then to extend the anteroom towards the end of last year.

Sajid Javid has taken over the office, and has had the CCTV camera above the meeting table taped up and disabled. Many have questioned why a camera is above a cabinet minister's table in the first place.

The sting that brought down Matt Hancock was executed by a whistleblower in his department who contacted opponents of the Health Secretary's stance on lockdown to help expose his affair. The clinch took place around this corner (bottom right part of image). The camera in question can be seen on the ceiling (top right-hand corner)

Mr Videcette called the camera's location 'ridiculous' but believes that it was used by someone to target Mr Hancock before his affair emerged

It came as Mr Hancock was accused of being 'the stupidest man on Earth' as MPs were told that the camera which caught him kissing his aide was not a secret.

Cabinet Office minister Julia Lopez admitted the device was 'not covert', dismissing theories that a rogue member of staff or security guard had planted a recording device to capture the former health secretary's affair with Gina Coladangelo.

It came as reviews were launched in both the Department of Health and Social Care and in Parliament into the leak of the compromising footage to a national newspaper.

Cabinet Office minister Julia Lopez, pictured, admitted the device was 'not covert', dismissing theories that a rogue member of staff or security guard had planted a recording device

Ministers' offices are now being swept for bugs and hidden cameras. Mrs Lopez told MPs that the camera in Mr Hancock's office was an 'outlier' and that it was not general policy for recording devices to be put in ministerial offices.

But she confirmed it was a CCTV camera operated by the Department of Health, adding that responsibility for security was down to the department, which was led by Mr Hancock until his resignation.

The Mail understands that security arrangements had been outsourced to a private contractor. But the House of Commons was told that ministers' offices are regularly swept for bugs, with some dealing with important issues of national security being checked more often on a 'risk-based assessment'.

Thanks to its central role administering the vaccine during the pandemic, the Department of Health is likely to have been among those checked regularly. She said: 'We do not believe there are covert concerns at this moment.'

Mr Hancock resigned as Health Secretary less than 48 hours after pictures emerged of him in a passionate embrace with Gina Coladangelo, pictured together above

But her response exasperated incredulous MPs, with Labour's Chris Bryant saying: 'Something really doesn't add up here... The secretary of state knew it was there. And yet, we've all seen the video. If that's true, he must be the stupidest man on Earth.

'Is [Mrs Lopez] really trying to persuade us that he knew there was a camera in his office?'

Officials are scrambling to identify and switch off any CCTV cameras with a view of ministerial offices. The Department of Health is carrying out an investigation, which is being supported by Whitehall security specialists from the Government Security Group based at the Cabinet Office. MI5 will be consulted by the Office in the leak inquiry if the disclosure poses a threat to national security.

Yesterday, Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle announced a second review in Parliament, saying: 'I have directed senior officials to consider what implications there are for security arrangements in the House given recent events in Whitehall and take any necessary steps with urgency.'

Earlier, Justice Secretary Robert Buckland told Sky News he had asked for his office to be searched. He said: 'I've never seen any camera facilities. I know there is CCTV in the building... but I am sure that many of my colleagues will be asking the same question and making sure that the offices are swept.'
A woman in Turkey claims to have celebrated her 119th birthday on Sunday, which would make her the oldest person in the world.

Turkish media reported that Seker Arslan had celebrated the astonishing milestone surrounded by her family in the northern city of Amasya.

According to her driving license, she was born on June 27, 1902, making her 119.

A woman in Turkey - Seker Arslan - is reported to have celebrated her 119th birthday on Sunday, making her the oldest known person in the world. However, it appeared that her family had got their maths wrong, presenting her with a 120th birthday cake (pictured)

According to her driving license (pictured), Arslan was born on June 27, 1902, making her 119

However, it appeared that her family had got their maths wrong, presenting her with a 120th birthday cake on Sunday.

Ms Arslan has six children, 12 grandchildren, and appears to have inherited her longevity from her mother who is said to have lived until 110 years old.

Her daughter, Serap Yueksel, put her mother's long life down to eating natural foods such as butter, honey and cheese.

'Butter, honey and cheese were always on the table. She used to leaven her yogurt herself. She still has a boiled egg at breakfast,' Yueksel said, adding that while her mother has Alzheimer's disease, she has otherwise stayed healthy.

According to Yueksel, her mother's only regret is not yet having any great-grandchildren to add to her family tree.

Arslan is still surrounded by relatives, however, as she lives with her daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren.

The family had a scare when they caught COVID-19 six months ago.

The family had a scare when they caught COVID-19 six months ago, but her daughter Serap Yueksel took precautions to ensure her mother was protected from the deadly virus

However, despite sharing the same space as their elderly relative, they did not pass the virus on to her, with her test coming back negative thanks to her daughter taking precautions not to spread it to her elderly mother.

Ms Arslan thanked her family at the birthday celebration, according to Turkish media. 'Thank God, I didn't even get sick. I didn't even get the coronavirus. You have the disease, I don't either,' she said.

Arslan spent most of her special day praying and recalling memories from her long life, in which she has lived through World War I, the Spanish Flu pandemic, the fall of the Ottoman Empire, World War II, the Cold War and now the Covid-19 pandemic.

She also found the time to receive a visit from Mesudiye Altun Guerlevik, president of the local women's branch of the ruling Justice and Development Party, who wished her a happy birthday.

Local officials want to have her birthday recognised so that she can claim the oldest living person title, overtaking the current record holder, Kane Tanaka of Japan (pictured in 2020), who was born six months later than Ms Arslan, on 2nd January 1903

Local officials want to have her birthday recognised so that she can claim the oldest living person title, overtaking the current record holder, Kane Tanaka of Japan, who was born six months later than Ms Arslan, on 2nd January 1903.

Ms Tanaka is currently the oldest confirmed person alive, aged 118.

But should her age be confirmed, Ms Arslan would top the list of the world's exclusive group of living supercentenarians - people over the age of 110.

The oldest person ever recorded was Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, who lived from February 21, 1875 to August 4, 1997 - until the age of 122.
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Monsoon flooding has revealed the shallow graves of suspected Covid-19 victims as bodies have floated along the Ganges following fears India's death toll is much higher than the 396,000 reported.

The start of seasonal monsoon flooding has caused strong currents to surge through the 1,550-mile long waterway, dislodging some of the bodies buried in shallow sand graves along its banks.

Bodies, which are believed to be fatalities from Covid-19, shrouded in saffron cloth have been seen floating down the Ganges river at the Phaphamau ghat near a cremation ground in Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh.

It comes as experts warned that India's death toll could be closer to two million compared to the 396,730 fatalities officially recorded from the virus.

The start of seasonal monsoon flooding has caused strong currents to surge through the 1,550-mile long Ganges river, dislodging some of the bodies buried in shallow graves along its banks

Bodies, which are believed to be fatalities from Covid-19, shrouded in saffron cloth have been seen floating down the Ganges river at the Phaphamau ghat near a cremation ground in Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh

The exposed shallow graves (pictured) comes as experts warned that India's death toll could be closer to two million compared to the 396,730 fatalities officially recorded from the virus

Families buried the bodies of their loved ones in shallow riverside graves as they were unable to afford the cost of funeral pyres. Pictured: Graves of suspected Covid deaths on the banks of the Ganges in Phaphamau before the river flooded in May

Families in India's north and east buried the bodies of their loved ones in graves along the Ganges as they were unable to afford the cost of funeral pyres at the height of the Covid outbreak in April and May.

The grim scenes along the Ganges river first started in May as India's ferocious coronavirus wave overwhelmed hospitals and crematoriums.

Officials in Allahabad - one of Hinduism's holiest cities, where millions visit to perform funeral rites - say almost 150 bodies that floated up in the past three weeks have been cremated.

Funeral pyres sit on riverside embankments beside piles of wood, waiting for new bodies to be retrieved from the waters and cremated.

There were also dozens of corpses partially submerged in the river in surrounding areas, according to AFP.

Officials have estimated that up to 600 bodies were buried along the Ganges in Allahabad during the height of the country's Covid crisis.

Funeral pyres sit on riverside embankments beside piles of wood, waiting for new bodies to be retrieved from the waters and cremated. Pictured: Risen water level of the Ganges washes away the sparse layer of the soil and reveals the shallow graves

The grim scenes along the Ganges river (pictured on Sunday) first started in May as India's ferocious coronavirus wave overwhelmed hospitals and crematoriums

Officials in Allahabad - one of Hinduism's holiest cities, where millions visit to perform funeral rites - say almost 150 bodies that floated up in the past three weeks have been cremated

There were also dozens of corpses partially submerged in the river in surrounding areas. Pictured: Bodies, many of which are believed to be COVID-19 victims, are seen partially exposed in shallow sand graves due to increased rainfall

But locals believe that is just a fraction of the real figures and fear that more could be dislodged from the sandy banks by rapid waters in the coming weeks.

Sonu Chandel, a boatman who works with a riverside crematorium, said he was shaken by the sight of families burying their dead two months ago.

He said a sense of uneasiness returned to him as the waters rose to cover the banks, adding: 'It was really sad to see poor people burying their loved ones in an undignified manner, but the rising water level has made it worse.

'There is always the fear of (a body) hitting the oar or (my boat) running over a dead body as the water level goes up.'

Other major religious centres in northern India, such as the religious hub of Varanasi further downstream, have experienced similar problems.

Locals fear the corpses, if not removed, risk further contaminating what is already one of the world's most polluted waterways.

'This... could cause dangerous diseases,' Dipin Kumar, who lives near the Ganges in Allahabad, said.

'The government must think this over and only they can make a plan.'

Funeral pyres wait on riverside embankments beside piles of wood waiting for new bodies to be retrieved and cremated. Pictured: Bodies are seen partially exposed in shallow sand graves in Phaphamau on Monday

Officials have estimated that up to 600 bodies were buried along the Ganges in Allahabad during the height of the country's Covid crisis. Pictured: Risen water level of the Ganges River reveals the shallow graves of suspected Covid-19 deaths

Sonu Chandel, a boatman who works with a riverside crematorium, said he was shaken by the sight of families burying their dead two months ago. Pictured: Graves revealed in Phaphamau, near Prayagraj

A journalist in Kanpur said the practice of riverside graves happens in non-pandemic times but villagers have never seen so many bodies wash up in such a short space of time. Pictured: Shallow graves of suspected Covid victim wrapped in cloth

The holiest river in India, the 'Mother Ganga', like other water bodies in India is worshipped as a goddess by Hindus and viewed as the giver and taker of life.

Pilgrims flock to the Ganges to ritualistically bathe, and even before the pandemic, millions of Hindus cremated their dead along its banks before scattering the ashes in the river.

Some who could not afford wood or other materials for funeral rites would submerge the bodies of their loved ones instead, while others conducted water burials as part of their religious traditions.

A journalist in Kanpur told the BBC last month that this practice happens in non-pandemic times but villagers have never seen so many bodies wash up in such a short space of time.

Locals said funerals, which can cost more than 7,000 rupees ($100), were adding to the hardships of those already struggling to make ends meet in the pandemic-stricken economy.

Police and state disaster teams are patrolling the river looking for bodies and officials have stationed two boats along the banks to retrieve the corpses, sometimes with help from local fishermen, but have had little success in recent days.

'The flow is very fast and it is a challenge to fish out bodies now,' a police officer said.

Shallow graves and human mounds have been found lining the embankment all along the Ganges, in villages including Kanpur, Kannauj, Unnao, Prayagraj and Mahadevi ghat.

Police and state disaster teams are patrolling the river looking for bodies (pictured on the banks of the Ganges River on Monday in Phaphamau, near Prayagraj)

Officials have stationed two boats along the banks to retrieve the corpses, sometimes with help from local fishermen, but have had little success in recent days. Pictured: Bodies partially exposed in shallow sand in Phaphamau on Monday

Shallow graves and human mounds have been found lining the embankment all along the Ganges, in villages including Kanpur, Phaphamau (pictured), Kannauj, Unnao, Prayagraj and Mahadevi ghat

Bodies are seen partially exposed in shallow sand graves as rainwater inundated the site and caused the soil to be washed away at a cremation ground on the banks of the Ganges River on June 28, 2021 in Phaphamau

The country of 1.4billion has officially recorded 30.28million Covid infections and 396,730 fatalities from the virus, but there are concerns that the country's true coronavirus death toll could be closer to two million.

Scientists at the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation have said that India could only be detecting between 3 and 5 per cent of cases due to insufficient testing.

Murad Banaji, a mathematician at the Middlesex University estimates the country's real death toll could be around five times the reported figure.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Mr Banaji based the estimation partly on mortality and serosurvey data, which shows the presence of antibodies in the population.

These new estimates echo research carried out by the New York Times last month which said the real death toll could be closer to 1.6million.

In consulting with more than a dozen experts, the Times found it difficult to get a clear picture even of the total number of infections in India due to poor record-keeping and a lack of widespread testing.

Experts have said the undercounting could be due to insufficient testing, hospitals being overwhelmed and lack of access to healthcare in rural parts of the country.

This could mean that many deaths with coronavirus are taking place at home, particularly in rural areas - and are therefore omitted from the count.

The system for keeping death records in India is also unreliable, with just four out of five deaths not medically investigated pre-pandemic.

The country of 1.4billion has officially recorded 30.28million Covid infections and 396,730 fatalities from the virus

There are concerns that the country's true coronavirus death toll could be closer to two million. Pictured: Bodies, many of which are believed to be COVID-19 victims, are seen partially exposed in shallow sand graves in Phaphamau

India has seen a steady fall in its Covid-19 infection numbers in June after a serious wave of the virus. Pictured: Corpses are seen partially exposed in shallow sand graves in Phaphamau

Corpses, many of which are believed to be Covid-19 victims, are seen partially exposed in shallow sand graves as rainwater inundated the site and caused the soil to be washed away at a cremation ground on the banks of the Ganges River on Monday

Dr Banaji has previously said that it is likely that underreporting varies from state to state.

He told the Hindu Times last week: 'Even within States, it is probably different in urban and rural areas.

'Many of the estimates are based on 2020 data. It's too early to know whether underreporting has been higher during this wave, but as more data comes in, this will become clearer.

'It may be that the speed of the surge meant that fewer of the deceased were tested, fewer received hospital care, and more died at home. All of these factors would tend to increase underreporting.'

The country was also the first nation to detect the Delta variant which is now driving a spike in cases in the UK.

India has seen a steady fall in its Covid-19 infection numbers in June and many states and cities have made steps towards re-opening fully, though the number of people vaccinated as a share of the overall population remains low.

Experts have raised concerns that re-opening too quickly could once again risk recent gains made in fighting the serious wave of coronavirus in the country.

India also successfully vaccinated up to eight million people a day in the last week, as the government has picked up the pace and announced plans to vaccinate all adults by the end of the year.
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This is the hilarious moment armed Downing Street police officers mocked cheating Matt Hancock when a member of the public jokingly asked whether the former Health Secretary could 'come out to play'.

In video posted on TikTok, an officer standing guard cheekily tells the laughing heckler that disgraced Mr Hancock 'is clearing out his locker', before another quips 'he's had his play already'.

Mr Hancock left government and ditched his wife of 15 years last week after the Sun splashed images of his clinch with millionaire aide Gina Coladangelo in his ministerial office.

This is the hilarious moment armed Downing Street police officers mock cheating Matt Hancock after a member of the public jokes if the disgraced former Health Secretary can 'come out and play'

In video posted to social media, armed officers standing guard cheekily tells a heckler Mr Hancock 'is clearing out his locker' to roars of laughter from the public as they laugh: 'He's had his play already'

The clip, filmed by company boss Dan Wright on Monday afternoon, has gone viral and been viewed more than a million times already.

In the video, Mr Wright asks the group of armed policemen: 'Is Matt allowed to play? Is Matt allowed to come out and play?' The smirking officer then responds: 'No, he's cleaning his locker out at the moment' - to roars of laughter from his colleagues.

Passerby Mr Wright, of Chelmsford, Essex, also bursts out laughing while a second armed police officer quips: 'He's had his play already.'

Social media users praised the video, with one writing: 'I love the British humour.' Another said: 'I find everything about this so funny, what a stinker he has had.'

A Scotland Yard spokesperson said 'We are aware of a video circulating online showing an interaction between a member of the public and officers from the Met's Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection Command. While there are no concerns around their conduct, the officers will be spoken to.'

It comes amid reports Miss Coladangelo, 43, has left her husband and is determined to 'make a go' of her relationship with the disgraced former Health Secretary.

Miss Coladangelo stepped down from her Health Department director role hours after Mr Hancock himself resigned over pictures of them in a passionate embrace.

Mr Hancock, 42, had also ended his marriage to wife Martha shortly before the revelations were made public and is now understood to be living with his lover.

Mr Hancock left government and ditched his wife of 15 years last week after the Sun splashed images of his clinch with millionaire aide Gina Coladangelo, the wife of Oliver Bonas founder Oliver Tress

The key questions Matt Hancock still has to answer about his affair What was he using his private Gmail address for at work? Former health secretary Matt Hancock used a private Gmail account and whether it was used to help conduct his affair in work time. According to The Sunday Times, Department of Health officials had complained that he 'only' deals with his private office 'via Gmail account'. However sources insist he has had a departmental email address since he became Health Secretary in 2018. Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner said there must be 'full transparency' and a 'full investigation'. She told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: 'I've written to ensure that there is an investigation into ministers using private emails to conduct official Government business in secret, agreeing contracts in private etc.' She added: 'We need full transparency on this and a full investigation.' Will he take his 16,000 pay-off from the taxpayer? There were calls last night for Mr Hancock to be stripped of his 16,000 severance pay. The payment is standard to ministers in whatever circumstances they leave their role. Mr Hancock is said to be weighing whether to take it. Labour housing spokesman Lucy Powell told Sky's Trevor Phillips On Sunday that people would be 'appalled to think that there's going to be a severance payment to Matt Hancock in this circumstance'. She added: 'We will certainly be calling that out and asking the Prime Minister not to give him that.' Did he share a bed with his aide at the G7 summit? Matt Hancock is facing fresh questions into whether he pursued his affair with his aide at public expense. The disgraced former Health Secretary is claimed to have taken mistress Gina Coladangelo, 43, to a G7 health summit in Oxford. It is not known however if they remained together after the event, which involved a dinner and overnight stay in a luxury hotel in the city where they met as university students. The meeting came four weeks after the now infamous clinch they shared in Mr Hancock's ninth-floor departmental office. According to The Sunday Times, it is understood Boris Johnson had no idea of claims his Health Secretary had invited married Mrs Coladangelo to Oxford for the events on June 3 and 4. But it is believed senior Government figures have now raised concerns that the pair pursued their extra-marital affair at a cost to the taxpayer. How long was their affair going on? Friends insisted the extramarital affair only began in May, the same month the pair were caught in the incriminating footage. But others said the pair, who have known each other since university days when they met at Oxford, have raised eyebrows for some time. Miss Coladangelo was confronted as long ago as 2019 by ministerial aides who asked outright if there was any romance between the pair, something the twice-married mother-of-three flatly denied. Does Hancock know who was behind the leak? The CCTV leak which led to Mr Hancock's resignation as Health Secretary has sent shudders through Parliament as ministers demanded to know if there are cameras in their offices and whether security staff have access to audio which could reveal sensitive discussions about key issues posing a risk of national security. Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis said: 'I do know that [the leak] is something the Department of Health will be taking forward as an internal investigation.' He told Sky News' Trevor Phillips On Sunday programme it was 'something we need to get to the bottom of'. 'Quite rightly what happens in Government departments can be sensitive and important,' he added. Mr Lewis also told BBC One's Andrew Marr Show that the investigatory team will be looking into the issue 'across Government'. Why did Misss Coladangelo get a Parliamentary pass? Mr Hancock sponsored a Commons pass for Miss Coladangelo between June 2019 and February 2020, but it is not known in what capacity she was working for him or if he declared their friendship. Last September, she was made one of just four non-executive directors in the Department of Health. And The Times has reported she had a new Parliamentary pass sponsored by junior health minister Lord Bethell - but she never worked for him. Advertisement

It has now been reported by The Sun that Mrs Coladangelo, 43, has split with her husband Oliver Tress after her affair was exposed.

Sources have said the millionaire Oliver Bonas founder has been left 'devastated' by the affair and her departure from their 12-year marriage.

She was pictured leaving her 4.5million south west London home hours before pictures of their hallway tryst were exposed.

Husband Oliver however helped as she loaded packed bags into the back of her 70,000 Audi Q7. He did not leave with her.

Friends now say that Mr Hancock and Mrs Coladangelo are in love and want to 'make a go' of their new relationship.

A neighbour in Wandsworth, South West London, told the publication: 'Gina and Matt are giving it a proper go and Olly was left reeling.

'They had lots of friends here so we are all trying to help look after Olly.'

Sources had said on Saturday night - when Mr Hancock resigned - that the pair had been seeing each other for around six weeks, but were a 'love match'.

The leaked CCTV footage of their tryst sparked a furious backlash among Tory MPs behind closed doors, while an awkward silence remained among ministers.

Mr Hancock initially clung on to his Health Secretary job, helped by the Prime Minister's backing, but later resigned under intense pressure from 80 MPs.

In a video announcing his resignation Mr Hancock said: 'The last thing I would want is for my private life to distract attention from the single-minded focus that is leading us out of this crisis.

'I want to reiterate my apology for breaking the guidance, and apologise to my family and loved ones for putting them through this. I also need (to) be with my children at this time.'

The Prime Minister said he was 'sorry' to receive Mr Hancock's resignation as Health Secretary.

He said Mr Hancock 'should leave office very proud of what you have achieved - not just in tackling the pandemic, but even before Covid-19 struck us'.

Boris Johnson added: 'I am grateful for your support and believe that your contribution to public service is far from over.'

Mr Johnson has since faced criticism for his decision to back Mr Hancock - with a spokesman even saying he 'considered the matter closed' - only for Mr Hancock to resign amid increasing pressure.

And yesterday he at one point even appeared to suggest he had sacked Mr Hancock but the Prime Minister's Official Spokesman then said the Cabinet minister had resigned.

Mr Johnson told broadcasters: 'When I saw the story on Friday we had a new Secretary of State for Health in on Saturday.'

The comment ignited a war of words from Dominic Cummings, the Prime Minister's former adviser, who mocked Mr Johnson over the Health Secretary's resignation.

Mr Cummings seized on the chaos as he labelled Mr Johnson 'Trolley' in a tweet in which he poked fun at the PM for seemingly changing his mind on the issue.

He also jibed that Mr Johnson had only seen sense on whether Mr Hancock should stay or go after he received '89 texts per hour' from his wife Carrie.

There were also questions yesterday about Mrs Coladangelo appointment after No10 said former health secretary Mr Hancock had personally handed her a role as a non-executive director (NED) for his department last September.

It remains unclear if their romance began before she was appointed to the department or if this was ever declared as a conflict of interest.

Labour's shadow Cabinet Office minister Fleur Anderson said: 'The Government must publish all documents relating to the appointment of Gina Coladangelo.

'The role of a non-executive director is to challenge and scrutinise the minister.

'We need to know if the nature of their relationship was declared and whether the recruitment process was carried out in a fair and transparent way.'

But Justice Secretary Robert Buckland told Sky News: 'Everything that I understand so far leads me to believe due process was followed in the appointment of this person and any declarations that should've been made were made.'

Sajid Javid, the former Chancellor, took over the role of Health Secretary, writing that he was 'honoured to be serving my country from the Cabinet once again'.

Boris Johnson was yesterday accused of 'rewriting history' after he implied he sacked Matt Hancock over his affair despite initially refusing to fire the cheating Health Secretary when he was caught in a passionate embrace with an aide.

Mr Johnson's claims ran contrary to No 10's insistence, hours after CCTV footage of the clinch emerged on Thursday night, that Mr Johnson considered the 'matter closed' and had 'full confidence' in Mr Hancock, who would keep his job because he had said sorry.

But after 80 Tory MPs told No 10 he had to go after they were deluged with complaints, Mr Hancock gave a video statement on Saturday afternoon that he had quit after he breached social distancing guidance by kissing Gina Coladangelo against his office door.

In response Mr Johnson said he was 'sorry to receive' Hancock's resignation.

And an extraordinary U-turn was completed on a campaign visit to Batley ahead of Thursday's crucial by-election yesterday afternoon, where the PM suggested he had fired the Health Secretary and replaced him with Sajid Javid, adding that the Government's 'moral compass' is intact.

When asked whether Hancock's affair undermined the message about the country being 'all in it together', Mr Johnson said: 'That's right, and that's why when I saw the story on Friday we had a new Secretary of State for Health in on Saturday.' He added: 'I think that's about the right pace to proceed in a pandemic'.

Adding to the confusion over Mr Hancock's exit, the Prime Minister's spokesman later said Boris Johnson did not sack Matt Hancock as health secretary, or urge him to quit over the scandal, despite Mr Johnson's implication he acted to remove him.

He said: 'You can see that actions that the Prime Minister took. He felt it was the right decision to accept the former health secretary's resignation, and we moved to accept a new health and social care secretary that day.'

When asked what had changed between Friday and Saturday he said: 'They discussed it further the next day and he accepted the resignation.'

No 10 sources said the Prime Minister (left) had only agreed 'reluctantly' to accept his resignation. It came after fellow Cabinet ministers warned they were unwilling to support him in public after the PM insisted the matter was closed

Former Health Secretary Matt Hancock's wife Martha, a 44-year-old osteopath, was pictured outside her North London home on Sunday. She was said to have had no idea about her husband's betrayal

The sting that brought down Matt Hancock was executed by a whistleblower in his department who contacted opponents of the Health Secretary's stance on lockdown to help expose his affair. The clinch took place around this corner (bottom right part of image). The camera in question can be seen on the ceiling (top right-hand corner)

After allowing a month to elapse, the whistleblower approached lockdown sceptics and asked them to help sell the incendiary footage to the media

The Hancocks, Gina Coladangelo and Oliver Tress: How they met and the affair that has torn them apart Mr Hancock resigned as Health Secretary less than 48 hours after pictures emerged of him in a passionate embrace with Gina Coladangelo, pictured together above 1993 : Oliver Tress opens the first Oliver Bonas store on London's Fulham Road

: Oliver Tress opens the first Oliver Bonas store on London's Fulham Road 1995 : Matt Hancock starts studying PPE at the same time as Gina Coladangelo at Oxford University, where he also meets his future wife Martha Millar

: Matt Hancock starts studying PPE at the same time as Gina Coladangelo at Oxford University, where he also meets his future wife Martha Millar 1998 : Matt Hancock and Gina Coladangelo graduate from Oxford, where they also worked on studio radio

: Matt Hancock and Gina Coladangelo graduate from Oxford, where they also worked on studio radio 2006 : Matt Hancock marries Martha Millar

: Matt Hancock marries Martha Millar 2002 : Gina Coladangelo starts working at lobbying firm Luther Pendragon, where she stays until 2014

: Gina Coladangelo starts working at lobbying firm Luther Pendragon, where she stays until 2014 2011 : Oliver Tress and Gina Coladangelo are believed to have married around this year

: Oliver Tress and Gina Coladangelo are believed to have married around this year 2 0 14 : Gina Coladangelo starts working as marketing and communications director at Oliver Bonas

: Gina Coladangelo starts working as marketing and communications director at Oliver Bonas 2018 : Matt Hancock becomes Health Secretary

: Matt Hancock becomes Health Secretary 2020 : Gina Coladangelo is hired by Matt Hancock as a non-executive director at the Department of Health. But she may have been advising him since 2019

: Gina Coladangelo is hired by Matt Hancock as a non-executive director at the Department of Health. But she may have been advising him since 2019 May 6, 2021: Colleagues kiss passionately in his Whitehall office

Colleagues kiss passionately in his Whitehall office June 3: Matt and Gina head to Oxford together for G7 health summit and may have stayed together

Matt and Gina head to Oxford together for G7 health summit and may have stayed together June 25: The Sun reveals the affair after CCTV emerges of them kissing

The Sun reveals the affair after CCTV emerges of them kissing June 26: Matt Hancock resigns as Health Secretary and the new couple go to ground Advertisement

Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner accused Mr Johnson of trying to take credit for the resignation having ignored calls to sack him immediately.

'Boris Johnson is trying to rewrite history because he didn't have the guts to sack Matt Hancock,' Ms Rayner said.

'A fish rots from the head down, and by failing to sack the former Health Secretary, Johnson proved he doesn't have the leadership qualities or judgment required to be Prime Minister.'

Mr Johnson's combustible former chief advisor Dominic Cummings seized on the confusion today accuse the PM's wife Carrie of ordering the removal of Hancock and the appointment of her 'friend' Mr Javid after '89 texts per hour'.

In a series of tweets where Mr Cummings referred to Boris as 'The Trolley' - a nickname he gave his former boss because he said in No 10 he was like 'a shopping trolley smashing from one side of the aisle to the other'.

Giving a mock timetable of events Mr Cummings said: 'Trolley Fri: Argh, accept apology I consider the matter closed Media/MP babble, 89 Carrie texts p/hour

'Trolley Sat, SMASH: 'Arghhh Matt go now you'll be back better stronger shortly matey forward to victory!

'Trolley Mon, CRASH: when I saw the story on Fri we had a new SoS on Sat'.

He added 'Free top tip for Saj (Javid): there's only thing 'irreversible' with the Trolley, only one line that is ever held thro crises, & all in No10 live by this rule: 'no comment' on PM's private life. *Everything* else is 'reversible' & usually reversed'.

Mr Hancock was accused of 'sh**ging on the taxpayer' after it was revealed he took his mistress to the G7 summit and claims they may have started their affair a year ago with the shamed Tory who has abandoned his wife Martha and is said to have told friends: 'He loves her and wants to be with her. It's properly serious'.

The Health Secretary's trip to a meeting of fellow ministers at Oxford University in early June included an overnight stay - but it is not known if his lover Gina Coladangelo shared his bed four weeks after their CCTV kiss against his office door.

But there are suspicions that they may have enjoyed a night away together in a luxury hotel after a day of working in the city where they met while studying more than 20 years ago. The summit was just 50 miles from his north London family home, which he shared with his wife of 15 years Martha, 44, and their three children - but Mr Hancock decided to have a night away on June 3.

One cabinet source told The Sunday Times: 'She went with him to the G7 health ministers summit. Did he disclose this to the PM? If it was shown he was sh**ging on the taxpayer, he had to go. He's been puritan-in-chief in the government and now it turns out he's a massive, lying hypocrite'.

It came as rumours emerged that they may have been having a secret affair for more than a year. The millionaire lobbyist, 43, whose husband is the founder of Oliver Bonas, first started working for Mr Hancock since his failed leadership bid in 2019.

Other sources said the 'love match' had featured intimate restaurant meals and a hotel stay during a summit.

Mr Hancock's demise began late on Thursday afternoon. He had been in the House of Commons, defending his department's controversial plans to share data on tens of millions of National Health Service patients with outside organisations.

After saying his piece and leaving, he received a call from The Sun newspaper at around 6pm, informing him that they had photos and video of him kissing his aide in his office, taken on May 6.

After saying as little as possible to the journalist, he returned to the London residence he shares with wife Martha, when they are not at their home in his Suffolk constituency, and their three children.

CCTV at Matt Hancock's office 'was no secret', MP says The door (to the left) is the same one as seen in the footage of Matt Hancock's clinch Matt Hancock has been accused of naivety as MPs were told that the camera which caught him kissing his aide was not a secret. Cabinet Office minister Julia Lopez admitted the device was 'not covert', dismissing theories that a rogue member of staff or security guard had planted a recording device to capture the former health secretary's affair with Gina Coladangelo. Ministers' offices are now being swept for bugs and hidden cameras. Mrs Lopez told MPs that the camera in Mr Hancock's office was an 'outlier' and that it was not general policy for recording devices to be put in ministerial offices. But she confirmed it was a CCTV camera operated by the Department of Health, adding that responsibility for security was down to the department, which was led by Mr Hancock until his resignation. The Mail understands that security arrangements had been outsourced to a private contractor. But the House of Commons was told that ministers' offices are regularly swept for bugs, with some dealing with important issues of national security being checked more often on a 'risk-based assessment'. Advertisement

Mr Hancock is understood to have told her that the story was set to appear, about the photographs it contained and that their marriage was over.

He then woke their youngest son, who is just eight-years-old, to tell him too that he was going.

Family friends said yesterday it was a bombshell from nowhere for Martha. She had believed their marriage had been 'happy and stable', and reportedly had no suspicions over her Facebook friend, whom she had also met while at Oxford.

The Hancock family had enjoyed Christmas parties with Miss Coladangelo and her husband, a joint founder of the Oliver Bonas retail chain.

Miss Coladangelo was seen on Thursday evening, shortly after the newspaper's phone call, outside the 4million mansion she shares with her husband and children. He was reportedly helping her load her car with belongings.

She is said to be lying low at a house in West Sussex and - on Friday as the scandal gathered pace - to have been 'cheery'. On that day, despite the devastating headlines and an instant storm of calls for Mr Hancock to resign, both he and Downing Street insisted they were standing firm.

By late morning, Mr Hancock had finally conceded he may have behaved wrongly, apologising for breaching social distancing rules - but he insisted that he was staying in the job.

He and Miss Coladangelo had come a long way since they met on Oxford student radio station Oxygen FM in the late '90s. She was the star of the show, presenting a politics programme, with many male admirers - while Mr Hancock, according to his fellow volunteers, was a lowly sports reporter.

Miss Coladangelo even told Radio 4 how when he was given a rare free ticket to commentate on a rugby match, he ended up oversleeping and failing to get to the stadium on time.

Instead, he watched the match on a pub television screen - but phoned his report in at half-time, pretending he had been at the game in person.

The lies and bluffing finally came to an end early on Saturday evening, when Mr Hancock visited the Prime Minister's country residence Chequers then issued a video resigning his post. Mr Hancock said: 'The last thing I would want is for my private life to distract attention from the single-minded focus that is leading us out of this crisis.'

There were calls last night for Mr Hancock to be stripped of his 16,000 severance pay. The payment is standard to ministers in whatever circumstances they leave their role.

Tory MPs also started to turn against Mr Hancock over the weekend as they were deluged with complaints from constituents about his conduct.

Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen said the PM had made a misjudgment in initially trying to keep him in post.

'Loyalty is normally a virtue,' he said. 'But it became clear within hours that Matt Hancock was losing the confidence of the public.

'A lot of colleagues raised that with the Chief Whip and No 10 on Saturday morning. The moment he lost public confidence, how could he stand up and say people have to adhere to these rules when he had broken them himself?' Mr Hancock quit on Saturday night, around 40 hours after CCTV pictures emerged of him in a passionate embrace in his office with glamourous married aide Gina Coladangelo.

In his resignation letter, which followed private talks in No 10 with the PM, he said he did not want to 'distract attention' from efforts to fight Covid.

In reply, Mr Johnson said he could be 'very proud' of his record during the pandemic.

No 10 sources said the Prime Minister had only agreed 'reluctantly' to accept his resignation.
A teen musician and skateboarder who drowned near a popular cliff-jumping spot is being remembered as 'a thoughtful and kind-hearted' boy.

Quinn Story, 17, died 'in a drowning accident at Mt Martha', at the Pillars, a well-known clifftop on the Mornington Peninsula.

Mr Story's death was 'a tragic accident' according to Mornington police sergeant Daniel Patten.

Quinn Story, 17, died 'in a drowning accident at Mt Martha', at the Pillars, a well-known clifftop on the Mornington Peninsula according to his school, Padua College

Australians were flocking to the Pillars, a hidden clifftop spot on the Mornington Peninsula near Melbourne last Summer. It is the last place 17 year-old Quinn Story was seen before his death from a 'tragic accident'

Sargeant Patten said Mr Story had not been seen for 24 hours prior to his body being discovered at the Pillars at 10am on Saturday morning, the Herald Sun reported.

The circumstances of Mr Story's death are still being investigated.

The Pillars is regarded an 'Instagrammable' spot for local thrill-seekers drawn to the spectacular-looking location and some locals have tried to have visitors banned from it in recent years.

Mt Martha Life Saving Club officials had spoken out in recent years against people jumping from the cliffs because of the risks involved.

Anthony Banks, principal at Mr Story's school, Padua College, posted a tribute to the Year 11 student on Monday.

'Quinn was a talented musician and a creative songwriter and improviser, who loved drama and skateboarding,' Mr Banks wrote.

'He was a thoughtful and kind-hearted person.'

He was also a valued member of the Djeembana House community.

'Eternal rest grant unto Quinn, O Lord, and may perpetual light shine upon him,' the Christian principal wrote.

Locals and tourists flocked to the Pillars, at Mount Martha, many jumping into the waters at the spectacular location

The post received thousands of reactions, including from friends of the Story family.

'Devastating, heart breaking and unimaginable,' one woman wrote.

'Monique, Andy, Tripp, Hunter and Syd, you are all in my thoughts,' another mother said.

'I will remember Quinn as the little energiser bunny that never stopped and always made time to make me laugh.'

'Only fond memories of an incredible gift to make everyone around him laugh.'
An official autopsy has confirmed that tech mogul John McAfee died by suicide in a Spanish prison cell where he was awaiting extradition to the U.S., El Pais newspaper said on Monday, citing unidentified sources close to the proceedings.

A spokesperson for Catalonia's court system, which is in charge of the autopsy, did not have any information on the report.

Prison wardens found the body of McAfee hanging in his cell on Wednesday in what appeared to be a suicide, his lawyer Javier Villalba said last week.

It comes after it emerged that a suicide note was found in the pocket of McAfee when he died.

The revelation was made by an official source familiar with the investigation who told the Associated Press that the note had been found on McAfee at the time of his death.

The source, who was not authorized to speak about the ongoing judicial inquiry, refused to comment on the contents of the note.

Authorities in Spain have previously said everything at the scene in his cell indicated that the 75-year-old did kill himself.

Meanwhile, his widow Janice McAfee, has demanded a 'thorough investigation' of his death, saying her husband did not appear suicidal when they last spoke.

An official autopsy has confirmed that tech mogul John McAfee died by suicide in a Spanish prison cell where he was he awaiting extradition to the U.S John McAfee is pictured together with his wife Janice, who insists he did not kill himself

John McAfee, creator of the famous commercial antivirus software McAfee, appears via videoconference during his extradition hearing at Audiencia Nacional court in Madrid on June 15

The widow of John McAfee, Janice, pictured, said Friday that her husband was not suicidal when she last spoke to him hours before he was found dead

In her first public remarks since the software entrepreneur's death on Wednesday, Janice said she wanted a 'thorough investigation' to provide 'answers about how this was able to happen.'

'His last words to me were 'I love you and I will call you in the evening,' the 38-year-old told reporters outside the Brians 2 penitentiary northwest of Barcelona where she recovered her late husband's belongings.

She said they spoke earlier on the day he was found dead and made no indication that he wanted to take his own life.

'Those words are not words of somebody who is suicidal,' she added.

'His last words to me were 'I love you and I will call you in the evening,' Janice McAfee told reporters outside the Brians 2 penitentiary northwest of Barcelona where she recovered her late husband's belongings

'Those words are not words of somebody who is suicidal,' Janice McAfee said, while demanding a 'thorough investigation' in her first public remarks since the software entrepreneur's death on Wednesday

John McAfee was arrested at the Barcelona airport in October last year on a warrant issued by prosecutors in Tennessee who were seeking up to three decades of imprisonment for allegedly evading more than $4 million in taxes.

The day before he was found dead, Spain's National Court had announced that it was agreeing to his extradition to the U.S. but the decision was not final.

'We had a plan of action already in place to appeal that decision,' Janice McAfee told reporters. 'I blame the U.S. authorities for this tragedy: Because of these politically motivated charges against him my husband is now dead.

'I don't believe he did this, I will get answers,' she said.

The couple met in 2012 in Miami and married the following year. John McAfee had several children from previous relationships, Janice McAfee said.

The entrepreneur had not been connected with the companies that took over the antivirus software he built after he sold his shares in the 1990s. That early success had made McAfee rich and followed him in his troubled biography.

John McAfee's wife Janice speaks briefly with journalists on leaving the Brians 2 penitentiary center in Sant Esteve Sesrovires, near Barcelona, northeast Spain, on Friday

Lawyer Javier Villalba, left and John McAfee's wife Janice leave the Brians 2 penitentiary center in Sant Esteve Sesrovires, near Barcelona

Prison wardens found the body of McAfee hanging in his cell on Wednesday in what appeared to be a suicide, his lawyer Javier Villalba said last week. Pictured: McAfee with his wife Janice Dyson

In 2012, he was sought for questioning in connection with the murder of his neighbor in Belize, but was never charged with a crime. The controversy didn't stop him from making long-shot runs for the U.S. presidency starting in 2016.

But it was his more recent tax problems that kept him away from the U.S., the country where the British-born entrepreneur was raised and had built his early success.

The Tennessee prosecutors' indictments from 2020 showed that the tycoon allegedly failed to declare income made by promoting cryptocurrencies, attending speaking engagements and selling the rights for a documentary on his eventful life.

'Even though he was born in England, America was his home,' Janice McAfee said. 'He came there when he was a child. He had his first girlfriend there, his first case, you know, his first job. He made his first millions there and he wanted to be there. But, you know, politics just wouldn't allow for that to happen.'

John McAfee's social media postings indicated that he had chosen a northeastern Spanish coastal resort town as his base in Europe at least since late 2019.

'All John wanted to do was spend his remaining years fishing and drinking,' his widow said on Friday. 'He had hope that things would work out. We knew that there would be an uphill battle to continue to fight this situation. But he's a fighter ... And anybody that knows John, that knows him even a little bit, knows that about him.'

'He was just so loving. He had a big heart and he just loved people and he just wanted to have peace in his life,' Janice McAfee added. 'My prayers are that his soul has found the peace in death that he could not find in life.'

McAfee's Spanish lawyer, Javier Villalba, left, said the entrepreneur's death had come as a surprise to his wife and other relatives, since McAfee 'had not said goodbye.'

John McAfee's wife Janice enters the Brians 2 penitentiary center in Sant Esteve Sesrovires

The National Court judge said John McAfee had provided no evidence to back his allegations that he was being politically persecuted.

'On the contrary, according to his own testimony, he took part in primaries of a certain party to defend his convictions with a result little favorable to him,' the judge wrote in the ruling.

In an e-mailed statement, the U.S. State Department confirmed for the first time the tycoon's death, offering the family condolences. It said: 'We are closely monitoring local authorities' investigation into the cause of death. We stand ready to provide all appropriate assistance to the family. Out of respect to the family during this difficult time, we have no further comment.'

Results of McAfee's autopsy could take 'days or weeks,' authorities have said.

Soon after his arrest last year, McAfee's Twitter account posted a dark hint suggesting that if he died in an alleged suicide, a conspiracy would be to blame

Final Tweet: In one of his final tweets, presumably dictated to his wife from behind bars, McAfee said 'I have nothing. Yet, I regret nothing.'

McAfee's lawyer, Javier Villalba, said the family was awaiting the results of an official autopsy, but he would request a second, independent autopsy as instructed by the McAfee family, who he said could take legal action once the investigation into the death was concluded.

Spanish authorities insist that there was no evidence of foul play, but McAfee's previous tweets that he would never take his own life 'a la Epstein' have fueled conspiracy theories.

'I am content in here. I have friends. The food is good. All is well. Know that if I hang myself, a la Epstein, it will be no fault of mine,' McAfee tweeted on October 15.

Furthermore, just minutes after his death was reported on Wednesday, his official Instagram account posted an image of the letter 'Q' - in an apparent reference to QAnon.

Some wild conspiracy theories are now emerging including the idea the tech guru activated a so called 'dead man's switch' to expose the government.

The mysterious 'Q' post shared to McAfee's Instagram minutes could indicate a hidden encryption, the theorists suggest.

A 'dead man's switch' is activated when the device's owner dies.

Just minutes after his death was reported, his official Instagram account posted a plain image of the letter 'Q' in an apparent reference to the QAnon conspiracy theory

McAfee got a tattoo in 2019 saying 'Whackd' - after he said the US government was after him and that he would never kill himself; his comments have now sparked conspiracy theories

John McAfee tweeted a shirtless photo in 2019 from the Spanish prison

The jailhouse photos from 2019 showed McAfee smiling

McAfee spent his final months of freedom in a mysterious 'ghost hotel' where he was tracked down by web sleuths.

While McAfee claimed to be jetting around to Belarus and hoaxed an arrest in Norway for wearing a thong as a mask, he was actually staying in the Daurada Park Hotel in Cambrils, Catalonia, according to the New York Post.

McAfee appears to have been hiding out in the hotel from March 2020 until his arrest in October, and was busted by amateur sleuths who spotted Spanish products and images of the Catalonian coast in his photos on Twitter.

At the hotel, no one answered the phones and it was impossible to make a reservation, according to El Confidencial, leading the Spanish newspaper to call the Daurada Park a 'ghost hotel.'

Last spring, McAfee claimed to be in 'lockdown' in Belarus, he posted photos that eagle-eyed followers noted contained Spanish products.

McAfee's photos showed beaches and balconies in the background that the sleuths were able to trace to Cambrils, and eventually the Daurada Park.

Confronted about the inconsistencies, McAfee lashed out on Twitter, claiming he had 'visited Spain for a few days.'

But it appears he used the mystery hotel as his base of operations for months before his arrest on U.S. tax and fraud charges.

McAfee was arrested at Barcelona airport in early October when he was about to board a flight to Istanbul with a British passport.

He languished in Spanish prison until a court this week approved his extradition to the U.S. to face the charges.

McAfee was found dead in his cell on Wednesday in what authorities say appears to be a suicide by hanging.

For confidential support call the National Suicide Prevention Line on 1-800-273-8255
A couple who allegedly attacked a restaurant owner after he asked them to check in with a QR code have been charged by police.

The man, 34, and woman, 27, were allegedly furious when staff at the Anatolia Turkish Cuisine in Forster, NSW, directed them to sign in with the mandatory Covid protocol at about 7pm on Monday.

Footage of the wild incident shows several people brawling in the outdoor dining area of the the popular restaurant, which was allegedly instigated when the man threw a glass bottle at a wall inside.

Tempers are beginning to boil over as NSW suffers another gruelling round of Covid restrictions, with masks and QR code check-ins mandatory across the state.

Footage of the wild incident shows several people brawling at the popular restaurant, allegedly instigated after the man threw a glass bottle at a wall inside

Police allege the man then punched the 39-year-old restaurateur Mostafa Jamalifard, after staff tried to escort him from the venue.

Mr Jamalifard had to be taken to Manning Base Hospital suffering a suspected broken nose and other facial injuries, Nine News reported.

As the melee went on in front of terrified dinners, the woman allegedly bit another man, 44, who was trying to intervene in the scuffle.

Police said he was left with a 'bleeding and bruised bicep'.

Deputy Police Commissioner Gary Worboys was outraged at the alleged incident, calling it 'disgraceful behaviour'.

The man, 34, and woman, 27, were allegedly furious when staff at the Anatolia Turkish Cuisine in Forster, NSW (pictured), directed them to sign in with the mandatory Covid protocol

Mr Jamalifard, the owner of Anatolia (restaurant pictured) had to be taken to Manning Base Hospital suffering a suspected broken nose and other facial injuries, police claim

'The owner was trying to do the right thing,' he said.

The couple were arrested a short time after the incident and the man was charged with assault occasioning actual bodily harm, affray, intimidation and malicious damage.

The woman was charged with assault occasioning actual bodily harm.

They are both due to appear in Forster Local Court on July 28 after being granted conditional bail.

They were also hit with a $1,000 fine each for allegedly breaching Covid restricions.

QR check-in codes are a lifeline for contact tracers who use the data to track everyone in a venue if someone came in while infected with Covid.

The data allows NSW Health to put out daily lists of exposure sites, warning people to get tested and isolate, keeping them away from vulnerable Australians.

Checking in is mandatory.
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Pupil absences due to Covid surged again this week, indicating the worst disruption to education since March, as No10 confirmed it was considering scrapping pupil bubbles and replacing mandatory isolation with daily testing.

New official figures released today show 384,500 pupils - one in 20 - were at home self-isolating on June 24.

Of these 278,500 were suspected of coming into contact with someone with Covid at school, up from 171,600 the previous week - a rise of 62 per cent.

Another 56,800 had a suspected contact outside the classroom, while 23,800 had actually tested positive for Covid themselves, up from 16,100.

The figures are likely to fuel concerns that requiring children to isolate if someone in their bubble catches Covid, even if they themselves test negative, is crippling the education system.

Data shows 6% of secondary school children were off school for a Covid-related reason - the highest figure since March - and up from 4.2% on June 22.

In secondary schools, only 82.4% attended class, down week-on-week from 84.9%, while 90.9% of pupils attended primary school, down from 93.0%, according to the Department for Education.

Downing Street today said that it intends to publish a review into whether to replace self-isolation rules in schools with regular testing at the same time as the review into social distancing.

The Prime Minister's official spokesman told reporters: 'Our intention is to publish this together and provide certainty to the public. If we are able to do that, that's what we intend to do.'

New official figures released today show 384,500 pupils - one in 20 - were at home self-isolating on June 24. A total of 23,800 had actually tested positive for Covid themselves, up from 16,100

Earlier today, schools minister Nick Gibb said ministers hoped that mass testing would reduce disruption to children's education, including removing the need to self-isolate for 10 days if another pupil in a bubble tests positive with Covid.

But leading a backlash to the new proposals, teaching unions blasted ministers for giving 'absolutely no consideration' to the logistical challenge involved, and suggested there would be 'chaos' when schools return in September.

Meanwhile, Laura MacInerney, founder of Teacher Tab, a daily survey of teachers' opinions, said there was concern about the proposals among school staff who had not received both jabs.

She told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: 'The majority of teachers are now double-jabbed but around 40% are not, so there is a concern among them.

'The level of support depends whether or not you are vaccinated, if you feel vulnerable and what the situation in your school is.'

Due to the pace of the UK's vaccination rollout it is likely that most teachers will be fully vaccinated by the times schools return in September.

Mr Gibb, who vowed to make a decision before 'Freedom Day' on July 19, told Sky News: 'We are conducting trials of daily contact testing as a possible alternative to self-isolation.

Schools ministers Nick Gibb said officials hoped that mass testing would reduce disruption to children's education

'What matters also is that we keep the school safe and if you go around our schools, you will see a raft of measures to reduce the infection rates within schools.

'There's extra hygiene, there's staggered breaks, we keep children in bubbles, and there's extra ventilation in classrooms to minimise the risk of transmission.'

It came as the new Children's Commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza, said bubble arrangements and self-isolation for pupils was 'very very restrictive' and should end soon, as she spoke of the 'real trauma' lockdown measures were causing for young people.

Tory MP Jason McCartney revealed yesterday that some families had been forced to isolate four times in a matter of months.

But unions poured scorn on the testing plans today, with Kevin Courtney, Joint General Secretary of the National Education Union, warning of summer of 'confusion and delay'.

He said: 'The Department for Education is once again jumping to half-explained ideas with absolutely no consideration of the logistical challenge facing schools and colleges.

'This shows every indication of our having to endure yet another summer of confusion and disarray, capped off by last-minute guidance with inadequate time for preparations. This is no Plan A, or Plan B. Currently it scarcely qualifies as a plan at all.

Paul Whiteman, general secretary of NAHT, which represents headteachers, also warned of the disruption ahead.

He said: 'Once again secondary schools are being put on standby to set up what are effectively fully-fledged COVID testing centres. The government must not underestimate the scale of this task and the likely disruption for pupils as they return in September.

'It is becoming increasingly clear that there is a strong chance it will not be ''business as usual'' for schools next term and the government will need to take into account the additional pressures they will be having to deal with.'

It comes amid increasing concern about the way the education system is coping, with FT editor Janine Gibson describing 'chaos' in London's schools and warning that the virus is 'running rampant'.

Tory MPs are also split on whether to tackle the issue by vaccinating pupils, with some saying children did not need a jab because they are not at risk from Covid, while others insisted the move would help reduce transmission, Politico reported. The government has not yet made a decision on the issue.

Prof John Edmunds, a Professor of mathematical modelling at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said: 'The prevalence of infection in school children attending school has been lower than the prevalence of infection in the same age groups in the community, suggesting that isolation of ''bubbles'' has worked at reducing infection in schools.

'It is, of course, very disruptive, particularly as prevalence increases, as is occurring at the moment. Vaccination of school children would be a far better method for reducing transmission in school without disruption, but we need to be sure that the vaccines are safe enough to use in children before considering this option.'

In other Covid updates today -

Boris Johnson slams 'despicable' thugs who put Chris Whitty in a headlock as Priti Patel says officials will look into the protection available to him;

Reports Matt Hancock's lover Gina Coladangelo has split from her millionaire husband and is already living with the disgraced former Health Secretary;

Hopes fade for UK-US travel corridor this summer as fears grow that Brits jabbed with AstaZeneca vaccine will be stopped from entering the States;

Daily cases more than doubles to 22,868 to highest level since second wave but deaths drop 40% to just three - in sign jabs are prevention serious illness;

Greece and Spain battle to spare Britons from the EU quarantine crackdown, as Malta and Portugal bring in new curbs unless you've had two jabs.

But leading a backlash to the new proposals, school leaders' union NAHT suggested ministers were underestimating the scale of the task. Pictured is a file photo of pupils in school bubbles

The number of acute respiratory infection (ARI) outbreaks, with two or more confirmed cases of Covid, flu or other respiratory illnesses, across England in the four weeks to June 24. There were 568 outbreaks in schools, universities and colleges in the past month, accounting for almost half of the 1280 total

Ex-education tsar Kevan Collins brands Government Covid catch-up plan for pupils 'feeble' By David Wilcock for MailOnline The Government's former education tsar lashed out at 'feeble' plans to help pupils catch-up on missed lessons today and warned that Covid's impact on schools will cost the economy 100billion. Sir Kevan Collins, who quit earlier this month after ministers rejected his 15billion programme for recovery, told MPs a 'massive national effort' was now required. He faced the Education Committee today and blasted the scheme that ministers chose instead, that was only worth an initial 1.4billion, branding it 'a bit of tutoring in the corner'. It came as Schools minister Nick Gibb today confirmed the Government is planning to scrap pupil bubbles and replace mandatory isolation with daily testing to reduce disruption to children's education from September. Sir Kevan told MPs: 'We do know that the impact of Covid has been significant on children's learning and that is ongoing and is sitting there and not recovering. 'It will go with them and we have international examples over time where, if you don't recover, it can impact not only your academic attainment, but your lifelong earnings. There is a long-term loss, not only to the individual but to the economy. 'There is definitely something we think happening ... to the mental health and the wellbeing of our children: not enough competitive sport, not enough activity, not enough socialisation and music and drama and art. That has a bearing. 'And we know that our country has responded in a way compared to some others which, quite frankly, is a bit feeble.' Advertisement

Meanwhile, Steve Chalk, founder of the Oasis Academy Trust, urged the government to act now to reduce the number of pupils isolating rather than waiting until September to introduce the new initiative.

He said more than 3,000 children across the chain's 52 schools were currently at home after someone in their bubble tested positive.

'We have about 10% of our 31,000 children out of school at the moment, so it's a pretty alarming situation,' he said. 'We would say that something needs to be done about this now.

'It's been in and out, in and out, up and down. The impact of this on many children is huge in terms of their development and mental health.

'There is still three weeks of this summer term to run that we can't just write off.'

Former catch-up tsar Sir Kevan Collins said the 'key thing' is to follow the evidence when asked about using testing to end self-isolation for school pupils in bubbles.

He quit his role as education recovery commissioner with a condemnation of the Government's 1.4 billion catch-up fund, which he said fell 'far short' of what was needed.

'In all of my work, the key thing for me is to follow the evidence of course,' he told MPs on the Education Committee.

'I guess with the bubbles, what I would really like to, and I think it's what the DfE (Department for Education) are doing, is taking new advice and asking the scientists and asking the experts what should we do next.

'Ideally, of course, what we all want to do is get every child back in school every day because that's the very best way we'll recover from the pandemic.'

Currently children have to self-isolate for 10 days if another pupil in their bubble tests positive for coronavirus, even if they themselves have received a negative PCR test.

It has resulted in a sharp rise in pupils off school for Covid-related reasons, with the latest official figures showing 239,000 children in England missing classes - as the numbers trebled in the space of a week.

Mr Gibb said that about 3% of students are currently self-isolating, but added this figure is lower than it was in the autumn.

The minister said it is still 'very important' that those who come into contact with people with Covid self-isolate, whether in schools or society.

He told Radio 4's Today programme: 'Well, it is very important that, when a Covid case is identified and somebody has had Covid, that we identify anybody they have been in contact with and they are asked to self-isolate, whether that's in schools or any other part of society, as we seek to tackle this appalling pandemic and minimise the spread of the virus.

'We are actually trialling daily contact testing, where somebody who has come into contact with somebody with Covid, instead of self-isolating, takes a test every day, and if they are negative they can go into school.

'We have trialled this in a small number of secondary schools and that trial finishes tomorrow. We will look at the data to see if that is an effective alternative to self-isolation.'

Covid has accounted for the vast majority of the incidents (shown in yellow) throughout the pandemic. Grey bars represent cases that could not be confirmed with a test or followed up

The most recent data from the Office for National Statistics shows just 0.3 per cent of secondary school pupils were testing positive for Covid in March, even though thousands were having to self-isolate. Currently, for every one confirmed case, there are more than 20 pupils isolating at home as a precaution

The ONS data shows secondary pupils were most likely to be diagnosed with the virus in December, when the second wave was taking off. But even when there was a large scale outbreak, fewer than 2 per cent were testing positive

The latest figures on school attendance will be released by the Department for Education around noon today.

The Education department today said ministers have written to secondary schools asking them to prepare to potentially replace isolation rules with testing.

A spokesman said: 'We are provisionally asking secondary schools and colleges to prepare to offer on-site testing when students return for the new academic year, so that schools are ready in case it is needed to keep as many children as possible in face-to-face education.

'We will provide further details about the approach to protective measures and test and trace in education from September in due course.'

New Health Secretary Sajid Javid yesterday said he has asked for 'fresh advice' on the issue, adding that the policy is 'having a huge knock-on impact' on children's education, with 250,000 pupils missing school every day.

'I will hopefully be able to say more on this as soon as possible,' he said.

Former health minister Steve Brine told the Commons: 'Estimates suggest that a quarter of a million children are missing school today due to precautionary isolations.'

Adding that many became trapped in a cycle of self-isolation 'due to the bubbles they are caught in', Mr Brine asked the new Health Secretary: 'Haven't our young people suffered enough?

'Is this not an area  given the availability and reliability of testing now  where we might find that change of policy I'm looking for?'

Mr Javid replied: 'This is a very important issue and it is something I've focused on, on day one of the job. That is why I've asked for fresh advice on this.' Stressing the policy was based on information 'available at the time', he continued: 'Clearly data is changing all the time and we must make sure that we keep that under review.'

He revealed he would discuss the subject with Education Secretary Gavin Williamson after MPs expressed concerns about children being kept at home for ten days  even after a negative PCR test  because a member of their classroom bubble has been infected.

Children's Commissioner Rachel de Souza said children needed to get back to normal.

'The experience of lockdown has been a real trauma, and I think we shouldn't underestimate it,' she told the Telegraph.

'Children are really troubled, and it's right across the board.'

Dame Rachel said young people, who have seen their normal childhood disrupted in order to protect older people, are now struggling with their mental health.

'They have done a huge amount for us, I mean they really were the least at risk of this and they've given up 19 weeks of their education, they've had all this anxiety and concern and exams cancelled; they've taken a big burden for us,' she said.

The commissioner said that, although adults largely assume 'kids are resilient, they'll bounce back', the results this year of a sweeping survey on British pupils, dubbed The Big Ask, showed 'they are telling us that they have got these worries and we need to listen to them'.

Of the impact on pupils, Dame Rachel said: 'All these children going in and out of self-isolation... that is a really big issue, and it's incredibly frustrating for children and teachers.'

The survey of more than 550,000 children, run by the office of the Children's Commissioner, showed mental health was the biggest concern for 20% of respondents, a figure that rose to 40% for those aged 14-17.

A former teacher herself, Dame Rachel said she has 'real concern' for nursery-aged children and those starting school, who are at an age when they 'need to be playing and learning and developing language skills' but have instead been 'stuck inside for too long'.

Her warning came as official figures yesterday showed another rise in infections, with almost 23,000 lab-confirmed cases - the highest daily rise since January 30.

Sajid Javid yesterday said he was seeking 'fresh advice' on the current policy where children self-isolate, which sees up to 250,000 pupils miss school every day

Sarah Croft, senior statistician for the Office for National Statistics Covid-19 Infection Survey, told Times Radio today that the 'main sort of increase seems to be in school year 12 to age 24 - so older teenagers and those in their early 20s.'

She added: 'In terms of other age groups, we're seeing school years 7 to 11, but that has stayed at about 0.3% for several weeks now, we haven't seen any recent increases there.'

They came amid continuing concern over the spread of the Delta variant, with Portugal, Spain, Malta and Hong Kong announcing new restrictions on tourists from the UK.

Despite the increase, Mr Javid said there is 'no reason' why the final stage of lockdown lifting in England should not go ahead as planned on July 19.

In a Commons statement, he said the country will have to ' learn to live with' the disease as there is no 'zero risk' option.

His comments were welcomed by Tory MPs, who believe they signal a more robust approach to ending restrictions than was the case under his predecessor, Matt Hancock.

Mr Hancock resigned at the weekend after admitting he had broken social-distancing rules when footage emerged of him kissing a close aide in the Department of Health and Social Care.
A holidaymaker has slammed her 'filthy' 1,750 quarantine hotel, claiming she was treated 'like a criminal' after returning from Bali.

Lyn Siddle, from Southport, returned from the Indonesian island - which is currently on the amber travel list - on Sunday, June 19, having recorded a negative PCR test.

She had completed a passenger locator form, and was going to isolate at home for ten days after arriving.

But as she changed flights in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which is on the red list, she says she was told she could not board the flight without showing airport staff proof of payment for ten nights in a quarantine hotel in England.

The mother-of-four, 64, then had to frantically shell out 1,750 at the departure gate to book a place at the Ramada Hounslow hotel, near Heathrow.

She has now been quarantining there for nine days but claims to have been subjected to poor living conditions, which made her feel 'like a criminal'.

Lyn Siddle has been at a quarantine hotel near Heathrow for nine days but claims to have been subjected to poor living conditions, which made her feel 'like a criminal'

The mother-of-four described the food as being 'horrible' and the overall experience as being 'like being in prison'

Lyn said: 'The first breakfast I had a potato cake dripping in fat, some beans and some scrambled eggs which were unseasoned'

She told MailOnline: 'It's the waste of government money that annoyed me initially - the number of security people everywhere was incredible, considering my flight to Heathrow was almost completely empty.

'They didn't bring the trolley down the aisle, we all had waiter service because there were so few of us.'

Lyn explained how she then had to wait for a coach to her designated quarantine hotel, but claims she had to mix with travellers from all over the world 'with very little social distancing' in the process.

She then arrived at her room at the hotel, where images show what appears to be dirt on the floor, as well as a broken air conditioning system, a broken television, and food in plastic containers.

A friend commented on her Facebook page saying she was being 'treated worse than a prisoner'.

Lyn added: 'When I arrived I felt like a criminal. I had to wait on the coach while security talked to each other and then escorted me in.

'The food has been horrible. You fill in a form to say whether or not you're vegetarian but other than that, you get what you're given.

'The first breakfast I had a potato cake dripping in fat, some beans and some scrambled eggs which were unseasoned. It was like being in prison.

Among the issues Lyn claimed to have had when she first arrived in the room was a broken air conditioning unit

She also claimed the television in her room at the Ramada, where she is having to isolate for 10 days, wasn't working

The stay at the Ramada Hounslow hotel, near Heathrow, has cost Lyn some 1,750

'I then had curry, for both lunch and supper, for several days. I like curry but I was having it around the clock.

'You don't even get proper cutlery or a paper plate - you just have to eat from these plastic containers, which, if you're having rice all the time, means it can end up falling out and that's how the floor becomes dirty'.

Lyn says after eight days of 'complaining, frustration and stress' she has since been moved to a bigger, cleaner room with a working TV and air conditioning.

Department for Transport guidance states if you have been in a country or territory on the red list in the 10 days before you arrive in England, you must quarantine in a managed hotel.

Government guidance also says people should not travel to red list countries or territories.

Ramada Hounslow and parent company Wyndham have been approached for comment.
A former Green Beret today begged Japanese judges to allow him to return to the U.S. to see his disabled father and told a Tokyo court he regrets smuggling fugitive Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn out of Japan in a speaker box.

Michael Taylor, 60, and his 28-year-old son Peter Taylor were extradited by US authorities after being accused of orchestrating Ghosn's audacious escape while awaiting trial in Japan.

Flanked by two guards, Michael Taylor, who was brought handcuffed into court with his son, bowed deeply to the three judges that will decide their sentence before asking them to allow him to return to the US to see his father, who is disabled.

The US Army Special Forces veteran said he regretted helping Ghosn flee Japan and said the former Nissan chairman should have stayed to face trial for alleged financial misconduct.

Michael Taylor and his son Peter (both pictured), have admitted smuggling fugitive Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn out of Japan in a speaker box

Michael Taylor told the Tokyo court on Tuesday he regrets smuggling fugitive Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn (pictured) out of Japan in a speaker box

'I deeply regret my actions and sincerely apologize for causing difficulties for the judicial system and for the Japanese people,' he said in a quavering voice.

He replied yes when the prosecutor asked whether he believed Ghosn should have stayed in Japan.

Michael Taylor and his son Peter this month pleaded guilty to charges that, in December 2019, they illegally helped Ghosn escape from western Japan's Kansai airport hidden in a speaker box aboard a private jet to Lebanon.

Extradited to Japan from the United States in March, they are being detained at the same jail in Tokyo where Ghosn had been held, and face up to three years in prison.

Meanwhile Ghosn is currently an international fugitive living in Lebanon, which has no extradition treaty with Japan.

Prosecutors said the Taylors received $1.3 million for their services and another $500,000 for legal fees.

Michael Taylor and his son Peter this month pleaded guilty to charges that, in December 2019, they illegally helped Ghosn escape from western Japan's Kansai airport hidden in a speaker box (pictured) aboard a private jet to Lebanon

US Army Special Forces veteran Michael Taylor (right with his son Peter when he was much younger) said said he regretted helping Ghosn flee Japan and said the former Nissan chairman should have stayed to face trial for alleged financial misconduct.

The Asahi Shimbun daily said the pair spent most of the money on preparations for the escape, including the costs of chartering a private jet, claiming that they were not paid for their help.

Michael Taylor, a private security specialist who in the past was hired by parents to rescue abducted children, on Tuesday said a cousin of Ghosn, who is his wife's sister in law, helped persuade him to take the job.

He also said he felt sympathy for Ghosn and his wife Carole after they told him that Ghosn could be held in Japan for up to 15 years.

The couple, he said, told him jumping bail in Japan was not a crime.

The Taylors' lawyers in the United States waged a months-long battle to prevent their extradition, arguing they could not be prosecuted for helping someone 'bail jump' and that they could face relentless interrogation and torture.

But the Massachusetts men, who had been locked up at a suburban Boston jail since their arrest in May, had failed to convince US officials and courts to block their extradition to Japan.

Suspects in Japan are interrogated without their lawyers present and are often denied bail before trial.

When asked by prosecutors if he had been treated badly in Japan, Taylor said the prosecutor who questioned him after his arrest was 'respectable and honourable'.

At the time of his escape, Ghosn was out on bail while awaiting trial on charges, which he denies, that he understated his compensation in Nissan's financial statements by 9.3 billion yen ($84 million) over a decade and enriched himself at his employer's expense through payments to car dealerships.

He managed to slip past authorities onto a private jet, transit in Turkey and land in Lebanon.

The escape was hugely embarrassing for Japanese authorities, who termed it 'one of the most brazen and well-orchestrated escape acts in recent history'.

An image from security camera video shows Taylor, center, and George-Antoine Zayek at passport control at Istanbul Airport in Turkey in December 2019

This graphic shows details of Carlos Ghosn's escape from Japan in December 2019

On the day of the escape, Michael Taylor flew into Osaka on a chartered jet with another man, George-Antoine Zayek, carrying two large black boxes and pretending to be musicians with audio equipment, authorities said.

Meanwhile, Ghosn, who was free on bail, headed to the Grand Hyatt in Tokyo and met up with Peter Taylor, who was already in Japan, authorities say.

The elder Taylor and Zayek met up with the two others at the Grand Hyatt and shortly after, they split up.

Peter Taylor hopped on a flight to China while the others got on a bullet train and went back to another hotel near the airport where Taylor and Zayek had booked a room. They all went in; only Ghosn's rescuers were seen walking out.

Authorities say Ghosn was inside one of the big black boxes. At the airport, the boxes passed through a security checkpoint without being checked and were loaded onto a private jet headed for Turkey, officials said.

Ghosn denies wrongdoing and remains a fugitive in his childhood home, Lebanon, where he was questioned last month by French investigators over a series of alleged financial improprieties.

Among the allegations are improper financial interactions with Renault-Nissan's distributor in Oman, payments by a Dutch subsidiary to consultants and lavish parties organised at the Palace of Versailles.

The questioning took place with his defence team and a Lebanese prosecutor present. Ghosn was heard as a witness as he would need to be in France to be formally indicted.

Others involved in the Ghosn case have faced legal proceedings, including his former aide at Nissan, Greg Kelly, who is also on trial in Tokyo for his alleged role in underreporting the tycoon's income. He also denies the charges.

Greg Kelly, a former Nissan executive charged with helping Ghosn hide his compensation, is also standing trial in Tokyo. He also denies the charges.

And a Turkish court has sentenced two pilots and another employee of a small private airline to four years and two months in prison for their role in Ghosn's escape.

Ghosn switched planes in Turkey on his way to Lebanon, and the three Turks were charged with involvement in a conspiracy to smuggle a migrant.

Over the years, Michael Taylor has been hired by parents to rescue abducted children, gone undercover for the FBI in a sting on a Massachusetts drug gang and worked as a contractor for the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan. And this isn't the first time he has found himself in legal trouble.

In 2012, federal prosecutors alleged Taylor had won a US military contract to train Afghan soldiers by using secret information passed along from an American officer.

When Taylor learned the contract was being investigated, he asked an FBI agent and friend to intervene, prosecutors charged. Taylor spent 14 months in jail before agreeing to plead guilty to two counts.
Thirty-one people, including 14 British tourists, were arrested after flouting Covid-19 rules by attending a lock-in at a red light district bar in Thailand.

The violators were caught drinking alcohol inside the bar on Bangkok's seedy Sukhumvit Road at around 2am on Saturday, despite a liquor ban being in place as part of emergency Covid measures.

Police arrested 31 people - 14 Brits and 17 Thai women - who were having a drinking party inside the cramped bar while it was supposed to be closed.

One of the customers fumed that they didn't want to sit in their room watching TV every single night and claimed that some bars remain open on 'the quiet' despite strict Covid restrictions.

The person, who did not want to be named, continued: 'The bars have been closed for the last few months but there are a few that still open on the quiet.

Thirty-one people were caught drinking alcohol inside a red light district bar (pictured) on Bangkok's seedy Sukhumvit Road at around 2am on Saturday

'What else are we supposed to do when we want to have a drink? I don't want to sit in my room watching TV every night.

'Someone needs to help the economy. I'll be more careful now because if we step out of line we'll be doing bird in the Bangkok Hilton.'

The 31 customers were remanded in custody for questioning before appearing in court the next day, where they all pleaded guilty.

Video footage showed them sitting in the police station after being arrested and waiting to appear in court the following day.

The South Bangkok District Court sentenced them to one month's imprisonment, which was cut to 15 days after all pleaded guilty to violating the Emergency Decree.

The sentence was suspended for one year and each person was fined 5,000 baht (112).

Police arrested 31 people - 14 Brits and 17 Thai women - who were having a drinking party inside the cramped bar (pictured) while it was supposed to be closed

Video footage (left and right) showed the individuals sitting in the police station after being arrested and waiting to appear in court the next day

The South Bangkok District Court sentenced them (pictured) to one month's imprisonment, which was cut to 15 days after all pleaded guilty to violating the Emergency Decree

The bar owner was charged with illegally opening the establishment during lockdown and selling alcoholic drinks during the liquor ban.

Those arrested were required to take a urine test to check for illegal drug intake but they were all found negative aside from having traces of alcohol. Police said that they would raid other bars serving alcohol.

Thailand has been hit hard by Covid-19 restrictions which have seen pubs and bars forced to close and a ban on selling alcohol beverages put in place.

Under the new restrictions, department stores and shopping centres in Bangkok can stay open until 9pm, but restaurants are only allowed to serve food and drink to take away, and seminars, meetings and parties are cancelled.

And last week, Thailand's capital announced a further ban on indoor dining and gatherings of more than 20 people from Sunday.

The measures will remain in place for 30 days and come after Thailand reported a staggering 3,995 confirmed infections and 42 deaths in the last 24 hours.

The number of Covid infections have doubled recently, with health officials blaming a lack of co-operation from migrant workers employed in construction and in factories.

Apisamai Srirangson, spokeswoman for the Centre for Covid-19 Situation Administration, said on Friday: 'Camps were closed but workers sneaked out to markets and communities, and spread the disease.'

She added that 'bubble and seal' disease control measures had proved successful within 28 days in handling clusters in Samut Sakhon province, south of Bangkok, but not in the capital.

The violators' sentences were suspended for one year and each person was fined 5,000 baht (112). Pictured: Video footage showing the individuals after being arrested

It comes as nightlife workers have protested (pictured) for financial assistance as Covid restrictions have seen pubs and bars forced to close and a ban on selling alcohol put in place

The situation has become critical as the number of hospital beds in Bangkok for seriously ill coronavirus patients is running low, despite the creation of several field hospitals.

Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha said on Friday that a proposal for a seven-day curfew for all of Bangkok has been rejected for the time being.

Meanwhile, authorities, are planning to go ahead with a proposal to allow fully vaccinated foreign tourists to visit the southern resort island of Phuket without undergoing a 14-day quarantine period which is otherwise mandatory.

Thailand is anxious to begin the recovery of its lucrative tourism industry, which has been devastated by the pandemic and consequent travel restrictions.

The Thai Restaurant Association has estimated the industry is losing up to 1.4 billion baht ($44.97 million) per day under the current restrictions.

Around 50,000 restaurants have shut down over the past two months, either temporarily or permanently, the association said. It expects at least 10,000 to go out of business completely by the end of the outbreak.

'The government told us to stop our businesses, but no help has arrived,' Taniwan Koonmongkon, the association's president, said. 'It has never been this bad. We're hanging by a thread.'

In late May, the government eased some restrictions on restaurants, allowing them to reopen for dine-ins but at a limited capacity of 25 per cent and only until 9pm.

Industry groups have said that is not enough for many operators who have run out of cash to keep their staff and pay rent in the absence of financial assistance from the government.

The capital and surrounding provinces are the epicentre of the two-month-old outbreak, during which the vast majority of Thailand's coronavirus cases and deaths have been recorded.

The restaurant association and another industry group, Fire & Ice, have called for urgent financial support and caution on any further restrictions.

'The food and beverage industry is also one of the main attractions for Thailand's tourism,' said Choltanutkun Tun-atiruj of Fire & Ice.

'What will be left of it once the country reopens, if the government doesn't see the importance of this industry?'

Thailand, a country of almost 70million, has recorded 244,447 Covid-19 cases and 1,912 fatalities, according to official figures from June 27.

Ministers hope a vaccine rollout that started this month will allow them to re-open the country to international tourists before the end of the year.

Thailand has administered around 8.66 million vaccine doses, with around 9 per cent of its 69 million people receiving at least one jab.

Critics have accused Mr Prayuth's government of failing to secure timely and adequate vaccine supplies.

The prime minister has said Thailand now has agreements that will ensure enough vaccinations for about 70 per cent of the population by the end of the year.
Locked-down workers at a Northern Territory mine have threatened to riot if strict 'solitary confinement style' conditions don't improve.

Nearly 800 miners at Granites gold mine, north-west of Alice Springs, were plunged into isolation over the weekend after they were exposed to Covid-19.

The infected worker tested positive to the Delta strain of the virus on Friday, but not before another 900 fly-in-fly-out workers travelled home to cities across Australia.

Frustrated workers quarantining in the Tanami gold mine have taken to social media to slam the strict lockdown conditions, which has seen some waiting 18 hours for food and surviving on a litre of water for two days.

Nearly 800 miners at Granites gold mine (pictured), north-west of Alice Springs, were plunged into isolation over the weekend after they were exposed to Covid-19

Several pent-up miners took to social media to share their scanty rations of dry cereal and Vegemite sandwiches

One pent-up worker shared a photo of his skimpy breakfast of dry cereal and a simple sandwich on Facebook.

'Fourth day of quarantine and this is what we get for breakfast... at 12pm', he wrote.

'No milk for the cereal, still no kettle for a half decent coffee. Just enough to make a Vegemite sandwich.

'Pretty sure I lived better than this on the dole. Yet this is meant to be a multi-billion dollar company.'

Another added: 'Heres about to be a f---ing riot 18.5 hours since the last food drop.'

Shocked social media users shared their thoughts in the comments, one woman stating the workers 'may as well be in jail'.

'This is disgraceful! Feeling for all the crew in there', one user wrote.

'Criminals get fed better', another commented.

One pent-up worker shared a photo of his skimpy breakfast of dry cereal and a simple sandwich on Facebook, saying he 'lived better than this on the dole'

'The workers are receiving food rations that would be lucky to have the nutritional value and calories required for a toddler (no exaggeration)' one miner's partner wrote on Facebook

The distressed partner of one locked-down miner also took to Facebook to vent over what she described as a 'solitary confinement style lockdown'.

'For four days they have not been allowed to leave their rooms. No fresh air, no exercise, no conversation with anyone, no smoking, no natural light', she wrote.

'The workers are receiving food rations that would be lucky to have the nutritional value and calories required for a toddler (no exaggeration)'.

She said the miners had space for a single bed and a TV the size of a laptop, but had hardly any internet or access to Facebook or streaming sites like Netflix.

The woman added that the food rations and the times of day that they were delivered are 'utterly absurd and unpredictable'.

'The mental health, the nutrition and the physical well-being of these workers is already deteriorating rapidly.

About 900 FIFO workers who were at the site (above) at the same time as the infected man have since travelled to a number of airports, sparking a contact tracing nightmare

About 900 fly-in-fly-out workers had already travelled home to cities across Australia before the worker at the Granites gold mine near Alice Springs was told he had coronavirus

'No one is arguing about the fact that they need to isolate - but an increase of conditions, clear, transparent communication and satisfactory food and water is all we are asking for.'

Other locked-down workers complained of being hungry and thirsty, with one miner claiming they hadn't received a 'food drop' in over 18.5 hours.

Another man said he and his colleagues hadn't been allowed out of their rooms or to buy provisions from the camp shop just 100 metres away.

'I'm sure we would get more rights locked up in jail', he said.

Gold mining company Newmont who runs the mine released a statement on Tuesday explaining workers were isolating in individual rooms, except those completing essential work such as catering and support services.

Other locked-down workers complained of being hungry and thirsty, with one miner from the Tanami site (pictured) claiming they hadn't received a 'food drop' in over 18.5 hours

'At the direction of the Northern Territory Department of Health, some individuals including positive cases and close contacts have been transferred from site to the Howard Springs quarantine facility in Darwin,' the statement read.

A rapid response team from the Northern Territory Department of Health has been deployed to the site, with Newmont to implement directions from the department.

Darwin went into a snap 48-hour lockdown on Sunday after 196 of the workers presented for testing, which resulted in four confirmed cases.

WHERE THE EXPOSED MINERS WENT: Western Australia: 252 workers South Australia: 29 workers Queensland: 170 workers Victoria: 7 workers Tasmania: 2 workers NSW: Unknown, 1 infection Northern Territory: 754 in isolation at the mine; 24 in Alice Springs; 70 in Howard Springs Advertisement

Another 24 went to Alice Springs and tested negative, and there are an additional 70 contacts at the Howard Springs hotel quarantine facility.

Western Australian health authorities scrambled to isolate and start testing 252 contacts who flew into the state over the weekend.

Another 177 people were identified as close contacts of the infected person and were told to isolate for 14 days, regardless of whether they get a negative test.

Areas of Southeast Queensland have entered lockdown after 170 workers arrived in Brisbane and a female miner from the Bli Bli area of the Sunshine Coast tested positive to the Delta strain after spending time out in the community.

The areas under lockdown include Southeast Queensland, Townsville city, Palm Island and Magnetic Island.

The state is also grappling with a further three infections from a different cluster, bringing the total up to 41.

Twenty-nine of the workers flew in to Adelaide, according to SA Health. So far, there is one confirmed case and 11 have tested negative.

Two workers also flew to Tasmania and are awaiting their test results, while three out of the seven who went to Victoria have tested negative so far.

It is not known how many miners entered NSW, but one person linked to the outbreak in the NT tested positive in Australia's most populated state - bringing the total number of infections to 130.

Pictured: Masked pedestrians exercising in Darwin on Tuesday as lockdown restrictions are extended by 72 hours for Darwin, Palmerston and Litchfield until 1pm on Friday July 2

The gold miner is believed to have been unknowingly infectious from June 18 until he tested positive.

The mining outbreak brings the total number of locally-acquired infections in the Territory to six.

NT Chief Minister Michael Gunner announced at a press conference that the lockdown, which will cover Darwin, Palmerston, and Litchfield, would start at 1pm on Sunday and run through to 1pm on Tuesday.

'We are assuming the worst,' Mr Gunner said.

'We are expecting more cases. There is a stronger chance that any new cases will have exposure sites which makes the job of tracing and testing much bigger.'
Queenslanders are gridlocked in five-hour long testing queues while supermarkets overflow with panicked customers as the state grapples with a new Covid outbreak.

Millions of residents have been plunged into a three-day lockdown amid fears a 19-year-old unvaccinated hospital worker from Brisbane may have spread the highly contagious Indian Delta variant to north Queensland.

The woman tested positive on Monday but is believed to have been infectious in the community for about 10 days, and in that time worked two shifts at Prince Charles Hospital and went on a family holiday to Townsville.

The teenager, whose younger brother has also caught the virus, worked on a special ward dedicated to Covid cases from overseas as a receptionist, but was not vaccinated, which Annastacia Palazczuk said made her 'absolutely furious'.

Although the 19-year-old was one of just two Covid cases recorded on Tuesday, health authorities have shutdown all 11 local government areas in the state's southeast corner, Townsville, and nearby Magnetic and Palm islands, as they battle to contain the more infectious strain.

Motorists are stuck in gridlock testing queues (pictured in Townsville) across Queensland after a a 19-year-old infected with the Indian Delta strain spent 10 days in the community

The hospital worker's brother has since tested positive to the virus, but is yet to be included in official figures.

The principal of St Patricks College at Shorncliffe, where the boy is a pupil, has written to parents to advise them of the result.

'Please keep him and his family in your thoughts and prayers over the next two weeks,' college principal Chris Mayes said, the Courier Mail reports.

After the lockdown announcement on Tuesday, motorists flocked to drive-through testing facilities across the state, with lines stretching for kilometres.

Photos posted on social media show customers snaked through shopping centres, waiting to enter capacity-limited grocery stores to pick up supplies.

Within hours, shelves had been stripped bare of toilet paper, dry food, and other stocks, with many buyers at packed registers spotted without masks.

Queensland traffic has also issued a road congestion alert along major highways in the state's south east as residents raced to flee the city ahead of the 6pm lockdown.

Townsville resident Bethany told Daily Mail Australia she left home at 12.30pm to get tested after learning the market she visited on Sunday was an exposure site.

The ill-fated journey of the 19-year-old woman who sparked Queensland's three-day lockdown

Queenslanders flocked to supermarkets on Tuesday after large swathes of the state were plunged into lockdown (pictured, a Townsville Woolworths)

By 5.30pm, she was still waiting in the queue.

'There are only four testing booths, the road is blocked both ways to get in, and there are now eight lanes of traffic - and no one is moving forward,' she said.

'There are kids in these cars and babies. Imagine waiting over four hours in the car not moving with a baby. I havent moved in 40 minutes. Ive been waiting over 4.5 hours now and they will be closing at 6pm.'

Bethany said the clinic appeared to be struggling to keep up with the workload, and many drivers had abandoned the line.

'They've been smashed. Its a s**t show and theyve literally shut the gate so people cant enter. Theyve just updated signs to say high traffic flow and be kind to staff.

'People are leaving and just chucking u-turns and heading home.'

Lines stretched for kilometres (pictured) at a Townsville drive-through testing clinic on Tuesday

Bethany said the disorganisation has instilled doubt the lockdown will end at 6pm on Friday as planned, and many appeared to be breaching health orders.

'No one is in masks and the security guy has his mask under his top lip,' she said.

'Its going take people days to get tested let alone sort things out in a lock down.

Around 13 million Australians, around half of the population, are now under some form of lockdown restrictions after cases seeped into the community in Brisbane, Darwin, Perth and Sydney.

As her state became the latest casualty, Premier Palaszczuk said she was 'furious' to learn the young woman was not vaccinated but continued to work shifts as a concierge stationed just outside the coronavirus ward of the Brisbane hospital.

'Despite the health directives that she should have been vaccinated, she was not,' Ms Palaszczuk said on Tuesday.

Queensland traffic shared footage of the congestion on major highways as residents raced to flee Deception Bay ahead of the 6pm lockdown

'Let me say, I am absolutely furious about this.'

Ms Palaszczuk promised an investigation into why the hospital worker was not vaccinated, and expressed exacerbation that unprotected staff continue to show up for work in high-risk environments.

The 19-year-old woman from Sandgate in Brisbane is believed to have been infectious from Saturday, June 19, before developing symptoms the following Monday.

She visited her local Woolworths and a gym on the Sunday before working shifts 'outside' Prince Charles' specialist Covid-19 ward on Tuesday and Wednesday last week.

On Thursday, June 24 she went to Brisbane Airport to catch a flight to Townsville for a family holiday at nearby Magnetic Island.

After three nights on the island, she returned to Townsville and attended the popular markets in Townsville's CBD on Sunday, June 27 before testing positive to the virus on Monday.

She then returned to Brisbane last Sunday, before testing positive to Covid on Monday.

People walk along the Southbank precinct on in Brisbane on Tuesday as millions of residents across the state braced for the three-day lockdown

Late Tuesday, authorities confirmed she has the Indian Delta variant, which is twice as contagious as the original virus and can be spread through fleeting contact that lasts just seconds.

One of her close friends and two of her family members are also now ill, and awaiting test results. The concierge also had contact with three other hospital workers.

The premier said the snap lockdown will be reviewed before it is due to end at 6pm on Friday.

But given how contagious the variant is, how long the worker was freely moving around Brisbane and north Queensland, there is a very real risk she has infected others in both locations.

Every single one of Magnetic Island's 2500 residents has been told to get tested, and authorities have included Palm Island given it has a large Indigenous population that would be more vulnerable to the virus.

Townsville resident Bethany told Daily Mail Australia she spent four hours waiting to get tested (pictured) after learning she had visited a Covid exposure site

She said staff put up a sign requesting patience and kindness as they struggled to keep up with the workload (pictured, the testing queue in Townsville)

Townsville exposure sites include the airport, the city's popular Sunday markets, the ferry to Magnetic Island, and the entirety of the island.

Virgin Australia flight 369 from Brisbane to Townsville on Thursday, June 24, is also an exposure site along with the family's return flight, Virgin Australia, 374, on Sunday, June 27.

The second case reported on Tuesday was another miner who returned to Queensland from a Northern Territory mine where Delta has also been circulating.

But Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young considers him low risk because he's been isolating since very soon after returning to his home at Ipswich, west of Brisbane.

He is the second miner among a group of 170 who returned to Queensland from the mine. All are in isolation and are being closely monitored.

The premier acknowledged the hard, fast lockdown would cause pain but did not offer any new support measures for businesses who'll lose days of trading, despite pressure from the Opposition and the Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

The infected 19-year-old hospital worker visited Sandgate Woolworths (pictured) while infectious

She repeated demands for the federal government to dramatically slash overseas arrivals, including returning Australians, until vaccination rates are vastly higher in Queensland.

Meanwhile, Queenslanders aged under 60 have been told to stick with the Pfizer vaccine, after the prime minister declared all Australians, no matter their age, would be able to get AstraZeneca at GP clinics under an indemnity scheme.

The partial lockdown covers residents of Brisbane, Ipswich, Logan City, Moreton Bay, Redlands, Sunshine Coast, Noosa, Somerset, Lockyer Valley, the Scenic Rim, the Gold Coast, Townsville, Magnetic Island and nearby Palm Island.

Residents in those areas will only be allowed to leave home to shop for essential items, exercise, or receive or give medical care.

Masks remain mandatory and other restrictions have also been tightened including limiting funerals to 20 people, and weddings to 10 people, including the celebrant and couple.

As cases grow elsewhere Queensland will declare Perth and Peel in Western Australia and Darwin, Palmerston and Litchfield in the Northern Territory as hotspots from 1am on Wednesday.
Police in Kuwait have arrested an Egyptian resident for posting a video online in which he rants about bad weather and dust storms.

The country has been enduring some of the hottest temperatures on earth this year, reaching as high as 122F (50C).

Kuwait's Ministry of Interior said the man behind the 'offensive' video was arrested and referred to authorities, which would 'take the necessary legal action against him'. Gulf News later reported that he had been deported.

Police in Kuwait have arrested a resident, an Egyptian man, for posting a video online in which he rants about bad weather and dust storms. The country has been enduring some of the hottest temperatures on earth this year, reaching as high as 122F (50C)

In a dashboard camera video posted on the social media app TikTok, the man can be heard complaining about the blinding sandstorm that has engulfed Kuwait for the past few days.

'I'm inside a dust storm right now, I literally can't see anything in front of me,' the man says, showing the dust coating the road like a thick fog.

'Fine, Kuwait, fine,' he adds, with an expletive in Arabic.

The clip went viral on Twitter, racking up tens of thousands of views.

The arrest underscored the country's restrictions on expression and drew criticism on social media over his detention.

Some social media users, who saw the arrest as a sign of Kuwait's crackdown on free speech and mistreatment of migrant workers, showed their support for the Egyptian man by posting their own videos insulting the weather.

In a dashboard camera video posted on the social media app TikTok, the man can be heard complaining about the blinding sandstorm that has engulfed Kuwait for the past few days

In a region full of governments hostile to free expression, the Gulf Arab state of Kuwait stands out for its outspoken parliament and relatively vibrant civic life.

However, authorities routinely use the cybercrime law to police criticism and prosecute dissidents.

The tiny sheikhdom, which like others in the Persian Gulf depends on the labour of millions of low-paid migrants from Africa, Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

It often faces criticism from human rights groups for its treatment of foreign workers, who remain vulnerable to deportation for minor offences.
Boris Johnson's former mistress has refuted his claim he made Matt Hancock leave his job, declaring 'Boris can't sack someone for adultery because then he'd have to sack himself'.

Petronella Wyatt, 53, ridiculed the Prime Minister's suggestion yesterday he had been responsible for the Health Secretary resigning on Saturday evening.

On Friday Johnson backed Hancock after his affair with aide Gina Coladangelo and said he 'considered the matter closed'.

Then at 6pm on Saturday his beleaguered health minister posted a shame-faced video on Twitter announcing he had been to see the PM to resign.

There was further confusion on Monday when Johnson attempted to rewrite the history of the action he failed to take, insisting 'When I saw the story on Friday we had a new secretary of state for health in on Saturday'.

Miss Wyatt  whose relationship with Johnson saw him sacked from his shadow cabinet role in 2004  did not believe him.

She said: 'Boris can't sack someone for adultery because then he'd have to sack himself.

'But I don't think that's the main reason, I think people are missing a trick here.

Mr Hancock said sorry for breaking social distancing and asked for 'privacy' for his family

Mrs Coladangelo (pictured here with husband Oliver Tress - the founder of the Oliver Bonas clothing chain), who is a director and shareholder at lobbying firm Luther Pendragon

'I think the main reason he didn't want to sack Hancock was because he wanted to use him as a human shield during the Covid inquiry.

'This is what I hear time and time again from senior Tories.'

She added in the interview to GB News: 'He also didn't want to sack Matt Hancock because he didn't want a change in that role which is pivotal at the moment just before a by-election.

'There are many reasons why he didn't want to sack Matt Hancock. He also didn't want to sack Matt Hancock because if Boris decides something is over in his narrative, it's over.

'I think he felt the media were putting pressure on his which is something he loathes, which is ironic given that he was a journalist, that he loathes the media and journalists  it's like a power play for him.'

Johnson was sacked in 2004 by then Tory leader Michael Howard following claims Johnson lied about the affair with Wyatt.

Boris Johnson with Petronella Wyatt in slightly happier times in London in June 2004

Johnson and another lover Jennifer Arcuri, who was a pole-dancing American businesswoman

Boris Johnson's own chequered love life Boris Johnson is said to have had a four-year affair with Jennifer Arcuri  a pole-dancing American businesswoman. The PM has had a chequered love life, which many predicted would stop him sacking Hancock. When he was Mayor of London he made Jennifer Arcuri his lover, and the Prime Minister even sent his former mistress a text message saying 'I miss you and I need you' while courting current fiancee Carrie Symonds, it is alleged. When he was at City Hall, Boris Johnson is said to have had a four-year affair with Ms Arcuri  a pole-dancing American businesswoman. In a new biography about the Prime Minister called The Gambler, by Tom Bower, it is claimed Miss Arcuri ended their relationship as his second term as mayor came to an end in May 2016. The biography claims his last text message to her was sent on December 29, 2018. He allegedly wrote: 'I miss you and I need you.' She deleted the text. By then, Mr Johnson was divorcing his wife Marina Wheeler and had already been courting Miss Symonds since February of that year. No 10 declined to comment. Advertisement

He was 'relieved of his responsibilities' after hearing new allegations about Johnson's relationship.

Johnson had at first claimed: 'I have not had an affair with Petronella. It is complete balderdash. It is an inverted pyramid of piffle. It is all completely untrue and ludicrous conjecture.'

On Friday the Prime Minister refused to sack Hancock having accepted an apology that neglected to mention the wife he cheated on after he was caught on CCTV passionately kissing his most senior aide against the door of his Whitehall office.

The PM's official spokesman said Mr Johnson now 'considered the matter closed' and refused to answer questions on whether Mr Hancock broke the law or ministerial code as the Health Secretary admitted he had 'let people down' and said sorry for flouting social distancing rules.

Married Mr Hancock, 42, failed to deny claims of a secret long-term affair after extraordinary images revealed his passionate clinch with millionaire lobbyist Coladangelo, 43, where he was filmed rubbing her back and bottom during their workplace embrace.

In an extraordinary statement he did not mention his wife of 15 years Marthaand just said he had 'let people down' and wanted 'privacy for my family on this personal matter'.

Labour and the Liberal Democrats branded him a 'hypocrite' who should be fired for kissing a lover and ignoring his own 'hands, face and space' mantra while telling the UK not to hug their loved-ones and not to have casual sex and stick to 'established relationships' to stop coronavirus spreading.

Backing him Boris Johnson's spokesman told reporters: 'You have seen the Health Secretary's statement and so I would point you to that, I don't really have anything further to add. He accepts that he has broken the social distancing guidelines. The Prime Minister has accepted the Health Secretary's apology and considers the matter closed.'

He added 'all the correct procedures were followed' in hiring Gina Coladangelo, who is paid 15,000 for around 15 days work per year.
A four-year-old who sparked an urgent police search after she disappeared from a children's play centre has been found 'safe and well'.

Scarlet Duddy was last spotted leaving the play centre on the Springtown Road area of Derry, Northern Ireland, shortly before midday on June 28.

Following an urgent appeal, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) said she had been found.

Police confirmed they had been able to find the missing four-year-old Scarlet Duddy who went missing yesterday. (Stock image)

In a statement, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) said: 'Scarlet has been found safe and well this afternoon and I want to thank the public for their help with our appeal.'

Earlier today Inspector Swanson urged members of the public with any information about the missing four-year-old to 'contact police immediately'.

He said: 'We are keen to know that Scarlet is safe and well.

Police in Northern Ireland said that Scarlet had been 'found safe and well this afternoon'

'We believe she may be in the company of a relative and may possibly be in the Republic of Ireland.

'She was wearing peach leggings, a peach skirt, peach t-shirt with daddy's little superstar printed on the front and a dark blue jumper with silver sequined heart.

'If any members of the public have any information about Scarlet, I would urge them to contact police immediately.'
A missing 13-year-old boy who went missing in the West Midlands has been found after police launched an urgent search for him.

A West Mercia Police spokesperson has confirmed Ryan Corrick, who went missing in Hereford, has been found.

The teen was described as a white male, 5ft 6in, of slim build with light brown short hair.

Ryan Corrick, 13, went missing in Hereford but has been found after West Mercia Police launched an urgent search for him and appealed for anyone who had seen him to contact 101

Police had launched an urgent search for him and had appealed for anyone who had seen him to come forward.

On Tuesday afternoon the force confirmed he had been found.
Labour was accused of employing 'dog-whistle racism' by one of its own MPs last night as the by-election campaign in Batley & Spen plumbed new depths.

Stockport MP Navendu Mishra lashed out after the party distributing a leaflet showing Boris Johnson with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi ahead of Thursday's vote.

The campaign material criticising the PM for meeting the Hindu nationalist leader in an area of West Yorkshire with a sizable Pakistani Muslim population was also attacked by Tory MPs.

Mr Mishra, a Hindu whose parents were born in India, told the Guardian: 'We beat our opponents based on policies, not by dog-whistle racism.'

The campaign to replace Tracy Brabin as the areas MP has become dogged by accusations of racism, anti-Semitism and homophobia.

Labour candidate Kim Leadbeater defended the leaflet as she bemoaned people with their 'own agendas and their own egos' campaigning in her home town.

Ms Leadbeater told BBC News: 'I don't think it is a mistake. I think that leaflet is about human rights and it's about having an MP who is going to speak out on the human rights issues in Kashmir.

'And, sadly, we've got a Prime Minister who isn't doing that, he isn't challenging the Indian government around these issues. So you need someone who can, and that's exactly what I would do.'

She said: 'We need an MP who can represent the constituents of this area on local, national and international issues.'

Labour cried foul over a fake leaflet highlighted party leader Keir Starmer's support for Black Lives Matter in a bid to hit his popularity among working class white voters.

The leaflet said it was from the TUC, but the union said it was part of a 'dirty tricks campaign' and that those responsible 'should be ashamed of themselves'.

It came as new footage emerged showing supporters of hard Left ex-Labour MP George Galloway clashing with local councillors canvassing for Labour.

Labour is under pressure today after it circulated a leaflet critical of Boris Johnson's diplomatic dealings with Indian president Narendra Modi - a Hindu nationalist - in an area with a sizable Muslim population

Councillor Gwen Lowe and husband Ken were confronted on camera by an unnamed activist in Batley yesterday ahead of this week's bitterly-fought parliamentary by-election

Labour lashed out today over a fake leaflet proporting to have been released by the TUC highlighting party leader Keir Starmer's support for Black Lives Matter in a bid to hit his popularity among working class white voters.

Galloway and Labour supporters in Batley street row over posters A public shouting match erupted after a George Galloway supporter accused a Labour councillor and her husband of tearing down election posters. Councillor Gwen Lowe and husband Ken were confronted on camera by an unnamed activist in Batley, West Yorks., yesterday ahead of this week's bitterly-fought parliamentary byelection. An irate Mr Lowe responded by accusing members of the Galloway campaign of removing placards promoting Labour candidate Kim Leadbeater and replacing them with their own. He admitted removing Galloway's flyers from private property but claimed he did so at the owner's request, before being pulled away from the heated row by his wife as she appeared to call the police. The Galloway campaign denied any of its members had taken down rivals' posters and called Mr Lowe's actions 'abusive'. A Labour campaign source said Galloway supporters were 'out of control' and compared the situation on the ground in Batley to 'the wild west'. The video shows the activist pulling up alongside the couple in a car as they walk along the footpath. He points and says: 'You've just took them George Galloway...' Before he can finish, Mr Lowe turns and snaps back: 'They took down the Kim (Leadbeater) ones.' The Galloway supporter asks: 'Who did?' To which Mr Lowe shrugs and says: 'Whoever put the George Galloway ones up.' When asked why he left the Labour signs up, Mr Lowe blasts: 'That's private property and he (the owner) doesn't want them (the Galloway posters).' The Galloway activist continues to harangue him, at which point Councillor Lowe takes her husband by the arm and pulls him away. She then appears to tell a police operator over the phone: 'I'm being harassed.' Advertisement

Councillor Gwen Lowe and husband Ken were confronted on camera by an unnamed activist in Batley yesterday ahead of this week's bitterly-fought parliamentary by-election.

An irate Mr Lowe responded by accusing members of the Galloway campaign of removing placards promoting Labour candidate Kim Leadbeater and replacing them with their own.

Mr Mishra later took to Twitter to add: 'It saddens me to post this but racism is alive and well within Labour.

'A hierarchy of racism exists inside the party and some groups are seen as fair game for attacks based on religion/race/heritage. More needs to be done when it comes to be being inclusive & welcoming to all.

'Labour will not win by playing divide and rule politics against our communities. We will win based on a principled stance against racism and discrimination of all kinds inside and outside the party.'

However the Leadbeater campaign defended the Modi material, with a spokesman saying: 'This leaflet makes it clear that a vote for anybody other than Kim would lead to a Tory MP who would support a Prime Minister who insults Muslim women and calls it a joke, refuses to deal with Islamophobia in his party, and fails to speak out on human rights abuses in Kashmir.

'Unlike the Tories, Labour's approach to these issues will be to always bring communities together, promote peace and put human rights first.'

But Tory MP Richard Holden said: 'Would Keir Starmer not meet Narendra Modi? Labour are playing the identity politics they have a go at George Galloway for.'

The former Labour MP who held the seat, Tracy Brabin, who quit after being elected mayor of West Yorkshire, also claimed that activists had been pelted with eggs and kicked in the head.

Supporters of hard Left former MP George Galloway, who is standing in the election, were accused last week of using the recent fighting between Israel and Hamas in Palestine, along with the Jewish heritage of Sir Keir's wife, to stir up anger.

Last Friday, Sir Keir condemned as 'disgraceful' the abuse Labour candidate Kim Leadbeater faced.

Miss Leadbeater, the sister of former MP Jo Cox who was murdered in the constituency in 2016, was confronted by a man who challenged her over the situation in Kashmir and her stance on LGBT+ education.

Miss Brabin said she was leafleting with 'colleagues, volunteers, campaigners' in Batley on Sunday when they 'were followed, verbally abused and physically assaulted by a group of young men'.

West Yorkshire Police confirmed that they were investigating, and Ms Brabin - who also holds the police and crime commissioner responsibility for the region - praised officers for their swift response.

But she added: 'We know why tensions are rising in our streets. The actions of these people do not represent the Batley and Spen I know. We are kinder than this.'

Labour MP for Halifax Holly Lynch added: 'There has been a series of increasingly serious and violent attacks in recent days and this is absolutely unacceptable.'

Supporters of hard Left former MP George Galloway were accused last week of using the recent fighting between Israel and Hamas in Palestine - and the Jewish heritage of Sir Keir's wife - to attack Labour. He denies all knowledge.

Kim Leadbeater is standing for Labour in Batley & Spen. Her sister Jo Cox represented the area before she was murdered by a white supremacist terrorist in 2016

In a video that circulated online on Friday, Ms Leadbeater was seen to ask the man not to shout at her, before turning away and being pursued and heckled by a group.

In the video, he raises his voice at Ms Leadbeater, who responds by repeatedly asking why he would shout at her in the street.

Ms Leadbeater then leaves and is pursued by a group to a car.

She later alleged that opponent and former MP George Galloway, who is standing for his Workers Party, had been 'laughing' nearby.

Mr Galloway said it was a 'false statement' and, asked whether he would condemn the behaviour, he replied: 'Absolutely.'
Priti Patel today blasted parents who smack their children as she said it is 'appalling' and 'incomprehensible' after experts called for it to be banned.

The Home Secretary said she was 'categorically' opposed to physically punishing children and that they 'need love and they need support'.

Ms Patel told Times Radio: I cant think of anything more appalling, quite frankly. To me it is incomprehensible smacking children, it really is.

I would just say that categorically. Children need love and they need support and I just think that is really crucial in the development and the upbringing of children.

Her comments came in response to growing calls to ban smacking in England, amid claims it has no benefits and can make children's behaviour worse.

Experts say evidence the practice is harmful is overwhelming but any move to ban smacking will prove controversial, with campaigners saying it impinges on peoples right to parent as they see fit.

Priti Patel today blasted parents who smack their children as she said it is 'appalling' and 'incomprehensible' after experts called for it to be banned

New research, published in The Lancet, evaluated 69 studies into corporal punishment conducted over the past 20 years. Stock image.

England is one of four European countries where parents can legally use physical force against children if it is reasonable punishment.

Scotland outlawed physical punishment of under-16s last year and a law imposing a similar ban will be implemented in Wales next year.

England and Northern Ireland must follow suit, said researchers from University College London, who were backed last night by health experts and childrens charities.

But others said banning smacking would be an invasion of government into family life that risks criminalising loving parents.

The latest research, published in The Lancet, evaluated 69 studies into corporal punishment conducted over the past 20 years.

It found under-16s who have been hit by parents are more likely to be aggressive, anti-social and display behavioural problems. The more frequently children are smacked, the worse their behaviour.

Lead author Dr Anja Heilmann, from the UCL department of epidemiology and public health, said: Physical punishment is ineffective and harmful, and has no benefits for children and their families. This could not be clearer from the evidence we present.

We see a definitive link between physical punishment and behavioural problems such as aggression and anti-social behaviour.

This is a public health issue. But physical punishment is not only harmful  it also violates childrens human rights.

Joanna Barrett, from the NSPCC, said: This is yet another significant study that shows physical punishment is harmful to children.

It cannot be right that in 2021 children are the only group in society that it is legally acceptable to assault in England. The case for reform is beyond doubt. The Childrens Commissioner for England Dame Rachel de Souza said yesterday: This report lays out starkly the negative effects smacking can have on childrens development and why it is simply outdated, wrong and unnecessary.

Scotland outlawed physical punishment of under-16s last year and a law imposing a similar ban will be implemented in Wales next year. (Pictured, MSPs in Scottish Parliament, Edinburgh, celebrating the passing of the Children Equal Protection from Assault Scotland Bill)

But she added that while she has never agreed with smacking and I never smacked my child it was too early to back a law change.

The Be Reasonable campaign, which opposes smacking bans, said: Parents who love their children should be trusted to decide when a smack on the bum is appropriate. Ordinary mums and dads are fed up of so-called experts demonising their parenting.

Andrea Williams, of Christian Concern, added: There is an important issue of parental freedom at stake here. A blanket ban on smacking would be a damaging invasion of government into family life.

In England parents who hit their children can claim a defence of reasonable punishment under section 58 of the Children Act 2004.

But if the violence leaves a mark, such as a scratch or a bruise, parents can be prosecuted for assault.

Smacking is illegal in 62 countries including all of Europe apart from England, Italy, Switzerland and the Czech Republic.
Pictured: Anna Coffey, who is desperate to see her dying father in Victoria

An Australian woman who was blocked from seeing her terminally ill father due Covid restrictions, unless she forked out thousands for a private jet, has been offered a charity charter and is set to take off on Wednesday.

Anna Coffey, 32 told Daily Mail Australia she raced home from New York about a week ago upon getting the heartbreaking news her 80-year-old dad John suffered a stroke and is in palliative care at a Melbourne hospital.

Doctors said he may only have days to live and that time is running out for Ms Coffery to see her beloved father one last time.

But despite being fully vaccinated with the Moderna jab, the Columbia Business School student was stopped by the Victorian and New South Wales health departments from driving south in a ridiculous case of box-ticking.

Diplomats have been allowed to fly into Sydney and then drive to Canberra to enter quarantine, but Ms Coffey was told the 'travel time' to Melbourne was too far - and she would instead be forced to shell out $7,500 for a private plane.

Anna Coffey was told she needed to fork out thousands of dollars for a private jet in order to travel from Sydney to Melbourne to see her beloved dad (pictured, left) before he dies

Ms Coffey raced home a week ago upon getting the heartbreaking news her 80-year-old father John (pictured together) suffered a stroke and is in palliative care at a Melbourne hospital

Upon her arrival in Sydney, she was not aware she would be stopped from driving the nine hours to Melbourne and forced to remain in hotel quarantine.

A public furor erupted over the heartless bureaucratic rules and even Prime Minister Scott Morrison weighed in on the ordeal, telling her in a heartfelt letter he's 'deeply sorry'.

It's been a rollercoaster ride of emotions over the past seven days for Ms Coffey, but now things are looking up after Angel Flight organised a private charter to fly her out of Sydney and into Melbourne tomorrow.

The organisation normally coordinates non-emergency flights to help people living in remote areas access specialist medical treatment, but in this case they reached out to help Ms Coffey.

'The first part of the week was pretty awful,' Ms Coffey said.

'There was a lot of uncertainty, anxiety and I've had trouble sleeping.

'But in the last few days it's been pretty amazing and I've been so touched by how lovely everyone has been and how willing everyone has been to try and help me in any way they can.'

It's been a rollercoaster ride of emotions over the past seven days for Ms Coffey, but now things are looking up after Angel Flight organised a private charter to fly her out of Sydney and into Melbourne tomorrow. Pictured: An Angel Flight plane

Victorian Health Minister Martin Foley held talks earlier today with his NSW counterpart Brad Hazzard, to discuss the situation and the pair officially agreed to grant her permission to travel on the private jet.

Ms Coffey has not seen her family since the pandemic began in November, 2019, and said she's has mixed feelings about the circumstances surrounding their emotional reunion.

'It will be exciting but also very sad to have to face seeing my dad in the flesh in the way that he is compared to the last time I saw him,' Ms Coffey said.

'I think it's also going to be very hard.'

She said her father, originally from the UK, led a 'very interesting life'.

'He served in the Navy and ended up in Australia in his mid twenties,' Ms Coffey said.

'He's done so many interesting things. He worked on a sheep station in Australia. He was also an sculpture artist and a great writer.

'He's just an amazing person that took care of me and is the smartest man that I know - very wise and very funny.'

Ms Coffey has not seen her family (pictured together) since the pandemic began in November, 2019

After hearing of Ms Coffey's heart-wrenching ordeal on Monday, Mr Morrison, who has no control over state quarantine policies, expressed his sympathies in a letter.

'To be so close to home but to still be so far away from being able to see your father must be heartbreaking,' he said.

'I farewelled my own father last year and I know how important those last moments are.'

The Prime Minister also vowed to reach out to the Australian Health Principal Protection Committee to draw up a more consistent plan to deal with compassionate exemptions for those blocked from seeing critically ill loved ones during the pandemic.

'I definitely appreciated the letter,' Ms Coffey said.

'I was very touched that he would do something like that and it really kicked off a lot of media attention that led to me being able to go home and see my father.'
South Africa's former president Jacob Zuma has been sentenced to 15 months in jail for contempt of court.

The country's top court on Tuesday found Zuma, 79, guilty following his refusal to appear before a corruption inquiry earlier this year.

Zuma was told to turn himself in within five days, failing which police will be ordered to arrest him and take him to jail.

The ruling sets a precedent for South Africa - and a benchmark for the continent - by jailing a former head of state for failing to respond to a corruption probe.

South Africa's former president Jacob Zuma (pictured in May) has been sentenced to 15 months in jail for contempt of court. South Africa's top court on Tuesday found Zuma, 79, guilty following his refusal to appear before a graft panel.

'The Constitutional Court can do nothing but conclude that Mr Zuma is guilty of the crime of contempt of court,' judge Sisi Khampepe said. 'This kind of recalcitrance and defiance is unlawful and will be punished.'

Zuma is accused of enabling the plunder of state coffers during his nearly nine-year stay in office.

'I am left with no option but to commit Mr Zuma to imprisonment, with the hope that doing so sends an unequivocal message... the rule of law and the administration of justice prevails,' Khampepe said.

'The majority judgement orders an unsuspended sentence of imprisonment for a period (of 15 months),' she declared, ordering Zuma to hand himself over within five days.

If Zuma fails to turn himself in within five days South Africa's minister of police and the police commissioner have been ordered to take him into custody within three days. This is the first time in South Africa's history that a former president has been sentenced to prison.

The commission of inquiry is headed by Deputy Chief Justice Raymond Zondo.

The panel was set up by Zuma himself, under pressure over mounting scandals, shortly before he was ousted in 2018 by the ruling African National Congress (ANC).

Pictured: Judge Sisi Khampepe reads during a ruling on whether former South African president Jacob Zuma should be punished for defying summons at an inquiry into corruption during his time in power, at the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg, South Africa, June 29, 2021

But he only testified once, in July 2019, before staging a walkout days later and accusing the commission's Zondo of bias.

He then ignored several invitations to reappear, citing medical reasons and preparations for another corruption trial.

He presented himself again briefly in November but left before questioning, and Zondo asked to ask the Constitutional Court to intervene.

Khampepe ordered Zuma to hand himself over to the police in Johannesburg or in Nkandla, a rural town in southeastern Kwa-Zulu Natal province where he has a home, within five calendar days.

If 'Mr Zuma does not submit himself... the minister of police... must within three calendar days of the expiry stipulated of the period... take all steps that are necessary and permissible in law to make sure that Mr Zuma is delivered to a correctional centre in order to commence the sentence,' said the judge.

Most of the graft investigated by the commission involve three brothers from a wealthy Indian business family, the Guptas, who won lucrative government contracts and were allegedly even able to choose cabinet ministers.

Zuma is separately facing 16 charges of fraud, graft and racketeering relating to a 1999 purchase of fighter jets, patrol boats and military gear from five European arms firms for 30 billion rand, then the equivalent of nearly $5 billion.

At the time of the purchase, Zuma was president Thabo Mbeki's deputy.

He is accused of accepting bribes totalling four million rand (around 200,000) from one of the firms, French defence giant Thales.
The mother of murdered Caroline Crouch is said to be 'happy' to see her daughter again in the eyes of her granddaughter Lydia, according to her lawyer.

Caroline's parents Susan Dela Cuesta and David Crouch have been reunited with one-year-old Lydia after a Greek court ruled that she should live with them until a final decision is made on her future.

Lydia had been staying with the parents of her father, Charalambos 'Babis' Anagnostopoulos, 33, following his arrest two weeks ago.

The emotional handover saw Anagnostopoulos' mother, Georgia, carry Lydia out of their Athens home at around 9am and take her to a secret location where, according to reports, she was handed over to Susan away from the eyes of the media.

Athanasios Harmanis, the lawyer for the Crouch family, accompanied Susan from Alonnisos as she travelled to collect Lydia.

He said: 'Both Susan and David are delighted that Lydia will be with them.

'For Susan, when she looks into Lydia's eyes, she will see Caroline, and this will bring her and David a lot of comfort and some joy to their immense suffering.'

Caroline's mother Susan Dela Cuesta is said to be 'happy' to see her murdered daughter again in the eyes of her granddaughter Lydia, according to her lawyer Athanasios Harmanis

Mr Harmanis accompanied Susan (pictured at Caroline's funeral on May 15) from Alonnisos to the mainland as she travelled to collect Lydia from Anagnostopoulos' parents

Mr Harmanis revealed that the last time Susan and David saw Lydia in person was in September 2020, when she visited Alonnoisis with Caroline and Anagnostopoulos for a holiday.

Since then, they have not been able to see her in person because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

He added that Susan would ensure that Anagnostopoulos's parents could continue visiting Lydia, because 'the more love she gets the better'.

Under a court order, they have been given the right to visit five days a month between 10am and 2pm in Alonnisos but Mr Harmanis revealed that they would be able to come more often than this.

He said: 'We said from the start that the perpetrators parents have a house in Alonnisos and will be able to see the child as much as they want. If they want to see here, they will have an open door The more love the child gets, the better.'

Mr Harmanis added: 'Caroline's parents will consult experts to help raise the little girl given the trauma she's suffered. They are prepared for this responsibility.

'Susan is a young, strong and very good person.'

The handover saw Anagnostopoulos' mother, Georgia, (above) carry Lydia out of their Athens home at around 9am and take her to be handed over to Susan

The youngster will live on the Aegean Sea island of Alonissos with Caroline's parents Susan and David, 78, a retired gas executive who was born in Liverpool.

It is also the island where Caroline spent most of her life and where she met Anagnostopoulos while she was still a teenager.

Lydia will live in Susan and David's retirement home on the island, where they will be helped by domestic staff and friends to raise her.

Harmanis said being brought up on the island rather than in Athens will shield Lydia from being known as the 'child of the murderer'.

He told The Sun: 'In Alonissos she would be the daughter of Caroline whose life was unjustly cut short.'

Pictures and video footage from around 9am showed Anagnostopoulos's mother Georgia holding Lydia tightly as she took her to be with her maternal grandparents.

She was gently placed into a car and then taken to a secret location, where according to reports she was handed over to Caroline's mother, Susan, away from the media.

Caroline's parents have been reunited with one-year-old Lydia after a Greek court ruled that she should live with them until a final decision is made on her future. Pictured: Caroline and Charalambos 'Babis' Anagnostopoulos with daughter Lydia

Footage broadcast on Greek television later showed a white car with Susan inside it boarding a ferry from Alonnisos to mainland Greece on her way to collect Lydia.

Earlier this week, a Greek court ruled that they should be granted temporary custody of the child and all legal responsibility for her was removed from Anagnostopoulos, who is not expected to face trial for another 18 months.

He had wanted custody of Lydia to be shared between the two families.

A final decision on Lydia's future is to be made within the next two months with Greek courts likely to award permanent custody of her to Susan and David.

The custody battle comes after Anagnostopoulos confessed that he killed his wife Caroline before staging an elaborate hoax to make it appear that she had been killed in a botched burglary.

He had previously spent weeks of falsely playing the role of a grieving husband and surrounding himself with Ms Crouch's family and devastated parents.

While David has now spoken out a number of times about Caroline's killing, Susan has remained tight lipped.

The only insight into her heartbreak is contained in a police statement on May 13, two days after Caroline's killing when she was not aware that Anagnostopoulos was the perpetrator.

In the statement, seen by MailOnline, Susan recalled Caroline's idyllic upbringing on the picture postcard island of Alonnisos, where she enjoyed diving, acting and was considered a model student.

Lydia was carried by Anagnostopoulos's mother, Georgia (pictured), out of their Athens home shortly after 9am, holding her tightly in her arms

She stated: 'Caroline's childhood years were in Alonnisos. 'This is where she went to school, where she made friends and where she met Babis, whom she later got married to.

'Caroline was a very good child, an excellent student and she took part in all kinds of activities. She was holding her school's flag for Greece's national day, she went to the scouts, she went diving and she loved acting and doing a lot more activities.'

She tells police that she moved to the island with David and Caroline so that they could have a more 'beautiful life'.

She added that the last time she spoke with Caroline was on the night of 10 May when her daughter had called her to see if she was suffering from any side effects from the coronavirus vaccine.

Just hours later Caroline was found brutally murdered in the early hours of 11 May.

Susan recalled: 'The last time we talked on the phone, on Monday evening, it was the day I had taken the coronavirus vaccine and she called to see how I was doing. She didn't seem to be preoccupied with anything. We said goodnight and hung up.'

Lydia was gently placed into a car (pictured) and taken to a secret location, where according to reports she was handed over to Caroline's mother, Susan, away from the media

She also revealed in her statement how she came to know that Caroline had been murdered after some friends arrived at her house to tell her what had happened.

She added: 'I made some phone calls myself and that's how I got to know about what had happened.'

Referring to the horrific events that led to Caroline's death, Susan stated: 'What happened in the house I don't know, and I don't want to know about it because it hurts too much.

'Thank God Lydia is all right.'

Meanwhile, grieving father David has said he wanted to 'blow the head off' Caroline's killer husband Anagnostopoulos.

David, 78, revealed that his grief rapidly turned to fury after he found out police had taken Anagnostopoulos from her memorial service to confront him with evidence proving he was the killer.

'When I found out later, my one regret was that I hadn't known when he was here,' he told The Sun.

'I would have blown his f***ing lying head right off his shoulders and willingly taken the consequences.'

David said he and wife Susan learned of Caroline's May 11 death from neighbours on Greek island Alonissos.

He said: 'I'll never forget how I felt. It was as if an icy hand had reached inside my chest and gripped my heart. It was the worst day of my life.'

The shocking revelation came as Ms Crouch's parents were awarded sole custody of her baby daughter Lydia

He said he believed there was 'some foundation' to rumours in the Greek press that the killer pilot was also linked to drug smuggling.

He said Caroline had a strong 'sense of right and wrong' and would have threatened to leave him had she found out he was involved.

The shocking revelation came as Ms Crouch's parents were awarded sole custody of her baby daughter.

One-year-old Lydia will be handed over to Susan and David Crouch who want to bring up their granddaughter on the Greek island of Alonnisos.

The Athens court ruling is a blow to the other set of grandparents, the parents of the husband who killed Miss Crouch.

Miss Crouch's husband Babis Anagnostopoulos has confessed to killing her. He wanted his parents to help bring up his daughter but they must now hand her over  although they have been granted access. A permanent decision ruling will be made in 30 days.

Mr Crouch said: 'All the people here on the island are rooting for Susan and me in our quest to gain full custody of Lydia.'
Detained immigrants at a Louisiana ICE facility have been made to drink unsafe water, eat moldy food, forced into solitary confinement for weeks and denied medical care in conditions 'tantamount to torture' according to civil rights groups.

Solitary confinement at Pine Prairie is not only used as a punitive measure but also to isolate Covid patients, people seeking mental health treatment, and as retaliation for protests, the complaint alleges.

The GEO Group, the private prison company that runs the facility, has denied the allegations made in the complaint which was filed on June 21.

Detained immigrants at a Louisiana ICE facility have been made to drink unsafe water, eat moldy food, forced into solitary confinement for weeks and denied medical care according civil rights groups. Pictured: Pine Prairie

The report states that the inmates with no disciplinary infractions are kept in conditions 'virtually identical' to those in solitary confinement for up to 24 hours a day for weeks at a time without access to medical care.

'This pattern of implementing punitive solitary confinement is abusive, unlawful, and tantamount to torture,' the complaint states.

The complaint was sent to the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security and claims detainees reported foul smelling drinking water that appeared to be contaminated in their cells.

It was signed by groups including the ACLU of Louisiana, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights and Immigration Services and Legal Advocacy.

They also claim the facility has been denying detainees access to sanitary supplies and there is a lack of Covid vaccines.

'One immigrant who works in the kitchen reported that the food is most often poor quality and is also often expired and contaminated,' the complaint said.

'On one occasion, detained immigrants who work as kitchen staff discovered that the bread ICE instructed them to serve was past the marked expiration date and had visible mold.'

The complaint dated June 21 says detainees who speak out about the horrific conditions are subjected to solitary confinement at the center in Pine Prairie

The report alleges that the facility is in violation of international human rights law and the US Constitution, as well as ICE's own policies.

ICE's Covid Pandemic Response Requirements dictates that detainees should be placed in housing that is 'operationally distinct' from 'any form of punitive housing' if they need to isolate.

But at Pine Prairie, it is alleged they were instead placed in solitary, denied recreational material or activities and received little or no medical attention, even if they had contracted the virus.

Sarah Decker, from RFK Human Rights, told Nola: 'We had several clients who had things like asthma or kidney issues who were being placed in solitary while they had COVID-19  actively experiencing shortness of breath, blurry vision, migraine headaches.

'They're locked in these cells where, you know, there's a little food slot. And that's the medical visit that they receive every day. Nobody's checking their pulse or their oxygen levels.'

It is also alleged that solitary is the 'default' for the detainees who seek mental health counseling.

One of those in the facility who speaks English has been in solitary multiple times for voicing the concern of other detainees, the report says.

He has been placed in solitary six times, each for around 45 days, three times longer than the internationally recognized legal limit, for merely translating the concerns of his friends, the civil rights groups claim.

The complaint comes as a separate ACLE report claims detainees who were staging hunger strikes in protest over ICE conditions were force fed by prison staff.

Officers and nurses from the private prison company GEO Group forced plastic tubes down the throats of inmates after they were sedated and held in handcuffs, according to Buzzfeed.

A spokesman for the private contractor that runs the facility denied the claims in an email to The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate, and said they were being 'advanced by radical special interest groups with a politically motivated agenda.'

'For more than three decades, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, we have been a trusted service provider to the federal government, providing consistent, high-quality services at all our facilities,' it said.

Louisiana has had a huge increase in ICE detainees, second only to Texas, because of a decline in its state prison population freeing up facilities.
A student Tasered in his underpants by police in his bedroom has lost his 40,000 fight for compensation, despite claiming he 'feared he would die'.

Carl Plumbley, 48, said he was was left 'writhing in agony' after a young constable blasted him with the Taser following a row between Mr Plumbley and his partner in Croydon in October 2015.

Mr Plumbley claimed he had been studying in bed in boxers and a t-shirt when the officer stormed into his bedroom after 'steaming up the stairs like the Gestapo'.

He said he told the officer he wanted to get dressed, and that he would come out and talk to him.

But officer said he had used a taser as a last resort in response to his provocative conduct after he swore at him and 'came at him in an aggressive manner'.

And after three days in court Judge Wall rejected Mr Plumbley's 40,000 damages claim against the Metropolitan Police

Student Carl Plumbley who was suing the Met Police after being 'tasered in his bed' by them

The incident happened at property in Ansley Close, Croydon, when police arrived on scene

Mr Plumbley told London's High Court during the trial of his claim: 'I got up from the bed to shut the door as I wanted to get changed without the police officer present in my room.

'I asked for a minute and shut the door, but he came through the door and pushed it back and that's when he tasered me.

'He tasered me in the chest. The barbs penetrated my skin. I was then tasered at least four times, it was a horrifying experience and I really felt it was the end of me.

'I believe a couple of seconds more and I'd have been dead.

'It totally dismantled me. I was writhing in agony.'

Mr Plumbley said he suffered PTSD and loss of concentration in the aftermath of the incident.

The case was heard and thrown out at the High Court in London before Judge Wall

He found it increasingly hard to keep up with his studies on his university course, which he was later forced to quit.

But Judge Wall rejecting Mr Plumbley's damages claim, said: 'I didn't find him to be a reliable or persuasive witness'.

'There is an unlikelihood of his account that the police officer was gratuitously aggressive despite the apparent absence of any provocation by Mr Plumbley,' the judge added, also finding the officer who tasered him to be a 'truthful witness'.

'He said he always tried to enter dialogue rather than resort to force,' she told the court, noting that in nine years spent carrying a taser he had used it just twice on duty.

Judge Wall found that the taser officer had not used 'gratuitous force', but responded to provocation and aggression as Mr Plumbley moved towards him.

Mr Plumbley had 'pushed the officer in the chest enough to make him move back and stumble' and slammed the door in his face.

And although he seemed to calm down for a brief period, Mr Plumbley then became 'enraged' when he overheard some comments made by his partner down the stairs.

'Mr Plumbley roared and moved towards the doorway and the officer honestly believed that he posed a threat of harm,' said the judge.

It was at this point he let fly with the taser in three separate bursts.

There was no room for him to use his baton, he couldn't use his pepper spray and the officer felt intimidated by his presence.

Deploying the taser was a 'reasonable use of force', the judge decided, squarely dismissing Mr Plumbley's case on assault, false imprisonment and malicious prosecution.
Upgrading the type of face masks worn by NHS staff could slash their chance of catching Covid and reduce outbreaks in hospitals, according to a study.

Cambridge University scientists found that using a high grade masks known as an FFP3 can provide up to 100 per cent protection to the wearer.

The research said there was a significantly greater chance of doctors and nurses catching Covid when wearing a standard surgical mask.

The British Medical Journal and Royal College of Nursing have called for all hospitals to start using FFP3 face masks to protect healthcare workers from the virus.

Even though standard surgical masks are fluid resistant, they are loose fitting and do not filter out tiny airborne particles which Covid spreads in.

On the other hand, FFP3 masks fit tightly around the nose and mouth and have an extra layer of protection to screen out the smallest of virus-carrying droplets.

Hospitals have been major hubs for Covid cases despite stringent infection controls being put in place throughout the pandemic.

More than 77,000 NHS staff in England have caught Covid since the pandemic began.

And 41,000 Covid sufferers caught the disease on wards while in hospital getting treatment for other conditions since August.

Cambridge University scientists found the risk of catching the virus was cut to almost zero on Covid wards (red bar) compared to non-Covid wards (yellow bar) after the upgraded face mask the FP33 was introduced on Covid wards. Infections on non-Covid wards rose at this time in line with surging infections in the community

FFP3 face masks (pictured) are close fitting around the face and are designed to filter out virus-carrying droplets that could spark an infection

The standard surgical mask, IIR, is used across most hospitals in the NHS. It is fluid-resistant but loose fitting and can let in fluid-carrying particles

For the latest study, data was gathered through a routine testing programme at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

The number of patients and healthcare staff involved in the study fluctuated as Covid hospital admissions rose.

There were almost 8,000 people involved in early November, but by early January this had risen to more than 30,000. There were 169 cases spotted on the wards overall throughout the study period.

The study was carried out between November and early January, at the peak of the second wave and before the vaccination drive kicked in.

Face masks set to stay on tubes and buses after July 19 Sadiq Khan is expected to insist that Londoners still cover their faces on public transport after July 19, despite an imminent change in the law. Reports suggest that England is set to be free of all Covid restrictions by the new 'Freedom Day' next month, as the country moves towards herd immunity. In doing so, ministers hope to lift rules such as social distancing, face masks in public spaces and work-from-home guidance - and could even allow nightclubs to reopen - in the comings weeks. Instead, orders to wear face coverings will instead be replaced with guidance, meaning people effectively have a personal choice over whether or not they wish to wear one. But the London mayor has spoken of his desire to continue to 'follow the science' which indicates masks are an effective barrier against transmitting the virus. A spokesman for Mr Khan told the Standard: 'On the continuing wearing of face masks, it is important that we continue to follow the science around the extent to which they limit transmission on transport and in busy indoor spaces. 'Evidence shows that the wearing of facemasks gives many Londoners the confidence that they can travel safely on public transport. 'People feeling confident they can travel on our tubes, buses and trains as they get busier will be a vital part of encouraging more people into central London as restrictions are lifted further, and it is something that we will continue to look at closely.' Advertisement

It found doctors and nurses working on Covid wards were 47 times more likely to catch the virus compared to those on non-Covid wards when they used standard face masks.

But when they were given FFP3 face masks their chance of not getting infected plummeted to between 31 and 100 per cent, the same rate as on non-Covid wards.

The scientists concluded in the study that 'cases attributed to ward-based exposure fell significantly, with FFP3 respirators providing 31 to 100 per cent protection (and most likely 100 per cent) against infection from patients with Covid'.

The Cambridge trust is among 17 across the UK known to have decided to upgrade PPE despite national guidance recommending standard masks.

Standard surgical masks can be purchased for as little as 12p each online, but FFP3 coverings are priced at around 5.99.

The Department of Health has not revealed how much the NHS is spending on different types of face mask, or how much it would cost to offer all staff on Covid wards FFP3 masks.

In the study, which has not been peer-reviewed, the scientists found the number of cases detected rose in line with infections in the community.

As expected, on Covid wards they rose more rapidly.

In early December as the second wave spiralled out of control there were 0.357 cases detected per day among staff on Covid wards, compared to 0.042 per day among staff on non-Covid wards.

But when FFP3 masks were deployed in early January the risk of catching Covid for staff working on both wards quickly became similar.

For those on Covid wards there were 0.138 cases detected per day in the week ending January 11, compared to 0.152 per day on non-Covid wards.

And it was 0.1 on Covid wards compared to 0.168 on non-Covid wards in the week to January 18.

The number of Covid wards in the hospital during the study period leapt from one to seven as healthcare staff battled an influx of patients.

The study continued until January 18, up to two weeks after NHS workers were first offered a first dose of the Covid vaccine. It takes around three weeks for the first jab to spark a level of immunity against the virus.

NHS staff on all wards were tested at least once a week, meaning asymptomatic cases that trigger no warning signs were also detected.

Dr Michael Weekes, from Cambridge Universitys Department of Medicine and who was involved in the study, said: 'Our data suggests theres an urgent need to look at the PPE offered to healthcare workers on the frontline.

'Upgrading the equipment so that FFP3 masks are offered to all healthcare workers caring for patients with Covid-19 could reduce the number of infections, keep more hospital staff safe and remove some of the burden on already stretched healthcare services caused by absence of key staff due to illness.

'Vaccination is clearly also an absolute priority for anyone who hasnt yet taken up their offer.'

Several organisations have called on Health chiefs to upgrade the protection offered for doctors and nurses to FFP3 face masks across the NHS.

Rose Gallagher, Professional Lead for Infection Prevention and Control for the Royal College of Nursing, said: 'This important study adds even further weight to the RCNs continuing call for nursing staff to be better protected from Covid-19 and given routine access to the highest levels of respiratory protective equipment whenever they need it.

'We are still seeing cases of Covid-19, even from some who have been vaccinated, and it is vital staff are fully protected and there are no attempts to restrict or ease off on measures to further reduce the risk of infection.'

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: 'The safety of the NHS and social care staff has always been our top priority and we continue to work round the clock to deliver PPE to protect those on the front line.

'Guidance on the appropriate levels and standards of PPE is written by experts and agreed by all four UK chief medical officers.

'Updated infection prevention control guidance was published this month to reflect the latest scientific understanding on how to prevent transmission of Covid-19.

'Emerging evidence and data are continually monitored and reviewed and guidance will be amended accordingly if appropriate.'
Up to 1,000 racing pigeons have vanished on a 92-mile trip across the UK on the same day that thousands more disappeared across the nation in a 'solar storm'.

The birds went missing on a journey from Swindon to South Wales on Saturday June 19.

Some 10,000 also disappeared during a race in Peterborough in an event on the same day - described by one breeder as 'one of the very worst racing days in our history.'

In total across Britain, 250,000 birds were released on the day and only a fraction returned.

While some have begun slowly returning home, many are still missing and have been spotted as far away as Holland and Majorca.

Dene Simpson, race controller for the South West Wales Federation of pigeon fanciers, described how a huge number of the birds the group had lovingly reared from chicks vanished into thin air.

Pigeon fancier Dene Simpson (far left) said only a few hundred of his 1,400 pigeons made it home after they were released for a race on the weekend of 'freak weather' this month

The 92-mile journey Dene Simpson's racing pigeons took from Swindon to Swansea when up to 1,000 went missing in a freak incident experts believe may have been due to a solar storm

'We'd let ours go from Swindon at midday on the same Saturday - that's a 92 mile journey with the wind behind them, so it shouldn't have taken that long,' said the 39-year-old from Swansea.

'But, of the 1,400 that went out, only about 200 to 300 made it home. And when we looked on social media later on we saw that lots of other federations around the UK had experienced something similar.'

Mr Simpson, who is in charge of checking the weather situation and deciding when and where the birds are released, said there were no warning signs that something odd was about to happen.

'The forecast had been overcast in the morning but with good visibility - by the afternoon there were clear blue skies back home in Swansea.

Pigeon racing sees the birds released at a start point to then make their way home, and the birds use the Earth's magnetic field as a guide, which expert Dene Simpson believs could be distorted by freak weather

'Which is why I think something invisible to the naked eye occurred, something that messed with the birds' internal Sat Nav and caused them to veer off course drastically.'

Mr Simpson said that homing pigeons can navigate using the Earth's magnetic field as a guide, but a freak occurrence such as solar storm could distort their sense of direction.

'There was definitely something strange going on that day because there were hardly any wild birds in the sky at all beforehand, it was just dead up there,' he said.

'Personally, I've not ruled out a series of mini tornadoes being to blame.'

Mr Simpson said another member of his federation, which covers Port Talbot, Pontardawe and Llanelli in Wales, has been told that one of his pigeons has been spotted in the Netherlands - ID'd by the tag or 'life ring' around its leg.

'It's upsetting for the boys because they've reared these birds by hand, really looked after them,' he said.

'And, while money is the last thing on anyone's mind at a time like this, pigeon fancying can be an expensive hobby. Losing this many birds will have cost a fortune.'

Pictured: Ian Evans, Chief Executive of the Royal Pigeon Racing Association

Ian Evans, Chief Executive of the Royal Pigeon Racing Association, said some of the pigeons which disappeared on the puzzling day have begun to return home.

He told Radio 4 last week that the birds would typically complete 'relatively short distances' in a matter of hours, but the pigeons were instead emerging 'a couple of days later.'

'I'd like to think the number missing today is a lot less and it should get a lot less over the next few days,' Mr Evans, 45, said.

'Pigeons are actually very clever if they do get tired and into difficulty they'll find another pigeon loft where they can rest up and the people there will take care of them.

'Then when they're fit enough and healthy enough, they will liberate them to return home.'

Mr Evans said the 'unprecedented' incident was also reported in the Continent, adding he was speaking to Met Office experts in order to understand what happened.

He was unable to put a number on how many birds had not yet come home, but confirmed they were slowly returning.

Richard Sayers, based in Skinningrove, North Yorkshire, 170 miles from the Swindon to Swansea race, says 300 birds also went missing from lofts in the fishing village, where pigeon racing is a way of life to many.

Richard Sayers (centre, with his family and birds), based in Skinningrove, North Yorkshire, 170 miles from the race, says 300 birds are missing from lofts in the fishing village

He appealed to people to give shelter to the missing birds, reminding the public of the part pigeons played carrying vital messages during the world wars.

Mr Sayers said: 'We've seen one of the very worst ever racing days in our history. Around 300 birds are missing from this village alone and thousands across the North East.'

'We're asking anyone who comes across a racing pigeon to feed, water and let it rest and there's an 80% chance the birds will get on their way after a few days,' he added.

'Each pigeon has an identification ring on with a code and number.

'We needed our little birds' help in the major conflicts and they saved 1000s of lives by carrying messages, now we can do our little bit to help them.'

Mr Sayers flies his homing birds as Sayers Bros & son from Skinningrove in the East Cleveland Federation. The partnership has kept birds for around 50 years.

Mr Sayers flies his homing birds as Sayers Bros & son from Skinningrove in the East Cleveland Federation. The partnership has kept birds for around 50 years

Nicola Maxey, a Met Office spokeswoman, told The Times there has been 'nothing unusual' in the last few weeks which could have impacted the strange behaviour.

She said: 'Looking at space weather, there has been nothing unusual that has happened in the last few weeks. It has all been business as usual.

'There has been some low-level geomagnetic activity but just fairly regular occurrences, nothing strange or extreme that we haven't seen lots of times before.'

Pigeon racing sees the birds released at a start point to then make their way home.

The time it takes the pigeon to cover the specified distance is measured and the bird's rate of travel is calculated and compared with all of the other pigeons in the race to determine which one returned at the highest speed.
A feisty four-inch crab impressively managed to keep a pride of man-eating lions at bay after coming claw-to-claw with them in the wild.

The crustacean had unusually come out of its burrow in daylight and was trying to cross a river at the MalaMala Game Reserve in South Africa.

But in a stroke of bad luck, the scuttling crab was spotted by the Kambula pride of lions and lionesses and it sparked their curiosity.

Video footage showed one of the sub-adults taking a look at the freshwater crab, but it went up on its back legs with pincers raised in a bid to intimidate the predators.

A feisty four-inch crab (pictured) impressively managed to keep a pride of man-eating lions at bay after coming claw-to-claw with them at the MalaMala Game Reserve in South Africa

Within a few moments, four other young lions had joined in and surrounded the un-snappy crab in a pincer movement, but it bravely refused to back down.

In the video, the tiny crab carried on retreating to its burrow in the river bank and kept the lions at bay single-clawed until it could escape down its hole to safety.

The young predators, at about three feet tall at the shoulder and 275lbs in weight, should have easily taken out the crab.

But by snapping its claws at their curious soft noses, the wary lions kept a safe distance away from the crustacean, deciding it was safer to avoid the mane event.

Rangers Ruggiero Barreto, 30, and Robyn Sewell, 27, captured the unexpected encounter on video at the MalaMala Private Game Reserve.

The 33,000 acre Big Five reserve is one of the oldest and biggest in South Africa in the Kruger National Park which is full of predators.

The crustacean had unusually come out of its burrow in daylight and was trying to cross a river when it was spotted by the Kambula pride of lions and lionesses and sparked their curiosity

Video footage showed sub-adults peering at the freshwater crab, but it bravely went up on its back legs with pincers raised in an attempt to intimidate the predators

But they didn't expect a lone crab to take on a pride of lions, telling LatestSightings.com: 'We left the camp at sun rise with the hope of finding lions and were lucky enough to find a pride at a riverbank.

'They were sheltering from the wind in the Mlowathi Riverbed and were sleeping so we thought we would drive on and look back a little later.

'But suddenly we noticed one of the sub-adults get up and start staring at something and at first we thought it was a scorpion but it was a crab.

'They normally only come out after dark but this one was crossing the river in daylight and it aroused the curiosity of the young lions in the pride.

'The lions were surprised by the appearance of perhaps something they had not seen before and the first lion went over to investigate what it was.'

The rangers quipped that not many people would have expected the crab to win the unusual face-off and were shocked to see the crustacean make his clever escape.

They added: 'The crab went up on its back legs and had its claws at the ready.

'The poor little fella was trying to make it to the riverbank where its burrow was when more lions came over to check it out until there were five of them.

In the video, the tiny crab carried on retreating to its burrow in the river bank keeping the lions at bay single-clawed until it could escape down its hole to safety

Rangers Ruggiero Barreto, 30, and Robyn Sewell, 27, captured the unexpected encounter on video at the 33,000 acre Big Five reserve

'The crab kept its claws up at the lions as it backed up until it made the bank and disappeared into a burrow and then the young lions lost interest.

'Not many betting people would have given the crab good odds on making it across the river past a pride of lions but this little fella was up for it.'

The only crab in the world with enough force in its claws to match a lion bite is the coconut crab, which grows to 18 inches and has super-strength pincers.

Marine biologist Shinichiro Oka said: 'The pinching force of the largest coconut crab is almost equal to the bite force of an adult lion it is so strong.

'They can generate a force of about 90 times their body weight allowing them to crush something with about six tons of force so close to a lion.'

The bird-eating-behemoths are found on the islands in the Indian and Pacific Ocean and are so strong can smash open coconuts and could lift a 10-year-old child.
A friend of Ghislaine Maxwell said abuse claims leveled against her in connection with her paedophile financier ex Jeffrey Epstein were 'Very shocking when I first heard everything'.

Lady Victoria Hervey, 44, first met the pair 20 years ago but says she has no clue what they had been secretly up to.

Former It Girl Lady Victoria - who is the daughter of the 6th Marquess of Bristol - said she believed Maxwell had been brainwashed by Epstein.

She said: 'She was always the centre of every fun party and she was a vibrant character that a lot of people wanted to be around. It was very shocking when I first heard everything about her because that was not the Ghislaine I knew.

'I think there's a lot of people in his position that like to be surrounded by young models - it didn't look that different to what I'd seen before. I was very young and very naive and didn't realise what was happening.

'He gave her that stability of what she needed and she gave him what he needed to meet all these powerful people. Everybody knew Ghislaine Maxwell but no one knew him. It was a partnership they had. I think she got in way too deep and just couldn't leave.'

Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein in 2005. Maxwell is accused of procuring girls as young as 14 for convicted pedophile Epstein to sexually abuse between 1994 and 2004

On whether she thinks Ghislaine was one of Epstein's victims, Lady Victoria said: 'She was in a way but she came the assistant of what she wanted. I think she was so brainwashed by him and so in love with him that she lost the reality of what she was doing.'

Maxwell, 59, has been held behind bars at the Brooklyn jail since her arrest on July 2 2020 on federal sex trafficking charges.

She is expected to stand trial in November accused of procuring girls as young as 14 for convicted pedophile Epstein to sexually abuse between 1994 and 2004.

The British-born socialite denies the allegations and has tried - and failed - five times to convince a judge to release her on bail, citing the allegedly squalid jail conditions.

On being invited to a party with Ghislaine, Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew and Epstein, Lady Victoria said to ITV's Lorraine: 'She loved being surrounded by power. That every event with Ghislaine. She loved fame and power. If you weren't going to be of any use to her, she wasn't going to pay you any attention. I think that's quite apparent about her. Bill Clinton was the president at the time and I think she liked to flaunt that she was friends with someone so powerful.

'It's going to be really tough for her in jail. If you're used to luxury, it will be hell on earth for her I'm sure. I think she's very tough but it's a front, I don't think she is as tough on the inside as what she exudes on the outside.

Maxwell's lawyers released a photo of Ghislaine Maxwell with a bruise under her left eye in April. It is not clear how she got the bruise, but Maxwell told lawyers it might have come from shielding her eyes during the nighttime checks

'She always exuded this air of mystery about her, you just never really knew where she'd flown in from and was quite secretive about her life.'

In April, her lawyers released a photo of Maxwell sporting a black eye inside the jail. They said she did not know how she got it but that it could have been from shielding her eyes in an attempt to sleep.

Her attorneys have branded her treatment 'the Epstein effect', as the Bureau of Prisons is under pressure to prevent her committing suicide after he died on their watch in his cell.

Prosecutors dispute the allegations that she is being treated differently to other inmates.

Maxwell was denied bail for a fifth time on June 2 - marking the second rejection by the appeals court, following three other rejections by her trial judge.

In the latest bail quest, Maxwell's lawyers asked the appeals court to at least order the lower-court judge to conduct a hearing where evidence related to bail could be shown. The 2nd Circuit rejected that, too.

Maxwell's trial was initially set to begin next month, however the trial date was pushed back after her lawyers requested more time to prepare.

Her trial is now expected to begin November 29.

She was arrested on July 2 when federal agents swooped on her home in Bradford, New Hampshire, aptly named Tuckedaway.

She was charged with conspiracy to entice minors to travel to engage in illegal sex acts, enticement of a minor to travel to engage in illegal sex acts, conspiracy to transport minors with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, transportation of a minor with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity and two counts of perjury.

Lorraine airs weekdays at 9am on ITV and ITV Hub
Police said they do not believe the three children were the 'intended targets'

Just 90 minutes later, a 10-year-old boy was shot and injured in another suspected drive-by shooting

She had been playing outside a house in Statesville with a boy, nine, when they were shot by a suspect driving a car

h'miyahh Howell, eight, has been named by her family as the deceased victim

An eight-year-old girl has been killed and a nine-year-old boy wounded in a drive-by shooting just 90 minutes before a third child was injured in another attack two blocks away in a night of bloodshed in North Carolina.

Ah'miyahh Howell, who has been named by her family as the deceased victim in the shooting, had been playing outside a house in Statesville with a boy, aged nine, when they were shot by a suspect driving in a car.

Just 90 minutes later, a 10-year-old boy was shot and injured in another suspected drive-by shooting.

Statesville Police Department said they do not believe the children were the 'intended targets' and urged the public who witnessed the murder and wounding of 'innocent children' to contact them.

Ah'miyahh Howell has been named by her family as the deceased victim in the shooting in Statesville

Ah'miyahh Howell, who has been named by her family as the deceased victim in the shooting, had been playing outside a house in Statesville with a boy, aged nine, when they were shot by a suspect driving in a car. Just 90 minutes later, a 10-year-old boy was shot and injured in another suspected drive-by shooting

Officers responded to reports of a shooting and rushed to 1309 Wilson Lee Boulevard at 6.56 pm on Monday.

Police said in a statement they found a nine-year-old girl and a seven-year-old boy suffering gunshot wounds. But speaking to DailyMail.com, family members identified Ah-miyahh as the victim and said she was eight. They also said the boy was Al'miyahh's cousin and was aged nine, not seven.

As the officers arrived on the scene, they began life saving efforts before medics arrived and took them to the hospital.

Witnesses told police a white car, believed to be a Mercedes, was heading southbound on the 1300 block of Wilson Lee Boulevard with the suspect shooting from inside the vehicle, the police said in a statement.

Ah'miyahh later died in hospital as a result of the gunshot wounds while the nine-year-old boy is being treated for his injuries.

An eight-year-old girl has been killed and a nine-year-old boy wounded in a drive-by shooting just 90 minutes before a third child was injured in another attack two blocks away in a night of bloodshed in North Carolina

While investigators were processing the crime scene at 1309 Wilson Lee Boulevard, police officers heard gunshots at 8.34 pm, around 90 minutes after the first shooting.

The officers responded to 316 New Bern Avenue where they found a 10-year-old boy suffering a non-life threatening gunshot wound, police said.

Witnesses told police that a white car, believed to be a Honda Accord, drove by with a suspect shooting from inside the vehicle.

Kendalen Howell, who says her granddaughter Ah'miyahh was killed and her nine-year-old nephew injured in the first shooting, told DailyMail.com that the shooter had murdered an innocent child.

She said: 'My granddaughter was a sweet eight-year-old girl that was just playing in my sister's yard.

Kendalen Howell with her granddaughter Ah'miyahh who was killed in the shooting

'They killed an innocent child and me and my family are hurting.'

Howell, 39, added: 'My granddaughter loved life. She liked TikTok, she loved her mama and baby brother. She was so full of life. I can't believe she's gone.'

She said her nephew and Al'miyahh's cousin, who is aged nine, was also shot in the leg in the incident.

When asked what she would say to the shooter, Howell said: 'Why y'all shoot these kids they had nothing to do with nothing.'

Howell told WSOC TV: 'It makes me very upset that you took my granddaughter away from me. She didn't even get to live her life.

She didn't get to grow up. None of that. And then you shot my nephew too... His leg and pelvic bone is broke.

'You just shot innocent kids. Y'all didn't care who y'all hit. You just hit anybody.'

The police department said in a statement: 'We are actively investigating these cases and asking if anyone has information regarding these violent crimes, please contact the Statesville Police Department.

'If you saw the murder of this innocent child and injuries to the other innocent children, you must help in solving these cases.

'If you have evidence or information regarding the shooters, please contact us. We do not believe the children were the intended targets.'
The Government's former education tsar lashed out at 'feeble' plans to help pupils catch-up on missed lessons today and warned that Covid's impact on schools will cost the economy 100billion.

Sir Kevan Collins, who quit earlier this month after ministers rejected his 15billion programme for recovery, told MPs a 'massive national effort' was now required.

He faced the Education Committee today and blasted the scheme that ministers chose instead, that was only worth an initial 1.4billion, branding it 'a bit of tutoring in the corner'.

It came as Schools minister Nick Gibb today confirmed the Government is planning to scrap pupil bubbles and replace mandatory isolation with daily testing to reduce disruption to children's education from September.

Sir Kevan told MPs: 'We do know that the impact of Covid has been significant on children's learning and that is ongoing and is sitting there and not recovering.

'It will go with them and we have international examples over time where, if you don't recover, it can impact not only your academic attainment, but your lifelong earnings. There is a long-term loss, not only to the individual but to the economy.

'There is definitely something we think happening ... to the mental health and the wellbeing of our children: not enough competitive sport, not enough activity, not enough socialisation and music and drama and art. That has a bearing.

'And we know that our country has responded in a way compared to some others which, quite frankly, is a bit feeble.'

Sir Kevan quit after demanding ministers approve a 15billion package to help thousands of children whose learning has been interrupted by the pandemic get back on track.

But Education Secretary Gavin Williamson announced that only an initial 1.4billion would be pumped into the system. Sir Kevan today said the sum was 'feeble'.

Other countries spending EIGHT TIMES as much as the UK on schools catch-up Boris Johnson faced pressure to pump more money into the schools Covid catch-up today as experts said other countries were being 'much more ambitious' than the UK. Luke Sibieta, a research fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said the government's total package so far was worth around 3.1 billion. 'A lot of that now is focused on the national tutoring programme, which (Sir) Kevan Collins talked about as being quite an important part of education recovery but it is clearly a lot less than the 10-15billion that Kevan Collins was proposing for a full-scale education recovery, which would incorporate much bigger elements.' The education researcher said there was 'value' in staggering funding for schools and that the prospect of clawing back lost learning in the space of two years was 'a bit fanciful'. But he said education recovery commissioner Sir Kevan's idea of longer school days had been 'pushed into the long grass' as the Government had failed to pilot the idea. Comparing the UK Government's outlay on school catch-up programmes internationally, he added: 'The Biden administration in the US has proposed about 122 billion  about 1,600 per pupil, over five times more than we're spending in the UK. 'The Netherlands is going even further and has allocated over eight billion euros, which amounts to over 2,500 per pupil, so there are countries around the world going much further and being much more ambitious.' Advertisement

Sir Kevan quit in fury at the start of June after the Government unveiled a Covid catch-up drive for schools with just a tenth of the funding he wanted.

Sir Kevan demanded ministers approve a 15billion package to help thousands of children whose learning has been interrupted by the pandemic get back on track.

But Education Secretary Gavin Williamson announced that only an initial 1.4billion would be pumped into the system.

Sir Kevan's call for the school day to be extended by half an hour was also kicked into the long grass, with moved a 'next stage' review due to report only by the end of the year.

Children will be offered 100million hours of tutoring over the next three years to help them bounce back from the pandemic - but plans for a longer school day appear to have stalled.

Teachers will also receive extra training and support worth 400million, bringing government spending to date on education recovery to more than 3billion.

The Government has also announced that schools or colleges will be given funding to let Year 13 students repeat the year if they have been badly affected by the pandemic. However, a longer school day and a huge 15billion funding package were notably absent.

Sir Kevan Collins said it had been a 'very, very difficult decision' to resign but that he felt he had been left with no choice.

He said the amount of money the Government was prepared to commit had fallen too far short of what he believed was necessary.

'It was a very, very difficult decision. It wasn't what I wanted to do,' he said.

'I did consider all the options but the quantum was so different from the amount that I thought we needed to deliver the exam question I was asked that it was impossible for me not to step back at that point.'

Sir Kevan said he was 'very worried' about 'complacency' and the belief that children's education would recover naturally.

'Of course we have to do more. We cannot blight a generation of children by not investing in their education,' he said.

Mr Gibb said today that ministers hoped that mass testing would reduce disruption to children's education, including removing the need to self-isolate for 10 days if another pupil in a bubble tests positive with Covid.

But leading a backlash to the new proposals, unions blasted ministers for giving 'absolutely no consideration' to the logistical challenge involved, and suggested there would be 'chaos' when schools return in September.

Meanwhile, younger teachers who have not yet been fully vaccinated expressed concern about the proposals, which they fear could leave them more vulnerable to infection.

Mr Gibb, who vowed to make a decision before 'Freedom Day' on July 19, told Sky News: 'We are conducting trials of daily contact testing as a possible alternative to self-isolation.

'What matters also is that we keep the school safe and if you go around our schools, you will see a raft of measures to reduce the infection rates within schools.

'There's extra hygiene, there's staggered breaks, we keep children in bubbles, and there's extra ventilation in classrooms to minimise the risk of transmission.'

Data showing the number of children being sent home to self-isolate every week, compared with the number of positive cases

It came as the new Children's Commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza, said bubble arrangements and self-isolation for pupils was 'very very restrictive' and should end soon, as she spoke of the 'real trauma' lockdown measures were causing for young people.

Tory MP Jason McCartney revealed yesterday that some families had been forced to isolate four times in a matter of months.

But unions poured scorn on the testing plans today, with Kevin Courtney, Joint General Secretary of the National Education Union, warning of summer of 'confusion and delay'.

He said: 'The Department for Education is once again jumping to half-explained ideas with absolutely no consideration of the logistical challenge facing schools and colleges.

'This shows every indication of our having to endure yet another summer of confusion and disarray, capped off by last-minute guidance with inadequate time for preparations. This is no Plan A, or Plan B. Currently it scarcely qualifies as a plan at all.
Overseas business leaders will no longer need to quarantine when arriving in England if their trip is likely to be of significant economic benefit to the UK, the Government has announced.

Company executives wishing to travel to England to make a 'financial investment in a UK-based business' or for 'establishing a new business within the UK' will be exempt but they will need written permission first.

The Department for Business said: 'This exemption is designed to enable activity that creates and preserves UK jobs and investment, while taking steps to ensure public health risks are minimised.'

But the Government added that business leaders will not qualify for an exemption if the activities can be carried out remotely via telephone or email, or by another person.

'Significant economic benefit' is considered to be having a greater than 50% chance of creating or preserving at least 500 UK-based jobs, or creating a new UK business within two years, the new guidance added.

Business leaders visiting England will need to take a Covid-19 test, take further tests on arrival, and tell the Government they intend to use the exemption, before getting a letter of confirmation.

The Government has announced the scheme today in an effort to help the economy recover

It will let company executives into the UK without having to quarantine for the mandatory time

Bosses hoping to use the loophole to attend a routine board meeting will be disappointed, although a meeting to make a decision on whether to invest in a new UK division could be accepted.

When not working in England on business matters, those executives will need to continue to self-isolate, the guidance added, and must conduct meetings in a Covid-secure way.

It said: 'Any individual who leaves self-isolation when required to self-isolate and who is not lawfully exempt from those requirements will be committing a criminal offence.'

The interior of Lloyd's of London, the centuries-old insurance market, part of the UK economy

Business leaders have been primarily carrying out activities remotely during much of the pandemic.

But airlines have been pushing hard for restrictions to ease because sales of business-class and first-class seats  which generate the biggest profits  have plunged as companies adopt remote working.

Downing Street defended the quarantine exemption for business chiefs following criticism from senior Labour figures.

The Prime Ministers official spokesman said: Protecting public health is our number one priority and thats why those exemptions will only apply in truly exceptional circumstances.

Many other countries have introduced similar exemptions and its important the UK public dont lose out on prospective major investments and new jobs as a result of that.

Deputy Labour leader Angela Rayner said the exemption was an offensive slap in the face for the lowest paid.

But the Prime Ministers spokesman said: This is about making limited exemptions when people can prove they are looking to make significant major investments that would benefit the UK public and provide more jobs.
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One of Britain's oldest seaside cafes is up for sale for 110,000 after serving food for 700 years.

The historic eatery, called Y Gegin Fawr, sits just yards from the sea and was once a rest stop for tired pilgrims to a holy island in the 1300s.

Travellers would use the spot to grab a bite to eat before sailing four miles out to sea to a remote island.

The current cafe was built in the 17th century in Pwllheli, Gwynedd, North Wales, and is now up for sale.

 Slide me  Y Gegin Fawr, which could be one of Britain's oldest seaside cafes, pictured today and many years ago. It was built as it stands today in the 17th century. It sits in in Pwllheli, Gwynedd, North Wales, and is on sale for 110,000

The historic north Wales cafe, Y Gegin Fawr, serves ice-cream from a parlour and has been in business for 700 years

The interior of the historic Y Gegin Fawr beach cafe is still complete with traditional dark wooden beams, unplastered whitewashed walls and also still has original features like a large fireplace

It includes a tearoom and ice cream parlour with original features including a large fireplace.

The site of Y Gegin Fawr - meaning The Large Kitchen - was used by pilgrims crossing to nearby Bardsey Island.

The 1.5 mile-long landscape of Bardsey Island is also known as the 'Island of 20,000 Saints' because legends say 20,000 graves lie beneath the land.

It is thought to be the real Avalon - the place where King Arthur was buried.

Inside the Y Gegin Fawr cafe, where decorations including old-fashioned cooking pans, crockery and furniture can be seen in historic pictures

Customers gather at the Y Gegin Fawr cafe in north Wales, centuries after the eatery used to be a popular break spot for pilgrims making their way to Bardsey Island, believed to be where 20,000 saints are buried

A centuries-old cafe is just yards from beautiful coastline in north Wales where customers can enjoy a stroll on the beach

A monastery was built in 1516 and destroyed by Henry VIII in 1537 - but it still remains an important religious site.

The tiny island community is accessible only by boat from Pwllheli.

Buyers hoping to snap up the historic cafe will be treated to stunning views of the sea.

Melfyn Williams, of estate agents Williams and Goodwin, said: 'It is an ideal location in our view in this popular coastal village - offering a thriving business complete with fixtures and fittings and well located a few metres from the seafront.

'There are tearooms over two floors and outdoor seating areas plus the ice cream parlour business next door.

'Whilst currently running on slightly reduced covers due to 2021 restrictions, the business offers scope for further income.

'Whilst there is no accommodation with the business it presents in our opinion a great opportunity that would be ideal for someone who lives nearby.'

The ice-cream parlour at Y Gegin Fawr cafe as it looks today, which is up for sale for 10,000 after operating for 700 years

The dining area for Y Gegin Fawr beach-side cafe in Wales, which still has many traditional features dating from centuries ago

Bardsey Island, a popular destination for pilgrims in the middle ages, and where 20,000 saints are believed to be buried

Bardsey Island, Welsh name Ynys Enlli, is said to have become an important religious hub in 5AD when Einon, the King of Llyn, invited the Breton St Cadfan to Bardsey
An 11-year-old boy is fighting for his life after he was struck by an alleged drunk driver while riding his bike and dragged 50ft down a Colorado street.

Caleb Ingelhart was only two minutes from home when he tried to cross the street but was hit by the SUV at a crossing.

Driver Hector Garcia is accused of not immediately noticing Caleb, and passers-by say he continued driving for 50ft before stopping in Aurora on June 10.

Caleb Ingelhart is fighting for his life after he was struck by an alleged drunk driver while riding his bike and dragged 50ft down a Colorado street

The youngster, pictured with his mother Deborah, was only two minutes from home when he tried to cross the street but was hit by the SUV at a crossing

Caleb is seen approaching the crossing on the side of the road on June 10 before the horrific crash

CCTV footage shows the moment the SUV (highlighted) exits the crossing and continues to drive

Bystanders lifted the SUV off the boy and a woman pulled him out, according to police.

The boy suffered a skull fracture, brain bleed, a fractured scapula, deep cuts to bones, trauma to neck tendons, road rash and other injuries as a result.

Caleb's mother Deborah told The Denver Channel: 'You wish you could do something. Its hard when you see your child screaming for three hours because theyre in so much pain.

'He needs to continue being a kid and get back on that bike.'

Driver Hector Garcia (left) is accused of not immediately noticing Caleb (right), and passers-by say he continued driving for 50ft before stopping

Caleb was riding his bike on a sidewalk of North Chambers Road and was using the crosswalk when he was hit at 7.30pm on June 10, documents said

The boy suffered a skull fracture, brain bleed, a fractured scapula, deep cuts to bones, trauma to neck tendons, road rash and other injuries as a result

Bob Ingelhart, 60, Caleb's great uncle, said: 'His injuries are horrific and it is a miracle that he is alive.

'His face was swollen, he was in a neck brace and he had deep scrapes in his skin.

'The bystanders are really the heroes here. They banded together, saved Caleb's life and got the driver stopped and under control.'

Caleb was riding his bike on a sidewalk of North Chambers Road and was using the crosswalk when he was hit at 7.30pm on June 10, documents said.

Bystanders lifted the SUV off the boy and a woman pulled him out, according to police

The driver was arrested for vehicular assault, driving while under the influence of alcohol, driving with a suspended license and failure to yield to a pedestrian

An affidavit said after the collision, the 32-year-old driver turned right and continued north.

He allegedly dragged the boy and his bike under his GMC Jimmy SUV for a 'considerable distance', police said, while witnesses yelled and honked for him to stop

The driver was arrested for vehicular assault, driving while under the influence of alcohol, driving with a suspended license and failure to yield to a pedestrian.

According to an arrest affidavit, one witness told police that he saw the man hide a 'can of booze of some sort' in the back of vehicle before getting out to assist the boy.

The affidavit says he denied this claim, and being drunk, but did later tell officers that he drank with his co-workers before hitting the boy and 'maybe two Smirnoffs.'

Bob said Caleb is now recovering at home, but still 'has periods with major pain.'
A Picasso painting stolen from Greece's National Gallery has been found hidden in a ravine nearly nine years after it vanished, officials announced on Tuesday.

The painting - which was personally donated by the Spanish master to the Greek people - was stolen alongside two other artworks in an audacious heist in 2012.

Until now, the perpetrator had evaded officials, but a 49-year-old who is said to have lived between Greece and England has now been arrested and later confessed.

Picasso's 'Head of a Woman' (pictured) stolen from Greece's National Gallery in 2012 has been found hidden in a ravine nearly nine years after it vanished, officials announced on Tuesday

The painting, called 'Head of a Woman' and gifted by Pablo Picasso to Greece in 1949, was recovered in Keratea, a rural area some 28 miles southeast of Athens, officials told a news conference.

A video shared online by the Greek police showed where the man had hidden the paintings. They were found in a ravine, wrapped in plastic sheets for protection and hidden beneath some dense and dry shrubbery in a riverbed, the footage shows.

Two other paintings were stolen in the same heist in January 2012. One, called 'Stammer Windmill' by Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, was also found with the Picasso.

A sketch by 16th-century Italian artist Guglielmo Caccia, better known as Moncalvo, was also stolen, but state television reported it was damaged in the heist and flushed down a gallerey toilet, something the suspect has reportedly confessed to.

'Today is a special day, (a day of) great joy and emotion,' Culture Minister Lina Mendoni told reporters, adding that the Gallery's 'greatest wound has been healed'.

Mendoni said the painting would have been 'impossible' to sell as it had a personal inscription by Picasso on the back - 'For the Greek people, a tribute by Picasso.'

But police sources told ARTNews it was possible the work had been offered for 15m on the black market but failed to find a buyer.

The 2012 heist at the National Gallery, Greece's largest state art collection, lasted just seven minutes, but the planning behind it was meticulous.

The break-in saw the sole guard distracted by alarms that were set off throughout the night until he disabled the system. He then went to check one part of the museum while the burglar slipped in through an unlocked balcony door elsewhere.

In the short time he was inside, he was able to strip the Picasso and Stammer Windmill from their frames and escape.

It was originally believed that two men broke in, cutting the paintings from their frames, but police have arrested just one person, the 49-year-old Greek construction worker, in connection with the case. He has not been named.

Pictured: Stills from a video showing the painting's hiding place, where it was found by police wrapped up. The man moved the paintings from a warehouse in Keratea to the ravine where they were finally discovered

'Head of a Woman', (pictured right next to 'Mill' by Piet Mondrian) gifted by Pablo Picasso to Greece in 1949, was recovered in Keratea, a rural area some 28 miles southeast of Athens, officials told a news conference

According to Greek news site Proto Thema, police said that the man, who claimed to be an art lover himself, watched guards at the gallery every day for over six months, learning their movements and shift patterns, and when they took cigarette breaks.

He would visit the gallery as a visitor or watch it from a distance, taking notes.

Investigators believe that he had worked as an oil painter himself and had knowledge of the materials and of the gallery, and that he stole what he could get his hands on in the short window he was inside for the heist.

They believe that he planned to wait a decade before selling the artworks, but his plan began to unfold at the end of last year when police started to monitor him, and learned that the painting had not left Greece.

It was found that the man had connections to the art world, and after learning that the police were on his trail, he moved the paintings from a warehouse in Keratea to the ravine where they were finally discovered.

The man was set to leave for the Netherlands this week, and so officers - fearing they may lose him abroad - moved in and arrested him.

Another painting stolen in the same heist in January 2012, 'Stammer Windmill' by Dutch painter Piet Mondrian (pictured right) was also found

'I am a man who loves art, I wanted to do it for myself, I did not intend to sell them,' the 49-year-old man reportedly told police when he was finally caught.

His arrest brings to a close an almost 10-year investigation that saw officials scour both legal and illegal art auctions across the globe, as well as private collections, thieves and black-market traffickers.

When he was caught, the man - who local reports say is married and divorced with children - was cooperative, and confessed that he was the one to 'disappear' the artwork.

His lawyer Sakis Kechagioglou said: 'My client showed practical remorse. It is an indisputable success of the Greek Police and the Department of Burglars to investigate this much acclaimed case and as a citizen I express my satisfaction for the recovery by the National Gallery and the Greek State Museum.

'It is also an indisputable fact that in this finding and recovery, my client played a decisive role, with his full cooperation with the law enforcement authorities from the beginning and the practical remorse he showed, the statement added.

According to reports, the man said that it was his love of art that led him to the theft, and that he knew that he would not find a buyer willing to pay the value of the painting he could not prove he was the owner of.

Furthermore, had it ever been found in a buyer's collection, it would be returned to Greece as its rightful owner with the buyers punished. The man was never able to get the paintings abroad to sell them on the black market.

Pictured: A cubist female bust by the Spanish painter Picasso, left, and a 1905 representational oil painting of a riverside windmill by the Dutch painter Mondrian are displayed by police officers, in Athens during a press conference on Tuesday, June 29

Picasso, who died in 1973, had given the cubist painting to the Greek state in recognition of the country's resistance to Nazi Germany during the painful 1941-44 occupation.

'This painting is of particular importance and sentimental value to the Greek people, as it was personally dedicated by the great painter to the Greek people for their fight against fascist and Nazi forces,' she said.

A state report found that the National Gallery's security had not been upgraded for over a decade, with the then police minister calling safeguards 'non-existent.'

Several areas in the museum were out of range of security cameras, while the alarms were faulty and prone to ringing gratuitously.

In addition, the gallery was on reduced security staffing at the time owing to a three-day staff strike.

'Today is a special day, (a day of) great joy and emotion,' Culture Minister Lina Mendoni (right) told reporters. Mendoni said the painting would have been 'impossible' to sell as it had a personal inscription by Picasso on the back - 'For the Greek people, a tribute by Picasso'

On the night of the heist, the burglar had set off an alarm by manipulating an unlocked door to send the sole guard elsewhere in the building.

The guard told police he ran after one thief, who dropped another Mondrian oil painting.

The theft, at the height of the Greek debt crisis, was followed a few months later by another high-profile robbery of nearly 80 archaeological artefacts from a museum in Olympia dedicated to the ancient Olympic Games.

The items were recovered several months later.

The National Gallery holds a prominent collection of post-Byzantine Greek art, as well as a small collection of Renaissance works and some El Greco paintings.

The paintings will be exhibited once again in the National Gallery, which opened in March after nine years and 59 million euros (60 million) of renovation work that doubled its capacity, as part of celebrations marking the 200th anniversary of the Greek War of Independence in Athens.
Shamed former Health Secretary Matt Hancock has become 'the face' of a dating site for married people straying from their partners.

The unlikely lothario - who quit his role after being caught on camera kissing his aide - features on a billboard branded for Illicit Encounters.

Its poster was spotted in south London and teased how he had been caught out cheating on his wife.

The slogan on the advertisement simply read 'For an affair behind closed doors'.

It is thought Hancock is not a willing participant of the advert.

The company describes itself as the UK's leading dating website for married people and the leading authority on infidelity. It claims to have over a million UK users.

A spokeswoman for Illicit Encounters told MailOnline: 'It's clear that "behind closed doors" doesn't mean much in Whitehall but it does at Illicit Encounters.

The sign was seen in south London and put online by a marketing expert who spotted it

Mr Hancock said sorry for breaking social distancing and asked for 'privacy' for his family, but refused to resign as Health Secretary

'This is the most talked about story in politics since that other chap with floppy blonde hair was accused of cheating, so we thought we'd use it as an opportunity to highlight the benefits of our service.

'Forget taped over CCTV cameras. We take the anonymity of our members very seriously to provide a meeting place for like-minded people looking for a little romance outside of their relationship.'

Hancock and his aide Gina Coladangelo are said to be serious about each other, friends claimed as the health secretary quit his job and walked out on his marriage.

He bowed to growing pressure to go on Saturday night, less than 48 hours after pictures emerged of him in a passionate embrace with Ms Coladangelo at the Department of Health.

He told Boris Johnson in his letter of resignation that the Government 'owe it to people who have sacrificed so much in this pandemic to be honest when we have let them down'.

The former health secretary told his wife, Martha, he would be leaving her on Thursday night - immediately after discovering that his affair with Gina Coladangelo was about to be laid bare.

Gina Coladangelo (pictured with the Health Secretary in September 2019), initially taken on by Mr Hancock as an unpaid adviser on a six-month contract in early 2020, is also leaving her position on the board of the Department of Health

Images and video showed Mr Hancock in an embrace with aide Ms Coladangelo last month inside his private office, sparking intense pressure on him to quit over the breaking of social-distancing rules.

Friends said on Saturday night the pair had been seeing each other for around six weeks, but were a 'love match'.

In a video announcing his resignation Mr Hancock said: 'The last thing I would want is for my private life to distract attention from the single-minded focus that is leading us out of this crisis.

'I want to reiterate my apology for breaking the guidance, and apologise to my family and loved ones for putting them through this. I also need (to) be with my children at this time.'

Ms Coladangelo, initially taken on by Mr Hancock as an unpaid adviser on a six-month contract in early 2020, is reported to also be leaving her DHSC job, but the department had not confirmed this on Saturday night.

Mr Johnson had refused to sack Mr Hancock, with his spokesman saying the PM considered the matter closed after receiving the West Suffolk MP's apology on Friday.

But by the next day Conservative MPs began to break ranks to call for Mr Hancock to go.

In response to his resignation, the Prime Minister wrote: 'You should leave office very proud of what you have achieved - not just in tackling the pandemic, but even before Covid-19 struck us.'

Mr Hancock also said in a video posted to Twitter: 'I've been to see the Prime Minister to resign as Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. I understand the enormous sacrifices that everybody in this country has made - that you have made. And those of us who make these rules have got to stick by them and that's why I've got to resign.

'I want to thank people for their incredible sacrifices and what they've done. Everybody working in the NHS, across social care. Everyone involved in the vaccine programme. And frankly everybody in this country who has risen to the challenges that we've seen over this past 18 months.

'I'm very proud of what we've done to protect the NHS and the peak, to deliver that vaccine rollout - one of the fastest in the world - and I look forward to supporting the government and the Prime Minister from the backbenches to make sure that we can get out of this pandemic.

'We're so close to the end - and then build back better so that this country can fulfil its potential - which is so great - and I will do that with all of my heart.'
Sydney businesswoman Melissa Caddick faked many documents in the 'quite elaborate fraud' she used to swindle trusting investors out of more than $23million, a judge has been told.

She operated 37 bank accounts, sent investors fictitious portfolio evaluations and kept 'meticulous' records, Farid Assad SC said in the Federal Court on Tuesday.

He is representing the corporate regulator, Australian Securities and Investments Commission, in a hearing related to trying to recover some of the millions said to have been misappropriated.

Melissa Caddick during a business meeting while she ran her 'sham' financial services company, Maliver, which she used to convince 72 clients to give her $30.2million to invest

A lack of credible witnesses and an absence of CCTV footage means the glamorous conwoman's disappearance may never be solved

Caddick vanished the day after corporate watchdog ASIC raided her luxury $6.1million home in Dover Heights, Sydney, on November 11 last year. Pictured: the ASIC raid

The 49-year-old went missing hours after ASIC executed a November 2020 search warrant at her eastern Sydney mansion.

More than three months later, the self-styled financial adviser's decomposed foot washed up on a remote southern NSW beach.

Between October 2012 and November 2020, she convinced at least 72 investors to provide her and her 'sham' financial services business, Maliver, with just under $30.2million, Mr Assad said.

She returned $8.5million, but there was now a deficiency of assets to liabilities of between $15million and $23.7million.

'Existing clients extolled the virtues of her and would then refer other clients,' he said.

'Ms Caddick built up a sizeable and loyal client base, and befitting of a successful businesswoman were the trappings of wealth, real estate in Sydney's eastern suburbs, luxury motor vehicles, designer clothing and jewellery,' he said.

'Unfortunately Caddick's success and the financial services business were all a facade.'

He submitted her successful business was an elaborate front for her Ponzi scheme, involving a repeated pattern.

Conwoman Melissa Caddick (centre) kept meticulous records in the course of running her sham investment

Caddick misappropriated investors' monies for her own use and maintained her deception by sending the investors fictional portfolio evaluation, the court has heard

Liquidators say the mother-of-one 'meticulously and systematically' deceived those who entrusted millions of investment dollars to her over seven years, then used the money to fund her lavish lifestyle

Pictured: Ulladulla SES search for remains

She would convince potential investors of her 'prowess in creating wealth', interview them and advise them of an investment strategy.

She said she was setting up accounts with CommSec, a well-known online share trading facility.

'She also managed to convince about half of them to establish self-managed superannuation funds to help facilitate the investments.'

Her clients would transfer their money to her and later to her alter-ego Maliver, incorporated in June 2013, for investment purposes.

'Unfortunately she was misappropriating these monies for her own use' and maintained her deception by sending the investors fictional portfolio evaluations.'

ASIC has managed to obtain many hundreds of pages of these evaluations, but not one was a genuine one from CommSec, he said.

Caddick blew her victims' money on luxury items and overseas trips with the authorities confiscating high end fashion label handbags, shoes and clothes during the raid. Pictured with husband Anthony Koletti

Caddick used the money to buy real estate, motor vehicles, artworks and jewellery, he said.

She provided each of the 72 investors with fraudulent documents including forged CommSec material as part of her 'elaborate fraud'.

He referred to 'the meticulous nature in which Caddick kept records which is quite uncommon I say for activities of this type' as he took the judge through a particular case.

'This is certainly one of those examples where Caddick has been very thorough and very diligent in maintaining records.'

He deemed the scheme to be 'inherently fraudulent'.

Bruce Gleeson and Daniel Soire, of Jones Partners, were appointed as provisional liquidators of Maliver and receivers of Caddick's property in December.

The hearing continues before Justice Brigitte Markovic.
A 'shifty' Airbnb policy change has rinsed thousands of dollars from locked-down families after the company removed border closures from their refund policy.

Dozens of devastated Australians say they have been left out-of-pocket by the refusal to refund bookings forced to be cancelled because of Covid lockdowns and border closures - with some spending as much as $7,000 and being refunded just $149.

Anita Birges, from Bondi in Sydney's east, had been looking forward to spending the school holidays with her family in a stunning Airbnb home on the beach.

However, as Greater Sydney was plunged into a snap 14-day lockdown, Ms Birges explained to the property owner she and her family could no longer travel.

'I contacted the host directly and said there's restrictions. She said to me, "oh well, why should I take the loss?" Ms Birges told A Current Affair.

Mother-of-two Anita Birges, from Bondi in Sydney's east, (pictured) claims to have lost $3000 from a new loophole in Airbnb's refund policy

The professional organiser said she asked the host to provide her a credit for the trip that could be used at a later date.

Instead, the host offered the family a mid-week vacation after the school holidays.

The frustrated Bondi mum said she had been saving up the money to rent the property and didn't want to see it thrown down the drain.

The trip - which had been organised with another family - cost each household $1,500.

Border closures are no longer included in Airbnb's extenuating circumstances policy, meaning consequences of Covid-19 are no longer considered unforeseen or unexpected.

Prior to March 14 2020, customers who cancelled their booking were offered a refund or a credit for their stay, with one disappointed dad accusing the company of 'doing a shifty'.

Ms Birges had been looking forward to spending the school holidays with her family at a beach house, but was forced to put plans on hold. Pictured: Hyams Beach on the NSW South Coast

Mother-of-two Kathryn found herself in a similar situation when plans to stay in a home in the Hunter Valley region of New South Wales, were dashed by the virus

BORDER CLOSURES: STATE-BY-STATE NSW: Open to all states and territories Victoria: - Border shut to Greater Sydney, Wollongong, Central Coast, Blue Mountains and Shellharbour areas of NSW, which are deemed red zones - The border is also shut to Greater Darwin, another red zone - The rest of NSW is an orange zone, meaning permits are needed - Greater Brisbane in Queensland and the Perth metropolitan region, as well as Peel Region, in WA are also classed as orange zones, limiting travel Queensland: - Border shut to Greater Sydney, Wollongong, Central Coast, Blue Mountains and Shellharbour areas of NSW - The rest of NSW must apply for border declaration pass, even if they live in a border town - Some Melburnians also need to fill in a travel declaration Western Australia: - Border closed to all of NSW - People from ACT, NT, Queensland and Victoria must self-quarantine for 14 days or enter hotel quarantine South Australia: - Border closed to NSW, Queensland, WA, the NT and the ACT - Victorians must get a test on the day they arrive ACT: - Residents of Greater Sydney, Wollongong, Central Coast, Blue Mountains and Shellharbour areas of NSW must gain an exemption to enter, and must still abide by stay-at-home rules when in the ACT Tasmania: - The border is shut to travellers from Greater Sydney, Wollongong, Central Coast, Blue Mountains and Shellharbour areas of NSW - All other states and territories are still deemed 'low risk' as of Sunday night, so travellers need only to register their details with the state government - But due to their own state's travel restrictions, those under lockdown cannot go to Tasmania Northern Territory: - Border open to all, but people from areas with known exposure sites including NSW, Queensland, Victoria and the ACT must quarantine and get tested, rules for which vary state-by-state Advertisement

On March 11 last year, the World Health Organisation declared Covid-19 a global pandemic, prompting Airbnb to change its policy on refunds just three days later.

Mother-of-two Kathryn found herself in a similar situation when plans to stay in a home in the Hunter Valley region of New South Wales, were dashed by the virus.

She contacted the host of the barn-style home three days after making her booking with concerns the state was on the brink of a lockdown.

'She came back to me and said, 'well you haven't booked a refundable option, so basically there are no options for you,' Kathryn said.

'How can it be ok for you to take my money and not offer me a service?', the frustrated mother said, who is now $2,200 out-of-pocket.

Kathyrn said she had been taken aback by the host's response after booking with 'someone as reputable as Airbnb'.

Thousands of hard-working Australians have been left out of pocket by a 'shifty' change in Airbnb's refund policy that no longer accepts Covid-19 circumstances are 'unforeseen'

Kathyrn contacted the host of the home three days after making her booking but was told she hadn't booked a refundable option, losing her $2200. Pictured: The Hunter Valley in NSW

The frustrated customer said she had assumed the company would have a universal policy that covered unforeseen consequences caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Travel writer Ute Junker explained that Airbnb offers three tiers of cancellation policy that can be chosen by the owners of the property.

A generous host will give guests a full refund up to 24 hours beforehand, however others will only give 48 hours after the booking has been made to cancel.

The other cancellation policy gives guests five days until check-in to cancel and still receive a full refund.

'If we start expecting Airbnb to start doing some sort of insurance to give people some kind of compensation, that's going to increase the amount you pay per night', Ms Junker explained.

Derek Nolan, the Head of Public Policy at Airbnb, said in a statement that almost two-thirds of active listings offer a moderate or flexible cancellation policy.

However, this didn't help Victorian resident Craig who had planned to visit his step-son in Perth, booking a spacious five-bedroom home for his family.

Then restrictions hit, meaning his $2,000 vacation with the additional cost of airfares had to be canned.

Luckily for Craig, the host agreed to refund half of the money.

Derek Nolan, the Head of Public Policy at Airbnb, said in a statement that almost two-thirds of active listings offer a moderate or flexible cancellation policy

Sydney, Wollongong, the Blue Mountains, Shellharbour and the Central Coast are just three days into a 14-day lockdown, which includes strict stay-at-home orders

Sydney and its surrounding areas have endured day three of a snap 14-day lockdown as the state recorded 19 local cases overnight.

The outbreak of cases that sparked when a Sydney airport limousine driver tested positive on June 16 has now reached 149 locally-acquired cases.

Sydney, Wollongong, the Blue Mountains, Shellharbour and the Central Coast are just three days into a 14-day lockdown, which includes strict stay-at-home orders.

Residents and anyone who has worked in Sydney in the last two weeks are only allowed to leave home to shop for food or other essential goods and services, give medical care or for compassionate needs, to exercise outdoors with a maximum of ten people, or for essential work or education.

Masks must be worn at all indoor public venues, while hospitality venues and pubs are only permitted to stay open to serve takeaway.

Households will not be allowed to have any visitors, although there are exceptions for partners that don't live with each other who can visit each other's homes.

Queensland will join New South Wales, the Northern Territory and Western Australia in lockdown after recording two cases on Tuesday. Pictured: People in Southbank in Brisbane

Masks must be worn at all indoor public venues, while hospitality venues and pubs are only permitted to stay open to serve takeaway in Sydney and its surrounding areas

Queensland will join New South Wales, the Northern Territory and Western Australia in lockdown after recording a further two cases on Tuesday, including a 19-year-old hospital receptionist who spent 10 days infectious in the community.

The state entered a snap lockdown on Tuesday after recording a further two community cases, including an unvaccinated hospital receptionist who travelled from Brisbane to Townsville and Magnetic Island while infectious and symptomatic.

The lockdown will last for at least three days from 6pm Tuesday, but restrictions will remain in place for the next two weeks.

Meanwhile Darwin, Litchfield and Palmerston in the Northern Territory will remain in lockdown until Friday.
Alexandria Ocasio-Ortez has come under fire for saying there was 'hysteria' across the United States over the surging violent crime rates, including a 64 percent spike in shootings in her native New York.

The New York congresswoman made the comment on Sunday while discussing concerns of the rising crime wave across the country.

'We are seeing these headlines about percentage increases,' Ocasio-Cortez said during the Zoom meeting with New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman.

'Now, I want to say that any amount of harm is unacceptable and too much, but I also want to make sure that this hysteria, you know, that this doesn't drive a hysteria and that we look at these numbers in context so that we can make responsible decisions about what to allocate in that context.'

Alexandria Ocasio-Ortez made the 'hysteria' comment on Sunday while discussing concerns of the rising crime wave across the country

Shootings have increased more than 60 percent in New York City compared to last year, according to data put out by the National Fraternal Order of Police.

The number of shootings has spiked 126 percent in Portland in the last year and 51 percent in Los Angeles.

Homicides in New York City have surged 12 percent compared to the same time last year, according to NYPD data.

Other cities have also seen homicide rates surge, including Atlanta (up 41%), Philadelphia (up 36%), Chicago (up 4%) and Portland (up 533%), according to their police department figures.

Ocasio-Ortez faced immediate backlash over her 'hysteria' comments given the rising crime statistics.

The View co-host Meghan McCain said on Monday it was okay for Americans to be concerned about rising murder rates.

'Facts are stubborn things. There is a huge homicide crisis in the country. And whether or not AOC likes it, it's OK for people to be concerned about a homicide spike,' McCain said.

'I think that's going to be very effective going into the midterms.'

Shootings have increased more than 60 percent in New York City compared to last year, according to data compiled by the National Fraternal Order of Police

Homicides in New York City have surged 12 percent compared to the same time last year, according to NYPD data

Statistics show shooting crimes have been up this year city-wide compared to last year

Journalist Glenn Greenwald criticized AOC for voting last month to increase Capitol Police funding while suggesting that concerns over rising crime was hysterical.

'AOC is mocking ordinary people as 'hysterical' who are afraid of violent crime in their neighborhood: people who, unlike her, don't have reams of private security,' he tweeted.

'Yet she just acted to ensure $2 billion more in spending on the police that protects her.'

Others pointed to how AOC had regularly spoken about the trauma she faced during the Capitol riots back in January.

Some slammed her comments as 'shameful'.

'The biggest spike in violent crime since the United States started keeping records is not 'hysteria,' it's real and so are its victims. This is shameful,' one said.

'Until a vagrant breaks into her Tesla or a mob ransacks her Whole Foods, AOC will advocate for policies that mean thousands of *other* people will be victimized by emboldened criminals,' another tweeted.

AOC's comments came as it was revealed that a young Marine who was shot in the back in Times Square by a stray bullet on Sunday night is the newlywed son-in-law of a former Pentagon official.

Surveillance footage released by the NYPD shows the moment a CD peddler opened fire outside a Marriott hotel, striking 21-year-old Samuel Poulin in the back.

Poulin was rushed to hospital where he is recovering from his injuries.

The Marine, who was visiting the city from Northville in upstate New York to attend a baptism, was walking with his family at the time when he was struck.

Police said the shooting broke out when a group of five or six CD vendors started arguing and one pulled out a gun.

An investigation is still underway and the gunman remains on the run.

The shooting is the second in Times Square in little over a month and comes just as the city is welcoming tourists back to one of its most famous landmarks.

Three bystanders were struck by gunfire in May, including a four-year-old child. The alleged gunman responsible for the May shooting was apprehended days later in Florida after fleeing the city.

Samuel Poulin, 21, (above with his wife Jacqueline Jensen) was shot in the back by a stray bullet in New York's Times Square on Sunday night

Surveillance footage released by the NYPD shows the moment a CD peddler opened fire outside a Marriott hotel, striking 21-year-old Samuel Poulin in the back

Police said the shooting broke out when a group of five or six CD vendors started arguing and one pulled out a gun. An investigation is still underway and the gunman remains on the run

AOC's comments came as it was revealed that a young Marine who was shot in the back in Times Square by a stray bullet on Sunday night is the newlywed son-in-law of a former Pentagon official

Mayor Bill de Blasio launched a new plan on Monday to increase police patrols at the iconic tourist attraction in the wake of the shootings.

'Now, we've seen patterns in Times Square that we are going to address very, very aggressively,' he said in a news conference, introducing his new Times Square Safety Plan.

The plan would include the deployment of 50 more officers to the area 'to make sure that anyone who goes to Times Square knows they're safe.'

The plan, which went into effect immediately after Sunday's shooting, includes the deployment of 'dozens' more police officers, some of whom will be plainclothes, to engage with street vendors.

They would ensure the vendors are not engaging in 'aggressive panhandling,' NYPD Chief Rodney Harrison said, and would make sure they are not threatening pedestrians.

It would be in addition to the officers the NYPD previously deployed to the area last month, De Blasio said.

'We are going to flood the area with additional police officers,' De Blasio said, adding later: 'There's no question in my mind this is going to work.'
President Joe Biden is getting local with the bipartisan infrastructure deal as he jets off to Wisconsin Tuesday morning after being forced to walk back on linking the bill to reconciliation with his massive 'human' infrastructure plan.

Republicans and progressive Democrats took up issue with the plan  but for very different reasons  after the deal was reached Thursday by Biden and a group of 10 bipartisan lawmakers.

Far left lawmakers claim that the $1.2 trillion deal doesn't go far enough and isn't inclusive of minority communities while Republicans were enraged with the president when he tied infrastructure to his American Families Plan.

On Saturday, Biden walked back on the comments, claiming they were never meant as a veto threat to the deal he had just reached a few days prior.

Biden will tour La Crosse Municipal Transit Utility in Wisconsin on Tuesday and later deliver remarks promoting the bipartisan infrastructure framework.

He is likely to try and reaffirm his commitment to bipartisanship to Republicans and centrist Democrats, while reassuring the far-left faction of his party that the package includes liberal initiatives.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez participated in a protest Monday outside the White House demanding that Biden include climate change initiatives in the infrastructure package.

The New York congresswoman was joined by progressive Representatives Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush at the protest organized by left-wing Sunrise Movement.

President Joe Biden will travel to Wisconsin on Tuesday to promote the bipartisan infrastructure bill after chaos erupted when he linked its passage to the American Families Plan and progressives said the deal didn't go far enough

Biden speaks to press as he departs the White House on Tuesday morning for Wisconsin

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined a protest outside the White House on Monday where she demanded that Biden include more climate initiatives in the package

'We're going to get that into this infrastructure bill,' the progressive New York lawmakers told the crowd of the Civilian Climate Corps

AOC embraces fellow progressive Representative Cori Bush at the 'No Climate, No Deal' demonstration organized by the left-wing Sunrise Movement

The demonstration was pushing for Biden to prioritize fighting climate change in the infrastructure bill and to include a provision creating AOC's proposed Civilian Climate Corps.

'They want you to think, 'Oh, this is a new idea, this is too ambitious, this is too crazy.' How about this? The last time we introduced the Civilian Climate Corps in this country, we hired and mobilized a quarter-million people in three months,' Ocasio-Cortez told the crowd.

The New Deal-type program, similar to the Civilian Conservation Corps, would create a federal focus on job creation in renewable energy sectors and other green industries.

'We're going to get that into this infrastructure bill,' said the congresswoman who represents parts of the Bronx and Queens.

On Thursday, Biden and a group of five Republican and five Democratic senators announced from the White House driveway that they had finally reached a deal on an infrastructure bill that they felt could pass Congress with bipartisan support.

During a press conference on the deal later on Thursday, however, the president said: 'If this is the only thing that comes to me, I'm not signing it.'

Biden announced with a group of 10 bipartisan lawmakers on Thursday they reached a deal on infrastructure. But shortly after, Republicans were infuriated when Biden said: 'If this is the only thing that comes to me, I'm not signing it'

He walked back on that comment on Saturday, saying he didn't mean to link the two bills

This led to immediate fury from Republicans, who claimed there was never any 'side deal' that made the infrastructure deal reliant on Congress also passing Biden's $2.5 trillion American Families Plan, which includes a slew of social programs and tax increases.

On Saturday, Biden backtracked on that comment.

'At a press conference after announcing the bipartisan agreement, I indicated that I would refuse to sign the infrastructure bill if it was sent to me without my Families Plan and other priorities, including clean energy,' Biden wrote in his statement released Saturday.

'That statement understandably upset some Republicans, who do not see the two plans as linked; they are hoping to defeat my Families Planand do not want their support for the infrastructure plan to be seen as aiding passage of the Families Plan.'

'My comments also created the impression that I was issuing a veto threat on the very plan I had just agreed to, which was certainly not my intent,' he added.

Senator Rob Portman, a Republican who worked to reach the deal and appeared alongside Biden on Thursday, said: 'I was very glad to see the president clarify his remarks because it was inconsistent with everything that we had been told all along the way.'

'We were all blindsided by the comments the previous day, which were that somehow these two bills were connected  the reconciliation bill, which is a trillion dollars of social spending that's going to be entirely partisan, the largest tax increase in American history, on the one hand. And the other hand the infrastructure bill, which is bipartisan, has no taxes, focuses on core infrastructure and has been bipartisan from the start.,' the Ohio senator told ABC's This Week on Sunday.

Biden salutes as he board Air Force One for Wisconsin to promote the infrastructure package

Despite Biden's walk back, Republicans are still concerned House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer could make the two bills' passage reliant on one another.

'The President has appropriately delinked a potential bipartisan infrastructure bill from the massive, unrelated tax-and-spend plans that Democrats want to pursue on a partisan basis,' Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell said in a statement Monday.

The Kentucky senator continued: 'Now I am calling on President Biden to engage Leader Schumer and Speaker Pelosi and make sure they follow his lead.'

'Unless Leader Schumer and Speaker Pelosi walk-back their threats that they will refuse to send the president a bipartisan infrastructure bill unless they also separately pass trillions of dollars for unrelated tax hikes, wasteful spending, and Green New Deal socialism, then President Biden's walk-back of his veto threat would be a hollow gesture,' McConnell continued.

He also said Biden's reversal would be a 'hollow gesture' if Pelosi and Schumer didn't cooperate.

'The president cannot let congressional Democrats hold a bipartisan bill hostage over a separate and partisan process,' McConnell said.

Mitch McConnell praised Biden for walking back. He said, however, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer need to agree or it's just a 'hallow gesture'

Biden's clarification was not popular with liberal Democrats like AOC and Senator Bernie Sanders.

'Let me be clear: There will not be a bipartisan infrastructure deal without a reconciliation bill that substantially improves the lives of working families and combats the existential threat of climate change . No reconciliation bill, no deal. We need transformative change NOW,' Sanders tweeted.

Fellow progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren posted to Twitter: 'Understand this: We're not leaving child care behind. We're not leaving green energy behind. And we're not going to make America's middle-class families pick up the ticket for this package. It's time for billionaires and big corporations to step up.'

Ocasio-Cortez says Biden shouldn't be 'limited by Republicans' while Democrats have control of the executive and legislative branches.

She has also argued adamantly for Democrats getting rid of the filibuster so they can pass more without any support from the other side of the aisle.

Centrist Democrats, however, like Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are against nixing the filibuster.

Manchin has said he won't support any massive legislative packages in the Senate unless it has some GOP cooperation.
Jacob Rees-Mogg today suggested that Matt Hancock should have declared his relationship with his aide Gina Coladangelo to the Cabinet Office.

The Commons Leader highlighted parliamentary rules on appointing family members to roles and said 'there are likely to be rules around disclosure of personal relationships in other areas too'.

Speaking broadly, Mr Rees-Mogg said that 'if a man were to appoint his wife to be a non-executive director you would hope that the Cabinet Office knew that the lady was married to the man'.

Ms Coladangelo was brought into the Department of Health first as an unpaid adviser before she was then appointed to a non-executive director role in September which came with a 15,000-a-year salary.

Her appointment as a non-executive director has prompted intense scrutiny with Lord Kerslake, the former head of the civil service, arguing this morning that the appointment rules must be changed and made more transparent.

Jacob Rees-Mogg today suggested that Matt Hancock should have declared his relationship with his aide Gina Coladangelo to the Cabinet Office

Ms Coladangelo, pictured with Mr Hancock in May this year, was brought into the Department of Health first as an unpaid adviser before she was then appointed to a non-executive director role in September which came with a 15,000-a-year salary

Mr Hancock announced he was stepping down as health secretary on Saturday evening, following the leaking of video footage showing him breaking social distancing rules by kissing Ms Coladangelo in his ministerial office.

Mr Rees-Mogg was asked whether her appointment as a non-executive director would have been 'proper' if the relationship with Mr Hancock had begun before she was appointed.

The Commons Leader told the MoggCast podcast published by Conservative Home: 'I don't know about individual appointments and I don't know about individual relationships and nor would it be right that I should, so it may be easier to talk in generic terms.

'But in generic terms, a member of Parliament who has an employee with whom he or she then develops a relationship is expected to declare that to IPSA because there are limitations on family members and restrictions on family members you may employ.

'So in a parliamentary context, IPSA would have had to be informed and there are rules around that and I think there are likely to be rules around disclosure of personal relationships in other areas too.'

Mr Rees-Mogg was then asked if the relationship should have been declared if it was in existence prior to the appointment.

He said: 'I am with Queen Elizabeth I, not liking to make windows into men's souls, therefore for me to start speculating about whether relationships between a couple of individuals existed or not is frankly none of my business.'

But asked to comment in general terms, he said: 'If we are asking general questions, if a man were to appoint his wife to be a non-executive director you would hope that the Cabinet Office knew that the lady was married to the man.'

His comments came as Lord Kerslake said that the way non-executive directors are appointed in Whitehall must change in the wake of the resignation of Mr Hancock.

He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: 'The problem really with the current model is about really the appointment process, how it is overseen and indeed clarity about what that role is supposed to be and I'm afraid changes are going to be needed in light of this sorry saga.'

Lord Kerslake said that ministers should be able to hire non-executive directors but the process needed to be transparent and regulated.

Lord Kerslake, the former head of the civil service, argued this morning that the non-executive director appointment rules must be changed and made more transparent

He added: 'I think the Secretary of State should appoint, as they do for permanent secretaries because actually this is their board, they chair it, and they need to have people on there that they think will help them do their role.

'But the process by which that happens needs to be properly open, fair and transparent, not just the minister waking up one morning and saying "I would like to have X on my board".'

Downing Street has suggested that Mr Hancock personally hired Ms Coladangelo as a non-executive director at the health department.

The Prime Minister's Official Spokesman said yesterday: 'As far as I'm aware I believe ministers are entitled to make direct appointments and I believe that was the case in this instance. Her appointment followed correct procedure.'
A former stockbroker was today convicted of kicking a passenger 'like a penalty' and punching another man in a violent cruise ship brawl after they asked him and his YouTuber girlfriend to stop swearing.

Paul Evans assaulted statistician Justin Gardner, who was aboard the P&O vessel with his wife and two daughters, before kicking project manager Andrew Irving when he tried to intervene.

A court heard other passengers, who had been enjoying a 'spectacular' cruise through the Norwegian fjords, looked on in horror as 'intoxicated' Evans punched and kicked the men.

The fight on board the Royal Britannia ship had been sparked when the Gardners asked Evans, 45, and partner Tabatha Young, a social media star, to tone down their language as they dined in the Horizon buffet.

Mr Gardner and his nurse wife Sarah had taken daughters Alice, 21, and Amelia, 16, to a family disco when they retired to the buffet but became upset by the swearing from a neighbouring table.

Mrs Gardner told the jury she tried to film Evans on a phone for 'evidence' as tempers flared and he grappled with Alice.

The court heard he then turned his 'rage' on Mrs Gardner, 48, by 'rugby tackling' her to the ground, snatching the mobile phone and hurling it out to sea, although he said he had simply taken the phone as he feared she would use it as a weapon.

Mr Irving, who was on board with his wife and granddaughter, 10, said he couldn't stand by so went to help, but was then knocked to the ground and kicked by Evans 'like he was taking a penalty'.

Evans, who now works as a financial advisor, denied one count of robbery and three counts of assault causing actual bodily harm following the extraordinary scenes on July 26, 2019, claiming he had simply been trying to protect his girlfriend.

Today, Evans, of Clayhall, Essex, was cleared of attacking Alice and robbing Mrs Gardner of the phone, but convicted of causing ABH to Mr Gardner and Mr Irving, after the jury deliberated for more than six hours.

Young, who interviews boxers on YouTube, pleaded guilty to causing actual bodily harm against Mrs Gardner last year.

Paul Evans assaulted statistician Justin Gardner, who was aboard the P&O vessel with his wife and two daughters, before kicking project manager Andrew Irving when he tried to intervene

The fight on board P&O's Royal Britannia ship had been sparked when the Gardners asked Evans, 45, and partner Tabatha Young (pictured), a social media star, to tone down their language as they dined in the Horizon buffet

A court heard other passengers, who had been enjoying a 'spectacular' cruise through the Norwegian fjords, looked on in horror as 'intoxicated' Evans punched and kicked the men

Royal Britannia had just left Bergen, Norway, a few hours earlier and was five days into a seven night tour of Norway's famous fjords when the brawl erupted.

A suite on the Britannia for this cruise currently costs from 1,429 per person.

Its Norwegian Fjords Cruise Holidays are described by P&O as: 'One of the most spectacular regions of the world. Cruising through the deep-blue waters of Norway's UNESCO-protected fjords is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.'

During a seven day long trial, Southampton Crown Court heard the Gardners had headed to the buffet as their youngest daughter wanted something to eat before going to bed at 1am.

Prosecutor Mark Ashley told the court: 'Mr Evans was intoxicated and when he was near their table, he was using language which a number of people found offensive.'

Mrs Gardner, a mother of three whose son had already gone to bed, wept as she told the court she became upset by his language which she believed was directed at Amelia.

She said: 'I felt very anxious. We carried on ignoring him and then my eldest daughter said 'please can you stop talking like that'.

'Then [Tabatha Young] flew up from another table and started pushing her. I tried to separate Tabatha and Alice.

'Then Mr Evans flew up from his seat and punched my husband who had been standing at the table with my other daughter who was very upset.'

The court heard Mr Gardner was struck on the side of the head before falling to the floor. His nose was bleeding, his glasses were smashed and he was rendered 'unconscious', his wife told the court.

Mrs Gardner claimed Evans then turned on Alice, adding: 'Then I was trying to pull him off her. Then I felt calm and got my husband's mobile phone from his suit pocket and started to film him so I could get evidence.

'I was shouting for the kitchen staff but they were just all lined up watching us. It was quite frightening. I did not understand why they were not helping us.'

The court heard Evans then turned his 'rage' on Mrs Gardner, 48, by 'rugby tackling' her to the ground, snatching the mobile phone and hurling it out to sea, although he said he had simply taken the phone as he feared she would use it as a weapon

Evans and Young were eventually restrained by security and taken into custody by police once the ship docked at Southampton

Today, Evans, of Clayhall, Essex, was cleared of attacking Alice and robbing Mrs Gardner of the phone, but convicted of causing ABH to Mr Gardner and Mr Irving, after the jury deliberated for more than six hours

Young, who interviews boxers on YouTube, pleaded guilty to causing actual bodily harm against Mrs Gardner last year

After spotting he was being filmed, Mrs Gardner claimed Evans then turned on her and was captured on CCTV throwing the phone overboard.

She said: 'He wrestled me for the phone. He was punching and kicking me. I was trying to hold on to the phone because my husband uses it for work. He (Evans) was in such a rage.

'He pulled the phone off me and was twisting my arm. I knew what he was going to do with the phone and did not chase after because I was worried he would throw me overboard.'

However, Evans denied attacking either Mrs Gardner or her daughter Alice, saying he would 'never hurt a woman' and had simply knocked the phone from Mrs Gardner's hand as he feared she would hit someone with it.

He told the court he only became involved in the incident in order to defend Young, who he believed was being attacked by the Gardners.

Fellow passenger Stuart Bishop, 46, who was on board with his wife Donna, told the court: 'My regret is I did not do more at the time and react quicker.

'No human being should be kicked in that way. I thought he was going to kill someone to be honest with you.'

Evans and Young were eventually restrained by security and taken into custody by police once the ship docked at Southampton.

The pair will be sentenced next month.
Police are seeking the public's help to find two teenage girls who have been missing for more than 24 hours.

Montanah and Lara, both 13, were last seen in Cranbourne, in Melbourne's south east, about 9.30pm on Monday evening.

Anyone who has information about their whereabouts is urged to contact Cranbourne Police on (03) 5991 0600.
A neonatal doctor from Spokane, Washington is being held on federal charges as he faces trial for allegations that he used the dark web to hire a hitman to kidnap and torture his estranged wife until she would agree to take him back.

Ronald Ilg, 55, was arrested in April, after the FBI received transcripts of messages on a dark web site from a user known as Scar215, requesting that Ilg's estranged wife be captured, held in a 'secure location' for seven days and drugged with heroin, according to the Daily Beast.

He asked for the hitmen to give her needles and other drug-injection paraphernalia, which they would also spread throughout her house, to use as incriminating 'evidence' to persuade her to return to him: Otherwise, he'd report her for drug use and she'd look like a drug addict and lose her son, according to the twisted plan.

He allegedly agreed to pay the hitman in Bitcoin.

The FBI traced the Bitcoin funds back to Ilg through his Coinbase account, and he is now facing up to 20 years behind bars, KHQ reports.

It's a bizarre and disturbing turn of events for a man who'd been seen as a respected doctor and community volunteer: Ilg served as a neonatologist, caring for pre-term infants for 17 years, as he worked his way up to become the chief medical director of a multistate neonatology management group, Mednax, according to his LinkedIn.

He married and divorced a local woman, the Daily Beast reports, then remarried an esthetician 15 years younger than him. This was the woman on whom he'd later put out a hit. Their son was born in 2018.

Ronald Ilg, a neonatal doctor, is being held in federal custody as he faces trial for allegedly trying to hire a hitman to kidnap and torture his estranged wife in an attempt to get her back

The second wife, who hasn't been named, claimed he put tracking devices on her car and cellphone, and threatened to take away her belongings if she refused his sexual demands, according to the Daily Beast.

About two years ago, he allegedly also started having a sado-masochistic affair with another woman, who would later claim he trapped her in an underground bunker and forced her to sign a sex slave contract in blood.

By the spring of 2019, the Daily Beast reports, the neonatology group where he worked received two complaints about his behavior - one alleging harassment, and another about his scheduling practices.

Soon, rumors started to spread that he was bringing a weapon into the NICU, and his bosses eventually asked him to step down from his role. When he refused, they allegedly eliminated his position entirely.

His second wife filed for divorce in June 2020, and in December, he was fired from his job at the medical group.

Someone with the username 'Scar215' posted a request to kidnap a woman on the dark web and torture her for seven days, saying 'Any and all persuasion should be used'

As he was reeling from the double-whammy, Ilg allegedly sent his estranged wife hundreds of text messages, begging her to stay and offering to pay her if she dropped the divorce proceedings.

Her attorney eventually emailed his lawyer asking for him to limit their conversations to just discussions about their son, but he refused, and she filed for a restraining order on December 21.

In response, Ilg said he was in a 'raw emotional state,' claimed he had learned his lesson and would cease contact with her.

But in the weeks that followed, she claimed in court documents, he parked outside her workplace, sent her dozens of text messages and pretended to drop a typewritten letter in front of her in hopes she would pick it up.

It read, in part: 'I do love you, more than words can describe, more than actions can show. Every fiber of my body, every ounce of my life energy calls out for you.'

Meanwhile, in February, a user known as Scar215 first requested through a 'dark web' site that a hitman visit a co-worker's home and give her a 'significant beating.'

The hitman, he said, should 'injure both hands significantly or break the hands.'

According to investigators, Ilg's target was a woman in his workplace he thought was spreading the rumors about him that led to him getting fired.

He put nearly $2,000 in Bitcoin in escrow to be released when the job was done, but his request wasn't ever completed.

One month later, the Daily Beast reports, Scar215 posted another assignment on the site: This time, he wanted someone to kidnap and torture his estranged wife in hopes of convincing her to return to him.

Ilg was a neonatologist for 17 years and worked his way up to become the chief medical director of Mednax (pictured), a multistate neonatology management group in Spokane, Washington

The plan, court documents show, was to kidnap his estranged wife while her children were away, take her to a 'secure location' and inject her with heroin twice daily for a week, after which she would be taught to administer the injections herself and video taped doing so as 'bribery later.'

'The target destroyed two families, and walked away as if she did nothing,' the request on the dark web said, adding: 'Any and all persuasion should be used.'

The victim would only be released, according to court documents, if she returned to her husband, dropped all court proceedings against him and agreed to be physically intimate with him at least three times in the weeks that followed.

She could never tell anyone what happened under the plan and 'she should be told her families health, including her father and her kids, depend on her completing these rules.

'It would be unfortunate if her older boy became addicted to heroin,' the post read, 'or her dad be severely beaten, or her dog be slaughtered.'

By early April, the Daily Beast reports, Scar215 reached out to a second dark-website, hoping to have his request completed by the second weekend of the month.

He said in that post he put $5,000 in Bitcoin for a hitman in escrow, and another $10,000 would be coming the next day. He also allegedly pledged to give the hitman an extra $40,000 if his goals were completed by the second weekend of the month.

Ilg was in Mexico with a new girlfriend on the day the day he'd scheduled the hit to occur, according to the FBI.

After speaking with his estranged wife, his mistress allegedly texted Ilg saying she is afraid of him

His new girlfriend had actually been in contact with his estranged wife, mainly asking her to drop a protective order against Ilg. But then she became increasingly concerned by what the ex was saying about her new boyfriend, the Daily Beast reports.

'You hired someone from the dark web to hurt [your estranged wife],' she later wrote to him, according to text messages that prosecutors obtained. 'Leave me alone forever. I'm scared of you.'

Ilg denied hiring anybody, court documents show, calling the dark web a 'scam.'

The new girlfriend would later tell the FBI that Ilg required her to call him 'sir' and submit to various punishments he devised, like sitting alone for hours in an underground bunker outside his home.

She also said they got into a fight while they were in Mexico, in which she asked him to stop hurting her as she struggled to breathe, and said he forced her to sign a contract requiring her to 'unconditionally accept' what he would like her to do, according to the Daily Beast.

The document was presented in court in April, the Daily Beast reports, and contained both of their fingerprints in blood.

When they returned from Mexico on April 11, the couple was confronted by BBC journalists who had unearthed the messages and identified the targets as one of Ilg's former co-workers and his estranged wife.

The BBC handed the documents over to the FBI, which tracked the Bitcoin account back to Ilg, and proceeded to raid his Spokane, Washington home, where they found a fingerprint-operated safe containing a sticky note with the name 'Scar215' on it and an apparent password.

They also reportedly found two concrete holes in the ground, that they believed were used to attach a ladder to an underground bunker.

His estranged wife also allegedly turned text message Ilg sent his son's nanny over to the FBI during the investigation.

In the messages, he described a sexual fantasy that involved kidnapping his wife, describing it as a way to 'get the adrenaline flowing,' and asking her to help him open the car doors during the abduction.

A text message Ilg allegedly sent his son's nanny described a sexual fantasy that involved kidnapping his wife, describing it as a way to 'get the adrenaline flowing,' and asking her to help him open the car doors during the abduction

Ilg reportedly confessed to trying to use the dark-web to hire a hitman under the name 'Scar2something,' but insisted he was actually trying to hire someone to kill him to ensure that his new girlfriend would get all of his belongings instead of his estranged wife, according to KHQ.

But when prosecutors examined his will, they found he hadn't updated it to make his new girlfriend his beneficiary, KHQ reported.

He tried to commit suicide on April 12, when authorities found him unconscious surrounded by loose pills, KHQ reports, and he was taken into custody four days later.

He was charged with attempted kidnapping, which he pleaded not guilty to, as his attorneys argued there was no concrete evidence he was Scar215, suggesting to the Daily Beast his account had been hacked and all of his relationships were consensual.

His estranged wife, meanwhile, received the order of protection she applied for in April, after she found out he allegedly tried to kidnap her, and as of May 10, Ilg was barred from coming near or having contact with her or their son.

A federal judge ordered him to remain in jail until his trial, which is scheduled for October, according to the Spokesman-Review.
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Hunters in the Faroe Islands have killed 175 pilot whales, turning the sea red with blood after boats drove the animals towards the shore where men waited in the shallows with hooks, knives and spears.

A gunman even fired a shotgun at a drone which was sent by Sea Shepherd marine conservationists to document the carnage, known as the Grindadrap or Grind in Faroese.

Faroese are divided on the Grind but many urge foreign media and NGOs to respect their traditional island culture where fishing retains a central place and all the whale meat is kept for food.

Sea Shepherd says the practice, which has killed more than 6,500 whales and dolphins over the last decade, is unsustainable and 'barbaric.'

In the early hours of Sunday, a pod was spotted off the coast near the town of Vestmanna, with it staying light throughout the night in the Danish archipelago.

Hunters grabbed their killing tools, gaff-hooks, lances and knives, as they hurriedly jumped into around 20 boats which sped off to corral the whale pod towards the beach at Leynar. They killed 52 pilot whales there.

But that spree would be dwarfed hours later, when another pod was spotted off the south coast and crews sailed out to drive them towards the town of Hvannasund where 123 whales were slaughtered by huntsman waiting for them on the beach.

Hunters on the shore at Hvannasund in the Faroe Islands where 123 pilot whales were slaughtered on Sunday at around noon

Towns people gather on the shore in Hvannasund to watch as hunters capture and kill the pilot whales on Sunday. Robert Read, chief operating officer at Sea Shepherd, said: 'The grindadrap is a barbaric relic of a bygone age. A needless hunt of hundreds of pilot whales and dolphins which should have ended a century ago which is not needed to feed anyone on the islands'

Dead whales are surrounded by sea water dyed red with blood after the killing of the whales at Leynar in the early hours of Sunday

A dead whale is hauled up the pier at Leynar by a digger after the hunt in the early hours of Sunday. It stays light in the Faroe Islands throughout the night during the summer

Sea Shepherd sent a drone to film the hunt, revealing how the sea turns a deep red from all the whale blood shed along the shore. The drone was shot at by a gunman who they say was the foreman of the hunt at Hvannasund

The Grindadraps or Grinds, as they are known in Faroese, took place on Sunday in the Danish archipelego. A pod of 52 pilot whales were spotted in the north in the early hours and driven towards a killing bay. Then hours later a much larger group of 123 whales was seen in the south a driven into town of Hvannasund

Grim decade of Grind leaves 6,532 whales and dolphins dead 2011 - 9 hunts - 726 pilot whales killed 2012 - 12 hunts - 713 Pilot whales & 2 bottlenose whales killed 2013 - 11 hunts - 1104 Pilot whales & 430 Atlantic White Sided Dolphins killed 2014 - 2 hunts - 48 Pilot whales & 5 bottlenose whales killed 2015 - 6 hunts - 501 Pilot whales & 2 bottlenose whales killed 2016 - 5 hunts - 295 Pilot whales killed 2017 - 25 hunts - 1203 pilot whales & 488 Atlantic white sided dolphins killed 2018  15 hunts - 524 pilot whales, 265 Atlantic white sided dolphins & 4 northern bottlenose whales killed 2019 - 14 hunts - 682 pilot whales and 8 Atlantic white sided dolphins killed 2020 - 6 hunts - 539 pilot whales, 35 Atlantic white sided dolphins and 11 bottlenose whales killed 2021 - 4 hunts - 197 pilot whales killed (to date) Advertisement

Drone footage shot by Sea Shepherd shows a boat riding into a group of lagging pilot whales in an apparent effort to shove them up to the shore. The drone descends to get close to the vessel, showing exhausted whales thrashing around in the water as the boat's engine blares next to them, but it is suddenly knocked off course.

As the flying camera jerks backwards violently a man with a shotgun is seen pointing his barrel at the drone. Sea Shepherd said this was the foreman of the hunt.

Photos later revealed how the pellets had torn holes into the drone but fortunately it was able to get back to conservationists who recovered their footage from it.

Sea Shepherd said: 'The killing at Hvannasund was poorly organised and more brutal (than at Leynar), as often we have filmed before at this location.

'A small drone operated by one of our crew above the bay was filming a Faroese Nordsj 640 WA boat which was deliberately ramming itself into, and right over a group of whales who were resisting being driven into the waiting hooks and knives of the killers.

'Spotting the drone in the sky over the water clearly raised the anger of one of the Faroese grindamaur (or grind foreman) who aimed a shotgun at the drone and fired at least once while standing in the middle of the crowd.

'The drone was hit and damaged in several places on it's fuselage, on one of the rotor blades, and one lead pellet passed straight through the centre of the drone. Despite this, and with one piece of lead shot embedded in the drone - the pilot skilfully managed to fly it back over the bay to retrieve the footage.'

Sea Shepherd said they had reported the incident to the police who are probing the shooting.

The animal rights activists have been operating in the Faroes since the early 1980s, taking direct action against the Grind with their own boats.

However, in 2015, changes to legislation prevented any Sea Shepherd boats from interrupting the hunt and so it launched a land-based crew to tackle the Grind by documenting it with photographers stationed on the shore and drones in the air.

Robert Read, chief operating officer at Sea Shepherd, said: 'The grindadrap is a barbaric relic of a bygone age. A needless hunt of hundreds of pilot whales and dolphins which should have ended a century ago which is not needed to feed anyone on the islands.'

Dead whales are dragged out of the water at Leynar. Faroese are divided on the Grind but many urge foreign media and NGOs to respect their traditional island culture where fishing retains a central place and all the whale meat is kept for food.

The sun shines on Hvannasund as whale corpses are washed up on the bearch after having their necks sliced open by huntsmen

The sea washes with red as huntsmen hook whales and cut them open at Leynar in the early hours of Sunday

In the early hours of Sunday, a total of 51 pilot whales lost their lives on the killing beach at Leynar in a Faroese Grindadrap hunt

After a pod is located, the Faroese drive the animals often for many hours with recreational boats, fishing boats and sometimes even jet-skis together creating a 'wall of sound' from their boat engines to force the pod towards the nearest designated killing bay.

Men waiting in shallow waters rush into the sea, dragging the whales alive with ropes attached to gaff-hooks which they ram through the whale's blowhole.

Killers closer to shore then attempt to sever the whale's spinal cord with a lance and then us a knife to cut down through the animal's neck.

It can take a long time before the last of the whales and dolphins are killed, left thrashing around in blood-filled waters while boats block any escape.

The Faroe Veterinary Service calculated the average duration of killing during grindadrap hunts at 12.7 minutes, though Sea Shepherd crew often record killing taking well over 20 minutes.
Babies and young children are among more than 60 migrants to make the Channel crossing today.

Around seven babies and three children made the dangerous trip and landed in Dover, Kent.

They were wrapped up in warm clothing as they were helped on to British soil by Border Force officials.

It comes as the total number of migrants to have made the journey in June rose to nearly 2,000.

Meanwhile Priti Patel said she plans to overhaul Border Force with a new supremo in charge of stopping Channel crossings.

Border Force were tasked with a busy weekend in the Dover Strait as 192 migrants were detained in 11 boats on Saturday. Pictured: Today

They were wrapped up in warm clothing as they were helped on to British soil by Border Force officials

Around seven babies and three children made the dangerous trip and landed in Dover, Kent

Border Force were tasked with a busy weekend in the Dover Strait as 192 migrants were detained in 11 boats on Saturday.

This was followed by a further 13 arriving in three boats on Sunday.

It means 1,812 migrants have made the treacherous 21-mile trip across the busiest shipping routes in the world on board 84 boats in June.

This surpasses the previous monthly record for 2021 set in May when 1,619 arrived in 80 boats.

A total of 5,539 migrants have made the treacherous trip so far this year - which is more than double the 2,165 who had arrived by this point in 2020.

And crossings show no sign of slowing down despite downpours of rain and poor visibility in the Channel as more migrants attempt the dangerous journey yesterday.

The first boat was intercepted shortly after 9am. Migrants on board were helped to safety by a Border Force cutter before being brought into Dover Marina, Kent on smaller vessels.

It comes as the total number of migrants to have made the journey in June rose to nearly 2,000

The first of three groups included a young child, wearing a green hooded coat and carrying a cuddly toy, was escorted up the gangway for processing by Immigration Enforcement.

They were followed by two boat-loads of men wearing orange lifejackets and huddling blankets for warmth.

At least 25 migrants are believed to have arrived by small boat yesterday but the Home Office is yet to confirm exact figures.

The Maritime Prefecture of the Channel and the North Sea say the French has rescued 40 migrants making the crossing on two boats so far yesterday.

A group of 12 were spotted by a Delft Seaways ferry in difficulty in the Dyck area. Several were hypothermic and required emergency medical attention when brought back to Dunkirk port around 8am.

The first of three groups included a young child, wearing a green hooded coat and carrying a cuddly toy, was escorted up the gangway for processing by Immigration Enforcement

They were followed by two boat-loads of men wearing orange lifejackets and huddling blankets for warmth

The French also rescued another 28 migrants in difficulty off Wimereux and returned them to the port of Boulogne-sur-Mer around 10.30am.

French authorities also prevented 105 people from reaching the UK on five boats on Saturday and an additional 101 people on a further five boats on Sunday.

A Home Office spokesman said: 'Criminal gangs are putting profits before people's lives through these dangerous and unnecessary crossings.

'Over 5,000 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.'

Ms Patel is set to overhaul Border Force with new a supremo in charge of stopping Channel crossings.

Priti Patel, right, is set to overhaul the Border Force with new a supremo in charge of stopping Channel crossings

The Home Secretary will unveil proposed new laws next week that will deny illegal migrants the right to settle in the UK.

The two directors general of Border Force and Immigration Enforcement are expected to quit their positions.

They will be replaced by a single supremo, The Telegraph reports. The new appointee will be tasked with overhauling the UK's 'broken' asylum system.

Border Force was criticised last month after one of its vessels picked up Channel migrants in French waters and took them to Dover.

The Home Secretary is working on laws which could see migrants sent to an offshore immigration centre, a report revealed on Sunday.

The legislation would allow the country to build a processing centre of this kind for the first time as the total number of migrants arriving in the UK this year has reached 5,300.

Ms Patel is in discussions with Denmark to share an immigration centre in Africa and is also set to unveil plans to crackdown on people smugglers.

According to the Times, the plans will form part of the Nationality and Borders Bill and will see asylum seekers processed outside the UK in a bid to stop migrants making the dangerous journey across the English Channel.

Denmark is said to be considering a site in Rwanda where two Danish ministers visited last month to sign off a memorandum on asylum and migration, according to the newspaper.

A government source told The Times: 'The prime minister and home secretary are determined to look at anything that will make a difference on Channel crossings.'
Hundreds of school children will be spending the school holiday break in isolation as the highly infectious Indian Delta strain of Covid-19 continues to infect younger and younger people.

From the early days of the pandemic last year right up until the new variant hit Australia's shores, politicians and public health authorities reassured parents that coronavirus was far less likely to impact kids and was not a major risk.

But with a growing number of cases at half a dozen schools in New South Wales, Western Australia and Queensland, it now appears children are much more susceptible to the virus than before.

Hundreds of school children will be spending the school holiday break in isolation as the highly infectious Indian Delta strain of Covid-19 continues to infect younger and younger people (stock image)

There are rising calls from teachers associations to have educators classed as front line workers so they can be vaccinated as soon as possible, as the mutant strain rips through much of the country, sending four states and territories into lockdown.

At the epicenter of Australia's surging Indian Delta outbreak is Sydney's eastern suburbs where the Bondi cluster has climbed to 149 cases on Tuesday, prompting public health alerts for thousands of venues nationwide.

Among them are a growing list of schools where infected children have unwittingly come to class.

Four students from South Coogee Public School have now returned positive tests, along with one student at Rose Bay Secondary College.

It comes after children at Bellevue Hill Public and Emanuel School also contracted the virus days earlier.

Meanwhile, a nine-year-old who attends St Charles Catholic Primary School caught the Indian Delta strain in a case which still remains a mystery to contact tracers.

Four students from South Coogee Public School (pictured) returned positive tests plunging every student and staff into isolation

Pictured: Parents wait to collect their children at St Charles Primary School on June 22 after a it was declared a Covid exposure site

But the damage has not been limited to Sydney with Connolly Primary School in Perth also declared a Covid exposure site on Monday.

The younger brother of an unvaccinated hospital worker who triggered Queensland's three-day lockdown has also become infected.

There are now fears other students at St Patrick's College at Shorncliffe, Brisbane, could be at risk after a long period of contact with the child.

Last year the federal and state governments reiterated the scientific consensus that Covid was much less likely to spread in schools with Prime Minister Scott Morrison saying, 'for children the health advice has been very clear, that schools are a safe place for children to be'.

St. Patrick's College in Sydney (pictured) has been impacted by the pandemic with attendees testing positive earlier this year

'From this point forward, teachers have to be regarded as front line workers,' senior vice president of the Teachers Federation, Amber Flohm said

A positive case was announced at Rose Bay Secondary College (pictured) this week

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian said: 'The health advice still stands and that is that schools are safe'.

Her Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant said: 'The adults are actually the ones who are actually spreading amongst themselves as opposed to children being a key driver.'

But as the alarming number of cases in schools grows there are now calls for teachers to be vaccinated.

'From this point forward, teachers have to be regarded as front line workers,' Senior vice president of the Teachers Federation, Amber Flohm told Nine's A Current Affair.

'With over a million coming through our school gates, each and every day in NSW, over 800,000 children, and a hundred thousand teachers and principals, teachers' roles in vaccination help to ensure the safety of all on site.'

In the United States the Pfizer vaccine has been approved for emergency use in children from the age of 12, with about three million kids already receiving the jab.

A nine-year-old who attends St Charles Catholic Primary School (pictured) contracted the Indian Delta strain in a case which still remains a mystery to contact tracers

Pictured: Cars line up at a drive-thru COVID-19 testing lab at Bondi in Sydney, Australia, 28 June 2021

The same age limit was also introduced in Indonesia after it was devastated by the Indian Delta strain which claimed the lives of almost 700 children.

But in Australian there are no vaccines that have approval for use for kids under the age of 16.

The total number of children who have contracted Covid-19 since the onset of the pandemic in Australia is a staggering 4,169.

That's 14 per cent of all cases Down Under.

In Indonesia, where the virus has been in the community for longer, that number has increased to above 16 per cent and health authorities fear it will continue to grow.
A police officer has denied causing the death of an 83-year-old pedestrian by careless driving.

PC Daniel Bowen, 28, was driving a marked Mercedes Sprinter police van when he allegedly struck Peter Dawes.

I happened as he crossed the road in East Ham, east London, on July 15.

Tragically Mr Dawes died from his injuries in hospital weeks later on 3 August.

The prosecution allege the 83-year-old would have been visible to PC Bowen for some time before the collision.

A marked Mercedes Sprinter police van, not the one involved in the collision last year

Dressed in a grey suit and tie, PC Bowen appeared at the Old Bailey today (Tue) and spoke to confirm his name and date of birth.

The officer, based at Stratford police station, denied a single charge of causing death by careless driving.

Karen Robinson, prosecuting, said: That plea was anticipated and discussed between the parties.

Stratford Police Station is where defendant PC Daniel Bowen, 28, worked as an officer

Ms Robinson said there was some volume of medical evidence to be served to the court due to the amount of time Mr Dawes spent in hospital.

Mr Justice Wall told the Met Police officer: Your trial will now begin on 13 December, youll learn the venue where it is to be tried in due course, you are on unconditional bail.

PC Bowen, of Hornchurch, east London, was granted unconditional bail ahead of his trial on 13 December at a venue yet to be set.
Top doctors have urged young Australians to stick with the Pfizer vaccine, claiming they were left blindsided by Scott Morrison announcing under 60s could instead opt for the AstraZeneca jab.

The Australian Medical Association say they were not consulted before the prime minister announced the policy changes on Monday, which allow Australians over 16 to get the jab, with its rare risk of blood clots, after seeking medical advice.

Many willing young Australians keen to get vaccinated in the face of outbreaks sweeping across Sydney, as well as Perth, Darwin and south-east Queensland, rolled their sleeves up on Tuesday to get the AstraZeneca jab after Mr Morrison's announcement.

It comes after an unvaccinated hospital receptionist in Queensland, who works on a Covid-specialist ward, caught the virus and spent 10 days in the community.

Her younger brother has since become infected, with south-east Queensland now entering a three-day lockdown to curb the spread, prompting more Australians to seek out the jab.

But the decision to extend the vaccine to younger age groups came less than two weeks after the federal government bumped the minimum age for the Oxford University jab from 50 to 60.

This was under advice from the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation, due to the risk of developing the rare blood-clotting condition.

The prime minister announced on Monday the controversial jab would be made available to under 40s in a bid to boost the country's low vaccination rate (pictured, a woman getting the jab)

The nation's top doctors have urged Australian's under 59 to follow immunisation experts' advice to receive the Pfizer jab, despite Scott Morrison offering AstraZeneca to anyone over 16

The Morrison government has backflipped on its guidelines, sparking concern among the nation's peak medical bodies.

On Tuesday, the Australian Medical Association (AMA) advised patients 59 and under to stick to immunisation experts' advice.

'The decision was a surprise to the AMA, its a surprise to doctors,' AMA president Omar Khorshid said.

'The experts have said that the preferred vaccine under the age of 60 is the Pfizer vaccine and that is still the health advice. Our recommendation is still really for patients to follow the ATAGI advice.

'Be patient and have the ATAGI-recommended vaccine when it's available. I am certainly still backing the expert advice at this stage.'

The ill-fated journey of the 19-year-old woman who sparked Queensland's three-day lockdown

Olympic swimmer Ariarne Titmus is seen waiting to get a Covid vaccine in Brisbane (pictured) with jabs now available to every Australian over 16

What are the chances of dying from a blood clot after AstraZeneca? One in 1.9million people have died from a blood clot after AstraZeneca. By comparison, Aussies have a one in 33 chance of dying if they catch Covid-19, a one in 12,000 chance of being struck by lightning and a one in 55 chance of winning the Oz Lotto. Advertisement

AstraZeneca holds a very low change of getting the blood clot, with around two in 100,000 people developing the condition, but it is less likely to occur in older adults.

Under the new policy, the prime minister said the Commonwealth would provide GPs indemnity cover so they could administer AstraZeneca to all adults, regardless of age.

People aged under 50 will be able to use Medicare for a vaccine consultation with a doctor, bringing them in line with older Australians.

However, Dr Khorshid said the announcement had left Australians confused and has called on the federal government to urgently clarify the new policy.

Karen Price from the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners said GPs had been inundated with booking requests after the overnight amendment.

She said some had been left shocked by the change and are still working through how much cover the indemnity scheme provides.

Annastacia Palaszczuk (pictured on Tuesday) has plunged millions into a three-day lockdown after the infected hospital worker travelled around for 10 days - saying the fact the 19-year-old was unvaccinated made her 'furious'

Workers are seen packing up a Brisbane cafe (pictured) on Tuesday after the new restrictions were announced

TEEN'S 10 INFECTIOUS DAYS IN QUEENSLAND Sunday, June 20, 9.30am-10.30am: Sandgate Woolworths Bay Health Gym from 10am-12pm on the same day. Tues-Wed, June 22-23: Prince Charles Hospital from 3:00pm to 10:00pm on the Tuesday and Wednesday last week. Thursday, June 24: The woman travelled with her family on VA369 from Brisbane to Townsville on at 10:00am. They were in Brisbane Airport for an hour prior and then when they landed at Townsville airport and stayed at the Cafe Brewery in the airport for an hour Thursday, June 24-Sun June 27: Magnetic Island. Sunday, June 27: Travelled from Magnetic Island back to Townsville. They went to the Sunday morning markets in Townsville City late morning, then caught VA374 from Townsville to Brisbane on Sunday, June 27, landing at Brisbane Airport at 2.55pm Advertisement

'Please remember us GPs are still trying to get our heads around last night's announcement concerning AstraZeneca too and what it means for our patients,' Dr Price said.

'A reminder to treat all nurses, receptionists and administrative workers with respect. We are doing our best.'

Cabinet's national security committee met on Monday to discuss the unfolding situation as several states grapple with outbreaks of the highly contagious Indian Delta variant.

With 13 million Australians in Sydney, Perth, Darwin, and Brisbane under some form of lockdown restrictions, Mr Morrison has been under mounting pressure to boost vaccination numbers to rectify the nation's beleaguered rollout.

Mr Morrison has faced growing pressure to boost vaccination numbers as several states grapple with the highly infectious Indian Delta variant (pictured, people line up at a vaccination centre in Sydney on Tuesday)

Government experts did modelling (above) to show the risk of getting a blood clot from the Astrazeneca vaccine for each age group, compared with the benefits of getting the jab

On Tuesday, millions of Queenslanders were plunged into a three-day lockdown amid fears a holidaying hospital worker may have spread the more infectious strain through Brisbane and north Queensland.

The 19-year-old tested positive on Monday but is believed to have been infectious in the community for about 10 days, and in that time worked two shifts at the hospital and went on a family holiday to Townsville.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said she was 'furious' to learn the young woman was not vaccinated but continued to work shifts as a concierge stationed just outside the coronavirus ward of Prince Charles Hospital in Brisbane.

Her younger brother has tested positive, while one of her close friends and another family member are also now ill, and awaiting test results.

AMA president Omar Khorshid (pictured) said the association was not consulted by the prime minister before the policy changes were announced

Millions of Australians are currently in lockdown as several states battle to contain local Covid outbreaks (pictured, Sydneysiders queue outside a vaccination centre on Monday)

What are the chances of getting a blood clot? Number of people who get blood clots after AstraZeneca per 100,000 people: <50 years - 3.1 people 50-59 years - 2.7 60-69 years - 1.4 70-79 years - 1.8 80+ years - 1.9 The overall case fatality rate in Australia is 3 per cent Source: Atagi Advertisement

The lockdown, which is in place until 6pm Friday, covers Townsville, nearby Magnetic and Palm islands, and all 11 local government areas in the state's southeast corner.

Dr Khorshid suspects the prime minister made the announcement to provide hope to people in lockdown.

'My guess is they are wanting to provide nervous Australians who are going into lockdown this week with something they can actually do to improve their chances of getting through this and to push the nation's vaccination program forward.'

Health Minister Greg Hunt on Tuesday confirmed the medical advice had not changed and that AstraZeneca remained the preferred vaccine for people aged over 60 and Pfizer was recommended for those under 60.

Mr Hunt argued the only change was making AstraZeneca available in more locations.

State governments were also understood to have been surprised by the announcement.

Ms Palaszczuk believes governments should follow the ATAGI's advice, while NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian is also lukewarm about the shift in position.

Dr Khorshid suspects the prime minister made the announcement to provide hope to people in lockdown. Testing queues are seen at Highgate Hill in Brisbane (pictured) on Tuesday as the state recorded two new locally acquired cases of Covid

Ms Berejiklian confirmed the change was discussed at national cabinet and would be followed in NSW, but barely endorsed the policy.

Victorian Health Minister Martin Foley insisted the AstraZeneca call was not a decision of national cabinet.

His department has written to the federal government seeking further advice.

In May, the federal government first announced Pfizer was the recommended shot for under 50s after AstraZeneca was linked to blood-clotting condition thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS).

Just weeks later, following the death of a 52-year-old woman, the age-restriction was revised to over 60s.

Wild FIVE HOUR long testing queues in Queensland as supermarkets overflow with panicked customers after 19yo with the Indian Delta strain spent 10 days in the community

By Tita Smith for Daily Mail Australia

Queenslanders are gridlocked in five-hour long testing queues while supermarkets overflow with panicked customers as the state grapples with a new Covid outbreak.

Millions of residents have been plunged into a three-day lockdown amid fears a 19-year-old unvaccinated hospital worker from Brisbane may have spread the highly contagious Indian Delta variant to north Queensland.

The woman tested positive on Monday but is believed to have been infectious in the community for about 10 days, and in that time worked two shifts at Prince Charles Hospital and went on a family holiday to Townsville.

The teenager, whose younger brother has also caught the virus, worked on a special ward dedicated to Covid cases from overseas as a receptionist, but was not vaccinated, which Annastacia Palazczuk said made her 'absolutely furious'.

Although the 19-year-old was one of just two Covid cases recorded on Tuesday, health authorities have shutdown all 11 local government areas in the state's southeast corner, Townsville, and nearby Magnetic and Palm islands, as they battle to contain the more infectious strain.

Motorists are stuck in gridlock testing queues (pictured in Townsville) across Queensland after a a 19-year-old infected with the Indian Delta strain spent 10 days in the community

The hospital worker's brother has since tested positive to the virus, but is yet to be included in official figures.

The principal of St Patricks College at Shorncliffe, where the boy is a pupil, has written to parents to advise them of the result.

'Please keep him and his family in your thoughts and prayers over the next two weeks,' college principal Chris Mayes said, the Courier Mail reports.

After the lockdown announcement on Tuesday, motorists flocked to drive-through testing facilities across the state, with lines stretching for kilometres.

Photos posted on social media show customers snaked through shopping centres, waiting to enter capacity-limited grocery stores to pick up supplies.

Queenslanders flocked to supermarkets on Tuesday after large swathes of the state were plunged into lockdown (pictured, a Townsville Woolworths)

Within hours, shelves had been stripped bare of toilet paper, dry food, and other stocks, with many buyers at packed registers spotted without masks.

Queensland traffic has also issued a road congestion alert along major highways in the state's south east as residents raced to flee the city ahead of the 6pm lockdown.

Townsville resident Bethany told Daily Mail Australia she left home at 12.30pm to get tested after learning the market she visited on Sunday was an exposure site.

By 5.30pm, she was still waiting in the queue.

'There are only four testing booths, the road is blocked both ways to get in, and there are now eight lanes of traffic - and no one is moving forward,' she said.

'There are kids in these cars and babies. Imagine waiting over four hours in the car not moving with a baby. I havent moved in 40 minutes. Ive been waiting over 4.5 hours now and they will be closing at 6pm.'

The infected 19-year-old hospital worker visited Sandgate Woolworths (pictured) while infectious

Bethany said the clinic appeared to be struggling to keep up with the workload, and many drivers had abandoned the line.

'They've been smashed. Its a s**t show and theyve literally shut the gate so people cant enter. Theyve just updated signs to say high traffic flow and be kind to staff.

'People are leaving and just chucking u-turns and heading home.'

Bethany said the disorganisation has instilled doubt the lockdown will end at 6pm on Friday as planned, and many appeared to be breaching health orders.

'No one is in masks and the security guy has his mask under his top lip,' she said.

'Its going take people days to get tested let alone sort things out in a lock down.

Around 13 million Australians, around half of the population, are now under some form of lockdown restrictions after cases seeped into the community in Brisbane, Darwin, Perth and Sydney.

The young hospital worker was not vaccinated but continued to work shifts as a concierge stationed just outside the coronavirus ward of Prince Charles Hospital in Brisbane (pictured, the city as lockdown came into effect on Tuesday)

As her state became the latest casualty, Premier Palaszczuk said she was 'furious' to learn the young woman was not vaccinated but continued to work shifts as a concierge stationed just outside the coronavirus ward of the Brisbane hospital.

'Despite the health directives that she should have been vaccinated, she was not,' Ms Palaszczuk said on Tuesday.

The 19-year-old woman from Sandgate in Brisbane is believed to have been infectious from Saturday, June 19, before developing symptoms the following Monday.

She visited her local Woolworths and a gym on the Sunday before working shifts 'outside' Prince Charles' specialist Covid-19 ward on Tuesday and Wednesday last week.

On Thursday, June 24 she went to Brisbane Airport to catch a flight to Townsville for a family holiday at nearby Magnetic Island.

The 19-year-old woman from Sandgate in Brisbane is believed to have been infectious from Saturday, June 19, before developing symptoms the following Monday (pictured, the city as lockdown began on Tuesday)

After three nights on the island, she returned to Townsville and attended the popular markets in Townsville's CBD on Sunday, June 27 before testing positive to the virus on Monday.

She then returned to Brisbane last Sunday, before testing positive to Covid on Monday.

Late Tuesday, authorities confirmed she has the Indian Delta variant, which is twice as contagious as the original virus and can be spread through fleeting contact that lasts just seconds.

One of her close friends and two of her family members are also now ill, and awaiting test results. The concierge also had contact with three other hospital workers.

Every single one of Magnetic Island's 2500 residents has been told to get tested, and authorities have included Palm Island given it has a large Indigenous population that would be more vulnerable to the virus.
Scientology leader David Miscavige's estranged father Ron, who became the church's most prominent defector, has died aged 85 following a battle with cancer.

The elder Miscavige died at his home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on Monday about a week after his health started deteriorating rapidly.

Ron's wife Becky, who he was married to for 31 years, revealed news of his death on Facebook, saying he died while she was reading him letters sent in by his supporters.

In recent weeks, Becky had shared several photos of Ron on social media that shed light on his declining health.

He had been battling health issues, including cancer, for the past five years and a GoFundMe was set up last month to help cover his funeral costs.

It was not immediately clear how long Ron had been battling cancer.

Scientology leader David Miscavige's estranged father Ron, who is the church's most prominent defector and wrote a scathing memoir in 2016, died on Monday aged 85 following a battle with cancer

The elder Miscavige died at his home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on Monday about a week after his health started deteriorating rapidly. His wife Becky posted this photo last week with his rescue cat

Ron, who had four children from his first marriage, had been a harsh critic of Scientology ever since leaving the church in 2012 after more than 40 years.

He was immediately shunned by his church-leading son David after defecting from Scientology.

The church, nor his son, have commented publicly about Ron's death.

At the time of his death, Ron was only in contact with one of his four children - his son Ron Jr. who is the only one not still involved with the church.

He had previously claimed that David had banned him from making contact with his two daughters, Denise and Lori, after leaving.

Ron had made it his life's mission to criticize the organization and his son David, who he often described as Scientology's 'corrupt leader', ever since he left.

In his 2016 memoir, which is one of the most comprehensive take-downs of the church in its history, Ron wrote that his son had turned Scientology into something that was 'manipulative, coercive and, in my mind, evil'.

David has ruled the church for decades ever since taking control after Scientology founder L Ron Hubbard died in 1986.

Ron, who grew up in Pennsylvania, served in the Marines after graduating high school and studied music theory at the Naval School of Music.

Ron's wife Becky, who he was married to for 31 years, revealed news of his death on Facebook, saying he died while she was reading him letters sent in by his supporters. They are pictured in February 2020

Ron (sitting at the front) had four children with his first wife Loretta Miscavige. His son David is pictured standing behind him. Ron and his children stayed in the church for more than quarter of a century until his son Ron Jr. quit in 2000. Ron left the church in 2012

After leaving the church, Ron made it his life's mission to criticize the organization and his son David (above in 2017), who he often described as Scientology's 'corrupt leader'

He married his first wife, Loretta Miscavige, back in 1957.

The couple went on to have four children - David, Ron Jr., Denise and Lori - who they raised in New Jersey.

It was there that Ron worked for a time as a salesman.

He was first introduced to Scientology while attending a marketing sales scheme meeting back in 1969 and started attending weekly meetings.

Ron brought his son David to a session that same year so a spiritual counselor could try and treat the boy's asthma.

When his son stopped having asthma attacks, the Miscavige family became instant Scientology believers.

The family ended up going to the UK twice to study with Hubbard.

Their son David dropped out of school at the age of 16 to join the Sea Org - the Church's inner core workforce.

Hubbard soon saw Miscaviges potential and he rapidly rose through the church ranks. David was groomed as Hubbard's successor for years. When he officially took over leadership, a year after Hubbards death, he was just 26.

Before David took over as leader, Ron had called him asking for help in 1985 after he was arrested for attempted rape and indecent assault.

Ron denied the allegations and the charges were later dropped when the victim couldn't identify him.

In his 2016 memoir, which is one of the most comprehensive take-downs of the church in its history, Ron wrote that his son had turned Scientology into something that was 'manipulative, coercive and, in my mind, evil'. Ron and wife Becky are pictured in Wisconsin in 2016

Ron was the church's most prominent defector and regularly spoke out about his son David. He is pictured on Late Night with Seth Meyers in 2016

After his son sent him money and lawyers to help with his case, Ron joined the Sea Org as well and stayed for the next three decades.

Ron and his first wife split in the late 80s and he married his second wife Becky, who worked in Scientology's marketing department, in 1990.

His first wife died in 2005.

He went on to work at Golden Era Productions - the Scientology wing that created music and videos to spread its word - where he composed church album music and materials.

Ron and his children stayed in the church for more than quarter of a century until his son Ron Jr. quit in 2000.

In his memoir, Ron detailed how his relationship with David deteriorated after his son started berating his work.

He said his son would often call him a motherf****r' and c***sucker' in front of groups of people.

Ron said he eventually decided to leave the church in 2006 but he and Becky took another five years working up the courage.

In 2011 they finally put their plan, which they described as being like something out of Mission Impossible, into action. They left the base pretending they were going to the music studio.

Ron spent the following years denouncing Scientology and revealed around 2021 that a private detective who was arrested for stalking him had claimed to police that he'd been hired by David.

After his arrest in Wisconsin, the private investigator said David Miscavige wanted him to survey his father 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Longtime Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg left his Manhattan apartment Tuesday morning and headed for Trump Tower  just as he has done for decades  only this time with potential indictments weighing over him and the company he has steered.

Weisselberg, 73, returned to work just hours after company lawyers made a last-ditch effort to try to persuade prosecutors not to bring charges against the business and its officials.

His journey came amid reports that state and federal prosecutors in New York are likely to bring one or more criminal indictments this week.

Trump's attorney Ronald Fischetti says he doesn't expect charges to be brought against the former president after meeting New York prosecutors on Monday.

Other people familiar withe the case said prosecutors were preparing for potential charges against Weisselberg while weighing charges against the company itself, Reuters reported.

Weisselberg began working for former President Donald Trump's father, Fred Trump, in the early 1970s, and helped run the company when Donald Trump took the White House.

Longtime Trump Organization exec Allen Weisselberg drove to Trump Tower Tuesday morning after company lawyers sought to convince prosecutors not to bring charges against the company

Now, he has been identified as one of the principal figures with legal exposure after prosecutors combed through company finances and picked through unusual pay and benefit packages including up to $500,000 in prep school tuition for his grandchildren.

On Tuesday, he could be seen leaving his luxury apartment building on the Upper West Side and getting into his Mercedes and heading to the office.

His former daughter-in-law, Jennifer Weisselberg, told CNN Monday night she is willing to testify to a federal grand jury meeting in Manhattan.

'We're prepared, and we are getting prepared,' she told the network's Erin Burnett. She was previously married to Weisselberg's son, Barry. She did not say whether prosecutors had formally asked her to testify, although she has handed over voluminous documents.

Attorneys representing Donald Trump's family business are attempting to convince prosecutors not to file criminal charges against the company, and told them that doing so could damage the firm's reputation beyond repair.

Lawyers met with Manhattan prosecutors on Monday in a last ditch attempt to dissuade them from filing charges against the Trump Organization.

Prosecutors are focusing on Weisselberg in their probe of company finances

DRIVER'S SEAT: His lawyers reportedly told prosecutors he would not cooperate in the investigation

After picking someone up, Weisselberg drove into a garage at Trump Tower

Weisselberg (c) helped run the Trump Organization along with Donald Trump Jr. (r) and Eric Trump when Donald Trump took the White House

During the meeting, senior officials with the Manhattan District Attorney's Office and the New York State Attorney General's Office both met with Trump defense lawyers who highlighted the damage the company could face, should an indictment occur.

The two prosecutors' offices - now working together in their probe against Trump - did not indicate whether they'd decided to press any charges.

But the collateral damage from any such allegations could spread far and wide, affecting relationships with banks and other business partners, Trump Organization lawyers are purported to have said.

Charges against the Trump Organization could come later this week

Donald Trump won't be personally charged in the Manhattan district attorney's case against the former president's business organization

The meeting to discuss 'collateral consequences' are routine in white-collar investigations when charges are near, according to the New York Times.

The meeting, conducted through video conferencing, lasted for less than an hour.

The prosecutors have not stated one way or the other if they have made a final decision on whether to bring charges against the Trump Organization which has long denied any wrongdoing, as has its long-serving chief financial officer Allen H. Weisselberg.

District attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., could well announce charges against the company and Weisselberg later this week. Weisselberg is said to have refused to flip and turn on Trump in return for easier treatment from investigators.

Donald Trump won't be personally charged in the Manhattan district attorney's case against the former president's business organization when the first indictment comes down, his attorney claimed earlier in the day.

In a lengthy and rambling statement issued on Monday, Trump called the DA's investigation 'a continuation of the greatest Witch Hunt of all time' and claimed prosecutors 'failed' to find a crime even as 'millions of dollars of taxpayer funds wasted.'

Charges are likely in connection with fringe benefits the company awarded its chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg who prosecutors were hoping might flip

His words came as an indictment against the business that made his fame and fortune, The Trump Organization, grows closer.

Ronald Fischetti, a New York attorney who represents Trump, told Politico that, at a meeting with Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance on Monday, he was told the DA's office will not bring charges against Trump himself when the first indictment arrives, which could be as soon as this week.

'They just said, 'When this indictment comes down, he won't be charged. Our investigation is ongoing,' he said.

Trump railed against the prosecution in his response.

'They will do anything to stop the MAGA movement (and me),' the former president said. 'They also know that no matter how strong our case, they will work hard to embarrass us and the Republican Party.'

He claimed the prosecution of his business organization meant other companies would see it as a reason not to station their businesses in New York.

The former president called the DA's investigation 'a continuation of the greatest Witch Hunt of all time,' in a lengthy, rambling statement

'Having politically motivated prosecutors, people who actually got elected because they will "get Donald Trump," is a very dangerous thing for our Country. In the end, people will not stand for it. Remember, if they can do this to me, they can do it to anyone! Why would anyone bring their company to New York, or even stay in New York, knowing these Radical Left Democrats would willingly target their company if viewed as a political opponent? It is devastating for New York!,' Trump said.

He also claimed to be the victim after he saved the country from COVID.

'These Witch Hunters are relentlessly seeking to destroy a reputation of a President who has done a great job for this Country, including tax and regulation cuts, Border control, rebuilding the Military, and developing the vaccine in record time - thereby saving our Country, and far beyond. Washington, D.C. and ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court, should finally stop these vicious, angry, and highly partisan prosecutors. They are a disgrace to our Nation!,' he concluded.

Meanwhile, Fischetti said he was told the charges against the Trump Organization and its individual employees related to alleged failures to pay taxes on corporate benefits and perks.

Those are believed to include up to $500,000 in school fees paid for Weisselberg's two grandchildren to attend Columbia Grammar and Prep School in Manhattan.

That cash is said to have been paid by both Weisselberg and Trump, as a gift to Weisselberg's son Barry, whose kids were attending the facility.

Prosecutors are believed to be probing whether those gifts should have been declared as such, which would have made them eligible for tax payments.

Charges will likely not be related to so-called 'hush money' payments that former Trump attorney Michael Cohen said were made to porn star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential campaign.

'Nothing. Not a word on that,' he said.

Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 in October 2016, a month before the election, to stop her discussing the alleged affair with Trump, which Trump denied having. The New York Times reported that, in court documents, Cohen said Trump Organization officials were involved in the payoff. Cohen pleaded guilty to eight federal charges on August 21, 2018, including a campaign finance violation, for his role in the payment.

Nor would the charges be related to concerns The Trump Organization used misleading valuations of its properties to deceive lenders, it is claimed.

'We asked, 'Is there anything else?' Fischetti told Politico. 'They said, 'No.'

'It's crazy that that's all they had,' he added.

'They just said, 'When this indictment comes down, he won't be charged,' Ronald Fischetti, a New York attorney who represents Trump, told Politico

He noted he expects charges to be filed against the company this week or next.

Prosecutors gave Trump's attorneys a Monday afternoon to make their final case as to why the Trump Organization should not face criminal charges over its financial dealings, The Washington Post reported on Sunday.

The charges would be the first criminal allegations to emerge from Vance's long-running investigation into Trump's business work in New York.

Over the past few weeks, a grand jury has been hearing evidence about Weisselberg, with prosecutors obtaining the executive's personal tax returns. Companies can be tried for crimes, and if they are convicted or plead guilty, they would face fines and other penalties.

Letitia James, the New York State Attorney General running a civil probe, has also reportedly acquired those tax returns. James' office had been investigating whether Trump's company falsely reported property values to secure loans and obtain economic and tax benefits.

Earlier, prosecutors were also able to obtain the personal bank records of Weisselberg.

Investigators are looking at whether or not Weisselberg failed to pay taxes on benefits over the years, including apartments, leased cars and private school tuition for two of Weisselberg's grandchildren.

To that end, prosecutors have subpoenaed records from an Upper West Side private school, the Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School.

Vance is reported to be seeking records into Mercedes-Benz vehicles leased for Weisselberg and other Trump Organization employees.

They are also looking at an apartment Trump may have gifted Weisselberg in Manhattan.

Trump's company, The Trump Organization, likely to face charges on alleged failures to pay taxes on corporate benefits and perks; charges would not be related to so-called 'hush money' payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels

Meanwhile, Weisslberg's former daughter-in-law, Jennifer, has been interviewed in the probe six times and is cooperating with prosecutors.

The Manhattan district attorney's office has informed Donald Trump 's lawyers that it is considering criminal charges against The Trump Organization in connection with benefits the company awarded its chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg

She has been asked about the tuition payments, as well gifts her ex-husband, Barry Weisselberg, received from Trump, such as leased cars and an apartment on Central Park South.

It's not clear what charges Weisselberg may be facing, though experts suggest it could be grand larceny, scheme to defraud or tax fraud.

If Weisselberg is charged with tax fraud and failing to pay more than $10,000 in taxes for a single year, he could face up to seven years in prison.

Prosecutors are hoping Weisselberg will cooperate with the probe into Trump and will flip on the former president. The indictments could put additional pressure on him to cut a deal.

The issue took on a renewed sense of urgency when Vance said in April that he will retire at the end of 2021 and there is speculation his office will issue any indictments before that.

Weisselberg is still an employee of the Trump Organization. He previously worked for Donald Trump's father and has been the chief financial officer at the Trump Organization for more than two decades, and has denied all claims of wrongdoing.
A human rights expert has called for an independent inquiry into allegations of state-ordered executions of thousands of of political prisoners in Iran in 1988 and the role played by President Ebrahim Raisi.

Javaid Rehman, the UN investigator on human rights, said on Monday that he believes it is 'very important' to investigate what happened in 1988 now that Raisi, 60, has become the Iranian president after a landslide victory earlier this month.

Ebrahim Raisi is known as 'the butcher' for executing thousands of opposition prisoners in 1988 while serving as Tehran's deputy prosecutor and allegedly ordering pregnant women tortured.

It is estimated that between 4,000 and 30,000 people were condemned to death by then-supreme leader Ruhollah Khomeini in two separate waves, while Raisi was on a four-man 'death commission' that oversaw the executions.

President-elect Ebrahim Raisi (pictured) is known as 'the butcher' for executing thousands of opposition prisoners in 1988 while serving as Tehran's deputy prosecutor

Rehman's office has gathered testimonies and evidence over the years and is ready to share them if the UN's Human Rights Council or another body sets up an impartial investigation.

He said: 'I think it is time and it's very important now that Mr. Raisi is the president (-elect) that we start investigating what happened in 1988 and the role of individuals.'

Rehman, who teaches Islamic law and international law in London, said he is concerned at reports that some 'mass graves' are being destroyed as part of a continuing cover-up.

He continued: 'We have made communications to the Islamic Republic of Iran because we have concerns that there is again a policy to actually destroy the graves or there may be some activity to destroy evidence of mass graves.'

The scholar insisted that a probe is in the interest of Iran and could bring closure to families.

He said: 'Otherwise we will have very serious concerns about this president and the role, the reported role, he has played historically in those executions.'

Javaid Rehman (pictured), the UN investigator on human rights, said it is 'very important' to investigate what happened in 1988 now that Raisi, 60, has become the Iranian president

'I will campaign for justice to be done,' he added.

More than 150 former United Nations officials, human rights authorities and legal experts have demanded that the UN open an inquiry into the killings they say 'may amount to crimes against humanity'.

Iran's new president is under US sanctions over what the United States and activists say was his involvement as one of four judges who oversaw the 1988 killings.

Amnesty International has put the number executed at some 5,000, but said in a 2018 report that 'the real number could be higher'.

When asked about executions after his election win, Raisi said: 'If a judge, a prosecutor, has defended the security of the people, he should be praised. I am proud to have defended human rights in every position I have held so far.'

Iran has never acknowledged that mass executions took place under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the revolutionary leader who died in 1989.

'The scale of executions that we hear imply that it was a part of a policy that was being pursued... It was not just one person,' Rehman said.

He also said that there had also been 'no proper investigation' into the killing of protesters in November 2019, the bloodiest political unrest since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

President Raisi (pictured) is under US sanctions over what the United States say was his involvement as one of four judges who oversaw the 1988 killings that saw thousands executed

'Even by conservative estimates we can say that more than 300 people were killed arbitrarily, extrajudicially, and nobody has been held accountable and no compensation,' he said.

'There is a widespread and systemic impunity in the country for gross violations of human rights, both historically in the past as well as in the present.'

Raisi secured victory in a landslide election marked by voter apathy over economic hardships and political restrictions.

Raisi will be Iran's eighth president taking over from Hassan Rouhani, a moderate who has served the maximum of two consecutive four-year-terms, on August 3.

Raisi will take over as the country looks to salvage its nuclear deal with major powers and free itself from the US sanctions which have contributed towards an economic downturn.

Human rights expert Rehman denounced what he called 'deliberate and manipulative strategies adopted to exclude moderate candidates and to ensure the success of a particular candidate'.

'There were arrests, journalists were stopped from asking specific questions about the background of the presidential candidate Mr Raisi and there was intimidation towards any issues that were raised about his previous role and background.'

Raisi secured victory in a landslide election marked by voter apathy over economic hardships and political restrictions. Pictured: Raisi's supporters cheer after his victory

His comments come after more than 150 former UN officials, campaigners and legal experts have said Raisi should face an international inquiry over the massacre.

Tahar Boumedra, of the Justice for the Victims of the 1988 Massacre in Iran campaign group, said: 'The massacre is an ongoing crime against humanity.

'The families of the victims continue to receive heavy sentences simply for asking the authorities where their loved ones have been buried. It's time the UN conducts its own investigation into these mass executions.'

Agnes Callamard, of Amnesty International, said: 'That Ebrahim Raisi has risen to the presidency instead of being investigated for the crimes against humanity of murder, enforced disappearance and torture, is a grim reminder that impunity reigns supreme in Iran.'

Iranian political prisoners who were interrogated, tortured and sentenced to die by Raisi have recently told of their horrifying experiences.

'He watched as guards threw my baby on the floor': How 'Butcher' Ebrahim Raisi oversaw brutal interrogations, torture and the execution of 30,000 political prisoners - as Iran prepares to make him president

By Chris Pleasance for MailOnline

Iranian political prisoners who were interrogated, tortured and sentenced to die by Ebrahim Raisi have told of their horrifying experiences as Iran prepares to make him the country's next president.

Farideh Goudarzi, who was jailed for being part of a banned political group, told MailOnline how Raisi watched guards drop her baby on the floor as part of one brutal interrogation - after she was tortured while pregnant and forced to give birth in jail.

Meanwhile Mahmoud Royaee, another political prisoner interrogated by Raisi during the execution of up to 30,000 opposition activists in a 1988 purge, said Raisi once handed down a death sentence to an inmate who was in the midst of an epileptic fit.

On Friday, the 60-year-old hardliner is expected to be named Iran's next president following an 'election' that saw moderate candidates purged from voting lists.

Both Goudarzi and Royaee said Raisi's appointment is intended to send a message to Iranians - following a series of large protests in recent years - that dissent will no longer be tolerated.

'Raisi is being brought to power to massacre these people,' Goudarzi said.

Ebrahim Raisi, the hardline head of Iran's judiciary, is expected to become the country's next president following elections on Friday that saw moderates barred from running

Raisi is known as 'The Butcher' for his involvement in the 1988 Death Commissions which sent up to 30,000 Iranian political prisoners to the gallows (file image)

'So the message to the people of my country is detention, torture, and execution.

'The message of for the rest of the world is the propagation and export of terrorism. There is no other message.'

Goudarzi explained that she was first arrested in 1983 for being part of the People's Mujahedin of Iran, a left-wing pro-democracy organisation and militant group.

At the time of her arrest she was 21 years old and eight months pregnant by her husband who was arrested two days before her, alongside her brother.

Despite being heavily pregnant, she said she was taken to torture chambers beneath the courthouse in the city of Hamedan - into a small, bloodstained room where she says she was tied down to a bed and beaten by guards.

There, guards asked her to give up the names and addresses of other members of the Mujahedin, which Goudarzi said she refused to do - leading them to torture her.

'In the corner of the room I saw a number of cables of different sizes and different widths, on the floor next to the bed was a lot of blood,' she said.

'It was clear that before me another prisoner had been tortured there.

'They put me on the bed and would slap and strike my face, with the cable they flogged my hands.'

Goudarzi said there were seven or eight people in the room, one of whom was Raisi - overseeing the interrogation in his position as the prosecutor of Hamedan.

After two weeks in detention she said she gave birth to a son, but was sent immediately to solitary confinement with her infant child.

The interrogations did not stop even after she gave birth, she claims, saying she was taken to torture chambers virtually every day and asked for information.

When that failed to yield results, Goudarzi says the guards began to use her son as part of the torture regime.

'When my son was only 38 days old, one night about 1am, a number of guards and interrogators raided the cell looking for documents.

'They banged the door open and several came in. They grabbed my child and from a distance of 2ft they threw him on the ground.

'I was screaming 'what do you want' but nobody was paying attention. My son woke up and was screaming.

Mahmoud Royaee (let) and Farideh Goudarzi (right) were both personally interrogated by Raisi during their time as political prisoners in Iran

'The guards ripped his clothes off... They were looking for documents or information, but they didn't specify what exactly

'The next day me and my child we were blindfolded and taken to the Hamedan court.

'From 8am until 2pm I was interrogated, in all that time my child was hungry and crying of hunger.

'One of the guards grabbed him and in front of my eyes hit him on the back, and the entire time I could hear the cries of my child.

'Standing there and witnessing the whole thing was Raisi.'

Goudarzi said her husband was also tortured - flogged and lashed so severely that he had to spend time in a mental hospital.

After 11 months in detention, in 1984, he was handed a death sentence by Raisi and hanged from a construction crane in the courtyard of the courthouse.

Meanwhile her brother was given 20 years in prison for belonging to a banned group. She was sentenced to five years.

That meant Goudarzi and her brother were still in jail when the regime began purging political prisoners in what became known as the 1988 Death Commission.

It is thought that an order - possible from Ayatollah Khomeinei himself - was sent to prosecutors across Iran ordering them to put all political prisoners on trial for their lives as 'apostates of Islam'.

The order covered tens of thousands of prisoners who were serving sentences for belonging to opposition groups including the Mujahedin, as well as thousands more who had completed their sentences and were waiting for release.

Many had been students when they were initially arrested, including some who were as young as 15 or 16.

One of those men was Mahmoud Royaee, who told MailOnline that he was originally arrested aged 18 in 1981 and taken to the notorious Evin prison in Tehran where he was tortured and then handed a death sentence for belonging to the Mujahedin.

His sentence was reduced to 10 years after his father paid money to the court, and until 1988 he was moved between three jails before ending up in Gohardasht prison, some 20 miles from Tehran, as the Death Commission got underway.

Royaee told MailOnline that he was hauled to court in Karaj, where Raisi was also a prosecutor, and told to sign a piece of paper denouncing the Mujahedin and requesting amnesty from Khomeinei.

When he refused, he said Raisi and another prosecutor threw him out of court - unbeknownst to him, they had ordered his execution.

But, thanks to well-connected family members who knew people at the court, Royaee was not immediately hanged and was instead sent back in front of prosecutors - clutching a piece of paper on which he had written a short statement saying he was not in contact with any opposition groups.

Royaee said he was thrown out a second time and sent to a 'death corridor' where people waiting to be executed were sat - although they didn't know this at the time.

Mahmoud was being held at Gohardasht prison (pictured) when he was hauled before Raisi and sentenced to death for refusing to sign a forced confession - a fate he ultimately escaped

But his name was never called by the executioners - he believes because the handwritten appeal was never resolved by prosecutors, meaning his name was not added to the death lists and he survived.

Others were not so lucky.

'One of my friends who was a prisoner was suffering from heavy epilepsy. More than 50 per cent of his body was disabled, he couldn't move it,' Royaee said.

'Also his prison term had expired and was finished, he was waiting to be released. They still took him to the death commission.

'When they brought him to the [court] he had a seizure. The other prisoners there, although they were blindfolded, they tried to help him to stop him from striking his head on the ground

'In that condition he was summoned by Raisi and his death sentence was signed - a person whose prison sentence was finished.

'He was suffering epilepsy, he was half paralyzed, he had lost some of his memory. Even to him, they showed no mercy.

'If Raisi was not on the death commission, he would still be alive. Nobody else would have given that sentence.'

The man's death was just one of many that took place in five bloody months in the summer of 1988.

While exact numbers of the dead are unknown, it is thought that at least several thousand and possibly more than 30,000 people were put to death - hanged by construction cranes in batches of 10.

Among them was Goudarzi's brother, who was still serving his 20-year sentence for being part of the Mujahedin.

She was also taken back to solitary confinement and tortured for three months to try and extract more information, but ultimately escaped the death penalty thanks to the pleadings of a senior cleric.

Fortunately, by that time her son had been allowed to leave prison and go to live with her family so he escaped the torture.

She was finally released from jail in the autumn of 1988, just a few months after the Death Commission ended. Royaee was forced to serve out the remaining three years of his sentence before he was also released.

Four years later Royaee fled Iran with the help of friends who live outside the country, and he now lives in Albania.

Goudarzi remained in Iran for the next 28 years, but decided to flee the country when her son was arrested for belonging to the Mujahedin - just as she was.

Fearing that he would suffer the same fate as his father and uncle, the pair fled the country before also making their way to Albania.

Raisi will be Iran's eight president taking over from Hassan Rouhani, a moderate who has served the maximum of two consecutive four-year-terms, on August 3

Royaee and Goudarzi say that Raisi is being brought to power to send a message to Iranians that dissent will no longer be tolerated

But while the pair may have left their old lives behind, both said that Raisi is a figure that will never leave their minds.

Royaee said: 'He had no humanity, he was very vicious towards the prisoners.

'The hatred that he was filled with against the prisoners - I have seen very few people like that.

'It's intolerable for me, for the families of the victims and for the nation of Iran to even contemplate such a man having the presidency

'His place is in court, on the defendant's chair.'

Goudarzi added: 'In my opinion Raisi is the murdered of the children of Iran, he is a criminal.'

Both have called on western governments to oppose Raisi's appointment and to put pressure on the regime by refusing to deal with it - a pointed reference to nuclear negotiations that Biden has pledged to resume.

Iranians do get to vote in the presidential election with the ballot held on Friday, but candidates have to be vetted and approved by the regime ahead of time - with Raisi their clear favourite.

Raisi - currently the head of the Iranian judiciary who has been responsible for the detention of foreign nations and crushing protests in Iran - is also the current frontrunner with voters, according to polling.

Hassan Rouhani, a religious moderate who has been president since 2013, is barred from running again due to term limits - while other members of his political faction have been purged from the candidate lists.

While the country Supreme Leader - Ayatollah Ali Khamenei - has the final say on all matters to do with the state, the president sets domestic policy and is also responsible for setting the tone in which Iran interacts with the world.
Comedian Lee Hurst has been reported to the police and Twitter for 'inciting violence' against Chris Whitty after he was attacked by thugs.

The former They Think It's All Over panellist said whatever happened to the Chief Medical Officer 'was not enough'.

His comments came after the epidemiologist was jumped on by yobs in St James's Park in central London on Sunday night.

Footage emerged on Monday of them following Prof Whitty and putting him in a headlock as he walked home.

Mr Hurst, 57, who says he is a 'proud covidiot', today launched his tirade against the top scientist on social media.

But his posts were quickly seized on and reported to Twitter and the police for 'inciting hatred'.

The former They Think It's All Over panellist said whatever happened to the Chief Medical Officer 'was not enough'

Mr Hurst told his 18,000 followers on Tuesday morning: 'Whatever has happened to Chris Whitty is not enough.'

He later put: 'I'm not putting any caveats into the Chris Whitty story. Fk him and his #FullPay, care home murdering scummy pals.'

And he added: 'If there was no video footage of Chris Whitty we would have been told he was beaten up.'

Prof Whitty was followed and put in a headlock by two thugs as he walked through St James's Park on Sunday night.

He was also targeted by lockdown sceptics who demonstrated outside his London flat on Saturday afternoon.

The first attack was widely condemned by politicians and public figures, with Boris Johnson branding it 'despicable harassment'.

Mr Hurst faced a swift backlash to his tweets, with anti-hate firms and social media users slamming him for inciting hate against Prof Whitty.
Wisconsin parents will now have the the ability to choose gender-neutral terms to identify themselves on their child's birth certificates.

Democratic Governor Tony Evers announced that starting July 1 birth certificates in the Badger State will include the options: 'mother and father,' 'parent and parent,' and 'parent giving birth.'

But the move has already been criticized by some for 'downplaying motherhood' .

Republican Rep. Gae Magnafici called the policy 'something that even the best satire writers cannot imagine.'

'The far-left liberals are at it again. Instead of acknowledging something as simple as a baby coming from a mom and dad, they deny science,' Magnafici said in a statement. 'As the Assembly chair of Family Law, a nurse, and a mom, I am insulted. I'm calling on Governor Evers to stop downplaying womanhood, stop downplaying motherhood, and stop downplaying settled science.'

Democratic Governor Tony Evers (pictured) announced that Wisconsin parents will now have the the ability to choose gender-neutral terms to identify themselves on their child's birth certificates

'This change reflects my and my administration's commitment to gender-neutral terminology and to recognizing that every family deserves to be treated with dignity and respect' Evers tweeted about the new policy.

The announcement follows a June 1 executive order signed by Evers that directed state agencies to use gender-neutral language in external documents.

'This change reflects my and my administration's commitment to gender-neutral terminology and to recognizing that Wisconsin families are diverse and should be valued and respected,' Evers said in a statement. 'I am glad to see this change being made as we continue to update our state policies and procedures to better reflect the Wisconsinites we serve.'

The birth forms will also be available in English, Spanish and Hmong, Evers announced.

Sue Erickson, president and CEO of UnityPoint Health-Meriter, a nonprofit hospital in Madison, Wisconsin, said this new policy will help more modern families pick correct labels when their children are born.

'Families have told us that a birth certificate that doesn't accurately reflect their growing family can take away a piece of the joy when welcoming a new baby,' she said. 'We are so pleased that Wisconsin created a more inclusive birth certificate form to reflect the families of our state and community.'

Starting July 1 birth certificates in Wisconsin will include the options: 'mother and father,' 'parent and parent,' and 'parent giving birth'

In more than 10 states it is now possible to request a non-binary birth certificate for a newborn

Wisconsin's policy is reflective of a widespread shift in attitudes towards gender in most of the country.

LGBTQ activist have advocated for bills that make it easier for identity documents to be changed to match gender identity.

Many in the community feel that the male and female categories are too limited and are a form of discrimination against transgender and gender-fluid people.

Last week, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the Gender Recognition Act, a bill that ensures nonbinary New York residents no longer have to identify themselves as male or female on state-issued documents, including drivers licenses and birth certificates.

In more than 10 states it is now possible to request a non-binary birth certificate for their newborn or amend an existing one, according to usbirthcertificates.com

People born in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode island, Utah and Washington, District of Columbia who do not identify as male or female can legally opt for a third gender category or an 'X' marker on their birth certificates.
Top scientists and Tory MPs have urged the Government to stop publicising Covid statistics every day because they 'frighten' people and are becoming obsolete.

The Department of Health has kept the public informed throughout the pandemic through its daily update of infections and deaths, as well as weekly hospitalisations data.

But there are growing concerns that the figures are becoming less necessary now that the vaccines have severed the link between cases and fatalities.

A slew of experts  most notably eminent professor Tim Spector, from King's College London  said there is a danger of people becoming fixated on the numbers.

They told MailOnline the Covid figures should be published less often and alongside statistics on other health conditions like flu, heart disease and cancer - all of which are killing thousands more people than Covid every month.

Conservative MPs are also said to be fed up with the numbers and are calling for a debate about when to stop publishing the data, as the country moves towards 'Freedom Day' on July 19.

They are lobbying No10 to follow public health chiefs in Quebec, Canada, who announced this week they will release the updates weekly now, rather than daily. Singapore is also planning to stop publishing daily infection numbers.

Other scientists told MailOnline that the data informed people's choices and indicated when they should moderate their behaviour to avoid catching the virus.

It comes as Boris Johnson today told the Cabinet the country will have to 'live with Covid in the future' in the same way it does influenza, in what appeared to be a concerted effort to take emphasis away from the daily numbers.

Professor Spector, the scientist behind the UK's biggest symptom tracking study, told MailOnline continuing to publish figures in the current format is scaring the public.

He said: 'The Government should start putting its daily figures "in context" and publish them alongside the number of deaths due to flu, heart disease and other conditions.

Professor Tim Spector, the scientist behind the UK's biggest symptom tracking study ZOE, told MailOnline that Covid data needs to be put in context of expected daily deaths and other illnesses

It is 'time to learn to live with Covid': Downing Street warns UK will have to accept flu-like death figures of up to 20,000 a year The Government is coming round to the idea of learning to live with the coronavirus. Prime Minister Boris Johnson took an increasingly hardline approach to ending lockdown on July 19 today, telling the Cabinet the country will have to 'live with Covid in the future'. Downing Street said the Cabinet - including new Health Secretary Sajid Javid - 'agreed that once we have completed the road map, we will be able to live with Covid in the future, even if cases continue to rise, thanks to the protections provided by the vaccine.' He made his Commons debut after replacing Matt Hancock and immediately ruled out an early end to lockdown in a week's time. But he was far more bullish about the restrictions being scrapped in three weeks time. He told the Commons: 'I spent my first day as Health Secretary just yesterday looking at the data and testing it to the limit. 'While we decided not to bring forward Step 4, we see no reason to go beyond July 19, because, in truth, no date we choose comes with zero risk for Covid. 'We know we cannot simply eliminate it, we have to learn to live with it.' Earlier today Home Secretary Priti Patel said we will have to 'adapt our lives accordingly' in order to get freedoms back while at the same time living with coronavirus. 'Look, I would love to take the mask off  but at the right time, I will do that,' she told Times Radio Breakfast. 'We are living with coronavirus and many of us have been saying this across Government, probably for the last 12 months actually, we are living with this virus, we're in a pandemic. 'Yes, we have the vaccine, there'll be boosters at some stage, booster jabs as well, so we are adapting our way of life. 'I think to look to getting our freedoms back, which of course we all dearly want, we are adapting how we live and that means living with the concept of this pandemic, the virus, and obviously we adapt our lives accordingly.' The Prime Minister's official spokesman today told reporters that 'as with other diseases such as the flu we will have to live with the virus'. When he was asked whether this meant that the Government would be comfortable with an annual death toll similar to flu, he said: 'That is just factual, the number. That is not a target or number that the Government sets.' There were 22,000 deaths associated with flu in England in the 2017/18 season, Public Health England figures show. The Government will continue to publish daily coronavirus figures once restrictions have been lifted, according to Downing Street. Asked if this is expected to continue, the Prime Minister's official spokesman told Westminster reporters: 'Yes. We will continue, and are continuing, to provide these updates through the dashboard that provide an important level of transparency to the public and ensure understanding how we are progressing.' Asked how long this could go on for, the spokesman added: 'We will keep it under review as we go forward but clearly now it is entirely right that we continue to provide this level of data and transparency to the public as the world continues to fight this pandemic.' Advertisement

'I've always and the ZOE app has always argued that they should be put into context. On their own they are useless and scaremongering.

'They need to be put in context of the number of expected deaths on that day and things like the number of deaths from cancer or heart disease so people have some idea or proportion because generally they are used to frighten people.

'People have forgotten how many admissions there were at the height of winter.'

Unlike at the beginning of the pandemic, the link between the number of people catching the virus and those being admitted to hospital and dying is now weaker, due to the success of the vaccine roll out.

The latest government figures show that 84.6 per cent (44.5million) of the UK adult population has received their first Covid jab, while 62.1 per cent (32.7million) have received their second.

At the height of the second wave in January, 4,579 people were admitted to hospital in a single day. In the first wave of the pandemic, admissions hit 3,565 on April 1.

A fraction of this amount is currently being admitted to hospital, with 223 patients going to hospital each day on average in the seven days up to June 20.

Professor Tony Brookes, a health data scientist at Leicester University, told MailOnline he would very, very much support halting the daily publication of Covid cases and deaths.

Its all nonsensical scientifically, he said. It is clearly motivated to promote fear to keep people compliant.

Theyll never stop publishing those figures if they want a climate of fear.

But, if they are ready to move on then they might be receptive to dropping daily figures which are not helpful.

He added: There are more people dying every day from pneumonia, for example, but we dont get a daily update on that.

Figures published today by the Office for National Statistics show that 3.5 times more people died from flu and pneumonia than Covid in the week leading up to June 18.

The data also shows that deaths caused by the virus increased by 12 per cent compared to the previous week, but was still only responsible for 0.78 per cent of all fatalities in England.

Professor Karol Sikora, a healthcare specialist and former cancer programme director for the World Health Organization, also called on the Government to dump the daily cases and deaths figures.

The only figures that actually matter are hospital admissions, and they have been below 250 consistently every 24 hours.

The number of cases is irrelevant, the more people you test the more you will find.

But the number of hospital admissions tell you if the NHS is likely to go into a crisis because of coronavirus  and at the moment it is a flat-liner as you would say.

When asked whether the daily figures were stoking an environment of fear, he strongly agreed.

We dont do it for other viruses and we dont do it for the common cold or influenza, and influenza kills many people every year and we dont worry about it in the population.

Professor Sir Simon Wessely, a psychiatrist and epidemiologist at King's College London, said bringing an end to the daily data publications would be a 'great idea' that he's 'completely in favour of' and would be 'part of the return to normality'.

He said the figures should be published weekly and alongside the other main causes of death, like cancer, so people can see Covid in that context and make their own judgement about the risk.

'Hugh Edwards [the BBC News at Ten presenter] reading out every number every night does not serve a constructive purpose anymore,' he said.

'The virus is here to stay, along with many other risks in life.'

Professor Wessely added as the number get lower they get 'very difficult to interpret and measure', meaning small fluctuations can cause alarm for no reason.

'I can't see what the downside is. I have been saying this for ages,' he said.

Dr Yoon Loke, a professor of medicine and pharmacology at Norwich Medical School, said that Covid figures can only be helpful when used to draw conclusions over a long duration.

'The number of deaths continues to be in small numbers and relatively little change over the recent months. It doesnt help to look at small daily fluctuations,' he said.

Interested members of the public should keep an eye on the weekly Office for National Statistics Data instead, he said.

Dr Loke said: 'At a later stage, the Cases data should also revert to a weekly release. Covid is here to stay, much like flu and other respiratory illnesses.

'Life has to go on, and we cant keep fretting only about Covid when there are many, many other illnesses that are causing huge burdens on the NHS.

Professor Tony Brookes, a health data scientist at Leicester University, (left) said he would 'very, very much support' suspending the publication of daily figures. Professor Karol Sikora, a healthcare specialist, (right) also called on the Government to cancel its daily cases and deaths updates

Professor Sir Simon Wessely, a psychiatrist and epidemiologist at King's College London, said bringing an end to the daily data publications would be a 'great idea' that he's 'completely in favour of' and would be 'part of the return to normality'

'Imagine what the mental state of the nation would be like if there were daily statistics rammed down peoples throats regarding new cancers, heart attacks, strokes, pneumonia etc.

'People would live in a constant state of fear. I do accept that if outbreaks occur, then the statistics should be made available more regularly.'

In addition to the scientists, MPs are voicing concerns about the daily Covid data.

One Tory minister told Politico's Playbook that the constant information on cases and deaths encouraged people to be extra cautious and the same data for flu cases was shared there would be a call for restrictions for that virus.

Another MP told Playbook the numbers put a 'mental weight' on people and thing cannot get back to normality if there is always speculation on social media and in the news about small rises in cases.

Public health chiefs in Canada today announced that they would switch from publishing Covid daily to weekly.

Mylene Drouin, the regional director of publish health in Montreal, tweeted that her region would stop publishing data from the last 24 hour and only publish Covid data on Mondays.

She wrote that her team continues to follow the situation with great attention, but the decision was made because the pandemic is currently stable.

But Alexander Edwards, an associate professor in biomedical technology at the Reading School of Pharmacy, said: 'Not publishing the data is an interesting idea and something worth discussing, but the simple idea is transparency is really important.

'The amount of information is unprecedented, but generally in the UK we have a policy of making it available. If the data exists we should be publishing it.

'There is a really valid point on data overload, but it's more important to help people understand what is going on and let people know what the data actually means.

'Theres lots of information on symptoms and testing, but not much about daily life going forward. I think it would be better to try and help people understand, addressing that problem.'

Bharat Pankhania, a senior clinical researcher at the University of Exeter's College of Medicine and Health, supported this view.

He said: 'There is no need for people to look at the data if they do not want to, but on the other hand it's very important because it drives actions and interventions in a timely way.

'If I told you the infection rates are very high in your locality that's the message that is very important and can inform choices. Theres every reason for keeping publishing it, including to reassure people.'

Professor Sheila Bird, a professor at the University of Cambridge's biostatistics unit, said if data is published appropriately it 'can aid the publics understanding of how the pandemic is evolving'.

The data from 2020 compared to 2021 can also be presented as an extra visual aid, she said.



'Developing informative data-displays which support public understanding is better than suppression of data that the public has a right to know about,' Professor Bird added.

It comes as a study from scientists at Cambridge University found that fewer than one in a thousand people who catch Covid in England now die from the disease. They estimate the overall infection fatality rate (IFR) of coronavirus has been driven down to 0.085 per cent thanks to the country's hugely successful vaccine rollout.
Prosecutors on Monday charged a Colorado police officer with second-degree assault after allegedly putting a man in an illegal chokehold during an arson arrest earlier this month.

Greeley police officer Kenneth Amick, 48, has been placed on unpaid leave as a result of the police department's investigation into the alleged June 7 assault on Matthew Wilson, 36, police said in a statement.

At the time, Wilson complained that Amick, who was wanted on a warrant, was using excessive force by allegedly putting him in a chokehold and asked for a supervisor, police said. Two officers also later reported what they believed to be excessive force.

In June 2020, Colorado lawmakers banned police officers from using chokeholds and also required police officers to intervene if they believe excessive force is being used as part of a sweeping police reform bill passed in the middle of protests over the killing of George Floyd.

Greeley police officer Kenneth Amick, 48, (pictured) has been placed on unpaid leave as a result of the police department's investigation into the alleged June 7 assault on Matthew Wilson, 36, police said in a statement

Amick, who has worked for Greeley police for 15 years, was removed from patrol duty while police conducted their investigation and the department later recommended that prosecutors charge him with assault, leading him to be placed on leave, police said.

On Monday, the office of 19th Judicial District Attorney Michael J. Rourke charged Amick with strangulation, a form of second-degree assault.

Court records do not indicate if Amick has a lawyer yet and there was no answer at two telephone numbers listed for him.

On June 7, officers responded to the City Center North building after someone had activated a panic alarm. When they arrived, an employee said that a man was making threats to burn it down.

Officers contacted Wilson at nearby City Hall, learned there was a warrant for his arrest and Amick put him in handcuffs in the lobby, police said.

As Wilson was being escorted outside, he became agitated and complained that his wrists were hurting from the handcuffs.

At the time of his arrest, Matthew Wilson (pictured) complained that Amick, who was wanted on a warrant, was using excessive force by allegedly putting him in a chokehold and asked for a supervisor, police said

Amick then 'suddenly placed Wilson into a chokehold,' police said. 'After several seconds, Wilson showed ill effects from this hold while being placed on the ground. A second officer attempted to intervene during this initial encounter.'

Wilson was then released from the chokehold and continued to walk to a patrol car.

But Wilson, who was still handcuffed, tried to grab Amick's hand, which prompted Amick to strike Wilson's legs with his knees before placing Wilson on the ground to try to calm him down, police said. Officers then helped Wilson back up and put him in a patrol car.

Two police officers raised their concerns about the arrest and said they believed Amick used excessive force. Investigators then referred the case to the district attorney's office after finding there was probably cause for charges.

In Colorado, felonies such as the one Amick faces are punishable by between two and six years in prison as well as fines up to $500,000.

Amick, who is currently on unpaid administrative while he waits for his first court hearing on August 24, joined the Greeley Police Department in 2006.

He was awarded a medal of valor in January 2020, the highest decoration for bravery exhibited by a public safety officer, reported the Greeley Tribune.


A lucky shopkeeper has scooped more than 600,000 after winning the lottery three times in ten years.

Mehmet Ozer, who has run his own upholstery business in Islington, north London, for three decades, bagged the incredible sum after winning the EuroMillions in 2016, the UK National Lottery in 2018 and the Turkish National lottery in 1998.

In 2016, Mr Ozer won 303,465.20 in the EuroMillions after buying a ticket from the Co-op store opposite his upholstery business.

He said: 'My friend was in front of me [in the shop] and he got the EuroMillions Lucky Dip and then I got the Lucky Dip, within a few seconds of each other in the Co-op supermarket.'

Mehmet Ozer, who runs an upholstery business in Islington, north London, has scooped more than 600,000 after winning the lottery three times

He continued: 'On Saturday morning, I had to go to work early in the morning.

'I was having tea and reading my newspaper and then all of a sudden I realised I hadn't checked my lottery [ticket].

'I started looking at it, I think the second line from the bottom [of the ticket], a number came up and then a second one, third one, fourth one, fifth one and one of the lucky stars.'

Upon discovering his incredible win, Mr Ozer headed to the balcony of his home and was left in a state of shock.

He said: 'I went out to the balcony to get fresh air and I asked myself, ''Am I drunk? No, I'm not drunk''.

'I came back and looked again and for a few minutes, I looked at the date of the lottery because sometimes I play and don't check, and the date was correct, it was last night's lottery and I was in shock.

'The jackpot was 100million and two people were sharing the 100million, I was going to be the third person if I had one more number.'

After the win, the lucky North Londoner booked a flight to Italy and was finally able to purchase a property of his own after decades of renting.

He said: 'I went to Rome for the first time, I always wanted to go.

'It was a happy time, I was dreaming of coming back home and how I would have over 300,000 in my account, I couldn't believe it was true, it was a nice weekend trip. When I came back I purchased a flat.'

He later told The National Lottery: 'Until now I have always rented, this EuroMillions win means I can finally buy my own home in the city that I love so much, it's simply magical.'

However this was not the first time the shopkeeper drew the winning numbers.

In 1998, Mr Ozer claims he walked away with almost 300,000 after entering the National Turkish Lottery.

Mr Ozer won 303,465.20 in the EuroMillions in 2016 and was finally able to purchase a property after decades of renting. (Stock image)

He said: 'I was on holiday in Turkey for Christmas, they have a special lottery on New Years Eve and I got nearly 300,000 there as well.

'I had lots of family members who I helped, who didn't have a house, who wanted to go to university and just helped lots of people in the family.'

Mr Ozer claims he then won a third time while playing the UK National Lottery in 2019 after getting five numbers on the ticket. The win saw him receive 1,750.

The shopkeeper continued: 'They paid me 1,750.

'The lady who came to give me the champagne and the cheque said that people who win the lottery have more chances of winning again.'
The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the government can indefinitely detain certain immigrants who say they will face persecution or torture if they are deported to their native countries.

Over the dissent of three liberal justices, the court held 6-3 that the immigrants are not entitled to a hearing about whether they should be released while the government evaluates their claims.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the court that 'those aliens are not entitled to a bond hearing.'

'[T]he finality of the order of removal does not depend in any way on the outcome of the withholding-only proceedings,' he wrote in the opinion overturning the Fourth Circuit of Appeals.

The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the government can indefinitely detain certain immigrants who say they will face persecution or torture if they are deported to their native countries. Migrants are seen crossing the Rio Grande near Del Rio, Texas, on June 15

The case involves people who had been previously deported and, when detained after re-entering the United States illegally, claimed that they would be persecuted or tortured if sent back.

'Although the statute does not specify a time limit on how long DHS may detain an alien in the post-removal period, this Court has "read an implicit limitation" into the statute "in light of the Constitutions demands," and has held that an alien may be detained only for a period reasonably necessary to bring about that aliens removal from the United States"'.

He wrote that it would be reasonable for these immigrants to seek release after six months of being detained.

One man is a citizen of El Salvador who said he was immediately threatened by a gang after being deported from the U.S.

An immigration officer determined that the immigrants had a 'reasonable fear' for their safety if returned to their countries, setting in motion an evaluation process that can take months or years.

Over the dissent of three liberal justices, the court held 6-3 that the immigrants are not entitled to a hearing about whether they should be released while the government evaluates their claims

The issue for the court was whether the government could hold the immigrants without having an immigration judge weigh in.

The immigrants and the Trump administration, which briefed and argued the case before President Joe Biden's inauguration in January, pointed to different provisions of immigration law to make their respective cases.

Alito, in his opinion for the court, wrote that the administration's argument that the relevant provision does not provide for a bond hearing was more persuasive.

In dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer saw it differently.

'But why would Congress want to deny a bond hearing to individuals who reasonably fear persecution or torture, and who, as a result, face proceedings that may last for many months or years...? I can find no satisfactory answer to this question,' Breyer wrote.

The federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, had ruled in the immigrants' favor, but other appellate courts had sided with the government. Tuesday's decision sets a nationwide rule, but one that affects what lawyers for the immigrants called a relatively small subset of noncitizens.

Migrant families wade through the waters of the Rio Grande to get to the US on June 16
A park commission in Mobile, Alabama cancelled a July 3 event where Donald Trump was scheduled as the keynote speaker after the chairman claimed the event was becoming 'too partisan.'

'After the request was made, then there was contact with the Republican Party, they contacted us and then it became apparent that it was going to be a partisan political event, rather than just a patriotic event planned for that evening,' commission chairman Bill Tunnell told a local NBC affiliate in Alabama.

Trump, according to the report, was supposed to be the keynote speaker at a Saturday event at the USS Alabama Battleship Memorial Park in Mobile, Alabama  the day before Independence Day.

A spokesperson for the former president did not respond to a DailyMail.com request for comment on the reported plans.

Donald Trump was supposed to speak at the USS Alabama Battleship Memorial Park on Saturday, but the event was canceled for being to 'partisan'

Instead, Trump will hold a rally in Tampa, Florida on Saturday  the second post-presidency rally. Here the former president arrives for a rally in Ohio June 26, 2021

Park Commissioner Bill Tunnell said they decided to nix the event when Trump became the keynote speaker. He said it could no longer be just a 'patriotic event'

Alabama Republican Party Chairman John Wahl told NBC 15 that Trump had committed for Saturday night and was excited to speak to the Port City.

Wahl added that Trump is disappointed the event is not moving forward.

Currently, the president is scheduled to hold a rally in Tampa, Florida on Saturday. This is the second rally he is holding post-presidency. The first was in Ohio on June 26.

Tunnel says commissioners asked Attorney General Steve Marshall in May about the invitation for Trump to speak. In the response, the attorney general said there was not enough time to issue a formal opinion.

Marshall did say, however, that the park is able to be used for political events as long as access is 'available for all political parties and candidates on an equal basis.'

Former Pennsylvania Republican Senator Rick Santorum previously used the same park for a political rally in his 2012 presidential campaign, which Tunnell said was the reason he no longer wants the park used for partisan events.

'Rick Santorum was the straw that broke the camel's back. And that's when the commission went to the no partisan politics open to the public,' Tunnell said.
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For close to 20 years, Bagram Airfield was the heart of American military power in Afghanistan, a sprawling mini-city behind fences and blast walls just an hour's drive north of Kabul.

It was initially a symbol of the US drive to avenge the 9/11 attacks and then of its struggle for a way through the ensuing war with the Taliban.

Now, in just a matter of days, the last US soldiers will have departed Bagram.

They are leaving what probably everyone connected to the base - whether American or Afghan - considers a strained legacy.

US Central Command said last week it is well past 50 per cent packing up Bagram and the rest is going fast. American officials have said the entire pullout of US troops will most likely be completely finished by July 4.

The Afghan military will then take over Bagram as part of its continuing fight against the Taliban - and against what many in the country fear will be a new eruption of chaos.

As the withdrawal date for the US troops approaches, thousands of Afghan translators now face being left stranded because they haven't yet been accepted for a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) into America.

Up to 18,000 translators and interpreters are under constant fear of deadly attacks from the Taliban and have been run out of their homes because of their support for the American government over the last 20 years.

It has cost the US military 2,312 lives and $816bn, according to the Department of Defense.

AMERICANS WITHDRAW: Within days, the last US soldiers will depart Bagram (pictured: US troops load up helicopter onto a C-17 Globesmaster at Bagram on June 16). They are leaving what probably everyone connected to the base, whether American, British or Afghan, considers a strained legacy

US forces load a UH-60L Blackhawk helicopter into a C-17 Globemaster III in support of the Resolute Support retrograde mission, the withdrawal from Bagram, on June 16, 2021

A gate is seen at the Bagram Air Base, around 40 miles north of Kabul on Friday, June 25, as the last US troops withdraw from Afghanistan

The US fortress is 40 miles north of the capital, Kabul. It was the heart of American military might in Afghanistan, a sprawling mini-city behind fences and blast walls

The currently US departure from Bagram - once described as Afghanistan's Guantanamo - is rife with symbolism.

Not least, it's the second time that an invader of Afghanistan has come and gone through Bagram: First the Soviet Union and then the US.

The Soviet Union built the airfield in the 1950s. When it invaded Afghanistan in 1979 to back a communist government, it turned it into its main base from which it would defend its occupation of the country.

For 10 years, the Soviets fought the US-backed mujahedeen, dubbed freedom fighters by President Ronald Reagan, who saw them as a front-line force in one of the last Cold War battles.

The Soviet Union negotiated its withdrawal in 1989. Three years later, the pro-Moscow government collapsed, and the mujahedeen took power, only to turn their weapons on each other and kill thousands of civilians. That turmoil brought to power the Taliban who overran Kabul in 1996.

More than a decade later, a hundred British troops from Special Boat Service - the Royal Marines' equivalent of the SAS - flew into Bagram on November 15, 2001 to reconnoiter the area before the deployment of thousands of soldiers from Britain and the US.

Within days, they had the base up and running, including the old control tower which was blasted and bullet-riddled from the previous wars between the Russians and the US-backed mujahedeen.

When the US and NATO inherited Bagram in 2001, they found it in ruins, a collection of crumbling buildings, gouged by rockets and shells, most of its perimeter fence wrecked. It had been abandoned after being battered in the battles between the Taliban and rival mujahedeen warlords fleeing to their northern enclaves.

After dislodging the Taliban from Kabul, the US-led coalition began working with their warlord allies to rebuild Bagram, with temporary structures that then turned permanent. Its growth was explosive, eventually swallowing up roughly 30 square miles.

TALIBAN GAINS NEW GROUND: A lighting offensive by the Taliban which began in May has seen the group take control of vast swathes of rural Afghanistan and battle their way to the doorstep of major cities such as Kandahar, Herat and Kabul - with attacks on them expected soon

MARCH 2002: U.S. troops from 10th Mountain Division make their way a Chinook helicopter at Bagram Air Base on their way to take up the fight in eastern Afghanistan in March 2002

APRIL 2002: Royal Marine Commandos board Chinook helicopters at the Bagram Air Base as they prepare to be transported to the theatre of operations and participate in Operation Snipe in the Afghan mountains

NOVEMBER 2019: President Donald Trump delivers remarks to U.S. troops, with Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani standing behind him, during an unannounced visit to Bagram over Thanksgiving

'Bagram grew into such a massive military installation that, as with few other bases in Afghanistan and even Iraq, it came to symbolize and epitomize the phrase 'mission creep',' said Andrew Watkins, a senior analyst at International Crisis Group.

The mood on the ground among the locals, at the time, was described as one of 'delight'.

One Afghan soldier said at the time: 'It is so nice to see the British come here. British or Americans, I don't mind which, both are my friends. Five planes came in last night. When I saw the British planes I thought 'the British are coming in, so the Taliban are definitely going out'.'

With hindsight, it's clear that the man's surety was misplaced.

The base has been the subject of a number of deadly Taliban attacks over the last two decades.

In June 2009, two American soldiers were killed in a rocket attack that also left six US soldiers injured. Four US troops were killed and several wounded in a Taliban mortar attack in June 2013.

In December 2015, six US troops were killed after a Taliban suicide attacker rammed an explosives-laden motorcycle into a joint NATO-Afghan patrol near Bagram.

And in April 2019, a car bomb attack at Bagram left three Marines dead.

In total, approximately 2,312 American military personnel have been killed in Afghanistan since 2001

Now, the Taliban are on the cusp of a great comeback, recapturing vast swathes of the Afghani hinterland and drawing close to major cities as US and NATO withdraw.

The base has been the subject of a number of deadly Taliban attacks over the last two decades. In April 2019, three US Marines were killed when a Taliban car bomb detonated at the airbase

VICTIMS: Sgt. Benjamin S. Hines, 31, of York, Pa., Staff Sgt. Christopher K.A. Slutman, 43, of Newark, Del., and Cpl. Robert A. Hendriks, 25, of Locust Valley, N.Y were killed in April 2019 when a roadside bomb hit their convoy near Bagram Airfield

It has been visited by every US President - apart from Joe Biden - since American troops moved in: George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Biden visited when he was Vice President back in 2011

Bill Roggio, senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said Bagram's closure is a 'major symbolic and strategic victory' for the Taliban.

'If the Taliban is able to take control of the base, it will serve as anti-U.S. propaganda fodder for years to come,' said Roggio who is also editor of the foundation's Long War Journal.

It would also be a military windfall.

The enormous base has two runways. The most recent, at 12,000 feet long, was built in 2006 at a cost of $96 million. There are 110 revetments, parking spots for aircraft, protected by blast walls.

GlobalSecurity, a security think tank, says Bagram includes three large hangars, a control tower and numerous support buildings.

The base has a 50-bed hospital with a trauma bay, three operating theatres and a modern dental clinic. There are also fitness centers and fast food restaurants. Another section houses a prison, notorious and feared among Afghans.

It has been visited by every US President - apart from Joe Biden - since American troops moved in: George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Biden visited when he was Vice President back in 2011.

Bagram has also been symbolic in Hollywood having been featured in films such as Iron Man and Lone Survivor, as well as TV series Homeland.

An Afghan soldier walks around the perimeter of the airbase with the control tower seen behind the barbed-wire wall at Bagram Air Base

A watchtower along the perimeter of the heavily-fortified base, the hub of US operations in Afghanistan for the last 20 years

After dislodging the Taliban from Kabul, the US-led coalition began working with their warlord allies to rebuild Bagram, with temporary structures that then turned permanent. Its growth was explosive, eventually swallowing up roughly 30 square miles complete with a hefty border fence

The prison in the base was handed over to the Afghans in 2012 and they will continue to operate it. In the early years of the war, for many Afghans, Bagram became synonymous with fear, next only to Guantanamo Bay.

Parents would threaten their crying children with the prison.

In the early years of the invasion, Afghans often disappeared for months without any reports of their whereabouts until the International Committee of the Red Cross located them in Bagram. Some returned home with tales of torture.

'When someone mentions even the word Bagram I hear the screams of pain from the prison,' said Zabihullah, who spent six years in Bagram, accused of belonging to the faction of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a warlord designated a terrorist by the US. At the time of his arrest it was an offence to belong to Hekmatyar's party.

Zabihullah, who goes by one name, was released in 2020, four years after President Ashraf Ghani signed a peace deal with Hekmatyar.

Roggio says the status of the prison is a 'major concern,' noting that many of its prisoners are known Taliban leaders or members of militant groups, including al-Qaida and the Islamic State group. It's believed about 7,000 detainees are still held there.

'If the base falls and the prison is overrun, these detainees can bolster the ranks of these terror groups,' Roggio said.

Jonathan Schroden, of the US-based research and analysis organization CNA, estimates that well over 100,000 people spent significant time at Bagram over the past two decades.

'Bagram formed a foundation for the wartime experience of a large fraction of US military members and contractors who served in Afghanistan,' said Schroden, director of CNA's Center for Stability and Development.

'The departure of the last US troops from there will likely serve as the final turn of the page for many of these folks with respect to their time in that country,' he said.

The Americans have been giving the Afghan military some weaponry and other material. Anything else that they are not taking, they are destroying and selling it to scrap dealers around Bagram (pictured, a junkyard near the base)

District Governor Darwaish Raufi said many villagers have complained to him about the U.S. leaving just their junk behind (pictured, a man holds a teddy bear as people look for useable items at a junkyard near the Bagram Air Base)

The Americans have been giving the Afghan military some weaponry and other material. Anything else that they are not taking, they are destroying and selling it to scrap dealers around Bagram (pictured, a junkyard near Bagram Air Base)

Bagram villagers say they hear explosions from inside the base, apparently the Americans destroying buildings and material (pictured, people selecting items from a junkyard near Bagram Air Base)

Last week, the U.S. Central Command said it had junked 14,790 pieces of equipment (pictured, a policeman stands guard as workers unload a container at a junkyard in Bagram)

For Afghans in Bagram district, a region of more than 100 villages supported by orchards and farming fields, the base has been a major supplier of employment.

The US withdrawal effects nearly every household, according to district governor Darwaish Raufi.

The Americans have been giving the Afghan military some weaponry and other material.

Anything else that they are not taking, they are destroying and selling it to scrap dealers around Bagram. US officials say they must ensure nothing usable can ever fall into Taliban hands.

Last week, the US Central Command said it had junked 14,790 pieces of equipment and sent 763 C-17 aircraft loaded with material out of Afghanistan.

Bagram villagers say they have been hearing explosions from inside the base, which is apparently the Americans destroying buildings and materials.

Raufi said many villagers have complained to him about the US leaving just their junk behind.

'There's something sadly symbolic about how the US has gone about leaving Bagram. The decision to take so much away and destroy so much of what is left speaks to the U.S. urgency to get out quickly,' said Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Asia Program at the US-based Wilson Center.

'It's not the kindest parting gift for Afghans, including those taking over the base.'

Inevitably, comparisons to the former Soviet Union have arisen.

Retired Afghan Gen. Saifullah Safi, who worked alongside US forces at Bagram, said the Soviets left all their equipment when they withdrew. They 'didn't take much with them, just the vehicles they needed to transport their soldiers back to Russia,' he said.

Militiamen gather near Kabul on June 23 this year to pledge their allegiance to the Afghan government in preparation for a Taliban assault that is threatening to overwhelm major cities

Hundreds of militiamen shout 'death to the Taliban' as they join government forces in Kabul on June 23 ahead of what is expected to be a major jihadist assault

Meanwhile, Afghan translators and interpreters who have worked alongside all US military branches and against the insurgents for the last 20 years now fear they could be left behind.

They have served with the CIA, the State Department, the Army and the Marines on the frontlines in one of the most dangerous battle zones in the world - but have been left in limbo by the slow process to get accepted for a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV).

They are the cooks, drivers and cultural advisors who were essential in supporting ground operations - even though they knew siding with American military would put their livelihoods in imminent danger.

They are all under threat, and when the U.S. ends its military presence on September 11, they will be even more exposed to the violence of the Taliban, who have grown increasingly aggressive since Biden announced he was pulling out U.S. forces.

Many have already seen relatives killed and others fear they will be decapitated. They are now reaching out to Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to give them safe haven in the United States.

Some have been waiting years to have their application approved, with the longest dating back to 1981, according to No One Left Behind, the non-profit charity fighting to make sure the U.S. government keeps their promise to those who supported the military during some of the most intense fighting in Helmand Province.

The organization says 300 Afghan interpreters have been killed in targeted attacks while waiting to secure their visas since 2014, but the exact numbers are unknown.

The process should take nine months, but has been hampered by a myriad of setbacks including the COVID pandemic and the need for translators to get paperwork.

SIVs are available to those who have helped the U.S. military and now face serious threats as a result of their employment.

The U.S. has handed out 50 special visas per year to be issued to Afghan and Iraqi interpreters and translators.

There have also been 26,500 visas allocated to Afghans employed by the government since December 2014, but the process for those who haven't had their applications accepted is slow.
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem announced Tuesday that she will join a growing list of Republican governors sending law enforcement officers to the U.S. border with Mexico

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem announced Tuesday that she will join a growing list of Republican governors sending law enforcement officers to the U.S. border with Mexico.

Noem's announcement that she will send up to 50 South Dakota National Guard troops to Texas comes as the GOP ramps up a political fight with President Joe Biden over border security.

The issue has drawn a host of prominent GOP figures: Donald Trump is going to the border this week and Republican governors from Florida, Nebraska and Iowa have all committed to sending law enforcement officers for border security.

Noem drew a distinction between her decision to send the National Guard and other governors who are sending state police officers.

'The border is a national security crisis that requires the kind of sustained response only the National Guard can provide,' she said in a statement.

'We should not be making our own communities less safe by sending our police or Highway Patrol to fix a long-term problem President Bidens Administration seems unable or unwilling to solve.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott this month announced plans to build more barriers along the border.

Abbott's new push has been criticized as political theater, but he has defended the plan, saying the number of border crossers remains high.

Donald Trump is going to the border this week and Republican governors from Florida, Nebraska and Iowa have all committed to sending law enforcement officers for border security.

The governor said he will use $250 million in state money and crowdsourced financing for the barriers, although the timeline and cost for the push are unclear. It also faces potential court challenges from the federal government.

Large numbers of migrants have been showing up at the U.S. border with Mexico, with many turning themselves over to U.S. Border Patrol agents in seeking legal asylum status.

But the numbers of families and children traveling without their parents crossing into the U.S. have dropped sharply since March and April, while the encounters with single adults have remained high.

A private donation will fund the cost of sending the South Dakota National Guard troops, Noem said.

Noem's announcement that she will send up to 50 South Dakota National Guard troops to Texas comes as the GOP ramps up a political fight with President Joe Biden over border security. Migrants cross the border on rafts in Roma, Texas, on June 19

Noem drew a distinction between her decision to send the National Guard and other governors who are sending state police officers. 'The border is a national security crisis that requires the kind of sustained response only the National Guard can provide,' she said in a statement

The deployment is expected to last from 30 to 60 days, while the other states involved are sending law enforcement officers for roughly two-week stints.

The governor's office did not respond when asked for the identity of the private donor paying for the National Guard deployment.

But Democratic state Sen. Reynold Nesiba said the fact Noem was using a private donor to pay for the deployment showed it was not a ' real priority' for the state, but instead gave her 'political cover.' He said he was looking into whether using a private donation to fund the deployment is legal.

'This could set a dangerous precedent to allow anonymous political donors to call the governor and dispatch the Guard whenever they want,' he said.
An illegal overstayer who raped a brain-damaged woman he was employed to care for - fathering her son - has been sentenced to twelve years and eight months imprisonment.

The Ghana-born 63 year-old took advantage of the vulnerable woman, who has been disabled since being starved of oxygen at birth, when supposedly assisting at her home in London.

The church-going assistant pastor, an illegal in the UK for over 21 years, pleaded guilty to raping the woman between February 1 and March 1 last year.

A judge ordered that doctors could deliver the baby in November last year via caesarean section and the child is currently in the care of the local authority.

He also pleaded guilty to fraud by false representation, namely using a false identity to obtain employment with a cleaning company - earning 19,500.

The man was sentenced on Monday to twelve years and eight months behind bars.

The Ghana-born 63 year-old took advantage of the vulnerable woman, who has been disabled since being starved of oxygen at birth, when supposedly assisting at her home in London

Inner London Crown Court heard the victim's IQ is between 39 and 45 and she is also autistic and epileptic and unable to look after herself.

'She needs support walking for more than short distances and is incapable of independent living and incapable of communication, except for a few words,' said the Recorder of Southwark Judge Usha Karu.

'You were fully aware of her conditions and limitations and you were in a position of trust,' the judge told him.

'She would not have had the capacity to consent to sexual relations.'

The defendant and another carer were paid by the local council, via the victim's mother, to assist her when lockdown resulted in less visits to her local day centre.

She trusted the defendant, having previously dated him and knowing his connections with the church, but took her daughter to her GP when her stomach swelled up.

Inner London Crown Court (pictured) heard the victim's IQ is between 39 and 45 and she is also autistic and epileptic and unable to look after herself

When the doctor confirmed the pregnancy all males who had access to the victim - including her brother - came under suspicion and the defendant even tried to shift the blame to two lodgers.

'This was an attempt to deflect blame from himself and onto others,' said prosecutor Gino Connors.

'He said he did not know who the father of the baby was.'

However DNA tests proved he was 41 million times more likely to be the father than anybody else.

In his immigration application he lied that he was 'destitute' and relying on the support of his pastor and possessed perfect English - despite a translator being needed in court.

He has a wife and six children in Ghana but claimed he was single with no dependents.

George Payne, defending, told the court: 'He describes it as a spontaneous and unplanned act and takes responsibility and has shown genuine remorse.

'He was clearly working illegally in this country and was sending money to Ghana to support a large family.

'He had a respectable life and religion played a very important part of his existence.'

Describing the rape as a 'life-changing event' the victim's mother said: 'It has devastated my family. There is unbearable pain within my heart. It is heartbreaking that my daughter is unable to say what she endured.'

She also received 'threatening letters' from the defendant in the period before he was charged.

Judge Karu told the first-time offender: 'She was really a child. This was the most serious breach of trust and you cast blame upon others.'
Andy Ngo said his podcast was banned from SoundCloud on June 28 for violating the sites community standards

Journalist Andy Ngo became the most recent voice to be banned from a Big Tech platform after SoundCloud has permanently banned him from its platform.

Ngo, the editor-at-large for The Post Millennial, wrote in a tweet that he had received an email from the streaming platform that his show, 'Things You Should Ngo' had been removed for violating the site's terms of service - even though he said he had not posted a new episode of the show in more than a year.

'We take the security of our community very seriously,' the email read, according to a post on The Post Millennial. 'We hope that you can understand that SoundCloud is a place for people to share content, which respects our Terms of Use and Community Guidelines.'

The company would not specify which of its Terms of Use and Community Guidelines he violated, he said, and did not provide him with a way to find out more information about the charges against him. He said the ban came on June 28.

And once a user is banned from the site, Ngo said in his post, he is banned from ever returning to the site.

'Big Tech is not nonpartisan nor neutral,' Ngo tweeted. 'Being permanently suspended from @SoundCloud without knowing why or even having an opportunity to appeal is how it is now.'

It's the latest example of a 'Big Tech' platform silencing speech that it deems unsuitable: Ebay banned the sale of Dr. Seuss books, Disney yanked some of its classic movies off of its streaming platforms, Facebook has smothered debate on COVID vaccines and Twitter has banned the accounts of Donald Trump and other prominent conservatives.

In a tweet on Monday, Ngo claims the company did not tell him which terms he violated

The site prohibits users from using the platform for 'abusive, libelous, defamatory, pornographic or obscene' content or those that promote 'or incites violence, terrorism, illegal acts, or hatred'

What are the parallels between violent extremists in radical Islam and antifa? @MrAndyNgo interviews @Imamofpeace in this "Things You Should Ngo" episode, available now on podcast platforms and YouTube. https://t.co/3gmQjDZ47T pic.twitter.com/1AjhX4OR8u  Things You Should Ngo (@YouShouldNgo) March 25, 2020

Under the site's terms and conditions, users are prohibited from using the platform to transmit a host of things, including pornography, views that cite violence, material that is libelous, abusive or defamatory. It also forbids material that promotes 'hatred on the grounds of race, ethnicity, cultural identity, religious belief, disability, gender, identity or sexual orientation, or is otherwise objectionable in SoundClouds reasonable discretion.'

'The long list of violations Sound Cloud accuses me of allegedly violating include incitement to violence,' Ngo told Fox News. 'How can a legitimate business accuse a client of such egregious crimes without even pointing to the offending content or giving me an opportunity to ask for more information?'

DailyMail.com contacted SoundCloud for comment.

He said his podcast featured interviews with public figures like Ben Shapiro and Dave Ruben.

In the last episode of the show, posted in March 2020, he said, Imam Tawhidi discussed the parallels between violent Islamic extremists and members of Antifa.

'Big Tech is not nonpartisan,' Ngo said in the Fox interview. 'But at least paying clients like myself on SoundCloud should know exactly what content they've uploaded that is so egregious that it merits permanent suspension.

'I'm scratching my head over what they could find so objectionable about interviews with professors and mainstream figures,' he continued.

Ngo is known as a conservative voice, mainly covering protests. He gained national attention in 2018, when he tweeted that he was attacked by an Antifa protester at a rally.

Meanwhile, Mumford and Sons banjoist Winston Marshall received backlash in March for tweeting his support of Andy Ngo's book 'Unmasked: Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy,' and has since stepped away from the successful band.

YouTube announced in September 2019 that it had banned more than 17,000 accounts for violating its rules

Ngo isn't the only one who has been banished from Big Tech platforms in recent years.

In June 2019, YouTube announced it was changing its policies to 'better protect against' videos that discriminate based on age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status, and by September the video-streaming giant announced it banned more than 17,000 accounts.

Those bans have only increased during the coronavirus pandemic, though.

In April 2020, the site removed a video of two doctors suggesting COVID-19 death tolls were being exaggerated and urging an end to the lockdowns, claiming it violated the site's user policy by disputing health officials.

Then in January, the site temporarily blocked Donald Trump from uploading a video from his speech in Texas, in which he said there was 'zero risk' of 25th Amendment removal.

The site did not specify which of Trump's remarks violated its rules, but said he incited violence.

Among the remarks the former president gave that day was that 'The 25th Amendment will come back to haunt Joe Biden and the Biden Administration.

'As the expression goes: Be careful what you wish for.'

YouTube also temporarily took down TalkRadio's channel in the U.K. claiming it 'violated' the website's community guidelines by airing criticisms of COVID lockdowns.

The decision sparked backlash among Freedom of Speech advocates, and the site agreed to reinstate the channel shortly thereafter.

'We quickly remove flagged content that violate our Community Guidelines, including COVID-19 content that explicitly contradict expert consensus from local health authorities or the World Health Organization,' a spokesman for the site said at the time.

'We make exceptions for material posted with an educational, documentary, scientific or artistic purpose, as was deemed in this case.'

But the site continued to take remove content, taking down a video of Florida Gov. Ron De Santis in a roundtable discussion questioning the wisdom of coronavirus lockdowns, after he suggested there is no reason for children to wear masks.

A spokeswoman for YouTube parent Google said of the video: 'YouTube has clear policies around COVID-19 medical misinformation to support the health and safety of our users.'

'We allow videos that otherwise violate our policies to remain on the platform if they contain sufficient educational, documentary, scientific or artistic context,' she added.

'Our policies apply to everyone, and focus on content regardless of the speaker or channel,' the statement said.

In January, journalist Elijah Schaffer tweeted that he had been permanently banned from Facebook and Instagram without an explanation

Social media has not been much different, with Facebook and Instagram removing journalist Elijah Schaffer from its platforms.

He tweeted: 'Facebook and Instagram have permanently suspended me from their platforms without explanation.

'It was mostly just pictures of my wife, dog and memories of my mom who recently died,' he continued, 'But big tech is relentless.

'Reporting the truth is now illegal.'

And following the Capitol riots on January 6, both Facebook and Twitter announced former President Donald Trump would be suspended from their sites.

Twitter claimed at the time Trump had used the site to incite violence at the rally.

'After close review of recent tweets from @realDonald Trump account and the context around them - specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter, we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence,' the company said in a statement.

Facebook, meanwhile, said it would ban the former president for two years, after which it will look to experts to decide 'whether the risk to public safety has receded,' according to the New York Times.
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Thousands of homeless people are finally being moved into shelters from hotels in Midtown Manhattan where they were housed during the pandemic.

The Lucerne Hotel, where Upper West Side residents protested when homeless people moved in, was one of the first to be cleared after the state of emergency in New York expired.

The city housed some 230 homeless at the Lucerne Hotel with a total of 13,000 in 60 empty hotels at the height of the pandemic.

Only 68 were left at the Lucerne when they were forced to leave on Monday and taken to shelters across the city.

So far, three hotels have seen people removed - the Lucerne on Monday and The Blakely and Kixby Hotel on Tuesday - with at least five more to go this week.

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Homeless men and women began to be removed from the Kixby Hotel on Tuesday, the third hotel with homeless evictions

A person is seen on the street with all of their things after being removed from the Kixby Hotel

Sam, 44, a homeless US veteran doesn't know what he's going to do next. He suffers from PTSD

Staff members were seen helping load things into a bus to be moved to an unconfirmed shelter

Occupants of the Bentley Hotel were snapped removing their belongings on a porter's trolley as they were moved back into homeless shelters

Two men loaded their belongings into the back of a white bus outside the Bentley Hotel on Tuesday

Homeless people must now return to shelters, after they were housed in hotels throughout COVID to try and keep them safe from the virus over fears it would spread like wildfire within the cramped confines of shelters

A man with a walking stick was seen fist-bumping a friend as he moved out of the Bentley Hotel on Tuesday afternoon

Moments later, he boarded the bus after leaving the four-star Bentley Hotel, which is located in Manhattan's Upper East Side

People who had been staying at the Kixby Hotel, located close to the Empire State Building, were also moved out on Tuesday, and directed instead to the nearby Jack Ryan shelter. Some refused to go, and said they would prefer to live on the streets

'Theres no other choice,' Daniel Freeman told CBS New York about the move. 'What else am I going to do? I wish they would leave us right here just until my housing comes through.'

Joe Humphrey said, 'Its like were going backwards after we got ahead.'

One resident, Janet Pytlik, seemed sad to see the men going, saying 'I just hope that theyre doing the right thing and giving them a better start. I have no problem with them being here in the first place.'

Isaac McGinn, who works in press relations with the Department of Homeless Services in NYC, released a statement to DailyMail.com.

'This relocation strategy worked, flattening the curve last year, stopping the spread of COVID-19, keeping rates low since then, and saving lives,' the statement read.

'Now that health indicators are headed in the right direction and State OTDA has issued new statewide guidance on congregate shelter operations, we are phasing out this temporary program and returning to shelter, as we have said we would throughout the pandemic.

The first three hotels have been cleared, with at least five more expected to be cleared this week

People were being loaded onto yellow school bus with no air conditioning from The Blakely Hotel near Times Square on Tuesday

The Lucerne Hotel was one of the more controversial locations hosting homeless people

'Because this process involves moving thousands of individuals, it will take some time and wont be done overnight, but working in close partnership with communities and provider partners we anticipate completing this process by approximately the end of July.'

In total, around 9,000 homeless people are being moved from hotels to commercial shelters in the coming weeks.

In those shelters, multiple people will likely have to sleep in the same room, a concern with the amount of homeless people vaccinated in the city not known.

The department did not elaborate on the destination of the homeless New Yorkers and how many are expected to be moved per week, though it averages out to around 1,800 per week.

The City reports that eight hotels this week will lose 1,500 residents, including OYO Times Square, Hotel Times Square, the Comfort Inn on West 44th St., the Four Points on West 40th St., the Kixby Hotel and The Bentley on East 62nd St.

Movers were packing belongings into trucks as the removals took place Tuesday

People were being loaded on to school buses that reportedly lacked proper air conditioning

It's not clear where the buses were headed, though one resident cited the Schwartz Assessment Facility, which is located on Randall's Island

As the pandemic has waned, there has been a push to start reopening hotels, both across the city and across the country, which had similar hotel stays for homeless people.

The fate of the Lucerne Hotel going forward is not immediately clear. Calls to the hotel were not returned.

A notice on the hotel's website reads, 'We are currently closed at this time. Please continue to check back for updates about our reopening date.'

On Tuesday, The Blakely became the latest hotel to be cleared out of their homeless population.

DailyMail.com's exclusive photos show residents of the hotel being taken on to yellow school buses, which lacked air conditioning.

Homeless men and women are set to leave the Kixby Hotel on 35th Street

'Right now we're being moved to the Schwartz,' George Yepez told DailyMail.com on Tuesday.

Yepez pointed to a yellow bus that the homeless residents are being moved to, pointing out the lack of AC.

'There's a bunch of dudes in there that are sickly, They have medical conditions,' Yepez continued, noting the extreme heat inside the bus.

'This is what everybody in the city is going through,' Yepez said. 'They pack us up, send us to Randall's Island, now they're gonna have us sitting in a waiting room for hours, waiting for a bed.

'This is what the city of New York is doing.'

Yepez said that the staff were not forceful with him when it came to taking him out of his room on Tuesday, but said they could be forceful with other individuals.

'It made you feel like you're not wanted,' Yepez said of the removal. '[Like] you're a nobody.'

Pictured: The Lucerne Hotel, which saw 68 people removed on Monday

People were seen leaving the Kixby Hotel with all of their possessions with them after being removed

Schwartz Assessment Facility, which is run by Volunteers of America, did not return calls from DailyMail.com for comment.

On Tuesday, homeless people were also removed from the Kixby Hotel, located just a couple of blocks from Herald Square in Midtown Manhattan.

People were seen outside of the hotel with all of their possessions, with some having their things loaded on to a bus.

The next destination for many leaving the hotel will be a shelter, though some are refusing the move and instead will be living on the streets for the time being.

The Kixby Hotel marks the third hotel where homeless people were seen being removed from this week

The move to vacate the hotels comes as de Blasio's administration faces mounting pressure to curtail an alarming surge in crime in the section of Manhattan that the NYPD has linked to the high number of homeless people being housed there by the city.

The police precinct that includes Times Square and many of the hotel homeless shelters has seen a 183 percent spike in felony assaults and 173 percent spike in robberies so far this year compared to 2020, according to NYPD data.

For months residents living near the hotels have implored the city to relocate the homeless people who they blame for bringing crime and drug use right outside their front doors.

Previous photos taken by DailyMail.com show the grim realities of homelessness in Manhattan, with many people lying on the ground without shoes, wearing worn and ragged clothing, using drugs and drinking alcohol, or passed out on the sidewalk.

On May 18, the city Department of Social Services asked the State of New York to authorize 'the return of folks in temporary hotel locations to permanent shelter locations,' de Blasio said.

'It's time to get that clear sign-off from the state, so we can move forward. Once we get that sign-off, we can start immediately moving people to shelters and getting back to that work of moving them forward in their lives,' de Blasio said recently.

'This is something that is going to help us move forward,' he added.

However a spokesman for Cuomo refuted de Blasio's characterization, saying that the governor did not have an issue with the plan so long as all the shelter residents wear masks, even if they are vaccinated.

Many of the relocated homeless people have blended into the area, but others who struggle with mental health issues and substance abuse have become a growing presence near people's homes and in high-trafficked tourist destinations.

Crime in the area - heavily concentrated on Eighth Avenue between Penn Station and the Port Authority Bus Terminal near Times Square - has soared this year, according to the NYPD.

NYPD crime data shows there have been 174 assaults, 150 robberies and four shootings that left two tourists injured in that area between January and May.

Residents are seen being removed from The Blakely and loaded on to buses on Tuesday

Police set up a command post and metal barriers in Midtown Manhattan to crack down on violent crime that's being fueled, in part, by an illegal drug market between Penn Station and the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

The city has spent $300million on the hotel program since last April, when officials first negotiated a contract with the Hotel Association of New York City to find and provide rooms in hotels across the city, according to the New York Post.

The initial contract was for $78million, the Post reported, but that only covered a fraction of the rooms and hotels that the city needed. By October, records from the city comptroller showed, the city had spent $299million on the program.

In August, de Blasio had said the city was beginning to wind down its use of hotels as temporary shelters, as positivity rates declined before going back up again after the holiday season.

Then in September, the mayor called conditions in the area surrounding the Lucerne Hotel 'not acceptable' after a 60-year-old man was found dead inside the hotel. A source told the Post at the time that his death was not suspicious and appeared to be linked to natural causes.

But it came amid growing complaints from the wealthy Upper West Side community, who argued that the city officials did not get community input before moving the homeless residents into nearby hotels, including the Lucerne, which the Post reports, became home to many addicted to drugs.

The residents argued that the new tenants harmed their quality of life by accosting pedestrians; claimed they saw some of the men at the hotel use drugs and overdose on sidewalks; and that they were responsible for a rise in robberies and burglaries - even though police statistics showed crime remained down in the area.

They formed a group, called the West Side Community Organization, after the homeless were quietly brought to the hotel, and claimed they saw fight, drug use and people spitting - despite the pandemic.

The New York Post at the time also reported that many of the new tenants were sex offenders.

In total, around 9,000 homeless people are being moved from hotels to around 60 commercial shelters in the coming weeks

The group urged city officials to relocate the homeless individuals, prompting the mayor to begin moving the homeless to the Harmonia in Midtown.

But it soon emerged that the men who were being brought there were displacing disabled residents at the Harmonia, and advocates for the homeless reacted with fury, marching from Carl Schurz Park to Gracie Mansion and demanding that de Blasio resign.

The Department of Homeless Services only paused the relocation in mid-September, though, after the Legal Aid filed a lawsuit on their behalf.

Roughly one week later, the city announced it would move the residents from the Lucerne to a Radisson hotel in the Financial District, prompting residents there to create a Facebook page entitled 'Downtown NYCers for Safe Streets.'

'We believe that our residents should have been notified in advance of this possibility and now that it has been agreed to without our knowledge, we need to make our voices heard,' the page's description read.

The NYPD have now set up a command post and metal barriers in Midtown Manhattan in a bid to crack down on violent crime that is being fueled, in part, by an illegal drug market between Penn Station and Port Authority Bus Terminal. Police say crime has spiked in that area after hundreds of homeless were rehoused there in hotels during COVID

A post on the page provided residents with a template to raise their concerns to city officials, and one of the posts on the page reads: 'I have great compassion for the homeless, but moving them in a few blocks from my son where drug use was clear is not appropriate.

'These human beings deserve help, not a hotel room with no medical and no counseling,' the mother continued. 'And residents deserve to raise their kids without fear of witnessing drug use and homeless individuals who are ill screaming day and night yelling obscenities on every corner.'

'They are ill, they need help - not a hotel.'

By November, homeless individuals claimed Upper West Side residents were offering them food or money to move out, and by the end of the month, a judge had ruled that the homeless must be moved out of the Lucerne hotel and into the Radisson.

The announcement that the 'Homeless-to-Hotels' program, though, came with mixed reaction.

Some homeless residents said the private hotel room provided a vastly better living experience than sleeping in a shelter, the Times reported, and others said they would rather live in the street than go back to living in a shelter.

Advocates have also argued that the decision is premature, as the Federal Emergency Management Association has offered to pay for the hotels until the end of September, and many of the homeless may not be vaccinated.

The city has said that about 6,300 homeless adults had been fully vaccinated through its Homeless Services sites, but officials did not know how many had been vaccinated elsewhere.

More than 17,000 adults are in the shelter program, the Times reported.
A three-year-old girl allegedly murdered by her 'uncaring' mother and the woman's boyfriend was 'dead before the (999) call was made', a court has heard.

Kaylee-Jayde Priest was found dead at the flat where she lived with her mother, Nicola Priest, on August 9 last year.

The youngster, described in court as a 'happy child', died from serious chest and abdominal injuries.

Later medical examinations showed she had also suffered historical injuries including broken ribs, lower leg fractures and a broken sternum, Birmingham Crown Court heard.

Priest, 22, and 21-year-old Callum Redfern, who prosecutors have alleged was in a 'close sexual relationship' with the child's mother, are accused of Kaylee's murder, and a separate alternative charge of manslaughter

Jurors heard claims that Priest would hit Kaylee around the head and refer to her as a 'f****** brat', while the youngster was also heard crying 'in a fearful tone'.

On one occasion, neighbours in a flat below recalled hearing a bang above and then Kaylee crying, before allegedly hearing Priest say: 'I'll just say she fell off the bed.'

The same residents claimed they noticed that 'when Kaylee cried, the response appeared to be to drown out her crying with music'.

Kaylee-Jayde Priest was found dead at the flat where she lived with her mother in Birmingham

Floral tributes to the young girl were left outside the flat after families learned of her death

In a text message exchange on July 24 2020, days before Kaylee's death, Priest told Redfern: 'I'm gonna kill her... because she keeps leaving the living room or going in the kitchen, so I've paled (hit) her one and smacked her for sh****** in her nappy'.

Redfern said: 'Good - give her one from me.'

Priest replied: 'I will, babe.'

Three days later, Redfern messaged Priest saying: 'I'm going to keep the little brat away from me... sick of your spunking daughter.'

Jurors heard the Crown's claim that such messages were indicative of the 'uncaring attitude from Priest and Redfern towards Kaylee'.

Opening the case on Tuesday, prosecution barrister Andrew Smith QC said: 'At 11.11am on August 9 2020, Nicola Priest dialled 999 to summon an ambulance to her home address in Kingshurst (Solihull) to treat her daughter.

'Kaylee-Jayde Priest, her three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, was dead before the call was made.

'The prosecution case is that her death was caused by her having received serious injuries to her chest and abdomen in a sustained assault on August 8 of last year.

'That intentional assault occurred when both of the defendants were alone with Kaylee-Jayde.'

A photo tribute at the scene of her death showed her happy and smiling in poignant scenes

Her mother Nicola Priest, 22, and 21-year-old Callum Redfern deny murdering the little girl

He added: 'Kaylee-Jayde was pronounced dead at 11.25am on August 9.

'The prosecution contends the deliberate unlawful actions of Callum Redfern and Nicola Priest caused her death, and that they are responsible for her murder.'

Mr Smith said neighbours had spoken of hearing parties 'lasting many hours' and more shouting by Redfern, but also Priest, with one resident claiming 'the tone of her voice seemed angry, and did not express love or care'.

From the time Priest moved in to the flat in mid-2019, nearby residents claimed they heard her 'shouting with real regularity' at Kaylee, including comments like 'Shut up', 'Go away' or 'Leave me alone' - and 'never anything positive or kind'.

In April 2020, the mother of Priest's ex-partner 'noticed a circular bruise-type mark of about one inch on Kaylee's cheekbone'.

Priest allegedly told her: 'She's been a little sh** this morning.'

In early July, a family friend allegedly saw Priest hit Kaylee across the head 'with the back of her hand', and later 'pulled Kaylee's hair' when the child went to get food from the fridge.

The prosecutor said that, on the evening of August 8 2020, Redfern and a male friend went to Priest's third-floor flat with a bottle of vodka.

While there, Redfern smoked cannabis and, with Priest, put Kaylee to bed.

Some minutes later, Redfern's friend 'heard Kaylee whinging - calling out, saying she wanted to come back out of her bedroom and carry on playing'.

As Kaylee's cries continued, Priest's bedroom door was heard to 'open and shut'.

The Crown's barrister said: 'About 10 minutes after, he heard Mr Redfern shout 'Kaylee's been sick, Nicky, let's get her in the bath'.'

Mr Smith said: 'He heard no more crying after Kaylee had been put back to bed.'

Priest, of Poplar Avenue, Edgbaston, Birmingham, and Redfern, of Temple Street, Dudley, West Midlands, are also accused of causing or allowing the death of a child and cruelty to a child, between June 12 and August 3 2020.

They deny any wrongdoing and the trial continues.
Wally the wandering walrus has made a splash after he hitched a ride on a boat so he could sunbathe.

The Arctic animal is only about three years old but all his adventuring so far away from home has clearly left him feeling long in the tooth and in need of a rest.

He scrambled up onto a moored boat so he could catch up on his beauty sleep, while starstruck tourists clamoured to get close and take photos.

Photographer Simon Carder, 56, was holidaying with his partner in the Isles of Scilly when their captain spotted the slumbering whopper at about 5.45pm on Saturday.

Simon whipped out his camera and took a collection of cracking photos of Wally.

Experts think Wally the walrus floated over on an ice floe across the North Atlantic from Greenland before he ended up scrambling aboard a moored boat in the Isles of Scilly

Wally the walrus clambered on to a moored boat to catch some beauty sleep

Tourists have been delighted by the walrus aboard a boat in the Isles of Scilly

The wise-looking walrus patiently posed for the camera from his makeshift ship bed.

His wrinkly neck and bristly face make him look like a weather-beaten old sailor in the photos.

'It's certainly not something you expected to see and it was quite incredible really,' said Simon, of Bath, Somerset.

'Obviously I'm quite surprised because it is meant to be in the Arctic rather than here.

'It was just lying there sunbathing, looking around. I think it had been there all afternoon.'

The porker - who could weigh up to a tonne - has been amazing locals since he hitched a ride on an arctic ice floe and first washed up in Wales.

The bristly-faced Arctic animal displaying his long white teeth as tourists watch on from the Isles of Scilly off the coast of Cornwall in south-west England

Where's Wally? Spot the Arctic animal far from home aboard one of the moored ships by the Isles of Scilly

But the RSPCA has warned it is 'sad' to see the walrus so far from where he should be, adding that he is 'underweight' has been 'obviously disturbed' by day-trippers getting too close.

Animal welfare groups believe Wally came across the North Atlantic Ocean from Greenland on an ice floe.

He has been travelling across the world since March, stopping off in Cornwall, Pembrokeshire and even Spain, France, and Ireland in his 2,000 mile adventure.

Six days after first appearing in Ireland in March, the RSPCA were called out to check on the creature at the bottom of a cliff near Broad Haven South beach in Pembrokeshire, Wales.

After becoming a known figure in the area, animal welfare groups believe he left after becoming 'obviously disturbed' by day-trippers getting too close.

Wally the walrus was captured by photographer Simon Carder who was 'surprised' to see him so far from his Arctic home while on holiday in the Isles of Scilly with his partner

Irresponsible tourists tried to approach him using jet-skis, paddleboards and drones as he rested on a RNLI slipway in the town's harbour.

It became a concern for RNLI volunteers, who had to resort to shooing Wally off the slipway, using brooms and airhorns to try to move the animal.

The RSPCA Cymru and Dyfed-Powys Police had to issue a plea to tourists to keep their distance from Wally, who is protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981.

RSPCA animal rescue officer Ellie West described Wally's plight as 'sad' during Radio 4's Today programme back in March.

She said at the time: 'Whilst it is a very unusual sight [...] it is quite a sad occurrence because we have to remember that this walrus is a very, very long way from where he should be.'
Rudy Giuliani is the subject of another Department of Justice investigation into his lobbying activities this time reportedly scrutinizing allegations that he worked for Turkish interests.

He is already under criminal investigation amid questions about whether he failed to declare lobbying on behalf of Ukrainian figures.

The new probe, reported by Bloomberg News, centers on his 2017 representation of an Iranian-Turkish gold trader accused of helping a state-owned Turkish bank avoid sanctions and funnel billions of dollars to Iran.

Giuliani pushed the Trump administration to release Reza Zarrab as part of a prisoner swap with Turkey.

At time, he was floating the idea he could be released in exchange for Andrew Brunson, an American pastor detained on flimsy charges by Turkey.

'Suppose I did talk to Trump about it - so what? I was a private lawyer at the time,' Giuliani told Bloomberg News in 2019.

'Maybe Im wrong. Maybe at some point I dropped his name in a conversation.

Former mayor of New York and Donald Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani faces fresh scrutiny this time as the Department of Justice reportedly investigates whether he lobbied on behalf of Turkish interests

In 2017, Giuliani represented Reza Zarrab, an Iranian-Turkish gold trader accused of helping a state-owned Turkish bank avoid sanctions and funnel billions of dollars to Iran. Giuliani reportedly urged the Trump administration to release him as part of a prisoner swap

Giuliani floated the idea of a prisoner swap in 2017 to return pastor Andrew Brunson, who was being held on flimsy charges in Turkey. He was eventually freed late in 2018, and is seen here praying with President Trump in the White House Oval Office after returning to the U.S.

'Or maybe one of his people talked to him about it because I was trying to do a prisoner swap.'

He also urged the extradition of Fethullah Gulen, a top priority of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who accuses the exiled cleric of plotting a 2016 coup attempt.

The request was immediately opposed by then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who argued it would constitute interference in an ongoing criminal case in New York federal court.

Zarrab eventually pleaded guilty and began cooperating with investigators.

Guilani is already under intense legal scrutiny.

Federal Bureau of Investigation agents seizing Giulianis electronic devices in April 28 raids on his Manhattan home and office as part of an inquiry into whether he illegally lobbied on behalf of Ukrainian interests

Giuliani has denied lobbying for either Turkish or Ukrainian interests, and the government has not accused him of wrongdoing in either matter.

If the authorities determine that Giuliani acted for a foreign interest, it could ask him to register as a lobbyist and disclose contacts he had with U.S. and Turkish officials, according to Bloomberg.

Last week, his law license was suspended by New York state for his role in the battle to overturn last year's election results.

Giuliani also urged Trump administration to extradite Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, who has been living in Pennsylvania since falling out with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan

The committee of First Department Appellate Division judges said Giuliani was not fit to practice law after he 'communicated demonstrably false and misleading statements to courts, lawmakers and the public at large in his capacity as lawyer for [Trump] and the Trump campaign' over the president's failed election campaign.

And a slew of new books picking over the last days of the Trump presidency offer a deeply unflattering view of the president's personal lawyer.

One of them suggests Giuliani was particularly erratic he fuelled the president's false belief that Mike Pence could overturn the election results.

'The one person Trump did have at his side, Rudy Giuliani, was drinking heavily and in a constant state of excitation, often almost incoherent in his agitation and mania,' author Michael Wolff wrote in an excerpt of his book published in New York magazine on Monday.
Britain and Brussels are set to agree a truce to avoid a so-called 'sausage war' over exports to Northern Ireland.

The UK and the bloc are expected to agree an extension to the current temporary post-Brexit arrangements to ensure that chilled meats will continue to be allowed to be shipped from Great Britain to Northern Ireland.

A grace period allowing chilled meats to cross the Irish Sea is due to expire at the end of tomorrow but both sides expect it to be extended.

Downing Street said that it believes a deal to avoid a ban will be reached 'on terms which are acceptable to the UK'.

Boris Johnson had threatened to unilaterally extend the grace period, something which would have triggered retaliatory action from the EU  a trade conflict which has been dubbed the 'sausage war'

European Commission vice-president Maros Sefcovic said he was confident a solution could be found on the chilled meats issue

The Number 10 comments came after European Commission vice-president Maros Sefcovic said he was confident a solution could be found before the scheduled ban on sausage shipments came into force on July 1.

The Prime Minister's Official Spokesman said: 'We expect to agree an extension to the chilled meat grace period soon, on terms which are acceptable to the UK.

'We will announce further details in the usual way.'

The extension is expected to be announced tomorrow - the last possible date to avoid a ban on chilled meats from Great Britain entering Northern Ireland's shops.

Boris Johnson had threatened to unilaterally extend the grace period, something which would have triggered retaliatory action from the EU  a trade conflict which has been dubbed the 'sausage war'.

The prohibition on chilled meats is one element of Brexit's contentious Northern Ireland Protocol, which has created a series of economic barriers on Irish Sea trade.

The protocol is aimed at avoiding a hard border with Ireland by effectively keeping Northern Ireland in the EU's single market for goods.

Shipments of chilled meats from third countries into the single market are banned  a prohibition which will cover the rest of the UK unless a lasting solution is found.

Mr Sefcovic told a Northern Ireland Assembly committee yesterday that he was confident an extension would be granted 'that will address both sides' needs and concerns'.

He said an 'obvious' way to remove new Irish Sea trade checks and restrictions on a longer term basis would be for the UK to strike a deal on animal and plant standards that would see London align with Brussels' agri-food regulations.
Donald Trump continued escalating his criticism of 'weak' Bill Barr on Tuesday, claiming he 'lost confidence' in his attorney general even before he shed doubt on his voter fraud claims following the 2020 election.

ABC News journalist 'Jonathan Karl's story on Slow Moving Bill Barr is made-up beyond any level imaginable,' Trump wrote in a statement sent out Tuesday. 'It is, in other words, Fake News!'

'I lost confidence in Bill Barr long before the 2020 Presidential Election Scam,' he continued from his Save America political action committee email.

'He, and other RINOs (you see it all the time!), always fold,' Trump wrote. 'If he becomes 'less' for President Trump, maybe they will leave him alone. It takes a very strong and special person to go against the 'mob'. Bill Barr was not that person.'

The term 'RINO', or Republican in name only, has been dubbed an insult to those on the right who identify as Republicans but pro-Trumpers feel are not Republican enough.

This is the third day in a row that Trump released a statement railing against Barr.

The comments following a report in The Atlantic including excerpts from ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl's upcoming book, which included multiple interviews with Trump's former attorney general.

Barr said, according to Karl, that he knew Trump's claims of a rigged election were 'bulls**t' from the start and only launched an investigation to make sure he could tell Trump he did all he could to probe it.

Donald Trump released on Tuesday a third statement railing against former attorney general Bill Barr, who he called 'weak' and 'pathetic' for not backing his voter fraud claims

'Despite evidence of tremendous Election Fraud, he just didn't want to go there,' Trump said in his Tuesday statement. 'He was afraid, weak, and frankly, now that I see what he is saying, pathetic.'

'The facts are rapidly coming out in States and Courts about the 2020 Presidential Election Scam, and let's see if Bill Barr, a man who was unable to handle the pressure, was correct? The answer will be a resounding, NO!'

Trump blamed Mitch McConnell in his Monday statement for helping seal Joe Biden's 'corrupt election' win by working with Barr to downplay his election fraud claims

'He never fought for the White House and blew it for the Country,' Trump wrote in his statement on the matter. 'Too bad I backed him in Kentucky, he would have been primaried and lost!'

'Based on press reports, he convinced his buddy, Bill Barr, to get the corrupt election done, over with, and sealed for Biden, ASAP!' he continued.

Trump claimed that the Republican leader didn't fight enough to try and overturn the election in his favor  and said if he was president, he would be vetoing Democratic legislation left and right.

'Had Mitch McConnell fought for the Presidency like he should have, there would right now be Presidential Vetoes on all of the phased Legislation that he has proven to be incapable of stopping,' he wrote.

'Not to mention, he lost two Senatorial seats in Georgia, making the Republicans the Minority in the Senate.'

FROM 'RINO' TO 'PATHETIC SWAMP CREATURE': TRUMP RAMPS UP BARR CRITICISM SUNDAY STATEMENT RINO former Attorney General Bill Barr failed to investigate election fraud, and really let down the American people. Even the scam that took place in Georgia of ballot stuffing on camera, he couldn't see what was wrong with it. Just like he failed to understand the Horowitz report and let everyone down with respect to getting a timely investigation (where's Durham?) on all of the corruption of the Obama-Biden Administration. It's people in authority like Bill Barr that allow the crazed Radical Left to succeed. He and other RINOs in the Republican Party are being used in order to try to convince people that the election was legitimate when so many incredible facts have now come out to show conclusively that it wasn't. He came in with a semi-bang and went out with a whimper. Earlier in his term Bill Barr went ballistic on CNN with Wolf Blitzer warning Democrats were changing election rules to flood the system with mail-in ballots that 'as a matter of logic' are 'very open to fraud.' They are, and Bill Barr did nothing about it. If there was no fraud, why are Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and other States spending so much time and effort on exposing the fraud? We already know that: 101,789 'obsolete' voters on the rolls in Georgia, including 18,486 dead people Ballot batches off by up to 17.5 percent in Maricopa County, Arizona 'Massive' chain of custody problems with drop boxes in Georgia, missing hundreds of thousands of records for months after the election Thousands of ballots 'wheeled in through the back door' in Fulton County days after the election 'Double feeding' ballots in Fulton County, Georgia Nearly 200,000 illegal 'indefinitely confined' votes in Wisconsin that violated Voter ID law 'Cash for votes' scheme in Nevada Illegal alien votes Election law changes were not authorized by the State Legislatures, which is mandated by the U.S. Constitution And much more! If he felt this way, why did Barr say he was 'greatly honored' and 'proud to have played a role in the many successes and unprecedented achievements you have delivered for the American people' in the final letter he wrote to me? He said, 'Few could have weathered these attacks, much less forge ahead with a positive program for the country.' Now it was revealed that Barr was being pushed to tell lies about the election by Mitch McConnell, another beauty, who was worried about damaging the Republicans chances in the Georgia runoff. What really damaged the Senate Republicans was allowing their races to be rigged and stolen, and worse, the American people to no longer believe their vote matters because spineless RINOs like Bill Barr and Mitch McConnell did nothing. Bill Barr was a disappointment in every sense of the word. Besides which, Barr, who was Attorney General (lawyer) shouldn't be speaking about the President. Instead of doing his job, he did the opposite and told people within the Justice Department not to investigate the election. Just like he did with the Mueller report and the cover up of Crooked Hillary and RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA, they don't want to investigate the real facts. Bill Barr's weakness helped facilitate the cover up of the Crime of the Century, the Rigged 2020 Presidential Election! MONDAY STATEMENT Had Mitch McConnell fought for the Presidency like he should have, there would right now be Presidential Vetoes on all of the phased Legislation that he has proven to be incapable of stopping. Not to mention, he lost two Senatorial seats in Georgia, making the Republicans the Minority in the Senate. He never fought for the White House and blew it for the Country. Too bad I backed him in Kentucky, he would have been primaried and lost! Based on press reports, he convinced his buddy, Bill Barr, to get the corrupt (based on massive amounts of evidence that the Fake News refuses to mention!) election done, over with, and sealed for Biden, ASAP! TUESDAY STATEMENT Jonathan Karl's story on Slow Moving Bill Barr is made-up beyond any level imaginable. It is, in other words, Fake News! I lost confidence in Bill Barr long before the 2020 Presidential Election Scam. It was when he dismissed and didn't act on the very powerful Horowitz Report, and instead gave everything over to John Durham, who has seemingly disappeared from the planet. Can you even believe a report coming out during the Biden Administration? We caught them but unfortunately didn't have an Attorney General who was capable of acting and wouldn't go against his friends in Washington, D.C. Barr was a 'swamp creature' who was devastated when the Radical Left wanted to impeach him. He, and other RINOs (you see it all the time!), always fold. If he becomes 'less' for President Trump, maybe they will leave him alone. It takes a very strong and special person to go against the 'mob'. Bill Barr was not that person. Despite evidence of tremendous Election Fraud, he just didn't want to go there. He was afraid, weak, and frankly, now that I see what he is saying, pathetic. The facts are rapidly coming out in States and Courts about the 2020 Presidential Election Scam, and let's see if Bill Barr, a man who was unable to handle the pressure, was correct? The answer will be a resounding, NO! Advertisement

The statement was the second from Trump in less than 24 hours lashing out at McConnell and 'disappointment' Barr for 'letting down the American people' by not outwardly supporting overturning the results.

'RINO former Attorney General Bill Barr failed to investigate election fraud, and really let down the American people,' Trump said in his Sunday evening statement from his Save America political action committee email.

'It's people in authority like Bill Barr that allow the crazed Radical Left to succeed,' the former president continued in his statement. 'He and other RINOs in the Republican Party are being used in order to try to convince people that the election was legitimate when so many incredible facts have now come out to show conclusively that it wasn't.'

Trump has repeated his claims nearly daily that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and rigged by Democrats for Joe Biden.

Barr said, according to excerpts published on Sunday, that he only really launched a Justice Department probe into Trump's voter fraud claims because he wanted to cover his bases when the then-president came to him about it.

'My attitude was: It was put-up or shut-up time,' Barr told Axios' Jonathan Karl. 'If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it.'

'But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all bulls**t,' he added. 'Instead of doing his job, he did the opposite and told people within the Justice Department not to investigate the election.'

Trump said in his statement that it was then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who pressured Barr to downplay GOP claims of voter fraud because he was worried about losing Republican Senate seats in two runoff elections in Georgia at the time.

Bill told Karl in interviews published in The Atlantic Sunday, that he concluded early on when declaring the investigation that it was highly unlikely that any evidence existed that would change that outcome of the 2020 election.

'He came in with a semi-bang and went out with a whimper,' Trump wrote Sunday of his former DOJ head, claiming he 'did nothing about' COVID-era election rules that he said left the ballots 'very open to fraud.'

'Bill Barr was a disappointment in every sense of the word,' he added.

Instead of doing his job, he did the opposite and told people within the Justice Department not to investigate the election.

Barr said he opened an investigation because he knew former Trump was going to confront him about his claims of fraud and a 'rigged' election, and he wanted to be able to say he looked into it and found nothing.

The former attorney general said that McConnell urged him to keep in good favor with Trump, but also speak out against election fraud claims because he felt he wasn't in a good position to do so himself.

'Look, we need the president in Georgia,' McConnell said, according to Barr. 'And so we cannot be frontally attacking him right now.'

At the time, the Republicans were vying in two key Senate runoff elections in Georgia, which ultimately decided the Democratic majority in the upper chamber after both Republican incumbents were defeated.

Barr said McConnell told him: 'You're in a better position to inject some reality into this situation. You are really the only one who can do it.'

Trump responded to this part of the report with: 'Now it was revealed that Barr was being pushed to tell lies about the election by Mitch McConnell, another beauty, who was worried about damaging the Republicans chances in the Georgia runoff.'

'What really damaged the Senate Republicans was allowing their races to be rigged and stolen, and worse, the American people to no longer believe their vote matters because spineless RINOs like Bill Barr and Mitch McConnell did nothing,' he accused.

Barr, who was Trump's attorney general from February 2019 until December 2020, said that he knew from the start that Trump's election fraud claims were 'bulls**t' despite opening a Justice Department investigation into it, according to an upcoming book

Following Joe Biden's declared win in November 2020, Trump immediately launched claims of widespread voter fraud by Democrats and began a series of lawsuits and probes into the election  especially involving the mass amount of mail in ballots in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

The former president is still spewing these claims, including at his first post-presidency rally in Ohio on Saturday night where he said that he is the legitimate election winner.

'This was the scam of the century and this was the crime of the history,' he said to a massive crowd gathered in Wellington, Ohio.

Last December, Barr told the Associated Press: 'To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election.'

Karl said Barr told him about a conversation he had with Trump after the report went out.

'Did you say that?' Trump had asked Barr, according to the former attorney general.

'Yes,' Barr responded.

'How the f**k could you do this to me? Why did you say it?' he shot back

'Because it's true,' Barr said he told the then-outgoing president.

'You must hate Trump. You must hate Trump,' he responded, referring to himself in the third person.

Trump insisted to supporters at his Ohio rally Saturday that in some states there were 'more votes than voters', that there was 'North Korean-style turnout' and that 'ballots were wheeled in backdoors.'

'There's just mountains of evidence,' Trump claimed, adding that Democrats 'used COVID in order to cheat.'

He said the Trump campaign lost dozens of court cases because 'many of our judges were gutless.'

'And I am ashamed of our Supreme Court,' the ex-president said.

The court, which skews 6-3 conservative thanks to three Trump nominees making it through in his four years, refused to take up the election fraud cases.

Trump gave a shout out to MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who has been publicly pushing the conspiracy that Trump won.

'Where's Mike, the pillow man?' Trump asked the crowd as he referred to Lindell as a 'patriot.'

He also raged at the government's treatment of the 'greatest mayor in the history of New York' Rudy Giuliani, who lost his law license Thursday over the election fraud farce. He also had his home raided by the FBI earlier this year and 18 electronic devices were seized.

'I'm not the one trying to undermine American democracy, I'm the one trying to save American democracy,' Trump went on.
British Airways has been fined 1.8 million after a female employee was crushed beneath a baggage tug at Heathrow Airport.

The woman was struck by a tug pulling a train of dollies - vehicles used to transport baggage - at Terminal 5 on March 16, 2018, Southwark Crown Court heard.

She was catapulted under another passing tug pulling dollies loaded with luggage, sustaining serious crush injuries.

The hearing was told that the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) discovered the worker was using the centre of the roadway between two lanes as a walking route.

The woman was struck by a tug pulling a train of dollies - vehicles used to transport baggage - at Terminal 5 of Heathrow Airport on March 16, 2018, Southwark Crown Court heard

A spokesman for the HSE said: 'This unsafe practice had been commonplace in the baggage hall for at least 10 years.

'The investigation also identified significant failings in the general management of health and safety and workplace transport risks, including issues relating to supervision and monitoring, risk assessment and training.'

British Airways admitted breaching Section 2(1) of the Health and Safety at Work Act and was fined 1.8 million and ordered to pay costs of 35,724 by the judge.

HSE inspector Megan Carr said: 'The situation in the baggage hall at Heathrow Terminal 5 was an incident waiting to happen.

She was catapulted under another passing tug pulling dollies loaded with luggage, sustaining serious crush injuries. Pictured: Stock image

'British Airways failed to appreciate the serious nature of the risks to which its employees were exposed and as a result failed to take appropriate action to ensure they were properly protected.'

A British Airways spokesperson told SurreyLive: 'The safety of our colleagues and crew is always our priority and we deeply regret that this incident was able to occur, despite the measures we had in place.

'We've been working hard to learn from this experience and implement further improvements to our safety procedures .'
Prosecutors in Florida will pursue a grand jury investigation into the deadly collapse of the Champlain Towers condominium building - as a survivor files a lawsuit which describes the pure terror of trying to escape as the building collapsed around her.

The grand jury's investigation would examine factors and decisions that led to Thursday's early morning collapse of the 12-story building in Surfside, Miami, that killed at least 11 people and left 150 unaccounted for.

Those factors could include serious structural damage that was identified in a 2018 report but did not appear to have been acted upon as the condo board attempted to raise enough funds to tackle the major repairs.

If negligence is a factor, those responsible could face criminal charges, such as the third-degree felony murder and manslaughter charges brought in the 1996 accidental crash of ValuJet 592 in the Everglades that killed 110 people.

'I am going to urge (the jury) to take a look at it,' State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle told the Miami Herald. 'Whether they do or not, it's completely their decision.'

The announcement comes as a survivor of the collapse filed a class action lawsuit against the condo association.

Ninth-floor resident and collapse survivor Raysa Rodriguez described in the suit how she 'screamed in horror' at waking to find the building had 'pancaked'.

Search and rescue looked for survivors of Thursday's condo collapse in Surfside, Miami. As of Tuesday afternoon 11 people were confirmed dead and 150 people remained unaccounted for

The complaint, filed Tuesday, alleges that it was the association's duty to maintain the building, and ensure the safety of residents, and is seeking unspecified monetary damages and a jury trial.

By filing for class action status, Rodriguez is seeking to have the suit represent anyone affected by the tragic collapse. It is the third lawsuit known to have been filed against the condo association since the collapse.

In it, Rodriguez recalls her escape from the ruined building after she woke to find it collapsing.

'I ran through my apartment and out to the hallway,' she said.

'I looked left to the North end of the building. A concrete column had pierced the hallway from floor to ceiling. I looked at the elevators.

'The elevator shafts were exposed, the doors were gone.

'I knocked on several neighbors doors, no answer. I run to the exit, open the doors that lead to the outside stairwell and I saw the devastation. The beachside of the Champlain had collapsed, pancaked.

'I screamed in horror.'

State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle announced she would bring the matter of Thursday's deadly Miami condo collapse before a grand jury for investigation Monday

Exposed portions of the building show a children's bedroom on the top floor of the building that was partially damaged alongside other parts that were ripped off. Condo resident Raya Rodriguez recounted her harrowing escape out of the building from her ninth-floor apartment in a class action lawsuit filed on her behalf Tuesday

Rodriguez described how she banged on her neighbors doors until she got an answer and eventually was able to help her elderly neighbor, in her eighties, and neighbor who was with her child and puppy, down the emergency stairs.

The suit cites the structural damage identified in a 2018 report by engineer Frank Morabito. He found that there was a 'major error' in the building's construction which meant the pool was leaking onto the concrete slabs below.

Additionally, suit alleges other factors may have contributed to the collapse such as faulty materials used in the building's construction and the excess weight of materials and construction equipment being used to replace the building's roof.

In April, the condo board - which had been deliberating the repairs for two years, trying to come up with the money for them and organizing a committee to oversee them - sent a letter to residents telling them the damage was 'significantly worse' and 'accelerating'.

'Please note that the original scope of work in the 2018 report has expanded. The concrete deterioration is accelerating. The roof situation got much worse, so extensive roof repairs had to be incorporated. When you can visually see the concrete spalling (cracking), that means that the rebar holding it together is rusting and deteriorating beneath the surface.

The suit references a 2018 engineers report, which outlined extensive damage to the building that had yet to be repaired

Among the deterioration included exposed rebar, and crumbling concrete

In that letter, she said they were still trying to finalize a loan from Valley bank to pay for the repairs (they tried to get a loan first from Banco Popular but the deal fell through) and that the total cost was more than $16million and the board had just $707,000 in cash reserves, leaving them with a bill for around $15million.

The owners of the building's 136 units would be responsible for repaying it and each was on the hook for a different amount depending on how big their unit was.

Adam Schwartzbaum, one of Rodriguez's attorneys, said the association had known the building had been in poor condition and ignored the warning signs.

'Certainly for at least three years, there was a major red flag...sirens flashing, alerting the condo association of this danger,' he told CNN, referring to the 2018 report.

Additionally, Schwartzbaum said his grandmother had lived in the building for 30 years before moving out 10 years ago, and said she had noticed water leaking onto her car in the building's underground parking lot.

A retired postal worker, Rodriguez had lived in Champlain Towers South for the past 17 years, according to the Miami Herald.

Rondriguez gave a detailed account of her escape from the building with a group of neighbors

In her suit, she recalled the chaos after being awoken from her sleep by the rumble of the collapse.

She said the building felt like it was swaying 'like a piece of paper,' and when she ran to her balcony, 'a wall of dust hit me.'

After viewing the destruction in the hallway outside her room, Rodriguez recounted hearing a woman scream, 'Please help me! Please help me! Dont leave me here!

She was unable to see whoever was calling out in the dark, and ran back inside to get dressed.

As she did so, a pounding came on her door, and she opened it to find her neighbor, Yadira, along with her 10-year-old son Kai and their Maltese puppy.

Crews from the United States and Israel work in the rubble Champlain Towers South condo Tuesday as hopes for further rescues faded

Soon, her brother, Fred, called and yelled at them to get out of the building, but she couldn't, she replied, because she believed the stairs had collapsed.

A firefighter then got on the line and told them to search for a way out, and that others had been able to escape through a stairwell.

As they made their way out, they slowly helped their 80-year-old neighbor Ada down the crumbling stairs.

Eventually they reached the first-floor exit by the pool, but it was blocked by rubble.

'I could hear water flooding into the garage,' Rodriguez wrote. 'I knew being electrocuted was a possibility.'

Finally, the group decided to try and escape through the second-floor balcony of a friend's apartment, and after a brief struggle with its sliding glass door, escaped to first responders, who helped the group down with a ladder.

According to the suit: 'Raysa and her neighbors were four of the more fortunate victims of the Champlain Towers South collapse.'
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy taunted Democrats on the House floor Tuesday, rubbing their noses in their partys racist past prior to a vote on a bill that would remove statues and busts of those who supported the Confederacy from the U.S. Capitol.

Let me state a simple fact. All the statues being removed by this bill are statues of Democrats, the Republican leader said, adding that he planned to vote in favor of the legislation. I think the bill should go further. Maybe its time the Democrats change the name of their party.

McCarthy said the bill showed that the Democrats were desperate to prove that their party has progressed from their days of supporting slavery, supporting Jim Crow laws or supporting the KKK.

The Democratic House majority has been proactive since last summers protests over the death of George Floyd in removing symbols of the Confederacy from prominent locales.

Last June House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced she would be removing portraits of four former House speakers who sided with the south to mark Juneteenth.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy taunted Democrats on the House floor Tuesday, rubbing their noses in their partys racist past prior to a vote on a bill that would remove statues and busts of those who supported the Confederacy from the U.S. Capitol

The bill that would remove from the Capitol a bust of Roger Taney, the U.S. chief justice best known for an infamous pro-slavery decision

They were all Democrats, McCarthy also pointed out Tuesday.

Legislation was also introduced in both chambers that would bar statues of those who served voluntarily with the Confederate States of America to be on display as part of the Statuary Hall collection in the U.S. Capitol.

That effort failed to gain traction, but backers are hoping for a different outcome now that President Joe Biden is in the White House and Democrats control the Senate.

The bill that would remove from the Capitol a bust of Roger Taney, the U.S. chief justice best known for his pro-slavery decision, as well as statues of Jefferson Davis and others who served in the Confederacy.

Taney ruled in Dred Scott v Sandford in 1857 that slaves were not United States citizens and could not bring lawsuits into federal courts.

Many Republicans in the House are expected to vote for the measure.

The vote comes against the backdrop of larger reckoning in the U.S. with racism, one thats prompted a reassessment of statues and other symbols that valorize those who upheld white supremacy.

Protesters decrying racism last year targeted Confederate monuments in multiple cities, leading to many being taken down. But many others remain in places of honor, including at the U.S. Capitol.

We cannot achieve true equity and a sense of welcome in public spaces if we continue to honor individuals who rose to prominence upholding slavery and other examples of systemic racism, nine environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and League of Conservation Voters, wrote in a letter to lawmakers urging them to vote for the bill.

The Taney bust would be replaced with one of Thurgood Marshall, the first black justice to serve on the nations highest court.

Lawmakers also want to remove the statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis (center) from the Capitol

The 2-foot-high marble bust of Taney is outside a room in the Capitol where the Supreme Court met from 1810 to 1860.

It was in that room that Taney, the nations fifth chief justice, announced the Dred Scott decision, sometimes called the worst decision in the courts history.

The Supreme Court held that Scott as a Black man was not a citizen and therefore had no right to sue, and found that legislation restricting slavery in certain territories was unconstitutional.

Three other statues honoring white supremacists - including former U.S. Vice President John C. Calhoun of South Carolina - would also be immediately removed under the legislation.

Three other statues honoring white supremacists - including former U.S. Vice President John C. Calhoun of South Carolina (pictured) - would also be immediately removed under the legislation

Longer-term, the architect of the Capitol would be instructed to identify any other statues depicting those who served in the Confederate States of America for removal from public display.

The statues would go back to the states that sent them.

The statue in Congress of Joseph Wheeler, a cavalry general in the Confederate army, would also be removed

The statue of Davis, for example, would be returned to Mississippi and that of Alexander Hamilton Stephens would be returned to Georgia.

Davis served as the Confederacys president and Stephens was its vice president.

Each state gets to submit two statues for display in the Capitol.

When the donated statue arrives, it is placed in a location selected by the Joint Committee on the Library, a group of 10 lawmakers from both chambers that oversees works of fine art in the building.

Republicans note that some states are already working to replace some of about a dozen statues that would be potentially removed under the bill.

North Carolina, for example, is replacing a statue of Charles Aycock, a former governor and white supremacist, with that of the Rev. Billy Graham. But the process is painfully slow.

Its Congresss responsiveness to the states request that actually delays the process, said Republican Rep. Rodney Davis of Illinois.

Some Democratic lawmakers offered to work with Republicans on speeding up the approval process, but they want to forge ahead in the meantime.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, the Democratic chair of the House Administration Committee, said the Confederate statues honor traitors to their country.

She denied that removing them would be erasing the nation's history.

On the contrary, we must never forget our nations shameful periods of slavery, segregation and racism, Lofgren said.

Now, that history belongs in a museum. You know, we need to remember our history, she said. It doesnt belong on a pedestal.

One statue already gone from the Capitol is that of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, which was removed from the National Statuary Hall Collection last year at the request of Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam.

When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi became House speaker the first time, she had Lees statue banished to the crypt.

A state commission decided that Lee was not a fitting symbol for the state.

Just two weeks ago Congress approved a bill establishing Juneteenth as a new federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States, an unexpected breakthrough for supporters of the legislation.

Democrats see a similar chance to address longstanding frustrations about the statues in the Capitol and are putting Republican lawmakers on the spot by calling a vote.

Last year, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said he supported continuing the practice of states replacing the statues on their own.

They can trade them out at any time ... a number of states are trading them out now, McConnell told reporters.

He also referred to the House legislation as nonsense that would airbrush the Capitol.

However, Republicans joined Democrats in the final weeks of former President Donald Trumps tenure to override his veto of a defense policy bill that allows for the renaming of military bases that honor Confederate leaders.

Trump repeatedly emphasized his opposition to changing the names of the bases as he leaned into culture war issues during his 2020 re-election campaign.

While McCarthy shamed the Democrats for their historical links to racism, at Trumps Ohio rally Saturday a number of his supporters carried Confederate flags.
US Southern District Judge Analisa Torres on Monday tossed a federal indictment against convicted felon William 'Ill Will' Scott, citing a lack of racial diversity in the White Plains, New York, grand jury pool

A federal judge in New York City has dismissed an indictment against a Bronx shooting suspect, citing a lack of racial diversity in the White Plains grand jury pool.

The ruling by District Judge Analisa Torres is said to be the first of its kind since city cases were moved to Westchester County during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In her 36-page opinion issued on Monday and obtained by DailyMail.com, Torres stated that she was throwing out the indictment against defendant William Scott on the ground that it violated his right to a representative jury under the Fifth and Sixth Amendments to the US Constitution.

Scott, who goes by the nickname 'Ill Will,' was indicted by the White Plains grand jury last June on a charge of being a convicted felon in possession of ammunition in connection with a shooting in the Bronx.

Scott had argued through his attorney that his constitutional rights had been violated because 'his grand jury did not represent a fair cross section of the community.'

In the Manhattan Division, the jury-eligible population includes just under 21 per cent black people, and slightly over 28 per cent of Latinos.

In the White Plains Division, the jury-eligible population is only 12.45 per cent black and 14.12 per cent Latino.

According to the latest US Census data, White Plains has a population of more than 58,000 people, of whom 60 per cent are white, 12 per cent are black and 32 per cent are Hispanic or Latino.

'Defendant has produced clear statistical evidence of underrepresentation of Black and Latinx individuals in the pool from which his grand jury was drawn, and a jury selection process that was susceptible to abuse,' Torres wrote.

Scott had allegedly committed the crime of ammunition possession in The Bronx, but his case had been moved to the suburb of White Plains, where the jury-eligible population is only 12.45 per cent black and 14.12 per cent Latino

'The Government has failed to meet its burden by coming forward with evidence rebutting the presumption that such underrepresentation was the result of purposeful discrimination. Therefore, Defendant has established a violation of his Fifth Amendment right to a race-neutral jury selection process.'

Prosecutors from the Southern District of New York explained in a letter to the court that they had Scott indicted in White Plains instead of Manhattan 'amidst a global pandemic that suspended grand juries across the country.'

They also noted that Scott 'posed a sufficiently serious risk to public safety that it was untenable to delay his prosecution until grand juries were more readily available.'

Judge Torres dismissed the indictment without prejudice, leaving the door open for prosecutors to refile it, which they did on the same day before a Manhattan grand jury.

A graduate of Harvard College and Columbia University School of Law, Torres was appointed to US District Court for the Southern District of New York by President Barack Obama in 2013.
The HR director at a nuclear site took 'no action' against a colleague who allegedly told inappropriate jokes, touched female colleagues and bragged about sexual conquests, a tribunal has been told.

HR consultant Alison McDermott has told an employment tribunal that reports of bullying, harassment and homophobic abuse were not investigated properly at the Sellafield nuclear fuel reprocessing and decommissioning site in Cumbria.

On Tuesday, the hearing in Leeds was told a report made anonymously through external system Safecall accused a member of the HR team of telling sexually inappropriate jokes, touching female members of the department, berating a colleague and 'telling tales' about sexual conquests.

The report also said there was a 'legacy of cover-up' at the plant in Seascale, and later an anonymous letter sent to bosses at the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) said the site's HR director had taken 'no action'.

HR consultant Alison McDermott has told an employment tribunal that reports of bullying, harassment and homophobic abuse were not investigated properly at the Sellafield nuclear fuel reprocessing and decommissioning site in Cumbria

Ms McDermott, who had a remit of equality, diversity and inclusion, has taken Sellafield, its HR director Heather Roberts, and the NDA, to tribunal, as she claims her contract was terminated for whistleblowing.

Giving evidence, David Vineall, group HR director for the NDA, said Ms McDermott was 'integral' to the equality, diversity and inclusion 'journey' the organisation had been on.

He confirmed that in October 2018 he received an anonymous letter which was 'highly critical' of the HR department at Sellafield.

The letter said: 'Someone has recently raised an issue of sexual harassment regarding HR leaders and Heather has taken no action.'

He said he advised Ms Roberts to undertake an external investigation into the allegations against the member of staff, but she told him they did not have the evidence.

He said: 'I wanted to make sure we were following the due process so I had discussions with her, she explained the approach she had taken, that she had taken advice from the legal team. I respected that and we moved on.'

Ms McDermott, who had a remit of equality, diversity and inclusion, has taken Sellafield, its HR director Heather Roberts, and the NDA, to tribunal, as she claims her contract was terminated for whistleblowing

Mr Vineall said an external investigation was later carried out into the allegations but he could not recall the outcome.

Ms McDermott, who was paid 1,500 a day for her services, had her contract terminated in October 2018 after she wrote a report which was highly critical of the HR department.

She claimed that when she told Paul Vallance, NDA communications officer, her contract had been terminated by Ms Roberts, he replied: 'For Christ's sake, how stupid can she be? She could have at least waited for a few months so it didn't look so blatant.'

But, giving evidence on Tuesday, he denied he had made the comments.

He said he could not recall Ms McDermott telling him her contract had been terminated to 'suppress wrongdoing'.

The hearing will continue on Thursday when closing submissions will be made by the parties.
Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra urged Congress to overhaul the country's immigration system after visiting a troubled tented camp for children center at the Fort Bliss military base near El Paso.

Vice President Kamala Harris avoided the facility during her visit to the Texas border city last week, asking Becerra instead to launch an investigation after reports that children were harming themselves and trying to escape the squalid conditions.

Most adult migrants arriving at the border are being turned back according to public health rules applied during the pandemic.

But unaccompanied children are being admitted and thousands are housed in emergency centers, such as Fort Bliss.

'We need to fix this broken immigration system,' said Becerra on a conference call with reporters, according to the New York Times.

'We need to be prepared to handle circumstances like this, and we need to do it in the best way possible.'

Xavier Becerra (seen on the right of this file picture) said: 'We need to fix this broken immigration system,' after visiting an emergency facility housing hundreds of children in tents at a U.S. Army base near El Paso, Texas

The Biden administration has been grappling with how best to look after unaccompanied children arriving at the southern border. This file picture shows children inside a playpen at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility, the main detention center for unaccompanied children in the Rio Grande Valley, in Donna, Texas

Activists defending the rights of migrants hold a protest near Fort Bliss to call for the end of the detention of unaccompanied minors at the facility in El Paso, Texas

Officials have reportedly taken away pens and toothbrushes to prevent children harming themselves at the facility

President Biden's officials have repeatedly blamed the Trump administration for dismantling the legal immigration system and Becerra called on Washington to press ahead with plans for reform.

'I would really encourage our colleagues in the House and the Senate to consider taking that proposal on so we can get to a system that works,' he said, even though few expect progress on Biden's plan.

He spoke after seeing for himself conditions at Fort Bliss, where tents have been built on desert land to accommodate child arrivals.

As many as 4800 children were held there in May but the number is now 790, according to Becerra, who also said his agency was looking to see if it could close some of the emergency shelters.

Officials at the site have reportedly banned the use of pencils, toothbrushes and metal items to prevent children harming themselves.

The Associated Press reported that interview transcripts filed in Los Angeles federal court last week showed children desperate to escape.

Several said they spent their days sleeping to cope with the boredom while others said they had been unable to sleep because of the way lights were kept on at night.

Some described foul smelling food and said they were denied sufficient access to a mental health counselor.

When Harris visited the area last week, her spokeswoman Symone Sanders said Biden had instructed Becerra to launch a 'thorough investigation.'

'The administration is taking this very seriously. Extremely seriously,' she said.
A truck driver who was smuggling more than 100 people across Mexico pulled over when the banging and screams of his cargo became too much to ignore.

Police who came across the scene found a man, 25, who had suffocated to death and an abandoned two-year-old boy.

It's the latest horrific discovery as hundreds of thousands of migrants from Central America cross through Mexico to attempt to illegally enter the United States - with some falling ill or dying in the desert or becoming prey to human smugglers.

The scene unfolded Monday morning in the southern Mexico state of Veracruz after the driver stopped the truck on a two-lane road and allowed more than 100 migrants, most from Central America, to get out of the freight container.

The survivors told Mexican National Institute of Migration agents that they were banging on the doors and screaming to be let out after they could longer bear the lack of air and heat inside the locked trailer.

A two-year-old boy, pictured, who authorities said was from Guatemala was found abandoned by the side of the road in Mexico after a human-smuggling truck stopped and most of the more than 100 migrants aboard fled. One man was found suffocated to death

An abandoned two-year-boy was among eight migrants who were found next to a tractor-trailer that was left behind in Veracruz, Mexico, on Monday. Authorities discovered the dead body of a 25-year-old man inside the freight container where 100 migrants were crammed together in their failed journey to the U.S. border

Pictured are six of the seven adult males who were ill and were unable to flee after a tractor-trailer ferrying more than 100 migrant bound for the United States border was abandoned in Veracruz, Mexico, on Monday morning. A 25-year-old man died after suffocating due to the lack of air inside the locked freight container

The driver or his companion opened the door, and most of the migrants jumped out and ran off into heavy vegetation on the side of the highway that connects Ocozocoautla, Chiapas with Las Choapas, Veracruz.

Immigration police came across the scene after the driver and his passenger also had fled.

They found the 25-year-old man, whose identity and nationality they didn't disclose.

They also found the two-year-old boy who apparently had been abandoned.

It's not clear if the two-year-old was traveling by himself, or was left by his parents who fled the scene when the cargo doors were opened.

The National Institute of Migration agents said that the driver of the tractor-trailer finally stopped the truck after migrants banged on the doors to be released because they could no longer bear the lack of air and high temperature inside the locked cargo container

The Mexican Secretariat for Home Affairs said that the child, who wasn't identified, was placed in custody of the office of State Attorney for the Protection of Girls, Boys and Adolescents

Authorities have not been able to locate the driver of the tractor-trailer or the person who was accompanying him after the pair abandoned the vehicle on the shoulder lane of a highway in the southern Mexican state of Veracruz that connects Ocozocoautla, Chiapas with Las Choapas, Veracruz

The migrants told immigration agents that many of the people inside the trailer were feeling faint several hours before the truck came to a stop.

Eight migrants were found lying on the ground or standing near the truck. The majority escaped into the Mexican countryside.

None of the seven adults identified themselves as family members of the boy, who is apparently from Guatemala. It's not clear how authorities determined his age or nationality.

The Mexican Secretariat for Home Affairs said that the child was placed in custody of the office of State Attorney for the Protection of Girls, Boys and Adolescents.

The adult migrants were transported to a local National Institute of Migration center where they were provided additional treatment.

The incident comes less than a week after 240 migrants, including 61 children, bound for the United States border for found inside a warehouse in the central Mexico state of Puebla.

The United States-Mexico border region, which covers 1,954 miles, has become a pressing issue for the administration of President Joe Biden. The administration has struggled with a rise in unlawful border crossers.

Vice President Kamala Harris, who was chosen by Biden to lead the nation's efforts in finding a solution to the migrant crisis, inspected the border area in El Paso, Texas, last Friday.

Harris had been criticized by Republican politicians and some Democrats for not visiting the border sooner.

Immigration 'cannot be reduced to a political issue,' Harris told reporters. 'We're talking about children, we're talking about families, we're talking about suffering. And our approach has to be thoughtful and effective.'

A monthly report released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection earlier this month showed that Border Patrol agents stopped 180,034 migrants in May along the southwestern border, a slight increase from 178,854 the prior month, with the increase driven largely by single adults.

From March to May more than 530,000 people were apprehended and pushed back into Mexico after attempting to cross without legal immigration documents, the June 10 report also indicated.
President Biden deployed his stage whisper during a speech in Wisconsin on Tuesday as he went about selling his infrastructure deal to the public and outlining plans to give tax breaks to ordinary families.

It was a standout moment as he described the urgent need for a 'generational investment' and looked to persuade voters of the economic benefits of a $973 billion bipartisan package.

After explaining how families would get a check for $3600 for each child under six and $3000 for each one under 12, he said he would accused of delivering giveaways.

He dropped his voice and leaned into the microphone to deliver a conspiratorial word to people watching at home.

'Hey guys, I think it's time to give ordinary people a tax break,' he whispered.

'The wealthy are doing fine.'

President Biden dropped his voice and moved close to the microphone during his speech on infrastructure, using a rhetorical trick he has deployed in several recent appearances. 'Hey guys, I think it's time to give ordinary people a tax break,' he whispered. 'The wealthy are doing fine'

The visit was part of Biden's effort to sell his huge spending plan to voters and keep up momentum after securing Republican support for a compromise infrastructure plan

Biden delivered his speech after touring a public transit center in La Crosse, Wisconsin. He discussed the benefits of electric buses with employees and how Wisconsin winters damage the citys roads

'Don't jump,' joked Biden when he saw Mike La Fleur, the superintendent of streets for Municipal Transport, sitting high on a paving machine. It is one of the president's go-to jokes whenever he sees someone at the top of a ladder, stairs on on machinery

The small audience at a public transit center in La Crosse, Wisconsin, loved it, breaking into loud applause.

The whisper has become a key part of Biden's rhetorical arsenal. He used it in his joint address to Congress and last week in a question and answer session with reporters.

Critics have labeled the effect 'creepy.' Yet it has become a go-to trick at moments when he wants to quietly suggest he has got one over on his more fiscally conservative opponents.

During the speech he explained how Wisconsin would benefit from the deal, including funds for electric buses, the replacement of some 80,000 lead water lines in Milwaukee and high-speed internet.

He said it would include $109 billion in funding for roads, bridges and other major construction projects.

'This is a generational investment to modernize our infrastructure, creating millions of good-paying jobs, and position America to compete with the rest of the world in the 21st century,' he said.

He also set out his plans to pay for the program, including a hike in corporate tax rates and ensuring that companies could not take their profits offshore.

Biden stopped for ice cream before heading for home. 'Oh, you guys got everything,' he said as he examined the menu

When Biden gave up sweets for Lent, he said ice cream would be the first thing he would have once it was over

Biden stopped for ice cream before heading home to Washington. He shied from ordering rocky road flavor, and instead plumped for scoops of strawberry and of cookies and cream

He promised that the plan would not increase tax on gasoline or raise taxes for Americans earning less than $400,000 a year.

The result, he said, was a 'blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America.'

After his speech, he made an impromptu stop for ice cream before returning to Washington.

He laughed off suggestions that he should order the rocky road flavor for infrastructure saying, 'It's been a rocky road, but we're going to get it done, before ordering scoops of strawberry and of cookies and cream.

The visit was all part of the president's effort to maintain momentum that led to a deal with Republicans last week, a push that Congressional leaders believe must be sustained into the second half of July.

That timetable could see legislation passed and sent to the White House by the end of September.

West Wing officials have this week held calls with more than 60 Democratic and Republican members of Congress and their aides, according to Press Secretary Jen Psaki who briefed reporters aboard Air Force One on the way to Wisconsin.

At the weekend, Biden was forced to back down from a threat not to sign a bipartisan bill unless it came with a separate package of 'human infrastructure' spending, including expanded home care for the elderly and disabled.

Republicans reacted furiously which would have put the bipartisan bill in jeopardy, given the 50-50 split in the Senate.

Former President Trump weighed in just before Biden spoke, accusing Republicans of selling out.

'So sad to see certain RINO Republican Senators go back and forth to the White House and continually get nothing for infrastructure or anything else,' he said, using an abbreviation for 'Republicans in Name Only.'

'When will they learn that they are being played with, and used by, the radical left - and only bad things can happen.'
A teen drowned his alcoholic father while trying to exorcize his demons through a late night baptism at a Massachusetts pond, a court heard.

Jack Callahan pleaded not guilty to murder when he appeared in court today accused of killing his father Scott Callahan, 57, CBS Boston reports.

The 19-year-old was arrested in the early hours of Monday morning after his mom called the police to report he was 'acting erratically.'

The teen had arrived home at 2am, dripping wet, and told his mother his father was missing - despite Jack traveling to pick his father up from a Boston bar earlier that evening, a court heard.

He eventually directed the police to Crooker Memorial Park where officers found Scott at the bottom of Island Creek Pond. Scott was rushed to Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Plymouth where he was pronounced dead.

Jack reportedly told the authorities that he'd been trying to baptize Scott to rid him of his alcohol demons.

Jack Callahan, 19, (pictured) has been ordered to undergo a mental health evaluation after pleading not guilty to a murder charge Tuesday in Plymouth District Court

According to Buckingham, Callahan held his father in the pond on his back like a baby, and continually dunked his head in the water about four-to-eight times

Authorities said Callahan went to a bar in Boston Sunday night to pick up his father, Scott Callahan, 57, who was not supposed to be drinking

'He believed he was baptizing his father,' Plymouth Assistant District Attorney Shanan Buckingham said in court.

'He was holding his father in the pond on his back like a baby and that he continually dunked his head under the water about four to eight times.

'When his father started to cough and choke, he would lift his head up. And when the father started fighting, he would strike him and push his head back down into the water.'

Callahan continued doing this until his father was no longer struggling and floating, Buckingham noted in court.

Jack allegedly explained he had been exorcising a demon named 'Dirty Dan'.

He said he'd given his dad a choice; 'I left him there to decide, you can come to heaven with me or hell.

When first responders arrived on scene, they found Jack's father, Scott Callahan, 57, at the bottom of the pond. He was rushed to Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Plymouth where he was pronounced dead

'I think he chose hell.'

Authorities said that the incident began when Jack went to pick up his father who had left a treatment center for alcoholism, to go to a bar in Boston.

By the time Jack arrived to pick him up, his 57-year-old father, who had a traumatic brain injury that impacts his decision making abilities, was drunk.

The pair got an Uber at the bar and originally headed home to Duxbery, but Jack's mother reportedly told him she didn't want Scott at her home. So the car dropped them off at Island Creek Pond in Crocker Park.

According to Jack, an altercation broke out between the two after Scott hit him.

Jack claims he 'blacked out' after being hit and they moved to the pond where Scott was drowned.

Hours later, Plymouth County District Attorney Tim Cruz's office said Jack was under arrest and charged with his father's murder.

An Uber picked Jack and Scott up at the bar before dropping them off at Island Creek Pond (pictured) in Crocker Park near their home in Duxbury. According to Jack, an altercation broke out between the two after Scott hit him

In court Tuesday, Callahan's attorney Kevin Reddington asked the judge to send Callahan to Bridgewater State Hospital for a mental health evaluation, adding that he is a danger to himself.

'He's a very nice young man,' Reddington said, 'He comes from a wonderful family  My client had a concern for his father, knowing that he would be drinking and knowing that he shouldn't be drinking. He was going to try to take him back where he should be.'

The judge ordered the court clinician to evaluate Callahan, he is to be held in jail without bail until he's due back in court on August 12.
In a statement to DailyMail.com, Navy officials said they would not prosecute Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher for comments he made saying he intended to kill an ISIS prisoner in 2017

The military will not prosecute Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher after he admitted he meant to kill an ISIS detainee, despite being acquitted of war crimes in 2017, when he posed with an Islamic terrorist's corpse.

In a statement to DailyMail.com, Cmdr. Courtney Hillson, assistant chief of information for the United States Navy, said: 'The Navy reviewed the matter and will not pursue further action.'

Meanwhile, Gallagher, who has written a book about his experience that he says will tell the whole truth of the situation, told Sean Hannity on Monday that he's been 'demonized' for just doing his job.

Gallagher, a former special warfare operator chief for the Navy SEALs, was acquitted of war crimes charges in 2017, when he was facing charges of shooting unarmed civilians and murdering a 17-year-old ISIS prisoner, whom he posed next to in a photo.

But in 2019, he was once again facing those charges, as prosecutors claimed he stabbed the teenage prisoner to death.

He was found not guilty, and the teenager's cause of death was officially ruled a 'Hellfire missile.'

But in an interview with 'The Line' podcast earlier this year, he admitted the SEALs meant to kill the teenager.

'The grain of truth in the whole thing is that that ISIS fighter was killed by us and that nobody at that time had a problem with it,' he said.

'We killed that guy. Our intention was to kill him. Everybody was on board... It was to do medical scenarios on him until he died.'

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Eddie Gallagher was a special warfare operator chief for the Navy SEALs

Gallagher faced war crimes charges for allegedly murdering a 17-year-old ISIS fighter in 2017, but was ultimately acquitted of those charges and the boy's cause of death was officially ruled a 'Hellfire missile'

Gallagher was acquitted by a military jury in 2019 of stabbing the ISIS fighter to death but was convicted of unlawfully posing for photos with his dead body.

On Tuesday, the Navy confirmed that it wouldn't prosecute him.

'After a review conducted by the Navy, it was determined that Gallaghers statements were not corroborated and no substantive information was found to merit an investigation based on those statements.'

He's now telling what he says is is side of the story in a new book, 'The Man in the Arena.' He appeared on Hannity's show on Monday to discuss the book, which includes QR codes to courtroom audio and files in an effort to let readers judge the situation for themselves.

'The reason we wrote the book is to get the truth out there about what happened and what took place during that whole two-year ordeal,' Gallagher told Hannity Monday night. 'The media decided to portray me in one way - made me look like a psychopath, a warmonger for actually wanting to do my job.'

He added that the media 'demonized all my friends and brothers that have fought over the past 20 years.'

'So I wanted to get the truth out there and just show the public that these people cobbled together a case out of a bunch of white lies, which then escalated to even bigger lies so the prosecutors could try to get a win, which 50 percent of that was not reported by the media.'

His wife, Andrea, added that they felt they needed to do more to address the claims that he killed the terrorist. 'Now we're telling that side of the story,' she said.

Gallagher and his wife, Andrea, appeared on Sean Hannity's show Monday night to promote his new book detailing his side of the case

The book includes QR-codes to courtroom audio and files in an effort to get readers to determine what happened for themselves

Gallagher's trial drew widespread controversy at the time after then-President Trump repeatedly intervened on his behalf and had him released from pretrial detention.

Gallagher, who was the platoon chief during the Iraq deployment, has always claimed the war crimes charges brought against him were made up by six platoon members who wanted to force him out.

In the podcast interview, Gallagher continued to deny that he stabbed the fighter.

He claimed, instead, that the SEALs did not treat the fighter for his injuries and jointly decided to practice medical procedures on him until he died.

'I didn't stab him. I didn't stab that dude,' Gallagher said. 'That dude died from all the medical treatments that were done  and there was plenty of medical treatments that were done to him.

'I mean, he was going to die, regardless. We weren't taking any prisoners.'

It is not clear exactly what procedures were allegedly performed on the ISIS fighter, who died about 20 minutes after being brought to the US base.

When he was asked why he cut the airway into the fighter's throat to insert a breathing tube, Gallagher said in the podcast: 'Just for practice. I was practicing to see how fast I could do one in.'

Gallagher walked into military court with his wife Andrea in 2019, as he faced charges for shooting unarmed civilians in Iraq and killing a captured ISIS fighter with a knife

His attorney Timothy Parlatore told military news outlet Task & Purpose that prosecutors and defense already knew that the SEALs had practiced medical procedures on the ISIS fighter before he was pronounced dead.

He said prosecutors chose not to bring up the claims during his marital court trial so he did not address them.

'When the terrorist came in, they did the initial assessment and they knew that he was going to die,' Parlatore said.

'There was no way that he was surviving this thing. And, exactly what he said there: They decided  ok, he's going to die anyway, let's use this as an opportunity for training. We'll just do procedures on him.'

Parlatore argued that none of the procedures carried out on the fighter sped up his death.

Gallagher's attorney said none of his clients recent comments made on the podcast changed his defense.

'They all knew that this is how the guy died and they made up a story after the fact,' Parlatore said.

'Everything that I said at the trial is absolutely true.

'The prosecutors chose not to make this argument at the trial because, quite frankly, it was inconsistent with their theory of the case. So they didn't want to make these arguments at the time. And I didn't need to make them at the time because it didn't matter.'

Gallagher has always maintained that the charges brought against him were made up by six members of his platoon who wanted to force him out

In the podcast interview, Gallagher continued to deny that he stabbed the fighter. He claimed, instead, that the SEALs did not treat the fighter for his injuries and jointly decided to practice medical procedures on him until he died

Court records obtained by the Navy Times have previously indicated that the fighter's body was covered in medical devices, including a trachea tube and two tubes in his chest, when he died.

The knowledge that the fighter was used for medical training was detailed as part of a defense motion filed back in 2019.

'At the time that the ISIS fighter was brought to the compound, he was at or near death and, although SOC Gallagher initially attempted to save his life, these efforts quickly proved to be fruitless,' the motion read.

'Once it was clear that the ISIS fighter was beyond saving, the platoon's medic... took over and began using the newly dead or nearly dead ISIS fighter as a training aid to practice performing medical procedures.'

The court records and defense motion did not detail how much, if any, pain medication was given to the fighter while the medical training was carried out.

In unseen videos that emerged after his trial, Gallagher's platoon SEALs chillingly described him as 'freaking evil', 'toxic' and trigger-happy.

The SEALs were interviewed by naval criminal investigators before Gallagher was charged in September 2018 and the later acquitted.

In addition to the video interviews, combat footage and text message exchanges between the SEALs were also released.

They were all part of the investigative files used in Gallagher's 2019 court martial trial, which is essentially a military version of a civil trial.

The trial attracted the attention of former President Donald Trump, who issued an executive fiat calling for Gallagher's rank to be reinstated. The former president is seen here with First Lady Melania talking to the Gallaghers at Mar A Lago

Gallagher's trial drew widespread controversy at the time after then-President Trump repeatedly intervened on his behalf and had him released from pretrial detention.

Gallagher was demoted following the trial but was later allowed to keep his Trident Pin and retire a SEAL following Trump's intervention.

Trump took an interest in the case after Bernard Kerick, a former business partner to Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, became an advocate for the family and made appearances in conservative media.

He tweeted in support of Gallagher, praising his service to the country and saying the case was 'handled very badly from the beginning'.

Shortly after the trial, Trump got involved again by ordering the Navy to withdraw commendations that prosecutors received for their work.

Trump then directed the Navy to restore Gallagher to his previous rank.

The then-President gave the direct order to allow Gallagher to retire without losing his SEAL status.

Trump tweeted: 'Eddie will retire peacefully with all of the honors that he has earned.'

'There are no words to adequately express how grateful my family and I are to our president, Donald J. Trump, for his intervention and decision,' Gallagher said in a statement following the former president's reversal.

'We would also like to thank the American people for their unwavering support during this very difficult time for my family and I - we can never thank you enough.'
The family of Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse has raised concerns about the massive funds raised to support his defense

The family of Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse has raised concerns about the millions of dollars raised to support his legal defense.

Rittenhouse, now 18, is charged with first-degree intentional murder in the shootings of three people, two of them fatal, during Black Lives Matter demonstrations last summer in Wisconsin.

The case became a national flashpoint, with elected Democrats accusing Rittenhouse of being a 'white supremacist terrorist,' though all involved were white, and conservatives insisting that he had acted in justified self-defense under imminent threat of harm.

A lengthy new article in the New Yorker examines the tensions between the family and the celebrity attorneys behind the foundation that raised funds for his defense, and reveals that one of the attorneys flew with Rittenhouse to Miami to introduce him to the leader of the Proud Boys.

In an interview with the New Yorker, Kyle's mother Wendy Rittenhouse expressed her concerns about the #FightBack Foundation, the group founded by attorney John Pierce.

'Kyle was John's ticket out of debt,' Wendy said of Pierce, who stepped down from the #FightBack board in early September to avoid any 'appearance of conflict' as reports emerged about his deep debts, according to the New Yorker.

Lin Wood, the famous defamation lawyer who has recently pushed theories related to QAnon and the presidential election, took over as CEO of the foundation on September 2.

Kyle Rittenhouse appears for an extradition hearing in Lake County court Friday, Oct. 30, 2020, in Waukegan, Illinois

Kyle's mother Wendy Rittenhouse expressed her concerns about the #FightBack Foundation, the group founded by attorney John Pierce (left). It is now led by Lin Wood (right)

Wendy in the interview questioned why Kyle remained in jail nearly a month after the foundation said it had raised enough money to cover his $2 million bail, wondering if keeping him behind bars was a fund-raising ploy.

Wood told the New Yorker that notion was 'blatantly false'. He did not immediately respond to an inquiry from DailyMail.com on Tuesday, and Pierce declined to offer immediate comment when reached.

Kyle became eligible for bail soon after his October 30 extradition from Illinois to Wisconsin, which set a $2 million cash bail for his release pending trial.

At that point, the #FightBack Foundation had easily topped the $2 million mark, according to the group's website, which boasted of $2.1 million raised on October 1.

It was not until November 20 that Pierce paid Kyle's bail, with a check from law firm Pierce Bainbridge, according to the New Yorker.

Wendy says she is pressing Pierce to return $40,000 in donated living expenses that she believed belonged to the family, a request she told the New Yorker he had refused.

'He said we owed him millionshe 'freed Kyle,'' she told the outlet.

Kyle Rittenhouse's mother, Wendy Rittenhouse, spoke out in a new interview

Kyle Rittenhouse, left, with backwards cap, walks along Sheridan Road in Kenosha, Wisconsin, with another armed civilian on August 25, 2020

A protester clashes with armed civilian Kyle Rittenhouse as a man (R) shot in the chest during the confrontation reacts

The Rittenhouse family says they grew uncomfortable with Pierce, telling the New Yorker that he drank excessively in front of Wendy's kids, called Kyle's sister a 'raging liberal,' and charged the family for time spent shopping for a shirt to wear on Tucker Carlson's show.

It is not the first time concerns have been raised about the foundation's massive fundraising push and connection to Pierce and his firm, Pierce Bainbridge Beck Price & Hecht, which has been accused of defaulting on millions of dollars owed to investors, according to court documents.

On December 3rd, Kenosha, Wisconsin prosecutors argued in a motion that the combination of Pierce's substantial debt and his connection to #FightBack offered 'ample opportunity for self-dealing and fraud.'

They referred to the foundation as a 'slush fund' with 'unregulated and opaque' finances.

Pierce has always maintained that his dealings with the foundation were above-board, and slammed claims that his firm was in debt as false.

'Total fake news. Pierce Bainbridge P.C. has zero debt. I have stepped off the #FightBack board to avoid any potential conflict. Of course the firm will have to be paid for some of its work and expenses so we can keep the lights on,' Pierce said in a September 5 tweet.

For his part, Wood seemed to lose interest in the Rittenhouse case as he became fixated on proving fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

Wood was banned from Twitter after tweeting that former Vice President Mike Pence could 'face execution by firing squad' for 'treason' in the U.S. Capitol riot, and going on to claim the riot was 'staged' by left-wing forces.

Rittenhouse jetted to Miami after posting bail where Pierce introduced him to Proud Boys leader

Six days after the Capitol riot, Kyle and his mother flew with Pierce to Miami for three days, where they met with Enrique Tarrio, according to the New Yorker.

Dave Hancock, a former Navy SEAL who has been handling security for the Rittenhouse family, told the magazine that the family was uncomfortable with the meeting, and blamed Pierce for orchestrating the encounter and exposing Rittenhouse 'to elements that hurt him.'

Tarrio, the controversial leader of the Proud Boys, was the one who picked up Kyle and Wendy from the airport, the magazine said.

Pierce introduced Tarrio as another client, and the four of them went out to lunch at a Cuban restaurant. The Rittenhouse family declined to tell the New Yorker what was discussed at the lunch.

Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio rallies in Portland, Oregon in a 2019 file photo

The Proud Boys are a far-right group known for physical confrontations with their political adversaries, and members of the group have espoused white supremacist or anti-Jewish ideology.

Hancock called the Proud Boys 'f***ing losers,' said that Rittenhouse initially 'may have thought it was kind of cool to see people fighting for him, but when he learned what they were all about it didn't sit well with him.'

He added: 'He's just as horrified by the white-supremacist part of it as anybody.'

Though the Miami lunch has not been previously publicly revealed, images circulated showing Rittenhouse partying in a Racine, Wisconsin bar called Pudgy's with men displaying Proud Boys tattoos, singing the song from the Little Mermaid that is the group's anthem.

The terms of his bond have been amended to prohibit contact with 'known members of any violent white power / white supremacist groups.'

Images circulated showing Rittenhouse partying in a Racine bar called Pudgy's with men displaying Proud Boys tattoos

Rittenhouse and his family are in hiding at an Indiana 'safe house' where he is looking at colleges and aspires to work in pediatric nursing

Kyle, his mother and two sisters are currently hiding out in a secluded safe house near South Bend, Indiana after being bombarded with death threats, according to the New Yorker.

The four-bedroom house has been comfortably furnished through donations, with a new sectional sofa, a Keurig coffeemaker, and bed linens from Walmart, according to a reporter from the magazine who visited.

Kyle has a bedroom furnished with a PlayStation and a desktop computer, which he has been using to research colleges.

He told the reporter he hoped to go into pediatric nursing, inspired by his mother, who is a certified nursing assistant.

Rittenhouse is now looking at colleges, and hopes to go into pediatric nursing

'Seeing how my mom and her co-workers work with their patients, and how they treat their familiesthose people are having the worst day of their lives, and they need somebody to fall onto and rely on,' he told the magazine. 'That's something I want to do.'

The family insists that Kyle's actions were in self-defense, as he was confronted by violent demonstrators.

'I'm sorry to the familieswe all are sorry,' Kyle's sister Faith told the magazine. 'We think about ita lot.'

'That day, I felt a part of me die,' Wendy said. Faith said, 'Because Kyle had to defend himself? And, if he didn't, he would have died?'

Wendy said, 'Yeah.' She started to cry: 'He didn't want to kill them!'
Authorities in Pennsylvania on Tuesday filed an arrest warrant in a 2013 campus attack at Gettysburg College, nearly eight years after the alleged victim went to police and a year after she received a disturbing Facebook message that said, 'So I raped you.'

Police say they are looking for 28-year-old Ian Cleary of Saratoga, California, but had not yet located him. The affidavit filed with the warrant accuses Cleary of stalking 18-year-old Shannon Keeler at a party in December 2013, following her home to her dorm and then sexually assaulting her.

Keeler says she was was attacked after helping another woman - Katayoun Amir-Aslani - get away from Cleary at the party.

As he apologized and fled, Keeler texted friends on campus 'OMG please Help me,' according to the warrant.

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Authorities in Pennsylvania on Tuesday filed an arrest warrant in a 2013 campus attack on Shannon Keeler at Gettysburg College

Warrant was issued a year after Keeler read this Facebook message, which Clearly had allegedly sent to her in December 2019

Keeler had discussed the experience - and her long push for charges - in a May story by The Associated Press that detailed the frequent reluctance among prosecutors to file charges in campus rape cases.

Keeler told the AP she did not know Amir-Aslani but helped her anyway.

'All I know is that she needed a girl to help her get away from a creepy guy, and I was more than happy to be that girl,' said Keeler.

Keeler then walked home, with a friend, for safety.

Keeler is pictured around the time of her rape in December 2013

TIMELINE OF KEELER RAPE CASE: December 2013: Shannon Keeler is allegedly raped inside her dorm room at Gettysburg University in Pennsylvania and reports attack to the police hours later 2015: District Attorney Scott Wagner declines to file charges December 2019: Accused rapist Ian Cleary sends Keeler Facebook message that says: 'So I raped you' June 2020: Keeler reads the message and takes it to Gettysburg police, who reopen rape case June 29, 2021: New Adams County District Attorney Brian Sinnett signs warrant for Cleary's arrest Advertisement

Clearly, at the time an upperclassman, then allegedly snuck into Keeler's dorm and barged into her room while she pleaded with him and texted friends, including Amir-Aslani, for help.

Keeler went to police hours after the encounter and had a rape kit done at a local hospital, only to graduate three years later without an arrest.

Authorities at the time told her it was hard to prosecute cases when the victim had been drinking, she said. The rape kit was later lost.

'It has bothered me over the years that I was never able to do anything,' she told the Associated Press. 'If you're not going to help me, who are you going to help?'

Last year Keeler received a series of Facebook messages, which, not checking her account often, she did not see until six months after they were sent in December 2019.

'So I raped you,' the person said.

'I'll never do it to anyone ever again.

'I need to hear your voice.'

'I'll pray for you.'

Keeler shared the posts with the Gettysburg authorities in June 2020, prompting police to reopen the case.

Police then linked the account to Cleary through a matching cell phone number, according to the affidavit.

The warrant filed Tuesday was signed by a new county prosecutor, Adams County District Attorney Brian Sinnett, who previously said he cannot file charges unless a case meets the high bar needed for conviction.

Cleary left Gettysburg but denied any wrongdoing in an email to school officials, according to records that Keeler obtained.

He appeared to finish college at another school.
The British cruise ship cocaine smuggling pensioners have asked to be moved back to the UK to serve the rest of their sentences.

It comes after it emerged the wife is 'seriously ill'.

Three judges convicted retired chef Roger Clarke, 72, and his ex-secretary wife Sue, 71, of drugs trafficking on a Caribbean liner after a one-day trial in 2019.

Three judges convicted retired chef Roger Clarke, 72, and his ex-secretary wife Sue, 71, of drugs trafficking on a Caribbean liner after a one-day trial in 2019

The British pair have been held in separate jails and Portuguese authorities are analysing their application to finish their sentences in England.

A source in Portugal claimed that Sue is 'seriously ill' and is now staying in a prison hospital in Caxias.

Court documents obtained by the Mirror show she has pleaded with the authorities to allow her to move to an English jail so she can be closer to family.

A legal source in Portugal told the publication: 'There is a big chance they will go to England quite soon  it's just hard to say when, as these things take time in Portugal.'

The couple have been in jail since September 2019, after smuggling 1million of cocaine on to a cruise ship.

They were told they will serve their eight-year sentences in Portugal instead of being kicked out of the country and sent back to Britain.

Clarke has previously complained about the harsh conditions in the jail, and claimed he lost six-stone and had a suspected heart attack.

The pair, originally from Kent but who lived in Guardamar, Spain, were arrested on board cruise liner Marco Polo on December 4, 2018

He also said he and his wife were 'innocent' and he sent a letter to Boris Johnson begging him to look into the couple's case.

The pair, originally from Kent but who lived in Guardamar, Spain, were arrested on board cruise liner Marco Polo on December 4, 2018.

Portuguese police acted on a tip-off from Britain's National Crime Agency and found 9lbs of cocaine hidden inside the lining of four suitcases Clarke had been handed at St Lucia.

After being sentenced, Clark held hands with his wife and whispered: 'Jesus Christ, I was not expecting more than four years. I'll be 80 when all this is over.'

Clarke told the court at the time that he was taking the suitcases back to the UK for a friend called Lee who had promised to pay him 800 and bragged he could sell them for a massive profit at upmarket stores such as Harrods.

He said UK-based Jamaican businessman 'Lee' and another associate called Dee, who he named in court as George Wilmot, had asked him to help negotiate the import of exotic fruit during Caribbean cruise stopovers and he brought the suitcases back for them as a sideline.

Police pictures show the suitcases being taken apart to show the hidden cocaine in the Clarke's cabin on the cruise ship

State prosecutor Manuela Brito rubbished his court claim he had been 'betrayed' by people he trusted and insisted the Brits were drug mules who used the four cruises they took to South America in two years as a front for their crimes.

And she questioned how they could pay for the cruises costing around 18,000 when they survived on a joint monthly pension of 1,150 from which the couple had to pay rent of 445.

Clarke said he fears for his health in jail after having stents fitted in his heart in 2010.

He said he had been taken to hospital with a suspected heart attack while in lock up, but it was just to do with his chest muscles caused by weight loss.

It is understood Sue works as a seamstress in Lisbon's Tires Prison, making toys.

She is believed to be sharing a cell with four other convicts.
A portrait of painter David Hockney by the artist Lucian Freud has sold for almost 15million at auction.

The painting - which has not been seen in public since Freud's 2012 exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery - sold above estimate for 14.9million at Sotheby's in London today.

The oil on canvas was pursued by five collectors, bidding on the telephone via Sotheby's representatives in New York, London and Asia.

Yorkshireman Hockney, 83, spent 120 hours sitting for the famous portrait in 2002, at the height of Freud's career in the months leading up to his critically acclaimed retrospective at Tate Britain.

But Hockney was prevented from buying it because Freud's New York dealer, William Acquavella, wanted to keep it.

It is not known if Hockney himself was among the bidders this time.

A portrait of painter David Hockney by the artist Lucian Freud (the painting next to the pair together) has sold for almost 15million at auction

He then sold the work to a private collector, and it was hidden from public view until a 2005 exhibition in Venice and then a further two in 2012, including one at London's National Portrait Gallery.

It is considered to be one of the most masterful peer-to-peer portraits ever committed to canvas.

The duo first met in 1962 but Freud did not paint his friend until 40 years later, when Freud was almost 80 and considered to be Britain's greatest living painter.

It shows Hockney's face close up and mid-thought as he peers over his round spectacles.

It was the latest in a series of high-profile sitters and subjects painted by the artist, including the Queen and Kate Moss.

During the sittings the pair would gossip, drink tea and talk about art while Hockney smoked, which was permitted by Freud, as long as Hockney did not tell Moss, who had been denied the same privilege during her own sittings.

Hockney has previously recalled sitting for the painting amid the 'old-fashioned bohemia' of Freud's flat, where they shared 'bitchy art-world gossip'.

The painting (pictured) - which has not been seen in public since Freud's 2012 exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery - sold above estimate for 14.9million at Sotheby's in London today

He has praised the final work, comparing it to works by the French Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cezanne.

'It's not me; it's an account of looking at me by a very intelligent and skilled painter,' he said. 'That's what a Cezanne portrait is  an account of looking.'

In a biography of Freud, who died in 2011 aged 88, author William Feaver said he believed Hockney's 'resentment' at not being able to buy the work was a matter for his dealer William Acquavella, 'not him'.

In Breakfast with Lucian, a 2013 book by DailyMail editor Geordie Greig, Hockney described the four months in 2002 when he sat every day for his friend.

'Sometimes I was early and he would leap up the stairs two at a time. No slouch at 80. He never wanted to be seen as inactive,' Hockney said of Freud.

Describing his flat, he said: 'I liked the old-fashioned bohemia of it all.

'The plates with old beans on them from the last night, or even last week  it was like student days, very appealing, very appealing after all those very clean New York lofts.'

Hockney's newest piece of art - a digital sunrise sequence - was broadcast simultaneously on billboards worldwide in May.

The six image sequence appeared on digital billboards in New York, London, Tokyo, and Seoul.

It was created by Hockney on an iPad during lockdown and represents a message of hope and collaboration as the world emerges from the pandemic.

The piece, titled, 'Remember, you cannot look at the sun or death for very long', was drawn by Hockney in the early mornings in Normandy, France, where he has lived since 2019.

Hockney's newest piece of art - a digital sunrise sequence - was broadcast simultaneously on billboards worldwide in May

The two and a half minute sequence transforms from a dark scene with long shadows to a brilliant image of bright sun rays spread dramatically across the scenery.

The world-renowned artist started experimenting with drawing on an iPad in 2009, and has praised the medium for not requiring an extensive clean up.

'No cleaning up needed', he told the New York Times, 'and I can always draw at a moment's notice.'

The famous artist started drawing digital with his thumb on an iPhone before shifting to using a stylus pen on the new released iPad.

'There was great advantage in this medium because it's backlit and I could draw in the dark. I didn't ever have to get out of bed,' said the artist.

He has now produced hundreds of paintings, portraits, and still lifes, on the Apple product.
Election officials in New York City admitted on Tuesday night that 135,000 test ballots in the race for mayor had been mistakenly counted as real ones.

The discovery came after mayoral election frontrunner Eric Adams questioned the ranked-choice results after his lead in the Democratic primary went down to a mere two points over rival Kathryn Garcia.

After 11 rounds of ranked-choice vote tallying Adams, a former police officer and Brooklyn borough president, was declared to be leading former Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia 51.1 per cent to 48.9 per cent.

The difference was 15,908 votes, without counting absentee ballots, the officials said.

Yet hours later, on Tuesday night, the board released a statement, explaining that it had failed to remove sample ballot images used to test its ranked-choice voting software. When the board ran the program, it counted 'both test and election night results, producing approximately 135,000 additional records,' the statement said.

Eric Adams on Tuesday questioned the updated results. By 10:30pm the Board of Elections admitted they had made a mistake and were rectifying it

Kathryn Garcia, hoping to be the first female mayor of New York, was edging closer to Adams with the 11th tally. It is unclear how Tuesday's mistake will affect the results

Former cop and Brooklyn borough president Eric Adams was announced on Tuesday afternoon to be leading former Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia 51.1 per cent to 48.9 per cent - a mere 15,908 vote difference. The Board of Elections later said the results were wrong

Many of those test votes were handed to candidates who've since quit the race, although Eric Adams also received a large number of them, The New York Times reported.

It is unclear how removing the test votes will change the gap in the race between Adams and Garcia, with the ranked choice process further complicating the ultimate count.

There has so-far been no suggestion that the primary vote will have to be held again.

The ranked-choice numbers, it said, would be tabulated again.

They said on Tuesday afternoon that 941,832 votes have been tallied and 124,000 absentee ballots remain to be counted.

The first absentee ballots results are not expected to be tallied until July 6.

Adams in a statement said he and his team 'appreciate the Board's transparency and acknowledgment of their error'.

Adams said: 'Today's mistake by the Board of Elections was unfortunate.

'It is critical that New Yorkers are confident in their electoral system, especially as we rank votes in a citywide election for the first time.'

His main rival, Garcia, said it was 'deeply troubling and requires a much more transparent and complete explanation.'

Wiley said that it was 'the result of generations of failures that have gone unaddressed.'

She said it was 'impossible to be surprised' at the chaos, and demanded reform of the Board of Elections.

'Today, we have once again seen the mismanagement that has resulted in a lack of confidence in results, not because there is a flaw in our election laws, but because those who implement it have failed too many times,' she said.

On social media, some people were saying that the system was too complicated.

'Some personal news: I've read like 20 articles about the NYC ranked choice election and I still don't understand it,' tweeted sports reporter Mina Kimes.

Nicholas Dawes, executive editor of The City, noted that his publication reported a month before voting began that there was chaos.

'Key questions remain unanswered on how the results will be tallied and disclosed,' the site reported.

Josh Kraushaar, a columnist at National Journal, said it was wrong to blame ranked voting, however.

He said it was 'NY's rickety voting system' that was at fault.

Others used the fiasco to claim that Donald Trump's criticism of the November presidential election was vindicated.

Yossi Gestetner, a political commentator, told his 41,000 followers: 'The NYC Board of Elections counted 135,000 test ballots together with real ballots and released results without anyone at BOE noticing.

'Trump lost the WH by 43,000 votes spread in 3 states and he is corroding democracy if he has concerns about the integrity of those numbers.'

Another person said: 'States need to start 2020 recount ASAP.

'Somebody who runs and ownes (sic) machines decides in advance who is the winner, Trump won.'

Another said: 'The person who should be the HAPPIEST about the incredible #NYC election vote count is now-suspended #lawyer Rudy #Giuliani, whose allegations on behalf of Trump 2020 campaign now do not sound as outlandish given the scope of the snafu admitted to by city board of elections!'

Tuesday's results led to the elimination of AOC-backed liberal candidate Maya Wiley who fell to third place. It is unclear whether the 135,000 erroneous ballots would affect Wiley.

Prior to Tuesdays ranked choice results, Adams had a convincing lead with 31.7 per cent of first place votes.

Adams immediately questioned the initial ranked choice voting results, which he said had 'irregularities.'

'The vote total just released by the Board of Elections is 100,000-plus more than the total announced on election night, raising serious questions,' he said in a statement on Tuesday.

'We have asked the Board of Elections to explain such a massive increase and other irregularities before we comment on the Ranked Choice Voting projection.'

His lead led former candidate Andrew Yang, who was once a favorite to win, to declare: 'It's almost mathematically impossible for Eric Adams not to win.'

Yang spoke on Monday, before the voting numbers were released.

'I think that there are going to be people who have different candidates in different orders such that it's almost mathematically impossible for Eric Adams not to win, based upon the lead that he has,' Yang said, on the latest episode of his podcast Yang Speaks.

'Based on the numbers, it seemed like a near certainty that Eric Adams will be the Democratic nominee,' Yang said.

Adams has not declared victory but said the early lead was encouraging.

'If the Democratic Party fails to recognize what we did here in New York, they're going to have a problem in the midterm elections, and they're going to have a problem in the presidential election,' Adams said at a press conference on Thursday.

Adams, a former NYPD officer, has vowed to bring back the controversial stop-and-frisk searches that were axed because they gave way to racial profiling. He also wants to reinstate the anti-crime unit that was disbanded last year at the height of the BLM movement.

Wiley, a former de Blasio administration official, was endorsed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren.

She ran on a 'defund the police' platform and promised voters a city-wide affordable healthcare plan in New York City and ran on a plan to build more affordable housing and more schools.

Adams (pictured) a former NYPD officer, has vowed to bring back the controversial stop-and-frisk searches that were axed because they gave way to racial profiling.

Kathryn Garcia, (pictured) the former sanitation commissioner, promised to raise age of police recruitment from 21 to 25 and to make NYC rely fully on renewable energy

During the final debate between the candidates, Wiley said she did not think more police were needed on the subway, where crime is escalating.

Garcia, who was endorsed by the New York Times, promised to raise age of police recruitment from 21 to 25 and to make NYC rely fully on renewable energy.

New York City's new ranked-choice voting process kicked in after no candidate secured more than 50 per cent of first-choice votes from those who headed to the polls last Tuesday or cast their ballot in the early voting period.

Voters can rank up to five candidates in the mayor's race, with the Democratic nominee now set to be decided through an elimination process that begins today.

The candidate with the fewest votes is knocked out and the second choices marked on the ballots cast for that candidate are then distributed among the remaining hopefuls.

This repeats until one candidate has a simple majority. Absentee ballots - excluded from earlier counts - are then added and a new set of eliminations begins to reveal the true winner.

The process could take weeks. A fresh round of results is expected on July 6, with a more complete set expected to follow the week after.

The winning Democratic candidate is widely expected to win the mayor's race and will face off against Republic candidate Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels vigilante group.

Sliwa, 67, defeated Fernando Mateo to win Tuesday's primary with an overwhelming 72 per cent to Mateo's 28.

The final election will be held in November, and will see the winner replace current two-term incumbent Bill de Blasio.
Millions of Australians could be freed from lockdown within days if new coronavirus infections in NSW remain 'in a holding pattern'.

Some experts believe the worrying New South Wales outbreak which has soared to 149 cases and plunged Sydney and surrounding regions into lockdown for a fortnight is 'fundamentally under control'.

'This is still looking like an outbreak that is fundamentally under control and it seems curtailed because even where they've missed people getting into quarantine before they're infectious, they've actually only been out for a day or two,' Deakin University chair of epidemiology Professor Catherine Bennett told the Australian Financial Review.

Despite the optimism, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has warned some reinstated rules are here to stay until most of the state's adult population are vaccinated.

The state's chief health officer Dr Kerry Chant says the key indicator of success for the lockdown will be if all new cases were already in isolation when they tested positive and there are no further community transmissions.

Some health experts believe the Sydney outbreak is now 'fundamentally under control' and say cases will stabilise. Pictured is a worker deep cleaning Great Ocean Foods in Marrickville after the business became an exposure site

'We want to start seeing all cases effectively isolating,' Dr Chant told reporters on Tuesday.

'What we're hoping is, because of the lockdown, the number of interactions those cases have had ... would have decreased significantly.'

While there's speculation lockdown stay at home orders could be extended beyond July 9, some health experts don't believe that will happen due to the lack of mystery cases linked to unknown sources.

Professor Bennett said health officials must tighten up infection controls to ensure cases are going into isolation 'a bit faster' before lockdown restrictions can possibly be reassessed later this week.

University of South Australia epidemiologist Adrian Esterman sees the drop in daily cases to below 20 as a promising sign and believes infections appear to have stabilised since lockdown came into full effect on Saturday night.

Health officials may reassess Sydney's lockdown in the coming days if cases continues to drop Pictured is a sign at Bondi Beach reminding people to follow the lockdown laws

However, UNSW Sydney epidemiologist Professor Mary-Louise McLaws believes it's too premature to suggest the latest Sydney outbreak is under control.

She believes cases will go up and down due to the highly infectious Delta variant of the virus health officials are working with.

'It's going to be quite some time, it's going to be a while. We need to be very patient. The horse has bolted,' Professor McLaws told the publication.

Australian National University infectious diseases expert Professor Peter Collignon believes lockdown will end as scheduled on July 9 but says the next few days will be critical.

'There are another 3 to 4 days of critical numbers,' he told Sunrise on Wednesday.

'I don't think it is possible that they could come out early, if we see low numbers over the next few days and on the week and we see four or five days and that continues, and all of those people are in isolation or known contacts, then two weeks is big because that is the average full incubation.'

The NSW Premier was warned some reinstated Covid restrictions are here to stay (pictured: Sydneysiders exercising during lockdown)

Seventeen of Tuesday's new cases were linked to previously confirmed cases, with the source of the other two still under investigation.

Both of the mystery cases work in Sydney's eastern suburbs, the epicentre of the outbreak.

But only seven of the new cases were in isolation for their entire infectious period, causing the number of exposure sites to balloon again.

Some restrictions will have to sta, even after the current cluster is eradicated and lockdown ends, the NSW Premier has warned.

'When you know that you've got such a transmissible variant ... you do need to look at what life looks like because what we want to do is prevent ever having to go into lockdown again,' Ms Berejiklian said.

She believes NSW must get 80 per cent of its adult population vaccinated before the government works on what 'COVID-normal' life could look like.

That's equivalent to 10 million jabs, with more than a fifth of that number administrated so far.
Fraud and error in coronavirus support schemes has already cost taxpayers more than 30billion  with many more billions in losses expected, MPs warn today.

Up to 27billion in bounce-back loans may never be repaid because businesses went bust or cheated in their applications, a new report claims.

Blunders and over-claiming of Universal Credit payments rose to an all-time high of 5.5billion in the year to March.

The Commons public accounts committee fears further vast sums could also have gone missing over the past year from funds designed to protect businesses and individuals hit by the pandemic.

Councils are responsible for delivering several Covid support schemes, but the committee said there was worrying evidence of their inability to investigate potential misuse of cash.

The eye-watering deficit come on top of the 51.8billion in public money that the Government believes is lost to fraud and error annually even before coronavirus struck.

Fraud and error in coronavirus support schemes has already cost taxpayers more than 30billion  with many more billions in losses expected, MPs warn today

Up to 26.8billion is wasted each year in the tax and benefits system, and a further 25billion is lost in other areas of public spending where exact figures are not measured.

Committee chairman Dame Meg Hillier said last night: The Government knows it is losing over 26billion a year to fraud and error in the tax and benefits systems, but admits to another 25billion it cant even detect.

Thats over 50billion worth of public services a year given to fraudsters and by mistakes in payments  before the frightening losses racking up in our Covid spending so far and against the backdrop of a massive surge in need.

Fraud is never acceptable and when so many were suffering as a result of Covid, the Government needs to tackle the fraudsters robustly.

The committee has long been concerned about the impact of departments own errors  including overpayments which need to be clawed back  which leads to further hardship for the already vulnerable.

It comes after the Mail revealed how scammers were helping people fraudulently obtain bounce-back loans worth up to 50,000 by providing fake tax returns to hoodwink officials and creating bogus bank accounts for non-existent businesses.

In one incident, a conman took out one of the loans in the name of a luxury car dealership in an attempt to buy a 41,000 Porsche from the same firm.

Critics say one of the key loopholes in bounce-back loans is that the Government promised to underwrite loans from banks  encouraging the lenders to make minimal checks because they wouldnt lose out if business failed and were unable to repay the cash.

It comes after the Mail revealed how scammers were helping people fraudulently obtain bounce-back loans worth up to 50,000 by providing fake tax returns to hoodwink officials and creating bogus bank accounts for non-existent businesses

Crooks who charged 6k to doctor the paperwork Illustrating how easy it is to swindle Covid finance schemes, the Mail exposed two fraudsters who offered to arrange fake loans worth tens of thousands of pounds a time  with almost no questions asked. Reporters posing as businessmen facing financial difficulties were offered fake tax returns so that they could show they had a turnover of 200,000  meaning they could apply for the maximum 50,000 Government-backed bounce-back loan. Working from a south London office block, consultants Zohaib Butt and Imran Khan demanded 6,000 in cash to submit these false accounts to HM Revenue and Customs to get the loan processed. The scammers promised to eliminate the paperwork as soon as the 50,000 loan was handed over to avoid the client being liable for tax on the figures on the bogus return. Khan assured the undercover reporter he had done it before and there would be no problem. Advertisement

The Government also made it clear that it wanted money paid out quickly to stop businesses going bust.

Now the MPs are calling for the names of businesses that were awarded Covid loans and grants to be published, demanding that the Treasury sets out new transparency guidance for Government support in the next six months.

The committee said this would provide the opportunity for whistleblowers and others to report suspicious claims.

In a report, it demanded to know how the Treasury would ensure Whitehall took a zero-tolerance approach to fraud and error following the pandemic.

It said all departments should report on estimated levels of fraud and error within their Covid schemes, how they are being tackled and what they plan to do to claw back lost taxpayers money.

The committee said it was unacceptable that it took the Treasury 12 months to approve funding for HM Revenue and Customs taxpayer protection taskforce to investigate misuse of Covid assistance schemes, even though it knew there was a heightened risk of fraud.

The Department for Business did not consult Cabinet Office counter-fraud experts when designing the bounce-back loan scheme, and HMRC does not intend to measure fraud in the self-employed income support scheme and Eat Out to Help Out  both set up to mitigate the effects of the pandemic.

The committee said: HM Treasury and Cabinet Office should, within six months, introduce mandatory fraud-impact assessments that require formal sign-off... for all Government major project portfolio programmes and for all other schemes that departments identify as having a moderate to high risk of fraud or error.

Around 16,000 civil servants work for the counter fraud function in the public sector to find and fight fraud  mostly in the Department for Work and Pensions and HMRC.

But the Cabinet Office admitted it was not able to give a view on whether they were working in the right areas.

Janet Alexander, Director of the HMRC Taxpayer Protection Taskforce said, HMRC is measuring the level of error and fraud within the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, Self Employment Income Support Scheme and Eat Out to Help Out scheme.

'We have already opened 12,000 inquiries into suspicious claims, and have made eight arrests with more in the pipeline.

'We know some people will have made genuine mistakes and these people should not be worried. They just need to get in touch so we can help them rectify the issue quickly. However, HMRC will take robust action to recover money from people who have made fraudulent claims.'
Social services groups want the federal government to plug gaps in its COVID disaster payment system as fresh outbreaks again wreak havoc on state and territory borders.

People are eligible for up to $500 a week if they're in a nationally-recognised hotspot for more than seven days and cannot work.

But they aren't eligible if they're also on the dole or other income support, or if they're receiving a separate federal disaster leave payment that also excludes people on JobSeeker.

The $500 weekly payments for locked-down Sydneysiders from the eastern suburbs unable to work will begin on Thursday, while the rest of Greater Sydney, Central Coast and Wollongong can claim the cash from July 4.

If Queensland or Darwin's lockdowns last longer than seven days, residents will be entitled to the same benefits.

Australians living in a Covid hotspot (such as those in Sydney's eastern suburbs, pictured on the first day of lockdown on Saturday) can claim $500 from the government from Thursday

The Australian Council of Social Service on Monday urged the Morrison government to plug gaps in its $500-a-week payment as states and territories again slammed their borders shut.

ACOSS chief executive Cassandra Goldie said people shouldn't have to wait a week to get the money or be excluded because they're getting JobSeeker.

'Getting by on the paltry rate of JobSeeker is impossible at the best of times, let alone in a lockdown,' Dr Goldie said.

For people who would usually work fewer than 20 hours a week, the disaster payment drops to $325.

It's separate to the government's $1500 payment for people forced to quarantine for two weeks, which comes with its own caveats.

The $500 weekly payments for locked-down Sydneysiders from the eastern suburbs (above, Bondi Beach on Sunday) unable to work will begin on Thursday

States and territories have all but closed themselves off to each other as NSW, Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia record new cases.

Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese said lockdowns and restrictions were the fault of the Morrison government and it should look after people who couldn't work as a result.

Newly appointed Emergency Management Minister Bridget McKenzie was contacted for comment.
There were 23 new Covid-19 cases in Australia on Tuesday, including 19 in NSW

Today show host Allison Langdon has questioned state leaders who imposed harsh lockdowns on 12 million Australians while 'no one is seriously sick', before taking aim at the federal government's sluggish vaccine rollout.

New South Wales, Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory were plunged into lockdown at various times this week amid just 23 new Covid-19 cases nationwide on Tuesday.

Despite Prime Minister Scott Morrison's promises to ensure Australians are 'at the front of the queue' for the vaccine in 2020, only about 7.1 per cent of the population have had the jab so far.

Langdon asked Nationals MP Matt Canavan and the editor of Stellar magazine Sarrah Le Marquand on Wednesday morning if state premiers are 'overreacting' by going into lockdown.

She also asked whether the harsh restrictions would be necessary if the vaccine rollout was faster.

Allison Langdon asked whether Australian officials are 'overreacting' by locking residents down

'Twelve million people in lockdown across four states and territories. We only had 23 cases nationwide yesterday. And no-one is seriously sick. Are we overreacting?' she asked.

Ms Le Marquand said the two-week lockdown in New South Wales 'made it easier' for Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk to throw her state into a three-day lockdown following just two new cases.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian announced a lockdown for the Greater Sydney Region when the city hit 112 cases of the highly infectious Indian Delta variant last Saturday, with the outbreak largely contained to Bondi.

Despite a low number of new cases on Tuesday, restrictions were imposed on the Sunshine State after an unvaccinated hospital receptionist holidayed across the state after getting the Delta strain of Covid.

'While I'm sure the Queensland premier would highly disagree with me here, the fact that NSW has made [the decision to go into lockdown] has made it easier for her to go into this three-day lockdown in Queensland,' Ms Le Marquand said.

Pictured, left to right: Nationals Senator Matt Canavan, Today host Allison Langdon and editor of Stellar magazine Sarrah Le Marquand

She added that the situation is 'really worrying' for Queensland tourism operators who reap the benefits of people in Victoria and NSW heading north for the winter school holidays, but pointed out would-be holidaymakers are unable to travel anyway due to border closures.

Langdon fired back and asked if states would still impose draconian restrictions on Australians if more people were vaccinated.

'To see this confusion over the last couple of days, the prime minister telling the under 40s they can now get the AstraZeneca jab,' she said.

'You've got the AMA [Australian Medical Association], also Queensland Health saying "No, stick with Pfizer" and GPs are angry they were given no warning before they were swamped with calls.

'Don't you guys have one main job here and you are not getting it right?'

On Monday, Scott Morrison announced the people over the age of 16 could get the AstraZeneca vaccine - which has previously been discouraged for people under the age of 60 due to the risk of a blood clotting disorder.

The Australian Medical Association hit back and said they were not consulted before Mr Morrison announced the policy changes, and advised under 59 to stick with the Pfizer jab.

But Senator Canavan defended the government's decision to open AstraZeneca to a wider demographic.

'Ultimately the patient decides, it's your arm, it will be your health side effects. You make that decision. Looking at all the risks. If you think you can do it go for it,' he said.

Matt Canavan (pictured) defended the federal government's decision to opent he AstraZeneca jab to a wider demographic

Unsatisfied with the response, Langdon then pointed out that the Australian vaccine rollout has been sluggish compared with the other 38 OECD countries, which includes the US and the UK - which have been inundated with thousands of new cases per day.

'I tell you what, when we are the last country, we are coming last in OECD countries to roll out a vaccine program,' she said.

'No, we are not,' Senator Canavan interrupted.

'Yes we are - who's behind us?' she asked.

'When you look at the number of people who have had a first dose in New Zealand, it's about 14 per cent - we are about a quarter,' he replied.

'That's a pretty comparable, given we both have not had widespread outbreaks of coronavirus. All those other countries that are ahead of us have had hundreds of thousands of deaths. We have not.'

Sydney entered lockdown at 6pm on Saturday. Pictured, a couple walking in Bondi during the lockdown

He added: 'I'd much prefer to be in a country that has a slower vaccination rate but a much lower death rate than the reverse.'

NSW has tightened the rules for people travelling into the state if they have visited other regions under new COVID-19 restrictions, as numerous new venues across Sydney were named as exposure sites.

On Tuesday evening, NSW Health issued more than 20 new public health alerts for venues across Sydney visited by Covid positive cases, including gyms, restaurants, shops, clubs and hotels as well as some bus routes.

NSW needs to get 80 per cent of its adult population vaccinated before having a conversation about what 'Covid-normal' may look like, the premier said.

People are tested for Covid-19 at a pop up clinic at Bondi Beach in Sydney on Monday. More than five million people in Greater Sydney and its surrounds are in a 14-day lockdown with infected cases in 48 postcodes

That's five million people receiving 10 million jabs. More than two million doses have been administered in NSW so far.

Seventeen of Tuesday's new cases were linked to previously confirmed cases, with the source of the other two still under investigation.

Both work in Sydney's eastern suburbs, the epicentre of the outbreak.

However, only seven of the new cases were in isolation for their entire infectious period, causing the number of exposure sites to balloon again.
A Florida building inspector who assured residents of the collapsed tower that it was in good shape a month after being warned otherwise has been suspended from his new job.

Rosendo Prieto was named chief building official of Surfside in July 2013 - a position he held until November 2020. On Tuesday Prieto was placed on leave from his job as interim building official for C.A.P. Government Inc, where he began working in May this year. He was working to provide building department services to government clients in Doral.

A spokesman for C.A.P. said: 'On June 28, 2021, C.A.P. Government, Inc. notified the City of Doral that Mr. Prieto was on a leave of absence and assigned another employee to assist the City of Doral Building Department on a temporary basis.'

In October 2018 Frank Morabito, an engineer, warned Prieto of 'major structural damage' in the Champlain Towers South building he said would cost around $9 million to repair. Morabito had been commissioned by the residents' association to look into the building, ahead of its 40-year structural review, due in 2021.

But in November 2018, Prieto told the residents that he had reviewed Morabito's report and found little of concern.

'It appears the building is in very good shape,' Prieto told them, according to the minutes of the meeting released by Surfside on Monday, and obtained by NBC News. The building collapsed in the early hours of last Thursday, with 12 people so far confirmed dead. A further 149 remain unaccounted for.

Surfside's chief building official in November 2018 told residents of the Champlain Towers South that there were no major structural concerns. He had received a report a month before warning of serious damage to the tower

The building from the water on Tuesday as search and rescue teams used cranes to try to find survivors. Only one part of the building remains intact

Tributes on the beach next to the collapsed condo on Tuesday morning. There are fears for the two that are next to it and were built by the same developer

Crews work in the rubble Champlain Towers South condo, Tuesday, June 29, 2021, in Surfside, Fla. Many people were still unaccounted for after Thursday's fatal collapse

Exposed portions of the building show a children's bedroom on the top floor of the building that was partially damaged alongside other parts that were ripped off. It's unclear if anyone was in these bedrooms when the building collapsed. 150 people remain missing - 11 are confirmed dead

The minutes stated: 'The permit process, balcony railings, concrete restoration, and waterproofing was discussed.'

The day after the meeting, Prieto wrote in an email to then-town manager Guillermo Olmedillo that 'it went very well.'

'The response was very positive from everyone in the room,' he wrote.

Rosendo Prieto was chief building officer of Surfside from July 2013 until November 2020

'All main concerns over their 40-year recertification process were addressed.'

Yet Morabito's report, released by Surfside officials on Friday, included pictures of what he wrote was 'abundant cracking' and crumbling in the underground parking garage of the 12-story building.

Morabito also said the waterproofing below the pool deck and entrance drive was failing, 'causing major structural damage to the concrete structural slab below these areas.'

The building's structural slab helps hold it up, with Champlain Towers' slab feared to have been badly corroded by water from its leaking pool, as well as sea water from coastal floods.

Morabito added: 'Failure to replace the waterproofing in the near future will cause the extent of the concrete deterioration to expand exponentially.'

Morabito recommended that concrete slabs, which were 'showing distress' by the entrance and pool deck, 'be removed and replaced in their entirety.'

He said the concrete deterioration should 'be repaired in a timely fashion.'

That pool was swallowed into a massive sinkhole shortly before the collapse, now-missing resident Cassondra 'Cassie' Billedeau-Stratton told her husband on the phone before her line went dead.

Another resident's concerns about construction work nearby were also dismissed by Prieto.

Mara Chouela, a member of the resident-led Champlain Towers South board, emailed Prieto in early 2019 hoping to raise a red flag about the construction.

'We are concerned that the construction next to Surfside is too close,' she wrote.

'The terra project on Collins and 87 are digging too close to our property and we have concerns regarding the structure of our building.'

Prieto responded: 'There is nothing for me to check.'

Prieto has not responded for comment about why he gave the building the all-clear, despite Morabito's report.

He told The Miami Herald that he does not remember getting the 2018 report, nor does he remember receiving the 2019 emails from Chouela.

This is the scale of the debris, shown overnight as search and rescue teams used cranes to sift through the rubble

Structural engineer Frank Morabito in October 2018 warned of damage to the tower

News of Prieto's role came as it emerged that a contractor photographed worrying signs of damage in the parking garage of the Champlain Towers South complex on Tuesday - just 36 hours before the building collapsed.

The photographer saw corroding 'rebar' - steel rods with ridges, for use in reinforced concrete - and cracked concrete.

Rebar often corrodes when exposed to salt and chemicals, like those used in the swimming pool - or from seawater.

The building collapse in the early hours of Thursday killed at least 11 people, with 150 still missing.

The contractor, who has not been named, had been asked to survey the damage in the pool equipment room, which was in the southside of the underground parking garage, beneath the pool deck.

Photos taken on June 22 in the pool equipment room at Champlain Towers South, which is located in the basement parking garage, show extensive concrete spalling and corroded rebar. A contractor took these photos and noticed that in the actual parking garage, there were puddles of water which were in the direct spot beneath the leaking pool deck

This is a breakdown of the repairs that were needed to Champlain Towers South and how much they were going to cost residents. The most expensive item was a $4million facade, balcony and railing repair. Residents questioned much of the breakdown

COST AND TIMELINE OF CHAMPLAIN TOWERS REPAIRS 2018 cost: $12million That is the initial cost given by Frank Morabito, who was hired to conduct a review for the building's recertification process. Morabito was rehired in 2019 and he conducted a more extensive review. A committee was then formed to decide who was going to do the work 2021 cost: $16million This was how much the work had increased by because the damage had become worse. This figure also reflects the engineer's fee for doing it. Cash on hand: $707,000 Cash needed: $15.5million What each owner owed: $80,000-$336,000 depending on apartment size Owners were given until July 1 to decide how to pay. The work bids were due to end on June 1 but bids were still being taken for the concrete project How to pay Lump sum or in monthly installments of $500 or more for 15 years Units in building: 136 Advertisement

He was putting together a bid to redo the pool and the pool equipment room - but was taken aback by the damage, which he photographed.

He told The Miami Herald afterwards: 'There was standing water all over the parking garage...I thought to myself, that's not normal.'

The damage had been identified in Morabito's 2018 report.

He found that there was a 'major error' in the building's construction which meant the pool was leaking onto the concrete slabs below.

In April, the condo board - which had been deliberating the repairs for two years, trying to come up with the money for them and organizing a committee to oversee them - sent a letter to residents telling them the damage was 'significantly worse' and 'accelerating'.

'Please note that the original scope of work in the 2018 report has expanded. The concrete deterioration is accelerating,' wrote board president Jean Wodnicki in a letter explaining why Morabito's estimate of $9 million to repair the building had risen to $15 million.

'The roof situation got much worse, so extensive roof repairs had to be incorporated. When you can visually see the concrete spalling (cracking), that means that the rebar holding it together is rusting and deteriorating beneath the surface.

'Indeed the observable damage such as in the garage has gotten significantly worse since the initial inspection.'

In that letter, she said they were still trying to finalize a loan from Valley Bank to pay for the repairs.

They had tried to get a loan from Banco Popular, but the deal fell through.

Wodnicki wrote that the total cost was more than $16 million and the board had just $707,000 in cash reserves, leaving them with a bill for around $15 million.

The owners of the building's 136 units would be responsible for repaying it and each was on the hook for a different amount depending on how big their unit was.

Owners of a one-bedroom apartment would owe $80,000, while those in a four-bedroom penthouse would have to shell out $336,000.

Officials said Monday that local investigations into what caused the building to collapse would determine if state building protocols need to be changed.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology said it was sending a team of six to the site of the collapse.

After the team, which investigated in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, does its initial assessment, it will decide whether to do a complete investigation that would likely inform future federal building codes.

President Joe Biden and the First Lady will visit the site on Thursday.





Miami officials will inspect 500 buildings to make sure they are safe after Champlain Towers collapse - as terrified residents in other condos share pictures of concrete damage and ask 'are we next?'

Miami Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said on Tuesday that was now contacting every building in the county that is 40 years or older

Miami Dade County official are inspecting 501 buildings - every one in their jurisdiction that is 40 years or older- to make sure none are compromised like Champlain Towers South was before it collapsed last week, killing at least 11 people.

There is currently no state law in Florida that requires high rise buildings to be inspected regularly.

The Miami Dade county inspector on Tuesday night contacted one building, in northeast Miami Dade, where they found four balconies they said were dangerous.

Of the 501 that the Mayor's office has identified which need to be visited, 131 have been contacted.

At a press conference, Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said: 'Our building audit continues. We're taking swift action to immediately identify and address any outstanding issues with the buildings that have not yet completed their recertification process.

'That's our priority right now. Last night, our officer notified one of those properties that four balconies must be immediately closed to residents due to safety conditions.

'We're proceeding at pace. In a matter of days or short weeks we will have addressed all of those safety concerns.

'I will be meeting with subject area experts from multiple fields to look closely at every possible angle on this issue related to building safety,' she said.

She added that after meeting with experts, her office will give out a list of recommendations relating to 'chains of custody' when it comes to condo maintenance.

Meanwhile, residents of high-rise condo buildings in Miami are worried their homes may crumble around them next.

Residents of Maison Grande Condominium are particularly worried because of concrete spalling in the parking garage.

Maison Grande is older - built in 1971, ten years before Champlain. It underwent its 40-year recertification process and there were no structural or safety concerns, according to its board's president.

But last year, inspectors found a crack in the ceiling on the penthouse level which they said was in violation of code. They stuck a warning in the lobby to say the building was unsafe.

These photos show the damage inside the Maison Grande Condominium building, a complex that was built in 1971 - ten years before Champlain Towers South - that is two miles away. Residents shared the photos on Tuesday in fear that their homes may crumble around them too. The condo association's president insisted to DailyMail.com the building was safe and up to code

These photos were taken by worried residents inside the condo building where residents say they are scared.

Other photos taken inside the parking garage show more concrete damage. The condo association president said she is waiting for a permit from the city to do the work but that they are delayed. In the meantime, she has insisted there is no safety concern

The Maison Grande complex, which is 2 miles from the Champlain collapse, where residents are scared of concrete cracks, but where the condo board insists it is safe

The board's president insists it has been fixed and that there are no safety concerns but residents, who have also seen damage in the garage, are not convinced. They shared photos of concrete damage in the garage with Local 10.

The president of the condo board there insists the building is safe, telling DailyMail.com that their recertification report was clean, and that an engineer confirmed last Thursday - after Champlain's collapse - that their building was safe.

The building was flagged for concrete damage on one floor of the building - a 72 square feet patch on the penthouse floor - that has just been fixed.

They are waiting to repair damage in the garage, which is what the residents photographed, but they are yet to receive a permit from the city to do it.

Lilly Ann Sanchez, the board's president, told DailyMail.com that she understands why the residents are scared but that they have nothing to worry about.

'Everything is being addressed - there is absolutely no danger in our building. I think they're spooked about what happened and some people like to be a little alarmist.

'People take this kind of tragedy and turn it into something it is not. There are tens of thousands of buildings all along the coast and across the country that are not just falling down around us.'

She added that the Maison Grande's re-certification report did not raise any safety concerns, unlike the Champlain Towers South recertification report, which identified 'major errors'.

'When you look at those reports, it's night and day,' she said.

The search and rescue effort at Champlain Towers, where teams are combing through the rubble in a desperate attempt to find survivors

In Miami Dade, the current rules are that buildings have to be recertified every forty years.

Most rules on how often buildings need to be inspected depend on the local authorities where they are. In New York City for example, it's every five years.

State Senator Jason Pizzo said on Monday that he wants the law to be changed to enforce stricter, more frequent inspections.

'We do need a statewide look, either by statute by rule or by policy, and really needs to incorporate two completely separate things.

'You have an environmental situation which is completely different than the design and construction.

It doesn't suffer the same subsurface situation. So, what I want to be mindful of it's not just the age of a building that may deteriorate over time, but also the geographic location,' he said.

He said he would work with Governor Ron DeSantis about new rules.

Three lawsuits have now been filed against the condo board at the Champlain Towers South site.

The board is made up of just seven volunteer residents who were trying to get a loan to pay for the $15million repairs that were needed.

Residents were tasked with repaying the loan and a one bedroom condo-owner was in for around $80,000, according to documents reviewed by CNN.

The condo board's lawyer on Friday told DailyMail.com that they were just as bereaved as anyone else and had lost loved ones.

A letter from them to residents in April mapped out the urgent need for repairs, saying the damage was 'accelerating' and had become 'significantly worse'.
Portugal last night U-turned over its quarantine policy for children, putting family summer holidays there back on the cards.

On Monday, the country had put the UK on a list of nations whose citizens would have to quarantine on arrival unless they were double-jabbed.

Because the policy initially applied to children aged 12 and over, hopes of holidays for British families were killed off because the UK is not vaccinating under-18s.

It meant families where the parents are fully vaccinated but have children aged between 12 and 17 would not have been able to go there because the children would be subject to quarantine.

But last night Portugal announced under-18s would be exempt if travelling with a fully vaccinated parent or guardian.

Children aged 12 and over will instead have to show proof of a negative test. Under-12s won't even have to show proof of a negative test and are completely exempt.

Portugal has U-turned on the decision over whether to insist children aged 12 and over are double-vaccinated before they are permitted to enter. Pictured: Santo Amaro beach, Lisbon

The country came under pressure from its own tourism industry to continue allowing British families in after neighbouring Spain and Greece said they would still welcome unvaccinated Britons with proof of a negative test, making them more attractive for families.

The Portuguese rules do not apply to Madeira, which will not require holidaying Britons to be fully vaccinated.

Madeira today goes on the UK quarantine-free travel green list having been on amber, but mainland Portugal will remain amber.

Portugal's rules on tourists having to be double-jabbed is still a blow to young British adults however, who are not due to receive their second dose until after the summer.

It comes amid fears about the Indian variant which is dominant in Britain. However, the EU and UK are closing in on a deal to accept each other's vaccine passports in a further boost for quarantine-free travel.

Negotiators said they were nearing an agreement which would allow fully vaccinated Britons to use the NHS app as proof of vaccination status while visiting the Continent.

Pictured: Madeira today goes on the UK quarantine-free travel green list having been on amber

Under the plan, double-jabbed EU citizens would also be able to visit the UK with fewer restrictions.

Analysis by the Daily Mail suggests EU countries which have introduced tough travel restrictions are actually trailing the UK with their own vaccine rollout or are not vaccinating children themselves.

For example, the service in Portugal only allows those aged 33 and over to reserve a slot for their first jab.

And Germany, whose leader Angela Merkel has been pushing for the most draconian restrictions on British tourists, is also not yet vaccinating all children over the age of 12.

It came as Jersey said it has moved England to its travel red list, requiring non-vaccinated Brits to quarantine on arrival for 10 days.

The largest of the Channel Islands has changed the rules because of concerns about growing case numbers and the spread of the 'Delta' coronavirus variant in Britain.

The changes mean that non-vaccinated Brits will be tested on arrival and then they will have to isolate with further tests on day five and day 10.

The isolation requirement will only cease after a negative result following the third test on day 10.

People who have been fully vaccinated will be tested on arrival and told to isolate until the result comes back. They will also be tested again on day eight of their stay.

Previously, England was on the island's green list which meant non-vaccinated people could avoid isolation with a negative PCR test while the fully vaccinated were tested on arrival but did not have to isolate.
There was an outcry when it was sold to an overseas buyer in 1922. Now Thomas Gainsborough's The Blue Boy will finally return to its homeland 100 years since it was last seen in the UK.

The oil on canvas will go on display at the National Gallery from January 25 next year, marking an 'unprecedented' four-month loan from a gallery in the US.

The portrait, which shows a boy in a blue jacket and pantaloons, was originally unveiled at the Royal Academy in 1770. However, it has been on display at The Huntington in California for the past century after it was sold to the museum's founder, a railroad tycoon.

The picture has remained influential with references in films such as Quentin Tarantino's Oscar winner Django Unchained.

Dr Gabriele Finaldi, Director of the National Gallery, described the portrait as a 'masterpiece of British art' and said its return to the London gallery is 'truly exceptional' and a 'unique opportunity for visitors to see Gainsborough at his dazzling best'.

The oil on canvas (pictured) will go on display at the National Gallery from January 25 next year, marking an 'unprecedented' four-month loan from a gallery in the US

He added: 'Rich in historical resonances, a painting of supreme poise and elegance, The Blue Boy is without doubt a masterpiece of British art.'

Karen R. Lawrence, Huntington president, said: 'This masterpiece has made an indelible mark on both art history and popular culture, capturing the imaginations of a wide range of audiences.

'Given The Blue Boy's iconic status at The Huntington, this is an unprecedented loan, one which we considered very carefully.

'We hope that this partnership with the National Gallery will spark new conversations, appreciation and research on both sides of the Atlantic.'

Thomas Gainsborough (pictured) painted in defiance of his rival Sir Joshua Reynolds

The Blue Boy will be part of a free exhibition in Room 46 which will also include a 'select group of paintings that demonstrate the profound influence of Van Dyck on Gainsborough's practice and identity'.

Its positioning in the gallery will be apt because Gainsborough is said to have been largely inspired by Flemish artist Sir Anthony Van Dyck, and painted The Blue Boy to show off his technical prowess at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1770, where it was to be displayed next to his rivals under the name A Portrait of a Young Gentleman.

By 1798 it was known at The Blue Boy.

Gainsborough painted it in defiance of his rival Sir Joshua Reynolds's belief cool colours could only be used to support warm colours.

Sir Joshua had said: 'It ought, in my opinion, to be indispensably observed, that the masses of light in a picture be always of a warm, mellow colour, yellow, red, or a yellowish white, and that the blue, the grey, or the green colours be kept almost entirely out of these masses, and be used only to support or set off these warm colours; and for this purpose, a small proportion of cold colour will be sufficient.'

The identity of the boy has been under question for centuries, but art historians believe it is Jonathan Buttall, the young son of a wealthy hardware merchant who befriended Gainsborough.

In 1939, an X-ray of the painting revealed the canvas once held an unfinished depiction of an older man. In 1995 another X-ray found the boy had once been joined by a small dog, which was later covered up by a pile of rocks.

People looking at the Blue Boy, painted in 1770 by Thomas Gainsborough. The painting is to return to the National Gallery one hundred years to the day since it was last displayed there, the gallery has announced

There was national outcry in Britain when the painting was sold to US railway baron Henry Edwards Huntington in 1922, with many believing a national treasure has been lost.

He paid $778,000, or about $9.29million (6.7million) today, making it the most expensive artwork that had ever been sold at the time.

Some 90,000 art lovers bid farewell to the painting in the final three weeks of its public display in London, and the then-National director Charles Holmes wrote 'Au revoir' on the back in the hope it would one day return.

Not everyone was sad to see the painting leave Britain, however, with a reporter in the Manchester Guardian claiming 'it would be a splendid thing if The Blue Boy were to pass into the French national collection,' because 'there is very little sign of any interest in France in English art'.

The painting has never before been loaned for display outside of its US museum and is unlikely ever to be loaned again.

The National Gallery threw open its doors to visitors in May after 152 days of closure, with strict Covid guidelines in place to allow a safe return.
Google is giving Brits incorrect Covid-19 advice about whether or not they have to isolate, an investigation reveals.

The search engine has been telling UK users they can stop isolating under certain circumstances, going against the NHS's guidance, according to the Guardian.

Following a request from the UK government, Google is reportedly fixing the issue  which relates to contact tracing and isolating after a negative Covid test.

The potentially dangerous error features under Google's 'common questions' tool, which tries to present simple answers to user questions, often clumsily scraped from other websites.

'Common questions' is one of Google's attempts to keep users on the search engine, rather than clicking away to other websites, the investigation claims.

Google is showing the incorrect answers to particular questions regarding self isolation, according to the new investigation

WHAT IS CONTACT TRACING? Contact tracing is the process of identifying people who have been exposed to a disease to prevent onward transmission. The UK has a contact tracing app - NHS Test and Trace. The app, a decentralised tool relying on Google and Apple Bluetooth technology, was introduced in September 2020 following months of delay and questions about its effectiveness. The app for iOS and Android asks users to log whether or not they symptoms and uses Bluetooth to keep track of other phones it has come into contact with. Advertisement

'Common questions and answers in Google search are generated by Google,' a government spokesperson told the Guardian.

'The Government Digital Service (GDS) works to ensure that all gov.uk information is clear and can be accessed directly from search engines, such as Google.

'Gov.uk plays a critical role in helping people and businesses get the latest information and support in response to the pandemic.

'Covid-19 content and services are regularly kept up to date to ensure that they reflect the latest government policy.'

According to the investigation, Google gives the wrong results when someone searches, 'Do I need to self-isolate after contact tracing if I test negative'.

This particular search brings up a list of questions under its list of 'common questions', one of which is 'Can I stop self-isolating if I test negative for Covid-19?'

This question features the wrong answer  'If your test is negative, you will no longer be required to self-isolate'  that's been taken from a slightly different question on the gov.uk website.

In reality, even if your test is negative, you have to isolate for 10 days from your date of exposure after receiving a notification from the NHS that you may have been exposed to Covid.

In a statement to MailOnline, a Google spokesperson said many answers  or 'snippets'  taken from authoritative sources like the NHS are selected by algorithms.

The NHS app for iOS and Android asks users to log whether or not they symptoms and uses Bluetooth to keep track of other phones it has come into contact with

'However, these snippets can still be missing important context, or only be relevant to part of the user's question,' the spokesperson said.

'We regularly review all of the question/snippet pairs we show in this feature to ensure that they are not outdated or missing any critical context.

'We have reviewed this snippet against our policies and taken appropriate action.'

Google would not say how long the incorrect information had been displayed or how many users had seen it.

A disclaimer beneath the common questions says: 'For informational purposes only. Consult your local medical authority for health advice.'

This suggests that users would be best off visiting the official government website and the NHS to get the correct information.

Google blocked more than 99 million Covid-related ads in 2020, including those for 'miracle cures' and fake vaccine doses, the firm said in March 2021

The tech giant has claimed to have kept on top of misinformation during the pandemic  in March, it said it removed more than 99 million malicious ads for fake Covid-19 cures and fake vaccine doses last year.

Google has also previously teamed up with the WHO to launch an SOS Alert dedicated to the coronavirus.

The search engine prioritises information on the virus from the WHO, including safety tips and WHO Twitter updates on the spread of the virus and how to stay safe.

However, early in the pandemic, YouTube, which is owned by Google, was accused of making money from videos promoting quack cures for coronavirus including herbs, meditative music and over-the-counter supplements.

Non-profit research initiative the Tech Transparency Project (TTP) said YouTube has run ads on videos that promote sham remedies like herbs and smoothies for the deadly illness.
From the seemingly endless staircase to the infamous 'The Dress', many optical illusions have left viewers around the world baffled over the years.

Now, a new class of illusion has been created that tricks your brain into thinking a spinning wheel is shimmering.

The illusion, dubbed the 'Scintillating Starburst', is made up of several concentric star polygons that rotate.

This movement prompts viewers to see bright fleeting rays emanating from the centre of the wheel  but they are not actually there.

The team behind the illusion says it illustrates how our brains 'connect the dots' to create a subjective reality of what we see.

Scroll down for video

The illusion, dubbed the 'Scintillating Starburst', is made up of several concentric star polygons, which rotate clockwise

The new illusion was developed by researchers from New York University and Recursia Studios  a multidisciplinary art and fashion production company.

Michael Karlovich, founder and CEO of Recursia Studios, and first author of the study, explained: 'Studying illusions can be helpful in understanding visual processing because they allow us to distinguish the mere sensation of physical object properties from the perceptual experience.'

The Scintillating Starburst is superficially similar to several previous grid-based illusions, according to the researchers.

However, unlike these previous illusions, the Scintillating Starburst evokes a number of newly discovered effects.

Among them, it that fleeting illusory lines diagonally connect the intersection points of the star polygons.

The new class of optical illusion tricks your brain into thinking a spinning wheel is shimmering

To understand the neuroscience behind the illusion, the team tested 162 version of the Scintillating Starburst on 100 participants.

The versions varied in shape, complexity and brightness, according to the team.

After viewing the illusions, the participants were asked a series of questions about they saw.

This included 'I do not see any bright lines, rays, or beams,' 'I maybe see bright lines, rays, or beams, but they are barely noticeable,' and 'I see bright lines, rays, or beams, but they are subtle and weak.'

The results revealed that several factors, including contrast, line width and the number of vertices had an effect on how the participants viewed the illusion.

Dr Pascal Wallisch, who led the study, explained: 'In particular, a large number of prominent intersection points leads to stronger and more vivid rays, as there are more cues to indicate the implied lines.'

Overall, the research highlights the constructive nature of perception, according to Dr Wallisch.

He added: 'The research illustrates how the brain 'connects the dots' to create a subjective reality in what we see, highlighting the constructive nature of perception.'
Two truly adorable baby squirrel monkeys were born at ZSL London Zoo this month  and zookeepers have given them the nicknames 'Teeny' and 'Tiny'.

The little ones were born to two different mothers in the troop  Avril (Teeny's mother) and Francis (Tiny's)  on Saturday June 5 and Wednesday June 9.

According to the zookeepers, the pair of newborns are 'doing really well'  and can now even be spotted by visitors in their lush, forested enclosure.

Two adorable baby squirrel monkeys were born at ZSL London Zoo this month and zookeepers have given them the nicknames 'Teeny' and 'Tiny' (pictured with his mother Francis)

The little ones were born to two different mothers in the troop  Avril and Francis  on Saturday June 5 and Wednesday June 9. Pictured: Avril, with her baby, Teeny

'Both the new little ones  who weve nicknamed Teeny and Tiny  are doing really well,' said zookeeper Rowan Swainson.

'Avril and Francis have started to bring them out of their cosy indoor dens,' he noted.

'So visitors can now spot both duos hanging out in the trees outside.'

At present, it is unclear what sex Teeny and Tiny are.

'Squirrel monkeys carry their babies on their backs continuously for the first six to 10 weeks of their lives, Mr Swainson explained.

'So well only be able to find out if the youngsters are male or female when they start to explore on their own.'

'Squirrel monkeys carry their babies on their backs continuously for the first six to 10 weeks of their lives, zookeeper Rowan Swainson explained

According to the zookeepers, the pair of newborns are 'doing really well'  and can even be spotted by visitors in their lush, forested enclosure

While Avril and Francis may be stuck carrying Teeny and Tiny around for a good few weeks yet, London Zoo's new, adult-only 'twilight sessions' may provide a pleasant escape for parents who can leave their little ones with the babysitter for a night.

These evening sessions  which commence on Thursday this week  are taking place on eight days across July, with tickets on sale for 19.95 per person.

'Luckily, human parents can sometimes take a night off here and there,' added Mr Swainson

'We look forward to helping our grown-up visitors enjoy a well-deserved wildlife break without the kids this July  where they can have the Zoo all to themselves as the sun goes down.'

'Avril and Francis have started to bring them out of their cosy indoor dens,' zookeeper Rowan Swainson noted. 'So visitors can now spot both duos hanging out in the trees outside'

While Avril and Francis may be stuck carrying Teeny and Tiny around for a good few weeks yet (as pictured), London Zoo's new, adult-only 'twilight sessions' may provide a pleasant escape for parents who can leave their little ones with the babysitter for a night
Scientists have found the earliest strain of Yersinia pestis  the bacteria that caused the Black Death, a devastating bubonic plague pandemic in the 14th century.

Y. pestis was found in the 5,000-year-old remains of a male hunter-gatherer, dubbed RV 2039, in a region called Rinnukalns in present-day Latvia.

Genetic analysis reveals that this ancient strain was likely less contagious and not as deadly as the medieval version during the Black Death.

This early form of the plague that killed RV 2039, around the year 3,000 BC, likely was a slow-moving disease and wasn't very transmissible.

Over the next 4,300 years, however, the strain evolved to become more deadly to humans, culminating in the catastrophic Black Death in Europe and Africa.

It's though the Black Death  which lasted from 1346 to 1353  could have killed as much as half of Europe's population.

This image shows the skull bones of RV 2039, a man buried in Rinnukalns, Latvia, around 5,000 years ago

Pictured, a depiction of plague victims being buried during the Black Death. The devastating bubonic plague pandemic ravaged Europe from 1346 to 1353

THE DEADLY PLAGUE Plague is an infectious disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which is carried by fleas and transmitted between animals. The bubonic plague - the most common form - is caused by the bite of an infected flea and can spread through contact with infectious bodily fluids or contaminated materials. Patients may show signs of fever and nausea and at an advanced stage may develop open sores filled with pus. It devastated Europe in the Middle Ages, most notably in the Black Death of the 1340s which killed a third or more of the continent's population. After the Black Death plague became a common phenomenon in Europe, with outbreaks recurring regularly until the 18th century. When the Great Plague of 1665 hit, a fifth of people in London died, with victims shut in their homes and red crosses painted on the door. Bubonic plague has almost completely vanished from the rich world. 90 per cent of all cases are now in Africa. It is now treatable with antibiotics, as long as they are administered quickly. Still, there have been a few non-fatal cases in the U.S., with an average of seven reported a year, according to disease control bosses. From 2010 to 2015 there were 3,248 cases reported worldwide, including 584 deaths, says the World Health Organisation. Advertisement

The genetic analysis of RV 2039 was led by Ben Krause-Kyora, a biochemist and archaeologist at the University of Kiel in Germany.

'What's most astonishing is that we can push back the appearance of Y. pestis 2,000 years farther than previously published studies suggested,' he said.

'It seems that we are really close to the origin of the bacteria.'

RV 2039, who would have been between 20 and 30 years old at time of death, was actually one of two people whose skeletons were excavated in the late 1800s in Rinnukalns.

Soon after their remains were found, both vanished until 2011, when they reappeared as part of German anthropologist Rudolph Virchow's collection.

After this rediscovery, two more burials were uncovered from the site to give a total of four specimens, likely from the same group of hunter-gatherers.

Krause-Kyora and his team used samples from the teeth and bone of all four to sequence their genomes and then tested them for bacterial and viral pathogens.

They were surprised to find evidence of Y. pestis in RV 2039, but not the other three specimens.

After reconstructing the bacteria's genome and comparing it to other ancient strains, the team realised the Y. pestis strain that RV 2039 carried was the oldest strain ever discovered.

It was likely part of a lineage that emerged about 7,000 years ago, only a few hundred years after Y. pestis split from its predecessor, Yersinia pseudotuberculosis.

'What's so surprising is that we see already in this early strain more or less the complete genetic set of Y. pestis, and only a few genes are lacking,' said Krause-Kyora.

'But even a small shift in genetic settings can have a dramatic influence on virulence.'

Y. pestis can infect humans via the Oriental rat flea (Xenopsylla cheopis), which is carried  as the name suggests  by rodents.

However, this newly-found ancient strain lacked one crucial element  the gene that first let fleas act as vectors to spread the plague.

This gene was responsible for efficient transmission of the bacterium to human hosts, which resulted in the growth of the grotesque pus-filled buboes in the sick associated with the Black Death.

Jawbone of RV 2039. The man was between 20 and 30 years old at time of death, the researchers estimate

The plague-carrying hunter-gatherer was one of two people whose skeletons were excavated in the late 1800s in a region called Rinnukalns in present-day Latvia

Flea-based transmission also required the death of the human host, which means that the appearance of the gene could have driven the evolution of a deadlier disease.

From RV 2039, it likely took more than 1,000 years for Y. pestis to acquire all the mutations needed for flea-based transmission.

But it's not clear the extent to which RV 2039 experienced the nastiest effects of the plague  buboes, bleeding and weakness, to name a few.

Although Y. pestis was found in his bloodstream, meaning he most likely died from the bacterial infection, the course of the disease might have been fairly slow.

Researchers observed that he had a high number of Y. pestis in his bloodstream at his time of death, as determined by analysis of a tooth root.

But in previous rodent studies, a high bacterial load of Y. pestis has been associated with less aggressive infections.

'If the bacteria are less aggressive and the infection lasts longer, it is possible that the bacteria can multiply more, so the person can then carry a higher number/dose of bacteria,' said Krause-Kyora.

The Rinnukalns, a Stone Age shell midden on the banks of the Salaca River near the outflow from Lake Burtniek

Additionally, the people he was buried near were not infected, which makes a highly contagious respiratory version of the plague less likely.

The 5,000-year-old strain was likely transmitted directly via a bite from an infected rodent and probably didn't spread beyond RV 2039.

Some historians have suggested that infectious diseases like Y. pestis evolved mostly in cities containing more than 10,000 people near the Black Sea.

However, 5,000 years ago  the age of RV 2039's strain  was long before the formation of large cities, which puts these theories in doubt.

Instead, agriculture was just beginning to appear in Central Europe, and populations were much sparser.

3D illustration of Yersinia pestis - the bacteria behind the the Black Death in the 14th century

This new study also contradicts an idea that Y. pestis led to the large population declines in Western Europe at the late Neolithic period (3000 to 2500 BC).

The authors say that examining the history of Y. pestis could also potentially shed light on human genomic history.

'Different pathogens and the human genome have always evolved together,' said Krause-Kyora.

'We know Y. pestis most likely killed half of the European population in a short time frame, so it should have a big impact on the human genome.

'But even before that, we see major turnover in our immune genes at the end of the Neolithic Age, and it could be that we were seeing a significant change in the pathogen landscape at that time as well.'

The study has been published in the journal Cell Reports.
A revolutionary new geological theory has proposed that Iceland is just the tip of a vast, sunken continent  a fragment of the former supercontinent of 'Pangaea'.

Experts led from Durham University believe that the hidden continent of 'Icelandia' could cover some 231,000 square miles from Greenland all the way to Europe.

When adjoining areas west of Britain are including in a 'Greater Icelandia', however, this area could expand to some 386,000 square miles in total.

The Icelandia theory challenges long-held ideas both about the make-up of the crust underlying the North Atlantic, as well as how volcanic islands like Iceland formed.

According to the team, such a previously unknown slab of continental crust could also contain untapped mineral and hydrocarbon resources for exploitation.

The formation of Pangaea 335 million years ago saw the Earth's landmasses come together to form a supercontinent some 57.83 million square miles in area.

Its gradual breakup  lasting from around 175 to 50 million years ago  resulted in the opening of the Atlantic and led to the continental distribution we see today.

In the new theory, Pangaea did not fully break up along the mid-Atlantic, but instead part of it stretched out  akin to a string of cheese hanging between two parting pizza slices  leaving Icelandia's continental crust crossing the divide.

A revolutionary new geological theory has proposed that Iceland is just the tip of a vast, sunken continent  a fragment of the former supercontinent of 'Pangaea'. Pictured: a bathymetric map of the seafloor around Iceland, showing the continental edges (the magenta line) proposed extent of Icelandia (magenta) and the Greater Icelandia area (beige)

'Until now Iceland has puzzled geologists as existing theories that it is built of  and surrounded by  oceanic crust are not supported by multiple geological data,' explained study leader and geophysicist Gillian Foulger of Durham University.

'For example, the crust under Iceland is over 40 kilometres [25 miles] thick  seven times thicker than normal oceanic crust. This simply could not be explained.

'However, when we considered the possibility that this thick crust is continental, our data suddenly all made sense.

'This led us immediately to realise that the continental region was much bigger than Iceland itself  there is a hidden continent right there under the sea.

'There is fantastic work to be done to prove the existence of Icelandia but it also opens up a completely new view of our geological understanding of the world.

'Something similar could be happening at many more places. We could eventually see maps of our oceans and seas being redrawn as our understanding of what lies beneath changes.'

If Icelandia does exist, Professor Foulger explained, it would remove the need to imagine a hotspot of upwelling magma beneath Iceland to explain the formation and geology of the Iceland Plateau.

'Until now Iceland has puzzled geologists as existing theories that it is built of  and surrounded by  oceanic crust are not supported by multiple geological data,' explained study leader and geophysicist Gillian Foulger of Durham University. Pictured: an active lava flow on Iceland's Mount Fagradalsfjall

Professor Foulger and her colleagues are now looking to collaborate with other experts from around the globe to test their theory, as soon as COVID-19 allows.

According to the team, this could involve varied probes of the nature of the crust underneath Icelandia's proposed extent and studies of special, tiny crystals called zircons that can be used to date and determine the provenance of certain rocks.

A more physical  if expensive  approach could see efforts to drill down to the lower crust in Iceland to look for characteristic continental signatures.

'Something similar could be happening at many more places,' said Professor Foulger. 'We could eventually see maps of our oceans and seas being redrawn as our understanding of what lies beneath changes.' Pictured: a map of the globe, showing the location of possible continental fragments like Icelandia (in red) and large igneous providences (in purple)

If hidden continents like Icelandia do exist, this would have significant legal and political ramifications.

Under UN law, coastal states can claim exclusive rights to the mineral resources of their nearby seabed if it is proven by researchers that this area is a sunken extension of their continental landmass.

'Countries around the world are spending enormous resources conducting subsea geologic research in order to identify their continental shelves and claim exclusive mineral rights there,' commented Durham University geographer Philip Steinberg.

The formation of Pangaea 335 million years ago saw the Earth's landmasses come together to form a supercontinent some 57.83 million square miles in area. Its gradual breakup (depicted above) lasting from around 175 to 50 million years ago  resulted in the opening of the Atlantic and led to the continental distribution we see today

'Research like Professor Foulger's [] forces us to rethink the relationship between seabed and continental geology.'

This, he added, 'can have far-reaching impact for countries trying to determine what area of the seabed are their exclusive preserve and what areas are to be governed by the International Seabed Authority as the "common heritage of humankind".'

The full details of the theory are described in a dedicated chapter of the book In the Footsteps of Warren B. Hamilton: New Ideas in Earth Science, which is being published today by the Geological Society of America.
Dinosaurs were already in decline 10 million years before they were wiped out by the impact of a mass-extinction asteroid, scientists have found.

Six species including tyrannosaurs, triceratops and hadrosaurs were all evolving and expanding throughout the Cretaceous period, spanning 145 to 66 million years ago.

But they suddenly experienced a downturn about 76 million years ago, researchers said, with rates of extinction increasing and fewer new species emerging.

A combination of global cooling  which saw the Earth's temperature fall by 7C (12.6F)  the loss of herbivores and the inability of dinosaurs to adapt to new conditions are thought to be the main reasons for the decline.

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Struggling to adapt: Dinosaurs were already in decline 10 million years before they were wiped out by the impact of a mass-extinction asteroid, scientists have found

DINOSAUR DECLINE: STUDY'S KEY FINDINGS A team of international researchers analysed 1,600 fossils from six dinosaur families: Ankylosauridae, Ceratopsidae, Hadrosauridae, Dromaeosauridae, Troodontidae and Tyrannosauridae. They found that the speciation rate dipped and extinction rate rose sharply in the last 10 million years of the age of dinosaurs. It led to a rapid reduction in the number of species just before an asteroid hit the Earth and wiped out non-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago. A combination of global cooling  which saw the Earth's temperature fall by 7C  the loss of herbivores and the inability of dinosaurs to adapt to new conditions are thought to be the main reasons for the decline. Many dinosaurs likely relied on warm temperatures to thrive and so struggled to adapt to cooler temperatures and new conditions on Earth, scientists believe. Advertisement

Mike Benton, a co-author of the study and professor at the University of Bristol said: 'We explored different kinds of possible causes of the dinosaur decline.

'It became clear that there were two main factors, first that overall climates were becoming cooler, and this made life harder for the dinosaurs which likely relied on warm temperatures.

'Then, the loss of herbivores made the ecosystems unstable and prone to extinction cascade.

'We also found that the longer-lived dinosaur species were more liable to extinction, perhaps reflecting that they could not adapt to the new conditions on Earth.'

The team of international researchers analysed 1,600 fossils from six dinosaur families: Ankylosauridae, Ceratopsidae, Hadrosauridae, Dromaeosauridae, Troodontidae and Tyrannosauridae.

One of the key findings was that a decline in the diversity of herbivorous dinosaurs, caused by them being outcompeted by hadrosaurs, may have played a role in the collapse of dinosaur ecosystems.

Lead author, Fabien Condamine, from the University of Montpellier, said: 'We looked at the six most abundant dinosaur families through the whole of the Cretaceous, spanning from 150 to 66 million years ago, and found that they were all evolving and expanding and clearly being successful.

'Then, 76 million years ago, they show a sudden downturn. Their rates of extinction rose and in some cases the rate of origin of new species dropped off.'

Around 10 million years later non-avian dinosaurs were wiped out and more than half the world's species were obliterated.

Analysis: These graphs show how speciation rate (blue) dipped and extinction rate (red) rose sharply in the last 10 million years of the age of dinosaurs. Run together, this corresponds to a rapid reduction in the number of species (black) just before an asteroid hit 66 million years ago

The Chicxulub asteroid, which slammed into a shallow sea in what is now the Gulf of Mexico, is often cited as a potential cause of the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event.

It paved the way for the rise of mammals and the eventual appearance of humans.

'This was a key moment in the evolution of life,' Condamine added. 'The world had been dominated by dinosaurs for over 160 million years, and as they declined other groups began their rise to dominance, including the mammals.

'The dinosaurs were mostly so huge they probably hardly knew that the furry little mammals were there in the undergrowth.

'But the mammals began to increase in numbers of species before the dinosaurs had gone, and then after the impact they had their chance to build new kinds of ecosystems which we see today.'

Guillaume Guinot, also of the University of Montpellier, said: 'In all cases, we found evidence for the decline prior to the bolide impact.

'We also looked at how these dinosaur ecosystems functioned, and it became clear that the plant-eating species tended to disappear first, and this made the latest dinosaur ecosystems unstable and liable to collapse if environmental conditions became damaging.'

The new study is published in the journal Nature Communications.
Archaeologists have uncovered a slab of carved sandstone depicting a naked horseman near Hadrian's Wall, northern England.

The priceless artefact was found during the annual excavations at the Roman fort of Vindolanda near the famous wall in Northumberland.

The complete stone, measuring 6.2 by 12.4 inches (160mm by 315mm), would have originally been fitted into a recess at Vindolanda.

The mysterious male figure is depicted holding a spear and is stood in front of a horse or donkey  but experts aren't sure which real-life figure it depicts, if any.

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The beautifully carved sandstone relief depicts a naked male figure of an unknown identity holding a spear

Hadrian's Wall was built by the Roman army on the orders of the emperor Hadrian after his visit to Britain in AD 122.

Although first built by the Roman army before Hadrian's Wall, Vindolanda became the wall's construction and garrison base.

Vindolanda Charitable Trust, which oversees archaeological, conservation and education work at the site, says it has had 'no comparable discoveries' before now.

The stone was uncovered on May 20 this year, only inches under the topsoil, by two volunteers from Newcastle.

Richie Milor and David Goldwater had been assigned to uncover a flagged floor inside a 4th century building of the ancient fort.

'We are just absolutely elated, very proud to be part of this discovery, it was actually very emotional,' Milor said.

Richie Milor and David Goldwater with their discovery, which will be on public display from July 1

Hadrians Wall was the north-west frontier of the Roman empire for nearly 300 years. Although first built by the Roman army before Hadrian's Wall, Vindolanda became the wall's construction and garrison base

'Whether you find something or not we love coming to this site, playing our small part in the research that takes place, but finding this made it a very special day indeed.'

Site archaeologist Marta Alberti, one of the team overseeing the excavations at Vindolanda, is now piecing together all the clues to try and establish who the carving may represent.

Unfortunately, the stone has no inscription that may have revealed his identity  although one possibility is it depicts some kind of deity.

'The nakedness of the man means he is probably a god, rather than a mere cavalryman,' Alberti said.

The stone measures 6.2 by 12.4 inches. Excavations at Vindolanda will continue until September 24 this year

The figure is also carrying a spear in his left arm, 'a common attribute' of Mars, the god of war in ancient Roman myth.

At the top of the figure's head there is also two almost circular features, that, according to Alberti, could be identified as wings. This may be a reference to Mercury, the god of travel.

'Horses and donkeys are also often associated with Mercury as a protector of travellers,' Alberti said.

Additionally, the stone floor where it was found was very close to that of a large 4th century cavalry barrack.

The units residing in the part of the fort may have had their own interpretation of Mars or Mercury, or a third and so far unidentified version of the god merging the qualities of both.

'This interesting relief may represent something we have not only never seen before but something we may never see again,' said Alberti.

The artefact will be going on public display in the current finds exhibition at the Vindolanda museum from July 1 for the remainder of the 2021 season.

Excavations at Vindolanda will continue until September 24 this year.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said on Tuesday that the company's Starlink satellite internet is on track to gain 'possibly over 500,000 users within 12 months.'

Musk, speaking via Zoom at Barcelona's Mobile World Congress 2021, added that he foresees up to $10 billion in investments before Starlink reaches positive cash and a whopping $20 to $30 billion over the project's lifetime.

'It's a lot, basically,' Musk said in a video interview from California, who also noted that the main goal of this project is to 'not bankrupt.'

Currently, the service has 69,420 active users.

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Elon Musk said Tuesday that SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet is on track to gain 'possibly over 500,000 users within 12 months.' The CEO spoke via Zoom at Mobile World Congress 2021, where he revealed updates on Stralink, which currently has 69,420 active users

Starlink now has more than 1,500 satellites aloft and expects service to go global by August, Musk said.

'You can think of Starlink as filling in the gaps between 5G and fiber,' added Musk, 'really getting to the most difficult to reach three or five percent' of people in need of high-speed broadband internet.

Musk also gave updates on the service, noting Starlink satellites are at around 300 miles (500km) above the surface, while geosynchronous satellites are at about 621 miles (1,000 km).

Geosynchronous satellites have an orbital period that matches Earth's rotation point and take 24 hours to complete a rotation around our planet.

The service serves less than five percent of internet users and Musk foresees up to $10 billion in investments before Starlink reaches positive cash and a whopping $20 to $30 billion over the project's lifetime

Starlink now has more than 1,500 satellites aloft and expects service to go global by August, Musk said

These satellites mostly beam signals down for cable television, but NASA has its own that sends communications and data between spacecraft.

Purchasing a Starlink Kit costs customers about $500, combined with the monthly service of $100, which the billionaire said is 'the same price all over the world.'

The Starlink Kit that includes the 'UFO on a stick' terminal, mounting tripod and WiFi router.

However, taxes and import costs can raise costs, Musk added.

The CEO was not shy about telling the world that SpaceX is losing money on Starlink terminals, explaining it costs $1,000 for the company to make and customers get it for half that.

'We'd like to reduce the cost of the terminal from $500 to $200 or $350 or something like that,' he said.

Purchasing a Starlink Kit costs customers about $500, combined with the monthly service of $100, which the billionaire said is 'the same price all over the world'

The Starlink Kit that includes the 'UFO on a stick' terminal, mounting tripod and WiFi router

'Our customers will very often live in remote regions. Sometimes they're up in a cabin up in the mountain that doesn't even have electricity!'

Musk also spoke about the potential for partnerships with mobile operators.

We have two quite significant partnerships that  with major country telcos [telecommunications companies], and we are in discussions with others,' he said.

'This is helpful because a number of countries have requirements that  in order to receive a 5G license, you also have to provide rural coverage. So sometimes urban customers end up subsidizing rural customers.'

However, Musk decline to name the telecommunication companies.
As if beating Germany was not cause enough for English celebration, here is the prize. Okay, it is not a bye to the semi-final, but hello, its Ukraine.

Yes, they must be applauded for passage to the last eight. But its still Ukraine, the team ranked 24th in the world, who needed a controversial red card to turn this tie in their favour.

Factor in an extra 30 minutes and an emotional and dramatic finish on the stroke of 10.30pm - funnily enough, thats last orders in these parts - and it is even further reason to believe the stars are aligning for England.

Artem Dovbyk scored a header in stoppage time of extra time to see Ukraine beat Sweden

The striker headed home Oleksandr Zinchenko's cross to break Swedish hearts in Glasgow

Zinchenko and Co will now face England in Rome on Saturday after they beat Germany

The Manchester City star was the one who gave Ukraine the lead in the first half

MATCH FACTS AND PLAYER RATINGS Sweden (4-4-2): Olsen 6; Lustig 6 (Krafth 83min), Lindelof 6.5, Danielson 6, Augustinsson 6 (Bengtsson 83); Larsson 6 (Claesson 97), Olsson 6 (Helander 101), Ekdal 6, Forsberg 7.5; Kulusevski 6.5 (Quaison 97), Isak 6.5 (Berg 97) Goal: Forsberg 43 Booked: Kulusevski, Forsberg Sent off: Danielson Manager: Janne Andersson 6 Ukraine (3-5-2): Bushchan 6.5; Zabarnyi 5.5, Kryvtsov 6, Matviyenko 6; Karavaev 6, Sydorchuk 6 (Bezus 118min), Stepanenko 6.5 (Makarenko 95), Shaparenko 6.5 (Malinovskyi 61, 6), Zinchenko 7; Yarmolenko 7 (Dovbyk 105), Yaremchuk 6 (Besedyin 90 (Tsyhankov 101) Goals: Zinchenko 27, Dovbyk 120+1 Booked: Yarmolenko, Dovbyk Manager: Andriy Shevchenko 6 Referee: Daniele Orsato (Italy) 7 Attendance: 9,221 Advertisement

All roads lead to Rome on Saturday, but this trail was winding and draining for Andriy Shevchenkos side.

They won it in the 121st minute when substitute Artem Dovbyk flashed home a close-range header from Oleksandr Zinchenkos wicked centre.

It was the strikers first goal for his country and he was soon buried beneath a mountain of exhausted team-mates, but this felt like the summit of Ukraine's achievements at this tournament.

Physical and mental exertions aside, there should be little to fear for Gareth Southgate on this evidence - save for Zinchenkos left boot and West Hams Andriy Yarmolenko.

Shevchenko said: 'This is an historic moment for our country. But now we have one of the strongest teams in the world in our next game.'

Ukraine arrived at this stage as the worst of the third-placed qualifiers. A format that allows for one victory over North Macedonia and a negative goal difference really does not tally with elite competition.

Anyhow, here they were, and as Switzerland proved 24 hours earlier with victory over world champions France, those who sneak through the back door can still make a noise once inside the party.

After perhaps the most absorbing and entertaining second round in the history of the European Championship, there was a fair bit for this unfashionable pair to live up to.

Lets be honest, it was not the most attractive of the eight fixtures. Last and least, you might say.

But this tournament does not do dull and, come half-time, there was enough to suggest both teams were invested in the spirit of what had gone before.

Zinchenko got on the end of Andriy Yarmolenko's inventive cross to power past Robin Olsen

But the influential Emil Forsberg restored parity just before the break for Sweden

The RB Leipzig man hit the woodwork twice in the second half - the first hit the foot of the post

Forsberg then cut inside and unleashed a delicious effort which cannoned off the crossbar

Indeed, Ukraines opening goal should at least make a long list when it comes to determining this summers best.

It was made in the Premier League, assisted by the left wand of Yarmolenko and converted by the equally exquisite left of Manchester Citys Zinchenko.

Yarmolenkos cross, on first viewing, had you wondering what his intention was, as if spun aimlessly across goal. You soon had your answer as to his objective when Zinchenko appeared on the blind side of Swedens defence and connected with the sweetest of half-volleys.

It left a sour taste for goalkeeper Robin Olsen, however. Despite getting a firm hand on it, the Everton stopper was beaten by both the force and fizz of Zinchenkos dispatch.

On reflection, Yarmolenkos ball was genius, deceiving all inside Hampden Park except his team-mate, it would seem.

The game went into extra time when Marcus Danielson was sent off in the first half of it

The referee Daniele Orsato initially gave a yellow before upgrading it after consulting the pitchside monitor

But Sweden drew level when, two minutes shy of the interval, Emil Forsberg bought a ticket from 20 yards and saw his numbers come up thanks to the most fortunate of deflections off 18-year-old defender Illya Zabarnyi. Not that the scorer cared about the aesthetics of his fourth goal in as many games.

The RB Leipzig forward would have had his fifth had he generated more whip on a shot that kissed the base of the post early in the second half.

The woodwork again came to Ukraines rescue when the brilliant Forsberg, escaping two defenders, crashed a dipping effort off the crossbar on 69 minutes.

Sweden boss Janne Andersson said: We had some really great chances. But the red card decided the game. It is a very bitter defeat.

That dismissal came in the first half of extra-time, defender Marcus Danielson the victim of a freeze-frame review.

Having won the ball, Danielsons studs connected with the shin of the closing Artem Besyedin, forcing the withdrawal of the Ukrainian forward.

Artem Besedin was on the receiving end of the tackle and hobbled off with ice on his left leg

But his side would win the game in the 121st minute with Dovbyk's dramatic late header

It looked awful in slow-motion - referee Daniele Orsato was sent to consider such images on his pitchside monitor, leading to the inevitable - but in real time there was little Danielson could do to avoid his opponent crashing into his boot.

It was more unfortunate than malicious.

But that gave Ukraine the advantage and they made it pay when Dovbyk stooped at the death to keep alive their involvement and spark those wild celebrations.

Southgate and his England players may well have punched the air, too.

Andriy Shevchenko will now lead his side against Gareth Southgate's men in the quarter finals
Gary Lineker, Rio Ferdinand and Alan Shearer certainly couldn't hide their delight as England sealed a famous win against Germany at the Euros on Tuesday.

The Three Lions secured their spot in the Euro quarter-finals thanks to a 2-0 victory over their old rivals, with Raheem Sterling and Harry Kane both scoring in the second half at Wembley.

After a nervy first-half as England looked to exact revenge over Germany - who have haunted them down the years in the knockout stages of a major tournament - Sterling sent Wembley into bedlam in the second period after netting the opener from close range from Luke Shaw's low cross.

Gary Lineker (L), Alan Shearer (C) and Rio Ferdinand (R) went wild as England went ahead

And as Sterling slotted home, Lineker, Ferdinand and Shearer were seen going beserk in the BBC studio at Wembley as England claimed the vital lead in the crunch last-16 showdown in the 75th minute.

After replays of the celebrations were shown, BBC host and former England striker Lineker joked: 'Should know better at our age, shouldn't we?'

And former Three Lions centre back Ferdinand, as replays showed him amusingly jumping with joy, quipped: 'I've pulled my Achilles, delirious.'

The trio's celebrations were in stark contrast to fellow pundit and former Germany international Jurgen Klinsmann, who watched on as his country fell behind.

Lineker couldn't hide his delight as Sterling put England in front in the 75th minute vs Germany

Ferdinand joked 'I've pulled my Achilles' after celebrating England's opener at Wembley

And things only got worse at Wembley for Klinsmann and Germany, who had a golden opportunity to equalise straight after Sterling's opener.

Goalscorer Sterling gave away the ball in a dangerous position, and Kai Havertz pounced to put Thomas Muller clean through on goal.

But with only Jordan Pickford to beat, the experienced Bayern Munich forward dragged his effort just wide of the post.

Sterling wheels away to celebrate after slotting home from Luke Shaw's cross at Wembley

England fans breathed a massive sigh of relief and the Three Lions then punished Germany, as Kane secured the massive win in the 86th minute at Wembley.

The England captain, who has had a quiet tournament up until now, headed home from a Jack Grealish cross - leading to incredible scenes at Wembley.

England will now face Ukraine on Saturday evening in the quarter-final in Rome after they overcame Sweden at the death in extra-time at Hampden Park on Tuesday.
Former Bachelor star Snezana Wood posed for a sweet selfie with her eldest daughter Eve this week, while enjoying a family holiday on the Gold Coast.

Snezana's personal trainer husband Sam Wood shared a picture of his girls on Instagram Stories, showing Snezana, 40, looking youthful and gorgeous as she posed next to her lookalike daughter, 16.

Snezana went makeup free and posed in a beige ribbed bikini, while Eve stood next to her in a leopard-print two-piece.

Like mother, like daughter! The Bachelor's Snezana Wood looked youthful as she joined her mini-me Eve, 16, on holiday in Burleigh Heads this week

Snezana completed her look with dark sunglasses and gold jewellery, and swept her brunette hair away from her face.

The family are enjoying a holiday in idyllic Burleigh Heads on the Gold Coast, and spent a day at the beach on Monday.

Snezana shared sweet images of herself and her daughters digging a hole in the sand.

Holiday mode: The family are enjoying a holiday in idyllic Burleigh Heads on the Gold Coast, and spent a day at the beach on Monday. Pictured: Eve

Making memories: Snezana shared sweet images of herself and her daughters digging a hole in the sand

'As the great Kerrigan family once did. Today we dug a hole,' Sam captioned his images

She looked chic in a beige shirt and a bikini.

Sam, 41, also posted pictures from the family outing, showing Snezana and their youngest daughters digging and playing at the beach.

'As the great Kerrigan family once did. Today we dug a hole,' Sam wrote.

Family: Sam is stepfather to Eve, from Snezana's first marriage. The couple also share two daughters of their own, Willow, three, and Charlie, two

Sam is stepfather to Eve, from Snezana's first marriage.

The couple also share two daughters of their own, Willow, three, and Charlie, two.

Snez, Sam and the girls relocated to Mount Martha, on Victoria's upmarket Mornington Peninsula, during Melbourne's lockdown.

Sparking rumours: Earlier this month, Snezana sparked rumours she may have undergone more cosmetic enhancements, after sharing a string of photos on Instagram showing off her plump pout and taut visage

Earlier this month, Snezana sparked rumours she may have undergone more cosmetic enhancements, after sharing a string of photos on Instagram showing off her plump pout and taut visage.

The mother of three uploaded a picture on Sunday of herself enjoying a romantic dinner with her husband, Sam.

She's previously admitted to having breast implants and transformative dental work.

But all eyes were on Snezana's gorgeous visage, which was practically glowing as she drew attention to her luscious lips with her hand resting underneath her chin.

Three days earlier, Snezana had uploaded a photo spruiking a mineral foundation, and again she showed off her plump features and smooth skin.
Sister Wives star Janelle Brown is taking the road less traveled.

The 52-year-old TLC reality show star revealed on her Instagram page that she has decided to move into an RV for the summer.

'So I have something fun to share,' Janelle wrote in the caption on the photo of her new mobile home that she posted on Sunday.

Ready for adventure: Sister Wives star Janelle Brown is taking the road less traveled

The television personality continued, 'I acted boldly and seized an adventure. The rental where I was living was sold and I chose an alternative path to trying to find another rental.

'Not only is the housing market in Flagstaff as crazy as where you are Im sure, rentals are even harder to come by. Presenting my new summer adventure - the RV life but camped on our property.

'Lots to do out here on the land so I figured why not be onsite. Honestly Im alternating between extreme excitement as Ive always wanted to try this and anxiety at all the unknown variables. So stay tuned, this is about to get real!'

Janelle's camper home is parked on her family's land on Coyote Pass in Flagstaff, Arizona. Brown stars alongside her husband Kody, 52, and his three other wives including Meri, 50, Christine, 49, and Robyn, 42, in the hit show that follows their lives as a polygamist family unit with their 18 children.

New home: The 52-year-old TLC reality show star revealed on her Instagram page that she has decided to move into an RV for the summer

When the series premiered in 2010, the family resided in Lehi, Utah, but they moved to Las Vegas the following year.

In 2018, the Browns spent $820,000 on the piece of land on Coyote Pass, where Janelle is currently camping.

The initial plan was to build four homes on the land, with one for each wife but no construction is yet underway.

On the move: In 2018, the Browns spent $820,000 on the piece of land on Coyote Pass, where Janelle is currently camping. Pictured in 2012

Janelle, who is the biological mother of six of Kody's children, was renting a five-bedroom three-bathroom home in Flagstaff. It was listed for $699,000 and sold three weeks ago.

Meri, who was legally married to Kody from 1990 to 2014, rents a four-bedroom, four-bathroom rental home with an estimated value of $1.3 million. She divorced Kody so that he could legally marry Robyn and adopt her three children from her previous marriage.

However, Kody and Meri have said that they are still spiritually wed. Kody shares spiritual unions with Janelle and Christine as well, though they are also not now nor have they ever been legally married.

Not happening yet: The initial plan was to build four homes on the Coyote Pass land, with one for each wife but no construction is yet underway. Seen in 2010

Kody removed his name from the deed of the three-bedroom three-bathroom Flagstaff home that he purchased with Christine for $520,000 in 2018 but she continues to live there as the sole owner.

Meanwhile, the patriarch and Robyn live in a lavish five-bedroom, five-bathroom residence that they bought in August 2019.

On the latest season of Sister Wives, Kody attributed the lack of movement on the four parcels of land that they own on Coyote's Pass to the family's financial struggles.
Radio host Jase Hawkins has opened up about his father's health battle.

The KIIS 101.1 Melbourne breakfast host revealed on air his dad has terminal cancer as a result of exposure to asbestos from his years working as a tradesman.

'He's done three rounds of chemo, and only last week we found out that it hasn't been working, and he's now going into palliative care,' he said on Jase & PJ.

Tough times: Radio host Jase Hawkins has revealed his father has terminal cancer as a result of exposure to asbestos from his years working as a tradesman

'My dad isn't doing well,' the father of two admitted. 'He got cancer through asbestos because he was a tradie back in the day.'

He also thanked his co-host, Polly 'PJ' Harding, for her support.

'You've been great, by the way, you've been amazing,' he told her.

Hawkins' family situation means Harding, who was set to leave the show in June, may have to delay her return to New Zealand.

Father and son: 'My dad isn't doing well,' he admitted. 'He got cancer through asbestos 'cause he was a tradie back in the day.' Hawkins is pictured with his father in January

An ARN spokesperson told Radio Today the network had been forced to delay its long-awaited unveiling of Harding's replacement.

'The announcement of the new co-host joining Jase Hawkins in Melbourne has been delayed while Jase and his family spend time with his family in Queensland,' they said.

Weekend Today host Lauren Phillips is said to be the favourite to replace Harding.

According to the Herald Sun last month, Phillips was 'expected to join Jase Hawkins as co-host next month' - although that now seems unlikely.

Phillips has had experience on the airwaves, having presented Jase & PJ's summer fill-in show with Ryan Jon.

Set to join? Meanwhile, Weekend Today host Lauren Phillips (pictured) 'is tipped to replace' Polly 'PJ' Harding on KIIS FM Melbourne's breakfast show Jase & PJ

An ARN spokesperson said in May: 'We look forward to making an announcement soon as to who will be joining Jase Hawkins on the KIIS 101.1 Breakfast show, but at this stage PJ "Polly" Harding's replacement is yet to be signed.'

In March, a well-placed source told Daily Mail Australia that Phillips had been offered the radio gig.

KIIS FM executives had a wish list of candidates to replace Harding, all of whom were known radio talents.

Delays: According to the Herald Sun in May, Phillips was 'expected to join Jase Hawkins as co-host next month'. Pictured: Polly 'PJ' Harding

They considered Kate Langbroek, who hosts the 3pm Pick-Up, and Yvie Jones, who hosted a Hit Network summer show with Grant Denyer in 2019.

Should Phillips take on the role, it's understood she would juggle her commitments between KIIS FM and as a weather presenter on Weekend Today.

In March, Harding broke down in tears on air as she told listeners that resigning was 'one of the hardest decisions' she'd ever made.

Top of the list: In March, a well-placed source told Daily Mail Australia that Phillips (pictured) had been offered the radio gig

She is returning to her native New Zealand after a 'challenging' year which saw her 'priorities change' after getting engaged.

Harding will be finishing up in the coming weeks. Hawkins is not leaving the program.

She explained that being separated from her family and fiance in New Zealand during the Covid-19 pandemic last year had taken a toll.

Announcement: In March, Harding broke down in tears on air as she told listeners that resigning was 'one of the hardest decisions' she'd ever made

Harding got engaged in December to her long-term partner, known only as 'Beej', but hasn't been living with him because she works in Melbourne.

In addition to the pressure of a long-distance relationship, she lost her father in 2019.

'It's not been an easy decision to make but I know for me it's the right one and will kickstart a brand new chapter,' she said.

'I will miss Jase and the whole team so much, but rest assured we will definitely stay in contact as Jase is adamant to be my head bridesmaid.'

Challenges: She explained that being separated from her family and fiance in New Zealand during the Covid-19 pandemic last year had taken a toll

Staying: Hawkins, PJ's co-host for the past six years, is not leaving the show

Hawkins revealed it had been distressing watching his co-host struggle behind the scenes over the last 12 months, saying she would often be in tears during ad breaks.

'There were mornings where we'd be in an ad break and you're in tears and you looked at me like, "I'm only staying here at the moment for you,"' he said.

Harding agreed she was reluctant to resign because she felt like she'd be letting Hawkins down, but ultimately she had to focus on her own happiness.
Blonde bombshell and Too Hot to Handle star Larissa Trownson says she's 'proud' of her body and the work she's had done.

Speaking to Daily Mail Australia last week, the 28-year-old Kiwi admitted to getting a breast enlargement, regular Botox injections and lip filler.

Larissa said she's unashamed to speak about her cosmetic enhancements and wants to be 'transparent' to help other women.

EXCLUSIVE: 'It's important that we're transparent': Too Hot to Handle's Larissa Trownson says she's 'proud' of her enhancements as she admits to getting a boob job, Botox and lip filler

'I think it's really important that we're transparent about work we've had done, otherwise that helps portray unreal beauty standards especially for younger women,' Larissa said.

'So I've always been upfront about it and I chose to have it, so I'm proud of it.

'But I totally understand why some people want to keep it to themselves. But I'm all about breaking stereotypes.'

Proud: Larissa said she's unashamed to speak about her cosmetic enhancements and wants to be 'transparent' to help other women

Her view: 'I think it's important that we're transparent about work we've had done, otherwise that helps portray unreal beauty standards especially for younger women,' Larissa said

After admitting on the Netflix show she got a boob job after university, Larissa said she's 'happy' with the way she looks and isn't planning to get anything else done.

'I'm happy the way I am. I get Botox regularly. I've just got Botox and lips and I'm happy with that,' she said.

Larissa, who is also a lawyer, told Daily Mail Australia she went on Too Hot to Handle to help break down stereotypes.

She wants people to know she can look the way she does and have a successful job.

'Happy the way I am': After admitting on the Netflix show she got a boob job after university, Larissa said she's 'happy' with the way she looks and isn't planning to get anything else done

'Long term, I want to be able to break the stereotype that I can be a lawyer and look this way,' she said.

When asked to describe herself in three words, Larissa said she's 'brains and beauty'.

After describing herself as the 'real-life Elle Woods' in a promo for Too Hot to Handle, Larissa said people are often surprised to learn she's a lawyer.

'I've had instances where I've turned up for a meeting and they say, "Can you get Larissa Trownson," and I say, "I am Larissa Trownson,"' she laughed.

'People judge me constantly.'

Too Hot to Handle follows a bunch of sexy singletons staying in a beachside mansion who must get through a four-week sex ban to win $100,000.

Season two of Too Hot to Handle is available to watch on Netflix
Irina Shayk put on a cheeky display as she rocked a tiny pair of string bikini bottoms while enjoying a tropical getaway ahead of the long weekend.

As she soaked in the glorious sunshine, the 35-year-old supermodel went topless as she posed for a number of sultry shots on the beach.

The beauty, who is rumored to be dating Kanye West after his split from Kim Kardashian, was seen hugging a wood pole as she looked off in the distance.

Looking good: Irina Shayk put on a cheeky display as she rocked a tiny pair of string bikini bottoms, while enjoying a tropical getaway ahead of the long weekend

Her long wet hair was positioned partially in front of her face as she stood to the side and flaunted her pert derriere in her barely-there two piece.

The only other article of clothing the mother-of-one wore was a pair of boots from her fashion collaboration with Tamara Mellon, who is the co-founder of Jimmy Choo.

In both images, Shayk was just feet away from the ocean and crashing waves as she looked back at the camera and showed off her toned figure.

Bombshell: As she soaked in the glorious sunshine, the 35-year-old supermodel went topless as she posed for a number of sultry shots on the beach

On Sunday, the Russian native shared additional snaps of her impressive tan as she perched close to the white sand on a similar beach.

She covered her breasts with her arms and wore a pair of canary yellow bikini bottoms as she gazed into the camera wearing minimal make-up, displaying her natural beauty.

She wore a pair of yellow heels to match her swimwear and captioned the snap: 'Sun valley.'

Au naturel: Irina Shayk, 35, ditched the designer clothes in favour of a more natural look as she wore only bikini bottoms and a pair of heels in a picture shared to Instagram on Sunday

Romance brewing: The post comes a week after it was reported Kim Kardashian's estranged husband Kanye West plans on seeing Irina again after they spent time together in France

Last week it was claimed Kardashian's estranged husband plans on seeing Irina again after they spent time together in France.

She is currently 'dating' the rapper, whom she has been connected to ever since she appeared in the 44-year-old star's music video for his track Power, which debuted in 2010.

According to People, he is excited to see Irina again.

'Kanye is doing well. He had a great trip to France with Irina. They will date long distance,' said the source.

New prospect: Irina initially met Kanye when she worked on the 2010 music video for his track Power (Kanye pictured in 2020)

'Kanye will continue to be L.A.-based. He has no plans to move to NYC. His kids live in L.A,' it was added; Kim and Kanye share daughters North and Chicago, aged eight and three, and sons Saint and Psalm, aged five and two.

'He is very focused on business in LA too. He likes spending time with Irina though and plans to see her soon again.'

The Bound 2 songwriter wed Kim Kardashian in 2014.

A source recently spoke to Page Six and pointed out that Kanye 'likes where things are headed' in his relationship with Irina (pictured with ex Kim in 2019)

Although the two went strong for several years, they eventually separated earlier this year, when 40-year-old Kim filed for divorce.

Shayk shares Lea with her former partner Bradley Cooper to whom she was initially linked in 2015.

Prior to becoming involved with the A Star Is Born director, she dated star athlete Cristiano Ronaldo for several years before the two split up in 2015.

The supermodel began seeing the 46-year-old actor later that year, and the two went on to welcome Lea, currently aged four, in 2017.

Although the couple was spotted with their daughter on several occasions following her birth, they eventually separated in 2019, although they remain on good terms and co-parent their child.
Megan Thee Stallion celebrated her BET victory with a wild after party on Sunday night.

The rapper - after winning four awards during the night - slipped into a revealing cut-out dress as she celebrated with pals including Lil Kim, in Hollywood.

And the 26-year-old star had a lot to celebrate as she took home the award for best female hip hop artist, best collaboration and best video of the year for 'WAP' with Cardi B, and the viewer's choice prize for 'Savage (Remix)' with Beyonce.

Time to let loose: Megan Thee Stallion celebrated her four awards at the BET Awards show by partying at an after party with her celeb friends on Sunday night

Stallion donned a skintight cream dress which featured cut-outs all over giving a glimpse of her nude underwear.

She wore her long locks loose and accessorized with her jaw-dropping 'hot girl' necklace which is said to be worth $425,000.

During the night Stallion cozied up to Lil' Kim, 46, who sported a hot pink spandex outfit with matching wig.

Risque: Stallion donned a skintight cream dress which featured cut-outs all over giving a glimpse of her nude underwear

Hot girl summer: During the night Stallion cozied up to Lil' Kim, 46, who sported a hot pink spandex outfit with matching wig

Star-studded: The WAP rapper accessorized with her jaw-dropping 'hot girl' necklace which is said to be worth $425,000. She's seen here with Swizz Beatz

Stallion dominated at the BET Awards on Sunday night.

Heading into the ceremony with DaBaby for the most nominations with seven each, Megan made a dramatic entrance with a sheer black veil over her head, which gave a hint of her face, and a long icy blonde wig.

She then proceeded to command the stage with a healthy dose of confidence and charisma, all while taking cues from her Thot S**t music video.

Getting wild: Kim, 46, got handsy as thy hit the dance floor and Stallion showed more of her revealing dress

Leggy looks: Stallion hung out with City Girls Yung Miami and JT

BET Awards party: Busta Rhymes and Suga Jay were also spotted at the bash

Center of attention: Stallion caught up with BET host taraji P. Henson

Before the the ceremony, Megan brought the wow factor on the red carpet decked out in a barely-there Gaultier gown that was held together with metallic cords and open-toe heels.

With her cleavage and legs nearly on full display, the Diamonds star also went with the flashy blonde wig during her time posing in front of the line of photographers.

Actress Taraji P. Henson served as host of the BET Awards for the very first time.

The evening included a tribute to musician and actress Queen Latifah (born Dana Elaine Owens), who received the Lifetime Achievement Award for her storied career that dated back to the 1980s.

Tongues out: Stallion also posed for selfies with fellow rapper Yung Miami

Killing it: The rapper put on a show stopping performance during the night after winning four awards

Making it a date: The hitmaker posed with boyfriend Pardison Fontaine as they arrived at the awards show
They are a high-powered Los Angeles couple who look to be thoroughly enjoying one another's company.

And Tina Louise along with her boyfriend Brett Oppenheim put on a loving and daring display of public affection on Monday, when they were spotted out and about in the Westlake Village area of Los Angeles, California.

The Australian and German model, 39, and her Selling Sunset realtor partner, 44, were dressed in their finest for a wedding.

Hands-on: Tina Louise and Brett Oppenheim put on a loving and daring display of public affection on Monday, when they were spotted out in the Westlake Village area of Los Angeles

Tina stunned in a putty-colored midi dress that hugged her every curve, pairing the gown with chunky-looking white sandals.

She held onto a small square white purse.

Brett looked dapper in a field blue suit over a white dress shirt with no tie.

He completed his outfit with a pair of brown leather loafers.

Hand in hand: The Australian and German model, 39, and her Selling Sunset realtor partner, 44, were dressed in their finest for a wedding

The loved-up couple held hands as they walked, with Brett sitting on a ledge at one point to rest his hand on Tina's hips.

The beauty then leaned over to give him a kiss on the lips, showing off her tattooed back which was revealed in her backless dress under two crisscross straps.

The pair have been dating at least since the spring, when Tina confirmed their relationship in late April.

At one point: The beauty then leaned over to give Brett a kiss on the lips, showing off her tattooed back which was revealed in her backless dress

Brett is a former partner at the Oppenheim Group, which is featured on the hit reality series Selling Sunset on Netflix.

Brett's twin brother Jason remains president at the Oppenheim Group, which employs reality star real estate agents including Christelle Stause, Christine Quinn, Mary Fitzgerald and others.

Early last month, Tina appeared on Brett's Instagram in a series of gorgeous and romantic portraits from the beach.

Happy: The pair have been dating at least since the spring, when Tina confirmed their relationship in late April; Seen recently on her Instagram
Total Bellas star Nikki Bella issued a formal apology on Monday to the late WWF trailblazer Chyna's family after joking about her gender in a resurfaced clip from 2013.

During an episode of E! series Fashion Police, the 37-year-old WWE wrestler held up a picture of Chyna and said: 'We don't know if it's a man or a woman.'

'I want to sincerely apologize for a comment I made over eight years ago on Fashion Police. I am sorry and embarrassed by my 29 year old self, who offended Chyna and, in turn, hurt her family and others,' Nikki (born Stephanie Nicole Garcia-Colace) tweeted.

'I want to sincerely apologize': Total Bellas star Nikki Bella issued a formal apology on Monday to the late WWF trailblazer Chyna's family after joking about her gender in a resurfaced clip from 2013 (pictured Monday)

'I wish I could take it back. Please learn from me, it's not worth hurting someone's feelings for a meaningless laugh. Chyna will always be remembered as an icon and pioneer who helped create the opportunities for women in wrestling that exist today. Thank you Chyna!'

A representative managing Chyna's official Twitter account then publicly accepted Bella's 'sincere' apology.

'Please stop attacking her. Her apology has been passed on to the family also,' the rep tweeted.

'She has grown as a person. There is no hate or Ill will. Please build each other up not tear down. Chyna believed in forgiveness.'

During an episode of E! series Fashion Police, the 37-year-old WWE wrestler held up a picture of Chyna and said: 'We don't know if it's a man or a woman'

Yeah this is messed upPoor Chyna. pic.twitter.com/7QP1oqpMnq  Vin (@TheVindictive) June 27, 2021

Nikki (born Stephanie Nicole Garcia-Colace) tweeted: 'I am sorry and embarrassed by my 29 year old self, who offended Chyna and, in turn, hurt her family and others. I wish I could take it back. Please learn from me, it's not worth hurting someone's feelings for a meaningless laugh. Chyna will always be remembered as an icon and pioneer who helped create the opportunities for women in wrestling that exist today. Thank you Chyna!'

'Chyna believed in forgiveness': A representative managing Chyna's official Twitter account then publicly accepted Bella's 'sincere' apology

The Bellas Podcaster was only 14 years old when Chyna (born Joan Marie Laurer) first rose to prominence as a member of D-Generation X in the WWF in 1997.

The University of Tampa grad's ring name was intentionally ironic, named after fine delicate and fragile china - which the 5ft11in athlete was not.

Chyna - who also served in the Peace Corps - commanded $1M per year during her hey day and was posthumously inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2019.

In 2016, the WWE Intercontinental champ died, age 46, of an accidental overdose of alcohol and pills following appearances in Playboy, porno films, The Surreal Life, and Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew.

WWE Intercontinental champ: The Bellas Podcaster was only 14 years old when Chyna (born Joan Marie Laurer) first rose to prominence as a member of D-Generation X in the WWF in 1997 (pictured in 1999)

Amazon: The University of Tampa grad - who also served in the Peace Corps - commanded $1M per year during her hey day and was posthumously inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2019

RIP: In 2016, Chyna died, age 46, of an accidental overdose of alcohol and pills following appearances in Playboy, porno films, The Surreal Life, and Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew (pictured in 2015)

Meanwhile, Nikki and her twin sister Brie Danielson were both inducted into the 2020 WWE Hall of Fame in a ceremony that aired April 6 on Peacock.

The Bella Twins announced their so-called retirement from the sport in 2019, but they're both scheduled to perform at WWE Summer Slam on August 21 in Las Vegas.

The San Diego-born, Napa-based athlete and her fiance Artem Chigvintsev will next celebrate the first birthday of their son Matteo Artemovich on July 31.

Nikki and the Russian-American 39-year-old are tentatively planning to schedule their Napa Valley nuptials 'in the fall.'

'Honored, grateful, and blessed': Meanwhile, Nikki and her twin sister Brie Danielson were both inducted into the 2020 WWE Hall of Fame in a ceremony that aired April 6 on Peacock

Back at it: The Bella Twins announced their so-called retirement from the sport in 2019, but they're both scheduled to perform at WWE Summer Slam on August 21 in Las Vegas

'A few of the [wedding] venues were like, "We're available!"' Bella told ET on June 4.

'And what we just started saying is, "We're so busy every day, and we completely remodeled the inside of her home. We haven't even lived in it yet and we're doing the outside and that takes so much work. We're still not even done designing." And so he and I both were just like, "Let's get through the house. If it happens, it happens." ...So as of now, we have no plans, no day.'

The two-time WWE Divas Champion was famously engaged to John Cena in 2017 when she first partnered with Artem in the 25th season of ABC's Dancing with the Stars.

It'll be the couple's second time down the aisle after ending their respective marriages to Giselle Peacock and her unnamed high school sweetheart.

Family pancakes: The San Diego-born, Napa-based athlete and her fiance Artem Chigvintsev will next celebrate the first birthday of their son Matteo Artemovich on July 31 (pictured Monday)

'A few of the [wedding] venues were like, "We're available!"' Nikki and the Russian-American 39-year-old are tentatively planning to schedule their Napa Valley nuptials 'in the fall'
She's made a career out of modelling her incredible figure.

And on Monday, Victoria's Secret stunner Shanina Shaik showed off her impressive physique in a black string bikini.

The Aussie beauty posted a mirror selfie taken from inside her Hollywood home.

Bikini babe! Victoria's Secret model Shanina Shaik stunned in skimpy two-piece on Monday in a selfie she posted from her Hollywood home

The 30-year-old flaunted her natural beauty by wearing minimal makeup, merely adding a sweep of bronzer to her cheeks.

Her long dark locks hung loosely on her shoulders, allowing all attention to be on her taut rig.

Last month, Shanina shared the 'secrets' to her supermodel physique in an Instagram post.

The Melbourne-born model captioned the set of skin-baring snaps, 'Home cooking , Pilates and lymphatic massage.... thats my secret'.

Sharing her secrets! Last month, Shanina shared the 'secrets' to her supermodel physique in an Instagram post. The Melbourne-born model captioned the set of skin-baring snaps, 'Home cooking , Pilates and lymphatic massage.... thats my secret'

In the images, the exotic beauty took several mirror selfies while wearing just a crop top and skimpy bikini bottoms.

Shania's raven tresses were pulled back up into a high bun for the impromptu photo shoot.

Legs for days: In the images, the exotic beauty took several mirror selfies while wearing just a crop top and skimpy bikini bottoms

The sultry pictures came after she celebrated the 93rd Academy Award in April, attending a private star-studded soiree in Bel Air.

She dressed to the nines, showing off her incredible figure in an elegant black strapless gown.

The designer dress, by Ulyana Sergeenko Couture, featured a thigh-high slit that showed off her slender pins.

All dressed up and somewhere to go! The sultry pictures came after she celebrated the 93rd Academy Award in April, attending a private star-studded soiree in Bel Air

It also boasted a low-cut neckline to flaunt a hint of cleavage.

Shanina left her decolletage bare, but accessorised with some diamond drop earrings.

The brunette stunner recently debuted her new boyfriend Matthew Adesuyan.

The pair went Instagram official with their relationship on Valentine's Day earlier this year.

Prior to becoming romantically involved with the record label owner, the model was married to Gregory Andrews from 2018 until the following year.

In January, Shanina was asked during an Instagram Q & A session if she would ever be open to becoming married again.

The model subsequently made her response through her Story and added a photo of herself from her wedding day.

At the time, she wrote, 'I think marriage can be a beautiful union! I'm not against it... and I would love to get married again one day.'
Two years after his Once Upon a Time in Hollywood movie was released, and just as his new novel based on the movie was released, Quentin Tarantino is opening up about early casting rumors involving Jennifer Lawrence.

Back in 2017, rumors surfaced that the 30-year-old actress was in contention for a role in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which many speculated was for the Sharon Tate role that was ultimately played by Margot Robbie.

However, Tarantino opened up about the early casting process in an interview with Marc Maron on his WTF podcast, where he revealed he was actually considering her for the role of Sqeaky Fromme, played by Dakota Fanning.

QT: Two years after his Once Upon a Time in Hollywood movie was released, and just as his new novel based on the movie was released, Quentin Tarantino is opening up about early casting rumors involving Jennifer Lawrence

Rumors: Back in 2017, rumors surfaced that the 30-year-old actress was in contention for a role in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which many speculated was for the Sharon Tate role that was ultimately played by Margot Robbie

The film is set in the summer of 1969, revolving around a fictional movie star (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stuntman (Brad Pitt), and the real events that lead up to the tragic murder of Sharon Tate (Robbie).

The film follows the Manson family as they were planning the killing, with Squeaky Fromme one of the family members who was called Squeaky by ranch owner George Spahn, because she 'squeaked' when he touched her.

Tarantino revealed on the podcast that he was 'early on in pre-production' when he 'flirted around' with the idea of Jennifer Lawrence playing Squeaky.

Squeaky: The film follows the Manson family as they were planning the killing, with Squeaky Fromme one of the family members who was called Squeaky by ranch owner George Spahn, because she 'squeaked' when he touched her

Flirted: Tarantino revealed on the podcast that he was 'early on in pre-production' when he 'flirted around' with the idea of Jennifer Lawrence playing Squeaky

He did make it clear, though, that he, 'couldn't be happier with what Dakota Fanning did,' adding she had, 'one of the best performances in the movie.'

'But early on, I investigated the idea of Jennifer Lawrence playing Squeaky. She came down to the house to read the script cause I wasnt letting it out,' Tarantino said.

'So, she came down to the house and I gave her the script and said, "Go in my living room or go outside by the pool and read it."'

Performance: He did make it clear, though, that he, 'couldn't be happier with what Dakota Fanning did,' adding she had, 'one of the best performances in the movie'

He added that she read the script and they, 'talked about it a little bit,' adding she was 'interested in doing it, but something didn't work out.'

He added she is, 'a very nice person, and I respect her as an actress,' and he even said she had a casting suggestion for him.

'But she goes, "Can I just make a recommendation for somebody to cast?" I go, "Oh yeah, sure." "You know that agent guy that talks to Rick at the beginning? Why dont you cast Marc Maron for that? I think he would be really, really good,"' he said.

Interested: He added that she read the script and they, 'talked about it a little bit,' adding she was 'interested in doing it, but something didn't work out'

The character she was referring to was Marvin Schwartz, Rick Dalton's agent, who was ultimately portrayed by Al Pacino.

Tarantino said that he told her he was thinking Marvin, 'should be significantly older than Marc Maron, but I see what you mean, yeah.'

'If I wasnt basing it on an older fellow, sure, he could do a good part with that. She was in there pitching for you, man!' he added.

Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood novel will be published by Harper Perennial on June 29.

Pitching: 'If I wasnt basing it on an older fellow, sure, he could do a good part with that. She was in there pitching for you, man!' he added
Personal trainers: they make their living from running gyms, training clients and brand sponsorships - but who is leading the competition on Instagram?

According to a recent study by My Protein, Kayla Itsines is sitting comfortably at the top of the list of Australia's highest-earning fitness stars.

The Adelaide-based influencer, 30, makes an estimated $57,500 for each sponsored Instagram post.

Winner: According to a recent study, Kayla Itsines is sitting comfortably at the top of the list of Australia's highest-earning fitness stars, making $57,500 for each sponsored Instagram post

Kayla is leagues ahead of the competition, with more than 13 million Instagram followers.

To put that in perspective, 36-year-old influencer and model Emily Skye - who has 2.5 million followers - came in second, pocketing $11,151 per sponsored post.

Nick Cheadle (777,000 followers) slid into third place with $5,145 for each post.

The silver medal: Fitness influencer and model Emily Skye (pictured), who has 2.5 million followers on Instagram, came in second with an estimated $11,151 per sponsored post

Jono Castano, who is the personal trainer behind Rebel Wilson and Hugh Sheridan's transformations, earns $4,321 per sponsored post thanks to his 658,188 followers.

One surprise placement was Michelle Bridges, who came in seventh and earns an estimated $1,857 for a single advertisement on Instagram.

The 50-year-old is arguably Australia's most well-known personal trainer thanks to her long tenure on The Biggest Loser.

But appears a television career doesn't guarantee you the top spot on Instagram.

Cashing in: Jono Castano, who is the personal trainer behind Rebel Wilson and Hugh Sheridan's transformations, earns $4,321 per sponsored post thanks to his 658,188 followers

Instagram trumps TV fame: One surprise placement was Michelle Bridges, who came in seventh and earns an estimated $1,857 for a single Instagram post. The 50-year-old is arguably Australia's most well-known personal trainer thanks to her long tenure on The Biggest Loser - but appears a television career doesn't guarantee you the top spot on Instagram

In addition to being Instagram-famous, Kayla is the co-creator and developer of the Sweat app and Bikini Body Training Company.

She founded these programs with her ex-partner Tobi Pearce, with whom she shares a two-year-old daughter, Arna Leia.

Both the app and the company have been highly successful, making Kayla and Tobi multimillionaires.

The top ten highest earning Australian personal trainers 1. Kayla Itsines - 13,049,488 followers - $57,504 2. Emily Skye - 2,530,014 followers - $11,151 3. Nick Cheadle - 777,114 followers - $5,145 4. Amanda Bisk - 682,519 followers - $4,511 5. Ashy Bines - 1,007,668 followers - $4,445 6. Jono Casanto - 658,188 followers - $4,321 7. Dasha Giavoronski - 338,571 followers - $2,238 8. Michelle Bridges - 280,954 followers - $1,857 9. Daniel Conn - 272,828 followers - $1,804 10. Sam Wood - 272,313 - $1,801 Advertisement
Rebel Wilson has received backlash online for speaking out against Sydney's latest COVID-19 lockdown.

On Sunday, the actress criticised the new lockdown measures on Instagram.

Several people have since responded, pointing out that the Los Angeles-based actress doesn't even live in Australia anymore.

'Mind your own business!' Rebel Wilson has received backlash online for speaking out against Sydney's latest COVID-19 lockdown

'Coming from somebody who has been travelling the world constantly over the past year for work,' sniffed one.

Another wrote: 'It's easy to have an opinion when you're not responsible.'

'Shut up, you don't even live here!' snapped another, while one wrote: 'Mind your own business, we are doing alright.'

The hosts of The Project also slammed Rebel after her criticism of the NSW government over Sydney's new lockdowns.

Jetsetter: 'Coming from somebody who has been travelling the world constantly over the past year for work,' snapped one fan

After a news package featuring the Australian actress was shown, guest host Steve Price lashed out.

'Not sure smug rock throwing from LA is the way to go for Rebel. I don't think she's done herself favours there, has she? Stupid opinion'.

Host Waleed Aly weighed in, saying that perhaps living in the United States in recent years has swayed Rebel's opinion.

'The one thing I would say, I know a few Australians who live overseas, it seems to me most of them feel like that,' he began.

Not impressed: 'Not sure smug rock throwing from LA is the way to go for Rebel. I don't think she's done herself favours there, has she? Stupid opinion,' raged Steve Price on The Project

'I think unless you're here... The whole world thinks - they've never been through what we've been through. Like two different planets.

'We look at America and the UK - how could you live like that and through that? They do the same with us. It's one of those situations.'

The Fat Pizza starlet is currently filming her new movie in the United States.

But on Sunday, the 41-year-old took time out of her busy schedule to post a series of Instagram Stories slamming the latest Sydney lockdown.

Not happy: Rebel may be filming her new movie in the United States at the moment, but she has some strong opinions on the Sydney lockdown. In an Instagram post shared Sunday, she posted a frowning selfie captioned, 'Sydney, WTF'

In her first post, she shared a frowning selfie captioned, 'Sydney, WTF'.

Her second post showed a photo of shelves at a Woolworths supermarket, which had been stripped bare by panic buyers.

She captioned that image: 'Mum took this at Woolworths'.

A third photograph showed hanging tinsel, with Rebel writing across it: 'You can't keep locking down as a strategy'.

Oh dear: Her second post showed a photo of shelves at a Woolworths supermarket, which had been stripped bare by panic buyers. She captioned that image: 'Mum took this at Woolworths'

A third photograph showed hanging tinsel, with Rebel writing across it: 'You can't keep locking down as a strategy'

Rebel has been filming her new movie, comedy Senior Year, in Atlanta, Georgia.

Earlier on Sunday, New South Wales recorded 30 new locally acquired Covid-19 cases, bringing the total number of infections in the Bondi cluster to 112 as fears grow the outbreak is rapidly getting out of control.

Premier Gladys Berejiklian thrust the city into a two-week lockdown as cases spread further away from the eastern suburbs epicentre, with several burgeoning super-spreader sites being a matter of concern.
Television personality Osher Gunsberg has slammed Prime Minister Scott Morrison's bungled Covid-19 vaccine rollout.

Taking to Instagram on Tuesday, the Bachelor host, 47, shared an animated graph highlighting Australia's low vaccination rate compared to other countries.

The graphic demonstrated just how far Australia is lagging behind the rest of the developed world when it comes to Covid shots administered.

Critic: Television personality Osher Gunsberg has slammed Prime Minister Scott Morrison 's bungled Covid-19 vaccine rollout

The former Australian Idol presenter wrote: 'Late to the party and last in line.'

He then railed against the Australian government, reminding his followers: 'Do not forget why we are locked down. Do not forget how our leaders have failed us.

'Do not forget this feeling on election day, no matter how many ways it is spun at you.'

Falling behind: Taking to Instagram on Tuesday, the Bachelor host, 47, shared an animated graph (pictured) highlighting Australia's low vaccination rate compared to other countries

Under fire: Referring to Prime Minister Scott Morrison's (pictured) assertion that the vaccine rollout was 'not a race,' Osher countered: 'Turns out it was a race'

Referring to Mr Morrison's assertion that the vaccine rollout was 'not a race,' Osher countered: 'Turns out it was a race.'

'This is not a "vaccination horizon", this is a masterclass in terrible planning and woeful messaging mixed with confusing and ineffective execution,' he added.

'Do not forget this on election day.'

Political message: 'Do not forget this on election day,' Osher concluded his Instagram post

Just 5.79 per cent of Australians are now fully vaccinated four months after the country's biggest ever inoculation rollout was launched, according to a graph compiled by Our World in Data.

Israel has vaccinated almost 60 per cent of its population followed by Chile with almost 55 per cent, while almost half of Britons and Americans have rolled up their sleeves.

Australia is also trailing behind Latvia, Turkey, Mexico and Colombia and even New Zealand, which only uses the Pfizer jab.

Masked up: Just 5.79 per cent of Australians are now fully vaccinated four months after the country's biggest ever inoculation rollout was launched, according to Our World in Data

Around eight million Australians are currently under some form of lockdown restrictions after cases broke out in Brisbane, Darwin, Perth and Sydney.

Greater Sydney is in a two-week lockdown, with Darwin shut down until at least Friday and Perth in its own four-day circuit breaker with tough restrictions as of 12.01am on Tuesday.

Rushing to plug the gaping holes in the nation's quarantine system, every worker involved in the program - either directly or indirectly - must now be vaccinated.

National cabinet are understood to have made the call after an unvaccinated Sydney man who drove international flight crews sparked the city's outbreak.

And anyone over the age of 16 can now get the AstraZeneca vaccine if agreed with their doctor, after many shunned the jab due to fears of incredibly rare blood clots.
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She has a packed itinerary while staying in Rome this week.

But Kim Kardashian made sure to look nothing short of flawless as she left her hotel in the Italian capital on Monday on her way to lunch at Roscioli Salumeria.

All eyes were on the 40-year-old as she flaunted her cleavage and midriff in a skimpy cardigan with just one button fastened.

European getaway: Kim Kardashian made sure to look nothing short of flawless as she left her hotel in Rome on Monday on her way to lunch

Her legs were also on show in a leather mini skirt embellished with a sequined dragon and some red mules.

Kim's extra-long tresses were styled straight and in a center parting and she showed off a nude makeup-look.

The mother-of-four was seen leaving the restaurant and making her way to an event in the city.

While she appeared to be alone, the former KUWTK star was seen with her glam squad on Sunday while she toured the Colosseum.

The trip comes amid a report that Kim is worried about dating again and 'did not think that Kanye would move on with someone else before her,' a source told Us Weekly.

Show stopper: All eyes were on the 40-year-old as she flaunted her cleavage and midriff in a skimpy cardigan with just one button fastened

Italian getaway: The former KUWTK star was seen having lunch at Roscioli Salumeria

Peek-a-boo: The mother-of-four showed off her flat tummy in the skimpy sweater

'She's not focused on dating at the moment but actually worries that guys will not want to date her because of how public her relationship was with Kanye,' an insider said on Saturday.

Kim filed for divorce from her estranged husband in February after nearly seven years of marriage.

'She also knows how hard it is to build trust with someone so she thinks it's going to take time before letting someone into her private life. It was easy with Kanye because they were friends before so they had years' worth of trust,' the source explained.

The insider also continued to dish on Kanye's blossoming relationship with Russian supermodel Irina Shayk, 35, saying that the SKIMS founder 'did not think' the rapper would 'move on' before she did.

All eyes on her: Kim turned heads as she left the eatery which also boasts a bakery, deli counter & wine shop

Door to door: Naturally the American star got the VIP treatment and was chauffeured around the city

With her gang: While she appeared to be alone, the former KUWTK star was seen with her glam squad on Sunday while she toured the Colosseum

Flawless: The beauty mogul's long locks were styled sleek and straight in a center parting

Turning heads: The star managed to cause a stir as she walked down the picturesque cobblestone streets

'She certainly did not think that Kanye would move on with someone else before her,' the insider noted.

Irina and Kanye have reportedly been dating for a 'couple months,' and they were seen celebrating his birthday in Provence, France after he decided to 'shoot his shot' in photos obtained exclusively by DailyMail.com.

Kanye and Irina have known each other for at least a decade, having first worked together when she played an angel in the music video for his song Power before hitting the runway for the rapper when he debuted a fall/winter collection at Paris Fashion Week in 2012.

Despite Kim's hesitation to dip into the dating pool again, her famous family and inner circle of VIP friends have offered reassurance that 'she has nothing to worry about,' while maintaining that they will be 'setting her up,' with eligible bachelors.

'Friends and family are telling her she has nothing to worry about and when she's ready to date again, they gladly will be setting her up with potential suitors,' the source shared.
Bachelorette star Lee Elliott did a little reminiscing this week as he and his wife Georgia Love celebrated five years since meeting on the 2016 season of the dating show.

Lee, 40, shared a sweet throwback image of the pair filming their very first date together, in the same location he eventually proposed to Georgia on back in 2019.

In his post Lee called Georgia the 'love of his life.'

'The love of my life': Bachelorette star Lee Elliott did a little reminiscing this week as he and his wife Georgia Love celebrated five years since meeting on the 2016 season of the dating show

'Five years on from our very first date ever aboard the vintage 1950 Halvorsen on the Hawkesbury River and the very same place I chose to propose to the love of my life,' Lee captioned the post.

In the first image from their very first date, the chemistry between the pair is palpable as they both smile and laugh.

He also shared videos and pictures from the moment he proposed on the same boat and lake.

Memories: Lee, 40, shared a sweet throwback image of the pair filming their very first date together, in the same location he eventually proposed to Georgia on back in 2019

He put a ring on it: He also shared videos and pictures from the moment he proposed on the same boat and lake

Toasting to their life together: They can be seen kissing and drinking champagne as the celebrated their engagement

They can be seen kissing and drinking champagne as the celebrated the moment.

Georgia also posted on her socials last week to mark their five-year milestone.

Sharing a gif of the moment she met her suitors on the Channel 10 show, Georgia wrote: 'Five years since this night. FIVE YEARS!!!?!?! And I still absolutely cannot believe they picked me.'

'I couldn't say more sincerely that I absolutely loved it! I had the time of my life, it was hands-down the best experience of my life and I met the love of my life. How bloody lucky am I?!'

Looking back: Georgia also posted on her socials last week to mark their five-year milestone. Sharing a gif of the moment she met her suitors on the Channel 10 show, Georgia wrote: 'Five years since this night. FIVE YEARS!!!?!?! And I still absolutely cannot believe they picked me'

She also went on to cheekily add: 'There was some stiff competition and I don't let him forget that.'

Despite the competition, Georgia was besotted with the tradesman from the minute she laid eyes on him.

The couple, who met on the 2016 season of The Bachelorette, got engaged in 2019.

Georgia and Lee tied the knot in an elegant ceremony in March after their initial plans for a 2021 wedding in Italy were cancelled.

The nuptials took place at the picturesque Frogmore Creek Winery in Tasmania.
As Brooke Blurton gears up for her debut as the first bisexual Bachelorette, a former franchise star has warned her to expect the worst from her contestants.

Becky Miles, who was last year's Bachelorette alongside her sister Elly, told The Real House Husbands Podcast that many reality TV participants are just looking for fame.

'I'm actually worried for Brooke,' the Newcastle defence worker, 30, told hosts Tim Sattler and Rod Jones.

Worried: As Brooke Blurton gears up for her debut as the first bisexual Bachelorette, former star Becky Miles (pictured) has warned her to expect the worst from her contestants

'I hope everyone is there for the right reasons and they're just going to be all eyes for Brooke,' she added.

When asked if she had any advice for Brooke, Becky said: 'Probably just follow your gut, follow your heart.'

Elsewhere, Becky said she was thrilled to see 26-year-old Brooke taking a shot at love with a mixture of male and female contestants.

Right reasons: 'I'm actually worried for Brooke,' the Newcastle defence worker said. 'I hope everyone is there for the right reasons and they're just going to be all eyes for Brooke'

'I think she's incredible. I haven't actually met her. I watched her on Nick [Cummins]'s season and I just thought she was a down-to-earth girl,' she added.

Despite not being acquainted with one another, Becky revealed she'd reached out to Brooke after she was announced as Australia's new Bachelorette.

'I just messaged her on Instagram saying, "Congratulations, so happy for you," but she hasn't seen it or replied,' she said.

However, it's likely Brooke didn't reply simply because she was in pre-season lockdown, which is customary for all Bachelors and Bachelorettes.

No reply? Despite not being acquainted with one another, Becky revealed she'd reached out to Brooke after she was announced as Australia's new Bachelorette, but didn't get a response

Telling all: Becky was interviewed this week on The Real House Husbands Podcast, hosted by former Amazing Race contestants Tim Sattler and Rod Jones

Becky's comments come a month after Brooke reflected on the adventure ahead of her in a thoughtful Instagram post.

'How exciting that I'll be embarking on the search to find "my one" in the next couple of weeks,' she wrote.

She told her followers she was 'so overwhelmed' by the positive response to her being the first bisexual and Indigenous Bachelorette.

'I've addressed in multiple interviews the immense pressure I feel to protect the communities I am a part of and represent them with so much pride and integrity,' she said.

'This is why I'm here': Becky's comments come a month after Brooke reflected on the adventure ahead of her in a thoughtful Instagram post
She rose to fame as one of the professional dancers on Strictly Come Dancing.

And Nadiya Bychkova showcased her incredible physique as she made the most of the good weather while abroad visiting Carpe Diem Beach in Croatia.

The 31-year-old dancer took to Instagram on Monday to share a racy bikini photo with her 85,000 followers.

'La douceur de lete': Strictly's Nadiya Bychkova sent temperatures soaring on Monday as she uploaded a picture to her Instagram of herself posing in a skimpy green bikini as she sat on a swing overlooking a bay in Croatia

In the photo, Nadiya can be seen wearing a tiny green bikini as she is perched on top of a large wooden swing.

With her hair tied back tightly into a bun, she kept accessories to a minimum, only opting for a pair of sunglasses on her face.

Captioning her picture, Nadiya wrote: 'La douceur de lete', which translates into English to say 'the sweetness of summer'.

Croatia is currently on the Government's amber travel list, meaning Nadiya will need to quarantine for ten days when she arrives back in the UK.

Wow: Earlier in June, Nadiya shared a series of sizzling Instagram photos of her luxury mother-daughter getaway at Slovenia's four star Bled Rose Hotel, wearing a variety of bikinis

With amber list countries, anybody that travels back to the UK from a country must take a Covid test before leaving, book and pay for day 2 and day 8 COVID-19 travel tests, and complete a passenger locator form.

After arriving back in the UK from the amber list country, the individual must then quarantine themselves for 10 days - ensuring that they conduct Covid tests on day two and eight after their return.

Nadiya's sizzling snap comes after she shared a series of stunning Instagram photos of her luxury mother-daughter getaway at Slovenia's four star Bled Rose Hotel earlier this month.

Slipping into a variety of skimpy bikinis, the Strictly Come Dancing professional put her impressively toned physique on display while lounging next to a jacuzzi, before enjoying a dip with her little girl, Mila.

Sizzling: The Strictly Come Dancing professional put her impressively toned physique on display while lounging next to a jacuzzi earlier this month

The blonde beauty first donned a striking olive green two-piece while sipping on a glass of wine, before changing into a one-shoulder, cut-out black bikini that made sure Nadiya's rock hard abs were centre of attention.

Nadiya revealed that she had whisked Mila away to celebrate her birthday, posting a snap of the pair hugging while sitting on the edge of an enormous bed that had been decorated with gold and pink balloons.

Nadiya captioned her snap: 'The best feeling ever is when she is happy. @bled_rose_hotel Thank you for making the best birthday surprise for Mila. You made this day very special for her and for me.' [sic]

The pair enjoyed a splash around in one of the hotel's jacuzzies, with doting mother Nadiya looking sensational in her black two-piece.

Birthday trip: Nadiya revealed that she had whisked Mila away to celebrate her birthday, posting a snap of the pair hugging while sitting on the edge of an enormous bed

Wearing her bright blonde hair loose, the Strictly star kept the sunshine at bay in a pair of chic oversized sunglasses while enjoying some quality time with Mila.

The professional dancer also made sure to squeeze in some time to herself, tucking into a luxury cup of coffee while sprawled across her hotel bed in lace lingerie.

Nadiya is a multiple-time Slovenian Ballroom and Latin Champion and previously has taken part in the Bosnian version of Strictly.

Aside from dancing, the Ukrainian has also done some professional modelling, starring on the front cover of Slovenia's Playboy magazine in April 2015.
James Franco covers his entire face while out and about in New York City with his friend and fellow actor Kevin Breznahan.

The 43-year-old actor and his 52-year-old friend, who he co-starred with on the HBO series The Deuce, were spotted in Washington Square Park in Manhattan on Monday.

They later joined actor Michael Gandolfini at the SoHo bar Felix to watch the France vs. Switzerland Euro Cup match.

Later: They later joined actor Michael Gandolfini at the SoHo bar Felix to watch the France vs. Switzerland Euro Cup match

James out: James Franco covers his entire face while out and about in New York City with his friend and fellow actor Kevin Breznahan

Out and about: The 43-year-old actor and his 52-year-old friend, who he co-starred with on the HBO series The Deuce, were spotted in Washington Square Park in Manhattan on Monday

Franco was representing his hometown of Palo Alto, California with an East Palo Auto trucker's cap.

He was also wearing a brown Palisades t-shirt and black Under Armour shorts swith black sneakers for his outing.

The actor also stayed safe amid the COVID-19 pandemic with a full face mask that covered everything except his eyes.

Representing: Franco was representing his hometown of Palo Alto, California with an East Palo Auto trucker's cap

He was seen picking up some ice cream treats amid the severe heatwave with Breznahan, who was wearing a white t-shirt, blue shorts and white sneakers.

Franco has kept a low profile over the past few months after it was revealed he settled a sexual misconduct lawsuit from two former students from his acting school.

His longtime collaborator Seth Rogen revealed in May that he has no plans to work with Franco in the future and that he regrets jokes he made about accusations against Franco in the past.

Ice cream: He was seen picking up some ice cream treats amid the severe heatwave with Breznahan, who was wearing a white t-shirt, blue shorts and white sneakers

The admission by Rogen seemed to surprise their Freaks and Geeks co-star Busy Phillips, who previously revealed Franco violently shoved her to the ground on the set of Freaks and Geeks, and how the producers forced him to apologize to her.

''I have to say, I mean, its interesting. They were super close, and they had a very tight relationship. And so I don't have any information,' Philipps revealed on The Daily Beast's The Last Laugh podcast.

'I haven't spent my days doing deep dives into what it all was. I didn't work with James past age 20, so I can only speak to the horrible behavior I experienced,' she said.

Low profile: Franco has kept a low profile over the past few months after it was revealed he settled a sexual misconduct lawsuit from two former students from his acting school

Franco stars in and directs The Long Home, based on the novel by William Gay, though it doesn't have a release date set at this time.

Franco stars alongside Josh Hartnett, Garret Dillahunt, Giancarlo Esposito, Ashton Kutcher and Josh Hutcherson.

He also serves as an executive producer on upcoming movies such as Camp and Blood Theater, which don't have release dates set at this time.

Coming soon: Franco stars in and directs The Long Home, based on the novel by William Gay, though it doesn't have a release date set at this time

Co-stars: Franco stars alongside Josh Hartnett, Garret Dillahunt, Giancarlo Esposito, Ashton Kutcher and Josh Hutcherson
Two years after he was declared cancer-free, NeNe Leakes has revealed her husband Gregg Leakes is once again battling the disease.

The former Real Housewives Of Atlanta star disclosed Monday that Gregg is currently in hospital and recovering from surgery.

NeNe, 53, told The Jasmine Brand during an Instagram Live that Gregg, 66, has 'been in the hospital for a week, tomorrow.'

Setback: NeNe Leakes revealed Monday that her husband Gregg Leakes is once again battling cancer and is currently in the hospital recovering from surgery (pictured in May)

Gregg was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2018 and NeNe shared the news in an emotional Instagram post in which she captioned a photo of her husband in a doctor's office with, The fight begins.'

The diagnosis and treatment put a strain on the couple's marriage but they appeared to weather the storm.

On Monday, NeNe said: 'I'm sure he'll be home in about a week or so.'

She added: 'It's difficult..... If you've ever been around somebody who's had cancer before, he's different. He's different.'

Staying positive: 'It's difficult,' the Real Housewives of Atlanta alum, 53, said during an Instagram Live with The Jasmine Brand. 'I'm sure he'll be home in about a week or so'

End of treatment: In May 2019, the couple celebrated after Gregg, now 66, was officially declared to be cancer free

Much of the couple's issues were played out on season 11 of their hit Bravo show, with NeNe coming close to calling it quits.

Their marital strain came to a head during the RHOA reunion in April 2019 when Gregg joined his wife of more than 20 years.

During the reunion, Andy Cohen asked if they both wanted to 'save the marriage,' and Gregg replied firmly: 'I do.'

NeNe, however, noticeably refused to declare the same.

'I can't tell you anything that I'm going to do,' she said. 'I feel like I have been pushed up against a wall. And I'm coming out like, 'No!''

Tough times: The diagnosis and treatment put a strain on the couple's marriage but they appeared to weather the storm and stayed together (pictured May 2019)

Gregg later admitted to Cohen that while he loves Nene they may end up just 'best of friends at the end.'

When Cohen said that the cancer diagnosis appeared to make 'everything exponentially worse' for them, NeNe agreed that it added a 'strain' but stressed that it was not the key issue.

'Gregg is not a walk in the park, even if he didn't have cancer. He is not a walk in the park,' she admitted.

'I was difficult at times,' Gregg agreed. 'I'm not a poster-child for calmness. Nobody's perfect.'

She admitted they were in counseling and no longer slept in the same room, saying: 'Our relationship is not ... great.'

NeNe and Gregg first tied the knot in 1997 and divorced in 2011. However, they subsequently reunited and married for a second time in 2013.
Walmart has removed a pair of Yeezy Foam Runner knockoffs, priced at $30 or less, from their site after Kanye West filed a lawsuit against them.

While the company removed the lookalike shoes online as of Friday, according to TMZ, they are still listed on third party sites like Etsy.

Walmart previously said the product in question was being sold via their platform by a reseller, and not the company itself.

Upset: Walmart has removed a pair of Yeezy Foam Runner knockoffs, priced at $30 or less, from their site after Kanye West filed a lawsuit against them; seen in 2015

'The product referenced in the complaint is not sold by Walmart, but rather by third party Marketplace sellers,' a Walmart spokesperson told the outlet last week.

The rep continued: 'We take allegations like this seriously and are reviewing the claim. We will respond in court as appropriate after we have been served with the complaint.'

Last week, the 44-year-old rapper's legal team noted in a lawsuit that they had already reached out to the company about the issue as well as provided photos of the two shoes for comparison, according to The Blast.

Kanye said in the documentation that 'Walmart is flagrantly trading off of his and Yeezy brand's popularity by offering for sale an imitation version of the Yeezy Foam Runner.'

West is suing Walmart for allegedly ripping off his Yeezy Foam Runner shoes. The 44-year-old rapper's legal team noted in the lawsuit that they've already reached out to the company about the issue as well as provided photos of the two shoes, according to The Blast; the Yeezy Foam Runners pictured

Imitation: Kanye said in the documentation that 'Walmart is flagrantly trading off of his and Yeezy brand's popularity by offering for sale an imitation version of the Yeezy Foam Runner;' the Walmart brand of shoes

In their report, The Blast noted that the lawsuit claimed that the conduct from Walmart is 'harming' Kanye and his Yeezy brand.

The document read: 'Walmart's conduct is harming and will continue to harm, West and Yeezy, leaving them no choice but (to sue) to stop Walmart's unfair competition and profiting from the popularity of the success of West and Yeezy.'

His legal team noted that the Yeezy brand is worth 'billions' of dollars and the imitation shoe could result in the loss of 'hundreds of millions' of dollars.

Legal: The outlet noted that the lawsuit claimed that the conduct from Walmart is 'harming' Kanye and his Yeezy brand; seen November 7, 2019 in NYC

Walmart: The document read: 'Walmart's conduct is harming and will continue to harm, West and Yeezy, leaving them no choice but (to sue) to stop Walmart's unfair competition and profiting from the popularity of the success of West and Yeezy'

The documents stated that celebrities are often seen photographed in the Yeezy brand, which in turn 'enhances the brand's popularity and appeal to the general public.'

It also lists the celebrities seen wearing them, including his estranged wife Kim Kardashian, as well as Justin and Hailey Bieber, Gigi and Bella Hadid, Ariana Grande and Snoop Dogg.

The legal documents stated that Kanye 'sets trends for everything he touches' and that he is a 'household name,' per the outlet.

Shoes: The document read: 'Walmart's conduct is harming and will continue to harm, West and Yeezy, leaving them no choice but (to sue) to stop Walmart's unfair competition and profiting from the popularity of the success of West and Yeezy'

Item in question: His legal team noted that the Yeezy brand is worth 'billions' of dollars and the imitation shoe could result in the loss of 'hundreds of millions' of dollars

Adding that the 'Yeezy brand' is synonymous with Kanye and is 'one of the most influential and successful brands in fashion.'

They also claim that Yeezy is 'losing market shares' with the imitation shoes allegedly harming the reputation and the goodwill of the rapper's brand.

The lawsuit comes amid Kanye's new romance with supermodel Irina Shayk.

Their new relationship was confirmed earlier this month after the rapper and the model were seen enjoying a romantic stroll in Provence, France.

Yeezy: They also claim that Yeezy is 'losing market shares' with the imitation shoes allegedly harming the reputation and the goodwill of the rapper's brand; Kanye with Steven Smith in New York City on November 7, 2019

They have been together for months, as early as March, per TMZ, with the couple spending time together in New York City as well.

During that time Irina was seen wearing a DMX memorial shirt before it was available to the public.

The custom shirts for DMX were commissioned by Kanye's Yeezy brand and designed by Balenciaga.

The project Kanye helmed raised over $1 million for DMX's family with profits.

Romance: The lawsuit comes amid Kanye's new romance with supermodel Irina Shayk. Their new relationship was confirmed earlier this month after the rapper and the model were seen enjoying a romantic stroll in Provence, France; seen on April 26 with her daughter Lea De Seine, four

Kanye and Irina were seen taking a romantic stroll in Provence, France, on Wednesday, June 9, 2021, as seen in exclusive images obtained by DailyMail.com.

The duo stayed at the luxury Villa La Costa boutique hotel together.

Irina, 35, and Kanye flew back to the the states via private jet after spending time in Provence, France for his 44th birthday.

Though the pairing may appear out of left field to some, Irina and Kanye have been connected for more than a decade.

Back in 2010, the runway maven was a featured player in West's Heaven-inspired Power music video, where she portrayed an angel.

Specifically, Shayk sported a revealing gold getup and a pair of CGI angel wings.

Just two years later, the Russian-born beauty put her modeling skills to the test as she graced the runway for West's Fall/Winter fashion collection at Paris Fashion Week.

Power: Back in 2010, the runway maven was a featured player in West's Heaven-inspired Power music video, where she portrayed an angel; Irina pictured seated in front of Kanye

In his 2010 song Christian Dior Denim Flow he rapped: 'I wanna see Irina Shayk next to Doutzen.'

Kanye's nearly seven year marriage to Kim Kardashian, 40, came to an end in February, with the reality TV sensation filing for divorce.

According to People, the Stronger rapper filed his response for divorce in early April, where he asked for joint legal and physical custody of their children.

The estranged pair share daughters North, eight, Chicago, three, and sons Saint, five, and Psalm, two.
Hugh Sheridan has been forced to defend their gender identity after coming out as a 'nonbinary human' over the weekend.

The actor was criticised by somebody online who took a dig at them by posting an article titled, 'How the nonbinary trend hurts those with real gender dysphoria'.

The article accuses celebrities of jumping on a gender bandwagon by coming out as nonbinary for publicity.

Under attack: Hugh Sheridan has been forced to defend their gender identity after coming out as a 'nonbinary human' over the weekend

'We have celebrities who are capitalising on gender's moment in the sun,' it reads.

'If someone has a large public following, and they announce they are nonbinary, it is hard to believe that doing so is anything but a publicity stunt to get people talking about them.

'Identifying as nonbinary provides social and literal, currency; and public figures who "come out" as nonbinary obtain adulation and newfound relevance as every media publication in the world hails them for their strength as a trailblazer.'

Hitting back, Hugh reposted the article on his Instagram Stories and wrote: 'Read what you posted... think about me as a REAL human and then educate yourself.

The star added: 'You can't imagine. Obviously.'

Accusation: A troll claimed that Hugh and other celebrities are just 'capitalising on gender's moment in the sun'

Hugh came out as nonbinary over the weekend, approximately eight months after revealing that they're attracted to both men and women.

Nonbinary people don't categorise their gender identify as either male or female and often go by the pronouns they/them.

Hugh made the announcement on Instagram in a post to promote landing the cover of gay men's magazine DNA with his fiance, Kurt Roberts.

Proud: Hugh came out as nonbinary over the weekend, approximately eight months after revealing that they're attracted to both men and women

'I AM still a human (non binary/bi/me/Hughman) but Im in a monogamous relationship with another human, who I love,' Hugh wrote.

The actor continued: 'I dont accept a label cause it limits me if you want it; take it.

'I chose zero labels for no other reason except the exclusion, limitations, separation, I believe are all one, deeeeep down. &who knows? Why chose?!! Be you. Be true. Be free: to BE, to JUST BE you, a human, same as me.'

In an interview with DNA, Hugh said that they were now comfortable with being called 'gay' despite not subscribing to labels.

Brave: Hugh made the announcement on Instagram in a post to promote landing the cover of gay men's magazine DNA with his fiance, Kurt Roberts (pictured together)

'Now Im marrying a guy you can call me gay,' Hugh explained to the magazine.

'Whatever! The point is, were all human and, in my case, labelling put me into a box that felt like a cell.'

Last year, Hugh told Stellar magazine, 'I believe labels are for clothes, not for people.'

In the same interview, the Packed to the Rafters actor said that they wanted to speak up for people who don't use labels.

'I AM still a human (non binary/bi/me/Hughman) but Im in a monogamous relationship with another human, who I love,' Hugh wrote

'It occurred to me that no-one ever sticks up for people who dont pick a label,' they said.

Hugh proposed to Kurt, who is the general manager of digital lending at the Commonwealth Bank, on stage during the first night of the Adelaide Fringe Festival in March.

'I went out and bought a ring and flew his family to be seated in the audience on the night. He had no idea. It was a really amazing moment,' Hugh said.

After proposing, the loved-up pair shared a public embrace and a cheeky kiss before a besotted Hugh ran back on stage and said: 'I just got engaged!'
Her recent departure from Channel 7's flagship Sunrise program has been marked by acrimony.

And on Monday, Samantha Armytage reached out to Karl Stefanovic, the anchor at former rival Channel 9's corresponding breakfast show, with a friendly invitation.

Noticing pictures of Karl and family on a farm, posted to wife Jasmine Stefanovic's Instagram, Sam commented, 'You guys should have dropped in'.

Slipping into her comments: On Monday, Samantha Armytage reached out to Karl Stefanovic, the anchor at former rival Channel 9's corresponding breakfast show, with a friendly invitation. Pictured: Karl's wife Jasmine and their daughter Harper

Sam lives on a farm in the Southern Highlands with her husband Richard Lavender.

Jasmine replied, 'next time for sure we would love that!! We had to come back for the lockdown.'

The exchange come after Sam made headlines last Monday when she criticised her former co-worker Natalie Barr on Twitter for continuing to speak about her in the press, three months after taking over as anchor of Seven's breakfast show.

She was responding to an interview Natalie had done with The Australian Women's Weekly in which she claimed the pair weren't friends outside the workplace.

Controversial figure: Sam's (pictured) recent departure from Channel 7's flagship Sunrise program has been marked by acrimony

After brushing off a question about their rivalry on The Kyle and Jackie O Show, Sam tweeted: 'Look, I'm out. Nat's wanted the job forever... and she's finally got it. She just needs to get on and enjoy it - and forget about me (even though I'm unforgettable).'

However an 'insider' at Channel 7 quickly struck back, calling Sam's claims about Natalie 'untrue' and criticising the way she has handled her exit.

'When she left Sunrise, Sam said she wanted to get away from the attention. But the only one creating the attention around her is Sam,' the insider said.

A friendly invitation: Noticing pics of Karl and family on a farm, posted to wife Jasmine Stefanovic's Instagram, Sam commented, 'You guys should have dropped in'

Meanwhile, the sweet rural updates that caught Sam's eye on Instagram were taken by Jasmine just before Sydney was plunged into lockdown on Friday.

On Sunday evening, the doting mum, 37, took to Instagram to share footage of her husband Karl, 46, with their one-year-old daughter as they attended a farm in NSW with a pal.

Their little girl looked elated to be surrounded by animals in the cute video, with the first clip showing Karl lift up his daughter in his arms while stroking a horse.

First pony ride! Jasmine recently shared sweet updates from a final family fun day out, just before Sydney was plunged into lockdown on Friday. Pictured: Karl with daughter Harper, one

Karl later beamed with pride as his little girl enjoyed her 'first pony ride', sitting atop a tiny white pony while dressed in a sweet baby pink ensemble.

'Country life before lockdown', Jasmine captioned the footage.

Sydney was plunged into a two-week lockdown over the weekend, after cases in the city increased rapidly.

Cute: Their little girl looked elated to be surrounded by farm animals in the cute video, with the first showing Karl lift up his daughter in his arms while stroking a horse in front

Family fun day! Jasmine was seen holding little Harper on her lap, while Karl drove a buggy and a pal sat in the seat next to them

Besides Harper, Karl is also father to daughter Willow, 16, Jackson, 20, and River, 13, from his marriage to Cassandra Thorburn.

Karl and Jasmine met in late 2016 and married two years later, in December 2018.

The couple welcomed their first child together, daughter Harper, in May last year in a star-studded ceremony in San Jose del Cabo, Mexico.

Dad: Karl is also father to sons Jackson, 20, and River, 13, from his marriage to Cassandra (left)

Jasmine is a former fashion model best known for being the co-founder of cult shoe label Mara & Mine.

Harper turned one on May 1, with Jasmine paying sweet tribute to her little girl on Instagram at the time.

'One year ago today you came into our world and filled our hearts with so much love. You are the most precious soul who we love beyond words,' she wrote.
Former Married At First Sight star Stacey Hampton has pleaded guilty to failing to comply with a Covid direction last year.

The 27-year-old was ordered to pay a total of $1,676 - including a $1,000 fine plus court fees - during a closed hearing at Adelaide Magistrates Court last Tuesday.

No conviction was recorded, and two similar charges were dropped.

Breaking the law: Former Married At First Sight star Stacey Hampton has pleaded guilty to failing to comply with a Covid direction last year

The reality TV star, from Ingle Farm, has until July 20 to pay the $1,676.

Stacey was charged in May 2020 with three counts of failing to comply with a direction after travelling interstate when she should have been self-isolating.

When contacted by Daily Mail Australia at the time, she played down the incident as 'a little hiccup' with her essential worker paperwork.

Expensive trip: Stacey was charged in May 2020 with three counts of failing to comply with a direction after travelling interstate when she should have been self-isolating

The guilty plea comes after Stacey slashed the price of her monthly OnlyFans subscription from $35 to just $15 last month.

Despite having the relevant qualifications, the mother of two has struggled to find work as a lawyer due to her responsibilities as a single parent.

'A lot of people ask why I'm not using my law degree, but not many law firms like to take on people who only want three days a week,' she said last year.

Cha-ching! The blonde often flaunts her expensive lifestyle on social media, and claims to earn a living as a social media influencer

'If I did five days a week [working as a lawyer] then I feel like I'm not being fair on my children and I'm not there for them.'

The blonde often flaunts her expensive lifestyle on social media, and claims to earn a living as a social media influencer.

Stacey rose to fame on last year's season of Married At First Sight. She was paired with 'husband' Michael Goonan but their relationship didn't last.
Selling Sunset's Christine Quinn was seen in West Hollywood on Monday, showing off her sleek figure about six weeks after welcoming her first child.

Quinn, 32, was seen with husband Christian Richard heading out to dinner on the summer evening donning a matching two-piece navy blue activewear ensemble with thunder patterns.

The Dallas native showed off her svelte waist in the outfit, accessorizing with tinted sunglasses and black sandals, with her lustrous blonde locks down.

The latest: Selling Sunset's Christine Quinn, 32, was seen in West Hollywood on Monday, showing off her sleek figure about six weeks after welcoming her first child as she went to dinner with husband Christian Richard at the restaurant Cecconi's

Richard wore a navy blue zip-up sweatshirt over a navy blue top with dark blue slacks and black leather shoes.

The couple is about six weeks removed from welcoming their first child, son Christian Georges Dumontet, in Los Angeles on May 15.

Quinn last month described her son as 'more precious that I could have ever imagined' in a chat with People last month.

'Nine months seems like a lifetime to wait to meet someone,' the real estate agent told the outlet. 'It is the most incredible feeling to know that you have created life. My protective mama bear mentality is stronger than ever.

Beaming: The couple looked happy as they stepped out to the West Hollywood eatery

Refresher: The Selling Sunset stunner enjoyed a beverage with her dinner on the summer night

'My sole job is to protect him, to love him and to raise him. Let's just say he was born with good taste. He has a closet filled with designer outfits that I cannot wait to dress him in!'

Quinn described the labor process, saying it came while she was resting at home while making her Netflix reality series.

'It was a giant gush of fluid, just like in the movies,' Quinn said. 'I wrapped a towel around my waist and off we went to the hospital. Twenty-two minutes later, Baby C was born via emergency c-section performed by Dr. Steve A. Rad.'

She said the doctor 'was incredible under the pressure and complexity of the situation.

'Baby C was very eager to make his appearance in this world and in dramatic fashion - he got that from his mommy.'

Quinn credited her spouse Richard for his support amid her term.

'He was very calm throughout the whole process,' she said. 'One day I might share more about what happened, but for right now, I am humbled and grateful that three of us came home from the hospital.'
He's been 'bedridden' following his recent hospitalisation for pancreatitis.

But Kurt Coleman ventured outside on Tuesday, heading off to the dentist on a sunny Melbourne day, as chronicled in the influencer's Instagram Stories.

The 24-year-old had earlier posted an image of himself looking very unwell, in which he had declared, 'f**k pancreatitis mate'.

The great outdoors: Kurt Coleman (pictured) ventured outside on Tuesday, heading off to the dentist on a sunny Melbourne day, as chronicled in the influencer's Instagram Stories

In the shirtless selfie, Coleman stared at the camera with red-rimmed eyes and bedhead.

The shades appeared to be drawn in his bedroom and the photo was taken with a flash.

He continued his caption, 'bed ridden still. just wanna workout and go outside.'

Sick: The 24-year-old had earlier posted an image of himself looking very unwell, in which he had declared, 'f**k pancreatitis mate'

The recent posts come after Kurt announced he's 'taking a break' from social media.

In a post on Instagram last Tuesday, the influencer told his 113,000 followers that he was still 'traumatised' after being hospitalised with pancreatitis.

'I'm taking a break from my phone for a week or however long I need,' he began in a lengthy post explaining his decision to step away.

Stepping away: Kurt Coleman has announced he's 'taking a break' from social media after a recent health scare landed him in hospital

'I'm literally that traumatised from what I went through the last week, the pancreatitis was the highest level of pain I think any human can go through.'

Kurt then thanked the people who had reached out to him and explained he's been 'too tired to even reply'.

'I'm really sad still after what I went through, I feel f**ked up from the drugs and just the whole experience,' he continued.

Health scare: In a post on Instagram on Tuesday, the 24-year-old influencer told his 113,000 followers that he was still 'traumatised' after being hospitalised with pancreatitis

'I'm taking a break from my phone for a week or however long I need,' he began in a lengthy post explaining his decision to step away

'I will be back better than ever when I come back, but I just really need this time to heal and get better. It has changed my life forever.'

Kurt revealed alcohol consumption was behind his diagnosis, and urged fans: 'Please think about my experience when you plan to have a wild drinking night out.'

The self-described 'Australian media personality' revealed he'd been hospitalised on Sunday, sharing a video of himself in his hospital bed.

On the mend: The self-described 'Australian media personality' revealed he'd been hospitalised on Sunday, sharing a video of himself in his hospital bed

'The doctors still don't know what's wrong with me so I'm just freaking out,' he wrote at the time.

On Monday, Kurt revealed he was still in hospital and had 'been at my lowest physical and mental pain the last few days'.

In a separate post on Monday, he said he was 'going to be sharing a lot in the next few weeks and months' about his condition.

Poison: Kurt revealed alcohol consumption was behind his diagnosis, and urged fans: 'Please think about my experience when you plan to have a wild drinking night out.' Pictured with friend Tori O'Neill

'I've learnt so much from my health taking a turn. I really am going to dedicate a lot of my time now making people aware of the things that I had no idea about until now,' he wrote.

'Going through this has CHANGED my life forever and I now have a new mission to share with you all because this has been such an important lesson I've learnt that everybody needs to know...

'Most scariest traumatic last few days of my life but also definitely changed my life forever in a good way. Everything happens for a reason.'
Over the years, she has graced the cover of countless magazines.

But on Monday, model Megan Gale radiated in a photoshoot alongside her three-year-old daughter, Rosie.

In one image, the stunning 45-year-old sits with her little girl in her lap while they take in their scenic rural surroundings.

Magic moments: On Monday, model Megan Gale radiated in a photoshoot alongside her three-year-old daughter, Rosie

A second image shows her cuddling Rosie into her chest while the two are comfortably laying on a bed of autumn leaves.

Meanwhile, another shows the former TV host on a swing set while her daughter is giving her a good push.

And in a fourth, Megan cups her daughter's face with her hands while looking into her eyes.

'Magic moments with my soul sister ,' she simply captioned the sweet mother and daughter pictures.

Play time! Another image shows the former TV host swinging on a swing set while her daughter is giving her a good push

Too precious: On picture shows her cuddling Rosie into her chest while the two are comfortably laying on a bed of autumn leaves

So sweet! And in a fourth, Megan is seen cupping her daughter's face with her hands while looking into her eyes

In the images, the girls are both donning an autumn collection by Seed Heritage and Byron Bay designer, Auguste The Label, Estelio Emporio and Ena Pelly.

Megan looks stunning in a mustard sweater and a floral skirt, teamed with a pair of boots.

Megan also shares her firstborn, a son named River, with her AFL star fiance Shaun Hampson, 33.

Her other half: Megan shares her children with AFL star fiance Shaun Hampson (pictured), 33

In 2019, the former runway model said her priorities shifted after having children.

'Becoming a mum has changed it all. It's made me slow down and re-prioritise what's important. Things I used to get upset about, I don't get upset about any more,' she told Good Health at the time.

'Your kids are so special and so precious, you don't want to waste time worrying about things that don't matter, or worrying about things that you have no control over,' she added.

Megan and Shaun met in 2011, and began a long-distance relationship, with the leggy brunette based in Sydney at the time and AFL star in Melbourne.

'We'd start Skyping around 8pm, then look at the clock and it would be 4am,' she told The Australian Women's Weekly last year.

'It was that giddy, high school thing where you could sleep for two hours then wake up and feel refreshed and energised. You're glowing and bolstered by this new connection.'
Safaree Samuels is a father once again, revealing on social media that he has welcomed his second child with estranged wife Erica Mena.

The 39-year-old rapper and Love & Hip-Hop star took to his Instagram revealing a photo of him with his newborn baby boy, stating, 'MR Straittt jr is here!'

He also took to his Instagram story on Monday, sharing a photo of the newborn's tiny hand around his finger.

Newborn: Safaree Samuels is a father once again, revealing on social media that he has welcomed his second child with estranged wife Erica Mena.

'Another me... That's all the world needed,' Samuels said in the caption of the snap, though Mena, 33, has yet to share the news to her fans.

Samuels also shared a photoshopped image of him with a baby bump, adding, 'Who's next?'

The birth of this child comes just a month after Mena filed for divorce in late May, just weeks after announcing their new child.

Another me: 'Another me... That's all the world needed,' Samuels said in the caption of the snap, though Mena, 33, has yet to share the news to her fans

The couple were engaged on Christmas Eve 2018, before tying the knot in early October 2019.

Mena welcomed their first child, daughter Safire Majesty Samuels, in early February 2020.

The couple announced the second child in early May in a now-deleted Instagram post with Safaree stating, 'Safire got a new sibling. New baby who dis?? #2under2 time to get neutered now I need a chef and a nanny.'

Engaged: The couple were engaged on Christmas Eve 2018, before tying the knot in early October 2019

Just a few weeks later, Mena filed for divorce in Fayette County Superior Court in Georgia, where they both reside and where they tied the knot in 2019.

Court documents revealed that Mena is seeking primary physical custody of their child Safire, though she is also willing to share joint legal custody of the child with Safaree.

The court documents also added that their marriage is, 'irretrievably broken' with 'no hope of reconciliation.'

Divorce: Just a few weeks later, Mena filed for divorce in Fayette County Superior Court in Georgia, where they both reside and where they tied the knot in 2019

There is no indication yet how the divorce proceedings will change with their newborn child, or if custody arrangements will change.

Samuels previously dated Nicki Minaj from 2002 to 2014, while Mena was previously engaged to Bow Wow.

Safaree also launched an Anaconda sex toy line in 2020 and an OnlyFans account in 2021.

Custody: There is no indication yet how the divorce proceedings will change with their newborn child, or if custody arrangements will change

Previous: Samuels previously dated Nicki Minaj from 2002 to 2014, while Mena was previously engaged to Bow Wow
Former Victoria's Secret model Shanina Shaik has been caught wearing what appears to be engagement ring on her left hand ring finger.

But the Australian catwalk superstar has denied an engagement with new beau, Matthew Adesuyan.

During a Q&A on Instagram, Shanina said the diamond ring was actually owned by her model pal, Jasmine Tookes.

Engaged? Victoria's Secret model Shanina Shaik (pictured) has set the record straight on engagement rumours after being caught with a 'big ring' on her finger

'I just want to clear this up,' Shanina said.

'A lot of you know my best friend Jasmine is engaged and every time I see her she gives me her ring and I wear her ring because I love it so much.'

Shanina debuted her relationship with Matthew on Valentine's Day, with the pair going official on Instagram.

No: 'A lot of you know my best friend Jasmine is engaged and every time I see her she gives me her ring and I wear her ring because I love it so much,' Shanina said of the rumours

Sharing a black-and-white picture of the couple, Shanina wrote: My Valentine... Happy Valentine's Day.'

In the photo, the beauty looks off into the distance while Matthew stands from behind her with his arms clutching onto her waist.

She confirmed the identity of her beau was Los Angeles-based record label owner, Matthew.

Feeling the love! Shanina revealed the identity of her new boyfriend Matthew Adesuyan on Valentine's Day this year

When he isn't on tour with his artists, Matthew is also the creator of fashion brand Made By US.

Her relationship with Matthew comes shortly after her break-up from her ex Seyed.

In August last year she shared a cryptic Instagram post, hinting at a split between the two.

Over: Shanina hinted that she had split with her ex Seyed (pictured) in August last year in a cryptic Instagram post

'What I have learned this week nothing ever goes away until it teaches us what we need to know,' she wrote at the time.

The couple were last spotted in the South of France only two weeks before, sharing a kiss while at the exclusive, Hotel du Cap Eden.

She had debuted the romance in December 2019.

First marriage: Shanina announced her split from husband DJ Ruckus in June 2019, after just one year of marriage

That relationship had come after she had announced her split from husband DJ Ruckus in June 2019, after just one year of marriage.

Shanina, who walked the runway for Victoria's Secret five times between 2011 and 2018, announced her split from DJ Ruckus in June 2019, after a year of marriage.

In October 2019, Shanina told The Herald Sun she'd leaned on her family and friends for support in the aftermath of the separation.
Kim Kardashian headed to the Vatican in Rome but flouted its strict dress code by wearing a sexy lace dress which didn't cover her shoulders and had cut-out sections throughout her mid-section.

The KUWTK star, 40, shunned conservative attire and instead opted to flaunt her sensational curves in the white lace dress as she toured the city, which is the official residence of the Pope of the Catholic Church.

There is a basic dress code that both men and women must adhere to when visiting the Vatican city, particularly St. Peters Basilica and/or the Vatican museums (including the Sistine Chapel).

Dressed to impress: Kim Kardashian put on a sizzling display as she stepped out in the Vatican on Monday amid her getaway o Rome

Visitors must cover their knees and upper arms, while they are prohibited from wearing shorts or skirts above the knee, sleeveless tops, and low-cut shirts.

Men must also remove their hats when entering, though women are permitted to remain wearing theirs.

Shoulders must also be covered and visitors may be turned away or advised to cover up with a shawl.

Regardless, Kim, who jetted to Rome earlier this week, appeared in great spirits as she made her way around the city in her showstopping outfit, with the star also accompanied by fashion icon Kate Moss and her daughter Lila Grace.

What would the Pope say?! The KUWTK star, 40, shunned conservative attire and instead opted to flaunt her sensational curves in an off-the-shoulder white lace dress

Kim, who was was baptized in a traditional Orthodox Christian ceremony in 2019, was sure to turn heads in her figure-hugging Bardot-style number, which featured a cut-out design at the midsection, allowing a glimpse of her toned abs.

Rounding off her look, the mother-of-four added barely-there white heels and shielded her eyes with futuristic sunglasses.

Kim, who donned a white face mask, looked in good spirits as she carried a black leather jacket, which she used to cover up inside so as to adhere to the conservative dress code.

The reality star was touring the city with her team including assistant Tracey alongside model Kate, 47, and her 18-year-old girl Lila Grace.

Stunning: Kim was sure to turn heads in the figure-hugging Bardot-style number, which featured a cut-out design at the midsection, allowing a glimpse of her toned abs

Kim's glamorous visit to Vatican City, home of the Pope, comes after she previously called Pope Francis 'dope'.

In 2015, during the time of Kanye West's then presidential bid, Pope Francis visited Washington where he spoke about gay marriage, abortion, immigration and the Syrian refugee crisis.

And before he addressed Congress, he received a big, albeit brief, endorsement from the reality TV star, who was clearly keeping abreast of the big events at Capitol Hill.

'The pope is dope,' she tweeted to her fans.

She quickly moved on though and turned her attention back to promoting her website and app, tweeting: 'Gonna live stream with all of this contour on!!!'

Wow: The reality star enjoyed a tour of Vatican city (pictured), home of the Pope, alongside Kate Moss and her daughter Lila, though Kim failed to stick to the conservative dress code

Meanwhile, Kim's been making the most of her visit to Italy.

On Sunday, she and her glam squad enjoyed the sights of the historical Colosseum, with the star wowing in a tight white bodysuit and blue shorts.

What is the dress code in the Vatican? There is a basic dress code that both men and women must adhere to when visiting Vatican city, particularly St. Peters Basilica and/or the Vatican museums (including the Sistine Chapel). Visitors must cover their knees and upper arms, while they are prohibited from wearing shorts or skirts above the knee, sleeveless tops, and low-cut shirts. Men must also remove their hats when entering, though women are permitted to remain wearing theirs. Shoulders must also be covered and visitors may be turned away or advised to cover up with a shawl. Advertisement

The beauty appeared to be having the best time as she also visited a vintage shop before strolling around the cobbled amphitheatre in her heeled sandals.

After working up an appetite amid her day of playing tourist, Kim was spotted arriving at Dal Bolognese restaurant for a bite to eat.

Meanwhile, earlier on Monday, Kim nothing short of flawless as she left her hotel in the Italian capital on her way to lunch at Roscioli Salumeria.

All eyes were on the stunner as she flaunted her cleavage and midriff in a skimpy cardigan with just one button fastened.

The trip comes amid a report that Kim is worried about dating again and 'did not think that Kanye would move on with someone else before her,' a source told Us Weekly.

'She's not focused on dating at the moment but actually worries that guys will not want to date her because of how public her relationship was with Kanye,' an insider said on Saturday.

Kim filed for divorce from her estranged husband in February after nearly seven years of marriage.

'She also knows how hard it is to build trust with someone so she thinks it's going to take time before letting someone into her private life. It was easy with Kanye because they were friends before so they had years' worth of trust,' the source explained.

Look away now! Who knows what the Pope might make of Kim's racy outfit choice (stock image)

Big fan: Kim's glamorous visit to Vatican City, home of the Pope, comes after she previously called Pope Francis 'dope' amid his address to Congress in 2015

The insider also continued to dish on Kanye's blossoming relationship with Russian supermodel Irina Shayk, 35, saying that the SKIMS founder 'did not think' the rapper would 'move on' before she did.

'She certainly did not think that Kanye would move on with someone else before her,' the insider noted.

Irina and Kanye have reportedly been dating for a 'couple months,' and they were seen celebrating his birthday in Provence, France after he decided to 'shoot his shot' in photos obtained exclusively by DailyMail.com.

Under wraps: While Kim had wowed in a flesh flashing white lace dress for her visit to the Vatican, she covered up with a leather trench coat inside to adhere to the dress code

Time to confess: The KUWTK star also snapped a picture of a nun while inside the Vatican

Time to indulge! Kim posted that she had been shopping as well as eating everything Italy has to offer

Recognizing her roots: Kim also shared this gift from Armenia

Opulent: Kim also shared snaps from inside the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church

Chic in the city: On Sunday, she and her glam squad enjoyed the sights of the historical Colosseum, with the star wowing in a tight white bodysuit and blue shorts

Views: The 40-year-old reality star took in the sights alongside her longtime makeup artist Mario Dedivanovic and hair artist Chris Appleton in Italy

Kanye and Irina have known each other for at least a decade, having first worked together when she played an angel in the music video for his song Power before hitting the runway for the rapper when he debuted a fall/winter collection at Paris Fashion Week in 2012.

Despite Kim's hesitation to dip into the dating pool again, her famous family and inner circle of VIP friends have offered reassurance that 'she has nothing to worry about,' while maintaining that they will be 'setting her up,' with eligible bachelors.

'Friends and family are telling her she has nothing to worry about and when she's ready to date again, they gladly will be setting her up with potential suitors,' the source shared.
Nathan Charles Smith paid tribute to Caroline Flack on Monday, following the return of Love Island.

And the manager, who represented the late star, took to Instagram to share a slew of throwback snaps and claimed she'll 'always be the queen' of the show.

Caroline tragically took her life at her London home aged 40 on February 15, a day after learning the CPS would be pursuing a case of assault against her following a row with beau Lewis Burton at her home in December.

'You'll always be the queen of Love Island': Caroline Flack's former manager Nathan Charles Smith paid tribute to the late star as the reality show returned on Monday

Nathan shared an old promotional photo from the reality programme that featured Caroline, as he wrote: 'You'll always be the queen of [heart emoji] [island emoji].

A second image showed Caroline in Piccadilly Circus, where she smiled for a photo as her picture was shown on the location's famous billboard.

And in a third picture, Caroline was seen sat in a plane with Nathan as she posed for photos for a new season of Love Island.

Looking back: Nathan took to Instagram to share a slew of throwback snaps, including one that saw Caroline in Piccadilly Circus, where she smiled as her picture was shown on the billboard

Missing her: And in a third picture, Caroline was seen sat in a plane with Nathan as she posed for photos for a new season of Love Island

Also honouring Caroline as the new series of Love Island begins was her make-up artist Gemma Wheatcroft.

Gemma posted a series of snaps with Caroline on her Instagram page on Tuesday.

She captioned the images: 'We had the best times... my sunshine girl.'

Current Love Island host Laura Whitmore paid her respects by commenting on the post with a simple red love heart.

Love: Also honouring Caroline as the new series of Love Island begins was her make-up artist Gemma Wheatcroft

Love Island's 2021 series began on Monday, with a slew of new people entering the villa in the hopes of finding romance.

Viewers took to Twitter during the show to express their sadness that they were not going to see her on the show anymore.

One person wrote: 'It really doesn't feel the same without caroline flack... remember this season the be kind (sic).'

Another added: 'I do miss the legendary Caroline Flack strut into the villa #LoveIsland Hope she is resting easy.'

Missing her: Love Island's 2021 series began on Monday, and viewers took to Twitter during the show to express their sadness that they were not going to see her on the show anymore

Laura Whitmore has taken over as host for the show, with many fans of the show gushing how gorgeous she looked just weeks after giving birth.

Laura, 36, welcomed a daughter in April with husband Iain Stirling, and looked beautiful when she kicked off the seventh season of the hit reality show in Mallorca this week wearing a patterned blue and white mini-dress.

After the show aired, one person gushed: 'Laura Whitmore looking THAT good 2 months after giving birth should be illegal.'

Host: A slew of new people entering the villa in the hopes of finding romance, and Laura Whitmore has taken over as host for the show

Gushing comments: Many fans of the show gushing how gorgeous she looked just weeks after giving birth

Another asked: 'how does laura whitmore look this good 2 months after giving birth???? What???' while a third echoed: 'How amazing Laura Whitmore looks after literally just having a baby.' [sic]

A fourth Twitter user penned on Monday: 'How [flame emoji] does Laura Whitmore look, hasn't she just had a baby?' before adding: 'But also shout out to new mums who don't look like that YOU ARE DOING GREAT.'

In December 2019, Caroline left her role presenting the show in the wake of her arrest over an alleged assault on her boyfriend Lewis.

The presenter was found dead at her home in Stoke Newington, London, on February 15, 2020, aged 40. She had taken her own life.

Caroline's death was ruled a suicide in August last year, with coroner Mary Hassell saying Caroline had experienced 'fluctuating ill health' and was 'distressed' at the thought of facing a trial.

In 2020, her mother Christine pledged to share part of the late star's fortune with charities she was 'passionate about.'

According to a report from The Sun, Caroline's family have decided to distribute some of her 827,691 estate to good causes after she didn't leave a will.

If you have been affected by this story, you can call the Samaritans on 116 123 or visit www.samaritans.org.

RIP: The presenter was found dead at her home in Stoke Newington, London, on February 15, 2020, aged 40. She had taken her own life
Lorraine Pascale has gotten married to beau Dennis O'Brien.

The TV chef, 48, wed the businessman at Chelsea Old Town Hall in London on Saturday, and her daughter Ella Balinska - who starred in 2019 movie reboot 'Charlie's Angels' - gave her mum away on her big day.

Sharing stunning pictures from the special day, including one of her and Ella walking down the aisle, Lorraine wrote on Instagram: 'My powerhouse of a daughter gave me away!

Happy! Lorraine Pascale is MARRIED! TV chef tied the knot with beau Dennis O'Brien on Saturday, after lockdown proposal following three year romance

'@ellabalinska you continue to inspire me every day- I love your kindness, your strength, your positive outlook and so much more!!! Thank you for being you! Thank you for all you do! (sic)'

Sharing her joy over the nuptials, Ella commented: 'I love you so much. I love you. I love you. I love you.'

The actress, 24, also shared her own post about her mum's wedding, using the same photos to congratulate the happy couple.

She wrote: 'Congratulations Mumma & Dennis. Gave my mum away and found my forever family 26.06.21 (sic)'

Sweet: The TV chef, 48, wed the businessman at Chelsea Old Town Hall in London on Saturday, and her daughter Ella Balinska gave her mum away on her big day

Lorraine looked sensational as she wore an ivory off-the-shoulder gown that cut high on her thigh to show off her slender legs and had a long train.

She thanked the former Casualty star for walking her down the aisle, and admitted she is 'more than I could ever have dreamed of for a daughter'.

The chef commented: 'Thank you for giving me away! You're more than I could ever have dreamed of for a daughter. I love you more than I can ever say.'

And Ella gushed: 'I love you to the end of the earth dont do this to me mum youll set me off again.'

Gushing: Sharing her joy over the nuptials, Ella commented: 'I love you so much. I love you. I love you. I love you'

Delighted: Ella wrote, wrote: 'Congratulations Mumma & Dennis. Gave my mum away and found my forever family 26.06.21 (sic)'

Sweet: Lorraine thanked the former Casualty star for walking her down the aisle, and admitted she is 'more than I could ever have dreamed of for a daughter'

In January, Lorraine revealed she was engaged to her boyfriend of three years Dennis after he proposed during the U.K's second lockdown.

The television chef announced her happy news during an appearance on Loose Women, and said she cried for ten minutes before accepting Dennis' proposal after he popped the question on his birthday.

Lorraine said: 'Big news: I got engaged over lockdown. The lucky man is Dennis O'Brien, he's amazing, we've been together for three years.

'It was during the second lockdown and it was actually on his birthday it was just when the restaurants were opening, and they were delaying their opening and he and I were testing recipes and he proposed and I cried for ten minutes before I said yes, I cried and cried and cried.'

Lorraine married musician Count Kazimierz Balinski-Jundzill at age 23, and they had a daughter Ella. The couple separated in 2000 and subsequently divorced.

And the chef talked about her daughter Ella, who has carved a successful career in the acting industry having starred in Charlie's Angels alongside Kristen Stewart.

Congratulations! In January, Lorraine revealed she was engaged to her boyfriend of three years Dennis after he proposed during the U.K's second lockdown

She said: 'You know what I haven't seen Ella since March and I miss her so much.

'She's doing incredibly well, she's got two projects coming up which will be announced soon. She's really happy, living the dream and enjoying the hot weather.'

The television personality first rose to fame in the modelling industry after being scouted by the agent who scouted Naomi Campbell.

Based in New York, Lorraine achieved recognition as the first black British model to appear on the cover of American Elle.

Over the moon: The television chef announced her happy news during an appearance on Loose Women earlier this year

Exciting: At the time, Lorraine said: 'Big news: I got engaged over lockdown. The lucky man is Dennis O'Brien, he's amazing, we've been together for three years'

Lorraine took a diploma cookery course at Leith's School of Food and Wine in 2005 and found that cookery fitted her 'like a pair of old jeans' and went on to establish herself as a specialist cakemaker, with a contract with Selfridges.

On Loose Women, the chef spoke about how she is doing a master's degree in Psychology and a doctorate.

She told the panel: 'I've been through so much nonsense in my life I wanted to put it to good use. if you find real meaning to it, it can be healing.

'Rather than be a TV chef talking about her experiences I wanted to do something different.

Motherhood: Lorraine married musician Count Kazimierz Balinski-Jundzill at age 23, and they had a daughter Ella (pictured together in 2017) before splitting in 2000

Details: She said: 'He proposed and I cried for ten minutes before I said yes, I cried and cried and cried.'

'When I was modelling I felt it was fun and everything but I couldn't be who I wanted to be, it was the same with cooking.

'At first it was fun, but then after a few episodes it was you have to make this recipe, and this one... I thought you know what I'm just going to totally change, totally be me, stop being so reserved and be totally myself.'

Lorraine said the career change would be to help others after experiencing 'emotionally abusive relationships'.

She said: 'I've been in bad relationships, emotionally abusive ones, I got dumped the day my mum passed away, I wanted to put what I learned through much therapy and training to help other people we're talking about Black Lives Matter and it's great, but I hope it can come in the forefront with mental health.'
Nicola Peltz shared a 'pregnancy' shot on Instagram on Tuesday as she modelled a prosthetic bump while filming wrapped on her new movie Lola James.

And her fiance Brooklyn Beckham was full of praise for her, sharing another snap and writing: 'I am so proud of you baby.'

Nicola, 29, has been hard at work on her first co-directed film and Brooklyn, 22, was quick to recognise her achievements with his post.

'So proud of you baby': Nicola Peltz shared a 'pregnancy' snap on Instagram on Tuesday as fiance Brooklyn Beckham praised her after filming wrapped on her movie Lola James

So that's how you make yourself cry: Nicola shared a funny snap of herself with ear buds up her nose as she prepared to film another scene

While Nicola shared a slew of snaps from the set, Brooklyn also posted a black and white shot of Nicola looking at a monitor as he gushed over the 'sexy director'.

Making his devotion clear for his followers to see, Brooklyn wrote of the project: 'I am so proud of you baby x 3 years in the making and tonight was the last night of filming this masterpiece.

'Im so in love with you and you are the most talented person I know  I am so in love with you xx my sexy director.'

Ahead of her last day on set, Brooklyn also sweetly brought Nicola her morning coffee with a strawberry placed as decoration on the side.

Cute couple: The actress, 29, has been hard at work on her first co-directed film and Brooklyn, 22, was quick to recognise her achievements

'You are the most talented person I know': Brooklyn shared a black and white snap of his fiancee while gushing over her talents

Nicola also took to Instagram as she shared a series of behind the scenes snaps from the set as she praised her cast and crew for their work.

'Set drop... my happy place,' she wrote to her followers alongside the collection of movie magic moments.

Upcoming movie Lola James is set in 2002 and follows the story of 19-year-old Lola who tries to save enough money to get her brother Arlo out of their toxic home.

Sweet: Ahead of her last day filming, Brooklyn also sweetly brought Nicola her morning coffee with a strawberry placed as decoration on the side

'My happy place': In one snap, the blonde beauty posed on set sporting a prosthetic baby bump, a white vest top, lilac hoodie and low cut jeans

However, Lola is also fighting a drug addiction and things go from bad to worse when a traumatic event sends their life into chaos.

In one snap, the blonde beauty posed on set sporting her prosthetic baby bump, a white vest top, lilac hoodie and low cut jeans.

She wore her golden tresses in tousled waves and completed the ensemble with a sultry smokey eye makeup look as she washed the dishes in the scene.

'A creative force @willmccance you are much more than a producer': Nicola then swapped into a navy jumper as she peered over the shoulder of her producer and looked at footage

Nicola then swapped into a navy jumper as she peered over the shoulder of her producer and looked at footage on his iPhone.

'A creative force @willmccance you are much more than a producer,' the actress sweetly added as she re-shared the snaps to her Instagram story.

The Florida Project actress Bria Vinaite, 27, will co-direct alongside Nicola for the project.

Sideways Oscar nominee Virginia Madsen will join her on screen as she plays a mother figure called Mona who also suffers with a dark past.

Film family: Nicola looked in high spirits as she shared photos from the set amongst her co-stars

All smiles: The model lovingly hugged her cast and crew as she beamed at the camera on their last day of filming

Nicola looked in high spirits as she shared photos from the set amongst her co-stars.

Eager to get a peak at the scenes they had captured, the actress and director was regularly seen peering at monitors behind the camera.

The model sweetly hugged her cast and crew as she beamed at the camera on their last day of filming.

Putting safety first in a high-vis jacket she sweetly cradled a toddler as she hung out by the movie set's marquees.

Cute: Putting safety first in a high-vis jacket she sweetly cradled a toddler as she hung out by the movie set's marquees

Artist: Eager to get a peak at the scenes they had captured, the actress and director was regularly seen peering at monitors behind the camera

The last day on set comes after Nicola and Brooklyn purchased a $10.5M starter home in Beverly Hills on Sunday.

The incredible property comes with impressive views and boasts a host of features typical of homes in the upscale area  including a private yoga room, gym, sauna, steam room and juice bar.

According to TMZ, the couple were so keen to get their hands of the keys to the property that they paid $1million over the asking price.
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She previously revealed Kate Moss is her 'icon' and has admitted to copying her style.

So Kim Kardashian, 40, was undoubtedly feeling rather starstruck as she joined the model and her teenage daughter Lila Grace for a tour of the Vatican on Monday.

The reality star looked slightly overwhelmed as she sidled alongside the supermodel, 47, and her daughter, 18, in the back of a car, where Kate had a swift cigarette.

Terrific trio: Kim Kardashian was undoubtedly feeling rather starstruck as she joined the model and her teenage daughter Lila for a tour of the Vatican on Monday

While Kim seemed starstruck in Kate's company, the pair have met in the past owing to their links in the fashion world.

The duo both attended Riccardo Tiscis 40th birthday party in Ibiza back in 2014, and were also seen at a Miami Dior fashion show in December 2019.

For her outing in the Vatican, Kim shunned conservative attire and instead opted to flaunt her sensational curves in an off-the-shoulder white lace dress as she toured the city, which is the official residence of the Pope of the Catholic Church.

Kim was sure to turn heads in the figure-hugging Bardot-style number, which featured a cut-out design at the midsection, allowing a glimpse of her toned abs.

Rounding off her look, the mother-of-four added barely-there white heels and shielded her eyes with futuristic sunglasses.

Puffing away: The 40-year-old reality star looked slightly overwhelmed as she sidled alongside the supermodel and her daughter in the back of a car, where Kate had a swift cigarette

Plenty to talk about: Kim previously revealed that Kate is her 'icon' so she no doubt had plenty to say to the Vogue cover girl

Fun times: Kate looked in great spirits as she chatted away in the back of the car

Sitting pretty: Kim was seen trying on her sunglasses as she relaxed alongside Lila and Kate, who were busy looking out the window to see the sights

Kim, who donned a white face mask, looked in good spirits as she carried a black leather jacket, which she used to cover up inside so as to adhere to the conservative dress code.

Kate also looked sensational in a little black dress that she teamed with a satin shirt and mule heels. The fashion icon accessorised with a pair of cat eye sunglasses and toted a laser cut handbag.

Later in the day, the Vogue covergirl donned a pink printed shirt that she teamed with black shorts and flats.

Wow: For the outing, Kim shunned conservative attire and instead opted to flaunt her sensational curves in an off-the-shoulder white lace dress as she toured the city

Sizzling: Kim was sure to turn heads in the figure-hugging Bardot-style number, which featured a cut-out design at the midsection, allowing a glimpse of her toned abs

Teetering along: Rounding off her look, the mother-of-four added barely-there white heels and shielded her eyes with futuristic sunglasses

What would the pope say? Kim opted for a racy number to tour the city - which is the official residence of the Pope of the Catholic Church

Looking just as fashionable as her mother, Lila wowed in a cobalt satin maxi dress that she paired with a black blazer and Prada handbag.

The mother-daughter duo have been in Italy on work, with Kate accompanying Lila to a Fendi photoshoot on the weekend.

Kim seems to be in the country on holiday, and her glamorous visit to Vatican City, home of the Pope, comes after she previously called Pope Francis 'dope'.

Stepping out in style: Kate also looked sensational in a little black dress that she teamed with a satin shirt and mule heels

Less is more: Kate later removed the shirt to reveal she'd opted for a classic LBD

Looking good: The fashion icon accessorised with a pair of cat eye sunglasses and toted a laser cut handbag

Stylish: Kate was a vision of beauty on the outing as she strutted her stuff across the concourse

Turning heads: Lila has followed in her mother's footsteps and taken up a career in modelling

In 2015, during the time of Kanye West's then presidential bid, Pope Francis visited Washington where he spoke about gay marriage, abortion, immigration and the Syrian refugee crisis.

And before he addressed Congress, he received a big, albeit brief, endorsement from the reality TV star, who was clearly keeping abreast of the big events at Capitol Hill.

'The pope is dope,' she tweeted to her fans.

She quickly moved on though and turned her attention back to promoting her website and app, tweeting: 'Gonna live stream with all of this contour on!!!'

Vision: Kate looked sensational as she stopped for a brief rest in the back of their vehicle

All about the accessories: Kate looked radiant with a pair of cat eye sunglasses

Terrific twosome: Lila and Kate chatted away after Kim hopped out of the car

Quick change: Later in the day, the Vogue covergirl donned a pink printed shirt that she teamed with black shorts and flats

Kim was no doubt pleased that the timing lined-up with Kate's schedule, as she previously admitted that the model was her 'icon'.

Speaking exclusively to MailOnline back in 2014, Kim announced: 'I love Kate Moss.

'I love how she wears her winged eyeliner and her messy hair and how it looks so effortless but still put together. It looks beachy and messy at the same time; I love her glamour.'

In 2018, Kim then copied one of Kate's iconic fashion looks, sporting the 'naked dress' that made headlines for Kate back in 1993.

Opting for an updated version of the sheer slip dress, Kim wowed in the leggy number, but sported a coat to protect her modesty.

Seeing double: In 2018, Kim copied one of Kate's iconic fashion looks, sporting the 'naked dress' that made headlines for Kate back in 1993

Meanwhile, Kim's been making the most of her visit to Italy.

On Sunday, she and her glam squad enjoyed the sights of the historical Colosseum, with the star wowing in a tight white bodysuit and blue shorts.

What is the dress code in the Vatican? There is a basic dress code that both men and women must adhere to when visiting Vatican city, particularly St. Peters Basilica and/or the Vatican museums (including the Sistine Chapel). Visitors must cover their knees and upper arms, while they are prohibited from wearing shorts or skirts above the knee, sleeveless tops, and low-cut shirts. Men must also remove their hats when entering, though women are permitted to remain wearing theirs. Shoulders must also be covered and visitors may be turned away or advised to cover up with a shawl. Advertisement

The beauty appeared to be having the best time as she also visited a vintage shop before strolling around the cobbled amphitheatre in her heeled sandals.

After working up an appetite amid her day of playing tourist, Kim was spotted arriving at Dal Bolognese restaurant for a bite to eat.

Meanwhile, earlier on Monday, Kim nothing short of flawless as she left her hotel in the Italian capital on her way to lunch at Roscioli Salumeria.

All eyes were on the stunner as she flaunted her cleavage and midriff in a skimpy cardigan with just one button fastened.

The trip comes amid a report that Kim is worried about dating again and 'did not think that Kanye would move on with someone else before her,' a source told Us Weekly.

'She's not focused on dating at the moment but actually worries that guys will not want to date her because of how public her relationship was with Kanye,' an insider said on Saturday.

Kim filed for divorce from her estranged husband in February after nearly seven years of marriage.

'She also knows how hard it is to build trust with someone so she thinks it's going to take time before letting someone into her private life. It was easy with Kanye because they were friends before so they had years' worth of trust,' the source explained.

Big fan: Kim's glamorous visit to Vatican City, home of the Pope, comes after she previously called Pope Francis 'dope' amid his address to Congress in 2015

The insider also continued to dish on Kanye's blossoming relationship with Russian supermodel Irina Shayk, 35, saying that the SKIMS founder 'did not think' the rapper would 'move on' before she did.

'She certainly did not think that Kanye would move on with someone else before her,' the insider noted.

Irina and Kanye have reportedly been dating for a 'couple months,' and they were seen celebrating his birthday in Provence, France after he decided to 'shoot his shot' in photos obtained exclusively by DailyMail.com.

Time to indulge! Kim posted that she had been shopping as well as eating everything Italy has to offer

Chic in the city: On Sunday, she and her glam squad enjoyed the sights of the historical Colosseum, with the star wowing in a tight white bodysuit and blue shorts

Under wraps: While Kim had wowed in a flesh flashing white lace dress for her visit to the Vatican, she covered up with a leather trench coat inside to adhere to the dress code

Time to confess: The KUWTK star also snapped a picture of a nun while inside the Vatican

Opulent: Kim also shared snaps from inside the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church

Recognizing her roots: Kim also shared this gift from Armenia

Views: The reality star took in the sights alongside her longtime makeup artist Mario Dedivanovic and hair artist Chris Appleton in Italy

Kanye and Irina have known each other for at least a decade, having first worked together when she played an angel in the music video for his song Power before hitting the runway for the rapper when he debuted a fall/winter collection at Paris Fashion Week in 2012.

Despite Kim's hesitation to dip into the dating pool again, her famous family and inner circle of VIP friends have offered reassurance that 'she has nothing to worry about,' while maintaining that they will be 'setting her up,' with eligible bachelors.

'Friends and family are telling her she has nothing to worry about and when she's ready to date again, they gladly will be setting her up with potential suitors,' the source shared.
Martin Lewis has recalled the moment a fan swore at him in front of his young daughter, branding it a 'scary' experience.

The 49-year-old finance expert - who shares eight-year-old daughter Sapphire with wife Lara Lewington, 42 - opened up about the moment someone approached him in public to ask for advice and reacted angrily when he politely declined.

Speaking on Good Morning Britain, which he is currently guest-hosting with Susanna Reid, he said: 'I will always remember when my daughter was three or four, I was taking her to the playground, she was on my shoulders and I was walking along the road with her.

Appalling: Martin Lewis has recalled the moment a fan swore at him in front of his young daughter, branding it a 'scary' experience

'A man came up to me and he says, youre the money guy arent you? And I said with a smile, Not today, Im daddy. She gets very scared when people we dont know approach.

'And he said, I just want to ask you a question. And I said, Im so sorry, Im on my way to the playground, I really cant do this right now, she gets a little intimidated'.

'Well, he started calling me a name that begins with a C and he followed me down the road shouting at me, 'you are...' you know what the word is.'

Susanna seemed shocked, and the MoneySavingExpert founder admitted while he is usually fine speaking to people in public, it's a different story when he's with his daughter.

Speaking on Good Morning Britain, which he is currently guest-hosting with Susanna Reid, he said: 'A man came up to me and he says, youre the money guy arent you? And I said with a smile, Not today, Im daddy. She gets very scared when people we dont know approach'

He added: 'Now, I have to say I normally when people come and talk to me in the street, Im always happy to do it, I smile, I'm always politely nice. But my little girl, understandably is a child, can get very scared when strangers approach.

'I will never forget that episode, because it made me intimidated to go down the street. It was scary, I was trying to protect her.'

They were discussing the incident which saw thugs attacking Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty in St James's Park on Sunday night.

A 16-second clip emerged online showing the moment the two men put the epidemiologist in a headlock, while cheering and yelling as they tackled the top scientist while continuing to film his stunned reaction.

Martin made quite an impression during his Good Morning Britain presenting debut on Monday - after going missing and flouting the show's dress code.

Family man: The 49-year-old finance expert shares eight-year-old daughter Sapphire with wife Lara Lewington, 42

Susanna was left stunned when he appeared to go missing - although his absence transpired to be an ill-timed toilet visit.

Aside from his disappearing act, Martin was seen to host the show in an open white shirt and a black blazer, which he admitted had gone against the dress code by not wearing a tie despite the request from producers.

Show officials then hosted an official poll on Twitter to ask viewers' thoughts on the need to wear a tie - leading to a whopping 89.5% agreeing it was not necessary.

Harassed: They were discussing the incident which saw thugs attacking Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty in St James's Park on Sunday night

Fury: Martin made quite an impression during his Good Morning Britain presenting debut on Monday - after going missing and flouting the show's dress code

It was revealed last week that Susanna would be joined by Martin for a three day stint as bosses have still not filled host Piers Morgan's role following his walkout in March in a row over Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.

When the camera returned to the panel on Monday, Charlotte Hawkins laughed and said: 'He's gone already!... Was it something you said?'

Susanna then pointed at her co-anchor's seat and said: 'I don't know what I said! before viewers learnt that Martin had merely visited the toilet.

He said: 'The truth is people when you're new to a job and you've been drinking tea since 7 O'clock this morning and you can't find the loo in the ad break you might occasionally be back late to your seat.'

What! The finance expert co-hosted the breakfast show with Susanna, however she was left stunned when he had appeared to go missing - although his absence transpired to be an ill-timed toilet visit

Hitting out: The finance expert, 49, co-hosted the breakfast show with Susanna Reid in an open white shirt and a black blazer, and he admitted he had gone against the dress code following a cheeky jibe made towards him by the stalwart host

It was then that Piers' now-legendary departure arose as Susanna said: 'We've got an issue with people leaving the studio on this programme. So I'm glad you're back.'

Elsewhere, Susanna couldn't resist a cheeky dig at his lack of tie, jokingly asking if his recent tooth surgery prevented him from wearing one. Martin said: 'Wow, two minutes in and she's already started.'

Martin went on to explain he decided to ignore the producers, who told him a tie was GMB protocol, because he doesn't like viewers to see him as corporate.

He said: 'The tie thing is interesting because the bosses said, 'Are you gonna wear a tie, it's part of our format to wear a tie'. I'm not disrespectful of the programme's structure, I was on it for 15 years.

No! Martin went on to explain he decided to ignore the producers, who told him a tie was GMB protocol, because he doesn't like viewers to see him as corporate (Richard Madeley, pictured hosting the show earlier this month)

Thoughts? The official Good Morning Britain Twitter account hosted a poll asking whether he needed to wear a tie with a whopping 89.5% agreeing a tie was not necessary

'Because I talk about money I've always had a deliberate thing, I won't wear a tie because it appears corporate and when you're talking money, I want people to understand I'm not on the corporate side I'm on the other side.'

The MoneySavingExpert founder caught Susanna giving him a look as he explained his decision and he jokingly told her to not 'pull a face at me.' Martin then let the viewers decide if he should have worn a tie for the show in a poll on social media.

He explained: 'Viewers are the ultimate arbiter of this so I've agreed that I won't wear a tie on the first day, we're gonna do a poll on Twitter asking whether you think I need to wear a tie.

Clean cut: He normally has a clean shaven appearance when offering his expert advice during the financial segments on This Morning

'I feel more comfortable without but if you say wear a tie from tomorrow I will put a tie on.'

However, Susanna was quick to note that he was happy to ignore ITV bosses but would change his stance for the audience.

She added: 'So when the bosses say wear a tie you say no, but when the viewers say wear a tie, they're the important ones.'

The poll revealed that 89 per cent of viewers were happy with Martin's choice of wardrobe.

Another one: Susanna is yet to have a full-time co-anchor assigned since Piers left in March

Later in the show, 'GMB' guest Tony Hadley backed Martin's decision. He said: 'You don't need a tie, it's too formal for the morning.'

Last week on This Morning, Martin explained that the reason behind his different appearance was because he is unable to shave due to recent dental surgery.

Joking about his rugged-looking face, Martin said: 'Before anyone says it no I'm notdoing tips on saving money on razor blades without shaving. I had dental sugery - hence the lisp - last week.

'I can't actually touch my top lip at the moment. And you'll have to forgive me for not speaking as clearly as normal everybody, sorry.'
Michael Sheen has reflected on contracting Covid-19 in February.

The actor, 52, discussed the 'rough' experience during an appearance on Tuesday's edition of Lorraine, where he claimed being in America at the time gave him a 'renewed love' for the NHS.

He explained: 'I had it back in February, yea it was rough. I remember thinking 'oh I'm going to have a couple of weeks in bed reading and watching TV', and that was not what it was like!

'It was very rough': On Tuesday's Lorraine, Michael Sheen reflected on his struggle after getting Covid-19 while in America in February

'It was very rough, and I was in America at the time as well so I suddenly felt the vulnerability of not having our national health service to rely on and kind of look after me. That was quite scary.

'I had a renewed sense of love and respect for what we have in this country, but I'm fine now.'

In February, Michael revealed to fans in a Twitter post: 'I've spent the last few weeks laid low by COVID. It's been very difficult & quite scary.'

Unwell: In February, Michael revealed to fans in a Twitter post (pictured): 'I've spent the last few weeks laid low by COVID. It's been very difficult & quite scary'

Struggle: Looking back, Michael said: 'It was rough. I remember thinking 'oh I'm going to have a couple of weeks in bed reading and watching TV', and that was not what it was like!'

Michael also spoke about his new initiative, A Writing Chance, which is helping young writers from working class backgrounds get a foot in the industry.

He said: 'I mean we all tell stories about who we are as a country, as a society. We want to tell a really engaging story we need to hear from everybody, in order to try and find and support those from underprivileged backgrounds.'

He said of the 11 writers the initiative is currently supporting: '[They] are amazing, diverse voices.

Honest: Michael added, 'It was very rough, and I was in America at the time as well so I suddenly felt the vulnerability of not having our national health service to rely on'

'They're an amazing group and we're going to support them and see what happens, and hopefully we can apply to the thousands who can break through.'

Speaking to The Mirror on Monday about the initiative, Michael said: 'We've got the chance to take a small group of writers, who are all phenomenally talented, and share opportunities with them that they may not have been getting for all kinds of reason.

'We want to make a difference, because if all that talent isn't able to break through and become part of the national conversation and our national storytelling, then we're all the poorer for it.'
Lila Moss was pictured looking stylish with her supermodel mother Kate during a sightseeing trip around Rome on Tuesday.

The 18-year-old, who has followed in mum Kate's modelling footsteps, kept it classy with a purple satin floor-length dress and black buttoned blazer.

Lila slicked back her long blonde locks, which fell poker-straight down her back instead of being on her face, days after attending castings in Rome.

Elegant: Kate Moss' daughter Lila Grace wowed in purple satin as she toured the Vatican with her mother and Kim Kardashian on Monday

Classy: Lila has followed in mum Kate's modelling footsteps and she kept it classy with slicked back hair as she sat alongside her mother in the car

Her makeup was kept subtle, with a hint of bronze defining her cheekbones.

Lila maintained the classy look with dainty earrings and a black Prada shoulder bag.

Lila, who commonly goes by Lila Grace, models for Kate Moss Agency, a talent firm ran by supermodel mum Kate, 47.

Natural beauty: The model kept her makeup subtle, with a hint of bronze defining her cheekbones

Slicked back: The young model's hair fell poker-straight down her back instead of being on her face

Prior to the Vatican City tour, the young model rocked the same slicked-back hair last weekend as she went out for cocktails with Kate.

The budding runway star, 18, teamed a black crop top with a show-stopping embellished skirt and added height to her frame in black heels.

Speaking to The Kit last August, Lila, who had her first modelling gig aged 14, revealed that most people wouldn't know she has type 1 diabetes.

'Its not visible from the outside, so no one would really know just by looking at you,' she said.

When asked if the condition was a cause she would like to get involved with, she said she would like to try and help as much as she can, adding: 'There's loads of things I'd like to try and help with.'

Terrific trio: Kim was undoubtedly feeling rather starstruck when she joined the model and her teenage daughter Lila for a tour of the Vatican on Monday
Coronation Street star Cherylee Houston is set to film scenes at her own home alongside her real-life partner Toby Hadoke.

The 46-year-old actress had been unable to work on the soap as she's been shielding since March 2020 due to a rare connective tissue disorder, which makes her vulnerable to coronavirus.

Cherylee will now be back on screens after 18 months away as she will shoot scenes for the show about having a disability and working remotely.

New job: Coronation Street's Cherylee Houston will film scenes from her own home with real-life partner Toby - as she returns to soap after 18 months shielding (pictured together in 2016)

Toby will play a neighbour of Cherylee's character, factory worker Izzy Armstrong, who has been granted permission to work from home.

The plot line aims to highlight the plight faced by millions of disabled people amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Cherylee, who was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome when she was 23, said: 'Theres 14.1 million people in the UK, thats one in five of us. We are employees, carers, front line workers, volunteers and a key part of every community.

'The pandemic has had an incredible impact on many disabled people due to social isolation, certain services being unavailable and a lack of understanding.'

Stayed home: The 46-year-old actress had been unable to work as she's shielding since March 2020 due to a rare connective tissue disorder, which makes her vulnerable to Covid

She continued: 'Theres currently 4.4 million disabled workers in the UK. We experience almost double the unemployment statistics compared to our non-disabled peers (mostly due to prejudice or lack of reasonable adjustments).

'I have been unbelievably fortunate that my employers enabled me to continue shielding after the official shielding guidance ended in March.'

'Ive been so supported by ITV, but Im aware that many of my disabled peers who were previously shielding havent had that safety and have been forced to make the decision to earn money to survive whilst facing the real fear of death or serious illness through COVID.'

Plot: Toby will play a neighbour of Cherylee's character, factory worker Izzy Armstrong, who has been granted permission to work from home (pictured: Toby and Cherylee in 2016)

In the new plot line, Toby's character Fergus is forced to step in when Underworld boss Carla Connor [Alison King] is left increasingly frustrated by the quality of Izzy's work she is producing from home.

In upcoming scenes, the business boss is expecting to deliver Izzy an ultimatum to either catch up on her work, or she will be let go.

The show's writers and producers have collaborated with Cherylee for months on the storyline.

Working from home: The story will highlight the plight of many disabled people working from home as Izzy is delivered an ultimatum to either catch up on her work, or she will be let go

In a report published earlier this month, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) listed findings in a survey carried out by workers with disabilities.

Their survey found that one in 13 had been the subject of bullying and/or harassment, were ignored or excluded, singled out for criticism or being monitored excessively at work.

One in eight believed that their disability had affected their chances of gaining promotion in the future.

While one in eight said they were concerned their disability had affected how their performance would be assessed by their manager.

Speaking about the new storyline, producer Iain MacLeod said: 'We had to think outside the box in order to tell this story, devising new protocols and ways of scripting scenes that would allow Cherylee to film the scenes herself in her home.

'It certainly helped that her partner Toby is a fabulous actor!

'Despite all the technical challenges we had to overcome, this was a story that needed telling and I hope it will resonate with millions of people who have found themselves in a similar position to Izzy - and perhaps open the eyes of millions of others who had little awareness of the issues facing disabled people during COVID.'
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Kate Hudson was seen getting to work on set of Knives Out 2 in Greece on Tuesday.

The actress, 42, looked sensational as she stepped out in a plunging red and black dress to shoot scenes on a boat and at a pier in Spetses alongside Dave Bautista, Daniel Craig, and Ethan Hawke.

Putting on a glamorous display in the sun-soaked location, Kate also wore a wide-brimmed white sun hat and chic shades for the day's shoot.

Wow! Kate Hudson put on a glamorous display in a plunging red dress as she films scenes for Knives Out 2 with Dave Bautista and a water pistol-toting Ethan Hawke in Greece on Tuesday

Kate looked relaxed as she filmed at the pier as she carried a straw fan to keep herself cool, while she accessorised with an array of gold necklaces and rings.

Meanwhile, Dave and Ethan were seen chatting together on set, with the latter holding up what appeared to be a water pistol at the Guardians Of The Galaxy star.

Ethan, who has yet to be announced as part of the cast, appeared to be giving water to Dave using the water pistol during the scene, which also featured Madelyn Cline.

Dave was sure to turn heads with his costume, which saw him show off his heavily tattooed chest as he wore his animal-print short sleeved shirt open so his torso was on full display.

Thirsty? Meanwhile, Dave and Ethan were seen chatting together on set, with the latter holding up what appeared to be a water pistol at the Guardians Of The Galaxy star

Standing out: Dave was sure to turn heads with his costume, which saw him show off his heavily tattooed chest as he wore his animal-print short sleeved shirt open so his torso was on full display

In character: Ethan looked dapper in a light blue pinstripe suit blazer and trousers that he donned over a white collarless shirt, while he kept a dark blue pocket square to offset the attire

Dave completed his look by wearing bright pink jeans that he paired with a black belt and beige suede boots, and he also sported a white fedora hat.

Ethan looked dapper in a light blue pinstripe suit blazer and trousers that he donned over a white collarless shirt, while he kept a dark blue pocket square to offset the attire.

He also wore a pair of blue slip-on shoes and a pair of black shades, while he wore his brunet locks in a slicked back ponytail for the shoot.

Leading actor Daniel, who is reprising his role as Benoit Blanc in the sequel, also ensured to stand out as rocked a cream linen suit and salmon pink shirt.

Stand off: Kate and Ethan were seen staring at each other intensely during the scenes by the pier

Handsome: Leading actor Daniel, who is reprising his role as Benoit Blanc in the sequel, also ensured to stand out as rocked a cream linen suit and salmon pink shirt

Arrival: Daniel later took his face mask off when he was about to start filming a scene

Ensemble: The star added to his look with white trainers, before donning a red polka-dot face mask as he patiently waited to be called to the scene

The star added to his look with white trainers, before donning a red polka-dot face mask as he patiently waited to be called to the scene.

Actress Kathryn Hahn also seemed to be on location with Daniel and Ethan, with the WandaVision actress sporting a tan suit and matching mask as well as toting a white bag over one shoulder.

Leslie Odom Jr was seen on set speaking with Ethan, while Jada Pinkett Smith -who has yet to be revealed as being part of the cast- also made an appearance and she looked stylish in a red and white gown.

Plot details for Knives Out 2 are being kept under wraps, the movie's director Rian Johnson took to Twitter to mark the momentous occasion, penning: 'Aaaaaaaand WERE OFF! Day one of filming on the next Benoit Blanc mystery.

Chat: Ethan was seen speaking with director Rian Johnson in between takes during a break from filming

On set: Actress Kathryn Hahn also seemed to be on location with Daniel and Ethan, with the WandaVision actress sporting a tan suit and matching mask as well as toting a white bag over one shoulder

Stunning: Jada Pinkett Smith -who has yet to be revealed as being part of the cast- also made an appearance and she looked stylish in a red and white gown

'Thanks to all the lovely patient people here in Greece for letting us do all this murdering on their peaceful shores.'

The first film, released in 2019, was an ensemble mystery caper starring Craig alongside Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis and Ana de Armas.

It saw detective Blanc figure out the circumstances surrounding iconic crime writer Harlan Thrombey's death, which at first appears to be a suicide, and sees him uncover secrets in the family with the help of nurse Marta Cabrera (Armas).

Action! Ethan was seen stepping out onto the pier while a camera on a crane filmed him from behind

Co-stars: Leslie Odom Jr was seen on set speaking with Ethan on set, he wore a brown striped shirt over bright yellow chinos

Following the rules: Whilst not filming, Dave and Leslie made sure to keep their face masks firmly in place

Also set to join Kate and Daniel in the cast is Game Of Thrones Jessica Henwick, according to Deadline.

The casting news comes after Jessica recently secured another plum role, as a lead opposite Keanu Reeves in the highly anticipated upcoming Matrix sequel, Matrix 4.

Other actors also set to appear in the hotly-anticipated Rian Johnson-directed thriller include Leslie Odom Jr, Madelyn Cline and Edward Norton.

Leslie was also seen filming in Spetses on Monday, with the actor sporting bright yellow trousers paired with a colourful shirt and khaki hat.

Kate has been enjoying some time in Greece in the lead-up to the shoot starting, with the actress being joined by her eldest child Ryder, 17, on Friday.

Taking to Instagram, she penned: 'Look who just got here,' alongside the hashtag 'family complete' with her teenage son sporting a cream tee and matching distressed shorts.

The movie star was joined in Greece by Ryder, whom she shares with American musician and ex-husband Chris Robinson.

The teen has joined Kate's partner Danny Fujikawa as well as half-sister Rani Rose, two, and half-brother Bingham, nine, on their family vacation by the Mediterranean Sea.

Lights, camera, action! The Last Jedi director Rian was hard at work making sure the shot was perfect for his film
Clifford The Big Red Dog was an absolute unit in children's books read by millions since 1963 and no doubt fans of the Scholastic book and television series are excited to see how the giant pooch would be portrayed on the big screen.

But perhaps they should shrink those expectations.

The Clifford The Big Red Dog trailer was released on Tuesday as it almost instantly began trending No. 1 on Twitter for several different reasons including skepticism regarding the pup's size, the fact that a BTS song was used in the clip, and even comparisons to Godzilla.

Coming soon: The Clifford The Big Red Dog trailer was released on Tuesday

'Now he's Clifford the clydesdale-sized dog': It almost instantly began trending No. 1 on Twitter for several different reasons including skepticism regarding the pup's size

The two-minute clip stars Darby Camp as Emily Elizabeth, who is Clifford's owner, and Jack Whitehall who portrays her uncle Casey.

Emily is having trouble fitting in at school and goes to a mysterious tent to find a new pet with her uncle.

It is then where she comes face-to-face with the tiny red puppy and wants to keep it before asking Mr. Bridwell (played by John Cleese) how big it will get.

Hijinks: The two-minute clip stars Darby Camp as Emily Elizabeth (left), who is Clifford's owner, and Jack Whitehall who portrays her uncle Casey (right)

Aww: Emily is having trouble fitting in at school and goes to a mysterious tent to find a new pet with her uncle

Cute: It is then where she comes face-to-face with the tiny red puppy and wants to keep it before asking Mr. Bridwell (played by John Cleese) how big it will get

The character - who is named after Clifford The Big Red Dog author Norman Bridwell - responds: 'That depends, doesn't it? On how much you love him'

The character - who is named after Clifford The Big Red Dog author Norman Bridwell - responds: 'That depends, doesn't it? On how much you love him.'

Then in a tender moment, Emily lays in bed with the tiny red pup and tells him: 'I wish you were big and strong and the world couldn't hurt us.'

Then a single tear drops from her eyes but unbeknownst to her it began to sparkle as it dropped down and hit Clifford's nose.

Then in a tender moment, Emily lays in bed with the tiny red pup and tells him: 'I wish you were big and strong and the world couldn't hurt us'

Whoa! The next morning is when everything changes as Emily wakes up to her beloved pet multiplying in size and taking up nearly half the room

Sight to see: Emily and Casey try bringing the dog to walk around New York City as they get stares from everyone

Uh oh: They even take him to a veterinarian - played by Kenan Thompson - as Clifford hilariously breaks the scale after sitting on it

Movie magic: Whitehall, Camp, and Izaac Wang (pictured left to right) are seen filming the movie in Manhattan's Soho area back in August 2019

The next morning is when everything changes as Emily wakes up to her beloved pet multiplying in size and taking up nearly half the room.

Emily and Casey try bringing the dog to walk around New York City as they get stares from everyone and even take him to a veterinarian - played by Kenan Thompson - as Clifford hilariously breaks the scale after sitting on it.

The perils of being a giant dog owner are showcased through the rest of the clip as he chases and deflates a human bubble ball containing a person and even accidentally puts a regular-sized pug in his mouth.

Many social media users were left unimpressed by the size of the CGI pup as one shared an image of a cover of one of the Clifford The Big Red Dog books with the caption: 'They didnt even make him a gigantic dog like in the books what the hell is even the point. Now hes Clifford the clydesdale-sized dog.'

Uh oh: The perils of being a giant dog owner are showcased through the rest of the clip

Oh no: He chases and deflates a human bubble ball containing a person

Terror: Clifford even accidentally puts a regular-sized pug in his mouth

Others just did not like the general appearance of the movie character as a Twitter poster wrote: 'you know, some things just arent meant to translate from animation to live action and clifford is one of them.'

Another said: 'a dog this big and this red was never meant to exist outside of a 2D format, the act of rendering clifford in 3D is grotesque and borderline body horror.'

Despite skepticism 'Clifford' trended at No. 1 in the US as a lot of it had to do with the BTS track Dynamite being used in the soundtrack of the trailer.

'some things just arent meant to translate from animation to live action': Some social media users just did not like the general appearance of the movie character

'The Clifford trailer has ruined my current, ongoing, unrelenting childhood': Twitter users were skeptical of the clip

BTS has perhaps the most loyal online fanbase in the world and several members of the BTS Army took to social media to repost the trailer and react to it with elation.

One of the funniest comparisons many made to the comically large pooch was to the Godzilla Vs. Kong film which was released earlier this year.

There were several photoshops which included Clifford The Big Red Dog in a match-up against the giant kaiju monsters.

Talented: Despite skepticism 'Clifford' trended at No. 1 in the US as a lot of it had to do with the BTS track Dynamite being used in the soundtrack of the trailer, as the group are seen in Los Angeles back in May

Squad goals: BTS has perhaps the most loyal online fanbase in the world and several members of the BTS Army took to social media to repost the trailer and react to it with elation

Comedy Central posted a funny image with the caption: 'Ok hear us out: Godzilla vs. Kong vs. Clifford.'

As kaiju is a Japanese genre of films and television featuring giant monsters, many even took to social media to debate on whether Clifford himself could qualify as a kaiju.

One user wrote: 'clifford is a kaiju and i will hear no different.'

Triple threat match: One of the funniest comparisons many made to the comically large pooch was to the Godzilla Vs. Kong film which was released earlier this year

Interesting: As kaiju is a Japanese genre of films and television featuring giant monsters, many even took to social media to debate on whether Clifford himself could qualify as a kaiju

Oh no: A user made reference to the original CGI version of 2020's Sonic The Hedgehog being trashed shortly after the release of the trailer forcing the studio to reanimate the film

Showdown: Another user photoshopped Clifford facing off against one of the Angry Birds

There were several others who liked what they saw in the trailer including comedian and podcaster Patrick Monahan who wrote: 'Honestly love that they went with a GREMLINS-esque origin story for Clifford the Big Red Dog.'

The film also stars Izaac Wang, Tony Hale, Paul Rodriguez, Sienna Guillory, Russell Peters, David Alan Grier, and Bear Allen Blaine.

Clifford The Big Red Dog - directed by Walt Becker - is set for released in the US on September 17 with a UK release following three months later on Christmas Eve.

There were several others who liked what they saw in the trailer including comedian and podcaster Patrick Monahan who wrote: 'Honestly love that they went with a GREMLINS-esque origin story for Clifford the Big Red Dog'
By CHRIS PLEASANCE FOR MAILONLINE

It was the series that remade TV - scooping dozens of awards and making stars out of its cast along the way.

The Sopranos first aired 22 years ago this January, before wrapping up 86 episodes and six seasons later, in 2007.

Now, as Michael Gandolfini - son of leading man James Gandolfini - prepares to play his father's character Tony Soprano in a prequel film, Mail Online examines what happened to the cast since the curtain dropped.

Iconic: The Sopranos first aired 22 years ago this January, before wrapping up 86 episodes and six seasons later, in 2007; the entire cast pictured in 1999

James Gandolfini - Tony Soprano

Playing an anxiety-prone mob boss juggling the demands of his figurative family - the Mafia - with his literal family was breakout star of the show, James Gandolfini.

Balancing the ruthlessness expected of a mob boss with a repressed emotional side and the tenderness requires of a family patriarch, Gandolfini's portrayal earned him three Emmy Awards, three Screen Actors Guild Awards, and a Golden Globe.

James Gandolfini (right in 2013) played leading many Tony Soprano

Sadly, the actor passed away in 2013 aged 51 while on holiday with his family in Rome from a heart attack.

He was found unconscious on his hotel floor by son Michael who alerted the emergency services, but was pronounced dead in hospital.

Michael, now aged 22, is currently portraying a young Tony Soprano in prequel film The Many Saints of Newark, due for release in 2021.

Michael Gandolfini, now aged 22, is currently portraying a young Tony Soprano in prequel film The Many Saints of Newark (left in 2019) due for release in 2021

Edie Falco - Carmela Soprano

Tony's trophy wife who decided to turn a blind eye to his many affairs and means of income and focus instead on the income itself.

Living a life of luxury did not solve all of Carmela's problems, however, as she struggled to raise her two children against a backdrop of immorality and violence.

Carmela Soprano, Tony's long-suffering wife, was played by Edie Falco who has appeared often on TV since (pictured left in character, right in 2020)

Falco, who won three Emmys, two Golden Globes and five Screen Actors Guild Awards as Carmela, went on to star as the eponymous hero in series Nurse Jackie.

She also worked alongside Louis C.K. in web series Horace and Pete, and as attorney Leslie Abramson in Law & Order True Crime.

In 2011 she also won a Tony Award for her role in the Broadway revival of The House of Blue Leaves. Edie stayed in the HBO family as the title character in Nurse Jackie from 2009-2015.

She will portray Hillary Clinton in season three of Ryan Murphy's anthology series American Crime Story in September 2021 which follows President Bill Clinton's sex scandal and impeachment.

Jamie-Lynn Sigler - Meadow Soprano

Growing up as the child of a notorious mobster comes with its challenges, especially for the principled Meadow - who struggles to reconcile how her father makes his money with the benefits it brings her.

Aged 17 when The Sopranos first aired, she carved out an acting career for herself in parallel with the TV series.

Jamie-Lynn Sigler was 17 when she was cast as Meadow Soprano (left), and has appeared in TV shows since, including HBO's Entourage (pictured right in January 2020)

She appeared in a Broadway production of Beauty and the Beast as Belle between 2002 and 2003, and played the titular character in Cinderella at Madison Square Garden in 2001.

Since the series wrapped she has made sporadic TV appearances, including as herself in two series of HBO's Entourage.

She has also featured in episodes of How I Met Your Mother and Ugly Betty, and appeared in the music video for The Lonely Island's song Jizz In My Pants.

Sigler dabbed in other fields - releasing an album in 2001 that flopped and she later said had embarrassed her - and modeled in FHM.

Robert Iler - AJ Soprano

The youngest child of Tony and Carmela, he starts the series as the innocent if badly-behaved tearaway of the family who fails to live up to his father's many expectations.

As the series goes on his innocence is shattered and he begins to exhibit all of Tony's negative traits, leading to a battle with depression.

Robert Iler was just 13 when he was selected to play Tony's son AJ (left) after working on commercials. He got into trouble with the law during filming, and has worked in TV seldom since (pictured right in January 2019)

Robert had featured in commercial for Pizza Hut and bit-parts on SNL before he was cast as AJ aged just 13.

He appeared sporadically in other TV roles while the show was on air - including Law & Order: Special Victims Unit - and just one since, also in Law & Order.

In 2001, Robert was arrested for armed robbery of two Brazilian tourists in the Upper East Side and possession of marijuana and was given three years' probation. After suffering from substance abuse he became sober in 2013.

Lorraine Bracco - Jennifer Melfi

Tony's psychiatrist and outlet for his anxiety and deeply repressed emotions, Jennifer was both fascinated and repulsed by the mobster.

Advised by her colleagues, loved ones and her own better nature to part ways with Tony, she never-the-less commits to helping him through his troubles.

A star of Goodfellas, Bracco (right in 2019) agreed to work on The Sopranos only if she could play Tony's morally conflicted psychiatrist Jennifer Melfi (left). She has continued to appear in films and TV since (pictured right this year), and did some voice acting in Bojack Horseman

Bracco was a former model, the wife of Harvey Kietel, and starred in mobster mega-hit Goodfellas alongside Robert de Niro before landing her Sopranos role.

While creator David Chase wanted her to play Carmela, Bracco said she would only sign on if she was allowed to take the role of Dr Melfi.

She appeared extensively in other shows and films during The Sopranos' run, including Riding In Cars With Boys and Law & Order: Trial by Jury.

Since the series wrapped, she has starred in TV movie Long Island Confidential, series I Married a Mobster and Blue Bloods, and as a voice actor in Bojack Horseman.

Most recently, Bracco purchased a 200-year-old home in Sambuca di Sicilia, Italy for just one euro which she went on to renovate for the HGTV series My Big Italian Adventure.

Michael Imperioli - Christopher Moltisanti

Tony's distantly-related cousin, fellow mobster, and chosen protege - Christopher is driven by a desire for success and notoriety that sees him at odds with Tony's 'strong, silent type' image and butting heads with his older 'colleagues'.

His character is also a drug addict who is frequently abusive to his partner, and is ultimately whacked.

Michael Imperioli was a veteran of Goodfellas before being cast as Christopher Moltisanti (left) in The Sopranos, and has continued his careers as an actor and screenwriter since (right in April 2019)

He scooped a Primetime Emmy for his portrayal in 2004.

An experienced actor before the series began - starring alongside Bracco in Goodfellas, along with appearances in Jungle Fever, Bad Boys and Malcolm X - he has appeared extensively in film and TV since.

Imperioli played Detective Ray Carling in the US adaptation of British cop show Life On Mars, and followed fellow Sopranos cast members into the Law & Order series, playing NYPD Detective Nick Falco.

He played Detective Louis Fitch in the ABC police drama Detroit 1-8-7 until it was cancelled, and in 2008 he achieved character Christopher's dream of writing a feature film, entitled The Hungry Ghosts.

Michael had stints on several series since The Sopranos like Californication, Hawaii Five-0 and Blue Bloods.

Andrea Donna de Matteo - Adriana La Cerva

Christopher's girlfriend-turned-wife, she is vain, obsessed with money and material goods, and desperate for fame.

Often a victim of violence at Christopher's hand, she turns mole in the later series but refuses to give up the family's deepest secrets.

Shallow, materialistic, stupid and vain - Andrea Donna de Matteo (right in 2019) won a Primetime Emmy for her portrayal of Adriana la Cerva (left). She has continued acting since, and played Joey Tribbiani's sister on Friends spin-off series Joey

Matteo won a Primetime Emmy award for the role in 2004, alongside Imperioli.

She used her Sopranos fame to launch a silver screen career, including appearances in Swordfish, Assault on Precinct 13, Dark Places, and Sex, Death and Bowling.

Matteo has also appeared in numerous TV shows since The Sopranos ended, including as Joey Tribbiani's sister Gina in Friends spin-off Joey.

She also starred in Sons of Anarchy, Desperate Housewives, CSI: Miami, and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Dominic Chianese - Corrado 'Junior' Soprano

Tony's petulant, resentful, power-hungry uncle who conspires with his mother early on to have him whacked so he can assume control of the family.

Out-played at the game of power by Tony he is ultimately left frail and confused after suffering from dementia.

A good friend of Al Pacino, Dominic Chianese (right in 2019) was an experienced film actor when he took the part of Corrado 'Junior' Soprano (left) in the series. He has continued acting since, including in Boardwalk Empire, and still finds work aged 90

Good friends with Al Pacino, Chianese was well-known before The Sopranos started having starred in The Godfather Part II, Dog Day Afternoon, ...And Justice For All, and Looking for Richard.

He continued to find work well into his 80s, including voice acting in Mr. Popper's Penguins as well as TV appearances in Boardwalk Empire and The Good Wife.

He appeared this year in new NBC drama The Village, about a Brooklyn apartment block and the people who live in it. The star celebrated his 90th birthday in February 2021.

Aida Turturro - Janice Soprano

Tony's older, new-agey sister who fled her family's troubles rather than stay and confront them, she returns to New Jersey and immerses herself in mob life.

Work-shy, manipulative and amoral, she has a love-hate relationship with Tony, born out of their shared childhood trauma.

Aida Turturro (right in 2017) appeared once as Tony's selfish, manipulative sister Janice (left) in the first series of The Sopranos but was then brought back for a permanent role. She has appeared in Blue Bloods and Law & Order since then, along with many of her former colleagues

Following the series finale in 2007, Turturro has appeared sporadically in film and TV, following many Sopranos alumni into roles in Blue Bloods and Law & Order.

In 2012 she was reunited with Edie Flaco in an episode of Nurse Jackie, while also appearing in ER, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Brooklyn Nine Nine.

Aida debuted a weight loss transformation in 2020 when she appeared much slimmed down in the Blacklist.

Tony Sirico - Paulie Gualtieri

One of Tony's right-hand men, Paulie is as vicious as he is paranoid, often carrying out hits on his boss's enemies and disloyal friends alike.

His loyalty to Tony - alongside his killing temperament - see him rise through the ranks to become underboss of the DiMeo crime family.

Sirico was born in Brooklyn and as a teenager he was part of a real-life street gang, and was once seen associating with Colombo family Caporegime Jimmy 'Green Eyes' Clemenza, along with fellow Sopranos actor Vincent Pastore.

A real-life gangster who spent parts of his youth in jail, Tony Sirico (right in 2019) agree to play paranoid mobster Paulie Gualtieri (left) on one condition - he never becomes a snitch

A real-life gangster who spent parts of his youth in jail, Tony Sirico (right in 2016) agree to play paranoid mobster Paulie Gualtieri (left) on one condition - he never becomes a snitch

He served time in jail for robbery and felony arms possession before deciding to give acting a try after being visited by a troupe of reformed convicts behind bars.

He initially tried out for the role of Junior was was persuaded into taking on Paulie on one condition - the character would never become a snitch.

Following The Sopranos he has made sporadic appearances in TV and films, including Family Guy, American Dad!, and Lilyhammer.

Steve Van Zandt - Silvio Dante

Silvio is the calm, collected, and ever-stylish owner of the gang's hangout spot and headquarters - a strip club called the Bada Bing!

Another of Tony's trusted advisers, he is often selected to carry out high-level assassinations, including on Christopher's girlfriend, Adriana.

Zandt was famous long before The Sopranos though for a profession other than acting. He was, and still is, a member of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band where he plays guitar and mandolin.

Bandanna-wearing Van Zandt (right in 2019) has since admitted that mobster Silvio's luscious locks (left) were a hairpiece. He has a successful career as a musician and in 2014 was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as the guitarist in Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band

Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for his work with Springsteen, he also founded his own band - Little Steven and The Disciples of Soul - in the 1980s.

Zandt continued to pursue acting after Sopranos, starring in and co-writing Netflix series Lilyhammer, which also starred Tony Sirico.

He also appeared in Netflix's The Christmas Chronicles in 2018.

Steve R Schirripa - Bobby Baccalieri

An unusual character within the mob world, Bobby Baccalieri was portrayed as lovable, kind-hearted, loyal to his wife, and caring of others.

A senior member of Junior's crew, he ends up caring for his former boss when he suffers from cancer, and marries Tony's sister Janice.

Bobby Baccalieri (left) played by Steve R Schirripa (right in 2019) was the rarest of things - a lovable mobster. He has continued to work in TV since the series, but has also written children's books and launched his own range of vegan pasta sauce

Schirripa has appeared regularly in both film and TV since his role as Baccalieri ended, including on series Blue Bloods.

He has also diversified away from acting and writes books playing on his mob persona, as well as children's stories.

Schirripa made a Nickelodeon film from his kid's book Nicky Deuce and in 2014 launched his own range of vegan pasta sauces.
Plans for I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! to return to the Australian jungle this year may reportedly be thrown into chaos amid Queensland's lockdown.

ITV bosses were given the go ahead to fly the show's cast and crew Down Under after the popular reality series was filmed in Wales last year due to pandemic travel restrictions.

But as Queensland and other Australian states were plunged into lockdown again on Monday, hopes to return to the original camp may be scuppered.

In the balance: Plans for I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!, hosted by Ant and Dec, to return to the Australian jungle this year may be stopped by Queensland's lockdown

A source told The Sun: 'The plan is for Im A Celebrity to be filmed in Australia and at the moment that is still the case.

'But seeing Queensland and other parts of Australia go into lockdown because of Coronavirus outbreaks is the kind of news they dread.

'People in the affected areas are not allowed to work for three days and are in total lockdown.

Familiar setting: ITV bosses were given the go ahead to fly the show's cast and crew Down Under after the popular reality series was filmed in Wales last year

'Filming is still a way off but if something like this happens nearer the time, they may have to rethink their plans.'

MailOnline has contacted ITV for comment.

Last month it was reported the show, hosted by Ant and Dec, was given the option to film in Australia again, after the 2020 series was recorded in Gwrych Castle in Abergele, Wales because of travel restrictions amid the coronavirus crisis.

Going back for round two? There has been speculation the show will return to Gwrych Castle in Wales for the 2021 series with reports claiming ITV have already booked it as a backup

A border force source told The Sun at the time: 'Everyone is delighted with this news. All the signs are now pointing towards a return to the jungle.

'As great as a year in the castle was, the show is made by its surroundings and the glitz and glamour of the jungle.

'ITV have assurances from Australian border control bosses that even if a wider travel ban is still in place for tourists, they'll get the paperwork and clearance they need to send cast and crew to Oz. It's a big moment.'

She's a champ! Giovanna Fletcher was crowned the first Queen of the Castle in December last year, beating Jordan North and Vernon Kay to the top spot

Australia has been hailed one of the world's Covid success stories, where infection rates were near zero, due to their strict lockdowns and border control.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced last month that Australia won't re-open borders until mid-2022.

Giovanna Fletcher was crowned the first Queen of the Castle in December last year, beating Jordan North and Vernon Kay to the top spot.
Irina Shayk continued to ramp up the sex appeal as she delighted fans with another sizzling bikini snap on Tuesday.

The model, 35, looked every inch the beach babe as she flashed some underboob in a yellow bikini from Candice Swanepoel's swimsuit range, Tropic Of C.

The photo, which was taken to promote the bikini line, captured Irina sitting peacefully on the sand wearing little more than her tiny swimsuit and white mesh sarong.

Making a splash! Irina Shayk continued to ramp up the sex appeal as she delighted fans with another sizzling bikini snap on Tuesday.

'D trip of 2021 ! Best time and best(bikini emoji) @tropicofc @revolve #revolvearoundtheworld @angelcandices,' she captioned the sun-kissed snap.

The bikini snaps continued on her Instagram Stories, where she posted a slew of sexy snaps of herself.

In one racy video, Irina shook her butt at the camera while clad in what appeared to be a white bikini and sheer cover-up.

'Thirst alert,' she wrote in the clip.

Va va voom! Shayk put her backside on display as she worked a very revealing white ensemble

'Thirst alert': Shayk's latest post sent temperatures soaring

Red alert! Other photos captured the beauty swimming in a cave while wearing a red string bikini

Other photos captured the beauty swimming in a cave while wearing a red string bikini.

Irina has been delighting fans to an array of bikini snaps on her Instagram account these last few days.

On Monday, the supermodel went topless as she posed for a number of sultry shots on the beach.

Sexy: Shayk looked incredible posing up a storm in her very skimpy bikini

Bikini babe! Irina has been delighting fans to an array of bikini snaps on her Instagram account these last few days

Looking good: Shayk put on a cheeky display as she rocked a tiny pair of string bikini bottoms, while enjoying a tropical getaway ahead of the long weekend

The beauty, who is rumored to be dating Kanye West after his split from Kim Kardashian, was seen hugging a wood pole as she looked off in the distance.

Her long wet hair was positioned partially in front of her face as she stood to the side and flaunted her pert derriere in her barely-there two piece.

The only other article of clothing the mother-of-one wore was a pair of boots from her fashion collaboration with Tamara Mellon, who is the co-founder of Jimmy Choo.

Bombshell: As she soaked in the glorious sunshine, the 35-year-old supermodel went topless as she posed for a number of sultry shots on the beach

In both images, Shayk was just feet away from the ocean and crashing waves as she looked back at the camera and showed off her toned figure.

On Sunday, the Russian native shared additional snaps of her impressive tan as she perched close to the white sand on a similar beach.

She covered her breasts with her arms and wore a pair of canary yellow bikini bottoms as she gazed into the camera wearing minimal make-up, displaying her natural beauty.

Au naturel: The 35-year-old ditched the designer clothes in favour of a more natural look as she wore only bikini bottoms and a pair of heels in a picture shared to Instagram on Sunday

She wore a pair of yellow heels to match her swimwear and captioned the snap: 'Sun valley.'

Recently it was claimed Kardashian's estranged husband plans on seeing Irina again after they spent time together in France.

She is currently 'dating' the rapper, whom she has been connected to ever since she appeared in the 44-year-old star's music video for his track Power, which debuted in 2010.

Romance brewing: The post comes a week after it was reported Kim Kardashian's estranged husband Kanye West plans on seeing Irina again after they spent time together in France

According to People, he is excited to see Irina again.

'Kanye is doing well. He had a great trip to France with Irina. They will date long distance,' said the source.

'Kanye will continue to be L.A.-based. He has no plans to move to NYC. His kids live in L.A,' it was added; Kim and Kanye share daughters North and Chicago, aged eight and three, and sons Saint and Psalm, aged five and two.

'He is very focused on business in LA too. He likes spending time with Irina though and plans to see her soon again.'

New prospect: Irina initially met Kanye when she worked on the 2010 music video for his track Power (Kanye pictured in 2020)

The Bound 2 songwriter wed Kim Kardashian in 2014.

Although the two went strong for several years, they eventually separated earlier this year, when 40-year-old Kim filed for divorce.

Shayk shares Lea with her former partner Bradley Cooper to whom she was initially linked in 2015.

Prior to becoming involved with the A Star Is Born director, she dated star athlete Cristiano Ronaldo for several years before the two split up in 2015.

The supermodel began seeing the 46-year-old actor later that year, and the two went on to welcome Lea, currently aged four, in 2017.

Although the couple was spotted with their daughter on several occasions following her birth, they eventually separated in 2019, although they remain on good terms and co-parent their child.
She made the decision to abstain from drinking alcohol more than two years ago.

And Cheryl Burke admitted she was struggling with her sobriety after temptation came knocking on her door during a recent trip to Hawaii with her husband, Matthew Lawrence.

The 37-year-old Dancing With The Stars professional noted that she's felt like drinking again 'a lot lately' while chatting with AJ McLean and Rene Elizondo Jr. on their Pretty Messed Up podcast.

Honest approach: Cheryl Burke admitted she was struggling with her sobriety after temptation came knocking on her door during a recent trip to Hawaii with her husband, Matthew Lawrence; seen in 2020

During a recent episode of their show, the co-hosts discussed Britney Spears' conservatorship battle before Elizondo noted how Cheryl came into their group looking for like-minded individuals who could offer support if she's ever feeling lost.

From there, Cheryl recalled a few recent triggers have made her sobriety journey a little more difficult lately.

'I've realized  how codependent I am on the two of you in a way because I look forward to these conversations of sobriety, of AJ talking about your ups and downs in life, if it's been rough at times, and you Rene, being that voice of God,' she said. 'For some reason, I was thinking, "What if this was all over one day?" And I had so much anxiety.'

Open: The 37-year-old Dancing With The Stars professional noted that she's felt like drinking again 'a lot lately' while chatting with AJ McLean and Rene Elizondo Jr. on their Pretty Messed Up podcast; seen in 2020 with AJ

During a recent Hawaiian vacation, hotel staff sent Burke and her husband a bottle of champagne to celebrate their anniversary, but they didn't know she' didn't drink.

Her husband had a few sips and she recalled: 'Never have I ever been triggered in the last two and a half years until that day.'

She remembered going to a friend's birthday party after the Hawaii incident and the 'same thing' happened, even telling her sister, 'I'm two seconds away [from drinking].'

Tough call: During a recent Hawaiian vacation, hotel staff sent Burke and her husband a bottle of champagne to celebrate their anniversary, but they didn't know she' didn't drink

Burke explained that she 'can't just have one' drink and 'might as well just go into this rabbit hole for a couple of weeks.'

'I have a lot of personal stuff going on right now at the moment, and so it's been very  I feel like I'm walking on a really tight rope at the moment,' Burke said. 'Therapy's not working right now.'

Cheryl made the decision to stop drinking after her engagement party in 2018 and noting her father's own addiction issues.

'It was just a decision that I made for myself,' she explained. 'And it was when Matt and I got engaged and it was during that engagement party that we were just like  or that I was like, he didn't even know  I was just like, I was done.'
She recently vacationed on the Greek island of Paros with her husband of nearly three years Justin Bieber.

And Hailey Bieber gave fans a peek at the luxury excursion in a series of idyllic snapshots shared to Instagram on Tuesday.

Many of the social media-worthy photos showed the 24-year-old model taking dips in the crystal clear ocean water, as well as dining on gourmet Greek cuisine.

Just a peek: Hailey Bieber gave fans a peek at the luxury excursion she took with husband Justin to Greece this past week in a series of idyllic snapshots shared to Instagram on Tuesday

'quick photo dump of this past beautiful week,' captioned the runway maven, who boasts 35.7million followers on the platform.

Bieber also included one shot of herself hanging out inside a lavish yacht, while playfully flipping off her husband's cellphone camera.

She flashed her toned tummy in a plunging black crop top held together with a piece of gold hardware and a pair of high-waisted trousers.

Hailey looked noticeably makeup-free and wore her golden hair slicked back into a chic bun.

Taking a dip: Many of the social media-worthy photos showed the 24-year-old model taking dips in the crystal clear ocean water

Venturing into the water with her husband, Hailey shared a snap of her and the 27-year-old pop star sitting together on a jet ski.

The BFF of Kendall Jenner put her toned physique on display in a green string bikini, consisting of a traditional triangle top and cheeky bottoms.

She accessorized her ocean ensemble with a myriad of glistening gold chains and matching hoop earrings.

Loved-up: The couple, who have since returned to Los Angeles, packed on the PDA for Hailey's Instagram slideshow, including on shot that showed them strolling down a cobblestone street together hand-in-hand

Sassy: Bieber also included one shot of herself hanging out inside a lavish yacht, while playfully flipping off her husband's cellphone camera

Justin's legs could be seen resting on each side of his wife of nearly three years as she let hers dangle in the water.

The couple, who have since returned to Los Angeles, packed on the PDA for Hailey's Instagram slideshow, including on shot that showed them strolling down a cobblestone street together hand-in-hand.

Justin and Hailey's loved-up snap appeared to have been taken after the pair's dinner at a gourmet eatery on the island.

Out at sea: Several images showed the blonde beauty chowing down on pasta and other eats as their yacht remained anchored out at sea

Natural beauty: Giving her millions of followers a better understanding of just how gorgeous Paros is, Hailey included several shots of the water and surrounding rock formations

The daughter of Stephen Baldwin looked stunning in a ruched hot pink mini dress, while Justin showcased his streetwear style in an oversized button up and deep red shorts.

Although they did spend plenty of time on the shore, Hailey appeared to be most at peace on the couple's spacious yacht.

Several images showed the blonde beauty chowing down on pasta and other eats as their yacht remained anchored out at sea.

Yummy: Taking to her Instagram Story on Tuesday, Bieber gushed that she 'ate lots of yummy food' on their trip to Greece, alongside an image of herself enjoying a fresh salad and a glass of wine

With a plate of pasta in hand, Hailey modeled a bright red halter dress during one of her and Justin's many delicious dinners.

Taking to her Instagram Story on Tuesday, Bieber gushed that she 'ate lots of yummy food' on their trip to Greece, alongside an image of herself enjoying a fresh salad and a glass of wine.

Giving her millions of followers a better understanding of just how gorgeous Paros is, Hailey included several shots of the water and surrounding rock formations.

Sharing is caring: Just like his wife, Justin has also been sharing tons of snapshots from his romantic getaway with Hailey, which began sometime last week when the pair arrived in Greece; Justin and Hailey pictured on Monday

Globe trotters: Justin and Hailey's trip to Greece comes just a week after the couple were spotted in Paris, France; Justin and Hailey pictured on Sunday

Girls-only: Earlier in the month, Hailey enjoyed some healthy time away from Justin as she flew to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico with her BFF Kendall Jenner and a few of their closest pals; Hailey pictured in Cabo on June 14

Just like his wife, Justin has also been sharing tons of snapshots from his romantic getaway with Hailey, which began sometime last week when the pair arrived in Greece.

On Monday, the loved-up pair were spotted enjoying dinner out in Naousa, a small fishing village, although they spent the majority of their time in Paros.

Justin and Hailey's extended stay in Greece came just days after the couple were spotted trekking around Paris, France.

Earlier in the month, Hailey enjoyed some healthy time away from Justin as she flew to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico with her BFF Kendall Jenner and a few of their closest pals.

Peaceful pose: Hailey also posted a peaceful pose Tuesday on her Instagram Stories

Black dress: The model also shared a snap in a little black dress Tuesday on social media

Planet praise: The daughter of Stephen Baldwin praised the planet

Dreamy view: Hailey also shared a dreamy picture with her followers
Emma Roberts and Thomas Mann were spotted in Boston on Sunday as they filmed a scene for their upcoming romantic comedy, About Fate.

The 30-year-old American Horror Story alum and the 29-year-old Project X actor were seen shooting on location for the movie, which takes place on New Year's Eve.

The film marks Emma's return to acting after giving birth to her first child, a son named Rhodes, in December 2020.

Fun: Emma Roberts and Thomas Mann were spotted in Boston on Sunday as they filmed a scene for their upcoming romantic comedy, About Fate

In About Fate, Roberts plays Margot, a woman 'who believes in love, but seems to never be able to find its true meaning.'

Mann, who was Emma's co-star in the 2010 romantic drama It's Kind of a Funny Story, plays her love interest

Emma was clad in a pink and white lace dress under a gray peacoat with black toggles and gray UGG boots. The blonde beauty's hair wore her hair mostly down with a few locks braided into a crown on top of her head.

Back to work: The film marks Emma's return to acting after giving birth to her first child, a son named Rhodes, in December 2020

Thomas donned a black suit under a black puffer coat with a fur-lined hood for the winter-set scene.

At one point in the scene, Roberts is seen wearing only one boot as she chases frantically after a horse-drawn carriage.

Mann appeared to run after Emma in the scene to return her missing boot.

Remake: The film is based on the 1971 Soviet television romantic comedy movie, The Irony of Fate, which remains a popular New Year's Eve classic watched by millions of Russians every year

The white carriage, which was adorned with Christmas lights and decorations, eventually stops and the two get on for a ride. Emma was seen smiling joyfully as the carriage passed by a building decorated with holiday lights and wreaths.

The film is based on the 1971 Soviet television romantic comedy movie, The Irony of Fate, which remains a popular New Year's Eve classic watched by millions of Russians every year.

Marius Weisberg is directing the remake which also stars Lewis Tan, Madelaine Petsch, and Anna Akana.

Emma shares Rhodes with her boyfriend, actor Garrett Hedlund, 36. The family is staying together in Boston and have been spotted out visiting local landmarks when Roberts takes breaks from filming.

The couple reportedly began their romance the same month (March 2019) Emma split from her on/off fiance, Evan Peters, after seven years.

Still going strong! Roberts and The United States vs. Billie Holiday star reportedly began their romance the same month (March 2019) Emma split from her on/off fiance, Evan Peters, after seven years (pictured February 14)

Family time: Emma shares Rhodes with her boyfriend, actor Garrett Hedlund, 36. The family is staying together in Boston and have been spotted out visiting local landmarks when Roberts takes breaks from filming

Garrett still has 20 months of probation left stemming from a 2020 arrest for DUI, according to Us Weekly.

Roberts will next perform guest judging duties in the sixth season of RuPaul's Drag Race: All Stars, which premiered Thursday on Paramount+ (not VH1).

Other celebrity guest judges include Charli XCX, Tina Knowles, Angela Bassett, Miss Piggy, Cheyenne Jackson, Fortune Feimster, Aisha Tyler, Big Freedia, Jamal Sims, Justin Simien, Tia Mowry, Zaldy, Alec Mapa, Jermaine Fowler, and Tanya Tucker.
She flouted the Vatican's strict dress code as she paid a visit to the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church alongside supermodel Kate Moss earlier this week.

And Kim Kardashian continued to turn heads in Italy as she ventured out of her hotel on Tuesday to attend a meeting at Fendi HQ in Rome.

The 40-year-old KUWTK star showcased her ample cleavage by going braless in a plunging black midi dress as she stepped out ahead of dining at Dal Bolognese Roma.

Striking: Kim Kardashian continued to turn heads in Italy as she ventured out of her hotel on Tuesday

Special guest: The 40-year-old KUWTK star paid a visit to the Fendi headquarters, located at the Palazzo della Civilta Italiana in Rome

The sexy garment featured spaghetti straps and a curve-hugging fit that flattered Kardashian's famous physique.

She layered up her look with a knit burgundy shrug and strolled down the cobblestone streets in a pair of ultra strappy heels that wound around her ankles and up her calves.

The KKW Beauty founder let her lengthy raven hair flow out from under a navy blue and red Sci-Fi Fantasy cap.

Kim kept her sultry brown peepers concealed behind a pair of reflective shades that matched her cardigan's hue.

Taking the plunge: Kardashian showcased her ample cleavage by going braless in a plunging black midi dress

Curve-hugging: The sexy garment featured spaghetti straps and a curve-hugging fit that flattered Kardashian's famous physique

She appeared to be in a chipper mood on Tuesday as she was seen waving at passersby before slipping into the backseat of a chauffeured SUV.

Upon arrival to the Fendi building, Kim was seen carefully climbing a set of narrow stairs outside, an act captured by one of her personal photographers.

The reality TV sensation was surrounded by a few of her closest team members who made sure she got up the steps safely in her heels.

Casual element: The KKW Beauty founder let her lengthy raven hair flow out from under a navy blue and red Sci-Fi Fantasy cap

Strike a pose: Upon arrival to the Fendi building, Kim was seen carefully climbing a set of narrow stairs outside, an act being captured by one of her personal photographers

It takes a village: The reality TV sensation was surrounded by a few of her closest team members who made sure she got up the steps safely

She was greeted by a Fendi representative who she shared a tender hug with.

Kim was also seen striking a pose near a stunning statue, before heading inside the Palazzo della Civilta Italiana, currently used as the Fendi headquarters, with her crew.

Although the reason for Kardashian's visit to the Fendi headquarters are unknown, the mother of four has proven to be a fan of the high fashion brand for years - often appearing on Instagram in their recognizable pieces.

One with art: Kardashian was also seen striking a pose near a stunning statue, before heading inside the Palazzo della Civilta Italiana with her crew

Friendly: She was greeted by a Fendi representative who she shared a tender hug with

Taking to her Instagram Story, the SKIMS CEO showed off the countless gifts she received from Fendi, including several bright yellow handbags and a pair of open-toed snakeskin heels.

After schmoozing with the folks at Fendi, Kim and her crew grabbed a decadent pasta lunch at Dal Bolognese Roma, which famously serves 'high-end, Italian cuisine.'

'When I'm (sic) Rome... FML,' captioned the star, who shared a snap of her dish to Instagram.

Treat yourself: After schmoozing with the folks at Fendi, Kim and her crew grabbed a decadent pasta lunch at Dal Bolognese Roma, which famously serves 'high-end, Italian cuisine'

Gifts: Taking to her Instagram Story, the SKIMS CEO showed off the countless designer goods she was gifted by Fendi, including several bright yellow handbags and a pair of snakeskin heels

Kim also unloaded several shots she had taken while visiting the Vatican on Monday.

The back-to-back images showcased the Vatican's stunning architecture and design, as well as several notable artifacts and items displayed around the spacious place of worship.

Kardashian, having Armenian roots on her father Robert's side, highlighted a 'gift from Armenia' to the Vatican, which was a gold necklace and matching diamond pendant displayed behind glass.

Historic: On Monday, Kim paid a visit to the Vatican with supermodel Kate Moss

Under wraps: While Kim had wowed in a flesh flashing white lace dress for her visit to the Vatican, she covered up with a leather trench coat inside to adhere to the dress code

Capturing memories: Kim also unloaded several shots she had taken during her visit to the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church via Instagram on Tuesday

Although she appeared excited to be visiting the Vatican on Monday, Kim failed to adhere to the church's strict dress code by wearing a sexy lace dress which didn't cover her shoulders and had cut-out sections throughout her mid-section.

There is a basic dress code that both men and women must adhere to when visiting the Vatican city, particularly St. Peters Basilica and/or the Vatican museums (including the Sistine Chapel).

Visitors must cover their knees and upper arms, while they are prohibited from wearing shorts or skirts above the knee, sleeveless tops, and low-cut shirts.

Virtual tour: The back-to-back images showcased the Vatican's stunning architecture and design, as well as several notable artifacts and items displayed around the spacious place of worship

Men must also remove their hats when entering, though women are permitted to remain wearing theirs.

Shoulders must also be covered and visitors may be turned away or advised to cover up with a shawl.

Regardless, Kim appeared in great spirits as she made her way around the city in her show-stopping outfit, with the star also accompanied by fashion icon Kate Moss and her daughter Lila Grace.
Erika Jayne's accountant, divorce lawyer and landlord have all been ordered to turn over her financial records by a judge, amid the ongoing embezzlement lawsuit against herself and estranged husband Tom Girardi.

People Magazine reports that the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star - who had previously been accused of refusing to give out access to her finances - will now have to provide bank statements and other documents requested by the judge.

The order comes as a bankruptcy trustee continues to investigate Girardi's assets, amid claims that both Girardi, 82, and Jayne, 49, allegedly embezzled settlement funds that were meant to help the families of plane crash victims on Lion Air Flight 610.

However, according to legal documents obtained by the outlet, Jayne's lawyers were already maintaining that the reality star 'has been and remains willing to cooperate fully with the Trustee's investigation in this bankruptcy of debtor Girardi & Keese.'

Turnover: RHOBH star Erika Jayne, 49, 'ordered to turn over financial records' in embezzlement lawsuit with estranged husband Tom Girardi, 82 (Pictured, 2019)

Per the documents, Jayne is said to have asked the court not to appoint attorney Ronald Richards as the special counsel to the trustee in the bankruptcy case, saying that he had made 'false and inflammatory' remarks about her via social media.

Jayne's request says the new motion 'is not a media fiction. She is a real person with rights, including the right to be treated fairly in these proceedings based on actual evidence and the law.'

When it comes to Richards' social media posts, her lawyers claim they 'violate the ethical rules to which he is bound and that unfairly target [her] in an attempt to destroy her credibility before any claim is even brought against her in this proceeding.'

Jayne's lawyers also assert that Richards 'continued to harass' her 'publicly through extra-judicial statements, including social media' to his over 16K followers in addition to engaging in interviews on YouTube which they believe harm the case.

Former flame: This comes just a day after it was reported that Jayne was being accused of refusing to submit bank records to an investigator who was combing through her 82-year-old estranged husband Tom Girardi's assets amid his bankruptcy case (Pictured, 2016)

The reality star also included screenshots of his social media activity, which were specifically aimed at Jayne and Girardi, in her filing.

Richards did not take the allegations lightly as he released a statement to Page Six on Friday which read: 'Not a single professional of Erikas has cooperated with our office regarding the Girardi Keese estate.

'We have filed numerous motions seeking documents and communications. This motion is designed to slow down our work. The Thomas Girardi estate is moving for relief from stay to pursue her in state court. This does not look like cooperation.'

He then took aim at Jayne's legal team's assertions about his social media following and conduct.

Richards told the publication: 'It is laughable to suggest that our 16,000 followers compared to Erikas 417,000 followers in a City of 12,500,000 would somehow would have an impact on anything.

'The first amendment does not leave itself in the doorways of the courthouse and the motion is a transparent attempt to interfere with the Trustees choice of counsel. These first amendment arguments were previously raised by her other counsel and rejected. No gag order was issued.

'Simply submitting innocuous and inadmissible hearsay comments on publicly filed documents does not create any relevant or actionable information.'

Earlier this week, allegations that Jayne refused to submit bank records were levelled in a new motion filed Wednesday by petitioning credits who accused Jayne of declining to hand over documents including bank statements to the bankruptcy trustee investigating her estranged husband's assets, according to People.

The 82-year-old's law firm Girardi Keese filed for bankruptcy last year, and a recent motion also alleged Jayne's companies had received $20 million in loans from the firm in recent years.

Back in the day: This throwback snap was featured on last week's RHOBH where Erika addressed her marriage breakdown with Tom for the first time

The motion requests that Michael Ullman, Jayne's accountant, procure 'key financial documents' such as receipts, bank statements, and pay stubs. It has also requested all communications that have occurred between Jayne's divorce lawyer Larry Ginsburg and Ullman, according to People.

'Erika has refused to provide access to her management company, her CPA which also houses her management company, any books and records of EJ Global or any of her affiliated companies,' the motion reads.

'As each day goes by, Erika has been publicly dissipating community assets by selling her clothes on public websites, flaunting large jewels on social media and on television, and has done nothing to assist in return structured firm payments being made to her instead of the firm by the California lottery, notwithstanding she was contacted through counsel over twelve days ago.'

The motion also accused Jayne of preventing access to her accountant, according to People.

Claims: Girardi's law firm Girardi Keese filed for bankruptcy last year, and a recent motion also alleged Jayne's companies had received $20 million in loans from the firm in recent years

'At every turn, Erika has used the glam to continue to aid and abet this sham transactions that have been occurring with respect to large transfers of assets from the [Girardi Keese] to Erika,' the motion reads. 'Moreover, the Trustee has received zero cooperation from Erika which is constant [sic] with someone hiding assets.'

New developments involving Erika, such as news her attorneys had dropped her before returning as her counsel, also raised concerns the reality star would spend money allegedly transferred to her from 'the Debtor', aka Girardi Keese.

These events have intensified 'the necessity to trace her money and investigate the receipt of funds, her purchases including the bling and the glam, (diamonds and high expenditures of beauty maintenance, etc.).'

The motion also took aim at Jayne's recent social media response to photos taken of her at a gas station, dressed down, amid accusations she and her ex Girardi embezzled his clients.

'Goodnight Twitter, please be in full glam when pumping gas. Apparently it's a big deal,' Erika, 49, tweeted on Monday, along with a rolling eyes emoji after the photos emerged.

She also replied to several Twitter users earlier sticking up for her and the dressed down look.

The motion called the response 'callous' and speculated the wealth she was flaunting could have been money intended for those 'cheated out of their money.'

Concerns: Recent events involving Erika, such as news her attorneys had dropped her before returning as her counsel, also raised concerns the reality star would spend money allegedly transferred to her from 'the Debtor', aka Girardi Keese

'As recently as yesterday, she callously sent out on social medial [sic] her bewilderment why people would continue to be upset at her displays of wealth (glam) while at a gas station, not-withstanding this money could be the Debtor's and clients of the Debtor's settlement proceeds, as well as other lenders and attorneys who have been cheated out of their money,' the motion read.

Girardi's legal license in California was revoked in March, the same month he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

Girardi faces a litany of legal problems, including 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.

He and Jayne were sued for allegedly embezzling funds meant for families of victims, while Edelson PC, a firm for their ex clients, said in court docs their divorce last fall was orchestrated to 'fraudulently protect Tom and Erika's money' as they're 'on the verge of financial collapse.'

In the Hulu documentary The Housewife and the Hustler, attorney Sunny Hostin pointed out that Erika is seeking to have her high-dollar items classified as 'separate property' in their split, claiming they were 'gifts to her.'

Reporter Brandon Lowrey of Law360 said in the doc that the estranged couple is 'together in these bankruptcy proceedings' and that 'it's going to be hard for her to say she didn't know that anything was going on.'

In a preview for the show's 11th season, Jayne said of the accusations, 'No one knows the answer but him.'
Georgia Steel and sisters Demi and Frankie Sims were among the attendees at the boohooMAN x Da Baby launch event on Tuesday evening.

The Love Island star, 23, showcased her svelte physique in a top vest top teamed with a pair of white sweatpants as she posed for pictures at the fashion event.

The reality personality wrapped a matching hoodie around her waist and added a pair of trainers to complete her look.

Glam: Georgia Steel and sisters Demi and Frankie Sims were among the attendees at the boohooMAN x Da Baby launch event on Tuesday evening

Georgia wore her hair swept back into a neat chignon and sported a neutral pallet of make-up, which only enhanced her pretty features.

She arrived at the event wearing a cream overcoat, which added a chic edge to her otherwise low-key ensemble.

Meanwhile, Demi, 24, made a statement in a graffti print jacket, which she teamed with a pair of ripped jeans and a pair of Nike trainers.

Sister, sister! Demi, 24, made a statement in a graffti print jacket, which she teamed with a pair of ripped jeans and a pair of Nike trainers

Work it: The Love Island star, 23, showcased her svelte physique in a top vest top teamed with a pair of white sweatpants as she posed for pictures at the fashion event

Glowing: Georgia wore her hair swept back into a neat chignon and sported a neutral pallet of make-up, which only enhanced her pretty features

Casual: Frankie, 26, opted for an edgy double denim as she rocked as cropped jacket and a pair of straight leg jeans and boots

Cheers: Demi layered the look with a white vest top, which perfectly coordinated with her Prada bag in the same shade

Group: The sisters were joined by their co-star Roman Hackett, who was sporting a green tracksuit with a white T-shirt and a pair of trainers

Demi layered the look with a white vest top, which perfectly coordinated with her Prada bag in the same shade.

She wore her bright blonde locks in bouncy curls and sported a full face of make-up in neutral shades.

Her sister Frankie, 26, opted for an edgy double denim as she rocked as cropped jacket and a pair of straight leg jeans and boots.

Arrival: She arrived at the event wearing a cream overcoat, which added a chic edge to her otherwise low-key ensemble

Designer: Georgia added a Dior bag to her look

Casual: Other stars who were seen arriving included Love Island star Montana Brown, 25, who opted for a low-key look in a black hoodie and leggings

Low-key: Montana went make-up free and wore he brunette locks swept back

She wore her brunette locks in tumbling curls and also sported a full face of make-up, while posing for shots with the reality star group.

The sisters were joined by their co-star Roman Hackett, who was sporting a green tracksuit with a white T-shirt and a pair of trainers.

Other stars who were seen arriving included Love Island star Montana Brown, 25, who opted for a low-key look in a black hoodie and leggings.

Catching up: She was seen chatting to two female pals outside the event

En route: She wore her brunette locks in tumbling curls and also sported a full face of make-up, while posing for shots with the reality star group
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WASHINGTON (AP)  The Supreme Court dealt a blow to New Jersey and other states seeking a way to oppose pipelines running through their land, siding with a pipeline company Tuesday in a dispute over New Jersey land needed for a natural gas pipeline.

Both liberal and conservative justices joined to rule 5-4 for the PennEast Pipeline Co. The ruling says that companies building interstate pipelines, once their projects have been given the greenlight by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, can obtain the land they need even in the face of state opposition.

Both the Trump and Biden administrations had supported PennEast. Nineteen states had urged the Supreme Court to rule the other way and side with New Jersey.

In New Jersey's case, the 116-mile planned pipeline is to run from Pennsylvanias Luzerne County to Mercer County in New Jersey. FERC had allowed the company's project to move forward in 2018 by granting PennEast a so-called certificate of public convenience and necessity, but lawsuits followed.

The company ultimately took New Jersey to court to acquire state-controlled land for its project. PennEast argued the commissions greenlighting of its project allowed it to use eminent domain to acquire state-controlled properties. The Supreme Court agreed.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority that when FERC issues a certificate of public convenience and necessity, federal law authorizes the certificate's holder to condemn all necessary rights-of-way, whether owned by private parties or States.

Roberts wrote that although nonconsenting States are generally immune from suit, they surrendered their immunity from the exercise of the federal eminent domain power when they ratified the Constitution. He said that because the federal Natural Gas Act delegates the federal eminent domain power to private parties, those parties can initiate condemnation proceedings, including against state-owned property. Roberts was joined by conservative justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh and liberal justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in a dissent that the majority's view that states had surrendered their immunity by ratifying the Constitution has "no textual, structural, or historical support." She was joined by fellow conservative justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch and liberal Justice Elena Kagan.

The decision from the high court doesn't end litigation over the pipeline. A separate challenge involving New Jersey is pending in a federal appeals court in Washington.

In a statement, New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir S. Grewal promised that the decision is not the end of the road in our fight against the PennEast pipeline."

We still have other, ongoing legal challenges to this proposed pipeline, which is unnecessary and would be destructive to New Jersey lands, Grewal said, urging "the federal government to take another look at this harmful proposal.

In a statement, Anthony Cox, chair of the PennEast Board of Managers said the company was pleased with the decision.

This decision is about more than just the PennEast Pipeline Project; it protects consumers who rely on infrastructure projects  found to be in the public benefit after thorough scientific and environmental reviews  from being denied access to much-needed energy by narrow State political interests, Cox said.

New Jersey had argued that PennEast couldn't take the state to court to acquire the property it is seeking  only the United States government can. The state argued that the Natural Gas Act does not explicitly authorize private lawsuits by private parties against states. A federal appeals court sided with New Jersey while a lower court had sided with PennEast.

The case is PennEast Pipeline Co. v. New Jersey, 19-1039.
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Today

Cloudy in the morning with scattered thunderstorms developing later in the day. High 86F. Winds E at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%..

Tonight

Scattered thunderstorms, especially in the evening. Low around 75F. Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 50%.
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The situation is grim across Andhra Pradesh and more so in Chittoor district, where nearly half of the registered and unregistered start-ups and MSMEs are in a mood to scale down production, shut down their units or sell them away. (Representational Image: PTI)

TIRUPATI: The Medium, Small and Micro Enterprises (MSME) sector has been going through a tough phase in view of the Covid19 pandemics repeated assaults on them.

According to a local survey, more than half of the existing start-ups/small companies may be shut down or sold off by the year-end due to the harsh ground situations. The situation is grim across Andhra Pradesh and more so in Chittoor district, where nearly half of the registered and unregistered start-ups and MSMEs are in a mood to scale down production, shut down their units or sell them away.

The MSME sector here was already facing problems of outdated technology, poor marketing and lack of coordination among the entrepreneurs and nodal agencies.

All start-ups and MSMEs have landed in uncertainty due to the closure of units amid the lockdowns since March last year. Now, the Covids second wave and the lockdown and curfew have all had an added adverse impact on the regions economy.

The majority of the workforce has gone back to their home states. Several MSMEs and even big units have faced a severe manpower crunch after the unlocking last year. Many skilled workers are yet to return from their native places. So, we are struggling to scale up the operations. This is hindering production, transportation and distribution of the stocks, said Sai Kiran Reddy, managing partner of TAGS Pvt. limited.

Chittoor district has more than 150 large-scale industrial units and close to 3,600 registered MSMEs with a turnover of over Rs 6,000 crore, in addition to hundreds of unregistered units. They, altogether, employ more than 1.5 lakh persons.

Around 7,500 odd small scale units had a workforce of more than 75,000. Now, only 30 to 35 per cent of the workforce (local/semi-skilled/unskilled) is turning up for work while the remaining (skilled-from north India) are away at their homes.

Many locally-available skilled workers and even persons at the managerial roles had succumbed to the first and second waves of Covid19. Guest workers who had left for their native states have not returned. We lost many experienced workers and their loss has demoralised the units working capacities and production, an entrepreneur lamented.

A local survey revealed that nearly 48 per cent of small and medium enterprises in the district were facing labour problems.

Other problems include marketing for 56 per cent of the units, raw materials for 37 per cent, financial problems for 43 per cent, Infrastructural issues for 40 per cent.

Now, the talk of a Covid third wave is sending chills down the spines of industry managers. Failing to scale up the operations due to manpower shortage and various other problems, several units in Chittoor district are now running out of funds. Most of them are also witnessing their working capital being hit as sales have crashed.

They are barely able to pay the power bills and laid off daily wage workers and are struggling to pay salaries to the retained workers.
Among the accused are Sandip Jhunjhunwala, a businessman of Delhi who is the managing director of REI Agro Limited, Muhammad Yousaf Bhat, the then branch head of the J&K bank at Mahim, Mumbai and other 29 others including bank officials.(Representational Image)

Srinagar: Jammu and Kashmirs Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) has filed a chargesheet before a special anti-graft court at Jammu against thirty-one persons in a  1,100 crore loan scam in the state-owned J&K Bank Limited.

Among the accused are Sandip Jhunjhunwala, a businessman of Delhi who is the managing director of REI Agro Limited, Muhammad Yousaf Bhat, the then branch head of the J&K bank at Mahim, Mumbai and other 29 others including bank officials.

The case registered by the ACB in 2019 under various provisions of the Indian Penal Code and J&K Public Company Act pertains to allegedly sanctioning and disbursing crop loans to the tune of  400 crores, term loan of  150 crores from J&K Bank branch Mahim and bill discounting facilities to the tune of  115 crores from J&K Bank Vasant Vihar (Delhi) branch in favour of Messers REI Agro Limited without tangible securities and in violation of banking norms.

Investigation has revealed that the said REI Agro Ltd its Chairman and Managing Director had no intention of repaying the loans to the bank. The sole purpose from the very beginning was to swindle the funds obtained, the chargesheet says. It adds, The company with the malafide intention to cheat the J&K Bank hatched a conspiracy with its officers and some private persons representing as JLGs (Joint Liability Groups) created fictitious lists of farmers who were non-existent under each JLG group and got the loan funds credited directly in the accounts of these JLGs who later diverted the funds back to the borrower company M/s REI Agro Ltd without crediting it to any farmers account.

It further said that these loans were sanctioned with malafide intention in violation of banking norms in order to confer undue benefit upon the promoters of the company and JLGs.
The Coronavirus infected patients and their family members alleged that some hospitals are generating bills for Covid care as per government prescribed rates, but charging them extra and collecting cash from them and refusing to accept any online payment to avoid detection. (Representational DC Image/Murali Krishna)

VIJAYAWADA: Several private hospitals continue to fleece Coronavirus infected patients to provide healthcare in parts of Andhra Pradesh.

The Coronavirus infected patients and their family members alleged that some hospitals are generating bills for Covid care as per government prescribed rates, but charging them extra and collecting cash from them and refusing to accept any online payment to avoid detection. On an average, they are charging a minimum of Rs 2.5 lakh from each patient to provide Covid care in the hospital for five to six days with a course of five shots of remdesivir injections along with other injections and medicines and some tests in the lab. If the patient requires oxygen or ventilator support and is having multiple health complications, the hospitals charge more and the bill goes up to Rs 12 lakh to even Rs 20 lakh per head.

They also alleged violation of ICMR recommended Covid protocol in providing admission to the patients by some hospitals after manipulating the vitals as they wanted more numbers of patients to be admitted for treatment.

Some of these private hospitals have set up temporary Covid care wards and hired doctors and health personnel to treat the patients. They offer financial incentives to the quacks to bring patients especially from rural areas for admission. Some quacks even set up hospitals with no registration with the health and medical authorities, by hiring doctors as consultants and started providing treatment even to the Covid-19 infected patients and in case the patients turn critical, they send them to other hospitals for treatment.

The patients also complain about poor quality of food being served at some hospitals and they want the state government to ensure quality food to be served to them as majority of them are being covered under government health schemes.

Though each hospital has a nodal officer, a cluster nodal officer and a district level flying squad to monitor it closely, some hospitals are continuing their illegal practices from the level of admission to provision of treatment to overcharging the patients undetected and their violations are having no limit at all. In a case in Kakinada in East Godavari, a private hospital was found claiming bills for treating a Covid infected patient even after his discharge from the hospital. In another case, a private hospital at Gollapudi of Vijayawada in Krishna district, treated a Covid infected patient for two days and when the patient died, it mentioned in its death summary that the patient died of cardiac arrest and when his family members questioned about it, the hospital management informed them that they were not supposed to treat a Covid patient and so they were not supposed to mention about it. For the folly of the hospital management, the deceased family members failed to get any financial benefit from the government.

A Coronavirus infected patient said, We appeal to the state government to further streamline functioning of private hospitals to ensure quality healthcare and food to be supplied to them as the state government is paying for their treatment under various health schemes.

The state vigilance authorities have booked over 75 private hospitals for a series of violations during the second wave of the pandemic and district authorities imposed fines worth several lakhs of rupees on these hospitals so far in the state.

Indian Medical Association AP president Dr N. Subramanyam said, We do not encourage corrupt practices by the private hospitals in the state and we are against promotion of quackery. But we appeal to the state authorities to revise rates for Covid treatment as they are unviable and not to penalise the errant hospitals heavily and take up proper inquiry to punish them as per norms.

Meanwhile, a private doctor admits, We are being approached by officials from various departments for money on one pretext or the other and we appeal to the government to control such illegal practice to avoid financial burden on them.
No physical classes will be held when schools and colleges start functioning from July 1, for the 2021-22 academic year. (DC file photo)

Hyderabad: No physical classes will be held when schools and colleges start functioning from July 1, for the 2021-22 academic year, education minister Sabitha Indra Reddy said on Monday.

The minister said that teaching for all classes right up to the postgraduate level must be conducted online only. This decision was taken in view of the Coronavirus pandemic situation.

The state government, she said, has taken all the necessary steps to conduct classes via television on T-Sat channels. Those students who miss the classes during the telecast can watch the lessons on the T-Sat App or DD App.

She said that 90 per cent of textbooks needed for students have been dispatched to government schools. While classes for Class 3 to 10 will begin from July 1, classes for Class 1 and 2, will begin from August 1.
Srinagar: The Army said on Monday that its alert jawans had averted two separate drone activities in the Ratnuchak-Kaluchak belt close to the border with Pakistan in the Jammu region, thereby foiling a possible threat in this extremely sensitive military zone.

This comes a day after two bombs believed to have been dropped by one or two drones rocked the high-security technical area of the Jammu Air Force Station. Two security personnel got minor injuries in these blasts, one of which ripped off the roof of a barracks and the other took place on an open ground on the intervening night of June 26-27.

The Army said on the intervening night of June 27-28 two separate drone activities -- one at 11.45 pm and the second at 2.40 am -- were spotted over the Ratnuchak-Kaluchak military area by alert troops who immediately opened fire at the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or unmanned aircraft systems (UASes).

Jammu-based defence spokesman Lt. Col. Devender Anand said: Immediately after the drone activities were noticed, a high alert was sounded and Quick Reaction Teams engaged them (drones), following which both flew away. He added: As a result of the alertness and proactive approach of our jawans, a major threat was thwarted in the area. The security forces are on high alert and the search operation is in progress.

Army sources said its men fired 20-25 rounds at the drones before these flew back under the cover of darkness. The drones were suspected to be flying at a height of 1.2 km and were possibly powered by long range batteries. The sources added the security grid was on its toes as 14 drone stories had reportedly been launched from across the Line of Control and the international border with Pakistan lately. The areas where such activity was seen include Jammu, Rajouri, Samba and Kathua in J&K.

The reports said one of the drones was hovering over the brigade HQ of an Army unit located in the Kaluchack garrison.

The probe by the Indian Air Force into the disquieting blasts at its overly sensitive airbase in Jammu, with the incident seen as a major security lapse by the authorities, is now rolling. A National Investigation Agency team had visited the scene on Sunday morning to gather initial evidence and there is a possibility that the NIA, the countrys premier counter-terrorist task force, will be asked to take over the probe.

Sources have told this newspaper that the IAF authorities have conveyed to the government that it is capable enough of probing the incidents and taking it to a logical conclusion on its own. However, some experts feel that taking into consideration the apparent terror aspect of the bombing, whether carried out with drones or as an act of sabotage from within, the IAF might need the help and expertise of a reputable probe agency such as the NIA.

The Air Chief, Air Chief Marshal Rakesh Kumar Singh Bhadauria, is likely to visit the Jammu airbase either on Tuesday or Wednesday after he returns from a three-day official visit to Bangladesh for an on-the-spot assessment of the situation arising out of the blasts. Late Sunday, he had telephoned the two IAF personnel injured in the twin blasts, Arvind Singh and S.K. Singh, to enquire about their well-being.

Explaining the NIA teams visit to the blast site, the sources said that the National Investigation Act 2008 gives the NIA powers to take suo motu cognisance of terror activities in any part of the country and register a case. In 2019, this law was amended to expand the type of offences the agency could investigate and prosecute, including the ones coming under Explosive Substances Act 1908, the sources added. The J&K police has also taken up the investigation into the blasts after an FIR was filed at the Satwari police station of Jammu under the relevant provisions of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act on Sunday.
The ISRO spy case had erupted in 1994 in Kerala when Narayanan was arrested on charges of espionage. (Photo: PTI/File)

Thiruvananthapuram: The Delhi Special Unit of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), probing the alleged framing of space scientist Nambi Narayanan in the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) espionage case, reached Kerala on Monday.

The senior CBI officials are expected to arrive in the state capital on Tuesday as the probe team is planning to record the statement of scientist Nambi Narayanan.

The development came after CBI filed an FIR marked as classified in the Thiruvananthapuram Chief Judicial Magistrate (CJM) court accusing 18 persons including former police officials of hatching a conspiracy.

The police officials named include the then head of Special Investigation Team (SIT) that probed the ISRO scandal Siby Mathews, along with others in the team including --- A Vijayan, Thampi S Durgadutt, then City Police Commissioner V R Rajeevan and then Deputy Director, Intelligence Bureau, RB Sreekumar.

In April, the Supreme Court had ordered the CBI to look into the Justice DK Jain Committee report on senior Kerala police officials who allegedly framed Narayanan in the ISRO espionage case.

The Supreme Court also had barred the public circulation of the contents of the report.

The ISRO spy case had erupted in 1994 in Kerala when Narayanan was arrested on charges of espionage along with another senior official of ISRO, two Maldivian women and a businessman.

It had created a political storm in the state as the inner party feud in Congress was at its peak and the then Chief Minister K Karunakaran had to resign over the case.
Bengaluru: Kerala government on Monday denied news reports that it was mulling to change names of certain places in Kasaragod district bordering Karnataka from Kannada to Malayalam.

Minister for Local Self-government M V Govindan Master's office denied the reports and said the Kerala government has not taken any step to change the names of any place in Kasaragod district.

Manjeshwaram MLA A K M Ashraf too said there was no move to change the names of the places. "This news is completely baseless. There was no move by the Kerala government to change the name of places," a senior source from the office of Master told PTI.

Ashraf, who took the oath as an IUML legislator in Kannada language, told PTI that it was fakenews. "Someone from Karnataka Border Development Authority has come up with the news. There are no plans to change the name of the places," Ashraf said.

Meanwhile, Karnataka Chief Minister BS Yediyurappa on Monday wrote a letter to his Kerala counterpart Pinarayi Vijayan requesting to not change the names of 12 villages in Kasaragod and Manjeshwara taluks in Kasaragod district, as the name change would "destroy Kannada and Tulu culture".

"The Kannada speaking areas of Kasargod District, in which Manjeshwara and Kasargod are situated are famous for their traditional culture and historical background...the existing manes were predominantly from Kannada and Tulu language. In some places, it is a mixture of Kannada and Tulu names. Some of the names of these villages have a long history of several centuries," the Karnataka Chief Minister said.

He pointed out that the change of names would affect the "feelings of people and their sentiments detrimentally".

"I feel that the Kerala government may not have the intention to change the names of these villages and this may have been a unilateral decision of the local bodies of these villages," said Yediyurappa.

He asked the Kerala CM to "oblige and make the Kannada-speaking people of Kasaragod and Manjeshwara happy by taking a decision to stall the process of changing the names."

Earlier on Monday, the Chairman of Karnataka Regional Border Development Authority Dr C Somashekhar met Yediyurappa and informed him that Kerala is going to change the names of some villages having Kannada names to Malayalam in the state's Kasaragod and Manjeswara districts.

The Karnataka CM responded immediately and said the matter had already been brought to his notice and will be conveyed to the government of Kerala.

"Some local bodies are attempting to change the names of Kannada-speaking villages in Kasargod district, Kerala, without any consultation with people. This would destroy Kannada and Tulu culture, which has been existing here for long," Dr C Somashekhar said.

CM said: "Kannadigas and Malayalees live together like brothers in Kasargodu and Manjeswara, prompting Kerala CM to stop the process of changing the names of villages in the state of Kerala."

Dr Somashekhar also told the CM that the attempt to change the names of the villages could have taken place at the level of the local bodies without the notice of the Government of Kerala.

Former Chief Minister and JD(S) leader HD Kumaraswamy on Sunday also expressed his opposition to the move and wrote a letter to Kerala Chief Minister urging him to halt the move.
Revanth Reddy said he, along with state leaders and seniors, would prepare an action plan on people's problems and take up agitation. (Photo: PTI/File)

Hyderabad: Newly-appointed Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee (TPCC) president A. Revanth Reddy said the fight against the TRS government ruled by Kalvakuntla family would begin soon. "We will bring to the notice of the Congress chief Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi the misrule of the TRS in Telangana state and after getting guidance from the high command, we will begin our fight," he said and termed Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao as traitor of Dalits.

Revanth Reddy on Monday called on senior Congress leader and former MP V. Hanumantha Rao at Hyderguda Apollo Hospitals, where the veteran leader was admitted due to some ailments. Speaking to reporters, the new TPCC chief said he was inspired by the reaction of Hanumantha Rao on people's issues, even while in hospital. "VH told me that both of us would meet Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi and discuss strengthening of the Congress in the state," he said.

The TPCC chief criticised the TRS government for failing to instal Dr B.R. Ambedkars statue at Panjagutta circle and shifting the statue to the police station. The Chief Minister had no respect for Dalits and betrayed them, he said. Revanth Reddy said during the Congress rule, SC/ST sub plan was implemented for upliftment of Dalits.

Congress state president described Dalit empowerment programme initiated by the TRS government as an eyewash. It is ridiculous to select merely 100 Dalits in each Assembly constituency, where their average population is 1 lakh (15 percent of total population), for the empowerment programme, he said. Revanth Reddy said he, along with state leaders and seniors, would prepare an action plan on people's problems and take up agitation.

Meanwhile, in his maiden programme after being named TPCC chief, Revanth Reddy paid rich tributes to former prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao. He also visited the residence of former MP Konda Vishveshwar Reddy and paid rich tributes to the latter's mother Konda Jayalata who passed away late last week. AICC secretary G. Chinna Reddy and other leaders met the new PCC chief and congratulated him. Former Chief Minister Y.S. Rajasekhar Reddys aide Sureedu and others also met Revanth Reddy.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed the absence of dil ki doori between his government and 14 Kashmiri mainstream leaders at his first meeting with them after Aug-ust 2019, when his government had revoked Jammu and Kashmirs special status under Article 370 and downgraded and divided the state into two Union territories. Questions naturally arise about what lies behind this softening of the Modi governments approach, far removed from the demonising of tr-aditional political parties over the past two years.

While the foreign policy of any democracy gets impacted by its domestic politics, it is more so with this Indian government. After Mr Modis convincing re-election in 2019, the government decided to pursue its core agenda with vigour. The Jammu and Kashmir decision was taken in August 2019, followed in December by the Citizenship Ame-ndment Acts passage, creating discriminatory, religion-based and nation-specific exceptions for refugees to gain Indian citizenship. In February 2020, US President Donald Trump visited India on a highly calibrated visit to massage his ego. To avoid appearing partisan, such visits are not usually sch-eduled when the incumbent faces re-election in nine months. Prime Minister Modi had in the preceding years personally cultivated relations with the rulers of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, besides of course the United States.

Thus, when implementing its majoritarian BJP agenda domestically, the government calculated that Pakistans protests over J&Ks rejig could be contained without too much diplomatic damage. Similarly, the friendly government of Ban-gladesh could be appeased to ensure that it ignored the rhetoric of senior BJP leaders dubbing illegal immigrants as pests. The US under President Trump was also expected to downplay the issue, as he demonstrated by ignoring the communal incidents in New Delhi on the last day of his visit in February 2020.

However, the US as well as its Gulf allies Saudi Arabia and UAE had been closely watching developments in South Asia. The escalation of tensions after the Pulwama terror attack and Indias airs-trike on Balakot in Paki-stan, followed by Paki-stans retaliatory strike and dogfight resulting in the capture of an IAF pilot, saw the behind-the-scenes role played by these three nations. The fact that the Indian pilot was handed back almost immediately, giving a fillip to Mr Modis popularity just two months before the Lok Sabha election, earned these three nati-ons goodwill and possible leverage in India-Paki-stan affairs. C-Voter pol-ling data found that bet-ween January 1 and Mar-ch 7 the net approval rating of the Modi government rose from 32 per cent to 62 per cent. While some of the bump came after the Budget, the real spike was after Balakot. The popularity of Rahul Gan-dhi fell from 23.3 per cent to 8.2 per cent, while that of Mr Modi rose from 32.4 per cent to 63.2 per cent.

However, the BJPs assessment about the international reaction to its domestic agenda getting easily manged came up against unforeseen factors. First, the outbreak of Covid-19, beginning soon after Mr Trumps India visit, distracted India and even affected Indias ima-ge abroad after the poor handling of its second wave. Second, China prot-ested strongly after the J&K changes, claiming that India could not alter the status quo unilaterally as China was a party to the dispute. Thus, India should have been alert to Chinese mischief at the Line of Actual Control (LAC), especially as China had quickly managed to contain the epidemic. Instead of showing contrition for letting the virus escape and cause a global health and economic crisis, China chose to push its Peoples Liberation Army at multiple points in Eastern Ladakh up to its claim lines, upsetting the status quo. While it has agreed to a mutual withdrawal in the Pangong Tso and Kailash Hills sectors, its intrusions remain in Depsang Plains, Gogra and Hot Springs, etc.

The third unforeseen factor was the defeat of President Donald Trump in November 2020. After Joe Biden assumed the presidency, India realised that his Democratic Par-tys left wing had evangelistic interest in human rights and freedom of faith and expression. Ironically, two Indian-origin members of Congress, Pramila Jayapal and Ro Khanna, are among the strongest critics of the BJP majoritarian agenda, including its draconian Kashmir policy. President Biden too strongly advocated an alliance of dem-ocracies to counter the challenge from the strategic convergence of Russia and China. It was because of this that at the recent G-7 summit in Cornwall, four democracies were invited as guests  Australia, India, South Korea and South Africa.

Critics would say US foreign policy rests on pragmatic considerations, oft-en ignoring its own advocated values of democracy and human rights. How-ever, the times have cha-nged, and Cold War arguments may now be inapplicable, particularly after Mr Trumps attempt at undermining US democracy itself. Moreover, China presents a different challenge from the one the former Soviet Union held. It posits a hugely successful model resting on restricted political and personal freedoms in exchange for prosperity, material growth and economic security. To challenge its lure, liberal democracies are being compelled to argue the relevance of their own model. Thus, the US and other Western democracies cannot ignore the continued debasement of liberal democracy in Asia, and certainly in India as they look towards this country as a role model.

The PMs session with the Kashmiri political leaders is a recognition that the governments Kashmir policy has yielded poor results at home and abroad. The restoration of Article 370 seems unlikely as its revocation has been a core BJP demand and which has popular support. That leaves delimitation, elections and statehood. Views on their sequencing differ, but the road to statehood is clear. This clears the path for a calibrated resumption of normal relations with Pakistan. Pakistans Prime Minister Imran Khan in an interview has sought civilised relations with India. He also interestingly argues that even Pakistan doesnt want the Taliban to continue its onslaught in Afghanistan to depose the government as a civil war will only have more refugees streaming into an already economically challenged Pakistan. The national security advisers of India and Pakistan will both be at the coming Shanghai Cooperation Organisation meeting. Hopefully, the Indian government has realised that its Pakistan policy should be delinked from electoral considerations and strategically its Kashmir policy has only deepened Sino-Pakistan relations. If Pakistan too realises that terror is a dangerous instrument to wield against India as it begets global condemnation, besides singeing the user, the region might actually stand to gain.

The writer is a former secretary in the external affairs ministry. He tweets at @ambkcsingh.
Twitter is already engaged in a tussle with the Indian government over the new social media rules. (AFP Photo)

Twitter India MD Manish Maheshwari was booked in Uttar Pradesh's Bulandshahr district on Tuesday amid fresh controversy over the website showing a distorted map of India. An FIR was lodged against Maheshwari along with another company official by a Bajrang Dal office-bearer's complaint at the Khurja Nagar police station. This is the second FIR that has been filed against the social media giant in UP amidst its standoff with the government.

The controversy erupted on Monday as a user flagged Twitter for displaying a distorted map of India on its website under the header 'Tweep Life'. This is the second time that Twitter has misrepresented the map of India. The map was later removed from the website after backlash from netizens. Earlier, Twitter had shown Leh as part of China.

Twitter displayed a distorted map of India on its website that showed J&K, Ladakh as separate country. (Website photo)

According to PTI, the complaint filed by Bajrang Dal stated, "The world map does not show Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir as parts of India. This is not a coincidence. This act has hurt the sentiments of Indians, including me."

The FIR has also named Amrita Tripathi, News Partnerships Head as an accused. Both Maheshwari and Tripathi have been booked under IPC's section 505 (2) (public mischief). Charges under Information Technology Act section 74 (publication for fraudulent purpose) have also been invoked in the case, as reported by PTI.

Twitter is already engaged in a tussle with the Indian government over the new social media rules. The US digital giant was slammed by the government for deliberate defiance and failure to comply with the country's new IT rules, which led to the microblogging platform losing its legal shield as an intermediary in India, and becoming liable for users posting any unlawful content.

Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter.
Brazilians were recovering from Carnival in the heady days of February 2020 when the first known carriers of the new coronavirus flew home from Europe, planting the seeds of catastrophe.

In Brazil, Latin Americas largest nation, the virus found remarkably fertile ground, turbocharging the outbreak that has turned South America into the hardest-hit continent in the world.

Brazil recently surpassed 500,000 official Covid-19 deaths, the worlds second-highest total behind the United States. About 1 in every 400 Brazilians has died from the virus, but many experts believe the true death toll may be higher. Home to just over 2.7% of the worlds population, Brazil accounts for nearly 13% of recorded fatalities, and the situation there is not easing.

President Jair Bolsonaro has led a strikingly lackadaisical, dismissive and chaotic response to a coronavirus crisis that has left Brazil poorer, more unequal and increasingly polarized. Social distancing measures have been spotty and badly enforced, the president and his allies have promoted ineffective treatments, and for months the government failed to acquire a large number of vaccines.

Read more: Pfizer-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine combination yields better results, study finds

As a Brazilian, its appalling to see the throwback following three decades of health achievements happening so fast, with devastating consequences, said Marcia Castro, chair of the Department of Global Health and Population at Harvard University.

As the virus began spreading from large cities to remote corners of Brazil last year, it took an especially high toll in the Amazon region. By January, patients in the state of Amazonas were suffocating to death after the government was late to heed warnings about oxygen shortages.

Now as the country struggles to vaccinate people, the regions isolated villages, deep in the rainforest and often accessible only by river, still present a unique challenge.

Bolsonaro has told Brazilians repeatedly that they had nothing to fear. The social distancing, lockdowns and travel restrictions that became the norm elsewhere were wild overreactions that would devastate Brazils economy, he warned.

In my particular case, given my history as an athlete, should I become infected, I would have nothing to worry about, Bolsonaro said in March 2020. I wouldnt feel a thing, or at most, it would be a measly cold, a little flu. (He later tested positive for the virus and appeared to have only mild symptoms.)

That cavalier attitude alarmed doctors in Brazil, which has a solid track record of finding innovative solutions to vexing health problems.

Bolsonaro fired his first health minister in April of last year, after their disagreements over virus containment became public. The next minister lasted barely a month, unwilling to abide by Bolsonaros effusive endorsement of hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria pill that has not been shown to effectively treat Covid-19.

Then the president put Eduardo Pazuello, an army general with no background in health care, in charge of the ministry. He has been faulted by lawmakers for allowing the outbreak to spiral out of control this year, pushing the health care system to the point of collapse.

Even after all the hard lessons that have been learned and adjustments that have been made, hospitals in cities like Campo Grande, in the hard-hit western state of Mato Grosso do Sul, are overwhelmed.

The pandemic abated late last year, worsened as the new year began and exploded in March and April. Brazils official death tally averaged fewer than 400 a day in early November but soared to more than 3,000 a day in early April  tragedy on a scale few would have predicted.

In recent weeks, the daily death toll has exceeded 2,000, and new cases are surging again.

Dealing with death has become routine for Mauricio Antonio de Oliveira, 51, a supervisor at the Grupo Eden funeral home in Sao Paulo. But 15 months into the pandemic, he hasnt gotten used to the particular viciousness that Covid inflicts on families of the deceased.

Open coffin viewings are normal in Brazil, which allows the grieving to say a final farewell. But such funerals are prohibited for Covid victims.

Its very cruel because the person with Covid is hospitalized and then you dont see them anymore, he said. They want to see their loved one, but theres no way.

By April 2020, many hospital intensive care units were overloaded, leaving families scrambling to secure beds, or even chairs, in packed emergency rooms.

Francis Albert Fujii, an emergency care physician in Sao Paulo who helps transport critically ill patients to hospitals, spent the early months of the pandemic cloistered in his apartment when he wasnt working. Fujii, 41, a divorced father of two, missed family milestones and went 1 1/2 years without seeing his mother.

The virus killed two of his co-workers, a fellow physician and a nurse.

My biggest fear wasnt even getting sick, he said. It was infecting someone.

Things quieted down later in the year, but then the second wave hit, far worse than the first.

Weve been in this battle for 15 months and theres no way out of the crisis, he said. Im very sad about the situation were in. We need leadership that believes in the disease and takes the situation seriously.

During recent congressional hearings on the pandemic, a Pfizer executive said that last year officials ignored repeated offers from Pfizer to sell its Covid vaccine to Brazil.

The scarcity of vaccines has left governors, mayors and private sector leaders scrambling to strike their own deals with suppliers.

Bolsonaro has expressed skepticism and at times ambivalence about the importance of vaccines, once joking that vaccine makers would not be held responsible if people who were inoculated turned into crocodiles.

This has definitely been mismanaged, said Carla Domingues, an epidemiologist who ran Brazils national immunization program from 2011 to 2019. We didnt believe in the need for vaccination, and we didnt even believe a second wave was coming.

At the end of March, as deaths soared, only 7% of Brazilians had been at least partly vaccinated. The campaign has accelerated since then  around 30% of the population has had at least one dose  but it still has far to go.

Lawmakers in April formed a special committee to investigate the governments response to the pandemic. For several weeks, the panel has held televised hearings that have put Bolsonaros government on the defensive.

Members of Congress have asked why the government mass produced and distributed hydroxychloroquine long after leading medical authorities had warned against its use, and why it waited so long to start buying Covid vaccines.

The hearings have also aired suspicions that Bolsonaro actually wanted to let the virus spread freely, to reach herd immunity, no matter the cost  although experts question whether that goal is even attainable. Critics have accused the president of choosing the economy over lives, without saving either one.

Growing political pressure has not led the government to correct course or take responsibility for missteps. In fact, Bolsonaros government has vigorously fought efforts to rein in transmission, fighting, for instance, for the right of churches to hold services this year, even as hospitals were having to turn patients away.

Anger over the response has incited large demonstrations. The rage of protesters is evident in the word used most often in posters and graffiti to denounce Bolsonaros actions and inaction: genocide.
Highlights of this day in history: The U.S. Supreme Court effectively voids state death penalty laws; Jerusalem reunified under Israeli control after the Six-Day War; Singer Rosemary Clooney and actress Katharine Hepburn die. (June 29)
A man from the Republic of Ireland who is charged with supplying drugs in Derry has been released on bail.

The defendant, who cannot be named for legal reasons, has been charged with six offences including possessing cannabis with intent to supply, being concerned in the supply of the same drug, conspiracy to cultivate cannabis and possessing criminal property.

The offences are alleged to have been committed between December 26, 2020 and June 25, 2021.

Derry Magistrates Court was told that on June 25 the defendants address was searched when police found 130g of suspected cannabis.

A police officer said that 4,200 in cash was seized along with four mobile phones.

During police interview the accused provided no explanation for the cash and said he didnt believe it was 130g of cannabis.

Material was extracted from two mobile phones, a PSNI officer explained, which contained offers to sell herbal cannabis and reference to cultivating cannabis.

The court heard that he made admissions to supplying friends and further enquiries are required.

Police believe he is highly involved in the supply of drugs in the city, the officer added.

He said the defendant has 55 convictions in the south of Ireland, mainly for road traffic offences.

Objecting to bail, the officer expressed concerns that the defendant could abscond while on bail and interfere with the course of justice by deleting a Facebook account.

A defence solicitor said his client lived in homeless accommodation.

He submitted that some of the 4,200 in cash relates to the sale of a car and he has no trappings of wealth.

Drugs were bought in bulk, the defence solicitor said, along with a number of friends who share drugs about.

The defendant was described as a middle-aged man who has been living in Derry for three or four years.

The court was also told that he has little by way of a relevant criminal record.

Concluding, he raised concerns about the possibility of the mans homeless accommodation being withdrawn.

Deputy District Judge McStay granted the defendant his own bail of 400.

Amongst bail conditions, he must sign twice weekly at Waterside Police Station, is permitted to own one mobile phone with one SIM card with details provided to police who have the right to access it.
Police in Derry are appealing to the public for help in locating four-year-old Scarlet Duddy.

Inspector Swanson said: Scarlet was last seen shortly before midday today (Monday 28 June) leaving a childrens play centre on the Springtown Road area of the city.

We are keen to know that Scarlet is safe and well. We believe she may be in the company of a relative and may possibly be in the Republic of Ireland.

I would appeal to that person to get in touch with police as soon as possible on 101, quoting the reference number 932 of 28/06/21.

Scarlet is described as having hazel eyes and light brown hair which was tied up with a pink hair bow and her front two teeth are missing.

She was wearing peach leggings, a peach skirt, peach t-shirt with daddy's little superstar printed on the front and a dark blue jumper with silver sequined heart.

If any members of the public have any information about Scarlet, I would urge them to contact police immediately.
A County Derry family whose son as a severe form of autism have criticised the support services available to them as 'almost non-existent'.

Gavin and Madison Cruise's son Jordan was diagnosed with autism at an early age, and the severity of his condition has seen him slip through the gaps for available support.

With the Limavady family unable to secure any form of regular respite care for their son, one doctor advised them their best course of action would be to speak to the media.

The doctor said 'why don't you go to the paper about it?'. I went there to get medication or help, or advice, and I got it. I was told to go to the paper, Gavin told the County Derry Post.

He was one of the doctors in the community who had been trying to get Jordan respite. He had sent 12 or 16 emails, and they hadn't responded.

Following his diagnosis, seven-year-old Jordan was referred to an ASD social worker, but attempts to link him with available support ran into difficulties.

Mum Madison with Jordan and his sister Bethany.

The family found that some organisations found it difficult to manage the severity of their son's condition.

It was recommended that we should apply for Little Orchards children's centre, which is a nursery for special needs children in Gransha, said Gavin.

You have to have supporting evidence and some level of severity, so we did that, but he only attended two sessions.

All the other parents were allowed to go away and come back three hours later, but we were told to basically hang about or wait in the car.

He only lasted two sessions, and we had to buy the uniform and she actually asked if we could give it back.

We were then referred to Action for Children, who said they could offer respite. They had a nursery and could do speech and language and different programmes.

A woman called out to the house for an assessment in the home. When she was leaving, I asked about the respite and she said they didn't offer it.

After that, he was referred to the Children's Disability Team to be assessed for an intellectual disability, and he was diagnosed with that as well.

Madison, Bethany and Jordan Cruise.

The ASD team was always saying 'wait until you go to the Children's Disability Team, they'll be able to do more for you'.

The ASD team wanted rid of him, but the Children's Disability Team didn't want to take him either. It's hard to explain, but it's unbelievable.

It was really to do with his severity. I can't really give any other answer, I've thought about it and I can't come up with anything at all.

There has also been a delay in medication promised to Jordan, to help aid his sleep, with a commitment to provide the medicine in March never followed through.

Gavin says the experience has left the family feeling let down by the services which were meant to support them, with much-needed respite care never materialising.

Respite would allow us a break, some time to recharge and to get your energy and momentum back up again so you can continue to provide the high level of care you provide day in-day out, he said.

The Children's Disability Team can maybe give you one overnight every 8-10 weeks, but if another family goes into crisis at the time your son or daughter is scheduled, then you'll be knocked out.

The ASD also offer respite through their own facility, but Jordan was referred when he was five and never received it, and still hadn't when he left.

Jordan has one sister, who is a year older. It's very difficult going out in the car, and as a family, you're always divided. It's very difficult to do things as a complete family unit, you're always sort of separated.

Gavin says Jordan's sleep and social interaction have been affected.

Going out together can make it more stressful, so it's not your normal brother-sister relationship. She doesn't want Jordan in her room and she tries to keep her distance.

She's always asking 'when's Jordan going to speak?' or 'when's Jordan going to come and play with me?' and things like that.

Gavin says the support provided by Jordan's school, Rossmar, has been really good, but they are unable to provide the kind of respite care that would ease the pressure on his family.

Jordan's sleep and social interaction have also been affected by the lack of support, with one social worker claiming they had offered it in the form of awareness courses.

His sleep and his social interaction have been affected. He's not really getting any social interaction. Even Jordan's own disability social worker said she didn't know anything about Jordan, he said.

That's who you're relying on and they don't even know him. She said we were offered two courses and we didn't do them.

We were offered a Level 1 and Level 2 course in understanding autism, but the woman at the post-diagnosis meeting said, in her professional opinion, that there was no point in us attending.

She said we wouldn't take anything away from it, because it is basically just for mild autism. They were trying to justify themselves and say they had offered us things and we hadn't done them.

While the waiting lists for an autism diagnosis have been widely publicised, Gavin feels not enough thought has been given to what happens after a diagnosis.

We're just waiting and hoping we will get offered respite, and it will be guaranteed and more regular, not just phoning and saying they might have a date some time in August, he said.

There are no guarantees at all, there really isn't. You see on social media and reports about autism services moving to new premises, and you're scratching your head at it.

It seems to be that everybody is concerned about the waiting list to get an autism diagnosis, but there is no mention of the aftercare.
A County Derry principal who has amassed 35 years in local primary education has retired.

After 17 years as principal of Holy Family PS and NS, Magherafelt, Peter Donnelly will welcome children and parents for the last time tomorrow before taking his retirement.

Prior to taking on his role in Holy Family, Mr Donnelly had served as principal in Knocknagin PS, Desertmartin, St Mary's PS, Stewartstown, Co Tyrone, and St Patrick's PS, Rasharkin, Co Antrim.

Described by one member of staff as 'personifying a vocation', Mr Donnelly has spent his career committed to the lives and experience of the children in his care.

Among the highlights of his Holy Family career was breaking a world record for the largest gathering of live scarecrows, an event that drew much media attention in November 2018.

At a recent celebration mass held at the school, parish priest Fr John Gates thanked Mr Donnelly for his service and set he had set an example for others to follow.

Peter saw the school as a family, with a vision that ensured that the Catholic Ethos of pastoral care for each child was evident from the moment they entered the school, he said.

He made sure that all children were provided with the experiences to reach their potential. Mr Donnelly was doing track and trace before these terms became the norm.

Mr Donnelly with his family at the retirement celebrations last week.

With his rigorous systems of testing, target setting and tracking the progression of each child, he was able to ensure that every child received the best education the school could possibly provide.

We in Magherafelt are indebted to him for his hard work and dedication over the last 17 years.

The Chair of the school's Board of Governors also paid tribute to the outgoing principal, saying he made sure every child was equally valued.

Mr Donnelly was a principal deeply committed to ensuring that every child is valued equally and that this was reflected every day in what we as a school did and what we said, they said.

In respecting each other, by celebrating diversity, inclusivity and sharing those experiences our pupils lived out our school motto of 'Forward Together.'

He has worked tirelessly over many years in an effort to one day secure a new building for the 600 pupils from across 14 different nationalities.

Mr Donnelly receives a token of appreciation from Fr Gates.

While we will continue that work, Mr Donnelly has already laid the keystone, the heart and soul being those indelible values that permeate our corridors and classrooms.

Mr Donnelly has made a huge difference to the lives of so many children, an inspirational and caring principal, a devoted family man. We thank him for his years of selfless dedication.

Don't miss next week's County Derry Post for a feature interview with Mr Donnelly about his career in local primary education.
Arjun Kapoor shares a candid shot from his birthday lunch; looks back at year gone by

Actor Arjun Kapoor says in the past one year, from being a tired and confused person, he has evolved into someone who is ready to face the challenges life has to offer. In an Instagram post, the Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar actor, who celebrated his 36th birthday over the weekend, also thanked his family, friends and colleagues for standing by his side.

"What a difference a year makes... A year ago I was deflated, tired & confused, today I sit ready with energy, vigour & determination to face any curveball life throws my way," the actor wrote alongside a photograph of him clicked on his birthday lunch.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Arjun Kapoor (@arjunkapoor)

"I just want to acknowledge all those close to me who have believed in me, supported me & cared for me. My work mates, friends, family & my baby thank you for standing by my side," he added.

On the work front, the actor will next be seen in the Mohit Suri-directed thriller Ek Villain 2 and comedy Bhoot Police.
John Abrahams was the first shot for 2021 calendar, reveals Dabboo Ratnani

Since Dabboo Ratnani had to cancel his annual calendar launch party due to the ongoing pandemic, the celebrity photographer has been unveiling his shots on social media-- a virtual launch for the Dabboo Ratnani 2021 calendar. Much to our delight, along with the breathtaking portraits the photographer has also been uploading behind the scenes clips with his muses! In a recent post shared by him, actor John Abraham revealed that he shot his first official portfolio in 1998 with Ratnani. It has been 23 years and they are back together again. What a journey!

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Dabboo Ratnani (@dabbooratnani)

Well, before launching Johns shot from the calendar, the photographer shared the story behind the photograph. In a report shared by Spotboye, Dabboo was quoted saying, John was shooting in Lucknow when I was planning this years calendar. I just messaged him to plan something interesting. In a few minutes he messaged me that he was in Lucknow and had some time and called me there. For the uninitiated, the actor was in the city shooting for Milap Zaveris Satyameva Jayate 2.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Dabboo Ratnani (@dabbooratnani)

The photographer flew down a day and a half later and they shot for the calendar. Dabboo feels it was meant to be. Talking about the shot, he shared, We were planning to shoot his portrait in black and white, but when we saw it in colour, we couldnt not use it. It was actually the first shot we did for this years calendar.

Well, we cant wait to see how it turns out!
Thomas Francis Meagher Flag-Raising Ceremony (Waterford, June 2021)

Speech

As a proud Freeman of Waterford, it is an honour for me to take part in this commemoration of the first raising of our national flag in Waterford in 1848 and to pay tribute to Waterfords own Thomas Francis Meagher.

History is a continuum in which, in one way of looking at things, each new day, each month and each year remakes the world, usually by means of imperceptible increments. But there are times when the wheel of life spins more aggressively and new eras appear to be forming in the womb of time.

1848, when Thomas Francis Meagher first raised the tricolour at the Irish Confederations Wolfe Tone Club on the Mall, was one such juncture in history when an old world was on the wane and, in the desperation of that dark and dreadful year for Ireland, new imaginings about our countrys future were coming into focus. Thomas Francis Meagher was someone whose mind abounded with ambitions for Ireland and it is fitting that we remember him in his home city almost 200 years after the year of his birth.

We all come of age in different circumstances and it is undoubtedly a blessing to do so in settled times when the call of daunting, dangerous challenges is muted. Then there are those who lives coincide with a cusp in history when the call to action becomes difficult for vigorous minds to ignore.

Meagher became politically active at a time when the long ascendancy of Daniel OConnell was ebbing and the Great Famine was about to unleash its waves of devastation that would change Ireland forever.

I like to compare that period in the 1840s with the turn-of-the nineteenth century when, in the wake of the fall of Parnell, a rising generation developed new attitudes that led to the Irish revolution in the second decade of the twentieth century.

When Meagher was born in 1823, the OConnellite world was still in the making. It would be six years before the crowning achievement of Catholic Emancipation. Meaghers family was deeply embedded in the political tradition of parliamentary nationalism created by OConnell and indeed his father was an OConnellite M.P. for this City for a decade after the Liberators death.

Meagher spent four of his formative years outside of Ireland at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire. When I visited Stonyhurst in 2016 to speak about another one of that schools past pupils, Joseph Mary Plunkett, I was shown some of Meaghers workbooks from his schooldays which included some juvenile poems of his.

In Ireland, the years between 1844 and 1848 were ones of political turbulence and economic disaster. Meagher returned to Ireland at nineteen in the year of Repeal, 1843, and joined the many young Irishmen who rallied in support of OConnells bid to re-establish a form of self-government for Ireland. As the Repeal movement unraveled and OConnells authority came under pressure, younger voices, Thomas Meagher among them, who took inspiration from the rise of romantic nationalism in Europe, asserted themselves and ultimately parted ways with OConnell in 1846.

This led to the creation of the Irish Confederation and ultimately to the Young Ireland rising of 1848 which resulted in Meaghers conviction, sentencing to death, commutation and transportation.

There are several reasons why I take a special interest in the life and legacy of Thomas Francis Meagher.

First, as a Waterford man, I see him as one of the great figures from this citys history, and it is fitting that he is impressively memorialised not far from where he first raised our tricolour in 1848.

Second, more than 50 years after I first studied the subject at Mount Sion, I retain a keen interest in Irish history and especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I take the view that the Young Ireland movement, overshadowed by the Great Famine, and, in terms of political history, wedged between the age of OConnell and the emergence of the Fenian movement in the 1860s, is a neglected domain. Meaghers life provides a lookout point from which to view the Young Irelanders.

Third, as Ambassador to the USA since 2017, I have interacted intensively with Irish Americans and I see Meagher as a key figure from the history of the Irish in America.

During the pandemic, my wife Greta and I, detached from our family across the ocean, and unable to travel very far from Washington DC, took a number of day trips to places in the neighbouring states of Virginia and Maryland. These included visits to the Civil War battlefields at Bull Run, Fredericksburg and Antietam, at all of which Meagher fought as an officer of the Union Army.

On the day we visited Antietam to see the Irish Brigade Memorial, I was struck by the thought that Thomas Francis Meagher was a rare individual in that he made a notable impact on two countries, on Ireland as a romantic revolutionary and on America as a civil war General.

Whats more, there are memorials in Meaghers honour on two continents. At the Antietam battlefield, Meaghers image is engraved on the Irish memorial and he is listed among the Union Generals involved in what became the bloodiest single day in American history. In September, I am due to pay an official visit to Montana and look forward to seeing the Meagher equestrian statue in that States Capital, Helena. The spot at Fort Benton on the Missouri River where Meagher met his death is also marked in his memory.

In Ireland, Thomas Francis Meagher was part of a group of young Irish intellectuals who, with inspiration from the wave of romantic radicalism that swept across Europe in 1848, devised a new definition of Irish nationality. As an agent of immediate political change, their efforts were a failure, but they were part of a continuum that, through words and deeds, kept the flame of Irish freedom alive during that most tragic of eras in our history.

As we remember that idealistic young man, I cannot resist reading from one of his speeches delivered at Dublins Conciliation Hall in February 1846 when Meagher was still attached to OConnell and the cause of Repeal:

Let earnest truth, stern fidelity to principle, love for all who bear the name of Irishman, sustain, ennoble and immortalize this cause. Thus shall we reverse the dark fortunes of the Irish race, and call forth here a new nation from the ruins of the old. . Thus shall an honourable kingdom be enabled to fulfil the great ends that a bounteous Providence hath assigned her  which ends have been signified to her in the resources of her soil, and the abilities of her sons.

In America, Meaghers contribution to the making of Irish America was an important one in that he was an avid supporter of the Union cause and urged his fellow Irishmen to follow his lead.

In nineteenth-century America, the Civil War was the kind of watershed that the Famine was in Irish history. After the Civil War, America experienced a period of rapid economic advancement during which immigrants, including the Irish, played a central role. Whereas in the 1840s and 1850s, nativist movements flourished in opposition to immigration from Ireland and elsewhere, the contribution of the Irish to the Union cause during the Civil War was one of the factors that brought about a waning of anti-Irish sentiment.

Allow me to finish by quoting an assessment of Meagher written in 1916 by Arthur Griffith in his introduction to a collection of Meaghers speeches. Griffith wrote, that while Meagher was not the greatest of the Young Irelanders (that title he gave to Thomas Davis and John Mitchell), he was the movements most picturesque and gallant figure and that he stands above all his colleagues, and indeed above all Irishmen of the century as the National Orator. His speeches, Griffith believed, would live forever as the authentic and eloquent voice of Irish nationalism.1

I do not know if Griffiths book of Meaghers speeches appeared before or after the Easter Rising of 1916, but it seems entirely fitting that the inspirational words of Meagher of the Sword should have appeared in print during that fateful year when another idealistic generation of young Irish people decided to strike for freedom.

Daniel Mulhall is Irelands Ambassador to the United States of America.

1. Arthur Griffith (ed.), Meagher of the Sword, (Dublin: M.H. Gill, 1916), p. xviii.

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We're celebrating our 20th birthday this month, and we've invited industry experts, researchers and scientists to write in and paint a vision of the future, 20 years from now. Here's what Ranjit Radhakrishnan, Chief Product Officer, BYJUS had to share about his vision of the future.

In the last century, the evolution of education accelerated in tandem with the evolution in technology. However, the journey towards embracing technology in education was mellow, frequently treated as an add-on' or the exception to the rule  appealing primarily to part-time students seeking more flexibility.

However, it was the COVID-19 pandemic that truly disrupted this approach  upending every aspect of education as we knew it  and changed the functional aspect of learning. It put the spotlight on the promising way forward for learning and the different modes of delivering quality education.

The pandemic also spurred innovation in the education sector at a never-seen-before pace, and it is now perhaps safe to assume that digitised, tech-enabled education will be crucial in achieving better learning outcomes in the years to come.

With edtech platforms gaining uninhibited momentum in growth post-2020, the sectors market size and potential continue to witness an upward swing. In fact, as per recent reports, Indias edtech industry is poised to surge to $30 billion in the next 10 years. With opportunities abound, and technology continuing to act as a catalyst for innovation in education, the next 20 years will truly define how the sector can democratise tech-enabled education, make it hyper-personalised, cost-effective, and immersive, among others. Two decades is akin to a lifetime in terms of constantly evolving technology and I feel global edtech platforms will rapidly innovate in these areas:

Uber personalisation

A one-size-fits-all model of education is passe. The coming 20 years will give edtech platforms the opportunity to meet evolving needs of learners across any and all requirements. Powered by data, Artificial Intelligence, and deep learning models, students will get access to specific support and guidance, optimised for their own individual needs, stage and style of learning and preferences. This will impact everything -- students learning path, the type of content they are exposed to, the timing and the goal-setting. We can expect most content, experiences, and interventions to be super personalised that will further enrich learning potential and boost creativity. The combination of AI and human abilities will be key to achieving this level of personalisation and customisation to teaching methods catering to individuals needs.

Synchronous and asynchronous learning formats will co-exist

While there is no doubt that students enjoy having more agency over their schedule and learning pace, combining that with the discipline and the rigour of a live class is important. This outlook will only get stronger over time, with a preference for blended formats that adopt both synchronous and asynchronous learning styles. By mixing the two, we will be able to gain advantages for each while reducing the limitations. This blended format will help reduce the isolation of asynchronous learning, while the limited flexibility of synchronous learning can be mitigated by asynchronous elements. Such innovative content delivery using a combination of always-on, live visual techniques while allowing students to control their pace of learning will make learning more engaging, equitable, scalable and personalised.

Content will be immersive, interactive, collaborative

As technologies evolve, so will learning experiences. With the help of VR, AR and Computer Vision, students will be able to immerse themselves into experiential, visual and true-to-life simulations. These will be further enhanced by using layers of information and insights. Students and learners across the world will be able to collaborate in real-time to co-create and work on the same visual models and projects simultaneously. Such immersive content will be instrumental in the gamification of learning techniques by helping create content that is fun, exciting and collaborative. In the coming years, the role of the arts - be it music, dance, crafts, painting - will be more significant than ever in helping students develop flexibility, expressiveness and adaptability in life situations. Immersive content and delivery of these skills, driven through VR and AR, will also greatly benefit students.

Learning devices and IoT will be the new normal

With the evolution of software and content to drive learning outcomes, what will naturally evolve is the development of newer forms of learning devices. These devices will be designed for learning first and will serve as a companion for students as they go through their most transformational period. Schools and classrooms will also further adopt IoT and learning devices to help better understand how learning is being received by students and use those insights to make the right interventions or provide the right hyper-personalised guidance.

Globally, edtech companies have been innovating products and platforms continuously and yet, we have just skimmed the surface of what is possible. We started with videos, moved to adaptive learning, interactive and game-based learning and then to hands-on, experiential learning. There is still so much to learn, explore, build. The students of the future will be at the forefront of education, empowered to create their own learning journeys. This will be supplemented by harnessing technology into building products that keep customers at the centre of innovation.

In the next two decades, what we can do with online learning is beyond just access and reach, but build powerful systems that possess the best omnipresent learning models and content to enable lifelong learning.

By- Ranjit Radhakrishnan, Chief Product Officer, BYJUS

To read what other industry leaders and experts have to say about the future in their respective fields, visit our 20th Anniversary Microsite.
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WASHINGTON (AP)  The Supreme Court on Monday refused to allow New Hampshire to sue neighboring Massachusetts over an income tax dispute involving people who have been working from home during the coronavirus pandemic.

The justices rejected New Hampshire's complaint without comment. The state objects to Massachusetts' collection of income tax from roughly 80,000 New Hampshire residents who are employed by Massachusetts companies, but who have been working remotely.





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By KIMBERLEE KRUESI

Associated Press

NASHVILLE, Tenn.  For a moment, the sight of a Christmas trees in the back of the bombed-out building took the workers aback. There it was, still standing at the approach of summer, adorned with festive holiday decorations amid the rubble of the powerful blast last winter.

It was now early June, nearly six months after Nashville woke up to a Christmas Day bombing that ripped a hole in the heart of Music City's historic downtown. A recreational vehicle had been intentionally detonated, killing the bomber, injuring three others and forcing more than 60 businesses to close.





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By CHALIDA EKVITTAYAVECHNUKUL

Associated Press

BANGKOK  As Thailand struggles to slow its worst wave of coronavirus infections, Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha announced Friday a one-month lockdown of camps where construction workers are housed in Bangkok and nine other areas.

The situation has become critical as the number of hospital beds in Bangkok for seriously ill COVID-19 patients runs short despite the creation of several field hospitals. Prayuth said a proposal for a seven-day curfew for all of Bangkok has been rejected for the time being.





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SEATTLE  The Boylston Place Apartments, at 1816 Boylston Ave., have sold for a bit over $9.3 million, according to King County records. The seller was Boylston Apartments LP, which acquired the land in 1989 for over $376,000, then developed it.

The buyer was TE GKI Boylston LLC. Public records indicate a loan from Thorofare Asset Based Lending.





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BELLEVUE  A small office building at 1412 112th Ave. N.E. has sold for a little over $4.6 million, according to King County records. The seller was Cascade Realty Group LLC, which acquired the property in 2007 for $3 million.

The buyer was Evergreen 1412 LLC, which is associated with Evergreen Gavekal, of Bellevue. (The firm was previously known as Evergreen Capital Management.) Public records indicate a loan from Twinstar Credit Union.





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State-news

Senate committee explores how strict a medical marijuana program should be

Rogelio V. Solis I AP Sen. David Blount, D-Jackson, watches a zoom presentation on the monitor by Oklahoma House of Representatives Republican member Scott Fetgatter, regarding his states handling and development of medical marijuana policies, Monday, at the Capitol in Jackson, Miss., during the Mississippi Senate Public Health and Welfare Committees hearing on medical marijuana. Rogelio V. Solis I AP Sen. Kevin Blackwell, R-Southaven, left, asks a question that elicits a laugh from Sen. Barbara Blackmon, D-Canton, during a hearing of the Mississippi Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee on medical marijuana, Monday, at the Capitol in Jackson, Miss.

JACKSON  Against the backdrop of a court ruling that tossed a voter-backed medical cannabis program, state lawmakers on Monday considered two very different approaches to medical marijuana regulations.

The Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee on Monday heard from representatives in two states  one in Utah and one in Oklahoma.

Senate Public Health Chairman Hob Bryan, D-Amory, told the Daily Journal that Mondays hearing is a way for lawmakers to consider how a potential program should be regulated.

What that looks like right now, I dont know, but I do believe there is a widespread consensus that people who are suffering from severe illness should have access to medical marijuana, Bryan said.

In Utah, marijuana is strictly regulated for medicinal purposes, and only around 42 pharmacies in the state carry an active business license to participate in the program.

By contrast, Oklahoma has a much less regulated medical marijuana program, which has about 368,218 patients or about 9.3% of the state.

If its medicine, lets treat it like medicine, Evan Vickers, Utahs senate majority leader told lawmakers via Zoom. Both from the regulatory side and the medical side.

According to information gathered from the National Conference of State Legislatures, around 23,089 people are registered in Utahs medical marijuana program, which is about 0.72% of the state. Around 2,000 dispensaries in the state have an active business license.

An Oklahoma lawmaker, however, believes the approach taken by his state is not especially controversial.

Most of the people that I talk to, even in a conservative state like Oklahoma, really dont have a problem with medical marijuana or an adult-use program, Oklahoma state Rep. Scott Fetgatter said at the hearing.

Mark Cash, the owner of a CBD dispensary in Saltillo, spoke at the hearing and said that he sells products in his store that have a minor dosage of THC, the main ingredient in cannabis.

Cash said he was prepared to transition his store over to a medical marijuana dispensary because hes seen firsthand the effects that his products have on people.

If we could allow a higher level of THC  I think that would be worth it, Cash said.

Cash said he believes $25,000 to $30,000 per year would be a reasonable fee for a marijuana business license and would allow for fair competition among business developers.

This is the second hearing the Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee has conducted since the Mississippi Supreme Court in May ruled that the medical marijuana initiative and the states ballot initiative process are invalid.

Since the high courts decision to toss out the initiative, talk has circulated about a special session to reinstall a medical marijuana program and restore the initiative process so voters can directly amend the Constitution.

The only person with the power to call the lawmakers back into session before January 2022 is Republican Gov. Tate Reeves, who would also have the authority to set the agenda for such a session.

Reeves seemed hesitant at first to call lawmakers back into session. Earlier this month, he shifted his position somewhat and told members of the press he supported a special session to address marijuana as long as a broad consensus existed among legislators beforehand about the specifics of any proposed program.

I can call them into a special session, and for $30,000 a day, they can sit around and talk and negotiate and determine what a medical marijuana plan can look like, Reeves previously told the Daily Journal. Or I can not call them in yet, and for $0 a day, they can talk and negotiate and develop a plan.

Reeves has been less receptive to using a special session for lawmakers to address the initiative process. Since he believes the initiative process cant be considered by voters until 2022, he believes the regular legislative sessions will give lawmakers ample opportunity to address the initiative process.

Republican Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, the leader of the Senate, declined to comment on whether he has talked with Reeves recently on the possibility of a special session.

Im not talking about that today, Hosemann said. Everythings in the governors hands.
The Arrogance Of Twitter, The Social Parasite!

Your account is now available for use. Please be aware that any additional notices against your account may result in your account being locked again and potentially suspended. In order to avoid this, do not post additional material in violation of our Copyright Policy and immediately remove any material from your account for which you are not authorised to post, the social media app warned Indias IT minister Shivshankar Prasad after unlocking the account

Behave, or else we shut you out, that was Twitters initial reaction to Indian authorities trying to bring in regulations for social media platforms that undermine the laws of the land and pretend to be the new age incarnations of the East India Company.

Twitter trained its guns first on Indias communications and IT minister Ravishankar Prasad for bringing in new IT rules that makes the likes of Twitter answerable to its customers for any wrongdoing by the company or its officials. The initial dose was denying Ravi Shankar Prasad access to his account for an hour.

The action, according to the social media platform, followed the ministers failure to comply with US federal regulations  a quid-pro-quo to the Indian governments insistence on Twitter following Indian laws in India.

"Twitter denied access to my account for almost an hour on the alleged ground that there was a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of the USA and subsequently they allowed me to access the account," Prasad said in a series of tweets.

Twitter is based out of the United States and only US laws apply to Twitter, that is what it is trying to prove to Ravi Shankar Prasad.

The social media app unlocked the access to Prasads account by posting a warning message, Your account is now available for use. Please be aware that any additional notices against your account may result in your account being locked again and potentially suspended. In order to avoid this, do not post additional material in violation of our Copyright Policy and immediately remove any material from your account for which you are not authorised to post.

While the social media platform explained that the ministers account was frozen following a DMCA notice for content posted from his account the blocked Twitter account was visible for public viewing.

Twitter is asserting its view that when it comes to rules of conduct, Indians, whether President or Prime Minister, should abide by its own rules, or at least the laws of the United States!

It is not just the IT minister who got a dressing down from Twitter, for it also blocked Shashi Tharoor, who is the chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology.

The Congress MP said that he was blocked from his Twitter account for a copyright violation over a video he had posted of a dance performance featuring the song Rasputin and referred to the DMCA as 'hyperactive.'

After a series of tweets in which Tharoor called the complaint 'stupid' and 'pointless', he wrote: "As chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology, I can state that we will be seeking an explanation from Twitter India for the locking of RS Prasad's and my accounts and the rules and the procedures they follow while operating in India."

Twitter feels that Ravishankar Prasad was all wrong, or even impertinent, when he said, Twitter's actions were in gross violation of Rule 4(8) of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021 where they failed to provide me any prior notice before denying me access to my own account.

The minister also clarified that in the past several years, no television channel or anchor has complained about copyright infringements with regard to these news clips of his interviews shared on social media.

"No matter what any platform does, they will have to abide by the new IT Rules fully and there shall be no compromise on that, the minister added.

Titter, it seems, is taking revenge after it lost its intermediary status and become liable under Indian laws, including the Indian Penal Code, as it failed to comply with the new IT rules.

We gave them (Twitter) three months. Others have followed (the rules), they haven't. Rule 7 of the (IT) guidelines says that if you don't comply then under Section 79, you may lose intermediary status and may become liable to other laws, including penal laws of the country, reports quoted Prasad as saying.

Twitter later aid it is trying to comply with the new Indian rules, but has not done so yet, except saying tat it has appointed an interim compliance officer, who was later reported to have quit the job.

Meanwhile, Twitter is trying to garner support in the bme of human rights, for which it claimed backing of some experts from the United Nations who allegedly claimed that Indias new IT rules are not in conformity with international human rights norms  that "due diligence obligations" placed on intermediaries may lead to "infringement of a wide range of human rights"!
Centrum Financial Services gets `in-principle' approval for setting up small finance bank

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has decided to grant in-principle approval to Centrum Financial Services Limited for setting up a small finance bank. RBI would consider granting a licence for commencement of banking business on being satisfied that the applicant has complied with the requisite conditions laid down by RBI as part of in-principle approval.

RBI had, in December 2019, issued general guidelines for on tap licensing of small finance banks in the private sector.

The in-principle approval has been accorded in specific pursuance to the Centrum Financial Services offer dated 1 February 2021 in response to the Expression of Interest notification dated 3 November 2020 published by the Punjab & Maharashtra Co-operative Bank Ltd, Mumbai.

RBIs December 2018 guidelines for on tap licensing of small finance banks in the private sector varies vastly from the earlier guidelines on small finance banks issued on 27 November 2014.

As per the revised guidelines,
ADA [ndash] Anna Marie Brown, 68, of Ada, Oklahoma passed away Tuesday, June 22, 2021, in Ada. Arrangements are pending at this time with Estes-Phillips Funeral Home. For up-to-date service information, please follow us on Facebook at Estes Phillips Funeral Home.
A High Court challenge has been brought by the DPP against the Special Criminal Court's decision to deem, after a retrial, a mans conviction of membership of an unlawful organisation a miscarriage of justice.

The court made the finding in respect of 47-year-old Michael Connolly, of Grange Drive in Dundalk, Co Louth, who spent some 14 months in prison.

He had denied a charge of IRA membership, brought after he was observed by gardai driving in convoy on December 16th, 2014, with another man who was then found with two improvised explosive devices.

His original conviction in the Special Criminal Court (SCC) in 2017, where he was sentenced to three years imprisonment, was subsequently overturned by the court of Appeal in 2018.

Mr Connolly was acquitted of the membership charge following a retrial at the SCC in 2019.

His conviction in the non-jury court was based on belief evidence given by a senior Garda that he was a member of the IRA.

The SCC can accept the belief evidence of high-ranking gardai in membership cases as long as it is based on material that is independent to the evidence before the court.

It emerged that in Mr Connollys case that the basis for Assistant Commissioner Michael OSullivans belief evidence was also contained in the book of evidence against the accused.

This, it was claimed, resulted in the belief evidence being in breach of the double-counting rule.

This rule requires that belief evidence is supported by evidence that is wholly extrinsic and outside of the matters relied on in the formation of the belief evidence.

The breach of the rule resulted in Mr Connolly's acquittal of the membership charge.

On June 14th last the SCC formally deemed that Mr Connolly's convictions was a miscarriage of justice.



The SCC held that there had been "a grave defect in the administration of justice brought about by agents of the state".

It found that the assistant commissioner had made an unqualified assertion during the trial that none of the material that formed the basis of his belief was in the book of evidence against the accused.

The SCC described this assertion as seriously incomplete and misleading.

At the High Court on Monday Brendan Grehan SC for the DPP said that the SCC's decision was flawed and should be set aside.

The DPP accepted that there was a reasonable possibility that the Assistant Commissioner considered and relied upon non-extrinsic measures when forming his belief.

It was the DPP's case the Mr Connollys acquittal was only based on the reasonable possibility that double counting could not be excluded.

There was evidence, establishing beyond a reasonable doubt, implicating Mr Connolly in the transportation of two improvised devices, the DPP claims.

This makes the SCC decision regarding the miscarriage "unsustainable."

The miscarriage finding was made despite the fact there was a proper basis for the prosecution.

There was no evidence that the Assistant Commissioner made his assertion to the SCC in the knowledge it was misleading, the DPP says.

There was no reasonable basis for the SCC to conclude that there had been a miscarriage due to a grave defect in the administration of justice brought about by agents of the state, the DPP also claims.

There was no finding of improper deliberate action on the part of the state in the conviction of Mr Connolly, the DPP adds.

Counsel said that there was no right of appeal against the SCC's decision, and the only way to challenge it was by way of judical review proceedings.

In its action against the SCC and Mr Connolly, the DPP seeks an order setting the finding that there was a miscarriage of justice quashed.

The DPP also seeks a declaration that the decision made by the SCC was made in excess of that court's jurisdiction, and is irrational, unreasonable and disproportionate.

Mr Justice Meenan, who considered the application on an ex-parte basis, directed that the application for permission to bring the application be made on notice to the respondents.

The judge also placed a stay on the decision.

The stay he said was on the terms including that the respondents, on a week's notice to the DPP, could come to court seeking to have the stay lifted.

The case will return before the court in October.
Over 500 people used the walk-in Covid-19 test centre in Dundalk while it was in operation last week, according to the Department of Public Health North East.

The centre, which was in operation from Wednesday through Sunday, was established due to rising Covid-19 cases in Dundalk and concerns about the Delta variant.

A total of 583 people used the walk-in centre during the five days it was active.

The highest number of people visited the facility on Wednesday with 169 people getting tested. The second-highest number of people who visited the facility was on Sunday, with 132 people getting tested.

The lowest number of people getting tested was on Saturday, when only 62 people were tested at the facility.

Current test positivity data was not available at the time of publication, with case figures in the electoral area continuing to be unavailable due to the HSE cyber attack in May.

The centre was located in Car Park 1 in the Marshes Shopping Centre, and was run by Midlands Louth Meath Community Healthcare alongside the Department of Public Health North East.

According to the Chief Officer of Midlands Louth Meath Community Healthcare Organisation, Des OFlynn, pop up centres like the one in Dundalk are useful to track asymptomatic cases of Covid-19 and further prevent the spread of the virus.

It comes as the government are set to decide whether or not to ease restrictions further, including reopening indoor dining and drinking in pubs and restaurants at a cabinet meeting earlier today.

The HSE are also encouraging anyone over the age of 50 who has not yet received a Covid-19 vaccination to attend a pharmacy to receive a one-shot Janssen vaccine.

There are currently 27 pharmacies in Louth that are offering the service, with 13 of these pharmacies located in Dundalk.

Speaking last week, Dr Augustine Pereira, director of Public Health North East said that there had been an increase in the number of Covid-19 cases detected in Dundalk in recent weeks.

"There has been a concerning increase in the detection of the Delta variant in Ireland and the department is also investigating probable Variants Of Concern of the delta clade in the county," said Dr Pereira.
A BMW crashed into a barrier after it failed to stop for Gardai in north Louth, Dundalk district court heard last week.

Scott Carthy (19) with an address at Annies, Kilcurry, Dundalk, was originally charged with dangerous driving at Drumnacarra, Drumnasillagh and Aghnaskeagh, and with driving without insurance or a driving licence at Dromad on March seventh last.

The court heard last week how Dromad Gardai spotted a BMW being driven erratically and overtaking at high speed at 10.50pm.

It failed to stop for them.

A decision was made not to chase the car and to follow it at a safe distance instead.

The BMW crashed into a barrier and the driver got out and fled on foot.

Scott Carthy - who had no previous convictions, was arrested following a foot pursuit and was charged with dangerous driving.

The Defence solicitor said his client, an apprentice electrician in Dublin, had bought the car for 300 and had panicked.

The court was asked to reduce the dangerous driving charges to careless driving.

Gardai said there was no objection to that course of action.

Judge Eirinn McKiernan said Im not overly impressed. He doesnt even bother to turn up" but the solicitor explained he had told the defendant not to come to court.

The 19 year old was remanded on continuing bail in his absence to September first to be present for finalisation of the case.
Louth TDs and Senators have welcomed the 3 million funding towards the Narrow Water Bridge project between Louth and Down.

The funding, which was announced by Taoiseach Micheal Martin this morning, is set to be used to put the project out to tender, with additional funding to be provided to the project when the final costs are determined.

Fianna Fail Senator for Louth, Erin McGreehan said that she is delighted to see the project going ahead and that the project is more than just a bridge.

This project is far more than a bridge, it is a symbol for Irelands future. A symbol to draw a line on the past by respecting it, acknowledging that past but it is also about building bridges, forging relationships, and moving on to the next 100 years of this islands story, said Senator McGreehan.

The people either side of Carlingford Lough are so close  culturally, geographically and yet we have been divided.

Fine Gael TD for Louth and chairman of the Oireachtas Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement, Fergus ODowd called it a shining example of what can be achieved by working together, North and South.

This is truly a cross-border project and when constructed will greatly assist tourism, trade and connectivity in the east border region, both North and South. There will also be a huge spin-off for active travel and recreation, including greenways, park walkways etc, said Deputy ODowd.

Dundalk Sinn Fein TD, Ruairi O Murchu said that while he welcomed the funding, there must be no more false dawns for the bridge project.

I very much welcome the announcement of funding to bring it the project through to tender stage, based on the current designs. It is a step forward and will be welcomed by those who live in the North Louth and South Down areas, said Deputy O Murchu.

But we need detail and timelines on this to ensure that it continues to progress, he continued.

Fine Gael Senator for Louth, John McGahon said that the project was the most significant infrastructure project for County Louth since the creation of the M1 Motorway over twenty years ago.

Its truly a great announcement for the people of North Louth and everyone in the Omeath community who have put so much effort into this project over such a long period of time, said Senator McGahon.
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U.S. general: 'wildfire of terrorism' on march in Africa

A senior U.S. general has warned that the wildfire of terrorism is sweeping across a band of Africa and needs the attention of the world
Oregon higher ed leaders see funding, new bills as major step in the right direction for colleges, universities


Steve Bates has resided in Boring for 44 years and is an honorary life member of the Vietnam Veterans of America and is a life member of the Associates of Vietnam Veterans of America. He serves as chair of the Committee on Memorials and Remembrance and president of the Vietnam War Memorial Fund.
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Dazzling fireworks displays over downtown Mesa, as seen here from this 2019 July 4 celebration, will be appearing instead over Fiesta Mall this Saturday for the second consecutive year.
EBRD providing 25 million loan to Aklease

Funding under EU-backed TurSEFF III expand local enterprises access to climate finance

Energy efficiency and climate resilience technologies in focus

Reinforcing its commitment to expanding climate finance in economies where it invests, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is providing 25 million in new funds to Ak Finansal Kiralama A.S. (Aklease) to finance green investments by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Turkey.

Aklease is a leasing subsidiary of Akbank and the fifth largest leasing company in terms of net leasing receivables.

The EBRD loan will enable the companyto provide funding to eligible private-sector companies for investments in energy efficiency, water efficiency, waste minimisation and small-scale renewable energy.

The loan was signed by EBRD Managing Director for Financial Institutions Francis Malige and Aklease General Manager Cetin Duz on the sidelines of the EBRD 2021 Annual Meeting and Business Forum.

Mr Malige said: Leasing is an important tool to finance businesses and is especially popular for the purchase and use of equipment and vehicles. Together with Aklease, we want to encourage smaller enterprises to invest in greener and more climate-friendly solutions. As the recovery of the Turkish economy is gathering pace, now is the time to commit to sustainable, post-pandemic growth.

Mr Duz added: We no longer finance coal-fuelled thermal power plants and coal mining investments. Aklease is a strong believer in climate finance and encourages customers to pursue green investments. As we transform our environmental, social and governance culture, we have implemented ECOLease, the first leasing-sector product focused on renewable energy and energy and resource efficiency. In 2020, between 70 and 75 per cent of our investments were in sustainable energy. We are extremely proud of this and continue on the green path. The loan agreement with the EBRD is a strong indicator of this direction.

The loan is extended under the third phase of the Turkey Sustainable Energy Financing Facility (TurSEFF) backed by the European Union and with funds from the Republic of Turkeys Ministry of Treasury and Finance. Launched in 2010, the credit line has provided 694 million to finance more than 2,000 projects to date, helping to install 595 MW of renewable energy capacity in the country.

In Turkey, the EBRD is a major institutional investor and to date has invested almost 13.5 billion in the economy through 341 projects, with 96 per cent of these in the private sector. In 2021, the Banks investments will support the countrys recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic.
In the week ending 25 June 2021 the net position of the Eurosystem in foreign currency (asset items 2 and 3 minus liability items 7, 8 and 9) increased by EUR 0.1 billion to EUR 313.5 billion.

As a result of the Eurosystems open market operations and standing facilities, net lending to credit institutions (asset item 5 minus liability items 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5 and 4) decreased by EUR 43.4 billion to EUR 1,531.3 billion.

Claims on non-euro area residents denominated in euro (asset item 4) increased by EUR 3 billion to EUR 13.5 billion, mainly owing to Eurosystem operations providing euro liquidity to non-euro area central banks (further details can be found on the ECBs website under Central bank liquidity lines).

Base money (liability items 1, 2.1 and 2.2) increased by EUR 108.4 billion to EUR 5,855.7 billion.

The table below provides the detailed breakdown of securities held for monetary policy purposes (asset item 7.1) into the different portfolios. All portfolios are accounted for at amortised cost.
SINCE Zeik Tuit was introduced to lobster fishing in Dunmanus Bay as a boy by his father, he was always going to be in it for the long haul.

I bought a boat and I spent 25 years at sea, says Zeik.

Donning sea-slicked oilskins, braving weather and waves to put food on this island nations plates in good and bad times, he has stuck with fishing through thick and thin.

Zeiks trawler was among the flotilla of up to 50 that steamed to Cork city docks last month, on a protest rally to call for the reversal of quota cuts and a re-negotiation of EU Fisheries Policy in Ireland,

He is dad to three children. Damien is a talented musician in up and coming rock band The Murder Capital, Bethany is studying to be a Montessori teacher and bakes amazing cup cakes in her spare time, while Devlin has just finished 5th year.

Zeik established ZT Fish Company three years ago, which distributes fish throughout West Cork and is currently expanding into new locations.

He says: I upgraded my boats over the years and I still have a team operating out of Union Hall. My headquarters is in Rosscarbery. I have a unit behind Ryans Spar shop where we process and fillet fish and get it ready for distribution.

How did Zeik first get hooked on catching, hauling, gutting, filleting and selling fish?

My dad, Terry, introduced me to fishing during my summer holidays when I was nine or ten, he says.

He got me used to hauling lobster pots and he got me used to the sea.

When I became a deck hand on a trawler fishing out of Union Hall at 19 or 20, I had found my sea legs already!

I worked my way up, working with the skipper and the crew on the boat.

He was a small fish in a big pond.

Starting off, the last man on board got the job of cooking and cleaning on top of the usual work, and in those days you started off on half a share, basically half the wages everyone else was getting. You would be damn glad to get a berth on a good boat and would be happy to serve your time this way."

He got good at cooking pretty fast.

If the crew were hungry; they werent happy! says Zeik. It was a great initiation for me.

He moved up the ranks, and met Margaret, from Wicklow, who became his wife. She is a home-maker and also a director of the company. Margaret is a great support to me. Our son Devlin is part of our staff along with Janis Grislis and Conor Murphy, who make up a great team.

Margaret was working in Cork and we got married in 1992. In 1993, I bought my first boat called Alice Again in Castletownbere. She was 33 feet long. I hoped I could make a living out of fishing. It was a capable boat.

It was a case of sink or swim.

This was it, says Zeik. I was going for it.

I spent three years as a deck hand and I stuck with it, but it was time to take the plunge and go out on my own.

Starting out as a young skipper was tough and I had lots of teething problems along the way, but I got a lot of help and support from the local Union Hall fishing community and survived against the odds.

FAMILY TRADITION: Zeik Tuit bought the Corona Gloria in France 14 years ago

After three years I upgraded my boat and bought the Girl Fiona, a 48 footer from Kinsale. After a further two years , I bought my third boat, the Horizon in Scotland, that I had for nine years. My current boat, The Corona Gloria, I bought in France 14 years ago. She has been very good to me.

Is the name a bit suspect given the current climate?

I get slagged a bit about that! laughs Zeik.

He never went under, but its a tough business with huge costs attached.

Fishing is a tough business and the sea can be cruel. I have lost friends and family to the sea in tragic circumstances, most recently my nephew and godson Kodie Healy, who the sea took from us in October, 2019. Kodie was an up and coming top skipper, a really rare commodity nowadays. Not many young people are entering the industry any more as its so tough.

Just a few weeks ago, Kodies older brother Patrick, another top skipper, lost his boat when a fire broke out on board. So much hard work had gone into that boat and she was maintained to a high standard but sometimes these things just happen.

Thankfully, all the crew were rescued, which is always the most important thing.

I was lucky, says Zeik. I was often out at sea in bad weather, lost gear on the bottom, engine failure, etc. But thankfully, I never had any really close shaves.

Fishing takes guts, determination and resilience.

My crew now six in number plus two skippers are as tough as nails, says Zeik. They are a dedicated bunch of lads. They get to know the territory very well. The crew share a great bond and are quick to react to any situation. The lads have a great mental attitude which makes them even tighter and tougher.

Back on land, Zeik is thriving as he concentrates more on the marketing side of the fishing industry. Covid threw up a new interest in healthy eating and in cooking fish which is plentiful along our shores.

During the first lockdown, there was an immediate effect, says Zeik. People werent able to eat out. They became more health conscious and had more time to cook. We saw a steady flow upwards.

Others struggled to survive during Covid.

Some of the restaurants I supply had to close during Covid, says Zeik.

But the sale of my fish at my stalls has flourished.

When HE sets out his stall, people flock to it to buy the catch of the day: cod, hake, plaice, John Dory, haddock, lemon sole, monkfish and fresh Irish prawns. Zeik shops local.

I buy from local suppliers regularly too. My skippers, Victor Piscako and Darron Shovlin, operate the boat on a trip on/trip off basis. Denis Cronin is the on-shore manger of the boat.

Zeik sells the best of the batch.

I am very fussy about the produce I sell. It must be super-fresh and it must be from local suppliers.

Bringing fish to the table is a tough industry nowadays with all the restrictions, adds Zeik.

Brexit made it worse. Ireland has a 15% fish quota in our own waters, which is ridiculous. In Casteletownbere, more fish goes through foreign vessels than ours. It brings nothing to the table or to the local economy.

The Spanish/French boats land their catch straight into the back of their own trucks, which head straight back to mainland europe, even bringing supplies for the boats with them.

Not many young people are joining the industry, adds Zeik.

Will his sea-legacy continue?

My own sons dont have much interest in going fishing and I cant say I blame them, says Zeik. I dont think Id encourage them either!

I do know big fishing families in West Cork carry on the fishing tradition and immerse themselves in that heritage and you have to respect that.

He hopes that the Irish fishing industry can survive and thrive like he did. He hopes the men of the sea can carry on trawling the depths of the ocean.

It would be a shame to see a fourth and fifth generational industry destroyed before their eyes, says Zeik.

Is he a fan of eating fish?

I throw on hake fillets on the barbeque some days, says Zeik. We have Monkfish skewers on a Sunday.

He has help from his first mate.

They are Margarets speciality!

ZT Fish Company Ltd, in five locations every week: Tuesdays  Wilton Farmers Market 9am-2pm, Wednesdays  O Sullivans Centra Innishannon, 9am-2pm, Thursdays  Hartes Spar, Fridays  Ryans Spar Forecourt Roscarbery, 9am-5pm. Saturday  Douglas Farmers Market, 9am-2pm.

Phone: 087-6645912

Visit: ZT Fish Company on Facebook
A Cork man who sexually assaulted his sleeping younger sister several years after raping her as a child has been jailed for four years.

The man (38), who cannot be named for legal reasons, raped his younger sister in their family home while he was aged between 12 and 14 years old. The man was 21 years old when his sister woke up to find him removing her clothes and sexually assaulting her.

The man was convicted following a trial in the Central Criminal Court in April 2021 of a single count of rape in the family home in Co Cork on an unknown date between November 25, 1995 and January 17, 1998.

He was also convicted of sexual assault at the same address on an unknown date between March 19, 2004 and November 23, 2004. The man had pleaded not guilty to both offences. He has no previous convictions.

Victim 10 or younger at time of rape

The court heard that at the time of the rape, the victim was aged between eight and 10 years old. The victim was 16 years old at the time of the sexual assault.

A local detective told Thomas Creed SC, prosecuting, that the victim gave evidence that the accused man called her up to his bedroom in the family home and raped her.

The victim's older sister came into the bedroom during the incident, took her out of the room and then brought her to the house where she was living at the time.

The detective said the victim gave evidence that she believes she was 16 when she fell asleep on a couch in her home and woke up to find her brother pulling down her pants and sexually assaulting her.

The victim got up, challenged her brother and immediately left the house. She met with a friend and disclosed the incident to her.

Victim left feeling 'ashamed, worthless, dirty'

In her victim impact statement, which she read before the court, the woman said that as a young child she remembers being a happy girl, but that all changed when she was raped by her brother.

The woman said that at the time she did not truly understand what had been done to me, but that she knew it was wrong as her sister came in and took her out of the room. She said it should never have happened and it made her feel ashamed, worthless, dirty.

She said that coming forward has brought all the emotions and shame to the fore. She said that after keeping the secret for years, she finally feels like it had been removed from her shoulders.

Colman Cody SC, defending, told the court that while his client's acknowledges the verdicts of the jury, he still maintains his innocence.

Mr Cody said there has been a significant lapse of time between the events and their being reported to gardai. He said there was no evidence to suggest his client had attempted to deter or prevent the victim from making a statement.

Counsel said that given his client's essentially unblemished record in that time and his having set down roots, the court can be satisfied this is not a man who poses a danger to anyone in the future.

Mr Cody submitted this is not a case in which a custodial sentence should be imposed and the interests of justice can be met in other ways.

Judge tribute to courage of victim

Mr Justice Michael White said he wished to pay tribute to the victim in this case. He said he saluted her for having the courage to come forward.

Mr Justice White said the most serious aggravating factors were the breach of trust and that the victim was a young child. He said the victim is of the view that if she had not woken up during the offence of sexual assault, the crime would have been more serious.

He said the court has to give due consideration in this case to the sentencing principles that apply when sentencing an adult for crimes committed as a juvenile.

No acknowledgement of guilt

Mr Justice White said there has been no acknowledgement of his guilt by the accused man. He said the most significant mitigating factor is the man's age at the time.

He said if the court had been dealing with the offence of rape alone committed when the accused was a juvenile, it is likely a non-custodial sentence would have been applied. He said if he was dealing with just the sexual assault, then a short custodial sentence would have been imposed.

Mr Justice White sentenced the accused man to four years imprisonment.
A RESIDENTIAL development which will provide more than 20 new homes in Cork has been given the green light by Cork City Council.

The scheme, set to be developed at Glenmont Crest in Silversprings, has been granted conditional planning permission by the council.

22 new homes to be built

The application, submitted by Rockspring Properties (Newport) Limited in November, sought planning permission for the construction of 22 houses.

These will comprise of one detached two-bedroom house, four semi-detached two-bedroom houses, five terraced three-bedroom houses, three detached three-bedroom houses and nine detached four-bedroom houses.

Cork City Council has now given the go-ahead to the development, with 26 conditions attached.

Planning conditions

One condition states that, in order to ensure full and verifiable implementation of the approved landscape design, the developer shall appoint and retain the services of a qualified landscape architect or qualified landscape designer as a landscape consultant throughout the duration of the construction works and shall notify the planning authority of that appointment in writing prior to the commencement of development.

Another condition states that all of the houses with on-curtilage parking must be provided with electric connections to the exterior of the houses to allow for the provision of future electric vehicle charging points.

Details of how it is proposed to comply with these requirements are to be submitted to and agreed in writing with the planning authority prior to the commencement of construction.

The total parking supply on the site must not exceed 37 car parking spaces.

While Cork City Council has granted permission for the development, the decision could still be appealed with An Bord Pleanala.

If there is no appeal against the decision, a grant of permission in accordance with the decision will be issued after the expiration of the period within which an appeal may be made to An Bord Pleanala.
A PROTEST calling on the Government to act urgently to maintain the Post Office Network was held outside the GPO on Oliver Plunkett Street yesterday.

The protest was organised by Sinn Fein members in Cork following the announcement that the Montenotte post office will close tomorrow.

Sinn Fein TD for Cork North Central, Thomas Gould, has said the loss of the Montenotte post office will come as a major blow to local residents and the community of the northside.

Montenotte post office will be the third post office on the northside to close its doors in the last two and a half years  following the closure of the post office on Shandon Street and Old Youghal Road.

We felt we couldnt do anything when they closed the Old Youghal Road one because we were in the thick of Level 5 restrictions then but we feel we have to do something now, he said.

Calls for financial intervention

Mr Gould said Sinn Fein is supporting calls from the Irish Postmasters Union (IPU) for an urgent financial intervention from the Government.

The Postmasters Union is looking for a public service agreement to be put in place and were supporting that call.

A report commissioned by the IPU from business advisors Grant Thornton, and published last September, warned of unrestrained post office closures from July 2021.

Grant Thorntons analysis recommended an annual Public Service Obligation (PSO) of 17 million, which it said would represent strong overall value for money for the State.

Speaking last month IPU General Secretary Ned OHara said that a Government financial intervention must be implemented within weeks, or the network as we know it will collapse.

Postmaster operated Offices face a major challenge from July 1, as a significant reduction in payment rates (an on average fall of approximately 20%) will take effect.

This is against the backdrop of rising viability pressure in recent years, which Covid-19 has further compounded.

The difficulty is also related to the delay in additional Government services promised in 2018, but only now being seriously examined, he said.

Sinn Fein councillor Mick Nugent said post offices are in effect a community hub and need to be protected.

Pictured at a protest outside of the GPO on Oliver Plunkett Street is Sinn Fein councillor Mick Nugent and Sinn Fein TD Thomas Gould.

We felt it was necessary to hold the protest due to a number of post offices closing across the northside and the threat of more with Postmasters Union concerned about new postmasters not taking over post offices due to the conditions on offer from An Post.

Post offices are a vital community facility and need to be protected and supported.

His party colleague and fellow Cork city councillor Kenneth Collins echoed this sentiment saying that post offices are a vital service for local communities and important for keeping people connected.

Some people dont see a person from one end of the week to the other until they go to the post office to collect their pensions, or to buy a stamp or just to get to the post office to pay bills.

The Government need to step up to the plate here and recognise that they [post offices] are a vital cog in the wheel in relation to getting services in the community.

Its important that we keep the pressure on. There should be a post office in every community.

Efforts made to maintain the service - An Post

In a statement in relation to the closure of Montenotte post office, An Post said efforts were made to maintain the service.

Montenotte, like the bulk of Irelands 930 plus post offices, is run by a self-employed contractor who contracts to provide post office services in a given area.

An Post is a commercial semi state company and does not receive any form of state payment or subsidy.

An Post sought to find a new contractor to take on the local service and advertised the Montenotte Park contract on two separate occasions but to no avail.

Our Postmaster in Montenotte Park post office Ms Mary Pauline Clifford tendered notice of her resignation from her PO contract some months ago.

Customers will now transfer to St Lukes Post Office, 900m away. However, there is the option to transfer to a number of the neighbouring post offices in the area, if more convenient.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused by the closure of Montenotte Park post office and have been working to ease the transition for customers, An Post added.
The National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet) has recommended pausing the reopening of indoor hospitality in Ireland.

The recommendation was made during a late night meeting on Monday with the Cabinet Covid Committee.

The Government is set to make a decision on Tuesday on the return of indoor drinking and dining from July 5.

But the recommendations received from Nphet on Monday night were said to be pessimistic amid growing concerns over the spread of the Delta variant.

It is understood Nphet warned that a high level of transmission could have a significant impact on the reopening of schools in September.

Nphet recommended pausing the reopening of indoor hospitality until government comes up with an enforceable system to prove people have been vaccinated.

However, Nphet also recommended that the numbers attending wedding celebrations indoors in July could increase from 25 to 50.

Meanwhile, the National Immunisation Advisory Committee (NIAC) has recommended that the AstraZeneca and Janssen (Johnson & Johnson) vaccines can be administered to 18 to 40-year-olds.

The committee has also recommended that the AstraZeneca vaccine dose gap be reduced to four weeks, to allow more people in their 60s to be vaccinated faster.

Earlier, Tanaiste Leo Varadkar said a decision will not be made until Tuesday on whether Covid-19 restrictions will be eased further on July 5 as planned.

Taoiseach Micheal Martin has brought forward the decision on whether to delay the next planned round of coronavirus relaxations, due to rising concerns over the Delta variant.

A final call on the return to indoor dining and drinking had initially been expected later in the week.

However, ministers have faced intensifying calls from bar and restaurant owners to urgently provide clarity.

They have made the point that they need to tell their staff whether or not they will be working on July 5.

Mr Varadkar said the hospitality industry had made a very reasonable request to bring the decision forward.

They have to engage employees, people have to come off PUP, they have to order supplies. So theyve asked us that we bring the decision forward so were going to do that, he said.

We will make a decision tomorrow.
A man and a woman who stayed the night at a vacant building raised the alarm on their trespass when they found themselves unable to leave and they smashed a window  to get out.

Sergeant John Kelleher said that at 8.23am on that morning a window was broken at Grand Parade in Cork from inside the building.

Passers-by had first reported hearing shouting from inside the building.

Once the window was broken the man and woman climbed out the window, which was eight feet higher than street level.

Witnesses supplied gardai with descriptions of both people who walked away from the scene. On further investigation a metal bar was found just inside the window.

Jenna Pierce of Mount St Josephs Heights, Gurranabraher, Cork, pleaded guilty at Cork District Court to a charge of trespassing on the building.

Previous convictions

Sgt. Kelleher said Pierce had one previous burglary conviction and 29 convictions for theft.

Defence solicitor Joseph Cuddigan said the defendant had made huge changes in her life from the time when she was getting into a lot of difficulties.

Mr Cuddigan said recently that she had undertaken a drug treatment programme and had moved on from chronic addiction.

Judge Kelleher Olann Kelleher imposed a nine-month sentence which he suspended on condition that she would keep the peace for the next two years.

The report prepared for the court shows she is making great progress," he said.

"The report is very good in fairness to her.

Imposing the suspended sentence he warned, she would serve the nine months if there was any other breach.
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The prosecution being carried out by Spain's public spending audit body, the Court of Accounts, against those responsible for the Catalan Government's foreign relations expenditure between 2011 and 2017, may end up in courtrooms beyond Spain. The defence team of exiled Catalan president Carles Puigdemont, led by lawyer Gonzalo Boye, is considering making a complaint about this procedure before the Belgian judiciary.

"We will use all mechanisms to demand responsibility for this action. A complaint or a lawsuit. We will spare no effort, because it is clearly an abuse," Boye told ElNacional.cat. The Court of Accounts has set at 5.4 million euros the deposit it requires from Catalan government officials for allegedly misappropriating funds from the foreign ministry budget, and in the case of Puigdemont it claims 1,981,474.47 euros, as a result of the expenses on Catalan offices, trips and events abroad during his term as president of Catalonia.

The fact that Puigdemont's residence is currently fixed in Waterloo, near Brussels, means that it is in Belgium where he will suffer the damage of this action by the Court of Accounts - through confiscation of funds and assets - and it is thus in the justice system of that country that he will have to appeal, according to his lawyer.

Request to lift immunity

Appearing before the delegated investigator for the case, Maria Esperanza Garcia Moreno, lawyer Boye stated that the documentation provided to the defendants does not state that the audit body has lodged any request to be able to act against Carles Puigdemont, who has immunity from prosecution due to his status as a Member of the European Parliament.

The investigator replied that she did not need it, but Boye, warning that any action against his client is protected by his parliamentary immunity, ensured that the court record showed the non-existence of any request in this regard, and he will include these facts in his arguments.

Violation of rights

The lawyer, who is also in charge of the defence of two other defendants in the case, Marti Anglada and Josep Suarez, says he will present arguments showing that these proceedings are affecting basic rights such as the right to a defence, to due process, to effective judicial protection, to the impartial judge predetermined by law, to the right to private property, to the presumption of innocence, and to legal certainty.

He will also denounce the "inquisitorial nature" of the proceedings being carried out by the Court of Accounts, which, he says are "inappropriate for a democratic state governed by the rule of law".

Former president

As well, Puigdemont's defence will argue that the tribunal is, by de facto means, undermining the Catalonia's Statute of Autonomy, given that the Catalan government's foreign action is provided for in the statutory text.

The lawyer also protested against the way which the investigator addressed his defendant, as Mr Puigdemont, and demanded that he should be referred to correctly as "The Right Honourable", since he maintains his status as a former president of Catalonia.

Complaint for abuse of office

Boye's statement about the complaint against the audit body comes in addition to that made by former Catalan minister Francesc Homs on June 10th, when he publicly warned the delegated investigator that if she did not correct her ruling, he would file a complaint for abuse of office against her.

The submissions presented to the court already include compaints about the conduct of Garcia Moreno, accusing her of "administrative arbitrariness that leads to unjust resolutions." Furthermore, it is asserted that these unjust resolutions have been taken despite knowing that they are improper.
St Ninian's High School student tests positive for COVID-19

A student attending St Ninians High School has tested positive for coronavirus.

It follows a staff who also tested positive over the weekend.

Following advice from Public Health, St Ninians High School will remain open to students, however interaction with other schools has been suspended and will be reviewed in a weeks time.



Mitigations to help prevent the spread of COVID-19 are already in place at the school.

The situation will be reviewed on a regular basis in liaison with the Public Health Directorate and regular updates will be given to all students and their parents/carers.


Manx Government gives 800,000 to WHO to help with COVID-19 response

The Manx Government has donated 800,000 to the World Health Organization (WHO) to help with the response to the COVID-19 pandemic.



The money will be used to support the WHOs COVID-19 work in Madagascar and South Africa, which forms part of its wider COVID-19 Strategic Preparedness and Response Plan.



The 800,000 in funding comes from an underspend in the 2020/21 international development budget, which was unable to be allocated, with Government focussed on responding to the pandemic.



Chief Minister Howard Quayle MHK said: We have heard time and again that no one is safe until everyone is safe. A pandemic does not respect nationality or international borders. We must tackle COVID-19 collectively, as a global community. The rapid spread of COVID has shown us how globally connected we are and I am delighted that the Isle of Man can support the World Health Organization in its vital work to respond to the pandemic.



The funding will be used by the WHO to cover several aspects of the COVID-19 response in Madagascar and South Africa, including vaccine roll out and directing resources to areas most in need.
Mark Cavendish takes 31st win on stage four at Tour de France

Manx cyclist Mark Cavendish's sprint finish has secured victory in stage four of the Tour de France.

He nudged ahead of the group to record his 31st career win - and his first since 2016.

France's Nacer Bouhanni finished in second, just ahead of Jasper Philipsen.
Changes to onward travel to the Isle of Man from amber list countries

Anyone arriving in England from an amber list country and transiting through to the Isle of Man, will no longer be required to book private COVID-19 tests in England from today.

The change follows engagement on the issue between the Manx Government and the UK Government.

To qualify for this new transit exemption, passengers must remain in their port of entry before onward travel to the Isle of Man or, if leaving their port of entry, they must be entering England for the sole purposes of continuing their journey to the Isle of Man.

Passengers will need to do the following before travelling to England from an amber list country:

On the passenger locator form, carry out the follow steps:

Select Stay in the UK under the Your travel plans section

Reply I will be travelling for an exempt reason to the question about whether you are required to self-isolate on arrival

Select the exemption options, and then select Transit Exemption

Passengers should be prepared to provide evidence at the border of their onward journey to the Isle of Man.

Full details are available on the gov.uk website.

There are different rules for passengers arriving from an amber list country in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Isle of Man residents arriving on the Island who have travelled to any country outside of the Common Travel Area (Guernsey, Ireland, Jersey, and the United Kingdom) in the previous 10 days are required to isolate on arrival, either for 21 days or for 7 days if they agree to have a test on arrival and again on day 6, at a cost of 30.

Details of the Day 7 Pathway are available here.
KC Logistics, a support company for Mazda Toyota Manufacturing USA in Limestone County, has purchased land in Athens for a $12-million project that will bring an estimated 100 jobs to the city. The property is located in Breeding Industrial Park, south of U.S. 72.
Ricky VanHoozer, 65, of Athens, Alabama, died Tuesday, June 29, 2021, in Madison Hospital. A 2 p.m. graveside service will be Saturday at Bottom Cemetery with son-in-law Billy Sims officiating. Visitation is from noon until 1:30 p.m. Saturday at Spry Funeral Home in Athens. Pallbearers will 
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., does a cable news interview before the start of a two-week recess, at the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, June 23, 2021. Earlier, President Joe Biden announced a bipartisan agreement on a pared-down infrastructure plan that would make a start on his top legislative priority and validate his efforts to reach across the political aisle.
Boston Dynamics' robots can boogie. We've seen Spot and Atlas strut their stuff many times, with some videos of them in action becoming viral hits. A collaboration with K-pop phenomenon BTS should be like catnip for the internet. But while the two videos are kind of fun, they're ever-so-slightly underwhelming.

Hyundai closed its deal for a majority stake in Boston Dynamics last week. It brought in Hyundai brand ambassadors BTS to celebrate the occasion and dance with the robots. Spot cuts a rug with the group in one of the clips, but only briefly. They dance together for around 20 seconds altogether. In the other video, seven Spot robot dogs, one for each member of BTS, perform a choreographed routine to the band's "Ioniq: I'm On It"  an ode dedicated to Hyundai's EV sub-brand.

The clip that BTS appear in only racked up a couple of million views within a day or so on YouTube. The video for the group's latest single "Butter," however, was viewed 113 million times on the platform within 24 hours, setting a new record. It seems dancing robots, just like pretty much everything else on the planet right now, aren't quite as popular as BTS.
Google has launched a new website called Find Food Support, which puts important resources on how to locate free and affordable food in the US in one place. Perhaps the most useful feature the website can offer is a new Google Maps tool that can point you to the nearest food bank, food pantry or school lunch program pickup site.

As the tech giant explains, the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated hunger for people around the world. According to Feeding America (PDF), 45 million people in the US alone had no reliable access to affordable food last year, including children who lost access to school lunches. That's a 30 percent increase from 2019. The non-profit has a slightly better forecast for 2021, but it still believes 42 million people in the country  13 million of which are children, and 1 in 5 of which are Black individuals  may experience food insecurity this year.

Google worked with No Kid Hungry, FoodFinder and the US Department of Agriculture to add 90,000 places with free food support across 50 states on Maps. The company said it will add more locations in the future. To use the tool, you only have to go to the website, whether on a PC or on mobile, and type in your location. It will then show you the nearest food banks and pantries with their addresses, phone numbers, and the days and hours they're operational.

Google

Find Food Support also houses YouTube videos showing how food insecurity affects people from all walks of life. The hope is to destigmatize food insecurity, since the stigma associated with getting help prevents people from seeking groups and organizations that can assist them in their time of need. In addition, the website contains links to food support hotlines, benefit guides per state and information for specific demographics and communities, such as seniors, families and children and military families. And in case you don't need food aid and want to help out, you can also find information on how you can donate food, time or money on the website.
Big Tech's bid to gain access into people's homes through smart tech like speakers and surveillance cams naturally spooks some people. To help you overcome those doubts, Google revealed a list of precautions back in 2019 when it rebranded its Home products as Nest. Several of the privacy commitments revolved around on-device data storage and the disabling of camera and recording features. Today, Google is updating those pledges with specific references to multi-device setups, account security, vulnerability research and future software releases. It's also making them easier to find by bundling them together in Nest's new Safety Center.

As part of the updates, Google says that all Nest devices released since 2019 are validated using third-party, industry-recognized security standards, including those developed by the Internet of Secure Things Alliance. It's also added a bit about its Nest bug bounty program that compensates security researchers who unearth vulnerabilities in its tech.

In addition, the revised precautions now mention how it keeps your Google Account secure with tools like two-step verification. While it promises future safeguards through a pledge to provide at least five years of security updates for Nest devices after launch. Plus, there are explicit references to its verified boot feature that checks a device is running the right software each time it restarts. Finally, Google also directs you to the device activity page that shows all the gadgets your Google Account is signed into.

Back when Google first made the commitments, it seemed as though the privacy hoopla over smart home tech was at a fever pitch. A damaging Bloomberg report had just detailed how Amazon hired contractors to transcribe Alexa recordings. Facebook  which was still reeling from the Cambridge Analytica scandal  had launched its latest Portal display to mixed reviews, including valid questions over its place in the home. While Google had faced its own backlash for putting a mic in its Nest security hub and not telling anyone about it.

More recently, Amazon's internet-sharing Sidewalk feature for Echo and Ring devices have kept data-sharing concerns in the spotlight. Therefore, you can't blame Google for promoting its privacy commitments in this sensitive environment. Especially, If it makes the difference between people choosing to buy its products over its rivals.
We may have to say farewell to SoftBank's adorable humanoid robot Pepper. According to Reuters, the Japanese conglomerate has stopped the robot's production last year and is slashing jobs across robotics-related businesses in several countries. Apparently, there wasn't much demand for Pepper, and SoftBank only ever produced 27,000 units manufactured by Foxconn.

Nikkei has also reported that Pepper's production was halted due to weak demand, but the SoftBank rep it talked to denied that the company is killing the robot entirely. "We plan to resume production if demand recovers," the spokesperson said.

While Pepper sold out in under a minute when it was released in Japan in 2015, the company only produced 1,000 machines for its consumer launch. Pepper was built as a social robot that can recognize faces and basic human emotions, so it can interact with people. Most of the units SoftBank produced are leased to corporate clients, and the company also placed the robot in its mobile phone stores in Japan.

With a price of over $1,600 for consumers in Japan and of over $20,000 for universities and businesses, though, Pepper a bit too expensive for most developers and small businesses. Reuters' sources said its sales suffered from limited functionality and unreliability. Further, SoftBank wasn't able to give the robot more features, because culture clashes between its French business in charge of robotics projects and its Tokyo management reportedly affected Pepper's development.

After SoftBank shifted its focus to the cleaning robot Whiz, Pepper was sidelined. The company plans to cut about half of its 330 staff positions in France in September, Reuters said, and half of the sales staff positions in the US and Britain had already been cut.

Update (07/01/21 7AM): A SoftBank representative told us that Pepper costs above $20,000 for universities and businesses. The $1,600 pricing is only for Japanese consumers and comes with a monthly subscription for data and insurances, as well as a commitment of 36 months.
How can Samsung make its smartwatches as successful as the Apple Watch? Returning to the Google fold  or at least collaborating on wearable software  is a start. Samsung has already helped develop the latest edition of Wear OS, apparently improving responsiveness and battery performance. Now we have a glimpse of a more unified software experience between your Samsung watch and phone, called One UI Watch. According to the companys MWC showcase, youll be able to adjust settings across both devices, while the menus on the watch will also mimic what youre already probably used to on Galaxy phones.

Samsung

Yeah, I know, Im not captivated either.

A few years ago, when Samsung developed its own mobile OS, Tizen, for both phones and wearables, it struggled to muster up third-party app support. With the new Wear OS inside, the One UI Watch will offer Google Play Store access, including apps from Adidas, Calm and MyFitnessPal, as well as core Google services, from Maps to Messages to YouTube Music. This will be crucial in helping Samsung turn a corner with its smartwatches. According to the latest figures from IDC, it remains a contender, but the Apple Watch still dominates the wrists of smartwatch buyers.

 Mat Smith

A new 4K Plus plan adds at least $10 to your YouTube TV subscription.

Finally, starting today, YouTube TV will have a new add-on called 4K Plus. As the name suggests, it'll enable 4K streaming, assuming you have a compatible TV and streaming device. The 4K Plus add-on also includes the ability to download recordings from your DVR to a phone or tablet, too.

4K Plus also lets you stream YouTube TV from "unlimited" devices when you're at home. The basic YouTube TV package can stream on three devices simultaneously. Unfortunately, this all comes at a fairly steep cost. The 4K Plus add-on costs $19.99 per month, on top of whatever your existing YouTube TV plan costs. (Right now, the basic YouTube TV plan starts at $64.99 a month.) That said, if you act quickly, you can get a price deal on 4K Plus  YouTube is offering a one-month free trial to new users, after which you can sign up for $9.99 per month, a pretty good deal over the standard price. Continue reading.

Warner Bros. plans to release it simultaneously on HBO Max and theaters.

Warner Bros.

If you've been waiting impatiently to see Denis Villeneuve's much-anticipated take on Dune, you'll have to keep on waiting. After being delayed to October 1st, 2021, from its original December 18, 2020, release date, Dune has been pushed back a further three weeks to October 22nd. Warner Bros. announced last year that its entire 2021 movie lineup, including Dune, would be released simultaneously on HBO Max. That move didn't sit well with director Villeneuve, who railed against the decision online. Continue reading.

Test out the new OS today.

Microsft

Microsoft has begun rolling out the first preview for Windows Insiders. The build will show off the operating system's centered taskbar and redesigned Start menu, as well as its improved window management. But you'll have to wait a bit for some of the more advanced features, like the integrated Microsoft Teams chat and Android app compatibility. Check your PC meets the Windows 11 minimum hardware requirements before you get too excited, though. Continue reading.

The Windows 11 preview can dynamically change your refresh rate to save battery

For $25 a month.

Amazon is targeting newbie record collectors with its latest subscription. If you sign up to the Vinyl of the Month Club, youll receive a new record for your collection every 30 days or so.

You wont know what records youll receive as part of the $25 plan until they show up at your door, but theyll be classics from the Golden Era of Vinyl  the 1960s and 70s  chosen by curators at Amazon Music. Expect releases from Pink Floyd, Aretha Franklin and ABBA, so if your tastes fall outside of the mainstream of the mainstream, this might not be for you. At least the spirit of Columbia House lives on. Continue reading.

The mainstream EV is due in early 2024.

Honda finally has a name for its first electric SUV. The Prologue is coming in 2024, so theres a little time to wait. You should also see the Acura SUV sometime in 2024, but that vaguer promise suggests this model will come later than its more mainstream counterpart.

Honda hasnt offered much detail about what the Prologue will entail, although it reminded us that both the Prologue and its Acura counterpart will run on GM's Ultium batteries. Honda is still hard at work on its own electric car architecture. Continue reading.

But wait, theres more...

How I inadvertently became a vinyl nerd

The world's fastest electric motorcycle has a new aerodynamic challenger

Watch Samsung's MWC event in four minutes

'Nier Reincarnation' comes to mobile on July 28th

Heineken made a cute but garish autonomous beer cooler

Nikon's Z FC mirrorless camera recalls the glory days of 35mm film
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Kevin Hassler is associate editor of the Enid News & Eagle.

Have a question about this story? Do you see something we missed? Do you have a story idea for Kevin? Send an email to enidnews@enidnews.com.
The closure will have a devastating impact on the Woodward County economy. The prison employs 142 people. The domino effect will cost Northwest Oklahoma hundreds of thousands of dollars. While the DOC will see by its own admission just an 8% savings, the damage that will be done to an economy with no easy way of rebounding is not worth it.
Hollywood actress Amber Heard took to Instagram on Monday sharing photos of herself in London, sparking speculations she is preparing for D.C.'s "Aquaman 2."

The 35-year-old ex-wife of Johnny Depp wears a casual black tank top, matched with skinny-leg jeans, a brown bomber jacket, and well-worn sneakers.

Amber also perhaps attempted to go incognito by wearing a pair of stylish dark sunglasses and added hands-on her pockets in a new Instagram photo.

The Los Angeles-based star, who has called it her home for several years, comes out with her hair tied into a sleek style at the nape of the neck with minimal makeup.

Yet, according to Daily Mail, the actress has not revealed the exact reason why she is in London. Amber simply captioned her Instagram post with, 'London, innit (sic),' alongside the British flag.

Amber Heard Goes Trending As Fans Don't Want Her On The Movie

It was announced on Twitter that 'Aquaman 2' has begun filming. However, fans are still not happy that Amber Heard is still included in the movie.

Don't care fire Amber Heard https://t.co/y9Cnq1jfuB  illusive  (@illusiveBeast) June 28, 2021



The public even agreed that they thought of boycotting the movie because Amber Heard will be in it.

So we are boycotting Aquaman 2 if amber heard is in it right?  clarissa buchanon (@LBTellsItAll) June 28, 2021

Due to the abusive backgrounds of the star, people have also brought up how horrible of a person she is to Johnny Depp by saying how much "hype" would "Aquaman" get if the people behind the movie removed Amber from the film.

Imagine how much more hype Aquaman 2 would be getting if Amber Heard wasnt in it.



Why an abuser still has a job with WB when Johnny Depp, her victim, had to step down from his is a peak of injustice I refuse to be okay with. pic.twitter.com/rU9YNjUKEP  LillyJane916 (@LillyJane916) June 28, 2021



More of how unfair it was, a Twitter user stated how unfair it was for Depp to have all of his projects removed amidst domestic violence accusations, yet, Heard still has her work.

So Johnny Depp is ACCUSED of domestic violence and is immediately removed from his projects.



Amber Heard ADMITS to hitting him (and has a history of DV) and is still hired for Aquaman 2?



Make it make sense!  Caeli Barnhart (@caelibarnhart) June 28, 2021



READ ALSO: Michael Keaton as Bruce Wayne Again: D.C. Fans Lose Minds Over 'The Flash' First Glimpse

Amber Heard For 'Aquaman 2'

Amber's latest work project seemed to be her return to the "Aquaman" franchise for its highly-anticipated sequel, "Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom."

In March, the sequel was eyeing a June production start in the UK, although that has not been confirmed.

"Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom" has been eyeing for a December 2022 release as Jason Momoa and many actors are up for the 2018 film's return.

Alongside Amber and Jason, Nicole Kidman, Patrick Wilson, Willem Dafoe, Dolph Lundgren, and Yahya Abdul-Mateen III are confirmed included in the project.

Director James Wan was also reported to lead the movie. The original "Aquaman" movie was released in 2018 and became one of the biggest hits in the D.C. Extended Universe (DCEU).

"Aquaman" alone took in $1.148 billion worldwide, the only DCEU movie to surpass the billion-dollar mark.

READ MORE: Why Amber Heard's Return To 'Aquaman 2' Can Help Johnny Depp Instead

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Kim Kardashian has made a deal with Spotify in the summer of 2020, but many people may have forgotten about it.

Her deal was to create a criminal justice podcast, as she shares insights after being frustrated with failing the baby bar twice.

However, the highly-anticipated podcast has been stalled and has yet to drop.

According to an insider who spoke to The Sun, there has already been much work done on the said podcast, but there are also several issues why it's taking so much time to finish.

"There have been countless rewrites, it was over-budget and COVID hit so they had to let half the production staff go last year, it was sad for those who had been involved from the beginning."

With so many things going on with Kim Kardashian's life, with her recent divorce, running her empire, being a mom, trying to pass the bar, and working with Team USA for the Olympics, does she still have time to do this criminal justice reform podcast?

The insider spilled that yes, the mom-of-four is still pretty much so devoted to it.

"I believe Kim is still really dedicated to the project and Spotify has invested a lot, so hopefully it will still come to fruition soon, everybody wants to see it happen."

And despite everything going on in her personal life, the insider revealed that "she's very professional and will honor her contract."

Fans of the "Keeping Up with the Kardashians" star has been begging her for some news on the show for several months already, with some of the most-tweeted-about things during the KUWTK reunion special was asking about her Spotify podcast drop.

However, The Sun did reach out to the KKW Beauty mogul, and they said they are "on track, production-wise," with the podcast set to release later this year.

Per the Wall Street Journal, she will work with Lori Rothschild Ansaldi for the podcast and be made exclusive for the platform.

The deal was estimated to be worth more than $100 million, with the streaming platform spending over $600 million in recent 2020 podcast acquisitions overall.

READ ALSO: P. Diddy's Sexuality Questioned Immediately After Supporting Lil Nas X 2021 BET Awards Performance

Kim Kardashian Goes for the Gold With SKIMS

I am honored to announce that @SKIMS is designing the official team USA undergarments, pajamas and lounge wear for the athletes this year in Tokyo and the same pieces will be available in a capsule collection at https://t.co/Qsy51Sl2Sd  pic.twitter.com/u2IWXCmUup  Kim Kardashian West (@KimKardashian) June 28, 2021

Meanwhile, another good news for Kim Kardashian is that she's about to rake in about $10 million or more from her loungewear line SKIMS after partnering with Team USA for the Tokyo Olympics.

The 40-year-old reality star shared the exciting news on her social media, even sharing pics of the Team USA SKIMS line.

A lawyer estimated that SKIMS would make a lot of money as being in the Olympics will "provide her with worldwide exposure."

She further told The Sun, "She will easily break the Internet on her website for the loungewear as soon as it appears on the screen."

READ MORE: Travis Scott's Dior Collab Receives Praises For Keeping Another Rapper's Memory Alive

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Scientology leader David Miscavige's dad, Ron, is dead at the age of 85.

Unlike his son, Ron renounced Scientology. He left the church in 2012 and divulged so much disturbing information about the church.

He even wrote an explosive autobiography four years later detailing David Miscavige's ruthless leadership.

Before Ron's death, in a Facebook post by his wife Becky Bigelow, who also left the Church of Scientology at the same time as him, said, "It's been quite the adventure and am blessed for our 31 years together. You've been my rock during rough times."

"You've been my guardian, and, despite everything, you brought me home. Sadly, our time is running out.

Ron Miscavige's death was announced on Monday, and The Underground Bunker's Tony Ortega first reported the news on his website.

His co-author and friend Dan Koon also addressed his death in an emotional letter saying Ron Miscavige's passing "broke his heart," especially when his family was "forced to disconnect from him" after escaping Scientology.

"To that we must give a big FU to David Miscavige," Dan added.

Ron Miscavige's cause of death is cancer.

At the time of his death, the Scientology whistleblower was in contact with only one of his four children, the only one not involved in the church, Ron Jr.

How Much Is David Miscavige's Net Worth?

According to Radar, sources close to Ron revealed that they would be fulfilling his dying wish by ensuring Becky won't drown in bills paying for his funeral despite his son David's multimillionaire status.

David Miscavige's net worth is reportedly between $10 million and $25 million, but he and his dad had a falling out when Ron left the Church of Scientology.

But despite their strained relationship, Ron reportedly once claimed that his son gave him money despite not being a church member.

He said in a 2016 interview that he reached out to David after escaping a Scientology base.

Ron told "20/20," "In that letter, I said, 'Hey, listen, I spent a lot of years in the Sea Org, I couldn't live under those conditions, and I have very little money paid into social security. If you can give me some financial help, I would appreciate it."

At the time, David Miscavige reportedly gave him $100,000 to purchase a house. But Ron wasn't convinced that his son's gesture was in good faith.

Ron Miscavige first thought that maybe it was his son's way of thinking he was old, so he's going to help him out. But on the other hand, he also believed that perhaps it was David's way of keeping him quiet about the secrets of Scientology.

Currently, the GoFundMe page has over $11,050 donations out of his $15,000 goal, with over 195 donors.

READ ALSO: P. Diddy's Sexuality Questioned Immediately After Supporting Lil Nas X 2021 BET Awards Performance

Ron Miscavige's Explosive Book

In the end, Ron Miscavige wrote the book "Ruthless" and exposed the Church of Scientology and David Miscavige's alleged abuse of power.

He called the impact his son has over so many people "toxic."

READ MORE: Cardi B Announces Pregnancy At 2021 BET Awards But Fans Aren't Happy Offset Is the Dad - Here's Why

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James Corden's "Spill Your Guts" segment on "The Late Late Show" has received a ton of backlash recently after a viewer highlighted what's disturbing and revolting about the entire thing.

Now, Kim Saira, the person who started the Change.org petition to remove Corden's late-night show segment, is getting a lot of backlash, including death threats.

She told TMZ that despite getting more than 45,000 signatures on the petition, Kim is also being bombarded with hate mail, some of which include disturbing messages and threats to her life.

In screenshots provided by the outlet, Kim received an email from a persona named John that said, "If I set up a GoFundMe account to help purchase you a lifetime supply of pacifiers, will you please stop whining and crying about things that bother you just because you don't have a sense of humor?"

Another person also commented on Kim's Instagram, saying, "Yet anti-white hatred is considered white supremacy."

"This is why people don't respect 'Asian Lives Matter' or BLM. ALL LIVES MATTER you POS."

But Kim believes that James Corden couldn't stop the hate she has been getting, especially the disturbing racial attacks.

Does James Corden Care?

However, she does wonder if the "Cats" actor even cares about what she's currently going through.

Additionally, Kim also said how she's disappointed with James' response to the Change.org petition.

During an interview on "The Howard Stern Show," Corden said of the petition, "We heard that story. And the next time we do that bit we absolutely won't involve or use any of those foods."

"Our show is a show about joy and light and love, we don't want to make a show to upset anybody."

However, Kim Saira's petition was to end what she sees as a racist segment towards Asians.

READ ALSO: Kim Kardashian's Spotify Deal: Fans Finally Get Major Updates On Her Highly-Anticipated Podcast

Petition to Remove 'Spill Your Guts'

"Spill Your Guts" is a popular segment on "The Late Late Show With James Corden." Guests either choose to answer a question truthfully or eat "revolting" items presented on the table.

The TikTok user took to the platform to share several clips of "Spill Your Guts," particularly with celebrity guest Jimmy Kimmel where he and the host go around the food choices while saying the food looks "disgusting" and "terrible."

Some of the dishes that are seen on the table are the famous Filipino delicacy balut, century egg, and pig's blood. However, these foods are well-loved in different parts of Asia.

Kim's online petition calls for "Spill Your Guts" to be removed because of the disturbing way it portrays Asian culture and for James Corden to apologize for his words.

He's also being called to donate money to Asian-American organizations.

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Kyle Massey, 29, is is charged with a felony charge for allegedly taking advantage of the intense desire of a young girl to become an actress. The actor promised to help her achieve her dreams, but in reality, allegedly sent her pornographic content in Dec. 2018 and Jan. 2019. The young girl is just 13.

That's So Raven actor Kyle Massey, 29, faces one felony charge for allegedly sending explicit texts and videos to a 13-year-old girl, according to TMZ and Variety.

The specific charge is one count of immoral communication with a minor. The charges were handed out on June 14 in King County, Washington. He however, failed to show up for his arraignment on June 28, Variety reported. It remains to be seen what the consequences would be.

The charge against Kyle stems from a 2019 civil lawsuit against him. At the time, the minor victim sued the ex Disney Channel star for $1.5 million for allegedly sending the pornographic content via Snapchat during the months of December 2018 and January 2019, as People reported.

ALSO READ: Kate Middleton Won't Get Pregnant Anymore: No Baby 4 With Prince William Unless This Happens, Expert Says

The girl alleged that they met at Universal City in California where she was able to express to Kyle that she wanted an acting career. Kyle promised to help her and said he would keep in touch. He did, and acted as "father" figure to her. At one point, Kyle even offered her a place to stay - in the home he and his girlfriend share. Kyle told her he would secure an agent for her.

According to the lawsuit as well, a month after resuming communication, Kyle reportedly added the alleged victim on Snapchat, a popular picture, video, and text app that is quite popular among the youth.

In the lawsuit, the teen claimed that after Kyle added her on this app, he proceeded to send her "numerous sexually explicit text messages, images, and videos," prompting her to file this lawsuit.

The news come as a surprise to many because Kyle technically grew up on national television.

Kyle was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and became a household name because of his Cory role on "That's So Raven," which aired from 2003 to 2007. After, his character was given a spinoff show, which spanned a year, between 2007 and 2008.



He once became a contestant on the reality television competition "Dancing with the Stars" as well.

ALSO READ: Colin Farrell Looks Relaxed While Waiting for Life-Changing Court Decision





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Allison Mack's mom knew the grave situation her daughter is in, and has made a last ditch effort to save her. The desperate mom is reportedly pleading with a judge to look at more factors that could be relevant to the case when sentencing the former actress.

The mom is not completely saying her daughter is innocent, but there are factors that she deemed could keep her daughter out of prison, based on the court documents obtained by Radar Online.

Ahead of her hearing, despite their issues with each other, Mack's mother Mindy wrote a lengthy letter to the judge asking for him to please be softer on her daughter. She said as a parent, not only was she devastated with the whole thing, she was also shocked to see Allison handcuffed in an orange prison jumpsuit during one of her initial hearings.

She also alleged that Mack only joined the group because she lost her way when she stopped acting. The former actress reportedly lost sight of who she is.

The mom also admits Allison told her about the secret women's society within NXIVM three months before her arrest but based on her understanding, or based on what her daughter relayed, it was meant to be empowering to women.

She however said that Mack failed to mention the branding.

Mindy also revealed that Mack felt it is unfair that she is the only one being singled out when there were so many women in the sorority, and that she was merely following orders.

"In the beginning of her time with us, she was very emotional and confused about how this could have happened to her, that she did nothing wrong. In her mind, she was following Keith's guidance in helping herself and other women to conquer their attachments and limitations. She was angry that she had been singled out for punishments when many women were equally involved in the sorority," the letter read.

Mack's mother then said her daughter has now turned into a new leaf and continuing to feel remorse about what she did.

"The shame she felt was crushing her soul," the mom wrote. She revealed that Allison has enrolled in school and started working as a caterer. She also started going back to a Christian church because she really wants to start anew and learn from her mistake.

It remains to be seen whether the judge would be moved by this letter.

ALSO READ: Colin Farrell Looks Relaxed While Waiting for Life-Changing Court Decision

This is however, quite a very desperate strategy, because at present, it appears that there are enough evidence to make the former "Smallville" actress face 17 years behind bars, especially since she pleaded guilty herself. She reportedly played a big role in the perpetuating of the illegal activities of the sex cult NXIVM.

The organization was found to be just guising as a self-help group. They lure innocent people who are not satisfied with themselves by claiming they can get a better understanding of who they are if they join. Mack, who was found to be guided by the leader Keith Raniere, was accused of running a women's group that is sick in all aspects. They reportedly brand all lured innocent women with Raniere's initials and then forced them to have sex with Raniere, among other manipulative actions.

The actress was arrested in 2018 on charges relating to sex trafficking, conspiracy and forced labor conspiracy. Because she entered a guilty plea, she now faces nearly two decades of prison time. When the once promising actress was taken into custody, Mack herself cooperated with the investigation by giving evidence to prosecutors about Raniere.

This is what Mack's camp, including her mom, is banking on. That the fact that she cooperated, she should be given even less prison time.

"Ms. Mack flew to New York from California to participate in numerous 'lengthy' proffer sessions, turned over relevant documents, and was the source of a critically important recording of Raniere discussing the branding of DOS members," her attorneys wrote.

Mack's involvement in NXIVM naturally caused a significant rift within her family, although this did not stop her mom from caring.

She moved back to live with her parents while all these legal issues against her were being investigated.

ALSO READ: Prince William 'Relieved' Kate Middleton To Stay Away from Princess Diana's Statute For One 'Telling' Reason

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Scientists have for the first time detected black holes eating neutron stars, "like Pac Man", in a discovery documenting the collision of the two most extreme and enigmatic objects in the Universe.

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the US and the Virgo gravitational-wave observatory in Italy have captured the gravitational waves from the death spiral and merger of a neutron star with a black hole, not once but twice. The findings are published today.

The researchers say their observations will help unlock some of the most complex mysteries of the Universe, including the building blocks of matter and the workings of space and time.

More than 1,000 scientists were involved with the world-first detections, with many from Australia, including The Australian National University, leading the way.

Distinguished Professor Susan Scott, a co-author on the study based at the ANU Research School of Physics in the Centre for Gravitational Astrophysics, said the events occurred about a billion years ago but were so massive that we are still able to observe their gravitational waves today.

"These collisions have shaken the Universe to its core and we've detected the ripples they have sent hurtling through the cosmos," she said.

"Each collision isn't just the coming together of two massive and dense objects. It's really like Pac-Man, with a black hole swallowing its companion neutron star whole.

"These are remarkable events and we have waited a very long time to witness them. So it's incredible to finally capture them."

One event included a black hole with a mass nine times bigger than our own sun and a neutron star with two times our sun's mass. The other event included a black hole with about six times the mass of our sun and a neutron star with 1.5 times its mass.

Professor Scott, also a Chief Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), said the international team had previously captured many events involving two black holes colliding as well as two neutron stars smashing together.

"Now, we've completed the last piece of the puzzle with the first confirmed observations of gravitational waves from a black hole and a neutron star colliding," she said.

Dr Johannes Eichholz, from the ANU Centre for Gravitational Astrophysics and an Associate Investigator with OzGrav, said the two detections were originally made on 5 and 15 January 2020.

"These kind of detections are incredibly rare," he said.

"We haven't detected these events once - but twice and within 10 days of each other.

"Like the ripples from these two events, which have been felt a billion years later, these findings will have a profound impact on our understanding of the Universe for many years to come."

###

The findings are published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

FOR INTERVIEW:

Distinguished Professor Susan Scott

ANU Research School of Physics

M: +61 450 522 939

E: Susan.Scott@anu.edu.au

For media assistance, contact James Giggacher on +61 436 803 488 or ANU Media on +61 2 6125 7979 or media@anu.edu.au

Additional information about the gravitational-wave observatories

The ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) is funded by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council Centres of Excellence funding scheme. OzGrav is a partnership between Swinburne University of Technology (host of OzGrav headquarters), The Australian National University, Monash University, University of Adelaide, University of Melbourne, and University of Western Australia, along with other collaborating organisations in Australia and overseas.

This material is based upon work supported by NSF's LIGO Laboratory which is a major facility fully funded by the National Science Foundation and operated by Caltech and MIT, which conceived of LIGO and led the Initial and Advanced LIGO projects. Financial support for the Advanced LIGO project was led by the NSF with Germany (Max Planck Society), the UK (Science and Technology Facilities Council) and Australia (Australian Research Council-OzGrav) making significant commitments and contributions to the project. Nearly 1300 scientists from around the world participate in the effort through the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, which includes the GEO Collaboration. A list of additional partners is available at https:/ / my. ligo. org/ census. php
Keep your checklists handy because the 62nd Supplement to the American Ornithological Society's Check-list of North American Birds, publishing today in Ornithology, includes numerous updates to the classification of the continent's bird species. A few highlights from this year's supplement, detailed below, include species splits for Mew Gull, Barred Owl, and Sedge Wren, among quite a few others; a transfer back to an old genus for Ruby-crowned Kinglet; and a revision of the linear sequence of passerine families. The Check-list, published since 1886, is updated annually by the AOS's North American Classification Committee (NACC), the official authority on the names and classification of the region's birds, and is consulted by birders and professional ornithologists alike.

The full Check-list supplement is available at: https:/ / academic. oup. com/ auk/ advance-article/ doi/ 10. 1093/ ornithology/ ukab037/ 6309332 .

Species Splits

Splitting of Barred Owl and Cinereous Owl (Proposal 2021-C-8)

Based primarily on differences in vocalizations, the Barred Owl (Strix varia) is being split into two species, the Barred Owl, which retains its English and scientific names for U.S. and Canadian populations, and the Cinereous Owl (Strix sartorii) for its counterpart in Mexico. "Vocalizations are particularly important for species recognition in owls," NACC chair Terry Chesser of the U.S. Geological Survey explains. The proposal to split Barred Owl into two species, submitted by Nathan Pieplow (University of Colorado Boulder) and Andrew Spencer (Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology), focused on key differences in both their rhythm and series songs, specifically in the series song, which they summarize as: "[sartorii's] syncopated beginning, its uniformity in pitch, and its lack of a drawn-out 'hoo-wah' note at the end. In the Barred Owl's series song, the highest and loudest notes are at the end, while in that of sartorii, the highest and loudest notes are in the middle."

Pieplow and colleagues were surprised and dismayed, when returning to many previously known locations to record vocalizations of Cinereous Owl, that there appears to have been a severe decline and reduction in range for this species. Moreover, while searching at sites in Oaxaca, Mexico, where this species had previously been found, they instead observed the Fulvous Owl (Strix fulvescens), a close relative more typically found farther south in Mexico and Central America, but which appears to have extended its range northward.

Splitting of Mew Gull into Common Gull and Short-billed Gull (Proposal 2021-A-3)

"If you're a coast-to-coast birder, you may be able to pick up a new species this winter," Chesser quips, describing the split of Mew Gull (Larus canus) into two species: Common Gull (Larus canus) and Short-billed Gull (Larus brachyrhynchus), the name used for this species as long ago as the first edition of the Check-list in 1886. The Common Gull breeds in Eurasia and is a casual visitor to the eastern U.S. and Canada, and occasionally ventures to Alaska, whereas the Short-billed Gull breeds in northwestern North America and winters south along the Pacific coast and also into the interior, primarily of the western U.S. This split is based mainly on differences in display vocalizations but also on genetic and other morphological differences outlined in a proposal by NACC member Pamela C. Rasmussen (Michigan State University). These species had been lumped based on what is now viewed as weak evidence from a paper published in 1919.

Splitting of Sedge Wren and Grass Wren (Proposal 2021-C-3)

Previous ideas about how Sedge Wren (Cistothorus platensis) should be divided turn out to be misguided, according to Chesser, who authored a proposal, based in part on a prior proposal to South American Classification Committee (SACC), to split this species. In the 1998 Check-list, Sedge Wren was considered a single species distributed from Canada to extreme southern South America, comprising three distinct groups: stellaris, whose range extended from Canada to Panama, and two other groups distributed in South America, platensis and polyglottus. However, the species split, which is based on vocalizations and genetics, does not occur where we might have expected it would, based on what we thought we knew about intraspecific variation in the species. Instead, it turns out that the populations breeding in Canada and the U.S. are distinct from all other populations, including those breeding in Mexico, Central America, and South America, and are being split from the rest. The new southern species, Grass Wren (Cistothorus platensis), will retain the scientific name due to reasons of priority, but the new northern species will keep the English name Sedge Wren (Cistothorus stellaris). The SACC had previously made this split after consideration of the separate proposal to that committee.

Transfers Between Genera

A New (Old) Genus for the Ruby-crowned Kinglet (Proposal 2021-A-9)

The Ruby-crowned Kinglet (Regulus calendula, now Corthylio calendula), a tiny olive-colored songbird with a bright red but hard-to-see crown in males, breeds in forests across the U.S. and Canada and winters as far south as Central America. It's one of six species in the family Regulidae, all currently placed in the same genus, Regulus. Two species are found in the New World, Golden-crowned Kinglet (Regulus satrapa) and Ruby-crowned Kinglet; and four species in the Old World, including the Firecrest (Regulus ignicapilla) and Goldcrest (Regulus regulus). In the 1931 AOU Check-list, the Ruby-crowned Kinglet had been transferred to its own genus, Corthylio, based on morphological differences from the other species, but as of the 1957 Check-list it was returned to Regulus, with Corthylio relegated to subgenus status, and it has been placed in Regulus ever since.

"It has long been known that the Ruby-crowned Kinglet is markedly divergent from the other regulids in plumage and other aspects of external anatomy, reflected by the fact that the genus Corthylio Cabanis, 1853, was erected for this species," authors Brandon Woo and Natalia C. Garcia (Cornell University) and NACC member Pamela C. Rasmussen (Michigan State University) state in their proposal. Moreover, vocal and genetic data, including molecular studies dating from the early days of molecular systematics to the current genomics era, have consistently shown that the Ruby-crowned Kinglet is strikingly different from other species placed in Regulus.

"This is my favorite proposal of the year," Chesser notes, "and I think it will be interesting to birders for the same reasons. I hope this generates new appreciation for an unassuming little bird that is of great interest evolutionarily and really distinctive from other species in its family."

Linear Sequence Revision

Revision of Linear Sequence of Passerine Families (Proposal 2021-B-7)

A proposal by Chesser and NACC member Shawn Billerman based on new, concordant information from three recent genomic studies of passerines has led to a reshuffling and update to the linear sequence of passerine families to better reflect their phylogenetic relationships. "This is a big step forward that reflects a wealth of new information on evolutionary relationships among passerine families," Chesser explains. "This revision will create short-term disturbance, but we think this will be more than offset by the benefits of having a more scientifically accurate classification, which should be stable into the future, with occasional minor changes. The fact that several genomic studies produced virtually the same phylogeny was the key factor in convincing us that the time was right for this revision."

About the Journal

Ornithology (formerly, The Auk: Ornithological Advances) is a peer-reviewed, international journal of ornithology published by the American Ornithological Society. The journal's name changed to Ornithology in January of 2021. Ornithology commenced publication in 1884 and in 2009 was honored as one of the 100 most influential journals of biology and medicine over the past 100 years.

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The oldest strain of Yersinia pestis--the bacteria behind the plague that caused the Black Death, which may have killed as much as half of Europe's population in the 1300s--has been found in the remains of a 5,000-year-old hunter-gatherer. A genetic analysis publishing June 29 in the journal Cell Reports reveals that this ancient strain was likely less contagious and not as deadly as its medieval version.

"What's most astonishing is that we can push back the appearance of Y. pestis 2,000 years farther than previously published studies suggested," says senior author Ben Krause-Kyora, head of the aDNA Laboratory at the University of Kiel in Germany. "It seems that we are really close to the origin of the bacteria."

The plague-carrying hunter-gatherer was a 20- to 30-year old man called "RV 2039." He was one of two people whose skeletons were excavated in the late 1800s in a region called Rinnukalns in present-day Latvia. Soon after, the remains of both vanished until 2011, when they reappeared as part of German anthropologist Rudolph Virchow's collection. After this re-discovery, two more burials were uncovered from the site for a total of four specimens, likely from the same group of hunter-fisher-gatherers.

Krause-Kyora and his team used samples from the teeth and bone of all four hunter-gatherers to sequence their genomes and then tested them for bacterial and viral pathogens. They were surprised to find evidence of Y. pestis in RV 2039--and after reconstructing the bacteria's genome and comparing it to other ancient strains, the researchers determined that the Y. pestis RV 2039 carried was indeed the oldest strain ever discovered. It was likely part of a lineage that emerged about 7,000 years ago, only a few hundred years after Y. pestis split from its predecessor, Yersinia pseudotuberculosis.

"What's so surprising is that we see already in this early strain more or less the complete genetic set of Y. pestis, and only a few genes are lacking. But even a small shift in genetic settings can have a dramatic influence on virulence," says Krause-Kyora.

In particular, this ancient strain lacked one crucial thing: the gene that first let fleas act as vectors to spread the plague. This gene was responsible for efficient transmission of the bacterium to human hosts, which resulted in the growth of the infamously grotesque pus-filled buboes in the sick associated with the medieval bubonic plague. Flea-based transmission also required the death of the human host, which means that the appearance of the gene could have driven the evolution of a deadlier disease.

From RV 2039, it likely took more than a thousand years for Y. pestis to acquire all the mutations needed for flea-based transmission. And it's not clear to what extent RV 2039 experienced the effects of the plague at all.

Y. pestis was found in his bloodstream, meaning he most likely died from the bacterial infection--although, the researchers think the course of the disease might have been fairly slow. They observed that he had a high number of bacteria in his bloodstream at his time of death, and in previous rodent studies, a high bacterial load of Y. pestis has been associated with less aggressive infections. Additionally, the people he was buried near were not infected and RV 2039 was carefully buried in his grave, which the authors say also makes a highly contagious respiratory version of the plague less likely.

Instead, this 5,000-year-old strain likely was transmitted directly via a bite from an infected rodent and probably didn't spread beyond the infected person. "Isolated cases of transmission from animals to people could explain the different social environments where these ancient diseased humans are discovered. We see it in societies that are herders in the steppe, hunter-gatherers who are fishing, and in farmer communities--totally different social settings but always spontaneous occurrence of Y. pestis cases," says Krause-Kyora.

These conclusions--that the early form of Y. pestis likely was a slow-moving disease and wasn't very transmissible--challenge many theories about the development of human civilization in Europe and Asia. For example, some historians have suggested that infectious diseases like Y. pestis evolved mostly in megacities of over 10,000 people near the Black Sea. However, 5,000 years ago--the age of RV 2039's strain--was long before the formation of large cities. Instead, agriculture was just beginning to appear in Central Europe, and populations were much sparser.

This timeline, plus the less contagious and deadly nature of this early Y. pestis strain, also contradicts the hypothesis that Y. pestis led to the large population declines in Western Europe at the end of the Neolithic Age.

The authors say that examining the history of Y. pestis could also potentially shed light on human genomic history. "Different pathogens and the human genome have always evolved together. We know Y. pestis most likely killed half of the European population in a short time frame, so it should have a big impact on the human genome," says Krause-Kyora. "But even before that, we see major turnover in our immune genes at the end of the Neolithic Age, and it could be that we were seeing a significant change in the pathogen landscape at that time as well."

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This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) and Germany`s Excellence Strategy. The anthropological and archaeological research on Ri??ukalns is funded by the DFG and the University of Latvia.

Cell Reports, Susat et al.: "A 5,000-year-old hunter-gatherer already plagued by Yersinia pestis." https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(21)00645-8
A stimulating environment keeps the "hippocampus" - which is the brain's memory control center - young, so to speak. Causes of this are molecular mechanisms that affect gene regulation. These current findings from studies in mice provide clues as to why an active, varied life can help preserve mental fitness in old age. Researchers from the DZNE and the Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden (CRTD) at the Technische Universitat Dresden report on this in the journal Nature Communications.

Human DNA - and this also applies to mice - contains thousands of genes. However, it is not only the genetic blueprint that is decisive for the function of a cell and whether it is healthy or not, but above all which genes can be switched on or off. Aging, living conditions and behavior are known to influence this ability to activate genes. The phenomenon, referred to as "epigenetics", was the focus of the current study. For this, researchers including Dr. Sara Zocher and Prof. Gerd Kempermann examined mice that had grown up in different environments: One group of animals experienced, from a young age, an "enriched" environment with toys and tunnel tubes. The rodents of a second group did not have such occupational opportunities.

Attachments to the DNA

When the scientists examined the genome, they found that in those mice that grew up in the stimulating environment, there was, with age, only a relatively small change in certain chemical tags of the DNA. In mice from the low-stimulus environment, these changes were much more pronounced - in comparison between young and older animals. "We registered so-called methyl groups, which stick to the DNA," explains Gerd Kempermann, speaker for the DZNE's Dresden site, DZNE research group leader and also a scientist at the CRTD. "These chemical attachments do not alter the genetic information per se. Rather, they influence whether individual genes can be activated or not."

Malleable Brains

Such "epigenetic markings" tend to diminish with age, but in the animals with stimulating living conditions, the decrease in methyl groups was comparatively small. Thus, in old mice raised in a varied environment, gene activity had, in a sense, remained young. In particular, this affected a series of genes relevant to growing new neurons and cellular connections in the hippocampus. "Epigenetically, these animals retained a younger hippocampus," Kempermann says. Therefore, the brains of these mice were more malleable - experts speak of greater "neuroplasticity" - than in conspecifics of the same age that had grown up in a low-stimulus environment.

The current study did not include behavioral experiments. However, Kempermann points out that many other studies have shown that mice raised in high-stimulus settings perform better on memory tests than those from low-stimulus environments. "It is fair to assume that this mental fitness is due to the stabilization of methylation patterns that we observed," the neuroscientist says. "Of course, the question is to what extent our findings also apply to humans. Here, the situation is likely to be more complicated. After all, it is about how living conditions influence behavior and the way humans react to external stimuli is much more complex than in mice. However, we have good reasons to believe that the basic epigenetic principles are the same in humans as in mice."

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Original Publication

Environmental enrichment preserves a young DNA methylation landscape in the aged mouse hippocampus, Zocher et al., Nature Communications (2021), DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-23993-1; URL: https:/ / doi. org/ 10. 1038/ s41467-021-23993-1 & https:/ / rdcu. be/ cm3nD

About Deutsches Zentrum fur Neurodegenerative Erkrankungen, DZNE (German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases)

The DZNE is a research center that addresses all aspects of neurodegenerative diseases (such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) in order to develop novel approaches of prevention, treatment, and health care. It is comprised of ten sites across Germany and cooperates closely with universities, university hospitals, and other research institutions on a national and international level. The DZNE is publicly funded and a member of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centers. Website: http://www. dzne. de/ en

About the Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden (CRTD)

The Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden (CRTD) of TU Dresden is academic home for scientists from more than 30 nations. Their mission is to discover the principles of cell and tissue regeneration and leveraging this for recognition, treatment and reversal of diseases. The CRTD links the bench to the clinic, scientists to clinicians to pool expertise in stem cells, developmental biology, gene-editing and regeneration towards innovative therapies for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, hematological diseases such as leukemia, metabolic diseases such as diabetes, retina and bone diseases.

Since 2016 the CRTD is part of the central scientific unit "Center for Molecular and Cellular Bioengineering" (CMCB) of the TU Dresden and plays a central role within the research priority area Health Sciences, Biomedicine, and Bioengineering of the TU Dresden.
This press release is in support of a presentation by Dr Ruth Howie presented online at the 37th Annual Meeting of ESHRE.

29 June 2021: Cancer treatments can cause premature ovarian failure (POI) including in girls who want to become mothers eventually. Ovarian tissue cryopreservation (OTC) provides a future fertility option but is invasive, has risks and evidence indicates that most girls don't develop POI. So, doctors face the dilemma of how to offer OTC appropriately.

Now, an assessment tool has been found to help predict correctly which female cancer patients aged under 18 years will develop POI and should therefore be offered OTC. Results from a long-term follow-up study of 423 girls and young women show nearly a quarter (24%; n = 9) of the 37 assessed as high risk by this method - known as the Edinburgh selection criteria - were later diagnosed with POI. This compares with only 3% who developed POI out of the 386 identified to be at low-risk.

Principal investigator Dr Ruth Howie, from the University of Edinburgh and NHS Lothian, will present the findings today online at the 37th Annual Meeting of ESHRE. She said that although prevalence of POI after childhood cancer is low at around 10%, the Edinburgh selection criteria (see notes) "are a robust tool for selecting those at high risk at the time of diagnosis who should be offered OTC".

She added: "Cancer treatments, especially aggressive chemotherapy and radiotherapy, can cause permanent damage to ovaries. Future fertility and reproductive health should be considered at time of diagnosis and treatment planning.

"Correct identification of patients at high risk allows appropriate discussion of fertility preservation with OTC and future transplantation."

The Edinburgh selection criteria for OTC have been in use since 1996 and were developed by a multidisciplinary group of experts. The criteria are based on knowledge of relevant scientific literature and clinician experience of POI. This report represents the longest follow-up to date to validate the selection method.

Overall, a total of 26 patients of the 37 offered OTC chose to actually have the procedure.

Data are based on all females under 18 years old and diagnosed with cancer in South East Scotland between 1 January 1996 and 30 April 2020. Reproductive function was assessed by the presence of menstruation, pregnancy, hormonal measurements, evidence of puberty or POI diagnosis at most recent follow-up to October 2020. The average time in the study for developing POI was 5.8 years, although many patients will develop the condition immediately after cancer treatment.

Of the 639 diagnosed, a total of 216 were excluded including those on hormonal contraception, girls aged under 12 because they were likely to be prepubertal and unable to have accurate assessment of current reproduction function, and those who had died before age 12.

The 423 remaining included a significant number (n = 143) with unknown reproductive outcomes. Dr Howie said this is likely to reflect "a lack of recording of normal menstrual function" in oncology and haematology clinics.

To address this, a subgroup analysis of 280 patients was carried out in addition to the main analysis. A total of 29 of the 280 were assessed as high risk of POI and offered OTC, and 31% (n = 9) of these developed the condition. This compares with 4% (n = 11) of the 251 patients assessed as low-risk.

Howie says the findings demonstrate that the Edinburgh criteria are successful at identifying "those at risk of developing a life changing and long-term effect". However, she added that the criteria should be continuously appraised via long-term follow up of the reproductive outcomes of those assessed. This is to ensure OTC is offered selectively.

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Presentation 0-177, Tuesday 29 June 2021

Long-term follow up to assess criteria for ovarian tissue cryopreservation for fertility preservation in young women and girls with cancer

Notes on the Edinburgh selection criteria for OTC

- Age younger than 35 years - No previous chemotherapy or radiotherapy if aged 15 years or older at diagnosis, but mild, non-gonadotoxic chemotherapy acceptable if younger than 15 years - A realistic chance of surviving for 5 years - A high risk of premature ovarian insufficiency (>50%) - Informed consent (from parents and, where possible, patient) - Negative serology results for HIV, syphilis, and hepatitis B - Not pregnant and no existing children

* When obtaining outside comment, journalists are requested to ensure that their contacts are aware of the embargo on this release.
FECYT - Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology - presented today at the headquarters of the National Museum of Science and Technology, MUNCYT, IN Alcobendas, the results of the third Social Perception Survey of scientific aspects of the COVID-19 in a debate moderated by Pampa Garcia Molina, Editor-in-Chief of the SINC Agency, in which Raquel Yotti, Director of the Carlos III Health Institute of Madrid, Josep Lobera, Professor of Sociology at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (UAM) and scientific director of the Social Perception Survey on the scientific aspects of COVID-19 and Pablo Simon, Professor of Political Science at the Carlos III University of Madrid, took part.

The results of this third survey correspond to interviews conducted by telephone with 2,100 individuals from 3 to 21 May 2021 and measures the evolution of vaccine reluctance and its associated social factors. The study with the results of this third survey was also presented during the event and is available on the FECYT website.

The first survey was conducted between 25 June and 15 July 2020 and the second between 4 and 22 January 2021. With the results obtained from both, the report Evolucion de la percepcion social de aspectos cientificos de la COVID-19 (Evolution of Social Perception of Scientific Aspects of COVID-19) was produced.

This series of surveys has been conducted for the FECYT by Professor Josep Lobera (Universidad Autonoma de Madrid) with the collaboration of researcher Pablo Cabrera (Universidad de Salamanca).

Attitudes towards vaccination

Results of the study show that the uptake of covid-19 vaccines consolidates the improvement initiated in January 2021. In July 2020, only one third of the population (32%) expressed with full confidence their intention to be vaccinated as soon as a vaccine was offered by health authorities. In January, that proportion increased to 58% and, in May, it has reached 83% (adding those already vaccinated and those fully confident of doing so).

The main factors associated with reluctance to vaccinate are the belief that vaccines are unsafe, complacency (the perception that when the majority are vaccinated, vaccination is no longer necessary), individualistic values (measured as disengagement from "I would accept the coronavirus vaccine if it helps protect my elders") and the conspiracy mentality around covid-19.

Compliance with COVID-19 preventive measures

Results show a certain relaxation in compliance with prevention measures, particularly in maintaining social distance. In May, only a third of the population (32%) said that they had strictly avoided social contacts in the last month, twenty points less than in January.

On the other hand, only half of the population (49%) say that they have avoided or have been able to strictly avoid being in enclosed spaces with other people outside their living environment. The main factors associated with non-compliance with prevention measures are: 1) non-compliance with the measures by their immediate social environment, 2) lack of trust in health institutions, 3) having a low level of education, and 4) being male. The quadratic effect of educational level points to a possible effect of living/working conditions on the maintenance of prevention norms. On the other hand, conspiracy mentality adds to the list of factors associated with mask use.

COVID-19 conspiracy theories

There is a significant percentage of people who believe in some conspiracy theories. One in four Spaniards (25%) strongly believe that there are secret organisations that strongly influence political decisions and only 17% strongly believe the opposite. Almost a third of the Spanish population (31%) believe that face masks are bad for their health and only 16% firmly believe that they are not. Nearly 8% strongly believe that vaccinating children is harmful, and this fact is hidden, while 35% strongly believe that this is not the case.

58% of the population declare they have seen or heard messages, through one or more media, encouraging people not to be vaccinated against the coronavirus. Twenty-seven per cent say they have heard or seen them on television, while 34% say these messages have come to them via a social network.

The main factors associated with having conspiratorial beliefs about covid-19 are: 1) a previous conspiratorial mindset about vaccines, 2) distrust of political institutions, 3) avoidance of mask use, 4) experiencing social difficulties associated with covid-19 containment measures, 5) being female, and 6) having a low level of education.

Technical data sheet of the survey:

Universe: individuals aged 18 and over resident in Spain for 5 or more years.

Sample size: 2,100 interviews.

Sampling: random selection of the interviewee with a sample stratified by the intersection habitat / autonomous community and distributed proportionally to the total of the region.

Method of data collection: computer-assisted telephone interview (CATI) using a structured and pre-coded questionnaire. The interviews were carried out in 75% of the cases by means of the interviewees' landline telephones and in the remaining 25% by means of their mobile telephones for people who did not have a landline telephone.

Data collection: computer-assisted telephone interview (CATI) using a structured, pre-coded questionnaire. The interviews were carried out in 75% of the cases through the landline phones of the interviewees and in the remaining 25% through their mobile phones for people who did not have a landline phone.

Sampling error: assuming the criteria and principles of simple random sampling, under the assumption of maximum sampling inefficiency due to the non-proportional distribution of the sample, for a confidence level of 95% and in the worst case scenario of maximum indeterminacy (p=q=50%), the margin of error for the total sample can be estimated at +-2.14%.

Fieldwork: between 3 and 21 May 2021.

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About FECYT

Fundacion Espanola para la Ciencia y Tecnologia, F.S.P. (FECYT), (Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology) is a public foundation under the Ministry of Science and Innovation. Thanks to this collaboration, FECYT works to strengthen the link between science and society through actions that promote open and inclusive science, scientific culture and education, responding to the needs and challenges of the Spanish Science, Technology and Innovation System.
Coastal ecosystems sequester large quantities of carbon through processes at risk of disturbance from changing climate, land use change and rising sea levels. How carbon moves from land to ocean is one of the critical knowledge gaps needed to constrain the structure and functioning of the Earth system. In coastal regions, the origin of various carbon sources is very difficult to identify - for example, whether the carbon is from rivers or marsh runoff, or created in place via phytoplankton production. Moreover, the generalization of these sources and the processes involved in transport to the ocean is even more difficult, thus limiting the ability to make future projections based on a changing climate and associated events such as wetter, more intense hurricanes.

One potentially underappreciated carbon source, the underlying marine sediments, may be particularly impacted under these conditions and may play an outsized role in the overall carbon budget. Satellite remote sensing is often used as a tool to characterize and quantify the various sources of carbon in coastal regions by measuring colored dissolved organic matter (CDOM) - more colloquially known as the "brown stuff" in rivers in Florida and beyond. However, it is not currently possible to discriminate between sediment-derived carbon versus other sources.

Using satellite images, hydrodynamic modeling and field work, scientists from Florida Atlantic University's Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute are setting out to quantify this sediment carbon contribution, make historical reconstructions, and contribute to future projections of the coastal budget. They have received a three-year, $736,000 grant from NASA's Minority University Research and Education Project Ocean Biology and Biogeochemistry (OCEAN). FAU is one of 10 universities in the nation and the only university in Florida to receive this grant in support of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in seeking a better understanding of the ocean's role in the Earth system.

If successful, this research in the Gulf of Mexico's hypoxia region off the coasts of Texas and Louisiana may demonstrate not just the ability, but also the utility, of remote sensing as an observational technique for characterizing potentially critical but often neglected carbon cycle processes related to marine sediments. Marine sediments are essentially a permanent means for carbon removal from the surface of the Earth over geological timescales. Yet, a changing climate, coastal eutrophication (i.e. excess nutrient inputs), and processes such as trawling are reducing their carbon storage capacity, resulting in the "browning" of coastal waters.

The FAU Harbor Branch project targets a NASA objective to "Improve understanding of carbon cycle processes and feedbacks in aquatic critical zones that are particularly vulnerable to environmental changes." Aquatic critical zones are regions where important biogeochemical and physical processes take place and together regulate the functionality of aquatic ecosystems.

The FAU Harbor Branch team includes: Veronica Ruiz-Xomchuk, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow who will lead the technical research aspects as the scientific principal investigator who has expertise in physical oceanography and ocean modeling; Jordon Beckler, Ph.D., the project's primary principal investigator and an assistant research professor and a fellow of FAU's Institute for Sensing and Embedded Networks Systems Engineering (I-SENSE) who has expertise in chemical oceanography and sediment geochemistry; and Tim Moore, Ph.D., co-principal investigator and a research professor who has expertise in ocean color and bio-optics.

The team is collaborating with Martial Taillefert, Ph.D., Georgia Tech, who is the chief scientist for a series of National Science Foundation-funded oceanographic research cruises that will be used to explore effects of ocean acidification on sediment processes. Taillefert has invited the FAU team onboard to leverage this campaign, allowing for the "groundtruthing" of the satellite observations using corresponding measurements obtained directly within the water.

By using a "benthic lander" developed via an existing collaboration between FAU and Georgia Tech to explore blue holes, the team will obtain direct flux measurement of dissolved organic matter and the CDOM from sediments to the water column above the seabed, otherwise known as the benthic-boundary layer. Then, the hydrodynamic model will simulate if, where, and when this carbon may be uplifted to the surface of the ocean where it can potentially be detected using satellite remote sensing.

Researchers will combine these sediment flux measurements with more than 20 years of ocean color satellite data and modeled ocean current dynamics to simulate this carbon transport, while additionally ensuring to account for other potentially confounding carbon sources such as river inputs. The research team will then extrapolate these sediment measurements across the entire study region over various timescales to corroborate satellite-derived estimates.

"We've seen huge inventories of darkly colored pore water in coastal ocean mud, which we know is CDOM, and I couldn't help but wonder to what extent this carbon could be escaping across the sediment surface and affecting the optical properties of the ocean," said Beckler. "However, it isn't yet possible to directly implicate the sediments over large areas by just looking at satellite images since they aren't able to 'see' more than a few meters below the surface of the ocean. The hydrodynamic model uniquely allows us to bridge the gap between the seafloor and the surface ocean. This is an exciting new avenue for my own sediment-centered research - and a topic that is rather unconventional with regards to NASA's typical project portfolio."

An important aspect of the project is the STEM engagement (science-technology-engineering-mathematics) portion that is weaved throughout the research and involves FAU's PK-12 schools and educational programs. The vast majority of work effort will enhance the capacity for STEM research and educational opportunities for underrepresented groups and will create many opportunities for student/intern engagement regarding ocean issues and experiential learning opportunities and the use of NASA products. The students also are invited to participate in the research cruises, depending on the school year schedule.

"Receiving funding from NASA for this innovative proposal is very exciting because, if we are successful, results from our project will have a tremendous impact on scientific inquiry from space to the seabed," said James Sullivan, Ph.D., executive director, FAU Harbor Branch. "We will know whether or not sediment-derived colored dissolved organic matter is routinely visible in the northern Gulf of Mexico."

FAU is the most racially, culturally and ethnically diverse university in Florida. In 2016, the FAU College of Engineering and Computer Science received designation as a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) by the United States Department of Education, only awarded to colleges and universities with enrollment of full-time Hispanic undergraduate students of at least 25 percent. This year, FAU's College of Engineering and Computer Science was recognized as a national leader in diversity in engineering by the American Society of Engineering Education.

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About Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute:

Founded in 1971, Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute at Florida Atlantic University is a research community of marine scientists, engineers, educators and other professionals focused on Ocean Science for a Better World. The institute drives innovation in ocean engineering, at-sea operations, drug discovery and biotechnology from the oceans, coastal ecology and conservation, marine mammal research and conservation, aquaculture, ocean observing systems and marine education. For more information, visit http://www. fau. edu/ hboi .

About Florida Atlantic University:
After centuries of human impact on the world's ecosystems, a new study from Flinders University details an example of how a common native bee species has flourished since the very first land clearances by humans on Fiji.

In a new paper in Molecular Ecology (DOI: 10.1111/mec.16034), research led by Flinders University explores a link between the expansion of Homalictus fijiensis, a common bee in the lowlands of Fiji, which has increased its spread on the main island Viti Levu alongside advancing land clearance and the introduction of new plants and weeds to the environment.

"Earlier research connected the relatively recent population expansion to warming climates, but our study reveals an interesting and positive response from an endemic species to human modifications to the landscape which commenced about 1000BC," says lead author, Flinders University researcher James Dorey.

"This species is a super-generalist pollinator (pollinates many plant species) and likes to nest in open, cleared ground, so one of the most important bee pollinators in Fiji actually appears to have benefited from human arrival and subsequent clearing of land in Fiji."

The study examined changes in native bee populations in Fiji using phylogenetic analyses of mitochondrial and genomic DNA. They show that bee populations in Fiji expanded enormously, starting about 3000 years ago and accelerating from about 2000 years ago.

Compared to the main island, Mr Dorey says no corresponding change in bee population size was found for another major island, Kadavu, where human populations and agricultural activities have been historically very low.

"That is too recent to be explained by a warming climate since the last glacial maximum which ended about 18,000 thousand years ago," says senior author Associate Professor Michael Schwarz in the new paper.

"Instead, we argue that the expansion of Fijian bee population better coincides with the early occupation of the Pacific islands by the somewhat-mysterious Lapita people, and this expansion accelerated with increasing presence of later Polynesians in Fiji who modified the landscape with their agricultural practices."

The research is an example of how the impacts of early human dispersals can be inferred even when fossil records are not available and when climate change is a complicating factor.

One possible downside of super-generalist pollinators, such as the endemic Fijian halictine bee Homalictus fijiensis, is that they could encourage the expansion of introduced weeds and exotic crop species - exacerbating other ecosystem changes in the long run.

"As well, those research techniques could be applied to many other animal species. For example, changes in population sizes of mammals, such as kangaroos, wombats and koalas, could be explored by looking at their tick and lice parasites which might have better 'genetic signals' of how populations have fared over the last few thousands of years or more, adds Associate Professor Schwarz, who says high-resolution population genetic studies such as this are a good way to discriminate between older and 'natural' events due to climate change and those resulting from early human dispersal and colonisation.

"A persistent question in studies of ecosystems over the last 60,000 years or so concerns the relative roles of climate change and human modifications of the environment. For example, there is a continuing debate about the extinction of megafauna in Australia - was it due to humans, climate change, or both?

"Those kinds of question can be addressed if there are very good fossil records, but what about ecosystems where fossil records are very poor."

The new paper is a result of almost a decade of scientific studies into Fiji's biodiversity by SA Museum and Flinders University biological scientists and students.

SA Museum's research fellow in World Cultures, Dr Stephen Zagala (pictured attached), says the new study gives fascinating insights into how current ecosystems were assembled during the various phases of human migration and settlement.

"Early European explorers and naturalists were unaware that extensive human dispersals had already been transforming the ecologies of Pacific islands for millennia," he says. "This study adds important details to an emerging picture of the Pacific as a highly cultivated landscape."

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The article, Holocene population expansion of a tropical bee coincides with early human colonisation of Fiji rather than climate change (2021), by James B Dorey, Scott VC Groom, Alejandro Velasco-Castrillon, Mark I Stevens, Michael SY Lee and Michael P Schwarz has been published in Molecular Ecology (Wiley) DOI: 10.1111/mec.16034
Mineral resources from Chile are of great importance to Germany. According to statistics from the World Bank, thousands of tons of valuable minerals are imported from the South American country every year, including raw materials for lithium-ion batteries. But their extraction causes ecological and social problems: "The use of the limited freshwater resources in northern Chile for mining regularly fuels conflicts with the local population," says Professor Thomas Kohl from KIT's Institute of Applied Geosciences (AGW). "Northern Chile is one of the driest regions on earth, but has extensive geothermal resources. With a novel type of plant, it is not only possible to generate electricity in a climate-friendly way, but also to extract drinking water and even mineral resources at the same time." The AGW team of BrineMine, a German-Chilean research project, is developing the necessary strategies and technologies.

AGW has a long history of cooperation in the field of geothermal research in Chile. Its main partner is the Centro de Excelencia en Geotermia de Los Andes (CEGA). "BrineMine demonstrates how well the cooperation between Chilean and German institutions works," says Professor Diego Morata, director of CEGA. "Sustainable development, achieved by the combination of geothermal and green mining, can benefit Europe and the Andean region alike."

First Demonstration Plant on the Upper Rhine Graben

Part of the transdisciplinary research initiative is dedicated to the geochemical and geothermal potential of thermal wells in Chile in order to identify suitable sites. A data survey is being conducted to determine the raw materials potential with a focus on the thermal fields of the Atacama Desert. In addition, the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (ISE) takes part in the BrineMine project by developing the plant technology for later industrial use. It is based on a novel process chain: First, heat from the geothermal brine is used for energy recovery. The cooled liquid, which has a relatively low concentration, is then pre-concentrated by reverse osmosis; at the same time, drinking water is obtained. The brine concentrate is then further concentrated by membrane distillation until it is saturated. "The thermal energy required for the entire process can be covered directly from the excess heat of the power plant process," explains project manager Dr. Joachim Koschikowski from ISE. "We have already set up a demonstration plant in a geothermal power plant in the Upper Rhine Graben and successfully integrated key components into ongoing power plant operations."

Optimization of Processes for Raw Material Mining

Most of the process steps are based on proven methods, but they have never been combined in this way. Detailed research is required, because, for example, both concentration and cooling increase the risk of silicate deposits. "Conventional strategies for silicate removal would greatly impair the extraction of the resources. Without water treatment, the technical plant components would be damaged," explains Valentin Goldberg from KIT's AGW. The researchers found a viable solution by changing the pH value of the brine and adding divalent cations (e.g. calcium or magnesium). "Our silicate removal method is fast and effective. Most importantly, it has no negative impact on raw material extraction," Goldberg says. The researchers describe this new approach in the Geothermics journal.

Before the first plants can be installed in Chile, further details about the process need to be clarified. In addition, specific models for economic operation are also being developed.

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About BrineMine

BrineMine was initiated in 2019 by Professor Thomas Kohl and Dr. Sebastian Held. The German-Chilean research consortium is coordinated by the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (ISE). Other project partners besides KIT are the companies Geothermie Neubrandenburg (GTN) and SolarSpring membrane solutions in Germany as well as Fraunhofer Chile and Centro de Excelencia en Geotermia de Los Andes (CEGA) in Chile. The Federal Ministry of Education and Research is funding the project with approx. EUR 1.5 million. The great interest of the Chilean industry in BrineMine became evident at a webinar hosted by the German-Chilean Chamber of Industry and Commerce, which was attended by hundreds of participants. The Chilean Ministry of Energy also provides support for the project.

Recording of webinar: https:/ / ecominingconcepts. cl/ de/ summary-brinemine-sustainable-mineral-and-fresh-water-extraction-from-geothermal-brines-in-chile

More information about BrineMine: https:/ / geothermics. agw. kit. edu/ brinemine. php https:/ / www. bmbf-client. de/ projekte/ brinemine

Original publications

Spitzmuller, L., Goldberg, V., Held, S., Grimmer, J. C., Winter, D., Genovese, M., Koschikowski, J,. and Kohl, T. (2021): Selective silica removal in geothermal fluids: Implications for applications for geothermal power plant operation and mineral extraction, Geothermics. https:/ / doi. org/ 10. 1016/ j. geothermics. 2021. 102141

Goldberg, V., Winter, D., Nitschke, F., Rath, M., Held, S., Spitzmuller, L., Budach, I., Pavez, M., Morata, D., Koschikowski J. and Kohl, T. (2021). The potential of raw material extraction from thermal brines-Successful milestones of the BrineMine project, Oil gas, DOI 10.19225/210306 https:/ / geothermics. agw. kit. edu/ downloads/ OGA_001_21_026-033_Goldberg_et_al_HP-Liz. pdf

Details about the KIT Energy Center: https:/ / www. energy. kit. edu/ index. php

Contact for this press release:

Dr Martin Heidelberger, Editor/Press Officer, Phone: +49 721 608-41169, E-mail: martin.heidelberger@kit.edu

Being "The Research University in the Helmholtz Association", KIT creates and imparts knowledge for the society and the environment. It is the objective to make significant contributions to the global challenges in the fields of energy, mobility, and information. For this, about 9,600 employees cooperate in a broad range of disciplines in natural sciences, engineering sciences, economics, and the humanities and social sciences. KIT prepares its 23,300 students for responsible tasks in society, industry, and science by offering research-based study programs. Innovation efforts at KIT build a bridge between important scientific findings and their application for the benefit of society, economic prosperity, and the preservation of our natural basis of life. KIT is one of the German universities of excellence.
Dr. Richard A. McIndoe, bioinformatics expert and associate director of the Center for Biotechnology and Genomic Medicine at the Medical College of Georgia, is leading a dynamic, new $6.2 million federally funded initiative to support highly innovative research ideas in three areas with tremendous impact on health.

This Innovative Science Accelerator, or ISAC, program establishes an expedited but still extensive review process that will enable scientists to pursue some of their most innovative research ideas in diseases of the kidneys; the urinary tract in both sexes as well as the male reproductive organs; and the blood and bone marrow.

"The idea is that ISAC will provide seed funds to investigators who have high-risk, high-reward ideas, and they will get one year of money to try to figure out if their idea is going to work. If it works, they will be able to use the data they generate to apply for a larger grant," says McIndoe, who wants the new program to be as innovative as the ideas scientists bring to it.

The five-year initiative is a new program of the Division of Kidney, Urologic and Hematologic Diseases of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases of the National Institutes of Health.

The goal is to move science forward that matters to people's lives, and the opportunities include giving particularly new scientists experience writing grants, going through the review process and generating findings, McIndoe says.

ISAC will provide scientists an efficient path to secure a one-time $100,000 grant that should ease application for a larger, traditional NIH grant, the gold standard for biomedical research in the U.S., or conversely to acknowledge that their idea does not merit additional pursuit.

Another primary function of ISAC is to host an annual scientific meeting for scientists working in these areas where awardees can present their work, and that will help fuel discussion and collaboration, says McIndoe, Regents' Professor and Georgia Research Alliance Distinguished Investigator.

High-risk research with high-reward potential often doesn't get funded in the traditional, highly competitive process of seeking NIH funding, McIndoe says. For example, the 2019 payline for the NIDDK was 13%, which means only 13 of 100 submitted grants get funded.

About half of submitted grants, don't even make it through the NIH study section manned by experts in the field who do the frontline review of grant proposals, says McIndoe, who at points in his career has sat on more than a half-dozen study sections annually.

As director of ISAC's coordinating unit, McIndoe will also work with NIH program officers with expertise in the area of interest of an application to identify other experts across the country. He'll then manage the review process from there, including assigning reviewers and making sure reviews are done on time.

He'll ensure that the scores and critiques get back to the NIH program officers who also will rank the grant proposals, and that information along with what the ISAC office determines to be a fundable score range will then go to one more group of experts in the field, ISAC's External Evaluation Committee, and if they agree with the determinations, the decision is made.

Although the review process is extensive, it's about half of the standard process for submitting for scientists and reviewers alike, starting with a three-page research plan rather than up to a dozen pages for an RO1, the NIH's oldest grant mechanism, and the application is easier for reviewers to digest, McIndoe says.

The ISAC Working Group recently opted to have three application review times annually to further expedite the process, and applications can be submitted at any time, McIndoe says. Scientists can begin submitting applications this fall, and the first annual meeting likely will be next Spring.

The local ISAC Working Group, which will advise McIndoe on kidney, urologic and hematology research, includes Dr. David Mattson, chair of the MCG Department of Physiology and an established hypertension researcher; Dr. Jennifer Sullivan, pharmacologist and physiologist in the Department of Physiology who is also interim dean of The Graduate School at AU and studies blood pressure regulation and kidney health, with a particular interest in gender differences; and Dr. Betty Pace, pediatric hematologist in the MCG Department of Pediatrics, an established sickle cell physician scientist who leads a federally funded national initiative to inspire the next generation of investigators.

ISAC's target areas may change annually based on what's happening in the scientific literature and what experts in respective fields identify as hot topics that need pursuing. The Working Group and the annual meetings will further enable those discussions and decisions.

McIndoe, an expert in managing and analyzing large amounts of data, has already managed two other innovative NIH funding approaches and consequently has a solid infrastructure in place to support this new initiative. For 20 years he has led the Coordinating and Bioinformatics Unit for the Diabetic Complications Consortium to fund shorter-term laboratory and human studies to better understand the complications of diabetes, like heart and kidney disease and vision problems. The consortium began as the Animal Models of Diabetes Complications, which specifically designed and shared good mouse models.

Fifteen years ago he began providing similar services for the Mouse Metabolic Phenotyping Centers, which make the specialized, expensive mouse-testing capabilities of a select number of universities available and affordable to researchers nationwide. Expertise includes things like characterizing mouse metabolism and analyzing blood composition.

Together those NIDDK initiatives, which also hold scientific meetings and support websites to support interested scientific communities, have resulted in thousands of publications that demonstrate new findings and helped scientists secure larger NIH grants. As an example, more than 60% of those receiving a $100,000 grant through the Diabetic Complications Consortium applied for an RO1 and about 25% were successful. "That's higher than the normal percentage and a goal of these kinds of programs," McIndoe says. Both those programs are scheduled to phase out next year.

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Earthworms experience constant chemical interactions with bacteria, fungi, plants and small invertebrates across soil ecosystems. Even within their tissues, earthworms harbor symbiotic microbes and small animal parasites that trigger internal metabolic responses such as innate immunity. To reveal the fundamental processes that enable animal-microbe symbioses to form and persist, we have to study their metabolic interactions in situ. By combining novel imaging techniques, a team of researchers around Benedikt Geier from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology (MPIMM) in Bremen, Germany, has now succeeded in imaging the exciting variety of interactions that take place inside the earthworm. This allows us to observe them in a completely new light.

The chemistry of the worm in 3D

Our understanding of the chemical interactions between small animals and the microorganisms that live inside their bodies is extremely limited. This gap of knowledge has its origin in a methodical challenge: To study the metabolic interactions in symbiosis we have to know who is producing which metabolic product where in the body. The core of this problem, however, is not only to image how molecules are distributed at the micrometer scale. Also, the chemical images are almost impossible to interpret without knowing if a tissue sample is healthy, diseased or infected with beneficial or pathogenic microbes or even animal parasites.

The new combination of high-resolution imaging techniques can offer a solution to this problem, as the research team now shows. "In our study, we introduce chemo-histo-tomography, a special three-dimensional imaging approach of the chemistry and anatomy of millimeter-sized animals and their parasites at a cellular level," says Benedikt Geier, first author of the paper. "This method offers a new strategy to visualize the most fundamental processes - metabolic interactions - in small animal symbioses. It allows us to spatially assign metabolic producs to the animal host and its microbial partners at the micrometer scale."

Chemo-histo-tomography (CHEMHIST) combines chemical imaging of metabolites based on MALDI mass spectrometry imaging with the microanatomy of the same animal that is recorded with micro-computed X-ray tomography. The latter is a non-invasive approach allowing X-ray imaging of the 3D histology, and can reach subcellular resolution. For metabolite imaging, MALDI mass spectrometry techniques have become a state-of-the-art tool to visualize micrometer-scale, natural distributions of metabolites. This enables a spatial assignment between chemical profiles and their production site and possibly to their producer.

"This advance allowed us to take an earthworm from the environment and create a 3D atlas of its chemical and physical interactions with the microorganisms naturally occurring inside its tissues," says Manuel Liebeke, leader of the Research Group Metabolic Interactions at the MPIMM and senior author of the study. "However, we were interested in more than just the biology of the earthworm. Our objective was to also make CHEMHIST applicable to animals directly sampled from their natural habitat, which can be essential for symbiosis research." The resolution of CHEMHIST outperforms existing similar methods developed for medical research in mice by up to two orders of magnitude. This may also lead into new avenues for research on insects or corals, which are key models for symbiosis research, both on land and in water.

The whole is more than the sum of the parts

Using the combination of different in situ imaging techniques through CHEMHIST, the researchers at the MPIMM in Bremen uncovered metabolites - products of the metabolism - in the earthworm that could shed light on how it chemically defends itself against parasites and how these, in turn, protect themselves against the earthworm's immune response. However, to even recognize that the chemical image data were metabolites of parasites in earthworm tissue, the 3D anatomical model was indispensable. A high-resolution micro-computer tomograph at the German Electron Synchrotron in Hamburg first made it possible to identify the parasites in the tissue.

Notably, metabolic interactions between animals and their microbes are not restricted to symbiotic tissues. Along the gut-brain axis, microbial metabolites produced in the gut can affect tissues across the host, even reaching the brain. Therefore, extending correlative chemical imaging into 3D approaches can be crucial for capturing the distribution of metabolites involved in symbiotic interactions and thus show how chemical signals from microbes possibly affect crucial processes in their host. Also, the method can be used in many ways: The research team around Liebeke and Geier is currently applying it to deep-sea mussels.

"Since I have specialized in the 3D visualization of invertebrate anatomy for years, it was particularly interesting for me to see the molecules hidden behind the morphological structures," says Bernhard Ruthensteiner, leader of the section Invertebrate Varia at the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology. The results of the study were made possible by an interdisciplinary collaboration that brought together scientists from the fields of microbiology, zoology, chemistry and physics. It quickly became clear that visualization such as the correlative 3D atlas of the worm facilitate science communication of the data.

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A long time ago, in two galaxies about 900 million light-years away, two black holes each gobbled up their neutron star companions, triggering gravitational waves that finally hit Earth in January 2020.

Discovered by an international team of astrophysicists including Northwestern University researchers, two events -- detected just 10 days apart -- mark the first-ever detection of a black hole merging with a neutron star. The findings will enable researchers to draw the first conclusions about the origins of these rare binary systems and how often they merge.

"Gravitational waves have allowed us to detect collisions of pairs of black holes and pairs of neutron stars, but the mixed collision of a black hole with a neutron star has been the elusive missing piece of the family picture of compact object mergers," said Chase Kimball, a Northwestern graduate student who co-authored the study. "Completing this picture is crucial to constraining the host of astrophysical models of compact object formation and binary evolution. Inherent to these models are their predictions of the rates that black holes and neutron stars merge amongst themselves. With these detections, we finally have measurements of the merger rates across all three categories of compact binary mergers."

The research will be published June 29 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. The team includes researchers from the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC), the Virgo Collaboration and the Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector (KAGRA) project. An LSC member, Kimball led calculations of the merger rate estimates and how they fit into predictions from the various formation channels of neutron stars and black holes. He also contributed to discussions about the astrophysical implications of the discovery.

Kimball is co-advised by Vicky Kalogera, the principal investigator of Northwestern's LSC group, director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA) and the Daniel I. Linzer Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy in the Weinberg Colleges of Arts and Sciences; and by Christopher Berry, an LSC member and the CIERA Board of Visitors Research Professor at Northwestern as well as a lecturer at the Institute for Gravitational Research at the University of Glasgow. Other Northwestern co-authors include Maya Fishbach, a NASA Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow and LSC member.

Two events in ten days

The team observed the two new gravitational-wave events -- dubbed GW200105 and GW200115 -- on Jan. 5, 2020, and Jan. 15, 2020, during the second half of the LIGO and Virgo detectors third observing run, called O3b. Although multiple observatories carried out several follow-up observations, none observed light from either event, consistent with the measured masses and distances.

"Following the tantalizing discovery, announced in June 2020, of a black-hole merger with a mystery object, which may be the most massive neutron star known, it is exciting also to have the detection of clearly identified mixed mergers, as predicted by our theoretical models for decades now," Kalogera said. "Quantitatively matching the rate constraints and properties for all three population types will be a powerful way to answer the foundational questions of origins."

All three large detectors (both LIGO instruments and the Virgo instrument) detected GW200115, which resulted from the merger of a 6-solar mass black hole with a 1.5-solar mass neutron star, roughly 1 billion light-years from Earth. With observations of the three widely separated detectors on Earth, the direction to the waves' origin can be determined to a part of the sky equivalent to the area covered by 2,900 full moons.

Just 10 days earlier, LIGO detected a strong signal from GW200105, using just one detector while the other was temporarily offline. While Virgo also was observing, the signal was too quiet in its data for Virgo to help detect it. From the gravitational waves, the astronomers inferred that the signal was caused by a 9-solar mass black hole colliding with a 1.9-solar mass compact object, which they ultimately concluded was a neutron star. This merger happened at a distance of about 900 million light-years from Earth.

Because the signal was strong in only one detector, the astronomers could not precisely determine the direction of the waves' origin. Although the signal was too quiet for Virgo to confirm its detection, its data did help narrow down the source's potential location to about 17% of the entire sky, which is equivalent to the area covered by 34,000 full moons.

Where do they come from?

Because the two events are the first confident observations of gravitational waves from black holes merging with neutron stars, the researchers now can estimate how often such events happen in the universe. Although not all events are detectable, the researchers expect roughly one such merger per month happens within a distance of one billion light-years.

While it is unclear where these binary systems form, astronomers identified three likely cosmic origins: stellar binary systems, dense stellar environments including young star clusters, and the centers of galaxies.

The team is currently preparing the detectors for a fourth observation run, to begin in summer 2022.

"We've now seen the first examples of black holes merging with neutron stars, so we know that they're out there," Fishbach said. "But there's still so much we don't know about neutron stars and black holes -- how small or big they can get, how fast they can spin, how they pair off into merger partners. With future gravitational wave data, we will have the statistics to answer these questions, and ultimately learn how the most extreme objects in our universe are made."

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About the collaboration

This material is based upon work supported by NSF's LIGO Laboratory which is a major facility funded by the NSF. LIGO is operated by Caltech and MIT, which conceived of LIGO and led the Advanced LIGO detector project. Financial support for the Advanced LIGO project was principally from the NSF with Germany (Max Planck Society), the U.K. (Science and Technology Facilities Council) and Australia (Australian Research Council-OzGrav) making significant commitments and contributions to the project. Approximately 1,400 scientists from around the world participate in the effort to analyze the data and develop detector designs through the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, which includes the GEO Collaboration. A list of additional partners is available at https:/ / my. ligo. org/ census. php .

The Virgo Collaboration is currently composed of approximately 650 members from 119 institutions in 14 different countries including Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Spain. The European Gravitational Observatory (EGO) hosts the Virgo detector near Pisa in Italy, and is funded by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France, the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) in Italy, and Nikhef in the Netherlands. A list of the Virgo Collaboration groups can be found at http://public. virgo-gw. eu/ the-virgo-collaboration . More information is available on the Virgo website at http://www. virgo-gw. eu .
CORVALLIS, Ore. - Research by a graduate student in Oregon State University's College of Science has upended the conventional wisdom that for a century has incorrectly guided the study of a toad listed as endangered in part of its range.

Anne Devan-Song used spotlighting - shining a light in a dark spot and looking for eye reflections - to find large numbers of the eastern spadefoot toad. The study illustrates how confirmation bias - a tendency to interpret new information as ratification of existing theories - can hamper discovery and the development of better ones.

Her findings, which show that the toad spends much more time above ground than commonly believed, were published in the Journal of Herpetology.

Known for bright yellow eyes with elliptical pupils and, as the name suggests, a spade on each hind foot, the eastern spadefoot toad ranges from the southeast corner of the United States up the Atlantic Coast to New England. Known scientifically as Scaphiopus holbrooki, it is a species of conservation concern in the northern reaches of its territory.

Devan-Song, a Ph.D. student in integrative biology, grew up in Singapore, where she learned she could search for reptiles and amphibians by spotlighting. In Rhode Island, where she earned a master's degree and then worked as a university research associate, the eastern spadefoot toad is endangered.

One rainless night while surveying for amphibians during a project in Virginia, Devan-Song's spotlight detected one eastern spadefoot after another. That surprised her because the toads were thought to be detectable only on a few rainy nights every year, when they emerge from underground burrows to mate in wetlands.

She continued looking for eastern spadefoots and kept finding them on dry nights, including in upland forest locales not close to any damp areas. Spadefoots remain still when spotlighted so it was easy for Devan-Song to approach the eye-shines and positively identify the toads.

"They need to get above ground to hunt for insects and build up energy stores for mating," she said. "That's why we were finding them when and where conventional wisdom said we weren't supposed to be finding them."

Back in Rhode Island, she tried spotlighting for spadefoots; it took her just 15 minutes to find one. The success led to a 10-night survey in a pair of locations last summer that produced 42 sightings - nearly double the number of eastern spadefoot toad sightings in Rhode Island over the previous seven decades.

Devan-Song also learned that she wasn't the first to question the notion that the eastern spadefoot was so "secretive" as to almost always avoid detection. As far back as 1944, Devan-Song said, it was suggested in scientific literature that the toad could be found outside of rain-induced migration and breeding aggregations. And in 1955, researchers used spotlighting to detect huge numbers of eastern spadefoots in Florida; the technique subsequently, inexplicably fell into disuse.

"Confirmation bias perpetuated the fallacy of when the eastern spadefoot could be found," Devan-Song said. "No breeding events or migration occurred during our surveys and we detected thousands of toads in Virginia and dozens in Rhode Island. The majority of those were subadults, a demographic category mainly overlooked in the literature. Progress in learning about the toad, its ecology and its conservation has been greatly hindered by a misconception that persisted even when evidence to the contrary was presented."

The ease with which many toads could be found during breeding, combined with a lack of data on toads in upland habitats, helped fuel confirmation bias in this case, she said.

"Everyone assumed they were underground most of the time so no one was really looking for them most of the time," Devan-Song said. "Our research demonstrates that you can detect them year round, though they do remain rare in Rhode Island. But likely not as rare as the scientific community thought."

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The National Park Service, through a cooperative agreement with the University of Rhode Island, supported this research.
A new paper in JNCI Cancer Spectrum, published by Oxford University Press, indicates that many survivors of adolescent and young adult cancers hesitate to obtain COVID-19 vaccinations.

As of March 2021, there were over 33 million cases and 580,000 deaths from COVID in the United States. Vaccines offer the best hope to control the spread of COVID-19. Some 20%-40% of the US population, however, is hesitant to obtain COVID-19 vaccination. Cancer survivors often have weakened immune systems and are more likely to develop severe respiratory infections, making them particularly vulnerable to the threat of COVID-19.

National organizations recommend strongly that cancer survivors receive the COVID-19 vaccine. Cancer survivors are a priority vaccination group.

Researchers involved in the study aimed to identify sociodemographic factors associated with COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among adolescent and young adult cancer survivors. Eligible participants were 18 years or older, diagnosed with cancer between the ages of 15 and 39, and received services through an adolescent and young adult cancer care program run by Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah and Intermountain Healthcare.

A total of 342 participants completed a cross-sectional survey. While 62.9% intended to get the COVID-19 vaccine, over one-third (37.1%) expressed COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. Female survivors and survivors with a high school education or less reported greater vaccine hesitancy compared to their male or college graduate counterparts.

Some 42% of female young adult cancer survivors in the study indicated vaccine hesitancy (vs. 30.1% of males). Survivors with high school education or less had 3.15 times higher odds of reporting COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy compared to college graduates. Of Hispanic participants, 52.9% exhibited vaccine hesitancy, while 31.6% of White participants reported such hesitancy.

"As life returns to some resemblance of normal, receiving the COVID-19 vaccine is as important as ever," said Austin Waters, who led the study with a research team. "Cancer survivors should not wait to get the COVID-19 vaccine. Oncology care providers and cancer centers should play an important role in encouraging young survivors to receive the vaccine. To ensure equitable protection of vulnerable populations, special attention should be paid to vaccine hesitancy among at risk groups such as young adult cancer survivors and groups that may have higher vaccine hesitancy such as female survivors or those with a high school education or less."

The paper "COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy Among Adolescent and Young Adult Cancer Survivors" is available (at midnight on June 29th) at: https:/ / doi. org/ 10. 1093/ jncics/ pkab049

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Direct correspondence to:

Austin R. Waters

Huntsman Cancer Institute, University of Utah

2000 Circle of Hope

Salt Lake City, UT 84112

Austin.waters@hci.utah.edu

To request a copy of the study, please contact:

Daniel Luzer

daniel.luzer@oup.com
HERSHEY, Pa. -- A new study by researchers at Penn State College of Medicine indicates that people living with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) -- approximately 38 million worldwide -- are more likely to have suicidal thoughts and die from suicide than members of the general population. The researchers said that despite significant medical advancements related to HIV treatment and patients' quality of life, risk of suicide in these patients is high and health care providers should prioritize mental health screenings in this population.

According to the World Health Organization, roughly 800,000 people worldwide die from suicide annually. Among members of the general population who have suicidal thoughts, one out of three will attempt suicide. Out of 286 suicide attempts, one will result in death. Results from a College of Medicine study suggest that for every two people living with HIV/AIDS who have suicidal thoughts, one person will attempt suicide. Among this population, out of 13 suicide attempts, one will result in death.

Analyzing data from more than 185,000 adults living with HIV/AIDS worldwide, the researchers examined risk factors and incidences of attempted and completed suicides among this population. They found that not only is suicidal ideation higher, but people living with HIV/AIDS were 100 times more likely to die by suicide compared to the general population.

"There is an urgent need to prioritize mental health screening and care into all HIV testing and treatment settings," said Dr. Paddy Ssentongo, researcher and an epidemiology doctoral student. "Suicide risk should be assessed in all HIV patients, especially in those who are newly-diagnosed and those with advanced disease."

According to the findings, people living with HIV/AIDS in North America are 50 times more likely to commit suicide compared to those living in Europe. Similarly, North America, South America and Australia have the highest rates of suicide attempts in people living with HIV/AIDS. The researchers also found that the risk of suicide was high for both newly diagnosed individuals and those whose illness progressed to AIDS.

The researchers noted that several possible factors may contribute to the increased risk of suicide among people living with HIV/AIDS, including advanced disease, neurological changes and societal stigmas. On the other hand, data from the study showed that patients being treated with antiretroviral therapy were less likely to commit suicide. The researchers said the study reveals the importance of mental health screenings and interventions for people living with HIV/AIDS.

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Matt Pelton, Matthew Ciarletta, Holly Wisnousky, Nicholas Lazzara, Monica Manglani, Djibril Ba, Vernon Chinchillli and Anna Ssentongo of Penn State College of Medicine and Ping Du of Takeda Pharmaceuticals also contributed to this research. The researchers declare no conflict of interest.

Paddy Ssentongo was supported by a U.S. National Institutes of Health Director's Transformative Award (award number 1R01AI145057).
INDIANAPOLIS - With the growing prevalence of chronic pain, depression, anxiety, and other symptom-based conditions, physicians and the healthcare systems for which they work are increasingly considering how to augment the care they can provide within the limited time allotted for patient appointments.

According to Regenstrief Institute Research Scientist Kurt Kroenke, M.D., writing in the Journal of General Internal Medicine (JGIM), collaborative care can and should play a major role targeting the treatment of symptoms and functional decline, both too frequently marginalized in medically oriented care delivery.

Collaborative care is a team-based model in which the patient's primary care physician is assisted in the management of specific health conditions (for example depression, anxiety or pain) by a care manager (often a nurse supervised by a physician specialist) with advanced expertise in the management of those conditions who provides care virtually.

Care managers help patients process information provided by their primary care physicians. For example, care managers can review treatment options, helping patients decide which option they prefer.

"We at Regenstrief and others have extensively studied utilizing collaborative care to provide behavioral treatments, education and care follow-up to patients with depression, anxiety and pain and we have found that it works," said Dr. Kroenke, a professor of medicine at Indiana University School of Medicine, an internationally respected pioneer in symptomology and the co-developer of the depression and anxiety scales most commonly used in primary care. "Collaborative care works because it provides patients with needed support between physician visits, augmenting medical practice via telephone or another telecare modality, making it easy for patients to fit into their schedules."

Collaborative care is becoming more common. Dr. Kroenke is currently exploring the use of collaborative care for substance abuse disorders.

"Perhaps the major reason that collaborative care hasn't gained traction outside of some large, integrated healthcare systems with multiple clinics, is because insurance companies typically have not covered augmenting physician care via telephone," said Dr. Kroenke. "But this barrier has eroded during the pandemic as telecare has been reimbursed by Medicare as well as insurance companies. And expanded use of telecare during the pandemic has also taught us to deliver virtual care more effectively and efficiently."

In addition to describing the collaborative care model and highlighting its application to patient care, "Canons of Collaborative Care" by Dr. Kroenke and Andrea Cheville, M.D., of the Mayo Clinic, provides principles for implementing collaborative care in real world clinical practice.

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About Regenstrief Institute

Founded in 1969 in Indianapolis, the?Regenstrief Institute?is a local, national and global leader dedicated to a world where better information empowers people to end disease and realize true health. A key research partner to Indiana University, Regenstrief and its research scientists are responsible for a growing number of major healthcare innovations and studies. Examples range from the development of global health information technology standards that enable the use and interoperability of electronic health records to improving patient-physician communications, to creating models of care that inform practice and improve the lives of patients around the globe.

Sam Regenstrief, a nationally successful entrepreneur from Connersville, Indiana, founded the institute with the goal of making healthcare more efficient and accessible for everyone. His vision continues to guide the institute's research mission.

About IU School of Medicine

IU School of Medicine is the largest medical school in the U.S. and is annually ranked among the top medical schools in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. The school offers high-quality medical education, access to leading medical research and rich campus life in nine Indiana cities, including rural and urban locations consistently recognized for livability.

About Kurt Kroenke, M.D., MACP

In addition to his role as a research scientist at Regenstrief Institute, Kurt Kroenke, M.D., MACP, is also a professor of medicine at Indiana University School of Medicine.
For the first time, scientists detected gravitational waves caused by mergers between black holes and neutron stars. Researchers from LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA detected the two gravitational wave events--from distances of more than 900 million light-years away--within a span of 10 days in January 2020 during the second half of LIGO and Virgo's third observing run. Astrophysical Journal Letters published the results and their implications today: https:/ / iopscience. iop. org/ article/ 10. 3847/ 2041-8213/ ac082e .

Researchers from Rochester Institute of Technology's Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation (CCRG) helped identify key characteristics about the merger events. Anjali Yelikar, an astrophysical sciences and technology Ph.D. student from India, was among those heavily involved in the findings. She used parameter estimation code developed by Associate Professor Richard O'Shaughnessy and alumnus Jacob Lange '18 MS (astrophysical sciences and technology), '20 Ph.D. (astrophysical sciences and technology) to find the mass, spin, distance from Earth, and position in the sky of the black holes and neutron stars involved.

"It's a real dream come true to be a part of a discovery like this," said Yelikar. "I was an undergraduate student when LIGO announced the first gravitational wave detection in 2016. It's amazing to see how far the science has come and I am excited to see what new developments await as the scientific community develops more sensitive detectors."

The yearlong third observing run was cut short by a month due to the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020 and the fourth is expected to begin in the summer of 2022, bringing more advanced detectors to the fold. Two main theories suggest how neutron stars and black holes could merge--one starting with two stars already orbiting each other and the other starting with unrelated supernova explosions--and while the mergers announced today offer hints about their origins, scientists hope to find more confirmation in subsequent observing runs.

"These elusive systems have long been missing from astronomers' family portrait of compact binaries," said O'Shaughnessy. "Now that we see the whole family, we can use this portrait to try to understand their relationships and lineage. For example, at least one of the neutron stars in these objects is relatively big, compared to neutron stars found before. That may be a clue into how cosmic explosions work and how these objects form."

Scientists did not observe electromagnetic wave counterparts to the gravitational waves caused by the events despite follow-up observations from multiple observatories. However, that is also something scientists will hunt for during future observing runs.

"This discovery is very exciting, not only because it confirms the existence of black-hole-neutron-star binaries, but also because such binaries are potential sources of extremely intense gamma-ray bursts," said Yosef Zlochower, an associate professor in the School of Mathematical Sciences who develops simulations used to compare against gravitational wave signals. "This leads to the real possibility of future combined gravitational-wave and electromagnetic observations of these sources."

Professor John Whelan, principal investigator of RIT's group in the LIGO Scientific Community, said, "With this observation of gravitational waves from yet another type of astrophysical system, the LIGO, Virgo and now KAGRA collaborations continue to broaden the field of gravitational wave astronomy. We look forward to further discoveries as we analyze data from this and future observing runs."

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HOUSTON - (June 29, 2021) - When you think about trade and market relationships, you might think about brokers yelling at each other on the floor of a stock exchange on Wall Street. But it seems one of the basic functions of a free market is quietly practiced by fungi.

New research from a Rice University economist suggests certain networks of fungi embrace an important economic theory as they engage in trading nutrients for carbon with their host plants. This finding could aid the understanding of carbon storage in soils, an important tool in mitigating climate change.

A research paper entitled "Walrasian equilibrium behavior in nature" is available online and will appear in an upcoming edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Ted Loch-Temzelides, a professor of economics and the George and Cynthia Mitchell Chair in Sustainable Development at Rice, examined through an economic lens data from ecological experiments on arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi networks, which connect to plants and facilitate the trading of nutrients for carbon.

Loch-Temzelides found that these relationships resemble how economists think about competitive - also known as Walrasian - markets. The paper demonstrates that Walrasian equilibrium, a leading concept in the economic theory of markets used to make predictions, can also be used to understand trade in this "biological market."

"Far from being self-sacrificing, organisms such as fungi can exhibit competitive behavior similar to that in markets involving sophisticated human participants," Loch-Temzelides said.

His finding also implies that resources are allocated to the maximum benefit of the market participants -- in this case, fungi and plants.

"Mycorrhizal fungi networks around the world are estimated to sequester around 5 billion tons of carbon per year," Loch-Temzelides said. "Manipulating the terms of trade so that carbon obtained from host plants becomes less expensive compared to nutrients could lead to additional carbon being stored in the soil, which could provide major benefits in fighting climate change."

Loch-Temzelides hopes future research by biologists and economists can make progress on better understanding these interactions.

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The paper is available online at https:/ / www. pnas. org/ content/ 118/ 27/ e2020961118 .

This news release can be found online at news.rice.edu.

Follow Rice News and Media Relations on Twitter @RiceUNews.

Photo link: https:/ / news-network. rice. edu/ news/ files/ 2020/ 07/ 140814_Economics_Faculty-0425. jpg

Photo credit: Rice University

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation's top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,978 undergraduates and 3,192 graduate students, Rice's undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for lots of race/class interaction and No. 1 for quality of life by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger's Personal Finance.
The Gerontological Society of America (GSA) has received renewed grant support to welcome a new class of reporters for the Journalists in Aging Fellows Program. The 2021 funders to date include RRF Foundation for Aging and The John A. Hartford Foundation.

Since its founding in 2010, this program has been responsible for more than 700 news stories produced by 185 alumni. It has two goals: to educate journalists about issues in aging, better allowing them to spread a new awareness to general-audience, ethnic, and other minority populations; and to disseminate information about new scientific findings, policy debates, innovations, and evidence-based solutions.

"With the support of our funding partners, the journalist fellows are able to build connections to expert sources on aging, to each other, and to their communities," said Todd Kluss, GSA's director of communications. "As a result, they are equipped to provide accurate, fact-based coverage to diverse audiences in a time when misleading news is often encountered."

Kluss co-directs the Journalists in Aging Fellows Program together with Liz Seegert, who serves as program coordinator of the fellowship's media partner, the Journalists Network on Generations.

"The COVID-19 pandemic put aging issues on the front burner for many and highlighted the need to tell older adults' diverse stories," Seegert said. "I'm excited to help journalists strengthen their reporting on the key topics that continue to impact us as we age."

The program's co-founder, Journalists Network on Generations National Coordinator Paul Kleyman, serves as senior advisor and editorial consultant.

As in previous years, half of the fellows will be selected from general-audience media and half from ethnic or other minority media outlets that serve communities within the U.S. Staff and freelance reporters and who are covering or wish to cover issues in aging are eligible to apply.

The program will commence with the fellows' participation in GSA's Annual Scientific Meeting, which in 2021 will take place from November 10 to 14 in Phoenix, Arizona, with the theme of "Disruption to Transformation: Aging in the 'New Normal.'" There the fellows will participate in an exclusive educational workshop, which will showcase demographic trends and research highlights and include discussions with veteran journalists on how to position aging stories in the current media environment.

The fellowship requires reporters to deliver two projects based on current aging research, including a short-initial story and major piece or series in the following months. All applications for the fellowship program will be reviewed by a selection committee of gerontologists and editorial professionals. The criteria will include clarity and originality of proposed in-depth story projects; quality of samples of published or produced work; and high-impact potential of proposals geographically and across different ethnic or racial populations. The application deadline is Wednesday, August 11.

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A continuously updated list of stories from the fellows is available online.
Scientists and doctors at University College London Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health (UCL GOS ICH) and Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) have given hope of a gene therapy cure to children with a rare degenerative brain disorder called Dopamine Transporter Deficiency Syndrome (DTDS).

The team have recreated and cured the disease using state-of-the-art laboratory and mouse models of the disease and will soon apply for a clinical trial of the therapy. Their breakthrough comes just a decade after the faulty gene causing the disease was first discovered by the lead scientist of this work.

The results, published in Science Translational Medicine, are so promising that the UK regulatory agency MHRA has advised the researchers that they can now proceed to prepare for a clinical trial. DTDS is a rare, progressive and life-limiting neurological condition caused by a faulty gene that affects brain cells. Infants with DTDS are rarely able to learn to walk or speak and as they grow they develop 'parkinsonism', so called because of similarities to Parkinson's Disease.

This includes slow movements, involuntary twisting postures of their arms and legs and whole-body stiffness.

There are no effective treatments or a cure and most children with DTDS sadly die before reaching adulthood, often from respiratory infections or other complications. Although the condition is rare, with around 50 children worldwide currently known to doctors, it has previously been mistaken for cerebral palsy and may continue to be undiagnosed.

Professor Manju Kurian discovered the faulty gene causing DTDS in 2009 and was subsequently granted seed funding worth just over 86,500 from Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity (GOSH Charity) to begin developing the treatment. Professor Kurian's team and her collaborators at UCL have also spent the last decade working to better understand the mechanisms that underpin this disease, and this has enabled them to develop a new, precision gene therapy with the potential to treat this devastating disorder.

How the precision gene therapy works

Scientists took skin cells from children with DTDS and turned them into stem cells, which can grow into any type of cell to build or repair different parts of the body. Professor Kurian's team, with work led by Dr Serena Barral, converted these stem cells into the exact brain cells (dopaminergic neurons) that carry the genetic 'fault' responsible for DTDS.

Using this laboratory model - or 'disease in a dish' - made directly from the cells of children with this rare condition, scientists were able to test the experimental gene therapy for DTDS and show that it could relieve the disease-related defects in DTDS brain cells.

The team used fluorescence microscopy to see what was happening in their 'disease in a dish'. The seemingly random pattern of colours in the untreated cells (left) shows how the neurons and their communicating 'arms' - called neurites - had not formed properly in cells with DTDS. The gene therapy treated cells form a much more obvious cluster pattern for the neuron - seen in white - with its red neurites, essentially showing the DTDS is cured in a laboratory model.

A further collaboration with UCL's Professor Simon Waddington and Dr Joanne Ng enabled the researchers to build on their 'disease in a dish' results, studying DTDS in mice and testing gene therapy as a cure. The gene therapy injects a modified, harmless virus containing the healthy gene into the area of the brain where this gene is missing. The mice were successfully cured of their symptoms including involuntary and disordered movements, progressive parkinsonism and weightloss. Based on the promising results of the laboratory tests, the next phase is to develop a clinicaltrial which would involve children diagnosed with DTDS.

22-year-old Shannon from Cornwall was one of the first patients diagnosed with DTDS after Professor Kurian discovered the faulty gene in 2009. Her mum, Judith said: "Shannon is a happy, bubbly girl and finds everything hilarious. DTDS meant Shannon suffered badly from shakes - she couldn't control her legs. She shakes very slightly now, but it's very mild."

On Shannon being one of the first patients in whom the faulty gene was discovered, Judith said, "It's amazing. The last time we saw Professor Kurian she said there had been a breakthrough with the research, but it hadn't been tried on anyone yet.

"GOSH is a brilliant hospital and I donate to the charity every month to help keep the extra support at the hospital going."

Professor Manju Kurian, Consultant Paediatric Neurologist at GOSH and NIHR Research Professor at UCL Great Ormond Street Hospital Institute of Child Health, co-lead author on this study and the scientist behind the discovery of this disease: "Our study provides real hope of an effective treatment for children who are living with this devastating, life-limiting brain disease, and it is hugely exciting to be at the stage of planning a clinical trial just ten years after discovering the gene that causes the condition.

"We hope this pioneering gene therapy will prevent the progression of this rare but cruel disease with a single procedure, giving children the improved quality and length of life that they deserve. If we can use gene therapy to treat children with this condition early enough, there is great potential for improvement in their health.

"We're hugely grateful to our funders including GOSH Charity who supported our research at the very beginning, as well as the Wellcome Trust, MRC, John Black Charitable Foundation, Robert Luff Foundation and Rosetrees for their investment; without their support we wouldn't be within touching distance of delivering a breakthrough cure that these children so desperately need."

Professor Simon Waddington, Professor of Gene Therapy at UCL, co-lead author on this study:

"Our whole working process has been guided by one principle: we want to find the answers for these children and how we can treat them. "The mice received the same carefully selected vector and delivery route that we plan to use in treating the children. This careful selection has allowed us to progress rapidly to design a protocol so we can start the clinical trial next year.

"While DTDS is rare, we know that there are many other conditions we can model in this way, opening the door for a standardised approach to finding cures for these rare conditions."

Dr Kiki Syrad, Director of Grants and Impact at GOSH Charity, which provided funding early in the development of this treatment said: "At GOSH Charity we fund paediatric research to aid the discovery of desperately needed new treatments and cures for children living with rare diseases.

"We are absolutely delighted to see the progress that this study publication points to. It offers the hope of an effective treatment which could be nothing short of lifechanging for children and families living this with this rare, devastating condition. This is the hope that paediatric rare disease research can offer, and that's why we will continue to invest in trail-blazing projects such as this."

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The research team is now developing the plans for the clinical trial. They are based at the Zayed Centre for Research into Rare Disease in Children, which is a partnership between GOSH, UCL, and GOSH Charity. They hope the clinical trial will launch at GOSH - an international recognised centre of excellence in neurotransmitter disorders - in 2022.

All research at Great Ormond Street Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is made possible by the NIHR Great Ormond Street Hospital Biomedical Research Centre.

This work was supported by the National Institute for Health Research, contributing only to work in human cells.
A new corona test developed at the University Hospital Bonn can analyze a large number of swabs simultaneously using sequencing technology and has a similarly high sensitivity as the common qPCR test. The innovative method offers great potential, especially for systematic testing in daycare centers, schools or companies. Today, the results of the study on the new Corona test have been published in the renowned journal "Nature Biotechnology".

Bonn, 6/29/2021 - In addition to vaccination, systematic testing of the population remains of central importance in order to effectively monitor and contain the spread of infections during the Coronavirus pandemic. Only in this way can the spread of the virus be effectively monitored and contained through targeted measures.

The innovative corona test "LAMP-Seq", which has been developed at the University Hospital Bonn (UKB), offers the possibility to test many people regularly for the SARS-CoV-2 virus. In this way, infections can be detected at an early stage and corresponding chains of infection can be interrupted quickly. "Our corona test "LAMP-Seq" can detect about 100 times lower amounts of virus than current rapid antigen tests and is almost as sensitive and specific as the common qPCR test" describes Prof. Dr. Jonathan Schmid-Burgk from the Institute of Clinical Chemistry and Clinical Pharmacology of the UKB the characteristics of the test procedure, which was developed interdisciplinary with other researchers at the UKB.

"Added to this is the high scalability of the test. By using sequencing machines, thousands of samples can be analyzed simultaneously," said Schmid-Burgk, who was appointed to the University of Bonn from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in early 2020. The LAMP-Seq method detects not only corona infections with the original SARS-CoV-2 virus, but also the novel variants of concern alpha to delta.

Members of the ImmunoSensation2 cluster of excellence, the Institute of Hygiene and Public Health, Life&Brain GmbH and Bundeswehr Central Hospital Koblenz were among those involved in the project.

For the "LAMP-Seq" test, the Bonn scientists have adapted the already established LAMP method ("Loop-mediated Isothermal Amplification" - propagation of the viral genome at a constant temperature) and made it compatible with sequencing machines used for biomedical research. As a result, many samples can be analyzed simultaneously in a high-throughput procedure. Before thousands of samples are analyzed together in a sequencing run, each individual sample is linked to a molecular barcode. This barcode ensures that each sample can be assigned without doubt, even after thousands of samples have been pooled. "Retesting of the entire pool in case of a positive test result is therefore no longer necessary" says Dr. Kerstin Ludwig, Emmy-Noether group leader at the Institute of Human Genetics. This technology significantly reduces the cost per test in comparison to the qPCR test and makes the "LAMP-Seq" procedure a scalable corona mass test.

"With its high throughput and sensitivity, the "LAMP-Seq" test can make a significant contribution to the screening of undetected infections. Especially in schools or companies, where many people regularly meet, the corona test is ideal to systematically and preventively monitor the occurrence of infections" describes Ludwig, the co-developer of the test procedure, the possible application scenarios of the "LAMP-Seq" test.

Prof. Wolfgang Holzgreve, Medical Director and CEO of the UKB, explains the benefits of the new test for corona surveillance as follows: "In order to effectively contain a pandemic, infected people must be found before they infect others. To achieve this goal, we need mass screenings with the highest sensitivity that can give us a detailed picture of existing chains of infection. This is exactly what the corona test "LAMP-Seq" developed at UKB is suited for."

Even smaller models of the sequencing machines used are capable of analyzing around 10,000 samples in a single run (duration: around ten to twelve hours). This virtually eliminates laboratory capacity as a limiting factor in testing.

In several large studies (including school and employee testing) with a total of around 20,000 tests, the Bonn scientists have extensively tested, optimized and successfully validated the entire upstream and downstream logistics, from sample collection by throat swabs to fully digital feedback of the test results. The documentation of the study results recently passed an independent peer review process and was published today in the renowned journal Nature Biotechnology.

While the Bonn scientists have currently focused their innovative method entirely on SARS-CoV-2 testing, "LAMP-Seq" can also be used in the future for differential diagnostics in testing for other viruses such as influenza A and can also be quickly adapted to other viruses.

The scientists are currently working on CE certification in order to make the "LAMP-Seq" test available internationally in the near future. Until this approval is obtained, the technically and scientifically fully validated "LAMP-Seq" method will continue to be used for pilot testing.

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The scientific team received financial support from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research BMBF within the framework of the "Bundesweites Forschungsnetz Angewandte Surveillance und Testung" (B-FAST).

Publication: Kerstin U. Ludwig, Ricarda M. Schmithausen, David Li, Max L. Jacobs, Ronja Hollstein, Katja Blumenstock, Jana Liebing, Miko?aj S?abicki, Amir Ben-Shmuel, Ofir Israeli, Shay Weiss, Thomas S. Ebert, Nir Paran, Wibke Rudiger, Gero Wilbring, David Feldman, Barbel Lippke, Nina Ishorst, Lara M. Hochfeld, Eva C. Beins, Ines H. Kaltheuner, Maximilian Schmitz, Aliona Wohler, Manuel Dohla, Esther Sib, Marius Jentzsch, Jacob D. Borrajo, Jonathan Strecker, Julia Reinhardt, Brian Cleary, Matthias Geyer, Michael Holzel, Rhiannon Macrae, Markus M. Nothen, Per Hoffmann, Martin Exner, Aviv Regev, Feng Zhang, Jonathan L. Schmid-Burgk: "LAMP-Seq enables sensitive, multiplexed COVID-19 diagnostics using molecular barcoding", Nature Biotechnology 2021, Internet: https:/ / www. nature. com/ articles/ s41587-021-00966-9

Press contact:

Felix Heyder

University Hospital Bonn

+49 228 / 287-11904

felix.heyder@ukbonn.de
Irvine, Calif., June 29, 2021 - Fireworks are synonymous in the United States with the celebration of Independence Day and other special events, but the colorful displays have caused a growing risk to public safety in recent years, according to a study by environmental health researchers at the University of California, Irvine.

Relying on real-time air quality measurements crowdsourced from a network of more than 750 automated sensors distributed throughout California, scientists from UCI's Program in Public Health found that short-term, extremely high-particulate-matter air pollution from the widespread use of fireworks spiked during the periods of late June through early July in 2019 and 2020.

The increase was most pronounced in Southern California counties where fireworks regulations are less strict than in northern parts of the state and where the illegal use of do-it-yourself pyrotechnics is also more prevalent. This and other findings are the subject of a study published recently in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

"You may have seen discussions on social media lately about people worrying for their pets on nights when the skies are filled with exploding fireworks, but we've found that there is a real threat to human well-being too," said co-author Jun Wu, UCI professor of public health. "And like many other environmental justice issues, we find the worst impacts among residents of low-income communities."

Aerial explosions cause the release of fine particles less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter. Airborne particulate matter of this size is hazardous because when inhaled, it can be absorbed by the lungs and passed to other tissues inside the body. Fireworks get their distinct colors from compounds containing barium, copper, magnesium, potassium and strontium. As rockets burst in the sky, they release these chemicals, trace redox-active metals and water-soluble ions, which inevitably fall on those below.

"These fine particles are known to cause a wide range of adverse health effects, including premature mortality, respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, adverse pregnancy outcomes, and neurological diseases," Wu said.

The UCI team used data accumulated via a statewide network of PurpleAir sensors, low-cost devices deployed in households. Utilizing this method, the researchers built a high-resolution map tracking levels of airborne particulate matter less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter before, during and after Fourth of July fireworks during the study period.

"The PurpleAir network includes sensors that monitor air continuously, which offers advantages over the traditional monitoring installations that are often positioned away from residential areas and take intermittent measurements that may miss peak days such as the Fourth of July," said lead author Amirhosein Mousavi, a postdoctoral scholar in UCI's Program in Public Health. "By taking data from a large, distributed sensor network that's always collecting data in neighborhoods where people from various socioeconomic profiles live, we were able to get a much clearer characterization of the health risks posed by do-it-yourself fireworks."

The team found that among all 58 California counties, Los Angeles County experienced the highest daily PM2.5 levels around the Fourth of July holiday in both 2019 and 2020. They believe this was the result of larger numbers of individuals shooting off their own rockets in neighborhoods where they lived, as well as the nature of L.A.'s topography, which has long been known to facilitate the buildup of air pollution.

In addition, researchers believe they detected a COVID-19 effect in their data. PM2.5 concentrations on July 4 and 5 in 2020 were, on average, 50 percent higher than in 2019, likely due to the increased use of household-level fireworks during the pandemic lockdowns.

The team also learned that peak fireworks pollution was two times higher in communities with lower socioeconomic status, larger minority-group populations and higher asthma rates.

"This work highlights the important role that policy and enforcement can play in reducing fireworks-related air pollution and protecting public health," Wu said. "As there is a patchwork of different restrictions and regulations regarding fireworks in our state, it's clear that a more coordinated approach would help people breathe easier during times of celebration."

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Besides Wu and Mousavi, the study included Yiting Yuan and Shahir Masri of UCI's Program in Public Health and Greg Barta from the SciVfx Initiative in London. Funding was provided by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

About the University of California, Irvine: Founded in 1965, UCI is the youngest member of the prestigious Association of American Universities and is ranked among the nation's top 10 public universities by U.S. News & World Report. The campus has produced three Nobel laureates and is known for its academic achievement, premier research, innovation and anteater mascot. Led by Chancellor Howard Gillman, UCI has more than 36,000 students and offers 224 degree programs. It's located in one of the world's safest and most economically vibrant communities and is Orange County's second-largest employer, contributing $7 billion annually to the local economy and $8 billion statewide. For more on UCI, visit http://www. uci. edu .

Media access: Radio programs/stations may, for a fee, use an on-campus ISDN line to interview UCI faculty and experts, subject to availability and university approval. For more UCI news, visit news.uci.edu. Additional resources for journalists may be found at communications.uci.edu/for-journalists.
Steven P. DenBaars, UC Santa Barbara professor of materials and of electrical and computer engineering, has been chosen by the American Association for Advances in Functional Materials (AAFM) as one of two recipients of its 2021 AAFM-Nakamura Award. Named for Nobel Prize winner Shuji Nakamura, also a UCSB professor, the award recognizes "an outstanding scientist in the field of functional materials who has made significant contributions and whose work shows significant innovation in the field." UC Berkeley professor of chemistry Omar Yaghi was also selected.

"I am very honored to receive this award for my contributions to functional materials, especially III-nitride semiconductors, and also because it was named after my esteemed colleague," said DenBaars, who was unanimously chosen by the AAFM-Nakamura Award committee from "among many exceptional nominations."

"The department is very proud of the recognition for Professor DenBaars's many contributions to the development of gallium nitride light-emitting devices that impact our daily lives," said Michael Chabinyc, chair of the Department of Materials at UC Santa Barbara.

As the term implies, functional materials are those that have properties that enable them to perform specific functions, such as magnetism, energy storage or thermoelectricity, to name a few. DenBaars is recognized for his "pioneering work" with gallium nitride (GaN) -- a highly efficient and high-performing semiconductor material that is the foundation of energy-efficient lighting, micro-LED displays, power electronics and nonpolar and semipolar laser diodes. Its efficiency and ability to withstand higher voltages and temperatures make it an ideal building block for power-saving electronics and versatile solid-state lasers, and it has already been embraced in the lighting, photonics and electronics industries.

In addition to his expertise with gallium nitride and its fabrication, DenBaars, who joined the UCSB faculty in 1991, is a seasoned entrepreneur, bringing to the market the various powerful, versatile and energy-efficient technologies that can be built on GaN. In 1996, along with fellow GaN expert Umesh Mishra, he co-founded Nitres, Inc., the first gallium nitride LED startup in the United States, which was acquired by Cree, Inc., in 2000. In 2008, with Nakamura and colleague James Speck, he co-founded Soraa, Inc. to commercialize LED lighting. Also with Nakamura, as well as UCSB alum James Raring and collaborator Paul Rudy, DenBaars in 2013 co-founded SLD laser to pioneer blue lasers and laser lighting products, growing the company to more than 150 employees before it was acquired by Kyocera Corporation in 2021. DenBaars is currently on the board of directors of Akoustis Technologies, a company founded by UCSB alumnus Jeffry Shealy to improve 5G wireless signal quality and enable the Internet of Things through the use of radio frequency filters.

A fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, the National Academy of Engineers, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), DenBaars has been the recipient of the IEEE Photonics Society Aron Kressel Award (2010) alongside Professor James Speck. He has also been recognized with the Pacific Coast Business Times Spirit of Innovation Award (2021) and the International Symposium on Compound Semiconductors' ISCS Award (2021). He co-directs the Solid-State Lighting and Energy Electronics Center at UC Santa Barbara.

DenBaars will receive his award and deliver a lecture at the AAAFM-UCLA Conference on Functional Materials, to be held virtually in August.

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A new technique established by a team of researchers from the University of Cambridge and the University of Massachusetts reveals the fundamental physics of how a polymer such as DNA threads through holes 10,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair.

Polymers are long, chain-like molecules which are everywhere in biology. DNA and RNA are polymers formed by many consecutive copies of nucleotides coupled together. When being transported within or between cells, these biological polymers must pass through nanometre-sized holes called "nanopores".

This process also underlies a rapidly developing method for analysing and sequencing DNA called nanopore sensing.

The study, published in the journal Nature Physics, shows how the Cavendish-led team developed a new LEGO-like technique for assembling DNA molecules that have protruding bumps at specific locations along their length. By passing these DNA molecules through a nanopore and analysing simultaneous changes in the pattern of ion flow, the researchers determined with great precision how the speed of the DNA changes as it moves through.

The experimental results revealed a two-step process where the DNA speed initially slows down before accelerating close to the end of the translocation. Simulations also demonstrated this two-stage process and helped to reveal that the underlying physics of the process is determined by changing friction between the DNA and surrounding fluid.

"Our method for assembling LEGO-like molecular DNA rulers has given new insight into the process of threading polymers through incredibly small holes just a few nanometres in size," explained Senior author Dr Nicholas Bell from Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory. "The combination of both experiments and simulations have revealed a comprehensive picture of the underlying physics of this process and will aid the development of nanopore-based biosensors. It is very exciting that we can now measure and understand these molecular processes in such minute detail."

"These results will help improve the accuracy of nanopore sensors in their various applications, for instance localising specific sequences on DNA with nanometer accuracy or detecting diseases early with target RNA detection," said lead author Kaikai Chen.

"The superior resolution in analysing molecules passing through nanopores will allow for low-error decoding of digital information stored on DNA. We are exploring and improving the utility of nanopore sensors for these applications."

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Reference: Chen, K., Jou, I., Ermann, N. et al. 'Dynamics of driven polymer transport through a nanopore.' Nature Physics (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41567-021-01268-2
Knowing the weight of a commodity provides an objective way to value goods in the marketplace. But did a self-regulating market even exist in the Bronze Age? And what can weight systems tell us about this? A team of researchers from the University of Gottingen researched this by investigating the dissemination of weight systems throughout Western Eurasia. Their new simulation indicates that the interaction of merchants, even without substantial intervention from governments or institutions, is likely to explain the spread of Bronze Age technology to weigh goods. The results were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

To determine how different units of weight emerged in different regions, researchers compared all the weight systems in use between Western Europe and the Indus Valley from 3,000-1,000 BC. Analysis of 2,274 balance weights from 127 sites revealed that, with the exception of those from the Indus Valley, new and very similar units of weight appeared in a gradual spread west of Mesopotamia. To find out if the gradual formation of these systems could be due to propagation of error from a single weight system, the researchers modelled the creation of 100 new units. Taking into account factors such as measurement error, the simulation supported a single origin between Mesopotamia and Europe. It also showed that the Indus Valley probably developed an independent weight system. The research demonstrated that if information flow in Eurasia trade was free enough to support a common weight system, it was likely to be sufficient to react to local price fluctuations.

The weight systems that emerged between Mesopotamia and Europe were very similar. This meant that a single merchant could travel, for instance, from Mesopotamia to the Aegean and from there to Central Europe and never need to change their own set of weights. The merchant could trade with foreign partners while simply relying on approximating the weights. There was no international authority that could have regulated the accuracy of weight systems over such a wide territory and long time span. In Europe, beyond the Aegean, centralised authorities did not even exist at this time. The researchers conclude that the emergence of accurate weight systems must have been the outcome of a global network regulating itself from the bottom-up.

"With the results of our statistical analysis and experimental tests, it is now possible to prove the long-held hypothesis that free entrepreneurship was already a primary driver of the world economy even as early as the Bronze Age," explains Professor Lorenz Rahmstorf from the Institute for Prehistory and Early History, University of Gottingen. Merchants could interact freely, establish profitable partnerships, and take advantage of the opportunities offered by long-distance trade. "The idea of a self-regulating market existing some 4,000 years ago puts a new perspective on the global economy of the modern era," says Dr Nicola Ialongo, University of Gottingen. He adds, "Try to imagine all the international institutions that currently regulate our modern world economy: is global trade possible thanks to these institutions, or in spite of them?"

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The study is a result of the EU-funded 'WEIGHT AND VALUE' project directed by Professor Lorenz Rahmstorf.

Original publication: Ialongo, N., Hermann, R., Rahmstorf, L. 2021. Bronze Age weight systems as a measure of market integration in Western Eurasia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). https:/ / doi. org/ 10. 1073/ pnas. 2105873118

Contact

Dr Nicola Ialongo

University of Gottingen

Faculty of Humanities

Institute for Prehistory and Early History

Nikolausberger Weg 15, 37073 Gottingen

Tel: +49 (0)551 39-25078

Email: nicola.ialongo@uni-goettingen.de

http://www. uni-goettingen. de/ de/ dr. +nicola+ialongo/ 569681. html
Mate choice is important for females, who often invest much more energy in offspring than males. However, being too selective is a bad idea, as they might end up not mating at all. Biologists have wondered for a long time how females optimize their chances. Scientists at the University of Groningen have performed experiments with fruit flies that reveal the explanation: mating induces a behavioural change in female flies that makes them more choosy than when they are virgins. The results were published on 21 June in Nature Ecology and Evolution.

The fourteenth-century French philosopher Jean Buridan described a donkey who starved to death because he couldn't choose between two bales of hay. Evolutionary biologists have their own version of this decision-making problem: in many species, females invest more energy in reproduction than males. Thus, males try to mate with as many females as possible, while females are choosy as they have to select the best males to father their offspring. But, like with the philosopher's donkey, being too choosy may result in no offspring at all.

Aphrodisiac

In 2005, theoretical biologists suggested an explanation: what if female species' mate preference changes over time? This would be especially beneficial for organisms like flies, who store sperm for later use and mate multiple times. 'The sperm from the last mating is favoured for fertilization, so a first mating with an inferior male is of little consequence but it does ensure that the flies can reproduce', explains Jean-Christophe Billeter, associate professor of Neurogenetics of Social and Sexual Behaviour at the University of Groningen.

The explanation sounds plausible, but is it actually true? It turned out to be difficult to prove this in a controlled experiment. Billeter: 'It is very difficult to distinguish between learned behaviour and a programmed change in mate preference.' However, Billeter and his group have ample experience in studying mating behaviour in fruit flies. And he had noted changes in the way that the flies process cues after a first mating. 'For example, food acts as an aphrodisiac - but only in females who have mated before, not in virgins.' This means that virgin and mated females pay attention to different cues. Other scientists also described differences between virgin and mated flies.

Mutations

As there are lots of lines of fruit flies with specific mutations, this model organism would allow a careful study of how mating preference is governed. Billeter and his colleagues performed a series of experiments to study mate choice. The basic set-up was to observe one female with two males, each from a different strain. These were NL (a Dutch strain) and Tai (originating from West Africa). As fruit flies mate for about twenty minutes, all it takes is to wait to see which of the two males will mount the female. 'We observed thousands of Petri dishes, often overnight, each with two male flies and one female, to get our results.'

In a first experiment, they found a very clear result: virgin flies showed no preference for NL or Tai males. But mated females became choosy; they subsequently mated with Tai males in nearly 100 per cent of the experiments. 'It was a bit of luck to find such a huge difference between the strains', says Billeter. Another series of experiments was then performed to find out how this preference came to be. A male pheromone in the sperm fluid was already known to be responsible for mating-induced changes in female behaviour. And when virgin flies mated with male mutants without pheromones, they did not become choosy. This indicated that the females were not learning to become more choosy, but, in fact, underwent a programmed physiological change leading them to become more selective.

Puzzle

As the pheromone induces the production of a substance called 'juvenile hormone' in the females, the next step was to confirm that this hormone plays a role in developing selectiveness. And indeed, virgin females that were fed this hormone developed a preference for Tai males. But how are Tai and NL males distinguished? 'We figured pheromones were involved, so we then tested females without a sense of smell. And indeed, they did not develop a preference for Tai over NL males.'

At this stage of the study, Billeter visited a conference where Chih-Ying Su from the University of California in San Diego gave a talk on pheromone receptors in fruit flies. They started a collaboration and, using electrical recordings, the Su lab showed that the Or47b Odorant receptor neurons become less sensitive to pheromones after mating, as a result of juvenile hormone signaling. 'So, we figured that the juvenile hormone reduces the sensitivity of the flies' olfactory cells to this pheromone.' The final piece of the puzzle was finding the pheromone that activates Or47b. 'This was identified, and we predicted that Tai flies would have higher levels of this aphrodisiac pheromone than NL flies.' The hypothesis was confirmed: levels in Tai males were twice as high as in NL flies. And dousing NL flies with the pheromone made them as equally attractive as the Tai males.

Ants

This leads to a clear picture: to virgins, all males smell equally lovely. But mating reduces their sensitivity for an aphrodisiac pheromone, and thus induces preference for males with higher levels of this perfume. 'We could only discover this sequence of events because fruit flies are such a powerful model system, thanks to the availability of off-the-shelf tools to manipulate neurons and behaviour', acknowledges Billeter. 'But, now that we have confirmed, in this model, that mating actually flips a switch that induces mating preferences, we expect that researchers will be able to find this in other species as well.'

And there are wider implications. 'We have now discovered a trigger that can change the behaviour of an individual by changing how it responds to a cue. The first author of the paper, postdoc Philip Kohlmeier, is an expert in social insects, such as ants and bees. He is now eager to find out if similar triggers are involved in how social insects specialize in different classes, such as foragers and nurses.'

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Reference: Philip Kohlmeier, Ye Zhang, Jenke A. Gorter, Chih-Ying Su and Jean-Christophe Billeter: Mating increases Drosophila melanogaster females' choosiness by reducing olfactory sensitivity to a male pheromone. Nature Ecology & Evolution, first online 21 June 2021.
Aerospace engineering faculty member Melkior Ornik is also a mathematician, a history buff, and a strong believer in integrity when it comes to using hard science in public discussions. So, when a story popped up in his news feed about a pair of researchers who developed a statistical method to analyze datasets and used it to purportedly refute the number of Holocaust victims from a concentration camp in Croatia, it naturally caught his attention.

Ornik is a professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He proceeded to study the research in depth and used the method to re-analyze the same data from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Then he wrote a rebuttal paper debunking the researchers' findings.

Ornik's rebuttal is published in the same journal as the original article. He said the editor asked him to include a list of answers to some of the potential questions other scientists may have when they read his paper. A few weeks later, the journal placed a note on the original article stating that they do not endorse or share the authors' views, and recommended reading Ornik's paper.

"As scientists, as engineers, I think it's our duty to correct flawed and faulty science," Ornik said. "There is so much effort to get the public and policymakers to believe in the science, that when a math expert says they have proof, it brings credence to the argument. But when their claims are demonstrably not true, it's not good for science and it's not good for society. That's why it's especially important for scientists to challenge false findings when we discover them."

According to Ornik, some individuals promote the view that concentration camps either didn't exist or weren't used to kill people, or that the currently widely accepted numbers of victims have been substantially inflated. Most historians do not take the claims seriously in light of vast available data and evidence.

"For the authors of the original paper to claim that they have found mathematical proof that the list of victims of that camp was fabricated has obvious historical implications," Ornik said. "I think, to some extent the damage has already been done, but I felt the need to go on record with the assumptions, inaccuracies, and misuse of the raw museum data I found in the original research."

The paper Ornik responded to presents a novel method to identify anomalies across a set of histograms. Ornik said he does not dispute the merits of the method presented in the original paper, just its application to the Jasenovac concentration camp.

Ornik became suspicious of the paper's conclusions because the researchers implied in one case that a smaller list naturally has a smaller outlier score, but they compared scores across victim list sizes to claim that the one related to Jasenovac, one of the biggest ones, was problematic.

"I started looking to see if there was some sort of a bias for the size and whether they were actually more likely to assign the flag of being problematic to a larger list or not. And it turns out, despite the authors' claims, they were," Ornik said. "The bigger lists are more likely to be computed to be problematic than the smaller lists when their method is applied to the data."

Ornik, who commonly uses similar statistical analysis in aerospace applications, explained another reason that their statistical argument doesn't work.

"When you look at data, a collection of anything, and you want to figure out an outlier--something that's different--you need to assume that all of the pieces of data come from the same source, the same distribution. Take a list of victims by birth year. It would yield a graph of the ages of each person. Say 10 percent are older than 70 years old. Now, that distribution wouldn't be true for a list of deported children, for example, because that list, by definition, is structurally different. It is also different from a list of everyone who has an identity card. Identity cards are issued only to people who are not children. Yet, the lists that these researchers worked with came from a multitude of sources and include lists of children, lists of people getting married, lists of prisoners of war--things that by definition cannot have come from the same distribution."

Another major error in the original paper, Ornik said, is that some duplicate lists were treated as two separate lists. This meant that approximately 67 percent of their entire database was actually sub-lists of the larger list.

"The 7,000-plus lists published online by the Holocaust Museum are not curated," Ornik said. "For instance, there are two lists that contain exactly the same data; one is in Cyrillic and the other one uses the Latin alphabet. But they treated them as two separate lists. There are other lists that contain the same name, but there is no way of knowing if they are the same person or two different people born on the same day with identical names. They could have removed the very egregious errors in which a list is clearly duplicated but the rest, you would need access to the original historic data."

Both the original paper and Ornik's paper, "Comment on "TVOR: Finding Discrete Total Variation Outliers Among Histograms," are published in IEEE Access.

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Securing decent living standards for all while reducing global energy use.

Fundamental changes in our economies are required to secure decent living standards for all in the struggle against climate breakdown, according to new research.

Governments need to dramatically improve public services, reduce income disparities, scale back resource extraction, and abandon economic growth in affluent countries, for people around the world to thrive whilst cutting global average energy use in half.

Without such fundamental changes, the study warns, we face an existential dilemma: in our current economic system, the energy savings required to avert catastrophic climate changes might undermine living standards; while the improvements in living standards required to end material poverty would need large increases in energy use, further exacerbating climate breakdown.

The study, led by the University of Leeds and published today (30 June 2021) in Global Environmental Change, examined what policies could enable countries to use less energy whilst providing the whole population with 'decent living standards' - conditions that satisfy fundamental human needs for food, water, sanitation, health, education, and livelihoods.

Lead author Jefim Vogel, PhD researcher at Leeds' Sustainability Research Institute, explained: "Decent living standards are crucial for human well-being, and reducing global energy use is crucial for averting catastrophic climate changes. Truly sustainable development would mean providing decent living standards for everyone at much lower, sustainable levels of energy and resource use.

"But in the current economic system, no country in the world accomplishes that - not even close. It appears that our economic system is fundamentally misaligned with the aspirations of sustainable development: it is unfit for the challenges of the 21st century."

Co-author Professor Julia Steinberger, from the University of Leeds and the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, added: "The problem is that in our current economic system, all countries that achieve decent living standards use much more energy than what can be sustained if we are to avert dangerous climate breakdown."

By 2050, global energy use needs to be as low as 27 gigajoules (GJ) of final energy per person to reach the aspirations of the Paris Agreement of limiting global warming to 1.5 C without relying on speculative future technologies, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That means current global average energy use (55 GJ per person) needs to be cut in half, while affluent countries like the UK (81 GJ per person) or Spain (77 GJ per person) need to reduce their average energy use by as much as 65%, France (95 GJ per person) by more than 70%, and the most energy-hungry countries like the USA (204 GJ per person) or Canada (232 GJ per person) need to cut by as much as 90%.

A major concern, however, is that such profound reductions in energy use might undermine living standards, as currently only countries with high energy use accomplish decent living standards.

Even the energy-lightest of the countries that achieve decent living standards - spearheaded by Argentina (53 GJ per person), Cyprus (55 GJ per person), and Greece (63 GJ per person) - use at least double the 'sustainable' level of 27 GJ per person, and many countries use even much more.

On the other hand, in all countries with energy use levels below 27 GJ per person, large parts of the population currently suffer from precarious living standards - for example, in India (19 GJ per person) and Zambia (23 GJ per person), where at least half the population is deprived of fundamental needs.

It appears that in the current economic system, reducing energy use in affluent countries could undermine living standards, while improving living standards in less affluent countries would require large increases in energy use and thus further exacerbate climate breakdown.

But this is not inevitable, the research team show: fundamental changes in economic and social priorities could resolve this dilemma of sustainable development.

Co-author Dr Daniel O'Neill, from Leeds' School of earth and Environment, explained: "Our findings suggest that improving public services could enable countries to provide decent living standards at lower levels of energy use. Governments should offer free and high-quality public services in areas such as health, education, and public transport.

"We also found that a fairer income distribution is crucial for achieving decent living standards at low energy use. To reduce existing income disparities, governments could raise minimum wages, provide a Universal Basic Income, and introduce a maximum income level. We also need much higher taxes on high incomes, and lower taxes on low incomes."

Another essential factor, the research team found, is affordable and reliable access to electricity and modern fuels. While this is already near-universal in affluent countries, it is still lacking for billions of people in lower-income countries, highlighting important infrastructure needs.

Perhaps the most crucial and perhaps the most surprising finding is that economic growth beyond moderate levels of affluence is detrimental for aspirations of sustainable development.

Professor Steinberger explained: "In contrast with wide-spread assumptions, the evidence suggests that decent living standards require neither perpetual economic growth nor high levels of affluence.

"In fact, economic growth in affluent or even moderately affluent countries is detrimental for living standards. And it is also fundamentally unsustainable: economic growth is tied to increases in energy use, and thus makes the energy savings that are required for tackling climate breakdown virtually impossible."

"Another detrimental factor is the extraction of natural resources such as coal, oil, gas or minerals - these industries need to be scaled back rapidly."

Lead-author Jefim Vogel concluded: "In short, we need to abandon economic growth in affluent countries, scale back resource extraction, and prioritise public services, basic infrastructures and fair income distributions everywhere.

"With these policies in place, rich countries could slash their energy use and emissions whilst maintaining or even improving living standards; and less affluent countries could achieve decent living standards and end material poverty without needing vast amounts of energy. That's good news for climate justice, good news for human well-being, good news for poverty eradication, and good news for energy security.

"But we need to be clear that achieving this ultimately requires a broader, more fundamental transformation of our growth-dependent economic system. In my view, the most promising and integral vision for the required transformation is the idea of degrowth - it is an idea whose time has come."

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Further information

The paper, Socio-economic conditions for satisfying human needs at low energy use: an international analysis of social provisioning, is published in Global Environmental Change on 30 June 2021.

DOI: 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2021.102287.

The research team included:

Jefim Vogel (Sustainability Research Institute, School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, UK).

Julia K. Steinberger (Institute of Geography and Sustainability, Faculty of Geosciences and Environment, University of Lausanne, Switzerland; Sustainability Research Institute, School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, UK).

Daniel W. O'Neill (Sustainability Research Institute, School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, UK).

William F. Lamb (Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change, Berlin, Germany; Sustainability Research Institute, School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, UK).

Jaya Krishnakumar (Institute of Economics and Econometrics, Geneva School of Economics and Management, University of Geneva, Switzerland).

The study was initiated by the "Living Well Within Limits" project, led by Professor Julia Steinberger.

The research of Jefim Vogel and Julia Steinberger was funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

For further details to request interviews, please contact Ian Rosser in the University of Leeds press office at I.rosser@leeds.ac.uk .
Scientists at the University of Sydney and Japan's National Institute for Material Science (NIMS) have discovered that an artificial network of nanowires can be tuned to respond in a brain-like way when electrically stimulated.

The international team, led by Joel Hochstetter with Professor Zdenka Kuncic and Professor Tomonobu Nakayama, found that by keeping the network of nanowires in a brain-like state "at the edge of chaos", it performed tasks at an optimal level.

This, they say, suggests the underlying nature of neural intelligence is physical, and their discovery opens an exciting avenue for the development of artificial intelligence.

The study is published today in Nature Communications.

"We used wires 10 micrometres long and no thicker than 500 nanometres arranged randomly on a two-dimensional plane," said lead author Joel Hochstetter, a doctoral candidate in the University of Sydney Nano Institute and School of Physics.

"Where the wires overlap, they form an electrochemical junction, like the synapses between neurons," he said. "We found that electrical signals put through this network automatically find the best route for transmitting information. And this architecture allows the network to 'remember' previous pathways through the system."

ON THE EDGE OF CHAOS

Using simulations, the research team tested the random nanowire network to see how to make it best perform to solve simple tasks.

If the signal stimulating the network was too low, then the pathways were too predictable and orderly and did not produce complex enough outputs to be useful. If the electrical signal overwhelmed the network, the output was completely chaotic and useless for problem solving.

The optimal signal for producing a useful output was at the edge of this chaotic state.

"Some theories in neuroscience suggest the human mind could operate at this edge of chaos, or what is called the critical state," said Professor Kuncic from the University of Sydney. "Some neuroscientists think it is in this state where we achieve maximal brain performance."

Professor Kuncic is Mr Hochstetter's PhD adviser and is currently a Fulbright Scholar at the University of California in Los Angeles, working at the intersection between nanoscience and artificial intelligence.

She said: "What's so exciting about this result is that it suggests that these types of nanowire networks can be tuned into regimes with diverse, brain-like collective dynamics, which can be leveraged to optimise information processing."

OVERCOMING COMPUTER DUALITY

In the nanowire network the junctions between the wires allow the system to incorporate memory and operations into a single system. This is unlike standard computers, which separate memory (RAM) and operations (CPUs).

"These junctions act like computer transistors but with the additional property of remembering that signals have travelled that pathway before. As such, they are called 'memristors'," Mr Hochstetter said.

This memory takes a physical form, where the junctions at the crossing points between nanowires act like switches, whose behaviour depends on historic response to electrical signals. When signals are applied across these junctions, tiny silver filaments grow activating the junctions by allowing current to flow through.

"This creates a memory network within the random system of nanowires," he said.

Mr Hochstetter and his team built a simulation of the physical network to show how it could be trained to solve very simple tasks.

"For this study we trained the network to transform a simple waveform into more complex types of waveforms," Mr Hochstetter said.

In the simulation they adjusted the amplitude and frequency of the electrical signal to see where the best performance occurred.

"We found that if you push the signal too slowly the network just does the same thing over and over without learning and developing. If we pushed it too hard and fast, the network becomes erratic and unpredictable," he said.

The University of Sydney researchers are working closely with collaborators at the International Center for Materials Nanoarchictectonics at NIMS in Japan and UCLA where Professor Kuncic is a visiting Fulbright Scholar. The nanowire systems were developed at NIMS and UCLA and Mr Hochstetter developed the analysis, working with co-authors and fellow doctoral students, Ruomin Zhu and Alon Loeffler.

REDUCING ENERGY CONSUMPTION

Professor Kuncic said that uniting memory and operations has huge practical advantages for the future development of artificial intelligence.

"Algorithms needed to train the network to know which junction should be accorded the appropriate 'load' or weight of information chew up a lot of power," she said.

"The systems we are developing do away with the need for such algorithms. We just allow the network to develop its own weighting, meaning we only need to worry about signal in and signal out, a framework known as 'reservoir computing'. The network weights are self-adaptive, potentially freeing up large amounts of energy."

This, she said, means any future artificial intelligence systems using such networks would have much lower energy footprints.

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DOWNLOAD the study, photos of researchers and nanowire networks at this link.

INTERVIEWS

Joel Hochstetter | joel.hochstetter@sydney.edu.au (located in Sydney)

Professor Zdenka Kuncic | zdenka.kuncic@sydney.edu.au (currently in Los Angeles)

MEDIA ENQUIRIES

Marcus Strom | marcus.strom@sydney.edu.au | +61 423 982 485

DECLARATION

The authors acknowledge use of the Artemis High Performance Computing resource at the Sydney Informatics Hub, a Core Research Facility of the University of Sydney.
During the last twenty years, the trading in stock markets has undergone significant changes. Researchers from the University of Turku and the University of Palermo have investigated the role of high-frequency traders in the markets.

Technological evolution and innovations both in the technology used by stock exchanges and the resources of the traders using their services have made faster trading possible. As a result, high-frequency trading in sub millisecond scale has increased.

However, not everyone has the opportunity to use high-frequency trading, and generally, the scales can be anything from microseconds to tens of thousands of seconds. The role of high-frequency traders has given rise to broad debate over the past years.

- On the one hand, people have argued that the presence of high-frequency traders makes the operation of the markets more efficient and lowers the trading expenses. On the other hand, there have been arguments that this type of trading increases the volatility of the markets, meaning strong fluctuation of prices, and makes them more prone to crashes, says University Research Fellow, Docent Jyrki Piilo from the University of Turku.

The researchers used data from the years 2004-2006, 2010-2011, and 2018. In the first decade of this millennium, the high-frequency trading was still limited while in the second decade it has become much more widely spread due to significant technological development.

- Using statistical analysis of data and the modern methods of network theory, the study allows us to see how the actions of the market members and their reactions to other members' actions has changed over the years, says Dr. Federico Musciotto from the University of Palermo.

A member of the market can trade for their own account or complete commissions for other traders on their request. The study also shows what kind of role the high-frequency traders have in this transformation.

- Based on the data, we have constructed the trading networks of market members, which allows us to detect in which pairs of market members there is a preference to trade with each other and for which pairs there is avoidance to trade with each other. In other words, the results show which type of market members have a preference to react for the order to buy or sell of other type of market member, and which type of market members avoid trading with each other, says Professor Rosario N. Mantegna from the University of Palermo.

The central outcome of the study is that the markets have become significantly more networked as trading has become faster through technological development. The networked character has increased significantly over the years - even though the anonymity in the markets has also increased.

Over the years, there has been a clear increase in the preference for the high-frequency traders to trade with other types of traders. Instead, high-frequency traders avoid mutual trading between themselves, as do other types of traders also. In general, the increasing presence of high-frequency traders has led to the increased networked structure of the market where the strong preferential trading patterns between specific pairs of market members can last up to several months.

Made possible by their technological edge and fast trading compared to others, the high-frequency traders have the ability to perform strategic trading decisions not accessible to other market members or investors, and thereby significantly influence the liquidity of the markets.

The networked structure of the market and the competition among market members are not necessarily the optimal solutions for the best operation of the markets

- The results emphasise the importance of the debate and further investigations of how we can ensure the fair and efficient operation of the markets, summarises Mantegna.

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(San Antonio, June 29, 2021) - UTSA criminology and criminal justice professors Michael R. Smith and Rob Tillyer working in collaboration with University of Cincinnati Professor Robin Engel examined racial and ethnic disparities in the use of force by the Fairfax County Police Department (FCPD). One of the nation's largest county police departments, the FCPD serves Fairfax County, Va., a major metropolitan county near Washington, D.C.

The team presented the results of its 18-month study today to the Public Safety Committee of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors. The team analyzed three years of data, including 1,360 cases of force used by FCPD officers against at least one civilian between January 1, 2016 and December 31, 2018.

In addition to investigating the influence of civilian race, ethnicity and other factors on force used by FCPD officers, the team also was charged with providing recommendations for reducing potential bias in officer decision-making and improving future use of force data collection.

"Last year highlighted the racial and social disparities that are a fact of life for many in the U.S. The protests following the killing of George Floyd, public health disparities highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and rising violent crime in many cities are examples of the larger social and economic challenges we face," said Smith. "As an urban serving university, UTSA is committed to research that can address the nation's pressing challenges."

Using benchmarks to compare the rate of force used against racial and ethnic subgroups to the expected risk of force across those groups, the researchers also used a series of multivariate regression models to assess factors associated with the totality and severity of force used used against civilians in Fairfax County.

The researchers benchmarked force used against the major racial and ethnic groups in Fairfax County to the racial and ethnic composition of criminal suspects and arrestees in the county. Key findings of the study included:

Average force levels were slightly higher for Blacks (2.4 on a 4.0 scale) than for other racial groups while resistance levels were essentially equal across the racial and ethnic groups.

The rates of force used against White and Black civilians consistently exceeded the benchmarks while Hispanic civilians were underrepresented in force cases compared to the benchmarks. The benchmarking findings for Asian civilians were mixed with some showing overrepresentation and some not.

Comparing rates of force used against minorities relative to Whites utilizing these same benchmarks showed that in all but one case, the rate of force used against minorities was lower than the rate used against Whites.

At the same time, Black, and to a lesser degree Hispanic civilians, experienced more severe force than Whites, and those findings varied by district station.

The researchers concluded that force was used county-wide more often than expected against White and Black civilians based on the benchmark comparisons and generally less often than expected against Hispanic civilians. They also found that Black civilians were more likely to have force used against them in arrest situations compared to Whites.

The researchers offered the FCPD many constructive suggestions on how to enhance its data collection practices, improve its use of force policies and provide evidence-based training to officers to help reduce future disparities in the use of force.

"The Fairfax County Police Department is one of the leading law enforcement agencies in the country. We hope our findings provide the agency and the residents of Fairfax County with a roadmap for improvement," said Smith.

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The tiny mouse embryo has a heart that beats. Its muscles, blood vessels, gut and nervous system are beginning to develop. But this embryo is unusual: It was made in a lab, out of mouse embryonic stem cells, and represents the most sophisticated in vitro (in a dish) model of a mammal ever so created.

This new model, developed at the University of Virginia School of Medicine by Christine and Bernard Thisse, is a major step forward in scientists' efforts to mimic the natural development of a mammal by using stem cells. Its existence is a wonder that will help scientists understand mammalian development, battle diseases, create new drugs and, eventually, grow tissues and organs for people in need of transplants.

"We found a way to instruct aggregates of stem cells to initiate embryonic development. In response to this controlled instruction, the aggregates develop into embryo-like entities in a process that recapitulate the embryonic steps one-by-one," explained Christine Thisse, PhD, of UVA's Department of Cell Biology. "What is amazing is that we can get the variety of tissues that are present in an authentic mouse embryo."

Bernard Thisse, PhD, who is also part of the Department of Cell Biology, noted the significance of the advance: "Human organs are made of multiple cell types that originate from different parts of the growing embryo," he said. "The gut, for example, is made from cells that form an hollow tube. Models of this tube in a dish have been made and are called gut organoids. However, this tube is not enough to make a functional gut because this organ contains other components, such as smooth muscles, blood vessels and nerves that control the function of the gut and which are made from cells of a different origins. The only way to have all the variety of cells necessary to the formation of functional organs is to develop systems in which all precursor cells are present. The embryo-like entities we have engineered using stem cells are providing just this." The Potential of Stem Cells

Stem cells are special cells that can turn into other cell types with specific functions. For example, stem cells turn into our hearts, our brain, our bones, our nerves. So scientists have been eager to harness the potential of stem cells, to put them to work to advance medical research and benefit human patients. But building sophisticated models with multiple cell types has proved incredibly challenging. It is far easier to direct the formation of a single cell type in a dish than to conduct the orchestra needed to have an organism develop as in nature.

The Thisses' new model is notable for its sophistication. It is the first in vitro model of a mammalian embryo with so many tissues to be built from stem cells, the researchers report. Most importantly, those structures are organized as they should be, around the notochord (the precursor of the vertebral column), a defining trait of vertebrate animals. In the Thisses' model, different cells types are woven together elegantly and correctly - a huge achievement.

To accomplish this, the Thisses and their collaborators had to overcome some of the greatest challenges in the stem cell field. Prior models failed to develop properly, or weren't organized correctly, or were plagued by other problems. Using their expertise in developmental biology and building on their previous work using cells from fish embryos (published in the journal Science in 2014), the Thisses solved these problems. The result is the beginnings of a mouse in a dish with properly organized cells and tissues. With the Thisses' model, the notochord is present and accounted for; the digestive tract starts to develop; the heart beats; and, for the first time in vitro, a nervous system develops with the formation of a neural tube.

"This in vitro mouse model shows that we are able to induce cells to execute complex developmental programs in the right succession of steps. Having all the variety of tissues made allows us to hope that the scientific community will be able to build organs with a proper vascularization, innervation and interactions with other tissues," Christine Thisse said. "This is essential to be able one day to produce functional human replacement organs in a dish. This would overcome the shortage of organ for transplants."

The Thisses' new model isn't a complete mouse yet and can't develop into one. Key parts are still missing, such as the anterior part of the brain. For now, the development of the embryoids stops at a time corresponding to middle period of gestation of a mouse embryo. The researchers' real accomplishment is developing an effective approach to creating sophisticated, embryonic-like structures, mimicking the development of a mouse embryo. This advances their field substantially, and it gives scientists more tailored control over stem cells than they have ever known.

"The embryoids we are currently producing lack the anterior brain domains," Bernard Thisse said. "However, with the techniques we have developed, we should be able, at some point, to manipulate molecular signals that control embryo formation, and this should lead generating embryo-like entities containing all tissues and organs including the anterior brain."

"The knowledge we acquired along all our career of developmental biologists served as a starting point for this study in the stem cell field," Christine Thisse said. "This was a big jump for us, but it shows that if you have a solid idea, it can be used to cross barriers and can be developed for other purposes. I say that for students: Nothing is definitive, there is room for knowing more and for solving problems."

"Watching an embryo develop is a marvelous thing to behold," she added. "I am lucky my work led me to contribute to the knowledge of how invertebrate and vertebrate embryos develop, and that using these principles, we were able to produce embryo formation in a dish using stem cells as building bricks." Findings Published

The Thisses and their collaborators have published their findings in the scientific journal Nature Communications. The research team consisted of Peng-Fei Xu, Ricardo Moraes Borges, Jonathan Fillatre, Maraysa de Oliveira-Melo, Tao Cheng, Bernard Thisse and Christine Thisse.

The research was supported by the March of Dimes (grant 1-FY15-298), the Jefferson Trust (FAAJ3199) and the University of Virginia. Maraysa de Oliveira-Melo was supported by CNPq-Brazil (200535/2014-5).

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For the first time, researchers have confirmed the detection of a collision between a black hole and a neutron star. In fact, the scientists detected not one but two such events occurring just 10 days apart in January 2020. The extreme events made splashes in space that sent gravitational waves rippling across at least 900 million light-years to reach Earth. In each case, the neutron star was likely swallowed whole by its black hole partner.

Gravitational waves are disturbances in the curvature of space-time created by massive objects in motion. During the five years since the waves were first measured, a finding that led to the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics, researchers have identified more than 50 gravitational-wave signals from the merging of pairs of black holes and of pairs of neutron stars. Both black holes and neutron stars are the corpses of massive stars, with black holes being even more massive than neutron stars.

Now, in a new study, scientists have announced the detection of gravitational waves from two rare events, each involving the collision of a black hole and a neutron star. The gravitational waves were detected by the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the United States and by the Virgo detector in Italy. The KAGRA detector in Japan, joined the LIGO-Virgo network in 2020, but was not online during these detections.

The first merger, detected on January 5, 2020, involved a black hole about 9 times the mass of our sun, or 9 solar masses, and a 1.9-solar-mass neutron star. The second merger was detected on January 15, and involved a 6-solar-mass black hole and a 1.5-solar-mass neutron star. The results were published today, June 29, in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Astronomers have spent decades searching for neutron stars orbiting black holes in the Milky Way, our home galaxy, but have found none so far. "With this new discovery of neutron star- black hole mergers outside our galaxy, we have found the missing type of binary. We can finally begin to understand how many of these systems exist, how often they merge, and why we have not yet seen examples in the Milky Way," says Astrid Lamberts, a CNRS researcher at Observatoire de la Cote d'Azur, in Nice, France.

The first of the two events, GW200105, was observed by the LIGO Livingston and Virgo detectors. It produced a strong signal in the LIGO detector but had a small signal-to-noise in the Virgo detector. The other LIGO detector, located in Hanford, Washington, was temporarily offline. Given the nature of the gravitational waves, the team inferred that the signal was caused by a black hole colliding with a 1.9-solar-mass compact object, later identified as a neutron star. This merger took place 900 million light-years away.

"Even though we see a strong signal in only one detector, we conclude that it is real and not just detector noise. It passes all our stringent quality checks and sticks out from all noise events we see in the third observing run," says Harald Pfeiffer, group leader in the Astrophysical and Cosmological Relativity department at Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (AEI) in Potsdam, Germany.

Because the signal was strong in only one detector, the location of the merger on the sky remains uncertain, lying somewhere in an area that is 34,000 times the size of a full moon.

"While the gravitational waves alone don't reveal the structure of the lighter object, we can infer its maximum mass. By combining this information with theoretical predictions of expected neutron star masses in such a binary system, we conclude that a neutron star is the most likely explanation," says Bhooshan Gadre, a postdoctoral researcher at the AEI.

The second event, GW200115, was detected by both LIGO detectors and the Virgo detector. GW200115 comes from the merger of a black hole with a 1.5-solar mass neutron star that took place roughly 1 billion light-years from Earth. Using information from all three instruments, scientists were better able to narrow down the part of the sky where this event occurred. Nevertheless, the localized area is almost 3,000 times the size of a full moon.

Astronomers were alerted to both events soon after they were detected in gravitational waves and subsequently searched the skies for associated flashes of light. None were found. This is not surprising due to the very large distance to these mergers, which means that any light coming from them, no matter what the wavelength, would be very dim and hard to detect with even the most powerful telescopes. Additionally, the mergers likely did not give off a light show in any case because their black holes were big enough that they swallowed the neutron stars whole.

"These were not events where the black holes munched on the neutron stars like the cookie monster and flung bits and pieces about. That 'flinging about' is what would produce light, and we don't think that happened in these cases," says Patrick Brady, a professor at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Spokesperson of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration.

Previously, the LIGO-Virgo network found two other candidate neutron star-black hole mergers. One event called GW190814, detected August 14, 2019, involved a collision of a 23-solar-mass black hole with an object of about 2.6 solar masses, which could be either the heaviest known neutron star or the lightest known black hole. Another candidate event, called GW190426, and detected on April 26, 2019, was thought to possibly be a neutron star-black hole merger, but could also simply be the result of detector noise.

Having confidently observed two examples of gravitational waves from black holes merging with neutron stars, researchers now estimate that, within one billion light-years of Earth, roughly one such merger happens per month.

"The detector groups at LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA are improving their detectors in preparation for the next observing run scheduled to begin in summer 2022," says Brady. "With the improved sensitivity, we hope to detect merger waves up to once per day and to better measure the properties of black holes and super-dense matter that makes up neutron stars."

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Additional information about the gravitational-wave observatories:

This material is based upon work supported by NSF's LIGO Laboratory which is a major facility funded by the NSF. LIGO is operated by Caltech and MIT, which conceived of LIGO and led the Advanced LIGO detector project. Financial support for the Advanced LIGO project was principally from the NSF with Germany (Max Planck Society), the U.K. (Science and Technology Facilities Council) and Australia (Australian Research Council-OzGrav) making significant commitments and contributions to the project. Approximately 1,400 scientists from around the world participate in the effort to analyze the data and develop detector designs through the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, which includes the GEO Collaboration. A list of additional partners is available at https:/ / my. ligo. org/ census. php .

The Virgo Collaboration is currently composed of approximately 650 members from 119 institutions in 14 different countries including Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Spain. The European Gravitational Observatory (EGO) hosts the Virgo detector near Pisa in Italy, and is funded by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France, the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) in Italy, and Nikhef in the Netherlands. A list of the Virgo Collaboration groups can be found at http://public. virgo - gw.eu/the-virgo-collaboration. More information is available on the Virgo website at http://www. virgo-gw. eu .

The KAGRA detector is located in Kamioka, Gifu, Japan. The host institute is the Institute of Cosmic Ray Researches (ICRR) at the University of Tokyo, and the project is co-hosted by National Astronomical Observatory in Japan (NAOJ) and High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK). KAGRA completed its construction in 2019, and later joined the international gravitational-wave network of LIGO and Virgo. The actual data-taking was started in February 2020 during the final stage of the run called "O3b." The KAGRA collaboration is composed of over 470 members from 11 countries/regions. The list of researchers is available from http://gwwiki. icrr. u-tokyo. ac. jp/ JGWwiki/ KAGRA/ KSC/ Researchers . KAGRA information is at the website https:/ / gwcenter. icrr. u-tokyo. ac. jp/ en/ .

Webinar Series

For those wishing for a deeper dive into these LIGO-Virgo results, the team has scheduled a webinar intended for a scientific audience. This is the 8th webinar in the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Webinar Series. The one-hour Zoom webinar will be on July 1, 2021 at 14:00 Universal Time Coordinated (7:00 Pacific Daylight Time; 10:00 Eastern Daylight Time; 16:00 Central European Summer Time; 23:00 Japan Standard Time).

To register, visit: https:/ / uwm-edu. zoom. us/ webinar/ register/ WN__GVBbtcoRRCbMM5oieoEdg

The Zoom webinar will also be live streamed and a recording will be available upon request.

Media Contacts

AEI/ Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics

Benjamin Knispel

benjamin.knispel@aei.mpg.de

+49(0)511-762-19104

Caltech

Whitney Clavin

wclavin@caltech.edu

626-390-9601

MIT

Abigail Abazorius

abbya@mit.edu

617-253-2709

UWM

Laura Otto

llhunt@uwm.edu

414-303-4868

Virgo

Livia Conti

livia.conti@pd.infn.it

EGO

Vincenzo Napolano

napolano@ego-gw.it

+393472994985

KAGRA

Masatake Ohashi

ohashi@icrr.u-tokyo.ac.jp

NSF

Josh Chamot

jchamot@nsf.gov

703-292-4489
MADISON - The presence of a state prison in a county was associated with 11% more COVID-19 cases through July 1, 2020, according to a new study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Many of the cases were likely due to the spread of COVID-19 within prisons. But researchers estimate that 95,000 cases and more than 3,300 deaths across the U.S. -- the majority of the prison-associated cases -- were due to spillover from prisons into surrounding communities.

The findings suggest both that prisons are vulnerable to diseases entering from outside and that they can then incubate and amplify those diseases and spread them to surrounding communities. The study authors say that counties that host prisons should prepare for future outbreaks by prioritizing the health of both incarcerated populations and those living in nearby towns.

"Your community is safer if your prison population is healthy," says Jeremy Foltz, one of the study authors and a professor of agricultural and applied economics at UW-Madison. The findings were published June 29 in the American Journal of Public Health.

The researchers searched for associations between COVID-19 and prisons by using public data on the number of cases of COVID-19 during the spring of 2020 and information on the presence of county jails and state and federal prisons. They controlled for county-level factors that might have affected the spread of COVID-19, such as the presence of nursing homes and population density.

Neither county jails nor federal prisons correlated with more COVID-19 cases. Federal prisons began restricting movement between and inside prisons starting in April of 2020, which might have reduced disease spread.

County-level data on the number of cases within prisons were not available, which made it difficult to quantify disease spread inside versus outside of prisons. But based on national data, the researchers estimated that about 70% of prison-associated cases were likely in the surrounding community.

"If we're creating holistic public health policies, prisons are an important factor," says Kaitlyn Sims, an author of the report and a doctoral student in agricultural and applied economics at UW-Madison. "Given the unique challenges that prisons face, it's important that we pay attention to them and recognize that they need equally unique policies."

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--Eric Hamilton, (608) 263-1986, eshamilton@wisc.edu
Under a concrete drainage culvert at the edge of a town in Botswana, a troop of banded mongoose is getting ready to leave its den. Moving from shade into light, the cat-sized animals scan the area for signs of danger and for opportunities to find something to eat in an increasingly crowded neighborhood.

Unbeknownst to them, the genetics of this troop's members -- and others like them -- are providing researchers in the College of Natural Resources and Environment with new understandings of how and why animal behavior changes in proximity to human development and how that change can impact infectious disease spread.

The researchers used genetic tools to identify changes in movement behavior among mongooses living in urban centers and natural areas, gaining important insights into how to better model disease transmission among wild animals living across complex landscapes. Results of their study, which was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation's Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases program, have been published in the journal Ecology and Evolution.

"The question has always been how do we predict what's going to happen once an infectious disease emerges," said Kathleen Alexander, the William E. Lavery Professor in the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation. "By using systems that are tractable, we can begin to learn a lot more about how disease dynamics are shaped by host behavior and environmental drivers, including urbanizing landscapes."

One tractable system can be found with social groups of banded mongooses, also known as troops, that live across urban and natural areas in Botswana. Over the past 20 years, researchers from the Chobe Research Institute and CARACAL, a nonprofit organization co-founded by Alexander, have been observing the behaviors of mongoose troops in the natural environment of Chobe National Park and in increasingly urban centers, such as Kasane.

Botswana's banded mongooses are ideal study subjects because they live in territorial social groups across the landscape, and, in northern Botswana, are infected with a novel tuberculosis pathogen closely related to human tuberculosis.

"We're looking for dispersal behaviors and movement of mongooses that may allow disease transmission to occur between these mongoose troops," said Professor Eric Hallerman, who specializes in population genetics and is a co-author of the paper. "This species tends to live in troop structures that are resistant to immigration from other troops, so it's important to know how they are moving across the landscape and interacting."

"They're a difficult species to follow on the ground because they look so similar, unlike, for example, cheetahs, which can be individually identified by their spots," continued Hallerman, who, along with Alexander, is an affiliate of Virginia Tech's Fralin Life Sciences Institute. "You can put ear tags and other markers on them, but they often lose the marks, making it difficult to track individuals across troops. Genetic approaches provide the key to addressing these difficulties."

To do so, the researchers needed samples. "We decided that the best option for trying to capture the most genetic diversity from the troops was to collect fresh stool samples," said Kelton Verble, the paper's lead author, who completed his master's degree in fisheries and wildlife sciences at Virginia Tech in 2018. He refined sample collection processes, tracking mongooses across landscape types and collecting fecal samples from a wide variety of troops.

"We also looked at the health status of the mongooses that moved between study troops," he said. "Our previous data indicated that tuberculosis-infected animals tended not to disperse, and data from this study supports this original finding."

Genetic data obtained from microsatellite DNA markers within the genome sequence of each animal allowed Verble to not only identify individuals that had moved between troops in their lifetime, but also characterize the general genetic makeup of the various troops across the landscape -- how were individuals connected and how would this influence disease transmission potential?

"With this study, we really wanted to explicitly investigate dispersal and clarify what was happening between and among troops across land type," said Alexander, who is also an affiliate of the Fralin Life Sciences Institute's new Center for Emerging, Zoonotic, and Arthropod-Borne Pathogens. "What we saw was that these urban landscapes were not only changing foraging behaviors, aggression, and den use, but also dispersal behaviors and, consequently, disease transmission potential."

The researchers discovered that mongooses living in urban landscapes were more likely to disperse to other troops in this land type, thereby increasing the chance of tuberculosis transmission. With more abundant, human-associated food sources, troops nearer to the city were also more likely to share dens and have overlapping home ranges.

"The banded mongoose is typically regarded as a philopatric species, meaning that if they're born to a troop, they stay there for life," said Verble, who is now working on a doctorate in genomics at the University of Alabama. "What we learned is that there was a lot more swapping of individuals between troops than had been recognized, which is crucial for predicting disease spread."

Such findings have implications not only for disease transmission among animals but also for understanding how zoonotic diseases, such as COVID-19, transfer from animals to humans and how urbanization might impact that spread.

"We've never been very good at predicting disease-emergence events," Alexander said. "We don't know when a pathogen will emerge, and we have trouble predicting what will happen when it does because there are so many possible influences. For zoonotic pathogens, it will be increasingly important to understand how animals interact with and are influenced by transforming landscapes and growing urban centers, information critical to advancing our toolkit for tackling public and animal health challenges."

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Written by David Fleming
California added five more states, including Florida, to the list of places where state-funded travel is banned because of laws that discriminate against members of the LGBTQ community.
Tuesday, June 29, 2021

I am a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell. Most of his books deal with research into the social sciences, particularly sociology and psychology and have been best sellers. His latest book, The Bomber Mafia, deals primarily with the philosophies of bombing during World War II, and has not become a best seller  at least not yet.

The words Bomber Mafia refer to a group of American pilots in the 1930s stationed at what was then called Maxwell Field in Montgomery, Alabama. These pilots dreamed of more humane ways to conduct wars. They believed that bombing strategic targets made sense, and bombing population centers didnt.

During World War II, some of these pilots became major decision makers. The theoretical discussions they had back at Maxwell Field didnt properly account for weather, enemy fire, and mass-produced bomb sights. The biggest runs against a strategic target, specifically a ball bearing factory, largely was a failure. Almost 100 B-24 planes were lost with only minimal damage done to the ball bearing plant.

In the Pacific, they had better planes to go against Japan. The B-29s were capable of making the 3,000+ mile round trip from Guam to Japan. The problem here was there above Japan there was a 140 mph (125 knot) jet stream, which played havoc with the bomb sight and precision bombing.

It was decided primarily by General Curtis LeMay to carpet bomb Tokyo, using napalm. He flew in at 5,000 feet elevation, which was under the jet stream, and under the altitude at which Japanese antiaircraft weapons were effective. Napalm is a gel that when it explodes, blows large clumps of fiery hot substance that sticks to every substance and burns brightly for several minutes. Much of Japanese housing was wood, paper, with straw mats. Perfect tinder for firebombing. In one day in March, 1945, more than 400 B-29s totally burned 16 square miles of Tokyo  killing far more than 100,000 people. And then they did the same thing to another city. And then another.

Weve all be taught that it was the two atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki that caused the Japanese to surrender. Actually, LeMays B-29s firebombed 67 different Japanese cities with far more lives lost than the atomic bombs. If LeMay firebombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the loss of life would have been similar as to what the atomic bombs caused  without the radiation.

After the war, LeMay was given a high medal by the Japanese government. Why? Because even though his bombing caused more than 500,000 Japanese citizens to lose their lives, it prevented a land invasion  which undoubtedly would have cost many more deaths than that. On both sides.

The war ended some 76 years ago. Perhaps bombing debate this is old hat to many of my readers. But it was news to me. And interesting.

There are a lot of moral dilemmas to chew on here. Once you are in a way, are some forms of bombing more humane than others? Can the less humane way actually save more lives in the long run.

I went back and read The Bomber Mafia a second time. And was engrossed once again.
Tuesday, June 29, 2021

Yesterday I posted an excerpt from David Chandler's testimony from the Dean Andrews perjury trial. Of course, James DiEugenio took exception to my post on Facebook :

"The only problem with this is a recurrent one with Litwin: its not true. David Chandler was a stringer for Time Life, and a great friend of the FBI informant Phelan and the CIA related Dick Billings. In fact he largely wrote the story Phelan had published about Garrison cleaning up the French Quarter and then the Life magazine hatchet job about Garrison being associated with the Mob, which he was not. Chandler was incessant in pushing the Mob angle on the JFK case. To the point of making stuff up and dropping it on the DA's office."

This is a standard DiEugenio tactic - dismiss testimony you don't like because you either don't like their associates, or because somebody, somewhere has some sort of relationship with the FBI or the CIA. First-hand witnesses like Rosemary James, James Phelan, Hugh Aynesworth, David Chandler are all ignored by DiEugenio because only he understands New Orleans. Here is my analysis of his scholarship .

In the same Facebook posting, DiEugenio also says:

"The way that Garrison found out who Bertrand was is rather simple: there was no such person listed in the Crescent City. Therefore, one had to find out who was using such an alias. The problem at first was that the people in the French Quarter hated JG because of his campaign against B girl drinking. So when Ivon told Garrison to let him and the staff do it alone, they started to get plentiful results. As Garrison said in his book one of the first was at a bar that Andrews frequented. But, after that, it mushroomed. The FBI knew this also but Hoover was not going to help Garrison since he was exposing the many holes with the FBI inquiry. Even Liebeler knew this as the info got to the DOJ, and Ed Guthman informed him of it. How bad was it: When Ed Tatro visited New Orleans for the trial, since he had a Boston accent, people asked him what he was there for. When he told them they chuckled: 'Everyone down here knows Shaw is Bertrand, but that poor devil Garrison can't prove it so save his life."

In fact, Garrison's staff did not get plentiful results. Here is a memo from Lou Ivon regarding his search for Clay Bertrand:

DiEugenio says that Ed Guthman of the Department of Justice told Wesley Liebeler about Shaw being Bertrand. But that is not true - that was a rumor that Lawrence Schiller told Tom Bethell :

"Schiller says Guthman told Liebeler it's been known for two months that Bertrand and Shaw are the same man."

And DiEugenio's source is Bethell's diary entry. There is no direct testimony from Guthman about Shaw being Bertrand.

By the way, I have debunked all of DiEugenio's witnesses he cites as proof that Shaw was Bertrand:

Did The FBI Know that Shaw was Bertrand?

Did Dean Andrews Admit that Clay Shaw was Clay Bertrand?

Did William Morris Know Clay Shaw as Clay Bertrand?

Did Clay Shaw's Maid Know he was Clay Bertrand?

Did Clay Shaw Admit to Aloysius Habighorst that he was Clay Betrand?

Did Clay Shaw Sign the VIP Guestbook as Clay Bertrand?

The Search for Clay Bertrand...

Did Thomas Breitner Meet Clay Bertrand?

Did Carlos Marcello's Doctor Friend Know About Clay Bertrand?

DiEugenio concluded his diatribe with this:

"How reliable was Chandler? When JG wanted to call him in for questioning about his Mob slanders, he avoided the subpoena. Then Time Life got in contact with the governor. They asked him to infiltrate Chandler into the State Trooper ranks so Chandler could legally decline the subpoena. They told McKeithen that if he refused they would smear him with the Mob as they did Garrison. How honest was Chandler? Many years later, when he was writing for a Denver weekly, he admitted that Phelan knew Hoover was incinerating records of Oswald's role as an FBI informant after the assassination. HIs son got in contact with me in the nineties and said that his father also knew that Shaw and Ferrie were friends. Fred Litwin relies on the public's ignorance about New Orleans. I look at my function the other way: to add to the factual record about the area. You cannot do that by going through the archives of Jim Kirkwood and rerunning mildewed and discredited stories from the likes of a cover up artist like Chandler."

Of course, Chandler wanted to avoid going before the grand jury. He knew it would be a lose-lose situation and that he could end up with a perjury indictment, which was Garrison's favorite ploy. Chandler had offered to turn over his investigative files to Garrison's office for presentation to the grand jury but that was turned down. Garrison had no interest in learning more about organized crime, he wanted to silence Chandler.

James DiEugenio criticizes me for going through the archives of James Kirkwood. It's interesting that he has not gone through the Kirkwood papers. It's a shame because Kirkwood interviewed all the major players in the Garrison investigation, and those raw interviews are amongst his papers. Ignorance is bliss, I guess.

Given the interest in David Chandler, I thought it appropriate to post a memo written by an investigator for Clay Shaw:

The dates above are clearly wrong. Garrison made the statement that he had solved the case in February, 1967.

David Lewis was one of Garrison's early witnesses - he was almost a protege of Jack Martin. You can read the entire story of David Lewis which includes a statement from David Chandler here .
A special discount for new registrants interested in attending the National Medicare Supplement Insurance Summit was announced by the American Association for Medicare Supplement Insurance (AAMSI).

"We are looking forward to the in-person industry event and anticipate a record-breaking crowd," announced Jesse Slome, AAMSI's director and organizer of the industry conference. The industry conference takes place September 8-10, 2021 at the Schaumburg, IL Convention Center.

"Medicare insurance sales are growing and people want to learn the latest and prepare for the continued growth and competition," Slome notes. "Professionals who price, administer, market and sell to Medicare beneficiaries will be coming to hear what's taking place and to network with their peers."

According to the Association, over one thousand Medicare insurance professionals are expected to attend the event that includes a free day for those residing in the immediate Chicago region. Slome announced a special registrant discount for new registrants who register during July. "Those who want to take advantage should enter the referral code july100 when registering online," he explains.

Details for the 2021 Medicare insurance conference are posted on the Association's website. To learn more go to www.medicaresupp.org/2021 or call 818-597-3205.

The American Association for Medicare Supplement Insurance is an advocacy and informational organization. The national Medigap organization also hosts the nation's leading Find A Local Medicare Insurance Agent directory, conducts and publishes studies and supports insurance professionals.
Days after a report detailed the failings of the city and its water and energy utilities during Februarys winter storm, CPS Energy officials said Monday theyve started carrying out some of the authors recommendations.

CPS chief executive Paula Gold-Williams said the utility is working on a tighter network of communication with the city and the San Antonio Water System to better coordinate in an emergency.

The 46-page report issued last week by the Committee on Emergency Preparedness, a seven-member panel appointed by Mayor Ron Nirenberg in March, found a lack of communication between city agencies worsened conditions for San Antonians during the storm.

The report placed much of the blame for the prolonged blackouts that crippled much of Texas on state lawmakers and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the states predominant power grid operator.

On ExpressNews.com: 'Cascading disaster': Report details city and utilities' response, failings during February freeze

Gold-Williams said one of the reports main recommendations  that ERCOT should connect to electric grids east of west of Texas, which serve the rest of the United States  may be a good idea, but wouldnt be a cure-all.

Other grids could provide power to Texas in emergencies, though Texas power marketplace would then be subject to greater federal regulation.

Also, states next to Texas but outside the ERCOT grid  such as Oklahoma and Louisiana  likewise dealt with widespread power outages during the storm.

Beyond interconnection, Gold-Williams said lawmakers should also examine the structure of the ERCOT market.

For more than 20 years, Texas main power grid has provided cheaper power on average than grid operators outside the state. But Gold-Williams said the states so-called energy-only system  in which power plants are paid only for the energy they sell on the market, rather than for the energy they generate  has not provided adequate incentives for Texas utilities to build new power plants.

There isnt a great system to (encourage) adding capacity, Gold-Williams said. You havent seen a lot of what we call base-load generation coming on the grid.

Nirenberg, however, cautioned against placing too much hope in state lawmakers changing how the states electric market operates.

Nirenberg, one of CPS five trustees, called on the utility to focus on local problems, such as doing more to its power plants from periods of freezing weather and improving coordination with SAWS and the city during emergencies.

It would be mistake for us to focus on the things that we cant control, he said. Most of the (recommendations) in the report are well within our control.

On ExpressNews.com: 'Complaints' against CPS Energy's chief executive led to resignations of utility's top attorneys

One local fix: CPS began redefining which of its circuits it considers critical, Gold-Williams said.

CPS distributes power through a network of about 700 circuits in its service area. Several thousand households and businesses are located in any one circuit area.

Throughout San Antonio, about two-thirds of those circuits are considered uninterruptible, meaning CPS has to keep power flowing to them even when the utility to has to conduct rolling blackouts. These areas are home to hospitals, public safety facilities and other operations deemed critical during an emergency.

Gold-Williams said Monday that some of those circuits will lose their designation, freeing up more circuits that CPS can cut power off to during future emergencies. That would allow CPS to spread out outages more evenly during a crisis.

We got to a point where we could not rotate (outages during the winter storm) because the demands were so high and we didnt have enough interruptible circuits, she said.

Gold-Williams also said CPS will alter its financial strategy for buying and storing natural gas. The utility faces roughly $700 million in charges from natural gas suppliers for gas it bought during the winter storm.

While demand for gas exploded during the deep freeze, the supply available to utilities, such as CPS, was constricted by frozen gas facilities and pipelines. As a result, natural gas prices rose astronomically the week of Feb. 15.

At some points, CPS paid as much as $400 per unit of gas, up from around $3 per unit before the storm.

CPS officials have held that no amount of hedging  financial strategies businesses use to shield against price swings of a commodity such as natural gas  could have protected the utility from such massive price increases.

Over the long-term, it would be very hard to hedge against a 15,000 percent to 16,000 percent pricing spike, Gold-Williams. But we do believe we could increase and improve some of the things that were doing.

Adding more natural-gas storage facilities  to save fuel for emergencies  is an option, too, Gold-Williams said.

Theres a question of when the cost to fortify San Antonios power system exceeds the potential risk. Trustee Ed Kelley has warned against spending too much to prepare for conditions CPS customers may not experience again for decades.

A Texas energy system that pays utilities for increased power-generation capacity rather than for energy sold would mean higher monthly bills for ratepayers. And investing in new gas storage would come at a price, too, Gold-Williams said.

Nirenberg, however, said the utility shouldnt focus solely on the bottom line.

There are scores of people across Texas whose family members arent with them anymore ... Theyre not counted in return on investment with regard to emergency preparation expenditures, he said. I would hate to just fall on the bottom line of dollars and cents return, because it has cost us real lives in Texas.

diego.mendoza-moyers@express-news.net
The first phase of a long-awaited development spearheaded by state Rep. Barbara Gervin-Hawkins  which would be among the largest projects on the East Side, if built out  is finally starting construction.

A new developer is involved and financing has been lined up for the initial stage of the development known as Echo East: 192 apartments off of Spriggsdale Boulevard near the AT&T Center reserved for residents earning up to 60 percent of the area median income.

Im excited, Im honored, Im pleased, Gervin-Hawkins said at a ground-breaking ceremony Monday for the Villas at Echo East. I am so glad its a reality.

The $43 million complex will be developed by an affiliate of Atlantic Pacific Companies, a real estate company with offices in Texas, Florida, Georgia and California. It is expected to be completed in fall 2022.

The apartments will receive a full property tax exemption and about $18.2 million in tax-exempt bonds through arms of the San Antonio Housing Trust, which stepped in last winter to help move the project forward.

We are gathered here as a community with a lot of hope in our hearts, Pete Alanis, executive director of the Housing Trust, said at the ceremony.

On ExpressNews.com: Plans to convert former Handy Andy building to live-work lofts moving forward

Financing includes $750,000 from Bexar County, $425,000 from the George Gervin Youth Center, $2.55 million from the city of San Antonios Inner City Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone and about $18 million in tax credit equity from the state of Texas.

Local politicians praised Gervin-Hawkins for persisting with the project despite years of setbacks.

Been a battle

This has been a battle to redevelop this particular land, said Bexar County Precinct 4 Commissioner Tommy Calvert, who represents the area where the project is to be built.

The lower-priced apartments will be a step for residents saving toward a down payment for a home, he added.

Poor people and working class people are having a heck of a time in America right now and they're not getting a whole lot of help from a lot of politicians, Calvert said.

The income level to qualify as a tenant for the first 192 units is up to $31,140 annually for one person, $35,580 for a couple and $40,020 for a family of three, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The maximum rents permitted for the one-, two- and three-bedroom units at Villas at Echo East range from $834 to $1,156 a month, depending on unit size.

Gervin-Hawkins, D-San Antonio, and the George Gervin Youth Center, which was founded by her brother, the Spurs legend George Gervin, have long been working toward creation of a mixed-use development on about 20 acres near the AT&T Center.

The organization has been acquiring land in the area for more than two decades, Gervin-Hawkins said. Eventually, it envisions as many as 500 apartments, including affordable housing for seniors along with retail and a boutique hotel for teams playing at the arena.

We want to create more than just an apartment complex, she said. We want to create a village.

Earlier roadblocks

The development has hit roadblocks over the years, including financing problems and opposition from neighbors.

It started gaining traction in 2015, when the City Council approved a $150,000 grant to the youth center to assess the land and create a master plan.

The proposal has drawn support from East Side residents eager to see more jobs in the area, but others expressed concerns about increased traffic and property taxes. And some were concerned about what they said was a lack of information about plans.

Because of their worries, then-District 2 Councilman William Cruz Shaw in 2017 postponed a vote on whether the city would sell about 10 acres at 301 Spriggsdale Blvd. to the youth center.

The organization commissioned a study showing demand for housing and retail in the area but city staff questioned its reliability. Even so, council members in 2018 gave the green light to sell the property to Gervin Youth Center for $430,000 along with a $450,000 grant to pay for the property and closing costs.

On ExpressNews.com: Despite opposition, housing trust approves plans to redevelop East Side's Friedrich complex

The land was put in escrow until financing was hashed out. The youth center initially partnered with Michigan-based Foremost Development, but that arrangement did not move forward.

The $450,000 grant was set to expire in December 2019 and the state required the developer to have control of the site to secure tax credits, so an application to receive them was withdrawn. Council members then voted to amend the arrangement to call for affordable instead of market rate apartments, which was the original plan, and set a new timeline.

Future phase

Gervin Youth Center later started working with Gardner Capital, a private equity firm with a Dallas office, but that fell through as well. Then, last year, affiliates of the San Antonio Housing Trust agreed to partner with the organization.

Some neighbors would have preferred single-family homes to apartments and are still concerned about more traffic and higher property taxes, said Bertha Sevilla of the Coliseum Oaks neighborhood association.

Theyve talked to Gervin-Hawkins about fencing, dumpster locations and other issues. So far shes been working with us, Sevilla added. They hope the development will bring more jobs and businesses that will benefit the East Side but are waiting to see what that will look like.

We just have to wait and see how its all going to work, Sevilla said.

Gervin-Hawkins has said she wont invest in or profit from the project, which is located in her Texas House district and expected to ultimately cost upwards of $120 million.

The first 192 apartments will be built on the land the city approved selling to the youth center, and has been conveyed to the housing trust.

A second phase will be built on land owned by the youth center. A master plan is being devised for that stage, which will include 300 or more market rate apartments, as well as retail and the hotel, Gervin-Hawkins said.

Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff said he supports the mix of affordable and market rate units.

In my view, you want mixed income living together, he said. You dont want to stick the poor people over here and the rich people over there and the middle income somewhere else. You want them to live together to understand each other's problems.

madison.iszler@express-news.net
Attorney Michael M. Parker has been selected as the next bankruptcy judge for the San Antonio division of the Western District of Texas.

Parker, a partner at the law firm Norton Rose Fulbright, is slated to replace retiring Chief U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Ronald B. King on Nov. 2.

Parker, 57, still must undergo a background check before his selection receives final approval.

He did not respond to a request for comment Monday.

Parker was chosen by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. It couldnt immediately be determined if any women or people of color were among the candidates considered for the post. A court representative was unavailable Monday.

On ExpressNews.com: San Antonio lawyer gets court order against dad after campaign of harassment and extortion

U.S. bankruptcy judges are appointed to 14-year terms and earn 92 percent of a U.S. District judges salary, or about $201,000.

Parker has been with Norton Rose Fulbright since 1995 after completing a two-year bankruptcy clerkship with the San Antonio court where he is expected to preside.

He has worked as lead or co-counsel representing debtors, creditors and trustees throughout Texas and elsewhere. Hes also represented buyers of assets in large Chapter 11 reorganization cases.

Parkers notable clients have included Palmaz Scientific Inc., a San Antonio company that set out to develop the next generation of arterial stents. Its efforts flopped and it landed in bankruptcy despite raising $40 million from investors.

He also represented a party in the bankrupt partnership behind a 500-acre real estate development, which included a water park and resort, near Corpus Christi.

A biography on Norton Rose Fulbrights website says Parker had served as a briefing attorney for King. Parker also was a law clerk for U.S. Sen. John Cornyn and U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett when each was an associate justice of the Texas Supreme Court.

Parker has four degrees, including a masters in engineering, a masters in business administration and a law degree from the University of Texas.

SA Inc.: Get the best of business news sent directly to your inbox

According to the website of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law, bankruptcy judges are appointed by a majority vote of the circuit court judges in their jurisdiction. Nominees are recommended by a judicial council, a group of appeals and district court judges thats chaired by the circuits chief judge.

King has been a bankruptcy judge since 1988 and became chief judge in 2006. Judge Craig Gargotta is the only other judge on the San Antonio bankruptcy bench.

Bankruptcy filings in the San Antonio division last year fell to their lowest level since at least 2007, likely due to supplemental and extended unemployment payments that have helped individuals during the pandemic. There were 2,091 bankruptcy filings in the San Antonio division last year, a 31 percent drop from the 3,038 bankruptcies in 2019.

This years filings are on pace to be lower than last years. However, filings could easily pick up now that those payments have expired and the possible end to moratoriums on foreclosures and evictions. The moratoriums, which were set to expire Wednesday, have been extended until July 31.

pdanner@express-news.net
For many San Antonians, the old ButterKrust billboard off San Pedro and West Hildebrand really was the greatest thing since sliced bread.

The former sign is best remembered for its giant rotating wheel of bread slices that fell from a fresh loaf. The very mention of it still takes many back to their grade school tours of the former ButterKrust plant on Broadway, where the smell of fresh-baked bread ended with a buttery slice and some gingham-patterned pencils and other souvenirs.

Today that sign is just another basic billboard. But just as the ButterKrust brand lives on, so, too, do the memories of its most beloved advertisement, a San Antonio fixture for more than 40 years.

So many people saw it and just enjoyed it. It was just iconic, said retired ButterKrust bakery president Joe Richter, whose great-grandparents William and Emma Richter started Richters Bakery in 1882 and bought the ButterKrust brand name in 1912.

Richter worked at ButterKrust for 43 years, the latter half of that with Georgia-based Flowers Foods, which acquired Richters and ButterKrust in 1994.

On ExpressNews.com: This 1894 photo shows St. Mary's University and end of horse and buggy trail. A look at how it's grown and what's there now

The San Pedro sign spun on until 1998, after Flowers Foods moved bread-making operations to the Northeast Side and closed the Broadway plant in 1997.

Richter believes the San Pedro ButterKrust sign first went up in the mid-1950s. Clear Channel Outdoor, which owns the now wheel-less San Pedro sign, has records for it that date back to 1956.

It brings back good old memories, said David Brown, who spent more than 50 years with ButterKrust, primarily in sales, before retiring in 2014. I see a lot of things on Facebook even, comments and pictures of the sign still. And every time, I will contribute something to the conversation.

Kin Man Hui /Staff photographer

While most remember the sign on San Pedro, there were in fact two animated ButterKrust signs in San Antonio with forever-falling slices. The other was at North St. Marys Street and Interstate 35.

Clear Channel has no record of the St. Marys sign. Brown believes it came down in the mid to late 1980s with I-35s expansion.

On ExpressNews.com: 'I would pay any amount': San Antonio man offers $20,000 reward for missing dog

That may well explain why most San Antonians remember the San Pedro billboard.

Brown recalled that the image on the San Pedro signs wheel mechanism would get spruced up to reflect changes in ButterKrust slogans and packaging, such as when it switched from wax paper to polyethylene bags.

Richter said the billboard was so beloved it even survived a city ordinance that prohibits animated billboards, thanks to a grandfather clause. Anybody that had a vote in that amendment of that clause would go for it, because it was just a part of San Antonio, Richter said.

ButterKrust cooked up other roadside marketing. As far back as the 1930s, ButterKrust gave schools free Safety Sally signs, which featured a life-size girl holding a loaf of bread labeled SLOW 20 MPH to remind drivers to ease off the gas in school zones. Brown believes the Safety Sally signs were discontinued in the 1970s.

On ExpressNews.com: San Antonio's historic public swimming pools reopen just in time for summer fun

As for those beloved bakery tours on Broadway, Richter said those started in 1941 soon after the plant opened, when a San Antonio nun rang up his uncle for a free tour with her 15 students.

The next day every nun and school was calling, Richter said, noting the tours hosted all sorts of schools and became so popular ButterKrust chartered buses for them. The free tours ended in 1993.

Institute of Texan Cultures

The tour brings up memories of the sign, Brown said, and the sign brings up memories of the tour.

After the ButterKrust sign came down in 1998, Minute Maid took over its rotating wheel feature with a carton pouring never-ending orange juice. Then in 2004, beer distributor BudCo replaced the OJ with a spinning taxi cab wheel as a public service announcement against drunk driving. Its believed the signs spinning wheel mechanism was removed for good in 2007.

But the sign did get a recent second lease on life. ButterKrusts 2020 Fiesta medal features both a spinning wheel of bread slices and an image of Safety Sally. The $10 medal is available at the Fiesta Store, 2611 Broadway, while supplies last.

As if a beloved icon couldnt be closer to heart.

rguzman@express-news.net | Twitter: @reneguz
For the past few Saturdays, teens from the Bexar County juvenile probation program have received hands-on culinary experience through the Recipe for Life course.

Inside of the Anne Marie Catering building, Chef Milas Williams offered ingredients for success. He stood on stage before the eight teens  who sat two to a table, each draped with blue cloth. Williams wore a white chefs coat, jeans and a gray baseball cap with the word skills, gifted to him by the executive chef of the Anaheim Mighty Ducks hockey team.

Im not here to make you a chef, Williams said to the teens, who attended the course as part of a community service commitment. Im here to give you options.

The class offers a different perspective of life. Williams, a former gang member, was 19 when he was arrested for aggravated robbery. He served 15 of a 25-year sentence in a Texas penitentiary. Five years into his sentence, a culinary class became his salvation.

Through his nonprofit World LOLEI, Williams has outreach initiatives that include an annual junior chef competition, a yearly Thanksgiving dinner for youth and financially assisting families in need of resources. LOLEI stands for Loyalty Over Liberty Equals Integrity.

Now, he has partnered with the Bexar County Juvenile Probation division for the four-week course. A graduation ceremony is set for July 17 at the sixth annual Community Junior Chef Competition at the Kitchen Campus, 3014 Rivas St. The free event will take place from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

In 2014, Williams founded the nonprofit with Athena Williams and his brother Detrick Williams, one of the first-day speakers at the course. The class falls under the nonprofits elite intervention program that helps teens avoid the pitfalls that plagued the chef in the past.

Robin Jerstad, San Antonio Express-News

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Williams said the idea for the course came to him spontaneously while sitting in his doctors office. He contacted Julie Diaz at the juvenile probation department, and he said it was a go within 15 minutes. Two and and a half weeks later, a schedule was set up. The course was scheduled to kick off last year, but it was put on hold because of the pandemic.

My goal and vision would be that this class would possibly be the endgame, Williams said, the class that the judge would recommend a juvenile go through before the decision to go away to prison is an option.

Williams was joined in a recent class by executive pastry chef Quila Polk and executive chef Kim Van Winkle, both part of his nonprofits staff.

He played a 15-minute video that chronicled his journey from the gang life to incarceration to preparing culinary cuisine in top-tier restaurants. The clips included one of his mentors, executive chef Johnny Hernandez, and brother Charles Sattiewhite, who said they left the days of gang banging behind to create opportunities for youngsters.

Weve got to be the bow in their life, Sattiewhite said. Were going to stretch them, and then when were done, let them go and hopefully point them in the right direction. That way, theyll know what theyre getting out of life.

Williams told the students their assigned book was their Bible. The black and white primer is the same one he studied when he took a culinary class in prison.

Then it was time for review. The students wrote down rules Williams stressed, such as the French phrase mise en place, or put everything in place, and preventing cross-contamination in the kitchen. When he asked what a mallet was used for, a young girl explained its purpose. Williams was ecstatic.

Yall clap for your queen, he said. Were brothers and sisters in here; were kings and queens.

Williams kept the pace light, weaving in stories of his past through the culinary curriculum.

When a student nodded off repeatedly, the chef said, in the name of Jesus, to get the teens attention. After suggesting the teen wake up by walking around the room, Williams talked proudly about a chefs uniform. For their purposes, the teens could wear black or checkered pants, a white or black shirt and black socks and black shoes  all proper attire for the undergarment of a chef.

Jill Mata, chief juvenile probation officer for Bexar County, said the course is one of several initiatives in the departments enrichment services program. Children from ages 10 to 16 are referred to the department, and some are placed under some supervision. Mata said the hope is that the culinary arts program can lead to some career opportunities for the young people. Mata said other courses include art classes, a Gemini Ink writing course and CHAPS (Children and Horses Always Produce Success).

Over the decades, research tells us that children do best when they see themselves in positive circumstances, Mata said. Hopefully, these experiences create a spark of interest that can lead to a passion and a way of seeing their future in a positive light.

On the second Saturday, the class convened in a classroom at the catering building near the San Antonio International Airport. Only three of the original eight class members were in attendance. Five new students joined the class at two large, round tables spaced three feet apart to follow COVID safety protocols. Williams thought of rapper Jay-Zs song, Public Service Announcement, and the lyric, allow me to reintroduce myself.

Given a second chance, Williams said hed allow the five original students to come back and finish in time for the four-week graduation.

He went over the first class exercises with the new students and the refrain that they had to be the executives of their lives.

Polk and Van Winkle helped Williams talk about dry, moist and combination cooking methods. They explained different cuts of meats for cows, pigs, lamb and fish. The trio emphasized the internal temperature of each meat, the dangers of not cooking meat properly, and food-borne illnesses related to each meat.

On ExpressNews.com: East Side community group helps give Wagner High basketball team opportunity to play for college coaches

When the chef asked what they learned, one student said he could be a leader instead of being a follower.

That right there touched me, Williams said.

The chef said some of the students fought back emotions when he said while he was incarcerated, he held onto a song or word that got him through challenging, hard times. The music embedded in his heart was an album by rapper DMX, titled Its Dark and Hell is Hot.

One of the lyrics states, A lot of people I let ride because it wasnt in my hands. A lot of people I let slide because it wasnt in my plans.

He urged the teens to write a song or word, read it to themselves one last time and then tear it up.

Make room in your life recipe and find a new song, a new word to carry you on, Williams said. Now, its time for a new success.

vtdavis@express-news.net
JERUSALEM (AP)  Thousands of Palestinians have taken to the streets in recent days to protest against President Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority, whose security forces and supporters have violently dispersed them.

The demonstrations were sparked by the death of an outspoken critic of the PA in security forces' custody last week, but the grievances run much deeper. Abbas' popularity plunged after he called off the first elections in 15 years in April and was sidelined by the Gaza war in May. The PA has long been seen as rife with corruption and intolerant of dissent.

The Palestinian Authority is one of the last manifestations of the peace process, which has been dormant for more than a decade, and is seen by Israel, the United States and the European Union as a key partner in promoting stability.

Here's a look at the PA and the protests against it.

___

A STATE IN WAITING

The PA was established in the 1990s through interim peace agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, which still represents the cause internationally. It was seen as a state-in-waiting and was granted limited autonomy in parts of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Israel and the PLO held several rounds of peace talks throughout the 1990s and 2000s. The Palestinians, negotiating from a position of weakness, sought an independent state in east Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, territories Israel seized in the 1967 war. They were never able to reach an agreement, and there have been no substantive talks since 2009.

The Islamic militant group Hamas seized power in Gaza in 2007, a year after winning an landslide victory in Palestinian elections. That confined Abbas' authority to parts of the West Bank. Several attempts at Palestinian reconciliation over the years have failed.

While the PA has ministries, security forces and the trappings of a state, its authority is limited to major population centers that amount to around 40% of the West Bank. Israel has overarching authority and controls access to the PA-run territories, which Palestinians routinely compare to the Black-ruled Bantustans established by apartheid South Africa.

___

GROWING AUTHORITARIANISM

The increasingly authoritarian PA is dominated by Abbas' secular Fatah party, which is led by a small circle of men in their 60s and 70s. The 85-year-old Abbas, whose four-year presidential term expired in 2009, leads the PA, the PLO and Fatah.

The PA leadership, which enjoys special privileges for cooperating with Israel, is widely seen by the Palestinians as corrupt and self-serving. Its policy of coordinating security with Israel to go after Hamas and other mutual foes is extremely unpopular. Protesters at the Al-Aqsa mosque on Friday accused the PA of being collaborators, a charge that amounts to treason.

Last week, security forces raided a home in the occupied West Bank to arrest Nizar Banat, who had repeatedly criticized the PA in online posts. His family says they beat him with batons before dragging him away. The PA says it has launched an investigation into his death, which ignited the latest protests.

Banat was a candidate in the parliamentary elections that Abbas called off in April when it looked like his fractured Fatah would suffer an embarrassing defeat to Hamas. During the Gaza war that erupted shortly thereafter, Hamas was widely seen as fighting for Palestinian rights and defending Jerusalem while the PA did nothing.

A poll taken after the war found a dramatic rise in support for Hamas, with more than half of respondents saying it should lead the Palestinian movement.

___

STAYING POWER

Despite his unpopularity, Abbas can count on the support of powerful friends, with Israel, the U.S. and Western donors deeply invested in the PA's survival. The PA also pays the salaries of tens of thousands of Palestinian civil servants who would otherwise struggle to find work.

By administering major population centers, the PA reduces the financial and security burden of Israel's 54-year military occupation of the West Bank. It also helps preserve the idea of an eventual two-state solution, even as Israel expands Jewish settlements and consolidates its control over the West Bank and east Jerusalem.

The EU has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the PA over the years, and the U.S. and other nations have trained and equipped its security forces. The Biden administration has said it hopes to strengthen the PA and work with it to rebuild Gaza  where it has no power.

Israel, the U.S. and the EU all prefer the unelected PA to Hamas  which they consider a terrorist group  or to the chaos that could ensue from the PA's collapse. They are committed to working with the PA to manage the conflict and reduce tensions until some future time when the peace process can be revived.

But after weeks of unrest in Jerusalem, a war in Gaza and now street violence in the West Bank, that approach seems increasingly fraught.
The mother of slain Trinity University cheerleader Cayley Mandadi has sued the school, alleging that it did not take the necessary steps to ensure her safety against her on-again, off-again boyfriend  who is accused of killing her in a jealous rage.

The lawsuit was filed Monday in Bexar County District Court on behalf of Mandadis mother, Alison Steele. It also names her daughters estranged boyfriend, Mark Howerton, as a defendant. The suit alleges Howerton sexually and physically assaulted the 19-year-old League City native and was ultimately responsible for her death.

According to the lawsuit, Trinity employees, its administration and on-campus police were aware of Mandadis volatile behavior during their relationship. It claims Howerton threatened to smash Cayley Mandadis face and/or commit significant bodily harm, but the university did not take action in the weeks before her death.

On ExpressNews.com: Records give timeline of Cayley Mandadi's death and what led the Texas Rangers to her alleged killer

A spokeswoman for Trinity University declined to comment on the lawsuits allegations, citing the ongoing litigation. John Hunter, Howertons attorney in the ongoing criminal proceedings, did not respond to a phone call Tuesday afternoon.

Howerton, 25, is accused of raping and beating Mandadi in a jealous rage on Oct. 29, 2017, after they attended a music festival in San Antonio. According to an arrest affidavit, the couple left the event and headed to Houston after a fight over Mandadis ex-boyfriend.

On the way to Houston, Howerton told police, the two had rough sex in his car before he took her to a Luling hospital because she had stopped breathing, the affidavit said. Luling is about an hour northeast of San Antonio.

When she arrived at the hospital, Mandadi was covered from head to toe with red marks, bruises and scratches, according to the arrest affidavit. Both of her eyelids were swollen and bruised, the affidavit said.

The only areas of (Mandadi) with no evidence of injury were her back and the back of her legs, the affidavit said.

She died two days later from her injuries. An autopsy revealed Mandadi had died from blunt force trauma to her face and head.

Howerton was arrested on suspicion of murder, sexual assault and attempted kidnapping.

Josie Norris /Staff Photographer

The case against him ended in a mistrial in December 2019 after his lawyers cast doubt on the official cause of death. Witnesses for the defense testified that it was possible she died from a fall after taking MDMA, a drug also known as ecstasy or molly. According the arrest affidavit, both Howerton and Mandadi took MDMA while attending the music festival.

Afterward, Bexar County District Attorney Joe Gonzales said he was disappointed in the outcome and would retry the case.

The case remains open, and prosecutors indicated recently they plan to move forward.

Steeles lawsuit also alleges that Trinitys refusal to respond to multiple reports of stalking, abuse, intimidation, domestic violence and gender-based discrimination resulted in her death. It states that Mandadis death could have been prevented had Trinity intervened as it should have done.

The university ignored its own policies to investigate and respond to potential dating violence and stalking incidents, the lawsuit says.

The court documents also highlight a Sept. 24, 2017, incident in which the school allegedly made Mandadi pay for damage Howerton caused to her dorm room during a fit of anger.

Trinity University police were called to Mandadis dorm room after her suitemates reported hearing bangs and noises coming from Mandadis room. When police arrived, they found Howerton alone and the room in disarray, the Express-News reported. A sliding door had been cracked, clothing and other possessions had been thrown off of the fifth-story balcony and soda was poured on her bed, totaling more than $1,600 worth of damage, records show.

After that incident, Howerton was instructed to remain off campus, but he was seen on Trinity surveillance footage going to Mandadis dorm at least six more times in the month leading up to her death, records said.

The lawsuit is seeking monetary relief in excess of $1 million against Trinity University and Howerton.

Nothing can replace the loss of Ms. Steeles only child, but monetary compensation can be used to hold the Defendants accountable and to prevent such intentional, grievous, negligent, and callous conduct from occurring in the future, the lawsuit said.

Staff Writer Emilie Eaton contributed to this report.

taylor.pettaway@express-news.net
Courtesy Bexar County District Attorney's Office

A Kerrville man was sentenced to 20 years in prison in a deadly shooting last year at a West Side parking lot.

Jacob Riley Embrey, 25, pleaded guilty in May in the 226th District Court to shooting Daniel Ramirez, 33, according to the Bexar County District Attorneys Office.
A judge sentenced a man to 40 years in prison Tuesday for causing the death of 8-month-old King Jay Davila, more than two years after police found the babys body wrapped in a blanket and buried in a backpack in a Northeast Side field.

Under an agreement with prosecutors, Christopher Davila, 37, pleaded no contest to a charge of injury to a child resulting in death, a first-degree felony. He faced up to 99 years in prison.

The sentence came more than two years after Davila, who was engaged to the boys mother, called police on Jan. 4, 2019, to report that his car had been stolen from a West Side convenience store with his infant son inside.

Police were immediately suspicious of Davilas report. A few days later, on Jan. 10, Davila was arrested and revealed where King Jays body had been buried.

Davilas mother, Beatrice Sampayo, 67, and his cousin, Angie Torres, 48, also were arrested, accused of tampering with evidence for allegedly trying to cover up Kings death. Both are awaiting trial, Torres in jail and Sampayo free on bond.

/Courtesy the Davila family

A grand jury indicted Davila with injury to a child, child endangerment and tampering with evidence, along with two other unrelated charges.

Davila later described the boys death as an accident.

On ExpressNews.com: Stunned to learn of boys death, San Antonio man claims King Jay is his son

While he was caring for King Jay, he had smoked some marijuana, he wrote in a letter to the Express-News in 2019. The baby was unbuckled in a car seat on the edge of a bed and hit his head when he accidentally fell, Davila wrote.

King Jay was unresponsive but Davila panicked and didnt call 911 or seek medical care for him, he wrote.

Police hinted they didnt believe Davilas later account, either. But throughout the ordeal, King Jays mother, Jasmine Gonzales, stood by her fiance, at one point testifying on his behalf in an effort to reduce his bond.

During testimony at a bail hearing for Davila, she described him as a good man who worked hard as a forklift operator to support his four children from previous relationships. At the time, she was pregnant with his fifth child.

Hes not the same person that he was before, Gonzales said, referring to Davilas past affiliation with Tango Orejon, a San Antonio-based prison gang.

She later admitted that King Jay was not Davilas son.

Davilas no contest plea means he neither admitted nor disputed the charge, but recognized that there was enough evidence to find him guilty.

Throughout the hearing Tuesday, which took place on Zoom, Davila appeared emotionless, answering the judge by saying Yes, sir or No, sir.

Judge Kevin OConnell of the 227th District Court found Davila guilty and took his other pending criminal charges into consideration in sentencing him to prison, plus a $1,500 fine.

Davila will be eligible for parole in 20 years.

OConnell also made an affirmative finding of family violence. That means Davila, if released from prison, will not be able to own, possess or purchase a firearm. It also could be used to enhance the sentencing for any future offense involving family violence.

King Jays death is a tragedy made even worse by Christopher Davilas cowardice in attempting to conceal it and avoid responsibility, District Attorney Joe Gonzales said in a statement Tuesday.

This plea does not bring back a precious life lost, but it does hold Christopher Davila accountable for this horrible crime.

eeaton@express-news.net
When it comes to immigration, Gov. Greg Abbott brings a false heat, promising a border wall that will never truly be built and making unfounded allegations of child abuse outside a migrant childrens shelter at the Freeman Coliseum.

When it came to reforming the electric grid this session, following Februarys deadly freeze and widespread outages, Abbott left Texans out in the cold, especially when he claimed, Everything that needed to be done was done to fix the power grid in Texas.

Saying something doesnt make it so. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas is struggling to keep the lights on and AC blowing this summer, and immigration remains a federal issue.

While Abbotts critics have, rightfully, scorched him on these two fronts  one is a failure to act, and the other is acting to fail, and both lead to harm  a number of his vetoes also deserve the publics attention and scorn.

Most of this attention has been showered on his defunding of the Legislature in advance of the July 8 special session. As we have noted, this is all about leverage as Abbott pushes to limit voting access in Texas. Lawmakers would be wise to not bend the knee to a governor who acts like a king.

On ExpressNews.com: Editorial: Abbott's veto his biggest tantrum yet

But other vetoes strike us as heartless, inhumane and arbitrary. Consider Abbotts decision to veto SB 1109, known as the Christine Blubaugh Act. This was in honor of a 16-year-old girl in Grand Prairie, murdered by an ex-boyfriend in 2000.

The bill would have required Texas students to learn about the signs and prevalence of domestic and dating violence, how to report abuse and also raised awareness about resources. But Abbott shot this down because it fails to recognize the rights of parents to opt out of such education. One problem is, some parents commit abuse, too. They can commit domestic violence against one another, or their children. Another is its difficult for adults to recognize warning signs of abuse, so it would help to educate children. Its a galling veto.

So is his decision to veto SB 474, the Safe Outdoor Dogs Act. It would have made chaining up dogs outside and leaving them without water, shade and shelter illegal. Abbott called it micromanaging.

We would call it humane. Its illegal to tether a dog with any kind of chain outside in San Antonio, thanks to a 2017 ordinance, and a tethered dog must have adequate shelter, shade and space to roam.

Abbott often complains about patchwork regulations, and this was an opportunity to establish a statewide baseline for the humane treatment of dogs.

What these bills have in common is an attempt by state lawmakers to protect the unprotected. Animals rely on people for their well-being, and children are empowered with knowledge about how to identify, report and not repeat domestic violence. That Abbott couldnt see this is as disturbing as it is unsurprising.

Abbott also vetoed two criminal justice bills that would have brought some welcome change on the edges of reform. House Bill 686 would have opened the door for earlier parole for those convicted of committing certain crimes when they were younger than 18. The point was for parole boards to consider the inmates age and mental state at the time. Abbott said this would create confusion with existing statute. We say its the right intention and policy.

Abbott also vetoed Senate Bill 281, which would have banned using statements gained through hypnosis in criminal court. Yes, thats your governor, Texas. Clearly, he has other priorities.
A San Antonio developer is zeroing in on details for the first-ever project through a new Bexar County nonprofit, one that would see two historic buildings redeveloped to provide housing in rapidly redeveloping west downtown.

Weston Urbans project would be the first in partnership with the Bexar County Public Facility Corp., a nonprofit that was set up in January in part for the redevelopment, said David Marquez, the countys executive director of economic and community development.

Other reasons for its creation are to boost high-quality development along San Pedro Creek, which is in the midst of its own makeover; rehabilitation of historic buildings; and to provide workforce housing in the downtown area, Marquez told me.

With the county partnership, Weston Urban would be exempt from property taxes for the $80 million project for 75 years in exchange for building apartments for tenants at lower income levels. Part of the property is already tax-exempt.

I think this is a game-changer for the county, Commissioner Trish DeBerry said at a June 15 meeting of the Bexar County Commissioners Court, referring to the nonprofit of which shes a board member. I am super enthused about the opportunity that has presented itself. I look forward to other projects that will come to this court.

On ExpressNews.com: With San Pedro Creek's restoration underway, San Antonio developers are snapping up property around it

Weston Urban plans to retain the facades of the former Continental Hotel and Arana buildings, which sit on a block bounded by Commerce, Laredo, Calder and Dolorosa streets. The firm has indicated it intends to refurbish the buildings, Marquez said.

Its plans call for construction of 250 apartments with parking.

Half of the units would be rented at market rates. Another 100 would be reserved for tenants earning up to 80 percent of the area median income, or $41,550 for one person and $47,450 for a couple, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The remaining 25 apartments would be for tenants making up to 60 percent of area median income, or $31,140 for one person and $35,580 for a couple. Rents would not exceed 35 percent of an individual residents income, and the average rent-to-income ratio across all of the lower-priced apartments would not surpass 30 percent of tenants income.

Two historically significant houses at the site would be conveyed to the county by Weston Urban, according to a presentation to the corporation board.

Courtesy of Bexar County

One of those, the De La Garza House served as headquarters of the Texian Army during the Texas Revolution. It is believed to have been standing where it is for more than 200 years, placing it among downtown San Antonios oldest residential buildings. The other house is the O. Henry House Museum, which was built in 1855.

In March, Weston Urban proposed moving the De La Garza House 42 feet south and 4 feet east of its current location. The citys Historic and Design Review Commission gave initial approval to the plan but commissioners and preservationists expressed concern.

On ExpressNews.com: The real deal - historic house was Texian Army headquarters during the Texas Revolution. Should a developer be allowed to move it?

At the time it was unclear why the firm was proposing the short move, but Weston Urban is no longer planning to relocate it. Its unknown whether the O. Henry House Museum would be relocated; unlike the De La Garza House, it had been moved previously.

The details of Weston Urbans plans for redeveloping the hotel and Arana buildings have yet to be made public. Randy Smith, the firms president, had not responded to an inquiry by press time.

The financial details, though, are coming into clearer focus. Under the deal, the Public Facility Corporation would get $150,000 per year in rent, a structuring fee of $250,000 and 1 percent of the sales price each time the complex is sold. The nonprofit approved moving forward with negotiations for the deal, which will be taken up again later by the board for final approval.

The Continental Hotel was built in 1896 and renovated in 1984 to include offices and lab space for the Metropolitan Health District, which vacated the building in 2016. It has remained empty since, and previous efforts to sell and develop it have flopped.

The city put the building and its parking lot up for sale in fall 2019. Weston Urban was the only firm to bid on it and received approval from the City Council last summer to purchase the property for $4.7 million.

Until the deal closes, that part of the block is exempt from taxes because it is owned by the city. Weston Urban bought the portion that includes the Arana building and historic houses in 2019, according to deed records.

San Pedro Creeks overhaul, the University of Texas at San Antonios plans to expand its downtown campus and Weston Urbans other projects are sparking interest in the area from multiple developers and investors, who are snapping up land along the creek or near it.

Weve invested probably a couple hundred million dollars in San Pedro Creek and its right there on the creek, a really critical position, Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff said during the corporation meeting, referring to Weston Urbans plans for the Continental site. It enhances the investment weve made already.

The firm has amassed more than 20 acres in the area.

Weston Urbans holdings include the Weston Centre offices; Houston Street buildings occupied by co-working space Geekdom, retail businesses and investment firm Scaleworks; a building across from City Hall that it recently refurbished; and the Milam building, which is slated to be renovated.

Weston Urban finished the Frost Tower in 2019. It plans to construct a 32-story tower with 351 apartments and ground floor retail nearby, at 305 Soledad St.

madison.iszler@express-news.net
FAIRFIELD  The Board of Education is asking the state to remove the mask mandate in schools and implement a state remote learning academy next year.

The school board recently unanimously approved sending a letter to Gov. Ned Lamont, requesting these changes.

Given Connecticuts low rate of COVID transmission and increased rate of vaccination, we are asking for the state to align its guidance for schools with those put forth for the general public, the letter reads.

The letter goes on to say vaccinated adults are able to return to normal, including no longer having to wear masks. Children and teens are also able to go maskless for activities outside of school, regardless of whether or not they are vaccinated.

Max Reiss, a spokesman for the governors office, said on Monday that he wasnt aware of the school boards letter.

The crux of the letter focuses on removing the mask mandate, which has been a point of contention among Fairfield parents, sparking several comments at previous school board meetings.

The letter also asks the state to give local health departments clear guidance on what would prompt the reinstatement of mask wearing as a mitigation strategy.

Board members are also requesting the state use some of its federal COVID relief funding to implement a synchronous state-run Remote Learning Academy for medically vulnerable students modeled on any/all of this years successful local models.

Fairfield and many local districts have said they will not offer remote learning next year.

About 15 parents addressed the letter at last weeks school board meeting prior to its approval, applauding the board for writing it but saying it should go even further.

Most of the speakers reiterated the desire to end the mask mandate, saying its harming their childrens social and emotional development, as well as their ability to learn. They also questioned the efficacy of masks and challenged the requirement that mask wearing be contingent on vaccinations since the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has only given the vaccines emergency approval.

Several speakers also pointed to the dozens of states and religious schools that have already lifted mask mandates.

We need to go back to normal, one father said. Unmask our kids, remove social distancing guidelines and let our kids behave like humans.

Some speakers said there has been a rise of mental health issues among young people, but others were quick to caution tying that uptick with wearing masks.

Theres also a bigger picture here  theres that isolation and the fear of getting sick  there are many components to living through a global pandemic that have created this terrible increase in mental health issues we have seen, said board member Jessica Gerber.

Other speakers said there was still a need for remote learning for families with members who have compromised immune systems, with some pointing to the success their children had in Fairfields Remote Learning Academy this year.

Fairfield school officials have previously talked about a desire for regional remote learning programs run by the state, which they say would meet the need and take some of the burden off the local district to offer both in person and remote programs.

What I have seen from the state is very, very disappointing in how they plan to help the students who are or have family members who are medically compromised and vulnerable, Board Vice Chairman Nick Aysseh said. Whats come out of the state level so far is words to help them down the road and not right now.

Both residents and board members said it was important the two requests be considered separately.

At this time, (the state Department of Education) and (the Department of Public Health) continue to require universal masking in all indoor educational venues, Peter Yazbak, a spokesman for the state Department of Education, said Monday.

He said the two departments also dont anticipate the need to mandate districts to offer the remote learning option next year based on a public health need.

We continue to emphasize and reiterate that access to in-person learning opportunities is a priority aligned with our promise of equity and access for all, Yazbak said.

He added the department has been working with various stakeholders to develop more detailed guidance on using technology in education along with related considerations stemming from recent legislation passed this session.

Board Chairwoman Christine Vitale said she decided to draft the letter after hearing concerns from the public and other board members.

Our children have been responsible citizens and made sacrifices in the name of public health, the letter reads. It is now time for the state to turn its focus on both the physical and mental health needs of our students.
WASHINGTON (AP)  The House voted Tuesday to approve a bill that would remove from the Capitol a bust of Roger Taney, the U.S. chief justice best known for an infamous pro-slavery decision, as well as statues of Jefferson Davis and others who served in the Confederacy.

The bill passed by a vote of 285-120. Democrats were unanimous in their support for the bill and were joined by 67 Republicans. A similar bill last year passed the House but failed to gain traction in the Senate. Backers are hoping for a different outcome now that President Joe Biden is in the White House and Democrats control the Senate.

The vote comes against the backdrop of larger reckoning in the U.S. with racism, one thats prompted a reassessment of statues and other symbols that valorize those who upheld white supremacy. Protesters decrying racism last year targeted Confederate monuments in multiple cities, leading to many being taken down. But many others remain in places of honor, including at the U.S. Capitol.

Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., said the Confederate statues send a message to Black people that their lives are not valued because those being honored stood for the proposition that you were less than human.

Its personally an affront to me as a Black man to walk around and look at these figures and see them standing tall, looking out as if they were visionaries and they did something that was great. No, they did something that was very hurtful to humanity, Johnson said.

The Taney bust would be replaced with one of Thurgood Marshall, the first Black justice to serve on the nations highest court. The 2-foot-high marble bust of Taney is outside a room in the Capitol where the Supreme Court met from 1810 to 1860. It was in that room that Taney, the nations fifth chief justice, announced the Dred Scott decision, sometimes called the worst decision in the courts history.

The Supreme Court held that Scott, as a Black man, was not a citizen and therefore had no right to sue, and found that legislation restricting slavery in certain territories was unconstitutional.

Three other statues honoring white supremacists  including former U.S. Vice President John C. Calhoun of South Carolina  would also be immediately removed under the legislation. Longer-term, the architect of the Capitol would be instructed to identify any other statues depicting those who served in the Confederate States of America for removal from public display.

The statues would go back to the states that sent them. The statue of Davis, for example, would be returned to Mississippi and that of Alexander Hamilton Stephens would be returned to Georgia. Davis served as the Confederacys president and Stephens as its vice president.

Each state gets to submit two statues for display in the Capitol. When the donated statue arrives, it is placed in a location selected by the Joint Committee on the Library, a group of 10 lawmakers from both chambers that oversees works of fine art in the building.

Republicans note that some states are already working to replace some of about a dozen statues that would be potentially removed under the bill. North Carolina, for example, is replacing a statue of Charles Aycock, a former governor and white supremacist, with one of the Rev. Billy Graham. But the process is painfully slow.

Its Congresss responsiveness to the states request that actually delays the process, said Republican Rep. Rodney Davis of Illinois.

Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said he would vote for the bill, but made it a point to emphasize that all the statues being removed by this bill are statues of Democrats."

That prompted Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., to question whether Republicans were aware of the whole history of the civil rights movement." She said that when Black people fought to enter the Democratic Party, many Americans left to join the Republican Party.

Some Democratic lawmakers offered to work with Republicans on speeding up the approval process, but they want to forge ahead in the meantime. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, the Democratic chair of the House Administration Committee, said the Confederate statues honor traitors to their country. She denied that removing them would be erasing the nation's history.

On the contrary, we must never forget our nations shameful periods of slavery, segregation and racism, Lofgren said.

Now, that history belongs in a museum. You know, we need to remember our history, she said. It doesnt belong on a pedestal.

One statue already gone from the Capitol is that of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, which was removed from the National Statuary Hall Collection last year at the request of Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam. A state commission decided that Lee was not a fitting symbol for the state.

Just two weeks ago Congress approved a bill establishing Juneteenth as a new federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States, an unexpected breakthrough for supporters of the legislation. Democrats see a similar chance to address longstanding frustrations about the statues in the Capitol and are putting Republican lawmakers on the spot by calling a vote.

Last year, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said he supported continuing the practice of states replacing the statues on their own.

They can trade them out at any time ... a number of states are trading them out now, McConnell told reporters.

He also referred to the House legislation as nonsense that would airbrush the Capitol.

However, Republicans joined Democrats in the final weeks of Donald Trumps presidency to override his veto of a defense policy bill that allows for the renaming of military bases that honor Confederate leaders. Trump repeatedly emphasized his opposition to changing the names of the military bases.
(The Center Square)  Law enforcement officers have arrested 353 individuals attempting to enter the U.S. illegally with known sex-related criminal convictions so far this year, according to Border Patrol. Some were previously convicted of committing crimes against a minor.

This number is up from 156 criminal sex offenders apprehended in 2020, and 58 apprehended in 2019.

Convicted criminals are the most likely among those seeking to avoid capture by Border Patrol, Acting Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz told attendees at a recent State of the Border address in Del Rio, Texas.

More than 250,000 people have evaded capture so far this year, Ortiz said.

There isnt a day that goes by that I dont read a paper or a report from my agents that talks about criminal aliens, sexual offenders that theyve apprehended out there, Ortiz said.

Those folks arent getting released in these communities. Guess what happens to them? They go to jail. When they get out of jail, they go back to their country of origin.

However, many of the criminals who were previously deported return to enter the U.S. illegally, sometimes multiple times, according to Border Patrol data.

Among examples, three recent arrests in June were cited. On June 14, a child rapist from Peru was arrested by Border Patrol near the border town of Roma, Texas. He had already been deported in 2020 after serving over five years for felony rape of a child in Idaho.

On June 20, Mexican national Isidro Efrain Gallardo-Rangel was apprehended as part of a group of 24 who entered the U.S. illegally near another border town of Laredo. A registered sex offender with an extensive criminal history, he was previously convicted of indecency with a child in 2018 in Dallas.

On June 24, convicted sex offender and Mexican national Benito Gomez-Lopez was arrested by agents in the border town of Rio Grande City after having been arrested last May by the North Dakota Burleigh County Sheriffs Department and repatriated to Mexico last July.

The Del Rio Sector in Texas is the second busiest, after the Rio Grande Valley sector, chief Austin Skero said.

Since January, the sector has apprehended 144,000 people, he said. While the sector has experienced surges before, he said, Its never been this bad. Ill tell you that straight up, Ive never seen it this bad.

The Del Rio sector alone has seen a 1,400% increase in the number of sex offenders arrested by Border Patrol agents.

Since Gov. Greg Abbott initiated Operation Lone Star in March, and through June 3, DPS has made 1,489 criminal arrests.

State Troopers have been involved in 340 vehicle pursuits along the border and have encountered 630 vehicle bailouts, where those in the vehicle scatter into the brush to avoid capture.

Disaster declarations have been issued for 34 counties inundated with cross-border crime and illegal immigration.

Abbott and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey have asked other governors to send law enforcement to help apprehend criminals. So far, Republican governors from at least seven states have pledged to send law enforcement personnel or National Guard troops to Texas and Arizona.

Florida was the first to answer the call, and Gov. Ron DeSantis recently announced an additional 50 state personnel were being sent to Texas next Monday.
Arable farmers are looking at 'once-in-a-generation' decisions about the future direction of their businesses as they prepare for life without direct payments.

The reality of what cuts to Basic Payments will mean to profitability is focusing farmers' minds, particularly in the arable, mixed and lowland livestock sectors.

Reductions in payments will be implemented quite swiftly, with larger farmers facing the loss of two-thirds of their BPS by 2024.

An impact assessment carried out by Strutt & Parker suggests that for an average arable farmer, net farm profits could fall by as much as 54% by 2028.

This is even if profits from Environmental Land Management (ELM) payments are double those generated under existing agri-environment schemes, and assuming a 3% per annum rise in profits from farming and diversification.

Jonathan Armitage, head of farming at Strutt & Parker said: Some people are hoping that ELMs will allow them to make up for the loss of BPS.

"However, our calculations suggest that even if payments under ELMs were five times higher than those paid under the current Countryside Stewardship Scheme  which they wont be  arable farmers could still face a fall of up to 20% in net profits.

Even in the unlikely event that farmers were to secure similar levels of payments to BPS, the net profit from ELMs will be much lower than that generated by Basic Payments, due to the associated costs of carrying out environmental management work."

Against this backdrop, there has been a shift in public expectations, with farmers being told they must start operating with a greater environmental focus.

Mr Armitage added: "The reality is that many businesses do need to carry out a major reappraisal of their farming policy to prepare for the next chapter.

He said it was a critical time for farmers to evaluate their options, identify where there might be new opportunities and then turn their plans into action.

Despite the challenges, there will also be plenty of opportunities for the best operators to grow their businesses, he added.

But navigating the changes that lie ahead will require innovative thinking and a proactive approach.
The farming industry has been encouraged to do all it can to fight against the latest cybercrime trends that appear to be more common than ever before.

The current threat of cybercrime to the farming industry has never been more topical, the South West Cyber Resilience Centre (SWCRC) has warned farmers.

It follows the worlds largest meat processor JBS recently sustaining a devastating cyber-attack which cost the business close to 8 million.

And such attacks can happen to any size farm at any time if preventative steps are not taken, the SWCRC explained.

The National Cyber Security Centre CEO Lindy Cameron also delivered a stark warning that ransomware is the number one threat in the UK.

But there are concerns that the farming community may not recognise that they are a target for cyber criminals or know how to make their businesses more cyber secure.

The SWCRC is a police-led partnership which helps business owners and leaders across all sectors to understand the purpose of cyber safeguarding.

It is raising awareness that the common misconception that cybercrime only affects large, established businesses, is playing into the hands of cyber criminals.

Superintendent Mark Moore, director of Cyber Resilience Centre for South West, said: Its very easy to pinpoint which businesses are at risk of cyber threats by using the most basic level of intel.

If email, a telephone system, or a wi-fi connection is being used for example, then the answer is simply, yes it can happen," he added.

Today, the farming industry is experiencing a digitalisation boom, with a host of cutting-edge management tools, automated equipment featuring GPS tracking and innovative heat pump technologies operated through cloud-based systems.

A government report recently stated that UK sales of new farming equipment is 1.9 billion annually.

Superintendent Moore added that this presented 'plenty of great material for a hacker to work with'.

"All they need is to identify a vulnerability in the set-up or a lack of simple maintenance of such products to strike," he said.

While the ransomware attack on JBS demonstrates the extreme end of what can happen to a global operator, many victims of cybercrime are often local, small to medium-sized businesses that are often uninformed of connectivity pitfalls.

According to the Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2021, a successful violation costs more than 8,000 of damage on average to small businesses.

A ransomware attack is when a user or entire business can no longer access the system and files they need to run their business.

To get the access back, the attacker will often demand a ransom payment and if a business fails to pay up, the data will be stolen and/or deleted.

Figures from Action Frauds National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB) state almost 190 extortion threats were reported in the South West of England between 1 Jun 2020 and 1 Jun 2021, with losses of more than 353,000.

However, it is widely reported that a considerable number of breaches and threats go unreported due to a lack of knowledge in where and how to report the issue.

Superintendent Moore said the reality was that smaller-scale producers were 'unlikely to survive' any such attack.

"And for bigger operators with complex supply chains, the fallout and reputational damage will be an overwhelming situation to come back from.

However, there are straightforward measures for farm owners and decision makers to get basic cyber security in place," he said.

"The SWCRC is the ideal solution for the time-poor, those who are completely new to the concept, right through to people with good knowledge that want to improve their knowledge using simple yet effective tools.
A new app has launched for farmers and land managers who want to make or adjust their hedgerow management plans.

Designed for farmers, landowners and land managers, the free app enables users to find out where hedges are within their natural lifecycle.

Developed by Peoples Trust for Endangered Species (PTES), it also offers feedback on how they can be best managed to ensure continued health.

Despite historic losses, the UK still has 500,000km of hedgerow habitat, much of which is incredibly old and has survived centuries.

Healthy hedgerows are a significant asset to farmers, as they can provide forage for pollinators, offer crop protection, act as a stock barrier and also as livestock shelters.

The wildlife charity said it hoped the software would help farmers create a thriving network of healthy hedges across the UK countryside.

Megan Gimber, habitats project officer at PTES, explained that whatever condition a hedge was in, it could be brought back to good health.

Our new app pinpoints where it is in its lifecycle and the best management options to adopt to get the most benefit for the farm and its precious wildlife," she said.

"The quality and structure of hedgerows will deteriorate if theyre managed in the same way for long periods of time, and over time they will eventually be lost.

"The best way to prevent this is by managing according to their lifecycle, which may include more sensitive trimming, periods of non-intervention and, in time, rejuvenation.

The app is part of the new Close the Gap project, a year-long programme focused on achieving healthier hedgerows.

It is a partnership project with The Tree Council, Peoples Trust for Endangered Species, Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group and the University of Reading, among others.

Farmers interested in downloading the app for free can do so by visiting the Apple Store or Google Play and search for Healthy Hedgerows.
Clarkson's Farm will reportedly hit TV screens again for a second season following the huge success of the debut series.

Jeremy Clarkson's new farming series first aired on 11 June on Amazon Prime, and it has turned out to be one of the service's most popular programmes.

The show follows the former Top Gear presenter through his first year of farming as he contends with the day to day challenges on his 1,000-acre Oxfordshire farm.

Speaking to FarmingUK before the show first aired, Clarkson explained that he wanted to present British farming in a different light.

Now a source has told The Sun that a second series of the hugely popular show is a 'no brainer'.

Jeremy is Amazons golden boy and a new series is already in the pipeline," the source said to the newspaper.

Its rated five stars on Amazon and has a 9.3 rating on IMDB, which is practically unheard of.

It means Jeremys fellow farmers Kaleb, Cheerful Charlie and Gerald will all be in front of cameras on the farm again.

Earlier this month, Jeremy Clarkson said that he was taken aback by how difficult farming really was.

In my mind, you put seeds in the ground, weather happens, and food grows, but that is simply not true, it is a very, very complex business," he said.

I know of no profession that requires you to be so multi-abled. You have to understand soil, weather, and science.

"You have to be a mechanic, a midwife, an agronomist, and a water diviner. You also have to be a gambler."
2020 was a year marked by hardships and challenges, but the Fauquier community has proven resilient. The Fauquier Times is honored to serve as your community companion. To say thank you for your continued support, wed like to offer all our subscribers -- new or returning --

4 WEEKS FREE DIGITAL AND PRINT ACCESS.

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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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You must be over the moon being nominated alongside names like Anthony Hopkins, Chadwick Boseman and Mads Mikkelsen for the BAFTA?It feels like a dream to be nominated amongst my childhood heroes, Sir Anthony Hopkins and Mads Mikkelsen. It is a dream for any actor and honestly its shocking and unexpected too.I wasnt upset when I lost because being nominated itself was a big deal for me. I have my whole career ahead of me to get nominated multiple times. This is only the beginning of my journey.BAFTA was criticised last time for not being too open to diversity in the top categories. According to you, did that change this year? Whats your take on the controversy?I actually wasnt aware of that criticism. But Im glad that there are different actors from different ethnicities being nominated because it is important for people all over the world to know about one anothers cultures and stories. Whats a better way than casting actors from different ethnicities to actually represent their side of the world. Its a great way for people to get to know one another.What Your familys reaction about the BAFTA nominatiuon?My family has been over the moon since the trailer released. They have been glued to their phones ever since. They share all the articles and the interviews of mine with everybody on the family WhatsApp group. I feel both embarrassed and happy by their behaviour. They are truly proud, also relieved in a way,I guess.How did the news of the nomination reach you?It wasnt just one person who broke the news. My agents in the US called me up, as did my father. Friends in the media too sent in their messages. Fellow actors started calling in, offering their praise. Then, social media is the big thing today. Everything gets splashed there as soon as it happens. So that surprise factor no longer exists, as the news gets picked up at the speed of light.Global recognition like The BAFTA and the oscars has put you on the world map in a big way. The expectations from you have increased. Do you feel the pressure?More than the pressure, what I feel is the spike in excitementI want to continue doing good work and grow as an actor. I want to constantly keep learning new things and keep playing more and more diverse characters. Im just hoping that the recognition gives me more opportunities to work with the directors I want to and to create work that inspires me. I hope that this happens within India as well as globally.How did The White Tiger help you evolve as an actor?The White Tiger really made me realise that the more time I spend on understanding the character the better it is. Its like any other thing. Its the universal truth. I had the luxury of four months to understand Balrams role during which I went on this journey and I feel thats my biggest lesson. Also, working with director Ramin Bahrani was such a high because it was a unique experience. Ive never been directed like that before, given that much freedom to understand my character and to improvise. I also feel Ive become a better listener after working on that film. Apart from that, playing Balram really helped me empathise more with people and understand them better.You reportedly worked in a tea stall to get your character right?One thing Ramin told me is to not read Aravind Adigas The White Tiger and rely on the screenplay to get the job done. Of course, I skimmed through the book in order to understand the character better. Ramin advised me to arrive at my own truth about the character and thats why I asked one of my friends to take me to his native village in Jharkhand, where I did work for some time at a tea stall in order to understand theangst of someone like Balram.Ramin Bahrani is said to have searched for real actors to be cast in The White Tiger. How did you fitinto that scheme of things?That could be better answered by Ramin. I guess what really helped me in understanding Balram was thatI spent my formative years in Jamshedpur, which is closer to the region where Balram actually belonged to. So I had an understanding of those people and their culture. As Ramin mentioned in a lot of his interviews, he wanted to cast a lesser-known actor for the part. I guess both these reasons helped me get the part. Hes always worked with people who almost have had no history in acting and then the kind of performances he extracts out of those people, its unbelievable. You feel like you are watching a documentary.As an Indian actor, you mustve never imagined your OTT film to take the number one spotin 64 countries in just four weeks. What was your reaction to it?It was supposed to be a Netflix global film and it was supposed to release in many countries. But to see our film do so well across the globe is reassuring because it is such a universal story. People from all over the world connected to it. All our hearts are full of gratitude for all the records that it set.
Filmmaker Karan Johar has announced that he is making a new movie based on the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Karan revealed that the film will capture the real life events surrounding the ghastly incident and that it will be directed by Karan Singh Tyagi. As of now, these are the only details shared by the filmmaker about the untitled venture.

This film unravels the legendary courtroom battle that Sankaran Nair fought against the British Raj to uncover the truth about the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre. Sankaran Nair's bravery ignited the freedom struggle across the country and is a testament to the power of fighting for the truth. The film is inspired from real life events and adapted from the book 'The Case That Shook The Empire' written by Raghu Palat (great-grandson of Sankaran Nair) and his wife, Pushpa Palat, the producer said in a statement on social media.

In related news, Karans production house, Dharma Productions will also launch Sanjay and Maheep Kapoors daughter Shanaya Kapoor. The film is reportedly going to be directed by Shashank Khaitan. I'm extremely excited and looking forward to shooting the film. I have been doing several readings with my director, and have been having lots of discussions on my character brief and breakdown of the scenes," Shanaya Kapoor had told IANS recently.

Besides this, Karan is also producing Brahmastra which stars Ranbir Kapoor and Alia Bhatt in the lead roles and is directed by Ayan Mukerji.
TOKYO, June 29, 2021 - (JCN Newswire) - Singapore-based Princeton Digital Group (PDG), Asia's leading data center provider, today announced its plan to build one of the largest hyperscale facilities in Tokyo, Japan, with a total investment value of USD 1 Billion. Japan is the fifth market that the company has entered in since its formation 4 years ago. With this investment, PDG marks a major milestone in its plan to build a 600 megawatts (MW) portfolio across the region.The new campus at Saitama City will have close to 100 MW of critical IT capacity across two phases of 48.5 MW each. Saitama City is one of the major commercial centers of the Greater Tokyo area. Located 30 km north of central Tokyo, the PDG Saitama campus has a total land area of 33,047 m2. The facility is designed to serve leading hyperscalers in Japan, one of the most dynamic cloud markets in the world.PDG has already secured the land and power with construction to begin later this year. The facility will be built to the latest hyperscale design and standards, with unrivalled scalability, connectivity and reliability."The Asia Pacific region is set to be the largest data center market in the world, and this announcement underscores our vision to be the market leader in this region," said Rangu Salgame, Chairman and CEO of Princeton Digital Group. "Over the last four years, through our unique three-pronged strategy of acquisitions, carve-outs and greenfield development, we've built a strong portfolio of data centers across key Asian markets such as China, Singapore, Indonesia and India. PDG has become a partner of choice for hyperscalers across multiple countries. Our entry into Japan and, in particular, Tokyo demonstrates our continued ability to enter new markets that matter to our customers."Tokyo is the largest data center market in Asia outside of China and is still in the early stages of growth, particularly in terms of entry and expansion of global hyperscalers. According to Structure Research, Greater Tokyo's hyperscale colocation market is expected to reach USD1.6 billion by 2025, growing at a CAGR of 25.1% between 2021 and 2025."The Greater Tokyo market is projected to see accelerated demand from hyperscale data center deployments moving forward from what we believe is a convergence of several critical factors that include Japan's sizeable addressable market as the 3rd largest country in the world by GDP, the absence of a domestic hyperscale cloud platform that presents an ideal competitive landscape between both US and Chinese hyperscale cloud providers, as well as being a key connectivity aggregation and distribution hub for submarine cables landing from the US West Coast to access the rest of the Asia Pacific region", said Jabez Tan, Head of Research, Structure Research.About Princeton Digital GroupPrinceton Digital Group (PDG) is a leading investor, developer and operator of Internet infrastructure. Headquartered in Singapore with presence and operations in China, Singapore, India, Indonesia, and Japan, its portfolio of data centers power the expansion of hyperscalers and enterprises in the fastest-growing digital economies across Asia. For more information, visit www.princetondg.comMedia ContactsPrinceton Digital GroupGrace ChenPR@princetondg.comPRecious Communications for Princeton Digital GroupPDG@preciouscomms.comSource: Princeton Digital GroupCopyright 2021 JCN Newswire . All rights reserved.
VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / June 28, 2021 / EMPOWER CLINICS INC. (CSE:CBDT)(FRA:8EC)(OTC PINK:EPWCF) ("Empower" or the "Company") an integrated healthcare company - serving patients through medical centers, telemedicine platforms and a high complexity medical diagnostics laboratory processing thousands of COVID-19 specimens - is providing this bi-weekly update on the status of the management cease trade order granted by the British Columbia Securities Commission on May 3, 2021.

The MCTO was issued in connection with the delay by the Company in filing its annual financial statements, management's discussion and analysis and related officer certifications for the financial year ended December 31, 2020 (collectively, the "Required Filings") before the prescribed deadline of April 30, 2021.

The MCTO was granted pursuant to Empowers application made under National Policy 12-203 - Management Cease Trade Orders ("NP 12-203"). The Company requested and received an extension relating to the Required Filings for delays primarily due to the impact of COVID-19 on the audit and associated required travel, of the Company's recently acquired subsidiaries in both the US and Canada.

The Company's staff and accounting firm are working diligently with its auditors at MNP in response to recent and additional work requirements. The financial statements have been provided as required and await final authorizations by the auditors and the Company Audit Committee. The Company anticipates it will have the audit of the Required Filings completed, and the Required Filings filed, by June 30, 2021.

The Company is providing this status update in accordance with NP 12-203. The Company reports that: (i) there are no changes to the information contained in its default announcement on May 3, 2021, that would reasonably be expected to be material to an investor; (ii) the Company is satisfying and confirms that it intends to continue to satisfy the provisions of the alternative information guidelines set out under NP 12-203 and issue bi-weekly default status reports for so long as the delay in filing the Required Filings is continuing, which will be issued in the form of a news release; (iii) there has not been any other specified default by the Company under NP 12-203 and no such other default is anticipated; and (iv) there is no material information concerning the affairs of the Company that has not been generally disclosed.

The MCTO does not affect the ability of shareholders who are not insiders of the Company to trade their securities. However, the applicable Canadian securities regulatory authorities could determine, in their discretion, that it would be appropriate to issue a general cease trade order against the Company affecting all of the securities of the Company.

The Company also confirms that the B.C. Securities Commission indicates the filing of an MCTO related to Q1 2021 filings is not required.

This press release is available on the Empower Clinics Verified Forum on AGORACOM for shareholder discussion, questions and engagement with management https://agoracom.com/ir/EmpowerClinics

ABOUT EMPOWER:

Empower is an integrated healthcare company that provides body and mind wellness for patients through its clinics, with digital and telemedicine care, and world-class medical diagnostics laboratories. Supported by an experienced leadership team, Empower is aggressively growing its clinical and digital presence across North America. Our Health & Wellness and Diagnostics & Technology business units are positioned to positively impact the integrated health of our patients, while simultaneously providing long term value for our shareholders.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS:

Steven McAuley

Chief Executive Officer

CONTACTS:

Investors:

Steven McAuley

CEO

s.mcauley@empowerclinics.com

604-789-2146

Investors:

Tamara Mason

Business Development & Communications

t.mason@empowerclinics.com

416-671-5617

DISCLAIMER FOR FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This news release contains certain "forward-looking statements" or "forward-looking information" (collectively "forward looking statements") within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities laws. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, are forward-looking statements and are based on expectations, estimates and projections as at the date of this news release. Forward-looking statements can frequently be identified by words such as "plans", "continues", "expects", "projects", "intends", "believes", "anticipates", "estimates", "may", "will", "potential", "proposed" and other similar words, or information that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" occur. Forward-looking statements in this news release include, but are not limited to, statements regarding: the expected benefits to the Company and its shareholders as a result of the acquisition of Kai Medical Laboratory; the transaction terms; the expected number of clinics and patients following the closing; the future potential success of Kai Medical Laboratory, Sun Valley's franchise model; launch of new healthcare centers and the occurrence thereof; that the Company can bring healthcare to millions of Canadians; that new healthcare services can be added and that the Company will be positioned to be a market- leading service provider for complex patient requirements in 2020 and beyond. Such statements are only projections, are based on assumptions known to management at this time, and are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results, performance or developments to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements, including: that Kai Medical Laboratory will successfully win any US Government RFP; that the MedX Health pilot program will be successful; that Empower will place the MedX Health teledermatology product in health centers in North America; that the Company's products may not work as expected; that the Company may not be able to expand COVID-19 testing; that legislative changes may have an adverse effect on the Company's business and product development; that the Company may not be able to obtain adequate financing to pursue its business plan; that the Company will be able to commence and/or complete build-outs and tenants improvements for Canadian clinics or Kai Medical Laboratory expansion inn 2Q 2021; that general business, economic, competitive, political and social uncertainties; failure to obtain any necessary approvals in connection with the proposed transaction; and other factors beyond the Company's control. No assurance can be given that any of the events anticipated by the forward-looking statements will occur or, if they do occur, what benefits the Company will obtain from them. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the forward-looking statements in this release, which are qualified in their entirety by these cautionary statements. The Company is under no obligation, and expressly disclaims any intention or obligation, to update or revise any forward-looking statements in this release, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as expressly required by applicable laws.

SOURCE: Empower Clinics Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/653488/Empower-Clinics-Provides-Bi-Weekly-Update-on-Status-of-Management-Cease-Trade-Order
ZeroAvia secures two Dornier 228 aircraft for the next phase of its research and development for clean hydrogen-electric aviation.

The 19-seat program will take place at the company's newest facility in Kemble, UK, with additional support from its Hollister, CA location.

This 600kW hydrogen-electric powerplant initiative builds on the company's technological achievements and flight testing of its hydrogen propulsion powertrain in its 6-seat aircraft prototype.

KEMBLE, United Kingdom and HOLLISTER, Calif., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- To continue the company's trajectory toward zero-emission flight, ZeroAvia is ramping up its 19-seat aircraft program to decarbonize and revolutionize regional air travel. The company will utilize two twin-engine 19-seat Dornier 228 aircraft - one in the UK and one in the US, provided respectively by Aurigny and AMC Aviation . Both aircraft were previously in service for regional flights in the US and UK, demonstrating the opportunity for carbon reduction on existing routes.

ZeroAvia's 19-seat R&D is part of HyFlyer II , the second ZeroAvia-led project backed by the UK Government to target the development of a hydrogen fuel cell powertrain. As part of HyFlyer I, ZeroAvia successfully demonstrated a 250kW powerplant in a 6-seat aircraft across three flight test campaigns, achieving all the project's technical goals, including fuel-cell only cruise flight. All the learnings of HyFlyer I will be fully utilized in the development of a 600kW 19-seater powerplant in HyFlyer II.

ZeroAvia has also secured an additional $13 million for its 50+ seat engine development program from AP Ventures , a significant investor in breakthrough technologies across the hydrogen value chain, Alumni Ventures Group , SGH Capital , Agartha Fund LP, and existing investors Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund , Breakthrough Energy Ventures , Summa Equity , Shell Ventures , SYSTEMIQ , and Horizons Ventures . This new funding complements the initial investment of $24 million the company announced a few weeks ago, bringing the total private investment into ZeroAvia large engine development for 50+ seat aircraft to $37 million.

"We are eager and ready to begin testing our hydrogen-electric powertrain technology on a larger commercial-size aircraft and grateful to our investors and grant funders for their continued support of our vision for sustainable aviation," said Val Miftakhov, Founder and CEO at ZeroAvia. "Various projections indicate that aviation may account for over 25 percent of human-induced climate effects by 2050. We are on the path to helping reverse that trend, first with our successful 6-seater testing and now with the R&D for our 19-seater, and the kick-off of our 50+ seat program. Hydrogen is the only practical solution for true climate-neutral flight, and it will become a commercial reality much sooner than many predict."

"We are delighted to welcome ZeroAvia to our existing portfolio of hydrogen-related technologies," said Kevin Eggers, Partner at AP Ventures. "We have been impressed with the progress that ZeroAvia has made over the last 24 months - technically, operationally, and commercially. Furthermore, we have become increasingly confident about the significant role of hydrogen in decarbonising aviation. We believe that ZeroAvia will pioneer the development of hydrogen-electric powertrains for the aviation space."

For the 19-seat aircraft, two 600KW units of the company's hydrogen-electric powertrain will replace the aircraft's twin engines, along with hydrogen fuel tanks eventually holding 100kg of compressed gaseous hydrogen to support the 500-mile range of the commercial offering in 2024. Additionally, ZeroAvia is progressing the software, hardware, mechanical integration, and fuel cell balance-of-plant to the certifiable state. The 6-ton aircraft will have a range of 500 nautical miles.

"As air travel begins to increase again, political and public pressure is mounting to incorporate more sustainable technology," said Nico Bezuidenhout, CEO of Aurigny. "ZeroAvia's 19-seat initiative will not only seek to decarbonize existing regional services but also expand the reach of regional aviation by ultimately reducing seat mile cost, making smaller planes competitive with larger aircraft. In turn, smaller airports will become more accessible for aviation service, increasing traveller convenience, and the corresponding demand for point-to-point regional air travel."

ZeroAvia's new 30,000-square foot Kemble facility will act as the dedicated base for developing ZeroAvia's 600kW engine class and marks a significant investment in and expansion of its UK-based R&D program. The company's Hollister, California location will assist the UK team with testing and will be responsible for building the second demonstration aircraft for commercialization of technology in North America. The company currently employs about 50 people, expanding to over 100 in the next 12 months across both the US and UK.

ZeroAvia has also made several key additions to its team, including its new CTO of Propulsion Dr. Youcef Abdelli, formerly Head of Electrical System and Power Electronics at magniX and Principal Electrical & Propulsion System Chief Engineer for Amazon Prime Air. Also joining the team is new Regulatory & Safety Advisor Sir Tim Anderson, a former Senior Royal Air Force Officer, inaugural Director-General of the UK Military Aviation Authority, Chief Operating Officer of Flybe Group, and Chairman of the UK Airspace Change Organising Group Steering Committee. Finally, Kenneth Braithwaite, the 77th Secretary of the Navy, a retired US Navy Admiral and a Senior Advisor to Summa Equity and Silicon Valley Bank, will be signing on as a board observer.

About ZeroAvia

ZeroAvia is a leader in zero-emission aviation, focused on hydrogen-electric aviation solutions to address a variety of markets, initially targeting 500 mile range in 9-19 seat aircraft used for commercial passenger transport, cargo, agriculture, and more. Based in the UK and USA, ZeroAvia has already secured experimental certificates for two prototype aircraft from the CAA and FAA, passed significant flight test milestones, and is on track for commercial operations in 2024. The company's expanding UK operations are supported by grants from UK's Aerospace Technology Institute and Innovate UK, and ZeroAvia is part of the UK Prime Minister's Jet Zero Council. For more information, please visit ZeroAvia.com and follow @ZeroAvia on Twitter , Instagram , and LinkedIn .

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/997335/ZeroAvia_Logo.jpg
World Wealth Report 2021: NorthAmericabreaks5-yeartrendandovertakes APAC in High-Net-Worth population and wealth

The 25th anniversary edition of the World Wealth Report found that it will be critical to invest in talent and technology to provide hybrid advisory services, based on human interaction and digital tools



Paris, June 29, 2021 - The global high-net-worth individual (HNWI)1 population grew 6.3%, surpassing the 20-million bar, while HNWI wealth grew 7.6% in 2020, nearly reaching USD80-trillion.Boosted by rising equity markets and government stimulus, North America surpassed Asia-Pacific to become the 2020 leader in both HNWI population and wealth.The 25th anniversary edition of Capgemini's World Wealth Report (WWR) examines global wealth evolution in the past year and HNWI trends and influences from the last quarter century.

In 2020, the ultra-HNWI segment led overall HNWI population and wealth growth at 9.6% and 9.1%, respectively, while millionaires next door and mid-tier millionaires had lower population and wealth growth at around 6% and 8%, respectively.2

According to the report, which is the industry's oldest and among the most referenced wealth studies, HNWIs have become more involved in their investments over the last 25 years, and now seek more and broader advisory support. As tech players continue to enter the wealth management space, wealth management firms need to move toward technology-enabled advice and hyper-personalized business models. As COVID-19 brought the third global economic upheaval of the 21st century, lessons from the 2002 tech bubble and 2008 global financial crisis continue to point to the tendency of HNWIs to self-direct investments in a bullish market but return to advice-seeking during crisis and market volatility.

Hybrid advisory capabilities, based on human interaction and digital tools, hold the key to opportunity for wealth management firms

Technological breakthroughs, changing social dynamics, new ecosystem players, democratization of investment management and the rise of digital channels and assets, will all impact the success or failure of wealth management firms in the future. Today's HNWIs are interested in hybrid models and increasingly seek a mix of digital and direct interaction. 34% of HNWIs say they are actively leveraging WealthTech services.3 Moreover, wealth management firms find WealthTechs with consumer lifecycle expertise to be good-fit collaborators that can enhance their capabilities, reach, and market trend responsiveness. The top two reasons, identified by executive survey participants, to partner with WealthTechs are gaining access to new client segments and providing new and unique client offerings.

"The wealth management industry must push its frontiers to capture customer mindshare and best serve HNW clients accustomed to BigTech convenience and personalization," said Anirban Bose, Financial Services Strategic Business Unit CEO & Group Executive Board Member, Capgemini. "Investing in technology and talent is a critical need for wealth management firms to maintain their market share as WealthTechs continue to grow and BigTech entry into the space looms."

Adopting new-age tech skills and reskilling or hiring the right talent will power wealth management transformation

Amid an increasingly fast pace of disruption, wealth management firms can build resilient and agile operating models by investing in technologies such as cloud, APIs, and microservices. While the industry's reputation for expertise and experience remains its primary strength, firms will need to incorporate data-driven insights into their client engagement and investment strategies. Investment performance will continue to be paramount, but firms will also need to focus on delivering value as well as environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) options.

Wealth management was and continues to be a relationship-based business. With wealth management client profiles rapidly evolving to include millennial and Gen Z HNWIs, women, non-traditional families, and more, firms must train their advisors and staff to meet more diverse segment-specific client expectations and behaviors. Hiring and digitally empowering a heterogeneous advisor workforce while re-skilling staff to engage with a variety of client segments is the way forward cites the report. Nevertheless, 63% of advisors surveyed said they are not satisfied with their wealth management firm's efforts to provide tools/training to meet changing client needs.

To meet evolving HNWI expectations, firms will also need BigTech strategies with hyper-personalization, lifestyle ecosystem offerings, and intuitive embedded interfaces to retain relevance among a diverse client base.

Industry and client changes conducive to diversification in wealth management

With the current stock market surge, HNWIs are also seeking to diversify their portfolio with alternative investments. Sustainable investing is now maturing, with 43% of ultra-HNWIs and 39% of youngerevent on Tuesday, June 29th at 8:30 am EDT.

Methodology

The World Wealth Report 2021 covers 71 markets, accounting for more than 98% of global gross national income and 99% of world stock market capitalization, for HNWI market sizing. The Capgemini 2021 Global HNW Insights Survey queried more than 2,900 HNWIs across 26 major wealth markets in North America, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific region. Interviews and surveys of more than 100 wealth management executives were conducted across 17 markets, with representation from pure wealth management firms, universal banks, and independent broker/dealer firms and queried Wealth Management Executives on digital transformation efforts, collaboration strategies, and industry trends such as sustainable investing. The 2021 Wealth Manager Survey covers more than 350 responses across six markets and queried wealth managers on their views on industry trends, preparation for new market demands, and their satisfaction with the support provided by their wealth management firm. The production of the World Wealth Report 2021 was supported by an external Executive Steering Committee composed of 14 Wealth management experts across banks, WealthTechs, business and technology enablers.

Learn more about the World Wealth Report 2021 at www.worldwealthreport.com

About Capgemini

Capgemini is a global leader in partnering with companies to transform and manage their business by harnessing the power of technology. The Group is guided everyday by its purpose of unleashing human energy through technology for an inclusive and sustainable future. It is a responsible and diverse organization of 270,000 team members in nearly 50 countries. With its strong 50 year heritage and deep industry expertise, Capgemini is trusted by its clients to address the entire breadth of their business needs, from strategy and design to operations, fueled by the fast evolving and innovative world of cloud, data, AI, connectivity, software, digital engineering and platforms. The Group reported in 2020 global revenues of 16 billion.

Get The Future You Want | www.capgemini.com







1 High Net Worth Individuals are defined as those having investable assets of USD 1 million or more, excluding primary residence, collectibles, consumables, and consumer durables.

2 Ultra-HNWIs are defined as HNWIs with investable assets of USD 30 million or more; Millionaires Next Door are defined as HNWIs with investable assets between USD 1 million and USD 5 million; Mid-Tier Millionaires are defined as HNWIs with investable assets between USD 5 million and USD 30 million.

3 WealthTechs are startup or ScaleUp firms specializing in digital wealth management solutions.





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Norwegian radiopharmaceutical company announces successful closing of a private placement that will allow the company to initiate the next phase of clinical development of its lead product candidate Radspherin

Norway Oncoinvent AS, a clinical stage company advancing a pipeline of radiopharmaceutical products across a variety of solid cancers, announced today that the company has raised NOK 250 million in an oversubscribed pre-IPO financing round syndicated by existing investors Hadean Ventures, Geveran, RADFORSK Investeringsstiftelse, Sundt, Must Invest, Canica, MP Pensjon and Watrium. The net proceeds from the Private Placement are expected to ensure financing past end of 2023 for its lead product candidate Radspherin, including financing of two clinical phase 2A studies (in ovarian cancer and colorectal cancer) as well as the advancement of the company's proprietary targeted radiotherapy candidates. Oncoinvent has raised a total of NOK 535 million to date. The closing marks the last round of planned funding before Oncoinvent goes to its contemplated initial public offering (IPO) which the intends to carry out in the coming twelve months.

"We are pleased by the response to our private placement offering from both new investors and those who had previously invested in the company," said Jan A. Alfheim, Oncoinvent CEO. "The demand was such that we increased the placement from NOK 200 million to NOK 250 million. The additional funding will allow the company to initiate preclinical development of our proprietary antibodies OI-1 and OI-3 in order to develop our pipeline of targeted radiotherapeutics one year earlier than planned."

Roy H. Larsen, Board Chair stated, "We are pleased to secure financing for developing Oncoinvent further and we thank our existing shareholders and new investors for their strong support."

Ingrid Teigland Akay, Managing Partner of Hadean Ventures and board member of Oncoinvent commented: "The strong demand from investors reflects both the growing interest we see in the radiopharmaceutical space, as well as the conviction in the Oncoinvent management, which has demonstrated the ability to execute on their strategy. We are pleased with the outcome of this financing round, enabling the next stage of the lead asset and an accelerated plan for the pipeline."

The Company intends to carry out a repair offering of up to 961,538 new shares at the same subscription price towards shareholders in the Company as of the 25th June 2021 (as registered in VPS on the 29th June 2021), who were not allocated shares in the Private Placement.

About Oncoinvent

Oncoinvent AS is a clinical stage company developing innovative radiopharmaceutical technology that delivers precise, alpha-emitting particles across solid cancers. By leveraging internal manufacturing and supply chain capabilities to enable a clinical supply of radioisotopes, the company is advancing a pipeline of novel products that use alpha particles, a higher Linear Energy Transfer (LET) form of radiation, that can potentially eradicate cancer cells. Oncoinvent's lead candidate, Radspherin, is designed for treatment of metastatic cancers in body cavities, and its versatility allows it to be deployed for the treatment of a variety of cancer indications. Radspherin is in two ongoing Phase 1 studies to treat peritoneal carcinomatosis from both ovarian cancer and colorectal cancer.

About Radspherin

Radspherin is a novel alpha-emitting radioactive microsphere suspension designed for treatment of metastatic cancers in body cavities. The radium-224 based therapeutic, Radspherin has shown strong and consistent anticancer activity at doses being essentially non-toxic in preclinical studies. It is anticipated that the product can potentially be used to treat several forms of metastatic cancer.

About RAD-18-001 and RAD-18-002

The Phase 1 open-label, dose-escalation clinical trials are designed to assess the dose, safety and tolerability of Radspherin, an a-emitting radionuclide therapy, administered into the intraperitoneal cavity in subjects with peritoneal carcinomatosis from ovarian cancer and colorectal carcinoma respectively. The trials include a dose escalation phase followed by repeated injection and expansion cohort phases at the recommended clinical dose. Key objectives in the studies include determining maximum tolerated dose, abdominal biodistribution, and preliminary anti-tumor activity. Please refer to www.clinicaltrials.gov for additional clinical trial details.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210628005687/en/

Contacts:

For further information, please contact:

Jan A. Alfheim, Chief Executive Officer

Cell: +47 46 44 00 45

Email: alfheim@oncoinvent.com



IR enquiries:

Courtney Turiano, Stern Investor Relations

Email: Courtney.Turiano@sternir.co
EQS Group-Ad-hoc: Lonza Group AG / Key word(s): Annual Results/Half Year Results

Lonza Publishes Restated Financials for 2020



29-Jun-2021 / 07:01 CET/CEST

Release of an ad hoc announcement pursuant to Art. 53 LR

The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.



Lonza reports restated 2020 financials for sales, EBIT, EBITDA and CORE EBITDA

Lonza now provides 2020 financials in the redesigned business structure to reflect divisional performance Basel, Switzerland, 29 June 2021 - Prior to the reporting of the Half-Year Results 2021 on 23 July 2021, Lonza today is providing restated financials to reflect: The classification of Lonza's Specialty Ingredients (LSI) business as discontinued operations for Half-Year Result 2020 (consistent with Full-Year 2020 Reporting)

Lonza's redesigned business structure

The revised Alternative Performance Measure (APM) policy In July 2020, Lonza announced the decision to divest the Specialty Ingredients business via a sale process. Consequently, the LSI operations results were reported as discontinued operations for the Full-Year 2020. The consolidated income statement for the six-month-end 30 June 2020 is now restated to present the LSI business as discontinued operations. On 15 October 2020, as part of Lonza's Investor Update, Lonza announced , the redesign of its business structure, the revision of its Alternative Performance Measure policy and its decision to increase the threshold for non-CORE adjustments to CHF 20 million per event.



As of 1 January 2021, the former Pharma, Biotech & Nutrition (LPBN) segment was split into four divisions - Small Molecules, Biologics, Cell & Gene1 and Capsules & Health Ingredients. The restated financials for 2020 at a divisional level are now provided for sales and CORE EBITDA. For Lonza Restated Financials 2020, click the following link: 2020 Restated Financials PDF 1 Cell & Gene division includes Cell & Gene Technologies and Bioscience businesses About Lonza

Lonza is the preferred global partner to the pharmaceutical, biotech and nutrition markets. We work to prevent illness and enable a healthier world by supporting our customers to deliver new and innovative medicines that help treat a wide range of diseases. We achieve this by combining technological insight with world-class manufacturing, scientific expertise and process excellence. These enable our customers to commercialize their discoveries and innovations in the healthcare sector. Founded in 1897 in the Swiss Alps, today Lonza operates across five continents. With approximately 14,000 full-time employees, we are built from high-performing teams and of individual talent who make a meaningful difference to our own business, as well as to the communities in which we operate. The company generated sales of CHF 4.5 billion in 2020 with a CORE EBITDA of CHF 1.4 billion. Find out more at www.lonza.com Follow @Lonza on LinkedIn

Follow @LonzaGroup on Twitter Lonza Contact Details Media / Communications Team

media@lonza.com Dirk Oehlers

Investor Relations

Lonza Group Ltd

Tel +41 61 316 8540

dirk.oehlers@lonza.com Additional Information and Disclaimer

Lonza Group Ltd has its headquarters in Basel, Switzerland, and is listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange. It has a secondary listing on the Singapore Exchange Securities Trading Limited ('SGX-ST'). Lonza Group Ltd is not subject to the SGX-ST's continuing listing requirements but remains subject to Rules 217 and 751 of the SGX-ST Listing Manual.



Certain matters discussed in this news release may constitute forward-looking statements. These statements are based on current expectations and estimates of Lonza Group Ltd, although Lonza Group Ltd can give no assurance that these expectations and estimates will be achieved. Investors are cautioned that all forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainty and are qualified in their entirety. The actual results may differ materially in the future from the forward-looking statements included in this news release due to various factors. Furthermore, except as otherwise required by law, Lonza Group Ltd disclaims any intention or obligation to update the statements contained in this news release. Privacy Policy link To immediately delete all the data

End of ad hoc announcement
LOS ANGELES, CA / ACCESSWIRE / June 29, 2021 / Recruiting qualified nurses and healthcare talent is a challenge, which often frustrates any human resources department. Nurses are in high demand across many fields. If you need to recruit nurses or find new healthcare talent for your hospital, medical group, doctors office, or recruiting firm, it can be a time-consuming hiring process. Special sourcing skills are crucial when trying to find the best nursing candidates. The best recruiting strategy for finding nurses and recruiting healthcare professionals is having their personal email address and cell phone number to contact them directly.

Both female nurses and male nurses are in high demand. Image Credit: 123RF.com / Cathy Yeulet.

It's no surprise that recruiting nurses and finding healthcare talent is still a challenge. The nursing shortage in the United States has been well documented and continues to grow. Recruiting nurses can be difficult for hospitals looking to fill openings. There are often overlooked healthcare hiring strategies that have helped other hospitals and medical groups successfully recruit qualified nursing candidates as we approach the busy summer months.

Nursing Profession in High Demand

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics , by 2022, there will be more registered nurse (RN) jobs available than any other healthcare profession. It is estimated that more than 100,000 new nursing jobs will need to be filled per year. Retirement is a big factor. It is anticipated that over 500,000+ RNs will retire heading into 2022. Projections are that at least 1.1 million new RNs are needed for expansion and replacement of healthcare retirees. This is crucial to avoid a nursing shortage.

Shortage of Nurses in Many States a Growing Issue

Every day, nurses are needed in healthcare facilities across the country. This is a growing problem as demand for qualified nurses continues to increase, while recruiting them has become more difficult. Nurses have been leaving the profession in droves due to low wages and overwork. These are contributing factors to the shortage of qualified nursing candidates.

From the past survey compiled by the Bureau of Health Workforce (BHW), a Division of the Health Resources & Services Administration (HRSA), latest figures show a breakdown of the total number of nurses in all 50 states within the U.S. This data includes all nursing titles , and not just limited to only registered nurses (RNs).

3,956,080 Total Nurses in the USA - 50 State Ranking Breakdown (Highest to Lowest)

California, 365,500 Texas, 279,000 Florida, 272,400 New York, 238,300 Pennsylvania, 193,200 Ohio, 184,000 Illinois, 157,400 Michigan, 137,500 North Carolina, 120,600 Massachusetts, 111,500 Georgia, 108,600 Indiana, 97,200 New Jersey, 97,100 Missouri, 92,900 Tennessee, 92,000 Virginia, 89,800 Minnesota, 89,000 Wisconsin, 88,500 Washington, 78,100 Arizona, 75,600 Maryland, 68,300 Colorado, 66,100 Alabama, 62,700 Kentucky, 61,000 Louisiana, 54,000 Connecticut, 52,600 Oregon, 46,500 Iowa, 46,180 Oklahoma, 44,200 Kansas, 42,900 Mississippi, 41,300 South Carolina, 40,600 Arkansas, 36,700 Utah, 33,900 Nevada, 28,400 West Virginia, 26,600 Nebraska, 25,000 New Mexico, 23,200 Maine, 21,500 Hawaii, 20,000 Idaho, 18,800 New Hampshire, 18,400 Delaware, 15,800 Washington DC, 13,000 South Dakota, 12,500 North Dakota, 12,500 Montana, 11,500 Wyoming, 11,500 Rhode Island, 11,000 Vermont, 11,000 Alaska, 10,200

Nursing Annual Salaries: State-by-State for Registered Nurses (RNs)

Nursing wage data per state compiled by the Division of Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics. Image Credit: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Where to Find and Source Nursing Candidates?

Some hospitals have begun recruiting international medical graduates and recruiting from other countries due to this shortage in qualified nursing candidates. Hospitals are also finding success by recruiting nurses who already live within a specific geographic region such as nearby military bases where there may be an abundance of qualified personnel.

'Nurses have long been praised as being one of the most sought after professions, however, recruiting nurses is still a challenge. Nurses are hard to find. We've made it very easy with Heartbeat.ai. With just a few clicks, you can find 5.8 million nurses' contact information , such as personal email addresses, direct telephone numbers, or cell phone numbers, ' said Ben Argeband, Founder of Heartbeat.ai .

About Campaign Writer:

Campaign Writer is a leading sales copywriting marketing firm working with Top Companies, Professionals, Executives, and Leaders in their field, to help increase sales and revenue through its content writing Team of Award-Winning Copywriters, Wordsmiths, and Ghostwriters for sales, marketing, public relations, direct response, and email marketing campaigns . Campaign Writer is led by Chief Strategy Officer Marty Stewart.

For a strategic exploratory conversation on how your company can increase sales, visit CampaignWriter.com. Or, call toll-free +1-877-463-9777 within the United States, or +1-702-997-1222 if calling Internationally.

SOURCE: Campaign Writer

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/653494/Recruiting-Nurses-Sourcing-Healthcare-Talent-Frustrates-HR
The financing round will support further development of SpinChip's proprietary point-of-care in vitro diagnostics platform

SpinChip is now preparing for design verification and validation, CE-marking and market entry

OSLO, Norway, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- SpinChip Diagnostics AS, a pioneering, diagnostics company developing a next-generation point-of-care platform for in vitro diagnostics, today announced the completion of its financing round, successfully securing NOK 130 million (13.5 million).



Carnegie Investment Bank Norwayacted as Sole Bookrunner on SpinChip's NOK 130 million (13.5 Million) private placement. Alongside new cornerstone investors such as Kistefos AS, the financing round was also well supported by existing shareholders.



The proceeds from the financing round will be used to further advance SpinChip's proprietary point-of-care (POC) in vitro diagnostics platform in addition to establishing a pilot- and full-scale manufacturing plant to prepare for market entry.

The SpinChip proprietary diagnostics platform, consisting of the SpinChip Analyser and assay-specific cartridges, is built on microfluidic technology in combination with nanotechnology-based cartridge assays. The platform is aimed at providing patients and healthcare professionals with a tool that only requires one droplet of blood to provide highly accurate results within minutes, next to the patient.

The diagnostics platform has through internal trials already proven to match the most advanced high-sensitive laboratory diagnostic analysers, meaning it can contribute to faster reliable triaging and facilitate earlier onset of appropriate treatment of patients. SpinChip is now preparing for clinical trial activities, including clinical performance studies, to gather sufficient data to apply for CE-marking, with its first diagnostic offering being within the acute cardiac segment.

Morten Jurs, Chief Executive Officer of SpinChip Diagnostics AS, commented:"We are very pleased to have successfully completed the NOK 130 million private placement and are delighted to welcome several new investors to SpinChip, alongside with strong support from existing shareholders. With this financial backing, we will be able to take the platform into the next stage of development to eventually apply for CE-marking whilst we are preparing for market entry."

Stig Morten Borch, Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of SpinChip Diagnostics AS, added:"SpinChip's platform represents the future of POC testing and we are delighted to get additional financial support to further advance the platform at this exciting time for the business."



Contact information:



Morten Jurs, Chief Executive Officer

E-mail: mj@spinchip.no

Phone: +47 991 67 922



Stig Morten Borch, Founder and Chief Scientific Officer

E-mail:smb@spinchip.no

Phone: +47 905 28 151

About SpinChip Diagnostics AS

Representing the future of point-of-care testing, SpinChip Diagnostics was founded in Norway in 2012. SpinChip's proprietary platform is focused on in-vitro diagnostics (IVD) to develop diagnostic tests for acute and chronic cardiac indications where test results are rapidly needed to provide patients with life-saving treatments. The platform is based on microfluidic technology in combination with nanotechnology-based cartridge assays, which together can relay test results as accurately as high-sensitive laboratory diagnostic machine within minutes, with only one drop of blood.

Visit Spinchip Diagnostics - Next-generation point-of-care platformfor more information.
First live deployment of AI into The Field Army to enhance information exploitation underpins technology's vital role in transforming defence capability following the UK's Integrated Review

LONDON, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Adarga is pleased to announce that it has been awarded a key contract to deliver its state-of-the-art AI-powered Knowledge Platform to the British Army for an extended Capability Concept Demonstrator. The UK developed software platform will enable the Army to exploit the vast, untapped and growing amount of data at its disposal at a speed and scale previously unimaginable to maximise its effectiveness on operations. The multimillion pound, multi-year software licence is the Field Army's first deployment of AI in day-to-day use, a significant development following the recent Integrated Review in which the UK Government committed to investing in new and emerging technologies to modernise Defence capability and enable the UK to maintain a competitive edge over its adversaries.

The ability for the Army to better understand and effectively exploit the myriad of valuable information and knowledge available to them, which includes practical military experience from decades of lessons learnt on training and operations, is vital in succeeding in the highly-dynamic, challenging environments in which the Army operates.

Adarga's AI platform, incorporating cutting-edge data science technology, provides the transformational approach the Army is seeking to enhance and extend its human capability, solve complex data problems and digitise otherwise time and knowledge intensive tasks. Mission critical insights and hidden data connections can be identified by the platform in seconds, presenting information that may have otherwise been missed or would have required weeks to find through human analysis. This is critical in today's fast-moving and competitive Information Age. The British Army's ability to maintain the initiative fundamentally depends on how rapidly personnel across the whole force gain and maintain understanding in an increasingly complex information environment and where replicating past mistakes could have fatal consequences for success. Adarga is providing the technology to enhance the intellectual agility and speed of action of the British Army.

Adarga's Knowledge Platform fuses a variety of data formats from across a range of disparate Army sources and data repositories, combining these with other valuable real-world, open-source data in a single software platform. The platform uses high-fidelity AI models, trained to understand and analyse complex defence and national security data, to convert data sources and incoming, real-time information feeds into readily accessible knowledge.

The platform creates a rich and ever-growing, interconnected digital picture, drawing complex links between critical pieces of information. Users benefit from an intuitive user interface providing a single view in which to explore this expanding knowledge - including videos and foreign language documents that have been transcribed and translated by the platform. Along with expansive visualisations of their topics of interest such as event timelines, network builders, graphs and maps, machine-generated document summaries and reports, suggested and corroborated reading on topics of interest and much more.

Adarga is solving one of the most complex challenges brought about by the pervasiveness of information - using cutting-edge AI to read and understand human language including text, voice and video - alongside structured data, to present it to users in context of their particular mission focus. Adarga's Knowledge Platform is helping Army personnel to prioritise information requirements, make sense of given context, apply learning and to make better decisions. This improved access to knowledge is key to succeeding on operations, reducing risk and maximising effectiveness.

Robert Bassett Cross, CEO of Adarga, said:

"In today's competitive and uncertain world, data and information are more of a strategic asset than ever before. Making sense of and understanding all of this available information underpins everything the British Army does and is vital to the success or failure of operations. Adarga is proud to be supporting the British Army in this first important, real-world application of AI. Harnessing AI technology provides Army users with a powerful capability to overcome the challenges of more traditional time and knowledge intensive methods of enabling understanding and highlights the Army's innovative approach and ambition to meet the challenges of a rapidly evolving operating environment. Working closely with our partners in the Field Army, the deployment of Adarga's AI platform has been pivotal in deciphering vast quantities of complex data at speed and scale, providing the context, insight and foresight required to drive effective decision making".

Notes to Editors:

About Adarga

Adarga is the one of the UK's leading developers of artificial intelligence (AI) software for Defence and National Security, helping organisations to discover mission-critical insights in seconds.

Based in London and Bristol, Adarga's mission is to enable its customers to make better decisions today, to work faster and smarter, and to unlock the hidden value their data. Its state-of-the-art enterprise AI analytics platform, the Knowledge PlatformTM, is providing organisations with a transformational competitive edge by automating the analysis of vast amounts of valuable, disparate data at high speeds to help users discover the deep and mission-critical insights that drive faster and better decisions.

Adarga's world-class team has combined cutting-edge natural language processing, machine learning and network science technology into a fully scalable, extendable software platform that can understand, analyse and contextualise complex defence and national security data in all formats, including human generated data like text voice and video, at a speed and scale previously unimaginable.

For more information visit Adarga.ai
- Liberis to embed business finance solutions within Klarna platform to expand scope of services to its customers

- Through the partnership, Klarna will offer pre-approved revenue-based financing to its global merchant base

- Liberis, the leading global embedded business finance provider, has provided 500m in financing to SMEs

LONDON, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Global embedded business finance platform Liberis has today announced it has been selected by Klarna , the leading global payments and shopping service, for a strategic collaboration to provide additional financial services to Klarna merchants. Through this partnership, Liberis will initially provide revenue-based financing to Klarna merchants.

Klarna, one of Europe's most valuable private technology companies, provides 250,000 merchants in 17 countries with a checkout and payment suite that enables their consumers to "buy now and pay later". Now, through Liberis, Klarna can also offer its merchant partners flexible financing solutions, pre-approved with fair and equitable payment terms that are based on their revenues and actual transactions.

Rob Straathof, CEO of Liberis: "By making finance more personalised, intuitive and accessible, we in turn empower our partners to improve engagement, satisfaction and loyalty for their own customers. This symbiotic relationship benefits everyone. We are proud to have been selected by Klarna, one of the world's most successful and admired fintech companies, in our shared mission to support the growth of small businesses around the world."

Straathof continues: "Klarna's "Buy now Pay Later" functionality has allowed merchants to serve their customers for many years. We are thrilled to expand this functionality by offering these companies a flexible financing option, embedded within Klarna's platform, that will bolster their businesses through hard times and periods of growth."

How it works

Liberis' API-powered technology integrates directly into its partners' platforms. These partners, typically ecommerce or payments platforms such as Klarna, can then provide their end customers with a value added service of revenue-based finance, with payment terms based on their actual transaction data.

The entire process is managed seamlessly within the Klarna ecosystem. Personalised, pre-approved financing offers are displayed within their Klarna dashboard or app. If interested, the merchant can complete a quick approval and underwriting process, and receive the funds within two business days of applying.

All of the transactions for the financing - both receipt and payment - take place within the merchant's Klarna account, at a pre-arranged rate of their choosing.

The revenue-based funding options will be available immediately for Klarna merchants around the world in the coming months.

About Liberis

Liberis is the leading global embedded finance platform. Founded in 2007, it provides ecommerce and payments partners with the technology platforms and financial solutions for hyper-personalised, fair funding for their small business customers. Headquartered in the UK, Liberis empowers businesses and provides positive impact. It has financed more than 17,000 SMEs worldwide with more than $700m. Liberis is supported by British Business Investments, Paragon and SVB. Learn more at liberis.com .

Images are found here

Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1493702/Liberis_Logo.jpg
Aragen Life Sciences (formerly GVK BIO), a leading Contract Research and Development Organization, headquartered out of Hyderabad, India, announces an expansion of their discovery research agreement with Boehringer Ingelheim, with the goal of accelerating the discovery pipeline of Boehringer Ingelheim.

This preferred partnership allows Boehringer Ingelheim, a leading research driven pharmaceutical company, to incorporate several design elements, synthesize, profile, and then characterize a wide range of chemotypes against key targets of interest in swift optimization cycles. The partnership also allows for the integrated up-scaling of compounds for larger pre-clinical studies. Biology screening of appropriate chemical moieties to drive decision making with speed and accuracy is also included in the partnership. Aragen will dedicate a sizeable portion of its campus in Hyderabad to support this alliance.

"We at Aragen believe that 'In Every Molecule is the Possibility for Better Health', and are excited about the opportunity to expand our partnership with Boehringer Ingelheim, a global leader in the discovery and development of novel medicines. It has been our privilege to collaborate with the scientists at Boehringer Ingelheim, and we thank them for their trust and confidence in the Aragen team. Together, we look forward to advancing Boehringer Ingelheim's innovative approaches into successful clinical outcomes that can have the potential to ultimately benefit patients," said Manni Kantipudi, CEO at Aragen

About Aragen

Aragen Life Sciences Pvt Ltd ("Aragen") is a global leader in providing discovery, development and manufacturing solutions for life sciences firms. With a team of over 3100 professionals, and through a network of sites around the world, we offer a seamless, integrated platform to advance customer programs from discovery through commercialization for both small molecules and biologics. Established in 2001, Aragen now serves over 450 customers worldwide across multiple modalities and therapeutic areas. For more information, visit www.aragen.com

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210628005162/en/

Contacts:

Aragen Life Sciences: Sarat Patanaik, +91 95732 80064, sarat.patanaik@aragen.com

MediaMedic Communications Pvt.Ltd.: Bhavna Pathak, +918830654608, info@mediamedichealth.com
DGAP-News: Defence Therapeutics Inc. / Key word(s): Agreement

DEFENCE THERAPEUTICS SIGNS A COLLABORATION AGREEMENT WITH THE CURIE INSTITUTE FOR TESTING THE ACCUM-T-DM1 ADC THERAPEUTIC IN PDX MODELS OF BREAST CANCER



29.06.2021 / 08:30

The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.





CSE: DTC FSE: DTC USOTC: DTCFF



PRESS RELEASE

DEFENCE THERAPEUTICS SIGNS A COLLABORATION AGREEMENT WITH THE CURIE INSTITUTE FOR TESTING THE ACCUM-T-DM1 ADC THERAPEUTIC IN PDX MODELS OF BREAST CANCER

Vancouver, BC, Canada, June 29th, 2021 - Defence Therapeutics Inc. ("Defence" or the "Company"), is pleased to announce the establishment of a collaboration with the Curie Institute (Paris, France) to evaluate the therapeutic efficacy of Accum-T-DM1 ADC in patient-derived xenograft (PDX) models of breast cancer.

The Curie Institute is a worldwide renowned center engaged leader in fundamental and applied scientific research to better serve humankind in fighting illnesses such as cancer. Their scientific team has a wide expertise in the field of medical and experimental pharmacology with PDX models of cancer.

T-DM1 (Kadcyla(R)) is currently used to treat women with metastatic HER2-positive breast cancer. The efficacy of the treatment remains limited due to sub-optimal drug delivery to tumor cells resulting in some treatment resistance, recurrence, and side effects.

The agreement between the Curie Institute and Defence Therapeutics stipulates the following objectives related to the breast cancer:

To perform a head-to-head toxicology profile comparisons of T-DM1 versus Accum-T-DM1 in mice.

Complete a dose escalation study in mice bearing PDX that are T-DM1 resistant.

Conduct a complete breast cancer efficacy study on PDX mice undergoing the ADC therapy, including in 3 HER2+ and in 1 triple-negative PDX.

"The AccumTM technology has been very efficient at enhancing protein-/or cell-based vaccination and ADCs potency. This studies objective in demonstrating enhanced efficacy and the refined treatment regiment of Accum-T-DM1, can lead to an enhanced ADC platform for the AccumTM technology. This serves as a strong foundation for a panoply of other therapeutics endowed with limitations known to impairing their therapeutic potency. AccumTM enhanced efficacy opens up a broad opportunity in the ADC market to address this," mentioned Sebastien Plouffe, CEO of Defence Therapeutics.

Currently, the T-DM1 regiment is long and tedious. The use of the AccumTM in this context is expected to increase significantly the efficiency as well as to lower the treatment cycle, which would highly lower the side effects triggered by the current ADC therapies.

US Breast Cancer Antibodies immunotherapy Therapeutics Market Offers USD 20 Billion Opportunity by 2026 according to Kuick research.

About Defence:

Defence Therapeutics is a publicly-traded biotechnology company working on engineering the next generation vaccines and ADC products using its proprietary platform. The core of Defence Therapeutics platform is the ACCUMTM technology, which enables precision delivery of vaccine antigens or ADCs in their intact form to target cells by inducing their entrapment escape. As a result, increased efficacy and potency can be reached against catastrophic illness such as cancer and infectious diseases.

For further information:

Sebastien Plouffe, President, CEO and Director

P: (514) 947-2272

Splouffe@defencetherapeutics.com

www.defencetherapeutics.com



Cautionary Statement Regarding "Forward-Looking" Information



This release includes certain statements that may be deemed "forward-looking statements". All statements in this release, other than statements of historical facts, that address events or developments that the Company expects to occur, are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are statements that are not historical facts and are generally, but not always, identified by the words "expects", "plans", "anticipates", "believes", "intends", "estimates", "projects", "potential" and similar expressions, or that events or conditions "will", "would", "may", "could" or "should" occur. Although the Company believes the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual results may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause the actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include regulatory actions, market prices, and continued availability of capital and financing, and general economic, market or business conditions. Investors are cautioned that any such statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual results or developments may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are based on the beliefs, estimates and opinions of the Company's management on the date the statements are made. Except as required by applicable securities laws, the Company undertakes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements in the event that management's beliefs, estimates or opinions, or other factors, should change.



Neither the CSE nor its market regulator, as that term is defined in the policies of the CSE, accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
LEIDEN, The Netherlands, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- VICO Therapeutics, a Leiden, the Netherlands, based biotech company focusing on the development of RNA modulating therapies for rare neurological disorders, today announced that the Office of Orphan Products Development (OOPD) of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted orphan-drug designation for VO659, VICO's investigational antisense oligonucleotide (AON) therapy for the treatment of spinocerebellar ataxia (SCA). In February, VICO already received orphan drug designation for VO659 in SCA from the European Commission.

Rupert Sandbrink MD PhD., Chief Medical Officer at VICO, stated:

"Spinocerebellar ataxia belongs to the group of polyglutamine disorders which aredebilitating and progressive diseases, leading to significant impairment of mobility and multiple other daily activities of patients suffering from these conditions. Currently, no disease modifying treatments are available for these patients. Our investigational RNA modulating therapy is designed to lower the mutant protein levels causing these neurodegenerative diseases."

"We're excited to obtain orphan-drug designation from also the FDA, following the EC grant earlier this year. This deeply underserved patient population deserves new therapies, and we look forward to advancing VO659, our therapy that holds great potential for addressing their unmet needs. It also recognizes the potential of our AON approach. This is yet another important step forward as we prepare for our first in human trials, expected to start in 2022."

FDA's Office of Orphan Products Development grants Orphan Drug Designation to drugs and biologics that are defined as those intended for the safe and effective treatment, diagnosis or prevention of rare diseases/disorders that affect fewer than 200,000 people in the U.S. The designation allows VICO to qualify for a number of incentives, including seven years of market exclusivity upon regulatory approval; exemption from FDA application fees for spinocerebellar ataxia; and tax credits for qualified clinical trials.

Contact

VICO Therapeutics B.V.

Gertjan Bartlema, Chief Executive Officer

T: +31 (0)71 203 68 31

E: Gertjan.bartlema@vicotx.com

www.vicotx.com LifeSpring Life Sciences Communication, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Leon Melens

T: +31 6 538 16 427

E: lmelens@lifespring.nl

About SCA

Spinocerebellar ataxia (SCA) is a group of rare, progressive hereditary genetic disorders that affects the cerebellum, brain stem and spinal cord. More than 30 types of SCAs have been identified to date (SCA1-SCA36), and the most common SCAs (types 1, 2, 3, 6 and 7) are caused by translated CAG trinucleotide repeat expansions that encode elongated polyglutamine (polyQ) stretches in the respective disease proteins. Presence of the elongated polyQ stretch confers pathogenic properties to the resulting protein through a dominant gain-of-function mechanism, resulting in degeneration of specific neuronal subpopulations that differ between the different SCA types. For SCA1 and SCA3 disease manifestation includes ataxia of gait, stance, and limbs, dysarthria, and oculomotor abnormalities. To date, there are no disease-modifying therapies.

About VO659

VICO's lead antisense oligonucleotide product, VO659 is designed to suppress mutant proteins and slow or halt disease progression. A major strength of VICO's approach is the broad applicability to different polyQ diseases and the preferential reduction of mutant relative to normal polyQ proteins.

About VICO Therapeutics

VICO Therapeutics is a Leiden, the Netherlands, based private biotech company focusing on the development of RNA modulating therapies for rare severe neurological disorders. VICO's antisense oligonucleotide platform (AON) is focusing on different forms of spinocerebellar ataxia (SCA) and Huntington Disease (HD). Its early discovery RNA editing platform is directed towards RETT syndrome.

Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1221143/Vico_Therapeutics_Logo.jpg


29June2021

Disclosure of Report on Payments to Governments

In compliance with Section 4.3A, and filed the Report with the National Storage Mechanism (NSM).



Media Contacts:

Sergey Dorofeev

Anastasia Gromova

Tatiana Smirnova

Public Relations

Phone: +7 (495) 777-08-65 (ext. 5196)

Investor Contacts:

Ilya Popov

Sergey Smirnov

Investor Relations

Phone: +7 (495) 745-77-45 (ext. 5252)

Acron Group is a leading vertically integrated mineral fertiliser producer in Russia and globally, with chemical production facilities in Veliky Novgorod (Acron) and Smolensk region (Dorogobuzh). The Group owns and operates a phosphate mine in Murmansk region (North-Western Phosphorous Company, NWPC) and is implementing a potash development project in Perm Krai (Verkhnekamsk Potash Company, VPC). It owns transportation and logistics infrastructure, including three Baltic seaport terminals and distribution networks in Russia and China. Acron subsidiary North Atlantic Potash Inc. (NAP) holds mining leases and an exploration permit for ten parcels of the potassium salt deposit at Prairie Evaporite, Saskatchewan, Canada. Acron also holds a minority stake (19.8%) in Polish GrupaAzoty S.A., one of the largest chemical producers in Europe.

In 2020, the Group sold 7.8 million tonnes of main products to 74 countries, with Russia, Brazil, Europe and the United States as key markets.

In 2020, the Group posted consolidated IFRS revenue of RUB 119,864 million (USD 1,661 million), with EBITDA of RUB 35,311 million (USD 489 million). Acron's shares are traded on the Moscow Exchange and its global depositary receipts are traded at the London Stock Exchange (ticker AKRN). Acron employs over 11,000 people.

For more information about Acron Group, please visit www.acron.ru/en.
Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - June 29, 2021) - Graph Blockchain Inc. (CSE: GBLC) (OTC Pink: REGRF) ("Graph" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that subsidiary Beyond the Moon Inc. ("Beyond the Moon") has selected "DuckSTARTER" as their first launchpad.

Beyond the Moon has acquired 100,000 DUCK tokens, and locked-in the "Champion Tier," the top tier on the launch platform of DuckSTARTER. The Champion Tier guarantees allocations in each Initial Dex Offering ("IDO"). After the DUCK tokens have been purchased, the Company will move into know your customer ("KYC") which makes us eligible for all upcoming IDO's.

"We are excited to bring our shareholders exposure to IDO's through our Beyond the Moon Acquisition. Graph has employed a unique approach to building our DeFi focused company a we look forward to reporting the results of the IDO's shortly," says Paul Haber, CEO of Graph Blockchain Inc.

About DuckSTARTER

DuckSTARTER is a service platform for blockchain projects. It acts as the final bridge between early-stage projects and the community before a project goes fully public. DuckSTARTER has a unique level system which requires users to lock-in a certain amount of DUCK tokens to participate in the launch platform. DuckSTARTER is a part of the DuckDAO ecosystem, a collective consisting of thousands of individuals, dedicated builders, and marketing powers.

Over the past 6 months DuckSTARTER has launched over 30 IDO's on the DuckDAO ecosystem and will continue to launch new IDO's each month.

Additional information on the DuckSTARTER is available at https://duckstarter.io/about.

About Beyond the Moon Coordinators

Beyond the Moon manages all aspects of investing in the launchpad opportunities. Beyond the Moon provides exposure to the most exciting opportunities in crypto - crypto launchpads. Launchpads are crypto projects designed to promote and introduce upcoming projects to the crypto market. The target manages the process of entering crypto launchpads, helping facilitate the access to early-stage crypto tokens. Before listing a new token on a Decentralized Exchange ("DEX"), launchpads provide the first public investment round, called an Initial DEX Offering ("IDO"). Early access to crypto projects is difficult to access but provides the highest potential return on investment in the space. Moon coordinates all aspects of registration, staking, and investment in the launchpads and their tokens.

About Graph Blockchain Inc.

Graph Blockchain provides our shareholders with exposure to various areas of Decentralized Finance. Graph, through its wholly owned subsidiary Babbage Mining Corp., a Proof of Stake ("POS") miner that focuses on altcoins, can provide our investors with exposure to the vast emerging market of cryptocurrencies with the significant technological disruption and potential gains that altcoins represent.

Additional information on the Company is available at www.graphblockchain.com and www.babbagemining.com.

For further information, please contact:

Investor Relations

Jamie Hyland

Phone: 604.442.2425

Email: jamie@graphblockchain.com

Media Relations

Anthony Feldman/Rich DiGregorio

Phone: 617.921.0984/856.889.7351

Email: gblc@kcsa.com

Forward-Looking Statements

This news release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of applicable securities laws. All statements contained herein that are not clearly historical in nature may constitute forward-looking statements. In some cases, forward-looking statements can be identified by words or phrases such as "may", "will", "expect", "likely", "should", "would", "plan", "anticipate", "intend", "potential", "proposed", "estimate", "believe" or the negative of these terms, or other similar words, expressions and grammatical variations thereof, or statements that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" happen, or by discussions of strategy. Readers are cautioned to consider these and other factors, uncertainties, and potential events carefully and not to put undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Such statements 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 and reflect the Company's expectations as of the date hereof and are subject to change thereafter. The Company undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, estimates or opinions, future events or results or otherwise or to explain any material difference between subsequent actual events and such forward-looking information, except as required by applicable law.

###

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/88919
VEVEY, Switzerland, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Nestle Waters will expand its current efforts to manage water sustainably and increase its collaboration with partners to identify and support local solutions. These solutions are designed to help regenerate the ecosystems in the areas around each of Nestle Waters' 48 sites. As of 2025, they will help nature retain more water than the business uses in its operations.

The new initiative builds on the company's 2017 commitment to certify all of its Waters sites by the Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS) by 2025. This standard requires water users to understand and act collectively on water challenges.

Nestle will now use its expertise to advance the regeneration of local water cycles through the implementation of more than 100 projects for its 48 sites by 2025. These new, measurable actions will support better water management and infrastructure. Some project examples include:

Buxton - Land conservation (protecting land from development) and natural flood management interventions in Derbyshire, UK

- Land conservation (protecting land from development) and natural flood management interventions in Vittel - River restoration and renaturation projects in Vosges, France

- River restoration and renaturation projects in Vosges, Nestle Pure Life - Support for farmers to use drip irrigation in Sheikhupura, Pakistan

- Support for farmers to use drip irrigation in Sheikhupura, Nestle Pure Life - The delivery of water treatment, filtration and pipeline infrastructure for the municipal water supply in Benha, Egypt

Nestle will invest CHF 120 million (USD 130 million) to assist the implementation of the more than 100 projects.

"Today, we are accelerating our journey to support the regeneration of local water cycles and are challenging ourselves to take bold new steps," said Muriel Lienau, Head of the Waters Business. "We want to play an active role in helping to conserve water resources everywhere we operate. To do so, we will work with many partners to develop tailored projects that help find local solutions."

Climate change, higher water consumption, growing urbanization and damaged infrastructure are some of the factors contributing to the deterioration of the natural water cycle. These trends are interfering with the predictability of precipitation and the availability of clean water. Additionally, rising temperatures and more extreme weather patterns are causing more flooding and droughts.

"As a business with a long heritage of nature protection and water stewardship, we want to go beyond the conservation of water sources to help regenerate and restore water cycles in the areas where we operate," said Cedric Egger, Head of Sustainability at Nestle Waters. "We know the water challenge is global, but it can only be tackled through local solutions. Now is the time to expand the scope of our actions. With Nestle's presence around the world, we can learn from our many partners and contribute to solving the water challenges in the locations near our operations."

Nestle's work will be tailored to individual locations, needs and issues and will take a broader approach, going beyond its own operations. The company will work with local water users, communities, partners and global experts to identify, develop and progress projects specific to those challenges. As a founding member of the 2030 Water Resources Group (2030 WRG), Nestle has a history of collaborating with leaders and experts from the public, private and civil society sectors to help design solutions for sustainable water management. The company will apply its experience and learnings from the 2030 WRG as well as from its many other partnerships in the implementation of the more than 100 water projects outlined above.

All projects will be measurable, using the World Resources Institute's Volumetric Water Benefit Accounting (VWBA) methodology. This methodology provides consistency in analyzing water management activities and helps to ensure that such activities address current and future shared water challenges.

Using this methodology, a newly created external panel will review the relevance and sustainability of the projects and give feedback on whether they are helping to address the local challenges and opportunities. Nestle Waters will provide full transparency on the water usage at each of its sites and on what its projects contribute to the area.

Contacts:

Media:

Christoph Meier

mediarelations@nestle.com



Investors:

Luca Borlini

ir@nestle.com

Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1553610/NESTLE_Logo.jpg
Quinyx and EduMe join forces to optimize deskless workers' performance through mobile onboarding, contextual training and seamless workforce management.

LONDON, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Quinyx and EduMe today announced an all-new partnership where they will integrate to support business growth and reduce costs, by better serving the informational needs of the 2.7 billion strong global deskless workforce across industries such as on-demand, logistics, hospitality and retail.

These individuals represent 80% of the world's workforce, yet just 56% are engaged enough to succeed at work, leading to poorer business results like: lower profitability, productivity, higher absenteeism, turnover, quality defects and safety-related compensation claims. In contrast, when empowered with the information they need to succeed, deskless workers can excel, facilitating the success of the whole, or 'Workforce Success'.

Quinyx's leading AI-powered workforce management software makes the complex tasks of scheduling, time reporting, communicating, budgeting and forecasting deskless workers simple. EduMe's mobile-based training tool ensures role-relevant knowledge is put into the hands of those who need it, when they need it, improving the productivity, retention and safety & compliance of workforces worldwide. Existing clients of the two platforms include brands like Hilton Hotels, McDonalds, Starbucks, Uber, Gopuff, Deliveroo and Vodafone.

The integration will see leading mobile training tool EduMe embedded within Quinyx's workforce management tool, facilitating a seamless journey in which deskless workers can stay organized and in-the-know from day one, with accessible and contextual information that enables them to become operational faster, elevate their on-the-job performance and ensure safety results.

Jacob Waern, Founder and CEO of EduMe said: "We're more than excited to be entering this partnership with Quinyx. The deskless workforce worldwide is on the rise, but are deprived of the tools to excel in their roles. EduMe's mobile-based training platform gives individuals seamless access to relevant knowledge in the flow of their working day, which appears contextually within Quinyx's platform. Together, our complementary solutions ensure modern businesses remain competitive and achieve Workforce Success, by improving productivity, reducing turnover and ensuring their large, distributed workforces are operating in a safe and compliant manner."

Erik Fjellborg, CEO and Founder of Quinyx added: "We're very excited about our partnership with EduMe. At Quinyx, we're committed to creating a better work life for as many people as possible. By entering this partnership with EduMe, we will be able to not only offer organizations the opportunity to seamlessly manage their workforce, but also to enjoy the benefits of EduMe's mobile-based training platform. For fast-growing and forward thinking organizations, implementing our complementary solutions will be a strategic decision that will lead to great benefits and help deliver business growth."

About EduMe

EduMe is a mobile-based training platform for the deskless workforce, used by modern companies in more than 50 countries worldwide. By providing their workforce with seamless access to relevant knowledge, companies like Uber, GoPuff, Deliveroo, Deloitte and Vodafone are enabling their people to achieve Workforce Success. EduMe is headquartered in London, UK with an office in Palo Alto, USA. Visit us at www.edume.com to learn more.

About Quinyx

Quinyx is a leading AI-powered workforce management software that makes the complex tasks of scheduling, time reporting, communicating, budgeting, and forecasting deskless workers simple. Quinyx helps companies around the world reduce labor costs, remain compliant, and improve workforce efficiency - all the while boosting their bottom line, employee satisfaction, and retention. Quinyx provides solutions that save time and money to some of the world's biggest companies like McDonald's, Sysco, Hilton, Virgin Atlantic, DHL, Maersk.

Matthew Brew, matthew.brew@edume.com, +44-203-984-7250
Avast uncovers regional cybercrime differences across the UK, following research with the University of Birmingham

- London and Wales most affected by cybercrime while the north of England reports significantly lower levels of victimisation

- Findings draw attention to a gap in cybercrime perception versus reality in the UK with several regions underestimating the actual levels of cybercrime

LONDON, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Findings from an academic study between Avast (LSE:AVST), a global leader in digital security and privacy, and the research division of the Centre for Crime, Justice and Policing, University of Birmingham , indicate that people living in London and Wales experience higher levels of cybercrime compared to the rest of the UK. Over the past 12 months, Avast has been working with the University of Birmingham to create a Cyber Vulnerability Index for the UK which assesses the regional differences in cyber-related crime across the country to better understand where cybercrime hotspots exist.

The following list shows the worst and least affected regions, along with the corresponding percentage of victimisation levels. Victimisation refers to the percentage of people who have been impacted by cybercrime:

1: London - 72%

1: Wales - 72%

2: Northern Ireland - 67%

3: Scotland - 63%

3: South West - 63%

4: West Midlands - 62%

5: East Midlands - 21%

6: East Anglia - 18%

6: South East - 18%

7: North East - 14%

8: Yorkshire & Lincolnshire - 8%

9: North West - 6%

The research forms part of Cyberhood Watch , a grassroots cybercrime prevention initiative between Avast and Neighbourhood Watch, that aims to help people protect themselves online and feel confident using the internet. The Cyber Vulnerability Index, which will be used to determine where Cyberhood Watch support is most critical, identifies the proportion of adults who have been impacted by cybercrime, such as having their personal data or identity stolen in a breach, or falling victim to an online scam. The University of Birmingham created this index after analysing data from an Ofcom survey on internet concerns among more than 2,000 people in the UK.

There are stark differences between some regions in the UK, with 72% of adults in London and Wales having experienced cybercrime, compared to just 6% in the North West. In fact, the ranking points towards a North-South divide, with those in the North not appearing to suffer from cybercrime to the same extent as those in the South. The findings also show an East-West gap in the Midlands; 62% of adults in the West Midlands have fallen victim to cyber-related crime as opposed to just 21% in the East.

Commenting on the victimisation findings, John Hayward-Cripps, CEO of Neighbourhood Watch, said, "There will be multiple reasons why the level of cybercrime victimisation differs from region to region. What we know for sure is that opportunistic cybercriminals are indiscriminate in who they target, and as our lives become more digitised, more people are likely to be affected by an increasing number of attempted attacks. Our Cyberhood Watch initiative exists to educate and protect people from cybercrime with on-the-ground support in local communities so that we can prevent it from spreading and adversely affecting unsuspecting people."

The Cyber Vulnerability Index also highlights the levels of cybercrime perception in the UK. This ranking shows the percentage of adults in the UK who register high levels of concern about using the internet, recognise potential online dangers, and don't trust that organisations are doing enough to keep their data safe. Overall, the research shows very low levels of perception across the country:

1: West Midlands - 42%

2: South West - 39%

2: East Anglia - 39%

3: Scotland - 36%

3: Wales - 36%

3: London - 36%

4: Northern Ireland - 35%

5: North East - 31%

5: South East - 31%

6: East Midlands - 30%

7: North West - 26%

8: Yorkshire & Lincolnshire - 24%

The findings show a perception versus reality gap in the UK, with regions falling into two distinct groups. Those living in the West Midlands, London, Wales, Scotland, South West and Northern Ireland appear to underestimate the threat, with their levels of perception much lower than actual rates of cybercrime. By contrast, those in the South East, North West, East Midlands, North West and Yorkshire & Lincolnshire, overestimated the threat in comparison to their levels of victimisation.

"For some people, there can be an unwillingness to report certain cyber incidents and for others there's a lack of understanding of how to do so. These could be contributing factors, however it's clear that more needs to be done to prevent cybercrime and raise awareness of its presence at a hyper-local level," said Pete Turner, Consumer Security Expert at Avast. "Cyberhood Watch exists to stop cybercrime from spreading throughout our local communities and to help people, particularly vulnerable groups, feel confident using the internet. It's important that we continue to educate individuals on how to overcome false senses of security that could be contributing to this apparent disconnect between the perception and reality of cybercrime."

Formed in 2019, Cyberhood Watch is a joint grassroots initiative between Avast and Neighbourhood Watch that aims to help vulnerable people in local communities become more cyber secure. The programme, led by local Cyberhood Watch Ambassadors, includes a training and accreditation scheme for Neighbourhood Watch representatives, downloadable guides and resources, and ongoing sharing of information about emerging threats.

For more information, please visit the Cyberhood Watch website: https://www.avast.com/uk-cyberhood

About Avast:

Avast (LSE:AVST), a FTSE 100 company, is a global leader in digital security and privacy. With over 435 million users online, Avast offers products under the Avast and AVG brands that protect people from threats on the internet and the evolving IoT threat landscape. The company's threat detection network is among the most advanced in the world, using machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies to detect and stop threats in real time. Avast digital security products for Mobile, PC or Mac are top-ranked and certified by VB100, AV-Comparatives, AV-Test, SE Labs and others. Avast is a member of Coalition Against Stalkerware, No More Ransom and Internet Watch Foundation. Visit: www.avast.com.

Keep in touch with Avast:

Follow us on Twitter: @Avast_antivirus

For security and privacy insights, visit the Avast blog:https://blog.avast.com/

For handy guides, advice and tips, visit Avast Academy: https://www.avast.com/c-academy

Join our LinkedIn community: https://www.linkedin.com/avast

Visit our Facebook group: www.facebook.com/avast

Editor's Note and Methodology

1) The University of Birmingham created this index for Avast after analysing data from an Ofcom survey on internet concerns among more than 2,000 people in the UK. The Cyber Vulnerability Index has been created by distilling questions from this survey; we classify the questions into five categories relating to consumers' understanding, usage, and knowledge of the cyber-world to develop the Cyber Vulnerability Index and report the mean frequencies within each category of questions. The five categories are: confidence, perception of risk, actual victimisation, cyber-usage, and active protection.

2) Definition of experiencing cybercrime: Experienced any of the following at-least on a monthly basis when using the internet, which has had a high impact on them: harmful or misleading advertising; stalking /cyberstalking (harassment from other internet users); people pretending to be another person; bullying, abusive behaviour or threats; personal data being processed without knowledge / consent; people or organisations collecting data in unclear ways for commercial reasons; personal information being stolen / hacked; scams / fraud; private information being made public (e.g. photos); viruses / trojans / worms / spyware / malicious software.

Media contact:

pr@avast.com

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Girard Takes Helm During Time of Unprecedented Growth for the Company

The board of directors of EfficientIP, a leader in network automation and DDI, is pleased to announce that it has named Norman Girard as its new Chief Executive Officer, effective June 28, 2021. He will also become a member of the board of directors. Girard, a customer-focused and energetic business leader, brings more than 20 years of experience in cybersecurity, networking, driving revenue growth, and scaling organizations at an international level; he aims to continue building EfficientIP as a leader in the secure DDI (DNS-DHCP-IPAM) space. He succeeds David Williamson, who has retired.

"I am very happy with the arrival of Norman, who should enable EfficientIP to accelerate its strategic development and technological leadership," says Thierry Drilhon, Chairman of the Board. "His knowledge of the market, his operational experience and his leadership are all assets in creating value for the benefit of customers, employees, partners, and shareholders."

Girard comes to the role from thirteen years at Varonis, a company focused on cybersecurity and data protection. Beginning first as a Managing Director for Southern Europe, Girard's strong sense of urgency and attention to detail led him to launch operations for a continental sales team. As Vice President and General Manager for Continental Europe, he built an $80M business and attracted over 2,000 new customers.

"It is an honor for me to join EfficientIP, and I want to thank the board of directors for their trust," Girard says. "I especially want to applaud the hard work of the team led by David Williamson, who was able to build the foundation for a sustainable, profitable business and create an international leader in the DDI space. I will do my best to maintain the amazing culture that has been established, and to lead the management, the strategic direction and execution of the EfficientIP vision."

Prior to Varonis, Girard was the Sales Director and General Manager for EMEA of Blue Lane Technologies (later acquired by VMWare). He also served as Technical Product Manager for Qualys, the Vulnerability Management Leader, and helped the company grow from ten customers to more than 2,500.

Girard comes to EfficientIP at an auspicious time. The company posted one of its strongest years on record in 2020, with 69% overall global growth for the year and nearly doubling its 2020 Q4 numbers from 2019 Q4. In 2021 so far, Q1 has shown a 39% increase in bookings from the same period in 2020.

Girard succeeds David Williamson, who had been the CEO of EfficientIP for twelve years. "I am very confident handing the role of CEO over to Norman," Williamson says. "It has been a fantastic journey! With great dedication and commitment from all teams, we managed to develop EfficientIP into a first-class player in the DDI market. I want to thank all members of the EfficientIP family for their hard work and contribution, and I am confident that Norman will lead EfficientIP to its next success."

Girard holds a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science from the University of Paris.

ABOUT EFFICIENTIP

EfficientIP is a network automation and security company, specializing in DNS-DHCP-IPAM solutions (DDI), with the goal of helping organizations worldwide drive business efficiency through agile, secure and reliable infrastructure foundations. We enable IP communication and simplify network management with end-to-end visibility and smart automation, while our patented technology secures DNS services to safeguard data and ensure application access. Companies in all sectors rely on our offerings to face the challenges of key IT initiatives such as cloud applications and mobility. For further information, please visit: www.efficientip.com

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005179/en/

Contacts:

APCO Worldwide for EfficientIP

In US:

Hajar Mahmoud

hmahmoud@apcoworldwide.com

In UK:

Nesta Smith

nsmith@apcoworldwide.com
New dataset offers a more comprehensive view of capital flows when combined with EPFR mutual fund and ETF database

BOSTON, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- EPFR, a subsidiary of Informa Financial Intelligence and worldwide industry leader in providing fund flows and allocation data to financial institutions, announces its Hedge Fund Flows dataset. The new offering applies EPFR's core competency in a combined database between EPFR and partner, Backstop BarclayHedge, delivering clients investment insights from a particularly discrete investor type.

The dataset provides non-estimated fund flow calculations at the fund level, offering a precise proxy of investor sentiment and hedge fund activity, and granularity to derive better insights. When viewed alongside EPFR's mutual fund and ETF data that tracks $48 trillion in global capital flows, Hedge Fund Flows offers investors a more complete view of market drivers supporting investment and risk management decisions.

"Our clients have expressed significant interest in hedge fund analysis, and we're pleased to bring Hedge Fund Flows to market with the support of our Backstop BarclayHedge partner," said Cameron Brandt, Director of Research at EPFR. "EPFR has a long-standing history of empowering investors with timely fund flows and allocations insights, and this new offering continues that mission, helping clients make more informed investment decisions."

BarclayHedge has been collecting hedge fund performance data for more than 30 years and is recognized as a trusted source of fund performance information helping allocators make better fund selection decisions.

"Providing clients with hedge fund performance benchmarks and analytics is core to our business," said Sol Waksman, President at Backstop BarclayHedge. "We are excited to collaborate with EPFR to better service the wider investment community with this new fund flows dataset. EPFR is recognized as a market leader and is a valued partner in this new product launch."

Hedge Fund Flows is the latest addition in a suite of offerings that includes EPFR's Fund Flows and Allocations, China Share Class Allocations and FX Allocations datasets. For additional information about Hedge Fund Flows, please visit: https://financialintelligence.informa.com/epfr-hedge-fund-flows-data.

About EPFR:

EPFR, a subsidiary of Informa plc (LSE: INF), provides fund flows and asset allocation data to financial institutions around the world. Tracking over 133,700 traditional and alternative funds domiciled globally with more than $48 trillion in total assets, we deliver a complete picture of institutional and retail investor flows and fund manager allocations driving global markets. Our market moving data services include daily, weekly and monthly equity and fixed income fund flows and monthly fund allocations by country, sector and industry. For more information, please visit https://financialintelligence.informa.com/epfr.

EPFR, a division of Financial Intelligence, part of the Informa Intelligence Division of Informa plc, is a leading provider of products and services helping financial institutions around the world cut through the noise and take decisive action. For more information, visit https://financialintelligence.informa.com .

About Backstop BarclayHedge

BarclayHedge, a division of Backstop, currently maintains data on more than 7,100 hedge funds, funds of funds and CTAs. The BarclayHedge Indices are utilized by institutional investors, brokerage firms and private banks worldwide as performance benchmarks for the hedge fund and managed futures industries.

MEDIA CONTACT:

Zach Allegretti, JConnelly

973-850-7341

zallegrettiII@jconnelly.com

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The Internet-safety news website's latest listicle informs readers of the world's largest data breaches and advice on how businesses and individuals can stay safe against cybercrime. This comes at the right juncture, with much of the world inevitably being vulnerable to cyber attackers while transacting online today.

IPOH, MALAYSIA / ACCESSWIRE / June 29, 2021 / HideandSeek.online (HideandSeek), an investigative website for Internet safety, announced that it has released a comprehensive list of 33 biggest data breaches and hacks the world has seen in the past 21 years. The catalogue gives an account of the cyber hacks of the biggest companies across the East and West and across industries, including the UK National Health Service (NHS), Sina Weibo, Marriott International, Netflix, and Yahoo, amongst others. In light of today's hyper-digital and virtually connected societies, HideandSeek also cracks down on the protection measures that businesses and individuals should take to reduce the risk of being cyberattacked.

The UK NHS, being the latest data hack of this year, starts the list countdown that contains the data breaches of companies ranging from the healthcare sector and the hospitality industry to social networking services. HideandSeek uncovers when the hacks occurred in its compilation, how many people were affected by it, and what information was stolen or left untouched. For example, it reports that Sina Weibo, China's equivalent of Twitter, had its systems breached in 2020, wherein 538 million users had their real names, location, and phone numbers posted for sale on dark web markets, but password data did not land in the hackers' hands.

For more information, visit https://hideandseek.online/internet-safety/the-biggest-data-breaches-hacks-since-2000/

An excerpt of its report on Marriott International's 2018 hack follows:

'Impact: 500 million customers. This data breach initially occurred on systems supporting Starwood hotel brands in 2014. However, attackers remained in the system even after Marriott acquired Starwood in 2016 and were only discovered in September 2018. Stolen information included names, email and physical addresses,... Even worse was the loss of hashed credit card information; credit card numbers and their expiration dates. The breach was attributed to a Chinese intelligence group seeking to gather data on US citizens.'

HideandSeek also notes Yahoo's cyber hack of 2013 and 2016, which compromised personal information like the actual names, email addresses, and passwords of 3 billion users.

'Online security needs to be taken seriously. Cyber attacks are getting more and more common these days because many businesses and individuals are coming online. It's no longer a matter of if, but when, our systems or personal information lands in the hands of cyber attackers. A lot of our digital footprint can be traced easily, no matter how secure we think we are, because these hackers are very sophisticated,' said Jerry, Founder of HideandSeek.online.

According to a report from credit-rating organisation Fitch Ratings, cyber insurance premiums in the United States recorded a 22% annual gain in 2020 and totalled around US$3 billion. Furthermore, the 2020 World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report listed cyber attacks on critical infrastructure as a top concern.

In its article, HideandSeek educates its readers on how data breaches can occur, such as phishing, SQL injection, and malware. The company also informs readers about what they can do to minimise such risk, like using anti-malware software, keeping good security habits of resetting passwords after certain periods of usage and using a business VPN..

Aside from this, HideandSeek consistently provides quality investigative research on Internet safety and online privacy. Some of its best work includes 'Countries where VPNs are illegal,' 'VPN vs Proxy: What's the Difference?', and 'What Does Facebook Know about Me?'.

About the Site:

HideandSeek.online offers in-depth investigations and tips on Internet safety, data protection, and censorship.

#

Contact Information

Name: Jerry

Company: HideandSeek.online

Address: 2 Jalan SCI 6/3, 31150, Ipoh, Perak, Malaysia

Email: support@hideandseek.online

SOURCE: HideandSeek.online

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/653516/Hideandseekonline-Curates-the-Biggest-Data-Breaches-Since-2000-Advises-Businesses-and-Individuals-on-How-to-Stay-Cyber-Safe
BRUSSELS (dpa-AFX) - At 4.30 am ET Tuesday, the Bank of England has released mortgage approvals data for May. The pound changed little against its major counterparts after the data. The pound was trading at 153.34 against the yen, 1.3847 against the greenback, 0.8597 against the euro and 1.2750 against the franc around 4:35 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.
SAN FRANCISCO, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Novakid Inc, an emerging EdTech brand reinventing learning English as a second language for children ages 4-12, was ranked number 1 among online ESL platforms for children that serve European market in the study (https://json.tv/en/ict_telecom_analytics_view/english-language-learning-market-2021-esl-for-kids-online-schools-and-trends) by the research company J'son & Partners.

The study was conducted in March-June 2021, it estimates the total global online ESL learning market to be worth $10 billion in 2021, and its segment for children of all ages worth $3 billion. In 2021, the market for English language learning (traditional offline and online learning) hit a record of 1.7 billion learners. The largest ESL markets in Europe are Germany, France and Russia, whereas Russia, Turkey and Ukraine have the smallest share of English speakers (12-16%).

Novakid was ranked 1st in Europe according to the number of active students, student satisfaction level, teacher education level and teachers' experience.

"The popularity of online ESL training for children has increased significantly since the pandemic began", says Maxim Azarov, founder and CEO of Novakid, "It is still growing, and is poised to continue to grow exponentially. We believe this is a consequence of the wider availability of quality online English learning platforms, the expansion of career opportunities for those with a good command of the English language, which is a modern lingua franca with nearly 20 percent of the world's population speaking it, and an increase in remote working. As linguistic research demonstrates, one needs to start learning a language as a child to achieve a high level of fluency. We at Novakid believe that a world where children are able to use a common tongue to communicate and exchange ideas will lead to more peace and more prosperity for all".

About Novakid

Novakid is an online ESL learning IT-platform offering individual lessons with native speaking certified teachers for children ages 4-12 with AI-assisted data extraction and analysis. Incorporated in the US, it has students in over 40 countries, focussing on Europe and MENA with major customer base in Poland, Spain, Italy, Germany, Turkey and Russia. https://www.novakidschool.com

About J'son & Partners

J'son & Partners is an investment and strategic advisor and research company on technology markets (Hi Tech / ICT / IT / Digital). It has a wide network of partners, and over 20 years experience in technology and digital markets. https://json.tv

https://youtu.be/zYjjYmlzx_c

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LONDON, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Markel Corporation (NYSE: MKL) announced today that Simon Wilson will become the next President of Markel International, a wholly-owned subsidiary. He will succeed William Stovin who has led the Markel International division since 2008. The transition is part of a planned succession that will fully take effect no later than January 1, 2022, pending regulatory approval.

Stovin joined Markel as part of the acquisition of Terra Nova Holdings, Ltd. in 2000. The deal was part of a long-term strategy to expand Markel's footprint beyond North America to become a global player in specialty insurance. Toward that end, Stovin played a leading role in helping Markel expand to more than 60 insurance offices in 16 different countries. Under Stovin's leadership, gross written premiums profitably increased at a compound annual growth rate of roughly seven percent-more than doubling the size of the division.

"Markel is a truly remarkable company, and having the opportunity to help expand it to new frontiers has been a great honour. I will always admire this organisation, and I know that Markel International will be in great hands under Simon's leadership," Stovin said.

Robert Cox, President and Chief Operating Officer of Insurance Operations for Markel, commented, "Our global expansion was one of the most important decisions in Markel's history, and William deserves significant credit for making it a success. His disciplined approach to profitably growing our wholesale business while also establishing and expanding our international retail operations has laid the foundation for tremendous growth in the future, and I'm confident that Simon will leverage this foundation to successfully lead our international operations in achieving our profitable growth goals."

Wilson comes to the position with nearly 20 years of experience scaling the international operations of large specialty insurance organisations. He joined Markel in 2010 to spearhead international business development, and he was the primary architect of the National Markets division with operations in Europe and Canada, which profitably grew from $121 million to $402 million in annual gross written premium over the last decade. Wilson currently serves as the Managing Executive of Global Strategy for Markel. Prior to joining Markel, he led the Lloyd's Asia platform in Singapore.

"I'm honoured to have been selected for this role, and look forward to building upon William's legacy. Markel seeks to be a leader in each of our pursuits, and our 90-year history has proven that the best way to do this is through deep expertise and exceptional service. Our commitment to understand our customers' needs while exceeding their expectations will continue to be at the forefront of our minds as we further scale our international operations," Wilson said.

Wilson will report to Cox and work from the London office. Stovin will remain with the company in an advisory capacity into next year.

About Markel

Markel Corporation is a diverse financial holding company serving a variety of niche markets. The company's principal business markets and underwrites specialty insurance products. In each of the Company's businesses, it seeks to provide quality products and excellent customer service so that it can be a market leader. The financial goals of the company are to earn consistent underwriting and operating profits and superior investment returns to build shareholder value. Markel is a registered trademark of the Markel Corporation. Visit Markel on the web at markel.com.

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Professor Sir Alimuddin Zumla receives prestigious tropical sciences recognition in London

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- It was a slew of firsts as Professor Sir Alimuddin Zumla received his prize as the recipient of the 2020 Mahathir Science Award (MSA), the most prestigious international science award for Tropical Sciences. This is the first time a recipient of the Award has been presented with the prize abroad as Sir Alimuddin received the prize at the Malaysian High Commission in London, where he lives. In previous years, the prize has been presented by the Malaysian King in a private ceremony in Malaysia.

This year's prizegiving ceremony, which was officiated by the former Malaysian Prime Minister Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, was also the first time the ceremony was held virtually and broadcast live.

Sir Alimuddin has been awarded the Mahathir Science Award in Tropical Medicine in recognition of his outstanding contributions to global health, particularly in tropical infectious diseases. His research and capacity development work across multiple countries have allowed for improved health policy and outcomes for people suffering from tuberculosis, TB/HIV co-infections and infectious diseases with epidemic potential.

Sir Alimuddin, who was born and raised in Zambia, is currently a Professor of Infectious Diseases and International Health at University College London, UK and Consultant Infectious Diseases Physician at UCL Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, London.

Utilizing his extensive experience in infectious diseases and global collaboration, he also played a role in initiating multidisciplinary collaborative research, capacity building, training and advocacy projects for COVID-19 with collaborators from China, Portugal, Italy, France, Ireland, Africa and the Middle East.

In his acceptance speech for the award, Sir Alimuddin said that individual efforts do not win prizes and medals.

"Throughout my career, I've been fortunate enough to work with thousands of wonderful people worldwide. The Award of the very prestigious Mahathir Science Award to me, reflects the commitment, dedication and hard work of my research teams, collaborators and friends across the world," he said.

Nominees for the Mahathir Science Award go through a rigorous selection process modelled on the Nobel Prize (scientific) selection procedures to ensure that the Award is presented to the best candidate. MSA Laureates receive USD100,000, a solid gold medal and a certificate as their prize.

Click here to view the event video.

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Orbit Discovery Ltd ("Orbit"), a biopharmaceutical company focused on discovering candidate peptide therapeutics using high throughput microfluidic platforms, has announced the appointment of Dr Neil Butt as Chief Executive Officer.

With an extensive track record in commercialising proprietary drug discovery platforms, Dr Butt joins Orbit to oversee the Company's development into a service driven drug discovery company, with a focus on identifying candidate peptides against challenging targets, such as G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs).

Prior to joining Orbit, Dr Butt most recently served as on the board and as Chief Business Officer of IONTAS, a privately held company exploiting mammalian display technology in the discovery of novel antibodies with inherent biophysical properties that align with speedy progression through manufacturing. The Company was sold to FairJourney Biologics in 2021 to create a global antibody discovery service company. Before that, as head of business development, he was part of the management team that took Abzena onto The London AIM market. Following this IPO, Abzena acquired two US companies to create the foundations of the current CDMO. Prior to Abzena, Dr Butt was head of business development and part of the executive management team at Antitope, which resulted in the sale of Antitope to Polytherics, with the joint parties then rebranding as Abzena.

"Neil is an accomplished biotech leader across all the areas and competencies that are required to run a successful business. His extensive experience in commercialising platform technologies, as well as his track record in growing and expanding service-based biotech companies, will be critical as we enter a new stage of growth for Orbit Discovery," said Dr Tom McCarthy, Chairman of Orbit Discovery. "On behalf of the entire Orbit team, I welcome Neil and look forward to his contributions."

Dr Neil Butt, CEO Orbit Discovery, said: "I believe Orbit Discovery is poised to exploit the challenging area of membrane spanning therapeutic peptides and proteins. The technology platform the team has developed is ideal for functional screening, which is a critical technology gap in optimising the drug discovery process and reducing risk in finding suitable leads for later development. I am looking forward to the challenges ahead and working with a team of talented and dedicated scientists."

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005525/en/

Contacts:

For high-resolution images please contact Zyme Communications.

Zyme Communications

Lorna Cuddon

Tel: +44(0)7811 996 942

Email: lorna.cuddon@zymecommunications.com
Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO) 's new insider guide to Japan features things to do and see that will sooth your soul. These contents are associated with the "Wellcation" concept that helps visitors relieve stress and anxiety arising from difficulties of the past year.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005546/en/

Photo courtesy of Moerenuma Park

Japan is often associated with big cities like Tokyo and Osaka, but 70% of Japan's topography is comprised of dense forests and mountainous terrain. Leveraging this landscape, Japan has long excelled at harmoniously mixing art and nature, with countless open-air art facilities across the archipelago showcasing a cornucopia of sculptures and installations. Among them is Moerenuma Park, a municipal facility (part of Sapporo City's Circular Greenbelt Concept) with a landscape dreamed up by artist Noguchi Isamu.

Visiting Upopoy in Shiraoi Town, Hokkaido Prefecture is another way to discover Japan's beautiful nature. This new national center celebrates and showcases the culture of the Ainu, the indigenous people of northern Japan and first settlers of Hokkaido. Upopoy, which means "singing in large groups" in the Ainu language, is a landmark project for the Ainu population. Surrounded by dense forests and adjacent to Poroto Lake, the National Ainu Park is an open-air museum where Ainu culture, including traditional dance performances and an array of hands-on activities and programs, overlaps with nature.

For those desiring a spiritual experience, Mount Koya may be the perfect place to go. This sacred religious site is the 9th-century birthplace of Japan's Shingon sect of Buddhism, and home to numerous Buddhist temples.

Mount Koya offers highly unique overnight stays at temples, known as Shukubo, where guests can follow in the footsteps of centuries old tradition of monks and pilgrims by checking into around 50 different temples. Shukubo is among Japan's most esoteric and stoic experiences, offering rare insights into the daily lives of Buddhist clergy, including their vegetarian meals and close-up views of cultural treasures used in their religious practices.

Below are some stories featured in the JNTO's New Insider Guide.

No.4: Japan, for All Five Senses

Whisky Trails

All about Ainu at Upopoy

Foodie Hiroshima Region

Full stories are available here.

No.5: Japan, Where Life is an Art

Echigo Tsumari Art Triennale

Open-air museums across Japan

The Charm of Japanese Tea

Full stories are available here.

No.6: Japan, Don't Miss Out

Shinkansen Deeply Connected with the Tokyo Olympics

Magic of Mount Koya

Tottori Sand Dunes

Full stories are available here.

JNTO website: https://www.japan.travel/en/

Media center: https://business.jnto.go.jp/

JNTO believes that our time apart will make travel experiences all the more exciting once cross-border travel is resumed. We look forward to seeing you in Japan.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005546/en/

Contacts:

Asuka Suzuki

Dentsu Public Relations for JNTO

media_inquiry@jnto.go.jp
NEW YORK, NY and SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA / ACCESSWIRE / June 29, 2021 / SUIC QQPay USA Inc., a rising fintech startup based in New York and led by Sino United Worldwide Consolidated Ltd. (OTC:SUIC) and QQ Pay Pty Ltd., Australia, is set to launch QQ Fintech Payment Platform, its Shari'a-compliant non-bank cross border payment platform supported by its proprietary fintech programs and solutions.

SUIC QQPay USA Inc. collaborates with QQ Fintech Pte Ltd. of Singapore to lead the group's expansion plans with unique value proposition in penetrating the cross-border payment space. This designated payment platform is a mature and fully-fledged ecosystem that culminates in the creation of Shari'a- compliant fintech services, bringing innovation into Islamic capital markets and Takaful payment experiences.

Co-Founder and the group CEO, Maninder Bhullar, highlighted that "QQ Fintech is launching the world's first Shari'a compliant non-bank cross border payment platform by July this year and is well poised to take on a sizeable market share in the global halal economy arena."

Strategically located in Australia, Canada, USA, Singapore, and Malaysia, SUIC QQPay USA Inc. and partner QQ Fintech Pte Ltd. designed a unified fintech payment platform to serve the global halal economy which is estimated to grow to $3 trillion by 2024 at a cumulative annual growth rate (CAGR) of 3.1 percent, as more opportunities arise in terms of tokenization of sukuks (Islamic bonds) within Islamic fintech, supply chain shifts, food security investments, nutraceutical demand, domestic tourism, and accelerated digital transformations. Source: State of the Global Islamic Economy Report 2020/2021 https://www.icricinternational.org/state-of-the-global-islamic-economy-2020-21-report-is-published/

QQ Fintech will launch a consistent payment system and solutions suited to the differing policies and infrastructure involved in moving value from financial institutions to the end beneficiaries, country to country, as much of the global consumers remain unbanked and do not easily have access to Shari'a based financial services. The platform will be an alternative to the existing Shari'a banks that have monopolized the market and customers now have a choice to leverage on fintech solutions and innovation adopted for the Shari'a market segment.

Faizel Ismail, Co-Founder and the Chief Expansion Officer of QQ Fintech, stated, "SUIC QQPay USA Inc stands a very good chance in making inroads to a niche SME market segment that previously had no choice. By adhering to Shari'a principles, the company is going to set standards for rolling out the novel concept of "Shariatization" of an economy segment where growth of digital financial services would exclusively cater to millions of Muslims around the world. Financial services are further being innovated from the ground level by leveraging modern technology with core traditional values kept intact to serve this market segment."

QQ Fintech offers multiple locations to reach more Muslim consumers across the globe that can narrow the significant gap in the halal economy among the under-represented Muslim SME's and financial service providers. In addition, Islamic social finance (Zakat, Sadaqah, and Waqf) can utilize our fast and convenient, safe and secure platforms to contribute towards poverty alleviation in their regions. This will create greater cross-border interoperability among its local operating networks, even in far-flung rural areas, and at the same time to override a complicated web of legacy systems by adopting blockchain.

About QQ Pay Pty Ltd., Australia

QQ Pay Pty Ltd is incorporated in Australia and has attained the independent remittance dealer registration with Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre, AUSTRAC that allows it to perform cross border transactions in Australia with the rest of the world. With the passion to expand as a leading global company and carrying the flag of its proprietary QQ Pay payment platform, QQ Pay Pty Ltd. operates in Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia.

For further information, please visit www.qqpay.com.au

About QQ Fintech Pte. Ltd., Singapore

QQ Fintech Pte Ltd. is focused in Fintech and technology driven services mainly by innovating traditional financial services where digitalization gaps still vastly exist. QQ Fintech has a clear vision to enable better and efficient financial services for the financial delivery system. For any queries or further information you may email them at info@qqpay.com.au

About Sino United Worldwide Consolidated Ltd., USA

The Sino United Worldwide Consolidated Ltd. provides research and development, venture financing for and investing in private enterprises and the public sector that develop products and services adopting core capabilities of the Internet of Things, cloud computing, mobile payment, Big Data, Blockchain, and Artificial Intelligence, to enhance and streamline existing processes, and establish new and exciting business models that will create revolutionary products and services. Shareholders of SUIC will be exposed to the diverse application of advanced services in various parts of the economy. Additionally, existing and potential customers can benefit from this company's diversified portfolio of technologies. As one of the pioneering publicly traded technology companies, SUIC will help build tech-enabled businesses of the future. To learn more, please visit www.sinounitedco.com.

Forward-Looking Statement

Certain the information set forth herein contains 'forward-looking information', including 'future-oriented financial information'; and 'financial outlook' under applicable securities laws (collectively referred to herein as forward-looking statements). Except for statements of historical fact, the information contained herein constitutes forward-looking statements and includes, but is not limited to, the (i) projected financial performance of the Company; (ii) completion of, and the use of proceeds from, the sale of shares being offered hereunder; (iii) the expected development of the Company's business, projects, and joint ventures; (iv) execution of the Company's vision and growth strategy, including with respect to future M&A activity and global growth; (v) sources and availability of third-party financing for the Company's projects; (vi) completion of the Company's projects that are currently underway, in development, or otherwise under consideration; (vi) renewal of the Company's current agreements; and (vii) future liquidity, working capital, and capital requirements. Forward-looking statements are provided to allow potential investors the opportunity to understand management's beliefs and opinions in respect of the future so that they may use such beliefs and opinions as one factor in evaluating an investment.

These statements are not guarantees of future performance and undue reliance should not be placed on them. Such forward-looking statements necessarily involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, which may cause actual performance and financial results in future periods to differ materially from any projections of future performance or result expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements.

Although forward-looking statements contained herein are based upon what management of the Company believes are reasonable assumptions, there can be no assurance that forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. The Company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements if circumstances or 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.

Contacts

Sino United Worldwide Consolidated Ltd.

New Release Department

929-391-2550

SOURCE: Sino United Worldwide Consolidated Ltd.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/652624/SUIC-QQPay-USA-Inc-Sets-to-Launch-QQ-Fintech-Payment-Platform-Worlds-First-Sharia-Compliant-Non-Bank-Payment-Platform-with-Enhanced-Security-Transparency-Speed-and-Cost-Efficiency
New study demonstrates that individualised dosing with Rekovelle(follitropin delta) was comparable to conventional dosing with follitropin alfa in terms of ongoing pregnancy rate in a broad Asian population.1

Additional data relating to pre-defined secondary endpoints showed that individualised dosing with Rekovelle significantly increased live birth rates in normal and high responders.2 Moreover, a post hoc analysis of a randomised clinical trial found that Rekovelle and follitropin alfa dosing regimens were similar in terms of live birth rate in frozen replacement cycles.3

All data support previous findings showing that ovarian stimulation with the individualised Rekovelle dosing regimen reduced the risk of ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS) without compromising efficacy.1,2,4,5

New data, presented today at the 37th Annual Meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE), show a comparable ongoing pregnancy rate of 31.3% with the individualised dosing regimen of Rekovelle, compared to 25.7% with follitropin alfa (adjusted difference 5.4% [95% CI:-0.2%; 11.0%]) amongst all ages in an Asian study population (mainland China, South Korea, Vietnam and Taiwan). 1 The live birth rate was significantly higher at 31.3% with Rekovelle compared to 24.7% with follitropin alfa (adjusted difference 6.4% [95% CI: 0.9%; 11.9%]; p<0.05). This was a pre-defined secondary endpoint so no confirmatory conclusions can be drawn.1

In the GRAPE study (a randomised, controlled, assessor-blind pan-Asian trial comparing individualised Rekovelle (follitropin delta) with conventional follitropin alfa), comparable pregnancy rates were achieved alongside a significant reduction in early OHSS incidence (5.0% with Rekovelle versus 9.6% with follitropin alfa). Among patients with AMH =15 pmol/L, excessive response occurred less frequently with individualised than conventional dosing (=15 oocytes: 20.2% versus 39.1%; =20 oocytes: 6.7% versus 18.5%).1 These secondary data endpoints support previous studies which have found that individualised Rekovelle dosing reduces the risk of ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS) and interventions to prevent it versus the conventional approach.4,5

"These data imply that, in addition to reducing the early OHSS risk, individualised dosing with follitropin delta has the potential to increase the live birth rate in fresh cycle across all ages," said Professor Jie Qiao, Academician of Chinese academy of engineering, Vice President of China Association for science and technology, Executive Vice President of Peking University, Director of Peking University Health Science Center, President of Peking University Third Hospital, Academician of American Academy of Arts and Sciences (IHM). "The data offer for the first time important support for the use of this treatment in the Asian population."

A new, independent individual patient data meta-analysis (IPD-MA) of nearly 2,700 women randomised to a conventional dosing regimen with follitropin alfa or beta, or individualised dosing with Rekovelle, supports the above findings.2 The occurrence of early OHSS was significantly reduced in the individualised Rekovelle group (4% vs. 6.4%). The study found that live birth rates were comparable in individuals who received individualised Rekovelle treatment compared to those who received follitropin alfa or beta. Moreover, the live birth rate in normal to high responders was significantly increased in those receiving individualised Rekovelle (31.4% vs. 25.9%).2 "The results of the IPD-MA support previous data which has shown that an individualised follitropin delta dosing regimen reduces the risk of OHSS without compromising efficacy," said Dr Femi Janse of the Nij Barrahus Fertility Clinic. "They also offer insights for clinicians seeking to tailor their treatment approach for normal and high responder patients."

Additional analysis from the ESTHER-1 and 2 clinical trials also announced at this year's ESHRE show that Rekovelle and follitropin alfa dosing regimens were non-inferior in terms of live birth rate in frozen replacement cycles.3 The analysis of 917 women who participated in the ESTHER-1 and 2 trials found that the live birth rate per started frozen cycle was 32.0% in the Rekovelle group and 31.3% in the follitropin alfa group (adjusted difference 1.2% [95% CI: -6.8%; 9.3%]).3

At Ferring we believe in everyone's right to a family, so are pleased to announce emerging data showing the benefits of the individualised Rekovelle dosing regimen in new populations and patient groups," saidMirjam Mol-Arts, Chief Medical and Science Officer at Ferring. "In addition, the expanded AMH assay options now included in the EU label are additional features allowing expansion of current treatment boundaries."

About the GRAPE study1

GRAPE was a randomised, controlled, assessor-blind pan-Asian trial comparing individualised Rekovelle (follitropin delta) with conventional follitropin alfa. The primary endpoint was ongoing pregnancy rate assessed 10-11 weeks after transfer. The trial found an ongoing pregnancy rate per started cycle of 31.3% for individualised Rekovelle vs 25.7% for conventional follitropin alfa. The live birth rate per started cycle was significantly higher for individualised Rekovelle than for conventional follitropin alfa. Early OHSS risk, evaluated as the incidence of early OHSS and/or preventive interventions, was significantly reduced with Rekovelle.

About the meta-analysis2

This was an independent individual patient data meta-analysis (IPD-MA) of three Rekovelle (follitropin delta) phase 3 trials to investigate whether an individualised, weight and AMH-based dosing approach with Rekovelle improved live birth rate, safety and efficiency compared to conventional dosing in IVF ICSI. The study found that individualised dosing with Rekovelle was similarly effective in terms of live birth rate (with significantly higher live birth rates seen in normal to high responders) and reduced safety risks and total follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) dosage compared to conventional dosing in IVF/ICSI.

About the analysis of the ESTHER-1 and 2 trials3

This analysis reviewed frozen cycles using blastocysts obtained from a randomised trial comparing individualized dosing with Rekovelle (follitropin delta) versus conventional dosing with follitropin alfa in 1,326 IVF/ICSI patients (ESTHER-1), and a subsequent trial of up to two additional ovarian stimulation cycles (ESTHER-2), for women who did not achieve pregnancy in ESTHER-1. This analysis aimed to compare the live birth rate using frozen-thawed blastocysts obtained from ovarian stimulation with individualized Rekovelle dosing and conventional follitropin alfa dosing. The proportion of women with frozen blastocysts was similar in the two treatment groups. Similar freeze-thaw blastocyst survival rates were observed for the two groups, as were implantation rate and live birth rates.

About Rekovelle (follitropin delta)

Rekovelle is a human recombinant follicle stimulating hormone (rFSH) with an approved dosing algorithm designed for predictable ovarian response.6 It is the first rFSH derived from a human cell line (PER.C6cell line). Rekovelle is structurally and biochemically distinct from other existing rFSH gonadotrophins.6,7 Rekovelle is approved for use in ovarian stimulation (OS) for induction of the development of multiple follicles in women undergoing assisted reproductive technologies (ART), such as an in vitro fertilisation (IVF) or intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). The individualised dosing of Rekovelle is determined using an approved algorithm, based on a woman's anti-Mullerian hormone (AMH) level and body weight.4,6,8 AMH is a biomarker used to assess ovarian reserve and can help predict ovarian response. AMH will be measured with a companion diagnostic, the ELECSYS AMH Plus immunoassay from F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd (Roche), or alternatively the ACCESS AMH Advanced from Beckman Coulter or LUMIPULSE G AMH from Fujirebio.9,10

About Ferring Pharmaceuticals

Ferring Pharmaceuticals is a research-driven, specialty biopharmaceutical group committed to helping people around the world build families and live better lives. Headquartered in Saint-Prex, Switzerland, Ferring is a leader in reproductive medicine and maternal health, and in specialty areas within gastroenterology and urology. Ferring has been developing treatments for mothers and babies for over 50 years and has a portfolio covering treatments from conception to birth. Founded in 1950, privately-owned Ferring now employs around 6,000 people worldwide, has its own operating subsidiaries in nearly 60 countries and markets its products in 110 countries.

Learn more at www.ferring.com, or connect with us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube

References:

Qiao J, Zhang Y, Liang X, Ho T, Huang H-Y, Kim S-H, Goethberg M, Mannaerts B, and Arce J-C, on behalf of the Asian Follitropin Delta Phase 3 Trial (GRAPE) Group. A randomised controlled trial to clinically validate follitropin delta in its individualised dosing regimen for ovarian stimulation in Asian IVF/ICSI patients. Human Reproduction. June 2021. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/humrep/deab155 Janse F, Eijkemans M, Fauser B. Improved safety and efficiency of individualised versus conventional gonadotropin dosing for ovarian stimulation in IVF/ICSI: an individual patient meta-analysis (IPD-MA) Havelock J, Arce JC. Clinical outcome in frozen cycles using cryopreserved blastocysts derived from ovarian stimulation with follitropin Delta. Abstract presented at ESHRE 2021. Andersen AN et al. Individualized versus conventional ovarian stimulation for in vitro fertilization: a multicenter, randomized, controlled, assessor-blinded, phase 3 noninferiority trial. Fertil Steril. 2017;107(2):387-396. Isihara O. et al. Individualized follitropin delta dosing reduces OHSS risk in Japanese IVF/ICSI patients: a randomized controlled trial. eprod Biomed Online. 2021;42(5):909-918. Rekovelle Summmary of Product Characteristics. Date of publication 2016 12 [cited 14 June 2018]. Approved on 18 March 2021 and made available on the EMA website on 17 May 2021: http://www.ema.europa.eu/docs/en_GB/document_library/EPAR__Summary_for_the_public/human/003994/WC500220238.pdf. Olsson H, Sandstrom R, Grundemar L. Different pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic properties of recombinant follicle stimulating hormone (rFSH) derived from a human cell line compared with rFSH from a non-human cell line. Journal of Clinical Pharmacology. 2014 11 [cited 2018 Jun 14];54(11):1299-307. Arce JC, Nyboe Andersen A, Fernandez Sanchez M, et al. Ovarian response to recombinant human follicle stimulating hormone: a randomized, anti-Mullerian hormone-stratified, dose-response trial in women undergoing in vitro fertilization/intracytoplasmic sperm injection. Fertility and Sterility. 2014 12 [cited 2018 Jun 14];102(6):1633-164 Deeks ED. Elecsys AMH assay: a review in anti-Mullerian hormone quantification and assessment of ovarian reserve. Molecular Diagnosis Therapy. 2015 07 [cited 2018 Jun 14];19: 245-249. Roche Diagnostics. Elecsys AMH (anti-Mullerian hormone): Method sheet. (2015). Date of publication 2014 [cited 2018 Jun 14]. Available from: http://www.cobas.com/content/dam/cobas_com/pdf/product/Elecsys%20AMH/Elecsys%20AMH%20FactSheet.pdf.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005127/en/

Contacts:

For more information, please contact

Bhavin Vaid

Head of Corporate Communications

+41 58 301 0952 (direct)

+41 79 191 0632 (mobile)

bhavin.vaid@ferring.com

Lindsey Rodger

Senior Manager, Corporate Communications

+41 58 451 4023 (direct)

+41 79 191 0486 (mobile)

lindsey.rodger@ferring.com


WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Oil prices fell for a second day running on Tuesday, as the rapid spread of the Delta coronavirus variant in parts of the world fueled worries about slower fuel demand growth. Speculation ahead of an OPEC meeting this week also kept investors on edge.



Brent crude futures for September delivery dipped 0.2 percent to $73.96 per barrel, while WTI crude futures for August settlement were down 0.4 percent at $72.62 a barrel.



Outbreaks of the highly contagious COVID-19 variant Delta raised concerns that the economic recovery will be slow.



In Australia, the cities of Sydney, Perth, Brisbane and Darwin have all been put into lockdown as the outbreak spreads.



British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace and half a dozen U.K. military commanders are self-isolating after the head of Britain's Armed forces tested positive for the coronavirus.



Spain and Portugal announced restrictions on the entry of unvaccinated British citizens ahead of the peak summer vacation period.



Russia's Saint Petersburg posted record Covid-19 deaths on Monday. South Africa has entered at least two weeks of strict lockdown.



Turkey has halted flights and all direct travel from Bangladesh, Brazil, South Africa, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka.



The strain, now in 85 countries, is the most contagious of any COVID-19 variant so far identified, according to the World Health Organization.



The group of producers, known as OPEC+, will hold technical meetings on Tuesday and Wednesday to review the oil market, ahead of the meeting of the OPEC and its allies, due Thursday. The production quota for August is expected to be decided in this meeting.



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Acquisition Expands Retail Footprint in Boulder County, Colorado

OTCQX: SHWZ

DENVER, Colo., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Schwazze, (OTCQX: SHWZ) ("Schwazze" or the "Company"), announced signed definitive documents to acquire the assets of BG3 Investments, LLC dba Drift which consists of two marijuana retail stores located in Boulder, Colorado. This purchase continues Schwazze's expansion and growth plans in Colorado adding to the Company's current dispensary footprint, with nine dispensaries acquired year to date, bringing the total number of dispensaries to nineteen. As part of the purchase, Schwazze will also acquire the assets of Black Box Licensing, LLC, which contains certain intellectual property.

"We look forward to adding these dispensaries to our portfolio. The Company remains focused on bringing excellent customer experiences to all areas of Colorado, and we are excited to bring that experience to our customers in Boulder," said Justin Dye, Schwazze's CEO.

The consideration for the proposed acquisition is $3.5 million and will be paid as $1.9 million in cash, and $1.6 million in common stock. This transaction represents a 3.5 times multiple based on the projected 2021 adjusted EBITDA for the two dispensaries. The acquisition is expected to close during the third quarter of 2021 after the Colorado Marijuana Enforcement Division and local licensing approval.

About Schwazze

Schwazze (OTCQX: SHWZ) is the parent company of a portfolio of vertically integrated cannabis brands spanning seed to sale. The company's intent is to apply its operational playbook by expanding into markets where it can entrench itself in a leadership position. Anchored by a high-performance culture, Schwazze focuses on growth by purposeful design, combining customer-centric thinking and data science to test, measure, and drive desired outcomes. The company's leadership team has deep expertise in CPG, retail, and building consumer brands at Fortune 500 companies as well as in the cannabis sector. Schwazze is passionate about improving the human condition; making a difference in our communities; promoting diversity and inclusion; and focusing on sustainable best practices.

Schwazze derives its name from the pruning technique of a cannabis plant to promote growth. Medicine Man Technologies, Inc. was Schwazze's former operating trade name. The corporate entity continues to be named Medicine Man Technologies, Inc.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains "forward-looking statements." Such statements may be preceded by the words "may," "estimates", "predicts," or similar words. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, are based on certain assumptions, and are subject to various known and unknown risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond the Company's control and cannot be predicted or quantified. Consequently, actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such risks and uncertainties include, without limitation, risks and uncertainties associated with (i) our inability to manufacture our products and product candidates on a commercial scale on our own or in collaboration with third parties; (ii) difficulties in obtaining financing on commercially reasonable terms; (iii) changes in the size and nature of our competition; (iv) loss of one or more key executives or scientists; (v) difficulties in securing regulatory approval to market our products and product candidates; (vi) our ability to successfully execute our growth strategy in Colorado and outside the state, (vii) our ability to identify and consummate future acquisitions that meet our criteria, (viii) our ability to successfully integrate acquired businesses and realize synergies therefrom, (ix) the actual revenues derived from the Company's Star Buds assets, (x) the Company's actual revenue and adjusted EBITDA for 2021, (xi) the Company's ability to generate positive cash flow for the rest of 2021 (xii) the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, (xiii) the timing and extent of governmental stimulus programs, and (xiv) the uncertainty in the application of federal, state and local laws to our business, and any changes in such laws. More detailed information about the Company and the risk factors that may affect the realization of forward-looking statements is set forth in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), including the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K and its Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q. Investors and security holders are urged to read these documents free of charge on the SEC's website at http://www.sec.gov. The Company assumes no obligation to publicly update or revise its forward-looking statements as a result of new information, future events or otherwise except as required by law.

For further information: Investors: Joanne Jobin, Investor Relations, Joanne.jobin@schwazze.com, 647 964 0292; Media: Julie Suntrup, Schwazze, Vice President | Marketing & Merchandising, julie.suntrup@schwazze.com, 303 371 0387
Drilling results on Main Zone reveal multiple veining horizons are extended 300 m down plunge

TORONTO, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Mandalay Resources Corporation ("Mandalay" or the "Company") (TSX: MND, OTCQB: MNDJF) is pleased to provide an update on the Main Zone and Lake Zone drilling programs at its Bjorkdal Operation in Sweden.



New Drilling Highlights:

Main Zone Veining

174.0 g/t gold over true width of 0.49 m in MU21-010;

in MU21-010; 6.1 g/t gold over true width of 8.85 m in MU21-010; and

in MU21-010; and 105.0 g/t gold over true width of 0.21 m in MU21-015



Lake Zone Veining

226.0 g/t gold over true width of 0.21 m in MU21-003;

in MU21-003; 25.3 g/t gold over true width of 1.03 m in MU21-007; and

in MU21-007; and 4.2 g/t gold over true width of 4.11 m in MU21-004



Note: Further intercept details including significant intercepts within composite intervals can be found in Table 1 and Table 2 in the Appendix to this document.

Dominic Duffy, President and CEO of Mandalay, commented: "Exploration at Bjorkdal for the first part of this year has been focused on the eastern margin of the orebody. Significant veining within this area has been confirmed through these two drilling campaigns."

Mr. Duffy continued, "We are very encouraged by the high grades within veining to the east of the mine and by the strong indications of major extensions to two previously mined high grade skarn lenses. Results from these two programs support Mandalay's primary objective of elevating gold grades within the site's current life-of-mine plan."

Mr. Duffy continued, "Building upon the success of these two campaigns, exploration efforts will test another eastern extension, as well as following-up on the targeting of the skarn mineralization sitting above the veining. This drilling aims to gain sufficient information to support a mining concession application that will cover the extended veining. Beyond these targets, significant extension potential also exists within the Aurora Zone and surrounding veins which will also be a major focus of underground exploration efforts at Bjorkdal in the near future."

Mr Duffy concluded, "A video has been prepared by Chris Davis, Vice President of Operational Geology and Exploration, to further explain the information in this release. The video can be found on Mandalay's website or by clicking here."

Eastern Extension and Upgrading Opportunity

Bjorkdal veining consist of a series of gold bearing east west trending, sub-vertical, north dipping veins. The majority of these veins exist below a marble horizon that dips towards the north and east with a series of sub-parallel faults trending with the marble. Due to drilling platform constraints, veining that shallowly plunges to the east underneath the marble is unbound. Further to the evident extension opportunity there is a significant potential for upgrading as increased interaction with the marble and faulting to the east produces a favourable mineralising environment (Figure 1).

Both suggestions of vein extension and upgrading have been supported by extensional drilling started in late 2020 by the Bjorkdal Deeps Drilling campaign and continued through the Lake Zone Infill and the Main Zone Extension drilling programs of 2021.

Figure 1. Perspective view of the Bjorkdal Mine looking towards the SSW highlighting the interaction of the veining

Main Zone Extension

Seven holes and a total of 2,720 m have been drilled from underground developments to the east in order to explore the area underneath the marble and identify vein extensions. Direct extensions to ten veins have been interpreted from the program with 63 significant intercepts within the drilling (Appendix A). Extending veining approximately 200m to the east is an intercept grading 174.0 g/t gold over true width of 0.49 m within MU21-010. To the north more veining extensions are revealed through veining over a total of 0.21 m grading 105.0 g/t gold. With significant mineralization extending through to the eastern most reaches of the program, Mandalay believes that the veining remains open at depth and to the east.

Along with these gold bearing veins, stratiform skarn mineralization has also been identified within MU21-009 and MU21-010 indicating a significant lens could be present above the intercepted veining. This is important as production along skarn lenses have delivered highly significant grades. On the 460 level, one such lens delivered an average grade of 4.8 g/t gold, diluted to 5 m, over a 40 m strike length. The presence of the stratiform skarn style orebodies was anticipated within this program through understanding of structural geometries and the strong interaction of the Bjorkdal Shear with the marble unit. The multiphase mineralization introduced as a result of this interaction is understood to be highly favourable to gold development.

Figure 2. Plan section of the Main Zone drilling highlighting the position of new drilling and intercepts above 0.5 g/t Au when diluted to 1 m.

https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/0c8960a5-6212-49fd-a5d9-2a09ca1502b7

Visible gold both within the Main Zone and Lake Zone is common and is generally accompanied by significant gold grades when assayed (Figure 3). Within the target zone elevated grades and amount of visible gold is generally attributed to the close interaction of the Bjorkdal shear, acting as a mineralising fluid conduit, and the overlaying marble unit.

Figure 3. Photograph of core containing gold within MU21-015

Lake Zone Veining

Following from the Bjorkdal Deeps drilling program of 2020 the Lake Zone infill drilling has confirmed the significant grades and veining continuity shown in the original program. Some highlights of this program are: 226 g/t gold over a true width of 0.21m within MU21-003 and 25.3 g/t gold over true width of 1.03 m within MU21-005. Along with the initial intercepts of 2020 the strike extent of some of the veining is interpreted to be approximately 300 m and the vertical extent below the marble horizon is expected to be approximately 50 m. As with the Main Zone mineralization, veining within lake zone remains unbound towards the east and at depth.

Skarn mineralization, similar to the Main Zone has been encountered within this drilling campaign. The orientation of drilling was not optimised for the stratiform skarn style orebody and a subsequent drilling program to delineate this skarn lens will be forthcoming in the months ahead.

Figure 4. Plan section of the Lake Zone infill drilling highlighting the position of new drilling and intercepts above 0.5 g/t Au when diluted to 1 m

https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/084a18d8-fdfb-4d06-a78d-af8be947ffdc

Drilling and Assaying

At Bjorkdal, all diamond drill core was logged and sampled by Bjorkdal geologists. Exploration drill hole samples were sent to CRS Laboratories Oy ("CRS") in Kempele, Finland for sample preparation and assaying.

Assaying was conducted utilizing the Pal1000 cyanide leaching processes. Mandalay's rigorous QA/QC program included the use of standard reference samples, blanks, duplicates, repeats, and internal laboratory quality assurance procedures.), which contains a complete description of drilling, sampling, and assaying procedures).

Qualified Person:

Chris Davis, Vice President of Operational Geology and Exploration at Mandalay Resources, is a Chartered Professional of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (MAusIMM CP(Geo)), and a Qualified Person as defined by NI 43-101. He has reviewed and approved the technical and scientific information provided in this release.

For Further Information

Dominic Duffy

President and Chief Executive Officer

Edison Nguyen

Manager, Analytics and Investor Relations

Contact:

647.260.1566

About Mandalay Resources Corporation

Mandalay Resources is a Canadian-based natural resource company with producing assets in Australia (Costerfield gold-antimony mine) and Sweden (Bjorkdal gold mine), with projects in Chile and Canada under care and maintenance, closure or development status. The Company is focused on growing its production profile and reducing costs to generate significant positive cashflow.

Mandalay's mission is to create shareholder value through the profitable operation of both its Costerfield and Bjorkdal mines. Currently, the Company's main objective is to continue mining the high-grade Youle vein at Costerfield, which continues to supply high-grade ore, and also focus on extending Youle's Mineral Reserves at depth. At Bjorkdal, the Company will aim to increase production from the Aurora zone in the coming years, in order to maximize profit margins from the mine.

Forward-Looking Statements:

This news release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of applicable securitieslaws,includingstatementsregardingtheexplorationanddevelopmentpotentialof the exploration results disclosed.Readersarecautionednotto place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Actual results and developments may differ materially from those contemplated by these statements depending on, among other things,changesincommoditypricesandgeneralmarketandeconomicconditions.Thefactors identifiedabovearenotintendedtorepresentacompletelistofthefactorsthatcouldaffect Mandalay.Adescriptionofadditionalrisksthatcouldresultinactualresultsanddevelopments differingfromthosecontemplatedbyforward-lookingstatementsinthisnewsreleasecanbe foundundertheheading"RiskFactors"inMandalay'sannualinformationformdatedMarch 31, 2021, a copy of which is available under Mandalay's profile at www.sedar.com. In addition, there can be no assurance that any inferred resources that are discovered as a result of additionaldrillingwilleverbeupgradedtoprovenorprobablereserves.AlthoughMandalayhas attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual actions, events or results to differmateriallyfromthosedescribedinforward-lookingstatements,theremaybeotherfactors thatcauseactions,eventsorresultsnottobeasanticipated,estimatedorintended.Therecan be no assurance that forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results andfutureeventscoulddiffermateriallyfromthoseanticipatedinsuchstatements.Accordingly, readersshouldnotplaceunduerelianceonforward-lookingstatements.

Appendix

Table 1. Main Zone Infill Drilling Composites

DRILL HOLE ID FROM

(M) TO (M) DRILL

WIDTH

(M) TRUE

WIDTH

(M) AU

GRADE

(G/T) AU (G/T)

OVER MIN.

1M WIDTH MU21-009 72.80 73.80 1.00 0.70 1.1 0.8 MU21-009 76.90 77.90 1.00 0.70 0.9 0.6 MU21-009 85.60 87.60 2.00 1.40 1.1 1.1 MU21-009 93.00 94.00 1.00 0.70 2.0 1.4 MU21-009 96.00 97.00 1.00 0.70 0.9 0.6 MU21-009 97.40 103.60 6.20 3.94 2.3 2.3 MU21-009 110.90 111.90 1.00 0.70 1.3 0.9 MU21-009 131.00 131.50 0.50 0.34 1.6 0.5 MU21-009 135.40 136.00 0.60 0.42 1.4 0.6 MU21-009 142.00 143.00 1.00 0.70 1.1 0.7 MU21-009 150.60 152.00 1.40 1.29 1.0 1.0 MU21-010 8.90 10.50 1.60 1.31 26.2 26.2 MU21-010 102.00 103.00 1.00 0.98 2.0 1.9 MU21-010 106.00 116.80 10.80 8.85 6.1 6.1 MU21-010 119.70 120.50 0.80 0.64 1.2 0.8 MU21-010 132.00 133.00 1.00 0.80 1.4 1.1 MU21-010 336.40 336.90 0.50 0.17 3.6 0.6 MU21-010 379.40 379.70 0.30 0.26 2.3 0.6 MU21-010 388.70 389.20 0.50 0.49 174.0 85.3 MU21-010 438.40 439.00 0.60 0.56 1.1 0.6 MU21-010 446.00 446.60 0.60 0.52 1.9 1.0 MU21-011 1.40 2.40 1.00 0.60 2.9 1.7 MU21-011 19.60 24.10 4.50 2.66 1.0 1.0 MU21-011 55.50 57.35 1.85 1.01 17.5 17.5 MU21-011 62.30 64.45 2.15 1.33 2.0 2.0 MU21-011 67.90 69.00 1.10 0.66 1.5 1.0 MU21-011 71.95 73.10 1.15 0.69 1.4 1.0 MU21-011 100.70 101.15 0.45 0.24 3.6 0.9 MU21-011 213.15 213.60 0.45 0.21 13.6 2.9 MU21-011 346.60 349.30 2.70 2.59 5.8 5.8 MU21-012 1.00 2.90 1.90 1.33 3.4 3.4 MU21-012 26.40 28.70 2.30 1.61 2.2 2.2 MU21-012 65.30 65.90 0.60 0.49 4.8 2.3 MU21-012 71.50 71.95 0.45 0.32 2.4 0.7 MU21-012 83.15 85.00 1.85 1.79 5.2 5.2 MU21-012 108.95 109.60 0.65 0.61 1.2 0.7 MU21-012 269.45 270.00 0.55 0.39 3.4 1.3 MU21-012 299.45 299.85 0.40 0.28 4.8 1.4 MU21-013 124.30 124.65 0.35 0.25 2.6 0.7 MU21-013 141.50 142.20 0.70 0.54 1.5 0.8 MU21-013 161.85 163.00 1.15 1.00 2.7 2.7 MU21-013 226.50 227.30 0.80 0.80 0.9 0.7 MU21-013 237.55 238.30 0.75 0.80 0.9 0.7 MU21-013 246.55 248.50 1.95 1.83 1.1 1.1 MU21-013 252.65 253.50 0.85 0.43 1.7 0.7 MU21-013 255.20 255.55 0.35 0.80 1.2 1.0 MU21-014 185.90 186.40 0.50 0.38 28.0 10.6 MU21-014 190.00 190.30 0.30 0.23 3.6 0.8 MU21-014 198.70 199.20 0.50 0.32 2.3 0.7 MU21-014 278.70 280.10 1.40 1.27 1.8 1.8 MU21-014 343.75 344.25 0.50 0.25 56.0 14.0 MU21-014 350.50 351.20 0.70 0.35 2.1 0.7 MU21-014 354.00 355.50 1.50 1.19 5.1 5.1 MU21-015 301.95 302.40 0.45 0.23 8.0 1.8 MU21-015 371.35 374.00 2.65 1.63 14.5 14.5 MU21-015 389.50 390.55 1.05 0.74 17.8 13.2 MU21-015 395.55 396.60 1.05 0.80 1.3 1.0 MU21-015 406.00 407.20 1.20 0.85 1.9 1.6 MU21-015 411.85 412.40 0.55 0.45 1.4 0.6 MU21-015 413.65 416.10 2.45 2.12 1.3 1.3 MU21-015 423.85 424.15 0.30 0.23 22.1 5.1 MU21-015 428.70 429.00 0.30 0.21 105.0 22.1 MU21-015 434.85 435.15 0.30 0.25 3.3 0.8

Notes:

Where true widths are greater than 1m, grades are not diluted and are presented as the grade over the composite true width. Composites that are below 0.5 g/t Au when diluted to 1 m are not reported in this table.

Table 2. Lake Zone Infill Drilling Composites

DRILL HOLE ID FROM

(M) TO (M) DRILL

WIDTH

(M) TRUE

WIDTH

(M) AU

GRADE

(G/T) AU (G/T)

OVER MIN.

1M WIDTH MU21-001 13.80 14.10 0.30 0.12 6.3 0.8 MU21-001 82.80 83.20 0.40 0.29 6.3 1.8 MU21-001 118.60 120.70 2.10 1.37 4.2 4.2 MU21-002 14.40 14.70 0.30 0.18 5.8 1.0 MU21-002 61.50 61.80 0.30 0.10 40.1 4.0 MU21-002 93.20 93.60 0.40 0.08 32.7 2.6 MU21-002 117.60 118.50 0.90 0.50 1.5 0.8 MU21-003 32.60 34.00 1.40 0.85 10.9 9.2 MU21-003 269.80 270.10 0.30 0.21 226.0 47.5 MU21-003 281.00 281.55 0.55 0.23 9.0 2.1 MU21-003 287.00 287.40 0.40 0.10 6.7 0.7 MU21-003 426.55 426.90 0.35 0.32 16.6 5.3 MU21-004 37.10 37.80 0.70 0.38 31.7 12.0 MU21-004 132.20 133.00 0.80 0.48 1.2 0.6 MU21-004 147.35 148.50 1.15 0.81 4.2 3.4 MU21-004 165.05 167.25 2.20 0.38 2.1 0.8 MU21-004 208.75 216.50 7.75 4.11 4.2 4.2 MU21-004 232.80 233.10 0.30 0.29 4.1 1.2 MU21-004 245.35 245.75 0.40 0.35 3.1 1.1 MU21-005 61.70 62.40 0.70 0.54 13.3 7.2 MU21-005 99.00 99.60 0.60 0.42 2.7 1.1 MU21-005 162.80 163.25 0.45 0.33 24.6 8.1 MU21-005 186.90 187.20 0.30 0.26 2.7 0.7 MU21-005 191.65 193.60 1.95 1.33 5.4 5.4 MU21-005 203.20 203.60 0.40 0.24 7.1 1.7 MU21-005 208.50 208.80 0.30 0.19 4.9 0.9 MU21-005 220.90 224.65 3.75 2.15 6.2 6.2 MU21-005 226.90 228.20 1.30 1.10 1.6 1.6 MU21-005 229.95 230.70 0.75 0.43 1.7 0.7 MU21-005 259.45 262.00 2.55 1.28 1.4 1.4 MU21-005 365.90 366.90 1.00 0.70 0.8 0.6 MU21-006 67.35 68.10 0.75 0.68 1.3 0.9 MU21-006 69.10 69.50 0.40 0.35 2.2 0.8 MU21-006 71.75 72.50 0.75 0.57 7.1 4.0 MU21-006 182.85 183.40 0.55 0.39 10.7 4.2 MU21-006 248.20 248.90 0.70 0.70 9.2 6.4 MU21-006 251.85 252.50 0.65 0.50 1.3 0.6 MU21-006 325.60 326.20 0.60 0.52 4.3 2.2 MU21-006 392.40 393.30 0.90 0.64 1.1 0.7 MU21-007 51.80 53.60 1.80 1.03 25.3 25.3 MU21-007 63.50 64.00 0.50 0.45 13.1 5.9 MU21-007 79.40 80.00 0.60 0.46 1.3 0.6 MU21-007 134.00 134.70 0.70 0.61 1.0 0.6 MU21-007 146.00 146.50 0.50 0.29 2.0 0.6 MU21-007 152.00 152.40 0.40 0.35 18.0 6.3 MU21-007 224.00 225.00 1.00 0.70 1.4 1.0 MU21-007 297.50 298.20 0.70 0.61 5.4 3.3 MU21-007 302.50 303.00 0.50 0.50 1.0 0.5 MU21-007 408.50 410.00 1.50 0.65 0.9 0.6 MU21-008 49.00 52.00 3.00 1.50 1.3 1.3 MU21-008 55.80 56.80 1.00 0.71 5.3 3.7 MU21-008 224.00 224.40 0.40 0.33 9.1 3.0 MU21-008 328.30 328.70 0.40 0.20 4.4 0.9

Notes:
4th Drill Rig Commences Drilling at El Tigre and 5th Drill Rig Being Mobilized

HALIFAX, NS / ACCESSWIRE / June 29, 2021 / Silver Tiger Metals Inc. (TSXV:SLVR)(OTCQX:SLVTF) ("Silver Tiger" or the "Corporation") has intersected 0.5 meters grading 4,461.4 g/t silver equivalent in the Sooy Vein in Drill Hole ET-21-233. This hole was collared on Section 3900N to intersect the Sooy Vein on Section 4050N, approximately 900 meters to the south along strike from discovery hole ET-20-202 (see Silver Tiger press release dated Feb. 2, 2021).

Highlights from the on-going drilling program targeting the Sooy Vein include the following:

Hole ET 21-233: 0.5 meters grading 4,461.4 g/t silver equivalent from 274.0 meters to 274.5 meters, consisting of 4,048.0 g/t silver, 0.45 g/t gold, 1.31% copper, 0.56% lead and 7.27% zinc, within1.0 meter grading 2,270.8 g/t silver equivalent from 274.0 meters to 275.0 meters, consisting of 2,041.4 g/t silver, 0.25 g/t gold, 0.65% copper, 1.18% lead and 3.63% zinc.

from 274.0 meters to 274.5 meters, consisting of 4,048.0 g/t silver, 0.45 g/t gold, 1.31% copper, 0.56% lead and 7.27% zinc, from 274.0 meters to 275.0 meters, consisting of 2,041.4 g/t silver, 0.25 g/t gold, 0.65% copper, 1.18% lead and 3.63% zinc. Hole ET-21-230: 0.5 meters grading 1,175.7 g/t silver equivalent from 239.2 meters to 239.7 meters consisting of 1,080.0 g/t silver, 0.20 g/t gold, 0.55% copper, 0.13% lead and 0.75% zinc, and 0.5 meters grading 1,175.7 g/t silver equivalent from 239.2 meters to 239.7 meters consisting of 1,080.0 g/t silver, 0.2 g/t gold, 0.55% copper, 0.13% lead and 0.75% zinc.

from 239.2 meters to 239.7 meters consisting of 1,080.0 g/t silver, 0.20 g/t gold, 0.55% copper, 0.13% lead and 0.75% zinc, and from 239.2 meters to 239.7 meters consisting of 1,080.0 g/t silver, 0.2 g/t gold, 0.55% copper, 0.13% lead and 0.75% zinc. Hole ET-21-229: 9.9 meters grading 208.7 g/t silver equivalent from 415.9 meters to 425.8 meters consisting of 83.3 g/t silver, 0.11 g/t gold, 0.27% copper, 1.01% lead and 2.04% zinc, including 1.8 meters grading 542.0 g/t silver equivalent from 424.0 meters to 425.8 meters consisting of 113.5 g/t silver, 0.21 g/t gold, 0.38% copper, 3.67% lead and 8.73% zinc.

Additional results are presented in the Drill Hole Results table below along with the details for the calculation of the silver equivalent grades.

See attached El Tigre Cross Section 4050N detailing drill hole ET-21-233. A Plan Map of El Tigre Veins and Drill Holes is also attached.

Silver Tiger's CEO, Glenn Jessome, stated, "I am pleased that our technical team now has an additional 4th drill rig turning at El Tigre and a 5th drill rig is being mobilized to the property. Our wide-spaced reconnaissance drilling over 3 kilometers of strike from the Benjamin Vein (aka the "northern Sooy Vein") south of Discovery Hole 202 on the Sooy has focused our attention on evolving high-grade ore shoots along strike. Our next phase of drilling will help define what we believe will become the basis for our next resource update."

As previously reported, Discovery Drill Hole ET-20-202 intersected 11.75 meters grading 667.9 g/t silver equivalent within 22.2 meters grading 381.9 g/t silver equivalent approximately 12 meters beyond the footwall of the Sooy Vein. Drill Hole 202 was drilled to test the down dip potential of the Sooy Vein targeting just under the lowest mine level approximately 150 meters from surface where mining ceased abruptly with the onset of the Great Depression in 1930. Drill Hole 202 passed through mine workings on the Sooy Vein as it was not targeted deep enough below the workings. The technical team opted to continue

drilling beyond the footwall of the Sooy Vein and discovered a new style of wide high grade mineralization

in the Flat Formation that is not the traditional quartz vein ore that had been previously mined at El Tigre (refer to Silver Tiger press release dated February 2, 2021).

Drill Hole Results Table

Hole ID Comment From To Length(1) Gold Silver Copper Lead Zinc AgEq Total (2) m m m g/t g/t % % % g/t ET-21-222 Sooy Vein 212.9 214.7 1.8 0.04 58.0 0.01 0.04 0.04 64.2 ET-21-224 189.5 192.5 3.0 0.04 29.9 0.01 0.00 0.01 33.9 ET-21-226 341.6 347.7 6.1 0.39 15.0 0.05 0.04 0.10 52.9 Sooy Vein 378.2 387.4 9.2 0.08 27.1 0.10 0.08 0.10 48.2 ET-21-228 65.1 66.7 1.6 0.12 57.5 0.01 0.01 0.01 67.5 113.5 114.5 1.0 0.04 61.1 0.01 0.00 0.00 64.5 222.5 225.5 3.0 0.12 153.7 0.04 0.01 0.02 167.8 265.0 271.4 6.4 0.21 30.5 0.01 0.06 0.05 49.7 Mining void El Tigre 281.5 289.4 7.9 - - - - - - ET-21-229 Sooy Vein 416.0 429.5 13.5 0.13 63.4 0.21 0.78 1.60 164.6 including 416.0 425.9 9.9 0.11 83.3 0.27 1.01 2.04 208.7 including 424.0 425.8 1.8 0.21 113.5 0.38 3.67 8.73 542.0 ET-21-230 134.8 137.8 3.0 0.21 32.9 0.01 0.01 0.00 49.8 153.7 155.5 1.8 0.05 87.0 0.03 0.00 0.01 94.2 189.0 189.5 0.5 0.15 704.0 0.14 0.00 0.05 731.1 211.5 214.5 3.0 0.04 76.2 0.02 0.01 0.03 82.1 228.2 230.2 2.0 0.07 82.1 0.02 0.01 0.02 89.4 239.2 242.2 3.0 0.12 193.3 0.09 0.03 0.15 216.9 including 239.2 239.7 0.5 0.20 1,080.0 0.55 0.13 0.75 1,175.7 267.6 268.1 0.5 0.28 199.0 0.06 0.20 0.34 241.5 285.5 288.5 3.0 0.21 43.4 0.02 0.05 0.06 63.9 330.2 330.7 0.5 0.41 161.0 0.04 0.19 0.44 214.4 ET-21-231 pending ET-21-232 234.5 236.5 2.0 0.05 60.8 0.03 0.03 0.02 68.9 347.7 349.0 1.3 0.16 32.0 0.22 1.45 1.36 143.9 Mining void Sooy Vein 355.7 358.4 2.7 - - - - - - 384.3 387.4 3.1 0.26 46.0 0.02 0.10 0.04 70.6

Hole ID Comment From To Length(1) Gold Silver Copper Lead Zinc AgEq Total (2) m m m g/t g/t % % % g/t ET-21-233 244.5 245.0 0.5 0.13 491.0 0.08 0.01 0.03 509.7 Sooy Vein 274.0 275.0 1.0 0.25 2,041.4 0.65 1.18 3.63 2,270.8 including 274.0 274.5 0.5 0.45 4,048.0 1.31 0.56 7.27 4,461.4 350.6 351.5 0.9 0.25 171.0 0.10 0.50 0.91 241.3 El Tigre Vein 362.9 377.5 14.6 0.17 56.7 0.02 0.00 0.03 73.1 including 363.4 364.0 0.6 0.11 380.0 0.08 0.22 0.04 402.2 Seitz Kelly Vein 447.1 455.1 8.0 0.04 72.8 0.02 0.05 0.12 83.3 including 449.1 450.1 1.0 0.08 200.0 0.06 0.00 0.20 218.6 ET-21-234 152.9 155.1 2.2 0.07 59.6 0.02 0.11 0.16 75.0

Notes:

Not true width.

Silver Equivalent ("EqAg") ratios are based on a silver to gold price ratio of 75:1 (Au:Ag). Copper, lead and zinc are converted using $3.66/lb copper, $0.90/lb lead, $1.26/lb zinc at 100% metal recoveries based on a silver price of $26.00/oz.

Drill Hole Location Table

Hole ID Section Easting Northing Elevation Az Dip Length ET-21-222 4575N 670681 3384574 1935 93 -53 308.1 ET-21-224 4425N 670682 3384423 1952 88 -67 332.5 ET-21-226 4425N 670682 3384423 1952 88 -56 466.7 ET-21-228 3815N 670911 3383816 1832 60 -30 289.4 ET-21-229 4475N 670707 3384475 1945 90 -64 472.8 ET-21-230 3825N 670883 3383820 1818 60 -38 372.1 ET-21-231 4425N 670682 3384423 1952 88 -50 216.6 ET-21-232 4475N 670707 3384475 1945 90 -58 430.1 ET-21-233 3900N 670848 3383899 1816 50 -35 460.6 ET-21-234 4925N 670737 3384920 1861 90 -50 387.4

El Tigre Cross Section 4050N

Plan Map of the El Tigre Veins and Drill Holes

El Tigre Resource Estimate

After acquiring El Tigre, Silver Tiger drilled 12,500 meters to define the wide halo of near surface gold mineralization around the mined high-grade veins of the historic El Tigre Mine. This allowed Silver Tiger to deliver a maiden resource estimate for the El Tigre Property to a depth of 150 meters containing indicated resources of 661,000 gold equivalent ounces at 0.77 g/t (21 g/t silver and 0.51 g/t gold) and inferred resources of 341,000 gold equivalent ounces at 1.59 g/t (88 g/t silver and 0.52 g/t gold). The National Instrument 43-101 Technical Report titled "NI 43-101 Technical Report and Updated Mineral Resource Estimate on the El Tigre Project, Sonora, Mexico" effective as of September 7, 2017 and dated October 26, 2017 prepared by David Burga, P.Geo., Yungang Wu, P.Geo., Fred Brown, P.Geo., Jarita Barry, P.Geo., Eugene Puritch, P.Eng., FEC, CET, Alfred Hayden, P.Eng. and Richard H. Sutcliffe, Ph.D., P.Geo. of P&E Mining Consultants Inc. is available on the Corporation's website at www.silvertigermetals.com and on www.sedar.com under the Corporation's profile.

About the El Tigre Historic Mine District

Silver Tiger Metals Inc. is a Canadian company whose management has more than 25 years' experience discovering, financing and building large hydrothermal silver projects in Mexico. Silver Tiger's 100% owned 28,414 hectare Historic El Tigre Mining District is located in Sonora, Mexico. Principled environmental, social and governance practices are core priorities at Silver Tiger.

The El Tigre historic mine district is located in Sonora, Mexico and lies at the northern end of the Sierra Madre silver and gold belt which hosts many epithermal silver and gold deposits, including Dolores, Santa Elena and Las Chispas at the northern end. In 1896, gold was first discovered on the property in the Gold Hill area and mining started with the Brown Shaft in 1903. The focus soon changed to mining high-grade silver veins in the area with production coming from 3 parallel veins the El Tigre Vein, the Seitz Kelley Vein and the Sooy Vein. Underground mining on the middle El Tigre vein extended 1,450 meters along strike and was mined on 14 levels to a depth of approximately 450 meters. The Seitz Kelley Vein was mined along strike for 1 kilometer to a depth of approximately 200 meters. The Sooy Vein was only mined along strike for 250 meters to a depth of approximately 150 meters. Mining abruptly stopped on all 3 of these veins when the price of silver collapsed to less than 20 per ounce with the onset of the Great Depression. By the time the mine closed in 1930, it is reported to have produced a total of 353,000 ounces of gold and 67.4 million ounces of silver from 1.87 million tons (Craig, 2012). The average grade mined during this period was over 2 kilograms silver equivalent per ton.

The El Tigre silver and gold deposit is related to a series of high-grade epithermal veins controlled by a north-south trending structure cutting across the andesitic and rhyolitic tuffs of the Sierra Madre Volcanic Complex within a broad silver and gold mineralized prophylitic alteration zone developed in the El Tigre Formation that can be up to 150 meters wide. The veins dip steeply to the west and are typically 0.5 meter wide but locally can be up to 5 meters in width. The veins, structures and mineralized zones outcrop on surface and have been traced for 5.3 kilometers along strike in our brownfield exploration area. Historical mining and exploration activities focused on a 1.5 kilometer portion of the southern end of the deposits, principally on the El Tigre, Seitz Kelly and Sooy veins. The under explored Caleigh, Benjamin, Protectora and the Fundadora exposed veins continue north for more than 3 kilometers. Silver Tiger has delivered its maiden 43-101 compliant resource estimate and is currently drilling to update its resource estimate and publish a PEA.

VRIFY Slide Deck and 3D Presentation - Silver Tiger's El Tigre Project

VRIFY is a platform being used by companies to communicate with investors using 360 virtual tours of remote mining assets, 3D models and interactive presentations. VRIFY can be accessed by website and with the VRIFY iOS and Android apps.

Access the Silver Tiger Metals Inc. Company Profile on VRIFY at: https://vrify.com

The VRIFY Slide Deck and 3D Presentation for Silver Tiger Metals Inc. can be viewed at: https://vrify.com/explore/decks/492 and on the Company's website at: www.silvertigermetals.com.

Procedure, Quality Assurance / Quality Control and Data Verification

The diamond drill core (HQ size) is geologically logged, photographed and marked for sampling. When the sample lengths are determined, the full core is sawn with a diamond blade core saw with one half of the core being bagged and tagged for assay. The remaining half portion is returned to the core trays for storage and/or for metallurgical test work.

The sealed and tagged sample bags are transported to the Bureau Veritas facility in Hermosillo, Mexico. Bureau Veritas crushes the samples (Code PRP70-250) and prepares 200-300 gram pulp samples with ninety percent passing Tyler 200 mesh (Code PUL85). The pulps are assayed for gold using a 30-gram charge by fire assay (Code FA630) and over limits greater than 10 grams per tonne are re-assayed using a gravimetric finish (Code FA530). Silver and multi-element analysis is completed using total digestion (Code MA200 Total Digestion ICP). Over limits greater than 100 grams per tonne silver are re-assayed using a gravimetric finish (Code FA530).

Quality assurance and quality control ("QA/QC") procedures monitor the chain-of-custody of the samples and includes the systematic insertion and monitoring of appropriate reference materials (certified standards, blanks and duplicates) into the sample strings. The results of the assaying of the QA/QC material included in each batch are tracked to ensure the integrity of the assay data. All results stated in this announcement have passed Silver Tiger's QA/QC protocols.

Qualified Person

David R. Duncan, P. Geo., V.P. Exploration of the Corporation, is the Qualified Person for Silver Tiger as defined under National Instrument 43-101. Mr. Duncan has reviewed and approved the scientific and technical information in this press release.

For further information, please contact:

Glenn Jessome

President and CEO

902 492 0298

jessome@silvertigermetals.com

CAUTIONARY STATEMENT:

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

This News Release includes certain "forward-looking statements". All statements other than statements of historical fact included in this release, including, without limitation, statements regarding potential mineralization, resources and reserves, the ability to convert inferred resources to indicated resources, the ability to complete future drilling programs and infill sampling, the ability to extend resource blocks, the similarity of mineralization at El Tigre to Delores, Santa Elena and Chispas, exploration results, and future plans and objectives of Silver Tiger, are forward-looking statements that involve various risks and uncertainties. Forward-looking statements are frequently characterized by words such as "may", "is expected to", "anticipates", "estimates", "intends", "plans", "projection", "could", "vision", "goals", "objective" and "outlook" and other similar words. Although Silver Tiger believes the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, 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 Silver Tiger's expectations include risks and uncertainties related to exploration, development, operations, commodity prices and global financial volatility, risk and uncertainties of operating in a foreign jurisdiction as well as additional risks described from time to time in the filings made by Silver Tiger with securities regulators.

SOURCE: Silver Tiger Metals Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/653476/Silver-Tiger-Intersects-44614-GT-AgEq-Over-05-Meters-in-the-Sooy-Vein
Company to serve as advisor and technology partner supporting UNICEF programs

SoftServe, a leading digital authority and consulting company, and UNICEF Ukraine are expanding their strategic partnership through 2023. SoftServe will now serve as an advisor and technology partner on UNICEF Ukraine's projects working toward the goals of sustainable development for children. The parties have outlined opportunities for cooperation in software development and other activities to support UNICEF programs in Ukraine in education, health, child protection, social policy, communication for development, and others.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005006/en/

The partnership between SoftServe and UNICEF Ukraine began in April 2020. To date, the parties have implemented numerous initiatives, including a platform for collecting and analyzing COVID-19 statistics in Ukraine, the launch of the country's National Volunteer Platform, a web portal dedicated to reforming Ukraine's school nutrition system, an infant care app for young parents, and an evidence-based medicine website. In 2021, SoftServe will also work on updating the national vaccination portal.

"We observe that Ukrainian society is transforming rapidly with new demands calling for new solutions," said Lotta Sylwander, UNICEF Representative in Ukraine. "That is why UNICEF is interested in expanding its cooperation with innovative partners like SoftServe that can offer their knowledge base and create technological solutions for today's challenges. Ensuring access to verified and timely information is key to our activities supporting children, parents, youth, and communities. This helps us to hear their voices and allows them to make informed choices regarding their health, nutrition, education, and future in general."

"We appreciate the opportunity to support UNICEF's projects in Ukraine as they systematically address social issues in child protection," said Yaroslav Lyubinets, co-founder and head of the board of directors at SoftServe. "What resonates with us is the fact that the goal of these initiatives to enable talented people to change the world aligns perfectly with SoftServe's mission."

Partnership projects are implemented as pro bono or volunteer initiatives involving Open Tech, SoftServe's charity crowdsourcing platform for time and technical skills contributions.

About SoftServe

SoftServe is a digital authority that advises and provides at the cutting-edge of technology. We reveal, transform, accelerate, and optimize the way enterprises and software companies do business. With expertise across healthcare, retail, energy, financial services, software, and more, we implement end-to-end solutions to deliver the innovation, quality, and speed that our clients' users expect.

SoftServe delivers open innovation-from generating compelling new ideas, to developing and implementing transformational products and services. Our work and client experience are built on a foundation of empathetic, human-focused experience design that ensures continuity from concept to release. We empower enterprises and software companies to (re)identify differentiation, accelerate solution development, and vigorously compete in today's digital economy. No matter where you are in your journey.

Visit our website, blog, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter pages.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005006/en/

Contacts:

SoftServe Media Contacts

Paul Jones

Senior Manager, Analyst and Public Relations

pjone@softserveinc.com

Andrew Kavka

Lead Analyst and Public Relations Specialist

akavk@softserveinc.com
Approval based on Phase 2 CheckMate -142 trial results showing nearly two-thirds of patients responded to the Opdivo plus Yervoy combination with durable responses observed

Opdivo plus Yervoy is the first dual immunotherapy regimen approved in the European Union for colorectal cancer

Opdivo plus Yervoy-based combinations now indicated in the European Union for five different advanced cancer types: mesothelioma, non-small cell lung cancer, melanoma, renal cell carcinoma and colorectal cancer

Bristol Myers Squibb (NYSE: BMY) announced that the European Commission (EC) has approved Opdivo (nivolumab) plus Yervoy (ipilimumab) for the treatment of adult patients with mismatch repair deficient (dMMR) or microsatellite instability-high (MSI-H) metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC) after prior fluoropyrimidine-based combination chemotherapy. The EC's decision is based on results from the Phase 2 CheckMate -142 trial in which Opdivo plus Yervoy demonstrated a clinically meaningful improvement in objective response rate (ORR) in patients with MSI-H/dMMR mCRC who received prior treatment with fluoropyridine, oxaliplatin and irinotecan. The safety profile for Opdivo plus Yervoy was consistent with previous studies of the combination in other tumor types.

"Metastatic colorectal cancer is an aggressive disease with a poor prognosis, leaving patients with a critical need for additional treatment options beyond standard chemotherapy," said Ian M. Waxman, M.D., development lead, gastrointestinal cancers, Bristol Myers Squibb. "With this approval, patients in the EU with mismatch repair deficient or microsatellite instability-high metastatic colorectal cancer will now have the first dual immunotherapy treatment available to them, and we look forward to working with stakeholders to advance this rational combination."

The combination of Opdivo plus Yervoy is the first approved dual immunotherapy treatment option for any GI tumor in the European Union (EU). This combination is also approved in the EU for non-small cell lung cancer and renal cell carcinoma. The Marketing Authorization approves use of Opdivo plus Yervoy in all EU member states, as well as Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein.

Opdivo plus Yervoy received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in July 2018 for the treatment of adult and pediatric patients 12 years and older with MSI-H or dMMR mCRC that has progressed following treatment with fluoropyrimidine, oxaliplatin and irinotecan. Opdivo plus Yervoy was also approved in Japan by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) in September 2020 for the treatment of MSI-H unresectable advanced or recurrent colorectal cancer progressing after cancer chemotherapy.

CheckMate -142 Efficacy and Safety Results

Results from the CheckMate -142 trial at minimum follow-up of 46.9 months include:

ORR: In the study, 64.7% (95% Confidence Interval: 55.4 to 73.2) of patients responded to treatment with Opdivo plus Yervoy , with 12.6% achieving a complete response.

In the study, 64.7% (95% Confidence Interval: 55.4 to 73.2) of patients responded to treatment with plus , with 12.6% achieving a complete response. DOR: Median duration of response was not reached in the Opdivo plus Yervoy arm (1.4, 58.0+ months).

Median duration of response was not reached in the plus arm (1.4, 58.0+ months). Safety: The most frequent adverse reactions, occurring in 10% or more of patients treated with Opdivo plus Yervoy, were fatigue (58%), diarrhea (41%), musculoskeletal pain (39%), rash (38%), pruritus (35%), nausea (30%), cough (29%), pyrexia (29%), abdominal pain (22%), arthralgia (22%), decreased appetite (22%), upper respiratory tract infection (21%), vomiting (21%), headache (19%), dyspnoea (19%), hypothyroidism (18%), constipation (18%), oedema (including peripheral oedema) (16%), dizziness (14%), hyperthyroidism (12%), dry skin (11%), hypertension (10%). The majority of adverse reactions were mild to moderate (Grade 1 or 2).

About CheckMate -142

CheckMate -142 included a multicenter, non-randomized, open-label cohort investigating Opdivo plus Yervoy in patients with mismatch repair deficient (dMMR) or microsatellite instability-high (MSI-H) metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC) whose disease had progressed during or after prior treatment with a fluoropyrimidine, oxaliplatin- or irinotecan-based chemotherapy.

In this combination cohort, patients received Opdivo 3 mg/kg with Yervoy 1 mg/kg every three weeks for four doses, followed by Opdivo 3 mg/kg as a single agent every two weeks until disease progression, death or unacceptable toxicity. Efficacy outcome measures included objective response rate (ORR) as assessed by blinded independent central review using Response Evaluation Criteria in Solid Tumors (RECIST v1.1) and duration of response (DOR).

About dMMR or MSI-H Colorectal Cancer

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is cancer that develops in the colon or the rectum, which are part of the body's digestive or gastrointestinal system. Globally, CRC is the third most commonly diagnosed cancer in the world. In 2020, it is estimated that there were approximately 1,931,000 new cases of the disease and that it will be the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths among men and women combined.

Mismatch repair deficiency (dMMR) occurs when the proteins that repair mismatch errors in DNA replication are missing or non-functional, leading to microsatellite instability-high (MSI-H) tumors. Approximately 5% of metastatic CRC patients have dMMR or MSI-H tumors. Patients with these biomarkers are less likely to benefit from conventional chemotherapy and typically have a poor prognosis.

Bristol Myers Squibb: Creating a Better Future for People with Cancer

Bristol Myers Squibb is inspired by a single vision transforming patients' lives through science. The goal of the company's cancer research is to deliver medicines that offer each patient a better, healthier life and to make cure a possibility. Building on a legacy across a broad range of cancers that have changed survival expectations for many, Bristol Myers Squibb researchers are exploring new frontiers in personalized medicine, and through innovative digital platforms, are turning data into insights that sharpen their focus. Deep scientific expertise, cutting-edge capabilities and discovery platforms enable the company to look at cancer from every angle. Cancer can have a relentless grasp on many parts of a patient's life, and Bristol Myers Squibb is committed to taking actions to address all aspects of care, from diagnosis to survivorship. Because as a leader in cancer care, Bristol Myers Squibb is working to empower all people with cancer to have a better future.

About Opdivo

Opdivo is a programmed death-1 (PD-1) immune checkpoint inhibitor that is designed to uniquely harness the body's own immune system to help restore anti-tumor immune response. By harnessing the body's own immune system to fight cancer, Opdivo has become an important treatment option across multiple cancers.

Opdivo's leading global development program is based on Bristol Myers Squibb's scientific expertise in the field of Immuno-Oncology, and includes a broad range of clinical trials across all phases, including Phase 3, in a variety of tumor types. To date, the Opdivo clinical development program has treated more than 35,000 patients. The Opdivo trials have contributed to gaining a deeper understanding of the potential role of biomarkers in patient care, particularly regarding how patients may benefit from Opdivo across the continuum of PD-L1 expression.

In July 2014, Opdivo was the first PD-1 immune checkpoint inhibitor to receive regulatory approval anywhere in the world. Opdivo is currently approved in more than 65 countries, including the United States, the European Union, Japan and China. In October 2015, the Company's Opdivo and Yervoy combination regimen was the first Immuno-Oncology combination to receive regulatory approval for the treatment of metastatic melanoma and is currently approved in more than 50 countries, including the United States and the European Union.

INDICATIONS

OPDIVO (nivolumab), as a single agent, is indicated for the treatment of patients with unresectable or metastatic melanoma.

OPDIVO (nivolumab), in combination with YERVOY (ipilimumab), is indicated for the treatment of patients with unresectable or metastatic melanoma.

OPDIVO (nivolumab), in combination with YERVOY (ipilimumab), is indicated for the first-line treatment of adult patients with metastatic non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) whose tumors express PD-L1 (=1%) as determined by an FDA-approved test, with no EGFR or ALK genomic tumor aberrations.

OPDIVO (nivolumab), in combination with YERVOY (ipilimumab) and 2 cycles of platinum-doublet chemotherapy, is indicated for the first-line treatment of adult patients with metastatic or recurrent non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), with no EGFR or ALK genomic tumor aberrations.

OPDIVO (nivolumab) is indicated for the treatment of patients with metastatic non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) with progression on or after platinum-based chemotherapy. Patients with EGFR or ALK genomic tumor aberrations should have disease progression on FDA-approved therapy for these aberrations prior to receiving OPDIVO.

OPDIVO(nivolumab), in combination with YERVOY (ipilimumab), is indicated for the first-line treatment of adult patients with unresectable malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM).

OPDIVO (nivolumab), in combination with YERVOY (ipilimumab), is indicated for the first-line treatment of patients with intermediate or poor risk advanced renal cell carcinoma (RCC).

OPDIVO (nivolumab), in combination with cabozantinib, is indicated for the first-line treatment of patients with advanced renal cell carcinoma (RCC).

OPDIVO (nivolumab) is indicated for the treatment of patients with advanced renal cell carcinoma (RCC) who have received prior anti-angiogenic therapy.

OPDIVO (nivolumab) is indicated for the treatment of adult patients with classical Hodgkin lymphoma (cHL) that has relapsed or progressed after autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) and brentuximab vedotin or after 3 or more lines of systemic therapy that includes autologous HSCT. This indication is approved under accelerated approval based on overall response rate. Continued approval for this indication may be contingent upon verification and description of clinical benefit in confirmatory trials.

OPDIVO (nivolumab) is indicated for the treatment of patients with recurrent or metastatic squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck (SCCHN) with disease progression on or after platinum-based therapy.

OPDIVO (nivolumab) is indicated for the treatment of patients with locally advanced or metastatic urothelial carcinoma who have disease progression during or following platinum-containing chemotherapy or have disease progression within 12 months of neoadjuvant or adjuvant treatment with platinum-containing chemotherapy. This indication is approved under accelerated approval based on tumor response rate and duration of response. Continued approval for this indication may be contingent upon verification and description of clinical benefit in confirmatory trials.

OPDIVO (nivolumab), as a single agent, is indicated for the treatment of adult and pediatric (12 years and older) patients with microsatellite instability-high (MSI-H) or mismatch repair deficient (dMMR) metastatic colorectal cancer (CRC) that has progressed following treatment with a fluoropyrimidine, oxaliplatin, and irinotecan. This indication is approved under accelerated approval based on overall response rate and duration of response. Continued approval for this indication may be contingent upon verification and description of clinical benefit in confirmatory trials.

OPDIVO (nivolumab), in combination with YERVOY (ipilimumab), is indicated for the treatment of adults and pediatric patients 12 years and older with microsatellite instability-high (MSI-H) or mismatch repair deficient (dMMR) metastatic colorectal cancer (CRC) that has progressed following treatment with a fluoropyrimidine, oxaliplatin, and irinotecan. This indication is approved under accelerated approval based on overall response rate and duration of response. Continued approval for this indication may be contingent upon verification and description of clinical benefit in confirmatory trials.

OPDIVO (nivolumab) is indicated for the treatment of patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) who have been previously treated with sorafenib. This indication is approved under accelerated approval based on overall response rate and duration of response. Continued approval for this indication may be contingent upon verification and description of clinical benefit in the confirmatory trials.

OPDIVO (nivolumab), in combination with YERVOY (ipilimumab), is indicated for the treatment of patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) who have been previously treated with sorafenib. This indication is approved under accelerated approval based on overall response rate and duration of response. Continued approval for this indication may be contingent upon verification and description of clinical benefit in the confirmatory trials.

OPDIVO (nivolumab) is indicated for the adjuvant treatment of patients with melanoma with involvement of lymph nodes or metastatic disease who have undergone complete resection.

OPDIVO (nivolumab) is indicated for the treatment of patients with unresectable advanced, recurrent or metastatic esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) after prior fluoropyrimidine- and platinum-based chemotherapy.

OPDIVO (nivolumab) is indicated for the adjuvant treatment of completely resected esophageal or gastroesophageal junction cancer with residual pathologic disease in patients who have received neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy (CRT).

OPDIVO (nivolumab), in combination with fluoropyrimidine- and platinum-containing chemotherapy, is indicated for the treatment of patients with advanced or metastatic gastric cancer, gastroesophageal junction cancer, and esophageal adenocarcinoma.

IMPORTANT SAFETY INFORMATION

Severe and Fatal Immune-Mediated Adverse Reactions

Immune-mediated adverse reactions listed herein may not include all possible severe and fatal immune-mediated adverse reactions.

Immune-mediated adverse reactions, which may be severe or fatal, can occur in any organ system or tissue. While immune-mediated adverse reactions usually manifest during treatment, they can also occur after discontinuation of OPDIVO or YERVOY. Early identification and management are essential to ensure safe use of OPDIVO and YERVOY. Monitor for signs and symptoms that may be clinical manifestations of underlying immune-mediated adverse reactions. Evaluate clinical chemistries including liver enzymes, creatinine, adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) level, and thyroid function at baseline and periodically during treatment with OPDIVO and before each dose of YERVOY. In cases of suspected immune-mediated adverse reactions, initiate appropriate workup to exclude alternative etiologies, including infection. Institute medical management promptly, including specialty consultation as appropriate.

Withhold or permanently discontinue OPDIVO and YERVOY depending on severity (please see section 2 Dosage and Administration in the accompanying Full Prescribing Information). In general, if OPDIVO or YERVOY interruption or discontinuation is required, administer systemic corticosteroid therapy (1 to 2 mg/kg/day prednisone or equivalent) until improvement to Grade 1 or less. Upon improvement to Grade 1 or less, initiate corticosteroid taper and continue to taper over at least 1 month. Consider administration of other systemic immunosuppressants in patients whose immune-mediated adverse reactions are not controlled with corticosteroid therapy. Toxicity management guidelines for adverse reactions that do not necessarily require systemic steroids (e.g., endocrinopathies and dermatologic reactions) are discussed below.

Immune-Mediated Pneumonitis

OPDIVO and YERVOY can cause immune-mediated pneumonitis. The incidence of pneumonitis is higher in patients who have received prior thoracic radiation. In patients receiving OPDIVO monotherapy, immune-mediated pneumonitis occurred in 3.1% (61/1994) of patients, including Grade 4 (<0.1%), Grade 3 (0.9%), and Grade 2 (2.1%). In patients receiving OPDIVO 1 mg/kg with YERVOY 3 mg/kg every 3 weeks, immune-mediated pneumonitis occurred in 7% (31/456) of patients, including Grade 4 (0.2%), Grade 3 (2.0%), and Grade 2 (4.4%). In patients receiving OPDIVO 3 mg/kg with YERVOY 1 mg/kg every 3 weeks, immune-mediated pneumonitis occurred in 3.9% (26/666) of patients, including Grade 3 (1.4%) and Grade 2 (2.6%). In NSCLC patients receiving OPDIVO 3 mg/kg every 2 weeks with YERVOY 1 mg/kg every 6 weeks, immune-mediated pneumonitis occurred in 9% (50/576) of patients, including Grade 4 (0.5%), Grade 3 (3.5%), and Grade 2 (4.0%). Four patients (0.7%) died due to pneumonitis.

In Checkmate 205 and 039, pneumonitis, including interstitial lung disease, occurred in 6.0% (16/266) of patients receiving OPDIVO. Immune-mediated pneumonitis occurred in 4.9% (13/266) of patients receiving OPDIVO, including Grade 3 (n=1) and Grade 2 (n=12).

Immune-Mediated Colitis

OPDIVO and YERVOY can cause immune-mediated colitis, which may be fatal. A common symptom included in the definition of colitis was diarrhea. Cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection/reactivation has been reported in patients with corticosteroid-refractory immune-mediated colitis. In cases of corticosteroid-refractory colitis, consider repeating infectious workup to exclude alternative etiologies. In patients receiving OPDIVO monotherapy, immune-mediated colitis occurred in 2.9% (58/1994) of patients, including Grade 3 (1.7%) and Grade 2 (1%). In patients receiving OPDIVO 1 mg/kg with YERVOY 3 mg/kg every 3 weeks, immune-mediated colitis occurred in 25% (115/456) of patients, including Grade 4 (0.4%), Grade 3 (14%) and Grade 2 (8%). In patients receiving OPDIVO 3 mg/kg with YERVOY 1 mg/kg every 3 weeks, immune-mediated colitis occurred in 9% (60/666) of patients, including Grade 3 (4.4%) and Grade 2 (3.7%).

Immune-Mediated Hepatitis and Hepatotoxicity

OPDIVO and YERVOY can cause immune-mediated hepatitis. In patients receiving OPDIVO monotherapy, immune-mediated hepatitis occurred in 1.8% (35/1994) of patients, including Grade 4 (0.2%), Grade 3 (1.3%), and Grade 2 (0.4%). In patients receiving OPDIVO monotherapy in Checkmate 040, immune-mediated hepatitis requiring systemic corticosteroids occurred in 5% (8/154) of patients. In patients receiving OPDIVO 1 mg/ kg with YERVOY 3 mg/kg every 3 weeks, immune-mediated hepatitis occurred in 15% (70/456) of patients, including Grade 4 (2.4%), Grade 3 (11%), and Grade 2 (1.8%). In patients receiving OPDIVO 3 mg/kg with YERVOY 1 mg/kg every 3 weeks, immune-mediated hepatitis occurred in 7% (48/666) of patients, including Grade 4 (1.2%), Grade 3 (4.9%), and Grade 2 (0.4%).

OPDIVO in combination with cabozantinib can cause hepatic toxicity with higher frequencies of Grade 3 and 4 ALT and AST elevations compared to OPDIVO alone. Consider more frequent monitoring of liver enzymes as compared to when the drugs are administered as single agents. In patients receiving OPDIVO and cabozantinib, Grades 3 and 4 increased ALT or AST were seen in 11% of patients.

Immune-Mediated Endocrinopathies

OPDIVO and YERVOY can cause primary or secondary adrenal insufficiency, immune-mediated hypophysitis, immune-mediated thyroid disorders, and Type 1 diabetes mellitus, which can present with diabetic ketoacidosis. Withhold OPDIVO and YERVOY depending on severity (please see section 2 Dosage and Administration in the accompanying Full Prescribing Information). For Grade 2 or higher adrenal insufficiency, initiate symptomatic treatment, including hormone replacement as clinically indicated. Hypophysitis can present with acute symptoms associated with mass effect such as headache, photophobia, or visual field defects. Hypophysitis can cause hypopituitarism; initiate hormone replacement as clinically indicated. Thyroiditis can present with or without endocrinopathy. Hypothyroidism can follow hyperthyroidism; initiate hormone replacement or medical management as clinically indicated. Monitor patients for hyperglycemia or other signs and symptoms of diabetes; initiate treatment with insulin as clinically indicated.

In patients receiving OPDIVO monotherapy, adrenal insufficiency occurred in 1% (20/1994), including Grade 3 (0.4%) and Grade 2 (0.6%). In patients receiving OPDIVO 1 mg/kg with YERVOY 3 mg/kg every 3 weeks, adrenal insufficiency occurred in 8% (35/456), including Grade 4 (0.2%), Grade 3 (2.4%), and Grade 2 (4.2%). In patients receiving OPDIVO 3 mg/kg with YERVOY 1 mg/kg every 3 weeks, adrenal insufficiency occurred in 7% (48/666) of patients, including Grade 4 (0.3%), Grade 3 (2.5%), and Grade 2 (4.1%). In patients receiving OPDIVO and cabozantinib, adrenal insufficiency occurred in 4.7% (15/320) of patients, including Grade 3 (2.2%) and Grade 2 (1.9%).

In patients receiving OPDIVO monotherapy, hypophysitis occurred in 0.6% (12/1994) of patients, including Grade 3 (0.2%) and Grade 2 (0.3%). In patients receiving OPDIVO 1 mg/kg with YERVOY 3 mg/kg every 3 weeks, hypophysitis occurred in 9% (42/456), including Grade 3 (2.4%) and Grade 2 (6%). In patients receiving OPDIVO 3 mg/kg with YERVOY 1 mg/kg every 3 weeks, hypophysitis occurred in 4.4% (29/666) of patients, including Grade 4 (0.3%), Grade 3 (2.4%), and Grade 2 (0.9%).

In patients receiving OPDIVO monotherapy, thyroiditis occurred in 0.6% (12/1994) of patients, including Grade 2 (0.2%). In patients receiving OPDIVO 3 mg/kg with YERVOY 1 mg/kg every 3 weeks, thyroiditis occurred in 2.7% (22/666) of patients, including Grade 3 (4.5%) and Grade 2 (2.2%).

In patients receiving OPDIVO monotherapy, hyperthyroidism occurred in 2.7% (54/1994) of patients, including Grade 3 (<0.1%) and Grade 2 (1.2%). In patients receiving OPDIVO 1 mg/kg with YERVOY 3 mg/kg every 3 weeks, hyperthyroidism occurred in 9% (42/456) of patients, including Grade 3 (0.9%) and Grade 2 (4.2%). In patients receiving OPDIVO 3 mg/kg with YERVOY 1 mg/kg every 3 weeks, hyperthyroidism occurred in 12% (80/666) of patients, including Grade 3 (0.6%) and Grade 2 (4.5%).

In patients receiving OPDIVO monotherapy, hypothyroidism occurred in 8% (163/1994) of patients, including Grade 3 (0.2%) and Grade 2 (4.8%). In patients receiving OPDIVO 1 mg/kg with YERVOY 3 mg/kg every 3 weeks, hypothyroidism occurred in 20% (91/456) of patients, including Grade 3 (0.4%) and Grade 2 (11%). In patients receiving OPDIVO 3 mg/kg with YERVOY 1 mg/kg every 3 weeks, hypothyroidism occurred in 18% (122/666) of patients, including Grade 3 (0.6%) and Grade 2 (11%).

In patients receiving OPDIVO monotherapy, diabetes occurred in 0.9% (17/1994) of patients, including Grade 3 (0.4%) and Grade 2 (0.3%), and 2 cases of diabetic ketoacidosis. In patients receiving OPDIVO 3 mg/kg with YERVOY 1 mg/kg every 3 weeks, diabetes occurred in 2.7% (15/666) of patients, including Grade 4 (0.6%), Grade 3 (0.3%), and Grade 2 (0.9%).

Immune-Mediated Nephritis with Renal Dysfunction

OPDIVO and YERVOY can cause immune-mediated nephritis. In patients receiving OPDIVO monotherapy, immune-mediated nephritis and renal dysfunction occurred in 1.2% (23/1994) of patients, including Grade 4 (<0.1%), Grade 3 (0.5%), and Grade 2 (0.6%). In patients receiving OPDIVO 3 mg/kg with YERVOY 1 mg/kg every 3 weeks, immune-mediated nephritis with renal dysfunction occurred in 4.1% (27/666) of patients, including Grade 4 (0.6%), Grade 3 (1.1%), and Grade 2 (2.2%).

Immune-Mediated Dermatologic Adverse Reactions

OPDIVO can cause immune-mediated rash or dermatitis. Exfoliative dermatitis, including Stevens-Johnson syndrome (SJS), toxic epidermal necrolysis (TEN), and drug rash with eosinophilia and systemic symptoms (DRESS) has occurred with PD-1/PD-L1 blocking antibodies. Topical emollients and/or topical corticosteroids may be adequate to treat mild to moderate nonexfoliative rashes.

YERVOY can cause immune-mediated rash or dermatitis, including bullous and exfoliative dermatitis, SJS, TEN, and DRESS. Topical emollients and/or topical corticosteroids may be adequate to treat mild to moderate non-bullous/ exfoliative rashes.

Withhold or permanently discontinue OPDIVO and YERVOY depending on severity (please see section 2 Dosage and Administration in the accompanying Full Prescribing Information).

In patients receiving OPDIVO monotherapy, immune-mediated rash occurred in 9% (171/1994) of patients, including Grade 3 (1.1%) and Grade 2 (2.2%). In patients receiving OPDIVO 1 mg/kg with YERVOY 3 mg/kg every 3 weeks, immune-mediated rash occurred in 28% (127/456) of patients, including Grade 3 (4.8%) and Grade 2 (10%). In patients receiving OPDIVO 3 mg/kg with YERVOY 1 mg/kg every 3 weeks, immune-mediated rash occurred in 16% (108/666) of patients, including Grade 3 (3.5%) and Grade 2 (4.2%).

Other Immune-Mediated Adverse Reactions

The following clinically significant immune-mediated adverse reactions occurred at an incidence of <1% (unless otherwise noted) in patients who received OPDIVO monotherapy or OPDIVO in combination with YERVOY or were reported with the use of other PD-1/PD-L1 blocking antibodies. Severe or fatal cases have been reported for some of these adverse reactions: cardiac/vascular: myocarditis, pericarditis, vasculitis; nervous system: meningitis, encephalitis, myelitis and demyelination, myasthenic syndrome/myasthenia gravis (including exacerbation), Guillain-Barre syndrome, nerve paresis, autoimmune neuropathy; ocular: uveitis, iritis, and other ocular inflammatory toxicities can occur; gastrointestinal: pancreatitis to include increases in serum amylase and lipase levels, gastritis, duodenitis; musculoskeletal and connective tissue: myositis/polymyositis, rhabdomyolysis, and associated sequelae including renal failure, arthritis, polymyalgia rheumatica; endocrine: hypoparathyroidism; other (hematologic/immune): hemolytic anemia, aplastic anemia, hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH), systemic inflammatory response syndrome, histiocytic necrotizing lymphadenitis (Kikuchi lymphadenitis), sarcoidosis, immune thrombocytopenic purpura, solid organ transplant rejection.

In addition to the immune-mediated adverse reactions listed above, across clinical trials of YERVOY monotherapy or in combination with OPDIVO, the following clinically significant immune-mediated adverse reactions, some with fatal outcome, occurred in <1% of patients unless otherwise specified: nervous system: autoimmune neuropathy (2%), myasthenic syndrome/myasthenia gravis, motor dysfunction; cardiovascular: angiopathy, temporal arteritis; ocular: blepharitis, episcleritis, orbital myositis, scleritis; gastrointestinal: pancreatitis (1.3%); other (hematologic/immune): conjunctivitis, cytopenias (2.5%), eosinophilia (2.1%), erythema multiforme, hypersensitivity vasculitis, neurosensory hypoacusis, psoriasis.

Some ocular IMAR cases can be associated with retinal detachment. Various grades of visual impairment, including blindness, can occur. If uveitis occurs in combination with other immune-mediated adverse reactions, consider a Vogt-Koyanagi-Harada-like syndrome, which has been observed in patients receiving OPDIVO and YERVOY, as this may require treatment with systemic corticosteroids to reduce the risk of permanent vision loss.

Infusion-Related Reactions

OPDIVO and YERVOY can cause severe infusion-related reactions. Discontinue OPDIVO and YERVOY in patients with severe (Grade 3) or life-threatening (Grade 4) infusion-related reactions. Interrupt or slow the rate of infusion in patients with mild (Grade 1) or moderate (Grade 2) infusion-related reactions. In patients receiving OPDIVO monotherapy as a 60-minute infusion, infusion-related reactions occurred in 6.4% (127/1994) of patients. In a separate trial in which patients received OPDIVO monotherapy as a 60-minute infusion or a 30-minute infusion, infusion-related reactions occurred in 2.2% (8/368) and 2.7% (10/369) of patients, respectively. Additionally, 0.5% (2/368) and 1.4% (5/369) of patients, respectively, experienced adverse reactions within 48 hours of infusion that led to dose delay, permanent discontinuation or withholding of OPDIVO. In melanoma patients receiving OPDIVO 1 mg/kg with YERVOY 3 mg/kg every 3 weeks, infusion-related reactions occurred in 2.5% (10/407) of patients. In HCC patients receiving OPDIVO 1 mg/kg with YERVOY 3 mg/kg every 3 weeks, infusion-related reactions occurred in 8% (4/49) of patients. In RCC patients receiving OPDIVO 3 mg/kg with YERVOY 1 mg/kg, infusion-related reactions occurred in 5.1% (28/547) of patients. In MSI-H/dMMR mCRC patients receiving OPDIVO 3 mg/kg with YERVOY 1 mg/kg every 3 weeks, infusion-related reactions occurred in 4.2% (5/119) of patients. In MPM patients receiving OPDIVO 3 mg/kg every 2 weeks with YERVOY 1 mg/kg every 6 weeks, infusion-related reactions occurred in 12% (37/300) of patients.

Complications of Allogeneic Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation

Fatal and other serious complications can occur in patients who receive allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) before or after being treated with OPDIVO or YERVOY. Transplant-related complications include hyperacute graft-versus-host-disease (GVHD), acute GVHD, chronic GVHD, hepatic veno-occlusive disease (VOD) after reduced intensity conditioning, and steroid-requiring febrile syndrome (without an identified infectious cause). These complications may occur despite intervening therapy between OPDIVO or YERVOY and allogeneic HSCT.

Follow patients closely for evidence of transplant-related complications and intervene promptly. Consider the benefit versus risks of treatment with OPDIVO and YERVOY prior to or after an allogeneic HSCT.

Embryo-Fetal Toxicity

Based on its mechanism of action and findings from animal studies, OPDIVO and YERVOY can cause fetal harm when administered to a pregnant woman. The effects of YERVOY are likely to be greater during the second and third trimesters of pregnancy. Advise pregnant women of the potential risk to a fetus. Advise females of reproductive potential to use effective contraception during treatment with OPDIVO and YERVOY and for at least 5 months after the last dose.

Increased Mortality in Patients with Multiple Myeloma when OPDIVO is Added to a Thalidomide Analogue and Dexamethasone

In randomized clinical trials in patients with multiple myeloma, the addition of OPDIVO to a thalidomide analogue plus dexamethasone resulted in increased mortality. Treatment of patients with multiple myeloma with a PD-1 or PD-L1 blocking antibody in combination with a thalidomide analogue plus dexamethasone is not recommended outside of controlled clinical trials.

Lactation

There are no data on the presence of OPDIVO or YERVOY in human milk, the effects on the breastfed child, or the effects on milk production. Because of the potential for serious adverse reactions in breastfed children, advise women not to breastfeed during treatment and for 5 months after the last dose.

Serious Adverse Reactions

In Checkmate 037, serious adverse reactions occurred in 41% of patients receiving OPDIVO (n=268). Grade 3 and 4 adverse reactions occurred in 42% of patients receiving OPDIVO. The most frequent Grade 3 and 4 adverse drug reactions reported in 2% to <5% of patients receiving OPDIVO were abdominal pain, hyponatremia, increased aspartate aminotransferase, and increased lipase. In Checkmate 066, serious adverse reactions occurred in 36% of patients receiving OPDIVO (n=206). Grade 3 and 4 adverse reactions occurred in 41% of patients receiving OPDIVO. The most frequent Grade 3 and 4 adverse reactions reported in =2% of patients receiving OPDIVO were gamma-glutamyltransferase increase (3.9%) and diarrhea (3.4%). In Checkmate 067, serious adverse reactions (74% and 44%), adverse reactions leading to permanent discontinuation (47% and 18%) or to dosing delays (58% and 36%), and Grade 3 or 4 adverse reactions (72% and 51%) all occurred more frequently in the OPDIVO plus YERVOY arm (n=313) relative to the OPDIVO arm (n=313). The most frequent (=10%) serious adverse reactions in the OPDIVO plus YERVOY arm and the OPDIVO arm, respectively, were diarrhea (13% and 2.2%), colitis (10% and 1.9%), and pyrexia (10% and 1.0%). In Checkmate 227, serious adverse reactions occurred in 58% of patients (n=576). The most frequent (=2%) serious adverse reactions were pneumonia, diarrhea/colitis, pneumonitis, hepatitis, pulmonary embolism, adrenal insufficiency, and hypophysitis. Fatal adverse reactions occurred in 1.7% of patients; these included events of pneumonitis (4 patients), myocarditis, acute kidney injury, shock, hyperglycemia, multi-system organ failure, and renal failure. In Checkmate 9LA, serious adverse reactions occurred in 57% of patients (n=358). The most frequent (>2%) serious adverse reactions were pneumonia, diarrhea, febrile neutropenia, anemia, acute kidney injury, musculoskeletal pain, dyspnea, pneumonitis, and respiratory failure. Fatal adverse reactions occurred in 7 (2%) patients, and included hepatic toxicity, acute renal failure, sepsis, pneumonitis, diarrhea with hypokalemia, and massive hemoptysis in the setting of thrombocytopenia. In Checkmate 017 and 057, serious adverse reactions occurred in 46% of patients receiving OPDIVO (n=418). The most frequent serious adverse reactions reported in =2% of patients receiving OPDIVO were pneumonia, pulmonary embolism, dyspnea, pyrexia, pleural effusion, pneumonitis, and respiratory failure. In Checkmate 057, fatal adverse reactions occurred; these included events of infection (7 patients, including one case of Pneumocystis jirovecii pneumonia), pulmonary embolism (4 patients), and limbic encephalitis (1 patient). In Checkmate 743, serious adverse reactions occurred in 54% of patients receiving OPDIVO plus YERVOY. The most frequent serious adverse reactions reported in =2% of patients were pneumonia, pyrexia, diarrhea, pneumonitis, pleural effusion, dyspnea, acute kidney injury, infusion-related reaction, musculoskeletal pain, and pulmonary embolism. Fatal adverse reactions occurred in 4 (1.3%) patients and included pneumonitis, acute heart failure, sepsis, and encephalitis. In Checkmate 214, serious adverse reactions occurred in 59% of patients receiving OPDIVO plus YERVOY (n=547). The most frequent serious adverse reactions reported in =2% of patients were diarrhea, pyrexia, pneumonia, pneumonitis, hypophysitis, acute kidney injury, dyspnea, adrenal insufficiency, and colitis. In Checkmate 9ER, serious adverse reactions occurred in 48% of patients receiving OPDIVO and cabozantinib (n=320). The most frequent serious adverse reactions reported in =2% of patients were diarrhea, pneumonia, pneumonitis, pulmonary embolism, urinary tract infection, and hyponatremia. Fatal intestinal perforations occurred in 3 (0.9%) patients. In Checkmate 025, serious adverse reactions occurred in 47% of patients receiving OPDIVO (n=406). The most frequent serious adverse reactions reported in =2% of patients were acute kidney injury, pleural effusion, pneumonia, diarrhea, and hypercalcemia. In Checkmate 205 and 039, adverse reactions leading to discontinuation occurred in 7% and dose delays due to adverse reactions occurred in 34% of patients (n=266). Serious adverse reactions occurred in 26% of patients. The most frequent serious adverse reactions reported in =1% of patients were pneumonia, infusion-related reaction, pyrexia, colitis or diarrhea, pleural effusion, pneumonitis, and rash. Eleven patients died from causes other than disease progression: 3 from adverse reactions within 30 days of the last OPDIVO dose, 2 from infection 8 to 9 months after completing OPDIVO, and 6 from complications of allogeneic HSCT. In Checkmate 141, serious adverse reactions occurred in 49% of patients receiving OPDIVO (n=236). The most frequent serious adverse reactions reported in =2% of patients receiving OPDIVO were pneumonia, dyspnea, respiratory failure, respiratory tract infection, and sepsis. In Checkmate 275, serious adverse reactions occurred in 54% of patients receiving OPDIVO (n=270). The most frequent serious adverse reactions reported in =2% of patients receiving OPDIVO were urinary tract infection, sepsis, diarrhea, small intestine obstruction, and general physical health deterioration. In Checkmate 142 in MSI-H/dMMR mCRC patients receiving OPDIVO with YERVOY (n=119), serious adverse reactions occurred in 47% of patients. The most frequent serious adverse reactions reported in =2% of patients were colitis/diarrhea, hepatic events, abdominal pain, acute kidney injury, pyrexia, and dehydration. In Checkmate 040, serious adverse reactions occurred in 49% of patients receiving OPDIVO (n=154). The most frequent serious adverse reactions reported in =2% of patients were pyrexia, ascites, back pain, general physical health deterioration, abdominal pain, pneumonia, and anemia. In Checkmate 040, serious adverse reactions occurred in 59% of patients receiving OPDIVO with YERVOY (n=49). Serious adverse reactions reported in =4% of patients were pyrexia, diarrhea, anemia, increased AST, adrenal insufficiency, ascites, esophageal varices hemorrhage, hyponatremia, increased blood bilirubin, and pneumonitis. In Checkmate 238, serious adverse reactions occurred in 18% of patients receiving OPDIVO (n=452). Grade 3 or 4 adverse reactions occurred in 25% of OPDIVO-treated patients (n=452). The most frequent Grade 3 and 4 adverse reactions reported in =2% of OPDIVO-treated patients were diarrhea and increased lipase and amylase. In Attraction-3, serious adverse reactions occurred in 38% of patients receiving OPDIVO (n=209). Serious adverse reactions reported in =2% of patients who received OPDIVO were pneumonia, esophageal fistula, interstitial lung disease, and pyrexia. The following fatal adverse reactions occurred in patients who received OPDIVO: interstitial lung disease or pneumonitis (1.4%), pneumonia (1.0%), septic shock (0.5%), esophageal fistula (0.5%), gastrointestinal hemorrhage (0.5%), pulmonary embolism (0.5%), and sudden death (0.5%). In Checkmate 577, serious adverse reactions occurred in 33% of patients receiving OPDIVO (n=532). A serious adverse reaction reported in =2% of patients who received OPDIVO was pneumonitis. A fatal reaction of myocardial infarction occurred in one patient who received OPDIVO. In Checkmate 649, serious adverse reactions occurred in 52% of patients treated with OPDIVO in combination with chemotherapy (n=782). The most frequent serious adverse reactions reported in 2% of patients treated with OPDIVO in combination with chemotherapy were vomiting (3.7%), pneumonia (3.6%), anemia (3.6%), pyrexia (2.8%), diarrhea (2.7%), febrile neutropenia (2.6%), and pneumonitis (2.4%). Fatal adverse reactions occurred in 16 (2.0%) patients who were treated with OPDIVO in combination with chemotherapy; these included pneumonitis (4 patients), febrile neutropenia (2 patients), stroke (2 patients), gastrointestinal toxicity, intestinal mucositis, septic shock, pneumonia, infection, gastrointestinal bleeding, mesenteric vessel thrombosis, and disseminated intravascular coagulation.

Common Adverse Reactions

In Checkmate 037, the most common adverse reaction (=20%) reported with OPDIVO (n=268) was rash (21%). In Checkmate 066, the most common adverse reactions (=20%) reported with OPDIVO (n=206) vs dacarbazine (n=205) were fatigue (49% vs 39%), musculoskeletal pain (32% vs 25%), rash (28% vs 12%), and pruritus (23% vs 12%). In Checkmate 067, the most common (=20%) adverse reactions in the OPDIVO plus YERVOY arm (n=313) were fatigue (62%), diarrhea (54%), rash (53%), nausea (44%), pyrexia (40%), pruritus (39%), musculoskeletal pain (32%), vomiting (31%), decreased appetite (29%), cough (27%), headache (26%), dyspnea (24%), upper respiratory tract infection (23%), arthralgia (21%), and increased transaminases (25%). In Checkmate 067, the most common (=20%) adverse reactions in the OPDIVO arm (n=313) were fatigue (59%), rash (40%), musculoskeletal pain (42%), diarrhea (36%), nausea (30%), cough (28%), pruritus (27%), upper respiratory tract infection (22%), decreased appetite (22%), headache (22%), constipation (21%), arthralgia (21%), and vomiting (20%). In Checkmate 227, the most common (=20%) adverse reactions were fatigue (44%), rash (34%), decreased appetite (31%), musculoskeletal pain (27%), diarrhea/colitis (26%), dyspnea (26%), cough (23%), hepatitis (21%), nausea (21%), and pruritus (21%). In Checkmate 9LA, the most common (>20%) adverse reactions were fatigue (49%), musculoskeletal pain (39%), nausea (32%), diarrhea (31%), rash (30%), decreased appetite (28%), constipation (21%), and pruritus (21%). In Checkmate 017 and 057, the most common adverse reactions (=20%) in patients receiving OPDIVO (n=418) were fatigue, musculoskeletal pain, cough, dyspnea, and decreased appetite. In Checkmate 743, the most common adverse reactions (=20%) in patients receiving OPDIVO plus YERVOY were fatigue (43%), musculoskeletal pain (38%), rash (34%), diarrhea (32%), dyspnea (27%), nausea (24%), decreased appetite (24%), cough (23%), and pruritus (21%). In Checkmate 214, the most common adverse reactions (=20%) reported in patients treated with OPDIVO plus YERVOY (n=547) were fatigue (58%), rash (39%), diarrhea (38%), musculoskeletal pain (37%), pruritus (33%), nausea (30%), cough (28%), pyrexia (25%), arthralgia (23%), decreased appetite (21%), dyspnea (20%), and vomiting (20%). In Checkmate 9ER, the most common adverse reactions (=20%) in patients receiving OPDIVO and cabozantinib (n=320) were diarrhea (64%), fatigue (51%), hepatotoxicity (44%), palmar-plantar erythrodysaesthesia syndrome (40%), stomatitis (37%), rash (36%), hypertension (36%), hypothyroidism (34%), musculoskeletal pain (33%), decreased appetite (28%), nausea (27%), dysgeusia (24%), abdominal pain (22%), cough (20%) and upper respiratory tract infection (20%). In Checkmate 025, the most common adverse reactions (=20%) reported in patients receiving OPDIVO (n=406) vs everolimus (n=397) were fatigue (56% vs 57%), cough (34% vs 38%), nausea (28% vs 29%), rash (28% vs 36%), dyspnea (27% vs 31%), diarrhea (25% vs 32%), constipation (23% vs 18%), decreased appetite (23% vs 30%), back pain (21% vs 16%), and arthralgia (20% vs 14%). In Checkmate 205 and 039, the most common adverse reactions (=20%) reported in patients receiving OPDIVO (n=266) were upper respiratory tract infection (44%), fatigue (39%), cough (36%), diarrhea (33%), pyrexia (29%), musculoskeletal pain (26%), rash (24%), nausea (20%) and pruritus (20%). In Checkmate 141, the most common adverse reactions (=10%) in patients receiving OPDIVO (n=236) were cough (14%) and dyspnea (14%) at a higher incidence than investigator's choice. In Checkmate 275, the most common adverse reactions (=20%) reported in patients receiving OPDIVO (n=270) were fatigue (46%), musculoskeletal pain (30%), nausea (22%), and decreased appetite (22%). In Checkmate 142 in MSI-H/dMMR mCRC patients receiving OPDIVO as a single agent (n=74), the most common adverse reactions (=20%) were fatigue (54%), diarrhea (43%), abdominal pain (34%), nausea (34%), vomiting (28%), musculoskeletal pain (28%), cough (26%), pyrexia (24%), rash (23%), constipation (20%), and upper respiratory tract infection (20%). In Checkmate 142 in MSI-H/dMMR mCRC patients receiving OPDIVO with YERVOY (n=119), the most common adverse reactions (=20%) were fatigue (49%), diarrhea (45%), pyrexia (36%), musculoskeletal pain (36%), abdominal pain (30%), pruritus (28%), nausea (26%), rash (25%), decreased appetite (20%), and vomiting (20%). In Checkmate 040, the most common adverse reactions (=20%) in patients receiving OPDIVO (n=154) were fatigue (38%), musculoskeletal pain (36%), abdominal pain (34%), pruritus (27%), diarrhea (27%), rash (26%), cough (23%), and decreased appetite (22%). In Checkmate 040, the most common adverse reactions (=20%) in patients receiving OPDIVO with YERVOY (n=49), were rash (53%), pruritus (53%), musculoskeletal pain (41%), diarrhea (39%), cough (37%), decreased appetite (35%), fatigue (27%), pyrexia (27%), abdominal pain (22%), headache (22%), nausea (20%), dizziness (20%), hypothyroidism (20%), and weight decreased (20%). In Checkmate 238, the most common adverse reactions (=20%) reported in OPDIVO-treated patients (n=452) vs ipilimumab-treated patients (n=453) were fatigue (57% vs 55%), diarrhea (37% vs 55%), rash (35% vs 47%), musculoskeletal pain (32% vs 27%), pruritus (28% vs 37%), headache (23% vs 31%), nausea (23% vs 28%), upper respiratory infection (22% vs 15%), and abdominal pain (21% vs 23%). The most common immune-mediated adverse reactions were rash (16%), diarrhea/colitis (6%), and hepatitis (3%). In Attraction-3, the most common adverse reactions (=20%) in OPDIVO-treated patients (n=209) were rash (22%) and decreased appetite (21%). In Checkmate 577, the most common adverse reactions (=20%) in patients receiving OPDIVO (n=532) were fatigue (34%), diarrhea (29%), nausea (23%), rash (21%), musculoskeletal pain (21%), and cough (20%). In Checkmate 649, the most common adverse reactions (=20%) in patients treated with OPDIVO in combination with chemotherapy (n=782) were peripheral neuropathy (53%), nausea (48%), fatigue (44%), diarrhea (39%), vomiting (31%), decreased appetite (29%), abdominal pain (27%), constipation (25%), and musculoskeletal pain (20%).

Please see US Full Prescribing Information for OPDIVO and YERVOY.

Clinical Trials and Patient Populations

Checkmate 037-previously treated metastatic melanoma; Checkmate 066-previously untreated metastatic melanoma; Checkmate 067-previously untreated metastatic melanoma, as a single agent or in combination with YERVOY; Checkmate 227-previously untreated metastatic non-small cell lung cancer, in combination with YERVOY; Checkmate 9LA-previously untreated recurrent or metastatic non-small cell lung cancer in combination with YERVOY and 2 cycles of platinum-doublet chemotherapy by histology; Checkmate 017-second-line treatment of metastatic squamous non-small cell lung cancer; Checkmate 057-second-line treatment of metastatic non-squamous non-small cell lung cancer; Checkmate 743-previously untreated unresectable malignant pleural mesothelioma, in combination with YERVOY; Checkmate 214-previously untreated renal cell carcinoma, in combination with YERVOY; Checkmate 9ER-previously untreated renal cell carcinoma, in combination with cabozantinib; Checkmate 025-previously treated renal cell carcinoma; Checkmate 205/039-classical Hodgkin lymphoma; Checkmate 141-recurrent or metastatic squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck; Checkmate 275-urothelial carcinoma; Checkmate 142-MSI-H or dMMR metastatic colorectal cancer, as a single agent or in combination with YERVOY; Checkmate 040-hepatocellular carcinoma, as a single agent or in combination with YERVOY; Checkmate 238-adjuvant treatment of melanoma; Attraction-3-esophageal squamous cell carcinoma; Checkmate 577-adjuvant treatment of esophageal or gastroesophageal junction cancer; Checkmate 649-previously untreated advanced or metastatic gastric or gastroesophageal junction or esophageal adenocarcinoma

About the Bristol Myers Squibb and Ono Pharmaceutical Collaboration

In 2011, through a collaboration agreement with Ono Pharmaceutical Co., Bristol Myers Squibb expanded its territorial rights to develop and commercialize Opdivo globally, except in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, where Ono had retained all rights to the compound at the time. On July 23, 2014, Ono and Bristol Myers Squibb further expanded the companies' strategic collaboration agreement to jointly develop and commercialize multiple immunotherapies as single agents and combination regimens for patients with cancer in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

About Bristol Myers Squibb

Bristol Myers Squibb is a global biopharmaceutical company whose mission is to discover, develop and deliver innovative medicines that help patients prevail over serious diseases. For more information about Bristol Myers Squibb, visit us at BMS.com or follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

Celgene and Juno Therapeutics are wholly owned subsidiaries of Bristol-Myers Squibb Company. In certain countries outside the U.S., due to local laws, Celgene and Juno Therapeutics are referred to as, Celgene, a Bristol Myers Squibb company and Juno Therapeutics, a Bristol Myers Squibb company.

Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 regarding, among other things, the research, development and commercialization of pharmaceutical products. All statements that are not statements of historical facts are, or may be deemed to be, forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements are based on historical performance and current expectations and projections about our future financial results, goals, plans and objectives and involve inherent risks, assumptions and uncertainties, including internal or external factors that could delay, divert or change any of them in the next several years, that are difficult to predict, may be beyond our control and could cause our future financial results, goals, plans and objectives to differ materially from those expressed in, or implied by, the statements. These risks, assumptions, uncertainties and other factors include, among others, that the CHMP opinion is not binding on the EC, that Opdivo in combination with Yervoy may not receive regulatory approval for the additional indication described in this release in the currently anticipated timeline or at all and, if approved, whether such combination treatment for such additional indication described in this release will be commercially successful. No forward-looking statement can be guaranteed. Forward-looking statements in this press release should be evaluated together with the many risks and uncertainties that affect Bristol Myers Squibb's business and market, particularly those identified in the cautionary statement and risk factors discussion in Bristol Myers Squibb's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2020, as updated by our subsequent Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The forward-looking statements included in this document are made only as of the date of this document and except as otherwise required by applicable law, Bristol Myers Squibb undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events, changed circumstances or otherwise.

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View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005600/en/

Contacts:

Bristol Myers Squibb



Media Inquiries:

Media@BMS.com



Investors:

Tim Power

609-252-7509

timothy.power@bms.com



Nina Goworek

908-673-9711

nina.goworek@bms.com


FRANKFURT (dpa-AFX) - Deutsche Bank and Investec have signed an agreement with the Republic of Ghana to finance the construction of a 100km stretch of Ghana's Western Railway Line, running from Takoradi Port to Huni Valley.



The 600 million euros financing consists of two loans in favour of Ghana's Ministry of Finance. Deutsche Bank acted as mandated lead arranger for both loans.



The first, backed by Swedish Export Credit Agency and fully arranged by Deutsche Bank, is a 523 million euros loan covering the bulk of the cost.



The second is a 75 million euro commercial loan arranged and structured by Investec to cover the down payment on the Swedish Export Credit Agency -backed financing. It is backed by Export Credit Insurance Corporation of South Africa and funded by a syndicate of Investec Bank Ltd, Rand Merchant Bank, a division of FirstRand Bank Limited, Nedbank Limited and Sanlam life Insurance Limited.



Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) contract of the project will be carried out by Amandi Investment Ltd with Bluebird Finance & Projects Ltd acting as lead financial advisor for the EPC.



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DEUTSCHE BANK-Aktie komplett kostenlos handeln - auf Smartbroker.de
Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - June 29, 2021) - Spirit Banner II Capital Corp. (TSXV: SBTC.P) ("Spirit") is pleased to announce that it has entered into a non-binding letter of intent dated June 23, 2021 (the "LOI") with Sabio Mobile, Inc. ("Sabio") pursuant to which Spirit proposes to acquire all of the issued and outstanding securities of Sabio in exchange for the issuance of securities of Spirit, which will result in Sabio becoming a wholly-owned subsidiary of Spirit (the "Sabio Transaction"). The Sabio Transaction, assuming the completion of the Private Placement (as defined below), will result in a reverse take-over of Spirit where the existing shareholders of Sabio will own a majority of the outstanding common shares of Spirit (the "Spirit Common Shares") and Spirit is anticipated to be renamed "Sabio Inc." (the "Resulting Issuer") or such other name as Sabio may determine. Upon completion of the Sabio Transaction, it is anticipated that the Resulting Issuer will be a Technology Issuer.

Trading of the Spirit Common Shares will be halted in accordance with the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange (the "TSXV") and will remain halted until such time as all required documentation in connection with the Sabio Transaction has been filed with and accepted by the TSXV and permission to resume trading has been obtained from the TSXV.

The Qualifying Transaction

Spirit is a capital pool company and intends that the Sabio Transaction will constitute its "Qualifying Transaction" under the policies of the TSXV. The Sabio Transaction will not constitute a non-arm's length qualifying transaction or a related party transaction pursuant to the policies of the TSXV.

Pursuant to the terms and conditions of the LOI, Spirit and Sabio will negotiate and enter into a definitive agreement (the "Definitive Agreement") incorporating the principal terms of the Sabio Transaction as described in the LOI and this press release. There is no assurance that a Definitive Agreement will be successfully negotiated or entered into. The terms and conditions outlined in the LOI are non-binding on the parties and the LOI is expected to be superseded by the Definitive Agreement to be negotiated between the parties.

As consideration for the acquisition of all of the outstanding securities of Sabio, holders of issued and outstanding common shares of Sabio ("Sabio Common Shares") will receive approximately one (1) Spirit Common Share (on a post-Spirit Consolidation (as defined below) basis) for each one (1) Sabio Common Share (on a post-Sabio Consolidation (as defined below) basis) (the "Exchange Ratio"), at a deemed price of $1.75 per Spirit Common Share. Excluding any securities issued in connection with the Private Placement (as defined below), immediately prior to the closing of the Sabio Transaction, it is anticipated that: (i) assuming completion of the anticipated exercise of 5,440,064 post-Sabio Consolidation incentive stock options, holders of the post-Sabio Consolidation Sabio Common Shares will receive an aggregate of approximately 35,646,924 Spirit Common Shares in accordance with the Exchange Ratio; (ii) holders of the unexercised post-Sabio Consolidation incentive stock options will receive an aggregate of approximately 3,394,600 incentive stock options of the Resulting Issuer pursuant to the Exchange Ratio; (iii) holders of the post-Sabio Consolidation common share purchase warrants will receive an aggregate of approximately 3,144,357 common share purchase warrants of the Resulting Issuer pursuant to the Exchange Ratio; and (iv) holders of the post-Sabio Consolidation convertible notes will receive an aggregate of approximately 2,591,713 Spirit Common Shares and an aggregate of approximately 1,295,856 common share purchase warrants of the Resulting Issuer, each pursuant to the Exchange Ratio, and on the assumed basis of a fully diluted equity valuation of Sabio of C$80,628,468. In addition, an arm's length finder's fee in the form of shares is anticipated to be paid in connection with the closing Sabio Transaction, the holder of which will receive an aggregate of approximately 85,714 Spirit Common Shares in accordance with the Exchange Ratio. The final structure of the Sabio Transaction is subject to the receipt of tax, corporate and securities law advice by both Spirit and Sabio.

Immediately prior to the completion of the Sabio Transaction, it is anticipated that: (i) Spirit will consolidate its issued and outstanding Spirit Common Shares on the basis of approximately 15.91 pre-consolidation Spirit Common Shares for each one (1) post-consolidation Spirit Common Share (the "Spirit Consolidation Ratio") as a condition to the completion of the Sabio Transaction (the "Spirit Consolidation"); and (ii) Sabio will consolidate its issued and outstanding Sabio Common Shares on the basis of approximately 0.2757 pre-consolidation Sabio Common Shares for each one (1) post-consolidation Sabio Common Share (the "Sabio Consolidation Ratio") as a condition to the completion of the Sabio Transaction (the "Sabio Consolidation"). All incentive stock options of Spirit are anticipated to be adjusted on the basis of the Spirit Consolidation Ratio. All incentive stock options of Sabio, common share purchase warrants to purchase Sabio Common Shares and other convertible securities of Sabio are anticipated to be adjusted on the basis of the Sabio Consolidation Ratio.

It is a condition of the Sabio Transaction for Sabio to close a concurrent brokered private placement (the "Private Placement") for aggregate gross proceeds of up to C$10,000,000 through the offering of subscription receipts ("Subscription Receipts") of Sabio to be sold at an issue price of C$1.75 or such other price as may be agreed to by Sabio. Immediately prior to the closing of the Sabio Transaction and assuming the other conditions applicable to the Subscription Receipts have been satisfied or waived, each Subscription Receipt shall be deemed to be exercised, without payment of any additional consideration, for that number of Sabio Common Shares as is equal to a fraction, the numerator of which is one and the denominator of which is the Exchange Ratio. Beacon Securities Limited and Paradigm Capital Inc. shall act as the co-lead agents of the Private Placement on their own behalf and on the behalf of a syndicate of agents (collectively, the "Agents"), and in connection with the services provided by the Agents pursuant to the Private Placement, Sabio shall pay the Agents a cash fee of 7.0% of the aggregate gross proceeds raised from the Private Placement (other than for the gross proceeds raised from subscribers on a president's list provided by Sabio (the "President's List") to the Agents, in respect of which a cash fee of 2.0% shall be paid to the Agents) and issue that number of compensation warrants to the Agents equal to 7.0% of the aggregate number of Subscription Receipts sold through the Private Placement (other than for Subscription Receipts issued to subscribers on the President's List, in respect of which that number of compensation warrants equal to 2.0% of the Subscription Receipts issued to such subscribers shall be issued to the Agents). Each compensation warrant shall be exercisable for one Sabio Common Share or one Spirit Common Share at the issue price of the Subscription Receipts for a period of 24 months following the date of deemed conversion of the Subscription Receipts.

Sabio intends to use the net proceeds from the Private Placement for business development, working capital requirements and general corporate purposes.

About Sabio Mobile, Inc.

Sabio provides a CTV platform that is powered by mobile data, providing leading brands with the perfect balance between media, data and technology. Sabio's unique approach to combining mobile data, device location and consumer behaviors aims to provide brands with more effective targeting and greater prediction accuracy for their mobile and connected TV ad campaigns. Sabio's team of experienced marketers, engineers and data scientists are passionately innovative in everything they do, from developing Sabio's proprietary audience platform and ad server to creating and delivering stunning ads on connected TVs and mobile devices. Sabio was founded in 2014 by veterans in the mobile and TV industries and is headquartered in Los Angeles. Sabio was incorporated under the laws of the State of Delaware.

Sabio has completed its audited financial statements for fiscal years ended December 31, 2019 and 2020 in accordance with international financial reporting standards (IFRS), as required by the policies of the TSXV and applicable securities laws. For its most recent fiscal year ended December 31, 2020, Sabio had audited revenues of US$13,192,426, assets of US$3,515,513, liabilities of US$12,055,228 and net losses of US$281,501 and for its fiscal year ended December 31, 2019, Sabio had audited revenues of US$16,311,492, assets of US$4,009,874, liabilities of US$12,346,876 and net losses of US$2,406,509.

Insiders of the Resulting Issuer

Upon completion of the Sabio Transaction, it is anticipated that the board of directors of the Resulting Issuer will consist of five nominees, each to be appointed by Sabio, three of whom are anticipated to be: (i) Aziz Rahimtoola; (ii) Paula Madison; and (iii) Carl Farrell. The senior management team of the Resulting Issuer will consist of those officers appointed by the new board of directors of the Resulting Issuer concurrent with the closing of the Sabio Transaction, and is anticipated to include: (i) Aziz Rahimtoola, Chief Executive Officer; (ii) Sajid Premji, Chief Financial Officer; (iii) Joe Camacho, Chief Marketing Officer; and (iv) Jason Tong, SVP of Engineering.

Aziz Rahimtoola - Aziz Rahimtoola is the CEO and Founding Team Member of Sabio and its subsidiary AppScience Inc., with more than 24 years of experience in the TV and mobile advertising tech industry. He has held leadership roles with multiple media and telecommunications companies, such as NBC Universal and AT&T Adworks. Prior to Sabio, Aziz was the SVP at Opera Mediaworks where he helped foster revenue and product innovation. As CEO, Aziz is responsible for keeping the company and its employees focused on short and long-term growth objectives. On the rare days when Aziz is not traveling, he can be found in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter.

Paula Madison - Paula Williams Madison is Chairman and CEO of Madison Media Management LLC and 88 Madison Media Works Inc. In 2011, Madison retired from NBCUniversal (NBCU) after a successful 22 years, where she held a number of leadership roles, including Executive Vice President for Diversity as well as a Vice President of the General Electric Company (GE), then the parent company of NBCU. She is also the author and executive producer, respectively, of the book and documentary FINDING SAMUEL LOWE, which tells the story of her successful search to locate her Chinese grandfather's descendants in China. Madison also is a board member of her family's investment company, Williams Group Holdings LLC, the majority owner of The Africa Channel. She and her husband Roosevelt Madison live in Los Angeles.

Carl Farrell - Carl Farrell is an experienced board member and advisor with over 30 years of global management expertise guiding large and small organizations through growth and transformation. Most recently, before retirement from full time roles, Carl was the Group President of commercial real-estate leader Altus Group where he also served as an independent director on the company's board of directors. Prior to that, Carl was the Chief Revenue Officer and member of the board of directors of global analytics leader SAS Institute. Before his 15-year tenure at SAS, Carl held senior management positions at Vignette Corporation, J.D Edwards, Idiom Technologies and JBA. Currently, Carl is a member of the board of directors of enterprise software company Basware Corporation and acts as a strategic advisor to other technology companies in Europe and North America. Originally from England, Carl resides in Toronto, Canada.

Joe Camacho - Joe is Sabio's Chief Marketing Officer and Team Member of Sabio. Joe is responsible for all marketing efforts as well as Hispanic and Political growth opportunities at Sabio. He is a seasoned marketing executive with production and sales experiences that range from network broadcast television to mobile. Prior to joining Sabio, Joe was CMO of Latin American Multimedia Corp, and he holds an MBA from San Diego State University. Joe currently resides in Los Angeles where he invests much of his free time hiking and exploring the Gold Coast's local beaches and mountains with his wife and two children.

Sajid Premji - Sajid Premji is the Chief Financial Officer of Sabio and its subsidiary AppScience Inc. Sajid has 15 years of experience in accounting, finance and capital markets in both Canada and the United States. Sajid is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) and a Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA, CA). Before joining Sabio, he spent several years in the public companies' audit and assurance practice at a national public accounting firm in Canada, and in the Internal Audit group at a large, multi-national financial institution (TD Bank Financial Group). Most recently, he held a senior-level position in the financial crimes compliance function at TD Securities (USA) LLC, a New York City-based investment bank and registered broker/dealer. Originally from Toronto, Canada, Sajid resides in New York City.

Jason Tong - Jason Tong is Sabio's SVP of Engineering and is responsible for leading the engineering teams in California and India. He has been instrumental in Sabio's growth and building its proprietary DSP, SSP and App Science Platforms. Jason has over ten years of experience in mobile marketing and overall ad tech with extensive knowledge of ad serving, action tracking and reporting. His specialties include LAMP, RTB, Ad network, performance marketing and programmatic marketing. Jason attended CSU Hayward and enjoys playing badminton.

Biographical information regarding yet to be determined directors will be provided in a subsequent news release.

Significant Conditions to Closing

The completion of the Sabio Transaction is subject to a number of conditions precedent, including but not limited to satisfactory due diligence review, negotiation and execution of the Definitive Agreement and accompanying transaction documents, approval by the boards of directors of each of Spirit and Sabio, approval of the shareholders of each of Spirit and Sabio (if required), obtaining necessary third party approvals, TSXV acceptance, closing of the Private Placement for minimum aggregate gross proceeds of up to C$10,000,000 and preparation and filing of a management information circular or filing statement outlining the definitive terms of the Sabio Transaction and describing the business to be conducted by the Resulting Issuer following completion of the Sabio Transaction, in accordance with the policies of the TSXV. There can be no assurance that the Sabio Transaction or the Private Placement will be completed as proposed, or at all.

The obligations of Spirit and Sabio pursuant to the LOI shall terminate in certain specified circumstances, including in the event that a Definitive Agreement is not entered into between the parties by July 21, 2021.

Sponsorship

Sponsorship of a Qualifying Transaction is required by the TSXV unless a waiver from the sponsorship requirement is obtained. Spirit intends to apply for a waiver from sponsorship for the Sabio Transaction. There is no assurance that a waiver from this requirement will be obtained.

Additional Information

This is an initial press release. Spirit plans to issue a comprehensive press release in accordance with Policy 2.4 once it has entered into the Definitive Agreement to provide, among other things, selected financial information respecting Sabio and the additional biographies of the anticipated directors and officers of the Resulting Issuer. Additional information with respect to Sabio and the Sabio Transaction will be included in Spirit's management information circular or filing statement to be filed in connection with the Sabio Transaction, which will be available under Spirit's SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com .

About Spirit Banner II Capital Corp.

Spirit is a capital pool company created pursuant to the policies of the TSXV. It does not own any assets, other than cash or cash equivalents and its rights under the LOI. The principal business of Spirit is to identify and evaluate opportunities for the acquisition of an interest in assets or businesses and, once identified and evaluated, to negotiate an acquisition or participation subject to acceptance by the TSXV so as to complete a Qualifying Transaction in accordance with the policies of the TSXV.

Forward-Looking Statements Disclaimer

Certain information in this press release may contain forward-looking statements. This information is based on current expectations that are subject to significant risks and uncertainties that are difficult to predict. Actual results might differ materially from results suggested in any forward-looking statements. Spirit assumes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements, or to update the reasons why actual results could differ from those reflected in the forward looking-statements unless and until required by securities laws applicable to Spirit. Additional information identifying risks and uncertainties is contained in filings by Spirit with the Canadian securities regulators, which filings are available at www.sedar.com .

Completion of the Sabio 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 filing statement or management information circular to be prepared in connection with the Sabio Transaction, any information released or received with respect to the transaction may not be accurate or complete and should not be relied upon. Trading in the securities of a capital pool company should be considered highly speculative.

The TSXV has in no way passed upon the merits of the proposed Sabio Transaction and has neither approved nor disapproved the contents of this press release.

The Spirit Common Shares will remain halted until such time as permission to resume trading has been obtained from the TSXV. Spirit is a reporting issuer in Alberta, British Columbia, and Ontario.

For more information about Spirit, please contact Matthew Wood, Chief Executive Officer, at (647) 951-6508.

NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UNITED STATES WIRE SERVICES OR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES. THIS NEWS RELEASE DOES NOT CONSTITUTE AN OFFER TO SELL OR A SOLICITATION OF AN OFFER TO BUY ANY OF THE SECURITIES IN THE UNITED STATES. THE SECURITIES HAVE NOT BEEN AND WILL NOT BE REGISTERED UNDER THE UNITED STATES SECURITIES ACT OF 1933, AS AMENDED (THE "U.S. SECURITIES ACT") OR ANY STATE SECURITIES LAWS AND MAY NOT BE OFFERED OR SOLD WITHIN THE UNITED STATES OR TO U.S. PERSONS UNLESS REGISTERED UNDER THE U.S. SECURITIES ACT AND APPLICABLE STATE SECURITIES LAWS OR AN EXEMPTION FROM SUCH REGISTRATION IS AVAILABLE. THIS NEWS RELEASE DOES NOT CONSTITUTE AN OFFER OR SALE OF SECURITIES IN THE UNITED STATES.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/88957
Thunder Bay, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - June 29, 2021) - Benton Resources Inc. (TSXV: BEX) ('Benton') and Sokoman Minerals Corp. (TSXV: SIC) (OTCQB: SICNF)('Sokoman') (jointly, 'the Companies' or 'the Joint Venture') are pleased to announce that on behalf of their strategic alliance (see news release dated May 20, 2021) Benton has entered into an option agreement to acquire the Larry's Pond project which lies along the western boundary of the Kepenkeck Gold JV claims (the "Option Agreement"). Larry's Pond consists of two licenses totalling 30 claim units (the "Property"). The optionors of the Larry's Pond project (the "Optionors") have discovered and sampled multiple quartz veins and silicified zones containing sulfides (chalcopyrite and galena) for which results are pending. Under the Option Agreement and upon approval from the TSX Venture Exchange (the "Exchange"), Benton, on behalf of the Joint Venture, will issue 200,000 common shares and make cash payments to the Optionors of $60,000 as per below:

paying to the Optionors in the aggregate $10,000 cash on execution of the Option Agreement;

issuing to the Optionors in the aggregate 50,000 common shares of Benton upon receipt of Exchange approval for the Option Agreement;

paying to the Optionors in the aggregate a further $10,000 cash and issuing to the Optionors in the aggregate a further 50,000 common shares of Benton by the first anniversary of the effective date of the Option Agreement (the "Effective Date");

paying to the Optionors in the aggregate a further $10,000 cash and issuing to the Optionors in the aggregate a further 50,000 common shares of Benton by the second anniversary of the Effective Date; and

paying to the Optionors in the aggregate a further $30,000 cash and issuing to the Optionors in the aggregate a further 50,000 common shares of Benton by the third anniversary of the Effective Date.

The Optionors will retain a 2% Net Smelter Royalty, half of which Benton, on behalf of the Joint Venture, can purchase for CAD$1M at any time. Under the terms of the Joint Venture, Sokoman will reimburse Benton for 50% of the Option payments made by Benton pursuant to the Option Agreement.

Personnel have begun prospecting and mapping on the Property, and the imminent, detailed, 100m-spaced Airborne Mag-VFL survey that will encompass approximately 1,600 line-km in the area will include the optioned Property. Benton and Sokoman anticipate that these initial activities will generate gold targets for further exploration. Results will be released as they are received and compiled.

QP

Nathan Sims, P.Geo., Senior Exploration Manager for Benton Resources Inc., and Timothy Froude, P.Geo., President & CEO of Sokoman Minerals Corp., "Qualified Persons" under National Instrument 43-101, have approved the scientific and technical disclosure in this news release and prepared or supervised its preparation.

About Benton Resources Inc.

Benton Resources is a well-funded Canadian-based project generator with a diversified property portfolio in Gold, Silver, Nickel, Copper, and Platinum group elements. Benton holds multiple high-grade projects available for option which can be viewed on the Company's website. Parties interested in seeking more information about properties available for option can contact Mr. Stares directly.

About Sokoman Minerals Corp.

Sokoman Minerals Corp. is a discovery-oriented company with projects in Newfoundland & Labrador, Canada. The Company's primary focus is its portfolio of gold projects: Moosehead, Crippleback Lake (optioned to Trans Canada Gold Corp.) and East Alder (optioned to Canterra Minerals Corporation) along the Central Newfoundland Gold Belt, and the recently acquired district-scale Fleur de Lys project in northwestern Newfoundland, which is targeting Dalradian-type orogenic gold mineralization similar to the Curraghinalt and Cavanacaw deposits in Northern Ireland, and Cononish in Scotland. The Company also recently entered into a strategic alliance with Benton Resources Inc. through three large-scale joint venture properties including Grey River, Golden Hope and Kepenkeck in Newfoundland. Sokoman now controls independently and through the Benton alliance over 150,000 hectares (>6,000 claims) of land, making the Company one of the largest landholders in Newfoundland, Canada's newest and rapidly emerging gold districts. The Company also retains an interest in an early-stage antimony/gold project (Startrek) in Newfoundland, optioned to White Metal Resources Inc., and in Labrador, the Company has a 100% interest in the Iron Horse (Fe) project that has Direct Shipping Ore (DSO) potential.

For further information, please contact:

CHF Capital Markets

Cathy Hume, CEO

Phone: 416-868-1079 x251

Email: cathy@chfir.com

Benton Resources

Stephen Stares, President & CEO

Phone: 807-475-7474

Email: sstares@bentonresources.ca

Sokoman Minerals

Timothy Froude, P.Geo., President & CEO

Phone: 709-765-1726

Email: tim@sokomanmineralscorp.com

Website: www.bentonresources.ca, www.sokomanmineralscorp.com

Twitter: @BentonResources, @SokomanMinerals

Facebook: @BentonResourcesBEX, @SokomanMinerals

THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE HAS NOT REVIEWED AND DOES NOT ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS RELEASE.

The information contained herein contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of applicable securities legislation. Forward-looking statements relate to information that is based on assumptions of management, forecasts of future results, and estimates of amounts not yet determinable. Any statements that express predictions, expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives, assumptions or future events or performance are not statements of historical fact and may be "forward-looking statements."

Forward-looking statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties which could cause actual events or results to differ from those reflected in the forward-looking statements, including, without limitation: risks related to failure to obtain adequate financing on a timely basis and on acceptable terms; risks related to the outcome of legal proceedings; political and regulatory risks associated with mining and exploration; risks related to the maintenance of stock exchange listings; risks related to environmental regulation and liability; the potential for delays in exploration or development activities or the completion of feasibility studies; the uncertainty of profitability; risks and uncertainties relating to the interpretation of drill results, the geology, grade and continuity of mineral deposits; risks related to the inherent uncertainty of production and cost estimates and the potential for unexpected costs and expenses; results of prefeasibility and feasibility studies, and the possibility that future exploration, development or mining results will not be consistent with the Company's expectations; risks related to gold price and other commodity price fluctuations; and other risks and uncertainties related to the Company's prospects, properties and business detailed elsewhere in the Company's disclosure record. Should one or more of these risks and uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described in forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned against attributing undue certainty to forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date hereof and the Company does not assume any obligation to update or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances. Actual events or results could differ materially from the Company's expectations or projections.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/88959
3.5 million app users can now send money locally and globally, quickly, conveniently, and reliably, 24/7

Western Union, a leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement and payments, has collaborated with Linxo, a leading budget management and bank account aggregation application in France, to enable users to make local and cross-border payments through Western Union's platform

Linxo's customers can now make and manage money transfers through Western Union's platform, quickly, conveniently, and reliably, 24/7. Users can fund their transfers through their bank account or card, and have their funds paid out into billions of bank accounts and millions of mobile wallets in approximately 125 countries, or more than half a million retail locations in more than 200 countries and territories.

"We are pleased to be joining forces with Linxo, offering the 3.5 million users of this innovative app access to the broadest digital global network coverage within the cross-border person-to-person payment sector," said Massimiliano Alvisini, Head of Europe, CIS, and Africa Network at Western Union. "In France, and across the world, we partner with fintechs, banks and post offices, offering their customers flexibility and trust underpinned by technology, customer experience and compliance," he said.

Established in 2010, Linxo is a pioneering account aggregation fintech, that optimizes bank account and transaction management for its users. The Linxo application is available in both free and premium versions on the Apple App Store and on Google Play.

"By integrating the Western Union platform into our Linxo Marketplace, we are providing our users with a new and seamless customer experience thanks to enhanced functionalities for the management of their financial assets from a single space: consultation and management of accounts, sending or transferring money to their families and loved ones," comments Bruno Van Haetsdaele, CEO and Co-Founder of Linxo Group. "Our ambition was to create a virtuous and open ecosystem. With the integration of the Western Union platform, this is now a reality. And we will continue to integrate new value-added services to provide our users with a quality service that exceeds their expectations within the Linxo application."

About Western Union

The Western Union Company (NYSE: WU) is a global leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement and payments. Western Union's platform provides seamless cross-border flows, and its leading global financial network bridges more than 200 countries and territories and over 130 currencies. We connect businesses, financial institutions, governments, and consumers through one of the world's widest reaching networks, accessing billions of bank accounts, millions of digital wallets and cards, and over half a million-retail locations. Western Union connects the world to bring boundless possibilities within reach. For more information, visit www.westernunion.com

About Linxo

Linxo Group is a subsidiary of Credit Agricole Payment Services, which {harnesses} Credit Agricole Group's expertise in marketing, innovation, processing and interbank representation. Since 2010, Linxo Group has been developing and marketing solutions for account aggregation, payment initiation and personal finance management.

The platform of its subsidiary Oxlin, a payment institution authorised by the ACPR [French Prudential Supervision and Resolution Authority], provides all the technology to access banking data and initiate transfers (services regulated by the Revised European Payment Services Directive no. 2, known as PSD2), with the customer's consent and in a totally secure manner.

The services it offers range from API (Application Program Interface) bricks to complete white-label mobile app solutions covering the needs of start-ups as well as banks and insurance companies. These solutions enable the development of new services and new sources of revenue from multiple use cases: budget management, pathways to credit grants, accounting, loyalty, etc.

Its mobile application Linxo, which is already installed and used by more than 3 million people in France, is an intelligent financial assistant, which allows everyone to have an overview of their finances and to simplify the management of their money.

The company has 85 employees, mainly in Aix-en-Provence and in the Credit Agricole Villages in Paris and Sophia Antipolis.

WU-G

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005637/en/

Contacts:

Media contacts:

Nicholas Mandalas

Nicholas.Mandalas@wu.com
OAKVILLE, ON / ACCESSWIRE / June 29, 2021 / Spark Power Group Inc. (TSX:SPG), parent company of Spark Power Corp. ("Spark Power" or the "Company"), is excited to share that we have partnered with GP JOULE, a global renewable energy company, on the construction of three new solar power projects in Western Canada. Based in Alberta, all sites are owned by Concord Green Energy and include Monarch, a 23.6-MW site, Coaldale, a 22-MW site, and Vulcan, a 22-MW site. Spark will provide full engineering, procurement, and construction support for the substation interconnection portions of each project, including electrical house supply and commissioning scope. Substation construction is set to begin in the fall of 2021, with completion of the last project in early 2022.

"This is a great opportunity for Spark Power to continue to expand our solar power services in Alberta," said Morgan Cowl, Vice President, Operations at Spark Power. "With a comprehensive portfolio of completed and ongoing solar, wind, battery energy storage, and electric vehicle infrastructure projects across North America, Spark has significant expertise in providing innovative renewable solutions for our customers," said Cowl. "We have a widely skilled team and are eager to begin work on this project," he said.

Throughout the first quarter in 2021, Spark's renewables business segment, which accounted for over 30% of total revenue in Q1, continued to grow by approximately 26.8%. This was the result of particularly strong growth across Spark's wind and solar services in the U.S.

"By partnering with GP JOULE on these new projects, we are continuing to establish Spark as a leading provider of renewable energy services across North America," said Richard Jackson, President & CEO of Spark Power. "As we move into a post-pandemic economy, we look forward to a strengthening market throughout Canada and the U.S.," he said. "We are confident that this project will provide opportunities for us to continue building our footprint in Alberta and Western Canada - areas that hold vast opportunities for renewable energy work in the future," said Jackson.

"GP JOULE found in Spark Power an ally in terms of safety, quality and reliability, with a well-established local execution team built through acquisitions," said David Pichard, CEO of GP JOULE North America. "Our client, the Concord team, looks for the highest level of service, and the Spark Power partnership aligns with our company culture as a leader in the construction of high-quality PV and storage assets," he added.

About Spark Power

Spark Power is a leading independent provider of end-to-end electrical services, operations and maintenance services, and energy sustainability solutions to the industrial, commercial, utility, and renewable asset markets in North America. We work to earn the right to be our customers' Trusted Partner in Power. Our highly skilled and dedicated people, located in the communities we serve, combined with our knowledge of the power industry, technology expertise, and commitment to safety, ensures we deliver the right solutions that keep our customers' operations up and running today and better equipped for tomorrow. Learn more at www.sparkpowercorp.com.

About GP JOULE

GP JOULE is a global renewable energy company headquartered in Reuenkoge Germany, with GP JOULE Canada Corp. and GP JOULE USA Inc., servicing the North American market. In this region the company provides EPC turnkey services and a full range of solar PV racking solutions which combined focus on delivering a long-term, lowest cost of solar power. GP JOULE's in-house capabilities include civil, structural, mechanical, and electrical engineering and construction execution in the commercial and utility-scale market. The company has installed more than 76 MW of solar PV across North America, with over 100 MW under construction and another 100 MW in its pipeline. Globally, GP JOULE has installed over 800 MW of solar and wind energy projects. More information at www.gp-joule.com.

Media Inquiries:

Kim Samlall, Director, Marketing Communications

media@sparkpowercorp.com

+1 (905) 829-3336 x185

GP JOULE North America

Michelle Montague

info@gp-joule.com

SOURCE: Spark Power Group Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/653139/Spark-Power-Awarded-Three-New-Solar-Projects-in-Alberta-With-GP-Joule-the-70-MW-Projects-to-Begin-Construction-in-Fall-2021
LONDON, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- According to many of the world's leading airlines, aircraft engineers, and designers, the aircraft of the future will have no windows. It is a bold statement to make, and one that may even slightly unsettle those with a fear of enclosed spaces, but a love of air travel.

The reason behind the future banishing of windows from passenger aircraft is driven by the demand for complete sustainability and environmental awareness across the entire aviation industry. The increase in air traffic is expected to grow by 4.5% annually over the next 20 years, and because of this there is a greater focus being placed on the environmental impact of air transport.

One of the steps towards that more sustainable future may somewhat surprisingly involve the elimination of aircraft windows. By removing the aircraft's windows the resulting reduced weight is directly linked to fuel consumption and provides advantages in terms of reduced operating costs and CO2 emissions.

So, does this technological and environmental dream, mean no more spectacular sunrises or sunsets, no more views of changing landscapes from the air, and no more first glimpses of new locations as your aircraft begins its descent and final approach? According to those invested in the reimagining of aircraft design, the answer is no.

Instead of tiny viewing portals - to which not everyone has access anyway - the aircraft of the future will feature large high-resolution LED screens where the world outside will be relayed - for all to see - via a series of exterior-mounted fibre optic cameras. These 'virtual windows' and seat-back monitors would allow passengers to switch views, discover the landscape below, or even explore their final destination using touch-screen technology.

The advantages of removing aircraft windows

Without the limiting design, structural, and weight factors associated with the need for aircraft windows, designers could repurpose their energy into developing a new breed of aircraft that will be lighter, have improved structural integrity, and reduced fuel-consumption.

For every 1% in the reduction of an aircraft's weight there is a fuel saving of 0.75% and this is the type of innovation the aviation industry is striving towards. Weight is the number one enemy for any aircraft, the heavier the aircraft the more fuel is consumed, and the greater the emissions. Each tonne of fuel saved means approximately 3.15 tonnes fewer CO2 emissions.

In 2018 it was estimated by researchers at MIT that each passenger carrying a phone on one US airline, cost the company $1.2million per year in weight related expenses, exchange the phone for a laptop and that figure jumps dramatically to $US21.6, such is the importance of weight.

Aircraft without windows would allow engineers to explore new lighter materials which would mean reduced production costs without compromising an aircraft's airworthiness and durability. The removal of windows would also greatly reduce drag and decrease fuel consumption.

Being windowless would also help to increase the fuselage's durability, and more importantly for aircraft manufacturers, the bold move would make any new aircraft's certification process far easier due to the lack of additional time-consuming safety checks. Additionally, windowless aircraft would simplify the aircraft's construction process and offer greater flexibility when designing the aircraft interior.

Are there safety concerns with windowless aircraft?

Despite all the benefits windowless aircraft may bring in the move towards a more sustainable future for aviation, there are still some who have raised concerns about this ground-breaking proposal.

The official stance of air safety regulators is that windowless aircraft pose no additional concerns, while others are of the opinion that the use of video technology instead of real windows might impede the work of flight attendants during an emergency situation.

It is imperative that flight attendants are aware of the situation outside the aircraft in order to quickly and safely evacuate the aircraft. Should the technology fail in such a situation the consequences could prove disastrous. However, the design and development of windowless aircraft should advance hand-in-hand with new technologies which would overcome any possible negatives.

The constant march towards aviation sustainability

In a post-pandemic world, and with an accelerated impetus towards sustainability, any developments which will lead to reduced costs, without compromising safety, will be warmly welcomed right across the aviation industry.

With the rapid advance in technologies available to aircraft designers, engineers, and airlines, every aspect of aircraft design has been placed under the microscope in the search for greater sustainability. Other developments such as disruptive aircraft design, experimentation with new materials, and the development of new fuel technologies like hydrogen are already well advanced.

Right across the aviation industry challenges are constantly being accepted as aviation strives to be more sustainable, more environmentally conscious, and more profitable. For example, the latest generation Airbus A320 is approximately 40% less costly to operate than its predecessor and is also more fuel-efficient. As if to cement this commitment to evolution, Airbus spends over $US260 million per annum in the continuous search to improve the efficiency of the A320 type family.

Windowless aircraft are just one example of disruption in the process of aircraft design in the continuing quest for greater efficiency. But, it is one of many that will allow the aviation industry to march boldly towards a more sustainable and more planet-friendly future.

SOURCES:

Preliminary design of a short-medium range windowless aircraft | SpringerLink

For media inquiries:

Vilma Vaitiekunaite

+370 686 16336

vilma.vaitiekunaite@aviasg.com

About Gediminas Ziemelis:

Gediminas Ziemelis is a founder and chairman of "Avia Solutions Group" - one of the largest aerospace servicing companies presented in more than 67 countries. In 2016, G. Ziemelis received a prestigious European Business Award in recognition for his visionary business management and development skills. The same year, under his leadership, Avia Solutions Group was named a national public champion in the category of Entrepreneurship, earning a spot in the top 110 of European businesses. Twice, in 2012 and in 2014, Ziemelis was acknowledged as one of the top 40 most talented young leaders in the global aerospace industry by the leading USA aerospace magazine "Aviation Week". 2014 - 2017 Gediminas Ziemelis personally supported and consulted Chinese Banks (including ICBCL, CMBL, and Skycop) with regard to financing aircraft sale-leaseback transactions in the CIS region. His total value of transactions - more than $ 2 B. 2006 - 2013 Gediminas executed successful IPOs of 4 companies at OMX and WSE and raised public capital worth more than $ 100 M.

More info: www.gediminasziemelis.com

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1553944/Avia_Solutions_Group_Gediminas_Ziemelis.jpg

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1553943/Avia_Solutions_Group_windowless.jpg

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1039700/Avia_Solutions_Logo.jpg
Fredericton, New Brunswick--(Newsfile Corp. - June 29, 2021) - TRU Precious Metals Corp. (TSXV: TRU) (OTCQB: TRUIF) (FSE: 706) ("TRU" or the "Company") is pleased to announce the appointment of Colin Sutherland, CPA, CA to its Board of Directors. TRU now has 5 directors, 3 of whom are independent.

Mr. Sutherland is a Chartered Professional Accountant with over 20 years of financial and operational experience in the mining industry with exploration and development-stage companies. He has held senior executive roles globally, currently with Magna Gold Corp. as its Chief Financial Officer and a director, and recently with Arizona Metals Corp., NQ Minerals Plc, Amarillo Gold Corporation, and McEwen Mining Inc. Over his career, Mr. Sutherland has led several M&A, equity and debt transactions, and has returned significant value to shareholders. Mr. Sutherland holds a Bachelor of Business Administration degree from Saint Francis Xavier University.

Along with his appointment as a director of the Company, Mr. Sutherland has also been appointed to the Company's audit committee, which is now comprised entirely of independent directors. This is consistent with the Company's broader commitment to strong corporate governance, to which end TRU has also previously adopted a Code of Business Conduct as well as a Corporate Disclosure Policy.

TRU Co-Founder and CEO Joel Freudman commented: "Colin is an excellent complement to our existing Board, bringing demonstrated and relevant mining experience, in-depth knowledge of the natural resource capital markets, and an accounting background. We believe Colin's experience and connections will further support our strategy to deliver value to our shareholders through good governance, operational excellence, and enhanced market presence."

The Company also announces that, subject to regulatory approval, it has granted an aggregate of 280,000 incentive stock options ("Options") to a director, an officer, and an employee in accordance with the Company's stock option plan. These Options have an exercise price of $0.34 each and a 3-year term, and vest immediately.

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 about Resurgent, 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 regulatory approvals and the impact of additions to the TRU leadership team. 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: challenges executing on corporate strategy and business plans; regulatory approval processes; 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/88955
As the Polkadot parachain slot auction heats up, some ecological landing projects have entered the public view and attracted unprecedented attention; Amara is one of them.

London, United Kingdom--(Newsfile Corp. - June 29, 2021) - In June 2021, Amara Finance announced that it has secured its seed round funding, and the financing scale is one million US dollars.

Amara Finance



To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit:

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Based on the introduction of Amara official: Amara is the Polkadot ecosystem multi-chain assets loan service provider, including 2 types of assets, mainstream assets and long tail assets, in addition to an assets cross chain protocol Mara-link, and financial derivatives such as NFT, impermanence lottery, etc.

The short-term goal is to become the most popular loan market of the Polkadot ecosystem, and introduce as many assets as possible into the Polkadot ecosystem.

This round of financing was announced to be completed this April; the investors include dozens of advanced institutions such as Digital Renaissance Foundation, DFG, Chain Capital, PreAngel, Dragon Roark, Waterdrip Capital, BTX Capital, AngelONE etc.

Investors & Partners



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Currently, Amara is financing its strategic private equity round; a new round of financing news will be released at a suitable time.

Amara: focusing on capturing Polkadot ecological value

Gavin Wood announced the initiation of the Polkadot advance network Kusama parachain slot auction. The Kusama slot auction is seen as the main rehearsal of Polkadot slot auction, the latter is more appealing and anticipated.

The meaning of the parachain auction is significant.

Before parachain, Polkadot was just Polkadot, a meta protocol with a fundamental protocol; its value is Polkadot's own value. After parachain, the Polkadot ecosystem started, and it is the beginning of Polkadot value capturing, while the biggest value captured is from Polkadot ecological increment market.

Amara is a one stop application developed on Acala Network focusing on value capturing, and it concentrates on the Polkadot DeFi ecological increment market.

Amara proposed its personal asset cross chain protocol, hoping to introduce more assets into Polkadot ecology, realizing the expansion of the new DeFi boundary.

Two types of assets and one protocol, expand DeFi new boundary

The slogan of Amara is "expand DeFi new boundary."

How does Amara realize it?

Amara proposed "two types of assets and one protocol." The two assets are mainstream assets and long tail assets (premium minor crypto assets) with Mara-link assets cross chain protocol.

Amara's loan product includes two assets: mainstream assets and long tail ones. Long tail assets are second-tier bluechip cryptos or minor assets. Multiple round market experiences tell us that compared to the stable performance of mainstream cryptos such as BTC, ETH, etc., the performance of the minor cryptos is better, and it is favored more by investors.

The Amara team focuses on two directions of long tail assets loans:

1. Stake mainstream assets and borrow long tail assets;

2. Stake long tail to borrow long tail.

The latter is more difficult, and requires a better interest model, more sound clearing mechanism, and higher asset security.

The scale of the loan market has a strong positive correlation with the scale of assets on the chain. Besides the assets in Polkadot ecology, Amara focuses on introducing more premium assets into Polkadot ecology. Mara-link is the one to take the responsibility; the asset cross chain protocol proposed by Amara introduces more premium assets into the Polkadot ecology by Mara-link. The above means not only does Amara build its products, but also it plans to deeply participate in the underlying infrastructure construction of Acala and Polkadot.

Just like the team mentioned, Acala's DeFi structure is very solid like that of Polkadot's, however, when facing the markets and users, Amara needs to accomplish more. Amara will not sit and wait but participate.

If the loan is the goal of the first phase of Amara, finance is the goal of the second phase. Blockchain financial derivatives have just started, Polkadot ecology's finance is empty, this all needs exploration.

AAVE's founder hinted that NFT is a collateral; in the Amara financial derivatives roadmap, NFT occupies an important position, besides, there are sections such as lossless lottery, market prediction, etc., and of course the loan section will be completed well first.

Tokenomics model, let value truly integrate into MARA

Amara's crypto is MARA; that is the platform's equity and governance crypto, the total amount is 150 million.

MARA crypto original distribution is as follows:

4% seed round

11% IDO and strategic private equity round, IDO occupies majority

55% mining reward, liquidity mining reward occupies a part

10% ecological reward

20% team reward

MARA use cases are mainly:

Community governance: Eligible MARA holders can propose constructive advice to Amara. All MARA holders have the corresponding voting rights. Amara establishes a dynamic incentive mechanism to improve user governance efficiency.

Debt pool quota: The long-tail asset loan section has a special deposit and loan quota, and stake MARA to obtain more loan quota.

Insurance Staking: The MARA deposited in insurance staking is used as a risk margin in certain emergency situations.

Asset gain: Users' mining process introduces the "popular mining acceleration pool". The more MARA they hold, the more mining profit.

Risk deposit: Amara platform revenue will be used to purchase high-quality stable assets as platform risk deposit, such as BTC/DOT/ETH/KSM/ACA, etc. The platform can mortgage these assets, and under the premise of asset security, borrow assets from other loan platforms to secure user assets.

Asset withdrawal: When withdrawing assets, the repurchase and destruction of vToken requires a certain amount of MARA as the destruction cost.

Technology and operation power until the launch of the Acala main network.

Currently, the Amara loan products beta version is deployed in the Acala Mandla TC6 version test network, which is released after the main network's launching.

The deposits and loans of USDT, ACA, BTC and DOT assets are first launched, and liquidity farming is available on the test net. Users are rewarded with MARA by deposits and lending. These functional models are internally tested to further improve product stability.

Mara-link is another key point, the technical research is completed early this June, which will be launched late this June.

In perspective of the operation, the global airdrop event schemed by the Amara North American business team was launched recently, and the time duration is three weeks with 30,000 MARA in the reward pool. During the event, North American BD Neal will be invited to several AMA events. Follow Amara twitter to view the event details.

When the internal test of Amara loan products is done, an internal event will be initiated. The Old Friend NFT holders of Acala have extra benefits, stay tuned.

Get the latest updates on Amara on its social media channels:

Website: https://www.amara.finance

Telegram: https://t.me/AmaraFinance

Discord: https://discord.gg/6KHbFCuX

Medium: https://amara-finance.medium.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AmaraFinance

White paper: https://github.com/AmaraFinance/Amara-White-Paper

Media Contact

Contact: Neal

Company Name: Amara Finance

Address: 247 INCORPORATORS LTD, 2 WOODBERRY GROVE LONDON ENGLAND N12 0DR

Website: https://www.amara.finance/

Email: amarafinance37@gmail.com

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/89000
Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - June 29, 2021) - NanoPsy Inc., a company that develops nanotechnology for theranostic applications to effectively improve psychedelic drug efficacy, has announced the completion of its seed financing round. The company has raised C$500,000 in equity at C$4.1mm post money valuation.

NanoPsy is being advised by capital market consultants Terrella Capital Corp. and LACG Capital Inc. Participating investors include Negev Capital, a psychedelic medical intervention investment fund; Ambria Capital, a fund focused on investing in agriculture, consumer, healthcare, and technology industries, and a UK-based family office.

The seed funding will be used to demonstrate proof of efficacy of the NanoBowl technology with Ketamine and LSD as the two lead molecules. Pending success, NanoPsy will apply their technology to other molecules in the psychedelic domain. And will be open to forming partnerships with drug-development and bio-pharma companies in the industry.

NanoPsy will continue adding to its team to support the company's rapid growth, building upon the recently announced leadership appointments of Bojan Krasic - Executive Chairman & President; Sunil Srivastava - Director; Ratnesh Lal, PhD - Chair of the advisory board for psychedelic bio-nanotechnology; Max Arella, PhD - Scientific Development; Bill O'Hara - Board of Directors.

NanoPsy's core research focus is on targeted on-demand delivery of psychedelic molecules to the brain & other human organs for effective treatment with optimal efficacy & minimal side effects.

'We are excited and proud to be working in a nascent industry that will greatly improve the human condition. We believe our technology will facilitate development of mental health medicines by providing a more efficient and efficacious delivery of psychedelic API compounds. We look forward to having a significant role in spearheading the evolution of this noble endeavour.'- said Bojan Krasic - Executive Chairman & President

Ken Belotsky, Partner, Negev Capital, commented: - "We are thrilled to co-lead NanoPsy seed round alongside other top tier investors. We look forward to supporting NanoPsy's path towards nanotechnology for theranostic applications to effectively improve psychedelic drug efficacy."

About NanoPsy

NanoPsy is a company that develops nanotechnology for theranostic applications to effectively improve psychedelic drug efficacy. Our patented nano technology which, in combination with our targeted delivery and controlled dosing technology methods, will allow for an increase in solubility/absorption of these molecules. Thus a more efficacious API.

Contact

Bojan Krasic

Executive Chairman & President

bojan.krasic@terrella.ca

Cell: +1.905.979.2937

Bill O'Hara

Director

bill@lacg.ca

Cell: +1.905.334.7344

About Negev Capital

Negev Capital is a psychedelic medical intervention investment fund with assets of USD$20+ million. We invest in drug discovery, with a focus on preclinical and/or Phase 1 stages of development. We aim to support those early stage companies in need of capital that promote the thoughtful, responsible, medical use of psychedelic medication for psychiatric disorders, and who have excellent management and science teams, and solid IP.

We believe that psychedelic medications will be not only disruptive to the practice of psychiatry, but hold the potential to reduce enormous amounts of human suffering, and we are committed to helping the field mature, and further promote ways for these treatments to reach all of those in need.

For further information, please visit https://negevcap.com/

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/88917
Takla, Tsay Keh Dene and Kwadacha Nations signal support for Amarc mineral exploration program

VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / June 29, 2021 / Amarc Resources Ltd. ("Amarc" or the "Company") (TSX-V:AHR)(OTCQB:AXREF) announces it has entered into a four-way Exploration Agreement with Takla Nation, Tsay Keh Dene Nation and Kwadacha Nation at its 100%-owned JOY Cu-Au district ("JOY District") in north-central British Columbia ("BC"), within the province's underexplored Toodoggone region.

Last month, the Company announced an alliance with Freeport-McMoRan Mineral Properties Canada Inc. ("Freeport") to explore the JOY District (see news release dated May 12, 2021).

Amarc's JOY District covers the northern extension of the prolific Kemess porphyry Cu-Au district, and is host to the open-ended PINE porphyry Cu-Au deposit, the promising MEX Cu-Au porphyry deposit target and a suite of other high-potential Cu-Au exploration targets. The JOY mineral tenure overlaps with the traditional territories of the Takla, Tsay Keh Dene and Kwadacha Nations.

"We are very pleased to formalize our relationship with these Indigenous Nations in whose territory Amarc is conducting exploration activities, and enter into an agreement that provides the blueprint for even closer and more beneficial partnerships in future," said Amarc President & CEO Dr. Diane Nicolson.

"The Takla, Tsay Keh Dene and Kwadacha Nations (collectively called "Tse Keh Nay") have expressed support for mineral exploration and development in their territories so long as it is undertaken responsibly, with due care for the environment and respect for First Nations people, their rights and interests. The agreement we're announcing today is intended to deliver on that vision by establishing a framework for ongoing cooperation and collaborative decision-making, and the sharing of benefits at each stage of project advancement."

In addition to protocols for ongoing engagement and information exchange between the parties, the Exploration Agreement also establishes a pathway for negotiating future agreements to support more advanced stages of development. The agreement also covers training, employment and contracting opportunities, and First Nation participation in environmental monitoring.

"Amarc's announcement of an alliance with Freeport is exciting. It has the potential to advance significantly exploration at the JOY property and, in doing so, create new opportunities for ongoing collaboration and mutual benefit between Amarc and Tse Keh Nay", said Chief Pierre, Tsay Keh Dene Nation.

As project operator, Amarc is currently mobilizing work crews to JOY to commence a comprehensive 2021 exploration program, inclusive of drilling, which is designed to advance deposit delineation and assess several important-scale mineral systems.

"There are many compelling reasons to believe in the development potential of JOY and the other two 100%-owned district-scale properties Amarc has acquired and assembled in BC," Nicolson said. "Of course, operating in regions known for hosting large-scale porphyry copper-gold mineralization, and in close proximity to low-cost, low-carbon infrastructure, will be fundamental to our success.

"But it's the mutually beneficial partnerships we're developing with First Nations and local communities that may be most rewarding. We respect and value the vision of the Takla, Tsay Keh Dene and Kwadacha leadership, and look forward to working with them as partners to achieve the long-term potential of JOY."

About Amarc Resources Ltd.

Amarc is a mineral exploration and development company with an experienced and successful management team focused on developing a new generation of long-life, high value porphyry copper-gold mines in BC. By combining high demand projects with dynamic management, Amarc has created a solid platform to create value from its exploration and development-stage assets.

Amarc is advancing the 100%-owned IKE, DUKE and JOY porphyry coppergold districts located in different prolific porphyry districts in southern, central and northern BC, respectively. Each of the three districts is located in proximity to industrial infrastructure - including power, highways and rail. Importantly, each district represents significant potential for the development of multiple and important-scale, porphyry coppergold deposits.

Amarc is associated with HDI, a diversified, global mining company with a 30-year history of porphyry discovery and development success. Previous and current HDI projects include some of BC's and the world's most important porphyry deposits - such as Pebble, Mount Milligan, Southern Star, Kemess South, Kemess North, Gibraltar, Prosperity, Xietongmen, Newtongmen, Florence, Casino, Sisson, Maggie, IKE and Pine. From its head office in Vancouver, Canada, HDI applies its unique strengths and capabilities to acquire, develop, operate and monetize mineral projects.

Amarc works closely with local governments, Indigenous groups and other stakeholders in order to advance its mineral projects responsibly, and in a manner that contributes to sustainable community and economic development. We pursue early and meaningful engagement to ensure our mineral exploration and development activities are well coordinated and broadly supported, address local priorities and concerns, and optimize opportunities for collaboration. In particular, we seek to establish mutually beneficial partnerships with Indigenous groups within whose traditional territories our projects are located, through the provision of jobs, training programs, contract opportunities, capacity funding agreements and sponsorship of community events. All Amarc work programs are carefully planned to achieve high levels of environmental and social performance.

Qualified Person as Defined Under National Instrument 43-101

Mark Rebagliati, P. Eng., a Qualified Person as defined under National Instrument 43-101, has reviewed and approved the technical content in this release.

For further details on Amarc Resources Ltd., please visit the Company's website at www.amarcresources.com or contact Dr. Diane Nicolson, President and CEO, at (604) 684-6365 or within North America at 1-800-667-2114.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF AMARC RESOURCES LTD.

Dr. Diane Nicolson

President and CEO

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor any other regulatory authority accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Forward Looking and other Cautionary Information

This news release includes certain statements that may be deemed "forward-looking statements". All such statements, other than statements of historical facts that address exploration drilling, exploitation activities and other related events or developments 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 the forward-looking statements. Assumptions used by the Company to develop forward-looking statements include the following: Amarc's projects will obtain all required environmental and other permits and all land use and other licenses, studies and exploration of Amarc's projects will continue to be positive, and no geological or technical problems will occur. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include market prices, potential environmental issues or liabilities associated with exploration, development and mining activities, exploitation and exploration successes, continuity of mineralization, uncertainties related to the ability to obtain necessary permits, licenses and tenure and delays due to third party opposition, changes in and the effect of government policies regarding mining and natural resource exploration and exploitation, exploration and development of properties located within Aboriginal groups asserted territories may affect or be perceived to affect asserted aboriginal rights and title, which may cause permitting delays or opposition by Aboriginal groups, continued availability of capital and financing, and general economic, market or business conditions, as well as risks relating to the uncertainties with respect to the effects of COVID-19. Investors are cautioned that any such statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual results or developments may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. For more information on Amarc Resources Ltd., investors should review Amarc's annual Form 20-F filing with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission at www.sec.gov and its home jurisdiction filings that are available at www.sedar.com.

SOURCE: Amarc Resources Ltd.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/653446/Amarc-Enters-Exploration-Agreement-With-Three-First-Nations-at-JOY-Project-BC
VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / June 29, 2021 / Gold Terra Resource Corp. (TSX-V:YGT)(Frankfurt:TX0)(OTCQX:YGTFF) ("Gold Terra" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that the Company's fully funded 10,000 metre Phase 2 drilling program is scheduled to start on or around July 14th, 2021. The drilling will test the Campbell Shear at the Yellorex zone where significant high-grade gold zones were intersected during the Phase 1 drilling program (14.09 g/t Au over 4.65 metres) (see April 6, 2021 press release). The Yellorex zone is located immediately south of the Con Mines on property optioned from Newmont Ventures Limited and Miramar Northern Mining Limited (the "Newmont Option") and adjacent to the Yellowknife City Gold Project ("YCG"), NWT. The objective of the drilling is to delineate a potential gold mineral resource to add to the Company's current 1.2 million inferred ounces (see March 16, 2021 press release) and ultimately bring the mineral resource towards the next stages of advanced planning.

President and CEO David Suda commented, "The Phase 1 drilling results have given us confidence that we can delineate additional high-grade ounces at Yellorex and expand our current resource of 1.2 million ounces of gold. Our Phase 2 drilling program will further test the depth and strike extension of the Yellorex Zone and build on our previous successes."

Yellorex Drilling Target

The Phase 2 drilling program will concentrate on the Yellorex Zone and South Con Mine area with a 50 to 100 metre drill spacing along strike and down dip (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Phase 2 drilling at Yellorex Zone.

Compilation work has shown that the strong sericite alteration and quartz veined gold system is dipping to the west and steeply plunging to the south with an interpreted plunge length of more than 1.5 kilometres. The Phase 2 drilling program will follow this plunge to test the continuity of the high-grade gold lenses at depth and along strike (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Longitudinal section showing Phase 2 drilling target area in Yellorex zone.

The technical information contained in this news release has been reviewed and approved by Joseph Campbell, Chief Operating Officer, a Qualified Person as defined in National Instrument 43-101 - Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects.

About Gold Terra's Yellowknife City Gold Project

The YCG project encompasses 800 sq. km of contiguous land immediately north, south and east of the City of Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories. Through a series of acquisitions, Gold Terra controls one of the six major high-grade gold camps in Canada. Being within 10 kilometres of the City of Yellowknife, the YCG is close to vital infrastructure, including all-season roads, air transportation, service providers, hydro-electric power, and skilled tradespeople.

The YCG lies on the prolific Yellowknife greenstone belt, covering nearly 70 kilometres of strike length along the main mineralized shear system that host the former-producing high-grade Con and Giant gold mines. The Company's exploration programs have successfully identified significant zones of gold mineralization and multiple targets that remain to be tested which reinforces the Company's objective of re-establishing Yellowknife as one of the premier gold mining districts in Canada.

Visit our website at www.goldterracorp.com.

For more information, please contact:

David Suda, President and CEO

Phone: 604-928-3101 | Toll-Free: 1-855-737-2684

dsuda@goldterracorp.com

Mara Strazdins, Manager of Investor Relations

Phone: 1-778-897-1590 | 604-689-1749 ext 102

Strazdins@goldterracorp.com

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Information

Certain statements made and information contained in this news release constitute "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities legislation ("forward-looking information"). Generally, this forward-looking information can, but not always, be identified by use of forward-looking terminology such as "plans", "expects" or "does not expect", "is expected", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "intends", "anticipates" or "does not anticipate", or "believes", or variations of such words and phrases or statements that certain actions, events, conditions or results "will", "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will be taken", "occur" or "be achieved" or the negative connotations thereof.

All statements other than statements of historical fact may be forward-looking information. Forward-looking information is necessarily based on estimates and assumptions that are inherently subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance, or achievements of the Company to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information. In particular, this news release contains forward-looking information regarding the current drilling on the Campbell Shear on the Newmont Option potentially adding high grade ounces to the Company's current YCG mineral resource, future planned drilling on the Newmont Option area and the Company's objective of re-establishing Yellowknife as one of the premier gold mining districts in Canada.

There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, as the Company's actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in this forward-looking information as a result of the factors discussed in the "Risk Factors" section in the Company's most recent MD&A and annual information form available under the Company's profile at www.sedar.com.

Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that would 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. The forward-looking information contained in this news release is based on information available to the Company as of the date of 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. All of the forward-looking information contained in this news release is qualified by these cautionary statements. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking information due to the inherent uncertainty thereof. Except as required under applicable securities legislation and regulations applicable to the Company, the Company does not intend, and does not assume any obligation, to update this forward-looking information.

SOURCE: Gold Terra Resource Corp

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/653486/Gold-Terra-Announces-Phase-2-Drilling-Program-on-High-Grade-Yellorex-Gold-Zone-Campbell-Shear-South-of-Con-Mine-Northwest-Territories
VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / June 29, 2021 / Wedgemount Resources Corp. (CSE:WDGY) ("Wedgemount" or the "Company"), is pleased to announce that it has acquired, via staking, an additional 6,200 hectares of mineral tenures directly adjacent to its Cookie copper - gold project located in the prolific southern Toodoggone copper belt of north-central British Columbia.

Wedgemount originally entered into an option agreement (see press release date June 1, 2021) to acquire the Red Property (now known as "Cookie") copper-gold project in November 2020 and has since staked over 24,000 additional hectares of mineral tenures (the "Cookie Claims") bringing the project to a total of over 26,000 hectares.

Mark Vanry, President and CEO of Wedgemount commented, "Wedgemount is excited to add additional highly prospective mineral claims directly adjacent to our existing Cookie project. Based on a thorough compilation of property and regional-scale geological, geochemical, and geophysical data these areas were immediately highlighted and subsequently staked. Including the newly staked claims, Wedgemount now controls over 28,000 hectares in one of BC's most sought-after copper exploration districts. The low-cost staking of additional mineral tenures at one of our three core areas is in-line with the Company's overall strategy to add underdeveloped and undervalued assets at attractive prices and minimal dilution to shareholders."

The center of the Cookie project is approximately 40 kilometers south of Centerra Gold's past producing Kemess copper-gold mine and approximately 200 kilometers north of Smithers B.C. Historical work from the late-1960s to the early 2000's, including geological mapping, geophysical and geochemical surveys and limited drilling have outlined numerous porphyry-related copper-gold targets defined by widespread hydrothermal alteration zones, copper and gold mineralization and strong, yet un-drill-tested copper-in-soil geochemical anomalies. These targets as well as numerous other property-wide targets will be rigorously investigated utilizing modern exploration techniques and equipment for the first time, during the summer 2021 exploration season with the goal of defining new drill targets. Exploration is scheduled to commence in mid-July.

Data Verification and National Instrument 43-101 Disclosure

Some data disclosed in this news release relating to sampling and drilling results are historical in nature. Neither the Company nor a Qualified Person, as defined by National Instrument 43-101 - Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects ("NI 43-101"),have verified the data, and, therefore, investors should not place undue reliance on such data. In some cases, the data may be unverifiable due to lack of drill core. Mineralization hosted on adjacent and/or nearby and/or geologically similar properties is not necessarily indicative of mineralization hosted on the Company's property. The technical information disclosed in this news release has been reviewed and approved by Christopher Leslie, P.Geo., a Qualified Person as defined by NI 43-101.

About Wedgemount Resources Corp.

Wedgemount Resources is a junior mineral exploration company focused on maximizing shareholder value through the acquisition, discovery and advancement of high-quality copper - gold projects in North America.

On behalf of the Board of Directors,

WEDGEMOUNT RESOURCES CORP.

Mark Vanry, President and CEO

For more information, please contact the Company at:

Telephone: (604) 343-4743

info@wedgemountresources.com

www.wedgemountresources.com

Reader Advisory

This news release may contain statements which constitute "forward-looking information", including statements regarding the plans, intentions, beliefs and current expectations of the Company, its directors, or its officers with respect to the future business activities of the Company. The words "may", "would", "could", "will", "intend", "plan", "anticipate", "believe", "estimate", "expect" and similar expressions, as they relate to the Company, or its management, are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements made in this news release include the Company's plans for exploration of the property and anticipated exploration results. Investors are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future business activities and involve risks and uncertainties, and that the Company's future business activities may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors, including, but not limited to, availability of funds, personnel and other resources necessary to conduct exploration programs, successes of the Company's exploration programs, availability of capital and financing and general economic, market or business conditions. There can be no assurances that such information will prove accurate and, therefore, readers are advised to rely on their own evaluation of such uncertainties. The Company does not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking information except as required under the applicable securities laws.

Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

SOURCE: Wedgemount Resources Corp.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/653489/Wedgemount-Adds-Strategic-6200-Hectares-to-its-Cookie-Copper-Gold-Project
Luke Lampsona Is A High-Fashion Up-And-Comer In NYC And Industry Prodigy

NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / June 29, 2021 / Green Stream Holdings Inc. (OTC PINK:GSFI) ("the Company") (http://www.GreenRainSolar.com ), an emerging leader in the solar utility and finance space, which recently announced that its wholly-owned subsidiary Chuck's Vintage (https://chucksvintageoriginal.com), an iconic brand and retail location renown among celebrity elite and fashion enthusiasts alike, that has opened a new retail location in New York City at 173 East 91st Street, Basement, New York, NY 10128 as of 5/21/2021, today announced it has selected a very high-profile acquisition in the NYC fashion trend field.

Luke Lampsona, will now be helming the new venture. Most recently the brain and the creative energy behind the emerging One on One brand, Lampasona has cut his fashion chops at some of the most iconic brands in the world including Barney's. He's also well-known among the trendy New York City flea scene where people have been scrambling to see what he has to offer.

"I know Luke is the exact right person to advance Chuck's, and I have so much confidence in both his business acumen and his well-trained eye for the hottest trends," said DiPalma and Vincent alike. "Keep an eye on him, because he is destined for big things."

The company also recently announced that it will be a sponsor for the Polo Hamptons Polo Match and Event. Being a sponsor, the magazine also included the article in its July 4th issue. This match and event are produced each summer in the Hamptons by Social Life Magazine, the Luxury Magazine for the Hamptons, the top luxury publication in the world-renowned Hamptons. https://sociallifemagazine.com

The clientele attending will include some of the country's most important influencers and the owners of international trend setting fashion houses. The Polo Match & Cocktail Party, held in Bridgehampton, 900 Lumber Lane, on July 24, 2021, will offer the Company's executive team the opportunity to gain new inroads for the company in both the Chuck's Vintage and the Company's cutting-edge solar technologies.

CEO James DiPrima previously said; "The events surrounding the Polo Match and the article in one of the most prestigious fashion/social magazines will undoubtedly help launch the new New York City location. Having Luke there with us.., he will be the straw that stirs the drink!"

About Chuck's Vintage:

Chuck's Vintage provides its clients an all access pass to historical fashion. Accessories, garments and complete ensembles from a bygone era, lest we forget its beauty. It seems only fitting that Chuck's Vintage would open its doors during a pandemic that is most closely associated with the plague that befell Los Angeles in 1924. In these times of uncertainty, and ever-changing business regulations and restrictions, Chuck's Vintage is doing its best to provide clients with a white glove experience.

Established in 2006, Chuck's Vintage is a store unlike any other; a true American original. The moment you step over the threshold at 16618 Marquez Ave, Pacific Palisades 90272, you find yourself amid abundant treasure. The selection of vintage denim has to be seen to be believed. The blue jeans in her store range from Strongholds found in the California Gold Rush mines to World War II-Era Levi's, Lees, and Wranglers, as well as 1960's ladies high-waisted and groovy deadstock Levi's bells. Come to Chuck's for the denim, but stick around and complete your look with the founder's sampling of vintage American workwear: rugged military and work boots, buttery leather bomber jackets, and soft, perfectly worn-in vintage 70's rock tees. Classic American Cool.

Chuck's Vintage was founded by GSFI former CEO Madeline Cammarata (fka Madeline Harmon), who hailed from an illustrious background in fashion. Her career began as a fashion model, where she was soon discovered by the iconic and provocative fashion photographer Helmet Newton, launching Cammarata to the runways of Europe. Returning to the US, Madeline found a powerful niche in the high fashion world of denim, where she was instrumental in providing fabric development for powerful brands like 7 For All Mankind and provided thousands of pieces to celebrity and business elites from Steve Jobs to Morrisey and everywhere in between.

?About Green Stream Finance, Inc.

Green Stream Finance, Inc., a solar utility and finance company with satellite offices in Malibu, CA and New York, NY, is focused on exploiting currently unmet markets in the solar energy space, and is currently licensed in California, Nevada, Arizona, Washington, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Colorado, Hawaii, and Canada. The Company's next-generation solar greenhouses constructed and managed by Green Rain Solar, LLC, a Nevada-based division, utilize proprietary greenhouse technology and trademarked design developed by world-renowned architect Mr. Antony Morali. The Company is currently targeting high-growth solar market segments for its advanced solar greenhouse and advanced solar battery products. The Company has a growing footprint in the significantly underserved solar market in New York City where it is targeting 50,000 to 100,000 square feet of rooftop space for the installation of its solar panels. Green Stream is looking to forge key partnership with major investment groups, brokers, and private investors in order to capitalize on a variety of unique investment opportunities in the commercial solar energy markets. The Company is dedicated to becoming a major player in this critical space. Through its innovative solar product offerings and industry partnerships, the Company is well-positioned to become a significant player in the solar space.

Forward-Looking Statements:

This press 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 and is subject to the safe harbor created by those sections. This material contains statements about expected future events and/or financial results that are forward-looking in nature and subject to risks and uncertainties. That includes the possibility that the business outlined in this press release cannot be concluded for some reason. That could be as a result of technical, installation, permitting or other problems that were not anticipated. Such forward-looking statements by definition involve risks, uncertainties and other factors, which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of Green Stream Finance, Inc. to be materially different from the statements made herein. Except for any obligation under the U.S. federal securities laws, Green Stream Finance, Inc. undertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statement as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

All Inquiries Contact:

+1 (424) 280-4096

president@greenstreamfinance.com

Website: chucksvintageoriginal.com

Instagram: chucksvintage original

Phone number: (646) 669-7007

SOURCE: Green Stream Holdings Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/653482/Chucks-Vintage-Inc-A-Wholly-Owned-Subsidiary-Of-Green-Stream-Holdings-Inc-Hires-Luke-Lampsona-To-Helm-Chucks-NYC
Cloud Native Multiline Platform Poised for Growth as Insurance Sector Looks for Customer-Centric Solutions that Enable Powerful Customer Experiences

EIS, a core and digital platform provider for insurers, today announced a growth investment of more than $100 million from TPG, a global alternative asset firm. TPG is investing out of TPG Tech Adjacencies (TTAD), its fund focused on flexible capital solutions for the technology industry. The new funding will be used to continue to accelerate product development across the spectrum of risk, health, and wealth, and support geographic expansion. Additional terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Founded in 2008, EIS is an insurance software company that enables leading insurers to innovate and operate in faster, more secure, and agile ways. The EIS SuiteTM is an open, flexible platform of core systems and digital solutions that liberate insurers to accelerate and scale innovation, launch products faster, deliver new revenue channels, and create powerful customer experiences. With thousands of open APIs, the EIS platform gives insurers across all lines of business the freedom to connect to-or serve as a hub for-a vast ecosystem of insurtech and emerging technologies.

"We are excited to partner with TPG as we continue to bring our best-in-class, cloud-native suite of technology solutions to insurers across the globe," said Alec Miloslavsky, Founder and CEO of EIS. "The team at TPG is aligned with our ambitious growth strategy and their longstanding track record, industry relationships, and deep expertise make them an ideal partner for EIS as we propel our business forward. The investment will help us to continue to meet growing client demand as insurers transition from outdated 'modern legacy' systems toward a platform that provides the flexibility, speed, openness, and security that today's highly competitive market requires."

The customer-centric EIS Suite is a unique multi-line platform combining depth in relevant lines of business, the modern architecture of insurtech, and proven scalability that supports the largest API-first, cloud-native core system implementation in the world. EIS serves clients across North America, Europe, and Asia and the platform-agnostic EIS Suite can be deployed on AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

"Digital transformation of insurance has been a longstanding theme for TPG, and we believe EIS is a solution built for the future of the industry," said Nehal Raj, Partner at TPG. "Alec and his team have built a powerful platform that enables insurers across the globe to operate more effectively, become more customer-centric, and achieve better speed to market. We look forward to working closely with the company to build on their strong momentum."

Some of TPG's investments in the insurance space have included Vertafore, a leader in modern insurance technology, and CCC Information Services, a leading SaaS provider to the automotive, insurance, and collision repair industries. The firm has been an active investor in technology since its inception, with current and past software investments including C3 AI, Kaseya, McAfee, Planview, ThycoticCentrify, WellSky, Wind River, and Zscaler.

GCA acted as exclusive financial advisor to EIS on the transaction. William Blair acted as financial advisor to TPG, and Kirkland Ellis served as legal counsel.

About EIS

EIS is an insurance software company that enables leading insurers to innovate and operate like a tech company: fast, simple, agile. Founded in 2008, EIS provides a platform for high-velocity insurance. This open, flexible platform of core systems and digital solutions liberates insurers to accelerate and scale innovation, launch products faster, deliver new revenue channels, and create insurance experiences the world will love. And with thousands of open APIs, the platform gives insurers the freedom to connect to a vast ecosystem of insurtech and emerging technologies. Headquartered in San Francisco, EIS powers premium growth for insurers in all lines of business worldwide. For more information, visit EISGroup.com or follow @EISGroupLtd on Twitter and LinkedIn.

About TPG

TPG is a leading global alternative asset firm founded in 1992 with $96 billion of assets under management and offices in Beijing, Fort Worth, Hong Kong, London, Luxembourg, Melbourne, Mumbai, New York, San Francisco, Seoul, Singapore, and Washington D.C. TPG's investment platforms are across a wide range of asset classes, including private equity, growth equity, impact investing, real estate, secondaries, and public equity. TPG aims to build dynamic products and options for its investors while also instituting discipline and operational excellence across the investment strategy and performance of its portfolio. For more information, visit www.tpg.com or @TPG on Twitter.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005329/en/

Contacts:

Courtney Rowan

PositivePR

crowan@positivemarketing.com

+44 (0)7907 418683
Consumers can receive 3 scams a day, with a quarter receiving more messages from fraudsters than they do from their friends and family.

Callsign, the digital identity pioneer revealed today that the rise of scams is harming organizations' reputations across the world. The global study* of consumers revealed that just receiving a scam message purporting to be from any brand is enough for 45% of them to lose trust in the organization regardless of any real association with the message.

Industries most targeted by fraudsters are financial services and ecommerce with consumers stating that of all scam messages they receive, 59% claim to represent their bank, or a retailer (36%).

The scam problem is rampant across all communications channels. Globally, on average, individuals who receive scam messages via all channels receive 1133 a year, with a quarter (24%) saying they receive more messages from fraudsters than friends and family.

With 50% of consumers admitting they don't report fraudulent messages, the scale of scam messaging and victims is likely to be underestimated.

"Fraud hides in volume and the rapid migration of the global population online in the last 18 months has led to the industrialization of scams. The consequence is fraudsters are using the same channels we're using to authenticate genuine consumers, and this is harming organizations' reputations with the decrease of trust in their brands," explained Stuart Dobbie, SVP, Innovation, Callsign.

The survey is a reminder that consumers have a choice. More than one fifth (21%) of consumers who have been a victim of fraud say they have stopped using the company whose name the fraudster used to execute the scam. In comparison consumers are less likely to leave the channel the scam is executed through (only 13% would leave their network provider) demonstrating that regardless of the scam method, it's the brand being mimicked that suffers.

SMS appears to be the weakest link with only 5% of consumers thinking it is a safe channel to communicate with their bank or retailer, and the channel has seen a 55% decrease in trust from those surveyed just because they have received a scam text message.

"Organizations need to re-evaluate the communications channels they use to interact with customers to better establish trust. With fraudsters monopolizing open channels such as SMS and email, these channels cannot be relied upon to also authenticate identity. Our research shows that over a third (38%) of consumers think identity is the problem and that people should prove who they are when signing up to use a platform to stop scammers. These consumer concerns emphasize organizations must wake up to the importance of digital identification," explained Dobbie.

Dobbie concluded: "If organizations are to maintain and build trust in the digital world, they need to better balance protection and experience to ensure their brand is not tarnished by scammers. With Intelligence Driven Authentication, organizations can overcome the fraudsters, protect their brand, create seamless and secure customer journeys and build all important digital trust."

Editors notes.

*All figures, unless stated are from Opinium. The total sample size was 9568 adults with the following national breakdown: Brazil, 1000; Germany, 1000; Hong Kong, 420; India, 553; Indonesia, 541; Philippines, 529; Singapore, 457; UK 1000; USA, 2003.

Regional samples; Benelux, 500; Middle East and Africa (UAE, KSA, Qatar, Bahrain, South Africa) 1065; Nordics; 500. The fieldwork was carried out online by Opinium in June 2021.

About Callsign

Callsign is pioneering the global network for identification. We solve challenges that organizations face in getting their users on to and interacting with their digital platforms easily and securely. We provide solutions to some of the world's largest banks and offer "bank-grade" identification to public and private sector clients of all sizes. Callsign's Intelligence Driven Authentication recognizes users by combining deep learning insights with personalized and contextual customer journeys. As a result, users can get on with their digital lives whilst businesses improve customer engagement, increase productivity and reduce the risk of fraud.

To learn more about Callsign and how it is helping businesses to intelligently protect against global threats in real-time visit: https://www.callsign.com/

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005593/en/

Contacts:

For media enquiries:

Rachel Matthews

Rachel.matthews@callsign.com
Partnership builds on complementary strengths to advance research in melanoma with a focus on Stage 2 melanoma patients

BRUSSELS and CASTRES, France, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) and Pierre Fabre today announced a strategic partnership in support of patients with resected Stage 2 BRAF-mutant melanoma. The partnership includes the planning, design and execution of a large Phase 3 study investigating the use of BRAF and MEK targeted therapies to reduce the risk of relapse in this patient population, currently under approval with authorities.

"Sadly, still today too many patients with Stage 2 melanoma have their cancer come back, even after their tumour is removed. Further understanding how effective treatments can have an impact on recurrence is essential," said Dr Denis Lacombe, CEO of EORTC. "We are pleased to collaborate with Pierre Fabre who bring strong heritage and expertise in this therapeutic area, to make a true difference to people living with Stage 2 melanoma."

"Collaboration between Pierre Fabre and EORTC is the perfect match between our medical and clinical capabilities and a leading global network in oncology research. Our strong complementary expertise have potential to transform patient care in melanoma," said Dr Deborah Szafir, EVP, Head of Medical and Patient Centricity Division at Pierre Fabre. "Our strategic partnership on a pioneering Phase 3 study confirms Pierre Fabre's R&D commitment to oncology and particularly in skin cancers. Through our growing expertise in BRAF and MEK inhibitors, we aim to strengthen our support for patients with skin cancers."

Pierre Fabre has a long-standing commitment to the melanoma community and takes a unique holistic approach to skin health through combined expertise in oncology, dermatology, and dermo-cosmetics. EORTC, a network uniting 2,800 clinical cancer research experts across the globe, shares Pierre Fabre's commitment to improving the standard of cancer treatment for patients.

For further information, please visit the EORTC website (www.eortc.org) and the Pierre Fabre website (www.pierre-fabre.com) - @PierreFabre.

References

1. Neoplasma. 2016;63(4):510-7. doi: 10.4149/neo_2016_403.

2. American Cancer Society. What Causes Melanoma Skin Cancer. Available at: https://www.cancer.org/cancer/melanoma-skin-cancer/causes-risks-prevention/what-causes.html. Accessed June 2021.

3. International Agency for Research on Cancer. Melanoma of skin. Available at: https://gco.iarc.fr/today/data/factsheets/cancers/16-Melanoma-of-skin-fact-sheet.pdf. Accessed June 2021.

4. Klein O, et al. Eur J Cancer 2013;49:1073-1079.

5. Melanoma UK. 2020 Melanoma Skin Cancer Report. Available at: https://www.melanomauk.org.uk/2020-melanoma-skin-cancer-report. Accessed June 2021.

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1553958/EORTC_Pierre_Fabre_Logo.jpg

Contacts:

EORTC:

Isabelle Gautherot

communication@eortc.org

Pierre Fabre:

Anne Kerveillant

anne.kerveillant@pierre-fabre.com
Vow ASA has through its subsidiary Scanship been awarded a contract with the French shipyard Chantiers de l'Atlantique for the delivery of advanced wastewater purification system to be installed on the seventh newbuild for Royal Caribbean International Oasis class of ships. This newbuild is planned to be the largest cruise ship in the world when it launches in 2026.

"This contract is a result of a more than 20 years cooperation with Chantiers de l'Atlantique and a true partnership with Royal Caribbean International within advanced wastewater purification. It also strongly signals a cruise industry planning for future growth with continuous focus on environmental sustainability and the health of our oceans"; says Vow ASA CEO Henrik Badin in a statement.





For more information, please contact

Henrik Badin, CEO, Vow ASA

Tel: + 47 90 78 98 25

Email: henrik.badin@vowasa.com





About Vow

Vow and its subsidiaries Scanship and Etia are passionate about preventing pollution. The company's world leading solutions convert biomass and waste into valuable resources and generate clean energy for a wide range of industries.

Cruise ships on every ocean have Vow technology inside which processes waste and purifies wastewater. Fish farmers are adopting similar solutions, and public utilities and industries use our solutions for sludge processing, waste management and biogas production on land.

With advanced technologies and solutions, Vow turns waste into biogenetic fuels to help decarbonise industry and convert plastic waste into fuel, clean energy, and high-value pyro carbon. The solutions are scalable, standardised, patented, and thoroughly documented, and the company's capability to deliver is well proven. They are key to end waste and stop pollution.

Located in Oslo, the parent company Vow ASA is listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange (ticker VOW).

This information is subject to the disclosure requirements pursuant to section 5-12 of the Norwegian Securities Trading Act.
VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / June 29, 2021 / Pampa Metals Corp. ("Pampa Metals" or the "Company") (CSE:PM)(FSE:FIRA)(OTCQB:PMMCF) is pleased to announce that it has now started its reverse circulation ("RC") drill program at its Redondo-Veronica project in northern Chile. The first drill hole is currently at approximately 270 meters depth and is testing the Cerro Redondo Norte target. Drilling is currently progressing at a rate of approximately 70m per day.

The Company plans to complete approximately 2,000m of drilling in 5 or 6 holes at the 6,600-hectare Redondo Veronica project. The targets are characterised by a combination of geological, hydrothermal alteration, and geophysical features that have been interpreted to be representative of porphyry copper systems (see news release dated June 16, 2021).

This first phase of the 2,000m drill program is expected to take approximately 30 days to complete, including moving between holes. Assay results are expected 4 to 6 weeks after samples have been sent to the internationally certified analytical laboratory in Chile. Standard quality control measures, including the use of duplicate samples, standard samples, and blank samples, are being employed to ensure the efficacy of the sample preparation and analytical results.

Drill chip samples from the RC drilling campaign are being bagged and logged in the field by a team led by a highly experienced Chilean geologist. Geological, hydrothermal alteration and visible mineralisation logs of the small RC chips will be constructed in order to more fully determine the overall geological environment of the areas being tested, and in order to correlate the results from the sub-surface with geological and geophysical observations made at the surface.

Upon completion of this phase of drilling, the drill rig will be immediately mobilised to the Company's Cerro Buenos Aires project, where a similar drill campaign will be undertaken.

The company is also pleased to announce that it has entered into a marketing agreement with Lakefront Enterprises Inc. ("Lakefront"), of Vancouver, B.C., Canada. Lakefront will raise public awareness of the Company, including its social media presence, to facilitate greater investor engagement and widespread dissemination of the Company's news.

Qualified Person

Technical information in this news release has been approved by Mario Orrego G, Geologist and a Registered Member of the Chilean Mining Commission and a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101. Mr. Orrego is a consultant to the Company.

COVID-19

The global outbreak of COVID-19 has led governments worldwide to enact emergency measures to combat the spread of the virus. Such measures may result in a period of business disruption including reduced operations, which could have a material adverse impact on the Company's results of operations, financial condition and the market and trading price of the Company's securities.

As of the date of this news release, the duration and immediate and eventual impact of the COVID-19 pandemic remains unknown. It is not possible to reliably estimate the length and severity of these developments and the impact on the financial results and condition of the Company. The outbreak of COVID-19 has not caused significant disruptions to the Company's business to date, with field activities being conducted by Chile-based specialists and consultants, although international travel to Chile for management is currently not practical. Important business communication is largely reliant on digital media. However, the COVID-19 outbreak may yet cause disruptions to the Company's business and operational plans.

ABOUT PAMPA METALS

Pampa Metals is a Canadian company listed on the Canadian Stock Exchange (CSE:PM) as well as the Frankfurt (FSE:FIRA) and OTC (OTCPK:PMMCF) exchanges. Pampa Metals owns a highly prospective 59,000-hectare portfolio of eight projects for copper and gold located along proven mineral belts in Chile, one of the world's top mining jurisdictions. The Company has a vision to create value for shareholders and all other stakeholders by making a major copper discovery along the prime mineral belts of Chile, using the best geological and technological methods. For more information, please visit Pampa Metals' website www.pampametals.com.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

Julian Bavin | Chief Executive Officer

INVESTOR CONTACT

Ioannis (Yannis) Tsitos | Director

investors@pampametals.com

www.pampametals.com

Neither the CSE nor the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This news release contains certain statements that may be deemed 'forward-looking statements'. All statements in this release, other than statements of historical fact, that address events or developments that Pampa Metals expects to occur, are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are statements that are not historical facts and are generally, but not always, identified by the words 'expects', 'plans', 'anticipates', 'believes', 'intends', 'estimates', 'projects', 'potential', 'indicate' and similar expressions, or that events or conditions 'will', 'would', 'may', 'could' or 'should' occur. Although Pampa Metals believes the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are not guaranteeing of future performance and actual results may differ materially from those in forward-looking statements.

SOURCE: Pampa Metals Corp.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/653457/Pampa-Metals-Starts-Drilling-Campaign-in-Northern-Chile
Thunder Bay, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - June 29, 2021) - White Metal Resources Corp. (TSXV: WHM) (FSE: CGK1) (OTC Pink: TNMLF) ("White Metal" or the "Company") is pleased to provide an update regarding its recently initiated exploration program in the region north of the Okohongo Cu-Ag Deposit (see Company news release dated 1 June 2021).

The Company is currently undertaking prospecting, geological mapping, grab sampling, and surface trenching and sampling programs along the prospective +7 km sedimentary-hosted copper horizon, which extends northward from the Okohongo Cu-Ag Deposit. This prospective horizon, colloquially known as the "Okohongo Horizon" occurs within the Lower Omao Formation (limestone, siltstone, dolomite), which is stratigraphically above the Nosib Group (sandstone, shale, conglomerate).

Michael Stares, President & CEO of the Company, stated, "These very high copper concentrations and strong silver assays confirm the significance of the Epunguwe area. This target area, being more than 5 direct kilometres north of the Okohongo Cu-Ag Deposit gives me further confidence in the prospectivity of this region of the Property. White Metal remains focussed on progressing the Tower Stock Gold Property in Ontario, Canada, but we will certainly continue to advance the Okohongo Copper-Silver Property as one of our primary assets."

A total of 56 rock grab samples were collected from the Epunguwe Target Area and Okohongo North Showing during recent geological mapping. The Epunguwe Target Area ("Epunguwe") is located about 4.3 km north of the Okohongo Cu-Ag Deposit and covers a minimum northwest strike length of 800 metres. The Okohongo North Showing is located about 2.7 km north of the Okohongo Cu-Ag Deposit. Assay results for the first 20 rock grab samples are summarized in Table 1.

Table 1. Summary of rock grab samples collected from the Epunguwe and Okohongo North areas.

Sample Location Description UTMX UTMY Cu

(ppm) Cu

(%) Ag

(ppm) Pb

(ppm) Pb

(%) U4968 Epunguwe Qtz Vein 376911 7946389 11200 1.12 5 1300 0.13 U4969 Epunguwe Gossanous Qtz vein 376911 7946389 62500 6.25 20 2140 0.21 U4970 Epunguwe Gossanous Qtz vein 376911 7946389 55000 5.50 10 1880 0.19 U4971 Epunguwe Gossanous Qtz vein 376911 7946389 54300 5.43 35 340 0.03 U4972 Epunguwe Fine grained sed - Sandstone 376911 7946389 56000 5.60 65 540 0.05 U4973 Epunguwe Fine grained sed - Sandstone 376911 7946389 51300 5.13 65 130 0.01 U4974 Epunguwe Fine grained sed - Sandstone 376911 7946389 46000 4.60 28 110 0.01 U4975 Epunguwe Fine grained sed - Sandstone 376911 7946389 50100 5.01 53 110 0.01 U4976 Epunguwe Qtz Vein 376911 7946389 14700 1.47 5 170 0.02 U4977 Epunguwe Fine grained sed - Sandstone 376911 7946389 125000 12.50 50 200000 20.00 U4978 Okohongo North Fine grained sed - Sandstone 378251 7944841 22100 2.21 6 1080 0.11 U4979 Okohongo North Fine grained sed - Sandstone 378251 7944841 318000 31.80 1 150500 15.05 U4980 Okohongo North Qtz Vein 378251 7944841 143500 14.35 6 186000 18.60 U4981 Okohongo North Qtz Vein 378251 7944841 50100 5.01 4 74000 7.40 U4982 Okohongo North Dolomite 378251 7944841 21100 2.11 39 1410 0.14 U4983 Epunguwe Fine grained sed - Sandstone 376935 7946333 80400 8.04 46 1280 0.13 U4984 Epunguwe Qtz Vein 376901 7946372 14100 1.41 7 510 0.05 U4985 Epunguwe Fine grained sed - Sandstone 376901 7946372 29900 2.99 7 180 0.02 U4986 Epunguwe Fine grained sed - Sandstone 376901 7946372 45700 4.57 13 220 0.02 U4987 Epunguwe Gossanous Qtz vein 376901 7946372 233000 23.30 58 2580 0.26

*WGS84 Z33S

The Company also completed 10 east-west and northeast-trending trenches (EPT001 to EPT010) targeting the contact horizon between the Lower Omao Formation (east) and Nosib Group (west) and exposing sediment-hosted copper mineralization. A total of 28 rock grab samples from the trenching program have been submitted for analysis.

Historical reporting describes the Epunguwe Target Area as a northwest trending, roughly three kilometre by half kilometre area of soil geochemical anomalies, as well as copper mineralization exposed at surface, in trenches, and in drill holes (Table 2), occurring along a significant syn-sedimentary, basinal growth fault.

Table 2. Summary of historical drilling results from the Epunguwe Target Area, EPL 7071, Namibia.

*Drill Hole From (m) To (m) **Interval (m) Cu (%) Ag (g/t) Length (m) TCD-019 19.00 41.60 22.60 0.34 3.2 65.10 incl. 19.90 31.40 11.50 0.49 4.7

And 55.80 65.10 9.30 1.64 122.6

incl. 55.80 61.80 6.00 2.23 171.4

TCD-021 10.00 42.00 32.00 0.14 2.0 81.34 incl. 22.00 26.60 4.60 0.37 5.4

And 59.90 78.20 18.30 0.72 13.6

incl. 61.00 65.30 4.30 1.84 37.9

TCD-023 107.30 123.50 16.20 0.35

175.80 incl. 107.30 108.30 1.00 1.89 17.1

TCP-002 0.00 27.00 27.00 1.47 11.7 45.00 incl. 0.00 21.00 21.00 1.76 14.1

incl. 0.00 8.00 8.00 2.80 18.9

KAP-130 0.00 20.00 20.00 0.94 14.1 75.00 incl. 1.00 9.00 8.00 1.58 30.0



*TCD = diamond; TCP = percussion; KAP = percussion

**drill hole intervals are not considered true widths and are being treated as core lengths.

Mineralization is described as structurally-controlled and hosted by conglomerates (sandstones) of the basal Nosib Group at or near the contact with overlying Ombombo Subgroup rocks; Lower Omao Formation siltstone and Lower Omao Formation dolostone also host mineralization (INV Metals Inc. Report, March 21, 2012, filed on SEDAR). To the Company's knowledge, no work has been completed in this area since 2012.

A more detailed description of the new areas of copper exploration can be viewed on the Company's website (https://www.whitemetalres.com/taranis-okohongo-cu-ag.html).

A qualified person has not done sufficient enough work to verify the historical assay results and technical information reported herein. Rock grab samples are selective samples by nature and as such are not necessarily representative of mineralization hosted across the Property.

Qualified Person

Technical information in this news release has been reviewed and approved by Dr. Scott Jobin-Bevans (P.Geo.), Vice President Exploration and a Director of White Metal, who is a Qualified Person under the definitions established by the NI 43-101.

About White Metal Resources Corp:

White Metal Resources Corp. is a junior exploration company exploring in Canada and southern Africa. The company's two key properties are the Flagship Tower Stock Gold Project in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada and the Okohongo Copper-Silver Project in Namibia, Africa. For more information about the Company please visit www.whitemetalres.com.

On behalf of the Board of Directors

"Michael Stares"

President & CEO

For further information contact:

Michael Stares

President & CEO

White Metal Resources Corp.

Phone: +1 (807) 358-2420

Nancy Massicotte

Investor Relations

White Metal Resources Corp.

Phone: +1 (604) 507-3377

TF: +1 (866) 503-3377

ir@whitemetalres.com

THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE HAS NOT REVIEWED AND DOES NOT ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS RELEASE.

The information contained herein contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of applicable securities legislation. Forward-looking statements relate to information that is based on assumptions of management, forecasts of future results, and estimates of amounts not yet determinable. Any statements that express predictions, expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives, assumptions or future events or performance are not statements of historical fact and may be "forward-looking statements."

Forward-looking statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties which could cause actual events or results to differ from those reflected in the forward-looking statements, including, without limitation: risks related to failure to obtain adequate financing on a timely basis and on acceptable terms; risks related to the outcome of legal proceedings; political and regulatory risks associated with mining and exploration; risks related to the maintenance of stock exchange listings; risks related to environmental regulation and liability; the potential for delays in exploration or development activities or the completion of feasibility studies; the uncertainty of profitability; risks and uncertainties relating to the interpretation of drill results, the geology, grade and continuity of mineral deposits; risks related to the inherent uncertainty of production and cost estimates and the potential for unexpected costs and expenses; results of prefeasibility and feasibility studies, and the possibility that future exploration, development or mining results will not be consistent with the Company's expectations; risks related to gold price and other commodity price fluctuations; and other risks and uncertainties related to the Company's prospects, properties and business detailed elsewhere in the Company's disclosure record. Should one or more of these risks and uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described in forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned against attributing undue certainty to forward-looking statements. These forward looking statements are made as of the date hereof and the Company does not assume any obligation to update or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances. Actual events or results could differ materially from the Company's expectations or projections

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/88982
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - June 29, 2021) - Golden Independence Mining Corp. (CSE: IGLD) (OTCQB:GIDMF) (FSE: 6NN) ("Golden Independence") or (the "Company") is pleased to announce the filing of a National Instrument 43-101 technical report on SEDAR supporting the May 19, 2021 release of a maiden Mineral Resource Estimate ("MRE") for the Company's flagship Independence project located adjacent to Nevada Gold Mines' Phoenix-Fortitude mining operations in the Battle Mountain-Cortez trend of Nevada.

The MRE, incorporating over 125,000 feet of RC and core drilling in 234 holes, outlines both a near surface as well as an underground resource and was completed by James Ashton of Dyer Engineering and Carl Defilippi of Kappes, Cassiday & Assoc. with an effective date of May 19, 2021. Highlights of the MRE include:

Near Surface Resource: Measured & Indicated Total Resource of 537,300 ounces of gold and 8.1 million ounces of silver plus an Inferred Total Resource of 147,300 ounces of gold and 1.2 million ounces of silver.

Measured & Indicated Total Resource of 537,300 ounces of gold and 8.1 million ounces of silver plus an Inferred Total Resource of 147,300 ounces of gold and 1.2 million ounces of silver. Underground Resource: Inferred Resource of 796,200 ounces of gold.

The technical report has been prepared in accordance with Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum Definition Standards on Mineral Resources and Reserves that establish definitions and guidance on the definitions for Mineral Resources, Mineral Reserves, and Mining Studies used in Canada. The Mineral Resource, Mineral Reserve, and Mining Study definitions are incorporated, by reference, into NI 43-101 - Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects.

There are no material differences between information disclosed in the Company's May 19, 2021 news release and the technical report.

Table 1: Independence Project - Mineral Resource Estimate

Independence Near Surface Mineralization Measured Resources

Cutoff Tonnes Grade (g/t) Ounces Ounces Ounces (gr. Au/tonne) Gold Silver Gold Eq. Gold Silver Gold Eq. 0.2 7,519,000 0.50 9.80 0.64 119,900 2,369,600 153,800 Indicated Resources Cutoff Tonnes Grade (g/t) Ounces Ounces Ounces (gr. Au/tonne) Gold Silver Gold Eq. Gold Silver Gold Eq. 0.2 32,133,000 0.40 5.59 0.48 417,400 5,775,700 499,000 Measured & Indicated Resources Cutoff Tonnes Grade (g/t) Ounces Ounces Ounces (gr. Au/tonne) Gold Silver Gold Eq. Gold Silver Gold Eq. 0.2 39,652,000 0.42 6.39 0.51 537,300 8,145,300 652,800 Inferred Resources Cutoff Tonnes Grade (g/t) Ounces Ounces Ounces (gr. Au/tonne) Gold Silver Gold Eq. Gold Silver Gold Eq. 0.2 14,449,000 0.32 2.62 0.36 147,300 1,219,100 164,900 Independence Underground Mineralization Inferred Resources Cutoff Tonnes Grade (g/t) Ounces Ounces Ounces (gr. Au/tonne) Gold Silver Gold Eq. Gold Silver Gold Eq. TBD 3,794,000 6.53 0.000 6.53 796,200 0 796,200

Notes to Mineral Resource Estimate:

Mineral Resources which are not Mineral Reserves do not have demonstrated economic viability. The estimate of Mineral Resources may be materially affected by environmental, permitting, legal, title, taxation, sociopolitical, marketing, changes in global gold markets or other relevant issues. The CIM definitions (2014) were followed for classification of Mineral Resources. The quantity and grade of reported inferred Mineral Resources in this estimation are uncertain in nature and there has been insufficient exploration to define these inferred Mineral Resources as an indicated Mineral Resource. It is probable that further exploration drilling will result in upgrading them to an indicated or measured Mineral Resource category. The Mineral Resource Estimate incorporates over 125,000 feet of reverse circulation and core drilling in 234 holes, and outlines both a near surface and an underground resource. The near surface mineralization is primarily based on the reverse circulation drilling, while the underground mineralization is based entirely on core drilling. The resource was prepared by James Ashton, P.E., an independent QP, with an effective date of May 17, 2021. The mineral resources are unconstrained and presented at an undiluted 0.20 g/t gold cut-off grade which represents mineralization that is potentially available for open-pit mining and heap-leach processing. There are sulfides present at depth in the near surface mineralization. The Company is undertaking metallurgical studies to define the redox boundary. Underground mineralization resources were quantified based on deep tabular solids representing potentially underground mineable lenses. Gold equivalent values are based on a silver to gold ratio of 70:1

Qualified Person

The technical content of this news release has been reviewed and approved by R. Tim Henneberry, PGeo (B.C.), a director and president of Golden Independence Mining and a qualified person under National Instrument 43-101.

About Golden Independence Mining Corp.

Golden Independence Mining Corp. is an exploration company currently focused on exploring the advanced-stage Independence property located adjacent to Nevada Gold Mine's Phoenix-Fortitude mine in the Battle Mountain-Cortez Trend of Nevada. The Independence property hosts a M&I resource of 537,300 ounces of gold and Inferred resource of 943,500 ounces of gold with a substantial silver credit. The Company is actively advancing the near-surface resource towards a production decision with a PEA anticipated in late 2021.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT:

Christos Doulis, Chief Executive Officer

Telephone: 1.647.924.1083

Email: christos@goldenindependence.co

This press release contains forward-looking information (within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation) that involves various risks and uncertainties regarding future events. Such forward-looking information includes statements based on current expectations involving a number of risks and uncertainties and such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance of the Company, and include, without limitation, statements regarding completion of the Private Placement. There are numerous risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results and the Company's plans and objectives to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking information in this news release, including without limitation, the following risks and uncertainties: (i) the risk that the Canadian Securities Exchange will not accept the terms of the Private Placement; (ii) the risk that the Company will not be able to locate suitable purchasers for the Private Placement; and (iii) management's discretion regarding the use of proceeds. Actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such information. This forward-looking information is based on estimates and opinions of management on the date hereof and is expressly qualified by this notice. Risks and uncertainties about the Company's business are more fully discussed in the Company's disclosure materials filed with the securities regulatory authorities in Canada at www.sedar.com. The Company 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 applicable law.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/88910
Edmonton, Alberta--(Newsfile Corp. - June 29, 2021) - TrustBIX Inc. (TSXV: TBIX) ("TrustBIX" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that it signed a co-marketing agreement on June 23, 2021 with United Energy Ltd. (operating as "8760 Expense Management" or "8760") to collaborate on building lead funnels for each party's solutions in the agri-food sector. Where exchanged leads result in revenue being generated by the receiving party, a finder's fee will be payable to the disclosing party.

This agreement marks the continued development and growth of the Company's energy management and clean technology solutions for the agri-food value chain. This collaboration follows an earlier agreement signed December 7, 2020 with Green Metrics and the April 22, 2021 announcement of Sunterra Group as the lead adopter of these solutions.

8760's focus will be to work with TrustBIX's network of agri-food clients to optimize their energy management needs from both a sustainability and cost reduction perspective. 8760 has a 17-year track record of helping clients navigate the complexities of the electricity and natural gas utility markets.

"We are pleased to partner with TrustBIX to provide energy management services to companies in the agri-food industry," said Ken Klassen, 8760 Expense Management EVP of Business Development. "Food production is critical so it is exciting for 8760 to be involved with a company like TrustBIX whose technology and expertise is food traceability and sustainability which leads to better and safer products for everyone."

"The management of energy use and cost is increasingly important to agri-food operations," said Tom Ogaranko, TrustBIX Chief Innovation Officer. "Our new partner, 8760, has an established track record of creative energy sourcing that brings real cost savings to their clients."

The agreement has a one-year initial term and is renewable.

About 8760 Expense Management

8760 Expense Management (8760) is a privately-held, Alberta-based company that is focused on helping public and private entities optimize their electricity and natural gas utility expenses. Our 360-degree optimization approach focuses on the entire energy bill (consumption and delivery costs) and, together with our unique aggregation and competitive tender process, works to implement strategies that will contain or reduce utility costs. At 8760, our goal is to make the complex simple when it comes to energy management and we get a charge out of helping our clients succeed. Learn more at www.8760.ca

About TrustBIX (TSXV: TBIX)

As an innovative leader, TrustBIX provides agri-food traceability. By addressing consumer and agri-food business demands, the Company has a goal to become the most trusted and largest source of third-party food traceability and sustainability information globally - Gate to Plate. TrustBIX Inc.'s focus is to create a world where we trust more, waste less and reward sustainable behaviour. The Company's proprietary platform, BIX (Business infoXchange System), is designed to create trust without compromising privacy through innovative use of data and technology. Extensive R&D has allowed TrustBIX to create a new blockchain-derived technology to complement its mature and proven traceability systems. By leveraging BIX and its unique use of incentive solutions, the Company can deliver independent validation of food provenance and sustainable production practices within the supply chain. ViewTrak Technologies Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary, provides a suite of hardware and software solutions to the livestock industry in Canada, United States, Mexico and China, such as Auction Master Pro, Market Master, Feedlot Solutions and pork grading probes. For more information, visit www.trustbix.com, or follow us on Twitter twitter.com/@TrustBIX_Inc, Facebook at www.facebook.com/BIXSco, or LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bixsco-inc-/.

Forward-Looking Information

This press release contains certain forward-looking information and reflects the Company's present assumptions regarding future events. These statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause the Company's actual results, levels of activity, performance, and/or achievements to be materially different from any future results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements.

Certain statements contained in this document constitute forward-looking statements and information within the meaning of the applicable Canadian securities legislation. When used in this document, the words "may", "would", "could", "should", "will", "intend", "plan", "propose", "anticipate", "believe", "forecast", "estimate", "expect" and similar expressions used by any of the Company's management, are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Such statements reflect the Company's internal projections, expectations, future growth, performance and business prospects and opportunities and are based on information currently available to the Company. Since they relate to the Company's current views with respect to future events, they are subject to certain risks, uncertainties and assumptions. Many factors could cause the Company's actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements that may be expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Given these risks and uncertainties, readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements. The Company does not intend, and does not assume any obligation, to update any such factors or to publicly announce the result of any revisions to any of the forward-looking statements contained herein to reflect future results, events or developments except as required by applicable securities legislation, regulations or policies.

FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT:

Mr. Hubert Lau

President and CEO

Telephone: (780) 456-2207

Email: info@trustbix.com

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy of accuracy of this release.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/88911
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - June 29, 2021) - PORTOFINO RESOURCES INC. (TSXV: POR) (OTCQB: PFFOF) (FSE: POTA) ("Portofino" or the "Company") is pleased to provide an update to the Company's June 23rd news release announcing the mobilization of our geological crew to the Allison Lake North lithium and rare elements property ("Property"). Portofino's geologists have encountered several granitic pegmatite outcrops in recently logged areas of the property enabling the team to immediately initiate a channel sampling program across these exposures (Photo 1). The Allison Lake granitic pegmatites are known to be enriched in lithium and other rare elements as established by the 2003 Ontario Geological Survey ("Breaks") report.

Channel sampling is the best way to take representative samples over broad zones where the mineral grain size can be large, and the pegmatites found on the Property can contain mineral grains measuring several centimetres. In addition, field identification of such minerals as beryl (Beryllium-silicate) and tourmaline (Boron-silicate), which can be intimately associated with economic rare element mineralization, support Portofino's objective of finding an economic deposit containing these important elements.





Photo 1. Portofino geological crew channel sampling - Allison Lake north property - June 2021.

To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/3751/88932_61c8c89a44b5c92c_002full.jpg

The Company's website contains additional exploration pictures that can be viewed at: Allison Lake North Property Sampling. Channel samples and selected grab samples will be submitted to an accredited laboratory for chemical and mineral analyses. The results will be released when available.

The Allison Lake North Property

The Property comprises 1,618 hectares (ha) and is located 100 kilometers ("km") east of the town of Red Lake in northwestern Ontario. It is accessible by well-established logging roads and a hydro-electric power line transects the claim group. The Property contains significant attributes that are key to the formation of lithium-bearing pegmatite dykes. It is positioned along the contact between the Allison Lake pegmatite granite batholith and the Jubilee Lake metasedimentary rocks of the Uchi Subprovince in northwestern Ontario.

The 2003 Ontario Geological Survey (Breaks) report described the Allison Lake batholith as the largest known peraluminous granitic body in northwestern Ontario. Breaks concluded that "the Allison Lake batholith represents an important new exploration target for rare-element mineralization and is the largest such granite thus far documented in Ontario. This area has high potential for further discoveries of rare-element mineralization."

Northwestern Ontario is host to several well-known Lithium and rare earth elements deposits that have delineated resources and preliminary economic assessment studies (Figure 1).





Figure 1. Major lithium deposits of northwestern Ontario.

To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/3751/88932_61c8c89a44b5c92c_003full.jpg

Qualified Person

Mike Kilbourne, P. Geo, an independent qualified person as defined in National Instrument 43-101, has reviewed and approved the technical contents of this news release on behalf of the Company.

About Portofino Resources Inc.

Portofino is a Vancouver-based Canadian company focused on exploring and developing mineral resource projects in the Americas. Its South of Otter and Bruce Lake projects are in the historic gold mining district of Red Lake, Ontario, Canada proximal to the high-grade Dixie gold project owned by Great Bear Resources Ltd. In addition, Portofino holds three other northwestern Ontario gold projects; the Gold Creek property located immediately south of the historic Shebandowan Nickel-Copper mine, as well as the Sapawe West and Melema West properties located in the rapidly developing Atikokan gold mining camp.

In addition to maintaining a 100% interest in the Allison Lake North Lithium project, the Company also controls a 100% interest in the 2,932 Hectare Yergo Lithium property which encompasses the entire Aparejos Salar, located within the world-renowned "Lithium Triangle" in Argentina.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

"David G. Tafel"

Chief Executive Officer

For Further Information Contact:

David Tafel CEO, Director 604-683-1991

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 may contain forward looking statements concerning future operations of Portofino Resources Inc. (the "Company"). All forward looking statements concerning the Company's future plans and operations, including management's assessment of the Company's project expectations or beliefs may be subject to certain assumptions, risks and uncertainties beyond the Company's control. Investors are cautioned that any such statements are not guarantees of future performance and that actual performance and exploration and financial results may differ materially from any estimates or projections.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/88932
Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - June 29, 2021) - Cascada Silver Corp. (CSE: CSS) ("Cascada") is pleased to provide updates on drilling activities at its Agua Amarga silver project and the underground exploration and sampling program at its Marilin gold silver project, both located in Chile's Atacama Region.

At the Agua Amarga project, the previously announced reverse circulation drilling program has been completed with four drill holes targeting the down dip extensions of the silver-bearing veins which had been mined during the 1800's. Samples from the drilling program have been sent for assaying. It is anticipated that results will be available in 3 to 5 weeks, which is longer than normal turn-around for results due to COVID-19 restrictions at the laboratories in Chile.

At the Marilin project, the underground exploration adit has been completed with the adit driven along 40 metres of the Marilin vein structure exposing a 0.90 to 1.50 metre wide zone of oxidized quartz carbonate veining. Samples, collected at the adit face after each blast, have been sent for assaying with results anticipated in 2 to 4 weeks. In addition to the underground exploration, approximately 200 metres to the southeast and 120 metres above the adit, two samples were collected from the sides of the main Marilin quartz vein, which had historically been exposed by a deep pit. One 0.6 metre chip sample collected across a quartz vein with iron and copper oxides returned assay results of 2.52 gram per tonne ("g/t") gold, 57.3 g/t silver and 1.35% copper. A second 0.2 metre chip sample of druzy quartz with calcite and iron and copper oxides returned 1.41 g/t gold, 152.8 g/t silver and 1.6% copper. The main Marilin vein itself could not be accessed for sampling.

"The exploration programs at the Agua Amarga and Marilin projects were completed as planned and within budget," said Carl Hansen, Cascada's CEO, "and we are now waiting for assay results from both programs. In the meantime, as we prepare further exploration activities, we will take advantage of the delay in assay turnaround times to catch up on conducting field examinations of potential properties which have been submitted to Cascada for review."

NI 43-101 Technical Disclosure

The Qualified Person, as defined by National Instrument 43-101 of the Canadian Securities Administrators, for Cascada's exploration activities in Chile is Sergio Diaz, a resident of Santiago, Chile. Mr. Diaz is a Public Registered Person for Reserves and Resources N 51, in Chile and is also registered in the Colegio de Geologos de Chile under N 315.

About Cascada Silver Corp.

Cascada is a mineral exploration company focused on silver and gold exploration in Latin America with four properties under option in Chile, including the historic Agua Amarga silver project where high-grade epithermal silver-bearing veins were mined during the 19th century. Cascada's team of successful exploration professionals are dedicated to the discovery of mineral deposits that can be progressed into economically viable development projects creating value for all stakeholders.

On behalf of Cascada Silver Corp.,

Carl Hansen, CEO

For additional information, please contact us at:

info@cascadasilver.com

Mars Investor Relations

(647) 557-6651

css@marsinvestorrelations.com

CAUTIONARY NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS:

This news release contains forward-looking statements, including predictions, projections and forecasts. Forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to: plans for the evaluation of exploration properties; the success of evaluation plans; the success of exploration activities; mine development prospects; and, potential for future metals production. Often, but not always, forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of words such as "plans", "planning", "expects" or "does not expect", "continues", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "intends", "potential", "anticipates", "does not anticipate", or describes a "goal", or variation of such words and phrases or state that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved.

Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, future events, conditions, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, prediction, projection, forecast, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Such factors include, among others: changes in economic parameters and assumptions; all aspects related to the timing of exploration activities and receipt of exploration results; the interpretation and actual results of current exploration activities; changes in project parameters as plans continue to be refined; the results of regulatory and permitting processes; future metals price; possible variations in grade or recovery rates; failure of equipment or processes to operate as anticipated; labour disputes and other risks of the mining industry; the results of economic and technical studies; delays in obtaining governmental approvals or financing or in the completion of exploration; as well as those factors disclosed in Cascada's publicly filed documents.

Although Cascada 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 forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements.

Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its regulation services provider has reviewed or accepts

responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of the content of this news release.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/88961
Highlights:

Exploration grant received from New Brunswick Junior Mining Assistance Program

Expanded +3,000-sample soil geochemistry program in progress over 31.25 km 2 of property acquired in late 2020

Project is adjacent to recent new visible gold discoveries and results up to 241 g/t Au reported at Puma Exploration's Williams Brook Gold Project

Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - June 29, 2021) - Stratabound Minerals Corp. (TSXV: SB) (OTCQB: SBMIF) ("Stratabound" or the "Company") is pleased to report it has commenced its 2021 exploration campaign at its McIntyre Brook Gold Project supported by a $30,000 mineral exploration grant awarded through the New Brunswick Junior Mining Assistance Program.

The exploration work expands upon the 2,460-sample soil geochemistry program completed in 2020 along 12 km of strike which revealed multiple broad, linear and parallel soil geochemistry anomalies. Both gold and copper trends align with past significant gold and copper-mineralized showings including the McIntyre Brook Zone which features 40 significant gold values between 0.20 and 41.56 g/t Au collected from bedrock exposed in trenches along 300m of strike. The mineralization is hosted in brittle-fractured rhyolite units in contact with regional sediments. In addition to the known McIntyre Brook trend identified in past limited work, a new parallel trend is now interpreted to lie about 1km to the south. The 2021 planned program is detailed in Figure 1 below.

Follow-up work this season includes closer-spaced sampling at 25m intervals, prospecting, geological mapping and trenching on selected anomalies, as well as first-pass soil sampling of the 31.25 km2 of additional property recently acquired through option agreements and reported on November 10, 2020.

The Company is also very pleased to read the reports of recent new discoveries of visible gold in quartz veins at surface associated with base metal sulphides on the neighbouring Williams Brook Gold Project operated by Puma Exploration Inc. ("Puma"). Numerous gold zones have been discovered by Puma through trenching and surface sampling including the Lynx Gold Zone with reported selected grab samples* yielding up to 241.0 g/t Au, 79.8 g/t Au and 74.2 g/t Au, (Puma Exploration Inc. press release, March 3, 2021). These zones, as well as the geophysical trends identified in recent airborne work recently reported by Puma, extend directly onto Stratabound ground. Puma further reports that gold mineralization is observed in brecciated quartz veins at the contact between the sediments and the altered rhyolite. This is the similar case of occurrence at Stratabound's McIntyre Brook Zone. (*Selected rock grab samples are selective by nature and may not represent the true grade or style of mineralization across the property.)

Mr. R. Kim Tyler, President and CEO of the Company commented, "We are as keen to see the results of our expanded exploration program at McIntyre Brook as we are to follow the continued success of our neighbour Puma Exploration Inc. at Williams Brook on our western strike extensions. The complementary results of both companies continue to grow compelling evidence that we are at the very early stage of yet another new Maritime gold district."

"We are also very pleased to receive the financial support of the New Brunswick Government that we perceive as not only an endorsement of the mineral potential of this new area, but also an endorsement of confidence in Stratabound as well."





Figure 1. McIntyre Brook 2021 Soil Geochemistry Program

(*Includes public data sourced from Puma Exploration Inc. website and SEDAR)

To view an enhanced version of Figure 1, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/4064/88966_1dc5d73b1455fbf2_002full.jpg





About Stratabound Minerals Corp.

Stratabound Minerals Corp. is a well-funded Canadian exploration and development company focused on gold exploration at its flagship Golden Culvert Project, Yukon Territory and its new McIntyre Brook Project, New Brunswick, Canada. The Company also holds a significant land position that hosts three base metals deposits in the Bathurst base metals camp of New Brunswick featuring the Captain Copper-Cobalt-Gold Deposit that hosts an NI 43-101 Measured and Indicated Resource.

Mr. R. Kim Tyler, P.Geo., President and CEO of Stratabound, and a "Qualified Person" for the purpose of NI 43-101, has reviewed and approved the contents of this news release.

For more information, please visit the company's website at www.stratabound.ca or contact: R. Kim Tyler, President and CEO 416-915-4157 info@stratabound.com.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

WARNING: The Company relies upon litigation protection for "forward-looking" statements. The information in this release may contain forward-looking information under applicable securities laws. This forward-looking information is subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those implied by the forward-looking information. Factors that may cause actual results to vary materially include, but are not limited to, inaccurate assumptions concerning the exploration for and development of mineral deposits, currency fluctuations, unanticipated operational or technical difficulties, changes in laws or regulations, failure to obtain regulatory, exchange or shareholder approval, the risks of obtaining necessary licenses and permits, changes in general economic conditions or conditions in the financial markets and the inability to raise additional financing. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on this forward-looking information. The Company does not assume the obligation to revise or update this forward-looking information after the date of this release or to revise such information to reflect the occurrence of future unanticipated events, except as may be required under applicable securities laws.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/88966
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - June 29, 2021) - LaSalle Exploration Corp. (TSXV: LSX) ("LaSalle" or the "Company") reports that shareholders voted in favour of all items of business brought before them at the Company's annual meeting of shareholders held on June 24, 2021 in Vancouver, B.C.

At the meeting, shareholders voted overwhelmingly in favour of LaSalle management's nominees to the Board of Directors, with all nominees receiving at least 99.9% in favour of the votes cast. Management nominees Dan Innes, Ian Campbell, Laurent Eustache, Karen Rees and Alan Moon were elected to hold office until the next Annual General Meeting or until their next successors are appointed.

Following the meeting, LaSalle's Board of Directors appointed its officers for the ensuing year, namely:

Chair of the board: Daniel Innes

President, Chief Executive Officer: Ian Campbell

Chief Financial Officer: Arnold Klassen

Corporate Secretary: Kristen Craiggs

Vice-President, Corporate Development: Ronald Stewart

Vice-President, Exploration: Alan Sexton

Steve Cook, a director of LaSalle since its inception as a private company, did not stand for re-election but remains as an advisor to the company. Commented Ian Campbell, President and CEO, "On behalf of everyone at LaSalle, I wish to acknowledge Steve's valuable insights, advice and overall contributions to the growth of our company, and we are really pleased he remains with us an advisor moving forward."

Dale Matheson Carr-Harris Labonte LLP were re-appointed as Auditors of the Corporation to hold office until the next meeting or until its successor is duly appointed, and the Directors were authorized to fix the auditor's remuneration.

Also at the meeting, shareholders overwhelmingly approved the Company's Stock Option Plan.

About LaSalle Exploration Corp.:

LaSalle is an exploration company focused on less explored districts of the Abitibi, recognized for mining investment based on mineral potential, policy and success, and the developing Eeyou Itschee-James Bay region in Quebec. LaSalle is actively exploring Radisson as well as the Blakelock and Egan high-grade gold properties located in northeastern Ontario. LaSalle trades on the TSX Venture Exchange ("TSX-V") under the symbol "LSX". Additional information about LaSalle can be found on SEDAR at www.sedar.com and on the Company's website at www.lasallecorp.com.

On behalf of the Board of Directors

LASALLE EXPLORATION CORP.

"Ian Campbell"

President and Chief Executive Officer

Telephone: (604) 647-3966

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements and Information

The information in this news release includes certain information and statements about management's view of future events, expectations, plans and prospects that constitute forward-looking statements. These statements are based upon assumptions that are subject to significant risks and uncertainties. Because of these risks and uncertainties and as a result of a variety of factors, the actual results, expectations, achievements or performance may differ materially from those anticipated and indicated by these forward-looking statements. Any number of factors could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements as well as future results. Although the Company believes that the expectations reflected in forward looking statements are reasonable, it can give no assurances that the expectations of any forward-looking statements will prove to be correct. Except as required by law, the Company disclaims any intention and assumes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements to reflect actual results, whether as a result of new information, future events, changes in assumptions, changes in factors affecting such forward-looking statements or otherwise.

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/88968


The Start-up Express Pitching Contest winners pictured together with the judging panel and special guests. Pictured on the front row (from left) are judges Herbert Chia, Venture Partner, Sequoia Capital China; Raymond Yung, Vice Chairman, AMTD Global Advisory Committee; Stephen Liang, Assistant Executive Director of HKTDC; Hendrick Sin, Co-founder & Executive Director & Vice Chairman, CMGE Technology Group Limited; and Duncan Chiu, Co-founder, Radiant Venture Capital Limited.



The distinguished judging panel witnessed the rise of new start-up success stories.



Renowned stand-up comedian Vivek Mahbubani, the event host, talked to entrepreneurs from some of the participating start-ups.

HONG KONG, June 29, 2021 - (ACN Newswire) - Start-up Express, an entrepreneurship development programme organised annually by the Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC), has returned for its fourth edition. The Pitching Final of the programme came to a successful conclusion today with a judging panel selecting exceptional Hong Kong tech start-ups that presented inspirational ideas and innovative solutions to help overcome social and environmental issues.For the second consecutive year, the Pitching Final was livestreamed online due to the pandemic. The Social Impact Award, established to recognise innovative and sustainable start-up ideas that create real social impact, was awarded to Breer. The "My Favourite Start-up Award", decided through live online polling, was awarded to Growgreen. The "AMTD SpiderNet Start-up Award" was awarded to HK Bio-Rhythm R&D and offers the winner to have open access to AMTD SpiderNet ecosystem. The 10 winners of the Pitching Final will participate in local and international activities that will help them develop their businesses by building connections, exploring markets, seeking partners and enhancing brand awareness.Stephen Liang, Assistant Executive Director of HKTDC, said: "As the pandemic situation gradually begins to ease, and global trade and economic activities continue to recover, innovative business models and ideas will become a new stimulus for the economy in post-pandemic times. The enrolment for Start-up Express 2021 reflected the great enthusiasm of local entrepreneurs, with shortlisted start-ups coming from a broader spectrum of fields than ever before, including new areas such as green tech, health tech and retail tech. Start-up Express has given tremendous support to local start-ups over the past three years, helping them explore global markets, seal major orders and win international awards. The HKTDC will continue its quest to spread the spirit of entrepreneurship in Hong Kong, assisting start-ups in growing their businesses to the next level."Start-ups promote social innovationThe shortlisted companies in this year's Start-up Express were mainly focused on new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, smart city tech, fintech and big data, with other emerging technologies such as green tech, health tech and retail tech also covered. In the Pitching Final, contestants put forward their innovative business ideas and responded to questions raised by a distinguished panel of judges as well as the online audience. This year's judging panel comprised:- Raymond Yung, Vice Chairman, AMTD Global Advisory Committee; Board Director, AMTD International (NYSE:HKIB; SGX:HKB)- Duncan Chiu, Co-founder, Radiant Venture Capital Limited- Herbert Chia, Venture Partner, Sequoia Capital China- Hendrick Sin, Co-founder & Executive Director & Vice Chairman, CMGE Technology Group Limited- Norma Chu, Founder, DayDayCookThe winners of the 2021 Start-up Express Pitching contest are: Kin Shun Information Technology (HK), PanopticAI, HK Bio-Rhythm R&D, CLAIRE Clinical AI Research, Wizpresso, Growgreen, Aurora Tele-Oncology, Kamakura Foods, Dayta AI, DeepTranslate. Click here (https://tinyurl.com/b7uu89n7) to view the profiles of each of the winning start-ups which will be able to join a range of local and international activities and events, exploring networking opportunities with potential investors, buyers and business partners.Attracting investorsAMTD Group is the Sole Strategic Partner of Start-up Express for the third consecutive year. Calvin Choi, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of AMTD Group, shared his perspective on the contest. "I am impressed by the performance of our city's young entrepreneurs in this year's Start-up Express Pitching Final presentation. We shortlisted more start-ups from a broader spectrum of fields this year. Among the product design and technology solutions, the area of environmental, social and governance (ESG) was heavily featured, with numerous innovative ideas and practical solutions presented, showcasing the unique business ideas of the participants and demonstrating the innovative power of the young generation in Hong Kong."He added: "As the pandemic begins to ease, entrepreneurs with strategic foresight and flexibility can adjust their business plans according to the current market landscape so as to overcome challenges and maintain ongoing development, exploring new opportunities amid this ever-changing business environment." With the support of AMTD Group, the SpiderNet Start-up Award was established to recognise the top performer selected by AMTD in the Pitching Final. The award aims to provide the winner with a unique and rare opportunity to access the resources and network of the AMTD SpiderNet ecosystem. The winner will benefit greatly in terms of its future business development and will also create synergies with other entrepreneurs within the ecosystem.Duncan Chiu, Co-founder, Radiant Venture Capital Limited and a member of this year's judging panel, said: "There are bound to be challenges in every entrepreneurial journey and the strength of a true entrepreneur is the ability to fight their way through the hard times. The global economy has been affected by the pandemic, so I am delighted to see so many Start-up Express applicants amid this uncertainty, showing their determination to fight through the adversity and succeed. Each start-up has its own strength, and their innovative ideas could help to boost social development. Regardless of the result, we hope all participants will embrace new opportunities in the international market through Start-up Express's unique support system, building connections and seeking opportunities with potential investors and partners. The entrepreneurial journey is never easy, but the results can definitely be fruitful."Assistance building brand reputation and awarenessA key driver for start-ups looking to participate in Start-up Express is the opportunity to enhance their brand awareness while also connecting with mentors, partners and investors through HKTDC-organised local and overseas events, and extensive highly curated marketing exposure. This provides start-ups with the chance to learn from experts and strengthen their core business.Past winners of Start-Up Express have benefited from new opportunities, including Return Helper, which offers a data-driven return management solution that optimises the return process and aftermarket activities for online retailers; and Gense Technologies, which develops portable imaging devices for patients' continuous health monitoring.Roy Wan, Co-founder and CEO of Return Helper, said: "With the assistance provided by the HKTDC, I successfully connected with e-commerce associations and organisations in Taiwan and Guangzhou, meeting almost 200 e-commerce representatives last October. These are the kind of valuable opportunities open to Start-up Express winners."Justin Chan, Co-founder and CEO of Gense Technologies, said numerous media interviews were arranged through the HKTDC, which have greatly enhanced his company's brand awareness and enabled more people to get to know its products and technologies.HKTDC throws full support behind local start-upsThe HKTDC has always given its full support to Hong Kong's entrepreneurial ecosystem, helping to maintain the city's status as a competitive business centre and hub for innovation.- The Hong Kong Start-up Fiesta, held in May and June, comprises a full range of activities to support and foster the local start-up ecosystem and help innovative new companies capture business opportunities amid the challenges of the pandemic.- The Start-up Express Master League, concluded in May, selected the programme alumni that had demonstrated the most vigorous business growth since joining the cohort.- Co-organised with the Hong Kong Startup Council in mid-June, Enterprise Connect: Solution Day invited start-ups in the areas of medtech, food tech and wellness tech to present their ideas under the theme "Well Being Tech", pitching to business users and fostering collaboration between start-ups and user enterprises.- Co-organised with The Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups in mid-June, the Young Founders' Camp equipped young entrepreneurs via brainstorming workshops and mentorship sessions, offering a testing ground for them to implement their start-up ideas.- The success stories of various Start-up Express alumni have been brought together in the Start-up Express Digital Book: A Journey to Success.In addition, to help enterprises the HKTDC runs the "HKTDC Transformation Sandbox (T-box)", offering free support on branding, e-commerce, manufacturing relocation and new market development. The "Voice of Start-ups" series has been launched on the HKTDC online platform to promote the success stories of local start-ups and show how their creativity and versatility help them thrive and capture local and overseas business opportunities. As well as organising Start-up Express, the HKTDC will give more support to start-ups by hosting the annual Entrepreneur Day in December.More informationStart-up Express: http://info.hktdc.com/startupexpress/en/index.htmlPhoto download: https://bit.ly/3h51AQ5About 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 LinkedInAbout AMTDAMTD Group is a comprehensive conglomerate in Asia, with businesses in investment banking, institutional asset management, digital solutions, real estate and hospitality, and education. AMTD Group is a global Strategic Partner Associate of the World Economic Forum, and has been the Grand Sponsor to the Singapore FinTech Festival since 2017 and Sole Strategic Partner to the Hong Kong FinTech Week since 2018.AMTD International (NYSE: HKIB; SGX:HKB), a subsidiary of AMTD Group and dual-listed on the New York Stock Exchange and Singapore Exchange, is a leading independent investment bank in Asia and one of Asia's largest independent asset management companies, and is also a leading investment house in the financial and new economy.AMTD Digital, a one-stop comprehensive digital solutions platform in Asia under AMTD Group, operates in businesses covering digital financial services, digital media, content & marketing, SpiderNet ecosystem solutions, and digital investment. Airstar Bank, one of the eight licensed virtual banks in Hong Kong, is the joint venture between AMTD and Xiaomi and a portfolio under this platform and is also one of the earlier virtual banks launching its service.Media enquiriesHKTDC Communications & Public Affairs DepartmentChristine Kam, Tel: +852 2584 4514, Email: christine.kam@hktdc.orgSource: HKTDCCopyright 2021 ACN Newswire . All rights reserved.
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - June 29, 2021) - Boosh Plant-Based Brands Inc. (CSE: VEGI) ("Boosh" or the "Company") announces that Ali Samei's role with Boosh has expanded and effective immediately will be overseeing all operations as the Company prepares to expand its Canadian sales and begin exporting Boosh entrees into the USA.

Ali Samei is a highly sought after, customer-focused natural food veteran with over 25 years of experience transforming operations of emerging natural food companies into successful, profitable brands, and in numerous occasions, into nationally branded powerhouses. Some of his past and current engagements includes companies such as Yves Veggie Cuisine, Hain Celestial, Lesley Stowe's Raincoast Crisp, Hippie Snacks, Organika, The Preservatory, and UPGUYS.

"I don't recall ever seeing such a promising opportunity from both the operational side and the public side as I see with Boosh," states Ali. "I've spent a considerable amount of time with the founder and president of Boosh, Connie Marples, studying their existing operations and just as importantly, I've peppered CEO Jim Pakulis as it relates to their public structure. Here's why I chose Boosh over many other opportunities; Boosh is an emerging, young, debt-free, 100% vegan, 100% plant-based food company that recently completed a successful IPO, has less than sixteen million shares outstanding where the majority of its competitors have greater than fifty million and many over one hundred million shares outstanding. In addition, Boosh has remarkably over 1,100 retail shareholders and growing, their insider ownership is approximately 28%, and a market cap about eighty percent less than its closest competitor. Combined that with seasoned, professional management on both the operational and public side, and I truly believe it's a recipe for success," Ali continues, "At this early stage I'd stack Boosh up against some of the largest nationally recognized brands I've consulted for when they first started. That's how confident I am of Boosh and the Company's future."

"Ali is best-in-class," states Boosh's president and founder, Connie Marples. "The abundance of over-all value that Ali brings having a quarter of a century of experience in the natural food industry is tremendous. As a new member of the leadership team, we firmly believe Ali will be a tremendous asset in helping us grow from the post-start-up phase to the acceleration growth phase, and beyond."

In other news, the Company entered into a contract with Sideways Frequency on June 23rd in which the Company paid Sideways a total of One Hundred Thousand Dollars for digital marketing. The term of the contract is for three months.

On behalf of the Board of Directors

James Pakulis

Chief Executive Officer

Telephone: (833) 882-6674

Investor Relations

Contact - Edge Communications Group

Email: invest@booshfood.com

Telephone: (236) 237-1315

About Boosh Plant-Based Brands Inc.:

Boosh Plant-Based Brands Inc., through its wholly owned subsidiary, Boosh Food, is the gateway to experiencing high quality, non-GMO, gluten free, 100% plant-based nutritional comfort foods for the whole family. We currently offer six frozen meals which are sold throughout Canada, and in the summer will be expanding our meals to include three refrigerated products. Boosh, good for you and good for planet earth.

The information in this news release includes certain information and statements about management's view of future events, expectations, plans and prospects that constitute forward looking statements. These statements are based upon assumptions that are subject to significant risks and uncertainties. Because of these risks and uncertainties and as a result of a variety of factors, the actual results, expectations, achievements or performance may differ materially from those anticipated and indicated by these forward looking statements. Forward-looking statements in this news release include, but are not limited to, the Company's proposed use of the proceeds of its initial public offering. Any number of factors could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements as well as future results. Although the Company believes that the expectations reflected in forward looking statements are reasonable, it can give no assurances that the expectations of any forward looking statements will prove to be correct. Except as required by law, the Company disclaims any intention and assumes no obligation to update or revise any forward looking statements to reflect actual results, whether as a result of new information, future events, changes in assumptions, changes in factors affecting such forward looking statements or otherwise.

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.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/88993
Tribe customers have grown 400% year on year as SaaS and technology sectors adopt a community-based engagement approach for their customers.

Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - June 29, 2021) - Tribe , a customizable community platform that enables businesses to create their customer communities, announced today it has closed a $7.5m seed financing round. It was led by Bessemer Venture Partners and CRV with participation from Inovia Capital.

With Tribe, companies can create online communities to engage customers and followers. Moreover, these communities empower customers to derive maximum value from the product, thereby improving customer retention and, ultimately, the revenue.

A growing number of SaaS players are turning to Tribe to build customer communities so they can get a pulse of customers, create a tight feedback loop, offer support, and enable knowledge sharing. Customer numbers at Tribe have soared 400% year-on-year since 2019 which includes businesses such as Pipedrive, ConvertKit, IBM, ASUS, Tim Hortons Foundation, and Prudential Financial.





Tribe in action: Businesses connecting customers, facilitating discussions, and collecting feedback.



To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/7234/88999_EETVnmYS_550.jpg

"We believe any business should be able to build something similar to Facebook, LinkedIn, or Clubhouse for their brand in a few clicks. Building an online community is less about technology and more about creating a network and sense of belonging. Still, many companies have to spend a tremendous amount of time handling the technology because the solutions out there are not customizable and extensible enough," said Siavash Mahmoudian, Co-founder and CEO, Tribe. "At Tribe, we don't just want to solve technical problems. We want businesses to learn best practices by action. A community manager with no coding knowledge should be able to bring up their community with Tribe in hours and not months."

Tribe's no-code community solution comes packaged with two components, a core platform, and modular apps. The core platform solves the most complex parts of an online community that includes member management, feed, notifications, moderation, analytics, and security. Apps are installed on top of the core platform to extend functionality such as events, Q&A, ideation, voice chat, and messaging.





Tribe founders: (L to R) Soheil Alavi, Siavash Mahmoudian, Mohsen Malayeri



To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/7234/88999_qg6LAJof_550.jpg

On investing in Tribe, Ethan Kurzweil, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, said "Tribe is building a flexible and highly customizable platform for communities, making it one-click easy for individuals and enterprises to spin up community sites for their fans and customers. Siavash is the very definition of product-centric, and his vision for bringing a community platform to the far reaches of the internet in an integrated way resonated highly with me. I'm excited to be part of the Tribe team".

Anna Khan, General Partner at CRV shared "Community has always been central to Siavash, Mo, and Soheil - and there is no better team to take on the momentous task of building the right tools to empower those who are building and joining communities at large. The Tribe team has accomplished so much in a short period of time, and I am thrilled to join them on this incredible journey".

Tribe was founded in 2018 in Toronto, Canada by Siavash Mahmoudian, Soheil Alavi, and Mohsen Malayeri, who migrated to Canada from Iran with a shared vision of enabling brands to build thriving online communities. The company is now powering thousands of active communities in SaaS, consumer online service, and retail in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

About Tribe

Tribe is a community platform designed to empower the customer communities of SaaS companies. It is popular for its collection of best practices derived from social networks and the ability to deeply integrate into products. Founded in 2018, Tribe now powers thousands of active communities to connect millions of end-users across the globe and features IBM, Pipedrive, ConvertKit, and ASUS as some of the biggest brands in its customer portfolio. For more information, please visit https://tribe.so/.

About Bessemer Venture Partners

Bessemer Venture Partners is the world's most experienced early-stage venture capital firm. With a portfolio of more than 200 companies, Bessemer helps visionary entrepreneurs lay strong foundations to create companies that matter, and supports them through every stage of their growth. The firm has 130 IPOs, including Pinterest, Shopify, Twilio, Yelp, LinkedIn, Skype, LifeLock, PagerDuty, DocuSign, Wix, MindBody, and Fiverr. Bessemer's team of investors and partners are positioned all over the world in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, New York, Boston, Tel Aviv, Bangalore, and Beijing. Follow @BessemerVP and learn more at bvp.com.

About CRV

CRV is a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage enterprise, consumer and biotech startups. Since 1970, the firm has invested in more than 400 startups at their most crucial stages, including DoorDash, Airtable, Patreon, Drift and Iterable. Founders need more than capital to build a great company. It takes a partner who understands the entrepreneurial journey and knows what it takes to win. From founding to IPO and beyond, CRV is there every step of the way. Founders rely on CRV to be trusted, long-term, committed partners, which has helped make CRV into one of the longest-running venture capital firms in the world. Learn more about CRV and the companies shaping the future at https://www.crv.com .

Contact Details

Tribe

Preetish Panda

preetish@tribe.so

Company Website

https://tribe.so/
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - June 29, 2021) - BioMark Diagnostics Inc. (CSE: BUX) (FSE: 20B) (OTC Pink: BMKDF) ("BioMark") is pleased to announce that Health Canada has approved its clinical trial application (CTA) and has granted a Letter of No Objection (NOL) for its application entitled Excretion of Acetylamantadine (AA) by Lung Cancer Patients During a Chemotherapy Regimen With or Without Immunotherapy. Since immunotherapy is now standard of care for lung cancer, BioMark amended the protocol to include study participants receiving immunotherapy and added the Institut Universitaire de Cardiologie et de Pneumologie de Quebec (IUCPQ) as an additional site under the supervision of Dr Philippe Joubert. The amended protocol is intended to test the hypothesis that downregulation of SSAT1 activity as reflected by a reduced plasma concentration of acetylamantadine, will occur earlier than can be detected by other diagnostic testing methods used to determine the efficacy of chemotherapy combined or not to immunotherapy in patients with a diagnosis of stage III lung cancer. This amendment approval from Health Canada will facilitate the study and permit achieving the required sample size in a timely manner. Patient recruitment is anticipated to commence later in the 3rd quarter.

"The assessment of tumor response to therapy is of critical importance as it permits for a prospective end point evaluation and provides a guide to clinicians for making future treatment decisions. We are excited to expand our liquid biopsy platform using SSAT assay for this important clinical indication. This could be used as a simple and effective test to assess response to treatment and to better tailor treatment of the patient as well as reducing side-effects and costs.", says CEO Rashid Bux.

This study on lung cancer patients is a follow-up to a previous study performed to determine the urinary levels of AA in normal healthy volunteers and in patients with a cancer diagnosis. The company would like to thank all investigators involved in this work, Drs. Andrew Maksymiuk, (CancerCare Manitoba), Daniel S. Sitar (College of Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Manitoba), Bram Ramjiawan and Paramjit Tappia, (Asper Clinical Research Institute), Philippe Joubert (IUCPQ - Department of Pathology, Laval University), as well as David Wishart (The Metabolomics Innovation Centre) for their excellent effort in developing and modifying the protocol, submitting all the material to Health Canada and eventually securing the NOL.

Advanced Stage Lung Cancer

For advanced-stage lung cancer, systemic chemotherapy and immunotherapy are the main choices for therapy. The objectives are usually palliative in intent: i.e., to maintain or improve symptoms and quality of life, with the additional benefit of improving the survival duration - though falling short of cure in most cases. Evaluation of response is often challenging as it may require several months to assess regression using conventional techniques of physical examination, radiographic studies and/or conventional laboratory biochemistry studies. Therefore, many patients may endure side-effects of therapy for several months before clinicians are able to determine if therapy will be effective in achieving the intended therapeutic outcomes. BioMark's assay is intended to monitor response faster and more accurately.

About BioMark Diagnostics Inc.

BioMark is developing proprietary, non-invasive, and accurate cancer diagnostic solutions which can help detect, monitor and assess treatment early for hard to detect and treat cancers. The technology can also be used for measuring response to treatment and potentially for serial monitoring for cancer survivors.

Further information about BioMark is available under its profile on the SEDAR website www.sedar.com and on the CSE website https://thecse.com/.

For further information on BioMark, please Contact:

Rashid Ahmed Bux

President & CEO

BioMark Diagnostics Inc.

Tel. 604-370-0779

Email: info@biomarkdiagnostics.com

Forward-Looking Information:

This press release may include forward-looking information within the meaning of Canadian securities legislation, concerning the business of BioMark. Forward-looking information is based on certain key expectations and assumptions made by the management of BioMark. Although BioMark believes that the expectations and assumptions on which such forward-looking information is based are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on the forward-looking information because BioMark can give no assurance that they will prove to be correct. Forward-looking statements contained in this press release are made as of the date of this press release. BioMark disclaims any intent or obligation to update publicly any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or results or otherwise, other than as required by applicable securities laws.

The CSE has not reviewed, approved, or disapproved the content of this press release.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/88922
CanAlaska Signs Staged Option for Manibridge

Government Funding for Magnetic Surveys Flown Over Resting Lake and Halfway Lake Projects

Agreement Reached to Terminate Hunter/Strong Option

Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - June 29, 2021) - CanAlaska Uranium Ltd. (TSXV: CVV) (OTCQB: CVVUF) (FSE: DH7N) ("CanAlaska" or the "Company") is pleased to provide an update on exploration activity at its land holdings within the Thompson Nickel Belt in northern Manitoba. The Company holds 27,372 hectares (68,430 acres) of claims and mineral exploration licences within the northern and southern portions of the Thompson nickel belt, the 5th largest sulphide nickel district in the world. The projects are all located close to road, rail and power infrastructure. Nickel milling facilities are situated in the south at the township of Wabowden, and in the north at the city of Thompson, Manitoba. Sulphide nickel deposits are a key provider of clean nickel for EV batteries. CanAlaska's projects encompass past producing mines, and mineral zones which have historical first-pass exploration success.

At the Manibridge nickel project, which includes a past-producing high-grade nickel mine, and new high-grade discovery holes by CanAlaska, 2 km to the north, a new funding option is now in place. A staged Option Agreement ("Agreement") with D Block Discoveries Inc. (DBD), to earn a 100% interest in the Project is in place. The Agreement will allow DBD to earn a 100% interest in the Project by undertaking work totaling $4,000,000, making cash payments totaling $180,000 and issuing $275,000 worth of common shares plus additional issuances totaling 6,500,000 common shares, all of which is payable in three defined earn-in stages over an aggregate 36 month period. CanAlaska will operate the project for the first two stages of exploration, and will receive customary operator fees. Approved exploration permits have been received for the Manibridge Nickel Project allowing for drilling in Phase 1 of the Agreement.

CanAlaska has also completed the first pass exploration targeting on its two newly acquired Resting Lake and Halfway Lake nickel Projects, see news April 28, 2021 and June 15, 2021, respectively. The new high resolution airborne magnetic surveys completed on the Resting Lake and Halfway Lake projects were completed following recent work permit approvals. The Resting Lake airborne survey received $23,820 of funding from the Manitoba government through the Manitoba Mineral Development Fund (MMDF) program.





Thompson Nickel Belt

To view an enhanced version of this map, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/2864/88960_60aabe0744a98aa6_001full.jpg

The Company is very pleased with the timely permit approvals and new exploration results. This new high resolution geophysical information will provide significantly more refined and high-quality targets for drill testing. Both project areas contain, or are immediately adjacent to, known sulphide nickel mineralization and deposits.

CanAlaska also announces that it has resumed 100% control of the Hunter and Strong nickel projects near the City of Thompson after completing a termination agreement with Fjordland Exploration Inc. (FEX). The exploration permitting process for the Hunter/Strong property has taken longer than expected, an outcome CanAlaska could not have foreseen more than 18 months ago when the Company first started discussion with FEX about an option agreement to explore the project area. Because the timelines have not unfolded as intended, CanAlaska and FEX mutually agreed to terminate the Agreement and CanAlaska has returned 1,000,000 FEX common shares that were issued as part of the Agreement.

The Hunter and Strong properties have high priority drill targets associated with historical mineralized drill holes and well modeled conductor targets along extensions of the geological horizons associated with the nearby Mel nickel deposit. The technical reviews and modeling undertaken under the Fjordland Option has reinforced CanAlaska's view of drill target quality and the Company intends to pursue early drill exploration for these exciting and high priority projects. CanAlaska continues to work with the Manitoba government toward a successful permit process outcome and has now applied for assessment timeline extension due to permitting delays as allowed by the Manitoba government. CanAlaska remains confident exploration permits will be received to allow drill testing of the newly prioritized and high-quality geophysical targets.

CanAlaska CEO, Cory Belyk, comments, "I am very pleased with progress made by the team on the Manitoba nickel projects. We continue to do the right deals at the right time with the right partners to advance these projects toward discovery, and we continue to add high-quality projects with our project generator approach delivering ever-increasing opportunity for our shareholders to realize value through discovery. I look forward to new and refined drill targets coming from our recently completed airborne surveys that will set these new projects up for success. CanAlaska looks forward to forming new joint venture partnerships in the Thompson Nickel Belt."

About CanAlaska Uranium

CanAlaska Uranium Ltd. (TSXV: CVV) (OTCQB: CVVUF) (FSE: DH7N) holds interests in approximately 214,000 hectares (530,000 acres), in Canada's Athabasca Basin - the "Saudi Arabia of Uranium." CanAlaska's strategic holdings have attracted major international mining companies. CanAlaska is currently working with Cameco and Denison at two of the Company's properties in the Eastern Athabasca Basin. CanAlaska is a project generator positioned for discovery success in the world's richest uranium district. The Company also holds properties prospective for nickel, copper, gold and diamonds. For further information, visit www.canalaska.com.

The qualified technical person for this news release is Dr Karl Schimann, P. Geo, CanAlaska director and VP Exploration.

On behalf of the Board of Directors

"Peter Dasler"

Peter Dasler, M.Sc., P.Geo.

President

CanAlaska Uranium Ltd.

Contacts:

Cory Belyk, Executive VP and CEO

Tel: +1.604.688.3211 x 306

Email: cbelyk@canalaska.com

Peter Dasler, President

Tel: +1.604.688.3211 x 138

Email: info@canalaska.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.

Forward-looking information

All statements included in this press release that address activities, events or developments that the Company expects, believes or anticipates will or may occur in the future are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements involve numerous assumptions made by the Company based on its experience, perception of historical trends, current conditions, expected future developments and other factors it believes are appropriate in the circumstances. In addition, these statements involve substantial known and unknown risks and uncertainties that contribute to the possibility that the predictions, forecasts, projections and other forward-looking statements will prove inaccurate, certain of which are beyond the Company's control. Readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Except as required by law, the Company does not intend to revise or update these forward-looking statements after the date hereof or revise them to reflect the occurrence of future unanticipated events.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/88960
FAYETTEVILLE, AR / ACCESSWIRE / June 29, 2021 / The soon-to-be-launched streaming service, MyFlix, will have a major new locomotive added to its arsenal with the announcement that management partner Hannover House, Inc. (OTC PINK:HHSE) will enable MyFlix to debut "Meltdown" on the same day as its USA Theatrical opening. The release model of premium streaming occurring simultaneous with a title's theatrical opening has been successfully implemented by Disney+, HBO-Max and will also be utilized by Apple TV in their 2022 launch of the Martin Scorcese thriller, "Killers of the Flower Moon."

"Meltdown" has been described as "Die Hard in a Nuclear Plant" and tells the story of an army ranger and two facility engineers who must stop a terrorist plan to trigger a meltdown at a nuclear power facility. Talks are in progress with three major stars for formal attachment in the roles of the Army Ranger, one of the engineers and the mastermind-antagonist who has orchestrated the terror attack.

The budget for the film has been increased from $15-million to the revised total of $20-million, which writer-director Eric Parkinson believes will provide sufficient funding to secure the three stars now in negotiation. Hannover House is confident that presale activities to finalize the financing of the movie will be completed in the next few weeks, which will be supplemented with film production incentives from the State of Oklahoma (where at least 85% of the film is planned to be shot).

"This bold move shows our commitment not only to front-line productions, but also to supporting the MyFlix service as a major platform for original programming," said Parkinson, CEO of Hannover House, Inc. "It's encouraging and exciting to have a commercial project that is strong-enough to attract three major stars, as this enhanced package has proven to be the catalyst in obtaining the international presale financing. Seasoned producers know that a great concept with major stars puts the film into the rarefied air of locomotive titles that distributors worldwide have been actively seeking."

Hannover House plans to commence principal photography on "Meltdown" in March, 2022 with a theatrical release and simultaneous MyFlix premiere in January 2023. The film requires over six months of pre-production time as a nuclear control room replica set must be constructed for filming many of the film's key action scenes.

The MyFlix service will launch later this summer with at least ten premiere titles, one-hundred exclusives and a total access selection of nearly fifteen-thousand titles from forty-three studio partners, film libraries and program suppliers. MyFlix hopes to brand itself as the one-stop digital superstore for consumers wanting to see more than just a handful of top theatrical hits or originals. The site is targeting high-consumption film aficionados as well as genre' specialty groups including independent film, kids, animation, science fiction, horror, comedy, martial arts and international cinema. The site also plans to add an educational portal and an interactive gaming option after the initial launch.

In support of MyFlix and Meltdown, Hannover House will be participating in the Cannes Film Festival in France, which is being held from July 6 - 16. The company will also be holding two press events for original family feature film, "Wildfire."

"Our current shareholders know that we have been developing the 'Meltdown" project for several years. But it has only been in the past few weeks that a financing structure has developed, inspired in large part by the attachment of a major star in the Army Ranger role," said Parkinson. "This leading actor has inspired forward progress on the casting of the other two principal leads, and the combined production package has rocketed into an exciting and attractive presale commodity. It's going to cost a lot more for our three principal stars than originally budgeted, but their participation is what triggers the presales, so this becomes a self-funding venture," he concluded.

As the production company of record for "Meltdown," Hannover House will be paid an upfront production fee for operations and overhead, as well as benefit from the non-pledged distribution revenues and other income benefits as a MyFlix premiere title.

"'Meltdown' is a true locomotive title that will drive consumer interest and elevate the MyFlix venture into a full-service platform. Hannover House has survived many marketplace changes over the past 28-years, and we feel that an incredibly commercial feature like 'Meltdown' combined with the MyFlix streaming service will deliver the brass ring of success to the company and to our shareholders," Parkinson concluded.

Announcement of the major star casting for "Meltdown" will occur later this year, with set construction commencing in October and principal photography launching in March, 2022.

Hannover House stock is traded on the OTC Markets under ticker symbol HHSE. The average share price for the past month has been approximately $.016 per share, which several OTC Markets stock analysts have declared to be less than 10% of their expected value of shares once the MyFlix site is launched.

FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT: Eric Parkinson, Eric@HannoverHouse.com / 818-481-5277

SOURCE: Hannover House, Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/653506/Hannover-House-Bumps-Up-Meltdown-Budget-to-20-MM-and-Tags-New-MyFlix-Site-as-USA-Premiere-Partner
MIAMI, FL / ACCESSWIRE / June 29, 2021 / Kisses from Italy Inc. (OTCQB:KITL), a publicly listed U.S. based company, restaurant chain operator, franchisor, and product distributor (the 'Company'), is pleased to announce that the Company's first franchise in Canada is expected to open by the end of September of 2021. Montreal, Canada will be the home of the new restaurant location and also marks the first location part of the Canadian multi-unit expansion deal, signed between Demasar Management and Kisses From Italy, which will see the development of 100 restaurants across the country. Demasar Management took on the role of becoming the lead operator of Kisses From Italy franchises in Canada when the deal was signed in June of 2020.

Located in the Montreal borough of Ahuntsic-Cartierville, the new location, having address at 1418 Fleury Street east, will bear the name of the Kisses From Italy brand and will be offering the full Kisses From Italy's menu that has been enjoyed by the Company's customers in Florida, Italy and California. Situated in a highly sought out commercial and trafficked area with a large residentially concentrated neighborhood and great demographics near the intersection of Fleury Street east and Christope-Colombe Ave, "we landed on a great spot in a great neighborhood, which we are excited to be part of and we believe the brand will do well in serving the local community," stated Demasar Management, Managing Director, Denis Senencal. 'It is a real privilege to be part of Kisses From Italy and opening the first franchise in Canada. Given the consumer demand for high-quality and affordable product offerings, I am confident the Kisses From Italy menu will do well. I am grateful to be given the opportunity to open a Kisses From Italy in Montreal, Quebec. This is a wonderful opportunity to represent the group and develop other franchisees in the Great White North!" added Senecal.

Claudio Ferri, co-CEO, CIO and co-founder of Kisses from Italy, noted "a huge thank you goes out to Oberfeld Snowcap, one of Canada's largest and leading retail advisory firms, that worked diligently in presenting us a few spots and helping our team find an ideal location for the first Kisses From Italy in Canada. Oberfeld Snowcap played a big role in supporting the Kisses From Italy team in finding, negotiating and overseeing everything necessary to secure this location." Ferri added, "now with the opening of the location in Montreal, as well as the newly formed relationship with franchise development giant Fransmart, for our international expansion plans, we believe the Kisses From Italy story will only continue to get better and better as our expected growth will begin to accelerate."

Michele Di Turi, President, co-CEO and co-founder of Kisses from Italy commented, "It has been an exciting few months for the Company with our retail product launch, at the end of 2020, of our gluten-free dry pasta, gnocchi and ready to be served gluten-free authentic Italian tomato sauce products, of which we are currently nearing the 30 store mark across Quebec and Ontario, the signing of the development agreement with Fransmart, the opening of our first operating Franchise in Chino, California and now securing a new location for Canada so that the work can begin on the development and remodeling of the new space, in order to bring the newest Kisses From Italy location to life!"

About Kisses from Italy, Inc.

Kisses from Italy Inc. is a U.S.-based restaurant chain operator, franchisor and product distributor with locations in North America and Europe. The Company offers a quick-service menu and a unique take on traditional Italian delicacies with an All-American flair. Kisses from Italy offerings include sandwiches, salads, Italian roasted coffee, coffee-related beverage and an array of other products. In November of 2020, Kisses From Italy launched its retail branded products for distribution stores across Canada. Currently, our products are being offered in grocery stores and retail food stores.

The Company currently operates three corporate-owned stores. It successfully commenced operations in May 2015 with the opening of its flagship location in Ft. Lauderdale at 3146 NE 9th St. This was followed by three additional sites across the greater Ft. Lauderdale/Pompano Beach area. The Company recently opened its inaugural European location in Ceglie del Campo, Bari, Italy in October of 2019. In September of 2019, Kisses from Italy Inc. was given the approval by FINRA to trade its common stock and was approved for up-listing by the OTC Markets Group to the OTCQB in mid-October 2019 under the ticker symbol KITL.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release may contain forward-looking statements, which are based on current expectations, forecasts, and assumptions that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual outcomes and results to differ materially from those anticipated or expected. These risks and uncertainties are further defined in filings and reports by the Company with the 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. Reference is hereby made to cautionary statements set forth in the Company's most recent SEC filings which are available at www.sec.gov as well as the Company's website at www.kissesfromitaly.com. The Company undertakes no obligation to update or revise forward-looking statements to reflect changed assumptions, the occurrence of unanticipated events, or changes to future operating results.

For more information, please visit www.kissesfromitaly.com

Contact Information:

Kisses from Italy Inc.

305-423-7129

info@kissesfromitaly.com

SOURCE: Kisses from Italy Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/653509/Kisses-From-Italy-Begins-Canadian-Franchise-Expansion-Plan-With-A-Commitment-for-the-First-Location
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - June 29, 2021) - Cross River Ventures Corp. (CSE: CRVC) (FSE: C6R) (OTC Pink: CSRVF) (the "Company") is pleased to announce the expansion of its McVicar Gold Project through the acquisition of inlier claims and new claim staking (the "Claims") for a total addition of 340 hectares in the immediate vicinity of the high priority Altered Zone high-grade gold target. Additionally, drill permits for the property have been issued. The McVicar Project is located in the Patricia Mining Division, approximately 150 km east of Red Lake, and 80 km west of Pickle Lake, in the Superior Province, northwest Ontario, Canada.

Altered Zone Expansion

Two mineral Claims were acquired from an arms-length vendor in consideration for the issuance of 200,000 common shares (the "Consideration Shares"). The Consideration Shares are subject to an escrow arrangement from which one-half of the Consideration Shares will be released four-months-and-one-day following closing, and a further one-quarter after six and twelve months following closing. The Company has also granted to the vendor a two-percent royalty on returns from the commercial production of minerals from the Claims. One-half of the royalty may be re-purchased by the Company at any time for a cash payment of $1,000,000.

No finders' fees or commissions were paid in connection with completion of the acquisition of the Claims.

The newly acquired inlier claims overlie the surface projection of the highly prospective Altered Zone target, where historic drilling intercepted 6.46 grams-per-tonne ("g/t") gold ("Au") over 10.09m (including 33 g/t Au over 1.86m) (drillhole ML-86-27; BHP-Utah Mines Ltd.), 5.7 g/t Au over 7.71m (drillhole ML-03-01; Continuum Resources Ltd.), amongst other high-grade results. Trenching of the shear zone approximately 200m north of the claims returned 6.89 g/t Au over 1.55m (trench AZ-03-05; Continuum Resources Ltd.). Ongoing geologic modelling of the historic drillhole and trench data suggests that the surface projection of the shear zone passes directly through these claims. This acquisition strengthens Cross River's now contiguous land position over the surface projection of the Altered Zone structure, allowing the Company to fully leverage the exploration potential of this high priority, gold endowed drill target.

In addition, the Company staked 15 mineral claims to cover the down-dip extension of the Altered Zone structure as projected by 3D geologic modelling. Based on historic data and new 3-dimensional interpretations, Cross River believes there is excellent potential for depth continuity of the mineralization encountered on surface and in drillholes. This zone has yet to be drill tested below 200m depth.







Figure 1: Newly acquired and staked claims over the Altered Zone surface and depth projection.



To view an enhanced version of Figure 1, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/7276/88956_img1.png

McVicar Permit Issuance

The Company is pleased to announce that Early Exploration Permits for the McVicar property have now been issued. These permits will allow Cross River to advance the property through GeoProbe bedrock interface drill sampling and diamond drilling in the Altered and North Flexure Zone and surrounding area, the Chellow Vein and surrounding area, and along the Bear Head Fault zone.

"We are making excellent progress in the advancement of McVicar," said Alex Klenman, CEO. "We're on schedule, on budget and are heading towards phase one drilling. This is a district scale project, with favourable geological characteristics and numerous historical gold occurrences. Drilling McVicar is a priority for us. The technical team is doing fantastic work getting us there and we're pleased to see the continued progression of our flagship project," continued Mr. Klenman.

Targeted field prospecting and sampling is scheduled to commence on the Property in early July, followed by GeoProbe sampling (see news release dated April 20, 2021) in July and August. Diamond drilling of targets will be contingent upon results of these Phase 1 programs.





Figure 2: ~12,000 hectare McVicar Gold Project, NW Ontario

To view an enhanced version of Figure 2, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/7276/88956_4c87b319f486ab78_004full.jpg

About the McVicar Project

Cross River's McVicar Gold Project is a district-scale (~12,000 hectares) gold exploration project that covers the main structural elements of the entire Lang Lake greenstone belt located in the Patricia Mining Division, approximately 150 km east of Red Lake, and 80 km west of Pickle Lake, in NW Ontario, Canada.

The McVicar project covers all the major fertile structural and geologic elements of the belt, which is bound to the south by the major NW trending Bear Head Fault zone (within which Golden Patricia is situated).

Historic drilling at McVicar Lake in the Altered and North Flexure Zones include:

6.46 grams-per-tonne ("g/t") gold ("Au") over 10.09m (including 33 g/t over 1.86m)

5.5 g/t Au over 3.6m

11.72 g/t Au over 1.52m

5.0 g/t Au over 2.74m

9.3 g/t Au over 2.02m, among others (Wildcat 2011)

The McVicar Lake claims also host the Chellow Vein zone, which is a narrow quartz vein that consists of smoky grey to white quartz mineralized with minor pyrite and visible gold. The vein system yielded high grade gold at surface. In the early 1990's, BHP Minerals Canada cut a series of 34 channel samples at approximately two meter intervals along the length of the vein exposed in trenches. The average value of the 34 samples was 28.8 g/t Au. Three samples (#1078, #1090, #1096) returned assays of:

578.1 g/t Au,

533.5 g/t Au, and

412.5 g/t Au, respectively

Limited drill testing below the known showings in the early 1990's didn't yield significant gold assay values; however, the Cross River technical team believe the Chellow Vein is hosted in a much broader (1-2km wide) high-strain or deformation zone characterized by a series of parallel-trending shears that have not been systematically tested.

^ Grab samples are selective by nature and may not represent the true grade or style of mineralization across the property.

The technical content disclosed in this press release was reviewed and approved by Dr. Rob Carpenter, P.Geo., Ph.D., a Qualified Person as defined under National Instrument 43-101. Historical assay results contained in this press release were not verified by the Company, however, the historical reports referenced were authored by experienced geoscientists and copies of laboratory assay sheets were commonly inserted in the reports.

About the Company

Cross River Ventures Corp. is a gold exploration company focused on the development of top tier exploration properties in premier mining districts. The Company controls a multiple project portfolio (over 28,000 hectares) in NW Ontario, Canada, with highly prospective ground in and among prolific, gold bearing greenstone belts. Cross River's common shares trade under the symbol "CRVC" on the CSE.

On behalf of the Board of Directors of

CROSS RIVER VENTURES CORP.

Alex Klenman

CEO

604-227-6610

aklenman@crossriverventures.com

www.crossriverventures.com

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.

This news release may contain forward-looking statements. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially because of factors discussed in the management discussion and analysis section of our interim and most recent annual financial statement or other reports and filings with the Canadian Securities Exchange and applicable Canadian securities regulations. We do not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required by applicable laws.

References

* Golden Patricia Mine - Harron, G.A.2009, Technical Report on Three Gold Exploration Properties Pickle Lake Area, Ontario, Canada. G.A. Harron, P.Eng., G.A. Harron & Associates Inc. Smyk, M., Hollings, P. and Pettigrew, N., 2015. Geology and Mineral Deposits of The Pickle Lake Greenstone Belt. Institute on Lake Superior Geology, May 20-24, 2015 Field Trip Guidebook and Puumala, M.A. 2009. Mineral Occurrences of the Central and Eastern Uchi Domain. Ontario Geological Survey, Open File Report 6228.

Kyle H, 2012. Geological Report on the McVicar Lake Project - Field Mapping Summer 2011: Wildcat Exploration Ltd. http://www.geologyontario.mndm.gov.on.ca/mndmfiles/afri/data/records/20000007971.html

Thomas R, N. 1988. McVicar Lake Project - Report on Diamond Drilling Work: BHP-Utah Mines Ltd. http://www.geologyontario.mndm.gov.on.ca/mndmfiles/afri/data/imaging/52O11SE0080/52O11SE0080.pdf

McKay D.B, 2004. Report on the 2003 Overburden Stripping, Geologic Mapping and Sampling Program conducted on the McVicar Lake Property: Continuum Resources Ltd and Prospector Consolidated Resources Inc.

www.geologyontario.mndm.gov.on.ca/mndmfiles/afri/data/imaging/52O11SW2003/52O11SW2003.pdf

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/88956
Upon Completion Phase 1 is Projected to Generate $27M USD Gross Sales Annually

Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - June 29, 2021) - TransCanna Holdings Inc. (CSE: TCAN) (FSE: TH8) (the "Company") is pleased to announce that the first phase of construction at the Company's new Daly facility is just two weeks from completion, with plants in its first cultivation room already underway.

To date, the Company has completed the build-out of a 4,481 square foot cultivation room containing 112 lights, a general distribution area, and a processing room. Initial planting was completed in the first of five cultivation rooms in May. The remaining four cultivation rooms will be operational on or about July 14, with each room planned to harvest at least once this fiscal year.

"This is our most critical phase as it will empower us towards our goal to become operationally cash-flow positive within the year," said Bob Blink, TransCanna CEO.

In total, the five rooms will produce approximately 4,800 lbs of harvest annually, generating a potential of over $15M USD in gross sales each year. The Company is confident that the incremental cultivation capacity of these rooms can create cash-flow positive operating results in the current fiscal year.

Phase 1 construction also includes industrial scale distribution and processing build-outs that will enable TransCanna to provide processing, packaging, storage, distribution and transporting services to third-party growers. The Company intends to generate additional revenue streams of over $1M USD per month from services to third-party farms.

Facilities completed in Daly Phase 1 construction include 8,000 square feet of processing space for drying, curing and semi-automated trimming; a 6,000 square foot packaging area with space for automated scaling, pouching, and sealing activities; 11,000 square feet of climate controlled storage space for bulk and retail-ready finished goods; and 7,000 square feet of secure, enclosed transportation vehicle loading bay area.

The Company reasonably expects the combined cultivation, processing, packaging and distribution activities made possible by Phase 1 construction to potentially generate $27M USD annually.

Throughout Phase 1, the Company continued to maximize output at its Jerusalem facility, which generated $5.3M USD in revenue from its cultivation, distribution and nursery activities in 2020. TransCanna fully intends to maintain all business activities at Jerusalem and has been using the facility for training key team members in preparation for the roll-out at Daly.

About TransCanna

TransCanna Holdings Inc. is a California-based, Canadian-listed company building cannabis-focused brands for the California lifestyle, through its wholly-owned California subsidiaries.

TransCanna's wholly owned subsidiary Lyfted Farms is California's authentic cannabis brand whose pioneering spirit has been continuously providing the finest cannabis flower genetics and cultivation methods since 1984. The Lyfted Farms brand of exclusive cannabis flower is sold at premium retailers throughout the state. With its new cultivation facility in Modesto, California, the company is now poised to become one of the largest and most efficient vertically integrated cannabis companies in the California market.

For updated information with respect to our company, please see our filings on SEDAR at www.sedar.com and on the CSE at www.thecse.com, or visit the Company's website at www.transcanna.com. To contact the Company, please email info@transcanna.com.

On behalf of the Board of Directors

Bob Blink, CEO

Corporate Communications:

info@transcanna.com

604-200-8853

FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION:

Certain information in this release may contain forward-looking statements, such as statements regarding financial statement filing timelines, future expansions and cost savings and plans regarding production increases and financings. This information is based on current expectations and assumptions, including assumptions concerning the completion of the expansion of the Daly Facility, government approval of pro-cannabis policies, greater access to financial services and increased cultivation capacity, that are subject to significant risks and uncertainties that are difficult to predict. Actual results might differ materially from results suggested in any forward-looking statements. Risks that could cause results to differ from those stated in the forward-looking statements in this release include unexpected increases in operating costs, a continued strain on farmers due to fires and the Coronavirus pandemic and competition from other retailers. All forward-looking statements, including any financial outlook or future-oriented financial information, contained in this release are made as of the date of this release and are included for the purpose of providing information about management's current expectations and plans relating to the future. The Company assumes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements, or to update the reasons why actual results could differ from those reflected in the forward-looking statements unless and until required by securities laws applicable to the Company. Additional information identifying risks and uncertainties is contained in the Company's filings with the Canadian securities regulators, which filings are available at www.sedar.com.

Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange ("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.

NOT FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES OR FOR DISTRIBUTION TO U.S. NEWSWIRE SERVICES AND DOES NOT CONSTITUTE AN OFFER OF THE SECURITIES DESCRIBED HEREIN

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/88962
National program promotes access for people with significant hearing and vision loss

WATERTOWN, MA / ACCESSWIRE / June 29, 2021 / iCanConnect is on a mission to increase independence for individuals with significant hearing and vision loss. Through iCanConnect, qualified individuals receive the distance communication equipment and training they need to do things like send and receive emails, text messages, make phone calls, participate in social media, and manage life activities and services that are increasingly conducted online.

Also known as the National Deaf-Blind Equipment Distribution Program, iCanConnect has been helping individuals with combined hearing and vision loss stay connected with their friends, family, community, and the world since it was established by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 2012. Program participants agree the free equipment and training they've received through iCanConnect has been life-changing.

Ernest Gallman was able to meet his grandson when he was born early in the COVID-19 pandemic thanks to the equipment and training he received through iCanConnect. The 69-year-old Columbia, South Carolina man began losing his eyesight at age ten and experienced progressive hearing loss over the years leaving him feeling isolated. After applying and being accepted into the program, Ernest's distance communication needs were assessed by his local iCanConnect representative and he received a smartphone, wireless headset, and desktop computer. Using this equipment, he was able to meet his grandson virtually via a video chat with his daughter soon after he was born.

"The equipment and training I received through iCanConnect really changed my life," said Ernest. "It made me more independent, and I hope anyone struggling with independence and isolation won't be afraid to reach out and get more information about the program. With everything that's going on, I can stay independent and stay connected with my family."

Since its inception, iCanConnect has been helping participants across the United States and its territories increase independence and keep in touch with family, friends and their communities. From reconnecting with old school friends after decades apart, to playing music and games with family over video chat, to continuing therapy appointments virtually during the pandemic, iCanConnect helps meet each participant's goals to stay connected.

For more information about iCanConnect, or to see if you or someone you know qualifies for the program, visit www.iCanConnect.org . Find your local contact to apply.

About iCanConnect

iCanConnect is a national program with local contacts in all 50 states, District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands. Established by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 2012, iCanConnect provides qualified individuals who have both significant vision and hearing loss with free distance communication equipment and training to help increase access to modern communications. To learn more about iCanConnect, visit www.iCanConnect.org .

Media Contact:

Paula Slotkin, Slotkin Communications

paula@slotkincommunications.com

781-248-9696

SOURCE: iCanConnect

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/653355/DeafBlind-Awareness-Week-Sheds-Light-on-iCanConnects-Mission-to-Increase-Independence
Tracking the most live music across UK cities

Hearby has launched its AI-driven Gig Guide on IQ Magazine,providing the most comprehensive single source of live music information ever available across UK cities.

IQ Magazine is a London-based news organization dedicated to reporting on the international state of the live music industry, holding their annual International Live Music Conference (ILMC), the largest gathering of live music professionals in the world.

"We are ecstatic to show off our new partnership with IQ Magazine," says Hearby co-founder Gary Halliwell. "Our goal is to raise awareness for live music and the venues where music happens, through distribution partners and brands who care about attracting and super-serving live music-loving audiences."

The Gig Guide is the chief vehicle for Hearby's suite of live music discovery tools, including interactive maps and carousels of live show listings in the UK and North America. These widgets not only raise audience awareness of local grassroots acts and venues around the user as live music returns, but also provide fun new pathways to discovering and browsing the amazing choices of local live music shows available in our communities.

"Hearby's Gig Guide provides information on the diverse local live music scenes happening in our cities," said Chris Prosser, publisher of IQ's monthly magazine. "Providing access to information on these shows has a material impact on artists and venues that have struggled this past year. Local live music is critically important as the bedrock of the UK's live music industry," he added.

Hearby takes an anthropological approach, in concert with AI, to gathering the most comprehensive long-tail presentation of shows happening around the user from arenas to intimate local venues, bars, and restaurants where music is performed. This depth of choice makes it fun to discover and share show information with friends, and capitalize on the transmissivity and connection of the passionate networks of music audiences, artists, venues, and music mavens.

"Live music has long been dominated by top-down curation or limited coverage of events from ticketing vendors focused on the transaction of their inventory, which is only 30-40% of available shows," said Ian Condry, Hearby co-founder and MIT professor of Anthropology who studies how social movements like music work from the ground up by engaging passionate supporters. "Our aim is to help you find a show to see with friends and maybe even help you find music you didn't know you liked."

IQ Magazine is the second high-profile industry distribution announced by Hearby in recent weeks. Hearby's partnership with Music Venue Trust (MVT) announced in May provides all the show information going on across the 900 MVT member grassroots music venues across the UK.

About Hearby: Hearby is a live music discovery platform created by Area4 Labs Inc. that combines Big Data and Anthropology to provide fun new pathways for music lovers to find shows from the most comprehensive collection of local music listings available. We use AI, data cleaning and social matching to yield data on 3x more shows across 100+ cities in North America and the UK. We aim to get more people to more shows.

Check out the Hearby Gig Guides at both IQ Magazine and Music Venue Trust

Connect with us

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About IQ Magazine: IQ is the leading global news platform for the live music business. IQ's news, features, information and analysis is read by 100,000 professionals worldwide each month. IQ publishes a regular magazine, several annual reports, and a daily news digest, IQ Index. The IQ family also includes ILMC, the live music industry's top international conference event, and the International Festival Forum (IFF).

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005207/en/

Contacts:

Jason Daniel Levy

jason.levy@area4labs.com
Andersen Global enters Norway through a Collaboration Agreement with law firm Brkhus, adding breadth to its footprint in Northern Europe as the organization continues its expansion in key markets throughout the region.

Led by Managing Partner Frank C. Aase, Brkhus is a full-service law firm based in Oslo. Operating with 27 Partners and over 70 professionals, the firm's capabilities include corporate, commercial, M&A, banking and finance, tax advisory, structuring and compliance, litigation, real estate, energy, construction, private client services, employment law, technology, e-commerce and intellectual property.

"Through transparency and uncompromisingly high professional standards, we look to form long-lasting relationships that create an added value for our clients," Frank said. "A collaboration agreement with Andersen Global fits well with our international strategy and perfectly complements our existing international legal and tax liaisons. Arthur Andersen alumnus and tax Partner Nils Eriksen will assist us as we collaborate with the member firms and collaborating firms of Andersen Global. Our firm's cultural synergy with the organization reinforces our vision and positions us to seamlessly deliver best-in-class and innovative solutions globally."

"Brkhus is highly regarded for their experience, expertise and ability to provide clients with independent, integrated solutions," said Andersen Global Chairman and Andersen CEO Mark Vorsatz. "Norway is a very important market in our expansion strategy, and our inimitable chemistry with Nils, Frank and their team provides an outstanding complement to our existing platform in the region."

Andersen Global is an international association of legally separate, independent member firms comprised of tax and legal professionals around the world. Established in 2013 by U.S. member firm Andersen Tax LLC, Andersen Global now has more than 7,000 professionals worldwide and a presence in over 277 locations through its member firms and collaborating firms.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005411/en/

Contacts:

Megan Tsuei

Andersen Global

415-764-2700
Ritesh Ramesh is Named Chief Technology Officer of the Year for IT Software Organizations

WELLESLEY, MA / ACCESSWIRE / June 29, 2021 / Hayes, makers of the industry's leading integrated auditing, billing compliance and revenue integrity platform for the nation's premier healthcare organizations, announced today that CTO Ritesh Ramesh was recognized by the Globee Awards as Chief Technology Officer of the Year in the 16th Annual 2021 IT World Awards. Ramesh, who took top honors in the IT Software category, was recognized for his work leveraging augmented intelligence (AI) to transform both the company and its revenue integrity platform.

Ramesh was awarded the Gold Globee for the AI-driven success of his long-term strategy to solidify Hayes' position as a leading technology company focused on supporting the nation's premier healthcare organizations as they move toward revenue integrity. A core component of his strategy was the integration of an augmented intelligence framework into MDaudit Enterprise, making it an even more powerful and agile enterprise-class platform.

"Ritesh's vision to incorporate innovative technologies into the MDaudit platform has not only enhanced Hayes' standing as a technology leader but is also improving the financial health of leading healthcare organizations," said Hayes CEO Peter Butler. "Ritesh has provided a timely and sound framework upon which they can build a solid revenue integrity strategy to survive today's fluid healthcare environment, and the Gold Globee recognition is well deserved."

"It is an honor to have our collective efforts recognized by Globee's IT World. I share this success with my entire team, without whom the transformation of MDaudit would not have been possible. The Hayes team showed the utmost resilience and focus during execution of these enhancements at a time when they were most needed," said Ramesh. "Not only does the integration of AI into the platform help healthcare organizations overcome pandemic-associated short- and long-term revenue shortfalls, but it helps ensure revenue integrity by enabling a deep dive into data sets to reveal insights and opportunities within the revenue cycle."

He adds: "Any transformation is a continuous process, and we will strive to ensure MDaudit will evolve with emerging market needs."

The IT World Awards are open to all Information Technology and Cyber Security organizations and their end users worldwide. More than 65 judges from around the world representing a wide spectrum of industry experts participated in the judging process to determine the 2021 winners.

Watch this informative video to learn more about the market forces that are reshaping the revenue integrity landscape and how MDaudit Enterprise is addressing them.

Follow Hayes via Twitter and LinkedIn.

About the Globee Awards

Globee Awards are conferred in 11 programs and competition: the CEO World Awards, the Consumer World Awards, The Customer Sales & Service World Awards, the Globee International Best in Business Awards, the Golden Bridge Awards, the Cyber Security Global Excellence Awards and Security World Awards, the IT World Awards, One Planet American Best in Business Awards, the Globee Employer Excellence Awards, the Globee Corporate Communications & Marketing World Awards, and the Women World Awards. Honoring organizations of all types and sizes and the people behind their success, the Globee Awards recognize outstanding achievements and performances in businesses worldwide. Learn more about the Globee Awards at https://globeeawards.com.

About Hayes and MDaudi

Hayes is a leading healthcare technology provider that partners with the nation's premier healthcare organizations to improve revenue, mitigate risk and reduce operating costs to succeed in an evolving healthcare landscape. MDaudit Enterprise, our flagship revenue integrity SaaS platform, enables organizations to reduce compliance risk, improve efficiency and retain more of their revenue stream by providing auditing workflow automation, risk monitoring, and built-in analytics and benchmarking capabilities - all in a single, integrated cloud-based platform. To learn more visit www.hayesmanagement.com.

HAYES MEDIA CONTACT:

Christina Cussimanio | Vice President, Marketing and Growth | Hayes 617-559-0404 | ccussimanio@hayesmanagement.com

SOURCE: Hayes

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/653434/Hayes-CTO-Wins-Gold-in-2021-IT-World-AwardsR-for-Work-Transforming-MDaudit-Enterprise-Platform
PARIS, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Ocean Agency together with UNESCO's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, Adobe, HP Inc. and other key partners announced the official launch of the Ocean Decade Exhibition - a global exhibition of creativity that aims to raise awareness of the importance of the ocean and inspire greater ocean knowledge and conservation during the pivotal UN Ocean Decade for Sustainable Development 2021-2030 (the Ocean Decade).

The exhibition kicked off this month in the center of Paris at UNESCO headquarters. Over the course of the next months, it will then travel to other UN locations, beginning with UN Headquarters in Geneva, and major conferences and events. The artworks are also being made freely available at www.theoceanagency.org/exhibition so anyone can create their own exhibitions. Micro-exhibitions are already being planned and displayed in venues ranging from schools in Paris, to universities and major aquariums across the globe.

The exhibition program, endorsed as an official activity of the Ocean Decade, was the brainchild of The Ocean Agency - the nonprofit, famous for taking Google Street View underwater and revealing the impacts of climate change on the ocean in the award-winning Netflix Original Documentary, Chasing Coral.

Content for the ongoing exhibition is being provided by the global creative community, especially young artists and designers, mobilized through a series of creative challenges in partnership with Adobe and other creative partners. A new campaign CreateWaves was launched this week by Adobe and The Ocean Agency, allowing anyone to be part of Ocean Decade Exhibition and have their work help raise awareness and inspire action.

The exhibition contributes to a busy launch year for the Ocean Decade which was officially launched on 1 January 2021. The Ocean Decade is a UN initiative designed to raise awareness and address the chronic lack of connectivity between ocean knowledge and smart, innovative solutions to sustainable development.

HP is proud to be the printing partner for the exhibition, utilizing water-based inks with HP Latex printers designed specifically with the environment in mind. HP aspires to be the world's most sustainable and just technology company and, among other initiatives, has been utilizing ocean-bound plastic in products and ink cartridges. Other partners involved in the exhibition include D&AD, a nonprofit supporting the design industry, and the PangeaSeed Foundation, working with artists to create change through street art.

Contact: Richard Vevers, richard@theoceanagency.org

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1552922/Ocean_20Decade_20Exhibition.jpg

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1552921/TheOceanAgency_Logo.jpg
Phoenix, Arizona--(Newsfile Corp. - June 29, 2021) - The Stock Day Podcast welcomed Sable Resources LTD. (OTCQB: SBLRF) ("the Company"), a well-funded junior grassroots explorer focused on the discovery of new precious metal projects through systematic exploration in endowed terranes located in favorable, established mining jurisdictions. CEO of the Company, Dr. Ruben Padilla, joined Stock Day host Everett Jolly.

"We are an exploration company and our goal is to deliver value through mineral discovery," said Dr. Padilla to start the interview. "Our competitive advantage is the way that we do things," he shared. "We look for deposits with a size and grade that can create value to the company," said Dr. Padilla. "We are very careful with the projects that we pick," he continued. "Another thing is very important to us is to be in a jurisdiction where we can advance our projects to drilling fast and eventually build a mine," he explained. "We also have an efficient and small team, which is important in mineral exploration."

Dr. Padilla then elaborated on the Company's long list of projects within their portfolio, which provides them with flexibility and opportunity. "Most importantly, it is important to be well financed," said Dr. Padilla. "Our advantage is in having those fundamentals well covered."

Jolly then asked about the results of the Company's drill results for their El Fierro project. Dr. Padilla explained that the Company began the project in October of last year and commenced drilling by February of 2021. "We have completed 3,300 meters of drilling in 25 holes," said Dr. Padilla. "We now have over eight kilometers of veins with high-grade results," he added. "The first round of drilling was very successful. We were able to prove the continuity of mineralization in the known old veins and to discover various new veins, El Fierro has a district scale potential."

The conversation then turned to the Company's La Poncha and Don Julio projects located in San Juan, Argentina. Dr. Padilla elaborated on the potential and size of these projects, and shared that the Company is preparing to drill at the La Poncha Project in two gold - copper targets. "These are the kinds of targets that can completely change the face of the company; they are big targets," he shared. "South of that we have our Don Julio project which is under an earn-in agreement with one of the largest base metal companies (South32). At Don Julio we have at least three targets moving to the drilling stage, which are large gold and copper targets," he explained. "We will have multiple projects to drill next year."

"What are your financial positions for these drill plans?" asked Jolly. "Our plan is to spend between eight and ten million dollars of our money to do all of the work that we need to do, and will drill the Don Julio targets with the cash coming from South32," shared Dr. Padilla, adding that this will still leave the Company with about $20 million. "We have all of the money that we need to do the right exploration work."

To close the interview, Dr. Padilla elaborated on the potential of the Company as they continue to advance their extensive portfolio of projects, while still remaining undervalued.

To hear Dr. Ruben Padilla's entire interview, follow the link to the podcast here: https://audioboom.com/posts/7895560-sable-resources-ltd-discusses-upcoming-drill-program-and-12-5-million-private-placement-with-th

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 SABLE RESOURCES LTD.

Sable is a well-funded junior grassroots explorer focused on the discovery of new precious metal projects through systematic exploration in endowed terranes located in favorable, established mining jurisdictions. Sable's main focus is developing its large portfolio of new greenfields projects to resource level. Sable is actively exploring the San Juan Regional Program (128,992 ha) incorporating the Don Julio, El Fierro, La Poncha, and Los Pumas Projects in San Juan Province, Argentina; and the Mexico Regional Program (1.16Mha in application, 39,000ha titled) incorporating the Vinata and El Escarpe projects.

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.

CAUTION REGARDING FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS

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", "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 Sable's current belief or assumptions as to the outcome and timing of such future events. Actual future results may differ materially. Although such statements are based on reasonable assumptions of Sable's management, there can be no assurance that any conclusions or forecasts will prove to be accurate. In particular, this release contains forward-looking information relating to, among other things, the receipt of regulatory approvals, the use of proceeds from the Offering and the listing of the Common Shares on the TSX Venture Exchange.

While Sable considers these assumptions to be reasonable based on information currently available, they may prove to be incorrect. Forward looking information involves known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking information. Such factors include risks inherent in the exploration and development of mineral deposits, including risks relating to changes in project parameters as plans continue to be redefined, risks relating to variations in grade or recovery rates, risks relating to changes in mineral prices and the worldwide demand for and supply of minerals, risks related to increased competition and current global financial conditions and the COVID-19 pandemic, access and supply risks, reliance on key personnel, operational risks, and regulatory risks, including risks relating to the acquisition of the necessary licenses and permits, financing, capitalization and liquidity risks.

The forward-looking information contained in this release is made as of the date hereof, and Sable is not obligated to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by applicable securities laws. Because of the risks, uncertainties and assumptions contained herein, investors should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. The foregoing statements expressly qualify any forward-looking information contained herein.

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/89007
WESTON (dpa-AFX) - Enel X, the advanced energy services arm of Italian electricity and gas company Enel S.P.A (ENLAY.PK, EN) , announced Tuesday it is working with biotechnology company Biogen Inc. (BIIB) to electrify its employee commercial fleet. As a member of the Climate Group's EV100, a global initiative of companies accelerating the global transition to electric vehicles (EVs), Biogen is committed to transitioning its global fleet of over 1,000 vehicles to EVs by 2025. Electrifying Biogen's fleet of over 1,000 electric vehicles around the world will represent emissions reductions of at least 7,000 pounds CO2 per EV per year. This collaboration with Enel X advances on Biogen's Healthy Climate, Healthy Lives initiative to go fossil fuel free by 2040 and improve public health by advancing global targets for climate change and air pollution reduction. After achieving carbon neutrality in 2014, Biogen was the first Fortune 500 company to commit to fully decarbonize its operations by 2040 as part of Healthy Climate, Healthy Lives, its $250 million initiative to eliminate emissions and improve public health. Through the collaboration, Biogen will provide employees with Enel X JuiceBox smart home charging stations, offering employees the convenience to charge company EVs at home, where more than 80% of EV charging typically takes place. Enel X is providing Biogen with a turnkey fleet management solution, including JuiceBox smart charging stations and JuiceNet Fleet IoT software to manage the electric fleet through optimized charging times, and remote access control for station monitoring, as well as real-time monitoring and reporting. Additionally, Biogen is providing its take-home fleet drivers with Enel X's JuiceEco, to match the energy consumed by each EV during charging with carbon-free electricity. 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.
Prilenia Therapeutics B.V., a clinical stage biotech company focused on developing novel treatments for neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders, received a positive opinion on European Orphan Drug Designation for pridopidine in Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The orphan designation is expected to be granted within 30 days, following the positive opinion issued by the EMA Committee for Orphan Medicinal Products (COMP).

ALS (also known as motor neuron disease and Lou Gehrig disease) is a life-threatening and chronically debilitating disease due to progressive degeneration of motor neurons, ultimately leading to paralysis and respiratory failure.

Pridopidine is a potent and selective Sigma-1 receptor (S1R) agonist, currently being assessed in the HEALEY ALS Platform trial in the US; a multi-center, multi-regimen clinical study evaluating the safety and efficacy of investigational products for the treatment of ALS. The ongoing trial enrolled its first participant for the pridopidine regimen in January 2021 and is on track to generate results in Q3 2022.

The S1R is a promising therapeutic target for the treatment of ALS, based on human genetic data as well as compelling preclinical evidence. Pridopidine demonstrates beneficial effects in key processes relevant to ALS and shows neuroprotective properties in numerous ALS preclinical models, via activation of the S1R.

The COMP granted Orphan Drug Designation for pridopidine in ALS based on supportive preclinical data indicating potential preservation of motor function, which is considered by the committee as an unmet need and a clinically relevant advantage over available treatment.

Under orphan designation in the European Union (EU), Prilenia would benefit from this designation with protocol assistance, reduced regulatory fees and market exclusivity. Orphan Drug Designation in Europe is granted for a serious or life-threatening disease affecting not more than five in 10,000 people.

Dr. Michael R. Hayden, CEO and Founder of Prilenia, commented: "This positive opinion from the EMA further validates the potential for pridopidine to impact the devastating course seen in patients with ALS. We are encouraged by pridopidine's diverse effects favorably impacting neurodegeneration in ALS models and look forward to the trial readout later next year".

Prilenia holds Orphan Drug Designation for pridopidine in Huntington's Disease (HD) in both the US and EU. In addition to the ALS trial, Pridopidine is being studied in a global phase 3 trial for HD (PROOF-HD).

Notes to Editors

About Prilenia

Prilenia is a clinical stage biotech startup founded in 2018 with the purpose of improving the lives of patients and their families by developing treatments for neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders. Prilenia raised 90.5 million thus far and is backed by a group of well-respected investors: Talisman, Forbion, Morningside and Sectoral and ALS Investment Fund. The Company is based in Naarden, the Netherlands, Herzliya, Israel and Boston, MA in the U.S.

For more information visit www.prilenia.com and follow us on twitter @prileniaTx.

About Pridopidine

Prilenia's lead asset is Pridopidine, a first-in-class, highly selective S1R agonist investigational drug.

Pridopidine has an established safety profile and therapeutic potential in several neurodegenerative diseases, affecting adults and children. Pridopidine was acquired from Teva in 2018.

Pridopidine is currently in late-stage clinical development for ALS and HD.

About Pridopidine for ALS

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS (also known as motor neuron disease) and Lou gehrig disease, is the most prevalent adult-onset progressive motor neuron disease, affecting approximately 350,000 people worldwide. ALS causes the degeneration of motor neurons, resulting in progressive muscle weakness and atrophy and eventually death. There are currently three FDA therapies approved specifically for treating ALS-riluzole, Nuedexta and edaravone.

The Sigma-1 Receptor is a promising therapeutic target for the treatment of ALS based on human genetic data and compelling preclinical evidence.

Mutations in the S1R gene are causative of ALS where complete loss-of-function (LOF) mutations cause a severe juvenile form of ALS while partial LOF mutations cause late onset ALS, indicating a correlation between S1R function and the severity of ALS. Previous clinical data also suggest that S1R is a promising target for ALS therapy, indicating that S1R activation may enhance bulbar and speech function in ALS patients. Preclinical data highlight the role of S1R in ALS. Mice lacking the S1R show degeneration of motor neurons and motor impairment. Furthermore, in ALS mice that also lack S1R expression, disease progression is accelerated.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005762/en/

Contacts:

For further information, please contact:

Contacts:

Prilenia Therapeutics

Limor Ben Har, COO

E: info@prilenia.com



Instinctif Partners

Melanie Toyne-Sewell Agnes Stephens

T: +44 (0) 207 457 2020

E: prilenia@instinctif.com
WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Tetra Tech Inc. (TTEK), a provider of high-end consulting and engineering services, said that the U.S. Agency for International Development awarded the company a five-year, $37 million single-award contract to promote the socioeconomic empowerment of women and girls in Colombia. Tetra Tech noted that it will support the Government of Colombia to empower women and girls by engaging the public and private sector to reduce gender-based violence, transform gender norms and attitudes, create economic opportunities for women, and improve awareness and implementation of gender-related policies and services. 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.
And that figure is based on a less ambitious climate change policy than the one Ottawa has committed to since the North American Renewable Integration Study started, in 2018.A modeling exercise carried out to determine the best path to a low carbon energy system across North America has estimated 34 GW of solar could be required in Canada by mid-century, rising to 51 GW with extensive electrification of heating and transport. Industry body the Canadian Renewable Energy Association (CanREA) has welcomed the findings of the North American Renewable Integration Study (NARIS), and pointed out the ...

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.
GA Telesis Engine Services OY ("GATES"), the engine heavy maintenance unit of global aviation integrator GA Telesis, LLC (the "Company"), announces the opening of its expanded Special Procedures Aeroengine Hospital ("SPAH") shop. The newly expanded Helsinki facility focuses on specialized aircraft engine repair requiring limited or targeted maintenance. SPAH also supports a mobile response team, concentrating on engine field maintenance and on-wing support.

SPAH is an independent business unit of the GATES facility in Helsinki. The SPAH services line opened in July 2020 and showed immediate success and tremendous growth in its first year of operation, resulting in the expansion. Future demand for SPAH services will be met with the integration of SPAH facilities globally. The Company recently announced a joint venture between GA Telesis and Air Transport Services Group (ATSG) to build the second SPAH in the United States and has two other global expansion locations under review.

SPAH offers a wide range of the following services:

Engine lease return inspections

QEC installations

Boroblend repairs

Top case repairs

Accessory gearbox repairs

Hot section repairs

Compressor rear frame repairs

Engine storage and preservation

Airworthiness Directives

Service Bulletin implementation

Engine module changes

Engine test and thrust conversions

Engine troubleshooting

Engine MPD Tasks

"After observing the success of our SPAH and the rapid growth in strategic engine repairs, we have an immediate need to expand our capacity. Now with the completion of our Helsinki SPAH expansion, we have added much-needed flexibility to the growing engine MRO targeted repair market segment. Our customers' success is paramount, and the new expansion is a direct response to meeting their needs," commented Carsten Hvidegaard Holm, Managing Director, GA Telesis Engine Services.

About GA Telesis Engine Services

GA Telesis Engine Services (GATES) is a fully integrated subsidiary of GA Telesis, offering customers a seamless engine solution that combines high-quality repair and overhaul services as well as world-class supply chain services. The GATES facility is based in Helsinki, Finland, and operates under FAA, EASA, CAAC, TCCA, DGAC, GACA, ANAC, DGCA and ECAA approvals for CFM56-5B, CFM56-7B, and General Electric CF6-80C2 turbine engines. GATES has an integrated test cell capable of up to 100,000 pounds of thrust and can overhaul up to 200 engines per year. GATES Go-Team is also one of the few companies authorized by EASA to perform remote repairs on engines that are installed on aircraft.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005776/en/

Contacts:

Cathy Moabery

marketing@gatelesis.com
Slovak private equity company Sandberg Capital has acquired a minority stake in Daktela, the leader in the Czech market for technological solutions for communication with customers. It is the second significant investment by Sandberg Capital from the newly created fund launched in January this year.

LONDON and PRAGUE, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Sandberg Capital, through the Sandberg Investment Fund II, acquired a stake in the fast-growing Czech technology company Daktela, which focuses on providing complete solutions for contact centers and communication with customers. Following the investment, the majority stake in the company remains with the founders - David Hajek and Richard Baar. Both will continue to manage the company together with the existing management team.

"In the area of customer communication, companies have to improve and expand their services constantly. The segment of communication solutions has great potential and, therefore, we consider it our mutual challenge to face the changes that will shape the market in the future. We are looking forward to cooperating with David and Richard in further development of the company," said Michal Rybovic, partner at Sandberg Capital.

He also emphasized that Sandberg Capital has been active in the field of telecommunications for a long time and recognizes that there is great space for further growth for quality solutions, such as those developed by Daktela.

A success story from the Czech Republic

Daktela has created a modern cloud solution suitable both for small businesses as well as large call centers. It has been operating in the Czech market since 2005 and, from the original solution for telephone exchanges, it has gradually expanded to include other communication channels (e.g. mail, SMS, web chat, whatsapp, messenger and others). The result is an 'all-in-one' product for the efficient management and administration of communication between companies and their customers. The solution is used by customers ranging from e-commerce companies and travel agencies to energy companies and call centers.

Three years ago, Daktela decided to expand its product offering to foreign markets resulting in successful business branches in Slovakia, Hungary, Poland and the United Kingdom. Moreover, it has attracted customers from all around the world, including in Mexico, Vietnam and the Philippines. During this period, Daktela's staff has grown by 350 % to a total of 80 people today. At the same time, the company has created a completely new partner program that will help it significantly in further foreign expansion.

"Thanks to the cooperation with Sandberg Capital and their experience in expansion, management and telecommunications, within five years we want to become number one provider in the Central and Eastern European (CEE) market for contact center software and customer care. We aim to be one of the major players in the Western markets as well. We firmly believe that together we can fulfil these visions and have presence all over the world," said Richard Baar, CEO of Daktela, who noted that the entry of Sandberg Capital marks the beginning of a new era for Daktela.

The fact that Sandberg has significant experience in the field of telecommunications should help the company to meet its ambitious goals. Sandberg Capital's portfolio includes, for example, the telco operator SWAN - a long time business partner of Daktela.

Same visions with a new investor

Daktela decided to bring in an investment partner at the beginning of the last year. "We were surprised by the great interest among investors. In a very short time, we had several offers on the table. From the beginning, however, Sandberg's offer and overall approach resonated with us. The negotiations were very constructive. The personal aspect was very important for us and with Sandberg we immediately understood each other. We consider this to be the key for future cooperation. From the very first meeting, it was clear that our visions of where Daktela should go in the future were the same," said David Hajek, one of the founders of Daktela, who is currently focusing on further expansion into foreign markets.

Martin Skaba, the investment manager who managed the entire acquisition process on behalf of Sandberg Capital, confirmed that they were attracted to Daktela because of both a well-established national and multi-national team of experts, with an almost family-like atmosphere, and the product itself.

"Daktela brings a world-class solution to its clients. The product can be easily modified according to individual needs of each customer. It is this flexibility and excellent references regarding the product that have convinced us of the great potential of the company."

During the acquisition, Daktela was represented by the transaction advisory company VICF and the law firm CEE Attorneys. Sandberg Capital cooperated with financial advisors from PWC and with the law firm Kocian Solc Balastik.

The parties have agreed that the value and details of the transaction will not be disclosed.

About the Daktela Group

Daktela Group was founded in 2005. Last year, despite the coronavirus pandemic, it experienced rapid growth. The total consolidated turnover increased to almost EUR 7 million and its EBITDA exceeded EUR 1.9 million. Daktela provides services to more than 850 customers across Europe, including leading e-commerce players such as Notino, Rohlik, Mall, Muziker and call center outsourcing providers such as Conectart and Paradigma. Daktela also provides its services via its partner network throughout Europe. Its main partners include T-Mobile Czech Republic, SWAN in Slovakia and E R Associates globally. Several other interesting projects also run on Daktela technologies, including 'Smart Quarantine' in the Czech Republic, where the call center technology is used every month by several thousand operators to track contacts during the pandemic. Daktela's product also advanced to the finals of the 'IT Product of the Year 2021' competition of the Computer World magazine.

About Sandberg Capital

Sandberg Capital is private equity management company operating on the Slovak market since 2014. It focuses on investments in small and medium-sized companies in Slovakia and the CEE region. Daktela transaction represents second acquisition into their second fund with volume of committed capital amounting to 109 million EUR. The new fund was established only in January this year and was invested in primarily by institutional investors, including one of the largest European investors - the European Investment Fund. In its first fund, Sandberg Capital manages assets worth more than 250 million EUR in the fields of IT, telecommunications, agriculture, education and retail. It creates and manages domestic and foreign alternative investment funds with permission from the National Bank of Slovakia.

https://www.daktela.com/en/

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1554101/Daktela_Sandberg_Capital.jpg
Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - June 29, 2021) - Relay Medical Corp. (CSE: RELA) (OTCQB: RYMDF) (FSE: EIY2) ("Relay" or the "Company") is pleased to share a recording of the recent "State of Cybersecurity Industry" webinar featuring key panelists Chuck Brooks, Chris Blask and Cybeats Co-Founder Dmitry Raidman. The webinar is the first of many for Relay, the panelists came together to discuss key cybersecurity issues and the recent Executive Order on Improving Cybersecurity in the United States by the Biden Administration.

On June 22, Relay's wholly-owned Cybeats Technologies Inc. held a live webinar with respected influencer and Forbes writer, Chuck Brooks, innovative creator of the Digital Bill of Materials and one of the first commercial firewall products, Chris Blask, and Cybeats Co-Founder and CTO Dmitry Raidman. The panel was moderated by industry expert Evgeniy Kharam, co-host of Security Architecture Podcast. The panelists discussed what the milestones for National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and Software Bill of Materials (SBOMS) are, how the order will change the way people develop software and hardware, and more cybersecurity topics.

Given the current increase in risk of software supply chain and ransomware attacks on the Internet of Things (IoT) and Operational Technology (OT) industry the audience was able to get a deeper understanding of why the Executive Order was needed and what more the industry needs to do to increase cybersecurity. With many active audience members and over 600 registrants, this was a great start to the series, which Relay is planning to host every other month.

The recording can be found on the Company's Youtube channel, here: https://youtu.be/0EWRvcYhaek





Cannot view this video? Visit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EWRvcYhaek

"This session, although the first webinar the Company hosted, created a high benchmark for future events. It is impressive to hear we have reached over 600 registrants, which shows us how important it is to discuss these relevant cybersecurity issues," said Yoav Raiter, CEO, Relay Medical Corp. "Having many years of experience, Chuck Brooks and Chris Blask, share their thoughts on the recent Executive Order with one of the main takeaways being how SBOMs are essential for the industry to move forward in the most secure and transparent way."

Key Questions and Answers

Question: In your opinion, what motivated Joe Biden and the American government to create the Executive Order?

Chuck Brooks said: "It's not really a political issue in the sense of other issues, but I think what motivated this administration was really two breaches: the solar winds, a supply chain breach and the colonial pipeline. I think we have to realize that this is the inner workings of the Executive Order which really changed the paradigm from reactive to preventative and that's really important."

Question: What do you anticipate to change in the IoT/OT vendors during the next 12-18 months?

Chris Blask said: "OT to be clear, Operational Technology is critical infrastructure, ships, boats, planes, rails, the big stuff. IoT is your $17 camera, all the little stuff. The solution seems to be that every IoT vendor out there suddenly has to do things that will cost more than the GDP of a small nation and that's not going to be the way it works out. That's why there are always going to be companies that are motivated to help out the IoT manufacturers. But the framing of the whole thing ends up with many of the same conclusions for OT. The same visibility is needed from the SBOM in IoT manufacturing for the contents of software and its operation for OT vendors."

Question: In your opinion what are some of the most vulnerable systems/networks out there?

Dmitry Raidman said: "The water treatment and power grid facilities are the most vulnerable systems out there, at the moment, we can not survive without these systems running 24/7, lives will be at risk otherwise. The other ones as Chuck and Chris mentioned are medical devices, many of these devices are running unsupported operating systems from a cybersecurity standpoint and they can't be taken out of operation when convenient and patched easily."

Question posted by an audience member, Izabela Siudak, asked "Currently in software development of complex solutions it is an ongoing practice to use many technologies and subcontractors, who rarely offer any transparency. How can this be addressed?"

Chris said: "This is a SBOM question; SBOMS are essentially allowing consumers to trust manufacturers under certain conditions. End users may want more security, however they agree in advance should a cyberattack happen or not happen, the SBOM provides the visibility of what aspects created the product and where the vulnerability might have occured. SBOMS are crucial so that if something fails, you are able to provide the information about this one thing immediately. Therefore the answer to your question is essentially how do we work with and get SBOMS standardized and into best practice."

Chuck Brooks added: "Maybe what's more important now then in the past is the automation of software testing for code problems. Also the behavioural aspects of it too, a lot of the algorithm is being developed now with machine learning and with artificial intelligence, this can impact the visibility issue of what's in your network, what's in your code, what's in your system and I think that it comes down to a certain security-first perspective."

For future virtual events on Cybeats, subscribe to the Youtube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqtoSrovJvXcIJZz9uRxXbg

SUBSCRIBE: For more information on Relay or to subscribe to the Company's mail list visit: https://www.relaymedical.com/news

About Relay Medical Corp.

Relay Medical is a technology innovator headquartered in Toronto, Canada focused on the development of novel solutions in the diagnostics and AI data science and IoT security sectors.

Website: www.relaymedical.com

Contact:

Destine Lee

Media & Communications

Relay Medical Corp.

Office. 647-872-9982

TF. 1-844-247-6633

Media Inquiries: media@relaymedical.com

Investor Relations: investor.relations@relaymedical.com

Forward-looking Information Cautionary Statement

Except for statements of historic fact, this news release contains certain "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities law. Forward-looking information is frequently characterized by words such as "plan", "expect", "project", "intend", "believe", "anticipate", "estimate" and other similar words, or statements that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" occur. Forward-looking statements are based on the opinions and estimates at the date the statements are made, and are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those anticipated in the forward-looking statements including, but not limited to delays or uncertainties with regulatory approvals, including that of the CSE. There are uncertainties inherent in forward-looking information, including factors beyond the Company's control. There are no assurances that the commercialization plans for the technology described in this news release will come into effect on the terms or time frame described herein. The Company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking information if circumstances or management's estimates or opinions should change except as required by law. The reader is cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Additional information identifying risks and uncertainties that could affect financial results is contained in the Company's filings with Canadian securities regulators, which filings are available at www.sedar.com

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/88930


WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - As the world, especially the West, is passing through a relatively lean period of the coronavirus pandemic when compared to the first and second waves, the United States has been ranked as the best place to be in the Covid-19 era.



Since November 2020, Bloomberg's Covid Resilience Ranking has tracked the best and worst places to be in the pandemic every month, based on 10 measures such as mortality rates, infection counts, freedom of movement and economic growth.



For its latest monthly ranking, the media organization added two new metrics reflecting reopening progress - flight capacity recovery and vaccinated travel routes.



The addition of these criteria has resulted in dramatic changes to the ranks. 'The U.S. is now No. 1, with its fast and expansive vaccine rollout, dominated by the highly effective Messenger RNA shots, stemming what was once the world's worst outbreak,' Bloomberg says.



U.S. replaces countries such as New Zealand and Singapore that topped the ranking consistently by stamping out local transmission of COVID through aggressive lockdown measures.



The United States tops the Bloomberg Covid Resilience Ranking list, consisting of 53 countries, with a Resilience Score of 76.



With more than 50 per cent of its population covered by vaccination, the U.S. currently has 334 vaccinated travel routes.



The United States is followed by New Zealand, Switzerland, Israel and France in the top five bracket.



Four European countries are in the top 10 as they open their borders to vaccinated tourists while hospitalizations fall.



Asian and Latin America countries, including, India, the Philippines and Argentina, are placed among the worst places to be in the pandemic.



'While the failure of powerful, developed economies to curb the spread of the coronavirus remains a lasting legacy of the pandemic and leaves a deep scar - the U.S., U.K. and parts of Europe have some of the highest mortality-per-capita rates in the world - these places are proving faster and better at exiting the Covid era, mostly thanks to domination of vaccine supplies,' Bloomberg says in its latest monthly report.



A fact-sheet released by the White House earlier this month had claimed that due to President Joe Biden's COVID-19 strategy, 'the virus is in retreat'. 300 million shots have been administered in 150 days, COVID-19 cases and deaths have decreased by more than 90 percent, and the economy is experiencing the strongest rebound in decades, it added.



'The progress on vaccinations has brought COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths down to their lowest levels since the start of the pandemic last year,' according to the White House.



A total of 28,962,849 people have so far recovered from coronavirus infection in the country, which lost 604,115 lives due to the pandemic as of Tuesday.



The coronavirus test positivity rate across the nation has fallen to 2.4 percent.



The Biden administration has announced plans for large celebrations in communities across the United States on Fourth of July to celebrate what it called 'independence from the virus.'



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

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Calgary, Alberta--(Newsfile Corp. - June 29, 2021) - Forza Petroleum Limited (TSX: FORZ) ("Forza Petroleum" or the "Corporation") today announces that the nominees listed in its Management Proxy Circular dated May 17, 2021 were elected as directors of Forza Petroleum. Detailed results of the vote for the election of directors held earlier today at Forza Petroleum's Annual and Special Meeting of Shareholders are set out below.

Each of the following four nominees proposed by management was elected as a director by a majority of the shareholders present in person or represented by proxy. The proxies received by management with respect to the election of directors were as follows:

Nominee Votes For Votes Withheld Brad Camp 516,160,726 97.53% 8,604,563 1.63% Peter Janele 524,754,959 99.15% 10,330 0% Peter Newman 524,754,959 99.15% 10,330 0% Sami Zouari 524,164,099 99.04% 601,190 0.11%





Percentages in the table above represent the votes for or withheld, as applicable, cast by proxy, as a percentage of all votes cast at the meeting for the election of directors by shareholders present in person or represented by proxy.

Final voting results on all matters voted on at the Annual and Special Meeting of Shareholders have been filed under the Corporation's profile at www.sedar.com.

ABOUT FORZA PETROLEUM LIMITED

Forza Petroleum Limited (formerly Oryx Petroleum Corporation Limited) is an international oil exploration, development and production company. The Corporation's shares are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange and trade under the symbol "FORZ". Forza Petroleum has a 65% working interest in and operates the Hawler license area in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, which has yielded oil discoveries in four areas, three of which are contributing to production while appraisal and development activity continues. Further information about Forza Petroleum is available at www.forzapetroleum.com or under Forza Petroleum's profile at www.sedar.com.

For additional information about Forza Petroleum, please contact:

Kevin McPhee

General Counsel and Corporate Secretary



Tel.: +41 (0) 58 702 93 00

E-mail: info@forzapetroleum.com

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/89017
Regulatory News:

Gecina (Paris:GFC) has signed a two-year lease with Cafe Joyeux to set up an inclusive cafe-restaurant in a ground-floor unit at its building located at 1 boulevard de la Madeleine in Paris. This cafe-restaurant concept will occupy a 430 sq.m unit and is scheduled to open to the public from the end of the summer 2021.

Thanks to this new location, Cafe Joyeux will be able to continue developing its activity and offer employment opportunities for 15 new crew members at this site.

Launched in 2017, the Cafe Joyeux cafe-restaurant concept reflects a desire to change the way people view disabilities and foster inclusion at the heart of our cities and our lives. Today, this franchise employs around 50 crew members with cognitive disabilities across its five locations.

"We are delighted to be opening up 1 Madeleine to Cafe Joyeux and enabling the general public to discover this original concept for an inclusive cafe-restaurant. Thanks to this socially responsible initiative, we are continuing to build on our role as an engaged stakeholder within the city to promote the integration of people with disabilities within society, while ensuring full alignment with our purpose: Empowering shared human experiences at the heart of our sustainable spaces", confirms Meka Brunel, Gecina's Chief Executive Officer.

"We will shortly be opening a Cafe Joyeux at 1 boulevard de la Madeleine, one of the most beautiful addresses in the whole of Paris, which is a great opportunity for our social enterprise and our mission to promote inclusion. Thanks to the generosity of Gecina and its teams, around 15 Joyful crew members will be able to find a job and a sustainable professional future that will change their lives.

This also proves that with a daring and generous approach, leading businesses can support the most fragile people, at the heart of the ordinary economy. This is what Gecina is clearly demonstrating here, in the same way as other companies: with Cafe Joyeux, solidarity can find opportunities to be expressed within the current economic system and through a good lunch and a delicious specialty coffee", confirms Yann Bucaille-Lanrezac, co-founder of Cafe Joyeux.

About Gecina

As a specialist for centrality and uses, Gecina operates innovative and sustainable living spaces. The Group owns, manages and develops Europe's leading office portfolio, with nearly 97% located in the Paris Region, and a portfolio of residential assets and student residences, with over 9,000 apartments. These portfolios are valued at 19.7 billion euros at end-2020.

Gecina has firmly established its focus on innovation and its human approach at the heart of its strategy to create value and deliver on its purpose: "Empowering shared human experiences at the heart of our sustainable spaces". For our 100,000 clients, this ambition is supported by our client-centric brand YouFirst. It is also positioned at the heart of UtilesEnsemble, our program setting out our solidarity-based commitments to the environment, to people and to the quality of life in cities.

Gecina is a French real estate investment trust (SIIC) listed on Euronext Paris, and is part of the SBF 120, CAC Next 20, CAC Large 60, CAC 40 ESG and Euronext 100 indices. Gecina is also recognized as one of the top-performing companies in its industry by leading sustainability benchmarks and rankings (GRESB, Sustainalytics, MSCI, ISS ESG and CDP).

www.gecina.fr

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005897/en/

Contacts:

GECINA

Financial communications

Samuel Henry-Diesbach

Tel: 33 (0)1 40 40 52 22

samuelhenry-diesbach@gecina.fr

Virginie Sterling

Tel: +33 (0)1 40 40 62 48

virginiesterling@gecina.fr

Press relations

Julien Landfried

Tel: +33 (0)1 40 40 65 74

julienlandfried@gecina.fr

Armelle Miclo

Tel: +33 (0)1 40 40 51 98

armellemiclo@gecina.fr
ATLANTISJAPAN GROWTH FUND LIMITED

("AJGF" or the "Company")

(A closed-ended investment company incorporated in Guernsey with registration number 30709)

LEI 54930041W0LDG00PGL69

Appointment of Director

29 June 2021

The Board of Atlantis Japan Growth Fund Limited is pleased to announce that Ms Yuki Soga will be appointed to the Board, as an independent non-executive Director of the Company, such appointment to take effect from 1 July 2021.

Yuki Soga is a Japanese citizen currently residing in London. Schooled in the UK and a graduate of Somerville College, Oxford, she has spent most of her career to date working in Tokyo. Yuki commenced her career with lawyers Clifford Chance and Herbert Smith and then researched quoted Japanese equities for Arcus and Macquarie. She subsequently became a partner at Indus Capital Tokyo. Since June 2020 Yuki has been running her own research and consulting business.

Yuki has an excellent industry background and brings genuine diversity to the Board, especially with her knowledge of Japan.

Mr Noel Lamb, Chairman, said "The Board of Atlantis Japan Growth Fund Limited is delighted that Yuki has agreed to become a Director of the Company. Her many years' experience and her excellent insights into the nuances and culture of Japan will bring many benefits to the Company."
Developers and merchants will now have even more potential to create unique experiences that will define the future of commerce on the internet

Internet, Everywhere--(Newsfile Corp. - June 29, 2021) - Shopify (NYSE: SHOP) (TSX: SHOP) already powers commerce on the internet; in 2020, more than 450 million people checked out on Shopify, and we processed nearly $120 billion in Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV). As the world's commerce platform, we keep innovating to give entrepreneurs endless possibilities to creatively present their brands and grow their businesses.

Today at Shopify Unite 2021, we announced our largest set of platform investments to date. With a lens into the future where every merchant can tell their unique story, we are reinventing the internet's commerce infrastructure like never before and calling on developers to help us build that future together.

We're not just betting on a world full of merchants, but on a world full of developers and technical entrepreneurs. Our infrastructure updates-from Storefronts and Checkout to the Theme Store and our Partner Ecosystem-give developers and merchants even more power to create, customize, scale, and monetize on Shopify.

"The internet is the world's largest city, and Shopify is building its commerce infrastructure," said Tobi Lutke, CEO of Shopify. "Especially over the past year, we saw independent businesses succeed by showing up creatively and uniquely in this city. The future of commerce on the internet relies on creative expression at every touchpoint. Together with developers, we are building the infrastructure to make this possible."

What we announced at Unite 2021

Snapshot :

Storefronts

Online Store 2.0: The biggest upgrade to Shopify's Liquid platform ever. It features greater levels of flexibility and customization so merchants can better showcase their brands, create unique online experiences, and integrate apps-all without touching code. We are also launching a new set of developer features including sections on all pages to personalize every aspect of a store, a new editor experience , and theme app extensions . The Shopify Theme Store will open for developer submissions on July 15. We're launching new developer tools and a new default theme that is faster and more beautiful than ever: Dawn . These will make building themes significantly easier and provide merchants more creative options for their storefronts.

Custom Storefronts: We have made major global infrastructure investments to get online stores and our GraphQL Storefront API within 50 milliseconds of every buyer on Earth . This includes expanding hosting regions to every continent, with Shopify commerce logic running in 100+ server locations that will directly serve API requests for Custom Storefronts for faster response times. Introducing Hydrogen , a new React framework for developers to build custom storefronts (launching soon), as well as Oxygen , our future hosting platform for custom storefronts on Shopify.

Metafields and Custom Content: With support for additional Metafields , merchants can now add their own attributes to models like products and product variants, with support for other models like customers and orders coming later this year. Custom Content , coming soon, will be built on top of the new Metafields infrastructure and will serve as Shopify's Content Management platform. It will allow merchants to store content of any format within Shopify.



Checkout

Shopify Checkout will be even faster, giving any shop the capacity to handle tens of thousands of purchases per minute. Shopify's goal is for a single merchant to be able to sell 300,000 pairs of sneakers in just over eight minutes, and for each individual shop to have the ability to handle as much sales volume as we served across all of Shopify at the peak of Black Friday Cyber Monday in 2020.

will be even faster, giving any shop the capacity to handle tens of thousands of purchases per minute. Introducing Checkout Extensions , allowing developers to securely build apps into Shopify Checkout. These checkout customizations will also work in Shop Pay, making the fastest way to pay on the internet another creative brand surface for merchants.

, allowing developers to securely build apps into Shopify Checkout. These checkout customizations will also work in Shop Pay, making the fastest way to pay on the internet another creative brand surface for merchants. Shopify Scripts are now easier to build and more powerful than ever for developers creating unique checkout experiences for Shopify Plus brands.

are now easier to build and more powerful than ever for developers creating unique checkout experiences for Shopify Plus brands. Introducing Payments Platform, a way to integrate third-party payment gateways into Shopify Checkout, unlocking new sales growth opportunities for merchants.

Developer-Entrepreneurs

Developers who build for the Shopify App Store will now pay 0% revenue share for the first $1M they earn annually on the platform starting on August 1. That's down from 20%. The $1M benchmark resets annually.

for the first $1M they earn annually on the platform starting on August 1. That's down from 20%. The $1M benchmark resets annually. The same 0% revenue share model will also be available to Theme Store developers.

Full details on Shopify Unite 2021 announcements :

Storefronts

Commerce requires creative expression. We originally built our Storefronts platform with this creative flexibility in mind, offering "no code" configurability for merchants to get started quickly, but also "max code" access for developers to extend and customize. New investments in our Online Store and Custom Storefronts platform ensure that, regardless of a merchant's size, technical skill, complexity, or scale, their business can thrive on Shopify.

Online Store 2.0: The biggest upgrade to Shopify's Liquid platform ever

Online Store 2.0 represents the biggest upgrade to Shopify's Liquid platform in our history. It features greater levels of flexibility and customization so merchants can better express their brands, create unique online experiences, and integrate apps-all without touching code. With Online Store 2.0, brands are no longer constrained by technical limits, giving them free creative control over their customer experience.

Online Store 2.0 updates include a set of new features that all work together:

Sections on all pages unlock new opportunities to personalize every aspect of a store

unlock new opportunities to personalize every aspect of a store New editor experience makes it more efficient for merchants to build their storefronts

makes it more efficient for merchants to build their storefronts Theme app extensions make it easier to extend and manage apps within themes

Shopify gave Netflix early access to Online Store 2.0, and they used the new features to create Netflix.Shop, the first ever ecommerce store for Netflix.

As of July 15, the Shopify Theme Store is open to developers for new submissions

We're launching a new range of development tools, including a new integration with Github, Theme Check, Development themes, and improvements to Liquid. Lastly, we are introducing Dawn, Shopify's first open source theme that has the powerful Online Store 2.0 features built in. Created with flexibility and speed in mind, Dawn is 35% faster than the most popular Shopify theme and will be the new standard for Shopify theme development. Together, these updates will give theme developers more creative freedom and efficiency than ever before.

Major infrastructure investments into APIs and developer tooling

Shopify scales with merchants at every stage, regardless of their maturity, technical resources, or complexity. A merchant should never have to replatform to achieve their desired tech stack, business logic, or buyer experience. Today, we are further investing into API-powered storefronts that allow developers to unlock our fast, flexible, and feature-rich platform while having the freedom to choose their own framework and language. And we have expanded hosting regions to every continent, with Shopify commerce logic running in 100+ server locations that will directly serve API requests for Custom Storefronts and bring online stores and our GraphQL Storefront API within 50 milliseconds of every buyer on Earth.

Available July 1, improvements to our Storefront API include:

New cart functionality that estimates the cost of products, with taxes and discounts, optimized for performance and designed to scale without any store-wide rate limits

that estimates the cost of products, with taxes and discounts, optimized for performance and designed to scale without any store-wide rate limits Selling plans that enable merchants to set up subscriptions, pre-orders, and other direct integrations with Shopify's native checkout

that enable merchants to set up subscriptions, pre-orders, and other direct integrations with Shopify's native checkout International pricing to offer localized buyer experiences by serving up per-country pricing according to buyer location

to offer localized buyer experiences by serving up per-country pricing according to buyer location Local pickup so buyers can purchase a product online and pick up from their desired location

Allbirds used our Custom Storefronts capabilities to build a new AR-enabled mobile app experience.

Introducing Hydrogen and Oxygen

At Unite 2021, we previewed Hydrogen, a React framework that simplifies the experience of building custom storefronts. Hydrogen includes commerce-specialized components like cart, variant picker, and media gallery that tackle the complexity of building a custom storefront. Now developers can focus on building the experiences that make brands truly stand out.

We also previewed Oxygen, a way to host Hydrogen storefronts directly on Shopify that is fast, global, and optimized for commerce.

Metafields and Custom Content

With support for additional Metafields, merchants can now add their own attributes to models like products and product variants, with support for other models like customers and orders coming later this year. Custom Content, launching soon, will be built on top of the new Metafields infrastructure and will serve as Shopify's Content Management platform. It will allow merchants to store content of any format within Shopify.

This flexibility enables merchants to store all of their data within one platform and makes data retrieval easier across the commerce experience for greater levels of flexibility and customization-across both Online Store 2.0 and Custom Storefronts.

Checkout

The most powerful checkout in the world is getting even faster, more scalable, and easier to customize.

Major Shopify Checkout speed and capacity improvements

Shopify Checkout will be even faster, giving any shop the capacity to handle tens of thousands of purchases per minute. With these capacity improvements, Shopify's goal is for a single merchant to be able to sell 300,000 pairs of sneakers in just over eight minutes, and for each individual shop to have the ability to handle as much sales volume as we served across all of Shopify at the peak of Black Friday Cyber Monday in 2020.

Introducing Checkout Extensions: Developers can now securely build apps into Shopify Checkout

Customizing Shopify Checkout has become far easier with Checkout Extensions, Shopify's new approach to customization that enables developers to securely build apps into Checkout. The post-purchase checkout extension is available now, so developers can build experiences like upsell and donation requests that render after checkout, with additional Checkout Extensions rolling out later this year. For merchants, Checkout Extensions will make Shopify Checkout even easier to use, integrate, and maintain over time, and the checkout customizations will also show up directly in Shop Pay, making the internet's fastest way to pay another creative brand surface for merchants.

Shopify Scripts are easier to build and more powerful than ever

We've rebuilt Shopify Scripts so developers working with Shopify Plus brands can write custom logic unique to their brand and deploy it to multiple stores using apps; and because Scripts execute in Shopify, they can scale up according to volume. For example, a merchant could customize the shipping options provided by Shopify and create a script that sorts shipping methods based on carbon emissions, allowing customers to pick the most eco-friendly option. With the new and improved Shopify Scripts, we've made it easier than ever to extend the business logic of Shopify and build unique checkout experiences.

Shopify is making it easier to scale Checkout globally with Payments Platform

Shopify's global payment partners solve for a diverse set of merchant needs. Last year alone, those partners processed more than $65B in GMV. With the launch of our new Shopify Payments Platform, we are unblocking future opportunities for growth in markets and industries by empowering payment providers to build new integrations into Shopify. Our Payments Platform will replace our legacy integration points and will enable partners to create payment gateways as Shopify apps. This opens Shopify to a broader ecosystem of gateways that offer niche functionality and brings new business value to merchants by helping them sell more, in more places.

Developer-Entrepreneurs

Shopify is the best place for developers to build, grow, and scale their businesses--and it just got even better. Introducing our developer-first business model: 0% revenue share for the first $1M in annual revenue on the Shopify App Store and the Shopify Theme Store.

Shopify revenue share is now 0% for the first $1M app developers make annually on the platform

When it comes to building apps for Shopify, the opportunity is already massive. In 2020 alone, Shopify partners generated $12.5B in revenue, up 84% year-over-year. Shopify makes it possible for developers around the world to build successful businesses of their own while giving merchants more flexibility to customize their commerce experience.

As of August 1, we're offering a 0% revenue share for all developers making less than $1M per year on our app store. This is significant for Shopify and our developers because:

Currently, Shopify charges 20% revenue share, so we're significantly increasing the opportunity for developers to build and grow their businesses

The $1M benchmark resets annually, meaning developers will have more earning potential year over year

Unlike other app stores, Shopify's revenue share (once it applies) will be only 15% of marginal revenue. In other words, developers will pay 15% only on revenue over $1M

We are making the same 0% revenue share model available to Theme Store developers*

Over 1.7M merchants around the world use Shopify themes, and we are offering the same business model of 0% revenue share for Theme Store developers until they make $1M annually. For merchants, more themes mean more opportunities to showcase their brands and deepen connections with consumers.

Commerce is rapidly evolving for merchants all over the globe. These updates mean more merchants will have their diverse needs met through a larger selection of apps and themes, and developers will have more entrepreneurial opportunities than ever before.

For more details and the full recording of Shopify Unite 2021, please visit unite.shopify.com.

About Shopify

Shopify is a leading global commerce company, providing trusted tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business of any size. Shopify makes commerce better for everyone with a platform and services that are engineered for reliability, while delivering a better shopping experience for consumers everywhere. Proudly founded in Ottawa, Shopify powers over 1.7 million businesses in more than 175 countries and is trusted by brands such as Allbirds, Gymshark, Heinz, Staples Canada, and many more. For more information, visit www.shopify.com.

*The Shopify App Store and Shopify Theme Store are separate revenue streams; the $1M revenue share metric applies to each independently.

While more generous terms on our developer revenue share mean less for us near term, we do not expect the impact to be material. We believe this more equitable approach will encourage greater innovation and development on behalf of merchants overall, and allow more businesses to succeed on Shopify.

Forward-looking Statements

This announcement contains forward-looking information and forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws ("forward-looking statements") including statements regarding Shopify's product offerings and planned product roadmap. Words such as "will", "plan" or similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are based on Shopify's current expectations about future events and are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated, including the risks described in Shopify's filings with securities regulators. Shopify undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as may be required by law.

MEDIA:

Megan Malarkey

Communications Lead, Product

416-238-6705 x 302

press@shopify.com

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/88946
WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Crude oil prices moved higher on Tuesday after a somewhat lackluster session with traders looking ahead to the upcoming meeting of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies. Traders are also awaiting weekly oil reports from the American Petroleum Institute (API) and U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). While the API's report is due later today, the EIA is scheduled to release its report Wednesday morning. Concerns about outlook for energy demand due to the surge in the delta variant of the coronavirus infection and fresh curbs on travel in several European countries weighed on crude oil prices. West Texas Intermediate Crude oil futures for August ended up by $0.07 at $72.98 a barrel. The OPEC+ meeting, scheduled to take place on Thursday (July 1), will likely see the members agreeing on increasing crude output by an additional 500,000 barrels a day from August amid hopes energy demand will pick up. Meanwhile, outbreaks of the highly contagious COVID-19 variant Delta raised concerns that the economic recovery will be slow. In Australia, the cities of Sydney, Perth, Brisbane and Darwin have all been put into lockdown as the outbreak spreads. Spain and Portugal announced restrictions on the entry of unvaccinated British citizens ahead of the peak summer vacation period. 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.
Mainz, Germany--(Newsfile Corp. - June 29, 2021) - This summer celebrate Germany's most beloved grape, Riesling throughout the 31 days of July.

Festivities will take place in five major cities across Canada with bespoke programming, all spreading the word of the magnificently lively and versatile German Riesling grape.

"I love stocking German wines. Even though the country has a centuries old winemaking tradition, the wines are still under represented in the North America, so it's fun to introduce people to something they maybe wouldn't think of straight away German Riesling is certainly among the best white wines in the world. German wines are incredibly food friendly! The Germans figured out long ago that rich and zippy whites are perfect for rich meats, and they have the delicacy to compliment the veg-heavy cuisine that is increasing in popularity."

- Peter Hammond, Sommelier, DaiLo Restaurant





31 Days of German Riesling

To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit:

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Canadians from Halifax to Vancouver will have the opportunity to experience German Rieslings as they never had before -- from unique finds and natural Rieslings at participating independent wine merchants -- to select restaurants featuring culinary dishes paired with German wines -- to virtual tastings with celebrity wine educators.

Visit: http://germanwinecanada.com/31-days-of-german-riesling-2021/ for details on how you can join in the celebrations near you.

Join us and raise a glass to "The 31 Days of German Riesling" - a new habit you will never want to break!

For more information, please contact:





Wines of Germany Logo



To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit:

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Pam Panesar

Wines of Germany - Canada

c/o Andros Communications

T: 877-637-2044 ext. 3

pam@androscom.com

Source: Andros Communications

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/88039
TechnipFMC (NYSE: FTI) (PARIS: FTI) announced today that it has been awarded a substantial(1) subsea contract by Petrobras for the Buzios 6-9 fields. Located in the Santos basin offshore Brazil, these fields are part of the pre-salt area, with a water depth of 2,000 meters.

TechnipFMC will supply subsea trees with controls, electrical and hydraulic distribution units, topside systems, and installation and intervention support services with rental tooling. Delivery is expected to begin in the first quarter of 2023.

Jonathan Landes, President, Subsea, at TechnipFMC, commented, "The Buzios 6-9 fields are major developments in Brazil, and we are very honored to support Petrobras in this subsea project, which further strengthens our long-term partnership. This contract demonstrates TechnipFMC's unique ability to deliver comprehensive solutions that meet clients' needs and leverages our expertise in the pre-salt field.

"Sustainability will be at the core of our project delivery. All of the subsea trees will be manufactured at our facilities in Brazil, which are powered entirely from renewable energy sources.

"This contract arrives only weeks after achieving our recent milestone of manufacturing and delivering 700 trees in-country a further testament to our long-term commitment in Brazil, where local content makes up over 97 percent of our workforce."

TechnipFMC's demonstrated history of project and technology delivery for Petrobras helped solidify the Lean manufacturing methodologies employed at its Rio Manufacturing Hub, improving safety and quality, while reducing waste and costs.

(1) For TechnipFMC, a "substantial" contract is between $250 million and $500 million.

Important Information for Investors and Securityholders

Forward-Looking Statement

This release contains "forward-looking statements" as defined in Section 27A of the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the United States Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. The words "expect", "estimated" and other similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements, which are generally not historical in nature. Such forward-looking statements involve significant risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from our historical experience and our present expectations or projections. For information regarding known material factors that could cause actual results to differ from projected results, please see our risk factors set forth in our filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, which include our Annual Reports on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, and Current Reports on Form 8-K. We caution you not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date hereof. We undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any of our forward-looking statements after the date they are made, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except to the extent required by law.

About TechnipFMC

TechnipFMC is a leading technology provider to the traditional and new energy industries, delivering fully integrated projects, products, and services.

With our proprietary technologies and comprehensive solutions, we are transforming our clients' project economics, helping them unlock new possibilities to develop energy resources while reducing carbon intensity and supporting their energy transition ambitions.

Organized in two business segments Subsea and Surface Technologies we will continue to advance the industry with our pioneering integrated ecosystems (such as iEPCI, iFEED and iComplete), technology leadership and digital innovation.

Each of our approximately 20,000 employees is driven by a commitment to our clients' success, and a culture of strong execution, purposeful innovation, and challenging industry conventions.

TechnipFMC uses its website as a channel of distribution of material company information. To learn more about how we are driving change in the industry, go to www.TechnipFMC.com and follow us on Twitter @TechnipFMC.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629006005/en/

Contacts:

Investor relations

Matt Seinsheimer

Vice President, Investor Relations

Tel: +1 281 260 3665

Email: Matt Seinsheimer

James Davis

Senior Manager, Investor Relations

Tel: +1 281 260 3665

Email: James Davis

Media relations

Nicola Cameron

Vice President, Corporate Communications

Tel: +44 1383 742297

Email: Nicola Cameron

Catie Tuley

Director, Public Relations

Tel: +1 281 591 5405

Email: Catie Tuley
COEUR D'ALENE, ID / ACCESSWIRE / June 29, 2021 / Timberline Resources Corporation (OTCQB:TLRS) (TSX-V:TBR) ("Timberline" or the "Company") announces that it has closed its previously announced non-brokered private placement financing (the "Offering"). Under the Offering, the Company issued 23,070,798 units ("Units") at a price of US$0.20 for total consideration of US$4,614,160. Each Unit consists of one common share of the Company and one-half of one common share purchase warrant (each full warrant a "Warrant"), with each Warrant exercisable to acquire an additional common share of the Company at a price of US$0.30 per share until the warrant expiration date of May 31, 2023. Proceeds of the Offering will be used for exploration on the Company's Nevada gold projects, primarily its flagship Eureka Project on the Battle Mountain Eureka Trend, and for general corporate purposes.

The private placement was led by orders from entities managed by Crescat Capital, Stichting Depositary Plethora Precious Metals Fund, and Torck Capital Management and included subscriptions from several new institutional investors and a strong slate of accredited retail investors.

The Offering was completed under Rule 506(b) of Regulation D promulgated by the SEC under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "Securities Act"), solely to persons who qualify as accredited investors and in accordance with applicable securities laws.

Finders fees in the amount of US $117,099.59 and 596,248 Warrants have been paid to licensed brokers and consultants in association with the Offering.

One insider of the Company subscribed for 1,250,000 Units of the Offering. Participation by an insider constitutes a related-party transaction as defined under Multilateral Instrument 61-101 - Protection of Minority Security Holders in Special Transactions. Because neither the fair market value of the shares issued to, nor the consideration paid by, related parties exceeds 25% of the Company's market capitalization, the issuance of securities is exempt from the formal valuation requirements of Section 5.4 of MI 61-101 pursuant to Subsection 5.5(a) of MI 61-101 and exempt from the minority shareholder approval requirements of Section 5.6 of MI 61-101 pursuant to Subsection 5.7(a) of MI 61-101.

The securities offered in the Offering have not been and will not be registered under the Securities Act or the securities laws of any state of the United States and may not be offered or sold absent such registration or an applicable exemption from such registration requirements. This press release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy securities nor shall there be any sale of the securities referenced herein in any state or other jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale is not permitted. The securities referenced herein have not been approved or disapproved by any regulatory authority.

This press release is issued for informational purposes pursuant to Rule 135c of the Securities Act and shall not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any securities, nor shall there be any sale of 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.

The shares issued pursuant to the Offering will be subject to a statutory hold period in accordance with applicable securities legislation, including resale restrictions expiring four months and one day following closing pursuant to applicable Canadian securities legislation.

About Timberline Resources:

Timberline Resources Corp. is listed on the OTCQB where it trades under the symbol "TLRS" and on the TSX Venture Exchange where it trades under the symbol "TBR".

On behalf of the Board of Directors,

"Patrick Highsmith"

President, CEO, and Director

Contact:

Tel: +1-208-664-4859

E-mail: info@timberline-resources.com

Forward-looking Statements:

Certain statements in this news release are forward-looking and 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, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, as well as within the meaning of the phrase 'forward-looking information' in the Canadian Securities Administrators' National Instrument 51-102 - Continuous Disclosure Obligations. Forward-looking statements are not comprised of historical facts. Forward-looking statements include estimates and statements that describe the Company's future plans, objectives or goals, including words to the effect that the Company or management expects a stated condition or result to occur. Forward-looking statements may be identified by such terms as "believes", "anticipates", "expects", "estimates", "may", "could", "would", "will", or "plan". Since forward-looking statements are based on assumptions and address future events and conditions, by their very nature they involve inherent risks and uncertainties. Although these statements are based on information currently available to the Company, the Company provides no assurance that actual results will meet management's expectations. Risks, uncertainties and other factors involved with forward-looking information could cause actual events, results, performance, prospects and opportunities to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from such forward-looking information include, but are not limited to those risks set out in the Company's public documents filed on SEDAR and EDGAR. Although the Company believes that the assumptions and factors used in preparing the forward-looking information in this news release are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on such information, which only applies as of the date of this news release, and no assurance can be given that such events will occur in the disclosed time frames or at all. The Company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, other than as required by law. No stock exchange, securities commission or other regulatory authority has approved or disapproved the information contained herein.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

SOURCE: Timberline Resources Corp.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/653601/Timberline-Closes-Non-Brokered-Private-Placement
WHITE ROCK, BC / ACCESSWIRE / June 29, 2021 / TDG Gold Corp (TSXV:TDG) (the "Company" or "TDG") is pleased to announce that it entered into a non-binding letter of intent (the "LOI") on June 18, 2021 with ASX-listed Kingsgate Consolidated Limited ("Kingsgate"), an arm's length party to TDG, to acquire Kingsgate's "Nueva Esperanza" silver-gold advanced exploration and development project, located in the Maricunga Belt of the Atacama Region of Northern Chile (Figure 1). The proposed transaction will be transformative for TDG, creating a leading pure precious metals focused company with the ambition to accelerate both Nueva Esperanza in the Maricunga and TDG's Shasta project in BC's Toodoggone Production Corridor to production decisions by the end of 2024.

The Nueva Esperanza project is located in the northern half of the Maricunga Belt, 140 kilometres ("km") northeast of the city of Copiapo, which is a regional mining centre. It is situated at 4000-4200 metres ("m") elevation and has three mining areas Arqueros, Chimberos and Teteritawith permits for development and associated water rights.

On April 13, 2016, Kingsgate published a JORC-compliant(1) mineral resource(2) estimate (the "Historical Estimate") for the Nueva Esperanza project (see Table 1) in a technical report titled "Nueva Esperanza Mineral Resource Update", including:

Measured and indicated mineral resource of 28.8 million tonnes ("Mt") containing 68.6 million ounces ("Moz") silver ("Ag") at an average grade of 74 grams per tonne ("g/t") and 400,000 oz gold ("Au") at an average grade 0.43 g/t; and,

Inferred mineral resource of 6.0 Mt containing 8.3 Moz Ag at an average grade of 43 g/t and 80,000 oz Au at an average grade of 0.42 g/t.

On April 13 2016, Kingsgate also published a JORC-compliant(1) prefeasibility study, including estimation of a mineral reserve(2) titled "Nueva Esperanza Pre-feasibility Study" (see Kingsgate's announcement of the prefeasibility study on April 13, 2016).

In July 2020, the Nueva Esperanza project was granted Environmental Impact Assessment approval allowing the pre-development, construction and operation of the project (see Kingsgate's news release dated July 14,2020).

TDG, as part of its due diligence, commissioned Sue Bird, P.Eng of MMTS (Moose Mountain Technical Services) to undertake an independent mineral resource estimate for the Nueva Esperanza project in accordance with NI 43-101. The work required to verify the historical mineral resource estimate as current includes a project site visit, and QA/QC data review together with modelling the in-pit silver and gold assay data.

TDG has completed extensive legal and technical due diligence review on the Nueva Esperanza project and concluded that the project offers an opportunity for significant value creation for TDG's owners and its other stakeholders, whilst transforming TDG into a silver-focused advanced exploration and development company.

TDG thanks Kingsgate for its work between 2009 to present and looks forward to working with the Kingsgate team located in Chile, and to welcoming Kingsgate as strategic owners of TDG (see summary of key transaction terms below).

The new 2021 mineral resource estimate, in combination with the foundational work by Kingsgate, would provide the basis for TDG to prepare a new Preliminary Economic Assessment study in accordance with NI 43-101 guidelines.

TDG looks forward to providing additional updates as the transaction progresses.

Key Transaction Terms (all amounts in Canadian Dollars unless specified otherwise)

Under the terms of the LOI, in exchange for 100% ownership of the Nueva Esperanza project, TDG will pay to Kingsgate the following consideration:

$25,000,000 cash on closing, subject to certain working capital and other deductions;

14.0% of TDG's outstanding common shares calculated on a post-closing basis (inclusive of any shares issued in a concurrent financing);

Up to $25,000,000 in future milestone payments, again subject to certain deductions, and of which up to $10,000,000 may be settled in TDG common shares at TDG's discretion, with the applicable milestones including completion of a feasibility study and the occurrence of a production decision in respect of the Nueva Esperanza project.

TDG has agreed to raise a minimum of $35,000,000 in an equity financing concurrent with the closing - further announcements will follow in due course regarding the financing arrangements. Kingsgate will also receive certain rights pursuant to an investor rights agreement providing, amongst other things, a Kingsgate nominee on TDG's Board of Directors and rights to maintain its TDG share ownership percentage under certain conditions.

TDG intends to file the acquisition with the TSX Venture Exchange (the "Exchange") as a Fundamental Acquisition and, as such, the acquisition is subject to Exchange review and approval per Exchange Policy 5.3.

The LOI is non-binding, and investors are cautioned that there is no guarantee that the Company will enter into a binding agreement in respect of, or ultimately complete, the proposed acquisition. Completion of the proposed acquisition would be subject to a number of conditions precedent, including completion of satisfactory due diligence, the negotiation and settlement of a binding definitive agreement, and receipt of regulatory approval, including the approval of the Exchange. The LOI will be terminable by either party if the parties have not entered into a binding definitive agreement by July 16, 2021, or such other date as determined by the parties. TDG anticipates that the proposed acquisition should close in mid-August of 2021, however the LOI contemplates an outside date for completion of August 31, 2021, which date may be extended by the agreement of the parties.

Nueva Esperanza and the Maricunga Belt, Chile

Over 100 Moz of gold with associated silver and copper have been discovered in the Maricunga Belt in northern Chile to date, with deposits dominantly hosted in a late Oligocene to Miocene age metallogenic belt. The sedimentary and volcanic rocks are host to a number of existing and advanced exploration and development stage projects as well as producing mines (Figure 1) including: Gold Fields' Salares Norte project, currently in construction, which is located in the northern Maricunga belt, and Kinross Gold's final stage La Coipa mine development, which is located approximately 30 km southwest from Nueva Esperanza.

Figure 1 showing the location of Nueva Esperanza and other key projects in the Maricunga Belt of the Atacama Region of Chile.

About Nueva Esperanza

Nueva Esperanza is a silver and gold project covering approximately 14,000 hectares of exploitation and exploration concessions. It comprises three well-defined silver-gold deposits hosted in a high sulphidation epithermal system along with a number of undeveloped exploration targets, including additional epithermal targets and gold mineralization hosted in porphyritic rocks. The principal silver-gold deposits within the project are Arqueros, Chimberos and Teterita (Figure 2). Since the initial discovery by Anglo American Chile in 1981, the project has been subject to over 279,000 m of historical drilling in > 3,900 drill holes. The Chimberos deposit was open pit mined in 1998-1999, producing 32 Moz Ag. The Arqueros deposit was underground mined between 2000-2004 producing 14 Moz Ag and 0.05 Moz Au.

In July 2020, the project was granted Environmental Impact Assessment approval allowing the pre-development, construction and operation of Arqueros, Chimberos and Teterita. The project also has existing water rights with Anglo American Chile through to November 14, 2029, which can be renewed on further agreement with the owner.

Figure 2 showing the proximity of the Arqueros, Chimberos and Teterita deposits and the location of the camp.

The project has existing Net Smelter Return ("NSR") royalties payable to Anglo American Chile ("MAAC") and Maverix Metals Inc. MAAC currently receives US$2 million per annum advance NSR payments of which US$1 million can be deducted from future payable royalty related to the Teterita zone production. Please see TDG's updated website and corporate presentation for more details.

2016 HISTORICAL MINERAL RESOURCE ESTIMATE

Table 1 Summary Historical Mineral Resource Estimate3

Deposit Category Tonnes Ag Au Ounces (Moz) (Million) g/t g/t Ag Au Measured - - - - - Arqueros Indicated 14.7 76 0.32 35.9 0.15 Inferred 3.3 42 0.30 4.5 0.03 Measured 1.6 93 0.01 4.8 0.0005 Teterita Indicated 3.3 98 0 10.4 0.001 Inferred 0.4 65 0 0.8 0.0001 Measured - - - - - Chimberos Indicated 9.2 59 0.84 17.5 0.25 Inferred 2.3 40 0.70 3.0 0.05 Total Measured 1.6 93 0.01 4.8 0.0005 Total Indicated 27.2 73 0.46 63.8 0.401 Total Measured & Indicated 28.8 74 0.43 68.6 0.402 Total Inferred 6.0 43 0.42 8.3 0.08

The Historical Estimate was estimated using Ordinary Kriging (OK) using a 0.5g/t gold equivalent cut-off grade, with the gold equivalent being calculated on an AuEQ60 basis (Gold Equivalent: AuEq (g/t) = Au (g/t) + (Ag (g/t)  60)). The cut-off grade was calculated assuming long-term historical prices of US$1,200/oz for gold and US$19.00 for silver and combined life of mine average metallurgical recoveries of 80% Au and 84% Ag, estimated from test work by Kingsgate.

The Historical Estimate is based on reverse circulation (RC), diamond (DDH) and open hole percussion (DTH) drilling from surface and underground mine workings completed by several companies since 1980. The sampling includes 2009-2015 drilling by Laguna Resources, a wholly owned division of Kingsgate Consolidated Ltd (25% of the drill meters) and previous explorers including Anglo American Chile (18%), Can Can Mining (44%) and Kinross (14%). The combined resource database totals 3,390 holes for 183,852 m.

Waste piles estimated at 4.6 Mt are located at Chimberos and were included in the Historical Estimate published by Kingsgate, but have not been included in the estimates summarised in this news release, as TDG believes additional sampling data is required.

A full description of the sample techniques and data was provided in the report published by Kingsgate.

In order to classify the Historical Estimate as current, a qualified person under NI 43-101 would have to complete a site visit to the project and complete an analysis of the Historical Estimate, including re-modelling each deposit and validating the historical assay results using statistical methods. Because the Historical Estimate was completed relatively recently pursuant to JORC standards, TDG considers the Historical Estimate to be generally reliable and relevant, however a qualified person has not done sufficient work to classify the Historical Estimate as current mineral resources, and TDG is not treating the historical estimate as current mineral resources.

Qualified Person

The technical content of this news release has been reviewed and approved by Andrew French, P.Geo., a qualified person as defined by NI 43-101 and a director of the Company.

About TDG Gold Corp.

TDG is a major holder of mineral claims and mining leases in the historical Toodoggone Production Corridor of north-central British Columbia, Canada, with over 23,000 hectares of brownfield and greenfield exploration opportunities under direct ownership or earn-in agreement. TDG's flagship projects are the former producing, high-grade gold-silver Shasta, Baker and Mets mines which are all road accessible, produced intermittently between 1981-2012, and have over 65,000 metres of historical drilling. In 2021, TDG proposes to advance the projects through compilation of historical data, new geological mapping, geochemical and geophysical surveys, and drill testing of the known mineralization occurrences and their extensions. TDG currently has 64,423,459 common shares issued and outstanding.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

Fletcher Morgan

Chief Executive Officer

For further information:

TDG Gold Corp.,

Telephone: +1.604.536.2711

Email: info@tdggold.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.

This press release contains forward looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws. The use of any of the words "anticipate", "plan", "continue", "expect", "estimate", "objective", "may", "will", "project", "should", "would", "predict", "potential" and similar expressions are intended to identify forward looking statements. In particular, this press release contains forward looking statements concerning the completion of the proposed acquisition of the Nueva Esperanza project, the completion of equity financing, and the potential development of the Nueva Esperanza project and the Company's existing mineral properties, including the completion of feasibility studies or the making of production decisions in respect thereof. Although the Company believes that the expectations and assumptions on which the forward looking statements are based are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on the forward looking statements because the Company cannot give any assurance that they will prove correct. Since forward looking statements address future events and conditions, they involve inherent assumptions, risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially from those currently anticipated due to a number of assumptions, factors and risks. These assumptions and risks include, but are not limited to, assumptions and risks associated with the ability of the Company to enter into a binding agreement with respect to the proposed acquisition of the Nueva Esperanza project, the completion of other conditions precedent to such acquisition, including the receipt of regulatory approvals, the completion of the Company's due diligence review in relation to the proposed acquisition, the state of equity financing markets and the Company's ability to complete the planned funding to complete the acquisition and undertake its future work programs, and results of future exploration activities by the Company.

Management has provided the above summary of risks and assumptions related to forward looking statements in this press release in order to provide readers with a more comprehensive perspective on the Company's future operations. The Company's actual results, performance or achievement could differ materially from those expressed in, or implied by, these forward looking statements and, accordingly, no assurance can be given that any of the events anticipated by the forward looking statements will transpire or occur, or if any of them do so, what benefits the Company will derive from them. These forward looking statements are made as of the date of this press release, and, other than as required by applicable securities laws, the Company disclaims any intent or obligation to update publicly any forward looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or results or otherwise.

1 JORC (Joint Ore Reserves Committee) standards are not in accordance with National Instrument 43-101 - Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects ("NI 43-101") and all figures quoted in this news release from the 2016 mineral resource estimate should therefore be treated as historical.

2 A qualified person has not done sufficient work to classify the Historical Estimate as current mineral resources or mineral reserves, and TDG is not treating the historical estimate as current mineral resources and reserves. For more information, see Table 1 and the information following Table 1, and Kingsgate's Nueva Esperanza Mineral Resource Update dated on April 13, 2016.

3 A qualified person has not done sufficient work to classify the Historical Estimate as current mineral resources or mineral reserves, and TDG is not treating the historical estimate as current mineral resources and reserves. For more information, see Table 1 and the information following Table 1, and Kingsgate's Nueva Esperanza Mineral Resource Update dated on April 13, 2016.

SOURCE: TDG Gold Corp

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/653627/TDG-Gold-Corp-Signs-LOI-to-Acquire-Advanced-Exploration-Development-Nueva-Esperanza-Silver-Gold-Project-in-the-Maricunga-Belt-Chile--Includes-Historical-MI-Resource-of-686-Million-Ounces-Silver-and-400000-Ounces-Gold


WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Auto giant General Motors Co. (GM) said on Tuesday that it is calling back around 380,000 SUVs in the U.S to correct a suspension problem, which may lead to the vehicles getting swayed at highway speeds.



As per GM, if a loose toe link is present, it can make a vehicle drift on the highway or allow water into the threads on the adjuster. A point to note would be that these SUVs are being recalled for the second time in a row.



The company said that the recall was initiated after the U.S National Highway Traffic Safety Administration started an investigation into the matter in 2020. Under the recall, 2016 Cadillac SRX and 2011 and 2012 models Saab 9-4X SUVs are being recalled.



GM decided on the recall after the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an investigation last year. The recall covers 2010 through 2016 Cadillac SRX and 2011 and 2012 Saab 9-4X SUVs. GM once owned Saab and manufactured its vehicles.



General Motors has revealed in government documents that the rear suspension toe link adjuster may not have been tightened properly in the SUV, which could lead to a loose toe link. The toe link is highly important as it keeps the rear suspension stable and keeps the tires on the ground.



The company has asked car owners to not use their vehicles if they observe certain dashboard warning lights or feel that the steering is not functioning properly. Car dealers will begin replacing the adjustable toe link at company costs and owners will be notified from August 9.



The first time the SUVs were recalled for the same issue was September 2014. Following accidents, which lead to people getting hurt on the highways, the government investigation into this matter was reopened.



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

GENERAL MOTORS-Aktie komplett kostenlos handeln - auf Smartbroker.de
Calgary, Alberta--(Newsfile Corp. - June 29, 2021) - INDVR Brands Inc. (CSE: IDVR) (the "Company" or "INDVR Brands" or "INDVR"), a premier cannabis brand, consolidator and edibles retailer, announces it has published its Financial Statements and MD&A for the three months ended April 30, 2021. The Financial Statements and accompanying MD&A are available on SEDAR.

About INDVR Brands Inc.

INDVR is focused on aggregating and optimizing popular cannabis brands throughout North America. We are committed to the pursuit of becoming a premier, globally recognized "House of Brands," holding a client portfolio of award-winning products with an extensive market footprint. For consumers, INDVR seeks to become the definitive source for unparalleled product selection, a tireless commitment to quality, exceptional craftsmanship and lifestyle. Whatever the occasion, INDVR has an inspired cannabis product tailored to meet every taste. INDVR's management team brings expertise in operations, cannabis cultivation and mergers and acquisitions to support its U.S. expansion through accretive acquisitions and organic growth.

Additional Information

Additional information regarding INDVR is available under INDVR's SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com. This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy securities.

Investor Information

Company Contact:

Scott Koyich,

Investor Relations

Scott@briscocapital.com

Phone: +1 (403) 619-2200

Disclaimer and Forward-Looking Information

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 "anticipate", "could", "intend", "expect", "believe", "will", "projected", "potential", "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 parties' current belief or assumptions as to the outcome and timing of such future events. Actual future results may differ materially. These statements are only predictions. Readers are cautioned that the assumptions used in the preparation of such information, although considered reasonable at the time of preparation, may prove to be imprecise and, as such, undue reliance should not be placed on forward-looking statements. The Company assumes no obligation to update forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by applicable law.

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 the extent any forward-looking information in this press release constitutes "future-oriented financial information" or "financial outlooks" within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities laws, such information is being provided to demonstrate the anticipated product sales of the Company and the reader is cautioned that this information may not be appropriate for any other purpose and the reader should not place undue reliance on such future-oriented financial information and financial outlooks. Future-oriented financial information and financial outlooks, as with forward-looking information generally, are, without limitation, based on the assumptions and subject to the risks set out above under the heading "Disclaimer and Forward-Looking Information".

Cannabis is legal in certain States in the United States ("U.S."), however cannabis remains illegal under U.S. federal laws. INDVR Brands intends to conduct its U.S. cannabis operations in a manner consistent with the applicable State laws and in compliance with regulatory and licensing requirements applicable in the applicable State. However, the readers should be aware that any change in federal guidance on enforcement actions could adversely affect INDVR Brand's ability to access private and public capital required in order to support continuing operations and its ability to operate in the U.S.

Unlike in Canada which has Federal legislation uniformly governing the cultivation, distribution, sale and possession of cannabis under the Cannabis Act (Federal), readers are cautioned that in the U.S., cannabis is largely regulated at the State level. Notwithstanding the permissive regulatory environment of medical cannabis at the State level, cannabis continues to be categorized as a controlled substance under the Controlled Substances Act in the U.S. and as such, cannabis-related practices or activities, including without limitation, the manufacture, importation, possession, use or distribution of cannabis are illegal under U.S. Federal law. Strict compliance with State laws with respect to cannabis will neither absolve INDVR Brands of liability under the U.S. Federal law, nor will it provide a defense to any Federal proceeding, which may be brought against INDVR Brands. Any such proceedings brought against INDVR Brands may materially adversely affect its operations and financial performance in the U.S. market.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/89052
VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / June 29, 2021 / Makara Mining Corp. (CSE:MAKA)(FSE:MK0)(OTC PINK:MAKAF) ('Makara' or the 'Company') is pleased to provide the following updates on its corporate and exploration activities in Canada and the United States.

Financing Update

Since Makara's last press release on March 29, 2021, the Company has been working on exploration planning for the 2021 season and particularly the necessary financing to do the required major exploration work. Makara is in talks with various groups with respect to the financing of drilling work on its large Yukon and Nevada mineral claims.

The Company's focus remains on Gold/Copper porphyry systems which also includes the vein systems found proximal to porphyry centres. Funds raised will mainly be used on core and RC drilling programs with some spend on further soil geochemistry, geological mapping and geophysics.

Yukon Mining Updates

There has been more positive news on the Yukon's Resource Gateway Project, located in the Dawson Range. The Canadian government, in partnership with the Yukon provincial government, recently announced that construction for the new roadway has commenced. The project, which is estimated to cost $469 million, will connect Makara to major transportation networks in the area and will add economic and logistical benefits for the Company. The Yukon Government's announcement comes after careful consideration and consultation with the area's First Nations peoples. The Resource Gateway Project is scheduled to be completed by 2024.

https://yukon.ca/en/doing-business/funding-and-support-business/learn-about-yukon-resource-gateway-project

Adjacent Project Significant Announcements

Companies engaged in mineral exploration adjacent to Makara's land positions in the Yukon and Nevada have also made the following significant announcements:

Yukon

The hyperlinks below discuss exploration and corporate activities by Western Copper and Gold at their large Casino porphyry copper-gold property. Casino is located approximately 10 km to the NW of Makara's Yukon projects.

https://westerncopperandgold.com/news-and-resources/news-release/western-copper-and-gold-announces-positive-pea-on-casino/

https://westerncopperandgold.com/news-and-resources/news-release/western-copper-and-gold-announces-completion-of-c25-6-million-strategic-investment-by-rio-tinto/

Nevada

The hyperlink below discusses exploration activity and past results at the P2 gold/copper property located approximately 4 km to the NW of Makara's Gabbs, Nevada Project.

https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2021/03/12/2191811/0/en/P2-Gold-Files-Technical-Report-on-the-Gabbs-Project-Nevada.html

Qualified Person

Grant Hendrickson, P.Geo., the Company's Chief Executive Officer, is the 'Qualified Person' under National Instrument 43-101 and has approved the scientific and technical information contained in this news release.

About the Company

Makara Mining Corp. (CSE:MAKA)(FSE:MK0)(OTC PINK:MAKAF) is a mineral exploration company focused on the acquisition, exploration and development of gold properties. The Company is based in Vancouver, B.C. and holds options over the Rude Creek Property and Idaho Creek Property located in the Yukon, Davis and Paradise Valley claims located in Nevada. Additional information about the Company is available at www.makaramining.com.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Grant Hendrickson

Director and Chief Executive Officer

Telephone: 604-372-3707

Email: grant@makaramining.com

Forward-Looking Statements

This news release contains certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws. All statements that are not historical facts, including without limitation, statements regarding future estimates, plans, programs, forecasts, projections, objectives, assumptions, expectations or beliefs of future performance, and statements respecting the Company's financing activities and mineral exploration programs, recent developments on the Yukon's Resource Gateway Project and the exploration programs being undertaken by Western Copper and Gold and P2 are 'forward-looking statements'. Forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, including those detailed from time to time in filings made by the Company with securities regulatory authorities, which may cause actual outcomes to differ materially from those discussed in the forward-looking statements. These factors should be considered carefully, and readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements and information contained in this news release are made as of the date hereof and the Company undertakes no obligation to update publicly or revise any forward-looking statements or information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, unless so required by applicable securities laws.

The Canadian Securities Exchange has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of the content of this news release.

SOURCE: Makara Mining Corp

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/653578/Makara-Provides-Updates-on-Financing-and-Nearby-Mineral-Exploration-Activities
Amber Group, a Hong Kong-based crypto trading and technology company, raised $100m in Series B funding at a $1 billion valuation.

Backers included China Renaissance Group, Tiger Brokers, Tiger Global Management, Arena Holdings, Tru Arrow Partners, A&T Capital, Sky9 Capital, DCM Ventures, Gobi Partners, as well as existing investors Pantera Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Blockchain.com, Bit Digital, Digital Finance Group, Fenbushi Capital, Math Wallet, SNZ Capital, Continue Capital, and Mr. Zhao Qingsun.

The company intends to use the funds to continue to expand global operations and develop market solutions for crypto investors and companies.

Founded in 2017 by Michael Wu, CEO, Amber Group is a crypto finance service provider offering clients services including principal algorithmic trading, electronic market-making, high-frequency trading, OTC trading, borrowing and lending, derivatives, and other structured products. Operating 24/7 with a presence in Hong Kong, Taipei, Seoul, and Vancouver, the company services both institutions and individual investors.

Active in the DeFi space as a liquidity provider and trader, the firm currently manages about $1.5 billion in trading capital that varies based on BTC and ETH prices. In early Q3 2020, Amber Group launched their mobile app, Amber App, to deliver an advanced suite of tools to assist users in achieving optimal investment returns on their investments.

Having started as a small team of less than 10 in 2017, the firm now has over 330 employees globally.

FinSMEs

29/06/2021
Cosmo, a Denver CO-based technology design and manufacturing company, raised a pre-seed funding of undisclosed amount.

The backers were not disclosed.



The company intends to use the funds to accelerate development of its suite of family products, expand its team and enhance brand awareness.

Led by Russell York, founder and CEO, Michelle Ross, co-founder and COO, Cosmo provides the JrTrack Kids Smartwatch, a 4G-enabled wearable for kids ages 5-12 years old. Designed and manufactured to deliver all the features available in offerings from prominent telecoms, Cosmo offers the JrTrack Kids Smartwatch starting at just $49.99 with a cancel-anytime subscription.

JrTrack 2 will be available for presale this Summer.

FinSMEs

29/06/2021
Motive.io, a Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada-based immersive training platform for enterprise, raised a seed funding of undisclosed amount.

The round was led by N49P along with several Vancouver-based angel investors.

The company intends to use the funds to accelerate its Engineering, Sales, and Customer Success investments.

Founded in 2015 by Ryan Chapman, CEO, Motive is a provider of immersive training solutions for the enterprise. The platform allows clients and partners to build, deploy, and maintain their own interactive 3D training scenarios on any VR headset or mobile device. The platform allows IT departments to securely host Motive on their own hardware, or via their chosen cloud provider. Learning teams can use the Motive StoryFlow authoring tool to visually build and edit their own high-fidelity immersive scenarios without code or any prior experience.

FinSMEs

29/06/2021
Sanyou Biopharmaceuticals, a Shanghai, China-based antibody drug discovery company, raised a Series B funding round of undisclosed amount.

The round was led by LH Ventures and Montesy Investment, with participation from Grand Mount Capital and Seeking Capital. In conjunction with the funding, Zhiyin Lan, venture partner of LH Ventures, will join the Board of Directors of Sanyou Bio.

The company intends to use the funds to expand operations and its business reach.

Established in 2015 and led by Dr. David (Guojun) Lang, CEO, Sanyou Biopharmaceutical is an antibody drug discovery company that focuses on R&D of innovative antibody drugs. The company has been continuously building a high-throughput integrated R&D platform for innovative antibody drugs, collecting technical resources to establish a large antibody library.

The company has established an integrated R&D platform for innovative antibody drug discovery, provided hundreds of R&D solutions and technical services for innovative antibody drug discovery projects to more than 150 pharmaceutical companies and drug development institutions around the world, and carried out more than 10 collaborative R&D projects with more than 10 partners.

Sanyou Bio has established an integrated innovative antibody drug R&D laboratory of several thousand square meters with advanced facilities in Shanghai Caohejing Hi-Tech Park. There are 10 major functional modules and more than 40 core technological platforms which are characterized by a series of sub-Trillion phage display antibody libraries, covering innovative antibody drug discovery, antibody engineering, in vitro and in vivo efficacy screening, antibody drug developability analysis, construction of cell lines for production, and manufacturing process development, etc.

FinSMEs

29/06/2021
Side, a San Francisco, CA-based real estate technology company that partners agents, teams, and independent brokerages to transform them into boutique brands and businesses, raised $50m in additional funding.

The round, which brought total funding to over $250m and the valuation to $2.5 billion, was led by Tiger Global Management, with participation from Iconiq Capital and D1 Capital Partners.

New funding will accelerate Sides growth for its technology brokerage platform, while setting the stage for a future IPO.

Led by Guy Gal, CEO, Side allows agents, agent teams and independent brokerages to gain ownership of their own boutique brand and business without having to operate as a brokerage. Developed by industry professionals and engineers, the companys white-label technology brokerage platform exclusively markets an agents business to clients while handling all the back-end implementation including marketing and advertising, brand development, system implementation, listing coordination, legal, insurance, office space, and more.

FinSMEs

29/06/2021
Swaarm, a Berlin, Germany-based global performance-based tracking platform for marketers, secured a new seven-figure round of funding of undisclosed amount.

The round was led by new investors STS Ventures and previous investors.

The company intends to use the funds to expand product development and increase its presence in new and existing markets.

Founded in October 2020 and led by David Frei, CEO, Swaarm provides a martech tracking platform that allows agencies, advertisers and networks to measure, optimize, and automate their marketing efforts at scale. Clients from around the globe including Apptrust (Poland), Adcrate (SEA), GoWithMedia (Israel) and ZinkAds (India) use Swaarm to simplify campaigns and accelerate business growth.

FinSMEs

29/06/2021
Rachel Bentley and Carly Nance

The Citizenry, a Dallas TX-based direct to consumer home decor brand that partners with artisans, raised $20M in Series B funding.

The round was led by NextWorld Evergreen.



The company will use the capital to accelerate its evolution into a whole-home, omnichannel brand, accelerate expansion of its furniture collection, and invest in additional sales channels, including physical retail.





Led by Rachel Bentley and Carly Nance, The Citizenry is a direct to consumer home decor brand that partners with artisans and manufacturers to create exclusive collections of home goods. Since closing its Series A in December 2019, the company has grown sales over 200% with repeat customers driving 45% of sales. Over the same period, it has supported over 3,000 artisan jobs, 58% of which were held by women.

The Citizenry has a flagship store in Soho, which opened in late 2020.

FinSMEs

30/06/2021
Tampa, FL (33646)

Today

Mostly cloudy early with thunderstorms developing later in the day. High 91F. Winds E at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%..

Tonight

Thunderstorms likely in the evening. Then a chance of scattered thunderstorms later on. Low 73F. Winds E at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%.
Last year, the government introduced Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) Schemes for Mobile Manufacturing and Large Scale Electronics Manufacturing that provides incentive of 6% to 4% on incremental sales of goods under target segments that are manufactured in India, for a period of five years. Yesterday, Union Finance & Corporate Affairs Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced that this scheme for a period of 2020-21 till 2024-25 has been extended by one year i.e. till 2025-26.

Even though incentives were applicable from August 1st 2020, companies have been unable to achieve incremental sales condition due to- disruption in production activities due to pandemic related lockdowns; restrictions on movement of personnel; delay in installation of relocated plant and machinery; and disruption in supply chain of components. Hence, the extension.

Participating companies will get the option of choosing any five years for meeting their production targets under the scheme. Investments made in 2020-21 will continue to be counted as eligible investments.

Earlier this year, the government announced that the scheme has received a very encouraging response. 16 applications were approved under the first round of the scheme (5 companies under Global Champions Category, 5 companies under Domestic Champions Category and 6 companies under the Electronic Components category) with an incentive outlay of INR 36,440 crore.

It also said that for the quarter ending December 2020, in the first 5 months of scheme operation and despite challenging times, the applicant companies have produced goods worth ~INR 35,000 crore and invested about INR 1,300 crore under the scheme. It also generated around 22,000 jobs.

Regarding the PLI extension, Rajesh Agrawal, Director, Micromax (Bhagwati Pvt. Ltd), said:

The governments decision to extend the PLI scheme for mobile phone manufacturing by a year offers a much-needed respite to the manufacturing industry that is reeling under the impact of the pandemic. This is a welcome move and will allow for more flexibility wherein we can now choose the years for meeting our production targets. Overall, it is a forward-thinking decision by the government to re-think business and scalability in these uncertain times that reiterates the governments support for the manufacturing industry.
Worse than ever before

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These are some of the illegal fireworks confiscated by investigators in San Bernardino County recently. (Contributed photo by San Bernardino County Fire Department)
MOBILE, ALA. (WALA)- A local Vietnam hero honored fifty years after paying the ultimate sacrifice for our country.

A solemn moment as a eulogy, taps and a 21-gun salute for Army Staff Sergeant Willie James, Jr. were given in front of his family Monday.

Sgt. James was among two others, killed in combat on June 28, 1971 in Vietnam. He and other members of C Company 2nd Battalion, 8th Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division were defending a resupply depot against Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army. Sgt. James was just 28 years old.

The Mobile hero's youngest brother, David James, was thankful his brother's legacy lives on.

James said, "He believed in America and he fought hard for his nation and his unit and we're just grateful to have a chance to honor him and we still miss him but this will let us know somebody else is remembering him as well."

Ceremonies in memory of the other two soldiers who died alongside Sgt. James, were held in Illinois and Clearwater, Florida Monday, too.
HART, GA (FOX Carolina)- The Hart County Sheriff's Office says that one person died and two people, including a nine year old child, were injured during a wreck at Hartwell Speedway
Keep the conversation about local news & events going by joining us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Recent updates from The News-Post and also from News-Post staff members are compiled below.
SCHOFIELD BARRACKS, HawaiiSoldiers from across the region competed in the U.S. Ar
Nona Elizabeth (Bridgman) Shell was born October 13, 1934 to Joe Wheeler Bridgeman and Lillie Leo Fergesen in Thackerville, OK. She had four siblings: Barbara, Bonnie, Larry, and Linda. Nona moved to Gainesville, TX at age 17 where she met the love of her life, F.D. (Boady) Shell. They were 
Galveston, TX (77553)

Today

Thunderstorms likely in the morning. Then a chance of scattered thunderstorms in the afternoon. High 86F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%..

Tonight

Scattered thunderstorms in the evening, then mainly cloudy overnight with thunderstorms likely. Low 79F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%.
Chris Avellone, a prolific game writer known for work on games like Fallout: New Vegas and Tyranny, has accused multiple people, including 100 unknown parties, of libel over allegations of sexual harassment made against Avellone last year.

That libel lawsuit and two Medium posts published by Avellone over the last few days mark his first significant comments on the multiple accusations of sexual misconduct made against him in June 2020.

Within those posts, found here and here, he argues that the libel lawsuit against Karissa Barrows, Kelly Bristol, and 100 unknown parties aims to elevate their voices rather than silence them, and maintains his earlier comments that the duo's remarks are retaliation for a "bad break up" with Barrows' and Bristol's friend seven years prior.

"Often, the legal system is used to silence others. I do not believe any good ever comes of this," writes Avellone, both in his Ending Silence blog and in a Twitter thread. "I do not want to silence anyone  I want the opposite. I want Karissas and Kellys story to be not only heard, but elevated, and I want them to speak more about what happened."

The language in the lawsuit takes a noticeably more abrasive approach, with each of the six libel complaints ending in a variation of a request for "an award of punitive damages in an amount appropriate to punish or set an example of [Barrows/Bristol] in an amount to be determined at trial."

In the complaint, found here, attornies representing Avellone outline the events they believe constitute libel. That includes six charges in total, four against Barrows and two against Bristol. All six apply to those 100 unknown parties, represented within the document as "Does 1-100", which is meant to represent individuals whose "true names are unknown to Avellone. Avellone will seek to leave to amend this complaint to allege the true names and capacities of these Defendants when they have been ascertained."

As with Avellone's Medium posts, the lawsuit walks through his 2012 interactions with Barrows from his perspective, and makes a point to argue throughout that what Barrows described as coercion and sexual assault was a consensual encounter that ended when Barrows objected and led to a "friendly relationship" in the years that followed.

Barrows original allegations against Avellone can be found here for context. Her account describes an encounter where Avellone "got me blackout drunk on Midori Sours," accompanied her back to her room along with two other men, "where he pounced in front of the other guys." She also adds that she witnessed a similar pattern to Avellone's interactions with other women throughout the time they knew one another.

Each of the individual libel counts levied against Barrows centers around how she shared her recollection of events on social media in 2020. All emphasize sections of her social media posts where she described Avellone as a predator or described actions as predatory behavior including the following Tweets (with emphasis added by Avellone's legal team).

ZERO interest in anything from a man who spent so much time preying on young women (no age check), getting them drunk & taking them to hotel rooms, showing up to panels late & wasted if at all, & treating fans/fellow industry SO badly, he was blacklisted from at least 1 big con[vention].

While were at it, heres another man to add to the gaming industry predator garbage pile. Yesterday was the fist time I said something publicly about this, and Im done being silent, despite that fuckstick in the reply telling me to shut up. I WILL NOT. Thread:

I didnt bother blowing this up until today due to work being insane all week, but Ive got time now. Chris Avellone is an abusive, abrasive, conniving sexual predator. People tried to get him help. He refused it and continued. Stop glorifying him.

For each, the lawsuit argues that the statements made by Barrows are false and "libelous on their face", that each implies Avellone purposely gets young women intoxicated with the intent of engaging in non-consensual sexual contact, and that Barrows "failed to use reasonable care to determine the truth or falsity" of her tweeted recollections. Each also includes the note that Barrows' accusations expose him to "hatred, contempt, ridicule" and professional harm, and that the statements were made "with the intent to vex, annoy, and/or harass Avellone."

Much of the same language is used to rebuke Bristol's claims against Avellone. Her own accusations say that Avellone groped her and made unwanted advances at her a 2014 event, and that "He [Avellone] knew exactly what he was doing. You didnt see it because he was just that practiced at it." Most of the lawsuit (and Avellone's Medium posts) focus on comments from Barrows. In that post, Avellone notes this is because he doesn't remember ever having met or spoken with Bristol.

As noted above, the lawsuit seeks damages from those named as defendants, including damages for emotional distress and to cover the cost of the lawsuit.

However, as game industry-watching lawyers have suggested on Twitter, Avellone's lawsuit could easily fall under the SLAPP, or Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, umbrella. That term largely refers to lawsuits filed with the intent of using legal pressure and costs to silence individuals that speak out on certain controversial topics (like sexual misconduct allegations in this case).
Earlier today Sony announced it had acquired Returnal developer Housemarque with a fairly standard press release on Business Wire and an equally unassuming post on the PlayStation Blog that were funneled like thick buttercream through the social media piping bag.

Although the news itself was fairly weighty, everything about the announcement was seemingly by the book -- except, that wasn't the case everywhere.

Over on the official PlayStation Japan Twitter account, somebody pushed out the announcement with an image that indicated Sony was welcoming Demon's Souls developer Bluepoint Games into the PlayStation Studios fold -- not as folks in other regions were being told, Housemarque.

Curiously, aside from the names on the image (pasted below) being completely different, the picture uploaded by PlayStation Japan also incorporated a Demon's Souls knight alongside the protagonist of Housemarque's Returnal. The official Housemarque announcement that went out later features a similar backdrop, but notably without the knight.

The seemingly premature announcement was documented by prolific video game tweeter Nibel, who managed to verify the original (and now-deleted) PlayStation Japan tweet using Tweetdeck.

We've reached out to Sony for comment on the matter and will update this article as soon as we hear back.




[This unedited press release is made available courtesy of Gamasutra and its partnership with notable game PR-related resource Games Press.]

At Zerouno Games and Whacky Squad Studio we are eager to introduce you Hell of Men: Blood Brothers, a real-time strategy (RTS) game that prioritizes the optimization of resources over the quantity of resources in a story that puts us in the aftermath of the 3rd World War.



With a story of 8 chapters that narrates times of crisis, Russia breaks diplomatic relations and invades Ukraine before the inoperative eyes of the United Nations. And while Europe seems about to explode, Belarus, Russia's next target, organizes itself to defend and protect its sovereignty.



Enjoy Hell of Men: Blood Brothers today, Tuesday June 29th on PC /Steam at a price of 19,99.





Hell of Men: Blood Brothers

In Hell of Men: Blood Brothers you will have to collect resources to expand your base and form your platoon. Your base will offer you a large choice of buildings and units, each unit has its strengths and weaknesses. Scattered around the world, you will find strategic points that you will have to capture to make vehicles spawn. You must then assign soldiers to use them.



Features An interesting and unique story!

Small-scale combat. Optimize your infantry platoon.

Strategic combat with a cover system for infantry.

5 factions each with special units and bonuses.

A large choice of infantry and drone units.

4 resources with 3 different types of collection.

Colorful environments.

A modern war context.

Hell of Men: Blood Brothers is developed by one person (Whacky Squad Studio) and suported and published by Zerouno Games.



We love to get constructive feedback on the game, what you like and what you would like to improve. Contact us at info(@)zerounogames.com if you want a review code!
Neither side got everything they wanted in this deal, and thats what it means to compromise. And it reflects something important: It reflects consensus. The heart of democracy requires consensus, Biden said, according to The New York Times.

Most of us who dont work in politics also recognize that as life, or what the kids sometimes call adulting.

Unfortunately, what the president gave in one moment, he appeared to take away in the next.

If this is the only thing that comes to me, Im not signing it, he said.

Biden promised that he wouldnt sign the infrastructure bill unless a far more divisive part of his economic agenda was passed in tandem.

Then, Saturday, the president gave us another twist, saying he would stay true to the promise to support the infrastructure deal.

The bottom line is this: I gave my word to support the Infrastructure Plan, and thats what I intend to do. I intend to pursue the passage of that plan, which Democrats and Republicans agreed to on Thursday, with vigor, he said, according to The Wall Street Journal.
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Albany pools

Albanys outdoor leisure pool, the Cool Pool at Swanson Park, reopened June 19 after being closed through the 2020 season and has also struggled with hiring enough lifeguards.

Scott Jackson, Aquatics Program Coordinator for Albany Parks & Recreation, said although COVID-19 restrictions are easing, Albanys Cool Pool will likely continue limiting the number of swimmers for its 90-minute recreation swim sessions to just 100.

The issue at this point is not a capacity limit due to COVID restrictions, Jackson said. The issue now is one of staffing. Though capacity limits due to COVID are lifted, we are still limited to 40 patrons for each lifeguard on surveillance duty. In order to increase our capacities, we have to increase staffing levels  which is difficult this year.

Jackson said the lifeguard shortage is a nationwide problem.

When COVID came along and pools were shut down, or opened with limited capacity, many of the lifeguards found other employment. Add to that that we were unable to train/hire new lifeguards for a year. Add to that the fact that we lose people each year to leaving for school or graduating and getting a job with their degree. Put all these factors together and we get a shortage, he said.
Salem was the hottest of those cities at 113 degrees. And it broke its all-time record again by hitting 117 degrees on Monday. The Portland airport set an all-time record for the third day in a row on Monday when it hit 115 degrees, according to the National Weather Service.

Thats why weve been calling this a historic heat wave. The duration of it also is quite extreme, said Tyler Kranz, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Portland.

ONeill cited a 110 degree reading from Sunday at Oregon State Universitys Hyslop Research Farm, about halfway between Albany and Corvallis on Highway 20, for the all-time record for the area. The National Weather Service doesnt have an official weather monitoring station for the Corvallis and Albany areas, but the Oregon Climate Service at OSU, which ONeill leads, generally has used Hyslop as its preferred site.

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The temperature also reached 109 degrees at Hyslop Research Farm on Monday, which also would have been a sort of record, ONeill said.
They had an opportunity to really engage, Thompson said of Republicans who voted against the bipartisan commission. And they didn't. So they can't now come back and say, Oh, thats not fair.'"

Many Republicans have expressed concerns about a partisan probe, since majority Democrats are likely to investigate Trumps role in the siege and the right-wing groups that participated in it. Almost three dozen House Republicans voted last month for the legislation to create an independent commission, which would have had an even partisan split among members. Seven Republicans in the Senate have also supported moving forward on that bill, but that was short of the 10 Senate Republicans who would be necessary to pass it.

Many Republicans have made clear that they want to move on from the Jan. 6 attack and Trump's role in it. But others have gone even further, with Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia suggesting video of the rioters looked like a tourist visit and Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona insisting that a Trump supporter named Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed that day while trying to break into the House chamber, was executed. Others have defended the rioters as they have been charged with federal crimes.
Gillette, WY (82718)

Today

Partly cloudy skies. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 64F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph..

Tonight

Partly cloudy skies. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 64F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph.
Toronto, Canada, June 28, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Canadas commercial real estate industry, represented by REALPAC, BOMA and NAIOP, is calling on the Government of Canada to enhance the Canada Emergency Rent Subsidy (CERS) program. The industry, which combined with residential real estate, is the largest contributor to Canadas economy by GDP, suggests a series of changes it believes are essential for the Canadian business communitys reopening.

The commercial real estate industry across Canada appreciates the federal governments efforts to support businesses during these challenging times. Tenants and landlords welcomed moves to improve the Canada Emergency Commercial Rent Assistance (CECRA) program with the subsequent CERS program. However, CERS in its current form is failing in its aim to get benefits out to the maximum number of impacted businesses, despite many property owners and managers actively working with tenants to ensure program benefits are promoted and properly accessed. Despite similar eligibility criteria, the popular Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS) program has helped 447,750 businesses, while CERS has helped less than half that number: 192,560 unique applicants with approved claims.

In a jointly signed letter to the Ministry of Finance, REALPAC (the Real Property Association of Canada), a coalition of affiliate chapters of the Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA), and the National Association of Industrial and Office Properties (NAIOP) Canada have requested that the Government of Canada continue to support tenants by reviewing the CERS program and consider its seven main suggested improvements:

Increase business education supports to allow businesses who have not yet applied to assess their eligibility,

Allow businesses who cannot pay 100% of rent as a condition of receiving their CERS grant to, at the landlords option, only pay the amount they received in rent subsidy,

Allow landlords the ability to, at their discretion, defer or abate rent after the September 27, 2020 effective date of the program without impacting tenants CERS benefits received (i.e., calculate CERS benefits on rents in place at the effective date of the program),

Grant support for new businesses that do not have qualifying period sales comparisons,

Increase the allowable expense limit for multi-location entities from $300,000 in eligible expenses to $1.8 million in eligible expenses,

Allow lockdown support to businesses with more than one location, irrespective of the number of locations of the tenant, and

Make all these changes retroactive to the effective date of the program.

The space from which a business operates is a key component of its successful operations. For many businesses, their lease is one of their largest expenses. In this context, landlords and tenants rely on each other as partners in a collective business. This reality has never been as apparent as it is now.

Throughout the pandemic and the public health orders, tenants and landlords across Canada have been working together on accessing and advising on government support programs. However, the role of the federal government as a policy partner is of paramount importance. A commitment to the review of CERS as a support tool would be welcomed by businesses across Canada. With the pandemic having lasted over 15 months, the impact of lengthy closures/restrictions have pushed businesses to the edge, with increased unpaid obligations (such as rent and other costs). This points to the importance of supporting Canadian business by implementing changes to CERS program eligibility, applied retroactively, to best support their chances for survival.

REALPAC, BOMA and NAIOP commercial real estate members are developers, owners, managers, and service providers active in the retail, office, industrial, and investment properties of every community in Canada. Their members have tenants in every industry of the Canadian economy. Considering the continued pressure on Canadian business, particularly on the small business community, we encourage the Government of Canada to review CERS and commit to an extended period of rent support.
DALLAS, June 28, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Highland Income Fund (NYSE:HFRO) (HFRO), a closed-end investment company managed by Highland Capital Management Fund Advisors, L.P. (the Adviser), announced an update in the case against Credit Suisse, AG, Cayman Islands Branch, and Credit Suisse Securities (USA), LLC (Credit Suisse).

The 134th Judicial District Court (the Court) issued a judgment today against Credit Suisse, awarding $121 million to Claymore Holdings LLC (Claymore), the entity formed to pursue the collective claims on behalf of HFRO and the NexPoint Strategic Opportunities Fund (NYSE:NHF)(NHF) (together the Funds).

The Court entered todays judgment on remanda result of the Texas Supreme Courts April 2020 ruling, which upheld the prior findings that Credit Suisse committed fraud but remanded the case to the trial court to enter a new damages award.

Credit Suisse has thirty days to file for appeal of the judgment, which they are expected to do. The matter will then go to the Dallas Court of Appeals, where Claymore was successful against Credit Suisse in the last round of appeals.

The total aggregate award, which stands at $121 million today, consists of damages and prejudgment interest. The award will continue to accrue interest until the appeals process is exhausted. Any final judgment amount would be reduced by attorney fees and other litigation-related expenses. The net proceeds would then be allocated to the Funds based on respective damages (approximately 82% to HFRO and 18% to NHF). As legal proceedings are ongoing and all recoveries remain contingent, no award amount has been recorded in the Funds net asset values at this time.

The Adviser is encouraged by todays order and pleased to see the lengthy process advance toward a conclusion that recognizes the harm caused to the Funds and their investors.

Background on the Case

The case was originally filed in 2013. Following a bench trial and jury trial, the Court issued its original judgment in favor of Claymore in 2015, which was confirmed by an appellate court in 2018. An appeal of that ruling sent the case to the Texas Supreme Court, which heard the case on January 8, 2020.

On April 24, 2020, the Texas Supreme Court issued an order that affirmed in part and reversed in part the 2018 ruling from the court of appeals. In the April 2020 order, the court upheld the $40 million fraud verdict that resulted from the jury trial; however, it did not uphold the contract damages and equitable relief awarded to Claymore by the trial court following the bench trial.

In its opinion, the Texas Supreme Court noted procedural issues related to the calculation of damages among the reasons for reversing part of the appellate court ruling. It remanded the case to the trial court to determine the appropriate damages calculations and enter a new damages award, resulting in todays judgment.

The case is Claymore Holdings LLC v. Credit Suisse AG, Cayman Islands Branch et al., case number DC-13-07858, in the 134th District Court in Dallas County, Texas.

About the Highland Income Fund

The Highland Income Fund (NYSE:HFRO) is a closed-end fund managed by Highland Capital Management Fund Advisors, L.P.

For more information visit www.highlandfunds.com/income-fund/

About Highland Capital Management Fund Advisors, L.P.

Highland Capital Management Fund Advisors, L.P. is an SEC-registered investment adviser. It is the adviser to a suite of registered funds, including open-end mutual funds, closed-end funds, and an exchange-traded fund.

For more information visit www.highlandfunds.com.

Contacts

Shareholders: (800) 357-9167

Financial Professionals: (833) 697-7253

Media: (214) 550-4572

---

This press release contains forward-looking statements. These statements reflect the current views of management with respect to future events and financial performance. Forward-looking statements can be identified by words such as anticipate, expect, could, may, potential, will, ability, targets, believe, likely, assumes, ensuring, available, optionality, viability, maintain, consistent, pace, should, emerging, driving, looking to, and similar statements of a future or forward-looking nature. Forward-looking statements address matters that involve risks and uncertainties.
NEW ORLEANS, June 28, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- ClaimsFiler, a FREE shareholder information service, reminds investors of pending deadlines in the following securities class action lawsuits:

Ubiquiti Inc. (UI)

Class Period: 1/11/2021 - 3/30/2021

Lead Plaintiff Motion Deadline: July 19, 2021

SECURITIES FRAUD

To learn more, visit https://www.claimsfiler.com/cases/view-ubiquiti-inc-securities-litigation

RLX Technology Inc. (RLX)

Class Period: Shares issued in connection with the January 2021 initial public stock offering

Lead Plaintiff Motion Deadline: August 9, 2021

MISLEADING PROSPECTUS

To learn more, visit https://www.claimsfiler.com/cases/view-rlx-technology-inc-american-depositary-shares-securities-litigation

If you purchased shares of the above companies and would like to discuss your legal rights and your right to recover for your economic loss, you may, without obligation or cost to you, contact us toll-free (844) 367-9658 or visit the case links above.

If you wish to serve as a Lead Plaintiff in the class action, you must petition the Court on or before the Lead Plaintiff Motion deadline.

About ClaimsFiler

ClaimsFiler has a single mission: to serve as the information source to help retail investors recover their share of billions of dollars from securities class action settlements. At ClaimsFiler.com, investors can: (1) register for free to gain access to information and settlement websites for various securities class action cases so they can timely submit their own claims; (2) upload their portfolio transactional data to be notified about relevant securities cases in which they may have a financial interest; and (3) submit inquiries to the Kahn Swick & Foti, LLC law firm for free case evaluations.

To learn more about ClaimsFiler, visit www.claimsfiler.com
Portland, OR, June 28, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- According to the report published by Allied Market Research, the India nano silver market was estimated at $61.6 million in 2019 and is expected to hit $208.2 million by 2027, registering a CAGR of 21.3% from 2020 to 2027. The report provides a detailed analysis of the top investment pockets, top winning strategies, drivers & opportunities, market size & estimations, competitive landscape, and evolving market trends.

Increase in demand for nano silver from various antimicrobial applications in end use industries and rapid growth of the electronics and pharmaceutical sectors in the province drive the growth of the India nano silver market. On the other hand, rise in concerns over environmental impact and toxicity nano silver products impede the growth to some extent. However, growth in awareness and trend toward biological synthesis method is expected to be beneficial for the market growth.

Download Sample PDF (96 Pages PDF with Insights): https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/request-sample/11709

COVID-19 scenario-

The outbreak of the pandemic led to declined demand for nano silver in India, owing to suspended manufacturing units, industrial activities, and disrupted supply chain management.

The suspended operations in the end using sectors including equipment, electronics equipment and others affected the market sales to certain extent.

India has been one among the most hit nations by the second wave of covid-19. This has further created several challenges for the market. However, as the nation has started recovering and the regulations are getting eased off, the industry is expected to recoup soon.

The India nano silver market is analyzed across method of synthesis and end user. Based on method of synthesis, the chemical reduction segment accounted for more than half of the total market share in 2019, and is expected to rule the roost by 2027. The biological segment, on the other hand, would cite the fastest CAGR 22.7% during the forecast period.

Request the Covid19 Impact Analysis @ https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/request-for-customization/11709?reqfor=covid

By end-user, the electrical and electronics segment held the major share in 2019, accounting for more than one-fourth of the market. The segment is expected to lead the trail throughout the forecast period. However, the pharmaceuticals segment would also cite the fastest CAGR of 22.3% by the end of 2027.

The key market players analyzed in the India nano silver market report include Merck KGaA, Mincometsal, Nanochemazone, Inc., Nanocomposix, Nano Labs, Nanoshel LLC, Reinste Nanoventures Pvt. Ltd, The key players operating in the India nano silver market are American Elements, Filo Lifesciences Pvt. Ltd, and Sisco Research Laboratories Pvt. Ltd.

Interested in Procuring this Report? Visit Here: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/india-nano-silver-market/purchase-options

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English Lithuanian

On the initiative and following the resolution of the Board of Panevezio statybos trestas AB, the Extraordinary General Meeting of Shareholders of Panevezio statybos trestas AB (address of registered office P. Puzino Str. 1, Panevezys, company code 147732969) is convened on 29 July 2021.

The place of the meeting shall be Panevezio statybos trestas AB at P. Puzino Str. 1, Panevezys.

The beginning of the meeting shall be at 10:00 (registration shall start at 9:30).

The accounting day shall be 22 July 2021 (only the persons who are on the shareholder list of the company at the end of the accounting day of the Extraordinary General Meeting of Shareholders, or the persons who are proxies for them, or the persons with whom an agreement on the transfer of voting rights is concluded, have the right to participate and vote at the Extraordinary General Meeting of Shareholders).

The Agenda of the Meeting shall be as follows:

Selection of an audit company and pricing of audit services.





The company shall not provide any possibilities to participate and vote at the meeting using any means of electronic communications.

Draft resolutions on the items of the agenda, any documents to be presented to the Extraordinary General Meeting of Shareholders and any information related to realisation of the shareholders rights shall be published on the website of the company at www.pst.lt under the menu item Investor Relations not later than 21 days before the meeting date. The shareholders shall also be granted access to the information thereof at the secretarys office at the headquarters of the company (P. Puzino Str. 1, Panevezys) from 7:30 till 16:30. The telephone number for inquiries: (+370 45) 505 508.

The shareholders who hold shares carrying at least 1/20 of all votes may propose additional items to be included in the agenda and present a draft resolution of the Extraordinary General Meeting of Shareholders for each proposed additional agenda item or, in case no resolution has to be adopted, give an explanation. Any proposals for additional items of the agenda shall be submitted in writing or by e-mail. The proposals in writing are to be delivered to the secretarys office at or sent by registered mail to the following address: Panevezio statybos trestas AB, P. Puzino Str. 1, LT- 35173, Panevezys. The proposals by e-mail are to be sent to the following e-mail address pst@pst.lt .

Any proposals for additional items of the agenda may be presented by 16:00 on 15 July 2021. In the event new items are added to the meeting agenda, not later than 10 days before the meeting date the company shall inform about the additions thereof using the same means as have been used for convening the meeting.

The shareholders who hold shares carrying at least 1/20 of all votes may propose new draft resolutions on the items that are on or to be included in the agenda, additional candidates for the members of the company bodies and the audit company. The proposals thereof may be presented in writing or by e-mail.

The proposals in writing may be delivered (on work days) to the secretarys office in the company or sent by registered mail to Panevezio statybos trestas AB, at P. Puzino Str. 1, LT- 35173, Panevezys by 10:00 on 29 July 2021. The proposals presented in writing shall be discussed during the meeting provided they have been received at the company before 9:00 on the meeting day (29 July 2021). Any proposals in writing may be presented during the meeting after the chairman of the meeting reads the agenda out but not later that the meeting starts working on the agenda items.

Any proposals delivered by e-mail are to be sent to pst@pst.lt . The proposals received at the e-mail address thereof by 10:00 on 29 July 2021 shall be discussed during the meeting.

The shareholders are entitled to present their questions related to the agenda items to the company in advance. The questions may be sent by the shareholders by e-mail to pst@pst.lt not later than 3 work days before the meeting date. The company shall answer the questions thereof by e-mail before the meeting. The company shall not deliver the answer to any question of the shareholders in person provided the relevant information is published on the website of the company at http://www.pst.lt .

When registering to participate at the meeting, the shareholders or their proxies shall present a document which is a proof of their personal identity. The proxies to the shareholders are to present their proxies certified following a prescribed procedure. The proxy issued by a legal person has to be certified by a Notary Public. The proxy issued in a foreign country has to be translated into Lithuanian and legalised following the procedure prescribed by law. The proxy may be given the authority by more than one shareholder and vote in a different manner based on the instructions given by each shareholder. The company has no special form for the proxy.

Using the means of electronic communications, the shareholder may authorize some other natural or legal person to participate and vote at the meeting on behalf of the shareholder. Such proxy requires no certification by a Notary Public. The proxy issued by the means of electronic communications is to be certified by the electronic signature of the shareholder created using any safe electronic signature software and attested by the qualified certificate valid in the Republic of Lithuania. Both the proxy and the notification are to be in writing. The shareholder shall notify the company about the proxy issued by the means of electronic communications by e-mail to pst@pst.lt not later than at 16:00 on the last work day before the meeting date. The electronic signature shall be affixed on the proxy and the notification and not on the letter sent by e-mail. When sending the notification to the company, the shareholder shall refer to the internet address to be used for the purpose of free downloading of electronic signature verification software. In case the shares hold by the shareholder are kept on a few securities accounts, the shareholder may authorise separate proxies to participate and vote at the Extraordinary General Meeting of Shareholders in accordance with the rights carried by the shares kept in each securities account. In that case any instructions given by the shareholder shall be valid only for one Extraordinary General Meeting of Shareholders.

The shareholder who holds the shares of the company acquired in his name, however for the interests of other persons, before voting at the Extraordinary General Meeting of Shareholders shall disclose to the company the identity of the end client, the number of voting shares and the content of given voting instructions or any other explanation related to the participation and voting at the Extraordinary General Meeting of Shareholders agreed with the client. The shareholder may vote in a different manner using one part of his shares carrying votes and the other part of shares carrying votes.

The shareholder or his proxy may vote in advance in writing by filling in the general ballot paper. Not later than 21 days before the meeting date the form of the general ballot paper shall be published on the website of the company at http://www.pst.lt under the menu item Investors Relations. In case the shareholder submits a written request, not later than 10 days before the meeting date the company shall send a general ballot paper by registered mail or deliver it in person against signature. The filled in general ballot paper is to be signed by the shareholder or his proxy. In case the general ballot paper is signed by the proxy, the document validating the voting right shall be attached to it. The filled in general ballot paper with the attached documents (if applicable) shall be delivered to the company by registered mail at Panevezio statybos trestas AB, P. Puzino Str. 1, LT-35173, Panevezys, to the secretarys office not later than the last work day before the meeting date.

The following information and documents shall be published on the website of the company at http://www.pst.lt under the menu item Investors Relations throughout the entire period starting not later than 21 days before the meeting date:

the notice of convening the meeting;

the total number of company shares and the number of voting shares as of the date of convening the meeting;

draft resolutions on the items of the agenda and any other documents to be presented to the meeting;

the form of a general ballot paper.



For more information contact:

Egidijus Urbonas

Managing Director

Panevezio statybos trestas AB

Phone: (+370 45) 505 503
Pune, India, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --



The global hydrogen generation market size is poised to expand at substantial CAGR during the forecast timeline due to the rising environmental concerns associated with the use of fuels with sulfur content. With the augmenting demand for crude oil, the initiation of refurbishment of refineries across the region is set to generate significant growth opportunities. Hydrogen power generation appears to be a silver bullet addressing the problem of global warming owing to its potential for near-zero GHG emissions.

With governments worldwide implementing policies to encourage the adoption of green energy, the hydrogen generation industry appears to be a promising area. R&D initiatives are making considerable strides in the recent times, backed by growing investments toward carbon negative solutions.

The following seven prominent factors are driving the hydrogen generation market forecast:

Preference for electrolysis process across North America

In terms of methods used for hydrogen production, electrolysis is witnessing a surge in deployment rate since the past few years in North America. The growing inclination toward obtaining greener fuel from hydrogen is responsible for this trend. With preference for hydrogen production from renewable resources rising, there is an increasing demand for this method. Data centers, aviation and logistics industries are some of the leading consumers of fuel from hydrogen.

North America hydrogen generation market share from electrolysis segment is slated to see an upsurge through 2026. Advantageous tax credit policies as well as duty exemption schemes of the regional governments are encouraging expansion.

Access sample pages of the report, North America Hydrogen Generation Market Forecasts 2026 in detail along with the table of contents (ToC) @

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Ongoing prototype projects across Canada

With the growing awareness regarding what is green hydrogen and its advantages, the Canadian government is encouraging this alternative. Numerous manufacturing facilities, spiraling demand for electricity, and ongoing proliferation of chemical, power, and automotive industries is setting the tone for growth. North America hydrogen generation market is progressing on account of the ongoing prototype projects coupled with the advancements in Canadian refining sector.

Growing consumption across Asian buildings

Hydrogen is gaining popularity as a buzzword in the real estate industry in Asia. The rising consumption of hydrogen-based fuel across the residential and commercial buildings in the region will power APAC industry outlook.

For instance, recently in May 2021, Toyota announced its collaboration with Japanese petroleum company ENEOS for developing a hydrogen fuel cell system to power its Woven City, a prototype of the city of the future. The collaboration marks a prominent move toward a hydrogen-based society, wherein the two firms are expected to assess the viability of a fully carbon-free supply chain right from production to usage.

Rising adoption by small scale industries in Asia

Asia Pacific hydrogen generation market size is set to grow significantly through the forecast timeframe, promoted by the growing adoption of renewables. Small scale industries are particularly leveraging the benefits of convenient storage and distribution offered by hydrogen. The ongoing R&D activities aimed at developing advanced industrial hydrogen generators are adding impetus to product adoption.

APAC market trends are seeing a move toward the adoption of industrial hydrogen generators. Offering superior hydrogen purity, several industrial hydrogen generator manufacturers are fulfilling the need for uninterrupted supply, fully integrated backup systems, compact designs, and easy maintenance.

Access sample pages of the report, Asia Pacific Hydrogen Generation Market Forecasts 2026 in detail along with the table of contents (ToC) @

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Growing LNG imports in China

The outbreak of the novel coronavirus marks a major disturbance in the global economy and trade as production as well as consumption are scaled down worldwide. China hydrogen generation market share is expected to exhibit a rising curve through the forecast timeframe, owing to the strong support from the regional government in these challenging times.

As per the records of the International Energy Agency (IEA), China ranks as the largest LNG importer with substantial potential for hydrogen projects. Robust industrialization alongside growing population rate is generating spiraling demand for electricity. With chemical, semiconductors, and automotive industries seeing expansion, Asia Pacific industry forecast is likely to register rising adoption.

Stream reformer process to see uptick in Europe

On account of the abundance of traditional fuels, stream reformer process (SMR) is expected to witness a rising deployment across Europe. The advantages accompanying this process include minimal operational costs and prevention of carbon deposition. Stream reformers can prevent carbon deposition over the catalyst. They are gaining acclaim across central oil plants and gas refineries due to their wide-ranging applications.

Access sample pages of the report, Europe Hydrogen Generation Market Forecasts 2026 in detail along with the table of contents (ToC) @

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Changing compliance demands across Europe

The announcement of new standards as per the recent Environment & Climate Change Law 2020 has reemphasized the need to limit emissions in Europe. Technological innovations for realizing a carbon-free future is paving the way for Europe industry expansion . Economic viability of advanced hydrogen generators is likely to accelerate the move toward sustainable, reliable, and efficient energy supply through 2026.

About Graphical Research:

Graphical Research is a business research firm that provides industry insights, market forecast and strategic inputs through granular research reports and advisory services. We publish targeted research reports with an aim to address varied customer needs, from market penetration and entry strategies to portfolio management and strategic outlook. We understand that business requirements are unique: our syndicate reports are designed to ensure relevance for industry participants across the value chain. We also provide custom reports that are tailored to the exact needs of the customer, with dedicated analyst support across the purchase lifecycle.
New York, US, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Polyhydroxyalkanoate Market Overview

According to a comprehensive research report by Market Research Future (MRFR),  Polyhydroxyalkanoate Market Information by Type, Technology, Application, and Region - Forecast till 2026 the market is estimated to reach USD 105 Million by 2026 at a CAGR of 8%.

Market Scope

Polyhydroxyalkanoate polymers are synthesized by fermentation of unprocessed raw materials by microbes. These polymers are derived from renewable sources, such as; starch, vegetable oil, and proteins. They are non-toxic, offer high UV resistance, exhibit biocompatible properties, display optical display, and shows the piezoelectric effect. These characteristics of polyhydroxyalkanoate polymers make them suitable for various applications, such as; biomedical, packaging, drugs, and biofuels.

The availability of polyhydroxybutyrate and polyhydroxybutyrate blended with copolymers that can meet different requirements can increase the market rise. Polyhydroxybutyrate is a thermoplastic polymer with similar properties to sought-after polypropylene. As polyhydroxy hold similar property to polypropylene, they have an edge due to their non-toxic nature and eco-friendly features. The rising demand for bio-based products that are compatible with the environment and contribute to sustainable development are other trends that are likely to influence the market. Alongside, the growing awareness about the antioxidant characteristics of polyhydroxyalkanoate can drive the market.

Market Drives

The increasing biomedical application of polyhydroxyalkanoate as the demand for smart medical solutions surge is the primary cause that can underline the market expansion. Further, product innovations and technological advances in the healthcare sector can create lucrative business prospects for new marketers. The packaging sector is booming, and the increasing adoption of polyhydroxyalkanoate can also influence the market.

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Polyhydroxyalkanoate Market Competitive Landscape

Some of the Reputed Companies functioning in the Polyhydroxyalkanoate Market are:

Shenzhen Ecomann Biotechnology Co, Ltd (China)

Tianjin GreenBio Materials Co., Ltd (China)

Kaneka Corporation (Japan)

BASF SE (Germany)

Biome Technologies PLC (U.K.)

BIO ON (Italy)

Polyferm, Inc (Canada)

Full Cycle Bioplastics (U.S.A)

Cardia Bioplastics (Australia)

The journal American Chemical Society (ACS) Omega, reported that the bacterium Zobellella denitrificans ZD1 can consume wastewater and sludge to produce polyhydroxybutyrate. This biopolymer can be used instead of petroleum-based plastics and reduce the burden on landfills on the environment. The growing awareness about such an advantage encourages relationships between top-notch biotech firms and companies dealing in consumer goods. To reduce the usage of fossil fuel-based plastics to half by 2030, Kimberly Clark, an American MNC leading in personal care solutions, entered into a partnership with the RWDC Industries that is on a mission to deploy advanced sustainable technologies. The collaboration would introduce cost-effective biopolymer innovations and develop marine-degradable solutions.

Market Restraints

The government's high production cost and tight regulatory controls on the approval of new products can restrain the polyhyrdoxyalkanoate market.

Browse In-depth Market Research Report (132 Pages) on Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA): https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/polyhydroxyalkanoate-market-4621

COVID 19 Analysis

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the supply chain can significantly impact the logistics arena due to a decrease in transportation services. However, governments are working on the same, and lockdown relaxation can help the market to rebound.

Market Segmentation:

The segment analysis of the global polyhydroxyalkanoate market is based on technology, application, and type.

The type-based segments of the polyhydroxyalkanoate market are polyhydroxybutyrate and polyhydroxyalkanoate. The technology-based segments of the polyhydroxyalknoate market are genetically engineered plants and genetically engineered bacteria. The application-based segments of the polyhydroxyalknoate market are biomedical, drug delivery carriers, packaging, biofuels, and drugs.

Rise in Packaging Application Emerges a Key Market Trend

Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) are considered promising materials in packaging applications. They have several utilities: films, plastic bags, sheets, boxes, and disposable spoons and forks. The upscaling demand for biodegradable plastics as well as the launch of new government initiatives in different countries to boost PHA-based packaging solutions, especially in food services, can add work in favor of the market. The rise in the number of manufacturing units, industrial production, food processing plants, and the expansion of the global packaging industry is expected to contribute to the robust growth of the PHA market.

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Regional Analysis:

In the Asia Pacific region, the market of the polyhydroxyalkanoate market can rise at the highest CAGR in the analysis period. China is expected to rise as the leading player in the regional market due to the upscaling usage in biomedical applications. Adopting disruptive technology and the easy accessibility of raw materials extracted from the waste of sugar palm oil can propel the market in India and Japan. The polyhydroxyalkanoate market in APAC can witness high momentum due to the replacement of petrochemical-derived products with biopolymers. In Europe, the polyhydroxyalkanoate market is expected to hold a decent share due to significant contributions made by Germany and the U.K, followed by Italy, in revenue generation. The presence of reputed players in the region and the high production of eco-friendly products can influence the polyhydroxyalkanoate market.

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Dublin, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "Saudi Arabia Drilling Rigs Market - Growth, Trends, COVID-19 Impact, and Forecasts (2021 - 2026)" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.



The Saudi Arabia Drilling Rigs Market is expected to grow at a CAGR of more than 1.5% over the period of 2020-2025.

Factors such as increasing investments in the sector are expected to drive the market. However, volatility in crude oil and natural gas prices, leading to a decrease in exploration and production activities, may restrain the growth of the market.

Natural gas production is expected to continue to be a vital part of meeting global energy demand, and the increase in its production is expected to drive the market.

New development in the smart rigs technology, like the advancements in the automated drilling rigs, is expected to make the oil and gas production more viable and may provide an opportunity for market players.

New rigs are being placed in the Persian gulf to extract crude oil and natural gas from the area, and this is expected to aid the growth of the offshore in the forecast period.

Key Market Trends



Increase in Natural Gas Production to Drive the Market

Saudi Arabia possesses around 18% of the world's proven petroleum reserves. The country is among the largest drilling rigs in the world and is expected to be driven due to the increasing production of natural gas.

In January 2020, ADES International Holding has secured a five-year contract renewal for the jackup ADMARINE 262 offshore Saudi Arabia. The new term, which comes into effect on the expiry of the current contract in April 2020, is expected to have a higher daily rate. Companies are investing in the continuation of oil and gas production in the country, which is expected to aid the growth of the market.

In 2019, Saudi Aramco awarded 34 contracts with a total value of USD 18 billion for the completion of the Marjan and Berri increment programs. The company plans to boost the production capacity of the fields to 550,000 barrels per day of crude oil and 2.5 billion standard cubic feet a day (BSCFD) of natural gas. These investments are expected to support the continued focus on employing advanced technologies in the sector and are expected to aid the drilling rigs market.

Natural gas production in the country has increased by 1.4%, to 11.00 billion cubic feet per day, in 2019 from 10.85 billion cubic feet per day in 2018. The increase in natural gas production may act as a driver for the Saudi Arabia drilling rigs market.

Hence, Saudi Arabia is expected to dominate the market in the forecast period due to an increase in production, advancements in technologies, and high efficiency in aiding oil and gas production.

Offshore Segment to Witness Growth

In the offshore segment, the drilling rigs are expensive and high-risk, the offshore platforms in the Persian Gulf have proven their usage from multilateral wells, horizontal wells with multiple zones, wells in heterogeneous reservoirs, and mature reservoirs.

New technologies in the sector are increasing the crude oil and natural gas produced. This involves the use of a wired drill pipe developed for automation drilling, which provides real-time downhole data that can be used to make adjustments during drilling. This has helped decrease the cost of drilling for the company. The technology has been deployed in Norway and may be deployed in different areas of the world, including Saudi Arabia.

In January 2020, ARO Drilling, a 50-50 joint venture (JV) between offshore drilling contractor Valaris and state-owned oil firm Saudi Aramco, has ordered two newbuild jackup rigs. According to Valaris, each new build are expected to cost approximately USD 175 million. They are expected to be constructed to the specifications laid out by Saudi Aramco. More joint ventures and increasing investment in the sector may aid the growth of the market.

Offshore rigs increase by 2.3% to an average of 18.583, in 2019 from 18.166 in 2018. An increase in the number of offshore is expected to take place in the forecast period. Thereby aiding the growth of the market

Crude oil production in the country has decreased by 3.5%, to 556.6 million tonnes, in 2019 from 576.8 million tonnes in 2018. The decrease in oil production may act as a restraint on the Saudi Arabia drilling rigs market.

Hence, the offshore segment is expected to witness growth in the forecast period due to an increase in investments, increasing units of rigs, and advancement in technology.

Competitive Landscape



The Saudi Arabia drilling rigs market is partially fragmented. Some of the key players in this market are Valaris plc, Arabian Drilling Company, Saipem S.p.A., ADES International Holding PLC, and Shelf Drilling Holdings, Ltd.

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/gj64o0
Dublin, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "Digital Transformation Initiatives Supporting Growth of the Generators Market Across Key End-user Industries, 2025" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The overall research objective is to understand end-user purchase behavior and other aspects of involvement in the generator market.

The team of expert analysts predicts that the digital transformation in the energy market will evolve from an IT market composed primarily of revenue associated with billing systems and services to a market that is increasingly incorporating advanced technologies such as analytics and integrated energy efficiency solutions.

The generators market is undergoing a transition. A greater power demand, coupled with increased awareness among customers, has driven opportunities for diesel and gas generators over the last 10 years.

Furthermore, the increased adoption of digital solutions for resource management, remote monitoring, and assets control solutions drive the need for reliable power sources, which will boost the demand for generators during the forecast period.

One of the biggest challenges for the generators industry is the continued need to serve customers with customized solutions, sales, and service. The trend of digital technology adoption feeds directly into these pain points and has the power to improve the customer experience.

This study will also provide insights on key measures needed for generator manufacturers to meet their key corporate goal: to improve overall customer experience and satisfaction.

In summary, this study aims to:

Monitor the market status by key end-user

Understand the industry challenges

Evaluate factors that drive spending

Gauge market trends

Discover opportunities in different industries and business sizes

Research Benefits

Identify key business objectives and challenges in this industry

Discover growth opportunities to address these objectives and challenges; find technologies that have been proven to reduce costs and generate revenue

Benchmark with competition and other industry leaders

Learn new ways to improve customer experience

Facilitate your digital transformation journey

Key Topics Covered:

1. Strategic Imperatives

Why Is It Increasingly Difficult to Grow?

The Strategic Imperative

The Impact of the Top Three Strategic Imperatives 8 on the Generators Industry

Growth Opportunities Fuel the Growth Pipeline Engine

2. Growth Opportunity Analysis, Generators Market

Generators Market Scope of Analysis

Generators Market Segmentation

Key Competitors for Generators Market

Key Growth Metrics for Generators Market

Distribution Channels for Generators Market

Growth Drivers for Generators Market

Growth Restraints for Generators Market

Forecast Assumptions, Generators Market

Revenue Forecast, Generators Market

Revenue Forecast by Industry Vertical, Generators Market

Revenue Forecast Analysis, Generators Market

Revenue Forecast Analysis by Industry Vertical, Generators Market

Competitive Environment, Generators Market

Revenue Share, Generators Market

Revenue Share Analysis, Generators Market

3. Growth Opportunity Analysis, Residential Segment

Key Growth Metrics for Residential Generators Market

Revenue Forecast, Residential Generators Market

Revenue Forecast Analysis, Residential Generators Market

4. Growth Opportunity Analysis, Data Center Segment

Key Growth Metrics for Data Center Generators Market

Revenue Forecast, Data Center Generators Market

Revenue Forecast Analysis, Data Center Generators Market

5. Growth Opportunity Analysis, Healthcare Segment

Key Growth Metrics for Healthcare Generators Market

Revenue Forecast, Healthcare Generators Market

Revenue Forecast Analysis, Healthcare Generators Market

6. Growth Opportunity Analysis, Oil & Gas Segment

Key Growth Metrics for Oil & Gas Generators Market

Revenue Forecast, Oil & Gas Generators Market

Revenue Forecast Analysis, Oil & Gas Generators Market

7. Growth Opportunity Analysis, Office Building Segment

Key Growth Metrics for Office Building Generators Market

Revenue Forecast, Office Building Generators Market

Revenue Forecast Analysis, Office Building Generators Market

8. Growth Opportunity Analysis, Government Segment

Key Growth Metrics for Government Generators Market

Revenue Forecast, Government Generators Market

Revenue Forecast Analysis, Government Generators Market

9. Growth Opportunity Analysis, Utilities Segment

Key Growth Metrics for Utilities Generators Market

Revenue Forecast, Utilities Generators Market

Revenue Forecast Analysis, Utilities Generators Market

10. Growth Opportunity Analysis, Others Segment

Key Growth Metrics for Other Generators Market

Revenue Forecast, Other Generators Market

Revenue Forecast Analysis, Other Generators Market

11. Growth Opportunity Universe, Generators Market

Growth Opportunity 1: Focusing on IoT-as-a-Service to Enable Actionable Intelligence for Generators

Growth Opportunity 2: Targeting Critical End-user Segments

Growth Opportunity 3: Omni-channel Customer Service that Uses AI and Analytics for Offering a Personalized Customer Experience

12. Next Steps

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/x0sewf




Dublin, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "Global Artificial Intelligence (AI) Partnering Terms and Agreements 2010 to 2021" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.



The Global Artificial Intelligence (AI) Partnering Terms and Agreements 2010 to 2021 report provides an understanding and access to the artificial intelligence partnering deals and agreements entered into by the worlds leading healthcare companies.

Trends in artificial intelligence partnering deals

Disclosed headlines, upfronts, milestones and royalties by stage of development

Artificial intelligence partnering contract documents

Top artificial intelligence deals by value

The Global Artificial Intelligence (AI) Partnering Terms and Agreements 2010 to 2021 report provides an understanding and access to the artificial intelligence partnering deals and agreements entered into by the worlds leading healthcare companies.



The report provides a detailed understanding and analysis of how and why companies enter artificial intelligence partnering deals. The majority of deals are early development stage whereby the licensee obtains a right or an option right to license the licensors artificial intelligencetechnology or product candidates. These deals tend to be multicomponent, starting with collaborative R&D, and commercialization of outcomes.



This report provides details of the latest artificial intelligence, oligonucletides including aptamers agreements announced in the healthcare sectors.



Understanding the flexibility of a prospective partner's negotiated deals terms provides critical insight into the negotiation process in terms of what you can expect to achieve during the negotiation of terms. Whilst many smaller companies will be seeking details of the payments clauses, the devil is in the detail in terms of how payments are triggered - contract documents provide this insight where press releases and databases do not.



This report contains a comprehensive listing of all artificial intelligence partnering deals announced since 2010 including financial terms where available including over 440 links to online deal records of actual artificial intelligence partnering deals as disclosed by the deal parties. In addition, where available, records include contract documents as submitted to the Securities Exchange Commission by companies and their partners.



Contract documents provide the answers to numerous questions about a prospective partner's flexibility on a wide range of important issues, many of which will have a significant impact on each party's ability to derive value from the deal.



For example, analyzing actual company deals and agreements allows assessment of the following:

What is actually granted by the agreement to the partner company?

What exclusivity is granted?

What are the precise rights granted or optioned?

What is the payment structure for the deal?

How are sales and payments audited?

What is the deal term?

How are the key terms of the agreement defined?

How are IPRs handled and owned?

Who is responsible for commercialization?

Who is responsible for development, supply, and manufacture?

How is confidentiality and publication managed?

How are disputes to be resolved?

Under what conditions can the deal be terminated?

What happens when there is a change of ownership?

What sublicensing and subcontracting provisions have been agreed?

Which boilerplate clauses does the company insist upon?

Which boilerplate clauses appear to differ from partner to partner or deal type to deal type?

Which jurisdiction does the company insist upon for agreement law?

The initial chapters of this report provide an orientation of artificial intelligence dealmaking and business activities. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the report, whilst chapter 2 provides an overview of the trends in artificial intelligence dealmaking since 2010, including details of average headline, upfront, milestone and royalty terms.



Chapter 3 provides a review of the leading artificial intelligence deals since 2010. Deals are listed by headline value, signed by big pharma, most active artificial intelligence dealmaking companies. Where the deal has an agreement contract published at the SEC a link provides online access to the contract.



Chapter 4 provides a comprehensive listing of the top 25 most active companies in artificial intelligence dealmaking with a brief summary followed by a comprehensive listing of artificial intelligence deals, as well as contract documents available in the public domain. Where available, each deal title links via Weblink to an online version of the actual contract document, providing easy access to each contract document on demand.



Chapter 5 provides a comprehensive and detailed review of artificial intelligence partnering deals signed and announced since Jan 2010, where a contract document is available in the public domain. The chapter is organized by company A-Z, deal type (collaborative R&D, co-promotion, licensing etc), and specific therapy focus. Each deal title links via Weblink to an online version of the deal record and where available, the contract document, providing easy access to each contract document on demand.



Chapter 6 lists artificial intelligence deals by technology type.



Chapter 7 provides a comprehensive and detailed review of artificial intelligence partnering deals signed and announced since Jan 2010. The chapter is organized by specific artificial intelligence technology type in focus. Each deal title links via Weblink to an online version of the deal record and where available, the contract document, providing easy access to each contract document on demand.



In addition, a comprehensive appendix is provided organized by artificial intelligence partnering company A-Z, deal type definitions and artificial intelligence partnering agreements example. Each deal title links via Weblink to an online version of the deal record and where available, the contract document, providing easy access to each contract document on demand.



The report also includes numerous tables and figures that illustrate the trends and activities in artificial intelligence partnering and dealmaking since 2010.



In conclusion, this report provides everything a prospective dealmaker needs to know about partnering in the research, development and commercialization of artificial intelligence technologies and products.



Report scope



Global Artificial Intelligence Partnering Terms and Agreements is intended to provide the reader with an in-depth understanding and access to artificial intelligence trends and structure of deals entered into by leading companies worldwide.



Global Artificial Intelligence Partnering Terms and Agreements includes:

Trends in artificial intelligence dealmaking in the biopharma industry since 2010

Analysis of artificial intelligence deal structure

Access to headline, upfront, milestone and royalty data

Access to over 500 artificial intelligence deals

The leading artificial intelligence deals by value since 2014

Most active artificial intelligence dealmakers since 2014

The leading artificial intelligence partnering resources

In Global Artificial Intelligence Partnering Terms and Agreements, the available contracts are listed by:

Company A-Z

Headline value

Stage of development at signing

Deal component type

Specific therapy and technology target

Key Topics Covered:



Executive Summary



Chapter 1 - Introduction



Chapter 2 - Trends in artificial intelligence dealmaking



Chapter 3 - Leading artificial intelligence deals



Chapter 4 - Most active artificial intelligence dealmakers



Chapter 5 - Artificial intelligence contracts dealmaking directory



Chapter 6 - Artificial intelligence dealmaking by technology type



Chapter 7 - Partnering resource center



For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/6lb5yt
Dublin, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "Military Aviation Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul Market - Growth, Trends, COVID-19 Impact, and Forecasts (2021 - 2030)" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.



The Military Aviation Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul Market is expected to grow from USD 37.6 billion in 2020 to USD 49.31 billion in 2030, witnessing a CAGR of 2.79% during the forecast period.



Since the demand for MRO services is a direct proponent of the sanctioned annual defense budget of the nations, COVID-19 had a moderate impact on the market in focus. The ongoing global economic slowdown is anticipated to result in a subsequent decline in defense spending on a short-term basis.

However, due to existing regulations and controls, major US-based military MRO service providers are less likely to bear the impact of the wider supply chain disruption caused by the pandemic. However, suppliers and MRO service providers located in Asia-Pacific and South America are more vulnerable to supply chain disruptions and are envisioned to face operational constraints and high financial risk exposure due to supply chain bottlenecks.



The market in focus is anticipated to be driven by a consistent increase in the global military fleet, internal and external security threats, technological innovations, aging global military fleet, joint ventures, and strategic alliances formed to address the specific requirements of the modernization initiatives undertaken by the global armed forces.



Starting with aircraft maintenance facility management and managing MRO throughout the supply chain, the use of advanced digital technologies is imperative to establish high-efficiency operations. With the advancement in AI and analytics, MRO companies are progressing from centralized maintenance diagnostic operations, through real-time condition monitoring services, to prescriptive maintenance operations.



Key Market Trends



Engine MRO segment to Dominate the Market During the Forecast Period



The engine is one of the vital components of any aircraft and is required to be maintained airworthy irrespective of the operational status of the aircraft. The increasing complexity of the engine parts and the increased number of military aircraft crashes due to engine failures have resulted in the global armed forces divesting enhanced focus on frequent engine maintenance and periodic checks. The active fleet of several countries is aging at a much faster pace than others due to extreme operating conditions that the aircraft are exposed to regularly.

The older aircraft need MRO services much frequently than their newer counterparts to prevent the systems from malfunctioning or becoming obsolete. On this note, several contracts are being awarded to avail MRO services for the active fleet. For instance, Rolls-Royce was selected by the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) in August 2019 to provide maintenance and repair support for the EJ200 engines of Typhoon fighter aircraft fleet in service of the Royal Air Force (RAF) until 2024.

The engine support contract (EJISS) was worth USD 431.06 million, a follow-on to the ten-year Partnered Support Operational Phase arrangement. Similarly, in October 2020, Honeywell announced that it won a five-year IDIQ (Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity) contract for the repair and overhaul of its T55-GA-714A engines that operate on the US Army's CH-47 Chinook helicopters. Such developments are envisioned to foster the growth of the engine MRO segment of the market in focus during the forecast period.



North America is Expected to Maintain its Dominance in Terms of Revenue During the Forecast Period



Though Asia-Pacific is expected to be one of the fastest-growing markets during the forecast period, the market is anticipated to be dominated by North America sheerly due to its diverse and superior fleet size. Currently, North America has the second-highest military aircraft fleet in the world and the demand for MRO services is driven by the initiatives to upgrade the existing fleet with the latest technologies and systems. The majority of MRO expenditure is on the region's large fleet of multi-role aircraft, transport aircraft, and surveillance aircraft that require high maintenance for engines and airframes, along with field and component maintenance services.

The United States Air Force is slowly addressing its aging aircraft problem, as it takes delivery of newer generation jets. However, the total active fleet of military aircraft has declined since 2000 despite the increasing budget. As inventories decreased, the average aircraft age has increased over the past decade. The average age of the United States Air Force fleet is over 25 years and the bombers have an average age of over 50 years. This necessitates upgrade and regular maintenance to keep the aircraft at par with the newer generation aircraft and extend their service life. The United States envisions achieving an 80% readiness rate for all military aircraft in future. Such initiatives are expected to propel the growth of MRO activities in North America. However, the market is expected to witness the highest growth in the Asia-Pacific region, with most of the demand being generated from countries, like China, India, Japan, and South Korea.



Competitive Landscape



Lockheed Martin Corporation, The Boeing Company, Raytheon Technologies Corporation, BAE Systems PLC, and Safran SA are some of the largest players in the market studied. The market is fragmented, with numerous local and international players providing various MRO services to the existing military aircraft fleets. Strategic partnerships between the players may help them gain more contracts while expanding their reach to untapped markets in the long run. As most of the MRO contracts are in the long term, it could be a time taking process for new players to establish themselves in the market, by competing with the existing ones.

The COVID-19 lockdown situation across the world is expected to delay some of the existing maintenance programs and planned projects at least by half a year, as players face issues with the supply chain, mainly due to the temporary shutdown of the aftermarket parts manufacturing industry. The impact of the same will be visible directly on the aftermarket parts logistics as well. In situations like these, players should adopt novel strategies to keep the business running with the existing inventory, which can help them reduce losses.

Besides, the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) - based predictive maintenance technologies are also envisioned to witness mass adoption during the forecast period. MRO operators use AI tools for planning, predicting non-routine check-ups, triggering part orders, and assigning bays, labor, supplies, and other resources for MRO activities. Potential investments would be required to enhance the IT capabilities of MRO operators for maintenance execution, supply chain management, to enhance mobility, and to adopt e-signatures.

Advanced data analytics are also being used by MROs for inventory optimization to plan to stock and optimize spares as and when required at minimal procurement costs. Such tools enable operators to function efficiently, derive maximum profits, and support the digitization of global aircraft MRO operations.

Key Topics Covered:



1 INTRODUCTION



2 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY



3 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY



4 MARKET DYNAMICS

5 MARKET SEGMENTATION (Market Size by Revenue - USD billion)



6 COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE



7 MARKET OPPORTUNITIES AND FUTURE TRENDS



Companies Mentioned

The Boeing Company

BAE Systems PLC

Elbit Systems Ltd

Saab AB

Lockheed Martin Corporation

General Atomics

Northrop Grumman Corporation

Amentum Services Inc.

Raytheon Technologies Corporation

Rolls-Royce Holding PLC

Safran SA

MTU Aero Engines

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/iib5w8
These actions will expand brand presence in both recreational cannabis and national CBD markets in North America, solidify sales and distribution, and streamline operations.

Company will look to raise up to $10MM to fund ongoing expansion

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- BC Craft Supply Co Ltd., (CSE: CRFT) (CRFT or the Company), a diversified wellness company advancing cannabinoid and psychedelic innovation and psychotherapy, today announced a series of global operational changes designed to expand sales, distribution, and streamline operations in North America.

CRFT will undergo a strategic refocus on growth segments; leveraging Canadian cannabis expertise in the United States cannabis and CBD markets and directing regulatory expertise in Canada towards licensure in psychedelics. As part of its ongoing strategic review of the business, the Company is today announcing the following priorities:

United States  National CBD Market: CRFT will expand distribution through a $1MM investment in wholly-owned Somo Industries Inc. d/b/a FeelWell Brands (FeelWell). Based in California, FeelWells flagship cannabis brand, CLIX, produces a variety of herbal blended pre-roll cannabis products, in addition to micro-dosed THC tablets. FeelWell will launch a national direct-to-consumer (D2C) CBD brand through strategic partnerships, large-scale facility partners, and product innovation-driven from CRFT in Canada. Sales will be driven primarily through proven D2C e-commerce partner channels starting Fall 2021, with retail distribution expected to commence Spring 2022.

CRFT will expand distribution through a $1MM investment in wholly-owned Somo Industries Inc. d/b/a FeelWell Brands (FeelWell). Based in California, FeelWells flagship cannabis brand, CLIX, produces a variety of herbal blended pre-roll cannabis products, in addition to micro-dosed THC tablets. FeelWell will launch a national direct-to-consumer (D2C) CBD brand through strategic partnerships, large-scale facility partners, and product innovation-driven from CRFT in Canada. Sales will be driven primarily through proven D2C e-commerce partner channels starting Fall 2021, with retail distribution expected to commence Spring 2022. United States  Recreational Cannabis: FeelWell will build distribution of a focused product range in the $11B California recreational THC market, which represents 15% of the total USA cannabis market. FeelWell continues to explore additional brand, facility, and device partnerships to support its cannabis market development in California.

FeelWell will build distribution of a focused product range in the $11B California recreational THC market, which represents 15% of the total USA cannabis market. FeelWell continues to explore additional brand, facility, and device partnerships to support its cannabis market development in California. Canada  Cannabis: Growth in USA CBD markets will be driven by a focused, profitable, recreational cannabis strategy in Canada. The Companys flagship cannabis brand, Grizzlers was launched in Alberta and Ontario in Summer 2021. CRFT will expand distribution through a $2MM investment in the Grizzlers brand to support inventory, distribution, and long-run brand building. The Company continues its mission to leverage the expertise of Canadian craft producers to build stronger local communities through enduring craft products.

Growth in USA CBD markets will be driven by a focused, profitable, recreational cannabis strategy in Canada. The Companys flagship cannabis brand, Grizzlers was launched in Alberta and Ontario in Summer 2021. CRFT will expand distribution through a $2MM investment in the Grizzlers brand to support inventory, distribution, and long-run brand building. The Company continues its mission to leverage the expertise of Canadian craft producers to build stronger local communities through enduring craft products. Canada  Psychedelics: With a core focus on plant-based innovation, CRFT sees tremendous potential in capturing and applying cannabis-based innovation/IP to psychedelic compounds derived from mushrooms. Its pre-clinical subsidiary, AVA Pathways Inc. (Ava Pathways), remains focused on neuroplasticity and alternative ways to treat common and debilitating medical conditions such as depression, anxiety, PTSD, and substance use disorder, through the use of psychedelic-based treatments. The AVA Pathways team is currently expanding headcount and is committed to securing licensure by Health Canada.

We believe in the power of the cannabis markets in the United States, fueled by the right partners, innovation, and scale, said Matthew Watters, CEO of CRFT. The strategic prioritization of a cannabis and CBD strategy in the United States, fueled by our success, innovation, and clout in the Canadian marketplace, are important steps in creating an enduring vision for CRFT. We will also continue our focus on plant-based innovation, bringing our history of success in cannabis to the psychedelic realm with the expansion of the AVA Pathways team in Canada.

In connection with the Companys refocus on the growth and development of its business as noted above, it will also look to raise up to $10MM in working capital to support these initiatives through private placements with strategic business partners and investors. The terms and conditions of the private placements will be announced as and when they material develop by way of further news release updates and will be in accordance with the policies of the CSE and Canadian Securities Laws.

This press release does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any securities of the Company in the United States nor shall there be any offer, solicitation or sale of the Companys securities in any state or other jurisdiction in which such an offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful. Securities issued by the Company have not and will not be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the U.S. Securities Act), or any state securities laws and may not be offered or sold within the United States or to, or for the account or benefit of, U.S. persons, as such term is defined in Regulation S under the U.S. Securities Act, unless an exemption from such registration is available.

About BC Craft Supply Co LTD ($CRFT).

BC Craft Supply Co Ltd. is a diversified wellness company advancing cannabinoid and psychedelic innovation and psychotherapy. The Company offers a reimagined vision for craft markets through collaboration, expertise, and adaptation. Its operations include:

CRFT a curator and aggregator of craft cannabis, providing advocacy and access for premium small-batch growers to Canadas cannabis market;

a curator and aggregator of craft cannabis, providing advocacy and access for premium small-batch growers to Canadas cannabis market; Medcann Health Products - a cultivation and processing facility in Chemainus BC;

- a cultivation and processing facility in Chemainus BC; FeelWell Brands , a successful cannabinoid brand house licensed in the state of California; and

, a successful cannabinoid brand house licensed in the state of California; and AVA Pathways a pre-clinical biotech company focused on neuroplasticity and mental health applications using psilocybin and compounds derived from mushrooms.

BC Craft works with local artists cross-sector and remains fervently committed to keeping the art, technique, and purity of their pursuit.

Follow @GrizzlersCan and @BC_Craft on Twitter for the latest updates.

THE CANADIAN SECURITIES EXCHANGE (THE "CSE") HAS NEITHER APPROVED NOR DISAPPROVED THE CONTENTS OF THIS PRESS RELEASE. NEITHER THE CSE NOR ITS MARKET REGULATOR (AS THAT TERM IS DEFINED IN THE POLICIES OF THE CSE) ACCEPTS RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS RELEASE.

CAUTIONARY NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION:

This news release contains "forward-looking information" and "forward-looking statements" (collectively, "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of the applicable Canadian securities legislation. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, are forward-looking statements and are based on expectations, estimates and projections as at the date of this news release. Any statement that involves discussions with respect to predictions, expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives, assumptions, future events or performance (often but not always using phrases such as "expects", or "does not expect", "is expected", "anticipates" or "does not anticipate", "plans", "budget", "scheduled", "forecasts", "estimates", "believes" or "intends" or variations of such words and phrases or stating that certain actions, events or results "may" or "could", "would", "might" or "will" be taken to occur or be achieved) are not statements of historical fact and may be forward-looking statements. In this news release, forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, the anticipated timing of the official launch of the Companys new product lines.

Forward-looking statements are necessarily based upon a number of estimates and assumptions that, while considered reasonable, are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors which may cause the actual results and future events to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors include, but are not limited to general business, economic, competitive, political, and social uncertainties. There can be no assurance that forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on the forward-looking statements and information contained in this news release. Except as required by law, Ascent assumes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements of beliefs, opinions, projections, or other factors, should they change, except as required by law.

For further information:

Matthew Watters, CEO, and Director

Phone: (604) 687-2038

Email: info@bccraftsupplyco.com

BC Craft Supply Co. LTD.

SUITE 810  749 West Pender Street

Vancouver, British Columbia

V6C 1H2
Acrivon signs exclusive worldwide license agreement with Eli Lilly and Company to develop and commercialize prexasertib, a clinically advanced, selective inhibitor targeting DNA Damage Response (DDR) kinases CHK1 and CHK2, which has shown durable activity, including complete responses in a proportion of patients across multiple cancers in Phase 2 studies



Acrivon aims to accelerate development and improve clinical success rate of prexasertib and pipeline of oncology drugs through its proteomics-based, drug-specific OncoSignature  companion diagnostics for prospective identification of patients most likely to benefit from treatment

companion diagnostics for prospective identification of patients most likely to benefit from treatment Company also discloses equity investors and announces experienced founding and executive leadership team to advance precision oncology drugs in multiple solid tumor types with high unmet need



WATERTOWN, Mass., June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Acrivon Therapeutics, Inc., a clinical-stage precision oncology therapeutics company with a unique patient selection platform, today announced its launch with multiple key catalysts, including the execution of an exclusive license with worldwide rights from Eli Lilly and Company (Lilly) for a clinically-advanced DNA Damage Response (DDR) inhibitor called prexasertib, advancement of internal pipeline programs targeting DDR, and appointment of its executive leadership team. Existing equity investors and shareholders include Chione Ltd., NEA, Alexandria Venture Investments, and Lilly.

Acrivon is surpassing traditional precision oncology by harnessing the power of proteomics to accurately match its therapies with patients who will benefit from treatment. Leveraging its proprietary platform technology, Acrivon Predictive Precision Proteomics (AP3), the company generates drug-tailored OncoSignature companion diagnostics that link drug mechanisms to the active disease-driving processes of cancer in patients, uncovering drug sensitivity not achievable through traditional genomics analyses. Acrivons pipeline will be advanced in clinical trials selectively enrolling patients predicted to benefit from treatment based on its proprietary OncoSignature companion diagnostics. These automated, quantitative protein tissue imaging tests are applied to pretreatment tumor biopsies to determine a patients likelihood of responding to therapy based on the drugs mechanism of action.

The companys newly licensed clinical asset, prexasertib, is a second-generation, dual inhibitor of the DDR kinases CHK1 and CHK2 which in multiple Phase 2 trials has demonstrated durable, potent single agent activity, including complete responses in a proportion of patients across several cancers with high unmet need, such as platinum-resistant ovarian, head and neck, and anal cancers. Acrivon intends to develop prexasertib (also called ACR-368) in accelerated clinical trials treating patients whose tumors are driven by, and depend on, dysregulated CHK1 and CHK2 using the OncoSignature test. The lead indications are platinum-resistant ovarian cancer as well as two additional solid tumor types not previously treated with ACR-368 but identified by OncoSignature to be highly sensitive to the drug. The company also announced it is rapidly advancing its proprietary pipeline of structure-based drug programs targeting critical nodes in the DDR and cell cycle regulation.

We are excited to gain worldwide rights to prexasertib from Lilly given promising deep and durable clinical responses observed in solid tumors, said Peter Blume-Jensen, M.D., Ph.D., chief executive officer and founder of Acrivon, and the inventor of the AP3 platform and OncoSignature patient selection method. We are committed to its successful development for the many cancer patients that truly can benefit from it. Our transformative AP3 approach is broadly applicable allowing us to develop drugs for high unmet need cancers beyond the small subset of cancers driven by single gene mutations or synthetic lethal context, where genetics has proven challenging for patient selection.

In addition to Peter Blume-Jensen, Acrivons additional co-founders include Kristina Masson, Ph.D., senior vice president of operations and site head for its Scandinavian drug discovery and phosphoproteomics hub in Medicon Village, Lund, Sweden, and Jesper Olsen, Ph.D., professor at the Novo-Nordisk Foundation Protein Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark, and a pioneer of global phosphoproteomics and systems biology.

Separately, the company announced the recent appointment of Erick Gamelin, M.D., Ph.D., as chief medical officer. Dr. Gamelin, a veteran drug developer of cancer therapeutics, joins Acrivon from clinical leadership roles at Amgen and Pfizer. Previously a professor of clinical oncology at University of Angers Pays de Loire, France, Dr. Gamelin has led over 150 clinical oncology trials.

Dr. Gamelin commented, I am very excited about the AP3 platform as an efficient, streamlined way to develop precision oncology therapeutics that are matched to the patients who need them agnostic of underlying genomic alterations. Appropriate patient selection is the biggest unmet need in our industry for targeted oncology therapeutics. We intend to apply OncoSignature patient selection tests to pretreatment tumor biopsies in prospectively designed patient selection trials aiming to significantly accelerate clinical oncology development.

In addition to Drs. Blume-Jensen, Masson, and Gamelin, Acrivons leadership also includes:

Jeremy Barton, M.D., chief medical advisor, who was previously global head of early clinical oncology, Pfizer, and CMO for Biogen, Effector, and Mirati Therapeutics.

Chris LeMasters, M.B.A., chief business advisor, who brings broad oncology-specific transactional and executive business leadership experience, including most recently at Amplyx and at Mirati Therapeutics.

Eric Devroe, Ph.D., senior vice president of business operations, with strong drug and diagnostics business, operational, and founding leadership experience from MD Anderson Cancer Center, Metamark Genetics, Xione, and Opsonix.

Mary Rose Keller, vice president of clinical operations, who was previously head of Global Clinical Operations at Pfizer, Shire, and Heron, and has led clinical operations for over 400 clinical programs.

Kelly Gordon, Ph.D., vice president of Companion Diagnostics, who previously led companion diagnostic product development and regulatory strategy for multiple oncology drugs, including Tecentriq  from Roche and Vitrakvi  from Loxo Oncology.

from Roche and Vitrakvi from Loxo Oncology. Michail Shipitsin, Ph.D., senior director and head of Clinical Biomarker Development who is a pioneering expert on automated, digital imaging clinical biomarker tests, and was the scientific lead on ProMark, a marketed prostate cancer test.

About Acrivon Precision Predictive Proteomics

Acrivon Predictive Precision Proteomics, AP3, is a proprietary, streamlined approach to develop patient selection tumor biopsy tests, called OncoSignature tests. The technology is engineered to be agnostic to underlying genetic alterations and enables identification and treatment of the patients whose tumors are regulated by and sensitive to the drug based on direct protein measurement of the critical tumor-driving mechanisms. The AP3 approach leverages unbiased differential global phosphoproteomic drug profiling using mass spectrometry, biased tumor model analyses, and quantitative multispectral in situ imaging of patient derived xenograft (PDX) in vivo models and intended-use tumor samples and clinical trial biopsies, to identify and evaluate biomarkers. The output of AP3 is clinically actionable, drug-tailored, proprietary OncoSignature tests. These are automated, quantitative protein multiplex imaging tests applied to pretreatment tumor biopsies as a companion diagnostic (CDx) to select and treat the patients predicted to benefit from the drug. The AP3 method is broadly applicable across drugs and is a transformative, efficient method to accurately match the right therapy to the right patient.

About Prexasertib (ACR-368)

Prexasertib, originally discovered by Array BioPharma and developed by Lilly, is a potent, selective inhibitor of CHK1 and CHK2 which has shown deep durable single agent activity, including complete responses, in a proportion of patients across several Phase 2 studies of platinum-resistant ovarian cancer and in squamous cell cancers, including anal cancer for which FDA has granted orphan drug designation. Prexasertib has been tested in >1,000 patients as monotherapy and in combination, showing excellent pharmacokinetic and pharmacological properties and a favorable safety profile at the recommended Phase 2 dose across monotherapy studies. Acrivon has obtained exclusive, world-wide rights to develop and commercialize prexasertib under a license agreement with Lilly. It is being advanced at Acrivon under the name ACR-368.

About Acrivon

Acrivon is a clinical stage oncology company leveraging its unique, proprietary phosphoproteomics technology called Acrivon Precision Predictive Proteomics, or AP3, in development of its pipeline of oncology drugs. The AP3 platform enables the creation of drug-specific proprietary OncoSignature companion diagnostics that can be used to identify patients most likely to benefit from Acrivons medicines. Through its highly specific patient selection, the company seeks to accelerate clinical development and increase the probability of successful treatment outcome for patients. The companys pipeline includes the clinically advanced lead program, ACR-368 (also known as prexasertib), a targeted oncology asset in-licensed from Lilly which has demonstrated evidence of durable responses, in solid cancers in Phase 2 trials. Acrivon is also developing additional pipeline programs targeting critical nodes in DNA Damage Response (DDR) and cell cycle regulation. Please visit the companys website at https://acrivon.com for more information.

Acrivon Contacts:

Alexandra Santos

asantos@wheelhouselsa.com

Aljanae Reynolds

areynolds@wheelhouselsa.com
Oak Brook, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- It is one thing to treat the symptoms of patients, but its another to treat the whole person, understand their needs and provide compassionate care. Professor Choi Youngsik of Busan, South Korea has dedicated his entire career to education, medical innovation and research, volunteerism and helping others in need.

For his dedication to humanitarian service and medical contributions to the world, Professor Youngsik was presented with the 2021 Lions Humanitarian Award. The presentation of this special award was broadcast during the 103rd Lions Clubs International Convention on June 28, 2021.

The Lions Humanitarian Award, the highest honor of the association, is given to an individual or an organization with exemplary humanitarian efforts and comes with a US$250,000 grant from Lions Clubs International Foundation. Professor Youngsik joins a distinguished list of prior recipients, including Mother Teresa, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Denis Mukwege.

Lions Clubs International President Dr. Jung-Yul Choi presented Professor Choi Youngsik with the award during a special ceremony, stating, I am honored to present this award on behalf of the more than 1.4 million Lions around the world. Your work is changing lives, just like Lions, and we are proud to support you and your important humanitarian efforts.

Professor Youngsik graduated from the Kosin University College of Medicine. His passion for humanitarian service began by observing his mentor, Dr. Jang Gi-ryeo, a surgeon, educator and philanthropist of South Korea who established Gospel Hospital in 1951 during the Korean War.

Inheriting Dr. Jangs spirit of compassionately caring for others, Professor Youngsik began his medical volunteer work as part of a medical team that was dispatched to Bangalore, India in 1996. They were later dispatched to the remote Tuguegarao area of the Philippines where he and his team have provided free treatment to patients in need since 2012. He also conducted research on correlations between the local food of Tuguegarao and thyroid diseases after treating many thyroid patients he met in the area during his medical service.

Under his leadership, Kosin University Gospel Hospital opened its overseas checkup centers in Almaty and Astana, Kazakhstan in 2015 and 2016 respectively, providing free treatment to residents. A group of doctors in Almaty was invited to the Gospel Hospital for training and education opportunities so they could continue to serve their communities more effectively.

In 2018, Professor Youngsik was named the dean of the Kosin University College of Medicine and the director at Gospel Hospital. Under his guidance, medical teams visited Hanoi, Vietnam in 2018 and 2019, providing medical service to residents who had no access to it. Before the COVID-19 global pandemic, Professor Youngsik recognized the benefits of telemedicine and how technology can provide safe access to healthcare. In 2020, Kosin University Gospel Hospital opened a telemedicine center in conjunction with the Hanoi Medical College, creating a venue for the sharing of medical information.

In the domain of medical research, Professor Youngsik published the nations first paper on the utility of ultrasound-guided fine-needle examinations on thyroid nodules in the Journal of Korean Society of Endocrinology. His research was revolutionary at a time when only palpable nodules were subjected to fine needle examinations instead of ultrasound tests. Based on this research, he contributed to the nationwide generalization of ultrasound-guided fine-needle examinations in the diagnosis of thyroid nodules through his in-service training lectures.

The research earned him many awards, including the Academic Medals of Korean Association of Internal Medicine and Korean Thyroid Association, the Academic Award at Medical Competition of Busan Medical Association, and the presidential citation on the 12th Cancer Prevention Day in 2019.

I am truly honored to receive the Lions Humanitarian Award, said Professor Youngsik. It is important that we set an example for our communities and the world by volunteering, teaching and helping others.

Learn more about the Lions Humanitarian Award and see our list of winners at https://www.lionsclubs.org/humanitarian-winners.

About Lions Clubs International

Lions Clubs International is the largest service club organization in the world. More than 1.4 million members in over 48,000 clubs are serving in 200 countries and geographic areas around the globe. Since 1917, Lions have strengthened local communities through hands-on service and humanitarian projects, and we extend our service impact through the generous support of our Lions Clubs International Foundation. We are focused on supporting vision, the environment, childhood cancer, hunger, diabetes and other pressing humanitarian needs to help address some of the biggest challenges facing humanity. For more information about Lions Clubs International, visit lionsclubs.org.

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ATLANTA, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- J.M. Huber Corporation (Huber), one of the United States largest privately-held businesses, has won the 2020 IMD-Pictet Sustainability in Family Business Award for its holistic and long-term approach to embedding sustainability across its operations, from governance to product innovation.



With sustainability rapidly becoming business-critical as a licence to operate, the IMD-Pictet Sustainability in Family Business Award acknowledges and motivates family-owned enterprises that strive to excel in corporate sustainability and impact.

The independent jury highlighted the Huber familys commitment to sustainability and the Companys clear demonstration of a will to transform itself, including the representation of sustainability at director level and the Huber Principles, which underpin its focus on the Triple Bottom Line of people, planet and profit.

At IMD, we are very familiar with Hubers outstanding strengths as a previous winner of IMDs Global Family Business Award. This is a family-owned company that leads by example by creating positive impact throughout its business and beyond, said IMD President Jean-Francois Manzoni. Our award jury of independent experts praised Huber for its strong leadership on sustainability, from product innovation to best practice governance.

The judges, featuring sustainability and family business experts, also praised Huber as a leading light in measuring its progress on sustainability through a robust, internationally aligned self-assessment system of performance metrics.

On behalf of the Huber family, I want to express our tremendous gratitude for this honor, said Molly Heaney, a fifth generation Huber family member and director of the company. J.M. Huber Corporation has been guided by a sustainability mindset since its inception and the companys commitment is reflected directly in the Huber Principles.

Founded in 1883 by German immigrant Joseph Maria Huber to make pigments for ink, Huber now operates in 20 countries worldwide as a diversified specialty products business including personal care, food and beverage, agricultural nutrients, sustainable forestry services, building materials and flame retardants.

As a family-owned business that thinks in terms of generations rather than years, sustainability is fundamental in supporting our long-term view, Heaney said. We feel a deep sense of responsibility to be a positive force in the world, caring for our people and our planet; mindful that our responsibility is not just to our stakeholders today but those who come after us. While this recognition reminds us of what we have done well, it drives us to continue to do better, thinking always of future generations and the world that they will inherit.

With more than 4,000 employees and US$2.4 billion in annual revenue, Huber is a six-generation family business guided by the Huber Principles of Environmental, Health and Safety Sustainability, Ethical Behavior, Respect for People and Excellence.

This important recognition signifies our substantial progress over the last decade in making Huber a more sustainable company by strengthening our culture, reducing our environmental footprint and enhancing the communities where we operate, said Mike Marberry, President & CEO of Huber. Winning the IMD-Pictet Sustainability in Family Business Award will certainly inspire us to become even bolder in driving an ambitious, long-term sustainability vision for Huber.

In selecting the award winner , the jury panel assessed how family businesses are incorporating sustainability throughout their operations, from strategy, innovation and materiality to governance and values.

The award trophy was made from recycled materials in the shape of the leaf of a tree and symbolizes the extension of the totem pole linking heaven and earth. It was created by Chopard , a family-run luxury watch and jewellery maker founded in 1860.

IMD and Pictet created the Sustainability in Family Business Award in 2019 to encourage and help leaders and organizations to be a force for good in the world. Family businesses are among the most proactive in this area as they are more inclined to think long-term.

About J.M. Huber Corporation

J.M. Huber Corporation, headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia (US), operates a diverse portfolio of companies: CP Kelco, Huber Engineered Materials, Huber Engineered Woods and Huber Resources Corp. With locations around the world, our businesses create products used in a broad range of applications including personal care, food and beverage, agricultural nutrients and adjuvants, building materials, flame retardants and smoke suppressants, as well as sustainable forestry services. Founded in 1883, Huber is one of the largest family-owned companies based in the US. For more information, visit www.huber.com .

MEDIA CONTACT:

Lea Volpe

Director, Corporate Communications

J.M. Huber Corporation

678.247.7128 phone

lea.volpe@huber.com

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/e11a12b6-e101-4036-94ef-d9113c3af933.
Oak Brook, Ill., June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Out of 48,000 Lions clubs, 20 clubs were recognized for performing an outstanding service project in one of Lions Clubs Internationals global cause areas: diabetes, hunger, vision, environment, or childhood cancer.

in April, Lions Clubs International presented Lions and Leo clubs with the Kindness Matters Service Awards. Clubs were chosen for their commitment to service and ingenuity in serving their community.

The Kindness Matters Service Award is a challenge for Lions and Leos to develop exceptionally innovative and creative service projects with the aim of leaving a positive impact in their communities, said Lions Clubs International President Dr. Jung Yul Choi. When caring people join together, roll up their sleeves and take action to make their community better, its a beautiful thingand an incredible feeling for everyone involved.

One of the winners this year was the Paramaribo Central Lions Club in the Republic of Suriname. Perched atop the northern coast of South America, Suriname is the smallest country on the continent, yet the Lions there have taken on a big role in fighting climate change by planting Mangrove trees.

The erosion of the coastline infringes on the agriculture land, writes Immediate Past Club President Glenn Tewari. Planting mangrove trees prevents the rich soil from being washed away by the oceans and protects the land from natural disasters.

The Paramaribo Central Lions Club has been supporting the Mangrove Project of the Anton de Kom University of Suriname under the direction of the Hydrologist Professor S. Naipal since 2015. Lions donated the specific kind of water-resistant wood required to build scaffolding that traps sediment so there the mangrove trees can take root. They also donated the wood to build the greenhouses where the seedlings grow and assisted in planting the mangroves. Lions of Paramaribo Central have taken on the project because they know how important a healthy coastline is to their community.

For their ongoing commitment to service, preserving the livelihood of the Suriname population and for conservation efforts, the Paramaribo Central Lions received the 2021 Kindness Matters Service Award.

Read all the service stories from this years Kindness Matters Service Award winners on our website at www.lionsclubs.org/en/kindness-matters-service-award.

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About the Lions Clubs International

Lions Clubs International is the largest service club organization in the world. More than 1.4 million members in over 49,000 clubs are serving in 200 countries and geographic areas around the globe. Since 1917, Lions have strengthened local communities through hands-on service and humanitarian projects, and we extend our service impact through the generous support of our Lions Clubs International Foundation. We are focused on supporting vision, the environment, childhood cancer, hunger, diabetes, and other pressing humanitarian needs to help address some of the biggest challenges facing humanity. For more information about Lions Clubs International, visit lionsclubs.org.
English French

ST-GEORGES, Quebec, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Komutel inc. announces today, that it is ready to begin testing the new NENA EIDO (Emergency Incident Data Object) schema as part of its on-going participation in the Canadian NG-trials.



On June 13th, 2021 CRTC decision 2021-199 established March 1st 2022 as the date by which the NG9-1-1 network providers are required to be ready to provide NG9-1-1 Voice, wherever public safety answering points (PSAPs) have been established in a particular region.

Also, at the beginning of June 2021, it was also confirmed by the chair of the Emergency Services Working Group (ESWG), that the NENA Public Review version of the new EIDO specification and schema (Release NENA-STA-021.1 Public Review  NENA911/EIDO-JSON (github.com)) was released and that all NG9-1-1 Call Handling vendors are expected to use that version and support this EIDO schema selected for Canada for Day 1 implementation by PSAPs in time for the launch of NG9-1-1 voice services in Canada.

Along with our partners, we are very excited to continue playing a leadership role towards supporting PSAPs with their migration plans for NG9-1-1 compliance. As one of the first vendors to commit to and support the new NG9-1-1specifications selected in Canada, we provide PSAPs with the opportunity to test their Call Handling Functional Element (CHFE) as soon as the specifications become available enabling more time to test in their environment. Since we have successfully tested and currently support the interim EIDO schema approved for NG-trials in Canada, this represents a natural evolution of our CHFE solution. We have a proven track record of partnering with Canadian PSAPs and our focus continues to be on the design and implementation of tailored solutions that will meet all their specific needs while minimizing risks and disruptions. There is a significant benefit to testing new specifications, functions and features well ahead of the March 1, 2022 beginning of PSAP onboarding date.

We take this opportunity to sincerely thank our partners and the PSAPs participating in the NG trials for their significant investment of time and resources over the last few years to contribute to the launch of NG9-1-1 services in Canada.

About Komutel

Komutel is a leading Canadian developer of 9-1-1 communication solutions which are easily integrated with our Public Safety Clients existing telecommunications and IT infrastructure (IT, VoIP, TDM, UC, Centrex, VM, mobile, and radio). Komutels portfolio of 9-1-1 solutions is designed to cost effectively facilitate migration from legacy environments to NG9-1-1 based on Nena i3 standards, while minimizing risk and disruption as much as possible. Based on Open Standards, the Komutel architecture enables clients to implement modular applications according to their specific needs, requirements and operational preferences. Komutel is a privately-owned Canadian company founded in 2001. www.komutel.com

Genevieve Thibodeau

Executive Assistant

1275, boulevard Dionne

Saint-Georges, QC G5Y 0R4

1 877 225-9988

genevieve.thibodeau@komutel.com

Komutel Inc.

www.komutel.com
Portland,OR, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- According to the report, the Italy gift cards Market was pegged at $6.55 billion in 2020, and is expected to reach $18.26 billion by 2028, growing at a CAGR of 13.9% from 2021 to 2028. The report provides an in-depth analysis of the top investment pockets, top winning strategies, drivers & opportunities, market size & estimations, competitive landscape, and changing market trends.

Rise in demand for innovative products, high adoption of smartphones, and increase in need for cash alternatives fuel the growth of the Italy gift cards market. On the other hand, security issues and privacy concerns restrain the growth to some extent. However, growing opportunities in the country have proven to be beneficial for the market.

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COVID-19 scenario-

The outbreak of the pandemic led to reduced demand for gift cards in retail, corporate, and any other sector, thereby impacting the Italy gift cards market.

However, to overcome these challenges, businesses are adopting the e-commerce tools and offering discounts on vouchers. Also, the situation is being ameliorated gradually and the market is expected to recoup soon.





The Italy gift cards market is analyzed across functional attribute, distribution channel, product type, and end-user. Based on functional attribute, the closed-loop card segment accounted for more than two-thirds of the total market revenue in 2020, and is expected to rule the roost by 2028. The open-loop card segment, on the other hand, would register the fastest CAGR of 16.1% from 2021 to 2028.

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Based on distribution channel, the offline segment held nearly three-fifths of the total market share in 2020, is projected to dominate by 2028. Simultaneously, the online segment would cite the fastest CAGR of 15.5% during the forecast period.

Based on product type, the physical gift cards segment held the major share in 2020, generating more than two-thirds of the Italy gift cards market. At the same time, the digital gift cards segment would manifest the fastest CAGR of 15.2% from 2021 to 2028.

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The leading market players analyzed in the Italy gift cards market include Auchan Holding, Apple Inc., Conad, Square, Inc., Amazon.com, Inc., EUROSPAR, Carrefour Group, Esselunga S.p.A., EPIPOLI S.P.A., and PANORAMA. These market players have incorporated different strategies including partnership, expansion, collaboration, joint ventures, and others to brace their stand in the industry.

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SAN JOSE, Calif., June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- BGI Americas, a global leader in diagnostic testing, today announced a partnership with Advaite, a Pennsylvania-headquartered biotech company, as well as the launch of dxpartnerships.com, a hub for diagnostics companies seeking partnerships through licensing, original equipment manufacturer (OEM) or distribution agreements.

The partnership will add Advaites RapCov Rapid COVID-19 Test to BGIs growing portfolio of diagnostic testing solutions. The Advaite test is a CLIA-waived, lateral flow immunoassay for the qualitative detection of immunoglobulin G (IgG) antibodies to the SARS-CoV-2 virus in human fingerstick whole blood samples. One of the first U.S.-manufactured point-of-care serology tests for which the Food and Drug Administration has granted for emergency use authorization, the RapCov Rapid COVID-19 Test is simple to use and delivers highly accurate results in 15 minutes by eliminating the requirement to send the sample to a laboratory. The partnership allows BGI to combine Advaites proprietary handheld test with its Real-Time Fluorescent RT-PCR Kit for Detecting SARS-CoV-2, providing hospital systems and other health care facilities with both central laboratory and point-of-care CLIA-waived testing solutions.

Our rapid antibody test kits provide an ideal solution for screening mass populations and help patients determine whether they were once infected with the disease without knowing, said Karthik Musunuri, CEO of Advaite. Partnering with BGI to supply hospitals and other health care facilities with our innovative tests was a no-brainer in helping fight this ongoing pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the global need for manufacturing and distribution of accessible and accurate diagnostic testing devices, and BGIs launch of dxpartnerships.com enables the company to partner with a broad range of organizations in the diagnostics testing space to advance diagnostic solutions. With proven commercial expertise and an established global footprint, partnering with BGI enables an organization to quickly and efficiently commercialize its in vitro diagnostic solutions.

As one of the worlds largest suppliers of COVID-19 testing reagents and automation systems, we are thrilled to partner with Advaite to bring their groundbreaking testing solution to market and help stop the spread of the deadly coronavirus, said Craig Hoechstetter, director of corporate development at BGI. Not only does quick and easy testing alert individuals whether they are infected, it also enables them to get treated faster and take the necessary steps to minimize the spread of the virus to their colleagues, friends and families, ultimately saving lives. By offering end-to-end high-quality molecular and serology tests, we are providing a synergistic solution to tackling this pandemic head on by being one step ahead of the virus.

To partner with BGI, visit dxpartnerships.com. For more information about BGI and the RapCov Rapid COVID-19 Test, visit bgi.com/us.

About BGI Americas Corporation

BGI Americas Corporation is the leading provider of genomics and proteomics services in the Americas Region as part of BGI Genomics, a public company listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange. Established in 2010, BGI Americas has grown to include presence in Boston and San Jose, serving a wide range of customers in genetics research, drug R&D and diagnostics. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, BGI Americas introduced its diagnostic solutions to the north and south American markets, and initiated its in vitro diagnostics business. BGI brings 20 years of genomics experience to its customers and collaborators. We are committed to advancing genetic research, technologies and applications to benefit the mankind.

About Advaite

ADVAITE Inc. is a Malvern, Pennsylvania-headquartered biotech company focused on developing novel therapeutics and diagnostics to help patients suffering from a variety of debilitating diseases. The word Advaite means one without a second, unrivaled or unique. At ADVAITE, our team aspires to be just that.

Currently, ADVAITE Inc. is focused on developing novel point-of-care assays to help combat the modern worlds deadliest disease, COVID-19. With a high-complexity CLIA laboratory based in Chicago, Illinois, and an expanded state-of-the-art R&D facility in Malvern, Pennsylvania, ADVAITE is continuously innovating, developing and commercializing best-in-class point-of-care tests to address this pandemic and help impact large populations.

About RapCov Rapid COVID-19 Test

The ADVAITE RapCov Rapid COVID-19 Test is a lateral flow immunochromatographic assay for the qualitative detection of IgG antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in human fingerstick whole blood specimens. Testing of fingerstick whole blood specimens is limited to laboratories certified under CLIA, that meet the requirements to perform high, moderate or waived complexity tests. Testing of fingerstick whole blood specimens is authorized for use at the POC, i.e., in patient care settings operating under a CLIA Certificate of Waiver, Certificate of Compliance or Certificate of Accreditation. At this time, it is unknown for how long antibodies persist following infection and if the presence of antibodies confers protective immunity.

This test has not been FDA cleared or approved, but the FDA has authorized it for emergency use by authorized laboratories;

This test has been authorized only for detecting the presence of IgG antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, not for any other viruses or pathogens; and

The emergency use of this test is only authorized for the duration of the declaration that circumstances exist justifying the authorization of emergency use of in vitro diagnostics for detection and/or diagnosis of COVID-19 under Section 564(b)(1) of the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, 21 U.S.C.  360bbb3(b)(1), unless the declaration is terminated or authorization is revoked sooner.

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FT. LAUDERDALE, FL, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- During the past 77 years, UNCF (United Negro College Fund) has helped more than half a million students earn college degrees. As the largest and most effective minority education organization in the United States, UNCF also actively supports 37 private historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and advocates for minority higher education. In South Florida, UNCF has been there to help students reach their educational dreams for more than 20 years.

UNCF will welcome 300 students across the educational spectrum from grades K-12 to undergraduates from its member institutions; community influencers; and host Calvin Hughes, anchor, WPLG-TV, as featured panelist Mr. David Greenberg, speaks about his experiences as a former Executive Board Member of the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) when it was recognized as the worlds largest physical commodities exchange. While at NYMEX, he oversaw a decade of its largest growth from $800 million to $12 billion.

Greenberg has more than 25 years of experience in leadership, public speaking, and consulting work. He is frequently called upon for guidance in new business ventures, strategic industry decisions and current market conditions. He has also served as a business and ethics mentor to graduate students and young professionals.

As Chair of ZiyenCoin and President of Greenberg Capital, David works with a network of corporate and educational professionals. He was recently the Chief Operating Officer for Oil Coin and Vivi Holdings, two successful start-ups involved in the cryptocurrency and financial software industries, as well as Chairman of the Advisory Board for Amercanex, an international cannabis exchange.

Greenberg will be join by, Carlton Williams, Vice President, Health & Welfare Consultant at USI Insurance Services, Ken Frazier, Vice President, Community and Business Development for JP Morgan Chase Bank, and Daphne Dilbert, Philanthropists and Lead Channel Manager, at AT&T. know the importance of a good education.

Haki Halisi, area development director, UNCF, said, Mr. Greenberg and his co-panelists have been a tremendous asset to UNCF South Florida as members of our Leadership Council. They bring years of experience and a dedication to our mission. They are major influencers in the South Florida community, and we are very excited to have them be a part of our second A Mind Is Lecture: Pandemic Proofing Your Career. More than 5,500 Florida students attend historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). UNCF-member institutions Florida Memorial University, Bethune-Cookman University and Edward Waters College are among the Florida HBCUs that contribute almost 8,000 in jobs, $833 million in economic impact and $8.6 billion in lifetime earnings for Florida HBCU graduates, according to a landmark study commissioned by UNCF.

This is the second effort in a series of educational initiatives we are planning to support area students and local HBCUs, said Halisi. We are encouraging the community to support our work as we secure better futures for us all by investing in the dreams of deserving South Florida youth.

This event is made possible because of the commitment of UNCF presenting sponsor Florida Lottery.

Click here or more information about UNCFs efforts in Florida or email Haki.Halisi@uncf.org or call 954.527.3315.

Follow the discussion on Twitter using #UNCFMiami; Facebook @UNCFSoFLo.

###

About UNCF

UNCF (United Negro College Fund) is the nations largest and most effective minority education organization. To serve youth, the community and the nation, UNCF supports students education and development through scholarships and other programs, supports and strengthens its 37 member colleges and universities, and advocates for the importance of minority education and college readiness. UNCF institutions and other historically Black colleges and universities are highly effective, awarding nearly 20% of African American baccalaureate degrees. UNCF administers more than 400 programs, including scholarship, internship and fellowship, mentoring, summer enrichment, and curriculum and faculty development programs. Today, UNCF supports more than 60,000 students at over 1,100 colleges and universities across the country. Its logo features the UNCF torch of leadership in education and its widely recognized trademark, A mind is a terrible thing to waste. Learn more at UNCF.org or for continuous updates and news, follow UNCF on Twitter at @UNCF.
Washington, D.C., June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- As COVID-19 vaccination rates continue to increase across the U.S., new research indicates that a high number of state and local employees are vaccinated. In this segment of the workforce, 70% are fully vaccinated and 6% are partially vaccinated.

These findings are contained in a new research infographic from MissionSquare Research Institute (formerly the Center for State and Local Government Excellence at ICMA-RC). The results are based on a national survey, fielded by Greenwald Research in May 2021, of 1,203 full-time state and local government employees. Access the infographic.

The research reveals that an overwhelming 65% of state and local employers are encouraging employees to get vaccinated. Another 8% of employers are providing incentives for their employees to do so. Only 5% of workers report that their employers have issued mandates. While 22% of employers have been neutral on the vaccine, none have discouraged vaccinations.

Nearly half (45%) of state and local employees believe government employers should mandate that employees get vaccinated against COVID-19. Also, 59% of respondents say that the vaccine will only be effective if everyone receives it, while 44% are concerned about whether their co-workers will get vaccinated.

The infographic also offers insight on vaccinations by gender, age, geography, income, profession, and race/ethnicity.

Its encouraging to see such high vaccination levels amongst the state and local workforce, said Rivka Liss-Levinson, Ph.D., Senior Research Manager at MissionSquare Research Institute. Many state and local employees are front line workers  public safety, public health, and teachers. High vaccination levels help protect the workforce and the public from exposure to this dangerous virus.

However, its worth noting that vaccination rates are not equal across this workforce, with younger, lower income, and Black or African American state and local workers significantly less likely to be fully vaccinated. It will be important for employers to continue their trend of encouraging vaccine uptake to increase equity, Liss-Levinson said.

Top factors for employees who opted for vaccinations include:

Protecting personal health (63%)

Ensuring the health of family and friends (58%)

Providing the freedom to travel without worry (26%)

Top factors for opting out of vaccinations among employees who are undecided or will likely not get the vaccine include:

Concerns about side effects (64%)

The need for more information about how well the vaccine works (37%)

A lack of trust in government (33%)

MissionSquare Research Institute will release the full results the survey throughout the summer of 2021.

This research follows previous polling conducted in October 2020 and May 2020 to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on public sector workers financial and employment outlooks, and health and safety concerns. Visit slge.org/workforce for past infographics and reports.

Final data were weighted by gender, age, income, and industry type to reflect the distribution of the state and local government workforce as found in the U.S. Census Bureaus Current Population Survey and the U.S. Census of Governments.

MissionSquare Research Institute (formerly the Center for State and Local Government Excellence at ICMA-RC) promotes excellence in state and local government and other public service organizations so they can attract and retain talented employees. The organization identifies leading practices and conducts research on retirement plans, health and wellness benefits, workforce demographics and skill set needs, labor force development, and topics facing the not-for-profit industry and the education sector. MissionSquare Research Institute brings leaders together with respected researchers. For more information and to access research and publications, visit slge.org and follow on Twitter and LinkedIn.
TORONTO, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- A comprehensive internal investigation launched by Easy Group Inc. has found that the company had no involvement and was not responsible for any cheating that took place at the University of Alberta. In reaction to a story published by several national news outlets in March 2020, where an unnamed University of Alberta spokesperson claimed that a letter to computing science students stating that Easy EDU, a division of Easy Group Inc., had been assisting students in cheating appeared to be legitimate, Easy Group immediately launched its own investigation and reached out to the University.



The story reported that 40 students had been caught cheating in the CMPUT174 and 175 lab assignments. Easy Groups internal investigation, aimed at comparing facts versus rumours, found that 35 of those students facing sanctions by the University were never students of Easy EDU and while the other 5 were indeed students of Easy EDU, the violations for which they were penalized had no relation to any services offered by the companys curriculum.

On the morning of September 29, 2020, Easy EDU Director of Academics, Dongyu Mao met with the Director of Student Conduct at the University of Alberta, after which their department followed up with an email stating, It is good to know that we are on the same page with our commitments to academic integrity!.

Further clarification that this matter has been resolved came when The Justin Poy Agency, the communications agency representing Easy Group Inc., was asked to confirm that no further action needed to be taken. When we spoke to the University of Alberta representative on June 22, 2021, it was made clear that there was no official involvement with the University of Alberta with respects to this incident and that the matter had been put behind them, states the agencys President.

We are on the same side, expressed Mao, when reaffirming Easy EDUs position and approach to education. This incident has further reinforced Easy Groups (and Easy EDUs) commitment to excellence and integrity and to working closely with all universities where Easy has services, to continuously monitor protocols and procedures to achieve the highest level of educational supplementation.

About Easy Group Inc.

Easy Group Inc. was founded in Toronto in 2014 as a best in-class tutoring service for international students. The company has provided online services to over 170,000 university applicants, students, and graduates, and served over 100,000 clients offline at our physical campuses. Its footprint has expanded from Canada, where it operates at 11 of the country's most prestigious schools, to the U.S., China, and the United Kingdom.

Easy Group has 3 pillars that guide its mission: Integrity, Inclusivity and Innovation. Under each of these pillars is a mission to ensure that students can experience the full benefit of their learning journey.

With a deep understanding of learning practices and a commitment to embracing technology, the company now provides a holistic educational and personal development platform which guides its clients through every stage of their time studying abroad. Easy Group helps with everything from applying to undergraduate university, graduate school and new careers, to integrating with a new community and overcoming cultural barriers.

For more information, please visit: https://www.easygroup.ca/

____________________

For media inquiries or interviews, please contact:

Sheryl Ning

Easy Group Inc.

Email: lingxue.ning@easygroup.ca

Phone: +8618518561327
Toronto, Canada , June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- GDA Capital will be hosting the Europe Disruptive Investment Summit virtually and with a live streaming in the Crypto Convention Center in Decentraland on July 7th. The two-day summit will raise awareness for disruptive investments in the family office community while bringing in global leaders with a focus on highlighting local European case studies. It will serve to connect these offices with global opportunities.

Leading companies across Scandinavia, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Holland, France, Italy, Ukraine, Russia, Monaco, as well as a diverse range of groups from around Europe have already been included as participants. Conversations range from discussions on how disruptive technology will impact everything from financial markets, real estate, securities, commodities, art, lending & the internet, among other topics. In addition, panels dive into how to get exposure through public markets and disruptive strategies for asset managers.

The opportunities in the disruptive technology space arent limited to any geography or type of investor. We believe European investors, including the family office community, stand to benefit a lot from these developments and the disruptive projects that are reaching the tipping point into mainstream adoption. It is our hope that the Europe Disruptive Investment Summit marks the beginning of an ongoing and productive conversation where families begin to learn more about these burgeoning industries.  GDA Capital CEO and co-founder Michael Gord.

The speaker list for the event includes global family offices and investment companies such as representatives from Transform World and WAMI Capital, LionieHill Capital & DLTx, as well as disruptive technology organizations, such as AXIA, Elitium, DigitalBits Foundation, Zytara, NetBox, Iqoniq and leading capital groups in Europe including Aero Capital, Staithe Capital, and Advanced Blockchain AG.



About GDA Capital

GDA Capital is a global organization that provides vertically integrated financial technology services to institutional investors and disruptive technology companies. We are the trusted advisor that bridges the gap between institutional capital markets and disruptive technologies. For more information about GDA Capital or any of our products and services, please visit https://gda.capital/







Media Contact:

Robert Penington

Robert@thronepr.com





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BERKELEY, Calif., June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Rigetti Computing, a pioneer in full-stack quantum computing, announced today it is launching the world's first multi-chip quantum processor. The processor incorporates a proprietary modular architecture that accelerates the path to commercialization and solves key scaling challenges toward fault-tolerant quantum computers. Rigetti expects to make an 80-qubit system powered by the breakthrough multi-chip technology available on its Quantum Cloud Services platform later this year.

Weve developed a fundamentally new approach to scaling quantum computers, says Chad Rigetti, founder and CEO of Rigetti Computing. Our proprietary innovations in chip design and manufacturing have unlocked what we believe is the fastest path to building the systems needed to run practical applications and error correction.

Scaling quantum computers comes with inherent challenges. As chips increase in size, there is a higher likelihood of failure and lower manufacturing yield, making it increasingly difficult to produce high-quality devices. Rigetti has eliminated these roadblocks by developing the technology to connect multiple identical dies into a large-scale quantum processor. This modular approach exponentially reduces manufacturing complexity and allows for accelerated, predictable scaling.

Scalability is a central objective across the entire quantum computing industry. Rigetti is the first to demonstrate an elegant, effective solution to this major technical challenge, said Marko Loncar, a Harvard professor of electrical engineering working on quantum hardware, who is familiar with the companys work.

The companys multi-chip approach enables future systems to scale in multiplicative ways. Next-generation architectures currently in development at Rigetti include individual chips with more qubits, as well as advanced technologies to help connect more of these chips into larger processors. Rigetti manufactures all of its chips at its California-based captive quantum foundry.

There is a race to get from the tens of qubits that devices have today, to the thousands of qubits that future systems will require to solve real-world problems, says Amir Safavi-Naeini, assistant professor of applied physics at Stanford. Rigetti's modular approach demonstrates a very promising way of approaching these scales.

About Rigetti Computing

Rigetti Computing is a full-stack quantum computing company that builds superconducting quantum computing systems and delivers access to them over the cloud. These systems are optimized for integration with existing computing infrastructure and tailored to support the development of practical software and applications. Learn more at rigetti.com.

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Auckland, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- (via Blockchain Wire) - Brave New Coin (https://bravenewcoin.com/), a leading data analytics and research company backed by Techemy Ltd., today announced a partnership with QuantHouse, the global provider of end-to-end systematic trading solutions including innovative market data services, an algo trading platform, and infrastructure products and part of Iress (IRE.ASX), to offer Brave New Coins data feeds, Indices and Analytics to QuantHouse customers. Upon launch, QuantHouse will feature Brave New Coins high-speed single asset indices for top ten crypto assets, plus the Brave New Coin DeFi Index.

Trusted by leading financial institutions, Brave New Coins enterprise-grade cryptocurrency market data solutions deliver actionable insights around trading, valuations, portfolio construction, performance attribution and risk management.

The partnership enables QuantHouse customers to leverage Brave New Coins high-frequency data feeds that the organization has been building out over the past 12 months, and underscores the importance of high-quality crypto indices and the role they play in successful trading. Brave New Coins indices have been launched to become the industry standard for price discovery and for pricing/ settling derivatives and other instruments, while its basket indices offer sector and asset diversification while mitigating market volatility.

For QuantHouse traders who have an established source for quotes, the availability of Brave New Coins data provides for an additional reference on settlement price and an understanding of real-time market conditions. This is particularly significant in the absence of formal standards in crypto trading.



QuantHouse and its parent company, Iress, have a deep history of assisting hedge funds, market makers, investment banks, brokers and other trading venues to achieve optimal trading performance, and gain access to rich datasets, together with ultra low latency built on a global infrastructure footprint said Fran Strajnar, CEO of Brave New Coin. Were proud that our new partnership with QuantHouse will enable their customers to make smarter trades courtesy of our industry-leading datasets.

Stephane Leroy, Co-Founder QuantHouse, commented Since its launch in early 2020, Brave New Coins cryptocurrency index infrastructure has been in high demand by companies including BTSE, the Toronto Futures Options and Swaps Exchange (tFOSE) and LedgerX. QuantHouse is pleased to be a part of developing standards in this space, enabling better trading by mirroring market structures similar to existing indices for equities and futures.





About QuantHouse

QuantHouse provides end-to-end systematic trading solutions. This includes ultra-low latency market data technologies with QuantFEED, algo-trading development framework with QuantFACTORY and proximity hosting and order routing services with QuantLINK. We help hedge funds, market makers, investment banks, brokers and trading venues achieve optimal trading performance, develop and integrate new trading strategies, comply with regulatory requirements, test existing and new trading infrastructure tools and rationalize operating costs.

QuantHouse is part of Iress (IRE.ASX), a technology company providing software to the financial services industry. Iress software is used by more than 9,000 businesses and 500,000 users globally. More information is available on www.iress.com.

Media Contacts for QuantHouse: Bill Yelverton, Holly Finn, Streets Consulting

holly.finn@streetsconsulting.com

bill.yelverton@streetsconsulting.com





About Brave New Coin

Brave New Coin (https://bravenewcoin.com/) (BNC) is a data and research company focused on the blockchain and cryptographic assets industry. Founded in 2014, BNC provides data, analysis and research to a global network of market participants. Brave New Coin supplies spot-pricing, index solutions, research and news both aggregate and proprietary, via partners such as Amazon Alexa, Dow Jones Factiva, NASDAQ, Refinitv, RapidAPI and dozens more. The companys experience and expertise make it the leading provider of standard and non-standard institutional grade, highly compliant, data solutions. BNC Pro leverages its experience and data into a user-friendly dashboard solution.
New York, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Concentrating Solar Power Market Overview: According to a comprehensive research report by Market Research Future (MRFR),  Concentrating Solar Power Market Research Report, Technology, Components, End User and Region - Forecast till 2027 the market size is projected to reach USD 16.41 billion by 2027 from an estimated USD 7.60 billion in 2020 with ~ 17.1% CAGR from 2020 to 2027.

The concentrating solar power market is proliferating on the global platform. Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) has several advantages over Photovoltaic (PV), such as higher efficiencies, lower investment costs, and an inherent thermal storage capacity that enables power generation even during cloudy weathers, after sunset, and a better hybrid operation capability with other fuels meeting the base-load demand at night.

Further, CSP plants help develop existing local industries and fulfilling renewable energy goals. Together with the potential for niche applications like absorption chilling, CSP becomes a rational choice in tackling the energy crisis. With its increased power generation capacity, the market is projected to garner significant traction over the years to come. Another major advantage that CSP has over solar PV is its storage capabilities. With CSP, engines have high heating capacities, allowing the heat transfer fluid to retain heat for a long period.



Get Free Sample PDF Brochure https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/2104





Competitive Analysis

Key Companies Profiled in the Concentrated Solar Power Market Report are 

Acciona Energy (Spain)

Abengoa Solar

SA (Spain)

GE Renewable Energy (France)

Enel Green Power (Italy)

TSK Flagsol Engineering GmbH (Germany)

BrightSource Energy (US)

eSolar Inc. (US)

Atlantica Yield PLC (UK)

SolarReserve (US)

Chiyoda Corporation (Japan)

ACWA Power (Saudi Arabia)

Soligua (Italy)

Alsolen (Morocco)

Concentrating solar power market outlook appears competitive due to several notable players forming a competitive landscape. Technology providers strive to increase production capacities with improved cost efficiency and a leaner organization supported by new possibilities offered by digitalization. Many of them are exploring the possibility of new development after mastering their existing product lines.



Browse In-depth Market Research Report (110 pages) on Concentrating Solar Power

https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/concentrating-solar-power-market-2104





Rise in Renewable Energy Generation Shares Drives the Market Growth

The concentrating solar power market outlook appears promising mainly due to the continually growing energy demand worldwide. Additionally, the rise in CSP installations in commercial & industrial and utility-scale applications positively impacts the concentrating solar power market growth.

The use of thermal energy storage tanks is much easier than storing electricity. As a result, CSP is often dispatchable even when the sun isn't shining. This is a major factor boosting the concentrating solar power market size. In addition, growing government initiatives and investments in large CSP plant installations benefit the concentrating solar power market revenues.

High Costs Associated with Installation and Maintenance of CSP Restrict the Market Growth.

Concentrated solar power systems tend to be large, utility-scale projects capable of providing a lot of electricity as a power source to the grid. Resultantly, CSP systems require a significant amount of land with direct sunlight. Unlike solar PV, they're not used in residential applications. Limited availability of places to build these types of systems impedes market growth.

Besides, a concentrated solar power system is an expensive technology in terms of installation costs and Levelized cost of energy (LCOE) compared to solar PV. Also, being newer technology, CSP requires more specialized technology and installation practices, increasing the overall costs of these projects.



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COVID-19 Impacts on the CSP Market

The novel COVID-19 pandemic did not affect much to the concentrating solar power industry. The pandemic increased the energy demand, reassuring a robust rise in the renewable energy market. Due to the increased energy demand, especially from the industrial sectors, the renewable energy market kept growing steadily throughout 2020.

Also, the cost of renewable continued to fall in 2020, despite disruptions of the pandemic. The cost of electricity from utility-scale concentrating solar power declined by 16% during 2020 alone. The concentrating solar power market is rapidly returning to normal and is projected to pick up further.

Segmentation

The market is segmented into technology, components, end-users, and regions. The technology segment is sub-segmented into parabolic trough, power tower, linear Fresnel, and dish/engine system. Among these, the parabolic trough segment accounts for the largest market share, witnessing applications in all major end-use industries, such as enhanced oil recovery, utilities, and mining, and others.

The component segment is sub-segmented into solar field, power block, and thermal storage. The end-user segment is sub-segmented into utilities, EOR, and others. The region segment is sub-segmented into Europe, Americas, Asia Pacific, and rest-of-the-world.

Regional Analysis

The Asia Pacific region dominates the global concentrating solar power market. The region accounts for one of the largest producers and consumers of power globally. The region also largely relies on renewable power generation, making vast investments. Rising focus on developing renewable energy sources, especially India, China, and a few South Asian countries, boosts the region's concentrating solar power market size.

Besides, the ample renewable/ natural resources and raw materials advantages increase the region's markets share. With their significant investments, China, Japan, and India account for major concentrating solar power market shares. Japan also contributes colossally to the regional market growth.

Segmentation of Market covered in the research:

Information by Technology (Parabolic Trough, Power Tower, Linear Fresnel, and Dish/Engine System), and Components (Solar Field, Power Block, and Thermal Storage)), End User (Utilities, Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR), and Others), and Region (North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East & Africa, and South America)



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About Market Research Future:

Market Research Future (MRFR) is a global market research company that takes pride in its services, offering a complete and accurate analysis with regard to diverse markets and consumers worldwide. Market Research Future has the distinguished objective of providing the optimal quality research and granular research to clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help answer your most important questions.
COLUMBUS, Ohio, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Columbus Metropolitan Housing Authority (CMHA) announced today a $134 million plan to award 20-year contracts to six Ohio-based nonprofit affordable housing providers for a record-setting combined total of 817 federally funded vouchers targeted toward creating additional permanent supportive housing for the elderly, people with disabilities and low-income households.

This will be the largest-ever issuance of Project-Based Vouchers (PBVs) in CMHAs 87-year history, said CMHA Chief Financial Officer Tom Williamson. CMHA is excited to move forward with each of our Project-Based Voucher partners."

PBVs are the federal governments major program for assisting more than 5 million people nationally in 2.2 million very low-income households, the elderly and the disabled to rent modest housing in the private market. To qualify, households must meet income requirements set by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

The six CMHA recipients of PBVs are National Church Residences (which received the highest total with 312 vouchers), Community Housing Network (121 vouchers), Homeport (108 vouchers), Wallick Communities (120 vouchers), Affordable Columbus Housing (113 vouchers) and Creative Housing (43 vouchers).

This announcement represents just the latest example of CMHA being laser-focused on providing affordable housing and meeting the needs of our people in Columbus and Franklin County, said CMHA President and CEO Charles Hillman.

In total, over the life of the 20-year PBV contracts, CMHA will provide the six recipients approximately $134 million in federal funding to commit to offering more affordable housing in Greater Columbus.

This is another terrific example of the long-term relationship that National Church Residences has developed with CMHA over the past 18 years, said Michelle Norris, executive vice president of external affairs and strategic partnerships for Columbus-based National Church Residences, which is the nations largest not-for-profit provider of affordable senior housing and the largest manager of service coordinators.

We are honored to be a partner supporting CMHAs mission to develop affordable senior housing, as well as our vision to advance better living for seniors, Norris said.

The PBV program is part of HUDs Housing Choice Voucher program.

Most Housing Choice Vouchers are tenant-based, meaning families can use them to rent any private apartment that meets program guidelines. PBVs, in contrast, are attached to a specific unit whose landlord contracts with the state or local public housing agency to rent to low-income families. Families can move without losing rental assistance if another voucher is available. If a family in a project-based voucher unit moves out, another low-income family moving in benefits from the rent subsidy it provides.

Families or individuals in units with PBVs contribute 30% of their income for rent and utilities; the voucher pays the difference between the tenant contribution and the units total rent and utility costs. Tenants in PBV units are assisted as long as they live in the unit and continue to qualify for the program.

CMHAs selection process in Columbus and Franklin County is aimed at serving an individual with an annual income of $17,700, for example, or a family of four with an annual income of no more than $26,200. Through CMHAs PBV program with its partners, the standard monthly rent would be $789 for a one-bedroom apartment or $1,428 for a three-bedroom unit.

PBVs are the largest, most available tool to create new project-based rental assistance, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), a nonpartisan research and policy institute which works at the federal and state levels on fiscal policy and public programs that affect low- and moderate-income families and individuals.

PBVs are not widely used but are gaining popularity, as they have multiple benefits for agencies and communities, including the ability to create more affordable and mixed-income housing with financing packages that make constructing or rehabilitating affordable housing possible, CBPP recently reported.

PBVs can also lock in lower rents in neighborhoods with fast-rising housing costs  such as the Columbus area  if the contract limits rent increases to changes in the landlords cost to operate the building rather than changes in market rents, CBPP noted.

About CMHA: CMHA helps people access affordable housing through collaborative partnerships, promote neighborhood revitalization and assist residents in accessing needed social services. CMHA has more than doubled its portfolio of housing over that last five years, including over $200 million in investment in 2020. We own over 4,000 units of affordable housing and through our Housing Choice Voucher and Project Based Rental Assistance Programs provide rental assistance to more than 250,000 Ohio and Washington DC residents. Half of the authority's apartments are set aside as workforce housing for families earning 80% of the area median income.

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WASHINGTON, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Data Bridge Market Research has published a new research report titled Laboratory Information Systems (LIS) Market gives a holistic view of the market from 2021 to 2028, Which Includes primary and secondary drivers, market share, leading segments, possible sales volume and geographical analysis. This market research report contains thorough analysis of the market structure along with forecast of the various segments and sub-segments of the market. A numerous Laboratory Information Systems (LIS) markets, marketing strategies, trends, future products and rising opportunities are taken into consideration while studying market and preparing this report. The areas covered in the Laboratory Information Systems (LIS) report include market definition, market segmentation, competitive analysis and research methodology.



The Laboratory Information Systems (LIS) Market is expected to gain market growth in the forecast period of 2021 to 2028. Data Bridge Market Research analyses that the market is growing with the CAGR of 9.85% in the forecast period of 2021 to 2028. The growing need for the developed healthcare monitoring systems will help in escalating the growth of the healthcare analytical testing services market.

Available Exclusive Sample of Laboratory Information Systems (LIS) Market Report in PDF Version Download @ https://www.databridgemarketresearch.com/request-a-sample/?dbmr=laboratory-information-systems-lis-market

The information for every competitor Includes:

Company Profile

Main Business Information

SWOT Analysis, Porters Five Forces analysis

Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin

Market Share, Market Trends



Companies Covered:

Cerner Corporation

Sunquest Information Systems, Inc

SSC Soft Computer

Compugroup Medical AG

McKesson Corporation

Medical Information Technology, Inc

Orchard Software Corporation

Epic Systems Corporation

Allscripts

Quest Diagnostics Incorporated, CPSI)

IBM Watson Health

Computer Programs and Systems, Inc

Merge Healthcare, Inc

Orchard Software Corporation

Agilent Technologies, Inc

Dassault Systemes

Access Full Report @ https://www.databridgemarketresearch.com/checkout/buy/singleuser/laboratory-information-systems-lis-market

Segmentation Outlook:

By Product (Standalone LIS and Integrated LIS)



By Delivery Mode (On-premises LIS, Web-based LIS, and Cloud-Based LIS), Component (Services and Software)



By End User (Hospital Laboratories, Independent Laboratories, and Physician Office Laboratories)



By Country (U.S., Canada, Mexico, Germany, Italy, U.K., France, Spain, Netherland, Belgium, Switzerland, Turkey, Russia, Rest of Europe, Japan, China, India, South Korea, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Rest of Asia-Pacific, Brazil, Argentina, Rest of South America, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Israel, Rest of Middle East & Africa)



Table of Contents

Report Summary Laboratory Information Systems (LIS) Market Overview and Key Insights Laboratory Information Systems (LIS) Market Determinants Laboratory Information Systems (LIS) Market Segmentation Research Methodology Laboratory Information Systems (LIS) Market by Product, 2018-2028 (USD Million) Laboratory Information Systems (LIS) Market by Distribution Channel, 2018-2028 (USD Million) Laboratory Information Systems (LIS) Market by Region 2018-2028 (USD Million) Competitive Landscape Company Profiles Appendix



View Detailed Table of Content and Respective Fact and Figures about This Report @ https://www.databridgemarketresearch.com/toc/?dbmr=laboratory-information-systems-lis-market

Market Overview

The LIS plays an important role in the creating of the information efficiently and precisely, which aid in the clinical decisions. The Laboratory Information Systems (LIS) Market is boosting, due to the growing need for the developed healthcare monitoring systems, improved effectiveness of the laboratories, and hospitals and the laboratories ranking for the information systems. Various factors supporting for example the considerable expenditure from the healthcare IT companies and the wave in the number of hospitals seeing the importance of Laboratory Information Systems (LIS), henceforth contributing in the growth of the Laboratory Information Systems (LIS) market during the forecast years.

To succeed in this swiftly changing market place, businesses must take up an excellent Laboratory Information Systems (LIS)market analysis report solution. This market report looks over the market with respect to general market conditions, market advancement, market scenarios, cost and profit of the specified market regions, position and modified pricing between major players. The data and information included in this marketing report not only aids business make data-driven decisions but also assures maximum return on investment (ROI). A range of steps are used while generating Laboratory Information Systems (LIS) market by taking the inputs from a dedicated team of researchers, analysts and forecasters.

The Report Covers

Laboratory Information Systems (LIS) market value data analysis of 2021 and forecast to 2028.

Annualized market revenues ($ million) for each Laboratory Information Systems (LIS) market share.

Country-wise analysis of major geographical regions.

Key companies operating in the global Laboratory Information Systems (LIS) market. Based on the availability of data, information related to new product launches, practical solutions, dedicated research and analysis, innovation, talent solutions is also available in the report.

Analysis of business policies by identifying the key Laboratory Information Systems (LIS) market segmentation positioned for strong growth in the future.

Analysis of major collaborations, merger acquisitions and market expansion strategies.

Competitive strategies by identifying 'who-stands-where' in the market on the basis of consumers demands and preferences.



Looking for customization or if any Query reach to us @ https://www.databridgemarketresearch.com/inquire-before-buying/?dbmr=laboratory-information-systems-lis-market

The study is useful in providing answers to several critical questions that are important for the industry stakeholders such as manufacturers, distributors, suppliers, partners, end-users, researchers, analysts and forecasters, besides allowing them in strategizing investments and capitalizing on current market opportunities. Laboratory Information Systems (LIS) market report emphasizes key market dynamics of Laboratory Information Systems (LIS) industry and covers historic data, present Laboratory Information Systems (LIS) market trends, environment, technological innovation, upcoming technologies and the technical progress in the related industry.

Regional Analysis

The countries covered in the Laboratory Information Systems (LIS) Market Report are the U.S., Canada and Mexico in North America, Germany, France, U.K., Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, Russia, Italy, Spain, Turkey, Rest of Europe in Europe, China, Japan, India, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Rest of Asia-Pacific (APAC) in the Asia-Pacific (APAC), Saudi Arabia, U.A.E, South Africa, Egypt, Israel, Rest of Middle East and Africa (MEA) as a part of Middle East and Africa (MEA), Brazil, Argentina and Rest of South America as part of South America.

North America is dominated the Laboratory Information Systems (LIS) market because of the growing acceptance of healthcare IT and suitable incentive plans. Furthermore, many manufacturers and technologically developed healthcare organization is expected to further boost the growth of the Laboratory Information Systems (LIS) market in the region. Asia-Pacific is projected to observe significant amount of growth in the Laboratory Information Systems (LIS) market because of the by rising geriatric population and broad utilization of healthcare IT. Advancing countries, have advantageous opportunities such as increasing awareness about electronic healthcare record systems and their growing importance coupled with the supportive government programs and policies are expected to boost the Laboratory Information Systems (LIS) market in the region during the forecast period.

Know more details visit to Laboratory Information Systems (LIS) Market Research Report @ https://www.databridgemarketresearch.com/reports/laboratory-information-systems-lis-market

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VANCOUVER, British Columbia, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Segra International Corp, a leading cannabis agriculture technology company, is pleased to announce its first successful export of Verified Segra Stock Cannabis plantlets to the Biopharmaceutical Research Company (BRC), one of the first groups in the USA to receive approval from the DEA to cultivate Cannabis for scientific research purposes.



This shipment marks a tremendous milestone in the evolution of the US cannabis industry, as it represents one of the first imports of live Cannabis plants to a federally licensed US cultivator. In recent months, the DEA has issued a select number of licenses to several groups in the US to allow for the cultivation of Cannabis for scientific research purposes. BRC, based in California, is among the first companies granted a license and is now operational. Segras Verified Segra Stock plantlets will provide BRC with standardized and validated starting materials produced through plant tissue culture and backed by extensive agronomic data and Cannabis plant pathogen screening.

BRC works with research groups studying Cannabis and Cannabis flower to understand the plant in a scientific and federally regulated environment. Under the federal licensing regime, BRC is only allowed to source genetics and starting material from DEA-compliant or federally legal sources.

Segra's Verified Segra Stock guarantee means our plantlets are DNA fingerprinted and pathogen-free with virtually no risk of pathogen introduction to the receiving grow facility. Starting with this input material is critical to effectively grow replicable crops, something highly valued by researchers who are studying the finished product of the Cannabis plant and its derivatives," said Jamie Blundell, CEO of Segra International. "Furthermore, Segra's VNTR DNA Fingerprinting technology allows BRC to order plantlets and cultivars with certainty, knowing they are receiving the same input material with each shipment. The application of VNTR DNA fingerprinting technology can be used throughout the supply chain for track and trace purposes, from plantlet to flower, translating this certainty to researchers who can study the same product repeatedly."

"At BRC, we are focused on developing federally compliant active pharmaceutical ingredients for federally compliant researchers examining the therapeutic effects of Cannabis" said George Hodgin, CEO of Biopharmaceutical Research Company. "We're fortunate to be working with Segra to offer our clients a wide range of clean, high-quality Cannabis of specific chemical expressions and flower types to help them better understand the applications of the Cannabis plant."

Learn more about Segra's services and premium cultivars by viewing the 2021 Cultivar and Services Catalogue.

About Segra:

Segra is an agriculture technology company offering plant tissue culture, plant genomics, and pathogen detection services to accelerate the advancement of the cannabis industry. The company's proprietary technologies empower its clients to drive financial performance and mitigate risk while exploring the next frontier of optimized cultivation practices for the rapidly evolving cannabis consumer. Segra has developed industrial-scale laboratories to produce Verified Segra Stock, robust, and DNA-fingerprinted Cannabis plantlets for licensed producers globally. Segra has assembled a world-class team of specialists in agronomy, molecular genetics, plant tissue culture, and regulatory compliance to support this vision. Learn more at segra-intl.com or by viewing the 2021 Cultivar and Services Catalogue .

About Biopharmaceutical Research Company

BRC is a specialty pharmaceutical company that holds several DEA Registrations across the entire value chain of Cannabis and is pioneering the federally legal Cannabis space in the USA.

Forward-Looking Information:

This news release includes statements containing certain "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities law ("forward-looking statements"). Forward-looking statements are frequently characterized by words such as "plan," "continue," "expect," "project," "intend," "believe," "anticipate," "estimate," "may," "will," "potential," "proposed" and other similar words, or statements that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" occur. These statements are only predictions. Various assumptions were used in drawing the conclusions or making the projections contained in the forward-looking statements throughout this news release. Forward-looking statements are based on the opinions and estimates of management at the date the statements are made and are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. The company is under no obligation, and expressly disclaims any intention or obligation, to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as expressly required by applicable law.
MONTREAL, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Osisko Development Corp. (Osisko Development or the Company) (TSX.V-ODV) is pleased to announce drilling results from the 200,000-meter 2021 exploration and category conversion drill program campaign at its Cariboo Gold Project (Cariboo) in central British Columbia. A total of ten diamond drill rigs are currently on the Project.



Drilling Summary

A total of 16,000 meters in 52 holes have been drilled thus far in 2021 on the Lowhee Deposit Zone, the strike extension of the Cow Deposit, located on Barkerville Mountain (Figure 1).

have been drilled thus far in 2021 on the Lowhee Deposit Zone, the strike extension of the Cow Deposit, located on Barkerville Mountain (Figure 1). Recent assay results include holes BM-21-020 to BM-21-036 (Figures 2 and 3).

(Figures 2 and 3). Drill holes BM-21-031, BM-21-033 and BM-21-035 (Figure 3) intersected multiple mineralized vein corridors and include highlights of 45.80 g/t Au over 0.75 meters in drillhole BM-21-031, 16.05 g/t Au over 7.50 meters , including a sample of 93.70 g/t Au over 0.80 meters , located 20 meters from surface in BM-21-033 and 15.20 g/t Au in 4.85 meters in BM-21-035.

in drillhole BM-21-031, , including a sample of , located 20 meters from surface in BM-21-033 and in BM-21-035. Mineralization has now been defined to a vertical depth of 350 meters and remains open at depth and along strike to the southeast.

Detailed drilling results, a drill hole location plan map and vertical cross section are presented at the end of this release.



Recent Drilling Highlights:

3.07 g/t Au over 16.20 meters in hole BM-21-023 11.35 g/t Au over 3.60 meters in hole BM-21-024 11.79 g/t Au over 2.80 meters in hole BM-21-025 17.44 g/t Au over 3.45 meters in hole BM-21-025 including 69.20 g/t Au over 0.80 meter 3.44 g/t Au over 11.10 meters in hole BM-21-026 15.15 g/t Au over 2.00 meters in hole BM-21-027 14.65 g/t Au over 4.15 meters in hole BM-21-028 including 29.40 g/t Au over 1.45 meters 20.02 g/t Au over 2.65 meters in hole BM-21-028 including 61.70 g/t Au over 0.50 meters 57.20 g/t Au over 0.55 meter in hole BM-21-029 45.80 g/t Au over 0.75 meter in hole BM-21-031 16.05 g/t Au over 7.50 meter in hole BM-21-033 including 93.70 g/t Au over 0.80 meter 50.20 g/t Au over 0.60 meter in hole BM-21-034 11.70 g/t Au over 4.40 meters in hole BM-21-034 including 47.40 g/t Au over 0.85 meter 15.20 g/t Au over 4.85 meters in hole BM-21-035 10.12 g/t Au over 3.05 meters in hole BM-21-035 60.90 g/t Au over 0.55 meter in hole BM-21-036 19.04 g/t Au over 4.25 meters in hole BM-21-036 including 39.50 g/t Au over 1.30 meters 27.45 g/t Au over 2.35 meters in hole BM-21-036

Chris Lodder, President of Osisko Development commented, The continued positive assay results from our ongoing drill campaign at Lowhee will continue to increase confidence within the modelled vein corridors and expand at depth. With two drills focused on this zone, we will also systematically step out to the south east to further expand this deposit.



The primary focus of the drilling at Valley Zone is to increase indicated category ounces to support our ongoing feasibility study. These excellent results from Valley Zone are hitting our designed targets and expanding the vein corridors at depth.

Mineralized quartz veins on Cariboo are overall sub-vertical dip and northeast strike. Vein corridors are defined as a high-density network of mineralized quartz veins within the axis of the last folding events folds and hosted within a brittle meta-sandstone or calcareous meta-sandstone. Vein corridors are modelled at a minimum thickness of 2 meters and average about 4.5 meters true width. Individual mineralized veins within these corridors have widths varying from centimeters to several meters and strike lengths from a few meters to over 50 meters. These corridors have been defined from surface to a vertical depth averaging 300 meters and remain open for expansion at depth and along strike. Gold grades are intimately associated with quartz vein-hosted pyrite as well as pyritic, intensely silicified wall rock haloes in close proximity to the veins.

True widths are estimated to be 60% to 75% of reported core length intervals. Intervals not recovered by drilling were assigned zero grade. Top cuts have not been applied to high grade assays. Complete assay highlights are presented in Table 1, drill hole locations are listed in Table 2.

Figure 1 is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/7823dd4f-fcd8-4657-ba67-4fc50117a527

Figure 2 is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/58c9e536-5481-42af-9903-930386b84ca1

Figure 3 is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/b0306874-db03-4069-9091-5810083225f0

Figure 4 is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/9a7997dc-abfb-407f-8a3c-4dbaa4d70c43

Qualified Persons

Per National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects, Maggie Layman, P.Geo. Vice President Exploration of Osisko Development Corp., is a Qualified Person and has prepared, validated, and approved the technical and scientific content of this news release.

Quality Assurance  Quality Control

Once received from the drill and processed, all drill core samples are sawn in half, labelled and bagged. The remaining drill core is subsequently stored on site at a secured facility in Wells, BC. Numbered security tags are applied to lab shipments for chain of custody requirements. Quality control (QC) samples are inserted at regular intervals in the sample stream, including blanks and reference materials with all sample shipments to monitor laboratory performance. The QAQC program was designed and approved by Lynda Bloom, P.Geo. of Analytical Solutions Ltd.

Drill core samples are submitted to ALS Geochemistrys analytical facility in North Vancouver, British Columbia for preparation and analysis. The ALS facility is accredited to the ISO/IEC 17025 standard for gold assays and all analytical methods include quality control materials at set frequencies with established data acceptance criteria. The entire sample is crushed, and 250 grams is pulverized. Analysis for gold is by 50g fire assay fusion with atomic absorption (AAS) finish with a lower limit of 0.01 ppm and upper limit of 100 ppm. Samples with gold assays greater than 100 ppm are re-analyzed using a 1,000g screen metallic fire assay. A selected number of samples are also analyzed using a 48 multi-elemental geochemical package by a 4-acid digestion, followed by Inductively Coupled Plasma Atomic Emission Spectroscopy (ICP-AES) and Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectroscopy (ICP-MS).

About Osisko Development Corp.

Osisko Development Corp. is well-capitalized and uniquely positioned as a premier gold development company in North America to advance the Cariboo Gold Project and other Canadian and Mexican properties, with the objective of becoming the next mid-tier gold producer. The Cariboo Gold Project, located in central British Columbia, is Osisko Development's flagship asset with measured and indicated resources of 21.44 Mt at 4.6 Au g/t for a total of 3.2 million ounces of gold and inferred resource of 21.69 Mt at 3.9 Au g/t for a total of 2.7 million ounces of gold (see NI 43-101 Technical Report for resource October 5th, 2020). The considerable exploration potential at depth and along strike distinguishes the Cariboo Gold Project relative to other development assets as does the historically low, all-in discovery costs of US $19 per ounce. The Cariboo Gold Project is advancing through permitting as a 4,750 tonnes per day underground operation with a feasibility study on track for completion in the second half of 2021. Osisko Development's project pipeline is complemented by potential near-term production targeted from the San Antonio gold project, located in Sonora Mexico and early exploration stage properties including the Coulon Project and James Bay Properties located in Quebec as well as the Guerrero Properties located in Mexico. Osisko Development began trading on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol "ODV" on December 2, 2020.

For further information, please contact Osisko Development Corp.: Jean Francois Lemonde

Vice President, Investor Relations

jflemonde@osiskodev.com

Tel: 514-299-4926

Forward-looking Statements

Certain statements contained in this press release may be deemed forwardlooking statements within the meaning of applicable Canadian and U.S. securities laws. These forwardlooking statements, by their nature, require Osisko to make certain assumptions and necessarily involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in these forwardlooking statements. Forwardlooking statements are not guarantees of performance. Words such as may, will, would, could, expect, believe, plan, anticipate, intend, estimate, continue, or the negative or comparable terminology, as well as terms usually used in the future and the conditional, are intended to identify forwardlooking statements. Information contained in forwardlooking statements is based upon certain material assumptions that were applied in drawing a conclusion or making a forecast or projection, including managements perceptions of historical trends, current conditions and expected future developments, results of further exploration work to define and expand mineral resources, expected conclusions of optimization studies, that vein corridors continue to be defined as a high-density network of mineralized quartz within the axis of the F3 fold and hosted within the sandstones and that the deposit remains open for expansion at depth and down plunge, as well as other considerations that are believed to be appropriate in the circumstances. Osisko considers its assumptions to be reasonable based on information currently available, but cautions the reader that their assumptions regarding future events, many of which are beyond the control of Osisko, may ultimately prove to be incorrect since they are subject to risks and uncertainties that affect Osisko and its business. Such risks and uncertainties include, among others, risks relating to the ability of exploration activities (including drill results) to accurately predict mineralization; errors in managements geological modelling; the ability of to complete further exploration activities, including drilling; property and royalty interests in the Cariboo gold deposit; the ability of the Corporation to obtain required approvals; the results of exploration activities; risks relating to mining activities; the global economic climate; metal prices; dilution; environmental risks; and community and non-governmental actions and the responses of relevant governments to the COVID-19 outbreak and the effectiveness of such responses.

For additional information with respect to these and other factors and assumptions underlying the forwardlooking statements made in this news release concerning Osisko Development, see the Filing Statement available electronically on SEDAR (www.sedar.com) under Osisko Development's issuer profile. The forwardlooking statements set forth herein concerning Osisko Development reflect management's expectations as at the date of this news release and are subject to change after such date. Osisko Development disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, other than as 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 news release. No stock exchange, securities commission or other regulatory authority has approved or disapproved the information contained herein.

Table 1: Cariboo Gold Project 2021 Length Weighted Drill Hole Gold Composites

HOLE ID FROM M TO (M) LENGTH

(M) AU G/T BM-21-020 126.70 127.35 0.65 12.10 211.00 211.55 0.55 4.80 236.85 237.35 0.50 19.80 BM-21-021 54.20 54.75 0.55 10.55 BM-21-022 79.00 79.50 0.50 3.31 130.60 132.45 1.85 7.56 INCLUDING 130.60 131.85 1.25 10.65 180.20 180.75 0.55 3.59 BM-21-023 33.80 50.00 16.20 3.07 INCLUDING 45.00 46.10 1.10 28.40 AND 46.10 47.00 0.90 12.10 136.30 136.90 0.60 3.17 183.65 184.15 0.50 4.34 185.65 186.15 0.50 7.82 208.25 213.40 5.15 5.12 INCLUDING 208.25 208.75 0.50 9.75 AND 212.25 213.40 1.15 17.45 225.05 225.55 0.50 6.99 229.80 230.30 0.50 3.19 247.65 248.35 0.70 4.33 258.65 259.30 0.65 8.34 282.90 283.45 0.55 6.87 BM-21-024 59.45 62.45 3.00 2.56 75.50 76.00 0.50 11.00 114.30 117.90 3.60 11.35 INCLUDING 114.30 115.25 0.95 6.88 AND 116.40 117.00 0.60 35.30 AND 117.00 117.90 0.90 14.50 164.00 167.45 3.45 4.73 INCLUDING 164.00 164.50 0.50 15.15 AND 166.95 167.45 0.50 13.90 189.50 190.00 0.50 4.49 BM-21-025 258.15 261.15 3.00 7.29 INCLUDING 259.15 259.65 0.50 35.40 270.50 271.00 0.50 4.47 287.25 290.05 2.80 11.79 INCLUDING 287.85 288.40 0.55 9.48 AND 288.40 289.35 0.95 20.90 AND 289.35 290.05 0.70 10.35 297.65 298.15 0.50 6.69 304.20 307.65 3.45 17.44 INCLUDING 304.70 305.50 0.80 69.20 BM-21-026 65.20 65.85 0.65 5.95 73.40 74.80 1.40 5.84 INCLUDING 74.00 74.80 0.80 8.99 93.40 93.90 0.50 6.57 105.60 106.20 0.60 17.95 142.05 142.55 0.50 5.81 175.00 175.55 0.55 25.90 187.05 198.15 11.10 3.44 INCLUDING 187.75 188.30 0.55 5.89 AND 189.10 189.85 0.75 16.50 AND 193.25 193.75 0.50 10.90 AND 197.65 198.15 0.50 23.80 240.25 241.15 0.90 4.47 281.00 281.50 0.50 12.05 BM-21-027 210.60 211.10 0.50 4.87 248.50 249.00 0.50 5.26 280.05 281.10 1.05 6.61 313.50 315.50 2.00 15.15 INCLUDING 314.50 315.00 0.50 31.00 AND 315.00 315.50 0.50 29.10 BM-21-028 61.15 65.30 4.15 14.65 INCLUDING 61.15 62.30 1.15 13.55 AND 63.00 64.45 1.45 29.40 73.70 74.40 0.70 4.01 77.25 77.80 0.55 3.66 87.60 88.25 0.65 12.75 90.40 90.90 0.50 3.48 106.20 107.60 1.40 12.29 INCLUDING 107.10 107.60 0.50 18.95 111.00 112.80 1.80 6.20 INCLUDING 111.90 112.80 0.90 10.50 122.80 123.30 0.50 5.48 125.50 126.00 0.50 7.87 136.40 139.05 2.65 20.02 INCLUDING 136.40 137.15 0.75 23.60 AND 138.55 139.05 0.50 61.70 153.40 153.90 0.50 34.00 BM-21-029 192.40 193.30 0.90 3.99 263.75 264.25 0.50 3.97 278.00 278.95 0.95 7.31 303.85 304.40 0.55 57.20 311.05 311.65 0.60 3.48 349.95 350.55 0.60 4.06 BM-21-030 78.00 78.50 0.50 4.30 157.90 158.40 0.50 8.41 BM-21-031 5.80 6.55 0.75 45.80 41.30 42.00 0.70 3.56 55.00 56.50 1.50 12.55 82.00 83.40 1.40 3.50 90.00 90.50 0.50 3.62 110.00 115.00 5.00 3.53 INCLUDING 111.35 111.90 0.55 8.35 AND 114.00 115.00 1.00 6.86 157.30 160.00 2.70 7.17 INCLUDING 158.00 159.00 1.00 5.70 AND 159.00 160.00 1.00 12.55 201.50 202.00 0.50 7.33 BM-21-032 HOLE ABANDONED BM-21-033 23.90 24.40 0.50 17.80 40.50 48.00 7.50 16.05 INCLUDING 40.50 41.00 0.50 5.18 AND 45.20 46.00 0.80 93.70 AND 46.00 46.70 0.70 25.60 AND 47.50 48.00 0.50 47.50 129.70 130.20 0.50 10.50 139.00 139.50 0.50 5.09 143.00 143.50 0.50 8.74 200.00 203.50 3.50 3.47 INCLUDING 202.00 203.50 1.50 6.63 BM-21-034 186.30 186.90 0.60 50.20 196.40 197.00 0.60 5.70 274.40 275.55 1.15 3.47 276.10 280.50 4.40 11.70 INCLUDING 276.10 276.95 0.85 47.40 AND 279.95 280.50 0.55 19.90 287.45 288.00 0.55 3.94 299.85 300.40 0.55 19.05 BM-21-035 41.20 41.80 0.60 28.10 91.40 96.25 4.85 15.20 INCLUDING 92.50 93.00 0.50 12.20 AND 93.00 93.50 0.50 12.50 AND 93.50 95.00 1.50 28.60 AND 95.00 96.25 1.25 12.90 112.45 115.50 3.05 10.12 INCLUDING 112.45 113.45 1.00 17.45 AND 113.45 114.45 1.00 11.50 120.00 120.50 0.50 3.00 127.50 128.10 0.60 3.33 162.40 162.90 0.50 11.80 207.50 208.20 0.70 34.10 BM-21-036 178.90 179.45 0.55 11.30 197.80 198.45 0.65 9.11 208.25 208.85 0.60 11.35 212.50 213.00 0.50 9.50 227.55 228.10 0.55 60.90 255.25 259.50 4.25 19.04 INCLUDING 255.25 256.00 0.75 11.05 AND 256.00 256.85 0.85 21.00 AND 258.20 259.50 1.30 39.50 282.05 284.40 2.35 27.47 INCLUDING 283.50 284.40 0.90 57.90 295.00 295.60 0.60 14.75

Table 2: Drill Hole Locations and Orientations
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Almaden Minerals Ltd. (Almaden" or the "Company"; TSX: AMM; NYSE American: AAU) is pleased to announce the results of its Annual General Meeting (AGM) held on June 29, 2021.



All of the matters submitted to the shareholders for approval as set out in the Company's Notice of Meeting and Information Circular were approved by the requisite majority of votes cast at the AGM.

The details of the voting results for the election of directors are set out below:

Nominee Votes For Votes Withheld Duane Poliquin 30,217,920 (98.08 %) 592,780 (1.92 %) Morgan Poliquin 30,169,432 (97.92 %) 641,268 (2.08 %) Alfredo Phillips 30,187,827 (97.98 %) 622,873 (2.02 %) Kevin OKane 30,155,109 (97.87 %) 655,591 (2.13 %) Elaine Ellingham 30,181,075 (97.96 %) 629,625 (2.04 %) Ria Fitzgerald 30,146,599 (97.84 %) 664,101 (2.16 %) William J. Worrall 30,162,612 (97.90 %) 648,088 (2.10 %)

A total of 55,414,056 common shares, representing 40.38% of the votes attached to all outstanding shares as at the record date for the Meeting, were represented at the AGM.

Shareholders also approved the appointment of Davidson & Company LLP as auditors of the Company for the ensuing year.

Duane Poliquin, Chairman of Almaden, stated We would like to thank our shareholders for their support. Mark Brown did not stand for election to the Board this year as he has decided to focus on other business interests. We thank Mark for his years of service to the Company. At the same time, we welcome Ria Fitzgerald as a new Almaden Board member. Ria has twenty years of experience in equity capital markets, mergers and acquisitions, project financing and project development with global and start-up companies in mining, infrastructure, and renewable power sectors. She has ten years of experience as an investment banker focused on the mining industry, where she was involved in over 100 financings raising more than $7 billion in private and public equity for global mining companies. Ria holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of Saskatchewan, where she graduated with High Honours and Great Distinction, and is a Chartered Financial Analyst. We warmly welcome Ria to the Board and look forward to working with her in the future.

Final results for all matters voted on at the AGM will be filed on SEDAR at www.sedar.com, on EDGAR at www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml, and on the Company's website.

About Almaden

Almaden Minerals Ltd. owns 100% of the Ixtaca project in Puebla State, Mexico, subject to a 2.0% NSR royalty held by Almadex Minerals Ltd. The Ixtaca deposit hosts a proven and probable reserve containing 1.38 million ounces of gold and 85.1 million ounces of silver (73.1 million tonnes grading 0.59 g/t Au and 36.3 g/t Ag). A report titled Ixtaca Gold-Silver Project, Puebla State, Mexico NI 43-101 Technical Report on the Feasibility Study, which was prepared in accordance with NI 43-101, is available under the Companys profile on SEDAR and on the Companys website. The Ixtaca Gold-Silver Deposit was discovered by Almaden in 2010.

On Behalf of the Board of Directors,

Morgan Poliquin

Morgan J. Poliquin, Ph.D., P.Eng.

President, CEO and Director

Almaden Minerals Ltd.

Contact Information:
TORONTO, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Flowr Corporation (TSX.V: FLWR; OTC: FLWPF) (Flowr or the Company) is pleased to announce that it has signed an agreement with Green Hedge Education & Distribution Services Ltd. (Green Hedge) to act as the Companys external sales agent providing coverage to licensed cannabis wholesalers and retailers across Canada.



Working with Green Hedge allows Flowr to access a much wider audience of retailers throughout Canada. In Ontario alone we expect more than 1,300 retail outlets to open by the end of 2021 and partnering with Green Hedge allows us to expand our trade universe coverage in a cost-effective manner, commented Darryl Brooker, Chief Executive Officer of the Company. Green Hedge has one of the biggest distribution footprints in Canada and we see this as an important way to have an even broader distribution of our flagship strains BC Pink Kush and BC Black Cherry.

Green Hedge is a leading cannabis sales and distribution company headquartered in Toronto, Ontario led by Andrew von Teichman. His entrepreneurial experience over two decades in distribution and consumer packaged goods has established Green Hedge as one of Canadas top cannabis distributors. Operating in six provinces with more than 2,000 active retail partners in Canada, the company has a 93% penetration rate with their customers.

We are thrilled to have Flowr as part of the portfolio. Their position in premium flower and production capabilities make them an ideal fit for our growing portfolio of market leading brands, commented von Teichman, CEO of Green Hedge.

About Flowr

The Flowr Corporation is a Toronto-headquartered cannabis company with operations in Canada and the European Union. Its Canadian operating campus, located in Kelowna, BC, includes a purpose-built, GMP-designed indoor cultivation facility; an outdoor and greenhouse cultivation site; and a state-of-the-art R&D facility. From this campus, Flowr produces recreational and medicinal products. Internationally, Flowr intends to service the global medical cannabis market through its subsidiary Holigen Holdings Limited, which has a license for cannabis cultivation in Portugal and operates a GMP licensed facility in Portugal. In 2020, Flowrs BC Pink Kush was recognized as the top indica strain in Canada by KIND magazine.

Flowr aims to support improving outcomes through responsible cannabis use and, as an established expert in cannabis cultivation, strives to be the brand of choice for consumers and patients seeking the highest-quality craftsmanship and product consistency across a portfolio of differentiated cannabis products.

For more information, please visit flowrcorp.com or follow Flowr on Twitter: @FlowrCanada and LinkedIn: The Flowr Corporation.

About Green Hedge

Green Hedges mission is to be the leading cannabis distributor in Canada, providing a complete sales, marketing and education solution for licensed producers and cannabis companies. Green Hedge offers cannabis manufacturers a national voice for their brands into retailers in every province, leveraging a highly knowledgeable and discerning team of cannabis sales educators. Green Hedge represents a leading portfolio of some of Canadas top cannabis brands.

On behalf of The Flowr Corporation:

Darryl Brooker

Chief Executive Officer

CONTACT INFORMATION:

INVESTORS & MEDIA:

John Chou

Chief Financial Officer

John.chou@flowr.ca

Forward-Looking Information:

Certain statements made in this press release may constitute forward-looking information, future oriented financial information or financial outlooks (collectively, forward-looking information) within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Forward-looking information may relate to anticipated events or results including, but not limited to: the Companys expectation that it will build on its achievements as it continues to invest in sales and marketing; the Companys expectations for sales of product in Quebec; Flowr servicing the global medical cannabis market and operating GMP facilities in Portugal; Flowrs business, production and products; Flowrs plans to provide premium quality cannabis to adult use recreational and medical markets; EU-GMP certification opening the medicinal cannabis opportunity for the Company in global markets; the Company being well positioned to distribute EU-GMP compliant product into underserviced markets; Flowrs ability to realize revenue from the Companys European operations within the anticipated timeframe or at all; Flowrs ability to establish sales and distribution channels in Europe to deliver medicinal cannabis to underserviced markets; expectations with respect to the anticipated timing for harvests, propagation, completion of construction and installation of extraction infrastructure at the Companys Sintra facility; the Company being unable to commence GMP packaging and commercial sales within the anticipated timeframe or at all; Flowrs ability to service the global medical cannabis market and/or operate GMP-designed manufacturing facilities in Portugal; the sale of medical cannabis in pharmacies in Portugal representing a watershed moment for cannabis in the E.U.; the Companys ability to complete offering(s) of its securities under the Final Shelf Prospectus; the expected impact of the strategic review decisions on the Company; the actual costs of savings from the Companys restructuring initiatives, including with respect to its workforce; the Companys plans to divest its interests in certain of its subsidiaries; the Companys ability to obtain licensing from Health Canada and other regulatory authorities with respect to its properties and facilities; future legislative and regulatory developments in Canada and elsewhere; the cannabis industry in Canada generally; the ability of Flowr to implement its business strategies; and the ability of Flowr to produce or sell premium quality cannabis. Particularly, information regarding our expectations of future results, targets, performance achievements, prospects or opportunities is forward-looking information. Often, but not always, forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as may, will, expect, believe, estimate, plan, could, should, would, outlook, forecast, anticipate, foresee, continue or the negative of these terms or variations of them or similar terminology. Forward-looking information is current as of the date it is made and is based on reasonable estimates and assumptions made by us at the relevant time in light of our experience and perception of historical trends, current conditions and expected future developments, as well as other factors that we believe are appropriate and reasonable in the circumstances. To the extent any forward-looking information in this press release constitutes future oriented financial information or financial outlooks, within the meaning of applicable securities laws, the purpose of such information being provided is to demonstrate the potential of the Company and readers are cautioned that this information may not be appropriate for any other purpose. However, we do not undertake to update any such forward-looking information whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required under applicable securities laws in Canada. There can be no assurance that such estimates and assumptions will prove to be correct. Many factors could cause our actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements or future events or developments to differ materially from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking information as discussed in the Risk Factors section of the Companys 2020 Annual Information Form dated April 28, 2021 (the AIF). A copy of the AIF and the Companys other publicly filed documents can be accessed under the Companys profile on the System for Electronic Document Analysis and Retrieval (SEDAR) at www.sedar.com. The Company cautions that the list of risk factors and uncertainties described in the AIF is not exhaustive and other factors could also adversely affect its results. Readers are urged to consider the risks, uncertainties and assumptions carefully in evaluating the forward-looking information and are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such information.



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.
Latest Headlines

'Finfluencers' now on regulator's radar

Social media stars and online "influencers" could be giving unqualified and dangerous financial advice to their many followers, prompting the Financial Markets Authority to publish new guidelines for "finfluencers".

Tuesday, June 29th 2021, 6:11AM

by Matthew Martin

Rob Everett.

The Financial Markets Authority (FMA) says its guide to talking about money online follows on from concerns that some social media influencers and bloggers may be straying into the realm of regulated financial advice.

And, according to Compliance Refinery chief executive Steven Burgess, the FMA's guidelines are timely, necessary and important, and shows the regulator is adapting quickly to changes in the financial advice industry.

FMA chief executive Rob Everett says the new guide is primarily intended for social media influencers but also contains useful tips for consumers when they find someone providing financial commentary on social media.

Many people now offer their thoughts and perspectives on all sorts of financial matters and some have built strong followings, Everett says.

"However, influencers do not want to find themselves caught offering advice theyre not qualified or authorised to give.

"Its also important for consumers to be wary of taking an influencers recommendation that might not be suitable for them, he says.

The new guide emphasises that talking about money or investing can sometimes cross over into providing financial advice, for which you are required to have a licence from the FMA.



Anyone who gives regulated financial advice to retail clients (everyday consumers) must either hold or operate under a Financial Advice Provider licence meaning they are subject to a Code of Conduct requiring them to act with integrity and place the interests of their clients first.

The new guide includes examples of where discussions about financial matters might cross the line into regulated financial advice.

Its usually fine to talk about financial matters online as long as you keep it general, Everett says.

When you start getting into recommending particular products, like specific funds, stocks or insurance, or telling individuals what to do, thats probably regulated financial advice.

Were also reminding influencers to be wary of promoting high-risk products like cryptocurrency and derivatives. Not only do these assets have a high risk of people losing money, theyre also often used as bait in scams.

The guide says influencers should disclose all paid and/or gifted posts (in line with Advertising Standards Authority code), moderate comments and act responsibly, especially with vulnerable consumers.

The participation of retail investors has increased significantly over the past 18 months and social media was a component of that, says Everett.

Burgess says unregulated online financial advice is becoming more prominent and should be a concern to regulators.

"But the social space is massive and there's a lot of ways to make it private...you are getting a lot of unsophisticated people trying to participate in a market that is quite sophisticated.

"It's obviously very difficult for the FMA to follow this."

Burgess says the FMA will be relying on people to report instances of dubious online financial advice and says the risks for uneducated investors are high.

"You don't get the people on these sites talking about big losses, all they tell you is that they are making money.

"I think it's great the FMA have come out with something like this.

"People are crossing those boundaries...and when you are seeing people online and they are telling people what to do it's obvious they don't understand the risks...it's remarkable quite frankly."

Burgess says it's also important for advisers to take this on board and use it as an opportunity to educate customers and potential customers about the risks of taking financial advice from those not qualified to give it.

The FMA is also encouraging social media financial commentators and influencers to seek legal advice where necessary as the guide is not intended to be a complete summary of the financial advice regime.

Individuals promoting themselves as financial advisers and who are not licensed could be liable for a penalty of up to $200,000.

To view the guide click here.

Tips for consumers:

- Be wary of what you see online. Social media posts by influencers are no substitute for professional financial advice.

- Some influencers are paid to promote financial products or services. This should be properly disclosed to you  but may not always be.

- Social media accounts or personalities could be based overseas where laws and regulation might be very different.

- Some products promoted online  particularly cryptocurrencies and derivatives can be very high risk and often not suitable for general investors.

- Be aware that online financial content also attracts scammers, including scam bots.

- Anyone providing financial advice must operate under a licence granted by the FMA.

Tips for influencers, bloggers:

- Its fine to talk about financial matters online, as long as you keep it general.

- You can share factual information about a financial products features or terms and conditions but you cant make a recommendation on who should or should not take up that product.

- Follow social media best practice, New Zealands Advertising Standards, and disclose all paid and/or gifted posts.

- Moderate comments made on your posts, including deleting any that could be scams or dont meet your guidelines.

- Act responsibly and consider your audience, including any people who may be considered vulnerable.

- Approach paid unpaid or gifted partnerships for financial services and products with caution.

- Dont promote a product you dont understand, and be cautious about promoting high-risk products like cryptocurrencies and derivatives.

- Remind your followers to seek regulated financial advice on money matters.

- If you start providing regulated financial advice you will fall under the FMAs regime. You must have a Financial Advice Provider Licence.

- Dont call yourself a financial adviser unless you are legally entitled to do so.

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Governor Northam Awards Grants to Brunswick, Lee, Lunenburg, and Rockingham Counties to Support Innovative Agricultural Projects

Funding to help farmers transitioning from tobacco to vegetable production, explore feasibility of sustainable organic waste disposal

RICHMONDGovernor Ralph Northam today announced that Brunswick, Lee, Lunenburg, and Rockingham Counties will each receive grants from the Governors Agriculture and Forestry Industries Development (AFID) Fund Planning Grant program to support local agriculture initiatives.

We are pleased to see localities continue to use AFID Planning Grants to further embed agriculture into their current recovery efforts and long-term economic development plans, said Governor Northam. Identifying and supporting local initiatives like these that strengthen and diversify Virginias agricultural economy is critical to positioning this vital industry for success in the years to come.

Brunswick and Lunenburg Counties submitted a joint application for $35,000 in AFID funds to help develop architectural and engineering plans for a proposed large-scale produce processing facility. The facility will be operated by Southside Virginia Vegetable Packing, LLC (SVVP) and provide infrastructure that allows the regions former tobacco producers to transition to vegetable production. Organic and conventional vegetable crops offer former tobacco farmers a stable and growing market opportunity that leverages existing farmland, labor, and production equipment to maintain and expand their operations. SVVP has seen tremendous growth through its existing fruit and vegetable production, aggregation, and distribution, leading to the need for a larger produce processing facility to meet increasing demand. The AFID Planning Grant award will leverage an additional $90,000 in local funds.

Lee County and the surrounding region is also experiencing a shift from tobacco to vegetable production. The $20,000 AFID Planning Grant will be used to fund a feasibility study for locating a produce auction in the county. The AFID award will leverage $20,000 in funding from the county and the Virginia Tobacco Region Revitalization Commission to develop a business and marketing plan, identify a suitable site, and create a design for the proposed produce auction facility.

Lastly, Rockingham County is exploring the feasibility of an anaerobic digester to provide the countys large agriculture and food and beverage manufacturing sectors with a sustainable disposal option for their organic waste streams. Anaerobic digesters are an established technology that accepts organic wastes and processes them into useful soil amendments and fertilizers, while also producing a methane bio-gas that can be used locally or sold back to a gas utility. The $20,000 AFID Planning Grant will be matched with local funds and will explore the financial feasibility of such a facility, available waste streams, potential locations, and ownership structures.

Embracing innovation and exploring new opportunities in agriculture is key to the growth and prosperity of rural communities, said Secretary of Agriculture and Forestry Bettina Ring. Congratulations to Lee County, Rockingham County, and Brunswick and Lunenburg Counties for recognizing the importance of our local agriculture industries and supporting local farmers and producers by creating and expanding new markets to maintain and grow their farms.

The Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, which administers the AFID Planning Grant program, accepts applications for the program on a rolling basis. Successful applications demonstrate a clear need, a proposed solution, strong support from local government and the agriculture and forestry community, and the ability to provide matching funds. Additional information about the AFID Planning Grant program is available here. Questions about the program and application process should be directed to Jennifer.Perkins@vdacs.virginia.gov.

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Grand Haven, MI (49417)

Today

Generally sunny despite a few afternoon clouds. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 82F. Winds SW at 10 to 20 mph..

Tonight

Scattered showers and thunderstorms. Low 68F. Winds SW at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 50%.
The European Council adopted its position at first reading on the European climate law, ending the adoption procedure and setting into legislation the objective of a climate-neutral EU by 2050. This follows a political agreement reached with the European Parliament on 21 April and the Parliaments adoption of its position at first reading on 24 June.

In addition to the goal of climate neutrality and an aspirational goal for the Union to strive to achieve negative emissions after 2050, the European climate law sets a binding Union climate target of a reduction of net greenhouse gas emissions (emissions after deduction of removals) by at least 55% by 2030 compared to 1990.

In order to ensure that sufficient efforts to reduce and prevent emissions are deployed until 2030, the climate law introduces a limit of 225 Mt of CO 2 equivalent to the contribution of removals to that target. The Union will also aim to achieve a higher volume of carbon net sink by 2030.

The Commission will also propose an intermediate climate target for 2040, if appropriate, at the latest within six months after the first global stocktake carried out under the Paris Agreement. At the same time, it will publish a projected indicative Unions greenhouse gas budget for the period 2030-2050, together with its underlying methodology.

The budget is defined as the indicative total volume of net greenhouse gas emissions (expressed as CO 2 equivalent and providing separate information on emissions and removals) that are expected to be emitted in that period without putting at risk the Unions commitments under the Paris Agreement.

The European climate law establishes a European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change. The board will provide independent scientific advice and produce reports on EU measures, climate targets and indicative greenhouse gas budgets and their coherence with the European climate law and the EUs international commitments under the Paris Agreement.

The Commission will engage with sectors of the economy that choose to prepare indicative voluntary roadmaps towards achieving the Unions climate neutrality objective by 2050. As well as monitoring the development of such roadmaps, the Commission will facilitate dialogue at EU-level and sharing of best practices among relevant stakeholders.

Background and next steps. The European Council, in its conclusions of 12 December 2019, agreed on the objective of achieving a climate-neutral EU by 2050. On 4 March 2020, the European Commission adopted its proposal for a European climate law, as an important part of the European Green Deal. On 17 September 2020, the Commission adopted a proposal amending its initial proposal to include a revised EU emissions reduction target of at least 55% by 2030. The Commission also published a communication on the 2030 climate target plan, accompanied by a comprehensive impact assessment.

On 10-11 December 2020, the European Council in its conclusions, endorsed a binding EU target of a net domestic reduction of at least 55% in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 compared to 1990.

The Council adopted a general approach on the proposal for a European climate law on 17 December 2020, after which the Council and the Parliament launched a series of trilogue meetings with the aim of securing an agreement on the final text.

The Council and the European Parliament reached a provisional political agreement on the proposal on 21 April 2021.

Now that the European climate law has been adopted by both the European Parliament and the Council, it will be signed and published in the Official Journal, before entering into force.
The United States is the third-largest electric vehicle (EV) producer behind China and Europe; a new study from the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) finds that the gap has widened. The ICCT study finds that the United States share of cumulative global EV production decreased from 20% to 18% since 2010 and only 15% of the approximately $345 billion in global automaker EV investments are flowing to the US.





Cumulative electric vehicle sales and production from 2010 through 2020, in major regions (based on EV-Volumes, 2021). Source: The ICCT

Based on company announcements through 2020, about 5% of this global total is actively being invested in local US assembly plants. Just seven of the 44 major US vehicle assembly plants are slated to be making all EVs by 2025.

Comparatively, EV manufacturing has increased at a faster rate in China, which made up 44% of global EVs manufactured through 2020, up from 36% in 2017. Similarly, European manufacturing accounted for 25% of global EVs through 2020, up from 23% in 2017. In terms of annual EV production, Europes 1.1 million nearly matched Chinas 1.27 million in 2020, followed by 450,000 in the US and about 110,000 each in Japan and South Korea.

The research on electric vehicle uptake around the world is clear: electric vehicle manufacturing growth happens where there are strong national policies designed to spur the market forward. Nic Lutsey, Program Director at ICCT

Of the 10 million cumulative EVs sold globally, 80% were produced in the same region in which they were sold. The US market has remained steadily behind with fewer than 360,000 EV sales annually from 2018 through 2020, whereas Europe saw explosive growth from 390,000 to more than 1.3 million and China grew from about 1 million to more than 1.25 million over the same period.

Recent policy action focused on the transition to zero-emission vehicles is responsible for the latest EV trends, the report concludes. In Europe, automakers deployed dozens more new modelsand with greatly increased volume compared to the USto meet the vehicle emission standards. China has the most comprehensive system of demand- and supply-side policies and has extended its consumer incentives and is implementing stronger EV regulations.

Similarly, of the automakers announcements that together total 22 million annual EV sales by 2025, about 2.3 million (or about 10%) are slated to be manufactured in US. Automakers based in China and Europe have made more substantial commitments to EVs.





Estimated global light-duty vehicle production through 2025, by automaker. Source: The ICCT.

About 33% of General Motors $27-billion EV commitment is being invested in specific US assembly plants. While Ford has pledged to offer all-electric variants for every model it sells in Europe by 2030, it has not made similar commitments in the US, and only about 6% of its $30-billion EV investment is actively being made in US plants.

Great promotional events and bold aspirational statements by the domestic auto industry cant mask the facts. This is a huge missed opportunity. Continuing on this path would hurt the domestic US auto industrys prospects for decades. Nic Lutsey

Of the seven US EV-only assembly plants, representing about 16% of US vehicle production and capacity, three are owned by General Motors, two by Tesla, and one each by emerging EV companies Rivian and Lucid Motors. Five automakers (Ford, Fiat Chrysler, Toyota, Honda, and Nissan) that each produce about 900,000 to 1.5 million vehicles annually in the US have not announced plans for EV-only assembly plants.
The US Department of Transportations (USDOT) Federal Transit Administration (FTA) announced approximately $182 million in funding for low- and no-emissions buses and the facilities that support them. The project selections were approved as part of the Low- or No-Emission (Low-No) Grant program, which funds the deployment of zero-emission and low-emission transit buses and supporting equipment and facilities. A total of 49 projects in 46 states and territories will receive funding through the program.

FTAs Low-No Program supports transit agencies in purchasing or leasing low- or no-emission buses and other transit vehicles that use technologies such as battery electric and fuel-cell power to provide cleaner, more efficient transit service in communities across the country.

This years funding opportunity prioritized applications with an environmental justice component as well as those that support workforce development.

A few examples of 2021 Low-No grant projects include:

The Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) will receive nearly $7 million to purchase battery electric buses and charging equipment, upgrade its Southside bus depot and provide workforce training. The electric buses will replace CTAs oldest diesel buses and reduce greenhouse gases in communities that have experienced air pollution and other environmental health hazards, improving public health and quality of life.

The Port Authority of Allegheny County in Pittsburgh, PA, will receive $5.1 million to purchase electric chargers and make improvements at its East Liberty Garage to support future electric buses as part of its planned bus rapid transit system. By retrofitting the garage to service electric buses, the agency will also lower pollution in the surrounding community.

The Regional Transportation Commission (RTC) of Washoe County in Washoe County, NV, will receive nearly $6.5 million to purchase hydrogen fuel cell-electric buses and construct a hydrogen fueling facility to improve service reliability and air quality for residents in the Reno-Sparks metropolitan area. The project also supports RTCs efforts to transition its aging diesel bus fleet to zero emission vehicles to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions in an area where ozone levels currently exceed air quality targets.

The Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Communitys Salt River Transit, which provides transit service to Native American communities in and around Scottsdale, Mesa and Tempe, AZ, will receive $611,840 to replace diesel-powered transit vehicles that have reached the end of their useful life with battery electric vehicles as well as install charging stations. The community seeks to reduce carbon monoxide pollution to improve air quality and quality of life in their EPA-designated non-attainment area.

Eligible applicants for Low-No funding included public transit agencies, state transportation departments and Indian Tribes. Projects were evaluated based on criteria defined in federal law and in the Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO), including the applicant's demonstration of need, project benefits and implementation strategies, and capacity for completing the project.

The non-profit Center for Transportation and the Environment (CTE) said that it is partnering on 18 of the projects. Out of the $182 million allocated for this years Low-No program, the agencies that CTE supported were awarded more than $72 million for the deployment of zero-emission buses and fueling infrastructure. Together, these awards account for 40% of the total program amount for this fiscal year.

CTE partnered with the following transit agencies on winning FY2021 Low-No Awards:

Atlanta-Region Transit Link Authority

Broome County (NY)

Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority

Central Midlands Regional Transit Authority (The COMET)

Chicago Transit Authority (CTA)

City of Fayetteville (NC)

City of Fort Collins (CO)

City of Lawrence / Lawrence Transit

Connecticut Department of Transportation

Delaware Transit Corporation

Golden Empire Transit District

Hawaii Department of Transportation

Kansas City Area Transportation Authority

Metro Transit (MinneapolisSt. Paul, MN)

Missoula Urban Transportation District

New Mexico Department of Transportation

Salem Area Mass Transit District

Utah Transit Authority

CTE works with transit agencies across the country to provide proposal support, project management, and technical assistance services for zero-emission bus planning and deployment projects. Each year, CTE staff advise transit agencies on effective strategies for developing Low-No grant applications. Once awarded, CTE then guides the projects using a proven methodology that is designed to mitigate risk and ensure successful zero-emission bus deployments.
Tula Technology, Inc., a leader in propulsion efficiency, will release the findings of a recent simulation study to evaluate the efficacy of its newest technology at the FEV Powertrain Conference. The study validated that Tulas Dynamic Skip Fire (DSF) developed for mild-hybrid diesel vehicles reduced CO 2 emissions in a 2.3 liter 4-cylinder 48-volt light commercial vehicle in challenging real-world conditions.

When Tulas software strategies were implemented, an additional 11% of CO2 was eliminated compared to industry-leading hybrid powertrains. The CO 2 reduction can be achieved at a cost of only 200 ($235 USD) per vehicle.

Tula says that its electrified diesel Dynamic Skip Fire (edDSF) reduces CO 2 in mild hybrid diesel vehicles as a cost-effective solution to meet Euro 7 emissions expected to go into effect by 2026 for all new vehicles in Europe.

We created a synergistic technology by combining mild hybrid powertrain controls with our diesel Dynamic Skip Fire, which has proven to be very effective at reducing NO x and CO 2 emissions in heavy duty trucks. We call it electrified diesel Dynamic Skip Fire, or edDSF, and it will help manufacturers of light commercial vehicles meet challenging NO x standards in a cost-effective manner. Equally significant, our product performs even better in tougher real-world conditions than under test cycles. R. Scott Bailey, president and CEO of Tula Technologies

FEV, an international engineering partner to the auto industry, joined forces with Tula to develop this study. Tula will present the results at the virtual Diesel Powertrains 3.0 Conference on 30 June.

The findings show that electrified diesel Dynamic Skip Fire (edDSF) can significantly reduce CO 2 output through the synergies created by pairing a hybrid system with DSF while also providing a means to achieve upcoming low-NO x targets aimed at decreasing the pollution created by internal combustion engines.

Fuel savings are an additional benefit of edDSF compared to other emissions management technologies that typically require burning additional fuel to produce the heat required to decrease tailpipe emissions. The economics of edDSF are compellingover a six-month period, an urban delivery vehicle equipped with edDSF will save enough in fuel expenses to recoup the costs associated with Tulas technology.
Life-long resident of the Greensburg/Jeannette area, Diane Bargerstock went to sleep, softly, and quietly on June 24, 2021 at the age of 70 years old and now she is resting in the arms of Jesus. Diane spent her work life with the Mercy Behavior Health System. She enjoyed her life with her hu
GREENWICH  As the temperature soared toward 90 degrees on Tuesday, residents of Greenwich sought relief from the heat at the pool and splash pad at Byram Park.

Residents of all ages headed to the park, with some swimming laps, others taking a cool dip and a few just hanging out on the splash pad.
GREENWICH  Another possible Democratic candidate from Greenwich has passed on running to fill the empty seat in the state Senate.

Dita Bhargava, a former vice chair of the state Democratic Party, announced she will not seek the seat vacated last week by state Sen. Alex Kasser. Bhargava, who has previously run for state representative and state treasurer, had been considering a run but now says she will not move forward with a candidacy.

Although Im grateful to the many people who have encouraged me to jump into this race, Ive decided not to be a candidate for the state Senate, Bhargava said in a statement Tuesday. In 2018, close to 90,000 voters cast their ballots for me as a non-party-endorsed candidate for state treasurer. That support empowered me to forge partnerships across the state and work on issues surrounding mental health and the opioid addiction crisis.

Despite not mounting a run for this special election, Bhargava said, I will continue to fight for our communities on all fronts and will consider the right opportunity to run a campaign to serve a broad base of constituents at the statewide level.

Trevor Crow and Matt DesChamps also weighed candidacies but decided not to move forward in the race for the 36th District, which covers all of Greenwich as well as portions of Stamford and New Canaan. All of the declared candidates in the race are Greenwich residents.

Alexis Gevanter and John Blankley are both seeking the Democratic nomination, which will be decided in an upcoming party convention.

Support began to coalesce around Gevanter this week after she received endorsements from Kasser and state Rep. Stephen Meskers, D-150.

But on Tuesday, Blankley said he would absolutely remain in the race and continued to point to his business background as an asset.

I have the right credentials to tackle the issues facing our state, he said. The economic impact of COVID and the potential inflow of federal infrastructure dollars are giving us a temporary respite. We must not lose sight of the fact that our longer-term problems remain  underfunded pension plans, debt overhang and anemic job creation.

Gevanter, an attorney, is running for political office for the first time but served as a legislative aide to former U.S. Rep. Steven Rothman of New Jersey. Until entering the race last week, she was the Connecticut chapter leader of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.

Our district is fortunate to have a deep bench of strong candidates, any one of whom would serve our community with distinction, Gevanter said. I am someone who doesnt take anything for granted. Nothing is decided until the last delegate vote is counted (at the convention). Until then, I will continue to work to earn the confidence and support of the delegates to the 36th State Senate District Nominating Convention.

Bhargava said Kasser and Meskers endorsements of Gevanter did not have an impact on her decision. She said she would not be making an endorsement in the race.

A Democrat, Kasser resigned unexpectedly on June 22, issuing a statement that cited her ongoing divorce as her reason for leaving the state Senate after she was reelected to a second term last fall.

On the Republican side, state Rep. Harry Arora and Representative Town Meeting member Ryan Fazio have said they are running for the GOP nomination. Republican National Committee member Leora Levy of Greenwich said she is considering a run but has not made an official announcement.

Gov. Ned Lamont must call a special election to fill the remainder of Kassers term, which runs through fall 2022.

Lamont faces a deadline of 10 days after Kassers announcement to declare the special election, and it must be held 46 days after. The Democratic and Republican parties must hold conventions to pick candidates 36 days before the election date.

Lamont is likely to issue the writ of special election this week, to schedule a special election on Aug. 17.

kborsuk@greenwichtime.com
Now that Huawei sold off its Honor brand, the company was able to become an independent smartphone brand and will once again release smartphone pre-installed with Google Services. With the company departing from its parent company Huawei, Honor explains exactly how firmware updates will be fulfilled going forward.

Honor View 20 (December 2018)

Honor Finland confirms to i>SuomiMobiili that Huawei will be handling firmware updates to all Honor devices released before April 1 2021 throughout the rest of their life cycles. That means that Honor will be solely responsible to handle its firmware updates for devices it releases after April 1. This means that firmware updates for the new Honor 50 series will be solely handled by Honor. This date is significant since Honor exited Huawei between March and April.

Honor promises to continue to support older devices in Finland, as much as possible, before being referred to Huawei support.

If an consumer is in touch with us, we always help [them] as far as we can before directing [them] to Huawei customer service. We continue to help with matters related to the use of smartphones[] The intention is to serve both old and new HONOR consumers as well as possible.  Suvi Surenkin, Honor Marketing Director for Finland and The Baltics.

In addition, Huawei has confirmed that it will continue supporting high-end Honor devices with monthly updates and more affordable devices on a quarterly basis.

Honor 20 Pro (July 2019)

Huawei confirms the Honor 20, 20 Pro, and View 20 will get monthly updates. Meanwhile, Huawei will support the following devices with quarterly security updates through the end of their product cycles:

Its worth noting that while Huawei may continue to support Honor devices, it does not guarantee that these devices will receive full Android version upgrades, whether thats Android 11 or Harmony OS. We're glad to hear that the phones will at least be updated with security patches.

Source (Finnish)
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Back in April, TCL announced it was expanding the TCL 20 lineup and today the company details which of the devices are becoming available in the US, and a promo for the brands newly unveiled Moveaudio earbuds.

TCL 20 Pro 5G

Lets start with the TCL 20 Pro 5G, which is available today at $499.99 in the US from Amazon in Moondust Gray and Marine Blue. Compared to the global version, everything will be the same on the US-spec, except for the 5MP macro camera, which is a 2MP sensor in the global edition.



TCL 20 Pro 5G

The 20 Pro 5G is powered by the Snapdragon 750G and paired with 6GB of RAM. Theres also 256GB of internal storage, expandable via microSD card. The quad camera array is made up of a 48MP main camera with OIS + 16MP ultrawide + 5MP macro + 2MP depth. Theres also a 32MP front facing camera behind a 6.67-inch 1080x2400 "dotch" AMOLED display with curved glass.

It has a 4,500 mAh battery with 18W wired charging and 15W wireless charging, a side-mounted fingerprint sensor, and it runs Android 11 with TCL's own UI on top.

This phone is compatible with "most GSM networks" at launch, including T-Mobile 4G/5G and AT&T 4G, as well as Verizon low-band 5G and 4G in the coming weeks.

TCL 20S

Next up, the TCL 20S is powered by the Snapdragon 665 chipset paired with 4GB of RAM and 128GB of expandable storage. It has a 6.67-inch "dotch" AMOLED screen, though without the curved edges, with a 16MP punch-hole selfie camera.



TCL 20S

The 20S quad-cam setup is made up of a 64MP super-hi res camera + 8MP wide + 2MP macro + 2MP depth. Theres also a 5,000 mAh battery with support for 18W Qualcomm quick charge. The 20S is available at Amazon for $249 unlocked in Milky Way Black and Frosted Blue. It's compatible with Verizon and "most GSM networks" including AT&T and T-Mobile.

TCL 20 SE

Finally, the TCL 20 SE is the entry-tier for the lineup. Starting at $189 and also available at Amazon today, the 20 SE is powered by a Snapdragon 460 chipset paired with 4GB RAM + 128GB of expandable storage. Theres a larger 6.82-inch LCD display with a U-notch containing a 13 MP camera.



TCL 20 SE

The 20 SE also boasts a quad-camera setup with a main 48MP camera, 5MP wide, and 2MP macro and depth cameras. The battery is 5,000 mAh. It's offered in Nuit Black and Aurora Green and like its siblings is compatible with "most GSM networks" including AT&T and T-Mobile.

TCL Moveaudio S600

The TCL Moveaudio S600 true wireless earbuds are launching on Amazon at $99.99 in black, white, and grey. These have Hybrid Active Noise Cancelling and Transparency Mode, with a "strong bass response" and "precise reproduction for music enthusiasts", with Bluetooth 5.0 and smart wear detection for auto-pause and resume.

They also support Google's Fast Pair protocol, and TCL promises 8 hours of music playback on one charge, with up to 32 hours of total battery life with the charging case. The earbuds are IP54 certified for dust, sweat, and water resistance.

If you buy a TCL 20 Pro 5G from Amazon before July 5, you can get the Moveaudio S600 true wireless earbuds for free when entering the code TCL20BOGO1 at checkout.
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Day of the Comet, by Ivar Jorgensen

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org . If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Day of the Comet

Author: Ivar Jorgensen

Release Date: June 29, 2021 [eBook #65726]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

Produced by: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DAY OF THE COMET ***

Day Of The Comet By Ivar Jorgensen When the world you live on is about to be

destroyed in a matter of hours, petty squabbles

no longer seem important; only Timeand regret! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy

October 1956

Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that

the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

So far as the public was concerned, the comet was discovered at 10:00 a.m. on a Friday morning; just when Frank and Dee Allison were in the midst of their bitterest domestic quarrel. Dee had just spoken through clenched teeth:

"I never knew I could hate a person the way I hate you."

"I consider that an honor!" Frank snapped back.

Then the music on the radio was cut off and the announcement was madein the calm, impersonal voice of the announcer that gave it a flavor of grotesque unreality....

"and so, although the discovery of the celestial interloper was made by astronomers some time ago, the announcement was delayed until all doubt as to its orbit had been dispelled. Thus, a direct and dismal statement becomes a matter of necessitythe earth is doomed"

Frank and Dee stared mutely at one another, trying to comprehend. "It's some kind of a gag," Frank said.

Dee shook her head. "Nothat was John Kalmus, the Green Network commentator who cut in. He wouldn't be a party to any hoax."

Frank knew this of course, but the destruction of the world was a pretty big lump to swallow in a matter of seconds. They continued to stare at each other, taking the rest of the story into their numbed minds. The end would come at exactly 1:42 on Sunday. Prior to that time, there would be vast weather disturbances and tidal catastrophies the world over. But these would be far milder than what would ordinarily be expected because the comet was moving at such a tremendous rate of speed. There would be no long-drawn out suffering.

"At least that's a blessing," Dee said.

"Uh-huh. SayI'll bet the churches will be crowded."

"No doubt." Dee paused, and added, "How long since we've been to church, Frank?"

There had been a cabinet meeting and now the President of the United States was seated alone in his study. He picked up his phone and asked, "How about that call to the Kremlin? Why the delay?"

The operator said, "The Premier was busy on the phonenot taking any calls, but it seems he was trying to get through to you. May I connect him, sir?"

"By all means."

The normally harsh voice of the Russian Premier was oddly quiet and pensive. "Mr. President?"

"Mr. Premier. I was trying to get through to you."

"They told me. Howhow are things there? How are your people taking it in the United States?"

"Very well. They are stunned, naturally, and I'm sure quite a few of them don't believe it. It will take a little time."

The Russian Premier chuckled with a note of wistfulness. "That's exactly what they will havevery little time."

"And your people?"

"We haven't told them. We thought it best."

The President sighed. "We stick to our ideologies to the very end, don't we?"

"Policy can't be changed overnight. Yet great strides can be made."

"I don't think I understand you."

"I'll try to clarify. We finished our public statement Monday, setting down our position on The Stockholm Conference last month."

"The conference was a great disappointment to meto you also, I imagine."

"Yes, and our public statement was, well, pretty bleak, but I'm changing it. I'm in the middle of rewriting it now."

"I'd like to sit down with you and perhaps readjust some of our own demands."

"I'd like to have you."

"No time now, of course."

"No, in fact the rewriting may seem futile to you but it gives me great satisfaction. A nice way to end a political career."

"Why don't you call me back and read it to me when you've finished?"

"I'll do that. Goodbye Mr. President."

Frank and Dee Allison walked hand in hand down the street. Dee had been crying but now her tears had been dried and her expression was calm. There was a wistful light in her eyes. "It could have been so much different, Frank."

"Yes darling. My fault. It was my damn temper."

"But I was always ready to snarl back. A wife's job is to"

He squeezed her hand. "Are you afraid, baby?"

"Nono. I won't be afraid as long as you're there to hold my hand."

He put his arm around her shoulders and drew her close and they walked with the other people toward the Church.

The President of the United States put through a call to the Premier of Russia. Connections clicked into place across half a world and the Russian operator's voice came through warm and cordial. "Of course, Mr. President. The Premier's wire is always open to you. I'll ring him."

The phone was lifted instantly. "Mr. President! How nice of you to call!"

"Our previous conversation set me thinking, Mr. Premier. I want to be a part of your inspiring idea. So I'm rewriting our own statement and I suggest we make a joint public release. I think it will help the people of the world to face the end with greater dignity. The knowingI thinkwill help."

"I'm sure it will. How soon will your draft be finished?"

"Can you give me another two hours?"

"Of course. Ring me when you're ready. Perhaps we can set up an international television hookup and appear together."

"I'm sure we can."

Frank and Dee Allison came out of church bringing some of the peace and the strength with them. Dee said, "I'd like to see my mother for a little while beforebefore"

Frank nodded. "Of course. And I think you should drop in on her alone."

"Oh, noI"

"A goodbye like this one should be said alone. You go up. I'll give you fifteen minutes and then call for you."

Dee's eyes were misty. "You're so understanding. Oh, why couldn't we have"

Frank grinned. "Come on, angel. Heads up. Eyes bright."

They walked up the street, others around them going quietly about their business. The people were very calm.

The conference of astronomers and scientists realized their ghastly blunder at 11:59 a.m. For a long moment, there was stunned silence in the room. None of them could believe that such a progressive series of errors could have been passed from man to man and been added to by each. Through every mind went the dread of what would come out of this. In the future it would be called the greatest hoax of all time. There would be gigantic investigations. Possibly a goat would have to be found. The world would never believe the truth.

"We might as well make the announcement," someone said.

"You make it," another scientist said. "I'm leaving for the North Pole."

Frank Allison heard the announcement from a loudspeaker in a store window on his sixth trip around the block. He'd been walking slowly, deep in his own thoughts and regretsgiving Dee a little more time with her mother. Then

"so the great danger is passed, ladies and gentlemen. The why and the wherefore of it is not known at this time. We are only sure of one thing: The comet will swing away into space. Rumor has it that the size of the invading body was what threw our scientists off. But whether the earlier announcement was sincere or merely a cruel joke will not be known immediately. The main thing is to be thankful that an error existedwhatever its cause"

Frank straightened his shoulders, turned and started briskly up the street.

The President of the United States put a call through to the Russian Premier. He awaited expectantly with the phone in his hand. But the connections slipped into place slowly and five minutes later a voice came across half a world. "The Premier is busy. Please inform the President of the United States that the Premier is engaged. Inform the President that I am able to connect him with the Premier's secretary. Ask him if that will be satisfactory."

The frost in the voice seemed to chill the President's ear. "I will talk to the Premier's secretary."

The Secretary's voice was careful, guarded. "May I help you, Mr. President?"

"Perhaps you can. I had a conversation with the Premier a little over an hour ago. We were planning a joint statementa joint television appearance."

The secretary's voice stiffened. "I'm sorry, but I know of no such statement nor of any such plans on the part of the Premier.'"

"May I speak to the Premier?"

"I'm sorry. The Premier has left on an extended vacation."

"I'm sorry too," the President said, and cradled the phone.

Dee Allison sat tight-eyed staring out the window. Her handkerchief was balled into a wad in her hand. "He's so cruelso thoughtless," she said.

Her mother regarded her with resignation. "What do you want me to tell him when he comes?"

"Tell him I never want to see him again!"

Frank Allison got as far as the lobby of the building in which Mrs. Gregg, Dee's mother, lived. He raised his hand and his finger was inches from the bell. Then he doubled the hand into a fist and thrust it into his pocket. "The hell with it!" he growled. "If she wants to see me, she knows where to find me." He turned and strode out of the building.

The President of the United States had sat staring into space for a long time. A sound caused him to look up. His secretary stood by the desk. "Yes?"

"This new statement you just prepared, Mr. President. I'm not entirely clear on how you plan to use itwhat should I do?"

"Tear it up," the President said wearily, "and throw it in the wastebasket. Things are now back to normal."

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DAY OF THE COMET ***
Gwinnett County Sheriff Keybo Taylor is the subject of a criminal investigation by state officials as well as at least three lawsuits, all of which appear to be related to allegations that he did not renew contracts for some bonding companies if they did not make contributions to his election campaign last fall, officials and attorneys have told the Daily Post.




Haiti - Insecurity : MSF forced to temporarily close its Emergency Center in Martissant





On Saturday afternoon, June 26, the Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) emergency center in Martissant was the target of several bursts of automatic weapons as MSF teams provided care for patients.



Fortunately, there are no deaths or injuries among the staff and patients of the Emergency Center, however the Humanitarian Medical Organization believes that it can no longer continue to treat the population without endangering its staff.



"As a result, MSF has decided to evacuate its staff and patients from the Emergency Center and to immediately suspend its activities in Martissant for one week period after which we want to find our Emergency Center intact," said Alessandra Giudiceandrea, MSF Head of Mission in Haiti, adding "Saturday's attack is an unprecedented event. However, the security of the teams has been strained for several weeks," recalling "[...] from the start of the clashes between the armed groups in the area, at the end of May, MSF had to reduce its activities and its resources in Martissant because armed clashes were taking place near the Emergency Center and during these episodes, medical staff had to protect themselves from stray bullets. At the beginning of June, armed individuals held up two MSF ambulance drivers [...]"



"At a time when we should be able to expand our activities due to Covid-19 and other needs, we are fighting to keep our structures open despite deplorable security conditions," deplores the Head of Mission.



Remember that MSF has been providing medical care in Haiti for 30 years and the Martissant Emergency Center, opened in 2006, is to date the oldest MSF project in Haiti. However, in order to continue its activities, MSF must be able to ensure the safety of patients and medical staff when traveling and within health structures. MSF calls on armed individuals in Haiti to respect the safety of health personnel, patients, equipment and medical structures; vehicles and ambulances must also be able to circulate in complete safety.



See also :

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-33960-haiti-news-zapping.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-33909-haiti-news-zapping.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-33829-haiti-insecurity-a-member-of-the-msf-trauma-hospital-shot-dead.html



HL/ HaitiLibre






















Haiti - News : Zapping...





Police operation in "Nan Zonbi" 7 dead

Following the operation of the National Police of Haiti (PNH) in Cap-Haitien, more precisely in the locality "Nan Zonbi" at Cambefort https://www.icihaiti.com/en/news-34086-icihaiti-cap-haitien-important-police-operation-in-nan-zonbi.html, the divisional inspector Arold Jean specified the human toll of this operation which resulted in 7 killed on the side of the bandits, 1 injured police officer and 2 arrests. Several bandits managed to escape and are actively sought.



Nothing will block the elections and the referendum

"The Government is determined, violence will not interrupt the democratic process or block the elections and the referendum. Elections are not optional but mandatory. Everything will be done to put out of harm's way those who influence violence," said Mathias Pierre, Minister Delegate in charge of Electoral Matters.



43 Haitian boat people intercepted off Providenciales

Police in the Turks and Caicos Islands on Friday intercepted a 40-foot vessel carrying 43 illegal Haitian migrants, including a child, off the island of Providenciales.



OAS Report

The Organization of American States (OAS) announces that the official presentation of the report of its good offices mission concerning the crisis in Haiti will be unveiled on Wednesday, June 30, 2021 by videoconference. According to the little information that has leaked, the OAS would recommend in particular the appointment of a new Prime Minister and a ministerial cabinet in mid-July, new members to the Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) and urgent measures to re-establish a climate of security... See also : https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-33948-haiti-politic-moise-seeks-the-support-of-the-oas-for-the-security-of-the-elections.html



Hospitals : wastewater treatment

The American Agency for International Development (USAID-Haiti) is proud to support UNICEF Haiti in the construction of wastewater treatment plants for St-Luc hospitals and Hopital Albert Schweitzer Haiti https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-33791-haiti-health-two-hospitals-in-haiti-with-a-wastewater-treatment-plant.html. The station at St Luc's Hospital treats up to 20,000 gallons of sewage per day, which is well over the 5,000 gallons per day that the hospital was previously capable of handling. Rehabilitating these stations eliminates the cumbersome operational logistics and transportation costs associated with delivering excess wastewater to remote treatment facilities and promotes a healthier hospital environment for patients and the community at large.



HL/ HaitiLibre


















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Editor: Early in 2020, when the pandemic was just starting, lumber prices were ste
(The Center Square) - As both parties debate the construction of new oil and gas pipelines, the U.S. Supreme Court has weighed in, saying states cannot overturn federal eminent domain permits for those projects.

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 Tuesday in PennEast Pipeline Co. v. New Jersey that the state of New Jersey was not exempt from federal eminent domain provisions.

In the case, the PennEast Pipeline company received a permit to build a 116-mile pipeline from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. That pipeline went through New Jersey, and the company obtained most of the necessary rights-of-way for construction.

However, when it came time to obtain them from the state of New Jersey, the states government resisted.

New Jersey argued that while other entities are subject to eminent domain, state governments are exempt under the 11th amendment.

The 11th amendment reads:

The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State.

The pipeline company argued that federal rules trumped state preferences.

Simply put, state veto power and interstate pipelines are incompatible, as Congress recognized more than 70 years ago in arming pipeline certificate holders with the federal eminent domain power, PennEast argued. As FERC explained, the decision below is both profoundly wrong and profoundly consequential  a combination that cries out for this Courts review.

The 5-4 decision did not fall along traditional partisan leanings. Justices Stephen Breyer, Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the pipeline company. Justices Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, Amy Coney Barrett and Elena Kagan opposed.

Roberts in the courts majority opinion pointed to previous federal eminent domain uses in railroads and other infrastructure projects, saying pipelines are allowed the same protection.

When the Framers met in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, they sought to create a cohesive national sovereign in response to the failings of the Articles of Confederation, the opinion reads. Over the course of the Nations history, the Federal Government and its delegates have exercised the eminent domain power to give effect to that vision, connecting our country through turnpikes, bridges, and railroads  and more recently pipelines, telecommunications infrastructure, and electric transmission facilities. And we have repeatedly upheld these exercises of the federal eminent domain power  whether by the Government or a private corporation, whether through an upfront taking or a direct condemnation proceeding, and whether against private property or state-owned land.

Environmental groups took issue with the ruling, arguing it would lead to more pollution and contribute to climate change.

The science is clear: more fracked gas means more heat waves, stronger hurricanes and more unnecessary deaths from fossil fuel pollution, said Kelly Sheehan Martin of the Sierra Club. Todays disappointing decision allows a fossil fuel pipeline to proceed that will harm communities and public health. But, the fight against PennEast is far from over, and the company continues to face stiff opposition. Governor Murphy can and must say no to this disastrous project.

Other groups praised the ruling as a win for the local economies and the integrity of U.S. infrastructure contracts.

The Supreme Court is upholding rule of law, said Daniel Turner, founder of the energy workers advocacy group, Power the Future. One of the problems with the Biden administrations decisions on ANWR and Keystone, outside of the energy and economic implications, is the idea that companies enter into negotiation with the American government, and then those negotiations are made null and void by the political persuasion of politicians. If anything the Supreme Court is just upholding the rule of law. We cant cancel projects ... infrastructure based on political whims. Of course, the job and energy implications, but just the larger implications of how we negotiate government contracts.

Wouldnt you be afraid if the next administration is going to change laws to punish the industries they dont like?




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Russian military launches secret missile with military jets carrying hypersonic missiles in a test flight. Meanwhile, NATO allies are busy with drills in the Black Sea, after the encounter with HMS Defender.

There's a renewed power projection as the Russians and its allies fill the Black Sea with more military activity, after tension with the UK.

Cold War 2.0 again?

According to the Russian TASS news agency, there's an unannounced rocket launch from Plesetsk cosmodrome in the northwest of the former USSR.

One source allegedly from the Kremlin said the top-secret operation did happen in mid-June. This was to test ICBM, Kedr designed and engineered by Moscow's Institute of Thermal Technology (MITT), which is adapted for mobile missile carriers or fired from launcher tubes.

One carrier on mobile launchers is harder to be targeted and wrecked by counter offensive strike. Silos are more vulnerable by far.

MITT is a component of state space corporation Roscosmos, which has a history of building successful ICBMS like Topol, Topol-M, Yars, and Bulava ICBMs, reported the Sun UK.

New nukes are coming?

This new Kedr system is poised to be a modernized version of the Yars nuke.

TASS: Russia is developing a new strategic missile system "Kedr" https://t.co/56PvvlJxAu pic.twitter.com/nRbdTgNNsT  Russian Exercises (@RUSexercises) March 1, 2021

After the perceived breach of Crimean waters by the Royal Navy, the Kremlin launches a secret missile, with military jets carrying hypersonic missiles. Furthermore, the Black Fleet warned British ships that they will sink if they sail close to Crimean territory, cited the World News.

Read also: The UK and Kremlin: An Encounter with HMS Defender and Russian Forces in Crimean Sea Causes Row

Activities in the east of the Mediterranean consisted of drills with interceptors and bombers in flying drills for war games. Reports state that the MiG-31K's were loaded with the Dagger hypersonic missile, which is touted by Vladimir Putin as lethal and effective.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is worried for the range of 1,250 miles of the Dagger super-fast missile that has no comparison in the west. Part of Putin's power push is deploying Tu-22M3 long-range bombers, just like the US B-52s which can carry nukes too.

Fighting with electronic ghosts to be ready

The exercises done by all flight crews was simulated electronic launches towards a virtual adversary.

These drills are timed, when the Royal Navy deployed the HMS Queen Elizabeth carrier, with its newly assigned battle group. The media in Russia did not miss a chance to propagandize country's military activity recently.

One TV channel remarked that the carrier strike group of the new carriers was sailing in the Mediterranean Sea. Adding the Russian drill is also meant to check on the Royal Navy's activity.

Included in the Black Sea fleet is the cruiser Moskva, guided-missile frigates Admiral Essen and Admiral Makarov, with two non-nuclear subs Stary Oskol and Rostov-on-Don. All carry anti-ship missiles and are heaviest armed naval vessels in the world.

Moscow issued a statement saying the Russian warships are drilling to defend against air assault, and for ship to air defense against adversaries.

Putin gets serious, NATO is not pushing him around

All these sea drills were ordered by the Kremlin leader, other missile systems were on alert that included the Zircon missiles, and the S-400 air defense batteries as a precaution.

US ships will be doing wargames with 30 nations. Sea Breeze 2021 will be done in the Black Sea and south of Ukraine for the venue.

Russians will monitor the US and NATO drills for two weeks, with NATO'S 5,000 personnel, 30 vessels, with 40 warplanes practicing together. The Sea Breeze drill is considered a threat to the Russian Federation, won't stop the exercises.

Related article: Russian Destroyers and Fighter Jets Engaged in Drills Near Hawaii, Carrier Strike Group Deployed as a Response

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Donald Trump will not be prosecuted personally in the Manhattan district attorney's case against the former president's business organization when the first indictment is handed out, his lawyers claimed.

In a long and meandering statement released on Monday, Trump referred to the DA's probe as the "greatest witch hunt of all time," claiming that prosecutors failed to uncover a crime despite millions of dollars in taxpayer cash being spent. His remarks came as an indictment on the Trump Organization, the company that gave him his fame and fortune.

In a meeting last week, Ronald Fischetti, a New York attorney who represents the former president Donald Trump, asked Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance's team for specifics on charges they were considering, according to Fischetti.

Manhattan DA looks into filing charges against Trump Organization, employees

Members of Vance's team told Fischetti that they were considering filing charges against the Trump Organization and each of some personnel for allegedly failing to pay taxes on corporate benefits and perks. Cars and residences were reportedly among the perks that were given away to them, but they argued only a few of the executives received the said perks.

Vance's team has warned Trump's lawyers that unless they are convinced differently today, they would press charges. Fischetti told POLITICO that charges are expected to be filed either this week or next. Fischetti continued, "It's like Shakespeare's play Much Ado About Nothing. This is so small that I can't believe I'm going to have to try a case like this."

Vance has been looking into the Trump Organization for years. His team went to the Supreme Court to gain permission to acquire Trump's tax returns, which means his investigators know more about the former president's finances than almost anybody else. According to The Washington Post, Vance's office formed a grand jury last month to consider whether or not to prosecute the Trump Organization or Trump personally.

Read Also: Biden Orders Airstrike Against Iran-Backed Militia Groups in Iraq, Syria Border

NY Attorney General obtained tax records of Trump Organization

The investigation has gotten a lot of media attention in recent weeks. Investigators have received reams of records from the former daughter-in-law of the Trump Organization's top financial officer Allen Weisselberg. Trump's finances have sparked tremendous attention and suspicion since the beginning of his 2016 presidential campaign.

A grand jury has been hearing evidence against Weisselberg for the past few weeks, with prosecutors acquiring the executive's tax records. Companies may be charged with crimes and may incur fines and other penalties if they are found guilty or plead guilty.

The tax records were apparently obtained by Letitia James, the New York State Attorney General who is conducting a civil investigation. James' agency was looking into whether Trump's firm lied about property valuations to get loans and other financial and tax benefits.

Prosecutors were already able to access Weisselberg's personal bank information. Investigators are digging into whether Weisselberg neglected to pay taxes on perks like residences, leased automobiles, and private school tuition for one of his grandkids over the years.

Prosecutors have obtained data from the Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School, a private school on the Upper West Side. According to reports, Vance is checking into Mercedes-Benz automobiles leased to Weisselberg and other Trump Organization workers.

They are also looking into a Manhattan apartment that Trump may have given to Weisselberg. Prosecutors are hoping that Weisselberg will cooperate with the Trump investigation and turn against him. The indictments may increase the pressure on him to strike a deal.

When Vance announced in April that he would retire by the end of 2021, the matter gained additional urgency. There is also anticipation that his office will release any indictments before then. However, Weisselberg is still employed by the Trump Organization, implying that he has not yet turned star witness against the former president, as per Daily Mail.

Related Article: Trump Organization Braces for Criminal Charges From New York Prosecutors as Soon as Next Week, Lawyer Says



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Facebook's stock market value rose past $1 trillion after an antitrust lawsuit by the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general was dismissed on Monday by a D.C. federal court.

The complaint aimed to contest the social media platform's social networking monopoly in an attempt to control the tech giant. The dismissal of the lawsuit has forced many in Congress to urge for revisions to the antitrust laws in the United States to better handle monopolistic abuses in the online world.

Antitrust Complaint

The ruling, delivered by U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, questioned the authenticity of the claim that Facebook and other huge tech platforms are monopolies. The decision argues that despite their massive size and reach they cannot immediately be legally labeled as such.

Across the world, Facebook has more than 2.7 billion users, which makes it the largest social network worldwide. However, Boasberg argued prosecutors did not provide sufficient evidence or arguments that explain what social networking is. They also were not able to detail their calculations regarding their claims that the social media giant controls more than 60% of the market.

On dismissing the FTC's complaint, Boasberg said there was no clear indication or classification of what constitutes social networking services among Facebook's functions, including those on its mobile application, Politico reported.

Read Also: How will the Chinese Space Station 'Tiangong' Redefine the International Space Station's Mission in Space?

Additionally, in a separate decision dismissing the state's case, Boasberg found out that the state attorneys general did not immediately challenge Facebook's purchase of Instagram in 2012, a dominant photo-sharing platform, and the social media giant's purchase of WhatsApp in 2014. The two incidents made Facebook much bigger than it originally was before having control of two additional platforms.

In a statement, Facebook welcomed the decision and said officials were working hard to provide services that their customers would be able to enjoy while using their platform. They noted they were fighting fairly within the market to earn their customer's attention and interest.

Monopolizing Social Networking

The FTC filed the complaint last December with the support of attorneys general from 48 states across the country. They argued that Facebook's acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp was a part of the platform's strategy to eliminate competition and monopolize the social networking market.

While the ruling dismissed the current complaint, it was not the end of the case. The court acknowledged that the FTC has a chance to provide additional evidence to prove its claims and arguments, giving it the ability to file an amended complaint to continue the case, CNBC reported.

The dismissal of the complaint could potentially fuel more aggressive actions from officials as Congress is currently supporting sweeping tech antitrust reforms. The House Judiciary Committee approved a slate of bills last week that focused on controlling the market power of big techs. The legislation would include bans on large mergers and implement new interoperability requirements.

Rep. Ken Buck said Boasberg's ruling on the case showed how badly antitrust reform is needed in modern days. He urged Congress to provide additional tools and resources to fight against tech companies that are engaged in anticompetitive conduct, The Verge reported.

Related Article: Prince Harry, Prince William Reportedly Quarrel at Prince Philip's Funeral; Will Not Offer Olive Branch to Each Other

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North Koreans raised concerns over Kim Jong Un's weight loss as the leader admits to growing economic problems, including food shortage. His "emaciated appearance" worried citizens, a state media quoted one resident.

According to some experts, Kim Jong Un's statements were made in an attempt to increase domestic support for his efforts as he deals with growing economic problems brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, mismanagement, UN economic sanctions, and natural catastrophes. Kim appears to have dropped a significant amount of weight in recent state-run media photographs.

North Korean watchdog looking into Kim Jong Un's health

Kim, who measures around 170 centimeters (5 feet, 8 inches) tall and weighs 140 kilograms (308 pounds), may have shed 10-20 kilos (22-44 pounds), some North Korean watchers estimated. Outside observers are paying close attention to Kim's health since the 37-year-old leader has yet to appoint a successor to command North Korea's growing nuclear arsenal, which is aimed at the United States and its allies.

Two recent clips shown on Korea Central Television, the country's primary television channel, have reportedly raised concerns about the Supreme Leader's health. One clip showed him going to a concert, and it could be observed that the Korean leader has lost so much weight.

North Koreas tightly controlled state media offered a rare public segment on leader Kim Jong Uns apparent weight loss, but did not provide details https://t.co/RhQEqL7dXH pic.twitter.com/8jtQBVjuvt  Reuters (@Reuters) June 28, 2021

A second clip was of an anonymous Pyongyang resident who said on Friday's major broadcast on Central TV: "Seeing him become emaciated like that, we all became so sad. Everyone just started to cry," he stated.

Kwak Gil Seob, the founder of One Korea Center, a North Korean-focused website, told the BBC that the Pyongyang regime "would never allow bad news about Kim Jong Un to be released," implying that the video was shown to indicate that Kim Jong-un is losing weight on his own.

Read Also: North Korea's Kim Jong Un's Comment, an Interesting Signal for Dialogue on Denuclearization

Is Kim Jong Un's weight loss related to food shortage?

Kim discussed the country's food shortage and economic problems. He encouraged officials to address the problem of poor agricultural output, blaming it on last summer's typhoons that swept away most of the crops for this year's supply. Kim's government is seeking to draw public support for him by holding interviews about his weight loss as the country's economic condition worsens, said Nam Sung-Wook, a professor of North Korean studies at South Korea's Korea University.

Whatever the cause of Kim Jong Un's weight loss is, the shift is most likely unintentional, said a former Seoul official and North Korean policy expert. Despite Kim's known smoking habits and his usual obese physique, which greatly affects his health, a South Korean analyst said his weight loss is unlikely to be an indication of serious disease.

Kim Chun-sig, a former official stated, "In North Korea, being overweight is a sign of authority and power. That's why Kim Jong Un gained weight in the first place and why he is unlikely to have lost weight on purpose," as per Washington Examiner.

North Korea's COVID-19 policy could lead to starvation

Kim Jong Un has openly admitted that the nation is experiencing a food shortage. One such threat, according to Kim, is the risk of famine, similar to the country's "arduous march" in the late 1990s, when millions died due to widespread hunger. North Korea has been even more isolated as a result of Kim's COVID-19 response, which may have caused food shortages that could affect millions, as per Scroll.

Kim's thinner appearance might be due to a lack of access to the food he used to enjoy. North Korea is currently subjected to international sanctions to date, which were imposed in 2017 in response to its sixth nuclear test.

The United Nations imposed the first sanctions in 2006 in response to North Korea's ballistic missile launches. In the following year after the nation conducted its first nuclear test, the sanctions were increased. The COVID-19 border shutdown is said to have impacted the North Korean economy even more than the sanctions, leading to a more than 50% drop in trade with China in comparison to 2018.

The lack of access to agricultural products such as fertilizers and machinery has made it difficult for North Koreans to harvest enough grain as a result of the border restriction. Imports of food and humanitarian supplies are also prohibited owing to the shutdown.

Related Article: Kim Jong Un Weight Loss Speculation Unlikely; Geopolitical Consequences May Imply as He Gets Thinner



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Oxford University led a study that discovered a "robust" immune response from the body when two different coronavirus vaccines are mixed and used together. The researchers particularly used the Pfizer-BioNTech and AstraZeneca vaccines.

The Com-COV study focuses on determining the feasibility of injecting two different vaccine shots into a patient for a stronger immunity against the COVID-19 virus, considering the first injection as the "prime" vaccination and the second shot as the "booster" vaccine.

Mixing Coronavirus Vaccines

Researchers observed that alternating doses of different vaccine brands produced stronger protection against the disease. However, they also found out that the order of injections caused a variation in the efficacy of the mixing of vaccines. The stronger immune response resulted from an initial shot of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine followed by the Pfizer-BioNTech shot.

The study observed vaccinations in patients who were spread four weeks apart, and the data for a 12-week dose interval experiment is due soon. On Monday, the researchers published their latest discoveries on the Lancet preprint.

The researchers noted how a mix of vaccines of the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines produced high concentrations of SARS-CoV2 antibodies when injected with a four-week interval, CNBC reported.

Health officials worldwide could use the information to potentially develop a more flexible process of injecting citizens with various vaccine brands, said Matthew Snape, associate professor in pediatrics and vaccinology at the University of Oxford and chief investigator on the trial.

Snape said the stronger immune response from a mixed vaccine was a positive sign for health experts worldwide. However, he noted that vaccination programs should maintain their regular processes and not mix vaccines all the time unless it has been proven to work effectively and safely, NBC News reported.

Read Also: Johnson & Johnson to Pay $230 Million As Settlement for New York State's Opioid Claims

Flexible Vaccination Programs

Using two injections of the same vaccine were discovered to provide sufficient protection against the COVID-19 virus. Health officials recorded the highest antibody response in patients who were given two shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. They also discovered that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine produced the highest T-cell response in patients.

Currently, the UK and U.S. are distributing and administering coronavirus vaccines that stimulate a person's immune systems into producing antibodies to fight against the COVID-19 infection. Snape gave emphasis on the production of antibodies from white blood cells and concluded that T-cells play crucial roles in preventing infection. He also said that the information provides key guidelines for the potential use of mixed vaccines.

So far, the UK has been praised for its quick and effective vaccination program spreading throughout the country. Authorities were able to decisively and quickly distribute vaccines and have now successfully administered first shots to all residents over the age of 18 years.

About 84.1% of all UK adults have been given their first dose, and 61.6% had already been fully vaccinated against the COVID-19. With easy access to COVID-19 vaccines, the UK officials do not have any plans to alter the schedule of doses, Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, England's deputy chief medical officer, said during a news release.



Related Article: Families and Experts Claim India Undercounted Real COVID-19 Deaths, May Reach 2 Million

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A congressional hearing with the head of the US Space Force Chief of Space Operations Gen. Jay Raymond was held last June 16 to discuss what was planned to allow continued dominance of the US in space.

The discussion revolved around the use of directed energy for knocking out enemy satellites to protect US satellites in space. One of the major concerns is how the tech for the space force is getting developed for an effective capability, reported C4ISRNet.

Space Force spokesperson said that according to the agency's head, Russia and China are capable of using directed energy as an offensive capability to cause damage or destroy them. He told Langevin that they have the tools to deal with such threats.

Next-generation defensive weapons

The use of lasers placed in orbit has been a focus of the Missile Defense Agency before. Advanced nations even developed lasers that can be fired at satellites disabling its sensors. Wrecking sensors of enemy space equipment like satellites is a crucial defense.

But space military agencies did not give all details of what key tech will be used or whether it is convention or energy-based. However, it is said that the directed energy offense system was under development.

The US Space Force developing exotic weapons using directed energy is a shift to the changes with others weaponizing space, as the next area of conflict.

Read also: US Air Force Developing Microdrones With Flapping Wings Instead of Rotors for Monitoring Combat Zones

There was mention of anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons by China and Russia that is the reason for the space-based military organization. ASAT weapons under test and development were scoured by the U.S. Space Command's Gen. James Dickinson, saying the debris from destroyed satellites in low Earth orbit poses a danger.

Another issue is the unacknowledged existence of a satellite that fires missiles in space which Raymond call as an on-orbit weapon system, cited Defense News.

Dickinson added that it was Russia that prompted an arms race in space by having weapons in space and on the ground made to knock out enemy satellites. It is not indicative of seeking a peaceful co-existence in space.

It does not encourage nations not to weaponize space, and keep it a neutral zone.

The current US Space Force has continued the mission carried out by the USAF, and the Air Force like now has kept what Satellite killer armaments it owns or developing in secrecy. One of these exotic weapons made public is the Counter Communications System which is portable enough to be transported to jam any adversary satellites in orbit, cited Funtitech.

What are the plans for laser development by the Air Force is not yet clear, whether they will be attached to weaponize space satellites or be fired from the ground. Missiles called ASAT in the US arsenal that can hit satellites low enough to reach.

Unconfirmed intelligence has mentioned that kinetic weapons like railguns or laser, and jammers for attacking satellites are now the emphasis of American adversaries. They want to become a dominant player by challenging US dominance in space.

Related article: US Army Develops 'THOR' Microwave Anti-Drone Weapon Against Hostile Enemy Attacks

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President Joe Biden commanded the military forces to launch airstrikes against Iran-backed militia groups on the Iraq-Syria border on Sunday evening following a series of attacks against US military assets in Iraq.

US officials said that the new class of Iranian-made drones could evade American surveillance and defenses. The most recent of such attacks transpired previously this month when an armed drone shattered at a dining facility at a key entry point in the Baghdad airport used by US diplomats and soldiers, according to a US military official.

Biden Acted to Protect US Personnel

Biden oversaw military forces in launching the defensive precision airstrikes. Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said that the targets were chosen because they were involved in the unmanned drone attacks by Syria-backed militia on facilities used by the US. The targets that were involved in the airstrikes were two operational and weapons storage facilities in Syria and one in Iraq, reported CNN.

He also said that the strikes showed that President Biden is committed to action in protecting US personnel. He said, "Given the ongoing series of attacks by Iran-backed groups targeting US interests in Iraq, the President directed further military action to disrupt and deter such attacks."

The Pentagon press secretary mentioned that the airstrikes targeted weapons and operational storage facilities at one location in Iraq and two locations in Syria. The facilities were utilized by at least two militias called Kata'ib Sayyid al-Shuhada and Kata'ib Hezbollah, per NBC News.

Read Also: Pentago+n Linguist Sentenced for 23 Years, Gave Her Hezbollah-Linked Lebanese Man a List of US Spies' Names

A strong Iraqi militia alliance, the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), said four members of a faction were killed. In response to the airstrikes, they also threatened to retaliate. Around 2,500 American troops are in Iraq as part of a worldwide coalition backing local security forces in their combat against Islamic State (IS), the jihadist group, reported BBC.

These military movements could be a sign that the fighting could be transforming into a sustained confrontation. According to a spokesperson for the American-led coalition Col. Wayne Marotto, multiple rockets had been charged at American troops and US forces responded by firing artillery at the rocket initiating positions.

Kirby said the United States took proper, necessary, and purported action designated to restrict the susceptibility of escalation. He also made sure to note that operations like this were meant to send a clear and unambiguous disincentive message. The Pentagon stated the country responded in self-defense.

Moreover, Kirby stressed out that America acted within its legal rights. As a matter of domestic law, Biden took this action pursuant to his Article II authority in order to shield American personnel in Iraq.

Iraq's military has denounced the American airstrikes. The militia groups called for retaliation against the US, using the facilities to initiate unmanned aerial vehicle strikes against American troops in Iraq.

Related Article: Iran Says It Prevented a Sabotage Attack on an Atomic Energy Agency Building, No Casualties or Damage Reported

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The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced the recall of frozen shrimp under many brand names over salmonella contamination concerns across the country.

The recall was issued by Avanti Frozen Foods, which sells products under many brand names and distributes them to major supermarket chains such as Whole Foods and Meijer. The products in question are frozen, cooked, peeled, and deveined shrimp goods, which sometimes come with cocktail sauce.

According to FDA, out of an abundance of caution after six instances of salmonella poisoning, the company is withdrawing the pre-cooked frozen shrimp items, which are sold under nine different brands. Plastic pouches and trays of various sizes, ranging from 1 pound to 7 pounds, are among the recalled items.

Throw away or return to the store the salmonella contaminated shrimps

A food safety notice from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) regarding the shrimp recall indicates the products were distributed between late December 2020 and late February 2021. However, there may have been more for sale more recently. The FDA notice contains a complete list of recalled product names, lot codes, and expiration dates.

In a statement, FDA said that anybody who purchased one of these items should throw it away or return it to the place of purchase for a full refund and contact Avanti for any additional concerns. The CDC also advises that any surfaces or objects that may have come into touch with the recalled items must be properly cleaned.

There have been six cases of salmonella illness linked to these shrimp items, including two hospitalizations. Fortunately, no deaths have been recorded. Illnesses were reported to have emerged in Arizona and Nevada between late February and late April 2021, SELF via MSN reported.

Routine FDA testing found salmonella infection in a different shipment of frozen cooked shrimp imported by Avanti in March 2021. While the brand canceled the delivery and none of the goods were shipped out, the positive test suggested possible salmonella contamination of Avanti products.

The FDA said salmonella can cause nausea, vomiting, fever, diarrhea, and abdominal discomfort. In young children, the elderly, and others with weaker immune systems, the organism can cause serious and occasionally fatal illnesses. Symptoms generally appear six hours to six days after ingesting the bacteria, and most individuals recover without treatment in four to seven days, as per ABC57.

Read Also: 78 Brands of Sunscreen for Recall Over Carcinogen Contamination as Summer Looms

What are the brands of the recalled frozen shrimp?

The shrimp that caused the illnesses have been removed from the stores since they have passed their expiry dates. Based on a report released by Newsweek via MSN, the following are the products under recall, along with their lot numbers:

Tail on, 2-pound pouch, 365 (Whole Foods store brand); codes 91AS/30HN/213 and 91AS/29HN/212B ; expiration dates 4/29/2022 and 4/30/2022.

Tail on - 16-ounce tray Chicken of the Sea ; 91AS/02UN/216 and 91AS/03UN/217; expiry dates 5/1/2022 and 5/2/2022.

91AS/02UN/216 and 91AS/03UN/217; expiry dates 5/1/2022 and 5/2/2022. Tail on, Honest Catch - 1-pound pouch ; Code 3150-GFF; expiration date 11/9/2022.

Code 3150-GFF; expiration date 11/9/2022. T ail off, Censea - 2-pound pouch ; Codes 140314D, 140315D, 140313D, 140316D; expiration dates 5/7/2022 - 5/10/2022.

Codes 140314D, 140315D, 140313D, 140316D; expiration dates 5/7/2022 - 5/10/2022. Tail on, CWNO - 7-pound pouch ; Codes 91AS/23HN/206B, 91AS/24HN/207, 91AS/06UN/220D, 91AS/07UN/221C; expiration dates 1/23/2022; 1/24/2022; 2/6/2022; and 2/7/2022.

Codes 91AS/23HN/206B, 91AS/24HN/207, 91AS/06UN/220D, 91AS/07UN/221C; expiration dates 1/23/2022; 1/24/2022; 2/6/2022; and 2/7/2022. Tail on, Meijer - 1-pound pouch ; Codes 29720 49982, 30320 50736, 30520 49486, 29820 49982, 30220 50736, 30620 49486, 30920 50737, 31020 50737; expiration dates 10/22/2022, 10/23/2022, 10/27/2022, 10/28/2022, 10/30/2022, 10/31/2022, 11/3/2022, 11/4/2022.

Codes 29720 49982, 30320 50736, 30520 49486, 29820 49982, 30220 50736, 30620 49486, 30920 50737, 31020 50737; expiration dates 10/22/2022, 10/23/2022, 10/27/2022, 10/28/2022, 10/30/2022, 10/31/2022, 11/3/2022, 11/4/2022. Tail on, Hannaford - 1-pound pouch; Codes AVF 31020 EF and AVF 30920 EF; expiration dates 10/25/2022 and 10/26/2022.

Codes AVF 31020 EF and AVF 30920 EF; expiration dates 10/25/2022 and 10/26/2022. Tail on, Waterfront Bistro (Safeway house brand) - 16-ounce tray; Codes 20305 and 20306; expiration dates 10/30/2022 and 10/31/2022.

- 16-ounce tray; Codes 20305 and 20306; expiration dates 10/30/2022 and 10/31/2022. Tail on, Open Acres - 1-pound pouch; Code 02572 0308 11 and 02572 0307 11; expiration dates 11/2/2022 and 11/3/2022.

Related Article: FDA Issues Recall Order for Enoki Mushrooms Over Potential Listeria Contamination

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Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards signed a measure this week exempting some feminine hygiene products and diapers from the state's sales tax.

Tampons, menstrual sponges, menstruation pads, sanitary napkins, panty liners, and menstrual cups, including disposable and washable variants, are free from the "pink tax." Diapers, which include any absorbent diaper or undergarment, are also exempted.

Louisiana Governor signed pink tax break into law

Louisiana receives roughly $11 million in tax income from the items each year. The act also allows local taxing authorities to exclude the items from their own taxes. According to a Forbes report from February 2021, 30 states maintained to charge feminine hygiene products while 15 states exempted them from sales and use taxes. Representative Aimee Adatto Freeman of New Orleans introduced House Bill 7 (Act 449), which Gov. Edwards signed into law on Thursday.

Per the Associated Press, senators voted 33-1 in favor of the pink tax while House members voted 63-36 in favor of the negotiated settlement. The bill was passed as part of a larger tax package that legislators approved in the last days of the session.

The tax exemption was intended to begin in July 2022 to give the state time to arrange for the projected $11 million in lost annual tax collections. So Louisiana women and families will have to wait a bit before they won't have to pay sales taxes on diapers, tampons, and other feminine hygiene products.

Read Also: Why Gas Prices Remain High, No Sign of Decrease Throughout Summer

How can a pink tax break help Louisiana women, families?

Diapers for children and adults, as well as all sorts of feminine hygiene products, will be free from the state's 4.45 percent sales tax and any local sales taxes that may be applied. According to a nonpartisan financial assessment of the legislation, women and families in the state spend roughly $249 million on these items each year. The tax discount will bring necessary products in line with prescription medications, which are currently tax-free.

This bill tackles the higher rates women pay for basic hygiene items when compared to their male counterparts. This is referred to as the Pink Tax by certain economists and researchers, and it typically applies to all items sold to women.

Tampons, panty liners, menstruation pads, sanitary napkins, menstrual sponges, and menstrual cups, including disposable and washable versions of these products, are defined as feminine hygiene products in the bill. After Gov. Edwards signed the bill into law, Democratic New Orleans' Rep. Aimee Addato Freeman expressed his gratitude to those who helped end the pink tax on Twitter, The Advertiser reported.

Governor Edwards signed HB7 into law as Act 449. Starting July 1, 2022, Louisiana will no longer have a sales tax on child and adult diapers and menstrual products. Thank you to the advocates who helped end the Pink Tax.#LALege #HB7 #Act449 #EndThePinkTax pic.twitter.com/yVsvXbdbvk  Aimee Adatto Freeman (@Aimee4nola) June 24, 2021

During the debate over Freeman's proposed bill, she said that it will mean a lot to women and children in Louisiana. However, Freeman's bill only eradicates the 4.45% sales tax of the state and gives the authorities the option to totally eliminate the taxes.

In previous years, Democrats had tried to advance the bill but they failed. Louisiana will be the second southern state to drop the pink sales tax, next to Florida.

Related Article: Biden's Corporate Tax Hike Would Cost 1 Million Jobs, New Study Shows



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This young woman passing years ago is remembered with a poem carved on the church floor. Since her death a long time ago, her story has endured to Dartmoor's present.

Unfortunate young woman

Mary was supposedly slain on the day of her nuptials. Legend says she was shot by a rejected suitor on the church steps right after her wedding. It forever left an imprint on the town, and even newlyweds would try to appease the perceived curse to this day by placing flowers on her grave, reported the Mirror UK.

Mary's story began to spread after her death in 1641 on October 11, Chagford where she lived. Her tale still haunts Dartmoor as a tale told in modern times.

According to accounts, the young woman was married at the Church of St. Michael the Archangel. After their vows, the couple was greeted by well-wishers. Out of nowhere, a gunshot rang during the young bride's happiest moment, and it ended the few moments of wedded bliss, noted Devon live.

The shot hit her above her heart, with a small speck spreading quickly to leave her white wedding gown stained crimson. Mary fell down.

The events were quick and she died from the wound. her spouse became a widower in seconds with a few minutes being married. He held onto Mary on the church's stone steps.

Who killed Mary Whiddon?

No one was caught for her untimely death, but suspicions arose that the culprit was a suitor who was spurned by her. However, it was never proven. The Curse of Mary Whiddon from Chagford started on this day.

Read also: India Mass Burial Site of COVID-19 Victims Along Ganges River Revealed by Drone Video

The former suitor did not accept getting turned down and was later heard talking bitterly about getting turned down by the young woman. He was convinced they were the perfect match, as he would tell others.

Many thought her suitor would stop talking about getting refused when Mary got married. They expected all the ill will towards the soon-to-be bride would end. However, on Mary's wedding day, he allegedly shot her and ended her life.

Her legend then began on the church steps in 1641 - with one pistol shot, or so the story goes.

Is it a false or real event?

After the murder of Mary Whiddon, the one who allegedly did it was never heard from again. Those from Dagmoor say it is a true story, but evidence that proves it to be real is not confirmed.

On her tomb that says she passed away a "matron, though yet a maid." This provides a clue to her identity but also makes her circumstances cryptic. "Maid" in the context of that time could mean that she was married, but still a virgin. The word "maid" as used in Devon can also mean young girl.

Church records of the marriage and death registers for this period in the 1600s are destroyed. One piece of evidence is a will from Mary Whiddon, which is undated, noted Today's UK News.

Her will says no husband. The unmarried name of Whiddon may mean she married a cousin. Her last will could be done before getting married. But despite the ambiguity of her life. her name lives to this day and a stone memorial is dedicated to her. The curse of Mary Whiddon from Chagford is like an old wives tale. It could be true or not, but some still believe.

Related article: Bride in India Unexpectedly Dies During Wedding, Sister Marries Groom Instead

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The Pacific Northwest experienced triple-digit temperatures on Monday. Based on the reports of the National Weather Service, these marked record highs during a prolonged heatwave. A new record was set at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport when the heat reached 106 degrees. This broke the 104-degree record that was set last Sunday.

Heat Advisory

Along the West Coast, over 20 million people were informed of a heat advisory or warning, between the Canadian border and Mexican border. Harmful and unprecedented heat will continue to build throughout Pacific Northwest for many days. High temperatures will soar into triple digits.

The heatwave searing the United States Pacific Northwest and British Columbia, Canada, is of an intensity that has not been recorded by modern humans. By one measure it is rarer than once in a thousand-year event. This means if you could live in this particular area for 1,000 years, you would possibly merely experience a heat dome like this once, if ever, reported CBS News.

This heatwave goes ahead the impact points of another historic heatwave that baked the U.S. Intermountain West, Desert Southwest, and California with hundreds of record highs almost two weeks ago.

Seattle reached 106 degrees on Monday afternoon. It broke the former record high of 104 sets on Sunday. Seattle then topped 100 degrees for three straight days. Before the heatwave, Seattle had merely reached 100 degrees three times since the record-keeping started in 1896.

Read Also: Heat Wave Bakes Western United States, 'A Signal of What the Future Might Look Like'

The temperature in Portland, Oregon, climbed up to 113 degrees on Monday. This marked the third day that the city has set a new record high. The state capital, Salem, Oregon, reached 117 degrees on Monday afternoon. This set a new record for the city and arrived mere two degrees shy of the hottest temperature recorded in Oregon state, a record set in 1898, reported Forbes.

According to Colby Neuman, a meteorologist in NWS's Portland office, "I have not seen very many events where places are breaking their record high temperatures by 4 degrees or 5 degrees. It's one thing to break it by a degree or two, but it's another thing to break it by 4 or 5 degrees, in places that have 100 years' worth of data, or 120 years' worth of data. That is pretty remarkable," reported Scientific American.

Record keeping in such areas dates back to the late 1800s. Temperatures like such have not been experienced in these regions for over 100 years.

At Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon, the US Olympic track and field trials were suspended on Sunday because of the intense heat.

The intense weather was caused by an extended "heat dome" parked over the Pacific northwest. The prolonged heatwave was a sign of the future as climate change transforms global weather patterns, according to Kristie Ebi, a professor at the University of Washington who delves into global warming and its effects on public health.

Related Article: Ponderous Rain Helps Mitigate UNESCO Heritage Fraser Island Site Bushfire

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Chris Whitty, England's chief medical adviser, was harassed in the streets by two male suspects.

The video recording was uploaded on Twitter and showed the two men holding onto Whitty who was struggling to break free. The suspects were seen laughing and posing for the camera as they harassed the health official.

Other politicians are condemning the actions of the two men and called the incident "absolutely appalling." Police officers are also investigating the case and are looking for the identity of the suspects involved.

Harassment of Public Servant

During the encounter, Whitty could be seen fleeing the two men who quickly followed him while he was trying to cross the street, continuing to harass him while filming. In the video, a voice could be heard telling the suspects to "leave this gentleman alone."

The Metropolitan Police released a statement after the incident saying they were aware of the video and the incident. The encounter occurred in St. James' Park. Police questioned people at the scene including those involved in the case to gather details of the incident.

Law enforcement also contacted Whitty to take note of his experience while the investigation of the case continued. Authorities were not able to say when the incident took place but the public is eagerly awaiting a statement from Downing Street as its response to the video, Sky News reported.

Unfortunately, it was not the first time that Whitty was harassed by a civilian. Earlier this month, the health adviser was walking down the street when a prominent anti-vaccine activist trailed him and later shouted at him, calling him a "liar."

Last February, a man also called Whitty a liar multiple times while he was waiting in line for his order at a street food stall. The recorded incident sparked widespread criticism of the suspect when the video went viral on social media, The Guardian reported.

Read Also: US Warplanes Retaliate After Sophisticated Attacks by Surveillance-Avoiding Drones from Iran

Jonathan Van-Tam, Whitty's deputy, was confronted last week while he was on the streets outside of the Ministry of Defense building. The anti-vaccine activist accused the official of allegedly poisoning Matt Hancock.

Online users posted and shared the recording of the incident on Facebook which showed the activist following Whitty down the street and shouting at him. Downing Street has since criticized the suspect, calling the behavior "appalling."

Appalling Behavior

Nadhim Zahawi, the country's vaccine minister, called the actions of the men "disgusting" and urged law enforcement to find the suspects and bring them to justice. He noted they should be arrested and charged for harassing a public servant, Independent reported.

Nick Gibb, the Minister of State for Schools Standards, said Whitty has done a favorable job as a health adviser amid the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. He was at the forefront of implementing necessary measures to keep the country's NHS safe and save the lives of citizens across the nation.

When asked if Whitty should be given close protection in public, Gibb said the decision was the responsibility of the security services and Whitty himself.

Related Article: FDA Announces Nationwide Recall of Frozen Shrimp Due to Salmonella Contamination

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Related Article: FDA Announces Nationwide Recall of Frozen Shrimp Due to Salmonella Contamination

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A new study shows that the COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna could provide shielding against the virus for "years." Scientists sought to identify whether vaccination alone will provide long-lasting protection against the COVID-19, following research suggesting that the vaccines may offer years of protection for individuals who were previously infected with the coronavirus.

The study was comprised of 41 people who received two doses of the Pfizer vaccine. The researchers extracted samples from the lymph nodes of the participants.

Researchers from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Mo., published their findings on Monday in the journal "Nature. " They examined immune responses in 14 individuals who were given both doses of the Pfizer vaccine, particularly focusing on the "germinal centres."

Robust Protection

The study concludes that either the Pfizer or the Moderna vaccine offers robust protection for at least 12 weeks following a second dose and could offer low-level protection for at least one year. According to the researchers, the vaccines offer "robust and prolonged" protection, reported Web MD.

Dr. Christian Ramers, an infectious disease specialist at Family Health Centers of San Diego, remarked, "I think it's encouraging that as a general rule the general population may not need boosters going forward. In fact, we may have selected administration of boosters for example to older people or immune-compromised people who may be more likely to lose that response over time," per KPBS.

Read Also: FDA to Add Warning to Moderna, Pfizer COVID Vaccines Literature; 309 Hospitalized Due to Heart Inflammation

The researchers found out that 15 weeks following the first dose the total number of memory cells that recognized the coronavirus had not deteriorated. The fact that the reactions continued for nearly four months following vaccination is a "very, very good sign," according to Washington University in St. Louis immunologist Ali Ellebedy, who led the study.

Germinal centres indicate sites where antibody cells could train to better recognize and battle viruses. Such centres are essential to antibody production and are produced as a result of a viral infection or an inoculation.

The researchers propose that coronavirus immunity could last for years, or even a lifetime, in people who had the illness, recovered and were inoculated. The researchers, spearheaded by Ali H. Ellebedy, Ph.D., of the Department of Pathology and Immunology at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, caution that variants of the virus that surface in the future may change the effectiveness of the vaccines.

According to Ramers, the new study evaluated the cells which created antibodies that fend off the coronavirus. They were detected at least twelve weeks after participants became fully inoculated. The study's researchers touted the findings as remarkable. However, a mere sample size of 41 people 55were assessed.

This suggested that Pfizer and Moderna vaccines could shield against COVID-19 for years or, at least, against the existing coronavirus variants. The report underscored that even if that is the case, COVID-19 vaccine boosters could remain to be necessary for some, including older adults and individuals with weak immune system, reported The Week.

Related Article: CDC Prolongs Eviction Moratorium Until July to Stabilize Housing, Says It's or the Last Time

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Man again seeks permission to blame others in 1976 murders

An 84-year-old man is again asking a state appeals court to intervene before he goes on trial for a double murder
Pritzker warns about Delta variant, expert says time to learn to live with virus
Calumet City Mayor Thaddeus Jones gives an address at the end of his swearing-in ceremony. "It's a new day in Calumet City," he said.
Copyright  2020 at Sun Newspapers/ APG Media of East Central Minnesota. Digital dissemination of this content without prior written consent is a violation of federal law and may be subject to legal action.
Anchor/Multimedia Journalist

Hello! I am the weekend anchor as well as a reporter for Your News Now! You can reach me with news tips (or just to say hello!) at khonigford@wlio.com.
Now Open

29 June 2021

Radisson Hotel Group is delighted to announce Italy's debut of the Group's newest brand, Radisson Individuals, with the opening of Hotel Alagna Mountain Resort & Spa, a member of Radisson Individuals. The hotel joins Radisson Hotel Group's global portfolio and booking platform, and will benefit from the Group's international awareness and experience while offering their own unique identity to travelers.

With 49 luxury suites in traditional "Walser" chalet style, Alagna Mountain Resort & Spa, a member of Radisson Individuals offers two restaurants, a spacious spa with sauna, Turkish bath, heated indoor and outdoor swimming pool, and a multimedia meeting room accommodating up to 80 guests.
Appointment

29 June 2021

Commonwealth Hotels is pleased to announce the appointment of Arthur Burrell to the role of director of sales and marketing of the Four Points by Sheraton Tucson Airport. Mr. Burrell brings over 15 years of hospitality experience to his new role having previously served as the director of sales and marketing at the Hyatt Place Tucson Airport.

Bringing his seasoned experience in both operations and sales, Burrell assumes his position as Director of Sales & Marketing by overseeing business development activities, developing marketing plans, and overall implementation of a strategic sales approach. Burrell has held various sales and catering roles for brands such as Hilton, Hyatt, IHG and now Marriott. His work in various full service properties has led him to acquire knowledge across the spectrum of market segments and geographies. Burrell attended Pima Community College and the University of Arizona.
Appointment

29 June 2021

Matthew Feliciano joins The Seagate Hotel & Spa team with nearly 10 years of experience in the food and beverage space. A true Floridian at heart, Feliciano returned to South Florida after four years in Las Vegas, where he spent nearly two years as Beverage Manager at The Cosmopolitan overseeing seven bars and two years as Restaurant Assistant General Manager at Jardin at Wynn and Encore Resort. While at Jardin, Feliciano developed a newfound passion for high-touch service, maintaining the resort's Forbes Five Star rating. Back to his roots, Feliciano spent the past four and a half years with Four Seasons Resort Palm Beach, where he served as Director of Recreation and Director of Event Operations.
Appointment

29 June 2021

With nearly 20 years of experience in the hospitality industry, Gina Netisingha joins The Seagate team as Beverage Director. Most recently, Netisingha served as Food and Beverage Manager for Four Seasons Hotel Baltimore, where she led all food and beverage activations including seasonal rooftop pool and cabana programming, outdoor dinner and holiday brunch series, implementing beverage offerings across the division. In addition to that, Netisingha worked at The Surf Club Hotel, Le Sirenuse & Champagne Bar in Miami. She was also previously a member of Tom Colicchio's management team at Craft Restaurant in NYC, and Chef Alain Ducasse's pre-opening team at Adour Restaurant in Washington, D.C.

At The Seagate Group, Netisingha will work closely with the food and beverage leaders at the Hotel & Spa, Beach Club and The Seagate Country Club to spearhead the beverage program. She will focus her efforts on strengthening the concepts in all outlets while working closely with the bar staff and sharing her passion for team development and service delivery. Netisingha's hire as Beverage Director signifies the hotel's commitment to growing the food and beverage team and enhancing the cocktail experience.
Appointment

29 June 2021

Aparium Hotel Group today announced the appointment of Joe White as General Manager of the Hu. Hotel in Memphis, TN. The 110 room hotel will reopen in summer 2021 with new and exciting guest programming, amenities and food & beverage experiences.

With over 25 years of hospitality industry experience, White has been recognized for his leadership and operational excellence having received the Marriott Service Excellence Leadership Award, Hotelier of the Year by the Alabama Hospitality Association, Hilton's Developer of the Year and Connie Award. Most recently, White was the General Manager for The Chattanoogan Hotel in Tennessee.
Supplier News

29 June 2021

Chicago, IL. - Cloud5 Communications , a leading provider of communications solutions for the worlds top hotel brands and management companies, recently completed the installation of their high speed internet access (HSIA) solution at Marriotts Element Denver International Airport by Westin in Colorado. The advanced HSIA network by Cloud5 ensures that the property provides the highest level of connectivity for guest satisfaction and meets Marriotts latest Global Property Network Standards (GPNS) for Internet.

The eco-conscious Element Denver International Airport, managed by Lotus Management, Inc., utilizes a nature-influenced environment to encourage a sense of well-being for their guests. Constructed with sustainability in mind, Elements efficient design and flowing layouts were created to maximize space and enable guests to use their rooms as a relaxing stop before heading to the local mountains or as a comfortable place to work as todays guests blur the line between business and leisure travel. The implementation of Cloud5s solutions at Element Denver International Airport represents the latest expansion of the Cloud5 and Lotus Management Inc. partnership, as the management company continues to secure reliable high-speed internet access across their portfolio.

Anna Steelfox, general manager at Element Denver International Airport, commented, Bleisure travel, or the blending of business and leisure travel, is on the rise, and high-quality Internet services are becoming increasingly essential for hoteliers to ensure guest satisfaction. This is particularly true for an Extended Stay hotel like ours. Our spacious suites, which are equipped with full kitchens and separate living, working and sleeping areas, require strong and reliable network connectivity for all guests, their families and their diverse Internet needs. Cloud5, an industry leader with a reliable reputation and strong certifications, went above our expectations. They upgraded our networks quickly and seamlessly, and their Wi-Fi has been dependable and fast.

Cloud5 is one of only four certified providers approved to design, install and support Marriotts managed Full Service hotels, and one of only three providers to have this distinction for Marriotts largest conference hotels. The company consistently earns superior service scores across all Marriott brands through its complete range of Internet services and has once again been awarded the top performance score in Marriott's GPNS program.

We are excited to expand our relationship with Lotus Management, Inc. by providing our services to Element Denver International Airport, said Mark Holzberg, President and Chief Executive Officer of Cloud5 Communications. As a management company dedicated to providing the best guest experience possible, we are honored to contribute our network solutions to their properties. Our internet services will provide high-speed Wi-Fi for leisure travelers and business travelers alike, ensuring fast and reliable Internet services designed to fit every guest need.
Press Release

29 June 2021

Los Angeles, CA  The renowned Farmani Group, along with the 3C Awards, is pleased to formally announce the winners of its first edition of the LIV Hospitality Design Awards.

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LIV Hospitality Design Awards is open to architects and interior designers around the world who have created incredible projects in Hospitality. The LIV Awards program is an inclusive platform, pursuing exceptional projects within the living and eating spaces, from co-living to beach resorts, from fine dining restaurants to pop-up bars.

On April 30th, 2021, the submissions for the 1st edition LIV Hospitality Design Awards were closed, leaving the panels esteemed jury of architects, designers, hoteliers, developers, and leaders in interior design and architectural fields to select winners in each category. The program received over 400 submissions from 55 countries, covering 64 categories in the first year alone.

"We truly believe in the power of hospitality architecture and interior design to foster exceptional guest experience, says co-founder and Program Director, Astrid Hebert. "As such, we are very pleased to announce the winners of our first edition, who will receive prestigious recognition, acknowledging their companys expertise while gaining greater exposure. We wish to congratulate all winners and participants for taking us on such an incredible journey.

The first edition winners are as follows:

ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN OF THE YEAR - LIVING SPACE

Park Hyatt Suzhou

Company: Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates

Lead Designer: Josh Chaiken

Project Location: Suzhou, China

ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN OF THE YEAR - EATING SPACE

Northern Lights Bar at ION Adventure Hotel

Company: Minarc

Lead Designer: Minarc team

Project Location: Selfoss, Iceland

INTERIOR DESIGN OF THE YEAR - LIVING SPACE

An Introduction of the Unique Bamboo Lodge

Company: Yang Yongquan Architectural

Lead Designer: Yongquan Yang

Project Location: Yibin City, Sichuan Province, China

INTERIOR DESIGN OF THE YEAR - EATING SPACE

Virgin Izakaya Bar

Company: YODEZEEN

Lead Designer: Artem Zverev

Other Designer: Artur Sharf

Project Location: Kyiv, Ukraine

EMERGING ARCHITECT OF THE YEAR - LIVING SPACE



Feathery snowflakes

Lead Designer: Yu-Chia Lin, Yu-Hao Chen, Shi-Yen Wu

University: National United University, Taiwan

Project Location: Lake Braies, Italy

EMERGING ARCHITECT OF THE YEAR - EATING SPACE

Farewell to Life



Lead Designer: Edwin Khai Vun Ho

University: University of Newcastle, Australia

Project Location: Mater Calvary Hospice, Newcastle, Australia

EMERGING INTERIOR DESIGNER OF THE YEAR - LIVING SPACE



GoodDay & GoodNight

Lead Designer: Irene Lee

School: ArtCenter College of Design, USA

Project Location: Los Angeles

EMERGING INTERIOR DESIGNER OF THE YEAR - EATING SPACE

Dim. Boutique Restaurant for Dim-sum

Lead Designer: Helene (Weixin) Huang

School: ArtCenter College of Design, USA

Project Location: Los Angeles, USA
Press Release

29 June 2021

New research released by Euronews, is a cause for optimism for the travel industry, as seven in 10 Europeans across France, Germany, Spain and Italy (70 per cent) say they will travel either domestically (39 per cent), internationally (21 per cent) or both internationally and domestically (10 per cent) for holidays this year.

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The research, conducted with 6,000 Europeans by Redfield and Wilton Strategies, examines Europeans' views on a variety of issues, including travel in the current pandemic situation.

When looking at each country surveyed:

Almost one in four respondents in France (23%) say they intend to travel for holidays abroad this year, while 37% say they will travel domestically, 11% declare intending to travel both domestically and abroad, when 29% do not intend to travel anywhere this year.

In Germany, 28% of respondents say they intend to travel abroad for holidays, 26% domestically, 10% both domestically and abroad, when over a third (35%) say they will not travel anywhere this year.

In Italy, almost half of the respondents (46%) say they intend to travel domestically, 19% are set on traveling abroad, 12% intend on travelling both domestically and abroad, and only 23% say they will not travel anywhere this year.

Like in Italy, almost of half of respondents in Spain (46%) say they intend to travel domestically, 14% have decided to travel abroad, 8% will travel both abroad and domestically, when 38% declare that they do not intend to travel anywhere this year.

The survey further shows that people in France, Germany, Spain and Italy are intent on travelling safely - four in five Europeans (80 per cent) say they would be willing to carry vaccine passports for international travel.

The research also delved into European attitudes to post-Brexit UK travel. Five years on from the Brexit referendum, more than two in five people (44 per cent) across the four European nations (Germany, France, Italy and Spain) believe that Brits should be subject to additional taxes or charges when purchasing holiday homes in the EU.

It appears however that Brexit has not deterred people from going to the UK. A majority of all respondents (63 per cent) said they were 'no more nor less likely' or 'more likely' to travel to the UK post Brexit; only 25 percent answered that they would be "less likely" to do so. An identical number (63 per cent) feel they would be "more welcome" or "no more nor less welcome" in Britain since it has left the EU, with only 24 per cent saying they would feel "less welcome".

The research was commissioned by Euronews as part of its 'Feel Connected to Europe' campaign embracing wider European and global issues and reinforcing the news channel's neutral editorial stance in an increasingly polarised news environment.

Michael Peters, Euronews CEO, says: "With this campaign, we want audiences to think critically about the news they consume, and the potential benefits of looking beyond the immediate national news agenda and embracing wider European and global issues. As Europe's leading international news media, our mission is to empower people to form their own opinion, through offering a diversity of viewpoints. Euronews' television and digital platforms provide thinking audiences with an alternative source of news and information that helps them to stay connected with Europe and the world."

The media company - which reaches 145 million people every month and is available in over 400 million homes in 160 countries, including two thirds of homes across Europe and the UK - recently expanded its digital feature-led content which complements its rolling news, broadcast in 12 language editions, including the launches of Euronews Next, Euronews Travel and Euronews Green.

Euronews Travel is a new digital destination by Euronews, Europe's leading international news channel. It speaks to those who are hungry for unique experiences and memories, but not at the cost of the planet and local communities.
Opinion Article

29 June 2021

Dr Marc Stierand, Director of the Institute of Business Creativity (IBC) and Associate Professor at EHL, takes us on a thought-provoking journey around the question of creativity in business. What does business innovation and creativity really imply, how does it differ from innovation and how should companies encourage it?

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What is creativity in business?

In the art world, creativity from a developmental perspective is asocial because it is an internal process and does not have to lead to useful output for anybody else. In the business world, this is different. Here, we see creativity as the single most crucial input for innovation: the socio-cultural acceptance of a creative idea. Therefore, business creativity is all about creative ideas that are new and useful, appropriate or valuable in some form. Although the individual creator is still essential, there is much more to it.

Sometimes the worlds of art and business overlap, like in the case of haute cuisine. In comparison to food that keeps you alive, one could argue that an haute cuisine dish in a Michelin-starred restaurant is useless and simply an unnecessary luxury. But this would be like comparing apples to pears. Which is the most creative idea: a cure for cancer or Ferran Adrias Melon Caviar? Everybody would certainly agree that the cure for cancer is more useful and certainly more important because it can save many lives, but Ferran Adrias Melon Caviar is appropriate and creative in haute cuisine because it is aesthetically pleasing for all the senses. It is an experience that consumers look for when going to a Michelin-starred restaurant. Comparing the two is meaningless.

To what extent does creativity matter in the business world?

This is a fundamental question and can easily be misunderstood because people generally associate or replace creativity with innovation. As I said before, innovation and creativity are not the same, so it does matter. Should all businesses care about creativity? Yes, they should. Should all businesses become innovators? Most businesses should not. What does this mean? When approaching innovation as a strategic focus, most businesses should not become innovators because it is often very costly and almost always very risky. That is, you may not want to spend all your creative energy on creating highly novel products or services. But, as any good entrepreneur, you should certainly focus on using your creativity for all other business areas and functions: processes, people management, marketing and communication.

You can sell traditional brasserie food, but this should not hold you back from being creative in how you sell it. Sometimes, you do not even have to reinvent the wheel, but look elsewhere for creative solutions and translate them for your business. Picasso is believed to have said that Good artists copy, great artists steal  with their eyes or ears, that is.

Are there techniques to make employees more creative?

This is another essential question and perhaps the most interesting for the business world: How do we become more creative? Or, how do we lead others to become more creative? Unfortunately, the answer is less straightforward than businesses want it to be. There is no such thing as a method that makes people immediately more creative. However, there are ways of going against the grain that can help people step out from the accepted frames of thinking, believing and feeling that one has been forced to learn and assimilate through socialization. But this is not sufficient. Organizations need to create an environment that allows for creativity. Then they need to accept that they should only manage this environment, not the creative individuals themselves.

Many organizations, especially when they are of a certain age, size, and prestige, are very good at killing creativity. There are many reasons for this, but overall, these organizations tend to follow a defender strategy simply because they have a lot to lose and, therefore, a lot to defend. Anybody inside or outside the organization trying to shake the boat, regardless of how good the intentions are and how positive the outcome might be for the organization, might face a brick wall. The bricks are made of old habits, newly invented procedures, and performance indicators that can only capture system compliance. For these organizations, more compliance means higher performance. The most creative people are often the least compliant because their ideas and values drive them. Organizations cannot expect them to always line up with the given values.

So what should companies do to increase creativity?

Creativity means wandering in the unknown and constantly asking, "What if?" Together with my friend and IBC Associate, Charalampos Mainemelis, Director of the SEV Center of Excellence in Creative Leadership and Professor of Organizational Behavior at ALBA Graduate Business School, we asked in a paper that we presented at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting "What if play were the core motive of work?" Playing and playfulness are essential for creativity to arise and remain. Still, they are frightening for organizations with a very solemn culture. Many organizations are too much like Buckingham Palace and too little like Hogwarts. They are impressive but have lost their magic.

Smaller and more entrepreneurial companies can be great role models here. For example, the famous chef, Ferran Adria, founded ElTaller', a creative workshop for his restaurant ElBulli. He brought together people from different disciplines intending to create the next best dish, experience or technique. At ElTaller you would find an immense array of ingredients, spices, machinery, tools, and the team would play around with all these things. Playing does not mean they were not serious. Playing gets the creative juices flowing by including all the senses. The creative process is never a purely intellectual exercise; it's sensory, its intuitive. It is true even in the most abstract domains, such as mathematics, or when your things are out of touch, such as astrophysics. You need to smell the freshly cut ginger, and you need to see the flower blossom to be able to start imagining.

How can we think outside the box?

This is the fascinating but paradoxical side of creativity. To create something new and useful in any field, you need to be knowledgeable in that field. It means that you need to become part of what Wittgenstein called the knowledge tradition. We inherit this tradition from those who have been in our field before. Being creative means not strictly following the tradition; it often means going against the tradition. How do we achieve both at the same time? How can we know all that is there to know, not reinvent the wheel, and yet, simultaneously disregard some aspects of that same tradition to create new knowledge?

My friend and IBC Associate, Viktor Dorfler from Strathclyde Business School, specializing in human mastery and AI, often jokes about this with his MBA students in class. He asks them: I am a creative guy. Would you like me to be creative about your eye surgery? Clearly, nobody ever wants his creative input for their eye surgery, however, most of his students would undoubtedly agree that Viktor is creative. Recently, he suggested that AI could play a valuable role in helping us think outside the box in the best sense of the word, not being bound by the knowledge tradition.

What's the business creativity conclusion?Business creativity is all about creative ideas that are new and useful, appropriate or valuable. At the IBC, we argue that all businesses must engage in creativity. However, not all should focus on an innovation strategy. Most companies do not have to invent highly creative products or services. Rather, they should think creatively about their business at large, including processes, people management, marketing, and communication. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a method that makes people immediately more creative - but, the IBC can certainly bring a bit of Hogwarts' magic to companies. We can help to create an environment and management culture that encourages employees, managers and directors to step out from the accepted frames of thinking, believing and feeling that hinders them from being imaginative.

Dr Marc Stierand is Director of the Institute of Business Creativity (IBC) and Associate Professor at EHL; he is also a former haute cuisine chef and one of the countrys leading business creativity researchers. Dr Stierand founded the IBC, EHLs longest-serving institute which prides itself on thinking outside the box. The IBC is a transdisciplinary hub that aims to provide research and knowledge relevant to practice. The first-class research it offers is informed by many years of industry experience, creative attitudes to outcomes and a more lateral and inventive approach to finding solutions.
Singapore, traditionally a global beacon of openness and connectedness, is grappling with how to chart a path through the lingering Covid-19 pandemic as officials worry that any significant relaxation will compromise their hard-won success against the virus.

The city-state has largely managed to stamp out infection and 36 people have died in the entire pandemic, compared to thousands elsewhere. With access to the highly effective messenger RNA vaccines and a largely compliant population, its immunization rate leads the region. Singapore plans to give a first Covid-19 vaccine shot to most of its population by the end of July after securing more supplies.

Government officials have flagged reopening prospects, saying theyre drawing up a roadmap that will shift focus from daily infection counts to hospitalizations, and treat Covid-19 as endemic. Yet even as rival financial center Hong Kong presses forward with easing travel and other restrictions for vaccinated residents -- despite its overall lower rate of coverage -- Singapore hasnt made clear its path to the post-pandemic era with a timeline or details, for reasons likely ranging from the citys low infection rate to its uncertain political transition.

The stalemate is causing tension. On the ground, businesses, residents and even doctors are pushing for bolder action, with some physicians saying the medical system can cope if any moves lead to a rise in cases. In the latest flareup, infections were less likely to lead to severe illnesses than in the past thanks to protection offered by the vaccines.

Singapore cannot and will not remain closed. Open borders and trade are our lifeblood, said Jeremy Lim, associate professor at the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health under the National University of Singapore. It all boils down to the risk appetite on the part of the decision makers, and clarity. And you do get a sense from the ground that people are getting fatigued and frustrated.

The citys exit path is being closely watched, a potential template for other areas that have contained the virus, vaccinated their populations and now want to rejoin the world. While Singapore is not alone in this dilemma, other isolationist Covid havens like mainland China and Australia have more domestic-focused economies, allowing them to remain cut-off for longer.

Billions at Risk

Singapore is facing a tourism gap that brought in $20 billion in 2019 and risking its reputation as a top international business hub, with the expatriate community growing restless with the tight restrictions. High-profile global events like the World Economic Forum and Formula One night race that were supposed to take place later this year have been scrapped, while others like Gastech are moving to more open host locations like Dubai.

The citys hurdles encapsulate the difficult transition that governments must navigate to exit the Covid era. Its not clear how long the process will take, with even highly-vaccinated countries like Israel occasionally re-instating some restrictions or delaying further reopening as the fearsome delta strain spreads.

Singapore is starting with a change in how officials talk about the virus, pivoting from a perception of it as a crisis-level threat to something that is endemic and even mundane.

A single case no longer carries as much weight as it did before widespread inoculation, said Dale Fisher, an infectious diseases physician at Singapores National University Hospital.

If a person is infected with Covid-19, but all his co-workers and most of his family were vaccinated, only a handful of his contacts might actually get the disease, Fisher said, adding that probably none of them will be severe anyway.

Trusting Vaccines

In order to embrace the endemic narrative, it will be critical to trust vaccines, said Donald Low, professor at the Institute of Public Policy of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Cutting quarantine time for vaccinated travelers, perhaps a bigger reduction than Hong Kongs move to slash isolation periods by half to seven days, would send a strong message that even if people contract the virus, most will have mild or no symptoms, and very few will require hospitalization.

This, in turn, helps people to accept that even though vaccination does not eliminate the virus, it allows society to return to normality sooner, Low said.

Officials have been seeding the idea that the nation has to live with the virus. Three ministers wrote in a column in a local newspaper last week that they want to turn the pandemic into something much less threatening, citing examples like influenza and chickenpox.

At a recent briefing, they also spoke about having large social gatherings and replacing quarantines with more testing when traveling for vaccinated people, without providing details. In a Facebook post, Health Minister Ong Ye Kung said that snap lockdown measures are likely not to be imposed again, given the citys capacity in testing, contact-tracing and vaccination.

Treading Slowly

Yet the government itself appears to be fearful of treading into uncharted territory. Officials last week said that not even fully vaccinating two-thirds of the population -- a rate that even Israel hasnt reached -- is enough to fully reopen with confidence, raising the question of what is.

The city-state aims to fully vaccinate two-thirds of the population by National Day, or Aug. 9, a day that marks its independence, at which point there will be some reopening, promised Health Minister Ong last week. Still, coverage needs to go further than two-thirds, especially given the transmissibility of the delta variant, and for the elderly, he said.

Part of the hesitation likely comes from the fact that unlike the U.S., European nations or Israel which faced raging outbreaks before vaccination, most Singaporeans have never been infected and lack protective antibodies.

Another major factor may be political pressure. The ruling Peoples Action Party will want to prevent a repeat of the initially bungled handling of a Covid-19 outbreak among low-wage migrant workers last spring that led to tens of thousands of infections.

Months later, a rare political setback for the party occurred at the ballot box, with the opposition winning a record number of seats. Shortly after, the politician who was heir apparent to Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong bowed out, citing his age. It sent a tremor through a nation known for political stability.

Both Finance Minister Lawrence Wong and Ong, who jointly oversee the virus taskforce, are in the running for the premiership, which currently has no clear successor. How Singapore exits Covid-19 -- and whose vision brings that outcome about safely -- is likely to be a deciding factor.

Singapore has always prided itself to be exceptional, even at crisis management, said Eugene Tan, a political commentator and an associate professor of law at the Singapore Management University. The cautiousness is in many respects exacerbated by the fourth-generation leadership seeing the pandemic as a litmus test and the outcomes critical for its performance legitimacy.

And the leadership transition, in some respects, is complicating the whole-of-government messaging, Tan said. While there is a consensus on how to tackle the pandemic, the differences tend to cohere around the pace of re-opening the economy, the borders, and the restrictions.

Can You Cope?

Even with the latest, delta-driven wave, Singapore has yet to see daily cases surpass 50. And the number of hospitalizations, currently at 144, are down from the staggering numbers -- more than 1,800 at one point -- seen during the mass outbreak among low-wage migrant workers. Only a handful of people are now in critical condition.

Singapores reopening decision should hinge on whether the health care system can cope, said the National University of Singapores Lim. And the short answer is, at least in the Singapore setting, yes it can.

If reopening in the U.S. and Europe continues safely, Singaporean residents will reasonably ask why the city-state cant do the same, especially when people are dutifully queuing to be vaccinated and practicing social distancing, Lim said.

Even with government aid, businesses are hurting. Restaurants had to dip into their cash reserves during the tightened restrictions in May, which were already depleted after the lockdown a year ago, said Lim Jialiang, the owner of a beer distributor firm called Watering Hole.

It would be better for the government to spell out whats their plan clearly and in advance because then we can plan and forecast demand, he said. Otherwise, its all too disruptive.
United Airlines is expanding its fleet amid rebounding travel demand as part of a plan that will bring 25,000 jobs to its hubs across the nation, including 3,000 in Houston.

The Chicago-based airline said in a Tuesday announcement that it would buy 500 new planes, including 200 Boeing 737 Max and 70 Airbus 321neos, by 2026 and retire around 300 planes that were reaching the end of their useful life.

The new jets will help United, the dominant airline in Houston, increase its total seats per departure by 30 seats, or almost 30 percent, increasing its fuel efficiency and reducing carbon emissions per passenger, it said. The company also said the new jets would allow it to offer more premium seating targeting business travel, which United executives said is still below prepandemic levels but is expected to bounce back.

On HoustonChronicle.com: United chief says IAH flights bouncing back with energy recovery

This gets us with the right product mix with the hubs were flying to everyday, said Andrew Nocella, Uniteds executive vice president and chief commercial officer.

United said it would be hiring customer service agents, dispatchers, flight attendants, pilots and technicians in Houston. The announcement is another bright spot for Houston-area airline workers laid off by the thousands last year as the pandemic grounded travel demand.

Most local workers have been called back, said Virginia McDavid, a United flight attendant and legislative and political coordinator for District 6 of the Communication Workers of America, the parent union of the Association of Flight Attendants.

It looks like things are getting back to normal. With announcements like today, even better than normal, she said. Its nice to see some good times on the horizon after what weve been through.

United plans to offer around 470 daily departures from Bush Intercontinental Airport next month, still down from the roughly 500 before the pandemic started, Nocella said. The expansion will allow the carrier to move that number to at least 600 a day, he said.

On HoustonChronicle.com: American Airlines cutting flights as summer season starts

Houston is an important hub for United, he said, as it provides it access to destinations in Mexico and Latin America.

United has a terminal redevelopment project underway at IAH and is also working with Houston Airport System to redesign its ticketing lobby in Terminal C to include new security checkpoints and a check-in location. United said it is also constructing a new baggage handling system and baggage storage facility at IAH, at a combined investment of around $300 million.

Nationally, United expects to introduce 40 new aircraft in 2022, 138 in 2023 and as many as 350 in 2024 and beyond. The airline also plans to retrofit all its existing planes to mirror features on the newer models, including screens on the back of every seat, larger overhead bins, faster in-flight internet and brighter LED lighting.

Its really an unprecedented change for an airline the size of United, Nocella said. These larger aircraft are a key ingredient to be able to grow our footprint.

amanda.drane@chron.com

Twitter.com/amandadrane
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP)  Tenants and their advocates hope New York's revamped rent relief program will finally help renters and landlords who have struggled to get assistance since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Paperwork requirements made it tough for tenants and landlords to get relief funds in a previous round of pandemic assistance.

Last year, New York dedicated $100 million from the federal CARES Act to rental relief and received 94,000 applications. But it wound up rejecting most applicants.

It has dispersed $47 million to date to 18,000 applicants, far fewer than officials had hoped to reach.

Now, it has a new $2 billion fund, passed in April, but people can only submit online applications and the website has been crashing in recent days and weeks.

Ernesto Tohom, an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala studying business at Baruch College who lost his job in a deli last year, said the state denied his application for rental relief last year, because he could not provide documentation that he had lost his job, which was off-the-books.

This year, he's trying again thanks to expanded eligibility criteria  which does not consider immigration status  but has not been able to submit the required documents because that part of the website has malfunctioned each time hes tried to load it.

It would mean a lot, said Tohom, who owes his landlord $7,500. Because to be honest, I dont know how I could pay the rent.

In New York City alone, renters owe at least $1 billion in back rent, according to a survey of rent-regulated apartments by Community Housing Improvement Program, a landlord trade group.

This year, New York launched a new program with more than $2 billion in mostly federal funds to help tenants with outstanding rent, utility payments and other expenses. A Chicago-based vendor, Guidehouse, Inc., received a $115 million contract to run the new rental relief fund.

The state has not distributed any funds yet. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's administration said that at least 110,000 people applied, and it could take four to six weeks to process complete applications. Payments will go directly to landlords.

New York has put a moratorium on evictions through August 31. Tenants can still be protected from eviction once the law expires, but only if they submit an application for rent relief.

New York released an application for tenants and landlords to fill out June 1  nearly two months after lawmakers approved funding in the state budget.

New York was one of eight states without an up-and-running relief program as of mid-May, according to the Legal Aid Society.

It took awhile, and thats been disappointing how long its taken, staff attorney Eileen Davidson said. You know when you look across the country, I think a lot of places have struggled to create these programs and get them up and running to get the money out.

Samuel Stein, housing policy analyst at New York City-based Community Service Society, said the most vulnerable people are less likely to have internet or an email address and or the time or computer skills to spend hours refreshing a malfunctioning page.

Stein said some translations are poor quality, particularly for Bangladeshi speakers. He questioned why advocates can't simply print out paper copies and help multiple people at once.

In some ways it is simpler but its still far too complicated, he said.

Cuomos administration did not provide The Associated Press with specifics about why there's no paper application option, or exactly why it took so long for the new fund to get up and running.

But officials said the state moved swiftly on roll-out, and said it took time to translate applications into eight languages and work with local governments on outreach, application assistance and anti-fraud prevention. Applicants can call the state hotline for help filling out the application over the phone.

A customer service agent reached through the website's live chat function said Friday that a lot of other callers are having the same issue with uploading documents and the website is currently having malfunctions.

And Tohom shared a photo of the website Monday that read: Page is currently unavailable, please try later.

Office of Temporary Disability Assistance spokesperson Anthony Farmer denied the document upload function has been down.

Minimal technical issues are being quickly addressed as they are encountered, and the application process continues," he said.

New York lags behind other populous states: Texas, for example, has paid out $388 million to 61,000 households.

Last year, state leaders set aside at least $2.6 billion in COVID-19 relief, but a year later more than $425 million of that  or 16%  hadnt made it into the pockets of tenants or their landlords, a ccording to an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity and The Associated Press.

New York-based construction management company Liro Engineers received a $12 million contract to staff a call center and provide translation services for the state's original rent relief program.

Davidson said New York's previous program last year was badly implemented and badly run, and stymied by too-strict eligibility rules. Tenants, for example, had to prove they were rent-burdened before the pandemic to qualify.

Charni Sochet, a spokesperson for the state's affordable housing agency, said the original program was designed by the Legislature and every eligible household received aid. Cuomo's administration did not specify how it plans to spend the rest of the $100 million in federal money it received, which can be used on any COVID-19 costs.

Davidson said the situation created "an incentive for the state not to pay it all out, because they then could take that money and use it for something else.

This year, New York can only use the new federal funds for rent relief.
SURFSIDE, Fla. (AP)  Search and rescue teams from Miami-Dade are considered among the best and most experienced in the world, dispatched to epic disaster scenes far beyond Florida  from the rubble of the World Trade Center to earthquake-ravaged Haiti, Mexico and the Philippines.

This time disaster struck at home.

The rescuers are searching urgently for the scores of souls buried beneath the fallen 12-story wing of the Champlain Towers condo building. As of Tuesday afternoon, more than five days after the collapse, the death toll stood at 12, with 149 people unaccounted for.

Its personal, said Miami-Dade Countys former fire chief, Dave Downey, a 37-year veteran of the department who retired two years ago but joined the search.

Id much rather be giving help than asking for help, but right now its in our own backyard, he said from a command trailer near the pile of broken concrete and twisted metal.

Crews from across Florida and from Mexico and Israel have descended on Surfside to join the effort. More than 400 rescue workers are at the scene, rotating in and out from the rubble every 45 minutes during 12-hour shifts. At any given time, six or seven squads  each with six members  tramp over the mountain of debris or tunnel into it.

The search for survivors continued amid anguished pleas from family for rescuers to work more quickly. On-and-off downpours have not stopped the crews. Nor did a smoky fire smoldering deep within the ruins. The oppressive Florida heat hasnt helped either.

The current fire chief, Alan Cominsky, grew emotional as he talked about the first hours after emergency crews arrived at the horrifying scene early Thursday.

Wow, wow. The rescue efforts that we did, what we went through, going on those initial first hours in this environment at 1:30 in the morning, he said. "So, Im just trying to emphasize the magnitude of what were encountering, what were seeing. And we still keep pushing forward.

Joseph A. Barbera, an expert at George Washington University on search and rescue, crossed paths with a team from Miami-Dade in 1990 while advising rescuers in the Philippines.

They have a very strong reputation, said Barbera, noting that the Miami-Dade search and rescue task force predates many of the other teams put in place in the United States and internationally. Im very confident that they will continue to do a great job.

They've had lots of practice.

In 1985, a Miami-Dade team rushed to Mexico City, where an 8.1-magnitude earthquake crumbled homes and buildings, killing some 5,000 people. A decade later, the department sent personnel to Oklahoma City after the truck bombing at a federal building that killed 168 people.

Then on to earthquakes in Turkey, Taiwan and Colombia.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 sent Florida crews to the World Trade Center, an especially emotional assignment. Many of the dead pulled from the debris were first responders who had rushed in to save lives.

But there were episodes of hope in Port-au-Prince, Haiti  devastated by an earthquake in 2010  whenever rescuers pulled out a survivor. A reporter for the Christian Science Monitor recounted witnessing a Miami-Dade crew going into a collapsed building to save three children, ages 5, 7 and 14, while a frantic mother looked on from the street.

There have been other tragedies at home, including the collapse in 2012 of a parking structure under construction at Miami Dade College that killed four workers. But perhaps nothing has hit as hard as this most recent disaster.

No one has been pulled out alive from the ruins since the first hours after the building fell. Rescue workers have had to move cautiously amid the precarious pile of debris.

Those first responders are breaking their backs trying to find anybody they can, Gov. Ron DeSantis said Tuesday.

Alfredo Lopez, who lived on the sixth floor of the condominium complex, in a portion that remained standing, bristled at complaints that crews werent working hard enough or fast enough.

When we got out there that night, I could see nothing but ambulances and fire trucks and police cars," he said. "Perhaps they didnt get in there soon enough because they didnt know what the hell was going on, like none of us.

A seven-member search and rescue team from Mexicos Jewish community is using for the first time a $23,000 suitcase-size device that uses microwave radar to see through 40 feet of shattered concrete and can detect signs of breathing and heartbeats. The team has also used dogs to sniff for victims.

We are hopeful for a miracle, said Ricardo Aizenman, one of the rescuers from Cadena International. It's happened before, he said. People can live up to 15, 16 days with only water, drops of water."

Dr. Howard Lieberman also believes survivors might still be found.

As a trauma surgeon, the one thing that Ive learned is never count someone out. Ive made that mistake once or twice, Lieberman said. And you know what? They proved me wrong.

Lieberman was on the scene hours after Thursday's collapse and now leads a five-person medical team attached to Miami-Dades search and rescue unit. He has found himself treating rescue workers for blisters and injured feet, heat exhaustion and fatigue from toiling in heat approaching 90 degrees.

These guys work 12-hour cycles. I see them coming off the pile at 12 noon and they are spent, and theyre working their way back down to their tents, said Downey, the former Miami-Dade fire chief who now chairs the Urban Search and Rescue Committee of the International Association of Fire Chiefs

They get cleaned up. They get a little bit of food. A few hours later, Im talking to my guys. They say, Were ready to go, chief. Put us in. We want to get to work.

_____

Calvan reported from Tallahassee. Associated Press writers Mike Schneider in Orlando, Freida Frisaro in Fort Lauderdale, and Adriana Gomez Licon and Terry Spencer in Surfside contributed to this report.
This column was originally published on June 29, 1955. The "House of Horrors" was a hotel for seamen at 7506 Navigation. It is long gone.

***

(It is our custom, on the last day of June, to turn out for the delight and edification of our many enthusiastic readers our one and only gossip column of the year. Because June 30 falls on a Thursday this year, and on Thursdays the editor cuts us down to two short takes, we are running our annual gossip essay today. Arent you glad you bought a paper today?)

Dots and dashes. Buckethead Sprague the tankerman checked in at the House of Horrors, on Navigation, last week...Lean Linda, recently a waitress at the Careless Cafe on McCarty, now driving a White Top Cab...Down on Chenevert St., where a highly respectable firm does $18,000,000 worth of biz a year, Big Annie and Mustache Jim used to run a 22-room hotel that was the most notorious resort in Houston at the centurys turn...Annie kept a decanter of knockout drops on the buffet in the hotel dining room....Quote of the week in Heavenly Houston, by Street Evangelist Robert L. Stone: Saloons are incubators of iniquity, immorality and insanity.

TEA PARTY

Whats Doing Among Our Juvenile Delinquents...Bug-juice Tupper and Root Square Ruby in charge of arrangements for the Independence Day reefer party honoring the memory of Clyde Barrow...Goose Creek Goldie sprung from detention with the withdrawal of an aggravated assault complaint by Hotrod Polk

Bulletin. Diamond merchants come and go over the years, but Uncle Tony DAmico is still the King of Diamonds. Railroad man DAmico has given away more sparklers than any millionaire in Texas. He buys and sells diamonds while others just talk about it. Now we learn he has just closed a deal with Joe Gallo of Gallos Italian Restaurant to furnish the gems to be stuffed from time to time in Joes meatballs...Add Diamonds... Bulldog Brown, able seaman, back on the beach after a voyage that took him to Walvis Bay, Southwest Africa, on Diamond Day. Thats the one day in the year, explains Bulldog, when they open the diamond fields to the public, and you can pick up all the ice you can find lying on top of the ground. Bulldog found something shiny, took it to a Walvis Bay jeweler for identification. It was a piece of busted gin bottle.

PIG HOUND

Hunting and Fishing NewsStumps Starnes the waterfront policeman claims he knows a man who trained a razorback hog to hunt coons: says the hog won first tree in a San Jacinto County hunt last year...Uncle Charley Brown of Morgans Point says conditions for crabbing around the Point have been unfavorable for the past 20 years...Jiggs Jaeggli the Preston Ave. cleaner hunting for the cat who left a zuit suit to be cleaned a month ago and never came back for it.

Here and There Around the Town...Mrs. Jerry Marsel, who runs the cigar stand in the Hermann Bldg., has given up pipe smoking...I. Greenfield remodeling his two-story building, N.E. corner Catfish Feef and Puh-ray-a-ree Ave., closing Shamrock Casanovas famous shoeshine parlor...Overheard on a local afternoon news program at 950 kilocycles: The mayor said it was him who began the investigation of the scandal.

CABANA SET

Exclusive Reports of Vacationing Houstonians...Hamburger Phil off via the Intracoastal Canal for Duquesne and Chicago as cook on the tug Seneca...Nick Sandov, who lived on the gallery of the Noble Mansion until the recent fire, taking a summer course in agriculture at the municipal prison farm...Stan the Franklin Ave. opportunist beachcombing and crabbing at Galvez Town.

Second Person Plural Dept.Last week Junior had a birthday. So we bought Junior an electric train. Junior is smart. Like us. When he goes to bed he takes his electric train to bed with him, to keep us from playing with it. You see, we never had an electric train when we were a little boy. Heck, we didnt even have electricity. Anyway, this was quite frustrating, and our psychiatrist says this is the main reason we had such a frustrated youth and ended up being a newspaper writer. But we arent really as dumb as this copy might make you think. Next fall when Junior starts back to school, we are going to stay at home one day and play with Juniors electric train.
A traffic stop last year led officials in South Texas to a massive trove of illegal goods.

Not drugs, weapons or gems.

It was cigarettes. Cartons upon cartons of black market cigarettes for export.

An 80-year-old Mission man and two young associates were convicted and sentenced for trying to move the stash. The elder player in the scheme admitted he intended to smuggle nearly 423 million cigarettes through Texas into Mexico.

The case provides a glimpse into the operations of Chinese firms that are well on their way to taking over the global tobacco market.

Although cigarettes seem an unlikely product to smuggle  theyre legal in most places  they represent a lucrative business that can include big profits and tax savings. And they give those backing the smugglers a way into the economies of other countries and sometimes the leverage to persuade governments to put in place more favorable policies, reporting by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project shows.

Warehouses on the border

Jose Francisco Guerra owned and operated Victor M. Guerra Inc. Duty Free Shop, a customs brokering company in Hidalgo. On Jan. 15, 2020, Department of Public Safety troopers stopped a tractor-trailer in Hidalgo County loaded with 17 million cigarettes headed for Mexico, according to court documents. The shipping manifest had been falsified to indicate the vehicle was carrying used clothes, toys and purses, and the cigarettes lacked the applicable tax stamp as Texas law requires.

Homeland Security agents ultimately seized more than 422 million cigarettes from the companys warehouses in Hidalgo and McAllen, including numerous brands banned in Mexico for health reasons, according to court documents.

The operation was a small part of a Panama-based network of shell companies sending huge amounts of Chinese cigarettes from the Colon Free Trade Zone  the second largest port in the world, at the Atlantic end of the Panama Canal  into Latin American countries where there is no legal market for them, according to an investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.

Reporting by the group, a global investigative journalism organization, found that firms are connected to convicted smugglers, as well as Chinas massive state-owned tobacco company, The China National Tobacco Corp. is by far the worlds largest cigarette company. It controls almost half the global market, selling most of its cigarettes to the approximately 300 million smokers in China. But the sprawling conglomerate  often referred to simply as China Tobacco  is angling for an even larger share, and it has been forging new markets from Africa to Europe.

Journalists from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and its partners found that China Tobacco cigarettes have flooded into countries from Mexico to Peru. The writing on the packs is Spanish, suggesting that they are made specifically for Latin American markets  even though Chile is the only country where its legal to sell them. Selling imported cigarettes legitimately requires a range of health, tax, commercial, and brand permits, which vendors have not sought or obtained elsewhere.

A company called Overseas United partnered with China National Tobacco Corp. subsidiary China Tobacco Hunan to build a factory in Panama that began churning out cigarettes in 2012. In turn, a related company, Finta Inc., was able to export more than 632 metric tons of cigarettes to Belize, Canada, and the United States between May 2013 and October 2018, international customs records show.

Courtesy / DIAN

Fintas main customer was Victor M. Guerra Inc. Duty Free Shop, according to customs records on the trade database ImportGenius. Finta sold the company more than 599 metric tons of cigarettes, which were shipped from Colon to Houston, and then brought to the companys facilities in Hidalgo County, across the Rio Grande river from the Mexican city of Reynosa.

Customs data from ImportGenius show that Victor M. Guerra Inc. imported into the U.S. China Tobacco brands like Win, Golden Deer, and Nise, which Mexican authorities have seized in anti-smuggling operations over the years. In addition to buying from Finta, Victor M. Guerra Inc. received cigarette shipments directly from Overseas United, as well as another Finta-connected firm called Take Roll.

Jose Francisco Guerra, who is serving probation for trying to ship the goods from his warehouses, admitted to officials that he knew exporting contraband cigarettes into Mexico was illegal. He had been smuggling 400,000-cigarette shipments into Mexico on a regular basis and he intended to keep exporting cigarettes. Guerra agreed to forfeit his customs broker license, pay a fine and forfeit his interest in the cigarettes and items seized from his warehouse.

The total value of the cigarettes and equipment authorities seized was estimated at approximately $88 million.

Smuggling operations such as Guerras can be very lucrative, said Richard Halverson, a former official Homeland Security Investigations Houston office, who specialized in fraud investigations. Smugglers frequently ship contraband, falsely labeling goods with stamps that conceal the products country of origin. That lets the smugglers avoid taxes and import duties.

It can be very profitable, Halverson said. But its all about evading those additional taxes.

Customs officials target such operations for numerous reasons, Halverson said: To assist investigators in neighboring countries through mutual aid agreements and to prevent smugglers from defrauding governments. And because frequently, smugglers dont stick to just one type of crime or victim.

If they are smuggling things into one country, theyre probably smuggling goods into another, he said. Tobacco might be just part of what theyre doing. With some of these organizations, you never know what youre going to find.

Things to know Key findings A network of Panama-based companies connected to China Tobacco shipped huge amounts of cigarettes to Latin American countries where there is no legal market. The Panamanian companies sent cigarettes to at least two firms controlled by convicted smugglers. One Panamanian company shipped $34,000-worth of cigarettes and alcohol to the Chinese embassy in Ecuador, a country where Chinese brands make up about a quarter of the illicit market. The embassy told reporters that the massive shipment was "diplomatic material and is for the exclusive use of the Embassy." About this investigation OCCRP is a global investigative journalism organization focused on cross-border reporting with a network in Europe, Africa, Central Asia, South Asia, Middle East and Latin America. Staff reporters St. John Barned-Smith and Gabrielle Banks contributed. A year ago, Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project reporters and partners across Latin America set out to determine whether there was a legal market for Chinese cigarette brands in 18 Spanish-speaking countries in the region, as well as in Spain. The objective was to establish why China National Tobacco Corp. factories are producing cigarette packs branded in Spanish. The reporters checked online official information and sent FOIA requests to health, tax and tobacco control institutions in the different countries. In eleven countries they obtained official information that no CNTC brands can be legally sold there. Just one of them - Chile - allows the sale of CNTC brands like Chunghwa and Golden Deer. Houston Chronicle reporters Gabrielle Banks and St. John Barned-Smith did local reporting on the trafficking of tobacco that goes through Texas and into Mexico. See More Collapse

The U.S. market

Busts on illicit cigarette traffickers are rare, based on a review of Justice Department news releases about prosecutions around the country.

The cases brought by federal prosecutors have primarily targeted suspected violations near urban ports of entry, including defendants in New York, California, Florida and Texas.

The Hidalgo County seizure stood out to several federal law enforcement officials in the Southern District of Texas who said they could not recall other recent cases involving illegal cigarette shipments. Officials from the Houston Field Division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said violent gun-related crime has taken priority over tobacco cases.

But the cases are out there. In Manhattan this week, the last of six convicted traffickers was ordered to pay $2.6 million restitution in a scheme that brought in more than $30 million of contraband cigarettes into the U.S. between 2013 and 2019, according to court documents.

Participants in this New York scheme managed to avoid approximately $30 million in taxes, according to court documents.

The docket indicates that during their appearances the participants in this scheme required translation from English into five languages: Mandarin, Cantonese, Foochow, Burmese and Rakhine.

Two major schemes involving Chinese nationals in California resulted in the sale of millions of contraband cigarettes in Southern California before federal officials charged the traffickers, who pleaded guilty.

Chinas growing role in tobacco

China Tobacco is taking a leaf from the playbook of Big Tobacco, shorthand for the group of companies that has long dominated the global trade: British American Tobacco, Imperial Brands, Japan Tobacco International, and Philip Morris International, which owns Marlboro.

In the 1990s, packs of Marlboro began pouring into Colombia, undercutting and eventually dominating local brands, said Daniel Rico, a Colombian expert on criminal economies. Then Philip Morris negotiated with Colombias National Tax and Customs Directorate.

One day they went and told the (National Tax and Customs Directorate) that they wanted to legalize, but they already had the whole market under control, said Rico, who is director of the research firm C-Analisis. Smuggling is a way to expand the market.

Colombia is awash with illegal cigarettes once again. But instead of Marlboros, the packs carry names like Golden Deer and Silver Elephant, along with other CNTC brands.

A shopkeeper in San Andresitos, an area in Bogotas city center known for black market goods, offered boxes containing 2,000 cigarettes for less than $300. The cigarettes were kept in a nearby warehouse, he said. Three other shopkeepers also offered to sell a journalist Chinese cigarettes.

Out on the street, a man was selling Marshal Mint cigarettes  produced by China National Tobacco Corp.s China Tobacco Hunan Industrial  out of his backpack, asking $5.50 for a carton of 10 packs. Another man offered a carton for just $4.70, or 47 cents a pack. By comparison, a pack of Marlboro or Lucky Strike would cost less than $2.50 on the legal market.

In July 2020, authorities in Bogota busted a huge shipment of Chinese cigarettes, confiscating almost enough for each of Colombias 50 million people to smoke two cigarettes.

Data obtained by reporters showing cigarette seizures did not name the companies involved, so it is impossible to know if they are a part of the China Tobacco-connected network. But reporters were able to trace the path of the 96 million cigarettes of China Tobacco brands Marshal, Golden, and Brass into the hands of smugglers in Colombia.

The cigarettes had been manufactured in China, and shipped to Colon. They then wound their way through the Caribbean, with stops in Jamaica and Aruba  a tactic to obscure their origin  before finally arriving in Colombias coastal city of Cartagena, and being transported to a free trade zone in the capital, Bogota, according to a senior Colombian customs official.

While it was Colombias largest-ever bust of Chinese cigarettes  or any cigarettes, for that matter  it was only one of many. Cuestion Publica obtained a database of cigarette seizures compiled by Colombias Tax and Customs Police, which shows that six of the 10 most confiscated brands in the country between 2015 and August 2020 were produced by China Tobacco.

And the smuggling seems to be growing rapidly. Colombian authorities seized 300,000 packs of Chinese cigarettes in 2016, according to the seizures data obtained by Cuestion Publica. But more than 6 million packs were confiscated within the first seven months of 2020 alone.

Other Latin American countries show a similar pattern.

About 1,800 miles north of Bogota, in Mexico Citys Tepito open air market, a carton containing 20 packs of smuggled Chinese cigarettes sells for $6. On the legal market, a carton of popular brands like Camel or Chesterfield costs about $33.

Experts say that Panama  where authorities last year seized 28 containers containing illegal cigarettes before they were shipped elsewhere  is the most important regional hub for this illicit trade.

The big distribution point for Chinese, Uruguayan and Paraguayan cigarettes is Panama, said Rico, mentioning two countries also notorious for producing illicit smokes. All of this arrives in the Colon Free Zone, and it is then distributed throughout Latin America.

Loose regulations and lax enforcement mean that companies can abuse the rules of the zone with few repercussions, according to Maria Lorena Cummings, director of the Colon Chamber of Commerces financial sector.

Any company within the zone can buy Chinese cigarettes tax free, and they can play the system in order to pay almost no duty to export them. Its easy to make a false export declaration, especially since very few containers leaving the port are checked.

Even if a company does get caught, Cummings said the penalties are laughably low: a maximum $50,000 fine for a shipment that can be worth close to $1 million.

Its such a profitable business that you can take the risk, she said.

Reporting from Nathan Jaccard (OCCRP), Sol Lauria (Concolon), David Tarrazona (Cuestion Publica), Mateo Yepes (Cuestion Publica), Lilia Saul (OCCRP). Additional reporting by Alessia Cerantola (OCCRP), Luiz Toledo (OCCRP), St. John Barned-Smith (Houston Chronicle) and Gabrielle Banks (Houston Chronicle). Daniel Salazar (OCCRP ID) and Dragana Peco (OCCRP ID) contributed research.
The FBI Houston has arrested another man in connection with the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, officials said.

The agency said it arrested Darrell Youngers for his role in the deadly attack on the Capitol, but did not provide specifics about the man's participation.
The lawsuits allegations were stunning: Harris County Precinct 1 deputy constables assigned to fight human trafficking had been exploited and molested by their superiors during undercover bachelor party stings. Undercover deputies pretended to be partying, with the hope of convincing escorts to agree to sex for cash  so they could try to build cases against the womens pimps. But female deputies said they received little training before being thrown into booze-fueled playgrounds in which their bosses groped them.

Precinct 1 Constable Alan Rosen defended his agency, saying internal investigators hadnt found any violations of policy or law, but for many, the accusations against high-ranking officials of the department reignited a debate that has simmered in Houston for the last half century: What is the appropriate role of the constables? And why were deputy constables running undercover prostitution stings  far afield from their traditional roles of policing rural counties or working as process servers and protecting local justice of the peace courts?

Many constables offices elsewhere in Texas have just a few employees. But not in Harris County. For a half century, Houston-area constables have steadily accrued more power and more responsibility. Now, they occupy a position unlike any other in Texas. According to records from the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, Harris Countys largest constable jurisdictions far outnumber any other constables offices elsewhere in the state. Harris Countys largest constables office, Precinct 4, mans 567 deputies and dispatchers and has a budget of $60 million, according to county records. The largest department outside of Harris County, the Montgomery County Precinct 3 Constables Office, has 65 employees, state records show, and a budget of about $6 million, according to Montgomery County records.

Critics say the offices are bloated and out of control, duplicating other law enforcement agencies and creating a two-tier system where wealthy neighborhoods pay for what amounts to a private security force. Defenders say constables provide badly needed backup to the regions larger departments, while constables themselves say that because they are elected, they are more responsive to their constituents.

Constables are first line on community policing, said Matt Wylie, newly elected president of the Justices of the Peace and Constables Association and Constable of the Johnson County Precinct 1 Constables Office. We are elected by smaller percentage of county, more accountable to people we serve.

Steve Gonzales, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

Lone Star states first lawmen

Texas constables tout themselves as the first lawmen to maintain order in the state, pointing to a letter from the first alcalde in a district in Stephen F. Austins first colony in what would become Texas.

Now, state law requires nearly every county across the state be divided into between one and eight precincts, each with a constable. The lawmen are elected every four years and appoint deputies under them.

The role of constables varies widely from county to county, and Texas law does not prescribe their role beyond peace officers, said Gretchen Grigsby, director of government relations for the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement.

Texas constables are fully licensed peace officers, but they have traditionally devoted their time serving warrants and civil papers such as subpoenas, restraining orders, or eviction notices, and working as bailiffs in counties justice of the peace courts. Decades ago, constables here occupied a similar position  until stormy political fights between the Harris County sheriff and county commissioners, who wanted a bigger say in law enforcement administration across the county.

One early dispute came in February of 1975, between Sheriff Jack Heard and county commissioners. Chronicle archives show that Heard had requested 15 new deputies. Irked commissioners accused Heard of criticizing them in speeches to local civic clubs. They gave the money  and positions  to the county constables, who at the time only performed civil work.

If the sheriff had played his cards a little differently, it wouldnt have to be done this way, but he just came on like horseradish, said one commissioner interviewed at the time.

Contract deputies and rapid growth

As the local offices grew, constables began moving beyond their traditional civil enforcement work. In rural Harris County, residents began paying for contract deputies. Under agreements with the county, neighborhoods would pay a portion of the salary of a constable. The county would furnish the car, and the deputy would be required to spend 70 percent of his or her time patrolling that neighborhood.

Proponents say the system allowed neighborhoods to obtain additional protection without raising taxes; critics argue that it creates a two-tiered system that forces some residents to pay twice for critical services but is out of reach of poorer neighborhoods.

It happens in Harris County way more than anywhere else, said William Fulton, director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research, which produced a report in 2018 on overlapping law enforcement services in Harris County.

The Kinder Institute found that nearly 40 percent of the 1,600 deputy constables in Harris County were paid through contract dollars.

There are a lot of problems, said Scott Henson, researcher for the criminal justice reform nonprofit Just Liberty. Its just this very obscure, pay-for-policing system that is unique in America, to my knowledge. Its bizarre.

Wylie, the constable association president, said constables frequently have a better understanding of problems in the areas where they work. Where we see a deficit in our communities, we try to fill that role, he said.

Because constables are elected, they spend a great deal of time directly with constituents, Precinct 8 Constable Phil Sandlin said. Were very conscious of citizens needs, he said.

Services offered by local constables Precinct 1: Environmental investigations, bomb detection and building security in county court complex, Human Trafficking, Voting irregularities, Special Response Group, Tactical Response Team Precinct 2: Domestic Violence Unit, Child Support Enforcement Unit, "hot check" detail, honor guard, toll road enforcement, motorcycle unit, Project Kid Safe, Bike Patrol specialty unit Precinct 3: Detective division, Operations Emergency Management Unit (water operations), Crime Interdiction Unit and Environmental Crimes Unit, Motorcycle reserve unit, School contracts, K-9 units, Precinct 4: Patrol, Honor guard, Toll road enforcement, canine units, Special Operations Unit, family violence unit, Accident Investigation Unit, High Water Rescue Unit, Reserve division, courthouse operations, CODIS investigator, Environmental Crimes Unit, Regulatory Enforcement Unit, High Tech Crimes Unit Precinct 5: Investigative deputies, teen police academy, major offenders (human trafficking/game rooms), Narcotics Unit, Strategic Response Group, Animal Crimes unit, Environmental crimes, toll road enforcement, Parks patrol, k-9, Motorcycle unit, Drone unit, High Water rescue, Behind the Badge academy, Women's Self Defense class, Silver Watch program, Ride Along Program Precinct 6: Anti-truancy program and parole violator task force, Court Security Detail, Contract deputies, Housing patrol, High Water Rescue Teams, Warrant Division, Reserve Deputy Program Precinct 7: Patrol and Traffic, Toll Road, Warrants, Bike units, K-9, Environmental crimes, domestic violence and human trafficking, Motorcade Precinct 8: Toll road enforcement and DWI patrols, criminal warrants, dispatchers, District Patrol See More Collapse

In 1992, commissioners voted to spend money to bulk up traffic enforcement across the county. Then-Sheriff Johnny Klevenhagen argued all 100 officers should go to the sheriffs office. Instead, commissioners decided to assign many of the deputies to the countys constables. Other criticisms also surfaced: The states attorney general ruled that the system was unconstitutional, and a Chronicle investigation found a tax-funded deputy handled more than twice as many calls, on average, as a contract deputy, and 13 times as many of the most serious calls.

The questions and criticism did little to slow constables growth.

By 2002, Harris Countys constables workforce grew to more than 1,200 people, with a combined budget of $75.7 million, according to a Chronicle investigation at the time. This year, they employ more than 2,000 people, including more than 1,600 peace officers, with budgets totaling more than $213 million  just shy of the Harris County Sheriffs Offices entire patrol budget, of $246 million. At the same time, Harris Countys population  the people they and other departments serve  has risen to nearly 4.7 million people according U.S. Census Bureau estimates.

Many community organizations passionately defend their contract deputies. Marshall Cohen is security liaison for West Harris County Municipal Utility District #6, a small community of about 3,500 people. It is surrounded by Houston but does not receive municipal services from the city, he said; instead, several Precinct 5 deputies serve the neighborhood.

They know where people live, know the businesses, and their response is unmatched, which can and has saved lives, he said.

But ACLU of Texas policy strategist Julia Montiel said the current system leads to a wasteful duplication of functions and a lack of meaningful oversight, and said county commissioners should consider merging the functions of the constable with those of the sheriff to improve accountability.

Deputies from eight Constables Offices patrol across Harris County, criss-crossing the same zones monitored by sheriffs deputies or Houston police officers. Each has its own dispatch system and command staff.

Former Houston Police Chief Charles A. McClelland questioned the present systems effectiveness, particularly in the city of Houston.

With all these law enforcement agencies doing their own thing, law enforcement agencies doing their own thing, it makes it difficult for the Houston Police Department to coordinate crime reduction strategies, he said. Its inefficient, in the sense that taxpayers are paying for multiple law enforcement agencies, and I dont know if they are getting their bang for their buck.

Brett Coomer, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

Conflict and scandal

Critics also point to significant controversies that have plagued local constables over the years, which have led to scandals, indictments and criminal sentences. In the 1980s, that was Precinct 5 Constable Ed Tracy Maxon, in a corruption scandal that led to his ouster. In the early 2000s, Precinct 7 Constable Perry Wooten was charged with bilking taxpayers and was sentenced to five years in prison.

In the last decade, Precinct 1 Constable Jack Abercia and Precinct 6 Constable Victor Trevino were both charged for criminal misconduct and received probation sentences. Then last year, 11 Precinct 2 deputies sued their boss, Constable Christopher Diaz, accusing him of retaliating against them for calling out unethical campaign practices. He was booted from office in 2020, but a Chronicle investigation found the constable could not account for more than $60,000 in contributions he had reported receiving.

The most recent scandal came in May, when several current and former Precinct 1 employees  all women  filed a lawsuit in which they said theyd been sexually exploited while working on an undercover task force meant to fight human trafficking.

After the scandal broke, Precinct 1 Constable Alan Rosen released a statement saying internal investigators probed the allegations prior to the lawsuits filing, but found no violations of policy or law.

Mission debate

For years, constables offices have expanded their roles, venturing into areas that traditionally were the purview of municipal police departments. They field K-9 units; teams that target environmental crimes or animal cruelty. They patrol toll roads, fly drones, and investigate car crashes.

Youd think they are a full metropolitan police force with all units they supposedly have and what theyre supposedly doing, said Annette Baldwin, who authored a study of the constables in 1996 in protest over patrol contracts in her subdivision in west Harris County.

Constables created task forces to fight human trafficking; to investigate voting irregularities; to police parks. Precinct 8 Constable Phil Sandlin runs a busy DWI enforcement unit; Precinct 4 Constable Mark Herman has high water units, a special operations unit, and investigators who target game rooms and online sex predators. In west Harris County, Precinct 5 Constable Ted Heap runs a narcotics unit, a strategic response group, a motorcycle unit and a parks patrol.

Precinct 7 Constable May Walker said that her precinct, located in southwest Harris County, is made of neighborhoods that cant afford contract deputies.

Because of that, shes tried to put all her available resources into patrols and a victims assistance unit, she said.

I do things at Precinct 7 based on what my community would like to see  and what they would like to see more than anything in world, is to have officers patrolling in their neighborhood, she said. I saw no reason for me to have specialized units (such as vice, narcotics or other investigators).

Douglas Griffith, president of the Houston Police Officers Union, said the constables have moved into areas traditionally handled by police. Thats good and bad. We dont have the manpower to handle everything that goes on in the city of Houston, so theyre force multipliers for us and it frees up our manpower (to handle other calls.) On the other hand, I dont feel like they have the training to do everything that they want to do.

At times, commissioners have pushed back on that expansion.

Steve Radack, a former police officer and county constable before he spent decades as a county commissioner, said in 2003 that vice investigations such as gambling or prostitution stings should be off limits, and that he would vote against any effort to create vice and narcotics divisions in constables offices.

But now Precinct 1 and Precinct 4 proudly tout game room busts and human trafficking stings. Precinct 5 fields its own narcotics officers, along with other deputies tasked with game room stings and human trafficking investigations.

Steve Gonzales, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

Community cops

Five current and former constables who spoke to the Chronicle defended the agencies, arguing that because they are elected officials, they are more accountable to the communities they serve, and their communities needs.

Were probably the closest you can get to community-oriented policing, said Sandlin, the top cop at Precinct 8.

And they argued that contrary to the criticisms of overlapping enforcement, waste, and scandal, constables are vital to protecting Harris County residents.

The reality is there needs to be more law enforcement officers in Harris County, not less, Radack said.

Now, the agency Radack once helmed looks far different. Along with deputies traditional responsibilities, Precinct 5 constables roam parks, investigate crimes against animals, perform narcotics enforcement, along with other duties. Because of Precinct 5s location  on the western edge of Houston  deputies run hundreds of thousands of calls that Houston police officers would be responsible for, said Heap, the current constable.

Heap also pushed back on criticism that constables are less well trained than other officers, saying there is more training now and touting a Department of Justice award for safety and training. All of that, he said, benefits his residents, he said.

Theres not one property crime that occurs (in Precinct 5) that doesnt get a followup call, he said. Although its not a big deal if your sons bicycle gets stolen compared to more serious crimes, it is to you. You worked for it. Weve tried to be able to respond on that level and were very successful in closing out those cases.
A 17-year-old boy was shot and killed early Tuesday while driving in west Houston, police said.

Officers located a gunshot wound victim around 12:15 a.m. at a hospital on Town Park Drive, according to the Houston Police Department. The unidentified victim died at the hospital.

The boy was driving on Boone Road when a black Chevrolet pulled up alongside his SUV and a person began shooting, witnesses told police.

No further information was immediately available.
A man was shot late Monday in northwest Houston while selling possibly stolen car parts, police said.

The shooting victim met up around 11:30 p.m. on the 7900 block of Amelia Road with several people interested in buying a truck tailgate that was advertised online, police said.

An unknown assailant approached the group and opened fire on the seller and buyers, striking the seller, police said. The man was taken to a hospital where he is expected to survive.

It's unclear how the shooter was related to the transaction, police said.

Police recovered at least one tailgate at the scene that they believe was stolen.
The Battleship Texas will open for the July 4 weekend, the Battleship Foundation said.

The ship has been closed for more than a year and a half for major repairs. The foundation said its permanent reopening is expected in 2023.

During the Battleship Texas Independence Day Tour, guests will have the opportunity to meet historians as they discuss the extensive history of the ship that served through both World War I and World War II.

A new exhibit debut honors Dr. John J. McArdle Jr., the WWII medical officer aboard the battleship, the foundation said. Guests will only have access to the main deck and above and the artifacts associated with the exhibit.

Since its closure to the public in August 2019, it has undergone preparation for transport in order to make necessary repairs to key areas such as its hull. In addition, the foundation has been looking toward getting the Battleship Texas to a new port. As a result, the foundations announcement said this will likely be one of the final chances to tour the ship in Houston.

The battleship is located at the San Jacinto Battleground State Historic Site in La Porte. Hours for tours are 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Admission is $10 for adults, $5 for children. For more information go to battleshiptexas.org.
A former stripper this week sued an upscale Galleria nightclub, saying that for years managers there never paid anything for her labor.

Instead  in a practice lawyers have identified time and again at some strip clubs  the bosses at Centerfolds Houston expected her to make all her money in tips. In addition, as a contractor the bosses charged her a house fee of at least $28 per shift to appear on stage, documents allege.

But that wasnt all.

The managers also required the now 41-year-old woman and her fellow strippers to share at least $55 of their tip money with fellow workers who dont earn tips, such as the DJ, house mom, front door girl, and, yes, the managers. If a customer bought a lap dance with a credit card, the stripper had to pay the house back the $5 credit card fee, the suit says.

In some cases, the plaintiff said she and her fellow dancers ended a shift at a financial loss.

Grace Roberts of Houston is now seeking damages for a violation of the minimum wage law and what her suit says is an unlawful tip sharing policy.

Staff at Centerfolds Houston declined to comment on the lawsuit and a spokesperson at its corporate office did not return multiple requests for comment.

Attorneys who bring labor cases against these establishments say managers tend to exploit vulnerable women who lack resources and are in need of work.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Dancer sues over labor violations at Dickinson gentlemen's club

David W. Hodges, a labor lawyer who brought the case and has sued the owners before, said very few of these places are unionized and they make workers sign a form that all complaints will go straight to arbitration, he said. They often have no clue what rights theyll be deprived of if they sign the forms, he said.

Theyre young and they dont have a lot of experience in the workplace, Hodges said. Sometimes they bring a home a lot of money. Sometimes they dont. The clubs have their hands out regardless.

Jarrett L. Ellzey, a labor and employment lawyer who represents an exotic dancer in a similar class action suit against Heartbreakers Gentlemens Club in Dickinson, told the Chronicle that there are dozens of these cases around the country. All go after what Ellzey calls a pervasive practice of forcing strippers to pay to work, failing to pay them the mandatory minimum wage and fraudulently classifying dancers as independent contractors.

A Bloomberg Law review of federal district court data found 406 wage-and-hour lawsuits filed by exotic dancers from 2005 to the end of September 2019.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Sara Underwood, Mercedes Terrell, other models sue Houston strip club

Roberts worked for three years at Centerfolds Houston a faux Greek Revival building with ornate private champagne rooms  and at establishments owned by the defendants between 2013 and 2020, according to her federal lawsuit.

In her class action, Roberts requested that the judge include all workers who have performed at the club and were treated as contractors as plaintiffs, since they were also financially harmed by the company unlawfully labeling them contractors, according to documents. This is also common in labor suits against strip clubs, lawyers said.

She sued brothers Ali David Davari and Hassan George Davari, of Houston, who have owned at least six prominent topless bars in Houston, including Centerfolds Houston on Richmond, Treasures on Westheimer, and at least one club in Las Vegas. They are, respectively, president and vice president of AHD Houston Inc., which does business as Centerfolds Houston. Also listed as defendants are Thomas Venza, the clubs general manager; Christopher Malusa, a former manager; and Kurt Houston, a former general manager.

Roberts said she received no hourly payment for four eight-hour shifts per week between August 2017 until February 2020. She is seeking damages, back pay, restitution, attorneys fees and costs, and all other relief the court deems just and reasonable.

The Davari brothers were sued earlier in a case alleging the same practices. In 2016 they paid more than $1 million to settle a federal labor lawsuit filed against them by some of their dancers.

The lawsuit accused the Davaris of categorizing dancers who work at their clubs as independent contractors. As such, they claimed the owners failed to pay overtime wages and minimum wages as required by the Fair Labor Standards Act.

The clubs identified in that lawsuit were the Gold Cup, Cover Girls, Treasures and Centerfolds.

In the 2016 settlement, filed in mid-September in the court of U.S. District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal, the owners denied committing any wrongdoing in how they classify their employees.

gabrielle.banks@chron.com

Diane Cowen contributed.
Harris County on Tuesday will unveil a new plan to address a funding gap for its flood bond program, which will rely more heavily on diverted toll road revenue instead of federal aid that may never arrive.

The goal is to give the county greater control over its own flood control future instead of waiting on unreliable state and federal partners. To that end, the Commissioners Court also is expected to approve a new, permanent fund for flood control purposes and give priority to the most vulnerable areas to receive aid from it.

The plan still leaves approved projects $950 million short, however, raising the possibility that a new bond or flood control tax increases may be needed in the future to pay for all planned projects, according to budget office documents. Additional money would not be needed for about five years, according to the budget office.

On HoustonChronicle.com: SE Texas lost out on Harvey aid while inland counties awarded huge share

Precinct 3 Commissioner Tom Ramsey said the fund, called the Flood Resilience Trust, is a good idea because it allows the county to stockpile money for projects in advance.

It allows the county to, in a very effective way, set aside money every year, and that money will be there when they make any federal or state applications, Ramsey said. With a trust, we can move forward with a project while anticipating those (matching) dollars will come in.

The revised strategy sprang from county officials realization this year that the original bond plan is not working. Voters in 2018 passed the $2.5 billion bond, though the county planned about $5 billion in mitigation projects  such as detention basins, buyouts and channel improvements  while anticipating federal matching dollars would pay for the rest.

Only $1.2 billion in federal aid has arrived so far, though, leaving the program $1.3 billion short. A key driver of this gap was the countys incorrect prediction that the state General Land Office would send $1 billion in federal aid; instead, Harris County received $0. Land Commissioner George P. Bush has said he wants to direct $750 million to the county, though his office has yet to formally ask the federal government for permission to do this.

Because the Harris County Flood Control District purposefully underfunded some bond projects in anticipation of receiving federal aid, the snub resulted in lopsided spending across the countys 23 watersheds. In March, the county announced that some of the watersheds with the wealthiest communities, such as White Oak and Buffalo bayous, had their projects close to fully funded.

Watersheds with some of the countys poorest neighborhoods, such as Halls and Greens bayous, had less than half the necessary dollars. That angered the commissioners who represent those areas, Rodney Ellis and Adrian Garcia, because the court agreed in proposing the bond three summers ago that funds would be spent equitably.

The new plan aims to fix that. First, it would direct Harris County Toll Road Authority revenue  a lump sum of $230 million plus $40 million annually  to a new Flood Resilience Trust. This account would be used to plug funding holes in projects where federal aid failed to arrive.

On HoustonChronicle.com: In Texas, a tiny inland town got Harvey disaster aid. A battered coastal city did not. Why?

Projects would be eligible based on their scores on the countys prioritization framework, which considers factors such as how many structures would benefit from a project, how frequently a target area has flooded and the socioeconomic makeup of the residents there. This worst first framework, approved in 2019, initially dictated only the order in which projects were started.

The two Republican commissioners on the court, Jack Cagle and Steve Radack, voted against the equity language; Cagle said he saw no connection between social factors such as education or poverty and flood risk.

The county budget office estimates that if no other federal or state aid comes, the Flood Resilience Trust will be able to make up bond project shortfalls until about 2026. After that, the commissioners may need to issue a new bond to cover the remaining costs.

Court members often discuss the need for future bonds but say they want to show residents progress on flood control before asking voters to approve additional spending.

On HoustonChronicle.com: With disaster recovery funding in turmoil, Harris County flood control chief resigns

Then-County Judge Ed Emmett framed the 2018 bond as a down payment on protecting the Houston areas future from flooding; his successor, Lina Hidalgo, agrees. The budget office presentation for Tuesday notes that about 25 percent of county structures sit in the 500-year floodplain.

Commissioners in September had attempted to form a local government corporation to manage the toll road authority and divert $90 million annually for other uses, including flood control. Attorney General Ken Paxton declined to approve the plan.

zach.despart@chron.com
Harris County leaders on Monday announced plans to invest $14.8 million in efforts to reduce violent crime and chip away at a massive backlog of pending criminal cases in the countys clogged courts system.

Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, Precinct 2 Commissioner Adrian Garcia, Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez and Houston Police Executive Assistant Chief Matt Slinkard discussed the initiatives at a morning news conference at the sheriff offices headquarters just north of downtown.

Among the most serious obstacles Harris County faces is the massive backlog of pending cases -- about 100,000 -- plaguing the court system. About 20,000 of those cases have been pending for more than a year, she said. And those shortcomings come with a cost: a perception that government isnt doing its part to address serious crime, lack of justice for victims, and perpetrators feeling empowered.

Were not powerless against this challenge of rising crime and we know what we need to do, she said.

Brett Coomer, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

Among the solutions commissioners plan to propose Tuesday: Add six associate judges to help reduce workloads for judges currently presiding over the countys 22 criminal district courts; expand jury operations at NRG Stadium; pay for visiting judges to support the associate judges and the district court judges.

We need to invest in what works, she said. That means resisting the urge to use blunt tools that have proven ineffective in the past, or temporary solutions only to get splashy headlines.

Hidalgo said bringing in the associate judges would cost about $1.26 million for the rest of 2021 and $2.5 million for a full year. Its still unclear, however, how quickly the proposed investments would help the courthouse clear backlogged cases.

"It's something that requires buy-in from the judges, so this is a challenge that we've posed to our justice administration department to the judges to say, 'OK, we have a problem. We need to solve it together. What are we going to do?" Hidalgo said.

Houston Police Executive Assistant Chief Matt Slinkard said the courts backlog must be addressed in order to hold violent offenders accountable.

Every piece of our system must be working in concert, he said. And when one spoke in that wheel breaks, its incumbent upon all of us to have difficult conversations and get us moving down the road again to the point where we are putting public safety first.

Officials also said the county plans to make a historic investment in technology for county law enforcement, including better protective gear, body cameras, and spending money to increase the number of neighborhoods covered by "ShotSpotter," a gunshot surveillance system that alerts law enforcement if it detects sounds of gunfire.

The investments come amid a continuing debate over the countys decision to force departments to spend or surrender unused budget funds. Across the countys entire government, that amounted to more than $180 million dollars. In some cases, constables offices had accrued millions of funds that had rolled over from past years, the result of what Hidalgo characterized as the countys past weak budgeting practices.

While commissioners originally voted in favor of reforming the countys rollover process, they have revisited the issue, with some suggesting that refusing to allow constables to keep rollover funds amounts to a defunding of the departments. But in some cases, constables said they had used rolled over funds to pay for personnel costs, and their new budgets did not account for that difference, meaning that they can now no longer pay officers whose hiring commissioners had approved.

During the news conference, Precinct 2 Commissioner Adrian Garcia returned fire.

Its frustrating, because frankly those who say it are actually lying and trying to to create the new Big Lie, he said, adding that it was time for a change. No more squirrelling that money away by departments, not using everything theyve been budgeted. This money will go to creating real solutions that will enhance safety of all Harris County residents.

Commissioners are expected to discuss and debate the issue  again  on Tuesday.

st.john.smith@chron.com
Harris County Commissioners Court on Tuesday created a new administrator position to oversee departments, which the three Democrats described as a wonky internal move to improve efficiency but the two Republicans decried as a radical and dangerous usurpation of their power.

The court voted 3-2 along party lines to hire the administrator to oversee the day-to-day activities of the 20 departments that directly report to Commissioners Court. David Berry, the county budget director, will fill the administrator role.

County Judge Lina Hidalgo said the move is long overdue, arguing that too often departments duplicate efforts addressing some needs, ignore others and fail to work together on big-picture problems that have plagued the county for decades.

Im so proud of the things that have been achieved, but would it have taken three 500-year floods for us to have a flood bond that, by the way, isnt enough? said Hidalgo, a Democrat. (Tropical Storm) Allison happened in 2001. But because its a parochial system, these kind of things went hush-hush.

Democratic Precinct 1 Commissioner Rodney Ellis said the administrator role will be nonpartisan and noted the other largest counties in Texas, except Travis, already have adopted the model. He said it also would leave intact the longstanding practice in which each commissioner oversees his precincts roads, parks and community centers without meddling from other court members.

Look, I think this makes sense, Ellis said. This doesnt take away from anybodys fiefdom.

The two Republican commissioners, Jack Cagle and Tom Ramsey, have a different view. Ramsey said the county has a long history of competent department heads and said he failed to see a need for a new layer of bureaucracy, which the budget office estimates will cost $2 million annually. He also accused his Democratic colleagues of trying to sneak a power grab past residents.

Public transparency we get an F on, in terms of this issue, Ramsey said.

Cagle said since Democrats control the court, and, thus, get to appoint the administrator, the new position merely allows them to grow their power. He echoed Ramseys concerns about redundancy and said the administrator would allow the Democrats to outsource unpopular decisions  such as firing personnel  to an unaccountable bureaucrat.

Were accountable to the people in our precincts, Cagle said. But the county administrator has no duty except to the majority of three here on the court. In essence, we become isolated.

Hidalgo countered that the power structure already exists on the court, which would neither be enhanced nor diminished by additional staff.

The trio of Democrats routinely steamroll the pair of Republicans on many issues, from non-binding resolutions to criminal justice reforms, just as Ellis found himself the loser on many lopsided 4-1 votes when Republicans controlled the court before 2019.

The county judges enthusiasm for adding more administration stems from her obsession with quantitatively measuring how well or poorly departments perform and finding ways to improve them. A 2020 top-down study of county operations by an outside consultant, which Commissioners Court approved, made several recommendations, including new administrators, to reform a county government the report concluded was outdated and inefficient.

Hidalgo cited a recurring headache of transferring the responsibility for medical care at the county jail from the sheriffs office to the public hospital network as an example of why more bureaucrats are needed.

We go and say wed like Harris Health to take over part of the jail, and this request just evaporates; nobody ever comes back, Hidalgo said. We dont have currently  benchmarks for each department.

A parade of public speakers who crowded the court chamber Tuesday morning were unconvinced; Ramsey encouraged the public to turn out to voice opposition. What Hidalgo pitched as a boring good-government initiative, they saw as a backdoor attempt to deprive the Republican commissioners of their authority.

George Brian Vachris, a Republican election judge, said the move reminded him of the Commissioners Court decision last year to remove election management duties from the county clerk and hire an elections administrator, which he said was also a bad idea.

How would an extra layer of bureaucracy be more democratic? Vachris said.

Rob Hungate, who lives in northwest Harris County, said with residents still recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, the court should not waste money on growing government.

Cara Vann, a small business owner, said adding the new administrator could strip residents of representative government, which she likened to voter suppression.

I feel that the county judges desire to hire a county administrator is truly nothing more than a power grab, Vann said.

A handful of speakers expressed support for the administrator model.

zach.despart@chron.com
Human remains found Monday at a construction site in League City are believed to be those of a 36-year-old Iraq war veteran who was reported missing last year, authorities said.

Workers clearing land the site on the 2100 block of Gun Range Road found the remains about 100 yards from the roadway in heavy vegetation, according to League City police. They also found personal items, including a backpack.
Border photo op

Regarding VP Kamala Harris visits border today as administration struggles to house migrant children, (June 25): So Vice President Kamala Harris finally made it to the border. Oh wait, her trip was to El Paso where there is no stream of immigrants entering the country. Guess that a trip to a hot spot like La Joya, or anywhere in the Rio Grande Valley would have been poor optics. How about a visit to Fort Bliss where children are being held and are having severe emotional issues? There was no visit with those on the front lines of the tidal wave of migration nor with any of the migrants themselves. But Harris is continuing to search for the root causes of the surge. While doing that, how about putting some control on the illegal flow so that the people in the Valley can lead safe lives? Working long-term to solve the problem is honorable and needed but meanwhile the country has to spend more time, money and resources on those breaking the law while neglecting citizens with legitimate needs of their own.

Michael Spiech, Sugar Land

Christian communities

Regarding Fewer than half of U.S. states ban this discredited practice, (June 24): Your article about conversion treatment of LGBTQ children and young adults makes the claim that this dangerous practice condemned by multiple medical groups is practiced particularly in Christian communities. I think the authors owe an apology to real followers of Jesus, who never even mentioned homosexuality and told followers to love everyone.

Houston is home to a number of Christian communities that welcome LGBTQ people to full membership, ranging from the Metropolitan Community Church (founded by a gay man after a suicide attempt) to mainstream Protestant churches that perform same-sex marriages and help youngsters regardless of sexual orientation. Please dont insult an entire religion because of a few people who use it as an excuse for abuse.

Stella Fitzgibbons, The Woodlands

Regarding As important to us as Easter and Christmas: Descendants of enslaved people reflect on days legacy, (June 19): As a Christian woman, I feel that those who put the same value on Juneteenth as the Christian holidays of Easter and Christmas must not have thoroughly examined their beliefs.

I am white and have not suffered injustices of the Black experience. However, I did endure severe mental illness with numerous breakdowns and hospitalizations until, at the age of 49, I was diagnosed as being bipolar and given the appropriate medications. Although I have been stable for 19 years, I know what it is to suffer. The development and use of appropriate drugs led to a form of freedom for many of us with mental illness. Nevertheless, I would never place the same importance of that event with that of the birth and resurrection of my Lord and savior, Jesus Christ.

I hope and pray that the Black spirituals and more importantly, the love and Gospel of Jesus Christ reflected in those hymns, are not forgotten. For it would seem much more likely than not, the comfort and strength needed by the ancestors of many Black Americans to get through the havoc until their day of earthly freedom on Juneteenth was provided by Jesus Christ and the Black spirituals.

Charlotte Lurie, Houston

Support poll workers

Regarding Texas Democrats didn't cheat voters by walking out on SB7. Republicans cheated in passing it. (June 1): I vote in every election and am proud of the dedicated professional election officials in my county.

Our election judges learn our complicated election laws and dedicate themselves to providing a safe and secure environment for the voters in their polling places. The judges should not be distracted by untrained partisan poll watchers. Lets keep our polls peaceful and protected places for citizens, like me, to exercise our freedom to vote. Partisan poll watchers should be observers of the election process, not free to possibly intimidate voters.

Who will work at polling places if election officials are threatened with crimes if they make a mistake? Safe and secure elections need election judges, clerks, ballot board reviewers, ballot counting and processing teams, early voting clerks, elections administrators and county clerks. If the Texas Legislature makes innocent or unintended mistakes by these election officials a criminal offense, it will be much harder to find folks to work our elections.

If the Texas Legislature really wants to secure and improve our elections, it should invest in upgraded equipment, expanded staffing for election administrators, and required training for poll workers.

Saidat Ilo, Richmond

National anthem

Regarding Gwen Berry turns away from flag during anthem, (June 27): If Gwen Berry is so ashamed of her country and its national anthem, why does she want to represent it in the Olympics? She is a disgrace and should not be allowed to compete. Wonder what would happen to her if she were Russian or Chinese and pulled the same stunt? She has already been sanctioned once and lost a number of sponsors for similar antics. Enough is enough.

Bob Pope, The Woodlands
U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw said Monday that he wants athletes who disrespect the national anthem and the country to be removed from the U.S. Olympic team and barred from the 2021 Tokyo games.

During an interview on Fox News Channel, the Houston Republican and retired Navy SEAL said hes done with athletes such as hammer thrower Gwen Berry, who was not attentive during the playing of the anthem during the Olympic track and field trials in Eugene, Ore., on Saturday.

Berry finished third in her event, winning a spot on the U.S. Olympic team. Afterward, as the anthem was being played, she turned away from the flag to face the stands. Berry then pulled a T-shirt over her head that said activist athlete.

She should be removed from the team, Crenshaw told Fox & Friends viewers on Monday. The entire point of the Olympic team is to represent the United States of America.

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Crenshaw said other athletes have disrespected the nation they are competing to represent.

They should be removed, he said. That should be the bare minimum requirement: that you believe in the country youre representing.

The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) earlier this year announced that some racial and social justice demonstrations, including kneeling and raising fists, will be permitted during the Olympic trials.

Berry said she didnt intend to create a stir on Saturday. She said she was surprised the anthem was played after the hammer throw and had thought it would played later that night, after all the competitions had been held.

I feel like it was set up, Berry said. I feel like they did that on purpose, and I was pissed, to be honest. I was thinking about what should I do. Eventually, I just stayed there and just swayed. I put my shirt over my head. It was real disrespectful. I know they did that on purpose, but itll be all right. I see whats up.

Berry, who is Black, has said she wants to advocate for African American communities that have been subject to police brutality and systemic racism. But she said that was not her plan Saturday night.

It really wasnt a message, Berry said of her actions. I didnt want to be up there. I felt like it was a setup. I was hot. I was ready to get my pictures and get to some shade.

Crenshaw, who won a second term in Congress in 2020, represents the 2nd Congressional District in Houston, which stretches from West Houston up to Spring and east towards Humble.

In his Fox interview, he tried to draw a link between athlete-led protests and the teaching of critical race theory, a controversial doctrine which holds that racism operates subtly and is deeply embedded in American institutions and social systems, even in the absence of explicitly discriminatory laws or policies.

This is the pathology that occurs when were teaching critical race theory into our institutions, Crenshaw said. Because critical race theory, again, basically teaches that our institutions are racist, that our systems are deeply racist.

It results in these displays of hatred toward our own country and its got to stop.

Crenshaw started the interview by refusing to criticize President Joe Biden for ordering drone strikes against Iranian-back militias in Syria and Iraq over the weekend. Crenshaw called the strikes a good thing to do in response to the militias efforts to stir up trouble in the region.

Watch the latest video at foxnews.com

The Fox & Friends hosts then turned the discussion to Olympic athletes and the fight against critical race theory. See the full interview at Foxnews.com
This article originally ran on thecentersquare.com.

FACT CHECK See inaccurate information in this story? Tell us here.
Clayton Anderson can be reached at clayton.anderson@newspressnow.com. Follow him on twitter: @NPNowAnderson.

This article originally ran on newspressnow.com.

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Gov. Mike Parson waves to senators as he enters the Senate chambers of the Missouri State Capitol Building in Jefferson City as he prepares to deliver his State of the State address on Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2021. The speech was moved from the House chambers to the Senate chambers over Coronavirus concerns. Photo by Colter Peterson, cpeterson@post-dispatch.com
Health care workers at a COVID-19 vaccine clinic draw vaccine doses at the Oregon State Expo Center in Salem, Oregon on January 2, 2021 where the state hopes to vaccinate up to 250 people per hour with the assistance of the Oregon National Guard.
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Meet Gabriella Ianni, Ingrooves VP Commercial Strategy

This edition of A2IM featured Executive highlights the accomplishments of Gabriella Ianni, from her start in the music industry to her current role as the VP of Commercial Strategy at Ingrooves.

Guest post from A2IM

Form Monterey, Californias KMBY Alternative rock radio station, to Astralwerks, to Capitol Records, Gabriella Ianni is now Ingrooves VP of Commercial Strategy (Americas)

Read about her career highlights below, and follow her on Instagram and Linkedin .

Gabriellas Start in Music

Gabriellas start was in radio in Monterey, California. During college, she signed up for an internship of (what was) KMBY in Monterey, an Alternative Rock station. Starting as an intern and quickly rising to an on-air personality, after one year, Gabriella took on the Music Director duties and the MidDay drive slot.

Looking to further her career in radio, she accepted a position with Clear Channel (iHeart) in Albany, NY. Leaving the sandy shores of her home state of California for a traditional noreaster arrival in the East. After barely making it through company restructuring, Gabriella landed her first label gig with Astralwerks records in NYC.

Handling the labels growing roster of College, specialty radio and dance releases, she sunk her teeth into being a radio promo rep. After many changes in the company and working in the larger ecosystem of Capitol Records, Gabriella took on the independent side as the Head of Promotion role at Glassnote records. It was there that she reunited with the band Phoenix & was a part of the launch of great artists like Laura Marling & The Temper Trap.

She joined Warner Bros Records for a brief period, in sync/licensing, before returning to an opportunity in radio that combined all of her previous jobs. Gabriella took a sabbatical from NYC and moved to Boston to be the Promotion Director for Entercoms MikeFM.

After a year in Boston & what was the end of the line for that radio station, she found herself back in NYC as a programmer at Music Choice. While there, Gabriella was responsible for a whole host of channels in the ALT and Rock space along with a few of their platform launches. It was then that she dove back into the independent world with MegaForce Records as their head of promotion. After a few years of working with bands like Blue October, Anthrax, Third Eye Blind, 10 Years & Slightly Stoopid the knock she had been waiting for arrived.

Gabriella Today at Ingrooves

Ingrooves was looking for someone who could understand working with labels & managers, DSPs and direct licensing. Gabriella had all of that + some under her belt. Starting as a hybrid radio promo / account manager, she had found the place she had been looking for all those years since the first crack of a mic on KMBY in college. A company that values life + work & encourages the best in its employees.

Based out of New York, Gabriella manages the North American Commercial Strategy team. She leads account managers on DSP facing pitching, editorial and commercial strategy for Ingrooves releases while simultaneously working alongside our global team who represent Ingrooves in 19 countries working across key territories worldwide. A major focus of Gabriella increases visibility, coverage and the overall footprint of Ingrooves label partners with DSPs.

Gabriellas Career Highlights

Playing a supporting role in Ingrooves vast K-Pop roster expansion and successes (TWICE, TXT, SEVENTEEN, ENHYPEN, NUEST)

Working with the team at Dirty Hit to elevate and expand on their already impressive successes (beabadoobee, Rina Sawayama, No Rome, Pale Waves)

Teaming up with her long time friend, Chuck D to release State of the Union from Public Enemy

Continuing to work with artists who have been in the Ingrooves family for years like Young M.A, boy pablo, Yoke Lore, Felix Cartal & GRiZ

Being able to collaborate and work with some of her favorite artists including Krewella, Yoke Lore, Felix Cartal, Jelani Aryeh, TJ Jackson, Flux Pavilion, Gang Starr, David Cook, Sech and Lunay

Outside of Work 

Gabriella and her husband live in New Jersey & have a 4 year old daughter, Lola. Showing her a world of differences and the importance of equality has become the family focus. Gabriella is very passionate about the organizations shes involved with like the AIDS Walk New York to benefit GMHC which she has raised money towards and participated in the walk. She also supports It Gets Better and Trinity Place Shelter in NYC. Both organizations focus on the health, well being & resources needed for so many LGBTQ+ youth.

As a founding member of the Ingrooves Diversity, Equity & Inclusion team, she has taken that passion and sentiment local to her residence in New Jersey. Last year, Gabriella teamed up with a group called PV Core which is dedicated to diversity & inclusion in the community. After participating in BLM community support and strategy (including an interview with the NYC NBC News affiliate), she turned her attention to another area needing local focus; LGBTQ+ outreach. She is a co-chair on their PRIDE subcommittee & helped support the communitys first PRIDE.

Do you or someone you know fit the bill? Submit an executive here.

Learn more about A2IM here, and contact thier team at membership@a2im.org to join now

A2IM is a 501(c)(6) not-for-profit trade organization headquartered in New York City that exists to support and strengthen the independent recorded music sector. Membership currently includes a broad coalition of more than 700 Independently-owned American music labels. A2IM represents these independently owned small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) interests in the marketplace, in the media, on Capitol Hill, and as part of the global music community. In doing so, it supports a key segment of Americas creative class that represents Americas diverse musical cultural heritage. Billboard Magazine identified the Independent music label sector as 37.32 percent of the music industrys U.S. recorded music sales market in 2016 based on copyright ownership, making Independent labels collectively the largest music industry sector.

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Between the 90s high and sweltering sun across my forehead, last week nearly killed me  figuratively, that is, not physically, of course. If summer were the cure for anxiety and depression, I would live in a location where summer never ended. However, like any mental illness, circumstantial changes like the weather or chain of events do not always dictate behaviors or emotions.

Lost in a hazy phase of options, beliefs, and credulity, I was overcome with sensations that left me like the sun outside my window, hot, parched, dry, and without a refreshing drink from the well. My mind was numb to the ability to trust Jesus, even though I kept longing to know Him and His well more.

With more questions than answers, I sat in the stillness of His presence. I pleaded for answers. I bowed in surrender. I stayed quiet until the thoughts pressing my mind evaporated like popped grapes in the humid day-star. Then, listening for the quiet, He spoke knowingness over my soul.

All my life, I've taken strides to love God and know Him more intimately. Saved at the age of eight, I do not remember life before knowing Him; other than now at 25, I still long to know Him more.

What Does it Mean to Know the Lord?

In 1 Chronicles 28, King David wanted to build the Lord a Temple. Although God said that David would not be the one to complete this task, the duty would belong to his son Solomon who would succeed the throne after David's death. Because of Solomon's inexperience, David wanted to make sure all the preparations were ready for the Temple of the Lord to be built. Furthermore, David longed for Solomon to know God in both word and deed so that His blessing would be upon him. Relaying this message to Solomon and the people of Israel, David made this need for intimacy clear.

"So now I charge you in the sight of all Israel and of the assembly of the Lord, and in the hearing of our God: Be careful to follow all the commands of the Lord your God, that you may possess this good land and pass it on as an inheritance to your descendants forever. And you, my son Solomon, acknowledge the God of your father, and serve him with wholehearted devotion and with a willing mind, for the Lord searches every heart and understands every desire and every thought. If you seek him, he will be found by you; but if you forsake him, he will reject you forever. Consider now, for the Lord has chosen you to build a house as the sanctuary. So be strong and do the work." (1 Chronicles 28:8-10, NIV)

Though David was concerned that the Temple of the Lord be built correctly, he was also concerned with the relationship his son and the people of Israel had with the Lord. Thus, in the final talk before his death, David was not caught up in trivial affairs but the condition of his nation's heart. The New Living Translation of verse 9 supports this type of affectionate relationship:

"And Solomon, my son, learn to know the God of your ancestors intimately. Worship and serve him with your whole heart and a willing mind. For the Lord sees every heart and knows every plan and thought. If you seek him, you will find him. But if you forsake him, he will reject you forever" (1 Chronicles 28:9, NLT).

Today, I wonder if we know God this way and seek and serve Him in this capacity? Above the resounding noise, do we understand what it means to know, understand, comprehend even a glimpse of Him?

How Does the Bible Teach Us to Know

In the Hebrew translation, Strong's Concordance marks to know God as a verb, an action. It's not passive, but active. It's not merely acknowledging Him as a person, place, or thing (noun) but actively pursuing intimacy, closeness, and a relationship with Him.

Yada, the Hebrew translation for know, means to know properly or ascertain by seeing. Used in senses, figuratively, literally, euphemistically, and inferentially (observation, care, recognition, instruction, design), it relates to both internal knowledge and external investigation. To know someone or something is not merely to recall the facts but to understand the culmination of those characteristics and relate to them personally.

Listed 947 times in the King James Version, David's word to know is also defined as acknowledging, having an acquaintance with, advising, answering, or appointing. Thus, while the Blue Letter Bible's list is extensive, yada essentially means knowing and being known.

Since I was eight years old, I've pursued that journey to find my Creator more intimately. However, as I grow and mature and engage in relationships, I'm learning that this process is not easy and often ends in heartbreak. Failed friendships, complicated dating ventures, fears of marriage, and disheartening parental views have often distorted my idea of what it means to know God and understand Him completely.

Lost in a sea of hurt, confusion, and distorted views, I've lost sight of knowing God too many times for fear that when He gets to know me completely, He will abandon me like everyone else. I have forgotten that the one I long to know already knows and designed me perfectly.

Braving the Intimacy of Knowing

As David wrote to Solomon in 1 Chronicles 28, he also penned in Psalm 139:1 this fact:

"You have searched me, Lord, and you know me" (Psalm 139:1, NIV). The Passion Translation writes this as "Lord, you know everything there is to know about me" (Psalm 139:1, TPT).

While both 1 Chronicles 28 and Psalm 139 use the word know in different contexts, the Hebrew translation is the same as that found in Genesis 4:1 when Adam knew His wife, Eve.

"And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord. (Genesis 4:1, KJV)

Although I've often tried to grasp how Genesis 4:1 in the context of sexual relations could relate to how God knows us intimately, it's like it finally clicked.

I've feared rejection in my friendships because I've lost too many friends who didn't know the value of choosing to stay.

I've feared abandonment in my relationships because no one wanted to date Amber beneath the surface of joy and external happiness.

I've feared marriage and consummation as a result of distorted perceptions in a Church-crazed purity movement.

I've lost out on passions for the future, replacing them with fears for the present in an inability to know that the God who knows every thought I think or step I take before I take it is already there tomorrow.

But fearing friendships only results in never knowing anyone. Avoiding transparency with potential mates makes for a lonely reality. Accepting Satan's deception of a beautiful gift leads to perversion and remorse. Missing out on the closest form of a relationship with God- to know, is to miss the source of life.

King David kept praying for Solomon to know God. In Genesis, Adam knew Eve. In Psalm 139, David said God knew me before I was born. Yada  to know.

As Christ is the bridegroom and we are the bride, the intimacy of marriage is not even a slither of what it means to know God and be known by Him. Just as we should not avoid closeness with others, we must not withdraw from affection found in Him.

God already knows everything about us, but we must seek to know Him more intimately.

"And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent" (John 17:3, ESV).

Agape, Amber

Photo Credit:  Getty Images/demaerre

Amber Ginter is an aspiring 25-year-old writer that currently works as an English teacher in Chillicothe, Ohio, and has a passionate desire to impact the world for Jesus through her love for writing, aesthetics, health/fitness, and ministry. Hoping to become a full-time freelancer, Amber seeks to proclaim her love for Christ and the Gospel through her writing, aesthetic ministry team (Aisthitikos Joy Ministries), and volunteer roles. She is also the author of The Story I've Never Told, which is currently in the publishing process. Amber has freelanced for Daughter of Delight, Kallos, Anchored Passion, Crosswalk, No Small Life, Darling Magazine, Called Christian Writers, Southern Ohio Today News, The Rebelution, Ohio Christian University, and The Circleville Herald. Visit her website at amberginter.com.
CHP Names Dr. Yaman Kana as Associate Dental Director

GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass.  Dr. Yaman Kana has been promoted to the position of associate dental director at Community Health Programs.

Kana will continue to practice dentistry as he assists with oversight of CHP's dental practices in Pittsfield, Great Barrington and North Adams.

He earned his doctor of dental surgery degree at Ovidius University of Constanta in Romania. He first practiced general dentistry in private practice in Damascus, Syria and in the Syrian military.

On relocating to the Boston area, Kana he worked in private practice and at Boston University's Dental Health Center. He later worked at the Brockton Neighborhood Health Center, then went on to practice dentistry at DotHouse Health in Dorchester, HealthFirst Family Care Center in Fall River and Community Health Center of Franklin County.

He joined CHP in 2020.

He brings to CHP his fluency in Arabic, Romanian and French.
Taiwan Coast Guard detains Chinese crew for illegal fishing

by Kelvin Chen

June 29,2021 | Source: Taiwan News

The Coast Guard of Taiwan on Monday (June 28) seized a Chinese fishing boat after it crossed into Taiwans maritime territory near Penghu.



A patrol boat from the Coast Guard's Penghu Offshore Flotilla was on a routine mission when it detected the Chinese fishing boat "Aonanao 3120" within Taiwans borders, 20.7 nautical miles west of Huayu Islet, CNA reported. The patrol boat broadcast three radio messages ordering the vessel to stop for inspection, but the Chinese crew attempted a speedy getaway and even threatened the Coast Guard officers by brandishing knives and iron rods.



In the end, the officers successfully boarded the vessel after taking out their shotguns and found 760 kilograms of fish onboard, which they dumped back into the ocean, per CNA. Once the vessel was towed back to Penghu, the Penghu Health Bureau disinfected the boat, and its crew members all tested negative for COVID-19.



The case will be handled based on the Act Governing Relations between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area.



The Penghu Offshore Flotilla stated that a total of six Chinese fishing vessels have been seized for illegally crossing the border this year.

 Taiwan News  2019 All Rights Reserved

Theme(s): Fishing Craft, Gear and Fishing Methods.
Jersey fishing row: More time granted to French fishermen

June 29,2021 | Source: BBC News

French fishermen will be allowed to work in Jersey waters without meeting new Brexit permit conditions for another three months.



Ministers agreed to extend the temporary policy while they finalised a new trade agreement.



It was due to expire but after a request from the EU, Jersey has agreed to extend it to the end of September.



Royal Navy vessels were sent to patrol waters around Jersey when the row escalated in May.



Jersey authorities have asked for confirmation the extension will also apply to local boats in EU waters.



In recent weeks Jersey, the UK, France and EU officials have been in discussions over the implementation of a new Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA).



The TCA requires evidence of the "extent and nature" of previous fishing activity to be demonstrated in order for access to be granted.



The EU requested an extension to the transitional arrangements, which had been due to come to an end on 30 June.



The Government of Jersey agreed to the request, which relates to vessels which the EU has submitted applications on behalf of, allowing more time for further track record evidence to be submitted and analysed.



Jersey has requested that the EU submits further evidence for existing applications by the end of July.



Minister for External Relations, Senator Ian Gorst, said the extension of the amnesty period was to allow discussions to continue.



"The relationship with France is hugely important to Jersey in so many ways," he said.



"We know aspects of that relationship have been difficult recently, but want to ensure we work through the issues, fulfilling the terms of the TCA and ensuring the sustainability of fishing in our waters."

 2021 BBC

Theme(s): Post Harvest Technology and Trade.
Japanese shipping co. launches charitable trust in Mauritius after Wakashio grounding

by Vel Moonien

June 29,2021 | Source: gCaptain

Mitsui O.S.K Lines (MOL) has established a charitable trust in Mauritius, pending the launch of a MOL Japanese Foundation, to support environmental and social projects.



This move is explained by the fact that it had chartered the MV Wakashio that later ended up grounding on the reefs of Pointe-dEsny, on the south-east coast of the Indian Ocean, island on July 25, 2020. The grounding resulted in an oil spill in its pristine lagoon, the first for this island highly dependent on tourism.



The Japanese shipping company says it has been working with the Wakashios owner, Nagashiki Shipping, and the Mauritian authorities on mangrove and coral reef rehabilitation projects on the southeast coastline affected by the oil spill. The trust will receive an initial funding of 300 million yen and will be managed locally by hand-picked professionals. A total of 800 million yen (approx. USD $7.24 million) will be injected in the trust.



Projects related to the restoration of the natural environment are on the agenda, but local communities in the southeastern part of the island will benefit from support for social projects, in line with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Mauritian governments priority projects. The trust will also help strengthen Mauritius presence in the Indian Ocean Rim and foster relationships between the Mauritian and Japanese people, says MOL in a press release published June 21.



Funding for the trust will also be open to receiving donations from other companies and individuals. The trust will focus on the conservation of rare birds, including migratory birds. Community empowerment through social welfare and education, humanitarian assistance in the aftermath of natural disasters, economic development through fisheries and tourism, environmental protection, promotion of ecotourism, preservation of cultural properties, and research in the field of renewable energy are amongst areas that the trust will fund.



In parallel, the Court of Investigation on the grounding of the ore carrier continues in the capital city of Port Louis. In recent days, the shortcomings of the National Coast Guard (NCG) have been highlighted. As for the Central Criminal Investigation Department (CCID), it has not recovered any additional data from the ship, whose dismantling of the stern is on hold due to unfavorable weather conditions.



Heard last Thursday, Joseph St-Mart, president of the Association of fishermen and boaters of the Southeast, said that traces of oil were seen at sea a month ago, near the site where the ship ran aground. The fishermen and the fishmongers are concerned about their future. For his part, the union negotiator of the port employees, Jean-Yves Chavrimootoo, talked about a similar the grounding, the one involving the MV Angel One in Poudre-dOr, in the North tip of the island, ten years ago.



He explained that the tugs of the Mauritius Port Authority (MPA), the organization managing the harbor of Port Louis, have then been called to maintain and stabilize the 250-meter long bulk carrier so that it does not hit the reefs. According to him, these tugs should have been sent to Pointe-dEsny for a similar operation to prevent the hull from breaking. He also cites the operation to stabilize the container ship MV Markella, which had lost its anchor in Baie-du-Tombeau, a village near Port-Louis.



The ship was carrying rosewood to Mauritius. It drifted more than 20 nautical miles to Le Morne and was towed to Port Louis. The MPA lied when it said that there is no local expertise for this type of operation, lamented the former journalist. He did not fail to criticize the Director of Shipping for having said that the Mauritian authorities could not board the MV Wakashio. He recalled the case of FV Kha Yang, a Malaysian trawler which ran aground in the St. Brandon archipelago, located 430 km north of Mauritius, six years ago.



For his part, the former assistant harbor master, Premananda Ponambullum, who retired in 2012, agreed with Jean-Yves Chavrimootoo. He pointed out that the MPA tugs would have been useful to free the ship, with the rising tide.



Last Friday, the ministerial cabinet decided that a first shipment of toxic waste from the Wakashio will leave Mauritius on July 2. They will be shipped in batches of 10 containers abroad. Under local environmental laws, this waste is considered hazardous, but cannot be treated in Mauritius, as the country does not have the necessary facilities.

Theme(s): Others.
Marine conservation to the fore in Brunei

by James Kon

June 29,2021 | Source: Borneo Bulletin

Brunei Darussalam is blessed with vast biodiversity based on previous record on marine biodiversity assessment done in 2014. It discovered that the country has rich coral fauna with 410 reef building coral species. The coral communities are most notable in respect of the very unusual co-occurrence of high distinctive suite of reef building (hard) coral, soft coral and gorgonian sea fans.



Unfortunately, similar to other parts of the world, Bruneis coral reefs are at risk of endangered by human activities including overharvesting, habitat degradation due to pollution and climate change. Capture fisheries are in the frontline to be impacted by any alteration of the marine ecosystem.



This was shared by Head of Fisheries Ecosystem Management Department of Fisheries, Ministry of Primary Resources and Tourism (MPRT) Hajah Zuliza binti Haji Jolkifli in her presentation on Artificial Reefs (ARs) for Fisheries Production Enhancement during the Decommissioning and Restoration Forum held in conjunction with the Brunei Mid-Year Conference and Exhibition (MYCE) at the Musyawarah Hall, International Convention Centre (ICC) in Berakas yesterday.



Realising the importance of coral reef, she said, The Department of Fisheries implemented management of fisheries resources under the Fisheries Order 2009 which include zoning of fishing grounds divided into four zones  Zone 1 at zero to three nautical miles, Zone 2 at three to 20 nautical miles, Zone 3 at 20 to 45 nautical miles and Zone 4 at 45 Nautical miles onwards. The purpose is to limit fishing rights to certain fishers in designated areas depending on the types and fishing capabilities of each fishing gear.



Other intervention measures that have been implemented, such as moratorium for commercial bottom trawlers, new mesh size regulation for trawl cod-end, moratorium for small scale fishing activities, banning of catches, landings and importation of sharks, established marine protected areas and Brunei government participated as the pilot country in ASEAN Catch Documentation Scheme.



On tools for management and enhancement of marine fishery resources, Hajah Zuliza said, Artificial reef is a submerged structure deliberately constructed or placed on the seabed to emulate some functions of a natural reef such as protecting, regenerating, concentrating or enhancing population of living marine resources.



The objectives of having artificial reefs include, creation of new habitat for fish to enhance the quality of fishing grounds offering alternative fishing sites to redirect fishing pressure, creating potential network of marine protected areas to manage the life cycle of fish and connectivity, promote the survival of commercial targeted species like red snappers, mackerel and emperor red snapper, serve as silent enforcement to minimise from foreign encroachment and local encroachment in prohibited areas, she said.



Hajah Zuliza also shared the expected increase capture fisheries production projected within three to five years of post-deployment of artificial reefs based on the experience gained from the neighbouring countrird during regional engagement which include increase of reef fish species, increase of coral species, increase in catch per unit effect, increase in high commercially value fish and increase in value of small scale fisheries.



Last year, she revealed, the Fisheries Department conducted a study on potential of deployment sites to identify proper site to support the growth of marine life by taking into consideration of Socio economic and environmental parameters. We found that Chearnleyrock, Nankivell, Victoria patch and Amcotts rock are most preferred deployment sites.



For the Rig to Reef (R2R) programme, she highlighted, In 1988, the Department of Fisheries and BSP cooperated in the building of rig reefs, two redundant offshore oil rig platforms were placed on the seabed of two Fathom rocks. In 1994, a second rigreef was built in the same area and in 2010, an additional deployment of artificial rig was constructed at Ampa patches.



The R2R, she pointed out, is a win-win approach for the environment and the economy to safeguard profitable venture for commercial fishing and ecosystem.



Meanwhile, Project Engineer, D&R from Petroleum Authority of Brunei Darussalam Nuramalina Hayate binti Haji Matassan gave a talk on Rig to Reef  Regulatory Perspective.



She shared that the outcome of R2R programme showed that in commercial fishing, groupers, jack, snappers, rabbitfish and barracudas are among the most commonly caught species and that in eco-tourism, divers and underwater photographers are also attracted to the colourful coral and organisms attached to the rig reefs.



She iterated the importance of continued cooperation between regulators, government agencies, operators and contractors as well as research and development on the best solution for engineering, preparation, removal, disposal and repurposing and restoration in safeguarding the environment and safe implementation.

 2013 Borneo Bulletin Online - The Independent Newspaper in Brunei Darussalam, Sabah and Sarawak

Theme(s): Fisheries Resources.
We saw it coming: The Indigenous leader fighting climate change in the Amazon

by Carolina Loza Leon

June 29,2021 | Source: Al Jazeera

People from the outside [of Waorani territory] see empty land but to us [Waorani people] the jungle is our pharmacy, our grocery shop, our home supplies shop. People just see gold and wood when they see our land, but this is our home, our diversity. We do not want to destroy our life, says Nemonte Nenquimo over a Zoom call from her office in the Ecuadorian city of Puyo.



The 36-year-old Waorani leader and land defender is referring to the 802,220 hectares (about 2 million acres) of Waorani territory in the Amazon Pastaza province, of which Puyo is the capital, in Ecuador.



One of the most biodiverse rainforests on earth, it is home to 600 types of birds, 200 different mammal species, 300 types of fish and thousands of plants with medicinal properties, according to Amazon Frontlines, an NGO that works alongside Indigenous communities in the Amazon.



Nemonte calls it Omere, meaning both jungle and our house in her native Wao language. About 2,000 people in 54 communities make up the Waorani nation.



Nemontes eyes light up as she describes her community Nemonpare, at the heart of the territory.



Located in the basin of the Curaray River and surrounded by tapirs, jaguars, streams and sacred waterfalls, she describes the sounds of parrots and leaves creaking under feet as people go about their day harvesting cassava or fishing by the river. About 40 people, including her family, live there.



When you are in the rainforest, you feel free, at peace in harmony. You bathe in the river or walk in the jungleit soothes your soul, she says.



Yet the pristine rivers and animals in the forest are facing extinction as a result of oil drilling, road construction and other operations nearby.



The Waorani people first faced colonisation in 1958 when Christian missionaries moved in, followed by settlers, loggers and Ecuadorian authorities looking for oil. Despite the Waoranis fight to stop them, road construction for oil extraction began in the 1960s and has had a deep impact on their way of living.



The Ecuador government has also divided the land into blocks to be auctioned to oil companies  covering four provinces and millions of hectares of land, threatening most of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Six of these blocks cover Waorani territory, including Nemonpare.



Many Waorani reject this contact and move deeper into the forest.



For the Waorani, the changes in climate and the impact on the rainforest are not new; they have seen it firsthand for decades.



People talk and talk about climate change just now, but we saw it coming for years before it was talked about, explains Nemonte, as she describes the floods and river fluctuations she has witnessed in the last few years  the sort that have never been seen before.



My dad used to have his small plot with different produce, cassava and plantain. My dad and my mom both had small pieces of land as they had all their life. Their chacras (land to plant food) on the riverbanks were destroyed by the river flooding. This did not happen before; the river is unpredictable now.



Nemontes appreciation and love of her land and her Waorani heritage drove her to lead a legal battle against oil drilling in their territory. In 2019, they won a lawsuit that suspended the auctioning of 180,000 hectares (445,000 acres) of their land for oil drilling, setting an important legal precedent for Indigenous communities fighting extraction operations in the Amazon.

While Nemontes leadership has been recognised internationally  Time Magazine named her one of 2020s most influential people in the world and she won the Goldman Environmental Prize that same year  she is not fazed.



When speaking about her work, her conversation always goes back to her compass: the elderly women in her community, or as she calls them, Abuelas. It is their wisdom and advice, she says, that have shown her the way forward and given her the strength to keep working for a clean future in the Amazon.

 2021 Al Jazeera Media Network

Theme(s): Communities and Organisations.
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Police arrested former senior editorial writer Fung Wai-kong, who worked for the recently shutdown pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily at Hong Kong International Airport on June 27. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and its affiliate, the Hong Kong Journalists Association (HKJA) condemn the polices arrest of Fung.

Apple Daily journalists hold copies of the newspaper's last edition next to supporters gathered outside their office in Hong Kong on June 24, 2021. Credit: Daniel SUEN / AFP

While boarding a flight to the United Kingdom, police arrested Fung on suspicion of colluding with foreign countries or foreign forces to endanger national security. Fung had written for Apple Daily since 1997 until his recent resignation, publishing his last column on June 21.

The arrest follows the recent announcement on June 23 of Apple Dailys shutdown that was preceded by Hong Kong authorities freezing Apple Dailys parent company, Next Digitals assets and the arrest of five Apple Daily executives during police raids of Next Digitals offices on June 17. The executives were arrested under Article 29 of the National Security Law prohibiting collusion with a foreign country or with external elements to endanger national security.

Fungs arrest makes him the seventh Apple Daily employee to be arrested since the June 17 raid. Another Apple Daily editorial writer, Yeung Ching-kee, who wrote under the pseudonym, Li Ping was arrested on the same charge as Fung on June 23 and released on bail on June 25.

Next Digital founder Jimmy Lai is currently in prison on alleged fraud charges under the National Security Law and is also serving a 14-month prison sentence after a court found him guilty in April 2021 of allegedly organizing and taking part in illegal demonstrations in 2019.

According to a South China Morning Post source, Hong Kongs police have a watch list of residents under investigation for alleged violations of the National Security Law who will intercept and arrest if they attempt to leave the city.

On the same day as Fungs arrest, another pro-democracy news website, Stand News, announced it would remove opinion pieces and columns to reduce the risks associated with the National Security Law.

The HKJA said: The police have repeatedly ignored the voices of the public and the industry, and they want to arrest journalists by using the words National Security. HKJA added, the recent series of incidents had almost completely buried the freedom of the press in Hong Kong.

The IFJ said: The recent arrests of Apply Daily employees under the National Security Law makes it clear the Beijing-imposed law is intended to burden freedom of speech and expression. The IFJ is deeply concerned by the impacts of the law and the culture of self-censorship that is growing in Hong Kong as a result. The IFJ urge authorities to repeal the National Security Law and to ensure that Fung and others who have been charged under the National Security Law are released.
Local journalist Aman Mohammad Khojamli was summoned to Gonbad City court and was transferred to the prison following his reporting over the presidential election in Iran. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) condemns this illegal and groundless arrest and urges the Iranian authorities to release him immediately.

Khojamli is an experienced local freelance journalist who worked for local print media like "Salim" and "Golshan Mehr" as well as several news websites in Golestan province like "Okamiz" and "Turkmen News".

Before his arrest, he told to local media that he was summoned because of his reports and comments about the presidential election in Iran, which was held five days ago. The journalist published some content and reports about the boycott campaign of the presidential election, which the government wanted to censor.

The authorities havent made any official statement on the charges he faces and they denied his application for bail.

Growing pressure on journalists

The Iranian authorities had increased the judicial and security crackdown on journalists who covered the campaign for boycotting the election.

It is not the first time Khojamli is arrested. On February 11, the security forces of Gonbad Kavous city arrested him after searching his house and transferred him to the city court. He was released later on bail.

Khojamli had also faced charges of "spreading lies" and "disturbing public opinion" by the Gonbad court last year. He was sentenced to pay a 4 million Toman fine.

The IFJ warned against the increasing judicial and security pressures on journalists ahead of the Presidential election.
Several journalists, including a number of women, were attacked and their equipment confiscated as they were covering violent clashes between demonstrators calling for an independent investigation into the killing of activist Nizar Banat, a fierce critic of President Mahmoud Abbas, and the president's supporters.

Security forces wearing riot gear and others in plain clothes started firing tear gas and violently attacking journalists while confiscating or breaking their equipment.

According to media reports, journalist Shatha Hammad was hit in the face by a tear gas canister and her phone was broken. Journalist Najla Zeitoun from Quds News Network was violently beaten with a stick and pulled by her hair despite being identified as a journalist. Her phone was also confiscated. Al-Madina TV journalist Fayhaa Khanfar is still suffering from shoulder pain after she was attacked. Faten Alwan, a freelance journalist, was interrupted as she was reporting live while journalists Aziza Nofal and Jihad Barakat where threatened and prevented from covering the demonstrations.

Other journalists injured include Jihan Awad, Muhammad Ghafri, Karim Khamayseh and female journalist Saja Al-Alami.

The PJS issued a statement in which it strongly condemned the attacks on journalists, calling it "a new, grave development in the onslaught on freedom of expression and the media". The union also demanded immediate actions from Palestinian PM Mohammad Shtayyeh, who is also the minister of interior. Its demands include the sacking of the police chief for their failure to protect journalists when they were attacked by plain clothes security officers and to bring those responsible for attacking journalists to justice. Until then, the PJS has called on journalists and the media to boycott any coverage of PA president and government news.

IFJ General Secretary Anthony Bellanger said: "This seems like a concerted attack orchestrated to intimidate journalists and prevent them from reporting the truth. These deplorable events are happening just 2 days after the ILO convention on violence and harassment in the world of work enters into force, showing the urgency for States to ratify the Convention and ensure clear procedures are put in place to prevent attacks against any workers in the course of their duty. We demand a full investigation into these attacks and a concrete commitment from the Palestinian authorities to ensure journalist's safety and stand in solidarity with the PJS".
Kickstarter is launching one of its most interesting projects yet: a four-day workweek for its employees.

The Brooklyn-based crowdfunding platform announced last week that starting in 2022, it will become the first company to join a set of pilot programs called 4 Day Week U.S. The programs, launched in part by Kickstarter executive Jon Leland, are a spinoff from 4 Day Week Global, a not-for-profit that promotes a shortened work schedule. On Monday, 4 Day Week U.S. circulated an employee petition to help identify companies to target, and encouraged employers to join the program.

For business owners, this could be the perfect time to experiment. "Remote workers are now coming back, and they're used to some flexibility," says Chris Mullen, executive director at Boston-based think tank the Workforce Institute. Mullen advises most employers to try it, provided they first gauge employees' interest and engage in significant dialogue about how to do it effectively.

The four-day workweek has gotten some traction in recent years. In March, Spain's government announced it would pay companies to try it. London-based consumer goods company Unilever began a yearlong test in its New Zealand offices in November 2020. And Buffer, a San Francisco-based social media software company, tried the schedule in 2020 and decided to continue it into 2021 because it "resulted in sustained productivity levels and a better sense of work-life balance," according to a company blog post.

Kickstarter CEO Aziz Hasan told Axios that the pandemic inspired him to try a four-day workweek for its 90 employees. "What we've been all living through the last 18 months, you feel this compression on your professional life, your personal life," he said. A Kickstarter spokesperson says the company has not yet determined how it will implement the schedule. 4 Day Week usually advocates a 32-hour workweek comprising four eight-hour days.
For many years in my various businesses, I heard a recurring complaint about one particular aspect of my leadership style that regularly frustrated a number of my team members. I'm sure there were many other complaints over the years as well, but this one was so common that I spent more time explaining my peculiar approach in this instance than I did addressing just about anything else--except possibly my reluctance to get regular haircuts.

The "problem" was my custom of occasionally assigning the same task to several people simultaneously. People would be pissed, or disappointed and think all kinds of things--I didn't trust them, I was wasting their time.

I'm sure there were some downsides to this approach, since it's apparently so very important for everyone to stay in their own lane, but from my perspective it had at least two critical benefits: a) duplication dramatically increased the likelihood that the thing would get done and done on time or sooner; and b) it often resulted in solutions that were novel, unexpected, and better thought-out than the more typical and/or traditional answers.

As things happened, two heads were often better than one even if they didn't realize that they were dealing with the same concern and even if, very infrequently, they might step on each other's toes. The smartest thing you can ever do in decision making is to make sure that you have considered as many options and different choices as possible.

Not that I ever felt bad about my strategy (which I thought of as the CEO's prerogative) or that I regretted using additional and sometimes redundant or scarce company talent and resources to run some of these things to ground. But it's always good from time to time to have some confirmation that you're not headed completely in the wrong direction and, of course, when the "word" comes from Jeff Bezos of Amazon, it feels especially good.

The Jeffism in question states that "there are multiple paths to yes." He happy to have multiple people at Amazon chasing the same rabbit, and he goes even further and violates the cardinal Mom-versus-Dad rule that we all learned growing up by suggesting that a team member who gets turned down by one manager should feel free to go try the same request on another manager who might be smarter, more favorably inclined, in possession of better information, or just more flexible. When I was a kid, this was the oldest ruse in the book - if Mom or Dad said no, you'd just go ask your other parent about the same thing praying for a more favorable result.

When I was a trial lawyer we used to call this "forum shopping," which means looking for a friendly or sympathetic judge's courtroom in which to bring your lawsuit, hoping that you'd get a better ruling. Today, if you're a gun nut, you file all your lawsuits before hyper-conservative district court judges in California or elsewhere in the South to get the initial outcomes you want. Class action lawyers all know that Texas and Alabama judges hate insurance companies, so that's where they file all their nationwide complaints along with their "spilled super-hot coffee in my lap" and "found a body part in my peanuts" tort claims.

According to Jeff, not only isn't there anything wrong with looking for a better answer when your pitch gets turned down, but carrying on and looking elsewhere is also often likely to lead to much better results. My experience was the same. Things got done more quickly, there were more paths forward in front of me, and the ongoing competition between the various choices sharpened everyone's focus.

Of course, before you drive yourself over the cliff, or spend too much time chasing too many rabbits, you do need to think carefully about why you're getting a negative response in the first place. It's good to really know why the response has been a no.

Sometimes, you're just in the wrong place or asking the wrong people. Other times, it's a matter of bad timing--a "no for now," which means your salespeople need to keep pushing forward and asking for the order. And finally, there are even times (perish the thought!) when your product or service just isn't the right fit, and you just have to do yourself and the customer a favor and take your ball and head home.

But before you bail, or bag the whole thing, remember these three critically important rules:

1) To succeed at anything important in life, you're gonna have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince or princess -- so be patient, get used to some rejection as you're pushing the envelope, but keep pressing ahead.

2) Never accept a no from anyone who can't say yes or write the check. Get thyself, by hook or by crook, in front of the actual decision maker.
Just as you might prepare for traveling by taking a Covid test, being prepared for changes and adjustments when traveling is a must in 2021. The number of people traveling has been increasing, thanks to more vaccine availability and fewer coronavirus cases. But as travel increases, so does the number of new travel scams.

While there may be a bit of travel anxiety still lingering, knowing what to watch out for can help make your next trip a little easier. With so many changes and guidelines still in place for some destinations, the following scams might even catch a seasoned traveler off guard. So here are a few things to note before your next trip.

Fake rideshare or taxi drivers.

When departing the airport (bus terminals and train stations may also be susceptible), you may encounter people lingering outside, claiming to be rideshare or taxi drivers. This illegal solicitation is dangerous for several reasons, including the lack of a safety net and accountability. While this is more common abroad, there have been incidents in the United States.

I recently encountered several men with the word "UBER" displayed prominently on their cellphones when I left JFK airport in New York City. An older woman was about to ask for a ride when I warned her about the fake driver. I recommend using the taxi rank or doing a quick search on the app yourself and ordering a car. You can also ask a nearby hotel if it will call a car for you.

WiFi hacking.

While this scam is quite old, it is still something to be aware of, especially when reliance on technology is high. Be careful when using open, free, or public WiFi connections, as hackers may be watching and collecting your usage and data. If you must visit a private site such as your bank's website, use a mobile hotspot or VPN.

Fake websites, third-party sites, and too good to be true "deals."

You may be surprised at the lengths scammers are going through to pull off their cons. There have been reports of fake websites popping up and people getting scammed. Some of the fake websites include:

Fake rental car

Fake airline

Fake hotel

Fake Covid tests to travel

Fake food menus (traveler places an order for food and pays over the phone or online, but the food is never delivered)

Fake government sites, including Global Entry and TSA PreCheck

Scammers have been setting up fake websites, fake phone numbers, fake reservation agents, and even fake advertisements that pop up when users search online for things such as "cheap rental car" or something similar.

It's also important to be careful with websites asking for vaccine information. If a vaccine passport is required abroad or a Covid test, check official government websites for further details. Government sites for Global Entry and TSA PreCheck, as well as any U.S. embassy or CDC sites, will end in ".gov."

Many websites and phone numbers seem legitimate, making it easy for unsuspecting readers and occasional travelers to fall for the scam. Additionally, double-check any pop-ups that appear, especially when entering financial information. Also, be careful of any calls or texts claiming to be agents seeking to confirm your reservations or claiming to be from the front desk.

Always go with trusted names when using third-party sites. Additionally, be sure the website URL is using HTTPS connection security. If the website is unfamiliar, search the web and Better Business Bureau for legitimacy.

It's a good idea to search addresses or areas on Google Maps to be sure they are accurate and factual. Also, take photos of any rental cars before leaving the lot and note any damages. You should also take pictures of your accommodation after checking in, especially if you use a houseshare like AirBnB.

Try to pay with a credit card when traveling, as they usually have more protection. Additionally, if an unfamiliar travel site asks for payment via gift card, debit card, wire transfer, cryptocurrency, or something similar, it is likely not on the up and up. Typos on sites and a lack of social media presence are usually signs of an illegitimate company.
Dir: Cate Shortland. Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Florence Pugh, David Harbour, O-T Fagbenle, William Hurt, Ray Winstone, Rachel Weisz. 12A, 134 mins.

Of all the heroes in Marvels Cinematic Universe, its Scarlett Johanssons Black Widow who deserves the biggest apology from her creators. Over the span of a decade, shes been treated like a cipher to drool over (the actor has herself criticised the hypersexualisation of her character in 2010s Iron Man 2), called a monster for not being able to conceive, and then killed off without even the dignity of a funeral in Avengers: Endgame. The steel-thighed, emotionally bruised Russian agent, otherwise known as Natasha Romanoff, has been hollowed out like a porcelain doll through year after year of poor screenwriting.

At least now, after all this time, she finally has her own film. Black Widow is a valiant but chequered attempt to do right by the legacy of Marvels first female Avenger. Its hindered most by the sensation that this has all come a little too late. Director Cate Shortland and writer Eric Pearson have tried to pry out new meaning from between the lines of the characters official biography, setting this particular adventure in a time after Captain America: Civil War and before Avengers: Infinity War. Natasha, at this point, is an international fugitive still in the grieving stages of the Avengerss very public break up. Having fled to Europe, she finds herself confronted by her own past  namely, Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), a pseudo-sister from her time in the Red Room, a programme of psychological torture that shaped young girls into fearsome killers.

Yelena reveals to Natasha that the man responsible (Ray Winstones Deykov, whose Russian accent is enough of a war crime in its own right) is still lurking in the dark. The Red Room was never defeated; it simply evolved into something altogether crueller and more sinister. Black Widow is, inescapably, a story about the abuse and exploitation of young women, who Dreykov so casually names as the only natural resource that the world has too much of. And there are moments in Pearsons script, and in Shortlands handling of those scenes, that are brutally and tragically effective  Yelena and Natasha talk about the forced sterilisation they underwent in exactly the kind of offhand, eerily detached manner that speaks to how deeply suppressed their trauma still is.

The problem is that these ideas are so much better expressed through Yelena, who arrives emotionally complete and having never met a space raccoon. Shes also bolstered by an absolute knockout performance from Pugh, who combines her characters from Little Women and Midsommar  a little petulance here, a little melancholy there  to conjure someone who is warm, witty yet crumbling from within. Yelenas entire identity has always existed at the whim of others, so much so that shes grown irreversibly attached to the fake parents she was once assigned on a mission. One of them, Soviet supersoldier Red Guardian (David Harbour), has an unhealthy fixation with Captain America, his great adversary in this great theatre of geopolitical conflict (the two dont seem to have met). The other, Melina (Rachel Weisz), owns a worrying number of pigs. The pair make for some affable comic relief, as they bicker and sourly down vodka at the dinner table.

Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) and Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) are pseudo-sisters from their time in the Red Room, which turned young girls into trained killers (Disney)

Johansson, meanwhile, does the best she can with the material, though her humanity tends to come out in smaller details  like a scene of her, alone, watching Moonraker and mouthing along to the terrible puns. Otherwise, shes still the unflappably elegant fighter who kicks, twirls, and always lands in a superhero pose (admittedly, theres a good running joke about this). Black Widow features some of the best fight choreography of the entire MCU, but Matthew Schmidt and Leigh Folsom Boyds editing has a chaotic quality to it that often turns an intricately designed sequence into a spinning blur of limbs. Theres one standout scene where Yelena and Natasha, much like Charlize Theron in Atomic Blonde, tear a city apartment to pieces as they fling assorted homeware at each others heads.

More often, the action will simply dissolve into a predictable CGI gruel. Considering Black Widow is one of the few heroes who cant fly, she spends a concerning amount of this film plummeting through the air. And the films mystery villain, Taskmaster, who comes with the ability to perfectly mimic anyones movements, is an intriguing idea that only ever feels half-deployed. But, for all of Black Widows flaws, the things that it does right build a more hopeful future for the women of the MCU  one with stories that not only invoke real and relatable experiences, but are actually being told by women behind the camera. Its just a shame that Natasha never had this from the very start.
An American Love Island fan has gone viral after expressing surprise at the oddness of British adverts.

TikTok user @stupidfreakingidiot sparked hilarity by posting a video of herself watching the new series of the ITV2 hit.

I would just like to say what a fun insight it is into the British world, she said. Im watching their commercials.

As the shot cut to her television set, which was showing the animated stars of the Compare the Meerkat ads, the TikTok user uttered: Huh?

She captioned the video: idk why im surprised their commercials have british accents.

Show Sergei the Meerkat some respect, joked one follower. Another added: Omg I feel embarrassed bestie, dont look.

Another person commented that the jarring realisation works on both sides of the pond.

This is how I feel when I watch American award shows! the TikTok user wrote. You guys have lots of adverts for medication.

Id love to know what you can guess about British people purely based off Love Island, asked one person, to which @stupidfreakingidiot replied: Theyre like Americans but with accents and weirder dating standards/norms.

Love Island has returned to ITV2 this week following a hiatus last summer due to the pandemic. Laura Whitmore is back to present the show, which revolves around a group of beautiful singletons tasked with coupling up with one another in a sun-drenched villa.

Find out more about this seasons contestants here.
China on Tuesday reacted sharply to a top Japanese officials call to protect Taiwan as a democratic country, according to a report.

Chinas foreign ministry said that Japans deputy defence minister Yasuhide Nakayamas characterisation of Taiwan as a country was erroneous and a serious violation, Reuters reported.

Joining a discussion at the Hudson Institute think tank, Mr Nakayama on Monday wondered whether the decision by several countries, including the US and Japan, to follow the one-China policy that recognised Beijings government over Taipeis since the 1970s, would stand the test of time.

He was speaking on the subject of transformation of Japanese security strategy and its implications for the US-Japan alliance.

Was it right? he asked. I dont know, he said. According to Reuters, the official also called on democracies to stand up to growing Chinese pressure on Taiwan.

Mr Nakayama cited Japan and Taiwans geographical proximity to stress that any political turbulence in the latter would affect Japans Okinawa prefecture which has a major US military presence.

So we have to protect Taiwan as a democratic country.

Japan and Taiwan are really close, the Japanese Times quoted Mr Nakayama as saying. We are not friends of Taiwan, we are brothers.

He went on to say that under President Xi Jinpings leadership China had aggressive, aggressive ... thought and will.

So wake up. We have to wake up, he said.

China claims Taiwan as an integral part of its territory and takes exception to any government referring to the area as a country. The One China policy accepts Beijing as the legitimate Chinese government and many governments, including Japans, call Taiwan a region instead of a country.

In 1972 Japan shifted its diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to Beijing to honour the One China policy.

We deplore the erroneous remarks by the senior official of the Japanese government, and we have lodged solemn representations, Reuters quoted Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin as saying.

This is highly sinister, dangerous and irresponsible. This politician also openly called Taiwan a country, in serious violation of the China-Japan joint statement, Mr Wenbin said.

We urge the Japanese government to make a clarification and ensure this will not happen again, he said.

Earlier this month, China said it lodged stern protests after Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga made a reference to Taiwan as a country during a parliamentary meeting.

Japanese leaders flagrantly refer to Taiwan as a country on multiple occasions, severely violating principles set out in the four political documents including the Sino-Japanese Joint Statement and its solemn and repeated commitment of not seeing Taiwan as a country, Mr Wenbin said.

Following Chinas protest, Japans chief cabinet secretary Katsunobu Kato said Japans position is to maintain relations with Taiwan as practical and non-governmental. Thats our basic policy and there is no change to that.
When the coronavirus pandemic tore through India this year, its ferocity killed tens of thousands of people. But thousands of those who survived were soon back in hospitals with an ominous fungal infection called mucormycosis.

The complaints ranged from a blurring of vision to droopy eyelids or discharge from the nose. At high risk were diabetic people or those with very weak immune systems. In many cases, the only treatment is the removal of the fungus from the infected area  and that area is often the eye.

Its a form of flesh-eating fungus that destroys tissues as it grows, says Akshay Nair, an oculoplastic surgeon treating mucormycosis patients in Mumbai. Before the pandemic, Nair would see 10 such patients in a year, but since January, he has treated nearly 100 affected patients. If it involves the sinus, they have to be cleared. If it involves the eye  the eyeball, lids, muscles around the eye have to be removed, leaving behind the bare, bony socket.

The antifungal drug used for treatment, amphotericin B, has run in short supply in India. The expensive drug has to be administered for at least three to five weeks after the surgery, increasing costs and complicating treatment efforts.

Doctors believe one reason for the spate of cases in India is the rampant use of steroids to treat Covid-19 patients. Steroids improve outcomes in serious covid patients but also make them susceptible to this infection by pushing up blood sugar levels.

Photographer Ronny Sen spent a week in Maharashtra in June with patients who made the difficult decision to have one eye removed to survive the deadly disease. The large state in western India has seen nearly 8,000 cases of the infection, and nearly 700 infected patients have died. Here are some of their stories.

Khurshida Banu

(Ronny Sen for The Washington Post)

A devoted mother and caring wife, 49-year-old Khurshida Banu spent her life looking after the needs of her family. With her sons and daughter now married, she looked forward to some rest and playtime with her grandchildren. This year changed that.

In February, Banu contracted Covid-19 and suffered severe lung damage. Two weeks after she returned from the hospital, one of her eyes wouldn't open. It was like it didnt exist, says her son Ilyas. The family was shocked when the doctor told them that the eye had to be removed.

Either take the eye out, or she may not live, her son recounts the doctors advice. Banu, who has diabetes, spent 40 days at a public hospital where she received free treatment for black fungus. When she was close to her discharge date, she suffered another setback: a stroke left her right hand and leg paralysed.

Now she is back home, but her days are punctuated by physiotherapy sessions and weekly hospital visits to change the dressing on her eye.

Allah is kind to have saved one of my eyes, she says. I am happy that I am back with my family.

Anil Baburao Wankhede

(Ronny Sen for The Washington Post)

As a photographer, Anil Baburao Wankhede relied on two tools: his Nikon camera and his eyesight. He photographed dreamy weddings and adoring couples at engagement ceremonies. He was his familys breadwinner, and his work helped pay for his son's college and his daughters school.

In April, he recovered from Covid-19 after a brief hospitalisation. But within days, he had to be readmitted. His right eye was badly swollen.

By June, Wankhede was still in the hospital, his face framed by a clump of tubes. His right eye was removed. He nearly lost his life when multiple organs began to malfunction.

Wankhede says he feels adrift. His brother had to borrow thousands of dollars to fund his treatment. The 56-year-old is unsure if he will be able to go back to his job.

I don't know how I will work now, he says. My life is devastated. There is only darkness.

Surekha Khadche

(Ronny Sen for The Washington Post)

Surekha Khadche and her family are running out of time.

In April, two weeks after she contracted Covid-19, Khadches right eye began to water. Then came swelling and shooting pain. Her sinus was full of black fungus, an MRI scan revealed. The family was shaken. A relative had recently lost his life to the same fungal infection before he could receive treatment.

The doctors said she needed immediate surgery because the infection would soon reach her brain. But they couldnt operate until she tested negative for the coronavirus.

Khadche, 49, spent more than a month in the hospital, and the 9,000 bill meant the family lost much of their savings. As the family struggled to procure the amphotericin injections she needed after her hospitalisation, the infection seemed to reach her second eye. Her left eyelid droops and barely opens.

She needs urgent treatment to save the other eye. She says Covid was nothing compared with mucormycosis. I dont feel like living any longer, she says.

Baburao Kamble

(Ronny Sen for The Washington Post)

Baburao Kamble, 45, sells tea at construction sites in Pune. His earnings were erratic. In good months, he could make nearly 200. During lean periods, he would not make even 70.

But his income dried up when the lockdown hit last year. Then he contracted Covid-19 in February.

A week into his illness, his blood sugar level shot up. Next, the vision in his right eye began to fade.

It was black fungus, his doctor told him. The only drug that could save him was in short supply and cost more than his monthly income. Each day for a month he needed six amphotericin injections. The bills mounted to a whopping 11,000.

Kamble withdrew money prematurely from a long-term account. His wife sold her gold jewellery. A cousin took a loan on his behalf. The family moved into a relative's home to save daily expenses.

How will I manage this huge financial burden now? he wondered.

Somnath Bodke

(Ronny Sen for The Washington Post)

For years, Somnath Bodke taught hundreds of schoolchildren Marathi, a local language, in the state of Maharashtra. Then the pandemic shuttered schools, and in April, Bodke tested positive for Covid.

The signs of black fungus began 10 days after he was discharged from the hospital: his jaw began to hurt, then his eye swelled. Finally, his eyelid began to droop. A CT scan revealed the infection.

Three hospitals in the city of Nashik told him they did not have a supply of amphotericin, the antifungal drug he needed. At the main government hospital, they suggested going to Mumbai for treatment.

Since mid-May, Bodke and his brother have been living at a large public hospital in Sion, Mumbai, where his left eye was removed. His headaches have diminished since the operation, but his spirits are low.

Life has turned dismal. I cry silently to myself, he says. What adds to his anguish is his separation from his young daughter, who calls him every day asking when he'll return. It will be at least another month before he will be discharged.

Papa, we love you. Please come home soon, his daughter said to him on a recent afternoon.

Chitra Arun Rakshe

(Ronny Sen for The Washington Post)

In March, Chitra Arun Rakshe, a 47-year-old housewife in Pune, lost her father to a heart attack. Rakshe and her husband spent 10 days at her parents home for the rituals as relatives arrived to pay their respects. Some brought the virus.

When the Rakshes came back, they tested positive for the coronavirus. For 10 days in April, they were hospitalised. Her four children celebrated their parents return home. But the cheer was short-lived.

The irritation in her right eye got worse, and she cried in pain. Soon, her eyelid shut completely. When it was forced open, she says, she couldnt see anything.

She begged the doctor to save her eye, but removing it was the only option. Now, her daughter Kajal, 25, changes the bandages daily. All that is left there is skin and an empty hole, says Kajal.

Rakshes doctor said she may be able to get an artificial eye after two months. For now, she is traumatised. Even enemies shouldnt be cursed with such a disease, she says.

 The Washington Post
US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm has suggested that impacts linked to the climate crisis may have played a role in the devastating condo building collapse in Florida.

The death toll from the collapse of the oceanfront Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Miami, continues to rise with 11 confirmed fatalities and more than 150 people still missing. It may turn out to be the deadliest building collapse in the US in two decades.

Rescue operations are still underway, and the investigation into what caused the residential block of apartments to collapse last Thursday on a still summers night is only in the initial stages.

But impacts of the climate crisis have been suggested as playing a potential role, including the rapidly-rising sea levels in the Miami area, sinking land and increasingly severe tidal flooding.

It was these factors that Ms Granholm appeared to highlight during a CNN interview on Tuesday about President Bidens infrastructure bill. She was asked by CNN whether climate change could have played a role in the buildings collapse.

Obviously, we dont know fully, but we do know that the seas are rising. We know that were losing inches and inches of beaches, not just in Florida but all around, Ms Granholm said.

Lake Michigan, where Im from, weve seen the loss of beaches because the waters are rising, so this is a phenomenon that will continue.

President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden will travel to Surfside on Thursday to meet with families of the victims.

A 2018 report by engineering firm Morabito Consultants first identified issues with weakening concrete at Champlain Towers and estimated it would cost more than $9m to repair. Much of the planned work was in the pool area and the facade but structural repairs and work on the garage were also needed.

Another 2018 Morabito document submitted to the city of Surfside said waterproofing under the pool deck had failed and had been improperly laid flat instead of sloped, preventing water from draining off, according to an AP report.

The failed waterproofing is causing major structural damage to the concrete structural slab below these areas. Failure to replace the waterproofing in the near future will cause the extent of the concrete deterioration to expand exponentially, the report said.

Engineering experts have suggested a range of possibilities including that substandard concrete or steel was used in construction or that a sinkhole opened up beneath the concrete pilings at the base of the building. The New York Times reported that heavy construction in 2019 at the building next door could have damaged Champlain Towers South.

However a former maintenance manager at the building in the late Nineties also told CBS Miami that he remembered up to two feet of seawater at times flooding the underground garage and that two large pumps couldnt keep up.

The water would just basically sit there and then it would just seep downward, William Espinosa told the station. It would just go away after a while. And I would think, where does that water go? Because it had to go in through somewhere.

Sea levels are rising quickly in the Miami area and by 2040, they are expected to be 10 to 17 inches higher than 2000 levels in Southeast Florida. An added problem for the state is that it sits on porous limestone meaning many traditional methods to stop flooding dont work as water can flow through and under sea walls, Sealevelrise.org reported.

Salty seawater is corrosive. It can seep into concrete and then rust thick steel rods known as rebar which are set within to strengthen building construction.

Elected officials in the area pledged to meet with engineering, construction and geology experts to review safety issues and develop recommendations as the collapse focused scrutiny on the safety of older high-rise buildings throughout South Florida. Some 120,000 properties are at risk from frequent tidal flooding in Florida.

AP contributed to this report
There is a definitive link between smacking children and behavioural difficulties, a new study has found.

Researchers at University College London, who reviewed 20 years of research on the topic, found that physical punishment is not effective in improving childrens behaviour, and instead makes it worse.

Published in The Lancet on Monday, the research, which looked at 69 studies from across the world, identified several key outcomes.

Researchers found that physical punishment of children increases the risk of involvement with child protection services and that smacking leads to worsening behaviour over time.

Dr Anja Heilmann, a professor in UCLs department of epidemiology and public health and a lead author of the study, said there is a definitive link between physical punishment and behavioural problems such as aggression and antisocial behaviour.

Physical punishment consistently predicts increases in these types of behavioural difficulties, she added. The study found that detrimental outcomes occurred irrespective of the childs sex, ethnicity or general parenting styles of their caregivers.

While a causal link between physical punishment and increased behavioural problems was identified, there was no link between smacking and improved behaviour.

Researchers found no improvements to childrens attention, cognitive abilities, relationships with others, reactivity to stress, or social competence.

The studys authors said their findings suggest that calls to introduce a ban on physical punishment of children are warranted.

Jillian van Turnhout, a co-author of the paper and a former senator in the Irish parliament, said children need to be protected from physical punishment.

A home should be a safe place for children, yet in many countries, the law can make it one of the most unsafe places for them. Countries need to do all they can to ensure that all children have equal protection from all forms of harm, including physical punishment, Turnhour said.

As per UNICEF, approximately 250 million children worldwide between the ages of two and four are subjected to physical punishment. Smacking children is currently prohibited in 62 countries, including Scotland and Wales.

Under Englands current laws, parents are allowed to smack their children if it amounts to reasonable punishment. Any physical punishment that is severe enough to leave a mark or a bruise can be prosecuted for assault.

Both the NSPCC and the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health have called on the government to introduce a ban in England.

Joanna Barrett, NSPCCs associate head of policy, told The Independent: This is yet another significant study that shows physical punishment is harmful to children.

It cannot be right that in 2021 children are the only group in society that it is legally acceptable to assault in England. The case for reform is beyond doubt.

With legal change already in Scotland and Wales, Westminster is behind the curve on this issue and urgently needs to make sure children in England have the same protection as those in other parts of the UK, she said.
Americas first lady is once again gracing the cover of Vogue, following a four-year break during the Trump era, with Dr Jill Biden revealed as the magazines August cover star.

Dr Biden, 69, was shot by photographer Annie Leibovitz and profiled for the accompanying feature by journalist Jonathan Van Meter for the issue on sale on 20 July. On the cover, Dr Biden is seen standing over the South Lawn wearing a navy Oscar de la Renta dress.

Her appearance in the fashion magazine comes after former President Donald Trump complained that his wife, Melania, had not been in Vogue  breaking the unofficial convention that the US first lady should feature on the magazines cover.

It is unconfirmed why Ms Trump did not assume the tradition, however, in a previous editors letter, long-serving editor-in-chief Anna Wintour endorsed Joe Biden during the 2020 election. She highlighted Mr Trumps dishonesty and shocking lack of empathy.

The snub did not go unnoticed by Donald and Melania Trump. In December 2020, Mr Trump complained about the perceived slight when he retweeted a post from Breitbart about how no American fashion magazines had extended an invitation to Melania  whereas former first lady Michelle Obama had featured in several. Additionally. according to a leaked conversation, heard by NBC News, Ms Trump expressed confusion that Beyonce was selected for cover of the September issue in 2018.

Ms Obama was the last first lady to be on the legendary American fashion magazine when she was profiled by Van Meter in 2016 and appeared on the cover two other times; in 2009 and in 2012. Ms Wintour once called her the best ambassador that this country could possibly have in many ways.

In the upcoming issue, Dr Biden spoke about what she wants to do with her platform, and how she finds it hard to stop herself doing more.

If anything, I feel like adding more things, but I know its not possible, because you want to stay centred, because you want to do things well. And theres so much to do. There is ... So. Much. To. Do, she told the magazine.

Some of the many things she has done include visiting the Navajo Nation, working with military veterans and touring states with low levels of vaccine hesitancy, such as Tennessee, where she was booed by the crowd when she brought up the fact that only three in 10 people in the state had been inoculated against Covid-19.

In the piece, it is clear that Dr Biden often finds the formality of the presidency uneasy, but is effective at communicating this.

Oh, please, call me Jill, she reportedly tells people in formal settings when they stumble over how to address her. Sit down,she says, laughing, when people stand for a second too long in her presence, writes Mr Van Meter.

The magazine also published photos of the less glamorous side of public service, showing her working in the Executive Residence, complete with a pencil in her mouth and eyes glued to her laptop.

Another revelation finds that she thinks her husband taking up residence in the Oval Office has made the national mood significantly calmer.

Dr Biden recalled, During the campaign, I felt so much anxiety from people, they were scared. When I travel around the country now, I feel as if people can breathe again.

Mr Van Meter also spoke to her husband, President Joe Biden, to whom she has been married for just over 44 years, about how the White House has affected their relationship, saying they find it harder to go on romantic trips, like they used to.

I miss her, Im really proud of her. But its not like we can just off like we used to. When we were living in Delaware and married, once a month, wed just go up to a local bed-and-breakfast by ourselves. he said. However, he went on to say they were working on finding a work-life balance.

This is Dr Bidens second time in the magazine, but her first time on the cover. In March 2020, she appeared during a feature on the women on the campaign trail. In February, Kamala Harris, the vice-president was featured on the magazines cover.
A mother has gone viral on TikTok after sharing the supportive message she received from a prospective company about childcare, and how she and her toddler then prepared for the job interview.

Maggie Mundwiller, who goes by the username @314handcrafted on TikTok, revealed that she was interviewing for new jobs after being laid off amid the pandemic in a video posted to the platform last week.

However, according to Mundwiller, who lives in St Louis, Missouri, when a company invited her back for a second interview, she was worried, as she wouldnt have childcare for her one-year-old son, Mylo.

Fortunately, as Mundwiller detailed in the video, when she informed the interviewers of her dilemma, she was told that the company was child-friendly and that she was welcome to bring her son.

In the now-viral TikTok, Mundwiller then described how she prepared her son for his big day, showing the toddler, dressed in a small blue and white striped suit and a white bowtie, having his hair combed before helping to wash his stroller and his mothers car.

The TikTok then saw Mylo walk into the workplace with his resume, which featured blue crayon writing and skills such as destroying a clean space in 30 seconds, before Mundwiller revealed that he ate the owners pickle from his sandwich and drooled - but that overall, the interview was a great experience due to the welcoming company culture.

The video has since been viewed more than 7.9m times, with people infatuated with both Mylos interview preparedness and the companys inclusive and supportive culture.

I would hire you simply because of the fact that you dressed him up and he had his own adorable resume, one person commented. Witty and I love it. Hope you got the job!

Another person said: Dear corporate America - make this normal.

This is so incredibly special and a huge win for all us mamas, someone else wrote.

According to the mother-of-two, who spoke with Good Morning America, she was so excited and inspired by the companys attitude, adding: How cool is that - that a company would be so welcoming? Its awesome to know that there are companies out there that are willing to work with parents and understand the struggles that parents are going through and just accommodate.

In a follow-up video, Mundwiller then gave viewers some additional details about her situation, revealing that she was laid off six weeks after giving birth to her son, at which point she decided to start her crafting TikTok.

In the video, Mundwiller also praised the platform for allowing herself and others in similar positions to normalise being a parent in the workplace.

Mundwiller then asked companies on the app that are also family friendly to respond to the video, before noting that she believes it will help them find some super loyal employees, with many commenters agreeing that supportive workplaces for working parents should become the norm.

As for whether Mundwiller got the job, she revealed in a follow-up video posted on Sunday that she was offered the position and that she is definitely considering it.

In the video, Mundwiller said that the next step will be attending a company event to see if it is the right fit, before revealing that she is so excited and so grateful for all of her TikTok supporters.

The Independent has contacted Mundwiller for comment.
A memorial in remembrance of the five people who died in a mass shooting at a Maryland newspaper is being dedicated on Monday, the third anniversary of the attack.

Friends and family are scheduled to attend the event at an Annapolis park, along with local officials. Author and journalist David Simon is expected to attend.

A memorial titled Guardians of the First Amendment will be dedicated at the event. It includes five pillars to represent the five lives lost in the shooting. Gerald Fischman, Rob Hiaasen, John McNamara, Rebecca Smith and Wendi Winters died in the attack.

The memorial includes a rounded brick edifice, which will hold a panel showing the First Amendment.

Gunman Jarrod Ramos pleaded guilty to all 23 counts against him in October 2019, but he says hes not criminally responsible due to mental illness. A jury has recently been selected to determine whether Ramos should be sentenced to prison or committed to a maximum-security psychiatric hospital.
The government has been urged to change the way ministers appoint advisers to their department in the wake of Matt Hancocks resignation over his affair with aide Gina Coladangelo.

Lord Bob Kerslake, former head of the civil service, said the way non-executive directors are hired must change following the scandal, as questions over Ms Coladangelos role remain.

Mr Hancock personally appointed Ms Coladangelo as non-executive director at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) last September  but there was no public record of the process.

The problem really with the current model is about really the appointment process, how it is overseen and indeed clarity about what that role is supposed to be, the former cabinet secretary told BBC Radio 4s Today programme.

Im afraid changes are going to be needed in light of this sorry saga, said Lord Kerslake  referring to Mr Hancocks exit as health secretary after he was pictured kissing Ms Coladangelo at work.

Lord Kerslake said ministers should still be able to hire non-executive directors  so-called Neds  but the process needed to be made fair, transparent and tightly regulated.

The former civil service chief added: I think the secretary of state should appoint, as they do for permanent secretaries because actually this is their board, they chair it, and they need to have people on there that they think will help them do their role.

But the process by which that happens needs to be properly open, fair and transparent  not just the minister waking up one morning and saying, I would like to have X on my board.

Mr Hancock hired Ms Coladangelo  whom he has known since they were friends at Oxford University  as an aide last March. She was then given a non-executive director role at the DHSC in September, and paid 15,000-a-year for only 15 to 20 days work.

A government spokesman has said her appointment followed correct procedure, but justice secretary Robert Buckland raised questions about a possible conflict of interest on Monday.

I dont know when this particular relationship began, but I expect those looking at the process would indeed ask those questions to make sure that this appointment, like thousands made every year, would stand up to scrutiny, said Mr Buckland.

Gina Coladangelo pictured with Matt Hancock last month (PA)

Non-executive directors are supposed to be appointed through fair and transparent competition and have experience of managing complex organisations to give government departments better oversight.

Labours shadow Cabinet Office minister Fleur Anderson said: The government must publish all documents relating to the appointment of Gina Coladangelo.

The role of a non-executive director is to challenge and scrutinise the minister. We need to know if the nature of their relationship was declared and whether the recruitment process was carried out in a fair and transparent way.

It is not yet known when Mr Hancock and Ms Coladangelos relationship began, but the leaked camera footage of their passionate embrace was from 6 May.

The Tory MP has reportedly left his wife of 15 years, and his relationship with Ms Coladangelo is understood to be serious.
After the discovery of hundreds of bodies in unmarked graves at former schools for Indigenous children, communities across Canada are canceling or altering plans to celebrate a patriotic holiday Thursday, increasing the pressure on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to call off national celebrations.

For decades, families were forced to send their children to boarding schools to assimilate them, in what a national Truth and Reconciliation Commission found in 2015 was an effort to wipe out their cultures. With the discovery of the bodies at two schools in Western Canada, most of them children, many members of Indigenous communities and their leaders say that its inappropriate at this moment to celebrate the country behind the system.

Celebrating Canada Day is being seen as inconsiderate to all the childrens lives that were lost and we encourage everyone to consider the price these children had to pay at the hands of the Canadian government, Chief Bobby Cameron of the Saskatchewan Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations said in a statement.

Canada Day marks the date, 1 July, 1867, when three British colonies were joined together to create the Dominion of Canada. Many Indigenous people have never commemorated Canada Day and view their Canadian citizenship as something that was imposed on them. Others, however, have actively participated in celebrations.

Last Thursday, the Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan said that ground-penetrating radar had revealed the remains of 751 people on the grounds of a former residential school for Indigenous children.

In late May, the same technology produced a preliminary finding of 215 remains in unmarked graves on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. The Tkemlups te Secwepemc First Nation anticipates that figure will rise considerably when a final analysis is finished.

The findings in Kamloops has prompted Indigenous communities across the country to embark on searches of other former school sites that will likely take years and are expected to substantially increase the grim toll.

None of the bodies from the two schools have been exhumed, so there is no indication yet how they died or when, but the Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that disease, malnutrition and physical, sexual and emotional abuse were widespread at such schools.

Abut 150,000 children passed through the system, which started in the 19th century and was not fully shut down until the 1990s.

The commission, established as part of a class-action lawsuit settlement with former students, estimated that about 4,100 children vanished from the schools nationwide. But an Indigenous former judge who led the commission, Murray Sinclair, said in an email this month that he now believed the number was well beyond 10,000. Several Indigenous leaders now put the figure at three to five times Mr Sinclairs estimate.

Compared to the national holidays of other countries, Canada Day celebrations are not as firmly woven into the countrys cultural fabric, and the day has always been less observed in French-speaking Quebec.

Matthew Hayday, professor of history who has studied Canada Day at the University of Guelph in Ontario, said that it took 12 years to make the date a holiday and the federal government did not regularly begin hosting events on the day until the 1950s. Because of the pandemic, this years celebrations have been planned as virtual events.

The way the day is marked ebbs and flows over time, Mr Hayday said. In some ways this year is kind of an ideal year that if you had to cancel because the pandemic limits the amount of disruption.

Ordinarily, the largest celebration is focused in and around Parliament Hill in Ottawa, where a large concert stage is normally erected and a day and evening of musical performances are capped with fireworks.

Steven Guilbeault, the federal minister whose department organises the celebrations in the capital, said in an email that the virtual celebrations would go ahead. But he added that the government would focus its attention on commemorating residential school students 30 September, which a recently passed law has made into a statutory holiday, National Day of Truth and Reconciliation.

We recognise that for many Canada Day is not an occasion to celebrate, Mr Guilbeault wrote. This has been a deeply emotional and traumatic time for Indigenous communities across the country.

Outside of the capital, celebrations are generally organized by local governments or volunteer committees.

Several of them have now canceled their plans out of respect for Indigenous communities.

I acknowledge that the Indigenous community has suffered and continues to suffer and grieve, Angie Hallman, one of the Canada Day organisers in the rural community of Wilmont Township, Ontario, said in an online post announcing her groups plans to cancel all celebrations, in person and virtually, in support of Indigenous people. We stop, sit and grieve in silence with them.

Some local governments in British Columbia and Saskatchewan also called off celebrations.

Last week, Erin OToole, leader of the opposition Conservative Party, criticised cities and towns for canceling celebrations.

I cant stay silent when people want to cancel Canada Day, Mr OToole said in a speech to his caucus in which he acknowledged that the finding of the remains was a necessary awakening on the need for reconciliation between Indigenous people and the rest of Canada.

He added: But lets also channel the pain of a Canada falling short to build up the country, not tear it down.

The New York Times
An arrest warrant has been filed after a woman received a So I raped you Facebook message years after she reported being attacked in 2013.

Pennsylvania authorities filed the warrant eight years after Shannon Keeler claimed she was attacked, and a year after she received the shocking message on the social media platform from her alleged attacker.

Now police want to take 28-year-old Ian Cleary of Saratoga, California, into custody but have not yet located him, according to the Associated Press.

The affidavit filed with the warrant accuses Mr Cleary of stalking Ms Keeler at a party in December 2013, following her home to her dorm room at Gettysburg College and sexually assaulting her.

It also states Mr Cleary apologised to Ms Keeler and fled the scene, and that she texted friends on campus OMG please Help me.

The warrant was filed by Adams County District Attorney Brian Sinnett, who took over the job in 2016.

Police reopened the case in 2020 after Ms Keeler went to them about a series of messages she had received, apparently from Mr Clearys Facebook account.

The affidavit says that investigators have linked Mr Cleary to the account in question through a matching cell phone number.

Ms Keeler told police that when checking her Facebook account for the first time in a long time, she logged on and found messages sent to her months earlier.

So I raped you, the sender allegedly wrote in one message.

And others read If you have a moment give me a call, I need to hear your voice, and Ill pray for you.

Ms Keeler told the news organisation earlier this year that she had gone to the police hours after the alleged attack and a rape kit was done at a local hospital.

It has bothered me over the years that I was never able to do anything, said Ms Keeler, who is now 26.

If youre not going to help me, who are you going to help? Because I do have evidence.

But she graduated three years later with no arrest having been made in the case, and authorities told her it was hard to prosecute when the victim had been drinking.

The rape kit was also reportedly later lost.

The Associated Press contributed to this report
Nothing says "let's try again" like hiring an assassin to drug your ex until they agree to rekindle the relationship.

That is apparently what one neonatal doctor in Spokane, Washington thought, as he allegedly did just that.

Ronald Ilg, 55, was arrested in April and is being charged in federal court for hiring a hitman over the internet to abduct his wife and imprison her in a "secure location" for a week, all the while dosing her with heroin.

"The target destroyed two families and walked away as if she did nothing," the doctor allegedly wrote in his abductor job synopsis. "I want the target kidnapped for 7 days. While being held, she will be given injections of heroin at least two times per day."

The Daily Beast reported that Dr Ilg's plan was allegedly to get her hooked on heroin and - while she was abducted - to litter her house with drug-injection paraphernalia.

The needles were meant to essentially serve as blackmail material the doctor could allegedly use to force his ex to restart their relationship. If she did not agree to restart the relationship, Dr Ilg's alleged plan was to turn her over to the police, who would have found heroin in her system and hypodermic needles throughout her house and presumably taken her children away from her.

Dr Ilg apparently agreed to pay the would-be kidnapper in Bitcoin. The FBI traced the Bitcoin transaction, which led them to Dr Ilg's Coinbase account.

Should Dr Ilg be convicted, he will face up to 20 years in prison.

Dr Ilg's wife shares one son with the man and is 15 years younger than him. She has not been named, but told investigators that her husband had taken aggressive steps to control her in the past, including placing tracking devices on her car and cellphone, and threatening to take away her belongings if she did not give in to his sexual demands.

Court documents suggest the doctor later became involved with another woman with whom he engaged in sado-masochistic play. The doctor took to the fetish too far, however, as woman involved in the affair claims Dr Ilg trapped her in an underground bunker and forced her to sign a sex slave contract in blood.

His second wife filed for divorce in June 2020, and five months later Dr Ilg was fired from his job for bringing a weapon to work.

During this period, Dr Ilg allegedly sent his wife hundreds of text messages asking her to take him back and offering to pay her money to drop the divorce proceedings.

In the call the doctor allegedly put out for abductors, the kidnappers' first goal should be to get the wife to "cancel all court proceedings immediately."

When the estranged wife would not halt the divorce proceedings, her lawyer sent Dr Ilg a letter asking him to refrain from talking to her unless it was about their son. Dr Ilg allegedly refused, prompting her to file for a restraining order.

At first it seemed that things had sorted themselves out; following the restraining order Dr Ilg admitted that he had been in a "raw emotional state," and said that he would stop trying to contact his wife.

Unfortunately for her, the doctor's sudden clarity was short-lived. As detailed in court documents, shortly after the restraining order was issued the wife began seeing Dr Ilg parking outside her work, and he again began sending her dozens of text messages. At one point he pretended to drop a type-written letter in front of her in hopes she might pick it up, read it, and forgive him.

That letter read, in party "I do love you, more than words can describe, more than actions can show. Every fiber of my body, every ounce of my life energy calls out for you."

Around the same time he was romantically dropping letters in front of his estranged wife, Dr Ilg was allegedly cruising the web looking for goons to dish out beatings on those he believed had wronged him.

In one instance a user named Scar215 attempted to hire muscle for use against a coworker he believed had been spreading rumours about how he was fired. He told his hired help to "injure both hands significantly or break the hands" of the woman he was targeting.

Dr Ilg was allegedly ready to pay $2,000 in Bitcoin to whoever took on the job, but the request was never fulfilled.

A month later, the same user posted another assignment on the dark web rent-a-killer site, this time asking for someone to kidnap, drug, and blackmail his estranged wife.

There are numerous "dark web" sites that purport to be assassin-for-hire services, but most are illegitimate and at least one - the obviously fake "rentahitman.com" - is essentially a honeypot intended to capture would-be killers by collecting assassination requests and turning them over to law enforcement.

Under Dr Ilg's alleged plan, the wife would be instructed never to speak of her kidnapping and was to be told that "her families' health, including her father and her kids, depend on her completing these rules."

"It would be unfortunate if her older boy became addicted to heroin," the post on the assassin rental site read. "Or her dad be severely beaten, or her dog be slaughtered."

According to a post on the site, the doctor had put $5,000 in escrow, and would deliver another $10,000 the following day. The doctor said that upon completion he would pay whoever took the job an additional $40,000.

Eventually Dr Ilg's new girlfriend became aware of her boyfriend's alleged proclivity for hiring dark-web toughs to get his way. While she was talking with Dr Ilg's estranged wife, the girlfriend learned about the ongoing battle between the two and confronted the doctor. She told him she was scared of him and mentioned the dark web killers.

Dr Ilg, in text messages obtained by the US Attorney's Office, brushed off the concerns, saying all the hype surrounding dark web assassins was false, denying he had any involvement in any plot to kill anyone.

"You hired someone from the dark web to hurt [the estranged wife]," the girlfriend texted. "Leave me alone forever. I'm scared of you."

The girlfriend revealed to investigators that Dr Ilg allegedly made her call him "sir" and would leave her locked for hours in an underground bunker outside his home. She was the woman who was forced to sign a sex slave contract in blood.

BBC journalists, who had been chasing the story, confronted Dr Ilg about his alleged calls for an assassin, and eventually turned their evidence over to the FBI.

Investigators raided Dr Ilg's home, finding his concrete bunkers and a reference to his online handle "Scar215" on a sticky-note in his house.

According to broadcaster KHQ, Dr Ilg reportedly confessed that he tried to hire someone on the dark web but claimed he was actually trying to hire someone to kill him to ensure that his girlfriend got all of his belongings rather than his estranged wife.

Prosecutors could not corroborate that claim, however, as Dr Ilg had never updated his will to include his new girlfriend as a beneficiary of any kind.

In April Dr Ilg tried to kill himself by overdosing on pills, but was found by authorities and later was arrested.

He faces attempted kidnapping charges, to which he has pleaded not guilty.

Dr Ilg's trial is slated for October, according to the Spokesman-Review.
A pool contractor who visited the site of the now collapsed Champlain Towers in Florida days before the tragedy struck said he had noticed cracked concrete around the pool and water in the basement.

The contractor, who did not wish to be named, took photographs of corroded rebar and cracked concrete around the pool area just 36 hours before half the building caved in, killing at least 11 people.

There was standing water all over the parking garage, the contractor, who asked not to be named, told the Miami Herald . I thought to myself, thats not normal.

Shocked by the buildings poor condition, he told his boss the job would be more complicated than expected. Days later, he has unsettling questions about what he saw.

I wonder if this was going on in other parts of the building and caused this collapse, he added.

EXCLUSIVE: There was nothing unusual about the lobby and pool area at Champlain Towers South Condo, which looked well maintained to a pool contractor who visited the building last Tuesday.



Then, he saw the basement-level garage. https://t.co/KYyQqZdNhH  Miami Herald (@MiamiHerald) June 28, 2021

As search and rescue efforts continue at the residential building in Miami-Dade, residents and local officials are demanding answers.

There was something obviously very, very wrong with this building, and we need to get to the bottom of it, Mayor Charles Burkett of Surfside, where the disaster occurred, told ABC This Week .

With still no official cause given, some in the community have begun to question how such a horrific accident could occur in a developed and wealthy country.

Buildings dont fall down in America, Mr Burkett said. That is a third-world phenomenon.

A structural engineer who inspected the garage last year told CNN he noticed damage to the buildings stucco facade and concrete balconies  although he said this was normal for an old building.

I saw cracks and deterioration of the garage and plaza level, but those are all things that were accustomed to seeing, said the engineer, Jason Borden.

(AFP via Getty Images)

There could have been construction errors or design errors or design defects, he added. There was maintenance or repairs that needed to be performed. You know, all of those things together likely contributed to what happened here.

Meanwhile, NPR has uncovered documents showing that a Surfside building official, Ross Prieto, told a 2018 meeting of the Champlain Tower South Condominium Association that the structure was in good condition.

Structural engineer report was reviewed by Mr Prieto, the minutes of that meeting say. It appears the building is in very good shape.

According to NPR, this directly contradicted the actual engineering report, given by Morabito Consultants just five weeks earlier, which warned of major structural damage to the building.

No investigation of the collapse has yet been completed, and its still possible the disaster had nothing to do with the buildings physical condition. But as the dust settles, questions about meetings and documents like these are likely to continue.
Ricardo Aizenman has been deployed to disaster zones around the world, but none so close to home as this. In recent days he has found himself trawling through the twisted metal, concrete and personal belongings of his neighbours homes at the site of a devastating building collapse in Surfside, Florida.

Its different, he says, standing a few blocks away from the site with his two search dogs during a break between shifts.Im a neighbour of the area. In the morning I saw that it collapsed; the same day, a few hours later, we were here.

Mr Aizenman is one of many among the hundreds of rescuers involved in the emergency effort here with some personal connection to the tragedy. Many searching through the wreckage count their own friends among the missing. For the firefighters, disaster response teams, police and volunteers involved in the rescue, the task is personal.

Usually the places where we go, there are no families around. We just dont know exactly the feeling of the society, says Mr Aizenman, who works for a Florida-based humanitarian organisation called Cadena International. In this case they are very close to the site and we know some of the people who are under the rubble and their family members, so it gets a little more complicated.

This complication, the personal or community connection to the tragedy, has added yet another layer of difficulty to an already arduous rescue effort. Teams from around the country and the world have been working around the clock at the Champlain Towers  a large section of which collapsed in the early hours of Thursday  battling against a giant mound of debris, sweltering humidity, pouring rain and fires.

You get soaked, you dry out, and you rinse and repeat, says Julie Jones, with the state fire marshals office, explaining the conditions at the site.

More than 150 people remain unaccounted for as the fifth day of search efforts came to an end. One more victim was found amid the rubble on Monday, bringing the total number of confirmed dead so far to 11.

Among the victims named are family members who died together, and others who, by chance, were apart from their loved ones when tragedy struck. They were Antonio Lozano, 83, and Gladys Lozano, 79, Cuban emigres who were about to celebrate their 59th wedding anniversary, and who died just hours after having dinner with their son.

Luis Bermudez, 26, and his mother, Ana Ortiz, 46, also died together. In a note posted online, his father Luis Bermudez wrote: My Luiyo. You gave me everything, he wrote in black ink, I will miss you all my life ... I will never leave you alone.

Teams have been working around the clock in 12-hour shifts to search for more survivors. Throughout the day on Monday, large groups were seen moving back and forth from the site. As one group left, drenched in sweat from the humidity and wearing the signs of fatigue on their faces, another entered the fray.

Search and Rescue teams look for possible survivors and to recover remains in the partially collapsed 12-story Champlain Towers South condo building on June 28, 2021 (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

The collapse of the condominium building has shaken the Surfside and Miami community. Families of the missing and residents of buildings nearby have called for an explanation as to why a building could suddenly collapse in the middle of the night.

Its less likely than a lightning strike, Surfside mayor Charles Burkett told reporters in the aftermath. It just doesnt happen. You dont see buildings falling down in America.

Experts have warned it could be months before investigators discover the cause of the tragedy. Soon after the collapse it emerged that a 2018 engineers report warned of major structural damage to the building. Work to address those damages was just about to begin when it fell. Weather damage, salt air and poor maintenance are all likely to play a part in the investigation.

Surfside, and the greater Florida area, is no stranger to disasters such as hurricanes and extreme weather. But the nature of the site is different from what many of the rescuers have encountered here before.

We normally deal with hurricanes  houses that are missing roofs and things of that nature are things that were used to, but definitely not a building collapse of this magnitude, says Margarita Castro, a member of the Florida task force with Femas urban search and rescue division.

Its tonnes and tonnes of debris that is made up of concrete, rebar, glass, household furnishings, everything is just covered in concrete dust and its all in one big pile.

Its different, too, because of the density of the tragedy in such a small space. The condo building, just steps from the beach, housed an entire community under one roof, an array of residents from around the world, reflecting the diversity of the town.

Hurricanes are a situation where a large group of people are affected. This is very intense emotionally because of its family units. Its a close knit community, its very diverse, says Ms Jones, with the fire marshals office, which is responsible for organising the logistics of this massive effort.

They are on the mission of their lives. Every single person working on that pile has dedicated themselves to bringing someone out alive. So no they are not giving up, and they are not giving up until there is nothing left in the rubble.

 Rescue teams continue working at the site of the deadly Miami building collapse

Meanwhile, families of the missing are enduring an agonising wait at a hotel a few minutes from the site. Those families were given a tour of the wreckage on Sunday afternoon to better understand the situation on the ground.

With so many missing, and so many families waiting for answers, rescuers have spent much of their time away from the search site consoling them and providing guidance.

The job is emotional for us, but were not focusing on what that means for us, were here to be supportive for the families, Ms Castro says. That means some people are on the pile removing debris, while others are talking to the families offering emotional support and just talking to them and giving them information. Were all on the same mission of just taking care of these families.

As she speaks, a downpour of rain sweeps through Surfside and adds yet another obstacle to the rescuers working in the rubble. They are using an array of high-tech equipment to search for signs of life in the rubble. Infrared sensors scan where the eye cannot see to search for pockets where people may still be alive. Drones, cranes, sniffer dogs and human hands all work in tandem.

Hopes of finding anyone alive have dimmed significantly as the days have gone by, but none of the rescuers are close to giving up hope.

The first 72 hours are the best window to find life. After that there are always miracles, says Mr Aizenman. Weve found in places like Haiti people lying under the rubble with water. Theres a chance that there might still be people under the rubble, but the conditions are rough.

We dont give up hope until weve found the last person, he adds, before leaving to rest before his next shift on the pile.
A life-threatening Northwest heatwave affecting parts of the US and Canada has reportedly seen as many as 200 people in Oregon sent to hospital with heat-related illnesses since Friday.

On Sunday, temperatures soared to an all-time record high of 112F (44C) in Portland, Oregons largest city.

According to Oregon Public Broadcasting, hospitals saw around half the number of patients with heat-related illnesses they would typically see in an entire summer over this past weekend alone.

The broadcaster said Multnomah Countys EMS received a record 410 calls for service on Sunday alone, with the countys health officer, Jennifer Vines warning people to take the heatwave for the serious health threat that this is.

This is life-threatening heat, she has said of the soaring temperatures.

The heatwave has also been linked to recent deaths, with two homeless men found dead over the weekend at an encampment in Bend believed to have potentially succumbed to the heat.

Oregon is not alone in seeing record-breaking temperatures, with parts across northwestern US and Canada enduring record-breaking temperatures in recent days, forcing schools and coronavirus testing centres to shut down, while cooling stations have opened up to provide residents with relief from the heat.

In the US, the National Weather Service has issued heat warnings for much of Washington and parts of California and Idaho as well, in addition to Oregon.

The weather service has urged people to stay safe and out of the heat as much as possible in the midst of temperatures so high they have caused train wires to melt and roads to crack in some areas.

The high temperatures have also brought delays to Olympic qualifying events in Eugene, Oregon, not far from Portland.

Meanwhile in Canada, Lytton, a village in British Columbia, became the first place in the country to record a temperature over 113F (45C) on Sunday, with temperatures reaching 116F (46C), according to The Washington Post.

However, that national record was quickly broken the following day, with temperatures surging to just over 118F (47C) on Monday.

Environment Canada, the countrys government department coordinating environmental policies and programmes, has warned that the dangerous heatwave is expected to continue to affect British Columbia until Wednesday, with northwestern parts expected to get some relief sooner.

The department said an exceptionally strong ridge of high pressure over the province would continue to bring record-breaking temperatures until then.

It warned that the heatwave would increase the possibility of heat-related illnesses, in addition to raising river levels due to glacier melt and increasing the risk of wildfires due to drought conditions.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Monday announced statewide changes to policing he says will increase transparency and accountability, ahead of an expected vote by lawmakers to approve a bipartisan public safety budget bill.

Walzs executive action includes $15 million for violence prevention programs and changes to the states policy on viewing of body camera footage. The move comes days after former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin was sentenced to 22  years in prison for the death of George Floyd.

Right now, we have an opportunity to create safer communities for all Minnesotans by building a public safety system focused on transparency, accountability, and violence prevention, Walz said. These policy changes and increased investments in safety  together with the Minnesota Police Accountability Act signed into law last summer and the bipartisan public safety plan this legislative session  get us closer to a system of public safety that truly protects all Minnesotans.

The $15 million in grants, directed from funding received via the American Rescue Plan federal stimulus package, will go toward community safety and violence intervention programs, as well as survivor support grants. The initiative also includes policy changes to increase transparency and accountability through the Minnesota Board of Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST).

Walz also directed state law enforcement agencies, including the Minnesota State Patrol and the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, to develop a policy that would allow families of victims killed by officers in those agencies to view the body-camera footage within five days of the fatal encounter. The action follows the governor's funding proposal in the public safety budget legislation for body-worn cameras for state law enforcement officers, which lawmakers reached a deal on over the weekend after months of negotiations.

The public safety package features provisions regulating the use of no-knock warrants, a police misconduct database to create an early warning system to keep bad officers off the streets, and the creation of an office of missing and murdered indigenous relatives as well as a task force for missing and murdered Black women.

Lawmakers are expected to vote on the legislation and attempt to finalize the state's two-year, $52 billion budget before Wednesday's deadline to avoid a government shutdown.

The Legislatures People of Color and Indigenous Caucus released a statement on Monday pushing for several amendments to the public safety package, including limiting pretextual traffic stops, where police pull over a driver for a minor violation like expired tabs. The measure didnt make it into the package following negotiations with the Republican Senate.

Black and brown people have not felt safe in Minnesota. This moment requires us to do something different to achieve justice for our community," the release stated. "We are asking our leaders to meet us in this challenge and intervene where they can enact stronger policies. We are not One Minnesota until all of us feel safe and protected, particularly by those sworn to do so.

On the city level, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey Council member Linea Palmisano and police leadership are recommending some changes to the field training police officer program after an audit found issues including lack of oversight and consistency in training for officers. Funding for the changes will be included in Frey's budget proposal to be unveiled in August, the mayor said.

___

Mohamed Ibrahim 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.
Barack Obama has condemned Donald Trumps ongoing attempts to undermine 2020 presidential election results with a warning that the former Republican presidents campaign to contest his decisive loss  based on a whole bunch of hooey  will continue to inspire similar attempts to discredit election outcomes.

Mr Obama, speaking to a virtual fundraiser for the National Democratic Redistricting Committee with former attorney US Attorney General Eric Holder and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, said that his successors baseless claims and conspiracy theories have legitimised other attempts from GOP officials to toss out results.

What we saw was my successor, the former president, violate that core tenet that you count the votes and then declare a winner  and fabricate and make up a whole bunch of hooey, Mr Obama said on 28 June.

If we dont stop these kinds of efforts now, what we are going to see is more and more contested elections, he added. We are going to see a further de-legitimising of our democracy  and a breakdown of the basic agreement that has held this magnificent democratic experiment together all these years.

Mr Trump undermined the legitimacy of mail-in ballots for months, before a single ballot was cast in 2020 elections, while his legal team mounted a spurious legal bid to toss out millions of ballots in states that he lost, while his attorneys and allies amplified baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, or suggested that Democrats conspired to manipulate ballots to ensure his loss.

The former presidents own elections commission, campaign attorneys, the Justice Department, FBI and elections officials from both parties across the US have not found any evidence of widespread fraud.

Following an attempted insurrection at the US Capitol, fuelled by the false stolen election narrative, a right-wing lobby-backed campaign to protect election integrity and voter confidence helped draft legislation in Republican-controlled state legislatures across the US to make it more difficult to vote by rolling back mail-in ballot and early voting options and stripping election oversight from elections administrators and giving it to GOP lawmakers and Republican-appointed agencies.

Senate Republicans blocked a sweeping voting rights bill that sought to combat nationwide voting restrictions, and the US Department of Justice has sued the state of Georgia over its elections law for violating the Voting Rights Act.

Former First Lady Michelle Obama also urged Congress to pass legislation to combat those measures before its too late.

Mr Obama said he believes that the US Senate will attempt a new vote on the For The People Act.

President Joe Biden told the fundraiser that the sacred right to vote is under assault in ways that I havent seen in my entire career, and thats what got me involved in the first place.

Its about who gets to vote and whether the vote counts, he said. And we have a system that does both with integrity and independence. But the Republicans want to do what no political party has ever tried to do: get to decide if your vote counts. Its outrageous.
Donald Trump has lashed out at woke generals at a rally in Ohio, saying military leaders are now more focused on being politically correct than on fighting Americas enemies.

He was speaking after General Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, defended the idea of teaching critical race theory and linked white rage to the pro-Trump riot at the Capitol when he appeared in front of a congressional committee last week.

Mr Trump, speaking to a crowd in Wellington, Ohio, at his first major rally since losing office, said: I said to one of the generals, who was a good general  he wasnt a woke general. Do you notice the woke generals we have? This was a real general.

Later in his speech he said: Our generals and our admirals are now focused more on this nonsense than they are on our enemies.

Do you see these generals lately on television? They are woke. Our military will be incapable of fighting and taking orders.

We need a Republican Congress to ban critical race theory, he added.

Last week Gen Milley responded to criticism from Republicans on suggestions the military was becoming too politically correct with an unusually impassioned statement.

He said: On the issue of critical race theory, a lot of us have to get much smarter on whatever the theory is, he said.

I do think its important, actually, for those of us in uniform to be open-minded and be widely read,.

I want to understand white rage, and Im white, and I want to understand it. What is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the constitution of the United States of America, what caused that? I want to find that out.

I want to maintain an open mind here. And I do want to understand that, he added. Its important that leaders now and in the future do understand it.

His comments sparked an ongoing public feud between his defenders and conservative pundits, such as Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson, and Republican lawmakers including Matt Gaetz.

Mr Trump and General Milley have a rocky history. The general apologised for taking part in Mr Trumps stunt on 1 June 2020, when the then-president and several aides walked through Lafayette Park  where a protest by racial justice campaigners had been violently broken up by law enforcement  to St Johns Episcopalian Church. When they arrived they stood silently in front of the church, which had been damaged by fire in protests the night before, while Mr Trump held up a Bible.
Walmart has announced it will launch its own brand of insulin, aiming to cut costs for diabetics reliant on the expensive drug.

The price of insulin has skyrocketed in recent years, making it unaffordable for many suffering from diabetes. Walmart claimed that the price of its brand of insulin would be between 58 per cent and 75 per cent lower compared to other brands on the market.

The company said its insulin would cost $72.88 per vial and $85.88 per FlexPen. Walmart claimed that these prices would save users $101 per branded vial and $251 per case of branded FlexPens.

Both lawmakers and patients have harshly criticised the rising price of insulin, with some diabetics saying theyve had to ration their supply, possibly endangering their health in order to afford it.

Despite insulin having been the drug used to treat diabetes for about a century, no generic versions are available, making it much more expensive.

Three drugmakers control 99 per cent of the market  Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi. Walmart said its insulin would be manufactured by Novo Nordisk.

Walmarts statement included remarks from the chief executive officer of the American Diabetes Association, Tracey Brown, who said that the organisation encouraged all affordable solutions for dealing with the disease.

Diabetes often comes with high medical costs, estimated around $9,601 per person per year, Ms Brown said.

The JDRF, a nonprofit previously called the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, said more actions need to be taken to make sure that insulin becomes affordable for everyone.

The rising cost of insulin is a fundamental issue faced by those living with diabetes, and JDRF applauds this new effort, the group said in a statement. No one should die because they cant afford their insulin.
Joe Biden promised Israel he wouldnt allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons on his watch while warning that the US Commander in Chief doesnt need Congressional approval to drop more bombs in the Middle East.

Mr Biden rattled the sabre during his first meeting as president with Israeli officials after he was blasted by Israels outgoing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over Democrat efforts to revive the Iran nuclear deal.

The president ordered an airstrike on Iran-backed militia groups on the Iraq and Syria border region on Monday in his second military action to bypass Congresss Authorisation for Use of Military Force (AMUF).

Speaking to outgoing Israeli President Reuven Rivlin soon afterwards, Mr Biden sought to placate fears his administration would be soft on Iran as the White House seeks a Diplomatic solution to normalising relations between the two countries.

What I can say to you is that Iran will never get a nuclear weapon on my watch, as they say, Mr Biden said.

His comments came after Mr Netanyahu used his last address as Israeli prime minister to compare the Iran nuclear deal to the United Statess refusal to act at the height of the Holocaust in World War II.

The new US administration requested that I save our disagreements on the Iran nuclear deal for behind closed doors, and not share them publicly. I told them I wont act that way, Mr Netanyahu said.

And Ill tell you why. Because the lessons of history are in front of my eyes. In 1944, at the height of the Holocaust, US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt refused to bomb the railway leading to the extermination camps, and refused to bomb the gas chambers, which could have saved millions of our people, he added.

Mr Biden told his Israeli counterpart that he directed Mondays airstrikes to sites used by Iranian-backed militia groups responsible for attacks on US personnel in Iraq using authority under Article II of the Constitution. It was the same authority he cited when bombing sites used by Iran-supported militia in eastern Syria in February.

I have that authority under Article II, and even those up in the Hill who are reluctant to acknowledge thats the case, Mr Biden said.

He was citing the constitutions authority to conduct United States foreign relations and as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive, which is a departure from previous presidents seeking authorisation from Congress.

Mr Biden supported House Democratss vote to repeal the 2002 resolution that authorised the invasion of Iraq and gave the White House broad war powers following the 9/11 terror attacks more than two decades ago.

The vote, which passed 268 to 161, is seen as the first step in rolling back broad-ranging powers used for the USs campaign against the Islamic State under former President Barack Obama and more recently by Donald Trump for the drone strike launched from Baghdad International Airport that killed Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in 2020.

But Mr Bidens use of Article II of the Constitution means the presidency wouldnt require new authorisation from Congress when acting as Commander in Chief, as he wrote to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi after the airstrikes in February.

I directed this military action consistent with my responsibility to protect United States citizens both at home and abroad and in furtherance of United States national security and foreign policy interests, Mr Biden wrote.

In his White House meeting, Mr Biden said he looks forward to welcoming the new prime minister of Israel, Naftali Bennett, as part of the USs unwavering commitment to supporting Israel.

As the American press here can tell you, my commitment to Israel is, well they cant tell you anything actually theyre not supposed to, but its ironclad. Its real, and its ... its something that I often say if there werent an Israel wed have to invent one, Mr Biden said.

And so this includes ... were, you know, were committed to unwavering commitment to your self-defence and today were going to be discussing a broad range of challenges, including Iran.
The British Embassy in the United Arab Emirates has been met with a backlash online after it hoisted a rainbow flag at its Abu Dhabi residence and spoke out in favour of Pride Month.

Despite its attempts to be seen as a voice of liberal Islam in the Middle East, the UAE still criminalises homosexuality.

So when the British Embassy in the UAE on Monday voiced its support for LGBT+ rights on social media, complete with pictures of a rainbow flag flying from its residence alongside the Union Jack, criticism swiftly followed.

Hundreds of comments from conservative Emiratis decried the move as unacceptable, disrespectful or insulting, while some suggested it was racist, and many urged the embassy to remove the flag immediately.

Many spoke of it being against Islam, or an example of the UK attempting to impose their views on another country. One comment likened the move to if a British consulate in the UK raised a flag of a swastika. The few who spoke out in favour of the embassy were primarily Western expats.

Despite the overwhelming opposition to the show of support for LGBT+ rights, some Emirati analysts believe the move comes as the UAE prepares to decriminalise homosexuality.

A government source, who asked not to be named, said homosexuality was expected to be decriminalised before the end of the year, potentially before Expo2020 Dubai, which begins in October. He said the government often drip feeds potential law changes on social media or in the public domain before they come into effect, to canvas the opinion of locals.

It was also unlikely that such a prominent public entity, one well aware of local laws, would risk falling out of favour with the Emirati government over such a bold move. Embassies, however, are not bound by local laws.

Emirati political scientist Abdulkhaleq Abdulla understood the embassy had sought permission to hoist the flag as a show of solidarity to the LGBT+ community.

They did inform the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation. They said: Look, were doing this because we have a stand on LGBT rights. I think the answer was: Its better for you not to do it, but then this is your sovereign right. So they did not get a green light, but I think they got a yellow light.

Abdulla labelled the move bad taste and one that had deliberately aggravated people. However, he said the negativity surrounding it had come from the most conservative members of Emirati society  representing about one third of the overall population.

Sixty per cent of the people dont give a damn about it, whether the British put up the flag or not. This has come from the vocal minority rather than from the silent majority, he said.

The US Embassy also flew a rainbow flag in Abu Dhabi this year, but did not draw the same level of criticism.

Abdulla believed legalising homosexuality might now be in the pipeline.

The UAE is as liberal as any [country] and the government will maybe find the right time to say: Everybody who wants to be homosexual, its up to you. Im not going to sanctify it, marriage-wise, but if you want to practise it, go ahead and be my guest.

The UAEs recent legalisation of cross-dressing was believed to be the first step in a process that would pave the way for LGBT+ rights.

The country quietly amended the laws around cross-dressing late in 2020, amid a raft of momentous legal reforms that decriminalised alcohol, suicide and co-habitation for unmarried couples. It is now only illegal to cross-dress if a man is doing so to gain access to facilities used by women.

These are big steps, not baby steps, Abdulla said.

This is a country that is very revolutionary compared to its surroundings. The things that the UAE has been doing are pioneering and are decisions not to the liking of many countries around us.

The world is changing, and the emirates of today are not the emirates of yesterday. The UAE must adapt to the transformations.

The British Embassy in the UAE did not respond to questions.
Malta has pledged to give people aged 65 and over 100 to stay there in a bid to lure back holidaymakers.

The aim is to attract older travellers for longer stays, with only those visiting the island nation for 15 days or more qualifying for the incentive.

Rather than being given cash, eligible travellers will receive 100 (around 85) of vouchers to spend, which can be redeemed at participating restaurants, hotels, shops and service outlets.

Set up by the Malta Tourism Authority, the scheme has a total budget of 1m (856,000), and vouchers will be available for those holidaying between 18 October and 19 December 2021.

Its not the first cash-style incentive scheme that the tourism-dependent country has launched to revive its struggling travel industry during the pandemic.

In April, the Malta Tourism Authority announced visitors could get up to 200 (170) towards their accommodation for stays of three nights or more.

Tourists staying at participating five-star hotels would get 100 (85) towards the cost of their stay from the Malta Tourism Authority, with the hotel matching the amount, equalling 200 (170) off in total.

Four-star guests would get a total of 150 (128) off, while those at three-stars were promised a 100 (85) incentive.

Those staying on the island of Gozo, 25 minutes off the coast of Malta by ferry, would get an extra 10 per cent off their booking.

The scheme is aimed at putting Malta's hotels in a very competitive position as international tourism restarts, tourism minister Clayton Bartolo told Reuters at the time.

With Covid rates far lower than the UKs and an impressively speedy vaccination programme, Malta was tipped as a dead cert to join the British governments travel green list at the last review.

But Malta was not added to the slim list of countries from where travellers arriving in the UK need not quarantine, and remained amber, along with most of the world.

Holidaymakers returning from Malta are required to self-isolate for 10 days and take two PCR tests on days two and eight of quarantine.

The UK, meanwhile, is on Maltas amber list, meaning travellers need not quarantine on arrival but are required to present a negative Covid PCR test certificate before boarding a flight to the archipelago.
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Police discovered the charred body of a 27-year-old techie from Hyderabad. The main suspect in her murder is her husband, who is absconding, as per India Today.

The mystery behind how the body came to be where it was got to be known after police checked the CCTV footage and saw the main accused dump the corpse. He was helped by the cab driver.

India Today

On being questioned, the driver identified the victim as Bhubaneshwari (27) from Ramasamundram in Chittoor and a software engineer who worked in Hyderabad. Her husband is Srikant Reddy of Kadapa and they were married in 2019. They have an 18-month old daughter.

After Srikant lost his job in the pandemic, they moved to Tirupati. He got into depression and drank a lot, resulting in frequent fights with his wife.

iStock

On the night between June 22-23, in a fit of rage he killed her, dumped her body in a suitcase and burned it. He also told the family that she died due to the Delta variant and the hospital had cremated her remains.

His lie was exposed by the cops. He is on the run and the police are on the hunt.


The Uttrakhand government on Tuesday announced that the Char Dham yatra which was scheduled to start on Thursday has been suspended.

The order came a day after the Uttrakhand High Court issued a stay on the government order to permit the pilgrimage to the residents of three districts.

BCCL

Last week the government had decided to partially open the Char Dham yatra for locals in limited numbers from July 1. Initially, it was decided, the yatra would be opened for residents of Chamoli, Uttarkashi, and Rudraprayag districts with a cap on the number of pilgrims to visit the temples in four pilgrimage sites in Badrinath, Kedarnath, Yamunotri, and Gangotri.

The Tirath Singh Rawat government had initially suspended the pilgrimage amid the COVID-19 concerns but later decided to allow it in a limited manner.

File Photo

This was challenged in the High Court which ruled that the pilgrimage should be suspended and cited the COVID-19 guidelines violations during the Kumbh Mela in Haridwar earlier this year.

The Rawat government which took office just before the Kumbh went ahead with the yatra, which saw millions of pilgrims converge there from across India.

Though a COVID-19 negative certificate was mandatory and SOPs for pilgrims were in place, it was hardly enforced.

AFP

Later it also emerged that more than one lakh fake COVID-19 negative certificates were issued by private labs to visitors.

The government is also facing accusations of a cover-up of COVID-19 deaths in the state.

Last week, the HC came down heavily on the state government for what it termed as a "totally vague, sham and misleading" audit report on COVID-19 deaths in the state, which it had ordered.

AP

The court reprimanded the government and said that the reason for the deaths due to COVID-19 was the incomplete preparations by the government.

Earlier this month the Uttarakhand government had cancelled the holy dip on the occasion of Ganga Dussehra in Haridwar.
In a shocking incident, a 28-year-old woman from Thane claimed that she was administered three doses of COVID-19 vaccine within 15 minutes at a vaccination centre in Anandnagar on Friday.

The incident allegedly took place on Friday when a woman along with her husband went to the vaccination center to get the first dose of vaccine. After the vaccination, the woman told her husband that the attendant at the vaccination centre administered the vaccine thrice to her. The husband then raised the issue with the local corporator.

PTI

Thane Mayor's statement

Following this, the civic body provided support and monitored his wifes health. The Thane Municipal Corporation (TMC) on Monday formed an inquiry committee to probe into allegations of the woman.

We have formed a committee to conduct an inquiry into the matter and have also provided necessary medical and other help to the woman and her husband. I am continuously in touch with the womans husband. There is no clarity yet if three shots were administered or not but there are bruises from needle injection, said Naresh Mhaske, the Mayor of Thane Municipal Corporation.

PTI

Victim didn't file complaint

The woman, who preferred to remain anonymous, said she was not interested in filing a complaint as her husband worked for the local civic body.

The womans husband said his spouse was not familiar with the vaccination process as she was getting a Covid-19 vaccine for the first time. "She had a fever on the day she got back-to-back shots, but it subsided the next morning. She is doing fine now," the husband said.



TMC medical health officer Dr Khushboo Tawre told India Today, "A team of doctors went to the victim's house and found her in good health. We have formed a committee to investigate the matter."

Getty

Politics galore over negligence

In light of the incident, a delegation of BJP leaders cornered Thane Municipal Commissioner Bipin Sharma and slammed him for negligence by the vaccination centre staff.

Speaking to India Today, BJP MLA Niranjan Davkhare said, "How did such a grave oversight happen? How did the staff members not notice that the same woman was vaccinated thrice? We have demanded strict action against those responsible."

The civic body officials are now probing the incident and strict action will be taken against those found guilty, assured Thane Mayor Naresh Mhaske.
"The central government must develop and put in place a portal for registering unorganised and migrant workers, and start the process, not later than July 31," said a 2-judge bench of justices Ashok Bhushan and MR Shah. "Lackadaisical attitude by the Ministry of Labour and Employment is unpardonable," the court added. "The centre's delay in not putting up a portal on unorganised workers and migrants shows it is not alive to the concerns of migrant workers and it is strongly disapproved," it said. Read more

Just Days Before Scheduled Start, Uttarakhand Suspends Char Dham Yatra Following An HC Order

PTI

The Uttrakhand government on Tuesday announced that the Char Dham yatra which was scheduled to start on Thursday has been suspended. The order came a day after the Uttrakhand High Court issued a stay on the government order to permit the pilgrimage to the residents of three districts. Last week the government had decided to partially open the Char Dham yatra for locals in limited numbers from July 1. Read more



Over 34K Children Tested COVID Positive In Assam Since April, 5755 Kids Were Under 5 Years

PTI

According to Assam Health Department, 34,066 children below the age of 18 years have tested positive for COVID-19 during the second wave of the pandemic in the state. This accounts for 12 per cent of the total cases reported since April this year. A total of 5,755 cases are children below five years whereas 28,851 are between 6 and 18 years. Read more



More Than 50% Kids Have Antibodies; 3rd Wave May Not Be Too Large In Mumbai

BCCL

A paediatric sero-survey conducted in Mumbai has shown that 51.18% of those below the age of 18 in Mumbai have antibodies against coronavirus disease (Covid-19). The survey was conducted by civic body-run BYL Nair Hospital and Kasturba Molecular Diagnostic Laboratory (KMDL) between April 1 to June 15. The study was done on the background of imminent danger of the third wave to the pediatric population. Read more

Thane Woman Claims She Got 3 Vaccine Doses In 15 Minutes; Probe Ordered

PTI

In a shocking incident, a 28-year-old woman from Thane claimed that she was administered three doses of COVID-19 vaccine within 15 minutes at a vaccination centre in Anandnagar on Friday. The incident allegedly took place on Friday when a woman along with her husband went to the vaccination center to get the first dose of vaccine. After the vaccination, the woman told her husband that the attendant at the vaccination centre administered the vaccine thrice to her. Read more


Veerabhadran Ramanathan, Indian American climate scientist at U.C. San Diego, is set to receive the Blue Planet Prize, an international environmental award. He is seen above speaking at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit, on Oct. 13, 2007 in New Delhi, India. (Sanjeev Verma/Hindustan Times via Getty Images)
Real-time social media posts from local businesses and organizations across Northern Virginia, powered by Friends2Follow. To add your business to the stream, email cfields@insidenova.com or click on the green button below.
Local Twin Cities artists Enzyrose, Eyenga Bokamba, Noah Lawrence-Holder, LeShon Lee, and Meadow Gillispie, talk about their reaction to the murder of George Floyd, the trial of Derek Chauvin, and life as a black artist during this time.
The Rhode Island Senate approved legalizing recreational marijuana use for adults, marking the first time either chamber of the state Legislature has voted on a bill to legalize cannabis.

The proposal was introduced by longtime proponent Senator Joshua Miller, a Cranston Democrat who chairs the chambers Health and Human Services Committee. It now heads to the state House of Representatives.

House Speaker Joe Shekarchi, a Warwick Democrat, has said the Democratic-controlled Legislature will likely end up taking up the question on how to structure a legal marijuana industry in a special session later this year.

Governor Daniel McKee has his own plan for legalizing, taxing and regulating marijuana, but legislative leaders didnt include it in their proposed $13.1 billion state budget for the coming fiscal year.

Millers proposal would impose a 20% tax on marijuana sales, create an independent cannabis control commission to license and oversee marijuana operations, and allow for home cultivation. It would also create a Cannabis Equity Fund to help marijuana businesses from disadvantaged communities.

McKees proposal would have the state Department of Business Regulation oversee the industry and ban home growing marijuana, among other differences.

Eighteen states and Washington, D.C. have legalized marijuana for adults over the age of 21, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Cannabis Politics
The U.S. Department of Labor has filed suit against a Pennsylvania paper products manufacturing company and its owner after they fired a worker for raising safety concerns and asking several times for safety gloves to operate a shredder and baler. Prior to the employee suffering injury while operating the machine, their supervisor denied multiple requests for protective equipment.

The department filed a lawsuit against Midvale Paper Box Co. Inc. and owner David Frank in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

On Oct. 5, 2017, a compliance officer with the departments Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) conducted a safety inspection at Midvale in response to a complaint alleging, among other things, that the company failed to provide personal protective equipment and made employees unjam machines without implementing required lockout/tagout procedures.

The worker, whose hand injury occurred after the company denied the first request for safety gloves, asked twice more after the inspection but the company denied the requests.

The department alleges Midvale Paper Box Co. Inc. later terminated the worker in retaliation for multiple requests for gloves, participating in OSHAs safety investigation and their mistaken belief that the worker filed the safety complaint that initiated the investigation.

Employers who retaliate against workers for raising valid safety concerns are breaking the law and creating an unsafe work environment for all of their workers, said OSHA Regional Administrator Michael Rivera in Philadelphia in a U.S. Department of Labor press release. Employees have a right to a safe and healthful workplace and must never fear that reporting their concerns will cost them their jobs.

The company is currently contesting citations issued because of the October 2017 OSHA inspection. The agency assessed a proposed penalty of more than $200,000 for nine workplace safety violations, including one serious, two willful and six repeat violations.

The employee filed a complaint with OSHA after their firing. OSHA concurred, concluding Midvale Paper Box Co. and David Frank violated Section 11(c)(1) of the OSH Act when they terminated the employee for engaging in protected activities.

The departments complaint seeks to:

Prohibit defendants, their officers, agents, servants and employees from violating the provisions of Section 11 (c) of the act.

Order defendants to reinstate and pay the complainant for all past and future lost wages that resulted from the termination.

Order defendants to post for no less than 60 days a copy of the decree entered in this case and a notice that the defendants will not discriminate against any employee for engaging in activities protected by Section 11(c) of the act.

OSHA enforces the whistleblower provisions of the OSH Act and 24 other statutes protecting employees who report violations of various airline, commercial motor carrier, consumer product, environmental, financial reform, food safety, motor vehicle safety, healthcare reform, nuclear, pipeline, public transportation agency, railroad, maritime and securities laws.

Source: U.S. Department of Labor

Topics Lawsuits Manufacturing
BRUSSELS  The European Commission plans to update its rules on worker safety to reflect the shift millions employees made to working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic and to reflect the anticipated digital and green recovery.

During the pandemic, nearly 40% of workers began to work remotely full time, reducing social contact and increasing their use of IT equipment as meetings and gatherings went online.

For many, the concept of a traditional workplace is disappearing fast. While that brings opportunities, it also brings challenges and risks  health, psychological and social, Commission Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis told a news conference on Monday.

Read more: UK Financial Services Sector Cautions About Legislating Work-from-Home Options

The Commission said it will review EU rules on workplace safety, from emergency exits to ventilation and use of workstations and screens, and will update limits on exposure to insulator asbestos and for lead and cobalt used in renewable energy technology and battery production.

In guidelines to protect almost 170 million EU workers over the 2021-2027 period, it will also seek to produce recommendations on mental health at work before the end of 2022.

Even before COVID-19 struck, mental health problems affected about 84 million people in the EU, with stress contributing to around half of all lost working days, the Commission said.

Work-related accidents and illnesses cost the EU economy over 3.3% of gross domestic product per year, the Commission said. It said estimates showed that for every euro invested in occupational health and safety, the return for the employer is around twice as much as employees take less sick leave.

The Commission said it also wanted trade unions and employers organizations to negotiate an agreement on asbestos and chemical agents that can cause cancer and respiratory problems. If they did not signal a wish to do so, the EU executive would put forward a proposal in 2022.

(Reporting by Philip Blenkinsop; editing by Barbara Lewis)

Related:

Topics COVID-19 Commercial Lines Business Insurance Europe
The European Union gave its formal blessing to a decision guaranteeing the free flow of data between the bloc and the UK.

The European Commission, the EUs executive arm, on Monday adopted so-called adequacy decisions that will allow companies to ship data between the EU and its former member state without fears of violating the blocs strict privacy rules.

This is a very big deal for any businesses operating in the UK, as it avoids complications that could have interfered with data flows from the EU to the UK, said Rafi Azim-Khan, a data-protection lawyer at Pillsbury in London.

As the EU and UK were still locked in talks in December over the final details of a historical post-Brexit trade deal, EU officials found a six-month interim solution to guarantee the free flow of data until the adequacy decisions were completed.

To address concerns the UK could in future move away from the EUs robust privacy protection rules, the commission added a so-called sunset clause, which leads to a review of the data transfer accord every four years.

We have listened very carefully to the concerns expressed by the European Parliament in particular on the possibility of future divergence from our standards in the UKs privacy framework, said Vera Jourova, a commission vice-president who played a key role in the establishment of the privacy rules, known by their acronym GDPR.

We have significant safeguards and if anything changes on the UK side, we will intervene.

Photograph: A UK national flag flies beside European Union flags outside the Berlaymont building in Brussels, Belgium, on Wednesday, Dec. 9, 2020. Photo credit: Geert Vanden Wijngaert/Bloomberg.

Copyright 2021 Bloomberg.

Topics Europe Privacy
Swiss Res iptiQ and ImmoScout24, Germanys leading online real estate platform, are launching a loss-of-rent insurance product, which provides private landlords with protection against the financial uncertainties that can arise from tenancy agreements.

As an insurance partner, iptiQ offers ImmoScout24 customers coverage for the complete or partial loss of up to six months rent (including additional costs) or a maximum amount of 10,000 (US$11,927), with annual premiums starting at 40.90 (US$48.78).

Not Every Insurtech Is a Startup: How Swiss Re Delivers Tech Solutions Swiss Re Builds Risk Scoring System, Aiming to Reward Safe Cars with Lower Premiums

Available in the German market, the product can be taken out with just a few clicks and is easily managed online. The insurance is valid for one year from the start of a new tenancy and can be canceled on a daily basis.

While ImmoScout24 acts as a registered agent for the product, all insurance-related aspects are covered by iptiQ, from the user journey to the issuing of policies, and the management of contracts to the settlement and payment of claims. This allows both partners to focus on their respective areas of expertise.

With ImmoScout24, we have found the ideal partner in Germany to offer customers tailor-made household insurance products online precisely when it matters. Thanks to the seamless integration of our product into ImmoScout24s digital ecosystem, customers can insure themselves against the risk of rent-related losses directly online and throughout the rental process, commented Andreas Schertzinger, CEO of iptiQ EMEA P&C.

The digital ImmoScout24 loss of rent insurance means that we can provide private landlords with an innovative service that makes renting out a property safer for them. Alongside our cooperation partner iptiQ, we can help make renting even easier, while minimizing the impact of losses, said Ralf Weitz, managing director of ImmoScout24.

This is particularly relevant if tenants experience difficulties meeting rent payments as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic  and other factors, of course, added Weitz.

About iptiQ

Swiss Res iptiQ is a digital platform and white-label provider of property & casualty and life & health insurance. Its B2B2C business model, combined with the iptiQ platform, enable brands like ImmoScout24 to offer new digital insurance solutions to their customers. iptiQ aims to make insurance more accessible and affordable.

Source: Swiss Re

Topics Profit Loss Swiss Re Germany
Markel Corp. announced that Simon Wilson will become the next president of Markel International, a wholly owned subsidiary. He will succeed William Stovin who has led the Markel International division since 2008.

The transition is part of a planned succession that will fully take effect no later than Jan. 1, 2022, pending regulatory approval.

Wilson joined Markel in 2010 to spearhead international business development. He was the primary architect of the National Markets division with operations in Europe and Canada, which profitably grew from $121 million to $402 million in annual gross written premium over the last decade.

Wilson currently serves as the managing executive of Global Strategy for Markel. Prior to joining Markel, he led the Lloyds Asia platform in Singapore.

Wilson will work from the London office and report to Robert Cox, president and chief operating officer of Insurance Operations for Markel. Stovin will remain with the company in an advisory capacity into next year.

Stovin joined Markel as part of the acquisition of Terra Nova Holdings Ltd. in 2000. The deal was part of a long-term strategy to expand Markels footprint beyond North America to become a global player in specialty insurance. Toward that end, Stovin played a leading role in helping Markel expand to more than 60 insurance offices in 16 different countries. Under Stovins leadership, gross written premiums profitably increased at a compound annual growth rate of roughly seven percent more than doubling the size of the division.

Our global expansion was one of the most important decisions in Markels history, and William deserves significant credit for making it a success, commented Cox.

His disciplined approach to profitably growing our wholesale business while also establishing and expanding our international retail operations has laid the foundation for tremendous growth in the future, and Im confident that Simon will leverage this foundation to successfully lead our international operations in achieving our profitable growth goals, he added.

Source: Markel Corp.
The following international People Moves provides details of appointments at reinsurer Peak Re and two brokers, TigerRisk and Oneglobal.

A summary of these new hires follows here.

Peak Reinsurance Co. AG, the wholly owned European subsidiary of the Hong Kong-based global reinsurer, Peak Reinsurance Co. Ltd., announced the appointment of Karlheinz Render as senior vice president Europe, effective Aug. 1, 2021.

Render will develop Peak Res market position in Europe by leveraging off the foundations established by Peak Re, namely in the property/casualty markets of the DACH region (which comprises Germany, Austria and Switzerland).

Based on his extensive experience in client markets and underwriting in the reinsurance industry, Render will be responsible for developing and maintaining client relationships in the region by providing tailored solutions to support clients growth aspirations. Render succeeds Emmanuel Thommen, former senior vice president at Peak Re AG, who has announced his retirement.

Render will report to Matteo Cussigh, chief executive officer of Peak Re. He will be based in Zurich.

Render will join Peak Re AG from Swiss Re, where he served in various client management and underwriting roles over nearly three decades. Most recently, he led Swiss Res large clients division in Germany and was accountable for the inforce and new business development of large German P/C clients. He also served on the leadership team for the Northern, Central and Eastern European P/C markets, with a proven track record in expanding P/C treaty portfolio. Previously, Render held various responsibilities, including client management and underwriting in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Spain, Portugal, and Latin America.

We are delighted to welcome Mr. Render to join our international client markets team. Expanding Peak Res franchise in Europe is a key building block in our global diversification and growth strategy, commented Matteo Cussigh, chief executive officer of Peak Re AG.

***

TigerRisk Partners LLC, the Stamford, Conn.-based risk, capital and strategic adviser to the global insurance and reinsurance industry, announced that Oliver Denbigh has joined its London Retro practice as partner.

Denbigh has joined TigerRisk from Aon, where he was a senior broker with the Non-Marine Specialty team. In this role, he worked on property retro, cat and risk on direct and facultative (D&F) and major global clients. Prior to that, Denbigh was at Willis Re, where he specialized in multi-territory property cat, and worked on international business across a number of classes of business.

Following the announcement last year of his appointment, TigerRisk now confirms that Denbigh has taken up his new position and is now part of the Retro team. Reporting to Alex Bridges, head of Retro, Denbigh is based in London.

***

London-based Oneglobal Broking announced the launch of its Special Risks team led by Alistair Fox, reporting to Group CEO Mike Reynolds. His appointment is effective Sept. 1, 2021.

Fox had a distinguished military career, rising to the rank of colonel in the army and being awarded the MBE (Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) for services to counter terrorism and OBE (Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) for his service in Syria. Latterly he has brought his military expertise to the insurance industry having previously been head of Security Risks at Price Forbes and prior to this as deputy chief executive, Credit, Political & Security Division at JLT.

Oneglobals Special Risks team delivers client-centric bespoke solutions in the areas of political, security and terrorist risks.

Topics Aon Swiss Re
As South Dakota anticipates a state Supreme Court decision on whether recreational marijuana will become legal in July, state lawmakers and city governments are moving forward with their own pot plans.

Officials across the state have warmed to the idea of legalization since voters passed a constitutional amendment in November legalizing marijuana for adults. Some cities want to own and operate recreational marijuana dispensaries, a lobbyist for municipalities told a committee of state lawmakers studying adult-use recreational marijuana on June 22. And even if the Supreme Court keeps the drug from being legalized, state lawmakers are planning to craft a legalization bill ahead of next years legislative session.

As it stands, the voter-passed law will not take effect on July 1 because a state circuit court judge struck it down in February, reasoning that it violated a requirement that constitutional amendments deal with just one subject and would have created broad changes to state government. An appeal to that ruling from marijuana legalization advocates is being weighed by the state Supreme Court.

State lawmakers have been in a holding pattern as the legal battle has played out.

Republican Rep. Hugh Bartels, who is the chair of the Legislatures Adult-Use Marijuana Study Subcommittee, said the Supreme Courts ruling will largely determine the job of the committee. If marijuana gets the go-ahead from justices, lawmakers will focus on cleaning up state law to accommodate pot and study its implications on issues such as property taxes and driving laws. If pot legalization is struck down, Bartels said the committee would focus on writing a proposal to legalize pot next year.

He said the bill would be a good, center of the road proposal that would look to avoid some of the pitfalls the constitutional amendment suffered, though he acknowledged the bill would not be a sure bet in the Republican-dominated Legislature.

During the 2020 election, 54% of voters passed the constitutional amendment legalizing pot. A separate ballot measure legalizing medical marijuana was even more popular, passing with 70% of the vote.

Gov. Kristi Noem has led the effort to stop recreational marijuana legalization, bringing the lawsuit challenging its constitutionality and calling it a bad decision for the state.

But Yvonne Taylor, the executive director of the South Dakota Municipal League, told lawmakers that cities are seeing the potential financial benefit of marijuana legalization. She proposed allowing cities to own and operate pot dispensaries as a way for local communities to reap some of the profits.

The advent of recreational marijuana is going to bring in a lot of money and a lot of outside interests, she said.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Legislation Cannabis South Dakota
Three journalists with Al Jazeera who were tear-gassed during a protest in Ferguson, Missouri, after Michael Browns death in 2014 have settled a lawsuit with the county whose SWAT team fired the tear gas.

St. Charles County agreed to pay $280,000, according to the law firm Lathrop GPM, which represented the journalists.

The St. Louis suburb of Ferguson became a focal point for the racial injustice movement after 18-year-old Brown, who was Black, was fatally shot by a white police officer during a street confrontation on Aug. 9, 2014. The officer, Darren Wilson, was not charged with a crime but resigned in November 2014.

The shooting led to months of protests that drew media from around the world. The Al Jazeera America journalists  correspondent Ash-har Quraishi, producer Marla Cichowski and photojournalist Sam Winslade  were preparing for a live broadcast when the St. Charles County SWAT team officers fired tear gas toward them. Those officers were among several from the St. Louis region who were brought to Ferguson during the demonstrations.

The law firm said video evidence contradicted police claims that tear gas was used in response to protesters throwing bottles and rocks at officers. The firm said several videos showed that there were no protesters in the area and no one was throwing anything at police.

St. Charles County spokeswoman Mary Enger said a SWAT team deputy fired the canister to clear an area near what he did not know at the time was an Al Jazeera news crew. She said the county and the deputy continue to maintain that the deputy exercised proper judgment in firing a single tear gas canister during a period of unprecedented public disorder in the region.

Bernie Rhodes, the attorney for the journalists, said the award was much larger than other settlements involving journalists in Ferguson because those settlements were reached before George Floyds death in Minneapolis in May 2020, which was captured on video. Former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin, who is white, faces sentencing Friday after being convicted in April in the death of Floyd, who was Black.

The jurys verdict finding Chauvin guilty of George Floyds murder represents a turning point in America: jurors will no longer rely on law enforcements version of what happened, especially where there is video that affirmatively disproves the police, Rhodes said in a news release.

Topics Missouri
Jurors on New Yorks Long Island are set to determine whether a group of opioid makers and drug distributors created a public health crisis and should pay for it, in a bellwether trial for lawsuits filed by communities across the U.S.

Endo International Plc, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. and McKesson Corp. are among the companies that New York Attorney General Letitia James and Nassau and Suffolk counties say made billions of dollars selling the highly addictive pills while illegally marketing them or turning a blind eye to suspiciously large orders. Opening arguments in the Central Islip, New York, trial are scheduled to start Tuesday.

The stakes are high for the industry. One defendant, Johnson & Johnson, agreed on Saturday to pay $263 million to settle its share of the case. Analysts predict companies eventually will have to spend tens of billions of dollars combined to resolve thousands of lawsuits over their role in the U.S. opioid epidemic. But so far, only one trial has been concluded, when a judge in Oklahoma ruled against a single company, J&J. And legal experts say a jury may be more sympathetic to damage claims.

The New York trial will be the first time youll have a group of regular people, who have likely been effected by the opioid crisis, deciding whether to hold these companies accountable, said Elizabeth Burch, a University of Georgia law professor whos been following the litigation. It will certainly be a different vibe from the judge-only cases.

Suffolk and Nassau counties are seeking reimbursement for what the local governments spent dealing with the fallout from overdoses and addictions. The trial in Central Islip will be used as a test for billions of dollars in claims made by other municipalities in New York, as well as an indicator of what may lie ahead for the drug makers, distributors and pharmacies in other states.

The eyes of the world are on New York as we prepare to lay bare the callous and deadly pattern of misconduct these companies perpetrated as they dealt dangerous and addictive opioids across our state, James said Friday in an emailed statement.

Read More: Opioid Distributors Sold Mountain of Pills, Lawyer Tells Judge

Suffolk County had New Yorks fifth-highest rate of opioid-related overdose deaths in 2017, the Fiscal Policy Institute said in a 2019 report. Neighboring Nassau, also a plaintiff, ranked 18th. Economic losses from the epidemic topped $16 billion for the communities over two years starting in 2016, researchers found.

The companies argue the epidemic wasnt caused by prescription painkillers but by illegal drugs  including synthetic opioids such as fentanyl  brought into the U.S. by drug cartels and criminal gangs. In court filings, they said they produced, transported and sold opioids only to fill doctors prescriptions and had no control over abuse of their products.

Our actions relating to the marketing and promotion of these important prescription pain medications were appropriate and responsible, J&J spokesman Jake Sargent said. J&Js Jansen unit worked with regulators to provide appropriate information about their risks and benefits  everything youd expect a responsible company to do.

Drug distributor AmerisourceBergen, in a statement Friday, said it is looking forward to sharing with the Court the facts about our role in the supply chain and our long-standing commitment to fulfilling our regulatory responsibilities and doing our part to combat the opioid crisis.

A six-person jury will hear the evidence at a trial expected to last four months. Theyll determine liability, and then, if necessary, another jury will decide any damages.

Advocates for opioid victims will be watching the trial closely. Almost 500,000 Americans were killed by the opioid crisis in the past two decades, eating up hundreds of billions in tax dollars.

States, local governments and Indian tribes have filed more than 3,000 suits against the drug industry. Distributors McKesson, AmerisourceBergen and Cardinal Health Inc. propose paying $21 billion to wipe out their opioid liability, along with a $5 billion offer by J&J.

While some local governments say those proposals arent financially substantial enough, the J&J deal with New York on Saturday may be good news for the global settlement offer by the company and the three distributors, said Holly Froum, a Bloomberg Intelligence litigation analyst.

Read More: Burned in Tobacco Deal, Cities in Drug Fight Target McKinsey

Drug makers alone could face liabilities of $57 billion, estimates RBC Capital Markets analyst Daniel Busby, who said the New York trial signals a broader pickup in U.S. opioid litigation as Covid-19 vaccinations help courts return to normal operations. In California, three counties and the city of Oakland are seeking $50 billion in damages for themselves.

These trials could increase the impetus for a global settlement, or at the very least, better inform manufacturer liability estimates as trial decisions are rendered, Busby said in a June 4 note to investors.

For New York to win its case, the state will need to spotlight how companies across the opioid supply chain made billions while downplaying the risks and ignoring red flags about dubious orders, said Richard Ausness, a University of Kentucky law professor who teaches about mass torts.

They need to break the case into manageable chunks so jurors dont get confused, but this is the first time theyll be able to have everybody in their gun-sights and can lay out the whole sordid tale, Ausness said.

Some pharmacy providers are also part of the case, and Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. remains a defendant in the Long Island trial this week. But last week, Walmart Inc., CVS Health Corp. and Rite Aid Corp. persuaded Judge Jerry Garguilo to remove them from the trial. The claims against those companies by the state and counties will be pursued separately.

In a statement Friday, Walgreens said it never manufactured or marketed opioids, and never sold opioids to the pain clinics, internet pharmacies or the pill mills that fueled the opioid crisis. Prior to 2014, we delivered opioids only to our own pharmacies, and the only place we ever sold opioids was at the pharmacy counter, when presented with a valid prescription written by a licensed physician for a legitimate medical need.

The trial isnt the first for the industry. A judge is currently trying claims in California against drug makers, and another is hearing a case in West Virginia against distributors. The only other trial so far was in Oklahoma, where a judge ordered J&J in 2019 to pay $465 million to the state to beef up policing and treatment programs. His ruling is on appeal.

Read More: Firms Lost Billions Over Opioids. CEOs Got Bonuses Anyway.

The Long Island jurors wont likely be strangers to the epidemic.

Over the last seven years, Ive been to more funerals than I can count, said Jeffrey Reynolds, head of the Family and Childrens Association, which provides drug-rehabilitation programs in Nassau County. The public sector has done what it can do, so now its time for the companies that made billions off these drugs to step up.

While prescription opioids and heroin no longer fuel the epidemic, most abusers are now using cheaper synthetic versions, Reynolds said. The police are finding fentanyl being combined into a lot of different illegally produced drugs, including anti-depressants such as Xanax, he said.

Among the Nassau County polices anti-opioid initiatives is Operation Natalie, named for a Long Island teenager who died of a heroin overdose in 2008 after getting hooked on opioids prescribed for pain treatment. The program targets drug dealers and includes a public-education component.

Just throwing money at this problem wont solve it, Victor Ciappa, Natalies father, said in an interview. But if this trial can provide more resources for rehabilitation programs, then maybe we can help other families avoid the tragedy of losing a child.

Copyright 2021 Bloomberg.

Topics Drugs
Pathpoint, a digital excess and surplus lines insurance brokerage, reported that it has raised $30 million in funding.

Investors include Caffeinated Capital, which led the round, and repeat investors including SciFi VC, Founders Fund, and Chubb. Hiscox and other carriers also participated.

Launched in late 2020, Pathpoint offers retail agents property/casualty products from 10 carriers through its online platform. With one submission, agents can find out which carriers can quote the risk and bind those quotes online.

More and more business has been conducted through the E&S market in recent years, yet its one of the key segments of commercial insurance that has not been effectively digitized in any meaningful way, said Alex Bargmann, co-founder and CEO of Pathpoint.

He said Pathpoint gives retail agents a fast and transparent way to access, bind and service E&S products online.

Retail agents receive their commission for every risk bound on Pathpoint, and there is no cost for them to use the platform.

The company said the proceeds from the funding will be used to further invest in software engineering and in growing distribution.

Pathpoint is licensed across the U.S. and is a coverholder at Lloyds of London. It distributes admitted and non-admitted products across multiple lines of business to U.S.-based retail agents.

The San Francisco firm raised $6 million in its debut in 2020.

Related:

Topics Agencies Excess Surplus Funding
More than a year and a half after Louisiana state troopers were captured on body camera video brutalizing Black motorist Ronald Greene during his fatal arrest, police brass are still trying to blame his death on a car crash at the end of a high-speed chase.

Police officials quietly commissioned a study late in 2020 into the role the crash could have played in Greenes 2019 death, part of a behind-the-scenes bid to reduce the agencys legal liability, according to internal documents obtained by The Associated Press.

The effort came despite the footage showing troopers stunning, punching and dragging the unarmed man  and one troopers admission that he bashed him in the head with a flashlight, a use of deadly force not previously reported.

The documents, which also detail how four troopers grossly exaggerated Greenes threat to justify their uses of force, provide the fullest account yet of the deadly May 10, 2019, arrest. And they show the extent to which top brass and troopers alike sought to cover up or explain away actions in a case that is now the focus of a federal civil rights investigation.

Its horrific, Greenes mother, Mona Hardin, told the AP. Theres nothing they can say to change, to warp, whats shown. I dont care which way they want to coat it, what different colors of paint they want to layer on this mess  they cant erase it.

Greene, a 49-year-old barber, failed to pull over for a traffic violation and led troopers on a midnight chase across rural northern Louisiana at speeds of up to 115 mph before his car spun to a stop on a roadside near Monroe.

Troopers told Greenes relatives hours later that he died on impact after crashing into a tree, an explanation called into question by photos of Greenes body on a gurney showing his bruised and battered face, a hospital report noting he had two stun gun prongs in his back, and the fact that his SUV had only minor damage.

Even Louisiana State Police appeared to back off the crash explanation later when they issued a one-page statement saying only that Greene struggled with troopers who were trying to arrest him and that he died on his way to the hospital.

The truth about what really happened began to emerge in May when the AP obtained and published body camera video showing troopers converging on Greenes car, repeatedly jolting him with a stun gun, wrestling him to the ground, putting him in a chokehold and punching him in the face, all while he apologizes and wails for mercy. A trooper can later be seen dragging a shackled Greene facedown and then leaving him unattended in a prone position for more than nine minutes before he finally became unresponsive.

But even after viewing that footage internally, and just three weeks after showing it privately to Greenes family, ranking police officials last November remained fixated on blaming the mans death on a car crash. They quietly asked a crash reconstructionist to estimate the g-force Greene might have suffered in a crash, suggesting that may have accounted for his fatal injuries.

Though the autopsy listed Greenes cause of death as cocaine induced agitated delirium complicated by motor vehicle collision, physical struggle, inflicted head injury and restraint, it notably left unresolved whether some of Greenes most significant injuries  a fractured breastbone and lacerated aorta  were caused by the crash or state troopers.

One high-ranking official, Capt. John Peters, wrote in a November email to a state police attorney that the crash reconstructionist estimated that the violent rotation of Greenes vehicle  combined with impacts and the sudden speed reduction when the chase ended  generated approximately 19gs of force. Aortic ruptures can occur in crashes, experts said, but depend on many factors.

That could have significant value on the civil side as we try to reduce our percentage of liability, he added.

Faye Morrison, a state police attorney, responded: This will definitely be important re cause of death and damages.

Morrison was reassigned this week as the agency investigates her role in the Greene case.

Capt. Nick Manale, a state police spokesperson, said only that the crash reconstruction was part of an ongoing investigation.

It shows misplaced efforts and attention, said Rafael Goyeneche, a former prosecutor who is president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, a New Orleans-based watchdog group. Theyre more focused on civil liability issues than the conduct of the troopers.

Master Trooper Chris Hollingsworth told investigators that Greene didnt have any apparent injuries when he rushed the mans SUV following the chase.

Hollingsworth, who was later recorded saying he beat the ever-living f out of Greene, told investigators he was aware the head was a red zone of deadly force but acknowledged striking Greene in the head three times with a flashlight and jolting him six times with a stun gun out of fear for his own safety.

He was much bigger than I was and much stronger, and he had already kept two troopers from being able to handcuff him, Hollingsworth said. He could have done anything once my hold was broke off of him.

Shown the gurney pictures of Greenes body, Hollingsworth acknowledged the flashlight could have caused the half-moon shaped gashes on his head but added, Im not a doctor.

Police spokesperson Manale did not comment on Hollingsworths use of deadly force. Hollingsworth died in a single-vehicle crash in 2020 just hours after learning he would be fired for his role in Greenes arrest.

The documents show Hollingsworth and three other troopers greatly overstated Greenes resistance to justify their use of force, with one telling investigators he had survived a fight for his life and another falsely contending that even after Greene was cuffed and shackled, he was constantly moving, trying to get up.

But investigators said those concerns werent justified based on body camera footage that showed Greene appearing to raise his hands and saying over and over, OK, OK. Im sorry and Im your brother! Im scared! Im scared!

Ive had a female fight me and put up a much bigger fight than what Im seeing on this video, one investigator remarked, contending Hollingsworth and another responding trooper, Dakota DeMoss, never gave Greene a chance to surrender.

DeMoss, who was recently fired, also admitted to investigators it was a rookie move to leave Greene handcuffed facedown on the ground with his hands and feet restrained for more than nine minutes  a tactic use-of-force experts have criticized as dangerous and likely to have restricted his breathing.

DeMoss said he got a knot in his stomach when he learned Greene had died.

I could tell by the way the paramedics were looking at each other, he told investigators. I just got this gut-wrenching sick feeling.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Louisiana Law Enforcement
Spurred by recent hurricanes and a rare winter storm that demonstrated the frailty of Louisianas public water supply, lawmakers have set their attention on improving the states troubled water systems.

Legislators created a new grading metric for community water systems, steered $300 million in federal coronavirus aid to improvements and allocated millions more in state cash to upgrades and fixes in their recently ended session. Gov. John Bel Edwards supported the efforts.

Louisiana has nearly 1,300 water systems statewide. About half are operating off structures that are more than 50 years old, according to reports documenting their vulnerabilities. In some rural areas, systems are teetering on the brink of failure and face such significant population loss they dont have enough money for proper maintenance.

If we fix everybody and everything that should be fixed, its about $4 billion in estimated costs, Desiree Honore Thomas, with the Democratic governors Division of Administration, told lawmakers.

That hefty sum still might have been underestimating the scale of the problems. A 2018 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency suggested Louisianas 20-year funding needs for drinking water infrastructure topped $7 billion.

We now have what we believe are the resources to make a meaningful impact and change on these systems, said House Appropriations Chairman Jerome Zee Zeringue, a Houma Republican.

Zeringue is co-chairing a 10-member legislative Water Sector Commission created to decide which community water and sewer systems should share in the $300 million in federal pandemic aid. It already held its first meeting.

The Edwards administration, which will run the application portal and handle the grants, told the commission it intends to submit recommendations for prioritizing projects by mid-July with an eye toward opening the application period Aug. 1.

The need to harden water infrastructure is an obvious, bipartisan issue.

When Hurricane Laura struck a wide path of destruction across Louisiana in August, it knocked out 121 water systems and temporarily left hundreds of thousands of people without water. Another 150-plus water systems had disruptions that required people to boil their water for safe use.

The February winter storm that dropped snow and ice across Louisiana walloped the systems again, leaving hundreds of thousands without potable water and hospitals trucking in water for patient care.

William Daniel, director of Shreveports water and sewerage system, believes even the multibillion-dollar estimates of the problem are understated. He told lawmakers the city of Shreveport, which suffered a week of water outages in February, probably has $2 billion in needs alone.

Amanda Ames, chief engineer for the Louisiana Department of Health, told the Water Sector Commission her agency already had identified 182 drinking water systems statewide that have $146 million in projects deemed critical.

Lawmakers also intend to make the lists of the states most fragile water systems more widely known  and the problems more understandable  to the public through a new grading system.

The bill creating the grading, pushed by St. Martin Parish Republican Sen. Fred Mills, won unanimous legislative support and has been signed into law. It will require the Department of Health to develop a grading system from A through F, similar to the way the education department grades public schools.

Mills said public information about water systems often is highly technical and hard to decipher.

When someone can see an F-rated system, it causes the public to say, Why do I have to live under this type of water system?' Mills told lawmakers.

Water systems will be judged on their water quality violations, financial sustainability, customer satisfaction and other benchmarks. The health department will have to publish the grades online. Any community water system that receives a D or F could be subject to corrective measures and will have to submit improvement plans.

Mills hopes communities that get water from poorly rated systems might have discussions about consolidating with better rated systems. While Louisiana has nearly 1,300 water systems, he noted Alabama has about 400.

Some water system leaders spend money on unrelated projects, while others dont want to suggest needed price hikes for consumers because they dont want to hurt themselves politically, Mills said.

I think by having this score carding system, its going to glaringly bring out weaknesses that some water systems just dont want to face, he told his colleagues.

The first grades arent due until 2023  but the state could issue them sooner to dovetail the effort with the financing.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Catastrophe Natural Disasters Legislation Louisiana Hurricane
The owner-operator of an Olympia, Wash., dry cleaning business faces a felony charge alleging he stole workers compensation benefits by faking the severity of his injury.

Byung Sung Kang, 54, is scheduled for arraignment Tuesday in Thurston County Superior Court on one count of first-degree theft.

The Lacey man is charged with stealing more than $21,000 in partial wage replacement payments from June 2018 through August 2019 from the Washington State Department of Labor & Industries.

L&I also reportedly paid out nearly $50,000 in medical bills, interpreter fees, vocational costs, and other benefits for Kang from June 2018 through March 2020.

An L&I investigation reportedly filmed Kang lifting heavy loads of clothing and doing other physical tasks at his shop during the same period he claimed his workplace injury was so severe that he spent his days resting at home.

Its unusual to bring fraud charges against business owners, said Chris Bowe, assistant director of L&Is Fraud Prevention and Labor Standards division. Thats because most of the people receiving workers compensation benefits are workers. But we do investigate business owners if we receive reports of fraud.

Kang allegedly injured his back in the summer of 2015 while working at the dry cleaning business that he and his wife own, according to charging papers.

With a doctors assessment that he was too injured to work, Kang reportedly began receiving payments from L&I in late 2016 to replace part of his salary. In addition, Kang regularly submitted official forms stating he was unable to work due to his on-the-job injury.

L&I opened an investigation of Kang in 2019 after an internal search of state databases raised questions about him and his business, which charging papers said was called Century Cleaners at the time.

The investigation included numerous witness interviews and undercover surveillance of Kang at his shop on 32 days that year, charging papers said. The investigator filmed Kang loading and unloading washers and dryers, hanging and bundling clothes, lifting and carrying a table and bags of garbage, and serving customers.

Two of the customers  a Washington State Patrol trooper and delivery service owner  reportedly said they had seen Kang working at the shop since at least 2016.

The investigation found Kang was making misleading statements to medical providers, saying he was mostly watching TV at home.

On Oct. 14, 2019, an investigator filmed Kang working at the shop, then followed him to a medical exam, where the doctor wrote that Kang told him he had not worked since his 2015 injury, charging papers said. After the appointment, Kang drove back to his shop to resume work.

During an interview with the L&I investigator, Kang said he was minimally involved in his dry cleaning business, doing only light tasks and rarely helping customers.

L&I administers the state workers compensation insurance system, which helps injured workers heal and return to work. The Washington State Office of the Attorney General is prosecuting the case based on the L&I investigation.

Topics Workers' Compensation Washington
Panelists convened by the Insurance Information Institute and ResilientH20 Partners agreed that resilience is building due to technological advances and greater awareness about how wildfires spread.

In the latest installment of the Triple-Is National Town Hall series, a risk modeler, an insurers founding partner, and an inventor were joined by subject matter experts from not-for-profit organizations and government to advance the latest developments in U.S. wildfire resilience.

We can tell you the wildfire risk for every single property in the U.S., said Bob Frady, co-founder and CEO, HazardHub, which awards wildfire risk graded and provides data to the Triple-Is Resilience Accelerator. Eighty-nine percent of wildfire-destroyed properties are in F zones, he stated, referring to California and citing historical data from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. Wildfire is a highly localized problem. They happen exactly where we think theyre going to happen.

Kevin Stein, CEO, Delos Insurance, said embers are one of the main ignition sources.

Our modeling has shown that what makes the biggest differencethe biggest indicator for loss for a homeis whether or not a fire can even be at that home in the first place, Stein said.

Michele Steinberg, wildfire division director of the National Fire Protection Association, talked about Outthink Wildfire, a new initiative launched earlier this year. The NFPAs campaign is aimed at educating the public on what they and their neighbors can do to reduce greatly the risk of a homes ignition during a wildfire.

It is a call to action to end the destruction of communities by wildfire in 30 years, Steinberg said.

Michael Morter, wildfire recovery ombudsman with the Oregon Office of Emergency Management, noted that Oregon lawmakers this year agreed to dramatically increase the financial commitment to mitigation after 2020s deadly wildfires in Oregon destroyed more than 3,000 homes, burned 1 million-plus acres, and caused upwards of $2 billion in insured losses.

Oregon is also implementing a statewide and regional strategy to leverage new technologies and best practices across residential and commercial properties, seeking to protect citizens and companies from persistent wildfire threats.

The panelists presented current data and updated practices in an interactive setting late last week on Changing the Course of Wildfire Resilience. Janet Ruiz, the Triple-Is California-based director of strategic communication, was the sessions moderator.

Related:

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Catastrophe Natural Disasters Wildfire
Italy's prime minister Mario Draghis government plans to end a ban on firing workers in the manufacturing and construction sectors, removing protections that have been in place since the start of the Covid pandemic in a sign of Italys recovery.

The move threatens to open a rift with some left-leaning parties in Mr Draghis coalition. Unions called on the government to extend the protections at least four more months, claiming the economy is still fragile.
A referendum on inserting a right to housing into the Constitution would open a conversation about how Ireland treats its housing crisis, a housing activist and university lecturer has said.

Dr Rory Hearne, assistant professor of social policy at Maynooth University, believes that a shift in how the country values its housing issues is needed.

The housing expert said there is a minority perception that housing should be treated as an asset rather than a home, which he says benefits landlords and real estate investors.

The Programme for Government commits to holding a referendum on housing rights, and there are two Bills providing for a referendum on enshrining the right to housing in the Constitution.

Housing expert Rory Hearne in the Marino Housing district in Dublin (Niall Carson/PA)

A private members Bill put forward by Solidarity-People Before Profit seeks to put the Government under Constitutional pressure to provide adequate housing for its citizens.

A similar motion brought forward by Fianna Fail senators also seeks to put a right to housing on a Constitutional footing.

Dr Hearne said that Ireland has been in a housing crisis for some three decades.

The countrys housing crisis has led to a social crisis of homelessness, particularly in Dublin, and the emergence of Generation Rent.

Dr Hearne said the crisis goes back to the failure to treat housing as a human right.

It goes back to housing policies and economic policies in this country that have different approaches to housing, predominantly, I would say, treating it as an investment asset, Dr Hearne said.

Its this idea of people accumulating wealth through their home, be that as a pension or a way for people to make money and this whole idea of the property ladder and not treating as what it is, which is a home, a fundamental need, a basic human need, that everybody has.

Property rights

Property rights are protected under Article 43 of the Constitution, however the insertion of housing rights would delimit those.

The property rights are often cited by Government as a barrier to bringing in rent freeze legislation and stronger protection for tenants and homebuyers.

However, some constitutional experts have argued that the property rights afforded by the Constitution could be delimited by the common good.

Dr Hearne said a referendum on housing rights would spark a conversation on how the country treats housing issues.

I think that having a referendum would enable us to have a conversation as a country, just like in marriage equality, just like in repeal, about how we treat housing, he added.

Solidarity-People Before Profits Paul Murphy said the Government has repeatedly hid behind the Constitution when it comes to taking action on housing (Brian Lawless/PA)

I believe that there is a value shift needed in how we treat housing, similar to the value shift that has happened in terms of social issues like those previous referendums.

There is still a certain perception, and I think its a minority perception, but there is very much this idea of treating housing as an asset rather than a home.

That benefits in particular, a very small number of landlords, real estate investors, but it doesnt benefit the majority of people.

A referendum would really offer that opportunity for us, as a society and a country, to say: we no longer are unclear about how we view housing, we view housing very much as a human right.

He said he believes that a Constitutional right to housing will help solve Irelands long housing crisis.

If we dont have a right to housing and we dont have this as our overriding policy goal and vision, we will just lurch from crisis to crisis, he added.

I think that absolutely getting this referendum would put a major, major impetus and pressure on our State at all levels and all obligations, to work and solve permanently the housing crisis.

Seven countries in the European Union, including Spain and Belgium, have the right to housing protected by their constitutions.

Solidarity-People Before Profit TD Paul Murphy said there are two reasons behind inserting a right to housing.

One is pragmatic, the other is principled, the Dublin South West TD said.

The pragmatic argument is that the Government has repeatedly hid behind the Constitution when it comes to taking action on housing.

When we tried to have proper rent controls the Government said we cant do it because of right to property in the Constitution.

This is a way of saying: well you say the Constitution is a problem, we dont agree with that, but we are going to insert a right to housing so we will remove all doubt from it.

A woman walks past the tent of a homeless person on Grafton Street in Dublin city centre (Niall Carson/PA)

It becomes an actionable thing. For example, a family that has been homeless for a few years could say that the Government is not vindicating their constitutional rights.

It would certainly put pressure on the Government in terms of their housing policies so people can have access to a home.

People are affected by the housing crisis in different ways. You have rough sleepers, then you have people who are homeless but are couch-surfing, then people in rented accommodation who are really struggling, and there are young people who want to buy a house but are struggling.

This would give all those groups of people a route to vindicate their right to housing as it affects everyone.

At a very basic level it means that everyone has a right to an appropriate home.

People spend on average up to 40% of their income on rent.

Dublin also has the one of the highest rents in Europe and new figures from Daft.ie show house prices have risen by 13% nationally in the last 12 months.
Update 5pm: A four-year-old girl has been found safe and well, police in Northern Ireland have said.

Scarlet Duddy had been reported missing in Derry on Monday.
Indoor dining is set to be delayed until at least July 19.

In an address to the nation, Taoiseach Micheal Martin said that Government will devise an implementation plan by 19 July for the return of indoor dining.

It was due to reopen on July 5, however, Nphet warned of the spread of the Delta variant which has caused concern.

Nphet advised that the incidence of the Delta variant in Ireland is rapidly increasing.

"For this reason, a cautious approach is maintained, with an emphasis on lower-risk activities," said a Government statement.

The Department of Health has recorded a further 351 Covid cases.

There are 46 people hospitalised with the virus which is up by seven on this day last week. There are 16 people in intensive care units which is up 3 over the same period.

The Government has said that pending the implementation of a system to verify vaccination or immunity, indoor services such as indoor dining will not proceed.

WATCH: Taoiseach announces the latest on the reopening restrictions. Live here, RTE One TV and the RTE News channel | Read more: https://t.co/CDrrMLxXmY https://t.co/29V4mNuHhT  RTE News (@rtenews) June 29, 2021

Mr Martin said that the Government will devise an implementation plan by July 19, following further consideration and consultation with relevant sectors.

The Taoiseach said in his address that the Government will work to agree a practical and workable approach.

He added that the country is in a race between the variant and vaccines.

We want to do everything we possibly can to make sure that the vaccine wins, he added, confirming that four million doses have been administered so far. The Government confirmed in a statement that 40% of the population now fully vaccinated.

Mr Martin said that the changes that have been agreed reflect a "sensible, safe and balanced way forward".

Mr Martin added: We do not want to lose the progress we have made and I am satisfied that the adjustments to our plan agreed by Government this morning represent a sensible safe and balanced way forward.

Mr Martin said that the changes that have been agreed reflect a "sensible, safe and balanced way forward". Picture: Collins

Our tourism and hospitality sectors have carried a disproportionate burden throughout this pandemic and I know that this delay we are announcing this afternoon will be greeted with dismay and frustration by some.

In recognition of the circumstances, we will provide additional support over the coming weeks."

The Tanaiste said that the Government was erring on the side of caution in announcing the delay.

The Taoiseach did announce increases to capacity at outdoor events and weddings from July 5.

From next week:

Numbers permitted at outdoor events can increase as planned, to a maximum of 200 attendees for the majority of stadia, and to 500 for stadia/venues with capacity greater than 5,000, with appropriate protective measures.

There should be no limit on the numbers of people that can visit together once they are all fully protected by vaccination or have had Covid-19 infection in the previous nine months.

As an exception, weddings already planned will be permitted to proceed on the basis of the expected changes for July, with 50 guests permitted to attend wedding receptions with protective measures.

In line with current advice, unvaccinated households may have visitors from one other unvaccinated household.

People should continue to work from home unless necessary to attend in person.

The Government also announced that the planned closure of the Pandemic Unemployment Payment to new entrants will be deferred to midnight on July 7, 2021, rather than on midnight on June 30.

In a letter last night, Nphet recommended that the Government should "pause" the reopening of indoor dining and drinking until they can put a "robust" system in place to prove that people have either been vaccinated or have immunity.

Nphet predicted that we could see up to 2,170 Covid-related deaths across July, August and September as the Delta variant spreads across the country.

The Health Minister has said that the Government intends to hold consultations with the hospitality sector to see how best to implement a system which would allow people who have been vaccinated or who had recovered from Covid-19 to dine indoors.

Mr Donnelly told RTE radios News at One that he knew that news of the delay of reopening the sector would come as a big blow to the sector.

Work will begin, in conjunction with the sector, to introduce a certification system under a model used successfully in many EU countries including Germany, Austria and elsewhere. If other countries could do it then there was no reason why Ireland could not do it, he said.

There were questions about what kind of technology would be used, the timeline, how it could be implemented.

We want to listen very carefully to the industry. When asked about the necessity to vaccinate young staff, Mr Donnelly said that the Nphet view was that this would not be necessary as such staff were already working indoors in hotels using health and safety protocols.

However, the Minister said that the public health advice from Nphet was that a negative PCR test was not recommended (as with the digital travel cert).

However, the idea of only fully vaccinated people being allowed to dine indoors has been rejected by vintners.

The Licensed Vintners Association (LVA) has described the idea as "ridiculous" while and the Vintners Federation of Ireland (VFI) deemed it unworkable.

Donall OKeeffe, Chief Executive of the LVA, said the system would create a two-tier society.

The VFI added that the way the Government has dealt with pubs over the past 15 months "is shocking".
The number of patients accessing abortion care in Ireland was unaffected by the pandemic.

According to the latest Government figures, 6,577 people had an abortion in Ireland last year - just 89 fewer than in 2019.

January saw the highest number of terminations carried out but the introduction of lockdown did not result in a significant drop in numbers.

The Abortion Rights Campaign (ARC) said the fact that people continued to seek abortions throughout the pandemic shows that it is an essential service.

It said the numbers also indicate the success of providing abortion as a telemedicine service something ARC says should be retained going forward.

The majority of terminations (6,455) were performed in early pregnancy - up to 12 weeks - while 25 were carried out because of a risk to life or health.

In terms of fetal anomalies, 97 abortions were carried out following a diagnosis of a condition likely to lead to the death of the foetus.

ARC spokesperson Helen Stonehouse said the system is grossly failing those who receive a diagnosis of a fetal anomaly.

"When this data is combined with the UK statistics for 2020, we can see that over 40% of those who received a prenatal diagnosis still had to travel to England to receive the care that they should have had at home," said Ms Stonehouse.

"At least 194 people from the Republic of Ireland travelled to England or Wales during 2020 for abortion (this only represents those who gave Irish addresses to the UK health providers), and more travelled from Northern Ireland or ordered abortion pills online."

While a number of people did not have to travel abroad to receive abortion care, ARC research has shown a number of patients travelled long distances within Ireland.

One participant in an ARC study said she had to travel from Donegal to Dublin for an ultrasound scan and described the experience as horrendous.

"As I dont drive I had to rely on public transport in the middle of the pandemic and do a solo trip. It also cost 50, then an additional 20 to get to the surgery each time as no surgeries in my town provide abortions."

Data from the ARC research project shows that people from every county accessed abortion care last year but many of those living in rural counties has to travel outside their county.

As only 10 of our maternity hospitals are providing, those who needed abortion access after nine weeks will also have been forced to travel away from their community and support networks.

"We need all of our maternity hospitals to provide abortion care, and extend community provision throughout the country," said Ms Stonehouse.

In 2020, 60 people who had an abortion gave an address in Co Sligo where there is currently no community provision of abortion services.

One person who spoke to ARC said they were refused treatment by four GPs in their area and eventually had to go outside their county.

"I visited my GP first, assuming she could prescribe the necessary medication, she refused treatment. I had to call My Options to find GPs in my area that perform abortions, I rang three different practices and two of the receptionists were very rude on the phone to me."

The patient was extremely upset and had to contact MyOptions a second time to get contact information for doctors in another county.

Where people have been able to access abortion services in Ireland, many people reported facing stigma and shame.

One patient told of an incident where a doctor told them that she didn't agree with what they had chosen to do.

"A doctor in an Irish hospital withheld a prescription she was advised by another doctors to issue me until she told me how horrific abortion was in her opinion and how she voted against it and absolutely did not agree with what I had done," the patient said.
When the European Council met this week in Brussels, it took time to look at the "lessons learned" from the Covid crisis thus far.

In Ireland, when the time comes to look at how we have handled the last 16 months, much of the focus will be on how Ireland's place in Europe shaped how we could and could not react.

The country's place in the EU has allowed us access to expertise and data, but there has been criticism at how the monolithic bloc has moved to deal with the pandemic.

Inside Government, frustrations have focused on a number of areas, with travel, vaccines, and Ireland's allocation of EU relief funding all mentioned.

However, there is also an appreciation that being in the EU has allowed Ireland access to much-needed PPE and equipment, as well as guidance from experts at a European level.

The worlds largest aircraft, the Antonov AN-225 touches down at Shannon Airport from China on June 10, 2020, carrying the single largest consignment of PPE to be flown into Ireland on a single flight. Picture: Arthur Ellis.

And, while some have criticised Ireland's reluctance to pursue outside purchases of vaccines, Government sources say that without the EU purchase scheme, Ireland would likely be "way behind" where we are currently.

The idea that the EU was ever going to be some kind of white knight is a bit misguided," says one source.

"All of the member states were dealing with this once-in-a-century pandemic, so the fact that there's as much alignment as there is now is impressive."

TRAVEL

Last February, as the world realised that the virus which had spread around the Wuhan region of China would not be contained, the focus shifted to Northern Italy. Images of overcrowded hospitals, overworked staff, and desperate death tolls were headline news here in Ireland as the importance of washing our hands was hammered home.

But among the public, more action was being demanded and, as an island nation, chief among them was to shut the ports of entry.

New Zealand and Australia had implemented stringent travel requirements and looked set to ward off the worst effects of the virus. But in the Irish government  which was still in caretaker mode, the plan was never truly countenanced.

"Of course we looked at what New Zealand and Australia had done," says a minister in that government.

But it was never a runner. We simply couldn't shut our airports and ports. It would have stranded thousands of Irish people and, we believed, breached EU freedom of movement rules."

While some called for the closure of airports to flights from Northern Italy, ministers were forced to point out that school trips were still in the region. There was also the question of how other EU states would react if Ireland unilaterally suspended free movement.

The European Commission sees free movement as the bedrock of the EU, and just last month asked Ireland to end its mandatory hotel quarantine system.

MONEY

In the early days of the pandemic, there was a creeping belief that as countries loaded up on debt to cover the cost of shutting down whole economies, the money printers would fire up and the EU would begin to dole out the billions to plug the holes created in budgets across the continent.

But as Ireland rolled out the largest budget in the history of the State, there was some disappointment with Ireland's allocation. The headline figure was startling  750bn would be disbursed across the continent in the coming years. But while Poland submitted a plan which will see it receive 58bn in loans and grants, Ireland is set to receive a relatively modest 915m grant across 2021 and 2022, with further grants to come in 2023.

Taoiseach Micheal Martin speaking to media at Dublin Castle. Picture: Sasko Lazarov / RollingNews.ie

Taoiseach Micheal Martin told the Dail that this figure's key measurement was "Ireland's strong economic performance relative to other countries, plus our population"  but for all the brave faces, there was some disappointment from Government TDs about the figure.

One said that while there was no expectation of "billions and billions", the final figure barely covers the cost of PPE.

Government sources say that the EU talks to establish the fund were fractious and contentious, and this meant any notion of transformative amounts of "free money" were never going to happen. They point out that the criteria used to decide how much member states will receive from the fund are complex and include assessments of per capita income levels in 2019 relative to the EU average, with poorer states receiving more.

While some in Ireland saw the potential of the fund as a chance to make big investments, the EU sees it more as a chance to balance the continent and buttress weaker economies.

It is this fundamental difference of viewpoint which left some in Government and Opposition disappointed, but public expenditure minister Michael McGrath said that the figure was "a milestone" and allowed the Government to announce its own 3.6bn recovery scheme.

"In a year that has seen us take on the twin challenges of Covid and Brexit, support from Europe is evidence of the solidarity that has been the hallmark of our EU membership over the last five decades," he said.
Although separate schemes and different issues, the Magdalene Laundries and symphysiotomy scandals share many painful resonances.

Both operated in the shadows of a theocratic Ireland where Catholic doctrine was allowed to control women and limit their reproductive rights.

Magdalene Laundries effectively incarcerated women, often vulnerable women, who became pregnant outside of marriage and made money from their forced labour. These womens children were also sometimes absorbed into these institutions and many suffered years of psychological and physical abuse there too.

Symphysiotomies were a brutal, widely discredited surgery, which sawed through a womans pelvis to widen it for childbirth and lesson the need for a much safer Caesarean section because the latter was not favoured by the Catholic Church at the time. Symphysiotomies left many of these women badly, permanently maimed and some 10% of babies dead.

In both of these scandals, misguided, misogynistic, abusive Church doctrines were permitted by the State to be visited on its citizens.

Wrongdoing admitted

While redress schemes were belatedly introduced for survivors of both of these scandals within months of each other, both were criticised for not admitting any liability as ex-gratia schemes.

Critically, an admission of wrongdoing should accompany all redress schemes, the UN has said.

No ex gratia arrangement offers survivors an effective remedy, Marie OConnor, chairperson of the support group of Survivors of Symphysiotomy (SoS) said.

Both schemes also demanded that those who applied for the scheme waived their right to pursue any legal claims against the State or relevant individuals or institutions.

Applicants had to sign away their legal and constitutional rights without knowing how much compensation they would eventually be offered. The majority of applicants to the symphysiotomy redress scheme were awarded the lowest amount, 50,000, which was far lower than what a successful applicant received through a legal challenge in court.

Marie OConnor, chairperson of the support group of Survivors of Symphysiotomy (SoS).

Survivors were also denied the right to opt-out after entering the scheme and bring an action for damages instead if the award offered was unacceptable.

The symphysiotomy redress scheme allowed applicants just 20 days to apply, effectively excluding those who could not access old medical records within that very limited timeframe.

Applicants to both schemes also had problems accessing the reports required by the scheme to make claims. Applicants to the symphysiotomy redress scheme were often searching for very old medical records from practices or hospitals that had since closed while many Magdalene Laundry survivors did not have access to their own information.

The compensation amounts allocated were broadly similar, with Magdalene survivors receiving a maximum of 100,000 and symphysiotomy survivors receiving a maximum of 150,000.

Access to enhanced medical cards has also been an issue following both schemes. Neither survivors of symphysiotomy nor survivors of Magdalene Laundries have been given Health Amendment Act (HAA) cards like those given to people accidentally infected with Hepatitis C through blood donations.

HAA cards entitle people to a wide range of health services for life, including free GP care, physio, counselling and home support.

Criticism

Both schemes have also been criticised for not adequately listening to survivors and responding to their needs.

And the same issues have already echoed loudly once again in the mother and baby homes scandal, with similar issues arising - survivors not feeling listened to and oral evidence from women being sidelined with more weight given to information supplied by institutions than survivor testimony.

A memo on the Mother and Baby Homes redress scheme is expected to be presented to Cabinet before the Dail breaks for summer.

The scheme is expected to be accessible to survivors sometime next year.

Childrens Minister Roderic OGorman has indicated that he will allow those who were resident in mother and baby homes after 1974 to access the redress scheme, even though the Mother and Baby Homes Commission recommended against doing so. Perhaps this is one small indication that lessons have been learned from redress schemes of the past and those in power are finally listening more carefully to survivors and their advocates.

The last symphysiotomy was carried out in 1984, the last laundry closed in 1996 and the last Mother and Baby home closed in 1998.

The Magdalene Laundry redress scheme was introduced in December 2013, and the Symphysiotomy redress scheme was introduced months later in 2014. The Mother and Baby Home redress scheme is likely to be available in 2022.

The new scheme could and should learn from redress schemes of the past.

Providing fair access to the new scheme and transparency in developing it is now crucial so that survivors feel listened to and so that their needs can be adequately met.

Unlike in the previous redress schemes, survivors should be entitled to individualised assessment of damages, free independent medical reports and free independent legal advice, Marie OConnor of SoS believes.

There should also be independent oversight of the process and a right of appeal.

These three scandals are deeply intertwined in recent Irish history, with many people suffering under at least two of these three repressive regimes.

Some of those fighting for justice today, who survived Mother and Baby homes, also spent time in Magdalene Laundries.

And some of those who survived these institutions may have been subjected to symphysiotomies.

Functional redress schemes are now vitally necessary to remedy the terrible mistakes of the past and to deliver some justice to survivors who have already suffered far too much.
Puberty is a gift from God. We are perfectly designed by God to procreate with him.

These lines, taken from a new relationships and sexuality education programme for use in Irish primary schools, have prompted dismay and anger from education experts, politicians, and parents.

Entitled Flourish, the programme has been developed by the Irish Bishops Conference for children from junior infants to sixth class. The text stresses that the Churchs teaching in relation to marriage between a man and a woman cannot be omitted and that a couple need to be committed to staying together if they are having children.

One can only imagine the impact these words will have on any children in the classroom from single-parent families or with unmarried or same-sex parents.

As shocking as this programme is, it has come as little surprise to Education Equality, a parent-led human rights group that has been campaigning to disentangle this kind of religious influence from our education system since 2015. We have heard countless stories from parents about the discomfort and social ostracism their children endure on a daily basis in our schools.

Government rhetoric about pluralism and inclusion is sharply at odds with the treatment of children who are not of the patrons religion.

Consider their experiences in their own words:

I didnt like having holy water thrown at me because I am not religious, says Liam, 8*.

I feel awkward when everyone is saying prayers. I sometimes feel everyone is looking at me because I am not saying them, says Anna Mae, 11.

I didnt like not being able to get a homework pass and jellies in the principals office because I didnt sing in the communion choir. It made me feel like I had done something bad, says Connor, 11

When the priest came around and flicked water at me I felt really uncomfortable. I stepped back and tried to explain that I am not religious but he splashed water at me anyway and made my top wet, says Eoghan, 9.

This is an unusual way to run an education system. We can thank the concept of subsidiarity, which seeks to assert religious social teaching as the dominant influence in education and restrict any activity by the State, except of course in the matter of finance.

Staff salaries, school refurbishments, light, heat  all are paid for by taxpayers. However, many of the policies that govern our schools are set not by the Department of Education but by religious clergy, who are effectively unaccountable to the public.

Integrated curriculum

So the Flourish programme is just one more symptom of the bishops integrated curriculum in action.

Formally introduced in the 1970s, this approach to education meshes the patrons religious beliefs with every imaginable subject. Rather than simply being taught science, for example, children may be invited to discuss the part science plays in Gods world. This offers no logical benefit from a pedagogical perspective and denies religious freedom under the European Convention on Human Rights.

Schools also devote 30 minutes every day to formal religious faith formation, which is afforded almost as much time each week as history, geography, and science combined. Religious worship is commonplace, as are visits by clergy and diocesan inspectors. Further time is devoted to sacramental preparation.

Schools have an umbilical cord with the State when it comes to funding but a dotted line when it comes to upholding constitutional safeguards, such as the long-neglected right to opt out of religious instruction. Article 44.2.4 of the Constitution provides for the right of any child to attend a school receiving public money without attending religious instruction at that school.

In practice, this right is illusory. Children who are opted out may be treated differently from their peers but they inevitably absorb much of the lesson regardless.

Tinkering with patronage

The Government has pinned its hopes for reform on the Catholic Church voluntarily ceding control of schools through divestment. The aim is to have 400 multi-denominational primary schools by 2030, a modest target that is nevertheless unlikely to be met. By leaving the modalities to those most keen to defend the status quo, the process has been engineered to fail. In truth though, divestment is a sideshow.

A glance at recent referendum results  over 87% of 18-24-year-olds voted in favour of repealing the Eighth Amendment in 2018  shows how much Ireland has changed. Tinkering with patronage is not enough.

While the nettle of Church control has yet to be grasped, it has certainly been approached. Recent legislation such as the Education (Welfare) Act 2000, the Equality (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2015, and the Education (Admissions to Schools) Act 2018 demonstrate the growing agency of the State in our education system and a concomitant decline in Church influence.

Despite this, religious doctrine continues to be taught as fact in our classrooms. This has not escaped the attention of domestic and international human rights bodies, which have made repeated recommendations that Ireland provide accessible options for children whose parents do not want them to attend religious instruction.

The Flourish debacle has demonstrated just how much our schools, in imposing religious dogma by coercion rather than consent, have lost touch with the society they are supposed to serve.

This programme is discriminatory, harmful and in conflict with the Irish Constitution. And it is being unashamedly forced on a captive audience of impressionable young children.

So what should be done? Education Equality believes it is time to finally close the chapter on religious ethos in our schools. Enough! We need to consign the integrated curriculum to history and move all religious faith formation lessons to the end of the school day, outside core hours, on an opt-in basis with parental consent. Equality for all children in the provision of an essential public service such as education is not a big ask in a liberal democracy.

Schools exist to educate, not indoctrinate. Its time we learned the difference. Until we do, we will continue to stumble from failure to farce.

David Graham is a parent and communications officer with Education Equality, launched in 2015 to campaign for equality in the provision of education for all children regardless of religion.
Burma In Myanmar Juntas Bid to Quell Opponents, Not Even Their Babies Are Spared

Su Htet Wyne at her birthday last year (left). At right, Su Htet Wyne holds a poster with a picture of detained State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi at an anti-coup protest in Mogoke. / Soe Htay / Facebook

No laughing family members gathered around. No blowing out the candles with friends. No cake. This was how one of Myanmars youngest political detainees, Su Htet Wyne, spent her fifth birthday on Monday, in the regimes custody.

She was arrested together with her mother and sister on June 13 because her father was an anti-regime protest leader in Mogoke, Mandalay Region. Junta soldiers took the three as hostages after failing to find Ko Soe Htay at their home on the day.

A warrant was issued for the father on an incitement charge for organizing anti-regime protests. When the junta forces came to arrest him, he and his two sons were not at home, as they had gone into hiding.

As they couldnt find me, they arrested my daughters, including a minor, and my wife, Ko Soe Htay told The Irrawaddy.

Today is my daughters birthday, he said.

It has been more than two weeks since the arrests. Relatives have had no contact with Ko Soe Htays wife and two daughters since the arrests and have not been allowed to see them. The three were not allowed to take anything with them, according to the father.

The case of Su Htet Wyne, her mother and sister is just one example of the Myanmar juntas increasingly common tactic of detaining family members, relatives and friends and holding them as bait in an effort to lure pro-democracy activists to come out of hiding and turn themselves in.

Su Htet Wyne, her mother and sister are among at least 91 people who have been taken away by junta forces during raids that failed to turn up targeted individuals. These targets have included protesters, student union members, National League for Democracy (NLD) members, journalists and striking civil servants, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) and local media.

On May 5, the 20-day-old baby and the wife of Ko Than Win, a protest leader in Mudon, Mon State, were arrested as hostages. A month earlier, on April 5, junta forces detained five relatives of strike leader Ko Ja Lay, including two girls aged 2 and 4. In both cases, the family members were released later the same day.

However, 62 of the 91 junta hostages remain in detention. Among them are mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, siblings, nephews, nieces and other relatives of wanted opponents of the coup.

The mother of Judge U Kaung Myat Thu from the Chaung-U Township Court in Sagaing Region was beaten and arrested on April 27 and remains in detention.

On April 22, junta forces searching for Pu Do Sian Pau, a member of the opposition Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM), arrested his mother and his 70-year-old father, a retired pastor of the Cope Memorial Baptist Church in Tedim, Chin State. Both are still in detention.

Daw Mi Nge, the mother of activist sons Ko Tin Htut Paing and his brother, was beaten and arrested after junta forces unsuccessfully searched for the two in Yangons North Okkalapa Township. During the search for the activists, their 90-year-old grandmother was also beaten.

The mother was interrogated for several days before being moved to Insein Prison, and later sentenced to three years for incitement under Article 505(a).

Human Rights Watch (HRW) recently called on the junta to immediately and unconditionally release all those wrongfully held and to end all collective punishment.

The arrest of family members and friends is intended to send a chilling message to activists and members of the CDM that no members of their families are safe, the New York-based international human rights watchdog said in a statement on June 14.

The detention of people based solely on their relationship to another person is a form of collective punishment, which violates the right to liberty and security of person and the right to a fair trial, HRW stated.

Myanmars junta has taken unlawful detention to a noxious new level by detaining those close to people who themselves should not be facing arrest, Phil Robertson, the groups deputy Asia director, was quoted as saying in the statement.

Concerned governments should urgently impose targeted sanctions and a global arms embargo or expect the junta to continue to raise the stakes on abusive actions, he said.



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Burma Myanmar Junta Forces Detain Villagers in Bago Region

Junta troops / The Irrawaddy

Junta forces arrested six male villagers on Sunday after raiding Sin Zaloke Village in Daik-U Township, Bago Region.

Three junta trucks entered the village around 2.30pm on Sunday. They fired around nine shots before entering the house of village National League for Democracy (NLD) leader Soe Win, said a resident.

Then, they searched the house of Zaw Htwe and said they found improvised explosive devices there. They called for more military trucks and soldiers to come to the village. They arrested six villagers, he added.

The six detainees were not wanted by the regime, but were randomly arrested while fleeing after junta troops entered the village, according to locals.

Four of the detainees are in their 20s and the two others are between 40 and 50. All make a living farming and selling bamboo shoots, said residents.

They arrested those who tried to run away. Some of the people were forced to kneel down and then slapped in their faces. Some houses were ransacked. They [junta forces] left after firing three shots.

Junta troops questioned residents and searched houses from 2.30pm to 11pm on Sunday. Around 60 male villagers, from teenagers to men over 50, fled into a nearby forest following the junta raid. Women stayed in the village for fear that the village might be set on fire if all the villagers fled.

We have farms to take care of. We dare not go back to the village for fear that we might be arrested. We dont like having to flee as we did nothing wrong, a villager who fled told The Irrawaddy on Monday.

Sin Zaloke villagers have staged protests against military rule since the juntas February coup, like the majority of civilians across the country.

The military regime has made no comment about Sundays raid on the village. The Irrawaddy was also unable to obtain comments from Daik-U Township General Administration Department and local police about the raid.



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Burma Myanmar Regime Offers no Help as Kalaymyo Struggles With COVID-19 Outbreak

A funeral of COVID-19 patients at a cemetery in Kalaymyo

Funerals have become a common sight in Kalaymyo, Sagaing Region as the town grapples with a severe COVID-19 outbreak, while also mounting armed resistance against the military regime.

Residents are in a state of panic as every day brings new fatalities.

People have died every day this month. A few days ago, over 20 people died in a single day. And most of them died of COVID-19. It has been more than a month since the COVID-19 outbreak started here in Kalaymyo, said local resident Ko Kyaw.

Kalaymyo, also known as Kale or Kalay, has experienced the highest death toll and the largest number of new infections since Myanmar was hit by the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. As of June 26, over 100 Kale residents had died of COVID-19 since the first cases were reported in May.

The town in northwest Myanmar was also one of the first to take up arms against the military regime following the juntas Feb. 1 coup. Some 40 residents have died in clashes between local resistance fighters and junta forces, according to locals, and sporadic clashes between peoples defense forces and regime soldiers continue to take place near the town.

Coronavirus cases have spun out of control because the township hospital is overstretched and ill-equipped to deal with the outbreak, as well as suffering from a shortage of oxygen, volunteers and donors. The dusk-to-dawn curfew imposed by the junta has also had an impact, as patients are unable to go to hospital during the curfew.

Tar Han ward, where most residents are ethnic Chin, in the west of Kalaymyo, has been hit hardest by the COVID-19 outbreak. Some 50 percent of the households in Tar Han are infected with the virus, said Kalaymyo resident U Ko Ko Maung.

There were many bodies at the Chin cemeteries yesterday. Tar Han is experiencing the worst situation in Kale, he said.

Over half of Kalaymyos 300,000-plus residents are ethnic Chin or from other minorities, with Bamar people making up the rest of the population.

Oxygen Shortages

The high number of COVID-19 deaths in Kale is due to shortages of oxygen. Some patients died on June 27 after the town ran out of medical oxygen.

Oxygen cylinders ordered from other towns did not arrive in time, as some of the buses transporting them broke down on the way and others were stranded due to fighting between local resistance fighters and junta troops on the Kalay-Gangaw road.

While some deaths can be confirmed as being caused by COVID-19, many people in rural areas died before they were tested for COVID-19. Four to five people die every day and the lack of oxygen is a factor, said a resident.

However, oxygen production machinery has recently arrived at Kalaymyo Hospital and work is under way to set up an oxygen production plant with funds contributed by donors under the National League for Democracy (NLD) government, said locals.

Some 200 million kyats has been donated under the peoples government to set up an oxygen plant. Dont think the military has funded it. They give nothing, said Ko Kyaw.

Self-treatment at Home

With the public hospital and COVID-19 centers overstretched and COVID-19 patients charged 40,000 kyats per head to receive treatment, patients are choosing to treat themselves at home, said Kale resident U Maung Maung.

One of my relatives was infected with the virus. He didnt go to the hospital. Instead, he stays at his home. His family members also do not go out and volunteers buy medicine and food for them, said U Maung Maung.

People stay at home because they think it is safer to do so. People who can afford it have bought oxygen and keep it at their homes. And philanthropic organizations buy oxygen for those who cant afford it, he added.

Elderly people and those with other underlying health problems have died while treating themselves at home. In rural parts of Kale, people are going into voluntary quarantine, with villagers posting notices in front of their houses when a family member is infected.

Regime Provides no Assistance

Although there has been no assistance from the capital Naypyitaw, the regime is putting pressure on health officials to control the outbreak.

Naypyitaw wants to see the death rate decline in Kale. But they dont provide anything to prevent people from dying. They have not provided any medicine or anything else so far, said a source close to Kale health workers.

Under the NLD government, there were sufficient medicines and medical devices at COVID-19 health facilities, as well as a lot of donors and volunteers and assistance from Naypyitaw, said volunteers from Kale.

I served as a volunteer before the coup. We could control the virus then. All the people took part in prevention. But there are no volunteers at all now. No one wants to volunteer. I also do not volunteer. No one is volunteering to help COVID-19 patients after five volunteers were infected. And there are fewer doctors and nurses working, said a former volunteer.

Under the peoples government, patients were not asked a kyat [to receive treatment]. There were many donors providing free meals and medicine. The [NLD] government also provided free medicines. You didnt need to spend a kyat from your own pocket. It was a totally free 20-day treatment, he added.

Patients are not going to hospital now unless it is an emergency as they have to pay to receive care at the COVID-19 center opened at the hospital and the treatment is not reliable. People who can afford it are choosing to receive treatment at private hospitals and clinics.

Curfew

Another factor contributing to COVID-19 deaths in Kale is the dusk-to-dawn curfew which effectively bars patients needing emergency care from being taken to hospital during the night hours.

A number of COVID-19 patients have died as they could not reach the hospital at night despite needing emergency healthcare. In the last week, a couple who were outside during curfew hours were shot by junta troops and one of them died.

Junta troops fire on sight without making inquiries first. So no one dares to go outside at night, said U Maung Maung.

Coup and COVID-19 Combination

Many lives in Kale are at risk because of the combined impact of the coup and the coronavirus pandemic.

Kalay residents feel unsafe because of both the armed clashes and the public health crisis. Many live in constant fear and are going through sleepless nights.

Many of my relatives, friends and acquaintances have died during this period. Some have died from COVID-19 and some have died of torture in military custody. I dont know what will happen to me tomorrow. I feel unsafe. I can only pray that I survive, said Ko Kyaw.

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More than a quarter-million Model 3 and Model Y Tesla cars are being recalled after China's vehicle safety authority announced the implementation. Tesla owners, however, don't need to bring their cars into a service center to get their cars fixed.

Tesla China Recall

China's State Administratin for Market Regulation for vehicle safety announced that Tesla isimplementing a voluntary recall over the weekend, CNBC reported.

This recall is a software update that addresses alleged safety issues regarding its driver-assistance systems. Although Tesla owners do not have to go to a service center to proceed with the update, the fix is still considered a recall.

The driver-assistance systems safety issue affects 285,520 of its Model 3 and Model Y vehicles across the country.

The recall covered 249,855 Model 3 sedans and Model Y crossovers that were manufactured by Tesla in Shanghai. The other 35,665 Model 3 vehicles included in the recall were Teslas manufactured in the U.S. and imported to China, CNBC noted.

BREAKING:

Tesla sent a software update to 300k cars in China.

All these 300k cars became 10% faster & safer in 42 mins.  $TSLA  doniyor (@bevedoni) June 27, 2021

The problem in the system, according the the Chinese regulators, is that it can be accidentally activated, CNN Business explained. Drivers can mistakenly switch the active cruise contorl feature on or off in their Model 3 or Model Y vehicles in certain situations. This includes triggering the feature on or off while making a sharp turn.

The issue is especially dangerous when the driver's Tesla could suddently accelerate in extreme cases leading to collisions, SAMR said in their recall announcement.

The recall and the update fix was Tesla's initiative to eliminate potentially safety hazards after the regulators initiated a defect investigation. This pressure was in light of a string of high-profile crashes, price changes, and quality complaints Chinese customers raised in recent months.

Tesla has apologized for the recall over the weekends, adding in a statement that the company would strictly follow national regulations and "keep inproving our safety protection," CNN said.

Sometimes people think it is performance, but safety is always the primary design requirement for a Tesla  Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 25, 2021

Read Also: Choosing Whether to Repair Your Car at the Dealership or a Local Garage

Tesla Stock Drop

The company's stock went down about 25 percent from a peak over the past year, CNN noted.

Short sellers and concerns about its management bench, and now the string of publicity issues in China aren't really helping Tesla's cause. Scrutiny from the Chinese government isn't helping either, and experts are suggesting that Tesla should really double down on their efforts to building more goodwill, customer service, and improving ties with the authorities.

However, this shouldn't derail the electronic vehicle company in the near-term or long-term.

Tesla China officially launched their 1st Solar, Storage and Supercharging Station in Lhasa today. An average of 3000+ hours of light throughout the year  this is the very first Powerwall in China and it wont be the last! @elonmusk @tesla $TSLA pic.twitter.com/j9afWMPtMa  Jay in Shanghai  (@JayinShanghai) June 23, 2021

The act of voluntarily going out of their way to fix issues and elected to cover more than a quarter-million vehicles is a move that should present the EV company as one that deeply cares for its customers.This should also subtly make concessions with the Chinese consumers and government despite the less-than-ideal PR.

This voluntary recall could even work in Tesla's favor, as the convenience of the software patch could be seen as an advantage over competitors, Taylor Ogan of Snow Bull Capital explained to CNBC.

The software patch is so easy to perform that some customers may not even really notice it, as well. Not to mention the update would take a minute fraction of the time customers would have to deal with bringing and leaving their vehicles in a dealership.

Not all car companies offer a software fix without requiring the customer to head over to the physical dealership. In the same manner not all companies could offer fixes for a fraction of the time. And so this could actually win over the Chinese market.

If Tesla could continue clearing their reputation, this could be a potential boost not only in the Chinese market, which the conpany considers its potentially largest market, but it could boost overall company growth.

Related Article: Tesla Recalls Over 285,000 Cars in China; Assisted Driving Feature to Undergo Software Update
Facebook received a massive boost, closing a record $1 trillion in market capitalization on Monday after a federal court junked a U.S. Federal Trade Commission anti-trust complaint against the social media giant, CNBC reported.

Facebook Stocks Close 4.2% Higher After Court Case Dismissal

Facebook stocks soared 4.2 percent higher--closing at $355.64--after Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia threw out the anti-trust complaint. It is after prosecutors failed to prove Facebook's alleged monopoly in the social networking space, his ruling stated.

FB is the fifth US company to reach the $1 trillion market cap after Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet (the parent company of Google).

The Federal Trade Commission and 48 state attorneys general accused Facebook of stifling and eliminating competition by devouring rivals, such as WhatsApp and Instagram, and leaving would-be competitors out of the running by cutting access to their data and systems, a report from NPR said.

Judge Boasberg, however, dismissed the FTC complaints "without prejudice," which means the complainants can file a new case against Facebook. As such, the judge gave the FTC 30 days to refile its complaint and explain further how it reached its conclusion that Facebook has a market share of more than 60 percent.

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The FTC and the New York attorney general, who led in filing the states' complaint, said they would evaluate the court decisions and consider their options.

Facebook takes most of its earnings from personalized advertisements that appear to users of Facebook and Instagram. It also has an emerging hardware business, developing such products as the Portal video calling device, Oculus virtual reality headsets and smart glasses set to unveil later this year, CNBC noted.

The Menlo Park, California-based company had its initial public offering in May 2012, starting with a market capitalization of $104 billion.

The FTC's inability to show "metric(s) or method(s) it used to calculate Facebook's market" in pegging Facebook's market share as "60 percent plus" makes the assertion "too speculative and conclusory to go forward," Judge Boasberg added.

He said the agency and the attorneys general waited too long to oppose Facebook's purchases of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, the Wall Street Journal noted.

Facebook 'Pleased' With Court Decision, Insists Competing 'Fairly'

The federal court ruling serves as a reprieve for Facebook, which has been a constant target of bipartisan political and regulatory bodies over chargers that they have unlawfully monopolized the market.

Facebook spokesperson Christopher Sgro said in the NPR report that the company is "pleased" with Judge Boasberg's decision, which recognized the "defects in the government complaints filed against Facebook." Sgro said Facebook "compete(s) fairly every day to earn people's time and attention," and added that it will stay committed to "deliver great products" for its users.

But politicians going after big tech companies are not perturbed. They are calling for an overhaul to U.S. competition laws that would strengthen anti-monopoly enforcement by government agencies. A U.S. Republican from Colorado, Rep. Ken Buck, emphasized that the Congress should offer more tools and resources for the government agencies to go after tech giants engaging in monopolistic practices.

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The undisputed giant of the internet age, Google is the most visited website in the world and dominates the search engine market. Billions of people use Google tools and websites every day. That means that a lot of data passes through Google's servers. Could some of that data help your business?

Google provides powerful and developer-friendly APIs for many of their top products. If you aren't familiar with the term API, it means application programming interface. An API enables software applications to talk to each other and exchange data. So if you use Google's APIs, you can work with Google Maps or Google Search to get data that you can use in your own applications. That's great, but what if you want to do more than is possible with the official APIs?

We're going to explore 3 of Google's biggest tools and show you what kind of data you can extract and use to enhance your business, study, or research.

These methods use web scraping. You've probably heard a lot about that recently, as more and more companies are turning to modern, efficient ways of collecting data. Web scraping just means that you use a script, or bot, to crawl a web page or website and collect data. The data is saved in a structured format that's perfect for using in databases, other applications, or spreadsheets.

Getting more from Google Maps

Google Maps has over one billion monthly active users and provides driving directions for 194 countries. That's just about the entire planet. On top of that, Google Places stores local information for more than 80 million places around the world. Those locations include businesses, shops, museums, tourist destinations, and more. Each location in the Google Maps database contains information on opening hours, popular times, reviews, photos, address, phone numbers, and plenty of other useful data.

That kind of data is perfect for aggregating and repurposing. You can probably already think of potential ways to take the information and repackage it for users in new and exciting ways. Combine opening hours with popular times and reviews to create tourist guides, scrape addresses and phone numbers to identify potential leads, or even just create aggregators to provide your users with the information they want without them having to look anything up themselves.

But unfortunately, the official Google Maps API and Google Places API have limits on how much data an individual user can extract from their databases. For instance, you can only download up to 5 reviews and 10 photos using the official API. You can't build a business with those kinds of limits.

Luckily, there are tools to do more. Apify has a range of Google scrapers, including one that lets you get unlimited results from Google Maps.

Why you might want to scrape Google Search

Google Search is even bigger than Google Maps. There are more than 3.5 billion searches made on Google every day. If a business isn't doing well in Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) then it isn't doing well in the real world.

Again, Google Search has vast amounts of data on companies, brands, products, and customers. It also has data on your competitors. Here are just some of the ways you could use Google Search data to better understand your business and its place in the world:

Search engine optimization (SEO): you can monitor how your website performs on Google over time, based on what you need to know and what information is important to you.

Collect data on display ads that were shown for a particular set of keywords and see how you can do better in your own advertising.

Monitor both the organic and paid results of your direct competitors or your field of business.

Build a URL list for particular keywords so that you know who to contact, which websites are relevant to you, or what websites to target for other web scraping projects.

To get this kind of data, you'll need to use a SERP API tool like Apify's Google Search Results Scraper, which has full support for proxies to enhance performance and allow for full geographical freedom, wherever your business is based.

Keep up to date with Google Trends

Finally, Google Trends isn't as high profile as Google Maps and Google Search, but it can make you very powerful when it comes to predicting what will be big in the future.

Google Trends shows you what people have been searching for around the globe and what ideas and fashions are just starting to emerge. Analyzing this at scale can give you superpowers, as you can find out what you should invest in, or where you can best spend your resources.

There are lots of ways that Google Trends can inspire you to make the right business decisions or adjust your strategy:

Property values can change rapidly. Checking up on the number of searches for a particular area could let you get ahead on buying property or providing services in a neighborhood.

E-commerce retailers can work out the best products to get into by seeing whether there is an upward trend for certain products or brands. Dropshippers can fine-tune their offering to really boost their margins.

Journalists can research hot topics and keep an eye on what interests their target audience, with precision based on location or time range.

If you're looking for new business opportunities, you can use Google Trends to fine niche markets. Time your business just right and you can profit from viral spikes in interest or seasonal trends.

Keyword research can help you refine your business and find related topics or keywords. Scrape keywords in bulk, import them into your favorite spreadsheet program and analyze what you need to offer next.

Keep an eye on your competitors by seeing how well they perform versus your brand. Make sure you stay one step ahead.

Google Trends doesn't have an API, but Apify has you covered with a tool for scraping data directly and at scale from Google Trends.

Google can give you the edge and information you need to get ahead. You just need to use the right tools to extract and use that data.
The 2022 Toyota Tundra is already gathering quite a bit of hype before its debut this September. With its new design, the Tundra is going to be fresh and exciting, and fans new and old will find something to love about the pick-up.

The 2021 Ford F-150 isn't sporting as dramatic of a redesign and changes, but it is a testament to Ford's reliability and durability. The carried-over engine and transmission still pack a punch and the performance is just as dependable.

Design Differences Between the 2022 Toyota Tundra and 2021 Ford F-150

Both the 2022 Toyota Tundra and the 2021 Ford F-150 are classified as full-sized pick-up trucks.

From the front, the Tundra looks fierce with its redesigned front-end. The strong and large grille is getting a lot of attention from enthusiasts, although the reactions are mixed, Hardworking Trucks said.

It has the Toyota badge on the upper center of the grille, and a large light bar underneath it. Toyota also did away with halogen.

The F-150 looks equally boxy with its front-end, but the grille is more modest in size. Motortrend said the exterior design was thoughtful. It looks fun and exciting enough to entice enthusiasts, but not stripping away from its functionality and reliability.

The Ford blue oval badge is right in the middle of the grille. And it's also got strip accent lights framing the grille and headlights.

The F-150 also offers multiple cab and bed configurations, from a Regular Cab to a SuperCab, and even a SuperCrew passenger cabin, where you can seat anywhere from three to six passengers.

There are also multiple bed lengths like the 6.5 ft. and 8.0 ft bed options for the Regular and SuperCab. The SuperCrew passenger cabin can opt for a 5.5 ft. or a 6.5 ft. bed, Motortrend added.

As for the interior, not much about the Tundra has been released yet, except for a press-released photo of half of the infotainment screen.

From the looks of it, the Toyota pick-up will be sporting a touchscreen multimedia system that will surely be supporting Android Auto, Apple CarPlay, and Amazon Alexa like its other siblings. It looks like it covers a sizeable area of the front as well.

The Ford pickup has some fresh materials to give the cabin a more modern and upscale look. You can also have a collapsible table called the Work Surface which extends from the center console. Moreover, you can charge your devices using its regular charger with its plugs in the bed.

The F-150's infotainment system offers either an eight-inch or 12-inch touchscreen, briinging Apple CarPlay and Android Auto support and a 4G LTE Wi-Fi hotspot.

Read Also: 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning: Price, Release Date, and How it Compares to the Tesla Cybertruck

2022 Toyota Tundra vs. 2021 Ford F-150: Engine and Other Spec Differences

The Ford F-150 is housing a 2.7-liter EcoBoost twin-turbo V-6 and a 10-speed automatic transmission.

Rumors are suggesting the 2022 Toyota Tundra will also be carrying a hybrid twin-turbo V6, although its capacity will be slightly larger, offering 3.5 liters for gas and 3.3 liters for diesel. The Tundra's engine will either be paired with an eight-speed automatic transmission or a 10-speed option like the 2021 Land Cruiser.

Although sporting a slightly smaller engine, the F-150 delivers 325 horsepower and 400 lb-ft of torque, and it's nearly as powerful as the traditional 5.0-liter V-8 that Ford has in its lineup, Motortrend furthered. The Tundra will be expected to pony up 409 horsepower and 479 lb-ft of torque.

In terms of towing capacity, the Tundra would be expected to improve upon the current pick-up's 1,730-pound payload capacity and 10,200-pound tow rating.

The F-150 has 3,325 lbs. Of payload capacity on a regular cab with 14,000 lbs of available towing capacity. To bring home just how capable the F-150 is at towing and lugging whatever it is you want to tow and lug, the F-150 is fitted with a smart hitch and smart trailer tow connector as well as onboard scales to measure payload weight.

Most of the specs for the Tundra are speculations until its debut in September. Bob Carter, the executive vice president of sales for Toyota North America, told MotorTrend that the new model "will blow you away."

Both are very exciting and capable trucks with different niches in the pick-up truck community they are trying to serve.

Related Article: 2022 Toyota Tundra vs. 2021 Tundra: Engine, Exterior Design, Specs and Other Differences
On Tuesday June 29, 2021 Betty Sue Ramage, daughter, sister, wife, mother, grandmother and friend went home to be with her Lord and Savior at the young age of 95 years. She was born youngest of six in Gatesville, Texas. Betty will be forever remembered by her children Susan Bockhorn, Martha 
Nokia announced that with solution integrator Beaqon it will deploy Nokias passive optical local area network (POL) solution at Changi Airport, Singapore.

The new network will support existing operations and enable new services to advance Changi Airports digital transformation.

By deploying Nokia Optical LAN, it will be able to support existing CCTV operations as well as intelligent subsystems.

Nokia head of enterprise for Asia Pacific and Japan Stuart Hendry said: Changi Airport has a clear mission to become the worlds leading digital air hub, transforming its operations efficiently and securely to deliver a seamless travel experience for passengers. This transformation to Airport 4.0 relies on secure and powerful networks that can connect thousands of devices.

As a leader in Passive Optical Network (PON) solutions, we are committed to leveraging fibre technology to offer enterprises a quicker and more cost-effective way to deploy LANs. We will partner closely with Beaqon as it transforms operations at Singapore Changi Airport.

Nokia Optical LAN leverages the tremendous bandwidth capabilities of fibre to cover greater distances than copper LAN networks in a smaller footprint. It offers a flexible, scalable and sustainable way to connect applications, and address growing data demands while reducing capital and operational expenditure.

The network will use the Nokia PCC to simplify network monitoring and operations even as Changi Airport expands connectivity to thousands more sensors and devices as it introduces new digital capabilities. The network will use geo-redundancy to ensure data is secure and always available.

TJ Systems, a subsidiary of Beaqon, managing director Jimmy Leow said: We are committed to providing the highest quality network solutions to our customers. Using Nokia Optical LAN, we can deploy a highly cost-effective solution that will deliver greater reach than copper LAN technology, while ensuring data security as Changi Airport expands capabilities.
Facebook Australia has announced the expansion of its Local Alerts product to all eligible state and territory health, police and lead central government Facebook Pages.

Facebook says this expansion will help government agencies connect with communities to find missing persons, share information on COVID-19 breakouts or hotspots and provide critical updates during disasters or significant hazards.

Local Alerts are designed to help authorities communicate urgent, need-to-know or actionable information to communities in emergencies as well as less critical situations where timely information is valuable.

When authorities with access to the product mark posts as Local Alerts, Facebook will send a notification to Page followers located in the affected area and mark the post as an alert to make it stand out in News Feed.

The Local Alerts product was originally launched by Facebook late last year in Australia to all state and territory fire and emergency service agencies.

Australia was the second country globally to access the tool and Facebook notes that a recent analysis in the US found that Page posts marked as Local Alerts by their administrators gained over 250% more views on average than regular Page posts.

We are very pleased to be expanding Local Alerts access to all eligible health, police and government state and territory pages in Australia,said Josh Machin, Head of Public Policy, Australia at Facebook.

Since the rollout of this feature 6 months ago to Australian fire and emergency services, weve seen Local Alerts used to provide critical and real-time information during bushfire, cyclone and flood emergency situations.

We hope this feature will be another important communication tool for health, police and central government agencies to share updates to people about critical events happening in their local area.

For example, with COVID-19 breakouts in different places around the country, Local Alerts could be used to advise communities about recent outbreaks, travel restrictions or lockdowns areas, and other requirements as situations develop and evolve, Machin concluded.

Katarina Carroll APM, QLD Police Commissioner said: The QPS welcomes Facebook's expansion of the Local Alerts tool to include state and territory police. We have successfully used social media platforms to enhance our engagement with local communities and this additional capability will help increase our reach for important community safety messaging.

We look forward to adding the Local Alerts product to our digital communications toolkit, particularly to issue real-time alerts, warnings and urgent messaging to our community during times of emergency and critical incidents.

The Department of Fire and Emergency Services (DFES) has strategically been using Facebooks Local Alert tool during incidents to quickly inform communities about imminent danger and how to stay safe, Darren Klemm AFSM, WA Fire and Emergency Services Commissioner said.

Our Digital Communications Team has found the tool extremely effective in notifying people online about bushfire, cyclone and flood emergencies - in most instances reaching hundreds of thousands of people within a few hours.

These were often people that would otherwise have had a delay in knowing the danger they were in. DFES is proud to be leading the way in emergency digital communications in Australia and encourages other eligible agencies to make use of this tool.

Facebook says the expansion of local alerts will extend to the following state and territory pages:

Health Services:

o Australian Capital Territory Health

o New South Wales Health

o Northern Territory Health

o Queensland Health

o South Australia Health

o Department of Health, Tasmania

o Victorian Department of Health

o Western Australia Health
Melbourne biosciences company Esfam Biotech says it is on track to commence human trials for a COVID-19 treatment by the end of 2021.

Esfam said on Tuesday it is developing a world-first novel, specific anti-COVID-19 treatment that has the potential to treat the symptoms of infection.

Esfam said that it is currently testing an injectable treatment and its researchers are also working on an inhaler option similar to those used by asthma patients, which could allow easy administration and, in some cases, facilitate delivery to some of the worlds most vulnerable and remote communities.

The company says it aims to contribute a critical and complementary part of the toolkit to bring the world out of the pandemic.

We see our treatment as working side by side with vaccines, by hopefully providing protection against current and future COVID-19 variants, and helping to restore a sense of normalcy worldwide, said Professor Albert Frauman, Director and CEO of Esfam Biotech and an established researcher into the causes and treatment of autoimmune disease and cancer.

Professor Jeffrey D Zajac AO, Academic Lead Medicine (Austin), University of Melbourne, and Medical Director of the Division of Medicine, Austin Health says there is reason to feel optimistic.

This novel therapeutic agent shows very significant promise as both a preventative and treatment for SARS-CoV-2.

Esfam says that unlike repurposed therapies, such as remdesivir and ivermectin, this ground-breaking discovery is a new targeted therapeutic developed specifically for SARS-CoV-2.

Esfam says its cell-based and animal testing by demonstrates a reduction in infection before it is established, as a prophylactic, as well as acting as an acute therapy for COVID-19 - and by deploying treatment to known close contacts, or to those who have been at exposure sites, researchers hope it could limit the type of community spread currently occurring across the country.

Esfam explains that the therapy works by blocking the binding of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to cells, by a unique mechanism not through the ACE-2 receptor, which has been previously studied - and testing has shown the drug prevents infection from occurring and reduces infection that has already started, and has also been shown to almost completely reduce lung infection in an animal model.

We used computer-based modelling of drugs that work on the virus-binding target. This is a new biochemical interaction and a new  not repurposed  drug, that could provide the ability to treat preventatively, or early or milder forms of the disease, as well as in hospitalised patients, Professor Frauman says.

Esfam says it hopes to confirm these therapeutic outcomes later this year with its planned human trials.

Esfam says that currently, there are few pharmacological interventions for treatment during early disease and no effective post-exposure prophylactic interventions - and its research may offer new hope in the fight against this overwhelming disease and the consequential impacts on global healthcare, communities and economies.

Supported by private equity and recognised by the Australian Government as its first life sciences early stage innovation company (ESIC), Esfam Biotech says it is working with partners worldwide to accelerate the next phase of its critical development.

The discovery may also offer effective treatment against future variants as the virus evolves, and provisional patents have been filed for use in SARS-CoV-2 and other coronavirus infections, Esfam concluded.
BAI Communications (BAI) acquires telecommunications infrastructure US company Mobilitie. The acquisition puts BAI in a position to support telecommunications operators and municipalities in the US. It also furthers BAIs capabilities of providing neutral host infrastructure in the major subways of different countries.

BAI Communications acquires telecommunications infrastructure US company Mobilitie.

According to BAI, the acquisition represents a major expansion of their business in North America. The company provides cellular and Wi-Fi connectivity across large infrastructure projects, including the New York City subway system, under its majority owned business Transit Wireless.

It significantly extends BAIs footprint coast-to-coast. The transaction is subject to customary regulatory clearances and is expected to close in the third quarter of this year.

The deal enables BAI to immediately extend and diversify its solution and service offering beyond its current global markets. It marries Mobilities assets and operations across 5G outdoor and indoor wireless infrastructure, credibility in small cell deployment, and BAIs work with transit operators across major US cities.

The expertise of both businesses positions BAI to support telecommunications operators and municipalities in the US and its other markets internationally to seize the smart city business opportunities that 5G services are offering worldwide.

BAI Communications group CEO Igor Leprince says the acquisition of Mobilitie establishes BAI as a leading telecommunications infrastructure and public transit wireless connection solutions provider in the United States.

This reflects our ambitions for the US as well as the other markets in which we operate globally and positions us to capitalise on the prioritisation of connected infrastructure in regions such as the UK and Europe, he says.

The scale and strong relationships with large venue operators and mobile network operators that Mobilitie brings fits perfectly with BAIs existing leadership in connected transit and infrastructure, he notes.

He says Mobilitie prioritises technical expertise and delivery to its customers, and is committed to exceptional customer service.

This alignment and the complementary fit of our offerings make this an exciting move for BAI and our customers around the world. It strongly positions us to scale and extend the work we are already delivering, he adds.

Mobilities portfolio includes existing agreements to provide wireless communications to the public transit systems in Seattle and the San Francisco Bay Area. The company is backed by investment firm Shamrock Capital.

The acquisition will see the addition of Mobilities broader portfolio of 220 venues across 39 states, 10,000 small cells across 45 states, and 300 tower sites across 14 states to BAIs operations.

This will also further BAIs capabilities of providing neutral host infrastructure in the major subways of New York, Toronto, and Hong Kong, and in Australia. It will also support BAIs expansion in the UK and Europe as it pursues, and wins, significant opportunities.

Mobilitie founder and chairman Gary Jabara is pleased with the transaction, which augments Mobilities market impact worldwide.

BAIs significance as a 5G player, together with Mobilitie, will enable unprecedented support of US wireless carriers. It puts us on a clear, long-term path to greatly accelerate business and help our customers, especially the mobile network operators, he claims.

He concludes: Combining BAIs connectivity solutions and international presence with Mobilities North American assets, including our nationwide footprint of tier one venues, public transit systems in the San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle, along with 10,000 small cells and thousands of New York small cells that are in and around BAIs existing assets, makes us better positioned for 5G growth than anyone else in North America.

Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments), BAI's majority shareholder, welcomes the acquisition.

CPP Investments head of portfolio value creation and non-executive director on the BAI Communications board of directors Max Biagosch comments: This acquisition represents an attractive opportunity for CPP Investments to increase its financial commitments and generate long-term sustainable returns for our contributors and beneficiaries.

Biagosch notes that the acquisition is also an addition to CPP Investments portfolio. It extends our investment in digital infrastructure, which is critical to people and communities around the world as our lives become increasingly dependent on connectivity.

Alberta Investment Management (a minority shareholder in BAI) senior vice president, infrastructure and renewable resources Ben Hawkins the management team of BAI in the acquisition.

BAI has a demonstrated track record of successfully integrating companies as part of its growth strategy and realising the full value of the combined entities for all stakeholders, he says.
This Week in Review

A weekly review of the best and most popular stories published in the Imperial Valley Press. Also, featured upcoming events, new movies at local theaters, the week in photos and much more.
Jacksonville, TX (75766)

Today

Intervals of clouds and sunshine. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High near 90F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

A few clouds. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 73F. Winds light and variable.




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Joburg Ombudsman Advocate Siduduzo Gumede has welcomed 25 ambassadors, who will extend the presence of the Office of the Ombudsman in the seven regions of the City of Johannesburg.



The 25 Joburg Ombudsman Ambassadors, who will start in July 2021, will be placed at all the regions of the City to assist residents with their complaints of alleged maladministration and unfair treatment by City departments and entities.



Taking the office to the people will ensure that residents can easily access our offices in the regions that are in their neighbourhood, said Adv Gumede.



The Office of the Ombudsman was established in terms of the Establishment of the City of Johannesburg: Ombudsman Bylaw 2014, and in line with the Citys 2040 Growth & Development Strategy (GDS 2040), which defines the type of society the City aspires to be by the year 2040.



As an office of last instance, residents may only approach the office after they have exhausted all official channels of the City of Joburg. Residents can talk to the ambassadors, lodge complaints, and use the complaints boxes that will be allocated in the regions.



The Ambassadors programme is significant in the history of our City and our country as they were recruited from the youth of our City and will spend 18 months in the Office of the Ombudsman where they will be exposed to the inner workings of the Office of the Ombudsman in local government, said Adv Gumede.



This is a great victory for service delivery in the City. To my knowledge, it is a first in this country. Theres therefore great interest in how it will develop. Its an experiment that, no doubt, will be emulated and replicated throughout the country in the future. Let us therefore approach it with the requisite commitment and give it the attention it deserves.



The Office of the Ombudsman is reachable through the following channels:

Helpdesk: 010 288 2800

WhatsApp: 081 365 0225

Physical address:

Sappi Building

48 Ameshoff Street

Braamfontein

2001

Email: complaints@joburgombudsman.org.za

@jhbombudsman

@jhbombudsman






A member of Waldoboro United Methodist Church sings a hymn during a service, Sunday, June 20, 2021, in Waldoboro, Maine. The drop in attendance at the church, in part due to COVID-19, forced its closure. The last sermon was on June 27.
Fresh Del Monte Produce Inc., one of the worlds largest leading vertically integrated producers, marketers and distributors of high-quality, fresh produce and German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) have joined forces to develop a three-year multi-stakeholder partnership with local organizations, government agencies, communities and subsidiaries to maximize the use of natural resources and to ensure the sustainability of landscapes in Costa Rica and in Guatemala.
Laurent Gbagbo, the former Ivory Coast president cleared by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, on Monday slammed The Hague-based court as biased and not serious.

Gbagbos first comments on the trial and his acquittal since his return to Ivory Coast after a 10-year absence, was met with rousing cheers from supporters in his home village of Mama in southwest Ivory Coast.

The ICC, its not serious, it had to eliminate an inconvenient man, an inconvenient competitor, so they put me there, he told journalists and local chiefs.

But I have no regrets, because if I had come back with the title of criminal, its you all here who were going to be ashamed, he said.

Gbagbo was speaking a day after his return to his village, where he had received a heros welcome from thousands of supporters.

He then headed to the town of Blouzon, near Mama, to visit the grave of his mother Marguerite Gado, who died in 2014 when he was in prison at the ICC in The Hague.

Gbagbo was able to return to his country earlier this month after having been definitively acquitted by the ICC on charges stemming from violence that claimed around 3,000 lives following his refusal to concede electoral defeat in 2010 to current President Alassane Ouattara.

 Im not a criminal 

Even the whites, who dont know us, who follow our little quarrels here, knew I (was not) a criminal, Gbagbo said on Monday.

Me, I do everything, eh, but Im not a criminal, he added, to laughter from his audience.

His words struck a chord with the crowd.

Gbagbo has come to bring peace to the nation, said Brigitte Koudou, who came from the neighbouring village of Zebizekou to see him.

Villagers danced and sang in the main village square exhorting Gbagbo to speak.

President Gbagbo is free, said Beatrice Djedje. We want to hear him, even if it is a single word.

Earlier Monday, Gbagbo met with traditional chiefs who had travelled from all over the centre-west region, his political stronghold, to meet him.

Local chieftain Joseph Goli Obrou from Gbagbos Bete ethnic group said the former president was vital for healing scars in the country, a regional powerhouse and the worlds top cocoa producer.

He has to use his popularity to urge the Ivorian people to opt for total reconciliation, he told AFP.

Gbagbo will undergo a purificatory ceremony traditionally reserved for someone who has served time in prison and has been released.

Tomorrow when I purify him, I will ask him to serve the process of reconciliation and that his first words to the nation should go towards reconciliation, Obrou said.

Gbagbos return to the former French colony on June 17 saw violence, with police making massive use of tear gas to disperse crowds.

His Ivorian Popular Front (FPI) party said several dozen of his followers were arrested.

Ouattara, re-elected controversially to a third term in October 2020, gave the green light for Gbagbos return a few days after the ICC in late March upheld his acquittal first pronounced in January 2019.
President Joseph Bidens announcement on April 24 that the United States will remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever again occurring was predictably met with great enthusiasm in Armenia and anger in Turkey. Those contrasting reactions demonstrate why simply acknowledging a historical injustice happened may not be enough.

An acknowledgment by the state responsible for the injustice can be an important first step, but it may still be seen as hollow if unaccompanied by unconditional truth-telling and adequate reparations. An acknowledgment by one state that another carried out genocide will obviously be welcomed by the people who suffered death and persecution, but it can justifiably be criticized as hypocritical if the acknowledging state continues to deny its own record of war crimes, genocide, and slavery and has not delivered reparations to the victims and their descendants. At the same time, while Armenia may rightfully seek acknowledgment from its neighbors of the genocide and other egregious violations, for its part, it must have the courage to reckon with its own recent past in the 30 years since achieving statehood, which includes war crimes, systematic corruption, and large-scale human rights abuses against its own citizens.

Failing to do so ultimately threatens the young republics democracy.

Timing, sequencing, and not doing harm

Transitional justice calls for prudent timing and thoughtful sequencing of truth-seeking initiatives, reparations, institutional reforms, and individual accountability measures. Those processes are not meant to be implemented in a particular order and at times some measuressuch as prosecuting long-dead perpetrators of massacres from a century agocannot be pursued at all. Remedies such as reparations and revealing the truth are often more important and urgent for many victims of human rights violations or conflict-related crimes than criminal prosecution and trials, particularly in global south countries.

For global north donor governments, that means first taking a do no harm approach and then asking whether the measures they support, the atrocities they choose to condemn or ignore, and their own record of denying or acknowledging injustices they caused could exacerbate conflict, heighten tensions, or devalue the goals of acknowledgment as a form of justice. For Turkey, the United States failure to acknowledge its own history of genocide became an excuse to say that if a genocide word has to be used, that has to be used for the United States, not for Turkey. It has obscured Turkeys own hypocrisy in reiterating its offer to establish a joint history commission with Armenia while the Recep Tayyip Erdogan government criminalizes dissent, including the acknowledgment by Turkish citizens of the Armenian genocide. The point is not that governments should withhold their acknowledgment of injustices committed by others if they cannot acknowledge their own. The point is that calls for justice and accountability from global north countries for the atrocities committed by others will be taken more seriously if global north governments acknowledge their own histories of genocide, war crimes, and human rights violations against their own or other people.

2018: An unfulfilled transitional justice promise

Armenia has gone through significant political upheavals in its history, from the genocide to the breakup of the Soviet Union and the emergence of an independent Armenian republic in 1991. This post-Soviet transition in turn led to conflict with neighboring Azerbaijan over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. Although these upheavals accelerated the formation of the Armenian state and opened a window to reinventing its national identity, they have also inflicted multigenerational wounds and left state institutions weak and in desperate need of reform. This allowed populist politicians and the oligarchs who backed them to capture the state and to commit mutually reinforcing violations of human rights and large-scale corruption.

These grievances were what led to the revolution in 2018, to the subsequent election of former political detainee and parliamentarian Nikol Pashinyan as prime minister, and to his promise to pursue transitional justice. That promise was why youth activists, human rights defenders, victims of corruption and human rights abuses, anticorruption organizations, and even Armenians in the diaspora were optimistic that accountability would emerge after the revolution. With the recurrence of war with Azerbaijan, some Armenians have also increasingly recognized the need for truth-seeking involving the conflict, a recognition that might eventually lead to realizing that civilians on both sides have suffered most.

But the promise is becoming difficult to fulfill. Armenia is repeatedly missing opportunities for truth-seeking and accountability. This is in part because the renewed conflict with Azerbaijan has given authoritarian-era politicians the excuse to invoke their past wartime roles and promote populist authoritarian leadership. But it is also because the Pashinyan government has failed to come up with a coherent transitional justice strategy that does not rely on his own version of populism. Thus, while political transitions might bring about a change in leaders or a shift in ruling parties, it is the creation of democratic space after authoritarian rule that might (but not always) lead to measures such as truth-seeking and reparations. In Armenias case, these measures could help build support for establishing a sustainable peace with its neighbors.

Commemorations and official apologies for past violations

The post-revolution government made some progress by filing criminal cases for corruption and for violations of the constitution against two former presidents and some of their family members. Pashinyan applied pressure on high judicial officials to resign so that the government could introduce judicial reforms. His majority coalition explored the possibility of judicial vetting, enacted constitutional reforms, and created new agencies to investigate corruption and recover ill-gotten assets. Pashinyan himself has issued official apologies for past human rights violations and led commemorations for victims of political violence under authoritarian rule.

However, a draft law that would create a truth commission is still pending in parliament. No other significant steps have been taken to address the demands of victims and their families for truth, reparations, and accountability for human rights violations, including those related to violent political repression, the detention of opposition activists, the corrupt and unjust expropriation of property in Yerevan, and the deaths under suspicious circumstances in non-combat situations of young Armenian conscripts in the military. In the latter case, a substantial number of these deaths also happened after the revolution, and this issue has come to symbolize the impunity that has become entrenched in the country.

More than ever, a broader transitional justice strategy is needed, instead of the ad hoc measures that the post-revolution government has so far implemented or initiated. This strategy should place a premium on truth-seeking, including for human rights violations and corruption. Armenia should not overly focus on criminal prosecutions and trials since those processes rely on an independent judiciary, which is still a work-in-progress in Armenia. This strategy should address both individual and institutional responsibility for past abuses and examine the root causes of the authoritarian rule that took hold in Armenia in the post-Soviet period. A truth-seeking process could help Armenians come to know and understand the hard truths about their recent history, including the history of the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, in the same way they have confronted and to some extent come to terms with the painful experiences of genocide and forced displacement of Armenians in the early 20th century.

However, transitional justice cannot meaningfully take place when the same oligarchs, political leaders, and foreign governments that benefited from authoritarian rule and state capture seek to undermine or even roll back the democratic transition that created the opportunity for accountability. It is therefore important to not simply explore transitional justice amid Armenias renewed conflict with Azerbaijan, but to explicitly carry it out with the goal of consolidating the democratic transition, protecting the human rights of Armenians, and demonstrating to Armenias authoritarian neighbors the Armenian peoples courage to seek the truth and their willingness to advance peace through justice.

Countries in the region and the global north can help

Global north countries including the United States and members of the European Union (EU), can help Armenia achieve accountability by taking a do no harm approach. That is, they should not exacerbate Armenias conflict with Azerbaijan or its tensions with Turkey by putting their own geopolitical agendas ahead of letting these countries carefully unpack their common historical baggage. Such an approach may also include promoting people-to-people dialogues that explore shared histories and even grievances, as well as ways of coexisting that do not depend on formal state involvement.

Foreign governments that support transitional justice, Armenia, or both can actively reinforce efforts initiated by Armenian officials and activists to hold accountable those responsible for large-scale corruption, justice for human rights violations, and respect for international humanitarian law. The EU, for example, can support Armenias efforts involving the release of prisoners of war from the recent clashes with Azerbaijan. A recently passed asset recovery law now empowers the government to seized ill-gotten wealth obtained through corruption, and countries where those assets are hidden can support the laws enforcement. As two U.S. senators who have proposed a national action fund to combat corruption put it: Imagine if the United States had been able to inject more anti-corruption resources into Ukraine after the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, or Armenia after the 2018 Velvet Revolution, or Malaysia after its 2018 election. If the United States had been ready with an anti-corruption action fund, we could have dramatically amplified the work of courageous reformers to establish lasting change.

Rewriting history and winning peace with justice

For the last three years, the revolution that took place in April 2018 has been celebrated in Armenia as Citizens Day, held on either the last Saturday or Sunday of April. It is not completely coincidental that it is celebrated close to Armenian genocide remembrance day of April 24. The 2018 commemoration of the genocide, which took place only hours after the authoritarian government had fallen, marked a turning point in the revolution. As journalists Ron Synovitz and Anush Muradian wrote in a Radio Free Europe article, for the first time, many were commemorating Armenian genocide remembrance day as victors rather than as victims.

That feeling of victory will be important for Armenians as they head into another political transition that may or may not expand democratic space and create new opportunities to address recent and historical grievances and injustices. The same transitional justice processes that Armenians have started to use to overcome an authoritarian past can be designed to find a just peace with Azerbaijan or even seek a formal acknowledgment of the genocide by Turkey. But in order to show the people of its authoritarian neighbors that peace and coexistence with Armenia is possible, it will be important for Armenias next government to show by example that it can use its democratic space to pursue transitional justice from within.

Recommended reading Why Joe Biden recognized the Armenian genocide
MATT Hancock and his lover assistant Gina Coladangelo lived together a few days after he revealed this to his wife.

The humiliated former health minister who resigned over the weekend gave up his wife Martha last week after 15 years of marriage.

4 Matt Hancock and his lover assistant Gina Coladangelo lived together a few days after revealing the incident to his wife Credit: Eyevine

4 43-year-old Gina also passed the time for her 12-year marriage with Oliver Tress Credit: Getty Images-Getty

4 The 42-year-old Hancock and the millionaire lobbyist Ms. Coradangelo were photographed by CCTV in his Whitehall office Credit: Sun

43-year-old Gina also passed the time for her 12-year marriage with Oliver Tress-Oliver Tress is said to be shocked by the shocking news .

It is understood that Hancock now lives with his lover-less than a week after their relationship was revealed by The Sun.

The last time Gina was seen was a few hours before the news that she had an affair with her boss Matt broke out last Friday, when the couples 3.6 million home was loaded with her 70,000 Audi.

The Sun revealed last night that the former minister will try Leave his affairs to his assistant Her friend claimed that Gina Coladangelo (Gina Coladangelo) established a proper relationship.

A neighbor in Wandsworth in southwest London said: Gina and Matt are doing their best, while Ollie is dizzy.

They have a lot of friends here, so we are all trying to help take care of Ollie.

4 Hancock is now believed to live with his lover Credit: LNP

Martha Hancock, 44, did not know that her husband, whom she had been in love with for 15 years, had an affair until he broke the news on Thursday night and announced the end of their marriage.

Afterwards, friends gathered around her Hancock, 42, and the Millionaire Lobbyist Lady Coladangelo It was photographed by CCTV in his Whitehall office.

After her husbands extramarital affair was exposed, Martha kept a solemn silence. Since the scandal was exposed, she has been wearing a wedding ring to go out.

Family and friends told the Daily Mail that the exposure of Mr. Hancocks extramarital affairs shocked his wife, and she had no doubts about Ms. Coradangelo.

Like her husband, she met Ms. Coladangelo at Oxford University-the two were friends on Facebook.

Brainless violence Reveler was beaten to death at a party, thug sentenced to jail after 12 years break in Where is she? The police desperately pursued the 4-year-old girl, who appeared for the last time when leaving the childrens play center exclusive Candle hell 33-year-old mother is homeless after a wax burner candle exploded and destroyed her apartment Supermarket horror An 18-year-old woman was stabbed in a parking lot in Sainsbury, and a 27-year-old man was arrested Cut it out Hancock merchandise flooded eBay after the extramarital affairs scandal, including life-size paper cuts Be lured to death Boy, 13 years old, tempted to park by a girl and stabbed to death in an ambush

Ms. Coladangelo has been a close friend of the former cabinet minister since attending university and was appointed as the non-executive director of the Ministry of Health and Social Care last year.

She is the marketing and communications director of Oliver Bonas, a popular British retailer founded by her husband Oliver Tress.

According to her LinkedIn profile, she has been serving as a non-executive director of the Ministry of Health since September 2020.
A Catholic organization that operates dozens of boarding schools in Canada said it is seeking outside advice on privacy laws that may affect the quality and comprehensiveness of the records it promises to provide.

Ken Thorson of the Consecration of the Immaculate Missionaries of the Fathers and Mothers of the Virgin said that these documents are personnel records that contain personally identifiable information, including those who work in boarding schools.

He said that privacy laws may prevent Oblates from publishing these records, but the organization is now studying the possibility of some disclosure.

Our main concern now is the truth, Tolson said on CBC Power and politics.

Tolson said that the release of these documents now helps to ensure that the Aboriginal groups fully and responsibly access the history that may be included in these personnel files, at least in part.

Watch: priest.Ken Thorson talks about efforts to publish residential school records

Dedicated to the provincial priest. Ken Thorson told Power & Politics that the digitization of key historical boarding school documents will take months to complete. He added that Oblates, which runs 48 boarding schools, is seeking guidelines from privacy experts on the release of more documents. 9:49

The Missionaries of Immaculate Conception operate 48 boarding schools in Canada, including the Marieval Indian Boarding School in Cowessess First Nations in Saskatchewan and the Kamloops Indian Boarding School in British Columbia

Cowessess First Nation announced last week that 751 unmarked graves were initially found on the site of the former boarding school.

Tkemlups te Secwepemc First Nation said last month that preliminary scans found the remains of approximately 215 children near the former boarding school in Kamloops.

Oblates has made a formal commitment to release records related to these schools, but Thorson said in an interview on Monday that the legality of the release of personnel files is unclear.

Information of this nature is usually protected by various federal and provincial privacy laws designed to protect employees.

Indigenous groups, including the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Peoples (FSIM), criticized Oblates for failing to fulfill past promises of providing residential school records.

FSIN stated that if Oblates extends the release of records or conceals information, it will explore legal actions.

Oblates seeks guidance from a privacy officer

According to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, the disclosure of personal information should Usually it can only be done with the knowledge and consent of the employee.

Thorson said Oblates is consulting with privacy experts to see if it can release these records without breaking the law. He also asked government officials to provide guidance.

Maybe the federal and provincial privacy commissioners [can] Help us find a way forward, he said.

We wanted to find a way to make it available to indigenous communities. Thats why we seek guidance.

Thorson said that other records related to the school may be released within three to six months, or even longer.

He attributed the delay in part to the difficulty of digitizing records.
San Diego-a family On Sunday night, a man was shot dead while sitting in a car in Sunset Cliffs Nature Park Looking for answers.

According to the San Diego police, shortly before 11:30 in the evening, the police received multiple reports of shooting near the district of Ladera Steret 4500, and someone called for help. When the police arrived, they found multiple gunshot wounds on a victim. Officials gave first aid, but the victim was pronounced dead at the scene.

The family identified the victim as 33-year-old Akili Cobbs. They say that Cobbs often goes to Sunset Cliffs, which is a popular place for surfers, tourists and stargazers. The parking lot is located below Point Loma Nazarene University and is surrounded by multi-million dollar houses.

By Monday afternoon, flowers marked the shooting scene.

When he was speaking, he was on the podium, the victims brother Marcellus Johnson told FOX 5. When he speaks, he is speaking to the crowd.

The victims family stated that they hoped that the neighbors home security camera would capture the incident and did not believe it was a random attack.

Its not like him, Johnson said. He has no conflicts like that.

Although the police are focused on investigations, the family hopes to get some benefits from it.

Make this place bright and bring something, because there was a murder here, Johnson said. Listen, there is nothing here that tells me murder. Its beautiful. So thats why I want to build this place, for my brothers, and for the people who live nearby.

Some frustrated neighbors said that they would like to see the gate of the parking lot locked at night, with street lights or patrol guards nearby.

The police said they have a Ring camera video of a nearby residence and hope it can provide some answers.
North Korean state media quoted local residents as saying that North Koreans have been crying over the wasting of leader Kim Jong-un. In a very unusual broadcast, they rarely admitted foreign speculation about Kim Jong-uns weight loss.

These commentsin a country that almost always prohibits public discussion of leaders health and personal livesare seen as efforts to increase domestic resistance to Kim Jong Un as he struggles to cope with the growing economic difficulties caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Support, some experts say, sanctions imposed due to its nuclear program and natural disasters.

When we see our people, their hearts hurt the most [Kims] Looks haggard, North Korean national television quoted the unidentified man as saying on Friday. Everyone said that their tears came naturally. 

Judging from the recently released photos, Jin, who is about 1.70 meters (5 feet 8 inches) tall, seems to be thinner. North Korean observers said that his weight was about 140 kg (309 lbs) before, which would make him very fat, but he may have lost 10 to 20 kg (22 to 44 lbs) recently.

Analysts said these remarks indicate that the authorities are trying to use Kim Jong Uns weight change to strengthen loyalty to the regime in times of crisis, portraying him as a dedication and hardworking as the country struggles to deal with the food crisis and other challenges Leaders.

The country closed its border in January last year to protect itself from the pandemic, so trade with Beijing, the lifeblood of Chinas economy, has slowed to a trickle.

The message from Pyongyang is that Kim Jong Un is a leader who works hard for the people, even to the point where he skips meals and loses weight, An Zhanil, a researcher from North Korea, told AFP.

Kim Jong Un was at a Workers Party meeting earlier this month.He is believed to have lost at least 10 kilograms [KCNA via AP Photo]

North Korea is more isolated than ever after its own coronavirus roadblock, and this month Kim admitted that in a country that has been unable to feed itself for a long time, the food situation is tight.

Jenny Town, head of the US-based 38 North project, said that it is not clear whether Kim Jong Uns weight loss was due to illness or whether he believes it is time to exercise. The intention behind the official media report is unclear. Monitor North Korea.

They made him wear such unfit clothes, which is a bit strange, because the optical system does seem to emphasize his weight loss, she said.

This is a major weight loss. His health is very important to the operation and destiny of the country. Thats why people are paying close attention to this matter.

Since the succession plan is not yet clear, the sudden decline in Kim Jong Uns health may throw North Koreas 76-year-old hereditary leadership system into chaos.

Kim Jong-uns personal life is usually a taboo of North Korean state media  Pyongyang has never even confirmed how many children the 37-year-old has  but he is a very addicted person, since he became the leader nearly 10 years ago. His weight has increased.

Kims father Kim Jong Il and grandfather Kim Il Sung are also overweight and heavy smokers. Both died of a heart attack.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and his father Kim Jong Il left in 2010.His father and grandfather were both heavy smokers and overweight, and died of heart disease [File: Kyodo via Reuters]

Yang Wujin, a professor at the University of Korean Studies, said that Kims recent weight loss is unlikely to be a symptom of a serious health problem because he participated in several public events this month.

No one can really know why he lost weight, he said. It is clear from the KCTV footage that the regime wants the world to think that its people love and care about their leader, so much so that they will cry for his thinner appearance.
A Muslim woman who served as a senior intelligence officer at the Canadian Security Intelligence Agency stated that the systemic racism and lack of diversity she experienced at CSIS posed a national security threatespecially given the recent incidents to a Canadian Muslim family. Fatal attack.

Huda Mukbil, an Arabic speaker wearing a headscarf, said that she was regarded as an insider threat during her 15-year career at CSIS and interrogated her religious beliefs.

Mukbil said that she was forced to sever ties with Muslim organizations, was excluded from her work, and was treated as a second-class citizen. After helping to file a civil lawsuit against CSIS for discrimination allegations, she left the intelligence agency in 2017.

This is why individuals in the Muslim community believe that they cannot trust the organization to respond to far-right threats, Mukbil, who is seeking to nominate the candidate for the New Democratic Party of the Southern Federal Republic of Ottawa, told CBC News.

The lack of trust is due to the lack of diversity. We dont have police officers like me out to talk to people who can relate to their experience. Now there is time to do something.

The man was accused of destroying a Muslim family in London, Ontario. This week, a truck briefly appeared in court on June 6. He faces charges of murder and terrorism triggered by the incident, which claimed the lives of 4 people and seriously injured a 9-year-old boy.

The 20-year-old Nathaniel Veltman faces four first-degree murder charges, one attempted murder charge, and related terrorism charges that are related to the murder of a Muslim family in London, Ontario on June 6. Related to the attack. The police and prosecutors claimed that the attack involving the truck was an act of anti-Muslim hatred. (Turgut Yate/CBC)

CSIS should see [mosque attack] future

This tragedy is Canadas second deadly attack on Muslims in the past four years.

In 2017, Alexandre Bissonnette opened fire on a mosque in Quebec City, killing six people. A survey revealed that the gunmen were radicalized online and consumed by the far-right media.

CSIS should see Alexandre Bissonette coming, Mukbil said. He is online. He is contributing to discussions with far-right organizations.

When asked for comment, CSIS did not directly respond to Mukbils statement. It did state that it was able to investigate suspected violent extremism or terrorism earlier than any other agency in Canada, and that threats against the Muslim community will always be a priority.

The head of the espionage agency David Vignot admitted last year that CSIS does have internal racism issues.

Yes, there is indeed systemic racism here, and yes, there is a certain degree of harassment and fear of retaliation within the organization, he said. 2020 meeting minutes.

CSIS did not allow CBC News to interview. In a statement, Vigno wrote: Ensuring greater diversity and inclusion is one of my biggest priorities.

I am committed to ensuring that CSIS reflects the vibrant communities across Canada that it protects-not only because it is the right approach, but because it is necessary to ensure the safety of Canada, Vignot wrote.

I feel like Im being targeted by CSIS

Mukbil said that she joined CSISs counter-terrorism department in 2002. As far as she knows, she is the first black Arab intelligence officer to wear a turban in CSIS history. She said that at first she was very popular at the Ottawa headquarters.

But she said that after two years of work, everything has changed.

She said that in 2004, the source of perception of the threat of terrorism in Canada shifted from Al Qaeda to young, second and third-generation Canadian Muslims. Mukbil said that she suddenly discovered that she was also seen as an insider threat.

I feel like I was targeted by CSIS, she said. I think the whole organization opposes me, I think I am lonely.

She said that it wasnt until she worked in the UK to help MI5, a domestic counterintelligence and security agency, that she felt that her skills as an Arabic-speaking Muslim intelligence officer were recognized. She said she helped provide clues to the explosion that killed 56 people in London in 2005.

On July 8, 2005, a bomb destroyed a double-decker bus in Tavistock Square in central London. (Reuters)

She said that the British Deputy Prime Minister was one of the senior officials who personally thanked her for her work.

But when Mookbeer returned to Toronto as an investigator, she said that CSIS did not acknowledge her achievements. According to a multimillion-dollar lawsuit filed against CSIS in 2017, an Allied security force questioned why CSIS would hire a Muslim woman wearing a hijab, and no one from CSIS management defended her.

Multi-million dollar lawsuit

Mukbils allegations of discrimination form part of the lawsuit. Five intelligence officials claimed that they faced years of discrimination at CSIS because they were Muslims, blacks, or homosexuals.

Mukbil claimed in the lawsuit that she was ordered not to associate with certain Muslim groups or individuals. She also claimed that she received a two-day 10-hour interview in 2005, when CSIS officials asked her to take a polygraph test. She said she refused.

Mukbil said that CSIS officials questioned her beliefs. She said her questioner asked her why she decided to wear a headscarf, how often she prayed, and what she thought of the Canadian army in Afghanistan, suicide bombings and well-known Islamic leaders.

After the interview, Mukbil filed a complaint. She said that the complaint went to the CSIS director that day. She said the supervisor issued some memos about workplace prejudice in response.

The lawsuit alleges that Mukbil was denied access to source files and was denied use for promotions and other foreign posts. She said that she filed complaints and harassment complaints, and carried out propaganda work with Muslim organizations and the then New Democratic Party public safety critic Matthew Dube to promote a more diverse workplace.

The threat should come from outside, Mukbil told CBC News. However, in the office, I have the most trouble.

Huda Mukbil said that during her 15-year career with the Canadian Security Intelligence Agency in Ottawa and Toronto, she was treated as a second-class employee and insider threat. (Marc Robichaud/CBC News)

As a result of the lawsuit, the spy agency conducted its own external investigation into the culture of the Toronto regional office where Mukbil worked. CSIS rarely publicly released the results of third-party reviews.

Vigneault said the investigation found serious concerns about retaliation, favoritism, bullying and other misconduct, which are absolutely unacceptable in a high-functioning professional organization.

CSIS stated that since then, it has improved the already powerful reporting system, including New code of conduct New mandatory training for employee harassment issues and for supervisors to promote a healthy workplace.

CSIS stated that it began to develop a diversity and inclusion strategy last year to address prejudices and build a more inclusive leadership team and recruitment process. CSIS stated that this work will help increase the percentage of visible minorities among the new employees recruited by the agency each year from 18% in 2019 to 25% in 2020.

The lack of diversity in CSIS is a weakness: ex-operating

CSIS stated that its latest data show that in 2019/2020, approximately 18% of employees self-identify as people of color; of these, 7.6% are executives.

The underrepresentation of Canadian security and intelligence services and the rate of harassment and discrimination faced by people of color remains unacceptably high. A report submitted to parliament last year Proposed by the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Congressmen.

Mubin Shaikh worked as an undercover security officer at CSIS for two years and was responsible for investigating extremist groups, including Toronto 18. He is now a professor of public safety at Seneca College.

Sheikh said the lack of diversity in CSIS and other Canadian intelligence and police agencies is a weakness.

This practice will definitely harm national security, Sheikh said. In order for you to get the right information, you need to get it from the right source. If your source does not reflect the society you serve, then you will get bad intelligence.

Human rights advocate and former communications director of the National Council of Muslims in Canada, Amira Elghawaby, said that cases like Mookbir will only increase the distrust of CSIS in the Muslim community.

Elghawaby said: If we hear and understand that there is a racism problem, employees are treated discriminatory, it really shakes our ability to trust these institutions to serve our interests.

Amira Elghawaby, a human rights advocate, said that institutional racism shaked the Muslim communitys ability to trust CSIS to protect them from violent extremists. (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation News)

CSIS spokesperson John Townsend said in a media statement that although work to make CSIS more diverse and inclusive is ongoing, we are proud of the significant progress that has been made in recent years.

CSIS stated that its recruitment team is committed to finding candidates from different backgrounds. The agency also pointed to its work in creating new terms to better describe the different types and motivations of violent extremism and terrorism.

CSIS says that terrorist acts after 9/11 are often referred to as Islamic extremism-a shorthand for terrorism. CSIS stated that the new threat dictionary it createdcovering ethnic violence, anti-LGBTQ violence, and ethnically motivated violencehas been adopted by the federal government and is also used in New Zealand and Australia.
As foreign troops continued to withdraw from Afghanistan, fighting with government forces took place in the central city of Afghanistan.

Local officials said that Taliban militants launched attacks on Ghazni, clashed with the Afghan army and used explosives to try to seize cities in central Afghanistan.

The attack on Ghazni on the highway connecting the capital Kabul and the southern province of Kandahar on Tuesday intensified the Talibans offensive against the government, while foreign troops are preparing to withdraw from the war-torn country in less than three months.

Although senior Afghan officials confirmed the Talibans offensive, they also said that the Afghan army is trying to regain control of the lost ground.

For many years, the Taliban have been very powerful in Ghazni Province, but provincial police officials said that night attacks from multiple directions were the most violent attacks launched by the armed group.

Conflicts intensified near security checkpoints in Shaikh Ajal and Ganj districts of Ghazni city, forcing shopkeepers to close the main market.

Abdul Jami, a member of the Ghazni Provincial Assembly, said: The situation in Ghazni is changing, and most of the land lost in the suburbs is being regained by the Afghan army.

Roads into the area were closed and telecommunications were interrupted, making it difficult for aid groups and officials to assess the number of casualties.

As the Afghan army fights the Taliban in Ghazni and other parts of the country, officials say that some civilians are actively joining the fight against the organization.

Ajmal Omar Shinwari, spokesman for the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces, said that Afghans who are keen to take up arms against the Taliban are integrating into the structure of the territorial army.

First they will be trained, and then they will be deployed on the battlefield with other Afghan security forces, said Sinwari in the capital Kabul.

After the U.S. and NATO troops began to withdraw their last remaining forces to meet the September 11 deadline announced by President Joe Biden, violence surged.

Since the beginning of May, the Taliban have launched several bloody offensives against government forces in rugged villages and stated that they have occupied nearly 90 of the countrys more than 400 areas.

However, many of the armed groups claims have been questioned by the government and have not been independently verified.

Saturday officials said 5000 Afghan families fled their homes After days of fighting between Taliban militants and government forces, the northern city of Kunduz.

According to local media reports, fierce fighting also took place in Kandahar and Baghlan provinces this week. The Afghan army claimed to have retaken from the area controlled by the Taliban. In some areas. .

Since the US-led invasion was overthrown in 2001, the Taliban have been launching armed campaigns against Western-backed governments.

In the context of escalating violence, President Ashraf Ghani visited Washington last week to meet with Biden. Who promised the U.S. to support Afghanistan But it said that Afghans must decide their own future.

Ghani acknowledged the escalation of Taliban violence, but said that the countrys security forces are retaking areas from rebel control.

In an exclusive interview with Al Jazeera, Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen said that if the United States continues to station troops in Afghanistan after September 11, the armed group has the right to react.

The peace talks between the Taliban and Afghan leaders in Qatar are still continuing.

According to the latest data on the cost of war at Brown University, an estimated 241,000 people have died directly in the war since the US invasion.
Opinion analysis

after Gabriel Chin





3:57 PM

Congress stipulates that non-citizens who have been deported but found in the United States should be deported again quickly. The second eviction is carried out by restoring the first eviction order and usually does not require further hearings, procedures or review. A narrow exception allows people in this situation to apply for detention relief, which will not reduce non-citizens deportation or otherwise give them the right to stay in the United States. Suffer torture or persecution.in a View Tuesday at Johnson v. Guzman Chavez, The court ruled that a group of non-citizens applied for withholding relief and sought a hearing to determine whether they can be released on bail while immigration authorities review their withholding claims.

The court is divided into conservatives and liberals. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the opinion with a six-member majority. Justice Stephen Breyer disputed herself and Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

Specifically, the question is whether, as non-citizens argue, a more tolerant and neutral connection process 8 USC  1226 Subject to jurisdiction; it applies to waiting for the decision of whether to deport the foreigner and allows non-citizens the opportunity to hold a bail hearing before an immigration judge. The government argued that 8 USC  1231 controlled. This part usually applies to when a foreigner is ordered to be expelled, and the order is administratively final. According to this section, non-citizens will be expelled within 90 days, and if the expulsion is not carried out within that period, the immigration manager will grant or refuse the guarantee. In practice, non-citizens are much less likely to be released under Article 1231. In view of the divergence of the circuit court on this issue, it can be said that the question of which one applies in this particular case is difficult.

Alito first inferred that non-citizens who were subject to the reinstatement of the deportation order had been deported and that these orders were administratively final. Therefore, the literal language of Article 1231 applies. Non-citizens can apply for detention relief does not change the existence of the deportation order and is the final administrative conclusion.The point is that the nature of the withholding relief is limited: It involves where is it An alien may be removed, Alito wrote. However, it does not address the previous problem regardless A foreigner will be expelled from the United States. Alito did not consider the objections and considerations considered by the lower courts-that is, in fact, most people who receive withholding tax relief stay in the United States indefinitely:[T]The fact that repatriation by alternative countries is rare does not mean that it is legally unauthorized. For Alito and most others, the reinstatement of the deportation order means that the deportability of the non-citizen has been finalized-although the withholding requirement means that the person may never be deported from the United States in practice.

Most people also rejected the paradox proposed by non-citizens and accepted by dissidents: Article 1231 considers expulsion within 90 days after the expulsion order ends. In the case of a reinstatement order, 90 days usually expire shortly after the initial order and the initial removal. This date is usually long before the non-citizen returns to the United States or is arrested. Non-citizens and dissidents argue that Article 1231 does not apply because Congress cannot consider that a person will be expelled within 90 days of the past few years. However, Alito did not find any inconsistencies and concluded that this section contains exceptions that cannot be removed within the specified time.

Alito also considered the arrangement of statutory terms, which mainly follow the sequential steps of the removal process. Article 1226 applies before the alien goes through the expulsion procedure and obtains a decision, he pointed out, while Article 1231 applies after. He concluded that the courts decision is consistent with Congresss obvious policy: Foreigners who have not been ordered to be expelled are less likely to abscond, because they may be considered acceptable but have been ordered to expel. Of foreigners are usually unacceptable and therefore are more likely to escape.

Breyers dissent began with a policy argument based on actual reality that a suspension of litigation usually delays: Why does Congress refuse to hold a bail hearing for individuals who are reasonably afraid of persecution or torture, and as a result they will face potentially continuing litigation? Months or Years[?]Breyers text argues that the deportation order is not administratively final until the immigration judge and the immigration appeals board resolve the withholding claim, because the withholding claim constitutes the seeking is actually a modification, modification or detention, aprior deportation order' . According to this interpretation, Article 1231 will not apply, and Article 1226 will apply. But again, most people disagree with the dissidents concept of the nature of withholding claims and believe that this will not affect the effectiveness of the basic reinstatement of the deportation order. Sexuality or finality.

Justice Clarence Thomas agreed, and Justice Neil Gorsuch joined. Thomas argued that since this case does not involve the review of the final deportation order, nor is it based on another clear jurisdictional grant, the Immigration and Nationality Act does not grant jurisdiction to the federal courts, and non-citizens claims should have been based on that basis. . The other four judges in the majority and three dissenting persons disagreed.

There are also differences in terminology. Both Alito and Thomas use the term alien to refer to people who are not American nationals or citizens. This term is often used in the Immigration and Nationality Act. Breyer used non-citizen, which is a nomenclature preferred by those who think alien is inhuman.Justice Brett Kavanaugh is one of the justices I prefer the term non-citizen. The Office of the Attorney General also Recently, non-citizens have been used to replace aliens.
Scottrade News

after James Romoser





12:14 PM

The pipeline developer can use the federal governments expropriation rights to confiscate property controlled by the State of New Jersey so that it can build a natural gas pipeline through the state. Supreme Court ruling Vote 5 to 4 on Tuesday.

case, PennEast Pipeline Co. v. New Jersey, Involving a planned 116-mile pipeline that will transport natural gas from northeastern Pennsylvania to western New Jersey. The developer obtained a license from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and argued that under federal law, the license includes the power to bring New Jersey to court so that it can acquire state-controlled property along the pipeline.

The State of New Jersey, which opposes the pipeline, argues that under the 11th amendment, it is not affected by the developers expropriation lawsuit.

According to the opinion of Chief Justice John Roberts, the court sided with the developer and removed obstacles to pipeline construction.

Roberts wrote: Although states that disagree are usually immune from litigation, they waived their immunity from exercising federal expropriation rights when they ratified the constitution. This power comes with the ability to condemn property in court. Because of the  The Natural Gas Act grants federal expropriation rights to private parties, who can initiate condemnation procedures, including targeting state-owned property.

Judges Stephen Breyer, Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor and Brett Kavanaugh joined Roberts majority opinion. Justice Neil Gorsuch raised an objection, and Justice Clarence Thomas joined in. Justice Amy Connie Barrett failed in the dissenting opinions of Justices Thomas, Gorsuch and Elena Kagan.

Check back soon for an in-depth analysis of opinions.
Negotiators in Paris are trying to persuade insistent countries to sign a Global Corporate Tax Agreement This week, they are increasingly worried that the compromise needed for countries to join will weaken the final agreement.

China, India, Eastern Europe All countries and developing countries raised objections G7 agreement Major economic groups this month.The OECD talks are Seek stripping Take them on board.

According to some sources, it is widely expected that tax havens and investment centers such as Ireland, Switzerland and Barbados will refuse to sign the agreement. The finance ministers of the G20 group of countries will discuss the details of these proposals at a summit in Venice next month.

Those who understand this process have greater hopes of reaching an agreement, especially hope that China will agree to participate, but warn that time is running out.

A negotiator told the Financial Times: I dont think it will fail There are still some uncertainties, but we are not far from reaching an agreement.

Another person close to the negotiations who has been worried about Chinas involvement last week said that the signs are now more positive, but warned that the negotiations may be the last chance to reach a global agreement that will stop decades of disputes over the global tax system. .

The European official said: If we cannot reach an agreement on the G20, then we will most likely have to restart 20 years of negotiations on this issue.

He stated that there was a risk of dilution in the deal to the point that it became meaningless, and pointed out the high risks involved: If we can reach an agreement, then this will be a huge victory, showing that the biggest issue is It is possible to engage in international diplomacy.

A third official said that China is still the main sticking point, but the optimism of the negotiators is more optimistic than a few weeks ago.

China and many Eastern European countries complain that the transaction will disrupt existing tax arrangements that provide manufacturers with investment incentives through corporate taxes to build factories and machinery at a tax rate lower than the proposed minimum of 15% in the world.

These countries are not regarded as tax havens, and multinational companies use low tax rates to release free profits in these countries. People close to the talks said that Eastern European countries have been exempted from manufacturing plants.

Negotiators are seeking to ensure that China can also benefit from it, but it is unclear whether the worlds second-largest economy will agree to a wider deal in exchange. No one really knows what Chinas position is, the European official said. They are fighting for time and keeping all options open.

Respected

Developing countries are dissatisfied that this transaction will not allow them to levy more taxes on the largest multinational companies, and they will have the right to tax a small portion of the companys profits based on sales.

The G24 developing country group requires the agreement to cover a larger share of profits and threatens to continue to impose its own digital tax.

They got a compromise that the threshold for companies covered by the global arrangement would be reduced from a turnover of US$20 billion to US$10 billion in seven years. A person representing developed economies said that if they reject this, they will lose their chance.

Developing countries also hope to increase the proposed global minimum tax rate of at least 15%.

In an online meeting on Monday, Nigerias ambassador to the OECD, Matthew Gebangjubora, stated that setting the global minimum level at that level will not benefit African countries much and may continue to promote [tax] Erosion of the tax base from African countries.

But when asked whether it is possible for developing countries to reject the deal, Gbonjubola said that political pressure made this a difficult decision. Each jurisdiction needs to clearly state whether it supports or opposes it. There is no third option, he said.
A stuntman has the worst job description in the worldmust be willing to be punched and kicked, blown up, crash in a speeding vehicle, and fall from a height.

But there are many benefits.

12 The 76-year-old British stuntman Rocky Taylor (Rocky Taylor) has been in this business for 6 years and is currently making the latest Mission Impossible movie Credit: if

You work with movie stars, visit fascinating places and get paid as a package if you are Rocky Taylor, Asked to take care of 13 Bond girl On a secluded island.

The risk is hospitalization or death, and the reward is becoming an unsung hero in the movie.

A new Britbox documentary called Hollywood Bulldogs looks at British adventurers working in the largest action film in history.

Frank Hansen tells how he continued to fight Harrison Ford The stuntman Vic Armstrong fell on Indiana Jones further than the planned rope ladder.

12 After the stunt of Death Wish 3 went wrong, Loki was unable to work for four years

Greg Powell talked about the moment when Daniel Radcliffes stand-in was permanently paralyzed in the everyday stunt performance.

Rocky recounted how he jumped off a hot 17-foot building and nearly died.

This documentary narrated by Ray Winstone tells how this deadly trade has grown from an unregulated company that caused poverty due to serious injuries to a multi-billion industry with strict health and safety. .

In an exclusive interview with The Sun, the oldest stuntman in Britain, Rocky, revealed the heroes and villains in the movie.

12 Rocky on the left doubled for Sir Sean Connery in Indiana Jones

The 76-year-old Rocky is the only one who doubled up two different Bond actors in the same year, and he likes to work with the deceased Sir Roger Moore with Sir Sean Connery.

He revealed: I did a lot for Roger, a lot of running around, because he couldnt run well.

Roger cant run around very well. Rocky Taylor

Roger Moore can punch, but he wont jump over the chair.

Sean doesnt know how to do a lot of stunts. He can throw his fists and do some swordsmanship.

12 Rocky and Sir Roger Moore became good friends and thought of 13 Bond girls Image source: Kobal Collection-Shutterstock

Rocky, he has been working in film since the age of 15, and performing stunts in the latest movies Mission Impossible movie starring Tom Cruise, Only met two industry legends he really didnt like.

They are the now-deceased Hell Knight Oliver Reid and the late director Michael Winner.

The abandoned actor Reid tried to beat him in an alcoholic battle, and he described the winner of the death wish as despicable.

Other stuntmen unanimously believe that Wenners accusation of asking women to expose their breasts during auditions at home is a rotten apple.

12 Rocky almost quarreled with Oliver Reid over a bottle of wine Credit: Rex

Harry Potter Stunt coordinator Greg Powell claimed that he used to terrorize people, and legendary Vic Armstrong claimed that he did things that only bullies can do.

Rocky has a good reason to despise Wenner, because when the director jumped off a 17-foot building in 1985s Death Wish 3, the director ordered him to light a flame, and he almost died.

It caused the fuel tank to explode, leaving Rocky with a terrible choice-either jump into the fireball or wait for the burning wooden structure to collapse.

I knew I had to jump down, he said, I can see that I missed the box when I came down. I hit the ground and my guts came out.

12 Rocky after breaking his back and pelvis on the set of Death Wish 3

They had to screw me tight and let me square.

The moment I watched slow motion replays of the Hollywood Bulldogs terrified me.

They had to screw me tight to make me square Rocky Taylor

When Luo Gene lay in the hospital with burns on his back, pelvis, face and hands, Wenner smiled and took pictures while whispering that Rocky had better not sue him.

In a filming in Jordan, due to local laws prohibiting alcohol, the crew could only drink one bottle of spirits a week.

12 Rocky started this business in 1961 before health and safety Credit: Rex

The notorious drinker Reid invited Rocky back to his trailer to watch the movie on his TV, but when the stuntman decided not to stay, the actor insisted that he keep his very precious bottle.

Loki smiled and said, He stood up and wanted to fight, and people had to separate us.

In the early days of the business, the stunt team must sign an agreement stating that they are fully responsible for any accidents.

If they killed someone during the filming, the daredevil might be sued, not the studio boss.

12 Greg Powell says stuntmen will claim to have skills they dont have Credit: Courtesy of Greg Powell Archives

Therefore, British professionals created a guild for stunt actors, a stunt registrar, and purchased insurance through Lloyds Insurance Company of London.

The register is called the Book of Lies because even if they have never saddled, the doubles will claim to have accomplished a bold feat such as falling from a horse.

Health and safety rules began to be imposed on the crew, and wages rose because there was a small group of professional adventurers.

This does not mean that the threat to life has been eliminated.

12 David Holmes doubles Daniel Radcliffe in Harry Potter movie Credit: Mirrorpix

Gregs father Nosher and uncle Dinny are legendary stunt performers. When Daniel Radcliffes Harry Potter duo David Holmes performed a flight scene in 2009, he was the stunt coordinator.

He said: Poor David has been in a wheelchair all his life. This is a bastard we do with Harry Potter every day. He is willing. This is one of them.

Poor David has been in a wheelchair all his life Greg Powell

In the 1976 James Coburn film Sky Riders, an electrician was burned and died when an explosion spread in the wrong direction.

Frank Hansen, who was working on the film, said: The explosion flew over our heads and 13 crew members were burned. I ran to the most burnt place.

12 Frank Henson has fallen more than expected when he made Indiana Jones Image source: Courtesy of Frank Hansen Archives

Richard Hammatt recounted how Christopher Reeve flew in the air because Superman only dropped half of the box there to prevent him from falling, Broken all the ribs, stabbed Pierced the lungs.

He added: I was discharged from the hospital and I was back at work.

I am discharged from the hospital and I am back to work Richard Hamat

Rocky was unemployed for four years after the accident.

Business is his blood, and he will not choose something safer.

12 Hansen and Harrison Fords doubles have been pretending to fight, even though they are worried that something is wrong with the action scene in the Temple of Doom Credit: Lucas Film

Rocky married his second wife Pamela and had two daughters with his first wife. He said: I have been in this industry for 60 years. This is a wonderful career. I have met all the stars and made some money. 

Being surrounded by beautiful women is another advantage of this job.

When making the Bond film Octopus, he was asked to be the only man to stay on the island with 13 women.

Rocky smiled and said, I said,Are you sure? Im Rocky Taylor. There are some benefits.

12 Rocky broke the glass with record-breaking stunts Credit: Getty

He also likes to have fun with actress Irene Papas in a movie called Sahara.

The stuntman recalled: She asked me,Would you like to have dinner with me tonight? I saidI said you were good to me, and the result wasHello andHello.

Rocky has also participated in the production of Titanic, Indiana Jones, Fast and Furious and Pink Panther, and he hopes that these thrilling performances will be done by humans rather than computers.

He said: I hate CGI.

When he was still wanted, he had no chance to give up.

Rocky said, People said to me,Are you not retired yet? I said, Well, when the phone stops ringing, Im retired. At the moment, it is still flickering.

Real miracle Florence Pugh of Black Widow loves to fight Scarlett Johansson as a superhero character Ghost Sequel Understanding of the third movie in the Call of Souls series Sex pistols are buck The sex pistol movie reproduces the iconic moment outside Buckingham Palace Steamy sex Netflix viewers criticize the 365 DNI shower scene as creepy and impractical Ugly beans Sean Bean was so tired of screen death that he rejected his dead role Cold art LS Lowrys relationship with snob mothers comes to life in the new movie

However, the only question is, what are the hallmarks of the British Bulldog and the American daredevil?

Loki concluded: They speak very well, we act very well

The Hollywood Bulldog will be exclusively launched at BritBox on June 24th.
This first-person work is by Bhoomika Dongol, who lives in Regina and has worked in the non-profit sector for more than nine years.

For more information about CBCs first-person story, see common problem.

Like many other newcomers, I participated in the massive hysterical celebration of Canadas birthday on July 1, 2018. I must admit that when I waved the rectangular red flag and witnessed the celestial fireworks, I was immersed in the glory of arriving in this land of Canada.

Three years ago, I did not know how intense these celebrations were. I gradually began to understand why Canada Day needs to be a day of reconciliation, not a day of celebration.

I work hard every day to educate myself, forget and re-learn, in order to reshape my understanding of Canada. Books and articles by indigenous writers are readily available and can teach many non-indigenous people like me about decolonization, reconciliation, and the indelible past and present of Turtle Island, a land scraped by the claws of colonization.

As immigrants, we all have our own unique stories about why we uprooted ourselves from the motherland and transferred ourselves to the utopian destinations that we imagined in our subconscious mind. Our fantasy of utopia may be just to escape boredom, but we prefer to believe that the grass on the other side is greener.

In the past three years of familiarizing with the grassland landscape, I have also realized how I live on the land where the settlers have been displaced and are still replacing our indigenous people-as long as the sun is shining, the grass grows, and the river flows. On most days, this feels like a wrong comedy. I moved myself away from a lush land, but immersed myself in the pain of another land.

It is interesting how we deceive ourselves into thinking that we own the land. -Bomika Dongor

I began to know that to live on a piece of land is to absorb its sorrow and make atonement for its irreparable past. I felt an intolerable heaviness, and the emotional baggage of homesickness was dragged down by the imminent guilt of living on the stolen land. The grief of losing this piece of land I call home for 35 years, coupled with the indelible sense of atonement, made me question the concept of home as a material residence.

The concept of a house is usually built around property and land ownership. It is interesting how we deceive ourselves into thinking that we own the land.

As an immigrant, the concept of home often discourages me. I dont yet have an answer about what home isor where it is.

All I know is that when I celebrated Canada Day three years ago, I wore orange instead of the traditional red. The orange vest I brought from Nepal was the closest to the red vest I could find in the first naive celebration on July 1st. Somehow, part of me, without knowing it, decided to wear orange. Orange represents all the feathers that fall. Orange is for all the children who cant find their way home.

On July 1st of this year, I will consciously and deliberately wear orange. I know that wearing an orange shirt will not eliminate the harm caused by my naive impulse to celebrate three years ago. What I continue to do regularly is to donate and support local charities that work directly with indigenous people. Most importantly, I read and promote the books of indigenous authors. Their work resonates deeply with me.

I will wear orange symbolically for this. This is my fourth year in Canada. On Turtle Island, I hope to have a fair understanding of what Canada Day is and what it is not.

Are you interested in writing for us? We accept opinions and first-person articles from Saskatchewan residents who want to share their thoughts on the news of the day, issues affecting their communities, or people who have a fascinating personal story to share. No need to be a professional writer!

Read more about what we are looking for here, And then email your thoughts to [email protected]
The militiamen chanted the death of the United States as they assembled near the Green Zone of Baghdad, where the U.S. Embassy is located.

Thousands of members of the Iraqi Hashd al-Shabi paramilitary coalition gathered in Baghdad on Tuesday to mourn the comrades who were killed in the US airstrike on the Syrian border.

This U.S. raid Earlier on Monday, the pro-Iranian militia and the US-led coalition exchanged fire in eastern Syria and feared that the US-Iran situation would escalate as efforts to restore Tehrans 2015 nuclear agreement with world powers faltered.

They chanted death to the United States and revenge for the martyrs, and gathered in Liberty Square near the capitals highly secure green zone-where the US Embassy is located.

Following a series of recent incursions by armed groups backed by Washingtons arch-enemy, Tehran, a large number of security forces have been deployed to block the Green Zone.

Sayid al-Shuhada militia commander Ahmed Maksusi, who has vowed to open war with the U.S. military, said it was time for the Americans to leave.

Since the Parliament passed a resolution, the presence of foreign troops in the country is illegal, al-Maqsusi said. They have been here since 2014, they have done nothing to the Iraqis, they have just carried out sabotage.

Several senior commanders of Hashd attended the symbolic funeral, including its top commander Faleh al-Fayyadh and Hadi al-Ameri, the head of one of its main factions, the Badr organization.

The mourner was accompanied by a vehicle full of gunmen, dressed in black, and holding a sign: The attack on Hashid must speed up the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.

Others carried pictures of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani and Hashd deputy commander Abu Mahdi Mohandis Killed by U.S. drones Last year there was a strike near Baghdad Airport.

The resistance rifles and drones will now move. The time has come to avenge the deaths of our heroes (including Qassim Soleimani and Abu Mahdi Mohandis), said a fighter Heydar Caral said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitors said that seven combatants were killed and at least six were injured in attacks on both sides of the Iraq-Syrian border.

Most of Hashds commanders are supported by Tehran and have become Baghdads main power brokers. The organization stated that four of its fighters were killed in the Qaim area near the border.

The organization stated that the militias were stationed there to prevent armed groups from infiltrating Iraq, and denied that they were involved in any attacks on American interests or personnel. They warned that they have a legal right to respondand hold the perpetrators accountable on Iraqi territory.

Attacked by multiple rockets

The Pentagon stated that the attack hit two locations in Syria and one location in Iraq at combat and weapons storage facilities, both close to the common border, and militias used drones to attack US interests in Iraq.

Coalition spokesperson Wayne Marotto said on Twitter that the U.S. forces were subsequently struck by multiple rockets in eastern Syria, but there were no casualties. The personnel fired against the rocket launch positions. .

The US military in Iraq deployed 2,500 American soldiers as part of the international coalition against the armed group Islamic State (ISIS) and has been the target of more than 40 attacks this year.

Mondays attack was the second deadly attack on a pro-Iranian target since US President Joe Biden took office.

Secretary of State Anthony Brinken announced that the U.S. has sent a strong message to the airstrikes against pro-Iranian fighters in Iraq and Syria, that is, not to continue attacking U.S. troops in Iraq.

Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Kadimi condemn The attack was an unacceptable violation of Iraqs sovereignty and Iraqs national security and warned against escalation.

Iraqi national security adviser Qassem al-Araji stated that al-Kadhimi will discuss the existence of the US military with US President Joe Biden.

The Iraqi governments position is clear. The prime minister condemns the attack, which is an infringement of national sovereignty. The prime minister is planning to visit Washington to set a timetable for the withdrawal of US troops, he said.
Yair Lapid will be The first Israeli minister in history He will arrive in the UAE on Tuesday to unveil the Israeli embassy in Abu Dhabi and the Dubai consulate, when he will officially visit the United Arab Emirates.

Israels newly appointed foreign minister will be chaired by his UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan. The top diplomats of the two countries are expected to discuss a series of bilateral issues during the two-day visit, including economic cooperation, trade and security.

The inauguration is a symbolic act, Lior Haiat, a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told Al Jazeera. The embassy and consulate have been working for four and a half months.

Israel Normalization of relations with the UAE and Bahrain In August last year, former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Benjamin Netanyahu) came to power, and his 12 years in power ended earlier this month.

Netanyahu referred to these agreements, known as the Abraham Agreements, as personal achievements and conducted an unsuccessful re-election campaign, partly because he believed that he could help Israel and its Arab neighbors while maintaining internal security. Candidates who come to have a better relationship.

Hay Eytan Cohen Yanarocak, a scholar at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategic and Security Research, told Al Jazeera that this visit shows that the new Israeli government attaches great importance to its Gulf partners and turns UAE relations into an Israeli national institutional policy, not a party policy. .

At the same time, Israel expressed serious reservations about Washington and Tehrans efforts to revitalize Israel. Iran Nuclear Agreement, And after the Gaza War-this war failed to destroy the fledgling UAE-Israel relationship, nor did it take quiet measures to deepen economic and security relations.

When the Abraham Agreement was signed last year, the flags of the United States, Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain were projected on the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem [File: Ronen Zvulun/Reuters]

double

Bilateral relations between Israel and the UAE Facing an early test in May Israel bombed the Gaza Strip for 11 days, killing at least 256 Palestinians, including 66 children, and Hamas launched thousands of rockets into Israel, killing 13 people.

Although the UAE criticized Israel for forcibly expelling Palestinians from the Sheikh Jala neighbourhood of occupied East Jerusalem and attacked Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, It maintained a more moderate stance on Israels attacks on Gaza.

Hayat said that from Israels point of view, the conflict proved the durability of normalization. This has no effect on the relationship between Israel and the Abraham Agreement countries, he said.

Nevertheless, the anger expressed by the Arab world over Israels actions in Gaza is a reminder that the official position of the UAE is far from that of public opinion.

Badr Saif, a non-resident researcher at the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center, told Al Jazeera: When there are no other themes, Jerusalem and Palestine are still the unified themes of the Arabs.

He added: If the people in every country that normalizes relations do the same, none of this will happen. Illegal occupations still exist.

But the UAE has established itself as an outsider in the region. Analysts said that after decades of careful security cooperation, making its relationship with Israel public has strengthened its pioneering credibility.

Saif said: It will be easier if we openly carry out economic and security cooperation, and the UAE is capable of doing this.

In Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, Israels bombing of the Gaza Strip last month destroyed the ruins of buildings. A woman painted a Palestinian flag on the face of a child [File: Said Khatib/AFP]

New offer

Just days after Gaza declared a ceasefire, the two countries signed a tax treaty to promote investment in their respective economies and eliminate double taxation. Hayat described the treaty as one of the most important agreements reached so far.

Ofer Sachs, chief executive of Herzog Strategic, an Israeli consulting firm with offices in the UAE, said that the treaty removes major barriers to cross-border investment and is seen by the business community as a positive step.

However, he said that when the Economic Cooperation Agreement was signed, the potential for building deeper economic relations was widely promoted. Abraham chords Not yet implemented. We are trying to show the success story very quickly, but that is not the case, he told Al Jazeera. As time goes by, the fruit will arrive.

He emphasized that UAE businessmen are proceeding cautiously, noting that they are not in a hurry for success. They want to establish real connections.

The largest potential transaction so far is the announcement of Mubadala, Abu Dhabis state-owned investment fund, that it intends to acquire a US$1.1 billion stake in Israels Eastern Mediterranean Tamar gas field.

But a key part of the Abraham agreement is that the UAE hopes to cooperate with Israeli companies and carry out joint projects, especially in areas where the interests of the two Middle Eastern countries overlap.

Israel Aerospace Industries Corporation signed a memorandum of understanding with the UAE state-owned defense company Edge in March to jointly produce anti-UAV systems.

Over time, fruit will arrive. Herzog Strategic Chief Executive Officer Ofer Sachs

The agreement was reached at a time when drone warfare became a powerful factor on the entire regional battlefield.

Turkey, which has tense relations with the UAE and Israel, is advocating itself as a niche exporter of military drones and has demonstrated their potential in conflicts from Libya and Syria to Nagorno-Karabakh.

Al-Saif stated that the UAE is paying close attention to the development of drone warfare.

In September 2019, the Yemeni Houthi rebels allied with Iran claimed to be Attack on Saudi Aramco oil facilities This temporarily interrupted oil production and exports.

Since then, Saudi Arabia, a close ally of the UAE Become a target Several drone attacks claimed by the Houthi rebels.

If what happens to the Saudis happens to the UAE, they will never be able to sustain their tourism or events like the Dubai World Expo, Saif said.

Continuing relationship

One of the rewards of Abu Dhabis normalization is its new ability to purchase F-35 fighter jets from the United States. After the Abraham Agreement, Israel cancelled its opposition to the purchase of weapons.

Although defense deals between the two countries can now be announced publicly, the UAE and Israels continued relationship based on the industry decades ago is an open secret. But Sachs did not see any significant movement of the pointer.

Maybe small and medium-sized companies that could not enter the market before will have opportunities, but I think the Abraham Agreement will not have that much impact on the defense industry, he said.

In September 2019, Houthi rebels allied with Iran in Yemen claimed responsibility for the attack on Saudi Aramcos oil facilities, which temporarily interrupted oil production and exports [File: Amr Nabil/AP]

Iran

Security may still be the top priority of Rapides agenda.

His visit to the UAE this week coincided with the ongoing efforts of the administration of US President Joe Biden to revitalize the UAE. Joint Comprehensive Action Plan (JCPOA), the Iran nuclear agreement with world powers in 2015.

After Netanyahu wooed former U.S. President Donald Trump, Rapide expressed his desire to repair the tension between his country and the U.S. Democratic Party.

On Sunday, he met with U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Brinken in Rome and promised that any Israeli opposition to the new Iran agreement would be privately raised to Washington.

Israel and the UAE both opposed the signing of the JCPOA and supported the Trump administrations unilateral withdrawal from the agreement in 2018. This alliance played a key role in advancing the Abraham Agreement.

Although it may not be in public view, Yanarokak stated that Israel will seek to cooperate with its new Gulf partner to jointly lobby the United States on Irans missile program concerns and support for regional agents.

He said: Israel needs to consolidate the Abraham agreement camp in order to put pressure on the US government and use its influence on the terms of a possible agreement with Iran.
Israels new foreign minister, Yair Lapid, began a two-day visit to the Gulf Arab country on Tuesday. He said Israel will stay here.

The Israeli Foreign Minister arrived in the United Arab Emirates on Tuesday, kicking off the highest-level visit by Israeli officials to the Gulf Arab countries since the two countries officially established relations nine months ago.

At the inauguration of the Israeli Embassy in Abu Dhabi, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid told diplomats that this was a historic moment.

The Middle East is our home and we will stay here. Therefore, we call on all countries in the region to recognize this and talk to us, he said.

Making history: proudly represent the State of Israel to make the first official visit to the United Arab Emirates. Thank you for your warm welcome. ???? Making history: proudly represent the State of Israel to make the first official visit to the United Arab Emirates.Thank you for your warm welcome pic.twitter.com/sxVXPYcghQ -Yair Lapid? (@yairlapid) June 29, 2021

Translation: Making history: proudly representing the State of Israel to make the first official visit to the UAE Thank you for your warm welcome.

Rapid will meet with the UAE Minister of Foreign Affairs in Abu Dhabi. The talks may be partly focused on Iran. Both countries consider Iran to be a regional threat.

The administration of former US President Donald Trump facilitated the so-called Abraham Agreement agreement, which established the relationship between the UAE and Israel. At the time, both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised this as one of their greatest achievements.

When Rapid was in Abu Dhabi, US Secretary of State Anthony Brinken welcomed the opening of the Israeli embassy in Abu Dhabi.

According to the Times of Israel, Brinken said in a statement that the opening of the embassy and Rapides visit to this Gulf country has great significance for Israel, the UAE and the wider region.

The United States will continue to work with Israel and the UAE because we have strengthened all aspects of our partnership and worked hard to create a more peaceful, secure and prosperous future for all people in the Middle East, Brinken said.

Architect Netanyahu

Rapides two-day visit to the UAE is what Netanyahu hopes to achieve before ending his 12-year ruling career earlier this month. He has tried several times to travel quickly to Abu Dhabi to take advantage of the normalization agreement signed by his government and promote his re-election campaign.

In acknowledging Netanyahu, Lapid said that the former prime minister was the creator of the Abraham Agreement and he worked tirelessly to realize these agreements.

Since then, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco have also begun to establish ties with Israel. The Palestinians expressed regret for regional reconciliation, and they hope to first resolve their demands on countries not occupied by Israel.

Mahmoud Abbas, chairman of the Palestinian National Authority, considered the Abraham Agreement to be an illusion and claimed that the colonial power implanted[ed] WAFA, the official Palestinian news service, stated that Israel acts as an outside entity in the region to divide it and maintain its weakness.

The common concern that underpins the relationship between the UAE and Israel is that Irans nuclear agreement with world powers is not enough to contain Tehrans influence in the region. Long before the two countries formally announced the establishment of a comprehensive diplomatic relationship last year, the two countries reservations to the deal helped promote a peaceful relationship.

Rapid will also visit the site of Expo 2020 Dubai, the World Expo that opened in October, where Israel built a pavilion.

Rapids plane passed through Saudi airspace on its way to the UAE. Although Riyadh has not normalized relations with Israel, it opened its skies to Israel-UAE flights last year.

This month, the UAE officially opened its embassy in Israel, temporarily located at the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.

The Israeli Embassy in Abu Dhabi still has only three diplomats and one mission chief, Eitan Naeh, who has not yet been confirmed as an official ambassador. The consulate in Dubai is also located in a temporary location.
The partys centennial celebration is about to kick off, and the Chinese President praised the countrys development as ordinary heroes.

Chinese President Xi Jinping kicked off the official celebration of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China, commending 29 people who have outstanding contributions to the party.

The recipients of the newly established July 1st Medal on Tuesday included several soldiers and officials from turbulent provinces such as Tibet and Xinjiang. The United Nations stated that approximately 1 million Uyghurs (mainly Muslims) were detained in China. Detention camp center for vocational skills training.

Al Jazeeras Katrina Yu reported in Beijing that he said that provincial officials were commended for what the Communist Party calls fighting separatism and encouraging loyalty to the party.

Yu said that the event held in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing marked the beginning of the official ceremony for the 100th anniversary of the Communist Party of China.

According to Xinhua News Agency, Xi Jinping said at the award ceremony that the medal winners on July 1 are ordinary heroes who perform their duties and make silent dedication. He also said that the CCP has written a glorious chapter in the history of the development of the Chinese nation and the progress of mankind in the past century.

The Chinese Communist Party was founded in Shanghai in July 1921, when the vast country was tortured by war and poverty. The Communist Party eventually overthrew Chiang Kai-sheks nationalist government in 1949, and is one of the few Communist Parties to maintain power into the 21st century.

Al Jazeeras Yu said that the CCP is planning to hold a grand event on July 1.

Most of it is shrouded in the typical Communist style, but we do know that certain activities will take place in Tiananmen Square during the day, and it is expected that President Xi Jinping will deliver a speech there, she said. Say. Later in the day, a large-scale celebration will be held at the so-called Birds Nest Olympic Stadium on the outskirts of the city, including performances, music and fireworks.

Xinhua News Agency said that the CCP held a theatrical performance called The Great Journey at the Birds Nest Stadium on Monday night, depicting the Chinese people under the leadership of the Communist Party of China for 100 years of revolution, construction and reform.

Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, under the strong leadership of the Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core, socialism with Chinese characteristics has entered a new era, and China is embarking on a new journey of comprehensive construction. A modern socialist country, the news agency said.

Xi Jinping and other party leaders joined about 20,000 people to watch the performance.
Delaware police arrested a Philadelphia woman in connection with the shooting of another woman outside the Christiana Shopping Center in Newark on Monday, the authorities said.

Shaidiah McNeair, 24, was charged with manslaughter and weapon crimes on suspicion of killing a 27-year-old victim who has not yet been confirmed by the police.

The state police responded to 800 Christiana Mall Rd. Shortly after 4 pm, it was reported that a black Ford Fusion collided with a metal guardrail in the Target store area.

At the scene, investigators found that the 27-year-old victim was unresponsive in the drivers seat of the car and had obvious gunshot wounds to the upper body. The victim was taken to Christiana Hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

The authorities determined that the second person was in the car with the victim and left before the police arrived. After searching the area, the police found McNeill and detained her. Investigators also found a white plastic bag with a pistol on a nearby embankment.

No more details about the shooting were released.

McNeair was summoned and escorted to Delores J. Baylor Womens Correctional Institution on a cash bail of US$250,000.

Anyone with information about this incident is required to contact Detective Grassi of the Delaware Police Homicide Unit by calling (302) 365-8441.
The culture of colonial colonial society, people from all over the world overwhelm the original inhabitants of a large or small territory to form a culture around their own garrison country, with enduring and insurmountable ills and world-weariness. This does not mean that people in Britain, France, Turkey, Iran, India or China do not have their own sedentary difficulties. They are like this. But these dilemmas belong to different pedigrees.

One thing the settler colonists did was to act as if they were native residents of the land they violently conquered, and label all those who followed them as immigrants. They are engaged in a strange and possessive work of historical compilation, trying to convince themselves and the world that they have legitimate demands on the land they stole.

These settler colonialists are fully aware of their recent origins, and every time they become more critical of who and what is on the land they claim to be their own, they feel threatened. Start to take strange actions.

This is exactly what is happening today in the settler colony that we call the United States of America.

You often wake up in this strange habitat and find that colonists who are born with racism are angry with a word, a spell, or something they consider to be magical spells, which can suddenly and irrevocably lose their origin myth. legality. Nowadays, it is the critical race theory, and given their strange obsession with abbreviations, they call it CRT.

Right now, in their eyes, CRT is swear word, a curse word. It represents the latest attack on their self-awareness, their homeland.

Now, what exactly is the critical racial theory?

It really doesnt matter. This means what Donald Trump told them. This means a bad thing. This means that white people are in danger. This means that if Americans do not re-elect Trump or another Republican who is equally reactionary and racist, then blacks, Latinos, feminists, Marxists, Jews, Muslims, gays, transgenders and all those The ungodly communists will come to take over their country.

Critical racial theory-a school of thought that believes that the main institutions of the United States are essentially racist and that its essence is to continue the white supremacy-if it were not for Trump and his stubborn war with all his strength, it would still be a complete Vague academic concerns. Won a second term. Today, critical racial theory has become a topic of discussion in the United States only because Trump decided to attack it because it exposed racism that he and his supporters cannot cure.

From post-colonial theory to critical race theory

In September 2020, as Trump lags behind Joe Biden in most polls, the Office of Management and Budget issued a directive: All agencies are instructed to begin identifying training related to anykey race theory All contract or other agency expenditures, white privilege, or any other training or promotional efforts, teach or imply that (1) the United States is essentially a racist or evil country, or (2) any race or ethnicity is essentially Is it racist or evil.

So you have it: if you tell the truth and expose the structural roots of racism in this country, then you are in trouble, and the federal government will hunt you down.

Using the federal government and its immense power to limit any form of critical thinking did not start with Trump. About 20 years ago, American Zionists used the same strategy to try to silence American universities criticism of Israel. Their main goal is Edward Said and his critical scholarship.

In October 2003, as Michelle Goldberg explained in the Salon, the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill that may require universities international research departments to show greater performance in U.S. foreign policy. More support, otherwise you will risk federal funding. Its approval is after the hearing [that] In the summer, members of Congress heard testimony about the harmful effects of the late Edward Saids Middle East research departments, which were described as degenerate anti-American enclaves. 

Attempts to ban the scholarship of Edward Said and any other forms of critical thinking that expose the roots of fundamental injustice that harm the United States and the world have now turned their attention to critical racial theory-the idea already exists For decades, it has tried to expose and eliminate the potential social forces that constitute racism, without allowing it to be reduced to Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, Emmanuel Macron or Boris Johnson. Demonstrated personal racist behavior.

The deep roots of critical thinking

The proposition that law, politics and even the education system are one of the ideological forces that maintain the class structure of society is certainly much older than the critical theory of race, and can be traced at least to the concept of the famous Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci. Hegemony and appeared before him in Marxs seminal text on German ideology.

We can go further back to Nietzsche, from there to the iconic encounter between Seras Marcus and Socrates in the first book of the Republic of Plato, in which he disrupted Socrates by defining justice as the will of the strong The argument about justice.

Therefore, scholars engaged in critical racial theory did not invent critical thinking, or even used it to analyze racism for the first time. The importance of critical racial theory at this particular moment in American history is that the continuing process of theoretical foundations now informs a large-scale social movement called Black peoples fate is also fate. This fruitful dialectic between academic theory and grassroots social uprising frightens those who maintain the status quo, who are doing their best to protect and maintain their racial and class privileges. This is a class struggle, pure and simple. Those who are identified as whites hope to protect their automatic privileges by simply becoming whites, and categorically oppose any critical awareness of the horror they systematically and consistently inflict on those under their power.

The way in which critical racial theory stands out is no different from the well-known and discussed ways in other academic movements and fields. In 2001, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic published Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, which detailed the origins of the field, The key theme and the main voice, this is a milestone event widely accepted by critical racial theory. The author subsequently revised and updated the book to include more recent developments.

Just like the field of liberation theology, or the field of subordination or post-colonial research before it, the criticism of race theory is not the cause of the existing social reality, but a response to the existing social reality-reality requires detailed historical and theoretical elaboration. Abolishing funding, censorship, or demonizing an academic field will not eliminate the social conditions that gave birth to it in the first place. In fact, it proved its importance and legitimacy.

Consider the fact that Republicans in the U.S. Senate just voted to veto major legislation designed to ensure voting rights for non-white Americans. By doing so, they proved the potential authenticity of the critical racial theory. This is a class war in which the rich mobilize against the poor, with specific racial distortions.

For public schools

The cancellation of funding for racism research is now actively on the Republican agenda. Just last month, Rep. Dan Bishop of North Carolina introduced what he called the Stop CRT Act and Combat Racism Training in the Military Act. As he explained in a press release, will Prohibit federal funds from being used to promote and teach Critical Race Theory (CRT) and prevent our soldiers from being controlled by it.

Critical racial theory is a poison to our nations soul, Rep. Bishop claimed. This destructive ideology has no place in American institutions. The bill I propose will help ensure that our government does not spend resources to promote it. He argued that the Biden administration was affected by radical leftists. Help and encouragement, and committed to pushing this neo-Marxist propaganda into our classrooms, workplaces and even the military.

These powerful Republican politicians have specifically targeted public schools because they are the most common places where the lower and middle classes and their children have direct contact with poorer communities. They dont mind whether private schools and affluent communities will be exposed to any radical ideas-because their wealth and privileges will affect their learning. But in low- and middle-class communities and public schools, these ideas resonate with the real lives of students, their parents and teachers. This means the ultimate change in peoples critical consciousness.

Demonization, condemnation, censorship, cancellation of funding, and even criminalization of critical racial theories will not erase the roots of systemic racism, and will extend to the branches and bitter consequences of this countrys history and reality. If you dont allow resistance to racism to reason and express itself, it will sing, dance, scream, protest and march on the streets and squares of this country and all other countries. Because facts always bravely cater to any real theory.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance.
A collection of artifacts, oral histories and photos at the University of Louisiana at Lafayettes Edith Garland Dupre Library recognizes the states contributions during World War II.

The Pelican State Goes to War: Louisiana in World War II traveling exhibit was created as a tribute to the nearly 280,000 state residents who served in the U.S. military during the global conflict. The National WWII Museum in New Orleans produced it.

The exhibit can be viewed until Aug. 27 in the main hallway of Dupre Librarys first floor, 400 E. St. Mary Blvd. Notable Louisianans who served in the military, industry contributions to the war effort, and the states role as a training hub are among the highlights.

The exhibit includes information about the six World War II Medal of Honor recipients born in Louisiana. They include Marine Col. Jefferson DeBlanc, 47, one of two University alums to have earned the U.S. militarys highest award for valor during combat. The other, Air Force Capt. Steven Bennett, 69, served during the Vietnam War.

The exhibit also spotlights Louisianans such as Air Force Maj. Gen. Claire Lee Chennault and Army Lt. Col. Richard English. Chennault, who led the fabled Flying Tigers squadron of pilots, developed a system to warn China of impending air attacks. English was a New Orleans educator who joined the Black Panthers  the segregated 761st Tank Battalion. He spent three decades ensuring the battalion received the Presidential Unit Citation it was finally awarded in 1978.

World War II began in 1939 and ended in 1945. The United States joined Allied Forces against Axis powers on Dec. 8, 1941, the day after Japan launched air attacks on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

War efforts in Louisiana, as the exhibit points out, were already well underway. The state was the site of the largest maneuvers in U.S. military history and hosted hundreds of thousands of troops between 1940 and 1945.

Factories and refineries in Louisiana did their part, too, producing equipment and supplies that, by wars end, included billions of gallons of aviation fuel and about 20,000 Higgins boats. The specialized boats, named for their creator, Andrew Higgins of New Orleans, were designed to carry troops onto land. The vessels transported soldiers to the beaches at Normandy, France, on June 6, 1945, during the Allied invasion known as D-Day.

Other elements of the exhibit  DeBlancs efforts over the South Pacific in January 1943, for example  illustrate World War IIs ties to campus. The fighter pilot downed several enemy planes during an escort mission. After DeBlancs aircraft was hit, he parachuted to sea and swam for hours to a Japanese-occupied island. DeBlanc hid in the jungle for five days before being discovered by friendly islanders and reunited with the U.S. Navy.

Not every item in the exhibit tells of good outcomes.

A letter by Dr. Joel L. Fletcher, then-University president, serves as a stark reminder that many people  including 4,987 Louisianans, according to the National WWII Museum  didnt return from the war.

Fletcher was among several civic leaders who offered sympathy to Mrs. Norbert Larriviere of Youngsville, La., after her son, Sidney Larriviere, became the first Louisiana service member killed during World War II. Larriviere was aboard a U.S. Navy destroyer patrolling a neutral zone in the North Atlantic Ocean on Oct. 17, 1941, several weeks before the Pearl Harbor attacks. He and 10 other service members died after the ship was struck by a torpedo fired from a German U-boat.

The last lines of Fletchers letter to Larrivieres mother, dated three days after the event, read: Please accept my deepest sympathy in your sorrow. I hope that the time will come when mothers like you will not have to make such sacrifices.

Learn more about Edith Garland Dupre Library and the National WWII Museum.
The New Iberia Police Department, with regards to an on-going active investigation, has requested the assistance of the Louisiana State Police Crime Lab to provide additional resources into an investigation.

According to New Iberia Police, no human remains, or bodies have been located.

State Police and Detectives with NIPD are still actively processing the scene.

We will provide more details once they become available.
Lake Charles, LA (KPLC) - A Cajun Navy volunteer says she was attacked while on the job in Lake Charles this week.

We spoke to the victim who says she never imagined a day volunteering could turn so brutal in just the blink of an eye.

Cajun Navy volunteer Becky Johnson spent Monday delivering some supplies when she decided to park her vehicle in an Albertsons parking lot. Thats when Johnson says she was jerked from her vehicle by two men who verbally and physically assaulted her.

Thats the last thing I would have ever expected, said Johnson. Ever. Im still shocked about that.

Johnson spoke to us with a black eye, nearly one week after the incident. You may remember her from working to help displaced hurricane victims by housing them in her own home. Now, she says it feels like shes being ousted from the very community shes been so desperately trying to serve.

Johnson described the incident saying, A lot of racial slurs, saying they dont want us serving in the African-American community. Thats what they were pretty much angry about. One of them came around as I was stepping out and physically attacked me. The other one tore up inside the vehicle, ransacking through the vehicles.

Rob Gaudet, with the Cajun Navy, says theyve already contacted the authorities regarding the incident.

We are working with authorities with Lake Charles Police Department on it, Gaudet says. They are looking for the suspects. As far as I know, they dont have anybody caught yet. Although I think they have some people in mind.

Lake Charles police have confirmed that this is an ongoing investigation and that they are attempting to catch the men responsible.

But this has done little to put Johnson at ease.

Im nervous in the sense of, I just need to be more aware especially until they are caught, she said.

In the meantime, the Cajun Navy Organization says they are packing their bags as they shut down their Lake Charles Operations due to the severity of this incident and several other factors.

Organizations get slammed for all kinds of stuff, says Johnson. Theres always some internal or external something but nothing that would cause this.

There is no timeline as of yet on when the Cajun Navy plans to move boots out of the area.

Statements from Mayor Nic Hunter and Chief Shawn Caldwell:

Detectives with our Investigations Division, under the direction of Deputy Chief Franklin Fondel, have been investigating this incident since the initial call was received, Caldwell said. Public safety remains our top priority and an assault of any nature is always taken seriously.

We understand the public shock and concern surrounding this incident and I assure you that this incident is receiving the proper attention of the Lake Charles Police Department, Caldwell said. As always, we will investigate in a thorough and professional manner.

I have great faith in the investigative abilities of the Lake Charles Police Department, Mayor Nic Hunter said. They have a proven track record and are committed to bringing closure to those impacted by crime. Additionally, if there were any knowledge of an orchestrated, ongoing effort to inflict harm on groups here in Lake Charles, the City would share that information with the public.

The police ask anyone with information about the incident to call Detective W. Loving at 337-491-1311.

The Cajun Navy issued the following statement:

On Monday, June 21st at 2:30 pm, a disaster response volunteer (white female) with the Cajun Navy Ground Force was pulled from her vehicle and assaulted by two white males while attempting to assist an elderly citizen of our community.

The incident occurred near the corner of Ryan and Sale during daylight hours. The victim was the subject of an attempted rape and was severely physically assaulted and verbally abused before being left lying on the ground with cuts, fingernail scrapes and significant bruising all of which resulted in a torn and tattered shirt and other clothing. They also destroyed the inside of her car and stole the Cajun Navy signs on the doors of her truck.

As evidenced by the unthinkable racial slurs hurled at the victim during the assault, along with a note left on her car days later, the motive for the attack seems to be a clear effort to demoralize those who are offering assistance to the underserved African American communities within some of the hardest hit areas of Southwest Louisiana.

The victim has operated in full cooperation with Lake Charles police department, who responded quickly and whos investigation is still ongoing. To our knowledge, as of the time of this submission, no arrests have been made.

The volunteer who was attacked visited the hospital bruised, scraped, and sore, yet returned to serving the community the next day. In response to the attack, the volunteer says, As the victim of a targeted assault on a volunteer serving the Lake Charles area I feel an extreme responsibility to let the community know and be aware. To be aware that the attack was not just on me but on our community as a whole. That individuals who carry hate have infiltrated our community and are trying to stop us from serving our African American communities by using physical force, and repetitive words of hate and racism.

As a testament to this united resolve, several volunteer organizations met on Friday, June 25th. The meeting was led by the Long Term Recovery Committee, which is charged with the execution of an effective and efficient recovery effort. The attack on the volunteer was discussed, as were ways to ensure volunteer safety, coordination, and collaborations in the future. We would like to acknowledge both Mayor Hunters and Police Chief Caldwells presence and participation in our meeting.

As the Cajun Navy Ground Force, along with those we serve beside, we want those we serve to know that though we each have different means and methods of accomplishing it, our mission here is to both amplify our advocacy for and intensify our actions to ensure that Southwest Louisiana not only recovers from its natural disasters, but also overcomes any present social ills that would impact its resiliency as a community in the future.

Together, we have already hosted thousands of volunteers in an unprecedented disaster response. We want every volunteer that has come, as well as those that are on their way, to know that every effort has - and will - be taken to protect them while they are here. We strive to provide an unparalleled opportunity to impact the lives of those within our community.

We remain United in our commitment to those most vulnerable in this community regardless of their skin tone. We know that no disaster - whether natural or social - will ever prevail over love.
"It's a timely reminder that the powders that are in pyrotechnics are unstable and they can absolutely do damage, they can absolutely be lethal if they're not handled by professionals," said John Ham with ATF.
ASHLAND, Ore.  Some cities in southern Oregon are following the lead of those in Siskiyou County by canceling fireworks displays or banning the sale and display of fireworks in city limits in the midst of extreme heat and drought conditions.

The Ashland Chamber of Commerce announced Tuesday that it would cancel the Independence Day fireworks show, citing both the current conditions and concerns from the community after the trauma of the September 8 fires.

"The safety of the Ashland community is of the utmost importance and current conditions require us to reconsider the decision. We feel it is best to be abundantly cautious and cancel the show this year," said Sandra Slattery, Executive Director of the Ashland Chamber of Commerce.

The Chamber's board voted in May of this year to go forward with fireworks while forgoing the parade and normal park festivities due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but "drier conditions than anticipated" at the fireworks launch site contributed to the decision to cancel the display as well.

"The City is appreciative of the energy and effort that the Chamber puts into all of our community events. The City and its Fire Department have long standing collaboration and partnership with the Chamber and fully support their very tough decision to err on the side of caution and cancel this event," said Adam Hanks, City Manager Pro Tem for City of Ashland.

As of Tuesday afternoon, the Boomfest fireworks display at the Jackson County Expo was still set to go forward on July 4.

Shortly after Ashland's announcement, the City of Jacksonville released a statement declaring critical fire danger, and prohibiting the lighting of fireworks within the city limits "immediately."

Along with the bans already announced in some areas throughout Oregon and California, NewsWatch 12 called around to local governments on Tuesday to get a better idea of where fireworks will be prohibited and where they will be allowed:

Fireworks prohibited

Ashland: City officials say that they always have a ban on public use of fireworks, and the Chamber's display was canceled on Tuesday.

Jacksonville: Temporary ban.

Mt. Shasta: Temporary ban.

Yreka: Temporary ban.

Weed: Temporary ban.

Portland: Temporary ban.

Bend: Temporary ban through July 9.

Fireworks allowed

Medford: Legal fireworks allowed in city limits (excluding the Greenway, public schools, and city parks) from July 1 through July 6.

Grants Pass: Within the city limits, fireworks are allowed only on July 4 between 6 p.m. and 11 p.m., excluding wildfire hazard zones.

Eagle Point: The city has no plan to ban fireworks, except those already prohibited under state law.

Jackson County: Commissioner Rick Dyer said that there is not enough time to enact an ordinance prohibiting fireworks throughout Jackson County, and enforcement would be too difficult even with a new ordinance in place. County officials urged people to stick with legal fireworks and use them responsibly.

TBD

Central Point: The city has not banned fireworks, though there is the potential that this could change.

Klamath Falls: City officials will be meeting Tuesday to discuss a potential ban, but there is nothing currently in place.

Talent: City officials plan to meet on Wednesday to discuss the issue, possibly adopting a permanent ban.

This list will be updated as we get more information.
ROGUE VALLEY, Ore. -- The Oregon Health Authority is lifting Covid-19 restrictions that caused capacity limits for public pools, malls, and movie theatres as Oregon is experiencing a record breaking heat wave.

The Rogue Valley YMCA in Medford says it's happy to open it's doors to more people and loosen capacity limits, as is the Grants Pass Family YMCA, which has seen between 700-800 people daily since restrictions lifted.

CEO for the Grants Pass Family YMCA, Matt Lund says staffing continues to be a concern, potentially leading to the need to revert to smaller capacities for pools.

The CEO for the Rogue Valley YMCA, Brad Russell says the facility has been able to hold onto it's staff throughout the pandemic but is open to hiring more staff and volunteers to support activities.

An ongoing chlorine shortage is impacting both facilities. The YMCA in Grants Pass has access to two pools, an outdoor chlorine pool and an indoor saline pool. If it can not get enough chlorine supply, the outdoor pool could close. Rogue Valley YMCA says it has stocked up on chemicals but is unsure how long it will last.
ASHLAND, Ore.  The nearly 60-year-old mystery of an unidentified boy found dead in the mountains east of Ashland has at last been solved, the Jackson County Sheriff's Office announced on Monday.

In July of 1963, 65-year-old Roy E. Rogers of Rogue River set out to fish in the Keene Creek Reservoir along Greensprings Highway east of Ashland. While out there, Rogers discovered the concealed body of a 2-year-old boy  found wrapped in layers of blankets, bound with wire, and weighted down with iron molds.

The investigation into the unidentified boy was undertaken by the Jackson County Sheriff's Office, but there would be no break in the case for decades. Over the next 58 years, almost two dozen Sheriffs, detectives and deputies worked on the case with help from the Oregon State Police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

An initial autopsy done shortly after the body's discovery did not produce a clear cause of death. According to the Sheriff's Office, the case almost immediately went cold, and files were archived in August of 1963, remaining that way for almost 45 years.

In 2007, JCSO detective Sgt. Colin Fagan found 11 paper boxes marked "old Sheriff cases," and he delegated special investigator Jim Tattersal to sort through them for possible follow-up. It was Tattersal who found the Keene Creek Case and decided to revive it.

In August of 2008, investigators exhumed the small body from Hillcrest Memorial Park cemetery to take a DNA sample, but the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) didn't return any matches. In 2010, the the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) created a composite image using the extracted DNA.

JCSO said that a "big break" in the case came in December 2020, when the agency received a tip through its Facebook inbox. Sheriff Nathan Sickler tasked deputy Medical Examiner Christian Adams to take up the investigation.

Adams worked with Dr. Nici Vance, coordinator of OSP's Human Identification Program, and submitted a DNA sample of the unidentified child to contractor Parabon NanoLabs with the idea of using phenotyping and genetic genealogy to narrow in on an identity.

Parabon took the DNA sample and used it to search GEDMatch, the same open-source genealogy repository used to find the Golden State Killer. Chief genetic genealogist Cece Moore found two potential siblings of the unidentified child, eventually securing an interview with a maternal half-brother in Ohio.

The half-brother told investigators that he had a sibling born with Down syndrome in New Mexico who later went missing. A birth certificate finally confirmed the child's name  Stevie Crawford, born October 2, 1960. All potential suspects in Crawford's death are deceased, a JCSO spokesperson said.

JCSO said that, beyond the core investigators, a number of people were integral in helping to identify Crawford, many of them offering time and effort for free. Hillcrest Memorial Park cemeterys Jed Ramey donated the work for the 2008 exhumation, while East Main Dental Center's Dr. Gregory Pearson and Dr. Hal Borg donated time and service for the dental identification process, which revealed signs of congenital defects. University of Oregon forensic anthropologist Dr. Jeanne Mclaughlin donated her time and efforts to skeletonize the remains for analysis and DNA extraction, JCSO said.

The agency also offered thanks to its own detectives, who logged many unpaid hours in attempting to identify Crawford, including Sgt. Fagan, detective Tim Pike, and special investigator Tattersal.
SALEM, Ore.  A bill that allows Oregon college athletes to be compensated for the use of their name, image, and likeness was signed into law by Governor Kate Brown on Tuesday.

California paved the way in 2019, adopting a law scheduled to take effect in 2023 that would allow college athletes to make money from endorsement deals. The state did so against stiff opposition from the NCAA. Since then, several other states have joined the push to compensate college athletes, even jumping ahead of California's original timeline.

This bill is historic  I wish Oregon was the first to do it, said Senate President Peter Courtney (D-Salem). Our college athletes have not been treated fairly. They sacrifice everything for their universities their bodies, their relationships, their academics. Meanwhile, the NCAA and universities are making millions off their hard work from tickets, merchandise, and concessions, all the way to college enrollment."

The new law will go into effect on July 1 of this year, giving college athletes the right to sign contracts for endorsement deals and appearance fees. Student athletes will also be allowed to retain professional representation, which is supposed to increase fairness during contract negotiations.

We are giving our athletes back what is rightfully theirs: their name, their image, their likeness. This should have been done a long time ago. It should have come from the NCAA and our universities. This is just the beginning. We must keep working to make sure our college athletes are treated fairly.
The last person who asked me that is still missing.

If you need me, I'll be underwater.

It's a dry heat.

You call this hot? Bring it on.

Vote

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A resolution solidifying the Bristol-Paris agreement, in part, states the agreement is made with the general purpose of guiding and accomplishing a coordinated, adjusted and harmonious development of the territory.

The state Department of Administration has a specific protocol before signing off on such plans. Participating communities, for example, are required to hold a joint public hearing and allow a period of public comment on the plan.

Although Mondays meeting served as the official hearing, no residents from Bristol or Paris were in attendance to weigh in on the document. Geary said a 20-day public comment period has now begun and should close by July 19. The two boards can then approve it.

Geary said he has been in dialogue with Department of Administration officials and is optimistic the hiccups that occurred in 2009 will not be repeated.

Im confident that it should pass muster this time around, Geary said.

Paris other agreements
MYRTLE CREEK, Ore. -- Myrtle Creek Police are asking for the public's help in finding a woman who was reported missing Monday.

Police say Hannah Kristine Gerlach, 35, of Myrtle Creek was last seen on Sunday around 12:15 p.m. and failed to show up for work Monday morning. Her co-workers say this is unusual behavior.

According to officials, Gerlach had spoken to her co-workers about going hiking, but no specific area was mentioned and it is unclear if she went on a hike.

Gerlach was driving a light blue 2007 Lexus SUV with Oregon license plate 600GLK.

She is described as being about 510 tall and 115 pounds with long brown hair.

If anyone has seen Gerlach or her vehicle, please contact Sgt. Kris Malek or Detective Kevin Taggart at 541-440-4471.
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The world premiere of The Secrets of Primrose Square will be streamed to Kilkenny audiences on dates in July.

The play, based on her book of the same name by Claudia Carroll will be streamed to audiences on July 7, 8, 9 and 10.

An instant hit when published in 2018, The Secrets of Primrose Square by Claudia Carroll remained in the charts for 14 weeks.

During Covid-19 lockdown, it was the number one downloaded book, both in Ireland and the UK. In August and September 2020, the audio book reached no. 1 in the public library download charts in Ireland, followed in the no. 2 spot by Normal People.

It was announced today that after a delay due to the impact of Covid 19, the stage production based on the book of the same name will at long last premiere next month. Directed by Mark Lambert, this stage adaptation is written by Claudia Carroll herself.

This premiere production will feature Megan McDonnell (Elaine in Normal People & The Playboy of the Western World Lyric Theatre & DTF), Clelia Murphy (Fair City, The Sound of Music, Bord Gais Energy Theatre & UK tour) and Marion ODwyer (one of Irelands most renowned actors of stage and screen).

This project has been part-funded by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht Sport and Media from the Live Performance Support Scheme.

Tickets are priced at 15.

Stream at home on from 8pm on Wednesday July 7 to Saturday July 10 at www.watergatetheatre.ie

As a bestselling author, Claudia Carroll has published sixteen novels, selling over 750,000 thousand copies in paperback alone. Four of her books have been optioned, two for movies and two for TV. Her books regularly reach number one in Ireland and in the UK, shes a Sunday Times bestseller. Claudia is also an actor, best known for her recurring role as Nicola Prendergast in RTEs long running soap, Fair City. Her new book, The Fixer will be published by Bonnier Zaffre in August 2021.
Young people are constantly connected to technology for most aspects of their lives and as a result can become disconnected from the real world around them and real connections.

By challenging teenagers to switch off to switch on, it allows space for creativity which leads to new experiences and opportunities and generate present moment awareness.

The Switch Off campaign was run over the last number of weeks through Ossory Youth, funded through Healthy Ireland Kilkenny.

Twenty young people switched off through a variety of activities including filmmaking, outdoor yoga (thankfully the rain held off), creative woodburning art, podcasting around mental mealth topics, samba drumming and it all culminated in a busy day in Castlecomer Discovery Park.

Young people who took part switched off and connected with their inner-selves and to their environment and began to recognise the benefits of less screen time.

Reducing time spent on devices can help foster positive self-esteem, improved sleeping patterns, greater mindfulness, improved physical and mental health and improved learning habits.

Jacinta Purcell from Ossory Youth sent thanks to Janette Boran from Healthy Ireland Kilkenny, Kathy and her wonderful team in Castlecomer Discovery Park and to all the amazing facilitators.
ROCHESTER, Minn. - The Delta COVID-19 strain first found in India continues to be a health threat in the United States and more than 80 countries across the world.

More than 63% of Minnesotans and more than 45% of Iowans are fully vaccinated against the virus, but it's unvaccinated people who are in danger. The Delta variant is 60% more transmissible than B117, the last variant of major concern.

There are confirmed cases of the strain in Minnesota and Iowa. The strain has hospitalized at least nine Minnesotans and killed two.

Mayo Clinic infectious disease specialist Dr. Abinash Virk tells KIMT vaccinated people are well protected, but unvaccinated people are putting themselves at risk when it comes to the Delta variant. "I cannot stress how phenomenal these vaccines are, how amazingly effective they are and it's not a figment of imagination in the scientific community. It is real. We're seeing the impact of the vaccination in the communities and nationally we are seeing an impact," she explains.

The Minnesota Department of Health says the mRNA vaccines like Pfizer's and Moderna's have high efficacy rates against the Delta variant. The single-dose Johnson and Johnson and Astra Zeneca shots have a significantly lower rate around 60%. Dr. Virk says that while people who received the J&J shot may not be fully protected from infection, it's still protecting them from severe illness.

As for children who are not eligible for a vaccine yet, Dr. Virk explains children are less likely to have severe symptoms.
MASON CITY, Iowa  A Nebraska man is now charged with homicide by vehicle after a woman was struck and killed at Mills Fleet Farm in Mason City.

Police say Christopher Rathfon, 35 of Omaha, NE, was driving the pickup truck that hit Dawn Merrick, 62 of Mason City, on June 8 as she was leaving the store. Merrick was taken to MercyOne North Iowa Medical Center, where she died on June 10.

Rathfon was initially charged with OWI but that has been dismissed to make way for his vehicular homicide prosecution.

Court documents state a breath test at the scene found Rathfon had a blood alcohol content of .255, more than three times the legal limit.
ROCHESTER, Minn. - Several regions of the country are experiencing their worst drought conditions in more than a century. When you combine that with many Americans longing for a Fourth of July celebration, the weekend could go up in flames.

A majority of the Fourth of July festivities were canceled last year because of the pandemic. So, fireworks industry professionals are anticipating a huge increase in sales this year. But Minnesota authorities are also expecting a longer wildfire season than usual. Wildfires are typically at the peak during spring and fall in Minnesota with summer slowing the rate down because of rain.

Rochester firefighter, Chad Kuhlman, said if you're planning on lighting your own fireworks, you must follow the local restrictions. He advises lighting them from a flat location and have some kind of water source on hand. "Use them away from trees and houses. Point sparklers and other types of fireworks away from people and animals," he explained. "We'll all try to be safe that way."

Even the smallest of fireworks can get up to 1200 degrees, which is how hot a wildfire burns. "Sparklers, for instance, they're not always safe. They say that 30% of the injuries caused by fireworks over the Fourth of July are due to simple things such as sparklers," said Kuhlman. "And 45% of those are in children."

The National Fire Protection Association reports more than 15,000 Americans went to the emergency room for fireworks-related injuries last year. That's thousands more than the year before.

Kuhlman recommends having a bucket of water available afterward to put the used fireworks and sparklers into, so you can properly get rid of them the next day.
ROCHESTER, Minn. - More than 15 months into the pandemic, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz announced he plans to give up his emergency powers by August 1st.

Several parts of the original executive order are no longer effective, such as the mask mandate or capacity or distancing restrictions on businesses and large gatherings. Those were among the most controversial requirements for the last year and a half.

The Governor first declared a peacetime emergency in March of last year when COVID-19 first hit Minnesota. In recent months, Republicans have increased their calls for him to give up those powers, saying the emergency is over. Governor Walz continued to extend the powers, saying he needed them to help with vaccine distribution, maintain the eviction moratorium and receive federal hunger relief funding.

Representative Liz Boldon said we're finally in a place where the powers can come to an end. "There definitely was a reason to have those tools in the toolbox over the course of the last year," she explained. "The legislature does not move swiftly and in an emergency, there's a reason to be able to put things into place very quickly. We're just in a different place now, so it makes sense for those things to be winding down and we're moving in the right direction and it's a good thing."

Some Republicans are planning to end the state of emergency an entire month earlier, by July first, which is this Thursday. The Director of Homeland Security and Emergency Management said ending the peacetime emergency by then will hinder the Minnesota Department of Health's COVID-19 response.

Representative Boldon said while some lawmakers feel the Governor's powers should have ended a long time ago, she thinks it's better to not rush things. "I think it's important to do things in a thoughtful and orderly manner," she explained. "We know that this is the direction we're moving in and August 1st is not that far away either. To me, it's important to have things go in kind of an orderly, thoughtful, structured process so we end up with the best possible outcomes."

The Governor's powers will officially end at 12:01, the morning of August 2nd.
AUSTIN, Minn.  A guilty plea is entered over a fatal collision in Mower County.

Christopher Robert Stewart, 33 of Lansing, pleaded guilty Monday to one count of criminal vehicular homicide for the May 9, 2019, crash that killed William Regner, 89 of Austin.

Authorities say Stewart crashed into the vehicle driven by Regner at the intersection of County Road 29 and County Road 29. Law enforcement says Regner was dead when they arrived at the scene. Court documents state marijuana was found in Stewarts vehicle and a test of Stewarts blood found amphetamine, methamphetamine, and THC.

Stewarts trial had been delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic but had been scheduled to begin on July 12. He is now set to be sentenced on October 8.
ANKENY, Iowa (AP)  Police arrested an Ankeny man after he allegedly threatened to blow up a McDonalds restaurant for neglecting to include dipping sauce with his order of chicken McNuggets.

Television station WHO 13 reports that police in the Des Moines suburb arrested the 42-year-old man after he admitted to investigators that he called the Ankeny restaurant Saturday evening upon realizing his order mistakenly didnt include the dipping sauce.

During the call, he threatened to blow up the restaurant and punch an employee.

The man was charged with a felony of false report of an explosive or incendiary device. He was booked into the Polk County Jail on Saturday and released on a bond Sunday.
ROCHESTER, Minn. - Minnesota is inching closer to approving a package of new rules governing law enforcement after the states top Democratic and Republican lawmakers reached an agreement this weekend.

The legislation includes new restrictions on no-knock warrants as well as the creation of a misconduct database.

Political analyst Rayce Hardy says the database is something the Rochester Police Department could use when hiring new officers down the line.

The package also contains the creation of an office of missing and murdered indigenous relatives as well as a task force for missing and murdered black women.

However, Hardy does say a number of provisions DFL lawmakers pushed for didnt make it into the final bill including a limit on pretextual traffic stops where police pull over drivers for minor violations.

Thats where there's an expired tab and a police officer pulls over the driver. In general, there's a group in Minnesota that wishes that wasn't part of police duties so that's not included in here, said Hardy.

The legislation needs to pass the DFL-controlled House and Republican-controlled Senate where it will face amendments and potentially be voted down.

He added, They have to get this passed tomorrow in the House, get it over in the Senate passed and the governor needs to sign it before we have a shutdown on July 1st so there's a lot of pressure.

In addition to a range of new policies, the bill also includes funding for law enforcement agencies and prisons
FORT DODGE, Iowa  Murder charges have been dropped against two more men for a double homicide in Webster County.

The bodies of Jamael Cox and Tyrone Cunningham were found on June 16, 2020, in Fort Dodge. Both men had been shot to death. The investigation led to the arrest of five men.

Two counts of second-degree murder and possession of a firearm as a felon remain in place against Michael Shivers of Eagle Grove and James Davis Jr. of Fort Dodge. Their trials are scheduled to begin on November 16.

Charges of second-degree murder were dismissed in April against Darryll Jones of Fort Dodge. A judge has now also dropped charges of second-degree murder against Jeremiah Hatten, 22 of Fort Dodge, and second-degree murder and possession of a firearm by a felon against Michael James Wells, 33 of Fort Dodge.

The Webster County Attorneys Office says it has learned additional information that leads it to believe Jones, Hatten, and Wells could not be proven guilty at trial beyond a reasonable doubt.
ROCHESTER, Minn. - Were learning more about what the letter of censure issued to former Rochester Public Schools Superintendent Michael Munoz means after the Minnesota Board of School Administrators approved the letter this week.

According to the state board, the letter is meant to be a one-year punishment, the lowest issued by the board. After that year it will be erased from his file.

Its meant to make the former superintendent reflect on his actions but not permanently impact his career in a negative way.

Munoz did agree to the letter being issued and acknowledges his actions in plagiarizing others work. Included in that list are a 2019 graduation speech, a 2020 graduation speech, a 2020 letter to school families and students, and a 2020 letter to school staff. All of those are violations of the code of ethics from school administrators.

Executive director Dr. Tony Kinkel says its vitally important to hold educators to the highest standards but also to realize there are far worse crimes taking place.

He explained, We're dealing with embezzlement, spousal abuse, falsifying of records, homophobic behavior, and harassment and so those things warrant revocation, suspension, and they're supposed to last probably throughout someone's career. A letter of censure was not meant to be a sort of scarlet letter on somebody's record.

The letter will be removed on June 28 of next year. However, the state board says in this day and age the letter of censure will likely live forever on the internet.

It's not necessarily the sense of justice we wanted, he added. The board clearly wanted to send a message and, I don't know Mr. Munoz personally, but my sense is that once you get something like this you make the adjustments, you learn from it and you move on. It's just unfortunate this won't be able to happen in the world we live in now.

The state board says letters of censure are handed out about three to four times a year.

You can find the full letter by clicking here.
NORTHWOOD, Iowa.  A second not guilty plea is entered over a Worth County crime spree.

Curtis Alan Anderson Jr., 22 of Mason City, pleaded not guilty Monday to ongoing criminal conduct, three counts of second-degree burglary, second-degree theft, and third-degree theft. His trial is scheduled to begin on August 4.



Nicholas McLeland Nicholas McLeland

Anderson and Nicholas Gaige McLeland, 29 of Clear Lake, are accused of burglarizing three homes near Grafton on the night of March 1 or the early morning of March 2. Investigators say several items were stolen from garages and outbuildings, including boots, tools, keys, and firearms.

McLeland previously entered a not guilty plea to the same charges as Anderson. His trial is set to start on September 15.

The two men are also facing prosecution for multiple burglaries and thefts between March 3 and March 5 in Floyd County.
KIRKWOOD, Mo. (KMOV.com) - A year-long investigation into sexual abuse and harassment claims in the Kirkwood School District is now complete.

Former Kirkwood High School student files lawsuit alleging abuse by former math teacher A former Kirkwood High School student has filed a federal lawsuit against the school district and a former math teacher for sexual abuse.

The independent investigation looked at current policies for reporting abuse and examined 30 reports of sexual abuse of misconduct against staff members dating back to the 1980s. One recommendation given to district officials is to better train staff on sexual misconduct and appropriate boundaries between adults and students.

School Board President Jean Marie Andrews released the following statement about the report:
At least 96 teens and staff test positive for COVID-19 after attending church camp with most unvaccinated
FREDERICKTOWN  The Fredericktown officer involved in Knox County's first police shooting since 2014 carries a clean professional track record, and was recently commended by Chief Kyle Johnson for his decision-making skills, records show.

Knox Pages obtained and reviewed Patrolman Josh Jones' 267-page personnel file last week through a public records request filed with the police department. Jones was involved in an incident June 17 where he fired shots at a suspect who appeared to point a gun towards him during a traffic stop.

The suspect, later identified as Darren L. Price, fled and remained at-large for nearly a week. He was apprehended by law enforcement July 24 in North Liberty and is currently being held in the Knox County Jail.

Jones was placed on paid administrative leave following the incident, per department protocol, while the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation completes its investigation.

The Fredericktown Police Department posted Monday on Facebook that it is currently looking for a new full-time officer. Johnson said this search is "not at all tied" to Jones' absence.

"Prior to the shooting, we were advertising for a school resource officer," Johnson explained. "And I got applications for it, but I also had an internal applicant interested, and it's looking like it's probably gonna be the internal applicant who gets it.

"That opens up a regular patrol position."

Jones' personnel file offers an in-depth glimpse into the officer's professional background.

Jones began working at the age of 16, while attending Mount Vernon High School. He graduated in 2011 with a 3.8 GPA, then enrolled in Central Ohio Technical College's Law Enforcement Technology program.

Jones held various jobs while enrolled in college, mostly in retail and fast food. He graduated from the OPOTA Basic Police Academy in 2013 with a 3.8 GPA. Jones then earned his associate's degree from COTC in 2014, finishing college with a 3.5 GPA.

Jones held his first job in law enforcement at the age of 22, working security for AlliedBarton in Upper Arlington. After graduation, he took a position with the Put-In-Bay Police Department, where he worked as a patrolman during the 2014 summer season. He then joined the Utica Police Department as a part-time officer in 2015.

The most notable blemish on Jones' record to-date came in June 2016, nearly one year into his tenure at Utica. A citizen wrote a letter to Mayor Lester Grennell, saying Jones "cussed out" his 16-year-old son during a traffic stop.

Jones admitted to asking the boy "Why are you driving like an ass----?" and was punished for his actions.

"In reference to this complaint, it was decided to 'change status' of Patrolman Jones from part-time and offer him re-training at an auxiliary status, in lieu of dismissal from the Village of Utica Police Department," Chief Clifford Bigler wrote in a letter dated June 17, 2016.

Bigler said Jones accepted this demotion, and was "also aware he will receive no monetary compensation from the Village while in this status." With additional training and approval from department leadership, Jones could potentially return to part-time status one day, Bigler said.

Less than a month later, Jones applied to become a part-time patrolman at the Fredericktown Police Department. He was hired by then-Chief Roger Brown for the position on August 15, 2016.

Since Jones has worked in Fredericktown, he has quickly risen through the ranks. He was hired as a full-time officer in June 2018, less than two years after joining the force.

His annual evaluation forms show consistent progress  after earning mostly 3s and 4s on his first two annual evaluations, Jones now earns 4s and 5s.

He was praised by Johnson in February for his work ethic and professionalism. Jones led the department in traffic citations (and warnings) in 2020, as well as criminal cases.

"Your work ethic and dedication to the department is noticed and is greatly appreciated," Johnson wrote in his evaluation. "You also continue to be someone that I can trust to make sound decisions in my absence. Your overall performance sets an excellent example for other officers to follow."

Jones' biggest area of improvement over the last four years, according to remarks from superiors in evaluation forms, has been his decision-making.

Johnson told Jones in 2019 to "force yourself to slow down and thoroughly assess everything that you are handling." Similar remarks were made in Jones' 2018 and 2017 evaluations. Now, however, Jones receives high marks for his poise under pressure.

"I am very pleased with your decision-making," Johnson wrote in February. "You do a great job of assessing a situation, considering all of the possibilities, and making a sound decision. I know that I can count on you to make a sound decision in my absence."

Jones has completed several firearm-related training courses over the years, his personnel file indicates, including a Mount Vernon Police Department course on "Patrol Decision-Making, De-Escalation, and Use of Force" in September 2019. He has also received training from state and local agencies on traffic-stop protocols.

Jones' file contains dozens of certificates signifying successfully completed training courses in other areas of law enforcement over the last decade.

While Jones has received verbal reprimands for tardiness and occasional procedural missteps during his time in Fredericktown, he has not been suspended or demoted.

He received a citizen complaint last September for reckless driving, but he's also received praise from citizens for helping out around the community.

Jones was named Knox County CIT Officer of the Year in 2020 for his work with local mental health and addiction professionals, and was also commended privately by other area law enforcement agencies for his diligent record-keeping and professionalism.

Jones was praised by Johnson last year for his role in spearheading the FPD's record-management system transition, which included collaboration with outside agencies over the course of several months.

Jones, 28, now ranks third in the department in terms of seniority, behind Johnson (who began there in 2011) and part-time patrolman Brandon Jacobson (who began there in 2015). The department currently employs five full-time officers and one part-time patrolman.

Back in 2014, when Jones was applying for his first part-time patrolman position at the Put-In-Bay Police Department, he said graduating from COTC and the police academy was his "greatest life experience" to-date because he was "proving people wrong." He said he wanted to become a police officer because he wanted to "help people out."

Three years later, when he was hired by Fredericktown, he said he'd reached another personal peak.

"I just want to thank you and Chief for giving me the opportunity to come to Fredericktown," Jones wrote to Johnson in his 2017 self-evaulation. "Fredericktown PD was in the top 3 places that I had wanted to work when I made the decision to become a police officer and go through the academy. Now that I am here, I have no desire to leave.

"This has been such a great opportunity and I have learned so much. I believe the change has made me a better officer. I also believe I still have so much to offer and look forward to many more years."

The Knox County Sheriff's Office, Fredericktown Police Department and BCI continue to investigate the June 17 officer-involved shooting, Knox County Prosecutor Chip McConville said Monday.

Once the investigation is complete, McConville's office will review all evidence and present it to a grand jury, which will then decide whether or not Jones' use-of-force was warranted in this case, according to Ohio law.

Steve Irwin, press secretary for the Ohio Attorney General's Office (which oversees BCI), told Knox Pages recently that investigations of officer-involved shootings typically take 400 hours to complete. He said the timing often depends on the specifics of the case.

"The timeline could be several weeks or a couple months," Irwin said.
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Kokomo, IN (46901)

Today

A few clouds early, otherwise mostly sunny. High around 90F. Winds WSW at 10 to 15 mph..

Tonight

Clear to partly cloudy. Low near 70F. Winds SW at 10 to 15 mph.
President Joe Biden, pictured here on Washington, DC on June 23, says he would travel to Florida after a residential building partially collapsed in the coastal city of Surfside.
By Javier Solana





MADRID  U.S. President Joe Biden's first international tour felt like a breath of fresh air. From the Group of Seven (G7) summit in Cornwall to a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva, Biden carried out his duties with statesmanship and composure  a stark contrast from the mayhem and mendacity that characterized Donald Trump's foreign visits. Biden's trip sent a clear message: The United States is once again in good hands, which will be held out first and foremost to its traditional allies.







But Biden's goals extend further: By rallying the world's democracies to counter China and other autocracies, he hopes to engineer a kind of global democratic renaissance. His ability to realize this vision is far from clear. Yet he has wasted no time in getting down to business.







The last U.S. president who chose Europe for his maiden foreign trip was Jimmy Carter, back in 1977. Carter's tour started off in the United Kingdom, where he attended a G7 summit, and later took him to Switzerland, where he met Syrian President Hafez al-Assad (a Soviet ally). The parallels with Biden's trip are unmistakable  and, given his longstanding admiration for Carter, perhaps not entirely coincidental.







But the world has also undergone profound changes since 1977. Consider the U.K. When Carter visited the country, it had recently joined the European Communities (which preceded today's European Union)  a move later endorsed overwhelmingly by British voters. Today, the U.K. has recently abandoned the EU and is mired in political turmoil.







For Biden, this demanded a reaffirmation of America's "special relationship" with the U.K., including signing a new Atlantic charter. But it also required a blunt reminder to Prime Minister Boris Johnson that the U.K. should uphold its commitment to maintain an open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland (an EU member), thereby protecting the Good Friday Agreement. All in all, if forced to choose between the U.K. and the EU, there is little doubt that Biden would favor the latter.







The G7 has also changed considerably since Carter's time. When the G7 countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S.) first met in the 1970s, they comprised nearly 70 percent of the world's GDP in nominal terms  a share they maintained until the turn of the century. But in the last two decades, this share has plunged to about 45 percent.







Biden's laudable commitment to strengthening cooperation with the other G7 countries has delivered mixed results. On one hand, the world's wealthiest countries continue to come up short in delivering COVID-19 vaccines to developing countries. On the other hand, their recent agreement to establish a global minimum corporate-tax rate of 15 percent is, as Harvard's Dani Rodrik put it, "historic."







Given the G7 countries' diminishing international weight, however, the agreement's principles will have to be adopted more widely to have the intended impact. And securing broad buy-in will not be easy. The next hurdle to clear will be the G20, where significant pushback can be expected, particularly from China, whose human-rights record and trade practices were harshly denounced in the G7 communique.







After the G7 meeting, Biden attended a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit in Brussels, which also produced a noteworthy communique that singled out China, along with Russia. Yet again, this represents a significant shift from the 1970s, when NATO served as the West's bulwark against the Soviet Union.







The symbolism of NATO placing such strong emphasis on China is not lost on anyone  least of all the Chinese. To be sure, many of China's conventional and non-conventional military actions must be countered. But NATO often is not the best vehicle for that, and it should avoid overreaching.







Biden's summit with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Charles Michel was the least politically charged yet most consequential event of his European tour. The meetings produced a truce in the two sides' 17-year dispute over subsidies to aircraft companies Airbus and Boeing. All retaliatory tariffs have been suspended for five years.







The U.S. and the EU also committed to resolve differences over trade in steel and aluminum by the end of this year. While U.S. protectionism will not fizzle out, and the bilateral trade relationship remains beset by tensions, Biden clearly understands that he has to pick his battles and that the EU  the world's largest trading power  has much leverage to wield.







The final item on Biden's agenda  his meeting with Putin in Geneva  also reflected a major shift from 1977. Of course, the U.S. and Russia remain adversaries on many fronts, and Biden made it abundantly clear to Putin that, unlike Trump, he would not shrug off the Kremlin's transgressions against the U.S. (such as cyberattacks) and violations of international norms.







But it would make little strategic sense to approach Russia only as an adversary. Biden is thus attempting a tough balancing act. While the U.S. is portraying Russia and China as the main spearheads of an autocratic bloc, much in line with the NATO communique, Biden is exploring the possibility of reaching some basic understandings with Russia, and perhaps even driving a wedge between it and China.







Overall, Biden's first foreign tour deserves high marks for both planning and execution. Biden succeeded in drawing a clear line under the previous administration, reassuring America's European allies, and presenting the U.S. as a "responsible stakeholder" within the multilateral system  precisely what it has long urged China to become.







But disagreements among democratic countries will not vanish overnight, nor will the West recover its former global standing any time soon. America is back, and there is cause to celebrate. But, like it or not, the US-led unipolar world is gone for good.











Javier Solana, a former EU high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, secretary-general of NATO, and foreign minister of Spain, is president of EsadeGeo  Center for Global Economy and Geopolitics and distinguished fellow at the Brookings Institution. This article was distributed by Project Syndicate ( www.project-syndicate.org ).
Kendallville, IN (46755)

Today

Partly cloudy skies. High 89F. Winds WSW at 10 to 15 mph..

Tonight

Mainly clear skies. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low near 70F. Winds WSW at 10 to 15 mph.
In this Wednesday, June 23, 2021, photo, lawmakers meet in the Oregon House of Representatives during the legislative session at the Oregon State Capitol in Salem, Ore. (Abigail Dollins/Statesman-Journal via AP)
Pocatello, ID (83201)

Today

Partly cloudy skies this evening will become overcast overnight. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low near 65F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Partly cloudy skies this evening will become overcast overnight. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low near 65F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph.
SPD and the coroner's office on the scene of a homicide on Pouncey Street in Shreveport.
Man who drove to Monroe jail with meth said God sent him there
BILLINGS - Billings' crime rate was on the rise in 2020 and seems to only be getting worse.
BILLINGS - With the rising number of violent crimes in Yellowstone County, State Attorney General Austin Knudsen stopped in Billings to meet with local law enforcement leaders.

Our team had the opportunity speak with the attorney general and ask him questions sent in from our viewers.

Knudsen says theres a violent crime problem in Montana and with Billings as the largest city, it has become a central point for those crimes.

Violent crime is up 50% just in the last six or seven years in Montana, across the board. All violent crimes. That's a scary, scary stat. I think there were 50 homicides in the state of Montana last year and half of them were here in Billings. I mean, people have a right to be concerned here in Billings, its absolutely a problem," the attorney general said.

Knudsen says Montana has a huge methamphetamine problem. With the majority of drugs being trafficked through Billings, he says its increased the number of violent crimes in the city.

Were treating a bleeding gunshot wound with a band-aid. More law enforcement is definitely whats needed, but we have to secure the southern border. We know thats where the methamphetamine, the heroine, the fentanyl, thats where its all coming from," he said.

Knudsen says because its a border issue, which is under the federal government, there's nothing they can do at the state level.

Though, what they can do, he says, is increase law enforcement presence and deter criminals from coming to Billings.

The attorney general says, while putting more officers in the streets will help, mental health issues also contribute to the increase in crimes, and treatment of those issues must be part of the conversation too.

People are using this stuff for a reason and they have to have some access to mental health facilities, services to give them some outlet and treatment, he said.

Knudsen says he understands Billings' residents' fears, and he and local law enforcement leaders are working to find a solution.
(The Center Square) - President Joe Biden spoke in La Crosse, Wis. Tuesday to promote the bipartisan infrastructure bill as his predecessor criticized Republicans for agreeing to the deal.

Biden spoke on the benefits of the bipartisan package on the 65th anniversary of President Dwight Eisenhower signing the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, which created the interstate highway system.

America has always been propelled into the future by landmark national investments, Biden said. Investments that only the government has the capacity to make, only the government working together can make.

In his speech at La Crosses Municipal Transit Utility, Biden promoted the potential for the various initiatives in the bill, including broadband internet and clean water.

This is a generational investment to modernize our infrastructure, creating millions of good paying jobsthat position America to compete with the rest of the world in the 21st century because China is way outworking us in terms of infrastructure, Biden said.

Throughout the speech Biden stressed the jobs created by the bill, even branding the bill as a part of his blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America.

Bidens emphasis on job creation and the location of the speech, in the swing state of Wisconsin, appear to have the 2024 election in mind. Biden won Wisconsin by only about 20,000 votes over former President Donald Trump in last years presidential election.

The city of La Crosse has consistently voted for Democratic Presidential candidates since 1988, including Biden in 2020. However, Wisconsins 3rd congressional district, where La Crosse is located, voted for Trump over Biden in last years election.

While promoting the benefits of the bipartisan agreement, Biden also made clear he still wants to see more of his infrastructure proposals enacted.

Let me be clear: there is much more to do and Im gonna continue to fight for more, Biden said. Im gonna keep working with Congress to pass even more of my economic agenda so we can keep building an economy from bottom up and the middle out.

Biden talked about the human infrastructure he wants passed through reconciliation, like housing and healthcare initiatives. He also stated he wants to pay for it through tax hikes for corporations, mentioning the G-7s proposed 15% global minimum corporate tax.

I have never had a reputation of being someone whos out there trying to just out-tax people, but heres the deal folks: I think it's about time there be fairness in taxes, Biden said.

Republicans preemptively warned of Bidens claims for his infrastructure plans ahead his speech. Spokeswoman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee Lizzie Litzow bashed Bidens plan in a statement Tuesday morning.

Youll hear a lot of spin from Joe Biden today, but heres the facts: Bidens tax plan would raise taxes on family farms and decimate rural communities," Litzow. said. Wisconsin families deserve better than Bidens systemic socialism and the Democrat politicians like those running for U.S. Senate in Wisconsin, who will blindly rubber stamp a radical, liberal agenda.

Bidens predecessor, former President Trump, also had sharp words for the Republicans who are supporting the bipartisan bill in an appearance on The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show Tuesday.

It's sort-of pathetic to watch, Trump said. The Republicans are being used, the Republican senators, now some of the senators wouldnt do that,theyre being used by the Democrats. They want to make it sound bipartisan.

In spite of criticism from both Republicans and Democrats over the deal, Biden ended the speech highlighting its bipartisanship support.

This country came together forged a bipartisan dealthat delivers for everybody, said Biden. We have shown the world and just as importantly weve shown ourselves that American democracy can come through there is nothing, nothing, nothing beyond our capacity when we come together as one nation.
As temperatures heat up and the chance to cool off in natural waterways arrives, Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks (FWP) reminds everyone that building dams in creeks and streams can have negative consequences for fish and is illegal.

Rock dams built to create swimming holes may seem harmless, but can accumulate debris and build-up over time. While small dams can be washed out during spring, these features often remain intact and function as a passage barrier all the way through winter, FWP says.

This is especially true for species such as bull trout, which ascend small tributaries in late-summer to spawn.
HELENA, Mont. - The Montana Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) kept approval of the solution to clean up groundwater contamination at the Evaporation Ponds at the Colstrip Power Plants last week.

The DEQ reached an agreement with Talen Montana, LLC, the operator of the Colstrip Steam Electric Station (CSES) to solve ground water contamination caused by leaking ash ponds for the Units 1&2.

The DEQ said in a release they introduced the Alternative 10 resolution in November 2020 that involves the digging and relocating of all coal ash in a new and lined containment over the water table.

In December 2020, Talen did not agree with DEQ's Alternative 10 and its required financial assurance.

Fast forward to June 2021, all parties have made an agreement setting the pathway for finalized agreement expected later this year.

DEQ believes that this is a productive step forward, Jenny Chambers, DEQ waste management and remediation division administrator, said in the release. This agreement advances the dispute resolution process and brings us closer to a settlement to address the contamination at the Colstrip Ponds.

DEQ said the Colstrip area is a complex contamination site managed by Administrative Order on Consent (AOC), the DEQ's enforcement effort to confront groundwater contamination due to leaking ash ponds.

DEQ is able to keep their Alternative 10 solution and establish financial assurance in this primary agreement. Talen will continue their remedying Alternative 10 design while assessing a single additional alternative required to be done within two years, according to DEQ. Once Talen has reached a conclusion in assessment, they may petition DEQ to perfect the remedy selection of Units 1&2 Ponds via Remedy to Amend.

Talks surrounding the financial assurance resulted DEQ's approval of a financial burden of $163,324,679, the required amount to establish enough resources for the chosen cleanup. DEQ said this amount will be reconsidered every year and may appropriately fluctuate to cover the remedy's entire cost.

In the event Talen submits a Request to Amend, DEQ will reassess using the same standards they use to make alternative remedy decisions under Administrative Order on Consent.

DEQ said the agreement is not the closing settlement and does not generate legally binding burdens; rather, it is a step to reach a final agreement to close disagreements among all parties.

DEQ said they aim to reach a final settlement agreement by the end of the third quarter of 2021.
What was the best piece of wisdom you received as a kid that is worth passing on to todays younger generation?
A US pageant winner will become the first transgender woman to compete in Miss USA.

Kataluna Enriquez, 27, was crowned Miss Nevada on Sunday and will now go onto the final that is being held on 29 November in Oklahoma.

Enrique beat 21 contestants to be named Miss Nevada at the event at Las Vegas' South Point Hotel Casino and made history in the process.

Enrique used the competition's question and answer segment to talk about how she was proud of what made her different and unique.

She told the judges: "Today I am a proud transgender woman of colour.

"Personally, I've learned that my differences do not make me less than, it makes me more than.

"I know that my uniqueness will take me to all my destinations, and whatever I need to go through in life."

For the ballgown round, Enrique opted for a sequined rainbow coloured gown she'd made herself to mark Pride.

Sharing a snap of herself in her dress, Enrique wrote: "Gown made by me @katalunakouture. In honour of pride month, and all of those who don't get a chance to spread their colours."

In an Instagram post following her win, Enriquez said: "Huge thank you to everyone who supported me from day one.

Related video:

"My community, you are always in my heart. My win is our win. We just made history. Happy pride."

In an interview with KVVU, Enrique said she'd 'struggled' in her earlier life but is now able to 'thrive' and be a trailblazer.

She told the news outlet: "I didn't have the easiest journey in life. It was a struggle for a moment. I struggled with physical and sexual abuse. I struggled with mental health. I didn't have much growing up. I didn't have support.

"But I'm still able to thrive, and I'm still able to survive and become a trailblazer for many."

She added: "Don't let your differences determine what you're capable of.

"Your differences is anything what makes you unique [sic], and you are capable of anything as long as you believe in yourself."
Ordering food from the McDonalds drive-through in the City of Lake Geneva could be a little more convenient in the future.

Members of the Lake Geneva City Council unanimously approved, June 28, to allow representatives from the McDonalds Corporation in Oak Brook, Illinois to install an additional bypass drive-through lane at the 104 Wells St. restaurant.

The plan commission recommended the additional drive-through lane June 21.

The restaurants drive-through area will be reconfigured from having two drive-through order points in one lane to two order points in two lanes.

Its another drive-through lane where you will merge to pick up your order, Alderman Tim Dunn said.

Mayor Charlene Klein said the additional drive-through lane will cause less traffic to be backed up onto Wells Street, which is currently an issue in that area.

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I think that was the main reason for doing this to alleviate that back up on Wells Street, Klein said.

Stephen Jeske of Haag Muller Inc. in Port Washington, architects for the project, said the two order lanes will be installed side by side.
RACINE  A Kenosha man allegedly sexually assaulted a girl under the age of 16 at a hotel in Racine.

Willie L. Cox, 25, of the 6000 block of 28th Avenue, was charged with felony counts of use of a computer to facilitate a child sex crime and second-degree sexual assault of a child under 16 years of age.

According to a criminal complaint:

An investigator with the Racine County Sheriffs Office began to investigate a child sexual assault that was reported on May 18 at Travelodge, the former Riverside Inn at 3700 Northwestern Ave.

He interviewed the victim who said she met with Cox at Travelodge and where he allegedly sexually assaulted her. She also said he knew how old she was.

The investigator was shown messages sent by Cox to the victim on Facebook Messenger. Cox sent messages to her about hanging out repeatedly and she finally gave in and allowed him to hangout with her. On May 18, he came over to smoke marijuana. She told him she didnt want to do anything sexual with him. She kept telling him no towards his advances and then Cox said let me change your mind, and began to sexually assault her.
WASHINGTON (AP)  The Supreme Court on Monday refused to allow New Hampshire to sue neighboring Massachusetts over an income tax dispute involving people who have been working from home during the coronavirus pandemic.

The justices rejected New Hampshire's complaint without comment. The state objects to Massachusetts' collection of income tax from roughly 80,000 New Hampshire residents who are employed by Massachusetts companies, but who have been working remotely.

New Hampshire wanted the justices to declare Massachusetts' collections unconstitutional and order a refund to people who are paying taxes of just over 5%.

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu said Monday that the court was setting a costly precedent."

This decision will have lasting ramifications for thousands of Granite State residents, he said in a statement.

The issue is especially sensitive in New Hampshire, which lacks a state income tax. New Hampshire also drew support from New Jersey and Connecticut, among others.

Residents of those states who are employed by New York businesses also generally pay state income tax to New York.
In Virginia, the Mount Clifton United Methodist Church experienced a similar fate. The church can seat more than 100 but the number of weekly worshippers dwindled to 10 to 15, even before the pandemic.

The small white church built on a hill in the Shenandoah Valley in the 1880s may be rented to another congregation, or it may be put up for sale.

Its a complicated picture overall, but the pandemic was the straw that broke the camels back, said the Rev. Darlene Wilkins, who oversaw Mount Clifton. It just became next to impossible to sustain.

In the United States, the latest challenge for places of worship comes against a backdrop of a decadeslong trend of a smaller share of the population identifying as religious.

Its too early to know the full impact of the pandemic. Surveys do show signs of hopefulness  and also cause for concern.

About three-quarters of Americans who attended religious services in person at least monthly before the pandemic say they are likely to do so again in the next few weeks, according to a recent AP-NORC poll. That's up slightly from the about two-thirds who said in May 2020 that they would if they were allowed to do so. But 7% said they definitely won't be attending.
#Belarus has suspended its participation in the Eastern Partnership initiative of the European Union (EU) due to the bloc's recently imposed sanctions against the country.



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More than 8,000 customers of Avista experienced a power outage in Spokane, Washington as the heat wave continued to ravage the western region of the United States. The said power outage experienced by their customers prompted the energy company to ask for energy conservation to address the issue.

The energy company placed the blame for the power outage on the extreme weather the western region is currently experiencing, according to a report from KHQ. To date, the outlet noted that at least 8,036 are currently without power.

READ NEXT: California Gov. Gavin Newsom Declares State of Emergency Amid Heat Wave

Over 8,000 Avista Customers Without Power

The Spokesman-Review reported that the first power outage was reported in North Spokane, at around 1:45 in the afternoon. Around 4,800 Avista customers concentrated in Nevada to the Lidgerwood neighborhood between East Hawthorne Road to East Wellesley Avenue. At around two in the afternoon, the number of Avista customers affected by the power outage in the area escalated to 4,865.

Another power outage affected at least 2,070 Avista customers in Emerson-Garfield Neighborhood to Logan neighborhood. Meanwhile, in West Spokane, around 1,353 customers of the energy company were reported without power.

The expected time of power restoration for major outages is around 4:30 in the afternoon until six in the evening. Meanwhile, KHQ noted that areas with smaller outages that affect fewer customers should expect their power to be restored around 8 in the evening. However, the time given by the energy company was still subject to change.

Avista Sought Their Customers' Help in Energy Conservation

The energy company also sought the cooperation of its customers in conserving energy. Avista sent an email on Monday asking their consumers to conserve energy around one in the afternoon through eight in the evening daily, until July 1, according to a report from KXLY.

Avista said in a statement that customers using less energy is essential in preserving "the reliability" of their service as well as minimizing the opportunity for power outages.

Apart from asking the help of the consumer, Avista also gave a set of steps on how people can preserve energy amid heat wave. The tips include reducing the use of air conditioning and other appliances, raising the thermostat of the air conditioning while maintaining comfort, closing blinds and drapes to block the heat of the sun, and using small electric appliances for cooking.

The energy company also noted that replacing the filters of the air conditioning units and making sure there is no debris blocking will help ease the heat.

"Avista always works with our customers to use energy efficiently and to conserve energy where possible, and we will count on that partnership as we all manage through this heat wave together," Avista's president and CEO, Dennis Vermillion, said in a statement.

In response to the power outage as well as the energy conservation reminder of Avista, Spokane County have designated areas as cooling stations, such as several locations of Spokane Public Library, Loof Carousel in Riverfront Park, and The City of Spokane Valley Libraries. On Tuesday, KXLY noted that the county would hit high temperatures up to 108 degrees.

READ NEXT: Oregon to Experience 3-Day Heat Wave; Excessive Heat Warning, Issued

WATCH: Energy Saving | Save Electricity - From Science Hangama
A gas explosion in Collin County has killed two people and injured others, according to officials.

Collin County Sheriff's Office said that the explosion occurred on Monday noon near the area of Farm-to-Market 2756 and Highway 78, according to an NBC local news report.

Officials had already secured the area by 5:30 p.m. However, they still urge the public to stay away from the area.

Among the respondents on the scene were the Wylie Fire Department, Collin County Sheriff's Office, Farmersville Police Department, Collin County Fire Marshall, and Texas Department of Public Safety. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has also joined the involved agencies in responding to the gas explosion.

The Farmersville police chief said that the people involved in the explosion were contractors for Atmos Energy. However, they are not actual Atmos employees, according to a WFAA report.

The police chief said that the contractors were servicing a gas line in the area when the explosion happened.

WFAA reported that two were killed and three were injured during the incident.

Authorities are not yet clear if it was a rupture involving a high-pressure line. There was also no visible evidence of a fire, according to a Fox 4 News report.

READ MORE: Colonial Pipeline Attack Hackers Got Nearly $5 Million in Ransom





Dallas Pipeline Explosion in 2018

This was not the first time that Dallas has encountered a pipeline explosion in their area in the recent years. The same incident had occurred in 2018, which killed a 12-year-old girl in northwest Dallas.

The National Transportation Safety Board declared that the probable cause of the 2018 gas explosion was a natural gas leak from a pipe that was damaged during a replacement done over 20 years ago, according to a KERA News report.

Nation Transportation Safety board member, Jennifer Homendy, said that the procedure and decisions by Atmos Energy contributed to the explosions.

Homendy added that contributing to the degradation of the pipeline system was Atmos Energy's inadequate integrity management program.

The same leak had caused two other fires on Espanola Drive days before the deadly explosion. The crack in the main pipeline had caused other several gas leaks through the neighborhood that were undetected.

Sara Lyons, the investigator in charge, said that Atmos Energy could have tested the customer piping.

Atmos Energy said that weather conditions made it difficult to investigate or immediately repair multiple leaks. The temperature at the time ranged from 32 to 54 degrees, which was exacerbated by heavy rainfall.

Atmos released a statement on the 2018 incident, saying that it believes the natural gas main pipe was damaged by excavation equipment and points to unreported third-party damage that led to the pipe's crack and leak. The energy company said that their number one priority is the safety of the public, their employees, and their natural gas distribution system.

Gas Supply in Texas

There were concerns in the state during the shutdown of the Colonial Pipeline, which is considered one of the largest pipelines in the U.S. The said pipeline runs from Houston up to New Jersey, and New York.

Director of the Maguire Energy Institute at Southern Methodist University, Bruce Bullock, said at the time that Texas is in good shape, according to another WFAA report.

Bullock added that it should not affect the North Texas area as long as they don't panic. He noted that the supply at the time should be more than adequate.

READ NEXT: Texas Power Company Files for Bankruptcy After Rampant Power Outage Due to Severe Cold Storm

WATCH: 2 dead, 3 injured in gas line explosion in Collin County, officials say - WFAA






Clayton Phillips, the 18-year-old man linked by the authorities in a Texas kidnapping of a 13-year-old that caused an issuance for a statewide Amber Alert, is now under Tarrant County's custody.

The teen's arrest happened a day after the Brownsville Police Department issued the alert on Saturday evening, June 26.

CBSDFW reported that Clayton Phillips and the 13-year-old girl, Antonette Rodriguez, were found while the Mansfield police searched an area in North Texas based on a tip from the Brownsville Police Department.

The suspect and the girl were reported to be inside a car backed into a spot of grass off West Debbie Lane in Mansfield.

Officers believed that the Texas amber alert suspect drove to the Dallas Fort Worth area, where he may have a family nearby. Phillips was charged with kidnapping and is held at Tarrant County Jail.

READ NEXT: George P. Bush Challenges Ken Paxton for Texas Attorney General Post

Police Release a Footage on the Arrest of the Texas Amber Alert Suspect

On Sunday, June 27, the authorities released body camera footage revealing how the officers arrested the 18-year-old amber alert suspect.

Why looking at an #amberalert on your phone is so important.



A 13y/o girl was kidnapped near the Mexican border, in Brownsville @bpd_pio. She was found safe 500+ miles away.



This is video of @MansfieldPDTX arrested the 18y/o.



Officers spoke to mom, & she was in tears.@wfaa pic.twitter.com/Z7rAsVnIbv  Malini Basu (@MaliniBasu_) June 28, 2021

The video featured loud voices of police officers as they open the door of the car. At one point, a police officer shouted, "let go of the door," and instructed the Texas amber alert suspect on the ground.

The authorities urged the suspect to put his hands around his back to cuff him, and the 18-year-old was seen cooperative. The bodycam footage also revealed that Rodriguez was in the passenger seat of the car.

"Looked like he was sleeping in the driver seat, and the child in the front passenger seat," said Sgt. Brian Raines from Mansfield Police Department as reported by WFAA.

Raines described the Texas amber alert suspect as "dangerous." Raines also noted that the area where the suspect's car was found was not a "normal area for a vehicle to be at that time of night." The police officer further noted that the vehicle had its parking lights on, which caught his attention.

13-Year-Old Victim of Texas Amber Alert Suspect Rescued

Meanwhile, police officers described the 13-year-old victim as startled but calm.

"[She] just listened to us and was completely fine, no injuries or anything like that," said Raines, adding that he thought of his own daughter while rescuing Rodriguez.

The police officer also said that their priority was to secure Antonette Rodriguez and separate her from Clayton Phillips. Officers believed that Rodiguez and the suspect met online.

In the end, the mother of the 13-year-old cried tears of joy, knowing that her daughter was alive. During the whole shift, Raines emphasized that their dispatch, officers, and the city helped find the child. Raines was joined with three other officers during the suspect's arrest.

The Texas amber alert was issued for Antonette Rodriguez when she went missing on Saturday. The 13-year-old girl, originally from Brownsville, was last seen in La Quinta Inn and Suites in San Antonio before she was rescued by the authorities.

Officers believed that Rodriguez was a victim of a Texas kidnapping and was in a "grave or immediate" danger when she disappeared.

READ MORE: Ex-Military Walter Klug Rivera, a Chilean Fugitive, Arrested in Argentina

WATCH: Texas Amber Alert Suspect Arrested In Mansfield, Charged With Kidnapping 13-Year-Old Girl - From CBSDFW
President Joe Biden respects Olympian Gwen Berry's right to peacefully protest when she turned her back on the American flag during a medal ceremony at the Olympic trials in Oregon, according to the White House.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Joe Biden had not spoken particularly about the Olympic hammer thrower. However, she noted that the president respects Berry's right to "peacefully protest," The Daily Wire reported.

Psaki said that Joe Biden is incredibly proud to be an American and has great respect for the anthem and all that it represents.

However, she noted that Biden would also say that part of that pride in our country means recognizing there are moments where we are, as a country, have not lived up to the highest ideals.

"And that means respecting the rights of people, granted to them in the Constitution, to peacefully protest," Psaki added.

READ NEXT: "We Exist": Afro-Mexicans Officially Counted After Struggling To Get Recognition

Gwen Berry Turning Her Back on the American Flag

Gwen Berry turned to the crowd rather than the American flag as the national anthem was being played in Oregon.

Berry placed third to qualify for the 2020 Olympic Games, which was postponed due to the pandemic.

She held her ceremonial flowers by her side while she covered her head with a T-shirt that read "Activist Athlete," the Washington Examiner reported.

Gwen Berry maintained that the Saturday ceremony, June 26, was a "setup" since she claimed organizers told her that the anthem would be played before they walked in. She said they had enough opportunities to play the national anthem before they got up there.

Gwen Berry further noted that she was thinking about what she should do. Eventually, she just stayed there and swayed and put her shirt over her head.

However, USA Track & Field spokeswoman Susan Hazzard disputed the allegations. She insisted that the anthem was played according to schedule.

Hazzard said they do not wait until the athletes were on the podium for the hammer throw awards, adding that the national anthem is played every day according to a previously posted schedule.

Gwen Berry has protested during the anthem's performance in the past. She said that the song does not speak for her, according to an Independent report.

Black athletes have protested in numerous anthem performances at competitions in recent years as a means of bringing light to systemic racism and police brutality in the U.S.

Berry said her purpose and mission are bigger than sports, and she is here to represent those who died due to systemic racism.

Criticisms on Gwen Berry

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas were among those who called for Berry's removal from the Olympic team, NPR reported.

Former U.S. Department of Education Press Secretary Angela Morabito also called for her removal. U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee CEO Sarah Hirshland said the trials had allowed respectful demonstration in light of racial and social justice this year.

In the 2019 Pan-American Games in Lima, Peru, Gwen Berry had thrown her fist in the air during the national anthem that cost her sponsorship and suspension for 12 months.

She will soon head to Tokyo with the U.S. team for her second Olympics, where protests and demonstrations are banned under Rule 50.

READ MORE: Pres. Joe Biden Starts Tulsa Massacre Speech by Making Sure 2 Girls Get Ice Cream

WATCH: Gwen Berry Responds to Criticism After Turning Back to U.S. Flag During Anthem at Olympic Trials - From CBS News






Scientists reported that COVID vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna had shown a persistent immune reaction in the body that may protect recipients against the coronavirus for years.

A new study shows growing evidence that most people immunized with the mRNA vaccines may not need boosters as long as the virus and its variants do not evolve much beyond their current strains. However, this is not guaranteed, The New York Times reported.

Ali Ellebedy, an immunologist at Washington University in St. Louis, said it is a good sign of how durable people's immunity is from the said vaccines. Ellebedy led the study, which was published in the journal Nature.

The study did not include the COVID vaccine developed by Johnson & Johnson. Ellebedy said he expected the immune response to be less durable than that produced by mRNA vaccines.

Meanwhile, Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel earlier suggested that it was likely that booster shots would be needed in the near future to boost waning immunity and protect against new virus strains.

Public health officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, rejected the idea. Fauci noted that a huge majority of people, who have received one of the two mRNA vaccines, will likely be protected over the long term and may not need a booster shot anytime soon, Forbes reported.

The study included 41 participants who received both doses of either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine. Among the participants were eight people who have a history of infection with the virus, but they were immunized with two doses of the Pfizer vaccine.

Ellebedy's team found that 15 weeks after the first dose of the vaccine, the germinal center was still highly active in all 14 participants, and the number of memory cells that recognized the virus had not declined.

READ NEXT: Moderna Scientists Warn Against New COVID Variants That Could Drive a New Wave of Transmission

Mixing COVID Vaccines

A study led by Oxford University found that mixing and matching COVID vaccines made by Pfizer and AstraZeneca creates a "robust" immune response against the virus, CNBC reported.

The study found that immune responses differed according to the order of immunization. AstraZeneca shot followed by the Pfizer vaccine showed a better immune response out of the two mixed schedules.

The researchers noted that all possible vaccination schedules involving the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines could potentially be used against COVID-19.

Matthew Snape, associate professor in pediatrics and vaccinology at the University of Oxford, said the findings could add much-needed flexibility to vaccination programs worldwide. Snape is the chief investigator of what is known as the "mix and match" trial.

The researchers also noted that both mixed schedules produced higher antibodies than the standard two-dose AstraZeneca schedule.

Meanwhile, UK's deputy chief medical officer, Prof Jonathan Van-Tam, said there was no reason to change the UK's current successful same dose vaccine schedules. Van-Tam noted that the given vaccines were in good supply and saving lives, BBC News reported.

However, he also said that it might be something that they could look at in the future, as mixing doses could give them even greater flexibility for their vaccination efforts.

READ MORE: Teens and Young Adults Could Have a Heart Problem as Rare Side Effect of COVID Vaccine, Evidence Growing: CDC

WATCH: COVID-19: Is it OK to Mix Pfizer and Moderna Vaccines? - From CBC News: The National






The family of Oscar Denis, the former vice president of Paraguay, has asked his abductors to provide proof of life.

Oscar Denis' daughter Beatriz said that in the nine months since her father was kidnapped, they had not received any news from her father, BBC News reported.

Oscar Denis was kidnapped by members of the Marxist Paraguayan People's Army (EPP) rebel group from his ranch near the city of Yby Yau on Sept. 9, 2020.

The EPP claimed responsibility for the former vice president's kidnapping and demanded the government to release two of the group's jailed leaders in exchange for Oscar Denis' release.

The group also directed the family of the former vice president to hand out food to 40 communities in the region where the kidnapping took place. They also ordered the family to distribute the group's propaganda material.

The family had met the kidnappers' demands. However, the government had refused to free the two imprisoned EPP rebels who are both serving sentences for the attempted murder of the three police during a failed jailbreak in 2004.

The 96-year-old mother of Paraguay's former vice president died last week without seeing her son. Beatriz said Sunday, June 27, that there had been no results from the government's side, with no advances or information.

The former vice president's daughter noted that the only information the family had received was in the form of another EPP pamphlet, which had been left in a local business on June 4. Authorities had verified the pamphlet, which was addressed to Oscar Denis' family.

The kidnappers asked the daughter of Paraguay's former vice president to make the pamphlet's contents public. However, she said that she would only do so if the rebels provided proof that her father is alive.

READ NEXT: Paraguay President Sacks Three Ministers Over COVID-19 Handling

Calls for Oscar Denis' Release

After he was kidnapped, hundreds of people joined a protest in Paraguay to demand the release of the former vice president.

According to another BBC report, the EPP had earlier released a pamphlet stating the deadline for the government to release Carmen Villalba and Alcides Oviedo. The deadline set by the rebels has already expired.

Villalba and Oviedo were members of the rebel group sentenced last year for the attempted murder of three cops in an attempted jailbreak. Both of them were already serving long sentences for kidnapping.

Paraguayan Interior Minister Euclides Acevedo said the state would never enter into negotiations about matters of "public security."

Girls Killed in a Paraguay Raid

In September 2020, the United Nations called for an investigation after two girls were shot dead in a raid by Paraguayan security forces on a rebel camp.

Neighboring Argentina has identified the two victims as Argentine nationals and confirmed that they were 11 years old, another BBC report noted.

The two girls were identified as Maria del Carmen Villalba and Lilian Mariana Villalba. Myrian Viviana Villalba, Lilian's mother, said the girls planned to return home to Argentina in March to start the school year.

However, they got stuck in Paraguay when both countries shut their borders due to the pandemic, The New York Times reported. Myrian said both of the girls had fathers in the EPP. However, she declined to identify the men.

The EPP is known for carrying out a string of killings and kidnappings in Paraguay.

READ MORE: Copa America in Brazil Raises COVID-19 Cases Among Players, Staff, Workers to More Than 50

WATCH: Former Paraguayan Vice President Feared Kidnapped - From Reuters






The numbers recently found by researchers regarding the growing numbers of the great white shark in California a month ago was proven by the latest shark attack after a surfer was severely injured with only one bite from the predator.

The 35-year-old California surfer was attacked by a great white shark and only managed to survive after he swam to the shore at Gray Whale Cove beach, which is close to San Francisco Area. When the rescuers arrived at the scene, they immediately applied a tourniquet to the man's right leg to stop blood loss.

According to The Guardian, the California Fire unit in San Mateo-Santa Cruz stated that first responders applied advanced life support measures to make sure that the surfer's life will be saved. The fire unit then transported the surfer to the trauma unit at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital for further medical assistance.

Based on the statement of the San Mateo County sheriff's office, the shark that attacked the 35-year-old man was estimated at between 6ft and 8ft, they indicated that it was probably a juvenile. The California man was released on Sunday from the hospital.

Meanwhile, Brian Ham, battalion chief of the San Mateo fire department shared that the surfer only had one bite but there were about 10 lacerations to the back of his right thigh. Ham also added that sharks are within the surf zone which is located 100 feet to 200 feet away from the actual beach. The depth of the water was shallow but a shark can attack very close to the beach, Bay Area CBS5 reported.

ALSO READ: Mystery Surrounding the Plane Found in California Lake Is Solved

Rising Numbers of Great White Sharks

Last month, Montana State University's marine ecologists found that the numbers of the great white rose in northern California's so-called "red triangle." The 'red triangle' runs north from Monterey Bay to Bodega Bay and about 20 miles offshore to the Farallon Islands. The Gray Whale Cove where the surfer went is at the center of the coastal stretch.

Based on the seven-year study, which was funded by Stanford University and the Monterey Bay Aquarium, they have concluded that there were 266 adult and sub-adult great white sharks in the red triangle. They mentioned that the increase in the number compared to a decade earlier was modest. The study was also supported by the Oregon State University.

Putting aside the recent shark attack, the researchers stated that it was a clear indication that ocean conditions were improving with associated benefits to marine life.

Paul Kanive, the lead author and a veteran member of the California white shark tagging team shared that they were cautiously optimistic that this is a good news story for the ocean ecosystem off California, Newsweek reported.

Kanive added that recent findings were good indicators regarding the overall health of the system. He also added that white sharks, as apex predators, need a healthy structure of other animals in the food chain's lower levels. White sharks' preferred prey were coastal seals, and sea lions, which have rebounded their population and at very high numbers. This means that there are sustainable and plentiful food sources for the sharks.

RELATED ARTICLE: Sea Level Rise Due to Climate Change Is Being Linked to Florida Condo Collapse

WATCH: Great White Shark Attacks California Surfer - TODAY
A North Carolina resident's zebra cobra snake is on the loose in Raleigh, North Carolina, at 1:30 AM on Sunday, June 27.

What Happened?

The people living in the vicinity were alerted by local police authorities, who sent out a warning message regarding the venomous zebra cobra snake. The snake isn't local to the area and even the United States. The snake originally comes from Africa, and according to the African Snake Bite Institute that the snake's nature is naturally shy and would rather escape than attack.

However, if the animal is cornered, it will spit or bite, releasing venom that can cause severe tissue damage bad enough to be fatal. The zebra cobra is a nocturnal reptile and has black vertical stripes, and has either a brown or dark blackhead.

The residents spoke with WRAL that they had no idea that one of their neighbors' pet snakes was living in the vicinity and that it had escaped. The families were concerned for their children and pets that might accidentally come across the escaped animal and fall victim to fatal injuries.

Read More: Pfizer and Moderna COVID Vaccines Can Offer Protection Lasting for Years, New Study Shows

Raleigh Neighbors Speak Out

Mark Pavlic, a concerned citizen within the area, said to WRAL, "It is pretty alarming. It seems like a pretty dangerous snake, and dogs like to sniff in the grass and check things out ... It's an extreme worry." Since then, residents are on high alert and are keeping a close eye out for the venomous snake.

As per the North Carolina state law, it is the owners' responsibility to keep a venomous snake as long as it is contained in an escape-proof enclosure. It's not illegal to own one if conditions are kept safe and that the owner must also have a countermeasure in the event of the animal escaping from the enclosure together with owning an antivenom to counter any and all bites.

Police have urged the public to call 911 if they see the snake and not get close to it.

How to Respond to Venomous Snakes

Experts agree that snakes can be dangerous and highly aggressive or the exact opposite who are harmless and non-confrontational. If ever encountering a snake, you always have to leave the snake alone and continue to do so and call the proper authorities.

Snake encounters usually happen in passing, and it's best to leave them alone, and you would most likely not be seeing it again. However, for this instance of a zebra cobra snake, you should immediately vacate the premises or stay a good long distance not to be a target of aggression or self-defense from the snake.

Leave the snake to proper authorities and do not attempt to handle them on your own, as a bite may be considered lethal. Snakes usually bite more than once, and it won't end well for you if you aren't treated immediately with the antivenom.

Read More: Collin County Gas Explosion Records 2 Deaths, 3 Injured

This article is owned by Latin Post

Written by Alec G.
Khloe Kardashian had the most amazing birthday on Sunday (27.06.21).

The Keeping Up with the Kardashians star spent her 37th birthday with her three-year-old daughter True, and has said she couldnt have asked for a better way to celebrate her special day.

She wrote on Twitter: "I had the most amazing birthday. I spent the entire day with my baby girl and then I ended the night in my pajamas, a glass of champagne and my beautiful family. Perfection! Laughing the night away.

I love you all so much!!!!! I cant even understand how this is really?!?! Pinch me!!!! But dont. thank you all again for making me feel so special (sic)

Khloes post comes after several of her family members took to social media to heap praise on the Good American co-founder.

Alongside a series of throwback pictures of Khloe growing up to now, her mum Kris Jenner wrote on Instagram: "Happy Birthday to my Angel Bunny @khloekardashian!!! You are one of the most remarkable human beings Ive ever known and Im so proud to be your mommy.!! I have never met anyone more supportive and positive and loving and kind and generous and giving! You are so patient with all of us especially all of Trues cousins. You are everyones ride or die and you love so hard. Thank you for being the most amazing daughter, mommy, sister and auntie you continually support and encourage each and every one of us and on top of it all you make the best cinnamon rolls I have ever had!!! I love you so much and being your Mommy will always be my greatest joy!! I love you my bunny (sic)"

While her sister Kim Kardashian West wrote: "OMG @khloekardashian Happy Birthday! You seriously are the most amazing magical person I know! You have the biggest heart and you take care of everyone around you! You are the best mom and friend to the small circle you keep! You are such a light in my life and everyone around you! I cant even put into words how blessed I feel that you are my sister! No one Id rather have by my side in this life time than you!!! I love you! (sic)"

And there was even a glowing tribute from Trues father Tristan Thompson, despite him and Khloe being reported to have separated recently.

He wrote on Instagram: Happy birthday @khloekardashian

Thank you for being not just an amazing partner, mommy and best friend but also being the kindest, caring and most loving human being Ive ever met. Your love and spirit is contagious to all whove met you. Thank you for always being there for me and putting our family first. I love you so much. Have an amazing day. (sic)
A man who almost caused a massive explosion that could have killed himself and others has lost his appeal against the severity of the five-year prison sentence imposed on him.

Evan Stubbins, aged 25, of Church Road, Croom, Co Limerick was convicted, at Cork Circuit Criminal Court last November, of possession of explosives, after pleading guilty to possessing a blow torch and canisters containing oxygen and propane in an attempt to blow up an ATM at the Maxol garage at Carrs Hill, Carrigaline, Co Cork on August 2, 2020.

Mr Stubbins, who is single and unemployed, also pleaded guilty to separate charges of criminal damage and attempted theft.

The court heard that Stubbins had used YouTube to research mixing chemicals to blow up the ATM in order to steal its contents.

Evidence was heard that the filling station had tanks containing 30,000 litres of fuel which could have destroyed houses 200 metres away if ignited.

Stubbins criminal plans were foiled when a passing Garda patrol spotted him using a screwdriver on the ATM. The explosive material was subsequently discovered in the appellants Volkswagen Passat.

At a sitting of the Court of Appeal, counsel for Stubbins, Ray Boland BL, argued that the sentencing judge, Judge Sean O Donnabhain, had not given the appellant a sufficient reduction off the headline sentence of seven years for his signed guilty plea.

Mr Boland claimed there was legal precedence that signed pleas should attract a reduction of around a third off the headline sentence.

Counsel said the judge has also erred by failing to further reduce the length of the sentence by taking into account various mitigating factors including Stubbins youth, his cooperation with gardai and the fact that the offence was committed under duress as part of his efforts to pay off a drug debt to unnamed individuals.

Mr Boland also argued Judge O Donnabhain had erred in principle by claiming the lack of sophistication in Stubbins crime was an aggravating factor when it should have been treated as a mitigating factor.

He claimed numerous judgements had consistently considered the sophistication of an offence to be an aggravating factor.

Mr Boland said Stubbins lack of sophistication arose from his use of the internet to prepare for the crime and the fact that he was the only one at risk of serious injury.

However, the president of the Court of Appeal, Mr Justice George Birmingham, questioned if the usual treatment regarding the sophistication of a crime applied to explosive offences. He noted the lack of sophistication by the appellant meant he posed an ever greater risk to himself and others.

Opposing the appeal, counsel for the DPP, Donal McCarthy, said the fact that Stubbins was caught red handed by gardai meant his guilty plea did not have the same mitigating value as one where the prosecution would have been required to prove various gaps in evidence the alleged offence.

Mr McCarthy said the five year jail sentence was appropriate given all the circumstances of the case.

In reply, Mr Boland said any mitigation allowed by Judge O Donnabhain was not transparent, while Stubbins guilty plea had spared the State from having to prove quite complex scientific matters as well as intent.

Delivering the Court of Appeals ruling, Ms Justice Isobel Kennedy said it was the view of the court that the headline sentence of seven years was entirely appropriate given the serious nature of the offence.

This was a serious offence with considerable planning required, she observed.

While the five year jail term was somewhat on the high side, Ms Justice Kennedy said it was within the margin allowed.

She said the court had not been persuaded there had been an error in principle as the risk that Stubbins placed himself and others in was exacerbated by the lack of sophistication of the offence.

The appeal was rejected.
Kildare bars, cafes and restaurants waiting to open indoor hospitality have urged the Government to give a definite date so the sector can prepare adequately to get back to work.

The Cabinet is due to announce on Tuesday whether customers will be allowed to drink and dine inside premises on Monday, July 5, or if this will be delayed by a number of weeks.

County Kildare Chamber claimed hotels have operated indoor dining for nearly a month without outbreaks of the feared Delta variant of Covid-19.

Meanwhile Joan ORourke of ORourkes Bar & Lounge in Newbridge said the government needs to give ample notice to businesses to order stock.

Joan said: "We can't just flick on a switch. We don't have any stock so we need get orders in a week in advance so we need to know in good time. If we dont open we will still have to pay for what we order.

She added: Its difficult to get back to work because its a changed environment now with social distancing rules.

We need extra staff too just to enforce the guidelines.

But we are looking forward to serving our customers again. We live in Newbridge and we meet them all the time and they say they cant wait to come back.

Joan added that the lack of clarity is equally difficult for cafes and restaurants who need to order in perishable stock like sandwiches and baked goods.

CEO of County Kildare Chamber Allan Shine said Ireland is an outlier in Europe as it is the only country not offering full hospitality indoors.

Mr Shine added: Delaying the reopening of the hospitality industry wont make any difference to this current variant.

Hotels have been open since the second of June and there have been no outbreaks of the Delta variant attributed to the reopening.

We need immediate supports for businesses that are delayed once again in reopening.

We are extremely successful with the vaccine rollout but are to conservative with the full reopening of the economy. Businesses in the hospitality sector should all be treated the same.

No different

Dining indoors in a restaurant be it in a hotel or on a main street of a town should be no different.

Mr Shine also said that the vaccination programme is stopping the population from contracting Covid-19 and ending up in hospital.

He explained: Delays in reopening of the economy used to be based on hospitalisations and numbers in ICU.

Now, the goalposts have shifted. Businesses are finding it very hard to have confidence in a Government which continues to give out mixed messaging.

Businessman Brian Flanagan of the Silken Thomas in Kildare town says the government should state clearly when the reopening of indoor hospitality will start.

It is likely that the scheduled reopening on Monday next, July 5 will be pushed out for another two weeks.

Mr Flanagan said businesses need certainty so that they can plan ahead.

The Flanagan family has a long association with the licenced trade in County Kildare and employs about 100 people in Kildare town and at Lock 13 in Sallins.

Unlike many other premises with no capacity to conduct trade outdoors, Mr Flanagan has been able to concentrate on business generated by the 27 bedrooms in Kildare town.

Because those availing of accommodation have permission to dine indoors, this had produced some revenue.

He explained: We are also a little different to some businesses which are landlocked, we have the ability to provide outdoor dining.

Mr Flanagan added: It has been particularly for those businesses who cant do this and they need certainty about when they can reopen for financial, organisational and even mental health reasons.

He said it is not looking like everybody wont re-open until July 19  not that in itself provides any certainty.

Indications only

We have learned over the past year that some of these dates are indicative only so a lot of people need to know that reopening will take place on July 19.

Like many in the food and drink industry the stop-start nature of business has been very frustrating.

Mr Flanagan added: We were allowed to reopen in June of last year and then it was decided to impose a lockdown in August in Kildare, Offaly and Laois; this is a time of year when we would hope to do a lot of business.

While the rest of the country was open businesses here had to shut.

Nevertheless, he was able to retain a core of staff to support the limited business that was being transacted which included takeouts.

He continued: We kept a core team together and brought in some more as needed.

However some of the best staff members we had have left the sector altogether and are now working in other industries because the pandemic unemployment payment was not enough to support them; but hopefully they will return in the future.

Mr Flanagan added: Being open even in a limited capacity allowed us to keep the lights on, the engine running and the building operational.

Expensive to cease

This was important because it can be expensive to have to cease completely for a long period and restart.

It is difficult for those who had to shut down for much longer periods and it is also difficult for them to take on staff without a definite reopening date, he concluded.
The National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET) has warned Cabinet ministers that Ireland could see 700,000 new Covid-19 cases between July and the end of September in a worst-case scenario due to the Delta variant.

NPHET expressed these fears and staggering modelling projections in a 13-page letter to government on Monday night. It said that an additional 2,170 deaths could occur in that period as a result of the new more transmissible strain of Covid-19 takes hold.

NPHET's modelling says an additional 81,000 cases caused by the Delta variant is the best-case scenario over the next three months.

Their grim warning comes as it looks increasingly unlikely indoor hospitality will open as planned on July 5. NPHET has advised against the reopening while government members scramble to appease the hard-hit hospitality sector. They are considering allowing fully vaccinated people to dine indoors, but not those unvaccinated or partially vaccinated.

The use of the cardboard vaccination cards that people have been given is being considered along with the use of the EU's vaccine passport app in order to police the rule. Question marks and the logistics of this process are making it extremely likely that the return of indoor dining will be at least delayed, possibly until July 19.

This news comes amid pressure on the government to speed up the vaccine process with many young people unvaccinated and others in older categories only partially vaccinated as they await appointments for their second doses.

Also, the National Immunisation Advisory Committee (NIAC) has now recommended to Government that the AstraZeneca and vaccines can be given to 18 to 40-year-olds. This is seen as a major boost to the rollout of the vaccine.

Both the AstraZeneca and Janssen (Johnson & Johnson) jabs were only recommended for over-50s due to incidences of rare blood clotting being linked to the vaccines in younger age groups, particularly in younger women.

Ireland is due to receive more doses of AstraZeneca in the coming weeks. Pharmacists had reported last week that take-up of the Janssen (Johnson & Johnson) in their outlets had been slow having been allowed for Over 50s who had not received another vaccine.

Government are now likely to speed up the rollout of vaccines to younger people in a bid to stave off the worst-case scenario painted by NPHET in light of the Delta variant. Currently, 35-39-year-olds can apply for a vaccine through the HSE portal. People under the age of 35 have not yet been given the opportunity to apply.

Taoiseach Micheal Martin is expected to address the country on Tuesday in light of the new NPHET advice, giving certainty on the reopening plans for hospitality and other sectors as well as the vaccine rollout.
Kildare County Council has been asked to have the High Court examine the decision to grant planning permission for a sand and gravel extraction operation near Kilcullen.

The call was made by Cllr Ivan Keatley who called on the council to seek a judicial review of the decision.

The council refused permission to Kilsaran Concrete for the project on an overall site of 79 acres at Racefield, Ballyshannon.

The decision to refuse was made last November but An Bord Pleanala granted permission - with conditions - on June 9.

Cllr Keatley said the community is in shock following the decision to allow the extraction over a 12 year period.

Through his involvement with the construction sector he said he is well aware of the need for aggregate and the objection was not a case of not in my backyard.

He said there are problems associated with these developments including substantial damage to roads used by lorries.

He said some roads in Ballysax are not fit for purpose.

He was supported by other councillors at a KCC meeting on June 28.

They included Cllr Kevin Duffy who said that the extraction process is an outdated one adding we need to move away from (it).

Cllr Chris Pender said other towns and villages are also concerned and the area resembles a Bermuda triangle of quarries.

Cllr Peter Hamilton said County Kildare has more than its share of these kinds of operations and Cllr Tracey ODwyer said that Kilcullen is already choked with heavy goods vehicle traffic.

She also questioned the practicality of a proposal to widen a road on the basis that the company does not own the land.

Read more County Kildare news

There is a level of anger among the residents and its incumbent on us to stick the course with them,'' said Cllr Brian Dooley.

KCC chief executive Peter Carey said that the council needs to examine all the issues surrounding the decision.

Were not happy about it,'' he said.
There's dismay in the hospitality industry after the date of indoor re-openings of pubs and restaurants was put back amid fears of the new Covid-19 Delta variant.

In an announcement this lunchtime, An Taoiseach Micheal Martin confirmed there will be no indoor re-opening as was originally anticipated next Monday, July 5.

Its left local publicans and restaurant owners counting the cost.

In a statement, the Vintners Federation of Ireland (VFI) said it emphatically rejects NPHET advice to Government that only the fully vaccinated should be admitted to indoor hospitality venues.

The VFI says the plan is unworkable and that it will only increase pressure on publicans and their staff.

Padraig Cribben, VFI Chief Executive, said: The idea that only allowing the fully vaccinated into hospitality venues is highly problematic and probably unworkable for a number of reasons, not least how do publicans and their staff police such a policy?

"Government has consistently stated it would not introduce this type of measure so for it now to change course has left the pub trade reeling."

Mr Martin said Ireland is in a race between the variant and vaccine ... and we want to do everything we can to ensure the vaccines win".

Mr Martin said that over the course of the last number of weeks concern has been growing over the prevalence, nature, and risk associated with the Delta variant of Covid-19.

He said it is clearly more transmissible - 55% more than the last variant, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention.

He said that tremendous progress is being made in the vaccine programme and careful, staged reopening of society with people's co-operation is working.

Mr Martin said that the reopening of indoor hospitality will be limited to those fully vaccinated or recovered from Covid-19 infection.

Organised events

There was better news from Mr Martin in terms of other organised events.

As planned, numbers at these can increase to 200 or 500 for stadiums or venues with a capacity of over 5,000.

Attendance at wedding receptions can go up to 50 guests as an exception.

But indoor activities will not proceed as planned, pending the implementation of a system to verify vaccination or immunity.

Government said it will devise an implementation plan by July 19.

There will be no limit on the number of people who can visit together if they are all fully protected by vaccination or have recovered from Covid-19 infection in the previous nine months.
The provision of temporary toilet blocks, which are connected to the public mains and sewers, cost up to 300,000 each annually as well as an installation cost of 70,000.

The cost is among the reasons why Kildare County council is resisting calls for additional temporary public toilets at outdoor gathering points around the county.

Cllr Peter Hamilton said at a KCC meeting money is available for it and it has been done in other areas such as Sligo town and Strandhill, County Sligo.

Read more County Kildare news

He said he spoke to some young people in Maynooth who said they use the bushes as a toilet and this a health hazard.

He said the toilets in public buildings could be made available but these buildings are not open at night.

Cllr Bill Clear said there is a need for facilities in Naas as well and said people with a disability are avoiding public places because there is a shortage of accessible toilets.

However KCC director of services Celina Barrett said that councillors had decided to get rid of public toilets and said that the money available for providing facilities is quite small and is shared between many local authorities.

Ms Barrett said the money pays for festival-type toilets which business people object to once they are located close to their enterprises. Ms Barrett also said the requirement for these will drop off as the Covid-19 restrictions are lifted.

She further said despite the fact that public buildings are being made available, they tend not to be used.

She also said that 250 portaloos were provided in Dublin prior to the opening of outdoor dining.

These were regularly used in the week prior to the return of outdoor dining but after that the numbers reduced significantly to the point where 170 portaloos were immediately removed.

Once indoor hospitality returns she expects that the remaining units will no longer be required.

Ms Barrett also said that people are reluctant to use portaloos because of Covid -19 - if they are not cleaned regularly and do not have appropriate hand washing facilities.

She said the provision of toilets in public buildings would provide a solution as demand continues to decrease.
LIMERICK Institute of Technology bucked the national trend over the past year by increasing its student work placement capacity by almost 50 percent despite the pandemic.

Work placement is considered an essential part of the practical learning that makes up LITs undergraduate and graduate courses, and is a major factor in LIT retaining its record as having the highest rate of full-time employment in any higher education institution outside of Dublin.

Over the past year, LIT has facilitated up to 1,500 student placements across all faculties, up from approximately 1,000 the previous academic year.

Strict Covid-19 restrictions in 2020 and 2021 did require some students to avail of alternative appropriate work placements, with the Covid-19 Vaccination Centre in Limerick proving particularly suitable.

Commenting on the figures, Seamus Hoyne Dean of Flexible & Work-Based Learning and Director of Industry Engagement at LIT said: Work placement is one of the key elements of practical and work-based learning championed at LIT. Work placement contributes significantly to the student academic experience, cooperation with regional employers, industry, businesses and communities, and it ensures our students are industry ready within their respective fields."

He said the past year has been particularly challenging with the knock-on effects of the global pandemic also impacting the education sector.

"I am therefore very proud of our staff and students whose dedication, hard work and flexibility ensured that learning outcomes were achieved, and our graduates will be fully trained, educated to the highest standard and work ready again this academic year.

Among students to take up essential work placements this year were 22 social care students who assisted with the roll out of the Covid-19 vaccine programme at the Radisson Blu Hotel and Limerick Racecourse.

It is an interesting experience working at the vaccination centre. It is good that we can lend a hand especially during the pandemic. LIT students and the public are therefore benefiting from this. There are certain aspects of the work we (the students) particularly benefit from, for example we are learning about GDPR, how to deal with conflict, teamwork and communications skills. These are many of the skills that are essential in the social care setting and they are also essential here, so I do think this placement is beneficial to us, said second year Social Care student Emma McComiskey.

Kate Archbold, a third-year Social Care student, believes she has grown in confidence since taking up her work placement at the vaccination centre.

As a placement I find it very interesting. We are also at an advantage to everyone else as no one else has done their placement in a clinical setting. Here you get to see the inner workings of how it all works and you have to work together as a team otherwise it wont go as smoothly.

Another student, Shauna Dillon, says she has also seen the benefits to working at the vaccination centre, as she learns to deal with people who might be worried or stressed.

It is a really good place to work. When we came here first I wondered what were we going to get out of this process in terms of a social care experience. I thought all we were going to be doing is showing people to their booths, but it is more than that. It is the little things that happen that help you see that this is going to be a good social care placement. Some people get scared for example and need encouragement and support, others need you to keep an eye on them throughout the process as a form of reassurance, and other people just what to be able to ask questions and have them answered.
Shannon Group has today confirmed that it is in discussions with Limerick City and County Council to transfer King Johns Castle to the local authority.

The transfer is part of a larger deal which has seen the group discuss, with local authorities in Clare and Limerick, the transfer of the Shannon Heritage company and all its visitor attractions in Co. Clare (including Bunratty Castle) to Clare County Council.

While an agreement in principle has been reached with Clare County Council, it will take some months to conclude and is subject to due diligence and formal consent of the Ministers for Transport, Public Expenditure and Reform and agreement with the Minister for Housing Local Government and Heritage. It is the intention of the parties that the transfer will be completed by the end of 2021.

Commenting on the announcement, a spokesperson for the Group told the Limerick Leader: The transfer of these heritage sites aligns with the two local authorities tourism development strategies and will provide opportunities for enhancing synergies and maximising the potential of these heritage sites in the region. The central role which local authorities are playing in tourism product development and sustainable tourism development make them a natural fit for Shannon Heritage.

In good news for employees of the sites, the statement also confirms "Engagement is taking place with employees and those directly affected by these changes. The employment rights of all its 200 employees will not change and will be fully protected"

The Shannon Heritage County Clare based visitor attractions to transfer to Clare County Council are:

Bunratty Castle & Folk Park; Knappogue Castle, Craggaunowen  Bronze Age Park, and the Cliffs of Moher retail outlet. In tandem with this, a Heads of Agreement will provide for the transfer of King Johns Castle to Limerick City and County Council.

Shannon Group will shortly engage with interested parties concerning the future operation of Dunguaire Castle in Co. Galway.

Shannon Heritage currently manages a number of day visitor attractions in Dublin on behalf of Fingal County Council and An Post. It is Shannon Groups intention to conclude these operating contracts and Shannon Group will work closely with both parties to ensure the smooth transition of the operations.

Commenting on the announcement a Shannon Group spokesperson said: At a time of unprecedented challenge in the aviation sector, there is consensus that the recovery of aviation is critical to the recovery of tourism. 75% of our tourism economy is dependent on international visitation and 90% of those come by air.

The agreement will enable Shannon Group to concentrate our energies on restoring passenger numbers at the airport, thereby supporting local economic activity, attracting tourists and enabling foreign and indigenous company investment in the region.

Todays announcement will ensure that the heritage sites are being managed by local authorities where there are synergies that can be further developed in line with their well-established tourism development strategies and will provide opportunities for maximizing future potential.

We have come through many crises in the past and we got through them by planning for the future and focusing our efforts on where they have best impact, the spokesperson said.
UP TO a dozen Post Office closures in Limerick are likely without immediate Government intervention, a local TD has claimed.

Around six branches shut their doors locally for the last time only three years ago, said Deputy Richard ODonoghue.

"The serious warnings by the Irish Postmasters Union about the inevitable collapse of the network and up to 200 branch closures are being ignored by the government, despite the government controlling the entire issued share capital of An Post.

"Tangible state intervention is now needed, to combat the potential raft of further post office closures, which could be as many as 12 in Limerick."

Deputy O'Donoghue added: "From this week, the Postmaster-operated offices face a major challenge, due to a reduction of around 20 per cent in government or State payments.

"Instead of our government trying to channel new state services through the post office network as promised in 2018, and as sought by the Postmasters Union, they are instead cutting existing services. Therefore, the demise of the network lies firmly at the door of this weak government."

The Independent TD said the main casualty will be rural and regionally-based postmasters, and rural communities across the country.

"We now need direct Government intervention immediately. Direct financial intervention is needed, together with a longer-term economic strategy to ensure survival.

"Should the government choose not to intervene, then they will be allowing post offices to close, knowing full well how vital they are for those living in rural communities."

Deputy ODonoghue concluded by calling for the immediate implementation of the Grant Thornton Report, which recommends urgent Government investment for the post office network, with an annual Public Service Obligation of around 1 million in Limericks case.

"Keeping rural post offices open is essential to our well-being as a nation. They continue to function as vital meeting, resource and information centres, even with the rise of the internet and the advent of instant global communications. The recent closures of Ardagh, Mungret, Feenagh and the like can not be replicated."
THE outgoing Mayor of the City and County of Limerick has honoured local healthcare workers who have been on the front line of the battle against Covid-19.

In a low key but hugely significant ceremony, governed by public health guidelines, Cllr Michael Collins presented scrolls to representatives of the UL Hospitals Group, National Ambulance Service Mid-West, Department of Public Health Mid-West and HSE Mid-West Community Healthcare.

The scrolls are in recognition and appreciation of the outstanding dedication, care and support provided by the staff to the many people who availed of its services especially during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Commenting following the short ceremony, Mayor Collins said: The people of Limerick are indebted to the frontline healthcare workers for their hard work and sacrifices since the outbreak of Covid-19. These scrolls are a token of our appreciation, he said adding he was anxious to host a reception before the conclusion of his term of office.

"Over the past 18 months or so, we have seen the way our healthcare staff have dedicated themselves to caring for and saving countless lives in our hospitals and community settings. They deserve this and every other accolade they receive, in honour of the way they have managed the Covid-19 pandemic, the way that they have set aside their own personal situations to help and support the people of Limerick and beyond," he said.

Noreen Spillane, Chief Operations Officer at UL Hospitals Group said they are delighted to be honoured by the Mayor: We have received tremendous support from the people of Limerick throughout the pandemic. Their understanding of and adherence to the public health guidelines has allowed us to continue to deliver essential services to Covid and non-Covid patients. This recognition of our staff from the Mayor of Limerick gives all healthcare workers a lift. We are now looking to the future as we keep in our thoughts those who have lost their lives and continue to experience health problems as a result of this terrible disease.

We are honoured to have received this recognition from Mayor of City and County of Limerick, Cllr Michael Collins for everyone on the COVID-19 frontline. Director Dr Mai Mannix was joined by our colleagues in @ULHospitals, @CommHealthMW and @AmbulanceNAS https://t.co/89w7YCDWm3 pic.twitter.com/CE4KpFioAl  Public Health Mid-West (@PublicHealthMW) June 29, 2021

Dr Mai Mannix, Director of Public Health Mid-West commented: We are absolutely honoured to receive this special recognition from the Mayor after what has been one of the most challenging 18 months for the health service and the public, in the history of the State. I have seen the resilience of my hard-working team in the Department of Public Health, Mid-West and the fortitude of the public throughout these trying times, and it gives me great hope and confidence for the future. With the publics continued support and dedication to fighting this virus, we will continue to save so many lives.

Maria Bridgeman, Chief Officer, HSE Mid West Community Healthcare said she was honoured to accept the scroll from Mayor Collins. "Staff at Mid-West Community Healthcare and across the HSE have made huge sacrifices going beyond the call of duty over the past 18 months. I have been inspired by the care and compassion I have witnessed from staff amid the devastating impact of the pandemic and I join the Mayor in recognising their efforts and the critical roles they played in our Covid response. I would like to take this opportunity to wish Mayor Collins the very best after his time as the first citizen and thank the people of Limerick for their continued efforts in suppressing the virus.

Ian Brennan, Assistant Chief Ambulance Officer with the National Ambulance Service in the Mid-West Region said: Our staff have worked tirelessly through this covid pandemic, adapting to new ways of working and taking on different roles when necessary. They have battled Covid at every front from swabbing thousands of people, assessing and treating them in emergency situations, transferring them to different facilities and vaccinating hundreds of house bound patients. We are now looking towards a better future, but wont forget the people that have succumbed or who are still struggling with this disease.
NEW DELHI : Chief of Defence Staff Gen Bipin Rawat on Tuesday visited a number of forward locations along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) with China around the Himachal Pradesh sector to take stock of India's military preparedness in the sensitive region.

In his interactions with troops, Gen Rawat exhorted them to remain steadfast in their task of defending the territorial integrity of the country.

His day-long visit to the Sumdoh sector along the LAC came amid the continued military standoff between Indian and Chinese militaries in several friction points in eastern Ladakh.

"General Bipin Rawat, #CDS interacted with the troops, complimented them for their high morale & exhorted them to remain steadfast in their task of defending the territorial integrity of the nation with the same zeal and fervour," the Army said.

It said the Chief of Defence Staff was briefed about the ground situation by local commanders.

"General Bipin Rawat, #CDS visited forward areas of Central Sector along LAC and was briefed by the local commanders on the operational situation," the Army said.

India and China were locked in a military standoff at multiple friction points in eastern Ladakh since early May last year. However, the two sides completed the withdrawal of troops and weapons from the North and South banks of Pangong lake in February following a series of military and diplomatic talks.

The two sides are now engaged in talks to extend the disengagement process to the remaining friction points. India has been particularly pressing for disengagement of troops in Hot Springs, Gogra and Depsang.

According to military officials, each side currently has around 50,000 to 60,000 troops along the Line of Actual Control in the sensitive sector.

There was no visible forward movement in disengagement of troops in the remaining friction points as the Chinese side did not show flexibility in their approach at the 11th round of military talks.

This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Only the headline has been changed.

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The National Investigation Agency (NIA) was on Tuesday given the charge of investigation into the drone attack on the Jammu air force station, according to PTI. The decision to hand over the probe into the first-of-its-kind terror attack at the Indian Air Force station was taken by the Ministry of Home Affairs.

Anti-drone technology

India is likely to make a decision soon on the deployment of anti-drone technology at military installations across the country, reported HT's sister publication Hindustan reported today.

First case of drones deployment

In what was the first instance of Pakistan-based terrorists deploying drones to strike vital installations, two bombs were dropped at the IAF station in Jammu in the early hours of Sunday, causing minor injuries to two airmen.

Well planned explosions

The explosions took place around 1.40 am within six minutes of each other. The first blast ripped off the roof of a single-story building at the technical area of the airport manned by the IAF in the Satwari area on the outskirts of the city. The second one was on the ground.

Cocktail consisting of RDX

The officials said the explosive material dropped by the drones might have been manufactured using a cocktail consisting of RDX, but a final confirmation was still awaited.

No eyes on the sky

Investigators were yet to determine the flight path of the drones that dropped the bombs as they scanned the CCTV footage, including from cameras installed on the boundary walls of the airport. However, all the CCTV cameras focused on the roadside, the officials said.

International border

The drones that dropped the explosives were either flown back across the border or to some other destination during the night, they suspect. The aerial distance from the Jammu airport to the international border is 14 km.

Evidence collection

A day after the attack, the IAF station located at the Jammu airport on Monday continued to remain out of bounds for all but the probe teams including one from the NIA, which picked up every bit of evidence available on the ground.

Over 300 drones

Over 300 drones and unidentified flying objects have been sighted along the sensitive border with Pakistan after the August 5, 2019 abrogation of Article 370 that granted special status to Jammu and Kashmir, central security agencies said.

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Scientists have found the earliest known strain of plague in the remains of a 5000-year-old hunter gatherer.

The "astonishing" discovery pushes back the first appearance of the plague bacterium (Yersina Pestis) by more than 2,000 years, study senior author Ben Krause-Kyora, a biochemist and archaeologist at the University of Kiel in Germany said in a statement . This date is probably close to when the bacteria first evolved, he added.

The plague-carrying hunter-gatherer , dubbed "RV 2039", was a 20- to 30-year-old man and one of four people whose remains were excavated from a burial site near the Baltic Sea in Latvia. An analysis of samples from the mans teeth and bones revealed that he was likely the only one among those buried with the disease. Researchers reconstructed the bacterias genome using genome sequencing, and believe the bacteria was likely a part of a lineage that emerged roughly 7,000 years ago, not long after Yersina Pestis split from a predecessor, Yersina pseudotuberculosis.

Related: Pictures of a killer: A plague gallery

The analysis also revealed that most of the deadly diseases key genes were already in place, even at this early stage of its history. "What's so surprising is that we see already in this early strain more or less the complete genetic set of Y. pestis, and only a few genes are lacking. But even a small shift in genetic settings can have a dramatic influence on virulence," Krause-Kyora said.

Modern plague variants contain one important thing that the newly-discovered ancient strain lacked  a gene enabling fleas to carry the disease. This adaptation hugely increased the rate at which the plague bacteria could infect human hosts, entering the body and travelling to the lymph nodes where it would rapidly replicate. The host would then form painful, pus-filled buboes  from which the bubonic plague gets its name  on their skin.

But the switch to fleas as a means of transmission required the disease to kill its host: an old hosts death encourages fleas to move to a new host and pass on the disease. The researchers speculate that this new gene was responsible for driving the plague to become deadlier.

Because this early strain of Y. pestis was not yet flea-borne, the scientists think that the bacteria originally entered the hunter-gatherers body through a rodent bite, possibly from a beaver, a common carrier of the plague predecessor Y. pseudotuberculosis and the species with the most remains recorded at the site. Once there, the course of the disease was fairly slow, with bacteria slowly accumulating in high quantities in the mans bloodstream until he died.

Related: The deadliest viruses in history

The three pandemics the bacteria would go on to cause are among the deadliest biological events in human history. The first pandemic, the Justinian Plague (which occurred roughly between A.D. 542 and 750), may have caused the Mediterranean population to decline by 40% by the end of the sixth century. The second, and most infamous, pandemic caused by the disease was the 14th century European Black Death, which killed approximately 25 million people  between 33 to 50% of Europes population. A third, lesser known, pandemic began in 1855 in Chinas Yunnan province and killed more than 12 million people in India and China alone.

The people buried around RV 2039 were not infected and he was carefully placed in his grave, two indications that he didnt carry the later, highly-contagious version of the disease. But because of its presence in his blood, scientists still think the plague bacteria could have killed him.

The idea that this ancient bacteria replicated slowly and was passed from rodent to human is bolstered by the fact that scientists have found other ancient skeletons infected with Y. pestis at other sites, where people lived very different lifestyles. "Isolated cases of transmission from animals to people could explain the different social environments where these ancient diseased humans are discovered. We see it in societies that are herders in the steppe, hunter-gatherers who are fishing, and in farmer communities  totally different social settings but always spontaneous occurrences of Y. pestis cases," Krause-Kyora said.

The picture of the early plague as a slow-acting, less virulent disease raises serious challenges to theories about the development of civilization in Europe and Asia.

One of these theories is that the plague was the cause of large declines in Western European populations towards the end of the Neolithic Age. In 2019, a tomb in modern-day Sweden containing 78 hastily buried bodies was dated to roughly the same period as RV 2039, and one set of bones and teeth, belonging to a woman also contained plague bacteria fragments, Live Science previously reported .

In fact, remains containing traces of plague bacteria have been found in sites all across Eurasia, and dated to coincide with the rapid decline in Neolithic populations between five and six thousand years ago.

Another theory is that the plague evolved in European "mega settlements" containing 10,000 to 20,000 people which existed between 6,100 and 5,400 years ago. But the new research suggests Y. Pestis could have split from Y. pseudotuberculosis as far back as 7400 years ago, a time when European populations had yet to grow beyond collections of sparse settlements.

The mystery of this population collapse, and whether it was caused by an early form of plague, has yet to be fully unravelled. The researchers believe that their work could open further investigation into the history of plague, offering valuable insights not just on the evolution of the disease, but on early human history and genomics.

"Different pathogens and the human genome have always evolved together. We know Y. pestis most likely killed half of the European population in a short time frame, so it should have a big impact on the human genome," Krause-Kyora said. "But even before that, we see major turnover in our immune genes at the end of the Neolithic Age, and it could be that we were seeing a significant change in the pathogen landscape at that time as well."

Their findings were published June 29 in the journal Cell Reports.

Originally published on Live Science.
This snake-shaped artifact dates back 4,400 years and may have been used as a staff or figurine.

A wooden stick carved into the shape of a snake dating back about 4,400 years has been discovered by a lake in southwest Finland. The stick may have been used for mystical purposes by a shaman.

"I have seen many extraordinary things in my work as a wetland archaeologist, but the discovery of this figurine made me utterly speechless and gave me the shivers," archaeologist Satu Koivisto said in a statement. Koivisto is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Turku in Finland who leads research at Jarvensuo, the site where the object was found.

The figure, which is 21 inches (53 centimeters) long and about an inch (2.5 cm) thick, was carved from a single piece of wood," Koivisto and co-author Antti Lahelma, an archaeologist at the University of Helsinki, wrote in a paper published June 29 in the journal Antiquity . "The figurine is very naturalistic and resembles a grass snake (Natrix natrix) or a European adder (Vipera berus) in the act of slithering or swimming away," the researchers wrote.

Related: The 25 most mysterious archaeological finds on Earth

A researcher not involved in the study suggested the artifact may depict a viper. "I would say that a viper is more correct, due to the shape of its head, the short body and distinguishable tail," Sonja Hukantaival, a postdoctoral researcher in Nordic Folkloristics at Abo Akademi University in Finland, told Live Science in an email. "This is interesting, since the viper has an important role in much later (historical) folk religion and magic."

The artifact was found at Jarvensuo, a site located beside a lake in southwest Finland. A large number of artifacts associated with fishing were also found at the site. (Image credit: Satu Koivisto, courtesy Antiquity Publications Ltd)

The carving could have been used as a decorative figurine, or perhaps it was a staff used by a shaman, the researchers wrote.

"As a preliminary hypothesis, it seems reasonable, however, to place the artifact in the religious sphere," the researchers wrote. According to historical records that discuss pre-Christian beliefs, "snakes are loaded with symbolic meaning in both Finno-Ugric and Sami cosmology, and shamans were believed to be able to transform into snakes" they said. The Sami live in northern Scandinavia and Russia, while Finno-Ugric languages are spoken in Scandinavia and eastern Europe.

However, the artifact dates back to long before Finnish people began keeping written records, and researchers can't be certain that people held the same beliefs around 4,400 years ago, Koivisto told Live Science.

The team has also found a large number of fishing artifacts at the Jarvensuo site, suggesting ancient fishers frequented the area.

Fascinating find

Experts not affiliated with the research told Live Science that they found the find fascinating.

"This marvelous find shows that people in the Neolithic had a great concern over the subterranean world that we, today, are mostly unaware of," said Vesa-Pekka Herva, the head of the archaeology department at the University of Oulu in Finland.

A few scholars that Live Science talked to raised the idea that the artifact could be an offering. The fact that it was found in a wetland by a lake "supports the idea that this precious artifact was an offering, and not an accidentally lost item," said Kristiina Mannermaa, a professor in the department of cultures at the University of Helsinki.

Mannermaa noted that Finland's acidic soil does not often preserve wooden artifacts for so long. "This is a remarkable sign for Finnish archaeologists that such wetland sites must be investigated before they are destroyed by, for example, drainage and peat extraction [a process in which peat is removed and sold as fertilizer]," said Mannermaa."

The discovery may be important for the modern day Sami people said Francis Joy, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Lapland. If the artifact "was linked with the ancient ancestors of the Sami it would bring into focus issues concerning repatriation and also give the Sami people validation in terms of their prehistory in southern Finland" Joy told Live Science. At times the Sami have faced discrimination and have campaigned for their rights for many years.

Joy also said that more archaeological work should be done to see if there is an offering place close to where the artifact was found.

Research at the site and analysis of the artifact are ongoing. Researchers are attempting to determine what kind of wood the artifact is made from.

Originally published on Live Science.
On July 4, 1054  about 700 years before the United States popped its first celebratory firework  a mysterious light exploded in the sky.

The blast was visible around the world, lingering in the daytime sky for nearly a month, and visible at night for nearly two years, according to NASA . At the time, Chinese astronomers labeled the mysterious blaze a "guest star"  a temporary heavenly object that seemingly appeared from nothing, then vanished to nothing. But modern space telescopes like NASA's Hubble reveal that Earth's strange "guest" is here to stay (albeit 6,500 light-years away).

What's left of that ancient blaze is known today as the Crab Nebula  a vast and rapidly-expanding balloon of irradiated gas with a powerful neutron star pulsing at its center. Nebulas like these are the smoldering remains of once-mighty stars that lost most of their mass in tremendous, end-of-life supernova explosions.

Many scientists now suspect that the mysterious light reported in 1054 was the Crab Nebula's progenitor star going boom (an event they now call SN 1054). But why a previously invisible star should explode so brightly and decorate Earth 's sky for so long is a question that still boggles astronomers to this day.

Now, careful study of a second supernova  one that lit up the cosmos in March 2018  could finally answer that 1,000-year-old riddle.

Related: Hubble just took a gorgeous new image of the southern Crab nebula's wonky gas bubbles

In a study published June 28 in the journal Nature Astronomy , researchers studied the gassy remains of that more recent explosion (named SN 2018zd) and matched it up with archival images showing what its progenitor star looked like before it blew its top. After a thorough before-and-after comparison, the team found that this dying star showed all the hallmarks of a rare, theoretical type of supernova explosion that has never been detected in the cosmos before  an electron-capture supernova.

With new data in hand, it's looking increasingly likely that the Crab Nebula's spectacular birth was also triggered by this same sort of elusive explosion, the researchers said.

"The Crab supernova has been suggested as an electron-capture supernova, but since it happened a thousand years ago, there is not much data on the progenitor star and the explosion itself," lead study author Daichi Hiramatsu, a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), told Live Science in an email. "This is where our research fits in  providing modern observations of a progenitor star and supernova explosion, and bridging our understanding of electron-capture supernovae from the explosion to the remnant."

This 2005 Hubble image of the Crab Nebula is the most detailed ever assembled. Scientists say the bright, slow-moving gas points to an ancient electron-capture supernova. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, J. Hester and A. Loll (Arizona State University))

The third nova

When a star explodes, it typically goes out in one of two ways: A thermonuclear supernova, or an iron core-collapse supernova.

A thermonuclear supernova occurs when a white dwarf (the withered core of a star up to eight times the mass of the sun) sucks away too much gas from a companion star. The white dwarf core heats up, fusing elements together in ever-hotter reactions until, finally, the star explodes in a brilliant blast. Meanwhile, a core-collapse nova happens when an even larger star (about 10 or more times the sun's mass) runs out of nuclear fuel, causing its iron core to collapse into an ultra-dense black hole or neutron star.

Electron-capture supernovas fit between these two categories, springing from stars of between eight and 10 solar masses  not too heavy, not too light. Since the 1980s, astronomers have calculated that stars in this transitional mass range could be victim to a strange kind of death, where an overwhelming gravitational force crushes the star's core, causing electrons in the core to smash into their atomic nuclei, triggering a core collapse, the researchers wrote.

Related: This is what a supernova sounds like, according to NASA

A star that dies in this manner should leave a few key signatures, according to the new paper. For one, the progenitor star should start out fairly massive, but lose much of its mass before the explosion begins, filling the space around it with an aura of ejected gas. When the star's core finally does blow, it will produce a relatively weak, slow-moving explosion that interacts with the nearby gas, lighting it up more brightly than would be expected.

Scientists have never found a star that perfectly matches these criteria  until March 2018, when a distant star 31 million light-years from Earth flickered out of existence. In their new study, the researchers analyzed the star using data from both the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes to match the supernova remnant (SN 2018zd) with the progenitor star that created it. They found that the star and explosion matched all of the criteria for the fabled electron-capture supernova.

"We started by asking 'what's this weirdo [supernova]?'" Hiramatsu said in a statement . "Then we examined every aspect of SN 2018zd and realized that all of them can be explained in the electron-capture scenario."

This research not only helps validate an astrophysical theory dating back 40 years, but also gives scientists a new way to look at the remnants of dead stars, Hiramatsu added.

The crab's secret

Having watched an electron-capture supernova unfold "live" before their telescopes, the study authors quickly applied what they saw to the ancient Crab Nebula explosion, which previous studies had suggested to be a possible electron-capture supernova as well. The team noticed many similarities between the two remnants, including low-velocity explosions (indicating that, like SN 2018zd, the Crab Nebula progenitor star lost a lot of mass before it blew) and a strikingly similar chemical composition in the leftover gas, which allowed them to estimate the Crab Nebula progenitor star's size.

According to study co-author Andy Howell, an astronomer at Las Cumbres Observatory in California and adjunct faculty at UCSB, these similarities increase the likelihood that the Crab Nebula was created by an electron-capture supernova 1,000 years ago.

That explanation could also solve the mystery of the ancient explosion's brighter-than-average luminosity as it lingered over Earth. Perhaps the Crab Nebula progenitor star lost a lot of mass before it exploded, just like SN 2018zd did. That would make the resulting supernova appear much brighter than it should have when gas from the explosion collided with the gas surrounding the star, Howell told Live Science.

"Of the six indicators for being an electron-capture supernova, SN 1054 has the right energy, chemical composition, and [fusion of elements]," Howell said, adding that it may have the right amount of mass loss and luminosity, too.

But because we'll never know exactly what the Crab Nebula's progenitor star looked like, or how spectacular its final explosion truly was, pinning a definitive explanation to it could be tricky. At least by scouring the remnants of "weirdo" explosions like SN 2018zd, astronomers are narrowing down the possibilities.

Originally published on Live Science.
The bright white region of this image, captured by Europe's Mars Express spacecraft in December 2012, shows the icy cap that covers Mars south pole, composed of frozen water and frozen carbon dioxide.

Much more liquid water may lie beneath the south pole of Mars than scientists had thought  or there may be something going on down there that they don't fully understand.

In 2018, researchers analyzing radar data gathered by Europe's Mars Express spacecraft announced they'd found evidence of a big subsurface lake in the Red Planet's south polar region. The lake appears to be about 12 miles (19 kilometers) wide, and it lies about 1 mile (1.6 km) beneath the dry, frigid surface, the scientists reported.

The same core research team soon followed up on the find, using the same Mars Express instrument  Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding, or MARSIS for short  to study the subsurface in a wide area around the apparent lake. This work turned up evidence for three more underground lakes, each of them about 6 miles (10 km) wide, the scientists reported in a study last year.

Related: The search for life on Mars (a photo timeline)

Now, a different team has taken a very deep dive into the data. Arizona State University doctoral student Aditya Khuller and MARSIS co-principal investigator Jeffrey Plaut, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, analyzed 44,000 observations MARSIS made of the Martian south polar region over 15 years. (MARSIS was built by the Italian Space Agency and JPL.)

The duo found dozens of radar reflections similar to the four that have been interpreted as buried lakes, over a wide range of horizontal and vertical distances. But many of the newfound signals were spotted relatively close to the surface, in places seemingly too cold to support liquid water  even the briny stuff hypothesized to exist in the Martian underground.

"Were not certain whether these signals are liquid water or not, but they appear to be much more widespread than what the original paper found," Plaut said in a statement. "Either liquid water is common beneath Mars south pole, or these signals are indicative of something else."

It's unclear what could keep so many relatively shallow lakes  if the newfound signals do indeed indicate lakes  from freezing over on frigid Mars. Volcanism is one possibility that researchers have raised, said Khuller, who conducted the new research while an intern at JPL.

The colored dots represent sites where bright radar reflections have been spotted by ESAs Mars Express orbiter at Mars south polar cap. Such reflections were previously interpreted as subsurface liquid water. Their prevalence and proximity to the frigid surface suggests they may be something else. (Image credit: ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech)

"However, we havent really seen any strong evidence for recent volcanism at the south pole, so it seems unlikely that volcanic activity would allow subsurface liquid water to be present throughout this region," Khuller said in the same statement.

Neither Khuller nor Plaut can explain what exactly the newfound MARSIS reflections mean. But they hope their results, which were published online last week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, will not remain mysterious for long.

"Our mapping gets us a few steps closer to understanding both the extent and the cause of these puzzling radar reflections," Plaut said.

Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall.
The new "scintillating starburst" illusion, bright rays emanate from the centre of the design through concentric wreaths of star-polygons.

A new type of mind-bending visual illusion makes people see dazzling rays that aren't really there at all.

The newly discovered illusion, nicknamed the "scintillating starburst," is made up of a simple pattern of concentric wreaths on a plain white background. However, almost everyone who looks at it can see bright rays, or beams, emanating from the center of the design, like sunlight bursting through clouds . The viewer sees these non-existent rays, because the brain "connects the dots" between certain points in the wreaths.

Michael Karlovich, a visual artist with a background in neuroscience, created the scintillating starburst as the logo for his design company, Recursia Studios, in 2019.

Related: The most amazing optical illusions (and how they work)

"When I first saw the illusion I created, I instantly had a hunch I was looking at an effect I had never seen before," Karlovich told Live Science. "I was pleasantly surprised, but ultimately confused as to what the mechanism underlying the effect could be."

To find out more, Karlovich teamed up with Pascal Wallisch, a psychologist and data scientist at New York University, to conduct a scientific study on the design.

Connecting the dots

The scintillating starburst design is made up of concentric wreaths, each made up of a pair of star polygons, which are in turn made out of two heptagons (seven-sided polygons) that bisect each other. The star polygons are arranged so that the bisecting heptagons in each one line up to create narrow intersection points in the wreaths. Viewers see these intersection points in the wreaths as "bright points," or dots, in their periphery because those points are the thinnest part of the wreaths. Because the bright points of each concentric wreath overlap with each other, the brain creates the rays between them even though there is no change in the background color.

"The mind connects the dots to produce illusory line segments," Karlovich said.

However, this effect is fleeting, and if you rapidly move your eyes across the design the rays briefly disappear or get stronger, depending on where you are looking.

Brand new illusion

Visual illusions that trick the brain into seeing something that isn't there are not a new phenomenon, but the way this particular illusion works has not been studied and documented before.

"There has never been a demonstration of illusory rays spanning through the background of a design," Karlovich said. "All other illusions involving illusory lines are confined to grid designs."

Grid designs, such as the Hermann grid illusion, lend themselves to creating this type of effect because it is much easier to create eye-catching bright points at intersections in the grid.

The Hermann grid illusion, dark spots appear at grid points even though they do not really exist. (Image credit: Shutterstock)

"However, here we have an example where the brain is constructing illusory rays through non-grid regions, which should otherwise be empty," Karlovich said.

Different configurations

Karlovich and Wallisch experimented with many different configurations of the scintillating starburst to determine which aspects most influence the effect.

They first experimented with the size of the illusion. "As far as we have studied, once the design is sufficiently large enough to render the illusion visible the effect is scale-invariant," Karlovich said. However, they suspect that the effect may break down if it is tried on a much larger scale than they studied.

The experiments also revealed that spinning the design made the ray effect stronger, Karlovich said. The strength of the effect also increased with more wreaths in the design, he added.

(Image credit: Courtesy of Michael Karlovich, Recursia LLC)

The rays are visible regardless of what color the lines and background are as long as they contrast, the researchers found. This can also make the rays change color; for example, putting white wreaths on a black background makes people see much darker, but equally bright, rays.

"Our preliminary pilot experiments with color suggest what is most important is that there should be a high amount of contrast between the color of the background and the color of the lines making up the design," Karlovich said. "The higher the contrast, the stronger the rays."

Filling in the gaps

As well as serving as the logo for Karlovich's company, the researchers believe that the scintillating starburst has further research potential.

"Like other illusions, the scintillating starburst could hypothetically be used as a stimulus in future studies regarding cognition and vision," Karlovich said.

Illusions like this help us to learn more about how our own brains evolved, Karlovich said. "Visual illusions provide us insight into how the brain reconstructs the world," he added. "They teach us about the assumptions and predictions the brain makes to construct our perceptions."

The study was published online June 29 in the journal i-Perception .

Originally published on Live Science.
The photo of a fry-snatching gull, captured in 2011 by photographer Hannah Huxford, quickly went viral and is now featured in a Google billboard campaign.

An astonishing photograph captures the instant a seagull in the United Kingdom gaped its beak to snap up a french fry. The sight of a gull trying to nab human food is all too familiar to beachgoers, but hungry gulls usually move too quickly for people to catch them in the act. One moment, your french fries were right beside you. A second later, they're gone.

In this particular case, photographer Hannah Huxford encountered the fry-nabbing gull in Bridlington, a coastal town on the Yorkshire coast. Huxford snapped the well-timed photo on her iPhone in 2011; it went viral soon after. A decade later, the fry-stealing gull is appearing on billboards across the U.K. and Ireland, as part of an advertising campaign for Google, My Modern Met recently reported .

Related: Beastly feasts: Amazing photos of animals and their prey

The "cheeky" herring gull (Larus argentatus) was bold and fearless as it approached Huxford in Bridlington, while her husband tossed fries ("chips," in the U.K.) for the gull to catch, she wrote in a blog post in 2012.

"He was fascinating to watch and just wasn't scared of anyone, all he wanted was chips!" Huxford wrote. "I took many snaps of him on my iPhone 3G, it was only when I got back home to download the photographs that I found this amazing picture of him in mid gulp."

Local and national media outlets, including the BBC, snapped up the story as quickly as the gull snatched the french fry. Eventually, the media frenzy died down, but the gull's brush with fame wasn't over just yet. On March 22, Huxford posted on Instagram to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of the image, and a design firm promptly contacted her about licensing the photo, Huxford told My Modern Met. Her picture of the gull  captioned "What are you searching for this summer?"  is now appearing on Google billboards for 30 days and in online advertising for the company for the next 12 months, the BBC reported .

Exciting news my photograph of the #seagull eating a chip I took a decade ago on an iPhone 3 in Bridlington is now on a national @GoogleUK billboard campaign if you see it let me know #myphoto #myphotography #Bridlington #google pic.twitter.com/AL0dT9J2MQJune 6, 2021 See more

Why are seagulls so interested in human treats like french fries? It's not just because they're plentiful and easy to steal. Researchers recently discovered that food may actually become more attractive to gulls when the birds observe humans handling it first, according to a 2020 study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science .

Gulls that live in urban environments associate humans with food  from the trash that people leave behind, and from food they consume outdoors. Observing humans as they eat signals to a gull that there's food available for the taking, and the food may be safer or more desirable than food that humans haven't touched, the study authors reported.

"Our findings suggest that gulls are more likely to approach food that they have seen people drop or put down, so they may associate areas where people are eating with an easy meal," study co-author Laura Kelley, a biosciences research fellow at the University of Exeter in Cornwall, England, said in a statement .

"This highlights the importance of disposing of food waste properly, as inadvertently feeding gulls reinforces these associations," Kelley added.

If you'd prefer that seagulls leave you and your food alone, scientists suggest a simple solution: stare at them. Herring gulls are quick to approach and snatch treats that appear to be unattended, researchers reported in 2019 in the journal Biology Letters . But if you stare directly at the birds, they'll be more likely to slink away and look elsewhere for an ill-gotten dinner, Live Science previously reported .

Originally published on Live Science.
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Today

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Scattered thunderstorms in the evening, with mostly cloudy skies overnight. Low 73F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 50%.
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Factual streamer CuriosityStream has begun production on an ambitious six-part documentary series exploring biomimicry, the study of solving human design challenges by looking to the natural world.

Hosted by biologist and filmmaker Patrick Aryee (pictured), original series Evolve is produced by Blue Ant Media-backed production outfit Beach House Pictures, and will span four continents. It will explore the ways in which humanity can solve problems by mimicking the innovations found in nature.

The show fits into a growing slate of originals from John Hendricks CuriosityStream, which reaches around 16 million subscribers worldwide and has distribution tie-ups with the likes of Roku, Apple TV Channels and Apple TV, Xbox One and Amazon Fire TV, among others.

We live in a laboratory where nature is constantly evolving  from stunning animal superstars to mundane, unsuspecting heroes of the wild. From awe to wonder, it all has something to teach us, said Aryee. I genuinely believe that our future survival as a species lies in understanding and appreciating the inner workings of our natural world. Its been the opportunity of a lifetime to work with some of humanitys greatest minds in order to truly learn from mother nature. The journey might not be seamless, but evolution rarely is.

From revolutionizing healthcare to transforming transportation, each adventure in the series will focus on a different challenge, and demonstrate how nature has already solved many of the problems we face today. The most pivotal aspect of the show, however, is the emerging technology on the cusp of innovation, whose real-world application will be illustrated through the use of CGI.

Evolve is going to be a truly immersive odyssey, making engaging natural history television in a new way, exploring the past, the present, and most importantly, the future, said Rob Burk, head of original content for CuriosityStream. Patrick will break down the fourth wall and bring viewers inside every adventure and every discovery, promising moments that are ceaselessly intimate, occasionally funny and infinitely revealing.

Aryee has previously worked, both in front of and behind the camera, for the BBC and Sky. From a face-off with a Komodo dragon to a free dive with 15-ton sperm whale, Aryees specialty is daringly close animal encounters that provide unique insights into natural history.

Theres hardly a better argument for conservation than the fact that a creature exists out there, from the tiny tardigrade through to the majestic cheetah, that might save our lives or even change our trajectory as a species, said Rob Sixsmith, head of factual for Beach House Pictures. Its a series that is crucial for our times and we are truly thankful to CuriosityStream, Singapores IMDA, Blue Ant Media and Abacus Media Rights for making this happen.

Evolve is produced by Beach House Pictures for CuriosityStream. For Beach House, executive producers are Jocelyn Little, Donovan Chan and Rob Sixsmith. Jerry Decker is showrunner and Chris Baron serves as series producer. Jorge Franzini is executive producer for CuriosityStream.

Abacus Media Rights will be distributing Evolve in Canada, Europe, Middle East, North Africa, Australia and New Zealand, Korea, Japan and China.

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Dreams make up both the form and substance of "I Carry You With Me," Heidi Ewing's accomplished narrative feature debut.

Ewing is already well known in the nonfiction world, where she made such documentaries as "The Boys of Baraka," "Detropia" and the Oscar-nominated "Jesus Camp" with her directing partner Rachel Grady. Here, she brings the subtle observational values of those films to bear on a tender love story that is both ethereal and rooted in all-too-real life.

Aspiring chef Ivan (Armando Espitia) meets a teacher named Gerardo (Christian Vazquez) at a nightclub in the provincial city of Puebla, Mexico. The attraction is immediate, but there are complications: Ivan has a 5-year-old son whose mother might take visitation away if she discovers that Ivan is gay. Gerardo, the son of a prosperous cattle ranching family, has his own battles to fight with his violently homophobic father. Desperate to fulfill culinary aspirations that have been thwarted in Mexico, Ivan makes the decision to immigrate to America, uncertain if he will see his son or Gerardo again.

These plot points make "I Carry You With Me" sound like a by-the-numbers melodrama, injected with hot-button issues like gay and immigrant rights. But in Ewing's sensitive hands, this story is anything but routine. Filming her protagonists with the same intense subjectivity she brings to her nonfiction work, she gives the couple's budding romance and struggles a sense of immediacy and naturalism, tinged with the otherworldly mists of memory.

Gracefully following Ivan and Gerardo from a discreet but keen-eyed distance, she frames them carefully, often against blocks of jewel-like, luminescent color and spectacular sunsets. Toggling back and forth in time and space - Yael Tadeo and Nery Arredondo play younger versions of Ivan and Gerardo, respectively - Ewing creates a world that feels both realistically grounded and fanciful, as if it's unspooling in Ivan's constantly evolving imagination, an effect heightened by his interior meditations, which form the film's narration. With her rich color palette and mouthwatering close-ups of the food Ivan lovingly prepares, Ewing concocts a film that, for all its painful conflicts and setbacks, never stints on the lyrical pleasures of life.

"I Carry You With Me" is made up of elegantly composed set pieces, each of which conveys volumes, whether it's the reaction of Ivan's father when he discovers his young son trying on a frilly quinceanera dress or a tentative flirtation that will eventually give way to a quietly thrilling first kiss. Once Ivan makes his way to New York and a series of menial car-washing and delivery jobs, "I Carry You With Me" promises to be a drama every bit as heartbreaking as Gregory Nava's shattering 1983 drama "El Norte."

It's then that Ewing's ambitions become clear, as she turns this story into something all her own. Elements of "I Carry You With Me" that are ambiguously presented at first come more fully into focus, and Ivan and Gerardo's love story takes on even more overwhelming power.

Ewing joins a generation of filmmakers who are using every piece of cinematic grammar available to communicate the emotional core of their stories and characters, fusing the impressionistic liberties of drama with more visceral truths to startling and potent effect. In "I Carry You With Me," those feelings have to do with the propulsive push of ambition and the pull of home, and whether Ivan - or anyone - can reconcile those equally inexorable forces.

In this affecting portrait of two unforgettable protagonists, Ewing rejects tidy answers in favor of leaning into - and bravely living into - the toughest questions.

- - -

Four stars. Rated R. At theaters. Contains strong language and brief nudity. In Spanish with subtitles. 111 minutes.

Ratings Guide: Four stars masterpiece, three stars very good, two stars OK, one star poor, no stars waste of time.
BECKET, Mass. - Dorrance Dance has performed all over the world, from Beverly Hills, California to Moscow. But this week marked the first time the leaders of the acclaimed company have had to do tick-checks after rehearsals.

Being vigilant about parasitic arachnids is just part of the comeback underway at Jacob's Pillow in western Massachusetts, where the New York-based tap-dance troupe and the famed Berkshires festival are preparing their first performances after last summer's pandemic shutdown. Dorrance's work here includes an outdoor piece that opens June 30 and will take the audience to six locations on the festival's wooded campus.

The roaming project - currently untitled - is a first for Dorrance and one borne out of necessity. There are no indoor venues at the festival affectionately known as "The Pillow" this year, and the audience is going to be socially distanced. Not that anybody minds.

"This is a gift, to work with this volume of people," said Michelle Dorrance, the company's founder. "The other night I hung out and talked until 3 in the morning. Because we're together."

In a small clearing in the woods, the 41-year-old watched two performers rehearse a short piece, a modern dance performed, in part, on facing chairs, set next to a downed tree. A breeze swept through as Donovan Dorrance, Michelle's brother and a member of the company, accompanied the dancers by softly playing chimes hung over a branch. As the piece developed, Ephrat Asherie and Matthew West's movements intensified, from hands brushing hands to an almost violent, choreographed bob-and-weave.

Earlier this spring, Dorrance and other members of the company's leadership came to the 220-acre campus to scout locations for this roaming piece, which they say is meant to evoke feelings of loss, community and our attempts - both successful and not - to communicate. (Dorrance Dance is also doing performances of other work on the festival's outdoor stage.) They considered a marshy spot, until they were told about the mosquitoes. The ticks are unavoidable, though the festival's staff has helped by mowing paths to each location. And there are other reminders that this is still not a normal summer, including the daily health questionnaire, which quizzes them on whether they're feeling a loss of taste or smell or any other coronavirus symptoms. Some also find it takes getting used to what they don't have to do. Massachusetts ended its mask mandate May 29 after recent guidance for vaccinated people from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"It's weird not to wear a mask, 24-7," dancer Leonardo Sandoval said. "I feel a little bit guilty, but actually we don't need to."

It is only fitting that Dorrance Dance, the tap company launched in 2011 by the North Carolina-born MacArthur fellow, is headlining the first week of in-person performances at Jacob's Pillow. The international dance festival, founded in 1931, has long nurtured young talent, from a 22-year-old Alvin Ailey, who first performed here in 1954, to the then 17-year-old Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards, part of the Los Angeles-based Jazz Tap Ensemble when she appeared in 1993. Dorrance's appearances in Becket date back to 2011 and, before the pandemic hit, the company was designated to take over all of the festival's performance spaces for a week of the 2020 season.

This is the first time the Pillow has had to make this kind of a comeback. Over the years, it has pushed through economic collapses, World War II and the energy crisis of 1979. But last year wasn't just canceled by the pandemic. In November, the festival dealt with another setback: Its 220-seat Doris Duke Theatre, a prime performance space built in 1990, caught fire and was destroyed. (The cause remains undetermined; the organization plans to rebuild the Duke, but details have not been announced.)

In January, the Pillow began a previously scheduled $8 million renovation of the 600-seat Ted Shawn Theatre, its other indoor performance space, which also renders that venue unusable until 2022. (There was talk of delaying the project, but the space's outdated ventilation system made it unsuitable in a post-covid world.)

So, as Dorrance Dance - the first of nine companies to be on-site this summer, including Streb Extreme Action and Contra-Tiempo- launched rehearsals earlier this month, tap shoes sometimes competed with the sounds of drills, hammers and table saws. On a sun-drenched clearing, workers readied the Henry J. Leir Stage. In the past, the site was used for free performances. This summer, it will be a key venue with ticketed seats or, more specifically, newly installed, wooden benches that allow for three-foot gaps between parties. The distancing has reduced the Leir's capacity from 900 to 400 patrons.

That's where Dorrance will present staged works, including the first collaboration between Josette Wiggan-Freund, one of the company's artistic leaders, and Keyon Harrold, the Grammy Award-winning trumpeter and composer who has played with Eminem, Rihanna and Gregory Porter. The official world premiere of "... Praise: The Inevitable Fruit of Gratitude" will come in July in New York as part of Queens Theatre's summer season.

"It's a blast just to be together, period," Wiggan-Freund said. "For all of us coming together, that alone is just enough. But then you transport that energy, you transport that idea here in this space and that takes it up a notch."

That was clear as Michelle Dorrance, artistic team member Nicholas Van Young and Wiggan-Freund checked on three of the sites for the roaming performances. The first was in what is normally an outdoor campus pub. Aaron Marcellus, at a piano, sang over a 12-bar blues alongside bassist and dancer Claudia Rahardjanoto. Tap dancer Luke Hickey hopped onto the wooden floor to deliver an energetic, upbeat performance. The company's artist directors snapped, clapped and shouted enthusiastically.

"A slam dunk," said Van Young at the end, delivering high-fives.

The artistic team then walked around the corner, where Dorrance and two other dancers rehearsed a piece that called for them to shovel gravel until they had built a percussive beat. As her boots hit the ground, dust kicked into the air. The group walked down a hill to a wooden shed that will house homemade electric instruments Van Young crafted out of shoe boxes, kid's toys and drum machines to simulate communication tools. And they stopped in what was once the festival's intern village, wooden cabins condemned a few years ago but still standing on the outside of a U-shaped clearing large enough to serve as a gathering spot. This is where the roaming performance will culminate.

For a moment, it seemed almost possible to forget that 2020 ever happened.

But it did, and cancellations meant Jacob's Pillow lost half of its $8 million annual operating budget and had to lay off 40 percent of its 45-person, full-time staff. Dorrance Dance, coming off a 2019 that featured a 30-city tour and its largest production to date, an adaptation of "The Nutcracker Suite," shut down on March 7 after a show at Sonoma State University. The company survived by reducing its budget and relying on covid relief, the government's Paycheck Protection Program, donors and virtual gigs.

While the festival will still be partially online this summer - including streamed performances by companies in other locations - there is a sense of relief that there will be an audience on hand for most of the work.

"There's nothing like live performance," Pamela Tatge, Jacob's Pillow's executive and artistic director, said.

And Dorrance, in particular, said she is eager to click off Zoom. In fact, while Jacob's Pillow is filming most performances this summer and making them available to what it sees as its growing audience online, Dorrence negotiated to keep Wiggan-Freund and Harrold's main stage piece off the Internet. Instead, the festival will make a short film of the site-specific, roaming performance.

"We've all talked about this quite a bit," Dorrance said. "We want the live performances to be special and remain live," Dorrance said. "One of our biggest concerns is that we are percussive dance artists. Sound, as it is received in a room versus an outdoor stage, there are a lot of variables. So if we're going to stream something, we already know it's compromised."

Tatge and the festival's staff have also been working to develop safety protocols on campus, even as federal and state guidelines shift, sometimes from week to week. In the Berkshires, a thriving summer tourist destination, other reopened attractions include the Williamstown Theatre Festival, the Barrington Stage Company and Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Lenox.

On campus, protocols have been put in place, Tatge said, that balance the need to keep performers and audience members safe while also respecting privacy. For example, Jacob's Pillow is not requiring ticket buyers to reveal if they've been vaccinated, but anyone walking the grounds - "in motion," as defined in the protocol - must wear a mask. People who say they've been vaccinated can remove their masks while at the Leir watching a performance.

Performers and staff are being asked to disclose to the festival whether they've been vaccinated but their information is not being made public. If they are not vaccinated, they will be required to get a weekly test.

"Health information is always 100 percent confidential for me," said Angelica McCarthey, who is serving as the festival's health-care coordinator and covid compliance director. "With covid, nothing's different."

Since testing began earlier this spring on campus, there has not been a single case of the coronavirus, she added.

During rehearsals, the majority of the Dorrance company members were not wearing masks. But one who chose to wear a mask bristled when asked about it. And a Jacob's Pillow publicist then made a request to a reporter that company members not be asked about covid precautions.

"Some people on this cast are cancer survivors," said Dorrance, who was not wearing a mask. "Some people on this cast have seizures. There's no part of me that is going to share that. We internally, as a company, know everyone's status. Because we have to keep everyone safe. But we're also here bubbled on campus.Anyone can do whatever they want. Regardless. Because we're safe now. So what we are doing as individuals, we all support each other."

There was no talk of the pandemic as they rehearsed, gathered for lunch and sang an impromptu happy birthday to Hickey - he turned 25 on June 21 - but the work produced for this summer's festival was clearly influenced by it, the artists said.

Take the solo piece Wiggan-Freund is preparing as part of the company's roaming project.

In it, she will be in a house, folding laundry next to an old Victrola as Sarah Vaughan's "Lover Man" plays.

"I think my character is remembering the good old days when I was surrounded by people listening to this record," she said.

Was that before covid, she was asked? Wiggan-Freund didn't answer and Dorrance, sitting across from her, piped in.

"We are, of course, experiencing these things of defining communication in isolation and being so close to someone and still entirely isolated from them and not being able to communicate with them."

The abstract beauty of a performance, Dorrance said, is that the audience can decide the meaning for itself.

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Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival 2021 runs from June 30-Aug. 29 with online programming available through Sept. 23. https://www.jacobspillow.org/festival/; 413-243-0745.
Laredo's Arturo Campos will play a part in NASA's next mission to the Moon, after NASA announced that he is the winner of its 'Moonikin' naming contest.

Campos family honored him posthumously by asking his hometown to help him in NASAs Name the Artemis Moonikin Challenge. And Tuesday, on the same day as their mothers birthday, the Campos family heard the good news  their father will be represented in the upcoming mission.

With the victory, the manikin launching on Artemis I will now be named after Campos, meaning Laredo will be represented in NASA's uncrewed mission around the Moon later this year.

After collecting over 300K total votes over the course of the campaign, Commander Moonikin Campos will embark on the #Artemis I mission around the Moon with his phantom crewmates, Zohar and Helga, said the NASA Artemis program in a statement.

The contest placed Campos against seven other entires in a bracket contest that honored NASA figures, program, or astronomical objects. According to NASA, more the 300,000 votes were received throughout the competition.

Arturo Campos is best known for his work as an engineer with NASA. He was key figure in the emergency landing of the Apollo 13 spacecraft and is credited for creating and helping execute the plan that led the crew safely back home.

Now, Campos will play an instrumental part in NASA's next moon mission, with the mannequin bearing his name used to determine the effects of the space trip on a human body. The data gathered will then be used for a future moon mission, which will include human astronauts.

"It is a fitting tribute that the data gained from Artemis I will help us prepare to fly astronauts  including the first woman and first person of color  to the Moon, where we will get ready for Mars." Brian Odom, one of NASAs acting chief historians, said.

The other entries included:

Ace  Stands for Artemis Crew Explorer, a practical name as the Moonikin will be a member of the first official crew of Artemis I.

Delos  In 2017, NASAs Terra satellite captured an image of islands scattered across the Aegean Sea. One group sat in the central region of the Aegean, encircling the island of Delos.

Duhart  Named after Dr. Irene Duhart Long, the first African American woman to serve in the Senior Executive Service at Kennedy Space Center. She was the first woman and person of color to serve as chief medical officer as her career spanned 31 years.

Montgomery  Named after Julius Montgomery, the first African American hired at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station working as a technical professional.

Rigel  One of the 10 brightest stars in the Earths sky, forming part of the Orion constellation. Rigel is a nod to the Orion spacecraft, which the Moonikin will be riding aboard.

Shackleton  Refers to the Shackleton Crater on the moon, named after Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton. NASA research finds that ice may make up the interior of the crater at nearly 22% of the surface material.

Wargo  Named after Michael Wargo, who represented NASA as the first Chief Exploration Scientist for the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate. He was a leading contributor of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), which launched together on to the Moon and confirmed water existed there in 2009.

In the final round, Campos bested Delos as voting was held on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and NASAs website.

On Facebook, Campos received 506 votes compared to Delos 216. On Twitter, Campos received 53.1% of the 9,041 votes submitted compared to Delos 46.9%.

Previously, Campos defeated Rigel in the second round and Shackleton in the first.

Campos was the lone name for an individual in the competition that won in the tournament after the other three were all eliminated in the opening round.

Delos had defeated Ace and Duhart in the previous two rounds to reach the finals.
SURFSIDE, Fla. (AP)  The remains of 11 people have been found after the collapse of a 12-story beachfront condominium building in Florida, authorities said Monday. The Associated Press has been reporting brief descriptions of the dead and the missing.

Miami-Dade police released late Monday the names and ages of three men who died in the collapse. They said the body of Marcus Joseph Guara, 52, was discovered on Saturday but only identified on Monday. Authorities say they found on Monday the remains of Michael David Altman, 50, and Frankie Kleiman, 55, who had recently gotten married.

Late on Sunday, police identified the remains of Leon and Christina Oliwkowicz, an elderly couple from Venezuela with ties to Jewish communities in Florida and Chicago. They also found the bodies of Luis Bermudez, a young man with muscular dystrophy, and his mother, Ana Ortiz, who were from Puerto Rico.

Authorities said 150 other people remain unaccounted for as rescuers search through the rubble of Champlain Towers South. Among them are Linda March, whose penthouse apartment was ripped apart, leaving her office chair and a set of bunkbeds next to the abyss.

____

CATTAROSSI FAMILY

Argentine Graciela Cattarossi is a beloved mother and friend who works as an independent photographer for hotels, magazines, banks and airlines from different parts of the world, said Kathryn Rooney Vera, a friend who has known Cattarossi since 2008.

The most important thing in her world, however, is her 7-year-old daughter Stella.

Cattarossi, 48, a single mother, lived in Champlain Towers South with Stella and her own parents, Graciela and Gino Cattarossi. All four were missing Monday, along with Cattarossi's sister, Andrea, an architect in Pilar, Argentina, who was visiting.

Vera said Cattarossi is a dedicated mother whose devotion to her child is unparalleled. She also described her as a "very hard worker, a beautiful person and beloved by everyone.

Cattarossi and Vera were exchanging text messages on Wednesday night, just hours before the building collapsed. The photographer took professional photos of Veras fourth pregnancy years ago and presented them as a gift to celebrate what they believed would be Veras last child.

She was happy to know that I was pregnant again, said Vera. We are devastated by what happened.

Vera said that Graciela Cattarossi has lived in Miami for decades.

____

ANA ORTIZ and LUIS BERMUDEZ

Luis Bermudez, of San Juan, Puerto Rico, had battled muscular dystrophy for years and used a wheelchair. The 26-year-old man lived with his mother, Ana Ortiz, on the seventh floor of the Champlain Towers South. They were identified among the 11 who died after the building collapsed Thursday.

His father, also named Luis Bermudez, texted the AP saying my son is a hero. He also wrote on Facebook that he could not believe hes gone.

Now rest in peace and without any obstacles in heaven, he wrote. I will see you soon my Luiyo.

In honor of Luis, family members on Monday laid flowers in the ocean at a beach near the site of the building collapse.

Ortiz, 46, had just gotten married to Frankie Kleiman. Alex Garcia, the couple's close friend, told The Miami Herald he had set them up on a blind date. Kleiman lived with his wife and stepson on the same floor as his brother Jay Kleiman, who was in town for a funeral, and their mother Nancy Kress Levin. The Kleimans and their mother are still missing.

Ortiz was described as a woman who was committed to giving her son the best possible life.

Shes a rock star, Garcia told the Herald. And on top of that a super mom.

-

LEON and CRISTINA OLIWKOWICZ

Leon Oliwkowicz, 80, and his wife Cristina Beatriz de Oliwkowicz, 74, lived on the 8th floor of the condo tower for several years, according to Venezuelan journalist Shirley Varnagy, a close friend of their family.

They had already sent their children to live in the U.S. from Venezuela, and then joined them as the economic and political crisis worsened in their native country, said Rabbi Moshe Perlstein, dean of the Yeshivas Ohr Eliyahu-Lubavitch Mesivta, an Orthodox Jewish School in Chicago where one of their daughters, Leah Fouhal, works as an office manager.

Perlstein flew to Florida to support Fouhal after the disaster as she waited anxiously to learn her parents' fate. Late Sunday, authorities announced that their bodies had been recovered.

On Friday, she was there and she was standing a few blocks away, and smoke was coming from the (collapsed building). And she tells me, I just hope Ill be able to bury my parents instead of their ashes... And then, thank God she was able to bury her parents, not the ashes, he said.

The Jewish people have unfortunately known too many cases where we have buried ashes. We dont want to bury people, but its better than burying ashes, he said as he prepared for their funeral on Monday.

Perlstein said the couple was known for their generosity: Three years ago, they donated a valuable Torah scroll to the school in memory of Leon Oliwkowiczs parents.

He was a person that enjoyed when he gave, he was happy. He loved giving, Perlstein said. With his wife, they were very dedicated to their children, helping the children, doing anything they could for their children, he said. It was their life -- giving to the family and giving charity to others.

Other Venezuelans who were caught in the collapse included Moises Rodan, 28; Andres Levine, 27; and Luis Sadovnik, 28, who remained missing along with his Argentine wife, Nicole Langesfeld, Varnagy said. The parents of Rodan, Levine and Sadovnik were able to travel to the U.S. from Venezuela after the disaster, she said.

Some did not have a visa, others had an expired passport, but with diplomatic collaboration they were able to arrive, Varnagy said.

___

LINDA MARCH

Among the missing was Linda March, who eagerly traded a cramped New York apartment for fresh air and ocean views after surviving a COVID-19 infection. She even bought a bright pink bicycle to cruise around Miami with, best friend Rochelle Laufer said.

March rented Penthouse 4, and was using the second bedroom of the furnished apartment as her office, Laufer told The Associated Press on Sunday.

Thursdays partial collapse of the condominium building left the penthouses interior exposed, with bunk beds and an office chair still intact just inside the broken edge where the rest of the 12-story structure crumbled into a pile of debris.

Another friend, Dawn Falco, said she had been talking on the phone with March until just two hours before the disaster. Falco said she immediately began searching for word on her friend, who she said never leaves the house without a smile.

My heart is breaking as I see the office chair that she just purchased next to the bunkbeds, Falco said.

Florida was a new start for the 58-year-old attorney. In the past decade, shed lost her sister and mother to cancer, her father died a few years later and she and her husband divorced. She had no children.

She would say to me, Im all alone. I dont have family, and I would say, Youre my sister, you dont have to be born sisters. And I said you always have me, Laufer recounted through tears.

Laufer said March loved the ocean views but hated the incessant noise from nearby construction and had decided to break her lease. She was looking for another apartment when this happened, Laufer said sadly.

Still, Laufer had been planning to visit her friend this fall.

I joked Im going to take the top bunk when I visit, she said.

-

This story has been corrected to remove a reference in the text and summary to Ana Otero. Her name was Ana Ortiz.

Associated Press writers Gisela Salomon in Miami, Fabiola Sanchez in Caracas, Venezuela, and Luis Andres Henao in Princeton, N.J. contributed to this report.
SAN DIEGO (AP)  The number of migrant children housed at the Biden administration's largest emergency shelter for those who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border alone has dropped by more than 40% since mid-June, a top U.S. official said Monday, touting progress at the facility that has been criticized by child welfare advocates.

Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra told reporters that 790 boys were housed at Fort Bliss Army base in El Paso, Texas, and the last girl left Monday. All the girls were reunited either with relatives in the U.S. or a sponsor such as a family friend or sent to licensed facilities, which have a higher standard of care, according to the agency responsible for caring for migrant children.

In mid-June, the administration reported about 2,000 boys and girls were at the Fort Bliss facility amid child welfare advocates concerns about inadequate conditions. A high of 4,800 children were housed there in May.

Becerra said his agency was evaluating whether it can close some of the emergency shelters that the government opened in the spring as record numbers of unaccompanied children crossed the border. He declined to say whether Fort Bliss would be among them.

Because weve been successful in managing the flow, we are prepared to begin the demobilization of several of our emergency intake sites, Becerra said.

He made his second visit to Fort Bliss since it opened in March and said more services and staffing have been added, including case managers who have helped get children released to relatives in the U.S. or placed in licensed facilities more quickly.

In transcripts of interviews done by attorneys and filed in federal court in Los Angeles last week, migrant children described their desperation to get out of Fort Bliss and the other large shelters set up by the Biden administration.

The children were interviewed from March to June by attorneys monitoring a longstanding settlement governing custody conditions for migrant children.

Some of the children said they did not know if anyone was working to reunite them with their families, giving them anxiety. Others did not have enough access to a mental health counselor, had trouble sleeping because lights were kept on at night and were avoiding meals because the food smelled foul. Several said they spent their days sleeping and had been in the facilities, like Fort Bliss, for more than a month.

Vice President Kamala Harris visited El Paso on Friday, and her spokeswoman, Symone Sanders, told reporters that President Joe Biden has instructed Becerra to do a thorough investigation and report back about the conditions in the tent camp at Fort Bliss, which advocates have called particularly troubling.

The administration is taking this very seriously. Extremely seriously, Sanders said.

A White House official said later Friday that conditions have improved, adding that Biden did not order a formal investigation request and that the agency was already looking into the facility.

Shaw Drake, staff attorney and policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, applauded the reduction in the number of children housed at Fort Bliss but questioned why it has taken this long to see real progress in releasing kids from the government's unlicensed shelters.

Drake praised the Biden administration for helping get children out of overcrowded holding facilities for adult migrants by opening more than dozen emergency shelters quickly. But he said immediately after that, the focus should have been to reunify children with sponsors, and it seemed like that languished and left kids in places like Fort Bliss far too long."

A rise in the number of migrant children crossing the southwest border alone has challenged the Biden administration. The Department of Health and Human Services has more than 14,200 migrant children in its care, down from 22,000 two months ago.

Becerra said more children are in licensed shelters now than unlicensed facilities, a reversal from a government report in May. He said officials are working to get more beds made available at licensed facilities.

We have continued to expand our capacity, and as a result, we're able to discharge more of these children into the hands of a responsible, vetted custodian, which then frees up a bed for another child," he said.

Despite the improvements, Becerra said the shelters are not a solution and urged Congress to fix what he called a broken immigration system.

___

Taxin reported from Orange County, California.
The COVID-19 pandemic appeared to undo years of improvement for Texas students meeting grade requirements in reading and math, with students who did most of their schooling remotely suffering "significant declines" compared to those who attended in person, according to standardized test results released Monday by the Texas Education Agency.

In districts where fewer than a quarter of classes were held in person, the number of students who met math test expectations dropped by 32 percentage points, and the number of students who met reading expectations dropped by 9 percentage points compared to 2019, the last time the test was administered. In districts with more than three-quarters in-person instruction, the number of students meeting math expectations only dropped by 9 percentage points and those who met reading expectations by 1 percentage point. Students of color and lower-income students saw greater gaps as well, although those gaps were smaller than the one between remote and in-person instruction.

READ ALSO: Texas universities got more state funding this year than anticipated, still hoping for more support

The impact of the coronavirus on what school means and what school is has been truly profound, Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath told reporters Monday. What we know now with certainty is that the decision in Texas to prioritize in person instruction was critical.

The STAAR test was optional last year due to coronavirus-related orders, but 87% of students still participated  compared to 96% of students in 2019. Morath said those numbers allow for fairly effective comparisons. The STAAR assessment for math and reading is administered from grades 3 to 8.

Since 2012, test results in the state had been steadily improving, but after COVID-19 related disruptions, the percentage of students meeting reading expectations dropped back to 2016 rates and the percentage meeting math expectations dropped to 2013 passing rates. Math test performance saw the most significant drop, from 50% of students meeting their grade level in 2019 to only 35% this year.

Hispanic students in districts with over three-quarters of learning done remotely saw the largest drops compared to other demographics, with a 10 percentage point decrease in the number of students meeting reading expectations and a 34 percentage point decrease in those meeting math expectations. This is followed by Black students taking mostly remote classes, who saw a 6 percentage point decrease in those meeting reading expectations and a 28 percentage point in those meeting expectations for math.

Students who took the test in Spanish also saw far more significant declines in rates of grade level than those who took the test in English, Morath said.

The data may be disheartening, but with it, our teachers and school leaders are building action plans to support students in the new school year, he said. Policymakers are using it to direct resources where they are needed most.

He said parents can also sign in to TexasAssessment.gov to go over their childrens results and strategize how to catch them up.

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There were outliers among the results, with some remote learners demonstrating progress and even some school districts containing a high concentration of remote learners with good outcomes. These outliers will be studied by a new commission on remote learning formed by the Texas Legislature.

While many districts expected remote learning to continue as an option moving into next year, a bill that would have funded it died during the final days of the Texas Legislatures regular session. Some programs were canceled with thousands of students signed up, such as in Frisco, according to the Dallas Morning News.

Morath said on average, only 4% of students across all grades who are below grade level catch up within two years. But he pointed to the recently passed House Bill 4545 as an opportunity to help with catching students up. The bill requires school districts to offer tutoring to any student who doesnt meet grade level expectations and to offer high-performing teachers.

He said the agency will also be offering rigorous instructional materials, additional teachers support, help wherever appropriate to expand learning time, and targeted tutoring this summer in an effort to close the gap.

The Texas Tribune is a nonpartisan, nonprofit media organization that informs Texans  and engages with them  about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
San Antonio-based USAA is facing calls to stop advertising on Fox News after Tucker Carlson called the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff a "pig" and "stupid," among other insults.

In a June 25 segment discussing critical race theory, Carlson takes aim at Gen. Mark Milley, a Trump appointee, after the general appeared in front of Congress last week.

"I do think it's important for those of us in uniform to be open minded and be widely read," Milley told members of the House Armed Services Committee. "I want to understand white rage and I'm white. I want to understand it. So what is it that caused thousands of people to assault this [U.S. Capitol] and try to overturn the U.S. Constitution."

READ MORE: Dan Crenshaw wants Olympic athlete Gwen Berry to be 'removed from the team' for protest

After airing that clip, Carlson, who has never served in the military, added: "Hard to believe that man wears a uniform. He's that unimpressive."

During the 10-minute segment, Carlson also attacks Milley's bravery, intelligence, and respectability before adding: "[Milley's] not just a pig, he's stupid." Gen. Milley went to Princeton. Carlson went to Trinity University, a liberal arts college in Connecticut.

In the aftermath of Carlson's attack, USAA has faced increasing pressure from some customers to remove advertising from Fox News. As the Express-News points out, USAA's more than 13 million members are exclusively military personnel, veterans, and their families, which puts the insurance provider in a particularly precarious situation.

According to the Express-News, USAA was not immediately available to comment.
In May, Auckland Councils Finance and Performance Committee and 20 of Aucklands 21 local boards strongly backed my Mayoral proposal for Auckland Councils 10-year Budget 2021-2031, or Recovery Budget, which will be formally adopted this month. This follows over 150 hours of workshops and meetings as we worked together to examine all options for dealing with the $750 million financial hole in Council income caused by the Covid-19 crisis.

What we came up with enables us to maintain critical services and infrastructure investment and act on future challenges such as climate change. Overall, we will be investing $31.8 billion over the next 10 years in transport, housing and environmental infrastructure, and improving parks and community facilities.

Rather than taking an austerity approach in the face of this challenge, we have opted to maintain our investments in critical infrastructure builds and renewals, as well as the key services and facilities that Aucklanders rely on.

We have increased funding for capital projects by $900 million in the first three years of the budget. This maintains the planned work  despite the impact of Covid-19  and brings forward important infrastructure projects to stimulate the recovery from the economic downturn.

Funding for renewals and maintenance has been increased by 50 per cent over the previous budget. Watercares infrastructure budget over the 10 years has increased from $5.7 billion to $9.7 billion. This will help ensure future generations of Aucklanders are not left with the consequences of a failure to invest in vital infrastructure, as we have seen in other cities.

To continue protecting our natural environment and native species, we are extending our Natural Environment and Water Quality targeted rates. We will also increase the Water Quality Targeted Rate in line with general rates rises. This will enable us to extend our focus on improving water quality, such as wastewater going into our harbours and beaches.

To fund critical services and infrastructure, we will lock in $90 million a year of savings from cost efficiencies, raise $70 million a year for assets through the sale of surplus properties, increase borrowing within prudent limits, and maintain our long-term annual average general rates increase at 3.5 per cent, with a one-off increase of 5 per cent next year.

We have kept rates increases much lower than other cities such as Wellington and Tauranga, where they are likely to be 13.5 per cent and 17 per cent respectively.

This approach allows us to maintain the investment necessary to stimulate recovery and make progress to build a world-class city, while keeping rates at a reasonable level.

The money invested in this budget will help Auckland pull out of the Covid-19 crisis, while addressing transport and traffic congestion, sustaining the environment, improving water quality and the resilience of our water supply, building more infrastructure for housing and tackling climate change.

It is a Recovery Budget that will keep Auckland moving.

Phil Goff, Mayor of Auckland

phil.goff@aucklandcouncil.govt.nz
RIP green NZ

The latest downside of our once autonomous Rodney County being commandeered by the metropolis to the south, will be its use as a toilet. Three hundred-plus truck movements per day only confirm it. The Dome Valley dump will be a giant tombstone for clean, green NZ and its dream of zero waste. It deserves worldwide advertising of our abject failure at environmental protection, our inability to recycle, as well as our tacit support for a plastic planet. Those who approved the dump clearly believe profit trumps the pollution of 1000ha of pristine land and the inevitable contamination of the Kaipara, one of the worlds largest natural harbours, via the Hoteo river. In the granting of a resource consent, we should be questioning how 971 submissions of protest were overruled by only 10 in support. Of course, the toxic waste dump is all about profit, otherwise who in their right mind would approve the ferrying of colossal quantities of the Supercitys (and New Caledonias) garbage by hundreds of road-pummeling trucks to a fringe zone of untouched land over 100 km from the point of origin? Something strangely familiar has resurfaced  the grim inevitability that these disastrous decisions will just happen, no matter how widespread the storm of protest. Its sad how easily money and power have made our representatives wilfully oblivious to the scale of future environmental damage.

Hugh Major, Matakana

No need to save us

We write in response to the article regarding the Mahurangi Community Trading Post saved in its final hour (MM June 16). To set the record straight, we did not need saving by anyone. The charitable society voted to close our operation for reasons that have been commented on before in this paper. Those being volunteer burn-out and also a rent increase. May we reiterate we did not need saving as we were neither broke nor drowning. We are not in any way connected with any incoming business on these premises. The Mahurangi Community Trading Post has to date donated over $420,000 to local charities and organisations in the general area, all made possible by our hard-working unpaid volunteer team.

John Carr, chair Mahurangi Community Trading Post

Ministerial advice

With Minister of Transport Michael Wood about to make a decision on whether to toll the new motorway from Puhoi to Warkworth, could I offer him some advice? The Government arent tolling Transmission Gully because they want as much traffic off the old, hopelessly inadequate State Highway as possible. Could the Minister follow suit? Dont toll the new road in order to keep as much traffic off the current hopelessly inadequate road as possible. Because it has been shown that even with a reduced speed limit, serious accidents are still occurring. With NZTA admitting that the road is not up to scratch in implementing the speed reduction, how could they then charge a toll on the new highway, forcing many road users to not use the new road? All a toll amounts to is a new tax on road users from a government that wasnt introducing more taxes this term.

Lloyd Stewart, Wellsford


The plans proposed protected areas.

Increased marine protection  and a reduction in fishing  is on the cards for several local bays and islands as a result of the new Revitalising the Gulf  Government Action on the Sea Change Plan that was published last week.

New High Protection or Seafloor Protection Areas are proposed for waters north and east of Hauturu Little Barrier Island, around Kawau Island and south of Kawau Bay, and around the Mokohinau Islands. In addition, the existing Goat Island marine reserve will be extended north.

The new High Protection Areas are comparable to no-take marine reserves, although customary rights will be negotiated on a case-by-case basis, while Seafloor Protection Areas are will protect seafloor habitats from some fishing (especially dredging, bottom trawling and Danish seining), sand extraction and mining. However, the strategy says that some commercial and recreational fishing may be allowed where they are compatible with the management objectives of each protected area.

The Government says these areas, which total 18 throughout the Gulf, will be progressed through new legislation in 2024. The Revitalising the Gulf Plan aims to mitigate some of the damage done to marine life of the Hauraki Gulf over the years by boosting stocks of fish and protecting habitats and ecosystems throughout the Gulf to support their recovery.

If the 18 protected areas proposed are established, the total area under protection will nearly triple, from 6.6 percent to 17.6 percent. However, one area that will not benefit from the new marine protection areas is Whangateau Harbour.

The Sea Change Plans proposal for additional protection in the Whangateau Harbour will not significantly increase biodiversity beyond what is offered by existing fishing restrictions, the document states.

Instead, it claims the area would benefit from a catchment-based approach to management.

Forum executive officer Alex Rogers will be a meeting at the Matakana Community Hall on Monday July 5, at 7pm.

To read the report: www.mpi.govt.nz/dmsdocument/45550-Revitalising-the-Gulf-Government-action-on-the-Sea-Change-Plan
The inaugural meeting of the Defective Blocks Working Group, established by Minister for Housing, Darragh O'Brien, will consider the establishment of a Mica Public Inquiry.

According to the draft 'Scope of the Review of the Defective Concrete Blocks Grant Scheme' seen by Donegal Live, it will consider calls for the establishment of a Public Inquiry into the issue of defective concrete blocks and make recommendations to the Minister.

The 12-person Working Group, which meets on Wednesday (June 30), will also consider what assistance, if any, is required or can be secured from responsible parties and financial institutions who hold mortgages over Defective Concrete Block homes and make recommendations to the Minister.

The draft 'Scope of the Review of the Defective Concrete Blocks Grant Scheme' has six additional areas of consideration.

It will consider the need for homeowner eligibility for Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) grants and options for homeowners to fund I.S. 465:2018 protocol.

I.S. 465:2018 protocol is the standardised protocol for determining whether a building has been damaged by concrete blocks containing excessive amounts of deleterious materials such as Mica.

The Defective Blocks Working Group will also review the scope of homes deemed eligible. The Defective Concrete Blocks Grant Scheme currently excludes certain dwellings, including parochial houses, holiday homes and buy-to-let properties.

The current allowable costs and qualifying works under the scheme and the existing homeowner contribution are also up for review, as are the existing [Defective Concrete Blocks] grant caps.

The Defective Blocks Working Group was set up by Minister O'Brien in response to concerns being raised by homeowners in Donegal and Mayo regarding the difficulty in accessing the existing Defective Concrete Blocks Grant Scheme.

The Working Group is expected to complete its work and submit a report with recommendations to the Minister by July 31, 2021.

According to the draft terms of reference, it is intended that this report and the recommendations therein will inform any changes or improvements to the scheme, as may be required.

The Minister will, following consultation with Ministerial colleagues and in particular with the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform and the Attorney General, bring forward proposals to Government for consideration.
This July, Helium Arts, the national childrens arts and health charity, launches Our World in a Window, a window exhibition featuring the animations and mechanised artwork produced by 49 children in 18 counties in Ireland on the Helium Arts Remote Programme Distance Creates.

The exhibition will take place from July 2 to 10 at Longford County Library.

Since February 2021, children aged 9-12 living with long-term health conditions have been exploring the world of animation guided by Helium Artist Chelsea Canavan.

From tinfoil and claymation characters to foam sculptures and hand-drawn illustrations, the childrens stories have come to life in unique and imaginative ways, showing persistence and creativity in the face of adversity.

The project origins date back to the onset of the pandemic, when Helium Arts began adapting its programmes to digital and postal formats to allow many vulnerable young people to practice their creativity from the safety of their homes.

The goal was to offer respite during these difficult times of social distancing, and support their mental health.

Between 2020 and 2021, Helium Arts remote programme increased access to creative psycho-social supports for over 250 children living with long-term health conditions across Ireland, increasing their wellbeing by 44% and in particular doubled participation by families living in rural and regional areas.

The programme reduces access barriers, removing the need and additional costs of traveling and enables parents and children to fit art activities in with existing schedules, all from the comfort of their home.

It also offered a suitable method of engagement for children and young people who found social situations challenging.

Helium Arts founder and CEO Helene Hugel said: This exhibition gives a voice to the many children living with health conditions during lock-down.

It symbolically brings their experiences and stories to life in unique and imaginative ways. Many of these children have faced multiple challenges during the pandemic, including reduced services and cocooning.

This exhibition celebrates their talent, persistence and creativity in the face of adversity.
The Vintners Federation of Ireland (VFI) has rejected NPHET advice to Government that only the fully vaccinated should be admitted to indoor hospitality venues.

The VFI says the plan is unworkable and that it will only increase pressure on publicans and their staff.

Padraig Cribben, VFI Chief Executive, says: The idea that only allowing the fully vaccinated into hospitality venues is highly problematic and probably unworkable for a number of reasons, not least how do publicans and their staff police such a policy? Government has consistently stated it would not introduce this type of measure so for it now to change course has left the pub trade reeling.

There is confusion and overwhelming anger among our members as to how pubs in the North can open safely for indoor trading since 24th May while the UK Government is removing all restrictions in the next three weeks stating that we must learn to live with Covid. Why are we taking such a markedly different, more conservative, approach?

Even some high profile medical experts are questioning this approach, such as David Nabarro of the World Health Organisation who says if you use vaccine status as a requirement for entry, youre also blocking out an awful lot of people from having any chance of participating.

Figures from the UK reveal that while case numbers are rising across Britain on a pro rata basis there are fewer hospital admissions, which is their green light for removing all restrictions. There is nothing to suggest we will have a different experience so to increase restrictions here as the rest of Europe opens up is simply perverse.

The summer season is here and with no date for reopening indoors our members will be wondering how long it will take to implement a vaccine admission protocol. There will be huge concern this will become a talking shop with ongoing delays. Is that the actual desired outcome of Government and NPHET?

The way Government has dealt with pubs over the past 15 months is shocking. So many reopening dates postponed or delayed and now this unworkable plan that will create a two-tier society that can only lead to animosity towards publicans and their staff, who are effectively being asked to become agents of the state.

As ever, we stand ready to engage with Government to find workable solutions to get hospitality open as soon as possible, concludes Mr Cribben.
Politics

By Chris Boyle Published: June 29 2021

Since beginning public service, Suozzi has fought tirelessly to protect Long Island and New Yorks environment.

Congressman Tom Suozzi (D-Long Island, Queens) has introduced three pieces of legislation that would promote environmental sustainability across New York and Long Island. As a member of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, the chief tax-writing committee, Suozzi is able to advance legislation that would amend our tax code and offer incentives to homeowners, businesses, and state governments that promote environmental sustainability.

The most significant efforts our government has made to address climate change and promote green energy is through investments via tax and funding policy, said Suozzi. As a member of the chief tax-writing committee, I am in a unique position to work on legislation that promotes tax credits, funding, and subsidies for renewable and green energies.

Since beginning public service, Suozzi has fought tirelessly to protect Long Island and New Yorks environment. In 2008, the New York State League of Conservation Voters (NYLCV) named him Environmentalist of the Year. As a Member of Congress, he has increased funding to protect the Long Island Sound by nearly 800%, fought to keep the U.S. in the Paris Climate Accord, supports the Green New Deal, and through his efforts as chair of the Long Island Sound Caucus has helped drastically reduce the amount of nitrogen in the Long Island Sound.

Background on the three pieces of legislation introduce by Suozzi is found below:

Legislation to Federally Fund Septic System Replacement Programs

Currently, under the federally-run Clean Water State Resolving Fund (CWSRF) program  a federal-state partnership that provides communities with low-cost financing for a wide range of water quality infrastructure projects  septic system replacement projects on Long Island rarely receive grants; they often only receive loans.

The legislation set to be introduced by Suozzi this week would allow septic system replacement programs in New York to receive more CWSRF grant money. Currently, states can give a portion of their CWSRF money in the form of additional subsidization (grants and not loans) for certain clean water projects, but septic system replacement programs rarely receive this funding. Congressman Suozzis bill would amend the CWSRF to allow states more flexibility to give these programs more grant money, opening up a federal funding stream for septic system replacement projects on Long Island.

Improving the quality of septic systems on Long Island has been a priority of mine for years, said Suozzi. In addition to introducing legislation that would help send federal funds to improve New Yorks septic systems, I have also introduced legislation that would make sure New York homeowners are not forced to pay taxes on grants they receive when updating their septic systems.

Suffolk Countys leadership in efforts to better protect water quality is well-recognized and residents have strongly supported the movement to replace outdated cesspools and septic systems. This proposal would build on the efforts already underway using state and local funding, expanding those successful programs to make it possible for even more homeowners to participate, said Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone.

The science is definitive- the sustainability of Long Islands future depends on our ability to upgrade waste water treatment systems for homes and businesses. The good news is that we can restore our drinking and coastal waterways, but we need the funding to achieve this critical goal. This is a common sense update to an essential federal program that will allow us to expedite replacing antiquated, polluting septic and cesspool systems. Protection of our water resources and the septic replacement programs program has strong public support and we are thankful that Congressman Suozzi is leading federal efforts to achieve the goal of clean water on Long Island, said Adrienne Esposito, Executive Director of Citizens Campaign for the Environment.

Save the Sound strongly supports the proposed amendment to CWSRF that will provide needed funds to communities plagued by pollution from septic systems. Fecal bacteria and excess nitrogen from septic systems are entering groundwater and surface waters in communities across the country, degrading ecosystems, driving harmful algae blooms, contaminating drinking water supplies, and reducing coastal resiliency, said Tracy Brown, Regional Director of Water Protection for Save the Sound. We thank Congressman Suozzi for his leadership in protecting our waterways by helping communities get the new and improved septic systems that are now available in the ground, stemming the tide on this water pollution crisis.

The Groundsource Exchange Tax (GET) Parity Act

The Groundsource Exchange Tax (GET) Parity Act would offer a 26% tax credit to companies that build and install geothermal heating and cooling systems in homes, putting it on par with the tax credit the solar industry currently receives. Under this proposed tax credit, these companies would be able to drastically lower their costs, allowing for more lower- and middle-class families to afford the installation of geothermal systems in their homes. Currently, companies that install these systems only receive a 10% tax credit, a rate much lower than the 30% companies that install solar industry panels have received.

As new technology systems that promote environmental stability develop, we must make sure those systems are affordable, said Suozzi. Through this piece of legislation, the costs of that technology will drop dramatically for the average homeowner who wants to warm and cool their home in a more environmentally friendly way.

Geothermal is the most efficient solution to reducing carbon emissions from home heating and cooling. This legislation will finally level the playing field for geothermalgiving homeowners a clean option while creating jobs," said Michael Sachse, Dandelion CEO. "We are grateful to Congressman Suozzi for his leadership on this issue for climate, homeowners, and jobs."

The PAPER Act

The PAPER Act is bipartisan legislation that would disincentivize the burning of recyclable paper at waste-to-energy facilities. Currently, the federal tax code allows for waste-to-energy facilities to receive an incentive for the burning of recyclable paper mixed with waste. Under the PAPER Act, waste-to-energy facilities would not get a tax credit for burning recycled paper mixed with waste.

Because of lack of clarity in the current tax code, many centers are incentivized to burn recyclable paper, said Suozzi. Recyclable paper is crucial for the preservation of our environment, but it doesnt do much good if its being mixed in with waste and burnt.
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(Alliance News) - Irish Health Minister Stephen Donnelly has confirmed that the National Immunisation Advisory Committee has recommended to Government that the AstraZeneca PLC and Janssen vaccines can be administered to 18 to 40-year-olds.

The committee has also recommended that the AstraZeneca vaccine dose gap be reduced to four weeks, to allow more people in their 60s to be fully vaccinated faster.

The current gap between dose one and two is being reduced from 12 weeks to eight at present.

Asked on Monday night about the NIAC recommendations, Donnelly said: "It will be for all age groups for Janssen and AstraZeneca."

The change in guidance on using the jabs in younger age cohorts will help speed up the vaccination programme, the Tanaiste Leo Varadkar said earlier.

The State's Covid-19 vaccine advisory group had assessed how a possible change in advice would affect the spread of the virus.

Leo Varadkar said the NIAC would give advice based on the best medical and scientific data.

"There are some decisions that are more in the political domain than others, and I think that this issue, particularly around the use of medicines and vaccines, is very much in the domain of the experts rather than politicians," he said on Monday.

"We are not going to be in a position to overrule their advice when it comes to something purely medical and scientific like the use of vaccines.

"We will be guided by what they say."

Previously, the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson Janssen jabs were recommended for over-50s only due to incidences of rare blood clotting being linked to the vaccines.

The government wanted to see a change in advice so that surplus AstraZeneca vaccines arriving in the next few weeks can be used on younger age groups.

Varadkar said it would be "unfortunate" if hundreds of thousands of vaccines cannot be used.

He added that he would support sending the surplus vaccines to other countries.

"The advantage of being able to use those AZ and Janssen vaccines once we have them a and we'll have them in a few weeks' time a is that would allow us to protect more people, more quickly," Varadkar added.

"If the Delta wave is coming, that makes sense to me.

"It has to be balanced of course with the risk of the very rare blood clot.

"Bear in mind when it comes to Pfizer in young people there's a very rare heart condition you can get too, so it's not that any vaccine has no risks of side-effects. They both do."

Varadkar also said he will not put pressure on the NIAC to confirm its advice before Cabinet meets on Tuesday to decide on the reopening plans for July 5.

"I believe that when it comes to decisions of the use of medicines and vaccines, it's what NIAC says that matters, these are not political decisions," he added.

"Of course it would be useful to have that advice for the Cabinet meeting tomorrow but it's not for me to put pressure or to rush the advice.

"It would be great as it would potentially allow us to speed up and update the vaccine programme, but if they are not able to make a decision, there is good reason for that."

By Cate McCurry and Jonathan McCambridge

source: PA

Copyright 2021 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
(Sharecast News) - Standard Life Aberdeen said on Tuesday that wholly-owned subsidiary Standard Life Mauritius has sold just over 100.8m shares in HDFC Life on the stock exchange in India for around 67.3 bn rupees (652m).

The proceeds will be used for general corporate purposes.



Standard Life said the subsidiary's holding in HDFC is now 3.89% and valued at around 54.6bn rupees (530m).




(Alliance News) - The following is a round-up of updates by London-listed companies, issued on Tuesday and not separately reported by Alliance News:







Appreciate Group PLC - Liverpool-based prepaid card operator - Revenue falls 5.3% to GBP106.8 million in year ended March 31 from GBP112.7 million in prior year. Pretax profit falls 84% to GBP1.3 million from GBP7.7 million. Recommends final dividend per share of 0.6p, bringing the full-year total to 1.0p, up from zero in financial 2020. Trading in first 12 weeks of financial 2022 has been slower than anticipated as gift card sales continue to be hit by the pandemic.







Strategic Minerals PLC - rare earths miner with assets in the US, Australia and Cornwall - Revenue rises 22% to USD3.0 million in 2020 from USD2.5 million in 2019. Swings to pretax profit of USD450,000 from a loss of USD845,000. Does not recommend dividend. Company cut overheads and sold some mineral rights in the year. Start of a second income stream at Leigh Creek copper mine in 2021 will improve the market's perception of the value of Strategic Minerals, company says.







SEEEN PLC - London-based social media app maker - Revenue rises to USD10.1 million in 2020 from USD4.3 million in 2019. Pretax profit rises to USD3.6 million from USD1.7 million. Company says three-year strategy is going as expected at the halfway point, and that it has enough capital for its growth and commercialisation plan.







D4t4 Solutions PLC - Surrey-based data management company - Revenue rises 4.6% to USD22.8 million in year ended March 31 from USD21.8 million in previous year. Pretax profit falls 39% to GBP3.0 million from GBP5.0 million. Final dividend per share 2.0p, bringing the full-year total to 2.81p, up from 2.67p in previous year. Enters new financial year in a strong position after record second half. Trading since March 31 in line with expectations.







Caspian Sunrise PLC - oil explorer in Kazakhstan - Revenue rises 18% to USD14.3 million in 2020 from USD12.1 million in 2019. Swings to pretax loss of USD1.75 million from a profit of USD941,000, after a USD2.6 million impairment. Company "on path to recovery" with improved oil price.







San Leon Energy PLC - oil explorer in Nigeria - Pretax loss narrows to USD9.6 million in 2020 from USD58.7 million in 2019. Expects to commission ELI pipeline, close Oza acquisition and make further transactions in 2021. Does not declare final dividend after a USD33.3 million special dividend in 2020.







Trakm8 Holdings PLC - Birmingham-based telematics hardware company - Revenue falls 18% to GBP16.0 million in year ended March 31, from GBP19.6 million in previous year. Pretax loss widens to GBP1.9 million from GBP1.7 million. Revenue in April and May 2021 is up 28% year-on-year. Company expects to return to pre-pandemic revenue and make a profit, assuming there are no more lockdowns or unmanageable supply chain issues.







Harvest Minerals Ltd - fertiliser producer in Brazil - Revenue rises 35% to USD2.0 million in 2020 from USD1.4 million in 2019. Pretax loss widens to GBP3.3 million from USD910,044. No dividend declared. Company progressed the Arapua fertiliser project to commercialisation, but did not advance its other projects. Sells 17,854 tonnes of KP Fertil product in second quarter of 2021, beating target of 16,000 tonnes. On track to meet 2021 sales target.







Standard Life Private Equity Trust PLC - investor in private equity funds focused on Europe - Swings to pretax profit of GBP113.9 million in six months ended March 31, from a loss of GBP43.6 million year-on-year. Net asset value total return 15% in period, underperforming FTSE All-Share index return of 19%. Net asset value per share 568.4p on March 31 vs 501.0p on September 30.







Myanmar Investments International Ltd - investor in companies in Myanmar - Swings to pretax loss of USD7.7 million in six months ended March 31 from a profit of USD1.7 million year-on-year. Company is in the process of winding down following military coup in Myanmar. Its remaining two investments give Myanmar Investments a net asset value per share of 74 US cents.







Blue Star Capital PLC - investor in esports, gaming and blockchain companies - Pretax loss widens to GBP494,543 in six months ended March 31, from GBP189,460 year-on-year, due to adverse foreign exchange movements. Sees upside from esports investments, while blockchain companies are taking time to mature.







British Honey Co PLC - Buckinghamshire-based spirits maker - Revenue rises to GBP1.5 million in nine months ended December 31, from GBP634,000 in previous 12 months. Pretax loss narrows to GBP1.2 million from GBP2.0 million. Positive trading momentum maintained in 2021. Reopening of bars will provide further opportunities to grow sales.







Aukett Swanke Group PLC - London-based architect - Revenue falls 28% to GBP5.3 million in six months ended March 31 from GBP7.4 million year-on-year. Pretax loss widens to GBP1.0 million from GBP182,000. Covid-19 has caused project delays. Company has taken action to support business model which should improve financial performance, but it is likely to report a loss for the full year.







By Ivan Edwards; ivanedwards@alliancenews.com

Copyright 2021 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
Food delivery giants Uber Eats have reversed a previous decision and allowed an Auckland kava bar to sell its products on the Uber Eats app.

'Four Shells', a popular Auckland kava bar, can now deliver the drink to peoples doorsteps if they live in central Auckland, from 4pm onwards all week!

Four Shells had previously been turned down twice by Uber Eats, a decision which the owners labelled bizzare.

A spokesperson for Uber Eats told the Herald that the company had reviewed their decision and "determined that these products could be sold safely".

Kava is regulated as a food under the Food Standards Code.

Co-owner Todd Henry told the Herald earlier this year that, during level 3 lockdown, they had remained open for contactless takeaway and offered a delivery service that had formed a "pretty substantial" part of the business.

Unlike so many in the hospitality industry, Four Shells has managed to experience growth in the last 18 months, which the owners state is a result of their position as a cultural space.

"As a Pacific space in the city, Four Shells is a reflection and representation of all the beautiful things about the Pacific. Warm, inclusive and relaxed," she told the Herald.
Thousands of British tourists will be arriving on the island this week as the Balearics are placed on Britains Green List. Travel giant, Jet2, has 40 flights from across Britain arriving on Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

Other British travel firms also have large programmes to the island. The President of the Majorcan Hoteliers Federation, Maria Frontera, said that everything was in place to welcome them to the island.
MANISTEE COUNTY  A Manistee man was sentenced on Monday for a felony operating while intoxicated charge after flipping a vehicle into Bear Lake in September.

Frederick Bradford, 58, was sentenced in Manistee Countys 19th Circuit Court and appeared in front of Judge David Thompson.

Bradford was ordered to complete three years of probation.

Bradford was sentenced to serve 10 months in the Manistee County Jail with credit for three days served. However, the remainder of his jail sentence was suspended as long as he follows all his probation terms.

Part of probation means he is expected to complete the 85th District Sobriety Court program.

A felony operating while intoxicated charge is punishable by up to to five years in prison. However recent criminal justice reforms have also been emphasizing alternatives to incarceration and connecting people with mental health and/or addiction services and programs.

Bradfords attorney, Lesya Dull, noted at Bradfords sentencing that he had completed a Bear River Health substance use addiction recovery program and he is expecting to enter into the 85th District Sobriety Court program as well.

The program mandates steps such as support group meetings, random drug and alcohol testing, and offers guided support. The program is open to nonviolent offenders who meet a list of eligibility requirements.

He knows that ultimately no matter how much help he gets from the courts, from his family, from Catholic Human Services, from the help he got at the rehab and from community mental health  it is ultimately his choice to drink or not, Dull said prior to sentencing. He is making the choice to stay sober but he knows he needs that additional help and he has sought that out.

She said the sobriety court program provides structure as well as a lot of accountability, which is something that he knows that he desperately needs that to set him on the right path for the rest of his life.

Thompson said that some of the positives that Bradford has going for him are that he sought treatment and graduated this month after 59 days from the Bear River Health program.

It would be easy to sit up here and say You know what, he only did those things as a way of mitigating his behavior and his hopes of staying out of jail. But your efforts thus far appear to be sincere and (you) appear to really desire a life thats free of alcohol, Thompson said prior to sentencing.

He also said Bradford was taking proper steps by addressing both his alcohol use issues alongside his mental health.

Bradford apologized to the court and said that the incident was a wakeup call.

Thompson also said Bradford has been convicted of 21 misdemeanors and four felony convictions, many that were alcohol related.

On March 15, Bradford pleaded guilty to operating while intoxicated third offense as he appeared in front of Judge David Thompson.

In the plea agreement, the court planned to dismiss a fourth offense habitual offender notice that has a compounding effect on charges.

According to a previous news release from Michigan State Police after the incident, it was reported that troopers from the Cadillac post were called to a rollover crash on Buttwell Road where the vehicle was upside down in the northeast part of Bear Lake.

The release stated that a preliminary investigation showed Bradford had driven straight instead of following the curve of the road, hit a boulder which launched the vehicle into the air, then hit the beach and rolled into the lake.

It was previously stated in a court appearance that according to the state police report, Bradford had a blood draw that showed 0.227 blood alcohol level.

Bradford is also ordered to pay a $500 fine, $750 court costs, $130 crime victims assessment fee, state costs of $68 and a DNA testing fee of $60.

Bradford is prohibited from using or possessing alcoholic beverages or any illicit controlled substances. He is also ordered to complete the courts Thinking Matters cognitive-based or a similar program.

Bradford was ordered to complete 80 hours of community service.

RELATED: Manistee man takes OWI plea deal after car flipped into Bear Lake

Manistee County's sobriety court program nears 1-year anniversary
Mankato's Public Safety Department is considering equipping officers with body-worn cameras. This camera was worn in 2016 by an officer with the Madelia Police Department, one of the first two agencies in south-central Minnesota to use them.
Hello and welcome to our Euro 2020 live blog for this Tuesday evening's heavyweight clash between England and Germany at Wembley. This last 16 game should be a good one, as it so often is when these two teams meet. In our live blog, we'll bring you preview content, team news and then minute-by-minute updates from the match too.

England vs Germany FULL TIME SCORE: 2-0

This is the start of our England vs Germany live blog, with updates following and with the most recent entries nearest the top. So, follow along with us as we enjoy this huge Euro 2020 last 16 game!

A night to remember

Star of the Match

Reaction to England 2-0 Germany

England midfielder Declan Rice on BBC One: "It's incredible, a lot of people had written us off in the group stage, complaints about the performances, not scoring enough but we want to put people wrong, with a full house everyone had the fire in the belly to one, knock Germany out and two progress in the tournament. Raheem Sterling is proving so many people wrong, scoring so many goals. Harry Kane is made for the big occasions, scored the goal that put the game to bed. We don't want to get too ahead of ourselves, but it a massive game in Rome on Saturday. For today, the occasion, the fans, the players that were up for it. The dressing room, I have not been a part of a team with this togetherness. We really believe, with the tournament being at Wembley."

Former Germany head coach Jurgen Klinsmann on BBC One: "You have to recognise the moment. This is England's moment. You've got to realise if you go through the quarter-final you play a semi-final here, and you maybe have a sell-out crowd in the final. It's not going to be an easy road to the final, but it's doable. Now they have showed the belief, Harry Kane broke through and the energy is high. You've got to take advantage of that and win this all."

Former England striker Alan Shearer on BBC One: "The manager deserves huge credit for sticking with Sterling. There was a lot of criticism flying around before the tournament, and when the manager sticks with you you've got to go out and perform, and nobody's performed better than Raheem Sterling in this tournament for England. He's been their go-to guy for the games."

FULL TIME: England 2-0 Germany

Second-half goals from Raheem Sterling and Harry Kane were enough for England to beat Germany and secure their place in the quarter-finals of Euro 2020. Jack Grealish was brilliant after coming on, playing a part in both of the goals, while England's defenders were fantastic, the Thomas Muller chance aside. England will face the winner of Sweden vs Ukraine in the last eight.

Minute 90+1: Four minutes added on

We are into the first of four minutes added on. Will we see any late drama at Wembley?

Minute 90: Goretzka shoots wide

Germany need a goal and fast, but Goretzka had a rush of blood to the head and failed to hit the target with his shot. England are almost there.

Minute 88: England with a midfield switch

Gareth Southgate has brought off Declan Rice, who has run his socks off, and replaced him with Jordan Henderson for the final minutes.

Minute 86: KANE SCORES FOR ENGLAND!

Harry Kane has finally got off the mark at Euro 2020 with a goal that allows England fans to breathe a sigh of relief. Shaw brought the ball forward and picked out Grealish, who took a touch before firing a cross for Kane to head home. England 2-0 Germany.

ENGLAND ARE IN DREAMLAND!!



HARRY KANE pic.twitter.com/GcCmFsXxyl ? ESPN FC (@ESPNFC) June 29, 2021

Minute 81: Muller misses one on one

Havertz played a pass into Thomas Muller, who found himself one on one with Pickford, but he put his shot wide of the bottom left post. Muller instantly dropped to his knees, recognising that he's just missed a huge chance for Germany.

MULLER MISSES THE SITTER!!! pic.twitter.com/b46XR1yOro ? ESPN FC (@ESPNFC) June 29, 2021

Minute 78: Muller's free kick... goes into the wall

Thomas Muller stepped up to try and score the free kick for Germany, but his effort went straight into the wall.

Minute 77: Kimmich fouled on edge of England's box

Maguire clipped Kimmich as he was running towards England's box, following a long ball from Germany. The England has been booked. It is free kick in a dangerous area.

Minute 75: GOAL FOR ENGLAND!

Sterling began and ended England's move, first playing it into Kane, who shifted it to Grealish, who played it to Shaw, before a cross was played across goal for Sterling to score. The boy from Brent, in the shadow of Wembley, scores for England! England 1-0 Germany.

STERLING SCORES!



ENGLAND GOES WILD pic.twitter.com/0GOz8ZRPC4 ? ESPN FC (@ESPNFC) June 29, 2021

Minute 73: Trippier has a knock

Trippier has gone down feeling what appears to be his left hamstring. The England medical team are working on him, but Reece James is warming up Trippier has been allowed to continue, for now at least.

Minute 72: Yellow card for Gosens

Robin Gosens has become the second Germany player to go into the referee's notebook after a late tackle on Kieran Trippier.

Minute 68: First changes of the game

Serge Gnabry has replaced Timo Werner for Germany, while Jack Grealish has come on in place of Bukayo Saka for England.

Minute 65: Germany lacking final ball

Havertz and Werner once again linked up, but this time there was no one to get on the end of Werner's cross as England cleared the ball away.

Minute 59: Saka down but gets back to his feet

Ginter won the ball but caught Saka's ankle with his knee on the follow-through. The England youngster has been able to get back to his feet, but it is another potential injury concern for Southgate to monitor.

Minute 57: Germany's Chelsea trio link up

A well-worked Germany move from inside their own half involved Chelsea trio Rudiger, Havertz and Werner, with the latter having his shot blocked by Stones inside the England area.

Minute 55: Kane carries on

Kane was able to walk off the pitch and has just come back on. It might have only been a scare for the striker.

Minute 54: Kane down injured

Harry Kane went up for a header with Hummels and then instantly grabbed his right knee. The England captain looks like he will have to come off.

Minute 48: Pickford at full stretch

Germany's cross from the left was not cleared and that allowed the ball to come to Havertz, who connected brilliantly with a half-volley that forced Pickford into a save at full stretch.

Minute 46: England get us back underway

England have kicked off the second half. It will be interesting to see the way in which Gareth Southgate and Joachim Low utilise their benches in these final 45 minutes of regular time. If things stay level, we will go to extra time and then potentially penalties.

Haaland has his say

Erling Haaland is clear about who could affect the game for England: Jadon Sancho, who is on the bench.

Time to bring on Sancho... ? Erling Haaland (@ErlingHaaland) June 29, 2021

HALF TIME: England 0-0 Germany

Neither side have been unable to find a breakthrough in the opening 45 minutes. Kane's chance at the end of the half was perhaps the clearest, but Werner will also be heading into the break feeling like he should have given Germany the lead. It's still all to play for in the second half at Wembley.

Minute 45+1: Kane misses gilt-edged chance

Sterling's driving run into the box saw a sea of Germany shirts come around him, but the ball ended up falling into the path of Kane, who was by himself, but he took a poor touch and that spurned the chance for him to get a shot away at Neuer's goal. Hummels did well to get the ball away.

Minute 45: Phillips goes into the book

Kalvin Phillips got a touch on the ball but his studs went over it afterwards, which caused him to connect with Toni Kroos. The referee did not hesitate in brandishing a yellow card.

Minute 44: Trippier's free kick almost works

Trippier took a quick free kick in the direction of Kane, but Hummels was able to get his head on it and turn it behind for a corner.

Minute 43: England free kick in a dangerous area

Harry Kane, who has largely been a peripheral figure during this match, was able to turn and start running towards the Germany goal before Goretzka brought him down. England now have a free kick 25-30 yards out from goal.

Minute 37: England pushing forward

England have had a couple of ventures forward with the ball but it has been to no avail, as Germany have remained resolute in their defending.

Minute 32: Pickford stops Werner

Havertz played a wonderfully weighted pass into the path of Werner, but the Germany forward's low effort was well saved by Pickford. Arguably the best chance of the game so far.

Save! Pickford to the rescue for England to deny Werner... #EURO2020pic.twitter.com/H9lPK8P285 ? UEFA EURO 2020 (@EURO2020) June 29, 2021

Minute 27: Chance goes missing for England

Kalvin Phillips played a beautiful pass into Trippier that the England right-back hung up for Maguire in the area, but the England centre-back was tentative with his header and saw his effort go wide. That was a good chance for England.

Minute 25: Ginter receives first booking

Matthias Ginter has picked up the first yellow card of the game after he complained about his foul on Luke Shaw, who was dragged down to the ground by the Germany defender.

Minute 22: Things are settling down

The intensity of the opening 15 minutes has died down somewhat, with both the England and Germany players playing with a bit more tranquility now.

Minute 16: Sterling tests Neuer

Raheem Sterling attempted a shot from 25 yards out and it almost came off, as Manuel Neuer had to scramble across his goal to make the save.

Minute 13: Rudiger fouls Saka

Bukayo Saka got away from Kroos and then Rudiger had to foul the England youngster to stop him from getting into the box. England did not capitalise from the wide free kick, though.

Minute 9: Havertz's free kick... is into the wall!

Toni Kroos and Thomas Muller laid the ball off for Kai Havertz, who attempted a shot at goal, but it was blocked by Rice. A let off for England.

Minute 7: Goretzka fouled in a dangerous area

Leon Goretzka made one of his trademark runs from midfield and was heading towards the box before Declan Rice fouled him just outside. A free kick in a dangerous area for Germany.

Minute 3: All Germany so far

Germany have started this game with a lot of confidence and are dominating the ball in these first few minutes.

KICK OFF: Germany get us underway

Here we go! Germany have kicked off this Euro 2020 last-16 tie at Wembley Stadium. Stay with us for updates from England vs Germany.

17:55 CEST: Who will advance: England or Germany?

We want to hear your thoughts on who you think will advance to the quarter-finals out of England and Germany. Have your say in our poll below.

17:50 CEST: The Germany fans inside Wembley

There is a decent turnout from the Germany fans inside Wembley, although they are obviously outnumbered by the home support. Incredibly, the atmosphere will go up a notch once the match gets underway.

17:45 CEST: Jurgen Klopp is ready for England vs Germany

A Jurgen Klopp lookalike went viral when Liverpool played Tottenham Hotspur in the 2019 Champions League final, and the same person is at Wembley Stadium for this evening's England vs Germany match at Euro 2020. He certainly looks ready for this fixture, even if it not the real Jurgen Klopp!

17:40 CEST: England's defensive approach

England have gone with just three attacking-minded players in Harry Kane, Raheem Sterling and Bukayo Saka today, so Gareth Southgate has clearly placed an emphasis on keeping things tight defensively. The Three Lions have plenty of attacking talent on the bench, though, in the form of Jack Grealish, Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho, Mason Mount and Phil Foden.

17:20 CEST: Memories of Euro 96

Germany are fondly looking back at their Euro 96 victory over England, which took place through penalties on British soil. They're just watching highlights "to pass the time", say Germany's official account.

To pass the time until kick-off https://t.co/atn7J7RtUb ? Germany (@DFB_Team_EN) June 29, 2021

17:00 CEST: Just one hour to go!

It's almost here. There's just an hour to go before England vs Germany, with both teams having already arrived at Wembley for the big game. Stay tuned to this live blog for all the build-up.

16:50 CEST: The England vs Germany line-ups are in!

Here we go then! We have the official line-ups from both teams. England are starting with: Pickford; Trippier, Walker, Stones, Maguire, Shaw; Rice, Phillips; Saka, Sterling; Kane. Meanwhile, Germany's starting XI is: Neuer; Kimmich, Ginter, Hummels, Rudiger, Gosens; Goretzka, Kroos; Muller, Havertz; Werner.

16:30 CEST: Waiting for the England vs Germany line-ups

The starting XIs from Gareth Southgate and from Joachim Low are expected in the next 15 to 20 minutes. Let's see who starts for these two European giants in this big last 16 clash.

16:10 CEST: Germany's fun fact

Germany are looking back to 2009, when their U21s thrashed England 4-0. Two of their current players were involved in that game 12 years ago, namely Manuel Neuer and Mats Hummels.

15:40 CEST: The UK's biggest capacity event since the pandemic

There are crowds of around 40,000 expected at Wembley for this last 16 match. That means that this England vs Germany game will be the event in the UK with the largest capacity since March 2020.

15:15 CEST: Who will start for Germany against England?

Germany are expected to stick with their three-at-the-back system, which means their probable line-up is as follows: Neuer; Ginter, Hummels, Rudiger; Kimmich, Goretzka, Kroos, Gosens; Havertz, Gnabry, Muller.

15:05 CEST: England's predicted line-up vs Germany

Gareth Southgate has some big decisions to make as he picks his team for this huge last 16 clash. He could spring a surprise, but the predicted England starting XI is: Pickford; Walker, Stones, Maguire, Shaw; Rice, Grealish, Philipps; Foden, Kane, Sterling.

14:50 CEST: When does England vs Germany start? Where can you watch it?

This England vs Germany game is in the early Euro 2020 time slot of 18:00 CEST, which is 17:00 BST or 12:00 EDT. For those watching on from the United Kingdom, the match will be on BBC's TV channels and streaming platforms. In the USA, it's ESPN who have the rights. There are more details on when and where to watch this match here.
France's suffered a shock exit from Euro 2020 at the last-16 stage after a penalty shootout defeat to Switzerland on Monday evening.

On what was a difficult night for the France team on the pitch, it seems that all was not well either in the stands, specifically amongst the families of certain players.

According to RMC Sport, Adrien Rabiot's mother, Veronique Rabiot, clashed with the families of Paul Pogba and Kylian Mbappe at full time.

As Mbappe's decisive penalty was saved, Veronique Rabiot approached the families of Pogba and Mbappe, with a number of incendiary comments, such as questioning how Pogba had given the ball away in the build-up to Switzerland's third goal.

She then went up to Mbappe's father, telling him to teach his son to be less arrogant, with these comments provoking a furious row.

The tension on the pitch went into the stands

The clash in the stands followed a similar clash on the pitch following Switzerland's 90th-minute equaliser, courtesy of Mario Gavranovic.

Pogba's failure to retain the ball prompted a frustrated reaction from Adrien Rabiot, who threw up his hands in disgust, before an argument broke out between the pair which had to be broken up by Didier Deschamps.

Deschamps had to intervene

Deschamps went on to state at full time that he had to calm the tense situation down with extra time still to play.

"I had to calm it down a little," said Deschamps.

"We had to stay calm, because there was still extra time to play."
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Altercation may have led victims in double homicide in Peoria to kill each other
US Department of Labor awards $11.6M in grants to improve delivery of workforce services, measure effectiveness in five states
If youre a Fulton County property owner and want to appeal your 2021 property tax assessment, you have until early August to do so.
Brenda Goodman is a senior news writer for WebMD. Andy Miller is editor and CEO of Georgia Health News. This is the first of a series. Chris Bolton and Dejania Oliver contributed additional reporting.
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George Edward Logan, age 82 of Conneautville, PA passed away on June 27, 2021, at Hamot Hospital with family. He was born November 14, 1938, in Meadville, PA to the late Catherine (Ohl) Logan and Thomas P. Logan. He graduated in 1957 from Conneautville High School where he was a star athlete
SAN FRANCISCO

Switzerland

June 28, 2021

Eliott Jones

Connected remote patient monitoring shortens the pathway from measurement to action in a clinical regimen;

Easy to use with an existing, ubiquitous device  the smartphone  removes adherence barriers;

Allows users to measure and monitor their blood pressure in their 'natural' environment, which is where blood pressure should be monitored;

App form factor offers continuous product improvement and feature updates; and

Unprecedented data insights drive higher value for drug development and lower insurance costs.

Fred St. Goar

May 2021

Patrick Schoettker

France

Germany

Spain

Switzerland

June 28 - July 1, 2021

July 2017

Switzerland

Mindy M. Hull

Kayla Bortak

, and LAUSANNE,/PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Biospectal, the remote patient monitoring and biosensing software company, today announced the alpha launch of Biospectal OptiBP for iOS at MWC Barcelona 2021. Backed by grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Grand Challenges Canada, and Innosuisse, Biospectal OptiBP empowers people worldwide with a medical-grade software that integrates directly into the ubiquitous smartphone already in their pocket, enabling instantaneous blood pressure measurement and monitoring, anytime and anywhere. The alpha launch of Biospectal OptiBP for iOS follows the public beta launch of Biospectal OptiBP for Android announced earlier this year at CES 2021. View a short video of how Biospectal OptiBP works here.The World Health Organization estimates 1.13Bn people worldwide have hypertension. Dubbed the "silent killer," only one in five people afflicted with hypertension has control over their condition. People need an easy to use means to accurately measure, monitor, track and share their blood pressure data with their doctors; a need that the onset of COVID-19 and demand for telehealth solutions has only amplified. Biospectal's patented OptiBP technology replaces the antiquated traditional blood pressure cuff and provides medical-grade blood pressure measurement and management at the 'point of patient' in the time it takes to download an app."During the course of developing Biospectal OptiBP and sharing our plans with third parties, we were surprised to find how widespread and intense the need was for a scalable, practical, and convenient way to measure blood pressure," said, CEO and co-founder of Biospectal. "Our early research across the board revealed that the current cuff-based method of measuring blood pressure was both cumbersome for patients (so they didn't use it themselves), and drove a lot of cost across players in the care process around hypertension. Bringing our software-based solution to the iPhone is a major step in our mission to make monitoring readily available and connecting actionable data to clinicians around the world. We have found this to be universally appealing across almost all touchpoints and players involved."How Biospectal OptiBP Works. The Biospectal OptiBP app runs on a typical smartphone and uses the built-in camera to record a user's blood flow via their fingertip quickly and easily. A measurement is rendered in approximately 20 seconds  half the time of a typical blood pressure cuff. Biospectal's proprietary algorithms and optical signal capture methods then transform the captured data into blood pressure values. Additionally, the captured blood pressure data connects seamlessly with a user's clinicians to support treatment regimens that help improve health, longevity and quality of life. Key benefits include:No other blood pressure monitoring and management device on the market offers both the medical-grade accuracy and convenience of Biospectal. "As a cardiologist who is actively tracking patients and their vital signs, my work is moving with increasing momentum to remote engagement through telemedicine solutions. The Covid pandemic has accelerated this process by at least several years, where suddenly remote connection with patients has become essential to the basic care regimen," says Dr., MD. "I can't see us going back to the way we used to do things, and that's a great thing for patients, doctors, and the cost and effectiveness of the health care delivery system. Simply put, remote patient monitoring will be part of the status quo going forward."A large-scale, third-party clinical research study published by Scientific Reports in Nature validated the ability of the Biospectal OptiBP smartphone app to accurately measure blood pressure utilizing transdermal optical sensing and a smartphone camera lens. Additionally, intwo independent global research and validation studies using its Biospectal OptiBP blood pressure measurement app. These studies further Biospectal's ability to transform the global network of smartphones into a connected, clinical-grade blood pressure monitoring platform  democratizing access and bringing the power of remote patient monitoring to people and communities worldwide.Biospectal trained its software algorithm using over two million resulting invasively acquired blood pressure samples recorded in the operating room of the CHUV in partnership with the Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology (CSEM), and then validated it with outpatients in the hypertension clinic CHUV. The company's patented technology represents 10+ years of non-invasive optical biosensing R&D led by Biospectal Chief Medical Advisor, Dr., M.D..The Biospectal OptiBP for iOS alpha is available now in the US, UK,and. Interested participants can register for the alpha here or sign up to be notified once Biospectal OptiBP becomes available in their country. Biospectal is attending MWC Barcelona,. Visit us at Hall 2 Stand 2H14.1 and contact biospectal@wearemgp.com to set up a meeting. Access the press kit here.About Biospectal Biospectal is the remote monitoring and biosensing software company focused on the worldwide democratization of clinical monitoring. We make it easy for hypertension patients and health conscious consumers to take on hypertension - aka the 'silent killer' and #1 chronic health condition worldwide. Biospectal's OptiBP smartphone application and data platform removes the outdated blood pressure cuff barrier and enables frequent and intelligent blood pressure tracking via a fingertip applied to a smartphone camera lens. By optically measuring blood flow through the skin, our proprietary algorithm turns light information into blood pressure values. Now, anyone with a smartphone can have the convenience of a connected blood pressure monitor with them anytime, anywhere.Founded, Biospectal is headquartered in Lausanne,, with an additional office in Silicon Valley. Biospectal's patented technology was co-developed & clinically validated by the Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology and represents 10+ years of non-invasive optical biosensing R&D. Read our news, like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, or learn more at https://biospectal.com.All trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners.###, Mercury Global Partners for Biospectal, +1 4158899977, biospectal@wearemgp.com, Mercury Global Partners for Biospectal, +1 305 697 0027, biospectal@wearemgp.comSOURCE Biospectal
Tapsee Pannu is super pumped to meet us in her upcoming movie, Haseen Dilruba.



Her fans will be able to see a new side of her on Netflix, as the movie is going to skip a theatrical release.

The movie also features Harshvardhan Rane and Vikrant Massey. The shooting of the movie was completed in 2020 and it's all set to release on the OTT platform on 2nd July.

The murder mystery is directed by Vinil Mathew and written by Kanika Dhillon.

 Instagram/Tapsee Pannu

In one of the interviews, Tapsee also spoke about how beautifully the story is written and said that she got a chance to experiment with her role.



As on sets, since celebrities learn a thing or two about their co-stars, Tapsee and Vinil Mathew recently joked about Harshvardhan 'having a fetish for teeth'.

 Instagram/Tapsee Pannu

The first day of the shoot required both Tapsee and Harshvardhan to do an intimate, kissing scene.

Vinil told in the interview, "I feel bad for Harsh, because he came in the middle of the schedule, and no time to warm up or meet anybody. The first day he lands up he has to do a kissing scene." Tapsee then added to this, "Harsh was very scared, he thought maybe I'll beat him up or something."

She further mentioned that if she knew about the fetish earlier, she would have made an appointment with the dentist before the shoot.

 Netflix

Harshvardhan responded saying that he was 'nervous about the the 'proximity' with Tapsee Pannu. But the actress made the whole scene comfortable for him.



Harshvardhan explained the remark saying, "I'll tell you the context. They asked me yesterday what are the things I look out for. So I felt I'm very shallow, so I said I look at the teeth, the skin, and the eyes."

 Netflix

He then said that this helps him understand how hygienic the person is whereas the skin helps understand the health of the person and eyes help define honesty. Harshvardhan also pointed out that the chemistry between the two was 'written and designed in a certain way' in Haseen Dilruba.



 Netflix

Haseen Dilruba is a story of a small-town girl who marries a docile man but seeks romance with a river-rafter. The mystery unfolds after her husband is killed and the wife becomes the first suspect of the murder.



On the work front, Tapsee has a good lineup of movies this year including Rashmi Rocket, Dobaaraa, Shabaash Mithu and Looop Lapeta. Whereas Harshvarshan was last seen in Taish.
Let's admit it.



While we were all (the entire world) together in the lockdowns during the first wave of Covid-19, it was definitely strange for us Indians to see the rest of the world open up while we still followed lockdown procedures under the second wave.

 iStock

 iStock

The main reason why other countries have been able to get back to normalcy faster is because of an effective vaccination policy, with many nations like the US vaccinating a majority of its population.



How have they done it? Simple. They had a lot of vaccines already, which was certainly not the case for India which has a considerably enormous population of 136 crores.

 iStock

Well, good news for everyone, as it looks like the Moderna vaccine has become the latest vaccine to finally get the nod for use in India.



Indian multinational pharmaceutical company, Cipla has been given an all-clear to import Moderna's Covid vaccine for restricted emergency use in the country.

 Reuters

According to Niti Ayog member (Health) V.K. Paul the new drug permission will pave way for the vaccine to be imported in India, making it the fourth vaccine for the country.



On June 28 (Monday), the Mumbai-headquartered Pharma giant had filed an application to seek permission to import the Moderna vaccine.

It had referred to DCGI notices dated April 15 and June 1 stating that if a vaccine is approved by the USFDA for EUA, it can be granted marketing authorization without bridging trial and assessment of safety data.

This was in the case of the first 100 beneficiaries of vaccines that had to be submitted before rolling out an immunization program.

#Moderna, the first international vaccine in India



No bridging trials in India for #MODERNA vaccine



Storage at -25 to -15, for 7 months



Normal storage after vial is opened is 30 days



Dr VK Paul, Member-Health, @NITIAayog pic.twitter.com/ZROgatnhEn  PIB India (@PIB_India) June 29, 2021

According to Moderna, the US government has also agreed to donate to a certain number of doses of the Moderna vaccine through COVAX to India.



It has sought approval from the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO) for these vaccines.

Pfizer and Moderna have both demanded an indemnity bond that will exempt them from legal claims in case of any adverse effects from the vaccines when administered in India.

Moderna, which is similar to Pfizer in terms of being an mRNA vaccine, is said to be 90 percent effective against Covid.

 Reuters

According to reports, after Moderna, Pfizer will be the next in line for use in India.


Forget the Russians and Chinese, the next batch of cybersecurity experts will in all probability come from India.



 iStock

A 20-year-old girl, Aditi Singh, who hails from Delhi, recently won Rs 22 Lakhs for finding a bug in Microsofts Azure cloud systems.



Not only that, she actually helped Microsoft, by suggesting what should be done so that similar bugs do not crop up in the future, and how to patch the one she found.

 Aditi Singh

Aditi is a self-taught cybersecurity expert who started by hacking an old WiFi system of her neighbour.



Soon, she took up ethical hacking and has helped a number of companies ever since.

 iStock

Currently, she is a Cyber Security Analyst for MapMyIndia, an Indian GPS and location-based services provider, and holds a certification from the EC-Council.



Ever since she took up ethical hacking, Aditi has helped over 40 companies which include the likes of including Facebook, TikTok, Microsoft, Mozilla, Paytm, Ethereum and HP. In fact, she actually won a bounty of $7,500 Rs 5.5 Lakhs, from Facebook, for finding a similar sort of a bug, just a few months ago.

 Reuters

Aditi found an RCE bug in Microsofts Azure cloud system. In very rudimentary terms an RCE or remote code execution bug allows miscreants to remotely execute code from the target device.



This can lead to machines getting locked up by ransomware, or downloading illegal content onto your devices.

 Reuters

This was the same sort of bug that she found for Facebook.



Apparently, Aditi had reported the bug to Microsoft about two and a half months ago, in April, but back then, they did not acknowledge having received the report.

It was only after their investigation into the matter did they acknowledge her discovery, and rewarded a bounty of $30,000 or roughly Rs 22 Lakhs.

Interestingly enough, Aditi wanted to pursue medicine and actually took up an interest in ethical hacking, while she was preparing for her medical entrance exam, NEET.

Although an education and a career in medical sciences and medicine would not materialise, she did end up getting into a career thats just as rewarding.
Twitter recently dropped an incorrect map of India on its website that showed Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh as a separate country. The social media giant has already been facing legal trouble in the country and now a second FIR this month has been filed against the micro-blogging website in UP. Twitter India chief Manish Maheshwari has been personally named in the FIR.

 Unsplash/jeremy-zero

The incorrect map which has now been removed was displayed in the Tweep Life section of Twitters website after it was flagged by a user. "This act of treason has been committed intentionally and action should be taken," reads the complaint filed by Bajrang Dal's leader Praveen Bhati.



The case has been filed under Section 505 (2) of the Indian Penal Code which deals with creating or promoting enmity, hatred or ill-will between classes. The case was also filed under Section 74 of the IT (Amendment) Act 2008.

 Facebook/Manish Maheshwari

Twitter chief Mr Maheshwari was summoned earlier this month over a separate FIR after links to the assault of a Muslim man in UP caused a controversy. The claim made by journalists Rana Ayyub and Saba Naqvi was debunked by the police as fake news and were also named in the FIR. The FIR said that tweets were shared with a motive to "provoke communal sentiments.



Twitter is amidst a tussle with the Indian Government and is at a stand-off over compliance with the new IT rules. This is not the first time Twitter has shown an incorrect map of India as it has happened two more times in the past few months. The IT ministry could issue a show-cause notice to the social media giant and may also recommend action for the repeated offence.

 Unsplash/joshua-hoehne

Twitters stand-off with the Indian government has also caused an interim grievance officer, Dharmendra Chatur, to quit his position as of this week. In the past, Twitter also got into trouble over censoring posts related to the farmers protests against the new controversial laws earlier this year. The Indian Government also asked the site to remove the "manipulated media" tag on tweets posted by BJP leaders. The social media giant refused to comply which resulted in the Delhi Police visiting Twitters office in Delhi and Gurgaon.


Meridian, MS (39302)

Today

Sunny, along with a few afternoon clouds. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High around 90F. Winds ESE at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Considerable cloudiness. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low near 70F. Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph.
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In summer 2020, The New York Times coordinated a nationwide project to document the lives of Americans out of work because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The study involved collaborating with 11 other local newsrooms around the U.S. The Messenger-Inquirer was the only newspaper from Kentucky in the collaboration. The resulting collection of stories was published Oct. 23, 2020, in the New York Times print edition and at nytimes.com/outofwork. The following list is the Messenger-Inquirer's local unemployment coverage from that time period; read more by clicking the "New York Times Project" header. Click on "Out Of Work In America" to go to the full
Europe imported around 1,500 tonnes of ferro-titanium per month on average from Russia in the past three years, including Scandinavia and Turkey, with 1,700-1,800 tonnes imported per month in the first four months of 2021according to industry estimates. Some of those imports into Europe from Russia may be sold on again to countries outside of Europe, trade sources said. Total ferro-titanium exports were around 20,000 tonnes from Russia in 2020.

The Russian government has approved temporary export duties on 340 steel and non-ferrous metals sold outside the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), which are set to take effect from August 1 through December 31, according to an official government decree. The dutys base rate will be 15%, with a specific rate of $150 per tonne on ferro-alloys such as ferro-titanium. The move is the latest in a series of steps by countries around the world...
Ambassador of Belarus P.Vzyatkin meets the Speaker of the National Assembly of Kenya

On June 29, 2021, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Belarus to the Republic of Kenya Pavel Vzyatkin met with Speaker of the National Assembly of Kenya Justin Muturi.

During the meeting, the Ambassador of Belarus informed about the competences and activities of the Belarusian Parliament in the field of international relations and expressed interest in expanding inter-parliamentary cooperation between Belarus and Kenya.

The Speaker of the National Assembly of Kenya noted the importance of forming a legal basis for bilateral cooperation as a foundation for the comprehensive development of Belarusian-Kenyan relations. J. Muturi confirmed the readiness of the Parliament of Kenya to assist in the implementation of joint initiatives in various areas.

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New federal regulatory framework is proposed to control unwanted travelers found in ballast water of ships plying the Great Lakes

New federal regulatory framework is proposed to control unwanted travelers found in ballast water of ships plying the Great Lakes

As part of Aquatic Invasive Species Awareness Week, MI Environment is highlighting the issue this week. Today's story by EGLE staffer Sarah LeSage is from the recently released State of the Great Lakes report.

Zebra mussels have forever changed the Great Lakes by causing serious ecological and economic harm. They are native to the Caspian Sea in Eastern Europe and were discovered in Lake St. Clair in 1988, having arrived in ballast water that was discharged from an oceangoing ship.

Ballast water has been the primary pathway for non-native aquatic species to become established in the Great Lakes basin as global trade connects the Great Lakes to ports across the world. The zebra mussel invasion of the Great Lakes played a central role in prompting passage of federal legislation in 1990.

The Nonindigenous Aquatic Nuisance Prevention and Control Act (NANPCA) was established to prevent the introduction of all new aquatic invasive species and to limit the spread of aquatic invasive species already in U.S. waters. Among other important objectives, the NANPCA also initiated ballast water regulation. Regulating ballast water -- which ships take onboard to control or maintain trim, draught, stability or stresses of the vessel during a voyage -- is complicated, evolving and influenced by economic growth and global trade, as well as by the irreversible harm that can be caused by aquatic invasive species.

Since the pivotal NANPCA, ballast water regulation has changed substantially with advancements at international, national and state levels. In the absence of protective federal regulations, Michigan has since 2007 required oceangoing vessels to treat discharged ballast water to prevent the movement of aquatic invasive species. The vessels can use one of four treatment methods: hypochlorite, chlorine dioxide, ultraviolet radiation or deoxygenation. Vessels can also use an alternative treatment, but they have to prove its effectiveness to the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE).

Michigan is not the only government body to pass ballast water regulations. The U.S. Coast Guard published rules, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) developed a permitting program and other Great Lakes states developed and implemented their own programs. In response to this complex regulatory framework, the Coast Guard Authorization Act of 2018 was established. Also known as the Vessel Incidental Discharge Act (VIDA), it streamlines requirements for the commercial vessel community.

VIDA creates a new regulatory framework that:

Overhauls ballast water regulation in the United States.

Establishes a new part of the Clean Water Act.

Preempts state authority to have state-specific regulations.

Establishes the USEPA as the federal lead in establishing new standards for ballast water.

Establishes the U.S. Coast Guard as the federal lead on monitoring, inspection and standards enforcement.

Authorizes $50 million for a Great Lakes and Lake Champlain Invasive Species Program.

In accordance with VIDA, the USEPA released in October 2020 a proposed new standard on its VIDA website, which explains the proposed new standards. Michigan submitted numerous concerns about the failure of the proposed standards to protect water quality and prevent the introduction of aquatic invasive species and their spread within the Great Lakes. In addition, a formal objection to the proposed standard was submitted in December 2020 by Governor Whitmer. The USEPA is evaluating the comments prior to finalizing the standards.

More than 30 years have passed since the initial zebra mussel invasion and discovery. They have quickly colonized all the Great Lakes, spread to many inland lakes in the region and continue to spread to the western U.S. and Canada by recreational vessels. New aquatic invasive species which can be spread from nearby waters or from across the world continue to threaten the Great Lakes. While advancements have been made to mitigate some of the risks of introducing aquatic invasive species via ballast from oceangoing vessels, there is more work to be done. It's critical to remain engaged on ballast water regulation and make investments in treatment technology to protect the unique Great Lakes ecosystem and the people and businesses that rely on them.

Photo caption: Great Lakes freighter on the water with a kayaker looking on.

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Lynsey Mukomel 517-599-2746 Attorney General

June 29, 2021

LANSING - Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel is warning Michigan residents to beware of scam artists and price-gougers who will try to take advantage of desperate home and vehicle owners in the next several days and weeks. Of particular concern are reports of price-gouging by towing companies that have towed cars out of flooded roadways and impounded them - as well as fly-by-night contractors offering to help homeowners clean up after the weekend storms.

"I am concerned that bad actors may use the weekend's flooding to overcharge or scam people who need assistance," Nessel said. "Our Consumer Protection team is committed to investigating complaints and I encourage people to contact our office if you believe an entity is engaging in price gouging or other fraudulent behavior. We stand ready to hold accountable anyone who attempts to take advantage of this devastating situation."

Nessel re-issued three consumer alerts related to natural disasters after the Department learned of complaints about possible price-gouging by towing companies recovering vehicles that were abandoned during flooding in Southeast Michigan. There are hundreds of abandoned vehicles through Southeast Michigan following recent rains that caused significant flooding and damage.

The first alert is focused on vehicle towing and explains the process to complain about unreasonable fees.

Drivers have the right to challenge whether your vehicle was properly towed and the reasonableness of towing and storage fees, but you must do so in a timely manner and in an appropriate district court.

The process requires you to file a petition in the district court with jurisdiction over the location from which your car was towed. You must file your petition within 20 days from the date on the notice that your vehicle was towed as abandoned. And you will be responsible for applicable court filing fees. The petition and instructions for how to fill it out are included with the mailed notice, or available on the Secretary of State's webpage (Petition Regarding Impoundment of Motor Vehicle (DC90) form). If you request a hearing, you can also get your vehicle back while you are awaiting the hearing outcome, but you will have to either:

post a towing and storage bond, (which will include the accrued towing and storage fees) with the court; or pay the abandoned vehicle fees and the accrued towing and storage fees to the custodian of your vehicle.

If the court finds the vehicle was improperly towed, you will be reimbursed for the towing and storage fees, and the abandoned vehicle fee will be returned.

To file a complaint with the Attorney General, or get additional information, contact: Consumer Protection Division

P.O. Box 30213

Lansing, MI 48909

517-335-7599

Fax: 517-241-3771

Toll free: 877-765-8388

Online complaint form

Your connection to consumer protection is just a click or phone call away. The Department provides a library of resources for consumers to review anytime on a variety of topics.
MDHHS provides State Emergency Relief to low-income residents who need home repairs because of flooding

MDHHS provides State Emergency Relief to low-income residents who need home repairs because of flooding

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: June 29, 2021

CONTACT: Bob Wheaton, 517-241-2112

LANSING, Mich. - Low-income residents affected by recent flooding in Michigan may be eligible for emergency relief assistance through the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS).

The State Emergency Relief program provides immediate help to families and individuals facing conditions of extreme hardship or for emergencies that threaten health and safety. It is available to eligible residents that need help with home repairs necessary to correct unsafe conditions and restore essential services.

Applicants must be the owner or purchaser of the home and meet other eligibility requirements - including income limits - to qualify.

"Flooding can be devastating - especially to households that lack the resources to fix unsafe conditions that can affect their families," said Lewis Roubal, MDHHS chief deputy director for opportunity. "MDHHS is committed to assisting these families in paying for home repairs that are necessary due to flooding or other reasons."

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has issued a state of emergency in Wayne County in response to flooding. More flooding is possible in Michigan, with flood warnings in Kent, Barry and Clinton counties in place until Thursday.

The lifetime maximum amount of funds available for non-energy related home repairs is $1,500 per household. State Emergency Relief Program assistance is available for repairs not covered by homeowner's insurance for the basic house structure, hot water heater, septic/waste disposal system, doors/windows, extermination services, electrical, plumbing, roofs and wells.

To apply for State Emergency Relief, visit www.michigan.gov/MIBridges. Anyone who does not have internet access or needs assistance applying can contact their local MDHHS office. Or call 2-1-1 to be referred to other community resources.

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West Maple Elementary School has the 21st Century Model School Library for the 2020-2021 School Year

West Maple Elementary School has the 21st Century Model School Library for the 2020-2021 School Year

Martin Ackley, Director of Public and Governmental Affairs 517-241-4395 Education

June 29, 2021

LANSING - The West Maple Elementary School library, part of Birmingham Public Schools in Oakland County, has earned the state's 21st Century Model School Library (SL 21) award for the 2021-2022 school year, the Library of Michigan (LM) announced today.

"The West Maple Elementary School library is a place where students and members of the community have opportunities to learn beyond their daily experiences, and that is a model for every school library," said State Superintendent Dr. Michael Rice.

The library won the SL 21 honor for its focus on bringing diverse life experiences to the school community as well as outstanding academic support. During the challenges brought about by the pandemic this past year, school librarian Carrie Betts created a virtual read aloud and discussion program, using titles from the MISelf in Books list, to her students and school community groups. MISelf in Books is an annual list from the state school librarians' Michigan Association for Media in Education (MAME) that promotes quality diverse books for preschool through high school readers.

Rice noted that the support that Model SL 21 libraries provide to their students and schools is aligned with Michigan's Top 10 strategic education plan.

State Librarian Randy Riley said the quality work that Betts and school principal Jason Pesamoska do for their students is an integral element to successful learning.

"Learning is about academics and also about understanding the wider community," Riley said. "The support the school and school library are providing West Maple's students as they learn about experiences outside their local environment are a successful part of that endeavor."

The Model SL 21 program recognizes particularly high-quality school libraries and library media specialists and promotes the development of similar initiatives in other schools. The program is based on the LM's School Library 21st Century benchmarks. The West Maple Elementary School library holds exemplary status in the SL 21 program through January 2023.

West Maple Elementary School library staff are available to consult with school district leaders, school librarians, and educators who want to develop, expand, or cast a new vision for their school library programs. Interested persons may contact Carrie Betts at cbetts@birmingham.k12.mi.us or Karren Reish at reishk@michigan.gov.
On the afternoon of June 26, residents of the Upper Thumb were going about their Saturday, trying to enjoy what seemed like one of the first normal summer weekends in ages. Despite the rain, the annual Ribstock festival returned to Caseville for the first time in two years, and music lovers gathered in Port Austin for Porch Fest.

Sometime around 4 p.m., the startling sound of an emergency alert blared from cell phones all over the county. The National Weather Service had issued a tornado watch for the region. Not surprising, given the steady procession of rain and storms the Thumb had received over the preceding days.

Then, just before 6 p.m., an EF-2 tornado touched down southwest of Port Austin and cut a four-mile swath of destruction through the area, leaving homes leveled and six people injured.

Residents of Port Austin have asked why they received no warning of Saturdays tornado, which would have given them more time to head to their basements or seek shelter. The answer to that question can be found in the damage caused by the tornado and the nature of the storm itself.

Huron County Emergency Services Director Randy Miller has spent the last few days working to coordinate clean-up and recovery efforts. He said the power outage caused by the storm prevented the towns emergency siren from sounding. The twister developed so quickly there was no time to sound the alarm before the power was lost and the backup power could kick in. He was thankful there was no loss of life and that those who were injured will recover.

Were one of the luckiest unlucky (communities) around, Miller said.

Megan Varcie, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in White Lake, said a special marine warning for the waters of Lake Huron off Port Austin had been issued just before the tornado hit, which warned of possible waterspouts. She said the geographic nature of the Upper Thumb can make it difficult for NWS radar to detect storm rotation close to the ground.

She emphasized the NWS had issued the tornado watch just hours before and urged Upper Thumb residents to take heed whenever watches for severe weather are issued.

If a tornado watch is issued for your area, you want to make sure you have several ways to receive warnings and updated information about the weather forecast and be on the lookout for severe weather, Varcie said. You dont want to be caught outside or  especially in the Thumb region  out on the water. Its important to increase your awareness when theres a watch in effect.

Varcie said NWS meteorologists coordinate with the Storm Prediction Center, a special section of the NWS focused on severe weather, to issue watches and warnings. They discuss weather conditions and favorability for the development of storms and particularly tornados. They use factors like temperature, humidity and wind speed and rotation.

To confirm tornados and their severity, meteorologists will review local reports of damage as well as things like photos or videos. They will then visit the affected area to inspect and document the damage and review all relevant data to make their final decision.
LOS ANGELES (AP)  Greg Da Bull Noll, who became a surfing legend by combining a gregarious, outsized personality with the courage and skill to ride bigger, more powerful waves than anyone had ever attempted, has died. He was 84.

Noll, who had lived in the picturesque, seaside town of Crescent City, California, died Monday of natural causes, according to an Instagram post from his son's company, Noll Surfboards. Requests for comment from the Noll family were not immediately returned, and it was not clear where he died.

One of the first and arguably one of the greatest big-wave riders, Noll was much more than a surfer. He was also an entrepreneur who helped transform the sport with his Greg Noll surfboards, which were among the first to be built from balsa wood, a substance that made them more maneuverable and light enough for most people to use.

He also appeared in numerous surfing documentaries, worked as a photographer on the 1967 film Surfari and was the stunt double for James Mitchum in the 1964 film Ride the Wild Surf. In 2010, he and his son Jed launched a surf apparel line.

It was the towering waves he caught, coupled with a blunt but friendly manner, that made Nolls reputation.

From the early 1950s through the 1960s, he traveled from Southern California to Mexico, Australia and the North Shore of Hawaiis island of Oahu in search of the biggest waves.

It was in October 1957, at Waimea Bay on Oahus North Shore, where he led a handful of surfers to a place where the waves can reach three stories high in the winter. The bay was said to be impossible to surf, and residents claimed nobody had tried since a young California surfer, Dickie Cross, had been killed there in 1943.

Grainy footage shows Noll catching a wave perhaps as high as 30 feet (9 meters), then somehow managing to stay standing as it pitches him some 10 feet (3 meters) or more straight down its face. From there, he moves outside and rides it nearly to the shore.

Years later, Noll would let out a cackle and an expletive as he recalled his first thought after finishing that ride: Im still alive!

From then on, there was no stopping the surfer who was instantly recognizable in his distinctive black-and-white jailhouse shorts. He started wearing them, he once said, so people would know it was him on a wave and get out of his way.

In 1964, Noll was credited with being the first person to ride a wave at Oahus Third Reef Pipeline. In 1969, at Hawaiis Makaha Beach, he rode what surfers who saw it asserted was the biggest wave anybody ever caught up to that point.

There was no definitive film footage taken that day, however, and in recent years, others have said the wave was no more than 20 feet (6 meters), not even as big as the ones Noll had surfed at Waimea. Still, no one who questioned the waves size doubted Nolls skill or bravery in hauling his board into the pounding surf that day.

Soon after the Makaha Beach ride, Noll left surfing, closing his surfboard factory in Hermosa Beach and moving to Northern California, where he became a successful commercial fisherman and later a sport fishing guide.

He was unhappy, he said years later, with what the popular Beach Party movies of the 1960s had done to surfing. The films flooded the Southern California shoreline, he said, with people who couldnt surf, got in the way of those who could and didnt understand or appreciate the sport.

That whole Hollywood scene at that particular time was just a mess when it came to doing anything meaningful with the surf community, Noll told The Associated Press in 2013. They lived in their own little bubble and thought surfing was all about beach parties and people jumping around dancing in the moonlight to funny music.

By the late 1980s, however, commissions started coming in for custom-made surfboards. Noll opened a little shop in his garage to make them, putting his son Jed, then a teenager, to work with him.

In 2009, his son opened Noll Surfboards in San Clemente and put the father to work designing a line of customized boards for collectors that commemorate historical surfing events or honor legendary surfers.

It gives me a chance to work with my son and share what I know about the ocean and the boards and the history, Noll told the AP in 2018.

Da Bull was born Greg Lawhead in San Diego on Feb. 11, 1937, later taking the last name of his stepfather, Ash Noll. He moved to the surf town of Manhattan Beach with his mother when he was 3 and soon developed an affinity for the water.

As a young man, Noll had a bodybuilders physique, and it was that, along with what fellow surfers described as his hard-charging, bull-headed surfing style, that earned him his nickname.

Although he disdained the Beach Party movies, Noll acknowledged that out of the water, he could be a hell-raiser and a good-time party guy himself. He took to surfing, he once said, because it was more fun than working.

As he told the AP in 2008: People always ask, What is it that makes people want to give up their friends, their family, their jobs and just go surfing? Those people always categorize surfing as a sport. But its not. Its a lifestyle.

A complete list of survivors was not immediately available. Noll and his wife, Laurie, had daughter Ashlyne and sons Jed, Tate and Rhyn.

___

Associated Press reporter Stefanie Dazio contributed to this report. Rogers is a retired AP reporter.
BARCELONA, Spain (AP)  Spains prime minister met Tuesday with the chief of Catalonia for the first time since his government pardoned nine separatist leaders of the affluent regions separatist movement in an attempt to further mend relations between their governments.

Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez sat down with Catalan regional president Pere Aragones for two and a half hours at the Moncloa palace, the seat of Spains government.

As expected, the meeting was more about getting the sides to talk again than real achievements.

Aragones repeated his demand for an authorized referendum on independence, as well as a complete amnesty for all those facing legal trouble for their roles in the region's illegal 2017 secession bid. Sanchez had previously said that a ballot on independence by a region is unconstitutional and that the way forward is satisfying the Catalans needs by focusing on social and economic issues.

The first meeting with Pedro Sanchez has shown how far apart our positions remain and the evident differences that exist to resolving the conflict, Aragones said afterwards.

But, Aragones added that the two leaders agreed that delegations from their respective governments will meet in September to start a new round of negotiations.

Government spokeswoman Maria Jesus Montero said that Sanchez did not take up Aragones demands. Instead, she said the prime minister focused on the need to establish a framework of trust.

The government is not naive and knows that this road is not easy, Montero said. It is time to end a chapter of pain and frustration and open a new one for Catalans and the rest of Spaniards that can allow us to resolve this conflict that has festered for far too long."

Last week Sanchezs government pardoned the nine separatists who had spent over three years in prison for instigating the 2017 secession bid that threw Spain into crisis.

Spains government hopes the meeting with Aragones can help foster a new period of calm in the nations northeastern corner surrounding Barcelona where roughly half the voters support pro-secession parties.

Sanchez, a Socialist, has made rebuilding bridges with the separatists a main goal of his left-wing coalition government. He and the separatists agreed to open talks in February 2020. But the issue of the imprisoned separatist leaders was a major stumbling block, and Sanchez had not met with a separatist leader since then.

While Sanchez has been accused by Spains right-wing opposition of appeasing radicals who want to rupture Spain, the meeting comes with political risks for Aragones as well. Aragones, who became the new regional leader of Catalonia in May, is being pressured to not renounce another unilateral attempt at secession by his hard-line cohorts like former chief Carles Puigdemont.

Despite the pardons, the legal plight of some separatists is not over. Puigdemont and others are still on the run from Spanish law after fleeing to other European countries, and Spains National Accountability watchdog said Tuesday that it will ask former Catalan officials to pay back millions of euros that they used to promote the secessionist cause abroad.

As for Aragones insistence that Spain stop seeking the extradition of Puigdemont, Montero said that Puigdemont must face the law in order to return home.
Friday, Jake Kulak & The LowDown bring their blend of guitar-driven blues and blues-rock to a free Summer Concert at the Hilton Mystic, hosted by The Irons Restaurant & Bar. Join them on the patio, and bring your own chairs and blankets.

Kulak has been immersed in the blues from Connecticut to Memphis and beyond. At age 13, he made the first of many trips to Memphis where he played in clubs on Beale Street as part of the International Blue Challenge Youth Showcase, and to Clarksdale, Mississippi, where he attended the Pinetop Perkins Masterclass in Guitar. He was also recognized with a merit scholarship by the Honeyboy Edwards Fund for the Blues at the National Blues Museum. He is currently attending the Berklee School of Music.

The band represented Connecticut for four years at the International Blues Challenge Youth Showcase in Memphis. In 2018 they won the Connecticut Blues Society Band Competition and performed at the International Blues Challenge in Memphis in 2019. They have also been nominated for a New England Music Award in the Best New Act of the Year.

Jason LapIerre joins on bass and multi-instrumentalist Jeremy Peck is on drums.

CHIRP has The Bumper Jacksons on Tuesday. Having virtually cornered the market on Washington D.C.s awards in 2020, this band paints Americas story from the streets of New Orleans to Appalachian hollers. Unafraid to scrap together new sounds from forgotten 78s, they elegantly balance paying homage to the traditions while fashioning their own unique, playful style. The group began as a duo, a city-meets-country experiment between songstress Jess Eliot Myhre and banjo player Chris Ousley.

They hopped on bicycles, touring the country, instruments on their backs, seeking to reimagine roots music. In five short years, Bumper Jacksons grew to a fiery five-piece, with horns and pedal steel. Honored multiple times as the Mid-Atlantics Artist of the Year & Best Traditional Band at the Washington Area Music Awards. The Bumper Jacksons go back to American music when, music was just fun, before categories like blues, country, and jazz set limits.

Westville Music Bowl has two nights, Tuesday and Wednesday, of the Tedeschi Trucks: Fireside Live. The Fireside Live tour marks the Tedeschi Trucks Bands first in-person live performances since last February, shortly before the pandemic put live music on hold indefinitely. This tour features various iterations of the band. The group recently postponed its Wheels of Soul tour, a more extensive trek that will hit large theaters and amphitheaters across the country, until summer 2022.

Friday, in Parkville Market, its Mardi Gras in July with River City Slim & The Zydeco Hogs. After a long years absence, Zydeco is back in Hartford. River City Slim & The Zydeco Hogs bring their red-hot rockin Louisiana-style dance music to the outdoor stage.

On Saturday starting at 2 p.m., it is Summer Blues n Brews II will be held at 43 Thorpe Avenue, Meriden. The second annual Summer Blues n Brews is presented by New Rising Sun band plus Murray the Wheel featuring Cheryl Tracy, CT Trainwreck Band, Taking Back Autumns Tim Longdon & Michael Simmons, plus guest jammers Boulder Shawn on harp and keyboard whiz Bob Bocchichio.

Tickets will be limited and food trucks on site. No coolers are allowed, but feel free to bring lawn chairs. This is a rain or shine event with plenty of covered picnic tables.

Righteous Continental and Justin Chan & the Vices are at Crystal Bees Friday. New Englands new guitar star Ryan Newman is back at Crystal Bees with two of his bands as blues-rock power trio Righteous Continental returns plus six-piece party time rockers Justin Chan & the Vices. This will be one of the best shows of the summer as Newman is joined by Tim Leffingwell, Mitch Igneri and celebrated vocalist Justin Chan.

The Bayou every Monday has a blues jam with Johnny Feds & Those Blues Guyz.

The Falcon Main Stage has a number of acts this week. Friday, has Johnny Nicholas Trio with Cindy Cashdollar and Katie Shore. Sunday it Stage is Buffalo Stack. Bluesy roots-rockers Buffalo Stack deliver with slide blues guitar, gospel organ chords, New Orleans-style horns, and group harmonies. Thursday, they host Oz Noy Trio with Chulo Gatewood & Rocky Bryant. An intoxicating blend of jazz, funk, rock, blues, and r&b. Ozs unique style has broken the rules of instrumental guitar by focusing on the groove.

The Hungry Tiger on Friday has Legions of Jerry is on the outdoor stage (6 pm) while Brandt Taylor Band plays the indoor stage (10 pm). And Saturday, the Watkins Glen Band is on the Outdoor stage (6 pm).

The Jeff Pitchell Trio plays Rooftop 120 on Friday. Also Friday, the Blueseyland Band is on The Patio at the Note Kitchen & Bar.

Friday Ripkas, outside under the big tent, it is The B Side. The Redding Roadhouse has live music on the patio with Shawn Taylor, Saturday. Lori and The Legends are outside at Pomona Petes, Saturday at 4 p.m.

Johnny and the East Coast Rockers bring its swingin rhythm and blues to the The Knickerbocker Cafe, Saturday. Dan Stevens acoustic blues tour stops Saturday at Joes Filling Station and Sunday it is Olde Mistick Village Gazebo.

Wednesday, Dr. G and the Believers are at Waters Edge Resort & Spa, and also on Wednesday, The 5 oclocks have a 6:30 pm date at the Sherman Green Gazebo in Fairfield, followed by The Lamb Jammers at The Sea Grape Cafe.

Thursday, the Olde Church Acoustic Summer Spin-Off Series at the Hubbard Park Bandshell invites you to a free concert. Join the Cobalt Rhythm Kings at 6:30 p.m., and Big Fat Combo at 7:30 p.m. There will be food for purchase. Proceeds will go back to the concert series to continue the free series.

Also Thursday, Dan Zlotnick Band is at Daryls House.

Any questions or comments should be sent to Domenic Forcella at TWBlus@aol.com.
STAMFORD  A 77-year-old New Canaan man who claimed his wife died in an accidental shooting in May is expected to be charged with murder, according to a state prosecutor.

Albert Kokoth, 77, has only been charged with second-degree assault, second-degree assault with a firearm and illegal discharge of a firearm for a May 6 incident that killed his wife, Margaret Kokoth, 75.

But Senior Assistant State's Attorney Joseph Valdes said that could soon change.

Valdes said during a remote hearing on Kokoths case Tuesday that the state is requesting the 77-year-old be brought to Stamford Superior Court on July 13 when he may be served with a new arrest warrant on a murder charge.

After Tuesdays hearing, Stamford criminal defense attorney Mark Sherman, who has been hired to represent Kokoth, said he was recently made aware of the warrant application for the murder charge.

While Sherman declined to comment on the specifics of the allegations, he said he expects his client will plead not guilty at the arraignment.

Dr. James Gill, the states chief medical examiner, said Margaret Kokoths death was a homicide.

When New Canaan police officers arrived at the Kokoth home on May 6 for a reported shooting, they found Albert Kokoth covered in blood, a police report read.

Kokoth told authorities he had been showing his wife a shotgun before a trip to a local gun range when he accidentally shot her, the report read.

When officers asked if his wife was still breathing, Kokoth responded by chuckling slightly and then saying, Uh, no I dont think shes breathing, according to the police report.

Kokoths son-in-law later told authorities his wife told him in recent months if they dont do something, theyre going to find (Margaret Kokoth) shot dead, the reports said.

Albert Kokoths wife knew he had owned the shotgun for years, their daughter told police, according to the report.

A neighbor told investigators he heard two shots from the home about 15 minutes apart, according to the police report.
MIDDLETOWN  As the city draws up proposed zoning changes in preparation of recreational marijuana becoming legal on Thursday, officials will use state and federal grants to renew efforts to educate the public, especially young residents.

Connecticut became the 19th state in the nation to legalize marijuana June 22.

The proposal outlines zoning changes that would permit a dispensary as well as micro-cultivators, which are defined as facilities with between 2,000 and 25,000 square feet of space.

Until 2024, state legislation allows only one cannabis production facility for every 25,000 residents. Middletown has an approximate population of 45,912.

The city, which has the 13th largest population in Connecticut, falls just shy of the 50,000 threshold, which requires municipalities to designate an area for public consumption if they establish restrictions on public weed smoking.

While there are no medical marijuana dispensaries in Middlesex County, retail would be permitted on portions of Washington/Route 66, South Main and Newfield/Route 3 and Saybrook Road, city Planner Marek Kozikowski said. However, the state is now allowing recreational marijuana to be sold until next year.

Grow houses will likely be permitted in the industrial area near Cromwell, in the southeast portion of the city, as well as on East Main Street and Main Street Extension, Kozikowski said.

Mayor Ben Florsheim, a progressive politician who participated in early conversations on legalization, is pleased that equity elements were included in the final bill.

My belief all along has been that prohibition is not an effective strategy, he said. If it did, I would support using it for substances like alcohol, which are much more damaging than marijuana.

The grants will allow health officials to conduct substance abuse education to people of all ages, Florsheim said.

Risks can be particularly concerning for underage people and youth, whose brains are still developing, the mayor said.

Just because marijuana isnt an opioid, and is not something that can kill you, it still needs to be [regulated], Florsheim said.

Cannabis is much safer when it is obtained at licensed facilities as opposed to the black market, Florsheim said.

He called legalization a win for the state and municipalities in terms of revenue. The 3 percent local sales tax on retail purchases will be used in conjunction with state and federal money on education efforts.

This is the right step for public safety, public health and for criminal justice issues, because it takes something that has always been happening anyway and brings it into the light, the mayor said.

Florsheim points to studies that show areas where pot is legal are associated with lower opioid overdose deaths.

The Connecticut Police Chiefs Association is working on what training will be required for law enforcement. In Middletown, the acting chief of police and other personnel will implement those procedures once they are established, the mayor said.

It will include training officers on what to look for when determining if someone is driving under the influence, and what laws are enforceable, he added.

With only one dispensary in town, traffic congestion and parking issues will be a large concern, Florsheim said. Other states, such as Massachusetts, have been dealing with the issue, he said, especially when dispensaries are in residential areas.

Those are the types of things were trying to anticipate now [before] retailers come knocking on the door and are interested in coming here. We need to make sure we have a plan in place so its done in a way that makes sense for our community, Florsheim said.

The Planning and Zoning Commission has scheduled a public hearing on the matter July 28. The agenda will be posted on the city website closer to the meeting. The zoning proposal can also be found online.
MIDDLETOWN  The city initiated emergency protocols Monday as temperatures are expected to remain in the 90s with heat indices over 100 for a few days.

A number of air-conditioned cooling centers will allow people to escape the oppressive heat.

Were closely monitoring everything, Middletown Mayor Ben Florsheim said.

The National Weather Service classifies a heat wave of three or more consecutive days with temperatures 90 degrees or above.

On Monday temperatures were expected to reach 92 degrees in Middletown with a heat index of 98 degrees, according to the NWS.

Tuesday is projected to hit a high of 95 degrees with a chance of thunderstorms after 2 p.m. The heat index could reach 102, the NWS said.

High temps are expected to continue through Wednesday, with a daytime high close to 92 degrees, and showers and thunderstorms predicted for the afternoon.

Thursday, projected to be 87 degrees, will provide some relief, with cooling expected over the three-day holiday weekend, according to the NWS.

Maximum heat index values will occur between 1 and 6 p.m., according to the NWS.

The citys emergency shelter is located at the high school, 200 La Rosa Lane. If conditions worsen, the mayor said, it may be activated, but he doesnt anticipate needing to do so.

Well see how the next 24, 48 hours go, he said Monday.

The facility has cots that can be set up for a large number of people, as was done for the 2011 winter storm that knocked out power to more than 90 percent of Middletown customers , and again in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

Last year, the cooling areas were not heavily populated, Florsheim said, because of COVID-19 concerns.

Cooling centers

The Russell Library, 123 Broad St., is open Monday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. It is closed for the July 4 holiday.

Older adults are encouraged to use the Middletown Senior Center at 61 Durant Terrace weekdays from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Also, the City Hall lobby and Council Chambers, at 245 deKoven Drive, are available those same hours.

People can also visit the police department community room, 222 Main St.

Middletown will also be opening fire hydrant sprinklers at designated times and locations at the following housing complexes: The Highlands Crescent Drive bus stop from noon to 4 p.m., Julia Terrace, Maplewood Terrace, and Summer Hill Road and Woodbury Circle from 2 to 5 p.m.; Macdonough School from noon to 3 and 6 to 8 p.m.; Santangelo Circle from noon to 3 p.m., and Daddario Road from 6 to 8 p.m.

For information on how to deal with the heat and learn the symptoms of heat exhaustion or stroke, visit ready.gov/heat.

Florsheim will be posting information to his Twitter account, @bdflorsheim, and Facebook page, @BenForMiddletown, if a cooling station nears capacity.
PHOENIX (AP)  The Arizona House voted Monday to allow some people convicted of certain crimes to earn time off their sentences for participating in work training, substance-abuse treatment or other prison programs.

If approved by the Senate and signed by Gov. Doug Ducey, the measure would mark a significant advancement in the criminal justice reform movement. Advocates say encouraging incarcerated people to participate in programs that help prevent repeat crimes will help the state save money on ballooning prison costs and improve public safety.

The data is there  mandatory sentences do not work, said Rep. Walt Blackman, a Republican from Snowflake who has worked for years on the legislation. Mandatory sentences do nothing to rehabilitate that inmate, which is going to cost Arizona taxpayers more money in the future.

Blackman's legislation will allow people in prison to earn anywhere from one to five days off their sentence for every six days served, depending on the crime for which they were convicted, in exchange for following prison rules and participating in improvement programs. Nonviolent drug offenses would carry the most generous earned-release credits.

People convicted of a wide variety of crimes are not eligible, including serious or violent felonies, sexual offenses, human trafficking and dangerous crimes against children.

The House approved the measure overwhelmingly in a 50-8 vote.

It costs more money in the long run to incarcerate people than to focus on rehabilitating them, said Rep. Diego Rodriguez, a Phoenix Democrat.

All weve done is fill our prisons, Rodriguez said. All weve done is drive up the cost of incarcerating people. It does not make the community safer.

States and cities around the country have rushed too fast into criminal justice reform, said Rep. John Kavanagh, a Fountain Hills Republican who voted against the measure and supported an unsuccessful effort to water it down.

If were going to err on the side of anything it should be on the side of safety of our constituents, Kavanagh said.
Christian Abraham / Hearst Connecticut Media

BRIDGEPORT  A city man was shot in the neck during an apparent street fight outside a gentlemens club over the weekend, police said.

Shortly after 2 a.m. Sunday, police responded to the area of Main Street and Capitol Avenue for a report of a possible street fight, according to Capt. Kevin Gilleran.
Venice, FL (34285)

Today

Partly cloudy in the morning. Thunderstorms developing later in the day. High near 90F. Winds SE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 90%..

Tonight

Tropical storm conditions possible. Thunderstorms. Low around 75F. Winds E at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 80%.
After Connecticut legislators let languish this spring a pack of bills designed to reduce vaping, the state has gotten a glimpse at concessions one major vendor is willing to make.

On Monday, North Carolinas attorney general announced a $40 million settlement with vaping device and pod maker Juul Labs, along with marketing restrictions going forward that will end any company references in the Tar Heel State to vaping as a healthier alternative than smoking.

Juul agreed to not introduce any new flavors without the approval of the Food & Drug Administration. The company pledged to back off social media advertising, and any marketing that appeals particularly to people below the legal vaping age of 21. And it agreed to create a secret shopper program to spot-check retailers to ensure they are not selling products to people below the legal age.

North Carolina became the first state to sue Juul in May 2019. According to a study published by the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, more than 2,600 people were hospitalized through January 2020 as a result of lung ailments linked to vaping, including a big spike in September 2019.

During the course of our investigations and litigation, we have learned in detail just how harmful these products are, how they were designed, marketed and sold to appeal to young people, and how damaging they have been to families all across the country, stated North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein in a letter to the FDA on Monday. The FDA should ban all non-tobacco flavors  including menthol  from e-cigarettes.

In February 2020, Connecticut Attorney General William Tong announced his own investigation that was joined by more than three dozen other states including Florida and Texas. A spokesperson in Tongs office described the investigation as active and ongoing while declining further comment.

New York, Massachusetts and California have filed separate lawsuits as well.

Juul moved its headquarters in 2020 to Washington, D.C., from San Francisco. The company is led by former Altria Group executive K.C. Crosthwaite, with its operations chief David Dickey having worked early in his career for United Technologies and Chemtura, at the time both with corporate headquarters in Connecticut.

In 2018, Richmond, Va.-based Altria Group invested nearly $13 billion in Juul. The Federal Trade Commission subsequently sued Altria on claims the tobacco giant scotched its own line of e-cigarettes after the investment, in violation of antitrust laws.

Altria now licenses the IQOS device from Philip Morris International, which this month announced the future relocation of its headquarters to Connecticut from New York City. In announcing the move, both CEO Jacek Olczak and Gov. Ned Lamont referenced the companys IQOS device as helping smokers kick the cigarette habit, while quick to distinguish IQOS core technology from vaping devices like those sold by Juul.

This spring, the Connecticut General Assembly considered multiple bills addressing vaping including legislation to ban the sale of most flavored vaping products in Connecticut, save menthol; and rules to reduce the nicotine levels in electronic cigarettes. In testimony submitted to the General Assemblys public health committee in February and March, a Juul lobbyist opposed the legislation on grounds that oversight is best left to the FDA.

Studies have shown that flavors are important to adult smokers considering alternatives to combustible cigarettes, stated Kate Rumbaugh, vice president of state government affairs for Juul Labs. There is a crucial balance between effectively reaching adult smokers and restricting access and limiting appeal to those underage.

In their most recent annual study of tobacco use issued last fall, the CDC and FDA estimated 1.8 million fewer youth were using e-cigarettes in 2020 compared to the previous year, though discovering an alarming increase in the words of the study for kids using disposable e-cigarettes and noting high interest in experimenting with differing flavors.

At the February hearing, a Greenwich High School student named Greer Levy told lawmakers vaping and juuling have run rampant among her peers.

A typical scene with youth in Greenwich goes as follows  first, a person takes the device out of a bag, then out of curiosity, the surrounding youth asked what flavor the vape is, Levy said. They go in where they know that the store owner wont card them.

But a convenience store trade group warned that Connecticut and other states risked creating a black market for flavored nicotine products, at a cost of both tax revenue and data on what products people are using.

It is a public health and financial disaster in the making, said Jon Shaer, executive director of the New England Convenience Store and Energy Marketers Association based in Massachusetts. Like it or not, tobacco products have enormous market demand  and where there is demand, there is always a market.

Corrected from an initial version to properly identify Greer Levy, and to distinguish technical differences between e-cigarettes and IQOS, which heats tobacco to form an inhalable aerosol.

Includes prior reporting by Julia Bergman. Alex.Soule@scni.com; 203-842-2545; @casoulman
The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee pledged Monday to pass legislation this year that would remove commanders from deciding whether to prosecute sex crimes cases, using various legislative approaches to accomplish the task.

Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., told reporters that his committee will consider a bill proposed by Rep. Jackie Speier, a California Democrat who chairs the House Armed Services personnel subcommittee, and language expected to be included in the fiscal 2022 defense policy bill that would ensure that military attorneys, rather than commanders, decide whether cases of rape and sexual assault warranted criminal charges and courts martial.

Smith said he also is weighing whether the effort should be broadened to remove most, if not all, felony prosecution decisions from the chain of command.

"We have to make this change," Smith said, referring to sex crimes cases, "there is no question about it."

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But as for the wider effort, he is less convinced.

"I have not decided yet. You know, we've been working on this for quite some time, and the focus has been to date trying to run sex cases out of the chain of command and give them to the [Judge Advocate General] Corps," Smith said.

The House Armed Services Committee is responsible for crafting the version of the fiscal 2022 National Defense Authorization Act that goes before the entire House for a vote. As chair, he holds significant sway in determining what gets forwarded.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., has worked since 2013 to remove the decision to prosecute rapes and sexual assaults from the military chain of command to attorneys with training in handling these cases.

Since 2014, her proposed legislation has sought to remove commanders from oversight of all serious crimes not related to military service, including murder, robbery, fraud, child endangerment and more. But most of the attention has been paid to the bill's changes to Section 920 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which covers rape, sexual assault and other sexual misconduct.

"When a service member is accused of sexually assaulting someone, who decides whether to prosecute? ... A bipartisan majority of the Senate agreed with me that this decision should be made instead by a highly trained military prosecutor, outside the chain of command of the victim and the accused," Gillibrand wrote in an opinion piece in the Washington Post in 2016.

This year, Gillibrand has argued that the broader application is needed to address racial bias in prosecution decisions by commanders.

"We have a bright line at all serious crimes. And that is an important bright line," Gillibrand told reporters last week. "We want to make sure that whether you're a plaintiff or a defendant, that you have access to a military justice system worthy of your sacrifice."

There were 7,825 cases of sexual assault reported across the military branches in fiscal 2019, up 3% from the 7,623 cases reported in fiscal 2018.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said last week he supports removing the prosecution of sex crimes from the chain of command, echoing recommendations of a panel that recommended they be decided by trained judge advocates general.

In interviews with the Associated Press and CNN in May, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Mark Milley said in May that he would drop his opposition to the change.

But in a letter released last week by the senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, Milley expressed reservations.

"It is my professional opinion that removing commanders from prosecution decisions...may have an adverse effect on readiness, mission accomplishment, good order and discipline, justice, unit cohesion, trust, and loyalty between commanders and those they lead," Milley wrote to Inhofe in a response to a request for his opinion. "However, in the specific and limited circumstance of sexual assault, I remain open-minded to all solutions ..."

Smith said Gillibrand has made a "reasonably compelling case" to include most felonies.

But, he added, he's speaking with experts to examine the arguments and the nuances in the proposed bill, which would move some felonies but not others.

"I'm trying to take the prudent approach of listening, examining and figuring out what the best approach is," Smith said.

Gillibrand's bill has 65 cosponsors from both sides of the aisle. Companion legislation introduced by Speier has 159 cosponsors. Most of the cosponsors are Democrats, but the list includes a handful of Republicans, notably Mississippi Rep. Trent Kelly, an Iraq war veteran and major general in the Army National Guard.

Editor's Note: This story has been updated to correct the number of sexual assault cases reported in fiscal 2018 and correct the description of Sen. Kristin Gillibrand's proposed legislation, dating to 2014.

-- Patricia Kime can be reached at Patricia.Kime@monster.com. Follow her on Twitter @patriciakime.

Related: 'It's Always A Long Game:' Inside Kirsten Gillibrand's Campaign to Overhaul Military Justice
The Arctic could potentially become the next region in which the U.S. executes "freedom of navigation operations," or FONOPS, the Coast Guard's top officer said Monday.

Home to an estimated $1 trillion worth of rare minerals, a third of the world's supply of liquefied natural gas and migratory fish species, the Arctic is increasingly attracting traffic -- especially from Russia, which draws 20% to 24% of its gross domestic product from the region, Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Karl Schultz said in an online discussion hosted by the Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institution.

While Russia has "legitimate access and rights" to the area, the U.S. also has an obligation to preserve "rules-based international order" if Russia or another country with Arctic interests, like China, fail to be "responsible actors" there, Schultz said.

"I don't want to accuse Russia of doing anything definitively, but I think what we have seen in terms of a propensity to aggressively be present ... is something we need a countering, tempering force for," Schultz said.

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Russia increased the number of Tu-95 Bear strategic bombers flyovers near Alaska last year and is positioning MiG-31BM Foxhound interceptors at bases on the Barents Sea. It recently held its annual Ocean Shield exercises to defend its maritime approaches in the Arctic and Pacific, which included amphibious landings on the Chukotka Peninsula near Alaska.

At the same time, the U.S. Coast Guard doesn't have the resources it needs to patrol the Arctic, with just one heavy icebreaker -- the Polar Star -- in operation, Schultz said.

"Presence equals influence in the Arctic, and right now, we are woefully lacking," he said.

The Department of the Navy released its Strategic Blueprint for the Arctic in January, noting that "U.S. naval forces must operate more assertively across the Arctic region to prevail in day to day competition."

According to the document, the challenge is to "apply naval power to keep the Arctic seas free and open and deter coercive behavior and conventional aggression."

Having a naval mission and law enforcement authorities, the Coast Guard is uniquely positioned to be the U.S.'s representative in the region, Schultz said.

"What we're concerned about is how [Russia] conducts in this space -- the same concerns we have about rules-based international order and adherence, modern maritime governance. The Coast Guard brings a lot of 'street cred;' we're recognized across the globe as adhering to and modeling those behaviors," Schultz said.

Some Arctic experts believe that increased activity in the Arctic, by Russia and to some extent, in partnership with China, is less a plan to be recognized as a "Great Power," when in fact it is a resumption of its Cold War activities in the face of adversaries who are far better equipped than they were during that era.

Eugene Rumer, director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Richard Sokolosky, a non-resident senior fellow with the organization, described the current situation as a "clash of the two parties' interests."

In a report in March, they recommended that the issue be dealt with through diplomacy and deterrence.

"The alliance should continue to manage competition with Russia through a combination of resolve and restraint, improving and demonstrating its capabilities for defense and deterrence, but without overreacting to Russian muscle-flexing," they wrote.

In their meeting June 18, U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed how to "make the Arctic a region of cooperation rather than conflict," according to Biden, while Putin described the area as a "zone of understanding."

The U.S. Coast Guard, according to Schultz, is doing its part to improve cooperation in the region, but is also keeping its eye on Russian behavior.

"We want to have a cooperative dialogue with Russia ... search and rescue, fisheries operations, environmental cooperation -- those are places that it's advantageous to U.S. interests and Russia interests that we cooperate up there," Schultz said.

"I do think there is a practical, functional approach that Russia takes to the U.S. Coast Guard in these spaces, and that's a positive thing."

-- Patricia Kime can be reached at Patricia.Kime@Monster.com. Follow her on Twitter @patriciakime.

Related: Coast Guard Gets a Pay Raise in Bidens First Budget Request
Military commissary shoppers now won't have to pay the almost $5 service fee to use the system's "Click2go" online ordering and curbside grocery pick-up service, as officials look for ways to lure more users for the program.

The service initially was offered free at three bases as a pilot program in 2013. A $4.95 service fee was added when it expanded to additional stores in 2019, and officials announced early this month sweeping plans to offer the option with the fee at all domestic stores by the end of 2021.

Now officials say that service cost, which is typically only waived for a 30-day introductory period at new locations, will be eliminated at all stores until further notice. The 5% system surcharge applied to all grocery purchases will continue.

"We're just weeks into the rollout and internet grocery shopping has continued its dramatic growth nationwide, so we are pleased to be able to waive the service fee for a limited time to encourage this increasingly popular convenience for our patrons to enjoy their commissary benefit," Bill Moore, DeCA's director and CEO, said in a release.

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Twenty-five stores offer the program today, with 62 more locations slated to come online in July, with most of those on the U.S. East Coast. Additional locations will be announced in mid-July, said Kevin Robinson, a commissary spokesman. OCONUS roll-out will begin after the stateside program is in place, he said.

To use the system, patrons must first register on shop.commissaries.com using their DoD ID number. After selecting their groceries via the online store system on that website, users pay for their orders online and pick up their purchases at the designated drive-up area outside the store. While substitutions for out-of-stock items are allowed, unlike some civilian grocery chains, the final price will be adjusted to reflect the new item.

Orders must be submitted at least six hours in advance of pick-up time and can be canceled within 4.5 hours of pick-up. Unlike commissary baggers, who work for tips only, curbside commissary workers are not permitted to accept tips. Only digital coupons are accepted, and online orders must be paid for by credit or debit card. Cash, check and assistance vouchers are not accepted. There is no minimum order amount.

The Defense Commissary Agency operates 236 stores in 13 countries.

A full list of stores offering the service is available on the commissary's website.

Related: Most Military Commissaries to Start Offering Curbside Pickup Service
The Navy on Tuesday said that it will not further investigate controversial former SEAL Eddie Gallagher after determining claims he made on a May podcast were not corroborated.

In an email, Navy spokeswoman Cmdr. Courtney Hillson said that the Navy has reviewed Gallagher's comments, and will not pursue further action.

"After a review conducted by the Navy, it was determined that Gallagher's statements were not corroborated and no substantive information was found to merit an investigation based on those statements," Hillson said.

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Gallagher, who in 2019 was acquitted of stabbing a wounded Islamic State prisoner to death after a Hellfire strike in Mosul, Iraq, and shooting at civilians on other occasions, raised further questions when he commented on the prisoner's death on the podcast "The Line."

"I didn't stab that dude," Gallagher said of the prisoner's 2017 death in Mosul. "That dude died from all the medical treatments that were done. And there was plenty of medical treatments that were done to him."

"Everybody knew what was going on," he continued. "The grain of truth in the whole thing is that that ISIS fighter was killed by us, and that nobody at that time had a problem with it. We killed that guy. Our intention was to kill him. Everybody was on board."

When host Dan Taberski asked, "Your intention was to kill him?" Gallagher responded that they intended to "do medical scenarios on him until he died."

Taberski asked if that meant they were nursing the prisoner to death, Gallagher said, "Yeah, if you want to put it in a nice way. Nursing him to death, or just killing him -- he was going to die regardless. We weren't taking any prisoners. That wasn't our job."

In a June 15 interview with Military.com, Gallagher said that the Iraqi Emergency Response Division was also on the scene, and would likely have tortured the prisoner to death.

"They were saying [in a video taken that day], 'Not in front of the Americans,'" Gallagher told Military.com. "Because what they were going to do -- what they always did -- is chop him up in front of us or somehow torture him and mutilate him. So we decided to just nurse him to death by medical procedures."

Gallagher told Military.com that the treatments were not done to hasten the prisoners death, and that they were done with his medical interests in mind.

After the podcast was released, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin declined to comment on Gallaghers comments, but told reporters that the Navy was looking into them.

The Navy repeatedly said, when asked by Military.com over the following two months, that it had nothing new to report, until Tuesday.

-- Stephen Losey can be reached at stephen.losey@military.com. Follow him on Twitter @StephenLosey.

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The Diamondbacks announced theyve placed center fielder Ketel Marte on the 10-day injured list, retroactive to June 27, with a left hamstring strain. Righty Humberto Castellanos has been recalled from Triple-A Reno to take his place on the active roster.

Marte left last Tuesdays game with hamstring tightness. After resting for three days, he attempted to return to action on Saturday. Marte almost immediately aggravated the injury upon his return, pulling up while jogging out a first-inning single. He departed Saturdays game and was sent for further testing today.

Theres no reason for the Diamondbacks to take any chances with their franchise player. At 22-57, any hope Arizona had of competing this season has long since gone out the window. Thats through no fault of Marte, who has a fantastic .370/.419/.556 line through 148 plate appearances.

Martes performance and the D-Backs place in the standings has led to some speculation hed be a potential midseason trade candidate. That never seemed especially likely, though. Marte is under affordable team control through 2024, and Diamondbacks GM Mike Hazen has pushed back against the notion the team needs to undergo a full-scale rebuild. Martes trip to the IL only seems to reduce the possibility he changes uniforms this summer.
Roth IRAs were intended to help average working Americans save, but IRS records show Peter Thiel and other ultrawealthy investors have used them to amass vast untaxed fortunes.

Billionaire Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal, has publicly condemned confiscatory taxes. Hes been a major funder of one of the most prominent anti-tax political action committees in the country. And hes bankrolled a group that promotes building floating nations that would impose no compulsory income taxes.

But Thiel doesnt need a man-made island to avoid paying taxes. He has something just as effective: a Roth individual retirement account.

Over the last 20 years, Thiel has quietly turned his Roth IRA  a humdrum retirement vehicle intended to spur Americans to save for their golden years  into a gargantuan tax-exempt piggy bank, confidential Internal Revenue Service data shows. Using stock deals unavailable to most people, Thiel has taken a retirement account worth less than $2,000 in 1999 and spun it into a $5 billion windfall.

To put that into perspective, heres how much the average Roth was worth at the end of 2018: $39,108.

And heres how much $5 billion is: If every one of the 2.3 million people in Houston, Texas, were to deposit $2,000 into a bank today, those accounts still wouldnt equal what Thiel has in his Roth IRA.

Whats more, as long as Thiel waits to withdraw his money until April 2027, when he is six months shy of his 60th birthday, he will never have to pay a penny of tax on those billions.

ProPublica has obtained a trove of IRS tax return data on thousands of the countrys wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years. This data provides, for the first time, an inside look at the financial lives of the richest Americans, those whose stratospheric fortunes put them among historys wealthiest individuals.

What this secret information reveals is that while most Americans are dutifully paying taxes  chipping in their part to fund the military, highways and safety-net programs  the countrys richest citizens are finding ways to sidestep the tax system.

One of the most surprising of these techniques involves the Roth IRA, which limits most people to contributing just $6,000 each year.

The late Sen. William Roth Jr., a Delaware Republican, pushed through a law establishing the Roth IRA in 1997 to allow hard-working, middle-class Americans to stow money away, tax-free, for retirement. The Clinton administration didnt want to give a fat tax break to wealthy people who were likely to save anyway, so it blocked Americans making more than $110,000 ($160,000 for a couple) per year from using them and capped annual contributions back then at $2,000.

Yet, from the start, a small number of entrepreneurs, like Thiel, made an end run around the rules: Open a Roth with $2,000 or less. Get a sweetheart deal to buy a stake in a startup that has a good chance of one day exploding in value. Pay just fractions of a penny per share, a price low enough to buy huge numbers of shares. Watch as all the gains on that stock  no matter how giant  are shielded from taxes forever, as long as the IRA remains untouched until age 59 and a half. Then use the proceeds, still inside the Roth, to make other investments.

About a decade after the creation of the Roth, Congress made it even easier to turn the accounts into mammoth tax shelters. It allowed everyone  including the very richest Americans  to take money theyd stowed in less favorable traditional retirement accounts and, after paying a one-time tax, shift them to a Roth where their money could grow unchecked by Uncle Sam  a Bermuda-style tax haven right here in the U.S.

To identify those who have amassed fortunes in retirement accounts, ProPublica scoured the tax return data of the ultrawealthy for IRA accounts valued at more than $20 million. Reporters also examined Securities and Exchange Commission filings, court documents and other records, including a memo detailing Thiels wealth that was included in his 2005 application for residency in New Zealand
In what is being termed as an inadvertent data leak, the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India (IBBI) has put out on its website Aadhaar and PAN (permanent account number) details of creditors, including workmen, of many companies undergoing resolution process.

Sources say that the details were shared "inadvertently" as the IBBI is currently said to be working on a beta project to host the information of creditors of companies undergoing corporate insolvency resolution process (CIRP) and liquidation but added that matter would be sorted out in a few days and stressed that most details have already been removed from the website now.

This is significant since for the past several years many government agencies have been issuing public warnings against revealing details of Aadhaar or PAN publicly as such information could be used for identity theft.

Having your Aadhaar or PAN leaked increases your chances of falling victim to identity theft actors, scammers, phishing campaigners.

In this case, IBBI should have treated the data with greater caution. Unfortunately, the circulation of notices regarding the data breach is not something to be expected from a public entity like IBBI either. Hence each of the compromised companies should take the appropriate steps immediately to inform their employees and help them stay safe.

In September 2018, Srikanth L (who goes by the Twitter handle @logic) discovered that the unique debt identifier would contain Aadhaar in plain text violating the Aadhar storage tokenisation guidelines or Aadhaar vault storage rules. He noted that this was problematic by referring the technical standards of IBBI.

Subsequently in March 2019, when IBBI openly sought feedback on various regulations, he wrote to IBBI and sounded a specific warning regarding collection and storage of Aadhaar details.

Srikanth wrote to them at that time with a general feedback on incompatibility of IBBI technical standards with Aadhaar Act and UIDAI regulations as part of IPA (insolvency professional agencies) & IU (information utilities) regulations feedback

In his feedback shared over two years back, he had specifically mentioned to IBBI, As per the Supreme Court judgement on Aadhaar, the use of Aadhaar as identifier is only subject to matters related to obtaining government subsidy, benefits and cannot be mandated by any other entity. It also specifies that private entities cannot mandate Aadhaar.

The IBBI technical standards extensively use Aadhaar in multiple places violating not just Supreme Court guidelines but also UIDAI regulations pertaining to storage and use of Aadhaar numbers, he added.

More specifically he had even explained For the above noted inconsistencies with Aadhaar Act, Regulations of UIDAI with regards to storage and use of Aadhaar number in applications and the Supreme Court judgement on the Aadhaar case, it is suggested that the use of Aadhaar in the technical standards to be reviewed and suitable alternatives like use of PAN is used for individuals users for registration, verification, unique debt ID as is being done with the case of non-individual users using IU services.

He had concluded his feedback by saying It is also suggested that IBBI audit IU to ensure compliance with laws, regulations related to Aadhaar and conduct a full IT audit to ensure full compliance after the technical standards is modified to be compliant with law.

It is not known, whether IBBI had taken note of the detailed feedback provided to it then since they did not acknowledge him individually. But his feedback was apparently published on the 'board' and the status next to it reads as Technical standards have been reviewed and amended w.e.f. 22nd January 2020 to take into account these observations.

Srikant points out that the feedback shared by him, most likely ended up in trash or else the current data leak would have been averted. If they had really updated technical standards, this data leak would not have happened.

He expressed his disappointment that government officials face no consequence for leaking Aadhaar data. According to him the actual scale of current data leak in IBBI is estimated to be around 1 lakh to 2 lakh Aadhaar numbers.

The IBBI, a key institution in implementing the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC), is said to be working on a project to ensure and enhance transparency with respect to CIRP and liquidation processes.

We accessed three separate documents uploaded on the IBBI website, which revealed the names and Aadhaar numbers of 128 workmen and the PAN of 234 workmen of three companies undergoing corporate insolvency proceedings. Moneylife is unable to confirm the total number of individuals and companies affected as of now by the IBBI data leak.

According to the IBBI regulations, details about creditors, including workmen, of companies undergoing CIRP or liquidation should be disclosed on the websites of the respective companies (corporate debtors). The details required include name of the creditor concerned, amount claimed and amount admitted.

There have been instances of resolution professionals approaching the IBBI and the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) with respect to the regulations requiring public disclosure of details of creditors.

In an order passed in December 2018, the Allahabad bench of the NCLT had directed an Interim Resolution Professional (IRP) to publish the list of creditors on the corporate debtor's website.

In case of a CIRP, these details must be disclosed by the resolution professional concerned while in liquidation processes, the respective liquidator would make these disclosures.

There are cases where small creditors have said that there is no way for them to monitor their claims and companies do not have websites where such claims can be uploaded and tracked.

For such companies, the IBBI is working on the proposed portal which would offer space where the status of claims can be revised and tracked by stakeholder and creditors too can have easy access.

Some officials acknowledged the goof up and explained that in some cases, the details about creditors, including information such as their Aadhaar and PAN, were submitted in the PDF format. Since it is difficult to remove specific details from the PDF files, Aadhaar and PAN information of many people were inadvertently made available on the IBBI website. The issue is expected to get resolved in a few days.

The identification information of creditors was meant for internal use by the IBBI and was made available publicly by mistake. Most of the documents revealing sensitive information on its website have already been taken down by the IBBI now.
The Chennai bench of the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) has grilled IDBI Bank again over one-time settlement (OTS) deal reached between the IDBI Bank-led bank consortium and Siva Industries and Holdings Ltd (SIHL), Zee Biz reported.

The bench last week questioned the alacrity being shown by the lead lender IDBI Bank as the central bureau of investigation (CBI) has charged C Sivsasankaran in a loan fraud case of IDBI Bank.

The bench also asked the bank consortium in what capacity did the proposer give the settlement plan and the 'real intent' behind the OTS offer.

The Tribunal also sought explanation if the proposal could be admitted under the law.

Some serious allegations and questions have been raised with respect to the Siva Industries and Holdings case that has grabbed the limelight because public sector banks (PSBs) have agreed to settle with the promoter of Siva Industries a huge loan of Rs4,863 crore at just Rs323 crore with a recovery of only 6.5%, Zee Biz reported earlier.

As per the report, interestingly the CoC member and biggest bank of the country State Bank of India (SBI) dissented against the settlement proposal.

Moreover, the case becomes even more important when the lenders are withdrawing the bankruptcy process of Siva Industries and Holdings.

Further, the important to note here is the settlement amount accepted by banks is said to be even lower than the liquidation value of Siva Industries and Holdings and it will result in a loss of approximately Rs4,700 crore public money, the report added.

Additionally, the public sector bank Canara Bank privately sold its exposure of Rs1,148 crore to an ARC  International Asset Reconstruction Company Private Limited (IARC).

It is feared that this case will set a bad precedent and defeat the purpose of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016. As if things are to be settled outside court with such a meager sum, then IBC may lose its relevance.

Interestingly IDBI Bank as the lead banker is settling the case with the same promoter who was earlier charged by CBI for defrauding the same lender to the tune of Rs600 crore along with the other then posted senior officials of the Bank, the report said.

Disclaimer: Information, facts or opinions expressed in this news article are presented as sourced from IANS and do not reflect views of Moneylife and hence Moneylife is not responsible or liable for the same. As a source and news provider, IANS is responsible for accuracy, completeness, suitability and validity of any information in this article.
While the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) virtually admitted that it was 'cheated' by the management of the scam-hit Punjab & Maharashtra Cooperative (PMC) Bank, it is noteworthy that as early as in 2011, a whistleblower had raised the issue of fraudulent activities taking place in the Bank on which no action was taken. All that RBI did was to forward the whistle-blower's complaint to chief executive officer (CEO) of PMC Bank instead of initiating an investigation or taking action.

On 28 January 2011, the whistleblower sent a letter (seen by Moneylife) to A Udgata, chief general manager (CGM)-in-charge of the urban banks department at RBI. The whistleblower, an employee of PMC Bank, alleged that actual non-performing assets (NPAs) of the Bank stood at 9.12% and not 1% as shown by the lender.

"Many large borrowers are NPAs, but the bank issues fresh loan in the name of the relatives of the directors or partners of the borrower NPA company and the NPA loans are closed by diverting these fresh funds towards settlement of NPAs. Also, the bank advises them to create a fresh partnership or proprietary firm and gives fresh loan to these new companies and then routes these funds to close NPAs or large borrowers or close pals of the directors of the bank," the letter says.

The whistleblower had alleged that "large borrowers at PMC Bank's Sion and Andheri branches are close friends, family and associates of the directors of the bank, hence the staff at the credit department are asked to do reverse calculations to arrive at the financials for the loan sanction. Then these calculations are given to the borrowers and they finalise their accounts and get it audited based on our calculations for loan."

According to the whistleblower, Housing Development and Infrastructure Ltd (HDIL), Dewan Housing Finance Ltd (DHFL), Dheeraj Builders, Trapinex and their group companies manipulated the banking system to their advantage. The 2011 letter says, "The bank manipulates its net time and demand liabilities by asking these companies to deposit cheques on a Thursday. These cheques are intercompany cheques drawn on HDFC Bank or Jankalyan Bank. These cheques are physically returned on Saturday. However, debit for outward return for these cheques will be spread over three days so that it does not come under monitoring by RBI for higher return percentage of cheques.

"Further, in return of the favour, all black money of HDIL and group companies which are received in cash and deposited in their account with PMC Bank and these cash deposits above the specified limit are not reported to RBI or sometimes window dressed so that RBI cannot make out the black money is being made white here," the whistleblower wrote in the letter.

Interestingly, the RBI itself admitted that it was supplied with fraudulently manipulated data by the PMC Bank. In an affidavit submitted before the Bombay High Court in November 2019, RBI says, "The disclosed HDIL related accounts were seen and majority of them were assessed as non-performing assets (NPAs). Further non-monitoring of end use of funds and conflict of interest of Waryam Singh as chairman of PMC Bank and as a former director of HDIL group was also commented upon in the report along with the attempt by the bank to show disclosed accounts of HDIL group as standard by sanction of new loans to close or regularise the old NPA accounts... Consequently, the assessed NPAs of the bank were significantly higher than the reported NPAs."

"The bank had also sanctioned mortgage overdraft limits to a wholly-owned subsidiary of the HDIL while the present (now arrested Waryam Singh) chairman of the PMC Bank, was also a director of the company -- a clear conflict of interests and violation of RBI's master circulars... Waryam Singh also chaired a PMC Bank board meeting to ratify the approval of mortgage overdraft in which he was directly interested, again contravening RBI norms."

"The inspection team had also established the relationship between the chairman of the Bank and HDIL promoters, which might have acted as the primary consideration for sanction of credit facilities and resulted in their utilisation to pay off one-time settlement dues with other landers," RBI says in the affidavit.

The RBI affidavit, filed in 2019, states that the scale of violation and the connected lending that was established, based on available records, was much lesser due to the 'camouflaging' resorted to by the PMC Bank, and hence what was noted was 'flagged', though it was not found to be significantly affecting the Bank's financial health.

The important question here is, when the whistleblower had brought forward all these issues in 2011 itself, what did RBI do for almost eight years before the Bank went bust? Why was no action taken on the whistleblower's letter by RBI? The important question here is, when the whistleblower had brought forward all these issues in 2011 itself, what did RBI do for almost eight years before the Bank went bust? Why was no action taken on the whistleblower's letter by RBI?

The letter sent by the whistleblower in 2011 also mentions the fake deposits worth Rs250 crore, which were updated in the system to portray PMC Bank as a big bank and to receive awards.

The letter says, "Now in the Omni core banking, we do not have access to head office accounts, but in the TBA software, the same was booked as under 'state district cooperative banks deposit' code 'STDIS-FD'. These vouchers were only signed by the then manager in-charge, accounts department, Manjit Ishwar Singh, Geeta Singh and Amit Mondkar. Fixed deposit (FD) receipts like that of Maharashtra Industrial Development Corp (MIDC) was printed and kept in safe for producing during inspection."

"When asked for FD confirmation, they used to say, yet to be received from the bank and they produced receipts to genuine deposits like Maharashtra State Cooperative Bank (MSC), State Bank of India (SBI), State Bank of Hyderabad (SBH) so that the inspectors get entangled in it and they do not ask for this confirmation. Once the RBI official insisted on the confirmation, their one official brought blank continuous paper stationary from MIDC and printed the conformation including fake deposits in the MIDC format and showed it to the RBI officer," the whistleblower stated in the letter.

The whistleblower also mentions how a few employees in the PMC Bank, who were 'rewarded' for helping HDIL in its manipulation and fraudulent activities. This includes Geeta Singh and Manjit Ishwar Singh, who headed the accounts department at PMC Bank's Bhandup central office and clearing department at Fort, respectively.

"...they have been provided flats in the Dreams Dheeraj Cooperative Housing Society at Bhandup west (a project of HDIL) by HDIL group at rates much cheaper than the then prevailing rates. Geeta Singh was allotted flat no 2003 in Dheeraj Dreams II C at a purchase cost of Rs12 lakh as against the prevailing cost of Rs55 lakh. Manjit Ishwar Singh was allotted flat no 2005 in the same building at Rs5 lakh against Rs50 lakh, the then prevailing cost. Both had obtained staff loan from PMC Bank for buying these flats."

"Joy Thomas (who was managing director when arrested by the police in 2019) was given a plot in Pune at Rs50 lakh against the prevailing cost of Rs10 crore and the non-agriculture (NA) was arranged by HDIL," the whistleblower alleged in the letter.

According to the whistleblower, in 2005, branch manager of PMC Bank's Versova branch gave an overdraft limit of Rs5.65 crore to Mahendra Dhariwal, Sunita Dhariwal, Dhariwals Films P Ltd, and Evershine Films without obtaining any security.

"When these film makers were unable to pay their dues, it came to the notice of the central office. The MD asked officials from the central office to investigate. A detailed report was submitted to the MD describing modus operandi of the fraud. This fraud was never reported to the RBI nor to Indian Banks' Association," the letter alleges.

According to the whistleblower, these NPAs were never revealed as NPAs by PMC Bank as it would have increased their NPA percentage. "The bank is already running in to huge losses though they have not disclosed the same to RBI or the general public," the whistleblower says.

A few days before its restrictions, on 19 September 2019, RBI sent its team for annual inspection of PMC Bank and thorough scrutiny of HDIL accounts, especially the Bank's exposure to the group.

Detailing the "modus operandi of hiding the information related to HDIL exposure" employed by the PMC Bank, the RBI affidavit stated they (Bank executives) tampered with management information systems (MIS) and NPC identification process. In this, the bank had given special access codes on Finnacle, its core banking software (CBS) for HDIL accounts with restricted visibility to less than 25 out of PMC Bank's 1,800 staffers.

RBI says, "While running the script for system identification of the NPAs, it deliberately excluded the HDIL accounts which were thus omitted from the system generated reports of NPA accounts, and ditto with the overdrawn accounts list. The PMC Bank's own MIS software called 'Opine' had a script for generating lists of newly sanctioned or disbursed accounts, but the undisclosed loan accounts were excluded from this list."

"These irregularities were not highlighted by the PMC Bank's concurrent auditors at the Sion Branch, where all these undisclosed accounts were parked though concurrent audits were carried out every month," the affidavit had pointed out.

In addition, the undisclosed loan accounts to HDIL group, sanctioned and renewed with approval from K Joy Thomas, the then managing director (now behind bars) of the Bank. This sanction of loans was not recorded in the minutes of the loan committee, recovery committee, or the board of directors, though they constituted a vital source of information for inspection, RBI says.

Further, the affidavit says, "PMC Bank submitted false information in the returns on single party or group exposures filed through offsite surveillance system (OSS) to the RBI, which again is a document relied upon by the central bank inspectors, by not disclosing large advances relating to the HDIL group that constituted its biggest exposure." ( Read: PMC Bank Fraud: RBI Says the Bank Submitted Fraudulently Manipulated Data on HDIL Loans

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June 29, 2021 Biden's Iran Policy Is Already At A Dead End On Sunday the U.S.bombed three positions of Iraqi Popular Mobilization Force at the Syrian-Iraqi border. The U.S. had no right to do so. The legal reasoning the Biden administration provided for the attack is nonsense. As is the claimed rationale of establishing 'deterrence' against further attacks on U.S. troops by this or that Iraqi militia group. The last strike in that area in February was supposed to have fulfilled the same purpose but obviously did not deter anything. Sunday's strike was immediately responded to with missiles fired against a U.S. position in Syria. More such incidents will follow. The attack has embarrassed Iraq's Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi: The most perplexing aspect of this airstrike, however, is its timing, coming only one day after Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi attended a celebration of the seventh anniversary of the creation of the PMF, held at Camp Ashraf, the former headquarters of the anti-Iranian Mujahedeen-e-Khalq terrorist group, located about 100 kilometers (62 miles) northeast of Baghdad. The PMF paraded thousands of its fighters, along with tanks, rocket launchers, and drones, before a reviewing stand that, in addition to Kadhimi, included Defense Minister Juma Inad, Interior Minister Othman Ghanmi, Iraqi Army Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Abdul Amir Yarallah, and PMF Chief of Staff Abdul Aziz al-Mohammadawi. More important than the list of attendees, however, is what Kadhimi said about the PMF. In a tweet released during the parade, the prime minister noted that [w]e attended the parade of our heroic army on December 6 (2020), as well as the brave police parade, and today we attended the parade of our sons in the Popular Mobilization Forces. We affirm that our work is under the banner of Iraq, and protecting its land and people is our duty. Yes to Iraq! Yes to Iraq, the strong and capable country. Kadhimi went on to highlight the fact that the PMF was a state service, and praised its role in the ongoing struggle against Islamic State. To reiterate, one day after the prime minister of Iraq, in the company of his military and national security team, declared the PMF to be an essential part of his nations state security, the US undertook to bomb these same forces at locations in Syria and Iraq from where the PMF carry out the very anti-IS operations praised by the Iraqi PM  and did so without either informing the Iraqi government beforehand, or seeking its permission. In response, Kadhimi convened an emergency meeting of his national security staff and issued a pointed condemnation of the US strikes as a clear violation of Iraqi sovereignty that would prompt his government to study all legal options in response. The strike has weakened the U.S. position in Iraq and has strengthened Iran's position. Some analysts say that the attack was a message to Iran in the context of the ongoing talks about the nuclear deal. But what did that message say? That the U.S. can bomb some minor targets? What is new with that? Let's go back to the big picture. An overarching aim of the Biden administration is to concentrate all its forces on the competition with China. To that purpose it has planned to largely leave the Middle East behind - the place where the U.S. has wasted its resources over more than two decades. To leave the Middle East the U.S. needs to find some form of peace with Iran. The Biden administration thus set out to reenter the nuclear deal. It must lift the sanctions Trump imposed against Iran to get there. But then mission creep set in. Instead of just lifting the sanctions in return for Iran's adherence to the limits of the nuclear deal the Biden administration has sought more concessions from Iran while offering less sanctions relief. Iran has made its position clear. If the U.S. lifts ALL sanctions imposed by Trump it will again subject its nuclear program to the limits of the nuclear deal. If the U.S. does not lift ALL sanctions then Iran will continue to exceed those limits by ever growing margins. Secretary of State Anthony 'Pompous the second' Blinken has the illusion that he can get Iran back under the nuclear deal and keep significant sanctions in place. He wants to use those to press Iran into limiting its missile force and into ending support for its allies in the Middle East: Senior Biden administration officials, from Mr. Blinken on down, have conceded that among the shortcomings of the old nuclear accord is that it needs to be longer and stronger, and address Irans missile development program and support of terrorism. Now the aperture appears to be widening even further: It is increasingly clear that any comprehensive agreement that addresses Americas many complaints about Iranian behavior must also cover a broad range of new weaponry that Irans forces were only tinkering with six years ago. Iran will not disarm itself. Those aims are impossible to achieve: Blinken has already said that some U.S. sanctions will remain, and will be lifted when  and only when  Tehran changes behaviour. Note the quiet shift. Blinken here is not talking regulatory nuclear framework, he is going Manichean. Thus, on this metric (correcting malign behaviour), it is not a matter of how many individual sanctions remain in place, but the nature of those remaining. Evidently, the nature of those that remain must imply great pain, if they truly are to coerce a change of strategic course by an irredeemably malign Iran. (It is another example of how the good/evil paradigm freezes politics solid). Team Biden knows, and freely admits, that Trumps maximum pressures did not shift Iranian behaviour. Yet Blinken is advocating the U.S. repeating what has just failed. Actually what Trump did was to persuade Iran to develop the smart missile-swarm drone deterrence that has made maga-weapons irrelevant. It has given Iran a strategic edge. Yet Blinken is now flirting with the idea to not return to the nuclear deal: If this continues, if they continue to spin more sophisticated centrifuges at higher and higher levels, we will get to a point where it will be very difficult as a practical matter to return to the parameters of the original nuclear deal, he said. I cant put a date on it, Mr. Blinken said of the day when the Biden administration might walk away from the nuclear talks, but its getting closer. And then what? If the U.S. does not return to the nuclear deal anytime soon Iran will leave it completely. My guess is by the end of this year. That would free it to do whatever nuclear it wants to do. Iran will also increase its support for proxy forces which are able to hurt U.S. forces and U.S. allies in the Middle East. A number of ever escalating needle pricks - burning Saudi tankers, exploding refineries, drone attacks on U.S. bases - would necessitate for the U.S. to stay engaged. The U.S. can not go to war with Iran. The country can not be occupied and any bombing of it would be responded to by missile and drone attacks against each and every U.S. base and ally in the region, including Israel.. A stand off or low level conflict could thus continue for a long time. It would consume more U.S. resources and management time. Time China can use, undisturbed, to further develop its capabilities. By adding more and more demands for the lifting of the sanctions against Iran the Biden administration is sabotaging its overarching strategic aim of competing with China. This is a very shortsighted policy. Iran will not flinch. Attempts to put pressure on it by killing a few Iraqi militia are just laughable nonsense. That the Biden administration tries to do so shows that it has driven itself into a blind ally but is unwilling to go into reverse. What then will be its next move? Posted by b on June 29, 2021 at 17:23 UTC | Permalink Comments next page  next page 
The Lorain Community Senior Center is sounding the call for participants for two events planned in the coming weeks.
Its construction time and sowing season at the new community garden sprouting on the south side of Elyria.
San Antonio-based USAA is facing calls to stop advertising on Fox News after Tucker Carlson called the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff a "pig" and "stupid," among other insults.

In a June 25 segment discussing critical race theory, Carlson takes aim at Gen. Mark Milley, a Trump appointee, after the general appeared in front of Congress last week.

"I do think it's important for those of us in uniform to be open minded and be widely read," Milley told members of the House Armed Services Committee. "I want to understand white rage and I'm white. I want to understand it. So what is it that caused thousands of people to assault this [U.S. Capitol] and try to overturn the U.S. Constitution."

READ MORE: San Antonio-based USAA announces major expansion to North Carolina

After airing that clip, Carlson, who has never served in the military, added: "Hard to believe that man wears a uniform. He's that unimpressive."

During the 10-minute segment, Carlson also attacks Milley's bravery, intelligence, and respectability before adding: "[Milley's] not just a pig, he's stupid." Gen. Milley went to Princeton. Carlson went to Trinity College, a liberal arts college in Connecticut.

In the aftermath of Carlson's attack, USAA has faced increasing pressure from some customers to remove advertising from Fox News. As the Express-News points out, USAA's more than 13 million members are exclusively military personnel, veterans, and their families, which puts the insurance provider in a particularly precarious situation.

According to the Express-News, USAA was not immediately available to comment.
On Thursday, Crumbl Cookies opened at 4400 Midland Drive, suite 501, to an excited Midland audience. The afternoon before, owners Chasen Tolbert and Jordan Sorensen wanted to put their employees through a test run. They ended up having a line out the door from people driving by and seeing they were open. The chef logo wall, the open-air kitchen and pink boxes also offered a perfect photo opportunity.

Its not just how the cookies are good, its like an experience when people come in they notice employees mixing and cracking eggs, balling the dough, Tolbert said. Its all the smells and sights that go along with it like the pink boxes and the cookies are good too on top of it.

The store will also have Crumbl Cookies ice cream brand available sometime in July. The store will sell ice cream separately in pints. Some flavors correlate with cookies, and he said he was familiar with churro, biscoff and other flavors that went along with the rotating menu.

Each Monday, Crumbl Cookies have a menu of new flavors. The favorite milk chocolate chip and chilled sugar cookies always remain on the menu, but the other four options change weekly.

Crumbl unveils the new flavors on social media (Facebook, Instagram and Twitter) on Sunday nights, he said. Everyone is following those pages just chomping at the bit and then we have a line on Monday of everyone who wants to try the new flavors.

This weeks flavors to celebrate the Fourth of July include Mallow Sandwich featuring Oreo (a whipped marshmallow fluff maize with Oreos sandwiched between two chocolate cookies rolled in Oreo and topped with brownie chunks and Oreo pieces), cornbread (a sweet cornbread cookie covered in a warm honey butter glaze and topped off with a dollop of rich honey buttercream frosting), hazelnut mudslide (a milk chocolate cookie filled with melty Nutella and topped with gooey milk chocolate and chopped hazelnuts), patriotic birthday cake (a warm cake batter cookie topped with cake batter cream cheese frosting and patriotic sprinkles) and coconut lime (a cool coconut lime sugar cookie topped with a lightly tart lime frosting and finished with a fresh lime wedge).

The shop is open 8 a.m. to 10 p.m Monday through Thursday and 8 a.m. to midnight Friday and Saturday. Delivery is available through DoorDash or cookies can be picked up curbside through the Crumbl Cookies app. Tolbert said eventually the store will have drivers to do deliveries as well. The store has two kiosks for fast checkout for customers familiar with the store.

More food news

--Tokyo Express is now open at 4501 W. Wadley Ave. The restaurant offers hibachi entrees, stir fry yakisoba, stir fry lo mein, sushi rolls, japanese fried rice and more. The restaurant is open 10:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Monday through Sunday.

--Lo. St. Books is now open for lunch at the Micro Market. The shop is open 11 a.m. to 10 p.m Wednesday through Saturday. The added lunch menu includes soup du jour, French lunch (pretzel roll, truffle butter, aioli and brie), soppre sammi (pretzel roll, soppressata, cheddar and dijon), cold chicken sammi (pretzel roll and chicken salad), pbFj (pretzel roll, pistachio, butter and fig jam), LOST club (turkey, prosciutto, tomato, greens and dijon), drunk hippie (fresh greens, feta, pecan and dried fruit) and cold cavatelli (mint pesto, burrata and parmesan rind).

--AnnieDotes will be having a grand opening at 11:30 a.m. Friday at 2016 E. 8th St. in Odessa. The event will have free hot dogs and hamburgers. AnnieDotes is a local and family owned drive-thru liquor, wine, beer and tobacco retailer. The store is open from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday.

--The Huddle House will host a grand opening 10 a.m. to 3 p.m July 10 at 4250 B NE Loop 338 in Odessa. The event will have 50-cent golden waffles, a prize wheel with Huddle House signature door prizes and a raffle with three grand prize winners to win free meals for a year. Fifty-cent golden waffles are available one per guest for dine-in only.

--Another Vinyl Brunch is set 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. on July 11 at Barrel and Derrick in the Odessa Marriott. Endless Horizons also will set up a pop-up shop in the lobby.

--Kung Fu Tea will have a grand opening on July 23 at 1220 N. Midkiff Road, suite G and H. The franchise was founded in 2010 in Queens, New York. The bubble tea brand now has more than 300 locations nationwide. Kung Fu Tea brews tea every three hours and their standard bubbles are cooked every two hours. Bestsellers orange green tea and strawberry lemonade are made with freshly squeezed juices. The Kung Fu Tea app allows customers to pay with a scan of a QR code and earn bubbles that can be redeemed for free drinks.

--Pints for Pencils benefits 3:11 Ministries, 5 p.m. July 24, Eccentric and Brewing Co.

The event is a back-to-school fundraiser for 3:11 Ministries. Attendees can enjoy beer specials with a donation to 3:11 Ministries, live music by Alan Castillejos, silent auction and food trucks will be on-site at 1402 Cotton Flat Road.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP)  California Republicans accused Democrats of acting unfairly Monday as state lawmakers passed a bill aimed at moving up Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom's recall date.

The conclusion is inescapable that Gavin Newsom is cheating in the recall and this Legislature is his willing accomplice," said Republican Assemblyman Kevin Kiley, who is considering running in the contest.

The proposal, now headed to Newsom's desk, would allow the recall to proceed at least 30 days earlier than under existing state law. Democrats hope to take advantage of what they view as favorable conditions for Newsom as the state moves on from the worst days of the pandemic and related restrictions.

Democratic Assemblyman Phil Ting acknowledged the bill will ensure that this recall election happens as soon as possible" and said that's something the recall's supporters should want.

Recall organizers collected 1.7 million signatures in support of recalling Newsom, and he'll face an election later this year. Without the recall, he'd next face voters in 2022 for a regularly scheduled reelection.

This marks the second time Democrats are changing the rules in hopes of helping their own. Four years ago, they added new steps to the recall process as a state senator faced a removal vote. At the time, they hoped to slow things down so the vote would align with the next primary. The changes gave voters who signed the recall petition 30 business days to remove their signatures and set a process for state finance officials and lawmakers to estimate and review election costs.

Democrats proposal would essentially bypass the legislative review process so long as lawmakers set aside money for counties to pay for the cost of the election. The state Department of Finance already sought a cost estimate from counties and lawmakers plan to approve $215 million to cover the local expense.

The bill also gives $35 million to the secretary of state, and Republican lawmakers questioned how it would be spent. They pointed to a controversial $35 million contract the office signed last year for voter outreach with a firm linked to President Joe Biden's campaign. The legislation approved Monday says the money would be spent to support statewide and county costs of the 2021 gubernatorial recall election," but provides no details on whether it could be used to hire an outside firm.

Here we go again. You know this just reeks of partisanship and we need to stop that," Republican Sen. Jim Nielsen said.

With no legislative review, Democratic Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, a Newsom supporter, will be able to set an election date sooner. County clerks have said they need until at least Sept. 14 to be ready.

Those who want to speed things up believe the longer the wait until voters cast their ballots, the more risk of problems arising for Newsom Recent polls show Newsom in a strong position to keep his seat.

Republicans said Newsom's party is trying to manipulate the election.

It is an attempt to put a thumb on the scale, to try to obtain a partisan outcome for one side," said GOP Assemblyman Vince Fong.

It's common for lawmakers in states that allow recalls to fiddle with election laws, but it usually happens after the contest is done, not before or during it, said Joshua Spivak, a recall elections expert. And efforts to manipulate election timing don't always work, he noted, pointing to California state Sen. Josh Newman, who lost his 2018 recall election despite Democrats' rule changes.

That really suggested maybe we dont know what were doing. Youre playing with fire by doing that, said Spivak, who is a senior fellow at the Hugh L. Carey Institute for Government Reform at Wagner College and runs the Recall Elections Blog.

He speculated the change could backfire because an earlier election gives Democrats less time to motivate their voters. Republicans were behind the recall effort and gathered more than 1.7 million signatures. They say their voters are energized.

The bill makes other changes sought by county clerks specific to mail ballots and vote centers. All counties will be required to mail voters a ballot.

Nathan Click, a spokesman for Newsoms campaign, didnt respond to multiple requests for comment about whether the campaign had communicated with Democratic lawmakers about the recall timing.
LOS ANGELES (AP)  The estranged brother of Robert Durst, the real estate heir on trial in his best friend's slaying, reluctantly testified Monday that the two never got along and he feared his oldest sibling would kill him.

Hed like to murder me, Douglas Durst bluntly told jurors in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

Douglas Durst, head of one of New Yorks largest commercial real estate firms, said his brother was angry and bitter over an acrimonious inheritance settlement for tens of millions of dollars. He had not seen his brother in 20 years but worries because of threats he has made.

The chairman of the Durst Organization, which owns some of Manhattan's premier skyscrapers and 2,500 apartments, said he and his brother have fought since childhood.

He treated me miserably, Douglas Durst said. He would fight with me at every chance. He would embarrass me.

Despite the bad blood, Douglas Durst said he did not want to testify against his brother, who is on trial on charges of fatally shooting Susan Berman in 2000 at her Los Angeles home. He said he cooperated with prosecutors under threat of subpoena.

There are other places Id much rather be, he said.

Prosecutors say Berman provided an alibi for Robert Durst after he killed his first wife, Kathie, in 1982 and that he silenced his friend after she decided to tell police what she knew about the disappearance. Robert Durst has pleaded not guilty to murder.

Kathie Durst had told Douglas Durst she planned to seek a divorce from his brother, he testified.

Douglas Durst said his brother told him Kathie Durst vanished three days after he put her on a train to New York City from their lakeside house in Westchester County. Robert Durst said that was the last time he saw his wife.

His tone was very neutral, Douglas Durst said. "There was no great anxiety in his tone. It seemed a little strange.

On cross-examination, he said his brother seemed distraught but added he would have been more upset if his wife was missing.

"There is almost no emotion that Bob shows that is genuine, he said.

He said his brother told him the disappearance might be related to a drug dealer who had come by the couple's apartment. The defense has suggested Kathie Durst, who was on the brink of graduating from medical school, had a cocaine problem.

Kathie Durst has never been found but wasalso declared dead. Robert Durst has long been considered a suspect in her death but has denied any involvement and has never been charged with a crime related to her disappearance.

Douglas Durst, tan and wearing a crisp white shirt with French cuffs and a gray mask to comply with COVID-19 court rules, cut a much different figure than his ailing brother.

A pale, thin Robert Durst, 78, with a shaved head that revealed a massive scar where fluid was drained from his skull, was seated in a wheelchair and dressed in baggy brown jail scrubs.

Durst, who has bladder cancer and several other maladies, stood and addressed the judge to counter a suggestion by Deputy District Attorney John Lewin that he was seeking sympathy by displaying his urine bag and shaving his head.

Durst said it was the only haircut he could get in jail. He said he wants a doctor to remove his catheter.

I am not seeking sympathy from the jury, Durst said in a throaty voice.

Douglas Durst showed no emotion while testifying. He recounted how their mother's death in a fall from the roof of their estate when he was 5 had been traumatic for the whole family, not just for Robert, who was 7 at the time.

He also disputed that $50,000 in checks that Robert Durst gave to Berman were out of generosity, saying his brother was stingy and everything had an ulterior motive.

His brothers trials have tarnished the reputation of his family, he said.

Its the most embarrassing thing that Ive ever encountered, he said. Its very painful to have our names associated with these incidents.

Durst said the last time he spoke with his brother was in 1999 and he had last seen him in Texas at a nephews wedding in 2001.

About two weeks after the wedding, Robert Durst fatally shot neighbor Morris Black in Galveston, where he had gone to hide out from New York authorities after they reopened the investigation into Kathie Dursts disappearance.

Robert Durst was acquitted of murder after testifying that he killed Black in self-defense. He served jail time for chopping up Black's body and tossing it out to sea and for jumping bail.

While he was on the lam in that case, he showed up outside his brothers Westchester home, Douglas Durst said he learned.

Robert Durst was later recorded in a jail phone call in essence plotting to kill his brother, Douglas, Lewin said in arguing that jurors should hear about him showing up at his brother's home.

He has compared the way he feels about Douglas to the way he felt about Kathie, Lewin said. Our argument and position is that is what he did, he killed her.

Robert Durst twice showed up outside his brother's house in 2008, including once when he was wearing a ski mask and fled after a security guard drew his weapon, Lewin said.

Douglas Durst said that although his brother is jailed without bail, he still is concerned about his safety and had flown to California with a security detail.

I have a fear that my brother has threatened to kill me, and I fear that he may have the means to do so, he said.
HONG KONG (AP)  Hong Kong says it will ban all passenger flights from the U.K. starting Thursday as it seeks to curb the spread of new variants of the coronavirus.

It said in a statement Monday that the U.K. has been classified as extremely high risk because of the recent rebound of the epidemic situation in the U.K. and the widespread delta variant virus strain there.

More than 95% of COVID-19 cases in the U.K. are of the delta variant, which was first identified in India. Cases have spiked in recent weeks as British authorities have relaxed coronavirus restrictions, allowing indoor gatherings and businesses including restaurants, cinemas and gyms to reopen. Scientists say the delta variant is much more transmissible than previous versions of the coronavirus, although it is uncertain if it is more deadly.

Under the classification, people who have stayed in the U.K. for more than two hours will be restricted from boarding passenger flights to Hong Kong.

It is the second time that the Hong Kong government has banned flights from the U.K., following a restriction imposed last December.

Although flights from the U.K. are banned from July 1, passengers can still book one-way flights from Hong Kong to London on airlines such as Cathay Pacific and British Airways.

Dr. Julian Tang, a virologist at the University of Leicester who previously worked in Hong Kong, said the ban makes sense from a scientific point of view.

The U.K. has never been good at controlling the virus and overconfidence in the vaccine is likely now spurring this (latest) wave," he said, adding it makes perfect sense for Hong Kong to ban travel from Britain.

He said previous surges of COVID-19 in Hong Kong have been tiny and that exported cases in a largely unvaccinated population would be worrying.

They want to keep that Chinese territory as pristine as possible until they can persuade people to get vaccinated, Tang said. And that's going to take a long time. He estimated that countries need to have at least 80% of their populations immunized to stop the spread of the delta variant.

The ban comes amid heightened tensions between the U.K. and China over semi-autonomous Hong Kong, which was a British colony until it was handed over to China in 1997.

The U.K. has criticized China for imposing a national security law on Hong Kong and tightening control over its media, saying Beijing is undermining the citys autonomy.

The flight ban was triggered by a policy put in place by the government to prevent coronavirus variants from spreading in Hong Kong.

A suspension of passenger flights is imposed if five or more passengers arriving from one place test positive on arrival for a particular coronavirus variant, or a relevant virus mutation within a seven-day period.

A ban is is also triggered if 10 or more passengers from one place are confirmed to be infected with the coronavirus via any tests, including tests conducted during quarantine, within a seven-day period.

The U.K. reported more than 22,000 new cases of the coronavirus on Monday, while more than 66% of the population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.

Hong Kong, which for months imposed a 21-day quarantine for arrivals from most countries and implemented strict social-distancing regulations, reported three new cases of the coronavirus on Monday. It has confirmed a total of 11,921 cases since the pandemic began.

The U.K. flight ban comes as Hong Kong is looking to relax quarantine measures for most other countries, including the U.S. and Canada.

Several other countries, including the Philippines and Indonesia, also face flight bans to Hong Kong.

Last week, the World Health Organization said the delta variant is the most transmissible variant identified to date and said it is spreading in at least 85 countries.
South Carolina officials gave initial approval Tuesday to a $6 million settlement to resolve dozens of prisoner lawsuits against the Department of Corrections following a riot that killed seven inmates.

With one abstention due to a conflict of interest, the State Fiscal Accountability Authority voted unanimously to approve the deal, which it said would work toward resolving a total of 81 lawsuits filed by or for inmates in state and federal courts against the prison system.

The 2018 riot raged for more than seven hours at Lee Correctional Institution in Bishopville, about 40 miles (65 kilometers) east of Columbia. Most of the slain were stabbed or slashed; others appeared to have been beaten. One inmate described bodies literally stacked on top of each other, like some macabre woodpile.

Corrections officials have blamed the violence  the worst U.S. prison riot in 25 years  in part on illegal cellphones, which Department Director Bryan Stirling has said represent the greatest security threat inside prisons because they give inmates an unmonitored way to communicate with the outside world and each other.

Stirling told The Associated Press after Tuesdays vote that the deal next goes to the plaintiffs for signatures, before a court decides how to divvy up the money.

Carter Elliott, an attorney for some of the inmates who sued the state, called the offer an important step toward recognizing the fundamental human rights of the inmates involved in this tragedy.

Rep. Justin Bamberg, another attorney who has represented inmates in the riot litigation, said he appreciated Stirling's leadership following the tragic incident.

Now everyone can focus on healing without needless litigation, and the state can move forward with its goal of improving the South Carolina Department of Corrections, Bamberg said in a statement to AP.

For several months leading up to the insurrection, the AP communicated with a Lee prisoner who used a contraband cellphone to offer insight into life behind bars. Describing frequent gang fights with homemade weapons, he said prisoners roamed freely, had easy access to cellphones and drugs, and were often left to police themselves.

Just after the riots, both that inmate and an attorney who frequently works in the states prisons told the AP that the illegal cellphones were frequently furnished by corrections officers themselves. A person familiar with the agencys operations backed up those notions, telling the AP that delivery trucks, required to be inspected upon entering prison grounds, often ferried cellphones and other contraband.

Since the riot, numerous security improvements have been implemented across the prisons system and specifically at Lee, including a $1 million cell door locking system, 50-foot-high nets to limit contraband from being thrown over the fences and systems to detect cellphones and drones, which could be used to ferry in contraband.

Federal communications regulations continue to prevent the full use of the cell signal-jamming technology Stirling wants, however.

The number of maximum-security inmates at Lee has also dwindled from more than 1,300 at the time of the riot to 270, as of this week, according to Corrections officials. Stirling said inmate assaults on each other, as well as on prison staff, have continually decreased in the years since the riot.

I think our staff has been working hard on safety and security, Stirling told AP. And weve been working hard on getting funding for rehabilitation and reentry programs. There are avenues, if people want to better themselves when they come to the Department of Corrections.

___

Meg Kinnard can be reached at http://twitter.com/MegKinnardAP.
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP)  South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem said Tuesday she will use a donation from a Republican donor to fund a deployment of up to 50 South Dakota National Guard troops to the U.S. border with Mexico.

Noem joined a growing list of Republican governors promising to send law enforcement officers to Texas as the GOP ramps up a political fight with President Joe Biden over border security. The issue has drawn a host of prominent GOP figures: Former President Donald Trump was expected to travel to the border this week and Republican governors from Arkansas, Florida, Nebraska and Iowa have all committed to sending law enforcement officers for border security.

Noems spokesman Ian Fury said the governor decided to fund the deployment with a private donation to help alleviate the cost to South Dakota taxpayers, but declined to provide estimates on the cost of the deployment, citing security reasons.

Willis and Reba Johnsons Foundation made the donation directly to the state, Fury said. Willis Johnson, a Tennessee-based billionaire, is the founder of an online used-car auction called Copart. He regularly makes large contributions to Republicans, including $200,000 to the Trump Victory Committee last year.

Johnson said he approached Noem about making a donation after hearing about Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's border barrier push. He figured Texas has plenty of money so he decided to help Noem, who governs a state with a significantly smaller budget. He also said he had no plans to donate to other states to send law enforcement officers to the border.

Johnson added that he would have preferred to stay anonymous but that Noem's office told him they had to at least disclose his name. He declined to say how much he was giving.

America gave a lot of money to get that border wall done, Johnson said. It takes private individuals now.

Noem, a potential presidential contender, drew a distinction between her decision to send the National Guard and other governors who are sending state police officers.

The border is a national security crisis that requires the kind of sustained response only the National Guard can provide, she said in a statement. We should not be making our own communities less safe by sending our police or Highway Patrol to fix a long-term problem President Bidens Administration seems unable or unwilling to solve.

But Democratic state Sen. Reynold Nesiba said the fact Noem is using a donor to pay for the deployment shows it is not a real priority for the state, but instead gives her political cover. He said he was looking into whether using a private donation to fund the deployment is legal.

This could set a dangerous precedent to allow anonymous political donors to call the governor and dispatch the Guard whenever they want, he said.

The federal government usually pays for National Guard deployments to other states. When troops respond to an in-state emergency, they are paid from state government funds, according to Duke Doering, a historian with the South Dakota National Guard Museum. He said he had never heard of a private donor funding a deployment.

This kind of floors me, when youre talking about a private donor sending the Guard, that doesnt even make sense to me, Doering said.

The South Dakota National Guard is expected to deploy for 30 to 60 days, Noem said, while the other states involved are sending law enforcement officers for roughly two-week stints.

Abbott this month announced plans to build more barriers along the border. Abbott's new push has been criticized as political theater, but he defended the plan, saying the number of border crossers remains high. The governor said he will use $250 million in state money and crowdsourced financing for the barriers, although the timeline and cost for the push are unclear. It also faces potential court challenges from the federal government.

Meanwhile, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson on Tuesday authorized a 90-day deployment of up to 40 National Guard troops to the border. His office said the deployment is not being paid for by a private donor.

Iowa has sent about 25 State Patrol officers to the border under a national interstate mutual aid network called an Emergency Management Assistance Compact. Under the compact, Texas has agreed to reimburse Iowa for the expense of the state troopers, though Iowa is paying expenses for the state troopers initially. The Iowa National Guard also has 24 soldiers providing assistance to law enforcement at the border under a federally-funded activation in response to a Trump administration request in October 2020.

A spokesman for the Nebraska State Patrol, which has sent 25 troopers to Texas, said it has not received any private donations for the deployment.

Large numbers of migrants have been showing up at the U.S. border with Mexico, with many turning themselves over to U.S. Border Patrol agents in seeking legal asylum status. But the numbers of families and children traveling without their parents crossing into the U.S. have dropped sharply since March and April, while the encounters with single adults have remained high.

___

Associated Press reporter Andrew DeMillo contributed to this report from Little Rock, Ark.
Editors Note: The Reporter-Telegram has asked community leaders to provide their opinions about what they believe the communitys priorities should be as the COVID pandemic comes to a close. This is another in that series.

--

ConocoPhillips Tim Leach said his priorities for a better Midland havent changed, and neither has his confidence in the best rocks in the world that will require improvements to make Midland into a viable, long-lasting community.

And at the end of the decade, it will be us, Russia and Saudi Arabia, and so we have a lot of infrastructure to build to attract the workers and to make the life that our citizens can live out here and be attractive to a new generation, Leach told the Reporter-Telegram.

Leach has told the newspaper that Midland needs a top quartile education system and an improved health care system.

Leach has worked through ConocoPhillips acquisition of Concho Resources and will remain in downtown Midland. He said there is a little bit of excess (oil) capacity -- held mostly by OPEC -- that needs to get back into the market and that's going to take place during the next six to 12 months.

He said the volatility will come from the operators in the United States that take their price signals differently.

You have to build companies that can withstand that volatility, which we've done here, that's part of this whole building process with this company, Leach said. I think generally that we will have a good economic band to operate in. We'll go through periods of high oil prices, periods of low oil prices, but generally, I think it's going to be economics, especially for us here in the Permian Basin, that will be compelling. And I think it will justify the kind of infrastructure investments that we need to make.

Leach was complimentary of leaders in Texas and New Mexico that understand how much oil companies provide. He talked about the support the industry has received from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Texas Transportation Commission Chairman Bruce Bugg and others in state government that have the will and leadership to say yes to meet the need for providing energy resources for the world.

We're not alone in this, Leach said.

But the health of oil and other energy companies will depend on the people they can recruit. ConocoPhillips has provided employees an office setting with everything needed, including health care, work-out and dining facilities. It is part of internal infrastructure build-up that has been common among larger employers in Midland.

Leach told the Reporter-Telegram that he expects an immediate build-up of the ConocoPhillips workforce by 100 new people. He expects a growth trajectory in Midland with people moving here, like we've seen in the past.

We want the jobs that are here, though, to be high-paying jobs, high-quality jobs, and to get those kind of jobs, you got have an education system, Leach said.

Leach talked about how much the community and nation has been through, specifically a worldwide pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, taken away a third of the demand for oil products and wiped out the nations economy for a period of time.

He also talked about resiliency of a region and industry that dealt with a 100-year winter storm, a president that told the nation our industry needs to go away, and the lack of appreciation for what we do as an industry.

You couldn't predict those things, Leach said.

Coming Wednesday: Midland-Odessa Transportation Alliance executive director James Beauchamp says Midland-Odessas long-term success will be determined by the development of the infrastructure needed
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced Monday he is allocating $94.6 million in federal COVID-19 relief money for higher education programs to support students as they continue to navigate college during the pandemic.

The one-time funding comes from the Governors Emergency Education Relief fund as part of the federal CARES Act. It will be distributed by the states Higher Education Coordinating Board, in large part to encourage students to enroll in degree and certificate programs in areas with employee shortages and to launch new programs to academically support new students and those who might have started college but left before finishing.

As we transition from pandemic response to economic recovery, a key dilemma our state faces is the significant gap between the skills and credentials many Texans possess and the needs of employers today and into the future, said Commissioner of Higher Education Harrison Keller in a press release. This dilemma requires strategic solutions and Texas higher education will play a pivotal role in empowering our states talent pipeline.

MORE POLITICS NEWS: Crenshaw calls for Olympic athlete's removal over national anthem protest

The majority of the money, $48.1 million, will go toward helping schools start new high-demand programs or expand capacity in current programs so more students can earn credentials in fields experiencing labor shortages, such as health care, logistics, and technology.

In addition, $28.5 million will be set aside to boost student enrollment and provide extra student support such as academic advising and tutoring and financial aid. While Texas university enrollment largely remained flat during the pandemic, community colleges saw large decreases.

Another $18 million will be used for new programs to help students finish college. That includes $10 million to start a student advising program called My Texas Future and $4 million to create a program called GradTX that will help adult students who have some college but no degree return to finish their certificate or degree. The coordinating board had asked the Legislature to fund the last program during the 2021 legislative session. The board estimates 4 million Texans have earned some college credit but not finished their programs.

Commissioner Keller said the agency is working with the Greater Houston Partnership, a chamber of commerce that represents the larger Houston area, as well as four colleges and universities in the Houston region to design the GradTX program, which he hopes can be replicated in communities across the state.

An additional $4 million will go toward boosting data security within a multi-agency group that includes the Texas Education Agency, Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, and the Texas Workforce Commision. The Tri-Agency Workforce Initiative, launched in 2016, works to connect students and higher education with workforce needs.

Abbott previously allocated $175 million in Governors Emergency Education Relief funding to support higher education during the pandemic, including $57 million for student financial aid at two- and four-year schools. He also directed $46.5 million to a grant program in which colleges and universities applied for funding to help students who lost their jobs during the pandemic and needed to learn additional skills to find new jobs.

Disclosure: Greater Houston Partnership has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

The Texas Tribune is a nonpartisan, nonprofit media organization that informs Texans  and engages with them  about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
News

Businesses hope end of federal unemployment increases employee pool

Demos

Some business owners in Rutherford County hope to see more job seekers as the state gets ready to halt federal pandemic relief unemployment checks July 3.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee announced in May that the state will be withdrawing from federal pandemic relief programs. Unemployed residents will no longer receive the $300 weekly payouts with the incentive of filling more than 250,000 job vacancies.

The states maximum unemployment compensation, which is not affected, is set at $275 per week.

State Rep. Charlie Baum, who is also an economics professor at Middle Tennessee State University, said the states decision will motivate more people to re-enter the job force.

Lots of people were able to make as much or more drawing unemployment compensation as they were working, said Baum, referencing the months when unemployed individuals were able to draw from both the federal and state government.

Peter Demos, the president and CEO of Demos Restaurants, said his restaurants faced many of the same challenges as other eateries over the last 18 months, from a shortage of to-go supplies to being short-staffed.

We lost sales. We had to modify to curbside carryout, delivery. We had to lay off workers, said Demos. We didnt know whether we were going to be making it or not.

When dining rooms began to reopen last summer, the business started offering jobs back to its laid-off employees, many of whom did not return, according to Demos.

Following the governors announcement, Demos said there was a surge in online job application submissions. Many applicants would skip the interview stage, he said. The state requires just a weekly work search to receive unemployment benefits.

In one day, we had over 200 applicants that we invited for an interview. Only six showed up for the interview and only two accepted the job, said Demos, who said he has spent more on classified advertising in one month than the business had budgeted for a year.

More recently, there has been an uptick in management applicants. The number of hourly employees has also begun to creep up as July approaches.

While Demos said he believes the end of the federal stimulus can be helpful, he doesnt see it as a cure-all for the labor crisis due to other factors that are being overlooked like lack of childcare options and lingering fears of contracting COVID-19.

Demos said he needs 350 hourly employees and 50 managers for his three Demos locations and two PDK Southern Kitchen & Pantry locations. Currently, he said his has about 275 hourly employees and 30 managers.

Of the Demos locations, he said the Murfreesboro restaurant has been faring better because of the high number of high school students who have started working during the summer months. Demos said these numbers are not expected to remain the same when school resumes in August.

Restaurant owner Marlyse Moran said she, like Demos, has witnessed an influx in job applications but little return in interviews. She attributes some of the issue to a lack of work ethic.

I dont think theres anything wrong with getting help when you need it, but I have a problem with people taking advantage of help when, you know, theres places everywhere hiring, said Moran, owner of The Empanada Sonata in Murfreesboro. Theres no excuse why you cant get up and get a job. Not at all.

Moran has been settled in her brick-and-mortar location just off the downtown square since last August, but her restaurants roots started on wheels with a food truck of the same name in New York in 2016. She and her husband, Keith, relocated to Murfreesboro in 2019.

The beginning of the pandemic brought forth a lot of uncertainty for the business as several corporate events were cancelled, leaving fewer opportunities for food truck owners to make a profit. The decision to move into a permanent space mid-pandemic came with risks, but the downtown location was too good to pass up.

It was a lot of struggling and a lot of tears and a lot of people getting their hours cut, as far as employees, and not knowing if we were going to even make it, said Moran, who employs a modest staff of about 8-10 employees.

Her ideal staffing scenario would be no more than 15 employees, just enough to provide some relief for her staff that has remained loyal to the business over the last year. She predicts the pandemic-related stimulus will yield positive effects for her business and many others.

I think that once it ends, youll see people banging down the doors for jobs, said Moran.
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Billie Vanderbilt, 72, resident of Boley, left us on Thursday, July 1, 2021 from her home. Service arrangements are pending in the Hyde Park Chapel of the Keith D. Biglow Funeral Directors, Inc., in Boley. biglowfunerals.com
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WASHINGTON (AP)  A new committee to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol would have 13 members and the power to subpoena witnesses, according to legislation released by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Monday. The House is expected to vote on the bill this week.

The effort comes after Senate Republicans blocked the formation of an independent, bipartisan commission to probe the attack, in which hundreds of former President Donald Trumps supporters violently broke into the Capitol and interrupted the certification of President Joe Bidens victory.

The new, partisan House panel would have eight members appointed by Pelosi and five appointed after consultation with Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy. A Pelosi aide said the speaker is considering including a Republican among her appointments, which would bring the likely partisan split to 7-6. The aide was granted anonymity to discuss her thinking.

Pelosi said in a statement that Jan. 6 was one of the darkest days in our nations history and that the committee will seek the truth about it.

The Select Committee will investigate and report upon the facts and causes of the attack and report recommendations for preventing any future assault," she said.

Many Republicans were concerned about such a partisan probe, since majority Democrats are likely to investigate Trumps role in the siege and the right wing groups that were present for it. Almost three dozen House Republicans voted to create an independent panel, which would have had an even partisan split among members. Seven Republicans in the Senate supported moving forward on that bill, but that was short of the 10 Senate Republicans who would be necessary to pass it.

As laid out in Pelosis legislation, the new select committee would have subpoena power and no specific end date. The panel can issue interim reports as it conducts the probe.

Trump is not explicitly referenced in the legislation, which directs the select committee to investigate facts, circumstances and causes relating to the January 6, 2021, domestic terrorist attack upon the United States Capitol Complex and relating to the interference with the peaceful transfer of power." The panel would also study influencing factors that fomented such an attack on American representative democracy while engaged in a constitutional process.

The House passed the bill to form an independent commission last month, and Pelosi, D-Calif., said it was her preference to have an independent panel lead the inquiry. But she said last week that Congress could not wait any longer to begin a deeper look at the insurrection so she would form the select panel. She has not said who will lead it.

Still, Pelosi said that the select committee could be complementary to an independent panel, should one ever be formed, and that she is hopeful there could be a commission at some point. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has said he might hold a second vote, but theres no indication that any GOP votes have changed.

Many Republicans have made clear that they want to move on from the Jan. 6 attack, brushing aside the many unanswered questions about the insurrection, including how the government and law enforcement missed intelligence leading up to the rioting and the role of Trump before and during the insurrection.

Others in the GOP have gone further, with one suggesting the rioters looked like tourists and another insisting that a Trump supporter named Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed while trying to break into the House chamber, was executed.

Two officers who battled the rioters, Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone and Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn, have been lobbying Republicans to support an independent commission and met with McCarthy on Friday. Afterward, they said they had asked McCarthy to denounce GOP comments downplaying the violence.

In the absence of an independent commission, Fanone said he asked McCarthy for a commitment not to put the wrong people on the new select panel and that McCarthy said he would take it seriously. McCarthy's office did not respond to requests for comment on either the meeting or the legislation to form the select committee.

The officers also asked McCarthy to denounce 21 Republicans who voted earlier this month against giving medals of honor to the U.S. Capitol Police and the Metropolitan Police to thank them for their service on Jan. 6. Dozens of those officers suffered injuries, including chemical burns, brain injuries and broken bones.

McCarthy, who voted for the measure, told them he would deal with those members privately.

Seven people died during and after the rioting, including Babbitt and three other Trump supporters who died of medical emergencies. Two police officers died by suicide in the days that followed, and a third officer, Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, collapsed and later died after engaging with the protesters. A medical examiner later determined he died of natural causes.

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WASHINGTON (AP)  A federal judge on Monday dismissed antitrust lawsuits brought against Facebook by the Federal Trade Commission and a coalition of state attorneys general, dealing a significant blow to attempts by regulators to rein in tech giants.

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ruled Monday that the lawsuits were legally insufficient and didnt provide enough evidence to prove that Facebook was a monopoly. The ruling dismisses the complaint but not the case, meaning the FTC could refile another complaint.

These allegations  which do not even provide an estimated actual figure or range for Facebooks market share at any point over the past ten years  ultimately fall short of plausibly establishing that Facebook holds market power, he said.

The FTC said in a statement that it is closely reviewing the opinion and assessing the best option forward." The agency has 30 days in which to file a new complaint.

Boasberg closed that avenue for the states, however, in dismissing outright their separate complaint.

The U.S. government and 48 states and districts sued Facebook in December 2020, accusing the tech giant of abusing its market power in social networking to crush smaller competitors and seeking remedies that could include a forced spinoff of the social networks Instagram and WhatsApp messaging services.

The FTC had alleged Facebook engaged in a a systematic strategy to eliminate its competition, including by purchasing smaller up-and-coming rivals like Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. New York Attorney General Letitia James said when filing the suit that Facebook used its monopoly power to crush smaller rivals and snuff out competition, all at the expense of everyday users.

Facebook, in an e-mailed statement, said: We are pleased that todays decisions recognize the defects in the government complaints filed against Facebook. We compete fairly every day to earn peoples time and attention and will continue to deliver great products for the people and businesses that use our services.

Richard Hamilton Jr., a former prosecutor and Justice Department antitrust attorney, said the judge, while finding the FTC's arguments insufficient, gave the agency a sort of road map for how to bulk up its case in another round.

Whether government or private entity, you still need to sufficiently plead the case," Hamilton said. He noted that as Boasberg saw it, the FTC failed to demonstrate how it arrived at the claim that Facebook controls 60% of the market in social networking and how that market power is measured.

Alex Harman, competition policy advocate for Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group, said: Courts really have a hard time with that market definition for some reason. It's Exhibit A for why we need the laws changed."

Rebecca Allensworth, a law professor at Vanderbilt University who specializes in antitrust, said the ruling illustrates the problems regulators face right now bringing antitrust suits in markets without prices, like Facebook's, but also Google's, and in markets where huge, dominant firms offer suites of products that don't neatly fit into the mold of well-defined markets like aluminum ingot or crude oil."

An ambitious package of legislation to overhaul the antitrust laws, which could point toward breaking up Facebook as well as Google, Amazon and Apple, was approved by the House Judiciary Committee last week and sent to the full U.S. House.

As the FTC and 48 state attorneys general have alleged, Facebook is a monopolist and it has abused its monopoly power to buy or bury its competitive threats," Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., who heads the Judiciary panel, and Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., the legislation's lead sponsor, said Monday. In the weeks ahead, we will work to advance this legislation to restore choice, innovation and opportunity for American businesses and consumers.

Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado, the chief Republican sponsor of the legislation, said the ruling shows that antitrust reform is urgently needed. Congress needs to provide additional tools and resources to our antitrust enforcers to go after Big Tech companies engaging in anticompetitive conduct.

Last October the Trump Justice Department, joined by about a dozen states, brought a landmark antitrust suit against Google, accusing the company of using its dominance in online search to stifle competition and innovation at the expense of consumers. As it stands, the case isn't scheduled to go to trial in federal court for nearly three years.

__

AP Technology Writer Barbara Ortutay in Oakland, California, contributed to this report.
Jenny Kane/AP

Forty-eight percent of Southwest Airlines' schedule was either delayed or canceled on June 25, per the aviation blog One Mile at a Time. It's the second time this month Southwest has delayed or canceled thousands of flights. On Saturday, 307 flights were canceled.

The airline blamed weather for the widespread disruption, but this is the second time recently an airline has announced widespread disruption. American Airlines announced hundreds of cancellations on June 21 which will extend at least through mid-July. American projects 50 to 80 flight cancellations per day through that time.
Morgan County

Sheriff

ARRESTS, CITATIONS

 Stephanie C. Sorrells, 45, of 1241 Merritt Road was booked into the Morgan County jail at 8:07 p.m. Sunday on charges of violating a stalking/no-contact order and resisting a peace officer.

 Gerald M. Sharp, 57, of 310 S. Grove St., Waverly, was booked into the Morgan County jail at 4:57 a.m. Sunday on a domestic battery charge.

 Glenn R. Engelmann, 56, of 783 Water Tower Road was booked into the Morgan County jail at 6:57 p.m. Saturday on a domestic battery charge.

 Ryan M. Hofmeister, 33, of 2976 Illinois Route 104, Franklin, was booked into the Morgan County jail at 2:13 p.m. Saturday on a burglary charge.

 Matthew M. Lemon, 25, of 8336 Berean Church Road, Modesto, was booked into the Morgan County jail at 4:05 a.m. Saturday on charges of driving under the influence, failure to reduce speed and illegal use of an electronic communication device.

 Randall G. Winner, 63, of 803 S. East St. was booked into the Morgan County jail at 3:38 a.m. Friday on charges of driving under the influence and possession of adult-use cannabis by a driver.

Jacksonville Police

ARRESTS, CITATIONS

 Dylan P. Willrett, 29, of 363 Marnico Road was booked into the Morgan County jail at 6 p.m. Sunday on a retail theft charge.

 Jebediah S. Miller, 43, of 501 Rodgers St., Bluffs, was booked into the Morgan County jail at 12:30 p.m. Sunday on a violation of the Sex Offender Registry Act.

ACCIDENTS

 Jade E. Young, 24, of Roodhouse was cited at 2:08 p.m. Monday on a charge of failing to yield at an intersection after the car he was driving and one being riven by Joshua L. Moles, 35, of Bowling Green, Missouri, collided at South West Street and West College Avenue.

 Judith E. Sides, 81, of Jacksonville was cited at 11:16 a.m. Monday on a charge of failing to yield right-of-way after the car she was driving and one being driven by Jeanne E. Koehler, 76, of Jacksonville collided in the 1800 block of West Morton Avenue.

 Dante M. Richardson, 18, of Jacksonville was cited on charges of driving too fast for conditions and improper use of an electronic communication device after the car he was driving hit a curb at Mound Road and Fairview Terrace at 2:08 p..m. Sunday and then hit a road sign, utility pole and tree before coming to a rest with its hood in front of 115 Fairview Terrace, according to a police report. Richardson was treated at Passavant Area Hospital for non-life-threatening injuries, according to police. A utility pole, a speed limit sign and a street name sign required replacement.



Pike County

Sheriff

ARRESTS, CITATIONS

 Derrick M. Mountain, 26, of Barry was arrested at 10:11 a.m. Wednesday on a warrant accusing him of domestic battery and criminal trespassing.

 Andrew J. Fesler, 40, of Barry was arrested at 2:38 p.m. Friday on a domestic battery charge.

 Lance R. Dixon, 34, of Curryville, Missouri, was arrested at 8:56 p.m. June 21 on a charge of possession of adult-use cannabis in a motor vehicle.

 Kennard R. Scranton, 36, of Griggsville was arrested at 4:55 p.m. Thursday on a petition to revoke probation.

 Bradly L. Surratt, 29, of Griggsville was arrested at 11:13 p.m. Thursday on two counts of violating an order of protection.

 Joshua L. Parks, 31, of Ladonia, Missouri, was arrested at 3:30 p.m. June 21 on a petition to revoke.

 Heather D. Herrin, 31, of Nebo was arrested at 2:20 p.m. June 22 on a domestic battery charge.

 John R.A. Orr, 27, of Pittsfield was arrested at 7:16 p.m. Wednesday on a charge of driving under the influence while license is revoked or suspended.

 Staci A. Blake, 50, of Pittsfield was arrested at 10:19 p.m. Wednesday on an assault charge.

 Cody N. McCoy, 31, of Rockport was arrested at 10:12 a.m. June 22 on a theft charge.

Pittsfield Police

ARRESTS, CITATIONS

 Jeffrey L. Kinne, 48, address unavailable, was arrested at 6:36 p.m. Friday on a charge of violating the Sex Offender Registry Act.

Compiled by David C.L. Bauer
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP)  U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said Monday that Puerto Rico will receive nearly $4 billion in federal education pandemic relief funds to help boost the U.S. territorys fight against COVID-19.

The announcement was made during Cardonas official three-day trip to Puerto Rico, the first for a Biden administration Cabinet member. It marks the first time the island has full access to those funds.

The students of Puerto Rico have suffered enough, he said. Its time to get back to school safely and quickly.

Roughly half of the nearly $4 billion will be released as part of the American Rescue Plan Act, which was signed into law in March to help offset the pandemics impact on the economy and public health.

Puerto Rico reopened dozens of public and private schools in March for the first time since the pandemic began, although less than 100 of the islands more than 850 public schools were authorized to do so. At the time, only kindergarteners, special education students and children in first, second, third and 12th grades were allowed to return to school for in-person classes twice a week. A month later, officials closed all schools given a spike in COVID-19 cases and didnt reopen some of them until May.

For more than a year, many teachers and students have struggled with ongoing power outages and unreliable or nonexistent internet connections amid virtual learning. Some 24,000 students failed their classes this year, with 13,000 receiving an F' in all their courses, prompting the island's Department of Education to hold summer courses to help them with the help of $210 million in previously approved federal funds.

Cardona said that in addition to meeting with Gov. Pedro Pierluisi, he also will meet with students, parents, educators, union leaders and others to make sure we hear whats happening and how we can best support...Puerto Rico.

It wasnt immediately known exactly how Pierluisi's administration planned to spend the newest federal funds. The announcement comes three months after Cardona announced that Puerto Rico had immediate access to $912 million in federal education money.

Strict conditions had prevented the U.S. territory from receiving certain federal funds in a timely manner under the Trump administration, but these have been easing under U.S. President Joe Biden.

The island of 3.3 million people has reported nearly 123,000 confirmed coronavirus cases and more than 2,000 COVID-19 deaths. More than 40% of the population has been vaccinated.
We use euphemisms to soften reality. We do it all the time when forced to discuss things we would rather not discuss or even acknowledge. Death comes to mind.

Ive completed an exhaustive study and determined that death affects one out of one human beings. Still, wed rather not talk about it or we try to make it a bit more digestible. After all, it sounds much nicer to say hes passed away than hes dead.

Employers are good at this. Were going in a different direction is much more polite than Youre fired.

Much of our interaction with our kids is laced with euphemisms. When my daughters were young, I found myself adopting certain euphemisms into my daily lexicon. I can remember, when I worked for the Justice Department office in Philadelphia, excusing myself from an important meeting by saying, I need to find the potty.

The problem with euphemisms is they can be used to deceive others and even ourselves. History is replete with state-sanctioned euphemisms designed to camouflage the truly horrible. For example, the Final Solution made for much better propaganda fodder than the systematic murder of 6 million Jews.

Today in the U.S., discussions about hot-button issues such as abortion are often lessons in euphemistic gymnastics, performed with amazing skill and dexterity in the White House briefing room.

A few days ago, a reporter asked President Joe Bidens press secretary, Jen Psaki, a direct and simple question. Does the president believe a 15-week-old unborn baby is a human being?

The answer ought to be just as simple, especially for anyone who is aware of ultrasound technology.

Instead, Psaki answered, Are you asking me if the president supports a womans right to choose? He does.

That wasnt the question and Psaki knew it. But to answer yes would have been an admission of what an abortion is and what it entails. Its much easier to couch support for a barbaric procedure in terms such as, a womans right to choose and reproductive rights. You can change the language, but you cant change reality.

It seems weve crossed yet another weird sociological and moral threshold when the leader of the free world, for purely political reasons, refuses to admit that a 15-week-old unborn baby is human. For an administration that often scolds its critics for failing to consider science, it seems more than willing to ignore biological reality. If youre interested, WebMD offers this description of an unborn 15-week-old:

Look closely, and youll be able to see a network of fine blood vessels forming. Babys muscles are getting stronger, and they are testing them out by moving around, making fists, and trying out different facial expressions.

That certainly sounds like a human to me.

The reason the reporters question was relevant and posed to Psaki in the first place was that in the fall, the U.S. Supreme court is scheduled to hear arguments on Mississippis ban on most abortions after 15 weeks. In the past, the president, through spokesmen, has called such prohibitions on abortion an assault on womens rights.

Such language has been part of the abortion debate for decades. Proponents of legal abortion would like you to believe that what is at stake in the Mississippi case and other similar cases is a womans right to choose. Theres nothing new about this defense, of course.

What is new is that we know a lot more about unborn babies than we did in 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade.

We know that some 62 million abortions have been performed in this country since 1973 and we can clearly see, through scientific innovation, the humanness in an unborn baby.

But for Psaki to admit than a 15-week-old unborn baby is human would be to admit that abortion and the administrations support of it really isnt about choice at all, no matter how much it tries to euphemize its way around the issue.

Because if it is, then we inevitably have to answer the question, What choice have we really made?

Rich Manieri is a journalist and author. He is a professor of journalism at Asbury University in Kentucky and can be reached at manieri2@gmail.com.
Tigray fighters in Ethiopia reject cease-fire as sick joke View Photo

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP)  The fighters now retaking parts of Ethiopias Tigray region will pursue soldiers from neighboring Eritrea back into their country and chase Ethiopian forces to Addis Ababa if thats what it takes to weaken their military powers, their spokesman said Tuesday, as a conflict that has killed thousands of civilians looked certain to continue.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Getachew Reda said that well stop at nothing to liberate every square inch of the Tigray region of 6 million people, nearly eight months after fighting erupted between the Tigray forces and Ethiopian soldiers backed by Eritrea.

He rejected the unilateral cease-fire Ethiopias government declared Monday as a sick joke and accused Ethiopia of long denying humanitarian aid to the Tigrayans it now pretends to care about. Ethiopia declared the unilateral cease-fire as its soldiers and hand-picked regional interim administration fled the Tigray regional capital following some of the fiercest fighting of the war.

We want to stop the war as quickly as we can, the Tigray spokesman said.

But he said liberating the region is not just about territory. If there is still a menace next door, whether it be in Eritrea, extremists from the neighboring Amhara region who have occupied western Tigray or Ethiopian forces, its about assuring Tigrayans security, he said.

The comments were sure to bring new alarm from the United States, United Nations and others who have pressed for an end to the fighting in Africas second most populous country that has sent hundreds of thousands of Tigrayans into the worlds worst famine crisis in a decade.

This weeks swift turn in the war has left people scrambling to understand the implications for Tigray, as communications links remained largely cut.

Eritrean soldiers, accused by witnesses of some of the wars worst atrocities against Tigrayans, left the towns of Shire, Axum and Adwa, witnesses said, but it was not clear whether the retreat was temporary. The information ministry of Eritrea, a longtime enemy of Tigrays former leaders and described by human rights groups as one of the worlds most repressive countries, did not immediately respond to questions.

We dont yet know if they are withdrawing from Tigray altogether, acting U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Robert Godec told the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. He said the U.S. had seen no statement from Eritrea saying it was committed to the cease-fire after what appears to be a significant withdrawal of Ethiopian national defense forces from Tigray.

The Tigray leaders have waged a guerrilla war since November after a political falling out with the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who had sidelined them from influential roles in Ethiopias government and military. An Ethiopian military spokesman did not answer the phone Tuesday.

The arrival of Tigray forces in the regional capital, Mekele, on Monday was met with cheers. The fighters on Tuesday moved into Axum and Shire, a town that in recent months saw the arrival of hundreds of thousands of people fleeing intimidation in western Tigray and is a key staging area for humanitarian aid.

Tigray forces are now in control of much of the region after a major counteroffensive with mass popular support, International Crisis Group analyst William Davison said in a statement. They are now in a position to facilitate access to many previously hard to reach areas, he said, urging Ethiopias government not to sabotage the urgent humanitarian efforts.

But the Tigray forces talk indicates how distrustful they are of the cease-fire, Aly Verjee, a senior adviser at the United States Institute of Peace, told AP. Of course, I think its highly irresponsible for them to say such things. It doesnt do anything for people on the brink of famine. At the same time, I understand theyre motivated by deep suspicion of Eritrean forces in particular.

Major questions remained about the fate of the more than 1 million civilians that the United Nations has said remain in parts of Tigray that have been hard, if not impossible, to reach with aid. The United States has said up to 900,000 people now face famine conditions, in the worlds worst hunger crisis in a decade.

That famine is entirely man-made, the acting U.S. assistant secretary of state said.

Sarah Charles, assistant to the administrator for the United States Agency for International Development, told the Washington hearing that the next week or two will be consequential. She urged Ethiopia to lift a communications blackout on Tigray and said forces from the Amhara region must lift checkpoints on key roads for aid delivery.

U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters that the impact of the current situation on the humanitarian operations in the region remains unknown right now. Operations have been constrained for the past few days due to the ongoing fighting. The airport in Mekele was closed, and routes to deliver aid were not open, he said.

Ethiopia has said the cease-fire is in part for the delivery of aid but will last only until the end of the crucial planting season in Tigray  which is in September.

In Ethiopias capital, Addis Ababa, people said they werent sure who to believe amid the battlefield claims, and hoped for peace.

Its the innocent children, farmers and the poor people that are at the front of the war and are suffering, resident Biruk Dessalegn said.

___

Associated Press writer Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report

By CARA ANNA

Associated Press
Ex-mayor in Busan, S. Korea, jailed 3 years for sex abuse View Photo

SEOUL, South Korea (AP)  The former mayor of South Koreas second-largest city was jailed Tuesday on a three-year sentence for sexually abusing two city employees during his tenure.

The lawyers of Oh Keo-don didnt immediately return calls and text messages asking whether they plan to appeal. Busans district court also ordered Oh to receive counseling and banned him from jobs at child welfare organizations and disability facilities for five years following the end of his jail term.

Oh, who was seen as a key ally of Busan-raised President Moon Jae-in, stepped down as the citys mayor in April 2020 after admitting he had unnecessary physical contact with a female public servant who accused him of groping her in his office. The unidentified woman said Ohs behavior caused her post traumatic stress disorder, according to her lawyers.

Oh was later separately accused of making unwanted sexual contact with another female city employee in 2018.

Ohs lawyers insisted it was unclear his behavior was responsible for the womans PTSD. They pleaded for leniency, saying that the 72-year-old Oh made positive contributions to society and was dealing with health issues that cause cognitive impairment.

The court rejected such claims, saying it was clear that Oh abused his status while harassing the women and that his actions werent accidental or one-off in nature.

Even based on materials submitted by the defendant, its difficult to believe that the defendant has a degree of cognitive impairment that would have influenced his actions when he was committing the crimes, the court said in a statement.

Moons Democratic Party has been rocked by sexual misconduct allegations surrounding some of its major politicians.

Former Chungcheong Province Governor Ahn Hee-jung, once seen as a presidential hopeful, is currently in prison for raping his former secretary. Park Won-soon, then Seouls mayor, was found dead of an apparent suicide in July 2020 after a female employee accused him of extended sexual harassment.

Moons liberal party lost the mayoral by-elections in both Seoul and Busan to conservative opposition candidates in April, a huge setback that analysts say possibly set the stage for an unpredictable presidential vote in March next year.

By KIM TONG-HYUNG

Associated Press
Popular ex-prosecutor in S. Korea launches presidential bid View Photo

SEOUL, South Korea (AP)  South Koreas former top prosecutor launched a bid to run in next years presidential election Tuesday, vowing to unseat the current liberal government that he once worked for and that he also investigated for possible corruption.

Yoon Suk Yeol tops surveys on the South Korean publics preferred future leader, and his announcement will likely heat up the race to find a successor for President Moon Jae-in, whose single five-year term has been marked by roller-coaster diplomacy with North Korea, a deepening domestic divide and varied economic woes.

Im stepping forward with a determination to change the government, Yoon said at a news conference. Ill join forces with everyone yearning for a shift in power and achieve that surely.

Yoon, who resigned as prosecutor-general in March, had led Moons push to root out corruption. But their ties soured as some of Moons political allies were investigated over corruption and other charges.

Moons supporters have accused Yoon of using the investigations to boost his political standing or thwart Moons prosecution reforms. Yoon has said the investigations were conducted in line with due procedures and principles.

While the infighting invited public criticism that Moons anti-corruption campaign was only tough on his political opponents, it also helped Yoon emerge as a potential opposition candidate as the conservatives still have no clear standard-bearer to fight against Moons governing party in the presidential election set for next March.

During Tuesdays news conference, Yoon called the Moon government corrupt, incompetent and arrogant. He said he wants to restore constitutionalism and the principle of fairness that he says have been marred by the Moon government.

Moons governing Democratic Party hit back at Yoon, accusing him of failing to clearly explain his vision and why he is running for the presidency.

Todays announcement of his election bid is full of vagueness and self-contradiction, party spokesperson Lee So-young said. He only focused on criticizing the government that he himself served in, and the nature and contents of liberal democracy that Yoon Suk Yeol talked about were vague.

Yoon has not joined the main conservative opposition People Power Party, though he said he shares its basic political philosophy. Some observers say Yoon may launch his own party if he maintains his current popularity.

The long-dominant People Power Party was in disarray following the explosive 2016 corruption scandal that led to the impeachment and ouster of then-President Park Geun-hye. Its popularity has revived since it elected a 36-year-old party member as its new chairman this month, sparking hopes for a generational change in local politics.

Yoons main rival is governing party member Lee Jae-myung, the governor of Gyeonggi province that surrounds Seoul, the capital.

In a public survey conducted by the Seoul-based private Korea Society Opinion Institute last week, 32.4% of respondents choose Yoon as the most suitable figure for the next president, and Lee came in next with 28.4%.

Compared with Lee, who has called for engagement with North Korea and drastic steps to reform family-run conglomerates and other establishments, Yoons election platform is still unknown. On Tuesday, Yoon stressed the need to cooperate with North Korea and restore frayed ties with Japan, but didnt elaborate.

Whoever becomes the next South Korean president will face a slew of daunting challenges such as an increasing North Korean nuclear threat, the U.S.-China rivalry, skyrocketing housing prices and high youth unemployment.

Some critics question if political novice Yoon can withstand the expected massive political offensive by his opponents.

In 2017, former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was once a favorite to replace the impeached Park, but questions about his political competence and corruption allegations forced his abrupt withdrawal from the race. Moon then scored an easy victory in the election.

By HYUNG-JIN KIM

Associated Press
Americans apologize to Tokyo court for role in Ghosn escape View Photo

TOKYO (AP)  Two Americans charged in Japan with helping Nissans former chairman, Carlos Ghosn, jump bail and escape for Lebanon apologized Tuesday in a Tokyo court.

I deeply regret my actions and sincerely apologize for causing difficulties for the judicial process and for the Japanese people. Im sorry, Michael Taylor, a former Green Beret said, bowing and holding back sobs.

Taylor, on trial in Tokyo District Court with his son Peter, said in response to questioning by his lawyer and prosecutors that he had been misinformed by Ghosn and his wife, Carole.

Carole Ghosn told Taylor her husband was tortured and grilled in solitary confinement, he said. Ghosn also said he was being mistreated, Taylor said.

Taylor said he has been well treated in Japan.

I didnt know much about Japan. All I know is that the Japanese are the friendliest people Ive ever bumped into, he said.

At the outset of their trial earlier this month, the Taylors indicated they werent fighting the allegations, in Japans equivalent of pleading guilty. They were arrested in Massachusetts last year and extradited to Japan in March.

Peter Taylor, who allegedly met with Ghosn to plan the escape, also apologized to the court for the trouble he had caused.

I must apologize to the people of Japan, Peter Taylor said, bowing to a panel of three judges.

After more than 400 days in jail, I have had a lot of time to reflect. I take full responsibility and deeply apologize. I am sorry, he said.

If convicted of helping a criminal, the Taylors face up to three years in prison. Japanese trials often drag on for months, and their defense team has indicated they want the trial to finish as soon as possible. Showing remorse for wrongdoing is considered crucial for defendants hoping for judicial leniency.

Ghosn, who led Nissan for two decades, was arrested in November 2018, and charged with financial misconduct, including falsifying securities reports to under-report his future compensation, and with breach of trust in using Nissan money for personal gain.

He says he is innocent, arguing that the compensation was never decided on or paid and the expenses were legitimate for his job.

Ghosn hid in a box for musical equipment and left Japan in a private jet in December 2019. He is now in Lebanon, which has no extradition treaty with Japan.

The Taylors, who have not been granted bail, are accused of playing leading roles in that escape. Prosecutors have described details of bank transfers and bitcoin payments, alleging Ghosn paid the Taylors the equivalent of more than $1 million.

While in detention, prosecutors questioned Ghosn without a lawyer present, although he was allowed lawyers visits. Thats standard in Japan, where more than 99% of criminal cases end with guilty verdicts. Critics often point to human rights abuses in the judicial system.

Another American and former top Nissan executive, Greg Kelly, is on trial in Tokyo on charges of under-reporting Ghosns compensation. Kelly says he is innocent and was only trying to pay Ghosn legally.

___

Yuri Kageyama is on Twitter https://twitter.com/yurikageyama

By YURI KAGEYAMA

AP Business Writer
German probe weighs possible extremist motive in stabbing View Photo

BERLIN (AP)  German investigators said Tuesday that an Islamic extremist motivation for last weeks fatal knife attack in Wuerzburg appears likely, but they havent so far found any propaganda or other extremist material. They also plan more checks on the suspects mental health.

Fridays assault in and outside a store in the center of the Bavarian city left three women dead and another six people seriously injured. The suspect, a 24-year-old Somali man, was shot in the leg by police and arrested after people surrounded him and tried to hold him at bay with chairs and sticks.

Officials have said they believe the suspect was a lone assailant. He was sent to jail on Saturday pending a possible indictment.

Bavarian extremism and terrorism investigators took over the case on Saturday because an Islamist background appears likely, Munich prosecutors and Bavarias state criminal police office said in a statement. They said that is supported by witnesses account that he twice shouted Allahu akbar, the Arabic phrase for God is great, and also referred to jihad after his arrest.

Investigators are still evaluating objects that were seized at his accommodation, including two cellphones, but havent yet found signs of propaganda or extremist material, they added.

They also plan to order a psychiatric evaluation of the suspect to determine whether he can be held criminally responsible for his actions and whether he needs to be sent to a psychiatric hospital or rehabilitation clinic.

Prosecutors have said there were two incidents earlier this year that resulted in him being sent briefly to a psychiatric hospital.
Dutch navy: Russian jets flew low over frigate in Black Sea View Photo

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP)  Russian warplanes repeatedly flew low over a Dutch navy frigate in the Black Sea last week and carried out mock attacks, the Defense Ministry of the Netherlands said Tuesday.

The incident involving the Dutch ship Zr. Ms. Evertsen happened last Thursday southeast of Crimea, the ministry said in a statement.

It came a day after after Russia said one of its warships in the Black Sea fired warning shots and a warplane dropped bombs to force a British destroyer out of an area near Crimea that Russia claims as its territorial waters. Britain denied that account and insisted its ship wasnt fired upon.

The Evertsen has been patrolling in the Black Sea with HMS Defender, the British ship that was involved in that incident.

Defense Minister Minister Ank Bijleveld-Schouten called the Russian actions irresponsible.

Evertsen has every right to sail there, she said. There is no justification whatsoever for this kind of aggressive act, which also unnecessarily increases the chance of accidents.

She said the Netherlands would speak to Russia about the incident.

The ministry said that the Russian jets, armed with bombs and air-to-surface rockets flew past the frigate between 3:30 p.m and 8:30 p.m. and were followed by disruptions to the Evertsens electronic equipment.

The Russian Defense Ministry responded in a statement later Tuesday, saying that the military scrambled its warplanes to prevent the violation of the Russian Federations territorial waters after the Evertsen changed course and headed toward the Kerch Strait between the Black Sea and the Azov Sea.

The ministry said that after the Su-30 fighter jets and the Su-24 bombers made flyovers at a safe distance from the Evertsen, the ship changed course and sailed away.

Russia annexed Ukraines Crimean Peninsula in 2014, a move not recognized by most countries, gaining access to its long Black Sea coast. Russia has chafed at NATO warships visiting near Crimea as destabilizing. In April, it declared a broader area off Crimea closed to foreign naval ships.

In April, Russia imposed restrictions on foreign naval movements near Crimea until November in a move that drew strong complaints from Ukraine and the West. Russia rejected the criticism and noted the restrictions wouldnt interfere with commercial shipping.

Earlier this year, Russia also bolstered its troops near the border with Ukraine and warned Kyiv against using force to reclaim control of the countrys eastern industrial heartland, where a conflict with Russia-backed separatists has killed more than 14,000 people in seven years. Moscow withdrew some of its forces after maneuvers, but Ukrainian officials say many of them remain.

___

Associated Press writer Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow contributed to this report.

By MIKE CORDER

Associated Press
Brazil to redeploy troops to Amazon to fight deforestation View Photo

BRASILIA, Brazil (AP)  President Jair Bolsonaro signed a decree Monday to dispatch Brazilian soldiers to the Amazon in a bid to curb surging deforestation, just two months after withdrawing troops from the region and days after his Environment Minister resigned.

The decree published in the countrys official gazette said soldiers would go to the states of Para, Amazonas, Mato Grosso and Rondonia through the end of August. It didnt provide details about the number of troops to be deployed nor the cost of the operation.

Vice President Hamilton Mourao told reporters earlier this month that the deployment could be extended beyond two months with the arrival of the dry season, when people burn forest to clear land.

Amazon deforestation has been ticking upwards for several years, but surged since the 2018 election of Bolsonaro, who repeatedly called for development of the rainforest. The destruction has elicited an international outcry and, more recently, an effort by U.S. President Joe Bidens administration to urge Bolsonaro to get tough on illegal logging.

This will mark the third time that Bolsonaro has dispatched troops to the Amazon, following two Operation Green Brazil deployments, the most recent of which ended in April. Each mission involved thousands of soldiers. Still, environmental experts have said the military was ill-prepared and had limited efficacy.

In 2020, deforestation in Brazils Amazon reached a level unseen since 2008, according to official data.

And 98.9% of deforestation had indications of illegality, either done near springs, in protected areas or carried out without requisite authorization, according to data released this month by the MapBiomas Project, a network of nonprofits, universities and technology companies that studies Brazilian land use. Brazils environmental regulator levied fines in just 5% of these cases, the group found.

Marcio Astrini, executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, a network of environmental nonprofit groups, called the latest military deployment a smokescreen that will allow the government to claim to be fighting deforestation. He noted a previously successful initiative, largely funded by the Norwegian and German governments, has been suspended since 2019.

The government has adopted a series of measures that simply destroys the states monitoring capacity, like stopping environmental fines, Astrini said. He added that the regulator has also ceased destroying machinery used for illegal logging.

Bolsonaros plan to send soldiers comes as the US. administration has called for curbing Amazon deforestation in order to help arrest climate change. Bolsonaro has said Brazil lacks enough funds to do so on its own, despite the fact the nation did so at the start of this century.

The U.S. has made clear it would only be willing to contribute once Brazil registers concrete progress, of which there has so far been no sign. Talks between the U.S. and Brazils environment ministry have stalled, three Brazilian government officials told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity because they werent authorized to speak publicly.

The decision to deploy troops is partially meant to demonstrate the governments good intentions to the U.S., one of the officials added.

On June 23, Environment Minister Ricardo Salles announced his resignation, giving up his post amid sharp criticism of his tenure and two investigations into his actions involving allegedly illegal timber operations. He has denied all wrongdoing.

By DEBORA ALVARES

Associated Press
Calaveras, CAA new grant for $35,000 was received from California Health Care Foundation(CHCF) and will be used to bolster and expand the Career Technical Education(CTE) program that benefits Calaveras students seeking a career in healthcare. In addition to that funding, Mark Twain Health Care District approved a $25,000 grant.

The CHCF is a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to improving Californias health care system.

Chief Executive Officer of the Mark Twain Health Care District Dr. Randall Smart is optimistic about partnering with the school system, he explained. The Mark Twain Health Care District is strongly committed to supporting our youth. We want every student to have the educational opportunity to explore the exciting and rewarding world of healthcare service. Our future depends on these young adults using their incredible skills to serve the sick and disabled. This partnership with the Calaveras County Office of Education will serve our county well.

In addition, Superintendent of Schools Scott Nanik expressed his excitement about the opportunities this gives Students by saying The financial support from these partners demonstrate how high-quality programs can be developed and grown in the Motherlode. The efforts of the Calaveras Education Workforce Development initiative and CCOE are paying off for our students.
McConnell: Biden Is Under Enormous Pressure From The Left

Microphone and US Flag View Photo

U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) recently delivered remarks on the Senate floor regarding infrastructure.

McConnell was Tuesdays KVML Newsmaker of the Day. Here are his words:

Earlier today, a bipartisan group of infrastructure negotiators took the results of their efforts to President Biden.

It was an encouraging sign of progress after leading Democrats had gone out of their way to slow the process.

Remember: At first sign of an agreement last night and then again this morning, both the Democratic Leader and the Speaker of the House made it clear they would hold the bipartisan agreement hostage, demanding trillions of dollars in wasteful spending and job-killing tax increases in return for even considering it.

The two top Democrats literally pulled the rug out from under their bipartisan negotiators with these unserious demands before theyd even made it to the White House.

So President Bidens show of support earlier today appeared to be a major breakthrough for earning Democrats support.

But that optimism was short-lived.

Less than two hours after publicly commending our colleagues and endorsing the bipartisan agreement, the President took the extraordinary step of threatening to veto it.

It was a tale of two press conferences  endorse the agreement in one breath and threaten to veto it in the next.

Less than two hours. It almost makes your head spin. An expression of bipartisanship, and then an ultimatum on behalf of your left-wing base.

Now, I have no doubt that the President is under enormous pressure from some on the Left to deliver on a laundry list of radical climate demands.

The Democratic Leader and the Speaker have already made clear theyll do whatever it takes to keep their runaway spending train chugging along this summer.

And more and more members of their party are having to contort their positions to keep pace with the expectations of the Green New Deal fringe.

But caving completely in less than two hours?

Thats not the way to show youre serious about getting a bipartisan outcome.

So I hope our colleagues can recover and get their good-faith efforts back on track.

The Newsmaker of the Day is heard every weekday morning at 6:45, 7:45 and 8:45 on AM 1450 and FM 102.7 KVML.
New Israeli foreign minister in the UAE on 1st state visit View Photo

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP)  Israels foreign minister kicked off the highest-level visit by an Israeli official to the United Arab Emirates on Tuesday, nine months after the two countries established relations in a deal brokered by the United States.

Foreign Minister Yair Lapid met the UAEs foreign minister in Abu Dhabi and inaugurated Israels first embassy in the Gulf.

Although the visit is historic, it received little fanfare across local media. Lapid was not greeted on the airport tarmac by Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, but by a lower-ranking minister of state. Even press access for Lapids various appearances in Abu Dhabi was strictly limited to Emirati media and select Israeli outlets traveling with him.

The toned-down atmosphere surrounding his visit belies the UAEs open-arm embrace of its newfound ties with Israel. In recent months, the two countries have rapidly expanded bilateral trade and signed investment deals, including in gas, technology and other sectors. More than 200,000 Israeli tourists have traveled to the UAE, the Israeli Foreign Ministry has said. Many of those visits have been to Dubai, which is open to tourists.

Lapids visit, however, comes just weeks after a new government in Israel was formed in a power-sharing deal that named the ideologically hawkish, right-wing Naftali Bennett as Israels prime minister.

His visit also comes less than six week after emotions ran high across the Middle East amid Israels 11-day war in the Gaza Strip that killed 254 Palestinians, including dozens of children. In Israel, 13 people died as a result of the conflict.

Lapid told diplomats gathered at the official opening of the Israeli Embassy in Abu Dhabi that the moment represented the right to determine our fate by ourselves. Israel, he said, isnt going anywhere.

The Middle East is our home. Were here to stay. We call on all the countries of the region to recognize that. And to come talk to us, he said, according to the speech released by Israels Foreign Ministry.

The Gaza war and tensions in Jerusalem, however, have interrupted U.S.-backed diplomatic efforts to encourage more Arab states to sign normalization deals with Israel.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken described Lapids visit as significant for Israel, the UAE, and the broader region. In a statement, he said the U.S. will work with Israel and the UAE to strengthen the partnership.

The Trump administration brokered the so-called Abraham Accords agreement that established ties between the UAE and Israel. It was hailed at the time by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump as among their greatest achievements.

Lapids visit to the UAE was one that Netanyahu had hoped to make himself before his 12-year-run at the helm ended earlier this month. He had repeatedly tried to score a lightning trip to Abu Dhabi to boost his re-election campaign.

In acknowledgement of Netanyahu, Lapid told diplomats gathered at the Israeli Embassy that the former prime minister is the architect of the Abraham Accords and that this moment is his, no less than it is ours.

Underpinning UAE-Israel ties is a shared concern that Irans nuclear deal with world powers did not go far enough to curb Tehrans reach in the region. Their reservations about the deal helped propel quiet ties, long before they formally announced full diplomatic relations last year.

President Joe Biden is pushing to revive and expand the nuclear accord, which Trump pulled the U.S. out of in 2018. Earlier this week, Lapid was quoted as saying that Israel has serious reservations about the nuclear deal being discussed in Vienna, but pledged Israel would make its objections privately. Its expected that Lapids conversation with his Emirati counterpart included talk of Iran.

Theres been years of under-the-radar relations between Israel and the UAE, and we are now enjoying the fruits of the infrastructure of peace that weve built in the last decades, said Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Lior Haiat.

On Wednesday, Lapid will inaugurate Israels consulate in Dubai and visit the site of the World Fairs Expo in Dubai, which will open in October. Lapid is also due to meet with members of the expatriate Jewish community residing in Dubai.

The UAEs move to formalize ties with Israel marked the first time in over two decades that an Arab state had normalized relations with Israel. It paved the path for a similar announcement by Bahrain, and later by Sudan and Morocco in rapid succession.

Soon after its pact with Israel, the UAE scored U.S. authorization for the sale of 50 advanced F-35 fighter jets, which would make it only the second country in the Middle East, after Israel, to acquire them.

Meanwhile, Palestinians across the political spectrum have slammed the UAEs ties with Israel in the absence of peace talks or concessions toward a two-state solution.

In May, tensions flared in east Jerusalem when Israeli forces clashed with Palestinian protesters and worshippers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in the final days of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. The site in east Jerusalem is holy to both Jews and Muslims.

The tensions in Jerusalem drew rare public rebuke from the Emirati government. The UAEs public statements, however, changed in tone after Hamas militants in Gaza began firing rockets at Israel. The UAE considers Hamas as an Iran-backed militant group and an offshoot of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood.

___

Associated Press writer Ilan Ben Zion in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

By AYA BATRAWY and ISABEL DEBRE

Associated Press
BEIRUT (AP)  The top leaders of the militant groups Hezbollah and Hamas held talks in Beirut on Tuesday about last months 11-day war with Israel in the Gaza Strip.

Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of the Palestinian Hamas, arrived in Lebanon on Sunday and met several top officials, including President Michel Aoun and Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri.

On Tuesday, Haniyeh and Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah discussed how they can build on the experience of the latest round of violence. The bruising war had caused widespread destruction in the Gaza Strip, brought life in much of Israel to a standstill and killed at least 254 people.

There were no comments after the meeting that brought Nasrallah and Haniyeh together. It was the first between the two since September.

During the war, Hamas and other militant groups fired over 4,000 rockets into Israel with dozens of projectiles flying as far north as Tel Aviv, the countrys bustling commercial and cultural capital. Israeli airstrikes and shelling caused wide destruction in Gaza.

Hezbollah and Israel fought a 34-day war in 2006 that ended in a draw.

After the end of the war in Gaza, Haniyeh visited Egypt for Palestinian reconciliation talks. He later visited Morocco and Mauritania before arriving in Lebanon.
CAIRO (AP)  A Yemeni government official said Tuesday that Houthi rebels fired two missiles in the latest attack in the government-held city of Marib, killing at least three people, including a child.

The missiles landed in the Rawdha neighborhood in the crowded city, according to Ali al-Ghulisi, the provincial governors press secretary.

At least 10 other people, including two children, were wounded in the attack, al-Ghulisi said.

The Houthis said they targeted military camps in the city, though they did not provide evidence to support their claim.

Yemen has been embroiled in a civil war since 2014, when the Iranian-backed Houthis swept across much of the north and seized the capital, Sanaa, forcing the internationally recognized government into exile. The Saudi-led coalition entered the war the following year on the side of the government. The war has killed more than 130,000 people and spawned the worlds worst humanitarian crisis.

Tuesdays missiles landed in the same residential neighborhood where a Houthi missile and explosive-laden drone attack hit a gas station earlier this month, killing at least 21 people, including a father and his 2-year-old daughter.

Iran-backed Houthi rebels have been attempting since February to capture Marib from the internationally recognized government, which would complete their control over the northern part of Yemen.

However, they have not made substantial progress and have suffered heavy losses amid stiff resistance from government forces aided by the Saudi-led coalition supporting them.

The Houthis have fired ballistic missiles and sent drones into Marib, often hitting civilian areas and camps for displaced people. More than 120 civilians have been killed, including 15 children, and more than 220 wounded in Marib in the past six months, according to the government.

The U.S.s top diplomat in Yemen, Cathy Westley, condemned Tuesdays attack and called for the Houthis to accept a cease-fire and engage in negotiations on a peaceful settlement to the conflict.

The Houthi offensive on Marib, combined with accelerating missile and explosives-laden drone attacks on Saudi Arabia, has come amid mounting international efforts to halt the fighting and relaunch talks between the warring parties to end the war in the Arab worlds poorest country.

By SAMY MAGDY

Associated Press
LOS ANGELES (AP)  Los Angeles police fatally shot an armed man Monday morning after a pursuit, authorities said.

The man, who has not yet been identified, was pronounced dead at the hospital, according to Los Angeles police Officer Tony Im.

The incident began in the citys Pacoima neighborhood shortly before 10 a.m. when officers saw a driver commit an alleged traffic violation, Im said. They tried to pull him over but he refused to stop.

They pursued him onto Interstate 5, Im said. The driver exited the freeway and lost control of his vehicle.

The driver then allegedly got out of the vehicle with a handgun, prompting at least one officer to open fire. Im said he did not know if the driver fired his weapon.

No officers were injured.

Mondays shooting was the seventh one this year where Los Angeles police officers fatally shot a person, according to the Los Angeles Times.
BAGRAM, Afghanistan (AP)  For nearly 20 years, Bagram Airfield was the heart of American military power in Afghanistan, a sprawling mini-city behind fences and blast walls just an hours drive north of Kabul. Initially, it was a symbol of the U.S. drive to avenge the 9/11 attacks, then of its struggle for a way through the ensuing war with the Taliban.

In just a matter of days, the last U.S. soldiers will depart Bagram. They are leaving what probably everyone connected to the base, whether American or Afghan, considers a mixed legacy.

Bagram grew into such a massive military installation that, as with few other bases in Afghanistan and even Iraq, it came to symbolize and epitomize the phrase mission creep, said Andrew Watkins, Afghanistan senior analyst for the Brussels-based International Crisis Group.

U.S. Central Command said last week that its well past 50% done packing up Bagram, and the rest is going fast. American officials have said the entire pullout of U.S. troops will most likely be completely finished by July 4. The Afghan military will then take over Bagram as part of its continuing fight against the Taliban  and against what many in the country fear will be a new eruption of chaos.

The departure is rife with symbolism. Not least, its the second time that an invader of Afghanistan has come and gone through Bagram.

The Soviet Union built the airfield in the 1950s. When it invaded Afghanistan in 1979 to back a communist government, it turned it into its main base from which it would defend its occupation of the country. For 10 years, the Soviets fought the U.S.-backed mujahedeen, dubbed freedom fighters by President Ronald Reagan, who saw them as a front-line force in one of the last Cold War battles.

The Soviet Union negotiated its withdrawal in 1989. Three years later, the pro-Moscow government collapsed, and the mujahedeen took power, only to turn their weapons on each other and kill thousands of civilians. That turmoil brought to power the Taliban who overran Kabul in 1996.

When the U.S. and NATO inherited Bagram in 2001, they found it in ruins, a collection of crumbling buildings, gouged by rockets and shells, most of its perimeter fence wrecked. It had been abandoned after being battered in the battles between the Taliban and rival mujahedeen warlords fleeing to their northern enclaves.

After dislodging the Taliban from Kabul, the U.S.-led coalition began working with their warlord allies to rebuild Bagram, first with temporary structures that then turned permanent. Its growth was explosive, eventually swallowing up roughly 30 square miles.

The closure of Bagram is a major symbolic and strategic victory for the Taliban, said Bill Roggio, senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

If the Taliban is able to take control of the base, it will serve as anti-U.S. propaganda fodder for years to come, said Roggio who is also editor of the foundations Long War Journal.

It would also be a military windfall.

The enormous base has two runways. The most recent, at 12,000 feet long, was built in 2006 at a cost of $96 million. There are 110 revetments, which are basically parking spots for aircraft, protected by blast walls. GlobalSecurity, a security think tank, says Bagram includes three large hangars, a control tower and numerous support buildings. The base has a 50-bed hospital with a trauma bay, three operating theaters and a modern dental clinic. There are also fitness centers and fast food restaurants. Another section houses a prison, notorious and feared among Afghans.

Jonathan Schroden, of the U.S.-based research and analysis organization CNA, estimates that well over 100,000 people spent significant time at Bagram over the past two decades. Bagram formed a foundation for the wartime experience of a large fraction of U.S. military members and contractors who served in Afghanistan, said Schroden, director of CNAs Center for Stability and Development.

The departure of the last U.S. troops from there will likely serve as the final turn of the page for many of these folks with respect to their time in that country, he said.

For Afghans in Bagram district, a region of more than 100 villages supported by orchards and farming fields, the base has been a major supplier of employment. The U.S. withdrawal effects nearly every household, said Darwaish Raufi, district governor.

The Americans have been giving the Afghan military some weaponry and other material. Anything else that they are not taking, they are destroying and selling it to scrap dealers around Bagram. U.S. officials say they must ensure nothing usable can ever fall into Taliban hands.

Last week, the U.S. Central Command said it had junked 14,790 pieces of equipment and sent 763 C-17 aircraft loaded with material out of Afghanistan. Bagram villagers say they hear explosions from inside the base, apparently the Americans destroying buildings and material.

Raufi said many villagers have complained to him about the U.S. leaving just their junk behind.

Theres something sadly symbolic about how the U.S. has gone about leaving Bagram. The decision to take so much away and destroy so much of what is left speaks to the U.S. urgency to get out quickly, said Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Asia Program at the U.S.-based Wilson Center.

Its not the kindest parting gift for Afghans, including those taking over the base, he said.

Inevitably, comparisons to the former Soviet Union have arisen.

Retired Afghan Gen. Saifullah Safi, who worked alongside U.S. forces at Bagram, said the Soviets left all their equipment when they withdrew. They didnt take much with them, just the vehicles they needed to transport their soldiers back to Russia, he said.

The prison in the base was handed over to the Afghans in 2012, and they will continue to operate it. In the early years of the war, for many Afghans, Bagram became synonymous with fear, next only to Guantanamo Bay. Parents would threaten their crying children with the prison.

In the early years of the invasion, Afghans often disappeared for months without any reports of their whereabouts until the International Committee of the Red Cross located them in Bagram. Some returned home with tales of torture.

When someone mentions even the word Bagram I hear the screams of pain from the prison, said Zabihullah, who spent six years in Bagram, accused of belonging to the faction of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a warlord designated a terrorist by the U.S. At the time of his arrest it was an offense to belong to Hekmatyar's party.

Zabihullah, who goes by one name, was released in 2020, four years after President Ashraf Ghani signed a peace deal with Hekmatyar.

Roggio says the status of the prison is a major concern, noting that many of its prisoners are known Taliban leaders or members of militant groups, including al-Qaida and the Islamic State group. It's believed about 7,000 prisoners are still in the prison.

If the base falls and the prison is overrun, these detainees can bolster the ranks of these terror groups, Roggio said.
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Screenwriter and award-winning producer Cynthia Hargrave, who helped launch the careers of Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson, has died due to complications from systemic scleroderma. She was 64.

With Andersons 1993 debut Bottle Rocket, Hargrave was the first producer to turn a Sundance Film Festival short into a Hollywood studio feature. Hargrave was a producer on the original short as well as the subsequent 1996 feature film of the same name, which stars Owen and Luke Wilson and has become an indie classic.

Hargrave was married to the late L.M. Kit Carson, who also produced and acted in Bullfighter and Hurricane Streets. She helped lift her husbands projects off the ground and served as a mentor for cinematographer Enrique Chediak, composer Jan Kaczmark and a long list of below-the-line professionals.

Hargrave also produced Morgan J. Freemans debut feature Hurricane Streets, which was the first film to win three awards at Sundance, as well as Michael Rymers Perfume  starring Jeff Goldblum and Rita Wilson  and Rune Bendixens Bullfighter  featuring Willem Dafoe, Olivier Martinez, Michelle Forbes and Jared Harris.

She also frequently produced short films to help boost the careers of promising young talent, and in 2003, Hargrave took time off to teach production and screenwriting at New York Citys Columbia University School of the Arts.

In 2010, Hargrave produced the docuseries Africa Diary, the first broadcast-quality program shot on a cell phone. A year later, she co-founded the experimental New Media Story-Finders Workshops, which aimed to develop a new audiovisual language based on burgeoning technology.

Hargrave is survived by her companion of six years, Eddy Burnett. Memorials will be held on Aug. 8 in Los Angeles and in early September in New York City.

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Stuart Damon, who was best known for his role on General Hospital, has died. He was 84.

Hed been struggling with renal failure for the last several years, ABC7 reporter George Pennacchio confirmed in a Facebook post. He was a kind, loving and friendly man. Its something Christopher heard his entire life. It was my honor to know Stuart Damon. May this Prince R.I.P.

Damon devoted over 30 years of his life to playing Dr. Alan Quartermaine on ABCs General Hospital and spinoff Port Charles. With the role, he earned six Daytime Emmy nominations and won in 1999  22 years after joining the cast  for outstanding supporting actor in a drama series.

The New York native was born in Brooklyn Feb. 5, 1937 and later went on to graduate from Brandeis University in 1958. He first took his talents to Broadway in 1959 in the ensemble of First Impressions and then spent over a year in the original production of Irma la Douce.

Bringing his theatrical prowess to the screen, Damons status grew with his performance in CBS 1965 production of Rodgers & Hammersteins Cinderella as the prince. He then jumped to London and appeared in a number of musicals and television shows, including The Champions, Charlie Girl, Man of Magic and The New Avengers.

Through the aughts, Damon stayed in the world of soap operas and joined Days of Our Lives as Gov. Jim Ford and As the World Turns as Ralph Manzo for a number of episodes. His other television credits include Fantasy Island, Naked City, Hotel and Yanks Go Home.

Damon is survived by wife Deirdre Ottewill, who he was married to for 60 years, and their children Jennifer and Christopher.

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Express-news

SAN ANTONIO - June 28, 2021 - Following the success of their YOUR SA Readers' Choice program earlier this year, the Express-News is extending YOUR SA into the great outdoors in Texas. They are excited to expand the beloved program to better support their reader's affinity for the outdoor lifestyle.

"It made sense for us to expand the program in the outdoor category. We know San Antonians and Texans have a love for the outdoors, and we can offer a unique way for the city to showcase who they think is the best. Plus, our timing is right before hunting season and temperate fall temperatures that get Texans out and camping. We can give the community a road map for those activities. It's a great story for us as community leaders, and for them as local businesses."  Kate Weber, CRO Express-News.
SURFSIDE, Fla. (AP)  About a block from the Miami-area beachfront condominium tower that collapsed sits its sister building, erected a year later by the same company, using the same materials and a similar design. It has faced the same tides and salty air.

This has made some residents of Champlain Towers North worried enough to leave, though many have remained, saying they are confident their almost 40-year-old, 12-story building is better maintained. They say their building doesn't have the same problems with cracking in support beams and in the pool area that 2018 engineering reports show the south tower had.

The collapse of Champlain Towers South in the town of Surfside on Thursday has drawn attention to older high-rise buildings throughout South Florida and prompted Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava to order a 30-day audit of whether such buildings under her jurisdiction are complying with a required recertification of structural integrity at 40 years. She said she wants any issues raised by inspections to be immediately addressed. Shes also urged municipalities within the county to follow suit. Miami, for example, has launched a 45-day audit of buildings six stories and higher that are 40 years old or older.

Inspectors performed a quick-hit examination of the north building and Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett said nothing was found that indicates the tower is in danger of collapse.

That didn't reassure everyone.

I'm petrified of returning, said Rebecca Weinstock, a snowbird who bought a sixth-floor condo in the north building four years ago with her husband. She is in New York, where she was when the south tower collapsed early Thursday, killing at least 11 people and leaving 150 missing.

While she agrees the north building is well maintained, she said that's not enough to satisfy her that it's completely safe. It was completed in 1982, one year after the south tower, and built by the same developer, Nathan Reiber, through his firm, Nattel Construction. The possibility that the collapse was caused by a design or construction flaw means she won't be returning anytime soon.

I am out my investment, I am out my apartment, I am out my future, but we are talking about lives here," she said. The only way she'll return, she said, is if two independent engineers  not from South Florida  agree it's safe.

North tower residents who want to temporarily relocate are being offered private assistance from Support Surfside, a charity group helping victims of the collapse. The group did a survey of the building's full-time residents and found about half are staying and half have left. Overall, about half the units are owned by snowbirds like Weinstock and those residents left before the collapse, the group's survey showed. Overall, 28 of the 113 units are currently occupied, the group found.

Most residents who are staying took the position of Philip and Nora Zyne, who remain in their fifth-floor condo. The Zynes bought their condo 12 years ago, and have lived there full time for six. They have several friends and acquaintances who lived in the south tower and remain missing.

Zyne said Monday that hes seen numerous inspectors in his building since the collapse.

Ive never seen any major structural issues" in the north building, said Philip Zyne, an attorney. Im not worried at all right now. I do want to get a full structural engineering and forensic examination done.

Salomon Gold, who spent 10 years as the condo association president for the north tower and 20 on the board, is convinced the building is safe, saying he and the other board members never skimped on maintenance. He compared the building collapse to airplanes: Just because one crashes doesn't mean others of that same make and model will.

We are in good shape, said Gold, 89. The current condo association president, Naum Lusky, declined comment Monday.

Surfside Mayor Burkett said a deep-dive inspection of the north tower will be conducted Tuesday by an engineering firm hired by the residents. The town will inspect other older buildings soon. Given the results of the preliminary examination of the north tower, he said he doesn't see a reason to order an evacuation. Still, he said, he's not sure he would stay there.

If you asked me if I wanted to spend the night in that building, Id be a little ... I wouldnt be willing to do that until we went through it, he said.

Esther Drachman and her husband arent taking any chances. Drachmans 91-year-old mother-in-law lives in the north tower.

My mother-in-law is bedridden, so we took her out and brought her to our house, Drachman said. We just felt like we couldnt get her out in five minutes if a rapid evacuation became necessary.

Drachman said her mother-in-law wasnt worried or very aware of the details of the disaster. She said she and her husband are waiting to see if a thorough inspection turns up any problems.

Well see if that buildings fine, Drachman said. And if it is, well put her back in.

__

Associated Press reporter Adriana Gomez Licon in Miami contributed to this report.

___

A previous version of this story, using information provided by a Surfside official, incorrectly reported that residents of the north tower are eligible for federal relocation assistance. They are not.
RENO, Nev. (AP)  A federal judge on Monday postponed until at least October what was set to be Nevada's first execution in 15 years.

U.S. District Judge Richard Boulware II in Las Vegas said he would issue a formal injunction this week to prevent the state from executing four-time convicted murderer Zane Michael Floyd in July.

Boulware said after a five-hour hearing that he agreed with arguments by Floyd's public defenders that they need more time to determine the constitutionality of a never-before-used sequence of drugs that prison officials want for the execution.

His lawyers argue lethal injection would subject him to cruel and unusual pain and that Floyd prefers safer alternatives, including a firing squad or a single dose of a barbiturate.

The judge told lawyers that he based his decision on the fact that experts at Nevada's Department of Corrections had at least three months to ensure the drugs, dosages and sequence planned for the execution will be done in a constitutional manner.

Fundamental fairness and the due process clause means that Mr. Floyd and his counsel should be afforded at least the same amount of time, he said, emphasizing this is an untested drug protocol that the state kept secret until last month.

Boulware said his written order this week will prevent the state from going forward with the execution before Oct. 18. He expects at least three days of testimony from experts at a hearing he plans to schedule the week of Oct. 4.

He said his ruling will be subject to appeal in the coming weeks.

Defense lawyers also appealed to the Nevada Supreme Court last week, saying the Clark County district attorneys office should be disqualified from helping prosecute the case because of a conflict of interest for two deputy district attorneys who also serve as members of the Nevada Senate.

Meanwhile, the manufacturer of one of the execution drugs says the state obtained it illegally. Lawyers for Hikma Pharmaceuticals told Nevadas attorney general last week that the company wants the state to return 50 vials of the anesthetic ketamine.

Chief Deputy Nevada Attorney General Randall Gilmer, who argued the state's case Monday, said prosecutors expect to prevail if the company follows through on threats to sue but that the state can obtain ketamine from other sources.

Floyd, 45, was convicted of killing four people and wounding a fifth in a 1999 shotgun attack at a Las Vegas grocery store.

A death warrant for Floyd had been scheduled to be issued July 9, with an exact execution date to follow. It would have been the first execution in Nevada since 2006.

Federal public defenders representing Floyd had asked the judge to slow down the case to allow enough time to examine the effects of the lethal drugs that would be used, including the powerful opioid fentanyl, ketamine, heart-stopping potassium chloride and perhaps a muscle paralytic called cisatracurium.

Prosecutors said in recent court filings that the Nevada Department of Corrections has provided the court with undisputed medical and pharmaceutical evidence establishing the execution will not result in unconstitutional pain or suffering  "indeed, it is likely to result in very minimal to no pain.

Floyds lawyers say the state wrongly maintains the alternatives they have suggested are not legitimate options because Nevada law provides only for lethal injection and the Department of Corrections has been unable to get a barbiturate.

But they said the Supreme Court has made it clear that an inmate seeking to identify an alternative method of execution is not limited to choosing among those presently authorized by a particular states law. They said both of Floyds proposed alternatives are well-established in other jurisdictions.

Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah authorize execution by firing squad, they said. Texas, Georgia and the U.S. government have recently used pentobarbital in executions.

Hikma Pharmaceuticals said in its cease-and-desist letter to the state that the ketamine it produces is meant to save lives and long has opposed use of its products for capital punishment. It said the drug has never been used in an execution and notes the company won a federal court order in 2018 that concluded the Nevada Department of Corrections had resorted to subterfuge when it similarly illegally acquired ketamine.

This is not Hikmas first rodeo with NDOC on this issue, its lawyer wrote Thursday. It is nothing less than shocking and embarrassing for the state of Nevada.
DEL RIO, Texas (AP)  Marianela Rojas huddles in prayer with fellow migrants after trudging across a slow-flowing stretch of the Rio Grande and nearly collapsing when she stepped on American soil for the first time.

I wont say it again, interrupts a U.S. Border Patrol agent, giving orders in Spanish for Rojas and a group of 14 other Venezuelans to get into a detention van. Only passports and money in your hands. Everything else  earrings, chains, rings, watches  in your backpacks.

It's a frequent scene across the U.S.-Mexico border at a time of swelling migration. But these arent farmers and low-wage workers from Mexico or Central America, who make up the bulk of those crossing. Among them are bankers, doctors and engineers from Venezuela, and theyre arriving in record numbers as they flee turmoil in the country with the worlds largest oil reserves and pandemic-induced pain across South America.

Two days after Rojas crossed, she left detention and got a bus out of the Texas town of Del Rio. The 54-year-old fled hardship in Venezuela a few years ago, leaving a paid-off home and career as an elementary school teacher for a fresh start in Ecuador.

But when the housecleaning work she found dried up, she decided to uproot again.

Its over, its all over, she said on the phone to loved ones. Everything was perfect. I didnt stop moving for one second.

Last month, 7,484 Venezuelans were encountered by Border Patrol agents along the U.S.-Mexico border  more than all 14 years for which records exist. The surprise increase is a harbinger of a new type of migration that has caught the Biden administration off guard: pandemic refugees.

Many of the nearly 17,306 Venezuelans who have crossed the southern border illegally since January had been living for years in other South American countries, part of an exodus of millions since President Nicolas Maduro took power in 2013.

While some are government opponents, the vast majority are escaping long-running economic devastation marked by blackouts and shortages of food and medicine.

With the pandemic still raging in parts of South America, they relocated again. Increasingly, theyre being joined at the U.S. border by people from the countries they initially fled to  like Ecuador and Brazil  as well as far-flung nations hit hard by the virus, like India and Uzbekistan.

Compared with other migrants, Venezuelans garner certain privileges  a reflection of their firmer financial standing, higher education levels and U.S. policies that have failed to remove Maduro but nonetheless made deportation all but impossible.

The vast majority enter the U.S. near Del Rio, a town of 35,000, and don't evade detention but turn themselves in to seek asylum.

Like many of the dozens of Venezuelans The Associated Press spoke to this month in Del Rio, 27-year-old Lis Briceno had already migrated once before. After graduating with a degree in petroleum engineering, she couldnt get hired in the oil fields near her hometown of Maracaibo without declaring her loyalty to Venezuelas socialist leadership. So she moved to Chile a few years ago, finding work with a technology company.

But as anti-government unrest and the pandemic tanked Chile's economy, her company shuttered. Briceno sold what she could to raise the $4,000 needed to get to the U.S.

I always thought Id come here on vacation, to visit the places you see in the movies, Briceno said. But doing this? Never.

While Central Americans and others can spend months getting north, most Venezuelans reach the U.S. in as little as four days.

This is a journey theyre definitely prepared for from a financial standpoint, said Tiffany Burrow, who runs the Val Verde Border Humanitarian Coalitions shelter in Del Rio, where migrants can eat, clean up and buy bus tickets to U.S. cities.

They first fly to Mexico City or Cancun. Smugglers promoting themselves as travel agencies on Facebook claim to offer hassle-free transport to the U.S. for about $3,000.

The steep price includes a guided sendoff from Ciudad Acuna, where the bulk of Venezuelans cross the Rio Grande and which had been largely spared the violence seen elsewhere on the border.

If youre a smuggler in the business of moving a commodity  because thats how they view money, guns, people, drugs and everything they move, as a product  then you want to move it through the safest area possible charging the highest price, said Austin L. Skero II, chief of the U.S. Border Patrols Del Rio sector.

Once in the U.S., Venezuelans tend to fare better than other groups. In March, Biden granted Temporary Protected Status to an estimated 320,000 Venezuelans, protecting them from deportation and allowing them to work legally.

Also, Venezuelans requesting asylum  as almost all do  tend to succeed, partly because the U.S. government corroborates reports of political repression. Only 26% of asylum requests from Venezuelans have been denied this year, compared with an 80% rejection rate for asylum-seekers from poorer, violence-plagued countries in Central America, according to Syracuse Universitys Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

I can write their asylum requests almost by heart, said Jodi Goodwin, an immigration attorney in Harlingen, Texas, who has represented over 100 Venezuelans. These are higher-educated people who can advocate for themselves and tell their story in a chronological, clean way that judges are accustomed to thinking.

Even Venezuelans facing deportation have hope. The Trump administration broke diplomatic relations with Maduro in 2019, so air travel is suspended, even charter flights, making removal next to impossible.

Briceno said that if she had stayed in Venezuela, she would earn the equivalent of $50 a month  barely enough to scrape by.

The truth is, Briceno said, its better to wash toilets here than being an engineer over there.

___

Follow Goodman on Twitter: https://twitter.com/APjoshgoodman.
Cities in the Pacific Northwest are recording temperatures surpassing 115 degrees while San Antonio maxed out at 90 degrees on Monday.

San Antonio is seeing cooler than normal temperatures, due to showers passing through, while the Pacific Northwest is enveloped in a "heat dome."

Salem, the capital city of Oregon, reached 117 degrees on Monday, marking the hottest day the area has seen on record, according to the National Weather Service.

RELATED: Record-breaking hailstone fell near San Antonio. A bigger one went into margaritas.

Portland broke records dating back to 1940, too. The National Weather Service reported a high of 112 degrees on Sunday and then 115 degrees on Monday.

Seattle also hit an all-time high of 108 degrees. Last year at this time, the high was 71 degrees in Seattle.

Americans are not alone in battling the oppressive heat. Lytton, a small town in Canada, recorded a high of 118 degrees on Monday.

RELATED: Heavy rainfall expected Monday, Tuesday in San Antonio

CBS News explained the mystery of a heat dome as a "mountain of warm air" built in a wavy jet stream. The issue arises when the jet stream stretches out and the pressure systems "pinch off" and become lodged, like what's happening in the PNW with the Omega Block.

Americans in the south, including Texas, are offering those living in the heat dome advice, such as covering windows in aluminum foil to block the heat or attaching ice-filled sandwich bags to fans. Many are pointing out that it was just a few months ago when residents in San Antonio and Austin were seeking tips from Northerners on how to survive the fatal historic freeze here.

Michael Palecki, who works on adjusting climate normals for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told the New York Times in May that Americans are "really seeing the fingerprints of climate change in the new normals.

San Antonio's Tuesday forecast includes scattered showers and highs in the 80s and 90s. The normal high is 93 degrees, but reached an all-time record 108 in 2013, according to the local NWS office.
JERRY LARA / San Antonio Express-News

MEXICO CITY (AP)  Immigration agents said Monday they came upon a heart-rending scene on a roadside in sweltering southern Mexico  a tractor-trailer with its door open and a migrant who had apparently suffocated to death inside.

Around the truck lay eight other migrants too weak to move. Nearby, a 2-year-old boy stood alone by the guard rail, apparently abandoned by whoever had been accompanying him on the clandestine trip to the U.S. border, authorities said.
Weve all grown very familiar with our homes over the past 18 months, so much so that many of us have decided the time is now to transform our living environments. Furniture manufacturers are feeling the same way, according to Graciela Soto, a Copenhagen Imports sales associate with 20 years of experience. Soto says new lines like Ego Italiano represent the crisp, contemporary designs that her new and returning clients are most excited about as they begin to furnish their homes. Makeover fever is in the air, she says, as many people who visit Copenhagen Imports intending to select one or two items decide to reimagine their entire home.

People have found themselves more at home, so they want to have a more inviting, peaceful area to meet with the family, says Soto, who is known for connecting strongly with customers across the showrooms. We also have a lot of clients who are working and studying at home. Its a great time to make significant changes, adding accents, changing out bedrooms, really redoing everything. People are really concentrating on their homes, often selling and buying them to make universal changes. Its a very exciting time to be working at Copenhagen Imports and helping so many people manifest their dream home decor.

Soto advises all of her clients to work within their budget, selecting one piece at a time if more comfortable, to create a complementary environment. She highly recommends meeting with Copenhagen Imports experienced designers to assure the colors and furniture are going to work together for many years to come.

Copenhagen Imports

You want to make sure everything is going to flow moving forward, regardless of how often you update your space, she says. You dont ever want to just throw pieces together. I have clients who like to change things out every three years, but we should always consider creating a space as a long-term investment, not just a momentary, impulse decision.

Whether selecting a recliner or, as a recent client, a 13-by-13-foot sectional, the first decision most clients make is whether to select leather or fabric covering. Soto says Copenhagen Imports sells more leather couches, as these modern pieces not only add sophistication and elegance, but the new materials are easy to clean with no worry of staining or other damage. Complementing a sofa or sectional with a fabric-covered chair provides an excellent opportunity to create a complementary living space.

Whatever style you prefer, Soto encourages all prospective buyers to visit the Copenhagen Imports showroom before purchasing a piece of furniture. It isnt just mattresses that come in hard and soft firmness, she says; seating has different firmness as well. When you come in to sit on a sofa or chair you know youre going to be comfortable once you receive your delivery. Recliners also vary in width, an important custom choice about where a homeowner will spend thousands of hours over the lifetime of the furniture.

Copenhagen Imports

Its just like finding a jacket or special occasion dress, says Soto, You want to make sure it fits well. Most often, once they see and sit in a piece of furniture, they fall in love with the appearance and quality. Younger folks tend to fall for style, while older clients are more concerned with how comfortable a piece of furniture is. Its actually the same with dining room chairs we find older couples spend more time enjoying dinner and coffee, so they want a piece that feels very comfortable. I never want someone to purchase something they arent happy with once they get it home; my priority is that my customers are happy for the long term.

Copenhagen Imports

The Margaret Power Lift Recliner is a perfect example of an item that combines a stylish look with incredible comfort. Available in leather or fabric, the Margaret comes in a spectrum of colors and patterns, the perfect accent to a new living room, den or study. The Selfy large wedge table or Selfy slide-up table, both in granite, add a solid contemporary look beside the recliner.

Soto says the Incanto Italia line of Italian-made furniture also comes in an impressive number of styles, from triple recliners to sofa beds and recliner-chaise combinations. These sleek designs are customizable with leather and fabric styles, wood and steel feet and several other accents. You can also take this sleek look in exciting directions by adding an assortment of armchairs, including a sling-back leather and wood design and deep leather and oval pieces. By adding the esteemed Ego Italiano line to Incanto and its other Italian brands, Copenhagen Imports has created still more diversity in its Italian-made furnishings. This exciting new line includes signature-flared arm sofas for comfort and class, as well as exceptional faux leather options.

Its just like finding a jacket or special occasion dress, you want to make sure it fits well. Most often, once they see and sit in a piece of furniture, they fall in love with the appearance and quality. "

Copenhagen Imports

It has taken San Antonio a while to find contemporary furnishings, but I definitely see more desire presently for the modern living arrangement with clean and fresh designs, Soto says. Every day, we are attracting new customers who just say Wow! I had a young couple who came in, and they were so in love with the style that they wanted to change everything. Its like walking into a candy store, they are so impressed with the styles and designs. I take so much pride and joy when they fall in love with what they see.

And its not just young first-time new furniture buyers who are smitten with Copenhagen Imports European designs. Soto also cites downsizing empty nesters with fueling the trend for contemporary furnishings  clients who are excited to leave their huge family homes and bulky furniture for clean lines that seem to magically clear up a lifetime of clutter. These couples still love to entertain, creating a space with a sofa or sectional, armchair and a sleek dining room set, complemented by fine art from the showroom.

Soto believes the importance of the living space for modern families will sustain its position for years to come. To this end, shes excited to see each new piece that arrives in the expanding Copenhagen Imports showroom. She and her colleagues invite everyone to visit Copenhagen Imports first and see the potential in contemporary European furnishing for the greater San Antonio home. Visit the Copenhagen Imports website to learn about the many styles as you consider the design of your living and entertaining space.
Readers, a request: Keith, who was been our absurdly calm and reliable hosting provider for many years, is getting out of the hosting business in the next few months. So we need a new host. For reasons I assume are obvious, we want our new host to be offshore, not located in a U.S. satrapy, and to be able to serve us from a physical rack (i.e., not AWS, again for obvious reasons. If the host wants to use their own cloud, thats fine. If the rack is a fallback, fine). The host should be familiar with demanding WP sites.

Our first choice, Qurium, looks good, but does not respond to our inquiries, whether because of Covid or because we dont fit their business model, we dont know. So we need your help, either (1) to get through to Qurium, or (2) to develop and vet alternatives. Thank you! lambert

* * *

Raise the Damned Gas Tax! Barry Ritholtz, The Big Picture

Australia oil industry up in arms over proposed decommissioning levy Reuters. Up in arms? Good. Since we have no cases of auto-defenestration, the levy is probably too small.

The Complex 50-Year Collapse of U.S. Public Transit Bloomberg

Facebook hits $1 trillion value after judge rejects antitrust complaints Reuters. Now they can hire even better lawyers.

SEC Issues First-Ever Penalties for Deficient Cybersecurity Risk Controls JD Supra

Six Days in Suez: The Inside Story of the Ship That Broke Global Trade Bloomberg. Tight coupling broke global trade, not Boaty McBoatface. Well worth a read.

#COVID19

China?

Myanmar

India

Surge in Covid-19 cases in Tokyo, less than a month out from Olympics Guardian (DL).

UK/EU

US, EU, Canada Impose Conditions for Possible Sanctions Review Venezuelanalysis

New Cold War

Sailing Into Troubled Waters. Russia Counters Britain in the Black Sea Moscow Times

Biden Administration

Assange

Big Brother Is Watching You Watch

Class Warfare

Microcities Interfluidity

Rare Events Need Different Methods Zeynep Tufecki, Insight

Antidote du Jour (via):

Bonus antidote:

Scritches from a friend pic.twitter.com/FhQTRe7PDg  CAPYBARA MAN (@CAPYBARA_MAN) June 28, 2021

See yesterdays Links and Antidote du Jour https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/06/links-6-27-2021.html>here.
Yves here. Remember the big talking point during the Trump tax cuts, that the 35% nominal corporate tax rate was oh so harmful to business competitiveness because it was higher than corporate tax rates in most other countries? Of course, that scare talk omitted that the US has a ginormous raft of deductions and tax credits, so that at most only small and dopey companies might pay the rack rate (and most small companies have gotten the memo and organize as LLCs or S corps). And thats before factoring in the way that multinationals can use transfer pricing games to shift income to low tax jurisdictions even if they barely have operations there.

By Anis Chowdhury, Adjunct Professor at Western Sydney University and University of New South Wales (Australia), who held senior United Nations positions in New York and Bangkok and Jomo Kwame Sundaram, a former economics professor, who was United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development, and received the Wassily Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. Originally published at Inter Press Service

Too many have swallowed the myth that lowering corporate income tax (CIT) is necessary to attract foreign direct investment (FDI) for growth. Although contradicted by their own research, this lie has long been promoted by influential international economic institutions.

Beggar-Thy-Neighbour Policies

The early 1980s economics counter-revolution impacted the Washington Consensus of the US federal government and the two Washington-based Bretton Woods institutions (BWIs)  the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

Thus, the rise of supply side economics in the US  advocating lower direct taxes on income and wealth  influenced the world. Without evidence, IMF researchers justified its policy advice thus: The complete abolition of CIT would be the most direct application of the theoretical result that small open economies should not tax capital income.

Noting that capital is highly mobile, and can more easily evade taxes than labour, IMF economists even recommended that small countries should not levy source-based taxes on capital income. Meanwhile, the Banks highly influential, but dubiousDoing Business Report has recommended tax incentives without evidence.

To get BWI approval, developing country governments have undertaken tax reforms, reducing progressive direct taxation. Instead, they have favoured more regressive indirect taxes, such as the value-added tax (VAT), sometimes dubbed the goods and services tax.

Consequently, IMF tax policy recommendations to Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries during 1998-2008 reduced corporate and personal income tax rates while promoting VAT. And following Bank advice, Tanzania  Africas third largest gold producer  ended up subsidising, not taxing foreign mining companies!

Evidence Contradicts Advice

World Bank research and surveys have long found that tax incentives do not really attract FDI inflows. A Bank report found no strong evidence that tax incentives attracted non-resource greenfield or additional new FDI.

It also found tax incentives impose significant costs on the countries using them, including fiscal losses, rent-seeking, tax evasion, administrative costs, economic distortions and retaliation against new or more generous incentives by competitors.

An earlier Bank brief noted tax incentives are not the most influential factor for multinationals in selecting investment locations. More important are factors such as basic infrastructure, political stability, and the cost and availability of labor.

It also argued that tax incentives do not compensate well for negative factors in a countrys investment climate. Meanwhile, the race to the bottommay end up in a bidding war, favoring multinational firms at the expense of the state and the welfare of its citizens.

Researchers have unearthed no strong evidence that tax incentives are beneficial. While some incentives may attract FDI, they crowd out other investments; hence, overall investment and growth do not improve.

An IMF report noted, Tax incentives generally rank low in investment climate surveys in low-income countries, investment would have been undertaken even without them. And their fiscal cost can be high, reducing opportunities for much-needed public spending, or requiring higher taxes on other activities.

Even Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) research confirmed BWI findings that tax incentives hardly attracted FDI. The Economist also found a weak relationship between tax rates and business investment as well as growth rates.

A UK government report cast more doubt: effectively attracting FDI needs public spending, so narrowing the tax base works with tax incentives for low-income countries could be contra-productive.

Race to Bottom Hurts All

IMF findings confirm that beggar-thy-neighbour tax competition worsened avoidable revenue losses. Such ill-advised efforts to attract investment inevitably accelerated CIT rates race to the bottom.

BWI advice to governments has undoubtedly lowered CIT rates. But despite lower CIT rates, transnational corporations (TNCs) still minimise paying tax, e.g., by shifting profits to tax havens and exploiting loopholes.

CIT rate averages for high-income countries (HICs) have dropped twenty percentage points since 1980, falling from 38% in 1990 to 23% in 2018. Meanwhile, they fell from 40% to 25% in middle-income countries, and from over 45% to 30% in low-income countries (LICs).

Cut-throat competition has especially hurt developing countries, which rely much more on CIT than developed economies. IMF research found a one-point average CIT rate cut in other countries reduces a developing countrys CIT revenue by two-thirds of a point.

Such tax cuts induce other concessions, further eroding the base for corporate taxation. Thus, tax revenue is doubly lost by both rate and base cuts. Fund staff estimated revenue loss at 1.3% of GDP in developing countries, due to base erosion and rate reductions  much worse than in developed countries.

The UK government estimated global revenue loss due to TNC tax minimisation at US$500-650bn annually. Such adverse effects were two to three times higher in LICs than in HICs. SSA countries lost the most revenue relative to GDP, followed by Latin America and the Caribbean, and South Asia.

A third of global revenue loss  US$167-200bn  is from low and middle-income countries (LMICs), costing them 1.0-1.5% of national income. With better tax administrations and larger formal sectors, HICs can replace such losses more easily than LMICs with generally weaker tax systems and larger informal sectors.

Tax Breakthrough

The IMF and others now agree that an international minimum CIT rate can stop this race to the bottom and TNC profit shifting. The group of seven largest rich countries (G7) recently agreed to a minimum 15% rate, rejecting US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellens proposed 21%. Even The Economist agrees the G7 proposal favours rich countries.

Earlier, the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation (ICRICT) had recommended a 25% minimum and fairer revenue distribution to developing countries.

Finance ministers from Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa and Germany joined Yellen in welcoming the recent G7 agreement for a minimum global CIT rate, while expressing confidence that the rate can ultimately be pushed higher than 15 percent.

An influential piece has claimed A Global Minimum Corporate Tax Is a Bad Idea, again citing the myth that low taxes will attract FDI. Invoking new Cold War fears, it claimed China and Russia would also gain an unfair advantage in luring even more FDI.

Trump-appointed Bank President David Malpass opposes the agreement, claiming it would undermine poor countries ability to attract investment despite Bank research showing otherwise. Pro-Trump governments in Hungary and Poland also object to the G7 deal. Developing countries cannot allow such tax-cutters to speak for them.

Developing country members of the G20 must insist on a higher minimum and fairer revenue distribution at its forthcoming finance ministers meeting. If the G7 refuses to start with anything more than 15%, an agreed rate increase schedule of an additional one percent annually would get to 25% in a decade.

International tax rules are currently set by rich countries through the OECD. Developing countries participate at a disadvantage. Instead of allowing it to control the process, they must urgently insist on an inclusive, balanced and fair multilateral process for international tax cooperation.
Warning signs are already flashing that the reopening of Europes tourism industry may be short lived.

Before Covid-19 brought global travel to a virtual standstill, Europe was the undisputed heavyweight of international tourism. It attracted over 700 million inbound tourists in 2019, contributed an estimated 2.19 trillion to EU GDP and provided as many as 35 million jobs. But much of that money has disappeared and many of those jobs are on hold. Thousands of businesses, particularly small ones, have closed their doors. Many of those that havent are barely hanging on.

Between April 2020, when the whole region was in lockdown, and March 2021, when it began to slowly emerge after a long dark winter, the number of overnight stays in the EU slumped by 61% year over year, from 2.8 billion to 1.1 billion, according to figures released on Friday by Eurostat, the EUs statistical office. The countries hit hardest include many of the southern European countries that were already sledgehammered by Europes sovereign debt crisis. Among the EU member states with available data, the sharpest falls were recorded in Malta, where overnight stays fell by a massive 80%; Spain (-78%); Greece (-74%) and Portugal (70%).

Before Covid struck, tourism provided 10% of GDP in France, 13% in Italy and Spain, almost 15% in Portugal and 20% in Greece. But tourism is also heavily localised. In some parts of Spain, such as the Balearic Islands or the Canary Islands, it accounts for roughly one out of every three euros generated in the local economy. The same goes for parts of Greece, Portugal and Italy. A huge chunk of that money disappeared last year, with brutal consequences for the local economy. In Greece GDP per capita lost another two percentage points and now amounts to just 64% of the EU average, having plunged from 95 percentage points since 2009.

The Reopening Begins

But there are hopes that this trend may be stalled, if not reversed, as Europes economy reopens. The continent is currently open for unrestricted travel to 15 Covid-19 safe countries: Albania, Australia, the Chinese regions of Hong Kong and Macao, Israel, Japan, Lebanon, New Zealand, Republic of North Macedonia, Rwanda, Serbia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and the United States. According to a new EU tourism tracker developed by Oxford Economics, the rebound in tourism is already gathering speed. Overall tourism is up 20% on 2020s anaemic levels and in Europes tourism hotspots its up 36% on average since March.

But its still way down on the 2019 numbers. And warning signs are already flashing that the reopening of Europes tourism industry could be short lived.

On Monday, Portugal imposed new quarantine rules on unvaccinated British travellers, placing the UK in the same high-risk category as Brazil, South Africa, India and Nepal. It means that all visitors from the UK to mainland Portugal must now quarantine for 14 days at home or at a location designated by health authorities unless they can show that they have been fully vaccinated at least two weeks earlier. Those who havent now have to quarantine for 14 days on arrival in Portugal and another ten days on their return to the UK. The rules are set to last until at least July 11.

The tightening of rules on British travellers comes amid a surge in cases of the Delta variant first discovered in India. On Monday Britain reported another 22,868 coronavirus cases, the highest since the end of January, even though more than 60% of the population have received both doses of the vaccine. Covid-19 related hospitalisations and deaths remain extremely low.

The surging cases are largely the result of the Johnson governments highly controversial decision not to ban flights from India even as the South Asian country experienced its biggest wave of infections. Johnson allegedly sought to curry favor with Indian PM Narenda Modi, whose government is in late-stage negotiations with the UK over a new trade deal. By the time the UK placed India on its red list, the damage had been done. The Delta variant now accounts for 90% of all covid cases in the UK.

Portugal, one of the first EU countries to welcome British tourists, has also seen a surge in Delta variant cases, which now represent half of all infections in the country. This has prompted Germany to place Portugal, alongside Russia, on its list of banned countries for the next two weeks, starting today (Tuesday), as Schengen Visa Info reports:

The move means that aside from citizens and residents of Germany, all other travel from both these countries will be prohibited.

German citizens and residents who reach Germany from June 29 and on will be subject to a fortnight of quarantine, regardless of whether they are vaccinated against the virus or have tested negatively. The option to end the quarantine early with a negative test is not available for these travellers.

According to the head of the RKI, Robert Wieler, the Delta variant is expected to become the dominant strain in Germany by the autumn.

Currently, Germany bans travel from the following countries, which are considered to have a high number of COVID-19 cases:

Botswana

Brazil

Eswatini

India

Lesotho

Malawi

Mozambique

Namibia

Nepal

Portugal

Russian Federation

Zambia

Zimbabwe

South Africa

Uruguay

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland of the Isle of Man, including the Channel Islands and all British Overseas Territories

Another Ruinous Summer?

Portuguese tourism entities have described Germanys decision to red list Portugal for safe travel as a drama. Millions of euros-worth of reservations are being cancelled and German holidaymakers already in the country are scrambling to get home before the Tuesday deadline. In light of the drama, millions of other people in Germany and other European countries who were considering holidaying abroad are now probably having second thoughts.

Fears are rising that this is the beginning of another ruinous summer for Portugals tourism industry. President of Turismo do Algarve Joao Fernandes told TSF radio:

We know that Austria and Switzerland normally follow the measures of Germany, and that in following the United Kingdom, this position by Germany will have an impact on other markets.

The decision, announced at the weekend, has already sparked a wave of cancellations which is causing even more pain for the local economy, said Pedro Costa Ferreira, president of APAVT (the Portuguese travel and tourism association):

There are hotels in the Algarve that opened, hired workers, took workers out of lay-off, bought provisions, made-up beds to accommodate these tourists  and then suddenly someone says none of them are coming and the money has to be returned

Banning the Brits

Germany now hopes to persuade its EU partners to take a leaf out of its book and ban British travellers from the EU altogether regardless of whether or not they have had a vaccine. But while France and Italy are on board with the plan, with Macron calling for coordinated decisions about the reopening of borders to third countries, its meeting stiff resistance from other quarters.

Portugal and Malta have agreed to allow only fully vaccinated British travellers to enter the country without undergoing a two-week quarantine while Spain has demanded that non-vaccinated British travellers provide proof of a negative covid-19 test. But these countries are unlikely to go the full hog and back mandatory quarantine for unvaccinated British travellers. The same goes for Cyprus and Greece.

These countries cannot afford to write off such a vital source of tourist euros. In 2019, the UK ranked as the leading tourist market for Spain, accounting for almost one in every four visitors, as well as Cyprus and Malta. In Greece and Portugal it was the second largest.

That said, one can understand Germanys reluctance to open the doors to British tourists, given how fast new cases, largely of the reportedly more contagious Delta variant, are rising in the UK. Lest we forget, travel and tourism are two of the most important vectors of contagion in this pandemic. Even widespread distribution and use of the vaccines may not significantly change this dynamic, given that the vaccines do not prevent infection or contagion.

Nor is it such a bad thing that unfettered mass tourism, with all its externalities (overcrowding, noise, environmental degradation, overstretched public services and infrastructure, sky-high rents etc.), should remain on hold for the foreseeable future (if not forever!). As someone who has spent most of his adult life living in one of Europes biggest tourist hotspots, Barcelona, I can attest to the fact that less tourism is not such a bad thing.

But for those whose jobs, businesses and rental income depend on tourism, the pain continues to grow. Another summer like the last one will tip many already heavily indebted businesses over the edge. And that will further weaken many of the eurozones weakest economies, which will make the eurozone itself even weaker. As such, if Germany and other northern European countries expect the economies of the South to jettison a major source of income and jobs in the midst of a once-in-a-lifetime economic crisis, they should at least be willing to cushion the blow.
(Natural News) Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said over the weekend that his office still has more than 500 election fraud cases that need to be heard in court.

(Article by Jack Phillips republished from TheEpochTimes.com)

The attorney general made the announcement after a woman was arrested by the state Election Fraud Unit late last week for multiple counts of election fraud, according to a statement from his office.

We will prosecute voter fraud every time we find it, Paxton, a Republican, wrote on Twitter over the weekend in reference to the case. Currently, our office has over 500 cases waiting to be heard in court.

While Paxton didnt provide any more information about the cases, he said that voter fraud is real and that Texans deserve to know their vote is legally and securely counted.

According to the release from his office, which provided scant details about the case, Monica Mendez was arrested and booked into the Victoria County Jail on June 23. It came after a grand jury returned an indictment on seven counts of illegal voting, eight counts of unlawfully assisting a voter, eight counts of unlawful possession of ballots, and eight counts of election fraud.

Her case, however, wasnt related to the 2020 election, the release said, but to a 2018 local election. The Texas secretary of state referred Mendez to the attorney generals office.

Referring to the Mendez case, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott suggested that his office would continue to pursue laws that are designed to bolster security around elections. The governor several days ago announced a special session of the state legislature to pass a number of measures relating to voter fraud laws, critical race theory, and how the state handles bail bonds.

In May, Texass state Senate approved a sweeping bill that would grant more power to poll watchers by giving them increased access inside polling areas. It would also create new penalties against election officials who restrict poll watchers movements and would allow a judge to void the outcome of an election if the number of fraudulent votes could change the result, among other provisions.

However, during the final hours of the previous legislative session on May 30, state House Democrats walked out before the Republican-led chamber could vote on the Senate bill.

I fully expect to have a session where we will pass an election integrity bill as well as bail reform, Abbott told the Dallas Morning News earlier this month. Those are both needed and they both must pass. And as we get there, we may be adding some additional items.

Democrats, meanwhile, have generally opposed the GOP-backed election reform bills that are being proposed in Texas, saying that such bills restrict voting access to minority groups.

Read more at: TheEpochTimes.com and VoteFraud.news.
(Natural News) Is there a new Chinese Virus soon on the way that will be delivered by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to the United States? According to Chinese billionaire Miles Guo, the answer is yes.

During a recent broadcast of TruNews, host Rick Wiles shared a clip of Miles speaking about what he claims is an impending attack on the U.S. that will be used to deliver a final death blow against the country.

Based on the true history and civilization of the Chinese people, were here delivering the message to the West that were all humans, Miles stated in the clip, clarifying that ordinary Chinese people are not the true enemies, but rather the CCP.

We will never become the enemies of the West. The Chinese people are not going to, have never, and will never invade or occupy any territories of any countries or any Western countries. Never, ever.

Miles made a series of announcements explaining that about 200 families in China, all belonging to the CCP, are the ones pulling the strings. This sounds a whole lot like the handful of elite families that also control the U.S., it is important to note.

They are the culprits of committing crimes against the West, attempting to lead the West and forcibly occupy the Wests resources, releasing the virus, other incidents that may occur, as well as the one Im announcing today, Miles claims.

Now, the most critical thing that Im going to tell you is that weve received the accurate intelligence. First, the CCP is attempting soon, probably at the end of this summer or the beginning of this fall, to release another virus.

Miles Guo: China will attack Taiwan as distraction before attacking USA

The alleged release of this new virus will coincide with a Chinese attack on Taiwan, Miles further claims. Once this attack is launched and all eyes are on Taiwan, China will then attack the U.S. with a bioweapon and possibly more.

Miles was heavily involved with releasing information all last year during the first release of the Chinese Virus, having made numerous appearances on Bannon WarRoom and other U.S.-based programs.

He has, in many ways, offered on-the-ground messaging out of China that is not being reported by the American media, though some of his claims may need to be taken with a grain of salt.

Time will tell if the CCP ends up releasing another virus, or at least claiming that they did, in order to try to strong-arm more lockdowns, mask mandates and general paranoia and fear among the populace.

Since it worked so well the first time around, there is a high likelihood that whoever is behind all of this will certainly try it again. When tyranny works, the tyrants continue to amplify it until they achieve the level of power and control they so very much crave.

The virus to be released this time will surely be more dangerous than the last one, Miles claims. We are informed that the CCP knows it very well that following the G7 Summit in 2021 with millions of deaths, hundreds of millions of people are being infected with the virus all around the world.

And meanwhile, all walks of lives [sic] in the whole world are demanding the truth (about the virus). The CCP is well aware that the truth will eventually be found out, making political deals and bribing or threatening politicians.

If you are interested in hearing the broadcast for yourself, you can do so by visiting this link.

More of the latest news about the Chinese Virus can be found at Pandemic.news.

Sources for this article include:

TruNews.com

NaturalNews.com
(Natural News) Since the coronavirus (COVID-19) started spreading across the globe back in December 2019, China has insisted that the infectious disease first spread from animals to humans.

Even mainstream media dismissed the lab-leak theory at first, but now health experts are reconsidering the true origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

Investigate the lab-leak theory, urges scientists

When the world first heard of the coronavirus, officials quickly suppressed rumors hinting that the virus originated from a laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). The lab has received funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and it was heavily involved in gain-of-function (GOF) research, or the development of engineered viruses.

Mainstream media successfully convinced the public that SARS-CoV-2 crossed to humans via the consumption of infected animals, most likely bats, from a nearby wet market in Wuhan.

At the time, people who suggested the possibility of a lab leak were called conspiracy theorists. Yet now, as the truth slowly comes to light, even world-renowned researchers are reconsidering their stance.

Several scientists call for comprehensive investigations into the true origins of the coronavirus. Even regular citizens are now questioning the animal to human transmission story, with more asking if the virus actually came from a laboratory.

Early in January and February of this year, the World Health Organization (WHO) funded an initial investigation into the origins of the coronavirus. The WHO reported that it was extremely unlikely that the virus came from the Wuhan laboratory, finally deciding and that pandemic first began via a zoonotic transmission (animal to human).

The biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) lab in Wuhan is one of the few laboratories in the world certified to perform research on viruses like Ebola, smallpox and coronavirus.

Despite Chinas claims that the coronavirus spread accidentally, experts now call for stricter controls on facilities due to fears that accidental leaks could start another devastating pandemic.

BSL4 is the most secure class of laboratories and these are built to work safely and securely with the most dangerous bacteria and viruses that can cause serious diseases with no known treatments or vaccines.

Gregory Koblentz, director of the Biodefense Graduate Program at George Mason University, said that BSL4 labs have HVAC filtration systems to prevent viruses from escaping through exhaust. Additionally, any wastewater that leaves the facility is treated with chemicals or high temperatures to kill anything in it.

BSL4 researchers are also highly trained and wear hazmat suits. According to a report that Koblentz co-authored, there are 59 such facilities worldwide.

The report, called Mapping Maximum Biological Containment Labs Globally, warned that there are no binding international standards for safe, secure, and responsible work on pathogens.

Because of this, accidents can still happen even at the most secure facilities. This doesnt include the more frequent incidents at lower rung labs, which may experience upwards of thousands of accidents.

Some recorded accidents include:

The human H1N1 virus, the same flu that caused the 1918 pandemic, first leaked in 1977 in the Soviet Union and China, finally spreading across the globe.

Back in 2001, a mentally disturbed employee at a U.S. bio lab sent out anthrax spores across the country, killing five people.

In 2004, two Chinese researchers exposed to severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) spread the disease to others, killing one person.

In 2014, a handful of smallpox vials were uncovered during a Food and Drug Administration office move.

For years, Lynn Klotz, a senior science fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, has been warning others about the public safety threats posed by these facilities.

Klotz said that [h]uman errors constitute over 70 percent of the errors in laboratories, adding that U.S. researchers often rely on data from Freedom of Information requests to find out about these incidents.

Data proves Chinas claim was insufficient

In May 2021, renowned experts published a letter in the peer-reviewed journal Science. The leading scientists call this conclusion into serious doubt, even claiming that it was not scientifically justifiable.

The letter outlined several concerns:

Out of the 313-page report presented by the WHO and China, only four addressed the possibility of a laboratory accident.

While China insists on the zoonotic transmission theory as the cause of the spread of the coronavirus, the WHO didnt provide any evidence to adequately back this claim. While the evidence supporting a lab-leak theory was also lacking, the WHO decided it can be considered extremely unlikely.

Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO Director-General, even acknowledged that the WHO reports consideration of evidence supporting a laboratory accident was insufficient.

GOF research should also be investigated

Experts from Harvard University and Stanford University also want investigators to strictly monitor GOF research in Wuhan. They added that laboratories and public health agencies should open their records to the public.

In the letter, the researchers also asked officials to take a much closer look at the Wuhan labs involvement in gain-of-function research. GOF research involves the modification of pathogens to make them more transmissible, deadlier, or better able to evade treatment and vaccines to find out how to fight them better.

The field has long been a subject of debate even among experts. Things escalated in 2011 when two research teams showed they could make bird flu transmissible between mammals.

That gain-of-function research on bat viruses took place in a laboratory located in the same city where the first reports of the coronavirus started spreading is suspicious enough. Even mainstream media can no longer deny the lab-leak theory isnt just a conspiracy theory. (Related: Former CDC director says he got DEATH THREATS from fellow scientists for suggesting coronavirus came from lab-leak.)

The authors of the letter, which include experts from reputable universities and one of the worlds leading coronavirus researchers, advised that subsequent investigations into the true origin of the coronavirus must be transparent, objective, data-driven, inclusive of broad expertise, subject to independent oversight, and responsibly managed to minimize the impact of conflicts of interest.

The authors concluded that brave Chinese doctors, scientists, journalists, and citizens stepped up to share crucial information about the spread of the virus  often at great personal cost. In the same vein, experts must now show the same determination to promote an impartial and science-based discourse on this important matter, especially since it has now spread across the globe.

Go to Pandemic.news to learn more about the true origins of the coronavirus.

Sources include:

NaturalHealth365.com

ChannelNewsAsia.com

Science.ScienceMag.org
(Natural News) David Feinberg, the head of Googles health division, admitted at a recent forum of The Wall Street Journal that the tech giant censored information showing that the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) may have originated at a Chinese laboratory.

Feinberg was asked by a reporter why Google censors search results linking the Chinese Virus to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), to which Feinberg tried to argue that censorship is good for Google users as it keeps them safe from misinformation.

Were Google to show people the search results they are looking for, it might lead people down pathways that we would not find to be authoritative information, Feinberg explained.

The authoritative information to which Feinberg was referring came from shamed EcoHealth Alliance head Peter Daszak, who we now know conspired with Tony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to conduct illegal gain of function research on bat coronaviruses at the WIV.

Back in February 2020, Daszak organized a letter that was published in The Lancet claiming that there was no possibility whatsoever that the Chinese Virus originated in a Chinese lab. That letter called such an idea a conspiracy theory.

At this point in time, many people believed [Daszak] and they stopped looking for any other potential truth about the situation, according to Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

It was The Lancet, after all, Carlson added in a recent segment about the scandal.

The real plandemic agenda is to take control of the human body and mind

Daszaks financial and political conflicts of interest are many, it turns out. But because he was widely forced into the limelight by the likes of Google as an authoritative source of information about the Wuhan Flu, few questioned his claims or motives.

That is now changing, thankfully, as more revelations come to light about how the plandemic was essentially organized and plotted by Fauci, Daszak, and many others, all of whom have profited immensely from the Chinese Virus.

It is now an undeniable fact that Daszak was directly involved in the illegal gain of function research that unleashed the Wuhan Flu, as he openly bragged about it back in December 2019.

So, why did Google continue to rely on Peter Daszak, of all people on earth, to decided what the rest of the population could know about the origins of covid? Carlson asked in the segment.

According to Daszak, Google was a financial contributor to this research, along with American taxpayers via Fauci. All of these people and entities had a stake in the Chinese Virus, hence why they conspired with one another to push the plandemic agenda.

Going all the way back to 2010, Daszak had published studies linking Google to illegal gain of function research on bat coronaviruses at the WIV. Google has essentially been sending cash to Daszak and others to do said research, which is how we ended up with the Chinese Virus.

The claim is that all that cash was used to study [p]erceptions associated with transmission of pathogens with pandemic potential in highly exposed human populations at the animal human interface.

The agenda is to gain control of the human mind and body! wrote one WND commenter about the true motivation behind the plandemic.

These people believe the lies Satan tempts them with and they then decide to get something for themselves using those lies. They do not believe in our Creator and think there is no consequences for their actions, as long as they can fool another human!

More news stories about Chinese Virus propaganda and the ongoing deception can be found at Pandemic.news.

Sources for this article include:

WND.com

NaturalNews.com
(Natural News) The fledgling radio corporation IHeartMedia recently announced they were instituting a diversity-only hiring policy, meaning they intended to exclude white people from positions before backtracking on their position after public outrage.

(Article republished from BigLeaguePolitics.com)

Diversity is incredibly important to our team and our company so we are looking at only diverse hires at this time, said Molly Socha, who works as executive producer of custom podcasts at IHeartMedia, while describing the podcast editor/engineer position to members of a New York City radio listserv group.

Publicly, IHeartMedia is signing a different tune. They claim their organization is an equal opportunity employer and will not tolerate discrimination in employment on the basis of race, color, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, religion, disability, ethnicity, national origin, marital status, protected veteran status, genetic information, or any other legally protected classification or status.

Socha was forced to backtrack and sent a message to the listserv after the story began to go viral recanting her previous statement.

I made an error in language in my last note, so I just want to clarify, ALL are welcome to apply and we will consider ALL qualified candidates. That being said, in our efforts to elevate diverse voices in the predominately white podcast space, we strongly encourage engineers/editors of colorregardless of gender and sexual orientation to apply, she wrote.

Big League Politics has reported on the trend of open racism toward white people becoming normalized as America heads down the road toward genocide:

Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois has vowed to oppose President Joe Bidens Cabinet picks if theyre non-diversity nominees.

Fox News reporter Chad Pergram quotes Duckworth as saying the following: I am a no vote on the floor on all non-diversity nominees. You know, I will vote for racial minorities and I will vote for LGBTQ. But anybody else Im not voting for.

Politico reports that she is primarily upset over Biden not nominating any Asians to be among his Cabinet secretaries. She inquired about the issue on a Monday evening call between Senate Democrats and Biden aides. Jen OMalley Dillon, the White House deputy of chief of staff, allegedly responded that were not going to put any more Asian Americans in the Cabinet because you have Kamala, which Duckworth said was incredibly insulting.

Duckworth herself is Asian. She was born in Bangkok, Thailand, to an American father and a Thai mother. Vice President Kamala Harris is often considered both black and Asian, with the media oftentimes emphasizing one over the other depending on the narrative they want to advance. Harris was born to a Jamaican father and an Indian mother.

This represents no more than racial discrimination on the part of Duckworth, and a disturbing first trend in the United States Senate where cabinet nominees are rejected or confirmed on the basis of their ancestry.

The Left will stop at nothing less than subjugating the white population, who they hate and want to destroy. Multinational corporations like IHeartRadio have clearly sold America out and are carrying on this wicked agenda of racial retribution.

Read more at: BigLeaguePolitics.com and AntiWhite.news.
(Natural News) A professor from Harvard University believes an ancient alien civilization may have dropped sensors on Earth, providing it with a readout of what its like in the solar systems habitable zone and only inhabited planet. He even suggests that the recent sightings of unexplained aerial phenomena (UAP) may be extraterrestrial vessels following up on their sensors.

At the center of this theory is Oumuamua, an interstellar object that was first discovered in 2017 when it entered the solar system. Oumuamua caught the attention of many scientists because of its flat shape.

While most astronomers believe Oumuamua is just a natural object hurtling through space, some scientists have suggested that it may have been sent by aliens. One of those scientists is Israeli-American Avi Loeb, a theoretical physicist and professor of astronomy at Harvard.

In an opinion piece written for Scientific American, Loeb suggests that Oumuamua might be an extraterrestrial spacecraft sent to the solar system to tune into sensors it left behind in the systems habitable zone. Some of these sensors might even be on earth.

Oumuamua may be linked to the rise in UAP sightings

To prove his claim, Loeb presented two crucial pieces of evidence.

The first is Oumuamua itself. Loeb argued that the interstellar object was acting like it was being pushed away from the sun, as if it were being powered by a solar sail  a method of spacecraft propulsion that uses the radiation pressure exerted by stars. (Related: Rocket booster mistaken for an asteroid shows Oumuamua is not just a space rock, astronomer says.)

Furthermore, Oumuamua was tumbling around as it soared through the solar system. That might be because the interstellar objects broader surfaces contain equipment that can pick up the signals from the sensors it left behind on Earth and elsewhere in the habitable zone. This, combined with the tumbling motion, might be meant to scan for signals from all directions.

The second piece of evidence involves the sudden abundance of UAP being spotted across the world. Loeb speculates that the reason the Department of Defense is preparing to deliver a report to Congress regarding the existence of UAP is that their true nature is unknown.

If UAP originated from China or Russia and were a national security risk, their existence would never have been revealed to the public, wrote Loeb.

Because of this, Loeb argues that it is reasonable to conclude that the American government does not believe the UAP are human creations.

This leaves two possibilities: either UAP are natural terrestrial phenomena or they are extraterrestrial in origin, Loeb added. Both possibilities imply something new and interesting that we did not know before. The study of UAP should therefore shift from occupying the talking points of national security administrators and politicians to the arena of science where it is studied by scientists rather than by government officials.

But even Loeb admits that his theory is just one of many possible scenarios for why Oumuamua is in the solar system. Instead of simply wondering about the other possibilities, Loeb believes scientists all over the world should begin conducting their own studies regarding Oumuamua and the true nature of UAP.

Loeb recommends that scientists begin deploying cameras on wide-field telescopes that can monitor the sky and keep an eye out for more UAP and to observe Oumuamua.

The sky is not classified, said Loeb. Only government-owned sensors are. By searching for unusual phenomena in the same geographical locations from where the UAP reports came, scientists could clear up the mystery in a transparent analysis of open data.

Learn more about extraterrestrial life and the other mysteries of space by reading the latest articles at Cosmic.news.

Sources include:

Futurism.com

ScientificAmerican.com
(Natural News) A group of West Point cadets are being punished for not getting vaccinated against COVID-19 by being forced to live in a crowded tent without the amenities afforded to vaccinated cadets in scorching summer heat.

Parents of some of the 37 unvaccinated cadets at the U.S. Military Academy (USMA) in West Point, New York, have reported that leadership there is essentially torturing these cadets by putting all of them in a single, mixed-gender, mixed-rank tent designed for 20 people throughout their June and July Cadet Field Training program, a summer training requirement that focuses on small-unit tactical operations.

Contrast this with the accommodations given to vaccinated cadets. They are enjoying open-bay barracks, with a separate area for female cadets as well as separate male and female bathrooms. The barracks are also equipped with electricity so cadets can cool off with fans during the sweltering summer temperatures.

Because unvaccinated cadets are being required to wear a mask and vaccinated ones are not, there are questions swirling about ethics. The parents of one cadet who is being forced to live in the punishment tent said that West Point leadership allowing HIPAA privacy violations goes against the honor of cadets by marking the unvaccinated with masks, promoting a climate of humiliation and intimidation.

A cadet who wished to remain anonymous told Childrens Health Defense that West Point medical officer Colonel Laura Dawson scolded unvaccinated cadets and called them names like science deniers and grandma killers instead of accepting their right to refuse experimental drugs. At least two reports were presented to CHD of conduct unbecoming an officer, both of which were initiated by cadets after graduation, presumably out of fear of retaliation.

In one incident, a male cadet suffering from a painful hernia said Dawson refused to treat him because he was unvaccinated, which resulted in him getting the shot so he could get treatment. Another case involved an unvaccinated female cadet who previously had a severe case of COVID-19, which prompted her personal physician to recommend against the jab out of concerns over a possible heart contraindication. This cadet alleged that Dawson threatened to recommend she not be permitted to graduate on the grounds that she was medically weak; the cadet sought additional counsel on her rights and ultimately stood firm in her refusal of the vaccine.

People who dont want the experimental vaccine are being treated like second-class citizens

Unfortunately, this is something we are only going to see more of moving forward. We recently reported on unvaccinated diners in New York City being relegated to unfavorable seats in restaurants, but West Points attitude takes this sentiment to even greater heights  and theres no telling how far this will go elsewhere. Could unvaccinated cadets also be punished by being forced to live in these tents in the winter, for example? What is happening to the unvaccinated in other areas of the military?

So far, just 139 out of 4,000 cadets have not been vaccinated. Herd immunity, therefore, should have been achieved at this 97 percent rate, which greatly exceeds the recommended 60 percent immunity for protecting the elderly and infants. It is unacceptable that West Points own medical officers are openly mocking those who are exercising their right not to get an experimental vaccine and refusing them medical treatment because of it. The men and women who are putting their lives on the line for our country deserve so much better than being tortured in hot, overcrowded tents without proper facilities simply because they care about their health.

Sources for this article include:

NaturalHealth365.com

ChildrensHealthDefense.org
(Natural News) Officials at Chinas National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC)  the countrys main economic planning agency  have limited the initial scope of a national carbon emission trading system that will be launched by the end of June.

The basic structure and relevant regulations of the carbon emission trading system have been completed. Live tests involving more than 30 Chinese enterprises have been conducted to ensure the national carbon trading scheme will be ready for public use at the time of launch.

The major goal of the carbon market is to serve companies to reduce carbon emissions, so companies are able to reduce emissions at a lower cost with a market-oriented mechanism.

Chinas Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE) issued three regulations on May 19 to further standardize the registration, trade and carbon emission rights. The country unveiled plans for a national carbon trading market in a push to cut greenhouse gas emissions in 2017.

The carbon emissions scheme is expected to expand to more industries and adopt stricter caps in the future, although the timing and scope havent been determined yet.

But people familiar with the matter said that Chinas top economic planners have put the brakes on attempts by environmental officials to reduce carbon emissions. This is because driving growth takes priority over meeting climate targets for now.

Chinas economic planners in charge of drafting carbon road map

The economic agency has also gained the upper hand in negotiations over drafting a detailed road map to Chinese President Xi Jinpings pledges to achieve a peak in carbon dioxide emission before 2030 and net zero emissions by 2060. The NDRC sets Chinas energy and emissions targets instead of the MEE.

In October last year, Vice Premier Han Zheng initially called for environmental officials to accelerate the launch of a national carbon market and formulate a carbon road map. But in March, when Chinas cabinet enumerated the bodies charged with drafting the road map, the economic planning agency was listed first  not the environmental ministry.

China also set up a group of high-level party members in May to cut across bureaucratic structures, issue guidance and oversee the road map. Three out of the five members of its leadership were senior economic advisers.

The initial rules for the emissions trading system, released by the environmental ministry in December of last year, are more limited than initially proposed.

The scheme will involve only about 2,200 companies in the power sector, which is responsible for an estimated 30 percent of Chinas total emissions, instead of the 6,000 companies from eight sectors that were in the initial proposal.

Rather than the absolute caps on emissions proposed by environmental officials, Chinese companies will start off with relative allowances  using benchmarks based on previous years performances. (Related: Companies worldwide make conscious effort to produce green concrete products.)

According to people familiar with the matter, economic planners have weakened the provisions of the scheme behind the scenes, fearing their potential impact on growth.

Actions speak louder than words

Chinas actions contradict the carefully crafted narrative the country has been telling the world recently.

John Kerry, the Biden administrations special envoy on climate change, said in April that his meetings with his counterparts in Shanghai were productive. He added that the two sides discussed the possibility of China enhancing the commitments made by Xi.

During his time in Shanghai, Kerry met face-to-face with Chinas special climate envoy Xie Zhenhua and talked to Han by video link. Kerry said that the Chinese delegation underscored that the climate issue must be addressed with urgency.

Following Kerrys visit, the MEE posted on its official WeChat account that China and the United States will strengthen cooperation and work together with other parties to address the climate crisis.

Follow CarbonDioxide.news for more news and information related to carbon emissions and climate change.

Sources include:

WattsUpWithThat.com

WSJ.com 1

WSJ.com 2
(Natural News) White House Chief Medical Advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci has been accused of lying to Congress after he denied having knowledge of the reasons behind former President Donald Trumps decision to cut funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). The WIV is being accused of engineering and leaking the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19).

The incident in question occurred in April 2020. Fauci then initially resisted Trumps order to prevent taxpayer funding from being funneled even further into the WIV. This was done with the help of a National Institutes of Health grant to the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit conducting research on coronaviruses that had a history of working with the WIV. He later reluctantly agreed with Trump.

But during a June 2020 hearing with the House Energy and Commerce Committee, he said that the $370,000 grant to the WIV was canceled because the NIH was told to cancel it and that he didnt know the reason behind Trumps decision.

This account by Fauci is contradicted by witnesses who supplied journalists with verbatim quotes which show he was actually fully aware that Trump decided to cut off funding for the WIV out of concern about the labs safety record and fears that it engineered and leaked the pandemic. (Related: Fauci accused of misleading Congress about taxpayers money given to Wuhan lab.)

The journalists further speculate that Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins were not sure whether the NIH had the legal authority to terminate a peer-reviewed grant in the middle of a budget cycle. This is allegedly why the pair tried to fight Trumps order to cancel the grant to the EcoHealth Alliance and the WIV.

Multiple members of Congress want Fauci to resign or be fired

Because of these revelations, multiple members of Congress have accused Fauci of lying and called for his resignation. Republican Rep. Buddy Carter of Georgia said that Fauci considered it more important to downplay Trumps role in combating the pandemic.

Obviously what we have got here is someone who is more concerned with remaining relevant than they are about telling the truth, said Carter in an interview with Fox News. He told [the Energy and Commerce Committee] that he did not know where this order came from when he did know. And he knew all along. We find that out now. Of course, we dont need someone who is more interested in their own PR campaign leading this fight against this virus and against the pandemic.

We need someone who is going to be studying the origin of this and investigating this, that truly is more concerned with the truth, he added. Thats why we need to get rid of him. he needs to be fired.

Rep. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma said Faucis statements were very concerning. He added that it goes to show just how important it is to have a full investigation into the origins of COVID-19.

House Minority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana told Fox News that the controversies surrounding Fauci have left Congress with many unanswered questions that can only be answered with a full investigation.

Joining in Carters call for Faucis removal, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky said he wants Congress to act so that the doctor can be removed from any position of authority.

Paul said he wants Fauci to be fired because the doctor discounts one of the most important parts of science, which is natural immunity. The senator made this comment after he questioned why Fauci and other health officials in the U.S. are pushing to vaccinate children.

Theres no real reason to be hysterical and force this on children, mandate it for school because the thing is for children, the bar is going to be much greater because children get almost no COVID symptoms, he said. They rarely die from it. Its about one in a million. So were going to have to be even more stringent with proving the safety of the vaccine.

Learn more about how Fauci attempted to cover up the lab leak pandemic until it became politically beneficial for him to support it at Pandemic.news.

Sources include:

DailyMail.co.uk 1

DailyMail.co.uk 2

FoxNews.com
(Natural News) Drug giant Johnson & Johnson (J&J) has agreed to stop selling opioid drugs in the United States following a $230 million settlement with the state of New York.

In a statement, New York Attorney General Letitia James office said the agreement prohibits J&J from promoting opioids through any means. J&J is also now barred from lobbying the products at the federal, state or local level.

J&J stopped marketing its opioid products in the U.S. back in 2015, and as of 2020 has fully discontinued its business of selling them at all here in America.

Part of the settlement also forces J&J to resolve all opioids-related legal claims with allocated payments over the next nine years. The company could also be forced to pay $30 million more in the first year if the states executive chamber signs into law new legislation establishing an opioid settlement fund.

Opioid pharmaceuticals have killed at least 500,000 people in the United States over the past several decades. The settlement follows many years of lawsuits filed by states, cities and counties against opioid manufacturers like J&J.

Flagrant overprescribing of the drugs caused millions of Americans to become addicted. Many others became seriously injured or are now dead because of that addiction.

The opioid epidemic has wreaked havoc on countless communities across New York state and the rest of the nation, leaving millions still addicted to dangerous and deadly opioids, James indicated in a statement.

Johnson & Johnson helped fuel this fire, but today theyre committing to leaving the opioid business  not only in New York, but across the entire country. Opioids will no longer be manufactured or sold in the United States by J&J.

J&J claims no wrongdoing despite settlement payout

In addition to J&J, drug giants Purdue Pharma, Mallinckrodt LLC, Endo Health Solutions, Teva Pharmaceuticals USA, and Allergan Finance LLC are all scheduled to have their day in court as well.

Each of these companies is accused of doing the same thing as J&J in terms of their marketing and distribution of opioids.

In a statement, J&J clarified that it is not an admission of liability or wrongdoing by the company and is consistent with the terms of the previously announced $5 billion all-in settlement agreement in principle for the resolution of opioid lawsuits and claims by states, cities, counties and tribal governments.

J&J has been in hot water before, having been charged with illegally pushing deadly pharmaceuticals on sick and elderly nursing home residents.

The company was found to have paid kickbacks to Omnicare to promote drugs like Floxin, Levaquin, Risperdal, Ultram, Duragesic, Procrit, and Aciphex when they were not needed, all to enhance its performance goals.

Now, J&J is pushing injections for the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) that are known to cause deadly blood clots. This is simply the latest iteration of J&Js illicit drug and vaccine racket, which always pays out more in profits than the measly costs of later settlements for injuries and deaths.

Concerning its Chinese Virus injection, J&J made the news after one mans skin started peeling off not long after getting the jab.

The company also became a target of the Catholic lobby after it was determined that its Wuhan Flu shots contain ingredients derived from aborted baby body parts, which violate the religions tenets regarding the sanctity of life.

Johnson & Johnson is 100% guilty, as are their bankster and Wall Street backers, wrote one of our own in response to another case involving J&Js talc baby powder causing cancer.

Big Pharma corruption and greed has cost untold billions of people their lives. To keep up with the latest, visit Corruption.news.

Sources for this article include:

CNBC.com

NaturalNews.com

NaturalNews.com

NaturalNews.com
(Natural News) The latest claim is that the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) Delta variant is spreading like wildfire, and the most affected by it are those who were already injected with vaccines.

According to the latest data, people who took a Wuhan Flu shot or two are up to eight times more likely to test positive or have to be hospitalized.

A preliminary statistical analysis found that hospitalization rates and absolute mortality due to the Delta variant are substantially higher among the vaccinated compared to the unvaccinated.

The figures show that among patients who test positive for the Delta variant, the mortality rate for those who are fully vaccinated, meaning they received both doses of an mRNA injection, is nearly eight times higher.

This corresponds to similar research from Public Health England which determined that vaccinated people are 600 percent more likely to die from Delta than unvaccinated people.

In England, it is now clearly seen in the data that those who have been injected are responsible for the spread of Delta. And the more people that get vaccinated, the more Delta is spreading.

The delta variant infection rate of people who received at least [one] dose of vaccine is lower than that of fully vaccinated people while higher than that of unvaccinated people, reports Gnews.

Science: Get vaccinated and youre more likely to die

At best, getting injected will lead to the same outcome as not getting injected. At worst  and this is what the data suggests  you are more likely to die if you get stabbed for the Chinese Virus.

So why even do it at all? Many people would probably say that they just want to do their part, but what part is that? The dying part? Because the only people who seem to be getting violently ill after exposure to Delta or any other alleged variant are people who obeyed the government and got injected.

It makes you wonder why the politicians are still pushing everyone to get vaccinated, considering the chance of death is not too different anyway, is how Gnews puts it.

Also, its worth mentioning that compared with hospitalization rate and infection rate, mortality rate is considered more accurate because for infection data, a person may choose not to get tested and there might be false positive or false negative for test results. And for hospitalization data, a person may choose not to go to the hospital and just stay at home. However, it is impossible to choose not to die for anybody, thats why mortality data are usually more accurate.

As time goes on, it becomes increasingly clearer that getting injected is just plain stupid. The shots admittedly do not prevent infection, nor do they prevent the spread, so what good are they?

The only claim the medical establishment is making with regard to the injections is that they might lower a persons risk of becoming seriously ill and requiring hospitalization after testing positive. The latest data, however, shows that even this is false.

[T]his analysis at least suggested that UK government might have cherry-picked the results that fits the take the vaccine narrative and chose not to report the whole picture in the article mentioned on their news report, Gnews concludes.

And this analysis also shows that the mortality rate (usually the most accurate metric compared with hospitalization and infection) for vaccinated people who have contracted delta variant CCP virus is very troubling, and might need further related investigation such as potential ADE effect.

You can read the full report from Gnews along with all associated data at this link.

More related news about Chinese Virus vaccine deception can be found at ChemicalViolence.com.

Sources for this article include:

Gnews.org

NaturalNews.com
(Natural News) A human rights professor slammed the Australian government for its hypocrisy in calling for countries to uphold their citizens rights. Griffith University professor Sarah Joseph said that Canberra needed to follow its own advice after it threatened to punish Australians who wanted to fly back home. Her remarks came as the countrys ambassador to the U.N. called on other nations to ensure their Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic responses lined up with international human rights guidelines.

Speaking to The Age, Joseph referenced the threat Canberra made in May 2021 to penalize 10,000 Australians for the mere act of coming home after being stranded in India. She called the measure a low point that undermined Australians basic rights to life and health.

That measure may have helped protect people in Australia, but it made things much more dangerous for Australians in India  especially given the shortages of basic resources like oxygen in [Indias] hospitals at the time, Joseph said.

Australia is unique in banning its citizens from traveling overseas at this time, she continued. Not even New Zealand has done that. And that measure cannot be justified on the basis of public health. People do not threaten Australia by leaving the country. Australia also banned citizens from leaving the country a measure also implemented by North Korea  back in March 2020.

Australia might be accused of throwing stones in glass houses, Joseph ultimately remarked.

International Service for Human Rights Director Phil Lynch said Australias abandonment of its citizens abroad had revealed values of insularity, isolationism and discrimination. He added that Australians at home and abroad are paying a very high price for the obsession of Canberra and the state governments to eliminate COVID-19.

A human rights-based approach to [COVID-19] requires that all measures be reasonable, necessary and proportionate. It requires not only steps to protect public health, but also to ensure respect for rights that Australian governments have seemed all too willing to sacrifice in their obsession with zero [COVID-19 cases], Lynch remarked. (Related: MEDICAL POLICE STATE TYRANNY: Australian police smash down the door of a man and violently arrest him for mentioning anti-lockdown protest.)

Australia imposed tyrannical COVID-19 lockdowns on its citizens

Joseph and Lynchs comments contradict a statement made by the Australian Ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva Sally Mansfield. During the recently concluded 47th session of the U.N. Human Rights Council, Mansfield remarked that governments must ensure COVID-19 response measures comply with international human rights obligations.

We reiterate our concerns that some states are taking advantage of COVID-19 to undermine or supplant established human rights, she added.

But Joseph said that the law threatening punishment for returning Australians was in stark contrast to Mansfields remarks. Invoked under the Biosecurity Act of 2015, the emergency law penalizes citizens flying back home with up to five years behind bars or a fine of AU$66,000 (US$50,110).

Australian Health and Aged Care Minister Greg Hunt invoked the Biosecurity Act following the advice of federal Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly. This was the first time Canberra used any kind of emergency powers to stop Australian citizens from returning home.

Australia is no stranger to draconian measures. In November 2020, the state of South Australia ordered a six-day circuit breaker lockdown following an outbreak of COVID-19 at the states capital Adelaide. The restrictions faced by South Australians under the lockdown included bans on outdoor exercise and even just walking their dogs. It also only allowed one person per household to go outside the home daily for essential reasons.

One Twitter user reached out to the South Australia Police to clarify the new measures. The user asked if she was allowed to walk her dog outside to defecate. The police department replied in the negative, saying that she cannot leave the house to walk the dog or to exercise. (Related: Walking your dog outside  and be punished  under new lockdown mandate in Australia.)

Visit MedicalTyranny.com to read more stories about Australias draconian measures to curb the spread of COVID-19.

Sources include:

DailyMail.co.uk

TheAge.com.au

ZeroHedge.com
(Natural News) The question of whether life exists outside the Earth has been around for some time. But a recent study has posed a different question  whether extraterrestrial beings have been observing our planet before without us knowing. In an effort to answer this question, scientists have discovered 29 planets where aliens could be watching Earth by eavesdropping on radio and television transmissions.

Astronomers identified nearby 1,715 star systems where alien observers could have discovered the Earth by watching it transit or pass by across the face of the sun. Of these star systems, they found 46 with planets close enough to pick up broadcast transmissions coming from the Earth. From the 46, the researchers estimated that there were 29 potentially habitable planets that were well-positioned to witness an Earth transit  and pick up radio and TV signals.

Cornell University astronomy professor Lisa Kaltenegger and American Museum of Natural History astrophysicist Jackie Faherty authored the paper  which was published June 23 in Nature. They turned to the European Space Agencys Gaia catalog of star positions and motions to find out any star systems well-positioned to observe the Earths transit across the sun.

One way we find planets is if they block out part of the light from their host star, said Kaltenegger. We asked: Who would we be the aliens for if somebody else was looking? There is this tiny sliver in the sky where other star systems have a cosmic front seat to find Earth as a transiting planet.

Kaltenegger and Faherty found a number of notable planets perfect for extraterrestrial life to observe Earth. One star they found, the red dwarf Ross 128 in the Virgo constellation, was positioned close enough to receive broadcasts from Earth at about 11 light-years away. It also had a planet nearly twice the size of Earth, with any suitably equipped life there managing to observe the Earths transit for more than 2,000 years. However, this planet lost the vantage point for viewing Earth 900 years ago.

Another star called Trappist-1 was also positioned close enough for aliens to tune in to human broadcasts at 45 light-years away. It hosted at least seven planets  with four in the temperate, habitable zone. But the two researchers noted that the four planets in Trappist-1 will not be in a position to witness an Earth transit for another 1,642 years.

Aliens have also made their presence known here

Kaltenegger and Faherty came amid renewed interest in alien life and unidentified flying objects (UFOs). Once dismissed as a conspiracy theory, a number of U.S. military officers have acknowledged sightings of UFOs near military bases and nuclear installations.

Some saw extraterrestrial beings deactivate nuclear technology, a CBS News report said. Erstwhile Air Force Capt. Robert Salas said back in 1967, 10 Minuteman nuclear missiles under his purview were suddenly set to the no-go position. At the same time, security personnel at the Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana where Salas was stationed told him of a mysterious red glowing object in the sky.

Another military officer shared how missiles needed to be reactivated following UFO visits. Retired Air Force nuclear missile targeting officer Robert Jamison said he had to go out and restart missiles rendered inoperable after UFOs appeared near them. (Related: Former US military officer claims UFOs shut down nuclear missiles.)

Furthermore, retired Air Force Col. Charles Halt shared that back in December 1980, three patrolmen investigated strange lights in a forest in England. The soldiers reported approaching a triangular spacecraft approximately three meters on a side, with a dark metallic appearance and strange markings. Halt added: They were observing it for a period of time, and then it very quickly and silently vanished at high speed.

Two nights after the UFOs initial appearance, Halts superior at the RAF Bentwaters military base said the craft had returned. Halt found indentations in the ground, broken branches and low-level background radiation when he and his team investigated. They also witnessed various lights moving silently in the sky alongside the disturbances on the ground. (Related: CIA declassifies documents featuring mysterious UFO sightings.)

Visit UFOs.news to read more articles about extraterrestrial beings observing humans.

Sources include:

TheGuardian.com

Nature.com

CBSNews.com
(Natural News) The New York Times conducted a lab analysis on fast-food chain Subways tuna sandwiches and wraps, which suggests that none of them contain even a trace of actual tuna.

Almost unbelievably, what Subway is passing off as tuna could actually be a mixture of various concoctions, according to The Washington Post.

The chain is now being sued for false advertising and the selling of unknown products after scientists determined no amplifiable tuna DNA was present in the sample.

Because there were no amplification products able to be obtained from the DNA, the scientists declared that they cannot identify the species of whatever it is that Subway is trying to pass off as tuna.

Using the same type of PCR test that was pushed all last year as a way to identify the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) in humans, scientists looked for one of five varying tuna species, explaining that there are 15 species of fish that can legally be labeled as tuna.

The Food and Drug Administrations (FDA) Seafood List outlines this with more clarity.

There are only two options, the scientists revealed, for why tuna could not be detected in Subways sandwich or wrap samples.

One: Its so heavily processed that whatever we could pull out, we couldnt make an identification, they said.

Or, we got some and theres just nothing there thats tuna.

Is Subway selling its customers mystery meat?

When tuna is cooked, the experts say, its proteins break down making it harder to identify. So, it could be that Subways tuna sandwiches and wraps do contain some tuna, albeit of the denatured variety.

On the other hand, it could be that Subway is selling something other than tuna as if it was tuna, deceiving customers and exposing them to some strange substance that looks and maybe tastes a little bit like tuna.

The food fraud investigation comes on the heels of a complaint filed with the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California alleging that Subway is tricking customers into buying food items that wholly lack the ingredients they reasonably thought they were purchasing.

That lawsuit, filed back in January, prompted a response from Subway, which says there is no truth to the allegations in the complaint.

At that time, Subway also affirmed that it delivers 100% cooked tuna to its restaurants.

Multiple samples collected from Subways tuna sandwiches have been analyzed at this point. However, while the mixture appears to be tuna, the fish simply cannot be found.

Tuna is one of our most popular sandwiches, claims Katia Noll, Subways senior director for global food safety and quality. Our restaurants receive pure tuna, mix it with mayonnaise, and serve on a freshly made sandwich to our guests.

Back in 2014, Subway made global headlines for announcing the removal of azodiacarbonamide, a toxic chemical also used in yoga mats, that was determined to cause cancer.

There have also been controversies with other fast-food chains regarding their use of other toxic chemicals in packaging that are linked to cancer and other chronic health problems.

Why is this difficult? The lab says that protein in tuna is broken down during cooking, leaving them unable to identify it, wrote one commenter at Fox Business, confused about why there is a controversy involving tuna.

Okay, so if the cooking process makes it undefinable, then how hard is it to follow the supply chain back to the pre-cooking supplier and check the FDA / USDA records? This should not be difficult.

More related news about the shady practices of the fast-food industry can be found at Twisted.news.

Sources for this article include:

FoxBusiness.com

FDA.gov

FoxNews.com

NaturalNews.com
(Natural News) On Friday, June 26, the Texas Supreme Court ruled that Facebook can be held liable for sex traffickers using the platform to prey on children.

The court ruled that Facebook is not a lawless no mans land and could be held liable for benefiting from human trafficking. The courts ruling was prompted by three lawsuits against the social media giant that involved teenage sex traffic victims who met their abusers through Facebooks messaging functions. (Related: Facebook a hub for sex trafficking, Twitter a haven for pedophilia.)

Facebook is being sued for negligence and product liability in Texas. Prosecutors argue the tech giant failed to warn its users about or block sex trafficking from taking place. The companys legal team argued that the social media platform was protected against liability due to Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA).

Section 230 protects websites from being taken to court for any potentially illegal content posted by their users. But there are exceptions for copyright violations, sex and prostitution-related material and violations of federal criminal law.

The Texas Supreme Courts majority opinion states: We do not understand section 230 to create a lawless no mans land on the internet in which states are powerless to impose liability on websites that knowingly or intentionally participate in the evil of online human trafficking.

Holding internet platforms accountable for the words or actions of their users is one thing, and the federal precedent uniformly dictates that section 230 does not allow it, the courts opinion said. Holding internet platforms accountable for their own misdeeds is quite another thing. This is particularly the case for human trafficking.

The Texas Supreme Court noted that Congress had recently amended Section 230 of the CDA to allow the possibility of civil liability for platforms that violate state and federal human trafficking laws.

Ruling can lead to other businesses being held accountable for benefiting from trafficking

Annie McAdams, a personal injury lawyer based in Houston, said the courts decision was unprecedented. She was the lead attorney for the families of several victims of sex trafficking who brought a case against Facebook in the state.

Our clients have fought for over two years for the chance to bring their case, said McAdams. While we have a long road ahead, we are grateful that the Texas Supreme Court will allow these courageous trafficking survivors to have their day in court against Facebook.

McAdams added that she hopes Chapter 98 of the Texas Civil Practices and Remedies Code can help other sex trafficking victims and survivors in the state hold businesses like Facebook accountable for benefiting from their exploitation.

Chapter 98 argues that a defendant that either engages in or intentionally or knowingly benefits from human trafficking is liable to the victims for damages arising from the trafficking of that person by the defendant or venture.

The three lawsuits against Facebook alleged that the social media platform enabled sex traffickers to target minors. The victims were all from the Houston metropolitan area. They were 13, 14 and 16 when sex traffickers preyed upon them through Facebooks messaging service.

Sex traffickers allegedly enticed their victims with false promises of love and a better future, including lies about modeling jobs that did not exist.

One of the cases involving a 14-year-old from Spring, recounts how the girl was recruited, groomed and sold in 2018 by a man she met on Instagram, reported the Houston Chronicle in April. The trafficker beat her and sold her for commercial sex for three weeks The child has undergone intensive therapy in the years since.

In a statement, a Facebook spokesman said the company was reviewing the Texas Supreme Courts decision and considering its next steps.

Sex trafficking is abhorrent and now allowed on Facebook, said the spokesman. We will continue our fight against the spread of this content and the predators who engage in it.

Learn more about the many crimes committed by Facebook by reading the latest articles at FacebookCollapse.com.

Sources include:

Breitbart.com

FoxBusiness.com

TheBlaze.com
(Natural News) In his book Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime, Dr. Peter Gotzsche arguably recognized as one of the worlds foremost experts in evaluating evidence-based medicine (EBM) writes, The reason why we take so many drugs is that drug companies do not sell drugs. They sell lies about drugs. The patients do not realize that although their doctors know a lot about diseases, human physiology and psychology, they know very little about the drugs that have been concocted and dressed up by the drug industry.

(Article republished from GreatGameIndia.com)

An issue that is rarely discussed or given serious attention is the over-specialization in healthcare. Modern medicines approach to identify and treat illnesses and tackle the reduction of infections has in many instances ceased to be multidisciplinary.

Medicine has also become increasingly compartmentalized and confined to a rigid materialistic belief system that has now established its own set of standards, criteria and values that are often contrary to gold-standard scientific protocols. The consequence is that its narrow single-mindedness has insulated modern medicine from objective criticism and preserved its internal flaws, errors and fabrications, which have contributed to the unnecessary injury and death of countless patients

US healthcare spending reached $3.8 trillion in 2019. Due to the Covid pandemic, expenditures for 2020 will be astronomically higher. One might expect that with the worlds most expensive healthcare system, the US would equally have the best evidence-based practices to keep its citizens healthy. By now we should be proficiently expert at preventing and reversing disease, while making minimal errors resulting in injury or death.

However, the exact opposite is the case. Instead of minimizing disease-causing factors, American medicine causes more illness through misguided diagnostic testing, overuse of medical and surgical procedures, and over prescribing pharmaceutical drugs. The fundamental reason for this catastrophe is that todays healthcare establishment, and corporate science in general, over relies on profit-generating motives.

Dr. Peter Gotzsche is arguably recognized as one of the worlds foremost experts in evaluating evidence-based medicine (EBM). As the co-founder of EBMs preeminent flagship organization  the Cochrane Collaboration  to review and analyze peer-reviewed clinical research, he is intimately knowledgeable about the widespread corruption permeating the pharmaceutical industry and medical journals. In his book Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime, he writes,

The reason why we take so many drugs is that drug companies do not sell drugs. They sell lies about drugs. The patients do not realize that although their doctors know a lot about diseases, human physiology and psychology, they know very little about the drugs that have been concocted and dressed up by the drug industry.

After we take a fair and objective look at American medicine during the past five decades, especially at the statistics of iatrogenic fatalities, or deaths caused by prescribed medications and medical error, our healthcare establishment is found to be anything but benign.

Despite its many noteworthy discoveries and merits, a substantial amount of recommended medical practice has failed patients.

If the medical system were a bank, writes Dr. Stephen Persell at Northwestern Universitys School of Medicine, you wouldnt deposit your money here, because there would be an error every one-in-two to one-in-three times you made a transaction. Dr. Persell is referring to the rates of preventable medical errors causing patients serious injury and now the third leading cause of death.

There is excellent evidence to support the argument that iatrogenic deaths have passed cancer fatalities and are now challenging heart disease for the number one spot. A 2008 study found as many as half of adverse events reported by patients were not recorded in their hospital charts.

As of 2017, investigations continue to find that less than 10% of medical errors are reported. Reported adverse effects vary depending on the specialty and frequently go unnoticed or are improperly evaluated. An additional study found that almost two thirds of cardiologists had refused to report a serious error they had direct personal knowledge of to an authority.

As one example, heart disease is Americas leading cause of fatality, accounting for 665,000 deaths annually. The CDC, which consistently undermines health threats if it means positioning itself in opposition to private commercial interests, estimates that 34 percent of cardiovascular fatalities are premature and preventable.

In contrast, the American Heart Association claims 80 percent are preventable. What are the heads of our federal health agencies doing to advocate on the side of prevention? Little to nothing.

There is no realistic and science-based national policy in place to lessen cardiovascular, cancer and diabetic death rates. Since the most viable and effective means to prevent these diseases are natural and within every persons means, it is not financially lucrative to divert federal funding away from pharmaceutical treatments and surgical procedures. The CDC and FDA are largely dependent upon monetary income received from the drug and medical device industries.

Earlier we reported about the systemic corruption and fraud that has plagued the CDC and FDA for decades. It would be far cheaper to completely empty, dismantle, fumigate and rebuild the agencies anew rather than continue exerting pressure for reforms, which have only perpetuated a killing spree by protecting life-threatening drugs, vaccines and unnecessary medical procedures.

Dr. Gotzsche notes, the same is true for private drug companies. Despite the numerous lawsuits drug companies have lost in federal courts, nothing has fundamentally changed in order to deter them from illegal activities to increase profits. In fact, the cost of paying out settlements and settling lawsuits is factored into the expense of doing business.

A decade ago, we teamed up with three board-certified physicians to undertake the task to review the peer-reviewed literature in order to recalculate the statistics from many branches of medicine in order to arrive at a more realistic casualty rate due to medical error.

We began with a basic question. Do the current standards of American medical practice and its supporting science prove that the recommended therapies and healthcare protocols  whether drugs, surgery, diagnostic methods, medical devices, etc  are actually effective? And if so, at what cost to the patients health and well-being?

Our results and final conclusions were startling and culminated in the release of a widely read and referenced book, Death by Medicine. We made every effort to avoid editorial commentary to our findings. We decided to only report the statistics and facts with our calculations. The fact that our data placed iatrogenic error as the number one cause of death in America was alone sufficient.

What was novel in our analysis was that we included preventable deaths, such as certain infections and severe nutrient deficiency, which could have been easily corrected by clinicians and medical personnel if viable prevention programs had been part of our healthcare system.

After publication the book was sent to hundreds of journalists, federal officials and non-profit medical organizations. It was completely ignored by the orthodoxy; however, it became increasingly popular among alternative and complementary medical physicians who were already fully aware of the structural dangers to public health within conventional medical care.

Revisiting American medicines legacy of iatrogenic deaths is now more crucial than ever because the same behaviors that have contributed to the nations leading cause of death are being repeated during the Covid-19 pandemic. The government and federal health officials are in reprehensible denial of inexpensive and highly effective drugs, such as Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, to treat early and middle stage SARS-2 infections.

Cases of Covid infections and deaths have been grossly exaggerated. And now we are realizing that the efficacy and safety profiles of the vaccines are orchestrated scams. As a result, the entire institutional edifice to vaccinate the global population is destined to become the greatest scandal of the 21st century.

Unfortunately, nobody can acquire accurate statistics for Covid-19 vaccine associated injuries and deaths from the CDCs Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). Careful weekly monitoring of VAERS adverse event updates convince us that the entire system is criminally rigged.

CDC officials overseeing the database are undoubtedly fudging numbers after ratio of adverse events, including deaths, per number of doses administered are compared to the more robust and accurate EudraVigilance database in the European Union and the less reliable Yellow Card System in the UK.

As of June 17, VAERS was reporting 329,021 injuries and 5,888 deaths due to the Covid vaccines. The databases most recent update is reporting an additional 26,541 injuries but 1,972 less deaths. How can this sudden disappearance of almost 2,000 deaths be accounted for?

The mysterious loss of fatality entries occurred during the same week as a CDC working group of outside medical professionals was reviewing an association between the mRNA vaccines and the rising number of reported cases of cardiac inflammation or myocarditis.

The group concluded that there is indeed a likely association. The occasion of deleted deaths in VAERS is also on the heels of the Israeli Shamir Medical Center report that Pfizers vaccine is linked with occurrences of thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura, an autoimmune disorder associated with a rare form of blood clotting.

However, despite weekly local news stories around the nation about youth as young as 19 years of age dying of vaccine complications shortly after receipt of an mRNA vaccine, the CDC is claiming that all 1,200 persons, between 16-24 years of age, recovered and no deaths were reported. Does this account for the likely scrubbing of entries in VAERS?

But it is much worse. We only need to look at the European Unions statistics for adverse Covid-19 vaccine events and compare that with VAERS and the CDCs recent conclusion to realize there is a massive cover-up in our governments efforts to sanitize the safety record of Covid vaccines.

As of this week the EudraVigilance system is reporting over 1.5 million injuries and 15,472 deaths. Within those figures, 28,583 injuries and 1,862 deaths are from cardiac complications such as myocarditis.

Second, the EU and US have administered approximately the same number of Covid vaccine doses, roughly 409 million and 379 million respectively. Therefore we should expect to find a similar dose-to-injury ratio.

Again we discover the CDC gaming the nations reporting system to lessen the perception of lethal risks. Based upon the EU ratio we can conservatively estimate that a minimum of 14,300 Americans have been killed by the vaccines so far. If we go back a week before the CDC scrubbed entries in VAERS, it would be over 17,000 Covid vaccine deaths. The actual number of Americans suffering adverse reactions would be 1.4 million.

In other words the EU is reporting 4 times more vaccine injuries and deaths than American health officials. In both the US and EU, Pfizers mRNA vaccine accounts for the majority of these casualties. Unless the Covid-19 vaccines engineer a personal vendetta against people holding EU passports, these numbers dont add up.

Before the arrival of the Covid vaccines, Mercks anti-inflammatory drug Vioxx was widely regarded as the single largest pharmaceutical catastrophe in American medical history. The drug should never have been approved and licensed in the first place; and, Merck knew beforehand that the drug would be lethal and concealed that documentation from FDA regulators.

Vioxx was on the market for five years before being withdrawn. At the time of the federal class action lawsuit against Merck, FDA epidemiologist Dr. David Graham estimated the drug had killed 60,000 patients due to heart attacks and strokes.

Since the majority of deaths were among elderly patients, a later report by the American Conservative predicted that upwards to half a million patients may have died from the drug over the course of a longer period. Yet during those years Merck was cashing in $2 billion annually from Vioxx sales, earning over double its eventual $4.8 billion fine after being found guilty.

To put this into a broader perspective, the Covid vaccines have only been distributed for six months and have now contributed to a realistic 17,000 deaths or upwards towards 30,000 this year alone. Since the vaccines immunity quickly wanes and it seems certain they provide little protection against new SARS-2 strains, health officials are already recommending regular booster shots.

Similar to a prescription medication, those who buy into the vaccine propaganda hype are in principle relying upon these vaccines for life or until such time the virus resides into just a seasonal nuisance. Consequently iatrogenic vaccine injuries and deaths may likely continue at current rates during forthcoming years.

The Covid-19 vaccines are on track to outpace the conservative number of Vioxx deaths over three-fold and even modern medicines most deadly drug Cerivastatin, manufactured by Bayer in the late 1990s and responsible for over 100,000 deaths during the four-year period it was on the market. In short time, Covid vaccines will be the deadliest drug to have emerged from Big Pharma.

A study published in the Journal of Patient Safety estimated that 400,000 unnecessary and preventable deaths occur annually in American hospitals alone. At that rate, it is not surprising that the large majority of deaths ruled as SARS-2 infections happened in hospitals.

If our federal health officials had been competent, and less compromised by the demands and influence of drug makers, most of these fatalities likely would never have occurred.

It has been estimated that US taxpayers have paid out $39 billion for Covid-19 vaccine development, funding and towards nationalized response measures. Most of this has been horribly wasted after we consider other options on hand to curve the pandemic but were categorically ignored. In the case of vaccines in general, the journal Health Affairs observed,

the government often plays an outsized role, but in the era of Covid-19 the governments role was even more central than usual. The government essentially removed the bulk of traditional industry risks related to vaccine development: a) scientific failures, b) failures to demonstrate safety and efficacy, c) manufacturing risks, and d) Market risks related to low demand.

While this may shock and disturb a rational person, Health Affairs  a thoroughly orthodox medical publication  applauds the governments negligent measures as money well spent.

For this reason it is crucial to understand the terrible decisions made during the Covid pandemic in the context of modern medicines past crimes and preventable failures.

In the coming months Anthony Faucis reputation will become further tainted. We might predict he will resign as more evidence of incompetence emerges, and, in our opinion, perhaps criminal negligence in his handling of the pandemic and efforts to whitewash the USs role in supporting gain of function research leading to the genetic engineering of the SARS-2 virus.

Fortunately, unlike past scandals when misguided medical decisions were responsible for thousands of unnecessary disabilities and deaths, numerous doctors and scientists worldwide are raising their voices to condemn the lethal policies of the CDC, NIAID, British Health Ministry and the World Health Organization.

So what can we reasonably surmise at this point? At one time most Americans trusted science, medicine and our healthcare system without question or criticism. However, today we observe systemic corruption and gross conflicts of interest across same federal health agencies that have also contributed to untold medical errors and deaths prior to SARS-2 arrival.

They have weaponized pharmaceutical science and a supplicant braying media supports this perversion of medical facts. Now the drug-happy media is attacking the truth-tellers, the physicians, professors and accomplished journalists who are risking their careers and reputations to bring forth the fallacies in the pandemic narrative. This is one battle that the silent majority can find its voice and courage to step forth and support.

Read more at: GreatGameIndia.com and PharmaceuticalFraud.com
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SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP)  In some ways, the new spending plan approved by the California Legislature on Monday is about going backward: Back to a time before the pandemic, when California's roaring economy fueled budget surpluses.

The $262.6 billion proposal now on its way to Gov. Gavin Newsom's desk would restore spending cuts to public schools, colleges and universities, the courts, child support services and state worker salaries  all things that were cut last year when state officials thought they were facing a record budget deficit because of the coronavirus.

Instead, state revenues soared by more than 27%, the biggest year-over-year increase in more than four decades. That includes roughly $100 billion in new money, both from a state surplus and coronavirus aid from the federal government. It's so much money that the state plans to give rebates of up to $1,100 to more than 15 million households while also pledging to pay for every 4-year-old to go to kindergarten for free and guaranteeing government-funded health coverage for low-income immigrants 50 and older living in the country illegally.

This budget does not get us back to normal, as that was not our intent, said state Assemblyman Joaquin Arambula, a Democrat from Fresno. Instead, it gets us to a better place by making transformative change for Californians.

Democrats in charge of the state Legislature would have spent even more money over time, but Gov. Gavin Newsom  who will face a recall election later this year  convinced them to adopt a more cautious approach that relies more on one-time spending instead of multi-year commitments.

That means the state won't spend $200 million this year to hire more people in local public health departments in the aftermath of the pandemic. Instead, the Newsom administration committed to spend $300 million next year. The Newsom administration said the money wasn't needed this year, in part, because the federal government is giving California $1.8 billion for public health, with most of that going for vaccines and coronavirus testing.

Still, there was some grumbling among Democrats about missing the chance to bolster local public health departments, many of which were overwhelmed by the pandemic. State Sen. Richard Pan, a pediatrician and Democrat from Sacramento, said he wanted the Newsom administration to do more than simply spend the whole year doing planning.

We already know from the pandemic some of our weaknesses, he said.

Republicans, meanwhile, grumbled about a tax increase on businesses with 500 or more employees. The hike would more than double an environmental fee that primarily goes into two funds to pay for cleaning up hazardous waste sites throughout the state.

The budget eliminates the fee for businesses with fewer than 100 employees and keeps it the same for those 100 to 499 workers.

State Sen. Shannon Grove, a Republican from Bakersfield, said the tax increase will discourage companies from hiring more people for fear of growing too large and having to pay a much bigger fee.

Why do we punish employers for hiring people? she said.

The tax increase required a two-thirds vote from the Legislature, a task made easier by Democrats controlling enough seats that they don't need Republican votes. Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia, a Democrat from Bell Gardens, said large employers were part of the negotiations on the bill and agreed to pay the higher tax because they understand that for a long time they have not been paying their fair share.

Not paying their fair share means communities like mine get treated like were a wasteland and like were disposable and its OK to let us be sicker, said Garcia, who represents communities contaminated with lead from a nearby battery plant.

The budget also pledges more than $276 million to help the Employment Development Department more quickly work through its backlog of unemployment claims, currently effecting more than 230,000 people.

In the past year, California has paid $153 billion in unemployment benefits, including billions of fraudulent payments to prison inmates and others who were not eligible. The state quickly ran out of money to pay benefits and had to take out a loan form the federal government to pay the rest.

The state's debt is approaching $24 billion, all which must be paid back to the federal government with interest. But the budget does not include any money to begin paying off the debt.

The federal government has forgiven the state's interest payments through September, and the Newsom administration hopes they will forgive more in the future. But it took the state seven years to pay off a much smaller loan after the Great Recession more than a decade ago. The Legislative Analyst's Office estimates interest payments on this current debt could cost the state between $2.5 billion and $5 billion over the next decade.

I don't understand how $2.5 to $5 billion isn't a priority to this administration, said Assemblywoman Suzette Martinez Valladares, a Republican from Santa Clarita.

Erika Li, chief deputy for the California Department of Finance, said the debt is a priority for this administration.

It is something we are working on and will continue to work on," she said.

___

This story has been updated to correct that state Sen. Shannon Grove is from Bakersfield and is not the Senate Republican leader.
LAS VEGAS (AP)  Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo formally kicked off his campaign for governor Monday, telling supporters in Las Vegas that he believed it was time to rid Nevada of one-party rule by unseating Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak.

Single-party rule has led to politicians focusing on felons' rights, prioritizing criminals over victims, weakening penalties for crimes and handcuffing the police. That is not sustainable behavior for any state, let alone a state that relies so heavily on tourism, the Republican said at Rancho High School, his alma mater.

Lombardo, who leads the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and confirmed last month that he was running for governor, officially launched his campaign before embarking on a statewide tour, with stops planned in Reno, Carson City, Winnemucca, Elko and Ely.

He's running in a Republican primary that's attracted North Las Vegas Mayor John Lee, who recently left the Democratic Party to become a Republican, and Joey Gilbert, a northern Nevada attorney who has questioned the results of the 2020 presidential election. Former U.S. Sen. Dean Heller also is considering a run and has been making recent appearances before rural GOP groups ahead of any official decision.

Lombardos announcement speech previewed his platform and the talking points that Republicans plan to use in the 2022 midterms. The two-term sheriff, who has never run in a partisan race, said he would block teaching critical race theory in schools, establish an election integrity commission and defend the Second Amendment.

He promised to veto any proposed tax increases and support school choice alternatives to traditional public schools. He also pushed back against criticism of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Departments decision to withdraw from a program coordinating with federal immigration officers and said he had zero tolerance for immigrants who break the law.

Theres been a lot of rhetoric out there that I have created a sanctuary jurisdiction. That is absolutely not true, Lombardo said. What we did is adjust, moved resources and addressed the problem to move forward, versus backing up and say, We raised our hands and gave up.

The Republican primary will not be held until June 2022, and hopefuls do not officially file their declaration of candidacy forms until early next year. But they typically jump into the race this far out to raise enough money for a statewide campaign and publicize their name.

Theyre vying to take on Sisolak, who was elected in 2018 by 4 percentage points. He was the political swing states first Democratic governor in two decades.

Before he was elected to the top office, Sisolak was chairman of the Clark County Commission and worked closely with Lombardo, an elected official who oversees some 5,000 Las Vegas police officers, the states largest force.

The two teamed up after the 2017 mass shooting on the Las Vegas Strip, the deadliest in modern U.S. history that killed 58 people and injured hundreds of others, to launch an online fundraiser for victims that quickly collected more than $10 million.

Lombardo started with the department as an officer in 1988. He was promoted through the ranks for 26 years, becoming an assistant sheriff in 2011 before he retired as a commissioned officer. He was elected in 2014 as sheriff and reelected in 2018.

Former Lt. Gov. Mark Hutchison, who served from 2015 to 2019, will be chairman of Lombardos campaign and introduced him Monday as the strongest conservative candidate who can win the general election.

Joes showed me why hes been elected twice as a conservative, pro-life, pro-Second Amendment Republican in our states bluest county, he said.

___

Metz reported from Carson City, Nevada, and 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.
GREENWICH  As the race for the special election in the 36th District comes into focus, Alex Kasser has chosen the candidate she would like to succeed her in the state Senate.

Kasser endorsed Alexis Gevanter of Greenwich, one of at least two Democrats seeking the partys nomination.

Gevanter has the personal attributes needed  courage and integrity, Kasser said Monday. Plus, she has great professional skills. Shes an attorney and a cause-driven advocate, just as I was before I entered politics. Im confident Alexis will carry forward the work Ive done over the last three years.

State Rep. Stephen Meskers, D-150, also endorsed Gevanter, noting her work with the advocacy group Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.

When there have been issues related to gun safety and gun violence, the Moms Demand Action group and Alexis herself have been a pivotal point in raising our consciousness and doing the right thing, Meskers said. I think her advocacy for the victims of gun violence, her concerns about safety in the community and her rational and reasonable approach to building coalitions convinced me that she will bring so much to the table.

Kasser resigned unexpectedly last week, only six month into her second term, and citied her ongoing divorce as the reason. A special election will be held to finish the term, which ends in 2022. The 36th Senate District represents all of Greenwich, northern Stamford and western New Canaan.

As for the Republicans, state Rep. Harry Arora, R-151, and Representative Town Meeting member Ryan Fazio both officially entered the race Monday afternoon.

After careful reflection about how to best serve our community, I am excited to announce my intention to run for state Senate, Fazio said in a statement. We all love our community and know it is an incredible place to build a life, but we also need a change in leadership to create a state government that is equal to the great caliber of our people.

He said he would focus on unemployment, the states debt, taxes, violent crime and education.

I look forward to continuing conversations with our Republican convention delegates and also welcome our other candidates to the race, Fazio said.

Aroras statement came soon after. He is in his first full term as a state representative after winning a special election in January 2020 to succeed Fred Camillo in the 151st District. He was reelected to the House seat last fall.

I am proud and excited to announce my candidacy for the 36th state Senate District, Arora said. As your next state senator, my focus will be on serving our community, solving public problems and providing leadership in the legislative process. I have connected with all delegates and hope to have their endorsement to be the official Republican candidate. I have broad popular support in the district, which will allow me to run a winning campaign.

Greenwichs Leora Levy, who is a member of the Republican National Committees Executive Committee, said she is also considering a run.

Before Kasser first won election in 2018, the 36th District had been represented by Republicans since 1930.

Democratic candidates

Gevanter, an attorney, served as the Connecticut chapter leader of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America until she began her political campaign last week. A newcomer to the political scene, she said she was honored to receive endorsements from Kasser and Meskers.

Alex and Steve have proven that we can grow Connecticuts economy without sacrificing our values, Gevanter said. As a business attorney, gun violence prevention advocate and proud mom, Im running because I can continue to make progress for our community.

Saying that she has spent my life advocating for others, Gevanter said Ill use my experience and relationships to listen to the needs of our district, bring people together and build coalitions so our families and local businesses can recover from the pandemic with even greater prosperity than before.

Gevanter is not the only Democrat seeking to succeed Kasser.

John Blankley, a former member of the Representative Town Meeting and Board of Estimate and Taxation in Greenwich, has also officially launched a campaign for the partys nomination.

We need a candidate who has a commitment to the values we share as Democrats, of course, but also a broad reach among unaffiliated voters, and the kind of experience that will serve all residents of Greenwich, Stamford and New Canaan to its best, Blankley said Monday. The most gratifying thing about being a Democrat is that we strive to accept the content of everyones character, and I look forward to sharing my experience, character and desire to serve our community.

He pointed to his experience in working in high-ranking executive positions at major companies and in starting a successful small business, as well as serving in government.

Blankley received the endorsement Monday from Stamford resident Mark Diamond, who was the Democratic candidate for the 36th District in 2008.

After Kassers resignation, this gives a candidate with vast financial and political experience the opportunity to pick up the flag, John Blankley, Diamond said.

Dita Bhargava, a former vice chair of the Connecticut Democratic Party, said last week that she was also considering a run but she has not made it official.

Two possible Democratic candidates said they will not be in the race: Greenwich residents Matt DesChamps and Trevor Crow.

DesChamps had put his name forward last week but said Monday that he told Greenwich Democratic Town Committee Chair Joseph Angland over the weekend that he was withdrawing.

And Crow, who is seeking the Democratic nomination to run for tax collector in Greenwich, confirmed Monday that she has withdrawn from consideration for the state Senate.

No dates have been set for the parties to hold their nominating conventions.

Under state law, Gov. Ned Lamont has 10 days from when Kasser resigned on June 22, to issue a writ of election to allow the special election to take place. Once that writ it issued, the election must be held 46 days after and the Democratic and Republican conventions to pick candidates must be held 36 days before that election date, creating a compressed time frame for the process.

Lamont had not set a date for the special election as of Monday.

Editors note: This story has been updated to correct a name. Matt DesChamps said he is no longer interested in running.

kborsuk@greenwichtime.com
In 1955, a New Haven Railroad commuter train could run nonstop through the 36-mile distance from Stamford to Grand Central in 48 minutes. Today that run takes 59 minutes at best, despite Gov. Ned Lamonts long-promised dream of a 30-minute trip time.

But now theres a new effort to speed up the New Haven line: Connecticut Department of Transportations ambitious Time for CT $8- to $10-billion plan. It promises 10-minute faster running times from New Haven to New York by next year and a 25-minute quicker run by 2035.

While some dream of a new high speed rail system running from Washington to Boston at speeds in excess of 200 mph, DOT and Metro-North are taking, in my view, a much more realistic approach to fixing our existing system. Higher speeds will be fine.

Reading the consultant-driven 138-page plan, which has been years in the making, one gets a sobering picture of how badly our railroad has deteriorated.

For safety reasons, slow orders all along the line have cut speeds to 37 mph, both for commuter trains and Amtrak.

As one trouble spot gets fixed, another pops up as Metro-North plays whack-a-mole with decaying infrastructure. Layer on top of this permanent slow orders implemented by the Federal Railroad Administartion in 2013 and you can understand commuters frustrations.

There are 57,000 track-ties that must be replaced. Of the 134 bridges between New Haven and the New York state line, 34 are rated as poor or in serious conditions. The open deck timber bridges are most in need of attention.

And of the five movable bridges, only one has been replaced while the others are each more than a century old. The South Norwalk swing bridge project alone will cost about $1 billion.

The catenary (overhead power) system is in better shape, but some of its trackside support structures are also in the century-plus club. Theres a lot of work to be done. And trying to do it while still running the railroad will be like changing the fan belt on a car running 60 mph.

At the Stratford event unveiling the DOTs plan, the construction unions photobombed the press conference unveiling a huge banner reading Jobs Jobs Jobs. And every speaker pandered to them, promising 45,000 good paying union jobs on this project.

But its not like DOT or Metro-North will be hiring 45,000 new plumbers, electricians and carpenters. That number is a hypothetical projection based on the cost and time involved in the work.

The Metro-North unions have jurisdiction over all track work and you cant join that union until you get hired by the railroad. Then you need training, which can only be done on the job. And you need track equipment, some of which on the New Haven line is 30 years old.

Hopefully well have enough money to make all this happen thanks to Sen. Richard Blumenthal and the congressional compromise on infrastructure achieved recently. But then we still need leadership.

DOT has been suffering a brain drain in recent years, losing its best and brightest planners and engineers to retirement, state pensions or lucrative consultant jobs. With so much federal money being thrown at transportation, Connecticut will be in serious competition for a limited pool of expertise.

Theres so much to be done. But its all achievable given enough money and patience.

Jim Cameron is a longtime commuter advocate based in Fairfield County. Contact him at CommuterActionGroup@gmail.com.
Exhibits and special activities celebrating the life and works of Steve Ditko, a Johnstown native and co-creator of Spider-Man and his cast of supporting characters and villains, will be showcased beginning July 15 at Bottle Works in the Cambria City section of Johnstown.
This June 8, 2021, Associated Press file photo shows the Supreme Court in Washington. On Monday, the court declined to take up a lawsuit New Hampshire filed challenging Massachusetts's application of its income tax on residents working remotely from other states during the pandemic.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: The Centre has developed an online portal to collect details about government and private warehouses, a move that will enable monitoring of storage availability on a real-time basis, a senior Food Ministry official said on Tuesday.

This will also help to know real-time foodgrain stock available in any of the warehouses in the country, he said.

The portal has been designed in view of the delay in timely collection of warehouse data, and lack of platform to collect private warehouse details and storage capacity, he added.

According to the official, "Creation of an online portal is a step closer to achieve the objective of National Food Security Act (NFSA) in a transparent manner."

Unavailability of details and data on storage in private warehouses has previously hindered the government in making well-informed decisions to ensure food security in the country, he said.

Sharing more about the new initiative, the official said any private warehouse owner can register on the portal and enter the warehouse and stock details.

The registration of the private warehouse is very user-friendly in which name, mobile number, and email address are collected and the user registration will be activated by the Food Ministry.

After the account is activated, a user can log in and enter warehouse storage capacity as well as month-wise stock details.

The user has to enter both agriculture commodity stock and non-agriculture commodity stock separately.

The website has a feature of a dashboard for real-time monitoring of all India positions of storage capacity and stocks, the official added.
By Express News Service

NEW DELHI: The new bad bank is likely to be launched later this week with all the regulatory approvals in place.

According to sources aware of the development, the Indian Banks Association (IBA) has already filed an application with the Registrar of Companies at the Ministry of Corporate Affairs to incorporate the National Asset Reconstruction Company Ltd and its debt management company.

India Debt Management Company Ltd (IDMCL). The proposal is also expected also get a green signal from the Cabinet by end of June or early July, the sources added.

We are expecting everything to be put in place by June 30 and from July 1 onwards things will start functioning, said a senior banker in the know.

Lenders have so far reviewed 101 non-performing assets (NPAs) in the first phase and now plan to transfer 22 accounts amounting to roughly Rs 89,000 crore to the bad bank.

These include names like Videocons VOVL (Rs 22,532 crore total exposure), Reliance Naval and Engineering Limited (Rs 8,934 crore), Amtek Auto (Rs 9,014 crore), Jaypee Infratech (Rs 7,950 crore), Castex Technologies (Rs 6,337 crore), GTL Limited (Rs 4,866 crore), Visa Steel (Rs 3,394 crore), and others.

Among banks, for instance, state-run Punjab National Bank (PNB) said that it has identified NPAs of Rs 8,000 crore to be transferred to NARCL.

The bad bank will pay up to 15 per cent of the agreed value for the loans in cash and the remaining 85 per cent would be government-guaranteed security receipts.

The government guarantee would be invoked if there is loss against the threshold value.

The government is expected to provide a guarantee of Rs 31,000 crore for a period of five years for the NARCL. Public sector banks, led by Canara Bank, together are expected to pick up a 51 per cent stake in the bad bank.

In an exchange filing earlier, the state-owned Canara Bank said its board had given in-principle approval to be the lead sponsor of the bad bank, with a 12 per cent stake in the entity.

Canara Bank has sought the RBIs approval for the same.
By Express News Service

CHENNAI: State-run oil explorer Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) has stuck to paying taxes under the old corporate tax regime due to a substantial amount of unutilised MAT tax credit available.

A switch to the new tax regime, which offers a corporate income tax rate of 22 per cent, would require the company to give up this accumulated tax credit since they cannot be carried over into the new tax regime.

The companys standalone results for the financial year 2020-21 declared a profit before tax of Rs 16,402.79 crore and total tax expenses of Rs 5,156.3 crore (31.43 per cent).

During the last year, profit before tax stood at Rs 20,387.82 crore and total tax expenses at Rs 6,924.15 crore (33.96 per cent) But, there is a substantial amount of unutilized MAT credit available, which can be used under existing tax regime, but not under new tax regime, ONGC said in response to a query on its tax expenses.

Indian tax laws require companies to pay a Minimum Alternate Tax (MAT)set at 15% from FY20.

The difference between MAT paid by the company and the actual incidence of tax according to general income tax provisions is considered MAT credit (when MAT paid is higher than the latter).

Companies can set off accumulated MAT credit against future tax expenses for a 15 year period.

While ONGC did not reveal MAT credit available currently, its latest annual report (for FY20) puts MAT credit entitlement at Rs 1,787.9 crore as of the end of March 31, 2020.
By Express News Service

In a major setback to GoAirs plans to go public, market regulator SEBI has halted the carrier's IPO process by up to 90 days.

The notification on SEBI's website did not specify any reason for putting these approvals on temporary hold but showed that the IPO application submitted by GoAir has been kept in abeyance.

According to reports, the delay is due to the regulator investigating irregularities with GoAir owner Wadia Groups other holdings. As per the rule, SEBI is "obligated to keep issuance of observations in abeyance for a period of 30 days or 45 days or 90 days or more, as the case may be".

GoAir, which recently branded itself as "Go First", had filed preliminary papers for an initial share sale worth Rs 3,600 crore in May. The proceeds will be mainly used by the airline to pay debt.

The airline plans to pay over Rs 2,015.81 crore towards prepayment or scheduled repayment of all or a potion of certain outstanding borrowings. An amount of Rs 279.26 crore would also be used for replacement of letters of credit, which are issued to certain aircraft lessors towards securing lease rental payments and future maintenance of aircraft, with cash deposit.

The airline also intends to repay dues of Rs 254.93 crore to Indian Oil Corporation Limited (IOCL) for fuel supplied to it.

GoAir's plan to go public comes at a time when airlines are severely hit by the Covid-19 pandemic. According to reports, the carriers operational cash flow in the first nine months of fiscal year 2021 (April-December 2021) reportedly fell to Rs 232 crores, down by 86.8 per cent year-on-year. At the end of December 31, 2020, GoAir had a net debt of Rs 7,346 crore.
By Express News Service

NEW DELHI: Union Minister of Finance Nirmala Sitharaman announced on Monday an allocation of Rs 3.03 lakh crore towards a revamped reform-based result-linked power distribution scheme.

The announcement came as part of the governments fresh stimulus package for the economy, which was announced by the finance minister.

According to the presentation, the Centres share in the allocation towards the scheme will be Rs 97,631 crore.

The scheme, a similar announcement for which was made in the Union Budget for FY2021-22 in February this year, is aimed at providing financial assistance to power distribution companies to help them in infrastructure creation, up-gradation of systems, capacity building, and process improvement, Sitharaman said.

The scheme will put forward state-specific intervention in place of a one size fits all approach.

However, participation in the scheme is contingent to pre-qualification criteria such as the publication of audited financial reports, upfront liquidation of state governments dues/subsidy to DISCOMS and non-creation of additional regulatory assets, Sitharaman said.

Companies and discoms that do not meet the criteria, will not get support under the scheme.

The most recent updates on the power ministrys PRAAPTI portal, which tracks the payment dues of Indias power distribution companies, shows that discoms have cleared a massive Rs 33,720 crore of overdues, bringing the total down from Rs 1,01,432 crore at the end of February 2021 to Rs 89,982 crore at the end of March 2021. Excluding payables which are disputed, overdues fell from Rs 84,478 crore to Rs 67,417 crore.
By Express News Service

BENGALURU: A few hours after Primary and Secondary Education Minister S Suresh Kumar announced that SSLC exams would be conducted in July in a safe manner like last year, Health Minister Dr K Sudhakar said he was not even aware of his colleague announcing the dates.

I havent spoken to Suresh Kumar yet. I dont know if the directions have been given by health department officials, but we are concerned about childrens health. I dont know if they spoke to the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) or not. I will talk to Kumar and TAC on this and then react, he said.

However, experts from the education field said the government cannot function without coordination. Conducting examinations for so many children is a big challenge, especially when there is an emergence of a new variant, a senior official said.

However, Suresh Kumar said the decision was taken only after a two-hour meeting with the health department officials, including the principal health secretary, and based on advice by TAC. The minister also clarified that after the meeting, Chief Minister B S Yediyurappa also gave oral approval to the move. All SOPs were issued by the health department, and the exam SOPs were released based on this, Kumar said.

Answering a question on whether the Covid Technical Advisory Committee was being sidelined and recommendations of the Dr Devi Shetty-led committee were given preference, Dr Sudhakar said, TAC gives overall recommendations as they are experts in community health and epidemiology, while the Devi Shetty committee is meant to get us to prepare for the third wave.
By Express News Service

BHUBANESWAR: Pollution and rapid urbanisation are responsible for rise in lightning incidents across the country, said experts at an awareness programme on lightning and thunderstorms here on Monday.

The workshop was organised by the Indian Meteorological Society in collaboration with India Meteorological Department (IMD), Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology and National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) under the guidance of Ministry of Earth Sciences via video-conferencing to mark the International Lightning Safety Day.

Pollution in the form of aerosols and local heating in urban areas heighten the risk of lightning strikes. Over the recent years, there is an increasing trend in death toll and damages due to lightning across the country. In view of widespread loss caused by lightning despite the enhanced understanding, monitoring and prediction capability, it is essential to spread awareness on thunderstorms and lightning and its early warning system with last mile connectivity, the IMD stated.

Around 277 people lost their lives between last year and June 21, 2021 due to lightning strikes in Odisha. Mayurbhanj district recorded the maximum 30 deaths followed by Ganjam (27), Keonjhar (24) and Balasore (19) during the period. Similarly, 281 people lost their lives between 2019 and February 15, 2020 due to lightning strikes in the State.

Bhubaneswar Meteorological Centre scientist, Umasankar Das advised people to take shelter in low-lying areas when lightning strikes. Keep away from all utility lines (phones and power), metal fences, trees and hilltops, he advised.
Parvez Sultan By

Express News Service

NEW DELHI: A growing disenchantment with the state leadership and poor planning for the upcoming municipal elections are causing concern among workers and senior functionaries of the Bharatiya Janata Party in Delhi.

Two recent incidents a revolt by two of its spokesperson against the top brass and exit of a prominent councilor from northeast Delhi have triggered fresh rounds of frenetic discussion in the party circles on possible departure of prominent leaders including incumbent and former municipal councillors before the elections scheduled early next year.

A couple of senior Delhi BJP leaders and former office bearers have suggested that nearly 70 colleagues including councillors, willing to switch over, are in touch with the rivals particularly the Aam Aadmi Party.

About 70 disgruntled party members are deliberating and holding meetings for quite some time. Most of them are from South Delhi. We all knew this but havent learnt from recent incidents. No senior leader, having responsibility of strengthening the organisation, is inclined to speak with the workers or leaders who have issues or complaints. The councillor Rajkumar Ballan from Brahmapuri ward joined AAP but no discussion or soul-searching took place, said a former officer bearer of BJPs local unit.

The two spokespersons Tajinder Pal Singh Bagga and Harish Khurana openly conveyed displeasure over their continuous neglect. Bagga, who has a noted social media presence, removed BJPs reference from his Twitter bio and Khurana left most WhatsApp groups of the party.

Another senior party functionary said that municipal elections were never on the agenda of the core group meetings till recently. It was like surrender before the elections. Focus was apparently on 2024 and 2025 polls, he said.

Survey predicts only 40 wards for BJP

Some BJP leaders are anxious about possible poor performance of the party in the upcoming MCD elections after an internal survey report gave only 40 seats to the BJP.

The party had won 180 wards in 2017 and presently has a comfortable majority in three civic bodies.

Delhi BJP chief Adesh Kumar Gupta was unavailable for the comment.

However, Harshdeep Malhotra, general secretary of Delhi BJP, said that preparations are already underway and a team of 15-22 grassroot level workers are being finalised to reach out to every household.

The party has a system to address issues and grudges of the workers or members. Discussions are held and issues are resolved. Several AAP workers are also contacting us to join BJP, he said.
By Express News Service

KOCHI: The proceedings to acquire land for Kochi metros proposed phase II expansion from Jawaharlal Nehru International (JLN) Stadium to Infopark via Kakkand are progressing. In a Facebook Live, District Collector S Suhas said 386 parcels of land are required for the second phase and that the special land acquisition drive had already been launched. A total of 386 parcels of land need to be acquired. Most of them are situated on the 10km reach between Palarivattom and Infopark.

The 286 parcels of land will be handed over by August. The remaining ones on the 1.2 km between Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium and Palarivattom will be completed by December. Kochi Metro Rail Limited (KMRL) had started preparatory works on land already handed over, he said. There will be 11 stations along the extension from JLN Stadium, including Palarivattom Junction, Palarivattom (traffic) signal, Chembumukku, Vazhakkala, Kunnumpuram, Kakkanad Junction, Kochi Special Economic Zone, Chittethukara, Rajagiri, Infopark I and Infopark II. The proposal submitted by KMRL is under the consideration of the Union government and the nod from the Centre for the second phase is expected soon.

Meanwhile, the collector said the land acquisition for Phase 1 (b) of Kochi metro between SN Junction and Tripunithura will be completed in another four months.
By PTI

MUMBAI: A doctor wanted in connection with a "bogus" vaccination drive case registered at the Kandivali police station in Mumbai surrendered before the police on Tuesday, a day after a sessions court rejected his anticipatory bail application, an official said.

DCP (Zone-XI) Vishal Thakur said that Dr Manish Tripathi was arrested after his role was established in the crime but refused to elaborate. Tripathi is one of the six accused whose name had cropped up in the "bogus" vaccination drive conducted at a housing society in suburban Kandivali last month.

Police had already arrested six persons in connection with the case. The official said Dr Tripathi reached the Kandivali police station in the afternoon and surrendered himself. "A Special Investigation Team (SIT) is probing the case now," he said.

In his pre-arrest bail application filed before the sessions court in Dindoshi on June 22, Dr Tripathi had stated the main accused in the case is a private hospital but the Mumbai Police are trying to protect its owners who are "powerful and politically well-connected".

In a complaint submitted to the police, Hiranandani Heritage Residents Welfare Association (HHRWA) had claimed that its members were cheated during a vaccination camp organised on its campus by some persons who claimed to represent a private hospital.

The residents had claimed that they couldn't find their details on the CO-WIN app and were issued certificates in the name of three different hospitals. They had also expressed fear that the vaccine administered to them could be spurious.

The FIR was registered at the Kandivali police station on June 17 for conducting an unauthorised vaccination drive for 390 people on May 30. Subsequently, similar FIRs were registered in Versova, Khar, Borivali, Bhoiwada and other areas of Mumbai.

Police suspect some of the accused were common in these incidents.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: There was a time when she had to pick the best from whatever was offered, but actor Taapsee Pannu says things have reversed now as she is getting to choose from "more diverse roles, scripts and genres".

The Bollywood star, whose "Haseen Dillruba", a romance-thriller, is coming out on Netflix on July 2, has back-to-back movies on her slate be it "Rashmi Rocket", "Looop Lapeta", "Dobaara", "Shabaash Mithu" and "Jana Gana Mana".

The actor said she would not let a good script go to others even if that means working more than 300 days in a year.

"I think I am yet to reach that stage where I will work only in one or two movies a year. I am selfish in this case so if I get a good script, I will not let it go to others whether that means working a little extra, overworking or working for 300 days or more in a year, which I do," Pannu told PTI in an interview.

The "Manmarziyaan" star said she has worked hard to reach a stage in her career where she has the luxury to select projects.

"I will not let a good script go because I have really worked hard to be in this position where I have so much to choose from. There was a time when I had to select from the worst of the scripts for the sake of being visible or for being around.

"I have seen those days, so now when I am getting to choose from more diverse roles, scripts and genres, I don't want to become complacent," she said.

Having previously worked in the Anurag Kashyap-directed "Manmarziyaan", which Kanika Dhillon wrote, Pannu said she was immediately attracted to the writer's latest story "Haseen Dillruba", again set in a small town but exploring a different dynamic and a unique genre of a romantic thriller.

"I wanted to do the film because it was a love story and a thriller, something that I have seen only in Hollywood. Since Kanika has written the story, I knew that the woman's part would be really good as I have worked with her earlier in 'Manmarziyaan'. When I got to know that she had a script like this, I told her, 'I want to do that' and after reading the script, it was an immediate yes," Pannu said.

"Haseen Dillruba", directed by "Hasee toh Phasee" fame Vinil Mathew and also starring Vikrant Massey and Harshvardhan Rane in lead roles, will see Pannu in the role of Rani Kashyap, a feisty woman who is a fan of a fictional Hindi crime novelist, Dinesh Pandit.

Under investigation as a suspect for the murder of her husband, Rani reveals details about their thorny marriage but that seems to further blur the truth about what happened.

Playing Rani, a woman who is led by her heart and is honest to a fault, helped Pannu explore the space of the so-called 'anti-heroine' or the 'not so likable' woman in Hindi cinema.

Pannu, 33, said she is more than happy to belong to that space as the likeability of a woman's character in Hindi cinema, for the longest time, meant someone willing to prioritise others over her happiness.

"If she works for her own happiness, then she becomes unlikeable, a vamp or anti-heroine whereas when a man does this runs away with a girl on his own, or revolts from his people, then he is the hero and the girl is selfish.

"These differences have started to change in cinema and I have experimented in this zone a lot, one of them was 'Manmarziyaan'. This is a new shift because now female characters have layers which was not the case earlier, which is interesting," she said.

Rani, Pannu said, may not be likable but she is honest, someone who will be the first to open up if she has made a mistake, which, for the actor, is a very likable trait in a human being.
Sajin Shrijith By

Express News Service

After the films of Fahadh Faasil and Mohanlal got a direct OTT premiere, many entertained the thought of a Prithviraj film going the same route in the future, considering the actors openness to such a prospect. The inevitable has finally happened, and its a cause for celebration for many of his fans who found the year-long wait to see their idols film nearly unbearable. Many expected Kuruthi to be the first Prithviraj-starrer to release post the pandemic, that too on the big screen. But when the second wave reared its ugly head, Cold Case took its place. Initially intended as a theatrical release, its producers (Anto Joseph, Shameer Muhammed, Jomon T John) opted for an OTT premiere when the reopening of theatres remained a distant possibility. Excerpts from the interview:

How did Cold Case become your first post-pandemic film?

When I got back from the Jordan shoot of Aadujeevitham, the whole industry was at a standstill, and a couple of months into me getting back, there were active discussions on ways to restart the film industry. Cold Case was the first script I okayed after I resumed work. We were very particular about working on films whose execution can be possible under strict covid protocols and regulations. Cold Case was one such project. It was the first film that went on floors for all of us with these regulations in place. Fortunately, the shoot went smoothly and efficiently.

Given the uncertainty of the present scenario, do you feel compelled to do more films in a brief amount of time?

Its not about deliberately doing more films. Whats been happening in general, not just in the Malayalam industry but in others too, is that we realised we are incapable of pulling off these giant films like, say, Empuraan (Lucifer sequel), which would be impossible to shoot under restricted circumstances. At this moment, its impossible to do something like a Lucifer where we are shooting across six states and three countries spread across 150 days. So what has happened now is producers, directors, technicians, actors, and writers started migrating towards smaller, contained films.

By this, I dont necessarily mean the canvas, but something we can execute with a limited number of people in a contained environment. So when you start thinking along those lines, the number of shoot days are reduced, and the volume of work goes up. An actor who used to do 2-3 films a year is now finishing a film in 25-30 days. But thanks to platforms like Amazon, we still have a venue where we can exhibit this work. We only had a short time for theatres in Kerala to function, that too with limited capacity. If not for digital platforms, the Malayalam film industry wouldve really struggled.

You have done plenty of thrillers before. When you approach a new one, how do you avoid repeating something that you have done before?

I think the idea is to be not too complex in your analysis and keep it simple. Its about reading a script and asking yourself if its something youd like to see on the big screen. Thats where the process ends. Ive always maintained that what I do in the film should be secondary. Yes, compared to some of my contemporaries, I may have done more thrillers and cop films than them. But despite that, I found much to be excited about in Cold Case. It is a plot-driven film, not a character-driven one. I had even thought of producing it, but the current producers didnt let me (laughs).

There is a line about logic in the trailer. As an actor, producer and director, do you prefer all your films to be 100 per cent accurate, logically speaking?

You see, when you take a horror film like Ezra, for instance, you obviously cant have everything logical. Thats the whole idea when you deal with something thats not scientifically explicable. Whats interesting about Cold Case is that there are two tracks in the film, of which one is a police investigation, which, as an actor and filmmaker, I expect to be logically foolproof. I dont want to take the audience for granted. We must explain how we reached each of the inferences.

As for the other track, which involves paranormal activities, its all about atmospheresetting up things that logic cannot explain but taking the viewer to a place and making them believe it is actually happening. Its not a black and white situation. However, I have to say that the investigation in Cold Case is well-researched, thanks to Sreenath V Nath (writer) and Tanu Balak (director). All the forensic inferences and science-based sleuth work in the film are backed strongly by science and meticulous research in conjunction with police and forensic officials.

Have you thought of the possibility of doing in the future, alternatively, one film for OTT and another for the big screen?

One can never do things as per a design. I believe, down the line, its going to be entirely reliant on the script. Some scripts are not subject to community viewing, whereas others are. In both cases, the schematic differs. When thousand people sit together, they have travelled from their homes to set aside three hours to have fun and leave.

They watch something in a different mental space, unlike watching it on any of their devices in their own private space. In the future, it is up to actors, technicians and producers to spot which script is going to make a better OTT or a theatrical release. That co-existence will create a really exciting atmosphere, not just financially for the industry but also creatively for the artistes and technicians.

How was it working with cinematographers Jomon T John and Gireesh Gangadharan? There is confusion about who actually shot the film and how much.

Well, Jomon was supposed to shoot the whole film. But when my dates had to be pushed on account of me testing positive for Covid, he had to stick to a prior commitment, this Rohit Shetty film with Ranveer Singh, called Cirkus. So Jomon started Cold Case; he shot a bit of the film, but then he had to leave, and Gireesh took his place. Ive known them both for a long time now. The first film I did with Jomon was Ayaalum Njanum Thammil, and Gireesh was his assistant then. I would say both are among the finest cinematographers in the country.

The idea of you directing a lighthearted film (BroDaddy) is exciting. Is this something that has been on your mind for a while?

Ive been thinking that the industry, in general, has been missing happy films. I think Malayalam cinema has made this marked shift towards dark investigative thrillers, murder mysteries, satires and the like. So when I happened to listen to the script of BroDaddy a few months ago, I really enjoyed it. I thought it could be a nice shakeup for me as a filmmaker you know, break down all my set filmmaking grammar and all that. It is diametrically opposite of something like Lucifer or Empuraan. Then I casually narrated the script to Lalettan, who laughed a lot while reading it and said we should do it together.

Do you wish you could direct something every year?

Not at all. I was happy to sit back and wait for things to open up and, eventually, the circumstances letting us get on with Empuraan. Im in no hurry at all. But then I just chanced upon this script and felt that maybe I should do it. That thought came and... it just wouldnt go. So, I thought, why not?

Have you already completed shooting for your portions in Barroz (Mohanlals 3D directorial debut)? Is it being filmed in 3D?

Not yet. Barroz is being shot in the absolute modern 3D technology right now available in the world.

You announced a virtual production movie last year. Whats the status  and do you see more possibilities of the technology in Malayalam cinema in the future?

Not just Malayalam cinema, I think that is definitely a big part of the future as far as filmmaking is concerned. It has already caught on in the West well and truly. India is only beginning to discover and come to terms with virtual production  not so much the technology, but the cost of the infrastructure. It is not very cheap, at least as we speak today; its hugely expensive. We have done a few test shoots, and we are confident that we can pull it off. But considering the sheer infrastructure, size of the project, I dont think we can pull it off in the present circumstances. But, yes, thats a film Im very much looking forward to.


Navein Darshan By

Express News Service

It is said that a journalist is someone who gets paid to learn through their interviews. Even still, I hardly expected that the conversation with director Leena Manimekalai would turn out to be a masterclass on caste-based oppression, censor board problems, and the female gaze in cinema. Even simple questionslike one about the germination of the films ideadrew incredibly detailed answers from her. You can see where she gains her knowledge from; she has been actively pursuing these stories for years. I have been working on a documentary feature named Rape Nation since 2015, that is based on five sexual harassment survivors, who led a legal movement against injustice and emerged as social leaders. While doing research for this documentary, I came across an oppressed community named Puthirai Vannars; this was the spark for Maadathy, she says.

Puthirai Vannars are thought to be the Dalit of Dalits and the last in the caste-based hierarchical system. They are thought to be unseeables. Even today, people consider seeing them a sin. Women from these community have faced sexual violence due to both gender and caste discrimination. Though I had touched upon this topic with my early documentaries, Mathamma and Parai, I wanted to make a feature film based on the struggles of Puthirai Vannar women. I met them, researched about their life for two years, and came up with the script of Maadathy, she says.

Excerpts from the conversation:

Is the protagonists name, Yosana, a philosophical choice, as the girl is a dreamer? Or is it a common name in the community?

A mix of both. Yavanika Sriram, the co-writer of the film, came up with this name. I liked it because it roughly translates to, a girl lost in her thoughts. Also, yes, its a common name in the community.

Do you consider migration to cities and towns as the first line of defence by the oppressed? The fate of Yosana turns worse when she tries to migrate, though.

Villages have forever been romanticised in films and novels. But for people from oppressed societies, villages have never been safe places. Migration is indeed the first step to liberation, but a wholesome culture change is the need of the hour.

I stayed in ex-Tahsildar Murthy Ayyas house during my research for the film. He was the first graduate of Puthirai Vannars. Even though he is an ex-government employee and a learned man, till date, he is forced to bow down while crossing upper caste streets. His brothers family is still enslaved and forced to wash period blood-stained clothes and the clothes of the dead. For migration to happen, the people must receive the grants of the government and get themselves educated. But there is a fundamental flaw in our system, as these oppressed people depend on testimonials of their oppressors to get their community certificate. This has prevented thousands of people from getting educated.

Maadathy has plenty of profane language, and strong visuals too. Had this been a theatre release, would these parts have been retained?

Absolutely. I was keen to take this film to the theatres, and above all, the film has been certified by the tribunal without any cuts. I fought a lot for this certification. The film got banned by the local censor board for harming the religious sentiment of Hindus, and for showing a minor girl experiencing infatuation and for swear words.

If the truth hurts people, let it. The purpose of art is not just to entertain, but also to provoke. I was infatuated at the age of 13. All small deities of Tamil Nadu like Muniyan, Neeli, and Mariyamman are representations of oppressed people who either rose against injustice or succumbed to it. As for the language, that is the reality. Most cuss words are insults aimed at women. I explained all this and got my film censored by the tribunal, like with my previous films. As this tribunal has been dissolved by the central government recently, the future of a lot of films is at stake now.

Do you see a solution to this issue in the future? What could be the remedy?

The mere existence of CBFC is an insult to a vibrant democracy like India. It is a dust-collecting, dead, colonial government agency that is wasting taxpayers money. So long as this agency exists, creative freedom will be curbed. CBFC committee members are political appointees who know nothing about art. The tribunal should be brought back, or the power of censorship should be stripped away from CBFC, with the agency allowed only to certify films.

Sadly, even OTT platforms arent free of censorship today. Every streaming service demands CBFC certification, and their own originals are getting unofficially censored. Very soon, a major film will face an issue because of the absence of the tribunal and then, only then, will the entire industry fight for a change.

Do you consider yourself an activist who uses film as a medium? Or a filmmaker with social consciousness?

(laughs) I am an artist first. But to say what I want to say, in the way I want to say, I have to be an activist too. The ideologies I studied and practised over the years made me understand my world better. Humanity is the only thing that matters to me now.

Yosanas mother goes to work the very next day after being raped, in order to put food on the table. Its a disturbing reality.

Every woman must have gone through abuse in some form and chosen to move on. They cant live life by holding on to scars. Our family structure would collapse if women chose to freeze after abuse. Women who go through frequent abuse because of their caste, are used to their daily dose of cruelty. I believe their DNA has the spirit of a survivor. They know they will be abused when they step out, and yet, they do. They dont have the agency to share their abuse nor the luxury to stay indoors.

As for our cinema, our films have barely got the female gaze right. Even an award-winning film like Paruthiveeran had a voyeuristic tone in that climax gang rape scene. Perfect female gaze is impossible for commercial cinema.

Maadathy is a rare Tamil film to feature male nudity.

I felt that this scene was crucial to the film as it shows the blossoming of the primal desire in a girl. So, I made sure that everyone in the crew, especially the two actors involved, were completely aware of the purpose and placement of the scene. We shot the suggestions of both the girl and boy separately to ensure their privacy. I followed the same technique for the final rape scene too.

A few people felt that the scene was unacceptable, but in real life, men bathe nude, as part of community bathing in villages, and every girl is pretty much exposed to it. Mainstream cinema hardly touches upon this reality, as its only interested in showing women in provocative angles. Its careful to fabricate reality to show men in the most dignified, majestic manner.

Top directors in Tamil cinema often say that the commercial compromises exist to take social messages to a wider audience. Have you ever considered fitting into the commercial template for the same reason?

Never. I would worry about my target customers if I were selling a product like a fairness cream, but I am here to make films. If I ever tweak my script to reach a wider audience, I will turn from being a creator into being a businessperson. I dont ever want to make that trade. If I get a bigger budget in the future, I will use it to invest in the technologies needed to improve my cinema and promote it.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: The Centre on Tuesday promised to take action on the report of a fact-finding team which claimed that there were 15,000 incidents of post-poll violence in West Bengal in which 25 people were killed and 7,000 women were molested.

According to Union Minister of State for Home G Kishan Reddy, the report of the civil society group -- Call for Justice -- headed by former Chief Justice of Sikkim High Court Justice (Retd) Permod Kohli stated that the magnitude and reach of the post-poll violence touched many villages and towns all across West Bengal simultaneously beginning the night of May 2 when the results of the assembly elections were declared. "This is a clear indication that most of the incidents are not sporadic but premeditated, organised and conspiratorial," the report stated.

The five-member team included two retired IAS and one IPS officers. "The Home Ministry will study the report and will try to implement its recommendations," Reddy told reporters after the group submitted it to him.

The report was prepared after the five-member team visited West Bengal and met a cross section of people there. Citing the report, Reddy said 16 districts of the state were affected by the post-poll violence. "The report said that due to the post-poll violence, many people have left their homes in West Bengal and had taken shelter in Assam, Jharkhand and Odisha," he said.

According to the report, some of the hardened criminals, mafia dons and criminal gangs who were already in police records allegedly "led and carried the deadly attacks unhindered, (which) reveals that there is clear political patronage even before the elections and same being used to silence the political rivals".

The report claimed the incidents of targeted destruction and vandalisation of properties, residential and commercial, have the sole purpose to deprive people of their livelihood and choke them economically. It claimed that the worst-affected people are those who depend on day-to-day work or business who are pushed into financial degradation and unmitigated misery.

"In most of the cases, victims were afraid to lodge a complaint with the police either due to fear of reprisal or due to the lack of faith in the police. Those victims who gathered courage and went to report, police either turned (them) away to settle the matter with the culprits or flatly refused to register the case. Many people left their homes and villages to safer destinations and took shelter in camps within and outside the state," the report said.

The fact-finding team suggested that the report should be placed before the Supreme Court.

In the light of overwhelming, ample, substantial and convincing evidence, the Supreme Court may consider constituting a special investigation team (SIT) immediately and monitor its work either through a sitting judge or a retired judge of the Supreme Court for fair investigation and early justice, the team said.

They also suggested that the central government should initiate disciplinary proceedings on those delinquent officers, including all-India service officers, who failed to discharge their duties in protecting lives and destruction of properties.

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Chetana Belagere By

Express News Service

BENGALURU: Delta variant of lineage B 1.617.2 has created havoc and is spreading fast even in the most vaccinated countries of the world. India too is still reeling under the effect of a deadly second wave due to this variant. Dr Eric Feigl-Ding, US-based epidemiologist and Health Economist and Senior Fellow at Federation of American Scientists told TNIE in an exclusive interview that India, where the Delta Variant first emerged, was in dark for the longer time. With evidence of the variant escaping vaccine efficacy, the country needs to now seriously ramp up genome sequencing and testing to mitigate the virus.

"We know a lot of things about delta variant now only because it invaded the UK and the country is able to track down these numbers epidemiologically and genomically. It is only when we know the data we

can respond with adequate and proportional medication. But India was in dark for the longer time," Dr Eric Ding said.

Meanwhile, he explained that India should also invest in a newer type of genomic testings including genotyping which is a shortcut method to sequence. He said the country also needs to be at the forefront and release the sequencing data in a week.

However, these require capabilities and infrastructure for which the Indian government need to come forward and invest into the pandemic planning and epidemiology to track down these through contact tracing.

"Every country offers different lessons which we can learn from each other. But the core is that if the variant rises from your country then to stop it from spreading to the world and to stop it from harming your own citizens, you need to invest in these resources. Or else not just India but the world will face multiple lockdowns," he explained.

Meanwhile, Dr Feigl-Ding warned that the world is far away from containing the pandemic and doing away with masks or social distancing. He said, we are reaching a point where we have more people that are previously infected, fewer people who have have never been infected.

"The virus will now search for more evasive-evasive of immune system, evasive of vaccines etc. That is the general trend. Playground of uninfected people is shrinking. Now the virus will look for ways to high jump to hose who have previously built some immunity. And we know delta plus is not just another random mutation but a tricky one which is known to be evasive," he said.

Hence, no country, according to him, should consider only vaccination as the strategy to mitigate the virus. He says, "Vaccinations are important but a country cannot rely on only vaccination as a strategy until the vaccinated population is in the 80 percent or higher. Until then wearing of proper N95 masks, especially indoors, ample ventilation, avoiding crowding are the only way forward. Many variants may emerge and if delayed in identifying those then there might bemany lockdowns in future not just in India but across the world."
By PTI

RANCHI: The Jharkhand government has vowed to end the menaces of human trafficking and migrant workers' exploitation, and steps taken by it so far have led to the rescue and rehabilitation of many people, including 30 minor girls and boys last week, Chief Minister Hemant Soren said on Tuesday.

Prompt action by the state police ensured that all traffickers were arrested, he said in a statement.

Soren, shortly after taking charge as the CM, had asked all deputy commissioners to ensure strict action against people engaged in human trafficking.

"Removing the blot of human trafficking from Jharkhand is our priority. On 24 June 2021, a crackdown by the Jharkhand Police led to the rescue of 30 minor girls and boys from Ranchi railway station and Birsa Munda Airport. They were being trafficked to Delhi," he explained.

Every measure is being taken to ensure the rehabilitation of girls rescued from the clutches of the traffickers, he said.

"They are being provided Rs 2,000 per month as living expense until they attain 18 years of age.

Apart from that, the girls are also entitled to free education, and vocational training which would help them become self-reliant," the statement said.

Soren further said that his government was also concerned about the welfare of migrant workers.

The COVID-19 pandemic induced one of the biggest migration crises in the country, but the state has handled the matter sensitively, the CM maintained.

Migrant labourers are being provided with welfare benefits and jobs in accordance with their skill sets, he underlined.

Citing examples, the statement said that the Soren government had ensured the safe return of migrant labourers from Deoria district of Uttar Pradesh earlier this month.

"Thirty migrant labourers including women and children were escued and brought back to Jharkhand," it maintained.

In yet another operation in February, the statement said, 14 minors, including 12 girls and two boys, were rescued from the national capital.

Similar measures have also been taken in the past, the CM stated, adding a proposal has been approved for the establishment of anti-human trafficking units especially in the vulnerable pockets of Jharkhand.

Also, women police officers will be appointed across the state to keep a check on human trafficking in the rural part of Jharkhand, he added.

The statement further added that the government will soon come up with a detailed plan for rehabilitation of children who have lost their parents to COVID-19.
Vineet Upadhyay By

Express News Service

DEHRADUN: Uttarakhand High Court on Monday stayed the state cabinet decision dated June 25 to start Char Dham Yatra for local pilgrims from July 1.

The division bench comprising Chief Justice RS Chauhan and Justice Alok Kumar Verma observing that the court must consider whether the said act would aggravate or lessen the impact of COVID-19 or not and that it is of paramount importance to save the lives of the people in the order said, "Having concluded that the decision of re-opening the Char Dham Yatra would lead to inviting a calamity, it is in these circumstances that this Court is compelled to stay the part of the Cabinet decision dated June 25, 2021. The said stay is strictly in the interest of public, and in the interest of justice."

Adding that the issue of the Char Dham Yatra is not just limited to opening of pilgrimage sites but about the people of the state and about the people of the nation, the bench remarked, "In fact, since the world is a small planet, viruses tend to escape from one country and affect the other nations. Therefore, the issue before this Court is not a regional one, but a global one. Therefore, this issue cannot be decided in a myopic manner. It has to be determined with a catholic vision."

The court keeping in mind the religious sentiments of the devotees ordered live streaming of rituals from the four shrines (Kedarnath, Badrinath, Gangotri and Yamunotri) for the devotees across the nation within 7 days.

The court observing that the state government cannot plead that merely because a few priests may object to the live streaming, it will succumb to their pressure directed, "In the interest of the people, this Court directs the Government to ensure that the ceremonies, the pujas and archanas, carried out within the sanctum sanctorum of the Char Dham temples, are live streamed for the benefit of the people at large. The Government should make sure that the live streaming is done throughout the country, so that the devotees may not only witness the deity, but may also pray to the same."

After the state government officials told the court that priests are likely to object to the decision of live streaming, the bench remarked, "It is for the State Government to decide whether the live streaming should be carried out or not? The decision cannot be left to the Char Dham Devasthanam Board, or to the priests of an individual temple. For, it is the constitutional duty of the State to protect its people from a pandemic. Therefore, the decision cannot be left either to the Board or to the Priests. Even if, there is an objection from a minority of priests, the said objection can easily be overruled by the State."

Further, the court citing the Supreme Court judgements added that the argument taken by the state government that it cannot control either a large crowd, or the unruly mob, does not lie in the mouth of the State Government.

"For, to argue the same, the State Government admits its inability to enforce the rule of law," observed the bench.

Citing the severity the second wave, the court states that it struck the country like a tsunami killing over 3 lakh people, devastated families, and orphaned children.

Mentioning the satellite images and the International Media which continued to show the endless number of pyres which were burning, the pitiable condition of people in the country, the court said that people could not perform a decent cremation, or decent burial to lost brethren.

"During that period, neither the lifesaving medicines were available, nor the oxygen tanks were available, nor sufficient numbers of bed were available, nor sufficient numbers of ambulances were available. The health care system began to crumble. Consequently, people had to run from pillar to post for seeking and begging only to be saved from the second wave. It is common knowledge

that as people began to die, there were insufficient spaces in our crematorium and burial grounds," the court stated in the order.

Asserting that one of the great contributory factors for the steep rise in the second wave was the ill-decision to hold Kumbh Mela at Haridwar between April 1-30, 2021, the bench stated that with 57% of deaths in Uttarakhand and the pictures of Kumbh Mela not only embarrassed the entire country, but also shocked the world community.

"Suddenly our country was painted as a renegade, and as an irresponsible member of the international community. Suddenly, flights coming from India were stopped by other countries. Even today, we are not free from the devastation caused by the second wave, although fortunately the second wave is on the decline," the court observed.

The court also expressed strong opinions about the claims of promises by the state government officials to implement the 'Standard Operating Procedures' (SOPs) stating that because there was breach of the very same SOPs in the Kumbh how is it possible to implement the same in Char Dham Yatra.

The bench also took vaccination of the tree districts- Chamoli, Uttarakashi and Rudraprayag where the four shrines are located and Yatra was to be allowed from July 1 for local pilgrims stating that according to the experts, it will still take eighteen months to vaccinate 70% of the population in Uttarakhand.

"Thus, even if 100% population of Uttarakhand were to be inoculated, even then there is no guarantee that the people of Uttarakhand will be protected from the invasion of delta plus variant," the bench remarked outlining the dangers of the latest variant of the Covid 19 which apparently gives just three days to the person to live.

Citing various media reports, science journals and experts from health care sector of the country the court warned about the impending dangers of the anticipated third wave in August 2021.

Uttarakhand government issues directives to start pilgrimage for locals

Hours after the High Court staying the Char Dham Yatra on Monday, the Uttarakhand government issued directives to start the pilgrimage for locals of three districts from July 1. The directives were mentioned in a letter regarding the extension of Covid curfew in the state.

First phase of Char Dham Yatra will begin on July 1. In the first phase, pilgrims from Chamoli district will be allowed to go to Badrinath, pilgrims from Rudraprayag to Kedarnath and from Uttarkashi to Gangotri and Yamunotri.

Every pilgrim is required to register for the Yatra and must have Covid negative report not prior to 72 hours of the pilgrimage, reads the 12-page letter.
Chetana Belagere By

Express News Service

BENGALURU: The Delta variant of B 1.617.2 lineage has created havoc and is spreading fast even in the most-vaccinated countries. India, too, is still reeling under the effects of the deadly second wave due to this variant.

Dr Eric Feigl-Ding, a US-based epidemiologist and Senior Fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, told The New Indian Express that India, where the Delta variant first emerged, was in the dark for a long time and with the evidence of the variant escaping vaccine efficacy, the country needs to now seriously ramp up genome sequencing and testing to mitigate the virus.

If a variant rises from your country, to stop it from spreading to the world and harming your own citizens, you need to invest in resources. Many variants may emerge and if there is a delay in identifying them, there might be many lockdowns in the future, not just in India, but across the world, Dr Feigl-Ding said.

India has to speed up its genome sequencing, and invest in technology to ramp up not only whole genome sequencing, but also testing. Many variants may emerge, and if there is a delay in identifying them, there might be many lockdowns in future, not just in India but across the world, said Feigl Ding, epidemiologist, Senior Fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, in an exclusive interview with TNIE.

India reeled under a deadly second wave of the coronavirus, caused mainly by the Delta variant of the Covid-19 virus. But now we are already talking about the third wave. Will India see another wave?

Its hard to say. I think India is still very vulnerable. We dont know enough about Delta-Plus but its likely to be as transmissible as the Delta variant. Obviously, India doesnt have enough vaccines rolled out, especially two doses. Delta is very evasive against one dose. Knowing that Delta-Plus has reinfection potential, I think it is worrisome.

WATCH VIDEO HERE:

We are seeing Delta create havoc across the world. Do you think India identified the variant late?

I think India doesnt have genome sequencing capabilities like the UK does. Very few countries have the expertise. This data allows us to find out and know the variant in advance. Although we identified the variant months ago, we did not have the sequencing in order to know how much it was growing, how quickly, and to what percent it had spread in the population. Does the vaccine work against it? For this information, a lot of people have to be sequenced. Right now we know that Delta is twice as contagious as the original strain. It is an approximately 4x greater risk for hospitalisation than the original strain and 2.5x greater than alpha. It is a very risky variant. But we learnt all this only because Delta has invaded the UK, and it is able to track down these numbers epidemiologically and genomically. But India was in the dark for a longer time.

What should India do now?

There should be a rule that India should do more testing. There are also shortcut tests like genotyping, instead of full genome sequencing. You need to develop genome typing shortcut tests, laboratory capabilities for genotyping, typing and do them fast. It requires infrastructure and investment from the government. Each country has different lessons to learn from each other. But if the variant rises from your country, then to stop it from spreading to the world and harming your own citizens, you need to invest in these resources. We need to wear masks, especially indoors. Ventilation is as critical as masks.

Is it necessary that the next variant is more transmissible?

It is not always worse. Mutations go in random directions until there is an evolutionary reason to direct into certain directions. We are reaching the point where we have more people who were infected and fewer people who have never been infected. The virus will now search to become more evasive -- of immune system, vaccines etc. Thats the trend. Delta-Plus is not just another random mutation, it is Delta with a previously known tricky mutation that is known to be evasive.

How important is vaccination?

Vaccination is important but a country cannot rely only on this as a strategy, until vaccination is 80 per cent or more. Herd immunity by vaccination is a term used by many countries, but unvaccinated people have almost no protection, even if 40 per cent of the population is vaccinated. It happens only when almost 80 per cent vaccination is achieved. However, two vaccine doses definitely prevent hospitalisation.
By PTI

SRINAGAR: A Sikh woman, who was restored to her family from her alleged kidnapper amid allegations of forced conversion, was Tuesday married off to a man from the Sikh community. "The girl was married to Sukhbir Singh today. They knew each other and there was no coercion or force used (against the girl)," Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) Delhi president Paramjit Singh told reporters here.

He thanked all the people who made the marriage possible. Asked if the 18-year-old woman was already married to a Muslim man following her alleged conversion, he said no marriage had taken place. He appealed to people to maintain the age-old communal harmony in Kashmir. "We do not want any (anti-conversion) law. The majority community has to take care of the minority community," he added.

Singh said the Sikh community wanted to set up a major hospital in Kashmir on a plot owned by Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee. "We have around 81 kanals of land (8.125 acres). A part of it is under occupation of the tillers. We want to pay them due compensation and take back the land for establishing a big hospital for people here," he added.

SAD leader Manjinder Singh Sirsa had alleged on Monday that four Sikh women were forcibly married and converted to Islam in Kashmir recently and demanded that they be returned to their families.
By PTI

JAMMU/ NEW DELHI: The banned Lashkar-e-Taiba terror outfit is suspected to have been behind the sensational drone attack on the Indian Air Force station in Jammu on Sunday morning with indication that the unmanned aerial vehicles had come from across the border, a top police official said on Tuesday.

Jammu and Kashmir DGP Dilbag Singh told PTI that the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a terror outfit based out of Pakistan, is suspected to be responsible for the attack. Two drones dropped explosive material on the IAF station located at Jammu airport on Sunday injuring two personnel.

A cocktail of explosive material, including RDX, is believed to have been used. The case was handed over to the National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Tuesday. The decision to hand over the probe into the first-of-its-kind terror attack at the Indian Air Force station was taken by the Ministry of Home Affairs.

A 1987-batch IPS officer, Singh, who has been monitoring the situation as well as the probe, said that in all likelihood, the unmanned aerial vehicles have flown in from across the border and returned after the operation. "We are still probing the case and will extend all our findings with other security agencies," Singh said.

Police also carried out a series of raids in Jammu and neighbouring locations but could not establish any concrete leads. "The drones are suspected to have come from across (the border) but we are still probing as of now," he said.

He said police have sensitised vital installations about the new threat from terror outfits. "All preventive measures have been taken for the same," Singh said. He said that a general warning has also been issued to the public for no unauthorised use of drones in Jammu and Kashmir. "Strict actions would be taken for the same," he added.

In what was the first instance of Pakistan-based terrorists deploying drones to strike vital installations, two bombs were dropped at the IAF station in Jammu in the early hours of Sunday, causing minor injuries to two airmen.

The explosions took place around 1.40 am within six minutes of each other. The first blast ripped off the roof of a single-storey building at the technical area of the airport manned by the IAF in Satwari on the outskirts of Jammu.

The second one was on the ground. The aerial distance from the Jammu airport to the international border is 14 km.
Sumi Sukanaya Dutta By

Express News Service

NEW DELHI: Despite a clear demand by at least two states recently to revise the Covid vaccine allocation between government and private channels from the existing 75:25 to 90:10, the Centre has made it clear that its not happening anytime soon.

Naveen Patnaik and MK Stalin, Chief Ministers of Odisha and Tamil Nadu, in their separate letters to the Centre over the past few days, had said that the Union government should take a further relook at the distribution of Covid vaccines in India.

While revising its earlier Covid vaccination policy, which came into effect on June 21, the Centre is now procuring and supplying 75% of the Covid vaccines being manufactured in India which is being administered for free to all adults in government facilities.

But 25% of vaccines continue to be up for supply by the private hospitals, as also was happening earlier as part of the Centres decentralised and liberalised vaccination policy.

Also, private hospitals have been permitted to charge Rs 150 per dose apart from the cost of the vaccine to the hospital.

In their letter, Patnaik and Stalin, however, contended that the share of participation of the private sector in their states has been rather poor.

In Odisha, while only about 4-5% of the vaccine administered have been in the private hospitals, this percentage is a little better -- at 10% -- in Tamil Nadu.

ALSO READ | Cipla gets licence to import Moderna's Covid vaccine

In its review meetings, top authorities in the Union health ministry too have taken up the matter with several statesmainly Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Odisha, among others -- saying that the participation of the private sector needs to grow.

In a press briefing on Covid status in the country on Tuesday, Lav Agarwal, joint secretary in the health ministry in response to a related question said that the vaccination policy has just been revised and while feedback from states is welcome, there was no plan on radar to incorporate further changes immediately.

We keep discussing with states (vaccination policy) and if the need be we will always examine the suggestions but the new policy has come into effect from June 21 only and it has pushed up the average daily vaccinations remarkably which shows that it is working well, he said.

So far, over 33 crore vaccine doses have been administered in India and while the CoWin dashboard by the government does not give a break up between doses provided in the government and private centres, it is understood that the private share may be less than 20%.

Incidentally, the suggestions by Tamil Nadu and Odisha come even as the Centre has been pushing the states to raise the private sector participation.

In a strategy paper issued on the new vaccination policy, the government had minced no words in indicating that the allotment of 25% of vaccines produced to private hospitals is aimed to incentivise manufacturers, by allowing them to sell a portion at a comparatively better price.
By ANI

JAMMU: A special bomb squad team of the National Security Guard (NSG) is investigating the nature of the blast at Jammu Air Force Station, said sources on Tuesday.

Sources said that the drones that carried out the blast were controlled from across the border.

"A special bomb squad team of National Security Guard (NSG) is investigating the nature of the blast at Jammu Air Force Station. The explosives used in the blast is likely TNT rather than RDX. Drones were controlled from across the border. Google Map was used for location. Involvement of local handler also being investigated," sources said.

They further informed that a team of the Anti Terror Unit of Delhi Police's Special Cell is also going to Jammu to look into the blast.

"The team of Special Cell of Delhi Police is going to analyze the drone blast case. There is always an alert of a terrorist attack on the national capital, so senior officers of Delhi Police have sent the team to understand the method of drone blast," they added.

A day after drone activities were thwarted at Jammu's Ratnuchak-Kaluchak Military Station, sources said more suspected drone activity was seen late on Monday night in Kunjwani.

Earlier today, the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) handed over the Jammu Air Force station attack case to the National Investigation Agency (NIA).

Prior to that, multiple agencies including the NIA, National Security Guards along with the local police and Air Force authorities were looking into the first of its kind terror attack in the country which has not caused any major damage to the equipment or personnel but had the potential of causing heavy damage to the infrastructure there.

The investigators were probing the possibility of drones having been launched from nearby locations in Jammu even as drones were seen hovering close to the Army facilities in the city.

The drones, however, could not be captured were taken out from the area by their handlers in the Army-related incident too.

Meanwhile, the Indian Air Force (IAF) is taking all possible measures to ensure that such an incident is not repeated at other places and a high alert has been sounded at all stations.

Two low-intensity explosions were reported early Sunday morning in the technical area of Jammu Air Force Station.

One of the blasts caused minor damage to the roof of a building while the other exploded in an open area.

There was no damage to any equipment, the IAF said.

ALSO WATCH | Top LeT commander, Pakistan accomplice killed in encounter in Srinagar
By Express News Service

NEW DELHI: The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs on Monday discussed the Centres preparations for a possible third wave of Covid-19, progress on vaccination and the impact of lockdown on the economy and migrant labourers.

The committee headed by Congress MP Anand Sharma heard views of senior officials from the health, home and labour ministries on the socio-economic impact of Covid-19. MPs from from the ruling party and the opposition asked the officials about reports of a possible third wave, the new variants and preparedness of medical infrastructure to handle the situation.

MPs told the officials that the government must speak in one voice regarding a possible third wave, to prevent spreading panic among the masses. Officials were told that the infrastructure put up during the second wave, which saw a massive jump in cases and deaths, should not be dismantled like it was done after the first wave. The Centre should be prepared with availability of medicines, oxygen supply and other infrastructure to tackle the next wave and should not be caught off guard.

On vaccine availability, the panel was told that about two-third of the population will be fully vaccinated by end of 2021 and over 135 crore doses will be available between August and December. The doses would be of Covishield, Covaxin, Zydus Cadilas DNA vaccine and Sputnik, among others.

According to the officials, coronavirus variants of concern (B.1.617) led to increased transmissibility, change in virulence and also had an effect on diagnostics, drugs and vaccines. The officials told the Parliamentarians that the proportion of Covid-19 cases with variants of concern has risen from 10.31 per cent in May to 51 per cent in June 20, the panel told the officials. The impact of lockdown on migrant labourers has been less severe.

Less severe on migrant workers

Labour ministry officials told the panel that the impact of second wave has been less severe on migrant workers. Compared to 1.14 crore, who returned to home states during the first wave, only 5.1 lakh returned this year.

ALSO WATCH | Kerala's Covid-19 fight: A tale of two waves | TNIE Documentary
By PTI

NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a meeting with Home Minister Amit Shah, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and National Security Advisor Ajit Doval on Tuesday and discussed "futuristic challenges" in the defence sector, sources said.

They also discussed various other aspects, including equipping security forces with modern equipment and involving more youth, start-ups and the strategic community in the field. The meeting came against the backdrop of the first-of-its-kind terror attack using drone at an Indian Air Force station in Jammu.

The government has handed over the probe into the attack to the National Investigation Agency.
By PTI

UNITED NATIONS: The possibility of the use of weaponised drones for terrorist activities against strategic and commercial assets calls for serious attention by the global community, India has told the UN General Assembly, a day after two explosives-laden drones crashed into the Indian Air Force (IAF) station at Jammu airport.

A fresh attempt to attack a military installation with the help of drones was foiled by alert Army sentries at the Ratnuchak-Kaluchak station who fired at the unmanned aerial vehicles that flew away, an incident that came hours after an IAF station saw the first terror attack using quadcopters.

The first drone was spotted at around 11.45 pm on Sunday followed by another at 2.40 am over the military station, which witnessed a terror attack in 2002 in which 31 people were killed, including 10 children.

The IAF attack is the first instance of suspected Pakistan-based terrorists deploying drones to strike at the country's vital installations.

"Today, misuse of information and communication technology such as internet and social media for terrorist propaganda, radicalisation and recruitment of cadre; misuse of new payment methods and crowdfunding platforms for financing of terrorism; and misuse of emerging technologies for terrorist purposes have emerged as the most serious threats of terrorism and will decide the counter-terrorism paradigm going forward, Special Secretary (Internal Security), Ministry of Home Affairs in the Government of India, V S K Kaumudi said.

Speaking at the Global scourge of terrorism: assessment of current threats and emerging trends for the new decade', he said, another add-on to existing worries is the use of drones.

"Being a low-cost option and easily available, utilisation of these aerial/sub-surface platforms for sinister purposes by terrorist groups such as intelligence collection, weapon/explosives delivery and targeted attacks have become an imminent danger and challenge for security agencies worldwide, he said at the 2nd High Level Conference of the Head of Counter-Terrorism Agencies of the Member States in the General Assembly.

The possibility of the use of weaponised drones for terrorist purposes against strategic and commercial assets calls for serious attention by the member states.

We have witnessed terrorists using UAS to smuggle weapons across borders, Kaumudi said, according to his statement issued by the Permanent Mission of India to the UN.

Kaumudi said the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent isolation have further accentuated the impact of the internet on people making them vulnerable to radicalisation and recruitment by terrorist groups.

Spreading terrorist propaganda through the use of "indulging video games" is another strategy that was deployed by terrorist groups during the pandemic, he said.

It is imperative for countries to adopt a multi-pronged approach to tackle the global threats emanating out of misuse of new technologies particularly aiming towards terrorism and violent extremism conducive to terrorism, he said.

India called on the world to remain united against tendencies of labeling terrorism based on terrorist motivations especially those based on religion, and political ideologies.

This will certainly divide us and weaken our fight against terrorism, Kaumudi said.

He said the transborder nature of this threat calls for collective and unified action by the international community, without any excuse or exceptions, ensuring that those countries which provide safe havens to terrorists should be called out and held accountable.

India noted with concern that internet and social media platforms have turned into indispensable resources in the toolkit of global terrorist groups for spreading terrorist propaganda and conspiracy theories aimed at spreading hatred among societies and communities and offer additional radicalisation opportunities which may proliferate globally.

The increased use of closed group communications adds to the concern, he said.

Kaumudi told the General Assembly that continuing advancements in evolving technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence, robotics, deep fakes, blockchain, dark web are fraught with the risk of being abused by terrorists.

Already, cryptocurrencies, virtual assets, crowdfunding platforms are helping terror financing, owing to anonymity and un-traceability of these technologies, he said.

India has put in place an elaborate counter-terrorism and security architecture, besides introducing a series of measures in the cyber-space encapsulating counter-radicalisation and de-radicalisation strategies.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Tuesday dismissed a plea challenging the Delhi High Court order which had rejected a PIL seeking to halt Central Vista construction work in view of the COVID pandemic.

A bench of Justices A M Khanwilkar, Dinesh Maheshwari and Aniruddha Bose said it is not inclined to interfere with the high court order as the PIL petitioners had selectively chosen Central Vista project and did not even do basic research about other public projects which were allowed during the lockdown in the national capital.

It said the high court findings on the PIL that it was "motivated" and filed with "ill-intent" and "lack of bona fides" is a possible view.

The top court also refused to interfere with the Rs 1 lakh cost imposed on the petitioners.

The main Central Vista project envisages building a new Parliament House, a new residential complex to house offices and the prime minister and the vice president.

It will also have new office buildings and a Central Secretariat to accommodate various ministries.

During the hearing, the bench said, if this was your conduct, then Rs 1 lakh cost was less, adding that when an affidavit was filed before the high court that the project was fully compliant with COVID protocols, then why did you pursue the case.

Senior advocate Siddharth Luthra, appearing for petitioners -- Anya Malhotra, a translator, and Sohail Hashmi, a historian and documentary film maker -- said that when the petition was filed they were non-compliant and later they have complied with the conditions.

"They were non-compliant from April 19 to April 30", he said.

The bench said that being public spirited persons had they done research on how many projects were given permission to continue the construction activity and how they selected this Central project.

"As a PIL petitioner, have you done any honest research as to how many other public projects were allowed and how did you pick up this project and say that it will be a super spreader of virus," the bench said.

Luthra said the petitioners were specific that they wanted order only with respect to stalling the construction activity which was not in compliance with the COVID protocol directions issued by Delhi Disaster Management Authority (DDMA).

On May 31, the Delhi High Court had described the Central Vista Avenue redevelopment, which entails construction activities on Rajpath and the surrounding lawns from the India Gate to the Rashtrapati Bhawan, as a "vital and essential" project of national importance.

It had dismissed the PIL against it saying it was "motivated" and filed with "ill-intent" and "lack of bona fides" and imposed a cost of Rs 1 lakh on the petitioners, while observing that it was "not genuine public interest litigation".

The high court had said it disagreed with the petitioners' claim that the project was not an essential activity and therefore, should be halted during the prevailing pandemic.

"The present petition has been filed to stop with immediate effect the work of the redevelopment of Central Vista Avenue. This work is part and parcel of the Central Vista project and of vital public importance. The construction of Central Vista Avenue redevelopment project cannot be seen in isolation," it said.

"In fact, the whole Central Vista project is an essential project of national importance, where the sovereign functions of Parliament are also to be conducted. Public is vitally interested in this project," it added.

The high court further said that this is a motivated petition preferred by the petitioners and not a genuine public interest litigation and dismissed it with Rs 1 lakh to be deposited by the petitioners with the Delhi State Legal Services Authority within four weeks.
By PTI

DIBRUGARH: A senior doctor of the Assam Medical College Hospital, Dibrugarh was arrested on Monday for allegedly raping a female colleague at a hotel room here, police said.

The woman, in her complaint filed at Dibrugarh police station, said the doctor, posted as registrar in the department of surgery in AMCH, had been pressurising her to marry him for the last three years.

He had even taken Rs 3 lakh from her, she claimed.

On the pretext of holding discussion about repaying the money, the senior doctor called her from Sivasagar to a hotel room here, where he allegedly raped her, police said.

The accused has been arrested and further investigation is underway, they said.
By PTI

GORAKHPUR: A panchayat in Uttar Pradesh's Maharajganj district has asked a minor girl who was allegedly raped by a boy from her village to settle the matter with him by taking Rs 50,000 from him and hitting him five times with a shoe.

Not satisfied with the panchayat's decision, the girl's family lodged a police complaint, officials said.

The mother of the girl, a resident of Kothibhar police station area, complained to the village panchayat on June 23 about the alleged rape of her daughter.

The panchayat asked the girl to settle the matter with the boy accused of raping her by taking Rs 50,000 from him and slapping him five times with a shoe in front of the village council, the police officials said.

On June 25, the girl's family lodged a complaint at Kothibhari police as they were not satisfied with the panchayat's decision, they said.

After news about the panchayat's decision went viral on social media, Maharajganj Superintendent of Police Pradeep Gupta on Tuesday directed officials to get the girl's medical examination done and record her statement.

"If rape is reported in the medical test, a case will be registered under the relevant provisions of law and further action will be taken," he said.
Lavu Sri Krishna Devarayalu By

The Union governments decision to cancel the CBSE Class 12 board exams ends the prospect of students having to take the examination amidst a pandemic that has infected three crore Indians. The ferocity of the second wave and the prospect of a devastating third wave have influenced the Centres thinking. The decision comes more than a year since the first lockdown in April 2020 shut schools for 24 crore children.

Over the past year, students and teachers have had to adapt to the learning from home model, where digital became the dominant medium. This forced change, however, is hardly desirable and the digital divide is leaving behind crores of children. Digital education favours the privileged children who had better learning outcomes even before the school closure. While there are stories of dedicated teachers visiting children at home or teaching in school playgrounds, these solutions are not scalable. The result is a worsening of the silent learning crisis that has been plaguing our children since before the pandemic.

Apart from impacting learning, school closures have also affected childrens health. The health ministry informed Parliament that there had been a 31% drop in vaccinations during April to June 2020, many of which are carried out in schools and anganwadis. Over 10 crore children have also been deprived of mid-day meals, which have been instrumental in reducing child malnutrition. Finally, there are children among the 23 crore Indians who have been pushed into poverty and will never return to class. Schoolgirls face the grim prospect of being forced into marriage or being trafficked.

In sum, prolonged school closures have reversed decades of gains in enrolment, learning and childrens health. We are yet to come to terms with this challenge. The first step must be reopening schools after vaccinating all children, teachers, and support staff. For this, the Centre must prioritise vaccinating children between 12 and 18 years. But none of the vaccines being used in India have been approved for children. Bharat Biotechs Covaxin and Zydus Cadilas ZyCoV-D are currently undergoing trials among children but awaiting regulatory clearance. Even after approval, Covaxins availability will be a challenge because it accounts for less than 10% of the doses administered. However, there are global alternatives.

The US-made Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccine is already being used by advanced economies like America, Canada, the European Union, Singapore, Japan and Israel to vaccinate children. More than 65 lakh children in the US have already received a dose.Reports claim that Pfizer will supply five crore doses to India. The Centre must fast-track this import agreement and direct these doses towards children between ages 12-18 years.The approval process can be fast-tracked because of the waiver for bridging trials of vaccines approved by the WHO or in the US, UK, Europe or Japan.

Yet, securing the vaccines is only half the battle. We must also work towards rapid inoculation of children. Three broad solutions can be suggested here.

First, prioritise children in rural and remote areas with low internet connectivity and smartphone penetration. Schools should be used as walk-in vaccination centres where children can enter their classrooms and get vaccinated in a comfortable environment. Children who are not enrolled should be allowed to walk into their nearest school to get a jab.

Second, vaccine hesitancy remains a problem in rural India. To alleviate this, state governments should actively encourage gram pradhans to spread positive messaging around vaccinations amongst parents and community elders in their villages. Teachers can also be asked to speak with their students parents to increase vaccine awareness.

Third, there is a gender gap in the current vaccination drivefor every 1,000 men vaccinated, there are only 871 women inoculated. This gap may worsen with children as parents may prioritise vaccinating boys over girls.To solve this, state governments can link existing schemes of cash transfers for sending girls to school with their vaccination status. Research shows that these incentives in the case of BCG and pentavalent vaccines had a large positive impact on vaccination rates.

With a fast-track import agreement and a mission-mode inoculation drive, our children can dream of re-entering classes within this year. The priority should be reopening upper primary, secondary and senior secondary classes in rural areas. This can be done by vaccinating the roughly 10 crore rural children aged 12-18 years. The Centre should target reopening schools by November so that children can celebrate Childrens Day on November 14 in their school. This will mean vaccinating 16 lakh children in rural areas daily between July and November. While this is a tall order, pursuing it will save another academic year from being washed out.

There are many Indian policymakers who hope for a Roaring 20s post-pandemic decade where Indias economy will grow rapidly. They would do well to remember that the worsening silent learning crisis among our children can seriously undermine this possibility. But we have the solutionvaccinate children and reopen schools.

Lavu Sri Krishna Devarayalu

YSRCP MP from Narasaraopet, Andhra Pradesh

(Assisted by Raghav Katyal, LAMP Fellow)

(krishna.lavu@yahoo.in)
No one envies the newly appointed TPCC president A Revanth Reddy, who has inherited a Telangana Congress whose body and soul are in a forlorn state. Losing one election after another since the 2018 Assembly polls, the party has been on a relentless downhill journey. As the senior leaders squabbled with one another, the party never inspired faith. At this juncture, Revanth Reddy has his task cut out. He has to bring the disparate elements together, apply a balm to their bruised egos and make the party battle-ready. By asking him to lead the TPCC, his Delhi bosses went along with the perception that Reddys, a dominant caste in Telangana, alone can take on Velamas, another powerful caste, to which Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao belongs.

The party initially feared that a conflagration would flare up if Revanth Reddy was appointed chief as the seniors in the party, cutting across the differences they had among themselves, rose against him as they saw in him a threat to their common interest. The dissidents charges against Reddy were that he made a lateral entry into the party only in 2017 and that he carried the taint of the vote for note scam of 2015. His detractors called him a TDP leader in Congress clothing and that the party would become the TDPs proxy. But the dissidence turned out to be not as much as was feared; the new leader put his best foot forward by calling on the senior politicians who opposed him and sought their cooperation, including K Jana Reddy and ailing V Hanumanth Rao. Now Revanth Reddy has to lift the sagging morale of the party workers. This may not be very difficult as he can make them eat out of his hand with his fiery speeches and prepare them for the upcoming by-polls for the Huzurabad Assembly seat where former minister Eatala Rajender is BJPs candidate and the TRS is hell-bent on winning it. The Congress has not won the seat since 1978 and Revanth has to perform a miracle to make the party reach at least the second position as this may prove to be a game-changer for the party as it nears the next Assembly polls in 2023.
Naushad Bijapur By

Express News Service

BELAGAVI: Notwithstanding the assurance given by the BJP leadership that he will be re-inducted into the state cabinet once he gets a clean chit in the sex CD case, former water resources minister Ramesh Jarkiholi landed in Delhi on Tuesday afternoon and met several BJP and RSS leaders in the evening.

He reportedly appealed to the party leadership in Delhi to help him return to the cabinet by getting him a clean chit in the CD case.

Sources close to Jarkiholi said the latter is not ready to rely on either Chief Minister BS Yediyurappa or the party leaders in Karnataka and that is why he rushed to Delhi in haste to meet the top leadership to make sure that he is re-inducted into the cabinet at the earliest.

After a meeting with his brothers and family in Gokak on Monday, Jarkiholi had decided to wait for some days without meeting any of the leaders until the government filed a B-report to close the CD case. However, Jarkiholi changed his mind suddenly on Tuesday and rushed to Delhi.

He met former Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis at the residence of a senior RSS leader in the capital and held a 45-minute meeting before speaking to media persons in the evening. He said he had been backstabbed by three BJP leaders in Karnataka and that he would teach them a fitting lesson.

While denying reports that he would resign as MLA, Jarkiholi said there was no question of quitting the assembly seat.

Jarkiholi did not disclose more on his meeting with Fadnavis but sources said he would not stop until the party helped him get back into the state cabinet.

"Jarkiholi is expected to meet some other top party leaders in Delhi to get the CD case closed as soon as possible. A court hearing into the CD case is scheduled to come up in Karnataka High Court in a few days," sources added.

The Gokak MLA is in touch with most of the BJP leaders, including Fadnavis, who were involved in the 'Operation Lotus' to help bring 17 other party MLAs into the BJP to help BS Yediyurappa form the government.
By Express News Service

KALABURAGI: Karnataka tourism minister CP Yogeshwar on Tuesday expressed his confidence in BJP leaders to help solve the leadership issue in the state party.

"I hope our party leaders will give us guidelines to solve the leadership issue just like they gave us guidelines to control the Covid-19 pandemic," he said.

Yogeshwar is a prominent member of the anti-Yediyurappa camp in the Karnataka BJP that is demanding the latter's exit as the Chief Minister of the state.

Speaking to reporters during his brief halt at Kalaburagi airport, Yogeshwar said that all arguments in favour of and against Yediyurappa's exit have been made and the verdict on the issue is awaited.

Yogeshwar also said that the debate on leadership has cropped up in the Congress too.

"Dalits feel deprived after having favoured the Congress for over seven decades (as the Congress did not choose a Dalit to be the CM of the state). The demand for a Dalit chief minister is gaining momentum," Yogeshwar told reporters.

"DK Shivakumar is dreaming of becoming the CM. But he doesn't seem to have enough support from that party's MLAs. He will not become chief minister till Siddaramaiah remains active in politics."

"Let us see what happens after two years," Yogeshwar concluded, indicating the Karnataka Assembly elections that are due in 2023.
George Poikayil By

Express News Service

KASARGOD: For the past four days, the buzz in Karnataka has been that the Kerala government is planning to change the names of border villages in Kasaragod district from Kannada to Malayalam. However, after talking to various officials in the local bodies in the areas, TNIE has found that it is a fake narrative first started by the Karnataka Border Area Development Authority, a government agency.It is fake news, said a top officer of the Kasaragod district administration. There is not even a file or a petition on changing names of villages in Kasaragod with us, he said.

On June 25, the authoritys secretary Prakash Mattihalli released a press note with the subject line that the Kerala government has changed the names of border villages in Kasaragod district from Kannada to Malayalam. The second paragraph of the three-paragraph note said the Kerala government has started the process to change the names of the village.

The press note was released in Bengaluru and widely reported by the media in Karnataka. Mattihalli said the Kerala government has decided to rename Madhur as Madhuram, Malla as Mallam, Karadka as Kadagam, Bedadka as Bedagam, Pilikunje as Pilikunnu, Anebagilu as Anevagil, Manjeshwar as Manjeshwaram, Hosadurga as Pudiyakota, Kumble as Kumbla, Sasihitlu as Shivalap and Nellikunja as Nellikunni.

The authoritys chairman C Somashekhara said some local bodies are attempting to change the names of Kannada-speaking villages in Kasaragod without any consultation with the people. This would destroy Kannada and Tulu culture existing here for long, he said.Media reported the press note verbatim, without cross-checking with the Kasaragod district administration or local bodies.

To keep the issue alive, Somashekhara met Karnataka CM B S Yediyurappa and urged him to intervene in the matter. Later he said in Bengaluru that the CM assured him that he would take up the matter with his counterpart in Kerala.

Ksgd village names: Kumaraswamy writes to Pinarayi

Janata Dal (S) leader H D Kumaraswamy wrote to Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan that he came to know through media that there was a move by the Kerala government to rename some village in Manjeshwar with Kannada flavour into Malayalam.If this is indeed correct, may I sincerely request you to halt the process in the name of linguistic harmony and cultural co-existence, he wrote. TNIE spoke with the district administration and the peoples representatives of the local bodies in Kasaragod and they sounded baffled. Madhur panchayat president Gopalkrishna K of the BJP said there was no such proposal to rename Madhur as Madhuram. The government has made no such proposal nor have we asked for a change of name, said Gopalkrishna. The panchayat is ruled by the BJP for the past four decades.

Anebagilu is a place near Madhur and there is no proposal to change that name either. Karadka panchayat vice-president M Janani said there was no demand from the people to change the name to Kadagam and for reason, there was no such proposal. The panchayat is also ruled by the BJP.

Janani, a BJP leader, said Kadagam was a place 6km from the panchayat headquarters Mulleria. Kadagam did not take its name from Karadka. Both the names have been around always. The panchayat has two villages, one is Karadka and the other is Adhur, she said. K Vijayan, head of the Department of History in Kasaragod Government College, said the people of Kasaragod speak several languages and they have their own names for their places. Malayalis may say Manjeshwaram and Nileshwaram. But officially, the place is Manjeshwar and Nileshwar. There is no proposal to change the names. I come from Kodakad. Some people write the name as Kodakkatt with stress on tt, he said.

District information officer M Madhusoodan said Kasaragod itself is written Kasargod and Kasarkode and Kasaragode. Officially, it is Kasaragod. But people have their own way of writing and pronouncing it, he said. He also said changing the names of places involved a lot of paperwork and process. None of us heard anything, he said.An exception was changing the name of a Tulu village called Maire to Sheni in Enmakaje panchayat. The name was changed because the word is profanity in Malayalam. But in Tulu, Maire is a shortened form of Mayoorapara, which means a place where peacocks flock. But even then, Enmakaje panchayat kick-started the process to rename the place by passing a resolution to change the name.

language barrier

Karnataka media and politicians in a tizzy because of a baseless press note from that states border area development authority

Not even a file or a petition on changing names of villages, says Kasaragod district administration
By PTI

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM/ THRISSUR: The opposition Congress and BJP on Tuesday lambasted the ruling CPI(M) in Kerala over the alleged link of a Kannur-based gold smuggling syndicate with the party and urged Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan to end his silence over the issue.

While the Congress alleged that the Marxist party is protecting all sorts of criminals, the BJP accused it of providing a safe haven to 'quotation gangs' and underworld mafia groups in the southern state.

The opposition parties sharpened their criticism after reports about the alleged link of the Kannur-based smugglers, involved in the illegal transfer of the yellow metal through the Karipur International Airport in north Kerala, with the CPM surfaced in the media.

ALSO READ| Ex-CPM member in Kerala is owner of car involved in gold smuggling, says Customs

The matter came to light after the recent death of a gang of five men in a road accident in Ramanattukara in northern Kozhikode district. The deceased persons were suspected to have links with the smugglers, police said.

Leader of Opposition in the Assembly, VD Satheesan hit out at the CPM and urged the party-led government to order an investigation into the smugglers' alleged relationship with political leaders and also about those who were protecting the criminals.

"Media reports are exposing the CPM's criminal connections everyday. It has now become clear that those who indulge in cyber goondaism for the party on various virtual platforms are either perpetrators or masterminds in various criminal cases reported in recent times," he alleged in a press meet in Thrissur.

The Congress leader further alleged that the left party was protecting those involved in crimes like gold smuggling, political murders and rape.

Cautioning that the control of the state would land in the hands of anti-social elements if the present gold smuggling case was not dealt with utmost seriousness, Satheesan said the CM should make his stand clear over the issue. "Pinarayi Vijayan should end his silence over the issue and make his stand clear," he said.

The opposition leader also accused the Vijayan government of sabotaging the probe into the hawala money case in Kodagara, in which the BJP faced allegations. Meanwhile, BJP state president K Surendran targeted the ruling party over the latest gold smuggling case in the state and said its roots could be traced to AKG Centre, the CPM headquarters here.

The recent incidents have proved that Kerala had turned out to be a safe haven for quotation and underworld gangs, he alleged in the state committee meeting of the saffron party held today.

Smugglers were engaging in illegal gold transfer with the support of the authorities, Surendran claimed adding that it was unbelievable that the home department did not get any prior information on the fight between two criminal gangs near the high security Karipur airport recently.

The Customs is probing the case related to the recent gold smuggling through the Karipur International Airport.
S Kumaresan By

Express News Service

CHENNAI: The next major political battle between the DMK and AIADMK would be the rural local-body elections expected to take place in nine districts. Last week, the Supreme Court ordered that elections to rural local bodies in the remaining nine districts must be held by September 15.

During the term of the last AIADMK government, rural local body polls were conducted in all districts, except these nine, which included the newly created districts and those whose boundaries were altered due to the creation of the new districts. This was due to the legal issues caused by the new district boundaries. Polls for the urban local bodies, including the Chennai Corporation, is still bogged in a legal mire.

Political parties in the State are now busy charting out the poll strategies. Just three days after the Supreme Court verdict, the governing DMK convened a district secretaries meeting on June 25 to discuss the elections. It is learnt from DMK sources that the party leadership was keen on ensuring 100 per cent victory in the upcoming local body elections and DMK President MK Stalin instructed the respective district secretaries to identify potential candidates to bag all seats in the districts, where the elections are going to take place.

Seat-sharing trouble

Keeping its allies happy in the seat-sharing exercise will be a tough task for the DMK. One of the state functionaries of the Congress told Express: In the Assembly election, we were given 25 seats, which is a little over 10 per cent of the total seats. But, we bagged 18 seats, which translates to 72 per cent hit. Hence, we expect at least 10 per cent of the union councillor and district councillor seats in the local body elections.

At the same time, he expressed concern over the hard bargain and the big-brother attitude of DMK district secretaries during the last local body elections held in December 2019. He expressed his hopes that the state Congress unit will take steps to get at least 10 per cent of the seats by negotiating with the DMK leadership. Functionaries of the VCK too aired the same concern.

The other side of the isle

In the AIADMK camp, there is much confusion and turmoil. An AIADMK functionary from the central region said: The AIADMK leadership dismissed Pugazhenthi for his remarks about PMK leader Dr Anbumani Ramadoss. It clearly shows that the leadership wants to continue the alliance with the PMK. But, we dont see the same attitude from the PMK; it will be tough for us northern districts if there is no alliance with the PMK.

Another AIADMK functionary said: Though AMMK didnt secure a considerable number of votes in the Assembly polls, it would be tough for us if they contested in local body elections as even single-digit vote shares can change the results in the local body election. Hence, our victory in the local body elections in some pockets depends on the AMMKs decision.

Meanwhile, BJP State President L Murugan recently said that the alliance for the Assembly election has expired. Hence, it is not clear whether the BJP will continue its alliance with the AIADMK in the upcoming local body elections.


By Express News Service

HYDERABAD: The Telangana government is planning to construct more hydel power plants at barrages proposed across rivers. It intends to tap 320 MW power at Dummugudem barrage and 40 MW to 60 MW power at Sammakka barrage. Hydel power component will also be examined at the proposed barrage across Krishna near Alampur. The quantum of power to be generated at Alampur would depend on the head of the project, discharges and inflows.

We will work in tandem with the Irrigation Department in this regard, a TS Genco official told Express. The Genco has hydel units at 11 sites and the present installed capacity of hydel power is 2,441 MW. Meanwhile, speaking to reporters here on Monday, Excise Minister V Srinivas Goud raised objections to APs complaint with the KRMB against TS power generation at Srisailam.

According to Bachawat Tribunal award, Srisailam is only a hydel project, the Minister pointed out. Alleging that Krishna River Management Board remained a mute spectator in several contentious issues between the sibling States-- Andhra Pradesh and Telangna, Goud wanted the Board to work in an impartial manner.
By PTI

LAHORE: A Christian man in Pakistan was on Monday sentenced to 22 years imprisonment and fined Rs three lakh by a special court for raping and kidnapping a woman.

A special court in Lahore for gender-based violence awarded a collective imprisonment of 22 years to Samson Masih for raping and kidnapping a 25-year-old woman of his locality.

The police had registered a case against Masih last year on the complaint of the woman's family that he abducted her outside her house and kept her at an unknown place for a month and subjected her to sexual assault.

The police traced the suspect through the location of his mobile phone and rescued the woman. The prosecution presented 10 witnesses in the case.

Judge Jamshed Mubarak handed down a 15-year imprisonment for rape and seven-year jail term for kidnapping. A fine of Rs 300,000 (USD 1,896) has also been imposed on the suspect. The sentence will run concurrently.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: Individual member states of the European Union will have the option to accept vaccines authorised by the World Health Organisation (WHO) like Covishield for obtaining the bloc's digital COVID certificate or 'Green Pass', an EU official said on Tuesday.

The official said the European Medicines Agency (EMA) has not received an authorisation request till Monday for the Covishield vaccine manufactured by Pune-based Serum Institute of India (SII).

The Covishield vaccine is yet to be cleared by the EMA.

There have been apprehensions in India that people who took Covishield jabs are unlikely to be eligible to travel to the European Union member states under its 'Green Pass' scheme.

The EU Digital COVID certificate or 'Green Pass' will be mandatory to travel to European countries and the document will serve as proof that a person is vaccinated against COVID-19.

"The aim of the EU Digital COVID Certificate is to facilitate free movement inside the EU. It is not a pre-condition to travel," said the official.

READ MORE | Serum Institute asks Centre to take up inclusion of Covishield in EU vaccination passport

"For the purpose of the Digital COVID Certificate, individual member states will have the option to accept also vaccinations that have been authorised by the World Health Organization, such as Covishield," the official added.

The EU Digital Covid Certificate is meant to facilitate safe free movement during the COVID-19 pandemic within the EU member countries and it will serve as proof that a person was vaccinated against COVID-19, received a negative test result or recovered from the infection.

"Concerning a possible EMA authorisation for Covishield, as of yesterday, the European Medicine Agency (EMA) stated that it had not received a request for approval," the official said.

"It will examine any such request when received, as per its procedures. The EMA does not investigate new drugs on its own unless it is asked by the relevant companies," the official said.

The EMA has already approved four COVID-19 vaccines which included Vaxzevria, the AstraZeneca vaccine manufactured in the UK and EU-member countries.

The SII makes Covishield in India with a licence from AstraZeneca.

The official said temporary restrictions on non-essential travel to the EU are currently in place from many non-EU countries, including India due to the pandemic.

"EU member states shall gradually lift these temporary travel restrictions at the external borders, based on developments of the health situation," the official said.

WATCH DOCUMENTARY:
By ANI

BRUSSELS: A European Union (EU) official on Tuesday said that the European Medicines Agency (EMA) has not received any request for approval of authorisation of the COVID-19 vaccine, Covishield.

Speaking to ANI, the EU official said: "Concerning a possible EMA authorisation for Covishield, as of yesterday, the European Medicine Agency (EMA) stated that it had not received a request for approval. It will examine any such request when received, as per its procedures. The EMA does not investigate new drugs on its own, unless it is asked by the relevant companies."

Meanwhile, the official said the member states of the bloc will gradually lift temporary travel restrictions for people from India at their external borders, based on the developments of the health situation pertaining to the COVID-19 pandemic.

"As to travel to the EU from India, temporary restrictions on non-essential travel to the EU are currently in place from many non-EU countries, including India, due to COVID. EU Member States shall gradually lift these temporary travel restrictions at the external borders, based on developments of the health situation," the EU official told ANI.

Meanwhile, the 27-member European bloc is now introducing the EU Digital COVID Certificate, which is meant to facilitate safe free movement during the COVID-19 pandemic within the EU.

The certificate will serve as evidence that a person was vaccinated against COVID-19, received a negative test result or recovered from COVID-19. The aim of the EU Digital COVID Certificate is to facilitate free movement inside the EU. It is not a pre-condition to travel.

For this purpose, member states of the EU will have the option to accept also vaccinations that have been authorised by the World Health Organization (WHO), including Covishield, confirmed the EU official.

On Monday, Adar Poonawalla, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and owner of the Serum Institute of India (SII) assured Indians who have taken Covishield doses and are now facing issues while travelling to European Union countries that the matter had been escalated to the 'highest level'.

I realise that a lot of Indians who have taken COVISHIELD are facing issues with travel to the E.U., I assure everyone, I have taken this up at the highest levels and hope to resolve this matter soon, both with regulators and at a diplomatic level with countries.  Adar Poonawalla (@adarpoonawalla) June 28, 2021

"I realise that a lot of Indians who have taken COVISHIELD are facing issues with travel to the E.U., I assure everyone, I have taken this up at the highest levels and hope to resolve this matter soon, both with regulators and at a diplomatic level with countries," he tweeted.

This comes after reports that travellers vaccinated with Covishield, the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine manufactured in India by the SII, may not be eligible for the European Union's 'Green Pass'.

Europe's vaccine passport programme, which allowed recipients to travel to and from Europe with fewer roadblocks, may not recognise recipients of the Covishield vaccine. Covishield is one of the three COVID-19 vaccines approved for use in India.
By PTI

UNITED NATIONS: India has told the UN General Assembly that it is high time the international community called on Pakistan to take "effective and irreversible" actions against terror outfits operating on its soil, asserting that Islamabad should not take the "high road of morality" which is only laden with mines of falsehood.

Hitting out at Pakistan for its "vitriolic diatribe" against India, Special Secretary (Internal Security), Ministry of Home Affairs in the Government of India V S K Kaumudi said: "as expected, the delegation of Pakistan has again resorted to peddling false narratives and making baseless allegations against India."

He was speaking at the 2nd High Level Conference of the Head of Counter Terrorism Agencies of the Member States in the General Assembly on Monday.

"For a nation that engages in sectarian violence against its own minorities and harbors a deep sense of insecurity and orchestrated hatred for India, there is nothing new that we could have expected from this delegation, he said at the session Global scourge of terrorism: assessment of current threats and emerging trends for the new decade.'

He noted that the 7th review of the Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy (GCTS) is over and Pakistan's false narrative was summarily negated by the UN membership.

"Its high time that the international community called upon Pakistan to take effective, verifiable and irreversible actions against terror outfits operating on the territory under its control and not take the high road of morality which is only laden with mines of falsehood, Kaumudi said, according to a statement issued by the Permanent Mission of India to the UN.

According to a UN report published last year, an estimated 6,000-6,500 Pakistani terrorists are in neighbouring Afghanistan, most of them with the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, posing a threat to both the countries.

The 26th report of the Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team concerning ISIS, al-Qaeda and associated individuals and entities said that the terror group al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) operates under the Taliban umbrella from Nimruz, Helmand and Kandahar provinces of Afghanistan.

The report had come over a fortnight after India at the UN asked Pakistan to introspect as to why it is universally acknowledged as the "international epicentre" of terrorism and the best safe haven for terrorists, while urging the global community to call upon Islamabad to take sustained, verifiable and irreversible actions against terror outfits operating from its soil.

In June last year, Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan publicly acknowledged the presence of up to 40,000 terrorists in Pakistan and that terrorists from there have attacked the neighbouring countries.
By PTI

BEIJING: India on Tuesday presented English, Russian and Chinese translations of 10 classic works of modern literature written by prominent Indian authors in different languages to the headquarters of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO).

Indian Ambassador to China Vikram Misri presented the books to SCO Secretary General Vladimir Norov at the SCO secretariat here.

The SCO is an eight-member economic and security bloc consisting of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, India and Pakistan.

Tuesday's presentation was a follow-up to the announcement by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the SCO Council of Heads of State Summit in Bishkek in 2019 that 10 great works of Indian literature will be translated into Russian and Chinese, which are the official languages of the SCO.

Accordingly, the Sahitya Akademi had commissioned the translation project and completed it by the end of last year.

The Indian Embassy here will be distributing the translated books to the Embassies of the SCO member states, Observers, Dialogue Partners and other missions.

The translated books included, Arogyaniketan (Bengali) written by Tarashankar Bandyopadyay, Ordained by Fate (Urdu) by Rajender Singh Bedi, Illu (Telugu) by Rachakonda Vishwanatha Sastry, The Last Exit (Hindi) by Nirmal Varma, Longing for Sunshine (Assamese) by Sayed Abdul Malik, Mystery of the Missing Cap and other short stories (Odia) by Manoj Das, The Last Flicker (Punjabi) by Gurdial Singh, Of Men and Moments (Tamil) by Jayakanthan, Parva: A Tale of War, Peace, Love, Death, God and Man (Kannada) by S L Bhyrappa and The Promised Hand (Gujrati) by Jhaverchand Meghnani.

Presenting the books to Norov, Misri described them as 10 master pieces which he hoped will strengthen the cultural bonds among the SCO member states.

"Today, younger generation of the SCO member states are not keenly aware of these enduring bonds of history that unites it and it is our hope and expectation that through this small initiative of translating these gems from Indian literature we will be able to contribute and take forward the understanding that is so important for us to enhance cooperation in all spheres between the SCO member countries, he said.

Norov said the books, which showed the rich culture and linguistic diversity of India, will strengthen the bonds between the people of member countries of the SCO.

Last year, India hosted an online Buddhist exhibition showing common linkage of all the SCO member states and organised yoga presentation at the SCO secretariat, he said.

He said the Foreign Ministers' meeting of the SCO to be held on July 13/14 at Dushanbe would be followed by Ministerial contact group on Afghanistan.

The Foreign Ministers' meeting will discuss 50 documents which included plan of action to eliminate the adverse effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the economies of the member states and transport connectivity, he said.
By PTI

LONDON: Wanted diamond merchant Nirav Modi on Tuesday renewed his appeal in the High Court in London against being extradited to India to face charges of fraud and money laundering in the estimated USD 2-billion Punjab National Bank (PNB) scam case.

The 50-year-old jeweller, who remains behind bars at Wandsworth Prison in southwest London, had lost the first stage of the High Court appeals process last week as a judge declined permission to appeal "on the papers".

Modi's lawyers had five days to file a renewal application seeking an oral hearing to plead the case for permission to appeal against the extradition ordered by UK Home Secretary Priti Patel on April 16.

"A renewal hearing is listed for 21 July 2021," a court official confirmed on Tuesday.

At the brief hearing next month, a High Court judge will determine if there are any grounds for an appeal against the Home Secretary's decision or the Westminster Magistrates Court February ruling in favour of Modi's extradition to India for the case should proceed to a full hearing.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), which appears in court on behalf of the Indian authorities, has previously said it is waiting for the next stages in the process.

"If they are allowed to appeal then we would contest any appeal proceedings on behalf of the GOI [government of India]," the CPS had said last month.

ALSO READ | Attached assets worth Rs 8442 crore of Mallya, Choksi and Nirav Modi transferred to PSU banks: ED

Meanwhile, Modi remains in prison since his arrest over two years ago on March 19, 2019 and his repeated attempts at bail were rejected as he is deemed a flight risk.

In his ruling in February, District Judge Sam Goozee concluded that the diamond merchant has a case to answer before the Indian courts and that the bars to extradition under UK law do not apply in his case.

As part of a very comprehensive judgment, the judge concluded that he was satisfied that there is evidence upon which Nirav Modi could be convicted in relation to the conspiracy to defraud the PNB.

"A prima facie case is established," he said, in relation to all counts of charges brought by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and Enforcement Directorate (ED), including money laundering, intimidation of witnesses and disappearance of evidence.

The court had also accepted that while Modi's mental health had deteriorated due to the lengthy incarceration in a London prison, exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, his risk of suicide did not meet the high threshold to conclude that it would be "unjust or oppressive" to extradite him.

ALSO READ | Mehul Choksi's lawyer appeals for CARICOM intervention in alleged 'kidnapping'

Under assurances given by the Indian authorities in court, Modi is to be held at Barrack 12 Arthur Road Jail in Mumbai and provided required medical attention on being extradited to face trial in India.

Modi is the subject of two sets of criminal proceedings, with the CBI case relating to a large-scale fraud upon PNB through the fraudulent obtaining of letters of undertaking (LoUs) or loan agreements, and the ED case relating to the laundering of the proceeds of that fraud.

He also faces two additional charges of "causing the disappearance of evidence" and intimidating witnesses or "criminal intimidation to cause death", which were added on to the CBI case.

"I do not accept the submissions that NDM [Nirav Deepak Modi] was involved in legitimate business and using the LoUs in a permissible fashion," notes the magistrates' court judgment forwarded to the Home Secretary.

India is a designated Part 2 country by virtue of the Extradition Act 2003, which means it is the Cabinet minister who has the authority to order a requested person's extradition after considering all issues.

The Home Secretary's order rarely goes against the court's conclusions, as she has to consider only very narrow bars to extradition, which do not apply in Modi's case.

The case will now go through the next stage of the High Court appeals process, with Modi's lawyers set to argue in favour of a full appeal hearing against the extradition order.
By AFP

ABU DHABI: Israel's top diplomat Yair Lapid opened the Jewish state's first embassy in the Gulf during a trip to the United Arab Emirates on Tuesday, nine months after they signed a normalisation deal.

"The opening of the Israeli Embassy in Abu Dhabi with the Emirati Minister of Culture and Youth," he tweeted with a photo of himself and UAE minister Noura al-Kaabi cutting a ribbon in the blue and white of the Israeli flag.

     .      .   .          . pic.twitter.com/Yq2rCINLKB    - Yair Lapid(@yairlapid) June 29, 2021

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken welcomed the opening as "historic".

Lapid's visit and the opening of the first Israeli embassy in a Gulf state are "significant for Israel, the UAE, and the broader region", he said in a statement.

Israeli ministers have previously visited the UAE, but newly appointed Lapid became the most senior Israeli to make the trip, and the first on an official mission.

ALSO READ | Israel resumes indoor mask requirement amid coronavirus spike

"Israel wants peace with its neighbours. With all its neighbours. We aren't going anywhere. The Middle East is our home. We're here to stay. We call on all the countries of the region to recognise that. And to come talk to us," Lapid said during the opening ceremony.

Israel wants peace with its neighbors.

With all its neighbors.

We aren't going anywhere.

The Middle East is our home.

We're here to stay.

We call on all the countries of the region to recognize that.

And to come talk to us. pic.twitter.com/wqcdPDnIgP    - Yair Lapid(@yairlapid) June 29, 2021

Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Lior Haiat denied Lapid was snubbed by his opposite number at the embassy opening, insisting that he would meet "five ministers in less than 30 hours".

Since their US-brokered normalisation agreement was signed last September, Israel and the UAE have signed a raft of deals ranging from tourism to aviation and financial services.

During his visit, Lapid will also inaugurate a consulate in Dubai.

Lapid's trip comes nearly a year after the nations moved to normalise ties, and it follows a string of visits by Israeli officials that were planned then scrapped over issues including the Covid pandemic and diplomatic scuffles.

ALSO READ | Tens of thousands attend Pride parade in Israel's Tel Aviv

In March, a planned official visit by Israel's then-prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was cancelled due to a "dispute" with Jordan over the use of its airspace, according to Israeli officials.

Netanyahu, replaced as prime minister by Jewish nationalist Naftali Bennett in a coalition government cobbled together by Lapid weeks ago, had already postponed a February visit to the UAE and Bahrain over coronavirus travel restrictions.

Minister Orit Farkash-Hacohen, now science and technology minister, reportedly also had to cancel trips.

In August 2020, former White House senior adviser Jared Kushner and Israeli national security adviser Meir Ben-Shabbat made history by flying to Abu Dhabi on an El Al plane from Israel.

That was feted by both sides as a breakthrough in efforts for peace in the Middle East, marked by the El Al jet touching down adorned with the word "peace" in English, Arabic and Hebrew.

The normalisation accords Israel struck with the UAE, followed by deals with Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan also last year, have been condemned by the Palestinians.

They break with years of Arab League policy of no relations with Israel until it makes peace with the Palestinians.

Hazem Qassem, a spokesman for the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas which rules Gaza, said the embassy opening showed the UAE was "insisting" on the "sin" of implementing the normalisation accord.

Also on Tuesday, Bahrain appointed its first ambassador to Israel.

Lapid is a centrist former television presenter who tenaciously hammered together Israel's new coalition, ending Netanyahu's more than decade-long tenure as prime minister.

He has sought to break from his rival's policies, saying Monday that Netanyahu's government had taken "a terrible gamble" by focussing only on ties with the Republican party in Washington.

ALSO WATCH | Demons and Genies: Yemen's mysterious 'Well of Hell'
By PTI

ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Imran Khan said on Tuesday that Pakistan was under "pressure" from the US and other Western powers over his country's all-weather ties with China and vowed to never buckle under pressure.

Pakistan and China enjoy a "very special relationship" spanning over 70 years and nothing could change these time-tested ties, Khan said in an interview with China's English-language state-broadcaster China Global Television Network (CGTN), an excerpt of which was shared on his Instagram account.

Talking about the evolving regional rivalry between the US and China, Khan said that "Pakistan thinks it is very unfair for the US or other powers, western power" to pressurise "countries like us to take sides" in a conflict with China.

"Why should we take sides? We should have good relations with everyone.

It is not going to happen if pressure is put on Pakistan to change its relationship or downgrade its relationship with China, it wouldn't happen," Khan said.

Emphasising the deep relationship with China, Khan said that Pakistan would never bend under any kind of pressure.

"Whatever will happen, our relationship between the two countries - no matter what pressure is put on us - is not going to change," he said.

He said that there was a "strange, great rivalry" taking place in the region which was public knowledge.

"You see the United States being wary of China. The way United States and China are looking at each other creates problems because what the United States is doing is it's formed this regional alliance called the Quad, which is US, India and a couple of other countries," Khan said.

ALSO READ | Situation at border with India generally stable, resolving issues through 'negotiations': China

The Quad or Quadrilateral alliance consisting of the US, India, Japan and Australia has been resolving to uphold a rules-based international order in the Indo-Pacific amid growing Chinese assertiveness in the region.

Responding to a question about how to further deepen Sino-Pakistan ties, Khan said that the two sides enjoyed strong political ties but the relationship was not only limited to official relations but it was also "people to people relationship".

He said trade was important to increase ties in future and termed the USD 60 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) as the "biggest thing happening in Pakistan".

The CPEC, which connects Gwadar Port in Pakistan's Balochistan with China's Xinjiang province, is the flagship project of China's ambitious multi-billion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Highlighting the 70 years of diplomatic ties, Khan said China always stood with Pakistan, which "always had a very special relationship with China".

He said that China "always stood with us" whenever Pakistan was in trouble politically or internationally or in a conflict with its neighbour, in an apparent reference to India.

"In good times, everyone stands with you but in your difficult, tough times, bad times, you remember those people who stood by you.

That's why you will find that in Pakistan, people always have a special fondness for people in China," he said.
By PTI

LONDON: The UK's Opposition Labour Party was branded "divisive" and "anti-India" by Indian diaspora groups after a party leaflet for a by-election in northern England used an image of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The leaflet, in circulation for the Batley and Spen by-poll in West Yorkshire scheduled for Thursday, shows Modi in a handshake with Conservative Party Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the G7 Summit in 2019 with the message "Don't risk a Tory MP who is not on your side".

It triggered furious reactions across social media after Tory MP Richard Holden posted an image of it on Twitter, questioning whether it implies that Labour Leader Sir Keir Starmer would not be seen in a handshake with the Indian Prime Minister.

"Dear Keir Starmer, please can you explain this leaflet and clarify whether a Labour PM/politician would refuse to have any relationship with the world's largest democracy? Is this your message to 1.5 million+ members of the Indian diaspora in UK," questioned the Conservative Friends of India (CFIN) diaspora organisation.

The outrage was echoed from within the Labour Party ranks, with the Labour Friends of India (LFIN) diaspora group demanding the "immediate withdrawal" of the leaflet.

Urm @kimleadbeater what is this leaflet about? Why is a photo of the PM with Modi specifically being used here? Especially in an area with a large Muslim community. This is terrible! https://t.co/fRAHLSSCdH  Nathan (@nathansangtm) June 28, 2021

"The Labour Party is right to call out Boris Johnson's lack of action following the conclusion that anti-Muslim sentiment remains a problem within the Conservative Party. It is unfortunate that the Labour Party used a picture of the Prime Minister of India, the world's largest democracy and one of the UK's closest friends, from the G7 meeting in 2019, on its leaflet," LFIN said in its statement.

Indian-origin veteran Labour MP Virendra Sharma also condemned the move as "cheap divide and rule" and "dog-whistle" politics not worthy of Labour.

"The Labour Party will win by bringing people together and uniting the community, to do anything else will divide our community and play into Tory hands," said Sharma, who represents Ealing Southall in London, a constituency with a large Indian diaspora presence.

Another Indian-origin Labour MP, Navendu Mishra, took to Twitter to declare that "racism is alive and well within Labour".

"A hierarchy of racism exists inside the party and some groups are seen as fair game for attacks based on religion/race/heritage," said Mishra, MP for Stockport in northern England.

"Labour will not win by playing divide and rule politics against our communities. We will win based on a principled stance against racism and discrimination of all kinds inside and outside the party," he said.

The Overseas Friends of BJP (OFBJP) group reacted by organising a letter of complaint to party leader Starmer, criticising the "votebank politics" of the campaign leaflet.

"OFBJP objects to this kind of anti-India branding just for votebank politics. Such posters and statements are clearly a sign of divisive politics played by Labour," said OFBJP President Kuldeep Shekhawat.

Angry messages dominated the original Twitter post on social media, with many pointing out that it was Labour's perceived "anti-India stance" that was among the factors behind its bruising defeat in the 2019 General Election under former leader Jeremy Corbyn.

The by-election in Batley and Spen, a traditional Labour stronghold, is seen as a crucial test of Starmer's leadership after the Opposition party fared poorly in recent byelections.

The by-poll this week follows the previous Labour MP, Tracy Brabin, stepping down after being elected Mayor of West Yorkshire and has Kim Leadbeater in the fray for the party, the sister of Jo Cox, the Labour MP murdered near her constituency office in a far-right attack in June 2016.
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My Turn: Sheldon H. Jacobson

Town Hall | 'There is no path to please everyone, but there are paths that will serve the best interests of everyone'
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Debra Pressey is a reporter covering health care at The News-Gazette. Her email is dpressey@news-gazette.com, and you can follow her on Twitter (@DLPressey).
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Mary Schenk is a reporter covering police, courts and breaking news at The News-Gazette. Her email is mschenk@news-gazette.com, and you can follow her on Twitter (@schenk).
Champaign, IL (61820)

Today

A few passing clouds, otherwise generally sunny. High 89F. Winds SW at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Mostly clear. Low 69F. Winds SW at 5 to 10 mph.
Champaign, IL (61820)

Today

Sunshine along with some cloudy intervals. High 89F. Winds SW at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Mostly clear. Low 69F. Winds SW at 5 to 10 mph.
'I want respect, and genuine concern, not a public show that fades away in time. It doesnt take all people believing the same, but it does take people willing to go the extra mile for one another and remain true to what they say they believe.'
The sun shines near the Space Needle on Monday in Seattle. Seattle and other cities broke all-time heat records over the weekend, with temperatures soaring well above 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
In a new scientific investigation headed by the German Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW), water from African and Mongolian waterholes as well as bloodmeals from Southeast Asian leeches were assessed for the ability to retrieve mammalian viruses without the need to find and catch the mammals.

The scientists analyzed the samples using high throughput sequencing to identify known viruses as well as viruses new to science. Both approaches proved to be suitable tools for pandemic prevention research as they allow finding and monitoring reservoirs of wildlife viruses. For example, a novel coronavirus most likely associated with Southeast Asian deer species was identified. The results are published in the scientific journal "Methods in Ecology and Evolution".

Finding and monitoring reservoirs of wildlife viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 - for which the reservoir has yet to be discovered - is challenging. Many areas which wildlife inhabit are difficult to access and the species in question are hard to find or catch. In order to prevent future pandemics such as COVID-19, new and effective methods to discover and monitor viruses circulating in wildlife are urgently needed. Environmental DNA (eDNA) and invertebrate-derived DNA (iDNA) based approaches may enhance the available toolkit to overcome these challenges, when coupled with high throughput sequencing.

The team of scientists assessed water from African and Mongolian waterholes and bloodmeals from Southeast Asian leeches for the ability to retrieve viruses from both sample types. The usual limitation of such samples is that they contain only tiny amounts of low-quality DNA, particularly pathogen DNA. The author therefore used a modern "hybridization capture" approach to fish out sequences similar to those from currently known vertebrate viruses and then sequenced them using sophisticated high-throughput techniques. This approach was successful in that it allowed the identification of known and novel viruses in both water and leech samples.

The DNA from water samples yielded several viruses common to zebras and wild ass, which were expected as these animals frequently visit the waterholes in large numbers. In the case of the viruses found in African water holes, the authors demonstrated in a related publication that the viruses are still infectious, suggesting that the water itself may be a source of viral transmission. From the Southeast Asian leeches, many known as well as novel viruses were identified. Of particular interest was a novel coronavirus previously unknown to science, which potentially represents an entirely new genus in the Coronaviridae family and seems to be associated with deer species.

"For many of the deadliest viruses such as Ebola we still don't know where they come from", says Prof Alex Greenwood, head of the Department of Wildlife Diseases. "The current pandemic demonstrates that we still know very little about the viral diversity in nature. New methods might help us to identify novel viruses and their potential hosts without the usual logistical and ethical problems associated with collecting wildlife samples directly." Environmental DNA is proving useful in a number of contexts including the characterization of the diversity of wildlife species from inaccessible regions, the study of ancient populations and more recently in pathogen research. Environmental DNA from water and DNA derived from blood-sucking invertebrates can be useful in different environments. "Water is an essential resource for life and, particularly in areas of seasonal shortages, a concentration point for animals", Greenwood says.

Terrestrial leeches are often highly abundant in areas of previous viral emergence in Southeast Asia and their bloodmeals can be used to identify their mammalian hosts, including the pathogens contained in their blood. We identified mammalian viruses from five different viral families in our leech samples and more than 50 % of the samples contained mammalian viruses. Some of these, such as a porcine circovirus or a bear annellovirus could be assigned to the bearded pig and sun bear, their mammalian hosts which were also detected in the leech samples. Most interesting was the discovery of the novel coronavirus, as this showed that with our method we are able to discover viral pathogens previously unknown to science circulating in wildlife", Alfano adds. This may help to identify potentially infectious viruses at an early stage which may help to prevent potential future epidemics." Dr Niccolo Alfano, former PostDoc from the Leibniz-IZW Departments of Wildlife Diseases and Ecological Dynamics, now working at the University of Pavia in Italy

Further work will be needed to characterize the newly discovered viruses, such as sequencing their complete genomes and confirming their host-virus relationships. In addition, waterholes or leeches are not found in all environments. Soil, feces and other invertebrates represent additional sources of nucleic acids that could be used to supplement direct animal sampling and enhance our ability to discover and monitor viruses as we go forward from the current pandemic and hopefully learn to prevent them in the future.
Despite facing cultural and political pushback, the evidence remains clear: Face masks made a difference in Kansas.

These had a huge effect in counties that had a mask mandate. Our research found that masks reduced cases, hospitalizations and deaths in counties that adopted them by around 60% across the board." Donna Ginther, the Roy A. Roberts Distinguished Professor of Economics and Director of the Institute for Policy & Social Research, University of Kansas

Ginther's article "Association of Mask Mandates and COVID-19 Case Rates, Hospitalizations and Deaths in Kansas" examines the effect of masks on the state's 105 counties. It appears in JAMA Network Open, a journal published by the American Medical Association.

Kansas boasts the fifth-highest total of counties among all the states. Executive Order No. 20-52 that took effect in July of 2020 was initially adopted by only 15 counties, with 68 others not adopting the order through October. A second mandate in November was embraced by an additional 40 counties.

"We thought masks would matter for certain cases, but the effect size for hospitalizations and deaths being the same rate was pretty astonishing," Ginther said.

Co-written with Carlos Zambrana, an associate researcher at the Institute for Policy & Social Research, Ginther estimated masks saved about 500 lives in adoptive counties. And, yet, other counties often refused to adopt the mandate, citing personal freedoms and lack of scientific evidence as reasons.

"There's no way to run a clinical trial on masks because you'd have to observe people using them all the time, and we can't observe everyone's behavior. This type of observational study is the best we can do," Ginther said.

"But in terms of personal freedom, I would say that wearing a mask is a public good. There's a negative externality to not wearing one, and you could get infected or infect others. In a pandemic, where close to 600,000 people have died, this is a low-cost preventative measure that preserves life."

Data for her study was corralled from several sources. She used the daily total number of cases per county from The New York Times COVID-19 data in the U.S. GitHub repository. The state information came from the list of county official actions compiled by the Kansas Health Institute. Linear regression difference-in-difference models were then employed, with cases regressed on an indicator variable that started 21 days after the mandate to allow for changes in mask-wearing behavior, an indicator for no coronavirus cases and the number of days since the first recorded case.

"We are required to wear seatbelts in the state to save lives. We get driver's licenses to save lives. We have vaccine mandates for children going to school to prevent the spread of infectious disease. These are all public health measures that we follow. At some point, the government steps in and says, 'These are the right things to do to save lives,'" she said.

Aside from the health implications of ignoring a mask mandate, there are also economic ones.

"COVID-19 costs money," she said. "It slows down economic activity. It drains money for hospitalizations. We show that if you prevent COVID, you save the health care system money."

Now in her 18th year at KU, Ginther believes "Association of Mask Mandates" demonstrates the importance of nonmedical interventions for preventing the spread of respiratory diseases.

She said, "Given everything that's happening around the world, this may not be the last pandemic in our lifetime. Just think about places like India that don't have access to the vaccine. If you're wanting to slow the spread, knowing that a mask works and is a cost-effective approach to public health is really important."
In 2014, around 10,000 gallons of a coal-washing chemical called MCHM spilled into the Elk River near Charleston, affecting 30,000 residents in nine counties.

Two years later, floods ravaged central and southeastern West Virginia, claiming 23 lives.

These incidents and others, including human-caused disasters, flooding, deteriorating infrastructure and climate change, are all tied to one essence of life: water.

Now a coalition of West Virginia University researchers is working together to address the state's most pressing water issues through Bridge, a campus-wide science and technology policy, leadership and communications initiative. The impetus for the initiative is to translate the work of WVU researchers to policymakers as part of the University's land-grant mission.

Science and technology are driving forces behind vast changes across much of our society. For public officials grappling with difficult policy decisions, data and analysis from experts can be indispensable. We chose water as the first focus area for the Bridge Initiative because of its importance to the state and the depth of experience we have on campus across the spectrum of water-related issues." Joan Centrella, Bridge Director

The Bridge Waters of West Virginia team includes over two dozen faculty and staff researchers from Chambers, Davis, Eberly and Statler colleges as well as the Extension Service and the Energy Institute.

"Translating the work of our high-level research is instrumental to a healthy, prosperous society," said Vice President for Research Fred King. "Connecting and building substantive relationships between our researchers with our policymakers in the state can bring forth what we need as a society to thrive in the future, while highlighting why we are a Carnegie-classified R1 institution."

Bridge has also developed a program for individual faculty members to work directly with the Bridge team and receive support to connect their research to the science and technology policy sphere. The focus area for this first year is environmental sustainability.

Bridge has just announced its inaugural cohort of faculty fellows. The Bridge Faculty Fellows are:

Eddie Brzostek, associate professor of biology

"As a scientist, I was trained to share my findings with my fellow scientists and hope that some of my science made it into the public consciousness," he said. "One of the most exciting things to me about being a Bridge Faculty Fellow is the hands-on training from experts on how to translate our science into policy. With this training, I hope to translate my science on how forests soak up carbon dioxide and slow climate change into policies that lay the groundwork for a carbon sequestration economy in West Virginia."

Emily Garner, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering

"For the Bridge Faculty Fellow program, I plan to focus on policies that can improve access to safe drinking water and sanitation in rural West Virginia communities," she said. "Some of the most pressing issues related to drinking water and wastewater in West Virginia that I hope we can address through the Bridge program include improving access to safe drinking water and sanitation in rural West Virginia communities and identifying policies that can support small water and wastewater systems in replacing and upgrading their aging infrastructure.

Jamie Shinn, associate professor of geology and geography

"As a Bridge Faculty Fellow, my goal is to learn how to translate my research on the impacts of flooding in WV into actionable policy recommendations, with the ultimate goal of decreasing community vulnerability to flooding in the state," she said. "I also hope to build connections with policymakers at local and state levels to ensure the research I am doing has a receptive audience. I think Bridge will play a fundamental role in connecting WVU's R1 research status with its land grant mission.'

Fellows will receive a $5,000 grant that can be used for expenses that will allow them to participate in the program, including summer salary, student stipends, research and conference travel, and the like. Each Fellow will serve for one year.

"The Bridge Initiative demonstrates WVU's commitment to leveraging faculty research expertise to inform public policy. These inaugural Bridge Faculty Fellows will blaze a new trail in fulfilling our land-grant mission. They will also help to show how WVU's ongoing strategic transformation is rooted in service and outreach to our state and region," said Provost Maryanne Reed.

Bridge is an initiative of the Office of the Provost and the Research Office.
Preliminary results from the European gene therapy trial for Crigler-Najjar syndrome, conducted by Genethon in collaboration with European network CureCN, were presented at the EASL (European Association for the Study of the Liver) annual International Liver Congress on June 26. Based on initial observations, the drug candidate is well tolerated and the first therapeutic effects have been demonstrated, to be confirmed as the trial continues.

Crigler-Najjar syndrome is a rare genetic liver disease characterized by abnormally high levels of bilirubin in the blood (hyperbilirubinemia). This accumulation of bilirubin is caused by a deficiency of the UGT1A1 enzyme, responsible for transforming bilirubin into a substance that can be eliminated by the body, and can result in significant neurological damage and death if not treated quickly. At present, patients must undergo phototherapy for up to 12 hours a day to keep their bilirubin levels below the toxicity threshold.

Dr. Lorenzo D'Antiga (Azienda Ospedaliera Papa Giovanni XXIII, Bergamo, Italy), one of the investigators working on the gene therapy trial being conducted into Crigler-Najjar syndrome by Genethon, presented the results from the first treated patients at this year's EASL (European Association for the Study of the Liver) congress. The treatment involves providing the liver cells with a copy of the UGT1A1 gene that encodes an enzyme designed to facilitate bilirubin elimination. Based on initial observations, the results are encouraging.

Specifically, the first two cohorts reveal that:

The product is safe and well tolerated in the four patients undergoing treatment

There appears to be a dose-response relationship (to be confirmed):

In cohort 1, treated at the lowest dose, the clinicians observed a temporary therapeutic effect but that was insufficient to allow prolonged stopping the phototherapy at the sixteenth week post-injection (the product efficacy endpoint) In cohort 2, treated at a higher dose, a major reduction in bilirubin levels was demonstrated in the first patient, enabling her to stop phototherapy a few weeks ago. The second patient has also seen a major decrease in her bilirubin levels. Her treatment is too recent to demonstrate a stable decrease, but if this decrease is confirmed she will also be able to discontinue phototherapy in a few weeks' time.

"We are very excited with the results achieved so far in this trial of AAV-mediated gene therapy for Crigler Najjar syndrome. The treatment, at appropriate doses, has shown to be safe and able to correct the disease to an extent that allowed the first patient to stop daily phototherapy, eliminating the risk of neurological injury. The degree of improvement of the second patient suggests that soon she might be able to stop phototherapy too. Our work on the immunomodulation protocol is now focused on maintaining a durable effect in the long term. This innovative strategy may replace liver transplantation in patients with a genetic liver disease". Dr. Lorenzo D'Antiga, who treated the last two patients and presented their results at the EASL congress.

The trial uses a technology developed by Genethon's Immunology and Liver Gene Therapy team, headed up by Dr. Giuseppe Ronzitti: "The team has worked incredibly hard on this project, from designing and developing the approach right through to the trial. We designed the drug candidate, undertook the preclinical efficacy testing, then designed the product for the clinical trial. We are continuing our work to develop new approaches for other liver diseases".
Rice University computer scientists are sending RAMBO to rescue genomic researchers who sometimes wait days or weeks for search results from enormous DNA databases.

DNA sequencing is so popular, genomic datasets are doubling in size every two years, and the tools to search the data haven't kept pace. Researchers who compare DNA across genomes or study the evolution of organisms like the virus that causes COVID-19 often wait weeks for software to index large, "metagenomic" databases, which get bigger every month and are now measured in petabytes.

RAMBO, which is short for "repeated and merged bloom filter," is a new method that can cut indexing times for such databases from weeks to hours and search times from hours to seconds. Rice University computer scientists presented RAMBO last week at the Association for Computing Machinery data science conference SIGMOD 2021.

"Querying millions of DNA sequences against a large database with traditional approaches can take several hours on a large compute cluster and can take several weeks on a single server," said RAMBO co-creator Todd Treangen, a Rice computer scientist whose lab specializes in metagenomics. "Reducing database indexing times, in addition to query times, is crucially important as the size of genomic databases are continuing to grow at an incredible pace."

To solve the problem, Treangen teamed with Rice computer scientist Anshumali Shrivastava, who specializes in creating algorithms that make big data and machine learning faster and more scalable, and graduate students Gaurav Gupta and Minghao Yan, co-lead authors of the peer-reviewed conference paper on RAMBO.

RAMBO uses a data structure that has a significantly faster query time than state-of-the-art genome indexing methods as well as other advantages like ease of parallelization, a zero false-negative rate and a low false-positive rate.

"The search time of RAMBO is up to 35 times faster than existing methods," said Gupta, a doctoral student in electrical and computer engineering. In experiments using a 170-terabyte dataset of microbial genomes, Gupta said RAMBO reduced indexing times from "six weeks on a sophisticated, dedicated cluster to nine hours on a shared commodity cluster."

Yan, a Ph.D student in computer science, said, "On this huge archive, RAMBO can search for a gene sequence in a couple of milliseconds, even sub-milliseconds using a standard server of 100 machines."

RAMBO improves on the performance of Bloom filters, a half-century-old search technique that has been applied to genomic sequence search in a number of previous studies. RAMBO improves on earlier Bloom filter methods for genomic search by employing a probabilistic data structure known as a count-min sketch that "leads to a better query time and memory trade-off" than earlier methods, and "beats the current baselines by achieving a very robust, low-memory and ultrafast indexing data structure," the authors wrote in the study.

Gupta and Yan said RAMBO has the potential to democratize genomic search by making it possible for almost any lab to quickly and inexpensively search huge genomic archives with off-the-shelf computers.

RAMBO could decrease the wait time for tons of investigations in bioinformatics, such as searching for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater metagenomes across the globe. RAMBO could become instrumental in the study of cancer genomics and bacterial genome evolution, for example." Minghao Yan, Ph.D Student in Computer Science
Researchers at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) have discovered that a specific type of lung cell exhibits unconventional immune properties and may contribute to the outcome of respiratory viral infections. The researchers focused on type II alveolar (AT2) cells, which are non-immune cells of the lung that are critical for basic lung health and tissue repair after lung injury. They found that AT2 cells express high levels of major histocompatibility complex II (MHC-II), an important immune system trigger, and that AT2 MHC-II expression appears to confer an appreciable advantage in the outcome of respiratory viral infection. The findings were published today in Nature Communications.

This study shows that MHC-II expression is regulated in a unique way in AT2 cells, which has important implications for the health of lungs when faced with infection. Future research should explore whether alterations in AT2 MHC-II expression or function contribute to the wide variation in outcome of lung diseases in humans, particularly SARS-CoV-2 infection, as AT2s are a major cell type infected with this virus in the human lung." Laurence Eisenlohr, VMD, PhD, Aenior Author, Investigator and Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at CHOP

MHC-II triggers an immune cascade that activates helper T cells, which in turn drive B cells, cytotoxic T cells and other important immune cells required to fight an infection. The sequence begins when a peptide from the infectious pathogen connects with MHC-II protein, and that complex is presented on the surface of the cell, a process known as "antigen presentation." Historically, only certain types of specialized immune cells, termed "professional antigen presenting cells," have been shown to express MHC-II at steady state, including B cells, dendritic cells, and macrophages; other cells outside of the immune system are thought to express MHC-II only when inflammation is present, such as during an infection. However, recent research has shown that some of these other "non-immune" cell types, including AT2s, can also express MHC-II under normal conditions as well, and this is thought to be driven by small amounts of inflammation that are still present even at homeostasis.

AT2 cells are epithelial cells in the lung parenchyma that produce surfactant and promote cell renewal. Previous studies of AT2 MHC-II expression and function have varied widely, and as a result, researchers have not fully understood how well AT2 cells express MHC-II, what triggers AT2 MHC-II expression, and how AT2 MHC-II functions in lung immunity both at baseline and during lung infection.

To better understand the role of AT2 MHC-II, the researchers analyzed mouse and human AT2 cells and found that despite being non-immune cells, AT2s express MHC-II uniformly and to high levels under normal conditions, at levels similar to the "professional antigen presenting cells." They also found that in AT2 cells, MHC-II expression is activated independently of the inflammation cascade that is thought to set the complex into action in essentially all other non-immune cells, suggesting it is triggered in AT2s by unique mechanisms.

Given the role of MHC-II in initiating an immune response, the researchers examined the role of AT2 MHC-II in protecting the lungs from respiratory disease. To test this, the researchers generated mice with an AT2-specific deletion of MHC-II. Under normal conditions, the health of the mice did not seem to be affected by the deletion of MHC-II; they did not develop spontaneous respiratory disease and the lung tissue was comparably healthy to mice with functional AT2 MHC-II, leading researchers to conclude that MHC-II does not seem to be required for effective surfactant production or lung regeneration, or lung immunity at homeostasis. However, when the mice were exposed to influenza A virus and Sendai virus, the mice with MHC-II deletions had higher morbidity and mortality than those with intact MHC-II, implying that it does contribute to improved outcomes during lung infection.

Although loss of AT2 MHC-II worsened respiratory virus disease, the effect was smaller than the researchers had anticipated based on the abundance of AT2 cells in the lung and the magnitude of AT2 MHC-II expression. Surmising this might be a result of a limitation in the actual function of MHC-II on AT2 cells, the researchers examined the ability of AT2 cells to present infectious and non-infectious antigens via MHC-II to stimulate other immune cells. They found that AT2 cells are capable of presenting antigen via MHC-II and that this is enhanced in the setting of inflammation, but compared to the specialized "professional antigen presenting cells," AT2 cells exhibit very limited antigen presentation capacity.

"Although future studies will need to explore the reasons why this combination of high MHC-II expression but limited antigen presentation occurs in AT2 cells, we propose that this is actually part of a carefully balanced system in the lung, where excessive T cell activation would be especially damaging," Eisenlohr said. "We propose that high MHC-II expression by AT2s allows them to participate in immune responses, but restrained MHC-II antigen presentation establishes a higher threshold that must be overcome in order to for them to activate the immune system, allowing for AT2s to contribute in a more tempered manner. This way, MHC-II presentation by AT2s would only trigger T cell activation in the setting of high antigen burden, such as a severe lung infection, but would prevent AT2-induced amplification of T cells in response to low levels of inhaled innocuous environmental antigens."
Imagine having feelings of distress and negativity at some point as you are going about your day. Then imagine feeling that way every day, for almost 21 days. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer youth don't have to imagine having negative feelings at some point throughout the day for an extended period of days. A new study from American University reveals just how pervasive emotional distress is related to stigma around sexual orientation.

Although we know that LGBTQ youth experience bullying, discrimination, and microaggressions during adolescence, we don't know how prevalent these experiences are in their day-to-day lives. Our study shows that LGBTQ youth experience stresses related to their multiple stigmatized identities almost daily, and sexual orientation-specific stressors on a weekly basis. These experiences are associated with greater negative emotions that can lead to depression or other mental health issues." Ethan Mereish, Lead Study Author, Licensed Psychologist and Professor, American University Health Studies

Researchers have long known that minority stressors harm LGBTQ youth. However, what is less understood is their daily effects and youth resilience and well-being in the face of stigma. Minority stressors range from hearing homophobic, transphobic or racist remarks to more severe stressors such as experiencing discrimination, prejudice and harassment directly related to one's sexual orientation or gender identities.

Could the pervasiveness of negative emotions lead to more serious mental health issues? LGBTQ youth are at greater risk for poor mental health outcomes, including depression, compared with their heterosexual and cisgender peers. "Having negative emotions does not necessarily make one clinically depressed; however, if they persist over several days and weeks, it could become depression," Mereish said.

For the study, nearly 100 racially diverse youth and adolescents between the ages of 12 to 18 were recruited from the Washington, D.C. LGBTQ community, with the greatest number of participants attending high school. The participants filled out a daily diary, which consisted of responding to daily surveys. Every day for 21 days, participants received a link to a survey that asked about their experiences in the last 24 hours to gauge their level of distress around minority stressors. The questions asked about their experiences with discrimination, prejudice, harassment and rejection. Participants also completed a psychological questionnaire as a baseline measure.

According to the study results, the participants experienced an average of 17 minority stressors during the 21-day monitoring period, and some participants experienced even more. Most participants attributed these stressors to their sexual orientation. Some minority stressors were more commonly experienced than others such as seeing or hearing negative or offensive messages; being made to feel uncomfortable or unsafe because of one's identity; experiencing one's identity to interfere with their life; and being misunderstood.

On days when participants experienced a greater number of minority stressors, they reported higher same-day negative emotions, or "negative affect," a medical term that refers to moods and emotional states. Additionally, the youth experienced heightened negative affect on days when they experienced a sexual orientation-specific minority stressor. A similar association between minority stressors and negative emotions was found on days when stressors occurred related to other identities, such as their gender or race.

The study models similar research done in adults, which also confirm a link between the daily stressors of being a sexual minority and negative emotions. The youth study differs for its diverse sample (both in race and gender identity diversity), and the implications, as youth and adolescents are developing, and interventions will be different, Mereish notes.

Future work with larger sample sizes will be needed to better understand the impacts of minority stress and LGBTQ youth. The study is published in Journal of Counseling Psychology.
A naturally occurring peptide in sunflower seeds was synthetically optimized and has now been identified as a potential drug for treating abdominal pain or inflammation (in the gastrointestinal tract, abdominal area and/or internal organs). That is the finding of an international study led by Christian Gruber from MedUni Vienna's Institute of Pharmacology (Center for Physiology and Pharmacology), which was conducted jointly with the University of Queensland and Flinders University in Australia and has now been published.

The scientific aim of the study is to find analgesics that are only active in the periphery and do not cross the blood-brain barrier, as an alternative to commonly used synthetic opioids. Gruber explains the background: "Morphine was one of the first plant-based medicines and was isolated from the dried latex of poppies more than 200 years ago. It binds to opioid receptors in the brain and is still regarded as the main pillar of pain therapy.

However, there is a high risk of opioid addiction, and an overdose - as a result of this strong dependency - inhibits the breathing center in the brain, which can result in respiratory depression and, in the worst case, in death." For this reason, researchers throughout the world are trying to make analgesics safer and to find active drug molecules that do not have the typical opioid side-effects.

Sunflower extracts were to some extent used in traditional medicine for their anti-inflammatory and analgesic properties. In the current study, the scientists from Austria and Australia, primarily PhD student Edin Muratspahi?, isolated the plant molecule that may be responsible for this effect. Medicinal chemistry methods were then used to optimize the so-called sunflower trypsin inhibitor-1 (SFTI-1), one of the smallest naturally occurring cyclic peptides, by 'grafting' an endogenous opioid peptide into its scaffold.

A total of 19 peptides were chemically synthesized based on the original SFTI-1 blueprint and pharmacologically tested. "One of these variants turned out to be our lead candidate for as potential innovative analgesic molecule, especially for pain in the gastrointestinal tract or in the peripheral organs. This peptide is extremely stable, highly potent and its action is restricted to the body's periphery. Its use is therefore expected to produce fewer of the typical side-effects associated with opioids," point out Gruber and Muratspahi?.

The mode-of-action of the peptide is via the so-called kappa opioid receptor; this cellular protein is a drug target for pain relief, but is often associated with mood disorders and depression. The sunflower peptide does not act in the brain, hence there is much less risk of dependency or addiction. Furthermore, it selectively activates only the molecular signalling pathway that influences pain transmission but does not cause the typical opioid side-effects.

The data of the animal model in the current study are very promising: the scientists see great potential for using this peptide in the future to develop a safe medication - which could be administered orally in tablet form - to treat pain in the gastrointestinal tract, and this drug could potentially also be used for related painful conditions, e.g. for inflammatory bowel disease.

Using Nature's blueprint

The research of this MedUni Vienna laboratory led by Christian Gruber exploits the concept of using Nature's blueprint to develop optimized drugs.

We are searching through large databases containing genetic information of plants and animals, decoding new types of peptide molecules and studying their structure, with a view to testing them pharmacologically on enzymes or membrane receptors and ultimately utilizing them in the disease model." Christian Gruber, MedUni Vienna Laboratory

Finally, potential drug candidates are chemically synthesized in a slightly modified form based on the natural blueprint, to obtain optimized pharmacological properties.
A growing concern among coronavirus vaccines is the vaccine side effects. Fear or misinformation about side effects may fuel vaccine hesitancy, contributing to low vaccination rates. Australian researchers recently published an article in Science Immunology to discuss why people develop side effects and their benefits.

About 60% of people have experienced a range of side effects from muscle aches, headaches, and fever. There have also been reports of more serious, albeit rare heart problems and blood clotting disorders.

The article suggests that vaccine side effects are a byproduct of short bursts of type I interferon (IFN-I) production needed to mount an effective immune response.

In light of the above, the prospect of fatigue and headache after vaccination for COVID-19 should be viewed positively: as a necessary prelude to an effective immune response. The side effects of vaccination will nearly always be mild and transient and indicate merely that the vaccine is doing its job of stimulating the production of interferon, the bodys in-built immune stimulator, wrote the researchers.

IFN-Is role in early immune response

Most symptoms result from overproducing a cytokine involved in the early immune response called type I interferon (IFN-I). Its activation of IFN-I and IFN-III in the respiratory system has antiviral effects that prevent the virus from spreading throughout the body.

The activation of IFN-I also increases activation of dendritic cells, which relays antigen information to naive CD4+ and CD8+ T cells. The CD4+ cells stimulate B cells to produce antibodies while CD8+ cells become cytolytic effector cells.

IFN-I acts in part by improving the immunogenicity of DC, particularly by elevating the surface expression of molecules that costimulate T cell activation. In addition, IFN-I has a direct stimulatory effect on T cells, promoting the optimal expansion of these cells and formation of long-lived memory cells, both for CD4+ and CD8+ T cells, explained the authors.

IFN-I during viral infection

For some infectious diseases, a virus may trigger an excessive IFN-I that leads to high inflammation, known as a cytokine storm. But, the researchers note that current evidence shows this is probably unlikely for SARS-CoV-2 because patients with severe COVID-19 infection have shown below-normal IFN-I levels in their blood.

Patients with COVID-19 infection may sustain damage because of cytokine storms from an overproduction of IL-6, but its likely not IFN-I mediated. Instead, severe COVID-19 infection might be linked with a break in IFN-I production during the early stage of infection. Some clinical evidence supports this notion as administering IFN-I to patients during the early stages of disease has been beneficial.

While there has been no direct evidence of IFN-I production after a COVID-19 vaccination, the researchers suggest this is likely happening because other mRNA vaccines stimulate IFN-I production.

IFN-I production may be correlated with COVID-19 vaccine side effects

Would this suggest IFN-I production is the cause behind the myriad of COVID-19 vaccines? The answer is still unclear. IFN-I therapy is currently used to treat hepatitis B and C and multiple sclerosis and shows similar side effects  headaches, fever, and fatigue  as the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. Though, IFN-I stimulates a lot of downstream effects, including the release of different cytokines and chemokines. There is a possibility that one of these downstream effects is the true culprit behind the side effects.

Vaccines not only produce immunity by antigen recognition on dendritic cells but T cells also respond to costimulation or second signal. The additional signal comes after contact with T cell CD28 molecules with CD80 and CD86 molecules on dendritic cells.

Because of the needed co-stimulation to induce immunity, a successful vaccine requires information on the virus or an adjuvant to increase costimulatory molecules on dendritic cells, and in turn, mount an immune response.

Similar to IFN-I, adjuvants binding to complementary pattern recognition receptors on dendritic cells. This then stimulates activation of cells and an upregulation of costimulatory molecules. The similarity in response has researchers suggesting that IFN-I is a potential adjuvant, and side-effects of COVID-19 vaccines result from a quick burst of IFN-I production after generating an immune response.

The point to emphasize here is the striking correlation with IFN-I production. Thus, closely paralleling the intensity of typical immune responses, IFNI generation is substantially stronger in females than males and in younger than older people.

COVID-19 infection generates low IFN-I levels, while the flu stimulates high IFN-I levels. This may explain why some people reported more flu-like symptoms after vaccination, even when they were asymptomatic while sick with COVID.

Though more research on this topic is needed to be sure.
Early in this century, post-SARS, and in a period when China started allowing more students and scientists to study abroad, collaboration and exchange between American and Chinese scientists blossomed.

Many of China's top scientists today were educated in the West. These include George Gao, the head of China's Center for Disease Control and Prevention, who trained and taught at Oxford and Harvard, and Shi Zhengli, who directs the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and received her Ph.D. in France.

Many, like Gao, spent more than a decade abroad before returning to China for top jobs and, often, prestigious positions and big salaries. They were great at their bench work, their science was well respected, and top American scientists got to know them well. They became friends with their American counterparts, as is clear from Anthony Fauci's email correspondence with Gao as the pandemic emerged, recently released through a Freedom of Information Act request.

But early on in what became a global crisis, when limited and reassuring information was coming out of China about the transmissibility of the novel coronavirus and the extent of its domestic outbreak, misplaced trust among America's top scientists led some to think the spread of virus probably wouldn't be so bad.

Here's the problem: Chinese scientists are great scientists, but they work for an authoritarian government where politics, not facts, always come first. If information they know or discover makes China look bad, it is dangerous to say it  especially to foreign colleagues, especially publicly, and, often, even to their friends or family.

That may sound familiar after the presidency of Donald Trump, during which he often mocked and sidelined experts like Fauci. But the risk for scientists in China is far worse: loss of your job and your kids' career prospects, visits by the police, false accusations, even prison.

As the country's leader, Xi Jinping reminded his scientists in a speech last year: "Science has no borders, but scientists have a motherland."

Every Chinese citizen knows how to interpret that statement, and I learned, too: When I was a reporter in Beijing, I got to know Dr. Gao Yaojie, who exposed an epidemic of HIV/AIDS in rural China that had resulted from unsanitary blood collection practices, some state-run.

She was a valued source for a series of articles I wrote on the unfolding tragedy, in which nearly the entire adult population of poor farming villages was dying, without any treatment and leaving AIDS orphans behind. Dr. Gao (no relation to George Gao) was feted by Bill and Hillary Clinton and won international human rights awards for saving perhaps tens of thousands of lives and ending dangerous practices. But in China, that very same work meant Gao spent her retirement under house arrest, often followed and threatened by local officials for embarrassing China. She fled China in 2009 and obtained political asylum in the U.S. And that was at a time when China was less autocratic and more open than it is today.

President Joe Biden had instructed security agencies to investigate the lab leak theory  to figure out whether SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid-19, emerged from the Wuhan lab or from nature. But if international scientific sleuths are hoping to see a lab log or find a whistleblower, that very likely won't happen. That kind of information won't be revealed, even to Chinese scientists' many American friends and scientific partners, which include the U.S. The Wuhan lab has received more than half a million dollars of funding that originated from the National Institutes of Healthand has worked with many American scientists.

Mistakes happen in science. Pathogens leak out of good containment labs, and not because people are evil. It's because, for example, the technician performing the bench work forgets an important step or, in a rush to go home, gets sloppy  it takes only a second. Or, for example, if scientists gathering bat samples in remote caves get a bit too comfortable in a dangerous environment  because they've been there dozens of times before with no problem and the biohazard suits and masks are suffocating. So, they pull off the face mask a bit too early as they exit.

When that happens, you have to acknowledge the error right away to contain the damage. But Chinese scientists can't do that, at least publicly. When, in late December 2019, Dr. Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist working at one of Wuhan's major hospitals, raised his concerns to colleagues about patients dying from a strange new virus, he was punished and told by police to stop making false comments and investigated for spreading rumours. He died of covid just a few weeks later.

In China today, it is dangerous to say what you know if it challenges the official government narrative. People who participated in the protests on June 4, 1989, in Tiananmen Square, which were violently put down by the Chinese army, don't even tell their children about that bloody day when many hundreds, and possibly thousands, were killed.

Kai Strittmatter, a longtime China correspondent for one of Germany's largest newspapers, told NPR's Terry Gross: "Of course, this generation, they all know, but they were afraid to tell their children. Because, you know, what do you do when your child in school suddenly tells the teacher and asks the teacher about Tiananmen massacre?"

We may never know if the novel coronavirus leaked from a lab or from animal-to-human transmission from a wild animal at one of Wuhan's live animal markets, as the Chinese first suggested. And that's exactly the knowledge we desperately need to prevent the next pandemic, because the solutions are so different.

If the former hypothesis proved true, U.S. scientists would need to ensure that collaborations with their Chinese partners involve full transparency  access to log books, internal reports, and all. If the latter, China must fully enforce its ban on the sale of exotic animals (the "intermediate hosts" that carry the virus) at its wet markets, a ban it promised after the original SARS virus emerged there from a civet cat nearly two decades ago. But the Chinese government's control over its scientists makes it unlikely we will learn the truth now  or ever.
Researchers from the University of Leeds have found that the y cross-chain structure of fibrin proteins is essential to stabilizing blood clots that can lead to harmful embolism formation.

Fibrin Fibers. Image Credit: University of Leeds

New evidence for the role of fibrin proteins in thromboembolic disease

Pulmonary embolism is a condition caused by a blood clot in the lungs that cuts blood flow to major blood vessels. The primary function of blood clots is to stem blood loss from ruptured blood vessels, but clots can form without injuries, which causes blood coagulation and circulation issues termed thrombosis.

Blockages can also be caused by destabilized clot fragments that have broken off from a blood clot in another place within the body. The fragments of the blood clot then move through the bloodstream to the lungs, where it can lead to acute and chronic damage recognized to lead to the death of over 2,000 people every year in the United Kingdom.

However, little is known of the molecular dynamics involved in the destabilization of blood clots and the structural requirements to prevent their formation.

New research funded by the British Heart Foundation now reveals that blood clots are stabilized by the structure of the fibrin protein. The study published in the scientific journal PNAS by researchers from the University of Leeds and University of Sheffield report on the role played by fibrin in stabilizing blood clots to prevent clot fragments from breaking loose.

Fibrin is a non-globular protein that can polymerize with platelets to form hemostatic plugs over wound sites in cross-linked meshes. This is a vital process for wound healing as this fibrous protein can help injuries recover thanks to its elastic and fast-acting functions.

In the present study, the team used in vitro experiments comparing mice bred with deficiencies in fibrin stabilizing compounds with non-deficient mice to determine the functional role of fibrin. Specifically, they examined the behavior of a key chemical building block of fibrin, known as -chain cross-links (gamma chain cross-links), and how it affected clot formation.

The experimental outcomes showed that mice that could not produce these gamma chain cross links showed blood clots that were more unstable thus more likely to fragment and produce more embolisms.

What we believe is happening is that without the -chain cross-links, the fibrin is not strong enough to hold the clot in place against the forces generated in the body from muscle movement and from blood flow." Dr. Cedric Duval, School of Medicine, University of Leeds

From these findings, the researchers were, therefore, able to demonstrate that the gamma chain structure is pivotal to the stabilization of fibrin proteins by enhancing their resistance. Specifically, these chains prevent ruptures and clot fragmentation that can lead to pulmonary embolism.

Utilizing and targeting the y cross-chain structure for clinical treatment

The formation of embolisms in the lung is a major cause of death and disability around the world. As such, the examination of molecular structures is central to understanding the mechanistic process behind embolism formation as well as determining how to prevent and treat it successfully.

Professor Robert Ariens, also from the School of Medicine at Leeds, who supervised the research, describes: "The findings reveal the importance of the -chain cross-links. These are the structural supports in the fibrin that keep the clot in place, adding that, "By identifying the structural dynamics of this mechanism, we have identified new targets for drugs that could be developed to stop fragments of a thrombosis breaking away to cause an embolism in the lungs."

The potential for clinical treatments to promote or support fibrin expression could lead to fewer clot fragments, but alternative treatments could prevent the transport of clot fragments or the formation of clots in the lungs themselves.

Nonetheless, knowledge of clot fragmentation, genetic predisposition to fragmentation, or mechanisms of fragment dissolution remain unknown. Understanding such concepts could lead to more effective treatments, yet the findings of this study provide initial support to expanding research to other areas despite its limited understanding.

I have always thought that the remarkable elasticity of fibrin, which has been described as like rubber or spider silk would be important to prevent clot fragmentation and thus thromboembolic disease. I was astounded to see the level of differences in pulmonary embolism that resulted from a genetic mutation that resulted in reduced elastic recovery of the fibres. So, when I saw the results, it definitely was a "wow moment" and I also had the "I told you so" feeling. Professor Ariens

Further extending the current findings in future studies could examine the genetic processes to develop successful clinical treatments that could prevent and eliminate pulmonary embolisms or support the structural integrity of fibrin.
One of the key mutations seen in the 'Alpha variant' of SARS-CoV-2 - the deletion of two amino acids, H69/V70 - enables the virus to overcome chinks in its armor as it evolves, say an international team of scientists.

SARS-CoV-2 is a coronavirus, so named because spike proteins on its surface give it the appearance of a crown ('corona'). The spike proteins bind to ACE2, a protein receptor found on the surface of cells in our body. Both the spike protein and ACE2 are then cleaved, allowing genetic material from the virus to enter the host cell. The virus manipulates the host cell's machinery to allow the virus to replicate and spread.

As SARS-CoV-2 divides and replicates, errors in its genetic makeup cause it to mutate. Some mutations make the virus more transmissible or more infectious, some help it evade the immune response, potentially making vaccines less effective, while others have little effect.

Towards the end of 2020, Cambridge scientists observed SARS-CoV-2 mutating in the case of an immunocompromised patient treated with convalescent plasma. In particular, they saw the emergence of a key mutation - the deletion of two amino acids, H69/V70, in the spike protein. This deletion was later found in B1.1.7, the variant that led to the UK being forced once again into strict lockdown in December (now referred to as the 'Alpha variant').

Now, in research published in the journal Cell Reports, researchers show that the deletion H69/V70 is present in more than 600,000 SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences worldwide, and has seen global expansion, particularly across much of Europe, Africa, and Asia.

The research was led by scientists at the University of Cambridge, MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research, The Pirbright Institute, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, and Vir Biotechnology.

Professor Ravi Gupta from the Cambridge Institute of Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Disease at the University of Cambridge, the study's senior author, said: "Although we first saw this mutation in an immunocompromised patient and then in the Kent - now 'Alpha' - variant, when we looked at samples from around the world, we saw that this mutation has occurred and spread multiple times independently."

Working under secure conditions, Professor Gupta and colleagues used a 'pseudotype virus' - a harmless virus that displays SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins with the H69/V70 deletion - to understand how the spike protein interacts with host cells and what makes this mutation so important.

When they tested this virus against blood sera taken from fifteen individuals who had recovered from the infection, they found that the deletion did not allow the virus to 'escape' neutralizing antibodies made after being vaccinated or after a previous infection. Instead, the team found that the deletion makes the virus twice as infective - that is, at breaking into the host's cells - like a virus that dominated global infections during the latter half of 2020. This was because virus particles carrying the deletion had a greater number of mature spike proteins on their surface. This allows the virus to then replicate efficiently even when it has other mutations that might otherwise hinder the virus.

When viruses replicate, any mutations they acquire can act as a double-edged sword: a mutation that enables the virus to evade the immune system might, for example, affect how well it is able to replicate." Ravi Gupta, Study's Senior Author and Professor, Cambridge Institute of Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Disease, University of Cambridge

"What we saw with the H69/V70 deletion was that in some cases, the deletion helped the virus compensate for the negative effects that came with other mutations which allowed the virus to escape the immune response. In other words, the deletion allowed these variants to have their cake and eat it - they were both better at escaping immunity and more infectious."

Dr. Dalan Bailey from The Pirbright Institute, who co-led the research, added: "In evolutionary terms, when a virus develops a weakness, it can lead to its demise, but the H69/V70 deletion means that the virus is able to mutate further than it otherwise would. This is likely to explain why these deletions are now so widespread."

Bo Meng from the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge, the first author of the paper, said: "Understanding the significance of key mutations is important because it enables us to predict how a new variant might behave in humans when it is first identified. This means we can implement public health and containment strategies early on."

The research was supported by Wellcome, the Medical Research Council, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre.
The first two COVID-19 vaccines authorized for emergency use by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) employed a technology that had never before been used in FDA-approved vaccines. Both vaccines performed well in clinical trials, and both have been widely credited with reducing disease, but concerns remain over how long immunity induced by the new vaccine technology will last.

Now, a study from researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, published June 28 in the journal Nature, has found evidence that the immune response to such vaccines is both strong and potentially long-lasting.

Nearly four months after the first dose, people who received the Pfizer vaccine still had so-called germinal centers in their lymph nodes churning out immune cells directed against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Germinal centers, which form as the result of natural infection or vaccination, are boot camps for immune cells, a place where inexperienced cells are trained to better recognize the enemy and weapons are sharpened. A better germinal center response may equal a better vaccine.

Moreover, vaccination led to high levels of neutralizing antibodies effective against three variants of the virus, including the Beta variant from South Africa that has shown some resistance to vaccines. Vaccination induced stronger antibody responses in people who had recovered from SARS-CoV-2 infection compared to those who had never been infected.

In April, both Pfizer and Moderna reported that their vaccines provided at least six months of protection. Their reports were based on tracking whether vaccinated people came down with COVID-19. Other groups have monitored antibody levels in the blood and concluded that the vaccine provides at least months of protection. But nobody had looked to see how the immune response was developing in the body, which could provide important clues to the strength and persistence of the immune response without requiring years of follow-up.

Germinal centers are the key to a persistent, protective immune response. Germinal centers are where our immune memories are formed. And the longer we have a germinal center, the stronger and more durable our immunity will be because there's a fierce selection process happening there, and only the best immune cells survive. We found that germinal centers were still going strong 15 weeks after the vaccine's first dose. We're still monitoring the germinal centers, and they're not declining; in some people, they're still ongoing. This is truly remarkable." Ali Ellebedy, PhD, Study Senior Author and Associate Professor of pathology and Immunology, of Medicine and of Molecular Microbiology, School of Medicine, Washington University

Scientists don't fully understand why some vaccines, such as the one for smallpox, induce strong protection that lasts a lifetime, while others, such as the vaccine for whooping cough, require regular boosters. But many suspect that the difference lies in the quality of the germinal centers induced by different vaccines.

The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were created with mRNA technology. Unlike most vaccines, which provide bits of viral or bacterial proteins to trigger an immune response, mRNA-based vaccines provide instructions for the body to build and release foreign proteins, such as the spike protein in the case of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

To assess whether this new kind of vaccine induces a good germinal center response, Ellebedy and co-first author Jackson Turner, PhD, an instructor in pathology & immunology, teamed up with co-senior author Rachel Presti, MD, PhD, an associate professor of medicine, and co-first author Jane O'Halloran, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of medicine, and started the study once the first COVID-19 vaccine became available in mid-December 2020.

The team enlisted the help of co-authors Sharlene Teefey, MD, and William Middleton, MD, both professors of radiology, to perform ultrasound-guided sampling of the minuscule germinal centers in lymph nodes in the armpit. Teefey and Middleton extracted cells from 14 people who received the Pfizer vaccine. Samples were obtained three weeks after the first dose (just prior to administration of the second dose), and at weeks four, five and seven. Ten of the participants gave additional samples 15 weeks after the first dose. None of the participants previously had been infected with the virus that causes COVID-19.

Three weeks after the first dose, all 14 participants had formed germinal centers with B cells producing antibodies that target a key SARS-CoV-2 protein. The response expanded greatly after the booster shot and then stayed high. Even 15 weeks after the first dose, eight of 10 people still had detectable germinal centers containing B cells targeting the virus.

"This is evidence of a really robust immune response," Presti said. "Your immune system uses germinal centers to perfect the antibodies so they can bind well and last as long as possible. The antibodies in the blood are the end result of the process, but the germinal center is where it is happening."

The researchers also obtained blood samples from 41 people who received the Pfizer vaccine, including eight who previously had been infected with the virus that causes COVID-19. Samples were obtained prior to the administration of each dose of the vaccine, as well as at weeks four, five, seven and 15 after the first dose.

In people without prior exposure to the virus, antibody levels rose slowly after the first dose and peaked one week after the second. People who previously had been infected already had antibodies in their blood before the first dose. Their levels shot up quickly after the first dose and peaked higher than the uninfected participants' levels.

"We didn't set out to compare the effectiveness of vaccination in people with and without a history of infection, but when we looked at the data we could see an effect," O'Halloran said. "If you've already been infected and then you get vaccinated, you get a boost to your antibody levels. The vaccine clearly adds benefit, even in the context of prior infection, which is why we recommend that people who have had COVID-19 get the vaccine.
Nanotechnology is widely employed in diagnostic and therapeutic applications both outside the body and in vivo. In particular, it is used in the form of biosensors and drug delivery agents, many of which are applicable in combating severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection. Nanomaterials additionally possess antimicrobial and antiviral properties when applied to physical objects, potentially aiding long-term in suppressing the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.

In a review paper published in the open-access MDPI journal Viruses, a team of researchers explored the potential of nanotechnology to alleviate the current and future coronavirus burden. The team focused on its potential role in the detection, diagnosis, protection, and treatment of SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Biosensors

Nanoparticles can act as sensitive biosensors that indicate the presence of a molecule of interest in a sample colorimetrically or fluorimetrically. Currently, detection of SARS-CoV-2 in a sample requires extensive PCR amplification steps followed by detection by enzyme assay, while nanoparticle detection systems may allow these costly steps to be avoided. Colloidal gold nanoparticles, for example, absorb light most strongly at a particular wavelength of light, giving them their distinctive red color. Aggregation of these particles into clusters, induced by the presence of the molecule of interest via complimentary ligand binding, causes a recognizable shift in color towards purple, allowing them to act as a sensitive biosensor. The ligand bound to the particle may be an antibody or DNA that is known to form a strong bond with the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein or viral RNA, respectively.

Involving computational detection allows greater sensitivity than can be seen by the human eye, and similar detection systems have been developed with fluorescent particles that bind with the spike protein in a sample and allow detection following only 5 minutes of incubation, with no viral RNA amplification. Electrical biosensors that do not rely on colorimetric detection have also been developed, one utilizing the change in electric potential caused across a graphene sheet upon the binding of an immobilized SARS-CoV-2 antibody with the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, providing highly sensitive detection.

Protection

Many nanomaterials are inherently antimicrobial and antiviral; metallic nanoparticles often express differing properties than their bulk counterparts. Silver and copper nanoparticles are well known for these properties, exerted through the generation of reactive oxygen species and by damaging the cell membrane of nearby pathogens. However, carbon-based nanostructures have also been seen to inhibit bacterial growth. For example, hydrophobic nanowhisker coating on a fabric surface prevents moisture adsorption and prevents bacterial adhesion.

Incorporating these technologies into commonly touched surfaces, face masks, and other personal protective equipment (PPE) could significantly reduce the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 by lowering the time that the virus can survive on such surfaces. Silver, gold, magnesium oxide, copper oxide, titanium oxide, and zinc oxide nanoparticles have each demonstrated an ability to be successfully used as a coating for many surface types, suppressing pathogen growth. Specific to SARS-CoV-2, copper nanoparticle-coated cardboard materials have demonstrated better suppression than otherwise commonly employed plastic or stainless steel implements in hospitals. Hydrophobic copper nanoparticle emulsions can be sprayed onto surfaces providing long-lasting protection to a wide range of materials, from wood to metals.

Therapy and Vaccines

Nanoparticle drug delivery systems generally offer greater retention time within the body than free drugs alone and greater target specificity thanks both to the high level of chemical customization possible to the nanoparticle surface and the innate physical properties of the particles themselves.

For example, nano-sized objects have a propensity to accumulate in areas of inflammation, becoming trapped and encouraging cell uptake in these tissues. This subsequently allows for a lowered frequency and volume of drug administration, resulting in fewer off-target effects. Drugs that are otherwise poorly bioavailable can be improved by incorporation into a nanocarrier. This allows them to better cross the intestinal membrane if administered orally and better cross the cell membrane into the target cell once in position.

Recently deployed COVID-19 vaccines utilize nanoparticle delivery systems, also acting as an adjuvant to stimulate an immune response in the case of the Moderna vaccine, which employs a chimpanzee adenovirus vector. The Pfizer vaccine instead uses liposomes as an mRNA delivery system, which can easily cross the cell membrane thanks to the lipophilic nature of the particle.

Future perspectives

While nanotechnology has advanced significantly in recent decades, many of the technologies described here are in their infancy, having only been deployed in a research context prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nanotechnology-based approaches do allow for fast and precise diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2, however, in addition to allowing for the production of more effective PPE and disinfectants. Lipid nanoparticles are already utilized in the major COVID-19 vaccine to deliver mRNA successfully.

Future use could include the delivery of traditional antiviral agents or biomolecules that allow for protein editing and gene therapy. In vivo biosensors for SARS-CoV-2 could also be realized using nanotechnology, indicating the specific location and magnitude of SARS-CoV-2 infection in the body. This could be done through combining MRI with magnetic nanosensors, contrast-based imaging with dense particles of any material, or optical imaging using color- or fluorimetrically sensitive particles that are tagged with a SARS-CoV-2-binding ligand.
Public opinion surveys could be used more widely to understand regional variation in vaccine hesitancy, experts have recommended.

The research shows vaccine uptake rates for childhood vaccines are significantly lower in regions where hesitancy observed in mass public opinion surveys is more pronounced.

This data is often not widely available, which makes it challenging for experts to analyse the links between attitudes and real-world behaviour. The study says this data should be used by public health officials to understand where vaccines are more likely to be rejected, and who should be the target of information campaigns.

The research published in the journal Vaccine, was carried out by Dr Florian Stoeckel and Professor Jason Reifler from the University of Exeter, Professor Ben Lyons from the University of Utah and Charlie Carter from the London School of Economics.

They analysed regional level data for the EU from 2019 for the uptake of various childhood vaccines in 177 regions of 20 European countries - DTP3 (diphtheria, tetanus toxoids, and pertussis), MCV1 (the first dose of the measles-containing vaccine), and MCV2 (second dose of the measles vaccine) for 2019. Data on vaccine hesitancy was taken from the Eurobarometer survey of Spring 2019, which included about 1,000 respondents from each EU country except for Luxembourg, Cyprus, and Malta, where about 500 individuals were interviewed.

Our analysis shows public opinion surveys can play a valuable role in public health as a tool to understand immunization behavior. It is currently high time for more opinion surveys on citizens' attitudes towards vaccines. Assessing the link between survey responses and actual uptake is important, because public opinion survey data on vaccine hesitancy is only useful if it is in fact related to behavior." Dr Florian Stoeckel, University of Exeter

"We found statistically significantly lower regional vaccine immunization rates in regions where vaccine hesitancy is more pronounced. Surveys can be used to observe where vaccine uptake is likely to be low (when vaccine uptake data is incomplete) and to learn from regions with high uptake (despite high vaccine hesitancy) so that best practices could be applied elsewhere."

Vaccine uptake for the childhood vaccines that we examined differs both between countries and within countries. Most national uptake rates of the childhood vaccines examined are above 90 percent. For instance, average national level uptake of the MCV1 vaccine varies between 85.94 percent in Cyprus and 99.87 percent in Hungary. However, there is a considerable amount of variation within countries. Uptake of MCV1 in Croatia ranges from 73.24 percent to 98.38 percent.

The analysis shows average country level vaccine hesitancy is lowest in Denmark and highest in Latvia. The least vaccine hesitant sub-national region in Latvia is more vaccinate hesitant than the most vaccine-hesitant region in Denmark.
A team of scientists from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) has developed a test kit for malaria that delivers results in 30 minutes. The kit could facilitate the diagnosis of malaria in the field, as the equipment needed is anticipated to be lightweight, easy-to-use, and able to detect the disease in its early stages.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), an estimated 229 million people suffered from malaria in 2019. The disease, transmitted by mosquitoes, caused the deaths of 409,000 people across 87 mainly developing countries.

Efforts to treat and control malaria in developing countries and rural areas are hindered by high cost and the lack of infrastructure. Rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) for malaria are unable to detect infections during the early stages of the disease, but can give false positive or negative results. They also do not determine the severity of the infection.

Compared to current solutions, the NTU-developed test kit is able to detect malaria infections even when the number of parasites in the blood are low, especially during the early stages of the disease. It is also able to quantify the number of parasites in every test, which allows physicians to monitor their patients' progress in fighting the disease." Liu Quan, Study Lead and Associate Professor, School of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

"We hope this could help in malaria control and elimination. The goal of our test was to reduce the reliance on lab equipment for the detection of malaria, which is an important step towards malaria field diagnosis. We had a simple goal in mind - to find a tool that can be produced at a low cost and was accurate enough to do quick screening."

Assessing the test, Professor Laurent Renia, Director of the Respiratory and Infectious Diseases Programme at NTU's Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine who was not part of the study, said: "The NTU test kit would help fill the gap in malaria detection for a tool that is accurate, sensitive, fast and cheap. As the team's test kit would be easily deployable, operable without extensive training, and would not rely on the usage of microscopes, it could be useful for malaria specialists that are conducting research remotely or clinicians without access to laboratory equipment."

The study was published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Sensors and Actuators B: Chemical in May. The NTU team has filed a patent application for their technology, on top of an earlier patent they obtained in 2017.

Digested blood - the key to the test's effectiveness

Microscopic examination of blood infected with malaria parasites remains the current global benchmark to confirm an infection. However, this requires microscopes and a level of expertise to conduct the process, which are both often not available in many health facilities in several malaria-endemic countries and rural areas.

The made-in-NTU test kit could reduce researchers' reliance on complex laboratory equipment as it would only require a blood sample and water to operate (see Image 1). The kit works by detecting hemozoin, a by-product formed from the digestion of blood by malaria parasites, which is a unique indicator of the disease.

First, ten microlitres of a patient's blood, which is less than a drop of water, is mixed with water to force red blood cells to release the parasites contained.

A pump within the test kit then sucks in the blood mixture to bring it in contact with several chemical patches, which cause hemazoin to light up. The flashes of light are then picked up by a detector, known as a Raman spectrometer, which determines whether an infection is present or not, as well as its severity.

To validate the accuracy of the test kit, the researchers loaded human blood infected with malaria parasites into the chip. The test could detect early stage parasites at a level of 125 parasites per microlitre of blood, which is a higher sensitivity than currently available rapid diagnostic tests.

The researchers estimate that each test would cost about US$1 per chip to manufacture and at this price would facilitate low-cost point-of-care field testing on a large scale.

The team hopes to find an industry partner to work with and to conduct further trials on their malaria test kit to improve its sensitivity and functionality.
Rice University scientists are starting small as they begin to figure out how to build an artificial brain from the bottom up.

Electrical and computer engineer Jacob Robinson of Rice's Brown School of Engineering and Celina Juliano, an assistant professor of molecular and cellular biology at the University of California, Davis, have won a $1 million Keck Foundation grant to advance the team's synthetic neurobiology effort to define the connections between neurons and muscles that drive programmed behaviors in living animals.

To begin with, Robinson and his colleagues are putting their faith in a very small animal, the freshwater cnidarian Hydra vulgaris, a tiny tentacled creature that has long been a focus of study in the Robinson and Juliano labs. Because they are small, squishy and transparent, they're easy to manipulate and measure through Robinson's custom microfluidic platforms.

Combined with the Juliano lab's cell type-specific genetic manipulation techniques, Robinson's team, part of Rice's Neuroengineering Initiative, hopes its high-throughput neural and behavioral recording technologies will allow the researchers to improve their understanding of how neural pathways regulate hydra behavior.

We've built a lot of the infrastructure to work with the animals in the lab to measure their neural activity and their behaviors. We also use computational techniques to automate the process, which allows us to look at many animals in parallel and get large quantities of data." Jacob Robinson, Electrical and Computer Engineer, Brown School of Engineering, Rice University

"The next big leap will be to edit the animal's nervous systems, and that's what this award will help support," he said. "For example, if we want to create a synthetic connection between two neurons, we could make specific neurons in the animal express a neuropeptide signaling molecule. We could then engineer another group of neurons, or even the muscle cells, to express the receptor for that signaling molecule.

"Then we'll have made a new organism with a connection between two cells that don't normally connect," he said. "In principal, we can build on this concept to make more complicated networks and designer neural circuits. As an engineer, I like to think of these connections between neurons like electronic circuits. If we can wire them up by design we should be able to program behaviors from scratch."

Because hydra reproduce both sexually and asexually, the labs expect they'll be able to create colonies of custom hydra for analysis.

Robinson ultimately hopes to design and build soft, self-healing "biorobots," as well as to create and repair organs and tissues that require functioning neural circuitry, in this case, "designer circuits" like biological oscillators, switches and logic gates that will "enable rational design of complex behaviors."

The W. M. Keck Foundation was established in 1954 in Los Angeles by William Myron Keck, founder of The Superior Oil Co. One of the nation's largest philanthropic organizations, the foundation supports outstanding science, engineering and medical research. The foundation also supports undergraduate education and maintains a program within Southern California to support arts and culture, education, health and community service projects.
A new study in Annals of Emergency Medicine highlights the importance of protecting physician residents--early-career doctors still in training--and emergency care teams from incidents of physical or verbal abuse.

The survey of 123 physicians, residents, and staff in one emergency department found that 78 percent of all health care workers experienced a violent assault in the prior 12 months, including more than one in five (22 percent) emergency physician residents. Eighty-nine percent of residents experienced verbal assault by a patient in the prior 12 months, compared to 80 percent of other health care workers.

Violent or threatening incidents in the emergency department pose risks to everyone's safety but can also impact health workers' mental health and may increase the likelihood of burnout. These encounters happen frequently and often go unreported." Lauren Querin, MD, MS, Study Lead Author and Emergency Physician, Chapel Hill Department of Emergency Medicine, University of North Carolina

Of the total respondents who experienced physical assault or violence, 19 percent did not discuss the incident with anyone. About half (53 percent) only discussed the incident with colleagues while only 20 percent filed a formal incident report with the hospital or police. Among residents, 96 percent discussed incidents with only a colleague or no one at all. None of the residents filed formal reports.

Residents' experience with assault became more common with time in the program, the analysis shows. Sixty-two percent of first year residents and 100 percent of second- and third-year residents experienced verbal assault. While no first-year residents reported a physical assault, 25 percent of second-year residents and 36 percent of third-year residents indicated that they have been physically assaulted.

"More can be done to make sure that every member of the emergency care team can prioritize patient care rather than worrying about their own safety at work," said RJ Sontag, MD, president of the Emergency Medicine Residents' Association (EMRA). "This study looks at one emergency department but stories like these are common nationwide. We must empower residents and others to report these incidents and take the necessary steps to protect health care workers and patients."

Only 24 percent of the residents believe that workplace violence protocols in place at their facility are adequate while 30 percent do not think the protections are sufficient and 38 percent were unsure. Eight percent were not certain what the protocols were.

Anonymous firsthand accounts of violence, sexual assault, or personal threats are detailed in the analysis:

One resident reported that a patient being discharged threatened to "come find me and shoot me in the kneecaps."

Another resident commented, "I was not only scared for myself and other staff...but also scared regarding the injuries the patient would sustain and I would need to treat."
The use of transparent masks during communication increases comprehension of speech by about 10% for people with hearing loss and people with normal hearing, according to a study published in the journal Ear and Hearing.

The study was conducted at the University of Texas in Dallas (USA), with the participation of Regina Tangerino, a professor at the University of Sao Paulo's Bauru Dental School (FOB-USP) in Brazil, and with support from Sao Paulo Research Foundation - FAPESP.

Our findings show that wearing a transparent mask can facilitate communication for everyone, minimizing stress and improving interaction. Protection obviously has to be the primary concern, and no clear models with proven effectiveness are sold in Brazil right now." Regina Tangerino, Professor, University of Sao Paulo's Bauru Dental School, Brazil

In the US, she explained, two models of mask with a see-through portion in the mouth area have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). "One of our aims is calling attention to the importance of the topic," she said.

The study began early in the pandemic, in 2020, when the group posted on the internet a set of videos lasting 40 minutes, with Tangerino voicing several utterances against background noise without a mask, wearing a mask with a clear mouth panel, and wearing an opaque fabric mask.

The study used 154 volunteers recruited via social media or by email. They were divided into three groups based on whether they had normal hearing, or confirmed or suspected hearing loss (with or without cochlear implants or hearing aids). They were invited to watch the videos in a quiet place and to type what they understood after each sentence. They also had to rate their level of confidence in responding and how intensely they had to concentrate to understand what was said. Each volunteer's score was computed at the end.

On average, the volunteers in all three groups correctly understood 83.8% of the sentences spoken without a mask, 68.9% of utterances with a see-through mask, and 58.9% with an opaque mask.

"The difference of 10 percentage points [between the latter two averages] is statistically significant. This benefit applies to more than just comprehension: the participants also felt more self-confident and were able to follow what was said with less effort when the see-through mask was used," Tangerino said. "In another study, conducted in the UK with 460 participants, the researchers noted that opaque masks influenced fatigue, anxiety and emotions in both listeners and speakers."

Visual cues

To find out if the difference in comprehension between transparent and opaque masks was due to visual cues such as lip reading, acoustic differences between the recordings, or the tendency for some masks to muffle sound, a follow-up study using audio only was conducted with 29 volunteers, who were not told which sentences were recorded with or without a mask.

"In this case, the average performance was actually worse for sentences spoken with a clear mask than with an opaque mask, confirming the significance of visual cues in the first study. They helped listeners surmount the problem of muffled sound when a mask is worn," Tangerino said.

Production of transparent masks certified by ANVISA, the national health surveillance agency, should be stimulated in Brazil, she added. Currently, the only see-through type available is a vinyl mask, considered insufficiently effective to block transmission of the novel coronavirus.
Gov. Gavin Newsom routinely boasts that California has "one of the highest vaccination rates in the United States of America."

But Newsom, facing a recall election this fall, rarely mentions that the state's covid vaccine uptake has largely stagnated in Black and Latino neighborhoods hardest hit by the coronavirus, and in rural outposts where opposition to vaccines runs rampant. In these communities, deep distrust of government and the U.S. health care system has collided with the state's high-stakes effort to finish vaccinating its 34 million vaccine-eligible residents.

These are places where state health officials believe they can change a significant number of minds. But the Newsom administration is struggling to do so, public health experts say, hampered by its inconsistent and hastily developed public messaging and outreach campaign that relies too heavily on private advertising firms and companies such as Google and Blue Shield of California.

"Many people don't trust information being put out about vaccines because it's coming from private companies that have profit-seeking motives," said Dr. Tony Iton, a senior vice president at the California Endowment, which focuses on expanding health care access for Californians. Iton served as Alameda County's public health officer from 2003 to 2009.

What actually works, Iton and other public health experts say, are well-funded, locally designed operations led by organizations that have built trust with residents and are capable of going door to door to dispel vaccine mythology, such as local nonprofits, county health departments and community clinics.

But California's 61 local public health departments have been stunted by years of declining revenue, budget cuts and staff reductions that have stymied their ability to conduct the expensive and time-consuming public health outreach campaigns necessary to combat vaccine skepticism and hesitancy.

"When something like covid-19 comes along, local knowledge is absolutely invaluable in reaching every pocket of that community, particularly in building trust in vulnerable populations," Iton said. "The state doesn't have that, Google doesn't have that, and certainly Blue Shield doesn't have that."

Even the Newsom administration's internal polling shows its efforts are faltering.

"The resounding barrier to vaccination," state officials wrote in the latest survey published in June, "has been confusion as a result of inconsistent, contradictory or insufficient messaging from government and public health officials."

Statewide, nearly 60% of Californians are fully vaccinated, but progress is uneven. Just 39% of eligible Black residents and 40% of Latinos had been vaccinated as of Friday, and local public health officials are intensely worried about regions like the Central Valley, where vaccination rates have stalled, especially given the threat of covid's dangerous delta variant. Similar disparities exist by geography, across regions and even among neighborhoods.

The state's vaccine holdouts make up a cohort that cuts across political and geographic ideologies and is dominated by Latinos, African Americans, rural residents and young people. Unlike outright vaccine "rejecters," who lean Republican, undecideds align with Democrats, according to state polling.

State officials are trying to change the minds of both "undecideds" and "rejecters," and are relying primarily on vaccine lotteries with giveaways totaling $116.5 million or vacation packages, and glitzy advertising campaigns featuring paid social media influencers. The state has awarded two $40 million contracts to high-dollar ad agencies for vaccine outreach and education.

Companies including Facebook, Google, Comcast and TikTok are providing free advertising on social media, radio and TV, and making charitable contributions to help the state fund its public education campaigns, state records show.

Lackluster vaccination uptake drove the Newsom administration to pursue the more personal approach that public health experts favor, but the still-nascent campaign leaves out large swaths of the state. The administration launched its "Get Out the Vax" campaign in April, enlisting 70 community-based organizations and 2,000 community canvassers, now focused on Los Angeles and Central Valley neighborhoods where vaccinations have plateaued or declined.

But county public health officials say the campaign isn't big enough to combat the vaccine misinformation that has infiltrated regions such as California's rural north.

"It's terrible," said Placer County's health officer, Dr. Rob Oldham, who said misinformation is driving vaccines down. "Unfortunately, the lottery didn't really help us. We're working so much harder to get a dozen people vaccinated, whereas before we were doing close to 1,500 shots a day."

State Health and Human Services Secretary Mark Ghaly acknowledged that the state must boost its presence on the ground and said it "needs to do better and more." At the same time, he and other state officials argue that the vaccine lottery is working and that they are seeing progress in hard-hit neighborhoods.

This month the state debuted pop-up vaccine clinics at McDonald's restaurants in 11 counties, and state-funded outreach workers have fanned out in neighborhoods such as South Los Angeles to sign people up for appointments or vaccinate takers from a roving van. Vaccine canvassers report that the people who don't want the vaccines say they're concerned about safety or repeat sometimes outrageous rumors, such as the false assertion that vaccines turn people into zombies.

"We're seeing lots of disinformation and lack of a sense of urgency," said Yolanda Richardson, secretary of the California Government Operations Agency and Newsom's "vaccination czar." "The work that we have left to do is really finding out what each individual person needs to make that jump."

Carnella Marks of Oroville, in Butte County, offers a telling case of how hard public health officials must work to cut through the thick swamp of misinformation and confusion.

Marks, 51, who is Black, has deep misgivings about the safety of the vaccines that are rooted in the country's racist history and her personal experience: When she was pregnant with her second child, her doctor suggested she get a hysterectomy even though she wasn't ready to stop having kids and had no health complications. She wonders if the U.S. government is experimenting on Black people, as it did on African American men in the Tuskegee syphilis study from the 1930s into the 1970s.

"Why do they want us to take the vaccine so bad?" Marks asked. "We've never been first in line for anything, but now all of a sudden you want to make sure that the African American community gets the vaccine?"

She had considered getting vaccinated because she thought it might be required for work  until government officials paused the single-dose Johnson & Johnson shot over concerns it caused blood clots.

"I don't care what kind of money the governor is shelling out to get me to take the vaccine," said Marks, who wants to discuss the safety of the vaccines with someone who knows. But "nobody's knocking on my door to talk to me or answer my questions."

Public health experts say it could be possible to change the minds of people like Marks with targeted and relentless outreach by trusted members of the community who acknowledge their fears and mistrust of the medical system. A knock on the door or phone call from an epidemiologist who can explain the science behind vaccinations couldn't hurt, they added.

"So many of these people really aren't vaccine hesitant; they're just trying to figure out the facts for themselves and get their questions answered," said Oldham of Placer County.

But the county can't afford its own campaign, so Oldham said it "Placerizes" state material, adapting messaging for its residents.

"What we've seen from the state, frankly, is a lack of investment and interest in public health," he said. "I think it builds trust when you have the resources to call people back and tailor a message, but honestly we don't really have that capacity."

Some counties have committed scarce funds to develop ads targeting populations among whom distrust runs rampant, an effort they say has helped boost vaccination rates. Santa Clara County, for instance, has plowed at least $8.6 million into an outreach campaign and public service announcements related to covid since March 2020, including Spanish-language ads targeting the county's large Latino population.

Health officer Dr. Sara Cody said the county has also enlisted the help of local health clinics, nonprofit groups and county employees of various ethnicities to develop messages that might persuade people to get vaccinated.

"We are extraordinarily fortunate," Cody said. "That investment turned out to be one of the most useful. People do have fears, and we want to hear them."

About 73% of the county's population is fully vaccinated, while other counties with fewer public health resources, like Placer, have struggled to mount effective campaigns. There, about 48% of residents are fully vaccinated.

Vaccine canvassers say they are making progress by using personal stories and discussing the science behind the vaccines.

Ricardo Marquez, a state-funded vaccine outreach worker in South Los Angeles, said he has changed minds.

"Sometimes facts and science work, but sometimes people who don't believe change their minds when I tell them people are dying, like my sweet grandma," Marquez said.

This story was produced by KHN, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation.
Gilbert J. Rake, 88, of Bonita Springs, FL passed away on Wednesday, June 30, 2021 with his loving wife by his side. He was born in Starlight, IN, son of Henry and Catherine Rake. Gil proudly served his country in the United States Army. Following the service, he worked as an accountant with
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(Newser)  California has added five more states to its state-funded travel ban list, for a total of 17 since the state started the practice in 2017. Arkansas, Florida, Montana, North Dakota, and West Virginia are now on the list thanks to what California Attorney General Rob Bonta referred to Monday as their "dangerous" laws discriminating against LGBTQ+ people, CNN reports. Assembly Bill 1887 bars state entities from requiring employees to travel to states on the list, and bars California from approving state-funded or state-sponsored travel to those places, though exemptions do exist for things like travel that is necessary to maintain grant funding or licensure, or to protect public health.

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The ban also does not apply to personal travel. In the past, California has been criticized for the list, with Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt banning all non-essential state travel to California in retaliation for being placed on the list and Texas last year asking the Supreme Court to block AB 1887. In his statement Monday, Bonta said the states that have been added have recently established laws that "directly work to ban transgender youth from playing sports, block access to life-saving care, or otherwise limit the rights of members of the LGBTQ+ community." Per Politico, the other states on the list are Alabama, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Texas. (Read more California stories.)
(Newser)  Authorities are investigating three young children's deaths in Southern California as suspicious and their mother was detained for questioning on Monday, the AP reports. The children, two boys and a girl who are all under 3 years old, were found inside a bedroom in their East Los Angeles home around 12:45pm after a family member called for help, according to Los Angeles County Sheriff's Lt. Chuck Calderaro. They were not breathing and efforts to revive them were not successful. Their 28-year-old mother is being questioned, Calderaro said. Per ABC 7, she is considered a person of interest.

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Other people who were in the home at the time and may have seen what occurred will also be interviewed. The children's father was not there at the time, but ABC 7 reports at least one other family member was. Calderaro said it was not immediately clear what caused the deaths and autopsies will be conducted. There were "no obvious signs of how they died, he said. Preliminary information revealed no prior reports of abuse or child neglect at the home, the sheriff's department said. Family members say one of the children was just six months old. (Another California mother is accused of killing her three children in April.)
(Newser)  "There was hate in this man's heart." That's what Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins said Monday of the man who shot and killed two Black people in Winthrop, Mass., on Saturday, identified as 28-year-old Nathan Allen. "Whether that was the only reason he did what he did, we're not going to be fully sure," Rollins said at a press conference, per Boston.com. "But I can tell you Im certain of his language, in his own handwriting, and certain of the fact that the two people that were murdered are Black." Allenwho had a firearm license and no criminal historystole a plumbing truck, crashed it into a building, then opened fire in the street, killing 60-year-old Air Force veteran Ramona Cooper and 68-year-old David Green, a retired state trooper. White bystanders say the shooter spared their lives before he was killed by an officer when his gun jammed, per the Boston Globe.

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Rollins said Allen's writings described white people as "apex predators" and included drawings of swastikas. She said he held "very disturbing beliefs, white supremacist beliefs, regarding members of our Jewish population, as well as Black individuals." Authorities note he may have intended to target Jewish temples near the crash scene. In the end, Cooper was shot multiple times in the back while Green was shot repeatedly in the head, neck, and torso. Green's neighbor Bill Leach, who is white, says both he and Green watched Allen shoot Cooper, per the Globe. He says he was taking cover when the shooter appeared "right beside me" and "we stared at each other," per WCAU. He says he was spared but then found Green lying on the ground. Green's brother, Aria, says he believes the retired trooper tried to prevent the shooter from "shooting any more people." (Read more hate crime stories.)
(Newser)  Jacob Zuma's legal problems just worsened. Last month, the former president of South Africa pleaded not guilty to corruption, fraud, and other charges tied to a multibillion-dollar arms deal in 1999, when he was the deputy president. On Tuesday, the Constitutional Court of South Africa, the nation's highest court, found the 79-year-old guilty of contempt of court in another corruption case and sentenced him to 15 months in prison, CNN reports. The charges and sentencing are the result of Zuma refusing to show up before a commission to face questions about alleged corruption that took place while he was president, a term that stretched from 2009 to 2018. "No person is above the law ... whatever his rank or condition," Justice Sisi Khampepe noted in the court's ruling.

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She added: "An act of defiance in respect of a direct judicial order has the potential to precipitate a constitutional crisis." Zuma, who sang at Nelson Mandela's funeral in December 2013, wasn't in court and wasn't immediately taken into custody, per the New York Times, which notes the former president never even bothered to pull together any kind of defense on the contempt charges. South Africa's current president, Cyril Ramaphosa, is in the midst of a campaign to get rid of corruption in government, specifically in the governing African National Congress party. Per the BBC, the court has given Zuma five days to turn himself in to police; if he doesn't, his arrest will be ordered. A Zuma spokesperson tells local broadcaster eNCA that his legal team needs to review the ruling before making a statement, Reuters reports. The trial for his arms case, which has been repeatedly delayed due to the pandemic, is now set to start next month. (Read more Jacob Zuma stories.)
(Newser)  A Picasso painting that was stolen in January 2012 and has particular meaning to the Greek people has been recovered. The BBC reports the artist himself gave "Head of a Woman" to Greece in 1949 in honor of the country's resistance to the Nazis. Culture Minister Lina Mendoni said it would have been impossible for the thief to sell the painting because Picasso had written the following on the painting's rear: "For the Greek people, a tribute by Picasso." Said Mendoni, per the AFP, "This painting is of particular importance and sentimental value to the Greek people ... Today is a special day, [a day of] great joy and emotion." That painting was stolen with two others from the National Gallery in Athens and was found in Keratea, which sits about 30 miles to the southeast.

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The art heist was completed in just seven minutes and saw two other paintings also cut from their frames: Piet Mondrian's "Stammer Windmill," which was recovered alongside the Picasso, and a sketch by Guglielmo Caccia that was reportedly damaged during the course of the theft and discarded. Reuters reports one Greek man has been arrested after the paintings were found in a gorge. It's believed two men carried out the heist, which happened when just one security guard was working and involved the thieves triggering a false alarm in another part of the museum to draw the guard away, reports Reuters. A subsequent inquiry chided the museum for its lax security, with some parts of the museum not captured by security camera and alarms that didn't work reliably. (Read more Pablo Picasso stories.)
(Newser)  The man who jumped from a moving plane at Los Angeles International Airport on Friday not only broke his leghe's now facing up to two decades in federal prison. Mexican national Luis Antonio Victoria Dominguez allegedly told authorities he'd spent the previous days smoking "a lot" of crystal meth, which might be why he missed two earlier flights to Salt Lake City on Thursday and Friday, reports the Washington Post. The 33-year-old had arrived in Los Angeles on a flight from Cabo San Lucas on Tuesday, initially planning to take a bus to Utah. But after smoking the meth, he decided to fly instead, according to the US attorney's office for the Central District of California. When he finally boarded United Airlines Flight 5365 ahead of its 6:30pm departure time, he "was coming down from all the drugs he had used ... and immediately started to doze off," per the complaint.

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That's when Victoria Dominguez heard passengers behind him "talking about the flight going to a different city than Salt Lake City," per the complaint. He panicked, telling the woman seated next to him that he planned to jump out, per the Post. He "sprinted" to the front of the plane, "began banging on the cockpit door and manipulating the locked doorknob," then opened the front right emergency exit, deploying the emergency slide as the plane was taxiing, according to the complaint and an FBI affidavit, per KCBS. He made it out the door, despite a passenger's attempt to hold him by the collar, but he missed the slide, breaking his right leg in the fall to the tarmac, before attempting to crawl away. Victoria Dominguez, who later underwent surgery, is to appear in court this week. He faces up to 20 years in federal prison on a charge of interfering with the flight crew. (Read more weird crimes stories.)
(Newser)  The estranged brother of Robert Durst, the real estate heir on trial in his best friend's slaying, testified under threat of subpoena Monday that the two never got along and he feared his oldest sibling would kill him. "He'd like to murder me," Douglas Durst bluntly told jurors in Los Angeles County Superior Court, per the AP, noting he'd flown to California with a security detail. "I have a fear that my brother has threatened to kill me, and I fear that he may have the means to do so," said the chairman of the Durst Organization, one of New York's largest commercial real-estate firms. He said his brother, whom he last spoke to in 1999, was angry and bitter over an acrimonious inheritance settlement for tens of millions of dollars. Douglas Durst also described bad blood dating back to childhood. Yet he said "there are other places I'd much rather be" than testifying against his brother, who's on trial on charges of fatally shooting Susan Berman in 2000 at her Los Angeles home.

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Prosecutors say Berman provided an alibi for Robert Durst after he killed his first wife, Kathie, in 1982, and that he silenced his friend after she decided to tell police what she knew about the disappearance. Douglas Durst said Kathie Durst had told him she planned to seek a divorce. He added there was "no great anxiety" in his brother's tone when he later claimed his wife vanished three days after he put her on a train to New York City from their lakeside house in Westchester County, NY, in 1982. Robert Durst, who has pleaded not guilty to Berman's murder, said that was the last time he saw his wife. Douglas Durst said his brother told him he suspected a drug dealer. But he also disputed that $50,000 in checks that Robert Durst gave to Berman were out of generosity, saying everything had an ulterior motive. Prosecutors argue the killings of Berman and Morris Black, whom Robert Durst was found to have killed in self-defense in 2001, were part of a cover-up.

(Read more Robert Durst stories.)
(Newser)  The Justice Department is looking into whether Rudy Giuliani conducted lobbying for Turkey. Giuliani's activities involving Ukraine already are being investigated; that case is being handled separately, ABC reports. There was no comment yet from Giuliani or his lawyer, but the former personal lawyer for former President Trump has denied conducting lobbying for foreign entities in the past. The allegations involve requests made to Trump during his presidency; the issue is whether they were on behalf of Turkey's government. Giuliani asked Trump to extradite Fethullah Gulen, an exiled cleric, to Turkey, per the Hill. And Giuliani wanted Trump to drop federal charges against an Iranian-Turkish gold trader, Reza Zarrab; he was accused of helping a state-owned Turkish bank send $10 billion to Iran despite the US sanctions.

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Trump didn't do either. Giuliani hasn't publicly disclosed any such activities, but the Justice Department could make him do so, as well as register as a foreign agent. The Turkey investigation isn't criminal, but the Ukraine one is, per Bloomberg. Federal raids on Giuliani's home and office in April were reportedly connected to the Ukraine investigation. The New York Times reported in 2019 that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson objected at the time to any effort to get Zarrab released, saying that intervening in an open criminal case would be inappropriate. Giuliani called the reporting of his talks with Tillerson about Zarrab's case "a completely malicious story coming from the consistent attack on me to try to destroy my credibility," though he said attorney-client privilege prevented him from saying what the inaccuracies were. (Read more Rudy Giuliani stories.)
(Newser)  This years Canada Day is likely to be somber. The country is reeling from the discovery of the remains of children in hundreds of unmarked graves at former residential schools for Indigenous children. Adam North Peigan, president of Sixties Scoop Indigenous Society Albertaan organization of residential school survivorscalled on Canadians to use July 1 to participate in Indigenous-led celebrations and learn more about Canadas history, the Calgary Herald reports. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called for a time of reflection and asked for people to pledge to make Canada better.

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Some Canadians dont want the holiday canceled altogether, and want an opportunity to celebrate the countrys progress, the CBC reports. Indigenous activist Evans Yellow Old Woman disagrees. "If you knew that your neighbor was grieving a lost loved one, you wouldnt throw a huge party in your backyard and set off fireworks," he says. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established in 2015 to investigate what happened at the residential schools. Murray Sinclair, who led the commission, says he thinks more than 10,000 children disappeared, the New York Times reports. Starting in the 19th century and into the 70s, Indigenous children were taken from their families and sent by the Canadian government to schools operated by churches to forcibly assimilate them. (Read more residential schools stories.)
(Newser)  South Dakota National Guard troops are being sent to Texas to help "secure" the border with Mexico, says Gov. Kristi Noem, the latest GOP governor to announce a border deployment. Florida, Iowa, and Nebraska are sending law enforcement officers, but Noem, a potential 2024 White House contender, says the National Guard is needed. "The border is a national security crisis that requires the kind of sustained response only the National Guard can provide," Noem said Tuesday, per the Hill. "We should not be making our own communities less safe by sending our police or Highway Patrol to fix a long-term problem."

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Noem said the initial deployment of 50 troops for 30 to 60 days will be funded by a private Republican donor. The governor said details of exactly what their mission will involve are still being finalized. Noem's office identified the donor as Willis and Reba Johnsons Foundation, founded by Tennessee-based billionaire Willis Johnson, a frequent GOP donor. Democratic state Sen. Reynold Nesiba accuses Noem of using a donor as "political cover" and says he is looking into whether it is legal to fund the deployment that way, the AP reports. "This could set a dangerous precedent to allow anonymous political donors to call the governor and dispatch the Guard whenever they want," Nesiba says. (Read more South Dakota stories.)
New Zealand has been usurped by the United States in Bloomberg's COVID Resilience Ranking - a list of the best and worst countries in the world to be during the coronavirus era.

The ranking looks at how major countries around the world are handling the pandemic, taking into account social and economic disruption, mortality and infection rates, freedom of movement and how the vaccine rollout is going.

A new criterion this month is 'reopening progress' - a measure of each economy's openness to the world - with two metrics introduced to capture the ease of moving in and out of a place and how much air travel has recovered.
The Supreme Court has dismissed Grace Millane's killer's application to appeal his conviction for her murder.



Jesse Kempson was found guilty in November 2019 of murdering the British backpacker in a central Auckland apartment after a date in December 2018. While he argued Millane's death was an accident during consensual rough sex, the jury decided otherwise. He was sentenced in February 2020 to life in prison, with a minimum non-parole period of 17 years.

The killer had name suppression until December last year when it was lifted following a ruling by the Supreme Court. It was also revealed at the time that he had been found guilty of a number of other violent offences relating to two other women.

An attempt to appeal both his conviction and sentence failed at the Court of Appeal last year, before Kempson then tried to take his case to the Supreme Court. However, his application was rejected on Tuesday.

"By their verdict, the jury showed that they were sure that if the applicant did not intend to kill the deceased, he at least intended to inflict bodily injury which he knew was likely to result in death," the Supreme Court said on Tuesday.

"The most that could be taken from the applicants account is that Ms Millane may have consented to the application of manual pressure to her neck for the purposes of sexual gratification. There is nothing in what the applicant told the police to suggest that she consented (or he believed she consented) to the infliction of bodily injury of a kind likely to kill her.

"For these reasons, albeit slightly differently expressed, the Court of Appeal was of the view the argument failed 'as a matter of fact'. We see no apparent error in this conclusion."

The court also said Kempson's actions following Millane's death - which included searching for pornography and taking intimate images of her body - "are not easily reconcilable with his innocent accident explanation".

"Nor are the actions that he later took to dispose of her body. Importantly, his narrative (such as it was) was not particularly congruent with the pathology evidence given at trial."

The full judgement can be found here.
Judith Collins says the proposed changes to hate speech laws are "a total cluster" and need to be scrapped

The National leader told The AM Show on Wednesday the Government has "no idea what it's talking about".

The Government last week published a discussion document that outlined plans to add religious groups and rainbow communities in beefed-up hate speech legislation.

The proposals also include a new criminal offence in the Crimes Act for inciting violence against listed groups, and a maximum penalty of three years in prison and a $50,000 fine.

Collins says the proposal threatens democracy, and is the Government being "opportunistic".

"Democracy requires us to have debates without people feeling insulted being able to criminalise people who make them feel insulted.

"It's a total cluster, frankly and the Government needs to stop this now and back away."

Collins is not the only MP to come out swinging against the proposed changes - ACT leader David Seymour also criticised the law change saying it could take the country down the wrong path.

"Outlawing insulting people based on political opinion belongs in North Korea, not New Zealand," he told Newshub.

Under the changes, a person would break the law if they intentionally stir up hatred by being threatening, abusive or even just insulting.
There's always a danger that first impressions don't hold but I'm happy to say that wasn't true of the Mi 11 Ultra once booted.

Even as a long-term iOS user, it didn't take me long to have my Google profile attached and when it became time to play around I was immediately grabbed by the TrueColor display.

A quick adjustment to the brightness - I find manual control over the screen much better than the adaptive adjustments most phones make - and it looked as good as any phone I've ever used.

Xiaomi phones use the heavily-customised MIUI Android ROM. I found it intuitive and the 12.5 update, which dropped near the end of my review period, made the overall experience better without it being a spectacular release. As it should be.

And so what about that impressive sounding camera package.

The Mi 11 Ultra has a 50MP main camera, combining both Xiaomi and Samsung technology. Xiaomi says the new GN2 primary image sensor is the largest in any smartphone and dual Pixel Pro technology on the main camera also allows the shooting of 8K videos.

Detailing all the specs would fill a few pages, but it's fair to say the Mi 11 Ultra is trying to be the best on the market and redefine what is possible with a smartphone camera.

So does it do that?

To my non-professional eyes it did fantastically well. I've often attracted comments about how good my photographs are with my iPhone camera and, believe me, that's solely down to the quality of the hardware and software. This was more than replicated here.
The Antarctic blast that's hitting New Zealand right now has the country divided, and not only geographically.

While the South Island freezes at temperatures at or around zero, Aucklanders are struggling with a daytime high of around eight.

It's also dividing those who love the cold, and those who don't. So, instead of tempting readers to a tropical island escape, here are some holiday destination options for lovers of the cold.

Lapland
Here's the latest on the pandemic from around the world overnight.

Asia-Pacific

Indonesia

Oxygen prices in Indonesia's capital had more than doubled and some suppliers reported shortages on Tuesday after a surge in COVID-19 cases that prompted the Red Cross to warn of a coronavirus "catastrophe" in Southeast Asia's biggest country.

Indonesia has announced record daily COVID-19 infections of more than 20,000 in recent days, in a new wave fuelled by the emergence of highly transmissible virus variants and increased mobility after the Muslim fasting month. Indonesia reported 20,467 more infections on Tuesday and 463 more deaths, bringing the totals to 2,156,465 cases and 58,024 deaths.

India

India's western state of Maharashtra is training thousands of health workers in how to care for children afflicted with COVID-19 as a first line of defence against surges involving new variants, health officials and experts said on Tuesday.

From 400,000 cases a day in May, daily new infections now stand at 37,566, health ministry data showed on Tuesday. The south Asian nation's official tally stands at 30.31 million, with a death toll of 397,637.

Australia

Australia reported a slight rise in COVID-19 infections on Tuesday, while officials in several states tightened movement curbs and pushed for vaccinations to limit flare-ups of the highly infectious Delta variant.
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This image shows how House lawmakers voted on the July 1 start date for the new budget bill to take effect. The House needed 27 votes, or a supermajority, for the so-called effective date to be approved.
Fairbanks, AK (99707)

Today

Partly cloudy skies early will give way to cloudy skies late. Low 53F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

Partly cloudy skies early will give way to cloudy skies late. Low 53F. Winds light and variable.
A Fourth of July parade is returning to downtown Fairbanks. The parade will start at 10 a.m. Saturday, July 3, 2021, at the Carlson Center, 2010 Second Ave., and end at Barnette Street. Metro Creative
Fairbanks, AK (99707)

Today

Mostly clear early then increasing cloudiness after midnight. Low 53F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

Mostly clear early then increasing cloudiness after midnight. Low 53F. Winds light and variable.
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Caption: Dr Al Zayani meets with Libyan counterpart Najla El-Mangoush on the sidelines of his participation in the ministerial meeting. He congratulated El-Mangoush on her appointment as the Minister of Foreign Affairs in the government of national unity, wishing her success in her duties. Minister Al Zayani noted the fraternal relations binding Bahrain and Libya, in light of the mutual keenness to enhance bilateral cooperation and joint coordination.

TDT | Manama

The Daily Tribune  www.newsofbahrain.com

Bahrain is fully committed to supporting the international community in all its efforts to defeat the terrorist Daesh group. This was emphasised by Foreign Affairs Minister Dr Abdullatif bin Rashid Al Zayani as he took part yesterday in the inaugural session of the Global Coalition to Defeat Daesh/ISIS ministerial meeting which was held in Rome.

The meeting was co-chaired by the US Secretary of State and the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and with the participation of a number of Foreign Ministers from the coalition member states. Dr Al Zayani delivered a speech in which he hailed holding the ministerial meeting, describing it as an opportunity to review the progress made by the coalition member states across the globe.

He hailed the updates and briefings on the efforts exerted to defeat Daesh, stressing the Kingdoms active participation in all efforts to defeat this terrorist organisation.

The Minister noted that the meeting is also an opportunity to highlight the potential effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the countries efforts, not only in how the past 18 months have influenced terrorist groups with ideas on biological weapons and exploiting the vulnerability in our international systems, but also in how the economic and social consequences can fuel desperation that extremists could take advantage of while looking for new recruits to join the organisation.

The Foreign Minister called for caution against new forms of terrorist attacks, biological attacks, drones, and other high-tech and low-cost threats, and to move to defeat both state and non-state sponsors of terrorism. He further stressed the importance of breaking this loop of despair and working to move towards positivity, peace and prosperity.

He underlined that the Kingdom of Bahrain would be at the forefront of such a process just as it has been in defeating Daesh. The Undersecretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Political Affairs, Dr Shaikh Abdulla bin Ahmed Al Khalifa, also participated in the meeting along with Bahrain Ambassador to Italy Dr Nasser Mohammed Al Balushi and the Chief of Strategic Affairs at the Foreign Ministry, Ambassador Nancy Abdulla Jamal.
TDT | Manama

The Daily Tribune  www.newsofbahrain.com

Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities (BACA) President Shaikha Mai bint Mohammed Al Khalifa yesterday visited the Kingdom of Bahrains National Pavilion at the Expo 2020 in Dubai. Shaikha Mai, who is also Commissioner-General of the Bahrain Pavilion, was briefed on the readiness of the structure after the completion of its construction on schedule, four months before the start of the global event.

BACA is fully prepared to participate in the expo, which is the largest event in the region, to share with the world Bahrains civilisational elements under the national pavilions slogan Density Weaves Opportunities.

Shaikha Mai affirmed that the Bahrain Pavilion, with its unique architectural design and rich cultural content, will constitute a platform for creating promising opportunities for Bahrain. The Bahraini youth will have a remarkable presence through the programmes of volunteers, musicians, artists and craftsmen.

The Bahrain Pavilion reviews the concept of density and its role in creating promising opportunities. Through a tangible and spatial experience, it explores the density and future possibilities of construction in an increasingly crowded world.

It was designed by architect Christian Kerez and in collaboration with the UAE-based Wanders Werner Falasi Consulting Architects. Expo 2020 Dubai Connecting Minds, Creating the Future originally was scheduled for 20 October 2020-10 April 2021. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it will now be held from October 1, 2021, to March 31, 2022.

It is expected to attract millions of visitors over the six months of its holding, and 70% of its visitors will be from abroad. This gives Bahrain a wider space to enhance its presence within an open commercial and economic environment.

Pavilion features

The pavilion forms an open and slightly submerged space on the site, accessed by a ramp that creates a transition between the outer and inner world of the pavilion. The structure of this central space consists of 126 columns, 11 centimetres thick and 24 metres high, connected to each other at several points along with the height of the space.

These columns support each other in addition to anchoring to the ceiling, in a poetic interpretation that illustrates principles of continuity and intensity in an exploration of three-dimensional possibilities inspired by the traditional geometric stucco decorations of heritage Bahraini architecture. This central space of the suite includes the main exhibition space, the gift shop, and the cafe, distributed liberally between the columns of the building that constitute the tangible spatial experience of the intensity of the suite.

The visitor experiences the space as if one were walking through a dense forest, where the exhibition and programme of the pavilion openly blended with the architecture of the building, which is based on columns made of steel, while the outer facade of the pavilion is made of aluminium, which represents one of the largest exports of Bahrain.

At the end of six months, the pavilion is scheduled to be completely dismantled and permanently reconstructed in Bahrain. The main exhibition element of Bahrains pavilion revolves around the textile industry as a metaphor for density.

The pavilion will display a live production of this craft, along with joint installation artworks produced and displayed in the exhibition space, and the works integrate handicrafts from the craft of textile and embroidery to palm frond weaving.

With innovative weaving techniques such as fibreglass and carbon fibres, emphasising the diversity of Bahraini folk handicrafts and the production of contemporary woven materials, as well as innovation and basic skills in the production process
TDT | Manama

The Daily Tribune  www.newsofbahrain.com

Cabinet Affairs Ministry Undersecretary His Highness Shaikh Isa bin Ali Al Khalifa praised the fruitful and constructive cooperation that exists between the Kingdom of Bahrain and UN Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat).

This came as HH Shaikh Isa received yesterday a delegation from the UN-Habitat Regional Office for the Arab States, led by its Director, Dr Erfan Ali.

Fernanda Leonardo nominated to head the programme office in Bahrain, and Amira Al Hassan, the programmes representative in Kuwait, were present.

The Undersecretary stressed that the comprehensive development process led by His Majesty King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa had a great priority in achieving sustainable development and sustainable urban development through the service projects in Bahrain.

His Highness noted the keenness of the esteemed government headed by His Royal Highness Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, the Crown Prince and Prime Minister, to raise the level of services and improving their quality, which was reflected in improving the standard of living of citizens, which is in the direction of achieving Bahrains Economic Vision 2030 and promoting the achievement of the 2030 sustainable development goals and the new urban agenda.

Dr Erfan praised the Kingdoms efforts in supporting the activities of the program at the regional and international levels, and its efforts to promote joint international action aimed at supporting sustainable urban development through its membership in the Executive Council for the programme.

He stressed the programmes readiness to support Bahrains efforts in achieving the new urban agenda, noting Bahrains status for being the only country in the GCC that is preparing a report on the progress made in implementing the new urban development goals, where the national reports will be presented at the special session of the United Nations General Assembly in April 2022.
TDT | Manama

The Daily Tribune  www.newsofbahrain.com

Bahrain hailed Italys hosting of the Ministerial Meeting of the Global Coalition to Defeat Daesh and praised the close friendly relations between the Kingdom of Bahrain and the Italian Republic, which are constantly developing in light of continued communication between officials from both sides.

Bahrain Foreign Minister Dr Abdullatif bin Rashid Al Zayani met his Italian counterpart Luigi Di Maio on the sidelines of the meeting.

Dr Al Zayani further stressed the importance of continued efforts to enhance joint cooperation at all levels.

Di Maio highlighted the distinguished Bahraini-Italian relations and their development in various fields, affirming the need to continue exerting efforts to enhance bilateral cooperation between the two sides.

The meeting reviewed means to enhance friendly relations between the two countries and develop joint cooperation and discussed political and security developments in the Middle East and further global and regional issues of common interest.

Bahraini Ambassador to Italy Dr Nasser Mohammed Al-Balushi and the Chief of Strategic Affairs Nancy Abdulla Jamal were present during the meeting.
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DANBURY  With fewer people seeking COVID-19 tests and vaccines, the Community Health Center is closing its statewide public COVID testing and mass vaccine sites at the end of Wednesday.

The Connecticut Institute for Communities is halting its public COVID testing at its Danbury site after Wednesday, but plans to continue to offer vaccines. CIC Health closed its five testing sites in Danbury, Bridgeport, Hartford, New Haven and Stamford on Sunday. Hartford HealthCares mega vaccine sites will close this week.

We have seen demand fall for testing, said Katie Curran, chief operating officer and general counsel for the Connecticut Institute for Communities, known as CIFC.

Only 400 tests were taken at that Danbury site in June, the lowest amount since CIFC began offering the service last year.

Statewide, the Community Health Center has provided about 1,000 tests daily, compared to 5,000 daily tests in January, said Leslie Gianelli, spokeswoman. Demand has declined as vaccination rates increased, she said.

In Bridgeport, 45.9 percent of residents have received their first dose, while 59.7 percent of Danbury residents have gotten their first dose. Greenwichs first dose percentage is 66.9 percent, New Havens is 51.25 percent, Norwalks is 64.9 percent and Stamfords is 67.4 percent.

Cases rates have fallen, with the states positivity rate at 0.56 percent on Tuesday. In Danbury, 10 positive tests were taken between June 21 to June 27 compared to 174 cases May 3 to May 9, according to city data.

But if cases were to rise, the organizations said they could make testing more broadly available again.

We work closely with the state, Gianelli said. If the need returns on a very broad-based basis, were always available to help the state with what the needs are.

Whats next?

Vaccines remain available at various permanent and pop-up clinics across the state, with health officials focusing on education and bringing shots directly to those who need them.

Tests will still be available for existing or new patients at CIFC and the Community Health Center. Local pharmacies and urgent cares allow patients use their websites to make appointments for tests. Quest Diagnostic service centers across the state provide tests for patients without symptoms.

At CIFC, patients will receive a COVID-19 test as they would a flu or strep throat if they have those symptoms, Curran said. Patients may have a telehealth appointment first or be tested as part of an in-person visit.

Were pivoting to fold everything into primary care, she said.

At the Community Health Centers locations, patients will be tested inside the clinic or their car, Gianelli said. Turnaround time for results remains two to three days.

That timeline will continue when we bring the testing in house, she said.

CIFC had about four staff members conducting tests for the last couple months, while assisting with the vaccine clinic. Those employees will be folded into existing primary care roles, Curran said.

Permanent staff members with the Community Health Center will return to other roles, while many temporary employees hired as testers will stay with the organization, Gianelli said.

Shutting down the Danbury site will allow CIFC to reopen its community center at 12 Boughton St., where testing had been held. The community center, which includes a public pool, had opened shortly before the coronavirus pandemic.

We were starting to think about what that was looking like before the pandemic, Curran said. Were looking to restart that effort to make the pool available again.

Plans for the center arent set in stone, but the organization may renew its agreement with nearby St. Peter School to allow students to use the gym, she said. The facility could open in the fall.

Demand for vaccines has been steady at CIFC, which distributed first doses to 100 people last week.

We are still seeing people who are getting the vaccine for the first time, not the second dose, Curran said.

Staff continue to reach out to patients about getting the vaccine. The plan is to run that clinic at 132 Main St. through September and then make vaccines part of the primary care sites, just like testing, she said.

Our plan for that space (132 Main St.) is to kind of reimagine that as an extension of our primary care space, as well, she said.

Correction: This article was updated to reflect that Quest Diagnostic service centers across the state provide tests for patients without symptoms.
DANBURY  Nuvance Health has named a new chief of cardiac surgery at Danbury Hospital with more than 25 years of experience.

Dr. Richard Kaplon, a cardiothoracic surgeon, will be part of the Nuvance Health Heart and Vascular Institute and work at Danbury Hospital, one of seven hospitals in the Nuvance system.

Im dedicated to quality patient care and timely and effective communication with my patients and colleagues, he said in a statement. My philosophy of care is to treat everyone as if they are a member of my family. I look forward to working at Danbury Hospital and sharing this commitment with the team.

He is a a board-certified cardiothoracic surgeon and has led several cardiac surgery programs throughout the country. Most recently, he served as chairman of the Department of Cardiology/Cardiovascular Surgery at Dignity Healths Mercy General Hospital in Sacramento, Calif.

Hes written many scientific publications and has served as primary investigator on a number of clinical studies.

Dr. Kaplon is an accomplished surgical leader who will join our team to help grow, guide and enhance our cardiac surgical program into the future, said Dr. Mark Warshofsky, senior vice president and chair of the Nuvance Health Heart and Vascular Institute. We look forward to sharing his expertise and reputation of excellence with the community and region.

He has a wide variety of experience in adult cardiac surgery, including minimally invasive cardiac surgery, valve repair, complex aortic surgery, structural heart disease, and advanced heart failure therapy, including mechanical assist devices and heart and lung transplantation.

He has had leadership roles at Dignity Healths Mercy San Juan Medical Center in Carmichael, Calif. and served as the director of the Artificial Heart Program and medical director of Perfusion Services at the University of Miami/Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, Fla.

He trained on cardiothoracic surgery at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, after completing his general surgery residency at New York University Medical Center. He trained additionally as a Margaret Hatch Fellow in cardiopulmonary transplantation from Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York.

After earning an undergraduate degree in philosophy from Columbia College in New York, Kaplon completed medical school at New York University School of Medicine. He holds a masters degree in health care management from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston.
Weeks before a Florida condo building collapsed, the president of its board wrote that structural problems identified in a 2018 inspection had gotten significantly worse and owners needed to pay a hefty price to get them fixed.

The April 9 Dear Neighbors letter from Champlain Towers South Condominium President Jean Wodnicki hinted at an ongoing debate over the repairs and a reluctance by some condo owners to pay for major work that would cost at least $15.5 million.

A lot of this work could have been done or planned for in years gone by. But this is where we are now, she wrote in the letter, which was confirmed to The Associated Press by a spokesman for the condo board.

Wodnicki noted costs had increased since an October 2018 report by engineering firm Morabito Consultants first identified key issues with weakening concrete, and she predicted they would only grow more if put off any longer.

Indeed the observable damage such as in the garage has gotten significantly worse since the initial inspection, Wodnicki wrote. The concrete deterioration is accelerating.

It is impossible to know the extent of the damage to the underlying rebar until the concrete is opened up. Oftentimes the damage is more extensive than can be determined by inspection of the surface, she wrote.

She added, "I acknowledge that we are talking about a huge project and a very large assessment. The longer we wait, the higher the bids will be.

Wodnicki did not immediately respond to phone, email and text messages seeking comment about the letter, which was first reported by USA Today and The Wall Street Journal.

Just over two months later and with bids for the work still pending, the 12-story Champlain Towers South building in Surfside came tumbling down early last Thursday. While the structural problems from the 2018 inspection have come under intense scrutiny, no definitive cause has been identified for the collapse that has left at least 11 people confirmed dead and more than 150 unaccounted for.

The Morabito report focused attention on the pool deck, which was found to have waterproofing underneath that had failed and had been laid flat instead of sloping to drain off water. This threatened not only the concrete slab under the pool but also other concrete structural areas.

The inspection was an early part of a process mandated by Miami-Dade County that all buildings undergo recertification  which would include any necessary repairs  once they reach 40 years of age. Champlain Towers South was completed in 1981.

Just a month after Morabito presented his findings in 2018, a Surfside building official assured board members that the building was in very good shape, according to minutes from that meeting.

The condominium association pegged the total repair and restoration cost at $16.2 million  counting items added since the 2018 Morabito inspection  that would be defrayed in part with about $707,000 the association had in cash on hand. That left the owners with a bill of $15.5 million, with individual assessments ranging from $80,000 for a one-bedroom unit to more than $300,000 for a penthouse.

For those who believe we are assessing too much, this shows that we are actually under-assessing a bit, according to estimates, Wodnicki wrote.

The letter also shows that, in April, a bid package for the major concrete and waterproofing work was still being discussed. The plan was to open those bids on June 8, but it's not clear from documents released to date whether that happened.

The bill for the repairs was a big topic of conversation among residents.

A lot of people were complaining, especially the old people living there, said condo owner Rosalia Cordaro, who was in New York when the building collapsed. It was a lot of money. I was complaining.

Another owner said the assessment was the talk of the pool when she last visited a week before the collapse.

It was the theme of most of our conversations, said Nieves Aguero. 'Are you going to pay it? Are you going to refinance?'

The number kept getting bigger, bigger and bigger, said owner Alfredo Lopez, adding that the board did a good job of communicating and keeping the process transparent.

A lot of people were unhappy with the upcoming assessment, but we all had the same goal of protecting our building, protecting our investment, Lopez said.

_____

Anderson reported from St. Petersburg, Florida, and Condon reported from New York.
(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.)

Laurie Woods, Vanderbilt University

(THE CONVERSATION) Police work can be one of the best-paid professions in the United States.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the 2020 median salary for a police officer was US$67,290  more than one-third higher than the national median of $48,769 for all occupations. Many officers probably earn much more, because the bureaus analysis is based on hourly wages for a typical work year of 2,080 hours and does not include overtime  one of the factors that can drive an officers yearly income even higher.

Although there is a great deal of variation across the nations roughly 18,000 police departments, the agency also reports that salaries for police have largely climbed in the past five years  from an 8.8% increase in Mississippi, the state that overall pays its police the least, to a 21% increase in Hawaii, one of the best-paying states.

While efforts to control police budgets have succeeded in Austin, Denver and Oakland, among others, the Biden administration recently announced that COVID-19 relief funds can be used to hire police officers to combat the rise in gun violence.

As a former police officer who studies policing in America, I think it is unlikely that police salaries can go anywhere but up.

Police salaries are inching up

Just look at the trends across the U.S.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics published the mean salaries for police officers in all states plus the District of Columbia for the year 2018.

Somewhat predictably due to cost of living, California topped the list at $101,380, followed by Alaska at $88,030, where the cost of living also drives salaries higher. New Jersey, Washington state and Hawaii round out the top five.

All of the 10 departments with the lowest-paid officers are located in the South, where Mississippi police officers earn slightly more than one-third of their California counterparts.

Large cities clearly offer higher wages to their police officers, as do some cities surrounding large metropolitan areas. The Los Angeles Police Department currently advertises a starting salary of $70,804 a year. Thats up from the 2015 starting annual salary of $59,717  an 18.5% increase over just six years.

Starting salary for police officers in Baltimore is $55,117, with a seasoned officer earning $95,325, base salary alone. Seattle officers earn $83,600 once theyve completed their basic academy training and top out at $109,512 after 54 months, not including overtime. Seattle even agreed to pay its officers an extra 2% for wearing body cameras.

Larger, better-paying police departments attract officers from smaller departments by offering more pay and better training for experienced officers. This often leaves a void that small agencies struggle to fill with qualified candidates.

There are three main drivers of police take-home pay: overtime, education and competition.

1. Overtime

In his recent trial for the murder of George Floyd, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was represented by an attorney paid for by his union, the Minneapolis Police Federation. This benefit is only a small part of the unions 128-page labor agreement with the city, which details salaries, vacation, sick leave, medical insurance, grievance procedures and, in particular, overtime pay.

Reportedly, Derek Chauvins 2018 salary was $90,612, more than twice the average Minneapolis per capita income of $38,808 in 2019. But it is overtime rather than base salaries that drives up officers total compensation.

Across the country, police officers typically receive time and a half for every hour worked beyond the standard 40-hour week, meaning a pay rate that combines their regular hourly rate plus an additional 50%.

Most union agreements also stipulate higher pay for other work deemed overtime, such as off-duty court appearances. They also stipulate other after-hours pay boosts, such as a minimum of four hours pay for officers called back to duty for any reason.

In practice, these extra pay arrangements have a huge effect on driving up the size of police budgets. A few examples:

 In Los Angeles, where the second-largest police force in the U.S. boasts salaries of $83,144 after two years of employment plus an annual 1.5% cost-of-living increase, the union recently negotiated $245 million in overtime pay for its officers.

 Bostons complex agreement with its police department results in many opportunities for overtime as well as extra payment for special assignments.

City governments typically budget for some police officer overtime, since that extra income does not count toward an officers eventual retirement pay and reduces the need to hire additional employees. However, unanticipated events such as national disasters, public demonstrations and political rallies all result in overtime pay for cops that cities must pay whether or not they planned for it:

 Palm Beach, Florida, paid $3.26 million in police overtime for former President Donald Trumps visits to his Mar-a-Lago resort over a period of just 27 days from late 2017 into early 2018.

 Demonstrations in the wake of Floyds murder cost New York City $115 million in overtime during one two-week period, while Seattle paid $6.3 million during the first 12 days of protests.

2. Education

Few local law enforcement agencies require a four-year college degree, but most offer educational incentives that range from a 2% annual salary increase for earning an associates degree to 10% for a bachelors degree.

For example, since 1970 in Massachusetts, police receive pay incentives of up to 25% over and above their regular salary for a masters or law degree. The Chicago Police Department, among others, provides tuition reimbursement for college courses, as well as additional incentive pay once a degree is completed.

Such incentives may be a good investment. Research indicates that police officers with college degrees are less likely to use lethal force and are subjects of fewer citizen complaints. Since fewer complaints mean fewer claims to pay and lawsuits to defend, this can ultimately save cities money.

3. Recruitment

More police officers are leaving the profession before retirement age, according to a 2019 study by the Police Executive Research Forum. The group has also found that the number of applicants for police jobs has steadily declined over the past 10 years. So departments trying to attract new recruits often go beyond tempting salaries by offering incentives like assistance with relocation, housing and childcare, education pay, college tuition reimbursement, health club memberships and employee signing bonuses.

At the New York Police Department, the nations largest force, the starting salary is a relatively modest $42,000 a year. But the department highlights on its website that starting benefits include holiday pay, longevity pay, uniform allowance, night differential and overtime, which together with salary can boost annual compensation to more than $100,000.

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Even smaller departments are coming up with incentives to try and remain competitive with larger agencies that can offer higher salaries, more overtime and more attractive benefits. The police department of Bellmead, Texas, a city of around 10,500 about two hours north of Austin, has begun offering experienced officers a $5,000 bonus for signing on to the force.

Another trend to watch: Not only are police salaries rising, but the size of police forces also continues to grow. The Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts a 5% growth in police jobs from 2019 to 2029, from 813,500 to an estimated 854,200, which is faster on average than other occupations.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here: https://theconversation.com/defund-the-police-actually-police-salaries-are-rising-in-departments-across-the-united-states-161977.
The retired spies met regularly at the Danbury mall food court for lunch.

Before COVID-19s arrival theyd gather at a table near the McDonalds kiosk and talk about old times, current goings-on and golf. Beginning in 2011, theyd often repeat a word that for nearly a half-century they hadnt dared even to whisper: Hexagon.

They werent really spies, not exactly, but theyd been cleared for top-secret work and long ago had crawled down a rabbit hole that led to the front lines of Cold War espionage.

On June 15, 1971, 50 years ago this month, the first Hexagon spy satellite launched into space from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California aboard a giant Titan IIID rocket. The heart and soul of this once top-secret satellite, also known as Big Bird, was its camera system. Light years ahead of anything else that existed, the optical system was built by the spies who met at the Danbury mall and a small army of men, and some women, like them. They worked for Perkin-Elmer, an aerospace company that specialized in optical systems, including a later satellite also starting with the letter H which gazed at galaxies and would be far more famous.

For about two decades, they toiled inside a windowless white building on a hill overlooking the Danbury Municipal Airport and what is today the Danbury Fair mall. Theyd walk through air showers and enter clean rooms to work on machinery that required mind-bogglingly minute precision. Theyd recreate the harsh conditions of space and the violent rattling of a rocket launch to ensure the camera system would continue to function during space flight. Some would meet regularly with high-ranking CIA and Air Force officials who would be referred to in company memos and conversations only by the cryptic moniker the customer.

The spies of Perkin-Elmer were really engineers and scientists, electrical whizzes and optical experts who accomplished digital-age wonders in the age of film and the slide rule. Almost by accident in many cases, theyd become math-savvy 007s in a real-world sci-fi espionage saga that was equal parts John Le Carre and Ray Bradbury.

This is their story.

H John Voorhees III

The Other Space Program

Phil Pressel was hired by Perkin-Elmer in 1965. At the time, the mechanical engineer who had recently graduated from New York University had no idea what hed signed on for. A Jewish native of Belgium, Pressel and his family fled to France and hid from the Nazis there for the duration of the war. Two decades later, the young Holocaust survivor would once again have a front-row seat to history.

The U.S. had two space programs, Pressel learned once he was cleared to work on the Hexagon program. One was run by NASA and had public funding and astronauts who appeared on the covers of magazines. The other space program was a world of code words and black projects mentioned only in whispers and rarely officially acknowledged. It was run by members of the CIA and Air Force who came together under the auspices of the shadowy National Reconnaissance Office, which had a larger budget than any other U.S. intelligence agency even though its very existence was classified until 1992.

The U.S.s covert space program took flight in the late 1950s with the design and testing for Corona, the first-generation spy satellite. The Corona cameras covered a wide area of the Earth but only provided a resolution of about 20 feet, which means it could spot the outline of a 20-foot truck. One of its successors, the Gambit spy satellite, had a much higher resolution of two feet but could not cover large areas as the Corona could. The Gambit program was also a film-based program providing extremely high-resolution black-and-white as well as color products, says Phil Datema, a retired Air Force colonel who oversaw both the Gambit and Hexagon payload programs for the NRO. But in comparison to Hexagon, it was like looking at a map through a soda straw.

Corona would identify potential targets within the Soviet Union and elsewhere that the Gambit could then photograph in more detail. But by the mid-1960s, the CIA and Air Force wanted a satellite that could combine the search-and-locate capabilities of the Corona with the high-resolution details of the Gambit, and were seeking proposals for the camera system for this new generation of satellite.

Connecticut Magazine

Pressel was hired to help put together that proposal for the government and would later be tasked with designing the optical bars for the system. However, when he learned the requirements for the new satellite, he was skeptical it could be accomplished, as were many of his co-workers. The CIA wanted coverage of the whole landmass of the Earth in stereo, which meant heights of objects photographed such as missile sites could be determined. This new satellite needed to be able to stay in orbit for months and take thousands of photographs on film that would then be jettisoned back to Earth in re-entry capsules with parachutes that would be scooped up by Air Force planes. We almost to a person said, We can never do this. Itll never happen. Its almost impossible,  says Pressel, whose book Meeting the Challenge: The Hexagon KH-9 Reconnaissance Satellite, was published in 2013.

Ultimately, Perkin-Elmer won the project and built 19 successful Hexagon spy satellites between 1971 and 1986. The 30,000-pound, 60-foot-long satellites carried miles of ultra-thin black-and-white and color film. The later satellites also contained mapping cameras that helped provide data that would enable the creation of the GPS systems, utilized by so many on a daily basis today.

The Hexagon had a resolution of at least two to three feet but its exact resolution remains classified. The intel gathered from the satellite was key in helping the U.S. triumph in the Cold War. It allowed the U.S. to monitor the capabilities of Soviet and Chinese ICBMs, monitor compliance of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty and peer into denied areas of the globe for a wide range of intelligence purposes, from monitoring troops to assessing crops and economic conditions.

The Recruits

After winning the government contract for the secret spy satellite, Perkin-Elmer built a new facility in Danbury and hired more than 1,000 people to work on the program. Some were veterans of previous satellite operations, while others were new to the cloak-and-dagger world.

These new hires couldnt work on the project or go near the Danbury building until they passed security clearance, an arduous process that took months. In the meantime, they showed up to work at a Perkin-Elmer office in Wilton where they did little odd jobs as they waited for clearance. Veterans of the program hated being assigned to that office, which earned the nickname the mushroom tank because while there you were kept in the dark. It was kind of boring because you really didnt know where you were going and what you were gonna do, recalls Mike Ferrara, who was hired by Perkin-Elmer in the late 1960s.

But once they left the mushroom tank, they followed Alice down the rabbit hole. For much of the remainder of their careers they wouldnt be able to talk about what they did, not even with their spouses or children.

Ferrara made up a cover story. I work on washing machines, he told people. Sometimes hed have to go into the Danbury facility for overnights or get called in the middle of the night. Other times hed travel to the West Coast for work related to the launches of the satellite. Training on the new washer models, hed explain to his wife. If his wife had any suspicions about why a washing machine builder would need to keep such odd hours and travel so much, she never voiced them. For many who worked on the program there was an unspoken understanding of silence between them and their families.

When Bob Zarba was hired by Perkin-Elmer in the fall of 1970 he was no stranger to secret projects. He had previously worked on Gambit as well as the MOL (Manned Orbiting Laboratory) project, a secret plan for a manned reconnaissance spacecraft that was scrapped shortly before Zarba joined Perkin-Elmer.

Jon Aspinwall

Zarba was stationed in California for much of the Hexagon program, where he would be on site during Hexagon launches into space. After its construction in Danbury, each Hexagon camera system would be transported via police guard to Bradley International Airport and flown out West, where it would be assembled along with other Hexagon satellite components made by other companies. For Zarba, even saying he worked for Perkin-Elmer was forbidden. People would ask you what you do. You had to come up with some kind of a story and it had to be fairly consistent because the next year they might ask you again, the New Milford resident says. Keeping what he did secret from friends and acquaintances was easy, he says. Keeping the secret from his family was more difficult. My kids would have been jumping out of their socks if they knew I was launching satellites and rockets, but I couldnt tell them.

Victor Abraham was hired by Perkin-Elmer in the early 1970s. Hed previously worked closely with CIA contractors for a company on Long Island that was building parts for the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane as well as conducting early work on another satellite program. He was still impressed with the audacity of the Hexagon program. I was overwhelmed by the size of it, and the capability of it. Even though I was working on other CIA programs, I didnt know about this program because everything was compartmentalized. I thought the program was tremendous. The size of it, the capability  for the country it was just amazing.

H John Voorhees III

Abraham was the program director from the mid-1970s until the Hexagon operation concluded in 1986. Keeping the program secret was the worry that kept him up at night. Even though we had a full-time security department, and the government actually had security people at Danbury, security was always a problem, says Abraham, who today lives in a Danbury retirement community with a view of the building from his balcony. We had over 1,000 people who worked in the program, and several hundred in California at the site we launched at. We had employees at various subcontractors monitoring the development of electronic boxes and other equipment.

Getting all these employees to uphold their code of silence required some doing and monitoring. Our personnel had to be polygraphed from time to time and sometimes we came up with some problems, he says. Drugs, gambling, chasing after other women, putting yourself in a compromising position to be blackmailed, these were all the things that we look at on a polygraph.

In the late 1970s, Perkin-Elmer was awarded the NASA contract to build the optics for the Hubble Space Telescope. This helped some of those who worked on the Hexagon project come up with a cover story about what they actually did, but it also posed security problems. The building was now divided into a classified Hexagon section and an open Hubble area. Hexagon material was never supposed to leave secure areas of the building, but on at least one occasion a worker took documents over to the other side, Abraham says.

At other times, employees were fired for indiscretions that might leave them open to blackmail or bribes, but overall the secret of the project was kept, until the project was declassified a decade ago. There was never a leak to the press, or to the public or anything like that. Security right up to the end of the program was great, Abraham says.

The Customer

Hexagon was really the keeper of the peace and kept us out of the hot war during that whole period in time, Datema says. The Hexagon mapping system not only led to extremely accurate products, but also enabled the advent of todays GPS products.

As the Air Force payload manager for the Hexagon spy satellite program in the later days of the Hexagon, Datema was the person referred to as the customer by Perkin-Elmer employees. But like most of those men, he had never intended to embark on a clandestine career.

An Air Force officer stationed at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois in 1979, Datema got a call out of the blue recruiting him for a highly secret assignment to the still-classified NRO. Weve got a very special assignment for you if youre willing to consider it, they told him. When Datema asked for details, he received few. All he knew is that they were looking for officers in good standing, with command experience, and as it turned out, with a chemistry degree, which didnt make sense. Datema didnt like the idea of committing to something without being told what it was, and said he wasnt interested.

But later in the day, a higher-up in his chain of command, a one-star general named Robert Herres who had been behind the security wall and knew a little about the story behind the phone call, told him that he would be foolish to turn down the offer. Datema quickly reconsidered and took the assignment.

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As part of the deal, he was sent to get his masters degree in imaging science and then to work at Kodak in upstate New York to learn more about photo imaging. All of this was done without him being told what his ultimate assignment would be.

Finally, after finishing his degree and the Kodak assignment, he was brought into the world of spy satellites. He now understood why Herres told him he would be making a mistake to turn down the assignment. Herres, now a four-star general, had been one of the astronauts assigned to the MOL project, the top-secret manned spy satellite program which never came to fruition.

The ability the U.S. had to spy from space was staggering to Datema. I was just absolutely amazed at the state of technology and the things that could be done from space, he says. It was almost overwhelming to discover the state of the technology that existed at that point in time.

Eventually, he got used to the technology and the secrecy that was needed in the field. In those early years, just hearing the word NRO would make you twitch, he says.

Once he became established in the world of satellites and assigned to oversee the Hexagon program, Datema visited Danbury regularly to check in on the progress of new optical systems for new satellites. He stayed at a nearby Quality Inn and got to know the staff there. Though they knew he and the staff who traveled with him worked for the Air Force, no one ever suspected he was in town to check up on a top-secret project at the large complex at the top of the hill. He had a cover story ready about visiting Perkin-Elmer for some mundane contract, but he almost never needed it because no one was ever that curious about what had brought him to Connecticut. People didnt really ask, they didnt really care so much, much to my chagrin, the Tucson, Arizona, resident muses.

The Legacy

Zarba watched the launch of the first Hexagon spy satellite in June 1971. Rising from the launchpad, the rocket seemed not so much to fly as to float upon the fire and smoke it spit out in its wake. At this and two other launches he would witness, he was struck by the fantastic throbbing of the rockets engines.

Back in Danbury, Pressel listened to the launch from the war room, a large conference room with a map of the world covering one wall and instrumentation to track the satellites progress through space. Senior members of the Hexagon team listened to the countdown and the liftoff. Then there was silence. When word came that the satellite was in orbit, the room erupted in cheers.

For some others who worked on the program, that first launch was less momentous. There wasnt much fanfare about the first one. Because we were busy, we were busy building others, says Frank Finnerty, who was a reliability engineer and lives in Brookfield. Maybe the front office had some champagne, but I didnt have any.

Champagne or not, the mission was mostly a success, though one of several canisters of film sent back to Earth was lost. Over the next 15 years, 18 more Hexagon satellites would be successfully launched into space. The 20th and final satellite in April 1986, however, blew up during launch, a depressing end to an otherwise stellar program, particularly coming just months after the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.

For many years after the program ended, the images the Hexagon had gathered remained classified, as the U.S. intelligence community didnt want the world knowing just how good its spy satellites were. But finally, in 2011, Hexagon was declassified and those who worked on the project were free to tell their families and the world about it. Yet for many who worked on the project, it was still uncomfortable to say the word Hexagon.

Ferrara, now living in New Jersey, was informed via a phone call from a co-worker named John that Hexagon had been declassified. He hung up to go tell his wife at long last, but decades of secrecy didnt melt away that easily. I went back, I called John again, I said, Are you sure? 

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Abraham was also stricken with disbelief. Saying the word Hexagon for the first time and seeing it in open print and people talking about it in the open, it was just unbelievable, he says. When Abraham told his family the news, the revelation landed with a bit of a thud. I told my family about the program; they were not impressed at all, he says. They said, Its just a camera. I have an iPhone, you know, with a camera and it takes pictures, and I can send it all over the place. Whats so great about your camera? 

All jokes aside, those who worked on the program are immensely proud of the role it played protecting the U.S. and helping to stave off a potentially catastrophic war between two superpowers. Holocaust survivor Pressel knows well the terror of war and is perhaps especially proud of his role in Hexagon as a result. The San Diego resident notes that when it was flying, There was world peace, there was peace in the world. He adds, President Reagan, when he said, trust but verify, the cameras that verified what the Russians were doing were the ones that I was responsible for. So Im very proud of that.

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What happened to the Perkins-Elmer lab?

The Danbury facility has seen a dizzying number of ownership changes since the Hexagon program shut down in the 1980s. Parent companies have included Hughes Aircraft, Raytheon Technologies and Goodrich Corp., among others. But the lab, which employs hundreds of workers, still works on precision optical systems that have both terrestrial and extraterrestrial applications.

Eyes on the Climate

The mission of the Hexagon satellite was to provide intel in the Cold War. But decades later, the massive cache of high-resolution images captured by the Hexagon from around the globe is being used for a far different purpose. After the imagery was declassified in 2011, scientists began poring over the photos to track the effects of climate change. For example, photos of 650 glaciers throughout the Himalayas were analyzed, including Hexagon images from the 1970s and 80s, along with other satellite photos through the 2000s. The conclusion: the rate of current glacier melting has doubled in roughly the last two decades compared with the last centurys closing decades.

What Came Next: The KH-11 Kennen satellite

Five years after the first Hexagon spy satellite launched, the original KH-11 Kennen satellite rocketed into space. It was the first U.S. satellite to use digital imaging. Unlike its film-based predecessors, the KH-11s images could be transmitted back to Earth in real time. Later generations of KH-11s are still flying today, and while most information around the satellites remains classified, some details have emerged over the years. In 2019, President Donald Trump shocked the intelligence community when he tweeted an image of an exploded rocket launch facility in Iran that is believed to have been taken by a KH-11 satellite. From this image, and other details that have emerged about the satellite over the years, it appears that the KH-11 does not have the wide-range image capabilities of Hexagon and is instead designed to photograph specific sites and areas.

As of January, the Union of Concerned Scientists database of satellites noted there are 3,372 satellites in orbit, 1,897 being U.S. satellites. Of those U.S. satellites, 212 are military, many of which we can assume are spy satellites. It is unclear if any have the wide-range image capabilities of Hexagon. Ive seen write-ups that some of todays military leaders are sorry that they did not have more Hexagon missions, because they could have used the data, says former Hexagon program member Phil Pressel. For example, during the Middle East wars, we could have seen the whole theater of battle, which some of the digital cameras, at least in those days, could not see.
National Intelligence Agency has been given the charge to probe into the twin drone attack at the Air Force Station by the Ministry of Home Affairs.

The investigation into the twin drone attack at the Jammu Air force station has been handed over to the National Intelligence Agency by the Ministry of Home Affairs on Tuesday. The NIA and NSG are yet to find any debris of the two drones and the possible spot used as a launch pad for the attack. The development comes after the counter-terrorism unit submitted a preliminary report of the incident to the ministry.

Prime Minister Modi will also be chairing a high level meeting with other cabinet ministers today evening to examine the security situation in Jammu.

An earlier probe conducted by the Jammu and Kashmir Police and security agencies impliedthat Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) may have a hand in the drone strike and a case under the Explosive Substances Act, Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act has already been filed.

In what seems to be a first of its kind attack, low-flying drones were used to airdrop improvised explosive devices (IEDs) inside the Air Force Station in Jammu. The two drones triggered two low-intensity blasts that caused a single storey building roof to rip open while the second was on the ground in an open area. Two IAF officials were also injured by the explosion.

Within 24 hours of the first attack, the Indian Army sighted two similar devices moving towards Ratnuchak-Kaluchak area, they were shot down by the soldiers. A high alert has been sounded at Srinagar, Jammu. Various deployments and strategies are being drawn in the region and along the Line of Control in the Union Territory.

The unexpected twin blasts has reflected how big of a threat this kind of attack can be for India. The ability of drones to evade radar, wreak havoc and act as ammunition for terrorist have raised questions regarding the technological competency to tackle such attacks in the future.
The error appears on the Twitter website under the header tweet life. Twitter has also lost its legal protection as an intermediary in India becoming editorially liable for unlawful content posted by any user on its microblogging platform.

The Twitter website yesterday displayed a distorted map of India showing Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh as separate countries drawing sharp criticism from various quarters. Criticisms are growing as this is not the first time Twitter has displayed the wrong map of India on its website. Last year it showed Leh as part of China.

The error appears on the Twitter website under the header tweet life. Twitter has also lost its legal protection as an intermediary in India becoming editorially liable for unlawful content posted by any user on its microblogging platform. However, the map was removed on late Monday evening following large social media outrage. Twitter India Managing Director Manish Maheshwari has been booked under section 505 of IPC and section 74 of IT Act 2008 for showing a wrong map of India on its website on receiving a complaint from a Bajrang Dal leader.

Twitter ban- an outrage against Twitter has been trending on Twitter lately. Meanwhile, Ghaziabad police filed a petition in Supreme Court against Twitter India and challenged the decision of the Karnataka High Court. The Karnataka High Court has directed the Ghaziabad Police not to take any strict actions against the MD of Twitter.

Sources say that even google has pointed out the wrong map of India. The large-scale outrage comes as the Indian map is widely available on all platforms online and then why does a tech giant behave in this manner.

Cyber Security Expert, Dinesh Bareja speaks to NewsX on the matter. He said,  Im quite amused with the big noise on Twitter and the map. I am outraged. Absolutely. And the same thing happened before. There were serving officers, Intelligence officers who did not even raise their voices. I was the only guy at the conference who dared to stand up to take it right off. Everybody came and told me no, lets not do it here

He adds that the situation is prevalent across platforms, be it google, amazon or Twitter. Moreover, he pointed out the lack of proper laws to punish those who portray India differently.

Many have asked me when I raise my voice against this- why you are wasting time. I waste my time because I love my country, said Dinesh.
DOVER, Del. (AP)  The state House on Tuesday gave final approval to legislation revising the standard under which the use of force, whether lethal or nonlethal, is justified under Delaware law.

Under current law, the use of deadly force by a police officer, or anyone else, is justified if the person believes it is necessary to protect himself or others from death, serious physical injury, rape or kidnapping.

The bill approved Tuesday requires that such a belief must be reasonable.

Supporters of the bill have said Delaware is one of only three states, along with Tennessee and Arizona, in which the law allows police officers to use deadly force whenever they believe it to be justified, regardless of whether such a belief is reasonable.

Today Delaware is ready to fix one of Americas weakest use-of-force laws, period, Democratic Attorney General Kathy Jennings said in a statement issued after Tuesdays vote.

If anything should be objective and reasonable, it should be the line that allows one person to take anothers life. The words I thought should not be an automatic get-out-of-jail-free card for any defendant, Jennings added.

The bill establishes reasonableness standards for both civilians and police officers. It defines reasonable belief as a belief that is reasonable from the viewpoint of a reasonable person or a reasonable law enforcement officer in the defendants situation under the circumstances.

The Democrat-controlled House approved the measure mostly along party lines after overwhelmingly rejecting an amendment stating that reasonableness should take into account a defendants situation under the totality of facts and circumstances of the case.

Supporters of the amendment said the additional language was necessary to ensure that factors such as a defendants mental health, intellectual functioning, and prior victimization, as in the case of a battered spouse, could be admitted into evidence.

Kevin OConnell, who leads Delawares Office of Defense Services, which includes public defenders, said many states have adopted the objective standard for use of force, and that case law states that testimony regarding personal characteristics is not admissible.

It only looks at the defendant as a reasonable person, not a reasonable domestically abused person, not a reasonable cognitively disabled person, not a reasonable person who has suffered post-traumatic stress disorder, he said.

Mark Denney, a former homicide prosecutor who now leads the Division of Civil Rights and Public Trust in the state attorney generals office, said the bill does not preclude such factors from being taken into evidence in court.

Denney said the amendment, proposed by Democratic Rep. Sean Lynn, a Dover attorney, could create loopholes that are ripe for exploitation, such as psychiatric evidence being presented in cases where its not appropriate.

Denney also noted that prosecutors will still have the burden of proving that a defendants use of force in self-defense is not justified.

In addition to the use-of-force bill, House members voted along party lines to give final approval to a companion bill that authorizes the attorney generals office to review police use-of-force incidents that result in serious physical injury. Under current law, the attorney generals office is authorized to review only deadly force incidents.

The legislation also requires that any public report on use-of-force incidents reviewed by the attorney generals office must include the race of the police officer, the race of the person on whom force was used, and a statement on whether race was found to be a relevant or a motivating factor in the use of force.
BRASILIA, Brazil (AP)  Brazil's president is sending troops back to the Amazon rainforest to bolster policing against logging and other illegal land clearance, acting amid international criticism of a surge in deforestation and just two months after withdrawing a similar military mission. Environmentalists are skeptical it will work.

President Jair Bolsonaro's decree calls for soldiers to go to the states of Para, Amazonas, Mato Grosso and Rondonia through the end of August. The order, which was published Monday in Brazil's official gazette, didn't provide details about the number of troops to be deployed nor the cost of the operation.

Vice President Hamilton Mourao told reporters earlier this month that the deployment could be extended beyond two months with the arrival of the dry season, when people burn forest to clear land for farming and ranching.

A separate presidential decree on Tuesday banned most fires across Brazil for 120 days, with stricter restrictions in the Amazon and Pantanal wetlands.

Amazon deforestation had edged upward for several years, then surged after the 2018 election of Bolsonaro, who repeatedly called for development of the rainforest. Tuesdays decree comes with Brazil in the midst of a historic drought, and follows a sharp increase in fires in both the Amazon and Pantanal wetlands. The destruction has elicited an international outcry and, more recently, an effort by U.S. President Joe Bidens administration to urge Bolsonaro to get tough on illegal logging.

This will mark the third time that Bolsonaro has dispatched troops to the Amazon, following two Operation Green Brazil deployments, the most recent of which ended in April. Each mission involved thousands of soldiers. Still, environmental experts have said the military was ill-prepared and had limited efficacy.

The Amazonian Environmental Research Institute, a Brazilian nonprofit, welcomed the fire ban, but said the army's intervention was unlikely to address the systemic problems that lead to deforestation and land grabbing.

It also criticized the specifics in the decree. When we announce which locations will be the object of an operation, we indicate to criminals where they should leave and where they can act with peace of mind, the organization said in a statement on Tuesday.

In 2020, deforestation in Brazil's Amazon reached a level unseen since 2008, according to official data.

And 98.9% of deforestation had indications of illegality, either done near springs, in protected areas or carried out without requisite authorization, according to data released this month by the MapBiomas Project, a network of nonprofits, universities and technology companies that studies Brazilian land use. Brazils environmental regulator levied fines in just 5% of these cases, the group found.

Marcio Astrini, executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, a network of environmental nonprofit groups, called the latest military deployment a smokescreen that will allow the government to claim to be fighting deforestation. He noted a previously successful initiative, largely funded by the Norwegian and German governments, has been suspended since 2019.

The government has adopted a series of measures that simply destroys the states monitoring capacity, like stopping environmental fines, Astrini said. He added that the regulator has also ceased destroying machinery used for illegal logging.

Bolsonaros plan to send soldiers comes as the US. administration has called for curbing Amazon deforestation in order to help arrest climate change. Bolsonaro has said Brazil lacks enough funds to do so on its own, despite the fact the nation did so at the start of this century.

The U.S. has made clear it would only be willing to contribute once Brazil registers concrete progress, of which there has so far been no sign. Talks between the U.S. and Brazil's environment ministry have stalled, three Brazilian government officials told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity because they werent authorized to speak publicly.

The decision to deploy troops is partially meant to demonstrate the governments good intentions to the U.S., one of the officials added.

On June 23, Environment Minister Ricardo Salles announced his resignation, giving up his post amid sharp criticism of his tenure and two investigations into his actions involving allegedly illegal timber operations. He has denied all wrongdoing. ___ AP reporter Diane Jeantet contributed from Rio de Janeiro
CONCORD, N.H. (AP)  A truck driver charged with causing the deaths of seven motorcyclists in 2019 deserves a bail hearing despite a judge's ruling that he should remain jailed, a defense attorney argued before the New Hampshire Supreme Court on Tuesday.

Volodymyr Zhukovskyy, 25, of West Springfield, Massachusetts, has been in jail since the crash happened in Randolph on June 21, 2019. He pleaded not guilty to multiple counts of negligent homicide, manslaughter, driving under the influence and reckless conduct. His trial is scheduled to start on Nov. 29.

His lawyers asked a judge for a bail hearing twice in 2020 and again in April. The judge denied the requests, agreeing with the state that Zhukovskyy is a danger to himself and others.

Christopher Johnson, appellate defender, said among the issues in dispute are statements Zhukovskyy made to police after the collision; the degree and extent of Zhukovskyy's impairment that day; the amount of reaction time available when the motorcyclists and Zhukovskyy came into each other's field of vision; whether Zhukovskyy did react by braking; and his lane location.

Johnson added that Zhukovskky has maintained his sobriety while he has been jailed for the last two years.

Johnson also said the state, in its written arguments supporting the judge's decision, relied on part of a statute that says people on probation have a right to a bail hearing. He said he didn't think the Legislature would need to make that right explicit in the law for people who are not on probation.

It would be an absurd result, I think, to say that probationers are the class of people more entitled to an evidentiary hearing than non-probationers," he said, adding, You give it to them, but not everybody else?"

Assistant Attorney General Scott Chase said the judge was not required to hold a bail hearing or use any specific method to assess Zhukovskyy's dangerousness. He said evidence on that point was glaring." For example, there is no dispute that Zhukovskyy said he mixed heroin and cocaine before getting behind the wheel that day, Chase said.

The defense admitted that he had a DUI and was on bail conditions with a suspended license at the time of the crash," Chase said. He was also aware of the danger of drug use because he had overdosed on narcotics and had to be revived by Narcan," he said of Zhukovskyy's past.

When questioned as to what harm there would be in granting a hearing, Chase said, Courts often, especially during COVID, have an interest in balancing judicial economy versus balancing the interests that are at play here.

Chase said the judge was tasked with one thing: Is this a person a danger by clear and convincing evidence, and should be held on preventive detention? And thats exactly what the court did.

When asked if Zhukovskyy could be deported to his native Ukraine if he made bail, Chase said it was his understanding that he could be deported before his case is resolved.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency had filed paperwork to detain Zhukovskyy shortly after the crash. Zhukovskyys father said at the time that his son had secured a U.S. green card and had gotten permanent resident status in the United States.
With COVID infections and hospitalizations remaining low, Connecticut health officials on Tuesday announced the state is shuttering its phone assistance line for people looking to get vaccinated.

Residents looking for help getting a vaccine appointment can now call 211, the states confidential helpline for health and human services, officials said. The helpline is run by United Way, which helped create the vaccine hotline earlier this year.

In a statement that acknowledged the vaccine hotline helped fill 185,000 appointments, Gov. Ned Lamont called the service one example of the agencys incredible work during the pandemic.

They have built new programs, hired large numbers of staff, and worked to train each and every one of them to have up-to-date information in a world where the right answer changes every hour, the governors statement said.

The appointment line represented one way for families struggling with the federal Vaccine Administration Management System to get a shot, after the much-maligned portal went public. Among early complaints were the portals lack of options for non-English speakers, and the requirement that users have a computer or other internet device.

The decision to shutter the dedicated line comes as walk-up appointments for the vaccines are widely available, but also as new vaccinations have sharply declined.

For the week ending June 19, Connecticut administered less than 62,000 shots  the lowest week since early January when doses were still tightly restricted to older adults, health care workers and first responders.

Just under 67 percent of Connecticuts total population have received at least one dose of a vaccine as of this week, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A little less than 61 percent are now considered fully vaccinated.

The state has fallen behind Vermont and Massachusetts, both of which have vaccinated over 70 percent of their residents, the CDC data shows. And in some parts of Connecticut, particularly rural communities along the eastern border and underserved neighborhoods in the states cities, vaccinations are still lagging compared with the state average.

But overall infections, hospitalizations and deaths have remained consistently low since the state began rolling back its pandemic restrictions in May.

Statewide, 40 new infections were reported Tuesday out of 7,099 tests for a daily positivity rate of 0.56 percent. Hospitalizations for COVID-19 dropped by seven, for a statewide census of 34. The official death toll remained flat at 8,276.

Acting DPH Commissioner Deidre Gifford said the appointment line has met its goal of providing access to those who due to lack of access to technology, disability, language, or other barriers couldnt schedule a vaccine appointment. She said about 26 percent of appointments scheduled through the service were in the states most vulnerable communities.

This extraordinary partnership has helped hundreds of thousands of people overcome barriers to getting vaccinated, Lisa Tepper Bates, president and CEO of United Way of Connecticut, said in a statement. We have helped older adults who could not access online scheduling platforms, people who speak a language other than English, members of the deaf and hard-of-hearing community, individuals facing a transportation barrier and residents who are homebound.

More research also continues to show the protection of the vaccines. A study published Monday in Nature suggested the two mRNA vaccines approved for use in the U.S., Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, seemed to provide an immune response at least 12 weeks after a second dose. The study looked at samples drawn from the lymph nodes of 14 participants, which seemed to show a persistent antibody response, the studys authors wrote.

The study seems to suggest more evidence the mRNA vaccines provide lasting protection against the virus, as regulators and vaccine makers weigh whether booster shots will be required.
LOS ANGELES, Calif. (AP)  Authorities are investigating three young children's deaths in Southern California as suspicious and their mother was detained for questioning on Monday.

The children, two boys and a girl who are all under 3 years old, were found inside a bedroom in their East Los Angeles home around 12:45 p.m. after a family member called for help, according to Los Angeles County Sheriff's Lt. Chuck Calderaro. They were not breathing and efforts to revive them were not successful.
WASHINGTON (AP)  After writing two of the Supreme Courts biggest decisions this year, Stephen Breyer could say hes come to a fitting end of nearly 27 years as a justice and announce his retirement.

Or the 82-year-old liberal justice could reason that his pragmatic, collaborative approach to judging has never been more needed on the high court and decide to stick around.

Breyer has given no indication he plans to retire at the end of the courts term, set for Thursday. Left for the justices to decide are a key case on voting rights and another involving Californias requirement that charities provide the names of major donors.

Justices have sometimes used the term's last day to announce their retirements. That's what Justice Anthony Kennedy did in 2018.

But on one occasion that could resonate with Breyer, the court's summer break had already begun when Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said she would retire once her successor had been confirmed.

Breyer and O'Connor were close on the court, employing similar approaches to their work, though she was generally more conservative.

Some liberal activists who have been pushing for his departure are mostly resigned to the prospect that he will remain on the Supreme Court bench.

I am assuming the worst and hoping for the best, by which I mean Im hopeful he might still make an announcement, but Im not expecting one at this point, said Brian Fallon, executive director of the progressive court group Demand Justice.

The reason for the liberal discontent: Democrats hold a narrow majority in the Senate, and an untimely death or lengthy absence by one of the older Democrats could give Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell all he needs to prevent a successor to Breyer from being confirmed. Unlike most legislation, nominations require a bare Senate majority.

Anything that threatens Democrats control of the Senate could imperil President Joe Bidens fulfillment of his pledge to name the first Black woman to the Supreme Court.

If nothing changes in the Senate, Breyer could retire next year as well, in the run-up to the congressional midterm elections.

Breyer and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg resisted calls to step down the last time Democrats controlled Congress and the White House, when Barack Obama was president. Then, Ginsburg died less than two months before Biden's election.

It's not as if McConnell hasn't frustrated Democrats before. In 2016, he prevented President Barack Obama from filling a Supreme Court vacancy and kept Antonin Scalia's seat open awaiting the outcome of that year's presidential election, won by Donald Trump more than eight months after Scalia's death. Last year, McConnell rammed through the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett just over a month after Ginsburg's death and less than a week before the 2020 election.

In both cases, a Senate under Republican control was able to put a Trump nominee on the court. Those were two of Trump's three Supreme Court appointments that cemented a 6-3 conservative majority.

Breyer's retirement and replacement by a Biden nominee wouldn't alter that ideological balance, but Supreme Court nominations are sufficiently rare that they always result in a pitched battle in politically polarized times.

A former Harvard professor and aide to Sen. Edward Kennedy in the 1970s, Breyer has been among the leading Supreme Court voices cautioning against viewing the justices as politicians in robes.

Speaking to a Harvard audience in April, Breyer said that "it is wrong to think of the Court as another political institution and urged supporters of expanding the court to think long and hard about what that would do to the institution.

In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, Breyer has spent much of his time at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, making a steady stream of public appearances via Zoom.

Some conservatives who pushed hard for Trump's judicial nominees said the loud calls for Breyer to step down now from progressive groups and law professors would backfire.

The political campaign to force Justice Breyer to retire is the worst possible way to do it, said Mike Davis, the founder of the Article III Project, a conservative counterpart to Demand Justice.

Breyer's experience this year could be seen as a vindication of his approach, despite the enhanced conservative strength on the court.

Breyer has been in several majorities with the other liberal justices in which they joined with a bloc of conservatives. Among those was the court's decision earlier in June to preserve the Affordable Care Act, rejecting a Republican-led challenge, in an opinion Breyer wrote.

The court also unanimously ruled that Philadelphia violated a church-based social service agency's religious rights by limiting its participation in a foster care program because it won't work with married same-sex couples.

In a case with fewer obvious political implications, Breyer wrote the court's opinion siding with a high school student who had been suspended from cheerleading after a vulgar social media post in response to not making the varsity team.

The health care and cheerleading cases showed Justice Breyers ability to achieve consensus in a pragmatic way thats agreeable to other justices, said Washington attorney Pratik Shah, who once worked as the justice's law clerk.

Breyer's skill in seeking broader agreement, honed during his time on Capitol Hill, might be useful in bridging conservative-liberal disagreement next term. The court already has agreed to take on major cases dealing with abortion and guns and could add another on affirmative action in higher education. There also might be less room for compromise on these hot-button issues.

One other consideration for Breyer could be the identity of his eventual replacement. Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, seen as a leading candidate for the seat, was just elevated by Biden from a trial court in Washington to the federal court of appeals. She also once worked as a Breyer law clerk at the Supreme Court.

If Breyer were to wait a year, Jackson would have that much time as a judge on the appeals court that has been a steppingstone to the Supreme Court.

Shes not ready right now to go on the Supreme Court. But in a year she might be, Davis said.
BOSTON (AP)  One was a respected state trooper, the other a beloved Air Force vet.

Family and friends on Monday mourned David Green and Ramona Cooper, the two bystanders killed Saturday afternoon by a white gunman in a Boston suburb in an attack officials are treating as a hate crime.

Authorities, meanwhile, said they're investigating when and how the gunman -- a 28-year-old man whose wedding plans amid the coronavirus pandemic were glowingly profiled in the local paper last summer -- became radicalized.

Prosecutors say Nathan Allen drew swastikas and wrote messages about whites being superior in the weeks leading up to the shootings. He was killed by police moments after shooting the victims, who were African American.

We are learning more every day, but I am confident saying that there was hate in this mans heart, Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins said.

Green and Cooper were each shot multiple times by Allen after he crashed a stolen box truck into a residential building in Winthrop, an overwhelmingly white, coastal community located on a peninsula jutting into Boston Harbor.

Greens longtime friend, Nick Tsiotos, said the two had coffee together just hours before the attack. He said the 68-year-old retired Massachusetts State Police trooper had been sitting outside his home and tried to help after hearing the crash.

He went out and tried to do what he was doing for 36 years with the state police  trying to help save lives," Tsiotos, who attended high school with Green, told WCVB-TV.

Green retired from the state police in 2016 after nearly 40 years in law enforcement and also served in the Air Force.

Massachusetts State Police Col. Christopher Mason said in a statement over the weekend that he was widely respected by his colleagues, always courteous to the public and meticulous in his duties.

Cooper's son, Gary Cooper Jr., remembered his 60-year-old mother as caring and selfless and always ready to help anyone in need.

We are heartbroken and she will be missed, just a senseless thing to have happened, he said in a statement to WCVB-TV.

Cooper, who is survived by her son, two grandchildren, and her twin sister, most recently worked at a U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs facility on Boston's Jamaica Plan neighborhood.

She was a beloved colleague who will be greatly missed," Kyle Toto, a VA spokesperson, told The Boston Globe on Monday.

According to Rollins, Cooper was shot three times in the back about a half-block away from the crash; Green was shot four times in the head and three times in his torso in an alleyway further down the street.

A candlelight vigil will be held Thursday night in front of Town Hall to the victims, but a makeshift memorial of flowers and other remembrances quickly grew on the temporary fencing around the destroyed building over the weekend.

Gov. Charlie Baker and other state leaders also offered condolences.

The Green and Cooper families lost loved ones to a despicable act and we lost two cherished public servants who proved their mettle time and time again, he tweeted Monday.

Assistant U.S. House Speaker Katherine Clark, a Massachusetts Democrat whose district includes Winthrop, denounced the killings as an act of hate-fueled violence" in a statement Sunday.

Winthrop Police Chief Terence Delehanty said he hoped the town wouldnt be judged by the actions of one individual that had a very strange ideology that is not representative of this community."

Rollins stressed investigators believe Allen acted alone and that the threat has been neutralized.

She has said officials are investigating whether Allen specifically targeted the victims because they were Black.

Officials found a notebook with troubling white supremacist rhetoric in the gunmans handwriting that included antisemitic and racist statements against Blacks. Allen also walked by several other people who were not Black that day and didn't harm them.

Allen, who property records show owned a condominium a few blocks from the crash site, was legally licensed to carry a firearm, had a doctorate, was married, and employed, Rollins said.

To all external sources he likely appeared unassuming, she said.

Indeed, Nathan Allen's Facebook page mostly contains pictures of him with his wife, Audrey, as well as posts about adopting rabbits, as the couple had a pet rabbit of their own. The two met at the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth, where they graduated in 2014.

Their engagement was profiled by the Globe and they were married at the nursing home where the former Audrey Mazzolas grandfather lived, with some 200 people tuning in via Zoom.

Audrey Allen didnt respond to a phone call and email seeking comment Monday.

Nathan Allen's final post on Facebook appeared on June 22, when he wished his wife a happy birthday. He posted two pictures of the couple, including one of them kissing on their wedding day.
MADISON, Wis. (AP)  Wisconsin legislators were set Tuesday to begin taking the final votes on the 2021-23 state budget.

The Assembly was scheduled to vote on the $87 billion spending plan on Tuesday. The Senate was expected to follow suit on Wednesday and send the document to Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, who can use his partial veto powers to rewrite the document or kill it outright.

Here are some highlights of the budget as it currently stands:

TAX CUTS

Bolstered by rosier revenue projections, Republicans inserted $3.3 billion in income and property tax cuts into the budget. The provisions include $2.7 billion in cuts for people who earn between $24,000 and $264,000 annually and nearly $650 million in local property tax cuts for schools and technical colleges. The budget would backfill that lost revenue with state aid. Residents would see a property tax bill but schools would come out even.

K-12 SCHOOLS

Republicans gave public schools an additional $128 million in state funding over two years, which is less than 10% of the $1.6 billion that Evers proposed. Republicans defended the move, noting that Wisconsin schools are slated to receive $2.6 billion in federal coronavirus relief money. However, nearly all of that would have been in jeopardy unless the state spent nearly $400 million more on schools. The additional $647 million in state aid Republicans handed schools to replace revenue lost through property tax reductions satisfies the spending requirement, ensuring schools will receive all of the $2.6 billion in federal aid.

SPECIAL EDUCATION

The plan would reimburse school districts 30% of special education costs in the second year of the budget, up from 28.2% currently. Special education advocates say that is woefully inadequate. The Evers budget would increase reimbursement to 45% in the first year and 50% in the second.

UW SYSTEM

The eight-year-old tuition freeze would end this fall under the GOP budget. UW schools would also receive just an $8.25 million increase in funding, compared with the $192 million Evers proposed.

TRANSPORTATION

There are no gas tax or vehicle registration fee increases. The budget would authorize the start of the oft-delayed Interstate 94 expansion project in Milwaukee County, as Evers wanted. State funding for transit programs was cut in half in Milwaukee and Madison, but Republicans said that was because those Democratic strongholds are receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in federal coronavirus relief money.

BUILDING PROJECTS

State building projects would receive $1.5 billion in funding, which is roughly $810 million less than what Evers wanted. The UW System would get about $629 million, down from the $1 billion Evers put forward.

STEWARDSHIP

Wisconsins land stewardship program would be extended for four years instead of the 10 that Evers wanted. The budget also would make $32 million per year available to acquire land, which is the amount available now but less than half of the $70 million Evers proposed.

UNEMPLOYMENT

The budget includes more money for vocational training for the disabled, and youth and adult apprentice programs with the goal of addressing the states worker shortage problem. However, Republicans rejected Evers call to spend $15 million to improve the system for administering unemployment payments. Republicans said Evers can use federal stimulus money for that.

BROADBAND

Broadband expansion would get $125 million, which is less than the roughly $200 million Evers proposed. The money would also be borrowed rather than paid with cash, as Evers proposed.

BODY CAMERAS

Funding to pay for body cameras for Wisconsin State Patrol officers and Department of Natural Resources wardens is included, but funding was rejected to equip state Capitol police officers with them.

JUVENILE PRISONS

A state mental health center in Madison will be expanded to reduce the number of inmates at the states juvenile prisons, but Republicans did not include funding to build a new juvenile prison in Milwaukee County. Instead, only money for the planning process was included, which Democrats said would delay the closure of the troubled Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake juvenile prisons north of Wausau.

TEEN DRIVERS

Teen drivers could opt out of taking a behind-the-wheel exam under a permanent policy that was tested last year during the coronavirus pandemic. To qualify, a driver must be applying for a non-commercial drivers license, successfully complete a drivers education course that includes 30 hours of behind-the-wheel experience and not have any moving violations within six months of applying. An adult must also consent to waiving the test.

WHATS OUT

Evers proposals to legalize recreational and medical marijuana, expand Medicaid and restore collective bargaining rights for public workers were among the first items killed by the legislative committee. Also removed in one vote striking out nearly 400 Evers proposals were $1 billion in higher taxes on manufacturers and capital gains; increasing the minimum wage to $10.15 per hour by 2024; suspending enrollment in the private school voucher program; and creating a so-called red flag law that would allow guns to be seized from people deemed to be a danger by courts.
Clara Benson, founder of a nascent South Carolina nonprofit that connects Black residents with health and wellness resources, got an intriguing call last September.

The caller told Benson to check her email. Her organization, Community Resources for Enduring Wellness, was receiving a grant. The new Southern Power Fund was giving money to Black-led, grassroots groups like Bensons. The nonprofit didnt have to apply. The fund already knew about the organizations work and its potential and wanted to help.

While Bensons organization, known as CREW, had recently received charity status from the IRS, it had no budget. Benson had compiled a list of Black mental-health care providers in South Carolina, which she posted on social media. The list was in response to requests from people looking for help coping with the racial inequities revealed as a result of the coronavirus pandemic and the police killing of George Floyd.

Benson, then a senior at Rock Hills Winthrop University, was majoring in psychology. She was busy with classes when she received the call. There was no rush to open the email she assumed would tell of a grant of $1,000, if we got lucky.

CREW needed substantially more money to get up and running.

$40,000! Benson shrieked with joy and disbelief after opening the email several hours later. This took CREW from an idea with a 501(c)(3) to an actual organization that can position itself to get funding.

Ash-Lee Henderson, co-executive director of Tennessees renowned Highlander Research and Education Center, had placed the call to Benson. Highlander is one of the organizations that helped launch the Southern Power Fund as the nation was reeling from the coronavirus pandemic and Floyds murder. Highlander, along with Southerners on New Ground, Project South and Alternate Roots, were responsible for distributing the grants.

The Southern Power Fund wanted to raise at least $10 million to send to grassroots organizations, no strings attached, to address immediate community needs. The goal was to quickly get the money to small, primarily Black-led groups, which foundations often overlook. The group planned to develop an ecosystem of grassroots organizations and link them with experts who could help them fill in gaps, such as fundraising skills.

The fund saw the potential to create long-term sustainability while developing a rarely used approach to philanthropy.

The fund exceeded its goal, raising $14 million, primarily from foundations. The Ford Foundation, which gave $4 million through Southerners on New Ground, was the largest donor. The JPB Foundation, financed and led by the philanthropist Barbara Picower, provided $1 million, while the Democracy Frontlines Fund, JPB Foundation, Resource Generation, and the Solidaire Network gave about $1 million each through their donor networks.

So far, the Southern Power Fund has awarded $9.7 million to grassroots organizations. Most of the roughly 250 grants were for $40,000, and beneficiaries received wide discretion in how to use the money.

It gets the money out of the hands of institutional philanthropy and into the hands of people who actually know what is happening and are doing the work  in ways that are not restrictive, Henderson said. There were a lot of intersecting crises and many of the organizations we funded were the social safety net that was literally saving peoples lives.

Nat Chioke Williams, executive director of the Hill-Snowdon Foundation, which supports nonprofits fighting for social and racial justice, said inherent in the no-strings approach is the drive by Black-led grassroots organizations to have more say in how to use philanthropic dollars. The foundation gave $75,000 to the fund.

There is resistance of foundations to support social justice, social change, etc., at a level that actually penetrates and does something about the inequities that almost all foundations list in their missions as something they want to change, Williams said. What they often support is more aligned with charity that, despite its best intentions, maintains the status quo and doesnt bring about change.

Research shows philanthropies routinely fail to fund the types of groups that Southern Power Fund is committed to supporting. A 2020 report by the Bridgespan consultancy and Echoing Green, which provides support to leaders of emerging social enterprises, found nonprofits led by people of color are awarded less grant money than white-lead groups, and the money they do receive has more restrictions on its use.

Last years seminal events, which motivated the country to examine the longstanding socioeconomic dimensions of racial inequality, drew attention to the funding issue. Henderson said many people with large funding groups may have been shocked by disparities, but grassroots groups werent.

It was a catalytic moment for philanthropy, Henderson said of Floyds murder. Philanthropy had to see that we were telling the truth for years. It should be shameful that it took this much cumulative Black deaths to prove to philanthropy that there was a level of crisis that needed to be paid attention to.

Bensons group and most of the nonprofits that received support through the Southern Power Fund didnt have to apply for the grants. Chantelle Fisher-Borne, project director of Out in the South, an initiative of Funders for LGBTQ Issues, provided expertise to the fund, including on nonprofits in the region worthy of support.

These groups were doing some beautiful and amazing and creative and critical work that is completely underresourced, Fisher-Borne said. We just want to move resources in a way that is actually useful to organizers on the ground.

CREW is using part of its grant to create a database of Black health and wellness providers, an idea that partially grew out of Bensons personal need for help.

She posted on social media last year about how she had been struggling emotionally. Benson described it as more than feelings of pandemic isolation. The racial inequality that the pandemic and Floyds death highlighted brought on her distress.

Benson, who has enrolled in a masters program in public health, said she was outraged by the health disparity issues raised by African Americans dying of coronavirus at higher rates. When people asked her if she knew of any Black psychologists and other mental-health professionals, she started compiling a list.

She spent several days working on the list, primarily by combing the websites of health systems and other providers in South Carolina. She then posted what she had found on social media.

Now CREW is using the grant, the first it has ever received, to create an online database that will be expanded to include other Black health-care and wellness providers, eventually also in North Carolina and Georgia. Some of the grant will be used to get professional expertise in compiling and designing a searchable database.

The goal is really to be like the Green Book of public health for Black folks, she said referring to the guidebook used extensively by Black travelers during segregation to find safe places to eat and sleep.

Latia Curtis of Greenville, S.C., was distraught by last years events for reasons similar to Benson, as well as for racial wealth inequality issues. The owner of a makeup and hair service for film, television, and print clients, Curtis said the fledgling CREW resource list has already helped her find a new therapist.

I wanted a Black woman therapist, Curtis said. I had been to a white therapist, who could understand superficially but wasnt able to empathize and help me find the language to deal with microaggressions and those types of things.

In Alabama, as in other parts of the country, people were being released from jail last year in an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Once released, they often couldnt rely on a heavily strained social safety net, according to Rodreshia Russaw, executive director of the Ordinary People Society, or TOPS.

Whats more, Russaw said, people who had lost jobs due to Covid-19 were having difficulty collecting unemployment benefits, and food pantries were overwhelmed. TOPS saw a gap and sought to fill it.

We wanted to make sure the communities that we serve got what they needed, she said.

The 20-year-old group based in Dothan, Ala., is using its grant to provide housing, food, personal hygiene products, and social services to 50 people who had been released from prison. The grant is also paying for a staff member to handle the increased caseload at the group, which had revenue of about $535,000 in 2019,according to Internal Revenue Service data.

One of the greatest lessons of the Southern Power Fund is that it showed us that when you put trust in the hands of the folks that are doing the true work on the ground, we can help our people, Russaw said.

The Southern Power Fund uses an approach to grant making that doesnt follow most philanthropic norms, such as an extensive application process and detailed reports on how the funds are spent.

We have seen firsthand how organizing and advocacy that takes place in the South can transform lives and impact the entire nation, Jerry Maldonado, who oversees grant making at Ford for projects that focus on specific cities and states, wrote in an email.

Meanwhile, grantees say the trust that the Southern Power Fund showed in making the no-strings funding, motivates them to be meticulous with how they use the money.

Benson, in South Carolina, not only hired an accountant and other professionals, she also is building relationships with more experienced nonprofit leaders in hopes of learning from them. This is the first time CREW has operated with a budget, and Benson knew this novice status left her vulnerable to mistakes.

I wanted to first make sure I was a good steward of the money, Benson said. My main concern was that we are able to do the most with this money to make this organization and this project as sustainable as possible.

In Alabama, Russaw said her organization takes photographs and videos of activities of grant-funded programs. She and her colleagues then share them on social media as a way of documenting how the money is being spent.

Henderson recalls the pleasant surprise from many grassroots leaders when she called to tell them about receiving the grants last year.

That was my favorite part of the whole darn thing, Henderson said.

Many grantees were convinced that the news of the grant was a prank.

They couldnt imagine that there was a fund that would have connections to the grassroots and radical legacies and traditions of Southern organizing that really was just giving them money with no strings.

___

This article was provided to The Associated Press by the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Olivera Perkins is a senior writer at the Chronicle. Email: olivera.perkins@philanthropy.com. The AP and the Chronicle receive support from the Lilly Endowment for coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits. The AP and the Chronicle are solely responsible for all content. For all of APs philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.
LOS ANGELES (AP)  A passenger who tried to break into an airplane cockpit last week had recently been under the influence of methamphetamine before he jumped from the moving plane in Los Angeles, authorities said Monday.

Luis Antonio Victoria Dominguez of La Paz, Mexico, broke his leg Friday when he opened the plane's emergency exit and jumped to the tarmac at Los Angeles International Airport, according to the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles.

He underwent surgery and is expected to appear in federal court this week on a charge of interference with a flight crew, which could bring 20 years in prison if he is convicted.

It was not immediately clear if he had an attorney who could speak on his behalf.

A criminal complaint released Monday gave new details about the incident and Victoria Dominguez's life in the days prior.

The 33-year-old arrived in Los Angeles on Tuesday from Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, the complaint says. His plan was to get to Salt Lake City, but he did not have a connecting flight. He spent the night at a hotel in downtown Los Angeles after drinking several beers and buying a lot of crystal meth for $20, he told the FBI.

The next day, he continued to smoke the crystal meth and decided to fly to Utah instead of taking a bus, the complaint says. He smoked more of the drug before heading to the airport Thursday but ultimately missed his flight and wandered the streets through the night.

On Friday, he missed a second flight but was rescheduled to board United Airlines Flight 5365, operated by SkyWest Airlines, to Salt Lake City. Victoria Dominguez took his seat and began to doze as he was coming down from all the drugs he had used the last couple of days," the complaint says.

The passenger sitting next to Victoria Dominguez told authorities that he kept looking around and fidgeting. He asked her where she was going, and she said it was not his business. She said he then whispered to her that he needed to get off the plane and was going to jump out. I'm serious, he said.

Victoria Dominguez, however, told the FBI that he had he heard other passengers laugh and say they were going to a different destination, the complaint says. He panicked. He sprinted toward a flight attendant at the front of the plane around 7 p.m. and said he wasn't feeling well and needed to get off the flight.

The flight attendant said the plane was about to take off and they began to struggle, the complaint says. He pounded on the locked cockpit door and tried to open it as the flight attendant prayed the pilots  who were confused by the banging  would not open the door, according to the document.

Victoria Dominguez wrenched open the emergency exit door and the emergency slide deployed, according to the complaint, as the flight attendant called the pilots to stop the plane.

He told the FBI that his panic attack potentially gave him the strength to open the door. The aircraft, which had not been moving before, began to roll as Victoria Dominguez struggled with a passenger who was trying to restrain him.

Victoria Dominguez got away and jumped from the aircraft, missing the emergency slide and landing on the tarmac, breaking his right leg. He was trying to crawl away from the plane when he was apprehended.
MEXICO CITY (AP)  Immigration agents said Monday they came upon a heart-rending scene on a roadside in sweltering southern Mexico  a tractor-trailer with its door open and a migrant who had apparently suffocated to death inside.

Around the truck lay eight other migrants too weak to move. Nearby, a 2-year-old boy stood alone by the guard rail, apparently abandoned by whoever had been accompanying him on the clandestine trip to the U.S. border, authorities said.
WALDOBORO, Maine (AP)  With millions of people having stayed home from places of worship during the coronavirus pandemic, struggling congregations have one key question: How many of them will return?

As the pandemic recedes in the United States and in-person services resume, worries of a deepening slide in attendance are universal.

Some houses of worship wont make it.

Smaller organizations with older congregations that struggled to adapt during the pandemic are in the greatest danger of a downward spiral from which they cant recover, said the Rev. Gloria E. White-Hammond, lecturer at the Harvard Divinity School and co-pastor of a church in Boston.

On the Maine coast, the pandemic proved to be the last straw for the 164-year-old Waldoboro United Methodist Church.

Even before COVID-19 swept the world, weekly attendance had dipped to 25 or 30 at the white-clapboard New England church that could hold several hundred worshippers. The number further dwindled to five or six before the final service was held Sunday, said the Rev. Gregory Foster.

The remaining congregants realized they couldnt continue to maintain the structure, and decided to fold the tent, Foster said.

We cant entirely blame everything on COVID. But that was just the final blow. Some people have not been back at all, he said.

In Virginia, the Mount Clifton United Methodist Church experienced a similar fate. The church can seat more than 100 but the number of weekly worshippers dwindled to 10 to 15, even before the pandemic.

The small white church built on a hill in the Shenandoah Valley in the 1880s may be rented to another congregation, or it may be put up for sale.

Its a complicated picture overall, but the pandemic was the straw that broke the camels back, said the Rev. Darlene Wilkins, who oversaw Mount Clifton. It just became next to impossible to sustain.

In the United States, the latest challenge for places of worship comes against a backdrop of a decadeslong trend of a smaller share of the population identifying as religious.

Its too early to know the full impact of the pandemic. Surveys do show signs of hopefulness  and also cause for concern.

About three-quarters of Americans who attended religious services in person at least monthly before the pandemic say they are likely to do so again in the next few weeks, according to a recent AP-NORC poll. That's up slightly from the about two-thirds who said in May 2020 that they would if they were allowed to do so. But 7% said they definitely won't be attending.

Those findings are in line with a Pew Research Center survey of U.S. residents last summer. It found that 92% of people who regularly attend religious services expected to continue at the same or higher rate, while 7% say they will attend in-person services less often.

Nashville, Tennessee-based Lifeway Research, an evangelical research firm, says many churches lost steam when in-person services shut down. A small but concerning number of churchgoers are coming out of the pandemic in limbo without a church home, said Scott McConnell, Lifeways executive director.

Thats a lot of momentum to lose and a lot of people stepping out of the habit of weekly worship, McConnell said.

Those that are successful in reemerging from the COVID-19 lockdowns will likely be those that did a better job adapting to the pandemic, said White-Hammond. Eight in 10 congregants in the U.S. reported that their services were being streamed online, Pew said.

Those that kept a connection with congregants and relied less on the physical passing of the plate for donations stand a better chance of emerging unscathed, White-Hammond said.

In Charlotte, North Carolina, Temple Beth El was closed during the pandemic but kept congregants in touch through events like challah day. Volunteers baked over 900 loaves of the bread, which were delivered to homes so worshippers could share them over a Shabbat meal.

There will be no returning to normal after the pandemic, said Rabbi Dusty Klass. There were people who went home and may never come back to the sanctuary. They may just pray from their couch. Its up to us to make sure they have the opportunity.

The All Dulles Area Muslim Society, whose main campus is in Sterling, Virginia, said some of its 11 locations have reopened to worshippers with safety measures.

If COVID is gone 100%, I firmly believe our community would be fully back because people crave ... to be together, said Rizwan Jaka, chair of interfaith and media relations.

In San Francisco, the historic Old St. Marys Cathedral survived when members rebuilt after a fire following the 1906 earthquake but it has struggled mightily during the pandemic to stay open.

The 160-year-old Roman Catholic church, which is heavily dependent on older worshippers and tourists, lost most of its revenue after parishes closed during the pandemic. During those dark hours, the Rev. John Ardis had to dismiss most of the lay staff, cut the salary of a priest and close the parish preschool.

The plaster is crumbling, the paint is peeling off the walls and dozens of its stained-glass windows need to be replaced.

But those are secondary at the moment, Ardis said. Because Im just basically trying to trying to keep the doors open.

Here in New England, any slide could be more acute since a smaller proportion of residents identify as religious.

In Maine, Judy Grant, 77, was a newcomer to Waldoboro who started watching the services online and then began attending in person.

Shes upset by the closure.

Im extremely disappointed, she said. A lot of churches are closing. I think COVID had a big part in this latest shrinkage, but they were shrinking even before that, she said.

The final service on Sunday was emotional, with both smiles and tears, as nearly 60 gathered in the sanctuary. Foster preached about new beginnings and encouraged people to continue their faith.

Afterward, people began removing some of the church's contents, including religious paintings, some furniture, and other items.

Grant said some hope the building will come alive again with a new congregation: We have to be positive  and pray."

___

Associated Press writers Mariam Fam in Winter Park, Florida, Luis Andres Henao in New York and Hannah Fingerhut in Washington contributed to this report.

___

Associated Press religion coverage receives support from the Lilly Endowment through The Conversation U.S. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
ATLANTA (AP)  A grand jury has declined to indict a former Georgia state trooper who shot and killed a Black man last year after trying to pull him over for a broken tail light.

Jacob Thompson, who worked for the Georgia State Patrol, had been arrested on charges of felony murder and aggravated assault in the Aug. 7 death of 60-year-old Julian Lewis. After the case was presented to a Screven County grand jury Monday, the grand jurors did not indict Thompson on any of the charges.

Francys Johnson, an attorney for Lewis' family said they want to see video from the shooting. He also called on District Attorney Daphne Totten to empanel another grand jury to try again to get an indictment.

A woman who answered the phone in Totten's office on Tuesday said the district attorney was in court in another county. Totten did not immediately respond to phone and email messages seeking comment.

Keith Barber, an attorney for Thompson, released a statement thanking the grand jury for listening diligently to the evidence in this case and coming to this just and fair determination.

We trust this will be the end of this long ordeal that the Thompson family has had to wrongfully experience because of Trooper Jake Thompson only doing his job to protect the Citizens of the State of Georgia, Barber said.

Lawyers for Lewis' family had applauded Thompson's arrest a week after the shooting and subsequent firing by the Georgia State Patrol. They were further heartened when Screven County Judge F. Gates Peed initially denied bond for Thompson in September, saying it would be inappropriate to allow bond at that moment given the facts in the case. Peed granted a $100,000 bond in November after seven people, including four law enforcement officers, testified on Thompson's behalf.

Lawyers for Lewis' family expressed disappointment Tuesday with the grand jury's decision, saying the system too often fails to provide justice for Black people.

Make no mistake about it, we believe that this was a very strong case," Johnson said during a livestreamed news conference in Savannah. "The evidence was there. It still is.

Barber said Thompson, his family and his defense team offer their condolences to Lewis's family, but he defended Thompson's actions.

Jake Thompson has committed no crime in relation to his interaction with Julian Lewis," Barber said. "He has clearly shown he only acted in self defense in this situation.

Thompson, who is white, tried to pull Lewis over for a broken tail light in rural Screven County, near Georgia's border with South Carolina. When Lewis didn't immediately stop, the trooper pursued him and forced his car into a ditch, then shot Lewis in the head.

Thompson wrote in his incident report that he shot Lewis as Lewis was revving his engine and turning his steering wheel, as if he was trying to ram the trooper. But Georgia Bureau of Investigation Agent Dustin Peak testified in September that was impossible, because Lewis car battery disconnected when it hit the ditch, leaving the vehicle inoperable.

Peak testified that dash camera video shows one second elapsed between the time the trooper got out of his patrol vehicle and when he fired the shot that killed Lewis.

Johnson noted that district attorneys have great power in the indictment process and essentially can present what they want to present how they want to present it. The evidentiary standard of probable cause required for an indictment is much lower than the "beyond a reasonable doubt" required to convict someone at trial.

While grand jury proceedings are secret and people accused of crimes do not generally get the opportunity to appear before grand jurors to present their side, Georgia law does have an exception that allows police officers accused of crimes to testify before a grand jury.

Johnson said he wants to see the transcript of the grand jury proceedings: If the presentation went like the prosecution has gone thus far, we will not be surprised by what we see if there is underzealous prosecution.
Gov. Ned Lamont blocked Rep. Sean Scanlons push this year for a major state income tax cut for Connecticuts middle class.

But Scanlon made sure  through the new state budget Lamont signed last week  that Lamont wont be forgetting it any time soon.

The two-year budget will force the administration to conduct Connecticuts first tax fairness study in seven years, something that fiscal moderates and conservatives have blocked on several occasions since 2014.

And should new federal income tax relief for the middle class expire as planned after this year, the budget also directs Lamont to at least develop his own plan to ease state tax burdens on low- and middle-income households.

Our world changes every year, but our world has changed a lot between 2014 and 2021, said Scanlon, a Guilford Democrat, who added that no one knows how badly the coronavirus pandemic skewed things over the past year.

If I had to guess, that [next] study will show the problem is far worse than it was seven years ago, he said, and I hope that is a call to action.

The 2013 General Assembly first ordered the Department of Revenue Services to provide a tax incidence analysis by December 2014  and then to prepare a follow-up every two years.

An incidence analysis studies which groups pay taxes and how those burdens are shifted. For example, renters effectively pay some or all of their landlords property taxes.

The report also noted that Connecticut relies heavily on regressive taxes  levies that charge the same rate to all households, regardless of income. Examples include property, sales and gasoline taxes.

The analysis found Connecticuts poorest households in terms of adjusted gross income  about 725,000 filers earning up to $48,000 per year  effectively spent 23.6 percent of their pay on state and local taxes.

By comparison, the middle-class paid about 13 percent, while the top 10 percent of earners paid 10 percent and the top 1 percent paid about 7.5 percent.

But while that report prompted many statements of concern from state officials, legislatures and governors would not permit another study, voting four times between 2015 and 2019 to postpone another analysis.

Some fiscal moderates and conservatives have dismissed the study on grounds that the data now is simply too old.

Yale Law School Professor Anika Singh Lemar, who teaches at the schools community and economic development clinic, supports regular updates, noting that otherwise you risk making policy in a vacuum.

Given the highly restrictive zoning rules many communities use to prevent construction of apartment complexes in Connecticut, Lemar also believes the next tax fairness study could show more tax burdens shifted onto renters.

We, right now, have a very tight housing market, she said. Its hitting renters because youve essentially made it illegal to build multi-family housing in your state.

The last of the four times the tax fairness study was postponed involved 2019 legislation signed by Lamont. And Scanlon said the administration pushed for yet another postponement in the most recent budget debate.

While the tax incidence study provides useful information on the burden of taxes by income strata, it is a substantial undertaking and is most useful at a time when more significant tax policy changes are under contemplation, Melissa McCaw, the governors budget director, said Wednesday.

Lamont insisted that the new state budget not include any major tax hikes and blocked progressive proposals to impose new income tax surcharges on wealthy households and a digital media ads levy on online giants like Google and Facebook.

But because of the economic chaos of the pandemic, Lamont also questioned whether Connecticut could afford to commit to a big state tax cut for the middle class.

About 4 percent of the new $46.4 billion biennial state budget, roughly $1.8 billion, is being supported by temporary federal pandemic relief that expires in 2024.

Scanlon wanted to give low- and middle-income households $600 per child  up to a maximum of $1,800  off of their state income taxes. This would cost Connecticut about $300 million per year, according to the legislatures nonpartisan Office of Fiscal Analysis.

Lamont blocked that on two grounds.

We came out of a year from hell, Lamont said while discussing the new state budget on June 10, one day after the regular 2021 General Assembly session adjourned.

The governor agreed that Connecticuts tax system, especially the over-reliance on the property tax  hits the middle class hardest.

But he quickly added that hes trying to jump-start an economy that gained few new jobs over three decades  before a pandemic that wiped out 292,000 positions.

According to the Department of Labor, the state has regained about 185,000 of those jobs but still has more than 100,000 to go. And it also still has more than 175,000 filers receiving weekly unemployment benefits.

Ive got to make sure we stay competitive and can grow, the governor added, because a growing economy is one of the best ways to hold down taxes in general.

The governors second reason for opposing a state income tax cut for the poor and middle class was that Congress recently gave them a federal tax break. The American Rescue Plan Act specifically set the federal child tax credit between $3,000 and $3,600 per child for this year only. Normally the limit is $2,000 per dependent.

Connecticuts congressional delegation has pledged to fight to make that upgrade permanent, but there is no guarantee that will happen.

And Scanlon ensured the new state budget forces Lamont to prepare for that possibility. It specifically orders the administration to at least develop a plan to create a child tax credit within the state income tax  if and when the enhanced federal benefit expires or is reduced.

Many advocates for tax reform dismiss Lamonts argument that the temporary federal relief is sufficient, arguing that tht Connecticuts poor and middle class were getting hammered economically even before 2020.

Between 2010 and 2019, pre-pandemic, Connecticut was the only state to see an increase in the child poverty rate, said Emily Byrne, executive director of Connecticut Voices for Children.

The New Haven-based policy group has been one of the strongest advocates for a state child tax credit to assist the struggling middle class.

Given the disastrous impact of the coronavirus pandemic and recession on children and families  compounded by the fact Connecticut has one of the greatest income and wealth gaps in the country and over a decade of stagnant wages for the majority of its workforce  it would not be surprising to learn that child poverty grew even more these past two years, Byrne added.

Lamont, a Democrat from Greenwich, has his own checkered past when it comes to promises to help Connecticuts middle class.

When he ran for his first gubernatorial term in 2018, his Republican opponent, Madison businessman Bob Stefanowski, made the fiscally dubious pledge to eliminate the state income tax, which effectively pays for half of the budgets General Fund.

As a shield, Lamont vowed to deliver dramatic state income tax cuts to the poor and middle class by expanding a credit that offsets households property tax costs.

He subsequently reneged on that pledge, and since being elected has said he opposes cutting state taxes on the poor and middle class if it means raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for it. The governor has said this approach will make Connecticuts economy less competitive with that of competing states and prompt wealthy families to move.

The Recovery For All Coalition, a team of labor and faith-based groups, lobbied Lamont frequently this past spring to address growing income and wealth inequality. The legislatures Black and Puerto Rican Caucus also has argued Connecticut is doing too little to address longstanding racial inequities in access to education, health care, affordable housing and economic opportunity.

Puya Gerami, director of the coalition, said last week that this debate over Connecticuts extreme inequity is just getting started and will absolutely persist throughout the 2022 gubernatorial campaign.

Lamont has deflected questions about whether he will run again , but many Democratic insiders expect him to seek re-election.

We cant wait any longer for justice, Gerami said, adding that the 2022 contest will be fundamentally, a debate about what kind of state Connecticut ought to be.
SHELTON - U.S. Army veteran Stephen Ford put others needs above his own - that was his way.

Ford died in 2016 at the age of 60, but his wife, Robbin says the Shelton mans legacy of looking out for others - whether it was during his tour in the U.S. Army, his time as superintendent of operations at Sikorsky Memorial Airport or just with family and his beloved dog, Ruby - remains alive and well.

He never boasted about anything, even his beautiful, meticulous yard, Robbin said of her husband. He was smart, funny, caring, always looking out for others.

On Saturday, House of Heroes looked out for Fords wife, honoring his military service in the process.

House of Heroes is a nonprofit veterans service organization that provides one-day, no-cost home improvements with a priority placed on safety and accessibility. The Connecticut Chapter is part of a national organization based in Georgia that has served more than 1,000 veterans nationwide.

About 20 volunteers from the Connecticut chapter, joined by a contingent from project partner Peoples United Bank, visited Fords Newport Avenue home Saturday to repair and remember.

I felt blessed, honored and very grateful, Robbin said. I was also feeling how much Steve would be humbled about all the attention. Its like Stephen is smiling down upon us, looking out for me. Im sure of it.

Robbin said she was stunned at how many volunteers came out, and how fast they worked.

Every single one of them were friendly and happy to help, she said.

Work began at 8 a.m. and included the installation of railings on the front porch, rebuilding of a side porch and steps, and a large amount of yard work.

Now my stairs are safe and I don't have to look at the old stairs anymore, Robbin said, adding that was the area her husband had fallen. He sends me many signs all the time, and I know he's smiling about everything that (House of Heroes) did for me on Saturday to make our one and only home together safe for me.

She added that her late husband can once again be proud of his yards appearance.

The Ford home was one of two projects that House of Heroes Connecticut tackled Saturday, bringing the number of veterans the organization has honored since its founding in 2012 to 147. The organization also assisted U.S. Army veteran Dennis Cunningham of Orange.

Robbin said her friend, Lisa Pavlich-Kuhn, also of Shelton, saw House of Heroes on the news a year ago and emailed them to nominate her.

I had never heard of them, until she told me, Robbin said. Carol May (of House of Heroes) got back to her immediately and said there is a quite a long waiting list, but I would be put on it. One year later, they were here.

Stephen Ford was Boston-born and dreamed of becoming an aviator while growing up in North Billerica, Mass. He joined the Army in 1980, trained at the U.S. Army Rotary Wing Flight School at Fort Rucker, Alabama, and became a helicopter pilot. He was stationed in West Germany and served as a chief warrant officer until entering civilian life in 1984.

Following his service, Ford earned an MBA degree at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. He joined Sikorsky Memorial Airport in 1991 and became superintendent of operations in 2006, the position he held when he died.

Ford was instrumental over the years in numerous major airport projects, Robbin said, and the City of Bridgeport honored his service with a memorial marker at the airport. Airport trucks are also emblazoned with In Memory of Stephen Ford and an American flag.

Robbin's memories of her husband include his love of flying and barbecuing, all the trips the pair took over the years, his desire to help other veterans, and his undying love for the couples beagle, Ruby, who she believes he was carrying when he fell.

His last heroic action was to save her from hitting her head. She was 16 1/2 and they were hooked at the hip, Robbin said. I always tell the story of him taking her to the airport one day years ago and the FAA came to survey the runways. He told the three men, Ruby is my right seat pilot, so you guys have to sit in the back - and they did. We laughed about that for years.

Robbin said perhaps Fords greatest accomplishment over the course of his Sikorsky Airport career was his mentoring of young aviation professionals - or his aces as he liked to call them. Several, according to Robbin, have gone on to accomplished careers in the aviation industry.

Every day I wake up and wonder how Ive made it through these past five years without him, she says. He would do anything for anyone and so many people have so lovingly spoken of him since his passing. I knew how wonderfully kind and giving of his time he was but didnt know the magnitude of how many lives he touched.

For more information about House of Heroes Connecticut, to nominate a veteran, to sponsor or volunteer for a project, or to simply donate to the cause, visit hohct.org.

brian.gioiele@hearstmediact.com
HAMDEN  At first, she thought it was a false alarm.

When Wonsu Luo walked into the hallway outside her second-floor apartment late Saturday night, she didnt even smell smoke.

But then she went outside and saw it: the roof was on fire.

Luo is one of about 90 residents who had to leave their homes at 925 Mix Ave. in the middle of the night last weekend. The cause of the fire is pending investigation, according to Fire Marshal Brian Dolan.

Now, with management saying it will be at least 6 months before the structure is habitable, residents are staying with friends and relatives or in hotels as they figure out long-term plans.

Contributed photo / Hamden Fire Department

Luo had lived in the building less than a month when the blaze hit, she said, and now she has to start the housing search all over again.

Shes staying with a friend in the interim, she said.

Joanna Marchetti, who manages the property for its operating firm Franklin Communities, said residents who have called the building home for more than 40 years as well as immigrants who dont know the area well are among the affected tenants.

Theyre lost. They dont know where to go, she said of the second group. Marchetti can imagine what that might be like  she immigrated to the United States from Poland 23 years ago, she said. She recalled going to the store and not being able to understand English.

Meghan Friedmann / Hearst Connecticut Media

Marchetti spoke of one tenant, a woman whose husband had applied for the apartment but was overseas in Ghana when the fire struck.

She said the tenant, who was living with her child, called Marchetti crying and asked the manager to find her another two-bedroom apartment.

But Franklin Communities does not have enough apartments in its stock to relocate everyone, according to Marchetti.

The property manager frets the state of the housing market will make it tough for the residents to relocate.

Arnold Gold / Hearst Connecticut Media

Marchetti has been calling competitors only to find that there are few options available, and most have a price point 20 percent to 30 percent above the Mix Avenue building, she said.

While some units appear hardly to have been touched by the fire, extensive smoke and water damage forced everyone to move out.

Photo CJ43SOUE ne063021displaced-01

Fortunately, many tenants were able to salvage belongings.

My apartment was one of the lucky ones, Luo said. It didnt really get much damage.

But she knows not everyone fared so well.

On Wednesday, in the middle of one of the hottest days of the year, workers stripped floors and carried debris outside. At the side entrance to the building, a man in a hard hat held a clipboard with a list of appointments for residents who were coming to get their belongings.

The fire burned through the ceiling on the third floor. Smoke soured the air.

Theyve lost everything, Marchetti said of one family who lived on the third floor.

David Velardi got to the apartments late in the morning. He was there to take stock of a clients apartment, he said, adding that he works for a private residential provider that helps adults with disabilities find housing.

Its a hard process because now we gotta get everything out of here, said Velardi. Its unsettling for (the tenant) because he has his own little set-up here.

The tenant, worried about his belongings, had been calling frequently, according to Velardi, who was relieved to find the unit relatively unscathed.

The client, whom Velardi did not identify for privacy reasons, had lived in the Mix Avenue apartment for almost two years, he said.

Hes loved it. Hes built friendships here, Velardi said, later adding, Its like getting uprooted. ... This is his home.

Velardis firm would help the man find his next home, Velardi said, adding that the client is staying in a hotel for the time being.

He worried about residents who did not have a support system in the area.

You just feel bad for those individuals who dont have a lot of family, Velardi said.

Hamden community members have set up a GoFundMe to raise money for residents affected by the fire, which will be distributed through the Keefe Community Center.

Specific items including toiletries, gift cards, nonperishable food, new and sealed bags of socks, laundry detergent, diapers and feminine hygiene products also can be dropped off at the Keefe Community Center during business hours.

A satellite drop-off location will be open from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 5 p.m. to 7 p.m at the Mix District firehouse at 905 Shephard Ave., according to Al Lotto, a town resident who helped organize the effort.

meghan.friedmann@hearstmediact.com
WEST HAVEN  The sites would be more marketable without any toxins present, officials say.

Now, through a state grant, there will be money to use toward assessing the cleanup needs with an eye toward development of four properties, including the location of the former Allingtown library and three former schools in search of a buyer.

Through the state Department of Economic and Community Developments Brownfield Remediation Program, the city is to receive about $180,000 to do assessment work for the blighted sites of the three former schools: the Stiles building at 561 W. Main St., the Blake building at 66 Tetlow St. and the Thompson site at 165 and 179 Richards St. and 70 Hall St.

Corporation Counsel Lee Tiernan said there is asbestos present in the buildings.

Mayor Nancy Rossi said the city received interest from a developer for those three sites, but materials used in the buildings construction gave the developer pause.

People are concerned about buying these buildings; you have to pay all this money to remediate them right off the bat, she said.

The funding will go toward determining the cost of cleaning the buildings. When that happens, Rossi said she believes the city can make a quicker sale of the buildings  and potentially at a higher asking price, as well.

Tiernan said a developer previously offered the city $800,000 for the three sites to build 88 units of housing, but he backed out when he saw the amount of remediation work that would need to be done to make the buildings habitable. Next in line, Tiernan said, was a developer offering $425,000 for the three sites. Although Tiernan said the city was making progress with that transaction, the pandemic put the sale on hold.

It put stuff on hold, but we cant keep the buildings on hold, he said, so the transaction expired.

But the state money, he said, will enable the city to look for a developer again.

Now were going to be able to put the properties in a position for one last study, which will have exact numbers on the work that needs to be remediated, he said.

Tiernan said the developer who offered $425,000 for the three sites had proposed developing flexible office space, for people who would like to rent office space such as conference rooms on a temporary basis.

Well have to see if hes still viable and he can still do it. If not, Ive had about half a dozen people with proposals, Tiernan said.

West Haven Superintendent of Schools Neil Cavallaro said that despite the asbestos in the three former school buildings, it was not asbestos that led to any school closings.

When Stiles was closed in 2002 as an elementary school, I believe, it was due to low enrollment. It was down to ... about 150 students. It then became an alternative high school with small numbers. As enrollment decreased at the high school, it didnt make sense to operate a separate building, so the program was moved to the high school in about 2009, he said in an email.

The Blake building, he said, closed before he began his career with the school district 34 years ago, and had been used as an administrative building before the citys school board was relocated to its current home on Main Street.

Thompson was closed in 2010. Increasing costs and declining enrollment led to a restructuring of the district. We closed Molloy Elementary that year as well, he said. Its important to keep in mind that at one time around we had almost 7,000 students in the district. We ended this year at 5,751.

On top of that, Cavallaro said, Stiles and Thompson had become obsolete because of outdated construction and a lack of accessibility.

In addition to the three former school sites, the city also received a $245,333 state brownfield grant for abatement and remediation of the former Allington library building on Forest Road. According to Tiernan, although the city sold the site to developer Acorn Group  which has completed three mixed-use buildings in the Allingtown district  the city is the recipient of the funding.

Arnold Gold / Hearst Connecticut Media

The city controls the grant, so if Acorn wants the grant theyre going to have to negotiate how thats going to happen, he said.

Tiernan said Acorn Group contributed to the application for the grant funding, and there is a potential advantage to the development group as it may stand to save on the total costs of remediation and abatement work in the building prior to construction.

Its not like its a 100 percent giveaway, but nonetheless it was understood in our negotiations if the remediation money comes through its a win-win for the city and him, he said. Its found money. It only helps.

Representatives of Acorn Group did not return a request for comment.

Arnold Gold / Hearst Connecticut Media

According to DECD spokesman Jim Watson, the purpose of the grant program is to support economic development by reducing the number of blighted properties in the state.

Brownfields are properties that are vacant or underutilized due to contamination issues and the state supports efforts to bring them back to economic reuse, he said in an email. DECDs brownfield program provides the funding to enable clean-up that may attract private development and leverage private dollars.

Watson said contamination due to past operations on sites are a detriment to developers taking on reuse and redevelopment of such sites due to the added expenses in comparison to development of green fields.

DECDs Brownfield program comes in to absorb that price differential and attract the reuse of such sites in our downtowns, he said in the email.

Ultimately, he said the states investment in remediation and abatement of the former library would be to the citys economic advantage.

Arnold Gold / Hearst Connecticut Media

The private developers multi-million dollar investment and reuse of the downtown property into a taxable Class A office facility will expand the Citys taxable Grand List. The City of West Haven is a distressed municipality and projects such as these will help the City. The project is also expected to generate 22 full-time equivalent jobs. The $245,333 state investment will be leveraging approximately $2.25 (million), Watson said.

City Assistant Building Official Doug Colter said all four sites have concerns with contaminated soil - including polychlorinated biphenyls from window caulking, asbestos that was commonly used in mid-century construction projects, lead and underground oil tanks that were not properly remediated during prior to demolition on those sites.

Colter said the Forest Road project will help with a cooperative developers abatement efforts, and the funding for the three former school sites will help to quantify the cost of remediating the buildings.

We want to get these properties into a state where they can be occupied back on the tax rolls, he said.

Alan Olenick, director of the West Haven Chamber of Commerce, said he occupies two additional roles that make the Forest Road development one complicated for him: past president of the library board and chairman of the Allingtown building committee.

Any development going on in Allingtown is obviously good for Allingtown: anything that will increase the commercial tax base there and reduce the reliance on residential taxes is a good thing for Allingtown, he said.

However, he said it still leaves the residents of Allingtown in the hunt for a location for a new library, in addition to other quality of life concerns.

Arnold Gold / Hearst Connecticut Media

Theres certainly a perspective of Allingtown residents who dont appreciate whats being developed over there since it is transforming it really into a college community, and theyre trying to hold onto their residential community, so youll always have some backlash, he said. But commercial development is desperately needed in Alligntown to balance the tax base there.

brian.zahn@hearstmediact.com
Niagara Falls, NY (14301)

Today

Intervals of clouds and sunshine. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 89F. Winds SSW at 15 to 25 mph..

Tonight

Partly cloudy in the evening followed by scattered thunderstorms after midnight. Low 72F. Winds SW at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 40%.
Jacob Zuma, former president of South Africa, has been sentenced to 15 months in prison for contempt of court. Zuma, on Tuesday, was foun...

Jacob Zuma, former president of South Africa, has been sentenced to 15 months in prison for contempt of court.

Zuma, on Tuesday, was found guilty of contempt of court following his refusal to appear before a graft panel.

The Constitutional Court can do nothing but conclude that Mr Zuma is guilty of the crime of contempt of court,





Sisi Khampepe, the judge, said.

The former president had defied an order by the constitutional court in January to appear at an inquiry into corruption while he was president.

The 79-year-old Zuma was forced to step down as president in 2018 over corruption allegations.

More to follow
A Federal High Court sitting in Port Harcourt on Tuesday struck out a suit by members of the Rivers State Anti-corruption Network against th...





A Federal High Court sitting in Port Harcourt on Tuesday struck out a suit by members of the Rivers State Anti-corruption Network against the Rivers State Government.

The court struck out the suit for lacking in merit.

The plaintiffs, Sebastian Kpalab and Arochukwu Ogbonna had asked the court to compel the Rivers State Governor, Nyesom Wike and the Accountant General of the State to make available documents showing the real cost of construction of flyovers and other projects in the state in compliance with democratic tenets of accountability to the citizenry.

The presiding Judge, Justice James Omotosho in his judgment ruled that the plaintiffs filed their suit out of the stipulated thirty days as required by the freedom of information act and therefore struck it out.

Speaking to newsmen after the court proceedings, counsel to the plaintiffs, Victor Nweke while acknowledging that the suit was filed out of time, vowed to re-file the suit in the High court.

Nweke also clarified that the suit was not a witch hunt but a quest to ensure accountability in governance.

The counsel said,  we still have the right to come back to the court for the court to hear our matter on its merits because striking out does not mean dismissal.

If a matter is dismissed you dont have any option than to approach a higher court by way of appeal but in this circumstance, we still have the right to come back to the court and seek Justice. We have a good case.

Also speaking, the counsel to the defendants, Lesley Wike described the judgement as well decided.

She also noted that her team is ready to challenge the suit if the plaintiffs return to court in exercise of their civil rights.
Israels new Foreign Minister, Yair Lapid, arrived in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on Tuesday, making it the first Israeli top diplomat ...

Israels new Foreign Minister, Yair Lapid, arrived in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on Tuesday, making it the first Israeli top diplomat to visit the Gulf state.

During his two-day visit, Lapid would meet with his Emirati counterpart, Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

He would also inaugurate the Israeli embassy in Abu Dhabi and a general consulate in Dubai.

Israel had signed agreements establishing diplomatic ties with the UAE and Bahrain in September following mediation by the United States.

The two became the first Gulf countries to establish official ties with Israel.

This could lead to crossing the decades-old line drawn by most Arab states who had refused relations with Israel until the conflict with the Palestinians had been resolved.
The Senate will on Wednesday consider the 2021 supplementary budget of N895.8 billion. President of the Senate, Ahmad Lawan said this in his...





The Senate will on Wednesday consider the 2021 supplementary budget of N895.8 billion.

President of the Senate, Ahmad Lawan said this in his remarks on a Point of Order raised by Chairman, Senate Committee on Appropriations, Sen. Jibrin Barau during plenary on Tuesday, NAN reports.

Barau had raised Point of Order 43 of the Senate Standing Rules, seeking for more time to submit the report on a supplementary bill for an act to authorise the issue from the Consolidated Revenue Fund of the Federation the total sum of N895, 842, 465, 917.

We were given the mandate to submit the report today (Tuesday).

I want to inform this distinguished Senate that we have started work on the bill. We discovered that we needed more time because we feel we must meet the minimum standard set out by the rules of this Senate in processing the bill, he said.

According to him, the time we expect we will be able to do this is this week, and then get our report submitted on Tuesday next week.

I appeal to this distinguished Senate to permit us to submit our report on Tuesday next week., he added.

Lawan, while interjecting, said, chairman, you will not have more than today.

This is a very straightforward Supplementary Budget request. So it doesnt need two weeks working on it. And you remember, we have a lineup of so many important bills to consider in this Senate.

So you have today. You lay tomorrow, we will receive tomorrow, please. Because I am sure you had the entire weekend from Wednesday, almost six days. That should be enough. These are just two sectors.

It is not a complicated thing. So you dont need up to Tuesday next week. So you submit tomorrow (Wednesday) please, Lawan added.
Watertown, NY (13601)

Today

Mostly sunny skies. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 84F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Thunderstorms likely. Low 71F. Winds SSW at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 70%.
Watertown, NY (13601)

Today

Generally sunny despite a few afternoon clouds. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 84F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Thunderstorms. Low 71F. Winds SSW at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 70%.
Like most good ideas, this one  to write a book about what to do with everything you own to leave the legacy you want  wasnt mine. The idea belonged to a publisher I worked with years ago, who tracked me down to write it up.

Why me? I asked, when he shared his vision for a book on estate planning. The world of wills and trusts was as foreign to me as nuclear physics. Im a home design columnist. My books are about downsizing.

Because this is the ultimate downsizing project, he said. Ive been looking for a book that goes beyond just getting your papers in order, for one that talks about what to do with everything else, and its not out there.

So, you want an estate-planning book that goes beyond peoples portfolios to their possessions, beyond their bank accounts to their belongings. A book that deals with the dishes and clothes, books and tools, mementos and music, art and jewelry. Our collections and cars. Our furniture, recipes, photos and linens. Everything weve made and touched and loved? So simple.

Yes, and that tells us how to create a plan while were alive so that our material assets can benefit others when were not around anymore.

+2 Dive into your closet to purge, reorganize and score a win big against life's chaos I remember the moment three years ago when I sternly told my closet: I will deal with you later. My husband and I were moving from the happy

When were not around anymore?! I needed a stiff drink of something to figure out whether I was up to this.

Also, he added, his voice dropping, I personally could really use this book, so could you hurry? This all happened in the fall before COVID-19, and this fellow was, and is, fit and in his 50s, so I really didnt know what the rush was, though, now, I think we all take life a little less for granted.

Think about it, he said.

So I started thinking. I thought about how, while were alive, our belongings bring us security, visual pleasure, comfort and convenience. They inspire feelings of accomplishment, memories and connections. They to some degree define us. And then what?

What if we could ensure that once we cross the finish line, our money and material goods would get funneled and redistributed in a way that served the people and causes we loved, and made a meaningful difference, as opposed to just creating a mess? I know, I know, we are out on a very thin limb here, but what if small moves we made today had a lasting impact for generations to come?

Sending flowers? 10 expert tips for getting the arrangements your really want from a florist I love getting flowers. I love sending flowers. They are beautiful. They convey emotion. And, perhaps best, when they die they get tossed, so 

I dug in. I talked to experts in tax and estate law, financial planning, philanthropy, estate sales, auctions, art and furniture appraisals. Then I talked to the real experts  people of all ages and stages, who had created an exit plan with intention. Among them were some with no children, many children or someone elses children, from families that were blended, upended or extended. Some had a little; some had a lot. But all had arranged for their belongings to fall into the right hands, someday, to make the world better.

What to Do With Everything You Own to Leave the Legacy You Want, (The Experiment Publishing) came out this week. The good ideas in it came from others. I am only the scribe, who, along the way, made these discoveries among others:

Everyone should have a plan. Whether you want your belongings and the fruits of your lifes work to go to your family, the arts, your church, the environment, animals, research, museums, orphans or all of the above, it wont unless you plan. That diamond necklace, the grandfather clock, the antique rug and the vintage car are not just going to march themselves into the right hands.

Most adults dont have a will, though most could benefit from one. Only a third of those over age 18 and just half over age 55 have any will or estate-planning document. So, if they get hit by a meteor, the state will likely decide who gets their assets. You can do better.

+3 4 dirty secrets of the floral business, and how to avoid being a shrinking violet in dealing with them When I first became a weekly columnist, an editor told me that if I didnt get both love and hate mail from readers, I wasnt doing my job. We

You dont have to be rich to make a difference. But you do have to be intentional. In the book, I share the story of a single schoolteacher in the Ozarks. She left her house, worth about $65,000, to her community foundation to use to help kids go to school. Her gift became an endowment that generates two $1,000 scholarships a year in perpetuity.

Have The Talk. Parents and their kids need to have another talk about the facts-of-life. Dont wait until after youre gone for the family to discover you left Suzy the farm and Sammy the saltshaker. Explaining now what youre doing, including your plan to give your Steinway piano to your church, will head off many conflicts later.

Do the legwork. If you have high-value items, like an antique French armoire or family silver that dates to the 1700s, have it professionally appraised, so family members know what theyre dealing with.

Liquidate while youre alive. Dont get rid of any belongings you still use, love and enjoy. However, if you have any you are ready to part with, ask family members if theyre interested and gift them now. Sell the others and put the cash, which is always easier to deal with than stuff, in the bank. Dont try to hide it. Shoving money in a mattress, under a stair tread, or in a safe-deposit box almost never ends well, and is a great way to destroy a family.

Your plan is the gift. Its not just what you leave, but how you leave it that matters.

Marni Jameson can be reached at www.marnijameson.com.
An alleged test-fixing scheme at a U.S. Coast Guard exam center in Mandeville has netted five more guilty pleas this month from cheating merchant mariners, as prosecutors close in on the Coast Guard employee they accuse of cashing in.

Four merchant mariners  Alexia Lovett, Fredrick Nettles, Stinson Payne and Shunmanique Willis  pleaded guilty last week in federal court in New Orleans, admitting they received job certifications based on bogus test scores.

Another defendant, Alonzo Williams, pleaded guilty to a conspiracy on June 10. Williams admitted he served as an intermediary in the alleged fraud, along with having his own scores fixed, according to interim U.S. Attorney Duane Evans' office.

Evans office said 26 of 31 defendants have pleaded guilty in what prosecutors describe as a bribery scheme that ran from 2012 to 2019.

The November indictment places Dorothy Smith, a U.S. Coast Guard employee and credentialing specialist who worked at the regional exam center on La. 22, at the center of the scam. She has pleaded not guilty.

Smith allegedly reported passing grades to the Coast Guard that effectively granted merchant mariners false endorsements, which determine what positions on a ship they can work. Applicants paid from $1,000 to $3,500 for the bogus credentials, according to the indictment.

Smith allegedly enlisted a half-dozen intermediaries, some from the Coast Guard, to recruit mariners who sought passing results.

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Those intermediaries allegedly included former Coast Guard employees Eldridge Johnson and Beverly McCrary, who also await trial.

James Carr and Harry Johnson are the other merchant mariners who remain as defendants in a case that came out of a probe by the Coast Guard Investigative Service.

The U.S. Merchant Marine is a maritime service outside of the military, made up of civilian mariners and cargo or transport ships that in wartime can be made an auxiliary to the U.S. Navy  as refueling ships at sea, for instance.

Among the fraudulent endorsements the defendants received were for senior positions such as master, chief mate and chief engineer, the indictment alleges.

Some endorsements begat others, authorities allege, and some of the mariners are accused of taking advantage of the scheme multiple times.

U.S. District Judge Barry Ashe, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, has set an Oct. 18 trial date for the remaining defendants. Each faces a maximum five years in federal prison.
The suspect who allegedly gunned down his former girlfriend's mother in Harvey before leading authorities on high-speed chase across the West Bank told authorities he began firing when he saw a man with a gun outside the house.

But a Jefferson Parish Sheriff's detective testified Monday during a probable cause hearing for Dwight Berry that witnesses said no one else at the residence was armed and that Berry "began firing indiscriminately."

Berry, 24, was booked with second-degree murder in the slaying of of Tamika London, 44, on May 18. He has two children with London's 22-year-old daughter, Detective Harold Wischan testified.

Berry also had a history of domestic violence against his former girlfriend that included a January 2019 arrest for allegedly choking and beating her while she was pregnant, court records said. Those charges were later dropped.

But on the day of the shooting, London's daughter had called the Sheriff's Office to report another domestic violence incident, Wischan said. Because the incident occurred in New Orleans, the department directed her to call the New Orleans Police Department.

+2 Harvey murder suspect accused of killing his child's maternal grandmother: JPSO A Terrytown man is accused of gunning down his child's maternal grandmother in Harvey Tuesday afternoon.

About 4:30 p.m. that day, London was standing outside her house while talking with a relative. The family member told investigators she saw a dark blue Ford Crown Victoria drive down the street toward them, Wischan recounted. The man behind the wheel opened the driver's-side door and got out while the car was still rolling.

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"The man began firing indiscriminately," Wischan testified.

London was shot several times as she tried to run to her vehicle in the driveway. The gunman, who callers to 911 identified as Berry, sped off.

Deputies responding to the scene spotted Berry driving away in the vehicle described by witnesses, according to Wischan. Berry refused to stop, kicking off a chase at speeds up to 100 mph that ended after he crashed near the intersection of Behrman Highway and Anson Street in Algiers. A search of his car turned up the 9mm pistol used in the homicide and an assault rifle, Wischan said.

+2 JPSO rearrests Marrero man accused of fraud involving disabled relative A Marrero man accused of improperly gaining access to a disabled relative's financial accounts has been arrested again on additional charges, 

During questioning, Berry told investigators he opened fire because a man who was at the house pointed a gun at him. Berry's mother told authorities she had been at London's home earlier in the day and saw an armed man, Wischan testified.

But the witnesses at London's residence countered Berry's claim. They said that neither London nor anyone else at the house was armed, according to Wischan.

Monday's hearing in Jefferson Parish Magistrate Court ended before Magistrate Commissioner Patricia Joyce could make a ruling on probable cause because Berry demanded to represent himself during the proceedings. Joyce continued the matter until July 13 so that Berry and the defense attorneys could sort out representation.

Berry was being held at the Jefferson Parish Correctional Center on an $804,300 bond.
A former homicide commander in the New Orleans Police Department is demoted after all, over an alleged pattern of sexual harassment and retaliation.

The Louisiana Supreme Court on Tuesday reinstated a demotion handed to Jimmie Turner, from lieutenant to sergeant, for acts that included kissing a subordinate on the top of his head and massaging a detectives neck while soliciting a ride on his motorcycle.

The states highest court found that the New Orleans Civil Service Commission was within bounds when it demoted Turner and suspended him for 25 days in late 2018.

An appeals court panel had overturned Turners demotion in March, ruling 2-1 that it was too harsh a punishment. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal Judge Terri Love dissented from that ruling, which the Supreme Court reversed Tuesday.

The court found that Turners demotion was not arbitrary and capricious and did not constitute an abuse of discretion.

Justice Scott Crichton wrote a concurring opinion that found the physical and verbal harassment of his subordinates provides a rational basis for determining Mr. Turner was unfit for his rank and position.

Only Justice Jefferson Hughes III voted to uphold the appeals court ruling that would have restored Turners rank.

A sergeant in the homicide section, Peter Hansche, filed an internal complaint in 2017 accusing Turner of unwanted touching and inappropriate sexual and racial comments, in a litany of acts.

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Internal investigators said they found evidence that Turner, who is married, once embraced Hansche from behind and kissed him on the top of the head. Turner also would haze Hansche  who is heterosexual  by positing Hansches romantic involvement with two male colleagues.

Another detective said Turner told him at the scene of a triple killing that he had just been showering, touching himself, and thinking of the detective.

By early 2018, NOPD brass had moved Turner out of the homicide section, which hed led since July 2015.

The department suspended him without pay in October 2018 and made him a patrol district sergeant. It said Turner had violated NOPD rules prohibiting workplace harassment and discrimination.

Turner appealed to the Civil Service Commission, and a hearing officer recommended reinstatement and back pay, saying the department had failed to make its case. Commissioners Michelle Craig, Clifton Moore, Jr. and Mark Suprenant rejected that view and denied Turner's appeal.

Turners attorney, Frank DeSalvo, has said the officer's accusers didn't support their claims at a hearing, and that Turner was guilty only of being "too casual, friendly with the people who worked for him."

"Jimmie Turner will survive. Life will go on," DeSalvo said after Tuesday's ruling. "I'm disappointed they felt the way they did. It's really a shame."
Pressed by NOLA Public Schools to address allegations of mismanagement of public funds, James M. Singleton Charter School could soon get a new operator.

Samuel Odom, a former board member and interim CEO for the PreK-8th grade school, said in a letter to the school district that officials want to transfer the charter and "refocus the mission" of the Dryades YMCA, which holds the charter, and return it to a "historical community organization that does not operate a school."

At the same time, officials with NOLA Public Schools vowed Monday to "take necessary next steps to redress" the charter's noncompliance with multiple district rules, after attempting to work with leaders since November "both formally through correspondence and informally through conversations," according to Taslin Alfonzo, a school district spokesperson.

"All options, including revocation, are on the table," Alfonzo said.

District officials have sent three warning letters to the school in the last seven months, and have cautioned the Dryades YMCA that failure to address the issues can ultimately result "in escalated consequences, including but not limited to, additional intervention or revocation of your charter contract with OPSB."

"Any course of action will include a plan that ensures every affected student can continue their classroom instruction during the 2021-2022 school year without interruption," Alfonzo said.

Among other complaints, the district said the school is owed about $1.1 million from its sponsor organization, that Odom's appointment to interim CEO runs afoul of state ethics laws, and that the school has failed to properly conduct background checks for employees.

While the charter organization has resolved some issues, the district said officials still haven't received a satisfactory answer to questions about the charter organization's financial management.

The district said earlier this month that the school was owed more than $1.1 million from "its sponsor organization, and other programs"; that the Dryades YMCA allegedly owed Singleton $381,578 from 2019; and that an onsite visit revealed more than $16,000 in checks and credit card payments were missing receipts.

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Odom said that while the Dryades YMCA is still sorting out the finances following leadership changes, officials there "have yet to validate the sensational and unverified allegations of misuse or noncompliance in handling public funds."

He said that because the Dryades YMCA holds the charter contract for Singleton charter school, it functions as one entity. He also said charter officials should be in the clear as long as public money was used toward the overarching mission of providing education and programs to Central City youth.

"We challenge the unsupported conclusion that a single legal entity owes itself funds," Odom wrote in the letter.

Odom said he would have more detailed answers about the charter organization's budget after a contracted accounting firm finishes their review.

However, Alfonzo said the financial information should have been made available by June 7 "regardless of the entitys relationship with the school," and that the organization also missed a second deadline of June 24.

The district's warning comes as Odom requested a sit-down meeting with officials and a moderator to figure out how the 115-year-old school can best serve students in New Orleans' Central City neighborhood.

Odom had said in a letter last week the board was open to transferring the school's charter agreement. In July 2020, he noted, Singleton officials had filed with the Louisiana Secretary of State to become "a separate and distinct non-profit" from Dryades YMCA.

"What were asking for is opportunity to sit down...we don't know what the options are," Odom said in a phone interview Monday. "There's just been back-and-forth bantering, letter and response between both entities."
The Orleans Parish school district has called an emergency board meeting for Wednesday morning to give an update on the charter held by Dryades YMCA, the nonprofit that runs James M. Singleton school.

The meeting announcement comes just days after the district vowed to "take necessary next steps to redress" allegations of fiscal mismanagement and other compliance issues at the nonprofit, which has been in charge of the F-rated PreK through 8th grade school in Central City since 2006.

Orleans School District could revoke charter for embattled James Singleton Charter School Pressed by NOLA Public Schools to address allegations of mismanagement of public funds, James M. Singleton Charter School could soon get a new

District spokesperson Taslin Alfonzo said via email that "all options, including revocation, are on the table," but that action would ensure enrolled students can still attend class next school year "without interruption."

District officials have sent several warning letters to the school in the last seven months, saying the school is owed about $1.1 million from Dryades YMCA, that its appointment of an interim CEO violated state ethics laws and that the school hasn't conducted employee background checks properly.

Some of those issues have been resolved, but district officials said they still have grave concerns about the nonprofit's fiscal management.

+18 COVID cases down, New Orleans families face new challenge: overflowing social schedules It was a long-awaited sign of normalcy for Jessica Rigaud when a neighbor called a few weeks ago and asked if her daughter could come play, a 

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The latest controversy comes after the school's former COO, Catrina Reed, was arrested for allegedly falsifying background checks for school employees and pocketing the money instead, an action that resulted in some employees with criminal backgrounds working at the school.

Samuel Odom, the school's interim CEO, said that the school is actively conducting background checks, that his appointment is kosher because he's volunteering and that the Dryades YMCA is still sorting out its finances following leadership changes at the school. He has also argued that the funding transfers were above board.

"We challenge the unsupported conclusion that a single legal entity owes itself funds," Odom wrote in a letter last week.

+3 Leadership at Lycee Francais resign amid labor law, administrative pay investigations Two top administrators and a governing board member have resigned from Lycee Francais de la Nouvelle Orleans, a popular French immersion chart

The live stream of the board's public hearing will be available via this link beginning at 10 a.m. on Wednesday. To call in, dial (301) 715-8592, (312) 626-6799, or (646) 558-8656 and when prompted enter the meeting ID 947 5193 2562.

Editor's note: This story has been corrected to say that students can attend class next school year regardless of the district's decision. An earlier version stated the students could attend Singleton.
Last month, an unknown amount and type of acid gas leaked from within the Domino Sugar refining facility in Chalmette, escaping into the air. The cause was also unknown, according to a notice sent to the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality by the plant.

Such self-disclosures are sometimes known as courtesy reports, and are often the only way members of the public learn of unauthorized releases. The leaders of a New Orleans-based grassroots advocacy group are worried about the potential impacts of keeping such reports shrouded from public view for up to two years, which is what could happen if Gov. John Bel Edwards signs legislation allowing the Department of Environmental Quality to create a voluntary environmental self-audit program.

"There's a lot of information and reports right now on below-reportable-quantity events that are pretty damn serious," said Broderick Bagert, a lead organizer for Together Louisiana. "At least in some instances, there is a venue of information that's going to be foreclosed of things that we already are aware of."

Louisiana polluters could report violations to receive lower fines, confidentiality The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality would craft an environmental self-audit program for industry use

Together Louisiana, a network of more than 250 faith-based and civic groups, is pushing for the governor's veto, a decision that will have to be made by midnight Thursday.

A move toward self-audits is heavily supported by Louisiana's oil, gas and chemical industries, who have pushed for some version of it since 1997. The state agency argues the program would be modeled after one designed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that aims to incentivize polluters to disclose and correct minor issues in plants more proactively. In exchange, companies may receive a reduction in fines and a veil of secrecy until settlement proceedings close -- or for two years, whichever comes first.

During the session, agency officials said information provided in self-audits that companies are already required to report would remain public. But those courtesy reports aren't legally required if the company finds that the amount released was below reportable quantities.

Bagert says it's unclear whether these notices would remain available to the public if they're provided through a self-audit.

"The question here is whether the public has a right to know information that its government is in possession of about toxic chemicals in their own community," he said. "We all could have debates about the appropriate regulation. This is something far simpler. It's even knowing that releases and spills of these toxic chemicals have taken place."

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A spokesman for the DEQ declined to comment at this time when asked whether courtesy reports would remain confidential under the program.

Should the bill become law, the agency would begin working internally and with stakeholders to develop rules. Those rules would have to go before the Legislature again for review and approval once complete. There is no timeline for implementing the program, but the rule-making process is expected to take months.

Some environmental advocates, including the Louisiana Environmental Action Network, also strongly opposed House Bill 72, which also removes the requirement for the DEQ to hold public hearings on major source air permits.

Shauna Sanford, the governor's communications director, said Monday that the bill is still "under review" and no action has been taken yet.

Since the legislative session ended, the governor has only vetoed three bills. He also issued a number of line-item vetoes to the budget and appropriations bills.
Any potential relocation of City Hall  including Mayor LaToya Cantrells plan to shift the seat of government to Municipal Auditorium  would require City Council approval under a new measure Councilmember Helena Moreno will put forward this week.

Combined with a temporary halt on any development at Municipal Auditorium proposed last week by Councilmember Kristin Gisleson Palmer, the new restrictions will likely be a significant roadblock that could prevent Cantrells efforts to squeeze the citys offices into the historic venue in Armstrong Park by requiring most city employees to work from home.

Cantrell is the third consecutive mayor to try to move City Hall out of its dilapidated home on Perdido Street and plans for a relocation go back even further. The Municipal Auditorium proposal has been assailed by neighbors and critics around the city, who say the building should be left as a cultural center and argue that turning the building that fronts Congo Square into an office would amount to desecrating a sacred space.

Moreno said Tuesday that her plan is aimed broadly at forcing community engagement and preventing the lack of buy-in that sank the previous proposals and now imperil the current administrations ambitions.

Shes not the first mayor to have some trouble and some pushback on the relocation of a City Hall, Moreno said.

Its because there was a lack of public engagement and a lack of a public process. This is a problem that has persisted now for decades, so lets create that process, lets require the public engagement, lets require the accountability and let's all be in this together, Moreno said.

That all would be accomplished by a change to the citys Comprehensive Zoning Ordinance that would require a conditional use permit to locate the seat of the citys government anywhere in New Orleans. Such permits must go through an extensive process, including City Planning Commission reports and hearings and, ultimately, they must be approved by the City Council.

Exactly how the seat of government will be defined is still being worked out.

The change will be co-sponsored by interim Councilmember Donna Glapion. Moreno and Glapion are the council's two at-large members, and they represent the city as a whole rather than individual geographic districts.

Changes to the zoning ordinance require an extensive process of reports, hearings and votes, and would likely take at least four months before the new requirements were put in place.

In the meantime, a move to the Municipal Auditorium would be blocked by Palmers measure, which would prevent the mayor's plan from being put into motion for a year.

The council is expected to vote on both Palmers proposal and a resolution supporting Morenos plan at their meeting on Thursday. The actual legislation is still being drafted and is not expected to come up for a formal vote before mid-July.

Councilmember Kristin Palmer moves to block Cantrell's plan to relocate City Hall to Treme Councilmember Kristin Gisleson Palmer on June 23 announced she is filing legislation that would temporarily halt Mayor LaToya Cantrells admin

In practical terms, the two measures rely on each other. Palmers hold on development at the site serves as a quickly-implemented stopgap to prevent the administration from moving forward, while Morenos longer-term effort prevents the mayors office from picking up where it left off when the moratorium expires.

However, that doesnt mean the two councilmembers are directly aligned on the issue.

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Im glad shes following my lead, Palmer said of Moreno on Tuesday, before noting that her approach "immediately protects Treme."

Palmer, whose district includes Treme and Armstrong Park, also argued that decisions about the future location of city government should be left up to a commission that would include public officials, council members, community members and those in development and finance, among others.

+5 LaToya Cantrell backs away from plan to move City Hall to Municipal Auditorium Mayor LaToya Cantrell backed away Friday from plans to move New Orleans City Hall to the Municipal Auditorium in Louis Armstrong Park, saying 

I do not think Morenos resolution is going to address all of this and I think it has to be done in a thoughtful manner, Palmer said.

For her part, Moreno cast Palmers solution as a temporary fix, and she said she began working on her own legislation because it doesnt solve the underlying problem.

Why isnt there a better process for public engagement? Why arent there more checks and balances for a new City Hall? Moreno said. I want to make sure that wherever theres a new City Hall, theres a requirement for public engagement, and that theres also City Council approval.

Such jockeying is not unheard of even among council members with similar aims, particularly as election season approaches. In this case, the stakes may be higher than normal as the Municipal Auditorium becomes an issue for Cantrells re-election efforts and an issue for council members to burnish their credentials with the community.

Palmer is currently seeking a promotion to an at-large seat, but wont be running against Moreno. Instead, shes seeking what will be an open spot, where shell be running against former state Sen. JP Morrell  who is a close ally of Moreno  and Councilmember Jared Brossett.

Cantrell has been arguing since the first year of her term that City Hall should be relocated to the Municipal Auditorium, in large part because $38 million in FEMA money has been dedicated to the buildings repair. That would put a dent in price tag for the renovations, which could cost more than $100 million.

But Cantrell was forced to retreat as opposition groups held meetings and protest marches attended by hundreds. She first scaled back the design  dropping plans that included a whole complex of government buildings with a much-derided parking garage  and then announced she would be open to hearing alternatives after this falls mayoral and council elections.

The administration, which attacked Palmers proposal immediately after it was released, has taken a less aggressive stance on Morenos so far.

Cantrell declined to comment on the proposal when asked about it at a press conference Tuesday morning. Her communications director, Beau Tidwell, said at a briefing later in the day that the administration has spoken to Moreno about the ordinance.

We haven't seen the specific language of what she's proposing, so I can't commit 100% one way or another, but as we understand it right now, it's not something we have any objection to, Tidwell said.

+3 'Can't Tell Cantrell:' Treme rallies for second line in opposition to City Hall relocation plan Mayor LaToya Cantrell wants Treme residents to just trust her when she says putting the offices of a government once tasked with enforcing sla

Staff writers Julian E.J. Sorapuru and Tony McAuley contributed to this report.
If you're heading into the three-day weekend with some outdoor Fourth of July plans in southeast Louisiana, we have some bad news to share: it may get rained out.

The off-and-on rainy weather that has lasted for several days now in metro New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Lafayette will unfortunately carry into the holiday weekend, said National Weather Service forecasters Danielle Manning.

"It's not looking good," Manning said. "Maybe have indoor plans."

 Good morning, guess what, another day of showers & thunderstorms. You know what we will just come out now & say storms are likely every day through the 4th & the worse news is that rain could last well into the evening hours at the end of the week & the weekend. #LAwx #MSwx pic.twitter.com/BHdo7t8169  NWS New Orleans (@NWSNewOrleans) June 28, 2021

Thunderstorms are most likely to drench the southeast on Saturday afternoon with an 80% to 90% chance. There is a 60% to 70% chance of precipitation for much of the long weekend, from Saturday morning to Monday afternoon.

Some relief might come Sunday evening, particularly for those with July Fourth of July fireworks plans, when rain chances drop down to 30% after 7 p.m.

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Manning added that high temperatures across the region are forecast to be in the mid 80s this weekend.

As the Fourth of July approaches, so does a dangerous New Orleans custom: celebratory gunfire In 2019, Mark Malouse was pulling into his Bywater backyard when he noticed his solar panels looked unusually cloudy. The lifelong 9th Ward re

Strong winds aren't expected to be a threat during the weekend's batch of summer showers, but forecasters anticipate these thunderstorms dropping plenty of rain in a short amount of time -- a problem for an already oversaturated Louisiana.

"Especially with how wet weve been lately, heavy rainfall is the main concern," Manning said. "When weve got this much moisture in the atmosphere, any thunderstorm could drop a quick 1 to 2 inches of rainfall in an hour. Thats when you can see street flooding."

To see the latest forecast, click here.
The New Orleans Regional Transit Authority is reducing fares and hoping more of us will return as riders.

I havent been on a bus since early 2020, and I was riding somewhat regularly.

Its important for those who dont ride public transit to remember that many people rely on it to get to appointments, to go shopping, to take their kids places, to see family and friends  and to go to work. Maybe youre fortunate enough to have a car or a truck. Maybe you can afford to pay cash for a vehicle or to pay a monthly note. There are some who have personal vehicles, but they choose to reduce the wear and tear, and perhaps reduce their personal carbon footprint, by using public transportation. But there are lots of people who dont have that luxury.

In New Orleans, public transit riders take the bus, the streetcar and the ferry. Each line serves different people for different purposes, and many lines serve people for some of the same purposes. The pandemic has changed life for us all, especially transit riders. And that means RTA hasnt been the same.

Im happy to see RTA making adjustments, being responsive to the marketplace and reducing fares to attract riders.

According to RTA, when the pandemic made things really rough in spring 2020, ridership didnt just slip. It fell like a rock being tossed from a levee top into the Mississippi River or the Industrial Canal. Pre-pandemic annual ridership 2019: 15,242,465. Ridership as of June 2021: only 2,990,837.

People who had to ride to get to their essential jobs did so and they rode on fewer public vehicles, each with significantly enhanced safety precautions. Those who didnt have a job to go to stayed home. Those who could find other ways to get to work did so. We lost a lot of hospitality jobs, and a bunch of those workers were public transit riders. RTA responded, cutting operations by half.

Since Gov. John Bel Edwards and New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell have lifted many COVID-19 restrictions, RTA wants to see ridership increase, preferably to pre-pandemic levels. According to a study of more than a dozen similar-sized public transportation agencies in the nation, RTAs rider prices were high compared to Austin, Charlotte, Chicago, Jacksonville and other cities.

Effective July 4, there are fare adjustments and fare reductions. The $1.25 base rate for a single trip will cover a rider without the $0.25 transfer upcharge. The 3-day and 5-day passes wont be available, at least not until 2022, because there were limited sales. Youth riders under 18 can get a single ride for $0.50 and they can get a monthly pass for $18. Senior citizens will be able to purchase a day pass for $0.80 and a monthly pass for $14. Others can take advantage of the $10 monthly pass price drop, from $55 to $45.

One of the best things about the changes: RTA wont require separate bus, streetcar and ferry passes. That makes it easier to go to work, stop at the store and go see yo mama and dem.

The changes will last at least through the end of the year. If enough people return and if enough tourists and visitors ride public transportation, theres a chance all or some of these fare changes might stick.

RTA gets most of its $115 million budget from sales taxes, and we havent had as many businesses paying as much in sales taxes, as some went to reduced hours with fewer customers and fewer sales, and as others shut down. Since RTA relies on rider fares for about $18 million, its important that this adjustment work.

I am fortunate enough that I dont have to rely on fare reductions to return to riding public transit. Now that Im out of my Sutton Slow Phase and into my Sutton Near-maskless Stage, Im likely to wear a mask as I return to riding soon. Im confident RTA will continue necessary safety precautions.

Were seeing a summer and fall with more of what the Crescent City and southern Louisiana is known for  festivals, food and fun. We know friends will email, text or call suggesting that theyre thinking about a visit. I suggest we welcome them, point them in the right directions and suggest that they ride a bus, ferry or streetcar.
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The Frontier is a nonprofit, independent news source based in Tulsa. Frontier content is republished in The Transcript through a special content agreement. For more information on The Frontier, visit readfrontier.org.
Staff Writer

Reese Gorman covers elections, local politics and the COVID-19 pandemic for The Norman Transcript. He started as an intern in May of 2020 and transitioned into his current position as a staff writer in August of 2020.
Two electric vehicle charging stations outside Rudys BBQ & Country Store, along Highway 9 at Chautauqua Avenue, are shown in October 2019. An electric vehicle startup will build its first manufacturing plant in Pryo, state officials announced Thursday.
Harrisburg, Pa.  Two 3-D printers and molds used to create homemade gun components from a convicted felon not to possess firearms were confiscated by the Office of Attorney General on Tuesday. The seizure is the first time a 3-D printer has been apprehended by the Office of Attorney General.

Kenneth Wilson from Northampton County, Pa. had been previously released on bail for charges of trafficking methamphetamine in September 2020, according to a news release.

Wilsons 3-D printer is alleged to have been used to 3-D print homemade firearms, which were previously unavailable to residents using an Internet Protocol address in Pennsylvania.

According to Attorney General Josh Shapiro, loopholes to produce homemade ghost guns, whether by building from an 80% receiver kit or using a 3-D printer, are often exploited by criminals who would be unable to obtain a gun legally.

Due to Wilsons felony convictions, he was unable to possess a firearm, homemade or otherwise.

Kenneth Wilson was caught manufacturing untrackable and untraceable firearms out of his home. Once assembled, these fully functional firearms often become a tool for senseless violence, said Shapiro. Ghost guns are quickly becoming the weapon of choice for criminals that take the lives of too many Pennsylvanians."

On June 24, 2021, agents from the Office of Attorney Generals Bureau of Narcotics Investigations and Pennsylvania State Police Special Emergency Response Team executed a search warrant on the home of Kenneth Wilson, 38. While executing the search warrant, agents seized two 3-D printers, three ghost gun frames, three firearms, a small amount of methamphetamine, $1,140 in cash, and drug packaging equipment.

The investigation is ongoing. This case is being prosecuted by the Northampton County District Attorney.
Williamsport, Pa.  A 20-year-old Williamsport mother is facing a felony endangering the welfare of children charge after authorities said she left three young children in a car.

Williamsport Bureau of Police officers responded to a call on May 15 at 8:25 p.m. in the evening for three juveniles being left unattended in a vehicle for several hours.

The children, aged 13, six, and one, told officers they had been in the car since it was hot outside. Officers said no food or drink was left in the car for the children.

Naionna Marie Banks, who officers said left the kids in the parking lot, was discovered around midnight after authorities received a call for an overdose.

Officers said Banks was discovered nearly two blocks away from where the children were found by police.

No bail was listed for Banks, who was also charged with two counts of misdemeanor endangering the welfare of children.
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Three more men have been arrested in Paulding County by Atlanta Police in connection with the May Peninsula Apartments shooting.
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The Michigan City Chamber of Commerce has launched the Discover Michigan City campaign to market the lakefront city in LaPorte County.

The city reached an agreement with the more than 100-year-old chamber of commerce to spearhead marketing efforts to promote Michigan City.

The chamber will be able to use this marketing content in a positive way to promote Michigan City, our businesses, nonprofit organizations and residents, Chamber President Katie Eaton stated. Of the over 350 members that are represented by the Michigan City Chamber of Commerce, over half of them are small local establishments and we are honored to have the opportunity to promote a stronger support local message using this content.

The chamber will use the city-owned website discovermichigancity.com and its existing content in its promotional efforts.

I am truly excited about this endeavor," Michigan City Mayor Duane Parry said. "I would like to commend Katie and her staff at the Chamber for the forward-thinking to promote and highlight our city and our small businesses to help Discover Michigan City.

A committee of several community groups and businesses will proffer advice on the marketing campaign.
"During the pandemic, we have been primarily work-from-home where possible. That said, we are a retail and customer-focused business, so there has always been a good part of our business that has remained in-person," Peoples Bank President and CEO Ben Bochnowski said. "We have had good success with our safety and vaccination efforts, and because of that, we have spent the better part of June transitioning back to a work-from-office environment. After the 4th of July, we expect to be as 'normal' as we can be while the safety of our employees remains our top priority."

"Over 70% of our employees are vaccinated, and external factors such as positivity rates and hospitalizations are trending in the right direction. We have always had some employees with flexible work arrangements; some of our sales team for example move between offices so they can best serve our customers," Bochnowski said. "While primarily a work-from-office company, we do have an alternative worker policy that covers part-time, flex-time, and remote work. This all depends on the role and the individual, and while we expect most of our team to come back to the office environment, some roles will have a remote component. We have also grown, and the technology we have deployed has allowed us to better use our facilities to office individuals in other areas, such as Orland Park, while we stay connected through videoconferencing and other technologies."
Fleetwood Mac legend Lindsey Buckingham will play Four Winds New Buffalo while touring in support of his first new solo album in a decade.

After leaving Fleetwood Mac, he is releasing a self-titled LB with a single "I Don't Mind." It's his first solo release since the 2011 album "Seeds We Sow."

I Dont Mind, like many of the songs on my new album, is about the challenges couples face in long-term relationships," Buckingham said. Over time, two people inevitably find the need to augment their initial dynamic with one of flexibility, an acceptance of each others flaws and a willingness to continually work on issues. It is the essence of a good long-term relationship. This song celebrates that spirit and discipline.

He will tour 30 cities in support of the album this fall, stopping at the Silver Creek Event Center at Four Winds New Buffalo at 11111 Wilson Road just across the state line in Southwest Michigan at 9 p.m. on Sept. 4. It's his first tour since a life-saving open-heart surgery in 2019.

Buckingham has released seven studio and three live albums as a solo artist. He wrote, produced and recorded the new self-titled album in his studio in Los Angeles, playing every instrument himself.
HAMMOND  Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Northwest Indiana celebrated 13 graduating seniors last week at a small ceremony at Hammond Boys & Girls Club.

In front of parents and friends, teens from Hammond, East Chicago, Gary and Lake Station wore their schools graduation regalia and received leather-bound Club diplomas from Boys & Girls Clubs president and CEO Ryan Smiley.

In his address, Smiley commended the grads on their accomplishments and perseverance through a tumultuous final year of high school. He advised the graduates to be kind and act with honor.

Remember to be the best version of yourself," Smiley said.

Boys & Girls Clubs first held a graduation ceremony last year after Region schools canceled theirs due to the COVID pandemic. Smiley noted the organization made the decision to hold the event again this year to mark the end of the teens tenure as Club members.

We didnt want the moment to pass without acknowledging the time they spent in our Clubs, he said.

Michael Hooper, chief operating officer and president of NIPSCO, delivered the commencement address. Hooper, who also sits on Boys & Girls Clubs board of directors, focused his speech on the importance of leadership.
Nicholas Brown stepped down in February as Chesterton's interim police chief in the face of an investigation for what was described only as an "out-of-state incident." He then left the department in May.

Robert Byrd, who has served 39 years as police chief for the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District, which operates the South Shore Line, has been serving as interim chief in Chesterton.

Richardson told the town he will continue his focus on combating illegal drugs and guns.

"My mantra as a law enforcement officer has always been that children deserve an opportunity to grow up in an environment free of gun violence," Richardson said. "As we watch the national news each morning, we get daily reminders of just how much gun violence is on the rise and how it impacts lives nearly every day. Some days, I think weve become almost numb to it, when we see that yet another active shooter event has occurred somewhere in our country."

"Ive always been very fond of the town of Chesterton, since childhood," Richardson said. "While the CPD is significantly smaller than the department I am leaving, all of the same principles and values still apply."
Hein received a retirement badge, a 25-year pin and retirement certificate from the Dyer Fraternal Order of Police during his retirement ceremony.

Griffith Police Chief Greg Mance said he came to know Hein through the major crime task force, and recalled one of the first things he noticed about Hein was how dedicated and professional he was.

"Everything that he set out to change, or to bring change to in a positive way, he did," Mance said.

Dyer Firefighter/EMT Scott Hemmerich said Hein became a "go-to" guy and mentor for him when he met Hein in 2007.

Hemmerich noted Hein became a first responder because of a car accident he was involved in, which "ignited his passion to protect and serve his community."

"You are, and always will be, a public servant, son, father, husband, coworker, mentor, role model we should all aim to be," Hemmerich said.

Town Council President Alan Brooks, R-Ward 3, said Hein, who he called the heart of the police department, has a big heart for the town and its residents.
A Saturday afternoon thunderstorm produced the Region's second tornado in a five-day span, the National Weather Service confirmed on Monday.

The NWS said the Saturday tornado, which touched down in Dyer and Schererville, was classified as an EF-0 with winds of 65 to 85 mph.

On the same day, another EF-0 tornado touched down just across the state line in Crete, the NWS said.

On June 21, the NWS reported an EF-0 tornado in the South Haven area. That was the same day an EF-3 tornado, with winds measuring 135-165 mph, caused major damage and several injuries in the southwest suburbs of Naperville and Woodridge.

Hazardous weather is predicted across the Region through the early part of this week, bringing thunderstorms and an elevated flood risk, according to the National Weather Service.

"Waves of thunderstorms with torrential downpours will move through northern Illinois and northwestern Indiana ... through Tuesday," according to the weather service. "With already saturated soils, additional rainfall may lead to flash flooding of ditches, farm fields, and roadways.

A flash flood watch is in effect for portions for much of Northwest Indiana and northern Illinois until Tuesday evening.
When discussing public safety, I preface it with I believe in law enforcement when it is done legally, morally and ethically. At the forefront of that discussion should always be the influence and accountability of prosecutors practices, which can make or break communities.

My brother was a police officer for 30 years in Chicago, and my husband was a mayor for eight years. It was through them I realized that prosecutors can have more influence over policing than even a mayor. They are the nexus between policing and community relations. Changes in prosecutor conduct causes changes in policing.

John Lake is LaPorte County's prosecutor and top law enforcement agent. His statements affect the reputation and safety of our county, and as voters, it is our responsibility to dissect them.

Since he took office, crime has skyrocketed. He stated he would prosecute more cases, but data has shown that does not reduce crime.

He explained that one of the three prongs of a prosecutors job is dealing with law enforcement. Prosecutors meet with a team of police officers on a regular basis to establish the tone for policing. Lake is playing a vital role in formulating the strategies for combating crime.
In recent weeks, the investigation has focused largely on the perks Mr. Trump and the company awarded Mr. Weisselberg and other executives, including tens of thousands of dollars in private school tuition for one of Mr. Weisselbergs grandchildren, as well as rents on apartments and car leases for him and his wife. If Mr. Weisselberg failed to pay taxes on those benefits, he may have violated the law, providing the prosecutors with leverage over him as they seek his cooperation with their broader investigation into the Trump Organization.

The prosecutors, who for months have pressured Mr. Weisselberg to turn on his longtime employer, have examined whether the Trump Organization misstated those benefits in the companys ledgers and failed to pay payroll taxes on what should have been taxable income. In general, those types of benefits are taxable, although there are some exceptions, and the rules can be murky.

A lawyer for Mr. Weisselberg, Mary E. Mulligan, has declined to comment on the investigation.

Mr. Weisselberg was not the only senior company executive to receive perks. Until 2018, when the company reined in the benefits, the company provided a number of employees with Mercedes-Benz vehicles, according to people familiar with the practice.

Lawyers for Mr. Trump and his company are already preparing to argue that a judge dismiss any indictment, and plan to say that there is no evidence that any employees failure to pay taxes benefited the company, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

It is unclear whether Mr. Trump will eventually face charges himself. The ongoing investigation into the former president has examined whether the Trump Organization manipulated the value of its properties to obtain favorable loans and tax benefits, people with knowledge of the matter have said.

The meeting on Monday was not the first Mr. Trumps lawyers have had with Mr. Vances office in recent days. On Thursday, the lawyers met with senior prosecutors in hopes of halting any plan to charge the company, according to several people familiar with the meeting. That meeting was arranged by Ronald P. Fischetti, a personal lawyer for Mr. Trump. He is a former law partner of Mark F. Pomerantz, a former federal prosecutor and defense lawyer whom the district attorneys office enlisted to help lead the inquiry into Mr. Trump and his business.
Parents protesting critical race theory, he wrote, do not want their children taught in state-run and state-funded schools that the country was founded on an ideology of white supremacy in which every white child and family today is invariably complicit regardless of their personal views of their Black fellow citizens. He compared the anti-anti-critical race theory camp to leftists in the 1950s who, while condemning McCarthyism, dismissed justified concerns about Soviet Communism.

That someone as smart as Linker, author of an essential book on the Catholic right, would analogize Communism to critical race theory strikes me as a sign of a moral panic, but leave that aside for a moment. Its nearly impossible to have a straightforward discussion of the educational content thats being labeled critical race theory precisely because people like Rufo have succeeded in turning critical race theory into a catchall term for discussions of race that conservatives dont like.

My own position is basically anti-anti-critical race theory, in that I disagree with some ideas associated with C.R.T., especially around limiting speech, but am extremely alarmed by efforts to demonize and ban it. Theres certainly some material that critics lump in with C.R.T. that strikes me as ridiculous and harmful. Ive seen the risible training for school administrators calling worship of the written word white supremacy culture. Theres a version of antiracism based on white peoples narcissistic self-flagellation that seems to me to accomplish very little.

But Im highly skeptical that many public schools are teaching that every white child and family today is invariably complicit in white supremacy. Rather, the campaign against critical race theory is doing exactly what Rufo wanted it to: taking inchoate anger about whats often derided as wokeness and directing it onto public education. In some ways, its like the campaign against sex education, where conservative activists would either cherry-pick or invent lurid anecdotes to try to discredit the whole project.

At my own kids fairly progressive Brooklyn public school, they were assigned an age-appropriate book about police shootings, Something Happened in Our Town, which I appreciated because it helped me explain last summers demonstrations to them. They have not, to the best of my knowledge, been ordered to confess their white privilege.
Sly is the redefinition of the word equity, which in common English means the quality of being fair and impartial, to mean something closer to the opposite: the quality of being anything but impartial to achieve a desired, supposedly fairer result.

And blunt is the racial preference, the explicit segregation, the insulting assumption-making and the overall intellectual sophistry that is antiracist ideology in action.

To have something called a whiteness accountability group is insulting to everyone who still believes we should be judged by the content of our character. To expect Jewish staff members to be assigned to that group is obscene, particularly when the Holocaust is still a living memory. To suggest that the federal government should be in the business of lending discrimination when lending discrimination is otherwise a crime makes a mockery of the law the government is supposed to enforce. To disfavor reporters purely on the basis of their race is definitionally racist, whatever the higher justification.

All this would have been too obvious for words until just a few years ago. The new dispensation in which racism is justified in the name of antiracism, discrimination in the service of equality, and favoritism for the sake of an even playing field, is exactly as Orwellian as it sounds. It may find purchase in the usual institutional and political progressive circles, but its not a good way to win converts when most of us believe that the promise of America lies in escaping the narrow prisms of race and identity, not being permanently trapped by them.

Thoughtful liberals who think this is much ado about nothing should spend some time pondering how perfectly people like Lightfoot are now playing into right-wing stereotypes. They should also spend time wondering whether the ideal for which they have long fought  a society that, if not colorblind, can at least see past color  is being jeopardized by progressives who apparently can see only color.

Whichever way, it shouldnt be hard to see that trying to solve the old racism with the new racism will produce only more racism. Justice is never achieved by turning tables.
WASHINGTON  President Bidens decision to strike Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria early on Monday illustrated the delicate balancing act of his approach to Tehran: He must demonstrate that he is willing to use force to defend American interests, while keeping open a fragile diplomatic line of communication as the two countries try to resuscitate the 2015 deal limiting Irans nuclear program.

In public, administration officials insisted that the two issues are separate.

Mr. Biden, they said on Monday, acted under his constitutional authority to defend American troops by carrying out airstrikes on sites used to launch drone attacks on American forces in Iraq. They said that should not interfere with the final push to bring both countries back into compliance with the nuclear accord.

In fact, the issues are deeply intertwined.

To the Iranians, the march toward the capacity to build a nuclear weapon has been in part an effort to demonstrate that Tehran is a force to be reckoned with in the Middle East and beyond. Now, the countrys power has been augmented by a new arsenal of highly accurate drones, longer-range missiles and increasingly sophisticated cyberweapons, some of which involve technologies that seemed beyond Tehrans skills when the nuclear deal was negotiated in 2015.

Part of Mr. Bidens goal in trying to revive the nuclear deal is to use it as a first step toward pressing Iran into addressing other issues, including its support for terrorist groups in the region and its expanded arsenal. On that front, the strikes ordered Sunday and carried out early Monday by U.S. Air Force fighter-bombers are not expected to be any more than a temporary setback to Iran.
Since taking office 157 days ago, President Biden has promised to put racial equity at the center of everything he does, pledging in an executive order on Day 1 to take a systematic approach to embedding fairness in decision-making as he drafts legislation, hires staff, proposes spending and develops regulations.

But his efforts  which could radically realign the distribution of federal money and benefits in favor of people of color and other underserved communities  are running into legal and political obstacles. They push against limits set by the Supreme Court, which say programs based on race must be narrowly tailored to accomplish a compelling governmental interest. And they ignite passions at a time when Democrats hold the narrowest majority in Congress and the country is already seething with disagreements about race, power and fairness.

On Wednesday, a federal judge in Florida echoed a court ruling in Wisconsin by ordering a halt to an Agriculture Department program to forgive the debts of Black and other minority farmers after years of discrimination. The judge wrote that Congress must heed its obligation to do away with governmentally imposed discrimination based on race.

A small-business program was forced to change its rules last month after challenges by white Americans who say the policy is racist. And around the country, Republicans are promising to tie the presidents equity efforts to a broader culture war during the 2022 midterm elections.
MEXICO CITY  A regional human rights court in Costa Rica ruled on Monday that the Honduran government was responsible for the 2009 killing of a transgender woman, a landmark decision that could have broad implications for trans rights in one of the worlds deadliest regions for L.G.B.T.Q. people.

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights ordered the government of Honduras to continue its investigation into the case and enact measures to prevent violence against L.G.B.T.Q. people, including allowing transgender people to officially alter their gender identity. That would most likely set an important legal precedent for Latin America and the Caribbean.

The court also directed the government to pay reparations to the family of Vicky Hernandez, who was 26 when she was brutally murdered in San Pedro Sula amid a wave of transgender killings that followed a June 2009 coup in which the countrys president was ousted from power.

Today marks 12 years since the coup, 12 years since Vickys murder, but its a new beginning, said Indyra Mendoza, founder of the advocacy group Cattrachas, one of the groups that brought the case before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. We are extremely happy.
OTTAWA  After the discovery of hundreds of bodies in unmarked graves at former schools for Indigenous children, communities across Canada are canceling or altering plans to celebrate a patriotic holiday on Thursday, increasing the pressure on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to call off national celebrations.

For decades, families were forced to send their children to boarding schools to assimilate them, in what a national Truth and Reconciliation Commission found in 2015 was an effort to wipe out their cultures. With the discovery of the bodies at two schools in Western Canada, most of them children, many members of Indigenous communities and their leaders say that its inappropriate at this moment to celebrate the country behind the system.

Celebrating Canada Day is being seen as inconsiderate to all the childrens lives that were lost and we encourage everyone to consider the price these children had to pay at the hands of the Canadian government, Chief Bobby Cameron of the Saskatchewan Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations said in a statement.

Canada Day marks the date, July 1, 1867, when three British colonies were joined together to create the Dominion of Canada. Many Indigenous people have never commemorated Canada Day and view their Canadian citizenship as something that was imposed on them. Others, however, have actively participated in celebrations in the past.
Hong Kong will suspend all passenger flights from Britain beginning July 1, the government said on Monday, citing the spread of the more virulent Delta coronavirus variant in the United Kingdom, which will be reclassified as extremely high-risk.

People who have stayed in Britain for longer than two hours will also be barred from boarding passenger flights bound for Hong Kong, the authorities said.

A number of cases imported from the U.K. involving variant virus strains have persistently been found in the past few days, officials said, according to Hong Kongs government news agency.

The restrictions are the second time Hong Kong has suspended flights from Britain. After an outbreak of a dangerous variant in December, authorities barred passengers from entering, leaving many Hong Kong residents angered and confused as they desperately tried to return home.
W.H.O. Urges Masking for the Vaccinated, in Split With C.D.C. Another city in Australia enters a lockdown as the Delta variant spreads. Mixing vaccines from Pfizer and AstraZeneca provides strong immunity, researchers find. Follow our latest virus coverage here.

Worried by the Delta variant, W.H.O. officials urged vaccinated people to keep wearing masks. Dia King, 49, left, and Shakeara Mingo dancing to a local band during a Juneteenth celebration and reopening party in Washington this month. Credit... Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times World Health Organization officials, concerned about the easing of precautions meant to stop the spread of the coronavirus even as the most contagious variant to date has emerged, have urged even fully vaccinated people to continue wearing masks and to keep taking other measures to prevent infection. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on the other hand, told fully vaccinated Americans in May that they no longer needed to wear masks indoors or to maintain a distance of six feet from other people. The agency also eased advice about testing and quarantine after suspected exposure to the virus. Asked on Monday about the new cautions expressed by the W.H.O.  the worlds largest public health organization  a C.D.C. spokesman pointed to the existing guidance and gave no indication it would change. A highly infectious form of the virus, called the Delta variant, was first detected in India and has been identified in at least 85 countries. In the United States, where its prevalence has doubled in the last two weeks, the variant is responsible for one in every five Covid-19 cases. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nations top infectious disease doctor, has called it the greatest threat to eliminating the virus in the United States. The rise of new variants makes it even more urgent that we use all the tools at our disposal to prevent transmission, including consistent use of both vaccination and public health and social measures, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the W.H.O., said at a news briefing on Friday. Dr. Mariangela Simao, the W.H.O.s assistant director-general for access to medicines, vaccines and pharmaceuticals, emphasized at the briefing that even vaccinated people should continue to consistently wear masks, avoid crowds and maintain social distance from others, make sure they are in well-ventilated spaces, wash hands frequently, and avoid sneezing or coughing around other people. What were saying is, Once youve been fully vaccinated, continue to play it safe, because you could end up as part of a transmission chain. You may not actually be fully protected, said Dr. Bruce Aylward, a senior adviser to the W.H.O. He added, I think the first message we want to be careful about is saying, Once youre vaccinated, you can just go ahead and do whatever. The comments were made in the context of broader statements criticizing the inequitable distribution of vaccines around the globe and the lack of access to vaccination in many parts of the world where the virus is spreading. Covax, the W.H.O. program that poor countries rely on for vaccines, has zero doses of AstraZeneca or Johnson & Johnson vaccines, or those made by the Serum Institute of India, available for distribution, Dr. Aylward said. While less than 2 percent of the population of Africa is vaccinated, some countries are purchasing vaccines for young people who are at relatively low risk from the virus, he noted. Even in countries where there are ample supplies of vaccine, full vaccination rates are lower than they could be, Dr. Alyward said. Though fully vaccinated people are largely protected from symptomatic and asymptomatic coronavirus infections, studies suggest the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines efficacy against the Delta variant is slightly lower than against other variants; the efficacy is significantly lower for individuals who have received only one dose of the vaccine. And countries with relatively high vaccination rates have seen an uptick in infections driven by the Delta variant: Britain, where some two-thirds of the population has received at least one dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech or AstraZeneca vaccine and just under half have received two doses, is nonetheless grappling with a sharp rise in infections from the variant. In Israel, which has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, a rise in cases attributed to the Delta variant has led the government to reimpose mask mandates indoors and at large outdoor gatherings. Given how pernicious and fast moving the variant is, the vaccine approach is not enough, said Eric Feigl-Ding, senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington. Were not at the level of vaccinations where we can release the brakes on everything else and herd immunity will grind transmissions to a halt. Other scientists disagreed, saying guidance has to be more nuanced and tailored to local communities, varying according to vaccination rates and infection rates. The W.H.O. is looking at a world that is largely unvaccinated, so this makes sense, said Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health. In parts of the United States with low vaccination rates, too, masks may be appropriate, and recommendations should be tailored appropriately, he added: If I were living in Missouri or Wyoming or Mississippi, places with low vaccination rates, I would not be excited about going indoors without wearing a mask  even though Im vaccinated.

Vaccine Protection Mixing Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines provides strong protection, according to a preliminary study. General practitioner displaying empty vials of the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines in Berlin in April. Credit... Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters Early results from a British vaccine study suggest that mixing different brands of vaccines can provoke a protective immune response against Covid-19. In the trial, volunteers produced high levels of antibodies and immune cells after getting one dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and one dose of the AstraZeneca-Oxford shot. Administering the vaccines in either order is likely to provide potent protection, Dr. Matthew Snape, a vaccine expert at the University of Oxford, said at a news conference on Monday. Any of these schedules, I think could be argued, would be expected to be effective, he said. Dr. Snape and his colleagues began the trial, called Com-COV, in February. In the first wave of the study, they gave 830 volunteers one of four combinations of vaccines. Some got two doses of either Pfizer or AstraZeneca, both of which have been shown to be effective against Covid-19. Others got a dose of AstraZeneca, followed by one of Pfizer, or vice versa. For the first wave of volunteers, the researchers waited four weeks between doses. Studies have found that the AstraZeneca vaccine provides stronger protection if the second dose is delayed for up to 12 weeks, so the researchers are also running a separate 12-week trial which should deliver results next month. The researchers found that volunteers reported more chills, headaches and muscle pain than people who get two doses of the same vaccine. But the side effects were short-lived. Dr. Snape and his colleagues then drew blood to measure the immune response in the volunteers. They found that those who got two doses of Pfizer-BioNTech produced levels of antibodies about 10 times as high as those who got two doses of AstraZeneca. Volunteers who got Pfizer followed by AstraZeneca showed antibody levels about five times as high as those with two doses of AstraZeneca. And volunteers who got AstraZeneca followed by Pfizer reached antibody levels about as high as those who got two doses of Pfizer. Dr. Snape said that the differences would most likely narrow in the volunteers who get a second dose after 12 weeks, when the AstraZeneca vaccine has had more time to strengthen its effects. The study also found that using different vaccines produced a higher level of immune cells primed to attack the coronavirus than did giving two doses of the same vaccine. Dr. Snape said it wasnt clear yet why mixing had that advantage. Its very intriguing, lets say that much, he said. Dr. Snape and his colleagues have begun a similar trial, adding vaccines from Moderna and Novavax to the list of possibilities. For now, he said, the best course of action remains getting two doses of the same vaccine. Large clinical trials have clearly demonstrated that this strategy reduces the chances of getting Covid-19. Your default should be what is proven to work, Dr. Snape said. But there are many cases in which that may not be possible. Vaccine shipments are sometimes delayed because of manufacturing problems, for example. Younger people in some countries have been advised not to get a second dose of AstraZeneca because of concerns about the small risk of developing blood clots. In such situations, its important to know whether people can switch to another vaccine. This provides reassuring evidence that should work, Dr. Snape said.

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Vaccine Protection A study finds that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines could offer protection for years. Prepped Pfizer and Moderna vaccines at a pharmacy in Little Rock, Ark., in March. Credit... Rory Doyle for The New York Times The vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna set off a persistent immune reaction in the body that may protect against the coronavirus for years, scientists reported on Monday. The findings add to growing evidence that most people immunized with the mRNA vaccines may not need boosters, so long as the virus and its variants do not evolve much beyond their current forms  which is not guaranteed. People who recovered from Covid-19 before being vaccinated may not need boosters even if the virus does make a significant transformation. Its a good sign for how durable our immunity is from this vaccine, said Ali Ellebedy, an immunologist at Washington University in St. Louis who led the study, which was published in the journal Nature. The study did not consider the vaccine made by Johnson & Johnson, but Dr. Ellebedy said he expected the immune response to be less durable than that produced by mRNA vaccines. Dr. Ellebedy and his colleagues reported last month that in people who had survived Covid-19, immune cells that recognize the virus remained in the bone marrow for at least eight months after infection. A study by another team indicated that so-called memory B cells continue to mature and strengthen for at least a year after infection. Based on those findings, researchers suggested that immunity might last years, possibly a lifetime, in people who were infected and later vaccinated. But it was unclear whether vaccination alone might have a similarly long-lasting effect. After an infection or a vaccination, a specialized structure called the germinal center forms in lymph nodes. This structure is an elite school of sorts for B cells. The broader the range and the longer these cells have to practice, the more likely they are to be able to thwart variants of the virus that may emerge. After infection with the coronavirus, the germinal center forms in the lungs. But after vaccination, the cells education takes place in lymph nodes in the armpits, within reach of researchers. Dr. Ellebedys team found that 15 weeks after the first dose of vaccine, the germinal center was still highly active in all 14 of the participants, and that the number of memory cells that recognized the coronavirus had not declined. The fact that the reactions continued for almost four months after vaccination  thats a very, very good sign, Dr. Ellebedy said. Germinal centers typically peak one to two weeks after immunization, and then wane. Usually by four to six weeks, theres not much left, said Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona. But germinal centers stimulated by the mRNA vaccines are still going, months into it, and not a lot of decline in most people. Dr. Bhattacharya noted that most of what scientists know about the persistence of germinal centers is based on animal research. The new study is the first to show what happens in people after vaccination. The results suggest that a vast majority of vaccinated people will be protected over the long term  at least, against the existing variants. But older adults, people with weak immune systems and those who take drugs that suppress immunity may need boosters; people who survived Covid-19 and were later immunized may never need them at all. Exactly how long the protection from mRNA vaccines will last is hard to predict. In the absence of variants that sidestep immunity, in theory immunity could last a lifetime, experts said. But the virus is clearly evolving.

Vaccine Protection A third dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine is found to boost immune response. Nurses preparing AstraZeneca vaccine doses in Bratislava, Slovakia, in April. Credit... Akos Stiller for The New York Times A third dose of the Covid-19 vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford generated a strong immune response in clinical trial volunteers, Oxford researchers reported on Monday. The finding indicates that the AstraZeneca vaccine could be an option should third shots end up being needed, for example, to extend immunity. To date, the vaccine has been given as two doses, typically between four and 12 weeks apart. The new data, detailed in a preprint manuscript that has not yet been peer reviewed, came from 90 study volunteers in Britain who were among the earliest to receive the shots in a clinical trial last year. This past March, they were given a third dose, roughly 30 weeks after their second. Laboratory analyses showed that the third dose increased levels of antibodies to the virus in the volunteers to a point higher than seen a month after their second dose  an encouraging sign that the third shot would be likely to bring greater protection if the effectiveness of two doses waned over time. We do have to be in a position where we could boost if it turned out that was necessary, Prof. Andrew Pollard, an Oxford researcher who has led studies of the vaccine, said in a news conference on Monday. I think we have encouraging data in this preprint to show that boosters could be used and would be effective at boosting the immune response. Scientists and policymakers do not yet know whether booster shots may be needed. Scientists reported Monday that the vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna set off a persistent immune reaction in the body that may protect against the coronavirus for years, but it isnt clear if the same is happening with other vaccines, including AstraZeneca. Emerging coronavirus variants could also accelerate the need for booster shots. If third shots are deemed necessary in the coming months, their availability could be severely limited, especially in poorer countries that are lacking enough supply to give first doses to their most vulnerable citizens. Earlier this month, the National Institutes of Health announced that it has begun a new clinical trial of people fully vaccinated with any of the three authorized vaccines in the United States. The goal is to test whether a booster shot of the vaccine made by Moderna will increase their antibodies against the virus. Initial results are expected later this summer. The AstraZeneca vaccine has won authorization in 80 countries since last December but is not approved for use in the United States, which already has more than enough doses of its three authorized vaccines to meet demand. The shot has been the backbone of the struggling Covax program to provide vaccines to poor countries, accounting for more than 88 percent of the doses shipped out to middle- and low-income nations through last week. AstraZeneca announced on Sunday that the first volunteers had been vaccinated in a separate study assessing a new version of the vaccine designed to protect against the Beta variant of the virus first seen in South Africa. Some study results suggested that the original version of the AstraZeneca vaccine may not be effective against that variant. Professor Pollard said the study would compare the effects of a third dose of the original vaccine against those of boosting volunteers with the new Beta-targeted vaccine.

Hong Kong bars passenger flights from Britain. Passengers at the British Airways counter of the Hong Kong International airport last week. Credit... Anthony Kwan for The New York Times Hong Kong will suspend all passenger flights from Britain beginning July 1, the government said on Monday, citing the spread of the more virulent Delta coronavirus variant in the United Kingdom, which will be reclassified as extremely high-risk. People who have stayed in Britain for longer than two hours will also be barred from boarding passenger flights bound for Hong Kong, the authorities said. A number of cases imported from the U.K. involving variant virus strains have persistently been found in the past few days, officials said, according to Hong Kongs government news agency. The restrictions are the second time Hong Kong has suspended flights from Britain. After an outbreak of a dangerous variant in December, authorities barred passengers from entering, leaving many Hong Kong residents angered and confused as they desperately tried to return home. Those restrictions were lifted in May. Now, Britain is struggling with rising infections, recording a 109 percent spike in cases over the past 14 days, though cases remain a fraction of their winter peak, according to a New York Times database. Experts say the rise is likely linked to the highly contagious Delta variant, which is spreading rapidly in other countries as well. The World Health Organization has said the variant is likely to become the most globally dominant strain of the disease. On Monday, the prime minister of Spain, Pedro Sanchez, also announced new restrictions on visitors from Britain. They will be required to present a negative coronavirus test or proof of full vaccination to enter the country. In Hong Kong, restrictions on passengers arriving from Brazil, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines and South Africa will also remain in place.

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Migrant workers flee Bangladeshs capital ahead of a new lockdown. On the move in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on Monday as the government began to implement new lockdown measures. Credit... Munir Uz Zaman/Agence France-Presse  Getty Images Bangladesh will return to national lockdown by the end of the week, responding to a wave of infections that on Monday brought its highest single-day death toll of the pandemic so far. The looming restrictions, imposed in a series of steps, have sent tens of thousands of migrant laborers in Dhaka, the capital and largest city, scrambling to get to their villages in scenes reminiscent of neighboring Indias migrant exodus last year. The garment industry, which employs 4.5 million people and makes up 80 percent of the countrys exports, will remain open. But other businesses were instructed to limit their operations to minimum levels of required staffing, and almost all public transportation systems are either closing or already closed. Residents of Dhaka expect to be largely confined to their homes after Thursday, the first day of what the government has called a hard lockdown, though how strictly the measures will be implemented remains to be seen. The government has said the army, police, and border guard will be deployed for strict enforcement. Bangladesh had slowed the spread of the virus with sporadic restrictions and reduced movement while trying to keep much of the economy open. But a fast-spreading wave now, with barely 3 percent of the population vaccinated, has forced officials to take more drastic measures. The country reported 119 deaths on Monday, the highest daily toll since the pandemic began, while the test positivity rate was over 20 percent. Bangladesh has officially reported a total of nearly 900,000 infections and 14,172 deaths from the virus, though experts believe the true numbers are much higher. The current lockdown has been gradual. The government stopped trains and long distance buses last week. It also imposed lockdowns in seven districts surrounding Dhaka, aiming to avert a surge there. Shopping malls are closed, and restaurants are limited to takeout orders only. The full lockdown, initially expected to last one week, begins on Thursday. All transportation systems except for auto-rickshaws will be shut. The government has instructed garment factory owners to arrange transportation for their workers during previous rounds of restrictions. When the public transportation was shut in April to slow the spread of the virus, factory owners who did not arrange transportation were accused of violating the order, and workers had to walk for miles twice a day to get to work. As the latest lockdown approached, ferry stations in Dhaka have been swamped by people trying to cross the river to the southern districts.

Australia faces simultaneous outbreaks, fueled by the Delta variant. New cases overnight prompted the state of Queensland, Australia, to issue a lockdown order for its capital, Brisbane. Credit... Darren England/EPA, via Shutterstock After months with hardly any community transmission of the coronavirus, Australia is facing a grim and unfamiliar challenge: simultaneous outbreaks in several parts of the country, fueled by the spread of the highly infectious Delta variant. On Tuesday, the state of Queensland announced a three-day lockdown in the capital, Brisbane, and surrounding areas. The announcement came after two positive coronavirus cases were detected in the community overnight, including a woman working as a receptionist at a hospitals coronavirus ward who had not been vaccinated. The most notable outbreak centered in Sydney, Australias most populous city, which is now in at least a two-week lockdown and reported 18 new cases on Monday, bringing its total to 130. Other states across Australia also reported new cases and toughened restrictions, and an expansion of Australias lagging vaccination program was announced after an emergency cabinet meeting. Tens of thousands of people in the state of New South Wales, which includes Sydney, rushed to get tested for the coronavirus, with more than 300 locations around Sydney having been identified as visited by people who were infectious. That raised concerns that the outbreak is far from over. Still, no deaths from the new outbreak have been recorded, and no one in Australia has died from the virus this year. Two people are in intensive care, and officials encouraged everyone who is eligible for a vaccine to line up for one  and otherwise, stay home. Not everyone heeded that warning, and one case in particular made much of Australia smile. Two nude sunbathers were caught violating lockdown rules when a deer chased them from their beach. The two men were found by emergency responders, separately, at about 6 p.m. on Sunday, after one of them called for help, according to a police statement. Each were fined 1,000 Australian dollars ($758). As news of the case traveled across the country, Mark McGowan, the premier of Western Australia, joked: I hope the deer is OK. (An earlier version of this item misidentified Mr. McGowan as Australias prime minister.) Damien Cave and

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A cascading series of failures left hospitals across India without medical oxygen. Workers refilling oxygen cylinders at a factory in Delhi in early May. Credit... Atul Loke for The New York Times At 9:45 p.m., alarms blared across the intensive care unit of Jaipur Golden Hospital. Over two dozen patients on ventilators couldnt breathe. Some flailed their arms and legs. Others cried for help, choking sounds coming from their throats as if they were being strangled. Mechanics sprinted to the maintenance room to see what was wrong. Nurses grabbed small plastic pumps to fill the lungs of critically ill patients by hand. It wasnt enough. Jaipur Golden, a respected hospital in Delhi, had run out of medical oxygen. Over the next seven hours, 21 coronavirus patients died. Nobody can forget that night, said Shaista Nigar, the hospitals nursing superintendent. It was a total breakdown. Across India, amid a devastating second wave of Covid-19, hospitals ran out of beds and critical supplies, contributing to deaths and worsening an already tragic outbreak. By one count, oxygen shortages alone have killed at least 600 people over the past two months. Indias leaders knew the country was vulnerable. Yet Prime Minister Narendra Modis government and local officials alike failed to prepare for the second wave, according to interviews and a review of government documents by The New York Times. India is a major producer of compressed oxygen. But the Indian government moved too late to distribute supplies. State governments feuded over oxygen and seized tankers, creating bottlenecks and delays. Delhi city officials didnt build systems to produce or store oxygen and struggled to allocate dwindling supplies. When tight supplies and government missteps led oxygen to run out at Jaipur Golden, some families said the hospital offered no warning. Without a comprehensive coronavirus plan, Mr. Modis government has left much of the burden to states, cities, hospitals and even individuals. The oxygen crisis tragically revealed the limits of a do-it-yourself approach. That approach will be tested again. Though infections have dropped, a vaccine shortage puts India at risk of a third wave. Without adequate preparations, the second waves tragedies could return. With an effective surge plan, said Robert Matiru, a director at Unitaid, a health initiative affiliated with the World Health Organization, this could have been averted. Jeffrey Gettleman, Emily Schmall, Suhasini Raj and

Bruce Springsteen reopens Broadway, ushering in theaters return to New York City. Bruce Springsteen in Springsteen on Broadway at New Yorks St. James Theater on Saturday night. Credit... Sara Krulwich/The New York Times In a city whose cultural soul had been closed for more than a year, with boarded-up windows and empty streets, Bruce Springsteen called it back to life on Saturday night. His gruff and guttural rasp was the first to echo across a Broadway stage to a paying audience in 471 days. Of course, Springsteen on Broadway is no traditional Broadway production. The show consists of a man alone onstage. His ensemble: a microphone, a harmonica, a piano and six steel strings stretched across a select slab of spruce wood. I am here tonight to provide proof of life, Springsteen called out early on. It was a line from the monologue of his original show  which ran for 236 performances, in 2017 and 2018  and now it carried extra weight. That proof, he continued, was to that ever elusive, never completely believable, particularly these days, us. For the us that packed inside the St. James Theater  1,721 filled seats, very few masked people, all vaccinated  that first chord from Growin Up was indeed proof that the rhythms that moved New York City were emerging from behind a heavy, dark and weighty curtain. The 15 months that Broadway had been closed were its longest silence in history. In years past, strikes, hurricanes, blizzards and blackouts had managed to tamp down the lights on Broadway only for a few days, weeks or a month. But the pandemic forced the Theater District into an extensive darkness on March 12 of last year, as New York became the epicenter of the epidemic in the United States.

Thousands of inmates sent home because of Covid may have to return to prison. This is not a get-out-of-jail-free card, said Wendy Hechtman, who is serving a 15-year prison sentence but was released to home confinement during the pandemic. But what it is is an opportunity card. Credit... Hilary Swift for The New York Times Some 4,000 federal offenders who were part of a mass release last year of nonviolent prisoners to help slow the spread of the coronavirus could soon return to prison  not because they violated the terms of their home confinement, but because the United States appears to be moving past the worst of the pandemic. In the final days of the Trump administration, the Justice Department issued a memo saying inmates whose sentences lasted beyond the pandemic emergency period would have to go back to prison. But some lawmakers and activists are urging President Biden to revoke the rule and use his executive power to keep the prisoners on home confinement or commute their sentences entirely, arguing that the pandemic offers a glimpse into a different type of punitive system in America, one that would rely far less on incarceration. Mr. Biden has vowed to make overhauling the criminal justice system a crucial part of his presidency, saying his administration could cut the prison population by more than half and expand programs that offered alternatives to detention. While the White House has yet to announce a decision about those on home confinement, the administration appears to be following the direction of the Trump-era memo. Andrew Bates, a spokesman for Mr. Biden, said in a statement that the president was committed to reducing incarceration and helping people re-enter society, but he referred questions about the future of those in home confinement to the Justice Department. The White House revisits the emergency declaration every three months, leaving the former prisoners in a constant state of limbo. The next deadline is in July. Zolan Kanno-Youngs and

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Two start-ups reaped billions in fees on loans aimed at helping small businesses. Dan Bourque, an Uber driver in San Francisco, saw Womplys ads and applied for a loan in mid-April. Seventeen days later, he had a $10,477 deposit in his bank account. Credit... Jim Wilson/The New York Times Though Congress approved billions in aid for small companies to help them keep paying their employees during the pandemic, it wasnt reaching the tiniest and neediest businesses. Then two small companies came out of nowhere and found a way to help those businesses. They also helped themselves. For their work, the companies stand to collect more than $3 billion in fees, according to a New York Times analysis  far more than any of the 5,200 participating lenders. One of the companies, Blueacorn, didnt exist before the pandemic. The other, Womply, founded a decade ago, sold marketing software. But this year, they became the breakout stars of the Paycheck Protection Program. Blueacorn and Womply arent banks, so they couldnt actually lend any money. Rather, they acted as middlemen, charging into a gap between what big banks wouldnt do and what small banks couldnt do. From late February to May 31, when the program ended, the companies processed 2.3 million loans. Most were for less than $17,000, and the vast majority went to solo ventures, which are more likely to be run by women and people of color. All that hustle had downsides, however, including widespread customer service failures. And some lenders now have regrets about signing rushed deals that delivered most of the profit to their partners. Stacy Cowley and

Young adults are among the biggest barriers to mass immunity. Gloria Molina, 28, checked in for her second dose of the vaccine at Samuel Rodgers Health Center in Kansas City, Mo. Credit... Chase Castor for The New York Times As the countrys vaccination campaign slows and doses go unused, it has suddenly become clear that one of the biggest challenges in reaching mass immunity will be persuading skeptical young adults of all backgrounds to get vaccinated. Federal officials expressed alarm in recent days about low vaccination rates among Americans in their late teens and 20s, and have blamed them for the countrys all-but-certain failure to reach President Bidens goal of giving 70 percent of adults at least an initial dose by July 4. The straightforward sales pitch for older people  a vaccine could very possibly save your life  does not always work on healthy 20-somethings who know they are less likely to face the severest outcomes of Covid. As public officials race to find ways to entice young adults to get vaccinated, interviews across the country suggest that no single fix is likely to sway these holdouts. Some are staunchly opposed. Others are merely uninterested. And still others are skeptical. But pretty much everyone who was eager for a vaccine already has one, and public health officials now face an overlapping mix of inertia, fear, busy schedules and misinformation as they try to cajole Gen Z into getting a shot. Public health experts say vaccinating young adults is essential to keeping infection numbers low and preventing new case outbreaks, especially as the more infectious Delta variant spreads. Since vaccines became available six months ago, health departments have focused with varying degrees of success on urging groups identified as reluctant  including people living in rural communities, African American residents, conservatives  to get vaccinated. But in recent days, public health officials have identified young adults as a significant challenge for a country where fewer than a million people a day are receiving a vaccine, down from an April peak of more than 3.3 million. In a federal report released last week, just over one-third of adults ages 18 to 39 reported being vaccinated, with especially low rates among Black people; among people 24 or younger; and among those who had lower incomes, less education and no health insurance. Mitch Smith, Giulia Heyward and
Birnbaum, a respected curator who was the director of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm for eight years before leaving to run Acute Art, enlisted the participation of 11 artists, including household names  Olafur Eliasson and KAWS  and such art-world favorites as Precious Okoyomon, winner of the 2021 Frieze Artist Award, Cao Fei, Nina Chanel Abney, Koo Jeong A and Julie Curtiss. Some of their works unfold over time and incorporate sound, while others are as unchanging as traditional sculptures.

Released from plinths, they can acquire new meaning from their unconventional contexts. Abneys piece, Imaginary Friend, is a hovering, bearded Black man in high-top sneakers and banded crew socks, reading a book, with a halo around his head. Its a Black Jesus, I guess, Birnbaum said. He observed that it would have a different impact if it appeared in a Washington political demonstration rather than on the High Line.

Eliasson, whose Rainbow in 2017 was a pioneering virtual-reality artwork, contributed a cluster of five pieces, from a series collectively titled Wunderkammer: a buzzing ladybug, a floating rock, a cloud, a sun and a clump of flowers that push up through the pavement.

Very often, these digitized platforms are presented to us as if they are the opposite of reality, but I saw it as an extension of reality, he said in a phone interview. Im a very analog artist, interested in the mixture of the mind and the body, and my first thought is, This is taking away your body. It seems like escapism and open to hedonism. On reflection, though, he concluded that since people are tethered to their phones, he would aim to reach them through the device in ways that are sensitizing rather than numbifying.
We eventually met in Berlin. He was playing at the MaerzMusik festival, and he asked me to meet him at an Austrian restaurant. The first thing he said to me was not Hello but Are you hungry? I said no, then he said, Well they make great knodel with goulash. I said I wasnt hungry, but then he called the waiter and said, This young man wants the knodel with goulash. So they brought a plate, and before I could touch it his fork was already in my knodel. He just wanted to have a second plate of goulash.

He wasnt too enthusiastic about me then. The first time he heard me was different. It took me a couple of years to be able to pull off People, but once I did I couldnt get enough. He came to Heidelberg, Germany, to hear me play it, and afterward he came backstage. He didnt say congrats. The only thing he told me was: Can you just stand up and leave in the future? All this business about ending a piece in a long silence, what B.S. The piece is not about that. You play the last octave, you close the music, you leave, life goes on. It takes a lot of courage to do that; but I did, and the effect on the audience was so much greater. It was a total breakthrough.

This is a piece written by a man whose main source of inspiration was life itself. He was the embodiment of the Nina Simone idea that artists have to reflect their own time. And People has this unbelievable ability to make every listener believe its about him or her. Ive never experienced a neutral reaction. Youre either for it or against it, and this is what makes great music great. It is so awake, so hopeful, so alive, so uplifting. Thats why I believe it belongs up there with Diabelli and the Goldbergs. I used Bach and Beethoven to give The People United the biggest possible platform. In a way, thats why I learned the Goldberg Variations, to make that project possible.
Recent titles of interest:

THE CRUELTY IS THE POINT: The Past, Present, and Future of Trumps America, by Adam Serwer. (One World, $28.) These essays by a staff writer at The Atlantic argue that the Trump years simply manifested Americas deep-rooted and abiding inequality.

THE SUNSET ROUTE: Freight Trains, Forgiveness, and Freedom on the Rails in the American West, by Carrot Quinn. (Dial, $27.) Quinn grew up poor in Alaska with a mentally ill mother before finding a sense of community among people who hop freight trains to see the country; this memoir charts her unusual path.

NICE RACISM: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm, by Robin DiAngelo. (Beacon, $24.95.) The author of the best seller White Fragility here amplifies and expands on that books claim that her fellow white progressives are often passively complicit in racist systems.

SILVER TEARS, by Camilla Lackberg. Translated by Ian Giles. (Knopf, $27.) This labyrinthian Swedish thriller features a wealthy cosmetics magnate whose ex-husband is serving time for killing their daughter. But did he really?
SOMETHING WILD

By Hanna Halperin



Theres plenty of talk about the banality of evil, but I think mostly about the mundanity of trauma. When I used to be an editor at a literary magazine, every second personal essay was from a young woman about her rape, her assault, a family member negating her boundaries, a boyfriend taking advantage of her. We said no to most of those pitches; tales of men abusing women were so routine that we simply couldnt publish every single one. There wasnt enough bandwidth for them all. I hated that.

The extraordinary commonness of female trauma, especially at the hands of men, can work against a piece of fiction, but in the case of Hanna Halperins debut novel, Something Wild, it does the opposite. Some version of the story Halperin tells will likely feel familiar in a way that reminds you of pressing on an old bruise you were sure had healed. Something Wild is propulsive, tender, frustrating and entirely realistic. Thats what hurts so much.

The book follows the sisters Nessa and Tanya, who return home to help their mother, Lorraine, move to a new home with her second husband, Jesse. When they arrive to pack up their childhood home, they realize that Jesse has been abusing Lorraine, and while Tanya pushes her mother toward a restraining order, Nessa struggles with her feelings of warmth toward her stepfather. At the same time, a trauma from the sisters past begins to fight its way to the surface, demanding their attention. The daughters recall the feeling theyd have when they were young and would feel the chill of danger  wild thing, they called it, a sensation that comes to them over and over in the book. Weaving between the past and the present of all three women, Something Wild creates a compelling, believable and upsetting portrayal of how trauma ripples through a family.

Its a rare story where youre somehow rooting for everyone: You want Nessa and Tanya, who have lost each other as adults, to reconnect in that profound way only sisters can. You want Lorraine to demand more for herself, to protect herself at all costs. You want Jesse to become a better man. You obviously wont get everything you want, but the book is an impressive hat trick, pulling empathy from you for so many people in one story. There are a few side plots that add little to the novel  Nessas maybe-boyfriend, Tanyas one-dimensional nice-guy husband  but the core of the book is still blistering.
I had no idea that Miss Singer would send my essay to a friend who worked in the Harvard admissions office. Did Harvard know whom they were admitting? Perhaps the committee imagined that Simon Putnam was a lost Puritan lamb, strayed from the flock and stranded in Brooklyn, a lamb they awarded a full scholarship to bring back into the fold. That Simon Putnam, the prodigal Pilgrim son, was a suit I was trying on, a skin I would stretch and struggle to fit, until I realized, with relief, that it never would.

The Holocaust had taught us: No matter what you believed or didnt, the Nazis knew who was Jewish. They will always find us, whoever the next they would be. It was not only pointless but wronga sin against the six million deadto deny ones heritage, though my uncle Madison had done a remarkable job of erasing his class, religious, and ethnic background. I tried not to think about the sin I was half committing as I half pretended to come from a family that was nothing like my family, from a place far from Coney Island. If someone asked me if I was Jewish, I would have said yes, but why would anyone ask Simon Putnam, with his Viking-blond hair and blue eyes? My looks were the result of some recessive gene, or, as my mother said, perhaps some Cossack who rode through a great-great-grandmothers village.



When Harvard ended, in June, Id returned to Brooklyn without having acquired one useful contact or skill my parents had hoped would be conferred on me, along with my diploma. Another lie of omission: My mother and father were astonished to learn that I had majored in Folklore and Mythology. What kind of subject was that? What had I learned in four years that could be useful to me or anyone else? How could eight semesters of fairy tales prepare me for a career?

Freshman year, Id taken Professor Robertson Crowleys popular course, Mermaids and Talking Reindeer, because it was a funny title and it sounded easy. After a few weeks, I knew that the tales Crowley collected and his theories about them were what I wanted to study. Handed down over generations, these narratives were not only enthralling but also seemed to me to reveal something deep and mysterious about experience, about nature, about our species, about what it meant to tell a storywhat it meant to be human. I wanted to know what Crowley knew, though I wasnt brave or hardy enough to live among the reindeer herders, shamans, and cave-dwelling witches whod been his informants. I wanted to be like Crowley more than I wanted to sit on the Supreme Court or win the Nobel Prize or do any of the things my parents dreamed I might do.

Despite everything I have learned since, I can still remember my excitement as I listened to Crowleys lectures. I felt that I was hearing the answer to a question that I hadnt known enough to ask. That feeling was a little like falling in love, though, never having fallen in love, I didnt recognize the emotions that went with it.

By the time I took his class, Crowley was too old for adventure travel. Hed become a kind of Ivy League shaman. Later, he would become the academic guru for Timothy Leary and the LSD experimenters, and soon after that he was encouraged to retire.

Every Thursday morning, the long-white-haired, trim-white-bearded Crowley stood at the bottom of the amphitheater and, with his eyes squeezed shut, told us folktales in the stentorian tones of an Old Testament prophet. Many of these stories have stayed with me, stories about babies cursed at birth, brides turned into foxes, children raised by forest animals. Most were tales of deception, insult, and vengeance. Crowley told story after story, barely pausing between them. I loved the wildness, the plot turns, the delicate balance between the predictable and the surprising. I took elaborate notes.
Vaccines point the way out of the pandemic

The mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna set off a persistent immune reaction that may protect against the coronavirus for years, if not a lifetime, without the need for a booster shot, scientists reported yesterday.

Its a good sign for how durable our immunity is from this vaccine, said Ali Ellebedy, an immunologist at Washington University in St. Louis who led the study. It did not consider the Johnson & Johnson shot, which is made with a different technology.

Mix-and-match vaccines  one dose each of Pfizer and AstraZeneca  also provide strong immunity, a separate study found.

Caveats: The protection is most reliable if the virus and its variants do not evolve much beyond their current forms  which is by no means guaranteed. And older adults and people with immunodeficiencies may still need boosters.
White House officials have spent recent days seeking to reassure progressives and centrist lawmakers, as well as outside groups that have pushed for all or part of Mr. Bidens sprawling economic agenda.

Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Air Force One on Tuesday that Mr. Bidens aides had in recent days held calls with more than 60 Democratic and Republican lawmakers, chiefs of staff and staff directors, across the House and the Senate. Senior White House staff members met on Tuesday with four Democrats and four Republicans in the House Problem Solvers Caucus, a centrist group, and administration officials also held talks with the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Ms. Psaki said White House staff members addressed more than 100 progressive groups in a call organized by the group Build Back Together.

We have every senior member of the White House working to communicate directly with the public, with groups, with members of Congress about the components of this package and our continued commitment to also get the reconciliation package across the finish line, Ms. Psaki said.

In Wisconsin, Mr. Biden sought to reassure everyone involved, in different ways.

His starting point in each case was to highlight the components of the bipartisan deal, casting it as a job creator that would help urban, rural and suburban Americans alike. This bipartisan breakthrough is a great deal for the American people, Mr. Biden said, predicting the agreement would produce jobs that did not require a college degree. This is a blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America.

He said the deal would improve the quality of life for Wisconsin residents, including through more deployment of broadband internet in rural areas, where the White House says about 35 percent of families lack reliable internet.

Mr. Biden said the $65 billion to expand broadband access in the deal would be enough to make high-speed internet available to every American home. Independent experts say the money is unlikely to stretch that far. Mr. Bidens proposed American Jobs Plan would have allocated $100 billion to fully complete the process of extending broadband to every home.

Mr. Biden also promised the bill would replace the nearly 80,000 water service lines in Milwaukee that are made of lead, along with every other lead water pipe in America. He cast spending on road and bridge repairs as a means to reduce traffic for drivers across the country, which he said amounted to a $1,000 annual loss for the average American because of wasted time. White House officials did not offer details of how much of that traffic tax the deal would alleviate.
The British government introduced a new exemption to its quarantine rules on Tuesday for business travelers bringing significant economic benefit to England, but the move is unlikely to quell frustrations that certain travel routes in and out of Britain remain effectively shut.

The exemption has strict criteria and applies only to executives whose work supports at least 500 British jobs. It is much tighter than one that was in place for about six weeks from early December, when travelers needed to support only 50 jobs in Britain.

There has been a growing concern that Britains strict travel rules could lead the country to miss out on business opportunities as other countries welcome the return of travelers, especially from the United States. Since Britain left the European Union, it is also particularly anxious about not losing lucrative business activity to its neighbors across the English Channel.

Parts of Britain, such as the financial and legal district of the City of London, rely heavily on the presence of large multinational corporations. But most people entering the country either must quarantine for 10 days and take coronavirus tests on the second and eighth days or must pay for an additional test to end their self-isolation after five days.
Im not in denial that education matters, but I am pushing back on the extent that it matters, said Darrick Hamilton, a professor of economics at the New School in New York. The fact is there are a limited number of jobs and we sort them based on power. Race is a deciding factor.

But for all the evidence of racial disparities, many economists say employers racial biases cannot fully explain whats going on in the workplace. The idea that discrimination alone has determined Black workers lot at work  their employment and their wages  does not mesh with how American society changed over the past half-century.

Most of the gains made by African Americans in the workplace were made from the 1940s to the 1970s, when racial biases were much more prevalent across society. Then they got stuck.

There was convergence between Blacks and whites, but then it stopped, said Erik Hurst, a professor of economics at the University of Chicagos Booth School of Business. The question is why.
The F.T.C.s complaint says almost nothing concrete on the key question of how much power Facebook actually had, and still has, Judge Boasberg wrote. It is almost as if the agency expects the court to simply nod to the conventional wisdom that Facebook is a monopolist. After all, no one who hears the title of the 2010 film The Social Network wonders which company it is about.

Yet, whatever it may mean to the public, monopoly power is a term of art under federal law with a precise economic meaning: the power to profitably raise prices or exclude competition in a properly defined market. To merely allege that a defendant firm has somewhere over 60 percent share of an unusual, nonintuitive product market  the confines of which are only somewhat fleshed out and the players within which remain almost entirely unspecified  is not enough.

The Argument

The commission also claimed that Facebook maintained its dominance by threatening to cut off software developers from plugging into the social network if they made competing products. It also argued that, although Facebook had reversed a policy that allowed it to cut off stand-alone apps that replicated its features, Facebook is likely to reinstitute such policies if such scrutiny passes.

The Opinion

A monopolist has no duty to deal with its competitors, and a refusal to do so is generally lawful, Judge Boasberg wrote. To be actionable, such a scheme must involve specific instances in which that policy was enforced (i) against a rival with which the monopolist had a previous course of dealing; (ii) while the monopolist kept dealing with others in the market; (iii) at a short-term profit loss, with no conceivable rationale other than driving a competitor out of business in the long run.

There are no facts alleged, moreover, suggesting that the antitrust scrutiny the company is facing is about to pass or indeed will pass at any time in the foreseeable future. Indeed, a quick glance at any newspaper yields the contrary conclusion.
Gary Gensler is turning to a longtime state and federal prosecutor to lead the enforcement division of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Mr. Gensler, the S.E.C. chairman, announced on Tuesday that he had picked Gurbir Grewal, New Jerseys attorney general since 2018, to run the all-important division at the nations top securities regulator. Mr. Grewal previously served as a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn and New Jersey, and was the chief prosecutor for Bergen County, one of New Jerseys most populous counties.

As a government prosecutor, Mr. Grewal has overseen a number of high-profile securities fraud cases, including a 2015 case involving the hacking of thousands of company news releases so a gang of criminals could engage in insider trading.

Mr. Grewal has the ideal combination of experience, values and leadership ability to helm the enforcement division at this critical time, Mr. Gensler said in a statement.
Fox News agreed to pay a $1 million penalty under a settlement reached last week with the New York City Commission on Human Rights. The case stemmed from a cascade of sexual misconduct allegations that shook the network several years ago and led to the exits of Roger Ailes, its co-founder, and the anchor Bill OReilly.

This is the largest civil penalty that has ever been levied by the City Commission on Human Rights, the agencys chair and commissioner, Carmelyn P. Malalis, said in an interview on Tuesday. We need to send a message in order to deter future acts of harassment or retaliation.

The settlement, which was finalized on June 25, will prevent Fox News for the next four years from including in new employment contracts a clause requiring confidential arbitration in cases where an employee lodges a complaint under the citys Human Rights Law. It also mandates that the network carry out a variety of anti-harassment training and prevention measures.

The Commission on Human Rights is the agency that enforces the citys anti-discrimination laws in workplaces, housing, public services and other spheres. Ms. Malalis said the commission began investigating Fox News in September 2017, around the time that several employees spoke out about sexual harassment at the network; it formally opened a complaint in December 2018.
The pandemic has worked out far better for the group of oil producers known as OPEC Plus than might have been expected a year ago. After a self-destructive price war, and a brief episode when some oil prices fell below zero, Saudi Arabia, Russia and their allies have emerged in a position that may be stronger than when the lockdowns began.

Prices have been gliding higher since November, up 85 percent to about $75 a barrel for Brent crude, as global economies begin to consume more oil while OPEC Plus keeps a tight leash on output.

As the oil producers prepare for their monthly meeting on Thursday, there is growing talk that the price could eventually hit $100 for the first time since 2014.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies are holding some high cards at the moment. More and possibly explosive growth in demand is expected in the coming months as economies recover from the coronavirus pandemic. Crude oil production in the United States, a nemesis for OPEC in recent years, has been slow to recover from a precipitous drop in 2020 as investors in producers lean on the management to restrain spending.
Shortly after that May event, Mr. Kelly told the firms roughly 40-member senior leadership team that he would cut back on some of his duties to deal with an unspecified health issue.

But most of the rest of Teneos employees, as well as the firms clients, found out about the incident last week from an article in The Financial Times. Afterward, the firm began to reach out to clients. And Mr. Kelly called for a staff meeting to discuss the article.

Mr. Kelly had planned to resume his normal duties after Labor Day.

Ive seen a number of crisis communications challenges over the course of my career  this one is especially challenging because the firm and Mr. Kelly are in the business, said Tony DAngelo, a professor of public relations at Syracuse University. This is like a celebrity chef who burns dinner on a global broadcast.

The fallout has been swift. General Motors, which became a client of Teneo this year, severed ties with the firm. A senior managing director quit on Friday as result of the event and the firms handling of it. Many others have questioned the firm about what happened at the event.

On May 2 I made an inadvertent, public and embarrassing mistake for which I took full responsibility and apologized to those directly affected, as well as my colleagues and clients, Mr. Kelly said in a statement. A campaign against the reputation of our firm has followed and may even continue in the coming days. However, regardless of the veracity of any such matters I do not want them to be an ongoing distraction to the running of our company.
Plane prices vary greatly by transaction, but such large aircraft purchases are typically deeply discounted, and Boeings outsize share of the order probably reflects an even better deal for United, according to George Dimitroff, head of aircraft valuations for Ascend by Cirium, a consulting firm that specializes in aviation.

The order is one of several that Boeing has won in the months since global regulators began lifting their bans on the 737 Max late last year. The manufacturer has struggled to sell a larger 737 Max model, the Max 10, but Uniteds order includes 150 of those jets and 50 of the smaller and more popular Max 8. That is important because while the two models cost nearly the same to build, a Max 10 sells for more. Cirium values a Max 10 at about $50 million apiece, compared with less than $44 million for a Max 8. (United said the Max 10 would seat 189 passengers compared with 166 for the Max 8. The A321neo will seat about as many as the Max 10.)

It makes sense for United, it makes sense for Boeing, Mr. Dimitroff said.

The new planes are best suited for domestic flights, though they could be used on some trans-Atlantic routes. And while the order includes none of the larger, twin-aisle planes typically used for international flights, United has taken delivery of about 30 of those planes  Boeing 787s and 777s  over the past two years.

There wasnt a need for us to order wide-body jets right now, Mr. Nocella said. The airline expects to fly more flights internationally in the summer of 2022 than it did in 2019, he added.

United laid the groundwork for this weeks order last summer during a daylong executive meeting at OHare International Airport in Chicago, said Scott Kirby, the airlines chief executive. The airline decided not to retire any planes during the pandemic, which other airlines were doing, and began to lay the strategy for the current order.

We sat around and spent the day talking about where we thought the world was going to go, and its turned out to be very close to what we thought it would be, Mr. Kirby said in a call with reporters.

Air travel has slowly recovered throughout the pandemic, a recovery that accelerated in recent weeks as people began summer vacations. On Sunday, the Transportation Security Administration screened nearly 2.2 million people at airports, the most since the pandemic began 16 months ago. United said this week that it expected to earn a monthly pretax profit in July, its first since January 2020.
Headliner

Old Johns Diner

What was Old Johns Luncheonette for decades, a neighborhood anchor that attracted marquee names from ABC Studios nearby, has reopened after a pandemic pause. It was first at Broadway and 66th Street, then a block away at 67th Street. And now it has a slight change in its name.

I liked Luncheonette, Louis Skibar, the restaurateur behind this venture, said of the old name. But most people referred to it as a diner.

Mr. Skibar, an owner of the Toloache restaurants, among others, once worked at the 66th Street location. Now, he has freshened the decor, while keeping the restaurant suitably vintage in appearance with black-and-white tile and booths. His consulting chef, Grayson Schmitz, working with the chefs Raul Navarrete and Victor Rojas-Milan, has refined the menu of diner-style comfort food, using organic chicken for roasting and in a potpie, adding her family recipe for cod crusted with saltine crumbs, and applying a pastrami coating to salmon. Theres also a fried mortadella and egg sandwich, meatloaf, and, from the pastry chef Tanya Ngangan, a five-layer dark chocolate cake. There are cocktails, wine and beer. For the next three weeks, the restaurant will serve only dinner; breakfast and lunch will follow, and baked goods will be sold to take out.

148 West 67th Street, 212-874-2700, iloveoldjohns.com.

Opening

LittleMad

An industrial-style space with exposed wood and touches of copper is the setting for the chef Sol Hans new venture. Mr. Han, who is Korean American, worked at Le Coucou and Ai Fiori, so there are tastes of France and Italy, in addition to Korean touches. Yellowtail with Asian pear and sesame dressing; nduja toast with Manila clams and herbs; black bass with artichokes, mussels and pickled ramp kimchi; and noodles inspired by instant ramen with crisp duck skin, corn and umami foam are on the menu.

110 Madison Avenue (29th Street), littlemadnyc.com.
Last September, a pair of cabins the color of spaghetti sauce went up in the West Village roadbed outside the Italian American restaurant Don Angie. Along the base of each was a stripe of the same checkerboard linoleum used on the dining room floor. Each had three walls perforated by large windows whose rounded corners echoed the ones in the restaurants facade. Through the windows could be seen private dining booths separated by transparent floor-to-ceiling partitions.

By that time, the Open Restaurants program that gave thousands of restaurants quick clearance to set up tables on streets and sidewalks was several months old. New Yorkers were used to seeing a first wave of in-street dining areas made of traffic cones, sawhorses, planter boxes and other hardware-store items. Don Angies cabins were different. They were forerunners of the second wave  designed with forethought, built to last beyond the warm weather and, most interesting of all, conscious of their responsibility to give the neighborhood dog-walkers and bike-riders a moment of visual joy in return for the privilege of existing on public land, in the public eye.

Now a third wave of curbside dining architecture is on its way, and its time for New Yorkers to think about what we want from restaurants in return for letting them operate open-air dining rooms on our streets.
In recent years, medical educators and accreditors have made a more concerted effort to evaluate the credibility of those institutions, with the goal of keeping applicants informed about subpar Caribbean schools, which charge tens of thousands of dollars in tuition and fees and sometimes fail to position their students for career success.

That effort has largely been led by the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates, which reviews and provides credentials for graduates of foreign medical schools, including documentation of their exam scores and their academic histories. In 2010, the commission announced an initiative requiring every physician applying for certification to have graduated from an accredited medical school. The group also said it would more closely scrutinize the standards for organizations that accredit medical schools around the world. The new rule will take effect by 2024.

The commission has already penalized two Caribbean medical schools  the University of Science, Arts & Technology Faculty of Medicine in Montserrat and the Atlantic University School of Medicine in Antigua and Barbuda. The group refused to grant credentials to any of those schools graduates, saying it had found the schools to be egregious in terms of how they treated students and misrepresented themselves. The medical school in Montserrat subsequently sued the commission, but the case was dismissed in a U.S. federal court. The University of Science, Arts & Technology Faculty of Medicine in Montserrat did not respond to requests for comment.

Im very concerned about students being taken advantage of by schools that may not give them proper information as to how theyre going to learn and what their opportunities are going to be when they finish school, said Dr. William Pinsky, head of the commission.

He said he hoped that students would be better protected by 2024, when accrediting organizations plan to complete evaluations of all international medical schools through a more rigorous accreditation process.

One of the primary accrediting bodies for Caribbean medical schools is the Caribbean Accreditation Authority for Education in Medicine and Other Health Professions, known as CAAM-HP. Lorna Parkins, executive director of the organization, said that some of the key factors the group considers in denying accreditation include high attrition rates and low exam pass rates.
Even Israel  which has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world and is aggressively immunizing younger adolescents and teenagers who qualify  has reinstated masking requirements in public indoor spaces and at large public gatherings outdoors, after hundreds of new Covid-19 cases were detected in recent days, including among people who had received both doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

This is not the first time the world has been consumed by a more contagious variant of the coronavirus. The Alpha variant walloped Britain and brought the rest of Europe to a standstill earlier this year. In the United States, Alpha quickly became the dominant variant by late March, but the rapid pace of vaccination blunted its spread, sparing the nation a big surge in infections.

But Delta is thought to be even more fearsome. Much of what is known about the variant is based on its spread in India and Britain, but early evidence indicates that it is perhaps twice as contagious as the original virus and at least 20 percent more contagious than Alpha.

In many Indian states and European nations, Delta quickly outpaced Alpha to become the dominant version of the virus. It is on track to do the same in the United States.

Among the variants many mutations are some that may help the virus partly dodge the immune system. Several studies have shown that while the current vaccines are effective against Delta, they are slightly less so than against most other variants. For individuals who have received only one dose of a two-dose regimen, protection against the variant is significantly reduced, compared with efficacy against other forms of the virus.
Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.

It started in January, when Choire Sicha, then The New York Timess Styles editor, posed a question to his team on an internal messaging platform that went something like this:

Who wants to buy a Subway tuna sandwich and send it to a lab?

Americas largest sandwich chain had just been sued by two Los Angeles customers who said that the meat that Subway was advertising as tuna was, in fact, something else entirely. Julia Carmel, a news assistant who covers nightlife and writes for the Styles section, volunteered to investigate. She procured 60 inches of tuna sandwiches from three Los Angeles locations, froze the meat and shipped it across the country to a commercial food testing lab that, two months later, was unable to determine conclusively which species of tuna it was  or whether it was tuna at all. She recently chronicled the odyssey in a 2,500-word deep dive, The Big Tuna Sandwich Mystery.

In a conversation, Ms. Carmel discussed her reporting process and how a gimmicky idea turned into a broader look at Americas food supply.

Are you a tuna fan?

Im not a huge canned tuna person. Im definitely more of a sushi eater. But I did eat a lot of fish while working on this article. My editors were sending me messages, too  I cant stop thinking about eating tuna now!

From that first message in January to publication last week, you spent six months in Tuna Land. Where did you start?
To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.



In March 1932, the cover of Fortune magazine featured a painting of Red Square by Diego Rivera. A numberless crowd of faceless men marched with red banners, surrounding a locomotive engine emblazoned with hammer and sickle. This was the image of communist modernization the Soviets wished to transmit during Stalins first five-year plan: The achievement was impersonal, technical, unquestionable. The Soviet Union was transforming itself from an agrarian backwater into an industrial power through sheer disciplined understanding of the objective realities of history. Its citizens celebrated the revolution, as Riveras painting suggested, even as it molded them into a new kind of people.

But by March 1932, hundreds of thousands of people were already starving to death in Soviet Ukraine, the breadbasket of the country. Rapid industrialization was financed by destroying traditional agrarian life. The five-year plan had brought dekulakization, the deportation of peasants deemed more prosperous than others, and collectivization, the appropriation of agrarian land by the state. A result was mass famine: first in Kazakhstan, then in southern Russia and especially in Soviet Ukraine. Soviet leaders were aware in 1932 of what was happening but insisted on requisitions in Ukraine anyway. Grain that people needed to survive was forcibly confiscated and exported. The writer Arthur Koestler, who was living in Soviet Ukraine at the time, recalled propaganda that presented the starving as provocateurs who preferred to see their own bellies bloat rather than accept Soviet achievement.

Ukraine was the most important Soviet republic beyond Russia, and Stalin understood it as wayward and disloyal. When the collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine failed to produce the yields that Stalin expected, his response was to blame local party authorities, the Ukrainian people and foreign spies. As foodstuffs were extracted amid famine, it was chiefly Ukrainians who suffered and died  some 3.9 million people in the republic, by the best reckoning, well over 10 percent of the total population. In communications with trusted comrades, Stalin did not conceal that he was directing specific policies against Ukraine. Inhabitants of the republic were banned from leaving it; peasants were prevented from going to the cities to beg; communities that failed to make grain targets were cut off from the rest of the economy; families were deprived of their livestock. Above all, grain from Ukraine was ruthlessly seized, well beyond anything reason could command. Even the seed corn was confiscated.

The Soviet Union took drastic action to ensure that these events went unnoticed. Foreign journalists were banned from Ukraine. The one person who did report on the famine in English under his own byline, the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, was later murdered. The Moscow correspondent of The New York Times, Walter Duranty, explained away the famine as the price of progress. Tens of thousands of hunger refugees made it across the border to Poland, but Polish authorities chose not to publicize their plight: A treaty with the U.S.S.R. was under negotiation. In Moscow, the disaster was presented, at the 1934 party congress, as a triumphant second revolution. Deaths were recategorized from starvation to exhaustion. When the next census counted millions fewer people than expected, the statisticians were executed. Inhabitants of other republics, meanwhile, mostly Russians, moved into Ukrainians abandoned houses. As beneficiaries of the calamity, they were not interested in its sources.
And Mr. Adams noted the unfortunate error by the Board of Elections and emphasized the importance of handling election results correctly.

It is critical that New Yorkers are confident in their electoral system, especially as we rank votes in a citywide election for the first time, he said in a statement released on Tuesday night. We appreciate the boards transparency and acknowledgment of their error. We look forward to the release of an accurate, updated simulation, and the timely conclusion of this critical process.

If elected, Mr. Adams would be the citys second Black mayor, after David N. Dinkins. Some of Mr. Adamss supporters have already cast the ranked-choice process as an attempt to disenfranchise voters of color, an argument that intensified among some backers on Tuesday afternoon as the race had appeared to tighten, and is virtually certain to escalate should he lose his primary night lead to Ms. Garcia, who is white.

Surrogates for Mr. Adams have suggested without evidence that an apparent ranked-choice alliance between Ms. Garcia and another rival, Andrew Yang, could amount to an attempt to suppress the votes of Black and Latino New Yorkers; Mr. Adams himself claimed that the alliance was aimed at preventing a Black or Latino candidate from winning the race.

In the final days of the race, Ms. Garcia and Mr. Yang campaigned together across the city, especially in neighborhoods that are home to sizable Asian American communities, and appeared together on campaign literature.

To advocates of ranked-choice voting, the round-by-round shuffling of outcomes is part of the process of electing a candidate with broad appeal. But if Ms. Garcia or Ms. Wiley were to prevail, the process  which was approved by voters in a 2019 ballot measure  would likely attract fresh scrutiny, with some of Mr. Adamss backers and others already urging a new referendum on it.

By Tuesday night, though, it was the Board of Elections that was attracting ire from seemingly all corners.
The D.E.A. has always been responsible for setting the supply of opioid medications through its use of annual quotas, and demand is driven by the licensed physicians who write prescriptions based on their independent medical judgment, the drug distributor AmerisourceBergen, a defendant, said in a statement. It added that the company had no role in working with the D.E.A., to set quotas, nor did we interact with physicians or patients to recommend particular medications.

The lawyers spoke before New York Supreme Court Justice Jerry Garguilo inside the auditorium at Touro Colleges Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center. As if transplanted from a courtroom, a mahogany-colored judges bench and matching tables were set inside the law school auditorium. Jurors, wearing masks, sat in a jury box, listening intently.

Their presence is critically important, Ms. James, the state attorney general, said in a news conference held during a break in the proceedings on Tuesday afternoon, where she heralded the jury as everyday individuals who represent the great state of New York.

While more than 3,000 lawsuits have been filed across the country against entities involved in the supply of opioids, only two trials are currently ongoing, and both are bench trials, or heard by a judge only: a state trial in California against several manufacturers, and a federal trial in West Virginia against a group of distributors.

Over the next several months in the New York trial, scores of witnesses are expected to testify, including a retired county medical examiner, and doctors who are experts on addiction, according to lawyers for the state and counties.

Plaintiffs in the New York case will also argue that the defendants are also responsible for much of the destruction wrought by drugs like heroin and fentanyl, to which they say opioids serve as a gateway.

The defendants say such claims are overly broad and that their culpability cannot be proven, according to court documents.
New Yorkers will get one step closer on Tuesday to learning who their next mayor is likely to be.

Because an initial count of ballots showed that none of the Democratic candidates got more than 50 percent of the first-choice votes cast by those who voted in person last Tuesday or during the early voting period, the citys new ranked-choice system has kicked in.

Voters could rank up to five candidates in the mayors race, and the Democratic nominee, who is almost certain to be next mayor, will now be decided through a process of elimination that begins on Tuesday.

Heres what you need to know:

How will the ranked-choice system play out on Tuesday?

The citys Board of Elections is set to reveal the first, preliminary round of ranked-choice results, which will give a fuller, if still incomplete, picture of how the vote totals are shaking out.

Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, led Maya D. Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, by 9.4 percentage points after first-choice votes were counted, and he was ahead of Kathryn Garcia, a former city sanitation commissioner, by about 12 percentage points.
[Eric Adams received the most first-choice in-person votes last week. It is difficult, but mathematically possible, for two other candidates to catch up to him.]

What happens today?

Elections officials will run through the ranked-choice ballots for all votes cast in person on Primary Day and during early voting, offering a fuller (but incomplete) picture of how votes are adding up.

A process of elimination will take place that works like this: The candidate with the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated. Those votes are then reallocated to the candidates whom his or her voters ranked second. The candidate in last place after that is then eliminated, with the votes reallocated to each voters next choice, and so on, until two candidates remain. The candidate with the most votes would be the winner.

In the Democratic race for mayor, Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, led Maya Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, by 9.4 percentage points after first-choice votes were counted. Mr. Adams was ahead of Kathryn Garcia, a former city sanitation commissioner, by about 12 points.
In his graduation speech last month, Mr. Muhammad pointedly asked why it took 106 years for Oakland Tech to award this honor to a Black male student: So why me? he asked. I dont know. But for all of those who didnt get to maximize their potential, for all those who had the ability but lacked the opportunity, I owe it to them to appreciate this history made by the people who put me in this position. We owe it to them to make sure that, while I may be the first young Black man to be our schools valedictorian, I wont be the last.

We all owe it to those who follow in Mr. Muhammad and Mr. Ahmads footsteps to focus on removing the obstacles they will confront. And we owe it to them to be more dedicated to dismantling racism than to congratulating them for being among the few to thrive despite it.

That requires an examination of the structures that helped us thrive, but werent available to others. Both Mr. Muhammad and I were part of a discussion-based humanities program at our school known as Paideia  the kind of program for gifted students whose benefits and problems are common in public high schools all over the country, which often include what social scientists refer to as racialized tracking.

The Paideia program, named after a classical Greek system of education and training, was started in the mid-1980s at Oakland Tech. Credited by some for transforming the school from one of the lowest performing and violent in the city to one of the most sought-after in the East Bay, Paideia once served mostly Black students. But as the academic reputation of the school improved and it became more popular with upper- and middle-income white families in Oakland, the programs demographics have shifted.

Oakland Techs enrollment is about a quarter Black, but the courses I took that were necessary to be a competitive college applicant were disproportionately white. The classes in the Paideia program are standard size: about 20 to 30 students. But there were only three Black students in my grade remaining in the entire program by the time we graduated. During my junior year I was the only Black person in my Advanced Placement U.S. History class.
But state governments largely did not make good on Kennedys promise. His plan was supposed to create 1,500 well-staffed, well-funded community mental health centers across the country, but only about 750 were ever built, and zero were ever fully funded. Today, more than a third of people with serious mental illness do not receive medical help, and the countrys largest facilities housing mentally ill people are jails.

The upshot: Americans with depression, bipolar disorder or other serious mental illnesses die 15 to 30 years younger than those without mental illness  a disparity larger than for race, ethnicity, geography or socioeconomic status, Dhruv Khullar wrote for The Times in 2018. The extraordinary life expectancy gains of the past half-century have left these patients behind, with the result that Americans with serious mental illness live shorter lives than those in many of the worlds poorest countries.

What would a more humane system look like?

The question tends to divide people into one of two camps, as the Times editorial board wrote in 2018: one that calls for more psychiatric beds in hospitals, which have plummeted by 95 percent since the 1950s, and another that argues that the problem is not the lack of psychiatric facilities but how little has been done to fill the void since they were shut down.

Neither side wants to return to the era of insane asylums, the board wrote. Nor does anyone disagree that the system that replaced them is a colossal failure. Whats needed, they argued, were three major reforms:

A continuum of care: The community-based care model envisioned in the 1960s should be given a chance, with community mental health centers, short-term care facilities, and  yes  longer-term arrangements for the small portion of people who cant live safely in the community.

Insurance equity: On paper, health insurers are required to provide the same level of benefits for mental health treatments and services as they provide for other medical services. But in practice, insurers often act as a barrier to mental health care.

Sensible commitment standards: In general, people cannot be hospitalized against their will unless they pose a clear and significant danger to themselves or others, but the standard varies by state and is not always properly enforced.

Another view: Adults without disabilities make decisions that run counter to their best interest all the time, and some argue that disabled people should have the right to do the same as long as theyre not harming someone else.

If a nondisabled person decides, Im going to skip work and have a couple of drinks and eat a whole bunch of doughnuts and then take a nap, that person isnt going to have any of their fundamental rights taken away, the journalist Sara Luterman tells Slate. Thats a thing that normal people are allowed to do. But if you have a disability and you do those things, thats seen as further evidence of your incapacity and inability to responsibly manage your own life.

Even in cases where involuntary commitment is justified, its benefits have to be weighed against its potential costs, which include hopelessness, fear and trauma. Im grateful for the medical care I got in the hospital; I know now that I needed it, Schwiegershausen writes of her experience being hospitalized for a manic episode. But there were ways that I was still myself throughout the experience, and Ill never forget what it was like to have people question my sanity.

Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at debatable@nytimes.com. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.
And so what many Hong Kongers most dreaded has come to pass: an accelerating crackdown on the very freedoms that distinguished Hong Kong from China. Not too long ago Hong Kongers stayed up through the night watching livestreams of police officers firing tear gas at protesters and beating them with truncheons. The current assault  less visible, but no less violent  is on the public sphere itself.

Hong Kongers fear what the next target will be after Apple Daily. The red waves are lapping at digital media outlets: The pro-democracy Stand News is already taking down online content. Others wonder whether the red sea will swamp international news outlets, which could feel compelled to pull their remaining correspondents from Hong Kong for their own safety as the government prepares legislation to combat fake news.

Attacks by the state-run Chinese media on the outspoken Bar Association are spooking the legal community, with foreign judges, allowed to serve under Hong Kongs Basic Law, withdrawing from the territorys courts. The Roman Catholic Church is in the cross hairs; this month banners warning of evil cults appeared outside seven churches offering Masses to remember the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown.

Hong Kongs vibrant, cacophonous civil society is being muzzled. As a result, there is an exodus of Hong Kongers making the wrenching decision to leave all they know since they see no future in their home.

Their sense of alarm has been reinforced by a government reshuffle late last week, which entrenches hard-line security officials at the very top of the civil service. It is the latest dark joke that this move literally makes Hong Kong a police state  and five of its top officials now are under sanctions from the U.S. government for undermining the citys autonomy and restricting its freedoms.

Many agree that worse is still to come. Using history as a guide, the China scholar Geremie Barme is predicting that re-education programs and centers will be the next step in Beijings campaign of coercive ideological control.

And yet, many Hong Kongers are determined to pursue what they see as the right moral path, no matter the cost. Jimmy Lai, the jailed founder of Apple Daily, is one example. He correctly predicted that the national security legislation would make the operation of the free press not just difficult but dangerous, yet he has vowed to continue. What keeps me going is I believe I am doing the right thing, he told me when I interviewed him last June.
In March, when the City Council of Fort Wayne, Ind., voted 7 to 2 to approve $16 million in tax breaks for a corporation to open a distribution center in the city, it was something of a shot in the dark: Four of the Council members  including two who voted in favor of the deal  didnt know which corporation they were considering.

How was it possible that public officials lacked such crucial information? Alarmingly, as a condition of its negotiations with the city, the company had required city officials who knew its identity (including the mayor) to sign nondisclosure agreements that kept them from sharing its identity before a deal was reached.

The company turned out to be Amazon.

As absurd as it may seem, it is not uncommon today for large corporations negotiating economic development deals to have public officials sign nondisclosure agreements, or NDAs. This practice needs to be stopped. By keeping salient information hidden, these NDAs impede government accountability and public involvement in economic policymaking. State and city officials should ban them.

Amazon is particularly aggressive in using economic development NDAs, but it is hardly the only corporate titan to do so. Google negotiated for many months with local officials in Minnesota to build a data center in Sherburne County before residents learned in 2019 that those negotiations were occurring; the officials had agreed to an NDA that they believed kept them from discussing the project in public. And when the City Council of Gallatin, Tenn., approved nearly $20 million in tax breaks last year for the creation of a data center in the city, the company that stood to receive the benefit was not named. Months later, it was revealed to be Facebook.
Its a shift of only one or two degrees, but the red-hot housing market in California is finally starting to cool.

Despite the median home price hitting yet another record high in May, year-to-date statewide home sales dipped in the state by 2.7 percent in May. They had been rising steadily since February. And for the first time in 2021, the median number of days that a single-family home was on the market did not drop, but rather held steady at seven, the same number recorded in April.

Buyers are getting fed up at this point with submitting as many as eight to 12 offers and getting rejected, said John Graff, a Los Angeles-based broker and the chief executive of Ashby & Graff Real Estate. Theyre throwing up their hands at this point.

The median price for a single-family home in California hit $818,260 in May, an uptick of half a percentage point from last month. Its an acceleration with a foot off the gas: In April, when the median price hit $814,010, prices had jumped 7 percent from the previous month to cross the $800,000 threshold for the first time in history.
SANTA ANA, Calif.  Many big YouTubers earn money by running advertisements on their videos. Not the Nelk Boys. The creators state often and with pride that they make no income from the platform, despite their regular video uploads, high view counts and millions of loyal subscribers.

That their channel produces no revenue is neither a fluke nor an accident. Their videos revolve around frat-like parties and elaborate pranks that sometimes promote illegal activities. They drink and curse and make crude jokes on camera. The police show up a lot.

YouTube doesnt love that. Which is why last year, after a series of incidents in which the group encouraged fans to flout Covid-19 safety guidelines, Nelks channel was demonetized.

The Nelk Boyss response: Who cares? Ads werent a big part of their livelihood.

Every video, were swearing, were doing some stuff that could be questionable or illegal, were making sexual references or drug references, said Kyle Forgeard, 26, the groups leader. So we were making no money on YouTube at all.
The F.T.C. is closely reviewing the opinion and assessing the best option forward, said Lindsay Kryzak, a spokeswoman for the agency.

The rulings were another instance of Facebooks ability to evade the harshest consequences to its business. Though the F.T.C. fined Facebook $5 billion in 2019 for privacy violations, there were few significant changes to how the companys products operate. And Facebook continues to grow: More than 3.45 billion people use one or more of its apps  including WhatsApp, Instagram or Messenger  every month.

The decisions were particularly deflating after actions to rein in tech power in Washington had gathered steam. Ms. Khans appointment to the F.T.C. this month followed that of Tim Wu, another lawyer who has been critical of the industry, to the National Economic Council. Bruce Reed, the presidents deputy chief of staff, has called for new privacy regulation.

Mr. Biden has yet to name anyone to permanently lead the Justice Departments antitrust division, which last year filed a lawsuit arguing Google had illegally protected its monopoly over online search.

The White House is also expected to issue an executive order targeting corporate consolidation in tech and other areas of the economy. The order is still being drafted, and officials said Mr. Biden had not yet reviewed it. White House officials have declined to discuss it in detail until he signs it, most likely next week.

The officials said that without action by Congress, a presidents powers to deal with antitrust issues were limited. One official, who requested anonymity, said that after the court decisions to throw out the Facebook suits, Mr. Biden was concerned about anticompetitive behavior in a number of industries, including the tech sector, and that he was encouraged by the bipartisan work in Congress to address the problems.

Activists and lawmakers said this week that Congress should not wait to give regulators more tools, money and legal red lines to use against the tech giants. Mr. Cicilline, along with Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said in a statement that the judges decisions on Facebook show the dire need to modernize our antitrust laws to address anticompetitive mergers and abusive conduct in the digital economy.
The reopening expenses are varied  a month of rehearsals to get actors, musicians, stagehands and others ready to perform again, as well as longer workshops for new cast members. Plus there are the costs of repairing and replacing equipment, transporting people and sets, hiring Covid safety personnel, and marketing the shows.

And the pandemic expenses, incurred throughout the shutdown, included financial assistance, health insurance coverage, and, in some cases, housing aid for those who had been employed by the productions at the time of the shutdown. Seller said Hamilton had continued to pay health insurance costs for all former employees throughout the pandemic, and had made emergency cash grants as well.

There were more mundane expenses as well, including $784,000 in rent for the shows Broadway theater (yes, Broadway landlords continued to seek rent from producers during the pandemic), as well as warehouse storage for costumes, and flights for cast and crew who needed to get home when the touring stopped.

Hamilton has spent many millions of dollars during a time in which it was earning no income, Seller said. Our goal is for Hamilton to be in the same financial position it was in when we suspended operations on March 12, 2020.

The rollout of the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant initiative, a $16 billion federal aid program designed to help get cultural organizations back on their feet after the pandemic forced many to close, has been plagued by delays and confusion. But the Small Business Administration, which is administering the program, has begun announcing grant recipients, and there are indications that Broadway and its affiliated businesses could fare well.

As of Monday, the administration said that among the entities getting $10 million, which is the maximum available for a single grant, were two Broadway landlords, the Nederlander Organization, which controls nine Broadway theaters (one of which houses Hamilton), and Jujamcyn Theaters, which controls five, as well as the Roundabout Theater Company, a nonprofit that runs three Broadway houses. David Byrnes Broadway show, American Utopia, was also among those getting $10 million.

Nederlander affiliates that run commercial theaters in Los Angeles and Chicago each got $10 million. Three Broadway touring productions managed by NETWorks were given grants  $10 million for Fiddler on the Roof; $9.8 million for Waitress; and $9 million for The Bands Visit.
Americans can now vacation in France, where the one-dose vaccination rate is 49 percent, according to the nonprofit Our World in Data; they can also go to Spain, where the rate is 51 percent, and Greece, 45 percent. But, with very limited exceptions, they still cannot travel to Canada, which, according to one source  the University of Oxford  is leading all countries globally in single-dose vaccination rates.

In mid-June, to the frustration of many on both sides of the border, Canada announced it was extending restrictions on nonessential travel until at least July 21. The ban includes travel via land, air and sea. It will ease entry requirements for fully vaccinated Canadians, permanent residents and some eligible foreign nationals on July 5.

Theres no other way to say it, wrote Brian Higgins, the U.S. representative of New Yorks 26th Congressional District, on Twitter, who went on to describe the prospect of another months delay with a colorful term for barnyard excrement. His district includes Buffalo, just across the border near Niagara Falls, a popular frontier for travelers going in both directions.

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York is among the American politicians pushing for a swifter reopening for those who are vaccinated and have personal or commercial ties to Canada. I explained to Ambassador Hillman how mind-boggling it is that many New Yorkers are free to travel to Europe now, but even those fully vaccinated cant even drive a few miles north to Canada to their homes, businesses, stores, families, and properties, he said in a news release detailing a call with the Canadian ambassador to the United States, Kirsten Hillman, on June 21.
President Biden and Jill Biden, the first lady, will travel to Florida on Thursday to tour the site of collapsed Champlain Towers South condo complex and comfort the families of the 149 people listed as missing as the excruciating rescue and recovery effort drags on.

The Bidens will thank search and rescue teams, and everyone who has been working tirelessly around the clock, and meet with the families who have been forced to endure this terrible tragedy, waiting in anguish and heartbreak for word of their loved ones to offer them comfort, Jen Psaki, Mr. Bidens press secretary, told reporters en route with the president to Wisconsin on Tuesday.

Ms. Psaki said the White House had planned the Florida trip in close coordination with officials in the Miami-Dade County area to ensure the trip would not divert any critical local resources from the recovery operation and to avoid any negative operational impact.
The White House has rejected the idea that Congress needs to authorize such action, saying Mr. Biden acted as many of his predecessors did, under his constitutional authority as commander in chief. Mr. Bidens formal notification to Congress continued that argument, saying that he acted consistently with my responsibility to protect United States citizens both at home and abroad and in furtherance of United States national security and foreign policy interests.

The notification concluded with a warning that the United States stood ready to take further action, as necessary and appropriate, to address further threats or attacks. That language could confirm suspicions by many in Congress that this was not a single attack on a terror group, but part of a continuing, low-level conflict.

The formal notification itself was no surprise, but Mr. Biden submitted it quickly, an acknowledgment of the sensitivity of the issue for Democrats. The airstrikes underscored how many conflicting currents Mr. Biden faces as he attempts to fashion a coherent Iran policy. Those include pressures from Congress, from Israel and from Arab allies who worry about his determination to get back into the Iran nuclear accord, and now from a new leader in Tehran, Ebrahim Raisi, the incoming hard-liner who was elected president two weeks ago. He will be inaugurated in August.

Since Mr. Bidens inauguration, there have been six meetings toward completing work on restoring the nuclear deal, which President Donald J. Trump exited three years ago. No additional meeting has been scheduled since Mr. Raisi won the election as the preferred candidate of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Nor has Iran indicated whether it will renew an agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations nuclear inspection group, to maintain cameras and other sensors that monitor the status of Irans nuclear material. Those negotiations remain underway. The last agreement expired on Thursday.
Brazils persistent struggles

Brazil recently surpassed 500,000 official Covid deaths, the worlds second-highest total behind the U.S. About 1 in every 400 Brazilians has died from the virus, but many experts believe the true death toll may be higher. The virus situation there is not easing, with an average of nearly 70,000 new cases per day.

To learn more, we spoke to Ernesto Londono, The Timess Brazil bureau chief.

The last time we spoke was mid-April, when Brazils average death toll was the highest in the world. Whats happened since then?

March and April were the peak months in terms of the hospital system coming under enormous strain. Since then, the number of daily infections and the number of deaths remains staggeringly high. Were talking about daily death tolls that have ranged from 1,500 to 2,500. So lower than the peak period we saw earlier this year where you were exceeding 4,000 deaths a day, but clearly, were still very much in the grip of a raging outbreak.
As the farmers met at a local church, police officers interrupted them, leading to a shootout in which one of the officers was killed. A mob of white men then poured into the county to suppress the alleged Black revolt that had been reported to them, Professor Mitchell wrote in a recent essay. Hundreds of U.S. Army soldiers were sent to Elaine at the governors request.

Over the next few days, soldiers, police officers and white mobs are believed to have killed hundreds of people. Homes were burned with Black families inside, and the victims included men, women and children, according to Nan Elizabeth Woodruff, a professor emerita of African American studies at Pennsylvania State University.

A jury later convicted 12 Black men for the murders of three white men in Elaine. They were sentenced to death, but freed years later after six of the convictions were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1923.

Textbooks in Arkansas once basically accepted initial, pro-establishment accounts of the massacre from local officials and newspapers, said Barclay Key, a historian at the University of Arkansas. More recent textbooks, he added, have better explained the role of the Black union organizers and how the massacre started.

This happened in my community.

When Professor Mitchell and his students began researching the Elaine massacre a few years ago, there was virtually no record of Black deaths from it in the county where it had occurred, he said. They managed to find death certificates in a local funeral homes collection that confirmed deaths that had gone unreported at the time.

The class created a searchable index of those records and donated it to the Arkansas State Archive. Separately, Professor Mitchell helped to create a virtual exhibit around the massacres centennial for the universitys Center for Arkansas History and Culture that includes teaching guides, archival records and interactive maps.
The White House appears to be back in Vogues good graces.

Jill Biden, the first lady, will appear on the cover of the August issue of the magazine, continuing a tradition that Anna Wintour, the magazines editor, had paused during the Trump presidency.

In interviews with the writer Jonathan Van Meter, Dr. Biden, who is the first in her role to keep her day job, said the mood of the country had changed with President Bidens election.

During the campaign, I felt so much anxiety from people, Dr. Biden said. When I travel around the country now, I feel as though people can breathe again. I think thats part of the reason Joe was elected.

As first lady, Dr. Biden keeps a busy travel schedule that currently outpaces her husbands, and she is viewed as something of a secret weapon by administration officials, who send her to parts of the country that are not typically Democratic territory. She has traveled to Alabama, West Virginia, Mississippi and Tennessee to promote pandemic relief legislation and encourage young people to receive the coronavirus vaccine.
After World Health Organization officials urged fully vaccinated people to continue wearing masks out of concern about the global spread of the Delta variant, New York City and Los Angeles County appear to now be taking slightly diverging approaches.

New York and California lifted virtually all coronavirus restrictions on businesses and social gatherings nearly two weeks ago, signs of immense progress after New York City and Los Angeles County suffered devastating waves of the virus. Both states have followed the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions mask guidance that allowed for fully vaccinated people to go maskless in most situations. (Exceptions remained for health care settings and public transit, among others.)

On Monday, though, Los Angeles County said that it strongly recommended that everyone wear masks indoors regardless of vaccination status as a precaution against the Delta variant. By contrast, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City said on Tuesday that fully vaccinated municipal office employees are no longer required to wear masks or adhere to social-distancing protocol inside their offices. Unvaccinated municipal workers and those who interact with the public must continue to wear masks.

We will make adjustments when we see real, consistent evidence, but so far, the data is telling us, in fact, things keep moving in the right direction, Mr. de Blasio said at a news conference.
WASHINGTON  Rushing to help Afghans who face retribution for working alongside American troops in their home country, the House voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to speed up the process that would allow them to immigrate to the United States.

With the American military in the final phases of withdrawing from Afghanistan after nearly 20 years of war, more than 18,000 Afghans who have worked for the United States as interpreters, drivers, engineers, security guards and embassy clerks are stuck in a bureaucratic morass after applying for Special Immigrant Visas, available to people who face threats because of work for the U.S. government.

I can say with confidence that I might not be here today had it not been for these men and women, said Representative Jason Crow, Democrat of Colorado and a former Army Ranger who is the lead sponsor of the bill.

The measure, passed 366 to 46, would waive a requirement for applicants to undergo medical examinations in Afghanistan before qualifying, instead allowing them to do so after entering the United States. The first in a series of bipartisan bills intended to smooth the visa process, it aims to shorten the long waiting period, which can be as long as six or seven years for some applicants.
Rushing to help Afghans who face retribution for working alongside American troops in their home country, the House is scheduled to vote on Tuesday to speed up the process that would allow them to immigrate to the United States.

With the American military in the final phases of withdrawing from Afghanistan after 20 years of war, more than 18,000 Afghans who have worked as interpreters, drivers, engineers, security guards and embassy clerks for the United States are stuck in a bureaucratic morass after applying for Special Immigrant Visas, available to people who face threats because of work for the U.S. government.

The measure slated for a vote on Tuesday  the first in a package of bills that would smooth the visa process  would waive a requirement for applicants to undergo medical examinations in Afghanistan before qualifying. It aims to shorten the long wait for permission to enter the United States, which can be as long as six or seven years for some applicants.

Some of the Afghan allies awaiting visas have spoken out about the threats they face from the Taliban.
Both have said the two measures will move on parallel tracks, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi said last week that there would be no infrastructure measure without a reconciliation bill.

The legislative two-step is tricky. The infrastructure deal has the support of five Republican senators, but must get five more to beat a filibuster, and even more if any Democrats peel away. At the same time, Democrats must unite around a reconciliation bill on social and climate spending that cannot be too big for moderate Democrats but also cannot jettison so many liberal priorities that it loses the left flank.

Mr. McConnells push to delink the bills and pass an infrastructure deal on its own was quickly embraced by some Republicans whom the centrist senators badly want to persuade to support their compromise. Senator Mike Braun, Republican of Indiana, followed Mr. McConnells statement with one of his own saying the compromise on infrastructure was a bad deal so long as President Biden, Speaker Pelosi and Leader Schumer insist on pursuing a multitrillion-dollar tax-and-spend reconciliation package.

All of that is prompting House liberals to worry that Mr. Biden and moderate Democrats will take the infrastructure deal now, rather than play for the larger package later.

We want to make sure that our communities are represented in federal legislation, said Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, and the fact of the matter is that these bipartisan deals are often very exclusionary of working-class communities and of communities of color that really badly need infrastructure investments.

The House Progressive Caucus is pushing for a bill that addresses five categories: the care economy, which includes paid family leave, universal child care and $400 billion for long-term health care; Medicare expansion to lower eligibility to age 60, widen coverage to vision, dental and hearing, and empower the government to negotiate prescription drug prices; climate change measures, including a clean-energy standard for electric utilities and a civilian climate corps; a path to citizenship for essential immigrant workers; and low-income housing.

Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who leads the Budget Committee, sees putting all of that into a budget resolution in July that could cost $6 trillion. Other Senate Democrats say they want a much smaller package.
What I try to do is demonstrate by precept and example how we are to proceed as a party, Mr. Clyburn said in an interview. When I spoke out against sloganeering, like Burn, baby, burn in the 1960s and defund the police, which I think is cutting the throats of the party, I know exactly where my constituents are. They are against that, and Im against that.

The special election in Cleveland is highlighting the vast generational divide and ideological gulf that the Democratic Party faces as the entire House leadership heads toward the sunset. Mr. Clyburn, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the House majority leader, Representative Steny H. Hoyer, are all octogenarians, leading an increasingly youthful, diverse and restive caucus. Ms. Pelosi even agreed to vacate her position after this Congress, and the next year will be an ideological battle over who will succeed her.

Ms. Brown has the backing of the Democratic establishment, including not only Mr. Clyburn but also Hillary Clinton; Richard Cordray, a former Ohio attorney general; Representative Joyce Beatty of Ohio, the chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus; and moderate Democrats like Representatives Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey and David Trone of Maryland.

Ms. Turner, who has the endorsements of much of the House Progressive Caucus, including the so-called squad  Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna S. Pressley, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib  would be a strong new voice for the congressional left. And the left is increasingly focused on Black and Hispanic districts that they see as safe redoubts for ideological candidates.

You cant take any one race and paint it as some larger aggregate for the whole country, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, said on Tuesday. But I do think that Nina is a beloved leader in the progressive movement, and the degree of excitement that shes generated and grass-roots energy and organizing in her direction is a real testament to the asset that the base of our party can provide.
The studys scope was chosen when the board was under Democratic control. Then some members departed and the board lacked a quorum, but its staff pursued the effort. The report was completed when the board was under Republican control.

Another complicating factor is that the board approved the report in December by voice vote without recorded opposition, according to several officials. Mr. LeBlanc told its general counsel the next day to record him as a no, they said. Mr. LeBlanc said he had abstained during the voice vote, adding that he was shocked that the board was suddenly voting on it.

I am unable to support the XKeyscore system report, he wrote. I harbor serious reservations about the deficiencies in our oversight of the XKeyscore program as well as significant concerns about the programs operations.

Mr. LeBlanc offered myriad criticisms of the report, portraying the boards approval of it as rushed and pointing to gaps like a failure to scrutinize the use of artificial intelligence in connection with the system, to conduct an adequate assessment of oversight mechanisms, and to scrutinize the National Security Agencys collection activities under Executive Order 12333, including those that can incidentally pull in Americans private messages.

The report, he wrote, unfortunately reads more like a book report of the XKeyscore program than an independent oversight analysis grappling with key concerns in this evolving technological and legal landscape.

But Adam Klein, a Republican who was the boards chairman until he stepped down on June 20, defended the effort as valuable.

This is a detailed, comprehensive report and recommendations on a very complex program, he said. It reflects six years of work by board staff and multiple iterations of board members. Its highly factual, substantive and apolitical  the type of oversight the board was created to perform.
Mr. Cruz won the state, the last one hed carry before ending his campaign a month later. Most, but not all, Wisconsin Republicans quickly got on board with Mr. Trump. Paul D. Ryan, then the House speaker, dragged his feet on endorsing Mr. Trump. Charlie Sykes, at the time the most influential conservative talk radio host in the state, never did, and quit his job to become a Never-Trump commentator.

Now, as they have in Georgia and Arizona, Mr. Trumps false claims that he won Wisconsins presidential contest threaten to split Republicans. At the party convention on Saturday, Mr. Trump delivered a prerecorded message reiterating the lie that he won the state  though he didnt mention any of the legislative leaders he had criticized the night before.

We had actually great results in Wisconsin, Mr. Trump said. As you know, in 2016 we won, and as you also know, in 2020 we won, but that hasnt been so adjudged yet.

Mr. Kapengas letter to Mr. Trump was a telling distillation of the delicate way Republicans try to navigate the former presidents whims, combining ego-stroking and gentle pushback. He lightly scolded Mr. Trump for broadcasting misinformation, saying, It is false, and I dont appreciate it being done before calling me and finding out the truth, before softening it with a request to play golf with Mr. Trump at the club of your choice.

The letter concludes: I write this as I am about to board a plane due to a family medical emergency. In addition to my Trump socks, I will pull up my Trump/Pence mask when I board the plane, as required by federal law. I figure, if the liberals are going to force me to wear a mask, I am going to make it as painful for them as possible. I will continue to do this regardless of whether or not I ever hear from you. Thank you for doing great things as our President.

Mr. Vos and Mr. Kapenga have advanced legislation to make absentee voting harder and forbid the mass collecting of early votes that the city clerk in Madison, the liberal state capital, engaged in last fall. But they have so far resisted, while not ruling out, calls to subpoena large numbers of 2020 votes and embark on an Arizona-style audit.
Military planners and intelligence analysts say the growing strength of the Taliban and planned withdrawal of international combat troops mean that the Afghan government was likely to fall in six months to two years. And while it is not clear that the Taliban would want to completely shut down the airport and isolate the country if they take full control of Afghanistan, the group has signaled that it will not accept the presence of any foreign troops, even from Turkey.

After two decades of war, failed military strategies and set-piece battles that seem to have fallen out of remembered time, the fate of the airport is shaping up as a potential epitaph to Americas presence in Afghanistan.

The importance of the strip of tarmac, radars and terminals, surrounded by the ring of mountains that define the capital city, cannot be overstated. Beyond its strategic importance for maintaining embassy operations and having an evacuation route for diplomats and the forces protecting them, the airport is the gateway to Afghanistan for workers from international aid groups and other nongovernmental organizations and health care providers that remain vital in a nation long reliant on foreign assistance to provide basic services.

Its important for the diplomatic communities, aid agencies, international organizations and also for the country to continue to have support from outside, Abdullah Abdullah, the chairman of the Afghan government council that has led peace negotiations with the Taliban, said of the airport in an interview on Friday after he and President Ashraf Ghani met with Mr. Biden at the White House.

Kabul Internationals importance was underscored last week after Pentagon and other administration officials said the military airport at Bagram, about an hour north of Kabul, would soon close on schedule.

Administration officials had briefly considered delaying the closure of Bagram to give commanders more options if security arrangements at Kabul International stalled or Pentagon planners needed another airport to evacuate thousands of Western diplomats or Afghan interpreters and other workers who helped the United States.
House Votes to Remove Confederate Statues at the Capitol The bill, which now heads to the Senate, would remove statues honoring Confederate and other white supremacist leaders from public display. On a daylong visit to Wisconsin, President Biden called an emerging bipartisan infrastructure deal a blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America. Follow the latest news on President Biden.

The House votes to remove Confederate statues from view at the Capitol. Video transcript Back bars 0:00 / 1:46 - 0:00 transcript House Debates Removing Confederate Statues The House voted Tuesday to remove statues honoring Confederate and other white supremacist leaders from public display at the United States Capitol. This holiday, while a celebration, is also an opportunity to take steps to right the wrongs of history, starting here, right here in the U.S. Capitol. That is why today we are again passing legislation to remove statues of Confederate officials and other advocacies of bigotry and removing them from the U.S. Capitol. Monuments to men or people who advocated cruelty and barbarism to achieve such a plainly racist end are a grotesque affront to those ideals. They are homage to hate, not heritage; they must be removed. Our nation was built on a unifying vision from the beginning. As Lincoln said, we are conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that we are all equal. Ill vote for this bill today, just as I voted for it before. But Madam Speaker, if we have not learned anything, we should not divide our nation based on race. This is a great country. Nobody denies that. I dont call this a racist country. I do say that this country has on occasion, too often for my taste, tolerated racism. Thats a fact. And nobody can deny that fact. Last time this bill came before this body, over 70 of my Republican friends voted for it. I would hope we could do a little better today. The House voted Tuesday to remove statues honoring Confederate and other white supremacist leaders from public display at the United States Capitol. Credit Credit... Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times The House voted on Tuesday to remove statues honoring Confederate and other white supremacist leaders from public display at the United States Capitol, renewing an effort to rid the seat of American democracy of symbols of rebellion and racism. The chamber voted 285 to 120 to approve the legislation, which aims to banish the likenesses of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, Jefferson Davis and roughly a dozen other figures associated with the Confederacy or white supremacist causes. Sixty-seven Republicans, including the partys top leader, joined every Democrat in support of the changes, but a majority of the party stood against it. We cant change history, but we can certainly make it clear that which we honor and that which we do not honor, said Representative Steny H. Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland and the majority leader, who helped write the bill. Symbols of hate and division have no place in the halls of Congress. The legislation will now go to the Senate, where Democrats have vowed to use their narrow majority to try to advance it. The vote marked the latest round in a yearslong debate on Capitol Hill and across the country over the role of Confederate statues and symbols in public spaces, and the implications of removing them. Proponents of replacing the monuments with new ones commemorating the national struggle for equal rights have notched steady progress. Among the likenesses targeted for removal is the bust of Chief Justice Taney, who as the leader of the Supreme Court in 1857 delivered the landmark Dred Scott v. Sandford decision denying the rights of citizenship to people of African descent. The legislation calls for Taneys bust to be replaced with one of fellow Marylander Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court justice. The bill also specifically singles out for removal statues of Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, president of the Confederate States of America, and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, the former vice president and leader of the Senates pro-slavery faction. The statues were selected and donated by states to the Capitol. Several states have already voluntarily taken steps to remove and replace some of them. Conservatives decried the bill as an attempt to whitewash history or deprive states of their ability to choose what figures they want to see honored in the Capitol. Yet many of the Republican arguments against the measure on Tuesday focused on complaints about the removal process Democrats had proposed, not their goal. It would mean a whole lot more to this body, as well as the American people, if the states who originally put those statues in here were the ones who now ask that they would be removed, said Representative Barry Loudermilk, Republican of Georgia.

The House approves a bill to speed visas to Afghans who worked alongside U.S. troops. Former Afghan interpreters holding signs outside the U.S. Embassy in Kabul on Friday urging the United States to help protect them. Credit... Reuters Rushing to help Afghans who face retribution for working alongside American troops in their home country, the House voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to speed up the process that would allow them to immigrate to the United States. With the American military in the final phases of withdrawing from Afghanistan after 20 years of war, more than 18,000 Afghans who have worked for the United States as interpreters, drivers, engineers, security guards and embassy clerks are stuck in a bureaucratic morass after applying for Special Immigrant Visas, available to people who face threats because of work for the U.S. government. I can say with confidence that I might not be here today had it not been for these men and women, said Representative Jason Crow, Democrat of Colorado and a former Army Ranger who is the lead sponsor of the bill. The measure, passed 366 to 46, would waive a requirement for applicants to undergo medical examinations in Afghanistan before qualifying, instead allowing them to do so after entering the United States. The first in a series of bipartisan bills intended to smooth the visa process, it aims to shorten the long waiting period, which can be as long as six or seven years for some applicants. Mr. Crow said waiving the medical examination requirement would save the average applicant about a month on processing the visa. The bill requires that applicants complete their examinations within 30 days of arriving in the United States. In combat and in a war zone, every hour matters, Mr. Crow said. A month will save many, many lives. Since 2014, the nonprofit No One Left Behind has tracked the killings of more than 300 translators or their family members, many of whom died while waiting for their visas to be processed, according to James Miervaldis, the groups chairman and an Army Reserve noncommissioned officer. It is a life and death situation, said Representative Brad Wenstrup, Republican of Ohio. Itll be a black eye on the United States if we dont do everything in our power to protect these allies.

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Bidens day in Wisconsin: reassurances on his infrastructure deal and the promise to fight for more. Video transcript Back bars 0:00 / 1:54 - 0:00 transcript Biden Touts Bipartisan Breakthrough on Infrastructure President Biden used an appearance in Wisconsin to pitch the bipartisan agreement announced last week, calling it the largest federal infrastructure investment since the Interstate highway system. American has always been propelled into the future by landmark national investment, investments that only the government has the capacity to make, only the government working together can make. Sixty-five years ago today, President Dwight Eisenhower signed a bill that created the Interstate highway system  65 years ago today. That was the last infrastructure investment of the size and scope of the agreement Im about to talk about today. Its time for us to write a new chapter in that story. After months of careful negotiation, of listening, compromising together and in good faith, moving together with ups and downs and some blips, a bipartisan group of senators got together, and they forged an agreement to move forward on the key priorities of my American Jobs Plan. The one sitting in front of me. As a result, this is a generational investment, a generational investment to modernize our infrastructure, creating millions of good-paying jobs. Thats not coming from me thats coming from Wall Street  millions of good-paying jobs and positions America to compete with the rest of the world in the 21st century. This bipartisan breakthrough is a great deal for the American people, not just for folks in cities, not just for red states or blue states, but for everybody. This is the answer for good-paying jobs  jobs, not just in our biggest cities along our coast, but in small towns across the country so families can build wealth and opportunity in rural hometowns and dont have to leave when theyre grown up. Ive said it all along, this is a blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America. President Biden used an appearance in Wisconsin to pitch the bipartisan agreement announced last week, calling it the largest federal infrastructure investment since the Interstate highway system. Credit Credit... Doug Mills/The New York Times President Biden returned to Washington on Tuesday evening after spending the day in La Crosse, Wis., where he opened a combination road show and apology tour centered on his bipartisan infrastructure deal. His aims: to reassure Republicans that he was committed to the agreement he struck last week and to convince liberal and centrist Democrats that the compromise had not dimmed his economic ambitions. In La Crosse, Mr. Biden praised the $579 billion bipartisan pact, promising it would bring faster internet, less traffic and safer drinking water to Americans in Wisconsin and across the country. Some of the benefits he promised were the same, or similar to, those he predicted when rolling out his more ambitious $4 trillion plan earlier this year. The president portrayed the compromise as the largest federal infrastructure effort since President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed legislation creating the interstate highway system 65 years ago. This is a generational investment  generational investment  to modernize our infrastructure, Mr. Biden said, creating millions of good-paying jobs. But in the same speech, the president also said he would continue to press the case for trillions more dollars to reshape the economy, educate children and young adults, support workers and families, and fight climate change. And he reiterated his plans to pay for that spending by raising taxes on corporations and high earners. Such a plan would almost certainly need to be passed with only Democratic votes. Theres much more to do, and Im going to continue to fight for you, Mr. Biden said during a stop at a municipal transit facility. Im going to keep working with Congress to pass even more of my economic agenda so we can keep building an economy from the bottom up and middle out. The stop, which took place in a swing congressional district held by a moderate Democrat and where broadband internet access remains spotty for many residents, represented a reset of sorts for a president who nearly fumbled his delicate balancing act on infrastructure before it could begin in earnest. The setting brought reminders of the tricky political landscape Mr. Biden is trying to navigate to pass that deal into law: His lectern was flanked by a digital sign, the kind usually used to warn motorists of upcoming road work, that showed the words American Jobs Plan  the name of the $2.3 trillion infrastructure initiative that Mr. Biden was forced to pare back significantly in the name of bipartisan consensus.

The Supreme Court keeps in place the moratorium on evictions. A Maricopa County constable signing an eviction notice in Phoenix last year. Credit... John Moore/Getty Images The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to lift a moratorium on evictions that had been imposed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The vote was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Brett M. Kavanaugh in the majority. The court gave no reasons for its ruling, which is typical when it acts on emergency applications. But Justice Kavanaugh issued a brief concurring opinion explaining that he had cast his vote reluctantly and had taken account of the impending expiration of the moratorium. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention exceeded its existing statutory authority by issuing a nationwide eviction moratorium, Justice Kavanaugh wrote. Because the C.D.C. plans to end the moratorium in only a few weeks, on July 31, and because those few weeks will allow for additional and more orderly distribution of the congressionally appropriated rental assistance funds, I vote at this time to deny the application that had been filed by landlords, real estate companies and trade associations. He added that the agency might not extend the moratorium on its own. In my view, Justice Kavanaugh wrote, clear and specific congressional authorization (via new legislation) would be necessary for the C.D.C. to extend the moratorium past July 31. At the beginning of the pandemic, Congress declared a moratorium on evictions, which lapsed last July. The C.D.C. then issued a series of its own moratoriums. In doing so, the challengers told the justices, the C.D.C. shifted the pandemics financial burdens from the nations 30 to 40 million renters to its 10 to 11 million landlords  most of whom, like applicants, are individuals and small businesses  resulting in over $13 billion in unpaid rent per month. The total cost to the nations landlords, they wrote, could approach $200 billion. The moratorium defers but does not cancel the obligation to pay rent; the challengers wrote that this massive wealth transfer would never be fully undone. Many renters, they wrote, will be unable to pay what they owe. In reality, they wrote, the eviction moratorium has become an instrument of economic policy rather than of disease control. In urging the Supreme Court to leave the moratorium in place, the government said that continued vigilance against the spread of the coronavirus was needed and noted that Congress had appropriated tens of billions of dollars to pay for rent arrears.

Ready to take further action: Biden officially notifies Congress of his airstrikes on Iran-allied militias. A funeral in Nineveh Province, in northwestern Iraq, for a paramilitary fighter killed in U.S. airstrikes ordered by President Biden on Sunday. Credit... Zaid Al-Obeidi/Agence France-Presse  Getty Images President Biden officially notified Congress on Tuesday about his justification for recent American airstrikes against Iranian-backed militias in Syria and Iraq, declaring that he acted to defend the safety of our personnel and to deter the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies from further attacks. The notification, in compliance with the War Powers Act, came as Mr. Biden drew criticism over the strikes from some in his own party  both progressives who generally oppose further military action in the Middle East and some Biden allies who questioned whether he needed a vote of Congress before getting into repeated conflict with the militias. Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut and one of Mr. Bidens most enthusiastic supporters, called the actions against Iran in the region part of a low-intensity war and said that, at some point, Congress approval would be necessary. The strikes occurred early Monday local time against locations in Syria and Iraq that White House officials said were used to launch unmanned aerial vehicles against U.S. troops in Iraq. The White House has rejected the idea that Congress needs to authorize such action, saying Mr. Biden acted as many of his predecessors did, under his constitutional authority as commander in chief. Mr. Bidens formal notification to Congress continued that argument, saying that he acted consistently with my responsibility to protect United States citizens both at home and abroad and in furtherance of United States national security and foreign policy interests. The notification concluded with a warning that the United States stood ready to take further action, as necessary and appropriate, to address further threats or attacks. That language could confirm suspicions by many in Congress that this was not a single attack on a terror group, but part of a continuing, low-level conflict. The formal notification itself was no surprise, but Mr. Biden submitted it quickly, an acknowledgment of the sensitivity of the issue for Democrats. The airstrikes underscored how many conflicting currents Mr. Biden faces as he attempts to fashion a coherent Iran policy. Those include pressures from Congress, from Israel and from Arab allies who worry about his determination to get back into the Iran nuclear accord, and now from a new leader in Tehran, Ebrahim Raisi, the incoming hard-liner who was elected president two weeks ago. He will be inaugurated in August. Since Mr. Bidens inauguration, there have been six meetings toward completing work on restoring the nuclear deal, which President Donald J. Trump exited three years ago. No additional meeting has been scheduled since Mr. Raisi won the election as the preferred candidate of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Nor has Iran indicated whether it will renew an agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations nuclear inspection group, to maintain cameras and other sensors that monitor the status of Irans nuclear material. Those negotiations remain underway. The last agreement expired on Thursday.

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A member of a privacy watchdog board says its secret report on an N.S.A. surveillance system fell short. Comments from Travis LeBlanc, a Democratic appointee to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, that were critical of a classified report emerged on Tuesday. Credit... Zach Gibson/Getty Images A member of a civil liberties watchdog board that investigates the nations security programs has sharply criticized a major  but still secret  report by his organization about a National Security Agency surveillance-related system that first came to public light as part of the leaks by the former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden. The system, XKeyscore, enables N.S.A. analysts to query huge repositories of intercepted internet communications and metadata in search of information. The official critical of the XKeyscore report is Travis LeBlanc, a Democratic appointee to the five-member agency that produced it, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. His critique emerged on Tuesday, in a newly declassified, 10-page statement that opened a window into infighting at the board and offered a few hints about the classified study, which was completed in December after more than six years of work. I am unable to support the XKeyscore system, Mr. LeBlanc wrote. I harbor serious reservations about the deficiencies in our oversight of the XKeyscore program as well as significant concerns about the programs operations. Mr. LeBlanc portrayed the boards approval of its report as rushed and pointed to gaps, including failure to scrutinize the use of artificial intelligence in connection with the system and not conducting an adequate assessment of oversight mechanisms. The report, Mr. LeBlanc wrote, unfortunately reads more like a book report of the XKeyscore program than an independent oversight analysis grappling with key concerns in this evolving technological and legal landscape. But other current and former officials pushed back on Mr. LeBlancs complaints and defended the oversight effort. Adam Klein, a Republican who was the boards chairman until he stepped down on June 20, said, This is a detailed, comprehensive report and recommendations on a very complex program, and added, Its highly factual, substantive and apolitical  the type of oversight the board was created to perform. Because the underlying report remains classified, it is difficult to assess the rival points of view.

The Bidens will visit the site of the Florida building collapse on Thursday. Video transcript Back bars 0:00 / 1:29 - 0:00 transcript Nobodys Giving Up Hope Here: Surfside Officials Provide Update City officials provided an update on the Surfside Condo collapse and the ongoing effort to locate the victims. In their update, officials discussed current difficulties in their rescue effort. Since our last briefing, no new fatalities have been confirmed, but we have been able to notify each of the 11 families who have lost their loved ones. And today, we were also very grateful to learn that our president, Joe Biden, will be visiting Surfside on Thursday. Hes going to spend time with the families who are affected and with our first responders. Weve had his support since he called me Day 1 in the morning. The west side of the pile, had to be cordoned off a little bit because it was becoming excessively dangerous to work there. What has happened is, I understand, the work still continues from the sides and underneath, but that area was cordoned off until they can sort of get their arms around the debris thats falling down. The second thing is theyve made very good progress on the east end. And its apparent that theyve got the pile down to the point where you could see into the parking lot. So there is great progress. Lastly, with respect to the site, there is an overwhelming amount, there are an overwhelming amount of workers, rescue workers on the site working, and with cranes and taking off debris. And the work continues. Nobodys giving up hope here. Nobodys stopping. The work goes on, full force. Were dedicated to get everyone out of that pile of rubble and reunite them with their families. City officials provided an update on the Surfside Condo collapse and the ongoing effort to locate the victims. In their update, officials discussed current difficulties in their rescue effort. Credit Credit... Lynne Sladky/Associated Press President Biden and Jill Biden, the first lady, will travel to Florida on Thursday to tour the site of collapsed Champlain Towers South condo complex and comfort the families of the 149 people listed as missing as the excruciating rescue and recovery effort drags on. The Bidens will thank search and rescue teams, and everyone who has been working tirelessly around the clock, and meet with the families who have been forced to endure this terrible tragedy, waiting in anguish and heartbreak for word of their loved ones to offer them comfort, Jen Psaki, Mr. Bidens press secretary, told reporters en route with the president to Wisconsin on Tuesday. Ms. Psaki said the White House had planned the Florida trip in close coordination with officials in the Miami-Dade County area to ensure the trip would not divert any critical local resources from the recovery operation and to avoid any negative operational impact. The families of the missing have endured a painstaking recovery process that has, so far, resulted in the retrieval of 12 bodies from tons of pulverized, unstable rubble. Earlier, the White House press office later issued a one-line statement confirming the trip a week after the 13-story building suddenly gave way under its sleeping residents in the middle of the night. On Monday, Ms. Psaki said the president believed there should be an investigation into the collapse. Mr. Biden, speaking briefly with reporters before boarding Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House en route to a trip to Wisconsin, also said that plans were in the works for the first lady to visit the Summer Olympics in Tokyo. Mr. Biden spoke with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida on Friday, pledging to provide federal help for the rescue, recovery and investigation of the collapse, which occurred after warnings about the structural integrity of the complex. We provided all the help they need, Mr. Biden told reporters on Friday. We sent the best people from FEMA down there. Were going to stay with them with the disaster declaration we made, provide for everything from housing to, God forbid, whether theres a need for a place for the bodies to be placed and everything in between. Word of Mr. Bidens visit came as new details emerged about the cause of the collapse, and what appears to be a long pattern of missed warning signs about the buildings deteriorating condition. Less than three months before the collapse, the president of the condominium association warned in a letter that the damage in the building had gotten significantly worse since it was highlighted in a 2018 inspection. The letter was written to residents by Jean Wodnicki, president of the associations board of directors, explaining why a list of extensive construction projects were worth a $15 million special assessment that residents were being asked to pay.

New Jersey cannot block a natural gas pipeline, the Supreme Court rules. The Supreme Court in Washington this month. Credit... Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times The Supreme Court on Tuesday cleared the way for a pipeline to transport natural gas from Pennsylvania to New Jersey, ruling that PennEast Pipeline Company, the projects developer, may exercise the federal governments power of eminent domain to condemn land owned by New Jersey. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority in the 5-to-4 decision, said the government was entitled to delegate its power of eminent domain to private parties even where state property is at issue. We are asked to decide whether the federal government can constitutionally confer on pipeline companies the authority to condemn necessary rights of way in which a state has an interest, Chief Justice Roberts wrote. We hold that it can. Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Sonia Sotomayor and Brett M. Kavanaugh joined the chief justices majority opinion. Under the Natural Gas Act, a federal law, the federal government can authorize private companies to use its eminent-domain power in at least some circumstances. PennEast obtained federal approval for its proposed 116-mile pipeline, to run from Luzerne County in Pennsylvania to Mercer County in New Jersey, and federal officials gave it the power to condemn property along the route. New Jersey, which owns some of the parcels the company sought to condemn, objected, saying that the doctrine of sovereign immunity barred the companys efforts. Rejecting that argument, Chief Justice Roberts wrote that there is a long history of eminent domain actions against state property rooted in federal power. Over the course of the nations history, the federal government and its delegatees have exercised the eminent domain power to give effect to that vision, connecting our country through turnpikes, bridges and railroads  and more recently pipelines, telecommunications infrastructure and electric transmission facilities, he wrote. And we have repeatedly upheld these exercises of the federal eminent domain power  whether by the government or a private corporation, whether through an upfront taking or a direct condemnation proceeding, and whether against private property or state-owned land. In dissent, Justice Amy Coney Barrett responded that Congress was powerless to allow private suits against states under its constitutional authority to regulate interstate commerce. Congress cannot enable a private party like PennEast to institute a condemnation action against a nonconsenting state like New Jersey, she wrote. Justices Clarence Thomas, Elena Kagan and Neil M. Gorsuch joined Justice Barretts dissent in the case, PennEast Pipeline Company v. New Jersey, No. 19-1039. (An earlier version omitted Justice Kagan and incorrectly included Justice Alito as among the dissenters.) Justice Barrett said the federal government has other ways to achieve its goals. In fact, she wrote, there is an obvious option that the court barely acknowledges: The United States can take state land itself. The eminent domain power belongs to the United States, not to PennEast, she wrote, and the United States is free to take New Jerseys property.

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The No. 3 House Democrat, James Clyburn, endorses the opponent of a Bernie Sanders ally in Cleveland. Nina Turner, who is running for a House seat in Ohio, was a prominent surrogate for Senator Bernie Sanders in 2016 and a national co-chairwoman for his campaign in 2020. Credit... Ruth Fremson/The New York Times Early last year, as Bernie Sanders was surging through the first Democratic presidential primary races, Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, a kingmaker in his state, stepped in to endorse Joseph R. Biden Jr. before the primary there, helping vault the former vice president to the nomination. On Tuesday, Mr. Clyburn, the No. 3 House Democrat, took aim at one of Mr. Sanderss most outspoken acolytes, Nina Turner, a hero to the left who is surging in her campaign in Ohio to claim the Cleveland-based congressional seat vacated by the housing secretary, Marcia L. Fudge. In a rare intervention into a party primary, Mr. Clyburn, a veteran lawmaker and the highest-ranking Black member of Congress, endorsed Shontel Brown, Ms. Turners leading opponent. The special election in Cleveland is highlighting the vast generational divide and ideological gulf that the Democratic Party faces as the entire House leadership heads toward the sunset. Mr. Clyburn, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the House majority leader, Representative Steny H. Hoyer, are all octogenarians, and their caucus is increasingly youthful, diverse and restive. All three have promised to vacate their positions after this Congress, paving the way for an ideological battle next year over who will succeed them. Ms. Brown has the backing of the Democratic establishment, including not only Mr. Clyburn but also Hillary Clinton; Richard Cordray, a former Ohio attorney general; Representative Joyce Beatty of Ohio, the chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus; and moderate Democrats like Representatives Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey and David Trone of Maryland. Ms. Turner, who has the endorsements of much of the House Progressive Caucus, including the so-called squad  Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna S. Pressley, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib  would be a strong new voice for the congressional left. And the left is increasingly focused on Black and Hispanic districts that they see as safe redoubts for ideological candidates. You cant take any one race and paint it as some larger aggregate for the whole country, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, said on Tuesday. But I do think that Nina is a beloved leader in the progressive movement, and the degree of excitement that shes generated and grass-roots energy and organizing in her direction is a real testament to the asset that the base of our party can provide.

Jill Biden will be on the cover of Vogue. Jill Biden, the first lady, at Tampa International Airport in Tampa, Fla., last week. Credit... T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times The White House appears to be back in Vogues good graces. Jill Biden, the first lady, will appear on the cover of the August issue of the magazine, continuing a tradition that Anna Wintour, the magazines editor, had paused during the Trump presidency. In interviews with the writer Jonathan Van Meter, Dr. Biden, who is the first in her role to keep her day job, said the mood of the country had changed with President Bidens election. During the campaign, I felt so much anxiety from people, Dr. Biden said. When I travel around the country now, I feel as though people can breathe again. I think thats part of the reason Joe was elected. As first lady, Dr. Biden keeps a busy travel schedule that currently outpaces her husbands, and she is viewed as something of a secret weapon by administration officials, who send her to parts of the country that are not typically Democratic territory. She has traveled to Alabama, West Virginia, Mississippi and Tennessee to promote pandemic relief legislation and encourage young people to receive the coronavirus vaccine. Unlike her recent predecessors, who largely kept their appearances to events that would be in service of the East Wing, Dr. Bidens staff has told the presidents advisers to use her in whatever way might be helpful to further the presidents agenda. Her nickname on the campaign trail was The Closer, said Anita Dunn, a senior adviser to the president who helps plans much of the first ladys domestic travel. Image Credit... Annie Leibovitz for Vogue In a separate interview for the Vogue piece, Mr. Biden said that Dr. Biden came into the White House understanding how to use the platform after spending eight years as second lady. But it was clear to me that she knew exactly what she would do if she were first lady, Mr. Biden said. The president said that he missed romantic time with Dr. Biden now that the two are in the White House. He said that when one of them has some free time, the other person tends to be busy with their official duties. I miss her. Im really proud of her, Mr. Biden told the magazine. But its not like we can just go off like we used to. When we were living in Delaware and married, once a month wed just go up to a local bed-and-breakfast by ourselves, to make sure we had a romantic time to just get away and hang out with each other. For almost a century, the Vogue treatment has been a perk of the first ladyship. Michelle Obama was featured on the cover three times. Hillary Clinton was featured once as first lady and another time as a Democratic presidential candidate. Lou Henry Hoover, Eleanor Roosevelt, Mamie Eisenhower, Jacqueline Kennedy, Lady Bird Johnson, Pat Nixon, Betty Ford, Rosalynn Carter, Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush and Laura Bush have all graced the magazines pages. Which is why the omission of Melania Trump was so noteworthy. Mrs. Trump, who had been featured on the cover as part of a feature on her marriage to Donald J. Trump, was informally barred from the magazine by Ms. Wintour, who, when asked about featuring Mrs. Trump in the magazine, said in 2019 I dont think its a moment not to take a stand. Mrs. Trump, who often hit back at critics through her official spokeswoman, quickly responded: To be on the cover of Vogue doesnt define Mrs. Trump. Shes been there, done that long before she was first lady. Her role as first lady of the United States and all that she does is much more important than some superficial photo shoot and cover.

News Analysis Biden faces a difficult balancing act as he tries to revive the Iran nuclear deal. Smoke billowing from a facility used by Iran-backed groups following U.S. air strikes on the Syrian-Iraqi border on Monday. Credit... Syria TV, via Agence France-Presse  Getty Images President Bidens decision to strike Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria early on Monday illustrated the delicate balancing act of his approach to Tehran: He must demonstrate that he is willing to use force to defend American interests, while keeping open a fragile diplomatic line of communication as the two countries try to resuscitate the 2015 deal limiting Irans nuclear program. In public, administration officials insisted that the two issues are separate. Mr. Biden, they said on Monday, acted under his constitutional authority to defend American troops by carrying out airstrikes on sites used to launch drone attacks on American forces in Iraq. They said that should not interfere with the final push to bring both countries back into compliance with the nuclear accord. In fact, the issues are deeply intertwined. To the Iranians, the march toward the capacity to build a nuclear weapon has been in part an effort to demonstrate that Tehran is a force to be reckoned with in the Middle East and beyond. Now, the countrys power has been augmented by a new arsenal of highly accurate drones, longer-range missiles and increasingly sophisticated cyberweapons, some of which involve technologies that seemed beyond Tehrans skills when the nuclear deal was negotiated in 2015. Part of Mr. Bidens goal in trying to revive the nuclear deal is to use it as a first step toward pressing Iran into addressing other issues, including its support for terrorist groups in the region and its expanded arsenal. On that front, the strikes ordered Sunday and carried out early Monday by U.S. Air Force fighter-bombers are not expected to be any more than a temporary setback to Iran. Even if the administration succeeds in putting the nuclear deal back together, Mr. Biden will still face the challenge of finding a way to further rein in the Iranians  a step the countrys new president-elect, Ebrahim Raisi, said the day after his election that he would never agree to.

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Under the Natural Gas Act, a federal law, the federal government can authorize private companies to use its eminent domain power in at least some circumstances. PennEast obtained federal approval for its proposed 116-mile pipeline, to run from Luzerne County in Pennsylvania to Mercer County in New Jersey, and federal officials gave it the power to condemn property along the route.

New Jersey, which has ownership interest in many of the parcels of land the company sought to condemn, objected, saying that the doctrine of sovereign immunity, which generally forbids private parties from suing states in federal court, banned the companys efforts.

A unanimous three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, agreed with New Jerseys position, ruling that the federal law did not authorize private parties to take state property.

There is, Judge Kent A. Jordan wrote for the panel, deep doubt that the United States can delegate its exemption from state sovereign immunity to private parties. But he said there was no need to resolve the question, as the Natural Gas Act had not delegated such a power to private companies.

If Congress had intended to delegate the federal governments exemption from sovereign immunity, he wrote, it would certainly have spoken much more clearly.
Rapid antigen tests are the least expensive (about $12 per test) and are available in retail stores and online. (They typically arent covered by insurance.) The BinaxNOW test, made by Abbott, contains two rapid antigen tests per box and costs around $24. To take the test, just swirl the swab in both nostrils and place in a special card. After 15 minutes, the result reads much like a pregnancy test: two pink lines indicate youre positive for Covid-19. The QuickVue At-Home test, from Quidel, is similarly priced. After swabbing your nose, dip the swab in a solution in a test tube, and then in a test strip. Youll get results in about 10 minutes.

The rapid antigen tests are less reliable for finding Covid-19 in people with low viral loads compared to the gold standard P.C.R. tests youd get from a health care provider. One study found that a rapid home antigen test had a 64 percent chance of correctly spotting the virus in people with symptoms who had tested positive on a P.C.R. test. (The test caught only about 36 percent of those who had the virus but didnt have symptoms.)

But dont be dissuaded by those numbers. The affordable rapid antigen tests provide a reliable quick check to identify people with infectious levels of virus. For example, lets say you want to invite friends into your home who are unvaccinated or who have an unvaccinated child. Before hosting an indoor gathering, you can reduce the risk of asymptomatic spread and infection by 90 percent or more if all guests use a rapid antigen test within an hour before the event, said Dr. Mina.

Rapid testing can also be used as an added layer of protection before spending time with people who are at high risk of complications from Covid-19, such as those with immune problems or undergoing cancer treatments. Neeraj Sood, a professor and vice dean for research at the University of Southern California and director of the COVID Initiative at the U.S.C. Schaeffer Center, said that even though hes vaccinated, he would use rapid testing to take extra precautions around such people.

If I was going to hang out in an enclosed space with a friend whos getting chemotherapy and hasnt gotten the vaccine, then I would do two tests, Dr. Sood said. He would take one rapid antigen test three or four days before visiting the friend, and another test the same day of the visit. If both are negative, Im very confident I dont have Covid, and Im not going to transmit it to my friend, he said.

Rapid testing could also be used to make a small family indoor gathering or a childs birthday party that included a mix of vaccinated and unvaccinated people safer. If you put that extra layer in of home testing, I think youre all making each other more safe, said Irene Peterson, a professor of epidemiology and health informatics at University College London. Or you could decide not to have the party.

If you want more certainty than a rapid antigen test can provide, you can consider a more costly rapid home molecular test. These tests work by detecting the viruss actual genetic material (RNA) and amplifying it to determine if youre infected. A home rapid molecular test works nearly as well as the P.C.R. tests given at testing centers that are processed by a laboratory, but they are also more expensive than the home antigen tests. Lucira makes a highly-accurate molecular test for $55 that uses nasal swabs and a battery-powered processing unit that provides results within 30 minutes.
International aid agencies on Tuesday continued to raise concern at the lack of humanitarian access for groups trying to deliver food and supplies to tens of thousands of people already suffering from famine in Ethiopias Tigray region.

Secretary General Antonio Guterres of the United Nations said he had spoken with Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia on Monday and was hopeful that an effective cessation of hostilities will take place in Tigray.

It is essential that civilians are protected, humanitarian aid reaches the people in need and a political solution is found, he said on Twitter.

In early June, the U.N. said that at least 350,000 people in the conflict-ravaged region had entered a state of famine. The U.S. Agency for International Development this week put its estimate for those facing famine conditions at 900,000.
Since the war in Tigray began in November, almost two million people have been displaced from their homes, moving to towns elsewhere in Ethiopia and across the border into Sudan.

Since Nov. 7, more than 63,000 Ethiopians have sought refuge in eastern Sudan, according to the United Nations refugee agency. Many arrived in border towns like Hamdayet carrying few belongings and were eventually moved to refugee camps dotted across the eastern Sudanese states of Gedaref and Kassala.

Most fleeing across the border were men, many of whom said they feared that government-allied militias and security forces would kill them on the spot, according to interviews with several refugees who had arrived in Sudan. And children made up more than a third of the asylum seekers.

In the eight months since the war began, the refugee camps in Sudan have become evermore permanent, with round tukul huts made of mud and grass, makeshift schools, and tea and coffee shops sprouting up. Yet even as they are safe from the violence at home, Ethiopian refugees in Sudan are contending with a change in weather conditions. After months of enduring scorching heat, the long rains in Sudan, which last from May to October, have caused floods and damaged shelters and latrines, according to the United Nations.
JOHANNESBURG  South Africas highest court on Tuesday ordered the imprisonment of Jacob Zuma, the countrys former president, for 15 months on contempt charges, after he defied an order to appear before a corruption inquiry examining the breathtaking financial scandals that tainted his tenure as the countrys leader from 2009 to 2018.

The move to detain Mr. Zuma, a comrade of Nelson Mandela and one of the dominant figures in the governing African National Congress party since apartheid ended in 1994, was a notable development in the legacy of corruption that shadowed his years in power.

Many across the country hailed the ruling as a victory for this young democracy  a message that no one, not even a former head of state, is above the law. It could even have implications across the continent, where courts often take a back seat to powerful heads of state, said William Gumede, who leads the Democracy Works Foundation, a nonprofit focused on developing democracy in Africa.

Its going to inspire people across the continent  civil society, media, opposition parties  to actually take on former presidents and sitting presidents, he said.
DAKAR, Senegal  For years he ran an intense and bombastic campaign against the Nigerian government from his hide-out somewhere in exile.

But on Tuesday afternoon, Nigerias most-wanted fugitive appeared in court in the capital, Abuja, hooded, flanked by security agents and facing charges that included treason.

Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra, a secessionist group in the West African countrys southeast, had not been seen in Nigeria since he was released on bail in April 2017 and then disappeared.

But in his absence, Mr. Kanu loomed large.

He attracted many more supporters to his fight to restore the independent state of Biafra, and his popularity and profile have only grown  partly as a result of the Nigerian government treating him as a serious threat, analysts said.
HONG KONG  With each passing day, the boundary between Hong Kong and the rest of China fades faster.

The Chinese Communist Party is remaking this city, permeating its once vibrant, irreverent character with ever more overt signs of its authoritarian will. The very texture of daily life is under assault as Beijing molds Hong Kong into something more familiar, more docile.

Residents now swarm police hotlines with reports about disloyal neighbors or colleagues. Teachers have been told to imbue students with patriotic fervor through 48-volume book sets called My Home Is in China. Public libraries have removed dozens of books from circulation, including one about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela.
In this episode of NYU Brainiacs, you'll learn about the "voice cultivation process" and how coworkers can help each other speak up, be heard, and give their ideas a chance to thrive. You'll also discover how NYU Law students are defending the advocates who fight for immigrants' rights and bringing their stories to life through an interactive map. And did you know that hackers can gain access to your car's computer?! Well, rest assured because Tandon researchers are now fighting these cybercriminals with new open source software.


The famously-bustling Times Square has been desolate and empty for 15 long monthsbut Broadway stages are finally turning the lights back on. The COVID-19 pandemic shuttered theatre doors in March 2020 and like many of the citys cultural and artistic industries, New Yorks theatres saw significant losses.

Actors and stagehands were suddenly without a job and many shows announced permanent closures. Theatremakers reimagined their art through digital platforms, often producing compelling new experiences for audiences online, yet many struggled without in-person connection and collaboration. And while the pandemic was upending life as we knew it, widespread protests over police killings of Black people were forcing a collective reckoning with racial inequality, prompting the We See You White American Theater movement to demand long overdue change.



Now that summer 2021 is almost here, New Yorkers and tourists alike can look forward to returning to the theatre, thanks to dwindling infection rates and a largely successful U.S. vaccine rollout. The first show back, Pass Over by Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu, is scheduled to reopen August 4 and long-running hits like Hamilton, Lion King, and Wicked are selling tickets for September performances.



But reopening is complex, and there are still a lot of details to work out.



When we get back into the theatre, things will look and feel different. Theatre is very complicated: We have 14 unions, we have the front of housethe concession stand and ticket distributionwe have the house, which is the patrons, and we have the back of house, which encompasses backstage and the dressing rooms, said Jack Caravanos, a clinical professor at NYU School of Global Public Health who has served as a special advisor to the Broadway League, the national trade association for the Broadway industry.



The requirements are going to vary between the three areas of the theatre, and unions are actively negotiating protocols. Its a moving target thats shifting every few days, he continued.

With public health guidance and cultural expectations evolving rapidly, questions remain: What can theatres do to keep their audience, cast, and crew safe? How might longstanding theatre practices adapt and change after one of the most disruptive events in history? And how can the theatre industry be more inclusive and attract diverse theatregoers moving forward?

Faculty from NYUs School of Global Public Health, Tisch School of the Arts, and Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development gathered as part of a June 2 panel designed to address these topics and more as we approach the date of Broadways reopening. NYU News spoke with Jack Caravanos, Donna Walker-Kuhne, and Laurence Maslon to discuss historical precedent for the shutdown, the biggest public health challenges Broadway faces, and strategies for attracting multicultural audiences to the theatre.
In the 1993 film Jurassic Park, scientists bring dinosaurs back from extinction using DNA extracted from mosquitoes that were preserved in amber for millions of years. While dinosaur DNA remains elusive in real life, the idea of resurrecting extinct species is gaining traction in plant genome research.

Researchers from NYU Abu Dhabis Center for Genomics and Systems Biology have successfully sequenced the genome of previously extinct date palm varieties that lived more than 2,000 years ago using a technique called resurrection genomics. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, marks the first time researchers have sequenced the genomes of plants from ancient germinated seeds.

Rather than dinosaur DNA, the researchers used date palm seeds that were recovered from archaeological sites in modern-day Israel and radiocarbon-dated from the 4th century BCE to the 2nd century CE. The seeds were germinated to yield viable, new plants. The researchers conducted whole genome sequencing of these germinated ancient samples and used these data to examine the genetics of these previously extinct Judean date palms.

By examining the genome of a species (Phoenix dactylifera L.) that thrived millennia ago, NYU Biology Professor Michael D. Purugganan and his NYU Abu Dhabi colleagues, along with research partners in Israel and France, were able to see how these plants evolved over a period of time. In this case, they observed that between the 4th century BCE and 2nd century CE, date palms in the eastern Mediterranean started to show increasing levels of genes from another species, Phoenix theophrasti, which today grows in Crete and some other Greek islands, as well as southwestern Turkey, as a result of hybridization between species. They conclude that the increasing level of genes from P. theophrasti over this period shows the increasing influence of the Roman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean.

Resurrection genomics offers an alternative to other approaches to sequencing ancient DNA and is particularly useful for ancient and extinct plant species, the researchers note. Ancient plant DNA can be tricky to study, as it easily degrades without the protection of material like bone, and only small quantities are usually foundbut regrowing the whole plant offers new possibilities.

We are fortunate that date palm seeds can live a long timein this case, more than 2,000 yearsand germinate with minimal DNA damage, in the dry environment of the region, said Purugganan, who is also affiliated with NYU Abu Dhabi and the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW). This resurrection genomics approach is a remarkably effective way to study the genetics and evolution of past and possibly extinct species like Judean date palms. By reviving biological material such as germinating ancient seeds from archaeological and paleontological sites, or historical collections, we can not only study the genomes of lost populations but also, in some instances, rediscover genes that may have gone extinct in modern varieties.

So, it is likely that scientists will use resurrection genomics to bring dinosaurs back from extinction?

In principle, resurrection genomics can be used to revive extinct species or populations. There is actually an interest in this area. However, dinosaurs are probably not possiblebut certainly plants, if we have seeds, or even bacteria or other microbes are possible, said Purugganan.
A Buddhist monk in Shanghai, China, has dedicated more than half of his life to caring for stray dogs, rescuing and taking care of tens of thousands of them since 1994.

53-year-old Zhixiang is the head monk of the Baoen Temple in Shanghai, but nowadays his disciples take care of most of the day-to-day business, as he spends all his time taking care of the rescued animals. There are currently around 8,000 dogs, not to mention hundreds of cats, as well as chickens, geese and peacocks in Zhixiangs care, but hes been rescuing abandoned and stray animals since 1994, so he is used to it. Over the years, he has learned to administer medicine and give the animals shots, as taking them all to a vet would be too costly, and only recently started taking donations from other animal lovers, as a ways to make ends meet.

Zhixiangs mission as a rescuer of stray animals began in 1994. He was riding in a car on the highway when he witnessed a cat being hit by another vehicle. It wasnt dead, but it was left severely injured, struggling to crawl to the side of the road with only two paws. Its an image that the Buddhist monk hates to remember and the one that pushed him to start rescuing strays.

Photo credit: Evan Clark/Unsplash

In the beginning it was just cats; He would carry paper bags with him to pick up and bury the bodies of strays killed on the street, and take those that could be saved to the vet. Eventually, he just started driving around with no other purpose than to find animals in need of help. After moving to Baoen Temple, in 2006, it became apparent that dogs were even more of a problem than cats, so he started dedicating more time to them.

Most of the dogs in Zhixiangs care come from the public shelter in Fengxian, where most of the dogs would be put down or starve to death if not for his intervention. He takes them to the temple for a few days to keep them under observation and give them any required medication, before sending the healthy ones to a rented shelter in Pudong, where most of the 8,000 dogs are kept.

A few hundred of the dogs in his care will likely be resettled in the US or European countries, but for most of them Zhixiang is the last hope to a decent life. Occasionally, people will come and ask to adopt a dog as a pet or for guarding their property, but he wont simply give them just anyone, especially if the person has a bad reputation as a dog owner.

Until 2017, Zhixiang never accepted any monetary donations from anyone, telling them to donate food, because that was all the animals needed. But as the number of stray dogs brought in grew, he understood that he couldnt keep doing this all by himself, not without spending the temples money, which was out of the question.

I didnt accept a donation until January 15, 2017. Until then, when people wanted to make a donation, I said no, the animals dont need money, they just need food to eat  you can help by donating supplies, Zhixiang told Smart Shanghai. I was keeping the animals in Baoen Temple. At one point, I had dogs, cats, chickens, ducks, geese and a peacock. But the temple was too small.

So in 2019, I rented this shelter in Dagang, Pudong, where they would let me keep animals. Its 9,000 square meters; rent is about 1,570,000RMB a month. I have seven people working there. We go through one ton of dog food every day. There are about 5,000 dogs and it costs three RMB to feed a dog for a day. You do the math, you figure out how much it costs, he added.

China has a serious stray dog problem. In 2019, there were around 50 million stray dogs in China, with that number roughly doubling every year. Zhixiang thinks that its not the Governments or the animals fault, but that of so-called animal lovers who think simply feeding stray animals without first neutering them is a kind thing to do. Obviously, irresponsible pet owners who simply abandon them are to blame as well.

When you feed stray cats in your neighborhood but dont take them for neutering first, then the number of the cats will soon exceed what the neighborhood can bear, the monk told Shine Magazine. Then other people complain and want the cats sent away for euthanasia. You do more bad than good in feeding stray cats. The road to hell is always paved with good intentions.

Despite earning the admiration of millions in China and abroad for dedicating nearly three decades of his life to rescuing and caring for stray animals, Zhixiang claims that there are people who either dont understand why he does it, or even criticize him for doing so.

Sometimes people who come to worship at the temple dont understand why I do this. Maybe they think that monks should sit in a temple all day chanting scriptures. But Buddha tells us to save lives and that all lives are equal, he said, adding that some even tell him to stop rescuing animals because they have karma.

But how can I stop? Letting them be does not mean watching them die without lifting a finger. I try my best. It is then their fate if they survive or not. Thats what letting them be means to me, the monk added.

Despite the hardships he faces every day, Zhixiang plans to continue his work with stray animals at least until he retires, as 65. Until then, he hopes to find someone to continue his project and ensure that the animals are well taken care of.

Zhixiangs dedication reminded us of other kindhearted animal lovers weve featured on OC over the years, like Mohammad Alaa Jaleel (The Cat Man of Aleppo), Serbias Sasha Pesic, or Indias very own Dog Father, Rakesh Shukla, just to name a few.
The Syrian city of Aleppo is probably the most dangerous place to be living in right now, but while many of its residents have left their homes to escape the war, one man has remained behind to care for the hundreds of abandoned and stray cats.

Known as the cat man of Aleppo, Mohammad Alaa Jaleel has been taking care to stray felines ever since people planning to leave the city started leaving their pets in his care, knowing he loved cats. As the fighting and bombing intensified, more and more frightened animals started approaching him for food and protection, and he was always more than happy to provide them with both. Mohammed says he started taking care of about 20 to 30 cats, but the number of feline refugees at his walled sanctuary has now swollen to over one hundred.

Photo: Nobel Peace Prize to Alaa/Facebook

Some people just left them with me knowing that I love cats, Jaleel recently told the BBC. I was surprised. There were about twenty to thirty cats. About a year later, there were more than a hundred. The Syrian cat lover welcomes the strays in his sanctuary, feeding them bowls of rice, and says that he is prepared to offer care and attention to any cat that needs them.

Photo: Nobel Peace Prize to Alaa/Facebook

In the touching BBC segment, Mohammand Alaa Jaleel recalled the heartbreaking moment when a young girl came to leave her cat with him before moving to Turkey with her family. One time a little girl brought me a cat. Her parents wanted to go abroad. So they came here  they knew there was a cat sanctuary here. The girl had brought the cat up since she was a kitten. She cried as she handed her over to me and they left the country, he said. Ive been taking photos of the cat and sending them to her in Turkey. She begs me, Send me photos of her. I miss her. Please promise to return my cat back to me when we come back.'

Photo: Nobel Peace Prize to Alaa/Facebook

The cat man said that ever since his human friends left Aleppo to escape the war, the cats have become his only friends in the city, and he would never dream of leaving them behind. Someone who has mercy in their heart for people has mercy for every living thing, he says. I said Ill stay with them no matter what happens.

And as if his commitment to protecting the abandoned cats of Aleppo wasnt heartwarming enough, you should know that Mohammand Alaa Jaleel is also actively involved in human rescue operations throughout the besieged city. Photos posted on the Facebook page Nobel Peace Price to Alaa show him rescuing children from collapsed bombed buildings, carrying defenseless civilians away from danger, and even feeding the needy and the sick. The man seems to be a real-life saint.

Photo: Nobel Peace Prize to Alaa/Facebook

Mohammands love for animals, and his willingness to put himself in danger for the benefit of these innocent souls, reminds me of Naoto Matsumura, also known as The Last Man in Fukushima, who returned to his home soon after the devastating tsunami of 2011 to care for the abandoned animals in the radioactive zone.

Photo: Nobel Peace Prize to Alaa/Facebook

Aleppo has been under constant siege ever since the Syrian civil war began in 2012.
45-year-old Rakesh Shukla is a talented software engineer and CEO of a successful tech company, but among Indias animal lovers he is known as The Dog Father, an exceptional man who founded the countrys most advanced dog rescue center and who personally takes care of 735 abandoned pooches that nobody else wants.

10 years ago, Rakesh and his wife founded The Writers Block, a technical communication outsourcing company which today works with some of the biggest names in the tech industry  Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, etc.. The Bangalore-based company quickly became successful, and over the next few years the software engineer got to travel the world, buy expensive cars and lead the fancy lifestyle he always thought he wanted. But he still didnt feel happy and fulfilled. It wasnt until 2009, when Kavya, a beautiful Golden Retriever, came into his life that he truly felt that his life had meaning.

Photo: Rakesh Shukla/Facebook

When we got home, she went and hid in a corner. I got down to her level on the floor and I was calling out to her. She was looking at me, she was scared, but I could see she wanted to trust me, Rakesh recalls about that fateful day. And thats when the moment happened  it was a physical feeling, my hair was tingling, I could feel a warm glow. And Ive never needed to ask myself that question  why am I here?  again after that.

Something magical happened when Rakesh Shukla met Kavya. Three months later, he got a second dog, this time a stray called Lucky. He found her on the streets, wet and miserable, so he just brought her home. Over the next few weeks, whenever, Rakesh saw a stray or an abandoned dog, he just brought it home. The growing number of canines soon became too much for his wife to bear, so he moved most of them to his workplace, turning the top floor of his office building into a dog shelter.

Photo: Rakesh Shukla/Facebook

In 2011, following a major human-stray incident (the massive culling of stray dogs), he founded the Voice of Stray Dogs, a modern dog rescue organization working to support the strays of Bangalore. Today, it is the worlds largest citywide dog rescue. VoSD rescue is essentially my private infrastructure that I opened to the city to save its dogs. Dogs that are my love. To do so I created the most automated and tightly managed rescue in the world, Rakesh wrote in a lengthy Facebook post, last year. My vehicles & people are GPS tracked. Each dog has a reference and exhaustive database entries and more. You get SMS, emails, online access. There is no rescue app like the VoSD Rescue App in the world. There is no enterprise CRM like the VoSD CRM in the world. There is no individualised tracking like VoSD provides in the world.

At the same time, he kept adopting stray and abandoned dogs, and by 2012 he realized he needed to set up a proper shelter for them. That year, Mr Shukla bought land in the neighboring Doddballapur town and set up a canine haven for dogs. Most of the residents are old or sick, while the rest are simply unwanted. Last time he counted them, Rakesh Shukla had 735 dogs in his care.

Photo: Rakesh Shukla/Facebook

Im the last stop for these dogs. They are no longer cute and cuddly. Many are sick and no longer wanted, Rakesh told the BBC. But thats all the more reason to make their life as happy and comfortable as possible. To that end, the Dog Father spares no expense. His shelter employs a staff of about 10 people, including trained veterinary assistants, to feed and care for the animals. They are fed 200kg of chicken and 200kg of rice every day, and many of them receive constant medical treatments. The daily cost of running this unique haven runs between $650 and $750 a day, of which he personally provides 95%.

In his 2015 message to the city of Bangalore, Rakesh Shukla estimated that in the previous three years he had spent over $1 million of his own money to fund the Voice of Stray Dogs rescue. He had managed to rescue over 5,000 stray dogs in Bangalore, not to mention taking care of the hundreds that lived at his shelter permanently. But following a string of problems faced by his organization while providing the city a free service, he decided to change his approach and focus more on the hundreds of dogs in his personal care. While VoSD still operates in Bangalore, its not a free lunch anymore, so people who need a dog rescued have to pay a 2,500 rupee ($37) fee.

Earlier, we entertained all calls, where many turned out to be fake. After a spate of bad experiences, we have decided that whoever wants to have a dog rescued has to register online and pay a nominal amount of Rs 2,500 per dog,  Rakesh told The Economic Times. This way , we will know that they are serious about what they want to do.

Rakesh Shukla is viewed by many as a hero, and a human champion of stray and abandoned dogs in Bangalore, but not everyone has been supportive of his efforts. In the past, he has been sabotaged by so called animal activists who demanded access to his dogs and facilities, has received complaints that he is creating public unrest by keeping so many dogs, and some have even demanded that he shut down his shelter.

He plans to do no such thing though. Ive made a pact with my dogs. We will part only when one of us kicks the bucket, he says.
Gender Equality in Chile

Towards a Better Sharing of Paid and Unpaid Work

The OECD review of Gender Equality in Chile: Towards a Better Sharing of Paid and Unpaid Work is the first of a series addressing Latin American and the Caribbean countries. It compares gender gaps in labour and educational outcomes in Chile with other countries. Particular attention is put on the uneven distribution of unpaid work, and the extra burden this places on women. It investigates how policies and programmes in Chile can make this distribution more equitable. The first part of the report reviews the evidence on gender gaps and on what causes these, including the role played by attitudes. The second part develops a comprehensive framework to address these challenges, presenting a broad range of options to reduce the unpaid work burden falling on women, and to increase womens labour income. The final part discusses the impact of the COVID-19 crisis and considers how the policy priorities of the government will have to change to address these.

Also available in: Spanish
Creative Lives, a charity which supports and encourages people to be creative in their everyday lives, will work in partnership with Offaly County Council on an ambitious three-year project to galvanise the creative and cultural scene in Edenderry.

This comes with the announcement of a Creative Places Award from The Arts Council for the town worth 500,000.

This project aims to build a greater sense of community and belonging, enabling social inclusion and cohesion through shared cultural activities.

In addition to Creative Lives and Offaly County Council Arts Office, the project steering group brings together Edenderry Municipal District, Creative Edenderry, North Offaly Community Development Network, Edenderry Community Cabin and Offaly County Library Service.

The ambition of the partners is to facilitate the emergence of a strong cultural identity for the area and support sustainable networks and opportunities for cultural engagement and participation. It will aim to achieve this through open, collaborative methods engaging with the community at grassroots level.

The work builds on recent initiatives delivered in partnership by Creative Lives and Offaly County Council Arts Office, which resulted in the creation of the Creative Edenderry community group and the Shoes of Edenderry project this past year. The local community is enthusiastic about developing a cultural and creative environment, and this award will help to provide the support, skills and opportunities needed to deliver these and build a brighter future for the people of Edenderry.

We are delighted to be significantly investing in these places in this focused manner. It is very important to us that public investment in the arts reaches and benefits more people in a sustained and meaningful way. We look forward to seeing the ambitious new projects that these inspiring communities create together and we are excited by the prospect of supporting them to celebrate and animate new places," Maureen Kennelly, Director, The Arts Council said.

Damien McGlynn, Ireland Director, Creative Lives, said: The expansion of The Arts Councils Creative Places programme is an incredibly exciting moment for communities across the country. The ambitious project we will be delivering in and around Edenderry with our partners will put people, place and participation at the centre of cultural life. Our organisation has spent 30 years supporting and encouraging people to be creative in their everyday lives and this project presents a unique opportunity to demonstrate the many benefits of this to individuals and communities. Over the next three years we aim to galvanise the incredible creativity that exists among local people of all ages and backgrounds and build sustainable support for ongoing engagement in the area.

Anna-Marie Delaney, Chief Executive, Offaly County Council said: This exciting project comes at a crucial time in the planned development of Edenderry, aligning to the opportunities and aspirations expressed in the recently published Blundell Report and will link with the ambitious plans currently underway in anticipation of the development of much needed new library and art space in the centre of the town. The project will have a huge impact for the people of Edenderry over a number of years, and will enable community cohesion and social identity and pride for the people and place of Edenderry.

Cllr. Liam Quinn, Cathaoirleach of Edenderry Municipal District, added: As Cathaoirleach of Edenderry Municipal District, I am delighted to receive the news of the successful application for Edenderry Creative Places Award. The Members of Edenderry Municipal District, who have approved match funding for this project, are looking forward to its commencement and are encouraging all communities to get involved. The project will be delivered in partnership between Creative Lives, Offaly County Council, Edenderry Municipal District Council and local community groups in the town and will form a very important part of the community and cultural development within the District for the next three years.
The murder of George Floyd, an African-American man, by a law enforcement official on 25 May 2020 in Minnesota, United States, sparked unprecedented worldwide protests that marked a watershed moment in the struggle against police brutality and racism.

Later that year in June, the UN Human Rights Council adopted resolution 43/1 that requested UN Human Rights Chief, Michelle Bachelet, to prepare a comprehensive report on systemic racism, violations of international human rights law against Africans and people of African descent by law enforcement agencies, and accountability and redress, and Government responses to anti-racism peaceful protests.

"Systemic racial discrimination extends beyond any expression of individual hatred," Bachelet told Human Rights Council that June. "It results from bias in multiple systems and institutions of public policy, which separately and together perpetuate and reinforce barriers to equality."

A year later, Bachelet's newly launched Agenda towards transformative change for racial justice and equality offers a way forward for States to "reverse cultures of denial, dismantle systemic racism and accelerate the pace of action." The report calls on States to right historic wrongs, while addressing the current realities and lived experiences of people of African descent.

Intersecting forms of racial discrimination

"Systemic racism operates as a series of racialized norms, and we have been able to measure it everywhere there is data. The way that systemic racism manifests in our societies globally is pervasive and toxic," said Dominique Day, chairperson of the UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent.

Day was among the UN experts whose perspectives and insights were sought to develop Bachelet's report. In addition, the report received more than 100 submissions by States and other stakeholders, as well as 23 online consultations with over 340 academics, human rights institutions, civil society organizations led by people of African descent, and family members of people of African descent killed by law enforcement officials.

Systemic racism is cross-cutting, Day continued. It is found in health care, doctors will credit less disease and pain based on race. It is found in education, where globally children of African descent are diverted away from higher level education and are subjected to lowered expectations, she added.

"So the manifestations of systemic racism are everywhere we look, despite the very strong inclination globally to deny that this high frequency occurrence is actually systematic," Day said.

The report highlighted that people of African descent "face inter-connected, intersectional and compounded racial discrimination, marginalisation and exclusion, shaped by historical legacies and mutually reinforced through cycles of structural inequalities that have lasted for generations, affecting the enjoyment of human rights in every part of life."

The report also found that in countries where they form sizeable communities, people of African descent are more likely to disproportionately suffer the effects of marginalisation and exclusion including: higher rates of poverty, unemployment rates and occupying less skilled positions; living in segregated, disadvantaged and hazardous neighbourhoods; environmental pollution and lack of access to clean water; obstacles in gaining equal access to quality education and health care; and, in some countries, displacement, dispossession, exclusion from and expropriation of their lands.

All these inequalities are compounded by insufficient participation and representation of people of African descent in decision-making processes and in public life, the report stated. For example, in the United States, some people of African descent are affected by measures to keep them from voting, including denying voting rights to individuals with felony convictions.

Lingering influence of a false construct on race

The dehumanization of people of African descent is rooted in the false social constructions of race created to justify enslavement, in pervasive racial stereotypes, and in widely-accepted harmful practices and traditions that have fostered a tolerance for racial discrimination, inequality and violence, the report explained.

Day said she has experienced this.

"I am an attorney. I go to court sometimes and on a number of occasions I have been inferred to be a criminal defendant rather than a lawyer," she said. "I am a black woman. Ninety-nine per cent of the people who are brought into criminal court, into family court are black. And despite the fact that I am wearing a suit, I am carrying a computer, I am doing things that only lawyers do."

"The inference, presumably based on my skin colour, is that I am a criminal defendant or respondent in court."

The report further highlighted that systemic racism persists because of the misconception that the abolition of slavery, the end of the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism, and some measures taken by States to date have removed racially discriminatory structures and created racially equal societies.

This culture of denial remains a significant obstacle to combating systemic racism, Day said. Not only because it is deeply embedded in the culture of individualism but also because "people do not want to disrupt their comfort."

"It is very difficult for people to sit with the discomfort that they are complicit in systemic racism," Day added. "So the idea that you need to confront your own bias and sit with the discomfort of how intentionally or not you contributed to racial hierarchy and human rights abuses is not something most people, even at very high levels, are capable of doing psychologically."

Outlining a way forward for States

Eliminating systemic racism would entail, among other measures, reforming institutions, legislation, policies and practices that may be discriminatory in outcome and effect, the report stated. It urges States to adopt a "systemic approach to combatting racial discrimination" through the adoption of whole-of-government and whole-of-society responses that are contained in comprehensive and adequately resourced national and regional action plans and special measures for disadvantaged groups.

The report also highlights the need for the collection, publication and analysis of data disaggregated by race and ethnic origin to allow a better understanding of the magnitude of systemic racism and monitor the effectiveness of policy measures.

States are also urged to ensure the meaningful participation of people of African descent in decision-making processes and State institutions, such as law enforcement and the criminal justice system.

"States have a wonderful opportunity to step forward. For some States, that might start with legal reform or policy reform. For every State that should start with developing a set of measures for how they know they are actually solving the problem," Day said. "These measures have to be grounded in impact and in outcomes, not merely in changing a language that inhabits our laws or that inhabits our policies. States also need to be courageous."

29 June 2021

This story is the first in a four-part series presenting UN High Commissioner Bachelet's Agenda towards transformative change for racial justice and equality. Each part highlights the historic specificities, the lived experience and current realities of people of African descent in several States.
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ALBANY  The U.S. Department of Justice expects to spend years investigating fraud cases involving billions of dollars in aid that was intended to help small businesses stay afloat and keep their workers employed, a top federal prosecutor in New York said.

I would be surprised if we were not bringing these cases five, six, seven years from now, acting U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of New York Antoinette Bacon said in an interview at her office Friday.

Government watchdogs have estimated criminals netted about $80 billion worth of loans issued by the Small Business Administration across two pandemic initiatives funded through the CARES Act, as well as the Paycheck Protection Program and Economic Injury Disaster Loans. Millions of Americans took advantage of the popular relief programs  especially the forgivable PPP loans  to prop up their businesses during the pandemic. But the fountain of fast-flowing government aid also provided an avenue for people to attempt to cheat the system with lucrative schemes.

The Department of Justice says it has prosecuted more than 100 defendants in at least 70 criminal cases for PPP and EIDL fraud since the programs launched last spring through the federal CARES Act.

The U.S. attorneys office in Albany has filed two cases with charges against four individuals who allegedly fraudulently obtained loans from the programs.

In one case, they said three men conspired to obtain at least $5.6 million in fraudulent loans and worked on their scheme in part in Ulster County. One defendant from Brooklyn has plead guilty in that case.

In April, they charged another man with wire fraud and money laundering stemming from his alleged efforts to fraudulently obtain $150,000 in PPP and EIDL loans. He is awaiting trial.

The prosecutors are continuing to investigate additional potential fraud cases across the district, they said.

Serial fraudsters look for opportunities like well-funded government programs, especially in times of crisis and disaster when people are desperate, Bacon said. The CARES Act for most people meant caring for your neighbor ... but for others the CARES Act was caring for themselves. It was selfishness. It was an opportunity to live a lavish lifestyle to get rich quick. So we wanted to jump on that as quickly as possible.

Within a month or two of the launch of these SBA programs, the U.S. attorneys office in Albany started following fraud leads, prosecutors said.

In March, the inspector general for the Small Business Administration testified before Congress that within days of the launch of the programs last year, banks started calling his office to report alleged fraud. Complaints alleging fraud started pouring in by thousands. The office received 150 years worth of complaints in just one year and has yet to process tens of thousands of them.

Hannibal Ware, inspector general for the Small Business Administration, said the SBA ignored repeated warnings about fraud in the programs as it reduced or eliminated controls designed to root out abuses in an effort to move funds out the door as quickly as possible.

The SBA has taken many steps to increase fraud controls over the course of the pandemic, a senior administration official at the SBA said this month. He noted that the inspector general has not investigated the full $80 billion worth of potential fraud estimated in the program, but used algorithms to pinpoint loans with certain characteristics.

Bacon declined to comment on whether she thought the SBAs vetting of the loans was sufficient given the fraud cases shes seeing now.

She asked the public to report tips about suspected loan fraud to the FBI in Albany or by calling the FBIs hotline at 1-800-CALL-FBI, or submitting a tip online to FBI.gov.

We hear a lot, people will say Well, everyone knew that so-and-so was committing fraud. Everyone knew that this was happening. Why isnt law enforcement doing something? Bacon said. Not everyone knows. We know because good honest citizens provide tips and leads.

The SBA is no longer offering PPP loans. The agency is still offering EIDL loans and targeted grants through the EIDL program.
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New Deal with Denmark National Lottery Danske Spel is a Push for Success in Europe

Published June 28, 2021 by Lee R

In one of Europe's key gaming jurisdictions, Push is making a bold move with a new agreement.

A European expansion for popular titles is underway in Denmark.

New Deal

The development comes in the form of B2B gaming supplier Push Gaming's new deal with Danish state lottery and gaming provider Danske Spil.

Enhancing Danske's Platform

The agreement bringing popular Push titles including Jammin Jars, Razor Shark and Fat Rabbit to Danish players across Danske Spils platform serves to broaden Push Gamings reach in regulated Europe.

Other Partners

Push Gaming has previously entered into other European jurisdictions via recent deals with Norsk Tipping, Soft Swiss, SkillOnNet and LeoVegas.

Denmark's Prominent Position

Denmark ranks only behind Sweden in the EU in online gambling participation rates as one of only three countries where the majority of industry GGR comes from iGaming.

Jewel of Push's Eye

At this point, the steady and continuous year-on-year rise in online gaming gross revenue and market share in the Danish Jurisdiction has made Denmark an integral part of Push Gaming's growth strategy since iGaming was introduced in 2021.

Push Rep Speaks

Push Gaming Head of Sales Fiona Hickey called Denmark an extremely vibrant market and as such, partnering with (Danish national lottery operator) Danske Spil...is a great achievement for us.

Hickey praised the opportunity to push content out to Dutch players as another step in our growth strategy.

Danske Rep Speaks

Danske Spil Promotion and Loyalty Manager Simon Hoffmann Riis said Push Gaming has been on our radar for years as one of the missing pieces in our otherwise impressive game offering. Riis expressed his excitement and the new ability to offer titles including Jammin Jars, Razor Shark and Fat Rabbit live across the Danske Spil platform while expressing confidence that the new offering would quickly gain traction with our player base.

Push's Momentum

Push is coming off a strong 2020 as well. Having just celebrated its tenth anniversary last October, Push gaming established significant momentum in 2020 by acquiring new licenses for platforms in Malta with the MGA and England with the UKGC.

Outlook

With Push already serving a slew of the most prominent private operators including GVC, William Hill, and more, the Danske Spel agreement appears the perfect complement to enhancing the brand recognition of Push Gaming as one of iGaming's premier suppliers.
Brasilian Gaming Congress

The Brasilian Gaming Congress allows leaders and delegates in the gaming industry to shape laws, regulations, and innovations in the Brazilian gaming industry.

The Brasilian Gaming Congress is a new event that seeks to bring together delegates from all over the world to discuss online gaming. This event is meant to be a high-level platform for delegates to interact with established market participants and Brazilian institutions.

The Brasilian Gaming Congress provides:

A forum for international and regional companies with significant influence to participate in debates in regards to gaming regulations. These debates include regional and international industry and media experts, regulators and legislators.

This event showcases the best practices in terms of the regulations and secure operations of online casinos. This is conducted within the ambit of secure and responsible online gaming sites that can be used to generate tax revenue for the country. In addition, this event showcases best-practice methods to provide consumer protection through demonstrations, presentations and discussions.

Receptions and networking opportunities before/after the Brasilian Gaming Congress give delegates the chance to engage with the leading participants and leaders in the gaming market in a relaxed and informal setting. This type of opportunity is simply not available at most other gaming events

Traditionally, this event concludes with a Letter of Intent which is signed by the delegates at the Brasilian Gaming Congress. This letter is then delivered to the government of Brazil. This event allows delegates and leaders in the industry to shape regulations, laws and innovations in the Brazilian gaming industry.
Laxman Pai, Opalesque Asia:

Virtus Investment Partners, a multi-boutique asset management shop, has agreed to acquire Stone Harbor Investment Partners, a manager of emerging markets debt, multi-asset credit, global corporates, and other strategies with $15.4 billion of assets under management.

Terms of the deal, expected to close by the end of the year, were not disclosed. Stone Harbor will continue to operate autonomously under its own name and will be Virtus' 11th investment manager affiliate.

Founded in 2006, Stone Harbor offers credit strategies primarily to global institutional clients, including sovereign wealth investors, pension plans, foundations, endowments, and insurance companies. Its strategies are also available through open- and closed-end mutual funds, including the Stone Harbor Emerging Markets Debt Fund (SHMDX), and to non-U.S. investors through UCITS and QIAIF pooled funds.

Virtus Investment Partners has affiliates that include Ceredex Value Advisors, Duff & Phelps Investment Management, Kayne Anderson Rudnick Investment Management, Newfleet Asset Management, NFJ Investment Group, Seix Investment Advisors, Silvant Capital Management, and Sustainable Growth Advisers.

"The addition of Stone Harbor as an affiliated manager will further enhance and diversify Virtus' investment capabilities with a highly-regarded emerging markets debt strategy that has a 30-year track record," said a press release from the boutique investment manager.

I......................

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In India, advancements, particularly in the field of Science and Technology, have ended up being the impetus for development, improvement, and our goal to becoming atmanirbhar. Innovation is all about envisioning something significant and turning that into value for the benefit of the community while solving real-world problems, and inspiring others to follow suit. At Bharat Vaani, we want to bridge the gap between Indian innovators and their primary audience, 
CELINA [mdash] Doyle Eugene Brittain Doyle Eugene Brittain was called to the lord on Wednesday, June 9th of 2021 in Mckinney, Texas. Doyle was born in Sigourney, Iowa and one of six children to the late Alfred and Bertha Brittain. His late siblings were Verle, Orbie, Eldon, Ruby, and Vera. H
This project is a collaboration of members of the Iowa Newspaper Association and includes reporting from 51 newspaper reporters from 30 newspapers across the state. Readers who have experienced difficulty obtaining police video in Iowa can contact reporters at PoliceVideoTips@inanews.com. Public records requests and data storage/visualization was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
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I recently saw a simple, yet excellent marketing campaign by Americas Newspapers that said: Shop Local, Eat Local, Read Local. Nothing could be more critical for a local community than this simple statement. After all, keeping as many dollars local as possible is what keeps pumping the lifeblood throughout a community.

Ironically, that same day I saw a piece in the MediaPost publication indicating that more people than ever are consuming and paying for news and information. That may seem to be a great trend if you are a media company, but the rest of the story as Paul Harvey might have used with this piece seems to indicate a troubling trend. The lions share of this shift is benefiting national news and information outlets, not local ones.

While we dont downplay the need for national news and information, one must wonder why communities would neglect information in ones own backyard. One of the biggest issues facing most every local community is the ability to convey needful and timely information. I would argue being locally informed is every bit as critical as being nationally informed. I might even go as far as to say, it is even more critical. Additionally, I would suggest that a well-run local newspaper or media company is able to move a community forward during these challenging economic times.

Before we touch on the need for communities to support their local news and information products just as they would support shopping, dining, and overall spending locally, lets look at why this trend might be so. Lets start internally, we have two groups of local media companies. In the first group, we must take an honest look at many of the local products being shoved off as local newspapers. They are run by out-of-town media owners who have no presence. Their staff has been cut to the bone. With staff cuts, content is more cookie-cutter, regional, and less about their community. Publishers or the face of the community have been eliminated. They have simply allowed their local media company to become a nameless entity in the community, throwing out information most could care less about.

We certainly dont want to paint with broad strokes, lumping all newspapers in group one. Mismanagement pointed out in group one isnt the case everywhere. In group two, there are many local media products where money, time, human capital, and much more are being poured into the local community. Whilst the first poorly managed group of media companies deserve their fate, this second group deserves and needs the support of their communities in much greater ways.

For these truly-local media companies in group two, we must understand the need to shop and dine locally, but we all must catch the greater vision as to why we need to read locally as well. I have yet to consult with any communities and/or media companies that have an outstanding community information network. It isnt a lack of informational tools, it is an over-abundance of these informational tools. In the world of information fragmentation, that includes traditional media such as newspapers, TV, radio, and so forth, we now can add digital outlets, social media, cable TV, and so much more. Without a comprehensive community vision as to how information will be shared far and wide, it will be shared in multiple fragments where no one in the community gets the whole information feed.

I would challenge every community leadership team to sit down with their local media company and carve out a community-wide communication strategy moving forward. Media companies in the second grouping are in a unique position to assist in accomplishing this task.

Throughout the United States, we are seeing an abundance of what is referred to as a news desert. These are communities that have lost their media representation. In a very competitive community environment, communities can ill afford to be a news or information desert. These deserts lose their identity and ability to compete. Dont let your community be an information desert. By working together with your media company you can be an oasis in the desert that has impacted over 2,000 communities in the past 20 years.

John A. Newby authors this weekly "Building Main Street, Not Wall Street " column series dedicated to helping communities and local media companies combine synergies allowing them to not just survive but thrive in a world where their Truly-Local identity is being lost to Amazon, Wall Street chains and others. Readers can email him at john@360MediaAlliance.net.
Protecting and preserving natures nursery Two families of wood ducks paddled in the water while bullfrogs periodically croaked and...

Beaverton Tavern nears opening COVID-19 and busy contractors caused unexpected delays, but Beaverton Tavern owner Robin...
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP)  An organization that represents thousands of racehorse owners and trainers is accusing New Mexico regulators of violating their civil rights.

The New Mexico Horsemens Association announced Tuesday that it is suing the state Racing Commission in federal court, saying it had no other recourse because the commission barred the group and its members from contacting any commissioners or attending its regular public meetings.

The commission limited communication after the horse owners sued in December to stop the panel from using purse money to cover operating costs at the states five privately owned racetracks.

The commission also voted this year to prohibit group members from contributing 1% of their purse winnings to the association and ending the contribution of starter fees that fund medical expenses as well as fees that go toward advocacy efforts. That prompted another legal challenge by the association in state district court.

Commission Chairman Sam Bregman said in a statement Tuesday that it was the horse owners group that was violating the law.

The New Mexico Racing Commission has stopped the New Mexico Horsemens Associations gravy train of redirecting the purses and the New Mexico Horsemens Association have now chosen to spend the horsemens money on legal fees, Bregman said. "New Mexico horse racing will continue to prosper with or without the New Mexico Horsemens Association.

Gary Mitchell, the association's attorney, accused the commissioners  who are appointed by the governor  of deliberately trying to do away with the group by stopping members from contributing shares of their purse winnings to the association and changing how purse money is distributed and for what purposes.

They wish to get their hands on this money and use it how they see fit  which is basically to pay the costs of running the racetrack," Mitchell said, noting that would allow more money to go into the tracks' associated casinos.
GREENSBURG, Ky. (AP)  U.S. Sen. Rand Paul complained bitterly Tuesday about the government's COVID-19 response but did not single out former President Donald Trump for blame, instead accusing Kentucky's governor and Dr. Anthony Fauci of encroaching on personal freedom.

In a home state appearance in Greensburg, Kentucky, the libertarian-leaning Republican said Americans should make their own decisions on whether to be vaccinated.

We dont really need people who believe in some sort of elitism to tell us what to do," said Paul, who is an eye surgeon, speaking before a luncheon audience. I think weve got pretty good sense.

Paul noted that most people age 65 and older have receive their vaccinations, saying they figured out it was in their best interest to do so.

In a free society, we make these decisions individually, he said.

Paul acknowledged Trump as one of the big leaders" of the national Republican Party but said the GOP has a lot of leaders. Paul deflected a question about whether he might seek the presidency again, saying he is focused on his 2022 Senate reelection bid.

Paul's talk of individuality comes as the Biden administration tries to reach its COVID-19 vaccination goal by sending A-list officials across the country, devising ads for niche markets and enlisting community organizers to persuade unvaccinated people to get a shot.

Paul opened his wide-ranging remarks by taking aim at Fauci, the nations top government infectious-diseases expert, and Kentucky's Democratic governor, Andy Beshear.

Paul has sparred with Fauci over the need to wear masks once coronavirus vaccines were available and over how COVID-19 originated. The senator told the rural GOP crowd Tuesday that Fauci was busy being political and elitist, adding: Were smart enough to make our own decisions.

The senator lambasted Beshear over his virus-related restrictions on businesses that have since been lifted, saying: In our state, the governor decided that he was king. Beshear has said his actions saved lives.

The Kentucky Supreme Court is currently reviewing a separation-of-powers case stemming from measures passed by the state's GOP-dominated legislature to limit the governors executive powers. Beshear filed a lawsuit after lawmakers overrode his vetoes of bills reining in his executive authority. Paul called it the most important case before the states high court in decades.

Because if the court rules that the legislature cannot limit a governors powers, then you have a governor with unlimited powers," the senator said Tuesday. "And it is incredibly dangerous.

After his speech, Paul defended his focus on the past virus-related actions. He said he gets more questions about his clashes with Fauci than any other topic when meeting with Kentuckians.

I think its still very present on peoples minds," the senator told reporters. "I think it also was the greatest restrictions of our freedom in a long, long time. Its hard to look for a precedent of where government got so involved in our daily lives over the past many decades.

Paul also criticized a push by liberal advocates to change or eliminate the Senates filibuster rules, saying he also opposed such efforts when Republicans led the chamber.

We have a danger zone until the election of 2022, he said, adding that removing the filibuster would lead to all kinds of michief by Democrats  including widespread voting by mail and confiscatory tax policies.

He said that having things go at a slower pace can be a good thing.

Paul is seeking a third Senate term in next year's election. Charles Booker, a Black former state lawmaker who touts a progressive agenda, has emerged as a leading potential Democratic challenger. Paul made no reference to Booker during his appearance in Greensburg.

Paul did downplay prospects for a repeat run for the presidency in 2024. The Kentucky senator ran for the White House in 2016 but his campaign fizzled as Trump overshadowed the GOP field.

Paul said Tuesday that he's focused on his reelection campaign, and said the national GOP political scene will be upended until President Trump decides what he's going to do."

And so I think we wait and see," Paul said when asked about a 2024 presidential bid. "But its not something that Im actively thinking, oh, this is my next step. Im not really thinking toward that. It would have to be some extraordinary set of events to come together probably for me to consider it.

Asked if Trump remains the leader of the national GOP, Paul said: The Republican Party is a big party, so I think there are many leaders. And former President Trump is one of the big leaders in the party. But its not monolithic.
The Islamic Center of Midland and Midland Area Interfaith Friends are excited to update that Phase Two of Project Vernon Rebuild will be complete soon.

"The outpour of support from our community has been simply incredible, stated Umbareen Jamil, member of the Islamic Center of Midland and co-director of Midland Area Interfaith Friends. Whether we are asking for financial contributions, sharing Vernon's story on social media or volunteering their time, so many friends and neighbors of the Islamic Center of Midland have come forward to help Vernon and his family.

Vernon Loree is a resident of Hope and one of the many families impacted by the dam failures in May 2020. After the devastating flood waters rushed through the childhood home that he helped his grandfather build, Loree is not capable of fixing it without major financial and physical contributions.

Phase Two includes purchasing the bathtub/shower, vanity and countertop, appliances, painting supplies, and kitchen countertops. Along with the purchases, the drywall, painting and roof leak need to be finished.

The quotes we received from painting companies were very expensive, so to keep costs low, we decided to think outside the box and look for volunteers, said Hayley Lodhi, member of Islamic Center of Midland and Midland Area Interfaith Friends. With the help of Molly Morrissey, who organized and led the entire painting project, we were able to cut a large chunk of the original cost estimated in our budget and that was so helpful.

Morrissey was the powerhouse behind the painting portion of the project. After organizing dates, recruiting several volunteers, and gathering all the supplies from Lowe's in Midland, she got the job done in less than a week. All the interior walls and ceilings were painted, as well as the staining and varnishing of the trim. The youth minister at Blessed Sacrament also brought lunches for the week to the volunteers. With the help of Morrissey and her volunteers from Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church, Blessed Sacrament Youth Outreach Team and Women of Michigan Action Network (WOMAN) group, Loree is one step closer to being welcomed home.

Jamil and Lodhi met Loree in November, when they were handing out gift cards donated by two local churches. Loree didnt qualify for help from FEMA and has suffered a great deal of stress and trauma due to the floodwaters. Since then, they made it their mission to try to help Loree get back into his home for his peace of mind and mental health.

During Phase Two, the bathtub/shower was installed by Reliable Plumbing and Heating and drywall was finished in nearly a week. Builder Mike Roebuck fixed the leaky roof that was found on a rainy day during Phase One. Loree's sister will be building the kitchen and bathroom cabinets next week, just like their grandpa built originally, as a gift to Loree.

We did have a couple of hiccups in Phase Two, like we did in Phase One. After the storm a couple weeks ago, there was water inside the house that ended up being from a faulty chimney and a very large tree uprooted and almost fell on the house, said Jamil. Luckily, Mike Roebuck was able to fix the chimney quickly and we had the most incredible blessing from Kindy Tree Service, who removed the tree at no cost.

After seeing ICMs facebook post asking for help, Teresa Quintana, co-organizer of Sanford Strong, reached out to Jerry at Kindy Tree Service for the removal of the complicated and unstable tree. Because the tall pine tree was leaning near power lines and only a few feet away from Loree's home, it took special precision and care to properly and safely remove it.

Phase Three consists of flooring, siding and home furnishings. The windows (Phase One) are still on backorder, but are expected to be ready the first week in July. The tile and carpet will be installed during the first two weeks in July. Once the windows are installed, the siding can be started.

The original estimate for the project was $60,000, however after seeking out several discounts the current estimate is $55,000. Phase One and Phase Two are fully funded. To date, ICM and MAIF have collected just over $47,000. They are still looking for another $7,000 in financial support to meet their goal and remember every penny goes directly to this project since Jamil and Lodhi are volunteers.

To donate to Project Vernon Rebuild visit www.paypal.com/paypalme/islamiccentermidland or send a check to: Islamic Center of Midland, 1801 North Stark Rd., Midland, MI 48642. For questions about the Project Vernon Rebuild, feel free to reach out to the Islamic Center via email at Islamic.Society.of.Midland@gmail.com or call 989-948-1012.
The following list includes recent reports from the Midland County Sheriffs Office and the Midland Police Department. Compiled by reporter Andrew Mullin.

Sunday, June 27:

11:52 p.m.  Deputies responded to the Mid-Michigan Medical Center for report of a dog bite that occurred at a Jerome Township residence. The victim, a 10-year-old Beaverton male, sustained a minor cut on his left hand. The owner of the dog, a 35-year-old Jerome Township female, was given an isolation notice.

9:17 p.m.  A deputy initiated a traffic stop on a vehicle in Homer Township for a speeding violation. The deputy contacted a 27-year-old Cadillac male who gave a false name and didn't have a valid driver's license. The male was arrested for two warrants out of Wexford County and lodged at the Midland County Jail without incident. The male was cited for driving while unlicensed and for the speeding violation. A report was completed and forwarded to the Prosecuting Attorneys Office for review.

7:45 p.m.  Officers made a warrant arrest on Lilly Court.

5:59 p.m.  Officers responded to a two-vehicle crash in the area of East Buttles Street and State Street.

5:50 p.m.  Officers responded to a hit-and-run on Eastman Avenue.

3:33 p.m.  A 35-year-old Homer Township male reported his 38-year-old male neighbor pulled his property stakes out of the ground. The owner didn't want to press charges but requested that the deputy let the neighbor know he cannot touch his property.

11:46 p.m.  Deputies investigated a suicide of a 61-year-old Lincoln Township man.

9:15 a.m.  A 59-year-old male reported damage to a water main at a Hope Township location. The male later called back and advised that the Water Department was on scene and he did not need further assistance.

4:39 a.m.  Deputies responded to a Coleman business for a burglary alarm. Upon arrival, deputies located a 29-year-old Edmore female inside of the business who had forced entry. The female stole liquor from the business and had been drinking it. The female was arrested for burglary and lodged at the Midland County Jail. A report was completed and forwarded to the Prosecuting Attorneys Office for review.

4:37 a.m.  Officers responded to a case of domestic violence on Eastlawn Drive.

2:56 a.m.  Deputies were dispatched to a Mills Township residence after a female called 911 and arguing could be heard over the phone. When 911 contacted her again, she denied any issues at the residence. When deputies arrived, the residents would not answer the door. Deputies made entry based on the 911 call and arguing heard in the background and found the husband and wife hiding in their bedroom. Both parties said it was just a verbal argument and no assault occurred.

2:50 a.m.  Deputies were dispatched to a Warren Township residence regarding an assault. The complainant, a 34-year-old Midland male, stated he had an altercation with a 28-year-old Coleman male at a party. The 34-year-old male claimed the 28-year-old male pointed a pistol at his face. After interviewing witnesses on scene, it was determined that a gun was never pointed at the complainant. A pellet gun was recovered at the scene. There were no injuries, the parties were separated and neither party wanted to pursue criminal charges.

12:08 a.m.  Officers responded to a hit-and-run in the area of Swede Avenue.
The following list includes recent reports from the Midland County Sheriffs Office and the Midland Police Department. Compiled by reporter Andrew Mullin.

Saturday, June 26

11:46 p.m.  Officers responded to a case of domestic violence on West Ellsworth Street.

11:16 p.m.  Deputies attempted to conduct a traffic stop at a Lee Township location. The suspect wouldn't stop, which led to a vehicle pursuit that occurred in Lee Township, Jerome Township, and Edenville Township. The suspect vehicle lost control and crashed at a Jerome Township location. The male driver fled on foot, which led to a foot chase. Deputies were unable to locate the driver, but they do have a suspect at this time. A report is being sent to the Midland Prosecuting Attorneys Office.

8:37 p.m.  A deputy was dispatched to a Larkin Township roadway reference a road possibly washing out. The deputy found a construction site where a culvert was recently replaced. There were potholes in the dirt section where the road construction is taking place. The site was already marked with four construction barrels to warn drivers to slow down. There was no hazard if paying attention and slowing down for the construction area.

6:39 p.m.  Officers responded to a obstruction of justice on Ashman Street.

6:12 p.m.  Deputies responded to a Greendale Township location for a two-vehicle injury accident. The occupants of the involved vehicles suffered minor injuries.

2:38 p.m.  A deputy responded to a Warren Township residence for a death investigation of a 58-year-old Warren Township male. The death appeared to be of natural causes.

12:14 p.m.  Officers responded to a driver operating with a suspended license in the area of Bay City Road and South Saginaw Road.

Friday, June 25

11:37 p.m.  A deputy was dispatched to the village of Sanford reference a verbal dispute. The complainant was upset about text messages she received from another resident in the trailer park. She was advised to block the person on her phone if she didn't want messages from him.

11:33 p.m.  Deputies were dispatched to a Homer Township residence in reference a verbal argument between a married couple. Deputies contacted a 31-year-old Homer Township female who advised her husband, a 34-year-old Homer Township male, was drunk and refusing to let her and the kids inside the residence. The male contacted his mother, who picked him up from the residence. The female remained at the residence to care for her children and no assault occurred.

9:01 p.m.  Officers responded to a verbal domestic situation on Dublin Avenue.

8:51 p.m.  An unknown person threw trash in the yard of a Greendale Township resident. The resident chased the vehicle down into Isabella County, where a license plate was obtained. The incident is under investigation.

8:48 p.m.  Officers responded to a case of domestic violence on Jefferson Avenue.

8:11 p.m.  A deputy responded to a Lee Township location for a 41-year-old Jerome Township male who reported his vehicle had been stolen by an unknown person. The vehicle has been recovered and returned to the owner. The vehicle was wrongfully sold to a 30-year-old Lee Township male. A report was completed and forwarded to the prosecutor's office for charges.

3:17 p.m.  Deputies responded to a Warren Township location for a single vehicle traffic crash. The vehicle slid into the ditch but sustained no damage.

2:34 p.m.  Officers responded to an injury crash in the area of Bayliss and Rodd streets. The driver was also cited for driving with a suspended license.

12:21 p.m.  A 51-year-old Homer Township female reported someone stole her engagement ring four years ago. The ring was purchased in 1999 for $2,599.

12:21 p.m.  An animal control deputy was dispatched to check the area of Freeland and Poseyville roads for a loose cow. The area was checked, and no loose cows were located.

11:22 a.m.  Officers responded to a death investigation on Cottonwood Drive.

10:58 p.m.  A 44-year-old Larkin Township female reported a 26-year-old Larkin Township male is messaging her 15-year-old daughter, and she wanted it to stop. The female said the messages were not inappropriate, but about family issues her daughter does not need to know. Deputies encouraged the female to block the male on Facebook, and his phone number.

8:24 p.m.  A 44-year-old male reported his wife slapped him. Deputies investigated the complaint and the female agreed to leave the residence. A report has been forwarded to the prosecutor's office for review.
Tripoli, Libya (PANA) - The Presidential Council on Monday summoned the Libyan Prime Minister, Abdelhamid Al-Dbaiba, to a meeting next Sunday in the office of the Supreme Commander of the Army, to consult on the appointment of the Minister of Defence and settle the matter once and for all
This is a very, very large loss for the community. We have crews all over trying to get to everyone as soon as possible, said Greg Cook, director of business development and marketing at Paul Davis Restoration.
EFFINGHAM  An Effingham man is accused of dragging an Illinois State Police trooper 25 yards down the road as he sped away Sunday from a roadside safety checkpoint, police said.

Marcus Pocrnich, 21, has been charged in Effingham County Circuit Court with two counts of aggravated battery to a police officer, one count of aggravated fleeing and eluding and one count of resisting a police officer causing Injury. Pocrnich also was issued numerous traffic citations.

According to an Illinois State Police news release, a trooper observed what appeared to be a pistol between the driver seat and center console of a vehicle around 12:27 a.m. Sunday at a roadside safety checkpoint.

The release said that during an attempt to gain control of the pistol, a brief struggle ensued between the driver and the trooper, during which the driver grabbed the troopers arm and accelerated, driving away and dragging the trooper approximately 25 yards down the roadway before the trooper was able to free himself.

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After the driver ignored commands to stop, a pursuit involving officers from the state police, Effingham and Jasper county sheriffs departments and Effingham police ensued. The chase ended with the vehicles driver and its occupants taken into custody.

The release stated the trooper suffered non-life-threatening injuries and was treated and released at a local hospital.

Pocrnich was appointed a public defender during a court hearing Tuesday and his bail set at $500,000, meaning he must post $50,000 to be released. A preliminary hearing is set for July 22.

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BLOOMINGTON  Cleanup efforts in Bloomington-Normal will take several weeks after more than 10 inches of rain fell throughout the weekend.

This is a very, very large loss for the community. We have crews all over trying to get to everyone as soon as possible, said Greg Cook, director of business development and marketing at Paul Davis Restoration.

Paul Davis is one of several companies fielding calls of reported water damage after homes, businesses and streets were flooded. Cook said Paul Davis has received more than 400 calls for service, both commercial and residential, since the storms moved in Friday evening.

Eric Davison, spokesman for the Bloomington Fire Department, said the agencys first storm-related call came about 9:45 p.m. Friday. About 178 calls later, the calls finally stopped at 1:50 p.m. Sunday.

The Normal Fire Department was busier than usual as well. Fire crews ran 47 calls for service between Friday afternoon and Saturday afternoon when the second round of storms finished, but not all of those were weather related, spokesman Matt Swaney said.

More than 40 of Bloomingtons calls were for stranded vehicles, with Bloomington Fire performing at least 17 vehicle rescues. Swaney said about six calls were from stranded vehicles, but they didnt require intervention from fire crews.

Anytime you see water across the roadway, turn around, Swaney said. You can never tell how deep the water may be, and it doesnt take much water to flood out your engine or push your car off the roadway. Its not worth losing your car, or worse, your life, just to get down the road.

At least 30 road cave-ins cropped up throughout Bloomington over the weekend in the wake of the torrential rains and flash flooding, blocking off roads for what could take up to several weeks to assess and repair, said Kevin Kothe, Bloomington director of public works. Additionally, the department has fielded hundreds of calls for flooded basements due to sewer backups and overwhelmed sump pumps.

When we have this much rain this quickly, its hard for water to get away, he said. Truly, this was a very heavy rain that we dont normally experience.

Early reports indicate the hardest-hit areas appear to be concentrated in Bloomingtons older neighborhoods, where the city uses a combination sewer system. Citywide, people have begun putting out furniture and other items damaged from the floodwaters onto the curb for roadside cleanup.

Crews have also hit the streets to clear away mud, twigs, grass and other debris left behind in the flash flooding, especially around the downtown businesses. Not even the public works department seemed to be spared as flood waters breached its doors for the first time in over 20 years.

That intensity of rainfall in that short of time really caused a lot of runoff that just exceeded what the sewers can handle, Kothe said. Water wants to go somewhere and it just unfortunately headed through downtown and got into businesses and residences along the path.

Many homes and businesses that experienced flooding were faced with water coming through their drains. Normal public works crews have monitored sanitary sewer systems, particularly at the Ironwood pump station, which can be more prone to flooding due to lower elevation, said Wayne Aldrich, Normal public works director.

The flooding, Aldrich said, was unlike any other storm hes seen in his 24 years with the town.

It was just an extreme storm, said Aldrich. The intensity is something these storm sewers arent designed to handle.

Several streets were underwater over the weekend, especially those areas near creek crossings. Much of the water receded within hours of the storms passing through, but creek levels remained high.

Alan Hardman, assistant manager at Ace Hardware in Normal, said the store had a record number of customers coming in since Friday, wiping out their flood and water damage supplies by Sunday morning.

Shop vacuums, dehumidifiers, sump pumps, box fans, hoses, submersible sumps, hose fittings  we sold out yesterday morning of everything, he told The Pantagraph on Monday.

The store owners sent a truck from other Ace stores in the area to restock Normal because from Springfield to Dwight, Nobody else got hit like we got hit, Hardman said.

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Bloomington-Normal recorded the highest rainfall totals in McLean County, according to the National Weather Service in Lincoln.

Bloomingtons totals were about 8-11 inches, depending on where in the city the measurement was taken. About 10 inches were recorded in Heyworth and 9.5 in Shirley.

Hardman said for those handling flooding basements, the first step is to pump out the water and bring in fans to try to dry the area. If the source of the water is the drains, homeowners dont have much control, since this depends on the sewer system and storm drainage.

If people suspect basement flooding due to sanitary sewer issues, they should call the public works department to file a report, Aldrich said, noting homeowners can also extend gutters to ensure water flows away from the homes foundation to prevent flooding.

Given the demand from customers, Hardman said he extended the store hours on Sunday, because Were trying everything we can to help the community."

Cook estimated cleanup will take several weeks as Paul Davis and every other restoration company is swamped with calls and working around the clock to help their customers.

The damage and flooding is widespread, he said. When you encounter as much rain as we did, in such a short period of time, sump pumps and drainage systems cant keep up. So what were finding is sump pumps are working nonstop and they just give out.

Once a pump fails, there is not much a home or business owner can do. The water is going to come in; theres really no way to stop it at that point, Cook said.

The water made its way into Home Sweet Home Ministries, pouring into the basement Friday night at 303 E. Oakland Ave.

The impact of over 38 inches of accumulated rain that flooded our basement, caused damage to the emergency shelters freezers, air conditioning unit, laundry facilities, storage shelves and maintenance areas, according to a statement from Home Sweet Home.

Power companies were also kept busy as many customers lost power and others requested their power be disconnected because they were experiencing flooding in their homes, said Hillary Cherry, director of communications for Corn Belt Energy, which powers the outskirts of Bloomington-Normal and the majority of rural McLean County.

One of our key points is we want to remind everyone not to step into standing water when there is electrical equipment, such as in their basement where they may have a sump pump or other things. It could be deadly, Cherry said.

She added that Corn Belt Energy crews responded to many calls related to flooding and fallen trees, and they continue to watch the Corn Belt service area for additional flood-related issues.

We also had power poles impacted by the storms including one that lightning hit and blew the top out of, Cherry said. Our crews were able to safely restore power to everyone impacted.

Ameren Illinois spokeswoman Stacey Shangraw reinforced the concern about customers entering flooded areas that contain electrical equipment. She also gave other advice that Ameren recommends during and after flooding, which includes:

Never attempt to turn off power at main electrical panel boxes if you must stand in water or on a wet floor to do so

Never use electrical appliances or devices or touch electrical switches, outlets or cords if you are standing or are on a wet surface, or even if you are wet or the device is wet

Before touching or unplugging electrical appliances or devices that have been in contact with water, turn off the circuit that feeds the appliance or have the power to the building disconnected

If you have any doubts about the safety of your home or business electrical system, have it inspected by a professional electrician

As saturated as the ground already is, Central Illinois isnt in the clear yet. The forecast calls for possible thunderstorms across the region through Thursday.

The potential for widespread severe weather is low, but locally heavy rain is possible. The heaviest rain is expected to fall south of McLean County, more along Interstate 72, said Mike Albano, a meteorologist in Lincoln.

Temperatures are forecast to be in the 80s, with high humidity through midweek, he said.

The weather should dry out for the holiday weekend, with cooler temperatures and lower humidity expected.

Contact Kelsey Watznauer at (309) 820-3254. Follow her on Twitter: @kwatznauer.

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A Sangamon County jail inmate who died at HSHS St. John's Hospital Sunday morning did not have any evidence of injury or trauma to his body, Coroner Jim Allmon said following an autopsy Monday.

Bobby Joe Jimerson, 62, of Springfield was taken by EMS to hospital and died at 9:38 Sunday morning.

"We were able to document the absence of any injury or trauma," Allmon told The State Journal-Register. "He didn't have any injury at all that would have caused him to pass away. We found a lot natural disease process."

That left the preliminary cause of Jimerson's death as "pending additional studies," Allmon said.

Histology and toxicology work-ups could take three to four weeks to come back, Allmon said.

The death comes almost two months to the date that Jaimeson Daniel Cody, 39, died as he was being restrained by jail correctional officers.

Cody's death was listed as "restraint asphyxia in the setting of methamphetamine intoxication" and classified as a homicide.

The Divernon man, who had been arrested on Apr. 27, became unresponsive after correctional officers used Tasers when Cody resisted health checks and attempts to handcuff him, jail officials said.

State's Attorney Dan Wright requested an independent review by the Illinois State's Attorneys Appellate Prosecutor's Office.

In a news release Monday, Sheriff Jack Campbell said Jimerson fell ill while correctional officers were escorting inmates to court Sunday.

Jimerson reported to the correctional officers, the release stated, that "he couldn't walk." Jimerson then went down on his knees.

In the release, Campbell said correctional officers assisted in placing Jimerson in a wheelchair and the medical staff was advised.

Jimerson became unresponsive and correctional officers and medical staff began life saving measures before paramedics arrived and took over, according to the release.

Allmon said Jimerson was not tased and that there was "no altercation, no scuffle" between Jimerson and correctional officers.

A family member of Jimerson did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

The coroner's office and Illinois State Police are investigating.

Jimerson was arrest at 4 Regency Court by Springfield Police at approximately 9:16 p.m. for domestic battery, possession of ammmunition and no valid Firearm Owners Identification (FOID) card

Cody's stepmother, Cindy Cody, and the group Education and Action Together (E.A.T.) have been among those who have asked Sheriff Jack Campbell to resign.

"My heart goes out to (Jimerson's) family," Cindy Cody said, reached Monday. "I know how they must be feeling. It's sad.

"I don't know what (Jimerson's) problem was, but obviously he had some issue (medically). Here you again, there's another death up there. What can be done to stop this?"

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ROCKFORD  City officials on Thursday will invite organizations, businesses and nonprofits to apply for $400,000 worth of cannabis-funded grants.

Called the Rockford REGROW Grant Program, it aims to support projects that promote economic development, reduce gun violence, provide job training and improve the lives of those disproportionately affected by cannabis prohibition in the city.

Rockford Community and Economic Development Director Karl Franzen said although the grants are designed to benefit communities that have been most affected by the war on drugs, the parameters were purposefully left broad to allow for innovation and creativity.

"We have a scoring system, and we want these programs to be successful, so we want to help these organizations build implementation teams and really drill down to specific deliverables to make sure these dollars are put to good use, but we don't want to be limited by a preconceived notion of success," Franzen said.

Aldermen in January created a cannabis fund designed to support programs for economic and business development, education, job training and youth programming. It is funded by a 3% sales tax on the sale of recreational marijuana.

A virtual kickoff presentation of the Rockford REGROW grant is planned at 5:30 p.m. Thursday on the city's Facebook page, and electronic applications should be available on the city website. Applications are due by July 31.

REGROW stands for "Reinvest, energize. Give. Restore opportunity. Win."

City staff will work with the city's Community Relations Commission to recommend to City Council which applicants should receive shares of the first $400,000 cycle of grant funding.

All applicants will be considered in a tier one pool. A select few applicants will continue on to a second tier in which more funding will be available. Second round projects will be required to submit more detailed plans, budgets, objectives and measurable outcomes.

There will be five 2021 "quick-deployment" awards of $10,000 available.

A two-year, $150,000 award; three, one-year, $50,000 awards; and a $50,000 "future project" award will be available in the second round.

"Communities across the country have felt the impact of the imbalanced enforcement of the war on drugs and we commend Rockford for strategically reinvesting cannabis tax revenue where it's needed most," said Jason Erkes, chief communications officer for Cresco Labs/Sunnyside, one of two marijuana dispensaries in Rockford.

The REGROW grant program is loosely modeled on Portland, Oregon's Social Equity and Educational Development, or SEED, initiatives.

According to information from Portland, the program is meant to support projects that seek to "repair the lasting legal, social, economic and intergenerational consequences past cannabis prohibition has had on Black, indigenous, and people of color communities."

Now in its fourth year, the program has grown exponentially, said Portland Strategic Communications Officer Daniel McArdle-Jaimes.

When it was first rolled out in 2017, there were three grant recipients chosen from nine applicants who shared $350,000 in cannabis tax funding. In May, the Portland program awarded grants totaling $1.8 million in cannabis tax revenue to 17 nonprofit organizations and businesses.

The recipients were chosen from among 123 applicants. It could be that Rockford will see similar growth.

McArdle-Jaimes said Portland has focused the grants on educational projects that include workforce development and training; legal aid for expungements, re-entry and undoing harm; and economic development programs.

"Its workforce development, its erasing criminal records for people who have been disproportionately arrested," McArdle-Jaimes said. "We are working to make sure they can start over on their record. I think a number of other cities and states are also mirroring that as well, recognizing that having a criminal record for something as minor as cannabis possession seems silly these days."

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Conservatives have long fulminated over left-wing indoctrination in our schools, a charge that led former President Donald Trump to create a pro-American curriculum  the 1776 Commission. Groups like Turning Point USA have long targeted professors who supposedly promote anti-American values and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom  including, I presume, history professors like me.

But what is it that I and my colleagues actually teach in the classroom?

In my modern European history courses, students learn about the rise of Benito Mussolini. That in the wake of the March on Rome in October 1922, King Victor Emmanuel III asked Mussolini, leader of Italys still small National fascist Party, to form a new government. That he convinced the legislature to grant him power to rule by decree for a year to restore order and to end the socialist threat in the country. That, thanks to his control of fascist newspapers and his intimidating militia forces, the Fascists, in coalition with other parties, gained a crushing majority in the elections of 1924. This majority was augmented by the Acerbo Law of 1923, which stated that the party with the largest share of the vote would automatically receive two-thirds of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies. Thus, Mussolini came to power in a legalistic fashion, undergirded by the threat of violence. Once in power, Mussolini used his control of Italys legislative bodies to legally bring an end to democracy.

They learn that Adolf Hitler, after the failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, served little time in jail, thanks to a sympathetic judge. Then he bided his time, building up the structures of the Nazi party. The despair of the Great Depression, coupled with violent clashes between the right and left in Germany, paved the way for the Nazi partys rise. Hitler, like Mussolini, came to power legally when President Paul von Hindenburg invited him to assume the position of chancellor in January 1933. Hindenburgs staff and family believed that they would be able to control Hitler, while enjoying the support of his rabid base. Also like Mussolini, Hitler used the legal measures available to him  including Article 48, which allowed the German president to rule by decree in times of civil disorder  to put an end to democratic institutions once he came to power.

I am bemused at the idea that we indoctrinate our students. While there are undoubtedly exceptions, most of us present our students with the facts of history. We ask them to read primary source documents and historical analyses, we train them to interpret documents and events, and we encourage students to tease out these ideas in classroom discussions.

Students are smart. If they sometimes develop new opinions as a result of their history classes, it is not because we push them in a particular direction. Students are perfectly capable of reading a bombastic nationalistic speech by Mussolini and hearing the echoes in modern political discourse.

Radically conservative politicians want to limit the ability of teachers to talk about structural racism because it may lead their sons and daughters to question the racism still embedded in the U.S. Will they also forbid teaching classes on the rise of 20th-century fascism and totalitarianism because the facts make them too uncomfortable?

Christine Adams is a professor of history at St. Marys College of Maryland.

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There is no denying that America took it in the teeth with the COVID-19 pandemic and related financial crisis, a one-two combination that was disproportionate in its impacts. And it had particularly dire consequences for journalism, adding to strains on a business model that relies on advertising and readers to stay afloat.

Between 2008 and 2019, nearly 1 in 4 newsroom jobs disappeared, according to the Pew Research Center. Since the onset of the pandemic, one-third of large-city newspapers reported fresh layoffs. And that doesnt measure the hits endured by freelancers as outlets budgets dried up.

Thats a lot of journalism not getting done, investigations not conducted and important stories left untold. Los Angeles litterateur David Kipen  founder of the Libros Schmibros lending library in Boyle Heights and formerly a book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and the literature director for the National Endowment for the Arts  has been pushing one possible solution. He envisions a new version of the Federal Writers Project, the Depression program that gave work to thousands of writers, historians, librarians and others whose skills fell outside the scope of public works projects that were key parts of the New Deal.

Kipen raised the notion in an article for The Times more than a year ago, which caught the interest of U.S. Reps. Ted Lieu of California and Teresa Leger Fernandez of New Mexico, who have introduced the 21st Century Federal Writers Project Act to allocate $60 million in grants through the Department of Labor to colleges, nonprofit organizations, news outlets and unions with experience in journalism and report writing to chronicle the impacts of the pandemic.

Its a bold proposal that is worth serious consideration. The immediate benefit would provide some work and relief to journalists and creative writers still trying to eke out a living in this fractured business landscape.

The public would benefit from their output, as well. The original Federal Writers Project produced more than 1,000 reports and books across a range of subjects, led by the American Guide Series with such titles as California: A Guide to the Golden State (1939). It also sent interviewers to sit down with thousands of people to record their personal stories and folklore, a project that also collected the oral histories of formerly enslaved Americans.

When a massive hurricane swept up the East Coast over Long Island and through the heart of New England in 1938, the government collected written and photographic reports from its stable of New England contributors to chronicle the damage in New England Hurricane, a book published less than six weeks after the storm made landfall.

Most of the people employed under the original writers project were as unfamiliar to the public in their time as they are today, many of them local journalists. But there were some notable names, such as Zora Neale Hurston and Nelson Algren, as well as future oral historian Studs Terkel and young writers such as John Cheever, Saul Bellow and Richard Wright, who also earned support through the program. Its not hard to imagine that current early career talent would benefit from such a project now.

The current proposal calls for using the new Federal Writers Project to hire individuals who are unemployed or underemployed in order to document in writing and images American society and the broad impacts and effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. There are countless stories to tell, a panoply of experiences during the pandemic and as the nation continues to recover. The bill before Congress requires the chronicle of this dark age to be archived at the Library of Congress and made publicly available.

There are shoals to navigate. For instance, the grants would have to be framed in such a way as to weed out projects with a discernible political agenda. Fear of underwriting Marxist propaganda during the fraught 1930s led the original project designers to focus on the travel guides in the belief that they would be hard to manipulate. Similar care should be taken now to avoid using federal grant money to underwrite polemics  antiabortion articles in conservative states, pro-union pieces in liberal states come to mind.

Yet such concerns should not derail the idea itself. The COVID-19 pandemic will resonate far into the future as families deal with crushing losses, as survivors struggle to regain full health, as communities stage their revivals and build their futures. Our national repository would not be complete without a chronicle of it all.

Los Angeles Times

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BLOOMINGTON  As you wait for water to recede from your yard or basement, let this sink in: the Bloomington area received more than twice the average monthly total for rain in about a 96-hour period.

In fact, most of that fell within a 72-hour period.

Official observers for the National Weather Service reported 10.57 inches of rain 2 miles east-southeast of Bloomington, 10.08 inches a mile east of Heyworth, 9.96 inches 4 miles south-southwest of Central Illinois Regional Airport and 9.54 inches 2 miles north-northeast of Shirley from Thursday morning through Sunday morning.

Mike Albano, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service office in Lincoln, said records going back to 1948 indicate the average amount of rainfall for all of June is 4 inches.

Illinois State Climatologist Trent Ford referred to it as a 100-year event, meaning there is a 1% chance of such an event occurring in any given year.

The trigger point for a 3-day, 100-year event is 9 inches, he said.

The one-day totals werent necessarily record-breaking, he said, but its rolling the three days together that is really impressive.

It was an extremely rare event of heavy rain for that area, said Ford.

For many people, the cleanup isnt over yet  and neither is the rain.

Another 1 to 3 inches could fall through the middle of the week, said Albano. The activity is expected to be scattered around the region with the heaviest amounts south of McLean County, closer to the Interstate 72 corridor.

A Flash Flood Watch remains in effect until 7 p.m. Tuesday for McLean, Logan, Tazewell and Woodford counties. Livingston County also is under a Flash Flood Watch as well as a Flood Warning for the Vermilion River.

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The area is under an unusually humid air mass. Think of it as a sponge, Albano said. A rain shower may only last 15 minutes but it can be a torrential downpour, he said. The temperatures though mid-week will remain hot and humid in the mid- to upper 80s.

However, looking ahead to the Fourth of July holiday, we may celebrate some freedom from the stormy weather.

There will be a little bit of a cool down and drier weather going into the weekend, Albano said, Theres a light at the end of the tunnel, but were not out of the woods yet.

With area rivers and lakes experiencing high water levels, some weekend activities could be curtailed.

Clinton Lake was closed to recreational boating effective 10 a.m. Sunday until further notice due to flooding-related hazards, according to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.

The Middle Fork of the Vermilion River is also closed to recreational boating because of high-water hazards.

In addition, the river level parking, boat launch and picnic area at Starved Rock State Park and the Lower Dells area at Matthiessen State Park are closed.

Ford, who watches weather trends as state climatologist, said, Its really difficult to say whether climate change contributed to this specific event.

However, he said, We see the frequency of extreme rainfall events has increased.  That is somewhat of a hallmark of climate change in Illinois.

On the positive side, everybody in Central Illinois is out of a drought, said Ford. It gives us a bit more breathing room than we had at the beginning of the growing season.

But parts of northwest Illinois still have a significant rainfall deficit, the northeast is still short and far southern Illinois is on Fords watch list because soil moisture is trending down.

Even though more rain is in the forecast for Central Illinois, Ford said most people have seen the worst of it in their rearview mirror.

Contact Lenore Sobota at (309) 820-3240. Follow her on Twitter: @Pg_Sobota

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Photo: (Photo : How To Fight Drugs Or Alcohol Addictions When You Have A Child)

Addictions can have a devastating impact on your life, especially if you have a child. It's hard enough to manage an addiction without having to manage another person's life. It's important that for you, and your child, that you kick your addiction once and for all.

It's also important that you kick your addiction the right way. If you don't overcome your addiction properly, you risk potentially relapsing and sinking back into addiction.

This article will tell you how you can fight drug or alcohol addictions when you have a child:

Recognizing Your Addiction

The first step to overcoming an addiction is to recognize that one exists. It's easy to rationalize and explain your addiction without ever accepting it for what it really is.

If you don't fully accept that you have an addiction, then you should try keeping track of drug and alcohol use, write a list of the pros and cons of quitting, ask a friend for their opinion on your substance misuse, and most importantly, consider how your substance misuse impacts the person closest to you, your child.

Coming to terms with your addiction can be a very anxious and uncertain time. Once you do come to terms with it, you will have to change a lot of things in your and your child's lives, including:

The medication and prescription drugs that you take;

Who you let into you and your child's lives;

The way that you manage stress;

What you do in your spare time.

All of these changes will ultimately benefit your recovery and keep you away from drug and alcohol addiction. Recovery doesn't happen overnight. You need to overcome your addiction one day at a time.

Treatment Options Available to You

Once you're ready to change, you can begin exploring your treatment options. Treatment for addictions varies according to the substance.

The most popular form of drug treatment is residential treatment, which involves you living at a hospital or facility, away from the influence of drugs and triggers. Some people stay in residential treatment centers for several months at a time. These centers can also, according to Shoreline Recovery Center, offer you job skills and training courses to help you integrate back into the community. Residential centers are by far the most successful types of rehabilitation centers.

However, because you have a child a live-in rehabilitation center might not be possible. Instead, you might want to try a day treatment center. They are clinics for people who still wish to live at home but want to receive support for their addiction. They can last for up to eight hours a day.

There are also sober living communities, which are similar to residential treatment. You live with other recovering users in a house or hostel. They're a great place to go if you have nowhere permanent in terms of housing. They may be incompatible with children, however.

No Treatment Works for Everybody

When you're entering into some kind of treatment for your addictions, it's important to bear in mind that no treatment works for everybody. Everybody's needs are completely different. What works for one person isn't guaranteed to work for another. Each situation is unique, and thus, must be treated as such.

Addiction Impacts Your Whole Life

Another thing to remember is that addiction impacts your whole life, and so, your treatment should address other areas of your life. Your child's life, for example, will undoubtedly be impacted by your addiction in one way or another. In order to totally recover, you need to address how your addiction has impacted your child.

Commitment

When you are embarking on a path to sobriety, you need to be committed. Addiction treatment is not easy. It is long, arduous, and stressful. Generally, if you have an intense addiction, the treatment will need to match it in intensity. This is something you can only manage through commitment. If you're not committed, you'll just leave.

Mental Health Issues

Drug addiction usually goes hand-in-hand with mental health issues. If you're seeking addiction treatment, you must equally address your mental health issues. The best way to overcome your addiction is to seek treatment for your mental health from the same people you are seeking addiction treatment from.

Talk to Your Family

Your family's there for a reason. When you are seeking treatment for your addiction, try not to go at it alone, especially when you have a child. During the hardest parts of your addiction, you might want to consider taking your child to live with your parents. If you do not have family, then you could potentially ask any close friends.

Breaking Your Network

It's important, once recovered, that you break your social network. As human beings, we tend to surround ourselves with people who enjoy the same things as us. As an addict, there's a strong chance that your friends are all addicts too. It's crucial to your recovery that you break your network and build it again. Any friends who are addicts have to go until they have recovered. They can be very dangerous to have around and can easily lure you back into addiction.

Coping with Stress

If you cannot cope with stress, you're more at risk of relapse. After you have resolved your addiction and you are in recovery, you need to begin learning to cope with stress.

In the past, after a long day, you would unwind with drugs and alcohol. That's impossible now. Instead of numbing your emotions, you need to address them and work through them.

After you have left treatment, the recovery center will assign you a key worker who will keep in touch and help you through the hardest part of your recovery: Going at it alone. You might also want to interact with drug workers and government-funded addiction services.

If you begin to struggle after you are fully recovered, don't hesitate to get in touch with your key worker or with a drug worker.

Dealing with any addiction can be very difficult. If you are trying to kick your addiction and live a drug or alcohol-free life, then this is the article for you. Good luck.
Photo: (Photo : University of Phoenix Reviews Rack Up Excellent Rating at Trustpilot)

Trustpilot is a website where people can leave and read reviews for thousands of businesses in the public and private sectors. University of Phoenix signed up for an account with Trustpilot in June 2019 because its administrators were genuinely interested in receiving student feedback. In the 24 months since the University established the account, 2,936 students have left a rating using the one to five-star system, and hundreds have also included comments.

University of Phoenix reviews have an Excellent rating with an average of 4.3 out of a 5.0 system. As Trustpilot explains, the numeric rating goes beyond just the accumulated average of all reviews. The scoring algorithm also considers the age and number of reviews and whether the business actively requests people to write reviews. Each of these combined factors go into the overall Trust Factor.

University of Phoenix received high marks for responding to all reviewers, whether their comments were positive, neutral or negative. Trustpilot also recognized the University for responding to every reviewer within one week.

A Sampling of University of Phoenix Reviews

More than 75 percent of current and former students gave University of Phoenix a five-star or four-star rating for their overall experience. See recent reviews by University students and alumni.

On May 29, 2021, Erica explained that she had been out of school for 14 years. Then, she decided to complete her Master of Business Administration degree online through University of Phoenix. Erica credited everyone from her enrollment specialists to her academic advisors and instructors for making it easy to return to school. Although she felt nervous about returning to a university, each of these professionals helped to calm her anxiety and prepare her for a smooth transition.

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Complimenting staff is a common denominator in hundreds of University of Phoenix reviews. Instructors bring real-world experience to their teaching roles to provide students with an education that goes beyond the theoretical. With 77 percent of students who provided a Trust Pilot review giving the University a four-star or five-star rating, it speaks to the overall positive experience they had obtaining their online degree.

About University of Phoenix

University of Phoenix offers associate, bachelor's, master's and doctoral degree programs in a convenient online format. Students can choose from more than 100 programs in the areas of business, technology or healthcare that can help prepare them for entry-level to advanced careers in more than 300 occupations. Programs can also start throughout the year, so they never have a long wait to start working toward their educational goals. Most degree programs have start dates at least once per month.

When students enroll at University of Phoenix, they lock in tuition rates for the entire time it takes them to complete their program. This is true even if it takes longer than expected. The tuition freeze is welcome news at a time when higher education expenses can increase an average of 2.6 percent each year.

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Rim Country is home to the largest stand of ponderosa pine trees in the world. But the majestic beauty of the forest can also be extremely dangerous. The region's two newspapers, The White Mountain Independent and Payson Roundup have teamed up to produce Catastrophe: A Forest in Flames - a six months-long, in-depth series that will focus on how the largest and deadliest wildfires in Arizona history happened, what has been done since then, and what could be done to have a healthier forest. We believe we have the responsibility of educating the community on the vital issues facing the forests, and take that role seriously.
KGL Group, a wholly-owned Ghanaian group of subsidiaries, lent support to host the maiden edition of the Ghana Diaspora Investment Summit 2021 organized by the Ghana Investments Promotions (GIPC).



The event held under the theme 'The New Normal: Leveraging Diaspora Investments To Build Back Better sought to highlight diasporan collaborative investments as an integral lever to spur rebound growth in the fall out of the global pandemic.



The summit brought together policymakers, corporate entities, private sector business and investors, both local and across the diaspora, to engage, identify entry barriers and propose viable solutions to create an enabling environment to foster direct local investments.



The two-day event was held on June 23rd and 24th at the Kempinski Hotel, and as part of the keynote addresses, Mr Yoofi Grant (CEO, GIPC) and Mr. Ken Ofori-Atta (Minister of Finance) provided an overview of the collaborative effort between Government and the GIPC to minimize entry barriers to investments and provide a sustainable environment conducive to business growth.



Mr. Alex Dadey, Executive Chairman of KGL Group, speaking from his perspective as a diasporan entrepreneur with over 30 years of experience working across multiple industries, highlighted the need for multilateral collaboration and diaspora socio-economic inclusion.



Recounting from his experience working in the UK and Ghana across different sectors, Agriculture, Fintech, Trade Finance, Technology and his most recent venture into technology service delivery partnerships with public sector institutions such as the NLA, Mr. Dadey broke down inward investments into four distinct categories: Remittances, Direct, Portfolio and Philanthropic investments.



In his submission at the event, Mr. Dadey also identified a two-prong approach of a deliberate policy on the part of Government to drive local and diaspora collaboration combined with promoting the revenue generation success stories of diasporans, as levers to make direct investments attractive and guide prospective investors across the diaspora to navigate the boundless local investment opportunities in Ghana.



The two-day event also provided a business development platform for participants to engage across different sectors: Agriculture, Real Estate, Technology, Fin-Tech and FMCG under a series of structured business to business sessions.



Mr. Dadey has been a strong advocate for diasporan collaboration, and instrumental in initiating the recent edition of the Diasporan Homecoming Summit in 2017 and the Ghana Investment and Opportunities Summit in the UK, platforms which collectively roped in significant investments to leverage Ghanas burgeoning opportunities.



The event climaxed with Mr. Alex Dadey reaffirming KGL Group's commitment to fostering local and diaspora socio economic inclusion as sponsors for the maiden Diaspora Investment Summit event.

Source: Peacefmonline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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The Minister for Finance, Ken Ofori-Atta has received commendations for employing innovative measures in managing the countrys finances and steering the economy back to its pre-COVID-19 levels.



John McDermott, who is the Chief Africa Correspondent for the Economist commended the Minister for playing a critical role in rejuvenating the economy, restoring macroeconomic stability and renewing investor confidence in an economy that suffered a setback from the coronavirus pandemic.



Tweeting via the handle @johnpmcdermott, he described the Minister as Africa's most innovative Finance Minister as Ghana prepares to raise $1 billion through the sale of sustainable bonds, including Africas first social debt.



The proceeds of the bonds will help refinance domestic debt used for social, environmental and educational projects.



The sale, likely to be a mix of social and green bonds comes months after Ghana sold the four-year zero-coupon debt to international investors as part of a $3.025 billion Eurobond deal that also included 20-year, 12-year and seven-year securities.



This will help reduce the government budget gap which is expected to be 9.5% of gross domestic product this year, down from an 11.7% shortfall in 2020.

Source: Peacefmonline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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The death toll in last week's floods in Kumasi is now seven, according to the National Disaster Management Organisation (NADMO).

Two more bodies were recorded at Aboabo over the weekend.



At Aboabo, the body of unidentified man suspected to be in his thirties was found whiles at Sokoban the body of a two-year-old was found.



The Ashanti Regional administrator of NADMO, Nana Atakora Manu made this known.



He said the successive rains led to the floods.



The first body was recovered at Atafoa, second at Sokoban and the third at Anloga on the Susan wooden bridge. The third was the body of woman believed to be in her fifties.



Another body was retrieved at Adoato Adomanu and it involved an 11-year-old boy whose body has still not been found according to the NADMO coordinator.



Mr Atakora Manu said a search team has gone out on two occasions and has still not been able to find the body.



There was another case at Sawaba, where a one-year-old boy - Awal who was riding in a tricycle with the mother got drownned.



The rider attempted to pass through the flood waters and lost control resulting in the accident which saw Awal drowning.



Displacement



The rain has displaced many including some traders at Kejetia, Atasemanso and at the Asafo markets respectively.



On Monday morning, some traders at Asafo expressed concern about a choked drainage at Asafo which they said resulted in the floods.

Source: graphiconline.com









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The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has deployed 40 population experts from the international community to monitor the Population House Census (PHC).



Sunday, June 27, 2021, was declared and observed as Census night. The counting and enumeration of persons in households and long-stay institutions would take place between June 28, 2021 and July 11, 2021.



The Country Representative of the UNFPA, Mr Niyi Ojuolape, who confirmed this to Graphic Online, said the deployment was in response to the governments request for the UNFPA to implement the peer monitoring of the 2021 PHC.



He said the purpose of the monitoring exercise was to observe and report on the training and data collection procedures viz-a-viz international standards and best practices that could be replicated elsewhere on the African continent, with documented lessons learned.



He said the monitoring was also predicated on the need to closely monitor and provide objective assessment and feedback on the impact of the extensive use of new methodologies and technologies (innovations) on the quality of enumeration and share the experiences and best practices with other countries through South-South cooperation.



Mr Ojuolape said the independent monitoring of census exercises had gained currency, especially in the last two census rounds.



He said more developing countries and experts were requesting to be involved in the initiative, as it also facilitated knowledge gathering and experience sharing.



The ultimate report will be used to share knowledge, experiences and best practices with other countries through UNFPA-led South-South cooperation. Population censuses have been conducted in Ghana at approximately 10-year intervals since 1891, the last being in 2010, Mr Ojuolape said.



He said the inclusion of people from other countries would enable the process to be truly independent.



Additionally, the independent monitoring process will benefit from skills and experiences from other parts that may be lacking within the Ghanaian context. Then, again, the inclusion of international citizens from developing countries enhances South-South exchanges, he said.



Technology



The UNFPA Country Representative said all previous censuses, including those conducted post-independence, and had been manually conducted with the paper-based questionnaire.



Mr Ojuolape said for the first time ever, the PHC would be done using a fully digital modality.



The modality utilises the Computer-Assisted Personal Interview (CAPI) method, which involves the use of tablets for data collection. While the use of technology allows for a more efficient data collection and analysing process, there are still calls to strengthen quality assurance of data collected.



Both the UN Principles and Recommendations for Population and Housing Census and Handbook on Census Management emphasize the role of monitoring and evaluation as integral to successful census taking, he said.



Mr Ojuolape said to facilitate the current census, several innovative and unique features had been introduced in the 2021 PHC that would not only ensure the collection of quality and policy-relevant data and rapid release of user-friendly results but also provide lessons learned and good practices for other countries.



He mentioned the innovations to include the fusing of interactive area maps for accurate identification of enumeration and supervision areas; the use of Geographic Positioning System (GPS) to capture the location of all structures; and advanced data quality assurance procedures, including use of real-time enumeration tracking dashboard and dynamic data quality management at the district, regional and national levels.



Other support



Mr Niyi Ojuolape said aside from the deployment of the independent observers; UNFPA had supported the Ghana Statistical Service with an international consultant who has been providing technical assistance to the census process since 2019.



The UNFPA, at the global level is finalising an e-Learning programme on census quality assurance, which includes observer missions as part of the M&E requirements for successful PHCs. It is, therefore, a laudable idea for Ghana Government to agree to the deployment of independent observers to monitor the census as Ghanas experience will be captured as part of the curriculum he said.



He applauded the fact that the country, in the midst of the pandemic drew a business continuity plan (BCP) which allowed for the extension of census preparations.



He said several questions on the impact of COVID-19 on censuses were yet to be answered.



For example, questions on the effectiveness of the use of self-learning, virtual, and face-to-face training needs to be responded to. Others include the impact of the pandemic on the procurement and distribution of census supplies; and how households will receive enumerators given the ongoing COVD-19 context.



All these uncertainties make a genuine case for the need for independent monitoring during a COVID-19 era. Other countries, especially those participating in the independent monitoring stand to benefit immensely from Ghanas experiences as one of the foremost African countries to conduct a census under COVID-19. The report of the independent monitoring and its dissemination will serve as a great knowledge product that other countries could use, he said.



He said the inclusion of persons from other countries would enable the process to be truly independent.



Additionally, the independent monitoring process will benefit from skills and experiences from other parts that may be lacking within the Ghanaian context. Then again, the inclusion of international citizens from developing countries enhances south-south exchanges, he said

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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Under the auspices of the JJ Rawlings Foundation, the Founder and CEO of the Atta-Mills Institute, Samuel Koku Anyidoho, joined hands in a tree-planting exercise at the Achimota School on Saturday, June 26, 2021.



In collaboration with the Forestry Commission of Ghana and Achimota School, the JJ Rawlings Foundation planted over 500 trees to create a new Arboretum for the school.



Preceding the tree-planting exercise, was a very colourful and brilliant drill by the Achimota School Cadet Corp - to which Rawlings belonged during his days as a student at the same school.



Interestingly, the Founder and CEO of the Atta-Mills Institute is also a product of Achimota School just as his late boss, President John Evans Atta-Mills.



Nobody can deny the fact that JJ Rawlings was a strong advocate for environmental preservation and spent a whole year after he left office serving as the United Nations' Special Envoy for the fight against malaria.



Present at the event were the children of Rawlings - Ezanetor, Yaa Asantewaa, Amina & Kimathi, as well as their mother, Nana Konadu Agyemang Rawlings.



Also, present was the Minister for Lands and Natural Resources, Honourable Samuel Abu Jinapor and many other persons who were specially invited for the epoch-making event.

Source: Isaac Kwame Owusu/Peacefmonline.com/[email protected]









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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National Organizer of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Sammi Awuku has encouraged the youth in Ghana to engage in agriculture.



Speaking on Peace FM's ''Kokrokoo'', Sammi Awuku bemoaned how agriculture has been bastardized in the country making it look like agriculture is a punishment.



Mr. Awuku urged government and corporate entities to make agriculture attractive to the youth by assisting them with the needed tools and resources ''so that these young people will be able to see that, look, agric is not a punishment but it can help [1] the economy grow. It can also help you develop. When you go to Europe, the rich are the farmers but it isn't like that here. So, I think we need to change that''.



To him, one of the areas for youth development and economic growth is agriculture stressing ''I think that the Ghanaian youth is very creative and when given the support and I think this discussion is a fantastic one, and I will challenge coporate Ghana''.



Sammi Awuku made these comments while discussing matters regarding youth development.





Source: Ameyaw Adu Gyamfi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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The Nigerian government says it is extending the ban imposed on flights from Brazil, Turkey, and India for another four weeks.



The chairman of the Presidential Steering Committee on Covid-19, Boss Mustapha, said on Monday that the measure was to prevent the importation of virulent strains of the virus into the country.



Last month people who had been to those three countries within 14 days of their intended arrival date in Nigeria were barred from entering the country.



The government said it was monitoring the situation in South Africa, Zambia, Rwanda, Namibia and Uganda as their Covid-19 cases rise.



As many other countries are witnessing a rebound in the number of infections, there are fears Nigeria could be hit by another wave which might overwhelm its vulnerable healthcare system.



Meanwhile, a total of 2.3 million Nigerians have received their first jab, while 1.2 million have had their second dose.

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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Nnamdi Kanu, the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (Ipob), a separatist group that wants to a breakaway Biafra state in eastern Nigeria has been arrested.



Nigeria's Attorney General, Abubakar Malami, told journalists that Mr Kanu was arrested on Sunday with the help of Interpol.



He was then repatriated to Nigeria where he will appear in court, Mr Malami said.



The Ipob leader - whose group is proscribed as a terrorist organisation by Nigerian authorities - fled the country in 2017 and is facing charges of treasonable felony.



Mr Kanu is thought to have been in Europe since he fled Nigeria and it is not yet clear where he was arrested.



Ipob established an armed wing - the Eastern Security Network (ESN) last year, and authorities say the group has been responsible for a number of attacks on police stations and other public properties in southern Nigeria.



Mr Kanu's arrest comes after he was caught up in a storm that led to Nigeria's government banning Twitter earlier this month.



The government accused the platform of allowing Mr Kanu to tweet in support of attacks in eastern Nigerian and pushing for secession, which the authorities said threatened the country's national security.

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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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Some travellers from Kadjebi in the Oti Region to Accra have been enumerated as part of the Census Night.



Ms Hellen Tsivanyo, an Enumerator, told the Ghana News Agency (GNA) that she and her team had no problem with the respondents as they were patient and willing to answer all questions.



She said the exercise was successful though they had a challenge with the Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing (CAPI) software they were using in collecting the data.



She called on the respondents to help generate accurate data since such statistics were critical to the effective implementation of decentralisation programmes.



Ms Tsivanyo said censuses helped in planning policies and their importance in decision-making could not be under-estimated.



Miss Emelda Nana Ama Amankwa, another official, who enumerated five persons at the Wobube Guest House, said the exercise was a great achievement and appealed to the people to help achieve total coverage of the district.



She explained that data from population and housing censuses provided rich sources of information for carrying-out demographic, social and economic surveys, hence the need for everyone to get counted.

Source: GNA









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A joint national monitoring team from the Ghana School Feeding Programme (GSFP) and the World Food Programme (WFP) has appealed to the various District Assemblies, Parent Teachers Associations and community leaders to play supportive roles in ensuring the smooth running of the programme.



The team was not enthused at how the assemblies and other local stakeholders had failed to provide simple kitchen spaces for caterers in their localities to complement the efforts of the government at feeding the over 3.4 million pupils with daily meals.



The Ghana School Feeding Programme and World Food Programme embarked on the monitoring in some selected districts in the Ashanti, Bono, Ahafo and the Bono East Regions to assess the performance of the caterers who received practical nutrition and innovation training in 2019.



In the Bono East Region in particular, the Group 4 team members led by Mrs. Dina Aframa Karikari of GSFP and Mrs. Gyamira Abdul Wahab from WFP, were much dissatisfied with the cooking spaces assigned to the caterers by the beneficiary school authorities and the local assemblies.



Almost all the caterers in every school visited by the team were either cooking from home and transporting to the schools at their own cost or cooking under trees and other unapproved spaces, stalling cooking activities during bad weathers.



Some of the schools visited included: the Al-Imam Islamic Primary A and B, Yeji VRA Primary School, Kojo Boffour D/A Primary School all in the Pru East District; Prang M.I.T. Islamic Primary, Asubende D/A Primary School, Abease Presby Primary School in the Pru West District; Dadetoklo D/A Primary School, Kojokrom D/A Primary School and Nkatia Akuraa D/A Primary School in the Sene East District of the Bono East Region.



The only two schools that had kitchens were also in very dilapidated condition. The Dadetoklo D/A Primary School kitchen was more than a deathtrap as the wooden structure was slanted and eaten up by termites.



The GSFP and WFP monitoring team also discovered that in almost all the schools, the pupils did not also have eateries. The pupils from Kindergarten to upper primaries either eat in their classrooms or sit on the floors to eat.



The monitoring team therefore appealed to the assemblies, PTAs and the school authorities to support the school feeding programme with kitchens and eating spaces to enhance the implementation of the programme.



Similar monitoring exercises were simultaneously conducted by other joint teams from the Ghana School Feeding Programme and the World Food Programme in the Ashanti, Ahafo and Bono Regions. The national monitoring tour was funded by the World Food Programme.









Source: graphiconline.com









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An activist of the #Fixthecountry movement, Kaaka Anyars Ibrahim has been killed by unknown assailants for his advocacy at Ejura Sekyeredumase in the Ashanti region.



He is said to have had his head clubbed in his home Friday night by the assailants until he became unconscious and was rushed to the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital in Kumasi where he later died Monday afternoon.



Sources say though he reported threats to his life to the police by some people who claimed his activism on social media was making the government unpopular in Ejura, the law enforcement agency failed to act but rather issued him with a warning letter to be cautious of his utterances.







Source: kasapafmonline.com









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There was drama in the Accra High Court Tuesday when the Member of Parliament for Assin Central, Mr Kennedy Ohene Agyapong, got into an altercation with the lawyer for private investigator, Anas Aremeyaw Anas.



Mr Agyapong, who was being cross-examined over a defamation case filed by Anas took offence at Lawyer Sammy Darko telling him to be briefed properly by his (Agyapongs) lawyer.



According to Mr Agyapong, the comment by Mr Darko was an insult as it presupposes that he (Agyapong) was not a competent witness.



Mr Agyapong then flared up prompting the judge to intervene to restore orderliness.



Below is what ensured in court;



Kennedy Agyapong: Youve to be careful the way you talk to me. You are very foolish. Im an MP. Youre insulting an MP and supporting criminals.



Lawyer Sammy Darko: When the witness disrespects the bar, he disrespects the court, and desecrating the sanctity of the court.



The presiding judge, Justice Eric Baah, intervened and asked the MP to withdraw the statement he made.



The words used are not acceptable and I call on the witness to withdraw his words, he said.



Mr Agyapong withdrew his words and accordingly apologised.



Background



In June 2018, Anas sued the MP for allegedly defaming him and is asking for Ghc25million in damages.



The publication complained of are a May 29, 2018, live programme in Twi on Adom TV, where Mr Agyapong allegedly stated that Anas was a blackmailer, corrupt, an extortionist and evil.



According to the statement of claim, the defendant, in a similar manner, published defamatory words on May 31, 2018, via Oman FM, a private radio station owned by the defendant.



The statement of claim also stated that the defendant published more defamatory materials against the plaintiff via other platforms to the extent of releasing pictures purported to be those of the investigative journalist in his bid to blow the latters cover.

Source: graphiconline.com









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The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has ruled that the Ministry of Works and Housing and the Ministry of Transport be surcharged with the cost of organising its sitting on Thursday, June 24, 2021.



This was after the two ministries had failed to appear before the committee without any prior notice.



The two ministries have also been asked to bear the cost of the days live broadcast of the sitting on national television and media coverage aimed at bringing the Committee's work closer to the public.



Ruling



The Chairman of the Committee, Mr James Klutse Avedzi, who gave the ruling, also warned ministries, departments and agencies that take the work of the committee for granted.



He reminded them that Article 103 (6) of the 1992 Constitution granted the Committee, like any other Committee of Parliament, the powers, rights and privileges of a High Court in relation to enforcing the attendance of witnesses and examining them on oath, affirmation or otherwise.



He said the Public Accounts Committee and the Committee on Subsidiary Legislation were the only Committees of the House chaired by a Member from the Minority side of the legislative body and that was to deepen the mandate of the Committee in scrutinising properly the audited accounts of government institutions.



National reclamation scheme



Meanwhile, at the sitting of the PAC yesterday, the Minister of Lands and Natural Resources (MLNR), Mr Samuel Abu Jinapor, disclosed that the government would roll out a comprehensive national reclamation scheme and plant different species of economic trees to replenish vegetation cover across the country.



The scheme, which was being finalised, was expected to start from July this year.



Job losses



Under the scheme, he said, former illegal miners, who lost their jobs due to the governments clampdown on galamsey, would be recruited to plant millions of trees in degraded mining communities and depleted forests.



He said special attention would be paid to the southern part of the country, including the Eastern, Central, Western and the Ashanti regions, where the entire landscape had been badly degraded.



I had an opportunity to go on an aerial tour and you will see that the whole landscape has been degraded and we are now working to roll out a national reclamation programme which will see us reclaiming all the lands, and hopefully in the process, the young men and women who have fallen out of the crackdown on illegal mining can be recruited to reclaim these lands and plant economic trees, he said.



The minister, who was accompanied by the officials of the various agencies under the MLNR, particularly the Lands Commission, was before the committee to respond to questions raised by the Auditor-General on the operations of agencies in the lands and natural resources sector.



He and other accompanying officials answered questions pertaining to the activities of the Lands Commission, the granting of licences and permits for natural resource exploitation, abuse of the ban on rosewood export, measures to sustain trees planted under the Green Ghana Day (GGD), fundraising for the GGD and youth in afforestation.



He also answered questions on the national afforestation and reclamation programme, illegal mining, alternative livelihood for former illegal miners and the management of the Achimota Forest enclave.



Alternative livelihood



Responding to a question on the governments support for formal illegal miners, Mr Jinapor, who is also the New Patriotic Party (NPP) Member of Parliament for Damongo, said the Presidents vision and strategy for the small-scale industry was not to just clamp down on galamsey but the provision of alternative livelihood which was dear to the heart of the President.



In his view, the government was determined to make it a viable industry which would employ the youth and contribute to the economy.



Small scale mining



He told the committee that the small-scale mining sector contributed 40 per cent of the countrys gold output last year and we are not at all against small-scale mining.



What we are against is illegal small-scale mining and the efforts we are making now, which has got the Ghana Armed Forces involved, exclusively is in respect of the red zones  the water bodies and forest reserves of our countries, he said.



Survival of trees



On how to nurture to maturity tree seedlings planted during the Green Ghana Day, Mr Jinapor said there was a whole strategy to ensure the survival of the over five million trees that were planted on June 11, this year.



He pointed out that from now till the next Green Ghana Day next year, a programme would be rolled out to ensure that more trees would be planted, especially in protected forests and major highways.



On the flouting of the ban on the harvesting, transportation and export of Rosewood from Ghana, the minister said matters of the natural resource sector and issues about Rosewood, which was one of the sought-after species of wood everywhere in the world, had become a complicated issue.



He, however, gave an assurance that adequate measures had been put in place to actively police the activities of those harvesting and exporting Rosewood in the northern part of the country.



To fortify the ban on Rosewood exports, the minister said the MNLR had also entered into partnership with chiefs from the northern Ghana, particularly those from the Savannah Region, who had placed a total ban on the harvesting of shed trees and Rosewood.



With regard to the mechanism for auctioning illegally harvested woods, he expressed worry about the manner in which individuals and groups behind illegal logging formed criminal cartels to benefit from the auctioning of confiscated illegal logs.



What I have found personally as minister is that in many cases, the criminal cartels involved in this illegal logging find other unorthodox means of participating in the auctioning.



The enforcement regime we have now is deterrent enough. So, we are examining it at the level of the ministry and to decide whether we should, for instance, begin to burn what we confiscate or give them to other institutions. These are questions which need answers to, Mr Jinapor added.

Source: graphic.com.gh









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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Barring any last-minute hitches, Stephen Asamoah Boateng, a Former Information Minister under the erstwhile Kufuor government is highly tipped to join the race for the Chairmanship slot of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP).



Sources close to the Director-General of State Interests and Governance Authority (SIGA) say the decision is as a result of calls from the rank and file of the party across the country.



The papers deep throat sources insist that the grassroots members of the Elephant Family believe Former Local Government, Rural Development and Environment Minister is the right man with party organization and experience to chair the affairs of the party ahead of the 2024 general elections.



Mr. Asamoah Boateng, also the former Mfantseman West Member of Parliament (MP) according to the source is set to contest the NPP Chairmanship position next year.



Apart from Mr Asamoah Boateng seven other party bigwigs have declared their intention to contest the NPP Chairmanship position currently occupied by Mr. Freddie Wosenawu Blay who is not seeking another term after leading the party to two successful election victories.



Prominent among the seven are Mr Stephen Ayensu Ntim who will be making his fifth attempt at the position after four unsuccessful efforts.



Others are former Education and Railway Minister Prof. Christopher Ameyaw Akumfi, Mr Edward Boateng Ghana Ambassador to China, Central Regional Chairman Robert Kutin, Former Greater Accra Regional Minister Ismael Ashitey and current National Treasure Kwabena Abankwa Yeboah.



Although, Mr. Asamoah Boateng, the man some rank and file of the party describe as affable and the best candidate for the NPP now is yet to make any public pronouncements on the matter, party insiders argue that delegates will not hesitate to give him the nod. Party insiders applaud his accessibility communication skills.



Mr. Asamoah Boateng however, declined comment when contacted except to state that the party needs every experienced hand and true party man who knows the workings of the party and is strategic to ensure victory in the election to continue with the incredible performance of the Akufo-Addo Bawumia administration.



He said the NPP under Akufo-Addo has done well in the midst of COVID-19 and urged party members to rally behind the president and his ministers towards fulfilling the campaign promises made in the last general election. He is committed to protect the legacy of President Akufo-Addo and ensure he successfully hands over government to another NPP President and a handsomely workable majority in the Parliament.



Mr Asamoah Boateng the source emphasized will soon announce his decision to the party and will run a campaign of inclusiveness where he will ensure that all former appointees of the party are brought on board to ensure that the partys quest to break the 8 year jinx is achieved.



The NPP delegates are expected to elect party leadership to preside over the affairs starting from March 2022, where polling station,constituency, regional and National executives will be elected.



The party will also elect a new presidential candidate as incumbent Nana Akufo-Addo is ending his term after serving two successive terms.

Source: MyPublisher24.com









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The Speaker of Parliament, Mr Alban Sumana Kingsford Bagbin, has called for the creation of an institutional memory bank to help enhance the transfer of knowledge in the public service.



He said there was a pressing need for state institutions to create a common platform where present and retired public officials could share knowledge and transfer experiences.



Courtesy call



Mr Bagbin made the call when the executive of the ex-Parliamentary Service Staff Association of Ghana (EPSSAG) paid a courtesy call on him in Parliament last Friday.



The leadership of the EPSSAG called on the Speaker to remind him of a commitment that was made by his predecessor, Prof. Aaron Mike Ocquaye, to allocate office accommodation to serve as a secretariat for the association.



Check-up



Mr Bagbin urged the group to ensure its members took advantage of the opportunity offered them to visit Parliaments Medical Centre for regular check-ups.



He said the centre now boasted critical equipment to address some of their health challenges.



He assured members of the group of his willingness to engage with the relevant departments to see to it that an office accommodation was made available to support their work.



He urged them to develop programmes and activities that would bring both retired and serving staff together to share ideas on the need to ensure harmony in their work as parliamentary service staff.



Mr Bagbin used the occasion to advise serving staff particularly directors to endeavour to soften their hold on what he described as undefined sources of power to maltreat their subordinates.



Welfare



The Chairperson of the association, Ms Lillian Bruce-Lyle, appealed to the Speaker to assist the members to address critical concerns bordering on welfare and health needs.



That, she said, would ease the burden associated with old age.



Ms Bruce-Lyle urged the Speaker to support the associations effort at creating an income-generating venture to cushion the work of the association and its members.









Source: graphiconline.com









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National Democratic Congress (NDC) Member of Parliament for Ejura Sekyedumase in the Ashanti Region, Alhaji Mohammed Bawa, says he is unaware that Ibrahim Mohammed, aka Macho Kaaka who was viciously attacked and later died at the hospital is a member of the pressure group, #Fixthecountry.



40-year-old Macho Kaaka was killed after receiving series of threats on social media from people were not happy with his activism. The deceased was repeatedly struck in the head with objects until he lost consciousness.



The group - social media users in Ghana who adhere to the hashtag #FixTheCountry in droves by pressuring the government to improve its citizens' lives - subsequently demanded justice following his demise.



In a press release, the #Fixthecountry Conveners claimed that the deceased had been recording videos of misconducts and other issues in Ejura and posted them on social media with the hope that the menace will stop.



As a result, he received threats from supposed bodyguards of the Ejura Sekyeredumase MCE, who claimed Mr Mohammeds activities on social media, were making government unpopular in the area.



But speaking in an interview on NEAT FMs morning show, "Ghana Montie", Hon Bawa pointed out that Kaaka had always been a member of the ruling party and was not too sure of his association with the pressure group as being reported.



I know him to be a member of the NPP, I doubt his involvement with the #Fixthecountry group, he said



Youth On Rampage



According to Peacefm's Senior Reporter in the Ashanti Region, Sampson Nyamekye, following his unfortunate demise, some angry youth who are demanding justice for the murdered social media activist, went on a rampage in Ejura on Monday.



The angry youth burnt tyres on some major streets as a sign of anger. They later stormed the police station on Tuesday morning to inquire about the extent of investigations regarding the murder of their colleague.



The agitated then decided to hit the streets to press home their demand for justice, but were met by Military and the Police personnel.



Police & Military Intervene



A tense standoff between the protesting youth of Ejura Sekyedumase and the military and police team then ensued, resulting in the reported death of two people, with four others suffering severe injuries.







More soon......





Source: King Edward Ambrose Washman Addo/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Nigerian music star Burna Boy is this years winner of the Best International Act at the BET Awards.



Burna Boy, whose real name is Damini Ebunoluwa Ogulu, was crowned the winner of the award for the third time in a row.



Compatriot Wizkid and Diamond Platnumz of Tanzania were also vying for the prize.



Burna Boy was also competing against Youssoupha and Aya Nakamura, both from France, Brazil's Emicida, and the UK's Headie One and Young T & Bugsey.



The 29-year-old Nigerian thanked his mother, the most beautiful woman in the world, as he picked his award in Los Angeles.



Diamond Platnumz thanked Tanzanians for their unity  amid a petition that had been launched to have him disqualified for the US music award.



The petition, which had been signed by more than 20,000 people, wanted him disqualified for whitewashing the late president John Magufulis government. Magufuli, who died in March, was accused of curtailing press freedom and harassing the opposition.



Tanzanias government spokesman Gerson Msigwa congratulated Diamond.



"We didn't get the award but we have more respect. We as Tanzanians know you are a winner, a fighter, a real patriot and best musician in Africa and around the world. We shall get the award another time," he posted on Twitter

Source: BBC









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Ghanaian actress and slay queen Moesha Boduong, has said goodbye to the world as she embraces her new life as a Christian after giving her life to Christ.



Moesha Bodoung who is known for her heavy endowments as she loves to flaunt them on social media said in a video testifying of Gods grace and mercy on her life and she told the congregation during a church service at the Revelation Church, Airport, Accra that she has repented.



The affluent Instagram celebrity looked slimmer than we know her for was seen on her knees worshipping and thanking God for saving her and she announced to her fans that she was going to hit the streets together with some friends from her new faith to evangelize as she has taken upon herself to serve God and become a vessel for her use after dumping the secular world.



Sharing a flyer of her church's upcoming event on her Instagram page, she wrote;



Good morning everyone so we @wearerevelationint are hitting the streets this morning .if you see your girl Maurecia boduong anywhere on the streets holla at your girl May God bless all of you.



Watch Moesha in church:



Source: Eugene Osafo-Nkansah/Peacefmonline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Telecommunications Giant, Vodafone Ghana, has crowned Ghanaian songwriter and musician, Martin King Arthur, popularly known as Kofi Kinaata as the winner of the Vodafone Green Award at the 22nd Vodafone Ghana Music Awards (VGMAs) held on Saturday, 26th June 2021.



The Vodafone Green Award was introduced by Vodafone Ghana to acknowledge and support musicians who use their crafts to drive environmental awareness and sustainability of the planet.



The highlife artist who received a recognition plaque during the VGMA on Saturday has also received Ghs10,000 for winning the Vodafone Green Award with his song dubbed, Illegal Fishing [Closed Season].



The song was produced in collaboration with the Ministry of Fisheries and the Ghana Sustainable Fisheries Management Project to help increase awareness on marine littering and expose wrongful practices in the fishing industry.



Presenting the award at the just ended VGMA, Director of Legal and External Affairs at Vodafone, Geta Striggner-Quartey called for a joint effort to preserve the environment.



In a brief remark during the VGMA, Geta said: Imagine a world without clean lakes, rivers and oceans. Can we survive? It is our collective responsibility to nourish our planet and keep it safe for the future. At Vodafone, we have chosen to embark on a journey to save the planet but we cannot do it alone, we need each and everybody to support this crusade. We believe that together, we can make the desired impact.



The 22nd Edition of the Vodafone Ghana Music Awards, Ghanas most anticipated music event and biggest festival, was held over the weekend at the Accra International Conference Centre.

Source: Peacefmonline.com









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NIGERIA: A mild drama recently occurred in Dakanbi community somewhere in the South West in Nigeria after residents filed out to praise God after they found a chicken in their community clucking what they could interpret as Olohun Dakun meaning God have mercy.



One of the elderly women said - This is where the chikens come to eat when they leave their owners house. I sat down and heard the chicken say ''Olohun Dakun''. I said this is a miracle ooo...from the mouth of a chicken? The second day, it stood there again and clucked ''Olohun Dakun''.

I called Iya Kazeem and told her to come that a miracle is happening here, a chicken is clucking Olohun Dakun.''



Another resident, a female, while giving an account of how they found the ''wonder chicken'', said.

''You see, on Thursday, a man who I know told me that in the middle of the night, he heard a chicken clucking Olohun Dakun but he didn't see the chicken. When he told us that were with him, I didn't take it serious.



However, when this old woman called me to come and see a chicken that was clucking Olohun Dakun, I went and saw the chicken and we started praising God. I asked who owns the chicken and they told me it is a christain woman living in this neighborhood.



When she came to my shop to buy something, she told me that this is what people were saying about her chicken. I told her it is true. She also witnessed as the chicken again clucked Olohun Dakun and said the chicken was giving a message'.'



The owner of the chicken, Mummy Blessing also confirmed that her chicken also clucked ''Olohun Dakun''



The residents gathered in front of the chicken as they prayed for God to have mercy.





Watch the video below...



































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Logansport, IN (46947)

Today

Some clouds in the morning will give way to mainly sunny skies for the afternoon. High around 90F. Winds WSW at 10 to 15 mph..

Tonight

Clear skies with a few passing clouds. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 69F. Winds SW at 5 to 10 mph.
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A healthcare worker administers a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine to a teenager at Holtz Children's Hospital in Miami, Florida, U.S., on Wednesday, May 18, 2021. Coronavirus cases in the U.S. increased 0.1% as compared to the same time yesterday to 33 million, as of 5:49 a.m. New York time, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University and Bloomberg News. Photographer: Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg via Getty Images.
Dining on Gay Street in West Chester has been very popular.
Benjamin Scrogins Wins the bestbet Jacksonville CPPT Main Event ($158,915)

June 29, 2021 Jason Glatzer

Florida has been a hotbed of poker action ever since live poker has resumed with bestbet Jacksonville often the center of attention. Last week was no different with 331 entries battling it out in the bestbet Jacksonville Card Player Poker Tour (CPPT) $2,500 Main Event to generate a $759,360 prize pool.

Benjamin Scrogins put a dominating display at the final table including defeating eight-time WSOP Circuit champion Kyle Cartwright to win the $158,915 top prize. This was a new personal best for Scrogins, who came into the event with $200,000 in lifetime cashes, of which nearly half came in 2017 when he won a Heartland Poker Tour $1,650 Main Event for $94,515.

2021 CPPT Jacksonville Main Event Final Table Results

Place Player Prize 1 Benjamin Scrogins $158,915 2 Kyle Cartwright $105,942 3 Dustin Holladay $77,910 4 Lamare Davis $57,979 5 Jessica Cai $43,669 6 Joseph Crowley $33,292 7 Mac Johnson $25,695 8 Jeremy Joseph $20,081

"My experience here has been amazing. This is my home and I love everybody here"

Every major victory is special, but winning the CPPT Main Event in front of a rail of friends made it even that much more special for Scrogins.

"Having the whole rail here made it feel even better," Scrogins told Card Player officials after the victory. "I almost cried for a second, but I got myself together. My experience here has been amazing. This is my home and I love everybody here. I know most of the dealers by name, and every time I walk into the door its Hey Ben, how are you doing? Its first-name basis. It really is like a home away from home, I got a second family here for sure."

Related: Ever Seen An Eleven-Way Chop? It Happened at RGPS Horseshoe Council Bluffs!

Final Table Action

Dustin Holladay began the eight-player final table as the table captain with Scrogins and Jessica Cai not too far behind.

A trio of players quickly hit the rail in Jeremy Joseph (eighth - $20,081), Mac Johnson (seventh - $25,695), and Joseph Crowley (sixth - $33,292).

Cartwright had a small lead with five players remaining before he won a huge hand while sending Cai to the rail. Cai check-jammed the turn holding on a board. Cartwright called with for top pair and ended Cai's Main Event run in fifth place for $43,669 after a blank came on the river.

Scrogins then eliminated a short-stacked Lamare Davis and soon after Holladay regained his throne as the chip leader after he doubled against Cartwright.

Related: Wynn Millions Massacre: Foxen Eliminates Kenney in Brutal Quads-Over-Boat Cooler

Holladay Eliminated on a Massive Cooler

Holladay's reign as the table captain would soon come to an end, as would his quest for the title on a cooler of a hand. Scrogins min-raised the button with and was called by Holladay from the small blind with .

Both players checked after Holladay improved to a full house on the flop. Scrogins improved to a better full house after a appeared on the turn and got some value with Holladay betting and calling a raise.

Holladay then check-jammed after a blank completed the board on the river. Scrogins made the easy call and Holladay was the first player out on the podium in third place for $77,910.

Heads-Up Action

Scrogins began heads-up play with a huge 4:1 chip advantage over Cartwright. All momentum seemed to be with Cartwright and he soon was able to capture the chip lead once again.

However, momentum in poker is often only as good as your last hand with Scrogins able to regain the lead with stacks close to even when the final hand took place.

Scrogins opened the button with and was called by Cartwright with . Scrogins smashed the flop to improve to trips and got Cartwright to check-call a small bet with air.

The action intensified after the turn improved Scrogins to an unbeatable full house. Cartwright now had an open-ended straight draw called his opponent's check-jam for his tournament life. The river bricked and Cartwright was eliminated in second place for $105,942.

Despite missing out on the victory, Cartwright has been on fire with three big podium finishes including taking third place in the 2021 bestbet Jacksonville Spring Series $2,500 Main Event in March for $88,761.

*Lead image and hand information courtesy of Card Player Magazine
The National Nuclear Security Administration announced on Monday its massive plutonium pit production project at the Savannah River Site had received the green light, teeing up South Carolina for a continued long-term role in the modernization of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

The Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility  where dozens of nuclear weapon cores, known as pits, are expected to be produced  will cost between $6.9 billion and $11.1 billion and will likely be realized between 2032 and 2035.

In terms of cost, $11.1 billion is more than double the figures previously floated. Members of Congress have already questioned the ballpark price tag, which was teased in President Joe Bidens fiscal year 2022 budget blueprint. In terms of schedule, the 2032-2035 window is years late, hamstringing the National Nuclear Security Administrations efforts to produce a mandated amount of the plutonium triggers by 2030.

More concrete baselines are expected in fiscal year 2024, the NNSA said, as designs mature and information congeals. The details published Monday stem from a major project milestone known as Critical Decision-1. A project is effectively finished a Critical Decision-4.

NNSA and Savannah River Nuclear Solutions  the top contractor at the Savannah River Site and the team spearheading the local plutonium pit endeavor  will continue to review this project to improve the fidelity of the current price estimate and schedule, the weapons-and-nonproliferation agency said in its evening announcement.

A video shared by SRS showed three men, including SRNS President and CEO Stuart MacVean, removing a Proposed sticker from the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility sign.

SR Pu Processing Facility design is approved to proceed! reads a tweet from the SRS Twitter account.

The Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility will be constructed using the bones of the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, a nuclear fuel plant that was axed in late 2018 after billions of dollars and years of work had been expended. Leveraging an existing footprint  and not a greenfield  offers a leg up, officials have said.

It's a massive infrastructure program, then-National Nuclear Security Administration boss Lisa Gordon-Hagerty said in a 2019 interview. These are major capital construction projects, and so we decided that it would be in best use of taxpayer dollars if we would repurpose that facility.

The Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility, and the broader SRS, generally represent one-half of the nations plutonium pit push. In 2018, the NNSA and the Department of Defense recommended a two-site strategy for reborn production: 50 plutonium cores would be made per year in South Carolina, they counseled, and 30 more would be made per year in New Mexico, at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The Los Alamos venture was given the go-ahead months ago, at a roughly estimated cost of $2.7 billion to $3.9 billion. The production of 30 pits there is on track for 2026, officials believe.

The acting leader of the National Nuclear Security Administration, Dr. Charles Verdon, in congressional testimony this month said the tandem strategy is the most cost- and time-efficient, despite pricier projections and a schedule slide.

Check back with the Aiken Standard for the latest information.
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Tropical Storm Danny made landfall on the southern South Carolina coast this evening, but will have minimal impacts to the Charleston region beyond rain and gusty winds.

Formerly Tropical Depression Four, the storm hit Pritchards Island, which is just north of Hilton Head, at approximately 8 p.m. on June 28.

It's the fourth named system of the year in the Atlantic basin. Only three times in the past have storms named with a "D" spun up before July 1, University of Miami researcher Brian McNoldy wrote on Twitter.

As it approached the sea islands of Georgia and South Carolina, the formerly disorganized system started showing more of the spin that is characteristic of cyclones and fiercer thunderstorms began to fire near the center, still offshore and well south of Charleston. The explosive thunderstorms erupted quickly over the warm waters of the Gulf Stream.

But with little time left over water, the chances of strengthening further before an expected landfall south of Charleston were slim.

Wind gusts had packed some punch already. One recorded at Folly Beach reached 41 mph. According to Dominion Energy's outage reporting system, about 574 households were without power in Berkeley, Charleston and Dorchester counties.

A tropical storm warning remains in effect for South Carolina's coastal waters from the Georgia border to just south of Georgetown, and for Charleston and Berkeley counties, according to the National Weather Service's Charleston area office. A flooding advisory was also issued for Beaufort and Jasper Counties.

The main flooding risk in the Charleston area could come this evening as the system moves ashore, and the tide rises at the same time. The next high tide at midnight is expected to reach 6.9 feet, just below the point where the lowest areas of the region begin to flood. But bands of rain earlier in the day had failed to produce much inundation.

Danny's center was moving west-northwest around 16 mph, the Hurricane Center said, and packed 45 mph sustained winds, with stronger gusts.

Tropical Depression #Four Advisory 1A: Reconnaissance Aircraft Investigating Tropical Depression Located Just Offshore the Coast of South Carolina. https://t.co/VqHn0u1vgc  National Hurricane Center (@NHC_Atlantic) June 28, 2021

"Some slight strengthening is expected today, and the depression is forecast to become a tropical storm before it makes landfall," the Hurricane Center said. "Rapid weakening is forecast after landfall occurs."

Residents should be wary of rainfall, meteorologists said. The system is capable of producing 1 to 3 inches of rain broadly, with higher amounts in some areas. The heaviest rain is expected south of Charleston, according to the Weather Service, but the Holy City could see downpours and gusty winds.

"This region has been dry, limiting potential widespread flooding impacts, however, local flooding impacts, especially in urban areas along the southern South Carolina and Georgia coasts, cannot be ruled out at this time," the Hurricane Center said.

About 1 to 2 inches of rain is possible in the South Carolina Upstate, Georgia Piedmont and into northeastern Alabama, forecasters said.

Forecasters also planned to keep an eye on any storm surge impacts from Port Royal Sound to the South Santee River.

If the surge comes at high tide, water could reach 1 to 3 feet above ground level, they said.

Shannon Scaff, Charleston's emergency management director, said city agencies stand ready to act if needed.

As of the most recent forecast, it didn't seem like the storm system would cause more than some potentially heavy rain, something Scaff said the city is well-versed in dealing with.

Like other emergency officials, he cautioned anyone who has to drive in the afternoon or evening hours to use caution.

Tropical systems in particular can cause significant localized downpours and flash flooding even though average rainfall may be moderate or minimal, Scaff said.

Danny, which the Hurricane Center called a "tiny" storm, was expected to move over Georgia on Tuesday and dissipate over that state's mountains on Tuesday night.

This story is developing. Check back for more.
COLUMBIA  South Carolina's prisons agency has reached a $6 million settlement resolving dozens of lawsuits stemming from America's deadliest prison riot in a generation that left seven dead and many more wounded.

Agency officials will seek approval of the deal June 29 from a state fiscal oversight board, according to an agenda posted online.

The settlement would wrap up 81 lawsuits filed on behalf of inmates in state and federal court, according to the brief explanation in paperwork submitted for the State Fiscal Accountability Authority.

The Corrections Department provided no further information ahead of the meeting.

The agency is "asking permission to move forward with a settlement in the Lee riot cases," said spokeswoman Chrysti Shain.

The deal comes more than three years after the riot at Lee Correctional Institution in rural Bishopville left seven inmates dead and dozens injured. Many of the lawsuits argued prison officials failed to keep prisoners safe.

"Were excited about the possibility of moving further toward a settlement," said attorney Bakari Sellers, who represents several families. "The state has worked diligently to put this matter behind them." As for the details, he responded: "At the end of the day, we still have to dot some 'i's and cross some 't's, but we feel like a dark chapter in the Department of Corrections history will finally be closed."

The April 2018 violence erupted after 24-year-old Damonte Rivera went into the unlocked cell of Michael Milledge, a well-liked 44-year-old prisoner, and stabbed him to death. Blood gang members then retaliated against Rivera, killing him and attacking members of his gang, authorities said.

The violence then spread through their dorm and into two neighboring housing units as gang members exacted retribution. Authorities blamed cellphones for allowing inmates in those dorms to communicate with one another and spread the violence.

The seven inmates slain ranged in age from 24 to 44. Some were new to the prison; others had been housed there for years. Their crimes included domestic violence, drug possession and murder.

The other inmates who died were Eddie Gaskins, 32; Joshua Jenkins, 33; Cornelius McClary, 33; Raymond Scott, 28; and Corey Scott, 38.

Twenty-nine men were indicted last December on 79 charges ranging from assault by mob to murder. None of those cases has gone to trial.

Three men are accused of murder in connection with Rivera's death. That charge carries penalties of 30 years to life or potentially the death penalty.

Murder charges were not filed in the other killings. However, 18 inmates were charged with first-degree assault and battery by a mob resulting in death, which carries a minimum 30-year sentence.

In 2019, The Post and Courier detailed how the brutality at Lee exploded between gangs after Milledge's killing. Reporters collected thousands of pages of records, interviewed experts and prison staff, and communicated with more than 100 inmates who either witnessed the violence or were touched by it. The coverage won several national awards.
A coalition of public-interest groups on Tuesday said it was suing the Department of Energy and its National Nuclear Security Administration, accusing the agencies of shirking environmental obligations in their ongoing efforts to produce nuclear weapon cores, also known as pits.

The announced legal action is a salvo in a long-simmering standoff between the groups  including Savannah River Site Watch, Nuclear Watch New Mexico, and Tri-Valley CAREs  and the federal government, which has denied wrongdoing.

The watchdogs in February lobbied the newly installed Biden administration to conduct a holistic review of contemporary plutonium pit production plans, which came to prominence under the Trump administration and have since been endorsed by Biden's energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm, and his choice to lead the NNSA, Jill Hruby.

The lawsuit seeks to prevent the Energy Department from moving forward until a more rigorous evaluation is done. Such analysis could take months  or years  to complete, on top of the potentially protracted litigation.

We do not want to have the community pitted against the government, but we see that is what is happening, said Queen Quet, the chieftess of the Gullah Geechee Nation.

In a March letter to the S.C. Environmental Law Project, which is representing the groups, the NNSA said its environmental evaluations for plutonium pit production were thorough and in accordance with the governing National Environmental Policy Act.

At this point, the NEPA review for pit production is complete, wrote Timothy Fischer, the NNSA's general counsel, and the department has no current plans to revisit the NEPA review.

That was, apparently, an unsatisfactory answer. No additional, comprehensive environmental documentation has since been published.

NNSA is robbing the public of its right to comment on alternatives, yet those of us in frontline communities will bear the brunt of this refusal, said Marylia Kelley of Tri-Valley CAREs, a monitor based in Livermore, California. It is workers and the public who will suffer the risks of accidents, spills, leaks, radioactive exposures, and the production and transportation of plutonium wastes.

The announcement from the groups and the S.C. Environmental Law Project, a nonprofit, comes one day after the NNSA said the pit plant at SRS had been greenlighted. Early estimates show the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility will cost between $6.9 billion and $11.1 billion  far more than previously expected. It is also expected to be finished between 2032-2035, years late.

DOEs rushed planning to unnecessarily expand nuclear bomb production has already resulted in a massive cost increase and significant delays in the SRS plutonium bomb plant, said Tom Clements, the director of Columbia-based Savannah River Site Watch. While more delays and cost increases appear likely, it is essential that DOE slow down and comply with requisite environmental laws before jumping into ill-conceived plans to expand plutonium pit production which would be a key part of a dangerous new nuclear arms race.

The last place the plutonium triggers were made at scale, the Rocky Flats Plant in Colorado, was scuttled following an environmental investigation and raid involving the FBI and the EPA.

The NNSA is now pursuing a tandem strategy for pit production, leaning on South Carolina and New Mexico. At least 50 cores per year will be produced at SRS, officials have pledged, and at least 30 cores per year will be made at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

A 2030 deadline, though, will not be met, budget documents and congressional testimony show.
A PBS series that filmed episodes for its second season in Charleston has been nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award.

"The Good Road," a travel docuseries that highlights philanthropy around the world, was nominated in the category of "Outstanding Multiple Camera Editing."

For the first season, hosts Earl Bridges and Craig Martin traveled to Thailand, Tanzania, Uganda, Myanmar, Kenya and Alabama to explore philanthropy in each region.

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Topics such as inner-city violence, anti-poaching work, technology in pursuit of doing good, incarceration and environmental activism were all discussed.

Characters such as punk rockers in Myanmar, game rangers with assault weapons in Kenya and drug dealers in Alabama told their personal stories on camera.

Drone shots were mixed with close-up camera shots and interviews with do-gooders at each location.

In Charleston, the crew spent several days during March filming episodes that will be released for the second season of the show.

Bridges, a resident of Charleston, wanted these episodes to home in on the area's Jewish heritage, Gullah-Geechee influence and LGBTQ history.

Underneath this beautiful veneer of our genteel city, there are many complexities that are simply not discussed, Bridges told The Post and Courier in March. We took some time to celebrate and show off the beauty of the Lowcountry while acknowledging that there is still a lot that needs to be addressed.

Among people interviewed were Osei Chandler, a South Carolina Public Radio host and jazz producer with over 40 years of experience in social service; Quentin Baxter, drummer of Grammy-winning Gullah music group Ranky Tanky; Harlan Greene, LGBTQ author and historian; Daron Calhoun, public programming coordinator at the Avery Research Center; Nakia Wigfall, a fifth-generation sweetgrass basket weaver; Anita Rosenberg, president of the historical Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim synagogue; the Palmer brothers, Dave and Ed, Gullah fishermen and oyster pickers; and Adam Parker, The Post and Couriers history and race reporter.

Its not the top 10 places to get shrimp and grits," said Bridges. "Its not heres five dive bars. Were not a guide. Were storytellers. And we always say we want to talk to Batman, not Superman.

The second season of The Good Road premieres on PBS on Aug. 1.
IRMO  More than 500 staff members and teachers from across the Lexington-Richland 5 district paid tribute to resigning superintendent Christina Melton through thank you cards, a portrait and other mementoes that were unveiled June 28 to the school system's trustees at a meeting that also saw them censure a former colleague for leaking details of closed door talks that led to her departure.

"We stand before you tonight to honor Dr. Melton in front of the board and our community," Dutch Fork High School teacher Ali Hendrick said. "To say that many of us were shocked after the June 14 board meeting was an understatement. After a year of hardship and challenge, it left many of us feeling confused, angry and heartbroken."

Hendrick and two other teachers came to the meeting with boxes full of the materials, which Hendrick said came from employees at every school in the district. It was the first time the public had a chance to address the board since Melton tearfully announced on June 14 that shed be leaving at month's end from the 17,500-student district about 15 miles outside of Columbia.

Board chairwoman Jan Hammond vowed that Melton would receive the items. Melton, whose last day is June 30, did not attend the meeting.

Neither did long-time trustee Ed White, who resigned about 20 minutes before Melton on June 14. His colleagues censured him June 28 for violating several board policies including disclosure of contractual information and ethics violations.

"It's not breaking the law, but it's breaking the trust among the seven of us," Hammond said after proposing the public rebuke, which carries no punishment. "Mr. White has caused irreparable harm to this school district and its superintendent."

White, first elected in 2002, walked out of the June 14 meeting after saying he was resigning on the spot.

He later issued a statement accusing several trustees of creating a hostile work environment and undermining Meltons authority, creating a situation that made it impossible for her to continue.

They wanted to present the false facade that she had resigned and keep it from the public until after the school year adjourned, ostensibly to avoid the criticism they would receive for their actions, White said in a scathing June 16 letter. He was not available for comment June 28.

Trustees voted 4-2 to censure White, though all agreed his actions were inappropriate.

Trustees Rebecca Blackburn Hines and Matt Hogan voted against the censure, while Nikki Gardner, Jan Hammond, Catherine Huddle and Ken Loveless were in favor.

"We need to stop the destructive behavior and move forward as a district, and I absolutely believe that," Hines said. "We need to go into the next year and set up everyone for success. What are we hoping to accomplish by this censure?"

Neither Melton nor the board has said why she is leaving, though she clashed with some parents and trustees over COVID-19 precautions, including limiting in-person learning and requiring masks.

Melton, who was appointed superintendent in 2018, was named South Carolinas best for 2022 in May but had to give back the award because only those are actively on the job are eligible.

The district could pay out as much as $415,000 through next summer in compensation for the outgoing and interim superintendents.

Melton is receiving a $226,000 buyout and Irmo-based consulting firm HeartEd getting $14,583 a month for its founder, Akil Ross, to serve as head of schools starting July 1. It was not immediately known how many other superintendents in the state are compensated through firms.

The board voted unanimously June 22 to hire Ross, the 2018 National Secondary Principal of the Year while he was leading Chapin High School. He attended the June 28 session in an unofficial capacity.
COLUMBIA  A former state lawmaker from Columbia pleaded guilty June 29 and was sentenced to 18 months in prison for misconduct in office and perjury for lying to the state grand jury as part of the long-running Statehouse corruption probe.

With this conviction, Jim Harrison is believed to be the first former South Carolina legislator to be sent to prison for illegal acts related to his time in office since the Operation Lost Trust scandal, an FBI-led bribery and corruption investigation that in the 1990s ended with 27 convictions or guilty pleas  17 of them from state legislators.

Harrison had no reaction during the hearing and declined to address the court. His attorney asked that Harrison receive the same sentence handed down when he was originally convicted. That conviction was vacated by the S.C. Supreme Court, setting up the hearing June 29.

The former Republican House Judiciary Committee chairman was convicted in 2018 of secretly profiting from work he did for the influential Richard Quinn & Associates consulting firm, failing to report that he earned nearly $1 million while working for Quinn for 13 years. Harrison said he worked on campaigns, but the investigation found Harrison received cuts of retainers paid to the firm by corporate clients.

The firm had been one the most powerful around the Statehouse until allegations arose that the Quinns made millions by illegally influencing legislation to benefit corporate and political clients. The firm, known for helping GOP politicians, was fined for illegal lobbying as part of the probe.

The S.C. Supreme Court voted 3-2 in January to vacate the original conviction saying that the special prosecutor appointed to the case, Democratic 1st Circuit Solicitor David Pascoe of Orangeburg, overstepped his mandate and should not have pursued misconduct charges against Harrison.

S.C. Attorney General Alan Wilson had recused himself from the case because of a conflict of interest with targets of the investigation, namely Quinn, his one-time campaign manager.

A new special prosecutor appointed by the Attorney General's Office, 7th Circuit Solicitor Barry Barnette, a Spartanburg Republican, renewed the corruption crimes Harrison pleaded to June 29.

Harrison entered an Alford plea, pleading guilty without admitting guilt, to statutory and common law misconduct in office.

Circuit Judge Carmen Mullen upheld a previous 18-month sentence issued for perjury. Harrison will serve time for all three crimes concurrently.

"She did the right thing," Pascoe said of the perjury sentence. "It was a good day."

Harrison, 70, will report to prison, surrendering himself to the state Department of Corrections on July 1, though hell likely serve only a fraction of his time due to state laws that allow prisoners to cut down sentences for good behavior and work. Harrisons attorney also asked for special considerations due to his age and heart-related health ailments.

The Statehouse probe that netted Harrison and others came out of a State Law Enforcement Division report written following an investigation into then-House Speaker Bobby Harrell. The Charleston Republican pleaded guilty in 2014 to misusing campaign cash and agreed to resign from office.

Quinn  once a political adviser to presidential candidates, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham and Gov. Henry McMaster  has been indicted twice over the course of the investigation. Quinn also advised top corporations, including AT&T and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of South Carolina, and large state agencies, including the University of South Carolina and the State Ports Authority.

Quinns first illegal lobbying and conspiracy charges were dropped in 2017 when his son, former state Rep. Rick Quinn, agreed to plead guilty to a misconduct charge for failing to include a financial conflict on disclosure forms. Rick Quinn, a Lexington Republican, served probation and resigned from office as part of his plea.

Richard Quinn then was indicted again about two years ago on 11 counts of perjury and one count of obstruction of justice, accused of lying to the state grand jury.

House Majority Leader Jim Merrill, a Daniel Island Republican, pleaded guilty to a misconduct charge and resigned from office in 2017. He received probation.

Pascoe, during his six year span in charge of the probe, also won a guilty plea on misconduct charges from state Sen. John Courson, who agreed to resign. He yet to be sentenced.

Barnette has taken over to handle lingering corruption and perjury cases against former state Rep. Tracy Edge, of North Myrtle Beach, Courson and Richard Quinn.

Andy Shain contributed to this report from Columbia.
GEORGETOWN  When Dedric Bonds took over as Winyah Auditorium's director in 2017, the venue primarily acted as a rental facility for different Georgetown city and county groups, he said.

Now, Bonds said the nonprofit auditorium is also offering musical performances, and acting as a space unlike any other within a 60-mile radius.

And for the first time in its history, Winyah Auditorium is offering a free summer concert series of several different local bands and musicians. On June 18, Bonds said the auditorium saw close to 400 people show up to see the band, Tru Sol.

After the pandemic kept everyone inside and isolated for the last year, auditorium board member Brad Freeman said it was inspiring to see everyone come together again.

"The crazy thing about (Winyah Auditorium) is no one knows about it, which is crazy to me," Freeman said. "It is not a bar band type of atmosphere by any stretch of the imagination."

Winyah Auditorium also has Saturday markets four weekends in June and July from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. where local vendors sell things like paintings and Gullah sweetgrass baskets. Live music is played for free for market visitors to enjoy, but following the next Saturday market July 10, The Delta Circus, a Rolling Stones tribute band, will be playing a ticketed show in the auditorium at 7 p.m.

Before the show, though, at 5 p.m., Bonds said there will also be a Winyah High and Howard High schools alumni reunion.

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Decades ago, Winyah High School was the historically predominantly White high school, Bonds said, while Howard was the historically predominantly Black high school. When Winyah High School burned down in the 80s, it merged with Howard High School to make Georgetown High School.

Bonds and Freeman said the reunion is meant to bring the entire Georgetown community together and show that no matter where someone went to school, they all are connected through their community.

"We want to make it a point to all those from the different communities around our area that our doors are open, and we want everybody to come in and feel loved," Freeman said.

Throughout the last four years as director, Bonds said some of his proudest achievements have been renovating the balcony to add more seating and building partnerships with various donor and fundraisers to make the auditorium all he imagined it to be. But the thing that sticks out the most is the pride he has in being able to offer Georgetown something he said it hasn't had much of, but deserves: a thriving music scene.

"(Georgetown) has a beautiful waterfront, we've got great restaurants and the one thing we were missing was the music venue, and we have that now," Freeman said. "We hope people will take a second to try something new, go off the beaten path and come see us."

The next Saturday market is July 10 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. followed by The Delta Circus concert.
FOUNTAIN INN  A coming wastewater pump station and proposed subdivisions are poised to transform hundreds of acres in southwest Fountain Inn and significantly expand the city's population.

The planned developments will change the landscape directly west of Interstate 385 and north of Highway 418. Coming projects include 361 houses that Mark III properties plans to build on 122 acres off of Jenkins Bridge Road. About a mile to the north, another developer intends to build 312 houses and townhomes off of Wilson Bridge Road.

Fountain Inn City Council also recently approved the annexation of a 139 acre property off Parsons Road in the same area, where a homebuilder plans to construct close to 300 homes.

"That's definitely the farthest west our city limits has gone and probably will go," City Administrator Shawn Bell said of the Parsons Road property.

Those subdivisions alone would add roughly 1,000 residences to Fountain Inn, which has a population of about 9,300 according to 2019 Census estimates.

Bell said all of that development would be connected to the coming Renewable Water Resources (ReWa) pump station, which will extend sewer lines along the Payne Branch Creek basin that runs through the area.

While swaths of largely untouched land in that corridor have attracted developer interest for several years, a lack infrastructure would have required homebuilders to install septic tanks to service any new subdivisions.

ReWa is constructing the $9.7 million pump station, which is set to be completed in late 2022, in response to that growing demand, according to an email from Chad Lawson, a spokesman for the wastewater system. Bell said the coming pump station, in turn, has made the area more attractive to a wider range of developers. The new pump station will be located southwest of downtown Fountain Inn between Highway 418 and Tall Pines Road.

In addition to the subdivisions that are already in the works, Bell said he expects two more large properties will be sold to developers in the near future: a 138-acre tract just north of the Parsons Road property that was recently annexed into the city, and another 103 acres directly to the east.

Another planned subdivision, which would not be connected to the pump station, would add 54 homes to an area on Fairview Street Extension.

The coming surge in development would redefine that part of the city, which is currently almost entirely farmland or woodlands, raising concerns about how the growth will impact surrounding roads.

Ahead of the recent vote to annex the Parsons Road property, Waverly Wilkes of Gray Engineering told council the developer plans to widen Parsons from the southernmost border of the tract to Wilson Bridge Road. But they could not acquire the right-of-way to expand the road up to Highway 418, leaving Parsons one lane approaching one of the main thoroughfares in the area.

"It's just an extremely narrow county road that was just not built for that type of traffic," Bell said. "But we feel fairly comfortable that at least that portion of Parsons Road (to Wilson Bridge) will be able to able to handle that additional traffic. So we feel like that was a win."

The state Department of Transportation owns Wilson Bridge Road and Highway 418, and many of the others are owned by Greenville County. Bell said SCDOT has preliminary plans to improve several roads in the area, including Highway 418, which would help meet the needs of the growth coming in the next several years.
The S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control said it is important for all students to get vaccinated against COVID-19 as quick as possible before the upcoming school year.

As of now, only the two-dose Pfizer vaccine is authorized for people 12 and older. Those who receive the first dose must wait at least three weeks to get the second one.

"It takes about five weeks to achieve full vaccination, so students who are eligible for the vaccine don't have a lot of time to spare if they want to protect themselves and their friends during the upcoming school year," said Dr. Brannon Traxler, public health director at DHEC.

Fully vaccinated students will not have to miss school or extracurricular activities if they are identified as a close contact to someone who has COVID-19. But unvaccinated students would need to quarantine and refrain from such activities, DHEC said in a news release.

The agency will develop guidance for South Carolina schools once the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention publishes its updated operations guidance for the 2021-22 academic year within the next few weeks.

"In the meantime, we cannot stress how important it is for everyone eligible to get vaccinated before the new school year commences," Traxler said. "Parents, teachers, and students deserve the right to attend or visit school without worrying about getting sick."

Statewide numbers

New cases reported: 55 confirmed, 40 probable.

Total cases in S.C.: 493,069 confirmed, 103,643 probable.

Percent positive: 1.7 percent.

New deaths reported: 3 confirmed, 0 probable.

Total deaths in S.C.: 8,637 confirmed, 1,180 probable.

Percent of ICU beds filled: 65.3 percent.

S.C. residents vaccinated

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DHEC's vaccine dashboard shows that 48.3 percent of the state's residents have received at least one shot of a COVID-19 vaccine.

Hardest-hit areas

In the total number of newly confirmed cases, Anderson (3), Charleston County (4), Dorchester (3), Greenville (8), Horry County (4), Richland (3) and York County (4) saw the highest totals.

What about tri-county?

Charleston County had 4 new cases on June 29, while Berkeley County had none and Dorchester County had 3.

Deaths

One of the deaths from COVID-19 confirmed June 29 were people 35 to 64. Two were patients age 65 or older.

Hospitalizations

Of the 124 COVID-19 patients hospitalized as of June 30, 37 were in the ICU and 16 were using ventilators.

What do experts say?

Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines have been all deemed safe and effected by the CDC.

The Pfizer vaccine is available to anyone 12 and older and the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson shots are available to those 18 and up.

Folks who opt for the two-shot Pfizer or Moderna vaccines should get the second dose as close to the recommended three-week and four-week intervals, respectively. But the second shot may be given up to six weeks after the first dose, if necessary, according to the CDC.
Kingstree, SC (29556)

Today

Generally sunny despite a few afternoon clouds. High 91F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

Partly to mostly cloudy. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 64F. Winds light and variable.
A South Carolina man was charged June 29 on allegations he participated in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol building.

George Amos Tenney III, 34, of Anderson, is accused of entering the U.S. Capitol building with a Texas man, Darrell Alan Youngers, after a violent mob overpowered Capitol police Jan. 6 and stormed the building, according to a federal criminal complaint.

Tenney, an administrator for the Facebook page "The PowerHouse Patriot," told officers in an interview he was only in the building for "three or four minutes" before realizing he should not be there. He said he did not engage in violence or cause property damage.

However, surveillance footage showed Tenney and Youngers scuffling with Capitol police officers while attempting to open doors to the building's east foyer during the riot, the complaint alleges.

Authorities say Tenney shoved one of the doors open before an officer pushed him aside. Tenney then grabbed the officer and had a "heated conversation," during which Tenney said "You're not going to stop us," the complaint claims.

As rioters began to stream through the rotunda, the complaint says Tenney shouted: "Come on, Americans!"

Tenney was interviewed by law enforcement officers in February, the complaint states. He said he attended the "Save America" rally that preceded the riot, where he met Youngers and William Robert Norwood III, of Boiling Springs.

Norwood, 37, was charged in March in connection to the riot.

Authorities say they have video of Norwood, Tenney and a third man being interviewed by an acquaintance after the riot. All three men wore masks to hide their identity, but the person who filmed the interview was able to identify Tenney for law enforcement officers.

Tenney and Youngers are charged with knowingly entering or remaining in a restricted building without lawful authority, disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building, disorderly conduct in a Capitol building and parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol building.

Tenney is also charged with interfering with a law enforcement officer during civil disorder and obstruction of justice.

Court records indicate Tenney was arrested June 29 and released on a $25,000 unsecured bond. He was also appointed a public defender.

The FBI's Houston office announced on Twitter June 29 that Youngers was also arrested in the case.
Results from more than 4,000 responses to a community survey asking how the Charleston County School District should use millions in federal COVID-19 aid show that parents want to see progress.

At a board meeting June 28, Superintendent Gerrita Postlewait presented the results from the survey, which was sent to families on June 17. The survey will inform the district's plan for around $163.1 million in federal aid in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The board also gave final approval to the district's 2022 budget. Some Charleston County property owners will see a tax increase.

The federal money is the last in a round of three packages sent from the federal government. In total the district is receiving $249 million, but the survey will only influence how the district uses the $163.1 million from the third package.

The rest of the money was used to fund new air filters, plexiglass barriers, personal protective equipment and other pandemic-related measures at the beginning of the year. A majority of that money will also be used to fund initiatives to address learning loss due to the pandemic.

Postlewait said the survey provided the district with six main areas to focus on when planning for the third package of funding. Those areas include:

Mental health services and support

Activities to address needs of low-incomes students and impacted subgroups

Addressing learning loss among students

Summer learning and supplemental afterschool

Educational technology for students

Indoor air quality in schools

Involving the community

Postlewait said the district will be asking for further community input in a number of ways. The district will post the six areas of focus and ask for feedback from families and the community.

District officials will also be calling around 480 phone numbers connected to families in high-poverty schools. Postlewait said the goal is to hear what families of the district's most vulnerable students need.

The district will also host a variety of community meetings and events throughout the summer. When all of that input is collected, the district will be developing proposals for the money, which the board will vote on Aug. 23, the day before the final plan has to be sent to the federal government.

Even with the district's outlined plan for how it will involve community input, some board members expressed concerns about the challenge of getting all the feedback the district needs in the 56 days remaining before the Aug. 24 deadline.

"That's a little bit of time to make a lot of heavy decisions among 50,000 parents," board member Cindy Bohn Coats said.

Board member Kristen French suggested that the district develop an accountability committee to ensure the money isn't mismanaged. Postlewait said the district hasn't yet thought about how it will keep itself accountable for the money, but it's on the to-do list.

The weight of the potential impact of the money and the district's responsibility to use it quickly and efficiently is not lost on Postlewait or her team.

"I don't think it's possible to add to our stress level," she said.

Budget changes

At the meeting, the board also voted 8-1 in final approval a $618.3 million 2022 general operating budget, which covers salaries, materials, learning services, reserves and payments to charter and private schools.

The money in the budget does not include the federal COVID-19 aid.

The budget is a $4.9 million increase from the initial 2022 budget the board approved on May 24 and a $32.3 million increase from the 2021 budget. The updated budget also includes a greater tax increase  about 3 percent in total  for some property owners in the county.

The tax increase means people who own a property that they don't live in worth $100,000 would be taxed $30.60. Under the original proposed budget, that property owner would pay $20.40.

Business owners with property assessed at $500,000 would pay $153 as opposed to the $102 that property owners would pay under the original budget. And a person who owns a car $20,000 would pay $6.12 opposed to $4.08 under the original budget.

People who live in their homes rather than renting them out won't see an increase to their taxes. In total the increase to taxes means $15 million of added revenue for the district.

Chief Financial Officer Don Kennedy said the increase in revenue helps cover the district's plan to increase teacher pay. The money covers a $1,000 increase to all teacher salaries and a 1.2 percent cost-of-living adjustment.

The money also covers a plan to allow teachers with 26 years experience to receive an annual "step" raise. Currently, the district allows "step increases," which take into account degree-level and experience to determine teacher pay, through a teacher's 25th year. Next year, teachers going into the 26th year will also receive a salary increase.

Over the next four years, the district hopes to increase that step maximum to 30 years. The district also plans to get non-teaching staff up to 100 percent of market value by 2026 through a similar phased approach.

Coats was the only board member to vote against the budget.
DARLINGTON  Jordan Andrew Hudson, the son of Darlington County Sheriff James Hudson Jr., was arrested Sunday and accused of failing to abide by the conditions of his bond in a 2020 attempted murder case.

Sheriff Hudson said he initiated the revocation of his son's bond because he felt the 28-year-old man was "not abiding by his conditions as he should," according to a June 29 statement from the Darlington County Sheriff's Office.

Jordan Hudson is charged with attempted murder and using a firearm during commission of a felony. South Carolina Now reported he's accused of shooting a person in the back during a fight Aug. 9 in Darlington County.

Hudson was released in December on a $50,000 surety bond while awaiting trial on the attempted murder charge and a second felony  using a firearm during commission of a felony.

James Hudson was the Democratic candidate for sheriff at the time of the shooting. He won the general election in November and was sworn into office in January.

James Hudson previously served as deputy chief of the Darlington County Sheriff's Office and chief of police for Hartsville.

Jordan Hudson was transferred to the Dillon County Detention Center, according to booking records. James Hudson said no new charges are pending against his son.
State education officials hope a $20 million partnership between the S.C. Department of Education and the S.C. Arts Commission will help public schools address pandemic-related learning loss.

State Superintendent Molly Spearman announced the partnership at a news conference on June 29. The state is dipping into a pot of $211.2 million in federal COVID-19 relief funding to pay for the effort, which will ultimately expand arts education throughout the state.

A former music teacher herself, Spearman said shes seen firsthand how arts education can help students improve in other subject areas.

It breaks my heart when I go out to some areas of the state and the district has no arts (program), Spearman said.

The money comes from $2.1 billion sent to the state as part of the third package of coronavirus aid the federal government is sending to state education departments. Ninety percent of that money is being sent directly to school districts to address learning loss locally. The remaining $211.2 million is to be used for state-level activities to address learning loss and pay for summer enrichment and after-school programs.

After collecting feedback for how it should use the money, Spearman said there was a strong indication that people wanted to see more arts education.

As part of the feedback, the Arts Commission submitted a proposal to help teachers fill learning loss gaps in the arts, use arts to help remediate core subjects such as math and reading, and provide arts-based summer and after-school programs throughout the state.

The funding lasts for three years, in which time the commission plans to increase access to quality arts education; develop arts-rich learning environments; build, restore, expand and support infrastructure for arts learning at the district level; and research and develop new instructional practices.

This money is more funding than the commission is used to having access to, Executive Director David Platts said.

The $20 million will help the commission complete one of its main goals: to have an arts program in every school district and school in the state.

It is time to expand that opportunity to every student in South Carolina regardless of where they happen to be geographically, regardless of what their opportunities may be when it comes to the arts, Platts said. It is part of our mission at the South Carolina Arts Commission, but we havent had the funding to do it.

The commission plans to use a number of partnerships to help complete its goals.

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Much of the initiative will be facilitated through the Arts in Basic Curriculum Project. The project works to implement arts-based curriculums in every school by allowing schools to partner and receive funding through the commission. It currently serves nearly 44,000 students in 74 schools.

The commission is also expanding its existing projects with the S.C. Governors School for Arts & Humanities in Greenville and Engaging Creative Minds, a Charleston nonprofit that provides arts-related summer camps.

Through the partnership with the Governors School, the commission has brought theater to summer reading camps. The goal is to have students experience their reading material through the lens of drama and theater.

Platts said the commission hopes to expand the Governor's School program and create more opportunities for core curriculum to involve the arts.

This just gives students who may not have had an opportunity to experience the arts the opportunity to do so, Platts said.
North Augusta Forward presented their strategic plan for the Main Street area to city council on Monday evening.

The Main Street Movement focuses on locally powered businesses as a way to revitalize the downtown area.

The downtown roadmap shows the addition of sidewalks, trees and city banners.

Avery Spears-Mahoney, the director of North Augusta Forward, pinpointed the revenue leakage from the city within a 30-minute drive.

You can have at least five more restaurants, any food-related businesses. That can be fast-casual type opportunities as well, Spears-Mahoney said. ... There is lots of opportunity for downtown and these numbers prove that.

North Augustas success in downtown hinges on food-related retail, Spears-Mahoney added. That would help the retail businesses grow.

Grocery stores and gas stations are the main sources of revenue for North Augusta shopping in the downtown area. However, both council and North Augusta Forward said there are opportunities to bring a wide variety of businesses to the city.

A design committee composed of various North Augusta residents and business owners looked at ways to beautify the downtown area and to slow down traffic coming on Georgia and West Avenues.

The addition of green spaces in downtown areas as well as park benches, self-watering flower baskets, banners to light-poles and trees were mentioned during the presentation.

Council was receptive to the small yet efficient ways to improve the downtown area as a way to continue to bring in tourist spending to the community.

Council member Jenafer McCauley, a small business owner herself, agreed with the plans made by North Augusta Forward and how they will benefit small business owners.

When we come down to Third Thursday, it was nice to kind of have that slowing-down environment, and I think adding small amenities like this are a quick change to see that change is coming too and helping create an environment so that small businesses can thrive, McCauley said. I think thats what we as city members can work toward, continuing to enhance the environment of downtown, and these are small ways to do it quickly.

North Augusta Forward meets the first Tuesday of every month with local businesses on ways to get involved in the community.
Charleston, SC (29403)

Today

Except for a few afternoon clouds, mainly sunny. High 88F. Winds E at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Considerable cloudiness. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 73F. Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph.
On June 14, a letter writer mistakenly wrote that I proposed a right turn lane and flashing yellow light as the remedy for safety and traffic concerns at the intersection of Riverland Drive and Central Park Road.

While I welcome any long overdue improvement to the intersection, that proposed solution belonged to Charleston County Councilwoman Jenny Honeycutt.

My preference was for a smaller version of the stoplight option, which was never presented to the public but which was designed by traffic engineer Howard Chapman at my request.

The stoplight would have taken fewer trees, cost $2 million less, been implemented faster and taken very little heirs property. Our solution was not accepted.

The letter writer was correct in that three years ago, county consultants presented three public options, which were all bad, and the dog bone design was selected by popular vote.

That vote, however, was taken before I-526 was funded. Once funded, I asked DOT officials whether a 10-year traffic standard would suffice rather than a 30-year standard since the Mark Clark was scheduled for completion within the next eight years.

Once complete, Riverland Drive will be significantly relieved of traffic. DOT agreed.

After the vote, a shortened stoplight solution became viable as opposed to the confusing dog bone proposal, which incidentally, has never been tried in South Carolina and there are very few nationwide.

Regardless, I am thankful for Ms. Honeycutts advocacy and councils funding as her suggested improvements will be made quickly and the new sidewalks will be a fabulous addition.

Sen. SANDY SENN

House District 41

Palmcrest Drive

Johns Island

No excuse on Medicaid

During state budget decisions, there was no consideration for expanding Medicaid, which reflects the partisan-driven intransigence of Gov. Henry McMaster.

That means 200,000 low-income adults will remain in the coverage gap, ineligible for traditional Medicare or the premium subsidy features of the Affordable Care Act. The state leaves an enormous amount of federal funds on the table.

Under recent stimulus legislation, South Carolina could receive about $800 million, paid over two years, if the governor chooses to expand Medicaid.

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This exceeds the cost to provide coverage to those 200,000 individuals for at least four years, and the federal government would provide all but 10% of the cost of covering them thereafter, a state obligation that would be less than 1% of the current budget.

Many expansion states have saved 50% or more of their cost by using federal dollars on programs where the state was responsible for 100% of the cost.

It would improve the situation with medical debt and bankruptcies, shore up rural hospitals under stress for having to provide uninsured care, lower mortality rates and enable preventive care for this population segment.

The state will receive $8.9 billion in pandemic relief funds, which the governor is trying to determine how to spend.

Add this to the potential $800 million Medicaid expansion windfall and there is no longer any good faith argument that the state cannot afford expansion.

JUDY MANNING

REN MANNING

Harbor Creek Place

Charleston

Drive, don't use phone

I suggest that state lawmakers pass a law that every time a driver is caught talking on a cellphone or texting, the offender would be fined $100.

And for each time charged and convicted, the drivers fine would increase another $100. (Texting while driving already is illegal in S.C. but carries a lesser fine for first-time offenders.)

When the fine reaches $1,000, the person would lose the use of the phone in the car for a year with another harsh fine.

There are far too many accidents caused by drivers who are talking on the phone or texting while the vehicle is in motion. I would like to see more driving and fewer accidents. Just drive, follow the rules and get to where you are going safely.

ANNA BARNETT

Habitat Boulevard

Johns Island
OMBRE GA'CHONG

As we celebrate the birth of our nation today, the United States of America, it is a good time to take pause and look how far we have come, wh Read more
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Steve Dixel serves as the district director for the U.S. Small Business Administrations (SBA) Eastern Pennsylvania District Office, where he is responsible for the delivery and leadership of the agency's financial and business development programs throughout the eastern 40 counties of Pennsylvania. He has nearly 30 years of federal service, during which he has worked for three federal agencies in the Financial and Operations fields throughout his career.
@PottstownNews on Twitter

Evan Brandt has been a staff reporter for The Mercury for more than 20 years. He covers municipal, school district, political, state government, federal government and environmental news.
As college students, John and I both subscribed to the philosophical doctrine of determinism. We differed, though, on what implications, if any, the doctrine had for the issue of income distribution.

I believed that because the traits that result in wealth are determined by causes beyond our control  the genetics lottery, for example  wealth is undeserved. Therefore, inequality is unjust and should be abolished

John understood that my conclusion didnt follow from our premise. Even if high incomes are undeserved in some philosophical sense, there might be, and indeed are, utilitarian-type reasons to eschew radical income redistribution policies and accept income inequality. Rewarding excellence with income produces benefits for society at large, while government-imposed income leveling is a recipe for mediocrity and possibly repression.

Speaking of repression, I had repressed the memory of making such a sophomoric argument until I read this column by George Will. From it, I learned that a Harvard political philosopher, Michael Sandel, makes essentially the same argument that appealed so much to me as a 21-year old, until John tore into it.

Will summarizes Sandels argument this way:

These days, Sandel writes, we view success the way the Puritans viewed salvation  not as a matter of luck or grace, but as something we earn through our own effort and striving. This is the heart of the meritocratic ethic. Sandel objects to this because expansive conceptions of personal responsibility ignore the fact that no one deserves his or her natural attributes.

Furthermore, the rhetoric of responsibility and of being masters of our fate obscures the degree to which even virtues conducive to thriving in a merit-based society  diligence, industriousness, self-reliance, deferral of gratification  are learned. They are largely inculcated in families, which are the primary transmitters of social capital  the habits necessary for taking advantage of the opportunities offered by an open society.

Thus, whether we succeed due to nature (our natural attributes) or nurture (what we learn from our family), its all a matter of luck, not desert. We arent really responsible for our success. It is pre-determined.

Will dismantles this reasoning with largely the same arguments John used 50 years ago. The talented reap rewards because the public freely benefits from their contributions to satisfying the publics preferences, Will explains. Regardless of whether this means, at some abstract philosophical level, that the rewards are deserved, they should be conferred to make sure the talented maximize their contributions to society. As Will says, no society ever has too much talent.

Will also highlights the undesirability of governments getting into the business of determining moral desert:

Because natural talents are undeserved, some progressives argue, the unequal rewards that the talented reap are, too, and are equitable only to the extent that they serve the public good. As defined by whom? Theres the rub. . . .

Equity, pursued through government-driven allocation of social rewards, drenches society with bitter distributional conflicts because wealth and opportunity are allocated by political power according to shifting standards contested by competing factions. Allowing the market to articulate preferences, without seeking to decide  who will decide who the deciders are?  the preferences moral worth, promotes domestic tranquility.

Will concludes with a point that not even John could have been expected to make 50 years ago when our only global rival was the plodding Soviet Union:

With America facing a future of intensifying commercial and military competitions of increasing sophistication, it is reckless to advocate retreat from meritocracy toward, inevitably, government-engineered mediocrity.

To me, such advocacy seems worse than reckless.

JOHN adds: As undergraduates, Paul and I debated many issues in the most cordial possible way. My recollection is that Paul won most of those arguments. I have no memory of discussing this issue back in our college days, but if I stumbled on the right argument I am happy to take credit for it. Blind pig, acorn.

I only add that, as we have remarked elsewhere, it is deeply ironic that the United States, supposedly founded on free enterprise and open competition, should abandon its meritocratic ethic at the very moment when Chinaa Communist country, supposedly!has become, in all things that matter, a ruthless meritocracy. Meritocracy will always defeat mediocrity.

PAUL adds: Any victories in arguments with John I might have won in college, and I dont recall many, were probably due to force of personality. My clear recollection is that Johns analysis was typically superior to mine.
One of the most elementary lessons of economics is that incentives matter. Youd hardly think this needs demonstrating, but apparently even the Wall Street Journals news pages struggle with basic economics. Today the Journal reports thatlo and behold!job growth is rising faster in states that have ended lavish unemployment bonus payments. I love the gee whiz language of this story:

The number of unemployment-benefit recipients is falling at a faster rate in Missouri and 21 other states canceling enhanced and extended payments this month, suggesting that ending the aid could push more people to take jobs. Federal pandemic aid bills boosted unemployment payments by $300 a person each week and extended those payments for as long as 18 months, well longer than the typical 26 weeks or less. The benefits are set to expire in early September, but states can opt out before then.

A little further down the story offers even more comedy:

Youre starting to see a response to these programs ending, said Aneta Markowska, Jefferies chief financial economist. In recent months employers were having to compete with the government handing out money, and that makes it very hard to attract workers.

I expect we can look forward to similarly insightful Journal new stories such as:

Study Finds No One Washes a Rental Car A study of 2,500 recent car rentals with Hertz found that not one single customer ran the car through a car wash before returning it to Hertz. Social scientists were baffled by this finding, as they had hypothesized that opinion surveys finding rising support for altruistic behavior would lead to an increase in car rental customers having sympathy for Hertz, which is still struggling to exit bankruptcy.

Or maybe:
New York City is being roiled by the latest shooting In Times Square. At 5:15 p.m. yesterday, a criminal started firing a gun in that iconic location, and a bullet struck a Marine:

The man is accused of opening fire at about 5:15 p.m. Sunday and hitting 21-year-old Samuel Poulin in the back with a ricocheting bullet outside the Marriott Hotel on West 45th Street and Broadway, according to police and sources.

The shooter apparently has not yet been apprehended, but here he is:

This is by no means the only time a random person has recently been shot in Times Square.

Sundays shooting occurred just a block from where a 4-year-old girl and two others were hit by stray gunfire just last month.

Still, the city was stung, and the story was featured on the cover of the New York Post:

What do normal people think about taking a risk of getting shot when they visit tourist destinations like Times Square? (Or, to be fair, New York City in general?) Once again, the Post steps up: Flying bullets not on my itinerary: Tourists react to Times Square shooting:

Tourists visiting Times Square on Monday expressed fears for their safety  and the citys future  following the second shooting there in as many months. Worrying about getting killed in a crossfire was not on my itinerary when I booked this trip with my girlfriends  especially while touring the biggest attraction, said Pat Flanagan of Cleveland.

This observer thinks things are worse than in the bad old days of the 1970s:

Retired teacher Arthur Escalera of Harrisburg, Penn., who was vacationing with his wife, said Sundays shooting made it seem like youre in a city thats lost the power to police itself. We remember Times Square the way it was in the 70s and 80s, and if we had tickets to a Broadway show we would consider it a sort of walk on the wild side to walk down 42nd Street at night, he said. But we never feared for our lives. Getting mugged was a fear, but death by a stray bullet? Never.

This dialectic is going on in cities across the country: 1) Times are good, so voters elect feel-good liberal candidates who are supported by the local liberal press. 2) Those liberal politicians enact pro-crime, anti-law enforcement policies, which are cheered on by local media. 3) Crime, especially violent crime, increases rapidly. 4) While local newspapers and other media consider this a mystery, voters think they may have a clue. 5) Liberal politicians scurry for cover.

New York City is currently in stage 5: De Blasio vows to flood the zone in Times Square in wake of shooting. Naive observers, untutored in the ways of liberal double-talk, might say: If flooding the zone is the way to keep violent crime down in Times Square, then maybe defunding the police and placing new restrictions on officers ability to identify and apprehend violent criminals were not good ideas. Especially since shootings in New York City in 2021 are up 43% over the same period last year.

One thing De Blasio has in his favor, however: he can rely on the New York Times to studiously refrain from connecting the dots.
R.J. Bailot stands next to one of the three vehicles used to transport traps and cats for the Canadian Animal Task Force of Tuesday, June 22nd in Suffield, Alberta. Beilot is the co-founder and executive director of the Task Force.
Yes, no matter what

Yes, but it depends on variety

No, for medical reasons, uncertainty

No, principle

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The UK government has promised 12.6 million to support efforts to combat terror in the Lake Chad Basin region covering Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger and Chad.

Britains foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, made the announcement on Monday at a meeting of the Global Coalition against Daesh in Rome.

The funds will be used to support both the regionally-led military fight against Daesh, and projects encouraging its fighters to leave the terrorist group, Mr Raab said.

The coalition meeting comes a day before the seventh anniversary of the terror groups proclamation of its self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria, and two years since the caliphates territorial defeat in Syria.

Foreign ministers from more than 45 countries reconvened in person to discuss deepening cooperation to combat Daesh and its affiliate terrorist groups, including emerging threats across the African continent.

Mr Raab urged the coalition partners to come together to tackle this pressing threat and target the longer-term drivers of terrorism.

He added: The UK is funding a new Conflict, Stability and Security Fund programme for the Lake Chad Basin region of West Africa, where Daeshs affiliate, known as Islamic State West Africa (ISWA), is responsible for significant violence.

According to him, this will support regional military efforts to counter the terrorist groups, as well as efforts to safely demobilise suspected low-level members of terrorist groups.

Two years after ISIS territorial defeat, Mr Raab said its hateful ideology has not gone away.

Worryingly it continues to grow in Africa which is why we must work with our Coalition partners to fight its poisonous propaganda on all fronts, the foreign secretary said.

We stand shoulder to shoulder with our African partners to tackle the growing threat from Daesh-linked groups across Africa, particularly in the Lake Chad Basin.

The Lake Chad Basin countries have experienced traumatic attacks from Boko Haram and other terrorist groups.

Members of Boko Haram and ISWAP reunited recently and pledged their allegiance to one Aba Ibrahim Al-Hashimiyil AlKhuraishi, whom they unanimously ordained as Khalifan Muslimai, translated as The leader of all Muslims.

This comes barely a month after Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau reportedly killed himself after a violent confrontation with some renegade Islamic State of West Africa Province (ISWAP) top commanders.
The former South African president, Jacob Zuma, was on Tuesday sentenced to prison for 15 months after he was found guilty of contempt of court by the Constitutional Court.

The Acting Deputy Chief Justice, Sisi Khampepe, in delivering the verdict, emphasised the extraordinary attacks by Mr Zuma on the legitimacy of the Constitutional Court.

Never before has the authority and legitimacy of the Constitutional Court been subjected (to) these kinds of attacks, the judge said.

If his conduct is met with impunity, he will do significant damage to the rule of law, the judge ruled.

Led by the deputy chief justice, Raymond Zondo, a corruption inquiry Mr Zuma himself began in 2018 had indicted many business tycoons, state-owned companies and government departments of corruption.

In its far-reaching mandate to examine allegations of high-level graft during Mr Zumas presidency from 2009 to 2018, the commission has interrogated more than 250 witnesses since February, one of whom could have been Mr Zuma, but he shunned the invitation, in spite of court orders.

The commission estimates that more than 500 billion rand (about $35 billion) was stolen from the Southern African nations coffers under Mr Zumas watch.

Mr Zuma argued that he was not legally obliged to appear before the panel, adding that Justice Zondo had a personal vendetta against him.

Pressed by the resolve to make the former president  who had made one appearance before he refused to appear subsequently  appear before it, the inquiry commission sought the intervention of the Constitutional Court.

In her ruling on Tuesday, Justice Khampepe dismissed Mr Zumas argument for not appearing before the panel as baseless.

She ruled that it amounted to contempt of the court before sentencing Mr Zuma  who was not present at Tuesdays hearing  to 15 months of jail term.

The former president has five days to present himself to the authorities.

In the event that Mr Zuma fails to do this, the minister of police and the national police commissioner must take all steps that are necessary to ensure he is taken into custody to serve his term, Ms Khampepe said.

The sentencing is a boost to President Cyril Ramaphosa, formerly Mr Zumas deputy, who has vowed to root out corruption and patronage within the ruling ANC. But the sentencing could also potentially split the party especially among the faction loyal to Mr Zuma.

Despite his controversial posturing in South Africa, Mr Zuma still has a considerable popularity back home. There are fears that his sentencing might trigger street protests by sympathizers and supporters.

A bruising internal battle within the ANC leadership in 2017 had humiliated Mr Zuma out of office as he was forced to step down as president, paving way for Mr Ramaphosa to head Africas second-largest economy.

No love has been lost between the two men since then.

After this conviction, Mr Zuma, a disciple of Nelson Mandela, still has a huge legal battle to fight.

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His eight years as president was dogged by corruption allegations, and he is now being prosecuted on charges of racketeering, corruption, fraud and money laundering after being accused of taking bribes from a $5 billion arms deal with a French arms manufacturer when he was deputy president in 1999.

The case was stalled earlier this year after which it was postponed until July.
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The senator representing Zamfara Central Senatorial District, Hassan Gusau, has resigned from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

Mr Gusau announced his decision on Tuesday but did not state the party he plans to join.

His decision was conveyed in a letter which was read out by the Senate President, Ahmad Lawan, at the start of plenary.

In the letter dated June 28, the senator stated the collapse of internal democracy in the PDP as part of his reasons to leave.

I write to notify the Senate of my resignation from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) with the effect of the date (June 28).

My decision is necessitated due to the collapse of internal democracy and functionalision of the party from ward levels In Zamfara state.

Further decision of my party affiliation will communicated to this chamber in due course, the letter read.

Should Mr Gusau join the APC as expected, he would be the third PDP senator to move to APC in the ninth senate. The other two are Elisha Abbo and Peter Nwaoboshi.

Mr Gusaus announcement comes barely three days after a presidential aide, Bashir Ahmed, suggested that the Zamfara State Governor, Bello Matawalle, had left the PDP for APC. The governor is yet to formally announce his defection.

Should Mr Matawalle finally join the APC, he would be the third PDP governor to join the APC in the past seven months. The other two are the governors of Ebonyi and Cross River.

The PDP has condemned the planned defection of Mr Matawalle, warning that he risks losing his seat should he do so.

The defection of key political players like governors and senators, from one party to the other, is commonplace in Nigerian politics and no governor has previously lost his seat because he changed parties.
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The Minister of State, Education, Chukwuemeka Nwajiuba, said that Nigeria has the highest number of Out-of-School Children in sub-Sahara Africa.

Mr Nwajiuba stated this during the inauguration of Better Education Service Delivery For All (BESDA), in Katsina on Monday.

He announced that Nigeria had an estimated 10,193,918 children out school.

According to him, the current challenges affecting the Nigerian education system has left much to be desired, the system is characterised by high illiteracy level, infrastructural decay and deficits.

We have inadequate number of qualified teachers, inadequate infrastructural facilities/resources and poor funding, he added.

Mr Nwajiuba congratulated the Katsina State governor, Aminu Masari, on his giant strides to reposition education in the state.

He said this is a clear demonstration of leadership quality and personal commitment to education as well as the passion to revitalise the sector to develop the abundant human capital of the state.

The minister stated that BESDA focuses on 17 states, 13 of which are in the North-west and North-east geopolitical zones, and Niger, Oyo, Ebonyi and Rivers.

In his remarks, Governor Masari commended the Federal Ministry of Education and the Universal Basic Education Commission for their foresight and commitment in evolving laudable programmes for the development of the education sector in particular and the development of society in general.

The programme started in 2018. (NAN)
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The leader of the proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), Nnamdi Kanu, has been re-arrested and brought back to Nigeria to face his trial, Nigerias Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, has said.

At a joint press briefing on Tuesday with the State Security Service (SSS) in Abuja, Mr Malami disclosed that international collaborative efforts with security agencies led to Mr Kanus arrest and repatriation to Nigeria.

Mr Kanu and his co-defendant are facing treasonable felony charges at the Federal High Court in Abuja.

Mr Kanu fled the country in September 2017 after an invasion of his home by the military in Afara-Ukwu, near Umuahia, Abia State.

The Nigerian government obtained a court order on September 20, 2017, to designate IPOB a terrorist group and to proscribe it.

How Kanu was rearrested

Mr Malami said Mr Kanu, 53, was arrested on Sunday, through collaborative efforts of Nigerian intelligence and Security Services.

He did not give details about where he was arrested.

He stated, Self-acclaimed leader of the proscribed secessionist Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), Nnamdi Kanu, has been intercepted through the collaborative efforts of Nigerian intelligence and Security Services.

He has been brought back to Nigeria, in order to continue facing trial after disappearing, while on bail regarding 11 count charge against him.

Recent steps taken by the Federal Government saw to the interception of the fugitive Kanu on Sunday, June 27, 2021.

Nwannekaenyi Nnamdi Ngozichukwu Okwu-Kanu, born September 25, 1967 at Afara-Ukwu, Abia State, Nigeria, is a holder of Nigerian Passport No A05136827, first issued October 17, 2013, at FESTAC, Lagos,

It is recalled that Kanu was arrested on October 14, 2015 on 11-count charge bordering on terrorism, treasonable felony, managing an unlawful society, publication of defamatory matter, illegal possession of firearms and improper importation of goods, among others.

Mr Malami recalled a judge at the Federal High Court, Abuja, had on March 28, 2019, revoked Mr Kanus bail that was granted him on health grounds and issued a bench warrant for his arrest on the same date.

The judge, Binta Nyako, revoked Mr Kanus bail over his failure to appear in court for hearing,

He has, upon jumping bail, been accused of engaging in subversive activities that include inciting violence through television, radio and online broadcasts against the Nigerian state and institutions., he added.

The minister also said Kanu was also accused of instigating violence especially in Southeastern Nigeria that resulted in the loss of lives and property of civilians, military, para-military, police forces and destruction of civil institutions and symbols of authorities.
The leader of the proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), Nnamdi Kanu, spoke at the Federal High Court in Abuja on Tuesday, denying the allegation that his fleeing the country in September 2017 amounts to him jumping bail.

He said he only escaped to safety after the military invaded his house.

Mr Kanu, who is being prosecuted on charges of treasonable felony, was re-arrested and returned to Nigeria on Sunday, the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, said earlier on Tuesday.

The AGF said, at a press conference in his office in Abuja, that the IPOB leader was arrested through collaborative efforts of Nigerian intelligence and security services.

Although, Mr Kanu is believed to have fled to the United Kingdom, the AGF did not give the details of the exact place of his arrest and the diplomatic collaborations the operation must have involved.

The trial judge, Binta Nyako, ordered the detention of Mr Kanu in the custody of the State Security Service (SSS) at his first court appearance since 2017 on Tuesday.

The judge also granted an accelerated hearing in the trial involving charges of treasonable felony filed against him.

Mrs Nyako, in the light of her order of accelerated hearing, brought the case earlier scheduled to come up on October 20, forward to July 26 and 27, 2021.

I didnt jump bail

Earlier at Tuesdays proceedings, the prosecuting counsel, Magaji Labaran moved an ex parte application urging the court to remand Mr Kanu in the SSS custody in Abuja.

He anchored his request on the grounds that the IPOB leader violated the conditions of the bail earlier granted him by the court.

After Mr Labarans submissions, Mr Kanu sought the trial judges permission to speak.

I did not jump bail, My lord, Mr Kanu said.

I only went underground when the Nigerian armed forces raided my residence in Abia State, which led to the death of some people. So, I had to run for my safety, Mr Kanu explained.

The judge went on to order him remanded in SSS custody and adjourned the trial till July 26.

The IPOB leader, who was earlier brought to court with a huge security presence on the premises of the Federal High Court in Abuja on Tuesday, was later whisked away through the rear exit gate of the court.

A horde of journalists and photographers scampered to catch a glimpse of him, but to no avail.

Backstory

Mr Kanu, who was then better known as the Director of Radio Biafra, was first arrested in 2015 over his separatist agitations for the independent Republic of Biafra, which will have the Igbo-dominated states in the South-east region and some other neighbouring states carved out from Nigeria.

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He was then the leader of the little known IPOB which started as a peaceful separatist group.

Following their arrest, Mr Kanu and his co-defendants were charged with offences of treasonable felony, unlawful possession of arms, and illegal importation of broadcast equipment, at the Federal High Court in Abuja.

The defendants including Mr Kanu denied the charges.

They were not granted bail until April 2017.

In September 2017, soldiers who were in the South-east region under a military operation code-named Operation Python Dance II staged to quell violent separatist activities in the region, invaded Mr Kanus home, in Afara-Ukwu, near Umuahia, Abia State.

The Nigerian government also obtained a court order on September 20, 2017, proscribing and designating IPOB a terrorist group.

Mr Kanu was no longer seen in the public space after the military attack on his home until months later, when his pictures showing him to be on a pilgrimage to Israel surfaced on the social media.

News also had it at the time that the IPOB leader, who is known to be a dual Nigerian and British citizen, was making moves to return to the United Kingdom.

Mr Kanu eventually returned to the U.K with the assistance of the British government, which stated at the time that it had yet to proscribe IPOB or recognise it as a terrorist group.

Since escape from Nigeria, Mr Kanu has been using the social media space to keep in touch with his followers who have multiplied in Nigeria over time.

Known for making incendiary statements against Nigeria through his posts and broadcasts on social media channels, Mr Kanu has instigated many attacks on state facilities and personnel and innocent citizens in the South-east region.

The Eastern Security Network (ESN), which he formed as a military wing of IPOB, has been accused by the Nigerian government of being responsible for many deadly attacks in the region. Many of the ESN members have also been arrested and killed.

IPOB initially started as an unarmed and peaceful group. Its members however became targets of violent attacks of state forces with many of them extrajudicially killed between 2015 and 2016,

While Kanu was abroad, the Federal High Court in Abuja, in March 2019, revoked the bail earlier granted him in April 2017.

The judge ordered his arrest, and the separation of his trial from that of his co-defendants.

While his trial has been stalled since 2017, that of his co-defendant has made progress.
Nnamdi Kanu, the leader of the proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra, was, on Tuesday, brought back to Nigeria to continue facing his treasonable felony trial which he fled from almost six years ago.

Recent steps taken by the Federal Government saw to the interception of the fugitive Kanu on Sunday, the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, announced triumphantly on Tuesday.

Mr Malami said, evasively, at a press conference that Mr Kanu has been arrested through the collaborative efforts of Nigerian intelligence and security services.

He did not take questions from reporters yearning to throw more light on the development for Nigerians.

The news hit many Nigerians like a thunderbolt on Tuesday, especially as Mr Kanus recent history on Twitter shows he has relentlessly tweeted every day up till Monday, except last Thursday and Friday.

Fraught with vague remarks on important issues on how Mr Kanu was brought back to Nigeria, Mr Malamis announcement has raised some questions begging for answers.

Many have also raised concerns about the legitimacy of the procedure adopted in bringing the IPOB leader back to Nigeria due to too little official information on the matter.

At the end of Mr Malamis press conference, which was immediately followed by a court appearance put together to obtain an order for Mr Kanus detention in the custody of the State Security Service (SSS), what was clear was that the IPOB leader was back in the country after almost six years abroad.

Where, when, and how he was brought to Nigeria remain a matter of speculation.

Below are some of the questions many Nigerians have raised just a few hours after Mr Malami announced Mr Kanus return to the country on Tuesday.

Where was Mr Kanu arrested?

One of the major gaps in Mr Malamis remarks was the the exact location where Mr Kanu was arrested.

For a highly prized suspect like Mr Kanu who has been repeatedly accused by the government of threatening the countrys corporate existence and instigating violence that has led to the wanton loss of lives and destruction of property, both public and private, the omission of his place of arrest in the AGFs remark on Tuesday could not have been an oversight.

Mr Kanu, who has dual citizenship (British and Nigerian), is known to have escaped to Israel and later to the United Kingdom after disappearing from public space following the September 2017 invasion of his home in Afara-Ukwu, near Umuahia, Abia State, by soldiers.

The IPOB leader is believed to have been residing in the U.K., although the possibility of him travelling to other countries in the past five years cannot be ruled out.

No word has come from the British government, which has rebuffed the push by the Nigerian government to recognise IPOB as a terrorist organisation. They have not confirmed that Mr Kanu was arrested in the U.K.

Where the IPOB leader was arrested remains a matter of speculation as different places have been mentioned in media reports. Nigerians want Mr Malami to shed light on it.

When was Mr Kanu arrested?

Apart from the exact location of Mr Kanus arrest, the date of his arrest stated by Mr Malami has also raised questions.

Mr Malami said on Tuesday that Mr Kanu was intercepted on Sunday, June 27, 2021.

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But Mr Kanu, an avid user of social media, tweeted via his handle that has for long been identified with him, on that same day.

He tweeted, not just that day, but also on the day before (June 26) and a day after (June 29).

Was he allowed to tweet from custody or somebody else was tweeting for him? If it is taken that his tweet on Sunday was before he was arrested, what about his Monday tweet?

His Mondays tweet was not just bereft of any hint of someone in a custodial condition, it fitted into the pattern of his regular hate campaigns against Nigeria and glorification of his dream Biafraland.

Mr Malami said the IPOB leader was intercepted on Sunday without stating the location or when he was brought to Nigeria.

How was Mr Kanu arrested or intercepted?

Another question begging for Mr Malamis answer is about how Mr Kanu was arrested.

The minister said Mr Kanu has been rearrested through the collaborative efforts of Nigerian intelligence and security services, adding in another paragraph that Recent steps taken by the Federal Government saw to the interception of the fugitive Kanu on Sunday the 27th day of June 2021.

The recent steps referred to by Mr Malami remain unclear to Nigerians, leaving many to speculate that the IPOB leader was abducted or arrested through some illegitimate methods.

Was it a due extradition process and in which country? Conflicting dispositions of Nigeria and the U.K governments towards IPOB, separatist activities in the Igbo-dominated South-east region and Mr Kanu, are well known.

The U.K. reportedly played a crucial role in helping Mr Kanu return to the U.K. after he fled Nigeria in 2017.

As recent as April 2021, the Nigerian government through the information minister, Lai Mohammed, described as disrespectful to Nigeria the reported plan by the U.K government to grant asylum to secessionists being persecuted in the South-east.

Trial

While the questions mount, Binta Nyako, a judge of the Federal High Court in Abuja, on Tuesday ordered Mr Kanu remanded in the custody of the State Security Service (SSS).

It was his first court appearance after he escaped from the country in 2017.

He is being prosecuted by the AGFs office on charges of treasonable felony, among others, bordering on his groups secessionist campaigns for the actualisation of the Republic of Biafra which will comprise the states in the South-east region and other neighbouring states.

The judge had earlier in March 2019 revoked the bail earlier granted the IPOB leader.

She also separated his trial from that of his co-defendants.

On Tuesday, she adjourned Mr Kanus trial till July 26.
UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, says in spite of important advances to fight terrorism across the world, the threats have continued to persist and diversity.

Mr Guterres told the Second High-level Conference of Heads of Counter-Terrorism on Monday at UN headquarters, New York that the fight against terrorism had caused damage by exploiting social grievances and gender stereotypes.

According to him, the fight against terrorism has itself caused damage, inspiring lone actors and co-opting other groups.

Recounting especially alarming advances of Al-Qaida and ISIL terrorist fighters in Africa, he upheld the importance of supporting the continent as a global priority.

The top UN Official expressed deep concern over foreign terrorist fighters and underscored the need to hold them accountable.

He also drew attention to the fate of the tens of thousands of relatives, women and children who were associated with them, urging Member States for their repatriation, particularly the children who remain stranded in conflict zones.

Amidst some slow and not comprehensive progress, Mr Guterres said, the situation is dire.

At the same time, years of increasing polarisation and a normalisation of hate speech have benefitted terrorist groups.

The threat stemming from white supremacistand other ethnically or racially motivated movements is increasingly transnational, the UN chief said.

In addition, he said terrorist groups were exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic.

We need consistent, coordinated and comprehensive efforts across countries, sectors and disciplines, anchored in human rights and the rule of law.

He urged the General Assembly to re-affirm the consensus behind the UN Global Counter-terrorism Strategy to enhance national, regional and international efforts and adopt a forward-looking resolution.

To counter terrorism, the UN chief outlined a set of overarching priorities, which began with building resilience.

Strong, just and accountable institutions as reflected in Sustainable Development Goal 16 for inclusive access to justice are a pre-requisite for States to deny terrorists the space to operate, bring them to justice and provide security to their populations.

While putting victims at the centre of all efforts, he also noted that to help break the cycle of violence, after serving their sentences, those found guilty should, when possible, be rehabilitated and reintegrated back into society.

Human rights reset

The secretary-generals second point was for a human-right reset for counter-terrorism.

We know that when counter-terrorism is used to infringe upon the rights and freedoms of people, the result is more alienation within communities and stronger terrorist narratives, the UN chief said.

He stressed that this must be addressed by protecting and promoting human rights, including gender equality.

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He also highlighted that misogyny, and womens and girls subjugation, is a common element of terrorist networks, which requires pluralist and independent civic space to counter it.

According to the UN chief, counter-terrorism must rise to the challenges and opportunities of transformative technologies.

To this end, technological innovation must be nurtured while mitigating its risks.

New technologies need to be harnessed responsibly for counter-terrorism, within the framework of the rule of law and human rights, he said.

Social media angle

Highlighting that social media is being used to accelerate hate speech and violent ideologies, he pointed out that since the pandemic, there has also been a spike in cyberattacks and cybercrime.

As capabilities and actions have not kept pace with risks, Member States have the ultimate responsibility to prevent technologies from falling into terrorist hands, he said.

Meanwhile head of the UN Office of Counter-Terrorism (OCT), Vladimir Voronkov spoke about terrorist challenges in an age of transformative technologies.

We need urgently to look ahead on how to adjust our counter-terrorism efforts to respond to new realities and emerging threats, Voronkov told the meeting.

As digitally-enabled technologies transform societies and economies, they present both opportunities and risks.

We have the means andresponsibility to work together to ensure safe and effective use of technology and prevent its use for terrorist purposes, the OCT chief said.

General Assembly President, Volkan Bozkr, noted that the initial hope was that the COVID-19 pandemic would deter terrorist groups and lockdowns restrict their movements.

It seems that terrorist groups have quickly adapted to this new landscape.

He called for global solidarity against the rise of xenophobia, racism and intolerance, stressing: we must be vigilant, and stop hate speech, when it is first uttered  both in person, and online.

That is an individual, collective, national, and international responsibility.

(NAN)
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The Court of Appeal in Kano State on Tuesday upheld a judgment that sentenced a rapist to 21 years behind bars.

In a judgment delivered by Habeeb Abiru, the appellate court affirmed the judgment of the Jigawa State High Court delivered on April 8, 2019, which convicted Mummuni Tukur of rape and armed robbery.

Mr Tukur had been charged with the offences before the high court under sections 298(b) and 283 of the Penal Code Laws of Jigawa State, 2012 and was found guilty by Umar Sadiq who is now the Chief Judge of Jigawa State.

The spokesperson of the states Ministry of Justice, Zainab Baba-Santali, said the convict had robbed and raped a woman in a bush called Shuga Bush in Kirkasamma Local Government Area of Jigawa.

The spokesperson said the appellant was apprehended by a good Samaritan and took him to the village head, which was later handed over to the police for investigation.

The convict was said to have confessed to committing the offences when he was interrogated by the police.

The Appeal Court dismissed his appeal as lacking merit and affirmed the judgment of the trial court, Ms Baba-Santali said.
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The suspected killers of Olajide Blessing, the 300-level student of the University of Ilorin raped and murdered last month, would be docked on Wednesday, this newspaper learnt.

Lawyers familiar with the case told PREMIUM TIMES that the suspects, earlier arrested by the operatives of the State Security Service (SSS) in Ilorin, will appear before Ibrahim Yusuf of the Kwara State High Court in Ilorin, Kwara State.

The deceased, who was living with her elder sister, was a student of Agricultural Science Department of the school.

She was lying dead on the floor when neighbours entered her apartment and saw her with her two hands tied to the back, and mouth gagged.

She was found naked and had bruises on her private part, the police said.

Also a note, said to have been written on a piece of paper, was placed on her chest containing a message, Unilorin doesnt forgive.

Many students of the school, civil societies and prominent Nigerians have demanded justice for the deceased, calling for the perpetrators to be brought to justice.

When asked about an update on the case, the spokesperson of the police in Kwara, Ajayi Okasanmi, directed PREMIUM TIMES to the SSS.

Peter Afunnaya, the spokesperson of the secret police, was yet to respond to telephone calls and enquiries sent via text as of the time of reporting.
The Proceeds of Crime Bill has scaled second reading at the Senate.

The bill , which was first read in December 2020, seeks to ensure the management of the funds and property confiscated from criminals.

It also seeks to address the lack of transparency and accountability associated with the management of recovered funds by anti-corruption agencies in the country.

The eight assembly had passed and transmitted the bill to President Muhammadu Buhari for assent but the latter declined assent.

Prior to the passage of the bill, there was controversy as to which agency would handle proceeds of crime as they were scattered among different and multiple agencies.

In October 2020, Mr Buhari transmitted the legislation to the Senate for consideration and passage.

The bill, he said, was critical in sustaining the fight against corruption, money laundering and illicit movement of stolen funds through the banking system and across Nigerian borders.

The second reading of the bill was a sequel to a debate on the provisions of the legislation, led by the Senate Leader, Abdullahi Yahaya.

Some objectives of the bill

The bill, according to the president, seeks to improve the ability of law enforcement agencies to seize, freeze, and confiscate stolen assets in Nigeria while observing all related constitutional and human rights laws.

It proposes the creation of the Proceeds of Crime (Recovery and Management) Agency  which will ensure that the provisions of the bill are enforced in all collaboration with anti-corruption and other law enforcement agencies.

The agency, he said, will also ensure that Nigerians benefit from proceeds of crime by ensuring that once recovery is made, the properties and assets will be secured and that the final forfeitures granted through a court order can be paid into the Confiscated and Forfeited Account to be domiciled in the Central Bank of Nigeria.

And the funds will be used for development projects approved by the National Assembly under the annual Appropriation Act and also support the work of the law enforcement and anti-corruption agencies.

The Debate

In his presentation, Mr Yahaya explained that efforts to develop a comprehensive bill have been impeded by agency rivalry since 2011.

He said the effort to sign the Proceeds of Crime Bill into law in 2019 was delayed as a result of complaints by agencies that claimed that the Bill is intended to take away their powers.

And the lack of a centrally managed database on recovered assets made it difficult to track and maintain the actual number of the seized assets, their location and their value.

There have been reported and verifiable instances over the years that showed that some recovered assets were being misused, stolen or lost.

Further investigations have shown that some of the agencies opened multiple accounts for the payment of forfeited assets without keeping proper records. And for this reason, the president constituted the Presidential Audit Committee on Recovery of Assets (PACRA) in 2017, he explained.

Following the submission of the report of PACRA in 2018, the President directed that the following measures amongst other be put in place pending the passing of the Proceeds of Crime Bill into law:

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 The establishment of an Asset Recovery and Management Unit in the Federal Ministry of Justice.

 A central asset recovery (final forfeiture) account be opened and a central (interim forfeiture) account in the Central Bank of Nigeria. This is to enable the FGN track all recovered assets and the benefits derived from them.

 Use of recovered assets/funds as a source of revenue in the Appropriation Act of 2018 and in subsequent Appropriation Acts.

The lawmaker also noted that a strong asset recovery measure can also disrupt the activities of criminal organisations and reduce the level of insecurity in the country.

In his remarks, the Senate Minority Leader, Enyinnaya Abaribe, commended the federal government for the legislation which he said is an effort to tackle corruption.

He also said the bill is commendable because Nigeria, as at today, has no procedure for handling recovered loot and the legislation will help streamline the procedure.

He,however, disagreed with the proposal to set up an asset management agency to handle proceeds of crime.

The bill was referred to the Senate Committee on Judiciary, Human Rights and Legal Matters for further legislative work. The committee is to report back in two weeks.
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Two members of a criminal group operating in Kogi State were gunned down in the early hours of Tuesday while collecting a ransom, says Onogwu Mohammed, the chief press secretary to the governor of the state, Yahaya Bello.

Mr Mohammed said the group of three was ambushed by local hunters when they were collecting ransom for the release of their victims.

Following actionable intelligence report, professional hunters in Okehi Local Government Area of the state ambushed the kidnappers who came out in Abobo area behind Nigerian Iron Ore Mining Company, Itakpe to collect the ransom demanded before the release of their victims.

While two of the three kidnappers were killed, one escaped into the bush with gunshot wounds.

Confirming the incident, the divisional police officer, Okehi Local Government Area, Ovanja Yakubu, said men of the Nigerian Police were on the trail of the third man.

Reacting to the development, Governor Bello said criminal elements are known to members of the public, stating that the state will not accommodate any criminal.

As quoted by Mr Mohammed, the governor said he was elected and sworn-in to protect the lives and property of the people and will ensure such covenant is kept for posterity.

The governor also commended the professional hunters for complementing other security agencies in the in rooting out criminal elements from the state.

Kidnapping for ransom across Nigeria has been rampant in the past months, compounding Nigerias security challenges of terrorism and banditry.
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French President Emmanuel Macron has inaugurated the France-Nigeria Business Council  a private sector initiative to enhance business relations between the two countries.

The council has Abdul Samad Rabiu, Founder/Chairman of Nigerias BUA Group as its inaugural President.

The newly inaugurated council also has Gilbert Chagoury of Chagoury Group, Mike Adenuga of Globacom and Conoil, Aliko Dangote of Dangote Industries, Tony Elumelu, Chairman UBA & Heirs Holdings, and Herbert Wigwe, CEO, Access Bank as the Nigerian members of the council.

The largest French companies including Dassault, Danone, Axens, Ponticelli and Total Energies are also members of the council.

Speaking at the inaugural meeting of the council in Paris on the sidelines of the Business France Summit in Versailles, France, Mr Abdul Samad Rabiu thanked President Macron for his vision in creating the French Nigeria Business Council which has led to a reset in the business relationship between Nigeria and France and has created a viable platform for business from both countries to partner and improve business ties.

According to Mr Abdul Samad Rabiu, Nigeria is blessed with numerous potentials for French companies to do business across different areas, notably solid minerals, mining, manufacturing, agriculture, associated equipment, power, food processing, and even in the business of associated equipment or infrastructure for the value chains of these sectors.

Where French businesses have formerly been risk-averse or outrightly unable to do business with Africas largest economy, they can now be assured of a platform through which they can penetrate and mutually grow the market. Where Nigerian companies had not seen French companies or the French market as a viable destination due to a lack of information, they can now be sure of a platform to facilitate this. This is all thanks to President Macrons foresight and vision.

Mr Abdul Samad Rabiu also thanked President Macron for appointing him to be the first President of the France-Nigeria Business Council and pledged to use the platform to create better opportunities for businesses on both sides.

On his part, President Macron, praised the BUA Chairman and newly appointed president of the council for having confidence in French businesses which led to a partnership for BUAs new 200,000barrels per day refinery.

He also pledged his governments support to facilitating better dialogue amongst the Nigerian businesses present and their French counterparts.

It would be recalled that French Minister for Foreign Trade and Economic Attractiveness, Franck Riester, had in April announced that the Chairman of BUA Group had been appointed Chairman of the France Nigeria Investment Club.
The African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank), a pan-African multilateral trade finance institution, has revealed its plans to support Ogun State, South-west Nigeria, with infrastructural facilities worth $200 million to complete its hospital project, initiate vaccine production, among other developmental initiatives in the state.

This is according to a statement issued by the chief press secretary to Governor Dapo Abiodun of Ogun State, Kunle Somonrin, a copy of which was made available to PREMIUM TIMES on Wednesday.

Mr Somonrin said the president and chairman of the board of directors of the financial institution, Benedict Oramah, made the disclosure when he led his team on a courtesy visit to the governor in Abeokuta, the state capital, on Monday.

The statement quoted Mr Oramah as saying that the bank would partner the state in ensuring that the 250-bed specialist hospital, in Abeokuta, is completed and begins operations soon.

He added that the bank also pledged its readiness to collaborate with the state-owned Gateway Pharmaceuticals to develop vaccines and other drugs as it has invested largely in Africas health sector.

We are willing to dedicate an envelope of $200 million for projects and initiatives here in Ogun State; we will also be happy to see the hospital project.

We will be very pleased to look at this asset and see how we can partner with your government. I assure you that we will consider Gateway Pharmaceuticals in our plans to invest in the health sector, Mr Oramah was quoted to have said.

Other infrastructure

Mr Oramah added that the bank would be working with the state government in its quest to make its road infrastructure more accessible for investors.

He also said that the bank would be interested in the Cargo Airport being built by the state.

The statement further added; On the highways we are also developing, there is a connectivity we are looking for in terms of how we connect Nigeria to the Benin Republic and others, connecting Ogun to Lagos and of course to the border.

It is something that is of interest to us, if there is any road that goes from here to the border, connecting where you stopped, that will be interesting, we can work with you.

The airport is also heteropolis, it is something of importance because we even have a project there called The Quality Assurance Testing Inspection Centre. This will be critical for implementing this airport, we can assure that it is something we would be interested in developing with you.

We are willing under the $200m envelope that I mentioned, to provide technical assistance which can be in the form of grants. We will look at how we can support you to help you develop some ideas, by providing advisory services.

We can also use our Project Preparation Facility to help prepare projects. For example, this hospital we are talking about, we can use this facility to develop it..

Ground breaking partnership

In his remarks, Mr Abiodu commended the banks support towards the production of vaccines and drugs in the African continent and its readiness to partner Gateway Pharmaceuticals in a similar direction.

He noted that the Quality Assurance Testing Centre operated by the bank would complement the international cargo airport.

He said the airport when completed would be a cargo hub for the country and the continent of Africa as a whole.

Our international cargo airport that we are building is our special agro-processing zone. Construction has started. It is our hope that the construction will be completed before the end of next year. We also invite Afreximbank to look at how to partner with us because it promises to be a cargo hub, not just for Nigeria, but for the entire continent,  he was quoted as saying.

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Mr Abiodun said his administration would continue to do all it can to make Ogun the destination of choice for investors.

He said his administration had in the last few months embarked on the construction of roads across the state, especially the Ijebu-Ode-Epe, Agbara-Lusada-Atan roads, which according to him, are capital intensive.

The governor further said; We have built one and we are building another at great expense to the state. These roads are federal roads and they are also commercial roads. We invite Afreximbank to partner with us.

Agbara-Lusada-Atan Road is the road that used to be called the Lagos-Sokoto Expressway. That road in its present state is very shameful and we have since intervened.

We have awarded the contract for that road and it will be delivered in 15 months time at a great expense to the state. We will concession and toll these roads on completion in order to be able to recoup the investment.
The Federal Government on Monday said flights to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are yet to resume due to discriminatory nature of protocol introduced by the United Arab Emirates, UAE.

The Minister of Aviation, Hadi Sirika, made the remark during the briefing by the Presidential Steering Committee on COVID-19 in Abuja on Monday.

Mr Sirika, who explained that the protocol appeared to be targeted at only Nigerians, added that it was discriminatory and not backed up scientifically.

He explained that UAE was insistent that all passengers intending to visit its country must use Emirates Airline or spend two weeks in the alternative carriers country before gaining entrance to Dubai.

The minister dismissed insinuations that the continuous delay in the resumption of flights was ego related.

He, however, said that talks were ongoing to resolve the matter.

According to him, Emirates in particular and other airlines, including KLM, gave some conditions that were not acceptable to Nigeria because they dont make scientific sense.

After review, some of the airlines, especially KLM, saw sense with what Nigeria presented which is that you can do the test 48 hours to 72 hours before you leave and do another test on arrival.

Emirates at that time wanted us to do the test 48 hours before boarding and 48 hours is not yet the incubation time.

They expect us to do a rapid test at the airport and then fly seven hours later and do another test in Dubai and then follow us to our hotel or our accommodation and do another test.

That dragged on and in the interest of our people and cordial relationship, even though it is a commercial decision for the airline to take at any point in time, we ceded and accepted that we would do those tests that doesnt make scientific sense to us at the expense of our people and our monies.

We accepted what Emirates presented and proceeded even though KLM and other airlines saw our reasons and rationale and towed the lines of Nigeria.

In this case, Emirates insisted again that in addition to the test on arrival and other tests, that Nigerians cannot fly to UAE except through Emirates airline.

And that if we choose to do so through other airlines like Ethiopia, Qatar, Turkish or other airlines, we must remain in the country of that airline for two weeks if we are Nigerians before we continue to Dubai.

Meaning that if I buy my ticket in a free market which Nigeria and UAE practices, if I buy a ticket on Ethiopian Airline, that means I must remain in Addis Ababa for two weeks whether I have a visa or not before I proceed to Dubai.

So, they insisted that we must fly by Emirates and majority of Nigerians are petty traders and the ticket of Emirates in this case may be higher than other airlines, Mr Sirika explained.

He stressed that civil aviation was being guided by agreement and international convention.

It is only one aviation and we found this position to be discriminatory against our country and it is not acceptable.

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We thought we could take it diplomatically and we have been meeting and exchanging ideas because at some point, they said they are being hard on Nigerians because there are fake results.

And I said there are fake results in UAE, Germany, UK, USA, all over the world, there are fake results but Nigeria went ahead to put measures in place to detect fake results.

So, we have gone the extra mile plus if you look at the rate of infection and the rate of people catching COVID-19 in Nigeria, we are far less than many other countries in the world which UAE did not apply that principle upon.

Mr Sirika said that the total number of deaths in Nigeria might be 3000 and in one day, 3000 Italians died or British and they were still being allowed to go direct to UAE.

Even Ghanaians, Nigeriens and other African countries can go to Dubai directly; so the protocol is country-specific and it is not acceptable by the agreement and convention that we signed with UAE.

So, this is the position, it has nothing to do with ego, it is a fact that we cannot be isolated as the only country that they will apply this to.

In one of our discussions, they said it is also the same case with South Africa, I want to put it on record that South Africa as a country wrote and demanded that the condition be applied upon them.

So, it is their own choice but it is not the choice of Nigeria that we should be excluded and discriminated against.

We are still talking with them and we would likely escalate the matter and I am sure that we would resolve it soon.

Mr Sirika, however, apologised to passengers, saying, we are aware that some have to travel for medical reasons while some have to resume work, some are students and even holidaymakers.

We believe that you have the right to travel to Dubai and you will do so and for the sake of the international convention, we cannot be discriminated against, he explained.

(NAN)
The only way for Sub-Saharan Africa to break free from the new vicious COVID-19 pandemic cycle is to swiftly implement a widespread vaccination programme, top executives of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have advised.

Sub-Saharan Africa is in the grips of a third wave of COVID-19 infections that threaten to be even more brutal than the two that came before, said IMF Managing Director, Kristalina Georgieva, and the Funds Africa Department Director, Aemro Selassie, in a new blog published late Monday.

The growth of infections in sub-Saharan Africa is now the fastest in the world, with an explosive trajectory that is outpacing the record set in the second wave.

At this pace, the two officials have warned, this new wave will likely surpass previous peaks in a matter of daysand in some countries, infections are already more than double, or even triple, their January peaks.

The latest Delta variantreportedly 60 percent more transmissible than earlier variantshas been detected in 14 countries.

When the pandemic first hit, quick action by policymakers in Africa helped prevent infection rates seen elsewhere around the world. But it pushed already strained local health systems to breaking point.

Only six months after the initial crisis, the region experienced a second wave that swiftly outpaced the scale and speed of the first. Now, another six months on, sub-Saharan Africa faces its third devastating wave.

Sheer speed

Ms Giorgieva and Mr Abebe view the sheer speed of this third wave, highlighting the difficulty policymakers in subSaharan Africa face in heading off a crisis once it gets under way.

In Namibia, for example, they said new cases reached the previous January peak within only two weeks, and tripled another two weeks later. For many countries, by the time a new surge is identified, it may already be too late.

They have written that the options employed during previous waves may no longer be feasible. The re-imposition of containment measures would likely come at too high an economic and social cost, and is simply unsustainableand unenforceableover a prolonged period.

Looking back, most sub-Saharan African countries entered the second wave in a more difficult economic position than the first, with shrinking fiscal resources to protect the vulnerable, additional millions thrown into poverty, and depleted household balance sheets.

While some countries have taken steps to improve preparedness, unfortunately, very few have had sufficient resourcesor timeto strengthen public health systems.

The scale of the current wave is once again threatening to overwhelm local health systems.

News reports across the region point to overwhelmed hospitals. The sick are dying while waiting for a bed. Non-emergency surgeries have been cancelled to preserve space for COVID-19 patients.

And military hospitals have been opened for civilian use. Oxygen has become a key constraint, with supply already failing to keep up with the demand for critically-ill patients.

The regions scarce health workers continue to be at risk.

Slow rollout

The IMF officials say the vaccine rollout in sub-Saharan Africa remains the slowest in the world. Less than one adult in every hundred is fully vaccinated, compared to an average of over 30 in more advanced economies.

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This means even most essential frontline workers continue to work unprotected. In this context, some of the worlds more fortunate countries have stockpiled enough vaccines to cover their populations many times over, said the IMF bloggers.

Without significant, upfront, international assistanceand without an effective region-wide vaccination effortthe near-term future of sub-Saharan Africa will be one of repeated waves of infection, which will exact an ever-increasing toll on the lives and livelihoods of the regions most vulnerable, while also paralyzing investment, productivity, and growth. In short, without help the region risks being left further and further behind, they warned.

And the longer the pandemic is left to ravage Africa, the more likely it is that ever more dangerous variants of the disease will emerge.

Vaccination is not simply an issue of local lives and livelihoods. It is also a global public good. For every countryeverywherethe most durable vaccine effort is one that covers everyone, in every country.

Proposal

IMF staff has put forward a global proposal that targets vaccinating at least 40 percent of the total population of all countries by end-2021, and at least 60 percent by the first half of 2022.

Africa is expected to receive 30 per cent vaccination coverage through COVAX and another 30 per cent coverage through the African Vaccine Acquisition Task Team (AVATT), established by the African Union under the leadership of President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa.

Key steps

Meanwhile, Georgieva and Abebe have identified seven key steps to ensure these vaccination targets are met:

First, it is essential to deliver vaccines to subSaharan Africa as soon as possible. Given that much of the global supply of vaccines for 2021 has already been bought up, many countries will be forced to wait until 2022 to get them.

So, the fastest way to get vaccines to subSaharan Africa is for advanced economies to share their stockpiles bilaterally or through multilateral initiatives. COVAX has already received pledges for over half a billion doses.

But these need to turn into actual deliveries as soon as possible to make a difference. Indeed, the goal should be to get a quarter of a billion doses to the region by September.

Second, vaccine manufacturers should speed up supply to Africa for the rest of this year. Advanced economies with vaccine manufacturing capabilities should encourage their manufacturers to do so, especially when demand at home is falling short of supply.

Third, AVATT should be fully financed to ensure coverage of 30 percent of the African Union population. This requires an estimated US$2 billion, that would for example allow AVATT to execute its optional contract of 180 million doses with J&J.

Fourth, remove cross-border export restrictions on raw materials and finished vaccines. This includes ensuring that the Aspen facility in South Africaa key supplier to AVATTis operational at full capacity, and resuming exports from the Serum Institute of India to COVAX. African vaccination plans rely heavily on these two facilities.

Fifth, financing of at least US$2.5 billion and upfront planning will also be critical to ensure health systems can deliver shots-in-arm promptly as vaccine supply ramps up. Many countries in the region, including eSwatini, Ghana, Kenya, Namibia, and Rwanda, have quickly and effectively administered their limited supplies.

These countries, along with others in the region, have had to place their vaccine campaigns on hold as they wait for the arrival of the new supplies that they have recently procured at comparatively high cost or the donated supplies from other countries stockpiles.

It is these shortagesrather than the ability to administer shotsthat has so far been the biggest constraint.

But when supply picks up, health systems must be prepared to vaccinate as many people as possible.

And this is doable as the experience in many developing countries showthe likes of Seychelles, Mongolia, Bhutan, and Maldives impressively scaled-up vaccinations quickly once their vaccine supplies arrived.

Alongside vaccination efforts, countries must also ensure that their public health systems are able to handle an influx of cases.

This includes accelerating the acquisition of vital COVID-19 health tools, including therapeutics, oxygen, and personal protective equipment.

No matter what the speed of vaccinations, these supplies are needed now to help save lives. This will require urgent grant financing to pre-emptively procure and deliver a minimum package of critical COVID-19 Health Tools to address the rising health and economic costs arising from the surge in cases driven by the delta variant.

Finally, the magnitude of the regions financing needs requires a coordinated effort on the part of the international community.

Few countries have the fiscal space to finance this effort on their own, considering the regions already elevated debt levels and already pressing spending needs.

Most of the international communitys financial assistance will need to come in the form of grants or concessional loans.

With our colleagues from the World Bank, WHO, WTO, and others, the IMF has formed a special task force to ensure that countries get the resources and vaccines they need, the officials said.

They concluded their write-up by giving the assurance that Africa can count on the IMF.

We remain deeply committed to all countries in the region. Weve ramped up our lending to subSaharan Africalast year it was more than 13 times our annual averageand support to increase our access limits will allow us to scale up our zero-interest lending capacity.

And the unprecedented US$650 billion new SDR allocation, far and away the largest in the Funds history, once approved will make US$23 billion available to member countries in subSaharan Africa.

Yet the gravity and urgency of the situation requires the global community working together. We all have a stake in this.

So, in all countriesadvanced and emerging alikewe can reclaim our physical and economic health from the pandemic. And so that subSaharan Africa can resume its path towards a more prosperous future.
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Two members of the House of Representatives from Cross Rivers State have defected from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to the All Progressives Party (APC).

The Speaker of the House, Femi Gbajabiamila, on Tuesday announced the defection of Lego Idagbo, who represents Beckwara/Obudu/Obanliku Federal Constituency and Michael Etaba of Obubra/ Etung Federal Constituency.

The two lawmakers, in separate letters read by Mr Gnajabiamila, cited the crisis in the PDP as the reason for the defection.

The announcement generated applause and cheers from some members of the ruling party.

Mr Idagbo, who is a close ally of Governor Ben Ayade of Cross River, will be joining his governor in the APC.

The governor had earlier decamped to the APC.

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Reacting to defection, Toby Okechukwu (PDP, Enugu), said the carpet cross violates section 68 of the 1999 constitution. He noted that there is no crisis is in the PDP.

He argued that defection is a right of anyone, but it should not be based on lies.

Mr Gbajabiamila responded that only the court can decide if there is a crisis in the party or not, adding that the fact that two people defected today tells the story.

No fewer than five members of the House have so far crossed from the PDP to the ruling APC since 2019.
The Senate President, Ahmad Lawan, has directed the Senate Committee on Appropriations to submit report on the supplementary budget on Wednesday.

He gave the directive on Tuesday, shortly after the Chairman of the committee, Barau Jibrin, requested about two weeks for the panel to conclude the report and present it to the Senate.

President Muhammadu Buhari transmitted the supplementary budget of N895 billion to the Senate for approval last Tuesday.

The presidents request was referred to the Appropriations Committee for further legislative work. And the panel was asked to report back on Tuesday (today).

But Mr Jubrin explained that it was impossible for the panel to conclude work on the budget and asked for more time.

We were given the mandate to submit the report today. We started work on the bill. And we discovered that we needed more time because we feel we must meet the minimum standard set out by the rules of this Senate in processing the bill.

The expected time we feel we will be able to do this is this week and then get our report submitted on Tuesday next week.

I appeal to this Distinguish Senate to permit us to submit our report on Tuesday next, he said.

But Mr Lawan declined this request as he said there are many other important bills to be considered by the Senate.

Chairman, you will not have more than today. This is a very straightforward supplementary budget request. So it doesnt need two weeks working on it.

And you remember, we have a line up of so many important bills to consider in this Senate.

So you have today, you lay tomorrow, we receive tomorrow. Because Im sure you had the entire weekend from Wednesday, almost six days. That should be enough. This is just two sectors

It is not a complicated thing. So you dont need up to Tuesday next week. So you submit tomorrow please.

While the budget is expected to be laid on Wednesday, it is ,however, not clear if the Senate will consider and pass it the same day.

Mr Buharis request comes about two weeks after the Federal Executive Council approved the money.

The federal government said the budget is specifically meant to enhance the capacity of the military and para-military agencies to tackle the various security challenges in the country.

The total of this expenditure is made up of N83.56 billion for COVID-19 vaccine programme, covering 30 billion vaccines from Johnson and Johnson vaccines and the logistics cost related to the deployment of that vaccine.

It also contains the sum of N1.69 billion for the Nigerian Comprehensive AIDS programme currently operating in the States and an additional contingency provision of N40 billion under the public service-wide wage adjustments to take care of the needs for allowances to the health and education sectors and other wage-related issues, the Minister of Finance, Zainab Ahmed, had said on June 9.

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She said the Council also approved an aggregate sum of N770.60 billion to further enhance the capacity of the defence and security agencies to address current and emerging security challenges in our country.
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The House of Representatives has approved Faruk Yahaya, a major general, as the Chief of Army Staff.

The confirmation followed the consideration of the report of the committee on defence on Tuesday.

The chairman of the committee, Babajimi Benson (APC, Lagos), presented the report and was considered by the Committee of the Whole.

The committee had, on 15 June, screened Mr Yahaya for the position following his nomination by President Muhammadu Buhari.

The new chief of army staff was appointed by Mr Buhari on May 27 to replace Ibrahim Attahiru, a lieutenant general, who died in an air crash alongside 10 other officers and men of the army, on May 21, while on an official trip to Kaduna State.

The president had sent the confirmation request to in House in compliance with section 18(1) of the Armed Forces Act Cap A20 Laws of the Federation of Nigeria 2004.

Speaking on the report, Mr Benson said the nominee answered all the questions by the committee.

Mr Chairman, the COAS came to the committee, and he was grilled on local content in armys procurement, funding of the military, the relationship with civil authorities and the relationship with the parliament.

The nominee gave apt answers to our questions, having been battle tested hence, we recommend the nominee be confirmed.

The committee of the whole, chaired by deputy speaker Idris Wase (APC, Plateau), approved the nomination.
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No fewer than four people have been killed in two separate attacks on farming communities in Plateau State, PREMIUM TIMES gathered.

Three lives were lost in the attack in Zanwra area of Bassa local government area on Sunday and one Bitrus Manzere was killed near a military base in Riyom local government area on Monday.

Confirming the attack in Zanwra, the President of Irigwe Development Association, Robert Ashi, said the suspected herders stormed the house at about 8:20 p.m. on Sunday.

He told PREMIUM TIMES that the assailants shot a pregnant woman, Rifkatu Friday; her 7year-old daughter, Ladi Friday, and an octogenarian, Minchwe Gado, to death.

There was an attack. They entered the house. Around 8:20 p.m. on Sunday June 27,2021, Fulani herdsmen attacked Zanwra village in Jebbu-Miango where three people were killed and two injured who are currently receiving treatment at a hospital, he said.

Mrs Friday was survived by two children, Mr Ashi added.

In the Riyom local government area, a middle-aged man, identified as Bitrus Manzere, was killed near a military station.

According to Daylop Solomon , a lawyer and the coordinator of a local non-governmental organisation, Emancipation Centre for Crisis Victims in Nigeria (ECCVN), Mr Manzere was ambushed by herders at about 8 p.m. on Monday.

The attack took place along Makera  Jol village road, which is close to Sector 6 Headquarters of Operation Safe Haven, the military task force set up to maintain peace in Plateau State.

The spokesperson of the state command of the police, Gabriel Ubah, was yet to respond to PREMIUM TIMESs enquiries as of press time.

Herder attacks across the North-central states have been a growing concern lately.

Benue State, which is the worst-hit, has recorded at least two deaths within the space of three months.

This, with banditry and terrorism, is some of the security challenges bedevilling Nigeria.

Meanwhile, Plateau state Governor Simon Lalong recently launched 50 new patrol vehicles and 200 security motorcycles purchased by the state government as part of efforts to quell criminal activities and criminal attacks on innocent citizens.
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The House of Representatives has summoned the Executive Secretary of Petroleum Product Pricing Regulatory Agency (PPPRA), Abdukadir Saidu, over unremitted N1.62 billion Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) to the Federation Account.

The Chairman of the House Committee on Finance, James Faleke, gave the directive at an investigative hearing into alleged $30 billion annual revenue leakage on Tuesday, in Abuja.

Mr Faleke said the directive was necessary to enable the PPPRA boss give explicit explanation on what actually happened to the N1.62 billion IGR and why it was not remitted to the Federation Account

He said the committee would peruse the agencys book from 2012 to date, adding that PPPRA must provide the IGR generated since 2012.

He also stated that the agency must provide the identity of the person it loaned money to, adding that the committee needed the approval letter from the Accountant Generals office.

Mr Faleke stated that on no account shall any withdrawal be made from the revenue account, stressing that a peep into the constitution would provide a better understanding.

The lawmaker also demanded explanation on conflicting figures in the consumption of fuel in the country.

He added that NNPC was earlier quoted to have said that daily consumption of fuel was 93 million litres, while PPPRA had also said that daily consumption of fuel was 80 million litres per day.

Mr Saidu failed to appear before the committee to answer questions.

However, the General Manager Finance of PPPRA, Peter Etuk, said daily consumption of fuel differs.

He stated that some days, fuel consumption could go higher, while at some point it would reduce.

(NAN)
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The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Femi Gbajabiamila, has said the House will pass the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) and the Electoral Bill, unfailingly before it goes on recess next week.

He also said the House will pass the Supplementary Budget forwarded to it by President Muhammadu Buhari on Tuesday.

The speaker announced this during the plenary session on Tuesday.

There are indications that the lower legislative chamber will embark on summer recess as from 15 July.

The PIB has been before the National Assembly since 2008.

A public hearing on the bill was conducted in January.

The lawmakers from the northern part of the country had on Monday met leaders from the region on the bill.

The Electoral Bill was reintroduced to the legislature after Mr Buhari declined assent on different occasions.

In March, the report on the bill was laid by the Chairman of the House Committee on Electoral and Political Matters, Aisha Dukku (APC, Gombe).

The House is yet to consider the report on the bill.

The bill also suffered several setbacks in the 8th Assembly.

Mr Gbajabiamila said he will be meeting with the Ad hoc Committee on PIB, alongside the leadership of the House to discuss the grey areas in the bill.

He also said the Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Mele Kyari, will be holding a briefing on the bill on Wednesday. He urged lawmakers to attend the briefing.

It is an important piece of legislation, and we need to pass these two before we leave for the summer break, he said.

There is so much to do. It is going to be a heavy load, including the supplementary budget.

Two weeks is a very short time, but we must do this work, we must do it thoroughly.

The spokesperson of the House, Benjamin Kalu (APC, Abia), had also told PREMIUM TIMES that the PIB will be passed before the lawmakers go on holiday.
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The lead counsel to the proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), Ifeanyi Ejiofor, has said the arrest and arraignment of Nnamdi Kanu earlier Tuesday was without his knowledge.

We have just confirmed through a correspondence from the Federal High Court Abuja about the arrest and the extradition of my Client- Mazi Nnamdi Kanu by the Nigerian State, Mr Ejiofor said in a statement on Tuesday evening.

He was brought before the Federal High Court No 2 Abuja today on an Eleven count charge, though without our knowledge, the attorney added.

He said regardless of the offences or charge against his client, he is still presumed innocent of the allegation under the law.

Mr Kanu, who is being prosecuted on charges of treasonable felony, was re-arrested and returned to Nigeria on Sunday, the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, said earlier

According to the AGF, the IPOB leader was arrested through collaborative efforts of Nigerian intelligence and security services.

Although, Mr Kanu is believed to have fled to the United Kingdom, the AGF did not give the details of the exact place of his arrest and the diplomatic collaborations the operation must have involved.

The trial judge, Binta Nyako, ordered the detention of Mr Kanu in the custody of the State Security Service (SSS) at his first court appearance since 2017 on Tuesday.

The judge also granted an accelerated hearing in the trial involving charges of treasonable felony filed against him.

Mrs Nyako ruled that the case earlier scheduled to come up on October 20, be brought forward to July 26 and 27, 2021.

Speaking in court, Mr Kanu defended himself, insisting that he did not jump bail but only fled the country for safety reasons.

Meanwhile, Mr Ejiofor has said the IPOB legal team will be in court on the date.

As it is in the public domain, the matter has been consequently adjourned to the 26th Day of July 2021, for continuation of trial, the lawyer said.

The legal team ably led by my humble self will meet them in court on this date. We insist that he must be given a fair hearing/trial which is his constitutionally protected right.

His safety as also guaranteed under our law throughout the trial and afterwards, should be enforced.

Our fortified Legal team will be meeting to agree on strategies within the context of the Charge and disposition of the Court. Await further update from us as we progress.
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The Caretaker Committee Chairman of the All Progressive Congress (APC) and Governor of Yobe State, Mai Mala Buni, has announced the dissolution of the executive council of the party in Zamfara State.

Mr Buni also declared Governor Bello Matawalle, who defected to the party from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) on Tuesday, as the new leader of the party in the state.

The Zamfara governors spokesperson, Zailani Baffa, in a statement, said Mr Matawalle has called for reconciliation among APC members in the state.

Mr Matawalle was received into the party by Mr Buni, in company of 10 APC governors, the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Boss Mustapha; two ministers and party dignitaries .

Mr Buni said: As from today, Governor Bello Mohammed is the official leader of the Party in the state just as he used the power bestowed on him by the constitution to dissolve the State Executive of Party.

From now on, Governor Matawalle is the leader our great party in Zamfara State. You will await further arrangements for new party structure from him, Mr Buni said.

Elated

Receiving the partys flag, Governor Matawalle accepted the leadership of the party just as he declared his membership of the party. He called on all party members to rally round him to build a new APC of the peoples desire in the state.

Governor Matawalle also declared his membership of the party along with all serving senators, 6 of the 7 members of the house of representatives and all members of the State Assembly, Mr Baffa said in the statement.

Speaking at the event, a former governor of the state, Abdulazeez Yari, reportedly declared his support and commitment to work for the success of the party.

The governors in attendance include those of Kano, Abdullahi Ganduje; Kaduna, Nasir El-rufai; Kebbi, Atiku Bagudu; Borno, Babagana Zulum and Kogi, Yahaya Bello.

Others include Governors of Niger State Abubakar Bello; Yobe, Maimala Buni; Ogun, Dapo Abiodun; Jigawa, Muhammad Badaru,and Plateau, Simon Lalong.

Also in attendance was a former governor of the state, Ahmad Yerima.
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Nigerian rulers may not be smart or intelligent but by God, they are very clever! It takes a certain imaginative quality to be clever. They are evil geniuses; only good at using their abilities for negative or harmful ends. Using the national security rationale to ban Twitter was a clever move. What the Information Minister evoked in that statement is called securitisation of speech acts

Are Nigerian rulers (not leaders) as dumb as some of us think? No! In the last few months, I have wrestled with a lot of questions on how Nigerias ruling elite thinks and acts. I have wondered if they are smart or just plain stupid. I havent thought of them as being clever, until I reflected over the reason given by the Information Minister, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, in the statement announcing the Twitter ban. In the statement, he said the use of Twitter was capable of undermining Nigerias corporate existence.

A deep dive into the structure of the language used in this statement got me thinking about how clever Lai Mohammed is. Yes, Nigerian rulers may not be smart or intelligent but by God, they are very clever! It takes a certain imaginative quality to be clever. They are evil geniuses; only good at using their abilities for negative or harmful ends. Using the national security rationale to ban Twitter was a clever move. What the Information Minister evoked in that statement is called securitisation of speech acts  a favourite of politicians and dictators since the end of the Cold War.

Security is not neutral, it is an emotive word. Lai Mohammed used his social and institutional powers to package governments grievances with the use of social media by Nigerians to petition the government and hold them accountable, as extreme security issues to be dealt with urgently. He pretended the issue is beyond politics by articulating it as a threat to Nigerias sovereignty. By framing the issue as dangerous and urgent, the Information Minister tapped into the securitisation theory in International Relations, where it is acknowledged that national security policy is not a naturally occurring issue but a construct of politicians and decision-makers.

It means issues that are described as threats may not really be threats, but they become threats when politicians and decision-makers label them as such. In other words, issues that are not threatening become security problems when they are referred to in that manner. As deft players in the power game, the masterminds pushing for social media censorship understand the uneven power relations between the government and the people. The government administers security, while the public receives security. Citizens are more likely to cower if the government tells them that they are in danger.

Who believes Lai Mohammed? Outside the government, I do not think anyone takes him seriously. He has long been creating his own regime of truth with no basis in fact. For someone who has no respect for facts and objective truth, he cannot frame threats through clever manipulation.

In this case, the governments attempt was met with derision. Who believes Lai Mohammed? Outside the government, I do not think anyone takes him seriously. He has long been creating his own regime of truth with no basis in fact. For someone who has no respect for facts and objective truth, he cannot frame threats through clever manipulation. We ask: What security? Security for who? Security from what? And security by who? The Twitter ban and the push for social media regulation is motivated by the concept of the securitisation of speech acts. This is done when a political actor exaggerates an issue above politics by declaring and necessitating the use of unnecessary extraordinary measures to violate the basic rights of people.

Absolute control over political speech is what propels the Nigerian government. Through the Nigerian Broadcasting Commission (NBC) Code, the government has been able to muzzle free speech, except that which serves it, by maintaining control over broadcasting channels. The NBC has imposed stringent rules on local media outlets, following the Twitter ban. Social media is targeted because the government has no control over citizens political expression. The Twitter ban and frantic moves to regulate social media is reflective of an anxious government seeking to control the narrative and exert power over online discussions in Nigeria.

No one said it better than the man who represents President Buharis constituency in the Federal House of Representative, Fatihu Mohammed, who is representing Daura/Sandamu/Baure Federal Constitutency of Katsina State. He said: For God sake, what is social media? Are we eating social media? Let us go back to the resources, and harvest them, and lets keep this thing aside, and face the real problem in Nigeria. My colleagues have spoken the mind of their constituents. If I would speak the mind of my constituents, I would include the president, because out of 360 of us, I am the only one voted by the president. Look, Nigeria first, let us be honest to ourselves, let us call a spade a spade. We should please regulate the media. If the minister did not ban Twitter on the instruction of the President, the kind of insults to the sovereignty of Nigeria from the users of Twitter would be more than what we are facing. Let us tell ourselves the truth, Nigeria comes first. Sometimes, when I am reading tweets, I am disappointed with the youths (because) we are the future of Nigeria.

In the words of President Muhammadu Buhari, Fatihu Mohammed is a mentally  lazy youth, who found himself in the National Assembly. He detests modernity yet benefits from it. Perhaps he should be allowed to ride donkeys and go back to the farm with hoes and cutlasses, so that he can harvest those resources in his constituency. It is saddening that he is not aware of the business side of social media and its advantages to the youth and small business holdings, which can sell their products and services without having to take on the costs associated with physical offices. He is ignorant of the contributions of e-commerce on social media to the GDP. All he is concerned with is hero worship, sycophancy and the muzzling of free speech.

The plan to rein in social media platforms through regulation wont work either. Seeking to license social media platforms through the NBC is impractical. There is no way the government can bring social media platforms under the same regulatory regime they have in place for broadcasting. Targeting users as contained in their hubristic Internet Falsehood Bill will prove problematic

Since the clever are not necessarily smart or intelligent, their approach presents new sets of challenges. Attorney-General Abubakar Malami threatened to prosecute those of us who have circumvented the Twitter ban by using Virtual Private Networks (VPNS). Within hours, he realised his folly that there is no legal basis for making good his threat. Moreover, many prominent Nigerians that they cannot afford to harass have defied the ban. Malami himself was caught using VPN to access Twitter. How is that for hypocrisy?

The plan to rein in social media platforms through regulation wont work either. Seeking to license social media platforms through the NBC is impractical. There is no way the government can bring social media platforms under the same regulatory regime they have in place for broadcasting. Targeting users as contained in their hubristic Internet Falsehood Bill will prove problematic because it wont scale through the legislature.

There are solutions to abuse of social media, which lie with the smart and intelligent who understand the technology and their genuine threats, and not the clever. The solutions are in plain sight; they require work and collaboration. Our rulers disdain work. They are power drunk and are always in for quick fixes.

Bamidele Ademola-Olateju a farmer, youth advocate and political analyst writes this weekly column, Bamidele Upfront for PREMIUM TIMES. Follow me on Twitter @olufunmilayo
We appeal to the Jigawa State government, led by His Excellency Alhaji Muhammadu Badaru Abubakar (MNI, MON), the Federal Ministry of Education, and all party stakeholders to consider making the necessary decision, to listen to the long-term desire of the good people of Gumel and locate this university in the Emirate.

First, let me congratulate the good people of Jigawa State for being among the beneficiaries of the recent approval of five universities of technology and health sciences by President Muhammadu Buhari. The new universities of technology will be located in Jigawa and Akwa Ibom States, while the universities of health sciences will be established in Azare, Bauchi State and Ila Orangun, Osun State.

One of the motives for establishing federal universities in States may be to ensure that all people have equal access to educational opportunities and to close the gap between the educationally underdeveloped and developed states. It is clear that the current Nigerian administration is committed to doing its best to fulfill its promises by filling the gap in education in the areas of technology, health, and science, particularly in some of Nigerias backward states.

Thankfully, by selecting Jigawa State as one of the recipients of these tertiary institutions, the Federal Government has made a fair and appropriate decision. As a consequence, this issue sparked public debates and mixed opinions, with regard to which zone or Emirate best deserves the new Federal University in Jigawa State. Although people in power or government have the utmost right or responsibility to implement their initiatives in a specific location, notwithstanding that they usually listen to the publics opinion, which is very essential, since the people are the ultimate beneficiaries.

The vast majority of people have agreed that the Gumel Emirate should get the slot because it is the only emirate with only one tertiary institution, and three of its four local governments are educationally disadvantaged. Another reason they mentioned was that one of the local governments of the emirate, Gagarawa, is located at the centre of the State, which is 35 kilometres away from Gumel Local Government.

Jigawa is one of the fastest developing states in Nigeria, with a population of about five million people, divided across three senatorial zones and five emirates, which include the following: Dutse, Ringim, Hadejia, Gumel and Kazaure, respectively. From 1991 to date, precisely 30 years, the State has established 11 higher institutions, in addition to one Federal University, one Federal Polytechnic, two private universities and four NOUN centres, distributed across four out of the five emirates. The only emirate with a single higher institution is Gumel. The College of Education (COE), Gumel was founded in 1976 in the old Kano State and was moved to its current location, Gumel, in 1980 by Muhammad Abubakar Rimi. Throughout the years, the States pioneer institute, COE Gumel, has graduated many prominent people from across the state, and even from neighbouring states, and it is still producing them today.

Gumel is one of the oldest emirates in Nigeria. However, despite its long history, huge manpower, human resources and contribution to state and national development, it is not only sad but extremely painful to note that, ever since the creation of Jigawa State, not even a single tertiary institution (State and Federal) has been established by the successive administrations in the emirate.

Undoubtedly, the Gumel is one of the oldest emirates in Nigeria. However, despite its long history, huge manpower, human resources and contribution to state and national development, it is not only sad but extremely painful to note that, ever since the creation of Jigawa State, not even a single tertiary institution (State and Federal) has been established by the successive administrations in the emirate. It is equally disheartening that the lone tertiary institution in the emirate, despite a huge and ever-increasing population, is the Jigawa State College of Education, Gumel, which was inherited from Kano State, as previously mentioned. The following analysis clearly shows how the remaining emirates in the state have been flooded with the establishment of tertiary institutions thus far. Looking at the status quo, its crystal clear to note that the existing tertiary institutions and universities in Jigawa state are as follows:

Dutse Emirate

1. Federal University, Dutse

2. College of Nursing and Midwifery, Birnin Kudu

3. School of Health Technology, Jahun

4. National Open University of Nigeria, Dutse Study Centre

5. Jigawa State Polytechnic, Dutse

Ringim Emirate

1. College of Islamic and Legal Studies, Ringim

2. Jigawa State College of Remedial, Babura

3. National Open University of Nigeria, Ringim Study Centre

4. Jigawa State School of Midwifery/Nursing, Babura

5. Khadija University, Majiya

Kazaure Emirate

1. Hussaini Adamu Federal Polytechnic, Kazaure

2. Informatic Institute, Kazaure

3. Research Institute, Kazaure

Hadejia Emirate

1. Sule Lamido University, Kafin Hausa

2. Binyaminu Usman College of Agriculture, Hadejia

3. National Open University of Nigeria, Hadejia Study Centre

4. Al-Salam International University, Hadejia

Gumel Emirate

Jigawa State College of Education, Gumel.

Under President Muhammadu Buharis leadership, the Federal Government needs to do justice to all of its units, not just in terms of tertiary education, but in terms of all material allocations. In its federal functions, the government should be seen as sticking to its federal character principle.

History has it that when the Federal Government planned to establish the Federal University in 2010, the most suitable site proposed by educationists was the Jigawa State College of Education (CEO) Gumel, but that did not see the light of day. Now, the Federal Government has announced it would establish a Federal University of Technology in Jigawa State.

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Under President Muhammadu Buharis leadership, the Federal Government needs to do justice to all of its units, not just in terms of tertiary education, but in terms of all material allocations. In its federal functions, the government should be seen as sticking to its federal character principle.

We appeal to the Jigawa State government, led by His Excellency Alhaji Muhammadu Badaru Abubakar (MNI, MON), the Federal Ministry of Education, and all party stakeholders to consider making the necessary decision, to listen to the long-term desire of the good people of Gumel and locate this university in the Emirate. This should be done if the Gumel Emirate is still being considered for educational development, which is the key agenda of this administration. Moreover, the institution should be situated in the Gumel Emirate, which has had only one such institution  the college of education, as mentioned earlier, which was inherited from the old Kano state.

Abba Garba is a PhD candidate at the laboratory of Network and Information Security, Peking University.
Some ex-militants in Ondo State have called for inclusion in pipeline and waterway surveillance contracts awarded to former militants by the state government.

The ex-militants, formerly under the aegis of Sea Wolf Avengers, made the appeal in a statement issued in Lagos on Tuesday by their leader, Deji Ehinmowo.

Mr Ehinmowo expressed displeasure with the exclusion of the group in the surveillance contract.

According to him, in 2017 when Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo was the Acting President, he came to Igbokoda where the youth told him that our major problem is amnesty and surveillance.

We told the vice president that we need amnesty and surveillance contract and he directed Governor Oluwarotimi Akeredolu to immediately address the issue.

After the governor met with the Federal Government, he advised all the militants to surrender their arms and a meeting was held at the International Culture and Event Centre (The Dome) in Akure on November 9, 2017, where amnesty programme for ex-militants was flagged-off.

After the programme, we were given 21 days to surrender our arms with a promise that we would be paid stipends as well as expose us to training on skill acquisition programmes.

At the event, there was also a promise that some of us would be sent abroad to acquire more skills, he said.

Mr Ehinmowo expressed regret that while the former militants had fulfilled their own side of the amnesty deal, the government failed to fulfil its own side of the agreement.

He particularly expressed disappointment that the government had not kept its promises to the group on their inclusion in the amnesty programme.

We have made several reports and nothing has been done up till now.

Some militants were disarmed in Edo and they are getting paid. Rivers State Governor, Nyesom Wike, offered amnesty to some militants in Rivers State and they are being paid.

Why are they not paying us in Ondo State. Do they want us to go back to our vomits?

When we talk about amnesty in Ondo State, we in the Ilaje/Ese-odo Federal Constituency, we dont depend on the state allocation, what we depend on is the Ondo State Oil Producing Area Development Commission( OSOPADEC) and Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC).

To our greatest surprise, government is doing empowerment through OSOPADEC for the youths of the region, that is pipeline security surveillance, but excluded us.

In Ilaje and Ese Odo Local Government areas, we have the old amnesty when militants surrendered arms during the tenure of the former President Musa YarAdua which was the first phase of the amnesty.

We also have the new amnesty. This group under the aegis of Sea Wolf Avengers under my leadership as the most senior general, surrendered arms in the 2017 amnesty programme.

We are the major camp in the new amnesty programme that submitted arms and ammunition in 2017 in Ilaje, he said.

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Mr Ehinmowo said the former militants worked for the re-election of Governor Akeredolu as part of their commitment to ensure the sustainance of the amnesty programme in the state.

We worked for the re-election of the Ondo State Governor, Arakunrin Rotimi Akeredolu, and we believe we should benefit from the amnesty programme and the government is supposed to use the surveillance contract to take care of us.

It is our turn to be empowered with surveillance job. If the state government wants to give it to Ilaje, it should be between the old and new amnesty groups.

We leant that N300,000 would be given to each camp which would be about N30,000 per slot out of N28 million surveillance contract.

We are urging the government to separate the old amnesty from the new amnesty.

We that surrendered arms in 2017, our percentage should be given to us, otherwise, the surveillance will not work, he stated.

(NAN)
The Synagogue Church of All Nation (SCOAN) on Tuesday said the passing of its founder , TB Joshua, drew tributes from millions of people around the world.

Gary Tonge, a member of the church, spoke during a press conference Tuesday in Lagos on the programmes for the burial of the preacher.

It would be recalled that TB Joshua was called to rest on June 5, and his divine call was met with an outpouring of millions of testimonies and tributes from 195 countries, he said.

According to Mr Tonge, July 5 to July 11, is dedicated to a series of laying to rest activities tagged Celebrating the Life and Legacy of Prophet Joshua, born (1963 to 2021).

He said the event would start with a private candlelight procession at 6:00 p.m.

Mr Tonge said on July 6 to July 7, there would be a tribute service from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. which would be opened to the public but with a limited physical presence.

He said there would be a service of songs and all-night praise starting at midnight.

The international member also said that on July 8, there would be the lying-in-state of the prophet from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

He said the event would be open to the public to pay their last respects to the man of God.

Mr Tonge said that July 9, would be the laying to rest service and interment activities which would begin at 10:00 a.m.

He said the thanksgiving service would be held on July 11 by 9.00 a.m.

According to Mr Tonge, the SCOAN founder was a man of the people with global influence, therefore, the church is aware that the eyes of the world are upon this event.

He said that SCOAN was working with the Lagos State Government and the ministry of health to ensure that the current public health and security protocols would be observed during the duration of the event.

He, however, appealed to the general public who would not attend due to the current public health challenges to watch the broadcast from the comfort of their homes.

He said the event would be broadcast live on Emmanuel TV, DSTV, GOTV, and streamed on Facebook.

Mr Tonge said the ministry would continue to touch lives as done by the preacher.

He said Mr Joshuas resting place would be at the church premises.

(NAN)

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An Ikeja Special Offences Court on Tuesday sentenced a student of Lagos State University (LASU), Afeez Ogunbowale, to 21 years imprisonment for involvement in armed robbery and rape of two fellow students.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that Oluwatoyin Taiwo, the judge, sentenced Mr Ogunbowale after finding him guilty of five counts bordering on conspiracy, rape, and armed robbery.

Mrs Taiwo said the prosecution proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt.

She held that the testimonies of the victims were compelling, adding that they were able to positively identify Mr Ogunbowale as one of the culprits.

The defendant is hereby sentenced to five years imprisonment for conspiracy, 21 years imprisonment each for counts of armed robbery and 21 years imprisonment each for counts of rape.

The sentences are to run concurrently, she said.

On hearing the sentence, Mr Ogunbowale, who has been suspended by LASU over the case, wept profusely in the dock.

NAN reports that the prosecution team led by O.A Bajulaiye-Bishi, had said the defendant committed the offences alongside others who are at large, on April 18, 2018, at the Okokomaiko area of Lagos.

The defendant and his accomplices, while armed with a gun, knife, machete, and bottle, robbed the two students in their off-campus accommodation.

They were robbed of their phones, power bank, earpiece, gold chain and N1, 200.

The defendant and one of his accomplices who is still at large had unlawful sexual intercourse with the complainants.

The offences contravene Sections 260(1) and 297(2)(a) of the Criminal Law of Lagos State, 2015, she said.

NAN reports that in their testimonies on Nov. 4, 2019, the two students, told the court that they lost their virginities to the attack.

The witnesses said they were robbed by five men but raped by two members of the gang  Ogunbowale and another  who is at large.

They said that they were able to identify Mr Ogunbowale through Facebook, adding that they belonged to the same faculty.

The complainants testified that when they confronted the convict at a police station, he prostrated and begged for forgiveness.

In his defence on September 30, 2020, the convict denied involvement in the crime and gave an alibi to the court.

Led in evidence by the defence counsel, Bisi Salau, he said that on the night the offences were committed, he was in the school premises preparing for an examination which was to begin in May 2018.

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(NAN)
The Lagos State Government has begun reviewing its Protection Against Domestic Violence Law (DVL) 20215, as part of efforts to combat rising cases of domestic violence.

The Rule of Law and Anti-Corruption (RoLAC) programme of the British Council and Lagos State Domestic and Sexual Violence Response Team (DSVRT) organised a meeting on Tuesday toward achieving this.

The meeting brought together judges, magistrates, police officers, students, and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) to contribute to the review.

Sherifat Solebo, a judge and member of DSVRT, said the review and reform of the states DVL which was enacted in 2007 were long overdue.

Mrs Solebo noted that the 14-year-old DVL which is currently enforced in Lagos preceded the Federal Act  the Violence Against Persons Prohibition (VAPP) Act 2015, by seven years.

She explained that during the COVID-19 lockdown, there was an increase in domestic violence cases in the state.

The judge said this informed the calls for a review of the law as well as agitations that Lagos should adopt the (VAPP) Act 2015.

There were a series of meetings with the wife of governor of Lagos State, Dr Ibijoke Sanwo-Olu. Some felt our DVL is adequate while some said it should be brought in line with the Federal Act (VAPP).

To my mind and understanding, the latter (VAPP) criminalises violence against persons, whereas the DVL protects the rights of persons in domestic violence.

I, therefore, urge us to take a cursory look at the DVL using the VAPP as a guide among other laws and come up with suggestions that are reflective of our peculiar circumstances and situation, she said.

Presenting an overview of the current DVL, Kikelomo Ayeye, a chief magistrate, highlighted some areas in the law which needed reform and review.

Mrs Ayeye said that there should be an acknowledgment of the mental effects of domestic violence in the new law and not only the physical effects.

Expeditious access to the justice system should be projected in the new law and it should be simple enough for lay men and illiterates to understand and know how to go about it.

The new law should look at the best interests of children. Training requirements must be added to the new DVL because of the psychology of judges.

In addition to the Prohibitive and Protection Orders issued by the courts in domestic violence matters, there is a need for diverse types of Orders such as Intervention Orders.

The need for independent professional counselors should be mandated to handle domestic violence cases and there should be sections in the law which prohibit perjury and mischief in proceedings, she said.

Tola Oguntade, a judge, said that men should be sufficiently protected in provisions in the new DVL.

Prior to sitting at the Family Court, I used to think that domestic violence was perpetuated by men but I was wrong.

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As we say protect women, protect children. I say protect the men.

The average Nigerian is ignorant of their rights. They think it is difficult to enforce their rights; we need to educate them because domestic violence is a destroyer of lives and livelihood, Mrs Oguntade said. (NAN)
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The Lagos State Head of Service, Hakeem Muri-Okunola, has said there were no bloodstains at the scene of the October 20, 2020, Lekki shooting incident when the state governor visited.

Mr Muri-Okunola said this on Tuesday during his cross-examination at the Lagos Judicial Panel.

The official said when Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu and his entourage  which included himself  visited the Lekki toll plaza between 12:30 a.m. and 1:30 a.m.  few hours after the shooting, they did not see any bloodstains on the ground.

The Head of Service was earlier summoned by the panel to give evidence for the state on the controversial shooting of protesters by soldiers on the night of October 20, 2020.

At his first appearance before the panel last Tuesday, Mr Muri-Okunola said injuries recorded in the aftermath of the Lekki shooting were predominantly fractures, machete wounds, and minor cuts.

At the time we were there, most of the injuries were all in the nature of cuts, bruises from machetes wounds, and stampede. Nobody at the hospitals said they were shot at, he said.

No blood at the gate

Mr Muri-Okunola was cross-examined on Tuesday by counsels to the #EndSARS protesters, Olumide Fusika and Adeshina Ogunlana.

Mr Fusika took on the Lagos State official on his last testimony, saying it contradicts what doctors from Reddington and other hospitals that treated victims of the shooting told the panel.

Mr Fusika, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), said the video clip presented by the Head of Service during his last testimony was edited.

Although the counsel representing the state government, Abiodun Owonikoko, raised an objection to the line of question, the panel allowed the question.

Responding to the question, Mr Muri-Okunola was the video clip presented was the way it was because cameras were not admitted at a point during the hospital visit.

He added that the government only tendered the relevant portion of the clip.

Amidst the numerous questions thrown at him by counsels to #EndSARS protesters, Mr Muri-Okunola insisted that at the time the governor visited the hospital, they were informed that there were no persons with gunshot injuries.

Mr Fusika presented records from the hospitals that treated victims of gunshot injuries, asking the Head of Service to react to them.

Either the hospital misled the governor or the governor misunderstood.

We were informed by Reddington, Lekki, that the patients were not shot, Mr Muri-Okunola said.

Following a series of questions to which Mr Muri-Okunola maintained the same position to, Doris Okuwobi, the chairperson of the panel adjourned the matter till July 3.
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Governor Seyi Makinde of Oyo State on Tuesday announced the dissolution of the states executive council.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) recalls that the governor constituted the cabinet on August 14, 2019.

The Chief Press Secretary to the Governor, Taiwo Adisa, made this known in a statement on Tuesday night in Ibadan.

Mr Adisa said the governor announced the dissolution of the state executive council at the end of its weekly meeting, which lasted about five hours.

According to him, the Governors Chief of Staff, Bisi Ilaka, and 17 commissioners were affected.

The council members, who were not affected include the Secretary to the State Government, Mrs Olubamiwo Adeosun; Head of Service, Mrs Amudat Agboola and the Director-General of Due Process Office, Ms Tara Adefope.

The governor expressed the gratitude of the government and the people of Oyo State to the sacked executive council members and wished them well in their future endeavours.

He equally praised the dedication to duty and the commitment of the council members to the cause of taking the state from poverty to prosperity, he said in a statement. (NAN)
A Celebration of Life Service for David J. Tallman, NK2Y, will be held at the Plattsburgh United Methodist Church, 127 Beekman Street, Plattsburgh, NY on Saturday, July 10, 2021, at 3 P.M. on the front lawn of the church, weather permitting. It will be moved to the sanctuary for inclement we
Southbury, CT (06488)

Today

Mostly cloudy skies early will become partly cloudy later in the day. High 79F. Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph..

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Clear skies with a few passing clouds. Low 67F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph.
2020 was a year marked by hardships and challenges, but the Prince William community has proven resilient. The Prince William Times is honored to serve as your community companion. To say thank you for your continued support, wed like to offer all our subscribers -- new or returning --

4 WEEKS FREE DIGITAL AND PRINT ACCESS.

We understand the importance of working to keep our community strong and connected. As we move forward together into 2021, it will take commitment, communication, creativity, and a strong connection with those who are most affected by the stories we cover.

We are dedicated to providing the reliable, local journalism you have come to expect. We are committed to serving you with renewed energy and growing resources. Let the Prince William Times be your community companion throughout 2021, and for many years to come.
Creating a trusted and safe communication ecosystem

Improved brand visibility enhanced brand identity

Better call pick-up & response rates, improved efficiency of communication

Empowering users to identify trusted brands & benefit from timely service

HYDERABAD, India, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Karix Mobile, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tanla Platforms Limited, India's largest CPaaS provider, and Swedish Caller ID firm Truecaller announced their partnership to launch the Verified Business Caller ID solutions for enterprises to enrich the user experience by fostering a communication ecosystem built on trust and safety. Enterprises in India can now leverage this solution to connect better with customers over voice calls through increased brand visibility, identity, and credibility.

With Truecaller Business Caller ID, Karix Mobile's customers will bear a verified business badge and a verified icon when calls are placed to their end-users. In addition, the appearance of the brand logo and brand name on the handset will help enterprises identify themselves and facilitate improved service delivery when they connect with their users. The configuration of these features into voice calls will also help brands gain insights into the health of their call workflow.

Deepak Goyal, Chief Business Officer, Tanla Platforms Limited said, "Our partnership is the coming together of two of the world's most trusted names - Karix and Truecaller - in the enterprise to consumer communication ecosystem. The partnership is an extension of our commitment to provide purposeful, timely, and verified engagements to enterprises and their consumers."

"The Truecaller Business Caller ID solutions will not only help enterprises improve the efficiency of their communication but also help end-users avail services by identifying the calls placed as genuine and important. On a real-time basis, enterprises will be able to establish their brand's trustworthiness, improving their customers' overall consumer experience," Deepak added.

Enterprises attempt to reach out to millions of users each day to service, transact and interact with their customers. However, increasing instances of fraud and spam discourage users from answering calls, thereby leading to a loss of customer delight, business opportunities, and revenue. With Truecaller Business Caller ID, enterprises can increase their customer outreach and service efforts. This results in improved response rates, driving higher customer satisfaction and call efficiency. For end users, the risk of falling prey to fraud, scams, or phishing is significantly reduced.

"Truecaller Enterprise has been set up with the goal of developing solutions for businesses that will not only increase the efficiency of their communications but also enhance their brand reputation and deliver considerable value and safety to consumers as a fraud prevention tool. With Truecaller Enterprise Solutions, our reseller partners will play a critical role in facilitating productive communication for both end-users and companies. With Karix Mobile's strong market presence and reach, they will play a critical role in expanding our business together and delivering tremendous value for end customers with the enterprise ecosystem," said Priyam Bose, Global Head, GTM at Truecaller Enterprise.

About Tanla

Tanla Platforms Limited (NSE: TANLA) (BSE: 532790) transforms the way the world collaborates and communicates through innovative CPaaS solutions. Founded in 1999, it was the first company to develop and deploy A2P SMSC in India. Today, as one of the world's largest CPaaS players, Tanla processes more than 800 billion interactions annually and about 60% of India's A2P SMS traffic is processed through its distributed ledger platform-Trubloq, making it the world's largest Blockchain use case. Tanla touches over a billion lives carrying mission critical messages meeting the needs of the world's largest customers. Tanla Platforms Limited is headquartered in Hyderabad, India and is expanding its presence globally.

About Truecaller

We enable safe and relevant conversations between people and make it efficient for businesses to connect with consumers. Fraud and unwanted communication are endemic to digital economies, especially in emerging markets. We are on a mission to build trust in communication. Truecaller is an essential part of everyday communication for over 280 million active users, with half a billion downloads since launch and 30 billion unwanted calls identified and blocked. Headquartered in Stockholm, since 2009, we are a co- founder-led, entrepreneurial company, with a highly experienced management team.

SOURCE Tanla Platforms
NASHVILLE, Ark., June 28, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Ivan Green, Editor of The Cannabis Radar, Nashville's very own award-winning cannabis journalist, wrote a blog post recently explaining the things people should know before buying Delta-8 products. A recent survey depicted that people don't know what Delta-8 really is, but they are still buying it to get high. Delta-8 THC has been turning heads this year for both recreational and medical purposes. Hence The Cannabis Radar released a blog post with all the information that people would need to get started with Delta-8.

The Cannabis Radar

Delta-8 vs. CBD: Delta-8 and CBD are very different. In fact, Delta-8 is more similar to Delta-9 than it is to CBD. While Delta-8 THC binds endocannabinoid, CBD does not, which causes the high. So in comparing the two, CBD products are ideal if people don't want to get high. However, for a mild high, Delta-8 is ideal.

Delta-8 may be a THC, but it is not like Delta-9 THC. Matt Baum at Ministry of Hemp said, "Delta-8 is like the less potent & less psychoactive brother of weed, that doesn't get you anxiety if you take too much." The first-time effect of Delta-8 varies from one user to the next. People should wait for one hour before redosing and they should always start small.

Consumers should be aware that Delta-8 shows up on the drug test. For urinal tests, it may show up between 1-6 weeks after taking it, depending on the human being and level of usage. To avoid failing a drug test, The Cannabis Radar advises discontinuing the usage several weeks before the test. Regular water intake will also hasten the metabolic process and help flush it out.

The best way to take Delta-8 THC will depend on the consumers' goal. Delta-8 can be taken by vaping, edibles & tinctures. Vaping Delta-8 THC has the best bioavailability and edibles the lowest.

The Cannabis Radar recommends asking brands a lot of questions before buying Delta-8 products. People should also check the lab reports, and look at the type of extraction used to make the products. Their favorite producer of Delta-8 is Exhale Wellness; they ranked them #1 on their Delta-8 brand list.

About The Cannabis Radar

The Cannabis Radar is a resource for people who are looking to try Cannabis products for the first time.

Email: [email protected]

Website: Thecannabisradar.com

Related Images

delta-8-gummies.jpg

Delta 8 gummies

SOURCE The Cannabis Radar
Shachi is currently managing AgBiTech's businesses in Africa and South Asia which he built from scratch over the last three years. This enabled AgBiTech to provide a safer and effective biological alternative to manage the threat of Fall armyworm as it spread rapidly across these regions. In doing so, Shachi established key partnerships and working relations with various local and international stakeholders, donors, research organizations, government institutions, distributors and farmers in many African countries, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Earlier this year, AgBiTech undertook a comprehensive review of its growth plans and strategic ambitions which resulted in a renewed focus to drive growth in Asia and Europe, two geographies where AgBiTech currently has a very limited footprint. This will enable the company to increase its impact on the global biologicals sector while maximizing returns from its range of lepidopteran control solutions in the coming years.

Dr. Shachi Gurumayum grew up in Manipur, India, and graduated from St. Stephen's College, Delhi, with Honours in Chemistry before pursuing his MSc and PhD in Formulation Science from Bristol University. Shachi also has an MBA in Strategy & Marketing from HEC Paris and is currently pursuing an advanced degree in International Healthcare Management from the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute. He has over 18 years of experience in four continents in the Chemicals, Oil & Gas and Agricultural sectors including a three-year stint as country manager for Syngenta Nigeria. He is a founding trustee of the MaolKeki Foundation and in January 2021, was awarded the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman Award, the highest honour conferred to an overseas Indian by the President of India.

About AgBiTech

Since 2002, AgBiTech has been delivering commercially proven products that help make farming more profitable and sustainable. AgBiTech combines field experience with innovative science and proprietary technology, working with farmers, advisors and researchers to develop products that deliver highly effective biological insect management solutions. AgBiTech manufactures all of its products in-house, with a tireless focus on quality and efficiency, allowing it to produce consistent and cost-effective biological products that have established market leading positions. For further information, visit www.agbitech.com.

SOURCE AgBiTech

Related Links

http://www.agbitech.com


SEATTLE, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- As Alaska Airlines expands its global reach with our oneworld partners, we proudly announced today the launch of a codeshare agreement with Qatar Airways, a fellow member of the alliance, that further strengthens the partnership between the two airlines and provides travelers with exciting and convenient options.

Beginning July 1, the agreement allows passengers on Qatar Airways to book travel and easily connect to more than 150 routes throughout Alaska's network. On the West Coast, Qatar Airways has nonstop service connecting its main hub in Doha to three of Alaska's primary gateway cities  Los Angeles with twice daily flights, and daily flights at San Francisco and Seattle  allowing for seamless connectivity.

"We're thrilled to be a part of this evolving partnership with Qatar Airways, one of the world's premier airlines," said Ben Minicucci, Alaska Air Group CEO. "As international air travel resumes, it's important to provide our guests with easier, more convenient travel options to get out and see distant places again. Qatar Airways' nonstop flights from our hubs in Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles to Doha and points beyond offers our guests tremendous opportunities to visit nearly any country they want."

"We are proud to advance our commercial cooperation with Alaska Airlines and we welcome the newest member of the oneworld alliance to Qatar Airways' list of strategic partners," said Qatar Airways Group Chief Executive, His Excellency Mr. Akbar Al Baker. "This agreement, combined with our existing partnerships, will help consolidate our presence in the region and provide Qatar Airways passengers travelling to and from our 12 U.S. gateways with access to the most comprehensive network of seamless connections across the United States."

Alaska launched its partnership with Qatar Airways on Dec. 15, 2020, with the ability for our Mileage Plan members to earn miles on Qatar Airways flights. On March 31, 2021, Alaska officially joined oneworld and expanded its partnership with Qatar Airways to provide elite benefits reciprocally, including preferred seat selection; priority check-in, security and boarding; lounge access and extra baggage allowance. Qatar Airways has been a member of oneworld since 2013.

In the coming months, Alaska's guests will be able to book travel on Qatar Airways flights between the U.S. and Qatar and beyond to their favorite destinations in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.

With more people flying again, Alaska remains committed to Next-Level Care for its guests and employees by implementing more than 100 ways to maintain the highest standard of safety  from clean planes to clean air in the cabin (with hospital-grade air filtration systems). For everyone's safety on board, Alaska continues to enforce the federally mandated mask policy, even for those who are fully vaccinated.

Alaska is the newest member of the oneworld global alliance. With oneworld and our additional airline partners, guests can fly to as many as 1,000 destinations around the world. Flyers can also earn and redeem miles with our highly-acclaimed Mileage Plan program to fly on more than 20 oneworld and airline partners.

About Alaska Airlines

Alaska Airlines and its regional partners serve more than 120 destinations across the United States and to Mexico, Canada and Costa Rica. The airline emphasizes Next-Level Care for its guests, along with providing low fares, award-winning customer service and sustainability efforts. Alaska is a member of oneworld. With the global alliance and the airline's additional partners, guests can travel to more than 1,000 destinations on more than 20 airlines while earning and redeeming miles on flights to locations around the world. Learn more about Alaska at newsroom.alaskaair.com and blog.alaskaair.com. Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air are subsidiaries of Alaska Air Group (NYSE: ALK).

SOURCE Alaska Airlines

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NEW YORK, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Thirstie , the leading e-commerce and business intelligence provider for beverage alcohol brands, today announced strong business momentum resulting in new team additions and top advisors from the e-commerce space, including the former CEO of Magento and former President of SAP Hybris.

As accelerated adoption of Thirstie's e-commerce platform for retailers and alcohol brands continues, the company has generated substantial growth. In early 2020, there were less than a dozen brands using Thirstie; today there are 200 alcohol brand partners using the platform with more being added every day. Platform revenue quadrupled from 2019 to 2020, and Thirstie anticipates a 2X YoY growth in brand sign up rate in Q3 2021 as the company continues to expand despite post-pandemic consumer behavior, adding both retailer and brand partners on to the platform.

"In the past year, we've had tremendous momentum; this growth and enthusiasm is a testament to the need for a highly-compliant ecommerce-driven data solution for alcohol brands," stated Devaraj Southworth, Thirstie's CEO & Co-Founder. "Our goal is to help grow and scale these companies while changing the course of the alcohol industry. Making these strategic investments in our team and advisory board will allow us to continue to be great partners for both brands and retailers while shaping the future of the Beverage Alcohol space."

Joining a diverse group of advisors and investors, Thirstie has added two e-commerce all-stars as Strategic Advisors; Mark Lavelle, the former CEO of Magento and SVP of Commerce at Adobe and Carsten Thoma, former President of SAP Hybris.

Mark Lavelle, Chairman, CEO and Co-Founder at Deep Lake Capital, joins Thirstie as a Strategic Advisor following his investment in the business. As the former CEO of Magento and SVP of Commerce at Adobe following Adobe's 2018 acquisition of Magento for $1.68 billion, Lavelle brings decades of e-commerce experience to the Thirstie team. "I am thrilled to serve as both an investor as well as advisor to Thirstie and look forward to providing strategic insights from my years of experience in this challenging space," stated Lavelle. "Thirstie is defining what B2B E-Commerce means within a highly regulated industry and I am confident they will continue to not only be innovators, but industry leaders."

Following his investment, Thirstie has also added Carsten Thoma to its Advisory board. Thoma is the former Co-Founder and Managing Director of Hybris and President of SAP Hybris, following SAP's acquisition of the company in 2006 for $1.1B. "There are many parallels between Thirstie's approach to e-commerce and how I have approached the space with my former company," stated Thoma. "E-Commerce and digital storefronts have the ability to change the trajectory for CPG brands. However, it's critical for businesses to find the right e-commerce partner. Devaraj and Max have figured out how to make this happen, through development of a highly compliant vertically integrated e-commerce solution built specifically for Beverage Alcohol."

In addition to strategic advisors, Thirstie announced Jason Dacaret as VP of People. In this position, Dacaret will guide and manage all human capital strategy, company culture, in-house processes for hiring talent, and employee onboarding processes. Prior to joining Thirstie, Dacaret was the Chief Human Resources Officer and Investment Committee Member at REAPRA, a venture builder and venture capital/investment management company in Southeast Asia. Prior to REAPRA, Dacaret spearheaded business development for North America for RGF International Recruitment, part of Recruit Group, the 4th largest HR services provider worldwide.

Thirstie has also onboarded John Briar as VP and General Manager. In this role, Briar will manage the day-to-day execution of the company's vision, as well as provide high-level guidance to departments that include Operations, Accounting, Customer Support, Retail and Brand Sales, Retail and Brand Account Management, and Partnerships. Prior to joining Thirstie, Briar served as Managing Director, Marketing Operations at Annalect, which he joined in 2019. Prior to that, he spent 16 years at Operative, where he held numerous roles including Chief Services Officer, and built a team from five to 300 employees over the course of his tenure.

In addition, Thirstie added Hannah Vogel as the Director of Analytics where she oversees Data Intelligence for Thirstie's Brand Partners. Vogel has a PhD in Mathematics, and has spent her career as a data scientist, analyst, and consultant working with e-commerce and marketing data.

Other recent new hires include: Ryan Malik, Controller, Catherine Herzog, Retail Development Manager and Kelley McGann, Marketing and Communications Manager.

About Thirstie

Thirstie, a New York based e-commerce company, is the leading e-commerce and data solutions provider for Beverage Alcohol brands, founded by Devaraj Southworth and Maxim Razmakhin in 2014. Thirstie helps brands to power consumer on-line transactions within an industry three-tier system complaint platform through a robust API and expansive retail network. The Thirstie platform also provides brands with transparency into all data, consumer insights analytics and ROI to improve performance marketing. For more information about Thirstie, please visit www.thirstie.com .

Contact Information:

Kelley McGann

845-494-3784

[email protected]

SOURCE THIRSTIE

Related Links

thirstie.com


SAN FRANCISCO, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Wonderschool, an innovative online platform that connects families to a diverse set of child care options and supports child care providers, today announced it is adding six new employees to its leadership team. The appointments signal the company's continued growth and commitment to ensuring every child has access to early education that helps them realize their potential.

"Wonderschool needs a slate of experts to help guide the expansion of its mission to serve not only individual home-based providers but also statewide and community early childhood systems, and in turn, the families and children who need services most," said Wonderschool CEO Chris Bennett. "We are thrilled to welcome these new leaders, and we look forward to learning from their expertise."

Leaders joining the Wonderschool team include:

Rupal Shah , Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing: Shah, a seasoned operational executive with more than 20 years of experience growing technology companies, will be responsible for building and scaling Wonderschool's partnerships in multiple markets to affect change in early child care. Shah previously worked at companies like Accenture, Oracle, Blackbaud and Civitas Learning, and he has led partnerships on large-scale transformation efforts with organizations like the University of Texas System, University of California System, the American Red Cross, the Puerto Rican government, UNICEF, and YMCA of America, among others.

Shah, a seasoned operational executive with more than 20 years of experience growing technology companies, will be responsible for building and scaling Wonderschool's partnerships in multiple markets to affect change in early child care. Shah previously worked at companies like Accenture, Oracle, Blackbaud and Civitas Learning, and he has led partnerships on large-scale transformation efforts with organizations like the System, System, the American Red Cross, the Puerto Rican government, UNICEF, and YMCA of America, among others. Carol Miller , Head of Employer Partnerships : Miller, who brings more than 20 years of experience working in employer-sponsored child care, will be responsible for building the company's partnerships with employers seeking to support working parents with high-quality and innovative child care solutions. Prior to joining Wonderschool, Miller worked for Bright Horizons in regional business development. She began her employer-focused career at Children's Creative Learning Centers, which was acquired by Knowledge Universe/KinderCare Education. Through various roles, she helped employers determine employee child care demand, as well as develop and operate on-site or near site child care programs, and she strategically managed several client accounts across a variety of industries.

: Miller, who brings more than 20 years of experience working in employer-sponsored child care, will be responsible for building the company's partnerships with employers seeking to support working parents with high-quality and innovative child care solutions. Prior to joining Wonderschool, Miller worked for Bright Horizons in regional business development. She began her employer-focused career at Children's Creative Learning Centers, which was acquired by Knowledge Universe/KinderCare Education. Through various roles, she helped employers determine employee child care demand, as well as develop and operate on-site or near site child care programs, and she strategically managed several client accounts across a variety of industries. Naveen Koorakula, Vice President of Product: Koorakula, a serial entrepreneur and seasoned product executive with over 20 years of experience building consumer products, will be responsible for building and scaling Wonderschool's suite of products to help teachers, directors, and other key players in the early childhood sector. Prior to Wonderschool, Koorakula founded multiple successful startups in marketplace, social, and web search spaces. He brings a wealth of experience scaling hyper growth marketplaces from his time at Groupon, Yahoo, and Next Force Technology to Wonderschool.

Koorakula, a serial entrepreneur and seasoned product executive with over 20 years of experience building consumer products, will be responsible for building and scaling Wonderschool's suite of products to help teachers, directors, and other key players in the early childhood sector. Prior to Wonderschool, Koorakula founded multiple successful startups in marketplace, social, and web search spaces. He brings a wealth of experience scaling hyper growth marketplaces from his time at Groupon, Yahoo, and Next Force Technology to Wonderschool. Holli Pritchard , Head of Customer Success, Directors: Pritchard will help Wonderschool ensure it is successfully expanding access to quality early childhood education for all. Following her career as a special education teacher in Atlanta Public Schools, Pritchard led the customer success team at educational startups IO Education and Illuminate Education.

Pritchard will help Wonderschool ensure it is successfully expanding access to quality early childhood education for all. Following her career as a special education teacher in Public Schools, Pritchard led the customer success team at educational startups IO Education and Illuminate Education. John Brody , Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering: Brody will drive Wonderschool's product growth and evolution. Brody has had individual and leadership roles on engineering teams at six previous venture-backed startups, including Glint (acquired by LinkedIn), Flurry (acquired by Yahoo), and DeviceAnywhere (acquired by Keynote Systems), and Speakeasy, which he also co-founded.

Brody will drive Wonderschool's product growth and evolution. Brody has had individual and leadership roles on engineering teams at six previous venture-backed startups, including Glint (acquired by LinkedIn), Flurry (acquired by Yahoo), and DeviceAnywhere (acquired by Keynote Systems), and Speakeasy, which he also co-founded. Adrian Lai , Chief of Staff: Lai will support the Wonderschool CEO by building alignment across teams and leading cross-functional initiatives. Most recently, Lai served on the product team at Spin, where he pioneered Spin Pass, a major revenue channel for the electric scooter sharing industry. Lai has also led SEO at Houzz, acted as a strategy consultant at McKinsey and Company, and analyzed data at Facebook. While at Facebook, he created the first network AB test designed to quantify the effects of receiving "likes" from friends.

Today's announcement follows efforts by Wonderschool to continue to expand both its product offerings and its partnerships. Earlier this year, for example, the company expanded its platform , which has traditionally served home-based care and education providers, to serve child care centers. It also announced the appointment of former Mayor of Philadelphia Michael Nutter as a senior advisor to help identify and develop new partnerships with governments and organizations.

About Wonderschool

Wonderschool is building the largest network of high-quality early education programs. Wonderschool offers a diversity of options and combines engaged teachers and thoughtful education with the warmth of a family program while maintaining standards that go above and beyond state requirements. By providing dedicated support, technology, training, mentorship, and community, Wonderschool lets teachers focus on what they do best teachingand allows them to earn a sustainable living in the field they love. Named one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies in Education in 2019, Wonderschool is based in San Francisco and venture-backed by Andreessen Horowitz, First Round, Omidyar, Unusual Ventures, and Gary Community Investments, among others. Learn more at www.wonderschool.com .

SOURCE Wonderschool

Related Links

https://www.wonderschool.com


MANASSAS, Va., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- ATCC , the world's premier biological materials management and standards organization, today announced it has made two key appointments within its leadership team. The company has expanded the role of Ruth Cheng, Ph.D., Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer to include duties as Vice President of Corporate Development. And Robert Gowin has been hired as its Chief Strategy Realization Officer to support the fulfillment of ATCC's five-year corporate strategy.

Since January 2020, Cheng has led the development of a short and long-term corporate strategic plan and launched the Innovation Hub that has invested in over a dozen employee-led discoveries. Cheng began her career at Boston Scientific, where she established and managed a corporate innovation team. She then joined Smith & Nephew as their Director of Innovation and Strategy. And before joining ATCC, Cheng served as Vice President of Global Strategy for AgNovos Healthcare.

Cheng received her Master's and Doctorate in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Michigan and her Bachelor of Arts in Biological Sciences from Cornell University. She holds executive certificates in Strategy and Innovation from MIT Sloan and Private Equity and Venture Capital from Harvard Business School. In addition to authoring numerous scientific publications and more than a dozen patents, she also is an invited lecturer at congresses and universities on medical technology innovation.

"Over the past year, Ruth has been instrumental in driving the company's strategic planning processes and strengthening relationships with our key stakeholders," said Raymond H. Cypess, DVM, Ph.D., Chairman and CEO of ATCC. "She has been a catalyst for change at ATCC, and we look forward to her taking on a larger role in identifying new opportunities with an eye towards maximizing the efficiency of ATCC's business operations and expanding its global products and service offerings."

Prior to joining ATCC, Gowin was Vice President of Pharmacy Operations, Analytics and Compliance for Anthem, Inc., with responsibilities for pharmacy compliance, pharmacy analytics, pharma strategy, pharmaceutical contracting, pharmacy profit and loss and administration, and pharmacy operations and implementation. Gowin spent 20 years in the U.S. Army in various leadership roles before joining Serologicals Corporation where he led enterprise initiatives, managed the company's strategic plan, and oversaw the consistency of processes.

Gowin holds a Master's in Business Administration from the Sorrell College of Business at Troy University, and a Bachelor of Applied Science in Resource Management from Troy University. He is a certified six sigma black belt from Georgia Institute of Technology and a certified Project Director from the Institute of Project Management.

"We couldn't be more excited to have Robert join us to help meet our strategic goals and objectives. In his role, Robert will partner with the leadership and management teams throughout the organization to ensure that plans, capabilities, organizational design, and management are aligned and executed across the company," said Cypess.

Cypess adds, "We're fortunate to have the benefit of Ruth and Robert's talent and experience on our executive team and look forward to their guidance in shaping and achieving ATCC's strategic charter."

About ATCC

ATCC is a premier global biological materials and information resource and standards organization and the leading developer and supplier of authenticated cell lines and microorganisms. With a history of scientific advancements spanning nearly a century, ATCC offers an unmatched combination of being the world's largest and most diverse collection of biological research solutions and a mission-driven, trusted partner that supports and encourages scientific collaboration. ATCC products, services, and people provide the scientific community with credible biological products, advanced model systems, and custom solutions that support complex research in a variety of innovative applications resulting in incredible achievements in basic science, drug discovery, translational medicine, and public health. ATCC is a not-for-profit organization with headquarters in Manassas, VA, and an R&D innovation center in Gaithersburg, MD. To learn more about ATCC, visit www.atcc.org .

SOURCE ATCC

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DUBLIN, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Brazil Data Center Market - Investment Analysis and Growth Opportunities 2021-2026" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

Brazil Data Center Market to reach a CAGR of 10% during the period 2021-2026



The growing digitalization in the country, increasing adoption of the cloud, the introduction of the local data security law by the local government, and the shift from on-premises to colocation data centers are some of the major factors driving the market.

Sao Paulo will witness investments from Equinix and Scala Data Centers in seven data center facilities in the coming years. Brazil is the top data center market in Latin America, with about 17 unique third-party data center service providers operating over 44 facilities in the country.

The market has grown significantly, with an increase in hyperscale data center development and investment by cloud service providers. The COVID-19 pandemic has also been a strong market enabler for digital transformation initiatives across private and public sector enterprises in Brazil.



KEY HIGHLIGHTS OF THE REPORT:

5G networks to boost the country's digital economy and heighten demand for high bandwidth networking infrastructure.

In 2020, the country's major data center service providers were Ascenty, Equinix, Scala Data Centers, and ODATA.

Development of the hyperscale facilities is likely to increase in the adoption of more than 10 kW PDU racks in the market.

In Brazil , there are over 75 Uptime Institute Tier III Certified facilities, which includes colocation and telecommunication, service providers.

, there are over 75 Uptime Institute Tier III Certified facilities, which includes colocation and telecommunication, service providers. In 2020, Sao Paulo witnessed investment in around four facilities, with approximately USD 295 million .

witnessed investment in around four facilities, with approximately . Rio de Janeiro , Sumare, and Hortolandia will witness significant investments from Ascenty and ODATA, adding an IT load capacity of more than 70 MW.

BRAZIL DATA CENTER MARKET INSIGHTS

Brazil is the leading data center market in Latin America , driving over 40% of the overall investment in the region.

is the leading data center market in , driving over 40% of the overall investment in the region. Amazon Web Services (AWS) plans to invest over USD 230 million over the next two years to expand its data center presence in Brazil and strengthen its cloud infrastructure in Latin America .

over the next two years to expand its data center presence in and strengthen its cloud infrastructure in . Brazil is the largest data center colocation market in the Latin America region and generated USD 680 million in 2020.

is the largest data center colocation market in the region and generated in 2020. Private cloud spending in Brazil is valued at around USD 600 million in 2021, with a 10% growth from 2020.

is valued at around in 2021, with a 10% growth from 2020. Remote monitoring and management systems tools are gaining traction in the Brazilian data center market due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2021, the country will spend around USD 400 million on various Artificial Intelligence data center projects.

on various Artificial Intelligence data center projects. The shift of workloads from on-premises to colocation facilities boosts retail and wholesale colocation in the Brazilian data center market.

BRAZIL DATA CENTER VENDOR LANDSCAPE



Brazil currently hosts over 75 data center facilities. Sao Paulo is the major market for data center development in Brazil. It is a prominent location for the establishment of cloud region and hyperscale facilities. For instance, Amazon Web Services is opening its cloud region in Sao Paulo.

Ascenty, Equinix, ODATA, and Scala Data Centers are investing in developing the Tier III facilities, which are opened and were under construction in 2020. Microsoft plans to open a cloud region in Rio de Janeiro that is expected to be operational in H2 2021. Ascenty (Digital Realty), Equinix, ODATA, and Scala Data Centers are the key investors in the Brazil data center market.



IT Infrastructure Providers

Arista Networks

Cisco

Dell Technologies

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)

Huawei Technologies

IBM

Lenovo

NetApp

Pure Storage

Construction Contractors & Sub Contractors

AECOM

Aceco TI

Constructora Sudamericana S.A.

Fluor Corporation

ZFB Group

Jacobs Engineering Group

Quark

Support Infrastructure Providers

ABB

Axis Communications

Caterpillar

Eaton

Generac Power Systems

Honeywell International

Legrand

Munters

Rolls-Royce Power Systems

Rittal

Siemens

Schneider Electric

STULZ

Vertiv Group

Data Center Investors

Ascenty (Digital Realty)

Equinix

ODATA

Scala Data Centers

Quantico Data Center

REPORT COVERAGE:



EXISTING VS. UPCOMING DATA CENTERS

Existing Facilities in the country (Area and Power Capacity)

Fortaleza

Hortolandia

Jundiai

Rio De Janeiro

Sao Paulo

Sumare

Vinhedo

Other Cities

List of Upcoming Facilities in the country (Area and Power Capacity)

BRAZIL DATA CENTER INVESTMENT COVERAGE



Infrastructure Type

IT Infrastructure

Electrical Infrastructure

Mechanical Infrastructure

General Construction

IT Infrastructure

Servers

Storage Systems

Network Infrastructure

Electrical Infrastructure

UPS Systems

Generators

Transfer Switches & Switchgears

PDUs

Other Electrical Infrastructure

Mechanical Infrastructure

Cooling Systems

Rack Cabinets

Other Mechanical Infrastructure

Cooling Systems

CRAC & CRAH Units

Chillers

Cooling Towers, Condensers, and Dry Coolers

Economizers & Evaporative Coolers

Other Cooling Units

General Construction

Building Development

Installation & Commissioning Services

Building & Engineering Design

Physical Security

Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM)

Tier Standard

Tier I & Tier II

Tier III

Tier IV

Geography

Sao Paulo

Other Cities

WHY SHOULD YOU BUY THIS RESEARCH?

Market size available in the area, power capacity, investment, and colocation revenue.

An assessment of the Brazil data center investment in the market by colocation, hyperscale, and enterprise operators.

data center investment in the market by colocation, hyperscale, and enterprise operators. Data center investments in terms of area (square feet) and power capacity (MW) across cities in Brazil .

. A detailed study of the existing Brazil data center market landscape, an in-depth industry analysis, and insightful predictions about the Brazil data center market size during the forecast period.

data center market landscape, an in-depth industry analysis, and insightful predictions about the data center market size during the forecast period. Snapshot of existing and upcoming third-party facilities in Brazil

Facilities Covered (Existing): 44

Facilities Identified (Upcoming): 15

Coverage: Sao Paulo , Rio De Janerio , Hortolandia, Fortaleza , Sumare, Vinhedo, Jundiai, and Other Cities

, , Hortolandia, , Sumare, Vinhedo, Jundiai, and Other Cities Existing vs. Upcoming (Data Center Area)

Existing vs. Upcoming (IT Load Capacity)

Data center colocation market in Brazil

Market Revenue & Forecast (2020-2026)

Retail Colocation Pricing

Wholesale Colocation Pricing

Classification of the Brazil data center market investments into multiple segments and sub-segments (IT, electric, mechanical, and general construction) with market sizing and forecast

data center market investments into multiple segments and sub-segments (IT, electric, mechanical, and general construction) with market sizing and forecast A comprehensive analysis of the latest trends, growth rate, potential opportunities, and growth restraints, and prospects for the market

Business overview and product offerings of prominent IT infrastructure providers, construction contractors, support infrastructure providers, and investors operating in the market.

A transparent research methodology and the analysis of the demand and supply aspect of the market.

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/lzlp1f

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

[email protected]

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SOURCE Research and Markets

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ASPEN, Colo., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ --

New $25 million climate-equity-focused philanthropic fund to complement GM's $35 billion investment in EV and AV programs globally through 2025

GM Chair and CEO Mary Barra reinforces the need for equity considerations as the industry accelerates toward an all-electric future

GM reinforces its focus on bringing its current workforce along while helping to build a diverse pipeline of talent as it advances its zero-emissions vision

Today, GM Chair and CEO Mary Barra expanded on GM's previous climate commitments, declaring the company would prioritize equitable climate action to help ensure its all-electric future is inclusive for its current and future workforce; customers; and communities that may be more likely to disproportionately experience the effects of climate change.

The company also announced the creation of a new $25 million Climate Equity Fund, dedicated to helping close equity gaps in the transition to electric vehicles and other sustainable technology. The philanthropic fund complements the company's $35 billion global investment in EV and AV programs, research, technology, manufacturing and charging infrastructure.

"Climate change does not impact every community equally. As we move to an all-electric, zero-emissions future, it is on us to lead positive change and implement inclusive solutions that bring everyone along, especially our employees and communities," Barra said during the Aspen Ideas Festival.

Barra also shared more about the company's broader focus on equitable climate action, which is rooted in four key areas:

The Future of Work: The company reinforced the prioritization of its current salaried and represented workforce, including reiterating its long history of supporting unions to promote safety, quality, training and jobs for American workers. GM also publicly reiterated its support for the UAW's efforts to organize employees at the Ohio and Tennessee Ultium Cells LLC battery cell manufacturing plants.

The company reinforced the prioritization of its current salaried and represented workforce, including reiterating its long history of supporting unions to promote safety, quality, training and jobs for American workers. GM also publicly reiterated its support for the UAW's efforts to organize employees at the and Tennessee Ultium Cells LLC battery cell manufacturing plants. EV Access: The company will offer a wide selection of EVs across a range of price points, from the Bolt EV to the Cruise Origin shared autonomous vehicle. GM also recently announced programs leveraging its HYDROTEC fuel cells for rail and aircraft applications, which could help pave the way for communities to experience the benefits of zero-emissions mobility beyond the motor vehicle.

The company will offer a wide selection of EVs across a range of price points, from the Bolt EV to the Cruise Origin shared autonomous vehicle. GM also recently announced programs leveraging its HYDROTEC fuel cells for rail and aircraft applications, which could help pave the way for communities to experience the benefits of zero-emissions mobility beyond the motor vehicle. Infrastructure Equity: GM is committed to ubiquitous charging solutions that can help meet customers where they are. The company also understands the need to help address charging deserts and other scenarios that can hinder EV ownership.

GM is committed to ubiquitous charging solutions that can help meet customers where they are. The company also understands the need to help address charging deserts and other scenarios that can hinder EV ownership. Climate Equity: GM will help fund organizations that are closing the climate equity gap at the community level and across four key areas: the future of work, EV access, EV infrastructure equity and climate equity.

As the company works to address the key priorities under its equitable climate action framework, it will be guided by five principles:

Make mobility safer, more accessible and more environmentally friendly for all. Incorporate and normalize equity considerations across our business operations and program implementation efforts, including workforce strategy, sustainability efforts, and products and services. Work with community-based stakeholders to identify their unique needs, assets and priorities as well as collaboratively assist impacted communities. Advocate for inclusive and equitable climate change, renewable energy and transportation-related policies at the federal, state and local levels to help ensure a sustainable mobility future for all. Help fund the organizations that are providing equitable access to a more sustainable future.

Climate Equity Fund

Beginning today, the company is accepting proposals for funding from its new Climate Equity Fund. Potential grantees are encouraged to submit proposals aligned to GM's four climate equity social outcomes: future of work, EV access, EV infrastructure equity and climate equity. The company will prioritize grassroots organizations working at the community level.

General Motors (NYSE:GM) is a global company focused on advancing an all-electric future that is inclusive and accessible to all. At the heart of this strategy is the Ultium battery platform, which will power everything from mass-market to high-performance vehicles. General Motors, its subsidiaries and its joint venture entities sell vehicles under the Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, Cadillac, Baojun and Wuling brands. More information on the company and its subsidiaries, including OnStar, a global leader in vehicle safety and security services, can be found at https://www.gm.com.

SOURCE General Motors Co.

Related Links

http://www.gm.com


The first two discovery holes at the Nesbitt Nickel property intersected visible disseminated nickel sulphides on a geophysical target that is 3.7 kilometres long and 100 to 300 metres wide and located just 8 kilometres north of the Company's Crawford Nickel Project. The first two holes at the Mahaffy Nickel property and the first two holes drilled by Canada Nickel on the Kingsmill property intersected mineralized dunite across core lengths up to 417 metres. Assays are pending on all holes.

Mark Selby, Chair & CEO said, "This discovery at Nesbitt of sulphide mineralization just 8 kilometres from Crawford is very exciting as it opens up the potential for another higher-grade source of feed for the Crawford mill. This discovery also further confirms the district scale potential of our properties. The success of our geophysical approach combined with the success in confirming the results of the historic Nesbitt drilling increases the potential for success following up on the historic 0.38% nickel interval at the recently acquired Bradburn/Dargavel target."

Steve Balch, VP Exploration said "These results highlight the success of our geophysical approach to define these hidden targets as we have intersected significant mineralization in every drill hole on our first three regional properties. While this approach has identified multiple targets on each property, we will focus our efforts outside of Crawford on Nesbitt, MacDiarmid, and our recently acquired Dargavel/Bradburn property as those properties will be closest to the Crawford infrastructure, appear to be more serpentinized, and most importantly, now have demonstrated higher grade potential. We will continue to explore targets on the other properties as we improve our robust methodology to rapidly evaluate prospects."

The Nesbitt Nickel property is located 8 kilometres north of the Company's initial discoveries in Crawford Township. The Mahaffy Nickel property is located 15 kilometres west of Crawford and the Kingsmill Nickel property is located 22 kilometres northwest of Crawford. The Crawford Nickel Sulphide Project is located in the heart of the prolific Timmins-Cochrane mining camp in Ontario, Canada, and is adjacent to well-established, major infrastructure associated with over 100 years of mining activity.

Nesbitt Nickel Project

The Nesbitt Nickel project is centered on an ultramafic sill that strikes east-west for a distance of 3.7 kilometres and a width that is estimated to vary between 100 to 300 metres (for reference, the Crawford Main Zone resource is 1.7 kilometres long and 225 to 425 metres wide). The ultramafic sill was previously drilled in 1966 with Historic hole 27083 yielding 0.28% nickel over a core length of 163 metres including 0.33% nickel over a core length of 43 metres and Historic hole 25027 yielding 0.23% nickel over 114 metres. See below Cautionary Statement Concerning Historical Information.

Two holes were collared on the central Nesbitt trend to explore a coincident (high) magnetic and (low) gravity anomaly (see Figure 2 below) identified during Canada Nickel's geophysical interpretation earlier this year. The first hole was set up on the same section as Historic hole 27083. The second hole was positioned within the most intense section of the geophysical anomaly 300 metres to the east of the first hole.

Nesbitt NES21-01 was collared on the south side of the intrusion and drilled to the north. The hole was pulled back into the volcanics to test for possible PGM (platinum group metals) mineralization at the pyroxenite-peridotite contact. It exited the volcanics and intersected dunite with visible sulphides for a core length of 154 metres from 315 metres until 469 metres where the hole returned to volcanics. NES21-02 was collared on the south side of the intrusion 300 metres east of the first hole, also pulled south into volcanic rocks to test for a possible PGM intersection. The hole encountered a gabbro, pyroxenite and peridotite sequence (similar to the north side of Crawford Main Zone hosting the PGM Zone) from 113 to 222 metres with visible sulphides throughout the pyroxenite and peridotite before intersecting mineralized dunite for 138 metres and remains underway in dunite at 360 metres. The area around Nesbitt may have been subjected to faulting with unknown displacement if any.

Figure 1  Hole NES21-01 Pentlandite + Pyrrhotite in serpentinized dunite.

Core sample at 316.5 metres, microscope photos at 321 and 326.5 metres, core sample at 352 metres

Figures 2 and 3  Left to right - plan view of Nesbitt Property showing Reported Outline of Gravity Low and Magnetic High geophysics anomaly overlain on total field magnetic intensity, Nesbitt Township, Ontario; and Nesbitt Property discovery holes on gravity low (gDD) over a color image of the total magnetic intensity (magnetics)

Mahaffy Nickel Project

The Mahaffy Nickel project consists of 4 to 5 closely spaced ultramafic sills having an aggregate strike length of 24 kilometres. This prospect was previously tested by Historic hole 31901 (1966) which intersected 0.23% nickel over 127 metres, and hole T2-80-2 (1980) which intersected 277 metres of serpentinized ultramafic rock with no assays reported. For reference, the Crawford Main Zone resource is 1.7 kilometres long and 225 to 425 metres wide.

The first hole at Mahaffy (MAH21-01A) was collared southwest of the intrusive sequence and was pulled back to the southwest to also test for PGM mineralization. The hole encountered 116.5 metres of overburden followed by 15.5 metres of volcanics before intersecting a thick interval of 427 metres of primarily peridotite (with lesser dunite) to the end of hole at 559 metres. A potential PGM interval was not identified in the drill core. Hole MAH21-02A was collared 100 metres to the west and along strike from MAH21-01A. The hole encountered 159 metres of overburden before intersecting a core length of 335 metres of mineralized dunite to the end of hole at 494 metres (no potential PGM interval).

Figure 4  Plan view of Mahaffy-Aubin Property  Current drilling overlain on total field magnetic intensity, Mahaffy and Aubin Townships, Ontario.

Kingsmill Nickel Project

Kingsmill Nickel project is a large serpentinized ultramafic intrusion which is 2.2 kilometres long and between 375 to 600 metres wide. For reference, the Crawford Main Zone resource is 1.7 kilometres long and 225 to 425 metres wide. Kingsmill was previously explored (see Canada Nickel press release dated July 13, 2020) where thick intersections of mineralized dunite were encountered. The follow-up drilling consisted of two in-fill drill holes and two more drill holes to test an area of major faulting (sometimes an area of upgraded mineralization).

Kingsmill hole KML21-01 was located at the western portion of the intrusion and was designed to test the dunite mineralization and for PGM at the north contact. The hole intersected 15 metres of overburden followed by 427 metres of dunite before entering pyroxenite and gabbro (favourable sequence for PGM). The hole ended in leuco-gabbro at 449 metres. KML21-02 was also collared at the western portion of the intrusion but was drilled to the west to test dunite mineralization parallel to strike and to test for PGM mineralization at the west contact. The hole went through 21 metres of overburden and then 308 metres of primarily dunite before entering gabbro. The hole ended in volcanics at 428 metres.

Kingsmill holes KML21-03 and KML21-04 were both located near faults to test for the possibility of upgraded mineralization. KML21-03, located near the center of the intrusion, intersected 78 metres of overburden and 74 metres of mineralized dunite before being lost in a fault zone at 152 metres. KML21-04, located at the eastern margin, intersected 37 metres of overburden and 108 metres of mineralized dunite before being lost at 145 metres.

Figure 5  Plan view of Kingsmill Property  Current and historical drilling overlain on total field magnetic intensity, Kingsmill Township, Ontario.

See below Cautionary Statement Concerning Historical Information.

Table 1 Drill Hole Orientation

Target DDH ID Northing Easting Azimuth Dip Length



(mN) (mE) () () (m) Kingsmill KML21-01 5,423,113 454,867 360.00 -52.00 449.0 Kingsmill KML21-02 5,423,105 454,810 270.00 -50.00 428.0 Kingsmill KML21-03A 5,423,097 456,498 90.00 -50.00 156.0 Kingsmill KML21-04 5,422,900 455,773 90.00 -50.00 198.0 Mahaffy MAH21-01A 5,413,477 457,650 45.00 -70.00 561.0 Mahaffy MAH21-02A 5,413,681 457,562 60.00 -70.00 495.0 Nesbitt NES21-01 5,416,550 468,015 5.00 -50.00 499.0 Nesbitt NES21-02 5,416,775 468,351 360.00 -50.00 329.0

Qualified Person and Data Verification

Stephen J. Balch P.Geo. (ON), VP Exploration of Canada Nickel and a "qualified person" as such term is defined by National Instrument 43-101, has verified the data disclosed in this news release, and has otherwise reviewed and approved the technical information in this news release on behalf of Canada Nickel Company Inc.

Cautionary Statement Concerning Historical Information

The historical information referenced in this press release is based primarily on drilling results reported by Inco Ltd. and Noble Mineral Exploration Inc. The information has also been filed with the Ontario Government and is available on-line though the Mining Lands Administration System (MLAS) website. The company believes this information is relevant, as it was completed by reputable companies using industry standard drilling and sampling practices. The company or its "qualified person" (for the purposes of National Instrument 43-101  Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects) has reviewed the information to confirm it has been correctly reproduced from the public MLAS database, but given the Company's and its qualified person's inability to access the underlying data, the Company or its qualified person has not done sufficient work to verify the historical information contained in this news release.

About Canada Nickel Company

Canada Nickel Company Inc. is advancing the next generation of nickel-cobalt sulphide projects to deliver nickel and cobalt required to feed the high growth electric vehicle and stainless steel markets. Canada Nickel Company has applied in multiple jurisdictions to trademark the terms NetZero NickelTM, NetZero CobaltTM, NetZero IronTM and is pursuing the development of processes to allow the production of net zero carbon nickel, cobalt, and iron products. Canada Nickel provides investors with leverage to nickel and cobalt in low political risk jurisdictions. Canada Nickel is currently anchored by its 100% owned flagship Crawford Nickel-Cobalt Sulphide Project in the heart of the prolific Timmins-Cochrane mining camp. For more information, please visit www.canadanickel.com.

Cautionary Statement Concerning Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains certain information that may constitute "forward-looking information" under applicable Canadian securities legislation. Forward looking information includes, but is not limited to, drill results relating to the Crawford Nickel Sulphide Project, the Nesbit Nickel Project, the Mahaffy Nickel Project and the Kingsmill Nickel Project, the potential thereof, timing of economic studies and mineral resource estimates, the ability to sell marketable materials, strategic plans, including future exploration and development results, and corporate and technical objectives. Forward-looking information is necessarily based upon a number of assumptions that, while considered reasonable, are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors which may cause the actual results and future events to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information. Factors that could affect the outcome include, among others: future prices and the supply of metals, the future demand for metals, the results of drilling, inability to raise the money necessary to incur the expenditures required to retain and advance the property, environmental liabilities (known and unknown), general business, economic, competitive, political and social uncertainties, results of exploration programs, risks of the mining industry, delays in obtaining governmental approvals, failure to obtain regulatory or shareholder approvals, and the impact of COVID-19 related disruptions in relation to the Company's business operations including upon its employees, suppliers, facilities and other stakeholders. There can be no assurance that such information will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such information. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. All forward-looking information contained in this press release is given as of the date hereof and is based upon the opinions and estimates of management and information available to management as at the date hereof. Canada Nickel disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law.

SOURCE Canada Nickel Company Inc.

Related Links

https://canadanickel.com/


PITTSBURGH, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Cannex Scientific Inc. ("Cannex Scientific" or the "Company"), a biopharmaceutical company focused on therapeutic discoveries in the area of cannabinoid medicine, today announced it has entered into a sponsored research agreement with Brigham and Women's Hospital. Cannex Scientific, through this premier collaboration, is implementing a novel drug discovery platform to advance cannabinoid therapies in multiple unmet health needs. This model positions Cannex Scientific to identify nature identical compound combinations that exhibit superior therapeutic benefits. These natural compounds have a record of safe human intake resulting increased likelihood of rapid progression to IND, successful clinical testing, and attainment of FDA approval.

Cannex Scientific is applying its novel biopharmaceutical drug discovery platform to address unmet medical needs in neurobiology, gastroesophageal disorders, and lung injury induced by respiratory viruses. Initial work has led to the identification of a compound pair that has demonstrated significant in vitro activity in one of these therapeutic areas.

The research will be led by Dr. Aaron Goldman an Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Associate Bioengineer in the Division of Engineering in Medicine at the Brigham who has a wide range of expertise in the discovery and translation of therapeutics and clinical platforms from the bench to industry, Dr. Luke P. Lee, a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and global-leading pioneer in pre-clinical bioengineering tools, and Dr. Ilana Braun Physician in the Department of Psychiatry at the Brigham and an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School. The team brings together a confluence of expertise in clinical medicine, human physiological models and microfluidic tools that allow for multiplex screening of cannabinoids and terpenes in numerous diseases and indications.

Rebecca Bagley, President and Chief Executive Officer of Cannex Scientific said: "We are excited to work with Dr. Goldman and the research team to develop rigorous science-based discoveries in the endocannabinoid system that leverages the therapeutic potential of nature identical cannabinoids, a goal that has not been realized to-date in the marketplace. These discoveries position us to develop therapies with natural compounds that have a record of safe human intake providing a potential rapid path to IND through clinical testing, FDA approval and entry into the pharmaceutical market," Bagley continued.

Dr. Bork Balkan, Chief Scientific Officer of Cannex Scientific says: "The drug discovery paradigm that Cannex Scientific employs positions us to harness the therapeutic benefits of plant extracts that are often the result of the combination of more than one compound, affecting more than one biological pathway. Our collaboration with the research team enables us to exploit state-of-the-art microfluidic organoid systems that provide a more physiological in vitro organ model than single cell type in vitro screens that are traditionally used for drug screening. This collaboration will also give us access to sophisticated in vivo models to demonstrate the efficacy of our compounds."

The research team will focus on a number of biological and bioengineering platforms including an animal model of neuropsychiatric conditions such as anxiety and social phobia that the Goldman-Braun team published in Nature Translational Psychiatry. In addition, the team will deploy biological platforms that mimic the natural physiology of the human brain and lung microenvironments.

Dr. Goldman stated, "This collaboration with Cannex Scientific is designed to robustly test and discover the power of the entourage effect in pre-clinical models. We are excited about the potential for new therapeutic discoveries that can be quickly translated to help patients."

About Cannex Scientific.

Cannex Scientific is a Biopharmaceutical company focused on the identification, development and commercialization of therapeutic discoveries in the area of cannabinoid medicine. Cannex Scientific is implementing a novel biopharmaceutical platform positioning it to rapidly screen for discoveries with cannabinoid therapies to address multiple unmet health needs. Through its team of medical, scientific and academic experts, Cannex Scientific is positioned to transform the development of FDA approved therapies that address large unmet health needs globally through the power of the human endocannabinoid system. For more information contact [email protected]

Forward-Looking Statements

This news release includes forward-looking information and statements, which may include, but are not limited to, information and statements regarding or inferring the future business, operations, financial performance, prospects, and other plans, intentions, expectations, estimates, and beliefs of the Company. Words such as "expects", "continue", "will", "anticipates" and "intends" or similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are based on the Company's current projections and expectations about future events and financial trends that management believes might affect its financial condition, results of operations, business strategy and financial needs, and on certain assumptions and analysis made by the Company in light of the experience and perception of historical trends, current conditions and expected future developments and other factors management believes are appropriate. Forward-looking information and statements involve and are subject to assumptions and known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors which may cause actual events, results, performance, or achievements of the Company to be materially different from future events, results, performance, and achievements expressed or implied by forward-looking information and statements herein. Although the Company believes that any forward-looking information and statements herein are reasonable, in light of the use of assumptions and the significant risks and uncertainties inherent in such information and statements, there can be no assurance that any such forward-looking information and statements will prove to be accurate, and accordingly readers are advised to rely on their own evaluation of such risks and uncertainties and should not place undue reliance upon such forward-looking information and statements. Any forward-looking information and statements herein are made as of the date hereof, and except as required by applicable laws, the Company assumes no obligation and disclaims any intention to update or revise any forward-looking information and statements herein or to update the reasons that actual events or results could or do differ from those projected in any forward looking information and statements herein, whether as a result of new information, future events or results, or otherwise, except as required by applicable laws.

SOURCE Cannex Scientific
As Carl's Jr.'s celebrates 80 years of innovation in the quick service restaurant space this July, the release in partnership with Mckinney signals the brands' final goodbye to a more risque advertising past as they continue to focus on impossible-to-ignore culinary innovations, including the recently launched Hand-Breaded Chicken platform, the first-ever CBD burger at Carl's Jr., Froot Loops Mini Donuts and more.

"Charlotte Mckinney is an integral part of one of our most storied advertising moments, and is now stepping into the crypto-culture," said Patty Trevino, senior vice president of brand marketing at CKE Restaurants. "Working with her to auction off our first NFT is the ultimate way to turn the page and move forward from campaigns of our past, while still maintaining our provocative style of doing things."

McKinney's 2015 Super Bowl advertisement helped CKE reach milestones faster than any advertisement at the time, generating nearly 2.5 billion media impressions and 9.5 million YouTube views in just two weeks. McKinney has remained an avid fan of the brands, most recently teaming up to launch the Happy Star filter on Instagram, encouraging her followers to "Feed Your Happy."

"Carl's Jr. was a launchpad for my career and I'm forever grateful for our partnership that sparked such a special moment in my life," said Charlotte Mckinney. "I'm honored to join forces with the brand for its first ever NFT in support of an incredible cause that is near and dear to my heart."

Visit https://opensea.io/collection/charlottes-bite-shot for more information.

Follow Carl's Jr. & Hardee's on social media for the latest product news and promotional offers.

Twitter: @CarlsJr & @Hardees

Instagram: @CarlsJr & @Hardees

Facebook: @CarlsJr & @Hardees

About CKE Restaurants Holdings, Inc.

CKE Restaurants Holdings, Inc. ("CKE"), a privately held company based in Franklin, Tennessee, runs and operates Carl's Jr. and Hardee's, two beloved regional brands, known for one-of-a-kind premium and innovative menu items such as 100 percent Black Angus Thickburgers, Made from Scratch Biscuits and Hand-Breaded Chicken Tenders. With both a US and international footprint, Carl's Jr. Restaurants LLC and Hardee's Restaurants LLC have over 3,900 franchised or company-operated restaurants in 44 states and 42 foreign countries and U.S. territories. For more information about CKE, please visit www.ckr.com or its brand sites at www.carlsjr.com and www.hardees.com.

SOURCE CKE Restaurants Holdings, Inc.

Related Links

https://www.ckr.com


ORLANDO, Fla., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Community Legal Services of Mid-Florida Inc. (CLSMF), a civil legal aid servicing 12 counties in Central Florida, is pleased to announce that The Orlando Business Journal (OBJ) has identified CLSMF as one of the Best Places to Work in Central Florida based in part on the quality workplace cultivated by the leadership team.

Companies that participate in OBJ's Best Places to Work competition are judged based on the results of an employee survey administered by OBJ partner Quantum Workplace. The honoree rankings will be revealed in OBJ's Aug. 26, 2021, weekly edition, as well as online.

According to the Orlando Business Journal, "A key element is the well-established, employee-focused leadership team that encourages staff to be their very best. CLSMF has taken special care to accommodate each person's individual circumstances, ensuring that every staff member feels safe and remains as productive as possible. The staff really see themselves as a necessary and important part of minimizing the economic effects of the pandemic."

CLSMF Chief Executive Officer Jeff Harvey said, "I think it is really an amazing thing, when an organization like ours does such important work for the community and employees love where they work. It makes us more effective at our mission."

Kevin Ross-Andino, Chair of CLSMF's Board of Directors said "As a lawyer, it is great to see CLSMF thrive during a time when legal assistance is such a necessary need for those impacted by the pandemic. I am proud to be a part of this organization."

This recognition comes at a time when Community Legal Services of Mid-Florida, as well as the entire legal aid profession, will be facing a tsunami of tenants needing help as the CDC Eviction Moratorium ends in July.

To help support CLSMF's mission of providing much needed legal aid to the underserved community, please consider donating at https://www.clsmf.org/ways-to-give/.

About CLSMF: CLSMF is a nonprofit law firm striving to remove barriers to justice by empowering vulnerable communities through legal advocacy and education. As the primary provider of no-cost legal aid for low to moderate-income residents in Central Florida, we provide legal assistance to help people obtain the basic necessities of life: food, shelter, health care, safety, and education. For more information visit http://www.CLSMF.org.

Media Contact:

Michelle Wargo

[email protected]

SOURCE Community Legal Services of Mid-Florida Inc.

Related Links

https://www.clsmf.org


SACRAMENTO, Calif., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Conception Nurseries, the leading cannabis tissue-culture company in North America with major facilities in California and Oregon, will exclusively provide cannabis clones to the Cookies Family of growers. Conception Nurseries' tissue culture technology will enable growers to receive Cookies Fam genetics in consistent, healthy, superior plants, increasing revenue for cultivators. Cookies is one of the most acclaimed brands in the cannabis industry, earning a global reputation for iconic, super-premium quality cannabis products. Utilizing Conception Nurseries' technology, growers will be able to scale with greater confidence, reliably sourcing from Cookies' diverse portfolio of cannabis strains.

TrueClone tissue culture technology, Conception Nurseries' proprietary process, removes the risk of introducing pests and pathogens into growing operations through the micropropagation of plant tissue. This unique system enables plants to be delivered transplant ready from the laboratory, ensuring the clean supply necessary for commercial cultivators' success.

"Cookies works with only the best, most innovative partners, which is why our partnership with Conception Nurseries makes perfect sense. Our success is due to the fact that we only provide the highest quality cannabis to our customers," says Berner, Founder and CEO of Cookies. "Our partnership with Conception Nurseries allows us to further increase our production while maintaining our strict high standards."

The future of cannabis

Tissue culture technology puts cannabis cultivation on par with advanced commercial agricultural crops and is the future of cannabis growth and production. Conception Nurseries' TrueClone technology increases the velocity at which cannabis can scale to meet the growing demand from legalization and increased consumer consumption.

"Conception Nurseries has been building momentum and is primed to add Cookies premium genetics to our expanding strain portfolio," says Kevin Brooks, Conception Nurseries CEO. "We look forward to providing the market with Cookies-approved clones to help growers further increase revenue with clean, consistent, high-quality cultivars year-round."

About Conception Nurseries

Conception Nurseries brings commercial scale tissue culture technology to the cannabis industry through TrueClone technology. Harnessing state-of-the-art AgTech equipment and techniques, Conception Nurseries produces pathogen-free clones of exceptional vigor below commercial cultivators' in-house nursery costs. In 2020 Conception won the prestigious Ready to Invest award from The Arcview Group and was named a Top Ten Cannabis Tech Solution Provider by Enterprise Technology Review.

About Cookies

COOKIES, founded in 2008 by Berner (the prolific Bay Area rapper and entrepreneur) and his partner Jai (a Bay Area breeder and cultivator) is more than a premiere cannabis company; it is an authentic brand with passionate fans all over the world. The company went mainstream in 2011 and has grown its business through the combination of globally recognized premium genetics, popular culture resonance, and social media influence. COOKIES is constantly engaged in new breeding projects to launch differentiated brands and has quickly built a grassroots cult following while remaining loyal to its brand promise: authenticity and innovative genetics.

Today, COOKIES is one of the most well-respected and top-selling cannabis brands in California and throughout the world. The company and its product are recognized globally and offer a collection of over 150 proprietary cannabis varieties and product lines including indoor and sungrown flower, pre-rolls, gel capsules, vape cartridges, CBD Flower and medicinal mushrooms. COOKIES' seed-to-sale business allows for complete quality control at every stepfrom cultivation and production to customers' end retail experience. With a deep commitment to restorative justice and progressive drug policy, COOKIES actively works to enrich communities disproportionately impacted by the War on Drugs through advocacy work and social equity initiatives.

Cookies Media Contact: [email protected]| [email protected]

This press release was issued through 24-7PressRelease.com. For further information, visit http://www.24-7pressrelease.com.

SOURCE Conception Nurseries

Related Links

https://conceptionnurseries.com


Alarmed by the increasingly unrealistic expectations placed upon modern CEOs, Jason Randall's Beyond the Superhero proposes a new leadership paradigm. His philosophy dispels the myth that leaders can and should do it all. Randall argues that not only is this a destructive mindset for leaders personally, but a leader who cannot communicate what they want done, who is untrustworthy of team members to execute effectively, or who is too close minded to receive valuable insights from colleagues, friends, and confidants is bad for the organization at-large.

"We are in a position in which the floor could drop out from under us at any time," explained Randall. "Leaders are always facing huge new challenges that we are not prepared for. We must live with a feeling that our next decision could be our last in our current position. But the central premise of this book is optimistic, not fatalistic: with authenticity and humility, we can keep the energy aloft and build great results."

Part memoir, part guidebook, Randall's insights in Beyond the Superhero are relayed in personal vignettes from the odd stops throughout his career, revealing with candor and clarity lessons learned from each experience. With humility and humor, Jason Randall debunks the flaws in the superhero leader, while providing actionable steps for becoming a servant leader. It's a philosophy that redefines what it means to be a superhero  and CEO.

About Jason Randall

Jaosn Randall, a business leader with a gift for inspiring successful teams, has a resume nobody would ever build by design. Jason studied accounting at the University of Missouri-Columbia, became a CPA for an international firm, then left to start small franchise businesses with a lifelong friend. After taking time out to earn an MBA at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, Jason plunged into the corporate world at Goldman Sachs and Boston Consulting Group before eventually becoming director of brand marketing for Maritz, a storied B2B company.

In 2005, Jason became CEO of an e-commerce company, where he was introduced to the concept of outsourcing human resources as a client of Insperity. He later joined Insperity, a company with more than $4 billion in revenue, serving as a vice president and managing director. In 2018, Jason was named CEO of Questco, a Houston-area HR outsourcing company known for its can-do spirit and award-winning customer service.

About ForbesBooks

Launched in 2016 in partnership with Advantage Media Group, ForbesBooks is the exclusive business book publishing imprint of Forbes. ForbesBooks offers business and thought leaders an innovative, speed-to-market, fee-based publishing model and a suite of services designed to strategically and tactically support authors and promote their expertise. For more information, visit forbesbooks.com.

Media Contacts

James Wilcox, ForbesBooks, [email protected]

Hilary Cooper, Questco, [email protected]

SOURCE ForbesBooks
Video Ad Serving in Europe, Now Supported Through ER's Cloud Platform, AdBridge, Provides Expanded Reach for Clients

NEW YORK, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Extreme Reach (ER), the complete global asset management solution for TV and video ads, today announced their approved status as the latest independent ad server to join IAB Europe's Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF). In joining the TCF, Extreme Reach ensures compliance with the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and ePrivacy Directive. Extreme Reach also follows the IAB's California Consumers Privacy Act (CCPA) compliance framework in the U.S.

The TCF was developed by IAB Europe in collaboration with organisations and professionals in the digital advertising industry. It provides transparency to consumers about how, and by whom, their personal data is processed. It also enables users to express choices. Moreover, the TCF enables vendors engaged in programmatic advertising to know ahead of time whether their own and/or their partners' transparency and consent status allows them to lawfully process personal data for online advertising and related purposes.

"We are proud to join the IAB Europe's Transparency and Consent Framework as we expand our offerings globally with our recent acquisition of Adstream," said Tim Conley, CEO and Co-Founder of Extreme Reach. "As a long-time member of the IAB and IAB Tech Lab in the U.S, we are committed to simplifying the digital advertising ecosystem with seamless asset management and campaign execution for marketers while always ensuring high quality, privacy compliant viewing experiences for consumers."

Through TCF, publishers can continue funding themselves through relevant online advertising, and brands can continue to reach their audiences. All the while and most importantly, consumer privacy is protected.

The added registration of Extreme Reach to TCF, further bolsters IAB Europe's mission to raise the standard and trust in digital advertising across Europe.

Parties interested in joining TCF to give audiences full visibility and control over who can process their data in connection with advertising, should visit https://advertisingconsent.eu/register/

About Extreme Reach:

Extreme Reach (ER) is the only end-to-end global platform that connects and simplifies the creative logistics and activation of multichannel campaigns for marketers, agencies and regional partners. The centralization of all creative assets and campaign workflow in one platform delivers visibility, control and agility, giving brands a competitive advantage in today's complex media landscape. From concept, through every stage of production, asset management, campaign clearance and deployment, to performance reporting and analytics with talent payment and usage rights management fully integrated, ER moves creative at the speed of media with assets cleared for use, and in compliance, everywhere.

With the acquisition of Adstream in June 2021, ER now operates in 140 countries and 45 languages, representing the top 100 global brands with close to 400 million creative assets under management. With workflow, reporting and analytics in one place, ER gives clients the control and the insight they need across the marketing supply chain to optimize productivity and profitability.

SOURCE Extreme Reach

Related Links

http://www.extremereach.com


WASHINGTON, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Fallen Journalists Memorial Foundation today announced the kick-off of its capital campaign with the receipt of two significant grants to support the establishment of the Fallen Journalists Memorial in Washington, D.C. The Annenberg Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, leaders in the advancement and preservation of journalism and civic life, will provide a total of $6 million in grants to support the early stages of the Fallen Journalists Memorial.

The Annenberg Foundation grant includes a commitment to match up to $2.6 million in other foundation grants intended to spark early-stage seed funding.

Legislation enacted by Congress and signed into law in December 2020 authorized the Fallen Journalists Memorial Foundation to build a memorial on federal land in Washington, D.C. The memorial will commemorate America's commitment to a free press by honoring journalists and photojournalists who have sacrificed their lives in service to that cause. This is the first such public memorial in the nation's capital.

The initial funding from Annenberg and Knight will be used to help scale the organization as it undertakes the multi-year process of building the memorial with private funds. That includes creating educational programming, selecting a site, and designing and constructing the memorial.

"The Annenberg and Knight Foundations are two of the most renowned foundations in the country, and we are delighted to have them as early partners in our work to honor fallen journalists and press freedom," said Hon. David Dreier, chairman of the Fallen Journalists Memorial Foundation and former chairman of Tribune Publishing.

The announcement of the launch of this program directly follows the third anniversary of a mass shooting at The Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland. The shooting killed five employees of the newspaper and was the inspiration for the creation of the Fallen Journalists Memorial Foundation.

"These funds will be instrumental as we work to build support for and erect a permanent memorial in Washington that demonstrates how our country values a free press, honors the sacrifices of journalists, and supports the family, friends and colleagues of the fallen," said Barbara Cochran, president of the Fallen Journalists Memorial Foundation.

"Each and every year, hundreds of journalists and photojournalists are attacked, imprisoned, and worse because of what they do," said Wallis Annenberg, chairman, president and CEO of the Annenberg Foundation. "We need to honor and memorialize them, so we never forget their sacrifice. I'm proud that we can do our part to support the Fallen Journalists Memorial. I wish it wasn't so necessary. But we need to remember and pay tribute. And we need to rededicate ourselves to protecting our precious press freedoms, and those who put their lives on the line to advance them -- word by word and day by day."

"This memorial will be an enduring tribute to journalists from all manner of media who have died because of their craft," said Alberto Ibarguen, Knight Foundation president. "It's also a stark reminder to those who routinely spew hate about media, that there are real-life, tragic consequences to their cheap shots and threats."

About Fallen Journalists Memorial Foundation

The Fallen Journalists Memorial (FJM) Foundation was authorized by Congress in December 2020 to build a memorial on federal land in Washington, DC to commemorate America's commitment to a free press by honoring journalists who have sacrificed their lives in service to that cause. The Foundation is led by former U.S. Representative David Dreier and former news executive and journalism professor Barbara Cochran. The Foundation is supported by numerous leaders from all segments of the journalism community who serve on its Board of Advisors, including editors and publishers, news anchors, and photojournalists. The Foundation operates under the auspices of the National Press Club Journalism Institute, which is the non-profit educational affiliate of the National Press Club. To learn more, visit fallenjournalists.org

About the Annenberg Foundation

The Annenberg Foundation is a family foundation focused on addressing the critical issues of our time through innovation, community, compassion, and communications for more than 30 years. Since 1989, it has funded programs in education and youth development; civic and community life; equity and social justice; health and human services; animal services and the environment; and arts, culture and humanities. To learn more about the Annenberg Foundation and its various initiatives, click here.

About the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

Knight Foundation is a national foundation with strong local roots. We invest in journalism, in the arts, and in the success of cities where brothers John S. and James L. Knight once published newspapers. Our goal is to foster informed and engaged communities, which we believe are essential for a healthy democracy. For more, visit kf.org.

Press Contact:

Kylie McKenna

The Levinson Group

[email protected]

202.848.1034

SOURCE National Press Club Journalism Institute; Fallen Journalists Memorial Foundation
ORLANDO, Fla., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- As pandemic turmoil fades, many young people look forward to a more usual college campus experience this fall. A number of them will receive help with their college costs from Florida Realtors Education Foundation Inc., which has awarded scholarships to 177 well-deserving young people living in communities throughout the state.

A not-for-profit corporation established by the state Realtor association, the Florida Realtors Education Foundation Inc. provides real estate-related educational scholarships. The Foundation's Board of Directors awarded $222,800 in scholarships to help pay for higher education expenses for 177 young people in the 2021-2022 school year. All recipients are Florida residents and will attend community colleges, four-year universities, graduate programs or law schools, both in state and out-of-state. Some students wish to pursue careers in real estate.

"For 11 years, the Florida Realtors Education Foundation Student Scholarship Program has helped 1,364 young people realize their dreams for the future by continuing their education," said Brenda Fioretti, chair of Florida Realtors Education Foundation Inc. "Florida Realtors has awarded a total of $1,968,200 in scholarships  nearly $2 million  to help these students and their families with financial support for college. These scholarships are an investment in the future, and Florida Realtors feels privileged to give back to our communities by helping these deserving young people."

Scholarship recipients are enrolled at institutions of higher learning throughout the state, such as the University of Florida, Florida State University, University of Central Florida, University of North Florida, Florida Atlantic University, University of South Florida and Florida Gulf Coast University, as well as other colleges throughout the U.S., including Yale University, George Washington University, Troy University, Duke University, Auburn and Stanford, to name a few. A variety of criteria was considered for successful applicants including academic achievements, financial need, relationship to the Realtor family and contributions to family, school and community.

Florida Realtors serves as the voice for real estate in Florida. It provides programs, services, continuing education, research and legislative representation to its 200,000 members in 51 boards/associations. Florida Realtors Media Center website is available at http://media.floridarealtors.org.

SOURCE Florida Realtors
VANCOUVER, BC, June 28, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - PODA LIFESTYLE AND WELLNESS LTD. ("Poda" or the "Company") (CSE: PODA) (FSE: 99L) (OTC PINK: PODAF) is pleased to announce that former JUUL Canada President Michael Nederhoff has joined Poda as a member of the Global Advisory Board and consultant to Poda's management team and the Company's Board. As part of the consulting agreement, Mr. Nederhoff will be assisting Poda with its global expansion.

Michael Nederhoff was previously the president of JUUL Labs Canada, a division of JUUL Labs Inc. ("JUUL"). JUUL is an American e-cigarette company headquartered in San Francisco. Altria Group, the maker of Marlboro cigarettes, invested $12.8 billion into JUUL in December 2018, acquiring a 35 percent stake. Michael was hired by JUUL to launch the product and business unit in Canada. He was instrumental in dealing with commercial and regulatory aspects of the e-cigarette market. In addition, Michael was previously responsible for launching Red Bull and CytoSport into the Canadian marketplace, and he is currently the CEO of Shelter. Michael commented "Poda's revolutionary heat-not-burn product is exactly what I was looking to get behind to support a smoke-free future. There are more than 1.3 billion smokers in the world and reduced-risk smoking products are essential to the longevity of this large population. I look forward to using my extensive experience in launching major CPG products to assist Poda as they roll out their global strategy."

Ryan Selby, CEO, commented "Bringing Mr. Nederhoff onto the Poda team marks the addition of yet another seasoned industry-specific executive to our Global Advisory Board, and we now have a well-rounded slate of proven leaders. Mr. Daniel Chen brings phenomenal experience and expertise in the global manufacturing and distribution realm and has worked with some of the biggest tobacco companies globally, including Japan Tobacco International, Imperial, British American Tobacco, Godfrey Philips India, Philip Morris International, and China National Tobacco. Mr. Jon Ruiz spent over 15 years as a top-level executive at Philip Morris International (one of the largest tobacco companies in the world and the current leader in the global heat-not-burn market with their IQOS product). Mr. Michael Nederhoff is an expert in the fast-moving consumer goods market and was the Canadian President of the most successful e-cigarette company in the world (JUUL). These individuals have joined the Poda team because they believe in the massive potential for Poda to capture substantial market share in the rapidly growing global heat-not-burn market. We already have an incredible product in Poda and our Beyond Burn Poda Pods, and now we are continuing to build an incredible team of proven professionals to support our global expansion goals. This is another major step towards our goal of becoming a major player in the global heat-not-burn market" stated Ryan Selby, CEO of the Company.

Pursuant to the consulting agreement, the Company has granted an aggregate of 485,000 restricted share units (the "RSUs") to Mr. Nederhoff at a price of $1.39. The RSUs vest as follows: (a) 240,000 six months following the date of grant, and (b) 245,000 twelve months following the date of grant.

On Behalf of the Board,

Ryan Selby

CEO, Director, and Chairman of the Board

Poda Lifestyle and Wellness Ltd.

Toll-free North America: +1-833-TRY-PODA (879-7632)

Outside North America: +1-406-TRY-PODA (879-7632)

[email protected]

www.podalifestyle.com

ABOUT PODA LIFESTYLE

Poda Lifestyle is actively engaged in the global commercialization of HNB smoking products, which have the potential to reduce the risks associated with combustible smoking products. The Company has developed a patented HNB system that uses proprietary biodegradable single-use pods, which are both consumer and environmentally friendly. The innovative design of the Company's HNB platform prevents cross-contamination between the heating devices and the pods, eliminating all cleaning requirements and providing users with the most convenient and enjoyable potentially-reduced-risk smoking experience. Poda Lifestyle's HNB system is fully patented in Canada and is patent pending in 65 additional countries, covering over 70% of the global population. The Company's Poda Pods are the first and only cigarettes to have a completely closed end. This exclusive design entirely eliminates all cleaning requirements and provides a truly ashless HNB cigarette. Poda Lifestyle's fully patented system is truly one of a kind and solves the major pain-point that ALL other HNB products suffer from: daily cleaning requirements. The Company's flagship Beyond Burn Poda Pods contain a unique tobacco-free blend of pelletized tea leaves infused with synthetic nicotine, which provides adult smokers with a smoke-free alternative to their regular habit without sacrificing satisfaction. Beyond Burn Poda Pods have been expertly crafted to mimic the sensorial experience of traditional cigarettes without the smoke, without the smell, and without the tobacco.

FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This news release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Although Poda Lifestyle believes in light of the experience of its officers and directors, current conditions and expected future developments and other factors that have been considered appropriate, that the expectations reflected in this forward-looking information are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on them because Poda Lifestyle can give no assurance that they will prove to be correct. Readers are cautioned to not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. Actual results and developments may differ materially from those contemplated by these statements. The statements in this press release are made as of the date of this release. Poda Lifestyle undertakes no obligation to comment on analyses, expectations or statements made by third-parties in respect of Poda Lifestyle, its securities, or financial or operating results (as applicable). Poda Lifestyle disclaims any intent or obligation to update publicly any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or results or otherwise, other than as required by applicable securities laws.

The Canadian Securities Exchange has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of the content of this news release.

SOURCE Poda Lifestyle and Wellness Ltd.

Related Links

https://podalifestyle.com/


DENVER, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- GigSmart, the staffing company that connects businesses looking for talent with individuals looking for work through its Get Workers and Get Gigs apps, today launched Project Gigs giving users an easy way to connect with local service professionals to complete a variety of residential tasks and projects, from landscaping and cleaning to furniture assembly and moving.

GigSmart

Over the past year, the number of residential requests posted in Get Workers surged 244%, identifying the need for a residential, project-based solution. In addition to connecting businesses and individuals with workers to fill hourly shifts and part- or full-time positions, Get Workers users can post Project Gigs to tap into a pool of skilled workers who are interested in completing household projects. With this enhancement, Get Workers can be used to source all types of labor: temporary workers, permanent employees, and home-service professionals.

"As the gig economy continues to grow, GigSmart provides the only end-to-end solution to connect people to local workers. Get Workers is now the most convenient place to find and hire local professionals to complete any task, both at work and at home," said Mitch Catino, COO of GigSmart.

Project Gigs makes it easy for residential requesters to tackle routine maintenance and repairs, or hefty home renovations  big or small  via their free Get Workers account, accessible from a web browser or in the Get Workers mobile app. With Project Gigs, requesters can:

Create and post free Project Gigs to source local professionals for any residential task or project.

Receive applicants and project bids.

Pay a one-time $4.99 fee to unlock full worker profiles, as well as communicate directly with applicants.

fee to unlock full worker profiles, as well as communicate directly with applicants. Easily connect with local home service professionals and choose how to pay hired workers  inside or outside of the Get Workers app.

Project Gigs are available to Get Workers users within all 50 U.S. states, across dozens of residential categories including Catering, Cleaning, Electrical, Events, Furniture Assembly, Gutter Cleaning & Repair, Handyman, Home Appliances, Interior Design, Junk Removal, Lawn & Yard, Moving, Painting, Pet Care, Plumbing, Roof, and TV Mounting; and across eight digital and remote categories including: Photo & Video, Graphic Design, and Computer & IT.

GigSmart's Get Workers and Get Gigs apps are available nationwide. To hire a worker, sign up for a Get Workers account on the GigSmart website at gigsmart.com or download the Get Workers app for iOS or Android. To become a worker, download the Get Gigs app for iOS or Android.

About GigSmart

GigSmart is a staffing company focused on providing modern solutions to meet the needs of a rapidly evolving economy. GigSmart's apps, Get Workers and Get Gigs, connect businesses and residential users looking for labor with local workers. The apps are available in all 50 states, serving industries including construction, manufacturing, food service, delivery services, transportation, retail, customer service, and professional services.

Media Contact:

Jenay Sellers

[email protected]

720.828.7720

Related Images

image1.jpg

SOURCE GigSmart
KANSAS CITY, Mo., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- GlynnDevins announces today that it has officially rebranded as Attane, a leader in results-based marketing solutions serving the senior living, healthcare and financial services industries.

"A tremendous amount of planning, analysis and effort has been put into transforming our business to maintain our position as a marketing technology leader," says President and Chief Executive Officer Chris Egan. "We have grown and evolved from being a traditional marketing agency and have combined three market leaders under one marketing technology brand  Attane."

Since 2017, the company has experienced a rapid growth trajectory with a five-year average annual growth rate of 33%. And in the past eight months, GlynnDevins acquired two marketing technology businesses  Linkmedia 360 (October 2020) and Bluespire (February 2021) with each branded as "a GlynnDevins company." Since the time of those acquisitions, the company has integrated operations, solutions and marketing professionals from all three companies.

While the impact the company has on clients' sales and marketing efforts continues to prove successful, how and what it delivers has evolved in order to outpace market demands. Today, Attane is a different, stronger and a more progressive company.

"Aligning under one, unified brand is important for continuity, awareness and growth as we deliver solutions for our clients and their industries," adds Egan. "GlynnDevins, Linkmedia 360 and Bluespire were all strong, reputable brands, and we will honor those legacies by elevating Attane to an even higher level of prominence and influence. As market conditions build momentum to pre-pandemic levels, and given the current state of our business transformation, we believe now is the optimal time to rebrand."

Attane represents a symbolic, yet purposeful name that upholds the company's position of delivering results, growth and success. "To attain is to succeed in achieving the desired outcome, and our solutions allow our clients to do this every day," states Egan. "We have changed our delivery models and have built solutions that provide the most effective and proven approaches to capture market demand and drive conversions."

GlynnDevins was founded as a marketing agency in 1987 by Jim Glynn and George Devins to serve the senior living industry. Attane has now grown to employ more than 300 associates nationwide and predominately supports senior living communities / operators as well as healthcare and financial services industries.

Media Note: For more information, or to arrange an interview, please contact:

Steve Wujek, Vice President of Communication  [email protected].

About Attane

Attane, formerly GlynnDevins, empowers revenue teams in senior living, healthcare and financial services to capitalize on market demand and reach their full revenue potential. With industry-leading marketing solutions driven by data insights and proven methodologies  Attane helps customers optimize their go-to-market strategies for speed, precision and performance. Thousands of clients trust Attane to drive conversions and fuel their revenue engine with the most return from their sales and marketing spend. Attane is a private company headquartered in Kansas City, MO. For more information, visit www.attaneresults.com.

SOURCE GlynnDevins

Related Links

http://www.glynndevins.com


ONTARIO, Calif., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- GOFBA, a leading secure search engine and communication platform, announced today the launch of GOFBA Chat and a digital communication platform that puts the privacy and security of users first. The new messaging service provides state-of-the-art safety while being user friendly. As an attractive alternative to other big tech options, GOFBA offers the highest-level of encryption available today for its new Chat service and a commitment to privacy which allows users to communicate across the platform with peace of mind.

Chat's features benefit not only consumers with day-to-day interactions but corporations as large enterprises continue to navigate security issues, data breaches and other hurdles to create a safe environment. GOFBA's innovative and extremely secure communication platform overcomes these barriers by incorporating features that put user safety first, and incorporating superior file sharing and data transfer capability. Users can instantly transfer and send important files up to 5 GB in size at speeds up to 10 Gb/s. Individuals can also form groups with an unlimited number of members or send a quick message via SMS.

"GOFBA offers a best-in-class experience between its private search services and a secure chat platform," said Bill DeLisi, GOFBA's CEO. "Users of any age can feel protected and confident jumping from unbiased news articles to communicating with friends or sending a co-worker a confidential file. GOFBA Chat is a milestone launch and part of a suite of offerings that prioritizes user security and safety while providing an easy to navigate platform."

GOFBA Chat is broadly compatible on both desktop PC and Mac operating systems and is complimented by an intuitive, native mobile app for Android and iOS for on-the-go convenience. The company continues to evaluate new opportunities to enhance the platform's capabilities and plans to integrate additional features such as secure video, voice chat and email all into one platform.

To learn more about GOFBA or to create an account, visit https://www.gofba.com/.

Primary Offering

GOFBA is raising capital subject to its S-1 Registration Statement that went effective with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 16, 2021. Two million shares of common stock were registered at a proposed price of $5 per share. As of April 6, 2021, $1.6 million had been raised. Proceeds from the stock offering are intended to be used to further develop and commercialize internet modules that will be incorporated into GOFBA's communications platform.

"With the launch of Chat, GOFBA introduces its third revenue-generating service (in addition to Five Star Business Listing and News) to its platform. We are eager to take full advantage of this revenue opportunity and to develop additional communication modules, that could make our platform even more robust, attract more users and accelerate our revenue growth," continued DeLisi.

This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy these securities, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or other jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to the registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or other jurisdiction.

About GOFBA

Founded in 2008, GOFBA - a California-based technology company - offers an array of tools for a safer and more secure online experience and addresses the vast dangers that threaten everyday internet users. GOFBA provides safe searching, secure chat and email to more than 45 million users worldwide. GOFBA is the only English search engine available in China, some of the Middle East, and other conservative countries, which adds over a billion internet users other search engines have no access to. The company's family-friendly search tool is ideal for businesses, schools, colleges and universities as well as families that require content filtering for safer search. GOFBA is actively developing new technology to enhance security and streamline productivity for its millions of users across the globe.

Disclaimer Regarding Forward Looking Statements

This release contains not only statements that are historical facts, but also statements that are forward-looking. Forward-looking statements are, by their very nature, uncertain and risky. These risks and uncertainties include international, national and local general economic and market conditions; the COVID-19 global pandemic; demographic changes; our ability to sustain, manage, or forecast growth; our ability to successfully make and integrate acquisitions; new product development and introduction; existing government regulations and changes in, or the failure to comply with, government regulations; adverse publicity; competition; the loss of significant customers or suppliers; fluctuations and difficulty in forecasting operating results; changes in business strategy or development plans; business disruptions; the ability to attract and retain qualified personnel; the ability to protect technology; and other risks that might be detailed from time to time in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Although the forward-looking statements in this release reflect the good faith judgment of our management, such statements can only be based on facts and factors currently known by them. Consequently, and because forward-looking statements are inherently subject to risks and uncertainties, the actual results and outcomes may differ materially from the results and outcomes discussed in the forward-looking statements. You are urged to carefully review and consider the various disclosures made by us in this release and in our other reports as we attempt to advise interested parties of the risks and factors that may affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations and prospects.

Contacts -

Media: Laura Waldron, Interdependence PR; (949) 777-2485; [email protected]

Investor: Peter Miselis, Interdependence PR; [email protected]

SOURCE GOFBA
LOS ANGELES, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- GR0 , a leading LA-based agency focused on organic growth, was recognized today by Clutch as one of the Top Firms in Los Angeles and California in 2021. The report's rankings are based on verified client feedback, services offered, market presence, and quality of work.

"This award is a huge testament to all those at GR0 who have been vital in building a client experience focused on a commitment to excellence and premium customer service." said Kevin Miller , CEO and Co-Founder of GR0.

"Since we began operations in 2020, our employees have been working through the growing pains of being a new agency and persevering to bring us to a place where we can be acknowledged as one of the top SEO firms. We will continue to work hard to prove that we are able to apply outstanding work and strategic insights to our clients' needs, industries and markets."

Clutch is a B2B review and rating platform that highlights top firms from different industries worldwide. Each year, Clutch announces the best and brightest service providers that meet their meticulous evaluation-based methodology. At the backbone of Clutch's research is the client perspective, which Clutch infers through intensive client interviews.

GR0 helps brands rank #1 on Google by leveraging search engine optimization. For more information about GR0 and to read reviews related to client and employee feedback, please visit Comparably , Glassdoor , Clutch or Crunchbase .

About GR0:

GR0 is a digital marketing agency focused exclusively on igniting organic growth for direct-to-consumer startups and helping brands rank #1 on Google. GR0 empowers clients to build powerful online brands that deliver incredible value and joy to consumers.

GR0 was co-founded by SEO & marketing experts and long-time best friends Jonathan Zacharias , and Kevin Miller who both have a wealth of online marketing and advertising experience with top D2C and B2B brands.

For business or media inquiries, please contact us at [email protected] .

About Clutch:

A B2B research, ratings, and reviews firm in the heart of Washington, DC, Clutch connects small and medium businesses with the best-fit agencies, software, or consultants they need to tackle business challenges together and with confidence. Our methodology compares business service providers and software in a specific market based on verified client reviews, services offered, work quality, and market presence.

Contact: Kevin Miller, Co-Founder & CEO

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE GR0.com LLC

Related Links

https://gr0.com/


Perfectly Planned: Book your stay seven+ days in advance and save up to 15%

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From June 29 until September 13 guests can book these packages for stays for travel between June 29 and September 20. The two room packages are available for stays at Virgin Hotels Chicago , Virgin Hotels Dallas , Virgin Hotels Nashville, Virgin Hotels Las Vegas as well as the soon-to-debut Virgin Hotels New Orleans and, can be booked on virginhotels.com

As travelers start to plan their summer vacations, Virgin Hotels' is ready to welcome all. In addition to the savings on accommodations, guests are guaranteed free high-speed Wi-Fi, street-priced minibars, and zero hidden fees or surcharges.

To learn more about Virgin Hotels and The Know, please visit www.virginhotels.com . To learn more about future developments, please visit https://development.virginhotels.com/ .

VIDEO: Watch video here

About Virgin Hotels:

Virgin Hotels is a lifestyle hospitality brand that combines heartfelt service, straightforward value, and a seamless, personalized hotel experience with the track record of innovation and smart disruption that Sir Richard Branson's global Virgin Group has pioneered for 50 years. Each property intermixes a passion for food and beverage with music and culture, fusing with the local landscape and providing a vibrant and inclusive environment for travelers and locals alike. Virgin Hotels Chicago - named the "#1 Hotel in the United States" in 2016 and "#1 Hotel in Chicago" in 2016, 2017, and 2020 by the Conde Nast Traveler's Readers' Choice Awards - Virgin Hotels Dallas - named the "#16 Hotel in Texas" - Virgin Hotels Nashville and Virgin Hotels Las Vegas are now open. Locations in New York, New Orleans, Miami, Edinburgh, and Glasgow to follow. Virgin Hotels continues to explore hotel and office conversions and ground-up development in Boston, Los Angeles, Austin, Seattle, and London.

SOURCE Virgin Hotels

Related Links

http://www.VIRGINHOTELS.COM


HILLSDALE, Mich., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Recently, Hillsdale College submitted a memo to the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission (ICRC). The memo highlights the serious deficiencies of a report similarly submitted to the Commission by the University of Michigan (UofM) that argues for a "new theory of representation" based, not on individual, voting citizens, but on "communities of interest."

The Hillsdale memo, 25-pages in length, was written by Stephen Markman, Hillsdale College Professor and retired Michigan Supreme Court Chief Justice. Professor Markman points to a series of issues within the UofM report, most notably that it encourages the drawing of representative districts according to "interest," which can be "racial," "ethnic," or "religious," among others. This, according to Markman, will likely result in "gerrymandering," or partisan redistricting, and will make representatives more responsive to special interest groups than to the needs of individual citizens  "We the People."

Professor Markman has written a piece for The Wall Street Journal titled, "The University of Michigan Guide to Gerrymandering." It details the memo and its recommendations and he states:

The Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission can do the public a great service by uniting behind an electoral map that curtails gerrymandering, partisanship and self-dealing. Or it can continue these same abuses, albeit in a camouflaged manner, by transforming the people of Michigan's towns, cities and townships into a mere assemblage of favored and disfavored interest, identity and affinity groupings.

The better alternative, Markman suggests, is to follow Michigan's long history of relying upon county, city, and township lines when possible. Counties, cities, and townships, the Hillsdale memo states, "are where the people reside; where they sleep, play, relax, worship, and mix with families, friends and neighbors In short, these places are meaningful to every Michigander, for they serve to define what we call 'home' and they signify to the rest of the world where we are 'from.'"

The Hillsdale memo also reminds the Commission that they are bound by the state and federal Constitutions, as well as related court precedent. "The [UofM] Report," it points out, "incorrectly states that the concept of 'communities of interest' is an entirely 'new' concept in Michigan law. It is not." As proof, it cites a unanimous decision by the Michigan Supreme Court in 1982 that addressed the redistricting process and identifies "communities of interest" most often with cities and townships.

The Hillsdale memo concludes with numbered recommendations to the commissioners and for redistricting. These recommendations will help commissioners understand their role under the Michigan Constitution and establish good precedent in Michigan and across the nation for decades to come.

The full text of the Hillsdale memo can be accessed here and is available to the public.

Link: https://info.hillsdale.edu/redistricting

Professor Markman will be attending an ICRC public hearing in Muskegon on Tuesday, June 29, where he will present to the commissioners his memo and offer to answer any questions they might have.

Hillsdale College commissioned the report because of its interest in preserving "the blessings resulting from civil and religious liberty" in Michigan and across the nation. To do so, it encourages a right understanding of the Constitution and the system of representative government it enshrined into law.

Professor Stephen Markman has taught constitutional law at Hillsdale College for nearly three decades. He served on the Michigan Supreme Court for 21 years, including two as the Court's Chief Justice. As a member of the state's highest court, Professor Markman is experienced, well-respected, and well-known for his sound, fair, and sharp legal reasoning. As illustrated by his years of public service, he takes the well-being of his fellow Michiganders to heart.

About Hillsdale College

Hillsdale College is an independent liberal arts college located in southern Michigan. Founded in 1844, the College has built a national reputation through its classical liberal arts core curriculum and its principled refusal to accept federal or state taxpayer subsidies, even indirectly in the form of student grants or loans. It also conducts an outreach effort promoting civil and religious liberty, including a free monthly speech digest, Imprimis, with a circulation of more than 5.7 million. For more information, visit hillsdale.edu .

CONTACT:

Emily Stack Davis

517-803-3745

[email protected]

SOURCE Hillsdale College

Related Links

http://www.hillsdale.edu


VANCOUVER, BC, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - International Battery Metals Ltd. (the "Company") (CSE: IBAT) (FSE: 8RE) The Company has been provided with an update from Sorcia Minerals LLC ("Sorcia Minerals") whereby its subsidiary Sorcia Chile SPA ('Sorcia") has reached an agreement with RJR SALAR SPA (RJR) to exploit over 2,000 hectares for lithium in the Maricunga salar, in the Atacama Region using IBAT's innovative sustainable technology.

IBAT continues to work with Sorcia on the construction and introduction of its innovative and highly sustainable technology into Chile. Once Sorcia has obtained appropriate environmental permits, IBAT's extraction units will be deployed at the salar to begin commercial lithium production. IBAT's innovative technology provides numerous advantages including;

Superior lithium extraction efficiency, greater than 95% recovery of lithium chloride in the brine. Minimal water consumption. IBAT's process is designed to recover greater than 98% of its process water. Minimal chemical inputs. Other than minor acid and base requirements for pH control, IBAT's process does not require industrial chemicals in its recovery process. Rapid installation of extraction facilities Short time to production

When fully deployed, IBAT's process will provide the highest lithium recovery efficiency, with the lowest environmental footprint in the industry.

which allows the extraction of lithium, while reinjecting over 90% of the extracted brine in its natural state, minimizing the consumption of fresh water and using mobile and modular plants that are less invasive to the land.

The "selective absorption" lithium technology was first co-invented in the late 1980s by Dr. John Burba, CEO of IBAT, and the latest version of Dr Burba's proprietary technology allows for a much more efficient extraction than methods currently in use, reducing the carbon footprint, drastically reducing the use of water and brine in the salar and protecting the surrounding ecosystem.

The growing demand for lithium, driven by electromobility, demands the use of cleaner technologies that ensure the preservation of resources and guarantee the living conditions of local communities, already challenged by the scarcity of water resources.

The initial exploratory work will be carried out in conjunction with the University of Santiago De Chile (USACH), Sorcia's strategic partner for research, development, and implementation of new sustainable mineral exploitation technologies.

Dr Burba stated "This is another step towards implementing our technology in a first class resource and where we can also showcase to the world the selective extraction of lithium in an environmentally responsible and sustainable way"

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

"Dr. John Burba"

Dr. John Burba, President CEO & Director

Tel: (778) 939-4228

Forwardlooking and cautionary statements

This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any securities, nor shall there be any sale of securities in any state in the United States in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful. The securities referred to herein have not been and will not be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and may not be offered or sold in the United States absent registration or an applicable exemption from registration requirements. This release may contain statements within the meaning of safe harbour provisions as defined under securities laws and regulations.

This release may contain certain forwardlooking statements with respect to the financial condition, results of operations and business of the Company and certain of the plans and objectives of the Company with respect to the same. By their nature, forwardlooking statements involve risk and uncertainty because they relate to events and depend on circumstances that will occur in the future and there are many factors that could cause actual results and developments to differ materially from those expressed or implied by these forwardlooking statements.

SOURCE International Battery Metals Ltd.
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Jack & Jill Center announced that high school graduates from its new Madelaine Halmos Academy (MHA) will be awarded a 2-year college scholarship at a family and student preview party for the new state-of-the-art elementary school building on June 17.

Steve and Madelaine Halmos Madelaine Halmos Academy

Elementary-age students along with their families toured the building and received the surprise announcement that each child who continues his or her education to graduate from high school will receive a 2-year college scholarship from the Jack & Jill Center Opportunity Scholarship Fund. The Jack & Jill Center Opportunity Scholarship Fund is being presented to 240 children enrolled in second through fifth grade. Steve and Madelaine Halmos have graciously underwritten the scholarship fund.

"Madelaine and I hope to give kids from high-need families the same opportunity to live the American Dream that we've had. That opportunity is built on a foundation of a great education," said Steve Halmos, honorary co-chair of the Madelaine Halmos Academy Capital Campaign.

The Jack & Jill Center Opportunity Scholarship Fund aligns with Jack & Jill Center's credo of giving high-need families a hand up, not a handout. In order to receive the scholarship, students will be required to do their part and graduate high school on time. This scholarship program, available for every student, is unparalleled to other elementary schools in Florida and across the nation.

"With this new state-of-the-art school, we are able to significantly enhance our ability to develop lifelong learners with the potential for prosperous futures," said Heather Siskind, CEO of Jack & Jill Center. "We are very thankful to the Halmos family and the community for their dedication to helping these children achieve success. The Jack & Jill Center Opportunity Scholarship Fund will provide even further assistance to help put the students on the path to a great future."

Now housed at a leased space, the brand-new state-of-the-art MHA is the tangible result of a $10.6 million fundraising effort, $9.7 million of which has already been raised to date by the Madelaine Halmos Academy Capital Campaign.

MHA's kindergarten through fifth grade program will serve 240 total students from high-need families, including early education and elementary school education, who will benefit from the Jack & Jill education program. MHA's new building will create 37 new full-time jobs.

MHA is fully operational as of June 21, coinciding with the commencement of its STEAM Summer Camp. Early education is offered year-round at Jack & Jill Center, which has earned the highest level of accreditation and one of only a few in Broward County to be awarded with this accreditation. Most MHA students will come from high-need families and receive tuition funding from Step Up for Students, a state-approved nonprofit scholarship funding organization that helps administer five scholarships for Florida school children.

MHA provides a safe, academically sound and socially supportive environment for all learners. With its new building, MHA is significantly extending its offerings by providing an accredited school incorporating research-based best practices.

Some of MHA's features include a technology-driven STEAM curriculum; dedicated, highly-skilled staff and educators with low student to teacher ratios; extended school day for students; daily healthy breakfast, lunch and snacks; extracurricular activities fostering healthy social-emotional growth and personal development, educational field trips, a quality after-school program to include enriched after-school and summer camp experiences, and on-site counseling and therapeutic services.

Fundraising momentum is still high, and the Campaign is seeking additional donors. For more information or to donate to the Madelaine Halmos Academy Capital Campaign, contact Chief Development Officer Maria Meyer at 954.463.8772 ext. 203 or [email protected], or visit www.jackandjillcenter.org/mha-campaign/.

About Jack & Jill Center

Jack & Jill Center's mission is to strengthen children and families through innovative education, supportive programming, and community engagement. It achieves its mission by focusing on both the children and family units as a whole, so that the entire household, children and parents alike, are able to reach their full potential. For over 79 years, Jack & Jill Center has served more than 20,000 children and families in South Florida. It currently serves as a NAEYC-accredited year-round early learning program for children aged 6 weeks though preschool, as well as an elementary school  with a brand-new elementary facility, The Madelaine Halmos Academy, housing kindergarten through fifth grade unveiled in spring 2021. For more information about Jack & Jill visit www.jackandjillcenter.org.

Media Contact:

Duree & Company, Inc.

954.723.9350 / [email protected]

SOURCE Jack & Jill Center

Related Links

http://www.jackandjillcenter.org


NEW YORK, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- JewBelong.com, expands their antisemitism awareness campaign "JewBelong or JewBeGone" with powerful new messages debuting now in NYC Times Square and expanding to other cities including Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Miami, and San Francisco. Messaging will be seen on billboards in high traffic areas, online as part of a national social media campaign, and jewbelong.com. The campaign will run through mid-August with plans to expand beyond that, including other markets.

JewBelong.com expands their antisemitism awareness campaign

As our campaign says, "We're just 75 years since the gas chambers. So no, a billboard calling out antisemitism is not an overreaction," says Archie Gottesman, Co-Founder of JewBelong. "If Jews stop talking about antisemitism, the haters win. It's that simple."

Antisemitism is on a rapid rise throughout the U.S. and around the world, as is the overwhelming amount of hate and misinformation, particularly on social media.

The new creative can be found here:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/cjwrx6t04mdqs40/AAAZMBvwry-cYjJUViG3jQRga?dl=0

As part of the battle against antisemitism, JewBelong is also a resource for those who want to learn more about antisemitism, including how to fight it, and share their own stories.

About JewBelong: JewBelong.com is a non-profit online resource that offers easy explanations and meaningful DIY rituals for Jews, allies and anyone who has felt like a Jewish outsider or feels disengaged from the religion. Because of the current climate, JewBelong's platform is focusing on the fight against antisemitism.

JewBelong's co-founders, Archie Gottesman and Stacy Stuart, are the marketing duo that was the voice behind Manhattan Mini Storage's iconic branding ("NYC: Tolerant of Your Beliefs. Judgmental About Your Shoes," and "If You Don't Like Gay Marriage, Don't Get Gay Married").

Contact:

Hayden Ari

9734054600

[email protected]

SOURCE JewBelong.com

Related Links

http://jewbelong.com


BOSTON, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- JFS Partners, a specialized M&A Advisory and Consulting firm facilitating transactions in the MSP, Cloud, Colocation and Communications industries, announced today the acquisition of NetGain Information Systems, a leading provider of cloud and managed IT services in Central Ohio, by Aunalytics, Inc, a leading It Services and data analytics firm with offices in Indiana and Michigan.

JFS Partners served as the exclusive advisor to NetGain Information Systems throughout the sale process. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Under the new management, NetGain is a fully-owned subsidiary of Aunalytics, Inc. NetGain's Michael Minnich, CEO and Kelly Jones, President and COO are Aunalytics' shareholders.

"Our team is pleased to have successfully served NetGain through the execution of their acquisition," said Jim Farrell, CEO of JFS Partners. "We are excited for the future of NetGain now that it has joined forces with Aunalytics.

"JFS Partners was a trusted partner throughout the process," said Michael Minnich, CEO of NetGain. "Selling a company during a global pandemic is extremely challenging. The ultimate success of the transaction came down to their industry experience and expertise in M&A. They understood our business, the unique value we bring, and the emphasis we place on our clients and employees. They knew we were looking for a people first culture and this match was a natural fit. We have exceptionally high standards and appreciate and value partners who understand our demand for excellence."

About NetGain Information Systems

Many SMBs aren't aware of the ways that flawed technology is already limiting their ability to meet strategic objectives. NetGain guides clients in West Central Ohio to measurable business improvement through optimized technology infrastructure. We remove bottlenecks and systemic constraints, so clients can grow without limit. Whether it's a switch to our proprietary fiber network or outsourcing their IT to NetGain, our clients are free to focus on top business priorities.

For more information, visit https://www.netgainis.com

About Aunalytics, Inc.

Aunalytics is a data platform company delivering answers for your business. Aunalytics provides Insights-as-a-Service to answer enterprise and midsized companies' most important IT and business questions. The Aunalytics cloud-native data platform is built for universal data access, advanced analytics and AI while unifying disparate data silos into a single golden record of accurate, actionable business information. Its DaybreakTM industry intelligent data mart combined with the power of the Aunalytics data platform provides industry-specific data models with built-in queries and AI to ensure access to timely, accurate data and answers to critical business and IT questions. Through its side-by-side digital transformation model, Aunalytics provides on-demand scalable access to technology, data science, and AI experts to seamlessly transform customers' businesses.

To learn more contact us at +1 855-799-DATA or visit Aunalytics at https://www.aunalytics.com or on Twitter and LinkedIn.

About JFS Partners

JFS Partners delivers M&A Advisory & Consulting services for buy-side, sell-side, consulting, exit planning and capital raises for MSP, Cloud, Colocation, Communication Service Providers (CSP), Manufacturing, Professional Services, SaaS, and VARs.

As a boutique advisory resource, JFS Partners offers a focused scope of M&A services that empowers businesses to take advantage of market consolidation and geographic expansion. This focus enables us to stay grounded in our area of expertise while cultivating a broad network of industry contacts and a deep understanding of the marketplace.

For more information, visit https://www.jfs-partners.com/

Follow JFS Partners: LinkedIn and Twitter

Contact:

Jim Farrell

508-330-6153

[email protected]

SOURCE JFS Partners
Shinhan Bank, a global financial leader in digital innovation, has built various blockchain based financial services including government policy loan, retirement pension, and derivative settlement since 2017. In addition to participating in co-governance of the Klaytn blockchain, Shinhan will develop various Klaytn-based digital services that can help foster the fintech ecosystem.

Officials at Klaytn said we welcome Shinhan, one of Korea's largest banks, to participate in the co-governance of Klaytn, and together with Shinhan and our Council members, we will continue to stimulate sustainable growth of the Klaytn ecosystem.

Officials at Shinhan Bank said we are excited to join Klaytn Governance Council involving various leading global organizations in diverse industries. We aim not only to create an ecosystem but also to introduce a digitally transformed financial service based on blockchain.

About Klaytn

Klaytn is a global public blockchain platform developed by Ground X, the blockchain affiliate of the leading South Korean Internet company, Kakao. Klaytn is a service-centric blockchain platform providing an intuitive development environment and friendly end-user experience. It is built upon solid reliability and significant stability with substantial service development for mass adoption. The platform allows real world applications of large scale to be produced right away so that our end-users can make full use of services without much expertise in blockchain or cryptocurrency. For more information, visithttps://www.klaytn.com.

SOURCE Klaytn
AUSTIN, Texas, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, RapidDeploy, the industry's leading cloud-native emergency response platform, successfully implemented its Nimbus platform for cloud-aided dispatch to Lockheed Martin's Aeronautics Facility in Fort Worth, Texas. The facility, which manages the production of 120+ fixed-wing military aircraft annually, will bring the capabilities of the Nimbus platform to its emergency response portfolio, ensuring real time situational awareness and dispatch for the facility's 15,000+ daily personnel.

"RapidDeploy's cloud aided dispatch platform, Nimbus, incorporates a multitude of data integrations from dozens of vendors to provide the best comprehensive operating picture for its users," Jon Samuelson, Vice President of Commercial Operations said. "Lockheed Martin's critical security needs at this facility warrant the kinds of services Nimbus can deliver, proving again that what we do for public safety also resonates with many other, similar verticals."

Nimbus brings information in real-time information, like location of dispatched vehicles, emergency personnel, and incident feeds to Lockheed Martin's Security and Emergency Services(SES) operations team at the facility. Nimbus also has a mobile application, which puts modern data capabilities at the fingertips of mobile users, ranging from advanced location tracking and navigation to innovative voice control features. Mobile users can now collaborate with dispatchers and others in near real time, maximizing efficiency and safety.

"We have seen what RapidDeploy has done for 911 centers across the country," Steven Jean, Deputy Fire Chief at Lockheed Martin said. "Taking that application and overlaying onto our enterprise needs was seamless, and we're excited to see how Nimbus performs in the hands of our Fire and EMS operations team members."

To learn more about RapidDeploy's 911 Public Safety ecosystem visit www.rapiddeploy.com .

About RapidDeploy:

RapidDeploy is the industry's only truly open and integrated response platform, transforming 9-1-1 communications centers of any size into data-centric organizations. RapidDeploy achieves new levels of situational awareness and reduces 9-1-1 response time by seamlessly integrating third-party data ensuring it is available when, where and how Telecommunicators and First Responders need it. The company's cloud-native platform includes analytics, mapping, dispatch and first responder applications. To learn more, visit https://www.rapiddeploy.com/

About Lockheed Martin:

Headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, Lockheed Martin Corporation is a global security and aerospace company that employs approximately 114,000 people worldwide and is principally engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture, integration and sustainment of advanced technology systems, products and services.

Media contact:

Joel Weyrauch

BLASTmedia for RapidDeploy

[email protected]

317.806.1900 ext. 117

SOURCE RapidDeploy

Related Links

http://www.rapiddeploy.com


AUSTIN, Texas, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Long View Equity (the "Company") announced today the recent acquisition of Parmer McNeil Plaza, a 47,888 SF retail development. The location is at the intersection of Parmer Lane and McNeil Drive in Austin, Texas, which is directly across from Apples Inc.'s new $1B campus. The project was built in 2005 and includes a diverse tenant mix including Chase Bank, Starbuck's, Wells Fargo, and several local favorite restaurants including Chi'Lantro and Juiceland.

The acquisition is part of the Company's newest fund, Long View Equity Partners IV. Building on the success of its prior funds, with Fund IV the Company seeks to construct a diversified portfolio of industrial, office, and retail properties located predominately in major metro markets in Texas.

Daniel Campbell, managing director, commented, "We are thrilled to add this asset to our Fund IV portfolio. Its addition will provide stability of cash flows while allowing us to invest in one of the most desirable submarkets of Austin dominated by some of the world's most admired technology companies including Apple, Ebay, PayPal, and Oracle. We expect this area to continue to grow with the development of Robinson Ranch and are excited about what the future holds for this project."

Colin Tierney and Taylor Golden with Gold Tier Real Estate represented Long View Equity and Nick Naumann with the Weitzman Group represented the seller.

Long View Equity

Long View Equity, LLC, founded in 2010, is an Austin, Texas based investment management company that oversees investment decisions and operations of real estate investment funds and other syndicated investment vehicles. Long View Equity's core purpose is to create long-term value for its 100+ investors by making well-thought-out investment decisions, exercising diligence in management, and continually seeking out opportunities to create value. The Company pursues strategies involving the direct acquisition of core-plus and value-added investments and has a proven 10+ year track record of operating over 50 office, retail, or industrial real estate properties located primarily in metropolitan markets in Texas.

For more information about Long View Equity, please visit: www.longviewequity.com

CONTACT:

Long View Equity

Daniel Campbell

(512) 377-9395

[email protected]

SOURCE Long View Equity

Related Links

http://longviewequity.com/


C$ unless otherwise stated TSX/NYSE/PSE: MFC SEHK: 945

TORONTO, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - Manulife Financial Corporation ("Manulife" or the "Company") is hosting an Investor Day today at 8 a.m. EDT. Manulife's senior management will present the next phase of the Company's strategy, with an emphasis on its Asia and Global Wealth and Asset Management businesses and digital transformation. New supplemental information has been made available for Asia and Global Wealth and Asset Management and this information will also be provided on an ongoing basis as part of the Company's financial disclosures.

In addition to presentations, the event will include live Q&A sessions for institutional investors and research analysts to engage with the presenters and other executives. Interested parties may access the live webcast here. The Investor Day slide presentations can also be found here. An archived version of the webcast audio and video will be available the day after the live event here for six months. More information about the Company can be found at the same location.

Investor Day Agenda

Roy Gori President and Chief Executive Officer Strategic Update: Accelerating our growth engines, powering the next phase of our journey Phil Witherington Chief Financial Officer Financial Update: Strength. Execution. Growth. Anil Wadhwani President and CEO, Manulife Asia Asia: Realizing our potential Paul Lorentz President and CEO, Manulife Investment Management Global WAM: Unlocking the next stage of growth Karen Leggett Global Chief Marketing Officer Accelerating our customer and digital strategy

A New Phase of our Strategy

At our 2018 Investor Day, we introduced our five strategic priorities, which include: Portfolio Optimization, Expense Efficiency, Accelerate Growth, Digital, Customer Leader and High Performing Team. Since then, Manulife has made significant progress executing on its ambition to become the most digital, customer-centric global company in the industry. Manulife is pleased to have achieved our Portfolio Optimization target three years ahead of schedule, releasing $5.9 billion of capital. In addition, Manulife's $1 billion expense savings target was achieved two years ahead of schedule and the Company is on track to deliver on its Expense Efficiency target to consistently report an expense efficiency ratio of less than 50 per cent by 2022.1 In 2020, the Company achieved top quartile employee engagement amongst global financial services companies and insurance peers.

_______________________________ 1 The Company's strategic priorities and 2022 targets, medium-term targets, and 2025 supplemental goals do not constitute guidance. See "Caution regarding forward-looking statements" below.

"Over the last three years we've strengthened our foundations significantly. Our strong execution and success on these priorities have positioned us well for future success, and the next phase of our transformation," said Manulife President & Chief Executive Officer Roy Gori. "We have entered a new phase of our strategy, with a greater focus on accelerating the growth of our highest potential businesses and are committing to meaningful metrics to measure our progress through to 2025."

"Manulife remains committed to our medium-term targets and has a clear path to delivering 10 to 12 per cent annual Core EPS growth," said Manulife Chief Financial Officer Phil Witherington.

Discussions at Manulife Investor Day 2021 will focus on the next phase of our journey, with plans to:

Generate 75 percent of total company core earnings from highest potential businesses by 2025.

Reach a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of +37 and Straight Through Processing (STP) of 88 per cent by 2025.

Continue to focus on Portfolio Optimization and reduce the combined contribution from LTC and VA to less than 15 per cent of total company core earnings by 2025.

The earnings profile of the Company has shifted as a function of growth in our Asia and Global WAM businesses outpacing other segments. As a result, Manulife has published expanded disclosures for Asia and Global Wealth and Asset Management to provide additional information for measuring progress. The new disclosures can be found in an updated 1Q21 Statistical Information Package here.

Accelerating Growth in Asia and Global Wealth & Asset Management

Our strategy continues to be supported by the macro environment, which is being shaped by three megatrends: the growth and emergence of the middle class in Asia, an aging global population, and the digitization of the consumer. Manulife is uniquely positioned to capitalize on these trends over the next decade and beyond.

With 120 years of experience in Asia, Manulife is a top tier pan-Asian life insurer, with insurance and/or WAM operations in 13 markets in Asia. The growth and emergence of the middle class in Asia, which will represent approximately two-thirds of the world's middle class2, will drive higher demand for financial services and insurance protection, creating a tremendous opportunity for Manulife. With a growing mortality protection gap and very low insurance penetration rates3 across many of our markets in Asia, the Company expects to see a very significant growth rate in insurance premiums over the next decade in Asia at more than double the rate4 it will in North America.

______________________________ 2 Source: Brookings, the unprecedented expansion of the global middle class (2017). 3 Source: Swiss Re Institute, Sigma 04/2020: Closing Asia's mortality protection gap (July 2020). 4 Source: Allianz insurance report 2020. Asia excludes Japan.

Anil Wadhwani, President and CEO, Manulife Asia said, "Manulife Asia aims to accelerate our growth by capitalizing on these megatrends and solidifying our position as a top tier pan-Asian life insurer. With an enviable geographic footprint, balanced distribution, and full range of products, Manulife is focused on growing and digitizing our leading agency force, deepening customer penetration with our bank partners, as well as accelerating growth in key markets in China and Southeast Asia."

Manulife's Global Wealth and Asset Management business, Manulife Investment Management, has delivered strong operating results over the last five years, with net inflows in ten of the past eleven years, supported by solid investment performance.

"Manulife Investment Management has a clear strategic direction and is well positioned to capitalize on a number of global macro trends through our insurance heritage and asset management business, including public and private market capabilities and retail, institutional and retirement services. And, we have made strategic long-term investments in growing markets including China and India," said Paul Lorentz, President and CEO, Manulife Investment Management.

The next phase of growth for Manulife Investment Management is focused on three key pillars that will position the Company well for growth. Our first pillar is about strengthening our commitments to our Retail business customers by expanding our distribution, enriching our digital capabilities and continuing to launch market-leading investment solutions. Our second pillar is focused on our Retirement business and providing advice and investment solutions to help plan participants save and prepare for their golden years. This will include enhanced digital experiences, improved use of data and analytics for the benefit of clients, and our diverse product shelf. Our third pillar is on augmenting our asset management capabilities by developing differentiated public and private market investment strategies, while building scale across the business and driving further awareness of ESG with unique integrated solutions for clients.

Making meaningful progress on our journey to become a Digital, Customer Leader

Since 2018, Manulife has invested more than $750 million to enhance our digital capabilities, "Our strategy takes a highly-targeted approach in how we select and plan our investments to have maximum impact for customers, shareholders and the company," said Karen Leggett, Global Chief Marketing Officer.

Manulife has deployed Human-Centered Design globally, with a dedicated team of practitioners to systematically research, design, iterate, and deliver best-in-class experiences, validated with customers at each step. In the past year, Manulife has engaged more than 7,500 customers in this process, contributing to a 50 per cent increase in NPS. The Company is accelerating its Customer & Digital strategy by listening to customers and addressing their most important feedback real-time and upfront, building market-leading experiences that emphasize high-value interactions that matter most to customers, and focusing on extending relationships and advice for customers in addressing their health and wellness needs.

Manulife is positioned well to capitalize on the significant value yet to be unlocked on its path to become a Digital Customer Leader.

Non-GAAP Financial Measures

Manulife uses a number of non-GAAP financial measures to measure overall performance and to assess each of its businesses, including its medium-term targets of: annual diluted core earnings per common share ("core EPS") growth of 10% to 12% over the medium term, core return on common shareholders' equity ("core ROE") of 13% or more, a leverage ratio of 25% and a common share dividend payout ratio of 30% to 40% of core earnings.

A financial measure is considered a non-GAAP measure for Canadian securities law purposes if it is presented other than in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles used for the Company's audited financial statements. Non-GAAP measures include core earnings, core EPS, core ROE, capital, net annualized fee income, net fee income yield, and expense efficiency ratio. For more information on non-GAAP financial measures, including those referred to above, see "Performance and Non-GAAP Measures" in Manulife's 2020 Annual Report and First Quarter 2021 Report to Shareholders.

Net annualized fee income yield on average AUMA ("net fee income yield") is a non-GAAP ratio. It is equal to net annualized fee income from Global Wealth and Asset Management ("Global WAM") channels, expressed as a basis point ratio over average assets under management and administration (AUMA). This ratio provides information on the business' basis point return from managing AUMA.

Net annualized fee income represents Global WAM's income before income taxes, adjusted to exclude general expenses, investment income and non-AUMA related net benefits and claims. It also excludes the components of Global WAM's net fee income from managing assets on behalf of other Segments. The measure is annualized based on the number days in the year divided by the number of days in the reporting period.

Caution Regarding Forward Looking-Statements

From time to time, Manulife makes written and/or oral forward-looking statements, including in this document. In addition, our representatives may make forward-looking statements orally to analysts, investors, the media and others. All such statements are made pursuant to the "safe harbour" provisions of Canadian provincial securities laws and the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The forward-looking statements in this document include, but are not limited to, statements with respect to the Company's strategic priorities and 2022 targets for net promoter score, employee engagement, its high potential businesses, expense efficiency and portfolio optimization; its medium-term targets for shareholder returns, core EPS growth, core ROE, leverage ratio and common share dividend payout ratio; the next phase of the Company's strategy and 2025 supplemental goals related to its highest potential businesses, net promoter score, straight-through-processing and portfolio optimization for the long-term care (LTC) and variable annuities (VA) businesses; the Company's plans to accelerate growth of its Asia and Global Wealth and Asset Management businesses and to become a digital, customer leader; and also relate to, among other things, our objectives, goals, strategies, intentions, plans, beliefs, expectations and estimates, and can generally be identified by the use of words such as "may", "will", "should", "expect", "plan", "aim", "continue", and "target" (or the negative thereof) and words and expressions of similar import, and include statements concerning possible or assumed future results. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are reasonable, such statements involve risks and uncertainties, and undue reliance should not be placed on such statements and they should not be interpreted as confirming market or analysts' expectations in any way.

Certain material factors or assumptions are applied in making forward-looking statements and actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in such statements. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations include but are not limited to: general business and economic conditions (including but not limited to the performance, volatility and correlation of equity markets, interest rates, credit and swap spreads, currency rates, investment losses and defaults, market liquidity and creditworthiness of guarantors, reinsurers and counterparties); the severity, duration and spread of the COVID-19 outbreak, as well as actions that have been, or may be taken by governmental authorities to contain COVID-19 or to treat its impact; changes in laws and regulations; changes in accounting standards applicable in any of the territories in which we operate; changes in regulatory capital requirements; our ability to execute strategic plans and changes to strategic plans; downgrades in our financial strength or credit ratings; our ability to maintain our reputation; impairments of goodwill or intangible assets or the establishment of provisions against future tax assets; the accuracy of estimates relating to morbidity, mortality and policyholder behaviour; the accuracy of other estimates used in applying accounting policies, actuarial methods and embedded value methods; our ability to implement effective hedging strategies and unforeseen consequences arising from such strategies; our ability to source appropriate assets to back our long-dated liabilities; level of competition and consolidation; our ability to market and distribute products through current and future distribution channels; unforeseen liabilities or asset impairments arising from acquisitions and dispositions of businesses; the realization of losses arising from the sale of investments classified as available-for-sale; our liquidity, including the availability of financing to satisfy existing financial liabilities on expected maturity dates when required; obligations to pledge additional collateral; the availability of letters of credit to provide capital management flexibility; accuracy of information received from counterparties and the ability of counterparties to meet their obligations; the availability, affordability and adequacy of reinsurance; legal and regulatory proceedings, including tax audits, tax litigation or similar proceedings; our ability to adapt products and services to the changing market; our ability to attract and retain key executives, employees and agents; the appropriate use and interpretation of complex models or deficiencies in models used; political, legal, operational and other risks associated with our non-North American operations; acquisitions and our ability to complete acquisitions including the availability of equity and debt financing for this purpose; the disruption of or changes to key elements of the Company's or public infrastructure systems; environmental concerns; our ability to protect our intellectual property and exposure to claims of infringement; and our inability to withdraw cash from subsidiaries.

Additional information about material risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations and about material factors or assumptions applied in making forward-looking statements may be found in our most recent interim report under "Risk Management and Risk Factors Update" and "Critical Actuarial and Accounting Policies", under "Risk Factors and Risk Management" and "Critical Actuarial and Accounting Policies" in the Management's Discussion and Analysis in our most recent annual report, and in the "Risk Management" note to the consolidated financial statements in our most recent annual and interim reports and elsewhere in our filings with Canadian and U.S. securities regulators.

The forward-looking statements in this document are, unless otherwise indicated, stated as of the date hereof and are presented for the purpose of assisting investors and others in understanding our financial position and results of operations, our future operations, as well as our objectives and strategic priorities, and may not be appropriate for other purposes. We do not undertake to update any forward-looking statements, except as required by law.

About Manulife

Manulife Financial Corporation is a leading international financial services provider that helps people make their decisions easier and lives better. With our global headquarters in Toronto, Canada, we operate as Manulife across our offices in Canada, Asia, and Europe, and primarily as John Hancock in the United States. We provide financial advice, insurance, and our global wealth and asset management segment, Manulife Investment Management, serves individuals, institutions and retirement plan members worldwide. At the end of 2020, we had more than 37,000 employees, over 118,000 agents, and thousands of distribution partners, serving over 30 million customers. As of March 31, 2021, we had CAD$1.3 trillion (US$1.0 trillion) in assets under management and administration, and in the previous 12 months we made $31.3 billion in payments to our customers. Our principal operations are in Asia, Canada and the United States where we have served customers for more than 155 years. We trade as 'MFC' on the Toronto, New York, and the Philippine stock exchanges and under '945' in Hong Kong.

SOURCE Manulife Financial Corporation

Related Links

http://www.manulife.com


DENVER, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Marco's Pizza, one of the nation's fastest-growing pizza brands, announces the signing of two new development agreements that will bring 20 new stores to the Denver metro market by the end of 2024. This development news comes on the heels of the brand's recent announcement of now 90-plus franchise agreements signed year-to-date, with over 200 stores in various stages of development, as Marco's aims to grow its 1000-plus unit footprint by more than 10% this year.

The first agreement is a multi-unit deal in which franchisees Aaron Rosenthal and Steve Moberly signed on to develop eight new stores throughout the greater Denver market, in addition to the 10 existing Marco's locations they operate. The best friend duo aims to open their first new store in Wheat Ridge by Q1 2022. Target markets for the additional development include, Applewood, Arvada, Brighton, Commerce City, Lakewood, and Thornton, among others.

"Aaron and I had long been seeking out franchise opportunities to start our roots and build a solid foundation for La Tavola Hospitality Group," said Moberly. "The pandemic shined a light on the value of having pizza in your portfolio, proving the industry to be essentially recession-proof. We knew timing was right to invest and be aggressive with growth. Marco's 40-year history, proven business model, and opportunity to develop in key markets checked all our boxes."

Behind the second multi-unit agreement are franchisees Austin Toupin, Chris Harper, and the investment group, MCAA Brands, LLC. Another best friend duo, Toupin and Harper have vast experience working with well-known restaurant franchise brands including Burger King, Chili's, El Pollo Loco, Cafe Zupas, and Jimmy John's. Eager to build their own franchise empire, Toupin and Harper joined Marco's Pizza with a development deal that will bring 12 stores to the Denver-Fort Collins area over the next three years. The first location is slated to open in Denver by the end of 2021, with the second projected to debut in Q1 2022.

"We were immediately attracted to the passion and nostalgia engrained in the Marco's brand," said Toupin. "With experience in restaurant franchising, we knew we needed to feel that passion and support from the team, and also believe in the product. We believe the quality of Marco's products is far more superior than any player in the space  and we're confident we've invested with the best," added Harper.

Marco's is experiencing explosive growth, record-breaking sales , and continues to innovate and pilot new programs to sustain its performance. As a result, eager and sophisticated entrepreneurs and multi-unit operators are flocking to the franchise opportunity as now nearly half of the franchise network is made up of multi-unit owners.

"We're placing an emphasis on growing with incredible partners who truly embody our People-First approach to business," said Keith Sizemore, Vice President of Development for Marco's Pizza. "The Denver market and the greater state of Colorado is ideal for our continued expansion in terms of unit count and franchisee health, all while yielding an impressive number of high-profile opportunities."

Opening a new store every three and a half days on average, the Top 50% of its franchised stores generated $1,059,574 AUV for 2020*. For more information on Marco's Pizza franchise opportunities, visit www.marcosfranchising.com or call 866-731-8209.

ABOUT MARCO'S PIZZA

Marco's Pizza is America's Most Loved and Most Trusted Pizza Brand, according to the 2019 Harris Poll EquiTrend Study. Headquartered in Toledo, Ohio, Marco's Pizza is one of the fastest-growing pizza companies in the United States. Marco's was founded in 1978 by Italian-born Pasquale ("Pat") Giammarco and thrives by making authentic Italian quality pizza with fresh ingredients. The company has grown from its roots as a beloved Ohio brand to operate over 1,000 stores in 34 states with locations in Puerto Rico and the Bahamas. Most recently, Marco's Pizza was ranked No. 2 in the Pizza category on Entrepreneur Magazine's 2020 "Franchise 500" ranking, and No. 6 in the Largest Pizza Chain category on Restaurant Business' 2020 "Top 500 Chains" ranking. Other recent accolades include ranking No. 4 in Forbes 2019 "Best Franchises to Buy" Small/Medium Investment and ranking five consecutive years on Nation's Restaurant News' prestigious "Top 200" ranking.

*Based on the Average Unit Volume of the top 50% of our Franchised Stores for fiscal year 2020. Based on fiscal year 2020, 142 of 369 Franchised Stores in the category (38%) met or exceeded this average. This information appears in Item 19 of our 2021 FDD  please refer to our FDD for complete information on financial performance. Results may differ. There is no assurance that any franchisee will perform as well.

SOURCE Marco's Pizza
Request a Free Sample Report to Know More

The market is fragmented, and the degree of fragmentation will accelerate during the forecast period. Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, New York University, Stanford University, University of California, University of Cambridge, University of New England, University of Oxford, University of Washington, and Yale University are some of the major market participants. The growth in the number of online medical education programs will offer immense growth opportunities. To leverage the current opportunities, market vendors must strengthen their foothold in the fast-growing segments, while maintaining their positions in the slow-growing segments.

Medical Education Market 2021-2025: Segmentation

Medical Education Market is segmented as below:

Courses

Graduate Courses



Certifications And Training



Post-graduate Courses

Learning Method

Blended Learning



Online Learning

Geography

North America



Europe



APAC



South America



MEA

To learn more about the global trends impacting the future of market research, download a free sample: https://www.technavio.com/talk-to-us?report=IRTNTR40007

Medical Education Market 2021-2025: Vendor Analysis and Scope

To help businesses improve their market position, the medical education market provides a detailed analysis of around 25 vendors operating in the market. Some of these vendors include Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, New York University, Stanford University, University of California, University of Cambridge, University of New England, University of Oxford, University of Washington, and Yale University.

The report also covers the following areas:

Medical Education Market size

Medical Education Market trends

Medical Education Market industry analysis

The advent of visual technologies in medical education is likely to emerge as one of the primary drivers of the market. However, the threat from open-source and free education resources may threaten the growth of the market.

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Backed with competitive intelligence and benchmarking, our research reports on the medical education market are designed to provide entry support, customer profile & M&As as well as go-to-market strategy support.



Related Reports on Consumer Discretionary Include:

Global Higher Education Testing and Assessment Market - Global higher education testing and assessment market is segmented by product (academic and non-academic) and geography (North America, Europe, APAC, MEA, and South America).

Request a Free Sample Report

Global Education Consulting Market - Global education consulting market is segmented by type (K-12 and higher education) and geography (APAC, Europe, MEA, North America, and South America).

Request a Free Sample Report

Medical Education Market 2021-2025: Key Highlights

CAGR of the market during the forecast period 2021-2025

Detailed information on factors that will assist medical education market growth during the next five years

Estimation of the medical education market size and its contribution to the parent market

Predictions on upcoming trends and changes in consumer behavior

The growth of the medical education market

Analysis of the market's competitive landscape and detailed information on vendors

Comprehensive details of factors that will challenge the growth of medical education market vendors

Table of Contents:

Executive Summary

Market Landscape

Market ecosystem

Value chain analysis

Market Sizing

Market definition

Market segment analysis

Market size 2020

Market outlook: Forecast for 2020 - 2025

Five Forces Analysis

Five Forces Summary

Bargaining power of buyers

Bargaining power of suppliers

Threat of new entrants

Threat of substitutes

Threat of rivalry

Market condition

Market Segmentation by Courses

Market segments

Comparison by Courses

Graduate courses - Market size and forecast 2020-2025

Certifications and trainings - Market size and forecast 2020-2025

Post graduate courses - Market size and forecast 2020-2025

Market opportunity by Courses

Market Segmentation by Learning Method

Market segments

Comparison by Learning method

Blended learning - Market size and forecast 2020-2025

Online learning - Market size and forecast 2020-2025

Market opportunity by Learning method

Customer landscape

Geographic Landscape

Geographic segmentation

Geographic comparison

North America - Market size and forecast 2020-2025

- Market size and forecast 2020-2025 Europe - Market size and forecast 2020-2025

- Market size and forecast 2020-2025 APAC - Market size and forecast 2020-2025

South America - Market size and forecast 2020-2025

- Market size and forecast 2020-2025 MEA - Market size and forecast 2020-2025

Key leading countries

Market opportunity by geography

Market drivers

Market challenges

Market trends

Vendor Landscape

Overview

Landscape disruption

Competitive Scenario

Vendor Analysis

Vendors covered

Market positioning of vendors

Harvard University

Johns Hopkins University

New York University

Stanford University

University of California

University of Cambridge

University of New England

University of Oxford

University of Washington

Yale University

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 focus on emerging market trends and provides actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions. With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavio's report library consists of more than 17,000 reports and counting, covering 800 technologies, spanning across 50 countries. Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavio's comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios.

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: www.technavio.com/report/medical-education-market-industry-analysis

Newsroom: newsroom.technavio.com/news/top-drivers-for-medical-educationmarket

SOURCE Technavio
FALLS CHURCH, Va., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Mill Creek Residential , a leading developer and operator specializing in premier rental communities across the U.S., today announced the start of preleasing at Modera Founders Row and Verso Founders Row , two distinct apartment communities that are part of Founders Row, a mixed-use lifestyle center in the heart of Falls Church.

Modera Founders Row, a luxury market-rate community, features 322 apartment homes and a vast array of contemporary amenities. Verso Founders Row is a 72-home age-restricted community dedicated to individuals 55 years and older and features an exclusive set of amenities, although Verso residents will have access to the amenity spaces at both communities. Situated at the intersection of West Broad and North West Streets about 10 miles west of Washington, D.C., Founders Row also includes 80,000 square feet of luxury retail space.

Move-ins for Modera Founders Row are anticipated for fall, while first move-ins for Verso Founders Row are slated for winter.

"The combination of well-appointed apartment homes, boutique onsite retail options and a charismatic location will make Modera Founders Row and Verso Founders Row part of a true destination community," said Joe Muffler , managing director of development for Mill Creek Residential. "This will be a benchmark development for Mill Creek, and we look forward to welcoming our first residents and offering an unmatched living experience in the area. Founders Row will have a little bit of everything."

Located at 110 Founders Avenue, the location is anchored in the heart of the City of Falls Church, a charming and bucolic inside-the-Beltway suburb of Washington, D.C. Situated on two square miles of land in northern Virginia, Falls Church features a thriving school system and an active arts and cultural presence, including the Falls Church Farmers Market.

While Modera and Verso Founders Row residents will be able to enjoy a wide variety of activities onsite and within steps of the community, they will also benefit from direct access to the Washington & Old Dominion (W&OD) trail, a paved 45-mile rail trail that extends through northern Virginia and is located directly adjacent the site. The community also sits less than a mile from the Orange Line of the Washington Metro system, and is a short drive from Downtown Washington, D.C. and the vibrant Rosslyn-Ballston Corridor in Arlington, Va.

Apartment homes at Modera Founders Row include studio, one- and two-bedroom homes with den/office and loft layouts available. Shared community amenities include a resort-inspired pool with sundeck, club-quality fitness center, expansive resident clubhouse with connected work-from-home business center, gourmet coffee bar, outdoor courtyards, private event space with demonstration kitchen, game room, pet spa and dog park and complimentary WIFi in amenity spaces. Residents will also have access to controlled-access garage parking, self-serve package lockers, bike lockers and additional storage units. Verso Founders Row, which offers one- and two-bedroom homes, will feature an additional community room, fitness center and rooftop deck retreat dedicated exclusively to those residents.

Boasting an average size of 940 square feet, Modera Founders Row apartment homes include keyless entry, elevated 9-foot ceilings, wood plank-style flooring, stainless steel Energy Star appliances, quartz countertops, under-cabinet kitchen lighting, moveable kitchen islands and full-size stackable washers and dryers. Select homes will offer private balconies, built-in shelving and upgraded finishes, including wine refrigerators, towel warmers and backlit bathroom mirrors. Homes at Verso Founders Row will be delivered with similar features, and also include a separate wine fridge and heated towel racks in bathrooms.

The ample retail space at Founders Row includes room for a luxury movie theater, upscale restaurants and boutique shops. To inquire about available retail space, please contact Chris Wilkinson, vice president of retail leasing at JBG Smith. He can be reached at 301-657-7321 or [email protected].

About Mill Creek Residential

Mill Creek Residential Trust LLC is a national rental housing company focused on the development, acquisition and operation of rental communities in targeted markets nationwide. The national company, headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida proactively develops, acquires, constructs and operates communities through its seasoned team of real estate professionals in offices across the United States. Mill Creek is building its portfolio in many of the nation's most desirable markets in Seattle, Portland, the San Francisco Bay area, Southern California, Denver, Dallas, Austin, Houston, South Florida, Tampa, Orlando, Atlanta, Nashville, Charlotte, Raleigh, Washington, D.C., New Jersey, New York, and Boston. As of March 31, 2021, the company's portfolio is comprised of 98 communities representing over 26,700 rental homes that are operating and/or under construction. For more information, please visit www.MillCreekPlaces.com .

Media Contact

Stephen Ursery

LinnellTaylor Marketing

303-682-3945

[email protected]

SOURCE Mill Creek Residential

Related Links

http://www.millcreekplaces.com


NEW YORK, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Mr Doodle has announced the release of his first Non-Fungible Token (NFT), an animated digital artwork that brings his iconic doodles to life.

Released through one of the top NFT marketplaces Nifty Gateway, ESC will be his first NFT and is themed around a digital and mechanical universe. While traditionally Mr Doodle's hand-drawn pieces live on canvases, large-scale installations, and fashion collaborations, ESC takes advantage of the new format to showcase his doodles assembling, interacting and dismantling over time.

The digital artwork by the international art sensation, Mr Doodle, will feature computers, robots, and cryptocurrency-eating aliens, and will be available to acquire by collectors for a 12-minute period Artist portrait for his first NFT artwork: ESC A Snippet of Mr Doodle's First NFT Artwork: ESC

ESC will be Mr Doodle's first digital artwork from the five-part ESC series. Four additional NFTs titled CTRL, ALT, DELETE, and SHIFT will be released at a later date.

"Layers and dense imagery are some things that inspire me recently," says Sam Cox, aka Mr Doodle. "I chose the title ESC from the keyboard as I feel the digital world can be an escape from the real world. I love seeing how doodle characters overlay each other, creating completely new scenery. Each layer can live individually, but if you put them all together you get this fulfilling sense of completeness." The ESC NFT will be released as an open edition, available for purchase during a 12-minute period starting at 7AM PDT USA / 10AM EDT USA / 3PM GMT +1 UK / 10PM GMT+8 China on 1 July, 2021. Visit Nifty Gateway for updates and buying information. With every sale, $100 will be donated to offset carbon footprint.

Mr Doodle is an international art sensation with 2.7 million followers on Instagram. His work has decorated surfaces from sketchbooks, guerrilla art giveaways, subway tunnels and outdoor installations. His 2019 Spring canvas sold for almost $1 million at the Tokyo Chuo Auction in 2020. The exclusive global representative for Mr Doodle is Pearl Lam Galleries.

About Mr Doodle

A millennial artist, Sam Cox is a voice of his generation, with artworks that provoke discourse on what we consider fine art today. Mr Doodle's works transcend beyond the canvas, invading furniture, books, clothing and more. He has collaborated with iconic brands, including Fendi, Puma, Samsung and MTV. Welcomed by millions of followers on social media, Mr Doodle's artistic process is fluid, mesmerizing, therapeutic and made without hesitation.

About Pearl Lam Galleries

Pearl Lam Galleries is a driving force within Asia's contemporary art scene. Founded in 2005, the gallery plays a vital role in stimulating international dialogue and cross-cultural exchange between the East and West.

Following a rigorous programme, Pearl Lam Galleries presents museum-quality exhibitions that re-evaluate and challenge perceptions of cultural practice in Asia. With a thoughtfully balanced roster of Chinese and international artists, the gallery is strategic in its curation, positioning itself as an educator. The gallery maintains a flagship space in the historic Pedder Building in Hong Kong, whilst the Shanghai gallery is situated in the heart of the Bund district. With a team of international staff, Pearl Lam Galleries' reach is global, having presentations at major international art fairs including The Armory Show, Art Cologne, Art Basel Hong Kong, Frieze Masters, and West Bund Art and Design.

Media Contacts:

America & Europe:

Josh Ginsburg / JG Communications

[email protected] / +1 212 352 3320

Asia:

Charmaine Chan / PR & Marketing Manager

[email protected] / +852 2522 1428

China:

Yidi Chow / Communications & Events Associate

[email protected] / +1 857 277 4082

SOURCE Mr Doodle
Initial funding for Sustainable Dairy PA comes from The Hershey Company's $300,000 commitment to support the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay and Land O'Lakes in helping install agricultural conservation practices on Land O'Lakes member dairy farms. The partnership includes 119 Land O'Lakes member-owners in Central Pennsylvania that ship 50% or more of their milk supply to Hershey.

The Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay will utilize Hershey's funds to leverage additional grant funding to implement conservation plans and innovative on-farm environmental practices. The solutions range from riparian buffer plantings that reduce stream bank erosion and improve habitat to animal waste storage systems and other sustainable farming practices to support a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and water pollution.

"Leadership from corporations, like that of Hershey and Land O'Lakes, is critical to restoring Pennsylvania's rivers and the Chesapeake Bay, and reaching our climate goals. With so many passionate businesses in our watershed, we hope this partnership inspires others to take action towards a more sustainable future," shared Jenna Mitchell Beckett, Pennsylvania State Director and Agriculture Program Director at the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay.

The initiative has begun working with dairy farmers in south-central Pennsylvania and is actively building a list of their conservation needs that will guide the program's priorities. In addition to working with the initial 119 farms, the partnership has the potential to reach more than 400 Land O'Lakes member farms supplying milk to Hershey as funding and support grows.

"We recognize that global impact means teaming up with other leading organizations like The Hershey Company and the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay, and we're excited to support this new initiative," said Glenda Gehl, Land O'Lakes Senior Director of Member Relations. "Through the Land O'Lakes Dairy 2025 Commitment, we are committed to developing measurable ways for our farmer-members to reduce their environmental footprint in a manner that supports on-farm profitability and meets the expectations of our customers and consumers."

The initiative recognizes that dairy producers are important players in helping improve water quality and mitigating climate change and was established to provide dairy farmers with the resources needed to improve their impact on the environment. This allows farmers to produce quality farm products while contributing to the health of the Bay, its tributaries, and the planet. The work seeks to demonstrate that conservation and economic profit are compatible, and high-quality milk produced on farms using clean water and climate-smart practices provides a value-added premium in the marketplace and addresses the growing demands of discerning consumers.

"As we continue on our path to reduce our environmental footprint and address climate change, we're excited to partner with Land O'Lakes and the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay to promote best on-farm sustainable management practices in our dairy supply chain," said Eric Boyle, Director of Commodities Procurement at The Hershey Company. "Not only will this initiative help Hershey to reduce our GHG footprint and improve water quality in the Chesapeake Bay and other watersheds in the region, it will also help to improve soil health and protect biodiversity, and strengthen our connection to our dairy producers who are so integral to the creation of Hershey's Milk Chocolate."

CLICK TO DOWNLOAD APPROVED PHOTOS/VIDEO

About The Hershey Company

The Hershey Company is headquartered in Hershey, Pa., and is an industry-leading snacks company known for bringing goodness to the world through its iconic brands, remarkable people and enduring commitment to help children succeed. Hershey has approximately 17,000 employees around the world who work every day to deliver delicious, quality products. The company has more than 90 brands around the world that drive more than $8.1 billion in annual revenues, including such iconic brand names as Hershey's, Reese's, Kit Kat, Jolly Rancher, Ice Breakers, SkinnyPop, and Pirate's Booty.



For more than 125 years, Hershey has been committed to operating fairly, ethically and sustainably. Hershey founder, Milton Hershey, created the Milton Hershey School in 1909 and since then the company has focused on helping children succeed.

To learn more visit www.thehersheycompany.com.

About the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay

Headquartered in Annapolis, MD, with offices in Lancaster, PA, Washington, D.C., and Richmond, VA, the Alliance implements local programs that connect people to their local rivers and streams. As individuals become directly involved in local restoration efforts, our programs build resiliency among our communities and landscapes to continually adapt to a changing world.

In the last 50 years, the Alliance has:

Planted over 1 million trees

Installed over $10M in practices to reduce polluted stormwater runoff

in practices to reduce polluted stormwater runoff Implemented over 764 acres of on-farm best management practices

Trained over 700 volunteer scientists to collect over 360,000 water quality data points

Visit allianceforthebay.org to learn more.

About Land O'Lakes, Inc.

Land O'Lakes, Inc., one of America's premier agribusiness and food companies, is a member-owned cooperative with industry-leading operations that span the spectrum from agricultural production to consumer foods. With 2020 annual sales of $14 billion, Land O'Lakes is one of the nation's largest cooperatives, ranking 219 on the Fortune 500. Building on a legacy of more than 99 years of operation, Land O'Lakes today operates some of the most respected brands in agribusiness and food production including Land O'Lakes Dairy Foods, Purina Animal Nutrition, WinField United and Truterra. The company does business in all 50 states and more than 60 countries. Land O'Lakes, Inc. corporate headquarters are located in Arden Hills, Minnesota.

SOURCE The Hershey Company

Related Links

https://www.thehersheycompany.com


DSNY took delivery of its first fully electric refuse vehicle, a Mack LR Electric demonstration model, in September 2020, when it began rigorous real-world testing in Brooklyn. Since then, DSNY has been evaluating payload capacity, regenerative braking, overall vehicle performance in their demanding operations, operating range and charging requirements.

"The DSNY order for an additional seven Mack LR Electric trucks speaks to the fact that the performance of the current LR Electric demonstrator model collecting in Brooklyn is meeting and even exceeding their expectations," said Jonathan Randall, Mack Trucks senior vice president of sales and commercial operations. "Mack has long been the number one choice of refuse customers, and we are now well-positioned to be the industry leader in e-mobility as well. The Mack LR Electric is equipped with Mack's integrated electric powertrain and will help New York City and DSNY achieve its zero-emissions goals."

The world's largest municipal sanitation department, DSNY collects about 12,000 tons of refuse and recyclables daily with more than 6,000 vehicles, the majority of which are Mack trucks.

"We look forward to our continued partnership with Mack Trucks in striving toward our environmental efforts to benefit the citizens of New York City," said DSNY Commissioner Edward Grayson. "The Mack LR Electric demonstrator is performing well, and we look forward to when we have one in each of our city's zones."

The seven battery-electric vehicles (BEV) will be located in the seven zones within New York City  the Bronx, Brooklyn North, Brooklyn South, Manhattan, Queens East, Queens West and Staten Island. DSNY will use a DC fast charger to charge each of the LR Electric vehicles.

"New York City has set an ambitious goal of reducing GHG emissions by 100 percent by 2040," said Rocco DiRico, deputy commissioner for support services at the New York City Department of Sanitation. "DSNY is purchasing these seven Mack LR Electric refuse vehicles in support of achieving our environmental objectives with a zero-emissions truck that is also extremely quiet."

Mack first introduced a prototype of the Mack LR Electric at WasteExpo 2018, announcing its plans to partner with DSNY for real-world testing in the largest sanitation department in the world. Serial production of the Mack LR Electric will begin in 2021. The vehicles will be built at Mack's Lehigh Valley Operations (LVO) facility in Macungie, Pennsylvania, where all Class 8 models for North America and export are assembled.

DSNY testing of the Mack LR Electric model remains ongoing. The DSNY Mack LR Electric demonstrator features twin 167-kW electric motors offering a combined output of 448 continuous horsepower and 4,051 lb.-ft. of torque available from zero RPM. The vehicle is spec'd with a two-speed Mack Powershift transmission and Mack's proprietary S462R 46,000-pound rear axles.

Four NMC (Nickle Manganese Cobalt Oxide) lithium-ion batteries, charged through a 150kW, SAE J1772-compliant charging system, offer vehicle propulsion and power for all onboard accessories, driven through 12V, 24V and 600V circuits. The three-mode regenerative braking system accounts for the refuse truck's increasing load throughout the day and helps recapture energy from the hundreds of stops the vehicle makes each day.

Featuring a copper-colored Bulldog hood ornament to signify the fully electric drivetrain, the Mack LR Electric may be fitted with equipment bodies from a number of manufacturers, allowing the truck to be tailored to each customer's unique needs. Customers will be able to choose from the same driver/passenger side driving configurations, seating choices and door options offered on the diesel-powered LR model.

For more information about the Mack LR Electric, please visit Mack booth No. 1851 at WasteExpo, your local Mack dealer or www.macktrucks.com.

NOTE TO EDITORS: A high-res version of these photos can be viewed and downloaded at www.mackmediabank.com.

Dedicated to moving and building a better world, Mack Trucks has provided purpose-built transportation solutions for more than a century. Today, Mack is one of North America's largest producers of heavy-duty trucks, and Mack trucks are sold and serviced through an extensive distribution network in many countries around the world. Mack trucks, diesel engines and transmissions sold in North America are assembled in the United States. Mack manufacturing locations are certified to the internationally recognized ISO 9001 standard for quality, ISO 14001 standard for environmental management systems and OHSAS 18001 standard for health and safety management systems. Mack is also a proud sponsor of Share the Road, an American Trucking Associations public information campaign aimed at enhancing the safety of our nation's roadways.

Mack Trucks is part of the Volvo Group, which is driving prosperity through transport and infrastructure solutions, offering trucks, buses, construction equipment, power solutions for marine and industrial applications, financing and services that increase customer uptime and productivity. Founded in 1927, the Volvo Group is committed to shaping the future landscape of sustainable transport and infrastructure solutions. The Volvo Group is headquartered in Gothenburg, Sweden, employs almost 100,000 people and serves customers in more than 190 markets. In 2020, net sales amounted to about $36.8 billion. For more information, please visit www.volvogroup.com. For more information about Mack, visit our website at www.macktrucks.com

FOR INFORMATION CONTACT

KIMBERLY PUPILLO

DIRECTOR  PUBLIC RELATIONS

MACK TRUCKS, INC.

336-662-1787

[email protected]

SOURCE Mack Trucks
HERNDON, Va., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Nacha announced today the addition of North American Banking Company as a Nacha Direct Financial Institution Member.

Nacha now has more than 40 Direct Members, consisting of financial institutions and Payments Associations (PAs) that collectively represent nearly all financial institutions across the U.S.

"On behalf of Nacha and its Board of Directors, we welcome North American Banking Company and look forward to working with them as a Direct Member," said Jane Larimer, President and CEO of Nacha. "North American Banking Company joins an elite group that shapes and influences the governance and direction of the modern ACH Network and the Nacha Operating Rules."

Through cross-industry cooperation, innovation and collaboration, Nacha's Direct Members are committed to shaping the future of the ACH Network  one of the largest, safest, and most reliable payment systems in the world. They are also active participants in Nacha's efforts to educate and advocate for the ACH Network with regulators, legislators, and other stakeholder organizations whose policies affect the payments system. These efforts help increase understanding of the role financial institutions play in the payments system and help them serve their customers more effectively.

"We are excited to become Nacha's newest Direct Member," said Michael Bilski, Chairman and CEO, North American Banking Company. "North American Banking Company looks forward to working with others focused on the future of the ACH Network and to enhance the ACH Network's offerings to meet the evolving needs of the payments industry."



In addition to North American Banking Company, Direct Member financial institutions are American Express National Bank, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclays Bank Delaware, BMO Harris Bank, BNY Mellon, Cadence Bank, Capital One, Citibank N.A., Citizens Financial Group, Commerce Bank, Deutsche Bank, Discover Financial Services, Inc., Fifth Third Bank, First PREMIER Bank, Huntington National Bank, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Key Bank, M&T Bank, Merrick Bank Corporation, MetaBank N.A., MUFG Union Bank, Navy Federal Credit Union, PNC Bank, Regions Bank, Silicon Valley Bank, Synovus Financial Corporation, TCF National Bank, TD Bank, N.A. Truist, UMB Bank N.A., U.S. Bank, and Wells Fargo.

About North American Banking Company

North American Banking Company (www.nabankco.com) is a locally owned and operated community bank with over $900 million in assets and five locations in the Twin Cities, Minnesota. North American Banking Company was the 27th largest ACH ODFI in the US by transaction volume, but remains true to its community bank roots by providing customized solutions and personalized service to Third Party Senders and Independent Sales Organizations for both ACH and Card processing and Money Services Businesses throughout the US. It is a Member FDIC and Equal Housing Lender.

Contact:

Heather McElrath

Nacha

703-561-3923

[email protected]

SOURCE Nacha

Related Links

http://www.nacha.org


As both a fertility benefit solution and direct provider of high quality care, Kindbody leverages proprietary technology to deliver a seamless patient experience and high quality outcomes at lower costs. In addition to the company's signature brick-and-mortar locations, mobile clinics, and comprehensive telehealth offering, Kindbody provides high-touch, virtual navigation for a growing network of 300+ partner clinics across the country and worldwide.

The Austin location was selected for its accessibility to top tech employers and employees who have relocated to the Austin area in recent years. "Austin is one of the fastest growing cities in the country, and we know its employers and residents are looking for convenient, cost-effective access to high quality fertility and family-building services," said Annbeth Eschbach, President of Kindbody. "We are excited to join the growing list of innovative, tech-centric companies in the area and we are eager to serve Austin's diverse patient population."

"Kindbody's welcoming, patient-first approach is exactly what Austin needs to reflect and support its growing, diverse population," echoed Dr. Deborah Ikhena-Abel, Kindbody's Austin fertility specialist. "I'm grateful to be working with the fantastic Kindbody team to deliver compassionate care for anyone and everyone who wants to build their dream family or pursue fertility and wellness services."

Kindbody's suite of offerings covers the full span of gynecology, fertility, and family-building care, including egg freezing, IVF, IUI, egg and sperm donation, adoption and surrogacy, as well as maternity care, gynecology, holistic wellness, and LGBTQ+ services. The company's unique combination of technology-enabled care, holistic approach, and value-based pricing enables a differentiated offering with cost savings of more than 20% compared to other fertility benefit managers.

Austin is Kindbody's third clinic opening in 2021 and ninth in total, with 13 locations scheduled to open by year-end, including Orlando, Denver, and Minneapolis. In addition to Austin, the company owns and operates locations in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Princeton, with over a dozen new openings scheduled for 2022. While the company grows its physical footprint, it continues to expand its telehealth platform and robust virtual service offering.

Kindbody's rapid expansion in both the physical and digital space is a reflection of the growing demand for family-building services from employers and patients alike. In the past year, Kindbody has doubled its number of employer clients to a total 45 representing more than 150,000 covered lives, grown its patient volume by 4x, increased its number of fertility providers by 150%, and increased the number of fertility cycles by 20% month-over-month.

Kindbody's Austin location opens less than one week after the company announced the largest fertility fundraise in history with its $62 million Series C funding. The raise will accelerate the company's growth, enable the global scale needed to meet increasing demand, and enhance the company's proprietary technology and reinvented patient experience.

The newest Kindbody clinic is centrally located on the northside of Lady Bird Lake, around the corner from the 2nd street district in Austin's bustling central business area. The location is easily accessible from either I-35, Mopac, or pedestrian scooter. To schedule an appointment at Kindbody's Austin clinic or any other Kindbody location, visit kindbody.com/book.

About Kindbody

Kindbody provides fertility, gynecology, and family-building services at over 300 locations around the country including signature and partner clinics. With a mission to deliver a more welcoming, inclusive experience for all, Kindbody leverages proprietary technology to enable high-touch care and superior outcomes at lower prices. Founded in 2018 by CEO Gina Bartasi, Kindbody has raised a total of $122 million in funding from leading investors including Claritas Capital, Perceptive Advisors, GV (formerly Google Ventures), RRE Capital, Rock Springs Capital, and TQ Ventures. Its leadership team includes President, Annbeth Eschbach; Chief Financial Officer, Meredith Whitney; Chief Business and Legal Officer; Shilpa Patel; Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Lynn Westphal; Chief Commercial Officer, Cindy Gentry; Founding Physician, Dr. Fahimeh Sasan; and, Chief Technology Officer, Richard Forsythe.

CONTACT:

Rebecca Silver

[email protected]

1-855-KND-BODY

SOURCE Kindbody

Related Links

https://www.kindbody.com/


TAVARES, Fla., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Palmate, a GMP-certified manufacturer of premium cannabinoid ingredients, is now in full operation in Lake County, Florida, at an FDA-registered production facility equipped with a state-of-the-art testing laboratory that ensures the quality and consistency of both the raw hemp it uses and the finished cannabinoids it sells. The company also collaborates with clients to develop, test and refine new cannabinoid-infused products, taking them from prototype to market-ready.

Palmate provides full spectrum CBD distillate, THC-free broad spectrum CBD distillate and CBD isolate products for use in cannabinoid-infused products across all categories, including food and beverage, supplements, cosmetics, pets and wellness in general. Its advanced facility meets or exceeds all federal and state requirements, and has earned GMP certification from the British Standards Institution (BSI) for product quality and safety adherence in its manufacturing, processing and packaging operations.

The company rigorously vets plant genetics and agricultural practices to certify its hemp supply partners, and conducts comprehensive post-harvest analytical laboratory testing to verify the potency, compliance with THC requirements, and absence of contaminants including herbicides, pesticides and mycotoxins. Approved hemp materials are stored in an on-site facility that was purpose-built for optimal storage conditions and cannabinoid preservation.

Palmate's custom-engineered, cryo-ethanol extraction process ensures the safety and consistency of its finished cannabinoid products. Final safety and purity testing is performed in the on-site laboratory and then validated by a reputable third-party lab, ensuring that only high-quality ingredients are delivered to the formulators and manufacturers planning to use them in their end products.

In addition, Palmate's in-house team of scientists and R&D experts helps clients identify and capitalize on emerging trends, refine their existing formulas, and successfully develop new products to bring to market. The result is an end-to-end partnership that helps growers, formulators, manufacturers and brands take full advantage of cannabinoid-related business opportunities.

"The biggest issue in the hemp industry is that growth has outpaced the establishment of needed rules and regulations. As a result, not all cannabinoid ingredients meet minimum standards for safety and consistency, which could undermine consumer confidence in the entire industry," said Adam Cyrus, CEO at Palmate. "Our mission is to produce a cannabinoids of unwavering quality, setting a standard that can help raise the bar for other producers and establish a strong foundation for sustainable industry growth."

Palmate will also help meet rising demand for cannabinoid-infused products. The global market for cannabidiol (CBD) alone is expected to grow from $2.8 billion in 2020 to $56 billion in 2028, according to a Fortune Business Insights market research report published in May 2021.

About Palmate

Palmate is a full-service manufacturer of premium cannabinoid ingredients. The company operates from state-of-the-art, FDA-registered facilities and employs a team of highly trained scientists, engineers, quality assurance experts and technicians who specialize in the field of cannabinoid extraction and refinement. Palmate is based in Lake County, Florida. For more information, visit https://palmate.com/

SOURCE Palmate
One in three pets will go missing in their lifetime, and more pets go missing July 4-6 than any other time of the year. July 5 th will be one of the busiest days of the year for animal shelters. Yet, a recent survey* of pet parents found that more than half are unsure of the steps to take or the resources available to find their pet.

"At Petco Love, we believe nothing is more important than keeping people and pets together for a lifetime of love. That is why we launched Petco Love Lost, a single national platform that connects shelters, pet parents, and good neighbors together," said Petco Love President, Susanne Kogut. "Our goal is to reunite more pets with their families with this free, simple-to-use tool accessible to all pet parents, or anyone who finds a lost dog or cat, should the unthinkable happen."

Petco Love Lost which launched last April, with the support of more than 1,000 industry partners, received positive initial user feedback with 96% of those surveyed recommending the tool1. This new national database powered by pet facial recognition search technology scans through thousands of found pets with a single photo in less than a minute. Pet parents can receive real-time notifications of new possible matches should the initial search not locate their pet. Additionally, Petco Love recommends conducting a physical search of your immediate area, as data collected from Petco Love Lost users found 66% of pets are found within one mile of their home2, and nearly 13% of users reported it took more than a week to locate their lost pet.3

Simple preventative steps can be critical to keeping pets home where they belong. Petco Love and Kat Albrecht-Thiessen share five ways to keep pets safe this 4th of July:

Protect your pet before and after the holiday: When panicked by fireworks and other loud noises, dogs run, and cats hide. Early fireworks celebrations and leftover fireworks catch many pet parents off guard, so be prepared to protect your pet a week before and after the holiday.

When panicked by fireworks and other loud noises, dogs run, and cats hide. Early fireworks celebrations and leftover fireworks catch many pet parents off guard, so be prepared to protect your pet a week before and after the holiday. Keep your pet secure: Think about your pet's behavior as you decide to attend holiday celebrations or leave them safe at home. To keep your pet safe indoors, crate them or place them somewhere comfortable and turn on a TV or stereo to drown out loud noises. If you're outdoors, properly leash your dog. Loop the leash around your shoulder so that your dog is still attached to you if you trip or fall.

Think about your pet's behavior as you decide to attend holiday celebrations or leave them safe at home. To keep your pet safe indoors, crate them or place them somewhere comfortable and turn on a TV or stereo to drown out loud noises. If you're outdoors, properly leash your dog. Loop the leash around your shoulder so that your dog is still attached to you if you trip or fall. Check your yard and home: Ensure your yard and home are secure and your pet cannot escape when panicked. If you've recently brought a new pet home and have not yet experienced fireworks together, be cautious that they may react negatively. Make sure your yard's fence is sturdy with no loose boards, nothing your dog could climb and jump over, or dig and crawl under, and that window screens and exterior doors to your home are securely in place.

Ensure your yard and home are secure and your pet cannot escape when panicked. If you've recently brought a new pet home and have not yet experienced fireworks together, be cautious that they may react negatively. Make sure your yard's fence is sturdy with no loose boards, nothing your dog could climb and jump over, or dig and crawl under, and that window screens and exterior doors to your home are securely in place. Keep your pet's ID tag and microchip up to date: Microchip your pet and ensure your contact information is registered and up to date. Make sure your pet has a properly fitted collar with a current ID tag. This goes for cats too! If your cat does not wear a collar and tag, try a temporary paper tag.

Microchip your pet and ensure your contact information is registered and up to date. Make sure your pet has a properly fitted collar with a current ID tag. This goes for cats too! If your cat does not wear a collar and tag, try a temporary paper tag. Register your pet on Petco Love Lost: Upload your pet's photo to Petco Love Lost, a free national lost and found database. If they go missing, one click will allow you to quickly search thousands of found pets from animal shelters and individuals using patented pet facial recognition technology, and it's also available in Spanish.

Petco Love Lost is here to help if you've lost or found a pet. Visit petcolovelost.org or join the conversation @PetcoLoveLost on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter via hashtags #PetcoLoveLost and #LoveandFound.

* An online survey of 1,005 past and current dog and cat owners was conducted by Petco Love on March 16, 2021.

All other data was cited from a Petco Love Lost user survey completed by 694 users from April to June 2021 :

1 According to 96% of 619 Question Respondents

2 According to 66% of 596 Question Respondents

3 According to 13% of 664 Question Respondents

About Petco Love (Formerly Petco Foundation)

Petco Love is a nonprofit changing lives by making communities and pet families closer, stronger, and healthier. Since our founding in 1999 as the Petco Foundation, we've empowered animal welfare organizations by investing $300 million in adoption and other lifesaving efforts. We've helped find loving homes for more than 6.5 million pets in partnership with Petco and organizations nationwide. Today, our love for pets drives us to lead with innovation, creating tools animal lovers need to reunite lost pets, and lead with passion, inspiring and mobilizing communities and our more than 4,000 animal welfare partners to drive lifesaving change alongside us. Is love calling you? Visit petcolove.org or follow at Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn to be part of the lifesaving work we're leading every day.

About Kat Albrecht-Thiessen

Kat Albrecht is a former police bloodhound handler, crime scene investigator, search-and-rescue manager, and police-officer-turned-investigative pet detective. Since 1997, Kat has solved lost pet investigations by using law enforcement-based techniques and strategies that are normally used to solve lost person investigations. Kat was the first person to pioneer the proper application of search dogs for lost pet investigations. She is the founder of Missing Animal Response Network, an international organization that offers Missing Animal Response training for Field workers, K9 handlers, shelter staff, Animal Control Officers, and volunteers, and also works to conduct research into lost pet behaviors. Kat's memoir Pet Tracker has received incredible reviews and was a 2017 Silver Medalist for the e-Lit book awards. Learn more at www.missinganimalresponse.com. Over 200 dogs and humans have tracked down thousands of lost pets!

Contact:

Jennifer Perez

Petco Love

[email protected]

SOURCE Petco Love

Related Links

http://www.petcolove.org


Piedmont Healthcare is a state-wide hospital network in Georgia, serving over 2.7 million patients last year. Dedicated to providing the best transparency and de-escalation tools to ensure staff, patients and visitors are kept safe, Piedmont will deploy body-worn cameras and TASER energy weapons to hospital security across nine locations in Georgia. By joining the Axon network, Piedmont's Public Safety team will be able to effectively and safely respond to critical situations based on their strategic officer concept: to provide all hospital security officers with the tools they need to make important decisions in real time.

"Having these tools available is a part of our desire to equip the best healthcare security team possible," says Mike Hodges, MA, CHPA- System Director of Piedmont Public Safety. "It is important to us that our officers are capable of responding effectively to all tactical challenges in order to provide the best possible patient care environment. We are dedicated to making a positive difference in the lives of those we serve by keeping people safe."



"We are excited to partner with Piedmont as they join the Axon network to increase safety and transparency at their hospitals," says General Manager of Axon's Commercial and Private Security sectors, Mike Shore. "Axon's TASER energy weapons, body cameras and incident management software will provide a holistic solution that enables Piedmont to provide their patients, guests and staff with a safer environment."



Piedmont Healthcare joins dozens of other innovative hospital systems adopting Axon safety technologies in the US. Axon is bringing its suite of advanced technology solutions to commercial and private security markets, including expansion into hospitals and healthcare systems in order to provide safety and peace of mind. These industries are now able to benefit from the same transparency and efficiency capabilities that the Axon network is driving in public safety.



About Piedmont Healthcare

Piedmont Healthcare empowers communities to connect with safe and high-quality care, conveniently, every step of the way. Our promise is to make a positive difference in every life we touch and today we are creating a destination known for the best clinicians and a safe one-of-a-kind experience that always puts patients first. Founded in 1905, we are a private, not-for-profit organization with over 23,000 employees caring for 2.7 million patients across 800 locations and serving communities that comprise 70 percent of Georgia's population. Piedmont provides safe, convenient and high-quality care across 11 hospitals, 35 Piedmont Urgent Care centers, 25 QuickCare locations, 1,875 Piedmont Clinic physician practices and more than 2,500 Piedmont Clinic members. In 2019, Forbes listed us as one of the Top10 Employers in Georgia, Piedmont became Great Place to Work-Certified, which was repeated in 2020. In FY 2020, Piedmont provided $393 million in uncompensated care and community benefit programming to the communities we serve. For more information, visit piedmont.org.



About Axon

Axon is a network of devices, apps and people that helps public safety personnel become smarter and safer. With a mission of protecting life, our technologies give customers the confidence, focus and time they need to keep their communities safe. Our products impact every aspect of a public safety officer's day-to-day experience with the goal of helping everyone get home safe.



We work hard for those who put themselves in harm's way for all of us. To date, more than 251,000 lives and countless dollars have been saved with the Axon network of devices, apps and people. Learn more at www.axon.com or by calling (800) 978-2737. Axon is a global company with headquarters in Scottsdale, Ariz. and global software engineering hub in Seattle, Wash., as well as additional offices in Australia, Canada, Finland, Vietnam, the UK and the Netherlands.



Facebook is a trademark of Facebook, Inc., Piedmont Healthcare and the Piedmont Healthcare Logo are trademarks of Piedmont Healthcare, Inc. and Twitter is a trademark of Twitter, Inc. Axon, Axon Evidence, TASER, TASER 7 and the Delta Logo are trademarks of Axon Enterprise, Inc., some of which are registered in the US and other countries. For more information, visit www.axon.com/legal. All rights reserved.



Follow Axon here:

Axon on Twitter: https://twitter.com/axon_us

Axon on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Axon.ProtectLife/

Note to Investors



Please visit http://investor.axon.com, https://www.axon.com/press, www.twitter.com/axon_us and https://www.facebook.com/Axon.ProtectLife/ where Axon discloses information about the company, its financial information and its business.



For our recent Safe Harbor Statement, please view page 2 of our Investor Relations Presentation HERE.



Media Contact:

Corinne Clark

Axon Public Relations Manager

[email protected]

SOURCE Axon

Related Links

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Not only does the Stingray offer multiple distinctive ride paths but its vivid, fiberglass theming and custom coloring is inspiring and captivating. Displaying the capabilities of Polin's state-of-the-art technology " UTexture " , its artwork is long-lasting, UV protected, integral, picture-perfect, and absolutely stunning. Not looking for the stingray theme? No worries. Polin's "UTexture" allows it to be designed with any theme to match your park's motif. Its custom capabilities, iconic look, and impressive stature make it a highly marketable attraction that will set your park apart from the rest.

Are You Ready to Dive into the depths of the Ocean with Stingray

~ Inspired by one of the most mesmerizing designs of nature, Stingray offers its users a sensational experience.

~ This new signature slide by Polin Waterparks is ready to be introduced world-wide.

~ With its unique spirit, it promises to provide the experience of diving deep down into the depths of an exciting underwater world.

~ Designed with an intrinsic theme, the high-capacity Stingray will become the main attraction of the waterpark!

~ Showcasing the experience of Polin's unmatched state-of-the-art techniques, Stingray is an asset for the amusement park industry.

More Experience, More Satisfaction!

What makes Stingray even more unique is the dazzling water and sound show it offers. Guests will hear the sound of the Stingray's wings, flying through water, as they spin inside the huge inner bowl. In the outer bowl, the guests will explore the dark and mysterious ocean with a sound and light show and then complete their amazing experience as they are quickly dispersed around the wings. This contrast in special effects further sets the experience of the two paths apart.

With its lights, sounds, multiple ride paths and the capabilities of Polin's state-of-the-art technology "u-texture", Stingray is the new main attraction of the amusement industry.

Product Features

Strong visual impact

High capacity ride

Compact design

Compatible with VR applications

A "shared" slide experience with others in the queue

Unique self fiberglass theming and coloring

Suitable for indoor or outdoor installations

Optional "Natural Light Effects" (which allows the sun's rays to stream into the tube via translucent stripes to create a different experience on every ride), "Slide 'N Roll" and "Special Pattern Effects" (which allow a variety of theming and patterns on the slide's surface)

Resin-transfer molding (RTM) technology creates perfectly smooth, shiny slide components with zero rough edges and perfect component alignment

Conveyor or tower available as an entry option Translucent applications

More on Polin Waterparks



Polin was founded in Istanbul in 1976 and has since grown into a leading company in the waterparks industry. Today Polin is a world leader in the design, production and installation of water parks and water-play attractions. Polin has completed 3,500 waterpark projects in 109 countries around the world and is the biggest waterslide supplier in Eurasia. Working with a wide variety of clients has helped Polin reach several milestones including installing the first waterparks in many countries and many other award-winning rides at parks with world-renowned reputations.



For more info, visit www.polin.com.tr or contact Sohret Pakis at +90 262 656 64 67 or [email protected].



Polin Waterparks is a Polin Group Company

SOURCE Polin Waterparks
WASHINGTON, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- "Commander Moonikin Campos" is the official name of the manikin launching on Artemis I, NASA's uncrewed flight test of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft around the Moon later this year. The Moonikin received its name as the result of a competitive bracket contest honoring NASA figures, programs, or astronomical objects. NASA received more than 300,000 votes.

The name Campos is a dedication to Arturo Campos, a key player in bringing Apollo 13 safely back to Earth. The final bracket challenge was between Campos and Delos, a reference to the island where Apollo and Artemis were born, according to Greek mythology.

"Our return to the Moon through Artemis is a global effort  and we're always looking at new ways to engage the public in our missions. This contest, which is helping pave the way for a human return to the Moon, also honors an important individual in our NASA family  Arturo Campos," said Brian Odom, NASA's acting chief historian at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. "It is a fitting tribute that the data gained from Artemis I will help us prepare to fly astronauts  including the first woman and first person of color  to the Moon, where we will get ready for Mars."

The other six names under consideration were:

ACE , for "Artemis Crew Explorer."

, for "Artemis Crew Explorer." DUHART , a dedication to Irene Duhart Long , chief medical officer at Kennedy Space Center from 2000 to 2010.

, a dedication to , chief medical officer at Kennedy Space Center from 2000 to 2010. MONTGOMERY , dedication to Julius Montgomery , first African American to work as a technical professional at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, now known as Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

, dedication to , first African American to work as a technical professional at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, now known as Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. RIGEL , a giant superstar in the Orion constellation.

, a giant superstar in the Orion constellation. SHACKLETON , a crater on the Moon's South Pole, which is named after famous Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton .

, a crater on the Moon's South Pole, which is named after famous Antarctic explorer . WARGO, a dedication to Michael Wargo , NASA's first chief exploration scientist.

The Moonikin is a male-bodied manikin previously used in Orion vibration tests. Campos will occupy the commander's seat inside and wear an Orion Crew Survival System suit the same spacesuit that Artemis astronauts will use during launch, entry, and other dynamic phases of their missions.

Campos will be equipped with two radiation sensors and have additional sensors under its headrest and behind its seat to record acceleration and vibration data throughout the mission. Data from the Moonikin's experience will help NASA protect astronauts during Artemis II, the first mission in more than 50 years that will send crew around the Moon.

The Moonikin is one of three "passengers" flying aboard Orion to test the spacecraft's systems. Two female-bodied model human torsos, called phantoms, also will be aboard. "Zohar" and "Helga," named by the Israel Space Agency (ISA) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) respectively, will support the Matroshka AstroRad Radiation Experiment (MARE), an experiment to provide data on radiation levels during lunar missions.

NASA's SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, along with a commercial human landing system and Gateway in lunar orbit, are vital to the agency's deep space exploration plans. Working with commercial and international partners, NASA is committed to establishing the first long-term presence on and around the Moon under Artemis. Using robots and humans to explore more than ever before, NASA also will use the Moon for humanity's next giant leap  sending the first astronauts to Mars.

For more information about NASA's Artemis missions on and around the Moon:

https://www.nasa.gov/artemis

SOURCE NASA

Related Links

http://www.nasa.gov


LAS VEGAS, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Refuge For Women, which opened in November 2015, is celebrating a five year milestone of serving the Las Vegas community. The national faith-based organization provides a residential healing and recovery program for survivors of trafficking and sexual exploitation to receive safe housing, counseling, life and work skills development. The non-profit is hosting the ceremonious occasion, on June 29 at The Crossing Church at 7p.m., to share graduation successes, debut upcoming services and recognize key stakeholders for Refuge For Women. The Mayor of Henderson, Debra March, will also be a part of the ribbon cutting. Inspirational music will be also performed by a combined church partner band of The Crossing Church and ChurchLV.

Refuge for Women

1 in 4 women will experience domestic abuse at some point in their lifetime. The organization's mission is to empower sexually exploited women to live a life a freedom through faith-based, residential healing programs providing safety, healing and growth. With the addition of its transitional living housing, which debuted in July 2019, Refuge for Women has served more than 48 women, graduated 19 women since 2005, and includes achievements, such as, completing their GED, obtaining dental assistant and culinary training, becoming employed, and being reunited with families.

When: June 29, 2021 Time: 5:30pm. Ribbon Cutting with Mayor of Henderson, Debra March

Program begins at 7pm Place: The Crossing Church, 7950 Windmill Lane, Las Vegas 89113

With multiple locations across the U.S., Refuge for Women offers up to twelve months of safe housing, at no charge to the resident, with around the clock care as residents progress through evidence-based, trauma-informed programming.

"Our vision is that every woman who is sexually exploited will have the hope, support, and tools needed to pursue her dreams and live a life of freedom," says Refuge for Women Executive Director, Robin Smith. "We are pleased to share inspiring graduation stories and celebrate their successes back as they completed their education, entered back into the community or who have reunited with their families."

Refuge For Women also recently launched its new Wall of Hope mural, created by Brandy and Erika of BE Creative, for its Hope Builders program. These monthly supporters help to restore hope into the lives of sexually exploited women. To become a hope builder, visit www.rfwlasvegas.org/donate.

Media contact:

Jennifer Bradley

[email protected]

702-234-9385

SOURCE Refuge for Women
MOSCOW, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The annual General Shareholders' Meeting of Joint Stock Company Sheremetyevo International Airport (JSC SIA) was held on June 28. The shareholders approved the annual report for 2020 and elected a new Board of Directors and Audit Committee, among other decisions.

Major Decisions

Due to the decline in revenue caused by the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the General Shareholders' Meeting decided not to distribute profits or declare or pay dividends on the company's placed ordinary shares.

The following members of the Board of Directors of JSC SIA were elected:

Chairman of the Board of Directors of Sheremetyevo Holding LLC A.I. Skorobogatko;

A.I. Skorobogatko; Member of the Board of Directors of Sheremetyevo Holding LLC A.A. Ponomarenko;

A.A. Ponomarenko; Director General of JSC SIA M.M. Vasilenko;

President of Sheremetyevo Holding LLC R.N. Zinovyev;

R.N. Zinovyev; First Vice President - Investment Director of Sheremetyevo Holding LLC A.S. Smagin;

A.S. Smagin; Vice President of MD Group LLC I.S. Petrov;

I.S. Petrov; Deputy Minister of Economic Development of the Russian Federation I.E. Torosov;

Deputy Minister of Transportation of the Russian Federation I.P. Chalik;

Head of the Federal Property Management Agency V.V. Yakovenko.

The shareholders elected the Internal Audit Commission of JSC SIA comprising of the same members:

Vice President for Finance of Sheremetyevo Holding LLC Yu.A. Levitina;

Yu.A. Levitina; Head of the Directorate for Planning and Budgeting of Sheremetyevo Holding LLC G.V. Utkina;

G.V. Utkina; Head of the Management Department of the Federal Property Management Agency M.V. Sorokin.

Ernst & Young LLC was approved as the auditor of JSC SIA for 2021.

Investment Projects Continued in 2020 Despite Slowdown

At the end of 2020, amid a sharp decline in air traffic caused by the coronavirus pandemic, Sheremetyevo's passenger traffic decreased by 60% compared to last year, a total of 19.8 million passengers. The number of takeoff and landing operations were half the 2019 figure.

Nevertheless, JSC SIA continued to implement key investment projects included in the Long-term Airport Development Program, which are designed to increase the airport's capacity to 110 million passengers per year in the future.

The international Terminal C (first stage), designed for 20 million passengers annually, opened in December after a complete reconstruction. The first runway (RWY-1) was rebuilt in a record 10 months, and a new apron and hangar complex for servicing the aircraft of the Aeroflot Group of Companies were also opened. JSC SIA also continued the project to modernize the luggage-handling system, the implementation of which will increase the capacity of the system and provide service to 80 million passengers per year.

Only Russian Airport Active in Repatriations

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Sheremetyevo was the only airport in Russia that served flights to return citizens to their home countries. Sheremetyevo also implemented a set of unprecedented measures to prevent the spread of coronavirus infection in the Russian Federation and protect the health of passengers and personnel. During the period from March to September 2020, the airport received 236 flights, which returned 50,000 citizens to Russia. Sheremetyevo was the first airport in the world to introduce rapid testing for COVID-19.

Effective Crisis Measures

To ensure uninterrupted regular work and retain the airport staff under new conditions, a set of anti-crisis measures was developed in all areas of the SIA Group of Companies. Non-production costs were reduced, production resources were redistributed and technological processes were optimized. Three of the five passenger terminals and runway-3 were decommissioned until air traffic could increase in volume and intensity.

In 2020, Sheremetyevo Airport strengthened its leading position in Russia in the Moscow Air Cluster cargo transportation market with a 70% share, with a significant part of the year's cargo turnover consisting of medical goods. By the end of the year, the cargo operator of the airport, Moscow Cargo, had handled about 20,000 tons of medical cargo on domestic routes, almost 70% more than in 2019.

High Quality Ratings Continue

In 2020, Sheremetyevo was recognized as the best in terms of service quality in the category of the largest airports in Europe for the third year in a row, according to the ASQ program of the Airports Council International (ACI). At the end of the year, Sheremetyevo was included in the Voice of the Customer list of the Airports Council International, which includes 140 airports that were most active in the implementation of the ASQ program during the pandemic. In addition, throughout 2020, Sheremetyevo consistently maintained the highest rates of punctuality in flight operations.

The key indicators, achievements and financial performance of JSC SIA and Sheremetyevo Group of Companies for 2020 are reflected in the Annual Report on the official website.

The auditor for the JSC SIA reporting in 2020 was Ernst & Young LLC.

SOURCE Sheremetyevo International Airport
"ReturnQueen is excited to arrive in the Windy City, says Mary Goosman, VP of Strategy. Chicago has amazing neighborhoods that each bring a unique quality, culture and history to the state. The diversity and attractions in this massive city make it a perfect location to enter into the Midwest market." From catching the Cubs in Wrigleyville to shopping in Lincoln Park and live jazz in Uptown, the Northern neighborhoods are youthful and desirable. The West Side is considered the city's culinary destination, along with the breathtaking murals, monuments and churches of Wicker Park. Chicago's Loop is home to some major attractions, the Historic Theatre District, as well as galleries, lounges and shopping on Michigan Avenue. The South Side showcases monuments, museums, and Chinatown's authentic cuisine. These neighborhoods help shape why Chicago is such a desirable place to live. As the third largest city in the U.S, Chicago remains more affordable to live than NY or LA, and still offers a vibrant and diverse city life.

About ReturnQueen

ReturnQueen, an on-demand service that picks up, processes and sends back all your online shopping returns. This contactless service was created to be the solution to the biggest pain points in the shopping cycle including, printing labels, packaging items, waiting in line, driving to the post office and handling receipts. This unique app allows users to view all their online purchases at a glance and choose which items they want to return. You can return as many items as you can fit into the return bag, provided by ReturnQueen. Membership options will be available to serve different customer needs. ReturnQueen is currently operational in over 6,100 zip codes across NJ, NY, NC, TN, TX, FL, MA, and IL. Immediate plans to expand to Atlanta, Silicon Valley, Dallas and Los Angeles. within the next 30 days. Their goal is to make this service quickly available throughout the U.S.

First pick up is FREE, Available NOW for download:

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/returnqueen/id1537845231

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.returnqueen

SOURCE ReturnQueen

Related Links

https://returnqueen.com/


RICHMOND, Va., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- RiverFront Investment Group, a global asset manager and Exchange Traded Funds (ETF) strategist headquartered in Richmond, VA, recently hired Bobby Brooks as President, RiverShares Division to lead its RiverShares ETF offerings.

With the hire of Brooks, RiverFront is focused on leveraging the ETF ecosystem to expose existing and new clients to RiverFront competencies and deliver new RiverFront capabilities for both passive and active portfolio managers. RiverFront provides core managed ETF solutions for financial advisors and independent RIAs to use in constructing suitable, risk-managed client solution.

"We believe Bobby is the right leader to drive our future growth in the ETF business. His experience, knowledge, and connections across the industry will make us better in everything we do," said Pete Quinn, RiverFront President and CEO. "I have known and respected Bobby for many years and could not be more excited to welcome him to our team."

With over twenty-five years of industry experience, Brooks helped State Street launch its ETF sales unit, and led distribution at PowerShares which tripled firm assets during his tenure. Most recently he served as a senior executive at DWS. Brooks will be based in Boston, MA. "I have followed Riverfront Investment Group since the firm's inception back in 2008," said Brooks. "The passion that everyone at RIG has for Advisors and their clients is infectious. I am excited to be a part of the next chapter in the firm's history."

ABOUT RIVERFRONT: RiverFront Investment Group is a global asset manager focused on Process over Prediction  a dynamic investment approach driven by a systematic, repeatable methodology. The firm provides flexible, risk-managed solutions for a range of investment objectives and risk tolerances. RiverFront is affiliated with Robert W. Baird & Co. Incorporated ("Baird"), member FINRA/SIPC, from its minority ownership interest in RiverFront. RiverFront is owned primarily by its employees through RiverFront Investment Holding Group, LLC, the holding company for RiverFront. Baird Financial Corporation (BFC) is a minority owner of RiverFront Investment Holding Group, LLC and therefore an indirect owner of RiverFront. BFC is the parent company of Robert W. Baird & Co. Incorporated, a registered broker/dealer and investment adviser. Learn more at riverfrontig.com.

Opinions expressed are current as of the date shown and are subject to change. Past performance is not indicative of future results and diversification does not ensure a profit or protect against loss. All investments carry some level of risk, including loss of principal.

This report does not provide recipients with information or advice that is sufficient on which to base an investment decision. This report does not take into account the specific investment objectives, financial situation or need of any particular client and may not be suitable for all types of investors. Recipients should consider the contents of this report as a single factor in making an investment decision. Additional fundamental and other analyses would be required to make an investment decision about any individual security identified in this report.

Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are sold by prospectus. Please consider the investment objectives, risk, charges and expenses carefully before investing. The prospectus and summary prospectus, which contains this and other information, can be obtained by calling your financial advisor. Read it carefully before you invest. As a portfolio manager and a fiduciary for our clients, RiverFront will consider the investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses of a fund carefully before investing our clients' assets.

ETFs are subject to substantially the same risks as those associated with the direct ownership of the underlying securities owned by the ETF. Additionally, the value of the investment will fluctuate in response to the performance of the underlying index or securities. ETFs typically charge and/or incur fees in addition to those fees charged by RiverFront. Therefore, investments in ETFs will result in the layering of expenses.

RiverFront Investment Group, LLC ("RiverFront"), is a registered investment adviser with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Registration as an investment adviser does not imply any level of skill or expertise. Any discussion of specific securities is provided for informational purposes only and should not be deemed as investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any individual security mentioned. RiverFront is affiliated with Robert W. Baird & Co. Incorporated ("Baird"), member FINRA/SIPC, from its minority ownership interest in RiverFront. RiverFront is owned primarily by its employees through RiverFront Investment Holding Group, LLC, the holding company for RiverFront. Baird Financial Corporation (BFC) is a minority owner of RiverFront Investment Holding Group, LLC and therefore an indirect owner of RiverFront. BFC is the parent company of Robert W. Baird & Co. Incorporated, a registered broker/dealer and investment adviser.

To review other risks and more information about RiverFront, please visit the website at www.riverfrontig.com and the Form ADV, Part 2A. Copyright 2021 RiverFront Investment Group. All Rights Reserved. ID 1687336 RIV000895

Media Contacts:

RiverFront Investment Group: Dorian Langlais | Rally Point Media Strategist | [email protected] | Ph 862-368-1011

SOURCE RiverFront Investment Group, LLC

Related Links

www.riverfrontig.com


CHICAGO, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- According to the new market research report "Structural Adhesive Tapes Market by Resin Type (Acrylics, Rubber, Silicone), Backing Material, End-Use Industry (Automotive, Healthcare, Electronics & Electrical, Renewable Energy, E-Mobility, Building & Construction), and Region - Global Forecast to 2026", published by MarketsandMarkets, the global Structural Adhesive Tapes Market size is projected to grow from USD 7.6 billion in 2020 to USD 10.2 billion by 2026, at a CAGR of 4.1% from 2021 and 2026. Factors such as consistently growing electrical & electronics, automotive, building & construction, and healthcare industries have boosted the demand for structural adhesive tapes across application industries. Moreover, the significant growth of the pharmaceutical industry in developing countries and the demand for thermal management solutions are driving the structural adhesive tapes market. Along with this, the increasing demand for strong, superior quality, reliable, and accurate structural adhesive tapes and expansion of gigafactories across the globe are expected to offer opportunities for structural adhesive tape manufacturers.

Download PDF Brochure: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownloadNew.asp?id=189736471

Browse in-depth TOC on "Structural Adhesive Tapes Market"

210  Tables

56  Figures

260  Pages

View Detailed Table of Content Here: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/structural-adhesive-tapes-market-189736471.html

Acrylic resin type segment estimated to lead the structural adhesive tapes market in 2020

The Acrylic segment's resin type accounted for the largest share in the overall structural adhesive tapes market. The demand for acrylic structural tapes is increasing worldwide, particularly in Europe, because of the region's growing electrical & electronics, healthcare & hygiene, and automotive industries. The properties of acrylic structural tapes make them more favorable in North America and Europe, where environmental regulations regarding solvent-based technology are very strict. Also, the price of acrylic structural tapes is comparatively lower than other types.

PVC segment is estimated to be the leading backing material of structural adhesive tapes

The PVC segment led the overall structural adhesive tapes market in 2020, both in value and volume. The fastest-growing market for PVC structural tapes is in developing countries, particularly in the electrical and electronics industries. It finds application in several end-use industries such as automotive, construction, electronics, and healthcare. Thus, with the growth of end-use industries worldwide, the demand for PVC-based structural tapes is expected to increase in the upcoming years.

Building & Construction end-use segment is estimated to be the largest segment of structural adhesive tapes

The Building & Construction segment is estimated to be the largest end-use segment in terms of demand. However, the healthcare segment led the overall structural adhesive tapes market in 2020 in terms of value owing to comparatively high price of the structural adhesive tapes used in this industry. The demand for structural tapes is anticipated to grow owing to ongoing mega projects across the globe. For instance, the California High-Speed Rail (CHSR) is a publicly funded, worth USD 77 billion, is a high-speed rail system under construction in the U.S. state of California. It is projected to connect the Anaheim Regional Transportation Intermodal Center in Anaheim and Union Station in Downtown Los Angeles. In addition to this, the booming Electric Vehicle (EV) industry is also anticipated to contribute to the product demand. EV manufacturers have announced several giga factories to be setup in various countries including US, Germany, China, Poland, among others.

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APAC projected to account for the largest share of the structural adhesive tapes market during the forecast period

APAC is projected to have the largest share in the global structural adhesive tapes market, in terms of both value and volume, from 2021 to 2026. APAC has been a high potential structural adhesive tapes market against an overall slowdown in global economic development. This region encompasses a diverse range of economies with different levels of economic development and a large variety of industries. Most of the industries in this region include manufacturing, mining, semiconductors, electronics, oil & natural gas, textile, automobile, financial services, pharmaceutical, and telecommunication. The electrical & electronics, healthcare & hygiene, and automotive end-use industries drive the structural adhesive tapes market in this region. 3M (US), Nitto Denko Corporation (Japan), and tesa SE (Germany) are the important players in this region.

3M Company (US), Avery Dennison Corporation (US), Tesa SE (Germany), Nitto Denko Corporation (Japan), and Lintec Corporation (Japan) are the key players operating in the structural adhesive tapes market. Expansions, acquisitions, joint ventures, and new product developments are some of the major strategies adopted by these key players to enhance their positions in the structural adhesive tapes market.

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Browse Adjacent Markets: Coatings Adhesives Sealants and Elastomers Market Research Reports & Consulting

Related Reports:

Adhesive Tapes Market by Resin Type (Acrylic, Rubber, Silicone), Backing Material (PP, Paper, PVC), Technology (Solvent, Hot-Melt, Water Based), End-Use Industry (Packaging, Healthcare, E&E, Automotive) and Region - Global Forecast to 2025

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/adhesive-tapes-market-251563138.html

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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's 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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Research Insight: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/ResearchInsight/structural-adhesive-tapes-market.asp

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SOURCE MarketsandMarkets
LUXEMBOURG, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Sun King Diamonds ("Sun King" or "the Company") announces that it has today signed a letter of intent ("LOI") to sign a definitive service contract with Xylene for the purpose of tracking diamonds from their source to the end of the production chain as part of the Company's commitment to their environmental, social and governance (ESG) action plan.

The Company, which has developed a range of diamond coatings for different luxury applications, has, since inception, ethically sourced natural gem diamonds in accordance with the Kimberly Process and the Diamond Source Warranty Protocol. However, during this period, it has decided to make material ESG issues central to its strategy and operations. Measurement and communication about the Company's performance in these areas are fundamental to success.

Today's agreement confirms the Company's choice of Xylene's system for importers and producers with complex international supply chains who want to improve transparency and control. Xylene's approach visualises the supply chain to illustrate where suppliers are located and where the material is sourced. Physical products are labelled and tracked along the supply chain from source to consumer. Information is connected to the product; it is passed between stakeholders using blockchain, and its authenticity is validated through satellite data, ensuring third party compliance with legal requirements and ethical sourcing standards.

The proprietary patented technique of Sun King transforms natural gem diamonds into a paint finish that guarantees high quality and visual brilliance. It then works with both large-scale manufacturers and artisans to create luxury finishes for aircraft, yachts and cars. By adopting Xylene's system, the end consumer will benefit from complete transparency as to the ethical provenance and authenticity of the diamonds, which are integral to Sun King Diamond coating.

Sun King Diamond Coating has been applied to supercars produced by some of the world's foremost luxury car marques and industry OEM's. Lawmakers, regulators and investors alike are committed to cross-sector ESG principles, which stand to bring human rights and environmental standards to a new level in all industries. Ours should set a shining example.

Commenting on the announcement, Mike Angenent, Director of Sun King Diamonds and its sourcing specialist, said:

"We are delighted to be working with Xylene. Ethical sourcing has always been part of our way of doing business. We understand that ESG performance is not a tick-the-box exercise but one that requires active monitoring and ongoing improvement. Now, as a result of Xylene's exciting new technology, we can provide our clients and the end-user with the assurances they rightly expect from any diamond supplier."

Commenting on the announcement, Christopher Edwards, Co-Founder & CEO, of Xylene said:

"We designed our product suite to meet today's standards of authentication and prove a technical solution to product traceability. Supply chain insight is widely recognised as fundamental to the accountability of suppliers and increasingly important to consumers who today have the power to exercise their right to make an informed choice. Sun King Diamonds is a perfect example of a company that wants to put its customers in control and simply provide luxury without compromise."

For further information, please contact:

Sun King Diamonds

Mike Angenent

[email protected]

Xylene

Christopher Edwards

[email protected]

Media

Lisbet Castillo & Jessika Angarita Pacta Relations

[email protected]

Jessika Angarita

+1 3058774710

SOURCE Sun King Diamonds
VANCOUVER, BC, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - TechX Technologies Inc. ("TechX'' or the "Company'') (CSE: TECX) (OTC: TECXF) (FRA: C0B1), a fintech company focused on traditional and emerging financial services such as payment processing, mobile payments and digital assets including cryptocurrency, is pleased to announce that it has closed the previously announced agreement whereby TechX has acquired all of the issued and outstanding shares of XPort Digital Limited ("XPort").

XPort is a merchant services fiat-to-crypto gateway onramp solution offering credit card processing for cryptocurrency exchanges, wallets and other cryptocurrency businesses. XPort's credit card processing solution provides real-time competitive cryptocurrency pricing and low transaction fees.

As per the agreement, TechX has issued 5,252,100 common shares to XPort shareholders at a deemed value of $0.952 per share for a total aggregate consideration of C$5,000,000.

XPort Digital Key Features:

Lightning-Fast fiat-to-crypto purchasing with competitive market prices and processes transactions below current market rates through our retail site, Buybitfast.com

Buybitfast.com will be launching in Q3 of 2021.

XPort's merchant services also offers various integration methods for a customized widget solution for our partners to integrate and process fiat to crypto transfers for their users.

Merchant wallet hosting allows merchants to bring their own wallet or use the XPort Digital wallets and liquidity pool for token distribution.

Full-service merchant dashboard to view transactions, administer refunds, automated reconciliation and reporting features.

Instant KYC with real-time video and AI to confirm customer identity within seconds and allow customers to complete purchases within minutes.

Secure - Partners with acquirers that are PCI DSS compliant to ensure high security standards are being used.

"We are very pleased to begin the next phase of our growth following the completion of this acquisition. XPort Digital has continued to prove itself as one of the cutting edge industry leaders in the crypto space and a benchmark for performance," said TechX CEO, Peter Green. "We look forward to working with XPort's talented team to build a solid and profitable business that allows merchants, exchanges and other cryptocurrency businesses to connect their cryptocurrencies to the platform and embed our white-label widget in their platform."

"The really cool thing about Buybitfast.com is that it's not just only a really simple and user-friendly site, but it's a testament to how our XPort Digital technology empowers our users and merchants to take advantage of opportunities to trade their crypto in this hot, fast moving market," said XPort CEO, Aaron Carter.

About TechX Technologies Inc.

TechX Technologies Inc. (CSE:TECX) (OTC:TECXF) (FRA:C0B1) a fintech company focused on traditional and emerging financial services such as payment processing, mobile payments and digital assets including cryptocurrency. Led by senior leaders and industry experts, our investors have access to strategically selected portfolio companies that offer technologies across the entire cryptocurrency funnel, unlocking massive market potential. TechX's portfolio of businesses include Mobilum , Catalyx Exchange , Altsignals , Xport Digital and Shiftinsights .

This news release may contain certain "Forward-Looking Statements" within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and applicable Canadian securities laws. When or if used in this news release, the words "anticipate", "believe", "estimate", "expect", "target, "plan", "forecast", "may", "schedule" and similar words or expressions identify forward-looking statements or information. Such statements represent the Company's current views with respect to future events and are necessarily based upon a number of assumptions and estimates that, while considered reasonable by the Company, are inherently subject to significant business, economic, competitive, political and social risks, contingencies and uncertainties. Many factors, both known and unknown, could cause results, performance or achievements to be materially different from the results, performance or achievements that are or may be expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. The Company does not intend, and does not assume any obligation, to update these forward-looking statements or information to reflect changes in assumptions or changes in circumstances or any other events affecting such statements and information other than as required by applicable laws, rules and regulations.

Related Links

https://tech-x.io/

SOURCE TechX Technologies Inc.

Related Links

https://tech-x.io/


For some time, there has been a need for school choice in America. This need was on full display during the pandemic last year. Some students found themselves unfairly disadvantaged as the country turned to virtual learning  some students missed meals that their schools would have otherwise provided, other students without internet access or laptops were unable to participate in their classes.

The ACLJ heard from numerous families who were struggling to provide their children with the educational tools that they deserved. We got to work, taking on the task of offering relief to parents and students to keep education first by giving parents options to provide the best quality education for their children individually.

We have achieved monumental victories for multiple families after launching our School Choice Initiative, victories that are only possible because of your help. It's why, in the fight for our students, the ACLJ is needed now more than ever.

Join the Fight: https://morethanever.com

About ACLJ: The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), focusing on the preservation and defense of constitutional rights, is based in Washington, D.C. For more information, visit https://aclj.org/.

Contact:

Brian Mayes

[email protected].



SOURCE American Center for Law and Justice

Related Links

http://www.aclj.org


Rising to blockbuster status with over 2 million tickets sold, Immersive Van Gogh is proving to be one of the hottest shows sold-out in Toronto, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. Audiences will have the opportunity to step into this unique space that will be transformed with Van Gogh's paintbrush in a swirl of color, brought to life with over 90,000,000 pixels of animation.

Featuring state-of-the-art technology and immersive storytelling, the breathtaking exhibit is called one of "the hottest tickets in town!" by MSNBC Morning News and "a mesmerizing interactive experience" by Architectural Digest.

"Immersive Van Gogh is perfectly hosted in Lighthouse Artspace," said co-producer Diana Rayzman, Co-Founder of Impact Museums. This venue provides us the ability to feature this multi-dimensional experience in a truly unique space.

"We have been delighted to see the way Immersive Van Gogh has been embraced by the city and people of Phoenix," says Lighthouse Immersive Producer, Corey Ross.

"We've created a unique and enthralling production where Phoenix residents and visitors alike can quite literally surround themselves with the work of Vincent van Gogh, one of the greatest artists who ever lived," added Producer Svetlana Dvoretsky.

For more information about Immersive Van Gogh Phoenix, visit https://www.vangoghphx.com . Follow the exhibition on social media on Instagram and Facebook .

For images, click here, and for video, click here

SOURCE Lighthouse Immersive
SINGAPORE and BANGKOK, June 28, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Siam Commercial Bank (SCB), Thailand's first and oldest bank, and Thunes , a global leader in cross-border payments, today announced a partnership to enable consumers and businesses overseas to send funds to Thailand faster, cheaper and with higher transaction limits. Locals and expats in Thailand will now be able to receive payouts in real time directly into their bank accounts from all over the world.

Existing methods of cross-border money transfer into Thailand are often slow, unreliable and burdened with high fees and low transaction limits. With the help of Siam Commercial Bank, Thunes' global customers are able to send transactions to Thailand more quickly, securely and cost effectively, helping to satisfy fast rising demand for the seamless movement of funds across borders. Senders can now transfer money via Thunes' global network to Siam Commercial Bank's 16.4 million customers and all other bank account holders in Thailand.

Along with consumer remittances, Siam Commercial Bank will also be able to facilitate B2B transactions, such as mass payouts in Thailand on behalf of enterprises based in other parts of the world.

"Thunes is leading the way in global cross-border payments and this is recognised by the caliber of our partners. We are now honoured by the addition of Siam Commercial Bank to our global network. This new partnership demonstrates our deep local knowledge of an important Southeast Asian market and builds on our experience in successfully overcoming compliance obstacles and understanding the country's local banking landscape," said Andrew Stewart, Global Head of Networks, Thunes.

"We are pleased to enter this partnership with Thunes, a global leader in the cross-border payments landscape. This latest innovative fintech solution aligns with Siam Commercial Bank's forward-thinking strategy. Partnering with Thunes, we are putting into action our mission that aims to respond to the rapidly evolving financial services industry, which is being reshaped by digital technology, regulatory change, and new consumer behaviour," said Mr. Sirote Vichayabhai, First Executive Vice President, Head of GTS and Ecosystems, Siam Commercial Bank (SCB).

NOTES TO EDITORS

About Thunes

Thunes is a B2B company that powers payments for the world's fastest-growing businesses. Corporates and financial institutions are able to move funds seamlessly, securely and cost-effectively with Thunes' well-established, reliable and far-reaching network. Thunes is used by global banks, money transfer operators, platforms and many other businesses to make payments to bank accounts, mobile wallets and cash pick-up providers around the world. Thunes' platform currently connects more than 260 customers and network partners from across 110 countries to send and receive money globally. Thunes is headquartered in Singapore with regional offices in London, Shanghai, New York, Dubai, and Nairobi.

For more information, visit www.thunes.com

About Siam Commercial Bank

Siam Commercial Bank PCL was established by Royal Charter in 1906 as the first Thai bank. As of March 31, 2021, the Bank had Baht 3,177 billion in total assets and Baht 379,008 million in market capitalization on a consolidated basis. The bank is one of Thailand's leading universal banks, providing a full range of financial services to clients in all segments, including wholesale, SMEs, and retail banking services, through its nationwide branch network. SCB is committed to becoming "The Most Admired Bank" by balancing value propositions to all stakeholders - customers, employees, shareholders, regulators and society - and becoming a leader in shaping the future of Thailand's banking industry.

For more information, visit https://www.scb.co.th

SOURCE Thunes

Related Links

http://www.thunes.com


PLANO, Texas, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Siemens Digital Industries Software today announced that TotalEnergies Gas Mobility has selected MindSphere, the industrial IoT as a service solution from Siemens, to collect, monitor and analyze data across its network of Natural Gas for Vehicle (NGV) refueling stations. TotalEnergies Gas Mobility is the global competence center for natural, renewable, and hydrogen gas for mobility and small-scale LNG for industry use of TotalEnergies, one of the world's largest energy companies.

TotalEnergies Gas Mobility selected MindSphere due to the wide variety of IoT capabilities available to orchestrate, collaborate and deliver digital services, its advanced security and governance options and its robust scalability. (PRNewsfoto/Siemens Digital Industries Software)

As part of a global digitalization strategy, TotalEnergies Gas Mobility has already connected over 50 stations across the Netherlands, Belgium and France in the first year, where the company is planning to reduce maintenance costs through remote monitoring and service scheduling. TotalEnergies Gas Mobility selected MindSphere due to the wide variety of IoT capabilities available to orchestrate, collaborate and deliver digital services, its advanced security and governance options and its robust scalability. MindSphere is part of Siemens' Xcelerator portfolio of software and services.

"In line with TotalEnergies' Climate Ambition to reach Net Zero emissions by 2050 together with society, TotalEnergies Gas Mobility's aim is to expand our broad energy company's European network for natural and renewable gas for vehicles to 450 stations by 2025 and so retain its NGV market leadership position in the region," said John Wilson, Vice President of TotalEnergies Gas Mobility. "The Siemens IoT monitoring solution will enable us to better serve our internal customers and station owners, the local affiliated offices of TotalEnergies in the different countries around the world, through enhanced station supervision, maintenance cost and TCO reduction."

"Siemens is a key strategic partner for executing our digitalization strategy," said Baldewijn Westerbeek, Digital and IT manager at TotalEnergies Gas Mobility. "Our purpose is to help other TotalEnergies' subsidiaries globally to expand their CNG, LNG and hydrogen offerings. These alternative fuel products require more complex refueling installations, which we operate and monitor closely using Siemens' MindSphere solutions. Combined, the connected stations report billions of datapoint readings per year to a cloud database in a fully secured environment. With this data, we can discover valuable usage patterns and resolve issues before anyone on the ground even notices."

Last year's disruptions as a result of the pandemic have only accelerated the need for digitalization. TotalEnergies Gas Mobility has been able to leverage the open, out-of-the-box capabilities of MindSphere to quickly scale the project and achieve positive results in the first year. MindSphere offers one of the most versatile solutions for companies to connect their data, turn this data into information and leverage this information to improve customer experience and the ability to develop new business models.

"Siemens is helping TotalEnergies Gas Mobility make tomorrow's goals a reality today through our versatile, secure and scalable MindSphere solution," said Raymond Kok, Senior Vice President of Cloud Application Solutions at Siemens Digital Industries Software. "It is rewarding to see how quickly TotalEnergies Gas Mobility has been able to implement our IoT solution to unlock the potential to realize savings and generate return on their IoT investment, and we look forward to further collaboration as they expand their use of our Xcelerator portfolio."

For more information on MindSphere, please see here.

Siemens Digital Industries Software is driving transformation to enable a digital enterprise where engineering, manufacturing and electronics design meet tomorrow. The Xcelerator portfolio helps companies of all sizes create and leverage digital twins that provide organizations with new insights, opportunities and levels of automation to drive innovation. For more information on Siemens Digital Industries Software products and services, visit www.sw.siemens.com or follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Siemens Digital Industries Software  Where today meets tomorrow.

Siemens Digital Industries (DI) is an innovation leader in automation and digitalization. Closely collaborating with partners and customers, DI drives the digital transformation in the process and discrete industries. With its Digital Enterprise portfolio, DI provides companies of all sizes with an end-to-end set of products, solutions and services to integrate and digitalize the entire value chain. Optimized for the specific needs of each industry, DI's unique portfolio supports customers to achieve greater productivity and flexibility. DI is constantly adding innovations to its portfolio to integrate cutting-edge future technologies. Siemens Digital Industries has its global headquarters in Nuremberg, Germany, and has around 76,000 employees internationally.

Siemens AG (Berlin and Munich) is a global technology powerhouse that has stood for engineering excellence, innovation, quality, reliability and internationality for more than 170 years. Active around the world, the company focuses on intelligent infrastructure for buildings and distributed energy systems and on automation and digitalization in the process and manufacturing industries. Siemens brings together the digital and physical worlds to benefit customers and society. Through Mobility, a leading supplier of intelligent mobility solutions for rail and road transport, Siemens is helping to shape the world market for passenger and freight services. Via its majority stake in the publicly listed company Siemens Healthineers, Siemens is also a world-leading supplier of medical technology and digital health services. In addition, Siemens holds a minority stake in Siemens Energy, a global leader in the transmission and generation of electrical power that has been listed on the stock exchange since September 28, 2020. In fiscal 2020, which ended on September 30, 2020, the Siemens Group generated revenue of 57.1 billion and net income of 4.2 billion. As of September 30, 2020, the company had around 293,000 employees worldwide. Further information is available on the Internet at www.siemens.com.

Note: A list of relevant Siemens trademarks can be found here. Other trademarks belong to their respective owners.

SOURCE Siemens Digital Industries Software
BOULDER, Colo., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Unity Rd., the cannabis dispensary franchise from Item 9 Labs Corp. (OTCQX: INLB), is opening its first franchise shop this week in Boulder, Colorado. The Boulder franchise is locally owned and operated by father-son-duo Bruce and Nate Wetzel; Nate relocated from Iowa to Colorado in 2020 to pursue the cannabis business opportunity.

"Our team has been waiting for this moment  this launch has been years in the making," shared Unity Rd.'s Chief Franchise Officer, Mike Weinberger. "We founded Unity Rd.  a cannabis dispensary franchise  with the mission of keeping dispensary ownership, and the wealth that comes along with it, local. We want to educate and empower owners, while also pumping revenue right back into their communities, but Rome wasn't built in a day. It's no secret that opening a dispensary is a lengthy process, and that's exactly why this opening means so much to our team  it's a reflection of a lot of hard work, creativity and dedication. Here's to the first of many."

Unity Rd. offers the safest route for cannabis entrepreneurs interested in staking their claim in an industry that's bursting with potential. The dispensary franchisor's time-tested Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and veteran team, with a combined 120+ years of cannabis experience, guide franchise partners through every operational function of the business, whether it be securing a license or assisting with cash flow, product selection or changing regulations.

"We had been looking at the cannabis space for a few years, trying to determine our best entrance that would mitigate the high risk," said Nate. "We knew that by partnering with a solid franchisor we wouldn't have to go through the School of Hard Knocks and dug into cannabis franchises. We found a few that were just selling a business plan, no long-term support, and then discovered Unity Rd. The team has a depth of history on both the retail and cultivation side with awards to back them up. We felt most comfortable with Unity Rd. versus other routes into this nascent industry."

Colorado Franchise Development Plans & Corporate Acquisition Strategy

The shop is primed for immediate success as Colorado's cannabis sales recently hit the highest point the state has ever seen, bringing in $2.2 billion in 2020 alone. While it was the first state to legalize cannabis seven years ago, Colorado is still ripe with opportunity. In fact, several cities in Colorado have recently made new dispensary licenses available. The Unity Rd. team is ready to help industry newcomers navigate the licensing process and notoriously complex industry, as well as partner with existing dispensary owners via its Local Alliance Program  providing access to the buying power, resources and supportive network normally reserved for multi-unit operators.

Unity Rd. is also seeking corporate acquisitions of existing dispensaries throughout the state, primarily in Denver as well as front range and compelling mountain towns. The cannabis dispensary franchise plans to convert the stores into Unity Rd. shops, operate them internally and sell them to an existing or future Unity Rd. franchise partner. This offers a turnkey solution for entrepreneurs seeking immediate entry into cannabis.

"Our corporate acquisition strategy eases hurdles for newcomers looking to acquire an existing dispensary and keeps ownership in the hands of local owners," Weinberger said. "We'll get the stores fully converted into a Unity Rd., train the shop team and oversee operations so franchise partners have a seamless transition to ownership."

Already, Unity Rd.'s Director of Franchise Operations, Jennifer Zarezadeh, has relocated to Denver to support the Wetzels and oversee future Unity Rd. operations.

The cannabis franchise is actively seeking qualified franchise partners throughout Colorado and the U.S. who would benefit from the systems, processes and ongoing support the franchise offers. As it stands, Unity Rd. currently has multiple agreements signed with more than 15 entrepreneurial groups who are in various stages of development nationwide.

To learn more about the Unity Rd. franchise opportunity, contact [email protected], call 720-923-5262 or visit unityrd.com.

ABOUT UNITY RD. :

Unity Rd. is bridging the two previously disconnected worlds of cannabis and franchising. The industry trailblazer is the first to bring the cannabis dispensary franchise model to the United Stateswith duality of prowess in both industries to back it up. Built up from a collective 200 years in the legal cannabis industry and franchising, the company helps eager operators enter the complex industry with ease. The marijuana franchise pioneer offers its partners the knowledge, resources, and ongoing support needed to compliantly and successfully operate a dispensary. Launched in 2018, Unity Rd. has signed multiple agreements with more than 15 entrepreneurial groups across the country. Recently, it was named one of the top cannabis retail leaders in the nation by MJBizDaily magazine and one of the "Best Cannabis Companies to Work For" in both the dispensary and cultivation categories in Cannabis Business Times' elite 2020 list. The company is also the first cannabis business to earn a Franchise Times Dealmakers award. For more information, visit unityrd.com.

SOURCE Unity Rd.
FAR HILLS, N.J., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The U.S. Supreme Court's narrow 5 to 4 ruling today overturns the Third Circuit Court of Appeal's earlier decision that PennEast, as a private company, lacks legal authority to seize state-owned lands without the state's consent.

The decision enables PennEast to proceed with seizing over 40 properties preserved for future generations by the State of New Jersey and its partners with tax-payer dollars. The court ruled only on the narrow issue of whether PennEast can seize state lands, not the merits of the project.

"The Supreme Court's decision to overturn the Third Circuit's ruling puts public preserved land in New Jersey in great jeopardy. This is disappointing, but PennEast is still facing numerous legal and regulatory hurdles that will prevent this unnecessary, polluting project from moving forward," said Tom Gilbert, campaign director, New Jersey Conservation Foundation and ReThink Energy NJ. "The PennEast pipeline would threaten the health and safety of our communities, seize private land and taxpayer-preserved open space, and harm our drinking water, natural and historic resources. Ultimately, the state will have final say as to whether the project may proceed."

"This project cannot move forward without a New Jersey authorization finding that it could be built consistent with Clean Water Act laws  which are designed to protect waters and wetlands against destructive projects like PennEast," said Jennifer Danis, senior fellow at Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and of counsel to Morningside Heights Legal Services at Columbia Law School. "While it's outrageous that the Court sidestepped decades of sovereign immunity jurisprudence, the Murphy Administration went to the mat trying to guard its public and stewarded conservation lands  and we are thankful that they take conservation so seriously."

FERC's certificate for the project is being appealed by numerous parties in the D.C. Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals. The project must still receive approvals from the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, the Delaware River Basin Commission and the NJ Department of Environmental Protection that has twice denied permits for the project.

SOURCE New Jersey Conservation Foundation
Volta Charging's unique charging stations  which feature large, eye-catching digital displays  provide an optimal content viewing experience for both the drivers who plug their vehicles into the stations and the customers who shop at near-by retailers. The Air Pollution Scoreboard is adapted from the Bloomberg Green Data Dash , a dynamic dashboard of environmental and energy metrics that provides a straightforward, highly visual way to understand what's happening in climate developments right now. EV charging stations and the shift to electric mobility can help to reduce air pollution, making the localized air pollution data displayed on Volta Charging stations all the more pertinent.

"Our commitment to sustainability is the fuel of our business model," said Scott Mercer, Founder and CEO of Volta Charging. "As we work to address the serious ramifications of the climate crisis, we know that it will take more than one company or one industry to spur meaningful change. Bloomberg Green shares our values and drive and we look forward to this new collaboration."

Volta Charging's media-enabled charging stations also offer brands a dynamic content experience platform, including activation and engagement opportunities. Brands running campaigns on Volta Charging's stations report experiencing positive results in brand awareness and increased purchase intent; in addition, business partners who choose to have Volta Charging stations installed report an increase in spend, dwell time and engagement on site.

"Just as Bloomberg Green provides a solutions-oriented approach to climate journalism, Volta provides new energy and clean air solutions for the automobile industry," said Margot Schupf, Head of Americas for Bloomberg Media Distribution. "Bloomberg Media and Volta Charging share the ambition to reach like-minded audiences with deeply engaging and relevant information around critical climate issues in their community, in new and innovative ways throughout their day."

Launched in January 2020, Bloomberg Green leverages deep data expertise and a global newsroom of 2,700 journalists and analysts in more than 120 countries, to deliver original reporting and solutions-driven coverage on the business, science, and technology of climate change. Offering news, analysis, and solutions, its content appears on the Bloomberg Green website, a daily email newsletter, a podcast, the Bloomberg Green magazine, and the Bloomberg Terminal, with integration across digital video, Bloomberg Quicktake, Bloomberg Television, Bloomberg TV+, Bloomberg Radio and Bloomberg Live events.

About Volta Charging

Volta Charging is an industry leader in commerce-centric EV charging networks. Volta Charging's vision is to build EV charging networks that capitalize on and catalyze the shift from combustion-powered miles to electric miles by placing stations where consumers live, work, shop and play. By leveraging a data-driven understanding of driver behavior to deliver EV charging solutions that fit seamlessly into drivers' daily routines, Volta Charging's goal is to benefit consumers, brands and real-estate locations while helping to build the infrastructure of the future. As part of Volta Charging's unique EV charging offering, its stations allow it to enhance its site hosts' and strategic partners' core commercial interests, creating a new means for them to benefit from the transformative shift to electric mobility. To learn more, visit www.voltacharging.com .

In February 2021, Volta and Tortoise Acquisition Corp. II (NYSE: SNPR), a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company with a strategic focus on energy sustainability and decarbonizing transportation, announced they entered into a business combination agreement. Upon the closing of the transaction, which remains subject to customary closing conditions, the combined entity will be named Volta Inc. and remain on the New York Stock Exchange under the new ticker symbol "VLTA".

Bloomberg Media

Bloomberg Media is a leading, global, multi-platform brand that provides decision-makers with timely news, analysis and intelligence on business, finance, technology, climate change, politics and more. Powered by a newsroom of over 2,700 journalists and analysts, it reaches influential audiences worldwide across every platform including digital, social, TV, radio, print and live events. Bloomberg Media is a division of Bloomberg LP. Visit BloombergMedia.com for more information.

SOURCE Volta
The event attracted community members supporting the fundraising for the Alzheimer's Association, enjoying the line-up of classic automobiles, and honoring their loved ones on Father's Day weekend. Car enthusiasts admired the variety of automobiles, while kids and grownups alike lined up for a treat from the TCBY vintage food truck.

"After a difficult year which affected our entire nation, we are touched by the collaboration of our Watercrest team and the surrounding community to support the Alzheimer's Association in their heroic efforts to eliminate Alzheimer's disease," says Noel Fortner, Community Programming Director of Watercrest Newnan. "We are grateful to implement our Common Unity initiatives to better our community and those who are a part of it."

At Watercrest, Common Unity initiatives inspire a sense of community at each location, while fulfilling needs in their hometowns and supporting residents in staying connected in meaningful ways. As part of a themed series of Common Unity initiatives, residents and associates spent months in fundraising and preparation for their events on 'The Longest Day.'

Watercrest Newnan is a 92,000 square-foot, signature Watercrest product offering 75 assisted living and 32 memory care apartments with premium accommodations, resort-style amenities, and world-class care. Watercrest Newnan is ideally situated on nine picturesque acres at 285 Summerlin Boulevard in Newnan, Georgia, southwest of Atlanta. For more information, contact the community at 770-637-2207.

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 and world-class care, including unparalleled service to seniors living with Alzheimer's and dementia. A certified Great Place to Work, Watercrest specializes in the development and operations of senior living communities and the growth of servant leaders. Visit www.watercrestseniorliving.com.

SOURCE Watercrest Senior Living Group

Related Links

http://www.watercrestseniorliving.com


"Until now, lower calorie wines have been seen as light on flavor. That was a trade-off we weren't willing to make," said John Casella, Managing Director of Casella Family Brands, which makes [ yellow tail ] PURE BRIGHT. "We took the opposite approach, ensuring great taste and then working our way backward to deliver on making it lighter."

It begins with the grapes, which are specially cultivated, and picked at exactly the right moment to maximize brightness and acidity. Once harvested, [ yellow tail ] winemakers use proprietary blending techniques and gentle reverse osmosis to reduce alcohol content and ultimately calories while maintaining all of the original flavor.

PURE BRIGHT launches nationally this month with help from mom, actress, author, and entrepreneur Sarah Michelle Gellar. The digital campaign gives fans a behind-the-scenes glimpse at Gellar's life, and how she makes time for herself.

"Like many busy moms I'm constantly multi-tasking. But at the end of the day, I want to lighten things up a little," Gellar said. "PURE BRIGHT tastes great and is the perfect way to bring some balance back into my life."

[ yellow tail ] PURE BRIGHT comes in three varieties:

Sauvignon Blanc : Notes of light citrus and lemongrass complement undertones of gooseberry, lime and a hint of passionfruit. Per 5fl.oz.: Calories 80, Carbohydrates 0.6g, ABV 8.5% (compared to 11.5% for [ yellow tail ] core Sauvignon Blanc)

: Notes of light citrus and lemongrass complement undertones of gooseberry, lime and a hint of passionfruit. Per 5fl.oz.: Calories 80, Carbohydrates 0.6g, ABV 8.5% (compared to 11.5% for [ yellow tail ] core Sauvignon Blanc) Pinot Grigio : Delightfully fresh, with aromas of pear, hints of green apples and passionfruit. Per 5fl.oz.: Calories 80, Carbohydrates 1.5g, ABV 8.5% (compared to 11.5% for [ yellow tail ] core Pinot Grigio)

Delightfully fresh, with aromas of pear, hints of green apples and passionfruit. Per 5fl.oz.: Calories 80, Carbohydrates 1.5g, ABV 8.5% (compared to 11.5% for [ yellow tail ] core Pinot Grigio) Chardonnay : Offers aromas of citrus, lemon and white peach, with a light spice and vanilla undertone. Per 5fl.oz.: Calories 85, Carbohydrates 1.1g, ABV 9.6% (compared to 13% for [ yellow tail ] core Chardonnay)

About Yellow Tail

[ yellow tail ] is the champion wine brand for Casella Family Brands. Owned and operated in Yenda, Australia, the Casella family has winemaking links going back six generations to Italy. [ yellow tail ] wines are created with a simple philosophy - make a great wine that everybody can enjoy. [ yellow tail ] is America's most beloved wine brand with a dedicated consumer following that cuts across all age groups. In addition to PURE BRIGHT, [ yellow tail ] offers eight core varietals including: Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Noir, Merlot, Rose. [ yellow tail ] wines are available at retailers nationwide: www.yellowtailwine.com

Contact:

Chandni Patel

646-726-4347

[email protected]

SOURCE [ yellow tail ]

Related Links

https://www.yellowtailwine.com


DUBLIN, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Pipeline Security Market - Forecasts from 2021 to 2026" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The global pipeline security market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 6.79% during the forecast period, reaching a total market size of US$11.803 billion in 2026 from US$7.451 billion in 2019.

Pipeline security is the protection of land-based pipelines against sabotage, illegal tapping, and terrorist activities using the pipelines.

The global pipeline security solutions are gaining importance across the globe owing to increased terrorist attacks and cybersecurity threats, worldwide.

Another key driver of the market is the increasing demand for pipeline security solutions coupled with the increase in the number of funds being invested in these solutions. The gradual increase in the demand for natural gas by the transportation and power generation sector is further augmenting the demand for these security solutions, globally.

According to a report by IBM, in 2019, the manufacturing, and energy industry are the topmost industries to be targeted the most for pipeline security attacks. To combat such attacks the governing bodies of several countries are adopting pipeline security solutions, which in turn is expected to fuel the market growth.

In addition, the rising need for multiple security solutions due to the lack of integrated platforms to provide both physical and network security solutions is expected to propel the market growth during the forecast period. Moreover, the increasing energy consumption in developing countries requires more extraction and distribution infrastructure, thereby impacting the market growth positively. The North American region is estimated to hold a significant market share during the forecast period owing to increasing shale gas exploration in the region.

By solutions, surveillance solutions and secure communication systems are expected to hold a notable market share owing to the increasing threat and security concerns across various industries, globally. By product type, the market for natural gas and drinking water segments is estimated to grow during the forecast period due to the rapidly increasing population and the rising urbanization across the globe.

Geographically, North America and Asia Pacific regions are projected to hold a significant market share owing to the increasing shale gas exploration, the need for reliable protected pipeline networks along with the upgrading of refineries, and the rising concern over pipeline attacks and damage due to natural disasters.



Growth Factors

Increasing cybersecurity threats and terrorist attacks

The sudden increase in the number of cybersecurity threats and terrorist attacks worldwide is a major cause of concern for the government of any country. The governing bodies of several countries are investing funds to protect the pipelines and prevent such attacks. The increasing concern and awareness is expected to drive the market during the forecast period.

Increasing demand for oil and gas

The rising demand for oil and gas due to the rapidly increasing population across the globe is projected to propel the growth of the pipeline security market during the forecast period. The big players in the pipeline security industry are spending large amounts of funds on developing Internet of Things (IoT) based tools which will be able to detect any leakages across the pipelines, which in turn will support the market growth.

Furthermore, the demand for natural gas is expected to grow during the next few years owing to increasing concerns regarding carbon emissions and the adoption of eco-friendly alternatives in the industrial sectors, which in turn will surge the demand for pipeline security in the years to come.

Restraints

High costs

The costs associated with the implementation of pipeline safety solutions are huge. The costs are high as an entire infrastructure system needs to be developed along with these solutions. Changes need to be made in the existing pipelines, trained manpower needs to be kept to monitor the systems, software needs to be developed, installed, and maintained all of which occurs at large costs. The governments especially those of developing countries might not be ready to invest a surplus amount of funds in developing the pipeline security system in their country, which may hamper the growth of the market.

Impact of COVID-19



The Covid-19 pandemic moderately impacted the global pipeline security market as due to the slowdown in the manufacturing processes, the demand for the pipeline security market was negatively impacted. The focus of all the governing bodies was more on combating the virus than on developing information technology infrastructure.

The business operations of many industries such and oil and gas, chemicals, refined products, etc. suffered due to the lockdown restrictions, which further hampered the market growth. However, the global pipeline security market is expected to rebound during the forecast period owing to the ease in Government restrictions, and the increase in the budget for the IT sector.



Competitive Insights



Prominent/major key market players in the global Pipeline Security market include ABB Ltd, Honeywell International Inc., Schneider Electric, Senstar Corporation, Thales Group, Huawei Technologies Co., BAE Systems, Siemens AG.

The players in the Global Pipeline Security Market are implementing various growth strategies to gain a competitive advantage over their competitors in this market. For Instance, in June 2020, ABB Turbo Systems Ltd was merged with ABB Switzerland Ltd to expand their market reach and become the global leaders.

Major market players in the market have been covered along with their relative competitive strategies in this report and the report mentions recent deals and investments of different market players over the last few years. The company profiles section details the business overview, financial performance (public companies) for the past few years, key products and services being offered along with the recent deals and investments of these important players in the Global Pipeline Security Market.

Key Topics Covered:



1. Introduction



2. Research Methodology



3. Executive Summary



4. Market Dynamics

4.1. Market Drivers

4.2. Market Restraints

4.3. Porters Five Forces Analysis

4.4. Industry Value Chain Analysis



5. Global Pipeline Security Market Analysis, By Solution

5.1. Introduction

5.2. Surveillance Solutions

5.3. Secure Communication Systems

5.4. Tracking Solutions

5.5. Identity and Access Control Solutions

5.6. Intrusion Detection Solutions

5.7. Others



6. Global Pipeline Security Market Analysis, By Product Type

6.1. Introduction

6.2. Chemicals

6.3. Natural gas

6.4. Crude oil

6.5. Refined products

6.6. Drinking water

6.7. Others



7. Global Pipeline Security Market Analysis, By Geography

7.1. Introduction

7.2. North America

7.2.1. United States

7.2.2. Canada

7.2.3. Mexico

7.3. South America

7.3.1. Brazil

7.3.2. Argentina

7.3.3. Others

7.4. Europe

7.4.1. United Kingdom

7.4.2. Germany

7.4.3. France

7.4.4. Spain

7.4.5. Others

7.5. The Middle East and Africa

7.5.1. Saudi Arabia

7.5.2. Israel

7.5.3. Others

7.6. Asia Pacific

7.6.1. Japan

7.6.2. China

7.6.3. India

7.6.4. Indonesia

7.6.5. Taiwan

7.6.6. Thailand

7.6.7. Others



8. Competitive Intelligence

8.1. Competitive Benchmarking and Analysis

8.2. Recent Investment and Deals

8.3. Strategies of Key Players



9. Company Profiles

ABB Ltd

Honeywell International Inc.

Schneider Electric

Senstar Corporation

Thales Group

Huawei Technologies Co.

BAE Systems

Siemens AG

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/htwr7e

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

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SOURCE Research and Markets

Related Links

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DUBLIN, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Smart Food Logistics Market - Growth, Trends, COVID-19 Impact, and Forecasts (2021 - 2026)" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The global smart food logistics market (henceforth, referred to as the market studied) was valued at USD 8.12 billion in 2020 and it is expected to reach USD 16.69 billion by 2026, registering a CAGR of 12.7%, during the period of 2021-2026.

The market for smart logistics in food industry has emerged from benefits of facilitating the 'Ease of procuring' to tracking packages in transit. The ability to receive the items fresh with a real-time access to the movement of food is where smart logistics powered by internet of things (IoT) is making a huge difference.

Convergence of logistics and technology, along with cloud-based collaborative solutions that extend through the entire supply chain, has enabled a tight integration of warehouse, transport, and end consumer information, and transparency through the supply chain, this in turn, has been identified as a key driver towards the growth of the market studied.

As the digital economy continues to grow, the IoT technology has transitioned from futuristic idea to tactical tool for logistics companies to implement in their supply chain. Sensors and IoT tools are transforming traditional asset tracking to intelligent supply chains that are capable of earning logistics companies a higher ROI. For the food industry, these IoT-enabled sensors are offering real-time knowledge of asset/fleet location, fleet motion speed, temperature conditions and other crucial data sets.

The sensors additionally help the allied stakeholders to closely monitor food safety data points, thus, ensuring efficient cold chain management. This data enables compliance adherence with local and global regulations. For instance, by using automated Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points (HACCP) checklists during the production, manufacturing, and transporting processes, companies attain access to consistent, meaningful data to implement food safety solutions.

Likewise, varying food laws and regulations across regions, one being the Food and Drug Safety Act has been realized as putting significant pressure on supply chains to record more information and increase transparency.

The COVID-19 pandemic severely disrupted almost all the end-user industries globally, affecting the supply chain management of businesses due to remote working conditions or complete lockdown, resulting in the halt of operations.? The disruption proliferated the use of technology and digitalization to its maximum to survive the pandemic and help prevent the disruption of their operations.

The pandemic affected the logistics industry in various ways, as the Logistics Managers' Index (LMI) for April 2020 fell to an all-time low. The LMI is based on eight unique components that involve inventory (levels and costs), warehousing (capacity, utilization, and prices), and transportation (capacity, utilization, and prices).

Key Market Trends



Cold Chain Monitoring to Hold a Significant Share

Rapidly changing food habits, heightened demand for packaged food, and stringent regulations regarding packing and storage have resulted in a power shift from manufacturers to retailers. Processes focusing on zero contamination, precise storage, and high-speed storage and retrieval operations are the key reasons driving automation and the adoption of the technologies in the food and beverage logistics process.

A cold chain monitoring solution helps the food manufacturers efficiently manage the storage, shipment, and distribution of products requiring a temperature-controlled environment. Incomplete cooling chains caused by mechanical breakdowns, traffic delays, and other factors create changing temperatures that can affect perishable foods' spoilage and safety. Also, a lack of real-time visibility of goods locations can contribute to inefficient operational processes.

Hence, the adoption of cold chain monitoring ensures stable temperatures for the transport and storage of goods. Technologies like Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons with temperature sensors enable tracking goods locations at relevant checkpoints and tracing temperature data continuously and seamlessly, during shipment, or throughout the supply chain.?

Multiple food logistics companies are engaging in expansion activities. For instance, in September 2020 , third-party food logistics company FreezPak Logistics has announced its plans to build a 140,000 square-foot facility in the United States equipped with an automated storage and retrieval system. The location to be outfitted with 12 robots that can automatically retrieve and store goods.

Competitive Landscape



The smart food logistics market is moderately fragmented. The major players with prominent share in the market are focusing on expanding their customer base across foreign countries. These companies are leveraging on strategic collaborative initiatives to increase their market share and increase their profitability.

Key Topics Covered:



1 INTRODUCTION



2 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY



3 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY



4 MARKET DYNAMICS

4.1 Market Overview

4.2 Industry Value Chain Analysis

4.3 Industry Attractiveness - Porter's Five Force Analysis

4.4 Market Drivers

4.4.1 Increasing Need for Efficient Monitoring and Tracking for Better Control of Assets

4.5 Market Restraints

4.5.1 Installation Complexities?



5 IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON THE LOGISTICS INDUSTRY IN THE FOOD AND BEVERAGE SECTOR



6 MARKET SEGMENTATION

6.1 Component

6.1.1 Hardware (Sensors, Telematics, Networking Devices, etc.)

6.1.2 Software and Services

6.2 Technology

6.2.1 Fleet Management

6.2.2 Asset Tracking

6.2.3 Cold Chain Monitoring

6.3 Geography

6.3.1 North America

6.3.2 Europe

6.3.3 Asia Pacific

6.3.4 Latin America

6.3.5 Middle East and Africa



7 COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE

7.1 Company Profiles

7.1.1 Orbcomm

7.1.2 Sensitech (Carrier Global Corporation)

7.1.3 Berlinger & Co. AG

7.1.4 Geotab Inc.

7.1.5 Kii Corporation

7.1.6 Verizon Connect

7.1.7 Teletrac Navman

7.1.8 Monnit Corporation

7.1.9 Controlant

7.1.10 Samsara Networks, Inc.

7.1.11 Seaos

7.1.12 Nippon Express co. ltd.

7.1.13 YUSEN LOGISTICS CO.,LTD.

7.1.14 Hacobu Co., Ltd. (MOVO)

7.1.15 Kouei system ltd.

7.1.16 LYNA LOGICS, Inc.



8 INVESTMENT ANALYSIS



9 MARKET OPPORTUNITIES AND FUTURE TRENDS?



For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/bny307

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

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SAN RAMON, Calif., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Accela , the leading provider of cloud-based solutions for government, is furthering its mission to provide digital government services with the appointment of Dennis W. Alpert as its new head of government affairs. A well-respected government and political strategist, Alpert boasts private sector and public service experience at the highest levels. He previously led government relations efforts for major global companies such as Walmart and Pfizer, and served as a senior advisor in the White House.

"Dennis brings extensive government and technology experience and a passion for empowering agencies to better serve residents' needs, and we're thrilled to welcome him to our team," said Accela Chief Revenue Officer Dennis Michalis. "Dennis' expertise in strategic relationship building is a vitally important asset to Accela as we continue to invest and push deeper into advanced collaboration with some of the most sophisticated governmental agencies in North America to drive technology modernization."

Alpert's appointment bolsters Accela's focus on helping agencies easily deliver core services while also responding to the biggest challenges facing our communities. The Accela Civic Platform provides agencies with the flexibility and scalability to enable innovation over time  without the need to constantly invest in new technology. Additionally, Accela's suite of out-of-the-box SaaS Civic Applications are designed to help agencies provide "consumer-like" experiences for residents, shorten time to value, and are pre-built with valuable best practices.

"I'm excited to support Accela's work to ultimately make it easier for more cities, states and counties to deliver critical services to their constituents," said Accela Head of Government Affairs Dennis Alpert. "It's an increasingly important time to modernize interactions between residents and their governments, and empower governments with the tools they need to build thriving, safe communities. I look forward to assisting Accela build new and deeper partnerships with agencies as they turn to the cloud to transform their ability to grow and better serve residents."

Accela's secure and flexible SaaS solutions give governments the technology resources that are needed to quickly respond to evolving community needs, increase efficiency, and maintain resilience to benefit 275 million citizens globally, in 80 percent of the United States' largest cities.

Today's announcement is another example of Accela's commitment to deliver cloud software that empowers government agencies to build thriving communities. To learn more about Accela's solutions, please visit https://www.accela.com/solutions/ .

About Accela

Accela provides market-leading cloud solutions that empower the most innovative state and local governments around the world to build thriving communities, grow businesses and protect citizens. More than 275 million citizens globally benefit from Accela's solutions, which are powered by Azure, for permitting, licensing, code enforcement, and service request management. Accela's fast-to-implement Civic Applications, built on its robust and extensible Civic Platform, help agencies address specific needs today, while ensuring they are prepared for any emerging or complex challenges in the future. The company was recently recognized as a 2020 Microsoft US Partner Award winner for its innovative SaaS solutions to help governments respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, and was named as one of the Largest East Bay Tech Employers by San Francisco Business Times. Accela is headquartered in San Ramon, California, with additional offices around the world. For more information, visit www.accela.com .

Media Contact: [email protected]

SOURCE Accela

Related Links

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BANGALORE, India, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Application Modernization Services Marke t is Segmented by Type (Cobol, ADA, PL/1, RPG, Assembler, PowerBuilder, Others), by Application (Emulation, Translation, Business Rules Extraction). The report covers global opportunity analysis and industry forecasts from 2021 to 2026. It is published on Valuates Reports in the Software & Services Category.

The global Application Modernization Services market size is projected to reach USD 43350 Million by 2026, from USD 16200 Million in 2019, at a CAGR of 15.1% during the forecast period 2021-2026.

Maintaining legacy programmes can be a time-consuming and resource-intensive task, especially when the software is so old that it is incompatible with newer versions of the operating system (OS) or system hardware. An application modernisation project's purpose is to extract new business value from current software. The goal of an application modernization project is to create new business value from existing applications.

Major factors driving the growth of the application modernization service market are:

Provides organisations with the flexibility and agility to adopt new technologies, even with legacy systems and applications, while also safeguarding previous investments.

The application management services market is expected to see significant growth due to the increased usage of open source technologies and the presence of a large number of legacy applications.

Furthermore, the application modernization service market is growing due to an increase in the use of cloud computing and enterprises attempting to generate value from mobile, cloud, analytics, social computing, and cognitive computing technologies.

Browse the Table of Contents and List of figures at: https://reports.valuates.com/reports/QYRE-Auto-14N771/global-application-modernization-services

TRENDS INFLUENCING THE GROWTH OF GLOBAL APPLICATION MODERNIZATION SERVICES MARKET

The application modernization services market is predicted to expand as the need for cloud services grows due to their scalability and flexibility, as well as the demand for updating older systems and applications, the rise in remote work scenarios, and improved customer experience by applications. With the widespread use of the internet and the scalability given by cloud-native applications, the market for application modernization services appears to be lucrative in the next few years.

The need for improved software functionalities due to changing business landscape is expected to further increase the growth of the application modernization services market. Due to changing client needs, technological improvements, and increased competition, businesses must continuously or periodically improve their business processes. In today's competitive business world, many firms require business agility to survive and grow. This is accomplished through using cutting-edge technologies and developing and providing cutting-edge application technology, resulting in increased demand for application modernization services.

Request a pdf sample at: https://reports.valuates.com/request/sample/QYRE-Auto-14N771/Global_Application_Modernization_Services_Market

APPLICATION MODERNIZATION SERVICES MARKET SHARE ANALYSIS

Based on application, the Emulation segment held the largest application modernization service market share of about 45.43% in 2017. However, the Business rules extraction segment is predicted to witness the highest growth during the forecast period.

Based on type, the Cobol segment held the largest application modernization service market share of about 63.32% in 2017.

Based on region, Asia Pacific is expected to be the most lucrative segment during the forecast period. Enterprises in this region are becoming more competitive as a result of increased internet traffic, cloud usage, and the IT services start-up ecosystem, and are focusing on providing better customer experience services to industries. As a result, global corporations are attracted to the APAC region's untapped potential.

Inquire for Regional Report : https://reports.valuates.com/request/regional/QYRE-Auto-14N771/Global_Application_Modernization_Services_Market

Major Players in the Application Modernization Services Market

Accenture

Atos

Bell Integrator

Capgemini

Cognizant

Fujitsu

HCL

IBM

Macrosoft Inc.

Tech Mahindra

TCS

Wipro

Infosys

DXC

Blu Age

TSRI

Modern Systems

Trinity Millennium

Micro Focus

Software Mining

Semantic Designs

Evolveware

Mapador

Fresche Solutions Inc.

Asysco

Expersolve

Metaware

MOST Technologies

Freesoft

Language Portability Solutions

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SIMILAR REPORTS

- The Europe application modernization services market size was valued at USD 2.14 Billion in 2019 and is projected to reach USD 6.60 Billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 15.1% from 2020 to 2027

- The global managed application services market size was USD 7,311 Million in 2017, and is projected to reach USD 16,441 Million by 2025, growing at a CAGR of 10.8% from 2018 to 2025.

- The global application transformation market size was valued at USD 9,214 Million in 2019, and is projected to reach USD 25,370 Million by 2027, registering a CAGR of 13.2% from 2020 to 2027

- The global Digital Transformation market size is projected to reach USD 886.9 Million by 2026, from USD 377 Million in 2019, at a CAGR of 13.0% during 2021-2026.

- The global API Testing market size is projected to reach USD 1520.5 Million by 2027, from USD 523.7 Million in 2020, at a CAGR of 15.9% during 2021-2027.

- The global Mobile Enterprise Application market size is projected to reach USD 91550 Million by 2027, from USD 50070 Million in 2020, at a CAGR of 8.5% during 2021-2027.

- The global Application Container market size is projected to reach USD 6304.5 Million by 2027, from USD 1228.9 Million in 2020, at a CAGR of 25.8% during 2021-2027.

- The Global Cloud Applications market size is projected to reach USD 365.00 Billion by 2026, from USD 147.12 Billion in 2020, at a CAGR of 16.35% during 2020-2026.

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SOURCE Valuates Reports
The Diver Chronometer features a bi-directional sapphire internal bezel used to count down dive time and ensure safety. Activated by the crown at 2 o'clock, the internal diving bezel can be operated while submerged under water to time the safety stop.

The Engineer Master II Diver Chronometer bezel and dial remain visible even in total darkness, thanks to the cutting-edge Swiss technology of self-powered H gas tubes:

Without any form of charging, H gas tubes shine automatically

For the first time, the tubes are placed underneath the bezel for an uncluttered design

For high visibility, micro gas tubes remain on the dial and hands

Available with either a classic mix of green and yellow tubes or a more modern rainbow-colored combination

To ensure high accuracy in adverse conditions, the movement is safeguarded by powerful resistance technologies including:

Water resistance of 300m /1,000ft

/1,000ft Automatic caliber BALL RR1101-C, certified by the Swiss Official Chronometer Testing Institute (COSC)

Anti-magnetic protection to an intensity of 1,000 Gauss thanks to a mu-metal shield

Patented Amortiser energy absorption system keeps every component intact during harsh impact or external shock

The Engineer Master II Diver Chronometer is a stainless steel 42mm timepiece with a thickness of only 13.5mm, available with a black or a blue dial, and either on a stainless steel bracelet (US$2599.00) or rubber strap (US$2499.00). It features hours, minutes, sweep seconds and a magnified date. To learn more, please visit https://shop.ballwatch.ch/en/emiidivercosc.

About BALL Watch Company

BALL Watch Company is a timekeeping pioneer and celebrated manufacturer of quality, precise and reliable timepieces since 1891. The company was literally founded by accident. Following a tragic 1891 Kipton, Ohio head-on train collision, American railroad companies appointed Webster Clay Ball "Chief Time Inspector" to supervise newly synchronized timing protocols. This standardized "railroad time" efficiency originated the popular "Be on the Ball" proverb and inspired the future Swiss Official Chronometer Testing Institute (COSC) which governs the highest watch timing certification standards today. Connect with us: Facebook , YouTube, and Instagram.

SOURCE BALL Watch Company

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"It's amazing to have Bechtel supporting us, not only financially but with mentoring from their team who deliver complex tunnels all over the world. They have helped us consider how our design could perform in real-life conditions and reinforced that now is a very exciting time to be Boring."

The Warwick team consists of thirty science, technology, engineering, and mathematics students. They began working on the project last autumn and had to pass various stages to be down-selected from 400-entries and named as one of the twelve finalists. The team is the only U.K university who will travel to the final in Nevada later in the year to compete with students and hobbyists from around the world, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Technical University of Munich.

The final will see the team use their prototype named Silk-Worm 1 to drill a 30-metre long and 50-centremetre wide tunnel as quickly and accurately as possible. To make the competition more exciting and stimulate the imagination of the participants, there are three winning categories. The categories include the fastest to complete the tunnel, the fastest to complete the tunnel and a driving surface through which a remote-controlled Tesla will drive, and the most accurate guidance system that keeps the tunnel on target. The team's innovative solution is top secret until competition day when the event is likely to attract worldwide interest.

John Williams, Bechtel's U.K & Ireland Managing Director said:

"There is no better investment than encouraging our next generation of engineers to challenge old ways of thinking and doing. The Warwick Boring Team is smart, innovative and driven. They aspire to make a positive impact on the world. We're excited to see how they have approached this far-from-boring construction activity, and the impact the competition ideas could have on the future delivery of infrastructure projects."

Tunnelling is an important component of infrastructure construction, including for transport, energy, water, and digital, and as cities become more congested and air pollution worsens, building more underground infrastructure can be a good solution. Tunnelling is a complex activity with many variables that must be considered and carefully managed, including geology, water levels, ground settlement, and navigating existing infrastructure.

Every year, Bechtel supports engineering college students with college donations in excess of US$180,000. In addition, the Bechtel Group Foundation gives US$2.45 million annually to pre-college students and the business supports STEM programmes globally through its stewardship programmes, including FIRST Robotics and FIRST LEGO League.

You can support the Warwick Boring Team via their fundraising page: https://www.warwickboring.com/support-here

About Bechtel

Bechtel is a trusted engineering, construction and project management partner to industry and government. Differentiated by the quality of our people and our relentless drive to deliver the most successful outcomes, we align our capabilities to our customers' objectives to create a lasting positive impact. Since 1898, we have helped customers complete more than 25,000 projects in 160 countries on all seven continents that have created jobs, grown economies, improved the resiliency of the world's infrastructure, increased access to energy, resources, and vital services, and made the world a safer, cleaner place.

Bechtel serves the Energy; Infrastructure; Nuclear, Security & Environmental; and Mining & Metals markets. Our services span from initial planning and investment, through start-up and operations. www.bechtel.com

Media contact:



Juliet Whitcombe

C : +44 (0) 7917 722304

[email protected]

SOURCE Bechtel

Related Links

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TOWSON, Md., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- BLACK+DECKER today announced the launch of BLACK+DECKER Health  a new product category within the BLACK+DECKER brand that will be dedicated to providing health and wellness solutions direct-to-consumers. As part of this announcement, the company has introduced goVia, a new product line of emergency response systems (PERS) designed to promote confident mobility for active older Americans.

"For more than 110 years, BLACK+DECKER has been a trusted manufacturer of power tools and products for the home," said Sean O'Brien, Product Director, BLACK+DECKER Health. "Now, as part of BLACK+DECKER Health, goVia will help provide an extra layer of protection at home and on-the-go to create a world in which active older Americans can be more confident, maintain their lifestyle, and age in place."

Each product in the goVia line of personal emergency response systems features 24/7 monitoring with a paid monthly subscription powered by Medical Guardian, a leading provider of innovative, connected care solutions for older adults and caregivers which will connect users to trained emergency operators should they need any assistance.

The full product line includes:

MINI  a discreet, portable, and wearable on-the-go device that includes nationwide cellular coverage on Verizon 4G LTE.

 a discreet, portable, and wearable on-the-go device that includes nationwide cellular coverage on Verizon 4G LTE. Compact, lightweight design that fits perfectly on belts, in bags or around the neck with the included lanyard.



Track the device location using GPS, WiFi and Triangulation.



Battery life of up to 5 days.

MOVE  a lightweight, wearable on-the-go device that includes nationwide cellular coverage on AT&T. The device has optional wearable help buttons that, when pressed from up to 300 feet of the base station device, will connect users to operators.

 a lightweight, wearable on-the-go device that includes nationwide cellular coverage on AT&T. The device has optional wearable help buttons that, when pressed from up to 300 feet of the base station device, will connect users to operators. While on the go, the water-resistant device can be worn on a belt or tucked into a purse or pocket.



While at home, the device can remain on the charging station and the optional wearable help button can be worn as a neck pendant or wristband. Wearable buttons will not connect to operators if outside the 300 ft. range from the device.



Track the device location using GPS and AT&T cellular service.



Up to 24-hour battery life with a single charge.

HOME Classic  a personal emergency response device for both in and around your home.

 a personal emergency response device for both in and around your home. Wear the emergency button as a neck pendant, wristband or simply utilize the base station device.



The waterproof, wearable help buttons have a coverage range of up to 1,300 feet from the base station device. Wearable buttons will not connect to operators if outside the 1,300 ft. range from the base station.



Connects to a landline for an added layer of protection at home.



Features a backup battery of up to 32 hours in the event of unexpected power outages.

HOME Wireless  a personal emergency response device for both in and around your home with no landline required.

 a personal emergency response device for both in and around your home with no landline required. Wear emergency button as a neck pendant, wristband or simply utilize the base station.



The waterproof, wearable help buttons have a coverage range of up to 600 feet from the base station device. Wearable buttons will not connect to operators if outside the 600 ft. range from the base station device.



Features a backup battery of up to 30 hours in the event of unexpected power outages.



Operates on included nationwide AT&T cellular network; no landline required.

HOME Fall Detection  an auto-fall detection device that can automatically detect a change in motion brought about by a fall, monitor for the impact associated with a landing, and automatically connect to emergency operators without the need for a landline.

 an auto-fall detection device that can automatically detect a change in motion brought about by a fall, monitor for the impact associated with a landing, and automatically connect to emergency operators without the need for a landline. Wear as a neck pendant, wristband or simply utilize the base station.



The waterproof, wearable help buttons have a coverage range of up to 600 feet from the base station device. Wearable buttons will not connect to operators if outside the 600 ft. range from the base station device.



Features a backup battery of up to 30 hours in the event of unexpected power outages.



Operates on included nationwide AT&T cellular network; no landline required.

The goVia line is available now. For more information on goVia and other BLACK+DECKER Health products, visit www.blackanddeckerhealth.com.

About BLACK+DECKER Health

BLACK+DECKER Health, a category within BLACK+DECKER, offers health and wellness solutions direct-to-consumers. Each product is designed to create an extra layer of protection at home, provide confidence and assurance, and empower through awareness. By living in the know, we create brighter relationships that steadily link us together and allow everyone to live life to the fullest. For more information about BLACK+DECKER Health, visit www.blackanddeckerhealth.com or follow BLACK+DECKER Health on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

About Medical Guardian

Founded in 2005, Medical Guardian is a leading provider of innovative medical alert systems that empower people to live a life without limits. Medical Guardian is headquartered in Philadelphia and provides services to over 175,000 active people across the country who are ready to take on the next chapter of life while remaining safe living in their own home. Medical Guardian has the personal medical alert device to meet an array of needs and lifestyles, such as an in-home system, several mobile devices with GPS/Wi-Fi capabilities, or an all-in-one wearable medical alert smartwatch. Learn more about Medical Guardian by visiting www.medicalguardian.com.

About Stanley Black & Decker

Stanley Black & Decker, an S&P 500 company, is a leading $14.5 billion global diversified industrial with 53,000 employees in more than 60 countries who make the tools, products and solutions to deliver on its Purpose, For Those Who Make The World. The Company operates the world's largest tools and storage business featuring iconic brands such as DEWALT, STANLEY, BLACK+DECKER and CRAFTSMAN; the world's second largest commercial electronic security company; and is a global industrial leader of highly engineered solutions within its engineered fastening and infrastructure businesses. Learn more at www.stanleyblackanddecker.com.

Media Contact:

Stacy Clougherty for BLACK+DECKER Health

508-971-7594

[email protected]

SOURCE Stanley Black & Decker

Related Links

http://www.blackanddeckerhealth.com


ROCHESTER, N.Y., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Brighton Securities, an employee owned wealth management firm, today announced that it has acquired Worth Considering, Inc. ("Worth Considering"), a Registered Investment Advisor ("RIA") which provides services to individual clients through a model-based portfolio management strategy. Upon closing of the transaction, Brighton Securities will create Brighton Securities Capital Management Inc ("BSCM"), a new RIA providing investment advisory and portfolio management services to financial advisors and individual clients.

Jai Ramachandran, Chief Executive Officer of Brighton Securities, said, "We are excited to welcome the Worth Considering clients and team to Brighton Securities. David Peartree, J.D., CFP and his team at Worth Considering have built a strong platform which we'll augment with our best-in-class client services, as well as additional talent. Worth Considering's approach to exceptional service and customized asset mixes is complementary to our team's focus on serving the needs of our clients. We look forward to working with the talented team from Worth Considering accelerating our combined growth."

Mr. Ramachandran continued, "Over the past several years we have tripled in size, and we will need to continue to find new and interesting ways to sustain that growth rate as we strive to double again by 2025."

Launched in 2011 by Founder David Peartree, Worth Considering is a fee-only investment advisory firm based in Rochester, NY. Worth Considering advises clients across the spectrum of the investing lifecycle, with a focus on wealth consolidation during the transition to retirement, and sustainable distributions throughout retirement. Worth Considering's investment approach is built around the use of index based mutual funds and exchange traded funds that are designed to capture market returns efficiently.

Upon closing of the transaction, the entire Worth Considering team will join BSCM, building upon Brighton Securities' long-term approach of building scale not just through organic growth but also through acquisition.

"Brighton Securities provides a wealth management platform that is rich in talent and resources," said David Peartree. "We are pleased to be combining with a local employee-owned firm that continually strives to innovate and improve the investment experience of its clients."

Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The transaction is expected to close July 6, 2021.

About Brighton Securities

Brighton Securities Corp., an employee-owned financial services firm, is headquartered in Rochester, NY with branch offices throughout Upstate NY, Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, and New Mexico. We understand that our advisors are the core of our business, so we focus on enabling our advisors to focus on what is important: their clients. As part of that mission, our dedicated marketing team works with each of our advisors to craft a personalized marketing campaign to strategically target their specific pool of prospects. Brighton Securities was named to the 2020 Rochester Chamber of Commerce's Top 100 Companies. Brighton Securities has been named a Top Workplace by the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle since 2014.

Brighton Securities

Christina Gregory, Marketing Coordinator

Phone: (585) 340-2204

Email: [email protected]

www.brightonsecurities.com

SOURCE Brighton Securities

Related Links

http://www.brightonsecurities.com


VENTURA, Calif., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The nonprofit, nonpartisan group, Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS), is calling for Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to resign. According to its mission statement, it is the duty of DHS "to secure and maintain our borders, prevent and intercept foreign threats [and] enforce immigration laws throughout the United States."

Californians for Population Stabilization Executive Director Ric Oberlink said:

"Mayorkas has failed miserably in his job. This unprecedented border surge has been caused by the Biden administration's clear signals that U.S. immigration laws will be ignored. The result has been a trashing of sensitive border lands, a diminution in national security, an increased risk to our health during this pandemic, and increased job competition for legal American workers."

In May, authorities stopped more than 180,000 illegal immigrants at the Mexico border according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, nearly eight times the total during May 2020 and the highest monthly total in over 21 years.

Despite the surge in illegal immigration, monthly figures for deportations in April fell to the lowest on record, just 2,962. This suggests that the Biden administration is ignoring the order of a federal court that barred its plan to cease deportations.

The abysmal performance of Mayorkas has been roundly criticized, not just by former high-ranking DHS officials, but also by Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar, who represents a Texas border district, and by the Presidents of Guatemala and Mexico. Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei, blamed the border crisis on the administration's messaging of non-enforcement, "The very next day, the coyotes were here organizing groups of children to take them to the United States."

"The DHS policies of Mayorkas have created tragedies on both sides of the border," Oberlink said. "He is providing incentives for cartels, coyotes, and drug traffickers. Multiple deaths of would-be migrants in SUV crashes, toddlers dropped from a 14-foot border wall, children abandoned in the desertthese are the result of open-border policies. Nobody knows how many migrants are killed or how many women are raped on the other side of the border. It is time for Mayorkas to resign or be replaced."

SOURCE Californians for Population Stabilization

Related Links

http://www.capsweb.org


SACRAMENTO, Calif., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- CarivaCare (https://carivacare.com/) (pronounced Ka-reevaCare) announced that Stephanie Lee would be stepping into the role of Vice President of Business Development effective immediately. She will be responsible for leading the company's sales vision, developing sales strategies and initiatives to elevate market visibility, and promoting brand awareness within the Workers' Compensation industry. CarivaCare specializes in helping clients and injured employees bring clarity to an often-confusing process in reporting work-related incidents and determining the best course of action in obtaining medical treatment, featuring a dedicated 24/7 incident reporting and nurse triage hotline.

"We're very excited and happy to have Stephanie as a part of CarivaCare's senior leadership," said Cheryl Cabrera, Sr. Vice President of Operations. "She is an absolute professional and has spent close to 20 years carving her place, while scaling varying facets of the Workers' Compensation industry." With humble beginnings answering a newspaper ad as a surveillance investigator, this is a dream come true for Stephanie who developed an innate ability to detect deception along with the courage to chase the truth no matter where it led. Stephanie entered the historically male-dominated arena of insurance investigations with no formal education, learning and perfecting her skills as she went. Relying solely on work ethic and authenticity in the beginning, she has finally found her seat at the executive table  a place she has more than earned. Prior to joining CarivaCare, Stephanie worked for service providers that included translation and transportation services, settlement solutions, and litigation. "We are very lucky to have her in this new capacity."

CarivaCare is a trailblazer in the industry, offering a Rapid Response Client Service approach, along with injury-photo inclusion when available and a unique pricing model that renders the service available to all sizes of employers  with no monthly minimums and no "use it or lose it" buckets. Whether an employer has 5 or 500,000 employees, our nurse triage services can help reduce workers' compensation claims and guide employees in the right direction. CarivaCare also provides First Notice of Loss services in the Workers' Compensation, Auto Liability, and General Liability sectors.

Learn more about CarivaCare and its services by viewing their explainer video. Or follow them on social media: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. You can reach Stephanie Lee by visiting her LinkedIn page at www.linkedin.com/in/stephaniekmlee/

About CarivaCare

The CarivaCare program was initially developed at the request from a large national customer in 2009 but has evolved and grown out of a passion for providing a much-needed service to employers and employees. We stand behind our program - service and outcomes are of the utmost importance. Client satisfaction is key, which is why our program is completely customizable. CarivaCare's services support public and private employers, third party administrators, insurance carriers, insurance brokers, PEO's and HR consulting firms. White label and co-branded programs are available. Learn more at: www.CarivaCare.com.

Media Contact:

CarivaCare, Inc. Marketing Department

1-800-274-1102 x1001

[email protected]

SOURCE CarivaCare, Inc.
MIDLAND, Mich., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- CASE SYSTEMS and BOSTONtec announce the formation of the COMMUNITY GIVING COMMITTEE, which supplants and expands its existing employee community service groupTEAM CASE.

Case Systems & BOSTONtec Community Giving Committee

Since its inception almost two decades ago, TEAM CASE has worked to support the fight against cancer through awareness and community goodwill. Shari Frankland, Team Case Organizer comments: "Over the years, this concerted effort has amounted to over $240K in donations garnered, countless volunteer hours worked, and recognition as a Top Supporter to Midland's local RELAY FOR LIFE chapter." Amy Tomchick, Team Case Organizer, adds, "We are so grateful for the extraordinary outpouring we've seen from the community, company partners & ownership, employees, and family & friends along the way. We've built up a tradition of giving and engagement, and we want to keep it going; make it biggerbetter."

With the formation of the new COMMUNITY GIVING COMMITTEE, the group strives to identify and meet a wider array of funding and volunteer needs within the Great Lakes Bay Region. "While we know cancer research and prevention to be indispensable, we also recognize the opportunity for doing the greatest good for those around us lies beyond supporting a single cause. In expanding our focus to include a broader selection of local charities, we hope to maximize our potential for positively impacting our local community," explains Jeff Clark, CASE SYSTEMS and BOSTONtec Human Resources Director, and committee Chairperson.

As engagement is a primary goal, there is an open invitation to the community to interact with the group. An application on the company website is available for those organizations interested in being considered for a donation.

About CASE SYSTEMS

CASE SYSTEMS is a leading designer and manufacturer of durable, versatile, laminate casework systems for the healthcare, education and laboratory markets. CASE SYSTEMS purchased BOSTONtec, a former supplier, to produce high quality, steel furniture for industrial and technical environments. All CASE SYSTEMS and BOSTONtec products are designed and fabricated in Midland, Michigan, and sold throughout North America.

For more information, please contact:

Drysdale, Kristine, Marketing Coordinator

989.496.0442

[email protected]

SOURCE Case Systems
The Opening Reception will also underscore the central role of solar in addressing climate change and advancing sustainable living worldwide. We encourage the clean energy community to join us and celebrate in person or virtually for SOLAR 2021: Empowering a Sustainable Future, register online and use promo code POWER21 for 10% off your entire registration by August 1.

James Rattling Leaf Sr., the Coordinator of Climate Partnerships for the Great Plains Tribal Water Alliance, will open the reception with a special blessing honoring the fact that SOLAR 2021 is being convened on the Arapahoe, Cheyenne, and Ute tribal lands. James has been a longtime force for tribal engagement in renewable energy development and will highlight the work of the North Central Climate Adaptations Science Center and the Tribal Leaders Program.

Peter Green, Deputy Laboratory Director at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), will discuss his vision for the energy system of the future. After highlighting NREL's contributions to solar research over the past 45 years, he will share NREL's plans for solar and sustainable renewable energy in the coming decades.

Dale Miller, University of Colorado Boulder's Senior Instructor in the Environmental Studies Program and SOLAR 2021 Conference Chair, will focus on the conference theme of equity in renewables. Dale notes that "through the exchanges at SOLAR 2021 some new positive change will result to help us reach our goals of 100% renewable energy, social and racial justice, and equality."

Carly Rixham, ASES Executive Director, will provide a synopsis on the history of ASES as the U.S. Section of the International Solar Energy Society (ISES). Carly also will acknowledge the 25th anniversary of the Colorado Renewable Energy Society (CRES), ASES's Colorado Chapter. Many of the local, national and international Solar Pioneers who have contributed to the solar movement will be invited to come together in person and online to commemorate the occasion.

More information about the history of ASES/ISES and the many Solar Pioneers are provided in the recently released ISES Virtual Living Museum and SWC50 Booklet commemorating 50 years of ASES and ISES conferences. The Museum and Booklet provide history as well as visions for the future.

For more information and to register for SOLAR 2021, visit ases.org/conference . Sponsorship opportunities are still available.

SOURCE American Solar Energy Society

Related Links

http://www.ases.org


PHOENIX, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Centuri Group, Inc. ("Centuri"), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Southwest Gas Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: SWX), today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Riggs Distler & Company, Inc. and its affiliates ("Riggs Distler"). Founded in 1909, and based in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, Riggs Distler has extensive relationships and long-term Master Service Agreements (MSA) with nearly all of the major investor-owned electric utilities in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions and provides unionized installation and repair services to its utility customers.

The addition of Riggs Distler provides Centuri a strong union electric platform and allows the Company to provide new service offerings to combination utility customers. The acquisition expands Centuri's geographic reach and union electric platform with virtually no overlap in existing customer base.

Paul M. Daily, President and Chief Executive Officer of Centuri, said, "Riggs Distler is an exceptional company with a seasoned, energetic leadership team and substantial growth opportunities in electric services, renewable energy, and 5G telecom. This is a transformational transaction for Centuri that adds a unionized electric services platform to our current utility infrastructure portfolio, significantly advancing our goal to encompass our customer's growing needs by providing 360 degrees of service."

In addition to its turnkey solutions for utility providers, Riggs Distler is the only provider in the region with a full suite of civil, mechanical, electrical and fabrication capabilities. Their addition to the Centuri enterprise brings additional opportunities in 5G telecom and renewable power generation, further advancing both companies' commitments to support clean energy delivery and reduce carbon emissions. As a long-standing member of the communities in which it operates, Riggs Distler's established community engagement programs align with Centuri's guiding principles and commitment to giving back.

"Riggs Distler has established itself as the region's premier utility services contractor for more than 100 years. We are excited about the path ahead for the combined organization, which leads to an even brighter future with more career opportunities for our combined employee strength of over 10,500," said Daily.

Stephen Zemaitatis Jr., President and Chief Executive Officer of Riggs Distler, said, "We are proud to join Centuri, a company that shares our century old core values of commitment to safety, operational excellence, and delivering high-quality, competitive, and essential services to customers. United, we will benefit from greater financial strength, growth, and diversification. We look forward to deepening our customer relationships and creating meaningful opportunities for our employees as part of the Centuri family."

Under the terms of the transaction, Centuri will acquire a 100% ownership interest in Riggs Distler for $855 million in cash subject to customary adjustments, including working capital. The all-cash purchase is expected to be fully funded by new Centuri debt. The transaction is expected to close in Q3 2021, after which Riggs Distler will operate as a standalone subsidiary of Centuri within the company's Power Group. Mr. Zemaitatis and the current Riggs Distler senior leadership team will continue to lead the company.

UBS Investment Bank served as the exclusive financial advisor to Centuri, while the firm of Foley & Lardner, LLP served as legal advisors to Centuri on the transaction. Morrison & Foerster LLP served as legal advisor to Southwest Gas Holdings. Harris Williams & Co. served as financial advisor to Riggs Distler and Kirkland & Ellis LLP as legal counsel.

Wells Fargo has provided a debt financing commitment for new senior secured credit facilities to fund the full purchase price and refinance existing indebtedness.

About Centuri Group, Inc.

Centuri is a comprehensive utility infrastructure services enterprise dedicated to delivering a diverse array of solutions to North America's gas and electric providers. Through sound investment, shared services, and an unwavering commitment to the safety of our employees and the communities we serve, Centuri supports the performance of its operating companies across the U.S. and Canada.

https://nextcenturi.com/

About Riggs Distler & Co., Inc.

Founded in 1909, Riggs Distler self-performs turnkey union construction solutions in the utility, telecom, and industrial markets in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions.

https://riggsdistler.com/

SOURCE Centuri Group, Inc.

Related Links

https://nextcenturi.com/


TAOS SKI VALLEY, N.M., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Cid's Food Market, the popular purveyor of local, organic and prepared foods, will expand into The Blake Residences, a part of Taos Ski Valley's ongoing revitalization. Cid's is one of five locally owned retail, dining, and lifestyle businesses moving into the new space. Several of the businesses have just opened, with more openings slated for summer 2021.

Cid's Food Market has been a staple of the Northern New Mexico community since 1986. Under their new brand, Cid's Mountain Market, Cid's will be providing both residents and resort guests a curated selection of quality grocery items, prepared foods, wine, and beer.

"Expanding to Taos Ski Valley is an exciting opportunity to grow our business locally and fill an important role in the growth of our community" said Lee Backer, C.E.O. of Cid's Food Market. "We are looking forward to this new project and appreciate Taos Ski Valley's support of local businesses."

In addition to Cid's, four additional locally owned and operated businesses are part of The Blake Residences' new commercial spaces:

Cold Smoke Photography : In its fourth decade at Taos Ski Valley , Cold Smoke provides action shots, group photos, and family portraits on the mountain and in the base area daily. Cold Smoke's relocation into The Blake Residences will give it a new space for guests to view and select photos.

In its fourth decade at , Cold Smoke provides action shots, group photos, and family portraits on the mountain and in the base area daily. Cold Smoke's relocation into The Blake Residences will give it a new space for guests to view and select photos. Squeezed Juice Bars & Nitro Fog Creamery : Local duo Squeezed Juice Bars & Nitro Fog Creamery team up to offer fare from nourishing to decadent. Choices will vary from nutrient-dense organic juices, smoothies, and acai bowls to small-batch gourmet ice creams and sorbets.

: Local duo Squeezed Juice Bars & Nitro Fog Creamery team up to offer fare from nourishing to decadent. Choices will vary from nutrient-dense organic juices, smoothies, and acai bowls to small-batch gourmet ice creams and sorbets. Le Ski Mastery: Since 1990, this family-owned ski shop welcomes guests to their quaint shop that offers outstanding service and state-of-the-art equipment. The shop is relocating from another ski valley location into The Blake Residences, giving residents and visitors access to rentals, retail, and demo equipment right in the heart of the base area plaza.

Since 1990, this family-owned ski shop welcomes guests to their quaint shop that offers outstanding service and state-of-the-art equipment. The shop is relocating from another ski valley location into The Blake Residences, giving residents and visitors access to rentals, retail, and demo equipment right in the heart of the base area plaza. Mesa's Edge: A gallery and retailer of authentic, beautiful, high-quality Southwestern and Native American art, which has been serving Northern New Mexico for more than 30 years. This will be the second Mesa's Edge location, complementing its first store in the Town of Taos .

"Taos Ski Valley's renaissance has delivered modern and thoughtful upgrades while retaining the area's character and soul, and businesses like Cid's and others reflect that ethos because they are locally owned, original, and will be integrated into the community," said David Norden, CEO of Taos Ski Valley. "Taos Ski Valley is one of the world's most renowned mountain communities in part because of the unique and independent spirit, which Cid's and others represent."

About Taos Ski Valley

Nestled among the pristine peaks of northern New Mexico, Taos Ski Valley is undergoing a $300 million renaissance making it one of North America's premier vacation and adventure destinations. With over more than 300 inches of average annual snowfall, 300 days of sunshine and more than 1,200 skiable acres, Taos Ski Valley is the industry's only B Corp Certified ski resort, which means it operates with the highest standards of environmental sustainability, and social and economic justice. An independently owned and operated resort, Taos maintains an authentic charm while delivering a world-class experience both on-mountain and off for skiers and riders of all abilities. Taos Ski Valley is proud to participate in the Mountain Collective and Ikon Pass. To learn more about Taos Ski Valley and its B Corp commitment, please visit www.skitaos.com.

SOURCE Taos Ski Valley
RADNOR, Pa., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The law firm of Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP reminds Danimer Scientific, Inc. (NYSE: DNMR) ("Danimer") f/k/a Live Oak Acquisition Corp. (NYSE: LOAK) ("Live Oak") investors securities fraud class action lawsuits filed 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


CHARLOTTE, N.C., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- CORA Health Services, Inc., doing business as CORA Physical Therapy, a top-10 national operator of outpatient physical therapy services, is excited to announce its new Orthopaedic Residency Program. The company is currently accepting applications from graduates of CAPTE-accredited PT programs for its first cohort, to begin in September 2021.

The application process marks phase two of a two-year vetting process to become fully accredited by the American Board of Physical Therapy Residency and Fellowship Education (ABPTRFE). The first step was successful completion of ABPTRFE's rigorous Application for Candidacy, consisting of both a written report and peer review of the program.

"We are delighted that our long-held dream of offering our own residency program is becoming a reality," said Kessem Winger, EVP, Chief Compliance Officer, Chief Clinical Officer & Privacy Officer at CORA Physical Therapy. "The residency program demonstrates CORA's wholehearted commitment to clinical excellence and furthering professionalism within our industry." While many academic institutions and hospital systems offer residency programs, CORA will be one of only 30 private outpatient physical therapy organizations making in-house residency available to new clinicians.

According to Jessica Heath-Byerly, CORA Director of Clinical Education and Orthopaedic Residency Program Director, a key advantage of CORA's program is that participants can go through the manual certification process at the same time they are completing residency. "We've worked hard to ensure that our residency program offers maximum value to participants as it demonstrates CORA's treatment model. It's a real reflection of our company culture and values to treat everyone rightemployees and patients."

The 13-month residency program incorporates clinical practice hours, one-on-one mentoring with board-certified specialists, a live and self-study didactic curriculum, and a research design component. On successful completion of the program's stringent requirements, participants are prepared to sit for the ABPTS Board Certification Examination in Orthopaedics.

CORA has long been committed to student education and professional development, with in-house clinical programs, mentoring and clinical rotation opportunities for students in partnerships with 50+ schools. Robb Seahorn, PT, CSCS, Director of Academic Partnerships at CORA said, "Our new Orthopaedic Residency Program will be a huge benefit to PT students. It's something they're looking for as they graduate, and having a program in-house at CORA puts their continuing education within easy reach." Seahorn said CORA is projected to have nearly 900 professional students in CORA clinics this year.

For more information on how to apply for residency, visit coraphysicaltherapy.com/residency-programs/ or email [email protected].

About CORA

CORA Physical Therapy is an outpatient rehabilitation company that uses proven clinical practices and cost-effective treatment protocols to return patients to their jobs and lifestyles as soon as possible. The company operates more than 225 clinics in Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, including specialty clinics under the Body Gears brand.

Media Contact

Laura Tobin, Strategic Marketing Director

567.825.3276 | [email protected]

Jessica Heath-Byerly, Director of Clinical Education

717.580.9151 | [email protected]

Related Images

cora-physical-therapy.jpg

CORA Physical Therapy

SOURCE CORA Health Services, Inc.
The event will feature a panel of distinguished international experts, including German Frassa - f.Head of Digital Product and Audience Development at Unidad Editorial - and Seraphina Davey and Omri Ariav - Director Publisher Account Management EMEA and Product Manager at Taboola, respectively. Tina Ferentinou , CCO at top media group DPG Digital Media in Greece, Maximilian Melles , CEO of popular Hungarian property Promotions.hu and more Project Agora publisher partners will be bringing in the local publisher perspective. Constantine Kamaras , Project Lead of the Online Publishers Association (OPA) Europe is joining as event moderator.

Attendees will hear how Content Discovery can help them adapt to Core Web Vitals, ensuring they maximize organic recirculation, user engagement and advertising revenue  all whilst protecting and enhancing their content brand's standing.

"This is a challenging time for publishers, as search rankings play an enormous role in organic website traffic," says Marilena Manatou, Customer Success Director at Project Agora. "We hope that by bringing together this panel of distinguished experts with a variety of perspectives, we can help publishers navigate the challenge and actually improve their brand and monetization strategies".

As with Project Agora's other recent events, "Core Vitals of Content Discovery" will be held entirely online. This enables publishers from all over the region to attend, helping to further establish Project Agora as a thought leader in their field.

The event is to take place on July 7th, 11AM (UTC +3).

Save your seat now.

SOURCE Project Agora
TORONTO & NEW YORK, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Crosslake Fibre, a leading provider of network services, announces today its latest connectivity on-ramp locations in New York at 60 Hudson Street and 111 8th Avenue. 60 Hudson and 111 8th are two of New York's major data centres and are critical interconnect locations for cloud service providers and network service providers. By establishing two new Points of Presence (PoPs) in these data centres, Crosslake has extended its Network Platform enabling customers to connect into its high-capacity routes from New York to major US cities and cross-border into Canada for connectivity to Toronto and Montreal.

"The additional PoPs in New York present a tremendous opportunity for Crosslake Fibre as we continue to grow our network reach and bring carrier-grade services to national and international organisations," states Crosslake Fibre CEO, Mike Cunningham. "Crosslake already operates the lowest latency, high-capacity network between the Toronto and the New Jersey Liquidity Triangle utilizing our unique subsea cable across Lake Ontario. We are now uniquely positioned to extend that low-latency and diverse connectivity into New York."

Crosslake's extended network in New York is designed and deployed utilizing a diverse metro fibre ring and offers direct interconnects with all major carriers and cloud hyperscalers. With low-latency, high-capacity, and diverse connections, it can deliver critical data services at speeds of up to 100 Gbps between key data centres in major North American markets.

Learn more about the unique 90-day trial being offered at these PoPs or request a KMZ route map today.

About Crosslake Fibre

Crosslake Fibre is an International Network Service Provider (NSP) and developer of fibre-optic projects throughout North America and Europe. Crosslake's innovative approach to operating and developing next-generation networks provides a range of capacity services on new backbone routes for financial services, telecommunications carriers and web-centric customers. For additional information, visit www.crosslakefibre.ca.

Contact:

Crosslake Fibre

Mike Cunningham

[email protected]

+1 416 613 6200

For Media inquiries, please contact:

Jaymie Scotto & Associates (JSA)

1 866-695-3629 ext. 13

[email protected]

SOURCE Crosslake Fibre

Related Links

https://crosslakefibre.ca/


DALLAS, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Crown Aesthetics, a division of Crown Laboratories, is thrilled to announce that Dr. Jeffrey Rapaport, Medical Director and Founder of Cosmetic Skin & Surgery Center, will be partnering with Crown Laboratories' Medical Affairs team to help support our customers' practices with medical education, clinical support and KOL development. This partnership will support the development of a suite of medical education events focusing on the significant benefits offered by both ProGen PRP Advantage and SkinPen Precision1. These events will also focus on presenting scientifically validated data on Crown Aesthetics devices as well as driving awareness of key factors to consider when purchasing a Platelet Rich Plasma system or microneedling device.

Dr. Rapaport has been a practicing dermatologist since 1981 and is certified by the American Board of Dermatology. Providing treatment to 4,800 patients per year, each patient has benefited from his talent, experience, dedication, and high standards of excellence, particularly in Aesthetic PRP and hair restoration for which he is widely recognized as one of the leading experts in North America. A Fellow of the American Society for Dermatologic Surgery, Dr. Rapaport has consistently been a leader in Aesthetic Surgery.

"I offer my patients only the highest quality, safest, and best treatment options," said Dr. Rapaport. "Crown's products, like ProGen PRP and SkinPen, are no exception. Their quality and attention to safety far surpass other devices on the market and ProGen's effectiveness at delivering platelets is second to none. This partnership is perfect for my practice and my patients. In fact, I am partnering with Crown Aesthetics to help other physicians interested in PRP achieve the same great results that I am seeing with my ProGen patients."

"Dr. Rapaport is a leader in the field of Aesthetic Dermatology and PRP and we are honored to partner with him to support our partners globally," said Joe Proctor, President of Crown Aesthetics. "We created a higher safety standard within the microneedling space and have followed suit with PRP by enacting strict protocols with ProGen, including moving all of our PRP manufacturing to the United States. To have one of the top PRP specialists in the country excited to work with ProGen PRP is extremely validating."

1 ProGen PRP Advantage is a US FDA 510k cleared Platelet Rich Plasma system indicated for the rapid preparation of autologous Platelet Rich Plasma from a small sample of blood at the patient's point of care. Made in the USA, ProGen Advantage is an easy to use, single spin system that features 15ml and 30ml tubes, yielding 7-15ml of PRP. With ProGen Advantage, physicians are now able to deliver Platelet Rich Plasma procedures more efficiently and conveniently. ProGen Advantage is manufactured in an ISO13485 certified manufacturing facility in Irvine, CA and sterilized by STERIS Applied Sterilization. Crown Aesthetics is proud to have the most comprehensive platelet rich plasma offering in the aesthetic space, all made in the USA.

SkinPen Precision is the first-to-market and US FDA-cleared microneedling device clinically proven to improve the appearance of wrinkles of the neck for Fitzpatrick skin types II - IV and to improve the appearance of facial acne scars in adults with all Fitzpatrick skin types aged 22 years and older. SkinPen has passed more than 90 validated tests to set the standard in microneedling. Ergonomically designed based on professional feedback, SkinPen's ultrasonically sealed hand piece reduces the risk of fluid transfer from the patient to the pen. SkinPen's superior cartridge was designed to inhibit the entrance of fluids into the device which, along with the BioSheath and routine cleaning, help to prevent potential cross-contamination. The patented cartridge features proprietary technology that includes 14 stainless steel needles that have been validated to stay sharp for a least 80 minutes. With patient safety top-of-mind, the single-use lockout feature eliminates the possibility of double usage and cross-contamination. This safe and versatile treatment can be performed on patients year-round.

If you are a medical aesthetic professional and would like to hear how ProGen Advantage and SkinPen can help your practice grow, please contact 888-372-3982.

About Crown Aesthetics

Crown Aesthetics, the premier medical aesthetics company, is dedicated to helping leading aesthetic practices around the world grow their businesses. We do that by delivering dramatic results in rejuvenation and restoration. Our non-invasive innovations  SkinPen, the first FDA-cleared microneedling device; the post-microneedling protocol Skinfuse; and the platelet-rich plasma (PRP) system ProGen Advantage  act as "gateway" products that draw new consumers to practices. Based in Dallas, Texas, Crown Aesthetics sets industry standards for efficacy, safety, and innovation. As a result, our customers consistently deliver the best aesthetic care in the business. For more information, please visit www.crownaesthetics.com.

About Crown

Crown, a privately held, fully integrated global skin care company is committed to developing and providing a diverse portfolio of aesthetic, beauty, and therapeutic skin care products that improve the quality of life for its customers. An innovative company focused on skin science for life, Crown's unyielding pursuit of delivering therapeutic excellence and enhanced patient outcomes is why it has become a leader in Dermatology and Aesthetics. Crown has been listed on the Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Privately Held Companies List for seven years and has expanded its distribution to over 38 countries. For more information about Crown or its products, visit www.crownlaboratories.com.

SOURCE Crown Laboratories, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.crownlaboratories.com


CHICAGO, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Citizens Utility Board (CUB) on Tuesday announced that it has released a new "Guide to Phone Choices" to help Illinois consumers navigate their options in the telecom market.

Visit CitizensUtilityBoard.org to order a free copy of the 16-page publication, which includes information about selecting cellphone, landline and VoIP service.

The phone landscape has shifted dramatically over the last decade. Traditional landlines have largely been replaced by VoIP, smartphones, bundled offers and Zoom. Tech giants seem as powerful as ever, and as a result, consumers face tough choices and high price tags. A family of four can easily spend more than $200 a month on phone service.

When shopping for phone options, consumers need good information. That's where CUB's Guide to Phone Choices comes in. The booklet also includes helpful sections on whether or not bundling is a good deal, dialing 911, calling internationally and videoconferencing.

"We know that Illinois consumersand even CUB stafferscan get overwhelmed by all the factors to consider when selecting phone service," CUB Executive Director David Kolata said. "This guide gives consumers the tools they need to make the right decisions for their lifestyle and wallet."

CUB is Illinois' leading nonprofit utility watchdog group. Created by the Illinois Legislature, CUB opened its doors in 1984 to represent the interests of residential and small-business utility customers. Since then, CUB has saved consumers more than $20 billion by helping to block rate hikes and secure refunds. For more information, call CUB's Consumer Hotline at 1-800-669-5556 or visit CUB's award-winning website, www.CitizensUtilityBoard.org.

SOURCE Citizens Utility Board

Related Links

http://www.citizensutilityboard.org


SELBYVILLE, Del., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Global Market Insights Inc. has recently added a new report on the cybersecurity market that estimates the market valuation for cybersecurity will cross US$ 400 billion by 2027. The growing demand for security solutions across enterprises to protect financial transactions and highly sensitive information from unauthenticated access and vulnerabilities is contributing to market growth.

The Cybersecurity Market size is set to surpass USD 400 billion by 2027, according to a new research report by Global Market Insights Inc.

Growing technological advancements and internet penetration are driving enterprises to shift to cloud-based business models. Extensive digitization across enterprises is prone to cyber threats and information breaches; thus, established enterprises are investing heavily in cybersecurity solutions. Cybersecurity solutions are assisting enterprises in preventing potential monetary and non-monetary losses including interconnected servers and data storage devices.

Request a sample of this research report @ https://www.gminsights.com/request-sample/detail/3078.

The lack of infrastructure resources and technology expertise may create concerns for some corporations. Large enterprises except a few SMEs have dedicated IT departments with dedicated solutions and equipment for deploying over network infrastructure. The SMEs are facing budget concerns that are affecting the adoption of security solutions. However, continuous development and cost-effective security solutions may drive enterprises to adopt security solutions.

The demand for products for infrastructure protection is expected to grow significantly from 2021 to 2027. The enterprises have adopted BYOD trends to a large extent to provide flexibility to the employees and boost business productivity. The enterprises are adopting endpoint protection to prevent any vulnerabilities and unauthenticated access to enterprise data resources through mobile devices.

As cloud business infrastructure is prone to cyber risks, the cloud security solution helps the company to maintain streamlined network operations by following guidelines. It also manages the overall network security and prevents unauthenticated changes over network. The adoption of cybersecurity solutions across SMEs is expected to grow at nearly 15% CAGR by 2027. The growing cyberattacks over SMEs and increasing monitory losses have resulted in increasing adoption of advanced security solutions. Enterprises have adopted cybersecurity policies for BYOD to reduce the capital expenditure and boost employee productivity.

The demand for cybersecurity products & services is increasing across IT and telecommunication enterprises due to the buoyed demand for protection of personal sensitive data. The enterprises are adopting security solutions to protect servers, data centers, and virtual information systems. This helps them to mitigate cyber risks, detect vulnerabilities at earlier stage, and protect from live attacks.

The cybersecurity market size in Europe is expected to grow at a CAGR of over 10% by 2027. The enterprises operating in the banking sector are adopting advanced cybersecurity solutions. The government authorities and private enterprises are making collaborative efforts to prevent vulnerabilities across the financial landscape. For instance, in May 2021, Belgium's Belfius Bank partnered with OneSpan, a cybersecurity technology provider, to integrated OneSpan Mobile Security Suite (MSS) into Belfius' mobile app to make banking transactions safer. The initiative focuses on providing biometric authentication, mobile application security, risk analysis, and other safety features to prevent frauds.

Targeting the government sector for securing high-value contracts has been a major go-to-market strategy for cybersecurity vendors. For instance, in June 2021, IBM launched the IBM Center for Government Cybersecurity, a collaborative environment focused on helping federal agencies address current and future cybersecurity threats. The center will facilitate events and learnings, drawing on IBM's cybersecurity expertise from delivering software and managed services to over 17,500 security customers globally.

Request a customization of this research report at https://www.gminsights.com/roc/3078.

Some major findings of the Cybersecurity Market Report include:

The growing need for cyber protection and advanced security for network infrastructure across enterprises are supporting market growth.

Government guidelines and initiatives in the market are supporting the adoption of security services by IT & telecom service providers.

The adoption of cloud computing services by enterprises is enabling them to adopt advanced security solutions.

Major players operating in the cybersecurity market are Amazon Web Services, IBM Corporation, Microsoft Corporation, Nokia Networks, Oracle Corporation, Google LLC, etc.

The companies operating in the market are focusing on strategic collaborations for the development of advanced cybersecurity solutions.

Partial chapters of report table of contents (TOC):

Chapter 3 Cybersecurity Industry Insights

3.1 Introduction

3.2 Industry segmentation

3.3 Impact of COVID-19 outbreak

3.3.1 Global outlook

3.3.2 By region

3.3.2.1 North America

3.3.2.2 Europe

3.3.2.3 Asia Pacific

3.3.2.4 Latin America

3.3.2.5 Middle East & Africa

3.3.3 Industry value chain

3.3.3.1 Suppliers

3.3.3.2 Cybersecurity technology providers

3.3.3.3 Marketing & distribution channels

3.3.4 Competitive landscape

3.3.4.1 Strategy

3.3.4.2 Distribution network

3.3.4.3 Business growth

3.4 Cybersecurity ecosystem analysis

3.4.1 Cybersecurity hardware suppliers

3.4.2 Cybersecurity software developers

3.4.3 Cybersecurity service providers

3.4.4 Cloud service providers

3.4.5 System integrators

3.4.6 Third party managed service providers

3.4.7 Distribution channel

3.4.8 End users

3.4.9 Profit margin analysis

3.4.10 Vendor matrix

3.5 Cybersecurity evolution

3.5.1 Evolution of cyber-attacks

3.6 Regulatory landscape

3.6.1 ISO/IEC 270001

3.6.2 Gramm-Leach-Billey Act of 1999, U

3.6.3 Cybersecurity Law, China

3.6.4 Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA)

3.6.5 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)

3.6.6 The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (EU)

3.6.7 Directive on Security of Network and Information Systems (NIS Directive) (EU)

3.6.8 The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), U

3.6.9 Cyber Security Framework, Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority (SAMA)

3.7 Technology and innovation landscape

3.7.1 Virtualized firewall

3.7.2 AI and machine learning

3.7.3 Blockchain

3.8 Patent analysis

3.9 Investment portfolio

3.10 Industry impact forces

3.10.1 Growth drivers

3.10.1.1 Increasing incidents of cyber-attacks

3.10.1.2 Growing need among organizations to minimize security risks

3.10.1.3 Increase in the number of IoT devices demanding network security solutions

3.10.1.4 Penetration of smartphones

3.10.1.5 Increasing demand for enterprise mobility

3.10.2 Industry pitfalls & challenges

3.10.2.1 Lack of IT resources and in-house expertise

3.10.2.2 Lack of knowledge about IAM solutions

3.10.2.3 Limited security budget among SMEs

3.11 Cybersecurity statistics

3.11.1 Security incidence by type of asset

3.11.2 Data breaches per industry vertical

3.11.3 Target device/network

3.11.4 Average cost of stolen data per industry vertical

3.12 Porter's analysis

3.13 PESTEL analysis

About Global Market Insights

Global Market Insights Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider; offering syndicated and custom research reports along with growth consulting services. Our business intelligence and industry research reports offer clients penetrative insights and actionable market data specially designed and presented to aid strategic decision-making. These exhaustive reports are designed via a proprietary research methodology and are available for key industries such as chemicals, advanced materials, technology, renewable energy and biotechnology.

Contact Us:

Arun Hegde

Corporate Sales, USA

Global Market Insights, Inc.

Phone: 1-302-846-7766

Toll Free: 1-888-689-0688

Email: [email protected]

Related Images

cybersecurity-market-size-worth.png

Cybersecurity Market size worth over USD 400 billion by 2027

The Cybersecurity Market size is set to surpass USD 400 billion by 2027, according to a new research report by Global Market Insights Inc.

SOURCE Global Market Insights Inc.
"Anyone who wants to work at home and make extra money can do this and the income is limitless," said Dan Marsh, CEO of danthetireman.com . "It's basically an affiliate program where anyone can refer people to our website and earn $50 per sale of 4 tires and/or 4 wheels. The customer who purchases using this special link will also get $50 off of their order."

More people are working from home than ever before due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This side hustle is perfect for stay-at-home moms (SAHMs) and dads or anyone who is looking for a side income or even a full-time income from home.

"We feel it will be appealing to folks because they can work as much or as little as they want to and they can do it from anywhere as long as they have a computer. We're excited to create a new income stream for digital nomads as well as expand our customer base," said Dan Marsh.

This sounds great but how will work from home digital marketers drive traffic to danthetireman.com so they can begin making $50 per sale?

"We suggest they first begin with their inner circle of friends and family who need tires and/or wheels because almost everyone needs that sooner or later. Then they can post video reviews on YouTube, FaceBook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc. They can put free ads on craigslist, OfferUp, and LetGo. They can post the offer on coupon discount code sites. And even go real world and print up flyers and pass them around. I'm sure people will get creative and figure out how to spread the word," said Katie Marsh, co-owner of Dan the Tire Man, LLC.

To sign up for this work from home side hustle opportunity and begin earning money today, please go danthetireman.com/work-from-home/

About Dan and Katie Marsh:

Dan Marsh has been in all aspects of the tire business for over 37 years. From owning a small tire shop and installing tires himself to exporting large containers of tires out of the US, he garnered the experience needed to create the e-commerce website that today is danthetireman.com. Katie Marsh has a background in SEO and marketing and manages the business day to day. To learn more, please visit danthetireman.com or call 207-316-2258. [email protected].

SOURCE DanTheTireMan.com

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ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- DCS Corporation is pleased to announce its ranking of 76 among the Washington Technology Top 100 for 2021. DCS has maintained a consistent presence in recent years since first featuring at #88 in 2019, and climbing to #81 in 2020.

Each year, Washington Technology ranks the largest government contractors based on their total volume of prime contract obligations. This includes analysis of procurement data in the areas of IT, systems integration, professional services, and other high-tech service areas for the prior year.

Building on past success, DCS strengthened its growth trajectory in 2020once again achieving record revenue and earnings and steadily added to its employee base throughout the year. Consistent growth stemmed from new and existing contracts, successful recompete efforts and strategic investments in facilities, tools and technologies..

As a privately held, employee-owned company, DCS continues to be a leader in the national security sector while consistently offering superior support to customers and their priorities.

"After our debut on Washington Technology's Top 100 in 2019, our continued robust organic growth has elevated DCS from 88th to 74th on this prestigious list over the past two years. This is testament to the value delivered to our customers in the defense and national security sector through the dedication and hard work of our nearly 1,900 employee-owners," said Jim Benbow, DCS CEO. "We are proud of the company we keep among the Top 100, and aspire to continue climbing the ladder by building on our successes for years to come."

The full list is featured on the Washington Technology website: 2021 Top 100 List.

About DCS

DCS offers advanced technology, engineering, and management solutions to government agencies in the national security sector. The transformative ideas, commitment to quality, and entrepreneurial spirit that characterize our employee-owners allow us to ensure the success of each customer's mission and actively contribute to the well-being of the Nation.

For more information, please visit: https://www.dcscorp.com.

Contact:

DCS Corporation,

[email protected],

571-227-6000

SOURCE DCS Corporation

Related Links

http://www.dcscorp.com


WASHINGTON, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- AI-powered DNS resolver, DNSFilter , announced its global MSP Partner Partner Program to expand its market reach and showcase marquee managed services providers (MSPs) who are demonstrating an outstanding commitment to security via DNS.

The new program offers MSP partners a one-stop shop for their business's marketing needs and selling DNS as part of their security stack, onboarding new customers with ease, and growing their security posture. DNSFilter sales and marketing resources will provide whiteglove support to select partners each quarter.

The new program offers MSP partners a one-stop shop for their business's marketing needs and selling DNS as part of their security stack, onboarding new customers with ease, and growing their security posture. DNSFilter sales and marketing resources will provide whiteglove support to select partners each quarter.

The company kicked off its channel expansion in 2018, launching MSP-specific pricing and a private partner portal of unbranded resources available to MSPs of any size. With more than 15,000 customers, and 4M end users, DNSFilter is experiencing rapid growth, in both new customers and average annual recurring revenue. While the program utilizes a conventional system, the benefits are structured to highlight top partners and provide significant marketing and sales benefits through digital channels.

"As businesses evolve their DNS security strategy, we want to create an ecosystem that rewards MSPs and IT organizations that are investing in edge-layer protection," said DNSFilter CEO Ken Carnesi. "COVID-19 has truly upended the way networks have traditionally been managed and protected. This Partner Program will celebrate the MSPs that have risen to the occasion in protecting their clients from DNS-based threats, which are growing rapidly every day."

With the launch of the MSP Partner Program, the company is looking forward to building new strategic relationships to help more MSPs utilize DNSFilter for security via DNS. While all MSPs have access to the Partner Portal, the program will launch with two tiers:

Summit:

Archway Computer , Agoura, CA

Founded in 2011, Archway Computer has always had one goal: to help insurance agencies get the most out of their computer hardware and software. Archway delivers unparalleled, secure managed IT Services, strategically designed and supported by a team of proven, experienced IT engineers, and technical staff24/7/365. At Archway, they understand insurance agencies rely on fast, efficient service and communications at all times.

Archway Computer will receive the coveted Summit badge, a permanent feature on the DNSFilter website, a seat on the company's beta testing council, and social media promotion throughout the quarter.

Platinum:

anykey , Zurich, Switzerland

Fullscope IT , Phoenix, AZ

HBCG , Glendale, CA

Frederix Hotspot , Hanover, Germany

Jackson Technical , Tulsa, OK

Platinum Partners receive Platinum badges and are highlighted on the Partner Page, as well as access to Platinum-only features and community groups inside the DNSFilter portal.

About DNSFilter

Founded in 2015, DNSFilter provides user-friendly DNS security to protect over 15,000 organizations from online security threats and undesirable content using artificial intelligence. DNSFilter catches threats up to 154 hours faster than competitors, and uniquely identifies more than 47% of domain-based threats including zero day threats.

For more information, visit https://www.dnsfilter.com/ .

Media Contact

Jillian Kossman, Director of Marketing

[email protected]

(714) 353-1769

SOURCE DNSFilter
SACRAMENTO, Calif., June 28, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Early Edge California celebrates the culmination of an 18-year struggle of family child care providers in California to gain higher wages and investments in professional development and training.

The announcement came late on Friday from Child Care Providers United (CCPU) that a contract agreement has been reached with the Newsom Administration, providing a significant investment in California's child care providers, kids, and their families.

The negotiated agreement includes critical increases in child care rates, additional funds for training and professional development, new funding to allow more providers to become licensed, and other much needed improvements in early childhood education.

Patricia Lozano, Executive Director of Early Edge California, stated, "We applaud the Child Care Providers United negotiating team and the Newsom Administration for reaching a contract agreement that invests in child care providers, infants and toddlers, and their families. As an early supporter of AB 378, which gave providers the ability to join together to form a union, Early Edge California understands that improving quality in family child care needs to start with raising the low wages of providers and providing the support and training that our Early Learning teachers need to do their work."

Early Edge California praises the providers of Child Care Providers United, SEIU Locals 99 and 521, SEIU California State Council, and AFSCME UDW for their tireless work on this as well as the Newsom Administration, with support from the State Legislature, for reaching a fair contract agreement.

Early Edge California is a nonprofit advocacy organization dedicated to improving access to high-quality Early Learning experiences for all California children so they can have a strong foundation for future success.

SOURCE Early Edge California
BOSTON, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Eaton Vance Management ("Eaton Vance") announced today the appointment of Ralph H. Hinckley, Jr., CFA, and Jake T. Lemle, CFA, to the portfolio management teams of the Eaton Vance floating-rate loan mutual funds, effective June 30, 2021, and the retirement of Craig P. Russ, Co-Director of Floating-Rate Loan Investments, in June 2022.

Mr. Hinckley and Mr. Lemle will join the team of Mr. Russ and Andrew N. Sveen, CFA, as portfolio managers of Eaton Vance Floating-Rate Fund (Class I: EIBLX) and Eaton Vance Floating-Rate Advantage Fund (Class I: EIFAX) and the team of Mr. Russ, Mr. Sveen, Kelley Baccei Gerrity and Stephen C. Concannon, CFA, as portfolio managers of Eaton Vance Floating-Rate & High Income Fund (Class I: EIFHX). In addition to their new mutual fund management duties, Mr. Hinckley and Mr. Lemle will continue their current responsibilities in the Eaton Vance floating-rate loan group, Mr. Hinckley as a credit analyst and portfolio manager, and Mr. Lemle as Director of Loan Trading and Capital Markets.

Mr. Russ will maintain his responsibilities as Co-Director of Floating-Rate Loan Investments until the end of 2021 and his portfolio management responsibilities, of both US and non-US based products, until his retirement. He will spend the next 12 months focused on ensuring continued investment and service excellence and a seamless transition. Mr. Russ has served as Co-Director of Floating-Rate Loan Investments since 2014 and has co-led the Eaton Vance floating-rate loan group team with Mr. Sveen since March 2019. Mr. Russ has been a leading contributor to the Eaton Vance floating-rate loan group since joining in 1997, serving initially as a credit research analyst, then as a portfolio manager and ultimately as co-director. Mr. Russ began his career in the investment management industry in 1985. Before joining Eaton Vance, he worked in commercial lending at State Street Bank.

"The promotion of Ralph and Jake to join the portfolio management teams of our industry-leading floating-rate income funds speaks to the depth of talent in our floating-rate loan group and our confidence in Ralph and Jake," said Eric Stein, CFA, Chief Investment Officer, Fixed Income, of Eaton Vance. "Craig's extensive leadership experience and investment insight, along with a deep understanding and connection to our clients, culture and industry, have been invaluable to the strong investment performance and growth of our floating-rate loan franchise."

Mr. Sveen will continue to lead the team as sole Director of Floating-Rate Loan Investments in January 2022. He is a 26-year industry veteran with deep knowledge of the floating-rate loan market and Eaton Vance's investment strategies, having previously held senior positions at Eaton Vance across floating-rate loan credit research, trading and portfolio management functions. Mr. Sveen served as Director of Loan Trading & Capital Markets from 2001-2019 and as a portfolio manager since 2007. He joined Eaton Vance as a Senior Credit Analyst in 1999 and previously worked as a corporate lending officer at State Street Bank alongside Mr. Russ, beginning in 1995. Mr. Sveen is a member of the Board of Directors of the Loan Syndications & Trading Association.

Eaton Vance applies in-depth fundamental analysis to the active management of equity, income, alternative and multi-asset strategies. Eaton Vance's investment teams follow time-tested principles of investing that emphasize ongoing risk management, tax management (where applicable) and the pursuit of consistent long-term returns. The firm's investment capabilities encompass the global capital markets. With a history dating back to 1924, Eaton Vance is headquartered in Boston and also maintains investment offices in New York, London, Tokyo and Singapore. For more information, visit evmanagement.com. Eaton Vance is a part of Morgan Stanley Investment Management, the asset management division of Morgan Stanley.

This press release is for informational purposes only and is not intended to, and does not, constitute an offer to purchase or sell shares of a Fund. Additional information about the Funds, including performance and portfolio characteristic information, is available at eatonvance.com.

Statements in this press release that are not historical facts may be forward-looking statements, as defined by the U.S. securities laws. You should exercise caution in interpreting and relying on forward-looking statements because they are subject to uncertainties and other factors that may be beyond a Fund's control and could cause actual results to differ materially from those set forth in the forward-looking statements.

SOURCE Eaton Vance Management
NEW YORK, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Pioneering education investors Ryan Craig and Daniel Pianko today announced the close of a new $180 million fund dedicated to creating faster pathways to good jobs. Achieve Partners' first-of-its-kind fund will focus exclusively on investing in businesses that are positioned to boost economic mobility via next-gen apprenticeship programs in skill gap sectors like IT and healthcare.

"We are excited to be supporting the Putting America Back to Work Fund, which through their unique playbook can accelerate the growth of businesses and at the same time build frictionless pathways to work for millions," said Andrea Kaufman of Prudential Impact & Responsible Investing. "Providing training for in-demand jobs has the ultimate impact of providing economic mobility for Americans."

In the wake of a pandemic that exacerbated economic inequality while accelerating the pace of technological change, the U.S. labor market faces a paradox: millions of Americans are still unemployed, but companies are struggling to find qualified talent to fill vacant roles. There are currently over 9 million unfilled jobs, millions of which are attractive career-ladder positions in fast-growing sectors. The Putting America Back to Work Fund is addressing this challenge head-on by acquiring platforms in fast-growing industries like healthcare IT and cybersecurity that are positioned to launch novel apprenticeship programs, and then throughput thousands of newly-trained apprentices into good entry-level jobs.

"Our goal is to catalyze more pathways to good jobs that provide learners a real-world experience and relevant job skills aligned to the evolving labor market," said Ben Walton, Co-founder of ZOMA Capital and investor in Putting America Back to Work. "At the same time, the apprenticeship model encourages companies to prioritize hiring based on skills and competencies which, in turn, increases opportunity for economic mobility."

"For decades, policy makers have sought to expand apprenticeships beyond the building and industrial trades," said Ryan Craig, the author of A New U: Faster + Cheaper Alternatives to College and College Disrupted: The Great Unbundling of Higher Education. "Rather than simply hoping that employers or colleges will start to act differently, we're buying companies that can create apprenticeship programs in talent-starved sectors of technology and healthcare. We're backing the buildout of an entirely new approach to sourcing and screening talent, and providing the vital last-mile training that workers need."

"This is not a concessionary capital fund, and we do have an explicit impact goal," added Daniel Pianko. "Over the life of the fund, we hope to put 100,000 Americans into good tech and healthcare jobs they would not have otherwise been able to access. If we're successful, we may play a small part in helping to rekindle socioeconomic mobility in the U.S."

About Achieve Partners

Achieve Partners is engineering the future of learning and earning by investing in cutting edge technologies and novel business models to bolster skill development and secure the future of work for millions of Americans. By harnessing digital transformation to build new models for learning and new pathways to good jobs, Achieve is helping to level the playing field, improve socioeconomic mobility, and rekindle the American Dream.

www.achievepartners.com

SOURCE Achieve Partners
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla., June 28, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Elliott Opportunity II Corp. ("Elliott Opportunity II" or the "Company") announced today that it priced its initial public offering of 53,000,000 units at $10.00 per unit. The units are expected to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange ("NYSE") and trade under the ticker symbol "EOCW.U" beginning on June 29, 2021. Each unit consists of one Class A ordinary share and one-fourth of one redeemable warrant. Each whole warrant entitles the holder thereof to purchase one Class A ordinary share at a price of $11.50 per share. Only whole warrants are exercisable. Once the securities comprising the units begin separate trading, the Class A ordinary shares and redeemable warrants are expected to be listed on NYSE under the symbols "EOCW" and "EOCW WS," respectively.

The Company was formed for the purpose of effecting a merger, amalgamation, share exchange, asset acquisition, share purchase, reorganization or similar business combination with one or more businesses. The Company intends to identify and acquire a business within the technology and technology-enabled services industry that has a strong and proven management team, a leading market position, a large and growing total addressable market, and a track record of sustainable growth. Elliott Opportunity II's sponsor is Elliott Opportunity Sponsor II L.P., an affiliate of Elliott Investment Management L.P.

Credit Suisse, Citigroup and UBS Investment Bank are acting as joint book-running managers of the offering. BTIG, Guggenheim Securities and Macquarie Capital are acting as co-managers of the offering. The Company has granted the underwriters a 45-day option to purchase up to an additional 7,950,000 units at the initial public offering price to cover over-allotments, if any.

The offering is being made only by means of a prospectus. When available, copies of the prospectus may be obtained from Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC, Attention: Prospectus Department, 6933 Louis Stephens Drive, Morrisville, North Carolina 27560, by e-mailing [email protected] or by telephone at (800) 221-1037; from Citigroup Global Markets Inc., c/o Broadridge Financial Solutions, 1155 Long Island Avenue, Edgewood, NY 11717, by telephone at 1-800-831-9146 or by email at [email protected]; or from UBS Securities LLC, Attn: Prospectus Department, 1285 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10019, by telephone at (888) 827-7275 or by email at [email protected].

A registration statement relating to the securities has been declared effective by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC") on June 28, 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 offering discussed above will be completed on the terms described, or at all, or 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 prospectus for the Company's offering filed with the SEC. Copies of these documents 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.

Investor Contact

Jaime Hobbeheydar

Email: [email protected]

Phone: (212) 478-2800

Media Contact

Casey Friedman

Email: [email protected]

Phone: (212) 478-1780

SOURCE Elliott Opportunity II Corp.
ELYSIS: Additional $20 million in federal funding

ALMA, QC, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - Eliminating all direct greenhouse gases from aluminium smelting has taken a major step forward today with the start of construction on the first commercial-scale prototype cells of ELYSIS' inert anode technology, at Rio Tinto's Alma smelter in Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, Quebec.

ELYSIS is a joint venture company led by Alcoa and Rio Tinto that is developing a new breakthrough technology, known as inert anode, that eliminates all direct greenhouse gases (GHGs) from the traditional smelting process and instead produces oxygen.

The technology has the potential to transform the aluminium industry, with a significant reduction in its carbon footprint.

The inert anode prototype cells will operate on a commercial scale typical for large modern aluminium smelters, using an electrical current of 450 kiloamperes (kA).

The Honourable Francois-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry joined representatives from ELYSIS, Alcoa and Rio Tinto to mark the start of construction and announce a further $20 million financial contribution from the Government of Canada to support the project.

The federal government's financial support will enable the creation of a unique commercial size inert anode technology showroom for future customers and will help develop the supply chain by involving local and regional equipment manufacturers and suppliers in the project.

ELYSIS is working to complete the technology demonstration by 2024 followed by the commercialization activities.

The technology at a glance

The ELYSIS TM technology addresses the global trend towards producing low carbon footprint products , from mobile phones to cars, planes and building materials.

technology towards producing , from mobile phones to cars, planes and building materials. The new process will reduce operating costs of aluminium smelters while increasing production capacity . It could be used in both new and existing aluminium smelters .

of aluminium smelters while . It could be used . In Canada alone, the ELYSIS TM technology has the potential to reduce GHG emissions by 7 million tons, the equivalent of removing 1.8 million cars from the roads.

alone, the ELYSIS technology has the potential to the equivalent of removing 1.8 million cars from the roads. ELYSIS will also sell next-generation anode and cathode materials, which will last more than 30 times longer than traditional components.

Alcoa and Rio Tinto will continue to support the ELYSIS development program alongside the Governments of Canada and Quebec.

ELYSIS is working closely with Alcoa's Technical Center, where the zero-carbon smelting technology was invented, and the Rio Tinto technology design team in France.

Alcoa's Technical Center supports ELYSIS in the manufacture of proprietary materials for the new anodes and cathodes that are essential to the ELYSISTM process. The Rio Tinto technology team in France is creating commercial scale designs for the ELYSISTM technology.

Quotes

 "The investment announced today will help Canada's world-class aluminum producers become leading players in the low-carbon economy and support key local players throughout the supply chain. We are proud to support ELYSIS in developing the world's first carbon-free aluminium that will help Canada achieve its net-zero objective by 2050. This investment will foster innovation, create good jobs here in Quebec and help support the future competitiveness of Canada's aluminum industry."

- The Honourable Francois-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry

 "This is a great day for ELYSIS. It means that we are becoming the first technology company in the world to build commercial-size inert anode cells. While we refine the technology in our R&D Centre, we start the construction of our prototype cells. This shows our confidence in our process and in the know-how of our team. The combination of ELYSIS' zero CO 2 technology and Quebec's renewable energy will be great competitive advantage for the future. I would like to thank the government for its support and all the partners for their commitment."

- Vincent Christ, CEO of ELYSIS

 "We appreciate the support of the Government of Canada and its invaluable assistance in helping to support the continued research and development of the ELYSIS technology. We are proud to have developed the carbon-free smelting process that became the basis of this joint venture, which offers tremendous opportunity to address the challenges of climate change and contribute to improved environmental performance."

- Louis Langlois, President, Alcoa Canada and ELYSIS board member

 "Today marks a real step towards the future of the aluminium industry, by progressing this breakthrough technology to cut carbon emissions. Rio Tinto is committed to supporting its ongoing development here in Quebec where we already use clean hydropower to deliver some of the world's lowest carbon aluminium. Combining this technology with renewable hydropower holds the promise of zero carbon aluminium smelting."

- Samir Cairae, Rio Tinto Aluminium managing director Atlantic Operations and ELYSIS board member

About ELYSIS

ELYSIS is a technology company that was created thanks to a ground-breaking partnership between two global industry leaders  Alcoa and Rio Tinto. ELYSIS' goal is to revolutionize the way aluminium is produced across the globe. Our process eliminates all direct greenhouse gases from aluminium smelting, and instead produces pure oxygen. Learn more at www.elysis.com.

SOURCE ELYSIS
Guardian Life Study shows employee loyalty is strongly tied to how employees believe their companies handled COVID-19. Tweet this

"COVID-19 created disruptions that deeply impacted productivity and morale, and the extent to which those are positive or negative is directly tied to how employers responded. Our findings showed that more than half of employees who rate their company's culture 'highly empathetic' have flexible work schedules," said Chris Smith, Head of Group Benefits, Guardian Life. "Employers today must examine how the pandemic has changed employee expectations and focus on promoting flexibility through strengthened paid leave polices, expanded telecommuting or hybrid work arrangements, and stronger mental health support to bolster their employee's quality of life and promote wellbeing."

The report's key findings include:

Though many prefer in-person work, the majority want the option to work remotely. The percentage of employers offering a remote work arrangement increased from 30% pre-pandemic to 73% currently, with 58% planning to continue remote work in some capacity post-pandemic. Meanwhile, although 42% of employees prefer working on-site, 56% of employees agree they'd prefer to work remotely at least part of the time in the future.

The percentage of employers offering a remote work arrangement increased from 30% pre-pandemic to 73% currently, with 58% planning to continue remote work in some capacity post-pandemic. Meanwhile, although 42% of employees prefer working on-site, 56% of employees agree they'd prefer to work remotely at least part of the time in the future. The pandemic spurred a significant increase in benefits technology adoption . As remote work necessitated a digital Open Enrollment, more than a third (37%) of employers say the pandemic accelerated their organization's use of benefits technology. More than half (55%) increased their use of collaborative tech during the pandemic to enable better communication.

. As remote work necessitated a digital Open Enrollment, more than a third (37%) of employers say the pandemic accelerated their organization's use of benefits technology. More than half (55%) increased their use of collaborative tech during the pandemic to enable better communication. Paid leave programs and flexible schedules are key to employee well-being. The significant number of employees who took extended leave due to COVID-19 meant 75% of employers changed their unpaid leave policies to paid. There was also a significant uptick in companies prioritizing flexible schedules: 58% of employers agree flexibility is important for employee well-being vs. 48% in 2019.

The significant number of employees who took extended leave due to COVID-19 meant 75% of employers changed their unpaid leave policies to paid. There was also a significant uptick in companies prioritizing flexible schedules: 58% of employers agree flexibility is important for employee well-being vs. 48% in 2019. More employers responded to the worsening state of workforce mental health. More than a third of employers say the pandemic negatively impacted employee well-being (35%) and morale (34%). As a result, 56% agree expanding employee use of mental and emotional health resources is a priority. However, only 16% added mental health benefits as a result of the pandemic. As for employees, more than a quarter (28%) agreed they have experienced increased anxiety, depression, or other mental health issues as a result of the pandemic. In particular, Generation Z and Young Millennial workers were more than twice as likely to say COVID-19 impacted their emotional health than Baby boomers (36% vs. 17%).

To download 10th Annual Guardian Workplace Benefits Study "Inflection Point," click here.

Methodology

The Guardian 10th Annual Workplace Benefits Study was fielded in February and March of 2021 and consisted of two online surveys: one among benefits decision-makers (employers) and another among working Americans (employees), allowing us to explore benefits issues from both perspectives. Survey data collection and tabulation were managed for Guardian by Zeldis Research, an independent market research firm located in Ewing, NJ.

About Guardian

Every day, Guardian provides Americans the security they deserve through our insurance and wealth management products and services. Since our founding in 1860, our long-term view has helped our customers prepare for whatever life brings whether starting a family, planning for the future or taking care of employees. Today, we're a Fortune 250 mutual company and a leading provider of life, disability, dental, and other benefits for individuals, at the workplace and through government sponsored programs. The Guardian community of over 9,000 employees and our network of over 2,500 financial representatives is committed to serving with expertise when, where and how our clients need us. Our commitments rest on a strong financial foundation, which at year-end 2020 included $9.5 billion in capital and $1.7 billion in operating income. For more information, please visit guardianlife.com or follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube.

For inquiries, please contact:

Brenda Mendoza

Guardian Life

[email protected]

Unless otherwise noted, all information is from the 10th Annual Guardian Workplace Benefits Study, "Inflection Point" (2021)

GUARDIAN and the Guardian Logo are registered trademarks of The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America. Copyright 2021 The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America, New York, N.Y.

SOURCE Guardian

Related Links

www.guardianlife.com


DALLAS, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Q Clothier invites existing and prospective clients to give their gently used business attire a second chance to make a first impression by donating to the annual Summer Clothing Drive.

During the month of July, all Q Clothier locations and their national team of professional clothiers will serve as drop-off locations for gently used men's business attire including, suits, shirts, slacks and jackets. Q Clothier will thank donors with a 20% discount on any like custom-made garment purchase.

Donations to Q Clothier's Summer Clothing Drive are distributed to local non-profit organizations that assist disadvantaged men by providing the necessary attire to help continue their upward path to becoming self-sufficient members of the community.

"Our summer clothing drive is an amazing opportunity for Q and our customers to contribute to the communities we serve," said Raja Ratan, Founder and President of Q Clothier. "It gives our clients the chance to clean out their closets and donate to a very worthy cause. Over the past few years alone, we have repurposed over 2,000 suits and over 5,000 shirts. This year we hope to re-ignite the tradition."

Partnering organizations includes: Family Gateway (Dallas, TX), Mercy Culture (Fort Worth, TX), Dress For Success Houston (Houston, TX), TEEM (Oklahoma City, OK), Center for Employment Opportunities (Tulsa, OK), Georgia Works (Atlanta, GA), Foxworth Ministries (New Orleans, LA), Conway Human Development Center (Little Rock, AR)

ABOUT Q CLOTHIER

One of the nation's leading purveyors of custom menswear, Q Clothier creates custom luxury suits, slacks, sport coats, shirts, denim, and casual apparel. Q's unique combination of retail stores along with a national team of professional clothiers allows Q to present clients with the ultimate in customer service. All garments are constructed with the finest fabrics by world-renowned mills including Ermenegildo Zegna, Loro Piana, Scabal, Dormeuil, Holland & Sherry and more. For more information please visit www.qclothier.com .

MEDIA CONTACT :

Alex Sandlin

[email protected]

SOURCE Q Clothier

Related Links

https://qclothier.com/


NEIL, Belgium and BRUSSELS, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- eTheRNA immunotherapies NV ('eTheRNA'), a clinical-stage company developing mRNA-based immunotherapies with in-house GMP certified production and process development capabilities, and Quantoom Biosciences S.A. ("Quantoom"), a biotech company aiming to improve access to essential medicines through innovative bioproduction methods, today announce that they are to collaborate on the development of a revolutionary RNA production system (RPS) for both research and GMP-grade material.

Quantoom and eTheRNA will work together to build an advanced, small footprint technology platform for the production of affordable RNA-based therapies, that can be used either within existing facilities or rapidly deployed to areas of urgent need. Unlike large and costly existing RNA production plants, the RPS will manufacture RNA small modular units, which can be shipped easily across multiple geographic regions. The RPS is intended to be scaled seamlessly from small scale preclinical batches to mass production of GMP-grade RNA. The only requirement will be for the RPS to be located inside a suitable clean room with an uninterrupted utility supply.

Under the terms of the agreement, eTheRNA will transfer manufacturing technology to Quantoom with all materials and data necessary for the development of the novel RPS. Following completion of the RPS, Quantoom will be responsible for commercialization of the system on a worldwide basis, with sales-related royalties payable to eTheRNA. International sales and distribution are expected to commence in 2023 following RPS production in Belgium.

Bernard Sagaert, SVP Manufacturing and COO of eTheRNA, commented: "This cooperation aligns with our goals for RNA production; namely cost reduction, process scalability from small to large scale, portability and process automation. Currently, the global supply of RNA is hampered by the lack of dedicated production facilities and by the cost of constructing new plants. The RPS will revolutionize the way RNA is produced and distributed globally and we are excited to be able to work with a leading developer and manufacturer like Quantoom to bring this vision to the market."

Jose Castillo, CEO of Quantoom Biosciences, commented: "We are delighted to enter into this collaboration agreement with eTheRNA, which has extensive experience in the field of RNA and like Quantoom, has a mission to change the RNA world. Through our combined knowhow, I am confident that Quantoom will be able to develop an open, integrated RNA platform that will enable manufacture of RNA-based vaccines and therapeutics at scale, resulting in affordable development and production of RNA-based drugs. "

About eTheRNA immunotherapies

eTheRNA immunotherapies NV is developing immunotherapy and vaccine products for the treatment of cancer and infectious disease from its multiple RNA, formulation, and manufacturing technology platforms. The company is headquartered in Belgium and was established in 2013. Its founding shareholders include Progress Pharma and VUB. eTheRNA is supported by an international group of specialist investors; BNP Fortis Private Equity, Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Funds, Everjoy Fortune PTE. LTD, Grand Decade Development Limited, Fund+, LSP, Novalis Lifesciences, Omega Funds, PMV and Ying Zhou Enterprise Management Company Limited who share the Company's ambition to build a world-leading company in the RNA field. To date, the Company has raised 63 million of venture funding. Further details relating to eTheRNA's R&D pipeline can be found at https://www.etherna.be/immunotherapies-rd-pipeline/.

About Quantoom Biosciences

Quantoom Biosciences is a biotech with the mission to deliver greater access and autonomy through innovation in bioproduction that will address some of the biggest production challenges in vaccines and therapeutics. As a Univercells company, Quantoom Biosciences provides open, integrated, affordable and (pre)clinically proven platforms to make biologics available for all. Our facilities are strategically located in Belgium, in the heart of Europe, benefiting from an exceptional biotech ecosystem. www.quantoom.com

Disclosure Statement

The contents of this announcement include statements that are, or may be deemed to be, "forward-looking statements". These forward-looking statements can be identified using forward-looking terminology, including the words "believes", "estimates," "anticipates", "expects", "intends", "may", "will", "plans", "continue", "ongoing", "potential", "predict", "project", "target", "seek" or "should", and include statements the Company makes concerning the intended results of its strategy. By their nature, forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, and readers are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance. The Company's actual results may differ materially from those predicted by the forward-looking statements. The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise forward-looking statements, except as may be required by law.

SOURCE eTheRNA
The EV Connect C-NOC provides visibility into more than a dozen critical charging station health and performance metrics, making it easy to pinpoint and swiftly deploy mitigations across devices on its platform. With access to station OCPP data streams, data-rich error alerts, automated diagnosis, and ticket status via a single dashboard, operators can extract trends and actionable insights, including the ability to export data for use in downstream operations and maintenance systems. For example, support technicians will be able to respond to technical problems through rapid auto-detection, alert notifications, and triage on a per-station basis. In addition, insights provided by the C-NOC can be leveraged to optimize planning of scaling charging networks and choosing the right charging station for each charging scenario.

"Charging station uptime is essential for boosting confidence in drivers and eliminating range anxiety today. The C-NOC will significantly provide faster time to resolution for charge stations, thus allowing network operators to ensure more consistent uptime for greater driver reliability," says Raj Jhaveri, Senior Director of Product and Technology of EV Connect. "At EV Connect, we are relentless in our pursuit of innovation and are committed to building a solution that leverages data and analytics to decrease the average time-to-resolution, reduce operating costs, and allows our customers to scale networks efficiently."

EV Connect's C-NOC includes real-time alerts on key charging station health metrics at the station-, location-, organizational, or network levels. The customizable alerts and notifications delivered via the dashboard give operators the power of diagnostics and the ability to drill down to OCPP logs and fault codes based on the administrator's auto-flagging configuration. With more than 20 hardware manufacturers OCPP certified on the EV Connect platform, site hosts can rely on the C-NOC to support any deployment. In addition, the triage ticketing tool included with the C-NOC allows support stakeholders to promptly recognize problems and create detailed work tickets which include pertinent station-level detail. Additional features of C-NOC will include CRM ticketing system integrations, collaboration and asset management tools, automated firmware and configuration fixes, automated technician dispatches, and advanced analytics and predictive maintenance through machine learning support. The C-NOC will also provide the ability to integrate charging stations with third-party business support systems to increase operational efficiency at the enterprise level.

For more information about the EV Connect C-NOC, please visit the EV Connect website .

About EV Connect

EV Connect is on a mission to build a better planet by enabling electricity as a transportation fuel. Through its innovative and open charging platform, EV Connect simplifies the set-up, management, and optimization of charging stations with premium customer service, from installation to driver support. EV Connect guides companies of all sizes in managing networks of chargers and delivers a seamless EV charging experience that empowers drivers.

Established in 2010, EV Connect serves customers across 41 states in the U.S. including Avista Utilities, Love's Travel Stops, Verizon, Marriott, Hilton, Western Digital, ADP, New York Power Authority, and numerous municipalities. Globally, EV Connect's reach extends across Europe, Australia, and Asia, removing carbon emissions from vehicles through the electrification of transportation. For more information, please visit www.evconnect.com and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn .

SOURCE EV Connect

Related Links

http://www.evconnect.com


COHASSET, Mass., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Everybody Water , a women-owned social impact beverage company, is today announcing the launch of their crowdfunding campaign via the StartEngine platform following 12 percent year-over-year growth in 2020, despite the headwind of significant customer shutdowns from the pandemic.

Around the world, more than 2 billion people do not have access to clean water. This lack of access in the home affects women and girls disproportionately as they are tasked with walking miles for hours on end every day to collect water for their households. Their time spent translates into the loss of opportunity to obtain an education, earn an income, and thrive.

Everybody Water currently offers unflavored premium water in fully recyclable cartons, available online and at retail locations, and donates 3% of gross annual revenue to help fund global clean water projects via Water1st International . Their solutions go far beyond a pump in a village, freeing women and girls by bringing running water directly into their homes.

Co-founders Megan Hayes and Kimberly Reilly are now focused on their raise with StartEngine, a well-established crowdfunding platform known for their celebrity advisor and spokesperson Kevin O'Leary, i.e. "Mr. Wonderful" from Shark Tank.

"Getting involved no longer means simply supporting a company whose mission you believe in... We are giving people the chance to actually invest in our business and its growth," commented Hayes and Reilly. "Everyday people should be able to invest in companies that do good while doing well, and that is exactly what Everybody Water is aiming to do...opening up impact investing for the everyday person with a crowdfunding approach." The capital will be used to increase staffing and further market the company's products and mission.

In response to the pandemic, Everybody Water has garnered even stronger interest from B2B customers who have heightened awareness to support environmentally and socially-conscious companies, developed a strong connection to its mission, and have the desire to support women-owned small businesses.

The company attracted numerous high-profile partners including the Newbury Hotel, Boston Private, Boston Children's Hospital, the Boston Ballet, and more. Furthermore, they've expanded their national footprint through premier hospitality partners such as Auberge Resorts Collection Properties Hotel Jerome; The Mayflower; The Vanderbilt; Relais & Chateaux property Winvian Farm; and upscale fitness venues such as O2 Life Aspen, Aspen Athleisure, Aspen Shakti, Fit Factory and others.

"Perfectly aligned partnerships are difficult to find," said David Arraya, General Manager of Hotel Jerome, Auberge Resorts Collection in Aspen, Co. "We have been fortunate to link up with Everybody Water, finding a deep connection for both the product and the mission they are bringing forth to market...and are excited to share our intentional values of community, education and making the world a better place together, one carton at a time."

ABOUT EVERYBODY WATER:

Everybody Water, an emerging social impact company based in Cohasset, Massachusetts, sells unflavored premium water that is filtered by reverse osmosis. The company donates 3 percent of its annual gross revenues to organizations committed to sustainable and full solutions such as Water1st International, supporting clean water and infrastructure projects that bring running water, sinks, showers, and toilets directly into homes for the first time. Everybody Water's carton is recyclable, made from mostly renewable resources, and the cap is derived from sugarcane, joining a larger movement in the wellness industry to cut back on single-use plastic water bottles. Learn more at www.everybodywater.com.

MEDIA CONTACT:

Nina Pfister, MAG PR at [email protected]

SOURCE Everybody Water
WASHINGTON, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Reference Point, a strategy, management, and technology consulting firm for the global financial services industry, today announced that Shamla Naidoo, one of the most influential information security experts among Fortune 50 companies, has joined the firm's Advisory Board.

Naidoo's appointment marks an expansion of the firm's technology and data service capabilities at a time when financial institutions grapple with the exponential rise of ransomware attacks as their digital footprints grow due to customers' digital-first expectations and the proliferation of access points.

"CEOs and boards of directors at global financial institutions turn to Shamla for her unique ability to distill the dense topics of information security and emerging threats and align them with strategic business priorities to generate new opportunities," said Scott Goeden, Managing Partner, Reference Point. "Immersed in the financial services and technology industries for more than 30 years, Shamla epitomizes Reference Point's core differentiator as a hands-on and deeply experienced practitioner who provides a new way to think about risk while delivering a full spectrum of technology and data services. Given her track record of protecting many institutions and vast amounts of high-value data, I am confident that her contributions to our services strategy will be immeasurable."

Previously, Naidoo served as Managing Partner at IBM Security, advising C-suite executive clients on how to converge business strategy with security and privacy practices in their digital and business transformation initiatives. She was also the Global Chief Information Security Officer for IBM, where she was responsible for safeguarding IBM assets globally, which included all aspects of its digital presence and one of the world's largest intellectual property portfolios. An engineer, economist, and lawyer, Naidoo has spent much of her career in banking and at wealth and investment management firms, including Bridgewater, Northern Trust, and ABN AMRO (full bio).

"I share Reference Point's belief in reducing the complexity of today's ever-expanding technology footprint, which often increases vulnerabilities of financial institutions' digital environments. By embracing simplification, tapping seasoned subject matter experts, and fostering a positive and collaborative culture around cyber risk, companies not only protect their customers and data but also capitalize on emerging technologies that serve business growth goals," said Naidoo. "Strong risk management practices enable banks to adopt innovation and build services that customers want while also avoiding operational disruption and revenue impacts from threats like ransomware. I look forward to working with the firm's experienced team that I've long admired for the value they create for Reference Point clients."

Naidoo's appointment is the latest in a series as Reference Point grows its Advisory Board and further expands its practice areas of Risk and Regulatory Compliance, Digital, Technology, and Data and Analytics.

ABOUT REFERENCE POINT

Founded in 2002, Reference Point is a strategy, management, and technology consulting firm focused on delivering impactful solutions for the financial services industry. We combine proven expertise and practical experience in a unique consulting model to give clients superior quality and superior value. Our engagements are led by former industry executives, supported by top-tier consultants. We partner with our clients to assess challenges and opportunities, create practical strategies, and implement new solutions to drive measurable value for them and their organizations. For more information, please visit www.referencepoint.com or contact us at [email protected].

Ph: 703-663-1745

[email protected]

SOURCE Reference Point

Related Links

https://referencepoint.com/


CLEVELAND, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- A new Freedonia Group analysis forecasts global demand for furniture laminates to rise 3.0% per year to 5.4 billion square meters valued at $25.6 billion in 2024, spurred primarily by increases in ready-to-assemble (RTA) furniture production.

Though Western Europe, home to IKEA, will remain the second-leading regional market due to its large ready-to-assemble (RTA) furniture industry, the region's share of the global furniture laminates market will continue to slide through 2024, as markets in the region begin to mature and RTA furniture producers shift production to countries with lower manufacturing costs in Eastern Europe (particularly Poland) and the Asia/Pacific region.

Asia/Pacific to Account for 66% of New Global Furniture Laminates Demand Through 2024

The world's largest market for furniture laminates, the Asia/Pacific region is expected to achieve above average gains through 2024, driven by increasing ready-to-assemble (RTA) furniture production in China, the largest global producer of this product. RTA furniture production will be promoted by continued growth in building construction activity within the region and strong export opportunities. Southeast Asian countries like Malaysia and Vietnam  sizable RTA furniture producers, as well  will also contribute to gains.

Eastern Europe Remains Attractive Destination for West European RTA Furniture Producers

Eastern Europe will be one of the fastest growing regional markets for furniture laminates through 2024, spurred by growth in regional economic output, manufacturing activity, per capita incomes, and building construction activity, leading to increases in demand for decorative laminates used to surface furniture.

Production capabilities in the region are substantial  and growing as more West European RTA furniture manufacturers open plants in the region to take advantage of the lower production costs. Poland, for instance, is one of the largest suppliers of RTA furniture to IKEA. Other producers of RTA furniture in the region include Romania, Russia, and Slovakia.

Want to Learn More?

Global Furniture Laminates is now available from the Freedonia Group. This study covers the global furniture laminates industry:

low-pressure laminates (saturated papers; low-basis weight papers; thermoplastic film  e.g., vinyl, polyester, polypropylene; decorative foils)

high-pressure laminates

Historical data are provided for 2009, 2014, and 2019, with forecasts for 2024 and 2029. Demand is provided in US dollars and square meters for furniture laminates by type, region, and major national market.

About the Freedonia Group - The Freedonia Group, a division of MarketResearch.com, is the premier international industrial research company, providing our clients with product analyses, market forecasts, industry trends, and market share information. From one-person consulting firms to global conglomerates, our analysts provide companies with unbiased, reliable industry market research and analysis to help them make important business decisions. With over 100 studies published annually, we support over 90% of the industrial Fortune 500 companies. Find off-the-shelf studies at https://www.freedoniagroup.com/ or contact us for custom research: +1 440.842.2400.

Press Contact:

Corinne Gangloff

+1 440.842.2400

[email protected]

SOURCE The Freedonia Group
SEATTLE, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Federal and state complaints, which were filed today by father Kevin Bolton represented by Oshan & Associates P.C., allege that the death of Kaloni Bolton, a 12-year old Black girl with asthma, was caused after she was denied appropriate medical treatment by Seattle's Renton Landing Urgent Care Clinic and North Benson Urgent Care Clinic -- both overseen by Valley Medical Center. The complaints were filed with the U.S. Department of Justice, Washington Human Rights Commission and Washington Medical Board.

According to the complaints, on December 29, 2020, Kaloni gasped for air and cried out "I can't breathe" as she plead for medical care but was denied treatment for asthma difficulty.

Rather than deliver basic and essential care, the staff at Renton Landing Urgent Care Clinic directed Kaloni to North Benson Urgent Care Clinic, where she was ordered by hospital staff to wait in the car. After approximately 30 minutes without basic medical treatment, Kaloni became nonresponsive and was transported to Seattle Children's Hospital, where she was pronounced dead several days later.

Since Kaloni's death last December, there has been a public outcry demanding justice. Kevin Bolton, Kaloni's father, demands answers and an independent inquiry into the facts and circumstances surrounding his daughter's death.

"I want to know what happened to my angel," said Mr. Bolton. "I demand to know why my daughter was denied medical treatment."

Mr. Bolton is represented by Evan Oshan of Oshan & Associates, who is calling for a thorough investigation into the facts in order to determine the next course of action.

"The complaints that have been filed are a major step on the path to obtaining justice for Kaloni Bolton, her family and the community," said Mr. Oshan. "We need to know what role racism and medical negligence played in Kaloni's death, as she would still be alive today if she was provided the appropriate medical treatment."

Mr. Oshan added the specter of systemic issues with Valley Medical Center given it operates both Renton Landing Urgent Care Clinic and North Benson Urgent Care Clinic.

Kevin Bolton (Kaloni's father) and Evan Oshan of Oshan & Associates are available for zoom interviews.

Contact: Evan Oshan /[email protected]/ 206.335.3880 - Voice & Text

SOURCE Oshan & Associates, P.C.

Related Links

oshanandassociates.com


CLEARWATER, Fla., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- PODS Enterprises, LLC , the industry leader in portable moving and storage solutions, has been recognized by Forbes as the No. 1 moving container company for 2021. With high marks in customer happiness and nationwide availability, PODS secured the top spot with a ranking of 4.8 out of 5 stars. In addition to its status as the top moving container company in the Forbes rankings, PODS is also featured in the publication's 2021 list of the best moving companies overall.

To determine their moving container company rankings, the Forbes Advisor editorial team analyzed third-party data on 70 national and international moving companies. A variety of metrics were considered, including nationwide availability, deposits, customer happiness, contents protection or insurance offered, and convenient storage options.

In addition to receiving the highest rating for overall customer satisfaction and availability of containers across the U.S. and Canada, PODS was also recognized for offering the most flexibility on delivery dates and container sizes, as well as providing customers unlimited time to load and unload their moving containers.

PODS' commitment to personalized service is consistently recognized by customers internationally. Following a recent cross-country move, customer Brian H. of Washington, D.C. said, "Every part of [my] experience [with PODS] was made great by the people I interacted with. The initial quote was explained fully and clearly to me, much better than some of [PODS'] competitors. The drivers who delivered the empty and the full PODS container were incredibly helpful and made every stressful situation a breeze. We are so happy we worked with PODS to move across the country."

"Being named the number one moving container company for 2021 is a great honor," said Kathy Marinello, President and CEO of PODS. "This achievement would not be possible without our dedicated call center associates and drivers, who go above and beyond to provide personalized, flexible, and outstanding service to our customers. PODS has raised the bar for the moving and storage industry for nearly 23 years and continues to redefine service excellence as a trusted partner for millions."

To learn more about PODS' moving and storage services and to request a free quote, visit PODS.com .

About PODS Enterprises, LLC

At PODS, we know that your moving and storage needs are unique, which is why we offer flexible, personal solutions with unlimited time, space, and control. When PODS pioneered portable storage in 1998, we introduced the world to a brand new way to move and store the things that matter most. Now an industry leader, PODS provides residential and commercial services in 46 U.S. states, Canada, Australia, and the UK. To date, the PODS network has completed more than 1.2 million long-distance moves, more than 5.4 million initial deliveries, and has over 227,000 PODS containers in service. To learn more about how PODS provides customers with a personal moving and storage team, visit PODS.com .

SOURCE PODS Enterprises, LLC

Related Links

https://www.pods.com


WASHINGTON, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Bracewell LLP announced today that Anne M. Termine, a former chief trial attorney at the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), has joined the Washington, DC office as a partner in the government enforcement and investigations practice. Termine joins Bracewell from Covington & Burling LLP, where she led the futures and derivatives practice and was a member of the white collar defense and investigations practice.

"Anne is a highly regarded commodities and derivatives lawyer, whose experience at the CFTC strengthens our ability to serve clients across a wide range of sectors, including financial services, energy and cryptocurrency," said Bracewell Managing Partner Gregory M. Bopp. "I'm thrilled to welcome her to Bracewell."

Termine draws on her nearly 20 years of CFTC experience in representing companies active in the commodities, derivatives and cryptocurrency markets with respect to internal investigations, enforcement and litigation matters, regulatory advocacy, and compliance policies. From October 2003 to August 2016, she was a chief trial attorney in the CFTC's Division of Enforcement, where she investigated and prosecuted alleged violations of federal laws related to commodities, futures, options, swaps and other derivatives. Termine notably designed and spearheaded the landmark CFTC enforcement program involving the manipulation and false reporting of LIBOR, Euribor and TIBOR. She led negotiations with nine global financial institutions, imposing $2.8 billion penalties in the sprawling international investigation that involved regulatory and law enforcement agencies across Europe and Asia, multiple divisions of the US Department of Justice, and a coalition of more than 40 state attorneys general. Termine also led investigations and successful litigation matters involving the attempted manipulation and false reporting of natural gas and crude oil prices, multi-million dollar Ponzi schemes, and forex fraud cases, as well as the illegal offer and sale of commodity options by internet event-based or prediction markets.

"Anne's practice adds tremendous depth to our existing CFTC practice and our broader commodities practice," said Mark K. Lewis, managing partner of Bracewell's Washington, DC office. "Her wealth of experience also complements several other practices, including our white collar, energy regulatory, finance, corporate and government relations practices."

Termine is the 12th partner or senior principal to laterally join Bracewell since the start of 2021. Other recent hires include Yasmin Nelson in Washington, DC; Seth DuCharme, Ted Duver, Martin Gusy, Frank Lee and Laura Martone in New York; Tom Jamieson, Ro Lazarovitch, Jo En Low and Gordon Stewart in London; and Ibrahim Siddiki in Dubai.

"I am delighted to join such a collaborative and welcoming firm," said Termine. "Bracewell's strong regulatory and litigation teams are an ideal match for my practice. I look forward to working with my new partners in growing the commodities and derivatives practices in the financial services, energy and cryptocurrency fields."

Termine received her J.D., magna cum laude, Order of the Coif, from Tulane University School of Law and her B.A. from Bucknell University.

About Bracewell LLP

Bracewell is a leading law and government relations firm primarily serving the energy, infrastructure, finance and technology industries throughout the world. Our industry focus results in comprehensive state-of-the-art knowledge of the commercial, legal and governmental challenges faced by our clients and enables us to provide innovative solutions to facilitate transactions and resolve disputes.

SOURCE Bracewell LLP

Related Links

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Healthcare and supply chain experts conduct a webinar on the best practices to address supply chain vulnerabilities and how the COVID-19 pandemic has revolutionized this industry

SANTA CLARA, Calif., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic, including multi-country shutdowns, put an excessive amount of pressure on healthcare supply chains worldwide. There are clear signs that the pandemic will be here in the long run, driving healthcare companies to address supply chain vulnerabilities. Pharmaceutical companies relied heavily on an unprecedented level of cooperation from raw material suppliers, government agencies, and contract development and manufacturing organizations.

Frost & Sullivan invites you to the upcoming webinar, "Top 5 Transformational Shifts Redefining Healthcare Supply Chains," on July 14, 2021, from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. EDT, to discover key trends and best practices to mitigate risks and provide the confidence to operate in a post-pandemic environment. Join Frost & Sullivan experts Gopal R., Global Lead, Supply Chain & Logistics; Siddharth Shah, Research Manager, Healthcare & Life Sciences; Unmesh Lal, Research Director, Healthcare & Life Sciences; and DHL's Thomas Ellmann, Vice President, CSI Life Sciences & Healthcare, Head of Clinical Trials Logistics.

For more information and to register for the webinar, please visit: http://frost.ly/5v6

Listen to others' experiences, participate in a live, interactive question-and-answer session, and walk away with actionable strategies for your organization. Attend this webinar to discover:

How the unquestionable impact of these shifts results from three merging drivers of changecoordinated management, flexible manufacturing strategies, and seamless mobility.

Best practices to optimize supply chain networks.

Direct-to-patient (DTP) and home care business models.

New strategies for the medical device and pharmaceutical industries.

Growth opportunities in a post-COVID-19 environment.

Medical device track-and-trace solutions and re-shoring hubs.

Cold chain capabilities for next-generation vaccines and biologics.

Valuable insights on real-time inventory management.

The event will also be recorded and available for on-demand viewing at http://frost.ly/1ti.



About Frost & Sullivan

For six decades, Frost & Sullivan has been world-renowned for its role in helping investors, corporate leaders and governments navigate economic changes and identify disruptive technologies, Mega Trends, new business models and companies to action, resulting in a continuous flow of growth opportunities to drive future success. Contact us: Start the discussion .

Press Contact:

Mariana Fernandez

Corporate Communications

Frost & Sullivan

[email protected]

SOURCE Frost & Sullivan

Related Links

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Soft funding from the GCRE Impact Fund will pay for the installation of EV charging stations at the new community. It will also provide tenants access to EV charging at significantly reduced rates.

"Gardner Capital will be providing Gala at Fate residents with access to EV charging stations at favorable prices," said Michael Gardner, Founder of the GCRE Impact Fund and CEO of Gardner Capital. "Promoting EV adoption in the DFW Metroplex, specifically in the City of Fate, while delivering real savings to our tenants, is one of the reasons we launched the GCRE Impact Fund. We look forward to continuing to provide additional capital to this innovative and impactful Fund and hope it inspires others to offer alternative and creative funding options."

Gardner Capital remains focused on developing projects that deliver material economic value for low to moderate income families. The company will be installing the first Level 3, ultra-fast charging station in the City of Fate, which is only the third high-capacity EV station available in Rockwall County.

Located at 359 E. Black Oak Lane, Fate, Texas, Gala at Fate has a total of 185 units. Amenities include a resort-style swimming pool, fully appointed clubhouse with a fitness center and club room.

The development was made possible through multiple financial and other partners, including CREA and Citibank .

About the GCRE Impact Fund

Launched in 2020, the GCRE Impact Fund provides low interest soft loans and grants to initiatives that focus on upward mobility, renewable energy, EV adoption, or initiatives focused on investment in otherwise underserved markets. The Fund is expected to commit more than $500,000 annually for programs that align with the Funds investment goals and guidelines. For more information or to inquire about funding opportunities, please visit GCRE Impact Fund - Funding Page.

About Gardner Capital

Gardner Capital is a private equity firm with multiple operating businesses focused on affordable housing and renewable energy development, tax credit syndication, as well as real estate-related investments, joint ventures and capital partner structures. The firm has offices in St. Louis, Dallas, Houston and Orlando. Since 1992, Gardner Capital has placed more than $3 billion of equity in affordable housing and related investments. In recent years, Gardner Capital added a rapidly growing national platform for solar development and investments, expanding its commitment to renewable energy and sustainability across its investment platform. Additionally, the firm launched multiple alternative investment funds focused on renewable energy and EV adoption, upward mobility and investments in underserved markets. We are committed to investing in communities, creating upward mobility, and improving the wellbeing of families by developing, investing and raising capital for affordable housing and clean energy-related businesses. For more information, visit www.gardnercapital.com.

Company Contact:

Mike Koehler

Chief of Staff and Director of Solar Development for Gardner Capital

(314) 561-6065

[email protected]

Media Contacts:

Amy Power/Stacey Gaswirth

The Power Group for Gardner Capital

SOURCE Gardner Capital

Related Links

http://www.gardnercapital.com


FACTS AT A GLANCE Edition: 15; Released: April 2021 Executive Engagements: 30573 Companies: 73 - Players covered include ABB Ltd.; AECOM; ARCHIBUS, Inc.; Autodesk, Inc.; C3 Energy; Cascade Energy Inc.; Cypress Envirosystems; Eaton Corporation Plc; Emerson Electric Company; Enel X S.r.l; ENERGYai; General Electric Company; GridPoint, Inc.; Honeywell International Inc.; IBM Corporation; Lightapp Technologies; Mitsubishi Electric Corporation; Opto22; Rockwell Automation, Inc.; SAP SE; Schneider Electric SE; Setpoint Systems Corporation; Siemens AG; Trane Inc. and Others. Coverage: All major geographies and key segments Segments: Component (Hardware, Software, Services); Application (Automotive, Food & Beverage, Electronics, Mining, Oil & Gas, Petrochemicals & Chemicals, Other Applications) Geographies: World; USA; Canada; Japan; China; Europe; France; Germany; Italy; UK; Spain; Russia; Rest of Europe; Asia-Pacific; Australia; India; South Korea; Rest of Asia-Pacific; Latin America; Argentina; Brazil; Mexico; Rest of Latin America; Middle East; Africa.

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ABSTRACT-



Global Industrial Energy Management Systems (IEMS) Market to Reach $32.1 Billion by 2026

The world's economy stands at the risk of requiring substantially high amounts of energy reserves in case the energy efficiency efforts are not prioritized on an immediate basis. From drilling and mining activities to the ever-increasing use of fossil fuels in industrial facilities and power plants, the massive production and usage of traditional energy can have several negative impacts. The process of extracting resources, such as petroleum and coal, can adversely affect ecosystems and landscapes, while water, soil, and air quality can get degraded due to release of particulates, pollutants, and heavy metals into the air. Energy efficiency is considered to be more cost-effective as compared to other energy options, making it vital that it should be prioritized on the policy agenda for immediate action. Energy efficiency can help in significantly reducing the amount of money required for saving electricity as compared to the cost of electricity generation through both renewable as well as traditional energy options. Apart from the apparent cost benefits, the implementation of energy efficiency measures can also indirectly facilitate in improving the efficiency of the electric grid, thereby bringing down electricity prices for consumers and saving money for grid operators.

Amid the COVID-19 crisis, the global market for Industrial Energy Management Systems (IEMS) estimated at US$21.3 Billion in the year 2020, is projected to reach a revised size of US$32.1 Billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 7.2% over the analysis period. Hardware, one of the segments analyzed in the report, is projected to record a 6.8% CAGR and reach US$17.2 Billion by the end of the analysis period. After a thorough analysis of the business implications of the pandemic and its induced economic crisis, growth in the Software segment is readjusted to a revised 7.5% CAGR for the next 7-year period.

The U.S. Market is Estimated at $6.4 Billion in 2021, While China is Forecast to Reach $2.4 Billion by 2026

The Industrial Energy Management Systems (IEMS) market in the U.S. is estimated at US$6.4 Billion in the year 2021. China, the world`s second largest economy, is forecast to reach a projected market size of US$2.4 Billion by the year 2026 trailing a CAGR of 8.5% over the analysis period. Among the other noteworthy geographic markets are Japan and Canada, each forecast to grow at 6.3% and 6.8% respectively over the analysis period.

Energy efficiency across all energy end-use sectors has and will continue to play an instrumental role in bringing down energy consumption levels. Gradually expanding energy diversity has additionally eliminated the threat of the impending energy crisis. Today energy is exploited from ocean beds, shale rock, nuclear fission, biofuels, wind and sun, among others. Climate change policies are continuing to encourage growth in the diversity of energy sources. By the year 2040, CO2 intensive activities will be halved by over 50% highlighting the massive long-term potential for the growth of clean technologies. The amount of energy required per unit of GDP is expected to decline by over 38% between the period 2017 and 2035. Global energy consumption per capita is therefore poised to decline despite the projected gains in energy demand for the coming years. Few of the perennial factors which will always create a need for energy include growing population and a parallel increase in heating and cooling HVAC needs, rapid urbanization and development of densely populated urban habitations, industrialization of emerging economies, and expanding manufacturing and industrial activity.

Services Segment to Reach $5.5 Billion by 2026

Global market for Services segment is estimated at US$3.3 Billion in 2020, and is projected to reach US$5.5 Billion by 2026 reflecting a compounded annual growth rate of 8.0% over the analysis period. Europe constitutes the largest regional market for Services segment, accounting for 30.0% of the global sales in 2020. China is poised to register the fastest compounded annual growth rate of 9.3% over the analysis period, to reach US$352.4 Million by the close of the analysis period. More

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WASHINGTON, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The GridWise Alliance today released a letter to Congressional leaders urging them to fully fund the GridWise call for at least $50 billion in federal spending to modernize the nation's electric power transmission and distribution systems.

Thirty-seven participants in the Grid Infrastructure Advisory Council, created by GridWise Alliance earlier this year, and GridWise member organizations signed-on to the 2-page request, which offers recommendations on how investments in the nation's electric system will make the grid more resilient, secure, and flexible. Collectively, the signatories on the letter represent $4 trillion of market capital, employ 1.6 million people in the United States, and represent 825,000 union workers.

"The U.S. electric grid is our primary platform to achieve net-zero energy goals, create good-paying jobs, and support a transition to a clean energy economy," said Gil C. Quiniones, Chair of GridWise Alliance and President and Chief Executive Officer of the New York Power Authority, the largest state-owned electric utility in the United States. "The organizations that have signed onto this letter are leading our energy transformation and collectively represent the varied elements of our vast electric power system. They understand the vital role that federal financing will play in ensuring the U.S. energy sector paves the way for a clean energy future."

The GridWise proposal would direct federal funding to existing agency programs with well-established records of successfully implementing Congressional appropriations or tax incentives that can accelerate the deployment of grid-enhancing technologies and the training of a diverse workforce for the 21st Century grid. The goals of the proposed $50 billion investment in grid modernization include:

Deployment of technologies to enhance grid flexibility to integrate variable renewable resources, relieve transmission constraints, and reduce the need for new carbon-emitting generation. Deployment of technologies to enhance grid integration of buildings and electric vehicles. Enhancement of grid cybersecurity and grow the cyber workforce. Reinvigoration of the Section 48c domestic manufacturing tax credit and inclusion of grid-enhancing technologies. Modernization of utility communication networks to serve as the backbone of the smart grid and, where possible, leverage investments to provide broadband service. Resilience for critical infrastructure, including microgrids and energy storage for mission-critical public infrastructure, as well as the hardening of utility infrastructure. Expansion of training, retraining and other programs to create a diverse pool of workers ready to take advantage of the digital, high-tech grid jobs that will be created with grid investment funding.

GridWise Alliance also has expanded its Grid Infrastructure Advisory Council, adding to the already diverse panel of industry leaders. Esteemed new participants to the Advisory Council, chaired by Mr. Quiniones, are in bold:

Keith Alexander , Chairman of the Board, Founder and Co-CEO, IronNet

, Chairman of the Board, Founder and Co-CEO, IronNet Anthony Allard , Executive Vice President, Country Managing Director, USA Hitachi

, Executive Vice President, Country Managing Director, Hitachi Lisa Barton , Executive Vice President and COO, American Electric Power (AEP)

, Executive Vice President and COO, American Electric Power (AEP) Calvin Butler , Senior EVP of Exelon; CEO of Exelon Utilities

, Senior EVP of Exelon; CEO of Exelon Utilities Patrick Byrne , CEO, GE Digital

, CEO, Tim Cawley , President & CEO, Con Edison

, President & CEO, Con Edison Tom Deitrich , CEO, Itron

, CEO, Itron John Di Stasio , President, Large Public Power Council

, President, Large Public Power Council Joy Ditto , President, American Public Power Association (APPA)

, President, American Public Power Association (APPA) Tom Dunn , CEO, VELCO

Julia Hamm , President & CEO, Smart Electric Power Alliance (SEPA)

, President & CEO, Smart Electric Power Alliance (SEPA) John Hewa , CEO, Rappahannock Electric Cooperative

Colette Honorable, Partner, Reed Smith LLP

Barbara Humpton , President and CEO, Siemens

Brad Keywell , Founder and CEO, Uptake

Lee Krevat , CEO, Krevat Energy Solutions

Robert Lee , CEO, Dragos

Werner Lieberherr , CEO, Landis+Gyr

Arshad Mansoor , President and CEO, EPRI

, President and CEO, EPRI Jim Matheson , CEO, National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, (NRECA)

, CEO, National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, (NRECA) Yvonne McIntyre , Director, Federal Electricity & Utility Policy, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC)

, Director, Federal Electricity & Utility Policy, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) Rose McKinney-James , Managing Principal, McKinney-James Associates

, Managing Principal, McKinney-James Associates Kenny Mercado , Executive Vice President, Electric Utility, CenterPoint Energy

Phil Moeller , Executive Vice President, Edison Electric Institute (EEI)

, Executive Vice President, Edison Electric Institute (EEI) Drew Murphy , Senior Vice President, Strategy and Corporate Development, Edison International

, Senior Vice President, Strategy and Corporate Development, Edison International Morgan O'Brien , CEO, Anterix

Maria Pope , President and CEO, Portland General Electric (PGE)

, President and CEO, Portland General Electric (PGE) Gil C. Quiniones , President and Chief Executive Officer, New York Power Authority (NYPA), Chair, GridWise Alliance and GIAC Chair

, President and Chief Executive Officer, New York Power Authority (NYPA), Chair, GridWise Alliance and GIAC Chair Jackie Sargent , General Manager, Austin Energy

, General Manager, Kevin Self , SVP Strategy, Business Development & Gov't Relations, Schneider Electric

, SVP Strategy, Business Development & Gov't Relations, Schneider Electric Tom Siebel , CEO, C3 ai

, CEO, C3 ai James Slevin , President, Utility Workers Union of America (UWUA)

, President, Utility Workers Union of America (UWUA) Lonnie Stephenson , President, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW)

, President, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Mahesh Sudhakaran , GM, Global Energy, Environment and Utilities Industry, IBM

, GM, Global Energy, Environment and Utilities Industry, IBM Sue Tierney , Former Assistant Secretary Policy, U.S. Department of Energy; Senior Advisor, Analysis Group

, Former Assistant Secretary Policy, U.S. Department of Energy; Senior Advisor, Analysis Group Bert Van Hoof , Partner, Microsoft

, Partner, Microsoft Clint Vince, Partner, Dentons and Counsel of GIAC

and Karen Wayland , CEO, GridWise Alliance

, CEO, GridWise Alliance Joshua Wong , CEO, Opus One Solutions

Elizabeth Yeampierre , Steering Committee Co-Chair, Climate Justice Alliance

, Steering Committee Co-Chair, Climate Justice Alliance Audrey Zibelman , Vice President, Electric Grid Moonshot, X, Alphabet's moonshot factory.

"This is a critical time for our nation's power grid as a transition to new energy resources and increased reliability is demanded in all segments of the energy system," said GridWise Alliance CEO Karen Wayland. "Grid modernization investments are essential to meet the goals of decarbonization, enhanced grid reliability and resilience, and affordability and equity. GridWise members continue to lead through example, developing our recommendations in a collaborative process with industry stakeholders. We look forward to working with Congress and the White House to on grid investments in any infrastructure legislation."

The letter was submitted today to President Biden, Vice President Harris, and Congressional Leadership.

About GridWise Alliance

The GridWise Alliance (GWA) represents the broad and diverse stakeholders that design, build, and operate the electric grid. Since 2003, the GridWise Alliance has been at the forefront of educating key industry stakeholders on the critical need to modernize our nation's electricity system. For more information about the GridWise Alliance, visit: www.gridwise.org.

Media Contact:

Richard O'Neill

Executive Director

GridWise Alliance

[email protected]

(202) 530-9740

SOURCE GridWise Alliance

Related Links

https://gridwise.org


CHARLESTON, S.C., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Hawthorne Global Aviation Services, LLC ("Hawthorne"), a long standing business partner of Embraer Executive Jets, has served as an Embraer Authorized Service Center since 2006, providing Base Maintenance service and support for the Legacy 600/650 product lines.

Today, we are proud to announce that we have expanded our Embraer Authorized Service Center capabilities agreement to include full Base Maintenance product service and support for the Phenom 100/300, Legacy 450/500, and Praetor 500/600 airframes.

Located at Long Island MacArthur Airport (ISP), Hawthorne is excited to be able expand our aircraft maintenance and support services to the Phenom and Praetor family of aircraft in the New York Metropolitan Area as well as the northeastern United States. Our goal is to provide aircraft owners and operators outstanding product service & support for their Embraer aircraft requiring base maintenance services. In addition to these base services, we are now offering AOG Service on a 24/7 basis throughout the region for any aircraft requiring support outside of our Long Island location at ISP.

Capabilities Include:

Scheduled Maintenance/Inspections

24/7 Mobile AOG Support at all NY Metro Airports & Beyond

Pre-Purchase Inspections

Interior Refurbishment, Modifications, and Upgrades

Avionics Repairs & Modifications

Factory Upgrades

Wi-Fi and Cabin Management System Upgrades

Weight & Balance

On-site de-fuel

Chuck Kegley, President of Hawthorne, said, "This is a great opportunity for Hawthorne to provide maintenance support services to Embraer operators in the greater New York area, as well as expanding our 15 year relationship with Embraer. With the addition of our new AOG 24/7 service, Hawthorne is ready to support Embraer's aircraft owners' maintenance needs throughout the Northeast."

About Hawthorne Global Aviation Services

Hawthorne Global Aviation Services is a premier provider of general aviation services, with a rich history in the industry dating back to 1932. Hawthorne operates six premier Fixed Based Operators (FBO), at Long Island MacArthur Airport in Islip, NY (KISP), Cobb County International Airport in Atlanta, GA. (KRYY), Chicago Executive Airport in Chicago, IL (KPWK), Chippewa Valley Regional Airport in Eau Claire, WI (KEAU), Tuscaloosa Regional Airport in Tuscaloosa, AL (KTCL) and Sioux Gateway Airport in Sioux City, IA (KSUX). Its Long Island MacArthur Airport FBO in Islip, NY (KISP) offers private jet charter, maintenance and avionics; the Chippewa Valley Regional Airport in Eau Claire, WI. (KEAU) FBO offers private jet charter and maintenance and the Tuscaloosa Regional Airport FBO in Tuscaloosa, AL. (KTCL) offers private jet maintenance. For more information on Hawthorne Global Aviation Services, please visit www.hawthorne.aero .

Related Links:

www.hawthorne.aero

SOURCE Hawthorne Global Aviation Services

Related Links

http://www.hawthorne.aero


DENVER, Colo., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - Intermap Technologies (TSX: IMP) (OTCQX: ITMSF) ("Intermap" or the "Company"), a global leader in geospatial content development and intelligence solutions, today announced it is negotiating final agreements for a senior secured convertible debenture private placement (the Notes).

Intermap has received terms and is in the process of negotiating final agreements for the Notes with a U.S. institutional fund investor through a private placement transaction. The investment contemplates an initial investment of USD$1 million and the ability on mutual agreement with the investor to issue additional Notes for gross proceeds not exceeding USD$3 million in aggregate. The Notes will have, among other terms, an 18-month term to maturity and will be convertible into Common Shares of the Company at the lower of a 135% premium to the 5-day VWAP at closing and prior to this announcement.

Closing of the private placement is subject to negotiation of final documentation, completion by the investor of its due diligence investigations of the Company and the approval of the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Intermap Reader Advisory

Certain information provided in this news release constitutes forward-looking statements. The words "anticipate", "expect", "project", "estimate", "forecast", "will be", "will consider", "intends" and similar expressions are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. Although Intermap believes that these statements are based on information and assumptions which are current, reasonable and complete, these statements are necessarily subject to a variety of known and unknown risks and uncertainties. Intermap's forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties pertaining to, among other things, cash available to fund operations, availability of capital, revenue fluctuations, nature of government contracts, economic conditions, loss of key customers, retention and availability of executive talent, competing technologies, common share price volatility, loss of proprietary information, software functionality, internet and system infrastructure functionality, information technology security, breakdown of strategic alliances, and international and political considerations, as well as those risks and uncertainties discussed Intermap's Annual Information Form and other securities filings. While the Company makes these forward-looking statements in good faith, should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary significantly from those expected. Accordingly, no assurances can be given that any of the events anticipated by the forward-looking statements will transpire or occur, or if any of them do so, what benefits that the Company will derive therefrom. All subsequent forward-looking statements, whether written or oral, attributable to Intermap or persons acting on its behalf are expressly qualified in their entirety by these cautionary statements. The forward-looking statements contained in this news release are made as at the date of this news release and the Company does not undertake any obligation to update publicly or to revise any of the forward-looking statements made herein, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as may be required by applicable securities law.

About Intermap Technologies

Founded in 1997 and headquartered in Denver, Colorado, Intermap (TSX: IMP;OTCQX: ITMSF) is a global leader in geospatial intelligence solutions. The Company's proprietary 3D NEXTMap elevation datasets and value-added geospatial collection, processing, analytics, fusion and orthorectification software and solutions are utilized across a range of industries that rely on accurate, high-resolution elevation data. Intermap helps governments build authoritative geospatial datasets and provides solutions for base mapping, transportation, environmental monitoring, topographic mapping, disaster mitigation, smart city integration, public safety and defense. The Company's commercial applications include aviation and UAV flight planning, flood and wildfire insurance, environmental and renewable energy planning, telecommunications, engineering, critical infrastructure monitoring, hydrology, land management, oil and gas and transportation. For more information, please visit www.intermap.com.

SOURCE Intermap Technologies Corporation

Related Links

https://www.intermap.com/


DALLAS, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Jacobs (NYSE:J) has been selected by National Industrial Corridor Development Corporation Limited (NICDC) to deliver master planning and preliminary engineering design services for three greenfield industrial developments in South India. The projects, under the third phase of the NICDC's National Industrial Corridor Development Program, aim to reimagine industrial cities in India and create new global manufacturing and investment destinations with world-class road, rail, water, power and social infrastructure.

Jacobs will provide innovative, evidence-based master planning and engineering design solutions to bring NICDC's vision for a global manufacturing hub transformed for the 21st century to life using cutting-edge technology. By combining information and communication technologies with the latest digital delivery and modelling tools, Jacobs will deliver data-driven generative designs, advanced visualization techniques and smarter integration of city infrastructure.

"We've been working with NICDC in India for the past 12 years," said Jacobs People & Places Solutions Executive Vice President Patrick Hill. "These latest appointments give us the opportunity to combine that experience with the recent advances in digital and technology to set the new standard of excellence for industrial developments, to help diversify India's economy and to deliver long-term economic growth."

The clusters, located at Palakkad in Kerala, and Ponneri and Dharmapuri-Salem in Tamil Nadu, will extend the Chennai-Bengaluru Industrial Corridor to Kochi. Jacobs will also deliver the economic feasibility assessment to help shape environmentally and economically resilient developments long into the future. When complete, the new smart cities are expected to attract businesses manufacturing high-value products with excellent export potential and help fuel economic and socio-economic development in the region.

At Jacobs, we're challenging today to reinvent tomorrow by solving the world's most critical problems for thriving cities, resilient environments, mission-critical outcomes, operational advancement, scientific discovery and cutting-edge manufacturing, turning abstract ideas into realities that transform the world for good. With $14 billion in revenue and a talent force of approximately 55,000, Jacobs provides a full spectrum of professional services including consulting, technical, scientific and project delivery for the government and private sector. Visit jacobs.com and connect with Jacobs on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Certain statements contained in this press release constitute forward-looking statements as such term is defined in Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, and such statements are intended to be covered by the safe harbor provided by the same. Statements made in this release that are not based on historical fact are forward-looking statements. We base these forward-looking statements on management's current estimates and expectations as well as currently available competitive, financial and economic data. Forward-looking statements, however, are inherently uncertain. There are a variety of factors that could cause business results to differ materially from our forward-looking statements, including, but not limited to, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the related reaction of governments on global and regional market conditions and the company's business. For a description of some additional factors that may occur that could cause actual results to differ from our forward-looking statements, see our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended October 2, 2020, and in particular the discussions contained under Item 1 - Business; Item 1A - Risk Factors; Item 3 - Legal Proceedings; and Item 7 - Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations, and our Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended April 2, 2021, and in particular the discussions contained under Part I, Item 2 - Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations; Part II, Item 1 - Legal Proceedings; and Part II, Item 1A - Risk Factors, as well as the company's other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company is not under any duty to update any of the forward-looking statements after the date of this press release to conform to actual results, except as required by applicable law.

For press/media inquiries:

Kerrie Sparks

214.583.8433

SOURCE Jacobs

Related Links

https://www.jacobs.com


SANTA CRUZ, Calif., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Jane Technologies, Inc. ("Jane"), a retail software company that created the leading online cannabis marketplace, today announced the release of its new headless e-commerce solution, Jane Roots. The proprietary software launched with Forage , an online cannabis discovery tool developed by Columbia Care to revolutionize the customer shopping experience.

The pandemic accelerated the adoption of e-commerce with online orders accounting for 21.3% of total U.S. retail sales in 2020. That equates to roughly $861 billion in e-commerce sales, a 44% increase from the $598 billion spent online in 2019. Despite the massive growth, many e-commerce platforms hamper online retailers' ability to keep pace with digital trends and consumer expectations.

Backend infrastructure for e-commerce is complicated to maintain, especially in the cannabis industry's retail landscape marked by rapidly changing inventory, dynamic pricing and diverse promotions. Jane Roots removes this burden on retailers by taking care of the backend integrations, data cleansing, personalization, reviews and automation so they can focus on designing modernized e-commerce experiences specific to their brand. Isolating the frontend allows brands to easily change the customer interface in line with emerging digital trends and quickly update sales content without losing the complicated backend code. For example, if a new product comes into stock, websites using Jane Roots don't need to spend time updating content -- Jane Roots automatically generates the correct product taxonomy, serving size, verified reviews, potency, photos and description into a custom UI design on behalf of the retailer.

"As consumers continue to embrace online shopping, a retailer's digital brand is now more closely tied to its customer shopping experience than ever before," said Socrates Rosenfeld, Co-founder and CEO of Jane. "Jane Roots offers brands free expression to design their interface as well as the agility to quickly update content for an enriched user experience that encourages purchases. Our integration with Forage is a best-in-class example of how Jane Roots adds exponential value to e-commerce platforms, streamlining the backend process of content updates, data cleansing and automation. We know the future of retail is digital and we worked tirelessly to create this solution that propels our partners into the next generation of retail."

Forage is a first-of-its-kind cannabis discovery tool designed to streamline and customize the individual shopping experience for expert and novice patients and customers alike. The web-based platform curates personalized cannabis product recommendations based on an interactive questionnaire covering the user's desired effects, intended activity and preferred product format, then syncs to local dispensary inventories and pricing for online ordering via delivery, curbside or in-store pickup. Forage.io also adds another layer of data to existing POS by leveraging Columbia Care's data infrastructure to optimize the customer experience. Jane Roots' integration leverages machine learning algorithms to automate all content and structured information, allowing the Forage team to focus its resources on creating a beautiful user experience rather than managing backend code and data. Jane Roots can be easily integrated with any frontend system currently available.

"Jane Roots has been pivotal in developing, launching and managing the Forage backend infrastructure in less time and with fewer resources," said Guy Hussussian, Chief Information Officer of Columbia Care. "Given our new platform's emphasis on creating exceptional customer experiences, we need to prioritize the design of our recommendation engine rather than the implementation of a full menu system. That's where Jane Roots comes in, providing Columbia Care with UI design automation that gives our team greater flexibility to focus on continuously enhancing the frontend features of Forage without having to worry about the complexities of backend order processing and data updates."

Over the past year, Jane powered more than 20 million orders and $2 billion in cannabis sales. Jane is the trusted e-commerce partner for over 2,000 dispensaries and brands across 34 U.S. markets.

About Jane Technologies, Inc.

Jane is the cannabis industry's first fully automated e-commerce solution, powering 2,000+ dispensaries and brands across 34 state markets and the Canadian market. Jane's unique offering provides dispensaries and brands with a turnkey e-commerce solution, including real-time POS integration, curated content directly from the brands (the best pictures, descriptions, etc.), and retail and market analytics. For more information and to request a demo, email [email protected]. For more information on Jane, visit www.iheartjane.com.

About Columbia Care

Columbia Care is one of the largest and most experienced cultivators, manufacturers and providers of cannabis products and related services, with licenses in 18 US jurisdictions and the EU. Columbia Care currently operates 122 facilities1 including 92 dispensaries and 30 cultivation and manufacturing facilities. Columbia Care is one of the original providers of medical cannabis in the U.S. and continues to deliver industry-leading products and services. The company launched Cannabist, its new retail brand, creating a national dispensary network that leverages proprietary technology platforms. Through its dispensary network, the company offers products spanning flower, edibles, oils, and tablets, and manufactures popular brands including Seed & Strain, Triple Seven, Classix, Plant Sugar, Press, Amber and Platinum Label CBD. With more than four million sales transactions since its inception in 2012, Columbia Care is known for setting the standard for compassion, professionalism, quality, care, and innovation in the rapidly expanding cannabis industry. For more information on Columbia Care, please visit www.col-care.com.

1Pro forma facilities either open or under development; includes facilities where Columbia Care provides consultative services pursuant to the terms of a management service agreement

Media Contact

[email protected]

SOURCE Jane Technologies, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.iheartjane.com


ATLANTA, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- For many years, auto dealers have operated under the same playbook but have been expecting different results that are necessary to adapt to a changing market. In most cases, they simply can't see today's innovative marketing strategies that help connect them to today's car shopper. These are exactly the solutions PureCars CEO, Jeremy Anspach addresses in his new book, "Blind Spots: A Guide To Eliminating Today's Automotive Digital Media Waste".

Available at Amazon.com, "Blind Spots" is a fact-based guidebook for automotive retailers, providing proven, easily executable solutions that help them reduce their ad costs per sale and repair order (RO), increase market share, boost their profitability and gain a powerful advantage over their competition.

Reducing advertising waste is a key element to boosting dealership profitability. It is estimated that the automotive industry will spend approximately $13.4 billion(1) on digital advertising, and nearly 40% of that expenditure will be ineffective(2) due to the wrong strategy, bad data, or both. "Blind Spots" shows how today's advanced advertising data and technology can help dealers follow and capture demand by identifying which vehicles they should be aggressively marketing, which target markets they should be marketing to, and which media channels will be most effective in reaching those markets -- all with the goal of optimizing to the lowest cost per sale and RO.

According to Rhett Ricart, 2020 NADA Chairman and CEO of Ricart Automotive, who writes in the foreword, "This book should be required reading at every dealership. It should be read by every general manager, marketing person professional, director of digital operations, and on and on down the line. The landscape has changed forever, and we have to change with it. Let this book serve as your guidebook to navigating that change."

In "Blind Spots", Anspach takes the reader through an important journey that thousands of automotive professionals are navigating through  the true digital revolution currently taking place within the automotive industry. Born and raised in Detroit, MI, Anspach touches on his early childhood dreams of working in automotive, his grandmother who worked on the assembly line at Ford, and his earliest tech startups that springboarded his career into digital merchandising and advertising for automotive. Along the way, Anspach developed a keen understanding, through experience and innovation, of the complexities and nuances of the internet's influence on the automotive industry.

"Today's automotive industry is continuously focused on the premise that margin compression is increasing," said Anspach. "I'm reminded of this in every conversation I have, and it's a significant reason why I decided to write this book -- to give dealers a game plan for how to eliminate the waste while also focusing on selling more cars, parts and service."

The book takes a deep dive into all the different types of blind spots today's professionals are still struggling with, the difference between data and information, as well as effective cost per sale strategies. The book also helps readers pursue the right audience for vehicle sales, optimize the customer experience, and discusses ways to sell inventory quickly and profitably through value-based intelligence. Along the way, Anspach provides real life ground-level perspectives from trusted automotive professionals who have benefitted from many of these digital strategies.

As Anspach eloquently relays in his new book: "It's time for dealerships to open their eyes to marketing blind spots  and embrace innovative twenty-first-century strategies before it's too late. The rise of digital marketing has forever changed how dealers interact with consumers  and understanding how to use these new cyber-selling tactics is critical for dealers who want to combat shrinking margins and new industry disruptors."

Proceeds from the book sale profits will go to charity. To purchase a copy of the book visit Amazon.com.

About PureCars

PureCars is dedicated to helping dealers and the automotive industry thrive with its advanced martech, advertising insights and portfolio management platform. Only PureCars has PURE Intelligence, giving dealers and automotive marketers a competitive edge with information that is PURE: Proven, Understandable, Relevant and Essential. PureCars' industry-leading tech leverages data and insights to make smarter media buys that result in lower ad costs per unit sold and per repair order. Since its founding in 2007, PureCars has achieved great success by combining martech with digital merchandising and market analytics tools to provide dealers and partners with best-in-class solutions that increase efficiency and profitability. PureCars is a certified digital provider for 15 OEMs in the U.S. and 1 in Canada, compliant with 40+ brands and serves 65 of the top 100 dealer groups in North America.

1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/243603/projected-online-ad-expenditure-of-the-us-automotive-industry/

2: https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/340946/data-estimates-40-of-all-media-spend-is-wasted-.html

SOURCE PureCars

Related Links

http://www.purecars.com


CHICAGO, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Jet Support Services, Inc. (JSSI), the leading independent provider of maintenance support and financial services to the business aviation industry, is today announcing the acquisition of SierraTrax, a leader in aircraft maintenance tracking.

SierraTrax provides maintenance tracking software for business aircraft worldwide through its modern technology interface. As a Textron Aviation recommended provider of maintenance tracking services, the SierraTrax platform is used extensively by Cessna, Beechcraft and Hawker operators. The company supports most turboprop, light and midsize aircraft, but will now focus on extending the service into the super-mid and large-cabin segments, to align with JSSI's coverage of virtually every make and model of business jet, turboprop and helicopter.

"The SierraTrax team has done an incredible job establishing a leadership position in a crowded maintenance tracking space in just five short years," said Neil Book, chairman and CEO of JSSI. "Their remarkable rate of growth has been fueled by great technology, an easy-to-use interface and a commitment to customer service, innovation and data transparency."

"We started SierraTrax to provide a modern maintenance tracking solution at an affordable price. We share a common value system with JSSI centered around exceptional customer service. Together, we will take the business to the next level and extend our offerings to a broader customer base bringing modern, accessible technology and pricing to operators worldwide," added Jason Talley, CEO of SierraTrax.

JSSI supports more than 10% of the world's business jets on its Hourly Cost Maintenance Programs and oversees more than 10,000 maintenance events per year. The company also provides parts, engines and APUs to hundreds of operators across all makes and models through their JSSI Parts & Leasing business. This strategic move into the maintenance tracking space will blend insight from SierraTrax with more than 30 years of JSSI operating cost data and complement the company's existing portfolio, which also includes JSSI Advisory Services and Conklin & de Decker.

"This exciting new partnership will enable the JSSI platform to deliver a full suite of highly complementary services to the market that will simplify and optimize the entire maintenance experience, allowing owners and operators to manage their aircraft more efficiently," concluded Book.

GTCR, a leading private equity firm, is a majority investor in JSSI.

Contact information

Chiara Lawrance / Ali Gibson

8020 Communications

+44 (0) 1483 447380

[email protected]

Tom Morton

JSSI

1 312.644.8779

[email protected]

Michele Pelz

SierraTrax

[email protected]

+1 316.453.7802

About Jet Support Services, Inc.

For more than 30 years, Jet Support Services, Inc. (JSSI), has been the leading independent provider of maintenance support and financial services to the business aviation industry. JSSI is responsible for maintaining in excess of 2,000 business jets, regional jets and helicopters across the globe and serves customers through an infrastructure of certified technical advisors. JSSI leverages this technical knowledge, experience, buying power and data to provide support at every stage of the aircraft life cycle; from aircraft acquisition to aircraft teardown and part out.

JSSI products and services include:

Hourly Cost Maintenance Programs to stabilize aircraft maintenance budgets, enhance residual value, and provide peace of mind to aircraft owners and operators of virtually all makes and models of aircraft, engines and auxiliary power units (APUs)

to stabilize aircraft maintenance budgets, enhance residual value, and provide peace of mind to aircraft owners and operators of virtually all makes and models of aircraft, engines and auxiliary power units (APUs) JSSI Parts & Leasing provides aircraft parts, leasing and supply chain solutions. From a single bolt to a complete engine, customers gain access to an inventory of over 32,000 aircraft parts, engines and APUs and a global vendor network to source assets for anything that flies. All backed by the buying power and expertise of JSSI, one of the largest purchasers of parts and maintenance services in the aviation industry.

provides aircraft parts, leasing and supply chain solutions. From a single bolt to a complete engine, customers gain access to an inventory of over 32,000 aircraft parts, engines and APUs and a global vendor network to source assets for anything that flies. All backed by the buying power and expertise of JSSI, one of the largest purchasers of parts and maintenance services in the aviation industry. JSSI Advisory Services utilizes JSSI's technical expertise and global network to deliver desktop appraisals by ASA-accredited appraisers, asset inspections, technical advice and maintenance event management. Trusted aviation advisors draw on decades of technical knowledge, experience and real-world data to consult clients.

utilizes JSSI's technical expertise and global network to deliver desktop appraisals by ASA-accredited appraisers, asset inspections, technical advice and maintenance event management. Trusted aviation advisors draw on decades of technical knowledge, experience and real-world data to consult clients. Conklin & de Decker enables aircraft owners and operators to make more informed decisions. More than 35 years of objective and impartial data powers digital tools to analyze aircraft ownership options with the most accurate performance and comparison data available, review critical state tax information, and streamline MRO business processes and track maintenance with Aerotrac software.

For more information, visit jetsupport.com.

About SierraTrax

Founded in 2017 by aviation entrepreneur Jason Talley, SierraTrax disrupted the aircraft maintenance tracking market by offering a simple, intuitive, and affordable maintenance tracking platform, at a fraction of the cost of their competitors. From individual aircraft owners-pilots, to corporate flight departments and Part 135 operations, SierraTrax customers enjoy an easy-to-use, modern interface developed with the end-user in mind. Committed to bringing needed intelligence solutions to the industry, SierraTrax is the only Textron Aviation recommended provider of maintenance tracking services that can provide comprehensive digital aircraft records through the SierraTrax nationwide scanning network.

To learn more, visit www.sierratrax.com.



About GTCR

Founded in 1980, GTCR is a leading private equity firm focused on investing in growth companies in the Growth Business Services, Technology, Media & Telecommunications, Healthcare and Financial Services & Technology industries. The Chicago-based firm pioneered The Leaders Strategy  finding and partnering with management leaders in core domains to identify, acquire and build market-leading companies through transformational acquisitions and organic growth. Since its inception, GTCR has invested more than $20 billion in over 250 companies. For more information, please visit www.gtcr.com.

SOURCE JSSI

Related Links

http://www.jetsupport.com


CAMBRIDGE, Mass., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- A new collaboration between Lesley University and The Ohio State University has resulted in the launch of the Leveled Literacy Intervention National Tutoring Scale-up Model, an evidence-based intervention that provides teacher training for implementation of intensive instruction to students who are performing significantly below grade level in reading and writing.

Girl reading at a desk.

The Leveled Literacy Intervention National Tutoring Scale-up Model is designed to help students in grades K-2 make accelerated and sustained literacy progress. It includes University trainers, based jointly at Lesley University and The Ohio State University, and tutors who are based at the school or district level.

Leveled Literacy Intervention National Tutoring Scale-up Model is featured on the ProvenTutoring.org website, a coalition of organizations founded by Robert Slavin and Nancy Madden of Johns Hopkins University that features highly effective tutoring programs to support students across the U.S. In addition, the model is backed by rigorous independent research, including What Works Clearinghouse who found positive effects for beginning readers in Fountas & Pinnell's Leveled Literacy Intervention system.

"Leveled Literacy Intervention is effective, engaging and efficient. Children's results have been remarkable," said Gay Su Pinnell, Professor Emerita in the School of Teaching and Learning at The Ohio State University. "Thousands of children have made tremendous gains because of their opportunity for this powerful early intervention. Now, with the Leveled Literacy Intervention National Tutoring Scale-up Model, we are able to create equitable literacy opportunities for all students with a coherent systematic implementation of an intensive intervention."

The Leveled Literacy Intervention National Tutoring Scale-up Model is specifically designed to lift the literacy achievement of students and turn struggling readers into successful readers with engaging leveled books and fast-paced, systematically designed lessons.

"Student success cannot be left to chance. Schools must rely on proven resources, proven instruction and proven tutoring models to assure equitable student outcomes for every child," said Irene Fountas, Director for the Center for Reading Recovery & Literacy Collaborative at Lesley University. "Leveled Literacy Intervention National Tutoring Scale-up Model is not only an investment in student success, but it is a long-term investment in teacher expertise that will power your scale up for many years to come."

For more information about training tutors by Lesley University and The Ohio State University, please join us for a complimentary webinar, July 22nd from 3:30-4:30pm EST, to learn more about how your school/district can benefit from this exciting program. To register, visit https://bit.ly/lliscaleup.

PR contact:

Rebekah Kapfer

[email protected]

617.349.8424

Related Images

young-student-reading.jpeg

Young student reading

Girl reading at a desk.

SOURCE Lesley University and The Ohio State University
SHIJIAZHUANG, China, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Yiling Pharmaceutical disclosed in a statement on Monday that it had received the medicine registration document for Lianhua Qingwen Capsules from the Ministry of Health of Ukraine.

As the leading product of Yiling Pharmaceutical, Lianhua Qingwen is dedicated to the treatment of relevant diseases including cold, flu, and COVID-19. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, Lianhua Qingwen Capsules (Granules) has been recommended by the Diagnosis and Treatment Protocol for COVID-19 (Trial Version 4/5/6/7/8) jointly issued by the Chinese National Health Commission and Chinese National Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine and the diagnosis and treatment protocols for COVID-19 in more than 20 provinces and cities, making it the most recommended Chinese patent medicine for curing Covid-19. In April 2020, Lianhua Qingwen Capsules/Granules were added new indication of "mild and moderate coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)" by the National Medical Products Administration of China.

According to Yiling Pharmaceutical's Annual Report, the 2020 annual sale proceeds of Lianhua Qingwen hit USD 659 million, with a growth rate of 149.89% YoY. Statistics published by Chinese authoritative information institute shows that the market share of Lianhua Qingwen in the cold/heat-clearing products category of Chinese retail terminals has increased from 2.44% in 2017 to 9.86% in 2020, which means that Lianhua Qingwen has become the No. 1 patent Chinese medicine for cold in the Chinese retail market.

The results of a prospective, randomized, controlled, and multi-center clinical study on treating COVID-19 with the TCM Lianhua Qingwen Capsules were published in Phytomedicine in May 2020. It's found in the study in terms of clinical use that Lianhua Qingwen proved to be both safe and effective in treating COVID-19 in conjunction with conventional therapy as it could significantly relieve clinical symptoms of COVID-19 such as fever, debilitation, and cough, greatly improve pulmonary lesions, shorten the duration of symptoms, and increase the clinical recovery rate.

Up to now, Lianhua Qingwen Capsules has got entry approval documents from more than 20 countries and regions around the world, including Canada, Russia, Singapore, the Philippines, Kenya, etc. The registration is being in process in dozens of countries. Besides China, Lianhua Qingwen Capsules has also been approved for COVID-19's indications in Kuwait and Mongolia, and has been applied in the Covid-19 hospitals in Thailand and Indonesia.

SOURCE Yiling Pharmaceutical
TEL AVIV, Israel, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Lutris Pharma, a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company focused on improving anti-cancer therapies by reducing dose limiting side effects, today announced that Jack Weinstein, a seasoned life science executive with deep financial experience, has been appointed as the Chairman of the Board of Directors.

"Jack brings nearly 40 years of wide-ranging executive management expertise to Lutris Pharma, including as a Chief Financial Officer, investment banker and consultant to the biopharmaceutical industry," stated Noa Shelach, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer of Lutris Pharma. "We look forward to leveraging his vast experience in these fields, as well as in corporate and business development, and the areas of regulatory and intellectual property strategies. His insights and relationships have already proved invaluable, as we have advanced our lead asset, LUT014, a proprietary, first-in-class, novel B-Raf inhibitor, into a phase 2 trial for metastatic colorectal cancer patients treated with Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor (EGFR) inhibitors, many of whom develop debilitating therapy-induced acneiform lesions, resulting in diminished treatment effectiveness and compliance."

Mr. Weinstein added, "Lutris Pharma has the potential to become a leading biopharmaceutical company and my decision to join as Chairman of the Board was driven by the strength of the company's technology and dedication to addressing a tremendous unmet need. Today, approximately three-quarters of cancer patients treated with EGFR inhibitor therapies suffer from dermal toxicities for which there is currently no approved treatment. The strength of Lutris Pharma's preclinical and clinical results thus far, as a potential treatment for patients taking EGFR inhibitors or undergoing radiation therapy, is highly encouraging and I am honored to work with the executive team, who have an impressive track record of building companies as well as developing and commercializing new drugs."

Mr. Weinstein is currently the Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer of biopharmaceutical company, Relief Therapeutics Holding AG. Before joining Relief Therapeutics, Mr. Weinstein served as Managing Director and Head of Healthcare Investment Banking at Avalon Net Worth, an independent New York-based boutique investment bank. Prior to that, he was Chief Financial Officer, Treasurer and Vice President of Business Development at Catalyst Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and was President and Founder of The Sterlington Group, Inc., where he provided advisory services to life science companies related to strategic planning, business development, operations and financial issues. Earlier in his career, Mr. Weinstein served as Managing Director and Head of Healthcare Investment Banking at both Ladenburg Thalmann & Co. Inc. and Gruntal & Co., LLC. He holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Miami and an MBA from the Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration.

About Lutris Pharma

Lutris Pharma is a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company focused on improving anti-cancer therapy effectiveness and quality of life for patients who are being treated with EGFR (Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor) inhibitors or with radiation, where dermal toxicity often leads to a reduction of anti-cancer therapy compliance. The company aims to provide novel topical therapies in order to mitigate these side effects. Lutris Pharma's lead asset, LUT014, a topical B-Raf Inhibitor, is a proprietary, first-in-class, small molecule currently in a phase 2 clinical trial in metastatic colorectal cancer patients with EGFR inhibitor induced acneiform lesions and a phase 1/2 study for the treatment of radiation-induced dermatitis. For more information, please visit www.lutris-pharma.com.

Contacts:

Lutris Pharma

Noa Shelach, Ph.D.

Chief Executive Officer

[email protected]

Rx Communications Group

Michael Miller

+1-917-633-6086

[email protected]

SOURCE Lutris Pharma

Related Links

http://www.lutris-pharma.com


SURFSIDE, Fla., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Tragedy often reveals the true character of those in our community. This could not be truer than with Patrick Daniel Law. They are volunteer effort leaders at the condo collapse site in Surfside, Florida.

The Surfside collapse is certainly not a mystery to the nation. What is lesser known are those groups that are boots on the ground helping outin any way possible. From a hug from an aggrieved victim to a bottled water for a police officer, helping is a moving target right now.

Patrick Daniel and his team delivering supplies to the first responders

Putting his business on hold, they went directly to Surfside. CSO, Nicolette Daniel woke up Saturday morning and turned on the news. She was not just saddened especially due to the recent sudden unexpected loss of her mother. "One day she was there and the next she wasn't," says Daniel. "I know the pain of shock and fear and I knew what they needed. We cannot be afraid and look away I needed to say, WE can to this, and you can hold my hand. I wanted to try and ease the pain and make even a small difference."

She looked at her husband, Patrick Danielthe head of Patrick Daniel Law, and told him what her heart felt. So, they decided to pick up immediately and head to the disaster. They contacted their team of friends and staff and said they wanted everyone and anyone who wanted to go and try to make a difference to pack a bag and make arrangements to leave without a return date.

Unsure of what they could do, what they would encounter and might find, or who to even approach, they started the process. Starting with water, they escalated their efforts based on police, first responder, victim advocate and fire & rescue requests from the front lines.

The help progressed based on the specific requests from the brave men and women looking for the victimsover 150 that were unaccounted for at the time. Bottled water turned into gum, deodorant, snacks, energy drinks, sunscreen, lip palm and ponchos.

They partnered with the efforts at Casa Church and went to "ground zero," together. They saw the incident site from a firsthand perspectiveit was horrifying, resembling a warzone.

"Nothing I had ever seen was like it," according to Patrick Daniel. "It resonated with me and scared meI cannot imagine the feat experienced by those victims of the disaster. I have seen some really sad things in my time as an attorney, but nothing compares to what is going here in Surfside," described Patrick Daniel. Patrick Daniel is a catastrophic injury attorney from Houston, Texas.

Patrick Daniel and his volunteers traveled from Houston, Texas. They are partnering with Circus Eats, CASA Church and Vanessa Brito of the Huffington Post to serve meals to the first responders, fire & rescue, and other front liners today. The Circus Eats food truck is preparing chicken tenders French fries and fried Oreos for those brave men and women trying to save more lives. They will feed up to 350 today at 2pm up and down Collins from 89th to 94th until they run out of food.

Media contact:

Nicolette Daniel

[email protected]

312-961-9437

SOURCE Patrick Daniel Law
NEW YORK, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- McCann Health took home a record-breaking 17 awards during the 2020/2021 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the most awards won at the annual awards show in the agency's history.

The performance more than doubles the agency's previous record of 8 awards, won in 2018.

"I couldn't be prouder of our McCann Health team with this year's results," said John Cahill, Global Chief Executive Officer, McCann Health. "Being recognized for world-class creativity and impact on a global stage is always such an honor, even more so to have such tremendous success during a year when every brand and business found themselves focused on health. As always, our success is enabled by our brave clients, partners and collaborators, we value their support.."

Contributing to an astounding 11 of those 17 awards was "The Bread Exam," a smart and provocative campaign that teaches women to perform self-checks in order to detect early signs of breast cancer. The campaign  which subversively looks like a standard YouTube cooking video but teaches life-saving lessons in a way that does not violate cultural -- was developed to help tackle cultural taboos in traditional communities in the Middle East. The work was created by McCann Paris, in collaboration with McCann Health London, FP7 McCann and Weber Shandwick. The work was supported by a trio of clients: Spinneys Supermarkets, American University of Beirut Medical Centre and the Lebanese Breast Cancer Foundation. The campaign won the Grand Prix in PR, one of the two Grand Prix won by parent agency McCann Worldgroup, along with won 3 Gold Lions (in Health & Wellness, Media and PR), 3 Silver Lions (in Health & Wellness, Social & Influencer and Brand Experience) and 4 Bronze Lions (in Media, Direct, PR and Brand Experience.

"We are so thrilled to chalk up McCann Health's most awarded year at Cannes in the history of the Festival," said Matt Eastwood, Global Chief Creative Officer. "But what makes it even more gratifying is that it occurred during one of the toughest business environments our clients have ever faced. Our clients have resoundingly embraced creativity and confirmed that they see it as one of the most powerful forces in business. And that is incredibly exciting."

McCann Health New York's impactful "Unfinished Votes" campaign was awarded a Silver Lion in Health and two Bronze Lions in Direct and Social & Influencer. The work for non-profit organization Change the Ref leverages AI technology to bring Parkland school shooting victim Joaquin Oliver back to life to encourage people to vote  because he can't -- and to work to end gun violence.

McCann Health Dubai, along with FP7 McCann Dubai and FP7 McCann Beirut, were awarded a Silver Lion in Health and Wellness and a Bronze Lion in Brand Experience for their campaign "Blood Unity." The campaign for NGO Donner Sang Compter turned tradition on its head to encourage blood donation and save lives in Lebanon. By encouraging Muslims observing the Day of Ashura who engage in blood-letting to donate their blood instead of spilling it, the campaign created an incredibly successful blood drive for the region.

Following up on their Grand Prix win at the last Cannes Lions show in 2019 (the Cannes Lions were canceled in 2020), McCann Health Shanghai won a Silver Lion in Pharma for their film "The Number," a beautiful story about a father and daughter and the caregiver's experience for families dealing with Alzheimer's. The work was completed for Greenvalley's Product: 971, a medicine for Alzheimer's.

About McCann Health

McCann Health is the world's top creatively awarded and effective health network. Through combining science, creative and strategy, the agency strives to deliver best-in-class services to clients. Its 2,500+ employees in 60 offices across 20 countries are united by one vision: to help clients play a meaningful role for healthier lives. McCann Health spans a range of global practices including advertising and promotion, strategic consulting, healthcare professional marketing, medical communications, consumer health and wellness, global health and specialty practices like pharmacy, payer and patient engagement.

As the winner of 12 "Network of the Year" titles from the industry's top five creative award shows, McCann Health's recent accolades include being named the 2019 Cannes Lions Healthcare Network of the Year for the third time and being awarded Cannes Grand Prix in the last two consecutive festivals. McCann Health was also named the "Most Awarded Network" for the second straight year at the 2019 Creative Floor Awards. Additional recognition for McCann Health agencies came from the Clio Health Awards, MM&M, London International Awards, Epica, and other shows across the globe. McCann Health's North American agencies received recognition in high-profile industry awards shows in 2019 and 2020, including McCann Health Managed Markets recent "Agency of the Year" award at the 2020 Med Ad News Manny awards.

SOURCE McCann Health
Most times, joint pains are occasioned by lifestyle, age and work type.

Speaking during the Live Show moderated by the Editor of TechEconomy.ng, Peter Oluka, a fellow American College of Orthopedics; FMC Ortho - Consultant Arthroplasty, Orthopaedic & Trauma Surgeon  Dr. Chigo Joseph Ezeh, described joint as a place in the body where two or more bones meet to effect motion, adding that the easiest type of joints human use is the synovial joint typified by the knee.

He said that the causes of joint pains can be traced to certain structures in the body, such as the tendon, the ligaments and movements of the bones while the commonest cause in this part of the world is trauma.

"Secondly, arthritis; which simply means the wearing of the cartilage lining the ends of the bones that form joint is subcontract. Cartilages are where it wears and tears over time".

"Symptoms: pain is one of the cardinal signs of inflammation and there are five of them; pain, redness, swelling, heats and loss of function. A patient that has pain in the joints does not want to move the joint so there is a loss of function.

On his part, Dr Kelechi Woryi, Orthopedic Resident with National Orthopedic Hospital, said that pains around the joint is an unpleasant feeling attributed to that joint. Dwelling his discussions on knee joint pains, he said that work types usually associated with that are those that would increase activity around the joint.

"So, if you have someone whose jobs requires him or her using the knees; kneeling, standing with the hips, you have that person coming down with hip pains. You also have people that carry heavy loads on the shoulder. So, they fall on that risk part of going into shoulder or neck pains. Essentially, any activity that causes us to use the job frequency will cause pains."

Sharing her experience while managing COVID-19 patients, Dr. Tolulope Akinnimi, a clinical researcher, said that although she hadn't had clinical trial regarding joint pains, however, apart from the continuous use of the joints, the disuse (not using the joints at all) can actually cause pains. "Although, it is one of the least causes of joint pains among people, but when there is no movement around the joint; that is being static, it can lead to pains. So, we have to come to the point of moderate use of the joints."

"When it comes to work related joint pains among most patients; by the time you trace the history of their work or occupation, you will discover the link between the work environment and the health issue".

Dr. Akinnimi added that employers, both in the private and public spaces need to be aware of the causes and growing cases of joint pains among the workers.

She also hinted that her studies so far show there is no linkage between joint pains and escalation of COVID-19 in the body, "but one thing we need to take cognizance of is that joint pains can be caused by infections. The truth is, if there is an infection in a patient, definitely the immune system goes down and he or she is exposed to all kinds of health issues."

In her words, "human begins are just like machines that suffer wear and tear. Care needs to be taken in this kind of area, because if a patient has dysfunction in those areas, there is little or nothing they can do with the use of the joints."

Meanwhile, Dr. Ezeh, debunked claims in some quarters that joint pains could be hereditary, stressing that there is no empirical evidence backing such claims.

Dr. Woryi therefore recommended among other things, the use of smart technologies or wearable devices to advance the prevention of joint pains. "Depending on how you view it, technology has come to stay and it has greatly improved lives. You have a smart watch or a smartphone which reminds you, 'oh, okay you need to start this activity' like talking a walk or the phone reminds you, you've taken 10,000 steps today. Accordingly, the WHO prescribes brisk exercise as helpful."

"So, if you have a phone or a smart watch, you can always set that target for a brisk exercise. Most times, it is just 30 minutes out of the 24 hours we have in a day; apart from it helping your heart and respiratory system, it will help in joint pain management," he said.

Nature'sField Joint Renew Advanced:

Nodding in agreement with the medical experts, Pharmacist Abayomi Onasanya, the head of marketing at Naturesfield, said the company has carefully developed Nature's field Joint Renew Advanced that contains ingredients such as; MSM, Glucosamine, Hyaluronic Acid, Chondroitin, Tumeric & Chinese Skullcap for optimum joint health.

He said that Joint Renew Advance improves long term joint mobility and flexibility.

Pharm. Onasanya said, "It promotes optimum joint structure and function, nourishes the joint tissues (Cartilage), improves joint flexibility by increasing joint fluid support rebuilding of worn-out joint tissues and guarantees painless movement."

While expatiating on prevention and management of joint pains or Osteoarthritis with Nature's Field Joint Renew, Olajide Asaolu, the product manager, Joint Renew Advanced at Naturesfield, reiterated that Osteoarthritis (OA) or degenerative joint disease (DJD), is a progressive disorder of the joints due to gradual loss of cartilage which results in the development of bony spurs and cysts at the margins of joints.

"You need Nature's Field Joint Renew if you are experiencing the following Osteoarthritis symptoms; Pain: Your joint hurts you during or after movement. Tenderness: Your joint may feel tender when light pressure is applied to it. Stiffness: You notice joint stiffness usually early in the morning or after a period of inactivity. Loss of flexibility: Inability to move joint through its full range of motion. Grating sensation: You are hearing and feel a grating sensation with use of your joint and Bone spurs: These extra bits of bone, which feel like hard lumps, may form around the affected joint", Asaolu explained.

SOURCE Natures Field Nigeria
DUBLIN, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Connected Consumer Survey 2020: Mobile Devices and Distribution Channels in the Middle East" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

This report focuses on aspects of the Connected Consumer Survey that relate to the behaviour, preferences and plans of smartphone users in the Middle East. In particular, it focuses on the adoption of mobile devices and distribution channels.

Bundling smart devices enables operators to differentiate their connectivity propositions, but they should be clear about what they want to achieve with these devices beyond increasing sales.

This report provides:

Insights into how operators perform as smartphone sales channels, and how their performance relates to consumers' choice of tariffs

An analysis of consumers' choice of, and spend, on handsets

An assessment of the adoption of smart devices and opportunities for operators to generate new revenue streams.

Survey data coverage:

The research was conducted between August and September 2020. The survey groups were chosen to be representative of the mobile-internet-using population in the region. We set quotas on age, gender and geographical spread to that effect. There was a minimum of 750 respondents per country, and 3750 respondents in the region.

This report focuses on aspects of the Connected Consumer Survey that relate to the behaviour, preferences and plans of smartphone users in the Middle East. In particular, it focuses on respondents' usage of and spending on mobile devices. The survey was conducted in association with On Device Research between August and September 2020. The survey groups were chosen to be representative of the mobile-internet using population in the region. We set quotas on age, gender and geographical spread to that effect. There was a minimum of 750 respondents per country, and 3750 in the region.

Key Questions Answered in this Report

How well do operators perform as smartphone sales channels, and how important are digital sales channels?

How long are consumers keeping their smartphones for and how much are they spending on them when they replace them?

What smart devices are smartphone users most interested in and how can operators capitalise on this demand to derive additional revenue and improve their consumer propositions?

Who Should Read this Report

Operator-based strategy executives and marketing managers who are interested in understanding consumer market trends, the role of operators as smartphone distribution channels and the impact of differing approaches to pricing in the market.

Equipment/device manufacturers and software providers that want to identify end-user trends in device usage and help their operator customers to improve their ability to address market opportunities. Telecoms operators that are searching for new revenue sources and/or are interested in partnering with smart device producers or in launching their own smart device propositions.

Key Topics Covered:

Executive summary

Analysis

Methodology and panel information

About the author

Countries Covered

Kuwait

Oman

Saudi Arabia

UAE

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/8rv2km

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

[email protected]



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SOURCE Research and Markets

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NEW YORK, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG) today announced that Rukhein Davis has joined the firm as Managing Director and Head of Corporate Derivative Solutions.

Mr. Davis will be responsible for growing the business while deepening existing corporate client relationships, focusing on developing solutions that bring the entire MUFG platform to clients. He will report to David Paster, Head of Corporate Risk Solutions, and will be based in New York.

"Rukhein has a consultative style with clients that centers around providing the right risk management advice, customized to each client's specific financial solutions needs," David Paster said. "His strong industry relationships, technical skills, and proven track record of winning mandates will be key in building out this area of our business."

Mr. Davis joins MUFG with more than 15 years of rates and FX derivatives experience, covering corporate clients across a range of sectors including Consumer and Retail, Health Care and General Industrial. Most recently, Mr. Davis was Head of Consumer and Retail Rates & FX at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Prior to that Mr. Davis worked at Citigroup as a Director in the Derivatives Solutions Group and at Goldman Sachs in Corporate Risk Management.

MUFG continues to make significant investments in strengthening its sales and trading platform to support its full life-cycle originate-to-distribution and secondary trading business model. Over the past 18 months, MUFG has added a specialized leveraged finance sales team to its roster and more recently expanded its fixed-income trading platform.

About Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Inc.'s U.S. Operations including MUFG Americas Holdings Corporation

The U.S. operations of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Inc. (MUFG), one of the world's leading financial groups, has total assets of $331 billion at March 31, 2021. As part of that total, MUFG Americas Holdings Corporation (MUAH), a financial holding company, bank holding company, and intermediate holding company, has total assets of $170 billion at March 31, 2021. MUAH's main subsidiaries are MUFG Union Bank, N.A. and MUFG Securities Americas Inc. MUFG Union Bank, N.A. provides a wide range of financial services to consumers, small businesses, middle-market companies, and major corporations. As of March 31, 2021, MUFG Union Bank, N.A. operated 309 branches, consisting primarily of retail banking branches in the West Coast states, along with commercial branches in Texas, Illinois, New York, and Georgia. MUFG Securities Americas Inc. is a registered securities broker-dealer which engages in capital markets origination transactions, domestic and foreign debt and equities securities transactions, private placements, collateralized financings, and securities borrowing and lending transactions. MUAH is owned by MUFG Bank, Ltd. and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Inc. MUFG Bank, Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Inc., has offices in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Mexico, and Canada. Visit www.unionbank.com or www.mufgamericas.com for more information.

About MUFG (Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Inc.)

About MUFG Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Inc. (MUFG) is one of the world's leading financial groups. Headquartered in Tokyo and with over 360 years of history, MUFG has a global network with around 2,600 locations in more than 50 countries. The Group has over 180,000 employees and offers services including commercial banking, trust banking, securities, credit cards, consumer finance, asset management, and leasing. The Group aims to "be the world's most trusted financial group" through close collaboration among our operating companies and flexibly respond to all of the financial needs of our customers, serving society, and fostering shared and sustainable growth for a better world. MUFG's shares trade on the Tokyo, Nagoya, and New York stock exchanges.

For more information, visit https://www.mufg.jp/english

Press Contact:

Oksana Poltavets

(646) 767-1326

[email protected]

SOURCE MUFG
CHAGRIN FALLS, Ohio, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- On a mission to provide safe, healthy, organic sleep for the whole family, Naturepedic is celebrating Independence Day with a 15% off sitewide sale on their full product line of GOTS-certified organic, MADE SAFE-certified nontoxic baby, kid and adult mattress and bedding products.

From June 30th through midnight on July 7th, customers can enjoy big savings on all Naturepedic products by using promo code HEALTHY15 at checkout online and in-store at Naturepedic's Organic Mattress Gallery stores.

Naturepedic offers an award-winning range of breathable, waterproof baby crib mattresses and accessories, along with an exclusive line of kids mattresses, designed to support their specific developmental needs. For adults, choose from the brand's top-rated Chorus and Serenade models, along with the innovative EOS Series and Halcyon models, which can be customized to suit individual comfort preferences on each side of the bed. Naturepedic's EOS Pillowtop Organic Mattress recently won the Good Housekeeping 2021 Bedding Award for "Best Sustainable Mattress." The sale also applies to all of Naturepedic's luxurious pillows, sheet sets, mattress toppers, protector pads, and more.

Leading the organic mattress revolution for over 18 years, all Naturepedic products utilize lightweight, breathable materials, like organic cotton fabric and fill, to achieve cool sleep all summer long. All Naturepedic products are certified organic by GOTS and certified nontoxic by MADE SAFE, eliminate questionable materials and chemicals found in most conventional mattresses, such as flame retardant chemicals and barriers, polyurethane foam, vinyl and formaldehyde, while meeting and exceeding the highest level of certifications available in the marketplace.

For more information and media inquiries, please contact Sara White at [email protected] or 914.621.1323.

About Naturepedic:

Since 2003, Naturepedic has been on a mission to protect the lives of families through safer, healthier organic-based products that have a positive impact on the environment. A brand with purpose, transparency and ethical practices, Naturepedic is the recipient of many certifications and is highly respected by numerous health and environmental organizations ( https://www.naturepedic.com/certifications ) and is an EPA Green Power Partner. Since its inception Naturepedic has been a consistent and generous advocate and supporter of NGO's and nonprofits advocating for "Right to Know" about what is in the products that people bring into their homes.

SOURCE Naturepedic

Related Links

https://www.naturepedic.com


OneNeck named to CRN's 2021 Solution Provider 500 list for 7th year in a row. Tweet this

This year's Solution Provider 500 companies collectively generated $403 billion in 2020, up nearly 3% from last year's $393 billion.

"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.

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.

Follow OneNeck: Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook

About OneNeck

OneNeck IT Solutions LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Telephone and Data Systems, Inc., employs nearly 450 people throughout the U.S. The company offers hybrid IT solutions including cloud and hosting solutions, managed services, application management, advanced IT services, on-premise hardware and local connectivity via top-tier data centers in Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, Oregon and Wisconsin. OneNeck's team of technology professionals manage secure, world-class, hybrid IT infrastructures and applications for businesses around the country. Visit oneneck.com.

Telephone and Data Systems, Inc. (NYSE: TDS), a Fortune 1000 company, provides wireless; cable and wireline broadband, TV and voice; and hosted and managed services. TDS has approximately six million connections nationwide through its businesses U.S. Cellular, TDS Telecom, OneNeck IT Solutions LLC, and TDS Broadband Service. TDS has been named to three Forbes lists: America's Best Employers for Diversity, Best Large Employers, and Best Employers for Women. Founded in 1969 and headquartered in Chicago, TDS employs 9,600 people. Visit tdsinc.com.

About The Channel Company

The Channel Company enables breakthrough IT channel performance with our dominant media, engaging events, expert consulting and education, and innovative marketing services and platforms. As the channel catalyst, we connect and empower technology suppliers, solution providers, and end users. Backed by more than 30 years of unequalled channel experience, we draw from our deep knowledge to envision innovative new solutions for ever-evolving challenges in the technology marketplace. www.thechannelcompany.com

Follow The Channel Company: LinkedIn: @The-Channel-Co @CRN, Twitter: @TheChannelCo @CRN, Facebook: @TheChannelCompany @CRNmag

 2021 The Channel Company, LLC. CRN is a registered trademark of The Channel Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

SOURCE OneNeck IT Solutions

Related Links

http://www.oneneck.com/


Orum builds industry-defining, embeddable financial infrastructure products that enable 24/7/365 money movement. Through bleeding-edge machine learning and technology, Orum is empowering enterprises to move money seamlessly and with less riskresulting in better experiences for the end consumer.

"As a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER, I saw firsthand the deep cracks in our financial infrastructure. While most Americans are not familiar with the intricacies of ACH or why it takes multiple business days to move money between accounts, Orum is wholly focused on unlocking a better system," says Stephany Kirkpatrick, Founder and CEO of Orum. "We're investing in a best-in-class team to use data, AI, and machine learning to move money smartly across all payment rails, and in doing so, to provide universal financial access."

Orum serves a range of enterprise partnersincluding First Horizon Bank, One, Alloy, HM Bradley, and Zero Financial, recently acquired by Avantwith a suite of machine learning-backed APIs: Foresight uses exclusive intelligence for predictive funds availability, and Momentum intelligently routes funds across payment rails to optimize for speed, cost, and risk, powered by banking providers that include JPMorgan Chase and Silicon Valley Bank.

"Orum's innovative approach to money movement tackles the root of the financial infrastructure challenge," says Sameer Gandhi, Partner at Accel and Board Member at Orum. "In just 18 months, they've built game-changing technology and an exceptional team. We are thrilled to be part of Orum's journey."

"At Canapi, we work with a broad network of banks and deeply understand their most pressing challenges. Money movement tops that list, and Orum marks a fundamental shift in how the financial services industry will move money. We are excited to fuel Orum's growth, connect them to our network of banks, and work together to innovate on a decades-old system," adds Jeffrey Reitman, Partner at Canapi Ventures.

As Orum scales, the company continues to invest in tech infrastructure. Orum's most recent leadership addition is former Facebook executive, Gaurav Tandon, as SVP of Data, Machine Learning and Data Science. Tandon holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science.

"Data science and machine learning have the potential to rewrite the rules of our financial infrastructure," explains Tandon. "Orum's data-first approach stuck out to me, and I am proud to lead the company's efforts to build robust, scalable data and ML infrastructure that enables end-to-end automated workflows. It's an exciting opportunity to work on ground-breaking technology, alongside a diverse team that is deeply passionate about our mission."

The company is guided by a commitment to diversity across all layers of the organization. Orum strives for equal representation within its workforce, with a team that is 48% female and 48% non-white. In addition, Orum was inspired by the Cap Table Coalition - a partnership between high-growth startups and emerging investors who want to work to close the racial wealth gap - to allocate over 10% of this round to underrepresented founders. This round includes investors like the Neythri Features Fund, a group of South Asian women investing in the next generation of female founders and diverse teams.

About Orum

Orum is a platform for frictionless money movement. By leveraging its exclusive intelligence for predictive funds availability, Orum is building an infrastructure layer to maximize the financial potential of every American household. The Orum team is helmed by expert fintech operators from LearnVest, N26, Square, Bread and Stash and has raised over $82M from leading investors, including Accel, Canapi, Bain Capital Ventures, Inspired Capital, Homebrew, Acrew, BoxGroup, Clocktower Ventures, Primary Ventures, SVB Capital, and American Express Ventures. To learn more, visit Orum.io .

SOURCE Orum

Related Links

https://www.orum.io/


XI'AN, China, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The tourism brands' "going global" marketing event "Meet Your Shaanxi Dream, Traveling in Shaanxi" ended in success on June 20th. Consisting of online celebrities' six-day experience in Shaanxi and marketing activities held via overseas social media for a month, this event integrated sightseeing in Shaanxi with experiencing Shaanxi culture and folk customs. It enabled fans from all over the world to have an immersive experience of the lively, vigorous Shaanxi culture and tourism while getting to know the natural landscape, delicacies and history of Shaanxi.

Six online influencers from Turkey, Nigeria and South Korea were invited to appreciate the cultural and natural tourist resources of Shaanxi such as the Bell Tower, the Emperor Qinshihuang's Mausoleum and the Hukou Waterfall in five routes including the Morning Bell of Shaanxi, Traveling back to the Great Qin, as well as Visiting Chang'an of Tang.

What's more, brush calligraphy ran through the entire experience of the online celebrities, so that fans from outside China can directly see the charming traditional Chinese culture. By writing with brushes, the online celebrities interpreted the profound history and culture embodied in the cultural tourism brands of Shaanxi.

During the event, Shaanxi synchronously presented the thriving "Meet Your Shaanxi Dream, Traveling in Shaanxi" offline activities by means of photos, videos and fun interaction on overseas social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. This event received altogether over 5.3 million views on overseas social media platforms, with relevant videos viewed for over 780,000 times, creating an all-round immersive experience for fans across the world.

With the aim of accelerating the pace of Shaanxi going global in the "post-pandemic" era, continuously promoting the international influence of Shaanxi's cultural tourism brands and laying a solid foundation for the recovery of Shaanxi's inbound tourism, this marketing event has raised the influence and popularity of Shaanxi's cultural tourism brands on overseas social media platforms and expanded Shaanxi's "circle of friends" worldwide. It is an excellent example of Chinese tourism going global.

SOURCE Shaanxi Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism
SAN JOSE, Calif., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- DTEN all-in-one video conferencing technology is now available through Nuvias UC, a leading, high-value, solutions-led EMEA distributor. The entire DTEN portfolio of video-first hardware, fully enabled for Zoom, is available immediately to channel partners with the new distribution agreement.

PR NEWSWIRE

"DTEN is pleased to join with Nuvias UC to meet the fast-growing demand for our video collaboration solutions in EMEA," says Wei Liu, CEO at DTEN. "As the only Zoom distributor and master agent across Europe, Nuvias UC offers customers a one-stop solution: Zoom's frictionless communications platform and DTEN's 'it-just-works' devices."

DTEN offers video conference solutions for meeting rooms of all sizes: board rooms, huddle spaces, individual workstations, and home offices. Known for all-in-one technology, every DTEN device is Zoom-ready and offers dynamic, immersive experiences with video conferencing, content sharing and interactive whiteboarding. DTEN hardware has recently won multiple international product design awards recognizing intuitive functionality, sleek and sustainable designs, and crystal-clear audiovisual quality.

"As a leading value-add distributor of unified comms, collaboration and cloud-based UC services and solutions, our focus is on providing Zoom-based solutions which are easy to procure and deploy," states Jeremy Keefe, CEO of Nuvias UC. "DTEN's breakthrough technology will play a huge role in ensuring that we manage that successfully."

DTEN products available through Nuvias UC include DTEN D7, DTEN ON, DTEN GO with DTEN Mate, and DTEN ME. These solutions will be bundled with Zoom licenses in Nuvias UC's new Zoom+ DTEN offering, to enable easy procurement of the software and hardware together.

Keefe concludes, "From looking at DTEN's impressive all-in-one solutions, it's evident that they have a clear understanding of how to provide a high-quality Zoom experience to end-users, which is exactly what we look to offer to our channel partners."

About Nuvias UC

Nuvias UC, the Unified Communications business of the Nuvias Group, focuses on enabling innovative Unified Comms, Collaboration and cloud-based UC services and solutions. As the fastest growing UC distributor, they make it easy for their partners to meet the needs of their customers by enabling the onboarding, deployment and support of products, services, and solutions from top-class vendors.

About DTEN

DTEN is changing the way teams connect and collaborate through immersive video-first communications hardware and subscription services. Founded in 2015, DTEN has become a recognized international leader for innovation and accessibility in video conferencing, with solutions known for their "plug and play" simplicity, one tap connectivity and affordable pricing. DTEN is headquartered in San Jose, California and is found online at www.DTEN.com and LinkedIn .

For additional information, please contact [email protected] .

SOURCE DTEN
FREMONT, Calif., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- PathPartner Technology, a leading product R&D organization, today announced a collaboration with Intel Corporation to deliver an Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology-based arc welding defect detection solution to the manufacturing industry. PathPartner leverages its deep expertise in building state-of-the-art AI and Machine Vision software on Intel edge processors to help manufacturers successfully adopt the defect detection technology and expand it to address broader Industry 4.0 use-cases.

The AI technology, developed by Intel, aims to solve a costly, age-old problem of manual defect detection in the robotic welding process. It uses a deep neural network based inferencing engine to detect welding defects in a way not possible with the human eye. The solution is scalable, powered by Intel Core i7 processors and uses Intel Movidius VPUs and the Intel Distribution of OpenVINO toolkit to detect defects with very low latency and high accuracy.

The collaboration leverages Intel's AI technology and PathPartner's expertise in building highly efficient, AI-based software to help manufacturers evaluate, adopt and successfully productize the solution for their custom use-cases. PathPartner, owing to its breadth of industry experience, custom AI algorithm development expertise and engineering talent with hands-on experience on Intel edge processors, is well placed to support the manufacturers in their AI adoption journey.

"AI and machine vision technologies are transforming traditional manufacturing processes in ways we could never imagine before. PathPartner is extremely excited to collaborate with Intel and be at the forefront of this transformation," said Raman Narayan, Country Head, USA at PathPartner. "With our extensive experience in building custom AI-based solutions coupled with the compute horsepower of Intel edge processors, we are committed towards helping our customers successfully deploy machine vision on their smart factory floors and bring unprecedented efficiencies in their manufacturing processes."

Quick Evaluation on AWS Marketplace

The technology is available for a free evaluation on the AWS marketplace. System integrators and manufactures can quickly evaluate the technology without worrying about hardware dependencies, software installations and other dependencies. Check it here .

About the solution

To learn more about the solution, please visit the PathPartner solution page at: https://www.pathpartnertech.com/products/machine-vision-based-arc-welding-defect-detection-for-manufacturing

About PathPartner Technology

PathPartner is a product R&D and engineering specialist. We help our clients develop, productize, and maintain advanced technology products. With our full-stack engineering services, re-usable solution accelerators, and unparalleled experience in transforming innovative ideas into full-fledged products, PathPartner provides its clients with the advantage of top-of-the-line technologies, superior performance and faster time-to-market. With extensive expertise in embedded systems, computer vision, deep learning, multimedia and imaging technologies, PathPartner provides next-gen technology solutions to customers in automotive, internet of things, intelligent devices and digital media products domain.

PathPartner's catalog of products and services continues to expand. To know more details and collaborate on next-gen products, please visit www.pathpartnertech.com or write to us at [email protected]

Media Contacts:

Sushmita Sharma

Director of Marketing

PathPartner Technology

[email protected]

SOURCE PathPartner

Related Links

http://www.pathpartnertech.com


SURFSIDE, Fla., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Patrick Daniel Law, in partnership with Circus Eats, CASA Church, and Vanessa Brito of HuffPost, will serve meals Tuesday to first responders, fire and rescue workers, and others on the front line of the rescue efforts at the collapsed Champlain Towers South condominium. The Circus Eats food truck is preparing chicken tenders, french fries, and fried Oreos for the brave men and women trying to save more lives.

Lunch will be prepared starting at 2 p.m. EDT Tuesday up and down Collins Avenue from 89th to 94th streets. Up to 400 first responders are expected to be served.

MAKING A DIFFERENCE

The Surfside collapse is certainly not a mystery to the nation. What is lesser known are those groups that are boots on the ground helping out in any way possible. From a hug for an aggrieved victim to a bottle of water for a police officer, helping is a moving target right now.

Attorney Patrick Daniel and his wife, Nicolette Daniel, decided to volunteer at the site of the Surfside condo collapse in the wake of a personal tragedy. Nicolette, the Chief Strategic Officer at Patrick Daniel Law, recently suffered the sudden loss of her mother.

"One day she was there and the next she wasn't," Nicolette said. On seeing the rescue efforts in Surfside on the news, she told Patrick, "I know the pain of shock and fear and I knew what they needed. We cannot be afraid and look away. I needed to say, WE can do this, and you can hold my hand.

"I wanted to try and ease the pain and make even a small difference."

Putting the business at the law firm on hold, Patrick and Nicolette contacted their staff and friends to invite anyone who wanted to try to make a difference to pack their bags, make arrangements, and go to Surfside without a return date.

Unsure of what they could do, what they would encounter and might find, or who to even approach, they started the process. Starting with water, they escalated their efforts based on police, first responder, victim advocate, and fire and rescue requests from the front lines.

The help progressed based on the specific requests from the brave men and women looking for the victims  over 150 of them unaccounted for at the time. Bottled water turned into gum, deodorant, snacks, energy drinks, sunscreen, lip balm, and ponchos.

The Patrick Daniel Law team partnered with the efforts at Casa Church and went to "ground zero" together. They saw the incident site from a firsthand perspective  it was horrifying, resembling a warzone.

"Nothing I had ever seen was like it," said Patrick Daniel, a catastrophic injury attorney . "It resonated with me and scared me  I cannot imagine the fear experienced by those victims of the disaster."

Patrick, who has handled cases involving traumatic brain injuries, spinal cord injuries, amputation, and wrongful death, has been shaken by the devastation at the site of the condo collapse.

"I have seen some really sad things in my time as an attorney," he said, "but nothing compares to what is going here in Surfside."

ABOUT PATRICK DANIEL LAW

Based in Houston, Texas, Patrick Daniel Law serves clients statewide and nationwide in complex legal claims involving serious injuries and wrongful death. Founder and principal attorney Patrick Daniel is supported by a knowledgeable and compassionate team who share his commitment to providing legal service that is Strategic, Meticulous, and Merciless.

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SOURCE Patrick Daniel Law
TAMPA BAY, Fla., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Pelipost has announced its new scholarship program for high school graduates or undergraduate students pursuing a college degree. The "Overcoming Adversity" scholarship was created to empower and reward five such students who are overcoming the challenges of having an incarcerated parent/guardian.

Pelipost, the makers of an app for uploading and delivering photos directly to incarcerated loved ones, is passionate about giving back to their community, and particularly close to the cause of supporting college-bound children of the incarcerated. That's because company co-founders Joe and Becky Calderon know from personal experience how difficult incarceration is on children.

Joe Calderon was a freshman in college when his mother, Becky, was sentenced to three years in prison. His communication and support system were severed the instant she was booked. As Becky walked through the motions of getting settled into her new reality on the inside, Joe was left to pack her belongings, figure out arrangements and make sure all her outstanding needs were taken care of while she was away. He completed all these daunting, emotional tasks while grieving his mother's support and absence in his life, juggling a loaded schedule of classes and a full-time job.

The physical, financial, emotional, and educational impact of having your loved one incarcerated is an unbelievably heavy burden to bear, especially for a child. The National Institute of Corrections estimates roughly 2.7 million children have an incarcerated parent or guardian. These staggering statistics reveal that there are more children impacted by incarceration than adults currently in the prison system.

To apply for the "Overcoming Adversity" scholarship, students must be U.S. citizens who are high school graduates or undergraduate students pursuing a college degree. They must submit a 300-750 word essay and share: 1) How has your loved one's incarceration impacted your life, education and future goals? 2) How are you overcoming adversity through this experience?

About Pelipost

Pelipost is 'The Photos-to-Prison App' that makes it easy to stay connected with your incarcerated loved ones. Share your special moments by sending beautiful, full-color 4x6 photos directly from your smartphone. Pelipost prints and ships your photos directly to your loved one in any city, state, or federal correctional facility in the USA.

Natalie Calderon

Chief Marketing Officer, Pelipost

[email protected]

SOURCE Pelipost

Related Links

https://www.pelipost.com/


CHICAGO, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Physician Growth Partners (PGP) is pleased to announce a partnership between Sperling Dermatology (Sperling) and Forefront Dermatology (Forefront), a portfolio company of OMERS private equity. This partnership facilitates Forefront's continued growth serving as an entry point into the State of New Jersey.

Founded in 2016 by board-certified Dermatologist Dr. Shari Sperling, Sperling Dermatology has been recognized as both the fastest-growing cosmetic dermatology business in the country and the #1 provider of body sculpting services, most notably CoolSculpting, nationally. Dr. Sperling partnered with career sales & marketing executive Ari Katz to develop a differentiated platform powered by unmatched marketing, technology and patient-acquisition capabilities. Sperling's unique angle is supplemented by a renowned medical offering and reputation that led to Dr. Sperling becoming the highest-rated dermatologist on HealthGrades.

Sperling's multi-faceted strategy combines 12 providers across a three-office footprint in New Jersey alongside New Jersey's first Mobile Spa, an innovative "straight to your door" mobile treatment solution. Forefront will be able to catalyze Sperling's future growth by leveraging Sperling's unique brand, marketing, and patient acquisition strategies not only across the New Jersey market, but its entire national footprint.

Physician Growth Partners served as the exclusive transaction advisor to Sperling Dermatology in its evaluation, negotiation, and execution of this transaction. Russell Hilton of Alston and Bird provided legal counsel to Sperling Dermatology.

"The Sperling Dermatology brand has always been focused on differentiating ourselves from the market," noted partners Dr. Shari Sperling and Ari Katz. "Our rapid trajectory toward becoming the largest provider of CoolSculpting/body sculpting services nationally proved that we'd figured that out, but we were at a crossroads in terms of navigating the next chapter of our growth. PGP's strategic guidance led by Ezra Simons, coupled with the execution supported by Jeremy Murphy and Jay Farkas, enabled us to meet with an unbelievable pool of qualified potential partners, all with different backgrounds and a unique angle within healthcare services. PGP ensured each group was exceptionally competitive from a valuation and structural standpoint. As a result, we were able to choose the partner that we felt would put us in the best position to realize our full potential. Forefront truly checked every box. As the leading dermatology group practice in the country with a national footprint and growing cosmetic offering, we felt there was a unique opportunity to continue growing the Sperling Dermatology brand in New Jersey while working alongside Forefront to build similar success stories in other markets. We could not be more excited for this next chapter."

"It was an honor working with Dr. Sperling and Ari Katz in their pursuit and ultimate consummation of the partnership with Forefront. Sperling had developed a patient acquisition model we hadn't seen before from a dermatology business. It was clear that, if we were able to position the business the right way, we could generate significant interest beyond traditional healthcare service-focused investors and strategics. We tailored a unique process that we felt could truly position the Sperling team to realize their potential. Ari and his team were able to comprehensively evaluate their strategic options and choose from multiple, very attractive and differentiated proposals and visions for growth. Ultimately, Forefront's growth-oriented nature, vast resources, and shared values surrounding high-quality patient care, alongside the ability to spread leverage what Sperling does so well across an existing, expansive, and well-respected footprint, solidified their position as the ideal partner for Sperling Dermatology. We're extremely excited about this transformational partnership and look forward to what the future holds for the platform," said Ezra Simons, Managing Partner at Physician Growth Partners.

About Physician Growth Partners (PGP)

Physician Growth Partners is one of the most active national healthcare advisory firms dedicated to representing physician platforms in transactions with private equity. PGP creates value by providing operational support, strategic positioning, and transaction advisory, ultimately realizing an optimal outcome for its clients.

SOURCE Physician Growth Partners, LLC
SAN DIEGO and PERTH, Australia, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- PYC Therapeutics (ASX: PYC), a biotechnology company developing a new generation of precision RNA therapeutics to change the lives of patients with inherited diseases, today released a comprehensive summary of preclinical findings supporting the potential of PYC's VP-002 program as the first disease modifying therapy for patients suffering from Autosomal Dominant Optic Atrophy (ADOA). PYC's PPMO technology used in the VP-002 program significantly increases levels of OPA1 protein and corrects major functional deficits that underly ADOA. Building on recent announcements relating to the VP-002 program, further optimized lead candidates have shown an even more potent ability to increase the OPA1 protein to greater than 1.5-fold. These data support continued development of the program toward clinical trials, which are estimated to initiate in the first half of 2023.

Together with VP-001, PYC's development program for Retinitis Pigmentosa type 11, the Company is now progressing two lead programs towards clinical trials, both of which could be the first disease modifying therapies for two important inherited retinal diseases. This approach also underscores the breadth of potential application of the Company's PPMO technology which PYC will continue to apply towards additional programs within and outside of ocular diseases.

ADOA is a genetic disease that causes progressive blindness affecting approximately 1 in 30,000 people globally1. The majority of ADOA cases are caused by loss of function mutations in the OPA1 gene, leading to haploinsufficiency of the OPA1 protein. The VP-002 program aims to treat ADOA through the upregulation of the target OPA1 protein.

"We are encouraged by the growing preclinical evidence for the VP-002 program supporting PYC's novel PPMOs potential as a differentiated, disease-modifying approach to treating OPA1 ADOA," said Prof. Sue Fletcher, Chief Scientific Officer of PYC. "There are currently no approved treatments, nor any in clinical development, for OPA1 ADOA. Our PPMO technology has demonstrated an ability to reach the target cells in the retina, a key barrier facing other potential approaches for this disease that show limited ability to reach target cells at even higher doses. We look forward to progressing additional preclinical efficacy and safety studies to advance the development of this program."

Highlights from PYC's preclinical research, which includes both in vivo assessments together with assessments in cells derived from four different patients with OPA1 ADOA, underscore the potential of the VP-002 program as the first disease modifying approach for the treatment of OPA1 ADOA. To-date, the Company has demonstrated the ability of PYC's PPMOs to:

Increase the target OPA1 protein by greater than 1.5-fold in a dose-dependent and mutation agnostic manner

Increase mitochondrial bioenergetics and adenosine triphosphate (ATP) production in a dose-dependent and mutation agnostic manner

Protect cells from apoptosis in a dose-dependent and mutation agnostic manner, rescuing the critical functional deficit observed in ADOA patients to near healthy levels; and

Effectively reach target retinal ganglion cells in vivo, compared to alternative antisense oligonucleotide (ASO) approaches that have demonstrated limited ability to reach these cells at much higher doses.

"These results show that PYC's PPMO technology is uniquely placed to address OPA1 ADOA and validate its continued development closer to the clinic," said Sahm Nasseri, U.S. CEO of PYC. "This program will address an important unmet patient need and a large target market. We expect to file an Investigational New Drug (IND) application with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the first half of 2023."

To learn more about the Company's VP-002 program and preclinical data, visit the Press Releases section of the Investor Center on the PYC website at https://pyctx.com/investor-center/ where a technical deck has been made available.

About PYC Therapeutics

PYC Therapeutics (ASX: PYC) is a development-stage biotechnology company pioneering a new generation of RNA therapeutics that utilize PYC's proprietary library of naturally derived cell penetrating peptides to overcome the major challenges of current genetic medicines. PYC believes its PPMO (Peptide conjugated Phosphorodiamidate Morpholino Oligomer) technology enables a safer and more effective RNA therapeutic to address the underlying drivers of a range of genetic diseases for which no treatment solutions exist today. The Company is leveraging its leading-edge science to develop a pipeline of novel therapies including three preclinical stage programs focused on inherited eye diseases and a preclinical discovery program focused on neurodegenerative diseases. PYC's discovery and laboratory operations are located in Australia, and the Company's preclinical, clinical, regulatory and corporate operations are based in San Diego, California. For more information, visit pyctx.com, or follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Forward looking statements

Any forward-looking statements in this announcement have been prepared on the basis of a number of assumptions which may prove incorrect and the current intentions, plans, expectations and beliefs about future events are subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors, many of which are outside the Company's control. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from assumptions or expectations expressed or implied in this announcement include known and unknown risks. Because actual results could differ materially to assumptions made and the Company's current intentions, plans, expectations and beliefs about the future, you are urged to view all forward-looking statements contained in this announcement with caution. The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statement whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

1 Lenaers G, Hamel C, Delettre C, Amati-Bonneau P, Procaccio V, Bonneau D, Reynier P, Milea D. Dominant optic atrophy. Orphanet J Rare

Dis. 2012 Jul 9;7:46. doi: 10.1186/1750-1172-7-46. PMID: 22776096; PMCID: PMC3526509

SOURCE PYC Therapeutics

Related Links

https://pyctx.com


MOSCOW, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF, Russia's sovereign wealth fund) announces the data of UAE's Ministry of Health on the Russian Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine confirming its safety and high efficacy during the vaccination campaign.

Efficacy among more than 81,000 subjects who had received both components of Sputnik V was 97.8%. Analysis is based on the data collected by June 8, 2021.

The Russian vaccine was also fully (100%) effective against severe cases of COVID.

Vaccination data indicates high safety of Sputnik V:

No severe adverse events associated with vaccination;

No cases of hospitalization after vaccination:

No deaths related to the vaccination;

No cerebral vein thrombosis (CVT) cases after vaccination;

No cases of myocarditis reported.

Sputnik V was registered in UAE in January 2021 under the emergency use authorization procedure.

Kirill Dmitriev, CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), said:

"Sputnik V complies with the highest healthcare standards while demonstrating safety and efficacy during the vaccination in UAE. Sputnik V is one of the best COVID vaccines in the world as confirmed by data from Argentina, Serbia, San-Marino, Bahrain, Hungary, Mexico and other countries. Administering the Russian vaccine helps create durable immunity among the population and provides for lifting the restrictions and returning to normal life."

Sputnik V has a number of key advantages:

The Sputnik V vaccine is based on a proven and well-studied platform of human adenoviral vectors, which cause the common cold and have been around for thousands of years.

Sputnik V uses two different vectors for the two shots in a course of vaccination, providing immunity with a longer duration than vaccines using the same delivery mechanism for both shots.

The safety, efficacy and lack of negative long-term effects of adenoviral vaccines have been proven by more than 250 clinical studies over two decades.

There are no strong allergies caused by Sputnik V.

The storage temperature of Sputnik V at +2+8 C means it can be stored in a conventional refrigerator without any need to invest in additional cold-chain infrastructure.

The price of Sputnik V is less than $10 per shot, making it affordable around the world.

Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) is Russia's sovereign wealth fund established in 2011 to make equity co-investments, primarily in Russia, alongside reputable international financial and strategic investors. RDIF acts as a catalyst for direct investment in the Russian economy. RDIF's management company is based in Moscow. Currently, RDIF has experience of the successful joint implementation of more than 80 projects with foreign partners totaling RUB 2.1 tn and covering 95% of the regions of the Russian Federation. RDIF portfolio companies employ more than 800,000 people and generate revenues which equate to more than 6% of Russia's GDP. RDIF has established joint strategic partnerships with leading international co-investors from more than 18 countries that total more than $40 bn. Further information can be found at www.rdif.ru

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1140939/Russian_Direct_Investment_Fund_Logo.jpg

For additional information contact:

Alexey Urazov

Russian Direct Investment Fund

Director for External Communications

Mobile: +7 915 312 76 65

E-mail: [email protected]



Andrew Leach / Maria Shiryaevskaya

Hudson Sandler

Tel: +44 (0) 20 7796 4133

SOURCE Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF)
CHICAGO, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Chicago-based R.J. O'Brien & Associates (RJO), the oldest and largest independent futures brokerage and clearing firm in the United States, today announced that Daniel Staniford has been promoted to President, acting on behalf of RJO and all of its global affiliates and related entities, including JVMC Holdings Corp., its parent company.

Staniford will also retain his role as RJO Chief Sales Officer, continuing to report to Gerald Corcoran, Chairman and CEO of RJO, acting on a group-wide basis. The promotion is effective immediately. The position of President has not existed at the company since 2009, and the firm's global presence now includes affiliates and offices in the UK, Dubai, France, China and Canada.

Corcoran said: "Dan has injected into our global sales efforts an unparalleled drive for excellence, always applying his deep knowledge of the markets and a profound sense of integrity. Over the past five years, he has proven to be a strong and decisive partner, committed to growing the company, building a best-in-class sales organization and reinforcing our unique culture. It was clear to me and our Board that Dan has earned the respect of our talented staff and is ready to join me in leading the entire firm as we continue our strategic, global expansion."

John O'Brien, Sr., member of the Board and speaking on behalf of the O'Brien family, which holds a majority interest in RJO, said: "We are thrilled to have Dan join Gerry in leading the firm that has been part of our family for nearly 107 years. Dan shares in our belief that nurturing relationships with clients and doing business the right way are the soul of this company, and we look forward to his contributions and vision as he embarks on his new role."

Staniford said: "I'm both excited and humbled to take on this new leadership opportunity on behalf of one of the most iconic firms in the business. One of my highest priorities as I continue to lead our exceptional global sales team will be a focus on driving top-line revenues for both long-established as well as emerging business lines throughout our organization."

Staniford assumes the role of President with nearly 25 years of experience in sales and management at some of the world's leading banks and financial services institutions. He joined RJO in 2016 as Executive Director, in charge of the firm's institutional business development in New York and London. He was promoted in May 2019 to the expanded role of Chief Sales Officer, overseeing global sales as well as RJO's Marketing organization, charged with ensuring the external brand and presence is aligned with sales strategies.

Prior to joining RJO, Staniford spent 13 years at Citigroup Global Markets, serving ultimately as Managing Director, Rates Sales. He spent the first seven years of his career at Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., where he became a Vice President in the Commodities Lending Department. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and an MBA in Finance from Columbia University in New York.

About R.J. O'Brien & Associates

Founded in 1914, R.J. O'Brien & Associates is the largest independent futures brokerage and clearing firm in the United States, serving more than 80,000 institutional, commercial and individual clients globally, in addition to a network of approximately 300 introducing brokers (IBs). RJO services the industry's most expansive global network of IBs, a vast array of middle market firms and many of the world's largest financial, industrial and agricultural institutions. The firm offers state-of-the-art electronic trading and 24-hour trade execution on every major futures exchange worldwide. RJO has received the FOW International Award for Non-Bank FCM of the Year for the past five years. At the HFM US Quant Awards 2020, RJO won the award for Best Independent FCM  the eighth honor bestowed by the HFM Global publications on RJO and its UK affiliate.

SOURCE R.J. O'Brien & Associates

Related Links

http://www.rjobrien.com


AUSTIN, Texas, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Rollick Inc., the leading relationship marketing technology provider for the Marine, Powersports, and RV industries, announced today that every GoRollick dealer in its network will now have access to the Reserve Now feature of its industry-first digital retailing solution for no extra cost through the end of 2021. RollickDR also contains integrated modules that allow users to view publicly available incentives and special offers, get a trade-in value estimate, schedule an appointment and use a payment calculator.

Since launching in April 2021, dealers using RollickDR report close rates that are 50% higher than a standard lead capture form. The tool also generates 87% more overall leads for dealers due to the many ways that a consumer can engage to buy the vehicle they're interested in. The pilot showed that 40% of users who submit a lead also complete a pre-qualification. Those customers who pass the pre-qualification check closed at a rate of 240% higher than a standard lead submitted by a consumer outside of the RollickDR tool.

"We've seen overwhelmingly positive results on RollickDR since launching the solution in early April," said Bernie Brenner, CEO of Rollick. "We have millions of members and employee groups through our strategic partnerships with trusted affinity organizations. They expect and appreciate the ability to provide more information to dealers while online when it improves their experience and speeds up the purchase process."

Existing GoRollick network dealers will have the tool added for no additional charge starting in July. Dealers interested in joining the GoRollick network can learn more by visiting https://gorollick.com/company/lets-talk.

RollickDR Testimonials

"Due to increased demand and the large amounts of inbound leads coming into our dealership daily, Rollick's Digital Retailing Solution is generating the highest quality, transaction-ready customers I've ever seen. The result is valuable time savings for me and my sales team," said Rick Santiago, Seminole Powersports.

"Giving customers the ability to build their deal online by estimating their monthly payments, pre-qualifying for financing, and scheduling appointments through Rollick's Digital Retailing solution is going to help my dealership streamline the buying process," said Patrick Green, Tobler Marina.

"Rollick's solutions bring a lot of value to our existing and conquest customers. The conversion process is smooth and consistently high on ROI, and Rollick's new digital retailing solution is empowering our sales team to sell more units in less time. The Rollick team is by far the best partner I have met in the RV industry," said Kristina Shrider, Giant Recreation World.

About RollickDR

Rollick's digital retailing solution provides a consolidated tool to help consumers gather detailed transaction information about a potential purchase and, when ready, provide all of the researched information to the dealer. With RollickDR, consumers can get pre-qualified for financing, review OEM & dealerships offers, estimate the value of a trade-in, schedule appointments, and reserve a vehicle in a simple interface that's embedded in the dealer's website.

Related:

About Rollick, Inc.

Rollick connects manufacturers, dealers, and finance and insurance providers with in-market consumers in the Powersports, RV, and Marine industries to deliver a seamless customer journey. Rollick's solutions include new customer acquisition, enterprise lead management, customer experience/loyalty, and marketing automation. In addition, the company has rapidly built its GoRollick.com outdoor recreational vehicle buying marketplace to include a nationwide network of dealers, over 100 manufacturers, and an affinity partner network with access to over 250 million high-quality customers including policyholders of major insurance providers, employees at more than 2,000 top U.S. companies, members of the military, veterans and first responders. For more information, visit Rollick .

SOURCE Rollick

Related Links

http://www.rollick.io


"This phase one placement at CVS, the largest drugstore chain in the USA, 1 is a significant milestone for Rritual's national retail rollout. In terms of the Rritual brand, placement with CVS further establishes confidence in our products and escalating demand for this category with consumers," said Mr. David Kerbel, Rritual Superfoods CEO. "Rritual's placement in CVS is doubly significant because our products have been chosen for CVS's new HealthHUB locations, which aims to transform the 'consumer health experience' with education and personalized service from CVS trained professionals at the community level."

In 2020, CVS opened 650 HealthHUB locations, and it plans to have 1,500 locations open by the end of 2021. CVS HealthHUB locations offer online streams of wellness and nutrition content from its community rooms in place of in-person classes, and care concierges pivoted to focus on reaching out to patients telephonically.

CVS will carry Rritual's full individual product line, including:

Chaga IMMUNE with adaptogens Eleuthero Root and Astragalus to support healthy immune function and well-being all year round.

with adaptogens Eleuthero Root and Astragalus to support healthy immune function and well-being all year round. Lion's Mane FOCUS with adaptogens Rhodiola Rosea Root and Bacopa to support brain health and cognitive function.

with adaptogens Rhodiola Rosea Root and Bacopa to support brain health and cognitive function. Reishi RELAX with adaptogen Ashwagandha and cacao to help the body adapt to stress.

Rritual will work with CVS to develop an in-store education program for CVS trained professionals to best serve CVS consumers on their "path to better health."

Rritual has scaled its production to meet growing demand, with a strategic sales and marketing focus aimed at major retailers across the USA in 2021. As previously noted, Rritual's retail strategy is disruptive, the Company is aiming at national retailers rather than regional rollouts to gain market share and establish category defining leadership.

Rritual product offerings are all USDA-certified organic and are a caffeine-free option that can be mixed with other beverages or enjoyed by itself. Rritual's proprietary Immune-Synergy Six Mushroom Blend is the only functional health product on the market that contains a daily prebiotic blend which nourishes a healthy gut microbiome and facilitates balanced digestive function.

1 https://www.drugchannels.net/2020/03/the-top-15-us-pharmacies-of-2019.html

About CVS and HealthHUB

CVS is a health care innovation company with a simple and clear purpose: Helping people on their path to better health. CVS is united around a common goal of becoming the most consumer-centric health company. CVS is evolving based on changing consumer needs and meeting people where they are, whether that's in the community at one of our nearly 10,000 local touchpoints, in the home, or in the palm of their hand.

HealthHUB locations offer a broader range of health care services, new product categories, digital and on-demand health tools, trusted advice and personalized care. With the new format more than 20% of the store is now dedicated to health services. HealthHUB teams are improving care for patients managing chronic conditions, with a focus on recommending next best clinical actions and driving medical costs savings. The HealthHUB store format also includes a variety of pathways to nutritional health with one-on-one and group counseling delivered by an in-store dietitian, as well as access to weight loss programs.

The design of the HealthHUB also includes community spaces and digitally enabled offerings. Wellness rooms are available for CVS professionals and community partners to host group events, including health classes, nutritional seminars and benefits education.

About Rritual

Rritual is a fast-growing functional superfood company that creates natural wellness products which support a holistic approach to a healthy lifestyle. The company is poised to dominate a segment where demand and sales are growing exponentially. Under the executive leadership with over 100 years of CPG pedigree, Rritual has launched distribution to major retailers and is positioning itself to lead and define functional health and wellness industry as a superfood platform. Rritual markets organic wellness products in the United States through initial retail rollout which includes over 10,000 points of sale and through www.rritual.com.

Follow Rritual on Twitter , LinkedIn , Facebook , and Instagram .

Functional Foods Market

According to Grandview Research*, it is estimated that the global functional food market is projected to reach $275 billion by 2025, growing at 7.9% each year with consumers putting more emphasis on health and wellness.



*https://www.grandviewresearch.com/press-release/global-functional-foods-market



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.

Forward-Looking Information

This news release contains forward-looking statements and forward-looking information within the meaning of Canadian securities legislation (collectively, "forward-looking statements") that relate to Rritual's current expectations and views of future events. Any statements that express, or involve discussions as to, expectations, beliefs, plans, objectives, assumptions or future events or performance (often, but not always, through the use of words or phrases such as "will likely result", "are expected to", "expects", "will continue", "is anticipated", "anticipates", "believes", "estimated", "intends", "plans", "forecast", "projection", "strategy", "objective" and "outlook") are not historical facts and may be forward-looking statements and may involve estimates, assumptions and uncertainties which could cause actual results or outcomes to differ materially from those expressed in such forward-looking statements. 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. In particular and without limitation, this news release contains forward-looking statements relating to the Company's plans to leverage third party manufacturing and logistics, the Company's broader retail distribution plans and the Company's other plans, focus and objectives.

Forward-looking statements are based on a number of assumptions and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond Rritual's control, which could cause actual results and events to differ materially from those that are disclosed in or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the impact and progression of the COVID-19 pandemic and other factors set forth under "Forward-Looking Statements" and "Risk Factors" in the final long form prospectus of the Company dated February 26, 2021 and available under the Company's profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Rritual undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as may be required by law. New factors emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for Rritual to predict all of them or assess the impact of each such factor or the extent to which any factor, or combination of factors, may cause results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statement. Any forward-looking statements contained in this news release are expressly qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement.

SOURCE Rritual Superfoods Inc.
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Summer learning loss has been a concern among educators for decades. Because of the inconsistent year schools have had due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there is increased worry.

Summer learning loss is a reduction of the academic learning accomplished during the school year. Teams across National Heritage Academies (NHA) have been collaborating for months to set a strong foundation for summer learning programs. With enhanced and self-paced options, schools can offer summer learning to all and target those who may need additional support. This is possible by all students being provided a Chromebook, which allows access to quality digital tools that support their development in both reading and math.

Kim Gray, English language arts specialist at NHA, explained that learning loss can be detrimental for students because if a student regresses over the summer, it takes a portion of the next school year to regain what was lost. "This cuts into the learning gains that can be achieved the next year, and then the cycle continues," she said.

According to a study published in the American Education Research Journal, 52% of first- through sixth-grade students lost an average of 39% of the academic gains they accomplished during the school year. To combat this, Gray provided five methods that can be implemented to reduce summer learning loss:

Balance. This school year took a toll on everyone, and it's important that families support not only academic needs but social emotional needs, as well. A student struggling emotionally will struggle to access academic content. Read together. Find a book to just enjoy and get lost in it. Not only will reading with one another strengthen your family unit, but strong language comprehension is essential to reading comprehension. A student's vocabulary immensely impacts their ability to comprehend a text. Audio books. If reading isn't your jam or you're going on a long car ride, listen to audio books. Listening comprehension is just as important as decoding when it comes to reading comprehension. Check out your local library. Experiences. Experiences expand vocabulary. Don't forget about all the amazing virtual experiences online, as well. You don't have to leave your house to visit a butterfly conservatory, access Mars, or even visit the Great Wall of China! Games. Games are a great way to build students social emotional learning and have fun together. Many games even incorporate reading and math concepts.

"Providing students with resources to support them academically when they aren't in school is essential to keep students minds working and processing so they can continue to learn and grow as much as they can the next year," said Gray.

About National Heritage Academies:

NHA is a network of 98 tuition-free, public charter schools across nine states, serving more than 60,000 students in kindergarten through 12th grade. For more information, visit nhaschools.com.

SOURCE National Heritage Academies

Related Links

www.heritageacademies.com


SALT LAKE CITY, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Scorpion , a leading provider of technology and services helping local businesses thrive, today announced it is now a Yelp Advertising Partner, enabling Scorpion customers to optimize their presence on Yelp and manage advertising campaigns more efficiently.

As a Yelp Advertising Partner, all Scorpion customers have access to exclusive tools, such as zip code targeting, campaign goals, negative keywords, and other pilot programs that take a granular and customized approach to ad delivery. Additionally, the partnership unlocks profile optimizations, dedicated agency teams and better pricing to ensure all campaigns run optimally. With tens of millions of users on Yelp, these capabilities ensure Scorpion customers can better engage desired audiences across relevant verticals on the platform.

"We're committed to delivering exceptional tools that strengthen our customers' position in their respective markets and ultimately benefit the communities they serve," said Jamie Adams, Chief Growth Officer at Scorpion. "Our strategic partnership with Yelp adds an important new layer to our product suite, enabling stronger consumer engagement and unique insights that help our local business customers connect with prospects and drive sales."

"We are thrilled that Scorpion is joining Yelp's Advertising Partner Program and getting access to the agency-specific resources and support that we provide exclusively to these partners," said Drew Canniff, Division VP, Agencies & Partner Sales at Yelp. "Through our partnership, Scorpion can support their thousands of local business clients on Yelp, by optimizing advertising campaigns and implementing critical profile enhancements."

About Scorpion

Scorpion is the leading provider of technology and services helping local businesses thrive. It helps local service providers understand their unique market dynamics, maximize their marketing efforts, and deliver experiences their customers will love. Scorpion puts SEO, Reviews, Advertising, Email Marketing, Chat and Messaging, Social Media, Websites, Lead Management, Appointment Scheduling, and more to work for local businesses. The company brings everything together in a way that's easy to understand and manage, blending AI and teams of real people with vertical expertise committed to customers' success and ready to do whatever it takes to help them reach their goals.

Scorpion is Headquartered in the Salt Lake City area, with offices in California, Texas, and New York. For more information, please visit https://www.scorpion.co/about-us/ .

SOURCE Scorpion

Related Links

https://www.scorpion.co


Seegene unveils "MOBILE STATION" at the Medlab Middle East 2021

Mobile laboratory designed for mass testing at schools, airports, or communities , delivering test results within 3h 30min with the maximum testing capacity of 7,500 a day

, delivering test results within 3h 30min with the maximum testing capacity of 7,500 a day The biotechnology firm to sign an MOU with G42 Healthcare, a leading health-tech company based in Abu Dhabi , expanding diagnostics business opportunity in the Middle East

SEOUL, South Korea, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- South Korea's leading biotechnology firm Seegene Inc. (KQ 096530) today introduced its new deployable container laboratory "MOBILE STATION", at the Medlab Middle East 2021, the world's largest medical laboratory and In Vitro Diagnostic exhibition which is taking place in Dubai from June 21 to 24.

Seegene's MOBILE STATION, an innovative laboratory-on-wheels facility, is designed to deploy the gold standard PCR testing solution to anywhere community-based testing is needed. While many countries around the world are planning to re-open their borders, schools, and public-use facilities, MOBILE STATION is considered an ideal option for conducting mass PCR testing in such locations. Also, MOBILE STATION can be mobilized anytime, allowing more people to utilize molecular diagnostics when needed.

MOBILE STATION sets the new bar of PCR lab setting with its ability to deliver effective testing solutions to anywhere testing is needed. PCR testing has been normally conducted only at fixed space due to concerns of cross-contamination. However, MOBILE STATION, with Seegene's technology and know-how gained through operation of South Korea's largest reference laboratory, has already minimized the overall risks of aerosol contamination posed in PCR process by installing Class 2 (A2) Bio-Safety Cabinet and negative pressure room.

From sample collection to automated interpretation of results, it offers streamlined and automated workflow backed by the company's All-in-One platform thereby allowing equitable access to health care for the public. Seegene's All-in-One platform, when fully utilized, can conduct up to 7500 tests per day with a turnaround time of 3.5 hours.

Seegene's pioneering concept of the mobile laboratory is expected to play a significant role in stopping the current pandemic since Seegene offers unparalleled PCR testing solution with its exclusive multiplex assays including Allplex SARS-CoV-2 Master Assay, a kit that simultaneously detects COVID-19 and multiple virus variants and Allplex SARS-CoV-2/FluA/FluB/RSV Assay, a kit differentiates 8 target genes including Flu A, Flu B, RSV A/B and three different target genes of COVID-19. MOBILE STATION is also fully compatible with Seegene's more than 150 multiplex assay menus including tests for respiratory infectious pathogens, HPV, STI, and GI.

Seegene also introduced 'Combo Swab', a self-administrable sample collection device. In comparison to nasopharyngeal swab, typically used in sampling for COVID-19 PCR testing, in which health care providers collect samples by inserting a swab deep inside nostrils, Combo Swab allows individuals to simply collect samples with two individual swabs through swirling around their nasal and oral cavity by two individual swabs without any discomfort. In addition, Combo Swab with dual sample collection showed the same accuracy compared to nasopharyngeal swab. Self-sample collection availability of Combo Swab along with provisional space scalability of MOBILE STATION enables mass testing to be proceed in a quicker time and more efficient manner than the conventional process.

Meanwhile, 'Seegene Middle East,' the company's Middle East subsidiary, signed an MOU on the same day, with Group 42 healthcare, a leading Information Technology and healthcare company to promote the MOBILE STATION in the Middle East and North Africa.

Min-cheol Lee, Seegene's Chief Technology Officer said, "As COVID-19 is likely to become endemic, the MOBILE STATION will play a key role in not only detecting COVID-19, but also closely monitoring other new viruses that can threaten our daily lives in the future. Seegene's multiple virus variant detection kits can detect the new strains of virus and prevent them from turning into an additional outbreak of subsequent pandemic waves.

U.S. Media Contact:

Kristin Schaeffer

E: [email protected]

SOURCE Seegene Inc.
Sharon was selected as a finalist by a panel of independent judges for his unstoppable drive and success, building Better Nutritionals into the largest starchless gummy manufacturer globally. Entrepreneur Of The Year is one of the preeminent competitive award programs for entrepreneurs and leaders of high-growth companies. The nominees are evaluated based on six criteria: entrepreneurial leadership; talent management; degree of difficulty; financial performance; societal impact and building a values-based company; and originality, innovation and future plans. Since its launch, the program has expanded to recognize business leaders in more than 145 cities in over 60 countries around the world.

Sharon embodies Better Nutritionals' brand promise of "Always Be Better," as he continuously strives for improvement and is always on the path to setting and reaching the next great milestone. Sharon's tireless dedication and boundless creative vision led to him identifying the need for a superior, world class contract manufacturing facility for supplements, founding Better Nutritionals as a result, and growing it to breathtaking heights of success. He spearheaded the construction of 18,500 sqft pharmaceutical-grade manufacturing facility in 2017. Since then, the business has grown from 7 employees to 700+, added 420,000 sqft, and revenue has increased by 25,000%.

Perhaps most notably, Sharon has built the company on the foundational value of caring for its community, including each and every employee, partner and end customer. Better Nutritionals sets the industry standards in customer-centricity, quality, safety, and innovation on a global level, with Sharon at the helm, based on his belief that there are no bad teams, only bad leaders. As such, he has built a diverse and lean leadership team, bound by the shared mission of making the highest quality products with integrity for better, accessible human health.

"I am deeply honored to be recognized as a finalist for one of the most prestigious awards in business, "says Sharon, "I also see this as a tribute for all of Better Nutritionals. I learned early on that there's only one way to ensure that everything we create reflects our values and meets our high standards, and that is a group of people wholeheartedly dedicated to creating exceptionally great, enduring products with intent. This is just the start of the accomplishments that we will be able to achieve together and the best is yet to be."

Award winners will be announced during a special virtual celebration on July 29 and will become lifetime members of an esteemed community of Entrepreneur Of The Year alumni from around the world. Regional award winners are eligible for consideration for the Entrepreneur Of The Year National Awards, to be announced in November at the Strategic Growth Forum, one of the nation's most prestigious gatherings of high-growth, market-leading companies. The Entrepreneur Of The Year National Overall Award winner will then move on to compete for the EY World Entrepreneur Of The Year Award in June 2022.

Sponsors

Founded and produced by Ernst & Young LLP, the Entrepreneur Of The Year Awards are nationally sponsored by SAP America and the Kauffman Foundation.

In Greater Los Angeles, sponsors also include Marsh & Tangram, Avitas Wealth Management, Cresa, Donnelly Financial Solutions and Olmstead Williams Communications

About Entrepreneur Of The Year

Entrepreneur Of The Year is the world's most prestigious business awards program for unstoppable entrepreneurs. These visionary leaders deliver innovation, growth and prosperity that transform our world. The program engages entrepreneurs with insights and experiences that foster growth. It connects them with their peers to strengthen entrepreneurship around the world. Entrepreneur Of The Year is the first and only truly global awards program of its kind. It celebrates entrepreneurs through regional and national awards programs in more than 145 cities in over 60 countries. National Overall winners go on to compete for the EY World Entrepreneur Of The Year title. ey.com/us/eoy

About EY Private

As Advisors to the ambitious, EY Private professionals possess the experience and passion to support private businesses and their owners in unlocking the full potential of their ambitions. EY Private teams offer distinct insights born from the long EY history of working with business owners and entrepreneurs. These teams support the full spectrum of private enterprises including private capital managers and investors and the portfolio businesses they fund, business owners, family businesses, family offices and entrepreneurs. Visit ey.com/us/private

About EY

EY exists to build a better working world, helping create long-term value for clients, people and society and build trust in the capital markets.

Enabled by data and technology, diverse EY teams in over 150 countries provide trust through assurance and help clients grow, transform and operate.

Working across assurance, consulting, law, strategy, tax and transactions, EY teams ask better questions to find new answers for the complex issues facing our world today.

EY refers to the global organization, and may refer to one or more, of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, each of which is a separate legal entity. Ernst & Young Global Limited, a UK company limited by guarantee, does not provide services to clients. Information about how EY collects and uses personal data and a description of the rights individuals have under data protection legislation are available via ey.com/privacy. EY member firms do not practice law where prohibited by local laws. For more information about our organization, please visit ey.com.

Contact: Anthony Tyre

Company: Better Nutritionals

Tel: 310 617 1921

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE Better Nutritionals
NEW YORK, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Shutterstock, Inc. (NYSE: SSTK ) , a leading global creative platform offering full-service solutions, high-quality content, and tools for brands, businesses and media companies, will report its second quarter 2021 business and financial results on Tuesday, July 27, 2021 before the market opens.

The company will host a conference call at 8:30 a.m. ET to discuss the results. The conference call can be accessed in the U.S. at (844) 634-1442 or outside the U.S. at (615) 247-0239 with the conference ID# 5195865. A live audio webcast of the call will also be available on Shutterstock's website at http://investor.shutterstock.com .

Following completion of the call, a recorded replay of the webcast will be available in the investor relations section of Shutterstock's website. A telephone replay of the call will also be available until August 3, 2021 in the U.S. at (855) 859-2056 or outside the U.S. at (404) 537-3406 with the conference ID# 5195865.

About Shutterstock

Shutterstock, Inc. (NYSE: SSTK ), is a leading global creative platform offering full-service solutions, high-quality content, and tools for brands, businesses and media companies. Directly and through its group subsidiaries, Shutterstock's comprehensive collection includes high-quality licensed photographs , vectors , illustrations , videos and music . Working with its growing community of over 1.7 million contributors, Shutterstock adds hundreds of thousands of images each week, and currently has more than 370 million images and more than 21 million video clips available.

Headquartered in New York City, Shutterstock has offices around the world and customers in more than 150 countries. The Company also owns Bigstock , a value-oriented stock media offering; Shutterstock Studios, an end-to-end custom creative shop ; Offset, a high-end image collection ; PremiumBeat, a curated royalty-free music library; Shutterstock Editorial, a premier source of editorial images and videos for the world's media; Amper Music, an AI-driven music platform ; and TurboSquid, a leading 3D content marketplace .

For more information, please visit www.shutterstock.com and follow Shutterstock on Twitter and on Facebook .

SOURCE Shutterstock, Inc.

Related Links

www.shutterstock.com


LAS VEGAS, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Southwest Gas Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: SWX) announced today that its wholly-owned subsidiary, Centuri Group, Inc. ("Centuri"), has entered into a definitive agreement under which Centuri will acquire Riggs Distler & Company, Inc. and its affiliates ("Riggs Distler"). Founded in 1909, and based in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, Riggs Distler has extensive relationships and long-term Master Service Agreements (MSA) with nearly all of the major investor-owned electric utilities in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions and provides unionized installation and repair services to its utility customers.

"This is an exciting and transformational acquisition for Centuri that will grow and diversify its utility services platform, while opening up exciting new opportunities in electric utility services, renewable energy, and 5G telecom," said John P. Hester, President and Chief Executive Officer of Southwest Gas Holdings. "Consistent with our excellent track record from prior acquisitions, we are confident this transaction will deliver significant growth opportunities for Centuri and long-term value for Southwest Gas Holdings shareholders by building upon our fundamental business strategies of operational excellence, strategic growth, and financial stewardship across both segments of our business. In addition, the Riggs Distler acquisition will further enhance the powerful synergy of knowledge gained and shared through front-line experience in diverse geographic markets across our utility and infrastructure platforms."

Under the terms of the transaction, Centuri will acquire a 100% ownership interest in Riggs Distler for $855 million in cash subject to customary adjustments, including working capital. The all-cash purchase is expected to be fully funded by new Centuri debt.

The transaction, which is expected to be accretive to SWX earnings in the first full year following its completion, will broaden Centuri's electric services platform to include 5G telecom and renewables services, where Riggs Distler helps utility customers design, build and integrate essential decarbonization solutions including deployment of smart meters, electric vehicle charging stations, battery storage and microgrids. The acquisition will expand Centuri's operating footprint into new markets in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic region and allow it to serve additional customers with an increased array of complementary capabilities and partner with those customers on their long-term programmatic infrastructure spending plans. The transaction also will enhance Centuri's utility service offerings for existing customers, further positioning the combined companies for future growth.

Paul M. Daily, President and Chief Executive Officer of Centuri, said, "Our targeted acquisition strategy has prioritized expanding our unionized electric utility services, geographic reach and customer base, and this transaction meets all of our criteria. Riggs Distler is an exceptional company with a strong, seasoned leadership team and substantial growth trajectory. This is an excellent opportunity to expand our services, and importantly, to add a unionized electric utility services platform to our current utility infrastructure portfolio, materially advancing our goal to provide 360 degrees of service to our utility infrastructure customers. We believe there are substantial growth opportunities for the combined organizations, and we are committed to providing the resources and operational support to ensure a highly successful partnership."

Stephen Zemaitatis Jr., President and Chief Executive Officer of Riggs Distler, said, "We are proud to join Centuri, a company that shares our century old core values of commitment to safety, operational excellence, and delivering high quality, competitive, and essential services to customers. United, we will benefit from greater financial strength, growth and diversification. We look forward to creating long-term value for all stakeholders, including world-class service for our customers and solid opportunities for our employees."

The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2021, subject to Hart Scott Rodino clearance and other customary closing conditions. Following the close of the transaction, Riggs Distler will operate as a standalone subsidiary of Centuri within its Power Group and will continue to be led by Mr. Zemaitatis and its current senior leadership team.

Southwest Gas Holdings will host a conference call with analysts today at 8:30 a.m. EDT / 5:30 a.m. PDT. To listen to the conference call via the Internet, please visit the investor relations section of Southwest Gas Holdings' website. To listen to the conference call via telephone, please call (877) 419-3678 (domestic) or (614) 610-1910 (international), Conference ID: 2489927. A replay of the call will be available from 12:00 p.m EDT on June 29, 2021 through 12:00 p.m. EDT on July 9, 2021. To listen to the replay of the conference call via telephone, please call (855) 859-2056 (domestic) or (404) 537-3406 (international), Conference ID: 2489927.

UBS Investment Bank served as the exclusive financial advisor to Centuri, while the firm of Foley & Lardner, LLP served as legal advisors to Centuri on the transaction. Morrison & Foerster LLP served as legal advisor to Southwest Gas Holdings. Harris Williams & Co. served as financial advisor to Riggs Distler and Kirkland & Ellis LLP as legal counsel.

About Southwest Gas Holdings, Inc.

Southwest Gas Holdings has two business segments:

Southwest Gas Corporation provides safe and reliable natural gas service to over 2 million customers in Arizona, California and Nevada.

Centuri Group, Inc. is a comprehensive utility infrastructure services enterprise dedicated to delivering a diverse array of solutions to North America's gas and electric providers.

About Riggs Distler & Co., Inc.

Founded in 1909, Riggs Distler self-performs turnkey union construction solutions in the utility, telecom, and industrial markets in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release may include "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The ultimate occurrence of events and results referenced in these forward-looking statements is subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause the actual results or performance to differ from those projected in the forward-looking statement. Among others, these statements relate to the anticipated acquisition of Riggs Distler, the anticipated timing for closing the transaction, the anticipated timing and impact to our earnings, our expectations regarding our ability to integrate Riggs Distler, and our expectations with respect to the impact of the Riggs Distler acquisition on our Centuri infrastructure business. No assurance can be given that the Riggs Distler acquisition will be completed on the terms described, or at all, or that we will achieve the anticipated benefits. Completion of the Riggs Distler acquisition is subject to numerous risks and conditions, many of which are beyond the control of the Company, including market conditions, general economic conditions and other factors, including those set forth under the heading "Risk Factors" in the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2020, and those set forth in the Company's other reports and information filed with the SEC, which are accessible on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov.

SOURCE Southwest Gas Holdings, Inc.

Related Links

https://www.swgasholdings.com


NEW YORK, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Stellar Health ("Stellar"), a leading healthcare technology company, would like to thank Jonathan Blum for his support and advisory of Stellar Health. Before becoming an Advisor, Jonathan was the Principal Deputy Administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services ("CMS") under the Obama Administration and has returned, as of June 7th, 2021, to continue his work with CMS under the Biden Administration.

In 2018, when Stellar was founded, Jonathan joined the Stellar Board of Advisors, helping them create a transparent incentive program, so providers know exactly what they need to do to be successful from both a payor and provider lens. "Payors have started to commit to value-based models, which starts with a product like Stellar Health. Someone needs to help Providers transition to value-based care in an easy-to-adopt way," said Jonathan upon joining the Board. He shared more of his thoughts on healthcare market trends on Stellar's 2020 Healthcare Predictions Podcast . With Jonathan's help and insight over the years, Stellar has been able to successfully transition over 5,000 providers to value-based care.

Stellar would like to thank Jonathan for his expert advice and contributions to the Stellar Health platform and team. "It has been a pleasure having Jonathan Blum as a Stellar Health Board Advisor. We are excited for him to take on this new role at CMS under the Biden Administration to continue to improve healthcare. We look forward to seeing all that he accomplishes," said Michael Meng, Chief Executive Officer at Stellar Health.

About Stellar Health:

Stellar Health ("Stellar") is a point-of-care, cloud-based platform that activates primary care providers to achieve value-based care ("VBC") goals that improve patient outcomes, such as improving quality scores and optimizing the patient care journey through transitions of care and high-value referrals. The Stellar platform helps primary care providers continually engage with their patients by providing them real-time information and tangible action-based incentives for improving quality of care. Stellar Health's mission is to enable all providers to engage and succeed in VBC by bridging the incentive gap between providers and payors.

If you would like more information, please contact Stellar Health at [email protected] or visit their website at www.stellar.health

Contact Stellar Health

Telephone (929) 382-4886

Email [email protected]

Website www.stellar.health

SOURCE Stellar Health

Related Links

https://stellar.health


TORONTO, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - Superior Gold Inc. ("Superior Gold" or the "Company") (TSXV: SGI) today announced a number of changes to its Board of Directors. Michael Mulroney, Northern Star Resources Limited's ("Northern Star") nominee Director has resigned as a Director to concentrate on his position as Chief Geological Officer for Northern Star. As previously announced, effective July 1, 2021 following his appointment as President and CEO, Chris Jordaan is appointed as a Director and Tamara Brown again becomes an Independent Director after stepping down as Interim CEO.

Mark Wellings, Chairman of Superior stated: "We would like to thank Mike for his contributions during his time with Superior Gold. We also welcome Chris Jordaan to the Board and look forward to working with him to execute on our growth strategy at Superior Gold."

Michael Mulroney, Chief Geological Officer of Northern Star stated: "The Board and management of Superior has done a tremendous job of putting in place a clear and concise organic growth plan for the Plutonic Gold Operations. We are very encouraged by the recent progress that the Company has made on both the operational and explorational fronts and believe that the Board has put in place a new management team that will be able to execute on its growth plan. We will continue to be supportive shareholders and continue to work with the Company as a partner in the mining industry in Western Australia."

About Superior Gold

Superior Gold is a Canadian based gold producer that owns 100% of the Plutonic Gold Operations located in Western Australia. The Plutonic Gold Operations include the Plutonic underground gold mine and central mill, numerous open pit projects including the Plutonic Main Pit push-back project, the Hermes open pit projects and an interest in the Bryah Basin joint venture. Superior Gold is focused on expanding production at the Plutonic Gold Operations and building an intermediate gold producer with superior returns for shareholders.

Forward Looking Information

This news release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities laws that is intended to be covered by the safe harbours created by those laws. "Forward-looking information" includes statements that use forward-looking terminology such as "may", "will", "expect", "anticipate", "believe", "continue", "potential" or the negative thereof or other variations thereof or comparable terminology. Forward-looking information includes information with respect to guidance as to projections, outlook, guidance, forecasts, estimates, and other statements regarding future or estimated financial and operational performance, gold production and sales, revenues and cash flows, and capital costs (sustaining and non-sustaining), including projected cash operating costs and all-in sustaining costs) as well as statements with respect to the mine-plan, exploration, drilling, operating and organizational matters and activities relating to the Plutonic Gold Operations and the Company generally, including its liquidity and capital requirements and financial results. Such Forward-looking information also includes information related to the Company's previously announced strategic review process, the potential outcome of such process and the intended maximization of shareholder value that the Company believes may result from such process. By identifying such information in this manner, the Company is alerting the reader that such information is subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information.

Forward-looking information is not a guarantee of future performance and is based upon a number of estimates and assumptions of management at the date the statements are made. Furthermore, such forward-looking information involves a variety of known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual plans, intentions, activities, results, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from any future plans, intentions, activities, results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking information. Readers are encouraged to refer to the Annual Information Form of the Company for a discussion of other risks including outbreaks or threats of outbreaks of viruses, other infectious diseases or other similar health threats, such as the novel coronavirus outbreak, which could have a material adverse effect on the Company by causing operational and supply chain delays and disruptions, labour shortages, shutdowns, the inability to sell gold, capital markets volatility or other unknown but potentially significant impacts. The Company cannot accurately predict what effects these conditions will have on the Plutonic Gold Operations or the financial results of the Company, including uncertainties relating to travel restrictions to the Plutonic Gold Operations or otherwise and business closures that have been or may be imposed by governments. If an outbreak or threat of an outbreak of a virus or other infectious disease or other public health emergency occurs, it could have a material adverse effect on the Company's business, financial condition and results of operations.

The Company cautions that there can be no assurance that forward-looking information will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such information. Accordingly, investors should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information as no assurance can be given that any of the events anticipated by the forward-looking information will transpire or occur, and if any of them do so, what benefits the Company will derive therefrom. Except as required by law, the Company does not assume any obligation to release publicly any revisions to forward-looking information contained in this news release to reflect events or circumstances after the date hereof. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange not its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

SOURCE Superior Gold

Related Links

https://www.superior-gold.com/


Innovative new features present in the most recent update include:

Add to List - trade professionals can now create custom product lists directly within the app. In addition to being able to personalize list names, add/delete items, and share/shop all lists from one place, it's possible to upload a company logo to create customized quotations to email directly to clients.

- trade professionals can now create custom product lists directly within the app. In addition to being able to personalize list names, add/delete items, and share/shop all lists from one place, it's possible to upload a company logo to create customized quotations to email directly to clients. Reviews - app users can now read/write reviews for any product within the app.

- app users can now read/write reviews for any product within the app. Faster Checkout Experience - with the ability to easily manage saved credit cards and addresses, check-out is now faster and more convenient.

- with the ability to easily manage saved credit cards and addresses, check-out is now faster and more convenient. TradeMaster Program  trade professionals can review and apply to SupplyHouse.com's TradeMaster program from directly within the app. This free program for tradespeople provides lower pricing and exclusive benefits.

SupplyHouse.com has seen exponential growth in TradeMaster app engagement: in the last six months, over 10% of total TradeMaster orders originated from within the app, with roughly 15% of all active TradeMasters relying on it to place orders.





"The app lets me order on the fly. Not only do they save me money, but they also save me hours of waiting in line at the counter. And everyone I've spoken with [at SupplyHouse.com] is genuinely nice," expressed SupplyHouse.com TradeMaster, Lance Little from Santa Cruz Radiant.

About SupplyHouse.com

SupplyHouse.com, is an e-commerce company that is home to over 180,000 plumbing, HVAC, and electrical supplies, providing trade professionals and homeowners with fast shipping, personalized customer service, and industry low prices. SupplyHouse.com has over 500 employees across its four locations in Nevada, New Jersey, New York, and Ohio, with a new Texas location opening in the coming months. With core values centered around Generosity and Respect, as well as a unique company culture that emphasizes Innovation and Teamwork, SupplyHouse.com strives to make a positive impact on its customers, employees, partners, and the greater community.





SOURCE SupplyHouse.com

Related Links

http://supplyhouse.com


DUBLIN, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Switzerland Data Center Market - Investment Analysis and Growth Opportunities 2021-2026" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

Switzerland data center market size to witness CAGR of 3.44% during 2021-2026.



Switzerland is a major and mature data center market, which ranks 12th across the globe in terms of mobile internet speed and 4th in fixed broadband services. The internet penetration in the country is over 95%.

Telecommunication service providers, enterprises, government agencies, and cloud and colocation service providers are the major data center investors in Switzerland. IT companies account for over 50% of data center service demand in Switzerland.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS OF THE REPORT:

Server systems suitable for machine learning and artificial intelligence workloads are likely to observe growth during the forecast period.

The adoption of 200/400 GbE ports is likely to increase, significantly impacting data center interconnection solutions.

Mission-critical and high-performance server systems are likely to dominate the market owing to the increase in IoT-related technology.

The majority of facilities are built to be Tier III standards, with N+1 redundant configuration across UPS systems.

In terms of electrical infrastructure, generators with N+1 redundant configuration expect to observe growth during the forecast period.

Data center operators in Switzerland are to procure generators with at least 48 hours of on-site fuel backup.

are to procure generators with at least 48 hours of on-site fuel backup. Free cooling techniques and chillers are the most adopted cooling systems in facilities.

The use of 45U-48U rack units expects to grow during the forecast period; however, 42U rack units are likely to observe a decline.

SWITZERLAND DATA CENTER MARKET INSIGHTS

The growing demand for smart devices and analytics cloud adoption and the growth of wireless networking technologies have led several Switzerland -based organizations to invest in Big data and IoT technology.

-based organizations to invest in Big data and IoT technology. Over 90% of the population in Switzerland is covered under 5G. The deployment of 5G across the country will enable IoT devices to communicate and share data at a faster speed.

is covered under 5G. The deployment of 5G across the country will enable IoT devices to communicate and share data at a faster speed. The adoption of cloud-computing technology in 2020 grew by around 30%. The adoption of cloud computing technology has experienced considerable growth in Switzerland over the last few years.

over the last few years. The revenue from the public cloud expects to reach over $10 billion by 2026.

by 2026. Cities such as Zurich and Geneva lead the colocation market. Zurich is considered one of the largest Tier III colocation markets in Europe .

and lead the colocation market. is considered one of the largest Tier III colocation markets in . The share of wholesale colocation will increase in the coming years, with increased investments by cloud service providers.

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the shift from on-premise to colocation facilities by enterprises and the government are increasing the data center service demand.

The country has a high internet penetration at around 96% of the overall population, with around 7.33 million active mobile internet users.

Smart city initiatives and 5G deployment will increase the number of connected devices during the forecast period, leading to edge data center deployments across the country.

SWITZERLAND DATA CENTER MARKET VENDOR LANDSCAPE



The Switzerland data center market comprises several IT infrastructure providers, construction contractors, support infrastructure providers, and investors. Vendors have involved a flurry of infrastructure and construction activities.

They are at the forefront of several innovations that aim to enhance the operational efficiency of facilities, reduce power consumption, and decrease carbon emissions. Renewable energy sources power multiple hyperscale facilities. The adoption of cloud-based services, big data analytics, and IoT services has been driven by local enterprises, boosting local colocation and managing host services demand in the market.



IT Infrastructure Providers

Arista Networks

Atos

Broadcom

Cisco Systems

Dell Technologies

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)

Huawei Technologies

IBM

Lenovo

NetApp

Construction Service Providers

Arup

Basler & Hofmann

cpcm (construction project cost management)

DPR Construction

ffbk Architekten

Gruner

ISG

Steiger Concept

Turner & Townsend

Support Infrastructure Providers

ABB

Caterpillar

Cummins

Eaton

KOHLER-SDMO

Legrand

Rittal

Rolls-Royce Power Systems

Schneider Electric

Socomec

STULZ

Trane Technologies

Vertiv

Data Center Investors

Digital Realty

Equinix

ewl (energie wasser luzern)

Green Datacenter

Safe Host

Vantage Data Centers

REPORT COVERAGE:



The segmentation includes:



Existing Vs. Upcoming Data Centers

Existing Facilities in the region (Area and Power Capacity)

List of Upcoming Facilities in the region (Area and Power Capacity)

SWITZERLAND DATA CENTER INVESTMENT COVERAGE



Infrastructure Type

IT Infrastructure

Electrical Infrastructure

Mechanical Infrastructure

IT Infrastructure

Server

Storage

Network

Electrical Infrastructure

Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS)

Generators

Transfer Switches and Switchgears

PDUs

Other Electrical Infrastructure

Mechanical Infrastructure

Cooling Systems

Rack Cabinets

Other Mechanical Infrastructure

General Construction

Building Development

Installation & Commissioning Services

Building Design

Physical Security

DCIM

Tier Segments

Tier I & Tier II

Tier III

Tier IV

Geography

Zurich

Geneva

Lausanne

Lucerne

Wolhusen

Bern

Lupfig

Steinhausen

Satigny

WHY SHOULD YOU BUY THIS RESEARCH?

Market size available in the area, power capacity, investment, and colocation revenue.

An assessment of the investment in Switzerland by colocation, hyperscale, and enterprise operators

by colocation, hyperscale, and enterprise operators Data center investments in terms of area (square feet) and power capacity (MW) across cities in the country

A detailed study of the existing market landscape, an in-depth industry analysis, and insightful predictions about the Switzerland data center market size during the forecast period

data center market size during the forecast period Snapshot of existing and upcoming third-party facilities in Switzerland

Facilities Covered (Existing): 31

Facilities Identified (Upcoming): 9

Coverage: Over 11 Regions

Existing vs. Upcoming (Data Center Area)

Existing vs. Upcoming (IT Load Capacity)

Data center colocation market in Switzerland

Market Revenue & Forecast (2020-2026)

Retail Colocation Pricing

Wholesale Colocation Pricing

Classification of the Switzerland data center market investments into multiple segments and sub-segments (IT, power, cooling, and general construction services) with market sizing and forecast

data center market investments into multiple segments and sub-segments (IT, power, cooling, and general construction services) with market sizing and forecast A comprehensive analysis of the latest trends, growth rate, potential opportunities, and growth restraints, and market prospects for the industry

Business overview and product offerings of prominent IT infrastructure providers, construction contractors, support infrastructure providers, and data center investors operating in the market

A transparent research methodology and the analysis of the demand and supply aspect of the market

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/546rgz

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Research and Markets

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SOURCE Research and Markets

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Throughout their thriving music career, the Black Eyed Peas have won six Grammy Awards in multiple categories. They achieved awards for their albums, singles, and performances. With multiple awards and 12.4 million albums sold, the group has unquestionably distinguished themselves as a household name. Vocalist Fergie was added as a permanent member of the group in 2002 and contributed to the massive success of the group. They have collaborated with a variety of A-list talent from different genres such as Justin Timberlake, David Guetta, Queen Latifah, and South Korean artist CL plus more. Fans were able to recognize any Black Eyed Peas song through her distinct lyrics and strong vocals. Fergie departed from the group in 2017 but the group stayed consistent in making new music hits.

Currently consisting of will.i.am, alp.de.ap and Taboo, the group continues to make popular bangers and collaborate with other worldwide acts. The group's eighth studio album, Translation, was recorded in both English and Spanish and released in 2020 to rave reviews. The album garnered 11 entries on Billboard's Latin Airplay chart and four number ones on the US airplay with "MAMACITA" with Ozuna and J. Rey Soul, "RITMO (Bad Boys For Life)" with Colombian superstar J Balvin , "FEEL THE BEAT" with Maluma and "GIRL LIKE ME" featuring "Queen of Latin Music," Shakira since the album's release a year ago.

Being a global act with deep multicultural roots, the group incorporates different sounds to appeal to a worldwide audience. Currently signed to Epic Records, the group will start touring while concurrently working on a follow-up to the popular album, Translation. The very talented group consistently proved that they go above and beyond any expectations. Just recently, the group played its first post-quarantine concert in Miami at FPL Solar Amphitheater which amassed around 9,000 fans. Keep a look out for their upcoming shows in France and Sweden as well as KXOL Los Angeles' Latin music festival, Calibash, at the Staples Center in January 2022. The international music sensation continues to remain as a strong cultural phenomenon and be celebrated with their latest Billboard magazine print cover feature.

SOURCE Grassroots Music
TUSCALOOSA, Ala., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The custom web design and digital marketing experts located in Tuscaloosa, Alabama expanded to meet a growing need in storytelling centered around the customer experience. The expansion furthers The Nine's footprint to serve as an activator and hub for global B2B and DTC growth.

The Nine announced the acquisition of Crossland Communication, a brand content agency based in Pensacola, Florida in a move that marks a commitment to center the customer experience in building fully engaged positive, powerful and impactful online experiences.

With machine learning and AI, we create content that tells stories in your customer's own words. Tweet this The Nine's web design and digital marketing agency expands with customer experience.

"Over the past two decades, we have seen a need for high quality content," said Robby White, founder and CEO of The Nine. "For the brands and businesses we work with, content improves everything from lead generation to SEO ."

Through the merger, The Nine integrated a breakthrough technology, Vox Verba, an AI-assisted marketing tool that intersects web development and digital marketing with the customer's story.

"We unlock business intelligence from your customer reviews and testimonies with machine learning and AI to find powerful messages and stories," shares Andrya Allen, The Nine Partner. "When you listen and integrate those insights across your business, you accelerate customer growth."

By listening to your customer's voice, we develop clear and confident key messages, traits and characteristics, storylines and assign unique brand positioning for your brand using a typology that segments into over 1,700 brand identities. Vox Verba provides voice of customer and brand insights for direct to consumer brands ranked some of which are in the global top three of online stores on the DTC Power List.

The acquisition expands The Nine's client base from broad national clients to international and venture-backed startups and expands services to include global market consulting, corporate training and team development while adding another location in Pensacola, Florida with the talent and resources needed to best serve our clients.

With designers, developers and marketers collaborating together, The Nine is able to produce millions in revenue across industries for clients. Current clients include billion dollar corporations with B2B and B2C markets, ecommerce brands ranked in Shopify's top 1%, international consumer goods companies, as well as intergovernmental and not-for-profit organizations.

Under Allen's leadership, Crossland Communication hosted workshops for TED speakers, innovators and creatives in business growth and marketing across six countries with training and development opportunities in global coworking spaces. Since starting in 2015, the brand content firm developed and managed go-to-market strategy and product launches for high growth brands including recognition, features, awards and press partnerships with TED, Healthline, Sony, Quickly and European startup programs.

Allen is a featured speaker, panelist and published researcher for organizations like the National Communication Association, the Advertising Federation, the Florida and Alabama Public Relations Associations and the world's largest group of social advertisers with Facebook Ad Buyers. Firm partners are top accelerators, Fortune 50 companies and resource hubs for startups ranging from investment firms to international food producers.

Partner results include increased revenues, new acquisition channels, viral video consumption, highly engaged audiences and brand voice that speaks with both intimacy and clarity.

In addition to the expansion, The Nine announced breaking ground on a partnership with Stillman College, a private Presbyterian and historically black liberal arts college, to bring technology courses, workshops, seminars, pitch opportunities, technology learning lab for students with onsite work study and internship placement. The partnership will host competitions and events to serve students and community members through the launch of The Hatchery, an up and coming incubator for innovators that need resources to reach their objectives.

"We were reactionary marketers prior to engaging The Nine to help us. Together, we came up with a strategy, and from there the number grew exponentially. Our monthly sales grew 681%, revenue 827%, and orders over 400% during the first year of working with them." W. Michael Wilson, Vice President of Marketing and Packaging at Afflink, a division of Performance Food Group. Wilson continues, "And the best part is we accomplished this on the same ad spend as before. Simply putour business wouldn't have survived without The Nine."

As a community expert and educator, The Nine offers digital training and courses to founders and their creative teams. The Nine invites executives and marketing teams with plans for customer acquisition growth to the Nine Foundations Series for Digital Marketing. The series walks you through the foundational steps of generating leads, search engine optimization, ecommerce and content marketing . Join The Nine on August 6th at 10 am online for an interactive, hands on workshop with actionable tactics for building a strong marketing foundation.

"Our digital marketing process will transform your marketing budget into a measurable investment in your company's growth," added Paris Vega, The Nine Partner, "The Foundations course is the first step in that process."

Interested teams can register for digital marketing training at https://www.nine.is/training .

About The Nine

The Nine is an award-winning web development and digital marketing agency in Tuscaloosa, Alabama with an expertise in trackable results. Gaining industry recognition for high performing campaigns, The Nine has grown into a team of more than 30 members as one of the fastest growing agencies in the Southeast. Founder Robby White started the Nine to make an impact in his community by creating high value jobs and great work in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The Nine is a strategic partner with Vox Verba, a business intelligence tool for fully integrating customer voice and leadership vision into your content marketing strategy.

Media Contact:

Andrya Allen

850-602-2296

[email protected]

SOURCE The Nine

Related Links

https://www.nine.is


LONDON, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Colossal 'Queen's Beasts' the height of three storey houses, dragons the dimension of London buses, and more than 5,000 military personnel, performers, key workers and volunteers from across the UK and all corners of the Commonwealth are planned to celebrate The Queen's 70-year reign next year in the Platinum Jubilee Pageant.

Held in London on Sunday 5th June 2022, The Pageant is shaping up to be one of the largest celebratory events for decades and will tell the story of Her Majesty's record reign and our transforming society over this unprecedented period.

Sir Michael Morpurgo, author of War Horse, has written a faerie story titled There once is a Queen, which Pageant Master Adrian Evans LVO is bringing to life, harnessing the talents of artists and creatives from every part of the nation and beyond.

The Pageant is underpinned by a commitment to sustainability and social impact and inclusivity. The company will offer internships and volunteering opportunities and encourage the creative projects to measure the impact that they are having in the local community.

The organising company, The Platinum Jubilee Pageant, is co-chaired by Sir Michael Lockett KCVO and Nicholas Coleridge CBE. The CEO is Rosanna Machado. The Pageant is privately funded, financed by a mixture of corporate partners, commercial businesses, royal warrant holders and generous individuals, who wish to honour Her Majesty The Queen.

Nicholas Coleridge CBE, Co-Chairman, comments: "Through the fusion of ceremonial and pageantry with razzmatazz and festival, we intend to create a spectacle that is at once energising and memorable and a fitting tribute to The Queen."

Sir Michael Lockett KCVO, Co-Chairman of the Platinum Jubilee Pageant, says: "The Pageant will take us on a journey through to the digital decade of the nineties and onwards to today where we stand on the cusp of new adventures and fresh progress."

Adrian Evans LVO, Pageant Master added: "We are commissioning artists and the communities they work with to interpret different chapters of The Queen's reign in a spectacular unfolding story."

For further information please visit the website .

[email protected]

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1553812/Platinum_Jubilee_Pageant_Logo.jpg

SOURCE The Platinum Jubilee Pageant
About WHrC

WHrC is a global initiative focused on working with multi-stakeholder partners to identify gaps in women's health care and address unmet need. WHrC brings women's health to the forefront by promoting patient centered research and innovation to define and spread best practices related to women's health issues. Learn more at https://womenshealthresearchcollaborative.com/.

Learn more by reaching out to [email protected].

SOURCE The Kinetix Group

Related Links

http://thekinetixgroup.com


Inspired by the strength of online communities and the growing creator economy, Giving Palette uses beauty as a means to engage audiences. Unboxing a Giving Palette is an experience that lets you learn, explore and interact with the stories that have inspired causes.

'We've been working on this since the start of the year and can't wait for the world to see the design, color stories, and quality of the palettes' said Giving Palette founder Vladimir Novosselov about the upcoming release. Each eyeshadow palette contains 10 unique, high-definition shades. Shades were developed using highly pigmented, luxurious ingredients and are paraben free. Formulas are vetted against a list of 2355 banned ingredients. Buttery in texture and great for blending, customers are able to use of neutrals, shimmers or smokey shades to curate a wide range of looks between the three palettes. Focused on sustainability and fair trade, Giving Palette's packaging is recyclable.

By partnering with nonprofits such as Trans Lifeline, Vladimir Novosselov aims to gain support for causes using skills he's honed from involvement in online communities and experience designing premium-quality consumable items. The Giving Palette team uses their expertise working on social media platforms, as well as creating high quality consumer goods that are made with quality for everyday use.

The Pride palette includes elegantly designed packaging inspired by a rainbow gradient as well as ten clean-vegan, paraben free shades: Noire, Tan, Cobalt, Coral, Lemon, Raw Sienna, Slate, Chartreuse, Burlywood, Peach Puff.

About Trans Lifeline

Trans Lifeline provides trans peer support for our community that's been divested from police since day one. The organization is run by and for trans people. Visit them at translifeline.org .

About Giving Palette

Giving Palette's products are cruelty free and vegan, made to raise money for good. Currently available to buy exclusively online with shipping to the United States of America. Explore the upcoming collection on givingpalette.com .

About Vladimir Novosselov

Vladimir Novosselov is a tech entrepreneur, investor and founder of Giving Palette. His specialties include working with creators, product and design. Read more about him at vladimirnovosselov.com .

CONTACT

Name: Vladimir Novosselov

Email: [email protected]

Phone: (802) 487-5417

SOURCE Giving Palette

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givingpalette.com


KENOSHA, Wis., June 28, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- U-Haul of Forest Park at 6503 39th Ave. permanently closed its doors on June 24 after 44 years of serving the local community.

The facility had been open to self-move customers since 1977. U-Haul sold the 0.72-acre property and 3,500-square-foot building to Grasscape Landscaping of Wisconsin, LLC.

Customers of this former U-Haul location can find a full line of U-Haul products and services just 1.5 miles away at U-Haul Moving & Storage of Kenosha at 4404 52nd St., site of a renovated and repurposed former Walmart store.

U-Haul Moving & Storage of Kenosha offers truck and trailer sharing, U-Box portable storage containers, moving supplies, towing equipment, professional hitch installation, bike racks and more.

Customers also have access to 716 indoor self-storage units with climate-control options and high-tech security features at affordable price points. There is the convenience of a covered drive-in area to shield customers from the weather when loading and unloading storage possessions.

"The acquisition of this new store has allowed us to better serve customers with a larger presence in the Kenosha area," said Adam Muszynski, U-Haul Company of South Eastern Wisconsin. "We have the ability to expand further at this location, and we are not immediately limited by the lot size."

Acquisition of the 52nd Street property was driven by U-Haul Corporate Sustainability initiatives: U-Haul supports infill developments to help local communities lower their carbon footprint. The adaptive reuse of existing buildings reduces the amount of energy and resources required for new-building materials and helps cities reduce their unwanted inventory of unused buildings.

Local U-Haul Companies are always exploring opportunities for growth as they pursue means to better serve the needs of customers, but sometimes find it necessary to close or relocate stores. Reasons for closures can include: long-term strategic plans; physical plant limitations; shifts in demographics; trends in migration; expansion of the U-Haul neighborhood dealer network; and proximity to other new or existing U-Haul stores.

As a result of U-Haul of Forest Park closing, three U-Haul Team Members were let go.

As an essential service provider, U-Haul continues to serve communities during the COVID-19 recovery while offering contactless business programs and enhanced cleaning protocols, including added steps for sanitizing equipment between customer transactions. U-Haul products are used daily by First Responders; delivery companies bringing needed supplies to people's homes; small businesses trying to remain afloat; college students; and many other dependent groups, in addition to the do-it-yourself household mover.

About U-HAUL

Since 1945, U-Haul has been the No. 1 choice of do-it-yourself movers, with a network of more than 23,000 locations across all 50 states and 10 Canadian provinces. U-Haul Truck Share 24/7 offers secure access to U-Haul trucks every hour of every day through the customer dispatch option on their smartphones and our proprietary Live Verify technology. Our customers' patronage has enabled the U-Haul fleet to grow to approximately 176,000 trucks, 126,000 trailers and 46,000 towing devices. U-Haul offers nearly 812,000 rentable storage units and 70.5 million square feet of self-storage space at owned and managed facilities throughout North America. U-Haul is the largest retailer of propane in the U.S., and continues to be the largest installer of permanent trailer hitches in the automotive aftermarket industry. U-Haul has been recognized repeatedly as a leading "Best for Vets" employer and was recently named one of the 15 Healthiest Workplaces in America.

Contact:

Andrea Batchelor

Jeff Lockridge

E-mail: [email protected]

Phone: 602-263-6194

Website: uhaul.com

SOURCE U-Haul
NEW YORK, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- From racial equality to voting rights, US corporations are facing mounting pressure to take stands on a growing list of social issues. A new report by The Conference Board helps companies decide whether and how to address such topics.

As the study details, the stakes have risen: Companies must decide whether to speak out on hot-button social issues at a time of intense polarization, with stakeholder views on all sides of the spectrum and social media fueling extreme divisions. Moreover, the challenges of navigating these complexities and the pressure to take stands show no signs of going away. Many employees and others believe government is not doing enough to address societal problems, and they are increasingly looking to companies for leadership.

The report's insights come primarily from a roundtable discussion hosted by The Conference Board ESG Center. More than 100 executives participated in a discussion on how their companies decide whether, when, and how to take a stand on social issues. The discussion generated several insights for what's ahead on corporate social activity:

A political peril: conflating the CEO's personal views with those of the company: While CEOs can be the best spokesperson for the company's position because they can speak credibly to multiple stakeholders, there is a real risk that a company's positions can be seen, fairly or not, as reflecting the CEO's personal views. This is particularly problematic when the pressure to take stances on social issues is asymmetrical, with most of the pressure coming from the "progressive" side. Companies should therefore establish an internal group representing multiple functions and views, separate from the CEO, to vet issues.

While CEOs can be the best spokesperson for the company's position because they can speak credibly to multiple stakeholders, there is a real risk that a company's positions can be seen, fairly or not, as reflecting the CEO's personal views. This is particularly problematic when the pressure to take stances on social issues is asymmetrical, with most of the pressure coming from the "progressive" side. Companies should therefore establish an internal group representing multiple functions and views, separate from the CEO, to vet issues. Trust in the company is at stake: While employees and others want companies to "reflect their values," employees' values vary as widely as those of the population at large. And companies and management can lose trust over time if they become perceived as partisan institutions. While some issues such as racial equality clearly transcend partisanship, many have become political hot-button issues. It is critical for companies to have a consistent approach to social issues to ensure that the company's stances represent company values.

While employees and others want companies to "reflect their values," employees' values vary as widely as those of the population at large. And companies and management can lose trust over time if they become perceived as partisan institutions. While some issues such as racial equality clearly transcend partisanship, many have become political hot-button issues. It is critical for companies to have a consistent approach to social issues to ensure that the company's stances represent values. Transparency and education can help mitigate the backlash: Companies should be transparent with employees and others about the criteria used to determine which issues to address and who is involved in the process. Doing so can help avoid backlash from those who oppose the company's position, as well as those who wish the company were doing more.

"How a company phrases its position is critical. Any thoughtful response will need a sense of empathya recognition that even though an issue may be making 'news' today, it is not at all 'new' to those most affected," said Paul Washington, a co-author of the report and Executive Director of The Conference Board ESG Center. "At the same time, it's important to avoid polarizing language, and to ground the response in the company's values and principles, and not in partisan terms."

It is critical to coordinate individual brands' responses to social issues: In many instances, individual brands are on the front lines in being exposed to or affected by social issues. They may wish to respond more quickly and may speak more credibly to customers and other stakeholders than the overall corporation. But a brand may get ahead of the rest of the company in responding, or the brand may not be the most appropriate one to lead the response. It can help for companies to establish internal guidelines on the role that corporate headquarters and the business units play; guardrails for the types of issues and statements brands can make; and a required heads-up to headquarters before taking a stance.

In many instances, individual brands are on the front lines in being exposed to or affected by social issues. They may wish to respond more quickly and may speak more credibly to customers and other stakeholders than the overall corporation. But a brand may get ahead of the rest of the company in responding, or the brand may not be the most appropriate one to lead the response. It can help for companies to establish internal guidelines on the role that corporate headquarters and the business units play; guardrails for the types of issues and statements brands can make; and a required heads-up to headquarters before taking a stance. When deciding whether to respond, a company's purpose or mission has limitations: A company's purpose or mission can be an important touchstone, but it alone doesn't provide the answer to whether to respond. Other factors to consider include: alignment with the company's core values; relationship between the issue and company's business; incremental impact the company can have; relationship with the company's sustainability, CSR, and philanthropic programs; external and internal expectations; and associated risks and opportunities.

A company's purpose or mission can be an important touchstone, but it alone doesn't provide the answer to to respond. Other factors to consider include: alignment with the company's core values; relationship between the issue and company's business; incremental impact the company can have; relationship with the company's sustainability, CSR, and philanthropic programs; external and internal expectations; and associated risks and opportunities. When deciding how to respond, companies should practice what they preach: Key factors to consider include the company's resources, prior track record in the area, and the ability to follow through. Indeed, companies can come off as inauthentic if, for example, they take a public position on racial equality but do not commit to improving diversity in their boardroom or senior management.

"Employees who are passionate about a cause may be frustrated if the company isn't working to bring about social change in line with their views. It highlights the need for companies to set realistic expectations, communicating that they will not take a stand on every topic. Shedding light on the process can also help manage expectations. Companies can educate their employees (and other internal stakeholders) about how they approach hot-button social topics," said Merel Spierings, a co-author of the report and Program Manager of The Conference Board ESG Center."

A localized approach can help multinational companies address issues around the globe: Companies do not need to back away from their universal principles, but should involve local management and employees in understanding how best to phrase and implement the company's position around the globe. In some cases, it may be best to focus a company's efforts at addressing social issues through its own workforce and operations.

Companies do not need to back away from their universal principles, but should involve local management and employees in understanding how best to phrase and implement the company's position around the globe. In some cases, it may be best to focus a company's efforts at addressing social issues through its own workforce and operations. Companies can better-engage their board in the process: While companies have increasingly engaged their boards in overseeing corporate political activity, boards have generally not been as involved in overseeing a company's position on social issues. Given the convergence of the political and social topics, and the reputational issues involved, boards can play an effective oversight role. Management should brief directors on the principles, standards, and guidelines the company uses on the decisions of whether, when, and how to take (and defend) a stand. The board should also have a solid grasp of how the company mitigates reputational and other risks.

While companies have increasingly engaged their boards in overseeing corporate political activity, boards have generally not been as involved in overseeing a company's position on social issues. Given the convergence of the political and social topics, and the reputational issues involved, boards can play an effective oversight role. Management should brief directors on the principles, standards, and guidelines the company uses on the decisions of whether, when, and how to take (and defend) a stand. The board should also have a solid grasp of how the company mitigates reputational and other risks. To gauge their impact of taking stands, companies can ramp up measurement efforts: While some companies measure how their stakeholders respond to the stances they have taken, many do not have a clear sense of whether taking stands has either benefited or harmed them more than they expected. As companies engage more on social issues, they can use surveys, data-based analyses of sales, employee hiring and retention, etc., to measure the impact they are having. They can not only measure to what extent they are moving the needle on the issue itself (e.g., improving health outcomes in underserved communities), but also on the perceptions of customers, employees, investors, business partners, and the public.

About The Conference Board ESG Center

The Conference Board ESG Center serves as a resource, platform, and partner to help Member companies address their priorities in corporate governance, sustainability, and citizenship. www.conference-board.org/ESG

About The Conference Board

The Conference Board is the member-driven think tank that delivers trusted insights for what's ahead. Founded in 1916, we are a non-partisan, not-for-profit entity holding 501 (c) (3) tax-exempt status in the United States. www.conference-board.org

SOURCE The Conference Board

Related Links

http://www.conference-board.org


SEATTLE, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Boeing [NYSE:BA] and United Airlines today announced the carrier will expand its 737 order book by purchasing an additional 200 737 MAX jets, including 150 for the largest member of the family, the 737-10, and 50 for the airplane that serves the heart of the single-aisle market, the 737-8. The new purchase positions United's fleet for growth and accelerating demand for air travel.

"Our 'United Next' vision will revolutionize the experience of flying United as we accelerate our business to meet a resurgence in air travel," said United CEO Scott Kirby. "By adding and upgrading this many aircraft so quickly with our new signature interiors, we'll combine friendly, helpful service with the best experience in the sky, all across our premier global network. At the same time, this move underscores the critical role United plays in fueling the broader U.S. economy  we expect the addition of these new aircraft will have a significant economic impact on the communities we serve in terms of job creation, traveler spending and the shipping of goods and services."

The purchase increases United's order book for the fuel-efficient, single-aisle family to 380 airplanes, including 30 that have been delivered. As the launch customer for the 737-10, United placed its first order in 2017 by converting 100 737-9 orders to the larger 737-10 variant. Today's agreement also includes the purchase of Boeing 737 MAX training simulator data packages to support United's pilot training programs.

Designed and built in Renton, Washington, the 737 MAX family delivers superior efficiency, flexibility and reliability while reducing fuel use and carbon emissions by at least 14% compared to the airplanes it replaces. The 737-8 seats up to 189 passengers and can fly 3,550 nautical miles  about 600 miles farther than its predecessor  allowing airlines to offer new and more direct routes for passengers.

The largest model in the family, the 737-10 seats up to 230 passengers in a single-class configuration and can fly up to 3,300 miles. The fuel-efficient jet can cover 99% of single-aisle routes, including routes served by 757s.

"We are truly humbled by United Airlines' confidence in the people of Boeing and the airplanes we design and build every day. Our strong partnership, dating back to United's founding, has helped us grow and weather challenges through the decades. As we look forward to the recovery ahead, we are honored that United has once again chosen the 737 family's performance, efficiency and flexibility to power their growing network. The Boeing team is excited to be building hundreds of these new jets for United and delivering on a landmark agreement that solidifies our future together for the next decades," said Stan Deal, president and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes.

As a leading global aerospace company, Boeing develops, manufactures and services commercial airplanes, defense products and space systems for customers in more than 150 countries. As a top U.S. exporter, the company leverages the talents of a global supplier base to advance economic opportunity, sustainability and community impact. Boeing's diverse team is committed to innovating for the future and living the company's core values of safety, quality and integrity. Learn more at www.boeing.com.

Contact:

Jessica Kowal

Boeing Communications

+1 (206) 660-6849

[email protected]

Joe Loeffler

Boeing Communications

+1 425-306-2145

[email protected]

SOURCE Boeing

Related Links

http://www.boeing.com


"The coronavirus pandemic has inflicted deep wounds on multiple aspects of a community's well-being  from which it will take time to recover. A county's population health metrics, including mental health, health outcomes and access to care, have been adversely affected, along with major hits to education, economy and equity," said Kim Castro, editor and chief content officer at U.S. News. "This year's Healthiest Communities rankings name not only the leading counties in the country, but also produce data reflecting other predictors of individual and community health as the country begins to recover."

The 2021 rankings are accompanied by editorial pieces exploring, for example, connections between community vaccine data and other health-related metrics . The U.S. News editorial team also examines issues of equity around Hennepin County, Minnesota  a top 500 county that was the site of George Floyd's murder by a police officer in May 2020  and of mental health in Hawaii, where Honolulu County posted the country's highest score in that subcategory of the rankings.

"Over the past year and a half, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated several issues that we knew existed within the health care system, including the interdependence between the health of our communities and our personal health." said Karen Lynch, president and chief executive officer of CVS Health Corporation. "While our country appears to be turning a corner on the pandemic, with more people getting vaccinated everyday, we understand that there is a lot of important work that still needs to be done to address the underlying community health issues that were brought to the forefront during the pandemic."

Separate from the rankings, the COVID-19 tools, which track case numbers, death rates, unemployment and more, have been updated to include vaccine data. These tools complement the rankings data to highlight the relationship between the coronavirus pandemic and community health. Based on a U.S. News analysis, counties that performed well in the Healthiest Communities rankings have slightly lower COVID-19 case rates than average.

Some other key findings from the 2021 Healthiest Communities Rankings include:

Overall, Iowa counties are most heavily represented in the top 500, with 61 counties in the state making the list.

counties are most heavily represented in the top 500, with 61 counties in the state making the list. No. 1 Los Alamos County had the 17th-lowest COVID-19 case rate overall out of places included in the Healthiest Communities analysis, with 2,731 cases per 100,000 residents over the course of the pandemic as of May 31, 2021 .

. Counties with more educated and higher-earning populations tended to perform better on mental health measures included in the Healthiest Communities analysis.

The Healthiest Communities rankings, underwritten by the Aetna Foundation, are part of a $100 million commitment by CVS Health and its affiliates to making community health and wellness central to the company's charge for a better world. The Building Healthier Communities initiative, which will be funded over five years by CVS Health and the CVS Health and Aetna foundations, builds upon the outstanding tradition of community investment by CVS Health and Aetna and advances CVS Health's purpose of helping people on their path to better health.

The Healthiest Communities rankings and accompanying analysis are based on an evaluation of approximately 3,000 communities nationwide across 84 health and health-related metrics in 10 categories, from Education and Population Health to Infrastructure and Environment. The project serves as a tool to inform residents, community health leaders and elected officials about policies and best practices for better health outcomes by assessing which communities offer their citizens the greatest opportunity to live a productive, healthy life.

To compile the rankings and create the overall Healthiest Communities project, U.S. News partnered with the University of Missouri Center for Applied Research and Engagement Systems (CARES), a research institution skilled in community health assessment. Overall, the rankings are based on metrics drawn from sources such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Much of the data used to compile the 2021 Healthiest Communities rankings came from periods predating the COVID-19 pandemic and would not have been affected by the pandemic's impact on communities.

The Healthiest Communities rankings are the centerpiece of a platform featuring in-depth reporting and analysis on community and public health issues, as well as comprehensive data covering the full spectrum of factors that influence population health. Healthiest Communities is part of U.S. News' Government Rankings initiative, which measures government performance at the international, state and local levels and includes the Best States , Best Countries , and Cities projects.

As a part of the 2021 Healthiest Communities rankings, U.S. News will be hosting the second annual Community Health Leadership Forum webinar series. Themes will cover lessons learned amid the COVID-19 pandemic, equitable vaccine distribution and addressing disparities in maternal health. The first webinar, featuring CVS Health President and CEO Karen Lynch, will be on July 1 and sessions will continue through the summer. Register here .

2021 Healthiest Communities- Top 10

*See the full rankings here

Top 10 Counties

Los Alamos County, New Mexico Douglas County, Colorado Falls Church, Virginia Loudoun County, Virginia Broomfield County, Colorado San Miguel County, Colorado Pitkin County, Colorado Howard County, Maryland Morgan County, Utah Routt County, Colorado

2021 Key Measures

Top 5 Communities for Health Outcomes

San Juan County, Washington Marin County, California Carver County, Minnesota Stevens County, Minnesota Hunterdon County, New Jersey

Top 5 Communities for Access to Health Care

Olmsted County, Minnesota Montour County, Pennsylvania Suffolk County, Massachusetts Johnson County, Iowa Perry County, Kentucky

Top 5 Communities for Mental Health

Honolulu County, Hawaii Pitkin County, Colorado Fairfax County, Virginia Santa Clara County, California San Mateo, California

For more information on Healthiest Communities , follow coverage on Facebook and Twitter using #HealthiestCommunities.

About U.S. News & World Report

U.S. News & World Report is the global leader in quality rankings that empower citizens, consumers, business leaders and policy officials to make better, more informed decisions about important issues affecting their lives. A multifaceted digital media company with Education, Health, Money, Travel, Cars, News and 360 Reviews platforms, U.S. News provides rankings, independent reporting, data journalism, consumer advice and U.S. News Live events. More than 40 million people visit USNews.com each month for research and guidance. Founded in 1933, U.S. News is headquartered in Washington, D.C.

About the Aetna Foundation

The Aetna Foundation is an independent, charitable and philanthropic affiliate of CVS Health Corporation (NYSE:CVS). For more information, visit www.aetnafoundation.org .

SOURCE U.S. News & World Report

Related Links

https://www.usnews.com


The report also offers information on the upcoming trends and challenges that will influence market growth.

Download Our Free Sample Report

Mobile Coupons Market in India: Key Price Trends

According to the Mobile Coupons 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 Mobile Coupons.

, the US, , , and will increase the price of exported Mobile Coupons. 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 Mobile Coupons suppliers' manufacturing costs.

Insights Offered in this Mobile Coupons Market Report

Top Mobile Coupons suppliers and their cost structures

Top Mobile Coupons suppliers in the US and their cost structures

Mobile Coupons market spend analysis in the US

Mobile Coupons price trends, and forecasts

Cost drivers influencing the Mobile Coupons prices

Explore more about market opportunities: www.spendedge.com/report/electric-vehicle-procurement-report

Some of the top Mobile Coupons suppliers listed in this report:

This Mobile Coupons procurement intelligence report has enlisted the top suppliers and their cost structures, SLA terms, best selection criteria, and negotiation strategies.

Harte Hanks Inc.

Dentsu Group Inc.

Publicis Groupe SA

Acxiom LLC

Harland Clarke Corp.

Omnicom Group Inc.

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.

Related Reports on Information Technology Market:

Creative Agency - Sourcing and Procurement Market Intelligence Report: The creative agency will grow at a CAGR of 8.82% during 2021-2025. Prices will increase by 8%-10% during the forecast period and suppliers will have a low bargaining power in this market.

during 2021-2025. Prices will during the forecast period and suppliers will have a low bargaining power in this market. IT Consulting - 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 it consulting requirements. Some of the leading IT consulting suppliers are profiled extensively in this report

Big Data Analytics - Sourcing and Procurement Intelligence Report: This report evaluates suppliers based on technological expertise, industry expertise, data security measures being implemented by suppliers, and financial stability.

To access the definite purchasing guide on the Mobile Coupons that answers all your key questions on price trends and analysis:

Am I paying/getting the right prices? Is my Mobile Coupons 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

Contact

SpendEdge

Anirban Choudhury

Marketing Manager

Ph No: +1 (872) 206-9340

https://www.spendedge.com/contact-us

SOURCE SpendEdge
NEW YORK, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- For years, at VNUE (OTC: VNUE) we've been saying one of our primary missions is to protect songwriters, artists and others in the music industry, so they get their fair pay via royalties  fair meaning fair to the stakeholders, but also fair to the business owners. This not only involves music played in public spaces such as bars, restaurants and others in the "general licensing" space, but also with radio.

Did you know the US is the ONLY country in the world that does not legally compel radio stations to pay royalties to performers? Now, there's some hopeful news for the music industry.

Ted Deutch (D-FL) and Darrell Issa (R-CA), with the full support of legendary musicians including Dionne Warwick and Sam Moore, just went to Congress to introduce a bill so musicians and copy-right owners can be paid for royalties. VNUE fully supports and endorses this proposed legislation.

The American Music Fairness Act (AMFA) would compel radio stations to pay performance royalties to all musicians and copyright owners.

This is where VNUE comes in. Our Soundstr music recognition technology (MRT) was made for this. Soundstr can identify music played on radio stations and create an accurate log of the music being played, and married together with additional data we compile, who the stakeholders are as well as their PRO (performing rights organization) affiliation. VNUE's technology has the capability of creating a clearinghouse of this data  not just limited to radio but also for physical locations, so that the end-to-end trail exists of what was played, when, and where.

Zach Bair, CEO of VNUE, said, "Although we value our radio partners and the contribution that radio has played in the industry, artists should be fairly compensated for their work. In today's world of streaming and the Internet, radio must adapt to the changing world. Soundstr can help on both ends  we can help make sure the correct artists and writers get paid, and at the same time, ensure that radio is only paying what they should, not more. I'm excited to see this develop, and we are hopeful VNUE and Soundstr can play a role. We are ready."

At a news conference announcing the introduction of the new Act, Deutch said, "The American Music Fairness Act will protect the artists we know as they make the music we love. For the first time, artists would see a piece of the massive profits made on the backs of their creative work. Congress must end the unfair deal AM/FM radio has forced on musicians."

The American Music Fairness Act would change the music industry by:

Requiring terrestrial radio stations to compensate all artists for their property.

Creating a fair market value for music performance royalties by closing the loophole that allows AM/FM radio stations to play music without compensating artists.

Exempting radio stations that fall under $1.5 million in annual revenue and whose parent companies fall under less than $10 million in annual revenue overall. For less than $2 per day ( $500 annually), small and local stations can play unlimited music.

in annual revenue and whose parent companies fall under less than in annual revenue overall. For less than per day ( annually), small and local stations can play unlimited music. Ensuring that foreign countries pay U.S. artists when their songs are played overseas.

The American Music Fairness Act is endorsed by: the American Association of Independent Music (A2IM), the American Federation of Musicians, The Recording Academy, The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), SAG-AFTRA, SoundExchange, and now VNUE.

About VNUE, Inc. (www.vnue.com)

VNUE, Inc., (OTC: VNUE) is a cutting-edge music technology company dedicated to further monetizing the live music experience for artists, writers, labels, publishers, fans, venues, and all stakeholders by creating new and exciting live music experiences, and by working to ensure the correct rights holders are being fairly compensated. The company is the exclusive licensee of DiscLive Network (www.disclive.net), the pioneer in "instant live" recording, and the owner and operator of Set.fm (www.set.fm), our innovative "instant" music delivery app platform. VNUE is also rolling out disruptive technology called Soundstr (www.soundstr.com), a cloud-based platform utilizing AI and other means which identifies music played in bars, restaurants, radio stations, and other businesses, and will ensure these businesses pay only their fair share for music licensing, while at the same time, ensuring songwriters and artists are paid for their work  creating a fully transparent performing rights ecosystem. The VNUE team is led by CEO and Chairman Zach Bair, a veteran music and tech entrepreneur and recording artist (www.zachbairmusic.com). VNUE is made up of a group of technologists, artists, songwriters, performing musicians, music and touring executives, and of course fans, who are passionate about the future of the music industry.

SOURCE VNUE, Inc.
MEMPHIS, Tenn. & THOUSAND OAKS, Calif., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Results from a partnership to address disparities and enhance the quality of breast cancer care at Memphis-based West Cancer Center & Research Institute were announced today. The program is sponsored by Amgen.

"Our goal is to reduce breast cancer-related mortality disparity rates of Black women in the Memphis area, where the current disparity rate is approximately 70 percent  which means that Black women are dying from breast cancer at approximately three times the rate of White women," said Carla Baker, COO, at Memphis Breast Cancer Consortium (MBCC), adding "By developing a patient centric care pathway, MBCC plans to systematically address the root causes of disparities.

The creation of the Memphis Breast Cancer Consortium (MBCC) in 2016 marked the first phase of an innovative, comprehensive, aligned, and intentional community-wide effort to address the higher mortality rates of Black women versus Caucasian women in the Memphis metropolitan area.

MBCC currently represents 38 member organizations including survivor groups, consumer advocacy groups, health systems, universities, health plans, the Shelby County Health Department, and the Tennessee Department of Health.

The purpose of the Care Pathway Initiative was to conduct baseline quality metrics of variation in care with the overall aim to enhance quality of care. Rabble Health, a digital patient engagement company, conducted the assessment of 81 breast patients regarding their ability to receive optimal care and services. Following the baseline assessment, solutions to improve health literacy and patient empowerment were highlighted, including the myRabble digital patient engagement platform.

"The data from Margaret West Comprehensive Cancer Center, a facet of West Cancer Center, was remarkable", said Aubrey Kelly, CEO of Rabble Health, adding, "As a full-service institution, many breast cancer patients treated at West were able to have a mammogram and biopsy the same day if needed. In cancer, every day counts, and patients should be provided the tools and resources to connect, understand their options, communicate goals of care, and manage through their diagnosis. Care pathway efficiencies can translate to optimized care and potentially improved outcomes."

Preliminary findings include a call to action for breast centers to address disparities in care by measuring adherence and improvements in quality measures and health literacy.

Dr. Gregory Vidal, MD, PhD, a breast medical oncologist at West, shared "To make a significant impact in health care disparities, our health care institutions have to take an unbiased look at their data, polices and practices. We are pleased to see independent data confirming the exceptional service we provide for all our West Cancer Center patients. We hope this approach can be replicated at other institutions to help address disparities incare across our beloved city."

Following these findings, the West Cancer Center is excited to continue the care pathway analysis and embark on key patient education and engagement solutions to improve health literacy and shared decision making.

About West Cancer Center & Research Institute:

West Cancer Center is an independent, comprehensive adult cancer center guided by physicians to provide the most outcome-driven, research focused oncology care to all patients, regardless of socioeconomic status. With over 40 years as leaders in oncology, 156+ specialists, 7 locations and 47,000 patient visits in 2020 - West is positioned as the first choice for cancer care in the Midsouth and a national model for comprehensive care.

About Common Table Health Alliance:

Common Table Health Alliance (CTHA) is the administrative home of the Memphis Breast Cancer Consortium. CTHA has focused on healthcare equity and disparities for over 21 years. Read more at www.commontablehealth.org.

About Rabble Health:

Rabble Health, a digital patient engagement company, is on a mission to address the information crisis in complex disease. The company's product line, myRabble, serves as a patient engagement solution designed to address health disparities in the cancer setting. myRabble empowers patients to have more choice, clarity, and connection as they manage through a cancer diagnosis. Read more at rabblehealth.com.

SOURCE Rabble Health

Related Links

https://www.rabblehealth.com/


BEIJING, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Yidu Tech Inc. ("Yidu Tech" or the "Company, together with its subsidiaries and consolidated affiliated entities, the "Group", HKEx: 2158), a healthcare big data and artificial intelligence solutions provider, announced its audited consolidated financial results for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2021 ("FY2021" or the "Period").

FY2021 Key Highlights

Total revenue increased 55.4% year-on-year ("YoY") to RMB867 million :

: Revenue from Big Data Platform and Solutions increased 8.1% YoY to RMB402 million ;

;

Revenue from Life Sciences Solutions increased 79.3% YoY to RMB184 million ;

;

Revenue from Health Management Platform and Solutions increased 353.1% to RMB252 million .

. Gross profit increased 123.4% YoY to RMB327 million ; gross margin rose 11.5 percentage points YoY to 37.8%.

; gross margin rose 11.5 percentage points YoY to 37.8%. Non-IFRS adjusted net loss narrowed by 14.7% YoY to RMB275 million .

. As of March 31, 2021 , the Company's data intelligence infrastructure had covered more than 500 hospitals in over 20 provinces in China , and supported the development of disease registries covering over 50 disease areas to greatly improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the production of research-grade evidence. Nearly one hundred papers have been published based on the Company's disease registries.

Ms. Gong Yingying (Rujing), Chairlady, CEO and Founder of Yidu Tech, remarked, "As the COVID-19 pandemic ("Pandemic") brought enormous challenges and uncertainties to the global and Chinese economy, it also underlined the urgent and multi-faceted needs for precise public health management and digital health solutions. FY2021 was an extraordinary year for the Company. Committed to our mission of making precision healthcare accessible to everyone, we continuously enhanced our data intelligence infrastructure and core capabilities in the three major areas of scientific research, diagnosis and treatment, and management, and accelerated the transformation of data to insights to personalized healthcare and efficient clinical development solutions, thereby creating more value for stakeholders across the healthcare ecosystem."

Rapid growth in revenue and profit driven by favorable policies and continuous technological advances

Yidu Tech works proactively to advance technology and promote innovation in order to address pain points in the digital transformation of the healthcare industry, all while closely adhering to government plans and policies that influence the industry. In FY2021, the Company continued to solidify its healthcare big data infrastructure, YiduCore, while actively expanding new and complementary businesses built upon YiduCore to serve existing and new customers. During the Period, the Company recorded total revenue of RMB867 million, representing a YoY increase of 55.4%, and a gross margin of 37.8%, up by 11.5 percentage points YoY. The quality and efficiency of Yidu Tech's data processing capabilities continued to improve and as of March 31, 2021, its YiduCore had covered more than 500 hospitals in over 20 provinces.

Yidu Tech continues to enrich its labelling system for various disease areas by collaborating with renowned hospitals and experts, and utilizes symbolic knowledge inference models, deep learning and other AI technologies to constantly refines and qualifies its real-world disease models. To-date, the Company has built disease registries covering over 50 fields of diseases to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the production of research-grade evidence. Nearly one hundred papers have been published based on the Company's disease registries. As of March 31, 2021, Yidu Tech had applied for 905 patents (including 552 invention patents), of which 482 patents (including 59 invention patents) had been authorized and approved, demonstrating the continuous enhancement of the Company's research and development capabilities.

Robust growth across all three key business segments to continue empowering the healthcare ecosystem

Despite the challenges posed by the Pandemic, Yidu Tech delivered strong performance and maintained solid growth in total revenue and gross profit for its three key business segments.

During the Period, the Big Data Platform and Solutions segment recorded total revenue of RMB402 million, representing a YoY increase of 8.1%, and a gross profit margin of 45.1%, up by 11.7 percentage points YoY. As of March 31, 2021, Yidu Tech had provided services and solutions to 76 research hospitals and 19 regulators and policy makers in China.

In the midst of the Pandemic last year, Yidu Tech stood at the forefront in the battle against the outbreak, assisting public health authorities in their efforts to prevent and control the spread of the virus. In particular, the Company received widespread recognition after successfully launching within seven days a pandemic response platform for the Wuhan Municipal Government at the peak of the Pandemic. Furthermore, the Company also developed a COVID-19 disease registry together with a renowned research hospital in Wuhan, and helped more than 50 doctors to conduct scientific and clinical research, and publish papers with the highest impact factor of over 30.

The Life Sciences Solutions segment recorded total revenue of RMB184 million, representing a YoY increase of 79.3%, and a gross profit margin of 21.7%, representing an increase of 8.3 percentage points. The segment experienced rapid growth in customers. As of 31 March 2021, the number of active customers increased by 45.9% YoY to 108, adding 25 new core pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device company customers. The Company also served 15 out of the top 20 global pharmaceutical companies by revenue in 2020.

In addition to expanding the customer base, Yidu Tech also took the efforts to actively enrich its solutions to enhance customer stickiness and expand the wallet share of its customers. During the Period, the overall revenue retention for Life Science Solutions customers was 124%, while the revenue retention for the core pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device company customers was 141%.

The Health Management Platform and Solutions segment recorded total revenue of RMB252 million, representing an increase of 353.1% YoY, and a gross margin of 40.7%. By leveraging the medical knowledge accumulated in YiduCore and AI technologies, Yidu Tech provides evidence-based one-stop health management solutions under the brand of "CausaHealth". The Company also offers insurance technology and disease management solutions under the brand of "CausaCloud" to insurance companies and agencies. As of the end of the Period, the number of paying users who made at least one purchase on the Company's health management platform exceeded five million.

On January 15, 2021, Yidu Tech was listed on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, which marked a significant step of the Company towards more transparent and standardized corporate governance. Looking forward, Ms. Gong said, "Yidu Tech is still a very young company. We strongly believe in 'data intelligence and green healthcare' and will invest relentlessly in strengthening our core capabilities and developing our ecosystem 'to make value-based precision healthcare accessible to everyone'."

About Yidu Tech Inc. (2158.HK)

Founded in 2014 with a mission "to make value-based precision healthcare accessible to

everyone", Yidu Tech Inc. ("Yidu Tech" or the "Company") focuses on the research, development and application of big data and artificial intelligence technology for the healthcare industry. The Company aims to provide the healthcare industry with innovative solutions driven by data intelligence, build a healthcare big data infrastructure, and promote the country's "Healthy China 2030" initiative.

SOURCE Yidu Tech
The project focuses on the use of revolutionary textile devices like the T-shirt without metal components and with sensors naturally "set" into the fabric. The project was presented today in front of the world press during the Mobile World Congress 2021 being held in Barcelona.

During the event, ZTE iterated that they are particularly proud to be partner in this extraordinary innovation and firmly believe that 5G technology is the key to a better quality of life. ZTE further emphasized that they believe in talent and capabilities and want to keep giving their contribution to the Italian and the global technological development. For this reason, starting from next fall, ZTE will initiate the YouCare 5G test in the Innovation and Research Center located in L'Aquila.

YouCare enables the detection of bio-vital parameters, such as a "real" electrocardiogram, a respiratory act analysis, the components of the sweat, the muscle effort, and the body temperature, that has never been detected by textile sensors. The T-shirt allows the transmission, via ultra-fast 5G ZTE connection, to health centers and control, as well as to individual users.

"It is an invention that will change the life and the quality of home and remote medical assistance to many citizens experiencing health problems and vulnerable people suffering from chronic diseases, ensuring accessibility to care services and the support of our national and international network," said Francesco Rocca, Chairman of Italian Red Cross and IFRC. "We have been working on the project since 2018 and today we are able to present the results of this important experimentation, born in the most difficult moment of the Covid emergenc. This experimentation allows us to think with pride about the path made so far and to look to the future with hope and certainty of having demonstrated the commitment, the ability and the dedication of Red Cross network, to use and to disseminate new technologies for the service of the people and of the society."

The textile technology, patented and certified, develops new services for the protection of health in the areas of telemedicine, work, sport, and the general well-being of an individual.

By monitoring health, stress, and active living behaviors, it improves the safety of people, of the elderly, and of the sportive people.

The bio-vital parameters of YouCare, detected by imperceptible polymeric sensors "set" in the fabric, are sent to a miniaturized control unit that records the data, converts them into digital format, and ultimately sends, thanks to 5G, to a bidirectional platform transmitting them to the user's smartphone or smartwatch in addition to a remote unit that analyzes the values with the medical software.

"From the very first moment - said Umberto Sgambati, CEO of Proger Group spa that, through the Start-Up Let's Web-earable Solutions, has created the "Smart T-shirt" sensor - we have believed and invested in what seemed to us a totally revolutionary idea that today is a concrete reality. Certified as a Medical Device, it has been enriched by the predictive algorithms of cardiovascular disorders of BSP-Medical the world leader in the field of Medical Data Science".

About ZTE

ZTE is a provider of advanced telecommunications systems, mobile devices and enterprise technology solutions for consumers, operators, businesses and public sector customers. As part of ZTE's strategy, the company is committed to providing customers with end-to-end integrated innovations to deliver excellence and value as the telecommunications and information technology sectors converge. Listed on the Hong Kong and Shenzhen stock exchanges (stock code H: 0763.HK / stock code A: 000063.SZ), ZTE sells its products and services in more than 160 countries.

Media Contacts:

Alessio De Sio

ZTE Italia

Tel: +39 366 682 4010

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE ZTE Corporation

Related Links

www.zte.com.cn


Anglo Asian has built up a strong track record of gold and copper production in Azerbaijan

Reza Vaziri, the chairman of ( ), addressed shareholders by letter on the morning of 29 June, ahead of the companys annual meeting due to be held later in the day.

Because of Coronavirus (COVID-19) restrictions, shareholders were only invited to attend on a virtual basis.

2020 was a year without precedent in the history of the company, said Vaziri.

It commenced with the rapidly evolving COVID-19 pandemic, which gradually restricted our ability to operate. In September, the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia broke out, which lasted until the ceasefire in November.

He added: COVID-19 restrictions in Azerbaijan have now mostly all been lifted so that daily life has more or less returned to normal. However, the COVID-19 pandemic and the conflict with Armenia were extremely demanding for all our employees and not only for those who fought in the conflict. Despite the numerous challenges, the company delivered an excellent financial performance helped by higher metal prices. More importantly for the company's future, we continued our successful exploration programme culminating in the discovery of Zafar, a major new deposit at Gedabek. Exploration at several other sites at Gedabek is ongoing. The year's operational performance was an outstanding achievement of which all employees are justifiably proud.

He also highlighted Anglo Asians financial performance in 2020. The company delivered revenues of US$102mln and profits before taxation of US$36mln. It also became debt-free during 2020 and ended the year with a cash balance of US$39mln.

The company is one of the few Aim-listed mining companies which pay a dividend and for 2020 will pay a total dividend of US$0.095 cents a share, which includes a special dividend of US$0.015 cents per share, Vaziri added.

The company's main priority is to now increase production by developing new mines as the Gedabek open pit nears the end of its life. I was therefore delighted at the recent discovery of the Zafar deposit, which is situated very close to our processing facilities. Zafar will be a major new underground copper and zinc mine at Gedabek and work is now rapidly ramping up on the large development project to design and construct the mine.

Separately, the company also published responses to questions from shareholders submitted in advance of the AGM.
's ( ) Tim Livesey joins Proactive London's Katie Pilbeam to confirm gold at all four prospects at its 51%-owned Bibemi gold project in Cameroon.

He says 'we're really pleased, for an early stage exploration programme in an area that's never seen a drill rig before - the results are fantastic!'

The remaining 20 holes returned further significant intersections, including 3.10 metres at gold grades of 1.07 grammes a tonne (g/t) from Bakassi Zone 1; 0.85 metres grading 4.59 g/t from Bakassi Zone 2; and 0.80 metres grading 27.90 g/t from Lawa East.
Pan Asia's objective is to identify and develop projects which have the potential to be placed at or near the bottom of the cost curve

Lepidolite rich pegmatite from 127.8 metres to 137.95 metres at Reung Kiet in Thailand.

( ) has received positive assay results from the 13 diamond core holes so far completed at the Bang I Tum and Reung Kiet lithium prospects in Southern Thailand.

The drilling intersected extensive pegmatite dyke-vein swarms containing lithium mineralisation associated with lepidolite (lithium mica).

Best results include:

11.3 metres at 0.74% lithium oxide from 19.2 metres;

10.7 metres at 0.98% from 81.8 metres;

13 metres at 0.72% from 49.5 metres;

4.2 metres at 1.30% from 31.9 metres;

6 metres at 1.08% from 38.5 metres; and

4.5 metres at 1.44% from 47.6 metres.

Moving to a double drilling shift

Pan Asia Metals managing director Paul Lock said: We are pleased with the drilling results, the intersection widths and lithium grades at both prospects position the company well, warranting the required investment to drill out to a JORC Mineral Resource.

We will be moving to a double drilling shift to expedite this process.

Using the global peer group of lithium projects as a guide, lepidolite is the only style of lithium mineralisation with an extensive suite of by-products.

Peer group studies indicate that these by-products can reduce the overall cost of lithium carbonate and or lithium hydroxide manufacturing, so much so that they can place lepidolite style projects at the bottom of the operating cost curve.

This is Pan Asia Metal's objective, to identify and develop projects which have the potential to be placed at or near the bottom of the cost curve and which provide PAM with the option to move past the mine gate and value add.

The drilling results at Reung Kiet suggest such goals are realistic.

Bang I Tum and Reung Kiet lithium prospects

The Bang I Tum and Reung Kiet lithium prospects, part of the Reung Kiet Lithium Project (RKLP), are two of PAMs key assets.

RKLP is a hard rock lithium project with demonstrated potential for lithium hosted in lepidolite/mica rich pegmatites chiefly composed of quartz, albite, muscovite and lepidolite, with minor cassiterite and tantalite as well as other accessory minerals including some rare earth.

Tin and tantalum mineralisation also occur at the project in association with lithium as well as rubidium and cesium, all potentially valuable by-products.

The company is focusing on lepidolite as a source of lithium as peer group studies indicate that lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide projects using lepidolite as their plant feedstock have the potential to be placed at the bottom of the cost curve.

Forward planning

Pan Asia is planning to drill holes both at Bang I Tum and Reung Kiet, to define mineral resources and exploration targets in the second half of 2021.
( ) has officially landed on the ASX, closing out its first day of trading at 15 cents per share.

The company is focused on its portfolio of gold projects in Guinea, West Africa, which includes its subsidiary Golden Guinea Resources SARLs two exploration licences within the Siguiri Basin.

It was admitted to the quotation after raising $5.2 million in the IPO, selling 26 million shares at 20 cents a pop; it has 79.44 million shares with a market cap of $15.9 million and an enterprise value of $10.7 million.

First day on the boards

Polymetals CEO Alex Hanly said the company was delighted with its first day on the ASX.

CEO Alex Hanly.

Todays ASX listing marks a pivotal moment for Polymetals and a step forward in becoming a leading gold producer, he told Proactive.

Our licences are strategically positioned within Guineas underexplored Birimian Greenstone Belt which holds substantial geological potential for the delineation of a large gold inventory.

I am pleased to report that we have commenced our planned RC 5,100-metre drilling campaign at Alahine, one of our licences, to follow up the many soil gold anomalies and mineralised drill intercepts defined by our previous exploration.

We were very pleased about the positive response we received to our IPO from a mix of institutional, sophisticated and retail investors.

We anticipate rapidly progressing our exciting portfolio of projects in Guinea, West Africa, once we have finalised our ASX listing which is anticipated to be early July.

What does Polymetals do?

Polymetals has a 100% interest in Golden Guinea Resources SARL which owns two exploration licences within the Siguiri Basin.

This basin occupies the countrys north-eastern corner and hosts several large active gold mining operations and is notable for its widespread gold anomalism.

This basin is broadly covered by exploration or exploitation tenure and there is little vacant land available for new exploration participants in the region.

The region is considered highly prospective for gold and relatively immature from an exploration perspective and produces over 500,000 ounces of gold/year.

The largest operation is the s Siguiri Gold Mine, around 37 kilometres west of the Golden Guinea licences, which to date has produced more than 6 million ounces of gold over its 20-year life.

Two other ASX-listed companies are active in the region; ( ) and ( ).

Polymetals two exploration licences, Alahine and Mansala, host many historic and current small-scale gold mining operations conducted by local individuals known as artisans.

Post IPO plan

The companys focus will be to continue with its exploration within the Alahine and Mansala licences and start its next drilling program.

Polymetals is aiming to delineate significant and economic gold reserves which can support the development and operation of a large and long-life gold mine, as well as expanding its ground position within the area.

The two Golden Guinea exploration licences, known as Alahine (64.21 square kilometres) and Mansala (48.23 square kilometres, host many historic and current small scale gold mining operations conducted by local individuals known as artisans.

Artisans seek out coarse gold situated immediately below the surface laterite capping and at various levels within the underlying intensely weathered bedrock.

All artisanal mining is limited to the depth of the standing water level which is approximately 15 metres below surface.

- Daniel Paproth
Moscow, June 29 : Russia logged 21,650 new coronavirus infections over the past 24 hours, taking the nationwide tally to 5,472,941, the official monitoring and response centre said on Monday.

The national death toll rose by 611 to 133,893 in the past day, while the number of recoveries grew by 12,626 to 4,969,340, the Xinhua news agency reported.

Moscow, Russia's worst-hit region, reported 7,246 new cases, taking the city's total to 1,346,183.

According to official data, 38,098,213 doses of Covid-19 vaccines had been administered in Russia as of Saturday.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Los Angeles, June 29 : Veteran Hollywood star Anthony Hopkins, who played a dementia patient in "The Father", says his memory is the single most important tool in his life.

Hopkins said: "Once you lose your memory, it must be a living hell to have no anchors left. It's the most powerful and important tool, essential to survival." He shared that his role in the Florian Zeller-directed drama made him look more closely at his own life, reports femalefirst.co.uk.

"I think as you get older, you do go around examining life more. This did make me think about my past and my parents and about all the sweet sadness of it all," Hopkins told Sorted magazine.

The octogenarian feels age has made it easier for him to find happiness in different things.

He said: "I enjoy it all more. I have a laugh now; I like watching old guys on TV, like Sinatra. And they've all gone too, and there's a great victory in recognising death and mortality while I'm here."
Srinagar, June 29 : Two Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists including a top commander were killed during an encounter at Parimpora in Srinagar on Monday, police said on Tuesday.

Police said that there was a specific input about terrorists carrying an attack on highway.

"Keeping in view the seriousness of the input few joint nakas of JKP and CRPF were place along the highway," police said.

Police said that on Parimpora Naka a vehicle was stopped and their identity was asked. The person sitting at the back seat tried to open his bag and took out a grenade. The Naka party swiftly swung into action and grabbed the person sitting at the back seat. Both the driver and the person sitting at the back seat were taken to police station where after taking off his mask it was identified that he was terrorist Abrar, a top LeT Commander.

He was put to joint interrogation by JKP, CRPF and Army. One Pistol and hand grenades were recovered from his possession.

"On sustained interrogation by the joint teams of JKP, CRPF and Army he disclosed that he had kept his AK-47 rifle in a house located at Maloora. There after he was taken to that house to recover the weapon after laying proper cordon of suspected house. When the party was entering the house to recover the alleged weapon, one of his associate, a Pakistani terrorist (about whom he didn't disclose anything) hiding inside the house fired on the party," police said.

"In the initial fire fight three CRPF personnel got injured and the said terrorist Abrar accompanying the search party got hit. The injured security force personnel were evacuated and the rest of the party took position and called for reinforcement. The cordon of target house was strengthened by component of JKP, CRPF and Army and the fire was further retaliated. In the ensuing gun fire foreign terrorist who fired from inside the house got neutralised and Abrar also got killed." Two AK-47 rifles along with ammunitions were recovered from the site. Police said that Abrar was involved in several killings of Security forces along with other terrorists.
Sirsa : , June 29 (IANS/ 101Reporters) When the second wave of Covid-19 was washing over many parts of the country, seven villages in Haryana's Sirsa district remained untouched. Makha, Musli, Budhimedhi, Dhani Satnam Singh, Dogra Wali, Modi, and Joriya -- which do not have more than 5,000 people each -- followed basic practices and cooperated in their small way to keep the virus at bay.

For instance, not a single person from Makha village ventures out without a mask, whereas cops have been rampantly penalising people for violations elsewhere in the Sirsa district. Makha sarpanch Veerpala Kaur proudly says that innate discipline has completely stalled Covid-19 in their village. "There isn't a single case in our village. It was possible because of adherence to three things - wearing a mask, attention towards sanitisation and social distancing. And the results are right in front of you," she said.

Kaur added that the panchayat held many dialogues with the villagers over prevention. "The panchayat meetings were conducted by following social distancing norms. We decided to stall weddings and other public gatherings," she said.

The villagers' sense of social responsibility made the implementation easier.

Rules and cooperation Sarpanch Kaur's brother, Harchej Singh (38), made brief clips on Covid-19 awareness and circulated them on social media. The villagers cooperated with the initiatives. They asked their relatives not to visit their village. "Moreover, the villagers refrained from travelling out. If a person had to leave for important work, he/she would quarantine himself/herself upon returning. The measures were not followed due to pressure from an individual, but out of respect for the decision taken for the public good," he said.

He added that the villagers believe in keeping a social promise. They have high regard for the decisions taken by the panchayat, and thus, they follow them ardently -- they feel it is their social responsibility. "Villagers come to know when a person violates the rule. Such a person is then socially boycotted and loses trust," Singh said.

People from Budhimedhi village weren't allowed to attend public gatherings or travel to mourn a relative's death. In case they had to travel, they would have to quarantine upon returning. The doctors would test them. Such a person could only return home once he/she tested negative. Budhimedhi's residents cooperated with every such regulation. "As a result, there has not been a single case," said village sarpanch Sukhbaj Singh.

Musli village resident Singh Chima said that people were not visiting the mandi during the lockdown. Since many vegetables are grown in the village, the residents decided to distribute them among themselves. "There were two advantages to this situation -- people did not have to step out for vegetables, and the home-grown produce was not spoiled. A few people from outside who come to sell vegetables did not arrive once they realised that we were self-sufficient," he said.

Small hurdles to deal with Making everybody follow the safety principles came with their difficulties. Sarpanch Kaur of Makha village said that the villagers are staunch followers of traditions and follow a strict schedule, which they do not like to disrupt. "Covid-19 had started altering people's routines," she said.

The sudden change has been unimaginable for Makha' senior citizens like Ramnivas Sharma. Before Covid-19 confined him to his home, he would spend his day with his friends in baithaks. "People of my age would gather in the morning and engage in banter all day. Tea, snacks, and lunch would be served in our baithaks. We wouldn't return home until late. With Covid-19, things changed drastically. We felt imprisoned in our homes. It was bizarre at first. But, we got slowly used to it," he said.

Sharma added that staying at home had its benefits. "We, senior citizens, grew close to our kids as we spent lots of time with them for the first time. Now, time flies. It feels as if I have wasted a lot of time in the past in the company of hookah, when a better part of life is at home," he said.

Sirach Sukhabaj Singh of Budhimedi Village from Sirsa deemed funerals the most difficult to regulate. In his village, when a person dies, people gather in support and solidarity. "Covid-19 did not allow any such gatherings. We reinforced the decision by allowing only the family to attend the final rights. When a person passed away, we wondered if the virus was responsible. The samples were sent to local government hospitals. The results always returned negative," he said.

The good word Sirsa Deputy Civil Surgeon Buddh Ram lauded the seven villages for their approach and discipline. "They stayed free of the virus when the pandemic was gathering momentum in rural areas. Their techniques can be seen as a model for preventing Covid-19," he said.

Social organisation network Youth 4 Change's director, Rakesh Dhul, said that such discipline is exemplary as it comes from the sector of Sirsa, which is protesting against the farm laws.

"These seven villages have shown much restraint and discipline and prevented Covid-19 altogether. If other villages adopt Sirsa's methods, Covid-19 can be evicted from rural areas. Sirsa's residents have not only prevented themselves from harm but have imparted a lesson," he said.

(The author is Chandigarh-based freelance journalist and a member of 101Reporters.com, a pan-India network of grassroots reporters.)

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Tokyo, June 29 : Two elementary school students were killed with three others severely injured when a truck driven by a drunk man rammed into a street in Chiba prefecture near Tokyo, police said.

The accident took place at around 3.30 p.m. on Monday in the city of Yachimata when the children were on their way home from school, Xinhua news agency quoted the police as saying.

Alcohol surpassing the legal limit was detected when the 60-year-old driver took a breathalyzer test, according to the police.

The driver was arrested on the spot on suspicion of negligent driving.
Muzaffarnagar : , June 29 (IANS) A 23-year-old youth was stabbed to death after he accidentally splashed water on a group of young men standing nearby.

The incident took place in Johra village here on Monday.

According to reports, Vinay was drinking water from a handpump in Mansurpur police circle when water was splashed on a group of youths who, in a fit of rage, stabbed him to death.

The police spokesperson said a case was registered against five youths who are absconding and the body has been sent for post-mortem.

Meanwhile, security has been strengthened in the village and additional police force has been deployed in the area.
Lucknow, June 29 : Sikh organizations in the Uttar Pradesh capital have condemned alleged religious conversion of two Sikh girls in Jammu and Kashmir and demanded action against those responsible.

The Lucknow Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (LGPC) held an emergency meeting on Monday evening and requested Prime Minister Narendra Modi to ensure action against those responsible for the incident and frame a law against such forced conversions.

The All-India Sikh Pratinidhi Mandal (AISPM) also condemned the incident and sought intervention of the Prime Minister, Governor of J&K and the National Human Rights Commission.

Both the organizations said there was anger in the Sikh community over the incident.

A delegation of LGPC will soon meet Uttar Pradesh Governor Anandiben Patel and hand over a memorandum to her in this connection.

"We urge the Prime Minister to formulate a law to save people from conversions based on exploitation, incentive or fraud," said the president of the committee, Rajendra Singh Bagga.

He said, "Those found responsible should be punished in a manner that serves as an example for others." AISPM national president Harpal Singh Jaggi said authorities should ensure safety of Sikh women.

"Justice should be provided to victims and strict action be taken against culprits as per law. If the government fails to take action, we will hold a protest in Delhi," he added.
Rome, June 29 : A Global Coalition to Defeat IS (Islamic State) has said that although nearly eight million people have been freed from the terror group's control in Iraq and Syria, it still remains a threat.

"IS no longer controls territory and nearly eight million people have been freed from its control in Iraq and Syria, but the threat remains," said a joint communique issued on Monday after a meeting of the Ministers of the Coalition concluded in Rome.

"The resumption in IS activities and its ability to rebuild its networks and capabilities to target security forces and civilians in areas in Iraq and Syria where the Coalition is not active, requires strong vigilance and coordinated action," it said.

This was the first time the Coalition members came face-to-face after two years.

The Coalition acknowledged that it also needed "to address the drivers that make communities vulnerable to recruitment by IS and related violent ideological groups, as well as to provide support to liberated areas to safeguard our collective security interests".

"The Ministers remain firmly united in our outrage at atrocities perpetrated by IS and in our determination to eliminate this global threat, and stand alongside survivors and families of victims of ISIS crimes working for accountability," the joint communique added.

The meeting was co-chaired by Italian Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

While addressing the meeting, the Italian Minister said the IS "was defeated in its territorial dimension, but it hasn't been uprooted".

This is why "Italy, with over 800 units between Iraq and Kuwait, will continu to keep its presence in support of local institutions so as to enable the country to tackle this threat autonomously," he added.

On his part, Blinken said "joint efforts by, with, and through our local partners have been a critical element in achieving IS's territorial defeat in Iraq and in Syria", but "there is still more work to be done".

The Ministers also reaffirmed their intent to hold the next ministerial meeting of the Global Coalition by June 2022 and to hold a Small Group Political Directors Meeting in Brussels in the fall of 2021.
Lucknow, June 29 : Three more persons have been arrested in connection with the alleged religious conversion of more than a thousand people across the country.

The accused, arrested on Monday, have been identified as Mannu Yadav a.k.a. Abdul Mannan, Irfan Sheikh and Rahul Bhola.

According to UP ADG Law and Order, Prashant Kumar, during the investigation it was found that funding for the alleged religious conversion was coming from abroad.

He said nearly Rs 1.70 crore transferred in the accounts has been trailed.

"This money has come between 2010 and June 2021. Money has been transferred in the accounts through cash and cheque. Rs 50 lakh has been deposited in accounts from Dubai, Qatar, Jeddah and Abu Dhabi," the ADG said.

"The role of three religious leaders was found suspicious in the conversion case. The Anti-Terror Squad is interrogating them," he said.

"During investigation, it was found that one of these leaders had also been in contact with Mohammad Umar Gautam, who was arrested earlier and is lodged in jail. Mohammad Umar had taken this religious leader several times with him to Halim Muslim College, where deaf students were brainwashed," he said.

The three leaders are also accused of collecting funds for organising protests against Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Register of Citizen (NRC).

The senior police official said the interrogation of Umar Gautam and Jahangir Alam, arrested in the case of conversion, is still continuing. "Omar's network is being claimed to be spread in 24 states across the country," the ADG stated.

Meanwhile, chief minister Yogi Adityanath has directed the officials to probe the case thoroughly and take action.
New Delhi, June 29 : Tech giant Apple has become the fifth-largest PC brand in India about nine months after it first opened its online storefront in the country, the media reported.

Shipments of Apple's Mac desktops and laptops and iPad tablets reached 208,000 units in the first quarter of 2021, according to new data from research firm Canalys.

The firm attributed the rise in shipments to the opening of Apple's online store in the country in September 2020, AppleInsider reported, citing DigiTimes.

Additional data from analysis firm IDC also showed that Apple PC shipments in India grew around 335 per cent in Q1 2021.

Apple lagged behind Asustek, which tied with the Cupertino tech giant for fifth-largest PC vendor, by about 2,000 units.

In India, Apple's tablet appears to be doing even better. Although Indian tablet shipments were down 34 per cent in the first quarter, Apple ranked as the second-largest tablet vendor with a 29 per cent share of the market.

Apple tablet shipments in India increased 144 per cent year-over-year in Q1 2021, allowing the company to overtake Samsung for second place.

When it came to individual devices, 17 per cent of Apple's 29 per cent market share came from the iPad 8, while 9 per cent came from the 2020 iPad Air model.
Chicago, June 29 : One person was killed and 10 others were injured during a shooting incident at a neighbourhood in Chicago, police said.

In a statement on Monday, the city police said the shooting took place at around 10.55 p.m., on Sunday night when three men emerged from an alley and fired shots into a crowd of people standing outside, reports Xinhua news agency.

A woman suffered at least one gunshot wound to the chest, was taken to hospital and was pronounced dead, the police added.

No motive for the shooting had been released.

No arrests had been made and no description of the gunmen had been provided, local media reported.

The shooting was the second of two mass shooting attacks that took place on Sunday.

At 8.45 p.m., six people were shot in South Shore on South Side of Chicago.

Between the two mass shootings, there had been at least 17 people shot, two fatally, one from each scene.

A police spokeswoman would not say whether there was any connection between the two shootings or if they were unrelated.

According to Chicago Tribune statistics, by June 12, 294 people had been killed in the city this year, 21 more than in 2020.
San Francisco, June 29 : Facebook stock surpassed the $1 trillion high-water mark for the first time after a pair of antitrust lawsuits were dismissed in federal court.

Shares of the social network finished up 4 per cent at $355.64 at the close of trading on Monday, giving the company a market cap of just over $1 trillion.

Hours before trading was halted, a federal court granted Facebook's request to dismiss a US Federal Trade Commission antitrust lawsuit, AppleInsider reported.

According to the judge, the FTC's complaint, which alleged Facebook maintains monopoly power over the social networking sector through illegal means, was "legally insufficient." "FTC has failed to plead enough facts to plausibly establish a necessary element of all of its Section 2 claims -- namely, that Facebook has monopoly power in the market for Personal Social Networking (PSN) Services," the judgment reads.

The case dates back to 2020, when the FTC and attorneys general from 48 states and territories lodged twin antitrust filings against the social networking giant.A Among the suits' chief complaints was allegedly anticompetitive conduct related to acquisitions of competing services, specifically WhatsApp and Instagram.

The states' case was also dismissed on Monday in district court.

Facebook is among an elite group of tech companies to surpass the $1 trillion mark, following in the footsteps of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, reports CNET.

Apple went on to become the first US company to obtain a $2 trillion market cap in August 2020 and Microsoft recently reached that same milestone last week.
Baghdad, June 29 : Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi condemned the US airstrikes on paramilitary Hashd Shaabi positions near the country's border with Syria.

A statement by his office on Monday said that al-Kadhimi's comments came during the extraordinary session of the Ministerial Council for National Security held to address the repercussions of the US airstrikes, reports Xinhua news agency.

The council, headed by al-Kadhimi, "strongly condemns the US bombardment that targeted the positions on our border with Syria, stressing that this attack represents a flagrant violation of Iraqi sovereignty", the statement said.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned the US airstrikes and confirmed "its total rejection of Iraq being a party to any conflict to settle scores on its territory".

The airstrikes represent "an aggression and violation of national sovereignty and a clear departure from international norms and conventions", the Ministry said.

For its part, the Hashd Shaabi said in a statement that the US aircraft conducted airstrikes at 2 a.m. on Sunday on three outposts on the Iraqi side of the border with Syria and four paramilitary members were killed in the attack.
New Delhi, June 29 : The Supreme Court on Tuesday said all state governments must implement one-nation, one ration card scheme by July 31.

A bench headed by Justice Ashok Bhushan passed a slew of directions to the Centre and state governments for the benefit of the migrant workers. The top court directed all state governments to implement one-nation, one ration card scheme, which allows migrant workers to avail ration benefits from any part of the country, by July 31.

The top court directed the Centre to develop a national portal in consultation with NIC to register unorganized and migrant workers by July 31. The top court directed the state governments to frame schemes for distribution of food grains to those who don't have ration cards and asked the Centre to allocate food grains as per the demands of the state governments.

The top court directed the distribution of dry ration and community kitchen, providing succour to the needy, to continue amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The top court order came on an application by activists Harsh Mander, Anjali Bhardwaj and Jagdeep Chhokar, through advocate Prashant Bhushan, 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 application was filed in the suo motu case initiated by the top court last year to address migrant labourer crisis during the national lockdown.

During the hearing, the top court said, its main concern is that benefits which are meant for migrant workers must reach them and stressed the process of their registration is woefully slow. The top court said the Centre and state governments must expedite registration of migrant workers and also those working in the unorganised sectors.

On June 11, the top court while reserving the judgment in the matter had asked the West Bengal government to immediately implement one nation one ration card scheme.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Chennai, June 29 : Tamil Nadu gets battle ready for the next big polls in the state, for electing local bodies in Kancheepuram, Chengalpettu, Vellore, Tirupathur, Ranipet, Villupuram, Kallakurichi, Tirunelveli and Tenkasi.

This will be the next crucial election, post the Assembly polls held in April, when the DMK handed a crushing defeat to the AIADMK.

The two Dravidian majors will face off in the local body elections in the nine newly carved districts.

A Supreme Court Vacation Bench of Justice Hemant Gupta and Justice Aniruddha Bose on June 22, directed the Tamil Nadu State Election Commission to conduct the local body elections in the nine new districts and declare results before September 15.

"We grant an extension of time to complete the entire election process, including publication/ notification of election schedule and the result thereof before September 15, 2021, as the constitutional mandate to conduct elections in a time-bound manner," the top court order said.

The nine districts were carved out from existing four districts and the elections to their local bodies were to be held before December 2019 after completing the delimitation process, for which they have now been given an extention.

Political parties have already started preparations, with the DMK already holding district secretary-level meetings at the party state headquarters on Monday in which Chief Minister and DMK president M.K.Stalin participated.

In the meeting Stalin exhorted the party district secretaries to chalk out a plan so that the DMK alliance win all the seats giving no room for the opposition.

DMK alliance partner Congress is keen that the differences with the Dravidian party at the grass root levels be ironed out and they get maximum seats to contest.

State Congress chief K.S. Alagiri told IANS: "Congress has performed extremely well in the recent assembly elections and we expect at least 10 per cent of the total seats in the local body polls to be allocated to us to contest the polls." Sources in the DMK, however, told IANS that Congress does not have a grass-root machinery in the state and that it is whu it is going piggyback on the DMK for reaping electoral dividends.

The DMK though would consider providing the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi, a movement predominant with Dalit cadres more seats in the ensuing elections as the VCK have a good grass-root presence in these districts.

The AIADMK is on a sticky wicket after losing power and the arrival of former interim general secretary V.K.Sasikala pitching her claims to lead the party.

While both the senior leaders, K. Palaniswami and O. Panneerselvam putt up a brave front, there are resentments at the grass-root levels as Sasikala tries to remain relevent by releasing audio clippings of her conversation with the AIADMK cadres in various parts of the state on a daily basis.

The AIADMK is also worried that the Amma Makkal Munnetra Kazhagam (AMMK) floated by Sasikala's nephew TTV Dhinakaran will create problems by eating into its vote share.

Even as the AIADMK has dismissed its spokesperson Pugazhendhi for having been vocally critical of PMK leader Anbumani Ramadoss, the party cadres do not feel that the PMK leadership have that bonhomie with the AIADMK and that there are several differences of opinion at the grass-root level between the PMK and AIADMK leadership, both at the micro and macro levels.

A senior leader of the AIADMK from Northern Tamil Nadu told IANS on conditions of anonymity: "If PMK does not support us in North Tamil Nadu, then it will be curtains and I don't think that the issues between the AIADMK and the PMK at several places of the state have died down and we have to immediately reach a solution to this vexing problem or we will face the music in the local body polls." Another issue confronting the AIADMK is BJP state president, L. Murugan, for making it known that the alliance with the Dravidian party was only for the assembly polls and that things are open.

While the BJP is not a big force to reckon with in Tamil Nadu, it has pockets of influence and this could also in turn create problems for the AIADMK at the grass-root levels if things are not sorted out.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
New Delhi, June 29 : The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has handed over the Jammu Air Force station attack case to National Investigation Agency (NIA), officials said on Tuesday.

The NIA took over the case from Jammu and Kashmir Police which started initial probe along with other investigating agencies under the Explosives Act and other laws. The case was initially registered by Satwari police station.

The anti-terror agency formally took over the case after the MHA's permission. However, its officials had reached at the spot just a few hours after the blast took place.

For the first-of-its-kind terrorist attack in the country, two drones were used to drop bombs at vital military installation in India on the intervening night of June 26-27. Two consecutive explosions took place within a gap of five minutes at the high-security Jammu Air Force station, injuring two personnel on duty in the technical area. The drones later flew away.

The two back-to-back explosions, which occurred at 1.37 a.m. and 1.42 a.m., injured two Air Force personnel. The roof of a building was damaged, but the explosive devices missed the aircraft hangar nearby. No valuable equipment was damaged in the attack.

The Air Force Station is about 14-15 km from the nearest point on the International Border (IB) with Pakistan. The farthest that a drone from Pakistan has so far come on the Indian side of the IB and Line of Control (LoC) in the Jammu region is 12 km.

Pakistan-based terrorists are suspected behind using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to attack the Air Force station, the officials said.

The attack on the Air Force Station took place a few hours after Jammu and Kashmir Police arrested an alleged Lashkar-e-Taiba operative with an improvised explosive device (IED) weighing nearly 5 kg in Jammu.

Jammu and Kashmir Director General of Police (DGP) Dilbag Singh on Sunday termed the twin explosion a 'terror attack'.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
New Delhi, June 29 : Earthmoving and construction equipment major JCB India expects a strong recovery towards the second half of the year aided by the accelerated vaccination programme along with Centre's focus on infrastructure creation.

Accordingly, the company has pinned hopes on the record high budget set aside to create infrastructure especially roads and highways.

"Overall, we are hopeful of a strong recovery towards the second half of the year once the vaccination programs start showing their effect and the pandemic begins to taper," said JCB India's CEO and Managing Director Deepak Shetty.

At present, India suffers from a massive resurgence in Covid cases. However, a sharp decline in new infection rate has triggered hopes of an accelerated recovery.

"The second wave has once again disrupted the momentum. With the health and safety of employees being critical, we took the hard stance of temporarily pausing all manufacturing across our plants in India." "The demand in April and May over the past two months has also expectedly remained subdued due to the various restrictions across the country." Nonetheless, he cited that as infrastructure development activity slowly resumes its pace, resumption of demand and re-energising the supply chain will take some time to settle down.

"However, as an organisation, we remain positive about India's growth story and are hopeful of seeing a strong recovery like we saw last time." "Infrastructure is vital for the development of the country as it has a significant multiplier effect. The investments and the focus in the sector must continue." According to Shetty, the government's continued thrust on building infrastructure is encouraging to the construction equipment sector.

"Infrastructure creation also opens opportunities for allied industries like raw material, quarrying and equipment manufacturing, among others. Critically it also creates jobs and livelihoods." "Despite the current challenges that we face due to the pandemic, we feel that India presents great opportunities for the future." Besides, he pointed out that outlay for the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways is the highest ever this year.

"The capital expenditure allocation for FY 2021-2022 is also much greater than the previous years. The Railways are set to emerge as a growth driver in addition to 'Roads and Highways', which was long overdue." "A record allocation for railway corridors and other structural developments has been made. This will certainly help in generating on-ground activity in the sector." Furthermore, he said that formation of a Development Finance Institute (DFI), the stress in capital requirements for long-term infrastructure projects should significantly ease out.

"This was also critical to infrastructure development and a long-standing request of the industry." Similarly, the company sees significant export opportunities through 'Make in India' for the world.

At present, it exports to over 110 countries from India and is looking forward to healthy export numbers this year.

In addition, he opined that creation of rural health infrastructure as well as other schemes to reinvigorate the economy will aid in supporting the expected uptrend during the second half of 2021.

Currently, JCB has has over 60 dealers and 700 outlets for professional product support.

(Rohit Vaid can be contacted at rohit.v@ians.in)
Beijing, June 29 : Two doses of CoronaVac, a Covid-19 vaccine manufactured by Chinese firm Sinovac, are safe and produce a strong antibody response among children and adolescents aged 3-17 years, according to a results of phase 1/2 clinical trial published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal.

China earlier this month, authorised the emergency use of CoronaVac, for children aged between 3 and 17 year.

In a randomised controlled trial of 550 young people, the vaccine manufactured by Chinese company Sinovac, more than 96 per cent children and adolescents developed antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing Covid-19.

Most adverse reactions were mild or moderate, with pain at the injection site the most commonly reported symptom.

"Our finding that CoronaVac was well tolerated and induced strong immune responses is very encouraging, and suggests that further studies in other regions, involving larger, multi-ethnic populations, could provide valuable data to inform immunisation strategies involving children and adolescents," said Qiang Gao, of Sinovac Life Sciences Co, China.

The team conducted a randomised, double-blind, controlled phase 1/2 clinical trial of CoronaVac in 550 healthy children and adolescents aged 3-17 years in Zanhuang County, China between October 31 and December 30.

The vaccine (either 1.5 or 3 microgram per dose) or a control was given by intramuscular injection in two doses, at day 0 and day 28.

Among the 550 participants who received at least one dose of vaccine or the control, adverse reactions mostly mild or moderate, with pain at the injection site occurred within 28 days in 13 per cent, 73/550 participants.

However, one limitation in the study is that T cell responses -- which play an important role in SARS-CoV-2 infections -- were not assessed in the study, said the researchers.

Further, the study involved only a small number of participants and all were of Han ethnicity, highlighting a need for larger studies in other regions and involving multi-ethnic populations.

Long-term safety and immune response data were not available, though participants will be followed for at least 1 year.

"Owing to the small number of participants in the study, the results should be interpreted with caution as it was not possible to draw strong statistical conclusions," the researchers said.

"Children and adolescents with Covid-19 usually have mild or asymptomatic infections compared with adults; however, a small number may still be at risk of severe illness. They can also transmit the virus to others, making it vital to test the safety and effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccines in younger age groups," Gao said.

In India, the Pune-based Serum Institute of India (SII) will begin clinical trials of Novavax for children starting July. Hyderabad-based Bharat Biotech has also two vaccines that are being tried on children, Covaxin and BBV154, a one-shot nasal vaccine. ZyCov-D, the Zydus' Covid-19 vaccine has trials on children in the age group 12-18 years was found effective. The vaccines may be available soon.

US pharma major Pfizer has also announced that its vaccine is safe for children above 12 years of age.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
New York, June 29 : Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, the first two jabs authorised for emergency use against Covid-19 by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), produce immune responses that are both strong and potentially long-lasting, finds a study.

While both vaccines performed well in clinical trials, and have been widely credited with reducing disease, concerns remained over how long immunity induced by the mRNA-based shots will last.

The study, led by researchers from the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis showed that nearly four months after the first dose people who received the Pfizer vaccine still had so-called germinal centers in their lymph nodes churning out immune cells directed against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19.

The team found that even three weeks after the first dose, all 14 participants had formed germinal centers with B cells producing antibodies that target a key SARS-CoV-2 protein. The response expanded greatly after the booster shot and then stayed high.

Even 15 weeks after the first dose, eight of 10 people still had detectable germinal centers containing B cells targeting the virus.

"Germinal centers are the key to a persistent, protective immune response," said Ali Ellebedy, Associate Professor of pathology and immunology, of medicine and of molecular microbiology.

"Germinal centers are where our immune memories are formed. And the longer we have a germinal center, the stronger and more durable our immunity will be because there's a fierce selection process happening there, and only the best immune cells survive," Ellebedy added.

Moreover, vaccination led to high levels of neutralising antibodies effective against three variants of the virus, including the Beta variant from South Africa that has shown some resistance to vaccines.

Vaccination also induced stronger antibody responses in people who had recovered from SARS-CoV-2 infection compared to those who had never been infected. Among people without prior exposure to the virus, antibody levels rose slowly after the first dose and peaked one week after the second.

Both Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were created with mRNA technology. Unlike most vaccines, which provide bits of viral or bacterial proteins to trigger an immune response, mRNA-based vaccines provide instructions for the body to build and release foreign proteins, such as the spike protein in the case of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel is participating in the virtual meeting of chief ministers with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The meeting will review the arrangements and progress of COVID-19 vaccine immunisation programme. Union Home Min Image Source: IANS News

New June 29 : Chhattisgarh chief minister Bhupesh Baghel has written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi urging him to provide at least one crore doses of corona vaccines in the month of July.

In his letter, the chief minister said, "At present only 9,98,810 doses of corona vaccines are left in the state which is sufficient for only 3 days." He said, despite repeated demands by the state, sufficient doses of vaccines are not provided to Chhattisgarh. The chief minister has also requested the Prime Minister to immediately direct the union health ministry regarding providing corona vaccines to Chhattisgarh.

The chief minister also informed the Prime Minister that the vaccination drive against Covid-19 is going on at a fast pace in Chhattisgarh. The state has so far vaccinated the first dose to 100 per cent of frontline workers and to 91 per cent of health care workers. Out of these, 71 per cent of frontline workers and 70 per cent of health care workers have been given the second dose.

Similarly, 80 per cent of the citizens in the age group of 45 and above have been given the first dose.

Although the vaccination for the age group of 18-44 years has started from May 1, yet in less than two months, 16 per cent of the citizens in this age group have been given the first dose of corona vaccine. Presently more than 3 lakh people are vaccinated in Chhattisgarh every day.

"We have set a target for the state that if we get sufficient number of corona vaccine doses from the Government of India, we will administer the first dose of vaccine to all eligible beneficiaries within a month. For this a massive public campaign is also being run in Chhattisgarh." he said
New Delhi, June 29: Monday was a big day for China and also the Communist Party of China (CPC). The country operationalised the Baihetan Hydropower Station in Southwest China, the largest hydropower project in the world.

The CPC gave itself a mammoth gift on its 100th anniversary--the plant will generate 1 million KW units. The State-managed newspaper Global Times said: "... the breakthrough of this super project marks a new milestone in the development of hydroelectricity in China, and also reflects the advantages of the socialist system with Chinese characteristics, under the leadership of the CPC, in concentrating its efforts on major projects." Chinese President Xi Jinping too sent a congratulatory letter. Highlighting that the plant will transfer power from western China to the eastern part of the country, he said: "Socialism was established through action, and the new era will be no different". He added that the plant will help China achieve its targets for peak carbon dioxide emissions and carbon neutrality.

China's stupendous feats in dam engineering and water management give nightmares to environmental groups, geologists and biologists. The multiple reasons are environmental impacts, stability of structures as well as loss of habitat.

India Narrative spoke with Dr Anjal Prakash, Research Director at the Indian School of Business, to find out more. Dr Prakash is the lead author in the IPCC's 6th Assessment Report which is currently ongoing.

Dr Prakash says that China has constructed the Baihetan Hydropower Station in the ecologically fragile Yunnan province. "The dam is on the Jinsha River in the upper stench of the mighty Yangtze River in Sichuan and Yunnan provinces. These provinces are also seismically active. Just last month, an earthquake of 6.1 magnitude hit Yunnan province. Building such a high dam on seismically and ecologically fragile regions is a recipe for disaster".

It is surprising that China has undertaken the construction of big dams at a time when such constructions are considered a pariah. Even global funding is drying up for big dams owing to their environmental costs which people and nature have to bear over a period of time. Big dams are associated with mass displacement of people, loss of identity and cultural heritage, habitat destruction and wiping out of endangered species.

"In the wake of a rapidly changing climate which is impacting water regimes around the world, building a high dam on Jinsha River could also prove to bring in huge climate related risks. Due to climatic changes, the patterns of rainfall have been changing. If there is high rainfall in the upper reaches of the river basin, it may affect the dam and could bring in huge stress", says Dr Prakash.

He adds that big hydropower projects are increasingly becoming costlier and this doesn't match with its advantages. "China is setting a very wrong example for countries around the world by building such dams", says Dr Prakash.

Chinese newspaper Global Times itself says: "... the project had to overcome extremely difficult technical problems, such as the fragile geology, the hot and dry wind in the valley, and the large excavation work". These itself could become issues for the dam to surmount in the future.

(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
Bengaluru, June 29 : Karnataka chief minister, B.S. Yediyurappa on Tuesday stepped in to clear the 'confusion' over announcement of class 10 examination, erupted after the education minister announced the dates on Monday.

Taking to Twitter, Yediyurappa said that there is no confusion over the announcement of conducting examination for state board's class 10 (Secondary School Leaving Certificate - SSLC) on July 19 and 22.

"Prior to the announcement of dates to this crucial examination, our education minister (S. Suresh Kumar) had consulted with me and then he proceeded with the announcement. Hence, let none have any confusion over the date of examinations again," he said.

Following tweet, health minister, K. Sudhakar too clarified that there was no confusion over conducting SSLC examinations on July 19 and 22. "With CM himself clarifying there is no need to drag this matter any further," he told reporters prior to heading Mysuru to review Covid preparations.

The minister said that he had stated that he was kept in the dark about the education department's decision to conduct examinations at such a large scale across the state.

"I was not aware that the education department had consulted with the CM, perhaps I must be busy with other meetings, therefore, this announcement was made. I too came to know late in the evening of Monday that the education department had consulted with the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC-K) on Covid. But by then it was too late for me to issue any clarification," he said.

The confusion over conducting examinations to SSLC erupted soon after the education department, S. Suresh Kumar announced the dates on Monday.

Reacting to the media about the education department's decision, Sudhakar had retorted that he doesn't think that examination dates were announced after he or TAC was consulted. "I haven't spoken to Suresh Kumar (Education Minister) yet. I don't know if the directions have been given by health department officials, but we are concerned about children's health. I don't know if they spoke to the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) or not. I will talk to Kumar and TAC on this and then react," he said obliquely but expressed his anguish in clearest terms.

Following this, speculation gained momentum that SSLC examinations might yet again be postponed which had already been postponed multiple times due to the prevailing pandemic scenario in the state.

Regardless of the pandemic situation, as many as 8,76,581 students have registered for the examination and admission tickets will be sent to respective schools on June 30. The examination will be held at as many as 73,066 rooms as compared to 48,000 rooms during the last year, the education minister had stated on Monday.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Mumbai, June 29 : Former Maharashtra home minister and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader Anil Deshmukh on Tuesday once again skipped the summons of the Enforcement Directorate (ED) citing Covid pandemic, in connection with its probe into the allegations of the alleged bribery. He said that he was ready to join the probe through any "video or audio" medium.

Deshmukh had skipped the ED summons last week also following searches at his residence in Nagpur. He had sought more time to appear before the financial probe agency.

In his three page letter to the ED, Deshmukh said, "I am a septuagenarian, about 72 years of age, suffering from various co-morbidities including hypertension and cardiac problems, etc. I have already exposed my person to some extent on June 25 in my long interaction with you spanning over several hours during the course of the search and recording my statement. Thus, it may not be prudent or desirable to appear in person today and I am sending my authorised representative." The NCP leader also said that he would furnish all information and documents sought by the ED after the agency provided him a copy of the Enforcement Case Information Report (ECIR) filed by it in the case. He further mentioned that the ED summons "do not clarify" the purpose of his personal appearance before it.

On June 26, the ED arrested Deshmukh's personal secretary Sanjeev Palande and personal assistant Kundan Shinde in connection with an alleged 'hafta' case. In its remand copy of the two officials of Deshmukh, the ED said that over Rs 4 crore was collected from bar owners between December 2020 and February 2021 was routed to Deshmukh's charitable trust in Nagpur, through four shell companies in Delhi.

Deshmukh (72), is facing an ED investigation on the basis of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) case as the fallout of the allegations made in a letter penned by former Mumbai Police Commissioner Param Bir Singh, who is now the Commandant-General of Home Guards.

Singh had alleged in his letter to chief minister Uddhav Thackeray in March that Deshmukh had fixed a collection target of Rs 100 crore per month for sacked assistant police inspector Sachin Vaze, who was the then head of the Crime Intelligence Unit of the elite Crime Branch-CID of the Mumbai Police. Thereafter, Singh had approached the Supreme Court which directed him to go to Bombay High Court where the CBI was asked to conduct a preliminary enquiry.

Meanwhile, Vaze was arrested by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) for the twin cases of planting of an SUV Scorpio with 20 gelatin sticks and a threat note near Antilia, the home of Reliance Industries Ltd Chairman Mukesh Ambani, followed by the murder of Thane-based owner of the SUV, Mansukh Hiran.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Damascus, June 29 : Rocket fire targeted a US military base in Syria's eastern province of Deir al-Zour, state media reported on Tuesday.

The targeted base targeted on Monday evening is located in the al-Omar oil field in the eastern countryside of Deir al-Zour, Xinhua news agency quoted the state media report as saying, without providing further details.

Meanwhile, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights watchdog group said the attack caused damage and burned cars in the base, without any mention of casualties.

The war monitor noted that pro-Iran fighters were behind the rocket fire.

Following the attack, areas under the control of the pro-Iranian fighters in the al-Mayadin city in Deir al-Zour witnessed several explosions, which appeared to be retaliatory shelling from the targeted US base in the al-Omar field, said the Observatory.

The exchange of fire comes after the United States carried out a missile strike at 1 a.m. on Monday on pro-Iranian fighters' positions in the eastern countryside of Deir al-Zour near the Iraqi border, killing five.

Washington claims that pro-Iran militiamen are responsible for attacks against US positions in Iraq.
New Delhi, June 29: The world famous Sherlock Holmes who has mesmerised generations of readers with his uncanny knack of solving cases that completely confound everyone is back to entertain in the form of audiobooks.

On June 28, the Swedish audiobooks platform, Storytel announced that it has signed a deal with Conan Doyle Estate for new stories in audiobooks. These will be written by the popular novelist Anthony Horowitz, the Swedish audiobooks platform said.

Holmes will be ready for new intriguing and mind-boggling adventures in the audio form through this exclusive agreement between Storytel and The Conan Doyle Estate. The deal will give Storytel the privilege of developing completely new stories featuring the world's iconic and best loved detective.

The adventure stories will be penned by a group of writers who will function under the creative lead of award winning novelist and screenwriter Anthony Horowitz.

Horowitz is recognised as one of the most versatile, prolific and successful authors in the United Kingdom. He has the unique distinction of working across varied mediums.

The author's Alex Rider series has sold around 20 million copies worldwide, and he enjoys the credit of being a writer who has encouraged an entire generation to read. Horowitz has so far penned more than 40 books. These include new Sherlock Holmes and James Bond novels and also an award winning television series Midsomer Murders and Foyle's War.

Recently, Horowitz's bestselling novel, "Magpie Murders" has just been filmed as TV miniseries by the same name. It is about a whodunit writer who is murdered while writing his latest mystery book. Again in August this year, his third in the series of adult novels "A Hawthorne and Horowitz Mystery" - "A Line to Kill" -- will see him being involved personally in murder investigations, along with ex-DI Hawthorne.

Giving his reaction to the Press about writing the three audiobooks, Horowitz said: "This is going to be Sherlock Holmes from a very different perspective, staying true to the spirit of the books -- which I have always loved -- but expanding the narrative and the vision of Conan Doyle in all sorts of unexpected ways. I'm excited to be collaborating with Storytel who has a huge worldwide audience. For me this project is an adventure in itself".

The Conon Doyle Estate too is thrilled about the audiobooks featuring the remarkable detective who is popular worldwide. "Growing up, we were always reminded of my great uncle Arthur's passion for telling stories to his children as his mother had done with him. He created some of the world's most famous stories and characters because of his first love for storytelling. Our mission for the estate is to expand Sir Arthur's universe and characters far past the original stories. We are delighted to be collaborating with Storytel and Anthony Horowitz on this audio first project which will give Sherlock and his universe a whole different dimension," observed Richard Doyle from the Estate.

According to Storytel these books will take the Homles legacy to a new place in a new digital format. Describing the project as a dream come true, Richard Henley, Storytel's Head of Global Direct Published said: "I am more than convinced that Anthony is perfect for leading this unique project creatively." Interestingly the deal gives Horowitz and Storytel access to both the brand and the vast knowledge and expertise that lies in the heritage of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Across 25 markets, Storytel offers listening and reading of over 500,000 audiobooks, and recently it signed a deal with Spotify which gives access to its subscribers to listen to audiobooks from its library.

In order to cash on the twin popularity of Holmes and Horowitz, Storytel is in talks with print publishers and for adaptations for television and movies of the new adventures of the time-tested sleuth! (This content is being carried under an arrangement with indianarrative.com) --indianarrative/
New Delhi, June 29 : The Supreme Court on Tuesday slammed the Centre for having a lackadaisical approach in developing a portal for registration of the unorganized or migrant workers, to avail benefits from various government schemes.

A bench comprising Justice Ashok Bhushan and M.R. Shah said: "When the unorganized workers are waiting for registration and are waiting to reap the benefit of various welfare schemes of the States and Centre, the apathy and lackadaisical attitude by the Ministry of Labour and Employment is unpardonable." The bench emphasized that only after registration of the workers, states and Centre will be able to extend the benefits of the welfare schemes to them. "Prior to that unless the registration is complete, tall claims by all the States and Union that they have implemented various welfare schemes for the migrant workers and unorganized workers remain only on paper without giving any benefit to unorganized workers," noted the bench.

The top court pointed out that there was urgency in the portal to be finalized and implemented looking at the pandemic and dire need of unorganized workers to receive the benefit. "The attitude of Ministry of Labour and Employment in not completing the module even though directed as early as on 21.08.2018 shows that Ministry is not alive to the concern of the migrant workers and the non-action of the Ministry is strongly disapproved", added the bench.

The bench directed the secretary, Ministry of Labour and Employment to ensure that National Data Base for Unorganised Workers (NDUW) portal is finalized, and implementation of the portal commences on or before July 31. The bench stressed that to provide access to the migrant workers to different schemes of state government and Centre, registration is a must.

The top court directed the Centre to develop the portal in consultation with National Informatics Centre (NIC) for registration of the unorganized labourers/migrant workers.

"We also impress upon and direct that the Central Government as well as the respective States and the Union Territories to complete the process of Portal for registration under National Data Base for Unorganised Workers (NDUW Project) as well as implement the same, which by all means may commence not later than July 31", said the top court, emphasizing that registration process should be completed before December 31, 2021.

The top court order came in the suo moto case -- problems and miseries of migrant workers.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Hyderabad, June 29 : Cyberabad police have arrested a youth who recklessly drove an Audi car killing a man travelling in an autorickshaw.

The incident happened on Sunday.

Police arrested Sujith Reddy and his friend P. Ashish, who was travelling with him in the same car, which struck the autorickshaw from behind, near Inorbit Mall in the information technology hub of Madhapur.

According to Madhapur inspector Ravinder Prasad, a case of culpable homicide not amounting to murder has been booked against the Audi driver and his associate. Both are aged 24.

Sujith Reddy is studying at Indian Institute of Civil Engineering and Management, Goa while his friend is an employee of a software firm in Hyderabad. Both were returning from a party, and were drunk.

Cyberabad Traffic Police on Tuesday released the horrific visuals of the accident that occurred around 5.30 a.m. on June 27. The car (Audi A8) being driven at a very high speed hit the three-wheeler from rear on the rain-drenched road.

The autorickshaw was thrown off the road killing its occupant Umesh Kumar, an employee of Prism Pub, who was returning home. The autorickshaw driver was injured.

"After travelling for some distance Sujith Reddy and Ashish got out of the car and tried to remove the number plate to wipe out any evidence," the police official said.

When a security guard from a nearby building questioned them, they threatened him and escaped leaving behind the car.

Later, Sujith Reddy's father Raghunandan Reddy approached Cyberabad police, saying it was his driver who was driving the car at the time of the accident. Police, however, doubted his version. The investigators scanned the CCTV footage to find that it was his son Sujith Reddy who was driving the car.

Police have also booked Raghunandan Reddy for giving false information, and for harbouring his son.

The inspector said Sujith Reddy and Ashish were also booked for causing disappearance of evidence and criminal intimidation.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Chennai, June 29 : The Madras High Court on Tuesday observed that without the Supreme court leave, the Tamil Nadu government cannot constitute a committee to study the impact of NEET on MBBS aspirants from socially backward classes.

The first bench of the Madras High Court of Chief Justice Sanjib Banerjee and Justice Senthil Kumar Ramamoorthy in the observation said, "There can be little room for the state to set up any committee for the purpose of ascertaining whether the NEET based admission process has prejudicially affected socially backward students." The court's observation came on a PIL moved by BJP state secretary K. Nagarajan seeking to quash an order issued by the Tamil Nadu government on June 10, constituting a committee headed by Justice, A.K. Rajan to study the impact of NEET.

The petitioner has in his plea said that any recommendation made by the committee cannot be implemented in view of the orders passed by the apex court on the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test(NEET).

The Tamil Nadu advocate general R. Shanmugasundaram argued that the constitution of the committee was backed by the election manifesto of the ruling party and that it was a policy decision. The court to this argument said, "Maybe its true but it's contrary to the Supreme Court order and it cannot be permitted." The court then gave one week to the Tamil Nadu government to respond to the plea.
New Delhi, June 29 : South Korean tech giant Samsung is planning to launch a new F series smartphone -- Galaxy F22 -- in the country that is supposed to be priced under Rs 15,000.

The upcoming Galaxy F Series smartphone is coming to India in the second week of July, industry sources told IANS.

The smartphone is tipped to feature a 6.4-inch HD+ Super AMOLED display with a 90Hz refresh rate for smooth performance.

Galaxy F22 is speculated to come with a massive 6000mAh battery to ensure that the lifestyle needs of Gen Z and millennial consumers are met.

It will sport a 48MP quad-camera set-up to capture detailed shots, the sources added.

Galaxy F is Samsung's India-specific smartphone series for which Samsung has tied up with Flipkart. Galaxy F smartphones also sell on Samsung Online Store and leading retail stores.

Samsung has launched a series of Galaxy F smartphones in India this year, including Galaxy F62, Galaxy F12 and Galaxy F02s. It will be Samsung's fourth Galaxy F Series smartphone to launch in India this year.

Galaxy F portfolio is a growing brand from Samsung and has become extremely popular among Gen Z and millennial consumers looking for powerful devices from Samsung.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Wellington, June 29 : New Zealand will resume the quarantine free travel bubble with some Australian states from Sunday after Wellington relaxes Covid-19 restrictions on Tuesday night.

The capital will move back down to alert level 1 from midnight on Tuesday due to zero community transmission found after the Covid-19 alert moved up to level 2 about a week ago, Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield told a press conference.

The raising of alert level on Wednesday was due to a Sydney tourist who visited Wellington between June 18 and 21 and tested positive for the more infectious Delta variant of Covid-19 upon returning to Australia, reports Xinhua news agency.

Under alert level 2, any mass gatherings are prohibited and limited to 100 people.

Facial masks are mandatory on public transport.

As Wellington prepares to return to Alert Level 1 tonight, people in the region are urged to remain vigilant and get tested if they are feeling unwell or were at a location of interest, Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said.

He said there have been no cases of Covid-19 detected in the community after nearly 2,500 negative results from contacts of the case (including repeat negative results from the case's close contacts) and wastewater testing The pause on the quarantine free travel from South Australia, Australian Capital Territory, Tasmania and Victoria will be lifted at 11.59 p.m. on Sunday, Hipkins said, adding this could change if the situation in Australia evolves.

The pause with Western Australia, Northern Territory, New South Wales and Queensland will remain in place so that outstanding test results can be returned and to "give New Zealand time to assess next steps", the Minister said, adding this will be reviewed again next on July 6.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
New Delhi, June 29 : NITI Aayog on Tuesday released a comprehensive study on the 'not-for-profit' hospital model in the country, in a step towards closing the information gap on such institutions and facilitating robust policymaking in this area.

The not-for-profit hospital sector provides not only curative but also preventive healthcare. It links healthcare with social reform, community engagement, and education. It uses government resources and grants to provide cost-effective healthcare to people without being concerned about profits. However, over the years, this sector has remained understudied.

The study provides insights into the operation model of not-for-profit hospitals. It presents research-based findings on such hospitals -- categorized under ownership and premise of service -- and makes subsequent comparisons with private hospitals and health schemes of the Union government.

It discusses in detail the cost-containment strategies implemented by not-for-profit hospitals and seeks to understand the challenges that burden the operations of these institutions and hinder their growth.

The report proposes short and long term policy interventions such as developing criteria to identify these hospitals, ranking them through a performance index, and promoting top hospitals for practising philanthropy, among others. It also highlights the need to use the expertise of these hospitals in managing human resources with limited finance in remote areas.

"There has been relatively low investment in the expansion of the health sector in the private domain. The stimulus announced yesterday provides us an opportunity to change this situation. The report on the not-for-profit sector is a small step in that direction," said Dr VK Paul, Member (Health), NITI Aayog while releasing the report in the presence of NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant, Additional Secretary Dr Rakesh Sarwal, and representatives of hospitals across the country who participated in the study.

NITI Aayog has been extensively studying the private sector healthcare delivery landscape in the country. While there exists adequate information on for-profit healthcare providers and institutions, there is a dearth of reliable and structured information on their not-for-profit counterparts, known for their tireless service in making quality healthcare accessible and affordable to everyone.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Canberra, June 29 : Australian Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce has been fined A$200 ($151) for failing to wear a face mask inside a petrol station in New South Wales (NSW) state.

Joyce, also the leader of the National Party of Australia, confirmed the incident of breaching coronavirus restrictions,reports Xinhua news agency.

"I went into the Caltex service station. I was going to the airport, fuelled the car up with fuel, went in, 30 seconds later, A$200 it cost me, because I didn't wear one of these (masks)," he told Sky News Australia on Tuesday.

NSW police said they were called to the petrol station by a member of the public and issued the fine to a 54-year-old male after reviewing the security camera footage.

"That person was apologetic and cooperated with police being firm and fair," deputy commissioner Gary Worboys told reporters.

"Police are rostered 24/7 right across the state and they will take action, and certainly the incident at Armidale is clear evidence that police will investigate and take action." It comes a week after Joyce was returned as the Deputy Prime Minister after a successful leadership challenge against former Nationals leader Michael McCormack.

The governing coalition government in Australia is formed by the Liberal Party and the National Party, with the leader of the later serving as the Deputy Prime Minister.

Joyce previously served as the Deputy Prime Minister from 2016 to 2018 when he resigned after being accused of sexual harassment, an allegation he strongly denied.
New Delhi, June 29 : The Monsoon session of Parliament is likely to commence on its usual timing this year with signals coming from the government to hold the session in the third week of July, sources said.

It is expected that the session might be held from July 19 to August 13 with all Covid-related protocols.

The nearly month-long session is likely to have around 20 sittings, sources said.

The Monsoon session of Parliament usually commences in the third week of July and concludes ahead of Independence day.

However, the final date will be officially declared after the Cabinet Committees on Parliamentary Affairs (CCPA) meeting which will be chaired by Defence Minister Rajnath Singh. The CCPA meeting is slated to be held after Rajnath Singh returns from his three-day Ladakh visit. Modalities of holding this year's Monsoon session are still being discussed.

Earlier, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Pralhad Joshi had said the government may hold the Monsoon session as per its normal schedule in July.

Since the pandemic began, three sessions of Parliament -- Budget, Monsoon and Winter Session -- were curtailed and the Winter Session last year had to be cancelled. Last year, the Monsoon session, which usually starts in July, had begun in September.

The authorities are confident of holding Monsoon session in July this year as most of the parliamentarians, staff members of both the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha secretariats and other stakeholders have received at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine.
Varanasi : , June 29 (IANS) Thirty nine projects in Varanasi are complete and are awaiting inauguration.

These include International Convention Centre 'Rudraksh' and the Ashapur railway overbridge, built at a cost of Rs 726.54 crore.

Fourteen more projects worth Rs 1424.42 crore are expected to be completed by the end of July.

Divisional Commissioner Deepak Agrawal said, "These projects are part of the 138 projects of Rs 8,331.30 crore which have already been launched in the district. Work on these projects is in progress. Of this, 39 projects of Rs 726.54 crore have been completed in May and 14 projects of Rs 1,424.42 crore will be completed in July." District Magistrate Kaushal Raj Sharma said, "So far, there is no intimation regarding the next visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Varanasi. However, assuming that all the completed projects could be ready for inauguration by July end, the pace of the projects where over 90 per cent work has been done, has been accelerated." Officials are trying their best to ensure the completion of over 50 projects before the next visit of the Prime Minister is announced.

Apart from these 53 projects, the commissioner said that 62 more on-going projects of Rs 3,879.49 crore will be completed by August-end, followed by the completion of 10 other projects of Rs 2003.92 crore in January 2022.

Varanasi is the parliamentary constituency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Manila, June 29 : The Philippines has extended the travel ban for all inbound travellers from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) until July 15, presidential spokesperson Harry Roque said on Tuesday.

"This is one of the proactive measures imposed to implement international border control because of the Covid-19 Delta variant," Roque said in a televised press conference.

The Philippines has detected the more transmissible Delta variants in the samples taken from 17 returning Filipinos, among whom a seafarer has died, the Department of Health of the Philippines said.

The Southeast Asian country initially imposed travel restrictions on India from April 29 amid the devastating second wave of the pandemic in the South Asian giant, reports Xinhua news agency.

It widened the ban to include travellers from Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka from May 7.

It also banned international arrivals from Oman and the UAE from May 15 after overseas Filipino workers who flew in from these countries tested positive for the Delta variant first detected in India.

The Philippines has reported a total of 1,408,058 confirmed cases of Covid-19 as of Tuesday, with 24,557 deaths.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Agartala, June 29 : Amid dissidence and discontent among a section of the legislators and leaders, the ruling BJP in the state along with the party's central leaders, have initiated a series of meetings to strengthen the organisation before the 2023 Tripura Assembly polls.

Tripura Pradesh Bharatiya Janata Party chief spokesman Subrata Chakraborty on Tuesday said that after the Monday's State Executive meeting, which was held after 10 months due to the Covid pandemic, district and 'Mandal' (state Assembly constituency) level executive meetings would be completed by July 15.

Though Chakraborty said that these meetings have no relation with the next Assembly elections, due in one and a-half-years, the political circles observed that the ruling party has seriously taken initiatives to further consolidate the party organisations in the midst of dissidence of a section of legislators and leaders.

To quell the dissidence and differences, besides the State Executive meeting two other very important meetings were held in less than ten days.

On June 16, BJP's national General Secretary, Organisation, B.L. Santosh, General Secretary in-charge of the Northeast region Ajay Jamwal and central observer Fanindra Nath Sharma rushed to the state and held a series of meetings for two days with the state leaders, legislators, ministers and other party functionaries.

Another central observer Vinod Sonkar was scheduled to come on June 16 but his tour was cancelled at the last minute.

In the Monday's meeting, where the dissident leaders and MLAs led by former Minister Sudip Roy Barman remained absent, Nath Sharma physically attended while BJP's strategist and National General Secretary Bhupender Yadav and Sonkar virtually participated in the meeting from Delhi.

A BJP insider said that at least ten of the party's 36 MLAs did not participate in the June 25 crucial meeting held in the state Assembly conference hall.

BJP spokesman Nabendu Bhattacharjee said senior leaders are thinking about those MLAs and leaders who remained absent without informing the party.

Chief Minister Biplab Kumar Deb, a former state BJP President, who attended all the three important meetings, asked all the leaders, ministers, MLAs and functionaries to maintain close relations with a cross section of the people to make the party base more strong.

Emphasising on triple 'S' -- 'Sambad' (information), 'Swabhav' (good relations) and 'Sadachar' (good behaviour), Deb said if the party leaders and functionaries sincerely work for the people's welfare, the BJP would be able to defeat the other parties in the coming elections.

Strong speculations about a fresh political development in Tripura are rife after BJP national Vice President Mukul Roy along with his son Subhrangshu Roy rejoined the ruling Trinamool Congress on June 11 in Kolkata.

Roy, before joining the BJP around four years ago, had often visited Tripura to supervise the Trinamool's organisational matters.

Under Roy's influence, seven Congress MLAs led by Sudip Roy Barman and a large number of party leaders and workers joined the Trinamool in 2016 and a year later joined the BJP, boosting the political strength of the saffron party.

All the seven were re-elected on the BJP tickets in the 2018 polls and among them Roy Barman, Pranajit Singha Roy and Ratan Lal Nath were made Ministers and Biswabandhu Sen appointed as Deputy Speaker.

Roy Barman, son of former Chief Minister and incumbent Congress leader Samir Ranjan Barman, became the Health and Family Welfare, Information Technology and Science and Technology Minister, but was sacked in May 2019 following differences of opinion with Chief Minister Biplab Kumar Deb.

At Least 11 BJP legislators and some party leaders led by Roy Barman and fellow MLAs and former party Vice President Ram Prasad Paul went to Delhi in October last year to discuss "party affairs in Tripura with the central leadership".

Amid dissidence and discontent among a section of the BJP leaders and legislators, Chief Minister Deb in December last year announced to take "public mandate" through public gatherings in Agartala but subsequently with the request of the central and state leaders, the plan was called off.
June

Cast: Nehha Pendse, Siddharth Menon, Saurabh Pachauri, Nilesh Divekar, Kiran Karmarkar

Direction: Suhrud Godbole and Vaibhav Khisti

Rating: * * * (three stars)

BY VINAYAK CHAKRAVORTY

Suhrud Godbole and Vaibhav Khisti's coming-of-age film is hard as nails while conveying its message, yet sensitive while driving home the point. The script focuses on issues such as bullying, teenage confusion, self-harm and suicide, and also touches upon wider issues as sexism and generation gap. The storytelling is commendable for the way it deals with the gamut of subjects within a runtime of a little over an hour and a half without losing focus, although certain situations and characters could seem unidimensional.

Nikhil Mahajan's script would seem relevant also because it is based in the small town of Aurangabad. Insecurity, uncertainty and angst among youngsters can often be more acute within this age group in smalltown India than the metros, owing to drastic conflict of culture and mindsets.

The story unfolds in an Aurangabad housing society, and the mood of conflict is set right away. A young girl Neha (Nehha Pendse) drives into the society from Pune, to move into one of the flats. As she lights up, the 50-something society president Jaiswal (Nilesh Divekar) tells her women are not allowed to smoke publicly within society premises.

The story, of course, isn't about Neha's clash with conservatism that the likes of Jaiswal define -- though that forms an interesting sub plot. The focus, rather, is on Neel (Siddharth Menon), the youngster who gave Neha vague directions about the location of her flat in the society when she arrived, confusing her.

As we step into Neel's world we discover he is in an angry, depressed space, tormented by the suicide of his hostel roommate, for which he holds himself responsible in a way, as well as the constant clashes with his father, who has been concealing the fact to neighbours that he failed engineering exam.

Mahajan's writing is impressive for the way it builds up Neel's dark world, and the entry of Neha lets the young boy find a companion he can talk to. The screenplay accords Neha a subtext of her own, which suitably runs as an undercurrent story but never distracts from the basic plot.

The film uses the smalltown set-up as an important third character, along with Neha and Neel. It's not just Jaiswal, who defines the neighbourhood bully and who wants people to follow what he believes is the moral code of conduct in life, but we find specs of smalltown mindset in Neel's father (Kiran Karmarkar), too, in the way he tries dominating his son. The father-son relationship lays down a familiar, albeit dramatic, track of generation gap. Interesting vignette bring alive smalltown mindset around sexuality -- Neel's girlfriend trying to shave with her father's razor and cutting herself because Neel told her she is a "bear" and he hates the idea of having sex with her. Or, the coy reaction Neel's best friend Pritesh (Saurabh Pachauri) gives, when a girl asks him to kiss her. These are all scenes handled without going over the top with emotions.

You could spot the flaws. A few protagonists (Jaiswal comes to mind) don't get any arc at all, and fall within the purview of black-and-white characterisation. In the case of Neel's father, his change of heart in the end seems too sudden and filmi to be true. The overall sombre mood of the film, although necessary, could be discomforting for some, for there are few moments of relief.

Overall, though, "June" is convincing in what it states. Powered by a strong cast, The film represents a new wave of introspective cinema triggered by the rise of OTT culture in India, not hesitant to initiate conversations that were deemed taboo even a while ago.

-- Syndicated from IANS
New Delhi, June 29 : With an aim to accelerate the growth of small and medium businesses in the country, Facebook on Tuesday partnered with VC fund Stellaris Venture Partners to scale young businesses by providing them with timely digital skilling.

The partnership is a part of Facebook's VC Brand Incubator Program, which is an industry-first initiative for building the ecosystem for SMB growth in the country along with leading venture capital funds.

"We know that timely skilling can unlock multiple growth opportunities for small businesses that are the backbone of India's economy. As business after business moves online in current times, the need for timely digital up-skilling becomes even more urgent to drive their recovery and growth," Archana Vohra, Director, Small and Medium Businesses at Facebook India, said in a statement.

"Facebook is committed to the economic recovery of India and as we mark the two years' milestone for the program, we are delighted to partner with Stellaris Venture Partners to help early stage SMBs to unleash their true potential to grow and scale their business," it added.

The partnership with Stellaris Venture Partners marks the completion of a two years milestone of the VC Brand Incubator Program.

In just 24 months since its inception, Facebook has tied up with nine VC funds and has successfully skilled, trained, and mentored more than 200 small businesses at various stages of their growth journey.

Before the partnership with Stellaris Venture Partners, Facebook has partnered with Sauce.vc, Fireside Ventures, Elevation Capital (SAIF Partners), Surge (Sequoia), DSG Consumer Partners, Matrix Partners, Anthill Ventures, and Kae Capital for the programme.

Stellaris Venture Partners is an early-stage, technology-focused venture capital firm working with SMBs such as Boldcare, Beepkart, CredFlow, Propelld, Whatfix and many more.

Their investment focus areas include global software companies with an India advantage, as well as tech businesses solving India-specific problems.
Minsk, June 29 : Belarus has suspended its participation in the Eastern Partnership initiative of the European Union (EU) due to the bloc's recently imposed sanctions against the country.

Head of the EU Delegation to Belarus Dirk Schuebel was summoned to the Foreign Ministry in Minsk on Monday and informed of the suspension, Xinhua news agency reported.

Belarus considers it "unacceptable" to use sanctions as an instrument of pressure on an independent state, and is forced to take concrete steps as a response to the actions that threaten the country's national security and are detrimental to the economy and citizens, the statement added.

EU representatives involved in the introduction of restrictive measures against Belarus will be prohibited from entering the country, the ministry said, and more restrictions are being planned.

Partially in response to the diversion of a Ryanair passenger flight to Minsk on May 23, the EU announced new sanctions against 78 individuals and eight entities in Belarus on June 21.

Belarusian journalist Roman Protasevich and his partner Sofia Sapega were on board a commercial flight between Greece and Lithuania that was rerouted on May 23 to Minsk shortly before it reached Vilnius due to an alleged bomb threat.

No bomb was found, but both were detained.

The Eastern Partnership is a joint initiative involving the EU, its member states and six Eastern Partner countries, namely Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine.
New Delhi, June 29 : Ensuring more penetration at booth level, the BJP has decided to form a five-member committee on each page of electoral roll ahead of next year's assembly polls in five states.

Earlier, the saffron party used to appoint 'Panna Pramukh', in charge of one page (both front and back) of a voters list, which is now replaced with 'Panna Committee' consisting of voters from the same page. The BJP believes that the panna committee will ensure a minimum 60 per cent of votes of the page in its favour.

Assembly elections will be held in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Manipur and Goa in the early part of next year.

The 'Panna Pramukh' concept, a brainchild of union home minister Amit Shah, was first used in 2007 Gujarat assembly polls and has since been replicated in other states and 2019 General elections as well. A 'panna pramukh' acts as the head of one page (both front and back) of a voters list consisting of the names of nearly 30 voters.

Panna pramukh's responsibilities include ensuring that people listed on the pages of electoral rolls exercise their franchise on voting day. They have to also establish regular connections with voters on their page and motivate them to vote in favour of the saffron party.

A senior party functionary said that to reach out to each and every voter, it has been decided that now onwards a committee consisting of five members will be formed for each page (panna). "It has also been decided that all the five committee members are from different families and their names are mentioned on the same page," he said.

Another BJP leader explained that there are 30 voters on a page and, on an average, consists of six to seven families. "To form the panna committee, we have to add one member each from the five families. In elections, if committee members only convince the majority of their family members then nearly 60 to 70 per cent will be confirmed in our favour," he said.

Process for formation of panna committees will start in the next couple of months after formation of party units at block level in these poll bound states. "It has been decided that the formation of an organisational unit at block level will be completed by September. After that formation of panna committee will start and is likely to be completed in next two months," a BJP national office bearer said.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Chennai, June 29 : Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin has reconstituted the state minority commission and has posted the former Congress legislator, S. Peter Alphonse as its chairman.

Peter Alphonse is a three-term legislator who got elected from the Tenkasi constituency in the years 1989 and 1991 and later from the Kadayanallur constituency in 2002, an official statement said on Tuesday.

The state minorities commission is an institution aimed at safeguarding the rights and interests of both the minority communities as well as the linguistic minorities.

The minority commission visits various parts of the state to study the problems of minorities and recommends measures to clear the problems pointed out.

The minorities commission was formed by the DMK government headed by M. Karunanidhi through a government order in 1989 and it was made into a statutory body by an act of the legislative Assembly in 2010.
Abu Dhabi, June 29 : Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid landed in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on Tuesday, becoming the first senior official from the Jewish state to visit to the Gulf nation.

Lapid's office said he has been accompanied by a delegation of senior Israeli officials, including Foreign Ministry Director-General Alon Ushpiz, reports Xinhua news agency.

Upon his arrival, he said in a tweet: "Making history: Proud to represent the state of Israel on its first official visit to the United Arab Emirates. Thanks for the warm welcome." During his two-day trip, he will inaugurate the Israeli embassy in the UAE's capital Abu Dhabi and the consulate in Dubai, according to the office.

Lapid, the centrist leader of the Yesh Atid party, was the driving force behind the forming of Israel's new cross-partisan coalition government which was approved by Parliament on June 14.

Israel and the UAE signed a US-brokered normalisation agreement in September 2020.

The UAE thus became the third Arab country after Egypt and Jordan to agree to formally normalise its ties with Israel.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Johannesburg, June 29 : The South African Constitutional Court on Tuesday found former President Jacob Zuma guilty of contempt of court and sentenced him to a 15-month jail term.

A BBC report says that Zuma has been five days to hand himself at a police station.

The country's State Capture Inquiry accused Zuma of accepting bribes, gratification and unauthorised payments from other parties in relation to the procurement of the arms worth billions in 1999.
Hyderabad, June 29 : A two-wheeler rider, who has 132 challans issued in his name that amounted to over Rs 36,000 in due for violating traffic rules for last four years, has finally been caught by Hyderabad traffic police.

The rider, said to be an employee in a software company, was caught during routine vehicle checking at Jubliee Hills check-post on Tuesday.

Police have seized the vehicle, a Honda Active, as the rider failed to pay Rs 36,185 penalty pending against him since 2018.

A traffic police official stopped the vehicle for irregular number plate. The rider was also found to be driving without a valid license. A penalty of Rs 700 was imposed for the two violations. However, the official was shocked when he checked the vehicle's record online in his handset.

A long paper slip with list of 132 challans was generated. Sub-inspector of police Prabhakar Reddy said the two-wheeler had violated various traffic rules.

Most of the challans were for riding without helmet. He was also fined for wrong side driving, speaking on cell phone while driving and over speeding.

He was found violating rules in all three police commissionerates -- Hyderabad, Cyberabad and Rachakonda.
Bhopal, June 29 : Madhya Pradesh school education minister Inder Singh Parmar has created a huge controversy after he allegedly told some parents, "go and die, do whatever you want to do".

The parents had gone to him to urge him to reduce the school fees as it is becoming increasingly difficult for them to pay due to reduced income impacted by the pandemic.

Parents Federation president Kamal Vishwakarma said that the parents went to the school education minister's residence on Tuesday morning with the complaint that schools are overcharging fees, but the minister did not listen to the parents and lost his cool.

The minister, enraged at the demand, told the visiting parents, "Go and die, do whatever you want to." Minister Parmar's statement has now gone viral on the social media.

The parents union has demanded an apology from the minister. They have also decided to file a defamation case against Parmar.

Attacking the minister, Congress leader and media coordinator of former chief minister Kamal Nath, Narendra Saluja, said, "The minister is a shameless person. The parents union went to meet him for relief, but he showed an irresponsible attitude. He told the parents if you want to die, then die, we don't care." The BJP has defended the minister. BJP spokesperson Rajpal Singh Sisodia said that the parents union had met the school education minister regarding school fees. "The minister asked them to wait and told them that he will get back after studying the issue. Then parents started saying, should we die. Then he said why die, I will solve the problem after studying the issue."
Chennai, June 29 : The Marine Police department at Devipattanam in Tamil Nadu seized Sea Cucumber, Cardamom worth Rs 17 lakh, which was meant to be smuggled to Sri Lanka.

The police seized these items bought from Kaliyapattanam on the wee hours of Tuesday. The Sea Cucumber and Cardamom were to be stored at Devipattanam and to be transported to Sri Lanka during night in hired boats, sources in the police department told IANS.

Police said that they had stepped up surveillance following a tip-off and intervened a gang along with the coastal hamlet. The marine police arrested Sadam Hussain (28) of Kayalpattinam who confessed that the gang had planned to smuggle the goods to Sri Lanka using the services of an agent.

Officers with the Marine, the police department said that they will be conducting searches at godowns in Kayalpattinam as the gang is believed to have stored more items to be smuggled to Sri Lanka.

Kasim Mohammed of Keelakarai was also arrested and the police said that they were on the lookout for two more accomplices of the arrested duo. Police sources said that mobile phone data retrieved from them showed that the arrested had contacted people in Sri Lanka.

Central Intelligence agencies have already stepped up the investigation as there were earlier reports of armed militants traveling to certain coastal regions of Tamil Nadu and Kerala. The police are investigating whether the arrested had any terror background or whether they were just smugglers operating for a profit.
New York, June 29 : Covid-19 vaccines are highly effective in preventing severe infections or death, but patients with multiple myeloma -- a type of blood cancer --- are immunocompromised and often on immunosuppressive therapy.

The mRNA-based Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccines evoked a lower and delayed response in them compared to healthy people, finds a study, asserting need for monitoring or continued precautions in patients with cancers.

Researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai found that almost 16 per cent of patients with multiple myeloma developed no detectable antibodies after both vaccine doses. These findings may be relevant to other cancer patients undergoing treatment and to immunocompromised patients. The study will be published in Cancer Cell.

"This study underscores the need for routine blood tests on multiple myeloma patients after vaccination to understand their risk and potential need to continue wearing masks and socially distance until the pandemic wanes," said Samir Parekh, Professor of Medicine (Hematology and Medical Oncology), and Oncological Sciences, at Mount Sinai.

"This also calls for clinical trials to study the use of prophylactic therapies, like monoclonal antibodies, to mitigate Covid-19 risk or to use different vaccines or booster vaccinations in these patients," he added.

Repeat antibody measurements from before patients' first vaccine dose until 60 days after the second vaccination showed delayed and suboptimal responses, particularly in patients with multiple myeloma who had not contracted Covid-19 before their vaccinations.

Patients on active cancer treatment had significantly lower antibody levels after two vaccine doses than multiple myeloma patients who were not on treatment at the time of vaccination, the researchers said.

The team analysed the antibody levels of 320 multiple myeloma patients, 260 of whom received two doses of Covid-19 vaccinations, and found that 15.8 per cent had undetectable antibodies.

The multiple myeloma patients who had had Covid-19 before vaccination showed immune responses that were 10 times higher than those who had not.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
New Delhi, June 29 : The central government on Tuesday gave additional charge of Delhi Police commissioner to senior Indian Police Service (IPS) officer Balaji Srivastav, a day before the incumbent Delhi Police chief S.N. Shrivastava is retiring from his service.

Balaji is currently holding charge of Special Commissioner of Police (Vigilance) in Delhi Police. He was earlier with the Research Analysis Wing before returning to Delhi a few years ago.

A 1988-batch Arunachal Pradesh, Goa, Mizoram, Union Territory (AGMUT) cadre IPS officer, Balaji has also served as Director General of Mizoram and Puducherry, and chief of the Delhi Police's Economic Offences Wing.

Balaji is replacing current commissioner S.N. Shrivastava, who will retire from his service on Wednesday. Shrivastava, a 1985-batch AGMUT cadre IPS officer, had taken charge as Delhi Police Commissioner on February 28 last year in the backdrop of riots in North East Delhi.

Ministry of Home Affairs issued the order on Tuesday appointing Balaji with the additional charge until the appointment of a regular incumbent or until further orders.

"Consequent upon the superannuation of S.N. Shrivastava, Commissioner of Police, Delhi, Balaji Srivastav will hold the additional charge of Commissioner of Police, Delhi in addition to his regular charge until the appointment of a regular incumbent or until further orders, whichever is earlier," the Home Ministry order mentions.
Thiruvananthapuram, June 29 : Even as the curtains come down on the official career of Kerala's top cop -- State Police Chief Loknath Behera, all eyes are on what would be his next assignment as he is reportedly very close to Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan.

Behera was appointed the police chief the very day Vijayan took office in his first outing in May 2016, but had to make way for T.P. Senkumar, who was later moved out by Vijayan.

But Senkumar fought his case against removal in the apex court and got his post back.

And when Senkumar superannuated, Behera got back the job and headed the state police for around five years being the most trusted cop of Vijayan.

A source in the know of things said with Behera himself stating that though he hails from Odisha, he will be around in Kerala for some more time, it clearly indicates that Vijayan will definitely place him somewhere.

At present two key posts are vacant -- the CMD post at Cochin Airport and advisor to Vijayan on law and order issues, which was held by Raman Srivatsava in the first tenure of Vijayan as Chief Minister (2016-21).

Behera in a career that began in 1985 has held all the key police posts including the state police chief, Fire and Rescue, Vigilance and Jails.

He also had a stint with the CBI and was part of the team which probed the Purulia arms drop case, IC-814 hijacking, Mumbai serial blasts and the Haren Pandya murder case among others.

And when the premier investigation agency NIA was formed in 2009, Behera was part of it from the time of its inception.

Behera superannuates on Wednesday and as is the norm he will be given a ceremonial send off.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
New Delhi, June 29 : FAITH, the policy federation of all the national associations representing the complete tourism, travel and hospitality industry of India (ADTOI, ATOAI, FHRAI, HAI, IATO, ICPB, IHHA, ITTA, TAAI, TAFI) have thanked Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman for recognising the deep pain and stress of Indian tourism, travel and hospitality industry after almost 5 quarters and for including it structured relief measures announcements on Monday.

Extension of E visa waiver: The fee waiver on 5 lakhs tourist e-visas is a demand stimulus. Since the inbound tourism industry must fully recover from the scratch, from the time that it restarts, they have requested that this fee waiver be extended till at least the pre-pandemic figures of tourist arrivals is reached or till 2024 without any end use restrictions on the travellers.

They have said that the fees foregone will be a notional loss of perhaps an additional Rs 100 crore is a minor investment in restarting the inbound tourism which contributed to more than Rs 2 lakh crore in the pre pandemic year. This will send a strong message of confidence building measure to the world which is waiting to travel again.

Reclassification of the financial support : The creation of financial support to be administered through MoT is a welcome step. Over 15 months there have been almost NIL cash flows and there is non propensity to pay interest. Since the financial support is already guaranteed by NCGLT, it is requested that it be converted to a grant or if not, then it be made interest free.

Each quantum of support helps. However, since this industry has been without cash flows and having to pay statutory liabilities and operating expenses, they have also suggested to double the amount of financial support. Alternatively, this relief payout, may be repeated in the next quarter as the travel industry will be constrained for this foreseeable period due to pandemic in some source markets Removal of TCS on outbound travel: TCS which was introduced in October FY 20 has made Indian tours and travel intermediaries uncompetitive. In addition of GST, now they are liable to deduct tax at source. This makes booking from Indian travel intermediaries uncompetitive as against those of based outside of India who do not have any such levies on either Indian or on international travelers. This will cause the travel transactional business to shift to outside of Indian jurisdictions.

As and when travel will restart, this will become like an artificial barrier on our travel intermediaries as they look to recover from the pandemic. The added disadvantage is that if our travel intermediaries are impacted on their outbound business the inbound business to India will also get severely impacted.

SEIS Credit of SEIS dues for 2019-20: SEIS scrips dues against tourism foreign exchange earned for 2019-20 is still outstanding which is creating significant distress as that money was spent in creating tourism demand for india.

It is requested that these SEIS dues be credited immediately to enable such tourism, travel & hospitality companies to meet their expenses and to take care of their employees.

Waiver of Statutory Dues: Despite no revenues, there are statutory liabilities & compliance liabilities at both state and central government level & other regulatory bodies which still need to be met.

These include various forms of duties, taxes, cess or license fees including electricity & water, property taxes, excise duties, state professional taxes, transport taxes, parking cess, insurance premiums, provident fund, ESI contribution and any penalties thereof on hotels, travel agents, tour operators, restaurants tourist transporters or any other form of tourism travel & hospitality service.

It is requested that all states governments and the respective central government ministries to waive off these fixed levies & compliances till the period of the pandemic.

Alternatively, a corpus with Ministry of Tourism be set up to meet these monthly liabilities of tourism travel & hospitality companies to discharge them on their behalf.
Hyderabad, June 29 : AIMIM president and Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi has urged Telangana police chief to stop harassment of cattle traders and transporters by cow vigilantes, police and other officials on the eve of Bakrid.

Owaisi said that alarming situation is sought to be created by anti-social elements in Hyderabad, Cyberabad, Rachakonda and other places in the entire Telangana region. Cow vigilantes are trying to harass the persons trading in or transporting oxen and buffaloes on the eve of Bakrid.

The MP wrote a letter to Director General of Police M. Mahender Reddy, requesting him to intervene and issue clear instructions to Hyderabad, Cyberabad, Rachakonda and other police commissioners and superintendents of police as well we municipal, revenue and animal husbandry officials assisting them not to prevent the transport of oxen and buffaloes to various places in the state, more particularly to Hyderabad.

The police officials manning the checkposts may be specifically directed not to harass the traders/transporters of oxen and buffaloes and not to book the cases or seize the cattle, he said.

AIMIM general secretary and MLA Syed Ahmed Pasha Quadri and MLC Syed Amin Ul Hasan Jafri on Tuesday submitted the representation to the DGP on behalf of their party leader.

The MP pointed out that during the Eid, Muslims sacrifice goats, sheep and bulls for three days. Traditionally, thousands of sheep and goats and scores of bulls are brought to Hyderabad and other main towns and cities for sale on the eve of Bakrid. Almost 50 per cent of the 44 lakh Muslims in Telangana State live in Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) area.

He urged the DGP to instruct the police officials not to insist on certificates from veterinary doctors on the age of fitness of the animals for slaughter, not to book cases for so-called overcrowding of animals in vehicles as there are no norms on the number of animals that can be transported in different types of light commercial and heavy vehicles and not to seize large number of oxen by claiming that they are calves.

"Muslims have to sacrifice goats, sheep and cattle (oxen) only if they are healthy and fit for consumption. Sacrifice of unhealthy, sick, aged or emaciated animals is strictly prohibited. Hence, there is no question of sacrificing animals that are declared unfit or condemned or are very old and emaciated. The police, municipal, revenue and veterinary officials who are manning these checkposts have to be told that sick, aged and condemned animals cannot be sacrificed during Bakrid," he wrote.

Eid-ul-Adha or Bakrid, the second biggest festival of Muslims, is to be celebrated on July 21.
Chennai, June 29 : Air Customs officials here have arrested one person and seized gold worth Rs 31.50 lakh that he was trying to smuggle in, the Commissioner of Customs at the Chennai International Airport said on Tuesday.

According to a statement issued here, 26-year old Fazuludeen of Cuddalore arrived by an Air India flight from Dubai and was intercepted by the officials at the exit point.

After a search, three bundles of gold paste were recovered from his rectum.

On extraction, 648 gm of 24K purity gold valued at Rs. 31.50 lakh was recovered and seized under the Customs Act and the passenger was arrested.
Dehradun, June 29 : A man who had returned home to Kota during the pandemic reportedly faced hostility in his village for calling out mass gatherings during the lockdown.

A corporate professional was branded an informer and harassed after the district administration raided and penalised a social gathering in his village during the lockdown.

He said the figurehead of the village publicly called him the mole, the Sarpanch (village head) confronted him for troubling the people, and the family whose function was raided also blamed him. He said this false narrative portrayed him as a nuisance to the fellow residents and caused much stress to him and his family.

Provoked, the youth shot off a defamation notice to the family that was fanning this narrative. He was mulling upon suing the others too but cooled down after the family signed a compromise letter and he could clear his name.

This episode unfolded in Rajasthan's Kota district during the second wave of Covid. The youth, Dhanraj Lodha, 35, works with a multinational company in Mumbai. He has been working out of his village, Nimoda, for the past one year because of the pandemic.

He told 101Reporters that even when the number of Covid deaths was spiking across the country in April and May, Covid-appropriate behaviour was not enforced in his village. At a time when health experts were insisting on social distancing and wearing double masks, he said hundreds were mingling here with no mask in weddings and other functions.

Unheeded pleas In a WhatsApp group that has 69 members from the village, including the Sarpanch, Dhanraj repeatedly called for greater attention to the pandemic. He shared screenshots of some of these conversations, starting mid-April, with 101Reporters.

In these messages, he repeatedly appealed to postpone or restrict crowded functions, wear masks and follow Covid guidelines. He advised checking oxygen levels and temperature of the villagers to identify suspected Covid cases and shared news reports that the virus was killing many in their district.

Gradually, his calls for action turned into caustic remarks. His one message reads: "Our local administration has failed completely. Our village head has gone missing and has left people to fend for themselves. Weddings are being held in violation of Covid guidelines. I don't see why we should not involve the district magistrate anymore." He even sent tweets to the Member of Parliament from Kota, Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla, and requested him to intervene.

Rajasthan government had ordered a statewide lockdown in mid-April. On April 25, a relative of Dhanraj, Satyanarayan Lodha, hosted his grandson's tonsure ceremony and a reception in the village. Invitations were duly sent out. Dhanraj and his family did not go but more than a hundred people turned up and so did a team of the district administration. Subsequently, it levied a penalty of Rs 10,000 on the hosts for flouting Covid guidelines.

Conflict escalates The next morning, Dhanraj crossed paths with the village figurehead, who is a landlord and also a former sarpanch. According to Dhanraj, the landlord asked him to quit calling out the Sarpanch and reasoned that the village head cannot fight with people for hosting functions. An argument ensued and the landlord proclaimed to the onlookers that Dhanraj had been complaining about village functions to the district administration.

(This article is not naming the landlord on the request of Dhanraj for personal reasons) Immediately after this altercation, Dhanraj visited the family whose function was raided and asked them not to heed this allegation. However, they told him they had credible inputs that indeed he was the informer.

Within a couple of hours, Dhanraj got a phone call from Sarpanch Meena, who asked him why he was bothering the villagers. Dhanraj said the Sarpanch went so far as to ask him why he came back to the village. When Dhanraj argued that permitting social gatherings at such a time could kill people, Meena reportedly said people were going to die and neither of them could do anything about it.

Rumour gains ground Dhanraj told 101Reporters he thought this was it but the rumour that he was the informer caught on and the villagers began growing resentful. He would be met with disapproving comments ("Why'd you report?", "You should not have done this.") whenever he stepped out. He said he overheard people dissing him even at a funeral.

Upon learning that Satyanarayan's family was still spreading this rumour, he sent a legal notice to them. The defamation notice, dated May 20, gave them three options: render a written apology; pay Rs 15 lakh for causing distress; or face a case of defamation in court.

After two-and-a-half weeks and many mediation attempts, Satyanarayan and his son Surendra signed a "compromise letter". It states they were misinformed but now they know that Dhanraj had not intimated the administration about their function. Further, it says they acknowledge and regret the trouble that Dhanraj and his family had to endure because of them.

Dhanraj told 101Reporters he was compelled to send the legal notice because had the rumour spread unchecked, it could have led to his and his family's isolation in the village. He believes his move of sending the notice turned the tide and sent a message that he must be innocent, which is why he was ready to go to the court.

Different versions Sarpanch Meena told 101Reporters he had called up Dhanraj to ask what his complaints were. He said Dhanraj should have brought his concerns about Covid guidelines to him or the other office bearers. He digressed when this reporter pointed out that Dhanraj had voiced his concerns many times in the WhatsApp group.

Further, Meena said he did not tell Dhanraj that people were bound to die and did not ask why he came back to the village. Also, he said the rumour that Dhanraj was the informer was baseless. "Main kaise maan sakta hoon ki yahi aadmi shikaayat de raha hai! Aur bhi toh ho sakta hai koi," he said. (How do I know he's the one complaining! It could be somebody else too.) However, a village resident told 101Reporters that Meena spoke at length in front of him and a couple of others that Dhanraj alone was behind the raid on his relative's function, perhaps out of a personal grudge. "Unhone kaha mere paas proof bhi hai." (He said he even had the proof.) He said the disinformation was turning the villagers against Dhanraj. Citing the village dynamics, this resident requested anonymity to avoid courting trouble. Another resident sought anonymity for the same reason and corroborated Dhanraj's claim that the village figurehead branded him as the tattler in a public altercation.

Meena insisted that 101Reporters get more point of views and shared phone numbers of three people. One did not return the calls and the other two-one of them the village figurehead's son-asserted that no dispute has taken place. But according to Meena: "Iss cheez ka 15 din tak poore gaon mein mahaul raha hai." (This issue remained in discussion across the village for 15 days.) Covid strikes

Fifty residents of Nimoda and a couple of adjoining villages were tested for Covid in May and 15 of them were found infected. This put the region's positivity rate (the number of people testing Covid-positive for every 100 people who are tested) at 30 per cent. The positivity rate of 5 per cent is deemed too high, indicates high transmission of the virus and calls for greater restrictions.

However, residents of Nimoda told 101Reporters that hundreds of people-including the Sarpanch and the village elders-partook in social gatherings unabated through the lockdown.

A string of weddings had left one dead and 95 infected in a village in Rajasthan's Jhunjhunu district in May.

Dhanraj said he was raising the alarm about the pandemic because he knows first-hand the agony it can inflict. His own family has been in mourning since December, when the virus claimed his mother's life.

(The author is a Dehradun-based journalist and the News Editor with 101Reporters.com, a pan-India network of grassroots reporters)

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
New Delhi, June 29 : The Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) on Tuesday took over the security of Odisha-based Talcher Fertilizers Limited (TFL) with sanctioned strength of more than 120 personnel.

In the light of the increased threat perception to the fertilizer companies situated across the country, TFL is inherently vulnerable to threats from anti-nationals and saboteurs.

The CISF will provide round-the-clock armed security cover to the TFL.

With the induction, total units under CISF security cover has risen to 352 across the country. This CISF unit deputed to guard the TFL is headed by Assistant Commandant rank officer.

The CISF, one of the seven Central Armed Police Forces (CAPFs), are engaged in providing security cover to private as well as government institutions or buildings across the country, including 64 airports and Delhi Metro Rail Corporation.

The TFL, a consortium of four state-run companies - GAIL, CIL, RCF and FCIL - was established in December 2014 to revive the Talcher fertilizer unit in Angul district of Odisha. It is located about 123 kms away from Bhubaneswar.

The Unit was established at Talcher due to abundance of coal that is being used as feedstock. It is spread over an area of 520 acres in which around 1,000 employees are working.
San Francisco, June 29 : Anti-virus software company McAfee on Tuesday announced an extension of its longstanding partnership with Samsung to protect consumer data against online threats.

Since 2017, McAfee has provided cross-device security to Samsung PC users worldwide via consumer security by McAfee LiveSafe. With this extension, Samsung PC users will be protected by McAfee LiveSafe from the time they turn on their devices.

"Consumers are more connected than ever, and McAfee is dedicated to protecting them online when they shop, bank, share and journey across the internet," Pedro Gutierrez, Senior Vice President, Global Consumer Sales and Operations, at McAfee, said in a statement.

"Our partnership with Samsung continues our mission to give consumers peace of mind that their data, as well as that of their families and friends, won't be jeopardized online," Gutierrez added.

According to the McAfee Labs Threats Report, the first quarter of 2021 saw the volume of new malware threats average 688 threats per minute, an increase of 40 threats per minute over Q4 2020.

Consumers need always-on, simple-to-use integrated security to protect their devices -- and their livelihoods -- from increasing and evolving threats and through the extension of this partnership, McAfee is providing that protection to Samsung users.

McAfee LiveSafe is purpose-built to deliver personal protection from the latest threats and peace of mind to consumers.

With McAfee LiveSafe, Samsung device owners will not only benefit from award-winning antivirus and device protection across their computers and smartphones but will also have parental controls, device optimisation tools, password and privacy protections, as well as other security features.

Samsung PC users can enjoy a 30-day free trial and after the trial period, will have access to offers on McAfee security solutions.
New Delhi, June 29 : The Supreme Court on Tuesday sought a response from the Karnataka government on an appeal filed by filmmaker Kavitha Lankesh, sister of journalist Gauri Lankesh, challenging the Karnataka High Court order quashing charges under the Karnataka Control of Organised Crimes Act (KCOCA) against one of the accused in the murder of her sister.

The plea claimed the investigation by SIT has revealed that Respondent No. 6, Mohan Nayak, is part of the syndicate led by Amol Kale which has committed multiple organized crimes apart from the murder of Gauri Lankesh.

The plea said charge-sheets have been filed with respect to the murders of Dr Narendra Dabolkar in 2013, Govinda Pansare in 2015, Dr M.M. Kalburgi in 2015 and conspiracy to murder Prof Bhagavan in 2018. "Accordingly, the condition of at least 2 charge-sheets having been filed against the syndicate in the last 10 years along with cognizance by competent court stands fulfilled and invocation of KCOCA against Respondent No. 6 stands justified", added the plea.

The plea added that Nayak had moved the Karnataka High Court for bail after charges against him under KCOCA were quashed by the High Court, and the bail hearing has been completed in the matter.

A Bench of Justices AM Khanwilkar, Dinesh Maheshwari and Aniruddha Bose after hearing arguments by senior counsel Huzefa Ahmadi assisted by advocate Aparna Bhat, representing the petitioner, issued notice to the Karnataka government and scheduled the case for further hearing on July 15.

The High Court on April 22 quashed the order of the Bengaluru Commissioner of Police passed in 2018 and the supplementary charge-sheet filed thereafter. Offences under Sections 3(1)(i), 3(2), 3(3) and 3(4) of the Karnataka Control of Organised Crime Act, 2000 against Mohan Nayak were, thereby, dropped.

The top court observed that the accused cannot be granted bail till the plea is heard and disposed off by the Supreme Court.

The plea claimed Nayak has been actively involved in providing shelter to the killers prior to and after committing the offence and has participated in a series of conspiracies, abetting, planning, providing logistics. "With regard to Respondent No. 6's involvement in the murder of Gauri Lankesh, the investigating agency has collected sufficient material to connect him with the case and establish his intimate nexus with the mastermind behind the entire event i.e. Accused No.1 Amol Kale and master arms trainer Accused No. 8 Rajesh D. Bangera who are part and parcel of an "organized crime syndicate" from its inception", added the plea.

The plea said: "The High Court has failed to appreciate that on a bare perusal of several judgments on the question of invoking provisions of KCOCA, it is revealed that the requirement of one or more charge-sheet relates to unlawful activity of an organized crime syndicate and does not pertain to a particular member of the crime syndicate."
New Delhi, June 29 : In a first-of-its-kind collaboration in the pharma industry, Cipla Limited, Dr. Reddys Laboratories, Emcure Pharmaceuticals, Sun Pharmaceutical and Torrent Pharmaceuticals on Tuesday announced collaboration for the clinical trial of the investigational oral anti-viral drug Molnupiravir for the treatment of mild Covid in an outpatient setting in India.

Such collaboration for a clinical trial is a first of its kind within the Indian pharma industry, and will aim to investigate yet another line of treatment in the collective fight against the Covid pandemic.

On successful completion of the clinical trial, each company will independently approach the regulatory authorities for approval to manufacture and supply Molnupiravir for the treatment of Covid-19 in India.

Molnupiravir is an oral anti-viral that inhibits the replication of multiple RNA viruses including SARS-CoV-2. It is presently being studied by MSD, through a collaboration with Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, in a Phase III trial for the treatment of non-hospitalized patients with confirmed Covid globally.

Between March and April this year, these five pharma companies had individually entered into a non-exclusive voluntary licensing agreement with Merck Sharpe Dohme (MSD) to manufacture and supply Molnupiravir to India and over 100 low and middle-income countries (LMICs).

The five pharma companies have entered into a collaboration agreement, wherein the parties will jointly sponsor, supervise and monitor the clinical trial in India.

As per the directive of the Subject Expert Committee (SEC) of the Central Drugs Standard Control Organization, Dr. Reddy's will conduct the clinical trial using its product, and the other four pharma companies will be required to demonstrate equivalence of their product to the product used by Dr. Reddy's in its clinical trial.

Following the clinical trial protocol approval given by the Drugs Controller General of India, the clinical trial will be conducted for the treatment of mild Covid in an outpatient setting. It is expected to take place between June and September this year across India with the recruitment of 1,200 patients.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Chennai, June 29 : Tamil Nadu Finance Minister P.T.R. Palanivel Thiagarajan has said that a federal approach is important in situations like the Covid pandemic.

Thiagarajan was interacting with the media after inspecting vaccination camps at Madurai along with Commerce Minister P. Murthy.

The Finance Minister said that the CoWIN portal, where the details of the vaccinated people are available, is a classic example of why the country needs a federal approach to pandemic-like situations.

He said, "The details of the vaccinated populace is available only with the Centre and not with the states as it should have been." Thiagarajan said that the Madurai corporation has successfully brought the second Covid wave under control and added that the district was well prepared as far as the health infrastructure is concerned.

The Minister said that there were sufficient beds, oxygen concentrators, oxygen generators and Covid care centres in Madurai.

Thiagarajan said that as many as five lakh people have been inoculated in Madurai and of this 4.71 lakh have received their first dose while 90,000 have received both the vaccine shots.

However, the Minister said that as the government and the administration was preparing to counter a possible third Covid wave, the non-availability of the vaccination details was posing a problem.

He said, "As the CoWIN portal is a centralized system, the details of vaccinated people are available only with the Centre and this is creating a hurdle to implement a pilot project to identify the vulnerable people and monitor them continuously." Thiagarajan said that the state government will be writing to the central government seeking details of the vaccinated population in the state and said that the Madurai district administration has 70 per cent of the details of the vaccinated people in the district through the vaccination camps. However the full details are with the central government.

The Minister said, "We need to analyse the full details of the vaccinated population to understand as to which part of the city has a larger number of immunised people and where there is a lesser number." He added that this information was important to tackle the third wave of the pandemic and added that the state was expecting the centre to share the details within the next few days.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Jaipur, June 29 : Factionalism in Rajasthan BJP took a new turn with a three-page resignation letter penned by state unit chief Satish Poonia 22 years back going viral on social media.

The letter has created a political stir in the desert state, drawing interesting remarks from the anti-Poonia camp led by former Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje.

The entire episode has once again exposed the factionalism in the saffron camp on different social media platforms.

The letter was written by Poonia when he was holding the post of state unit chief of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM) and had resigned after being denied an election ticket in 1999.

In the letter addressed to then Rajasthan BJP President Gulab Chand Kataria, Poonia had termed veteran leaders like Rajendra Rathore and Ram Singh Kaswa as 'Bhasmasura', besides accusing former Vice President Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, Harishankar Bhabhda and Lalit Kishore Chaturvedi of 'backstabbing' him.

In Hindu mythology, 'Bhasmasura' was a demon who was granted the power to burn up and immediately turn into ashes anyone whose head he touched with his hand.

Meanwhile, Poonia has taken the incident in a lighter note, saying, "A 22-year-old letter getting released at this time is a wonderful story of strange politics. In those days also, I had represented ordinary leaders and today too, I stand with the ordinary workers. The party leadership has given me an important responsibility after I put my words on the party forum. I have been faithfully discharging my duties." Meanwhile, former minister from the Raje camp, Rohitash Sharma, who was recently issued a show-cause notice for 'anti-party' activities, said, "How can a person who openly flouted all limits of discipline teach discipline to anyone." Sharma was issued the show-cause notice after he was accused of speaking against the party during a meeting in Alwar.

The saffron party's in-charge for Rajasthan, Arun Singh, during his recent trip to Jaipur had said that those speaking against the party will be penalized. Just a day after his announcement, the show-cause notice was issued to Sharma who is yet to file his response in the matter.

There is a buzz in the political circles here that Poonia's letter resurfacing after 22 works is the handiwork of his rival camp, which is trying to show the state BJP President in poor light, said a person belonging to the Poonia camp.
New Delhi, June 29 : Bharatiya Janata Party chief J P Nadda on Tuesday expressed confidence that the saffron party will form the government in West Bengal in the 2026 assembly elections.

Virtually addressing the West Bengal BJP executive meet, Nadda said, "The BJP has covered a long distance in Bengal in a very short span of time. We had won just two seats in 2014 Lok Sabha polls and had got 18 per cent votes. In 2016 Assembly polls, we had won just three seats and 10.16 per cent vote share. In 2019, we got 40.25 per cent votes and won 18 seats out of 42 in the Lok Sabha elections." He stated: "In the recently concluded assembly polls, our vote share was 38.1 per cent and we got 2.27 crore votes, and won 77 seats. In the next five years, the BJP will take another big leap and will form the government in the state. We will achieve it and there will be a BJP government in the state." Referring to the post poll violence in West Bengal, Nadda claimed that no post poll violence was reported from Assam, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry as the TMC was not there.

"TMC unleashed unprecedented political violence after winning the polls. 1,399 properties of our workers have been destroyed. 676 incidents of loot have taken place. 108 families have received threats. Our offices in Arambagh and Bishnupur have been burnt down by TMC cadres. All of this happened under a female Chief Minister. A lot of atrocities have been faced by women. If the women are not safe, what sort of governance are the people of West Bengal receiving from TMC," Nadda said.

Nadda alleged that West Bengal Police has remained a mute spectator. "Aadhar cards and ration cards of BJP workers have been taken away. The Bengal violence clearly shows a failure in administration, according to the high-powered committee," he said.

Hitting out at other opposition parties, Nadda said, "If such violence against women or Dalits was reported in BJP ruled states, then all the opposition parties would have joined hands and a created a storm. But they were silent over violence in West Bengal. There was no talk of human rights. It is also our responsibility to expose such people and we will continue to do so." Nadda alleged that corruption, TMC and Mamta Banerjee are synonymous with each other. Referring to a fake Covid vaccination drive, Nadda said, "Even if there has been a scam on the vaccine, it has happened in West Bengal. In Bengal, Mimi Chakraborty was given a fake vaccine. If you support the corrupt, then even the MPs will get fake vaccines and there will be fake vaccination drives."
New Delhi, June 29 : Chief of Defence Staff of the armed forces, General Bipin Rawat, on Tuesday visited the forward areas along the Line of Actual Control with China in the central sector in Himachal Pradesh.

On arrival at the forward most post in the Sumdoh sub-sector, the Chief of Defence Staff was briefed on the operational preparedness of the forces towards safeguarding the territorial integrity of the nation.

He interacted extensively with the Indian Army, Indo-Tibetan Border Police and General Reserve Engineer Force personnel deployed in the remote areas and appreciated their state of high morale.

He encouraged all ranks to keep up the high state of alertness and professionalism displayed by them.

Later in the day, General Rawat visited the headquarters of the Western Command of the Indian Army at Chandimandir, where he reviewed the operational situation along the western borders.

The CDS commended the formation for their efforts to ensure force preservation and at the same time stepping forward to provide support in terms of establishing Covid hospitals in Chandigarh, Patiala and Faridabad, providing paramedical staff in aid of civil hospitals, assistance in vaccination of common citizens and revitalising oxygen plants at various places in the nation's fight against the Covid-19 pandemic.

He stressed upon the need to focus on training hard and remaining vigilant to thwart the nefarious designs of our adversaries. He emphasised that all ranks must keep themselves abreast with the latest trends in information technology, emerging cyber threats and counter measures.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Beijing, June 29 : The Chief of Lancet Covid-19 Commission has dismissed claims by the Chinese government that he is being pushed by the US government to favour the Wuhan lab-leak theory, the media reported on Tuesday.

There is "no outside interference whatsoever", Jeffrey Sachs, a professor of economics at Columbia University in New York, was quoted as saying by the South China Morning Post.

Sachs is also the chair of the interdisciplinary initiative backed by medical journal The Lancet to find solutions to the pandemic.

His comment follows an accusation by Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin on Monday that "some international scientists on Covid-19 origin studies, including US members of the Lancet Covid-19 Commission, were threatened, cyber attacked and forced by some US politicians to give up the widely proven natural origins hypothesis and turn to the lab-leak theory", The Global Times reported.

Wenbin said that the US "is actually engaging in political manipulation". However, Sachs has denied the claim.

"There is no outside pressure of any kind in the work of the Lancet Covid-19 Commission. There is of course internal debate and discussion, but no outside interference whatsoever," Sachs told the South China Morning Post.

He added that his views align with what's being discussed in the scientific community about probes into Covid-19's origins.

"I am of the view that a natural spillover event and a research-related event are both worthy of independent and objective investigation," he said.

Earlier dismissed as a conspiracy theory, the theory that coronavirus could have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology has gained fresh momentum. There have been calls for a renewed investigation both by governments and the scientific community worldwide.

US President Joe Biden has also recently ordered the intelligent community to re-double efforts to examine how the virus originated, including the lab accident theory.

China has, however, dismissed the Wuhan lab-leak theory as "extremely impossible" and has accused the US of "political manipulation".

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Srinagar: Mainstream political leaders who are part of the Peoples alliance for Gupkar declaration (PAGD), said on Tuesday that they will be attending the all party meeting called by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on June 24.(Photo: Nissar Malik/IANS) Image Source: IANS News

New Delhi: Former CM and PDP leader Mehbooba Mufti, address to media after meeting with prime minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi on Thursday, June 24, 2021. (Photo: Qamar Sibtain/ IANS) Image Source: IANS News

New Delhi, June 29 : After attending the recent all-party meeting chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi, two former chief ministers of the erstwhile state of Jammu & Kashmir, Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti stood miles apart.

Omar Abdullah candidly admitted that Article 370 won't be restored, while Mehbooba Mufti announced that she won't contest the Assembly elections till J&K gets its special status back.

"It is foolish to demand the restoration of Article 370 of the Constitution from the Modi government. It took the BJP 70 years to fulfill its political agenda for (Article) 370. Our struggle has just started. We don't want to fool people by telling them we will get 370 back in these talks. It will be foolish to expect 370 will be back - there has been no indication it will be restored by the current government", Omar said.

After the meeting Mehbooba said, "I will not contest the elections. I will do this because otherwise people will feel that the resolution of Article 370 is just a slogan for me and I am just doing politics over it. That is not the case; hence, I will personally not contest any election till it's reversed." She claimed that Article 370 and 35A were a means for J&K people to have job security and also their identity of being from J&K. "So, these are important to us. And that is why you must have seen that J&K was India's most prosperous state," she said.

Since August 5, 2019 when the Centre abrogated J&K's special status and divided it into two union territories - Kashmir-based leaders have been claiming that "everything has been snatched" from the people of Jammu & Kashmir.

These leaders seem to have forgotten that no one in J&K opposed the Centre's August 5, 2019 decision. Not a single protest was witnessed anywhere. People didn't react at all. They remained busy with their daily chores and the life went on.

J&K on path of development During the past two years Jammu & Kashmir has witnessed a massive change as the projects that were lying dormant for the last several decades were revived in a speedy manner. Various developmental schemes - acceleration of the projects being executed under the Prime Minister Development Package (PMDP), targeting the individual beneficiaries, restarting the long-pending projects by removing the obstacles, to ensure effective administration with transparency - have been taken up after J&K started functioning as a Union Territory.

For developing the Information and Technology sector in J&K many sops have been framed. These include providing "subsidy on rent" to the outside investors. The policy document of the government envisages two IT parks -- one each in Srinagar and Jammu -- spread over 5 lakh square feet.

The J&K administration also released a real estate policy which states that "land banks" created by the government will be disbursed to "private developers" through a transparent bidding process.

The development has not been only confined to building roads and highways. Almost all the sectors that were ignored during the past political regimes have been explored and new life stands infused in the projects to help J&K grow and come at par with the other states of the country. From 2015 to 2020 only 37 per cent funds from PM's Rs 80,000 crore package were utilized.

In 2015, Prime Minister Modi had announced Rs 80,000 crore package for J&K's development. When PM Modi had announced the special financial package late Mufti Mohammad Sayeed was the chief minister of J&K, his party Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) had joined hands with Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to form coalition government in the erstwhile princely state.

PM Modi had stated that it was his "heartfelt desire" that the Rs 80,000 crore package announced by him should help in turning the fate of J&K people. He had stated that the money should be used for converting J&K into a modern, prosperous and progressive place. "Delhi's treasury is for you. Not only our treasury, but our heart also beats for you," Modi had said.

However, in 4 years the J&K government could only spend 37 per cent of Rs 80,000 crore package. When the package was announced at that time it was decided by the Central Government that the sanctioned amount would be spent in five years and the developmental works under the package had to be completed by the ending 2020.

According to the official figures, of the Rs 80,068 crore package, Rs 30,049 crore were released till March 31, 2019 for the erstwhile J&K state. Of the 63 projects, only 18 were completed. In 2020, the parliamentary panel had expressed dismay over the slow pace of work under the package.

Article 370 deprived J&K of benefits When the Article 370 - a temporary provision of Indian Constitution - was in vogue, the Kashmir-based politicians remained in power for nearly seven decades. For the 70 years the Centre kept on pumping money into J&K with a hope that it would be utilized for the benefit of the common man. But the leaders in J&K kept on feeding people with slogans like self rule and autonomy and forgot to concentrate on the issues which touched the skin of the populace.

The so-called special status of J&K deprived people of the benefits of the centrally sponsored schemes and the progressive laws that were devised by the Indian Parliament. The reservation laws for the weaker sections of the society were not applicable in J&K. There was a complete gender bias as if a man from J&K married a woman from any outside state he could retain his property rights but if a woman married an outsider she used to lose all her rights.

But now, J&K is a changed place as the benefits of it getting merged with Union of Indian have started to trickle down to the people.

Since the day Article 370 has been done away with Mehbooba Mufti has been claiming that J&K has lost its identity but the facts and figures contradict her claims. Local leaders beating around the bush has failed to impress J&K denizens, who have witnessed a massive change during the past two years.

The Articles 370 and 35A deprived outsiders from buying land in J&K due to which Kashmir didn't witness much industrial growth as outside investors were not ready to invest in the erstwhile state.

After the Centre's August 5, 2019 decision Jammu & Kashmir Government received investment proposals worth Rs 15,000 crore from nearly 40 companies. Players from various fields like Renewable Energy, Hospitality, Defence, Tourism, Skill, Education, IT & Technology and infrastructure have come forward to invest in J&K.

J&K's transition into a Union Territory restored confidence of the people in the Constitution of India and robust democratic system of a united sovereign India with Justice, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity assuring the dignity of every Indian.

Reforms in power sector During the past two years the J&K government has strived to achieve 24A7 power for all. J&K has achieved 100 per cent household electrification which has rekindled the hope of many who had never seen electricity in their lives. Household water connections have reached 43 per cent of rural households which is double the national average of 21 per cent, and a road map has been prepared to ensure 100 per cent coverage of piped water supply to all 18.16 lakh rural households by December 2021.

The Indian government approved a nearly Rs 6,000 crore multi-purpose project in February 2020 to provide uninterrupted water for irrigation to farmers in J&K's Kathua district and to produce power. In 2014, when assembly polls in Jammu & Kashmir were round the corner and the Himalayan state was facing acute shortage of electricity, then J&K chief minister Omar Abdullah had chosen to lock horns with the Centre over return of power projects by the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation (NHPC).

"Return of power projects by the NHPC to the state is of significant importance and critically essential for the energy supply and economic development in Jammu & Kashmir," Omar had said.

He had claimed that the Indus Water Treaty between India and Pakistan was "a cause of enormous losses to J&K". "While both India and Pakistan benefited from the treaty, J&K was put to disadvantageous position." The Centre had turned down Omar's demand and had made it clear that NHPC would continue to own the power projects in J&K.

In September 2019 Union Power Minister R.K. Singh and then J&K Governor Satya Pal Malik jointly inaugurated 15 power projects and laid the foundation stone for 20 others worth Rs 10,000 crore. The unbundling of the Power Development Department into two corporations, Kashmir Power Development Corporation Limited (KPDCL) and Jammu Power Development Corporation Limited (JPDCL) has opened new avenues. J&K is on way to becoming self reliant in the power sector.

Article 370 won't come back Kashmir-based leaders, including Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti, need to understand that no government at the Centre would even think of rolling back Article 370 and there are no takers for their rhetoric that they will get everything back. J&K is prospering and people have already associated themselves with "New India" where they know that their future is secure and they will grow.
Mumbai, June 29 : Ken Ghosh directs Akshaye Khanna in "State Of Siege: Temple Attack", and he reveals a big reason why the actor was attracted to the script.

"Akshaye Khanna loved the script and also what attracted him to the project was the fact that he could return to wearing a uniform, which brought back memories from 'Border'," Ghosh said, referring to Akshay's role of an armyman in JP Dutta's 1997 superhit "Border".

"State Of Siege: Temple Attack" is the second season of the series that started with the eight-episode "State of Siege: 26/11" last year. While the first season was about operation of the National Security Guards (NSG) following the 2008 Mumbai attacks, "Temple Attack" trains focus on the terror strike on Akshardham Temple.

On September 24, 2002, two armed men attacked the Swaminarayan Akshardham complex at Gandhinagar, Gujarat, killing 30 people and injured over 80. The NSG ended the siege a day later, killing both assailants.

The show marks Akshaye's digital debut as an NSG officer and releases on July 9 on Zee5.
New Delhi, June 29 : Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday held a meeting with Home Minister Amit Shah, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and other top bureaucrats to discuss the prevailing security issues the country is facing.

Sources said the Prime Minister also held discussions on the "futuristic challenges in the defence sector and equipping the armed forces with modern equipment".

The meeting took place two days after a drone was used in a bid to attack an Indian Air Force base in Jammu, which left two personnel injured. Such kind of threat is the beginning of a new security threat for the country.

Both blasts took place within six minutes of each other, injuring two IAF personnel.

Earlier in the day, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) took up the investigation into the drone attack on the Jammu Air Force station.

On Monday, India had told the UN General Assembly that the possibility of the use of weaponised drones for terrorist activities against strategic and commercial assets calls for serious attention by the global community.

Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly, V.S.K. Kaumudi, Special Secretary, Ministry of Home Affairs, said, "Another add-on to existing worries is the use of drones", explaining that they are a "low-cost option and easily available".

The utilisation of these aerial/sub-surface platforms for sinister purposes by terrorist groups, such as intelligence collection, weapon/explosives delivery and targeted attacks has become an imminent danger and challenge for security agencies worldwide, Kaumudi said.

Modi also discussed ways to promote startsup and engage the youth in more research and development works.

He took a stock of the government's Aatmanirbhar Bharat initiative with the involvement of industry, academia and startups.
Chennai, June 29 : V.K. Sasikala, former interim general secretary of the AIADMK, has set up a war room at her home in T. Nagar here and is calling the party cadres and middle level functionaries with 20-30 calls per day.

Sasikala, who was a close aide of late Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa, is using her contacts across the state and is carefully choosing the cadres she should address and is mainly concentrating on the turfs of AIADMK leaders Edappadi K. Palaniswami and O. Panneerselvam.

Sasikala's sister-in-law Ilavarasi, her personal assistant Karthikeyan and four assistants manage the war room at her residence which has high-tech digital facilities, and proper data of the lower and medium-level functionaries of the party.

Sources in Sasikala's team told IANS that she is abreast of all the English, Tamil newspapers as also several YouTube channels which are focusing on developments in Tamil Nadu politics.

She is receiving 50 to 80 letters a day from AIADMK and AMMK cadres who are disgruntled at the leadership of the functioning of their party leaders, they claimed. The war room was instrumental in releasing recorded audiotapes of her conversation with the AIADMK functionaries to the media.

Karthikeyan is the key person who puts her through to the AIADMK cadres and he connects her to these leaders only after a thorough background check. The Sasikala team is planning meticulously to discredit EPS and OPS regularly and sources indicated that she was using different languages to different functionaries. To some people she evokes the name of MGR, to some she uses the name of Jayalalithaa, and to some leaders, she speaks ill of both Palaniswami and Panneerselvam.

Her released tape that she would have made Panneerselvam the Chief Minister was a meticulously planned telephone call to create a wedge between the two leaders.

The war room members claimed that Sasikala is getting several calls from disgruntled AIADMK cadres from across the state to take over the reins of the party but she is waiting for an opportune moment for the same.

The callers, according to her aides are mostly from Tiruppur and Namakkal which are the strongholds of former Chief Minister Palaniswami.
Hyderabad, June 29 : Five major pharma companies announced on Tuesday that they will collaborate for the clinical trials of the investigational oral anti-viral drug Molnupiravir for the treatment of mild Covid-19 in an outpatient setting in India.

Cipla Limited, Dr. Reddy's Laboratories, Emcure Pharmaceuticals, Sun Pharmaceutical Industries and Torrent Pharmaceuticals Ltd have announced the collaboration.

Between March and April this year, these five pharma companies individually entered into a non-exclusive voluntary licensing agreement with Merck Sharpe Dohme (MSD) to manufacture and supply Molnupiravir to India and over 100 low and middle-income countries (LMICs).

The five pharma companies have entered into a collaboration agreement, wherein the parties will jointly sponsor, supervise and monitor the clinical trials in India.

As per the directive of the Subject Expert Committee (SEC) of the Central Drugs Standard Control Organization, Dr. Reddy's will conduct the clinical trial using its product, and the other four pharma companies will be required to demonstrate equivalence of their product to the product used by Dr. Reddy's in its clinical trial.

Following the clinical trial protocol approval given by the Drugs Controller General of India, the clinical trial will be conducted for the treatment of mild Covid-19 in an outpatient setting.

It is expected to take place between June and September this year across India with the recruitment of 1,200 patients.

Such collaboration for a clinical trial is a first of its kind within the Indian pharma industry, and will aim to investigate yet another line of treatment in the collective fight against the Covid-19 pandemic.

On successful completion of the clinical trials, each company will independently approach the regulatory authorities for approval to manufacture and supply Molnupiravir for the treatment of Covid-19 in India.

Molnupiravir is an oral anti-viral that inhibits the replication of multiple RNA viruses including SARS-CoV-2. It is presently being studied by MSD, through a collaboration with Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, in a Phase III trial for the treatment of non-hospitalised patients with confirmed Covid-19 globally.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Mumbai, June 29 : For the second consecutive year, the Maharashtra government has decided to ban gigantic idols of Lord Ganesha and mega public celebrations for the upcoming 10-day Ganeshotsav festival starting September 10, even as the organisers cried foul.

Maha bans giant idols or mega Ganeshotsavs, organisers upset (Ld) Mumbai, June 29 (IANS) For the second consecutive year, the Maharashtra government has decided to ban gigantic idols of Lord Ganesha and mega public celebrations for the upcoming 10-day Ganeshotsav festival starting September 10, even as the organisers cried foul.

In view of the anticipated Covid-19 'third wave', the state government on Tuesday issued a detailed notification restricting the height of the idols to up to 4-feet at public marquees and 2-feet for home worship.

The government has also stipulated simple, unostentatious celebrations, without crowds and strictly following all Covid-19 protocols during the 10 days which mark the state's biggest public festival in which people from all communities participate.

No processions will be permitted for the start of the festival on September 10 or for the 'Visarjan' (immersion) ceremonies on various dates till the final adieu on September 19, sounding a dampener on the much-awaited festival.

Objecting to the notification, the president of the influential BrihanMumbai Sarvajanik Ganeshotsav Samanvay Samiti (BSGSS), Naresh Dahibavkar, termed it as "a rude shock" for the second year running.

"The organisers and idol-makers are surprised and stunned. We had sent several letters to the state government but they remained unacknowledged and now suddenly this unilateral and one-sided decision has come," Dahibhavkar said in a strong statement.

He appealed to Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray to convene a meeting of the BSGSS and others in the state to discuss and jointly finalise the norms for the 2021 Ganeshotsav.

As in 2020, the government has recommended giving priority to health camps or blood donation drives or health awareness campaigns for coronavirus, malaria, dengue etc., with highest levels of cleanliness maintained by all the public mandals and organisers of the mega Ganeshotsav groups.

Depending on the levels of restrictions that may be in force during the festival, the authorities have made it clear that these will not be eased during Ganeshotsav and directed the public 'mandals' to ensure that there is no overcrowding during the daily 'aartis', 'poojas' and 'darshan'.

The state government has asked the public 'mandals' to switch over to online 'darshan' or relaying the celebrations in the marquees through the local cable television networks, websites or social media platforms, as per the notification issued by Sanjay D. Khedekar, Deputy Secretary, Home Department.

For the 'Visarjan', children and senior citizens must avoid stepping out and as far as possible, the immersion ceremonies should be performed at artificial ponds which will be created by various public and private bodies, as in 2020, at the height of the first wave of Covid-19.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Johannesburg, June 29 : The South African Constitutional Court on Tuesday found former President Jacob Zuma guilty of contempt of court and sentenced him to a 15-month jail term.

A BBC report says that Zuma has been given five days to hand himself to the police.

The country's State Capture Inquiry accused Zuma of accepting bribes, gratification and unauthorised payments from other parties in relation to the procurement of the arms worth billions in 1999.

Zuma's time in power, which ended in 2018, was dogged by graft allegations.

Businessmen along with politicians were accused of conspiracy in influencing the decision-making process.

The former President made one appearance at the inquiry into what has become known as "state capture" but then refused to appear subsequently.

The inquiry headed by Justice Raymond Zondo asked the Constitutional Court to intervene.

Acting Chief Justice Sisi Khampepe was damning in her ruling.

Zuma refused to come to the court to explain his actions, she said, and he "elected instead to make provocative, unmeritorious and vituperative statements that constituted a calculated effort to impugn the integrity of the judiciary.

"I am left with no option but to commit Zuma to imprisonment, with the hope that doing so sends an unequivocal message... the rule of law and the administration of justice prevails." Zuma was not in court to hear the majority ruling and has repeatedly declared that he was the victim of a giant political conspiracy.

In a separate legal matter, the former President pleaded not guilty last month in his corruption trial involving a $5bn (A3bn) arms deal from the 1990s.
San Francisco, June 29 : Google on Tuesday announced a new website designed to be a "one-stop-shop" for people with food insecurity in the US.

The "Find Food Support" site includes a food locator tool powered by Google Maps which people can use to search for their nearest food bank, food pantry or school lunch programme pickup site in their community.

Google is working with non-profit groups like No Kid Hungry and FoodFinder, as well as the US Department of Agriculture, to aggregate 90,000 locations with free food support across all 50 states, with more locations to come, The Verge reported.

The new site is a product of Google's newly formed Food for Good team, formerly known as Project Delta when it was headquartered at Alphabet's X moonshot division.

Project Delta's mission is to "create a smarter food system", which includes standardising data to improve communication between food distributors to curb food waste.

Food insecurity is defined by the US Department of Agriculture as a lack of consistent access to enough food for an active, healthy life.

The number of people experiencing food insecurity spiked during the Covid-19 pandemic, affecting an estimated 45 million people or 1 in 7 Americans, including 15 million children.

Google said that searches for "food bank near me", "Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)", "food stamps application", and "school lunch pick up" reached record highs during 2020.

In addition to the new food location site, Google is publishing five new videos on YouTube aimed at de-stigmatising food insecurity.

The site will also include links to food support hotlines, state-by-state benefit guides and information for specific communities, such as seniors, families and children, and military families.
New Delhi, June 29 : The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology on Tuesday asked for an explanation from microblogging site Twitter over denying access to the accounts of Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and committee head Shashi Tharoor.

Sources said that the parliamentary committee has written to Twitter and asked to explain the provision under which accounts of Prasad and Tharoor were locked. The Committee has asked Twitter to file its reply within two days.

Last week, Prasad and Tharoor were denied access to their Twitter accounts for some time which was later restored.

"Friends! Something highly peculiar happened today. Twitter denied access to my account for almost an hour on the alleged ground that there was a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of the USA and subsequently they allowed me to access the account," Prasad has tweeted after restoration of account.

Prasad had also said, "No matter what any platform does they will have to abide by the new IT rules fully and there shall be no compromise on that." Quoting Prasad's tweet, Tharoor said, "Raviji, the same thing just happened to me. Clearly DMCA is getting hyperactive. This tweet has been deleted by Twitter because its video includes the copyrighted Boney M song 'Rasputin'. After process, a/c unlocked." Tharoor further stated: "As Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology, I can state that we will be seeking an explanation from Twitter India for the locking of Ravi Shankar Prasad's and my accounts and the rules and procedures they follow while operating in India." On Tuesday, Facebook India and Google India representatives appeared before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on IT to explain their views on safeguarding citizens' rights and prevention of misuse of social and online news media platforms.

Sources said that the Committee has directed Facebook and Google to follow the new IT rules and laws of the land.
Mumbai, June 29 : The SEBI board on Tuesday approved a proposal to introduce a framework for Accredited Investors in the Indian securities market.

'Accredited Investor' is a term referred to a class of investors who may be considered to be well informed or well advised about investment products.

The tag of Accredited Investors may be assigned to individuals, HUFs, family trusts, sole proprietorships, partnership firms, trusts and body corporates based on financial parameters and information as may be specified by SEBI.

Eligible subsidiaries of depositories and specified stock exchanges, and any other specified institutions may be recognised as Accreditation Agencies.

Accreditation agencies would grant accreditation status and issue accreditation certificate to accredited investors.

Under the framework, accredited investors shall have flexibility to participate in investment products with an investment amount lesser than the minimum amount mandated in the Alternative Investment Funds (AIF) Regulations and Portfolio Managers (PMS) Regulations.

AIF for accredited investors where each investor invests minimum investment amount of Rs 70 crore may avail relaxation from regulatory requirements such as portfolio diversification norms, conditions for launch of schemes and extension of tenure of the AIF.

Accredited investors with minimum investment of Rs 10 crore with registered PMS provider, may avail relaxation from regulatory requirement with respect to investment in unlisted securities and can enter into bilaterally negotiated agreements with the PMS provider.

Further, the accredited investors who are clients of investment advisers will have the flexibility to determine the limits and modes of fees payable to the investment adviser through bilaterally negotiated contractual terms.

Among other amendments, the SEBI board has approved the proposal to amend the SEBI (Foreign Portfolio Investors) Regulations, 2019 to permit eligible Resident Indian Fund Managers (other than individuals) to be constituents of Foreign Portfolio Investors (FPIs).

Such FPIs shall be investment funds approved by Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) under IT Act. These amendments shall bring the SEBI (FPI) Regulations, 2019 in line with the recent amendments in Section 9A of the IT Act, thereby facilitating Indian fund managers in managing investment funds incorporated, established or registered outside India.

The capital market regulator also amended regulations to define a Credit Rating Agency (CRA) in terms of rating of securities that are listed or proposed to be listed on a recognised stock exchange, and to provide for an explanation specifying that ratings undertaken by a CRA under the respective guidelines of a financial sector regulator or authority shall be under the purview of the concerned financial sector regulator or authority.
New Delhi, June 29 : The Centre on Tuesday granted approval to the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine to enter the Indian market as the fourth vaccine in its arsenal to fight the deadly pandemic, adding that the next in line is the Pfizer vaccine.

Member of NITI Aayog, V.K. Paul, made the announcement at a press conference, saying that "new drug permission has been granted to Moderna, the first internationally developed Covid vaccine".

Paul, however, made it clear that the new drug permission is for restricted use and that Moderna will be administered in two doses.

Moderna thus became the fourth vaccine which has been approved by the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) after AstraZeneca's Covishield, Bharat Biotech's Covaxin and Sputnik V developed by Russia's Gamaleya Institute.

While making the announcement regarding opening of the Indian market for Moderna and mentioning that Covaxin, Covishield, SputnikV and Moderna will now be available in the fight against Covid, Paul said "India will soon close the deal on Pfizer as well".

Mumbai-based pharmaceutical company Cipla Ltd on Tuesday received approval from the DCGI to import the Covid-19 vaccine developed by Moderna Inc for restricted emergency use.

Cipla had filed an application with the DCGI on Monday to import the vaccine.

The entry of Moderna vaccine is a significant move amid India's accelerated vaccination drive to inoculate as many people as soon as possible. The new drug would undoubtedly help better the supply constraints, besides allaying the fears of a possible third wave of the pandemic.

Earlier in the day, Johnson and Johnson had said that it is in talks with the Indian government to explore ways to speed up the delivery of its single-shot Covid-19 vaccine in the country.

So far, India has administered more than 31.90 crore (32,90,29,510) vaccine doses, including 52,76,457 doses in the last 24 hours.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
New Delhi, June 29 : Hours after the Ministry of Home Affairs handed over the probe into the drone attack at an Air Force Station (AFS) in Jammu to the National Investigation Agency (NIA), the NIA on Tuesday registered a case to probe the matter.

An NIA spokesperson said that the anti-terror probe agency, in pursuance of the MHA order, has reregistered the case under several sections of the Explosive Substances Act, Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and the Indian Penal Code.

The official said that while the NIA has been working with the other agencies since immediately after the incident, pursuant to the re-registration of the case, requisite actions as per the law have been initiated.

An NIA team had visited the blast scene on Sunday to collect samples from the spot.

In a first of its kind terrorist attack in the country, two drones were used to drop explosives at the vital military installation on the intervening night of June 26-27. Two consecutive explosions took place within a gap of five minutes at the high-security Jammu Air Force Station, injuring two personnel on duty in the technical area. The drones later flew away.

In the two back-to-back explosions, which occurred at 1.37 a.m. and 1.42 a.m., the roof of a building was damaged. However, the explosives missed the aircraft hangar nearby. No valuable equipment was damaged in the attack.

The Air Force Station is about 14-15 km from the nearest point on the International Border (IB) with Pakistan. The farthest that a drone from Pakistan has come so far on the Indian side of the IB and Line of Control (LoC) in the Jammu region is 12 km.

Pakistan-based terrorists are suspected to be behind the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to attack the Air Force Station, officials said.

The attack on the Air Force Station took place a few hours after Jammu and Kashmir Police arrested an alleged Lashkar-e-Taiba operative with an improvised explosive device (IED) weighing nearly 5 kg in Jammu.
New Delhi, June 29 : Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Tuesday asked the ministries and respective departments to make efforts to frontload capital expenditure.

The minister held a virtual meeting with senior government officials to discuss the infrastructure roadmap ahead. This was the sixth review meeting by the Finance Minister with ministries and departments on the infrastructure roadmap.

While reviewing the progress, the Finance Minister asked the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs to expedite the capital expenditure and make efforts for frontloading it, said an official statement, adding that the Steel Ministry was asked to frontload capex and facilitate private investment by providing support and removing bottlenecks.

Similarly, Sitharaman also asked the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas to expedite monetisation of assets during FY 2021-22.

The Department of Space on the other hand was asked to focus on domestic procurement wherever possible.

Sitharaman also highlighted that the infrastructure expenditure is not just Central Government budgetary expenditure on infrastructure and includes infrastructure spending by state governments and private sector. It also includes government expenditure through extra-budgetary resources.

Therefore, ministries are to actively work on getting projects funded through innovative structuring and financing and provide all support to private sector for enhancing infrastructure spending, said a Finance Ministry statement.

The Finance Minister also added that the ministries also need to explore Public Private Partnership (PPP) mode for viable projects. Sitharaman also asked the ministries and their CPSEs to ensure clearance of Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises (MSME) dues by July 31, 2021.

She also asked the secretaries of ministries to push expenditure on large important projects to ensure that the achievement is commensurate with timelines.

Sitharaman also asked the ministries to take up regular reviews of sector-specific projects with the concerned state governments for effective implementation of the same.
New Delhi, June 29 : The Supreme Court on Tuesday issued a notice on a plea filed by Matrix Cellular challenging a Delhi High Court order which refused to grant permission to release its oxygen concentrators seized by the Delhi Police amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

A bench comprising Justices Rohinton Fali Nariman, K.M. Joseph and B.R. Gavai said: "Issue notice, returnable in three weeks. Dasti, in addition, is permitted." Senior Advocate Mukul Rohatgi, representing Matrix, argued that when no prices were fixed, how can it be a case of black marketing?

He added that the scenario is similar to lawyers -- if prices are not fixed, then they will charge whatever they want.

Rohatgi contended that every item included GST, and emphasised that if there is no price fixation, there can be no case of black marketing and hoarding.

He pointed out that the magistrate has sealed Matrix Cellular's concentrators worth Rs 3.5 crore and which have become the case property now.

On May 27, the Delhi High Court had dismissed a petition filed by Matrix challenging the seizure of oxygen concentrators and other Covid care equipment from its office by the Delhi Police.

Justice Yogesh Khanna had observed that such a direction could not be issued when the investigation into the matter is at an initial stage.

In the backdrop of acute shortage of oxygen concentrators amid the raging pandemic, the court had said that there was no illegality committed by Delhi Police when it seized the oxygen concentrators. The court also pointed out that the attendants of the patients were running from pillar to post to purchase concentrators.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
New Delhi, June 29 : Twitter said on Tuesday that it has zero tolerance policy towards child sexual exploitation.

The statement came regarding the FIR registered by Delhi Police's cyber cell in connection with 'child pornographic contents' on Twitter.

A Twitter spokesperson said, "Twitter has a zero tolerance policy towards child sexual exploitation (CSE) and we have a proactive approach in combating sexual exploitation of minors on our service." "We have been at the forefront of responding to the evolving challenge of preventing the exploitation of children on the Internet and will continue to aggressively fight online child sexual abuse, as well as invest in the technology and tools that are essential to stay ahead of this issue.

We will continue to invest in proactive detection and removal of content that violates the Twitter Rules and work with law enforcement and NGO partners in India to tackle the issue", Twitter said in a statement.

Twitter uses PhotoDNA technology, our own proprietary tools, and other systems to detect behavioral signals and remove media; which also, in many cases, helps to remove new accounts linked to this type of content before they have even sent their first Tweet.

All viewing, sharing, or linking to child sexual exploitation (CSE) material, regardless of the intent, contributes to the re-victimization of the depicted children and is prohibited on Twitter.

This includes media, text, illustrations, or computer-generated images. This also applies to content that may further contribute to the victimization of children through the promotion or glorification of child sexual exploitation. For the purposes of this policy, Twitter defines a minor as any person under the age of 18.

In 2019, Twitter launched a feature in our search prompt that is aimed at deterrence of child sexual exploitation (CSE).

The prompt was developed in collaboration with the Ministry of Home Affairs and NGOs in India to blacklist specific CSE search keywords in Hindi, English, Bengali and Kannada.
New Delhi, June 29 : A delegation of Sikh leaders on Tuesday met Union Minister of State for Home Affairs G. Kishan Reddy over the recent incident of forcible religious conversion of two Sikh girls in the Kashmir valley and submitted a memorandum in this regard.

The delegation led by BJP national spokesperson, Sardar R.P. Singh demanded action over forced conversion of Sikh girls to which the minister has assured necessary action.

"The delegation submitted a memorandum about the alleged forced conversion and wedding of Sikh girls in Kashmir. I will discuss the matter with the Union Home Minister about the action that is required to be taken," Reddy said after meeting with the delegation.

Singh said that the delegation demanded a law in Jammu & Kashmir to protect girls of Sikh community from forceful conversion.

"Kashmir is not Pakistan where Sikhs can be forced to convert, we won't allow this to happen. Jathedar Akal Takht Sahib has written a letter to Lieutenant Governor of Jammu & Kashmir to bring a law against 'Love Jihad'. He should write a similar letter to the Punjab Chief Minister against religious conversion in the state," Singh said.

Secretary, Delhi BJP, Impreet Singh Bakshi, who was also part of the delegation, said, "We requested the Minister of State for Home affairs to bring an ordinance against conversion and he assured proper action."
New Delhi, June 29 : The national capital on Tuesday witnessed a slight surge in the number of new Covid infections with 101 cases getting reported in the last 24 hours, according to the daily health bulletin issued by the Delhi government .

It is after three days that Delhi's single-day Covid tally breached the 100-mark, a day after reporting the lowest tally of the year -- 59 -- on Monday. The national capital had reported 85 new cases on Sunday and 89 cases on Saturday. On Friday, the national capital had reported 115 Covid cases.

Meanwhile, four persons succumbed to Covid-19 in Delhi in the last 24 hours, taking the national capital's overall Covid death toll to 24,971.

Delhi presently has 1,531 active cases, the lowest since March 1 when it had an active caseload of 1,404. The city's positivity rate stands at 0.15 per cent, while the recovery rate is 98.15 per cent.

A total of 66,397 tests were conducted in Delhi in the last 24 hours.

On a positive note, 119 people recovered from Covid in the past 24 hours, taking the total number of recoveries in the city to 14,07,592.

As far as vaccination is concerned, Delhi had administered more than 2 lakh vaccine doses on Monday, taking the total number doses administered so far to 75,43,765, of which more than 17 lakh people have received both the doses.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
New Delhi, June 29 : Bharti will invest an additional $500 million into Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite communications company OneWeb.

Post the investment, the total funding raised by OneWeb would amount to $2.4 billion.

The latest investment announcement comes as OneWeb prepares for its eighth launch on July 1, delivering the highly anticipated and strategically valuable Arctic region coverage down to 50-degree latitude.

"OneWeb, the global Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite communications company, has secured further fund-raising on the anniversary of the successful bid by the UK government and Bharti Global (Bharti) to purchase OneWeb from US Chapter 11 to bring its total funding to $2.4 billion," said a statement.

The call option is expected to be completed in the second half of 2021, subject to regulatory approvals. On completion of the call option and with Eutelsat's $550 million investment, Bharti will hold 38.6 per cent, while the UK government, Eutelsat and Softbank will each own 19.3 per cent.

The final shareholding structure may alter to the extent a member of the shareholders' group chooses to exercise a part of this call option.

On completion, OneWeb will have secured $2.4 billion of equity investment, with no issued debt.

OneWeb's Executive Chairman, Sunil Bharti Mittal, said: "OneWeb represents a unique opportunity for investors at a key moment in the commercialisation of space." "With its Global ITU LEO Spectrum priority, telco partnerships, successful launch momentum and reliable satellites, OneWeb is ready to serve the vital needs of high-speed broadband connectivity for those who have been left behind," he added.

Neil Masterson, CEO of OneWeb, said that the completion of the funding puts OneWeb in a "powerful" position.

"With the forthcoming launch we will have completed 40 per cent of our network. We are intently focused on execution and just ten more launches will enable us to deliver global coverage," Masterson said.
Aizawl, June 29 : The Mizoram accord, signed 35 years ago after years of terrorism, has become an exemplary peace agreement and the neighbouring states and countries also take it as a model of peace, Mizoram Chief Minister Zoramthanga said on Tuesday.

On the occasion of the 35th anniversary of the Mizoram Peace Accord (MPA), Zoramthanga said that the model peace treaty is legally binding and invaluable, and the government of India even awarded the state a 'Peace Bonus' to the tune of more than Rs 182 crore.

The 77-year-old militant leader-turned-politician said: "Abiding by the terms and conditions of the peace accord, I brought out all the boys from the jungles, leaving no arms and ammunition behind, and handed over everything to the Indian government.

"We abide by the accord cent per cent. The government of India is also praiseworthy in this matter, as it has done very well on its part to fulfill the terms and conditions." The Chief Minister claimed that the Mizoram Accord, signed on June 30, 1986, is one of the most successful peace accords ever signed by the government of India.

"Since then, not a single person has ever ventured out to carry out underground activities," he said.

Zoramthanga further said that prior to the signing of the peace accord, various political party leaders, the people, the church, NGOs and student organisations were invited to contribute what was necessary for the accord.

He said the peace accord was finally signed by the government of India represented the by Union Home Secretary, the underground government represented by President Laldenga and the then Mizoram Union Territory represented by the Chief Secretary.

"It was the happiest night we had seen. All the requirements we wanted to incorporate in the Constitution was added through Article 371(G)," said the veteran leader, who is also the President of the ruling Mizo National Front.

The Chief Minister said that in view of the Covid pandemic, normal celebrations of the peace accord would not be observed like in the previous years.

"However, this year, I implore my fellow Mizos to take pride in this gift of God we received, and to preserve it for generations to come. Peace pays, and I believe that through brotherhood and understanding, our neighbours can eventually achieve the peace we enjoy today," Zoramthanga stated.

Like few other northeastern states of India, Mizoram was previously a part of Assam until 1972, when it was carved out as a Union Territory.

After the signing of the peace accord, the Memorandum of Settlement, in 1986, which ended two decades of strife and insurgency, Mizoram became the 23rd state of India on February 20, 1987.

With a population of 1.1 million (2011 census), India's second least populous state Mizoram is home to various Mizo tribes and shares an unfenced international border of 510 km with Myanmar and 318 km with Bangladesh.
Guwahati, June 29 : Several Congress leaders went into quarantine and isolation with some in the ICU while lakhs of BJP functionaries and workers have been risking their lives while dealing with the Covid pandemic for the wellbeing and safety of the people, BJP president J.P. Nadda said on Tuesday.

While addressing the Assam's BJP state executive meeting virtually from Delhi, terming Congress leaders as "political tourists", Nadda said that during election time some Congress leaders are visible in the country but after the vote every one shutting their camps and closing their tents went home.

The BJP chief alleged that Congress was using the toolkit maligning Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Yoga events in India and famous Assam tea.

Slamming the Congress led former Assam government, Nadda said that during the previous government, communalism and terrorism were very vigorous in Assam while corruptions griped every spheres of life.

"I thanked the people for voting BJP and its allies in the recent Assam assembly polls winning 75 out of 126 assembly seats by the NDA. The Assam government headed by Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma would work with the mantra of 'development for all appeasement to none'. As Assam is the gateway of northeast India, development of the state would be reflected in the other states of the region," the BJP supremo said in his 46-minute speech.

He asked Sarma and newly appointed state BJP president Bhabesh Kalita to take the inoculation in Assam as mission mode.

Highly appreciating the 45-day old second BJP led government in Assam, he said that the state Chief Minister already took many initiatives in this short period including that of talks with the Amilitant outfits and crusade against drugs.

Nadda asked the BJP leaders, ministers and workers to effectively implement the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana (PM-GKAY) in Assam.

"It is very praiseworthy that Sarma has taken steps to give 3.50 lakh vaccine doses every day across Assam," he said.

Kalita took over the charge as 19th Assam state President on Tuesday. Praising Prime Minister Narendra Modi for effective management of the Covid pandemic in the country, the BJP President said that when the crisis has cropped up across the country, the government within a week supplied the medical oxygen to all the states.

"Director General of World Health Organisation and Secretary General of United Nations highly praised Modi for undertaking economic programmes and schemes along with the health schemes to deal with the pandemic in India. They said that India's combined economic and health programme must be replicated by other countries," Nadda said.

Claiming that by December India would produce 135 crore vaccine dose per day, the former Union Health Minister said that India is not begging Covid vaccine from any country but has the ability to provide the vaccine to other countries

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Hyderabad, June 29 : A teenager killed his friend by pushing him into a well following a fight between them over an issue pertaining to a woman, Hyderabad police said on Tuesday.

More than one-and-a-half month after the body of a youth was found in a well under Golconda police station limits here, the police cracked the case with the arrest of his friend who had intentionally pushed him. Both the victim and the accused were auto trolley drivers.

Hyderabad Police Commissioner Anjani Kumar on Tuesday announced the arrest of 19-year-old Mohammed Irfan, who killed Ajju Ali (21) following a fight over a woman with whom Ajju was in a relationship.

According to police, the accused bore a grudge as the victim had refused to allow him to spend a night with the woman.

The body of Ajju Ali was recovered from a well in Golconda on May 11. As his father suspected foul play, the police took up investigation and finally cracked the case.

The investigation revealed that Irfan took Ajju Ali for swimming on May 10 with a plan to kill him. When Ajju was standing on the steps, the accused who was already in the well insisted that he too join him. When Ajju refused, the accused pulled him in and pushed him into the deep water and as a result Ajju drowned.

Two others boys who were in the well and one boy who was standing near the well witnessed the incident but the accused misled them saying that the deceased drowned accidentally and left the spot.

The accused and deceased both used to work as auto trolley drivers with one Nayeem at M.D. Lines. Irfan, who was facing financial problems, had also requested Ajju to help him in getting a passenger auto by providing surety, but the latter had refused.

According to police, the deceased was also into an illicit relationship with a woman at Asif Nagar. On few occasions, the accused had dropped the deceased at her house. The accused also expressed a desire to spend a night with the woman but the deceased refused leading to a quarrel between them. Due to this, the accused bore grudge and decided to eliminate him.
Amaravati/New Delhi, June 29 : Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y. S. Jagan Mohan Reddy wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi saying that the state is uniquely positioned to inoculate lakhs of people on a daily basis, propelled by its grassroots governance system comprising ward and village secretariats.

"We have demonstrated our capacity of large-scale vaccination by immunising 13.7 lakh people on a single day, June 20. Andhra Pradesh is in a unique position to vaccinate lakhs of people daily due to the setup of 15,004 village and ward secretariats," wrote Reddy to Modi in a letter.

Similarly, he mentioned the earlier feats of inoculating 6.3 lakh people on April 14 and 5.7 lakh people on May 27.

He said that the 2.6 lakh ward and village volunteers, responsible for 50 households each, established in 15,004 secretariats were aided by more than 40,000 ASHA workers, including more than 19,000 ANMs and a vast number of PHCs and CHCs.

Reddy thanked the Centre for extending the support needed to fight the Covid pandemic and called the government's decision to procure and supply the entire vaccine requirement for all eligible age groups from June 21 as the right policy.
New Delhi, June 29 : Hardened criminals, mafia dons and criminal gangs led and carried out the deadly attacks in West Bengal after the declaration of Assembly election results on May 2, as per the report of a fact-finding committee comprising the civil society group 'Call for Justice, which was submitted to Union Minister of State for Home, G. Kishan Reddy, on Tuesday.

The report said that these elements were unhindered, which reveals that there was clear political patronage even before the elections and the same was used to silence the political rivals.

Recognising the spectrum of the incidents of post-poll violence in West Bengal, Call for Justice had constituted a fact-finding committee led by Justice Permod Kohli, former Chief Justice of Sikkim High Court, and comprising Anand Bose, IAS (retired), former Chief Secretary, Kerala; Nirmal Kaur, IPS (retired), former DGP, Jharkhand; Nisar Ahmed, ex-President, ICSI; and M. Madan Gopal, IAS (retired), former Additional Chief Secretary, Karnataka.

The magnitude and reach of the post-poll violence touched many villages and towns all across the state simultaneously, beginning from the night of May 2. This is a clear indication that most of the incidents were not sporadic but premeditated, organised and conspiratorial, the committee found.

In most of the cases, the victims were afraid to lodge a complaint with the police either due to fear of reprisal or due to the lack of faith in the police, it said.

The victims who gathered courage to go to the police were either turned away to settle the matter with the culprits or faced flat refusal to register the case. Many people left their homes and villages for safer destinations, to shelter camps within and outside the state, the report said.

Forcibly taking away Aadhaar cards, ration cards, demanding written undertaking on not to support a particular political party, demanding ransom and protection money (called 'tolabazi') to return to workplaces or for reclaiming lands or for rebuilding the houses, removal from contractual employment and all such incidents were basically meant to instill a lasting political impact and fear psychosis at large, the report said.

Although the figures of the exact number of casualties, grievous injuries, extent of damage to property are yet to be known fully, the lumpenisation of public life nurtured and protected through powerful lobbies at every level is very clear, it said.

"The intensity and spread of post-poll violence could have been halted or controlled if the administration and the police had acted in time. An assessment of the ground situation reveals that no adequate or reasonable measures were taken, knowingly or unknowingly," the report said.

The fact-finding team has recommended that the government should initiate disciplinary proceedings against the delinquent officers, including the All-India Service Officers, who failed to discharge their duties in protecting the lives of people and destruction of properties.

The services of retired judges of high courts or the Supreme Court should be sought to head these inquiry proceedings, it said.

All the reports prepared by the MHA, NCSC, NCW, NHRC, NCPCR along with the report of the fact-finding committee must be placed before the Supreme Court, it said.

In the light of the overwhelming, ample, substantial and convincing evidence, the Supreme Court may consider constituting a Special Investigation Team (SIT) immediately, it added.

The progress of the work of the SIT should be monitored by Supreme Court to ensure impartial and professional manner, either through a sitting judge or a retired judge of the top court for fair investigation and early justice, the committee has recommended.

As an alternative, the government of India may constitute a judicial commission headed by a sitting or a retired Chief Justice or a judge of the Supreme Court or high court.
New Delhi, June 29 : The Supreme Court noted on Tuesday that there are around 38 migrant workers in the country, as it directed the state governments, which have not implemented the 'One Nation One Ration Card (ONORC) scheme so far, to implement it by July 31.

Passing a slew of directions for the benefit of migrant workers amid the Covid pandemic, a bench comprising Justices Ashok Bhushan and M.R. Shah said: "The states, which have not yet implemented the 'One Nation One Ration Card' scheme are directed to implement the same by not later than 31.07.2021." Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, representing the Centre, had told the top court that Assam, Chhattisgarh, Delhi and West Bengal are yet to implement the ONORC scheme.

The bench cited a survey conducted by the National Statistics Office (NSO) in 2017-2018, stating that there are around 38 crore migrant workers in the country -- more than 1/4th of the population of the entire country -- who are engaged in the unorganised sectors.

The bench said the Parliament has enacted various legislations to safeguard the interest and welfare of the migrant labourers, adding that the Right to Life as guaranteed by Article 21 of the Constitution gives right to every human being to live a life of dignity with access to at least the bare necessities of life.

The bench observed that the Constitution does not have any explicit provision regarding Right to Food and insisted that providing food security to the impoverished persons is the bounden duty of all the state governments.

"The fundamental Right to Life as enshrined in Article 21 of the Constitution may be interpreted to include Right to Live with human dignity, which may include the Right to Food and other basic necessities," said the bench.

The Parliament with an aim to provide food and nutritional security to the people had enacted the National Food Security Act, 2013, noted the bench.

In an 80-page judgment, the bench also directed the states/Union Territories to run community kitchens at prominent places where large number of migrant labourers are found, and continue them at least till the pandemic doesn't subside.

The bench also directed the states to bring a scheme for distribution of dry ration to migrant labourers, for which they can seek additional food grains from the Centre.

The bench insisted that such a scheme should be implemented before July 31, and it should run till the current pandemic continues.

"We direct the Central government and the Department of Food and Public Distribution (Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution) to allocate and distribute food grains as per the demand for additional food-grains from the states for disbursement of dry food grains to migrant labourers," added the bench.

The bench also directed all states/UTs to register all establishments and license all contractors under the Inter-State Migrant Workmen (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act, 1979 and ensure that the statutory duty imposed on the contractors to give particulars of the migrant workers is fully complied with.

Insisting on developing a national portal for migrant workers, the bench said that only after registration of the workers, the states and the Centre will be able to extend the benefits of the welfare schemes to them.

The top court pointed out that there is an urgency to get the portal finalised and operational, given the pandemic situation and the dire need of unorganised workers to receive the benefits.

"The attitude of the Ministry of Labour and Employment in not completing the module even though directed as early as on 21.08.2018 shows that it is not alive to the concern of the migrant workers and the non-action of the Ministry is strongly disapproved," added the bench.

The bench directed the Secretary in the Ministry of Labour and Employment to ensure that the National Data Base for Unorganised Workers (NDUW) portal is finalised, and implementation of the portal commences on or before July 31.

The top court order came on an application filed by activists Anjali Bharadwaj, Harsh Mander and Jagdeep Chhokar in a suo moto case related to the problems and miseries of the migrant labourers, seeking the implementation of welfare measures for them during the second wave of Covid-19.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Dhaka, June 29 : Fire personnel on Tuesday recovered the body of the security guard Harun-ur-Rashid, 65, from the rubble of the building which had collapsed here following a massive explosion on Sunday, said Deputy Director, Debashish Bardhan, Operation of Fire Service and Civil Defence.

The body was recovered after 44 hours.

As many as seven people died and 66 others injured in Shawrma House Chain Restaurant building collapse afer explosion in the capital's Moghbazar area on Sunday.

The blast triggered partial collapse of a building while shattering the glass walls of dozens of nearby structures in Moghbazar.

Hundreds, including many pedestrians and commuters, are under treatment at different hospitals in Dhaka.

The explosion is believed to have been caused by a gas leak somewhere in the building.

Police have ruled out any foul play behind the incident.

Mangled pillars, glass shards and broken concrete were all over 79 Outer Circular Road.

Two heavily damaged buses were left in a heap outside the three-storey building, witnesses said.

Monirul Islam Ramna Police Station officer-in-charge (OC) said, "The caretaker had been missing since the blast." The deceased have been identified as Jannat, 23, and his nine-month-old daughter Sobhana, private car driver Swapan, 39, bus driver Abul Kashem Mollah, 45, private employee Ruhul Amin, 30, Sharma House restaurant chef Osman Gani Tushar, 35, and Radio Dhwani journalist Mostafizur Rahman, 26.

Earlier, police chief Benazir Ahmed said explosives experts would investigate the deadly blast in Moghbazar even though he did not believe the incident was caused by a bomb.

Meanwhile, a five-member probe body has been formed to investigate the incident. Md Asaduzzaman, chief of the police's counter terrorism unit (CTTC) will be at the panel's helm, assisted by the Additional Deputy Commissioner of the Bomb Disposal Branch.

On the other hand, the law enforcers have formed a seven-member committee to investigate the incident.

Besides, a seven-member panel has been tasked with inspecting the scene and handing in a detailed report on the incident within seven working days, the Police Headquarters said on Monday.

The committee members include a special superintendent of police from the forensic division of the CID, a special superintendent of police from the CTSB, an additional superintendent of police from the anti-terrorism unit, a co-commander of the APBN, and a deputy chief explosives inspector from the explosives directorate.

The panel will work in coordination with the Fire Service's probe committee to ascertain the cause of the explosion and formulate recommendations to prevent such incidents in future.
Amaravati, June 29 : Andhra Pradesh Social Welfare Minister Pinipe Vishwarup on Tuesday directed various government departments' heads to 100 per cent expend the funds allocated under Scheduled Castes Component (SCSP).

He said that Rs 19,430 crore was allocated in 2020-21 under SCSP to 44 departments, out of which only Rs 13,672 crore was exhausted.

Vishwarup said Rs 17,403 crore have been earmarked under SCSP for fiscal 2021-22 to 42 departments.

He claimed that the current fiscal's quantum is 10 per cent (Rs 1,667 crore) higher and 16 per cent more (Rs 2,402) than the allocation in 2019-20.

According to the Minister, the government spent Rs 4,641 in the current fiscal until May.

Incidentally, 12 departments spent more than 76 per cent of those funds while nine of them did not expend even a penny.

"As Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy is according utmost importance for the upliftment of SCs, all departments must take care to expend 100 per cent of the funds allocated for this purpose," said Viswarup.

He highlighted that the next review meeting on this subject will be chaired by Reddy and directed all the heads of the departments which were lagging behind to exhaust the funds.
New Delhi, June 29 : There seems to be no respite from the scorching heat as the national capital on Wednesday witnessed the first severe heat wave of the year with its maximum temperature soaring to 43-degree Celsius, the highest recorded so far this year, the met department said.

Lodhi Road, Ridge and Pusa areas witnessed severe heat wave with the mercury soaring to 42.6-degree Celsius, 43.4-degree Celsius and 44.3-degree Celsius, respectively, seven notches above the average temperature.

The highest temperature was recorded in the Najafgarh area at 44.4-degree Celsius, followed by Pitampura (44.3) and Mungeshpur (44.3).

The India Meteorological Department (IMD) has predicted a similar heat wave on Wednesday with the highest temperature remaining around the 42-degree Celsius mark.

The IMD has attributed the severe heat wave to the delay in the arrival of monsoon.

The southwest monsoon has reached Barmer in western Rajasthan, one of its last outposts, two weeks before its normal schedule but is yet to arrive in the north Indian plains, including Delhi, according to the IMD.

The IMD had earlier predicted that the wind system may reach Delhi by June 15, which would have been 12 days early. However, westerly winds have been blocking its advance into Delhi, parts of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Punjab and Haryana.

Normally, monsoon reaches Delhi by June 27 and covers the entire country by July 8. Last year, the wind system had reached Delhi on June 25 and covered the entire country by June 29.

However, this year the wait for Delhi, Haryana, parts of western Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and western Rajasthan has got prolonged even as the mercury and humidity continue to soar, the IMD said, adding that immediate relief is unlikely.
Mumbai, June 29 : Reliance Industries and Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), a state-run oil company of the UAE, have finalised an agreement for a petrochemical joint venture several months after signing a broad framework agreement.

The two on Tuesday announced that through the agreement, Reliance will join a new world-scale chlor-alkali, ethylene dichloride and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) production facility at TA'ZIZ in Ruwais, Abu Dhabi.

The agreement capitalises on the growing demand for these critical industrial raw materials and leverages the strengths of ADNOC and Reliance as global industrial and energy leaders.

The project will be constructed in the TA'ZIZ Industrial Chemicals Zone, which is a joint venture between ADNOC and ADQ.

The agreement continues the momentum of ADNOC's downstream and industry growth plans in line with ADNOC's 2030 strategy.

Petrochemical, refining and gas growth projects are currently under construction, with a number of projects also recently completed across the downstream and industry portfolio.

ADNOC is gearing up for growth with TA'ZIZ, the world-scale chemicals production hub and industrial ecosystem based in Ruwais, with investment in excess of 18 billion AED (Arab Emirates Dirham) and a number of further growth projects in the downstream and industry sector.

Under the terms of the agreement, TA'ZIZ and Reliance will construct an integrated plant, with capacity to produce 940 thousand tonnes of chlor-alkali, 1.1 million tonnes of ethylene dichloride and 360 thousand tonnes of PVC annually.

Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology, and ADNOC Managing Director and Group CEO, said: "We are delighted to attract an investor of Reliance's caliber to partner with ADNOC and ADQ in accelerating growth at TA'ZIZ. This agreement is a significant milestone, as we continue to grow a globally competitive industrial ecosystem and highly attractive investor value proposition." Welcoming the initiative, Reliance Industries Chairman and Managing Director Mukesh Ambani said: "We at Reliance are excited to enter into a strategic partnership with ADNOC for establishing a world-class and world-scale chemical project at TA'ZIZ in Ruwais. This important milestone further bolsters our long-standing relationship with ADNOC, reaffirming our faith in the global vision of the UAE's wise leadership.

"It is also yet another testimony to the enormous potential in advancing India-UAE cooperation in value enhancement in the energy and petrochemicals sectors. The project will manufacture ethylene dichloride, a key building block for production of PVC in India. This is a significant step in globalising Reliance's operations, and we are proud to partner with ADNOC in this important project for the region." Chlor-alkali is used in water treatment and in the manufacture of textiles and metals. Ethylene dichloride is typically used to produce PVC, which has wide range of applications across housing, infrastructure and consumer goods. The market for these chemicals is expected to enjoy steady growth supported by the needs of growing demand, particularly in Asia and Africa.
Amaravati, June 30 : The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has issued notices to the Andhra Pradesh government over the delay in submitting a report on the arrest of rebel YSRCP MP Raghuramakrishna Raju.

The NHRC had earlier sought for a report from the state government on the arrest of the MP.

On Tuesday, the commission expressed anger over the delay in filing the report and issued conditional summons to the state government.

The commission has ordered the state government to submit its report by August 9.

The MP's son Bharat had approached the NHRC, after his father was arrested on sedition charges, by the AP CID in May this year.

The NHRC had ordered the Andhra Pradesh DGP to enquire into the MP's allegations of being tortured while in custody.

The DGP was supposed to submit the report to the NHRC by June 7, but was delayed.
Bengaluru, June 30 : Karnataka would seek more vaccines from the Centre to ramp up its drive to inoculate as many of its citizens soon, said state Health Minister K. Sudhakar on Tuesday.

"We will urge the Centre to allot more vaccines to the state for inoculating a maximum number of people, including senior citizens, above 45 years and those in the 18-44 age group, Sudhkar told reporters after a review meeting here.

Sudhkar, who is a medical doctor by profession, will fly to New Delhi early next week to meet Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan and officials for allotting more Covishield and Covaxin to the southern state for ramping up its vaccination drive.

According to the state health department, Karnataka has been allotted only 60 lakh doses for July, which will limit its vaccination drive to 2-lakh per day.

The Centre allots doses to states across the country on the basis of pro-rata population of 18 years and above age group, the number of active cases and progress of the vaccination drive, launched nationwide on January 16.

The state health bulletin said cumulatively 2,24,18,621 people have been vaccinated across the state till date, including 2,05,920 on Tuesday.

"With stocks we received this month, we have been given 2-lakh doses daily across the state, with an inventory of 5 lakh vaccines regularly," he said.

About 50 per cent of the adult population of 78-lakh in Bengaluru received at least one dose so far.

As epicentre of the pandemic in the state, Bengaluru was the worst-affected district, accounting for over 50 per cent of Covid cases since the first wave struck in mid-March a year ago.
Ottawa, June 30 : The number of Canadians who died from the Covid-19 pandemic is likely double that shown in the official numbers, according to an investigative report published by the Royal Society of Canada on Tuesday.

Up to date, Canada has reported a cumulative total of 1,414,158 Covid-19 cases, including 26,238 deaths, the Xinhua news agency reported.

The report, titled Excess All-Cause Mortality During the Covid-19 Epidemic in Canada, suggests that largely racialised communities and essential workers were the ones who died at home and going unreported as Covid-19 deaths.

This contradicts current reporting of Covid-19 fatalities in Canada as being overwhelmingly concentrated in long-term care homes, a focus which may have distracted people from other communities.

The investigation reviewed death reports in 2020 and compared them to the expected number of deaths in a normal year, finding some 6,000 extra deaths among those aged 45 and older between February and November 2020.

Assuming this pattern of missing deaths continued after last November, it's possible that as many as 50 per cent of deaths missed being counted as Covid-19 deaths and included in that official number, the report suggests.

This could mean that instead of 26,000 deaths, up to 52,000 Canadian deaths may be linked to the pandemic.

"They weren't recognized as Covid-19 deaths, for whatever reason, and there are quite a number of possibilities and they vary by province," Tara Moriarty, an infectious disease researcher with the University of Toronto and one of the authors of the report, told CTV.

"What it really looks like right now is that the Covid death toll is very likely to be double what we think in all regions outside of Quebec, (which) is probably accurate," Moriarty said.

The report detailing this enormous oversight is a complicated indictment of Canada's response to Covid-19, exposing a failure to test, report deaths consistently, and to pay attention to marginalised communities.

Moriarty said she started to realise something was off while she was tracking long-term care deaths in Canada.

"I was looking at things like the case for case fatality rates in Canada, and the numbers didn't seem quite right," she said. "Over time I started realising that, in fact, there were quite a few more deaths than we had expected and so it took months to sort of be sure that what I was seeing was likely Covid-19 deaths." She said that researchers adjusted for an aging population as well as the number of deaths due to toxic drugs, and still found a disparity in the excess deaths.

Right now, the official data for Covid-19 deaths in Canada suggests that about 80 per cent of Covid-19 deaths occurred in long-term care homes.

But the report says that's wrong - like most other countries, two-thirds of Canadian deaths likely happened outside of long-term care homes, when the elderly living at home and lower-income racialised front-line workers became ill.

"That suggests that people have been dying in their homes, unrecognized, with Covid-19," Moriarty said. "And for them and their families for everyone, we need to understand exactly how that could have happened because that's actually quite horrifying." She said that Canada should've known from data from other countries that something was off about our numbers.

The report also cited a study that looked at cremation records in Ontario in 2020 and found that there was a rise in at-home deaths, with 63 per cent of excess deaths occurring there as opposed to only 30 per cent in long-term care homes.

"We know that twice as many Covid-19 deaths, for example, have occurred in racialised communities, communities that have lots of essential workers, high-density apartment buildings, larger households," Moriarty said, adding that those receiving home care were a population overlooked as well.

One of the problems that led to these deaths failing to be counted, according to the report, is that Canada tested 75 percent less than the average for Canadian peer countries early on in the pandemic, missing cases until doctors spoke up, recognising atypical symptoms.

Another contributing issue in having accurate death records is that Canada's requirements for filing death reports are lax.

"Every one of our peer countries legally requires deaths to be recorded nationally within a week of them occurring," Moriarty said. "Canada is months to years behind -- we don't have any requirement for that." She pointed out that there is still incomplete data even now. "We don't have complete cause of death reporting in many provinces past February 2020, June 2020." The report pointed out that if a person died mysteriously and had symptoms clinically similar to Covid-19 cases, if they did not have a known close contact who had Covid-19, their death would not be considered to be connected to Covid-19 unless a post-mortem was done to confirm the cause of death.

It's imperative for Canada to learn from these uncounted deaths, Moriarty said, adding that Canada could still be undercounting deaths right now. "This could be very important as the Delta variant spreads."

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Washington, June 30 : US President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden will visit Surfside, Florida, on Thursday in wake of the collapse of a residential building there, the White House announced on Tuesday.

"They want to thank the heroic first responders, search and rescue teams and everyone who has been working tirelessly around the clock, and meet with the families who have been forced to endure this terrible tragedy waiting in anguish and heartbreak for word of their loved ones to offer them comfort as search and rescue efforts continue," White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters aboard Air Force One.

The death toll from the tragedy, which happened last Thursday, now stands at 11, with 150 more remaining unaccounted for, making the disaster on track to become the largest mass casualty event of the Biden presidency so far, the Xinhua news agency reported.

While rescuers are still racing to find the missing ones, affected families have become increasingly devastated as the hope that their loved ones are alive dwindles.

"It's difficult to put into words the devastation that this community is experiencing. Our hearts go out to all the families and loved ones that have been impacted by this event," Deanne Criswell, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), said on Tuesday during a congressional hearing.

Biden has declared a state of emergency for Florida, directing FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security to provide federal resources and assist local rescue efforts.

The President and the first lady "want to make sure that state and local officials have the resources and support they need under the emergency declaration approved by the President for Miami-Dade, Florida," Psaki said while announcing the presidential visit.
Maun Airport, Maun, Botswana [ MUB / FBMN ]

If you are planning to travel to Maun or any other city in Botswana, this airport locator will be a very useful tool. This page gives complete information about the Maun Airport along with the airport location map, Time Zone, lattitude and longitude, Current time and date, hotels near the airport etc... Maun Airport Map showing the location of this airport in Botswana. Maun Airport IATA Code, ICAO Code, exchange rate etc... is also provided.

Maun Airport Info:

Maun Airport IATA Code: MUB Maun Airport ICAO Code: FBMN Latitude : -19.9722 Longitude : 23.4316 City : Maun Country : Botswana World Area Code : 510 Airport Type : Medium Maun Airport Address / Contact Details :

Maun Airport (MUB), Maun, Botswana Airport Type : Public Operator : Botswana Department of Civil Aviation Timezone : Africa/Gaborone Maun Airport Timezone : GMT +02:00 hours Current time and date at Maun Airport is 07:44:04 AM (CAT) on Monday, Jul 5, 2021

Looking for information on Maun Airport, Maun, Botswana? Know about Maun Airport in detail. Find out the location of Maun Airport on Botswana map and also find out airports near to Maun. This airport locator is a very useful tool for travelers to know where is Maun Airport located and also provide information like hotels near Maun Airport, airlines operating to Maun Airport etc... IATA Code and ICAO Code of all airports in Botswana. Scroll down to know more about Maun Airport or Maun Airport, Botswana.

Maun Airport Map - Location of Maun Airport Load Map Botswana - General Information Country Formal Name Republic of Botswana Country Code BW Capital Gaborone Currency Pula (BWP)

 1 BWP = 0.091 USD

 1 USD = 10.959 BWP

 1 BWP = 0.077 EUR

 1 EUR = 12.99 BWP

 More BWP convertion rates Tel Code +267 Top Level Domain .bw

Major airlines flying to Maun Airport, Maun

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MUB - Maun Airport IATA Code and FBMN - Maun Airport ICAO code
2022 Honda Civic Sedan Touring interior from driver seat angle perspective

Honda Santa Maria is dedicated to selling the latest Honda models to drivers in the Santa Maria area. As the 2022 model year gradually arrives for Honda models over the next few months, many will be available at Honda Santa Maria. One of the most recent arrivals is the 2022 Honda Civic Sedan, which is sold in a few different trims to allow shoppers some variety.

The base trim of the 2022 Honda Civic Sedan is the 2022 Honda Civic Sedan LX. This trim features a 158 horsepower, 2.0L engine, LED headlights, Apple CarPlay compatibility, adaptive cruise control and automatic climate control. There are six units of this trim for sale at the dealership.

The 2022 Honda Civic Sedan Sport is one trim level above the LX and features the same engine. It also has a three-mode drive system, 18-inch gloss-black alloy wheels, an 8-speaker 180-watt audio system, remote engine start and a collision mitigation braking system. Seven units of this trim are available at Honda Santa Maria.

At the time of this writing, the dealership reports having one unit of the 2022 Honda Civic Sedan EX. This trim has a 180-horsepower turbocharged engine and many of the same interior technology and safety features found on the Sport model.

The highest trim level is the 2022 Honda Civic Sedan Touring, a model which uses the same engine found in the EX model but adds leather-trimmed seats, a one-touch power moonroof, a 12-speaker Bose premium sound system and wireless Android Auto and Apple CarPlay Integration.

Shoppers interested in any of these models are encouraged to contact the dealership online through their websites chat function, by calling (805) 922-4600 or by visiting in-person at 1735 S Bradley Road, Santa Maria, California.


A Safe Haven Foundation (ASH), an internationally acclaimed top Chicago-based 5013 nonprofit dedicated to preventing and ending homelessness, recently held an informational session about the Rauner Family Veterans Apartments by A Safe Haven at the Lake County Government Center Auditorium in Crown Point, Indiana.

A Safe Haven Foundations Co-Founder and President Neli Vazquez Rowland, represented the nonprofit along with speakers Tracy Emmanuel, social work supervisor from the Jesse Brown HUD-VASH program, Jesse Brown VA Homeless Program Supervisor; Byron Taylor, Lake County Commissioner; Mike Repay, Executive Director of Lake County Community and Economic Development; Tim Brown, Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority (IHCDA) Housing Choice Voucher Program Analyst Michael Wey and 1st District American Legion member and WJOB Veterans Views Radio Program host Patrick ODonnell.

I would like to thank all the speakers who have helped support this important project forgiving a voice to veterans who are in need of affordable housing, said Vazquez Rowland. I am proud to say that the Rauner Family Veterans Apartments is near its completion and we are now accepting applications from veterans that are interested in living in the new development. The property is scheduled to open in mid-September 2021.

This project is a 75 Apartment Units Supportive Housing development. The apartments will be made available to low-income, senior, and disabled military veterans who are referred to A Safe Haven by the local US Veteran Administration offices. Onsite services will include supportive housing, individualized case management and peer support services.

The department and the Lake County Redevelopment Commission were eager to help the veterans in our area and, while it took a few years, very soon the facility will be open helping veterans with affordable housing options and unique social services, Brown said. It has been a pleasure to work with A Safe Haven and their supporting staff to make this project a reality.

Emmanuel added: Jesse Brown is excited to have 75 new, permanent housing units in Hobart for Veterans. It is critical for Veterans to have a safe, stable places to call home. This development does that.

The HUD-Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing (HUD-VASH) program combines Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) rental assistance for homeless Veterans with case management and clinical services provided by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). VA provides these services for participating Veterans at VA medical centers (VAMCs) and community-based outreach clinics to help Veterans find and sustain permanent housing. HUD has approved 75 vouchers for use by veterans for this project.

In addition to over $20 million in Federal HUD/VA rental housing tax credits, bond volume and other financing secured from the Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority (IHCDA), former Governor of Illinois and Venture Capitalist, Bruce Rauner and his wife, Diana Rauner, have generously gifted $1,000,000 to A Safe Haven Foundation to support financing and long-term ongoing support.

To make this development a reality the leadership team at A Safe Haven Foundation has worked with KMA Companies as the development partner and the City of Hobart on this project for almost three years.

Vazquez Rowland also announced that Veterans Matter, a Toledo, Ohio-based organization, has agreed to generously donate the cost of the applications for the apartments for all qualified veterans. Veterans Matter is providing a grant to cover all veteran application fees for Rauner Family Veteran Studios by A Safe Haven Foundation in Chicago RRVH and the Rauner Family Veterans Apartments by A Safe Haven Foundation in Chicago.

ODonnell remarks mentioned that the 75-unit permanent housing facility is a big boon for our homeless veterans, this facility is perfectly located to shopping, restaurants, and the VA Clinic. This housing will not only be safe and secure, but our homeless veterans desire a place they can proudly call home.

For more information about eligibility and referrals, contact the Jesse Brown HUD-VASH Team at 312-569-8387, Ext. 59339. For information about A Safe Haven Foundation, visit http://www.asafehaven.org.

About A Safe Haven

A Safe Haven Foundation is a 501(c)3 not for profit, social enterprise that helps people aspire, transform, and sustain their lives as they transition from homelessness to self-sufficiency with pride and purpose. A Safe Haven provides the tools for each individual to overcome the root causes of homelessness through a holistic and scalable model. A Safe Havens visible social and economic impact unites families, stabilizes neighborhoods, and creates vibrant, viable communities. To learn more about A Safe Haven visit, http://www.asafehaven.org. A Safe Haven Foundation has been proud to have been named a HUD Envision Center and a DOL VetHire Gold Medallion employer. ASHF is proudly co-founded by US ARMY VETERAN Brian Rowland.

About KMA Companies

A Real Estate Development and Property Management Company specializing in building, construction management and managing affordable housing, since 1996.
Jeff McWilliams stands in the lobby of ACDI's corporate office in Benton, Arkansas. His unique ability to inspire others through his storytelling is how Jeff will lead this team to achieve beyond just metrics.

Access Control Devices, Inc. (ACDI), a leading Channel Intelligence Partner and PaperCut Authorized Solutions Center, is pleased to announce that Jeff McWilliams will take over leadership of the Canadian Sales Team.

Mr. McWilliams served as the Director of Sales for ACDI beginning April 2018 and has since been promoted to Vice President of Sales as of March 2021. He brings a wealth of knowledge, passion, and excitability to a challenging role. In 2019, Jeff led ACDI to its highest revenue recorded in its 25 plus year history. Jeffs leadership and industry experience will drive the continued growth and expansion of the Canadian team. This change will propel ACDI into the future and secure a foothold in the ever-changing technology marketplace and imaging industry we serve.

Mark Hart, Vice President of Business Development, ACDI, will continue to lead the business development team to foster vendor relations, empower OEM growth, and expand ACDIs product offerings. Hart says, I am proud of the Canadian team that we have assembled and all of their accomplishments. To take it to the next level, they need a true sales leader, and we are fortunate to have this quality in Jeff McWilliams. His integrity, honesty, and strategic thinking are vital, but his unique ability to inspire others through his storytelling is how Jeff will lead this team to achieve beyond just metrics.

Jeff McWilliams, Vice President of Sales, ACDI, says, I am excited to expand my current role and accept a new challenge that will bring alignment and consistency to an already successful Canadian team. ACDI's dedication to research and development, on-call support, industry-leading PaperCut software, and strong presence in healthcare, education, SME, and legal markets are just some of the key reasons that customers continually choose ACDI.

About ACDI

Access Control Devices, Inc. (ACDI) specializes in delivering world-class integrated software and hardware solutions through proven innovation, service, and culture. Since 1994, office equipment suppliers have trusted ACDI to provide industry-leading capture, print management, and cost-recovery solutions to streamline the complete document lifecycle. Through channel distribution and development partnerships with the most prominent copier and printer manufacturers globally, ACDI solutions drive efficiency and productivity for thousands of organizations in education, healthcare, government, and beyond. For more information, visit http://www.acd-inc.com.
Arteris IP has unparalleled technology that meets the unique functional safety, performance and time to market needs of our rapidly evolving automotive semiconductor market, said Cliff Gu, chief designer at AutoChips.

Arteris IP, a leading provider of network-on-chip (NoC) interconnect and other intellectual property (IP) technology that manages the on-chip communications in system-on-chip (SoC) semiconductor devices, today announced that Chinese automotive semiconductor vendor AutoChips has again licensed FlexNoC interconnect IP for use in automotive systems-on-chip (SoCs).

AutoChips first licensed Arteris IP semiconductor IP in 2018 and has implemented the technology in a production automotive chip design. (See, Arteris IP FlexNoC Interconnect Licensed by AutoChips for Automotive SoC Development.)

Arteris FlexNoC IP has been critical to our ability to quickly design and qualify our chips for the automotive market, said Cliff Gu, chief designer at AutoChips. Arteris IP has unparalleled technology that meets the unique functional safety, performance and time to market needs of our rapidly evolving automotive semiconductor market. In addition to offering unique on-chip interconnect IP with a strong track record of mass production automotive designs, the local Arteris IP engineering support teams expertise in semiconductor architecture and design has provided added benefits to our company.

We are excited that AutoChips has renewed their use of Arteris IP interconnect technology as the on-chip communications backbone of its automotive systems-on-chip, said K. Charles Janac, president and CEO of Arteris IP. AutoChips decision to standardize on our interconnect IP for their automotive SoC portfolio is a strong endorsement of the benefits we bring to automotive semiconductor design teams.

About AutoChips

AutoChips Inc. is the China leading Automotive IC company, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of NavInfo. AutoChips head office is based in Hefei, responsible for designing and developing, and has three branch offices located in Shenzhen, Shanghai and Wuhan.

AutoChips is engaged in research and SoC design of automotive electronics, and is awarded the qualifications of National Hi-Tech company and National IC design company. AutoChips first-class engineering and service make it the leading position in the China after-market. Its products are widely used by Tier 1 customers and automotive manufacturers.

About Arteris IP

Arteris IP provides network-on-chip (NoC) interconnect IP and IP deployment technology to accelerate system-on-chip (SoC) semiconductor development and integration for a wide range of applications from AI to automobiles, mobile phones, IoT, cameras, SSD controllers, and servers for customers such as Bosch, Baidu, Mobileye, Samsung, Toshiba and NXP. Arteris IP products include the Ncore cache coherent and FlexNoC non-coherent interconnect IP, the CodaCache standalone last level cache, and optional Resilience Package (ISO 26262 functional safety), FlexNoC AI Package, and PIANO automated timing closure capabilities. Customer results obtained by using Arteris IP products include lower power, higher performance, more efficient design reuse and faster SoC development, leading to lower development and production costs. For more information, visit http://www.arteris.com or find us on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/arteris

Arteris, FlexNoC, Ncore, CodaCache, PIANO, Arteris IP and the Arteris IP logo are registered trademarks of Arteris, Inc. All other product or service names are the property of their respective owners.
Ann Anders launches a new press campaign for her autobiographical expose Hold On (published by Trafford Publishing).

First published in January 2011, this book is about a young woman whom God chooses to go up against Klans, who are people in high places. Here, Anders talks about the many trials she went through from Franklinton, Louisiana, to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to New Orleans, Louisiana, and back to Franklinton, Louisiana. Her mother said that God was using her for something bigger. She details how God showed her in a vision that she was killing and eating big anaconda snakes and saw herself pulling pins out of her mouth. Then, she saw a big bus coming her way in her spirit. She knew it could be charges, but then, she came out with the victory. The pins she mentioned coming out of her mouth were things she was saying that was hurting her relationship with God.

An excerpt from the book reads:

It was so hard for me to write that this is Gods plan for the enemy to be exposed and this is the way God wanted it done. Im sure that the enemy will not like this but God will show himself mighty! I have learned how to rest in God. Knowing that He will take care of me and that he will punish my enemies!

Visit https://www.trafford.com/en/bookstore/bookdetails/321465-Hold-On to purchase a copy and know more about Hold On.

Hold On

By Ann Anders

Softcover | 6 x 9in | 48 pages | ISBN 9781426950810

E-Book | 48 pages | ISBN 9781426950988

Available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble

About the Author

Ann Anders is a Christian woman who wants to tell her story to the world through her book Hold On.

Trafford Publishing, an Author Solutions, LLC, author services imprint, was the first publisher in the world to offer an on-demand publishing service, and has led the independent publishing revolution since its establishment in 1995. Trafford was also one of the earliest publishers to utilize the Internet for selling books. More than 10,000 authors from over 120 countries have utilized Traffords experience for self publishing their books. For more information about Trafford Publishing, or to publish your book today, call 844-688-6899 or visit trafford.com.
2021 CODiE Winner - Beable Life-Ready Literacy System "Im so proud of the incredible Beable team that developed and released such an incredible product in less than a year! And Im grateful to our district partners: together, were already accelerating literacy at five times expected gains." - Saki Dodelson, CEO Beable

On June 23, the Beable Life-Ready Literacy System was named the Best Advanced Reading/Writing/Literature Instructional Solution at the 2021 SIIA CODiE Awards. The prestigious CODiE Awards recognize the companies producing the most innovative education technology products across the country and around the world.

Through its revolutionary, multi-dimensional approach, Beable enables all students to achieve unprecedented 5X literacy gains by integrating literacy acceleration with content mastery, SEL and career development. Leveraging the latest technology and best methodologies, Beable creates real-time Learner Records that reflect the whole student, including interests, strengths, academic gaps and goals, accomplishments and college/workplace aspirations  creating their roadmaps to the future. Through these Learner Records, Beable gives each child  general ed, SPED, ELL and gifted alike  her own tailored path forward, including reading lessons differentiated to 10 Lexile levels in English and Spanish; companion scaffolds individualized to address specific skills gaps; and additional readings personalized based on interests to foster student choice. Earlier this year, Beable was awarded two 2021 EdTech Awards: Leadership  CEO/Founder and Cool Tool  New Product or Service.

Saki Dodelson, CEO of Beable, commented: When we first imagined Beable, our goal was to take literacy acceleration to an exponentially higher level in support of the whole student. We believed we could enable all kids to close the literacy gap with greater speed and certainty, while also putting students on a clear path to lifelong success. Im so proud of the incredible Beable team that developed and released such an incredible product in less than a year! And Im grateful to our district partners: together, were already accelerating literacy at five times expected gains.

Congratulations to the 2021 Ed Tech CODiE Award winners, said SIIA President Jeff Joseph. The COVID-19 pandemic reminds us of the importance of innovative Ed Tech products and services and this years class takes a special place among the many amazing products recognized across the 35-year history of the CODiE Awards.

The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), the principal trade association for the software and digital content industries, announced the full slate of CODiE winners during an online winner announcement in light of ongoing COVID-19 concerns.

Forty-five awards were given for products and services deployed specifically for education and learning professionals, including the top honor of the Best Overall Education Technology Solution.

A SIIA CODiE Award win is a prestigious honor, following rigorous reviews by expert judges including educators and administrators whose evaluations determined the finalists. SIIA members then vote on the finalist products, and the scores from both rounds are tabulated to select the winners.

More information about the Awards is available at http://www.siia.net/codie.

Details about the winning products can be found at https://history.siia.net/codie/2021-Winners.

About Beable

Beable is a women-owned public-benefit corporation launched by ed-tech visionary Saki Dodelson and the co-founders of Achieve3000. With Beable, Dodelson and her team are pursuing an ambitious and essential mission: to exponentially accelerate literacy and learning for all students, while creating personalized pathways to lifelong success. Beable delivers on its charter by providing K-12's first Life-Ready Literacy System, a revolutionary, multi-dimensional system that enables all students to achieve unprecedented 5X literacy gains by integrating literacy acceleration with content mastery, SEL and career development. Powered by the proprietary BeableIQ engine, which combines automation, artificial intelligence and flexibility across physical and virtual learning environments, Beable is a system created especially for the educational challenges of 2021 and beyond. Beable also provides TestAhead, the ultra-personalized online ACT/SAT prep solution that leverages students unique strengths to build test-taking skills and cognitive flexibility  while assuring test-prep equity and access. Learn more at http://www.beable.com

About the CODiE Awards

The SIIA CODiE Awards is the only peer-reviewed program to showcase business and education technologys finest products and services. Since 1986, thousands of products, services and solutions have been recognized for achieving excellence. For more information, visit siia.net/CODiE.
After having seen the hard work and commitment shown by Angel and Yessenia, I have immense respect for them and can't wait to see the amazing things that they will do in the future."

BeSmartee, leading software provider and founder of modern digital mortgage platforms for financial institutions, is proud to congratulate the Women in Tech Scholarship awardees on their outstanding progress and successful completion of the mentorship program. The program, coordinated in partnership with LearningFuze development bootcamp and coding school, launched in September 2020 to encourage and support women pursuing careers in coding.

The scholarship awardees  Angel Leung and Yessenia Rodriguez  completed a 14-week intensive on the basics of web development. They were each paired with one of BeSmartees software developers to guide them through the entire program. Both BeSmartee mentors  Krystal Enojado and Matt Geller  are LearningFuze alumni themselves.

I had never been a mentor before, said Enojado. I just remember being in her shoes, taking that same leap into a completely different industry, and appreciating any bit of information or guidance from anyone who had work experience as a developer. This program really helped me step out of my comfort zone, and allowed me to help another person go through the same experience I had years ago.

Geller said he was impressed with the format of the program. Being in a collaborative environment at bootcamp, yes, you work on your own projects and youre responsible for your own work, but being able to collaborate with others  whether they are mentors, instructors or peers  is helpful because its quite similar to the experience found on the job. Some of the questions Yessenia brought up even inspired me to connect with mentors of my own, he said.

The mentorship program, designed to further BeSmartees company values, encouraged:

Fearlessness

Commitment

Excellence

Selflessness

Geller cites being in a positive and collaborative environment at LearningFuze as being helpful in making more of a natural transition from bootcamp to BeSmartees culture of collaboration and selflessness.

The positive feedback from mentees was effusive. When asked about the most rewarding part of the program, Rodriguez said she was thrilled with how much she was able to learn within a week and that being able to talk to Matt about what she learned each week inspired her to want to be a mentor to women who are trying to break into the tech industry.

Leung called her mentee-mentor relationship with Enojado a personal connection that helped her navigate the transition from her healthcare background to software development, and even well into the job search.

After having seen the hard work and commitment shown by Angel and Yessenia, I have immense respect for them and can't wait to see the amazing things that they will do in the future, said BeSmartee mentorship program leader and lead UX engineer Mark Martinez. I am also happy to see the strong, lasting bonds that have formed between them and their mentors, and my hope is that they will continue to seek mentorship and give mentorship, as it is one of the keys to success in a development career.

Watch the video to find out what the mentees had to say about the program.

The Women in Tech Scholarship and Mentorship program is part of a key ongoing diversity and inclusion initiative backed by BeSmartees leadership.

To learn more about BeSmartees commitment to D&I research and programs in the mortgage and technology industries, contact nicolette@besmartee.com.

About BeSmartee

Leading Fintech firm BeSmartee disrupts the financial services industry with its award-winning, web-based digital mortgage platforms for banks, credit unions, and non-bank lending institutions. BeSmartee delivers a complete digital mortgage experience that goes deeper into the origination process to help lenders convert higher and close faster  making a once-cumbersome experience easy, fast and transparent for all.

Visit our website: http://www.besmartee.com

Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/besmartee/

Read our blog: https://www.besmartee.com/blog

About LearningFuze

LearningFuze is the top-rated coding bootcamp in Southern California. Their full-stack development program is a 14-week intensive that teaches front-end and back-end programming including; JavaScript, React, Node.js, PostgreSQL, HTML, CSS, Amazon Web Services, Git/GitHub, the Agile methodology and more. LearningFuze teaches students how to solve problems, think like a programmer and succeed in a workplace. In addition to their Web Development Program, LearningFuze offers a Coding Prep Class, UX/UI Classes, Part Time Web Development Classes and Career Services both at the campus in Irvine and virtually. Learn more at https://learningfuze.com/.

Source: BeSmartee
Every lab we encounter wants rapid, easy-to-use susceptibility testing at the right price; we couldnt reach them all without partnering with an organization with the scale and quality of bioMerieux, said Paul A. Rhodes, Ph.D., CEO of Specific.

In the context of the global threat from Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR), clinicians need to receive faster antibiotic susceptibility test (AST) results and accurate interpretation, to enable timely and optimized patient intervention. In bloodstream infections, an urgent and often life-threatening condition, time is of the essence to deliver targeted antibiotic treatment: it is crucial to determine what antibiotic to prescribe, at which dose, for what duration. Making clinical decisions based on rapid AST not only dramatically improves patient outcomes, but also serves the broader purpose of fighting Antimicrobial Resistance, to help sustain the efficacy of antibiotics for generations to come.

A perfect complement to bioMerieuxs suite of systems delivering rapid results

Developed by Specific Diagnostics, and based on its unique, patented metabolomic signature technology, the REVEAL Rapid AST system provides actionable results for bloodstream infections (in an average of 5 hours* directly from positive blood culture), allowing either timely de-escalation to a focused, more appropriate and lower-cost therapy, or life-saving rapid escalation to a more effective drug where a multidrugresistant (MDR) infection is present.

REVEAL Rapid AST offers customers an easy to use instrument with a targeted menu, small footprint, and modular design well-suited for a large number of hospitals. REVEAL Rapid AST system is a perfect complement to bioMerieuxs unique suite of systems delivering rapid results including the industrys fastest blood culture system, the BACT/ALERT VIRTUO, and rapid identification with either VITEK MS PRIME or BIOFIRE BCID2, and VITEK 2. Adding REVEAL Rapid AST enables hospitals to have the fastest possible path to fully actionable results, combining ID (microbial identification) and AST, to allow clinicians to diagnose and treat patients much faster, establishing a new standard of care.

Mark Miller, Executive Vice President, Chief Medical Officer, bioMerieux explained, Partnering with a fast AST solution makes great sense for bioMerieux, whose mission over decades is to provide diagnostic solutions that support the best possible patient care. By combining the advanced technology of the REVEAL Rapid AST solution for bloodstream infections with our own solutions, we are increasing the ability of laboratories to deliver results in record time, especially in cases of very critical infections such as sepsis, which require urgent and appropriate treatment.

A distribution agreement within a stronger partnership

The co-exclusive distribution agreement signed between both companies will cover Europe, where the REVEAL Rapid AST has been CE-IVD approved. In addition, bioMerieux will invest 10M$ thru a Convertible Promissory Note to support commercial activities. In 2019, bioMerieux participated in Specific Diagnostics Series A funding round, alongside other investors. As a result of this transaction, bioMerieux holds around 8% of the share capital of Specific Diagnostics.

We are honored to partner with a world leader as bioMerieux to bring the REVEAL Rapid AST system to microbiology labs across Europe, said Paul A. Rhodes, Ph.D., CEO of Specific. Every lab we encounter wants rapid, easy-to-use susceptibility testing at the right price; we couldnt reach them all without partnering with an organization with the scale and quality of bioMerieux.

Pierre Boulud, Chief Operating Officer, Clinical Operations, bioMerieux declared, "With the addition of Specific Diagnostics REVEAL Rapid AST system into its microbiology offer, bioMerieux demonstrates its commitment to provide fast AST to clinicians and laboratories, with the double objective of dramatically improving patient outcomes and serving antimicrobial stewardship, leveraging our extensive distribution network.

*Tibbetts et al, ECCMID 2020 and in review.

ABOUT BIOMERIEUXS COMPLETE ANTIMICROBIAL STEWARDSHIP (AMS) SOLUTION

bioMerieuxs healthcare mission is to help sustain the use of antibiotic efficacy for generations to come. To support hospitals, institutions and laboratories with their AMS programs, bioMerieux has a complete solution covering antibiotic therapy initiation, optimization and discontinuation. This constantly evolving offer provides timely, accurate results to adjust therapy, transforms data into actionable insights and integrates smoothly into any hospital with its flexible partnership approach. bioMerieux has over 55 years of microbiology expertise with 80% of its R&D directed to AMR/AMS research to ensure the current offer evolves to meet customers AMS needs.

ABOUT BIOMERIEUX

Pioneering Diagnostics

A world leader in the field of in vitro diagnostics for over 55 years, bioMerieux is present in 44 countries and serves more than 160 countries with the support of a large network of distributors. In 2020, revenues reached 3.1 billion, with over 90% of sales outside of France. bioMerieux provides diagnostic solutions (systems, reagents, software and services) which determine the source of disease and contamination to improve patient health and ensure consumer safety. Its products are mainly used for diagnosing infectious diseases. They are also used for detecting microorganisms in agrifood, pharmaceutical and cosmetic products.

bioMerieux is listed on the Euronext Paris stock market.

Symbol: BIM  ISIN Code: FR0013280286

Reuters: BIOX.PA/Bloomberg: BIM.FP

Corporate website: http://www.biomerieux.com.

ABOUT SPECIFIC DIAGNOSTICS

Specific Diagnostics has developed in vitro diagnostic systems based upon a unique, patented metabolomic signature technology that enables rapid detection and identification of microorganisms as they grow in culture. Its first commercial application, the REVEAL, applies this fundamental new capability to the rapid determination of antimicrobial susceptibility directly from positive blood cultures, as well as isolate dilutions.

Specific is based in San Jose, CA with operations in the UK, France and Ireland.

Corporate website: http://www.specificdx.com

CONTACTS

bioMerieux

Investor Relations

Franck Admant

Tel.: +33 (0)4 78 87 20 00

investor.relations@biomerieux.com

Media Relations

Romain Duchez

Tel.: +33 (0)4 78 87 21 99

media@biomerieux.com

Media Relations

Claire Doligez (Image Sept)

Tel.: +33 (0)1 53 70 74 48

cdoligez@image7.fr

Specific Diagnostics

Press Relations

Jeff Holman

Tel +1 317 617 9153

press@specificdx.com
BurnAlong Social Group Classes BurnAlong continues to grow our portfolio of diverse and inclusive programming so that every employee, and their families, can benefit from a holistic approach to wellness, says Daniel Freedman, co-CEO of BurnAlong.

Today, June 29, 2021, BurnAlong, the worlds leading health, wellness, and social motivation platform, announced its joining Virgin Pulses partner ecosystem to offer its diverse, virtual class selection to Virgin Pulses employers and health plans around the world. BurnAlongs comprehensive and holistic range of class categories spanning chronic condition support, adaptive workouts, self-defense, family workouts, mental health, financial wellness, fitness, neuromuscular, and more are now accessible to an expanded audience through Virgin Pulse, the leading global provider of digital and live health and wellbeing solutions.

Many corporate wellness programs today focus on a single area of wellness, such as fitness, which limits the effectiveness of the program and can exclude many employees. Today, 26 percent of adults in the United States have some type of disability and require varying levels of adaptive support or programming. Additionally, nearly 40% of employees today are ages 50 and older; this core demographic understandably has different wellness interests and needs than their younger counterparts. Beyond age and ability, there are also more than 150 million Americans who have a chronic health condition and require expert support and programming. And particularly in the wake of the pandemic with an increase in those experiencing mental health crises, only 41 percent of people seek professional care.

A singular approach to corporate wellness programming, thus, does not serve the entire workforce and will limit the effectiveness of health and wellness strategies. BurnAlongs class offerings cover more than 45 categories of health and wellness. Along with its diverse program options, BurnAlong provides social motivation for members by offering four sub-accounts to share with family and friends. Members have the ability to invite their social circles to join them for classes and connect with supportive communities via the BurnAlong platform.

Through this partnership, BurnAlong complements Virgin Pulses Homebase for Health experience that unifies and simplifies the health and wellbeing journey for users through a single entry point. Within this seamless, one-stop shop, members can access the Virgin Pulse platform and partner ecosystem including BurnAlong.

As a certified international partner, Virgin Pulse clients can now leverage BurnAlongs solution directly through Homebase for Health without the administrative burdens of configuration and privacy and security vetting.

BurnAlong continues to grow our portfolio of diverse and inclusive programming so that every employee, and their families, can benefit from a holistic approach to wellness, says Daniel Freedman, co-CEO of BurnAlong. We are excited to join Virgin Pulses partner network to offer programming that meets employees wherever they are in their wellness journey with a wide range of classes.

To learn more about contracting with BurnAlong or for more information on the partnership, Virgin Pulse clients should reach out to their Client Success Manager.

ABOUT BURNALONG

BurnAlong (http://www.BurnAlong.com) is an online health, wellness, and fitness platform that works with leading employers, insurers, municipalities, non-profits, and health systems who provide BurnAlong for their employees, members, and patients. BurnAlong helps people achieve their health and wellness goals by giving them unparalleled access to more than 1,200+ instructors, teaching live and on-demand wellness classes across more than 45 categories - from traditional fitness to nutrition, financial wellness, adaptive workouts, chronic conditions, and more - for the entire family. People can take classes alone or live with others where they can see and hear each other for added social motivation.

For press inquiries contact:

Annika Mitic

press@burnalong.com

(443) 920-4357
We are thrilled to honor three outstanding institutions that have utilized CollegeSources solutions to innovate their transfer and degree evaluation processes to ensure the academic and career prosperity of their collective students and staff, said Kerry Cooper, CEO of CollegeSource.

CollegeSource, the higher education industrys most trusted provider of transfer and degree achievement solutions, today announced the winners of its annual Sourcies Awards, which recognize institutions best practices in transfer and degree achievement. Announced during the CollegeSource Annual Conference  again held virtually this year  the 2021 Sourcies were awarded to Jefferson Community and Technical College for Superior Work in Supporting Statewide Transfer, Metropolitan State University for Best Holistic Model for Transfer Student Success, and to California State University, San Bernardino for Innovation in Degree Achievement Solutions.

We are thrilled to honor three outstanding institutions that have utilized CollegeSources solutions to innovate their transfer and degree evaluation processes to ensure the academic and career prosperity of their collective students and staff, said Kerry Cooper, CEO of CollegeSource.

At Jefferson Community and Technical College, a team was tasked with reviewing, cleaning, and expanding the number of course equivalences to be used as the definitive set for the Kentucky community and technical college systems 16 institutions which share a catalog and collectively serve over 100,000 students annually. Team leads Cassie Poole and Beth Dixon utilized CollegeSources Transfer Evaluation System (TES) to create 6,503 new equivalencies and update another 3,394 to further enable statewide transfers. This work will allow students to easily navigate a path to their most fulfilling academic careers.

With the help of CollegeSources Transferology and uAchieve degree audit solutions, Metropolitan State University has achieved a high level of transfer-friendliness. Founded on a mission of exclusively serving transfer students as a university without walls, Metropolitan State University can fulfill its longstanding commitment of maximizing the applicability of transfer credits to ensure student mobility as the university still enjoys a nearly 95% transfer student population.

This year, California State University, San Bernardino was inspired by CollegeSources uAchieves Exceptions-from-the-Audit feature to make their current process of approving exceptions for degree achievement audits more efficient. Moving from quarters to semesters, the public institution knew there would be a rise in exception requests, which were previously handled manually. With uAchieves Exceptions-from-the-Audit, students can more accurately track their degree achievement progress and the work of the institutions advising staff is far more efficient and streamlined.

About CollegeSource

CollegeSource is the higher education industrys trusted provider of transfer and degree achievement solutions. For 50 years, CollegeSource has led market-changing transformation by inventing and investing in technology solutions that aid the staff and students of higher education in their quest to plan and complete academic careers. As the archiver of the nations extensive higher education course catalogs, CollegeSources degree audit, academic planning, and transfer credit evaluation solutions are depended on by more than 2,000 institutions and millions of individuals worldwide. Founded and led by higher education and technology veterans, CollegeSource is a privately-held company based in San Diego with offices in Cincinnati, Ohio. For more information, please visit collegesource.com.
The important question: How did we embrace our beliefs at first? Did we follow the religion of our parents? Or our family? Or our societies or countries? Or is religion like DNA?

If the stewards of religion would allow people to communicate with whatever they believe in, humanity would be a lot better off. That is a bold assertion from Quincy Jones, who examines everything from terrorism, Islamophobia, Armageddon, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and metaphysics in Faith Customers (published by Balboa Press AU).

This book brainstorms the way that people approach faith and sheds light on the conflicts that stem from the concept of religion. Here, the author discuses pertinent topics from a new angle such as the relationship of religion and upbringing (like father, like son), religion and terrorism, counterterrorism, the brainwashing notion in religion, the role of media in religious extremism and its popularization, and so on.

The important question: How did we embrace our beliefs at first? Did we follow the religion of our parents? Or our family? Or our societies or countries? Or is religion like DNA? the author writes.

With the ongoing conflict between religions and terrorism, Faith Customers allows readers to examine what makes a person believe what they believe and why members of different faiths are so often at odds with each other.

Visit https://www.balboapress.com/en-au/bookstore/bookdetails/818660-faith-customers to purchase a copy of the book.

Faith Customers

By Quincy S. Jones

Softcover | 6 x 9in | 142 pages | ISBN 9781982290375

E-Book | 142 pages | ISBN 9781982290368

Available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble

About the Author

Quincy S. Jones is an author, politician, public policy analyst, and theology researcher. He believes liberal democracy and social enlightenment can solve problems and disputes of all kinds, and he believes in divine oneness. Faith Customers is his first book.

Balboa Press Australia is a division of Hay House, Inc., a leading provider in publishing products that specialise in self-help and the mind, body and spirit genre. Through an alliance with the worldwide self-publishing leader Author Solutions, LLC, authors benefit from the leadership of Hay House Publishing and the speed-to-market advantages of the Author Solutions self-publishing model. For more information or to start publishing today, visit balboapress.com.au or call 1-800-844-925.
I am thrilled to share our new website for our Athens, Greece, location. It is a great resource to help my Greek patients stay informed and involved in the services and procedures we provide at our clinic, says Dr. Anastasatos

John Anastasatos, M.D., FACS, is pleased to announce his brand-new practice website, https://www.drjohnanastasatos.gr/ for his Los Angeles Plastic Surgery location in Athens, Greece. Dr. Anastasatos is board certified and has gained an international reputation for his knowledge and ability to create incredible, natural-looking results in both cosmetic and reconstructive plastic surgery, including revision cosmetic surgery of the face, breast, body and nose. The innovative website for Greek speakers provides high-resolution photos and informative content that accurately reflects Dr. Anastasatoss expertise and artistic talent. It is easy to navigate and features an appealing layout that is tailored for the needs of both current and potential patients, keeping them fully educated on the treatment options available at the cutting-edge practice in Athens, Greece. Whether its a small cosmetic change, a facelift, a rhinoplasty, breast augmentation or a full body makeover, patients can expect exceptional results with individualized care when they choose Los Angeles Plastic Surgery and the skilled hands of Dr. Anastasatos.

The new site represents the state-of-the-art plastic surgery clinic in Kifisia, Athens Greece. The plastic surgery clinic in Athens by Dr. John Anastasatos is an extension of his Beverly Hills and Los Angeles plastic surgery clinic. It has been his long-term vision to be able to offer the same high level of expertise available to his Beverly Hills patients in Athens. The aim is to serve patients in Greece and Cyprus, but also patients from The United States who wish to combine plastic surgery in Greece and recover in private beautiful settings.

I am thrilled to share our new website for our Athens, Greece, location. It is a great resource to help my Greek patients stay informed and involved in the services and procedures we provide at our clinic, says Dr. Anastasatos

More about Dr. John M. Anastasatos:

Dr. Anastasatos was born in the United States, but his family roots are in Athens, Greece. Dr. Anastasatos earned his bachelors degree in economics from Brown University in only three years and was immediately accepted in their School of Medicine. General surgical training followed at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, an affiliate of Columbia University. Dr. Anastasatos then moved south to the University of Alabama, Birmingham (UAB) for his cosmetic and reconstructive residency. He also completed a fellowship in hand surgery, upper extremity and micro surgery. Upon his certification by the American Board of Plastic Surgery, he was appointed as an assistant professor of plastic surgery. During this time, Dr. Anastasatos also served as an attending surgeon at UAB Hospitals, The Childrens Hospital and Veterans Administration Hospital. He then moved to Southern California and established his own plastic surgery clinic in 2007 in Beverly Hills. As his practice and reputation grew, he opened a second location in Athens, Greece, and another in Bakersfield, CA. Dr. Anastasatos has earned global recognition for his beautiful surgical results, treating patients from all over the world.

To schedule a consultation with Dr. John Anastasatos or for more information about his practice located at Palas Kefalari, Kolokotroni 23 Kifisia, 145 62 in Athens, Greece, please visit https://www.drjohnanastasatos.gr/ or call +30 210 682 4021.
Endeavor Schools has added seven schools thus far in 2021 and plans to add several more by year-end. As one of the leading education management companies in the United States with more than 60 schools, the company is committed to bringing high-quality private education to all areas of the country.

Endeavor Schools continues to expand its Atlanta area presence with another addition to its fast-growing network of high-quality schools.

The Miami-based education management company recently finalized its acquisition of the former Kids R Kids location in North Peachtree City, located approximately 30 miles south of downtown Atlanta. The school will be rebranded as Parker-Chase Preschool, which is one of Endeavors most successful and respected brands with several locations in Georgia and Texas.

Endeavor Schools now owns and operates nine schools in the Atlanta area, including three Parker-Chase schools.

The newest Parker-Chase already has a solid reputation in the community because of its talented, dedicated staff and beautiful facilities. Endeavor Schools will continue to enhance that excellence to ensure that the North Peachtree City community will always have high-quality education available for young children.

The North Peachtree City Parker-Chase school will provide childcare and education for children at the infant stage through pre-kindergarten. In addition to exceeding all Georgia state education standards, the new Parker Chase school will continue its use of the highly regarded Creative Curriculum, which supports learning and development through play and the creation of rich, nurturing environments.

We are very excited to bring the Parker-Chase mission to Peachtree City and look forward to working with the schools tenured, dedicated staff. The school has such a deep connection to the community and has provided excellent support over the years, said Danielle Millman, the Chief Growth and Experience Officer at Endeavor Schools. We will continue to strengthen that bond by maintaining NAEYC accreditation and providing children with a high-quality, innovative education in a safe, loving environment.

The new Parker-Chase school contains an elegant, 12,000-square foot facility and is located on a nearly 2-acre lot with secure outdoor play areas. The location is ideal for North Peachtree City residents with its proximity to Joel Cowan Parkway.

Adding this location was important to us because we want to show our commitment to serving Atlanta area residents by giving families the best in early childhood education in as many locations as possible, said Endeavor Schools CEO, Ricardo Campo. We welcome our new students, families and employees and look forward to serving them for many years to come.

Endeavor Schools has added seven schools thus far in 2021 and plans to add several more by year-end. As one of the leading education management companies in the United States with more than 60 schools, the company is committed to bringing high-quality private education to all areas of the country.


Take comfort in the peaceful, sleepy village of Taos which vibrates with an aura of reverence, mystery, and spirituality, with a unique allure, found nowhere else in the world

In Taos, New Mexico, in 1969, an angry rancher falls for an alluring hippie. Find out if their love survives cultural turmoil and their varied beliefs in Love and War in the Age of Aquarius (published by Archway Publishing) by Amaia Joy and Geoffrey Carroll. Simultaneously in the heavy jungle of Vietnam about 40 miles northwest of Saigon, a private first class experiences the claustrophobic battles of the Vietnam War, the combat scars and psychological wounds.

1969 was a pivotal year. [Our] generation will relive and the younger generations will discover what life was like in the year of Woodstock, first man on the moon, 250,000 Vietnam War protesters marching on Washington DC, and the invention of the internet, Joy and Carroll say. Live this year through the eyes of three diverse souls living out differing perspectives.

Experience the escapades of an era  the Age of Aquarius  filled with social milieu, change, tragedy and triumphs. This multi-layered tale explodes with the haunting hazards of the Vietnam War, along with a richly compelling, provocative, and unlikely passion between a hippie and a rancher.

The story gives you a tour and trajectory of the profoundly beautiful and diversified towns, villages, and cities of New Mexico, with accurate descriptions of its rich history, and its beloved Native People and Hispanic culture, the authors say. Take comfort in the peaceful, sleepy village of Taos which vibrates with an aura of reverence, mystery, and spirituality, with a unique allure, found nowhere else in the world.

Love and War in the Age of Aquarius is available for purchase online at the Archway link above, from Barnes & Noble and on Amazon at: https://www.amazon.com/Love-War-Age-Aquarius-Amaia/dp/1665702850.

Love and War in the Age of Aquarius

By Amaia Joy and Geoffrey Carroll

Hardcover | 5.5 x 8.5 in | 336 pages | ISBN 9781665702867

Softcover | 5.5 x 8.5 in | 336 pages | ISBN 9781665702850

E-Book | 336 pages | ISBN 9781665702843

Available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble

About the Authors

Amaia Joy and Geoffrey Carroll are a husband and wife team. Joy has lived in New Mexico her entire life, and as a cowgirl roving throughout the high deserts and mountains. She knows the people and places, has lived the history amongst the many colorful cultures of Nuevo Mexico. Joy holds the honor of being awarded the Distinguished Governors Award for Outstanding Women of New Mexico.

Geoffrey Carroll graduated from high school in 1969, hitch hiked around Europe, returning to his home on Oahu to enjoy surfing, partying and the life of a hippie at a commune at the nearby neighboring island of Maui. Upon returning from Vietnam, Carroll lived in the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco and Big Sur Coast of California until his calling leads him to the land of enchantment  New Mexico. Carrolls own war experience informs the character of Blue in the book.

Simon & Schuster, a company with nearly ninety years of publishing experience, has teamed up with Author Solutions, LLC, the worldwide leader in self-publishing, to create Archway Publishing. With unique resources to support books of all kind, Archway Publishing offers a specialized approach to help every author reach his or her desired audience. For more information, visit archwaypublishing.com or call 844-669-3957.
proceedings began when KPMG complained to the police that truthful blogs that Dhillon wrote should be punishable by jail time.

Today at 10:30 am in the British Columbia Court of Appeal the final ruling will be given in a long running and historic freedom of speech case (Case No.42922) which stemmed from blogs written about KPMG (the 4th largest accounting firm in the world).

To read more about the history of the case click here below:

Freedom of Speech at Stake - Satinder Dhillon Files Historic Application With The Supreme Court of Canada Asking for the Right to Use the Truth in Court

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/freedom-of-speech-at-stake---satinder-dhillon-files-historic-application-with-the-supreme-court-of-canada-asking-for-the-right-to-use-the-truth-in-court-301040660.html

The blogs were written by British Columbia based social activist, freedom of speech advocate, blogger, and international businessman, Satinder Singh Dhillon, 43, who has been fighting for his right to speak the truth about the conduct of KPMG and others in a long running matter that has been going through the courts in interrelated lawsuits for over 20 years.

Dhillon has been out on bail for over 11 years now and has had 17 bail hearings in this bizarre and long running case, which is the first of its kind in Canadian history.

Dhillon's lawyer Nicolas Rouleau, who is a highly regarded constitutional law expert, stated in his submissions on June 25th, 2021, to the British Columbia Court of Appeal via Zoom that Dhillon had already served one week in jail after writing blogs and that was enough.

The hearing that took place on June 25th, 2021, was an appeal that Dhillon had filed of his sentence whereby Madam Justice Holmes of the Supreme Court of British Columbia ruled that Dhillon could not write about KPMG and others. Dhillon appealed that decision and during his conviction appeal he did win the right to criticize judges, but not KPMG.

In 2015, after his trial ended - Dhillon filed 2 separate appeals from the lower court decision by Madam Justice Holmes who is now the associate Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of British Columbia.

The first appeal that was heard was for the conviction itself and Dhillons right to use the truth.

Dhillon was charged with contempt of court and an 800 year old law that is still used in Canada in contempt of court cases was applied to him. This law is the last law left under Common Law in Canada and technically still punishable by death even though Canada abolished the death penalty in 1976, which was the year before Dhillon was born.

In a previous statement, when Dhillon had applied to be heard by the Supreme Court of Canada, Dhillons lawyer - Rouleau- said the following about the national importance of the case, "This case is critical because a Canadian citizen was imprisoned for criminal contempt of court, simply because he spoke the truth. We want to live in a society where we are allowed to speak the truth, even when the truth is uncomfortable.

Along his journey the worlds most powerful blog (The Huffington Post) gave Dhillon his own blog:

https://www.huffpost.com/author/satinder-dhillon

Currently, there is a movie being written about Dhillon's life, largely based on the historic case he has fought in Canada for many years.

To read more about the movie about Dhillon please click on link below:

Indias Top Screenwriter Delivers Aamir Khan and Priyanka Chopras Next Script And Is Going To Write Biopic About Modern Day Revolutionary - Satinder Dhillon Next

https://www.prweb.com/releases/2017/10/prweb14758274.htm

Dhillon has gone on to found the Justice and Equality Party of Canada and said he plans to run a full slate of candidates in the next election if he has enough time to prepare depending on when an election is called.

What Ive learned through this process is that the system itself is broken and that is where we need to focus our energy next. Fighting one case at a time does not make sense anymore and a wholesale change is what is needed of this law itself. The mindset of many within the system is the problem. Its just become a game in many ways and justice itself is being subverted in far too many cases and the process is essentially being abused by those that have the power currently - stated Dhillon from his residence in British Columbia where is in mandatory quarantine after coming back from the United States.

Dhillon has hired agents based in Hollywood who are working with American attorneys that are negotiating a potential deal with Amazon Studios and/or Netflix that will tell the life story of Dhillon in its entirety and a TV series based on his life is also being discussed.

It was a unique set of personal circumstances that took me to California in April of this year and I ended up staying a lot longer than expected and the full story will be told very soon.

Ive kept quiet about a lot of things for a long time now while rebuilding my life after it was decimated by the system. By the grace of God Ive been able to assemble a global team of lawyers, entrepreneurs and do-gooders that have formed a movement now that is much bigger than just this one case. It is a movement that will long outlast me and that is what I wanted, so that the change I would like to see take place doesnt die with me whenever God chooses to take me from this world.

Ive only come to the forefront and fought this case after having been behind the scenes for almost a decade prior to my arrest in 2009. I only came forward when there was no other option left. My nature and upbringing is not one that warranted any major notoriety but with what happened to me and others - I felt compelled to stand up for them and myself and do what I did because of the injustice of it all.

For the full story please visit:

https://freedomofspeechincanada.blogspot.com/2021/06/final-court-hearing-to-take-place-in.html

For more information about Dhillon please visit:

https://www.satinderdhillon.com/

To read about Canada's newest political party that Mr. Dhillon has formed please visit the links below:

Satinder Dhillon Launches Campaign to Run for Prime Minister of Canada - Forms the New 'Justice and Equality' Party

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/satinder-dhillon-launches-campaign-to-run-for-prime-minister-of-canada---forms-the-new-justice-and-equality-party-300925751.html

https://justiceandequalityparty.blogspot.com/

For more information about Nicolas Rouleau please visit:

https://www.nicolasrouleau.com/

For more information about the initial arrest please visit:

https://satinderdhillonkpmg.wordpress.com/

Other Media:

https://www.prweb.com/releases/2018/06/prweb15579559.htm

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/mar/09/blogs

Emerging Leader Award given to Satinder Dhillon by the Times of Canada.

http://timesofcanadapresents.blogspot.com/

https://thetimesofcanada.com/satinder-dhillon-modern-day-revolutionary/

https://thetimesofcanada.com/modern-day-revolutionary-satinder-dhillon-continues-to-fight-corruption/

Jewels of Punjab - 3rd youngest entrant - Satinder Singh Dhillon - 100 Leading Global Punjabi Personalities, the book and awards were released on the eve of Indias 71st Independence Day, August 14, 2017, in New Delhi a at the Ashok Hotel.

https://www.satinderdhillon.com/satinder-dhillon-family-jewels-of-punjab/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESZ2Ls7UI4s
The event will feature appearances and with performances by Brothers Osborne, Lily Rose, Tenille Townes, and more, alongside GIVN brand partners Brooke Eden and Michael Ray. GIVN Water was made available for artists and their teams to consume during the pre-taped event and will match each bottle drank with a bottle of GIVN Water for the local Nashville non-profit organization Oasis Center. The partnership of GIVN and the Concert for Love and Acceptance brings together two brands that stand for human rights and believe that the everyday hero can positively impact the world.

GIVN is the nation's leading social impact beverage brand and makers of GIVN Water. GIVN Water is the premium North American spring water made with recycled materials that provide one day of clean water to people in need for every bottle sold and enables everyone to Thirst for More. This collaboration will provide clean water to the local Nashville community members of the Oasis Center. The Oasis Center helps young people in Middle Tennessee move into a happy, healthy, and productive adulthood.

John Houseal, GIVN Water Co-Founder & CEO, stated that "We are incredibly humbled and honored to be the hydration partner for the Concert for Love and Acceptance this year. Ty and Cody are true human rights warriors who inspire us daily. Together, we will be a collective voice standing up for the social justice human rights issue of the LGBTQ community. We are excited for GIVN to be a part of this movement. Most of all that together, we will make a meaningful, positive impact for people in need."

ABOUT GIVN:

GIVN Goods, the maker of GIVN Water, is a Certified B-Corporation dedicated to helping the everyday consumer be their best selves: physically, mentally, and spiritually. GIVN has been recognized year over year as a Best for the World Honoree. To date, GIVN retailers and consumers have provided over 5 million days of clean water to people in need around the world. GIVN Water is available on Amazon.com and in over 4,000 retail locations across the United States. In 2019 GIVN water committed to converting all bottles to be made from reused materials, including recycled plastic and aluminum. Visit http://www.givnwater.com for more information. GIVN is a registered trademark of GIVN Goods, Inc. B-Corporation is a registered trademark of B Lab.

Visit http://www.f4la.org and connect with the Foundation for Love and Acceptance at @foracceptance on Instagram and Twitter to stay updated.
Golden Bridge Awards by Globee More than 85 judges from around the world representing a wide spectrum of industry experts participated in the judging process. The Golden Bridge Awards are the worlds premier business awards program honoring achievements in every industry around the world.

The Globee Awards organizer of worlds premier business awards programs and business ranking lists today announced the Grand, Gold, Silver and Bronze winners in the 13th Annual 2021 Golden Bridge Awards honoring achievements and recognitions in business and innovations worldwide.

More than 85 judges from around the world representing a wide spectrum of industry experts participated in the judging process. The Golden Bridge Awards are the worlds premier business awards program honoring achievements in every industry around the world.

The pandemic has changed the way people live, work, shop, and socialize, said San Madan, co-President of Globee Awards. Businesses every where are now preparing for growth as signs of normalcy start to become visible.

All organizations operating anywhere in the world  large to small and startups, government, public and private, for-profit and non-profit are eligible to submit nominations to the Golden Bridge Awards in a wide range of categories honoring achievement in every aspect of business + work life.

See the complete list of 2021 winners here: https://globeeawards.com/golden-bridge-awards/winners/

Stay posted and read success stories of organizations by subscribing to the Globee Newsletter: https://globeeawards.com/subscribe/

2021 Grand Globee winners in Golden Bridge Awards include Cebuana Lhuillier, Concentrix, IBM, ITC Infotech, Jeunesse Global, MMI Agency, NewAge, Inc., Tata Consultancy Services, and Wolters Kluwer, and Wolters Kluwers ELM Solutions.

Winners of one or more 2021 Gold Globee include Abbott, Cyara, M3, MMI Agency, Cepheid, Cebuana Lhuillier, ITC Infotech, Lightspin, AppViewX Inc., Supply Wisdom, Innover, Verdigris, ADP, Cabax International Schools, Intoo USA, Luminance, SecuPi Security Solutions, Verizon Connect, Evreka Yazilim Donanim A.S., Export Bahrain, Immunicom, Inc., Dottedyellow, Hypori Inc., Mplus Agentur, Kong Inc., Postoplan, Trustifi, TCC, Lookout, Dovly, SpendMend, Scality, Comtrend, AVer Information, 7 Stage Advisors, Corner Financial Corporation, ArmorCode Inc., Aerendir Mobile Inc., IDology, Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting, Adaptive US Inc, North Lane, Fi911, Corsight AI, Serving Our Superheroes, Mentor Collective, Volterra, QNET, Centage Corporation, Full Sail University, CT Corporation, a Wolters Kluwer company, First Advantage, Ziraat Bank and ZIRVE Fan Community, ASG Technologies, Imperva, ManagedMethods, PandoLogic, Jack Henry, Inspired eLearning, LLC, Transport for New South Wales, Dell Technologies Education Services, Flare Systems, R Reflections Ltd, Marilyn Barefoot, CoreStack, Nestle India, Dexatel OU, MojoRank, Orange, Energous Corporation, Precision Medical Products, JK Technosoft Limited, EdgeVerve Systems Limited, Ziraat Bank, Microsoft, Augeo, NewAge, Inc., VYVO, Adaptiva, Concentrix, Vivial, iboss, OneTrust, PDI, Qgiv, Dubai Electricity and Water Authority, Forward Networks, HiringThing, Moodys Analytics, Zyter, Pinnacle Performance Company, Concentrix, Sumsub, New Heights Educational Group, Your Best Place, Centene Corporation, Carv by Motion Metrics Ltd, ACCURE Battery Intelligence GmbH, Empire Today, LLC, Jeunesse Global, Huawei Technologies USA, IBM, Wolters Kluwers ELM Solutions, Rockwell Automation, Vertafore, Sounding Board Inc., Mary Kay Inc., 1903 Public Relations, Censia Talent Intelligence, Nextivity Inc., Generali Global Assistance, Axele, LLC, PRO Unlimited, BURSALI, Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S. (LRUS), Semperis, Spireon, Inc., Wolters Kluwer Lien Solutions, SmartFox Technologies, Tata Consultancy Services, Wolters Kluwer, Makers Nutrition, Philip Morris International, and Conntac GmbH.

Submit your nominations for the 2021 American Best in Business Awards



July 2, 2021 | Last chance deadline

July 13, 2021 | Public announcement of 2021 winners

Learn more about the 2021 American Best in Business Awards and how to nominate here: https://globeeawards.com/american-business-awards/

About the Globee Awards

Globee Awards are conferred in eleven programs and competition: the American Best in Business Awards, Business Excellence Awards (Best Employers), CEO World Awards, Communications Excellence Awards, Customer Sales & Service World Awards, Cyber Security Global Excellence Awards, Disruptor Company Awards, Golden Bridge Awards, International Best in Business Awards, IT World Awards, and Women World Awards. Learn more about the Globee Awards at https://globeeawards.com

All trademarks belong to their respective owners.
Hartland Deerfield Fire Authority joins the MITN Purchasing Group Registered vendors can access bids, related documents, addendum and award information.

The Hartland Deerfield Fire Authority announced it has joined the MITN Purchasing Group and will be publishing and distributing upcoming bid opportunities on the system. bidnet directs MITN Purchasing Group connects over 250 participating agencies from across Michigan. The purchasing group provides a transparent bid process through which the bid is available to all vendors at the same time. The Hartland Deerfield Fire Authority invites all potential vendors to register online with http://www.bidnetdirect.com/mitn to access its upcoming solicitations.

The Hartland Deerfield Fire Authority joined the purchasing group in June. The Hartland Deerfield Fire Authority will utilize the system to streamline the purchasing process including bid management, bid distribution and vendor relations. The MITN Purchasing Group is a single, online location for managing sourcing information and activities and provides 254 Michigan local government agencies the tools needed to have a transparent bid process while minimizing costs and saving time.

The MITN Purchasing Group expands an agencys vendor pool and enhances vendor competition without increasing distribution costs. In addition to the existing vendors on the purchasing group, all vendors looking to do business with the Hartland Deerfield Fire Authority can register online: http://www.bidnetdirect.com/mitn. The Hartland Deerfield Fire Authority invites all interested bidders to register today.

Registered vendors can access open bids, related documents and files, additional addendum and award information from all participating agencies. In addition, the MITN Purchasing Group offers a value-added service to notify vendors of new bids targeted to their industry, all addenda and advance notification of expiring term contracts.

With one click, the Hartland Deerfield Fire Authority can now see how many vendors match a specific opportunity, how many have downloaded documents, responded and more. Hartland Deerfield Fire Authority also has its own, branded page on the public side of the MITN Purchasing Group in which tax payers can view all closed bids and any awarded information.

Vendors may register on the MITN Purchasing Group: http://www.bidnetdirect.com/mitn. bidnet directs vendor support team is available to answer any questions regarding the registration process or the bid system at 800-835-4603 option 2.

Other local Michigan government agencies looking to switch from a manual bid process, please contact the MITN Purchasing Group for a demonstration of the no-cost sourcing solution.

About the Hartland Deerfield Fire Authority:

Located in North-East Livingston County, MI, we provide fire & rescue protection from three stations utilizing 2 Engines, 2 Rescue-Engines, 1 Ladder/Aerial, 3 medical/brush fire response units, 1 dive rescue unit, and 2 dive rescue boats.

For the fastest medical intervention, our apparatus are equipped for emergency medical response. In addition, twelve Automatic External Defibrillators (AEDs) and three mechanical compression (CPR) machines are in use for rapid response and increased successes rates of cardiac emergencies.

We are responsible for fire protection, rescue, and emergency medical response to a population of 22,000 people in Hartland and Deerfield Townships. In addition, we provide fire protection by contract to portions of Tyrone Township and the Lake Shannon Association, for a total coverage area over 80 square miles.

About bidnet direct:

bidnet direct, powered by mdf commerce, is a sourcing solution of regional purchasing groups available at no cost to local government agencies throughout the country. bidnet direct runs regional purchasing groups, including the MITN Purchasing Group, across all 50 states that are used by over 1,600 local governments. To learn more and have your government agency gain better transparency and efficiency in purchasing, please visit https://www.bidnetdirect.com/buyers
Jane Blasio lived a story that most of us could only imagine--from being sold as an infant by a small-town doctor to years of searching for her birth mother. Sometimes you have to remind yourself that this was a life lived, not one just crafted." Rick Bragg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.

One of the Hundreds Sold Out the Back Door of a Clinic, Jane Blasio Searches for Her Birth Mother, Finds Home and Forgiveness

From the 1940s through the 1960s, young pregnant women entered the front door of a clinic in a small North Georgia town. Sometimes their babies exited out the back, sold to northern couples who were desperate to hold a newborn in their arms. But these weren't adoptions--they were transactions with cash and no birth records. It is called human trafficking.

In her book, Taken at Birth: Stolen Babies, Hidden Lies, and my Journey to Finding Home, author and investigator, Jane Blasio, takes readers with her as she uncovers hundreds of babies that were sold to couples from the Hicks Clinic for cash. She takes you on her journey to find out who gave her up at birth, the deception and the small-town doctor who was responsible for the human trafficking scheme.

After the story broke in the paper in 1997, hundreds of people with the Hicks Clinic on their birth certificates came forward. Blasio has spent the past 20 years personally investigating her own origin, and helping other victims identify and reunite with their biological families. Along the way she became an expert in illicit adoptions, serving as an investigator and telling her story on every major news network. She was the investigative lead on the recent TLC docuseries, Taken at Birth.

"Jane takes you on the ride of her life, weaving, in emotional detail, the search for her birth family, the shocking circumstances surrounding her adoption, and the dark secrets as deep as the small southern town where it all began, said Lisa Joyner, host of the TLC docuseries Taken at Birth and adoptee and adoptive mom. Through thoughtful investigative work, she effortlessly puts the reader front and center as this real-life story of deceit, trauma, and ultimately redemption unfolds. Regardless of our start in life, Jane reminds us, we all have the ability to find humanity if we know where to look.

Blasio also shares the impact the search has had on her life  from finding her roots, to forgiving the past, and being at peace with who she is.

In her search she says she found more than a birth mother.

I found what was more important than a birth mother and more satisfying than all the answers I sought, writes Blasio. I found where I belonged. It took the journey of searching, not the actual DNA, to find who I am.
Minor accidents can happen to anyone. After hitting a pole is important to remain calm and assess the damage done to the vehicle. If the damage is minor, filing a claim is not recommended, said Russell Rabichev, Marketing Director of Internet Marketing Company.

Compare-autoinsurance.org has launched a new blog post that presents how much the car insurance premium will go up after hitting a pole and when to file a claim.

For more info and free car insurance quotes online, visit https://compare-autoinsurance.org/does-car-insurance-cover-drivers-that-accidentally-hit-a-pole/

The most basic form of auto insurance does not always cover hitting a pole. Drivers who hit a pole can be reimbursed by their insurers if they have a certain type of car insurance coverage. The type of coverage that will help them if they hit a pole is collision coverage. In many states, this type of coverage is not mandatory. Most states require only bodily injury liability and property damage liability insurance. Liability coverage protects the policy owner if he is at fault for a collision.

It is important for policy owners who got involved in an accident with a pole to know the following information:



How much their car insurance premium will go up? If a driver hits a pole out of negligence, then his premium will be hiked. Drivers can expect their premium to rise by about $500 per year for about three years. If the driver is not at fault, then he will have to pay only the deductible. This is the benefit of collision coverage. Without this coverage, the driver would be paying for the damage out of his own pocket. In many cases, the costs to fix the car can reach thousands of dollars.

Should they file a claim after hitting a pole? If the driver is at fault when hitting a pole, but the damage doesnt look too extreme, they should try to find out how much it would cost to fix their cars. If the total cost for fixing the car is smaller than paying the deductible and the increased premium for the next years, drivers are recommended to pay for the damage out of their pockets. All in all, its situational. Also, drivers should always inform the police after hitting a pole.

Is backing into a pole considered an accident? It usually is, but if alcohol or drugs are involved it will not be viewed as an accident. Also, drivers who crash into a pole will have to pay the city for the damages.

What happens when hitting a lamppost? In most cases, the author of the crash will be held liable for the cost of repair to the lamppost.

For additional info, money-saving tips and free car insurance quotes, visit https://compare-autoinsurance.org/

Compare-autoinsurance.org is an online provider of life, home, health, and auto insurance quotes. This website is unique because it does not simply stick to one kind of insurance provider, but brings the clients the best deals from many different online insurance carriers. In this way, clients have access to offers from multiple carriers all in one place: this website. On this site, customers have access to quotes for insurance plans from various agencies, such as local or nationwide agencies, brand names insurance companies, etc.
The Everyday Life platform will enable community banks to lean into their mission to serve their people in the way in which they expect: seamless, digital experiences that are purpose-built to enhance their customers financial well-being," says Jake Tamarkin, CEO, Everyday Life.

Everyday Life, an insurance platform on a mission to get life insurance to everyone who needs it, is partnering with Independent Financial Partners (IFP) to bring its innovative life insurance solution to IFPs Institutional Services group network of community banks and their customers. The new insurance offering will support the banks initiatives to improve the financial health and resilience of their retail customers, forging deeper relationships with them.

There are an estimated 102 million uninsured and underinsured Americans, according to the insurance industry research firm, LIMRA. Up to now, insurers have been challenged to find ways to sell affordable policies to families with average incomes. Everyday Life is the first company to offer an end-to-end platform that saves customers money, time and hassle with personalized recommendations and life insurance plans that bank customers can purchase directly. The platforms proprietary Predictive Protection technology is plug-and-play, making it simple for banks to offer expert financial planning services without adding personnel or licensed insurance agents. The Everyday Life platform will complement the service offering across the IFP network of banks and credit unions.

Covid made many more Americans aware of the need for life insurance coverage, and more moderate income families want to protect their loved ones. The Everyday Life platform will enable community banks to lean into their mission to serve their people in the way in which they expect: seamless, digital experiences that are purpose-built to enhance their customers financial well-being, says Jake Tamarkin, CEO, Everyday Life.

Community banks are looking for ways to offer consumer-centric solutions that are delivered digitally, now that more customers are banking digitally. This partnership with Everyday Life helps banks remain relevant to their customers, says Dan Overbey, Divisional President, Institutional Services, IFP. IFP is rolling out the Everyday Life offering now.

About Everyday Life

Everyday Life is a life insurance platform for people who want to be smart with their money and protect their families but think life insurance is too complicated, expensive and they dont know who they can trust. Everyday Life is changing that paradigm by making it easy for every family to get exactly the right amount of coverage to fit every stage of their lives. Predictive Protection technology builds personalized policies that save people money by fitting the coverage to their lives and adjusting as needed over time. The company is on a mission to make life insurance accessible to everyone who needs it. Everyday Life was founded in Boston, Mass in 2018, and is backed American Enterprise Ventures, Financial Health Network, Global Insurance Accelerator and Techstars.

About Independent Financial Partners

Tampa-based Independent Financial Partners is an independent broker dealer, registered investment advisory firm and insurance agency. With a national footprint, IFP manages >$12.0 billion in client assets across retirement plans, securities, and advisory accounts.

IFP Institutional Services was formed to work with financial institutions and other financial aggregators to provide consulting, program administration, or distribution services. Today, the firm works to bring transparency and fair pricing to the financial institution channel through customized solutions, leading edge technology, recruiting and operational support.
Loves Battlefield: an emotional and faith-based fiction. Loves Battlefield is the creation of published author Keitha Parton, a devoted wife and loving mother and grandmother who has enjoyed life in the heart of the Great Smoky Mountains of western North Carolina.

Parton shares, Katherine Oben is left alone to care for her brother, Benjamin, on a small farm on the outskirts of the small village of Bentonville, North Carolina. Her father had left four years prior to fight for the Confederacy and was never heard from again. Soon after his departure, a horrible accident took the life of her mother, leaving the two siblings to make it on their own.

Jerob Brown is a Confederate soldier entrenched in a bloody attempt to stop Shermans march to the sea. Tired of fighting, homesick, and struggling to find anything good to believe in anymoreJerob finds himself wounded, confused, and with nowhere to go.

Imagine Katherine and Benjamins surprise to find an injured soldier in their barn. While tending to Jerobs physical needs, each have no idea how much their love, compassion, and faith help heal his broken spirit. He finds his heart starting to soften toward Katherines gentle ways and joy watching the antics of a lively eleven-year-old boy and his hound dog.

In this epic tale, discover how God uses the most unusual circumstances to bring the lives of three people togetherone struggling to find peace, one to find companionship, and the other to find guidance as they unite to face loves battlefield.

Published by Christian Faith Publishing, Keitha Partons new book is a surprising and heartfelt tale of sibling love and the dangers of life during the Civil War.

This enjoyable narrative is certain to capture the imagination of anyone who reads along to discover the fates of the affable characters found within.

View a synopsis of Loves Battlefield on YouTube.

Consumers can purchase Loves Battlefield at traditional brick & mortar bookstores, or online at Amazon.com, Apple iTunes store, or Barnes and Noble.

For additional information or inquiries about Loves Battlefield, contact the Christian Faith Publishing media department at 866-554-0919.
With Pride Month coming to an end, this campaign wants to provide tools to empower the LGBTQ+ community year-round.

Helping to conclude Pride Month, Mediaplanet today announces the launch of this Junes edition of LGBTQ+ Empowerment. With Pride Month coming to an end, this campaign wants to provide tools to empower the LGBTQ+ community year-round. The campaign highlights organizations who are implementing changes everywhere from workplace safety and inclusion to disparities in healthcare and access to equal services.

As the country continues to deal with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, attitudes toward LGBTQ+ Americans and their experiences remain underexamined. More than one in three LGBTQ+ Americans faced discrimination of some kind in the past year, including more than three in five transgender people. While the United States has grown since the Stonewall riots in 1969, there is still much improvement needed.

The print component of LGBTQ+ Empowerment is distributed within todays edition of USA Today in Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, and Washington DC/Baltimore markets, with a circulation of approximately 150,000 copies and an estimated readership of 450,000. The digital component is distributed nationally, through a vast social media strategy, and across a network of top news sites and partner outlets. To explore the digital version of the campaign, visit: https://www.modernwellnessguide.com/campaign/lgbtq-empowerment/

Long-time LGBTQ+ activist Frankie Grande graces the cover of the print publication. In an exclusive interview, Grande why homophobic bullying online had such a traumatic impact on him, and how hes learned to manage his social media content creation without spinning out of control. I had worked so hard to build a community of support so that I felt comfortable being my out proud, gay rainbow, loving, glitter-wearing self. And that was the thing that people started bullying me for, Grande said. It was just for being who I am.

This campaign was made possible with the support of GEICO, REALI, Guaranteed Rate, Mountainside Treatment Center, and Calmerry.

About Mediaplanet

Mediaplanet specializes in the creation of content marketing campaigns covering a variety of industries. We tell meaningful stories that educate our audience and position our clients as solution providers. Our unique ability to pair the right leaders with the right readers, through the right platforms, s made Mediaplanet a global content marketing powerhouse. Our award-winning stories have won the hearts of countless readers while serving as a valuable platform for brands and their missions. Just call us storytellers with a purpose. Please visit http://www.mediaplanet.com for more on who we are and what we do.

Press Contact:

Danielle Elbert

danielle.elbert@mediaplanet.com

(646) 518-5421


Independent publisher Post Hill Press is set to release an intimate biography about tech pioneer and eccentric billionaire John McAfee. The book, No Domain: The John McAfee Tapes, is scheduled to release on December 21, 2021 and will be distributed by Simon & Schuster.

Written by bestselling Scottish author Mark Eglinton, who was one of the last people to have a significant relationship with McAfee before his arrest in October 2020 and his sudden mysterious death last week, No Domain tells McAfees story in his own words. Drawn from hours of conversations between Eglinton and McAfee in 2019 and 2020, while he was in an undisclosed location, the book provides a startling look inside the extraordinary life of one of Americas genuine renegades.

McAfee shares his life story like its his last will and testament, providing revelatory details on the abusive father who shot himself when John was young, the life-changing LSD overdose in St. Louisduring which he was nearly convinced by the voices in his head to kill his first wife and daughterthe unexpected government clearance that led to him working with the CIA on dark programs, his attempt to find a quiet life in Belize, only to become a pariah in the eyes of the local militia, from whom he would eventually flee, after being framed for the murder of his neighbor, and much more.

No Domain: The John McAfee Tapes releases from Post Hill Press on December 21st, 2021 and is available for pre-order now:

Amazon: http://posthill.to/1642939536

About Post Hill Press

Founded in 2013 by a team of seasoned entrepreneurs and book industry professionals, Post Hill Press has successfully published a wide spectrum of books, with a focus on the categories of pop culture, business, self-help, health & wellness, current events, Christian, and conservative political books. Our entrepreneurial spirit makes Post Hill Press a nimble publisher, willing and able to move quickly and take advantage of opportunities in the marketplace.

Our books and authors have appeared on The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists. A number of our authors have appeared on national media such as CNN, Fox News, The Doctors, and many others, as well as national radio and print outlets.

For an advance copy of No Domain and all press inquiries, please contact:

Devon Brown | Post Hill Press

devon@posthillpress.com

615-261-4646 x104

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The journey of my thoughts and contemplations, while giving full throttle to my intuition itself, grew more fascinating and intriguing as I continued to write. All of a sudden, it took only one moment of thought for me to discover the physical source of intuition. The entire logic of it manifested in my mind in a flash, as if it were an episode of deja vu, Buthayna Taha states.

In Unveiling the Physical Source of Intuition: A Discovery that Answers What Were Thought to Be Miracles, Supernatural Phenomena, Extraordinary Events, and Coincidences (published by Balboa Press), she offers an examination of intuition. She shares her journey to find the place where it exists within each human and tells how it is connected to the universe. Taha discusses how it explains some spiritual experiences, emotional behavior, and those events once thought to be miracles, coincidences, or extraordinary. She presents her findings, building the evidences chapter after chapter. She communicates that intuition is a gift from the creator, given to you to use or not use. It can optimize and utopialize your path, your purpose, your identity, your type, and, ultimately, your connection to this universe and to everything and everyone in it.

There is a shift in humanity toward spirituality and its hidden answers that have not been more needed and explored by human beings across the globe than today, Taha points out. As you begin to know where and how our intuition is connected to the universe, you will find that if you align yourself consciously with your intuition, you will most likely make the best decisions of your life  those that will always make your journey meaningful  and you will stay true to your path. Ultimately this process will align your spiritual growth to its ultimate, highest destined path meant to be yours. After all, the only treasure we were given since our birth is our connection to this universe.

The revolutionary finding about the physical source of intuition presented in this book aims to open lots of other intriguing findings about the source or non-source of creation, and more value and insight about intuition itself. For more details about this book, please visit https://www.balboapress.com/en/bookstore/bookdetails/787534-unveiling-the-physical-source-of-intuition

Unveiling the Physical Source of Intuition: A Discovery that Answers What Were Thought to Be Miracles, Supernatural Phenomena, Extraordinary Events, and Coincidences

By Buthayna Taha

Hardcover | 5.5 x 8.5in | 108 pages | ISBN 9781982268466

Softcover | 5.5 x 8.5in | 108 pages | ISBN 9781982268442

E-Book | 108 pages | ISBN 9781982268459

Available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble

About the Author

Buthayna Taha earned a bachelors degree in architectural engineering and a masters in urban planning. Her current work connects her to the building industry. She is also a climate leader and environmental advocate, an alternative medicine advocate, and, most importantly, a spiritual seeker. She loves and enjoys living in Michigan. This is Tahas debut book. Visit her online at buthaynataha.com.

Balboa Press, a division of Hay House, Inc.  a leading provider in publishing products that specialize in self-help and the mind, body, and spirit genres. Through an alliance with the worldwide self-publishing leader Author Solutions, LLC, authors benefit from the leadership of Hay House Publishing and the speed-to-market advantages of the self-publishing model. For more information, visit balboapress.com. To start publishing your book with Balboa Press, call 844-682-1282 today.
Onna and Zapproved have today announced a direct integration between Onnas Knowledge Integration Platform and Zapproveds ZDiscovery platform to create a more seamless legal hold experience than ever before, particularly for unstructured data.

Through this integration, joint Onna and Zapproved customers will be able to automatically preserve Slack data at the point of hold issuance  something that has not been possible until now. Slack legal holds initiated from Zapproveds ZDiscovery Preserve are instantly applied to archived data in Onna, significantly reducing the time and costs associated with preserving Slack data.

Until now, businesses have struggled with a way to deal with legal hold management for unstructured data. Traditionally, preserving Slack data required multiple steps, including notifying custodians from a legal hold platform, followed by a repeated process to identify, collect and hold Slack data from a separate platform. This integration will enable customers to place holds and send out communications seamlessly, starting first with Slack and then expanding to other applications, where a single hold for selected custodians in ZDiscovery Preserve can be automatically applied across multiple data sources in Onna.

Data can be searched, culled, and exported for review at any time, which improves legal self-service by creating less dependence on the IT department. The integration can be set up quickly and easily, and features an intuitive user experience that allows for rapid time to value.

"As cloud collaboration apps exploded over the last year, more corporate legal teams are staring at the unprecedented challenge of finding and extracting meaning from vast amounts of unstructured data, said Rekha Shenoy, Chief Product and Customer Officer at Zapproved. Making this unstructured data more discoverable, while empowering users to preserve it wherever it lives, is key for the success of a company's eDiscovery program, and is one of the main drivers behind our collaboration with Onna."

Onna and Zapproved have combined our complementary best-in-class solutions to solve customers complex and multifaceted eDiscovery workflows better than any single purported end-to-end solution can, said Kelly Griswold, Chief Operating Officer at Onna. After all, eDiscovery is not a single problem to solve, but rather a multi-stage workflow that requires targeted technology to address. Together, Onna and Zapproved provide a leading experience across the entire EDRM, giving customers a comprehensive solution where the integration of technologies is already taken care of and not an additional responsibility that customers have to manage themselves.

Join experts from Onna and Zapproved for a live webinar on Wednesday, June 30th, 2021: Unstructured data and the EDRM: Building a defensible strategy that mitigates risk. Register here.

 ends 

About Onna

Onna integrates knowledge from all workplace applications, allowing anyone to unify, protect, search, automate, and build on top of their organizations proprietary knowledge. With the rise of cloud-based and hosted workplace apps, knowledge is extremely fragmented and difficult to access in most organizations, costing businesses huge amounts of time and money in searching for their own information.

Onnas Machine Learning-based Knowledge Integration Platform can be connected to any

cloud or on-premise application, including Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, Dropbox, Salesforce, and many more. It supports eDiscovery, information governance, knowledge management, archiving, monitoring for private and sensitive data sharing, and building bespoke internal workflow apps using proprietary information.

With headquarters in New York City and Barcelona and teams in Raleigh, San Francisco, Toulouse, and London, Onna supports some of the worlds leading companies, including Dropbox, Electronic Arts, Fitbit, Lyft, NewsCorp, and Slack. Onna has raised $43M from investors, including Atomico, Dawn Capital, Dropbox, and Slack Fund. To learn more, visit http://www.onna.com.

About Zapproved

Founded in 2008, Zapproved builds eDiscovery software designed to help corporate legal teams reduce costs and mitigate risk. The ZDiscovery platform unites Zapproveds industry-leading legal hold management with its intuitive processing and review engine to enable corporate legal teams to manage ediscovery more efficiently, cost-effectively, and confidently  and with the built-in flexibility to bring in outside counsel for high risk and highly complex cases.

Zapproved has more than 350 corporate customers, including 20% of the F100, and an unwavering commitment to keeping customers ridiculously successful. Learn more at http://www.zapproved.com.
Out East, the female founded, sustainable wine company founded in New York City in 2018 by Cori Lee Seaberg and Patrick Mitchell, today announced new partnerships with distributors along the East Coast in key markets including Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, South Carolina and Florida.

Previously only available in New York, Florida, Virginia, Rhode Island, Texas, Maryland and District of Columbia, the new partnerships with Martignetti Companies (MA), Consortium Wine & Spirits (FL), Vintage Imports (NJ, PA, DE) and Curated Selections (SC) brings the premium portfolio of wines to 12 states in addition to Dubai, UAE with the leading Middle East distributor, MMI.

We are thrilled to expand our footprint in the US and look forward to bringing Out East to these new markets by partnering with seasoned distributors that share the same passion we do, said Co-Founder Cori Lee Seaberg.

Through pioneering collaborations with best-in-class producers, we are developing a portfolio of signature, sustainably produced and beautifully presented wines to define a new paradigm for contemporary wine brands that appeal to discerning consumers and new audiences alike, Patrick Mitchell added.

Out East focuses on leading destination markets, primarily on the east coast from New York City to The Hamptons and Miami to Palm Beach with their portfolio of highly rated wines having received placements in leading retailers and restaurants including Le Bilboquet, DANIEL, La Goulue, Surf Lodge, Casa Tua, and Loews Hotel. These new strategic partnerships allow them to continue expansion into major urban markets and highly regarded destinations like The Cape & Islands, Charleston and the Jersey Shore.

Out Easts current portfolio includes sustainably produced wines from France: Out East Rose (Cotes de Provence, SRP $19.99, 92 Points), Champagne A L'EST (Epernay, SRP $49.99, 93 Points) and Out East Hermitage 2017, a limited edition release in partnership with Cave de Tain (Hermitage, SRP $89.99, 96 Points).

About Out East:

Out East is a female founded, purpose driven wine company defining a new paradigm for contemporary wine brands. Launched in New York City in 2018 by Cori Lee Seaberg and Patrick Mitchell, Out East partners with best-in-class producers to develop signature premium wines. These are made from the finest ingredients on earth, sustainably produced and beautifully presented. Around this portfolio, Out East is building a passionate community through thoughtful brand activations, charitable collaborations and captivating original content.

For press enquiries, please contact:

autumn@westwaycommunications.com

john@westwaycommunications.com
After an impressive initial month in the digital marketing industry, surpassing all expectations, Promo Leads has announced that it is expanding its customer service staff. Thus, support to users of the brands platform and mechanism will be granted on several new channels, and service hours will be extended. These changes are to take place immediately, and will be felt by all clients around the world.

We are flattered by the growing interest in us and our products and services, commented Promo Leads spokesperson Samuel Adams. When we started this adventure, just a few months ago, we knew it would turn out successful. Weve hired the best professionals in the sectors of analytics, finance and service. Now its time to give back to the thousands all around the globe who have put their trust in us, and this step is just one of many to come.

A new way to grasp digital marketing

If theres something to be learned from the year of the pandemic, it is that theres a need for out-of-the-box thinking when it comes to digital marketing. As traditional models collapsed during the crisis, few brands were able to persevere. In that sense, the decision made by the founders of Promo Leads, to enter the market at such fragile times, was a risky one - but so far seems to be paying off.

The company operates a lead generating platform, enabling freelance marketers to use its services in order to put their skills to work. Promo Leads has collaborated with thousands of businesses around the world from different industries, to grant the demand side of the equation - and to let marketers make a living off of meeting that demand. This is all executed in a simple, three step process, which includes the creation and publication of online advertising content, as well as monitoring and analytics through its lifetime.

Promo Leads is all about disrupting the way online marketing is done, added Adams. Were proud of the way weve changed the industry in the short time since our establishment. We promise to keep being attentive to our customers needs and to evolve accordingly. We know that this is the only viable way to develop as a brand. Sadly most of the other players in our industry jost dont seem to get that, and thats why we plan to keep being there for marketers who require our services.

About Promo Leads

Founded earlier in 2021 by a team of expert financial analysts and marketing executives, Promo Leads has managed in a short time to become a known and trusted digital marketing brand. The company provides advertising services across the world in different languages, with the help of its proprietary platform. All users of this platform also enjoy constant monitoring performed by Promo Leads professional staff. Support is now granted through email, direct messaging and telephone, and all of the relevant details can be found on the companys website.
Stayflexi has developed an on-demand and contactless check-in/check-out process.

Proptech software company Stayflexi today announced it has raised $1.6 million dollars in seed funding from a cohort of prominent investors. Founded in 2020, the company has created a proprietary first-of-its-kind operating system to automate and integrate hotel and vacation stay processes and operations end to end. Notably, it has developed an on-demand and contactless check-in/check-out process, which has been a critical offering as the hospitality industry recovers from the pandemic.

In raising its seed funding, the company caught the attention of major players. Prominent venture capital firms Y Combinator, Agya Ventures, BlueField Capital, Asymmetry Ventures, and Good News Ventures all participated in the round. Additionally, the company was backed by leading individual investors: PagerDuty co-founder Baskar Puvanathasan; Squarefoot Inc. co-founder Jonathan Wasserstrum; and COO of Incuspaze Mohit Srivastava, who also served as an executive at OYO and head of the Indian Subcontinent for AirBnb.

Our firm is committed to backing companies helping to shape the future of hospitality, and Stayflexi is a prime example of that, said Kunal Lunawat, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Agya Ventures. Hospitality, as we know it, needs to become even more guest-centric: flexible reservations that enable unconstrained check-in and check-outs are just a starting point. We are excited by what the Stayflexi team is building and look forward to helping them realize their vision."

Integrated with services like Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb, and others, Stayflexis operating system automates the entire reservation flow, from the booking to the stay to the post-stay review. This benefits both guests and hosts, saving operational costs and capturing additional revenue from unsold rooms and amenities; while offering an ultra-customizable, convenient, and streamlined customer experience. The companys software is being used in over 100 cities across six countries worldwide including India and the U.S., totaling more than 10,000 rooms across 750 paying properties and counting.

We invested in Stayflexi because their platform opens up new flexible booking opportunities for hotels  making it easy for them to manage upsells, walk-ins, and even fractional stays  which can change the way the hospitality industry operates, said YC Group Partner Aaron Epstein.

As many aspects of hospitality have been adversely affected by the pandemic, Stayflexis software is helping assuage key travel pain points by providing critical flexibility and no-contact services. In fact, the company is helping bring more hotel and vacation rentals back online and begin to recover. During the pandemic, the software has become increasingly in demand; the company has grown 25 percent month-over-month during 2021.

We founded Stayflexi to try to fix a problem we personally faced in our hotel stays, said Stayflexi CEO and Co-founder Venkatesh Sakamuri. As the travel industry modernizes, guests should be able to access their rooms and services anytime, anywhere. Our vision is to make short-term rentals totally flexible in a way that helps both guests and hosts, and were very grateful to our investors for supporting this vision.

About Stayflexi

Stayflexi is a San Francisco-based proptech company shaping the future of hotel and vacation rental stays. Founded in 2020 by Venkatesh Sakamuri, Preetam Mohan Shetty, and Krishna Sasank Talasila; all of whom are computer science alumni from Carnegie Mellon and Cornell Universities, as well as former Oracle engineers. The companys proprietary software enables flexible check-in and check-out as well as enhanced amenities, adding convenience, value, and peace of mind to hosts and guests alike. It is backed by investors including venture capital firms Agya Ventures, Asymmetry Ventures, BlueField Capital, Good News Ventures, and Y Combinator; and individual investors Baskar Puvanathasan, Jonathan Wasserstrum, and Mohit Srivastava.

Learn more at https://business.stayflexi.com
Photo by Jim Gates, courtesy of the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands "We are privileged to help this event move forward and raise the profile of Cayman's thriving arts community." - Sue Nickason of Provenance Properties

Luxury real estate brokerage Provenance Properties, the exclusive affiliate of Christies International Real Estate in the Cayman Islands, is pleased to announce it is a lead partner of Cayman Art Week.

The brokerage joins fellow lead supporters Susan Olde OBE (Patron) and National Gallery of the Cayman Islands in supporting the week-long celebration of the Cayman Islands local art scene.

Darts Vice President of Real Estate Marketing and Sales, Sue Nickason, explained the importance of Cayman Art Week to Provenance Properties. As the official Christie's International Real Estate affiliate in the Cayman Islands, we are aware of the importance art has in enriching the lives of all who create and appreciate it. Much like the industry-leading art and luxury goods specialists at Christie's  the world's oldest auction house  we embrace opportunities to connect buyers and sellers of bespoke products, and this made supporting Cayman Art Week an easy decision."

Cayman Art Week (CAW) went live with its website, caymanartweek.com, last week in advance of the inaugural event scheduled for 7 to 10 July 2021. CAW is an annual, week-long programme of art exhibition tours, gallery events and open studios. The project seeks to raise visibility for the arts sector through a joined-up platform connecting collectors directly with creators.

Project founder and creative director Natalie Urquhart is already well known in the Caymanian creative sector, leading the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands for more than a decade. CAW is a personal project developed in response to what Urquhart sees as a need for a central collaborative 'hub' to share information about Cayman's commercial art sector. Urquhart says, "Cayman Art Week aims to shine a light on the vibrant gallery and studio sector through a comprehensive website, interactive art map and week-long celebration that encourages the sale of art."

Urquhart chose to bring the launch date forward in response to conversations with colleagues and creatives. "The small creative business owners, who are all heavily reliant on the hospitality sector, have seen their incomes severely impacted by the pandemic. Their venues and the artists that they represent contribute significantly to the unique cultural wealth of the Cayman Islands, and they remain at risk while the sector begins to rebound. CAW hopes to help sustain the local arts community while we wait for borders to reopen," she says. The long-term idea for CAW is to develop a cultural tourism product that can attract international collectors; however, this first edition will function exclusively on a local scale because of ongoing travel restrictions.

CAW has already confirmed 25 venues, with more expressing interest. These range from long-running art galleries to cutting-edge spaces and start-ups. Confirmed galleries and studios include: The Gallery at the Ritz Carlton, Grand Cayman, Kennedy Gallery, Sandon Feat Gallery, Parcel 110, Guy Harvey Gallery, Pure Art Gallery, Carlos V. Garcia Gallery, Artisan Metal Works Gallery, Gordon J. Solomon Fine Art, John Reno Jackson Studio, David Bridgeman, Al Ebanks, Kay Smith, Charles Long, White Dog Art (Ren Seffer) and Scott Swing. Several artists are also hosting pop-up exhibitions at venues like The Art Collective, Notable Island Gallery and Award Art Gallery at Monaco Towers, Shane 'dready' Aquart at Whitehall Chambers, Davin Ebanks at Palm Heights, along with pop-ups at design firm IDG Cayman and Calypso Grill.

In addition to its lead partners, CAW also benefits from the support of George Town Revitalisation, Monaco Towers, the Cayman Islands Department of Tourism and Real Life magazine. As a result of its project partners, as well as the CAW team working in a voluntary capacity, CAW has been able to offset costs for participating partners in 2021 to ensure all proceeds from the sale of artwork goes directly to the organisations and artists to offset losses caused by the pandemic. It also ensures that CAW registration is free for all visitors and guests.

Provenance Properties Cayman Islands was delighted to come on board as a Lead Sponsor of the first annual Cayman Art Week. "We are privileged to help this event move forward and raise the profile of Cayman's thriving arts community, said Nickason.

Says CAW Patron Susan A. Olde, OBE, "It is my pleasure to support the inaugural edition of Cayman Art Week, a landmark initiative that provides the first joined-up platform through which to showcase Cayman's vibrant gallery and studio scene. Commercial galleries play a crucial role in our thriving art community by supporting emerging and established artists and facilitating the sale of their work. Cayman Art Week seeks to champion these efforts and to help ensure Cayman's cultural landscape continues to thrive in these challenging times."

The four-day schedule will focus on a different geographical concentration of galleries and studios daily, starting with the Seven Mile Beach area on Thursday, 8 July, George Town on Friday, 9 July, and the eastern districts on the morning of Saturday, 10 July, followed by an Art Symposium at the National Gallery in the afternoon. In Cayman Brac, the Solomon Studio will host special events throughout the week, and Artist Talks will take place in Little Cayman in partnership with the Little Cayman Museum. There will also be a tri-island 'Open Studio Day' on Saturday, where artists across all three islands open their doors to the public. Lead CAW partner, George Town Revitalisation, which manages the largest concentration of creative spaces in Cayman, will host its new 'Art in the City' initiative that celebrates creativity across the town centre. The evolving schedule can be accessed via the CAW website at http://www.caymanartweek.com/events.

Following the annual event, the CAW website will continue to function as a one-stop place to access knowledge about how and where to buy Cayman art with featured local experts, blogs, and news about Caymanian art events. This online component is the first time that all of these venues have been available via a single website. Content includes profiles and artwork samples from featured venues along with their contact and locations details and an easy-to-use Google map.

Longer term, CAW hopes to help support the islands' creative economy and grow CAW into an annual tourism attraction. Scheduled during the off-peak season, it allows another marketable product to attract cultural visitors to the island. Urquhart hopes that the event will become part of the Cayman cultural calendar and becomes a yearly draw for international visitors.

For more information about Cayman Art Week, to register an event or to sign up for the schedule, please email info@caymanartweek or visit http://www.caymanartweek.com.

About Provenance Properties Cayman Islands

Provenance Properties is the exclusive Christies International Real Estate affiliate in the Cayman Islands and a member of the Cayman Islands Real Estate Brokers Association (CIREBA). In 2019, Provenance Properties was recognised as a Christies Affiliate of the Year. Provenance Properties is also the exclusive Cayman Islands affiliate of Haute Residence.

Provenance Properties provides access to a portfolio of luxury residences and condominiums for sale or rent, as well as land for sale and commercial properties for lease in the Cayman Islands. The Provenance Properties team provides bespoke service to individuals seeking to relocate to the Cayman Islands for business or personal reasons.

For more information, visit provenanceproperties.com, keep up with the latest information on Facebook and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

About the Cayman Art Week Project

Cayman Art Week is a week-long curated programme of gallery tours and open studios around the Cayman Islands, held annually in July. Designed to celebrate and encourage the collection of Caymanian art, CAW offers unparalleled access to over 25 art venues and provides a web-based platform and programme through which to showcase a range of discussions, pop-up interventions and exhibitions to local and international audiences. We are dedicated to ensuring Caymans cultural landscape continues to thrive by connecting collectors with creators to facilitate the sale of art.


"With Mike on our team, we can deliver emergency preparedness and business continuity services more effectively to enterprises in other parts of the world. -- Michael J. Boardman, CEO

Readiness Associates (RA), a global, virtual, tech-based consultancy with headquarters in Portland, Maine, empowers enterprise leaders and employees to weather any natural or manmade adversity. Today, RA announces Michael Burke has joined the company in the role of Business Continuity Executive. Mr. Burke, a resident of Auckland, New Zealand, brings decades of experience in risk management and business continuity planning. Mr. Burke has also served in senior management positions with Vero Insurance (NZ) and Zurich Municipal (UK).

In his new role, Mr. Burke will support the overall business objectives of RA through risk assessments and effective action planning. He joins a growing team of emergency preparedness and business continuity experts helping organizations around the world mitigate the impact of worst-case scenario events on the wellbeing of their employees and their ability to operate.

Mikes addition highlights our commitment to mitigating losses from a significant spike in negative events globally, said RAs CEO, Michael J. Boardman. With Mike on our team, we can deliver emergency preparedness and business continuity services more effectively to enterprises in other parts of the world.

About Readiness Associates

Readiness Associates (RA) enables leaders from all types of organizations to confidently assess and overcome critical threats with customized emergency preparedness and business continuity planning. Our comprehensive ReadySuite(TM) of onsite and virtual solutions empowers our partners to weather any adversity, natural or manmade, by fortifying their entire organizations in key areas that include cloud-based response planning and pandemic wellness tracking; compliance and regulatory audit planning; crisis communications; cyber-security training; and more. Visit us online at: http://www.readinessassociates.com.


Removery rebrands Vamoose Tatoo Removal We are thrilled to continue our growth throughout the Midwest, establishing Removery in the Chicagoland region." -- Tom Weber, CEO of Removery.

Removery, the world leader in laser tattoo removal, change, and fade services, announced that it has completed the rebranding of Vamoose Tattoo Removal in Chicago. Removery acquired Vamooses four studios in October of 2020 and has been working with the team to rebrand them as Removery. Vamooses Chicago studios are located in Lincoln Square and Bucktown, with another located in Gurnee, IL, and one in Milwaukee, WI. All four locations are now officially Removery studios.

We are thrilled to continue our growth throughout the Midwest, establishing Removery in the Chicagoland region, said Tom Weber, CEO of Removery. Building upon the solid foundation Vamoose has set here, our team of tattoo enthusiasts and removal experts are excited to open our doors and bring a whole new level of service to those in the area in need of removal, change or fade services.

Founded in 2013 by Howard Bennett MD and Marc Falleroni MD, Vamoose Tattoo Removal has conducted over 20,000 sessions over the last eight years using the latest laser technology. What began as one location in Chicago has grown to four locations across the Midwest. Bennett and Falleroni will join Removery as Regional Medical Directors.

With plans to grow to 200-plus locations across North America and Australia over the next five years, Removery is working to normalize laser tattoo removal and fading. The company recently acquired and rebranded Absolute Laser Tattoo Removal in Southern California, followed by acquisitions in Pittsburgh, Hawaii, Cincinnati, Louisville and Indianapolis.

Trained in the most advanced laser tattoo removal equipment and procedures, the tattoo removal specialists at Removery use PicoWay laser technology that makes the process as fast, effective, and comfortable as possible. In addition to reducing the number of treatments, PicoWay enables Removery technicians to target any tattoo no matter the ink colors used or skin type.

Removery was formed in 2019 through the merger of four leading tattoo removal brands that have been operating since 2011. Removery's trusted laser specialists collectively have completed more than 250,000 safe and effective laser tattoo removal treatments.

About Removery

Removery is the largest specialized provider of tattoo removal services in the world with 48 locations across the U.S., Australia and Canada. Its laser specialists are highly trained in Candelas state-of-the-art PicoWay lasers. To learn more about Removery and tattoo removal, see before-and-after pictures, or schedule an in-person or virtual consultation, visit Removery.com.


PechaKucha Live Event Whether in person or online, people desire to connect with others in uplifting and inspiring ways. PechaKucha provides meaningful sharing through real-world and digital talks, sessions and chats that leave people feeling motivated to do great things  for themselves and the world.

PechaKucha, Inc., a social storytelling platform that has been used by millions of people across the globe, today announces a Seed funding of $2.7 million to scale its platform for time-based connectivity and sharing among creators, professionals, and brands.

PechaKuchas raise is led by Muneaki Masuda, the founder and CEO of Culture Convenience Club Company, Limited (CCC). CCC operates Tokyo-based Tsutaya, Japans largest bookstore, movie, and music chain, among other companies. Participating investment firms are Lofty Ventures and Nameless Ventures with notable angel investors including Jimmy Chamberlin (CEO of Blue J Strategies and Grammy Award-winning drummer for The Smashing Pumpkins), Chuck Cohn (Founder and CEO of Nerdy), Chris Gladwin (Founder and CEO of Ocient), Paul Hsu (CEO and Founder of Decasonic), Brad Keywell (Co-Founder of Groupon, Founder and CEO of Uptake), Rob Solomon (Chairman of GoFundMe), and Vidisha Prasad (Managing Partner at Adya Partners), among others.

Whether in person or online, people desire to connect with others in uplifting and inspiring ways. PechaKucha provides meaningful sharing through real-world and digital talks, sessions and chats that leave people feeling motivated to do great things  for themselves and the world, said Sean Smyth, CEO and Co-founder, PechaKucha. Our social storytelling platform keeps engagement authentic, human, and concise  with time as our superpower.

PeckaKucha, which means chit-chat in Japanese, was founded in 2003 by architects Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein of Klein Dytham architecture. It originated as a 20x20'' live presentation format that consisted of 20 image-based slides, each automatically advancing every 20 seconds. The time-based talks organically grew into a global live event series attended by three million people in 140 countries with more than 150,000 presenters.

Coinciding with the Covid-19 pandemic, PechaKucha launched a virtual storytelling platform that grew to over 100,000 beta users within nine months. Users can produce and share recorded content, host live events online and offline, and build communities about popular and niche topics. PechaKucha plans to scale headcount across product design, software development, and marketing to build new video and mobile capabilities, extend social connectivity features including group chat, enhance event hosting functions including ticketing and CRM, and grow its community of content creators.

PechaKucha has built a deeply engaged community that has accelerated in growth since the pandemic, said Paul Hsu, CEO and Founder of Decasonic. PechaKuchas social storytelling platform supports content creators who seek to build strong communities and share stories for inspired outcomes. Im excited to partner with them to further transform how communities can connect with these positive intentions.

About PechaKucha

PechaKucha, based in Chicago and Tokyo, is the fast-growing storytelling platform used by millions of people across the globe. Content creators, schools, businesses, and government agencies worldwide license PechaKuchas 20 images x 20 seconds platform to share visual stories, information and concepts for inspired action. PechaKucha community organizers host live events in more than 1,250 cities in 140 countries, with thousands of individual creators using PechaKuchas social storytelling platform for digital talks, sessions and chats. To gain inspiration from 50,000+ PechaKucha stories or to share your own, visit https://www.pechakucha.com.
With the return of Mobile World Congress, a renewed level of enthusiasm seems to be in the air." said Fred Yentz CEO, Tartabit "It seemed like the right time and place to announce the IoT Bridge support for OMA and LWM2M 1.1 based device integration services with Microsoft Azure."

Today, Tartabit LLC announces the availability of LWM2M 1.1 server support as part of the IoT Bridge LPWAN to Microsoft Azure integration service. In addition, Tartabit is pleased to announce they have joined the Open Mobile Alliance to help improve the specification and further promote adoption of LWM2M as a leading device management technology for low-powered wide-area (LPWA) devices.

Tartabit recognizes the inherent advantages of the newest OMA standards regarding to data plan optimization, reduced power consumption and device management. These known advantages in conjunction with Tartabits mission of reducing IoT adopter development and deployment challenges will certainly contribute to the acceleration of the LPWA IoT market.

As a leading provider of Microsoft Azure IoT Cloud Gateway solutions, the Tartabit IoT Bridge continues to expand the number and types of IoT devices which will now seamlessly integrate with Azure IoT Services. Providing additional industry standard protocol onboarding for Microsofts Azure extends market reach and supports an ever-growing IoT device maker and solution provider ecosystem.

In conjunction with Tartabits OMA membership, Tartabit is also pleased to announce the release of IoT Bridge Solution Templates in support of select Nordic Semiconductor, Telit, and Quectel LTE Cat-M and NB-IoT devices and development kits. Tartabit provides a vendor neutral, industry standard on-ramp to Microsoft services with flexible SaaS Public and Private, and Cloud deployment models, all with the goal of creating the most flexible and cost optimized LPWAN bridge into Microsoft Azure IoT.

Todays announcement reinforces our dedication to the rapidly growing LPWAN sector of the IoT Market, said Fred Yentz, CEO and Co-Founder, Tartabit. With the return of Mobile World Congress, a renewed level of enthusiasm seems to be in the air making it the right time and place to announce our support for the Open Mobile Alliance in addition to IoT Bridge's LWM2M 1.1 based Solution Templates for Microsoft Azure. Frictionless integration of LPWAN devices will speed the adoption of OMA standards and contribute to the growth of our industry."

"OMA SpecWorks is pleased to welcome Tartabit to the community of contributors and implementers of LwM2M," said Seth Newberry, General Manager of OMA SpecWorks, "OMA has a rich history of developing mobile service layer specifications with over 200 unique specifications in its portfolio. First released in 2018, LwM2M along with its IPSO objects provides device management and service enablement capabilities for managing the entire lifecycle of the IoT device."

About Tartabit LLC

Tartabit is a Next Gen Things (IoT) enablement company founded by a team of experienced IoT executives and practitioners who share a passion to provide easy to use tools and services capable of accelerating the adoption of IoT globally. Our vision is to radically increase the ability for enterprise and OEM customers to leverage next generation IoT device data by offering the easiest to use, buy, deploy, and manage LPWAN Cloud Gateway Service to bridge next generation IoT device data with industry leading Cloud Services. IoT Services built for Developers by IoT Developers.

http://www.linkedin.com/company/tartabit/

Copyright  2021 Tartabit LLC. All rights reserved. Tartabit, Tartabit IoT Bridge and all associated logos are trademarks of Tartabit LLC in the United States and other countries. Other names used herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.
"The websites are designed to empower users with the information they need to excel with title joint ventures and their careers."

Title Alliance, Ltd., a nationwide family of affiliated title insurance agencies, launched new online hubs this month - featuring the rollout of revitalized corporate and careers websites to highlight its leading title and escrow services. The refreshed digital presence comes as Title Alliance is experiencing rapid growth within its Family of Companies.

The new websites at http://www.titlealliance.com and http://www.titlealliancecareers.com highlight what sets Title Alliance apart from its competitors, a commitment to forming innovative joint ventures that operate efficiently and with the highest standards of responsibility and integrity. In addition to the main website, the Careers portal is a one-stop resource for Title Alliance job openings as the company seeks enthusiastic and skilled title professionals to support its operations across the country.

At Title Alliance, we believe in continuous improvement, and our refreshed websites are a visible example of our commitment to growth in all facets of this exciting industry, said Jim Campbell, Chief Executive Officer of Title Alliance. The websites are designed to empower users with the information they need to excel with title joint ventures and their careers. I invite you to visit our websites to find out more about this exciting chapter in our companys history - and how you can be a part of it!

With a focus on interactivity, the websites include several video features on getting to know the Title Alliance family and why Title Alliance partners value the personalized experience and competitive advantage they gain from operating as a joint venture. For the latest job opportunities and why a growing number of Realtors, lenders and builders are choosing to form partnerships with Title Alliance, be sure to check out the new websites today!

About Title Alliance:

Title Alliance, Ltd., has been forming successful single and multi-state joint ventures with lenders, Realtors and builders since 1983. We work with our partners to establish in-house title and settlement operations, dramatically enhancing their customer service and increasing their profit. Started and headquartered in Media, Pa., Title Alliances family of companies are currently in 11 states and across 60 offices. More information at http://www.titlealliance.com.


The study clearly shows that our customers benefit from the flexibility of our Enterprise Service Management solution

Today Matrix42 released the commissioned Total Economic Impact study conducted by Forrester Consulting, which concludes that the Matrix42 Enterprise Service Management (ESM) solution provides an increased ROI when switching from third-party vendors. The robust software assists companies with their digital transformation while delivering a high net present value and an impressive three-year 51 percent ROI.

A highly valued Matrix42 customer, a well-known international automotive supplier, sat down with Forrester consultants to discuss their experience using Matrix42 ESM. With the goal to successfully navigate an increasingly complex IT landscape, this company switched to Matrix42 ESM away from a very well-known third-party provider. The prerequisite for the investment was a substantial cost reduction while maintaining the same scope of services. According to the interview, the switch resulted in more transparency, increased flexibility, and an overall improvement in IT governance.

The Forrester framework provides potential customers with insights into the cost, benefit, flexibility, and risk factors of ESM implementations; and evaluates the impact of migrating to Matrix42 ESM. The results of the latest Forrester study are very promising. Fabian Henzler, VP Products at Matrix42, explains, The study clearly shows that our customers benefit from the flexibility of our Enterprise Service Management solution. Apart from cost savings, process automation also significantly increases employee productivity and relieves the workload of the IT service desk. Were very delighted with this result. Companies interested in our services can leverage this report to gain a sound insight into the numerous benefits of our solution from a costbenefit perspective.

Benefits of migrating to Enterprise Service Management

The Forrester study highlighted the following benefits from migrating to Matrix42 Enterprise Service Management:

Businesses can achieve a cost reduction compared to solutions from other providers, especially with regard to licensing, cloud, infrastructure, and support costs.

Both end users and IT staff benefit from Matrix42 ESM. End-user productivity increases due to the ten percent savings in the amount of time worked. The high level of automation bolsters the IT service desk efficiency by 33 percent.

In addition, there are productivity gains by reducing the off boarding workload by 20 percent.

At the same time, automation and self-service reduce IT service tickets and the time and effort required to process change requests by 15 percent each.

A benefit of the Matrix42 solution that cannot be quantified is greater end-user acceptance of the software through a better understanding of the service. In turn, this leads to optimized business results and an enhanced customer experience. Improved incident and change management means system availability is more stable, which benefits both customers and employees. Employees also gain greater data integrity and availability, which facilitates decision-making. The new ticketing system also results in a reduction in overall end-user wait time by up to three days.

The full study can accessed here: https://www.matrix42.com/en/resources/market-studies/total-economic-impact-of-matrix42-enterprise-service-management-136934?utm_source=Press

About Matrix42

Matrix42 supports organizations in digitalizing their employees work environments and making them more secure. Our digital workspace experience software manages devices, applications, processes, and services in a simple, secure, and compliant manner. This innovative software seamlessly integrates physical, virtual, mobile, and cloud-based work environments into existing infrastructures.

Matrix42 AG is headquartered in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and sells and implements software solutions worldwide with the help of local and global partners. For further information, visit: http://www.matrix42.com
Dynamicweb, a leading eCommerce Suite, including a PIM system, provider in the mid-size and enterprise industry, announced today the partnership with Zington, a well-known Swedish Digital Transformation leader with expertise within Business, Technology & Experience.

his partnership strengthens the Dynamicweb brand in the Swedish market and allows Dynamicweb's fast-growing customer base to get local support with their digital transformation and implementation of the Dynamicweb eCommerce Suite. Zington brings a wealth of knowledge in this area and helps create the best possible digital user experience that drives both your brand and business forward.

Most recently Rodin & Co has signed with Zington Group for a project involving the Dynamicweb PIM solution. Rodin & Co is a key supplier in Norway within the auto equipment, workshop equipment and service industry. With a big assortment, including lots of variants, a PIM-solution will help Rodin & Co decrease manual complexity and scale their product data accuracy and product data quality.

We are excited to continue our collaboration with Zington in the accelerated Swedish B2B eCommerce market! We see increased movement and need for digital transformation in the B2B wholesale market, as well as in construction, electronics and the spare parts & aftermarket product industry, areas in which Zington brings a wealth of experience. Says Christian Beer, CEO and co-founder of Dynamicweb.

We at Zington are pleased to announce the collaboration with Dynamicweb. We are convinced that together we will be able to offer more companies an efficient platform for their digital business. Dynamicweb has done an excellent job in providing a platform that is both easy to implement and has great possibility to scale up. That is something that is in great demand. At Zington, we look forward to a continued and successful collaboration, says Robin Fredriksson, Head of Sales Marketing and Commerce.

About Dynamicweb

Dynamicweb offers a cloud-based eCommerce Suite. It enables customers to deliver better digital customer experiences and to scale ecommerce success through our Content Management, Digital Marketing, Ecommerce, and Product Information Management solutions.

Dynamicwebs 300+ partners, 200+ employees in offices all around the globe are proud to support well over 4.000 brands, which includes leading brands like Lego Wear, Vredestein, Unilever, Winnebago, LOreal, Flying Tiger, Toyota, Europcar, and Skanska. Built on Dynamicweb, these customers are empowered to gain lifelong customer relations, increase revenue and grow their brands.

Learn more at Dynamicweb.com.

About Zington

Zington  nearly 250 committed digital consultants, fully focused on bringing our clients forward. Towards digital leadership. Through years of experience with digitalisation projects across a range of industries we have accumulated the knowledge and skills required to manage a companys digital ecosystem. We make everyday life easier for our clients customers, co-workers and partners, by creating a positive brand experience and enhancing efficiency as a result.

At Zington, we are united by a strong entrepreneurial spirit and mindset. We are sincere when we say that we aim to acquire an in-depth understanding of each clients business. That is how we enable the full potential of technology for your specific operations. It is also due to our high-touch, and personalised engagement with clients that we have achieved recognition within our industry.

We have breadth and depth of technical experience, are well-known for our precision in delivery, always focus on the client and are strongly committed to create profitability and new business opportunities for our clients.

Learn more at Zingtongroup.com
German-Bliss dashboard designed by Zinrelo We love Zinrelos structured approach to create an optimized loyalty program. commented Alex German, Marketing manager  German-Bliss Equipment. We were able to increase the number of repeat purchasers significantly which has helped us increase repeat purchase revenues by 85.10%.

COVID-19 has had a negative impact on many businesses. When the business cash inflow becomes acute, marketing budgets are the first to take a hit. According to Forbes, acquiring new customers can be 5x more expensive than retaining existing customers. A limited marketing budget and pressure to keep a steady revenue stream highlights the importance of loyal customers. With an objective to improve customer retention and repeat purchase revenues, German-Bliss Equipment launched their rewards program: Parts Advantage Rewards System.

The Rewards System awards customers loyalty points for completing certain activities. These points are then redeemed for rewards. Balancing the accrual rate of loyalty points and pay-out rate for rewards was a delicate act because too much of either could disrupt profit margins. Additionally, if the points and rewards were not optimal, the program would not be attractive to the customers! Zinrelos data sciences team addressed both these issues by analyzing German-Bliss Equipments past purchase data to help set up an optimized program.

Zinrelo identified activities that were best suited to increase customer engagement. These activities included purchases made on website, referrals, birthday bonus, welcome bonus, win-back bonus and sharing on Facebook. All these activities were simple to execute for the customers and created a great top of the mind recall. A tier-based program accelerated the points earning capability and created exclusivity for the top customers. This was a big a hit with repeat purchasers. Customers could exchange the accumulated points for attractive coupons to save more with every additional purchase. The engagement activities, benefits of tiers and the available rewards were responsible for the customer retention to increase by 87.32% at the end of Q1-2021.

We love Zinrelos structured approach to create an optimized loyalty program. commented Alex German, Marketing manager  German-Bliss Equipment. We were able to increase the number of repeat purchasers significantly which has helped us increase repeat purchase revenues by 85.10%.

Zinrelos loyalty program ensures customers are engaged and deeply connected with your brand. Such loyal customers have a massive positive impact on revenues. said Samir Palnitkar, VP of Customer Success at Zinrelo, We are empowering businesses to create personalized & data driven rewards programs with ease.

About German-Bliss Equipment:

Since 1940, German-Bliss Equipment has grown from Central Illinois choice for tractors, excavators, skid steers, lawn mowers, and other utility vehicles to a premier online dealer of replacement parts and components for a wide range of equipment. Spanning from Befco and Bush Hog parts for mowers to Bradco and Sweepster parts for attachments and sweepers, German-Bliss Equipment is the trusted online parts dealer for timely delivery at an affordable price. They have the largest selections of land pride parts for mowers, rotary cutters, tillers, and other land pride machines.

About Zinrelo:

Zinrelo is a modern-day, loyalty rewards platform that maximizes repeat sales and per-customer revenue through a 360-degree customer engagement. Zinrelo unlocks customer loyalty across multiple dimensions including transactional, social, referral, engagement, behavioral and emotional loyalty. It supports omni-channel deployments that span across ecommerce, physical stores, phone orders and more.

Zinrelo uses deep data analytics to create a custom, highly optimized loyalty program. Advanced machine learning algorithms are used to identify customer clusters and targeted campaign strategies for these segments. Hundreds of businesses are using Zinrelo to leapfrog their competition and gain market share. Zinrelo has been consistently rated as a leader in loyalty management software as reflected in the current ranking on various review platforms.

To launch a data driven loyalty program, contact Zinrelo at https://www.zinrelo.com/ or info@zinrelo.com.
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind.  Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb on Monday (June 28) appointed the Purdue University Board of Trustees' new student member and reappointed three current trustees.

Mark Gee of Johnston, Iowa, was appointed to serve a two-year term as the boards student trustee. Michael Berghoff, JoAnn Brouillette and Vanessa Castagna were reappointed to serve three-year terms. All appointments are effective Thursday (July 1).

Gee is a Purdue graduate student pursuing a masters degree in agricultural and biological engineering. He aspires to engineer sustainable biological systems through the development of plants and environmentally friendly technology. Gee was a Beering Scholar as an undergraduate student at Purdue, earning three bachelors degrees in biological engineering, biochemistry and agronomy in 2019.

Gee created and hosted the first Honors Alumni panel, which helps undergraduates learn from the experience of successful alumni, and he has been involved with Purdue Space Day, the Purdue World Food Prize Youth Institute and the Reading is Leading program for elementary school students. As a senior, he was selected to Mortar Board. He also has sung in the Purdue All Campus Community Choir. Gee currently serves as the graduate student social chair for agricultural and biological engineering.

Before returning to graduate school at Purdue, Gee worked for two years as a research engineer for PowerPollen in Iowa and Puerto Rico. In addition, he completed internships with Corteva Agriscience in Johnston, Iowa; the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico; and MS Swaminathan Research Foundation in India.

The student trustee is the student representative to the Board of Trustees, serves on the boards Academic and Student Affairs Committee and Physical Facilities Committee, and has an equal vote on all actions taken by the board.

Berghoff, of Indianapolis, was appointed to the Board of Trustees in 2009 and has served as chairman since 2015. He is a 1985 graduate of Purdue with a bachelors degree in industrial management. Berghoff is founder and president of Lenex Steel Corp., the largest steel fabricator in the region, which is headquartered in Indianapolis.

Brouillette, of Lafayette, Indiana, has served on the board since 2006. She is managing partner and president of Demeter LP, a privately held agricultural and commercial warehouse firm headquartered in Fowler, Indiana. Brouillette also serves as chairman of the Indiana Chamber of Commerce.

Castagna is one of three alumni trustees, having first been elected by the Purdue Alumni Association in 2013. She received a bachelors degree in psychology and speech communication from Purdue in 1971. Castagna is a longtime retail leader and executive, working for blue chip Fortune 50 retail companies. She also serves as member and past chairman of the Purdue University Band and Orchestras Advisory Board.

A news release from the governors office is available online.

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 purdue.edu.

Writer: Tom Schott, tschott@purdue.edu

Source: Office of the Board of Trustees, 765-494-9710, trustees@purdue.edu
Purdue addresses concerns about civics literacy with new programming

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind.  When it comes to addressing the nations civic literacy, there may be no better resource than C-SPAN, the nonprofit television network that covers political and policy events, known for offering your unfiltered view of government. When it comes to harnessing C-SPANs content, there is no better place than the Center for C-SPAN Scholarship & Engagement at Purdue University.

Part of the Brian Lamb School of Communication, the Center for C-SPAN has launched a podcast charting the history and principles of the United States governmental system.

The series, titled My Constitution, was created as part of the Purdues Civics Literacy Proficiency program, a set of activities designed to support the universitys efforts to graduate a knowledgeable and engaged citizenry.

With over 2 million podcasts (and over 48 million episodes) currently available online, the creators of My Constitution knew they would have to make something special. The result is a blend of academic rigor and creative storytelling designed to be both informative and interesting.

We knew that we wanted these to be amazing, to be accurate and to be above the fold, says Connie Doebele, managing director of the Center for C-SPAN Scholarship & Engagement at Purdue, who oversaw the podcasts production.

With a start in radio followed by more than 25 years as an executive producer for C-SPAN, Doebele has experience presenting political discussion in a way that keeps the audience tuned-in.

What we really wanted to do with these was to tell stories. We dont go in and say, This happened, then this happened and then this happened. Thats not a good story or a good podcast, she says.

Doebele believes the storytelling format of My Constitution offers a way into understanding, not only the facts, but the effects of the American story.

Purdue President Mitch Daniels said during a recent interview on C-SPANs Washington Journal that the goal of Purdues Civics Literacy Proficiency program should be to teach beyond the facts of American history and government.

It should not be limited to simply understanding the mechanics of our system, Daniels says. The why? is just as important.

Doebele says My Constitution helps demonstrate why the American system is built the way it is by showing the effects it has on real people.

Its easy to think of American history just as a topic, but there are real people at the heart of that history, she says. We leave in the details about the people involved  what happened after the cases were decided and elections were finished.

Though committed to bringing American heart and spirit to the project, Doebele knew they needed the series to live up to Purdues reputation of educational excellence.

To write the episodes, we wanted to bring in an expert who had already demonstrated excellence in teaching issues of U.S. political history and the Constitution, Doebele says.

The Center for C-SPAN selected Peter Watkins, who was approaching the end of a limited-term lectureship in Purdues Department of Political Science. Doebele says she had heard about Watkins from students who raved about his classes on the Constitution. Watkins is now the academic program manager in the political science department.

To ensure the scripts remained accurate and objective, each episode was reviewed by multiple experts, usually including Robert Browning, professor of communication and political science, and director of the C-SPAN Archives, Doebele says.

The podcast series is one of three ways students at Purdue can fulfill the Civics Literacy Proficiency requirement. Other options are to take an approved course or attend a number of approved events. Additionally, a general test on civics knowledge is required. Purdues Board of Trustees recently voted to make the program a graduation requirement for all students admitted for and after fall of 2021.

My Constitution begins with the nations foundational history, including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, before moving to basics of governmental structure, including the separation of powers and federalism. The series also works through principles of freedom still in conversation today, including voting rights, the freedom to marry and freedom of speech. Each of the 12 episodes is about 15 minutes long and is accompanied by an interactive transcript, guiding questions and links to supplementary reading and viewing materials.

A very C-SPAN way of doing things

Though Doebele is the primary narrator of the series, she says organizers tried to bring in as many voices as possible. Whenever possible, episodes include audio clips from the C-SPAN Archives, interviews with firsthand sources and conversations with outside experts.

This is a very C-SPAN way of doing it, Doebele says. A lot of people want to be the ones constantly telling the story; we like to be the ones who step back and let the real people who are involved tell the story themselves.

This was easier for some episodes than others.

The episode Storm Center: The Supreme Court, features a new interview with C-SPAN founder Brian Lamb, Purdue alum and namesake of the Brian Lamb School of Communication. Lambs reflection on the issue of cameras in the Supreme Court is woven through the episode, which also features audio from various justices, author David M. OBrien and Lambs 1988 congressional testimony.

Other episodes feature emotive and insightful clips, such as crowds singing on the steps of the Supreme Court during Obergefell v. Hodges, a 2015 case considering the rights of same-sex couples to marry, but they had to get creative for some of the earlier topics.

The C-SPAN Archives simply doesnt have audio of Benjamin Franklin speaking, Doebele says. But we made it work.

Though producing a video series would have been easy using the archives, which currently holds 268,000 hours of televised C-SPAN content, Doebele felt that an audio series was the way to reach both students and anyone interested in tuning in.

A podcast seemed kind of fresh and new, something portable and accessible, and more to the C-SPAN style than putting together a book, Doebele says. Just like blending the academic with storytelling, it feels like a marrying of the traditional and the future in a way that meets students where they are.

Issues of civics literacy have received a lot of attention since the 2016 election. According to the University of Pennsylvanias Annenberg Public Policy Center, only 39% of Americans can name all three branches of government. A 2019 survey from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation found that Vermont was the highest-preforming state on a civics literacy exam, yet only 53% of the state received a grade of 60% or higher. One report says only 16 states require high school students to pass a civics exam in order to graduate.

My Constitution is currently available for listen or download on the Center for C-SPANs Civics Literacy Initiative website. More information about the center is available online.

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: Christy McCarter

Media contact: Amy Patterson Neubert, 765-412-0864, apatterson@purdue.edu

Source: Connie Doebele, cdoebele@purdue.edu

Journalists visiting campus : Journalists should follow Protect Purdue protocols and the following guidelines:
Aiming to boost signal strength of next-generation networks in densely populated urban and suburban markets, Technicolor Connected Home has introduced what it says is revolutionary 5G Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) consumer premises equipment (CPE).





In outlinining the rationale for the launch of the launch of the 5G Omni Outdoor CPE, the company said that as 5G spectrum auctions continue to take place in many countries, 5G networks are being rolled out at an unprecedented pace. It added that traditionally, 4G and 5G outdoor CPEs require roof mounting, accurate pointing, and line-of-sight, making their installation very complex and costly especially given the need for a truck roll from an engineering professional installer who must spend several hours at the customers home.To address these issues, Technicolors new equipment is designed to enable telecommunication operators to deliver broadband services to their residential and enterprise customers through 5G wireless connectivity and attain the benefits of the newly available capacity in the C-band (around 3.5GHz).The equipment is designed to work in densely populated environments and can cope with signal interference and reflection and is said to have garnered significant interest from operators looking to replace existing DSL installations in places where fibre may not be planned soon.The 5G Omni Outdoor CPE is equipped with an Outdoor5G antenna system that does not require line-of-sight alignment and therefore doesnt need to be installed on the roof. The outdoor unit (ODU) can be wall-mounted close to the window, or attached to the balcony railing to deliver superior 5G speeds from these locations. Deployed outdoors, the CPE terminates the 5G connection and delivers the broadband service into the home through any indoor residential router such as Technicolor GAZELLE Ethernet products.We are leveraging our experience in deploying over 2 million units of LTE-enabled CPEs, to offer an innovative 5G FWA solution that can reduce subscriber acquisition costs while meeting the burgeoning demand for reliable broadband access generated by the work-at-home paradigm, said Girish Naganathan, SVP, Technicolor Connected Home broadband product unit.As Technicolors CPE unit was rolling out the 5G kit, high dynamic range technology firm Advanced HDR by Technicolor announced it would continue to provide its HDR technology to Sinclair Broadcast Group operated stations, with WNUV the CW Baltimore the latest station to incorporate ATSC 3.0 -powered NEXTGEN TV capabilities featuring Advanced HDR.
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For the first time in Domino Sugars century in Baltimore, a Black woman is running the refinery
At the smallest scale, the tony community of Buckhead, Ga., may be seceding from Atlanta. Mayor Keisha Bottoms' anti-anti-crime strategy has led to a predictable criminal surge.
Back in the 1980s, comparative-literature majors at my university had to take a required course in literary theory. This courseLit 130, if memory servesoffered prospective scholars a series of frames and theories that could be applied to the reading of books. This was the heyday of deconstructionismessentially a form of highly pretentious close reading, imported from Franceand so we read quite a few texts looking for things that interested deconstructionists. But we also read Freudians, Marxists, feminists, and others.
John F. Kerry, the special presidential envoy for climate, said only months ago that those losing fossil fuel jobs in coal and hydraulic fracturing will find they have a better choice of jobs either in the solar industry or as wind turbine technicians.

That was then. Now, a wind blade manufacturing plant located in Aberdeen, South Dakota, has announced it is shutting its doors permanently in less than two months.

The disappearance of Molded Fiber Glass will displace over 300 workers and their families. It marks another major loss of energy jobs in the state following President Joe Biden's halting of the Keystone pipeline on the first day of his administration.

MFG said in a news release that the closure will happen because of changing market conditions, foreign competition and proposed revisions to tax policies affecting the wind energy industry in the United States.

Since 2007, the Aberdeen plant has been producing wind turbine blades. The plant will remain in operation for the next two months until it has fulfilled existing orders.

A family member of one of the workers said they were informed of the closure about two weeks ago. Employees were completely taken off guard by the announcement. She was also perplexed by it. "They should be swimming in orders right now," she said.

In 2017, MFG threatened to kill 400 jobs at the plant and shut down because of the "proposed revisions to tax policies." At that time, Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., stopped the closure by pushing for revisions of the 2017 tax bill to be more favorable to the industry.

Thune, in an emailed statement, said it is troubling that at a time when wind energy is seeing record investment, this growth is not translating to American jobs. It's especially hard for those working these good-paying jobs in Aberdeen to face uncertainty yet again. Thune criticized Biden's statement from his address to Congress: "There's no reason," the president said, "the blades for wind turbines can't be built in Pittsburgh instead of Beijing." But Beijing is getting all the business.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance's recent ranking of global wind turbine manufacturers last year showed that seven of the top 10 wind turbine manufacturers are Chinese companies. General Electric, an American company, is first, but Goldwind of China is in second place. The study also found more than half of the world's newly installed wind power capacity was built in China in 2020.

Last month, Thune proposed an amendment to the Democrats' expansive energy tax credit bill, requiring the administration to certify that U.S. manufacturers would not be undercut by foreign suppliers using low-cost labor and creating higher emissions. MFG, in closing its 14-year-old plant, cited precisely these two adverse factors as its reasons.

One day after the announcement, TC Energy, the Canadian pipeline company that sought to build the Keystone XL pipeline, announced that it was terminating the project, a 1,700-mile pipeline intended to carry 800,000 barrels of oil a day from Alberta to the Gulf Coast, passing through five states, including South Dakota.

Although the wind and pipeline industries are different sides of the climate change coin, both were considered economic lifelines to small-town South Dakota. Both promised economic stability and a revenue stream that would keep many towns hopping until tourism hit its stride once again.

"We are a smallish community of 28,000 people, so 300 jobs is a big deal," said the family member of a worker. "Granted, two facilities in town, 3M and Banner Engineering, have recently doubled capacity, so most of the hourly employees should be absorbed by that," she said. "However, some of these people have been with the company since 2008. How do you start over after 13 years?"

It is a question that has been asked by many Americans in manufacturing jobs, who have had to compete with cheaper overseas products for generations. And it is a question many workers in the energy industry may be asking soon.

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The crisis of illegal immigrationto give this calamity its true nameis growing increasingly grave. The reason is no mystery. The Biden administration replaced policies that staunched the illegal flow of migrants with policies that actually encourage it.

Instead of securing the U.S. border, the administration says it wants to deal with the root cause, desperation in Central America. That wont work for two reasons. First, the administration doesnt have the tools to markedly change conditions in Central America. Second, even if the policies could stimulate economic growth, improve safety, and reduce corruptionspoiler alert, they cantthey wont have any significant impact for years. Under even the most optimistic scenarios, they couldnt reduce immigration anytime soon. Its a policy based on a mirage.

The Biden team is certainly right that bad conditions in Mexico and Central America drive immigration. But its easy to show thats the wrong explanation for our current crisis. The reason, as all social scientists know, is that you cannot explain change with a constant. What is constant here? Poverty, corruption, and danger in Mexico and Central America. Since those root causes have not changed over the past year, they cannot explain the dramatic rise in illegal immigration since Biden took office. What does explain it? The administrations decision not to secure the southern border and to give up any serious effort at preventing illegal immigration. Migrants have gotten the message, and they are coming north in unprecedented numbers.

The media, always eager to protect their favorite political party, never asked Vice President Kamala Harris three crucial questions after her root causes trip to Guatemala and Mexico.

Can the U.S. really do much to improve conditions there?

Would relatively modest improvements have much impact on migration? And, crucially,

How long before these policies can have a major impact, if they work at all?

Back in the real world, the best Biden-Harris can expect is some small, slow improvements. Desirable as those are for humanitarian reasons, they would have no effect on migration for decades.

Meanwhile, the flood continues unabated. When the administration repeats its false mantra the border is closed, they should add the Monty Python phrase Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge.

Normally, the flood of illegals would recede at least briefly during the summer because Mexicos scorching temperatures make the trek so dangerous. This year, however, the caravans keep coming. Why? Because migrants see a window of opportunity that might close if the U.S. comes to its senses. So do coyotes, who profit from trafficking humans and drugs. They need not worry. The Biden administration is locked into its catastrophic policies and its lovefest with their partys left wing, which refuses even to acknowledge the problem and would rebel at tough policies to prevent illegal crossings. They refuse even to call them illegal. Too harsh. Too accurate.

It is unclear whether administration officials actually wanted more illegal immigrants or simply wanted to undo everything Donald Trump did and hope for the best. Whatever their goals, they quickly unwound all Trumps immigration policies without checking to see what was working. They didnt talk with border patrol agents (they are now firing the leaders) or consult with elected officials along the bordernot even the Democrats. They didnt ask anyone in Mexico City if the Trump policies were working and sustainable. They didnt check with development experts to see if aid would have much impact. Due diligence was replaced with utter negligence.

What immigration policies did the Biden administration change? What are the results so far?

The Wall

Trumps policy: Build an impermeable wall in the most accessible locations, despite strong opposition from Democrats.

Bidens policy: Stop building the wall on day one. Stop building even portions that were already funded and under construction. Better to waste the money than to complete a successful project.

The result: Gaping holes made illegal crossing easy. Ceasing construction sent a powerful signal to potential migrants that U.S. policy was now much more lax.

The Rhetoric

Trumps policy: We will keep you out of the country. Migrants and coyotes believed him because he also implemented tough anti-immigration policies.

Bidens policy during the campaign: We are a welcoming country; Trumps policies are inhumane. During a 2019 Democratic debate on ABC, he told Univisions Jorge Ramos, "We're a nation that says, 'You want to flee, and you're fleeing oppression, you should come.'"

Bidens policy two months into office: You can still come illegally, but please wait a little. As Alejandro Mayorkas, secretary of Homeland Security, put it, We are not saying, Dont come. We are saying, Dont come now.

Bidens policy five months into office: Please dont come.

The result: The Biden-Harris dont come message has gone unheeded. Without concrete policies to back it up, people dont believe it.

Remain in Mexico While Seeking Asylum in the U.S.

Trumps policy: Negotiated agreement Mexico, requiring asylum seekers to stay there until their U.S. application was decided. Formally known as the Migrant Protection Protocols.

Trumps policy: Get Mexico to guard the U.S. border. As a 2019 Reuters headline put it, Mexico says it has deployed 15,000 forces in the north to halt-U.S.-bound migration.

Bidens policy: End the agreement with Mexico, which also withdrew its troops, leaving the border essentially unguarded on both sides.

The result: After Biden switched policies, hundreds of thousands of additional asylum seekers have crossed into the U.S. instead of waiting in Mexico. Since only a federal judge can decide their cases and since the backlog is now four-to-six years and growing, these migrants are simply released into the U.S. and told to return in a few years for a court date. Some do; some dont. Those who do attend are mostly turned down and deported.

Refuse Entry Because of Communicable Diseases

Trumps policy: Under Title 42 of the U.S. Code, customs officers were authorized to prohibit entry of adults who might have a communicable disease such as COVID. Almost three-quarters of adult migrants at the border were refused entry.

Bidens policy: End the use of Title 42 this summer.

The result: The change will lead to an immediate surge in illegal immigrants. No one knows if that will lead to more communicable diseases and preventable deaths.

Grant Non-Immigrant Visas

Trumps policy: Sharply limited visas because they posed a risk of displacing and disadvantaging United States workers. (Proclamations 10014, 10052)

Bidens policy: Revoked Trumps policy a month after taking office because it prevents family reunification and harms industries in the United States that utilize talent from around the world.

The result: The numbers of visa admittees will jump sharply, returning to Obama-era levels. According to the State Departments Visa Office: From fiscal years 2016 through 2020, immigrant visas ... declined from 617,752 to 240,526. Nonimmigrant visas declined from 10,381,491 to 4,013,210. Among specific immigrant categories, visas for immediate relatives fell from 315,352 to 108,292. The Biden administration is moving back to the higher figures.

Prohibition on Entry From Some Countries, aka Muslim Travel Ban

Trumps policy: Utter chaos shortly after inauguration when he announced Executive Order 13769, Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry. Most countries on the banned list had majority-Muslim populations. After courts injunctions, Trump issued a replacement order, added some non-Muslim countries, and faced still more legal difficulties. The administrations stated rationale was the countries were not banned for religious reasons (there were lots of Muslim-majority countries not on the banned list) but solely because they could not reliably vet travelers and identify terrorists, which were standard U.S. requirements. In 2018, a 5-4 vote of the Supreme Court allowed the Trump program to go into force.

Bidens policy: Ending the court-approved travel ban on Inauguration Day.

Result: No problems with Bidens policy, so far.

Will There Be Political Consequences?

Whatever the motives for Bidens immigration policies, the results have been a fiasco. Nothing is halting the tsunami of illegal immigrants, dangerous drugs, and gang members from coming. Nothing is stopping the human traffickers from scaling up their despicable trade or molesting women and children en route. The effects will be felt across the U.S. as more illegal immigrants move into communities, more gang members set up operations, and more opioids and hard drugs hit the streets.

Biden and the Democrats are likely to pay a political price, even as the media downplays the issue. You can already hear yelps from Democrats representing border districts. Among national figures, the worst hit will be Vice President Harris, who has been the hapless point person for these hapless policies.

In Harris defense, she has been handed a no-win job. The administration created the problem, and there is no way they can ameliorate it without infuriating their base. To change policies dramatically would be to concede a huge, unforced error. Worse, it would force Biden to revert to some of Trumps policies because they actually worked.

That wont happen.

Instead, Biden will cling to his current, failed policies as long as he can. Polls already show voters are unhappy. What they want is a government that fulfills its primary responsibility: provide citizens with a safe environment. They believe our countryany countryhas the right to decide who can enter and to demand that they come here legally. If this bunch of politicians wont meet that responsibility, many voters are bound to think, Maybe I should vote for somebody who will.
With the For the People Act stalled in the Senate, Democrats are poised to make another push on voting legislation in the coming weeks. They say their roughly 900 pages of federal voting mandates and other provisions are all that stands between our democracy and an irreversible era of Republican authoritarianism  bipartisanship be damned.

Yet, merits of the bill aside, the fact remains that attempting a national rewrite of federal election law with a razor-thin majority is unlikely to succeed, and even if it did, could dangerously backfire on our democracy. Instead, Congress should follow the example of several states by forging a sustainable two-party solution that puts voters first and keeps election administration beyond partisan politics.

The fate of our democracy hinges more on trust than on laws. Like the currency we use every day, the value of our vote derives from our faith in it. Not only will skirting the filibuster further accelerate the ongoing tit-for-tat erosion of our governing institutions , but new voting rules jammed through by one party will inevitably be viewed as election-rigging by roughly half the country and further undermine confidence in electoral outcomes.

While Sen. Joe Manchins compromise framework is a helpful way forward, any viable federal voting solution must be developed alongside pro-democracy Republicans. Which ones? Consider the eight GOP senators who either voted to convict at President Trumps impeachment trial or voted in favor of the Jan. 6 Commission. Earning their support and adding at least two more to surpass 60 votes should not be an impossible task for legislation that would be much less politically perilous among the Republican primary electorate.

These Republican senators must soon put forward their own plan. We know what theyre against, but what are they for? To her credit, Lisa Murkowski has repeatedly stated her support for restoring the Voting Rights Act, along with provisions for early voting and no-excuse absentee voting. Her leadership is a foundation on which to build.

Unfortunately, like nearly every other national issue, democracy itself has become polarized between two competing, self-serving narratives from both political parties. As usual, Americans are presented with a false choice: in this case, between voting access and security.

Fueled by unsubstantiated assertions of a stolen election in 2020, Republican attempts at the state level to restrict voting access and meddle with election administration are both predictable and inexcusable. Though the impact of portions of these new laws has at times been greatly exaggerated, the impact of other aspects has not  and one can understand the moral outrage around any attempts to make it harder to vote, especially from Americans who have historically been disenfranchised.

But where Democrats see a Big Lie, Republicans see a series of smaller ones  including how the label of voter suppression has been applied as a catch-all to broadly popular voter ID laws that research demonstrates has a negligible effect on turnout and to routine voter list maintenance that is required under law. Republicans point out that some of the most restrictive voting policies are those already in place in blue states like Connecticut and Delaware, while some of the best models exist in red states like Utah and Ohio.

The current national debate on voting  which is often divorced from the realities of election administration  overshadows our nations history of bipartisan voting legislation and broad agreement that is still possible today.

This year, Kentuckys Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear (pictured) and Republican Secretary of State Mike Adams championed legislation that permanently established early voting while prohibiting so-called ballot harvesting. In Vermont, Republican Gov. Phil Scott signed bipartisan legislation that will send a mail ballot to every registered voter prior to the general election while requiring a signature match. Those who do not believe bipartisanship is possible certainly have a way of proving themselves right, but these states demonstrate otherwise.

Congress itself has passed bipartisan voting legislation in recent decades, which included provisions to streamline voter registration, provide funding for updated elections infrastructure, enfranchise service members and citizens abroad, and much more. That included the 1993 National Voter Registration Act , the 2002 Help America Vote Act , the 2010 Military and Overseas Voters Empowerment Act , and the CARES Act of 2020. In addition, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed and reauthorized with strong bipartisan support several times, most recently in 2006 .

How could a bipartisan agreement be found once again today? Republicans are aghast at private funding of election administration in 2020 and have previously supported increased federal funding for elections . In combination with a new Voting Rights Act, Congress could continue to offer additional federal elections funding, on the condition of specific benchmarks for both voting access and voting security. For example, Congress could reward states that offer no-excuse absentee balloting and a week of early in-person voting, along with signature matching (or an equivalent), requiring paper trails and routine auditing.

A congressional compromise on voting will not immediately cure our ailing democracy. A set of proposals that has buy-in from Senate Republicans, however, would at least have a chance of passing and would bring real benefits to voters of all political affiliations  without digging our trust deficit deeper.

Greg Orman is a Kansas entrepreneur, author of A Declaration of Independents, and a former independent candidate for governor and senator of his state. His website is www.greg-orman.com.
Erica Mena is a mom of three.

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The 33-year-old television personality recently welcomed a son with her ex-husband and Love and Hip Hop: New York co-star, Safaree Samuels , amid their divorce.

The new baby is Mena's second child with Samuels. The pair also have a 16-month-old daughter, Safire Majesty, while Mena has a 14-year-old son, King Javien, with Raul Conde.

Samuels shared news of the birth Monday on Instagram alongside a photo of himself holding his baby boy.

"MR Straittt jr is here!!" he captioned the post.

Love & Hip Hop: New York's Papoose and Somaya Reece and Love & Hip Hop: Hollywood's Princess Love were among those to congratulate Mena and Samuels in the comments.

"Congrats to you both brother & sister what a beautiful blessing," Reece wrote.

Mena announced in early May that she was expecting her third child.

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"More Life. Who wants that perfect love story anyway," she wrote in a since-deleted post on Instagram. "Marriage - It's not easy at all. But having a family of your own makes up for it all."

Mena and Samuels married in October 2019. News broke in late May that Mena had filed for divorce from Samuels amid her pregnancy.
Stacey McKenzie will not be returning to the judge's table for Season 2 of Canada's Drag Race.

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"#CanadasDragRace fans, we're sad to share that Stacey McKenzie won't be able to return for Season 2 due to COVID-related challenges," the official Twitter account for the competition series said on Monday.

"We'll miss her killer lewks, positive vibes, & energy but know that she'll be cheering on the S2 queens! Stay tuned for updates on our judges soon!" the statement continued.

McKenzie (America's Next Top Model) is the second judge to leave the show for Season 2 following Jeffrey Bowyer Chapman (unREAL), who cannot participate due to filming Disney's Doogie Howser reboot Doogie Kealoha, M.D.

Brooke Lynn Hytes of RuPaul's Drag Race Season 11 remains the only returning judge.

Canada's Drag Race was renewed for a second season in January. The first season ended in September with Priyanka from Toronto being crowned the first-ever Canadian Drag Superstar.
Vanessa Kirby has joined the cast of the new film The Son.

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Variety reported Monday that Kirby, 33, will star with Hugh Jackman and Laura Dern in the new movie.

The Hollywood Reporter confirmed Kirby's casting.

The Son is directed by Florian Zeller. The film is Zeller's followup to his Oscar-nominated 2020 drama The Father.

Like The Father, The Son is based on Zeller's play of the same name. Zeller and Christopher Hampton adapted the screenplay.

The new film follows Peter (Jackman), a man whose busy life with his new partner, Emma (Kirby), and baby is disrupted when his ex-wife, Kate (Dern), shows up with their teenage son, Nicholas. Peter tries to be a better father to the troubled Nicholas, but the weight of his son's condition sets the family on a dangerous course.

"Vanessa Kirby is for me a very great actress: intense, inventive and powerful. I am especially happy to take her on this cinematic adventure," Zeller said in a statement.

Kirby is known for playing Princess Margaret in The Crown Seasons 1-2. She was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress for her performance in the 2020 film Pieces of a Woman.
Traverse City, MI (49684)

Today

Partly cloudy in the morning followed by scattered thunderstorms in the afternoon. Storms may contain strong gusty winds. High 88F. Winds SW at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 40%..

Tonight

Thunderstorms during the evening, then partly cloudy overnight. Low 67F. Winds WSW at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 70%.
I was working at my desk the other day when I turned to look at my girlfriend Caitlin. Sitting across our 430-square-foot apartment, she was visibly and audibly frustrated and muttered, "Shit."

She just started an online course required for graduation at the University of Georgia. I asked her whats wrong.

She told me she needed to put on pants before taking a practice test.

Her course, like many required courses for students, uses Respondus LockDown Browser, one of many course monitoring and test proctoring software that have become all too familiar through the COVID-19 pandemic.

It just asked her to pivot her webcam to show her immediate surroundings, so as to limit her ability to cheat. In addition to preventing her from opening extraneous tabs on her internet browser, LockDown Browser keeps her webcam on when she is accessing course materials.

Online classes predate the coronavirus by decades, yet I never saw or heard of these kinds of programs until the past 18 months. They were not necessary before the pandemic, they are not now, and they should be banned from use.

Caitlin is going to graduate in a year's time, but because of the rapid normalization of programs no better than school-sanctioned spyware, she will only get her degree after being coerced to sacrifice her privacy.

She is far from the first to experience the fury of dealing with a proctoring program torn right from Orwell. Hundreds of thousands of students have been subject to this nonsense just since 2020, and theres no guarantee well be rid of them after the pandemic chaos winds down.

Theres nothing these programs even do to genuinely prevent all cheating, or even a sizable chunk of it. From putting notes on the laptop keyboard to cross-room screen mirroring, the state-of-the-art tech is less of an impenetrable wall and more like a revolving door if you think about how to cheat for longer than 5 minutes.

All of this is not to mention the added toll on students financially and mentally. LockDown Browser is free, but other programs like Proctorio arent, and other ancillary websites that professors seem to require more and more post-pandemic. WebAssign, StatCrunch and other third-party sites, each with fees and subscriptions, add cost to students unannounced until after they enroll in a course.

They rarely provide services that eLC, the official UGA online learning management system included in student fees, cannot. Weve allowed these private companies to insert themselves as middlemen leeching money from students already sinking their present and future finances into school.

For many students with mental health concerns or disabilities, the pandemic promised potential to make school more accessible and less stressful. Then the test monitoring started.

Margaret Lonsway, a second year environmental health science major and student on the autism spectrum, had to pay for ProctorU for her precalculus class.

I didnt like the idea of having someone being able to control my screen, even if it wasnt for that long, Lonsway said.

These programs are doubly unfair to neurodivergent students, as Miami University students point out in their petition to ban the school's use of Proctorio, calling it ableist by design. Any suspicious looks or glances can be flagged as potential cheating. Nevermind that most people would struggle to be self-aware of their eye movement, this is completely discriminatory against students with ADHD, autism and other disabilities.

College, among other things, serves to prepare students for corporate America. Unfortunately, UGA using what you could call proctorware is doing exactly that if trends hold. Companies and corporations have implemented always-on microphone and webcam policies for remote work, capitalizing on our new circumstances to build an omnipresent workplace culture thats indistinguishable from their personal life or free time.

The threat of this software being somehow compromised or abused, and subsequent identity theft or leaking of private information, is a far greater threat than students cheating on tests. Cybersecurity threats are going to grow exponentially as industries and finance become more digitized. If oil pipelines and banks can be hacked, so can Proctorio.

Schools and employers having the expectation of insight to your personal life is not an expectation that we can sustain. My professors have all OK'd open-note tests because they recognize that when students do all their work at home, they cant reasonably prevent it without crossing a line. Students should be able to do schoolwork at home pantsless if they choose, something I cannot believe needs to be argued.

The honor system is not without its flaws, but weve gone all of academic history with it save the past year and a half. We shouldnt stop now. Hopefully, a future is near where COVID-19 is completely behind us. Lets leave proctorware in the past, too.
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Hong Kongs government says it will ban all passenger flights from the U.K. starting Thursday as it seeks to curb the spread of new variants of the coronavirus
Members of the Brattleboro Fire Department visit the St. Michaels Preschool and Youth Summer Camp during the Community Heroes week on Wednesday, June 30, 2021. The members of the fire department went through fire safety with the children and then showed them the equipment that is stored on
Vermont Republican Gov. Phil Scott announces that the state had reached its goal of vaccinating 80 percent of the eligible population. As a result, Scott lifted all remaining COVID-19 restrictions that were imposed to deal with the pandemic.
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Chris Mays is a general assignment reporter for the Brattleboro Reformer. He has been with New England Newspapers Inc. since 2012.
Brattleboro, VT (05301)

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Cloudy early with partial sunshine expected late. High 79F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph..

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A few clouds from time to time. Low 64F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph.
Katelyn Bennett, D.O., Heather Farr, D.O., and Kristy Farmer, D.O., celebrated learning their residency location and specialty during Match Day in March. WVSOMs Class of 2021 consisted of 179 graduates, with a 97 percent residency match rate. Submitted photo.
HARTFORD  A man suffered non-life-threatening injuries in a shooting on Barker Street late Monday afternoon, according to police.

Around 5:30 p.m., patrol officers responded to Hartford Hospital for a call about a gunshot wound victim showing up to be treated, Lt. Aaron Boisvert said.

The victim was a man in his 20s who suffered non-life-threatening injuries, Boisvert said. The victim told officers he was shot in the 100 block of Barker Street, Boisvert said.

The investigation is ongoing.

Anyone with any information is asked to call the police tips line at 860-722-TIPS.
NEW YORK (AP)  Lawyers for the Trump Organization met again Monday with prosecutors in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office in a last bid to forestall a potential indictment stemming from a long-running investigation into the former presidents company.

Trump Organization lawyer Ron Fischetti told The Associated Press the meeting came as a grand jury nears a vote on an indictment this week following a more than two-year investigation into Trump's business affairs.

He said prosecutors have told him Trump himself will not be charged at this time  at least not with what's coming down this week"  but added the investigation is continuing.

There is no indictment coming down this week against the former president," Fischetti said in a telephone interview Monday. "I cant say hes out of the woods yet completely.

The Manhattan district attorneys office declined to comment.

The former Republican president, however, issued a blistering statement in which he derided District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.'s office as rude, nasty, and totally biased in the way they are treating lawyers, representatives, and some of the wonderful long-term employees and people within the Trump Organization.

After hundreds of subpoenas, over 3 million pages of documents, 4 years of searching, dozens and dozens of interviews, and millions of dollars of taxpayer funds wasted, they continue to be in search of a crime," Trump alleged, calling the investigation a continuation of the greatest Witch Hunt of all time.

In recent months, investigators in Vance's office have focused on fringe benefits the company gave to top executives, such as use of apartments, cars and school tuition.

Investigators have scrutinized Trumps tax records, subpoenaed documents and interviewed witnesses, including Trump insiders and company executives.

Another person familiar with the investigation confirmed there were communications between defense lawyers and prosecutors on Monday. The person declined to give any details of the talks.

Such final exchanges are considered formalities that rarely change the course of an investigation in a late stage, suggesting the grand jury is near a vote.

The person was not authorized to discuss the case and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

Fischetti, who did not attend Mondays meeting, said the gathering had been arranged for the Trump Organization  not Donald Trump himself.

Were just waiting, Fischetti said, adding he expects to know this week whether charges will be brought.

The prospective charges this week, he said, are limited to a couple of Trump Org employees who didn't declare taxes on fringe benefits they received. The company itself also could be charged, he added.

Lawyers representing Donald Trump's company also met virtually with prosecutors for more than 90 minutes last Thursday.

It isn't illegal for a company to offer employees tuition help, lease them cars or let them use company-owned apartments, but such arrangements can be subject to income tax.

Fischetti has called the possibility of charges absolutely outrageous and politically motivated. He said it would be extremely unusual for prosecutors to seek criminal charges over unpaid tax on fringe benefits.

Some of the scrutiny has been focused on longtime Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg.

Vances investigation of Weisselberg, 73, stemmed in part from questions about his sons use of a Trump apartment at little or no cost, cars leased for the family and tuition payments made to a school attended by Weisselbergs grandchildren.

Weisselbergs attorney, Mary Mulligan, has declined to comment.

In addition to fringe benefits, prosecutors have looked into whether the Trump Organization lied about the value of real estate holdings to lower taxes or to obtain bank loans or insurance policies on favorable terms. They have also looked into the companys role in paying hush money to two women who say Trump had affairs with them, accusations Trump has denied.
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POTTSVILLE  A judge has dismissed a challenge by a Lackawanna County business to a change to an ordinance that will limit the height of new wind turbines in much of Schuylkill County.

In a one-sentence order, Schuylkill County Judge Cyrus Palmer Dolbin dismissed the challenge raised by Clean Air Generation LLC, North Abington Township, to the county planning commissions refusal to consider its plan for new wind turbines in Frailey, Porter and Tremont townships.

The effect is to uphold the commissioners change to the zoning ordinance that restricts the height of such turbines, which have multiplied in the county and elsewhere to try to harvest wind power as a source of energy that does not use fossil fuels.

Dolbins order does not contain the reasoning behind his ruling.

Clean Air Generation has sought to build dozens of wind turbines on land it controls in western Schuylkill County.

The company had submitted a plan to the county Planning Commission to build approximately 70 such turbines. The commission marked the plan as unfiled because it had been submitted during the time when the commissioners were considering the amendment, which they passed on Feb. 19, 2020.

Clean Air Generation had filed the original lawsuit on Oct. 16, 2019, asking Dolbin to force the commission to consider its application. It filed a subsequent lawsuit after the commissioners adopted the new ordinance.

Dolbin denied the requests to force the commission to consider the plan and to overturn the curative amendment to the ordinance.

The plan had included requests for wind turbines in Frailey, Hegins, Porter and Tremont townships. The commission has jurisdiction over Frailey, Porter and Tremont; Hegins has its own ordinance governing such issues.

The new county ordinance restricts the height and placement of such turbines but does not ban them.

It also has no effect on turbines that already are operating.

The amendment also had implemented new rules for medical marijuana and natural gas compressors. Clean Air Generation specified that it was not challenging those measures in either of its lawsuits.
POTTSVILLE  Preston Lareau sexually assaulted two 8-year-old girls in Tamaqua and Lebanon County, and will pay for it by spending at least 1 years in a state correctional institution, a Schuylkill County judge ruled Monday.

Lareau, 20, of Tamaqua, must spend 1 to five years in a state correctional institution, plus an additional 10 years on probation, President Judge William E. Baldwin decided.

Baldwin also sentenced Lareau to pay costs and $50 to the Criminal Justice Enhancement Account, have no contact with his victims and submit a DNA sample to law enforcement authorities. He made the sentence effective at 9 a.m. July 12 at the request of Lareaus lawyer, William J. Watt III, of Pittston, who said his client needs the time to take care of his medications with the prison.

In addition, Baldwin imposed lifetime Megans Law sanctions on Lareau. However, he ruled Lareau is not a sexually violent predator, which would have triggered even more sever sanctions, when prosecutors decided not to seek that status for him.

The report (from the state Sexual Offenders Assessment Board) came back that he does not meet the criteria of a sexually violent predator, Assistant District Attorney Jennifer N. Foose said.

Lareau did not testify at Mondays hearing and said nothing as he left the courtroom.

He pleaded guilty on March 5 to two counts each of statutory sexual assault, indecent assault, corruption of minors and indecent exposure. Prosecutors withdrew two counts each of rape of a child and involuntary deviate sexual intercourse.

Baldwin recommended that state prison authorities send Lareau to SCI/Pine Grove in Indiana County due to his age and his diminished intellectual capacity.

Tamaqua police charged Lareau with sexually assaulting the girls over two years in the borough and in Palmyra, Lebanon County. Police said they learned of the crimes in August 2019.

Police said both girls could describe what Lareau did to them and what he had them do to him.

The Megans Law sanctions to which Lareau will be subject after he leaves prison require him to provide his name, address, Social Security number, telephone numbers, photograph, employment, any schools he might attend, registration of any vehicles he owns and other information to the Pennsylvania State Police.

Any violation of the sanctions would be an additional crime and subject Lareau to another prosecution.

Megans Law was enacted in Pennsylvania, numerous other states and at the federal level after the July 29, 1994, murder of Megan Nicole Kanka, 7, in Hamilton Township, Mercer County, New Jersey.
A day after the Hazleton Area school board raised taxes, the district learned that Pennsylvania will provide extra funding.

A budget that state lawmakers approved Friday increased Hazleton Areas grants for basic and special education by $4,515,497.

Schools across the state also are set to receive more money.

For Hazleton Area, the new funds reverse projections from a deficit of $3,464,256 to a surplus of $1,051,241.

Another $2,680,251 in federal pandemic relief that the state Legislature authorized for Hazleton Area would more than offset the $2.35 million of revenue from a tax increase that the board approved Thursday.

This is great news, Hazleton Area Business Manager Robert Krizansky said in an email. I wish we had known a week prior to the budget vote.

Asked if the school board might change its budget to reduce or abolish the tax increase, board President Linda DeCosmo said she didnt know if the board is allowed to do that.

DeCosmo, who voted against the tax increase, pointed out that districts are required to enact budgets by June 30.

Andrew Armagost of the Pennsylvania Association of School Business Officials said boards can revise adopted budget budgets.

With an email, Armagost sent the applicable section of the Public School Code, which says:

A board of school directors of a school district may reopen its annual budget for a period of 30 days after the annual General Appropriation Act is enacted to reflect Federal and State allocations for the current fiscal year provided by the annual General Appropriation Act.

State Rep. Tarah Toohil, R-116, Butler Township, who represents part of the Hazleton Area School District, called the state budget increase historic.

The allocation for Hazleton was made without raising state taxes on the people of Pennsylvania, which is particularly important as we exit the pandemic, Toohil said in an email.

Others affected

Lawmakers approved $300 million to spread among 500 school districts. Of that, $100 million will go to the 100 poorest districts.

Locally, Hazleton Area, Panther Valley, Mahanoy Area and Shenandoah Valley are among the 100 poorest districts in the state.

Shenandoah Valley and Panther Valley are two of six school district that allege that Pennsylvania discriminates against them and have a suit pending in Commonwealth Court that asks the state to equalize funding for districts.

Even with the funding increase statewide, Shenandoah Valley is estimated to lose $115,517 in basic education funds.

As one of the poorest districts, however, it would receive $274,303 for a net gain $158,785. Increases for special education and pandemic funds make its total allocation $584,523 more than last year.

Shenandoah Valleys superintendent and business manager did not reply to questions about the cut in basic funds.

Figures are estimates from the Pennsylvania Association of School Business Officials, but wont become official until Gov. Tom Wolf signs the budget, which he said he intends to do.

In February, Wolf, a Democrat, wanted to give schools an additional $1.35 billion by raising the state income tax, a proposal that didnt gain support in the Republican-led House and Senate.

On Friday, some Democratic lawmakers said they would have preferred that the budget spend more of the $7.3 billion that Pennsylvania received from the federal government for pandemic relief.

The state budget saves about $5 billion in pandemic funds for future years.

Schools will receive pandemic funds to make up learning that students missed while studying from home and to offer after-school programs and summer school.

Weatherly Area, which isnt considered among the 100 poorest schools, anticipates a raise of only $71,816 for basic and special education combined, but did get $85,952 for pandemic funds.
Despite reports of a nationwide fireworks shortage heading into the July 4 holiday, local retailers say they are having no trouble getting them, but the price has gone up.

I personally havent had issues, said Melissa Lytle, who checked out customers Monday under a Keystone Fireworks tent at the Fuel Up gas station and convenience store in Minersville.

Shipping delays from China and record-breaking sales from last year have affected the fireworks supply across the country, with one retailer quoted in an Associated Press story stating the shortage is limiting the amount of products he can sell this year.

Lytle said that, while business has been steady, the demand for fireworks has leveled off since last year.

We were busy nonstop last year, she said, adding fountains and firework packages have been particularly popular for the past few years.

A few customers stopped under the tent Monday afternoon to browse the aisles of fireworks for sale. Among them was Gloria Moran, of West West Terrace, who came to buy a package of Turbo fireworks for a July 4 celebration with her grandchildren. She said she didnt have any difficultly finding the pyrotechnics.

I wanted to buy them before they sold out, Moran said.

Tom Griffin, who sells TNT Fireworks under a tent at the Coal Creek Commerce Center in Saint Clair, said Monday afternoon that while there hasnt been a shortage of them, the price has gone up 20% compared to last year. He said the increase is due to a shortage in supplies because of not enough employees to make them. But that hasnt stopped customers from purchasing them.

People are still coming to the tent, he said. They like to see the sparks.

Mike Bixler, owner of Bixler Pyrotechnics, Ashland, said he has an excess of fireworks materials from shows that were canceled last year due to the coronavirus pandemic. Compared to previous years, Bixler said he is doing more shows this year.

Bixler attributes it to people wanting to get out. So far, they have done displays for proms, weddings, graduations and community shows in and around the county. For Independence Day, he expects to do a lot of them.

The number of shows were doing on July 4 is more than normal, Bixler said.
PINE GROVE  A Pine Grove man was killed when his car collided with an SUV Sunday morning on Pleasant Hill Road near Tregea Lane in Pine Grove Township, state police said.

Trooper Zachary McDonald of the Schuylkill Haven station said the crash occurred around 11:40 a.m.

Charles S. Williams, 28, of Pine Grove, was driving a 1998 Dodge Durango south at an apparent high rate of speed when he lost control of the SUV, entered the northbound lane and collided head-on with an oncoming 2008 Nissan Altima driven by Harvey J. Warner, 72, also of Pine Grove, McDonald said.

He said lifesaving measures were performed on Warner but were unsuccessful and that the man was pronounced dead at the scene.

Williams was also injured and was taken to Milton S. Hershey Medical Center.

The extent of his injuries was not known, McDonald said.

The trooper said that he was assisted by firefighters from Ravine, Pine Grove and Suedberg, as well as EMS units from Tremont, Pine Grove and Hegins.

Warner was pronounced dead at the scene by a Schuylkill County deputy coroner.

The investigation into the crash is continuing.
In ruling Wednesday that Brandi Levy was protected by her constitutional free speech rights when she profanely condemned the Mahanoy Area School District, the U.S. Supreme Court rendered a Solomonesque decision.

The district disciplined Levy for a profane rant she posted on social media after not making the schools varsity cheer squad.

The high court, affirming a decision by the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, ruled that public school students speech rights are protected so long as the speech does not risk substantial disruption of or material interference with school activities.

That mirrors the courts decision in a 1969 case in which it overturned an Iowa school districts disciplinary action against students who wore black arm bands to protest the Vietnam war.

Levys rant was more personal than a protest of public policy, but the biggest difference is that it was on social media.

The justices, in their 8-1 decision, were careful to note that the decision in Levys case does not preclude districts from acting when students use social media in ways that can harm other students or the school.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote that whereas courts must be skeptical of a schools efforts to regulate off-campus speech, there might well be cases in which a school legitimately can intervene, such as cases of severe bullying or harassment targeting particular individuals.

Thats far from distinct guidance that school administrators might prefer, but its impossible to draw a bright line around the vagaries inherent in speech.

In this case, while acknowledging students free speech rights, the justices also acknowledged that limits on it  especially on social media  are a moving target.
When is PennDOT going to fix the potholes at Route 61 and Hancock Street in Saint Clair, right underneath the red light? Also, Hancock Street. That is a state road, correct? When are they going to fix it? Like next year.

Saint Clair



I think President Biden and Vice President Harris are doing a wonderful job at the border. Those people need help. The Democratic Party only wants to help the poor. I have to give credit to CNN and MSNBC for not publicizing anything at the border.

Kline Township



Argall should focus on the people of Pennsylvania and not trying to please Trump. Find some political courage and be a leader for Schuylkill County and Pennsylvania.

Branchdale

Instead of Sen. Argall concentrating on an audit of the election, why doesnt he spend more time giving relief to senior citizens for their property taxes? It is just unbelievable.

Pottsville



So, now Sen. Argall wants an audit of the recent election. He is as delusional as the My Pillow guy. When will he and Rep. Meuser realize that every time they publicly support Trumps Big Lie they push more thoughtful, honest people away from the Republican Party? I was once proud to say I was a Republican, but no more. It is sad.

Schuylkill Haven



In history, there is only one president who was a sworn enemy of the USA. It was John Taylor, who after serving as president from 1841 to 45, a decade later joined the Confederacy and the failed insurrection. Now we have Trump and his Schuylkill County followers like Argall trying to destroy faith in democracy by using the Big Lie to encourage another insurrection. Argall and Trump deserve voter shame and rejection.

Minersville
There have been several media reports making claims of External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar meeting Taliban leaders earlier in the month. Putting an end to such claims, sources in the Government told Republic Media Network on Tuesday that "such reports are completely false, baseless and mischievous."

"We have seen social media reports claiming that EAM has met certain Taliban leaders. Such reports are completely false, baseless and mischievous," sources said.

These rumours were seemingly circulated across social media as Jaishankar visited Qatar twice in a week earlier this month. Moreover, reports stated that a senior Qatari official said Indian officials made a "quiet visit" to Doha in order to speak to the Taliban's political leadership based in Doha as the Qatar government has hosted the Talibans main office in Doha since 2013.

Jaishankar, who was on a three-day visit to Kuwait, had a brief stopover in Doha where he had met Qatari National Security Advisor (NSA) Mohamed Bin Ahmed Al Mesned on June 9. Thereafter, in a surprise move, he visited Doha on June 15 and met US Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation Zalmay Khalilzad in Doha to discuss the situation of war-torn Afghanistan as the US and NATO allies are involved in the process of withdrawing their armies from Afghanistan. What could have fueled speculations is that the meeting with Khalilzad was not previously announced by the External Affairs Ministry.

Jaishankar had spoken to Khalilzad over the phone in March as well and discussed the developments pertaining to the Afghan peace talks. While attending the 9th Heart of Asia Ministerial Conference in Tajikistan's capital, Dushanbe, he had also voiced out concerns over the violence and bloodshed in Afghanistan and said that there is a need for a genuine double peace in and around the war-torn country.

The situation over Afghan peace talks

India has been keenly following the evolving political situation after the US signed the peace deal with the Taliban. The deal provided for the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, effectively drawing curtains on America's 18-year war with the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Negotiations between the Taliban and Afghan representatives began last September in Doha, Qatar and continued earlier this year. But the Taliban announced on April 13 -- a day before President Joe Bidens announcement that all U.S. troops would leave by September 11 -- that it would not take part in any conference intended to decide the future of Afghanistan until all foreign troops were gone.

Although a peace deal has been brokered between the US and Taliban, UN experts have stated that the violence perpetrated by Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan continues to hamper the peace negotiations with the Afghanistan government. The U.N. experts, who monitor sanctions against the Taliban, predicted more violence in the run-up to their departure, raising a significant question as to how would the Afghanistan military manage without any external support.
German Ambassador to India Walter J. Lindner on June 29 took to Twitter to share glimpses of the famous New Delhis Okhla fruit market or Mandi. Questioning Can you smell the sweetness?, Lindner shared his excitement with the incomparable mango season that will soon be attaining its peak in the country. In the post shared on Tuesday morning on the microblogging website, the German envoy shared images of fruit vendors standing next to their stalls full of mangoes and pineapples and said, lets not forget Okhla Mandis ananas wallahs. Showcasing his love for mangoes, he referred to the fruit as king of fruits.

Is it Alphonso, Chaunsa, Langra, or Himsagar, Badami, Kesar youre craving for? Incomparable mango season coming to its peak soon. Called the king of fruits (mangosteen=queen). Here early morning impressions of South-Delhis Okhla fruit mandi. Can you smell the sweetness?  pic.twitter.com/3twfmgcZG1  Walter J. Lindner (@AmbLindnerIndia) June 29, 2021

...and lets not forget Okhla Mandis ananas wallahs..busy from early morning on... pic.twitter.com/XAGWdug1q6  Walter J. Lindner (@AmbLindnerIndia) June 29, 2021

This is not the first time that the German envoy shared his version of life at the national capital. Earlier on June 28, he also underlined the tough life of Delhi cycle rickshaw wallas, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Again sharing pictures of the workers, Lindner wrote on Twitter, Tough life, even more difficult during COVID: Delhi cycle rickshaw wallahs battle heat, chaotic traffic, competition, less customers & pandemic. Whatever job we have, lets not forget the daily hardship of those citizens! Meet Nadeem, Mohammed, Laxman.

Tough life, even more difficult during COVID: Delhi cycle rickshaw wallahs battle heat, chaotic traffic, competition, less customers & pandemic. Whatever job we have, lets not forget the daily hardship of those citizens! Meet Nadeem, Mohammed, Laxman (took off mask for pic) pic.twitter.com/gNVI5yUDgS  Walter J. Lindner (@AmbLindnerIndia) June 28, 2021

Lindner visits kite market, Lal Kuan Bazar

Always appearing to take note of the rich culture and famous markets in New Delhi, Lindner on June 26 also shared his moments from Lal Kuan Bazar. Even though it is a wholesale market for hardware and hotel kitchen equipment, the market is mainly famous for kites or what the German envoy referred to as heaven for kite lovers. the market is also frequented by a number of renowned spice snd sweet shops. Notably, the lines of shops that sell kite are made by them.

Sharing the colourful and vibrant glimpses of the market, Lindner wrote on Twitter, Old Delhi, Saturday morning, Lal Kuan Bazar, famous heaven for kite-lovers. Youll find all sorts of Manjhas & Charkhas. Patangbaazi (kite flying) very popular among Dilliwallahs in Shahjahanabad (Walled City). High season Aug, when youll hear lappet & wo kata everywhere. Before the Lal Kuan Bazar, on June 25, he also visited Southex Books, one of few surviving antiquarian bookshops of India.

Old Delhi, Saturday morning, Lal Kuan Bazar, famous heaven for kite-lovers. Youll find all sorts of Manjhas & Charkhas. Patangbaazi (kite flying) very popular among Dilliwallahs in Shahjahanabad (Walled City). High season Aug, when youll hear lappet & wo kata everywhere pic.twitter.com/u2jq2dtpaq  Walter J. Lindner (@AmbLindnerIndia) June 26, 2021

Secret known only to rare book collectors, bibliophiles & travel-story-lovers, hidden in small lane in Delhis SouthExtension2, Southex Books, one of few surviving antiquarian bookshops of IND. Books/prints/maps in wooden bookshelfs transport into gone-by eras betw 16.&19. centu pic.twitter.com/JCjQmflI4C  Walter J. Lindner (@AmbLindnerIndia) June 25, 2021

IMAGE: @AmbLindnerIndia/Twitter
Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad K Sangma on Monday said his government would try work out a solution to the vexed boundary dispute with neighbouring Assam He said the state has a good relationship with the neighbouring state and that he was hopeful of resolving the boundary issue. The move to address the dispute comes at the initiative of the central government according to sources.

With the new leadership in Assam, a leadership with a very positive mindset and (having) good relationship with Meghalaya leadership, we are hopeful we will move forward and find an amicable solution, Sangma told reporters on Monday.

Asserting the need to look into all boundary related documentation with an open mind, Sangma said, we will start with a clean slate as the objective is really not to find faults but to find a solution.

The two states have 12 areas of disputes between them.

These are in Upper Tarabari, Gizang Reserve Forest, Hahim area, Langpih area, Bordwar area, Nongwah Mawtamur area, Pilangkata Khanapara area, Deshdemoria area, Khanduli area, Umkhyrni Psiar area, Areas of Block I and Block II and Ratacherra area.

Stating that the issue is very critical, Sangma said, I again stressed for an amicable solution which is acceptable to both parties. We are open for discussion.

Let us have a fresh start to the entire process and in this fresh start we will think of all the options that are there, he added.

The Central government wants North Eastern states to resolve their boundary disputes by next year, according to sources. The Chief Minister however said the timeline would depend on how the border talks move forward.

Yes, the union home minister had desired that before the 75th year of Indias Independence of the country all these issues not only between Meghalaya and Assam but Assam and other states should be resolved he confirmed.

He said it would be his endeavor to do so within the time frame given (by 2022) but it all depends on how the talks move forward.

The government of India has been sending us messages and asking us to move forward. The union home minister has said when countries like India and Bangladesh can resolve their border issues, why states within the country cant resolve the issue, he added.

Last week, Senior BJP leader and Health minister A L Hek called on Assam chief minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma and requested him to re-start the chief minister level talk to resolve the boundary dispute between Meghalaya and Assam.

Sangma revealed discussion at an unofficial level has been going on with the Chief Minister of Assam even before he took over. He also added that he had met Sarma over a friendly-dinner at Guwahati last week.

He also added that he had briefed his cabinet colleagues about the unofficial meeting with the Assam CM.

Stating that the issue is not easy to resolve, the Chief Minister said, It is a very complicated issue and therefore, there will not be a simple solution, it will require us to be able to figure out what would be amicably acceptable to both sides.

Asked about measures being taken by the government to stop alleged illegal encroachment by Assam, Sangma said he would hold direct talks with his Assam counterparts whenever he comes to know of such incidents.

(Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com)
New Delhi, Jun 29 (PTI) Chief of Defence Staff Gen Bipin Rawat on Tuesday visited a number of forward locations along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) with China in the Himachal Pradesh sector to take stock of India's military preparedness in the sensitive region.

Gen Rawat also visited the headquarters of Western Command of the Indian Army at Chandimandir where he reviewed the operational situation along the border with Pakistan, officials said.

In his interactions with troops in forward locations along the LAC, Gen Rawat exhorted them to remain steadfast in their task of defending the territorial integrity of the country.

His visit to the Sumdoh sector along the LAC came amid the continued military standoff between Indian and Chinese militaries at several friction points in eastern Ladakh.

"On arrival at the forward most post in Sumdoh sub-sector, Gen Rawat was briefed on the operational preparedness of the Indian troops towards safeguarding the territorial integrity of the nation," the Army said.

It said the Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) interacted extensively with the Indian Army and ITBP troops deployed in the remote areas and encouraged all ranks to keep up the high state of alertness and professionalism.

"General Bipin Rawat interacted with the troops, complimented them for their high morale and exhorted them to remain steadfast in their task of defending the territorial integrity of the nation with the same zeal and fervour," the Army said.

Following the escalation of tension with China in eastern Ladakh in June last year, India significantly enhanced the alert level all along the nearly 3,500 km-long Line of Actual Control.

India and China were locked in a military standoff at multiple friction points in eastern Ladakh since early May last year. However, they completed the withdrawal of troops and weapons from the North and South banks of Pangong lake in February following a series of military and diplomatic talks.

The two sides are now engaged in talks to extend the disengagement process to the remaining friction points. India has been particularly pressing for disengagement of troops in Hot Springs, Gogra and Depsang.

According to military officials, each side currently has around 50,000 to 60,000 troops along the Line of Actual Control in the sensitive sector.

There was no visible forward movement in disengagement of troops in the remaining friction points as the Chinese side did not show flexibility in their approach at the 11th round of military talks. In Chandimandir, Gen Rawat commended the formation for their efforts to ensure force preservation and at the same time stepping forward to provide support in terms of establishing COVID hospitals at Chandigarh, Patiala and Faridabad, the Army said in a statement.

He also complimented the force for providing paramedical staff in aid of civil hospitals and extending assistance in vaccination of common citizens.

"He stressed upon the need to focus on training hard and remain vigilant to thwart the nefarious designs of our adversaries. He emphasied that all ranks must keep themselves abreast with the latest trends in information technology, emerging cyber threats and countermeasures," the Army said. PTI MPB RT RT

(Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com)
Days after the Jammu attack that involved the use of drones, India has now raised the issue at the UN General Assembly (UNGA). India has stated that the use of weaponised drones for terrorist activities against strategic and commercial assets calls for serious attention by the global community. After the Jammu attack, a fresh attempt was again made to attack a military installation with the help of drones. However, alert Army sentries at the Ratnuchak-Kaluchak station fired at the drones which later flew away.

India raises drone usage issue at UN after Jammu attack

Addressing the UNGA at the Global scourge of terrorism: assessment of current threats and emerging trends for the new decade, Special Secretary (Internal Security), Ministry of Home Affairs in the Government of India, V S K Kaumudi spoke about drones being used for terrorist activities. Kaumudi said that the drones are being increasingly used as its a low-cost option and easily available. He added that the danger is imminent and comes a challenge for the security agencies worldwide.

"Being a low-cost option and easily available, utilisation of these aerial/sub-surface platforms for sinister purposes by terrorist groups such as intelligence collection, weapon/explosives delivery and targeted attacks have become an imminent danger and challenge for security agencies worldwide, he said at the 2nd High Level Conference of the Head of Counter-Terrorism Agencies of the Member States in the General Assembly. The possibility of the use of weaponised drones for terrorist purposes against strategic and commercial assets calls for serious attention by the member states. We have witnessed terrorists using UAS to smuggle weapons across borders, Kaumudi said, according to his statement issued by the Permanent Mission of India to the UN.

Speaking to Republic TV, Major General GD Bakshi (Retd) stated that Pakistan used commercially off the shelf technology. He added that Pakistan used locally made copters that are made of plastic. He added that the already existing radars that are not able to detect the small drones. GD Bakshi added that India needs to be proactive in countering the threat.

"One can easily use these drones to attack individuals, ammunition dumps, buildings and military installations. You have to be proactive. In 2017, Russia had used a drone that had gone 96 kilometers into Ukraine. It blew up the ammunition dump. Therefore, we have to be proactive as we cannot allow Pakistan to use such technology," he added

J&K drone attack

In the early hours of Sunday, twin explosions rocked the technical area of the IAF airbase in Jammu causing minor damage to the facility and leaving two Indian Air Force officers injured. The blasts which took place within a gap of five minutes occured after explosive-laden drones crashed in the airbase. The first blast sound is captured in the CCTV at 1.37 am while the second at 1.43 am. It is believed that the target was the aircraft parked in the dispersal area. The blasts come after Prime Minister Narendra Modi's high-level meeting with J&K's political parties and the Gupkar alliance, the first since the abrogation of Article 370.

With PTI Inputs
On Monday, June 28, an encounter operation was initiated and carried out by the Jammu and Kashmir Police at the Malhoora Parimpora area of Srinagar. In the encounter, top Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) commander Nadeem Abrar and one foreign terrorist were killed and two AK-47 rifles were recovered from the site.

The Srinagar encounter has ended after 12 hours of the firing. After the encounter, the bodies of Abrara along with a foreign terrorist were recovered.

As per sources, the foreign terrorists and Abrar were planning to attack the highway and had also come for weapons.

Civilians residing near encounter sites were evacuated as the gunshots and explosion continued. During the Srinagar encounter operation, an assistant commandant, sub-inspector and one jawan of Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) were injured.

Top Pakistani terrorist killed in an encounter

As the firing continues, IGP Kashmir Vijay Kumar said to ANI that a Pakistani terrorist and top Lashkar-e-Taiba commander Abrar was killed in the encounter with security forces in Maloora Parimpora, Srinagar.

IGP added, "Top LeT commander Abrar, who was arrested yesterday (June 28), disclosed during interrogation that he had kept his AK-47 rifle in a house. When the party was entering the house to recover the weapon, one of his associate hiding inside the house fired on the party".

He further informed, "In the ensuing gunfire, the foreign terrorist who fired from inside the house was neutralised & Abrar also got killed. Two AK-47 rifles were recovered from the site. Terrorist Abrar was involved in several killings of security forces & civilians".

In the ensuing gunfire, the foreign terrorist who fired from inside the house was neutralised & Abrar also got killed. Two AK-47 rifles were recovered from the site. Terrorist Abrar was involved in several killings of security forces & civilians: IGP Kashmir Vijay Kumar  ANI (@ANI) June 29, 2021

Abrar was involved in several killings including the killing of territorial army persons and CRPF personnel.

For the past 6 months, three FPs have been neutralised, two in North Kashmir and one in Srinagar.

India's proposal against terror organisations

On 24, NSA Ajit Doval had attended the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) NSA's meeting at Dushanbe, Tajikistan where he had proposed an action plan against Pakistan-based terror organisations LeT and JeM as part of the SCO framework. The NSA condemned terrorism in all forms and asserted the need to bring perpetrators of terrorism to justice. In addition, he had also pushed for the full implementation of UN resolutions and targeted sanctions against the UN-designated terrorist individuals and entities. Pakistan has also participated in this meeting.

Former SPO shot dead by terrorists

On Monday, June 28, a former special police officer and his wife were shot dead at their home in Hariparigam village in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district. The terrorists barged into SPO Fayaz Ahmad's house and fired indiscriminately at the family members. They were rushed to the hospital but everyone in the family including SPO, his wife and daughter succumbed to bullet injuries.

(Image credit: PTI/REPRESENTATIVEIMAGE)
From the high-level meeting at the Prime Minister's 7 Lok Kalyan Marg residence on Tuesday, sources have informed that Union Defence Minister Rajnath Singh has received PM Modi's nod to expedite a policy on drones. The development comes in the aftermath of the drone attack on the Indian Air Force's Jammu station, wherein two drones armed with IEDs caused blasts over the technical area. Sources have informed that the Defence Minister, prior to his meeting with PM Modi, met with officials and Air Force representatives to deliberate on a special policy pertaining to drones.

At the high-level meeting which was attended by NSA Ajit Doval and Home Minister Amit Shah as well, sources said that a unanimous clearance was obtained for expediting a policy on drones which had been pushed by the Defence Ministry and IAF on previous occasions as well. PM Modi and Rajnath Singh also discussed futuristic challenges in defence sector, equipping forces with modern equipment, sources added.

#EXCLUSIVE | Details of PM Modi's meeting with Home Minister, NSA accessed; Centre to give clearance for drone policy: Sources



Tune-in here to watch #LIVE - https://t.co/rGQJsj1RRC pic.twitter.com/GopqQwXAzu  Republic (@republic) June 29, 2021

Drone attack at IAF station in Jammu

A first of its kind, the drone attack in the premises of the technical area of the Jammu airbase led to two IAF personnel sustaining minor injuries. The case has been handed over to the National Investigation Agency. Two blasts were heard within a gap of 5 minutes, the first blast is captured in the CCTV at 1.37 am while the second was captured at 1.43 am. A team of Jammu and Kashmir police along with other security agencies and forensic experts rushed to the incident spot to further investigate the cause of the blast.

Hours later, two more drones were spotted over the Kaluchak military station in the wee hours on Monday. The drones hovering in the Jammu airspace were thwarted and were forced to fly back without causing any damage. Sounding a high alert across security installations and the bordering region with Pakistan, a high-level investigation team of the IAF was dispatched to Jammu after the explosions. The possible target of the drones is said to be the aircraft parked in the dispersal area just meters away. Defence Minister Rajnath Singh spoke to Vice Air Chief Air Marshal HS Arora regarding the blasts and Western Air Commander Air Marshal VR Chaudhary and Air Marshal Vikram Singh reached the spot to investigate the matter.
The Uttar Pradesh forced conversion racket took an even murkier turn when a link between accused Umar Gautam, alleged international mastermind behind the conversion racket Bilal Philip, and fugitive preacher Zakir Naik was speculated. Following this, Republic Media Network on Tuesday conducted a sting operation with Sufiyaan, the aide of Umar Gautam and an integral part of the Islamic Dawah Centre (IDC). During the sting operation, he divulged details that confirm that Umar Gautam was linked with Bilal Philip, and also with Zakir Naik. This has Confirmation was also attained in the earlier alleged link to ISIS.

Republic's sting operation

Sufiyaan says to a spy camera, "Dr Philip runs Islamic Online University and its examination centre is situated in the IDC building in Delhi. The main centre is in Hyderabad. Students do the course from their homes but come to take the exam in the building of IDC. We have their IDs and passwords." He further added, "IDC and IOU have tie-ups. Umar Saheb is connected to Bilala Saheb, and he, in turn, is connected to Zakir Saheb."

This makes the link between Umar Gautam, 'Bilala Saheb' and 'Zakir Saheb' very clear.

Further, he said, "Both (Bilal and Umar) have met. A Sarv Dharm Seamelan took place in Kazakhstan, and Umar Saheb was sent as the representative of India. Bilal Saheb was also there."

It is pertinent to mention here that it's the detail of the Kazakhstan meeting that makes evident the link between Umar and ISIS.

The police also established that Gautam has a very close association with Bilal Philip. It may be noted that Philip's entry has been restricted in many countries, including India. He is said to have motivated almost half a dozen Indians to join the Pakistani ISIS.

Forced conversion racket busted in Uttar Pradesh

The alleged conversion racket was busted by the Uttar Pradesh Anti-Terror Squad (ATS) following the registration of an FIR in the case at Lucknows ATS police station. As per reports, two men of Delhis Jamia Nagar were allegedly running an outfit involved in converting deaf and dumb students and other poor people to Islam in Uttar Pradesh with funding from Pakistans ISI. Moreover, children and women were also lured in with false promises of cash, job, and marriage, and later, converted. Gautam, who is one of the two accused arrested in the beginning, and himself a convert to Islam from Hinduism, boasted to the police of having converted at least 1,000 people to Islam. I converted at least 1,000 non-Muslims to Islam, marrying them all to Muslims, Kumar quoted Gautam as boasting.

Meanwhile, the ATS has nabbed three more individuals in connection with the conversion racket. Rahul Bhola, Mannu Yadav (Abdul Manan) and Irfan Khayaza after the interrogation of Umar Gautam. Addressing a press briefing on Monday, the UP ADG Law & Order Prashant Kumar informed that Irfan Khayaza is an Interpreter in the Ministry of Children's Welfare in Delhi.

Using his influence, Khayaza used to manipulate the dumb and deaf people and speak ill about other religions, the police said. He used to provide gifts and other inducements to attract the people and get them converted. Khayaza was accompanied by Rahul Bhola, who is also deaf. Both of them would force people to get converted and distribute conversion certificates with the help of Umar Gautam. Mannu Yadav and another accused Aditya Gupta were also converted by them.
Union Minister of State for Home Affairs G Kishan Reddy on Tuesday said that international organisations are involved in the nexus of the forced religious conversions which are happening in the country. This statement by the Union Minister comes in the context of the incidents of forced religious conversions and mass conversions that surfaced recently putting the issue at the core of the political discussions.

When asked about controversial fugitive Islamic preacher Zakir Naik, Reddy said that Naik is a different issue as he put the onus on foreign organisations behind the mass conversions. While speaking exclusively with Republic Media Network, he said faith should not be forcibly imposed.

"Zakir Naik is a different issue but many foreign organisations are involved in mass conversions which have been reported several times. The government has also taken action on multiple occasions," he said.

"This shouldn't be happening (conversions). Your religion is not good, ours is better; your god isn't real but ours is, this mindset is wrong. Every individual should be free to follow his/her faith and it shouldn't be forcibly imposed," he added.

BJP MP Ravi Kishan has called religious conversion "another form of terrorism". While speaking with Republic, he said, "This is another form of terrorism. Due to PM Narendra Modi led government, terrorism has been finished by 99 per cent. A syndicate has been working for religious conversions in several States, it is a big conspiracy and foreign funding is involved."

"It is a well-planned conspiracy and a heinous crime. I am pained by this and will raise this issue in the Uttar Pradesh assembly. This crime should be treated no less than terrorism and the person involved in conversion should be punished accordingly," he added.

Menace of forced and mass religious conversions

Last week, a mass conversion racket was unearthed by Uttar Pradesh ATS arresting two who were identified as Mufti Qazi Jahangir Alam Qasmi and Mohammad Umar Gautam. When confronted, the accused confessed that he has converted at least 1000 people to his religion.

According to reports, the two accused ran an outfit that was involved in converting deaf and dumb students and other poor people to Islam in Uttar Pradesh with funding from Pakistans ISI. Moreover, children and women were also lured in with false promises of cash, job, and marriage, and later, converted. Investigators have also speculated that the syndicate is allegedly linked to fugitive preacher Zakir Naik. Now, the NIA is said to have taken over the probe.

Furthermore, another shocking incident of conversion came to the fore, this time in Jammu and Kashmir, in which two Sikh girls were abducted and forcibly converted to Islam. According to reports, an 18-year-old Sikh Girl from Badgam district was abducted and forcefully converted to Islam at gunpoint. The second case of another girl from Srinagar who after attending a function of her Muslim friend has been missing. As per reports, she was married off to a 62-year old man.

The Sikh delegation also met G Kishan Reddy and submitted a memorandum of their demands including an anti-conversion law. The Sikh leaders have demanded a strong law to be implemented in the wake of the events of abduction and religious conversions. They have also urged for equal rights for the minority Sikhs residing in Jammu and Kashmir.
Despite its extraordinary surface temperature that hovers around 900 degrees Fahrenheit (480 degrees Celsius), Earths twin planet Venus was suspected to have some indicators that pointed towards habitability. When NASAs Magellan entered Venus orbit on Aug.10, 1990, it found key similarities between Venus and its planetary neighbour Earth in terms of size and density. Besides, the planet's rocky terrestrial features such as the volcanoes, long lava channels, pancake-shaped domes, and evidence of hot mantle plumes at depth like the one responsible for creating the Hawaiian Islands made scientists hopeful.

In September 2020, scientists made a groundbreaking discovery after they found a gas called phosphine that is an indicator of life on Earth in the atmosphere of Venus.

Study co-author and astrophysicist and planetary scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sara Seager, said Something completely unexpected and highly intriguing is happening on Venus to produce the unexpected presence of tiny amounts of phosphine gas. Approximately 20 parts-per-billion of the gas was found to be present in Venus' clouds.

On Monday, June 28, however, a new study published in the journal Nature Astronomy that analyzed the data from the several probes that flew to Venus found that the amount of water in the atmosphere of Venus is so low that the planet is incapable of supporting even the most drought-tolerant microbes of the Earth. Scientists accumulated data about the temperature, humidity, and pressure in the thick sulphuric acid clouds of Venus.

For instance, NASAs Parker Solar Probe has made multiple flybys of Venus, coming within about 515 miles (830 kilometers) of the surface on July 11, 2020. Spacecraft had flown through the planets upper atmosphere. This was the first direct measurement of the Venusian atmosphere in nearly 30 years.

On June 2, 2021, NASA announced two new missions to Venus as part of the agency's Discovery Program. The selected missions are DAVINCI (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging) and VERITAS (Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy). The European Space Agency (ESA) announced the selection of EnVision to make detailed observations of Venus with NASAs Synthetic Aperture Radar, called VenSAR to document the planets surface features.

Putative Venusian life 'not possible'

However, the data from the probes already gathered by the scientists has revealed that the very cloudy planetary atmosphere that had regenerated interest in the idea of life in clouds due to the presence of phosphine, is not at all conducive for life. There is no reason to suppose that putative Venusian life would have the same biochemical basis as that on Earth, the study that determined habitability for Venuss acid clouds, indicated. It added that microbial growth cannot occur anywhere near the Venusian clouds, given that permissive water activity is a prerequisite for the active metabolism of terrestrial life forms.

[This image is a composite of data from NASA's Magellan spacecraft and Pioneer Venus Orbiter. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech]

At Venus, We observed a strong reduction of water activity even at modest sulfuric acid concentrations, the scientists said after they derived results from the study of the two independent thermodynamic models of H2SO4H2O mixtures. The level of the water was approximately 100 times less (than was previously thought of) to support any life form.

"The water in the clouds of Venus is just not up to the levels required to support life," said study co-author Christopher McKay, a NASA scientist. Meanwhile, the studys lead author John E. Hallsworth of Queen's University, Belfast, said, the new research shows that the sulfuric acid clouds in Venus have too little water for active life to exist, based on what we know of life on Earth.

Although, scientists have been able to find that the water levels in Jupiters clouds have a higher concentration as compared to Venus as well as adequate temperature to support life. "We have also found that the conditions of water and temperature within Jupiters clouds could allow microbial-type life to subsist, assuming that other requirements such as nutrients are present," the lead author Hallsworth stated.
SpaceX plans to launch a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral on a southerly coast-hugging route on Tuesday to deliver 88 tiny satellites into polar orbit. The first stage booster of the Falcon 9 will return to Florida's Space Coast for the first time since December, landing at Cape Canaveral. Here is more about Cape Canaveral launch schedule.

Cape Canaveral launch schedule

As mentioned on the official website of kennedyspacecenter.com, here is the SpaceX launch schedule

NORTH ATLANTIS LAWN: The North Atlantis Lawn opens at 1:00 PM with the launch video feed.

ATLANTIS SOUTH LOT: The Atlantis South Lot opens at 1:30 PM with the launch video feed.

A 58-minute launch window opens at 2:56 p.m. EDT (1856 GMT) Tuesday for the Falcon 9 rocket to launch from Cape Canaveral's pad 40. SpaceX postponed the launch from last week to complete more pre-flight inspections, but the corporation gave no further reason for the postponement. Last Tuesday, SpaceX successfully tested a previously-flown Falcon 9 rocket in preparation for the Transporter 2 small satellite ridesharing mission.

There's an 80% probability of good weather for launch on Tuesday at Cape Canaveral. The Transporter 2 mission, according to SpaceX, will launch 88 tiny spacecraft into orbit for clients all around the world. Transporter 1, SpaceX's first dedicated rideshare mission, launched in January carrying 143 tiny satellites, setting a new record for the number of different spacecraft flown in a single flight.

Although the Transporter 2 mission will not surpass that record, SpaceX claims that the customer spacecraft set to launch on Tuesday have a combined mass larger than the previous rideshare mission. Small satellites for the US military, as well as radar and optical Earth observation satellites for Satellogic and ICEYE, commercial remote sensing firms located in Argentina and Finland, are among the payloads onboard Transporter 2. Several CubeSats for US and international operators are also on board the flight.

The Falcon 9 launch on Friday will be the year's 20th, although all 19 flights in 2021 have targeted landings on drone ships in the Atlantic Ocean. On the company's final mission of the year 2020, a launch for the National Reconnaissance Office on Dec. 19, SpaceX's last rocket landed at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

This year, all but one of SpaceX's rocket landing attempts were successful. On missions transporting large goods into space or flights hauling payloads to high-altitude orbits, SpaceX generally deploys Falcon 9 rockets on drone ships. On lesser payload launches, the rocket has enough propellant reserve to turn around utilising a "boost-back" burn shortly after stage separation. On Tuesday, when Transporter 2 is out, this will be the case.

IMAGE: SPACEX UNSPLASH
Pope Francis on Tuesday invited the faithful to pray for peace in Lebanon and to spiritually join the heads of Lebanon's churches as they meet the pontiff in the Vatican on 1 July to pray, discuss and reflect on the future of the country.

"I invite everyone to join us spiritually in praying that Lebanon may recover from the serious crisis it is going through and show the world once again its face of peace and hope," Francis said from his studio window overlooking St. Peter's Square.

Thursday will be marked by several significant moments, starting with the Pope's procession with the representatives of the Orthodox and Catholic Churches, present with their different rites and traditions, towards the Vatican Basilica.

This will be followed by a round table, moderated by Nuncio Joseph Spiteri, with the ten heads of the Christian communities. Finally, an ecumenical prayer, still in the Basilica, with prayers and songs of the different ritual traditions present in Lebanon.

Pope Francis then praised Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI for dedicating his life to prayer and meditation.

"70 years ago Pope Benedict was ordained a priest. To you Benedict, dear father and brother, goes our affection and gratitude and our closeness," he said.

IMAGE: AP

(Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com)
After relaxing its restrictions to allow international travellers, Switzerland on Tuesday announced that citizens from nations with the 'Delta variant' like India would be allowed to enter the country without a COVID-19 test or mandatory quarantine if they were 'fully vaccinated' against the virus.

Switzerland's Federal Council of Public Health stated that people arriving from a country with 'a variant of the virus of concern', will be permitted entry as long as it is certain that their vaccination offers good protection. It is important to note that Indian travellers need to have received both shots of Oxford-Astrazeneca vaccine- 'Covishield' which has been granted the EU green pass. However, those who have neither been vaccinated nor have recovered must present a negative PCR test or rapid antigen test and go into quarantine on entry.

Switzerland's guidelines for travel

The Federal Council of Public Health guidelines states, "From 1 July, the federal government works on the assumption that anyone who wants a COVID certificate will have received one. From this date, only COVID certificates will be permitted as supporting documents for the areas of application in Switzerland. This applies to cases set out in the COVID-19 Special Situation Ordinance, so e.g. events, cinemas, theatres, and restaurants if they wish to restrict entry to those who are vaccinated, have tested negative or recovered."

"In international travel and in the context of contact quarantine, alternative supporting documents are still possible," it added. Additionally, children can also be issued with a COVID certificate of testing or recovery and the certificates of all family members can be stored in a single app, according to the Council.

Opening applications for Indian travellers, the official website of the Swiss embassy in India reads, The embassy of Switzerland in New Delhi is currently accepting all visa categories for persons arriving from third countries like India, who can prove, that they have been fully vaccinated. Booking of a prior appointment is mandatory for all application type. VFS Global Services is operational and accepting visa application at the centres in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bangalore, Chennai, Cochin and Hyderabad.

India reported 37,566 new cases of Coronavirus on June 29. Currently, there are 5,52,659 active cases in the country. The total number of recoveries crossed 2,93,66,601 and 907 deaths were reported in the last 24-hours.

(With Agency Inputs)
Israel's foreign minister on Tuesday inaugurated Israel's Embassy in the United Arab Emirates, kicking off the highest-level visit by an Israeli official to the Gulf Arab state since the two countries normalized relations nine months ago.

Yair Lapid together with the Emirati Culture Minister Noura Al-Kaabi joined Rabbi Levi Duchman, the Rabbi of the UAE, in putting a mezuzah at the door of the newly inaugurated embassy.

The mezuzah is a parchment inscribed with religious texts and attached in a case to the doorpost of a Jewish house as a sign of faith.

It is usually the last thing to be put on a new home or office as part of an inauguration.

Lapid is later expected to meet UAE's foreign minister, with talks likely to focus in part on Iran, which both countries view as a top regional threat.

The Emiratis and Israelis had strong reservations about the nuclear deal between Iran and world powers brokered by the Obama administration, which aimed to limit Tehran's ability to develop nuclear weapons.

Their shared concerns that the deal did not go far enough helped propel quiet ties and covert meetings long before they formally announced full diplomatic relations last year.

The Trump administration brokered the agreement that established ties between the UAE and Israel. It was hailed at the time by both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump as among their greatest achievements.

IMAGE: AP

(Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com)
Days after barring all international passengers from Indonesia, the Hong Kong administration is set to ban all incoming flights from the United Kingdom starting July 1. At present, Britain is battered with the surge in the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, first discovered in India. Pertaining to the same, the Hong Kong authorities have now enlisted the UK in the extremely high irks category of countries, most severe rating for pandemic travel.

"All passenger flights from the UK will be prohibited from landing in Hong Kong," the global financial hub said in a statement.

According to the new rule, all passengers who have stayed in the UK for more than two hours would not be allowed to land in Hong Kong. Later, the Carrie Lam administration confirmed that the decision was made following after the city registered cases related to L452R strain, a further mutation of Delta variant, in people who had come from the UK. The city confirmed its first local Covid case involving the Delta variant last week, ending a 16-day streak of zero local cases.

Hong Kong has registered 11,921 cases, out of whom 211 have died and 11,626 have recovered. As many as 2,17,528 (32 per cent) people in Hong Kong have received at least their first dose while 133,217 (21 per cent) people been fully inoculated, according to Hong Kong Government. A total of 3,612,745 doses have been administered.

Ban on Indonesia

Starting June 25, the Hong Kong administration banned passenger flights from Indonesia deeming arrivals from the country as extremely high risk. Hong Kong successfully curbed the spread of the deadly contagion initially but has reported multiple imported cases in recent weeks. Additionally, it registered its first local case involving the lethal delta variant last week, sending authorities into alert. At present, Hong Kong has banned flights from India, South Africa, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Indonesia and South Africa, all to curb the transmission of COVID-19 infection on the Chinese control land.

Image: AP
Russia has reportedly tested the readiness of its air defence system in Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, in an apparent show of force as Ukraine and NATO collision continues to hold military drills in the black sea as a part of their Sea Breeze exercise 2021. According to Interfax, Moscow deployed about 20 warplanes and helicopters, including the much-vaunted Su-24M bombers, S-400 and Pantsir surface-to-air missile systems-all part of the countrys Black Sea Fleet. It is not clear when the military exercise began.

The Black Sea Fleet is doing a number of things to monitor the actions of ships from NATO and other countries taking part in Sea Breeze 2021, the National Defence Management Centre said in a statement.

Sea Breeze and Retaliation

Earlier this week, Ukraine along with more than 30 NATO countries kick-started the two-week-long Operation Sea Breeze 2021. The operation witnessed the participation of over 5,000 military personnel, along with 30 US warships and 40 US aircraft including destroyer Ross. While the marine exercise has been conducted over 21 times since 1997, Kremlin called for its cancellation.

TODAY: Opening Ceremony for #ExerciseSeaBreeze kicked off in #Odesa, #Ukraine ! This year marks the 21st iteration of the exercise!#SB21 is nothing new, except that the number of countries is bigger than ever and the scenarios are more complex! #SeaBreeze2021 pic.twitter.com/ko8IWGMmRG  Exercise Sea Breeze (@ExSeaBreeze) June 28, 2021

The Russian military exercise comes amidst escalating tensions between NATO and Moscow with UK PM Boris Johnson even terming their mutual relationship as "pretty disappointing." His opinion caught the public eye last week after a Russian warship fired warning shots to deter a British Royal Navy warship from its waters near Crimea in the Black Sea. As per reports, Russia accused the British destroyer of encroaching two miles into Russian waters following which the Russian warship along with a jet fighter fired shots and dropped bombs respectively near the British Royal Navy destroyer ship near Crimea's Cape Fiolent.

Reports quoted the Russian Defense Ministry claiming that the Russian Navys Su-24 attack aircraft dropped four bombs along the path of the British Royal Navys HMS Defender destroyer to stop it from further manoeuvres after a border patrol ship fired warning shots. The HMS Defender 'did not respond to a warning' about the use of weapons in response to its movements, the Defense Ministry was quoted as saying. The Ministry added that the HMS Defender left the Russian waters moments after the shots were fired.

Image: USNAVYEUROPE/TWITTER/DFNC.RU
On Monday, June 28, the UN diplomats sounded alarmed about the risk of a freeze on all of UN peacekeeping missions after member countries failed to reach a budget for the year 2021-2022 that commences on July 1. Financing of the UN Peacekeeping operations is the collective responsibility of all its 193 UN Member States but due to the multiple last-minute requests made by China and the African nations, a deal on the budget was deferred on June 28.

The risk is that for a while until a decision on budgets is reached by the General Assembly, our missions will find themselves under strict constraints, to only spend on measures to protect our personnel, UN under-secretary-general for peacekeeping operations, Jean-Pierre Lacroix, told a video press conference. Furthermore, he added that the situation was worrying, especially in an environment in which most of our missions are operating in very difficult, problematic and dangerous circumstances.

Last year, the UNs Fifth Committee of the Administrative and Budgetary had submitted its 22 draft resolutions and 1 draft decision to the General Assembly for the authorization of a $6.51 billion budget. The deal was reached by June 23, although with the approved peacekeeping budget below the previous years level, that is an estimated 1.8 percent less than the Secretary-Generals request. But the amount covered the cost of the UNs 13 peacekeeping missions from 1 July 2019 to 30 June 2020. It included the related funds for the United Nations Logistics Base at Brindisi, Italy; the Regional Service Centre in Entebbe, Uganda; and the peacekeeping support account.

UN peacekeeping 'most important tools', said the US delegation

Earlier, the representative of the United States stressed that the UN peacekeeping mission remains one of the most important tools for assisting the conflict-affected countries and helping them reach a resolution. US delegation sought to ensure that missions remain effective and operate. Meanwhile, last year, Ugandas delegate, who spoke for the African Group, strongly urged Member States and groups to avoid any further attempts to make arbitrary cuts in the name of seeking efficiency. We call attention to the adverse effects of doing more with less, he said. The committee has also approved a draft resolution on improving the financial situation of the United Nations, as well as support the replenishment of the Special Account to improve the organizations financial situation.
Three Brazilian senators formally accused President Jair Bolsonaro of malfeasance before Supreme Court, on June 28, over allegations he failed to have a top ally investigated for suspicious of massive corruption in the purchase of COVID-19 vaccines. The criminal complaint comes days after a Senate Commission discretely uncovered a colossal corruption scandal in the Health Ministry related to the procurement of Covaxin shots. During its probe, the commission also discovered that President Jair Bolsonaro had full knowledge of the scandal but failed to do anything to stop it.

"I filed a criminal complaint today with the Supreme Court because of the serious accusation that the president took no action after being notified of a gigantic corruption scheme at the health ministry," said opposition Senator Randolfe Rodrigues, the commission's deputy chair.

Corruption scheme

The allegations emerged when a Singapore based firm, now suspected of being a shell company, billed the Brazilian Health Ministry US$45 million for yet-to-be delivered doses. However, it raised red flags for one health ministry official-Luis Ricardo Miranda who refused to sign off the payment. Miranda had multiple arguments. Firstly, the countrys procurement contract did not mention any firm in Singapore. Secondly, all payments were to be made after the delivery of the shots.

Miranda told the Senate inquiry his superiors at the ministry exerted "atypical, excessive" pressure on him to approve the payment. He took his concerns to his brother, Luis Miranda, a congressman close to Bolsonaro, who arranged a meeting for them with the president. Following the meeting, Bolsonaro told Miranda that he suspected the corruption scheme to be the work of Ricardo Barros, who is head of Bolsonaro's coalition in the lower house. The Brazilian leader also assured Miranda, on March 20, that he would ask the police to investigate but never did, as per his testimony to the senate. Other irregularities in deal soon emerged, forcing the administration to cancel it as prosecutors opened an investigation. If Bolsonaro is convicted and a criminal case ensues, the rightist leader faces the risk of getting removed from the Presidential office.

Image: AP/PTI/Randolfe Rodrigues/Facebook
An 11-year-old Muslim primary schoolboy was reported to the anti-terror watchdog Prevent in the UK after the teacher misheard the word alms as arms. The child was responding to the question what would he do if he was in possession of immense wealth. The kids answer that he would give lots of charity [as in alms to the poor and oppressed] was misinterpreted by the lecturer as arms, the legal challenge issued by the parents stated, according to multiple reports.

Having misconceived his intentions, the teacher reported the kid whom his pupil and the parents described as very intelligent and widely read to the UKs controversial counter-radicalization programme. The police investigated the boy as the teacher claimed that it was non-typical for a boy of his age to mention such words in the classroom. The police later found that the allegations were baseless as they quickly closed the case.

The parents of the child were reportedly distraught after they learned about the matter. They filed a legal case against the school demanding a written apology, compensation for the damages, and expunging off the Prevent referral from the boys record as they are now planning to move the child to another school. The police declared that there was no substance to the teachers case against the child, as she had misheard him.

In a statement to the press, the parents of the 11-year-old said that the boy took a deep interest in medieval history. During the olden days, religious people would give alms to the poor, underprivileged, and financially challenged to help alleviate their struggles. But the panic-stricken teacher reported the student without prior consent from the parents, sharing his data with the anti-terror unit. The boys pupil alleged that the teacher breached the 2010 Equality Act, forming notions and stereotypes with respect to the childs background and his faith. The police however closed the case stating that there was no sign of radicalization or extremism or any threat to national security.

'No bearing on a persons education, career,' says gov't spokesperson

Director of Liberty Law Solicitors, Attiq Malik told UKs Daily Mail that once again the case highlighted the 'failure' of the Government's Prevent Programme on the vulnerable impressionable children, adding that it could also be detrimental. Furthermore, he stressed that the laws, criminal legislation, and safeguarding policies that exist were able to protect the public, adding that every time a Prevent referral was made and it was vague, there were issues with the families as the family members record was generated with the Home Office and various other intelligence agencies. Furthermore, he told Guardian that it was very unfair that a record was now created for the kid who had done nothing wrong which may never be deleted in the future.

Although a government spokesperson, on condition of anonymity, emphasized that Prevent was created to safeguard vulnerable people from turning into terrorists, protecting the vulnerable people who can be enforced into radicalization and those who are targeted by the terror organizations and recruiters. Furthermore, he clarified that being referred to Prevent was not a criminal sanction, and it has no bearing on a persons education or career prospects.

IMAGE: Unsplash/Representative Image
US President Joe Biden on June 28 met with Israeli counterpart Reuven Rivlin ahead of the scheduled visit by the new Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and assured Jerusalem that Washington will not allow Iran to elevate its nuclear programme. According to the readout of the Biden-Rivlin meet by the White House, US President assured the Israeli President, Iran will never get a nuclear weapon and reiterated US commitment to counter Irans malign activity and support for terrorist proxies, which have destabilizing consequences for the region.

Following the talks, Rivlin told the reporters that he was very much satisfied by Bidens stance on Iran and emphasised that US-Israel have to cooperate. While both the leaders met just days after the Biden-directed airstrike against the Iranian-backed militias near the Iraq-Syria border, Bidens comments dismissed the critics who questioned the legal authority of the move. He said, I have that authority. Meanwhile, as per reports, the White House and Israeli Prime Minsiters Office have been holding advanced talks on arranging his trip to Washington next month for their meet.

This afternoon, Ill be meeting with Israeli President Reuven Rivlin at the White House. Im looking forward to highlighting the strength of the bilateral relationship between our two nations and working together to achieve security and stability in the region.  President Biden (@POTUS) June 28, 2021

Biden extended an invite for Bennett

While Bennetts office confirmed to Walla news site about talks with the US, in his remarks on Monday, Biden also extended an invite to the new Israeli PM. According to the White House statement, The President warmly extended an invitation for Prime Minister Naftali Bennett to meet with him soon at the White House and reaffirmed that this administration looks forward to close collaboration with the new Israeli government on the many important issues on the bilateral agenda.

Both leaders, Biden and Rivlin also weighed in on the opportunities to enhance peace and stability in the Middle East and beyond and the US President expressed his strong support for the normalisation of relations between Israel and other Arab, Muslim nations. Israeli and American President also discussed the developments in Gaza and West Bank, weeks after the 11-day offensive in the region. White House said in a statement that Biden  emphasized the importance of Israel taking steps to ensure calm, stability, and to support greater economic opportunities for the Palestinian people. Biden also backed the two-state solution as the best avenue to achieve peace.

IMAGE: @PresidentRuvi/Twitter/AP


The United States will be sending 2.5 million doses of Moderna's COVID-19 vaccines to Bangladesh. US Ambassador to Bangladesh Earl R. Miller in a Twitter post on June 26 said that Bangladesh will soon receive a gift of vaccines from Americans under the COVAX programme. The decision of the Biden administration comes amid the rising coronavirus infections in Bangladesh.

Pleased to announce  will soon receive a gift of 2.5 million doses of Moderna COVID-19 vaccine from the American people via @gavi. As the largest contributor to #COVAX, the U.S. is committed to increasing the countrys vaccine supply to beat the pandemic here and worldwide. pic.twitter.com/durDLQMtb3  Earl R. Miller (@USAmbBangladesh) June 26, 2021

President Joe Biden has declared the United States as the world's vaccine "arsenal" in the war on the novel virus. The Biden administration has committed to donating $2 billion to COVAX and also purchasing 500 million doses of Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine to donate it to countries worldwide. Earlier this month, The White House said that vaccines will be shipped in August 2021 to 92 low and lower-middle-income countries. The United States will distribute 200 million doses by the end of this year and the remaining 300 million will be delivered in the first half of 2022. .

COVID-19 situation in Bangladesh

According to the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS), as on June 29, Bangladesh has recorded 7,666 more COVID cases in the 24 hours taking the overall tally to 904,436. Another 112 deaths have been reported during the period, bringing the number of total fatalities to 14,388. The total number of people recovered from the virus stands at 811,700.

Amid the surge in COVID-19 infections, the Bangladesh government has announced that it will enforce a nationwide all-out lockdown from July 1 instead of June 28 to control the spread of the novel virus, reported ANI. The decision came from a high-level meeting on June 26 presided over by Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan.

The strict lockdown decision was attributed to a "dangerous and alarming" surge in Delta variant cases of coronavirus. Under the lockdown rules, all government and private offices would remain shut during the lockdown. Only emergency services are allowed to operate under the guidelines. All kinds of transports, except those carrying emergency supplies, ambulances and vehicles for healthcare services and media, will remain suspended.

IMAGE: AP

Inputs from ANI
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The family of Liao Qiang has been living temporarily in democratic Taiwan pending resettlement, in the absence of a refugee law.

A prayer gathering at the Early Rain Covenant Church in Sichuan's capital Chengdu is shown in a file photo.

A family of six linked to the Early Rain Covenant Church in the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan has been granted political asylum in the United States after fleeing China for the democratic island of Taiwan, RFA has learned.

Early Rain member Liao Qiang and five family members traveled to Taiwan while on a trip to Thailand in 2019, and were temporarily settled in Hsinchu while their U.S. asylum application was processed, Liao's daughter Ren Ruiting told RFA.

"Back then, all we knew was that we were heading for Taiwan, thinking that there would be some kind of law about refugees there," Ren said. "We didn't realize until we got there that we would just be there while we were waiting to go to the U.S."

"We went along with the arrangements, as there was no way for us to stay in Taiwan, so we will go to the U.S. and settled wherever something has been arranged for us," she said.

While the administration of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) President Tsai Ing-wen is proud of its human rights record, Taiwan, which has a refugee law in the pipeline, is traditionally wary of granting political asylum to Chinese nationals for fear of triggering a flood of applications.

In the absence of legislation on refugees, Taiwan has tended to find workarounds if the authorities decide to allow someone to stay on the island, rather than issuing a blanket residency.

On Dec. 30, 2019, the Chengdu Intermediate People's Court jailed Early Rain pastor Wang Yi for nine years, after finding him guilty of "incitement to subvert state power" and of "running an illegal business" in a secret trial.

Wang, who founded the church, was detained by police in Sichuan's provincial capital Chengdu on Dec. 14, 2018, alongside dozens of church members in a raid that prompted an international outcry.

Some Early Rain Covenant Church members who were detained in raids on Dec. 9 and 10, 2018, and later released said the police had beaten them, and one detainee described being tied to a chair and deprived of water and food for 24 hours, rights groups reported at the time.

'Impossible to go back'

Ren said church members had initially believed the authorities would leave them alone after Christmas, and then after Lunar New Year, but the raids and police harassment had continued well into the next year.

"My plan at the time was to keep a low profile for maybe six months or so and then go back," Ren said. "But it became clear after I arrived in Taiwan that it would be impossible to go back."

"[Church members] are still under very close surveillance ... with no sign of any relaxation at all," she said.

Ren said the authorities had used some of her comments to overseas media to intimidate relatives back home in China, with police warning that she could be "locked up" if she went back now.

Liao, his wife, Ren, her husband and Liao's two younger sons will all be resettled in the U.S., after attending school temporarily in Taiwan.

She said she has already been struck by a stark difference between the political cultures in China under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and in Taiwan, a fully democratic society with an accountable style of government.

She said President Tsai's public apology for the fatal train crash in April had been a key moment.

"I have never seen the CCP apologize for anything," Ren said. "This is the free world, and governments need a humble attitude to run this country."

Persecution getting worse

Bob Fu, president of the U.S.-based Christian rights group ChinaAid, said his organization had partnered with a Taiwanese group to support the applications of Liao and his family.

He said religious persecution is only worsening under CCP leader Xi Jinping.

"Xi's anti-Christianity campaigns are pretty terrifying," Fu said, adding that churches are being forced to kneel before symbols of CCP authority, which he described as "idols."

"There are still around 7,000 who have refused to bow down in the face of oppression by the CCP, people who have been locked up, like pastor Cao Sanqiang, elder Hu Shigen, lawyer Gao Zhisheng, and pastor Wang Yi," Fu said.

"Many of them have been jailed for more than 10 years, and are still suffering in prison," he said.

But he called on the Taiwan government to pass a refugee law as soon as possible to aid others fleeing authoritarian rule and persecution under the CCP.

"Many people have been persecuted or even committed suicide under the CCPs enforcement of the national security law, and yet their families and large numbers of students remain stranded," Fu said.

"This is the the way things are in Taiwan right now."



Reported by Hwang Chun-mei for RFA's Mandarin Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.
The move signals US resolve to confront China's presence in contested areas of the South China Sea, some analysts say.

The United States and Indonesia are building a U.S. $3.5 million coast guard training center on Batam, an industrial and transport hub at the south end of the South China Sea, to boost Jakartas capacity to fight domestic and transnational crime, authorities said.

Representatives of Indonesias Coast Guard (Bakamla) and the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta were present at the groundbreaking ceremony at the Batam Navy Base on Friday. The U.S. ambassador and Indonesian Coast Guard chief attended virtually.

[T]he United States remains committed to supporting Indonesias leading role in advancing regional peace and security by countering domestic and transnational crime, U.S. Ambassador Sung Kim was quoted as saying in a joint statement about the event.

Vice Adm. Aan Kurnia, the Bakamla chief, said construction of the training center would be completed next year, and after that, it would be owned and operated entirely by his institution.

No U.S troops will be stationed there, Aan said.

He said there was no specific reason behind the location of the new facility, when asked if it was part of efforts to strengthen Indonesias maritime presence amid incursions by Chinese fishing and coast guard vessels in nearby waters.

Everything is still in the corridor of the principle of a free and active foreign policy, Aan told BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service. We, as a new institution, are still limited in capacity, so there needs to be innovation to improve human resource capabilities.

Batam, the capital of Riau Islands province, lies just 32 km (20 miles) south of Singapore, near the border of disputed waters between China and several Southeast Asian countries.

The training center is a collaborative effort between Bakamla, which was established in 2014; the U.S. Coast Guard; the U.S. State Departments International Narcotics and Law Enforcement office; and the U.S. Department of Defense.

Disputed waters

Bakamla has intensified sea patrols in recent years after Chinese fishing boats escorted by China Coast Guard ships sailed into Jakartas Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) off the Natuna islands, Indonesias name for its waters at the southern end of the South China Sea.

It has also seized dozens of Vietnamese fishing boats trespassing in Indonesian waters. In early 2021, Bakamla apprehended two tankers in the Java Sea carrying out an unauthorized oil transfer from an Iran-flagged tanker to a Panama-flagged one, in violation of international law.

Adding to tensions in the congested waterways, Beijing has authorized China Coast Guard ships to use weapons against any vessels found in waters that Beijing claims as its territory.

Indonesia does not regard itself as a party to territorial disputes over the South China Sea, but Beijing claims historic rights to parts of the maritime region that overlap Indonesias EEZ.

A clear signal

The U.S. previously helped Indonesia build a maritime training center at the Ambon Navy Base in the eastern province of Maluku in 2018.

The new facility will accommodate up to 50 trainees and 12 instructors, and include classrooms, offices, a kitchen and dining area, barracks, and a vessel launch ramp, the statement said.

Aristyo Rizka Darmawan, a senior researcher at the Center for Sustainable Ocean Policy at the University of Indonesia, described the new facility as an exciting development for Indonesia-U.S. relations, at a time when Jakarta has been involved more with China.

This is a positive development for both countries, [while] also very beneficial for Indonesia to confirm its symbol of presence in the North Natuna Sea, Aristyo told BenarNews.

He said the cooperation also showed Indonesias efforts to balance its position amidst a rivalry between the two superpowers.

Indonesia is showing its neutrality from the cooperation, as the Southeast Asian country also takes advantage of its relationship with China, which will contribute to stability in the region, he added.

Aristyo said this initiative by the U.S. would also extend Washingtons presence in the region in a way that is acceptable to the Indonesian public.

But geopolitically, this is a clear signal for the U.S. to confront Chinas presence in the region, especially after the salvage operation of the KRI Nanggala-402 with the help of Chinese naval ships.

Indonesia recently accepted help from three Chinese naval ships in its ultimately fruitless operation to salvage a submarine that sank north of Bali in April with 53 sailors on board.

Ships and aircraft from Australia, India, Malaysia, Singapore,and the United States were involved in earlier search efforts for the sub, which sank during a torpedo-firing exercise.

Reported by BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service.
Party newspapers regularly lauded the benefits of democratic government and deplored attacks on press freedom under the Kuomintang regime, which ended in 1949.

People dance during a Cultural Performance as part of the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) at the Bird's Nest Stadium in Beijing, June 28, 2021.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which came to power with the proclamation of the People's Republic of China by Mao Zedong in 1949, and which marks its centenary on July 1, spent much of its early life talking about democracy.

"China has a shortcoming, and it is a big one. This shortcoming, in a nutshell, is the lack of democracy," ran an article in the June 13, 1944 edition of the party's Liberation Daily newspaper.

It was taking aim at the Kuomintang regime, formed in the wake of the 1911 revolution under Sun Yat-sen that toppled the Qing dynasty (1644-1912).

"Do not reject democracy because of the low level of education of citizens: apply democratic politics to educate and improve the people's level of education," a commentary in the Xinhua Daily opined on Feb. 25, 1939.

Another editorial in the same paper warned: "Substituting one-party dictatorship for democracy may be clever, but it is far from being what the people want: the Chinese people are watching."

In September 1943, the paper warned against "fascist news theorists" who wanted to restrict and destroy progressive newspapers.

"Eventually, they engage in forced takeovers, before ordering them closed," it said.

A few months later, the Xinhua Daily was putting its finger on what is still a sore point for the CCP today: the connection between a pluralistic society and freedom of expression.

"It is clear that democracy and freedom of speech are really inseparable," the paper said.

And yet, CCP leader Mao Zedong was keen to make sure nobody thought he would engage in such suppression.

Asked in 1945 by former Kuomintang education minister Huang Yanpei how the CCP would avoid falling prey to the usual pattern of rising and falling dynasties in China, Mao replied that democracy was the key to avoiding such a fate, according to former top CCP aide Bao Tong.

'Operating a scam'

Bao wrote in 2013 that Mao and the CCP had operated a "scam" since taking power in 1949.

"It's a shame that that consummate showman Mao Zedong sang his siren song of democracy, but walked the road of fascist dictatorship instead," he wrote in a commentary broadcast on RFA's Mandarin Service.

Deng Yuwen, a former newspaper editor for a CCP party school publication, said the party's slogan, the "dictatorship of the proletariat," was indeed deceptive.

"Their claim to be engaging in the dictatorship of the proletariat is a strategy of deceit," Deng said.

"From Mao Zedong's point of view, he practiced this deception in order to seize power, and naturally he wasn't going to admit to having deceived people [after taking power]," he said.

"But of course it was deceitful, from the peoples point of view."

Since CCP general secretary Xi Jinping took power in 2012, he seems to be forging ahead with Mao's style of government, changing the constitution to ensure that he can stay in power indefinitely, and inserting his "core" status into the CCP charter.

In 2013, The Economist ran a cover image with Xi's face on a much older image of dynastic, imperial power: the yellow, dragon robe of China's emperors.

"The CCP is an organized crime group engaging in fraud, and Mao Zedong was its leader," former Renmin University professor Zhou Xiaozheng told RFA.

"It has always been a one-party dictatorship, and now it's a one-person dictatorship, too," Zhou said. "There is no leadership of the CCP any more: there is only one leader, and that's Xi."

Ren Songlin, a U.S. historian of the KMT's Republic of China said that Xi is simply letting China return to its default state under the CCP.

"The CCP has always been in an abnormal state; one in which all of its theories and practices are incompatible," Ren told RFA. "The only period of time in which theory and practice really came together was the Cultural Revolution [1966-1976]."

He cited China's promise to implement the "one country, two systems" principle in Hong Kong after the 1997 handover, without really implementing it when faced with a choice about the city's democratic development.

Power at all costs

Deng Yuwen agreed, saying that the CCP's main interest has never been ideology, but gaining and holding onto power at all costs.

"For the CCP, as long as it can hold power, it does not matter what kind of ideology it uses," Deng said.

The CCP's own newspaper op-ed writers under the KMT regime clearly had other ideas, however.

"If a country calls itself a democracy, but its sovereignty is not in the hands of the people, then it is definitely not on the right track," the Xinhua Daily wrote in an editorial on Sept. 27, 1945.

"It can only be regarded as 'abnormal', and it is not a democratic country," it said.

The Liberation Daily was founded on May 16, 1941, and published political theory pieces during the Yan'an period.

The Xinhua Daily was founded on Jan. 11, 1938 by Zhou Enlai, who went on to become Mao's premier. It was conceived in enemy territory, being the first CCP paper to be published in the Republic of China.

In a pithy epithet from March 30, 1946, the paper warned its readers, again referring to the KMT regime: "A one-party dictatorship is sure to be riddled with disaster."



Reported by Rita Cheng for RFA's Mandarin Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.
Government spins leaders slimmer appearance as evidence that he suffers along with his people.

This combination of file photos provided by the North Korean government, shows North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at Workers' Party meetings in Pyongyang, North Korea, on May 24, 2020, left, and June 15, 2021. North Korean state TV has cited an unidentified resident as saying that citizens are heartbroken because of leader Kim's emaciated looks. The comments are a rare acknowledgment of outside speculation that Kim has recently lost a considerable about of weight. Photos: AFP

North Korea has launched an investigation into gossip about the health of the countrys leader Kim Jong Un, after he appeared on state media looking thinner after a lengthy absence, sources in the country told RFA.

Kim resurfaced in public this month and North Korea watchers noted that he had noticeably lost weight, even analyzing photographs to see if he was using a different notch on his wristwatch band, the New York Times reported Tuesday.

Although the reasons for his apparent weight loss are unknown, state media have used it for propaganda purposes, saying that Kim is suffering alongside his people, who are struggling in a country plagued by chronic food insecurity exacerbated by the effects of the prolonged coronavirus pandemic.

Last week North Korean state TV cited an unidentified male resident as saying ordinary people were heartbroken at the sight of a leaner Kim.

Our peoples hearts ached most when we saw (Kims) emaciated looks, the man said. Everyone says their tears are welling up in their eyes naturally.

But discussion of the North Korean leaders health can be considered treason, so authorities are launching investigations nationwide to stop people from spreading rumors about Kim, called the Highest Dignity in official communication.

I was informed that the Ministry of State Security issued an order to each regions State Security Department last week to secretly investigate rumors related to the health of the Highest Dignity, a resident of the northwestern province of North Pyongan told RFAs Korean Service June 27.

I heard about it from a state security agent in Tongrim county who I am close with, said the source, who requested anonymity to speak freely.

According to the source, the investigation will occur simultaneously in all cities and counties in the province and will target government officials and residents alike.

There is a rumor spreading around that the Highest Dignity has health problems, and the State Security Department is trying to find out the source of the rumor, the source said.

In fact, some residents, as well as government officials, are saying these days that the highest dignity is still young, but he will not live long due to various diseases including high blood pressure, said the source.

According to the source, the public suspects Kim might have a health problem because when he appeared on state TV a few days ago, he was much thinner than when they last saw him in May.

Since even mentioning the health of the highest dignity is considered treason in North Korea, the rumor has not been widely spread or publicized yet, the source said.

The Ministry of State Security sees the spread of even the slightest word about the health of the Highest Dignity as a case related to the stability of the regime, so not only government officials, but also the people are extremely careful about their words because they dont want to get caught in an investigation.

In South Pyongan province, north of the capital Pyongyang, the head of a neighborhood watch unit told RFA that the State Security Department is ordering each unit to report on residents who mention even trivial matters about Kim Jong Uns health.

I understand that such measures are happening nationwide under the direction of the Ministry of State Security, said the second source, who requested anonymity for security reasons.

The second source said the investigation is similar to public opinion surveys launched when Kim Jong Uns grandfather and national founder Kim Il Sung died in 1994, and when his father and predecessor Kim Jong Il suddenly collapsed from a stroke in 2008 and could not attend a ceremony for the 60th anniversary of the founding of the North Korean regime.

The reason for this investigation is because the Highest Dignity on TV last month had a big build, but he looked unhealthy during the plenary meeting of the Central Committee [of the Korean Workers Party] this month, the second source said.

Thus, there is a rumor going around that Kim Jong Un is in poor health like his father was for now it is unknown how long this investigation will continue.

Several analysts told RFA that even though Kims thinner appearance might indicate to the public that he could be ill, a slimmer build could be good for propaganda.

I think the North Korean regime understands that, in a country where there are pockets of people starving, to have a very overweight Supreme Leader is just not a good image. And I think by showing that he's lost a little weight -- that can really kind of go along with the narrative that he's working very hard for the people and everybody's suffering including him, Ken Gause of the Virginia-based CNA think tank told RFA.

We haven't seen any other indications that actually he's suffering any particular ailment, Gause said, adding that the weight loss was not dramatic.

Mark Barry, the associate editor of the International Journal on World Peace, said Kim may have lost weight for health reasons.

Surely whatever was done to attain weight loss was for the sake of improving Kims health over the long-term, Barry told RFA.

However, it does serve a propaganda purpose to portray Kims weight loss as if he were suffering along with his people due to the adverse food situation this spring and summer, he said.

Kims rapid weight gain since 2011, when he became ruler at only 27 years old, may have been as a means to appear older and more in charge so that elites who served his father would fall in line, added Barry.

U.S.-based North Korea expert Kongdan Oh told RFA that even if Kim is in poor health, the government must spin it positively, because North Korean society is so leader oriented.

This time, the weight loss is being propagandized as, he worked so hard for the people and couldnt sleep. Thats why he has become so emaciated, she said.

Whenever Kim Jong Un is absent from public view for an extended period, rumors of his ill health or plans for after his death circulate both inside and outside North Korea.

RFA reported in April 2020, during one such absence, that people living near the Chinese border were spreading rumors that Kim Jong Un was on his deathbed. Meanwhile North Korea watchers in the West were speculating that Kims sister, Kim Yo Jong, would be next in line to rule.

The rumors were quashed when a seemingly healthy Kim made a public appearance on May 1. Kim Yo Jong was demoted in 2021, further muddling outside speculation over her level of importance within her brothers inner circle.

Reported by Hyemin Son and Albert Hong. Translated by Jinha Shin and Leejin Jun. Written in English by Eugene Whong.
This photo taken and received courtesy of an anonymous source via Facebook shows protesters, some holding flares, taking part in a demonstration against the military coup in Monywa, Sagaing Region, June 21, 2021.

Militiamen killed at least nine junta soldiers in northwest Myanmars war-torn Sagaing region over the weekend in a two-pronged attack on a convoy heading to Kalay township, while 3,000 villagers fled the area amid intensified raids on civilian homes and in anticipation of a major military offensive, fighters said Monday.

The Kalay branch of the Peoples Defense Force (PDF) militia said in a statement that two of its units ambushed the convoy around 1:00 p.m. Sunday between Khway Kyin and Than Pho villages, some 15 miles from the center of the township of 400,000, killing the nine soldiers in a firefight. More than half the population of Kalay is ethnic Chin.

RFAs Myanmar Service was unable to independently verify the PDFs claims.

Separately, two bomb blasts occurred in downtown Kalay on Sunday, according to a resident, who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal.

The first explosion occurred at 11:00 a.m. in front of the Myanmar Shaysaung Bank on Kalays Bogyoke Road, while the second took place at around 3:00 p.m. near the local governments Supaung Office.

The military has strengthened its presence in the town and tightened its checkpoints, the resident said.

A bomb exploded near the Myanmar Shaysaung Bank  No one was injured. It happened about 100 yards from where I was.

Additional details of the bomb blasts were not immediately available.

Sources told RFA that military troops had conducted a search for PDF members in several villages near the scene of Sundays violence, shooting randomly as they entered the areas and making multiple arrests.

In one case, a resident said, when a militia member was not at home, soldiers took his wife and his 12-year-old daughter away  [and] even hit the girl as they detained her.

People had to run away, some with their families, on motorcycles and cars, the resident said.

Other sources said four people were arrested in Htaukkyant village, prompting about 3,000 residents from seven villages along the Gangaw-Kalay Highway to flee into the mountains.

The PDF said Sundays attack occurred a day after it ambushed a convoy of more than 20 military vehicles headed to Kalay from nearby Gangaw township, although the number of casualties was unclear.

Attempts by RFA to contact the militarys Deputy Information Minister Zaw Min Tun for comment on the fighting over the weekend went unanswered.

Protesters holding signs supporting the newly formed opposition National Unity Government as they take part in a demonstration against the military coup in Shwebo in Myanmar's Sagaing region, April 18, 2021. Credit: AFP/anonymous source via Facebook Growing conflict

There have been at least seven clashes in Kalay between PDF forces and the military in the months since early April, when the military used heavy artillery to smash barricades and disperse people peacefully demonstrating against the juntas Feb. 1 takeover of the government. Junta forces have since killed some 40 residents of the township, according to local sources.

The junta has attempted to justify its coup with claims that Aung San Suu Kyis National League for Democracy (NLD) party stole Myanmars November 2020 general election but has yet to provide evidence of alleged voter fraud. The military has violently suppressed widespread protests, killing at least 883 people and arresting more than 5,200, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP).

On Monday, a member of the PDF in Kalay told RFA that around 60 vehicles loaded with military troops had arrived in Sagaing over the past two days in preparation for a major offensive against his branch of the militia, as well as others in the region.

I think they have been surveilling the situation from the sky with a chopper, he said.

They appear to have moved into the entire region, as there are PDF branches through Mindat and Tamu [townships] along the Chindwin River, and there were also clashes in Mingin area.

Family members wait in front of Yangons Insein Prison as rumors emerged that those arrested by the junta would be released, June 26, 2021. RFA Residents frightened

Residents of Kalay told RFA they are frightened for their safety amid the increased military presence in the township, citing reports of abuse, detentions, and even deaths in custody.

In one case, the military arrested a 47-year-old ethnic Chin man named Zaw Myint and his 26-year-old son Zaw Htet on June 25 without providing a reason, and the son died under mysterious circumstances in custody the following day, according to family members.

Zaw Htets mother said family members were informed that he had died of COVID-19 and were only permitted to see his body briefly before troops interred him.

He didnt have COVID earlier and he was a healthy manhe even came to have lunch at my house that morning, she said.

We saw his body at the hospital only briefly. They told us we mustnt touch his body because we might get infected with the virus, and then he was taken in an ambulance to the cemetery. When we arrived there, his body was already cremated.

Family members told RFA they believe Zaw Htet likely died of severe torture while in detention and expressed concern that his father, who remains in custody, is also at risk.

Sources said Zaw Htet was only one of three people to die in less than 24 hours while in military interrogation in Kalaythe other two being Mai Ngum Zar Tiang and Min Min. The military also claimed that Mai Ngum Za Tiang died from COVID-19, they said.

A resident, who declined to be named, told RFA that as many as 20 people have died in custody at military interrogation centers in Kalay.

They are using violence and torture to instill fear among members of the public, but people are more determined than ever to fight back, the resident said.

With every new case, they become even more determined to avenge the dead.

Reported by RFAs Myanmar Service. Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.
With COVID-19 infections and deaths rising in Myanmar and its neighbors, deposed national leader Aung San Suu Kyi has called on citizens in the military-ruled country to strictly observe all precautions aimed at preventing the pandemics spread, her lawyers said on Monday.

Following a court hearing in the capital Naypyidaw directed by the military junta that overthrew Aung San Suu Kyi and her democratically elected civilian government on Feb. 1, defense attorney Min Min Soe said the 76-year-old leader had asked him to relay a message to the people of Myanmar to take good care of themselves amid the rising numbers of infections and deaths in the pandemic.

She is very deeply concerned for the people, Min Min Soe said, adding that Aung San Suu Kyi was asking many questions in order to stay informed on the growing spread of COVID-19 across the country and in the capital, where she now faces trial on seven separate charges brought by Myanmars new military rulers.

As usual, she reiterated the need for people to wear face masks and regularly wash their hands. And she told us, her lawyers, to be especially careful ourselves during this time, he said.

On June 28, 1,225 new cases of infection were reported in Myanmar, with 125 deaths recorded during the same 24-hour period. A total of 154,385 infections and 3,309 deaths from COVID-19 have now been reported in Myanmar since its first positive case was detected on March 23, 2020.

In neighboring Laos, COVID-19 cases began to climb again following a brief reduction in numbers with an additional 26 infections reported on June 28, bringing the nationwide total to 2,136, Rattanaxay PhetshouvanhDirector General of the Department of Disease Control of the Lao Ministry of Healthtold reporters at a press briefing.

Three new deaths were also reported.

'Only minor symptoms'

On June 27, the Lao National Taskforce for COVID-19 Prevention and Control reported that a 29-year-old woman living in the capital Vientiane had tested positive for COVID-19 despite having received two doses of the Chinese Sinopharm vaccine, one of the 530,000 residents of Laos to be fully vaccinated.

We have warned the general public that even those who have been fully vaccinated can still contract [the virus], a member of the National Taskforce told RFAs Lao Service on June 28.

They should still wear masks and maintain social distancing, he said.

In this particular case, the woman just has some minor symptomsnothing serious. The vaccine has helped to protect her body from serious illness, he added.

Im worried about what happened to that woman. I have no choice but to wear a mask and continue social distancing. None of can let our guard down, one resident of Vientiane said, with another capital resident adding, Even people having had two shots shouldnt be careless.

They shouldnt go drinking, partying, or gathering in large numbers. They should always practice strict preventive measures, he said.

In Thailand, a 38-year-old Lao worker selling clothes at a market in Bangkok died at home of COVID-19 on Sunday after being diagnosed on June 18 and waiting for days for a hospital bed, a Thai health worker told RFA on June 28.

Her body was immediately cremated, and her husband is now also infected, RFAs source said.

Cases climb in Vietnam, Cambodia

Case numbers also climbed in Vietnam and Cambodia over the weekend, with Vietnams Ministry of Health reporting 382 new cases on June 28 and Cambodian health authorities reporting 883 new cases for the same 24-hour period.

Of the new cases in Vietnam, 218 were registered in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly called Saigon, while 40 cases were reported in the southern province of Binh Duong and 26 were reported in the northern province of Bac Giang.

The remaining infections were detected in 16 other provinces and cities, health officials said.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the Southeast Asian country has reported 16,041 coronavirus cases. A total of 6,519 patients have recovered from the disease, including 200 announced on June 28, and 76 deaths have been recordedmost in patients already suffering from serious underlying health conditions.

Thirteen provinces and cities have not reported any new local infections now over the past 14 days, according to official reports.

In Cambodia, 16 more deaths were reported on June 28, bringing the countrys total to 556 dead since the pandemic began, the Ministry of Health said. The number of new infections has now risen to from 500 to nearly 1,000 per day, with daily death tolls rising from 10 to 20.

With case numbers climbing especially in the provinces of Tbong Khmum, Prey Veng, Svay Rieng, Siem Reap, and Banteay Meanchey, Cambodian health authorities are calling for renewed attention to prevention measures, especially with new cases of infection with a stronger and more virulent Delta variant being brought into the country, in many cases by workers from Thailand.

More than 48,590 cases of COVID-19 have now been recorded in Cambodia, with more than 42,000 now reported cured, and thousands of patients still receiving treatment in hospitals or at home. Nearly 4 million of the countrys 10 million people have now been vaccinated, mostly with Chinese-made vaccines.

Reported by RFAs Myanmar, Lao, Vietnamese, and Khmer Services. Translated by Khin Maung Nyane, Max Avary, Viet Ha, and Sok Ry Sum. Written in English by Richard Finney.
Critics point out that NUG is not internationally recognized, and Myanmar is not party to ICC

Dr. Sasa, who was set to be part of Aung San Suu Kyi cabinet before the military coup, is seen in this still image taken from a video of an online interview with Reuters from his undisclosed location, February 28, 2021. Picture taken February 28, 2021.

Myanmars shadow government has compiled more than 400,000 pieces of evidence of atrocities committed by the military regime against civilians since it overthrew the government in February and is preparing to file an international lawsuit against the junta for crimes against humanity, its spokesman said.

National Unity Government (NUG) spokesman Dr. Sasa told a news conference Friday that the evidence is sufficient to prosecute the military government and its leader Sr. Gen. Min Aung Hlaing at the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity.

The military overthrew the countrys democratically elected government on Feb. 1 and has been violently suppressing resistance to military rule since then.

The NUG claims to be the legitimate government of the country and is made up by lawmakers ousted by the coup, as well as ethnic leaders.

It is important to bring these generals to the court. Justice must be served. A total 915 people have been killed so far. This is not acceptable, Sasa said at the news conference.

We are determined to put those who committed these atrocities behind bars. Min Aung Hlaing is supposed to be behind the bars. He is now out killing the people of Myanmar, he said, referring to the junta leader.

Sasa also said that the NUG is working with international legal experts and with several rights organizations to collect evidence but could not reveal which organizations for their security.

The shadow government has evidence of crimes like assault and battery, unfair trial, torture, sexual violence, forced mass displacements, use of lethal weapons, airstrikes and ethnic cleansing among others, Sasa says.

The evidence is in the form of testimony from witnesses that the NUG and the other groups plan to narrow down to 200 testimonies that meet international standards and are deemed the most accurate, for submission to the ICC.

After the review with legal firms we hired, we will present these cases to ICC. For example, we are going to present the incident from Kin Ma village as crime against humanity, he said, referring to the June 16 burning of the village in the central Magway region that destroyed about 250 houses and displaced thousands.

In the case of Kin Ma village, they have made claims like the villagers burned their own homes. We are working with a technical firm in Canada who can offer us face recognition technology to verify our evidence, Sasa said.

Min Lwin Oo, a human rights attorney based in Norway, told RFAs Myanmar Service that the NUGs attempt to bring the military leaders to ICC could be challenging because Myanmar is not a party to the Rome Statue, the treaty that established the court.

The NUG would first have to get recognition as the government of Myanmar and become party to the Rome Statute otherwise it could be difficult because the military leaders would argue that the ICC has no jurisdiction, Min Lwin Oo said.

I think it would be an uphill struggle for the NUG to get official recognition as the government of Myanmar. In the past four months since the coup, I dont see any governments openly recognizing the NUG, so bringing the case to the ICC is somewhat far-fetched, he said.

The ICC and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) have been arenas where Myanmars previous government and some generals stand accused of forced deportation of more than 700,000 Rohingya Muslims in 2017 to neighboring Bangladesh as the military targeted the minority community in Rakhine state.

Thousands of Rohingya perished as a result of the 2017 violence, which included indiscriminate killings, mass rape, torture, and village burnings. The hundreds of thousands who fled to Bangladesh now live-in massive displacement camps.

Aung San Suu Kyis government dismissed the ICC, arguing that the court has no jurisdiction over Myanmar, while she appeared at the ICJ in late 2019 and defended the country in a suit brought by Gambia accusing Myanmar of violating the 1948 Genocide Convention during the 2017 violence.

The ICJ ordered Myanmar to take measures to protect the Rohingya and document evidence of the Rakhine atrocities, but this ruling was shrugged off by the Myanmar government.

Early this month, however, the NUGs minister of Human Rights, Aung Myo Min, said his government would work to grant citizenship to the Rohingya and seek justice and accountability for all crimes committed by the military against the Rohingyas and all other people of Myanmar throughout our history.

These measures would include involving the ICC if necessary, Aung Myo Min told a news conference on June 4.

Rights experts told RFA that getting the ICC to hear a suit from the NUG was not likely.

The reason that Bangladeshs complaint went forward was because they allege that the people have been persecuted and forced to flee to Bangladesh, which is a member of ICC. But Myanmar is not a member and the only way for a case to be brought against them is to be referred by UN Security Council. With both China and Russia there, it is not likely that will happen, Phil Robertson, deputy director of the Asia Division of New York-based Human Rights Watch, told RFA.

Robertson said it was important that the NUG was raising these issues and recommended that it reach out to the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM), established by the UN Human Rights Council in 2018 to keep track of what that body describes as the most serious international crimes and violations of international law committed in Myanmar since 2011.

There are a number of ways to go forward. There are a lot to be done for the NUG to raise these issues. It would be a worthwhile effort to compile these abuse allegations and document them in great detail so that there is culpability at the international level for  the leaders and people who are following their orders, he said.

Nickey Diamond of the Fortify Rights NGO told RFA that his organization welcomed the NUGs condemnation of the militarys crimes.

Previously, the NLD government has failed to take actions against these crimes. But the NUG government is trying to bring them to the court, and it is promising. But since Myanmar is not a member of Rome Statute, they need to ratify the statue first, he said.

"In addition, it is important to look into how they process and verify the evidence from hundreds of thousands of cases. It is crucial to verify the evidence in a technically correct way so that they will be admissible in court. I think the NUG would need to cooperate the organization like IIMM, said Diamond.

Beyond filing suit in the ICC, the NUG is also considering appealing to the UN Security Council and other international measures, Sasa said during the news conference.

He also said that the NUG would build a museum to document the atrocities by Min Aung Hlaing and other military leaders. He said it would first be an online museum, with a physical repository coming at a later date.



Reported and translated by Ye Kaung Myint Maung for RFAs Myanmar Service. Written in English by Eugene Whong.
'We are now heading back to the pre-democracy era, the Dark Period,' says LGBT activist Ma Shin Thant.

Members of Myanmars LGBT community are being targeted for humiliation by security forces after arrests in anti-junta protests, raising fears that rights recently won under democratic rule are now being rolled back under the military regime, sources in the country say.

Forms of humiliation used against LGBT detainees include sexual insults, taunts, and mockery of styles of dress, with arrestees often kicked and beaten while being detained, they said.

At least 45 LGBT citizens have been arrested while protesting against the Feb. 1 military coup that ousted Myanmars democratically elected government, according to the opposition National Unity Governments (NUG) Ministry of Human Rights.

Thirty-five of these are still being held in custody, and at least six have been killed during protests in the streets, the ministry said.

LGBT people are being specially targeted for persecution, and are being humiliated and treated even more inhumanely [than others] because of prejudice against them, and because the military thinks it can do whatever it likes, NUG Minister of Human Rights Aung Myo Min told RFA.

They hate to see a man dressed like a woman, and when they see people like this, they not only arrest them but harass them sexually, said Aung Myo Min, Myanmars first openly gay government minister.

The NUG, a parallel government made of lawmakers who won elections last November but were ousted in the coup, is working to provide more protection for Myanmars women, children, and minority communities, he added.

Among those arrested, May Sharra transgender person from Taunggyi in Myanmars Shan statewas arrested and held for 24 hours for taking part in local anti-military protests, and was mocked and beaten while detained, she said.

You queers are so useless, May Sharr said she was told. Why did you have to get involved in this protest? What do you have to do with it?

They pushed me onto a truck, and when I struggled they pulled my hair and pushed me to the ground, she said.

Arent you a man? they asked, and hit me again.

LGBT rights had improved under the former civilian-led National League for Democracy government, May Sharr said.

But the lives of LGBT people, who had been oppressed in various ways in the past, are now again being faced with uncertainty just when our lives were starting to get better, she said. I feel that there was more openness under the NLD government, where we could say what we wanted and make our voices heard.

All of our dreams have been shattered by this coup, she said.

'My brother is dead'

Among those killed by junta troops, Thaw Thawa makeup artist and transgender person from Mandalay regions Kyaukpadaung townshipwas shot dead by soldiers while delivering makeup to an area wedding by bicycle, his sister said.

Because I have a heart ailment, I thought I would be the first to die, but now the heart patient is still alive and my brother is dead, she said, adding, I am so devastated, and every time I think of him I cant help but cry.

Khine Khine, an anti-coup protester in Yangons Pazundaung township who dresses as a woman, was arrested one night in mid-April at his home by soldiers who beat him and taunted him over his clothes, according to a friend.

Now facing trial, he is being forced to wear mens clothing in a male dormitory in Yangons Insein Prison, his friend said.

Attempts this week to reach military spokesperson Zaw Min Tun for comment were unsuccessful.

We are now heading back to the pre-democracy era, the Dark Period under a military regime in which we passed our childhood, said LGBT activist Ma Shin Thant.

To whom should we make our complaints if we are arrested?

There are blatant human rights abuses [in Myanmar] now. There is no justice, and we have no one we can turn to.

We really dont want to see democracy turned back, she said.

The militarys violent suppression of widespread protests has killed at least 883 people, with more than 5,200 arrests, according to the Thailand-based NGO the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP).

Reported by Soe San Aung for RFAs Myanmar Service. Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Richard Finney.
Wahitjan Osman was arrested for incorporating content in government-approved textbooks that was later branded radical and separatist.

A graphic from CGTN's short documentary "Challenges of Fighting Terrorism in Xinjiang: The Textbooks" shows senior editors Yalqun Rozi and Wahitjan Osman, accused of allegedly spreading extremist ideas. The documentary aired on April 2, 2021.

Supporters of Wahitjan Osman have launched a social media campaign for the famous Uyghur poet arrested in Chinas Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) for allegedly incorporating extremist separatist thoughts into school textbooks, highlighting his case after a Chinese state TV documentary linked him to terrorism.

Wahitjan's arrest in October 2016 came amid a deepening crackdown by Chinese authorities on intellectuals in the XUAR that Uyghurs say is part of a deliberate campaign to undermine their culture, religion, and language under the pretext of fighting extremism.

In early April, state-run China Global Television Network (CGTN) broadcast a documentary titled Challenges of Fighting Terrorism in Xinjiang: The Textbooks about the arrests of former Uyghur publishing officials and two senior editors of the Xinjiang Education Publishing House for including separatist thoughts in Uyghur-language textbooks.

Wahitjan, 58, a prolific poet who has penned hundreds of works admired in both the XUAR and the rest of China, was a senior editor at Xinjiang Education Publishing House at the time of his arrest.

The others arrested for alleged separatist activities were Sattar Sawut, former director general of the Xinjiang Education Department, his deputy director general, Alimjan Memtimin; two former Uyghur presidents of the Xinjiang Education Publishing House, Abdurazaq Sayim and Tahir Nasir; and a second senior editor, the literary critic Yalqun Rozi.

Under the direction of one of Xinjiangs top education officials, the 2003- and 2009-edition textbooks contained texts and images that highlighted ethnic hatred and incited separatist ideas among Uygur children and teenagers, says a brief description of the documentary on CGTNs website.

Sattar was later charged with promoting ethnic separatism and terrorist ideology in textbooks and sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve, according to the documentary, part of a larger four-part series on fighting terrorism in Xinjiang.

The documentary made no mention of the punishments handed to Wahitjan and Yalqun, who were described as two editors with radical separatist thoughts, instructed to collect more content on ethnic oppression for the textbooks. The other three officials were given life sentences.

After the documentary aired, two of Wahitjans supporters  Abdushukur Muhammat, a Uyghur intellectual based in Sweden who knows the poet and his works, and Alimjan Inayet, a prominent Uyghur professor in Turkey  collaborated with the detained poets Turkey-based daughter, Aykanat Wahitjan, to launch a Freedom for Poet Wahitjan Osman campaign on Facebook.

At this point there have been many different social media campaigns about detained Uyghur intellectuals, but there hasnt yet been a campaign for Wahitjan Osman, said Abdushukur, who began posting short passages about Wahitjan in Uyghur, English, and Turkish, last week to refute Chinas portrayal of the poet in the documentary and inform the public about his plight.

Because I know Wahitjan Osman well, and because he is an especially capable person among Uyghur elites, and because I dont want our elites to be forgotten, I want other people to pay attention to them like we do, he said.

Abdushukur, who said he has known Wahitjan since 1998, recalled having last seen the poet at an academic conference at Istanbul University in Turkey in 2013.

I went to the conference, where there were scholars who had come from Beijing, from Minzu University, he said. Additionally, I also saw Wahitjan Osman there.

We met up there, said our hellos to each other, because wed always gotten along well, Abdushukur added.

That same year, a collection of Wahitjans poems titled The Talking Bow and Arrow won the Steed Award, a Chinese national-level award for ethnic minority literature, he said.

More than 500 of Wahitjans poems were published in various newspapers and journals in the XUAR from 1985 until the time of his arrest, and over 40 of them had been set to music and sung in popular song.

He has never been the type of person to commit illegal acts, Abdushikur said. He is a very polite, moral, and principled person who gave his all to his literary work.

Sweeping purge of intellectuals

Alimjan, who also attended the same 2013 conference in Turkey, said that the poet had participated in the event with the express permission of the Chinese government.

Alimjan said that he was deeply saddened by the disappearance of Wahitjan, one of many intellectuals who have been targeted by Chinese authorities. He told RFA that nowhere else in the world are intellectuals called terrorists and imprisoned on account of what they have written in textbooks.

Our intellectuals are among the leading figures in our society, Alimjan said. They are the minds of a society. In order to eliminate Uyghur society, the Chinese regime wants to eliminate our minds.

The crackdown that claimed Wahitjan and his colleagues followed a strike hard campaign in 2014 targeting Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities in the XUAR to combat violent religious extremism.

Those efforts were ramped up after Chinese Communist Party Secretary Chen Quanguo relocated from the Tibet Autonomous Region to assume leadership of the XUAR in late 2016 and ushered in a policy of mass arbitrary detentions in re-education camps that have handled an estimated 1.8 million people since 2017.

The sweeping purge of intellectuals  as well as the camps, forced labor, and other abuses  are among serious human rights problems that have been cited as evidence of genocide of the Uyghurs by the U.S. government and some European parliaments this year as international scrutiny mounts.

China angrily rejects genocide accusations and says the camps are vocational training facilities to combat terrorism in the region, but government documents and detailed reports by credible news organizations and rights groups, indicate extensive and systematic suppression of the Uyghurs by Chinese authorities.

In September 2016, XUAR Bureau of Education authorities announced a new policy implementing national language teaching code for Mandarin Chinese instruction  in kindergartens, primary schools, and secondary schools throughout the region. It was after that that officials said the textbooks incited separatist thoughts, according to the Uyghur version of events.

The CGTN documentary says that in 2016 there were reports of errors in the 2003 and 2009 editions of the Uyghur-language textbooks for primary and middle school students. Some of the problems cited were cover design and illustrations that contained the national emblems of East Turkistan  the name many Uyghurs prefer for their homeland  and fabricated stories of heroic Uyghurs.

[The] investigation found that a large quantity of material inciting extremism was included in the textbook, the documentary said. From 2004, these textbooks were used region-wide for 13 years.

In the case of the Uyghur-language textbooks, the Education Department and the government itself approved all the content, so the books were published according to the law, Alimjan said.

To say that something is illegal two years after saying it was legal is, in actuality, a violation of Chinese law and of the laws of other countries, he said. There is absolutely no proof that Wahitjan Osman or the others committed any sort of crime.

Chinese authorities have arbitrarily detained professors, researchers, and academics in the camps as part of the policy to eliminate Uyghur culture, Alimjan said.

These people were detained as part of a clear plan, he said. By eliminating intellectuals, by means of detaining them, they have made it a goal to block the cultural development of the Uyghurs, to leave Uyghurs culturally behind and in a backwards state. We can see this as part of a plot.

No details given

Wahitjans daughter, Aykanat, told RFA that she first learned of her fathers detention from a list of detained Uyghur intellectuals that had been published on social media.

The first official Chinese government report she had seen about accusations of terrorism against her father came at news conference in China on April 3, a day after the airing of the documentary on the textbooks, where officials mentioned some of the intellectuals arrested, including Wahitjan, and issued a photo of him and Yalqun Rozi, though they gave no details about the two men, she said.

In addition to that, they also gave the reason why he was arrested, but they didnt say anything other than that, she said. Nothing about how many years [he was sentenced to]  nothing else.

Aykanat said she has been very worried about her fathers condition during the nearly five years since his arrest.

Abdushukur Muhammat called on international human rights organizations and Western democratic governments to pay special attention to the plight of Uyghur intellectuals such as Wahitjan who are locked up in Chinese prisons.

I hope that human rights organizations and the kinds of people who are concerned about the fate of Uyghur intellectuals will also pay attention to what has happened to Wahitjan Osman, he said.

Reported by Mihray Abdilim for RFAs Uyghur Service. Translated by the Uyghur Service. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.
U.S. President Joe Biden assured Israel on June 28 that Iran will never acquire a nuclear weapon, as he met with outgoing Israeli President Reuven Rivlin at the White House.



What I can say to you is that Iran will never get a nuclear weapon on my watch," Biden said at the start of a meeting in the Oval Office.



The meeting with Rivlin, who is set to leave the largely ceremonial post on July 7 after a seven-year term, took place after Naftali Bennett earlier this month became Israels new prime minister, replacing Benjamin Netanyahu.



Biden said he hoped to meet the new prime minister at the White House very soon."



Rivlin told reporters that he was "very much satisfied" by Biden's comments on Iran.



Iran and the United States have been holding indirect talks in Vienna on reviving the 2015 agreement between Tehran and six powers that imposed restrictions on Tehran's nuclear activities in exchange for lifting international sanctions.



Former President Donald Trump trashed the accord in 2018, in a move backed by Netanyahu.



Tehran reacted to the reimposition of sanctions by gradually reducing its nuclear commitments under the deal.



The meeting with Rivlin comes one day after Secretary of State Antony Blinken held his first meeting with Israel's new Foreign Minister Yair Lapid while the two were in Rome.



Lapid, a centrist who along with Bennett and six other political allies built a fragile coalition government, said Israel had some serious reservations about the Iran deal that is being discussed in Vienna.

Based on reporting by AFP and AP


Russia has reported another daily record for COVID-19 deaths as the country struggles with a jump in cases triggered by the highly contagious delta variant first identified in India and a sluggish vaccination rollout.

According to the official government tally on June 29, 652 coronavirus deaths were recorded in Russia over the past 24 hours, topping the record set in December 2020, while nationwide infections grew by 20,616, bringing Russia's caseload to nearly 5.5 million.

In another dose of bad news, the Kremlin announced on June 29 that the vaccination target set by authorities for the fall will not be met.

Over the past several weeks, Moscow and the second-largest city, St. Petersburg have seen a spike in infections, prompting city authorities to reintroduce virus restrictions.

St. Petersburg, which is due to host a Euro 2020 quarterfinal on July 2, also reported a new high -- 119 fatalities for the previous day, while Moscow registered 121 deaths for the same period -- a day after setting a record for the capital with 124 deaths.



Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin has said that the delta variant accounts for 90 percent of cases in the capital, where reported infections on June 29 reached 6,209.

To curb the spread of infections, Sobyanin ordered businesses to send home 30 percent of unvaccinated employees and restaurants to allow inside only patrons who have been inoculated or infected in the past half year.

Moscow also became the first Russian city to introduce mandatory vaccinations, requiring at least 60 percent of service industry workers to be fully inoculated by mid-August, with several other regions following suit.



Amid the rise in cases and widespread skepticism over homegrown vaccines, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia will fail to inoculate 60 percent of its population by the fall as previously planned given the low uptake of vaccines.



At a government meeting, Health Minister Mikhail Murashko said that 23 million people out of a population of about 146 million had received at least one vaccine dose, despite free vaccines having been available since December, when Russia launched Sputnik V.

He said that 151,000 people in Russia are currently in hospitals with the coronavirus out of a total of 182,000 beds allocated to COVID-19 patients.

Sobyanin expressed hope that up to 2 million people would be vaccinated in the Russian capital within the next six weeks.

With more than 134,000 deaths, Russia has the highest coronavirus death toll in Europe.

A parallel tally kept by statistics agency Rossat, which uses a broader definition for deaths linked to coronavirus, has put the toll at least at 270,000 fatalities since the pandemic began.

However, critics say that Russia vastly underreports fatalities, and the real toll could be considerably higher.

With reporting by AFP, AP, and Reuters
PRAGUE -- The Czech Republic has agreed to establish an official office in Prague for the Belarusian opposition as it battles a brutal crackdown at home under the direction of authoritarian leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka.

"The Belarusian opposition has and will have the unequivocal support of the Czech Republic," Foreign Minister Jakub Kulhanek said in a tweet announcing the move just weeks after opposition leader Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya visited Prague.

The Belarusian opposition already has similar offices in Lithuania and Poland.

"A good reminder of 1920s when democratic Russians found a safe place in Prague" Jakub Janda, the director of the European Values Center for Security Policy in Prague, said in a tweet.

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.

Lukashenkas regime has been under international pressure since it launched a brutal crackdown on the political opposition and the independent media in the wake of a disputed election in August 2020.

The protesters have said that election was rigged, and that their candidate was the victor. The EU, the United States, and other countries have refused to recognize the official results of the vote and do not consider Lukashenka to be the country's legitimate leader.

The crisis hit a new level on May 23 when Belarusian authorities scrambled a military jet to escort an Athens-Vilnius Ryanair flight to land in Minsk in what many countries regarded as a "state hijacking." After the plane, which was diverted just before it left Belarusian airspace, landed, law enforcement immediately arrested opposition blogger Pratasevich and Sapega, his Russian girlfriend.

The European Union, the United States, Britain, and Canada have previously slapped sanctions on Belarus over the diversion of the Ryanair flight, including asset freezes and visa bans imposed against dozens of officials, lawmakers, and ministers from Lukashenka's administration and his family members, as well as Belarusian entities.

Belarus responded to the latest set of EU sanctions by cutting ties with the bloc. In a statement on Facebook on June 28, the Belarusian Foreign Ministry announced, among other measures, that Minsk had recalled its permanent representative to the EU for consultations and was suspending its participation in the Eastern Partnership program, which seeks closer cooperation between the EU and six former Soviet republics -- Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine.

The European Union has said it regrets Belaruss decisions, saying they will only further isolate the country and have a negative impact on the Belarusian people.

Speaking to Current Time on June 29, Tsikhanouskayas representative, Valery Kovalevsky, said the opposition leader will insist that Belarus continues being a member of the Eastern Partnership."

We will continue working within the framework of this organization, and we will attend, among other things, the Eastern Partnership summit on October 2021, Kovalevsky said, calling the Eastern Partnership program a wonderful platform to work for the interests of the Belarusian people."

Current Time is the Russian-language network run by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA.
MOSCOW -- Moscow police have carried out searches of the homes of several senior journalists at the investigative website The Project hours after it published a report questioning how Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev and his relatives gained their wealth.

The Project said on its Telegram channel on June 29 that police searched the home of Editor In Chief Roman Badanin, as well as that of his colleague, Maria Zholobova.

The website also said that police detained Badanin's deputy, Mikhail Rubin, near Zholobova's home and took him to his parents' apartment, which was also searched.

No reasons were given for the searches.

According to the website, the searches were conducted after The Project had produced an investigative report about Kolokoltsev, his son, and other relatives that alleges the family used connections with Russian officials, businesspeople, and criminal kingpins to enrich themselves.

Kolokoltsev has not commented on the report.

The website published its investigative report on June 29, but the large number of visits to the site made it difficult to access. The report also is available on The Project's YouTube channel.

The Russian authorities respond to reports of top-level corruption with impressive severity and lightning speed -- except that they persecute those who expose it," said Natalia Zviagina, Amnesty Internationals Moscow office director.

Denouncing the searches of the journalists's homes as "another brazen attack on independent media and freedom of expression in Russia," Zviagina called for "an immediate termination of all criminal libel proceedings against journalists and an end to the state harassment of independent Russian media.

Gulnoza Said, the Committee to Protect Journalists' Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, urged the Russian authorities to drop their investigation into The Project and its journalists, return their equipment, and "stop harassing them for their investigative reporting.

Law enforcements job should be to protect journalists, not to use the law to try and shut down independent voices, she said in a statement.

The Project said earlier that its website suffered a massive cyberattack after it published an investigative report about the wealth of the authoritarian ruler of Russias North Caucasus region of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, and his wives.
NUR-SULTAN -- Kazakh authorities have detained another activist as they continue a crackdown amid preparations to mark the 81st birthday of former President Nursultan Nazarbaev in the tightly controlled former Soviet republic.

Aizhan Abenova informed her friends by phone on June 29 that police were taking her to a police station in Nur-Sultan. It was not immediately clear why she was detained.

A day earlier, police in Nur-Sultan detained two other civil right activists -- Marat Musabaev and Qaiyrgeldy Nurghaliev -- and charged them with violating laws on public gatherings.

Hours later, a city court sentenced Nurghaliev to 15 days in jail and Musabaev to 20 days in jail.

Local activists say that the incarcerations are connected to a call by Mukhtar Ablyazov, the leader of the Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan (DVK) movement, for a demonstration on July 6, the day the country's capital, Nur-Sultan, is celebrated in tandem with Nazarbaev's birthday.

Kazakhstan changed the name of its capital to Nur-Sultan in 2019 to honor Nazarbaev, who ruled with an iron fist from the nations independence in 1991 until 2019. The renaming of the capital from Astana to Nur-Sultan sparked protests across the country at the time.

Nazarbaev continues to wield considerable influence as chairman of the Security Council and enjoys almost limitless powers as "elbasy" -- leader of the nation.

Kazakh authorities have banned DVK and its associate, the Koshe (Street) party, labeling them as extremist organizations.

Dozens of activists have been on hunger strike in Nur-Sultan and several other cities in Kazakhstan, including Almaty, Oral, Oskemen, and Shymkent, since June 19, demanding the cancellation of court decisions to ban DVK and Koshe.

One hunger striker in the southern city of Shymkent had to stop his protest on June 29 after his health deteriorated and an ambulance was called to treat him.

Under President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev, who was handpicked by Nazarbaev, Kazakhstan continues to clamp down on freedom of speech and harass opposition members.

Police last year detained dozens of journalists and bloggers and launched criminal cases for alleged crimes such as spreading false information and inciting the public, according to Adilsoz, a local media watchdog.
DUSHANBE -- Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov has called deadly clashes along a disputed segment of the Kyrgyz-Tajik border "a heavy test for both nations."

Japarov made the statement on June 29 in Dushanbe at a meeting with his Tajik counterpart Emomali Rahmon.

Rahmon did not address the deadly clashes that erupted in late April in the area close to Kyrgyzstan's southern region of Batken.

"The events of April 28-29 became a heavy test for our countries. Authorities of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan must prevent repetition of such events. Tajiks and Kyrgyz have had brotherly and neighborly ties for many years and we are doing our best to preserve the friendly relations," Japarov said at the meeting, which was initially scheduled for May before being postponed following the deadly clashes.

The clashes erupted after the Tajiks tried to install security cameras in disputed border territory. The battles saw border troops open fire on each other and left dozens of people dead and dozens of homes destroyed.

Kyrgyzstan reported 36 deaths from the violence at the time, mostly civilians, while Tajik officials said 19 of its citizens died in the clashes.

Many border areas in Central Asia have been restive since the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991.

The situation is particularly complicated near the numerous exclaves in the volatile Ferghana Valley, where the borders of Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan meet.

Official media outlets in both nations said earlier that Japarov and Rahmon will discuss bilateral relations, while several documents will be signed following the talks.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed into law a bill that criminalizes participation in the activities of foreign nongovernmental organizations recognized as undesirable in Russia.

Putin promulgated the bill on June 28, five days after parliament's upper chamber, the Federation Council, approved it.

The lower chamber of parliament, the State Duma, passed the measure on June 16.

Under the law, Russian citizens may face up to six years in prison if found guilty of organizing the operations of "undesirable" international organizations on Russian territory.

Russian citizens and entities located in any country of the world will be barred from taking part in the activities of foreign nongovernmental organizations that are labeled "undesirable" in Russia.

Individuals who take part in the activities of such organizations activities may be sentenced to up to four years in prison, while punishment for raising funds for such groups will be up to five years in prison.

The bill also says that individuals who voluntarily stop cooperating with "undesirable" organizations or assist in the shutting down of such organizations' operations will not face trial.

The law also allows Rosfinmonitoring, the country's money-laundering monitor, to track money transfers from some countries, the list of which will be specially determined in agreement with the central bank.

The "undesirable organization" law, adopted in May 2015, was part of a series of regulations pushed by the Kremlin that squeezed many nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations that received funding from foreign sources -- mainly from Europe and the United States.


BLAGOVESHCHENSK, Russia -- The Investigative Committee in Russia's Far Eastern city of Blagoveshchensk has launched a probe into a physical attack on a contributor to RFE/RL's Siberia.Realities.

Andrei Afanasyev told RFE/RL that police informed him on June 29 that an investigation was launched into "hooliganism" 12 days ago.

"I think the investigators are trying to avoid mentioning the word 'journalist' in the case and present everything like it was mere hooliganism, as if [the attack] has nothing to do with my professional activities," Afanasyev said, adding that a probe should have been launched into the "obstruction of journalistic activities."

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Afanasyev was attacked and severely beaten by three unknown assailants on June 9.

He says one of the attackers knocked him to the ground late at night near his apartment block by striking him with a metal bar. He says he was then beaten for about 10 minutes by all three assailants.

Afanasyev believes the attack was retribution for a recent investigative report he filed about the Akhmat martial arts club in Blagoveshchensk. The manager of that club, Adam Magomadov, is a former leader of the Chechen diaspora community in Russia's Far Eastern Amur region.

Magomadov was arrested in April on an extortion charge.

Afanasyev's reporting revealed that Andrei Domashenkin, a local lawmaker from the ruling United Russia party, had founded the martial arts club.

When questioned by RFE/RL on June 10 about the attack against Afanasyev, Domashenkin said that "law enforcement is taking care of that case." He did not elaborate further.

On June 14, Afanasyev filed a lawsuit with the local prosecutors office against police in Blagoveshchensk, accusing them of failing to launch an investigation into the crime.

RFE/RL President Jamie Fly has urged Russian authorities to investigate the attack against Afanasyev.

"Russian authorities must thoroughly investigate and hold accountable anyone involved in the attack on Andrei. Investigative journalism is not a crime, Fly said in a Twitter post on June 11.

The Committee to Project Journalists (CPJ), a New York-based media-rights watchdog, also has called for an investigation into the attack.

Siberia.Realities is a regional news outlet of RFE/RL's Russian Service.
Russia has tested its air-defense systems in occupied Crimea as multinational military drills co-hosted by Ukraine and the United States were under way in the Black Sea.

A total of 32 countries, including most Black Sea nations, NATO allies, and partners are attending the Sea Breeze exercise, which kicked off on June 28 amid rising tensions between Russia and the West following an incident last week involving Russia and a British warship off the coast of Crimea.

Moscow seized control of Ukraines Crimean Peninsula in 2014 after sending in troops and staging a referendum dismissed as illegal by at least 100 countries. Moscow is also backing separatists in a war in eastern Ukraine that has killed more than 13,000 people since April 2014.

The exercise includes 5,000 troops, 32 ships, 40 aircraft, and 18 special operations and dive teams and will last through July 10.

Russia's Black Sea fleet was cited by Interfax on June 29 as saying it had deployed around 20 aircraft and helicopters, including Su-24M bombers, as well as S-400 and Pantsir surface-to-air missile systems in the readiness tests.

"The Black Sea Fleet is doing a number of things to monitor the actions of ships from NATO and other countries taking part in Sea Breeze 2021," Interfax quoted the National Defense Management Center as saying in a separate statement.

The drills come after Russia claimed on June 23 that it fired warning shots and dropped bombs in the path of the British destroyer HMS Defender to force it to change course from the area near the Crimean city of Sevastopol.

Britain's Defense Ministry denied the HMS Defender had been fired upon, saying that Russia was carrying out a previously announced "gunnery exercise" in the area. Britain said it was practicing freedom of navigation in Ukrainian and international waters.

In response to the incident, Moscow warned it was prepared to fire on warships entering territorial waters it claims around Crimea.



And on June 29, the Netherlands said that Russian fighter jets armed with bombs and air-to-surface missiles repeatedly flew low over a Dutch Navy frigate in the Black Sea last week and carried out mock attacks.

"After hours of intimidation, disruptions to electronic equipment of [the warship Zr. Ms. Evertsen] also took place," the Defense Ministry said in a statement.

The incident occurred on June 24 southeast of Crimea, the ministry said, with Defense Minister Minister Ank Bijleveld-Schouten calling the Russian actions irresponsible.

Evertsen has every right to sail there, she said. There is no justification whatsoever for this kind of aggressive act, which also unnecessarily increases the chance of accidents.

Speaking in Vienna, the secretary-general of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), Helga Schmid, called for confidence-building measures to limit tensions in the Black Sea, saying that any incidents there could spiral out of control.

The OSCE's chairperson-in-office, Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde, expressed concerns about the Ukraine conflict, citing worrying developments in the last couple of months with an increasing number of cease-fire violations, aggressive rhetoric, and unusual military activity by Russia, including restrictions of access to parts of the Black Sea.

With reporting by Reuters, AFP, dpa, and Interfax
MOSCOW -- Russia has placed Ivan Zhdanov, the director of jailed Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), on an international wanted list and shared the details of his case with Interpol.

Zhdanov's lawyer, Vladimir Voronin, tweeted on June 29 that Russian authorities added his client, who currently resides in Lithuania, to a wanted list on June 18 but never informed him of the move.

Voronin posted the court decision online. It says that Russian officials are in the process of asking Interpol to issue a "red notice" on Zhdanov.

A red notice is a request to law enforcement worldwide to locate and provisionally arrest a person pending extradition, surrender, or similar legal action. It is not, however, an international arrest warrant, and a country can choose whether or not to apprehend the suspect.

Analysts say the political nature of Zhdanov's case makes it unlikely that a Western country would execute an international warrant against him.

Voronin also said that Moscow's Nagatino district court issued an arrest warrant in absentia on June 29 for Zhdanov for not complying with an order not to leave Moscow. The warrant seeks his arrest for one month, starting from when he is detained. It gave no further details.

"We always assumed that if Ivan returns [to Russia] he will be immediately sent to a detention facility from the moment he crosses the border," Voronin was quoted by Reuters as saying. "Now we know this for a fact."

Voronin told reporters that the move to place Zhdanov on an international wanted list is related to a 2017 court order instructing him to remove parts of an FBK investigative report about then-Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev that the FBK published on the Internet. Zhdanov refused to follow the order.

Navalny's foundation has relentlessly targeted senior government officials over the past decade with widely watched videos that expose corruption allegations against them.

Voronin also said the court decision will be appealed.

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 the administration of a Russian town 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 parliamentary elections in September, with opinion polls showing support for the ruling United Russia party waning.

Navalny's political network has been instrumental in implementing a "smart voting" strategy -- a project designed to promote candidates most likely to defeat Kremlin-linked figures.

A Russian court on June 9 approved a request by prosecutors to declare organizations linked to Navalny as "extremist."

The Moscow City Court ruling prevents people associated with the FBK and Navalny's network of regional offices across Russia from seeking public office.

The ruling also carries lengthy prison terms for activists who have worked with the organizations.
BELGRADE -- By land and by air.

From the Peshterska Plateau in the southwest to a historic Serbian capital farther north.

With tanks, heavy weapons, and drones to go along with around 2,300 troops.

Serbia's army and air force this month put on a display of military might and diplomatic clout in two weeks of exercises, dubbed Lightning Strike, that marked the seventh such tactical drills so far this year.

The inclusion of Russian MiGs and T-72 tanks, Airbus light-attack helicopters, and Chinese combat drones appeared to underscore populist President Aleksandar Vucic's avowal of a "multi-vector" foreign policy that has frequently rankled the West.

But there was also something for Vucic's domestic audience one day after the exercises wrapped up on June 27, as some of the troops and hardware were transported about 200 kilometers north for a show for the public near a World War II memorial in the first modern Serbian capital, Kragujevac.

June 28 is a national holiday in Serbia to mark the 14th-century Battle of Kosovo, a source of pride for many Serbs and a reminder of perceived indignities since the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, including Kosovo's partially recognized independence.

The carefully orchestrated appeal to Serbian nationalism was lent greater force by a pledge from Vucic, who told the crowd in Kragujevac that even more military equipment is on the way.

"We'll get a lot next year, which will make the Serbian Army twice as strong as today," Vucic said.

It marked a sharp contrast with his statements 18 months ago, when he signaled a brake on major purchases in order to "modernize the army."

"We will adopt additional reforms of our army, to make it even more mobile and faster," Vucic said in December 2019. "That doesn't mean buying weapons -- on the contrary."

Vucic -- who has maintained a policy of seeking EU membership and keeping a strategic relationship with Moscow, while bucking most of the region's trend of pursuing NATO membership -- stressed that Serbia is "not interested in any wars or conflicts."

Belgrade, he said, is merely "strengthening the army for defense" of the country.

But a turn toward greater militarization could unsettle some of Serbia's neighbors, which include not only a partly recognized Kosovo and a shambolic and ethnically divided Bosnia-Herzegovina, but also EU member Croatia, whose officials demanded an apology earlier this year after a member of a Serbian delegation described one of its Adriatic towns as "Serbian and occupied."

Serbia has around 7 million people and also boasts the biggest economy among non-EU members in the Western Balkans, with strong trade ties in the former Yugoslavia and robust trade with EU members like Germany and Italy.

Checking Out Capabilities

Defense Minister Nebojsa Stevanovic said Lightning Strike was simply "an excellent opportunity to check the operational capabilities of the command and units of the Serbian Army."

"It also showed how much was invested in equipping and arming our people," he said.

But with the horrors of war and ethnic cleansing so fresh in people's minds and reconciliation proceeding so slowly since the Balkan wars of the 1990s, many people are bound to be concerned at a perceived buildup anywhere in the region.

"Anytime that Serbia is parading military equipment, this is always something that will make a lot of people very nervous, given the past," James Ker-Lindsay, a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, told RFE/RL's Balkan Service.

It is clear that "things have moved on," he said, but Belgrade still has its critics.

"It's a very good opportunity for people in other countries who don't view Serbia in a particularly positive light to then use this as a chance to point the finger and say, 'Look, they haven't changed, they're still as militaristic as they were in the past. This is all about trying to flex their muscles and show their neighbors that they're still able to take back territory, and that's what they want.'"

Ker-Lindsay said the "natural inclination" would be to regard any Serbian buildup as being directed at Bosnia-Herzegovina or Kosovo, both with sizable Serb minorities.

"[But] in reality, what has been driving a lot of the [Serbian] defense expenditure in recent years -- and is actually more worrying in many ways -- is the relationship with neighboring Croatia," Ker-Lindsay said.

Serbia overtook NATO member Croatia as the region's biggest military spender in 2019, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). That ranking was fueled by a 43 percent year-on-year hike in defense spending.

Russia, in particular, has sold air defenses like the Pantsir system and other military hardware to Belgrade, while China has supplied unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) like the CN92-A combat drones used in Lightning Strike.

To some Westerners, then, Serbia parading military equipment might not be a good look.

"I think it's worrying because this doesn't do a lot of good for Serbia's international standing," Ker-Lindsay said. "And there's also a bit of a view -- certainly not in all EU member states but in a number of them -- that military parades are a bit passe."

But he also said that many countries have been eager to sell military equipment to both countries, citing France as an example.

That could highlight "a bigger reason behind it that in some ways is potentially more worrying," he said.

Militaristic Populism?

Blagoje Grahovac, a geopolitical analyst and retired general from Montenegro, said he thinks the recent military showboating by Serbia is more likely an appeal to populism that is directed at Serbia's own public rather than other countries.

"It's populism in order to militarize the state of mind of the citizens," Grahovic told RFE/RL's Balkan Service. "What can it serve? Unreasonable policies to once again abuse citizens."

He warned against the "wrong path" in Belgrade of basing its defenses so heavily on weaponry, rather than "friendly relations with its neighbors."

But he is not necessarily fearful of a major conflict, he said.

"Who can wage war in the Balkans today? Nobody," Grahovac said. "If someone goes to war, they'll lose. Neither the European Union nor the international community will allow it."

The most reliable estimates are that at least 130,000 people died during the so-called war of Yugoslav succession that erupted as that country disintegrated in the 1990s, and millions more were displaced.

Plenty of Serbia's citizens are weary -- and wary -- of military solutions.

One day before the big display of military weaponry at Kragujevac that was attended by Vucic, a group of locals -- including activists in the Serbian opposition -- laid flowers at the Sumarica memorial to the nearly 3,000 civilians who were executed by Nazi forces there in 1941.

They called it a symbolic "apology" that was part of a broader anti-war message to counter the government's public militarism.

"Are we now threatening someone again? Are we demonstrating force for internal political reasons? Or what's the reason?" asked Ljiljiana Palibrk, one of the organizers of the peace gesture. Whatever it is, she said, "the choice of location is inappropriate."

With much of the public's focus on ending an unprecedented health crisis and fostering economic recovery, Vucic's Progressive Party (SNS) used its supermajority in the Serbian parliament in April to allocate an additional 40 percent, beyond what lawmakers had originally proposed, for defense spending (to about 1.2 billion euros or $1.45 billion).

Maja Bjelos, a researcher for the Belgrade Center for Security Policy (BCSP), an NGO, suggested the "the goal of this exercise, this play, was mostly directed toward domestic public opinion" to rally Serbian public support for such heightened military funding.

"The army is strong if it has people who know how to handle equipment, especially if we're talking about equipment that was procured either from Russia or China, if it is professional and depoliticized -- that is, it is not instrumentalized by politicians and political parties," he said. "On the other hand, the priorities of the citizens of Serbia are to have clean water and clean air, better health, [and] higher employment."

Written by Andy Heil based on reporting by Mila Djurdjevic and Predrag Urosevic, with contributions by Branko Vuckovic
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy hopes a proposed expansion of Ukraines famous blue-and-yellow national emblem -- the trident -- can be passed by parliament in time for the countrys 30th anniversary of independence.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on June 29 that he is submitting to the Verkhovna Rada an urgent draft law that would update the design of Ukraines national emblem. If passed, the proposal would give Ukraine a more complex national emblem than the current yellow trident on a blue shield. Ukraine seeks to join several countries that have two national emblems, with one serving as a kind of visual shorthand for a more elaborate "greater" symbol of statehood.

The design being put forward by Zelenskiy (pictured above) won a 2020 contest judged by a professional jury that included the creator of the trident currently used as Ukraine's state emblem. The design fulfills several requirements stipulated in the constitution, but some have called for tweaks to be made. Complaints include the Ukrainian flag appearing to be being stepped on and what appear to be socks being worn by an angel.

The Ukrainian president said on June 28 that "over the years, there have been many different competitions, disputes, quarrels, opinions, and visions for the final design of the national emblem. He added: This is normal. This is democracy. I think that in the year of the 30th anniversary of independence and the 25th anniversary of [Ukraines] constitution, we must finally put an end to this issue.

The exact symbolism of the current trident is unclear, but its earliest known use dates to the rule of Volodymyr the Great, the ruler of Kievan Rus, from about 1,000 years ago.

In 1918, the trident symbol appeared as a national symbol for independent Ukraine during the countrys short-lived Peoples Republic of 1917-20 before Ukraine was captured by Vladimir Lenins Bolsheviks and turned into a socialist republic of the Soviet Union.

During World War II, the trident reappeared as heraldry for Nazi-linked nationalist organizations who were fighting against the Soviets, including the notorious Auxiliary Police, who aided the Germans during their bloody occupation of Ukraine.

After Ukraine declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the hammer and sickle of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was replaced with a lesser emblem of the yellow trident on a blue shield. A greater and more elaborate symbol still has not been agreed upon, despite several attempts.
Mary Breitinger moved to the U.S. 46 years ago from Oxford, England. Like most people who move to a different country, there was a learning curve she needed to become well-adjusted to in terms of customs, culture and governmental policies.

When she became administrative manager of Milark Industries, one thing she had to become overly familiar with was insurance for employees. The company funds over 99.8 percent of employees' insurance, and Breitinger is tasked to ensure they are on the right plan suitable for all.

Milark Industries has been partnered with Hummel Group for 16 years after deciding they wanted something new, affordable and more comprehensible.

They've always given very good advice on the best plans available, the best price available, and they oversee our group plan to see if we need to change or if we need to switch back to another option, Breitinger said.

Andy Yost, a benefit-risk advisor for Hummel Group became Breitingers main point of contact in 2020. Like the past advisors shes worked with at Hummel Group, she has not been let down. From sorting out issues with claims to physically coming into their office to help someone get on a Medicare plan, hes been there every step of the way.

Yosts primary role is to come alongside business owners and provide counsel and expertise to try and save them as much money as possible on their health insurance. At the same time, he provides a high level of benefit to their employees.

Recently, Yost helped Breitinger with insurance claim issues.

It can provide a lot of confusion because you have to call the carrier or the insurance carrier, you have to pull unnecessary documents, Yost said, It can be a painful process. So what Hummel Group tries to do is bring clarity to that and really take on the responsibility of an advocate for the employees.

From a personal standpoint, Yost understands those struggles employees go through if not on the best-chosen plan from an employer. For eight years, he worked for a manufacturing company, and three years ago he and his wife brought their child with special needs into the world.

Yost was instantly thrown into the world of healthcare. He and his family saw several specialists, and while going through that, they were also in a state of confusion about what his job's insurance covered and what they needed to pay out of pocket.

Due to that personal history, Yost can provide to an employer not only from a knowledge and expertise standpoint but also from a relatability standpoint of knowing what their employees need.

I've walked down that path, and that's part of the reason that I joined Hummel Group, Yost said. Because in my opinion, the broker you partner with or the insurance agency that an employer chooses to partner with is getting paid to not only help a management team make decisions but really be the mouthpiece for all employees at that organization.

Breitinger rates her overall experience over and beyond any limit. Instead of having to figure issues out on her own, all she has to do is call Hummel Group and they will come to her and discuss it.

Sometimes I still don't totally understand insurance, but they will sit down with you, they will take the time and they will thoroughly research for you to make sure youre getting the best plan at a good cost, which is really important in a business, Breitinger said.

They're just very professional, very friendly and very willing to help. They go out of their way to make sure that you are a happy client.
MANSFIELD -- A $100,000 county-wide branding effort, a key messaging and development idea found in the Mansfield Rising plan, was put on hold in March 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered Ohio.

That effort resumes again next week, according to Lee Tasseff, president of of Destination Mansfield-Richland County, who met with Richland County commissioners on Tuesday.

Local leaders are working with Cubic Creative, an Oklahoma-based company that is now part of Belo + Company.

According to the company's website, Cubic Creative is a "full-service creative company that transforms communities and companies through strategic creativity. While our services range from brand research and strategy through creative development and media implementation, our real strength is in building your brand with imagination and resourcefulness."

Cubic has worked with several communities on branding efforts, including Roswell, N.M., Raleigh, N.C., and Bristol, Tenn., among others.

The effort has various public and private funding sources, including the Richland Area Chamber & Economic Development, Destination Mansfield and the Richland County Foundation, among others.

"Focus groups start next week and the immersion week when (Cubic Creative) is actually in town will be (July) 12 through 16," Tasseff said. "So all that stuff is picking up speed again after being on hold for 15 months."

Tasseff told commissioners, who are also contributing financially to the effort, that the branding effort should result in a "brand story, a roadmap on how to use it, how to implement it" by the middle of the fall.

Leaders in the effort have said the branding company experts will conduct thorough research on Mansfield and Richland County, necessary to create an "authentic brand."

"Research drives it all. There are going to be focus groups. There is going to be a quantitative study. It's about perceptions, so you have got to dig underneath that," Tasseff said in 2020.

"If your research is solid, it drives what you do, because then the message becomes clear. It has to be authentic. What you put out there has to match what somebody finds here. You can't position yourself to be something you're not," Tasseff said last year.

Jodie Perry, president & CEO of the chamber, has said organizers are focused countywide, including county commissioners, mayors and others.

"We are intentionally doing this inclusively with the whole county," she said in 202. "What will the brand say? We won't know until we do the research.

"If we do the job right, the brand should reflect the (entire county). It should help us speak with one voice," Perry said in 2020.

A large group interactive event that is open to the public will likely be scheduled as part of the process.

"It's not a one-hit wonder kind of thing," Tasseff said Tuesday. "If you are going to implement it, if you're going to spend all this time and money, you have to hit (branding) hard and often.

"The plan for implementing it spreads out more than a year. It actually goes closer to four years," Tasseff said.

On Tuesday, Tasseff also updated commissioners on local travel and tourism efforts, an industry that has rebounded after the COVID-plagued 2020.

"This year is so much more fun than last year," Tasseff said with a laugh.

"Last year was all about surviving, getting through it, and being in a position to thrive this year, which is what we are doing," he said.

"We are getting back to doing what we normally do," he said, admitting his agency is adapting to a new normal.

"We need to relearn how to do different things. We will see what's important to us. We've not done some of the same things anymore. We are continuing to do things that are important to us, but change was part of the reset. Going forward, we knew we couldn't just do the same things," Tasseff said.
Electronic cigarette giant Juul Labs Inc. will pay $40 million to North Carolina and take more action to prevent underage use and sales
We must do better than latest NC energy bill
Rutland, VT (05701)

Today

Partly cloudy skies. High near 80F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Rain showers in the evening with scattered thunderstorms arriving overnight. Low 66F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%.
Sara YANAROCAK

Translation by Janet MITRANI

After the special opening ceremony organized by the 'Union of the Jews of Turkey in Israel (IYT - Itahdut Yotsei Turkia)', Bet El Synagogue is once again in service for the worshipers. The opening ceremony hosted a distinguished group of guests including the Sagol Family who made the renewal of the synagogue possible, Moreno Margonato, IYT Chairman of the Advisory (Moatsa) Board Yakup Barokas, Members of the Advisory (Moatsa) Board and spouses, and IYT Members of the Board of Directors.

Following the speeches of IYT Chairman of the Board Ovi Roditi Gulersen and Moreno Margonato after the Shehecheyanu Prayer recited along with the Hazzan and the lighting of the Havdalah Candle, the young violinist Dilan Karaylan gave a small concert with her violin. The young artist, who interpreted works from Shostakovich to Turkish compositions and a few Israeli works with folkloric motifs, received a big applause from the audience at the end of her concert. Karaylan, who is a student of Prof. Cihat Askn, is currently studying the first grade at Tel Aviv University Music Academy.

Itzhak Sagol, after her violin concert, presented Dilan Karaylan with a certificate of appreciation. Also, Chairman Ovi Gulersen presented Yesua Avaz, the synagogue's Chairman of the Board a silver 'Yad [Hand]' after his speech of appreciation in Hebrew.

After this ceremonial event, guests had a pleasant time savoring the delicacies presented by the Sagol Family. This synagogue will from now on continue to serve the Jews of Turkish origin, for both worshiping and celebrating their happy events.

A short history of Bet El Synagogue:

Bet El Synagogue started to serve the Jews from Turkey living in Jaffa and its vicinity in 1963. However, when the Turkish immigrants had started to move to other districts mainly Bat Yam, the number of synagogue-goers decreased, decay and corruption started due to neglect. At this stage Sagol Family, one of Israel's most important philanthropic families stepped in and provided the necessary funds to renew the old building with a large donation. The interior furnishings and ornaments of the renewed building were made by donations from the worshipers of the synagogue, and donations made from inside and outside of Israel.

To watch the video of the opening ceremony and the violin concert please visit the YouTube link below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dhlKbLm5QU
NEW YORK (AP)  Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg toured the century-old rail tunnel connecting New York and New Jersey Monday and offered his support for an $11 billion project to build a new tunnel that has endured years of political squabbling and funding disputes.

Buttigieg accompanied members of the two states' Congressional delegations including New York Sen. Chuck Schumer and fellow Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey on a ride through the 111-year-old span, the site of regular delays that ripple up and down the rail corridor between New York and Washington, D.C.

What we saw were building techniques and transportation technology representing the absolute state of the art ... of 1910, Buttigieg said from Amtrak's concourse in Penn Station. It was the best construction you could possibly get 110 years ago. Now, it's time to upgrade and secure this infrastructure for the 21st century.

The federal government gave the tunnel project key environmental approvals last month. That had been a sticking point during the Trump administration, as Schumer, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and others had accused Trump of purposely delaying the environmental approval for political reasons, a charge administration officials denied.

The approval will smooth the process for the project to secure federal funding as part of a 50-50 split between the federal government and the two states. The project has languished for so long  it began in earnest 10 years ago  that plans announced in late 2017 by Cuomo and then-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to fund the states' share need overhauling.

Assuming a funding deal is worked out, primary construction wouldn't begin until 2023, Schumer said, though he added that he hopes to push that up to sometime next year. Once that begins, it will take about six or seven years to complete.

Schumer sounded a positive tone.

Today we can announce that the hostage that was the Gateway tunnel under the previous administration has been set free, he said.

The project will benefit in part from $49 billion set aside for transit and $66 billion set aside specifically for rail projects contained in the bipartisan infrastructure plan being considered in Washington, he added.

The existing tunnel is prone to problems and delays due to aging infrastructure. Saltwater intrusion from Superstorm Sandy in 2012 accelerated the tunnels deterioration and forced Amtrak, which owns the tunnel, to embark on costly repairs to keep it functioning reliably.

Hundreds of trains and hundreds of thousands of passengers pass through the tunnel per day during normal times.

A new tunnel would allow the old tunnel to be overhauled, a process that would take roughly two years, and then returned to use.

That could significantly increase rail capacity into and out of New York, though it likely would require additional tracks at Penn Station. Cuomo and transit officials announced plans to redo Penn Station in April, but those are expected to take years to be implemented.
BUCHAREST (AP)  At least 200 people gathered outside the Czech Republics embassy in Bucharest Tuesday to protest the death of a Roma man following an incident with Czech police earlier this month.

Video footage of the detention of the Roma man, in the northern Czech city of Teplice on June 19, shows a policeman kneeling on his neck for several minutes. The Roma man later died in an ambulance.

The incident sparked widespread condemnation about racism and discrimination allegedly faced by the Roma, whose population in Europe numbers around 10-12 million.

At Tuesdays event in Romanias capital  which was attended by dozens of Roma  some wore t-shirts brandished with the text: Racism kills. One of the protesters demands was an independent investigation into the man's death.

A man of ours  was brutally killed by the police. This is proof that brutality against Roma people exists, Banu Ionut Alin, from the civic group Aresel, told The Associated Press.

Czech police have said that the man died from a drug overdose. Official investigations are ongoing.

The reason we took to the streets today is that this institutionalized racism is more and more present. There is a rising trend of extremist attitudes against Roma communities, Alin said. We are many, we have power, and we will oppose everything we can to respond to this institutional racism."

The European Commission has said that many Roma in the European Union are victims of prejudice and social exclusion, despite a discrimination ban across EU countries.

Since the Roma mans death, protests and vigils have been held in various countries, including the United Kingdom, while many have drawn parallels to the death of George Floyd, a Black man, in the United States last year, which sparked huge protests.

The Council of Europe and Amnesty International have both called for an independent investigation into the Roma man's death.
LOS ANGELES (AP)  Detectives arrested a mother for investigation of murder in the deaths of her three small children  including a newborn baby  in East Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department said Tuesday.

The coroner's office identified the children as Mia Camila Rodriguez, 4, and her brothers Mason Mateo Rodriguez, 3, and Milan Mateas Rodriguez, who was 1 month old. Their autopsies are pending.

Their mother, 28-year-old Sandra Chico, was being held on $2 million bail and is scheduled to appear in a Los Angeles courtroom on Wednesday, a Sheriffs Department statement said.

The statement said the arrest was based on the detectives preliminary investigation and that no additional information was available.

It was not immediately known if Chico had a lawyer to speak on her behalf. The case had not been presented to the district attorney's office as of Tuesday morning.

The children were found in a bedroom in their home around 12:45 p.m. Monday after a family member called for help, according to Lt. Chuck Calderaro. They were not breathing, and efforts to revive them were not successful.

Neighbors placed flowers in front of the home to remember the children. Arturo Cerezo, an uncle, arrived as Chico was being detained.

She would do anything for those kids, he told KNBC. Thats whats so hard to understand. What happened?

Authorities have said there was no obvious cause of death or physical signs of trauma.

We still dont know the cause, or the motive. All I know is, she wasnt right, the childrens grandmother, Rosalba Flores Castillo, told KTLA in Spanish.

There was no forewarning of any kind, Sheriff Alex Villanueva said. No repeated calls for service ... no allegations of child abuse. This was out-of-the-blue tragedies.

Neighbor Victor Ohm told FOX 11 he previously saw the kids playing in the yard whenever he left to get groceries.

Its heartbreaking, Ohm told the TV station. They were happy kids.
BANGKOK (AP)  Myanmar's ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi suffered a legal setback Tuesday when a judge denied her lawyers motion to disqualify prosecution testimony against her on a sedition charge, her defense team said.

The court, however, said it would allow the issue to be referred to the High Court and would suspend testimony until a ruling is issued. Ousted President Win Myint and the former mayor of Naypyitaw, Myo Aung, her close political allies, are co-defendants in the charge.

The court will continue to hear prosecution testimony on other charges Suu Kyi faces: that she illegally imported walkie-talkies for her bodyguards use and used those radios without a license, and violated COVID-19 pandemic restrictions on two occasions during the 2020 election campaign.

Suu Kyi went on trial on June 14 in a closed court in Naypyitaw, the capital. The ruling military junta is widely seen as using the charges to discredit her and consolidate its control. Sessions are being held weekly on Mondays and Tuesdays.

The military took power in February after ousting Suu Kyis elected government and arresting her and other top officials in her administration and National League for Democracy party, which had been due to start a second five-year term after winning a landslide victory in a general election last November.

The army has said it will hold new polls within two years of its takeover, but a conviction on virtually any charge could result in Suu Kyi being banned from running.

The sedition charge, which is sometimes called incitement, provides for up to two years imprisonment for anyone guilty of causing fear or alarm that could create an offense against the state or public tranquility. It has been law since Myanmar was a British colony, and has been criticized as a catch-all statute that infringes on freedom of speech and is used for political repression.

The plaintiff. a local Naypyitaw official, cited two statements posted on the Facebook page of Suu Kyis party as evidence supporting the sedition charge.

Suu Kyis defense team raised an objection to that testimony, noting that all members of the partys central executive committee, including Suu Kyi, had already been arrested before the statements were posted.

San Mar La Nyunt, the defense lawyer handling the sedition case, said they raised the objection because the prosecution witnesses testimony was not in accordance with the law. After the court ruled it allowable, they asked for and were given permission to apply to the High Court.

Suu Kyi faces additional charges that have yet to be tried, among them allegedly accepting bribes, which carries a penalty of up to 15 years in prison, and violating the Official Secrets Act, which has a maximum prison term of 14 years.

Suu Kyi, 76, who has not been allowed a public appearance since her arrest, passed a message through her lawyers for the public to stay united in the face of the political situation and the COVID-19 crisis.

She also said that a doctor and a nurse are assigned to her, but that she is in good health, said another of her lawyers, Min Min Soe. Earlier in the trial, Suu Kyi had complained of a toothache.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP)  A judge in West Virginia has granted a group's request to stop a law tightening requirements on needle exchange programs from being implemented next month.

The American Civil Liberties Union's West Virginia chapter filed a federal lawsuit last week. A judge issued a temporary restraining order Monday and scheduled a July 8 hearing on the issue. The law was set to take effect July 9.

Were encouraged by this decision from the court," chapter legal director Loree Stark said. "This harmful, constitutionally flawed bill should never be allowed to take effect. Harm reduction saves lives.

Republican Gov. Jim Justice signed the bill in April over the objections of critics who said it will restrict access to clean needles amid a spike in HIV cases.

The governors office did not return an email seeking comment Monday.

The bill would requires licenses for syringe collection and distribution programs. Operators would have to offer an array of health outreach services, including overdose prevention education and substance abuse treatment program referrals. Participants also must show an identification card to obtain a syringe. Advocates view the regulations as onerous.

Supporters said the legislation would help those addicted to opioids get connected to health care services fighting substance abuse. Some Republicans lawmakers had said the changes were necessary because some needle exchange programs were operating so irresponsibly that they were causing syringe litter.

The ACLU chapter called it one of the most restrictive state laws governing syringe exchange services in the nation. The group said it would likely lead to more HIV cases and the spread of other bloodborne illnesses.

The law, if implemented, would take effect amid one of the nations highest spikes in HIV cases related to intravenous drug use. The surge, clustered mainly around the capital of Charleston and the city of Huntington, was attributed at least in part to the cancellation in 2018 of Charleston's needle exchange program.

It has led to an investigation by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that last week found emergency departments and inpatient medical personnel rarely conducted HIV testing on intravenous drug users in Kanawha County.

Previously, city leaders and first responders complained that the program in Kanawha County led to an increase in needles being left in public places and abandoned buildings, and it was shut down.

The CDC describes syringe programs as safe, effective, and cost-saving.

On Saturday, dozens of volunteers formed the letters HIV SOS at a health event as activists seek a public health emergency declaration in Charleston for the HIV crisis as well as overdoses from prescription pain pills.

___

Associated Press writer Cuneyt Dil contributed to this report.
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP)  A bipartisan school-funding plan in the works for years is back in Ohio's upcoming state budget, under a compromise approved Monday by a joint legislative committee working out final details of the $75 billion spending plan.

The Republican-controlled House had included the education proposal known as the Fair School Funding Plan in its version of the budget passed in April. The plan, supported by multiple education advocacy groups, is meant to bring more reliability to annual school funding payments to districts.

The GOP-controlled Senate stripped the plan from its budget version approved earlier this month, saying its own proposal provided more money than the House plan over the next two years.

The budget approved by the House and Senate Monday night and sent to GOP Gov. Mike DeWine would provide about $10.9 billion for districts for the next two years, with an estimated per pupil cost of $7,202, according to an analysis by the Legislative Service Commission. Under the deal reached with the Senate, new per student calculations will be made in future budgets, and won't be arrived at through an automatic funding formula.

DeWine must sign the budget by July 1 and could veto some items, though he hasn't indicated if anything is on the chopping block.

Restoration of the Fair School Funding Plan brought praise from school organizations.

Enacting this funding model represents a generational investment that will thrust Ohio forward into an era of stable and predictable education budgets to help schools meet the needs of all students," said Rick Lewis, CEO of the Ohio School Boards Association.

The Senate also included a plan that for the first time would require the state, not individual districts, to pay charter schools directly.

The budget compromise announced Monday keeps the direct payment to charter schools. Senate President Matt Huffman, a Lima Republican, suggested that keeping such direct payments in the budget helped the two sides come together on the school funding plan. Those things really cleared the picture, he said.

The budget also increases the maximum amount for vouchers to attend private schools from $4,650 to $5,500 for children in grades K-8 and from $6,000 to $7,500 for high school students.

The final version of the budget also includes $250 million for a broadband access grant program meant to boost connections to high-speed internet in underserved areas. The state estimates 300,000 households and at least 1 million residents across Ohio lack broadband.

The Senate had removed the broadband funding after Huffman said there werent enough details on how the money would be spent for the Senate to support it.

Among other details in the final version of the budget, the plan:

 Provides a 3% personal income tax cut for Ohioans, a compromise between the House plan, which proposed a 2% cut, and the Senate, which wanted a 5% personal income tax cut. Democrats oppose the cut, saying it will benefit the wealthiest Ohioans. The budget also eliminates income tax payments for anyone earning $25,000 or less, up from a previous maximum of $22,150.

 Restores a requirement that publicly funded day cares must achieve a quality of care rating to be listed in the state system. The Senate removed the mandate, leading to an outcry of advocates for low-income families.

 Removes a Senate-added requirement that food stamp recipients must undergo an asset test that would have measured recipients' total worth, including the value of cars owned by anyone in a household.

 Allots $170 million over two years for the state's H2Ohio clean water initiative.

 Declares Juneteenth a state holiday in Ohio. The day commemorating June 19, 1865, when slaves in Galveston, Texas, were told they were free, was declared a national holiday earlier this month.
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Keene, NH (03431)

Today

Mostly cloudy skies early, then partly cloudy in the afternoon. High 78F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph..

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For those of you not following the important news within other sections of The Chronicle, a Pekingese named Wasabi won best in show at this year's Westminster Kennel Club dog show, the second-oldest continuous sporting event in the country.

A gorgeous fluff of fur, he makes it difficult to believe that he is descended from wolves. The son of a dog named Sushi, he has been loved by his owner, David Fitzpatrick, all his life and never needed to be found or rescued.

A lot of people think of us as a rescue family. But the Fisher-Paulson humans did not rescue our dogs, Buddyboy and Bandit. They rescued us from a limited understanding of other species on the planet.

At 16, Buddyboy has taught us that even dogs tend to forget as they grow older. Just as he no longer remembers where the dog door is, I wander aimlessly through the living room in search of my glasses, only to find they are perched on my nose.

And Bandit has taught us you dont need all four limbs to work to lead a complete life. His front legs have never ambulated well, despite the several-thousand-dollar screws in his shoulders. It took him three years to learn how to operate his tail, but Bandit remains the established alpha in a very assertive pack.

My husband Brian and I did not rescue our sons, Zane and Aidan. They rescued us from the limited understanding of how chosen kinship works. They transformed us from a monochromatic gay household into a family full of color.

Perhaps the only truth is that I am a rescue husband.

Which brings us to Queenie: a damsel who has never been in distress or in need of rescue. She may be the only Fisher-Paulson never to have spent a night in jail, an orphanage or an animal shelter.

She started out, in concept, as a rescue. We regularly get emails from adopt-a-pet sites, and I made the mistake of clicking a link, which led me down a rabbit hole to a picture of a mostly white puppy with an adorable black circle around her left eye.

We did not care that she was not lost. She was just right for our little wolf pack. And she moved in as the only purebred in the Bedlam Blue Bungalow.

When asked what breed she is, Queenie insists shes a gourmand. This is not a breed, I say, but a connoisseur of good food. And your papers state: Pekingese. To this she only sniffs.

Did you know that Pekes were the royal dogs of the Imperial family in China, believed to be descended from lions? The story goes that when the British sailed up the Yangtze during the Second Opium War, the emperor ordered that all the dogs of that breed be slain, lest they fall into the hands of the British, who were famous at the time for sacking and pillaging.

The emperors aunt hid some of them in her chambers to spare their lives, and they were indeed sacked by the British soldiers and presented to Queen Victoria herself. She named one of them Looty.

Queenie may not be standard of the breed, and she is unlikely girlfriend material for Wasabi, but she lives up to her royal title. She thinks of us as her Looty and the outer, outer, outer, outer Excelsior as her kingdom, in which we promenade each afternoon. When I walk in the door after a long day of sheriffing, she runs to make sure she is picked up first. She tells me I might not be the alpha, but I sure make a good meatloaf.

She makes me a better person. At some point a father fails to impress his sons. Its hard to live up to the expectations of a teenager.

But a father always wants to be the hero his dog thinks he is.

Kevin Fisher-Paulsons column appears Wednesdays in Datebook. Email: datebook@sfchronicle.com
Scoot, one of the few micromobility companies allowed to operate electric scooters in San Francisco, will halt service indefinitely starting July 1 because it violated its permit agreement.

Two scooter operators, Lime and Spin, were approved by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency for one-year permits that will take effect Thursday, continuing their place in the citys transit spectrum, but Scoot, a San Francisco company that had also applied for a permit under the citys scooter share program, did not make the cut.

In an announcement of the new permits Friday, the agency said it held off on approving Scoots application to operate 1,500 scooters after it had recently learned of revelations, confirmed by Scoot that the company had been using subcontractors without SFMTAs approval.

A fourth company that applied for a scooter permit, Helbiz, was denied for low evaluation marks. The agency said it will decide whether to approve Scoots 2021 permit application after a full investigation of the companys permit violations, though its unclear when a final call will be made.

As recently as April, the agency allowed Scoot to expand its fleet by 500 scooters. Under the permit agreement, Scoot could subcontract part of its operations only upon prior written approval of the SFMTA, according to an April 1 letter from the agency that laid out terms and conditions.

The SFMTA sent Scoot a cease and desist letter May 21 after learning that Scoot had subcontracted with Martin Bros. Inc., Puma Couriers LLC and Bay City Bikes without getting approval from the agency.

The agency told Scoot in a June 25 letter that it was fining the company $105,600 for subcontracting without SFMTAs approval, not providing the city with proof of insurance for the subcontractors, and for failing to disclose its use of subcontractors in its quarterly reports. According to the letter, Scoot began subcontracting some of its fleet management responsibilities last August without notice or approval.

Scoot did not respond to requests for comment.

In 2019, Scoot was acquired by one of its rivals, Bird, a Santa Monica-based scooter company that just months prior had lost out on winning a coveted permit to operate in San Francisco. Months after Birds acquisition of Scoot, the operator laid off Bay Area employees, The Chronicle reported in December 2019.

Electric scooters have exploded in San Francisco in recent years, and the city views them as an alternative to its public transit system, which is slowly restoring service to pre-pandemic levels. But theyve also attracted much criticism from residents who say the proliferation of scooters in the city has resulted in blocked sidewalks and dangerous riding with little enforcement from the city.

Lime and Spins approved permits allow the companies to each operate fleets of 2,000 electric scooters in the city to start. The two operators can apply with the city every few months to add to their fleets in increments of 500, according to the SFMTAs announcement.

Ricardo Cano is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: ricardo.cano@sfchronicle.com
United Airlines, San Francisco International Airports biggest carrier, will add up to 4,000 jobs in the Bay Area as part of a 270-plane expansion of its domestic fleet.

United is buying new aircraft from Boeing and Airbus to boost the number of seats on domestic flights by 30% by 2026, a major bet that travel will rebound as the pandemic fades in the U.S. The company plans to add 25,000 jobs across the Newark, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Houston, Denver and Los Angeles airports. The expansion is expected to contribute $50 billion to the U.S. economy by 2026.

San Francisco is an important global gateway for United Airlines, Andrew Nocella, United chief commercial officer, told The Chronicle. Were excited to invest in San Francisco.

Leisure traffic has returned or exceeded pre-pandemic levels, but business travel still lags, Nocella said. Corporate conferences at Moscone Center are still months away, but many vaccinated people are eager to travel this summer.

United expects to have a profit in July, for the first time since the pandemic crippled air travel. The companys revenue in the first quarter of 2021 was $3.22 billion, down 60% from the previous year.

SFO is the companys main hub for travel to Asia, where traffic demand is still trailing Europe and South America. Mainland China and Japan arent open to U.S. tourists. But Nocella expects demand to rebound by mid-2022.

The order includes 50 Boeing 737 Max 8 airliners, 150 737 Max 10s and 70 Airbus A321neos  all narrow-body planes. The aircraft have more seats and larger storage bins compared to existing planes. United also plans to renovate its existing narrow-body planes to the same interior standards by 2025.

The increased number of seats per plane is particularly important at SFO, because the airport is constrained and cant expand beyond its four runways, limiting Uniteds ability to add more flights. Fog also cuts capacity in half. An early 2000s proposal to fill part of the bay to expand runways was scrapped after protests and high cost projections.

This order is really key to a place like San Francisco, Nocella said.

Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes

The airline has also added wide-bodied jets to SFO to keep up with demand, such as to four Hawaiian islands this summer. Demand for nature destinations like Montana and Oregon has also been growing steadily, as customers flocked to outdoor activities during the pandemic.

Nocella expects the airlines flight service at SFO to return to pre-pandemic levels later this year.

The airline averted 3,000 furloughs at SFO in March after Congress passed additional federal aid for the industry.

United said earlier this month that it would buy 15 ultrafast jets from Boom Supersonic, a startup that is developing a plane that has yet to be built and certified.

Roland Li is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: roland.li@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rolandlisf
After four homicides over two days, the debate over policing in Oakland intensified Monday when the police chief sharply criticized the City Councils move last week to redirect about $18 million away from the mayors proposed police budget.

Chief LeRonne Armstrong said the budget vote means fewer officers will be on the streets and response to 911 calls will be delayed. He added that a surge in violent crime makes it more crucial to increase police funding and said that the social services and violence-prevention programs meant to replace officers are not fully operational yet. Oakland saw four homicides over Friday and Saturday, bringing the citys total to 65 for the year compared with 32 at this time in 2020.

We find ourselves in a crisis, Armstrong said at a news conference Monday. We see clearly that crime is out of control in the city of Oakland and our response was for less police resources.

Yet another shooting was reported right before the press conference began, and a victim was in critical condition, Armstrong added. Then, just hours after the press conference, two armed robbers held up a television news crew that was interviewing Guillermo Cespedes, the head of the citys Department of Violence Prevention, outside City Hall. The suspects fled after a scuffle with a security officer and no injuries were reported.

Armstrongs strong statement reflects a hardening of sides as the city grapples with how to best address a surge in violent crime. Armstrong, who was appointed by Mayor Libby Schaaf, finds himself on the side of the mayor and two council members who opposed the progressive majority on the council that pushed to shift resources from the police.

Some residents want an increase in police while others are advocating for shifting resources to try to address the root causes of crime, and city leaders are lining up against each other.

That debate is playing out in the wake of the City Council passing a two-year budget that cut $18.4 million from Schaafs proposed spending on police. The money will instead fund violence prevention measures and social services. In May, Schaaf proposed a two-year budget, which goes into effect July 1, that would have increased funding for the department, spending $693 million in total.

Schaaf would have paid for two additional police recruit academies, bringing the total to six. The councils adopted budget funds four police recruit academies instead. The approved budget will also freeze 50 vacant officer positions.

Council President Nikki Fortunato Bas, who led the push to shift resources from the department, said Monday she appreciates the chiefs passion and commitment to keeping the people of Oakland safe. I know he has lost loved ones to violence, like so many others in our city this last year alone.

She said she shares his public safety goals, but differs in how we must allocate our public safety resources for the next two years. For me, the time has never been more urgent to increase our investments in preventing violence from happening in the first place.

She has said transitioning low-level, nonviolent 911 calls to other departments would help officers focus on the highest-priority cases.

Armstrong spoke emotionally Monday about the loss of lives to gun violence. He pointed to a photo of LaShawn Buffin, a 53-year-old woman killed Jan. 19 in East Oakland.

That is my god-sister, Armstrong said. That means something to me.

Armstrong said he responded to a report of a shooting Saturday night where a man was killed. As he walked through the neighborhood, a woman yelled from her window, Do something about it.

Without the resources, it makes it challenging to make Oakland safe, he said. When the yellow tape is gone and when the streets are cleaned up, there is still hurt and pain and tragedy in our community.

In a statement on Facebook, Bas said the first year of the citys two-year budget is a transition year and residents will receive the same level of police service. Bas said there are no layoffs or reductions to the police force.

Thursdays vote came after the citys Reimagining Public Safety Task Force met for nearly a year and put together a list of recommendations on how to best use funds from the police department to bolster social services. In May, the City Council voted to prioritize 12 of those recommendations, which included creating a new unit within the Fire Department to respond to certain calls for homeless people and mentally ill that police previously responded to. They also included moving some traffic enforcement into the transportation department.

Out of the $18.4 million, the council redirected about $17 million to the Department of Violence Prevention, which works in partnership with the police department, but Armstrong said the new programs dont yet exist and will take time before theyre launched.

In the meantime, Armstrong said, the city will suffer from not having additional police resources.

As of July 1, there will not be one additional resource to help address public safety, he said. And we wont have an increased presence on the ground in the city of Oakland. That concerns me.

Oakland currently has 714 police officers  roughly 165 officers per 100,000 people, while San Francisco has 202 officers per 100,000 people.

Council Member Loren Taylor, who was at the news conference, said after the event that he is frustrated because his district in East Oakland feels the impact of gun violence disproportionately.

We dont have the number of violence interrupters that are trained ready to do the work today, he said, adding that it can take up to a year to hire for those positions. Taylor had proposed five police academies instead of four. He voted against the budget Thursday.

We need to center the voices and the lives of our community members as we are reimagining public safety, he said.

Councilman Dan Kalb, who voted for the budget, said there will be no shift in resources on July 1 when the new budget goes into effect. The cut to the departments budget is roughly 2.5% and any impact might be seen at the end of the first fiscal year, he added.

Still, the investment and priorities council made are critical, Kalb said.

Weve been saying for years that we have to step up and put serious investments into a range of violence prevention and intervention strategies that will help reduce violence, Kalb said. Its not going to be an easy transition. We have to do that at some point and we are starting that point now.

Sarah Ravani is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: sravani@sfchronicle.com
A first-of-its-kind sushi bar serving cultured salmon is gearing up to open in Dogpatch this fall  but it will be a while before paying customers can sample any of the fish.

The project is the brainchild of the S.F startup Wildtype, which has been working since 2016 to produce cultured salmon, or salmon grown in a lab. Like other alternative meat companies, Wildtype hopes it can eventually produce enough fish to be sold at grocery stores and to be served in dishes at Bay Area restaurants.

Founders Arye Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck, who announced plans for the new Dogpatch tasting room in April and more recently slated a tentative debut this September, said the sushi bar isnt a restaurant. Instead, its more like an interactive museum where visitors get a window into how the fish is made, literally. The tasting room will have a glass barrier allowing diners to peer into the production facility where the salmon is grown in stainless steel tanks, similar to what visitors might find in a brewery.

People are often so removed from the process of meat and seafood production, said Elfenbein, a molecular biologist by training, who relied on his background in science and medicine to create Wildtype along with Kolbeck. We wanted to remove that barrier, to have customers feel connected to what theyre eating.

Companies like Wildtype fall into the category of whats known as cell-based agriculture, where instead of plant-based alternatives, animal cells are used to create cuts of meat in a lab. In the case of Wildtype, the company is still working with the same salmon cells it acquired a few years ago to create fish in its lab. These salmon cells are then fed nutrients in the tank before they are harvested and affixed to plant-based structures that enable the cells to grow into a particular cut of the fish.

From the cell stage to harvesting, it can take between three weeks to three months, said Elfenbein. Conventional fish farming can often take upwards of a year before the fish can be harvested.

Wildtype

For now, Wildtypes lab will be invitation-only tastings limited to students and chefs. Tastings will emphasize raw preparations of the salmon, such as in sushi rolls or in ceviche.

Whether it will taste any good is another question: One of Wildtypes first major events was a 2019 Portland, Ore., tasting, where Bloomberg described the taste of the startups salmon as lacking. Kolbeck and Elfenbein said theyve used that feedback to continue evolving their product. At that time, a sushi roll using Wildtype salmon cost about $200 per roll; the duo has now brought that cost down to $30 per roll, but say they still have a long way to go.

Our work isnt done until were able to make affordable seafood, Kolbeck said.

The company is still working to get approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to open its sushi bar to the public, though Kolbeck is hopeful that might happen by the end of this year.

Unlike plant-based meat substitutes like Impossible Foods and Beyond Beef, which have skyrocketed in popularity in recent years, cell-based, lab-grown meat products have yet to be approved for mass consumption by the FDA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Bay Area companies like Eat Just, Wildtype and Berkeleys Upside Foods are among a growing number of companies nationwide looking to make lab-grown meat go mainstream in an effort to counter the environmental impacts of traditional meat production.

In December last year, the Singapore government approved the sale of Eat Justs lab-grown chicken, making it the first country in the world to approve such meat consumption on a commercial scale. Hong Kongs Avant Meats, which also makes lab-grown seafood, is also looking to join this global chorus of more than 70 companies looking to transform the meat production industry.

Studies are still being performed on how cultured meats will impact the environment: A 2011 University of Oxford study indicated that cultured meats could generate 96% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than traditional meat. But a later study by the same university suggested that depending on the production and scale, lab-grown meats could lead to higher global temperatures in the long run due to some cultured meat production methods requiring a large amount of energy.

Food Guide Top 25 Restaurants Where to eat in the Bay Area. Find spots near you, create a dining wishlist, and more.

That this is still largely unchartered territory is partly why Wildtype hasnt been able to mass-produce quite yet. The Dogpatch production facility is hoping to produce 50,000 pounds per year in the near future, with plans to expand to 200,000 pounds per year in a larger space down the road, Kolbeck said.

Courtesy Wildtype

Wildtype has come a long way since its founding, but Kolbeck and Elfenbein acknowledge that a lot of work remains. The company has raised a total of $20 million in funding since its launch. In comparison, Eat Just closed on $200 million in funding this year, though that company also makes other products like plant-based eggs and mayonnaise.

Part of perfecting Wildtypes product has been working with local sushi chefs, including a recent collaboration with Adam Tortosa, the chef and owner of top Hayes Valley sushi destination Robin. The Wildtype founders are hoping to do more such chef partnerships once the sushi bar opens, including a potential chefs-in-residency program.

At the day end of the day, this is still a working facility, said Kolbeck. But we want to be able to open this up to people as much as possible.

Tanay Warerkar is The San Francisco Chronicles assistant Food + Wine editor. Email: tanay.warerkar@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @TanayWarerkar
On a recent afternoon in San Franciscos Excelsior district, Katherine Flores waved down a stranger to ask: Have you been vaccinated?

Joel Marquez said he had not  hed had an appointment a few weeks ago, but missed it because his wife was sick that day. Flores sprang into action, firing off a series of questions shed been trained to ask as a vaccine ambassador who goes door to door, street by street, to try to get San Franciscans vaccinated against COVID-19.

The ambassadors also canvass in the Bayview, Visitacion Valley and the Tenderloin, areas where vaccination rates are lower than the city average. The program, funded by a $500,000 Crankstart Foundation grant and coordinated by the San Francisco Department of Public Health and UCSF, pays college students like Flores $20 an hour. It is slated to run through the end of July, but its leaders are hoping to get a federal grant to expand and extend it another 18 months  one sign that even as the country returns to some semblance of normalcy, the push to get shots into arms is far from over.

Health officials are relying on such one-on-one efforts to replace mass vaccination clinics as a primary way to reach people who are unsure, distrustful or simply havent gotten around to getting vaccinated.

As they stood, masked, outside a Mission Street restaurant, Flores continued: Do you live in California? Whats your name, phone number and date of birth? Which day is best?

With each response, Flores clicked through a web portal on her phone, then asked Marquez to sign his name on the screen. In less than five minutes, he was booked to get his first shot the next day at a vaccine site down the street. He walked away with a flyer with the address of the site and a QR code so he could make appointments for his wife and children.

Im glad he found someone who spoke Spanish, because if not, we probably wouldnt have gotten him, said Flores, 22, a physiology major at San Francisco State University.

Its hard to pinpoint whether such vaccine outreach programs are directly driving San Franciscos high rate of full vaccinations, which at 73% of eligible residents is among the best in the nation. There are lots of reasons people get vaccinated, and high education and income levels tend to correlate with high rates of vaccination. But the canvassing is making a difference in the neighborhoods that need it the most, officials say.

Jessica Christian/The Chronicle

In two months, the San Francisco ambassadors work has led to 150 people getting vaccinated, said Dr. Jonathan Fuchs, who helps oversee the program as the health departments lead on neighborhood COVID vaccine efforts. Most of them live in the citys southeast sector, and most are Latino and Asian American. Statewide, 40% of eligible Latino residents have been fully vaccinated  lower than Californias overall rate of 59%  while a higher proportion of Asian American residents, 77%, have been vaccinated.

I do think (outreach) is a contributing factor to the citys high vaccination rate, Fuchs said.

Millions of dollars are going into similar vaccine outreach programs across the region and state, financed by a mix of federal, state, local and philanthropic funding. In contrast to the spring, when mass sites such as the Oakland Coliseum and Levis Stadium were vaccinating thousands of people a day, outreach efforts are now making progress at a slow and painstaking pace  20 shots here, 10 shots there. Even two shots in a day in a hard-to-reach community is considered a win, health officials said.

During the first few hours that Flores group was in the Excelsior neighborhood on a recent Friday, they signed up just two people for vaccine appointments. The vast majority of the people who answered their door said theyd already gotten their shots.

As the U.S. vaccination campaign enters its eighth month, this scenario is increasingly common in the Bay Area, where overall vaccination rates are high. Seventy percent or more of eligible residents in most local counties are fully vaccinated. But many undervaccinated pockets remain, and unvaccinated people are vulnerable to the delta variant that is picking up speed in California. These are the targets of one-on-one, community-centered outreach efforts.

Were really digging into the places of very low vaccine uptake and putting in the time and attention, said Tuere Anderson of the Alameda County Health Care Services Agency. One person getting vaccinated is a success.

Health officials are homing in on census tracts with lower vaccination rates and on reaching demographics that are lagging behind others. In Alameda County, for instance, officials are partnering with Street Level Health Project, an Oakland community group that works with immigrants, to bring shots to non-English-speaking day laborers in the Fruitvale district, which has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the county. One pop-up clinic this month got shots to 200 workers, and the group plans to hold additional clinics in July.

In Santa Clara County, officials are pushing to reach a few groups that have been falling behind on vaccinations  including Latino men, teens and young adults, and older white men. A recent vaccine event with the San Jose Earthquakes got 80 people in the door for shots. A four-hour mobile vaccination pop-up in downtown San Jose got about 20 people vaccinated, most of them young adults.

Were going to get fewer doses at these events, but they will add up and be very meaningful in the end, said Dr. Marty Fenstersheib, the countys COVID vaccine officer. We bring out the forces to do them, but every little group of 20 or 40 is closer to that goal.

A couple months ago, if a mobile vaccination unit administered just a handful of shots a day, that would have been too small a number to justify going back to that location. Now, thats becoming the norm.

We are coming into the long game here, said Dr. Matt Willis, public health officer for Marin County. His department is sending staffers to grocery stores, shopping centers and other public spaces in undervaccinated parts of Marin City, Novato and the Canal neighborhood of San Rafael.

If a team comes back having vaccinated 10 people, thats OK, Willis said. Thats a success.

Catherine Ho is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: cho@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Cat_Ho
California health officials are not ready to ask people to wear masks indoors again, despite the fast-spreading threat of the delta variant that now accounts for nearly a quarter of new coronavirus infections in the state.

The delta variant has many across the world concerned, and on Monday, Los Angeles County health officials strongly recommended that all residents again wear a mask in indoor public spaces, regardless of vaccination status. However, they did not reimpose the indoor-mask mandate for vaccinated people that was dropped statewide on June 15.

The California Department of Public Health is closely monitoring the spread of COVID-19 and its variants across our state, Dr. Tomas Aragon, the states health director, said Tuesday. Currently, the delta variant accounts for approximately 23% of cases sampled in California, and we anticipate this percentage will increase. The most important thing we can do to stop the spread of COVID-19 is ensure everyone who is eligible gets vaccinated.

Bay Area health officials said they are following the states lead for now and remain focused on encouraging people age 12 and over who have not been vaccinated to get their shots. Most people now being infected with the coronavirus have not been inoculated.

Vaccinating as many people as possible, as soon as possible, is our best defense against COVID-19, the delta variant and the harm it can do to our communities, the San Francisco Department of Public Health said.

Aragon pointed out that COVID vaccines provide excellent protection from serious disease, even from the delta variant. The variant, which was first reported in India, is 75% more contagious than the original coronavirus, according to Dr. F. Perry Wilson, a Yale Medicine epidemiologist. It is not clear whether it results in more severe cases of COVID than other variants.

Aragon said Californias mask guidance would continue to align with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Preventions recommendation, which allows fully vaccinated people to go maskless in most settings. Unvaccinated Californians must continue to wear masks in indoor public settings and businesses.

Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images

Under this guidance, businesses have the option of requiring all customers to wear a mask, even if theyre already vaccinated, Aragon said.

Los Angeles Countys new recommendation was not a mandate but a precautionary change from state guidance. County officials said fully vaccinated people appear to be well protected from infections with delta variants, but concerns are rising for those who are unvaccinated and at higher risk for COVID-19.

Officials in Alameda, San Mateo, Contra Costa, Santa Clara and Solano counties also said they will not change their recommendations at this time.

We are targeting hard to reach communities to provide them with the vaccine,said Jayleen Richards, Solano Countys public health administrator. The vaccine is still the best arsenal against the virus.

Pfizer has reported that its vaccine is 88% effective against the delta and 96% effective at preventing serious cases caused by the variant. Moderna said Tuesday that its vaccine was found in lab experiments to work against the variant, although it did not provide a level of efficacy.

About 59% of eligible Californians 12 and older are fully vaccinated and 68% have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, according to the latest state data.

Los Angeles Countys recommendation follows several similar moves worldwide. On Friday, the World Health Organization urged that people continue to wear their masks regularly, socially distance and avoid crowding, even if they are fully vaccinated against COVID.

Dr. Bob Wachter, chair of the Department of Medicine at UCSF, said that while he has been lax about wearing a mask in recent weeks, he is changing his behavior. He said he will wear his mask in most indoor settings if he isnt certain everyone around him is vaccinated.

The chance of getting infected is related to how much virus there is in your environment and how infectious the virus is, Wachter said. Even if the vaccines are 90% efficacious ... the risk is going to go up considerably if more people have delta because it spreads more easily.

He added that there is zero data about the probability that (a vaccinated person) with a breakthrough case can get long COVID  a case in which symptoms linger for weeks or months after the onset of infection.

I might not get very sick, but I might feel crummy two months from now, he said. Wearing a mask seems like a pretty benign thing to do.

Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease expert at UCSF, does not think the Bay Area should be worried, thanks to the regions high rate of vaccination.

We are well protected against the delta variant, she said. This is likely to cause outbreaks among unvaccinated individuals, which is why we must continue to educate on vaccine hesitancy. But our current COVID-19 vaccines are highly protective against the delta variant, and with high levels of population immunity in California, most California-based scientists are not worried.

She said fully vaccinated people can continue to live their lives more normally as the CDC has advised, including no need to wear masks indoors for COVID protection.

Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease expert with UCSF, said that the Bay Area is good for now but that things could change in poorly vaccinated communities.

Most of the most vaccinated counties in the country are in the Bay Area, so we will likely continue to be the COVID safe house of the state and of the country, even in the face of delta, he said. If anyone is going to be safe from delta, we are.

UC Berkeley infectious disease expert John Swartzberg said the trajectory of the delta variant suggests it is doubling every two weeks, which puts it on par with the alpha variant in the spring before it became the dominant type.

Swartzberg advises vaccinated people to add a little more caution to their daily routines, including choosing to eat outdoors instead of indoors, and wearing a mask at indoor businesses where it is unclear if everyone is vaccinated.

We should be more cautious than we were three weeks ago, he said. The little things add a layer of safety to the already great safety of being fully vaccinated.

This story was updated June 30 to clarify that California vaccination percentages are for eligible Californians 12 and older.

Aidin Vaziri and Kellie Hwang are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: avaziri@sfchronicle.com, kellie.hwang@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @MusicSF, @kelliehwang
Via AlertWildfire

The Lava Fire, ravaging through steep and rugged terrain near Mount Shasta and Lake Shastina in Siskiyou County, tripled in size overnight and was burning across 13,300 acres as of Tuesday morning.

Wind gusts as high as 50 mph contributed to the wildfires spread Monday to the east and southeast toward Mount Shasta, said Michelle Carbonaro, spokesperson for the inter-agency team managing the fire.
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (AP)  The coronavirus already changed the way we work. Now its changing the physical space, too.

Many companies are making adjustments to their offices to help employees feel safer as they return to in-person work, like improving air circulation systems or moving desks further apart. Others are ditching desks and building more conference rooms to accommodate employees who still work remotely but come in for meetings.

Architects and designers say this is a time of experimentation and reflection for employers. Steelcase, an office furniture company based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, says its research indicates half of global companies plan major redesigns to their office space this year.

This year caused you to think, maybe even more fundamentally than you ever have before, Hey, why do we go to an office? said Natalie Engels, a San Jose, California-based design principal at Gensler, an architecture firm.

Not every company is making changes, and Engels stresses that they dont have to. She tells clients to remember what worked well  and what didn't  before the pandemic.

But designers say many companies are looking for new ways to make employees feel safe and invigorated at the office, especially as a labor crunch makes hiring more difficult.

That's what drove food and pharmaceutical company Ajinomoto to overhaul the design of its new North American headquarters outside Chicago last year.

Ajinomotos employees returned to in-person work in May to a building with wider hallways and glass panels between cubicles, to give them more space and try to make them feel more secure. To improve mental health, the company transformed a planned work area into a spa-like relaxation room with reclining chairs and soft music. A test kitchen is wired for virtual presentations in case clients dont want to travel. And a cleaning crew comes through twice a day, leaving Post-it notes to show whats been disinfected.

Maybe its over the top, but maybe it provides comfort to those that have sensitivities to returning to an in-person work environment, said Ryan Smith, the executive vice president of Ajinomoto North America. Smith estimates 40% of the new headquarters design changed due to COVID.

Shobha Surya, an associate manager of projects and sales at Ajinomoto, is energized by the space.

The office gives you a balance of work and home life, she said. You are more focused here and dont have any distractions.

Surya said she's also thrilled to be working alongside her co-workers again.

Shes not alone. Surveys show the thing employees miss most about office work is socializing and collaborating with colleagues, said Lise Newman, workplace practice director at architecture firm SmithGroup. Companies are trying to encourage that rapport by building more social hubs for employees. Some mimic coffee houses, with wood floors, booth seating and pendant lamps.

Companies are trying to create the sense that this is a cool club that people want to come into, Newman said.

Steelcase has divided one of its lobbies into cozy meeting spaces of varying sizes, separated by plant-filled partitions. Mobile video monitors can be wheeled in so that people working remotely can be included in discussions.

Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes

But after a year of working from home, some employees crave privacy, so Steelcase added more glassed-in booths for private calls and cocoon-like cubicles with small sliding doors.

Mark Bryan, a senior interior designer with Columbus, Ohio-based M+A Architects, expects a more fluid office culture in the future, with different places to work on any given day. Introverts might choose a small, private room; extroverts, a table in the office cafe.

Some office changes reflect a new commitment to hybrid work. Valiant Technologies, which provides tech support and other services to businesses, is letting its employees work primarily at home but has them reserve a desk for the days they want to come to the office. The New York company has removed rows of desks and put more space between the remaining ones. Employees leave their keyboard, mouse and headsets in lockers.

Megan Quick, a sales associate with Valiant, said she appreciated the company allowing her to ease back into office life this month.

It will take a lot of time for us to readjust, she said. Valiant letting us set our pace for returning makes me feel safe.

Not every design change will stick. Last summer, when Steelcase started bringing back some workers, they pushed tables in the cafeteria far apart from each other and only allowed one person per table. It made the space so depressing that no one wanted to sit there, Steelcase CEO Jim Keane said.

An important lesson is that, yes, it has to be safe, but also has to be inspiring, he said. People are actually going to expect more from offices in the future.
UPDATE: The Lava Fire has exploded to more than 13,000 acres. Read the latest here.

A wildfire sparked by lightning Friday jumped Highway 97 on Monday afternoon and barreled toward the Northern California community of Lake Shastina, driven by high winds and dry vegetation.

The 4,000-acre blaze, known as the Lava Fire, more than doubled in size over the course of the day Monday, fanned by strong winds that have helped the fires footprint expand considerably since Sunday, said Michelle Carbonaro, spokeswoman for the inter-agency team managing the fire.

Around 500 firefighters and several bulldozer units worked to establish a perimeter to halt the flames spread at the base of Mount Shasta, Carbonaro said. The fire was 20% contained as of Monday morning, but crews lost ground throughout the day and new containment figures were not available as of Monday evening.

Siskiyou County officials ordered residents to evacuate in the areas of Lake Shastina and Juniper Valley, along Hoy Road, Highway 97 and County Road A-12 due to the encroaching flames, officials said. An evacuation center has been set up at a local elementary school.

We are trying to stop the fire from growing toward the communities, Carbonaro said.

The flames crossed Highway 97 around 5 p.m., hours after fire crews closed the scenic byway to cars.

The area recorded a scorching 103 degrees Monday afternoon, with temperatures lingering about 20 degrees above normal for this time of year, said Dan Weygand, a National Weather Service meteorologist based in Medford, Ore.

Strong winds pushed flames to the northwest, Weygand said, with the strongest gusts approaching 35 mph. Windy conditions continued until nightfall, but were expected to die down around 9 p.m.

The winds are likely to reverse direction by Tuesday afternoon, Weygand said, giving firefighters a boost by pushing the blaze back into burn zone.

We'll take any help we can get, he said.

The National Weather Service placed parts of Siskiyou County on a red flag warning for fires on Monday as well as an excessive heat warning that will continue into Thursday, July 1. The city of Weed has experienced triple digit heat since the weekend.

Omar Shaikh Rashad is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: omar.rashad@sfchronicle.com
Fourth of July travel is expected to rebound to near pre-pandemic levels this year as California reopens and returns to some form of normalcy.

AAA says more than 47 million people in the U.S. could be traveling by car, plane, bus, train or cruise ship this Independence Day weekend  an increase of 40% from last year, when coronavirus cases were surging and many Bay Area businesses were forced to halt indoor operations before the holiday weekend.

But this year, We saw strong demand for travel around Memorial Day and the kickoff of summer, and all indications now point to a busy Independence Day with travel in full swing this summer, said Sergio Avila, a spokesman for AAA Northern California, in a statement last week.

This Fourth of July holiday is expected to have the second-highest travel volume ever in the U.S., surpassed only by 2019, AAA said.

The auto club predicts road trips will continue to dominate this summer with approximately 43.6 million people driving to their planned vacations  a 34.1% increase over last year and a 5.1% increase over 2019.

According to AAA data, San Francisco and San Jose were in the top 10 cities where people are picking up car rentals on Independence Day. Others include Las Vegas, Phoenix, Kahului, Hawaii, Sacramento, Chicago, Honolulu, Los Angeles and San Diego.

About 5.4 million Californians are expected to travel for the Fourth of July this year, slightly less than the 5.7 million people who traveled in 2019 for the holiday. In 2020, the number fell to about 3.7 million travelers.

Air travel in the U.S., which was severely curtailed during the pandemic, is expected to rise 164% over last year, to 3.5 million travelers  but that number still represents a decline of 10.3% from 2019.

That slower recovery in part reflects the reality that the pandemic isnt over yet.

Travel and face mask restrictions are still in place, the delta variant is rising fast in California and children under 12 are still not eligible for vaccines.

Heres what you need to know before you travel for the Fourth of July weekend:

What are the COVID restrictions in California?

On June 15, state officials eliminated almost all coronavirus-related restrictions, including physical distancing and capacity limits for businesses.

Fully vaccinated individuals are also no longer required to wear a face mask in most settings. But unvaccinated individuals must still wear one in indoor public settings and businesses, and outdoors where social distancing cannot be maintained.

There are some settings, however, where everyone, regardless of vaccination status, has to wear a face covering. Individual businesses may also require all patrons to wear a mask.

Heres where face masks are required in California for everyone, regardless of vaccination status:

 Public transportation and transportation hubs (airplanes, ships, ferries, trains, subways, buses, taxis, ride-shares, airports, bus terminals, train and subway stations, among others).

 Health care settings.

 Indoors in K-12 schools, child care and other youth settings.

 Homeless shelters.

 Correctional facilities.

What if Im traveling out of state?

California no longer requires residents to get tested for COVID-19 or quarantine before and after traveling. However, state officials strongly recommend that unvaccinated travelers get tested before and after their travels.

Rules can vary state-to-state, so be sure to check the restrictions where youre going.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a Travel Planner where you can learn about the travel restrictions, guidance and resources in the city/state/national park youre traveling to. AAA also has a similar tool called the COVID-19 Travel Restrictions map.

What if Im traveling with kids who are too young to be vaccinated?

Children under age 12 are not yet eligible for COVID-19 vaccines and must still wear a face mask in all indoor public spaces in California.

Although data shows that children under 12 have a lower risk of infection, Bay Area experts say families and guardians should take several things into consideration when traveling, such as the location theyre traveling to, activities they will be participating in and the mode of travel to get to their destination.

Yvonne Maldonado, a pediatric infectious disease expert at Stanford, said summer activities are easier to manage because children are usually with their own families or social pods.

Summer (is) actually easier than school time because families have more control of who is around their children while on vacation, said Maldonado.

She added that its important that the adults who will be around unvaccinated children are immunized.

Should I be worried about the delta variant?

The highly infectious delta variant is quickly spreading in California. While experts say it's unlikely to impact residents as much due to the high rate of vaccinations in the state, Los Angeles County health officials on Monday issued a strong recommendation that even fully vaccinated people return to wearing masks in public indoor spaces to protect those who are unvaccinated or at higher risk.

The new guidance was not a mandate, however, and California health officials on Tuesday said they were not ready to follow suit and issue such a recommendation statewide. Bay Area counties indicated they were still weighing their options.

There isnt enough data that shows whether the delta strain causes more serious illness than other strains, how it affects children who are not eligible for a vaccine, and how well all of the current vaccines can fight the variants.

But studies so far show that the Pfizer and Moderna two-dose shot offers strong protection against the delta variant.

San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Kellie Hwang contributed to this report.

Jessica Flores is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jessica.flores@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jesssmflores
The Supreme Court reinstated a lawsuit against San Francisco on Monday by property owners challenging the citys requirement to offer lifetime leases to tenants before converting a jointly owned residential building to a condominium.

The case involved buildings whose owners purchased them as tenants in common, with each having equal ownership rights and sharing a single mortgage. City approval is required to convert them to condos, in which each owner has an individual unit and can rent it to others.

San Francisco formerly allowed only 200 condo conversions a year, based on an annual lottery, but a mounting backlog of requests led to a new ordinance in 2013: Owners could transform a tenancy in common to a condominium by mutual agreement, but nonresidential owners had to offer lifetime leases to their tenants.

That requirement was challenged in 2017 by an out-of-state couple, Peyman Pakdel and Sima Chegini, who bought a tenancy in common in a six-unit building on Green Street in the Russian Hill neighborhood in 2009, an arrangement that gave them the right to use one of the units.

They rented it to a tenant and, after the city changed its rules, agreed at first to offer the tenant a lifetime lease. But after gaining city approval for condominium conversion, the couple said they wanted to move in themselves after they retired, claimed that the lease requirement violated their property rights, and filed a lawsuit seeking either an exemption or financial compensation.

Lower federal courts refused to rule on the claim, saying it was premature. In a March 2020 decision, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the owners could have asked the city, under its rules, for an exemption from the lease requirement, had failed to do so, and thus could not claim an intrusion on their ownership rights.

The Supreme Court unanimously disagreed Monday and allowed the suit to proceed. The couple did not have to follow city procedures for seeking an exemption, the court said, because San Francisco had made its position clear: If they did not grant a lifetime lease, the city would enforce its rules.

The couple has already suffered an actual, concrete injury by being required to choose between surrendering possession of their property or facing the wrath of the government, the justices said in an unsigned ruling.

They also indicated that the Ninth Circuit should reconsider its separate decision that San Franciscos lease requirement did not amount to a taking, or confiscation, of the couples property. The Supreme Court cited its June 23 ruling that said California was unconstitutionally taking growers property by allowing union organizers to enter and talk to workers during non-working hours.

The ruling was praised by attorney Jeffrey McCoy of the Pacific Legal Foundation, which represents the couple. Property owners should not have to jump through nonsensical hoops to get their day in court, he said.

John Cote, spokesman for City Attorney Dennis Herrera, said the city still expects to defeat the lawsuit. He said the couple had agreed to all terms of the citys condo conversion program, gave the lease to their tenant to sign, and objected only after the condo had been officially recorded.

The courts procedural decision should not affect the merits of the case, Cote said.

The case is Pakdel vs. San Francisco, 20-1212.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko
As many San Francisco businesses struggled  or shuttered  under the harsh economic effects of the pandemic, one sector in particular saw its fortunes bloom.

San Franciscos cannabis industry saw an enormous boom during, and perhaps in part because of, the pandemic.

The citys Office of Cannabis approved more permits for cannabis-related businesses in 2020 than in any previous year. And as other businesses were forced to close, at least 10 cannabis retail shops opened in the city last year.

The businesses have opened through the cannabis equity program, which prioritizes permits for people who have been harmed by the war on drugs. In the summer of 2018, the office began accepting applications and by the end of 2019, it had issued their first two permits. The office expects to issue a handful of additional permits in the coming weeks.

The pandemic revealed what San Francisco has long known about its cannabis industry, said Marisa Rodriguez, director of the Office of Cannabis. The strength of the industry, and the cannabis community more generally, is a story of resiliency and overcoming adversity.

San Francisco was one of the few cities in the U.S. to designate dispensaries essential early on in the pandemic  though cannabis-related businesses still didnt receive federal relief or state and local aid. Hurdles aside, the city only saw a handful cannabis businesses close, bringing the citys total count to 38 medical cannabis dispensaries and 75 other supply-side and delivery companies.

The citys cannabis industry also provided a substantial number of job placements through the Office of Economic and Workforce Development  and the pandemic didnt seem to slow those opportunities down.

According to the OEWD, the citys First Source Hiring Program connected 82 people with jobs in the citys cannabis industry since 2019. The program matches economically disadvantaged San Francisco residents with entry-level positions across various industries in the city.

The expansion of San Franciscos cannabis industry last year tracks with national trends. The U.S. saw legal cannabis sales surpass $17.5 billion in 2020, a 46% increase over its 2019 levels, according to BDSA, a research firm focused on the cannabis industry..

Californias market expanded the most, rising by $586 million in 2020. Early on in the pandemic, the California delivery retailer Eaze said deliveries to first-time customers increased by more than 50%, according to the Associated Press.

The pandemics tendency to induce anxiety, insomnia, panic and existential distress may have also contributed to the industrys success last year. During the pandemic, the only San Francisco tax outpacing city projections was the tax on cannabis, The Chronicle reported in November. The local cannabis excise tax generated $4.9 million in 2020-21, exceeding forecasts by $700,000.

Marijuana businesses can now be found in San Franciscos Castro, Nob Hill, Bayview, Dogpatch, Hayes Valley, Tenderloin, Pacific Heights and Potrero Hill neighborhoods, among others.

I think were on a pretty good route to become the Napa Valley of cannabis, said Ali Jamalian, an equity applicant who opened up his manufacturing facility, Sunset Connect, in September 2020. I think people will come here to educate themselves about cannabis  and I think were going to be a major tourist destination.

Jamalian, 42, is the chairman of the citys Cannabis Oversight Committee  but hes also, like most of the citys equity applicants, a person who had been personally impacted by the criminalization of cannabis. In 1999, when he was 20, he was arrested for possession, evicted from his San Francisco home, and nearly got deported back to Germany, he said.

Now, Jamalians manufacturing company  which sells to most dispensaries in the city  has grown from four full-time workers to nine additional employees who work in packaging and processing.

Sunset Connect has also partnered with Cookies and STIIIZY, both major cannabis brands with storefront locations in San Francisco. In October, STIIIZY Union Square, a new location of the dispensary brand, opened at 180 OFarrell Street through the equity program.

The owner, 39-year-old Cindy De La Vega, who grew up in Sunnydales public housing projects and has been a longtime activist with United Playaz, a local violence prevention nonprofit, now holds the title of the citys first Latina dispensary owner.

With reopening and the return of tourism to San Francisco, De La Vega expects even more foot traffic to come STIIIZYs way, but even in the depths of the pandemic, the store was doing remarkably well.

San Francisco has a long history of viewing cannabis as a healing substance, ever since the compassionate care movement, she said. Cannabis is a medicine, and during the pandemic, folks needed their medicine at a higher demand.

Annie Vainshtein is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: avainshtein@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @annievain
The increasing spread of the delta coronavirus variant has many across the world concerned  with Los Angeles County health officials on Monday strongly recommending that all residents again wear mask in indoor public spaces, regardless of vaccination status.

Should people in the Bay Area also be so worried that they again routinely wear masks, even if theyre fully vaccinated?

Los Angeles Countys new recommendation was not a mandate but a precautionary change from recent state and local guidance, which allows fully vaccinated people to go maskless in most settings. California health officials on Tuesday said their guidance would remain unchanged for now, though state health director Dr. Tomas Aragon said his department is "closely monitoring " the spread of coronavirus variants.

Aragon emphasized that COVID vaccines provide excellent protection from serious disease, including from the delta variant

In their announcement Monday urging masks for all, Los Angeles County health officials also said fully vaccinated people appear to be well protected from infections with Delta variants, but concerns are rising for those who are unvaccinated and at higher risk for COVID-19.

Their new guidance follows several similar moves worldwide due to the highly infectious delta variant. On Friday, the World Health Organization began urging that people continue to wear their masks regularly, socially distance and avoid crowding, even if they are fully vaccinated against COVID-19.

Israel, which has one of the worlds highest vaccination rates, has seen a rise in coronavirus cases tied to the delta variant, including among fully vaccinated people. The government reimposed an indoor mask mandate, but it has declined to reinstate more stringent measures, stating confidence in the effectiveness of vaccines and declaring that very few infected individuals have become seriously ill.

The delta variant spread quickly through the United Kingdom and by mid-June was responsible for 90% of all infections, according to a study from the government. White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci warned last week that it is the greatest threat to the U.S. and its ability to end the pandemic.

The variant makes up 20% of new cases in the U.S. and 23% in California, and Los Angeles County officials noted that in the week ending June 12, it comprised nearly half of all variants genetically sequenced there. Santa Clara County in the Bay Area recently reported that the delta variant now makes up 7% of all cases sequenced.

About 59% of eligible Californians 12 and older are fully vaccinated and 68% have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, according to the latest state data.

California reopened its economy on June 15, dropping its mask requirement in most settings for fully vaccinated people. Unvaccinated people must still wear masks indoors, and outdoors where distancing cannot be maintained.

Counties may choose to implement tighter  but not looser  restrictions. The nine Bay Area counties, which mostly aligned with the state's relaxed guidance starting in mid-June, were still weighing their options Tuesday after Los Angeles County's move.

Bob Wachter, chair of the Department of Medicine at UCSF, declared Monday on Twitter that while he has been lax about wearing a mask in recent weeks, he is changing his behavior now with the threat of the delta variant. He said he will wear his mask in most indoor settings if he isnt certain everyone around him is vaccinated.

Im not concerned that the vaccines work less well because the data seem pretty clear that the vaccines hold up very well against the delta variant, he said in an interview Monday.

However, he continued, The chance of getting infected is also related to how much virus there is in your environment, and how infectious the virus is. Even if the vaccines are 90% efficacious...the risk is going to go up considerably if more people have delta because it spreads more easily.

Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease expert at UCSF, is not concerned about the rise in the delta variant breakthrough infections in Israel, and pointed to evidence that they are only causing mild illness. She does not think the Bay Area should be worried, due to the regions high rate of vaccination.

We are well protected against the delta variant, she said. This is likely to cause outbreaks among unvaccinated individuals, which is why we must continue to educate on vaccine hesitancy. But our current COVID-19 vaccines are highly protective against the delta variant, and with high levels of population immunity in California, most California-based scientists are not worried.

She said fully vaccinated people can continue to live their lives more normally as the CDC has advised, including no need to wear masks indoors for COVID protection.

Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease expert with UCSF, said the Bay Area is good for now but that things could change the fastest in poorly vaccinated communities in California.

Most of the most vaccinated counties in the country are in the Bay Area, so we will likely continue to be the COVID safehouse of the state and of the country, even in the face of delta, he said. If anyone is going to be safe from delta, we are.

Chin-Hong said people visiting from less-vaccinated regions will inevitably cause an increase in cases from the delta variant.

I would be shocked if we see a full-on surge here given our robust community vaccination rate, he said. This may translate into higher numbers of hospitalizations locally, but will be comprised of mainly unvaccinated folks.

Wachters personal concern is that there is zero data about the probability that someone with a breakthrough case can get long COVID  meaning a case in which symptoms linger or develop weeks or months after the onset of infection  and he would prefer not to put himself at that risk.

I might not get very sick, but I might feel crummy two months from now, he said. Wearing a mask seems like a pretty benign thing to do.

UC Berkeley infectious disease expert John Swartzberg said the trajectory of the delta variant suggests it is doubling every two weeks, which puts it on par with the alpha variant in the spring before it became the dominant type. The delta variant is estimated to be 60% more transmissible than the alpha variant, which originated in the U.K.

Swartzberg advises vaccinated people to add a little more caution to their daily routines including choosing to eat outdoors instead of indoors, and wearing a mask at indoor businesses where it is unclear if everyone is vaccinated.

We should be more cautious than we were three weeks ago, he said. The little things add a layer of safety to the already great safety of being fully vaccinated.

But Swartzberg doesnt think California will need to backtrack and face any new restrictions this summer. Rather, he sees that happening in pockets across the country where the vaccination rates are much lower.

Chin-Hong doesnt think its time yet to impose new restrictions given that the vaccines offer strong protection against hospitalizations against the delta variant, and most of the vulnerable population that would more likely need to be hospitalized due to COVID has been vaccinated. If a spike in cases occurs down the line, he imagines we may again see a mask mandate for everyone in indoor public areas.

He said the WHOs advice is more applicable for vaccinated individuals living in regions that have not achieved herd immunity and in places where the most effective vaccines have not been administered.

Wachter said people will have to make decisions based on their own risk tolerance, but if cases and hospitalizations continue to rise, the first thing to do would be to reinstate a mask mandate indoors for everyone.

It was always a bad idea to be unvaccinated, but now is a really, really bad time to be unvaccinated, he said.

This story was updated June 30 to clarify that state vaccination percentages are for eligible Californians 12 and older.

Kellie Hwang is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kellie.hwang@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kelliehwang
The first conclusion that can be drawn from the rise of the coronavirus delta variant is a familiar one that nevertheless bears repeating: Those who can get vaccinated should.

While the variant has alarmed officials in Southern California and beyond, their concern is mainly for the unvaccinated. The vaccines are highly effective even against the variant, particularly in preventing it from causing serious illness.

The second lesson is also more evident than it is accepted: The pandemic has receded in many places, but it isnt over. Officials and the public alike should therefore be ready to adjust their advice and behavior. Its another reason to avoid the sort of sweeping and simplistic proclamations that accompanied Gov. Gavin Newsoms grand reopening of California this month.

First detected in India, the delta variant contributed to a resurgence of the virus in Britain and has been spreading in the United States, including California, where it now accounts for nearly a quarter of new cases. Its reported to be substantially more transmissible than the dominant U.S. variant, alpha, and might be more dangerous.

The variants rise prompted Los Angeles County public health officials this week to recommend that everyone, regardless of vaccination status, wear masks indoors in public places as a precautionary measure. That followed a similar warning from the World Health Organization, which also urged even the vaccinated to wear masks, maintain distance and take other precautions. But California officials demurred Tuesday, hewing to state and federal guidance that masks are no longer necessary for the vaccinated.

It seems clear that the virus is only growing more dangerous for the unvaccinated, but the chief risk for the vaccinated is that they will transmit the contagion to those who arent. It follows that the highly vaccinated Bay Area has less to fear from the new variant than parts of California and the country where immunization rates are much lower. That said, wearing masks in crowded indoor spaces is a minor inconvenience and courtesy that can prevent illness and worse.

The trouble for California is that the governor has already declared reopen season and cajoled a workplace safety board into dropping mask requirements with limited efforts to distinguish the vaccinated from the unvaccinated. The delta variant should make Californians less hesitant to get their shots but more reluctant to believe the boldest predictions from on high.

This commentary is from The Chronicles editorial board. We invite you to express your views in a letter to the editor. Please submit your letter via our online form: SFChronicle.com/letters.
SACRAMENTO  California lawmakers voted Monday to speed up the recall election against Gov. Gavin Newsom, part of a broader state budget plan they adopted after weeks of wrangling with the governor.

The change, which will let voters weigh in sooner on whether to remove Newsom from office, reverses rules that Democratic legislators created just four years ago in an attempt to protect one of their own from a recall drive.

Now many Democrats believe that Newsom, whose approval ratings have held strong as California emerges from the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, would benefit if the election is held sooner.

They approved a bill Monday to expedite a required legislative review of the cost of the recall, potentially allowing the election to take place by early fall. Republicans complained that Democrats were cheating and eroding public trust by changing the rules in the middle of a campaign.

The message sent with this bill proves the publics frustration that politicians will do whatever they can do to stay in power, Assembly Member Vince Fong, R-Bakersfield, said during the Assembly floor debate.

The measure, SB152, passed 53-18 in the Assembly and 31-9 in the state Senate, along largely partisan lines. Newsom signed it hours later without comment and his office declined to answer questions about his decision.

Democratic lawmakers previously extended the recall process in 2017, as Republicans targeted Sen. Josh Newman over his vote for a gas tax increase. The Fullerton Democrat had just narrowly won a traditionally Republican seat in Orange County, and legislators tried to boost Newmans chances of surviving his recall by pushing the election to the following year, when it would be consolidated with a regular primary they hoped would have better Democratic turnout.

They added 30 business days for voters to withdraw their names from the recall petition, 30 business days for the Department of Finance to assess how much the election would cost and 30 days for the Legislature to review and comment on the estimate. Newman was recalled nonetheless  and then won back the seat in November.

Organizers of the recall drive against Newsom have collected enough signatures to hold a special election later this year, but state officials are waiting on the financial analysis before they can set a date.

The new bill allows Secretary of State Shirley Weber to certify the recall before the end of the the legislative review period, as long as the Legislature has already appropriated money for the election. Based on a preliminary estimate, the state budget plan that lawmakers passed Monday includes $215 million for local elections officials to conduct the recall.

That would kick the process over to Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, who must set a date for the election within 60 to 80 days. The shorter time frame could move up the recall vote to as soon as September, though county clerks have said they cannot be ready any sooner than Sept. 14.

Democrats largely ignored criticisms of the bill during brief legislative floor debates, but Assembly Member Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, noted that by holding the recall election as quickly as possible, opponents had a chance to remove Newsom from office more than a year before his term ends in January 2023.

My belief is thats what the recall was about, Ting said.

For more recall coverage, see our special report.

The Legislature also overwhelmingly passed a $262.2 billion state budget, ahead of the start of the new fiscal year on Thursday, sending it to Newsom for his signature. The record spending plan, powered by an unexpectedly robust recovery from the pandemic recession and federal coronavirus relief, pours billions into liberal priorities such as access to health care, early childhood education and college scholarships while restoring reserve accounts that were drawn down last year.

This budget is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to make transformational change, said state Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, a chance to not only check boxes but to change lives.

In a historic move, the budget would extend eligibility for Medi-Cal, the states health care program for the poor, to undocumented immigrants age 50 or older. Undocumented immigrants from low-income families are already eligible for coverage until age 26.

It includes $1 billion annually for each of the next two years to help local governments pay for services to combat homelessness, along with $2.75 billion to extend Homekey, a pandemic program to convert hotels, motels and other vacant buildings into housing for homeless Californians.

A second state stimulus package would send $600 checks to middle-income households that make up to $75,000 per year and were left out of a first round of direct assistance this spring. The $8.1 billion program would provide an additional $500 to families with children and undocumented immigrants.

In an effort to avert mass evictions, lawmakers approved and Newsom signed a $5.2 billion rent relief program that would extend that states eviction moratorium through September, giving struggling tenants more time to apply for help paying off the rent they missed during the pandemic.

Alexei Koseff is a Chronicle staff writer. Email: alexei.koseff@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @akoseff
As legislators debate the future of Californias high-speed rail project, results from a public opinion poll showing lackluster voter support has aided skeptics fighting to take money away from the bullet train.

The poll, which The Chronicle obtained, was commissioned by the Assembly Democratic Caucus and suggests voters are almost evenly split over whether construction should continue on the 220-mph train.

A slight plurality of voters surveyed, 42%, said the state should stop building the high-speed rail system and use the money elsewhere while 41% of voters said construction should continue, according to the polling firm Goodwin Simon Strategic Research.

Support for the bullet train varied greatly along partisan and regional lines. For example, 71% of Republicans support stopping construction while only 29% of Democrats want to halt work. Support for the project is highest in the Bay Area, where 48% of voters want construction to continue, compared with 35% of voters in the Central Valley and 40% in Los Angeles.

The poll appears to have had a significant influence at the state Capitol as some Assembly Democrats from Southern California push to block Gov. Gavin Newsoms request to use $4.2 billion in voter-approved bond funding to finish building an initial 171-mile stretch from Merced to Bakersfield.

Newsom wants to build that segment first, followed by extensions to San Francisco and Los Angeles, and eventually a spur to Sacramento.

Opponents say the money should instead be used for local rail projects in the states denser urban centers, and theyve excluded the project from the state budget that legislators are expected to approve this week.

But supporters of the high-speed rail project said lawmakers should be thinking more long-term about the states transportation needs and not get distracted by polling. They worry that diverting funding could hurt California as the federal government may be poised to offer additional financial backing via President Bidens $1 trillion infrastructure bill.

Assembly Member Luz Rivas, D-Arleta (Los Angeles County), said the poll supported her belief that more Californians would benefit if much of the money were instead diverted to rail connectivity projects in L.A. and the Bay Area.

It actually confirmed what my constituents have been saying all along, she said. Weve lost the publics trust.

California voters approved $9.95 billion in bond funding for high-speed rail in 2008, with the promise that money would be used to help build a bullet-train system to zip riders between San Francisco and L.A. in less than three hours.

Construction started on the Central Valley line six years ago, but repeated construction delays and soaring costs, with the budget growing from $33 billion to about $83 billion, have led to ridicule.

Proponents of the project said negative news about its hiccups has unfairly tainted the bullet trains reputation. They said delays are, in part, the direct result of political bickering and legal challenges.

State Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, said the state needs to do a better job talking about the long-term potential for high-speed rail. The project was envisioned as a way to connect Californias affluent coast with inland counties, where people suffer from high unemployment and poor air quality.

Were the fifth largest economy in the world, yet we dont have a true statewide rail system, Wiener said. Its embarrassing. We know that we need it. We cant keep expanding our airports, we cant keep expanding our highways.

Rail advocates said the emphasis on money for regional projects presents a false choice. They said the state is simultaneously investing billions in local transportation projects with its budget surplus.

Dan Richard, a former chairman of the High-Speed Rail Authority Board, said the debate also overlooks the history of the project: More than $2 billion in rail funds have also already been allocated to projects that improve connectivity with local transit systems.

He said while the project has faced headwinds, hes frustrated that legislators have used polling to help guide their discussions about a major infrastructure project that could shape the states growth.

I dont think something like this, that involves the future of California, ought to be susceptible to that kind of polling, he said. Leadership is important when youre building a multi-generational project, something that is going to last for 150 years.

Bill Wong, political director for the Assembly Democrats, said the poll was influential insomuch as it confirmed many legislators concerns that construction delays and soaring costs have made high-speed rail unpopular.

The poll findings were presented to legislators in a May caucus meeting.

Wong said while many lawmakers support the concept of a bullet train, many feel the project has gone astray as the state focuses on building the Central Valley segment first. Originally, the Rail Authority planned to build track inward from Los Angeles and the Bay Area, including a line running east from Silicon Valley. Now, its building the Central Valley segment first while planning continues on those other spurs.

Theres a big portion of the population that will never see use of the high-speed rail because of where its located, he said.

The poll, which had not been made public before, was conducted in mid-March and included 668 registered voters, who were surveyed on land lines, cell phones and through text message invitations. It was conducted in English and Spanish. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.

Dustin Gardiner is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: dustin.gardiner@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @dustingardiner
SACRAMENTO  California will shield struggling tenants from eviction for at least three more months, as the state acted Monday to renew protections that were set to expire this week.

The Legislature overwhelmingly passed AB832, which extends the states eviction moratorium through the end of September while also providing more money to lower-income residents to pay off the rent they missed during the coronavirus pandemic. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the bill hours later, touting critical relief to renters.

Facing the looming end of a statewide eviction freeze on June 30 and fears that hundreds of thousands of California households behind on their rent could be pushed onto the streets, state officials agreed to another temporary extension of the moratorium to give tenants more time to apply for financial aid.

Despite vaccinations and the economy reopening, many Californians are still in precarious financial situations, Assembly Member David Chiu, D-San Francisco, said on the Assembly floor. Ending these protections now would seriously undermine our ability to help our most vulnerable Californians recover from the pandemic.

An estimated 758,000 California households are behind on their rent, according to a National Equity Atlas analysis, owing about $3.5 billion statewide. But a state rent relief program, funded by the federal coronavirus stimulus package, had paid out less than 10% of the money that had been requested as of last week, a glacial pace adminstrators blamed on complex application requirements and fraud prevention measures.

Groups representing property owners lobbied against the moratorium extension, criticizing the states slow distribution of rental aid for creating the necessity to prolong the freeze on evictions. Republican lawmakers echoed those complaints Monday, calling the plan unfair to property owners who have gone without getting paid for more than a year.

That promise has not been kept, said Assembly Member Laurie Davis, R-Laguna Niguel (Orange County). This extension would not be necessary if we had competent leadership ensuring the state and local governments were distributing rental assistance funds to tenants and housing providers in an expedited manner.

The measure passed with some bipartisan support, 58-9 in the Assembly and 34-0 in the the state Senate.

It continues the pause on evictions for nonpayment of rent due to a financial hardship related to the pandemic, such as lost income or increase medical expenses. Tenants who pay at least 25% of what they owe by Sept. 30 cannot be evicted over that back rent, which is converted into civil debt.

Starting in October, tenants will owe their full rent again. But for six additional months, through March 2022, they cannot be evicted if they qualify for the state rental aid program.

More for you Politics S.F. to extend eviction moratorium as negotiations over...

That program is available to lower-income tenants who earn 80% or less of the median income in their county  up to $114,480 for a family of four in San Francisco  and were financially affected by COVID-19.

Under an earlier, more limited version of the program, tenants were offered between 25% and 80% of the rent they missed during the pandemic, depending on whether the owner would forgive the rest of what they owed.

Another infusion of money from the federal government has doubled the available funding to $5.2 billion. The new state plan will allow tenants to obtain 100% rental assistance, even if their property owner refuses to participate in the program, while tenants and property owners who already received aid will be able to apply again for full coverage.

Alexei Koseff is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: alexei.koseff@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @akoseff
The dinosaurs at the Flintstone House in Hillsborough won't be going extinct just yet.

The town of Hillsborough and the owner of the house, Florence Fang, have quietly settled a lawsuit that said changes Fang made to the "Flintstones"-themed property violated local code.

The Palo Alto Post first broke the news of the April 12 settlement on June 25. The case was dismissed in San Mateo Superior Court on April 27.

As part of the settlement, Fang will receive $125,000 from Hillsborough and, upon filing new permits for the changes to the property, the backyard additions will be approved, according to city records.

The property, a favorite of drivers zooming by on I-280, is on Berryessa Way and was purchased by Fang in 2017.

Eric Risberg/Associated Press

Controversy began surrounding the famous home in 2017, when the town noted that Fang, who previously owned the Independent and the San Francisco Examiner, had made changes to the backyard, including adding new metal dinosaurs, "Flintstones" characters, a staircase, parking strip, deck and a sign that reads "Yabba Dabba Doo."

At the time, the town called the home a "highly visible eyesore."

Hillsborough said that Fang should have asked the planning department for approval as the changes involved more than 10,000 feet of the property. The town then issued three "stop work" orders.

Hillsborough took Fang to court, alleging that she failed to comply with the "stop work" orders. The lawsuit also sought to force Fang to remove the new features around the multimillion-dollar property. Fang then countersued, saying she had been discriminated against because of her race and had been impeded during her attempts to secure a permit.

Eric Risberg/Associated Press

According to the Palo Alto Post, as part of the settlement, Fang agreed to dismiss these claims. She is receiving $125,000 from the town "solely to cover expenses incurred by Flintstone related to the lawsuit," and not as payment for the alleged discrimination, the Post reported.

You won't be hearing much from Fang on the matter. Per the Post, the settlement stipulates that neither the town nor Fang shall contact the media, and to respond with this statement when contacted: The parties have reached an amicable resolution of the case to the satisfaction of all the parties, such that the improvements made to the Flintstone House will be permitted to remain.
NEW YORK (AP)  Stocks that traded heavily or had substantial price changes:

Morgan Stanley, up $2.94 to $90.64.

The investment bank and financial services firm doubled its quarterly dividend and approved a $12 billion stock buyback plan.

L Brands Inc., up 24 cents to $71.21.

The company's Victorias Secret unit, which it is spinning off, is offering to sell $500 million in senior notes through a private placement.

Purple Innovation Inc., down $1.16 to $26.79.

The mattress company pulled its financial forecast for the year as it deals with mechanical and maintenance issues.

Enerpac Tool Group Corp., up $1.92 to $26.99.

The industrial products company's fiscal third-quarter earnings and revenue beat analysts' forecasts.

2U Inc., up $1.70 to $42.08.

The online education services provider is buying substantially all of edX's assets for $800 million.

Occidental Petroleum Corp., up 6 cents to $31.30.

The energy company said it started buying back senior notes.

Lennar Corp., up 81 cents to $99.22.

Homebuilders made gains following a report that showed home prices soared in April.

Herman Miller Inc., down $3.32 to $44.63.

The furniture maker gave investors a disappointing earnings forecast.
WASHINGTON  In a stunning setback to regulators efforts to break up Facebook, a federal judge on Monday threw out antitrust lawsuits brought against the company by the Federal Trade Commission and more than 40 states.

The judge eviscerated one of the federal governments core arguments, that Facebook holds a monopoly over social networking, saying prosecutors had failed to provide enough facts to back up that claim. And he said the states had waited too long to bring their case, which centers on deals made in 2012 and 2014.

The judge said the FTC could try again within 30 days with more detail, but he suggested that the agency faced steep challenges.

The rulings were a major blow to attempts to rein in Big Tech. In Congress, legislators pointed to the decisions as proof that century-old antitrust laws needed updating for the internet sector.

This really stings, said William E. Kovacic, a former chairman of the Federal Trade Commission. This is a reminder to those who have wanted a dramatic, sweeping litigation campaign to take on Big Tech that theres nothing easy about it, because the courts have a different view of the antitrust system.

Representatives for the FTC and Letitia James, the New York attorney general, who led the states case, said they were reviewing the judges decision and considering their legal options.

Christopher Sgro, a spokesperson for Facebook, said: We are pleased that todays decisions recognize the defects in the government complaints filed against Facebook. We compete fairly every day to earn peoples time and attention and will continue to deliver great products for the people and businesses that use our services.

The news pushed Facebooks stock up 4.2%, and the company passed $1 trillion in market capitalization for the first time. It is one of only half a dozen companies to reach such a valuation.

Congress, President Joe Biden and many states have made weakening the grip of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google a high priority. Biden has installed critics of the technology giants in key regulatory roles, including Lina Khan as chair of the FTC, and he is expected to issue broad mandates this week for federal agencies to address corporate concentration across the economy. Khans first major task as chair will be to rewrite the Facebook lawsuit to address the judges criticisms.

Courts have narrowed interpretations of antitrust laws over the years, making government cases difficult to win. Last week, the House Judiciary Committee advanced six bills that would overhaul antitrust laws, with the goal of loosening the influence that the big companies have over wide swaths of the economy.

Todays development in the FTCs case against Facebook shows that antitrust reform is urgently needed, said Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., a co-sponsor of the antitrust bills. Congress needs to provide additional tools and resources to our antitrust enforcers to go after Big Tech companies engaging in anti-competitive conduct.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., a critic of Big Tech, said on Twitter that the court had acknowledged Facebooks massive market power but essentially shrugged its shoulders.

The lawsuits by the states and the Federal Trade Commission argued that Facebooks acquisitions of Instagram for $1 billion in 2012 and WhatsApp for $19 billion two years later squashed competition in social networking. The regulators argued that Facebook should break off the two apps and that new restrictions should apply to the company on future deals. Those are some of the most severe penalties that regulators can demand.

The FTC was split on its decision to pursue the lawsuit. Its chairman at the time, Joseph J. Simons, a Republican appointed by President Donald Trump, and the two Democratic commissioners voted in favor of the suit. The two remaining Republican commissioners voted against it.

The state suit was signed by attorneys general from 46 states and the District of Columbia and Guam. Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and South Dakota did not join the case.

Facebook asked the court to dismiss both suits in March. The company argued that it is continually challenged with competition, including from new rivals such as TikTok. It also argued that the regulators failed to prove how the services, which are free, harm consumers.

The judges dismissal of both suits, so early in the process, stunned regulators and Facebook executives.

The judge, James E. Boasberg, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, wondered why the states had waited so long to try to unwind Facebooks deals for Instagram and WhatsApp. Regulators had not tried to block them when they happened. He also rejected allegations that Facebook squashed rival apps by blocking their ability to easily interact with the social media platform.

Ultimately, this antitrust action is premised on public, high-profile conduct, nearly all of which occurred over six years ago, he wrote, before the launch of the Apple Watch or Alexa or Periscope, when Kevin Durant still played for the Oklahoma City Thunder and when Ebola was the virus dominating headlines.

Boasberg, who was appointed to his post by President Barack Obama, said the FTC did not sufficiently prove that Facebook was a monopoly. He said the agencys definition for social media was too vague, and in a reference to an interpretation of antitrust law prevalent in courts that is anchored in consumer prices, he noted that the product was free.

It is almost as if the agency expects the court to simply nod to the conventional wisdom that Facebook is a monopolist, he wrote. After all, no one who hears the title of the 2010 film The Social Network wonders which company it is about.

But, he said, monopoly power is a term of art under federal law with a precise economic meaning.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, noted how internet companies defy conventional market definitions.

The court rejected the FTCs case because it wasnt clear under our current antitrust laws that Facebook has a monopoly in online networking  a flabbergasting assertion given Facebooks firm grip over consumers, their data and the social media market, Blumenthal said.

The decision was a disappointment for the growing cohort of activists who have pushed regulators to move to break up the biggest tech companies. Sarah Miller, the executive director of the antitrust think tank the American Economic Liberties Project, said she hoped that the states would appeal the dismissal and that the FTC would file its case again. But she said the judges ruling underscored the need for Congress to update the laws that police market concentration.

The courts are going to need, ideally, some congressional guidance here, given that they have some outsized role in determining the outcomes of antitrust cases, she said. Sometimes losses can be good because it can just reinforce that necessity, and were hoping that this will serve to do that.

Lawmakers in Congress are trying to overhaul antitrust with an eye toward the digital economy. But there is no guarantee that the two parties will be able to agree on the specifics.

In Europe, courts have also provided companies a cushion against crackdown efforts by authorities. Last year, a European Union court struck down efforts by the blocs antitrust regulator to force Apple to pay 13 billion euros (about $15 billion at the time) in unpaid taxes. In May, Amazon scored a victory against a similar order to repay 250 million euros in taxes.

In Germany, an effort by antitrust regulators to crack down on Facebooks data-collection practices has been stalled in courts. And Google has used court appeals to delay the enforcement of three judgments from the EU regulators that it violated antitrust laws, which would result in billions of dollars in fines.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Thomas Winz/Getty Images

Midway through NBC Bay Area's interview with Oakland's head of violence prevention, Guillermo Cespedes, two robbers interrupted, holding up the crew and Cespedes. A "scuffle" took place, an Oakland police spokesperson told SFGATE, before a security officer with the news crew pulled out his own firearm and commanded the robbers to leave.

The incident took place Monday afternoon, shortly after Oakland Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong decried a city budget that reallocated an extra $18 million away from police out of a proposed police budget of $674 million. Those funds will be put into the city's Department of Violence Prevention, helmed by Cespedes, who joined the department in 2020.
BERLIN (AP)  Berlin's museums authority is moving forward with plans to return to Nigeria artifacts known as the Benin Bronzes, saying Tuesday that it aims to make substantial handovers next year.

The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, an authority that oversees many of Berlins museums, said its board gave the foundation's president, Hermann Parzinger, formal permission to conduct negotiations on returning pieces that are in its collection.
How fleeting world domination can be. It can disappear in a snap.

It's been two years since the last Marvel film, an unfathomable chasm for an ever-churning movie machine. In between, Marvel has made its most ambitious forays onto television, with the streaming series "WandaVision," The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Loki. Marvel, of course, isn't going anywhere.

But it's also possible that the pandemic hasn't just been a blip in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Even before COVID-19 delayed the release of Black Widow and subsequent installments a year or more, Avengers: Endgame felt very much like the conclusion of something. Can the most all-powerful juggernaut in movie history just pick up where it left off?

Black Widow, thankfully, isn't exactly designed that way. It's as close to a one-off as Marvel gets. Set in between 2016's Captain America: Civil War (when the superheroes fell out) and 2018's Avenger: Infinity War" (when they made up), it doesn't have any grander, universal purpose to the franchise's overarching aims than giving Scarlett Johansson's Natasha Romanoff/ Black Widow (who perished in Endgame), a proper sendoff after a decade of service stretching back to 2010's Iron Man 2. It's the second Marvel movie fronted by a female star (following 2019's Captain Marvel, with Brie Larson) and only the first to be directedly solely by a woman, Cate Shortland. (Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck shared the helm of Captain Marvel.)

And I think partly because Black Widow needs to exist purely by itself, it works. It's absorbing in its own right. Less occupied with driving a universe of movies forward, the almost-standalone film instead digs into slightly darker, deeper realms of the typically bright and shiny Marvel world. Shortland, an Australian director of indies ("Somersault," Berlin Syndrome), grounds Black Widow in a more tactile and murky reality. Essentially a European-set spy thriller with all the shadows of the postwar period (WWII, I mean, not the Civil War), Black Widow is, for much of its running time, closer to Bourne than Thor. And while it marks a farewell to Johansson, Black Widow is given a boost by a number of new faces  Florence Pugh, David Harbour, Rachel Weisz, Ray Winstone (terrific actors all)  who supply some new verve in a movie world that's recently been dependent on many of its longest-running stars.

Black Widow doesn't deviate radically from the Marvel formula. Just as usual, there's a giant contraption in the sky, winks to the Avengers and light banter mixed with battle scenes. But it's often in Marvel movies that the director has his or her best chance to flex their own filmmaking muscles early on, before the set-piece mandates set in. And Black Widow excels early.

The movie, scripted by Eric Pearson, begins with familiar suburban scenes of two young girls and their apparent mother (Weisz) readying for dinner. When the father (Harbour) arrives, he's distraught. They have an hour to flee, he whispers. They grab little before driving straight for a small airport. Out the window, while American Pie plays on the car stereo, are all-American scenes of families playing on the lawn, a ballgame under the lights. It's an early sign that Black Widow will be about an American Dream denied  or at least delayed  and a kind of anti-Captain America. Only when the dad flips a car to clear the runway do we have any sense that these aren't your average Americans. And once they land in Cuba, we realize they aren't citizens at all, nor are they a family.

Harbour's character in fact is Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian, a Soviet-built super soldier made to compete with Captain America. Their family was a cobbled-together Ohio sleeper cell. The four of them are quickly split apart, and over a melancholy cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit," the opening credits roll with a montage of U.S.-Russian relations over time, mixed with images mixed of Soviet mastermind Dreykov (Winstone) and his Red Room program of elite assassins  dubbed Widows  all of them plucked from the streets as young girls.

Twenty years later, the long-freed and reformed Natasha  now an Avenger  is well beyond of her painful beginnings. But not as much as she thought. Her belief that she killed Dreykov is spoiled when she reunites in Budapest with her faux-sister from childhood, Yelena (Pugh), who informs her that not only is the Red Room very operational, but Dreykov has created a new, frightful method of control of his Widows. From afar, he can operate their movements and terminate their lives with a few computer buttons. It's an overt form of male control over female bodies with a wide metaphorical meaning that Black Widow transforms seamlessly into comic-book allegory.

Natasha and Yelena resolve to topple Dreykov and the Red Room, a mission that requires them to reconnect with their once parents. Once freed from a Siberian prison, Harbour, as the Red Guardian, gives the film a comic lift, playing a cartoonishly washed-up former super soldier who has long receded from even pseudo family life.

As a unit, they are an emotionally damaged bunch, making their task throb with not just vengeance but their own psychological healing. Pugh, the fast-rising star of Lady Macbeth and Midsommar" and an actor of ferocious strength and poise, is especially good as Yelena, the younger of the two and the only one of the Ohio clan to not know it was all a ruse.

They all also owe their powers to the crippling, cruel system that made them. For Natasha, this is a discomforting truth always just below the surface. As played by Johansson, excellent here, every action for Natasha is tinged with acceptance and revulsion for her own nature. Black Widow becomes, kind of stirringly, a movie not about franchise extension but sisterhood, improvised families and traumatic pasts.

Marvel movies, like the moon, are categorized in phases. Black Widow is meant to kick off phase four, but it's not clear if the empire is waxing or waning. Unlike any previous Marvel movie, this one will be streaming at home, on Disney+ for $30 at the same time it lands in theaters  fallout from the pandemic, to be sure, but also a once unthinkable retreat for an unstoppable box-office force. But if Black Widow is a sign of things to come  new directorial voices, grittier tones, feet (at least sometimes) on the ground  it's a promising new direction.

"Black Widow, a Walt Disney Co. release, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for intense sequences of violence/action, some language and thematic material. Running time: 134 minutes. Three stars out of four.

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Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP
Blair Heagerty, Blair Heagerty / SFGate

When the new Restaurant Revitalization Fund announced in early May that it would be offering grants to businesses impacted by the pandemic, many restaurant owners jumped to apply. The funds were to be prioritized for women, people of color, veterans, and other socially and economically disadvantaged individuals.

But then, the lawsuits came. According to the New York Times, the right-wing advocacy group America First Legal filed a lawsuit on behalf of white restaurant owners in Texas and Pennsylvania, claiming that the prioritization of these disadvantaged groups was discriminatory against white men. Another conservative advocacy group called The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty also filed a lawsuit on behalf of a restaurant owner in Tennessee who claimed he had "been pushed to the back of the line because he is a white man, according to the New York Times.
If you ever visited the Nut Tree, two words will bring all the memories flooding back:

Marshmallow sauce.

From 1921 to 1996, the fanciest place to grab a bite, a souvenir and a bathroom break on the drive between the Bay Area and the Sierra was the Nut Tree. And that soft, fluffy sauce, draped over fresh fruit, was the epitome of the high-end roadside stand, a concept that didnt really exist until Nut Tree invented it.

According to legend, the first seeds of the Nut Tree were planted by migrating pioneers passing through Vacaville in the 1860s. A single black walnut tree sprung up near the side of what would become the Bay Areas main thoroughfare, marking the property of the Harbison family.

Dreyfuss + Blackford/Courtesy

Helen Harbison grew up on that farm, and in the late 1910s attended UC Davis, where she met a man named Edwin Bunny Power at a tree-trimming class. They married and moved back to the Harbison farm, where Helen ran the family business.

Just a few years into their marriage, nature took a toll. A harsh spring frost in 1921 wiped out much of their fruit crop. Normally, the Power family shipped their peaches, pears, apricots, nectarines and figs back east for sale, but now they didnt have enough viable fruit. They held a family meeting to figure out what to do, and Helen proposed the idea of opening up a fruit stand for the Fourth of July weekend.

Public Domain

To our surprise we sold all we had on the stand and when we counted our receipts at the end of the day found that we had taken in $15, Edwin Power reminisced to the Los Angeles Times a few years later.

They began expanding their offerings, adding oft-requested items like ice cream and chewing gum. Thirsty drivers started stopping for water, so they also kept a bucket of ice cold water on hand. Whenever a thirsty-looking person approached the stand, he was offered a well-filled cup even before he asked for it, Power said. We beat him to it.

They found this strategy paid off: Usually the person would then spend a few cents on fruit before heading back out onto the road.

Speaking of the road, the family also solved a problem there. They realized cars were zipping past at up to 35 mph (By the time they see our fruit and make up their mind to purchase are too far past to stop, Power lamented), so they added signs in both directions farther down the road, alerting drivers to the upcoming Nut Tree stand. A few years after its grand opening, the Los Angeles Times called it one of the most unique and profitable fruit marketing stands in the country.

After a summer of brisk sales, they added prepared food and the first of their specialty items. In 1924, you could have the Nut Tree ship their 3.5-pound gold nugget replica, filled with nuts, raisins and candied fruit, anywhere in the country.

The Power children, Edwin Jr., Mary Helen and Robert, also contributed to the family business. In the 1950s, Edwin Jr. added an airstrip to lure in aviators. During that era, the Nut Tree Restaurant boomed, serving millions of visitors their famed chicken curry, turkey tamales, chocolate fudge layer cakes, tiny individual loaves of bread and, of course, the marshmallow sauce.

Dreyfuss + Blackford/Courtesy

The stunning dining room, designed by Dreyfuss + Blackford Architecture, featured a glass aviary in the center. Sometimes, a live cockatoo strutted about inside. Once done with their upscale meal, families could head outside to ride the kids train to the airport and back, flop around on the hobby horses or visit the gift shop.

Dreyfuss + Blackford/Courtesy

Dreyfuss + Blackford/Courtesy

At its height, the Nut Tree even catered lunch for a royal visit to California, setting off several culinary tizzies in the process.

Northern California Anglophiles evinced concern Wednesday that two types of shellfish will be served at the state Capitol luncheon March 4 for Queen Elizabeth II, who supposedly does not like to eat shellfish, the Sacramento Bee reported in 1983.

Luckily, the State Department reassured them that the queen only disliked uncooked shellfish, and the Nut Trees planned menu of California sole stuffed with Dungeness crab and Pacific Bay shrimp crepes were perfectly acceptable. More consternation came in the form of staffing, after several female Nut Tree employees complained that only 40 male wait staff were invited to serve the queen. The news went public, and the restaurant allowed women to join the lunch service, too.

In the end, it all went off without a hitch, besides a snarky column from Herb Caen the next day questioning the Nut Trees choice to serve croissants with crepes.

But those were the halcyon days. In the early 1990s, trouble was brewing within the Power family. The business was by then split between the surviving Power children, Edwin Jr. and Mary Helen, and Roberts widow, Margaret.

In 1994, Margaret Power filed a lawsuit in the Solano County Superior Court alleging her business partners (and in-laws) had lost $5.5 million over the past seven years. In the suit, she demanded they sell the Nut Tree immediately and split the profits.

"There's this family animosity going on and it throws logic out the window," an anonymous source told the Sacramento Business Times. "The current cash flow for the owners is not a problem."

After nearly two years in litigation, the case was settled out of court. The terms of the settlement were never disclosed, but it doesnt seem coincidental that two weeks after the deal, the Nut Tree was officially for sale. Buyers came out of the woodwork, prominent among them developer Bill Poland, credited by the Bee as the man who created the South of Market renaissance in San Francisco. Poland was reportedly ready to turn the Nut Tree into a theme park, complete with roller coasters. Hed even tentatively hired an executive from the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk to help with the new project.

Family drama aside, the bell was perhaps already tolling for the Nut Tree. Officials from the business told the media in 1996 they were a victim of their own success; theyd brought so many visitors to Vacaville that the city green-lit the massive outlet stores development across the highway, which was drawing foot traffic away. And, frankly, the Nut Trees mid-century glory was feeling pretty dated.

Dreyfuss + Blackford/Courtesy

It used to have a Nordstrom quality to it, one visitor told the Bee shortly before its 1996 closure. Now its more like a Kmart.

In June 1996, Polands deal fell through. Although the media reported at the time that Poland failed to secure the $16 million needed to buy the property, Poland says he terminated the contract after exorbitant demands from the city of Vacaville to pay for surrounding road improvements. For years, the Nut Tree was the very sunny and hot location of occasional renaissance fairs, and by 2003, most of the main buildings had been demolished.

Today, the Nut Tree exists in a new iteration: a strip mall. Opened in 2009 under the name Nut Tree Shopping Center, its a mishmash of national retailers and eateries. A few relics of the old days remain. The train, fully restored, still runs, although on a much smaller circuit. If you get a poke bowl at Okashi Fusion (which you should, its excellent), you can eat it in a food court under a large vintage Nut Tree sign.

Dreyfuss + Blackford/Courtesy

The food court is little more than a collection of picnic tables in the shade, but the view is a distinctly Bay Area one  golden fields framed by low rolling hills and the Vaca Mountains beyond. Sometimes, a small plane takes off or lands at the Nut Tree Airport. And for just a moment, its like the marshmallow sauce is still steps away, by the glass aviary and the gift shop selling tiny gemstones.

Editor's note: This story was updated on July 4, 7 a.m., to add details about the failed Nut Tree sale of 1996.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP)  Two Massachusetts men have been sent to prison for shooting up a Rhode Island nightclub they had previously been asked to leave, shooting one person in the back in the process, prosecutors announced Tuesday.

Dajour Hutchins, 23, and Robert Sudue, 27, both of Worcester, Massachusetts, pleaded guilty to assault and firearms charges, according to a statement from the office of state Attorney General Peter Neronha.
RAYTOWN, Mo. (AP)  Authorities found a body Tuesday in the basement of a suburban Kansas City duplex where multiple people were injured in an explosion.

John Ham, a spokesman for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, told The Kansas City Star that the body will be taken to the medical examiner for identification once the Raytown building is secure.
New Jerseys prison system is about to begin housing inmates based on gender identity, the result of a lawsuit filed in 2019 by a transgender woman who said she was forced to live in mens prisons for a year and a half.

The new policy goes into effect July 1 and provides greater protections for transgender, intersex and nonbinary people in state prisons, most importantly by housing them based on the gender they identify with rather than by sex assigned at birth. Inmates can provide information about their gender identity at any time during their incarceration, under the policy.

Other protections include single-cell housing while final housing determinations are being made; being able to shower separately from other inmates; the right to have input into housing decision and to appeal those decisions, and a prohibition of physical examinations to determine an inmate's genital status. Pat-down searches or strip searches by transgender women by male officers will be prohibited.

The policy will be maintained for at least one year, according to the settlement.

This policy places New Jersey in the vanguard of states committed to protecting transgender, intersex, and nonbinary people in prison housing determinations and continues its path toward eliminating discrimination based on gender identity, said Tess Borden, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union in New Jersey, which represented the woman along with attorney Robyn Gigl.

Under terms of the settlement, the woman, identified in court papers as Sonia Doe, will receive $125,000 in damages and $45,000 for attorneys' fees, and won't face any sanctions in connection with an assault that occurred in prison in May 2019.

When I was forced to live in mens prisons, I was terrified I wouldnt make it out alive. Those memories still haunt me, Doe said in a statement. Though I still have nightmares about that time, its a relief to know that as a result of my experience the NJDOC has adopted substantial policy changes so no person should be subjected to the horrors I survived.

The New Jersey Department of Corrections didn't immediately return a request for comment.

The change comes at a time when New Jersey is grappling with reports of widespread abuses and systemic failures at its only women's prison, the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women in Clinton.

Ten prison guards face criminal charges stemming from an alleged assault on inmates, including a transgender woman, in January. Several corrections officers at the prison have pleaded guilty or been convicted of sexual abuse and misconduct in recent years, and last year a Department of Justice report concluded officials failed to take action to prevent rampant abuse at the facility despite being aware of systemic problems.

Corrections Commissioner Marcus Hicks resigned this month, a day after Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy said he would close the prison.
JUNEAU, Alaska (AP)  A state court judge on Tuesday scheduled arguments for next month involving whether Alaska Attorney General Treg Taylor's lawsuit over the state budget process is moot and should be dismissed.

Superior Court Judge Herman Walker previously said he intended to dismiss the case after the state House Monday passed effective date provisions for a budget package that it had failed to adopt earlier this month. Walker set a Tuesday deadline for parties involved in the case to explain why he shouldn't dismiss the matter as moot.

During a brief hearing Tuesday in Anchorage, Walker agreed to hear arguments July 23.

Taylor sued the Legislative Affairs Agency after the House on June 15 failed to adopt the effective date provisions. Gov. Mike Dunleavy called the budget defective, highlighting the effective date failure as a concern.

Taylor, in his lawsuit, argued that under the state constitution, laws don't become effective until 90 days after enactment unless the Legislature with two-thirds support in each chamber provides for other effective dates. He said retroactive provisions in the bill did not provide a workaround. The new fiscal year begins Thursday.

Megan Wallace, a top legislative attorney, in a memo to the House speaker said the governor could give heed to retroactive provisions in the bill or use other tools to keep state government operating until it takes effect, such as interim borrowing.

While a number of legislators disagreed with Dunleavy's interpretation, the House got the support needed Monday to take another vote and pass the effective date provisions. Dunleavy said that action would avert a threatened partial government shutdown.

The Department of Law, which Taylor leads, said Taylor still wanted a court to weigh in on the effective date issue.

This has implications for years to come, and it is much better to decide the issue before it arises again in the future with another potential shutdown, Taylor said in a statement Monday.

Attorneys representing the Legislative Affairs Agency, in court documents, said the case should be dismissed. They argued, among other things, that political lawsuits brought by the state against the Legislature are barred by Alaska's constitution.

The Legislative Affairs Agency carries out policy set by the Legislative Council, composed of House and Senate leaders, and provides other legislative services. It does not have the power of appropriation; that rests with the Legislature, the agencys attorneys said.

The lawsuit inappropriately uses the agency as a proxy for the legislature, attorneys James Torgerson, Kevin Cuddy and Connor Smith, representing the agency, argued in court documents.

Documents filed by the agencys attorneys included a letter from Dunleavy to state Supreme Court Chief Justice Joel Bolger, dated June 18, in which Dunleavy outlined differing views on the effective date issue and said he had asked Taylor to seek a determination of the issue through the courts.

Dunleavy asked that the issue be addressed in the most expedited way possible.

Bolger, in a response letter, told Dunleavy he could not engage in such communications and said he was sure that Taylor's office was familiar with the proper procedures to bring your concerns to the attention of the appropriate forum.
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Alert: Israel's new foreign minister lands in the UAE, first official visit by top Israeli diplomat since ties were formalized
A council member and former mayoral candidate in Allentown, Pennsylvania, was charged Tuesday with child endangerment after prosecutors said she took a runaway teenager to a tent encampment used by homeless people, where he was subsequently solicited for sex.

The council member, Democrat Ce-Ce Gerlach, denied any wrongdoing, and her lawyer slammed the Republican district attorney over what he suggested was a political hit job" meant to destroy Gerlach's career.

Gerlach was working as a homeless outreach caseworker when she gave the 16-year-old boy a tent and other supplies, took him to an Allentown encampment known as Tent City and asked a resident there to look after him, according to the Lehigh County district attorneys office.

The boy spent parts of two days and one night at the camp before another caseworker spotted him there. He told police he was solicited for sex in exchange for a cigarette and saw prostitution and fighting, authorities said.

Gerlach was charged with endangering the welfare of children and failing to report suspected child abuse, both misdemeanors. She was arraigned Tuesday and released on unsecured bail, according to the DA's office.

In a written statement distributed by her attorney, Gerlach declared that she has never committed a crime in my life and that includes the current allegations against me. ... I refuse to allow these allegations to distract me from my service to the people of Allentown.

Gerlach, a longtime community activist and former school board member who was elected to City Council in 2019, entered the race for mayor but lost in last months Democratic primary.

The incident for which she was charged took place about a month after Gerlach began working at Valley Youth House, an organization that serves thousands of at-risk youth and their families in 23 Pennsylvania counties.

The 16-year-old told police he had called the organization's hotline last July and was put in touch with Gerlach, who was on duty. He told her he had run away from home and needed a place to stay. Gerlach took him to Tent City and asked a man who lived there to look after him, prosecutors said.

The man, who had lived at the camp for six years, described the teenager as a young skinny kid that was scared to be there and not capable to taking care of himself, prosecutors said. He said Gerlach told him she had tried to place the boy at a YMCA but was unsuccessful because he was a minor.

A day later, prosecutors said, a caseworker for another organization saw the boy at the encampment and knew he should not be there because of his age, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors said Gerlach failed to immediately notify the states ChildLine abuse reporting system about the boy, as state law required. Prosecutors also said she could have contacted police or Lehigh County child welfare authorities instead of taking him to the encampment, where police have been called dozens of times over the past year.

In a statement that did not name Gerlach, Valley House said Tuesday it suspended an employee in May during its own internal investigation, then fired the person.

Our number one priority is the safety, protection, and well-being of the young people served by Valley Youth House, said the statement, issued by Senior Vice President Christina Schoemaker.

Gerlach's lawyer, Ettore J. Angelo, accused District Attorney Jim Martin of releasing a statement about the case that poisons the justice process against his client.

Angelo said one of Martin's deputies contacted him earlier Tuesday with a threat from Martin himself: that if Ms. Gerlach or I contacted the press about her legal appearance today that there would be no discussions about possible resolutions.

He called it a devious move, considering that Martin issued a lengthy recitation of the case while Gerlach was being processed at the county jail.

Angelo questioned whether Martin had launched a political hit job to destroy the career of a woman who spends her every working hour fighting for the downtrodden.

A message was left with Martin's spokesperson seeking comment on the allegation.
WASHINGTON (AP)  President Joe Biden overstated the expected employment gains Tuesday in making his pitch for a bipartisan infrastructure proposal that he said would create millions of new jobs. That might or might not have resulted from his initial plan, but there's a smaller one on the table now.

He also suggested that the package to boost roads, bridges and airports could be a solution for flight delays, glossing over recent and bigger problems of labor shortages and bad weather during the busy summer season.

A look at his claims in La Crosse, Wisconsin:

BIDEN: After months of careful negotiation, of listening, of compromising together ... a bipartisan group of senators got together and they forged an agreement to move forward on the key priorities of my American Jobs Plan. ... As a result this is a generational investment  a generational investment to modernize our infrastructure, creating millions of good paying jobs. And thats not coming from me, its coming from Wall Street.

THE FACTS: The bipartisan proposal is not forecast to create millions of new jobs, according to Wall Street, but only a fraction of that.

That plan would provide $579 billion in new infrastructure spending and create new jobs by fixing and updating the nation's crumbling roads, bridges and ports, expanding public transit and building half a million electric charging stations. But it is significantly scaled back from Bidens initial proposal for $2.3 trillion in new spending, which Moodys Analytics estimated would create roughly 2.6 million jobs over the next decade.

Peter Williams, an analyst at investment bank Evercore ISI, estimates the bipartisan compromise package would create 450,000 to 775,000 jobs, and mostly not until 2025-2026, because infrastructure projects can take years to win approval. He projects the package would increase the economys total output 1% in those years.

While Biden and congressional Democrats are aiming to pass the remainder of the president's proposal in separate legislation, that is meeting Republican resistance and is far from certain. Nor is that what Biden said Tuesday when he asserted the creation of millions of jobs just from the bipartisan pact.

The Biden team has previously offered vastly inflated projections of how many jobs his American Jobs Plan is expected to create, initially claiming it would mean 19 million new jobs before his press secretary ultimately corrected the accounting to over 2 million.

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BIDEN: This deal also modernizes our outdated airports, ports and waterways. That means fewer delays that drain so much money from families and from businesses. Theres no good reason why that zero  zero  of the top 25 airports in the world are American.

THE FACTS: To be clear, modernized airports can only do so much to reduce flight delays. Most delays don't result from outdated infrastructure.

Flight delays are much more often the fault of airlines themselves, and that trend has been growing for years. More recently, airlines have encountered longer delays due to bad weather and labor shortages as they fail to keep up with high summer demand for travel as pandemic concerns ease in the U.S.

In 2020, for instance, 71% of flight delays were due to circumstances within the airlines control, such as crew or baggage loading problems, or because of the previous flight arriving late, according to the federal Bureau of Transportation Statistics. About 22% were due to a national aviation system delay, which does include infrastructure problems, such as not enough terminals, gates or ramps. Extreme weather or security problems accounted for the remaining delays.

A decade prior in 2009, national aviation system problems accounted for a bigger chunk of flight delays, about 31%, compared with 64% due to airline problems.

Delta Air Lines canceled dozens of flights around Thanksgiving last year, when crowds were much smaller, and again around Easter this spring at least partly because of staffing shortages, and Southwest has suffered staffing shortages and technology problems that have led to thousands of delays and hundreds of canceled flights this month. Bad weather, especially thunderstorms in the summer, frequently snarl flights.

This month, American Airlines also said it will cut hundreds of flights over three weeks to avoid overloading its operation. The union representing Americans pilots said company management failed to move quickly enough to retrain 1,600 pilots who were temporarily sidelined last year or replace some of the 1,000 who took early retirement.

That said, a civil engineers report card recently scored aviation infrastructure a dismal D+ due to shortages in capacity.

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Yen reported from Austin, Texas, and Koenig from Dallas.

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EDITOR'S NOTE  A look at the veracity of claims by political figures.

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Find AP Fact Checks at http://apnews.com/APFactCheck

Follow @APFactCheck on Twitter: https://twitter.com/APFactCheck
HONG KONG (AP)  In 2003, public opposition to a proposed national security law for Hong Kong swelled an annual protest held on July 1 to hundreds of thousands of marchers.

A few months later, the Hong Kong government dropped the legislation, and the idea remained largely dormant for more than 15 years. Then last year, the central government in Beijing unveiled a surprise: a national security law it had drafted and quickly imposed on the semi-autonomous city. It took effect on the eve of July 1.
PHOENIX (AP)  An indictment released Monday charges an Arizona man with murder and aggravated assault in a string of drive-by shootings earlier this month in metro Phoenix.

The grand jury indictment against 19-year-old Ashin Scott Tricarico mirrors the charges filed previously by prosecutors after his arrest 11 days ago.

He is accused of killing one person and injuring a dozen others. In all, he is charged with 31 felonies.

Thomas Glow, an attorney representing Tricarico, didnt immediately return a message Monday evening seeking comment.

Tricarico is accused of opening fire on cars and pedestrians from his SUV in at least eight separate shootings in three Phoenix suburbs.

Four people were shot, including 67-year-old David Liebler, who was found dead in a pickup truck that had gone off the road and into a canal near a freeway. A 3-year-old child was in one vehicle with her mother when the front windshield and drivers side door were hit, but wasnt harmed.

Investigators said Tricarico told them that he believed people were after him because of his involvement in another shooting.

More than a month before the shootings, police say Tricarico was working as a licensed security guard at a north Phoenix restaurant when he shot a male customer outside who was reported intoxicated, causing a disturbance and charging at Tricarico.

Police said the man was taken to a hospital with an injury that was not life-threatening, and Tricarico remained at the restaurant and cooperated with investigators. The case is still being investigated, and Tricarico told police he shot the man in self-defense.
BRASILIA, Brazil (AP)  President Jair Bolsonaro signed a decree Monday to dispatch Brazilian soldiers to the Amazon in a bid to curb surging deforestation, just two months after withdrawing troops from the region and days after his Environment Minister resigned.

The decree published in the country's official gazette said soldiers would go to the states of Para, Amazonas, Mato Grosso and Rondonia through the end of August. It didn't provide details about the number of troops to be deployed nor the cost of the operation.

Vice President Hamilton Mourao told reporters earlier this month that the deployment could be extended beyond two months with the arrival of the dry season, when people burn forest to clear land.

Amazon deforestation has been ticking upwards for several years, but surged since the 2018 election of Bolsonaro, who repeatedly called for development of the rainforest. The destruction has elicited an international outcry and, more recently, an effort by U.S. President Joe Bidens administration to urge Bolsonaro to get tough on illegal logging.

This will mark the third time that Bolsonaro has dispatched troops to the Amazon, following two Operation Green Brazil deployments, the most recent of which ended in April. Each mission involved thousands of soldiers. Still, environmental experts have said the military was ill-prepared and had limited efficacy.

In 2020, deforestation in Brazil's Amazon reached a level unseen since 2008, according to official data.

And 98.9% of deforestation had indications of illegality, either done near springs, in protected areas or carried out without requisite authorization, according to data released this month by the MapBiomas Project, a network of nonprofits, universities and technology companies that studies Brazilian land use. Brazils environmental regulator levied fines in just 5% of these cases, the group found.

Marcio Astrini, executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, a network of environmental nonprofit groups, called the latest military deployment a smokescreen that will allow the government to claim to be fighting deforestation. He noted a previously successful initiative, largely funded by the Norwegian and German governments, has been suspended since 2019.

The government has adopted a series of measures that simply destroys the states monitoring capacity, like stopping environmental fines, Astrini said. He added that the regulator has also ceased destroying machinery used for illegal logging.

Bolsonaros plan to send soldiers comes as the US. administration has called for curbing Amazon deforestation in order to help arrest climate change. Bolsonaro has said Brazil lacks enough funds to do so on its own, despite the fact the nation did so at the start of this century.

The U.S. has made clear it would only be willing to contribute once Brazil registers concrete progress, of which there has so far been no sign. Talks between the U.S. and Brazil's environment ministry have stalled, three Brazilian government officials told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity because they werent authorized to speak publicly.

The decision to deploy troops is partially meant to demonstrate the governments good intentions to the U.S., one of the officials added.

On June 23, Environment Minister Ricardo Salles announced his resignation, giving up his post amid sharp criticism of his tenure and two investigations into his actions involving allegedly illegal timber operations. He has denied all wrongdoing.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP)  California Gov. Gavin Newsom is suing the state elections chief he appointed in an effort to get his party affiliation to appear next to his name on the ballot for a recall election that will determine if the first-term Democrat is forced out of office.

The lawsuit against Secretary of State Shirley Weber, a fellow Democrat, came after Newsom's campaign failed to file the appropriate paperwork.

Newsom was supposed to indicate whether he wanted his party preference on the ballot back in February 2020, when he first responded to the recall petition. That requirement was part of a new law he signed that took effect in January 2020. In the past, politicians targeted in recalls weren't allowed to have their party next to their names.

Due to an inadvertent but good faith mistake on the part of his elections attorney, Newsom timely filed his answer but did not include his party-preference election," reads the lawsuit, which was first reported Monday by Courthouse News Service.

Weber's office said it has a duty to accept timely filed documents and anything after the deadline requires judicial resolution."

The recall election, driven by criticism of Newsom's handling of the coronavirus pandemic, is likely to be held in early fall. The two-part ballot will first ask voters if they want to remove Newsom from office and, if so, who should replace him. The answers to the second question are only counted if more than 50% of people say yes to the first.

Newsom's lawsuit argues that Weber should accept his updated notification of his party preference because the recall hasn't been certified, an election date hasn't been set, his opponents haven't filed their own paperwork and the ballots aren't yet designed.

When Newsom responded to the recall petition, few believed it would generate enough signatures reach the ballot. But with growing frustration over his on-again, off-again shutdown orders during the pandemic, support for the recall gained momentum and ultimately more than 1.7 million valid signatures were gathered.

A key event for Newsom's critics was his decision to attend a birthday party for a lobbyist friend at a posh San Francisco Bay Area restaurant when he was telling people to stay home, socially distance and wear masks. Photos showed him unmasked and seated close to other guests.

Republicans seeking to unseat Newsom include former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, businessman and unsuccessful 2018 gubernatorial candidate John Cox, former U.S. Rep. Doug Ose and reality TV personality Caitlyn Jenner.

Though many voters know Newsom is a Democrat, the paperwork error is an embarrassing mistake for his campaign, which last year also failed to challenge a court ruling that gave recall proponents more time to collect signatures.

Newsom's campaign has painted the recall as a partisan effort driven by extremist Republicans, and having the word Democratic" next to his name would remind voters of that, said Darry Sragow, a former Democratic political strategist who runs the nonpartisan California Target Book, which tracks elections. Most California voters are not deeply engaged, and some may not know Newsom's party affiliation, he said.

It makes all the sense in the world for the governor to want to be identified on the ballot as a Democrat because the dynamics in the recall are pretty simple: If he can make sure that Democratic voters in California know there's a recall, know when the recall election is, and know that he is one of them, he beats the recall," Sragow said.

In late February 2020, political neophyte Orrin Heatlie filed a recall petition against Newsom, one of about a half-dozen that had been filed at that point. Newsom was required to respond to the petition, and under the new law, he was supposed to say if he wanted his party preference on the ballot. His campaign only realized its mistake this month and on June 19 filed a notice of his party preference with Weber, but she declined to accept it.

Newsom's lawsuit asks for a ruling by July 12, which indicates his campaign does not expect an election date to be set before that.

In the past, those targeted in a recall didnt have the option to list their party preference. Democrats in the state Legislature voted to change that in 2019 after a state senator was recalled, arguing it gives voters important information.

On Monday, Newsom signed a law that changes the recall rules in an effort to speed up the election. It essentially bypasses a legislative review of costs associated with the recall, because lawmakers already agreed to give counties $215 million to administer the election.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP)  California is phasing out its state-run youth prisons and shifting the responsibility to counties, 162 years after lawmakers created the first alternative to housing children as young as 12 alongside adults in San Quentin and Folsom state prisons.

Advocates said the move reflects their belief that children who commit crimes can be reformed and are better served when held closer to their homes.

But supporters and skeptics said there is plenty of uncertainty ahead as the three remaining state-run lockups stop admissions Thursday and close in 2023. Oversight of juvenile offenders will shift from the state corrections department to the California Health and Human Services Agency.

That change in mindset has a lot of potential to be far more effective, said Jessica Heldman, a juvenile justice expert at the University of San Diego School of Law, as well as of course make communities safer" by having the needs of the youthful offenders identified and met so they can be reformed.

The state-run system has a troubled history marked by inmate suicides and brawls. The shift to local control is the final step in a lengthy reform effort driven in part by a class-action lawsuit and incentives for counties to keep youths out of the state system.

The first facility for troubled youths  the San Francisco Industrial School  was created by the Legislature in 1859. Two years later, the State Reform School in Marysville opened for boys 8 to 18. At one point, the state system included 11 lockups holding about 10,000 youths.

That youth offender population has dwindled to about 750. About 16% are serving time for homicide, 37% for assault, one-third for robbery, 9% for rape or other sex offenses. A disproportionate 59% are Hispanic and 29% are Black.

Until now, youths as young as 12 could be sent to the facilities and remain in some cases until age 25, though many are transferred to an adult prison when they turn 18. New admissions will now be overseen by 58 county probation departments.

Teens 14 and older who once could have gone to a state facility can instead be housed in county secure youth treatment facilities at the direction of juvenile court judges.

That's a troubling replication of state lockups at the local level, said Meredith Desautels, a staff attorney at the Youth Law Center in San Francisco.

My major concern is that what were actually going to see is youth who never would have gone to (state facilities) spending more time in secure confinement than they would have prior to the closure, she said.

Counties are determined to make the law work, said California District Attorneys Association legislative director Larry Morse, yet "frankly the details are still a little opaque and we have not really been able to sort through exactly how this will unfold.

Prosecutors want to know where youths who commit the most egregious and horrifying crimes will be held and how they will be helped, he said.

County officials fear smaller counties could have difficulty providing specialized programs for youths who commit sex crimes, for instance, or have serious mental health needs.

The state will ramp up to sending counties $212 million annually to help pay for their new responsibilities  about $225,000 per youth.

But the California State Association of Counties said the funding formula punishes counties that relied most on the state-run system and therefore need the greatest help developing local alternatives.

County probation officers, meanwhile, will be trying to find a balance between reform advocates' focus on rehabilitation and juvenile judges who, at prosecutors' request, could still send 16- and 17-year-olds to adult prisons for the most serious crimes.

California counties already handle about 35,000 juvenile offenders, more than 3,600 of them held in juvenile halls, camps and ranches. But when juvenile court judges in the past were faced with the most recalcitrant or troubled youths, they had the option of sending them to the state Division of Juvenile Justice.

And then youd have a big $200 million system available to that one youth to develop whatever case plan was necessary. So that gave confidence to the court that they didnt need to go to the adult system, said Chief Probation Officers of California executive director Karen Pank.

With that option gone, officials and advocates alike are looking for guidance from the nascent state Office of Youth and Community Restoration.

A consortium of 40 youth advocacy groups recently asked lawmakers to budget $30 million for the office  four times what Gov. Gavin Newsom most recently proposed  to provide better oversight of the entire juvenile justice system and not just those youths who previously went into state custody.

"Its been mass confusion at the county level with very little guidance at the state level, said attorney Frankie Guzman, director of the California Youth Justice Initiative at the National Center for Youth Law.

That has often left probation departments leading by default while law enforcement agencies are suspect in the eyes of many advocates, said Guzman, who spent six years in Californias youth prisons for armed robbery.

Heldman cautioned that the state cant simply absolve itself of responsibility for the youths it is now pushing back to the counties.

Its what I call the Pontius Pilate: the state washes its hands of these wards, Republican state Sen. Jim Nielsen, a former state parole chief, said during a legislative debate over the shift this spring.

But Democratic Sen. Maria Elena Durazo promised her budget subcommittee will oversee a proper transition, so that all young people remain in our communities instead of being held in youth prisons far away from the resources and support they need to heal trauma and change the course of their lives."

This was a moment of hope, Durazo said of lawmakers vote for the shift. It was also a recognition that we had to get it right, and it would not be easy.
BEIJING (AP)  Amid celebrations over the centenary of the ruling Communist Party, Chinese President Xi Jinping has awarded loyal party members with medals and called for adherence to Marxism.

Xis speech at a ceremony Tuesday follows a lavish celebration at Beijings Olympic stadium on Monday night emphasizing Chinas rise to economic and political prominence following reforms enacted more than 40 years ago.

While unleashing private industry, the ruling party has maintained an iron grip on political power, along with preferential policies toward state-run companies.

All party comrades should take their faith in Marxism and the socialism with Chinese characteristics as their lifes purposes, Xi said in his address to medal winners. Celebrations conclude with a commemoration Thursday at Beijings Tiananmen Square.

Over his nine years as party head, Xi has established himself as China's most powerful ruler since Mao Zedong, who founded the People's Republic in 1949 after defeating Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists amid civil war.

Like Mao, Xi is not bound by term limits and, at 68, will likely remain in office for years to come. While repressing any sign of political opposition at home and promoting an anti-corruption campaign, he has advanced an increasingly assertive foreign policy that seeks to command control over the South China Sea, intimidate Taiwan into accepting Beijing's control, and join with Russia in challenging U.S. influence in international affairs.

China's Communist Party now boasts almost 92 million members, just over 6% of the country's population of 1.4 billion. The vast majority of government officials and leaders of state industry are party members, providing what the leadership hails as a source of social cohesion in contrast to partisan divides in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Alongside the anniversary celebrations, the party has been giving heavy coverage in the entirely state-controlled media to racial inequality and other social problems in the West. That appears to reflect confidence in its ability to deflect heavy criticism over China's detention of more than 1 million Uyghurs and a crackdown on freedom of speech and political opponents in Hong Kong.

In his speech, Xi said party members should lead the drive for China's great rejuvenation," a reference to his agenda for China to retake its centuries-old role as a regional and international power in culture, economics and military power.

On the new march to a fully established modern socialist nation, keep moving toward the goals of the second century," Xi said.
Congressional leaders and a media advocacy group are urging the Federal Communications Commission to examine how policy decisions and programs have disparately harmed Black Americans and other communities of color, according to a letter sent Tuesday to the acting FCC chair.

In the letter, first shared with The Associated Press, Democratic Reps. Jamaal Bowman of New York, Yvette Clarke of New York, and Brenda Lawrence of Michigan along with Media 2070 said the FCC should conduct an assessment to address and redress the harm the agencys policies and programs have caused Black and brown communities and identify the affirmative steps the agency commits to taking to break down barriers to just media and telecommunication practices.

The FCC is an independent governmental agency that is responsible for regulating the nations communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable. In total, 25 members of Congress signed onto the letter, including Congresswomen Karen Bass of California, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.

A lack of diversity and representation has long been a concern for media advocates and experts who argue that racism permeates the nations media industry, partly because of historical exclusionary policies and regulations that have made it hard for Black Americans and others to control and shape news coverage and other forms of media in communities across the nation.

Media 2070, an initiative created by the Black caucus of the nonpartisan organization Free Press, has called for media reparations for the Black community and the FCC letter is part of its efforts. Earlier this month it delivered a petition to 3,000 newsrooms across the country, urging news outlets to dismantle anti-Black racism in the media, trust Black journalists and care for Black communities.

Although many journalists and artists of color have used their talent to ensure critical stories about their communities are being told, our nations big media companies nevertheless continue to stereotypically depict people of color as being a threat or a burden to society, the lawmakers wrote in their joint letter to Acting FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel. Historic federal policies are a primary reason why structural inequities exist in our nations media and telecommunication systems today. FCC policies, license decisions and inaction have had the result of effectively excluding people of color from media ownership opportunities.

The lawmakers noted the nations first radio and TV licenses were awarded by the Federal Radio Commission and then its successor, the FCC, during an era of Jim Crow segregation.

The (Trump administrations) efforts to consolidate the media marketplace limited ownership opportunities for people of color and women, the letter stated.

President Joe Biden signed an executive order in January, directing executive agencies to assess how federal policies have exacted harm upon communities of color. Each agency was tasked with identifying potential barriers that underserved communities and individuals face in trying to access contracting opportunities and also whether new policies, regulations or guidance documents may be necessary to advance equity.

The order also strongly encouraged independent agencies, which would include the FCC, to conduct an assessment.

In a statement to the AP, an FCC spokesperson said Rosenworcel is committed to ensuring that FCC policies are equitable, fair, and transparent. Rosenworcel announced last week a plan to expand the work of the recently renamed Communications Equity and Diversity Council. The councils mission will expand from its initial focus on the media ecosystem to review more broadly critical diversity and equity issues across the tech sector.

She believes that we must prioritize diversity and expand opportunities for communities that have for too long been overlooked and underserved, the statement said. "While the FCC is an independent agency, it has been working diligently under her leadership to follow President Bidens executive order. But more work remains to be done. We are committed to working with those who sent this letter to do so.

People of color own and control just 6% of our nations full-power TV stations, 7% of commercial FM radio stations and 12% of commercial AM radio stations despite making up more than 40% of the U.S. population. As of 2017, Black Americans owned or controlled less than 1% of television stations, the group said, citing a 2020 FCC, Media Bureau, Industry Analysis Division report.

Bowman said he supports a full racial equity audit of the FCC.

Dismantling structural racism is a priority of our office, Bowman said. Media controls our narrative and controls our consciousness and if people of color arent owning those spaces and are strategically and just purposely excluded from those spaces, we have to do something about that.

A 2011 FCC report on the changing media landscape found that broadcast owners of color and advocates largely attribute low minority broadcast ownership levels to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which relaxed the local broadcast ownership rules and led to increased consolidation in broadcast media. The newspaper and radio industries have also faced rapid consolidation.

The FCC report noted that several studies have concluded that mainstream media outlets dont adequately cover Black Americans and other communities of color. The famous Kerner Commission report, which was commissioned by President Lyndon B. Johnson and released in 1968, found that the majority-white owned media outlets failed to cover the 1967 uprisings in Detroit and elsewhere from the perspective of Black Americans in a nuanced and accurate manner.

By and large, news organizations have failed to communicate to both their Black and white audiences a sense of the problems America faces and the sources of potential solutions. The media report and write from the standpoint of a white mans world, the 1968 Kerner Commission report stated.

And more than 50 years later, media organizations across the nation continue to grapple with a lack of people of color in newsrooms and media ownership. Efforts have been made to democratize the nations media system. But some of those changes were eventually rolled back.

In 1978, the FCC created the minority tax-certificate program, which allowed broadcasters to receive a tax break if they sold their stations to people of color. But in 1995, the Republican-controlled Congress passed legislation that ended the program, which had increased broadcast ownership by people of color from less than 1% to 3%.

Mark Lloyd, a former associate general counsel and chief diversity officer at the FCC, said there have been efforts over the years to address diversity and the agency is required by Congress to review its policies and determine whether or not those policies are in the public interest.

Thats the law, and having Congress reassert that I think has some utility, Lloyd said. "I would also say that it is important for the Federal Communications Commission to focus its concerns on whether or not the public is getting the critical information that it needs.

Congresswoman Lawrence said she has had previous conversations with the FCC about representation and she said shes hopeful the agency will conduct an audit.

President Biden made that commitment that he is going to really strive to have racial equality, and that includes the FCC because we know some of the policies have been more roadblocks and barriers, instead of being inclusive," Lawrence said.

Media 2070 leaders said the goal of the letter is to not only push the FCC to address its history and shift the public conversation but also outline tangible steps to repair harm, including fixing the ongoing consolidation of media and directing financial resources into Black-owned platforms.

The nation's demographics are changing and the "media system has to change if it is going to survive, said Collette Watson, co-creator of the Media 2070: Media Reparations consortium and the Free Press' vice president of cultural strategy.

Its not just a matter of being diverse or being inclusive, it's really about completely upending the structure that exists so that we can have something that looks more truthful to who we are and how were going to exist together as a multiracial society," Watson said. If we cant have a media system that tells the truth of Black lives, the truth of all, and one that is safe for Black people to exist in and have our stories told in, then we arent going to have a media system. It will become obsolete.

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Stafford reported from Detroit. She is a national investigative writer with The Associated Press Race and Ethnicity team. Follow her on Twitter at https://www.twitter.com/Kat__Stafford.
MADISON, Wis. (AP)  Police were within their rights when they used data from a man's cellphone to link him to a northeastern Wisconsin homicide, the state Supreme Court ruled Tuesday.

George Burch of Green Bay was convicted in 2018 of first-degree intentional homicide in the 2016 death of Nicole VanderHeyden. Her body was found in a Bellevue field.
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP)  The federal Clean Air Act does not preclude Ohio from seeking its own compensation against Volkswagen over the company's efforts to cheat U.S. diesel emissions tests, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled Tuesday.

At issue before the court was the 2015 scandal in which the automaker was found to have rigged its vehicles to beat the tests. The company ultimately paid more than $33 billion in fines and settlements.
PHOENIX (AP)  Rep. Aaron Lieberman announced Tuesday he's running for Arizona governor, becoming the third major Democrat to seek the state's highest office.

The Paradise Valley lawmaker founded two organizations focused on early childhood education before being elected to the Legislature in 2018. Hes developed a reputation as a moderate during two terms in the House.
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP)  A Dutch court convicted a 32-year-old woman and sentenced her to six years' imprisonment Tuesday for involvement in war crimes committed by the so-called Islamic State extremist group in Syria and Iraq.

In the ground-breaking conviction, The Hague District Court ruled that Islamic State is a criminal organization with the aim of committing war crimes and convicted the woman of involvement in the war crimes for spreading IS propaganda from her home near Amsterdam.
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP)  Russian warplanes repeatedly flew low over a Dutch navy frigate in the Black Sea last week and carried out mock attacks, the Defense Ministry of the Netherlands said Tuesday.

The incident involving the Dutch ship Zr. Ms. Evertsen happened last Thursday southeast of Crimea, the ministry said in a statement.

It came a day after after Russia said one of its warships in the Black Sea fired warning shots and a warplane dropped bombs to force a British destroyer out of an area near Crimea that Russia claims as its territorial waters. Britain denied that account and insisted its ship wasnt fired upon.

The Evertsen has been patrolling in the Black Sea with HMS Defender, the British ship that was involved in that incident.

Defense Minister Minister Ank Bijleveld-Schouten called the Russian actions irresponsible.

Evertsen has every right to sail there, she said. There is no justification whatsoever for this kind of aggressive act, which also unnecessarily increases the chance of accidents.

She said the Netherlands would speak to Russia about the incident.

The ministry said that the Russian jets, armed with bombs and air-to-surface rockets flew past the frigate between 3:30 p.m and 8:30 p.m. and were followed by disruptions to the Evertsens electronic equipment.

The Russian Defense Ministry responded in a statement later Tuesday, saying that the military scrambled its warplanes to prevent the violation of the Russian Federation's territorial waters after the Evertsen changed course and headed toward the Kerch Strait between the Black Sea and the Azov Sea.

The ministry said that after the Su-30 fighter jets and the Su-24 bombers made flyovers at a safe distance from the Evertsen, the ship changed course and sailed away.

Russia annexed Ukraines Crimean Peninsula in 2014, a move not recognized by most countries, gaining access to its long Black Sea coast. Russia has chafed at NATO warships visiting near Crimea as destabilizing. In April, it declared a broader area off Crimea closed to foreign naval ships.

In April, Russia imposed restrictions on foreign naval movements near Crimea until November in a move that drew strong complaints from Ukraine and the West. Russia rejected the criticism and noted the restrictions wouldnt interfere with commercial shipping.

Earlier this year, Russia also bolstered its troops near the border with Ukraine and warned Kyiv against using force to reclaim control of the countrys eastern industrial heartland, where a conflict with Russia-backed separatists has killed more than 14,000 people in seven years. Moscow withdrew some of its forces after maneuvers, but Ukrainian officials say many of them remain.

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Associated Press writer Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow contributed to this report.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP)  One of two inmates who had escaped from a Nevada jail was arrested in California, authorities said.

Matthew Marizza, 27, and Cody Abernathy, 28, escaped from the Carson City jail Saturday, the Carson City Sheriffs Office said.

Deputies with the Sacramento County Sheriffs Office arrested Marizza on Sunday after a high-speed pursuit. The two inmates were in a car reported stolen in Nevada's capital city and initially eluded capture after crashing into a ditch and running away, the Sacramento Bee reported.

Deputies found Marizza within an hour of the crash, and he was transported to a local hospital, treated and booked into the Sacramento County jail, authorities said.

Abernathy remains at large and Carson City deputies arrived Tuesday in California to help with the search.

The men escaped during an inmate work program, using a vehicle that was traced to Austin Rivers, 29, who had been released on bail from the jail hours before their escape, authorities said.

Marizza had been facing theft charges, with a $5,000 bail, and Abernathy was facing drug and weapons charges, with a $10,000 bail. The two will now face additional charges after the escape.

Rivers was taken into custody without incident in Carson City on Monday. He faces charges of aiding in a felony prisoner escape.
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP)  A South Carolina lawmaker who once ran one of the General Assembly's most powerful committees is getting ready to head to prison for an 18 month sentence on corruption charges.

Former Rep. Jim Harrison has had the sentence for perjury hanging over his head for three years. The state Supreme Court refused to overturn that conviction in January while overturning two misconduct in office convictions.
CLARKSBURG, W.Va. (AP)  A Florida man has admitted to bilking more than a dozen people out of nearly $5 million in an investment scheme.

Phillip W. Conley, of Jacksonville, Florida, pleaded guilty to one count of securities fraud in federal court in Clarksburg, West Virginia, acting U.S. Attorney Randolph J. Bernard said Tuesday.
PARIS (AP)  Frances lower house of parliament adopted a law Tuesday that will allow single women and lesbians access to medically assisted reproduction for the first time.

The wide-ranging bioethics law, presented by French President Emmanuel Macrons government, was approved by the National Assembly in a 326-115 vote.

The measure had been much awaited by LGBT rights groups, who had pushed for the reproduction measure since France legalized same-sex marriage in 2013.

The new law will expand access to fertility treatments such as artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization (IVF), currently reserved only for infertile heterosexual couples.

In France, fertility treatments are free  and this would now also include lesbian couples and single women.

Armel Balogog, a journalist who describes herself as bisexual and in a relationship with another woman, welcomed the new law.

Let me tell you how much it means for me to live in a country where I can legally have a child with the woman I love, Balogog tweeted after the vote. She said only regrets that transgender people were forgotten by the law.

The law did not meet demands that transgender women be allowed to donate sperm for use in fertility procedures before their gender reassignment.

Health Minister Olivier Veran said French authorities are getting ready to apply the new law as quickly as possible, so that the first children could be conceived by the end of the year.

The vote marks the end of a protracted, two-year debate in parliament. The conservative majority in the Senate repeatedly rejected the measure, but the lower house of parliament, where Macrons centrist party has a majority, has the final say.

French LGBT rights groups lobbied for the measure after France legalized same-sex marriage under then-President Francois Hollande, following months of mass protests by conservative and Catholic groups.

Finally, Matthieu Gatipon, spokesperson of the Inter-LGBT association said, welcoming a long-awaited progress.

We are satisfied that this is getting done ... but this has been a painful birth, he said, expressing frustration that it took so long to get to the final vote of the law.

Gatipon said it has been hard on French women who had to delay for years their plans to have a baby, and others who had to pay expensive fees to go abroad to countries where such procedures are available, such as Spain and Belgium.

The new law does not address Frances ban on surrogacy arrangements in which a woman carries and delivers a baby for someone else.
BERLIN (AP)  German investigators said Tuesday that an Islamic extremist motivation for last week's fatal knife attack in Wuerzburg appears likely, but they haven't so far found any propaganda or other extremist material. They also plan more checks on the suspect's mental health.

Fridays assault in and outside a store in the center of the Bavarian city left three women dead and another six people seriously injured. The suspect, a 24-year-old Somali man, was shot in the leg by police and arrested after people surrounded him and tried to hold him at bay with chairs and sticks.
John Hanna/AP

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP)  Gov. Laura Kelly and her top welfare official moved Tuesday to keep thousands of families from losing extra food aid because Kansas is no longer under a state of emergency for the coronavirus pandemic.

The announcement that Kelly plans to continue the extra $14.5 million a month in aid came two weeks after top Republicans in the GOP-controlled Legislature ended the state of emergency.
BAGHDAD (AP)  Iran halted its crucial supply of power to Iraq, fueling fears of protests Tuesday amid instability following the resignation of Iraq's electricity minister.

Cash-strapped Iran has put pressure on Iraqs government to release payments for power after falling into arrears. The development comes with months of scorching summer temperatures still to come, and ahead of much anticipated federal elections.

Electricity Minister Majed Mahdi Hantoosh submitted his resignation Monday amid popular and political pressure over repeated power outages across the country. Provinces across the countrys south  where temperatures currently average 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit)  are shortening working hours citing extreme heat.

A call for protests in the oil-rich province of Basra, often the stage of power-related demonstrations, was distributed across social media giving the government until 6 p.m. Tuesday to restore power.

Or else we will escalate and all of Basras streets will be cut off, and we will teach the officials a lesson they will never forget, it said.

Iraq's reliance on Iranian energy imports has geopolitical consequences and has been a source of ongoing tensions with the U.S. Washington has conditioned successive sanctions waivers  enabling these imports to continue  on Iraq becoming more energy independent.

The stakes are high for Iraq's government as electricity outages have routinely led to violent protests, particularly in the south. Federal elections are slated for Oct. 10, the first since mass anti-government protests swept the country in 2019.

Outputs from four cross-border electricity tie-lines from Iran to Iraq were at zero on Tuesday, according to Ministry of Electricity data seen by The Associated Press. The total cuts began this week, a ministry official said. The official requested anonymity because they are not authorized to brief media. In past weeks supply has fluctuated.

Gas and electricity imports from Iran often meet up to a third of Iraq's power demands.

Iraq relies on Iranian energy imports heavily, especially in peak summer months," said Yesar al-Maleki, Gulf analyst at the Middle East Economic Survey.

Gas imports from Iran range from 1.5-1.8 billion cubic feet per day. Now, we see generation in the south collapsing below 1 (gigawatt), meaning not just these lines are offline but even gas flow is down.

Iran feeds gas into Iraq through two pipelines used to power plants in Basra, Samawa, Nasiryah and Diyala. Generation from these plants also plummeted, suggesting supply from Iran in these plants is also low.

The impact has been immediate.

In Basra, the province requires 4,000 megawatts but is currently receiving 830 MW. It is a catastrophe, said al-Maleki.

The cuts will deprive Iraqis of power to run hospitals, businesses and homes as temperatures rise.

With calls to demonstrate growing louder, many fear a repeat of violent protests that swept Basra in 2018. These also coincided with Iranian power cuts over non-payment issues.

Iraq owes Iran $4 billion for energy imports. The country' economic crisis has caused delays in part, but even for money earmarked to pay for imports a complex payment scheme designed to evade U.S. sanctions has slowed down transfers.

Through the scheme, Iraq is unable to pay Iran directly for the imports, but can pay for goods, medicines and other expenses related to Tehran's diplomatic mission and Iranian companies working in Iraq. Recently, Iraq purchased vaccines for Tehran.

But Iran has complained the money is trickling in too slowly.

Provinces across Iraq, meanwhile, took precautions and shortened working hours to cope with rising temperatures. Basra, Najaf, Diwanieh and Diyala shortened working days from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m.
JACKSON, Miss. (AP)  Lawmakers working on a proposal to bring a medical marijuana program to Mississippi plan to have a draft of the legislation ready later this summer, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said Tuesday.

I think well have something that we can have serious discussions about, hopefully relatively soon, the Republican governor said.

Reeves addressed the issue of medical marijuana in Mississippi after he was asked about it by reporters during an unrelated news conference about a new occupational licensing law going into effect this week.

The state Supreme Court ruled in May that a voter-approved medical marijuana initiative is void because Mississippis initiative process is outdated.

Medical marijuana advocates were outraged after Initiative 65, a state constitutional amendment approved by voters in November, was thrown out. It would have required the Health Department to create a program to make marijuana available to people with debilitating medical conditions. The long list included cancer, epilepsy and sickle cell anemia.

Many lawmakers, including Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, have said the Legislature should honor the will of the voters by returning to the Capitol outside of the normal session and passing medical marijuana legislation.

To do so, they need the approval of the governor. Reeves has said he will support a special session, but he does not want it to go on for too long, costing more taxpayer money. The governor said lawmakers need to come to a consensus on how to implement the program before returning to the Capitol.

Reeves said Tuesday that hes had several conversations with Republican Sen. Kevin Blackwell, a lawmaker working to draft the proposed legislation. He said he understands legislators expect to have a draft bill within the next couple of weeks."

Blackwell, of Southaven, is Senate Medicaid committee chairman and a member of the Senate committee on Public Health and Welfare, which has held hearings in the past few weeks on the issue.

Blackwell led an effort to get medical marijuana legislation passed during the 2021 legislative session. It would have acted as a backup to the ballot initiative, allowing some sort of medical marijuana program to come to the state if the Supreme Court threw out Initiative 65. That legislation passed the Senate, but not the House.

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Leah Willingham 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.
PORTLAND, Maine (AP)  Trying to fill this dumpling order left one business in a pinch: A common but disruptive shipping error sent a custom dumpling-making machine manufactured in China to the wrong Portland in May.

The owners of Little Brother Chinese Food, which sells frozen dumplings in Portland, Maine, ordered a custom dumpling machine in March to help them fulfill demand, but an emailed shipping receipt delivered the bad news, the Portland Press Herald reported on Monday.

We saw that it was headed for Tacoma, Washington, and then Portland, Oregon, Richard Lee said. We called them and they said, Its already in the water. We cant do anything about it now.

Lee and co-owner Claire Guyer hired customs broker Oceanair, based in Boston, to help redirect the machine they hoped would fold some 3,000 dumplings a week for them.

Kelly LHeureux, vice president of Oceanair, told the newspaper the error happens frequently  especially with smaller companies  and can be costly.

"They end up working with someone who either doesnt ship a lot, or they could ship a lot but just dont know their geography, she said.

LHeureux was able to file a required document, the import security filing, that directed the machine to be put on a truck to Maine, not Oregon, when it landed in Tacoma, Washington.

Lee said the cross-country shipping cost almost as much as the machine itself, though he didn't tell the newspaper what the costs were. Now that the machine has arrived, Lee and Guyer are learning to use it.

If were being honest, we thought the process would be like turning on a dishwasher," they wrote in an email newsletter to customers, "but its actually more like playing an accordion.
MARINETTE, Wis. (AP)  An 84-year-old man is again asking a state appeals court to intervene before he goes on trial for a double murder.

Raymand Vannieuwenhoven is charged with two counts of first-degree murder for the 1976 deaths of 25-year-old David Schuldes and 24-year-old Ellen Matheys. The two were shot in a county park.

Vannieuwenhoven's trial is scheduled to start July 19 but he's asking for permission to blame others for the deaths. In Wisconsin, the defense must meet certain criteria and get a judge's permission to argue before a jury that another suspect is responsible for a crime.

The murders of Schuldes and Matheys were unsolved for more than four decades. Prosecutors charged Vannieuwenhoven after a DNA sample from evidence at the scene was found to match his in 2019.

Vannieuwenhoven also allegedly sexually assaulted Matheys, but a sexual assault charge was dismissed because the statute of limitations on that charge has expired.

Judge James Morrison has already denied a defense request to pin the murder on a former parks worker. That denial is already before the appeals court. Morrison more recently denied a request to blame another man who was previously questioned in the case but never charged. WLUK-TV reports that this denial is the subject of a new appeal.

In both cases, the appeals court has to first decide if it will accept the case before it proceeds. So far, there has been no action.

But the trial calendar is proceeding anyway. Attorneys have started the process of picking a jury. Fifty prospective jurors were eliminated last week due to their responses to written questionnaires.
PHOENIX (AP)  Officials in Arizona's largest county plan to stop using voting machines turned over to contractors hired by Republican state senators for a partisan audit of the 2020 election.

The Republican-controlled Maricopa County Board of Supervisors agreed with Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who said in May that she had grave concerns regarding the security and integrity of these machines because the county had lost control of them. Hobbs said she would seek to decertify them if the county planned to continue using them.

The Board shares your concerns, county attorney Joseph La Rue wrote to Hobbs on Monday.

The Senate GOP's unprecedented partisan audit of the 2020 election has been condemned by voting rights advocates and election experts who say it's being conducted by biased and incompetent consultants.

Senate Republicans issued a subpoena earlier this year demanding the county turn over vote-tabulation equipment, along with ballots and a variety of other records for the audit. Former President Donald Trump and his supporters had claimed without evidence that his loss was marred by fraud.

The county fought the subpoena but lost in court and turned over the materials. The Senate hired several firms to conduct the audit, led by Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based firm that had no election experience before 2020 and is led by a Trump supporter who has promoted election conspiracies.

The audit will not change the outcome of the election, but many Trump supporters hope it will lead to similar reviews in other battleground states and turn up evidence that President Joe Bidens victory was illegitimate. Critics say its a fruitless attempt to further Trumps narrative about the 2020 election and will diminish faith in the democratic process.

The county spent $6.1 million to lease the machines from Dominion Voting Systems in a three-year contract that expires before the 2022 election. There are three one-year renewal options.

County officials said in a news release that they used backup equipment for local elections in March and May and are working with Dominion to replace the subpoenaed machines ahead of elections in November.

Fields Moseley, a spokesman for the county Board of Supervisors, said there will be a cost associated with using new machines but the exact amount is still unclear. He said the board hasnt decided whether to seek reimbursement from the Senate.

The Senates contractors said Friday that they have finished counting and photographing ballots, ending the most visible phase of the review. A final report isnt expected for weeks or months.

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This story has been corrected to show that the Senate, not the county, hired several firms led by Cyber Ninjas to conduct the audit.
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP)  The Missouri Supreme Court on Tuesday set an October execution date for Ernest Lee Johnson, who was convicted of killing three people at a central Missouri convenience store 27 years ago.

The order set the execution for 6 p.m. Oct. 5 at the state prison in Bonne Terre. It would be the state's first execution since convicted killer Walter Barton was put to death in May 2020.
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP)  Public governmental bodies in Missouri cannot charge fees for the time attorneys spend redacting documents prior to their release to the public, the state Supreme Court ruled Tuesday.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that the court ruling noted that the Missouri Sunshine Law allows officials to charge requestors for research and staff time, but not attorney review.
SEATTLE (AP)  Money is on the way to help save the only grocery store in an isolated Washington state community that's been especially strained by the pandemic-related closure of the U.S.-Canada border.

About 1,300 people live on Point Roberts, on the tip of a peninsula south of Vancouver, British Columbia, that juts into U.S. territory. It's part of Washington, but separated from the rest of the state.

Before the pandemic residents often traveled into Canada to shop, work or drive the 25 miles (40 km) through southern British Columbia to reach the U.S. mainland. Canadian shoppers and tourists, meanwhile, have been a big source of revenue for the point's businesses.

But the border has been closed to nonessential travel since March 2020. The Point Roberts International Marketplace, the community's only grocery store, has lost many of its customers.

Gov. Jay Inslee announced Tuesday that Washington would give $100,000 from its strategic reserves to support the market, which faced closure on July 15.

The money will help keep the market afloat until the border reopens, preserving its 10 jobs and avoiding a food security crisis, Inslee said. The market might even be able to add three employees once business picks up.

"While all Washington communities have been impacted, the situation up there is unique, Inslee said in a news release. This action is a small bridge to support the entire community and retain a critical employer. I urge the U.S. and Canadian governments to take rapid and meaningful steps to reopen travel across the U.S.-Canada land border, consistent with public health guidelines.

The market's owner, Ali Hayton, said she remains frustrated by the border closure but is thankful for the governor's support, which she said would help stop the hemorrhaging at her store. Other businesses and residents in Point Roberts continue to need help, she said.

As a business owner, I have never wanted a hand-out; I just want my customers back, Hayton said.

The market has been losing $30,000 a month without its Canadian customers and owners of second homes who haven't returned to Point Roberts, she told Northwest News Network last week. The most recent extension of the border closure  through July 21  had pushed her to the brink, Hayton said.

Point Roberts leaders have been calling for a border reopening exemption for their community, going so far as coming up with a plan to offer surplus vaccine to Canadian visitors. They insist they don't pose a public health threat to Canadians because about 85% of the community's residents are fully vaccinated.

Inslee has repeatedly asked Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, without luck, that Point Roberts residents be allowed to travel directly through southern British Columbia to re-enter the U.S. mainland at Blaine. Trudeau has acknowledged the difficulty the border closures have caused some communities, but he has cautioned against reopening too hastily.
HELENA, Mont. (AP)  A District Court judge in Helena has temporarily blocked parts of a new Montana law banning voter registration and get-out-the-vote efforts in certain areas of college campuses and requiring judges to recuse themselves from cases if they have received campaign donations from anyone involved in the case.

District Judge Mike Menahan said Monday he would temporarily block two parts of Senate Bill 319, which were to take effect Thursday, and would issue a written order soon, said Raph Graybill, attorney for the plaintiffs.

Those filing the legal challenge are the Forward Montana group dedicated to electing progressive leaders, Lewis and Clark County Attorney Leo Gallagher, the Montana Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and attorney Gary Zadick.

They argued that a campaign finance bill to allow groups of candidates to create joint fundraising committees was hijacked in the final hours of the 2021 legislative session to add two unrelated provisions.

Montanas Constitution requires that bills contain only a single subject and prevents the Legislature from amending laws so much during the process that they change their original purpose.

The plantiffs claim that the campaign finance bill was amended without public comment to require judges to recuse themselves from cases if an attorney or other party involved in a case before them had donated, directly or indirectly, to the judges' election campaigns.

The bill was also changed during a committee meeting to make it more difficult for a civic leadership group at the University of Montana to receive funding. It made a $5-per-semester fee for the Montana Public Interest Research Group opt-in instead of opt-out and also banned voter registration activities in public college dorms, dining halls and at athletic events.

Lawyers for the state argued that Forward Montana lacked standing to challenge the campus campaign activity provision of the bill, and therefore failed to show it would cause irreparable injury to the group.

State lawyers also argued a provision of the new law applies to cases filed on or after July 1 and would not cause problems for current cases, and that all three provisions of the law regulate campaign finance.

In granting the preliminary injunction, the judge did not address the plaintiffs lack of standing or the unlikelihood that they will succeed on the merits of the case, said Kyler Nerison, a spokesperson for Attorney General Austin Knudsen, whose office is defending the legislation.

The plaintiffs also failed to show the legislation violates the Montana Constitution, Knudsens office argued in briefs filed in the case.

State officials will decide after receiving the judge's written order on the preliminary injunction whether to continue arguing the case before Menahan or appeal to the Montana Supreme Court, Nerison said.

The bill that led to the law was among several passed during the session that appeared aimed at making it more difficult for college students to vote and challenging what Republicans consider an activist judiciary.

Montana's 2021 Legislature also passed a bill to end Election Day voter registration and to require more than just student identifications for college students to register to vote or vote.

Lawmakers also passed a bill to eliminate the state's Judicial Nomination Commission and to allow the governor to directly appoint judges to fill vacancies between elections.

All of those new laws face legal challenges. The Montana Supreme Court ruled that the judicial appointment law was constitutional, but the law faces a separate challenge on another aspect.
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP)  The North Carolina General Assembly's annual farm bill received final legislative approval on Tuesday, a measure whose debate centered on a proposed simplified permitting process for hog farms that also want to collect methane gas from waste ponds for energy.

The Senate voted 35-11 in favor of House changes to the measure. Those included removal of a Senate provision that would have altered how the state labor commissioner could act on complaints that workers file alleging discrimination or retaliatory actions by employers.

The bill now heads to Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, who can sign the bill, veto it or let it become law without his signature.

The measure directs the Department of Environmental Quality to develop a general permit for animal farm operations that allow the owner to construct and operate a farm digester system.

Currently digester operators must seek individual permits, but interest is growing in the collection of natural gas from covered hog waste lagoons. Bill supporters contend the streamlined permit change makes sense because most biogas systems are similarly situated. Smithfield Foods and Dominion Energy are developing a project in which trapped gas from hog farms gets pumped to a refining facility proposed in Duplin County.

Environmental groups and some residents in hog-intensive areas oppose the provision. Some groups on Tuesday called on Cooper to veto the bill. They say general permits would discourage public input and the transition away from lagoon and spray-field methods for dealing with waste, instead of toward improved technologies otherwise now considered too expensive.

The House voted for the measure last week. Eight Senate Democrats and 14 House Democrats joined all Republicans present in voting for the final piece of legislation. The margins suggest there could be enough votes to override a Cooper veto.

The North Carolina Farm Act of 2021 also would increase punishments for stealing timber and clarify overtime compensation rules for state Forest Service firefighters.
CONCORD, N.H. (AP)  More than half of Gov. Chris Sununus Advisory Council on Diversity and Inclusion resigned Tuesday, saying his decision to sign a state budget that limits the discussion of systemic racism and other topics has derailed the work they were appointed to do.

In their resignation letter, 10 of the 18 members said the budget provision is in direct conflict with the mission they were given in December 2017 when Sununu created the group.

We accepted your appointment to this council out of commitment and love for this state and your stated desire to advance diversity and inclusion, they wrote. Given your willingness to sign this damaging provision and make it law, we are no longer able to serve as your advisors.

Sununu had opposed an earlier version of the legislation that echoed a now-rescinded Trump administration order and sought to ban discussion of divisive concepts in schools. But he later backed the approved language, which would prohibit teaching children that they are inferior, racist, sexist or oppressive by virtue of their race, gender or other characteristics.

Republicans cast it as an effort to strengthen anti-discrimination laws and said it would allow the teaching of such concepts in a historical context. But Democrats argued it would prevent teaching about implicit bias and structural racism and sexism.

As part of its work, the council has spent hundreds of hours listening to residents of more than a dozen communities, many of whom have experienced systemic discrimination, members said.

Governor, we feel obligated to inform you that  contrary to your recent public statements  systemic racism does in fact exist here in New Hampshire. You appointed us to explore these issues, and we have reported our findings to you in detail every step of the way. The pain that we heard in the voices of those who came to the meetings to convey their truths and lived experiences served as a call to action.

Sununu said the council has been going through a transition period during the coronavirus pandemic and since the death in November of its chair, Rogers Johnson. Some members had already indicated they were planning to move on after the first few years of work, he said in a statement.

There are many individuals who have expressed a willingness to join these efforts as we come out of the pandemic, and we have already started filling these vacancies with representatives from all walks of life, he said.

The entire council had sent a letter to Sununu earlier this month opposing the budget provision, saying its ambiguous language and penalties threaten to censor New Hampshire schools, police and other government agencies from having important conversations about race, gender, sex and ability. But the council's chair, Ahni Malachi, said Tuesday she will work with the Department of Justice to develop guidance that makes clear the legislation will not prohibit necessary conversations.

Despite some misinformation out there, the new language placed as a budget amendment does not place a limit on the important discussions to be had across the state, and this new language took out the phrase divisive concepts as it worked its way through the legislative process," said Malachi, director of the New Hampshire Commission for Human Rights.

The councils members also included representatives from multiple state agencies, law enforcement, educational institutions, and the American Civil Liberties Union. Nearly all of the remaining members represent state agencies; the departing members include a school superintendent, the head of an organization seeking to end homelessness and the ACLU of New Hampshire director, Devon Chaffee.

We resign today not to stop this critically important work, but to recommit and strengthen our resolve to build an equitable and inclusive New Hampshire, Chaffee said.

But Sununu blamed Chaffees organization for trying to insert politics into an otherwise fruitful mission in addressing many issues of race and discrimination in our state.

These politically-charged actions will not deter the Council from advancing the good work theyve accomplished and help move forward New Hampshires efforts around messaging, training programs and diversity in the workplace, he said.

The concept known as critical race theory has become a new lightning rod of the GOP, and 26 states have considered legislation or other steps to limit how race and racism can be taught, according to an analysis from Education Week. Nine states, all Republican-led, have banned or limited the teaching of critical race theory or similar concepts through laws or administrative actions.
The Republican-led committee that will draw the boundaries of North Dakotas new legislative districts has scheduled its first meeting later this summer at the state Capitol.

The Aug. 26 meeting will be followed by at least six others statewide to gather input on a new legislative map that will influence the political balance of power for the next decade.

Finley GOP Rep. Bill Devlin, chairman of the 16-member committee, said Tuesday that public input will be part of the committees work sessions. The meetings also will be livestreamed, which had not happened previously.

Legislative redistricting happens every 10 years after a federal census. It aims to ensure each lawmaker represents about the same number of people.

Devlin said lawmakers are still awaiting final federal census numbers, which are expected to be released in mid-August.

Population is power in the Legislature because each legislative district must represent roughly the same number of people. When North Dakotas new legislative map is drawn later this year, Fargo and Bismarck will have more power in the Legislature, while North Dakotas rural areas will have less.

When the Legislature completed its last redistricting plan a decade ago, district populations averaged about 14,500 people. The new plan will likely add about 2,000 more people to that, with preliminary census estimates.

North Dakotas population is estimated at a record 779, 000, up 106,000 people from a decade ago, said Kevin Iverson, manager of the census office at the state Commerce Department.

More than 90% of the growth has occurred in the states 13 biggest cities, Iverson said. Of the states 357 cities, 223 have lost population in the past decade,

North Dakota currently has 47 legislative districts, and each is represented by two House members and a senator. The Legislature has 47 senators and 94 House members. Republicans have 80 House seats to Democrats 14, and a 40-7 edge in the Senate.

The redistricting committee, picked earlier this month by legislative leaders, consists of 14 Republicans and only two Democrats.

Democrats hold about 14% of legislative seats, so proportionately, the redistricting committee is in-line with the Legislatures makeup.

The Legislature would finish the redistricting job during a special or reconvened session this fall. The full Legislature has to approve the plan, and the governor must sign off on it.

Any new districts would be reflected in the June 2022 primary.
FARMERSVILLE, Texas (AP)  Two people were killed and three injured in a natural gas pipeline explosion in Texas, officials said.

The deadly blast happened around 4 p.m. Monday at an Atmos Energy facility in Collin County near Farmersville, about 35 miles (56 kilometers) northeast of Dallas. Collin County Sheriff Jim Skinner said the explosion appeared to be an accident but he invited the FBI to assist in the investigation.
PHOENIX (AP)  The decomposing body of a man has been found at a worksite near the downtown Phoenix area, according to police.

They said construction workers discovered the body around 8:30 a.m. Monday while doing demolition work on an unoccupied house.
SRINAGAR, India (AP)  A suspected rebel commander being held in police custody was killed in a gunfight between government forces and another militant in disputed Kashmirs main city, Indian police said Tuesday.

The suspected commander, Nadeem Abrar, was arrested Monday in Srinagar city and interrogated on the basis of a specific input about terrorists planning to carry out an attack on a highway, police said in a statement. Inspector General Vijay Kumar called his arrest a big success against Kashmiri rebels who have been fighting Indian rule since 1989.

Police said Abrar, during a sustained interrogation, identified a house where he had concealed his automatic rifle. A police raiding party took Abrar to the house, where they were hit by gunfire from a Pakistani militant who was hiding inside, the statement said.

It said Abrar and three Indian soldiers were hit by the shots, which sparked a gun battle that ended early Tuesday.

In the ensuing gunfire the foreign terrorist who fired from inside the house got neutralized and Abrar also got killed, the statement said. Police said the slain Pakistani militant was Abrars associate.

Police said they recovered two rifles along with some ammunition from the site.

In the past, many militants have been killed while being taken by government forces to recover weapons, in what rights groups and residents have called extrajudicial killings.

Meanwhile, police confiscated a drone hovering over Srinagars sprawling Dal Lake and started an investigation, Kumar told reporters. He said drones pose a new technological threat and we will counter it by technology.

It was unclear whether the drone was being flown to carry out an attack or was merely being used for photography. On Monday, Indias military said it thwarted a major threat when it intercepted two drones flying over an army base in the regions Jammu area. On Sunday, Indian police said two suspected explosives-laden drones were used to attack an air base in Jammu city.

The Himalayan region of Kashmir is divided between India and Pakistan and claimed by both in its entirety.

Most Muslim Kashmiris support the rebel goal of uniting the territory, either under Pakistani rule or as an independent country.

New Delhi insists the Kashmir militancy is Pakistan-sponsored terrorism. Pakistan denies the charge, and most Kashmiris consider it a legitimate freedom struggle.

Tens of thousands of civilians, rebels and government forces have been killed in the conflict.
GRANTS PASS, Ore. (AP)  Multiple law enforcement agencies served a search warrant earlier this month at an illegal marijuana grow operation in southwestern Oregon, authorities said.

The Josephine County Sheriffs Office said Tuesday the search warrant was served during the week of June 21 at the pot operation in Selma.

More than 86,500 illegal marijuana plants were seized and destroyed and that a firearm, water pumps and generators were seized as evidence, according to the sheriff's office news release.

Twelve people were detained because of safety concerns, authorities said.

No arrests had been made as of Tuesday. An investigation is ongoing.

No further information was released.
JOHANNESBURG (AP)  Pro-democracy activists in Eswatini, the southern African kingdom previously known as Swaziland, have vowed to intensify demonstrations against the monarchy until it makes democratic reforms and lifts its ban on all opposition parties.

The small mountain kingdom has been rocked by pro-democracy demonstrations over the past three days and videos of people burning tires and barricading streets in the largest city, Manzini, and the central town of Matsapha have been circulating on social media.

To quell the unrest the government on Tuesday ordered all businesses to close by 3:30 p.m. and a strict curfew to have all residents off the streets from 6 p.m. to 5 a.m. Schools were told to close immediately.

Unfortunately, the protests we are seeing of late have been hijacked by criminal elements. Such cannot be acceptable under any circumstances, acting prime minister Themba Masuku said in a statement.

King Mswati III, Africa's last remaining absolute monarch who has ruled the country for more than three decades, is accused by the demonstrators of human rights abuses and running a repressive government.

His family, including 15 wives, is accused of enjoying a lavish lifestyle while most of the country's 1.1 million people are impoverished, according to human rights groups.

Political parties were banned in the country in 1973 and are barred from participating in parliamentary elections.

The Eswatini government on Tuesday denied claims that the king had fled the country.

His Majesty King Mswati III is in the country and continues to lead in working with the government to advance the kingdoms goals, said the acting prime minister.

He called for calm, restraint and peace, saying the government would update the nation on the governments interventions on the current situation.

The demonstrators are demanding a democratic government that will serve the interests of the people, said Sakhile Nxumalo of the Swaziland Youth Congress, which is involved in the demonstrations.

People want a democratic government where they can elect their own leaders, in particular, they want a republic so that the country can be led by a president, said Nxumalo.

He claimed the army had been deployed by the royal family to attack protesters and quell the demonstrations.

The people have said themselves that they are tired of feeding a certain family and making sure that a certain family is living through their blood, Nxumalo posted on WhatsApp. So now they have taken it to the streets.

Matshapa's factories and workplaces have been brought to a standstill and demonstrators are demanding that all businesses belonging to the royal family must be seized or destroyed, he said.

The 16-nation regional bloc, the Southern African Development Community, known as SADC, should intervene in Eswatini, said Lucky Lukhele, a spokesman of the South Africa-based Swaziland Solidarity Network.

While we stand by the people of Swaziland in this very difficult period, we wish to urge the international community once again to play a proactive role in minimizing casualties. The Swazi issue should now be the top priority of the SADC, said Lukhele in a statement.
OMAHA, Neb. (AP)  A 15-year-old boy charged with murder in the killing of an Omaha man had exchanged several texts with friends the day of the shooting that said they planned to hunt for people in the projects of north Omaha, according to prosecutors.

A prosecutor gave those details Monday at a bond hearing for the teen, the Omaha World-Herald reported. The teen is charged with first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder and weapons count in the March 12 shooting death of 59-year-old Larry Thompson, who was sitting on his porch when he was fatally shot. First responders found Thompson wounded and rushed him to an area hospital, where he later died.
PLYMOUTH, Mass. (AP)  A Massachusetts man charged with murder in the death of his father told police he was exorcising a demon and performing a baptism when he dunked his father's head in a shallow pond, prosecutors said in court Tuesday.

Jack Callahan, 19, of Duxbury, was held without bail after a not guilty plea was entered on his behalf at his arraignment.
SURFSIDE, Fla. (AP)  The remains of 11 people have been found after the collapse of a 12-story beachfront condominium building in Florida, authorities have said. The Associated Press has been reporting brief descriptions of the dead and the missing.

Miami-Dade police released the names and ages late Monday of three men who died in the collapse. They said the body of Marcus Joseph Guara, 52, was discovered on Saturday but only identified on Monday. Authorities say they found on Monday the remains of Michael David Altman, 50, and Frankie Kleiman, 55.

On Sunday, police identified the remains of Leon and Christina Oliwkowicz, an elderly couple from Venezuela with ties to Jewish communities in Florida and Chicago. They also found the bodies of Luis Bermudez, a young man with muscular dystrophy, and his mother, Ana Ortiz, who were from Puerto Rico.

Authorities said 150 other people remain unaccounted for as rescuers search through the rubble of Champlain Towers South. Among them are Linda March, whose penthouse apartment was ripped apart, and five members of an Argentine family.

____

NICOLE LANGESFELD AND LUIS SADOVNIC

Nicole Langesfeld and her husband Luis Sadovnic were just starting their lives together after moving into an apartment on the eighth floor of Champlain Towers South earlier this year after getting married five months ago, her brother Martin Langesfeld told The Associated Press.

Sadovnic proposed to Langesfeld on December 24, 2020, on the beach in front of the building. The Jewish couple married one month later in a private civil ceremony because of COVID-19 restrictions.

Nicole Langesfeld is a commercial litigator whose family is from Argentina, but she was born in the U.S. Sadovnic is an entrepreneur from Venezuela. The apartment where they lived was owned by Sadovnic's grandfather. They met when they studied at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

I know she is fighting, Martin Langesfeld said of his missing sister.

Nicole Langesfeld, 26, is a bilingual associate in the Miami office of Reed Smith. She began to work as a summer associate in 2018 and one year later was hired as a full-time lawyer. Her practice focuses on litigating and settling insurance coverage on behalf of policyholders. She was a member of the University of Miami Business Law Review.

Nicky, as she is known to friends and family, loves animals. She has a guinea pig named Kali and two dogs, Capo and Zoey.

Sadovnic loved playing golf early on the weekend with his friends before joining Langesfeld on the beach, where they listened to reggaeton, lay out in the sun and swam in the ocean, said Noah Goldberg, a co-worker of Langesfeld. At night, they enjoyed going out to different restaurants and exploring.

Hugh Lumpkin, a partner in the insurance recovery group where Nicole worked, described Langesfeld as a very smart and hard-working lawyer. He said that it is a loss that goes beyond business.

We are still sad to the bone, Lumpkin said. We miss her every minute of every day."

Co-workers said she was always smiling, and after working all day long liked to walk on the beach with her dogs. Last week, she began a fitness challenge of 30 minutes of exercise every day on her balcony.

Goldberg said Langesfeld was very funny and always caring for her friends. On Wednesday, Goldberg didnt feel well and Langesfeld called and texted him at 9:45 p.m. to ask how he was feeling. The building collapsed a few hours later.

Ana Barton, a colleague who used to socialize with Langesfeld, said she and others still have hope she will be found alive.

She is the most beautiful person, Barton said.

___

RUSLAN MANASHIROV AND NICOLE DORAN-MANASHIROV

They were transplants to Florida, where they met, fell in love and got married last month in Fort Lauderdale in a sunny outdoor ceremony. They moved into a seventh-floor unit in the Champlain South Towers, enthralled with the beachside view.

They were so happy, Valery Manashirova, brother of Dr. Ruslan Manashirov, told WABC-TV in New York. It was a beautiful wedding and they were just starting their lives.

Loved ones are anxiously awaiting news about Dr. Manashirov and his wife, Nicole Doran-Manashirov. They are among those missing following the collapse of the condominium building in Surfside, Florida.

The couple had to postpone their wedding date three times due to the coronavirus pandemic, which also affected their work as medical professionals.

Ruslan Manashirov is a neurologist and family doctor at ClareMedica of South Miami while Doran-Manashirov, who previously lived in South Park, Pennsylvania, is a physician assistant in the emergency department at Aventura Hospital in Aventura, a city near Surfside.

She worked indescribable hours during the pandemic, a family friend, Wendy Kays, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. She never backed out on her duties.

Ruslan Manashirov grew up in Brooklyn, New York, to an Azerbaijani-Jewish family originally from the Azerbaijani capital of Baku, according to Chabad.org, the Judaism site of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement.

He just enveloped you with his personality, Susan DeRisi, a friend of the couple, told the Post-Gazette. He came into the group and it was like he belonged.

Valery Manashirova recalled that when he woke up Thursday, his father called him over to the television, which was showing news of the collapse.

It just felt like a bad dream, he said.

____

CATTAROSSI FAMILY

Argentine Graciela Cattarossi is a beloved mother and friend who works as an independent photographer for hotels, magazines, banks and airlines from different parts of the world, said Kathryn Rooney Vera, a friend who has known Cattarossi since 2008.

The most important thing in her world, however, is her 7-year-old daughter Stella.

Cattarossi, 48, a single mother, lived in Champlain Towers South with Stella and her own parents, Graciela and Gino Cattarossi. All four were missing Monday, along with Cattarossi's sister, Andrea, an architect in Pilar, Argentina, who was visiting.

Vera said Cattarossi is a dedicated mother whose devotion to her child is unparalleled. She also described her as a "very hard worker, a beautiful person and beloved by everyone.

Cattarossi and Vera were exchanging text messages on Wednesday night, just hours before the building collapsed. The photographer took professional photos of Veras fourth pregnancy years ago and presented them as a gift to celebrate what they believed would be Veras last child.

She was happy to know that I was pregnant again, said Vera. We are devastated by what happened.

Vera said that Graciela Cattarossi has lived in Miami for decades.

____

ANA ORTIZ and LUIS BERMUDEZ

Luis Bermudez, of San Juan, Puerto Rico, had battled muscular dystrophy for years and used a wheelchair. The 26-year-old man lived with his mother, Ana Ortiz, on the seventh floor of the Champlain Towers South. They were identified among the 11 who died after the building collapsed Thursday.

His father, also named Luis Bermudez, texted the AP saying my son is a hero. He also wrote on Facebook that he could not believe hes gone.

Now rest in peace and without any obstacles in heaven, he wrote. I will see you soon my Luiyo.

In honor of Luis, family members on Monday laid flowers in the ocean at a beach near the site of the building collapse.

Ortiz, 46, had just gotten married to Frankie Kleiman. Alex Garcia, the couple's close friend, told The Miami Herald he had set them up on a blind date. Kleiman lived with his wife and stepson on the same floor as his brother Jay Kleiman, who was in town for a funeral, and their mother Nancy Kress Levin. Jay Kleiman and Nancy Kress Levin are still listed as missing.

Ortiz was described as a woman who was committed to giving her son the best possible life.

Shes a rock star, Garcia told the Herald. And on top of that a super mom.

___

Associated Press writers Gisela Salomon in Miami; Peter Smith in Pittsburgh; Fabiola Sanchez in Mexico City; and Luis Andres Henao in Princeton, New Jersey, contributed to this report.
Before the pandemic hit, Jacqueline Bartley, a mother of two girls and a boy, had a comfortable life. Then the 41-year-old lost her job at American Airlines, quickly spent her savings and found herself months behind on the $1,350-a-month home she rented. Until then she had never missed a rent payment.

Bartley, of Durham, North Carolina, turned to the state's rental assistance program and was relieved in January to be awarded $8,100. But she says her landlord refused the money after she rejected his request to amend her two-year lease to a shorter period. The program required landlords to honor leases, among other conditions, to get the money.

She turned to a second program launched this month by the state and again was approved. Last week, she learned her landlord had accepted nearly $20,000 for back rent and three months of future payments, and agreed to dismiss his eviction lawsuit.

The news means she won't be forced from her home after the federal eviction moratorium ends July 31. But the waiting and uncertainty meant months of stress.

Its been crazy especially when you have children in school, Bartley said. Its pretty much been going by a whim. OK, am I going to have somewhere to go each month?

Millions have found themselves in situations similar to Bartley's, facing possible eviction despite bold promises by governors to help renters after Congress passed the sweeping CARES Act in March 2020.

Nationwide, state leaders set aside at least $2.6 billion from the CARES Acts Coronavirus Relief Fund to prop up struggling renters, but a year later more than $425 million of that  or 16%  hadn't made it into the pockets of tenants or their landlords, according to an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity and The Associated Press.

Its mind-boggling, said Anne Kat Alexander, a project manager with Princeton Universitys Eviction Lab. I knew there were problems but thats a huge amount of money not to be disbursed in a timely manner.

Like many state leaders, North Carolina's Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper pledged to roll out an ambitious program last year offering tens of millions of dollars in federal aid that would help cover unpaid rent.

But it took months to get up and running and stopped accepting applications just weeks after it finally opened in October due to overwhelming demand. The 20 nonprofits designated to distribute the money often lacked the capacity to get it out quickly.

Then, faced with the Republican-controlled Legislature's takeover of CARES Act spending in January, the state had less money to award applicants. It eventually spent $133 million of a promised $167 million  far short of what some housing advocates say is needed.

We knew the money would not be enough. There were too many people who needed rental assistance, said Pamela Atwood, director of housing policy at the North Carolina Housing Coalition. There was a lot of poor execution in rolling out that first program and it caused a lot of inefficiency.

Tens of billions of dollars more in rental assistance have been delivered to states from the federal government in 2021, but that has been slow to be disbursed, too.

With the first round of funds in 2020, bureaucracy was not the only problem. Politics also played a role, with a handful of states, many led by Republicans and with a history of weak tenant protections, offering little to no assistance.

Then, there was the often onerous application process and an end-of-the-year federal deadline for spending the money, extended so late that some states had already pulled funding to use on other expenses. Some landlords refused to participate over restrictions that meant they could not evict a tenant who fell behind again after the assistance. Tenants sometimes short-changed themselves by filing incomplete applications.

Congress' sweeping 2020 CARES Act sent billions of dollars to states and some local governments. But it didnt mandate that any money be spent on rental assistance, leaving it to states to create their own programs and set the rules.

According to the National Low Income Housing Coalitions database of rent relief programs in 2020, Georgia, West Virginia and Tennessee, all run by Republican governors, chose not to set up statewide rent-relief programs that year, despite having higher than average historic eviction rates. South Carolina allocated less than $14 per renter-occupied household.

Georgias Department of Community Affairs tried to set up a rental assistance program with funds from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in the fall of 2020, but when it became clear that a separate, larger amount of money would be coming from the U.S. Department of Treasury in 2021, the program stalled, said Susan Reif, housing unit director for Georgia Legal Services Program and director of the Eviction Prevention Project.

Still, many states did scramble into action, creating massive programs to keep families in their homes  the safest place to shelter during the coronavirus pandemic. By the summer of 2020, state and local government officials launched about 530 rental assistance programs, setting aside at least $4.3 billion from various sources.

Several states were praised for programs that ran well. Illinois, Indiana, Oregon and Washington state were among more than a dozen that reported distributing every dollar of the rental assistance set aside from the Coronavirus Relief Fund by March 31.

The Center for Public Integrity surveyed about 70 state and local agencies that the National Low Income Housing Coalition identified as having set aside Coronavirus Relief Fund money for rent help in 2020. About $1 out of every $6 of that $2.6 billion wound up getting spent on other COVID-19-related expenses, such as protective equipment, police officers' salaries and small-business loans.

Some states also spent millions of dollars setting up their programs, including North Carolina, which allocated around $20 million on administrative costs, and Hawaii, which spent $8 million. In the case of Hawaii, much of that went to help nonprofits scale up and rent space. The state also spent money on a software system in an effort to prevent fraud.

Diane Yentel, executive director of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, said last years funding challenges led Congress to earmark nearly $47 billion specifically for emergency rental assistance in December and March.

The previous funds, the vast majority of them, were very flexible and had a broad set of allowable uses," of which eviction prevention was just one, said Yentel, whose group has been tracking rental assistance programs.

Some states and cities carved out some of those funds for eviction prevention and to create emergency rental assistance programs," she said. "But many didnt or many didnt set aside enough.

Among the biggest challenges was states' failure to spend what they had allocated.

The Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency received $150 million to help renters, but returned about $96 million to the state treasury, which plugged holes in the states public safety budget. The Florida Housing Finance Corporation earmarked $250 million for rental assistance but returned about $99 million to the state treasury to be spent on other programs. Eighty-three percent of Montanas $50 million set aside for rental assistance went back to the state. New York ended up spending only $47.5 million of the $100 million promised for rental assistance.

New York's 2020 rent-relief program was set up to fail, said Ellen Davidson, a staff attorney at Legal Aid Society in New York. It was a program that really punished people. There was a real intention to make sure people didnt do better in being hurt by COVID, so if they were struggling before, they should be struggling after.

Tenants had to prove they were rent-burdened before the pandemic to qualify for rent relief in 2020, though eventually that stipulation was removed.

Hawaii spent around $71 million of the $100 million initially promised, though an analysis by the Hawaii Appleseed Center for Law and Economic Justice found the state spent the most per capita, at $44.50. Still, the Legislature set a late December deadline for the spending, which meant the remaining $29 million had to be redirected to the states unemployment insurance trust fund.

It would have been better to base the ending of the program on the CARES Act spending deadline with whatever extensions were enacted, because ultimately the deadline was extended, said Gavin Thornton, the centers executive director. If that had been done, the program would have continued, and landlords and tenants would have been able to continue to access those funds, which were certainly needed.

Smaller cities and counties were affected too. In Marion County, Florida, none of the $1 million set aside for renters from the Coronavirus Relief Fund ever made it to people who needed it because the United Way of Marion County, which administered the funds, didnt have enough workers to process applications, said Scot Quintel, the organizations president. The United Way was able to distribute rent assistance from another source, but the Coronavirus Relief Fund money went back to the city for other COVID-19-related expenses.

Its just horrifying how ill-prepared some states were, said Alexander, of the Eviction Lab. Some places made it work and some places didnt, which demonstrates that the places that didnt probably could have.

In Athens, Georgia, Dylyn Price said she got about $5,800 in rental assistance but that may not prevent her from losing her home. After her pay and hours at a fast food restaurant were cut, eviction notices started arriving in early 2020. They havent let up.

Price received rental assistance from the Ark, a nonprofit administering funds from the CARES Act on behalf of the city of Athens, but the assistance ended earlier this year. Prices landlord has refused to renew her lease after it expires Wednesday.

She fears having to live, once again, in a homeless shelter with her 14-year-old son.

Its a very nauseating and uncomfortable situation to be in, Price said.

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Casey reported from Boston, Kleiner reported from Washington, D.C., and Johnston reported from Brook Park, Ohio. Casey can be reached at mcasey@ap.org. Follow him on Twitter at @mcasey1. Kleiner can be reached at skleiner@publicintegrity.org. Follow her on Twitter at @bysarahkleiner.



This story is a collaboration between The Associated Press and The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative newsroom in Washington.
SYDNEY (AP)  Chinas government and its supporters have monitored, harassed and intimidated pro-democracy Chinese students living in Australia, and Australian universities have failed to protect the students' academic freedoms, Human Rights Watch said in a report published Wednesday.

The fear caused by the intimidation  which includes classmates reporting the students activities to Chinese officials  has intensified in recent years, according to the report. Terrified of reprisals against their families in China, many Chinese students and academics in Australia now censor their behavior, despite being thousands of kilometers (miles) from Beijing.

It was really heartbreaking how alone these students were and how vulnerable they are so far from home and feeling this lack of protection from the university, said Sophie McNeill, Australia researcher for Human Rights Watch and the reports author. Universities really fear a backlash from Beijing, so rather than discuss these issues openly, they are swept under the carpet. But we think they no longer can be.

In three cases, police in China visited or asked to meet with the families of students because of the students activities in Australia, according to the report, based on interviews with 24 pro-democracy students from mainland China and Hong Kong, and 22 academics at Australian universities. Chinese authorities threatened to jail one student who posted pro-democracy messages on Twitter in Australia, and confiscated the passport of another who expressed support for democracy in front of classmates in Australia, Human Rights Watch said.

Those cases have caused particular alarm for Chinese students across Australia, McNeill said.

These are all one-child families and they would so dearly love the freedom in Australia that other young people enjoy, McNeill said. But they cant, because they live in fear of something happening to their parents.

All students interviewed by the group said they were afraid their actions in Australia could prompt Chinese officials to punish or interrogate their families in China. Because of that, most said they censored their own words and activities in Australia. More than half the academics interviewed, who were either from China or studying China, said they also regularly censored themselves when talking about China.

This is the reality, one student told Human Rights Watch. I come to Australia and still Im not free.

The Chinese embassy in Australia called the report rubbish.

Human Rights Watch has decayed into a political tool for the West to attack and smear developing countries, the embassy said in a statement. It is always biased on China.

The issue is financially and diplomatically sensitive for Australian universities, which have been encouraged by the government to build partnerships with China and have made billions of dollars in the process.

International education is one of Australias top exports, contributing 40 billion Australian dollars ($30 billion) to the nation's economy in 2019. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 40% of all international students in Australia came from China, according to a 2019 report by the Centre for Independent Studies, an Australian think tank.

But Australias decision to close its borders in March 2020 in response to the pandemic left foreign students unable to enter the country. As a result, universities lost AU$1.8 billion ($1.4 billion) in revenue last year and are expected to lose another AU$2 billion ($1.5 billion) this year, according to Universities Australia, an umbrella group of the nations universities. A recently announced pilot program would allow some international students to begin returning to Australia later this year.

The issue of foreign interference is especially thorny for Beijing. In 2018, Australia introduced laws widely seen as a means of preventing covert Chinese interference in Australian politics, universities and other institutions. The laws enraged China and stoked increasing tensions between the nations.

Most of the students who were harassed told Human Rights Watch they didnt report the incidents to their universities because they believe the schools care more about maintaining their relationships with Beijing.

Catriona Jackson, chief executive of Universities Australia, said the report was both sobering and unsurprising. She urged Chinese students and staff to report any harassment to their universities.

Jackson denied universities had turned a blind eye to Chinese interference and said they were actively trying to combat the problem by working alongside security agencies as part of the governments University Foreign Interference Taskforce that was formed in 2019.

Free debate, open intellectual inquiry, the contest of ideas is at the absolute center of everything Australian universities do, Jackson said. Why would we not be in support of the very thing that defines us?

More publicity surrounding the threats could help deter them from happening, McNeill said. Human Rights Watch urged the government to publish an annual report documenting harassment and censorship of international students, and to establish a mechanism for students to report any intimidation, censorship or retaliation involving foreign governments. The group also encouraged universities to report such incidents to law enforcement.

Federal Education Minister Alan Tudge said he was considering the reports recommendations and seeking advice from the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, which is conducting an inquiry into national security risks affecting higher education.

There are some deeply concerning issues raised in this report, Tudge said in a statement. Any interference on our campuses by foreign entities cannot be tolerated.
OAKLAND, Calif. (AP)  Robbers held up a television news crew at gunpoint Monday in Oakland as they were interviewing the citys director of violence prevention, authorities said.

The crime outside City Hall was just hours after the police chief slammed a move to cut the department's budget by $18 million and redirect the funds in an effort to support alternatives to law enforcement.
MOSCOW (AP)  Russian health officials have approved booster shots for people vaccinated against COVID-19 six months after their first immunization, as the country struggles to cope with a surge of infections and deaths.

Health Minister Mikhail Murashko told a government meeting Tuesday that the ministry has issued guidelines allowing those who contracted COVID-19 to get vaccinated six months after they recovered, and those who have been immunized to get booster shots six months after their first vaccination.

Murashko cited an unfavorable epidemiological situation in Russia" and said that after achieving herd immunity and stabilization (of the epidemiological situation), vaccination (against the coronavirus) will be carried out once a year."

He didn't offer any data supporting the need for booster shots six months after the first vaccination. Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova, however, referenced international and Russian studies showing that immunity in those who have recovered from the virus persists for six months on average and winds down gradually after 9-12 months.

The new guidelines come as infections in Russia soar and vaccination rates lag behind many other nations.

Russias state coronavirus task force has been reporting over 20,000 new COVID-19 infections daily since last Thursday, more than double the average in early June. On Tuesday, 20,616 new contagions were registered and 652 deaths  the highest daily death toll in the pandemic.

Russia was among the first in the world to announce and deploy a coronavirus vaccine last year, but has since inoculated only a fraction of its 146 million people. Murashko said Tuesday that more than 23 million  just over 15%  have received at least one vaccine shot.

Hampered by widespread vaccine hesitancy and limited production capacity, Russia's vaccination rates have picked up in recent weeks, after authorities in many regions made shots mandatory for employees in certain sectors, such as government offices, retail, health care, education, restaurants and other service industries.

But a spike in demand was quickly followed by reports of shortages in a number of Russian regions, and some experts have questioned whether Russia will have enough vaccines to go around.

Industry and Trade Minister Denis Manturov said Tuesday that, to date, 36.7 million sets of four domestically-developed coronavirus vaccines have been released into circulation in Russia, and 30 more million are expected to be produced in July.

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MOSCOW (AP)  A court on Tuesday ordered the arrest of a top associate of imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, though the man lives outside the country out of the reach of authorities.

The Nagatinsky District Court said Ivan Zhdanov should be arrested on charges of failing to comply with an earlier court ruling  an offense that carries a prison term of up to two years.

Zhdanov, who lives abroad, dismissed the ruling to arrest him as a pseudo judicial procedure" in a statement posted on his Instagram.

Zhdanov headed Navalny's Foundation for Fighting Corruption, an organization that was outlawed as extremist along with other Navalny organizations by another Moscow court earlier this month. That ruling prevents people associated with Navalnys organizations from seeking public office and carries lengthy prison terms for activists who have worked with the organizations and those who donated to them.

The court's decision was part of a multi-pronged campaign by the authorities to silence dissent and bar Kremlin critics from running for parliament in September's election.

Navalny, the most ardent political foe of Russian President Vladimir Putin, was arrested in January upon returning from Germany, where he spent five months recovering from a nerve agent poisoning that he blames on the Kremlin  an accusation that Russian officials reject. In February, Navalny was given a 2 1/2-year prison term for violating the terms of a suspended sentence from a 2014 embezzlement conviction that he dismissed as politically motivated.

Navalny's Foundation for Fighting Corruption, started 10 years ago, has relentlessly targeted senior government officials with colorful and widely watched videos exposing their alleged corruption. One of its latest productions, which has received 117 million views on YouTube, claimed a lavish palace on the shores of the Black Sea was built for Putin through an elaborate corruption scheme. The Kremlin has denied any links to Putin.

Navalny also has relied on his offices across Russia to organize anti-Kremlin protests and implement his Smart Voting strategy  a project to support the candidates most likely to defeat those from the Kremlins dominant United Russia party in various elections.
TUCSON, Ariz. (AP)  A Russian immigrant who once staged a monthlong hunger strike at an Arizona detention center and was shot months later during a struggle with a federal agent near the Mexican border was sentenced Tuesday to time served for illegally reentering the United States after he was deported.

Evgenii Glushchenko has already served about 151 days in custody. The plea deal that Glushchenko made two months ago said it was a virtual certainty that he will be deported.

He previously acknowledged he illegally crossed the border east of Lukeville, Arizona, in November 2019. He was shot in the thigh by a Border Patrol agent who tried to apprehend him.

About five months before the shooting, Glushchenko lost 25% of his body weight as he refused to eat until he was released from detention, leading a judge to give authorities the power to force-feed Glushchenko.

Once deported to Russia, Glushchenko resurfaced in Arizona several months later and was injured in the shooting.

One of his attorneys has said Glushchenko came to United States seeking asylum because he is a member of the Jehovahs Witnesses, which Russia banned in 2017 and declared to be an extremist organization.

In the shooting, authorities say Glushchenko ran from the Border Patrol agent, resisted the officers attempt to handcuff him and pulled the radio off his belt. They say Glushchenko then grabbed the agents genitals, leading the officer to shoot Glushchenko.

In his earlier arrest that led to the hunger strike, his lawyers had said Glushchenko and his wife fled Russia to Mexico after receiving repeated government death threats because of his work with western charities.

Prosecutors said investigators later discovered Glushchenko wasnt actually married to the woman with whom he had a child. The woman is seeking asylum, according to court records.
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP)  The South Carolina Senate voted Tuesday that they have no confidence in embattled Department of Juvenile Justice Director Freddie Pough.

Pough is unable to fix problems at the agency that operates the state's juvenile prisons, senators decided in a 34-4 vote. The action follows a hearing earlier this year where department employees testified to worsening conditions at the states main juvenile prison in Columbia as Pough sat behind the podium where they spoke.

Lawmakers called the hearings after a scathing report released in April by the Legislative Audit Council. The report found a significant increase in violence, problems getting timely medical care and excessive use of isolation as punishment, with some students even missing testing to get high school diplomas because they were locked up by themselves.

The unchecked violence has led to students and correctional staff being hurt on a regular basis, said Sen. Katrina Shealy on Tuesday. She added that last week, two youths were seriously injured and one correctional officer had four of her fingers broken.

I know this because the boots on the ground tell me so, said Shealy, a Republican from Lexington and longtime agency volunteer.

Shealy has led a panel of lawmakers who cast a similar no-confidence vote earlier this month. She said several senators have recently met with Gov. Henry McMaster and his staff about Pough, but it's been to no avail.

McMaster chose Pough to run the agency and is the only person who can fire him. Pough, who has led the department since 2017, has repeatedly told senators that he won't quit the job.

The governors going to continue doing the hard work of making sure the changes that need to be made at the agency are being made, said McMaster spokesman Brian Symmes. "Director Pough has already implemented important recruitment and retention policies by providing bonuses to existing employees and signing bonuses for new ones. Improvements still need to be made, and they will be.

In recent weeks, the agency has also contracted extra security officers at the Columbia prison.

A few senators objected to the vote itself, arguing it was purely symbolic and would do nothing to fix the structural issues plaguing the agency.

What needs to happen, said Sen. Gerald Malloy, a Democrat from Darlington, are juvenile justice reforms that the state failed to implement years ago. The juvenile system currently faces a bottleneck, Malloy added, noting a law that went into effect in 2019 to raise the minimum age that teenagers could be tried as adults. Malloy still voted in favor of the motion.

Of the four senators who didnt vote against Pough, all were Democrats and African Americans.

Tuesdays action was the first time a no-confidence vote has been even broached by the full Senate since June 2014, when Department of Social Services Director Lillian Koller quit a day before lawmakers planned a similar vote.

Pough himself had no comment on the Tuesday vote, according to agency spokesman Jarid Munsch: Director Pough and DJJ are focused on rehabilitating young people and supporting families throughout the state."

-

Associated Press writer Jeffrey Collins contributed to this report.
NEW YORK (AP)  Gwen Goldman exchanged fist bumps with the New York Yankees she had been admiring for decades from afar, walked onto the field and waved to the crowd.

She got to be a Yankees' bat girl on Monday night at age 70  a full 60 years after she was turned down because of her gender.

Shaking with excitement, she beamed while recounting how it felt to be at Yankee Stadium on this day for the game against the Los Angeles Angels.

I dont know where to start, of which was the best, what did I enjoy the most? she said during a news conference in the fourth inning.

"The whole piece, from walking in the front door of the stadium at Gate 2, to coming up to a locker with my name on it that said Gwen Goldman, and suiting up, then walking out onto the field. It took my breath away. Its obviously taking my words away also.

It was a thrill of a lifetime  times a million. And I actually got to be out in the dugout, too. I threw out a ball, I met the players. Yeah, it goes on and on. They had set up a day for me that is something that I never would have expected.

Goldman retired in 2017 as a social worker at Stepping Stones Preschool, a public school in Westport, Connecticut.

She used the Hebrew word dayenu  which translates to "it would have been enough  to describe the different parts of her experience.

It just kept coming and coming, he said.

Goldman had been rejected by then-Yankees general manager Roy Hamey, who wrote her in a letter on June 23, 1961: While we agree with you that girls are certainly as capable as boys, and no doubt would be an attractive addition on the playing field, I am sure you can understand that it is a game dominated by men a young lady such as yourself would feel out of place in a dugout.

Current Yankees general manager Brian Cashman said he had been forwarded an email written by Goldman's daughter, Abby. In a letter dated this June 23, Cashman wrote it is not too late to reward and recognize the ambition you showed in writing that letter to us as a 10-year-old girl.

"Some dreams take longer than they should to be realized, but a goal attained should not dim with the passage of time, Cashman added. I have a daughter myself, and it is my sincere hope that every little girl will be given the opportunity to follow her aspirations into the future.

Wearing a full Yankees uniform, Goldman threw out a ceremonial first pitch to New York player Tyler Wade, then stood alongside manager Aaron Boone for the national anthem.

I think its really cool, Boone said after meeting her. I think youre going to see her probably take balls out at some point to home plate. ... Hopefully its an experience of a lifetime for her and a long one in coming.

New York extended the invitation as part of the Yankees' annual HOPE week, which stands for Helping Others Persevere & Excel.

She posed with the umpires when the lineup cards were brought out. After the third inning, the Yankees played a video that included the letters and a Zoom session in which Cashman, assistant general manager Jean Afterman and pitcher Gerrit Cole were among those informing her of the invitation.

She then was introduced to the crowd, walked up the Yankees dugout steps onto the field and waved her cap as fans applauded.

I didnt hold it against them. I loved the Yankees," she said. "I never in my wildest dreams  never thought that 60 years later, Brian Cashman would make this become a reality.

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JOHANNESBURG (AP)  South Africas former President Jacob Zuma has been found guilty of contempt of court and sentenced to 15 months in prison for defying a court order to appear before an inquiry probing wide-ranging allegations of corruption during his tenure from 2009 to 2018.

Zuma was not in court for the ruling on Tuesday and has been ordered to hand himself over within five days to a police station in his hometown of Nkandla in KwaZulu-Natal province or in Johannesburg.

If Zuma fails to turn himself in within five days South Africa's minister of police and the police commissioner have been ordered to take him into custody within three days.

This is the first time in South Africas history that a former president has been sentenced to prison.

Finally, Zuma will find himself where he belongs - behind bars, said opposition politician Herman Mashaba in reaction to the sentence.

This is indeed a victory for all South Africans that have become gatvol (fed up) with those who have looted our country with impunity," Mashaba, former mayor of Johannesburg and leader of the ActionSA party, said in a statement. "The judgment is equally a victory for the rule of law in South Africa, once again serving to highlight the independence of our judiciary. This is a central pillar of our hard-won democracy.

South Africa's apex court, the Constitutional Court, ruled that Zuma defied an order by the countrys highest court by refusing to cooperate with the commission of inquiry, which is chaired by deputy chief justice Raymond Zondo.

The Constitutional Court holds that there can be no doubt that Mr. Zuma is in contempt of court. Mr. Zuma was served with the order and it is impossible to conclude anything other than that he was unequivocally aware of what it required of him, said acting chief justice Sisi Khampepe.

She added that in determining the jail sentence for Zuma, the court found it impossible to conclude that he would comply with any other order.

Mr. Zuma has repeatedly reiterated that he would rather be imprisoned than to cooperate with the commission or comply with the order made, said Khampepe.

Zuma has previously expressed his unwillingness to appear before the commission, which has so far heard evidence directly implicating Zuma in wrongdoing.

In a previous 21-page letter written to Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng, which the court has described as scandalous, Zuma claimed that he was ready to be sent to prison.

In his letter which he released to the public, Zuma claimed that the commission chairman, Zondo, was biased against him and that evidence presented against him was politically motivated.

Some former Cabinet ministers, high-ranking government officials and executives of state-owned enterprises are among witnesses who have implicated Zuma in corruption.

Several have testified that while president Zuma allowed members of the controversial Gupta family to influence his appointment of Cabinet ministers and lucrative contracts at state-owned companies.

Zuma is also facing additional legal woes as he is standing trial to face charges related to bribes that he allegedly received during South Africas 1999 arms procurement deal.

He has pleaded not guilty to the charges and his lawyers have applied for the lead prosecutor in his case to step down because of alleged bias against Zuma.
WASHINGTON (AP)  The Supreme Court is leaving a pandemic-inspired nationwide ban on evictions in place, over the votes of four objecting conservative justices.

The court on Tuesday rejected a plea by landlords to end the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention moratorium on evicting millions of tenants who aren't paying rent during the coronavirus pandemic. Last week, the Biden administration extended the moratorium by a month, until the end of July. It said then it did not expect another extension.

U.S. Judge Dabney Friedrich in Washington had struck down the moratorium as exceeding the CDC's authority, but put her ruling on hold. The high court voted 5-4 to keep the ban in place until the end of July.

In a brief opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said he agreed with Friedrich's ruling, but voted to leave the ban on evictions in place because it's due to end in a month and because those few weeks will allow for additional and more orderly distribution of the congressionally appropriated rental assistance funds.

Also last week, the Treasury Department issued new guidance encouraging states and local governments to streamline distribution of the nearly $47 billion in available emergency rental assistance funding

Chief Justice John Roberts and the court's three liberal members also voted to keep the moratorium in place.

Justices Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas said they would have ended it.

The eviction ban was initially put in place last year to provide protection for renters out of concern that having families lose their homes and move into shelters or share crowded conditions with relatives or friends during the pandemic would further spread the highly contagious virus.

By the end of March, 6.4 million American households were behind on their rent, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. As of June 7, roughly 3.2 million people in the U.S. said they faced eviction in the next two months, according to the U.S. Census Bureaus Household Pulse Survey.
WASHINGTON (AP)  The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the government can indefinitely detain certain immigrants who say they will face persecution or torture if they are deported to their native countries.

Over the dissent of three liberal justices, the court held 6-3 that the immigrants are not entitled to a hearing about whether they should be released while the government evaluates their claims.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the court that those aliens are not entitled to a bond hearing.

The case involves people who had been previously deported and, when detained after re-entering the United States illegally, claimed that they would be persecuted or tortured if sent back. One man is a citizen of El Salvador who said he was immediately threatened by a gang after being deported from the U.S.

An immigration officer determined that the immigrants had a reasonable fear for their safety if returned to their countries, setting in motion an evaluation process that can take months or years.

The issue for the court was whether the government could hold the immigrants without having an immigration judge weigh in. The immigrants and the Trump administration, which briefed and argued the case before President Joe Biden's inauguration in January, pointed to different provisions of immigration law to make their respective cases.

Alito, in his opinion for the court, wrote that the administration's argument that the relevant provision does not provide for a bond hearing was more persuasive.

In dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer saw it differently. But why would Congress want to deny a bond hearing to individuals who reasonably fear persecution or torture, and who, as a result, face proceedings that may last for many months or years...? I can find no satisfactory answer to this question, Breyer wrote.

The federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, had ruled in the immigrants' favor, but other appellate courts had sided with the government. Tuesday's decision sets a nationwide rule, but one that affects what lawyers for the immigrants called a relatively small subset of noncitizens.
STOCKHOLM (AP)  The head of Sweden's center-right opposition Moderates party, Ulf Kristersson, was tasked Tuesday with trying to form a new coalition government a day after Prime Minister Stefan Lofven resigned following a no-confidence vote last week.

Parliament speaker Andreas Norlen earlier held a first round of consultations with all party leaders, starting with Lofven who heads the Social Democratic Party  Sweden's largest political group.

Norlen said he asked Kristersson to try to form a government because he is the leader of the largest in the group of parties that unseated Lofven.

Kristersson has until Friday to try to find support for a government, Norlen said, adding that the deadline could be extended. If he fails, Norlen will ask another politician to head the process.

Lofven, in office since 2014, lost a no-confidence vote in parliament on June 21. Instead of calling an early election, as the Constitution allows him, he opted for the coalition-building process that is overseen by Norlen.

The motion was called by the right-wing populist Sweden Democrats party. But it ultimately succeeded because a government ally had withdrawn its support for Lofven's administration over proposed legislation to tackle a housing shortage.

Lofven, a63-year-old former welder, will remain caretaker prime minister until a new government has been found.

His party holds 100 of parliament's 349 seats. Lofven had headed a minority government composed of a Social Democratic-Green coalition.

None of the parties in parliament want to cooperate with the Sweden Democrats.

Sweden's next general elections are normally set for Sept. 11. 2022.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP)  A Tennessee man pleaded guilty Tuesday to federal arson charges in connection with damage to the Metro Courthouse that followed protests last year in Nashville.

Wesley Somers, 26, of Hendersonville, entered his plea in U.S. District Court and faces five to 20 years in prison when he is sentenced Dec. 1, the U.S. attorney's office said.
MOSS POINT, Miss. (AP)  The third of three suspects in a Mississippi killing has been arrested.

WLOX reports that JaMichael Jenkins was arrested Tuesday morning by the U.S. Marshals and Moss Point Police Department. The two agencies tracked Jenkins to a south Mississippi residence.

Jenkins faces a homicide charge in the shooting death 27-year-old Devonte Carson, who was killed on May 27 in Moss Point. Two other suspects, Anthony Rashawn Hunt and Nekila Michelle Davis, were also charged with homicide in Carsons death.

Hunt was the first captured  after a five-hour standoff with authorities in New Orleans on June 11. He died in custody last week. The Orleans Parish Sheriff's Office said he was found unresponsive at the jail and was taken to a hospital. The local coroner has not released an official cause of death. The sheriff's office said there were no visible injuries or signs of self harm and the sheriff's news release said the hospital's preliminary examination indicated he suffered cardiac arrest.

All three suspects are accused of being involved in the shooting of Carson following a late night confrontation. Investigators talked to witnesses who said trouble started when an SUV drove up to the area and two men got out. The driver of the vehicle was a woman, said witnesses.

Police havent released a motive for the shooting or said what caused the confrontation.
NATCHEZ, Miss. (AP)  The trial of a man charged in the death of a folk artist in Mississippi has been postponed until October.

The Natchez Democrat reports that Arthur Moore, 45, is charged with murder in the January 2019 death of James Henry Williams, 54, a Natchez folk artist.
The organization overseeing Catholic schools in the United States gets a new chief executive this week as it seeks to rebound from its biggest one-year enrollment drop since the 1970s.

Amid the pandemic, more than 200 schools closed permanently, and enrollment at the 5,981 remaining schools fell by 6.4% -- or more than 111,000 students  for the 2020-2021 academic year, according to the National Catholic Educational Association.

Total enrollment was about 1.63 million, down from a peak of more than 5.2 million in the early 1960s.

On Wednesday, the NCEA installs a new president and CEO, Lincoln Snyder, who served as superintendent of schools for the Diocese of Sacramento, California, since 2015. Based on trends in that diocese, where enrollment is up 3% from September 2019, Snyder is cautiously optimistic that many Catholic schools nationwide can slow or stop the enrollment decline in the coming year.

Economic hardships caused by the pandemic forced some families to pull their children out of Catholic schools because they couldnt afford the tuition, Snyder said. But in Sacramento, he said, those losses were offset by an influx of families new to Catholic schools who were attracted by the systems educational strengths and its handling of the pandemic.

We had low infection rates... very few documented cases (of COVID-19) on site, he said. We showed we could have kids in class and still be safe  and that seems to have been respected by parents.

Of the 209 Catholic schools that closed or were consolidated last year, the biggest impact was felt by urban communities and non-Catholic families, the NCEA said. In its latest annual report, it expressed regret, saying the closure of Catholic schools in underserved areas eliminates pathways of opportunity for the affected families.

To curtail such closures, the NCEA will need the help of philanthropic donors, Snyder said.

Among dioceses in major cities, Las Vegas was the only one where enrollment in Catholic schools increased by more the 2% last year, the NCEA said.

Conversely, Catholic school enrollment decreased by more than 8% in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

The overall enrollment drop was 8.1% at the 4,812 Catholic elementary schools, and 2.5% at the 1,169 secondary schools.

The reduction in school staffing  including teachers and administrators  was relatively modest at 2.3%, due in part to the availability of the federal Paycheck Protection Program in the spring of 2020.

Snyder said the NCEA wouldnt know until September whether Catholic schools collectively have been able to halt the enrollment decline.

I believe its possible, he said. Im optimistic that with the right resources and people, Catholic schools can grow.

___

Associated Press religion coverage receives support from the Lilly Endowment through The Conversation U.S. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
Ramil Nasibulin/AP

WASHINGTON (AP)  The United States on Tuesday proposed sharp restrictions on travel between the U.S. and Belarus, the latest fallout from the forced landing of a passenger jet to arrest a dissident Belarussian journalist.

The Transportation Department said the order would bar airlines from selling tickets for travel between the two countries, with possible exceptions for humanitarian or national security reasons.
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP)  Officials in North Carolina are warning people to be on the lookout for a venomous snake on the loose.

The Raleigh Police Department sent out a notice early Tuesday urging anyone who sees the missing zebra cobra to stay away and 911. They say the venomous snake could spit and bite if cornered.
KANSAS CITY,, Mo. (AP)  A person who was shot Tuesday at a hotel in the upscale Country Club Plaza shopping and dining district has died, authorities said.

Captain Leslie Foreman, a police spokeswoman, said the victim was suffering from critical injuries when officers responded to the Sheraton Suites County Club Plaza, and the victim later died at a hospital. Foreman said a person has been detained.
NEWARK, Del. (AP)  Delaware State Police have charged a Philadelphia woman in the death of a woman who was found shot in a car that crashed into a guardrail outside Christiana Mall.

Troopers were called to the mall parking lot on Monday afternoon for a report of a car that crashed into the guardrail near the Target, police said in a news release. They found a 27-year-old woman unresponsive in the driver's seat with an apparent gunshot wound to the upper body. She was taken to a hospital, where she was later pronounced dead, police said. Identification is pending notification to next of kin.
PHOENIX (AP)  A woman with bizarre doomsday beliefs that Idaho prosecutors say she and her husband used to justify the killings of her son and daughter was indicted in metro Phoenix on a charge of conspiring to murder her ex-husband.

In an indictment unveiled Tuesday, Lori Vallow Daybell was charged in the 2019 death of Charles Vallow, who was killed in the Phoenix suburb of Chandler months before his son, 7-year-old Joshua JJ Vallow, and stepdaughter, 17-year-old Tylee Ryan, went missing.

Police records show he was fatally shot by Daybells brother, Alexander Lamar Cox, when Charles Vallow was picking up his son from his estranged wife. The indictment says Daybell conspired with her brother in Vallows death.

Cox told police he killed Vallow in self-defense and wasnt arrested. He died five months later from what medical examiners said was a pulmonary blood clot.

Lori Daybell is already at the center of a complicated criminal case in Idaho, where prosecutors allege she conspired with her new husband, Chad Daybell, to kill the two children and his late wife, Tammy Daybell. The couple hold apocalyptic religious beliefs that prosecutors claim they used to justify the killings.

Lori Daybells attorney in Idaho, Mark Means, didnt immediately respond to a phone message and email from The Associated Press seeking comment.

That case against Lori Daybell is on hold while she undergoes treatment at a mental health facility. A judge had her committed this month after determining she wasnt competent to assist in her defense. Chad Daybell has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

In the investigation of Charles Vallows death, Tylee told police that she confronted Vallow with a baseball bat after she was awakened by yelling outside her bedroom door. The teen girl said she was trying to defend her mother, but Vallow took away the bat, according to police records.

Police say Cox was at the home and intervened, leading to a confrontation where Vallow hit the back of Coxs head with the bat. Cox told police that he then went to his bedroom, got his gun and demanded that Vallow leave.

Cox told police that he fired in self-defense after Vallow refused to drop the bat and came after him. In a police video, Cox told investigators that Lori Daybell and the two children had left the house shortly before the shooting occurred.

Four months before his death, Charles Vallow filed for divorce from his wife, alleging that she had become infatuated with near-death experiences and claimed to have lived numerous lives on other planets before her current life.

He also alleged his estranged wife threatened to financially ruin and kill him, according to court records, which noted that Charles Vallow sought an order of protection and a voluntary evaluation of his wife at a mental health facility.

After Vallows death, Lori Daybell and the children moved to Idaho, where Chad Daybell lived. He ran a small publishing company with his wife, Tammy Daybell, and released several of his own books  doomsday-focused fiction loosely based on the theology of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Tammy Daybell died in October 2019, and her obituary said she died in her sleep of natural causes. But authorities grew suspicious when Chad Daybell married Lori Daybell just two weeks later. Authorities later exhumed Tammy Daybells body.

Police began searching for Tylee and JJ in November after relatives raised concerns. Police say the Daybells lied to investigators about the children's whereabouts before quietly leaving Idaho. Months later, they were found in Hawaii without the children, whose bodies were eventually found buried on Chad Daybells Idaho property.

___

Associated Press writer Rebecca Boone in Boise, Idaho, contributed to this report.

___

This story has been corrected to say that the charges Lori Daybell faces in Idaho in the deaths of her children are conspiracy to murder charges, not murder charges.
PHILADELPHIA (AP)  A Pennsylvania woman accused of filming an attack on  and allegedly yelling for the attackers to mace  a New York Times photographer during the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol was arrested Monday.

Sandra Sandy Pomeroy Weyer, of Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, outside of Harrisburg, is facing charges of violently entering a restricted building, disrupting government proceedings and engaging in disorderly or threatening conduct while inside the Capitol. Court records did not list an attorney for Weyer, who is scheduled to make her first appearance Thursday in federal court via video conference.

According to court documents unsealed Monday in Weyer's case, several witnesses contacted the FBI to report that Weyer had posted live video inside the Capitol on her Facebook profile. Facebook removed the videos but several were recovered by investigators.

FBI investigators say Weyer, who was wearing a red sweatshirt, can be seen on a landing filming with her cellphone as four or five men confront a female New York Times photographer taking photos. Investigators say the photographer told them the men demanded to know who she worked for and when she didn't answer, they reached into her vest and took her press credentials.

The photographer told investigators in an interview that the men became agitated when they saw she worked for the New York Times, pushed her down and took one of her cameras. She chased them and was pushed down again.

Investigators say Weyer can be heard screaming that the photographer was a traitor, to get her out and to mace her."

Agents also recovered a handful of conversations between Weyer and other Facebook users saying she had been inside the Capitol, that she hadn't seen rioters and characterizing the group as patriots, and saying that she did what needed to be done.
CAIRO (AP)  A Yemeni government official said Tuesday that Houthi rebels fired two missiles in the latest attack in the government-held city of Marib, killing at least three people, including a child.

The missiles landed in the Rawdha neighborhood in the crowded city, according to Ali al-Ghulisi, the provincial governors press secretary.

At least 10 other people, including two children, were wounded in the attack, al-Ghulisi said.

The Houthis said they targeted military camps in the city, though they did not provide evidence to support their claim.

Yemen has been embroiled in a civil war since 2014, when the Iranian-backed Houthis swept across much of the north and seized the capital, Sanaa, forcing the internationally recognized government into exile. The Saudi-led coalition entered the war the following year on the side of the government. The war has killed more than 130,000 people and spawned the worlds worst humanitarian crisis.

Tuesdays missiles landed in the same residential neighborhood where a Houthi missile and explosive-laden drone attack hit a gas station earlier this month, killing at least 21 people, including a father and his 2-year-old daughter.

Iran-backed Houthi rebels have been attempting since February to capture Marib from the internationally recognized government, which would complete their control over the northern part of Yemen.

However, they have not made substantial progress and have suffered heavy losses amid stiff resistance from government forces aided by the Saudi-led coalition supporting them.

The Houthis have fired ballistic missiles and sent drones into Marib, often hitting civilian areas and camps for displaced people. More than 120 civilians have been killed, including 15 children, and more than 220 wounded in Marib in the past six months, according to the government.

The U.S.s top diplomat in Yemen, Cathy Westley, condemned Tuesdays attack and called for the Houthis to accept a cease-fire and engage in negotiations on a peaceful settlement to the conflict.

The Houthi offensive on Marib, combined with accelerating missile and explosives-laden drone attacks on Saudi Arabia, has come amid mounting international efforts to halt the fighting and relaunch talks between the warring parties to end the war in the Arab world's poorest country.
California lawmakers voted Monday to approve a record-busting state budget that reflects new agreements with Gov. Gavin Newsom to expand health care for undocumented immigrants, spend billions to alleviate homelessness and help Californians still struggling through the pandemic.

The $262.6 billion spending plan for the fiscal year that begins July 1 was fueled by a $76 billion state surplus and $27 billion in federal aid. Democrats who control the Capitol wanted to use the windfall to help the state recover from the coronavirus pandemic and its uneven toll on Californians.

While the state's top earners continued to accrue wealth from a strong stock market, booming tech sector and rising home values, low-wage Californians suffered from job losses, child care cutbacks and a dysfunctional unemployment insurance system. The state's progressive tax structure allowed Newsom and lawmakers to infuse social service programs for the needy and middle class with billions of dollars largely from wealthy taxpayers.

The California Highway Patrol reported Monday night that the person who died in a solo-motorcycle crash earlier that day on U.S. Highway 101 was a 20-year-old San Jose man.

The CHP reports that the man was traveling northbound at about 5:30 p.m. at an unknown high rate of speed in the number three lane, near the Buena Vista Avenue overcrossing north of Gilroy in unincorporated Santa Clara County.

Witnesses told officers that the motorcyclist lost control for an unknown reason and drifted into the right shoulder and up an embankment before colliding with the overcrossing.

The CHP said witnesses stopped to provide care to the man until emergency services arrived, but all attempts to revive him were unsuccessful and he died at the scene.

A 3.9 preliminary magnitude earthquake struck near Castro Valley Monday evening, according to U.S. Geological Survey.

The quake struck at 6:29 p.m., 1.5 miles southeast of Castro Valley. The temblor was initially reported as a magnitude of 4.2 and previously downgraded to 4.0.

Nearly three quarters of San Francisco's Latino residents have received at least one shot of the COVID-19 vaccine -- marking a major milestone for a community that once had the highest case rates in the city -- city officials said on Monday.

So far, 70 percent of the city's eligible Latinos aged 12 and up, about 93,000 people, have received at least one dose of the vaccine.

Latino residents in the city, as well as across the state, have seen the most disproportionate COVID-19 infection rates, with Latinos accounting for over 40 percent of all cases citywide despite representing just 15 percent of the city's population.

Health experts had said Latino San Franciscans faced high infection rates because many work essential jobs and also live in multi-generational households.

A man who drowned at Lake Berryessa on Sunday has been identified as 25-year-old Marcos Salvador Grijalva Pocasangre, a citizen of Guatemala who was visiting family in San Pablo.

Pocasangre is the second person to drown in Lake Berryessa within the previous nine days.

The Napa County Sheriff's Office received a call around 4:30 p.m. regarding a man who may have drowned in the Oak Shore day use area. Witnesses said Pocasangre went under while trying to swim across the cove.

Pocasangre's body was recovered around 7 p.m. by divers from the sheriff's office, about 15 feet from McKenzie Ridge, in water approximately 12 feet deep.

A fire broke out in a San Leandro commercial building Monday night, officials with the Alameda County Fire Department said.

The blaze was reported at 8:11 p.m. in the 14600 block of East 14th Street.

When crews arrived at the building, they saw smoke coming from the roof and upon entering crews found more smoke, Alameda County Fire Department spokeswoman Jo Leal said.

But the fire was small and kept to a back room, Leal said. No one was injured but the business and an adjacent one sustained smoke damage.

The National Weather Service forecast for the San Francisco Bay Area on Tuesday calls for another hot day under sunny skies, with most areas warmer than Monday, especially in inland valley. High temperatures will range from the 60s along the coast to the 70s and 80s around the Bay, with inland valley temperatures reaching the low to mid 90s. Overnight lows will range from the mid to upper 50s.

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.
Though the world of travel has opened significantly in the past couple months, the Bay Area remains one of the most beautiful places in the world to explore. I was reminded of that a few weekends ago when I rented a little electric boat and took it on a spin around the Oakland Estuary. Its the kind of thing anyone  even someone who has never operated a boat before  can do, but it felt like an adventure.

These adorable electric boats are the Segways of the San Francisco Bay

The more trips I take in this weird late-pandemic limbo period, the more Im reminded of the parts of travel that arent fun or romantic. One of the challenges of hitting the road again? A lot of us seem to have forgotten how to pack.

Ive taken two trips outside the Bay Area and realized weve all gotten hilariously bad at packing

Tahoe editor Julie Brown knows the Sierra better than almost anyone. So where does she go when Tahoe is overrun with tourists during the busiest weekends of summer? The Lost Sierra.

Welcome to the Lost Sierra: An hour away from Tahoe is a corner of California history

Gwyneth Paltrows Goop is the website everyone loves to skewer  low-hanging overpriced organic fruit, as Andrew Chamings writes. But when the site thats been cited multiple times for making dangerous claims about the efficacy of vaginal jade eggs and seaweed that protects against radiation published a travel guide to SFGATEs home city, Chamings couldnt hold back.

Goop names hotel 250 miles from SF in bizarre 'Whats new and great in San Francisco' list

Its been a rough week for airlines and their aggravated passengers. Early in the week, it was revealed that the ultra-budget Frontier Airlines had been charging passengers a particularly contemptible new fee.

Frontier's shadiest airline fee yet only lasted a month after backlash forced them to rescind it

Then, Southwest Airlines had its second major service meltdown in less than a month, canceling 4,000 flights over the weekend and upending vacation plans coast-to-coast.

Southwest Airlines cancels and delays thousands of flights. Again.

As always, Jim Glabs Routes column is an indispensable source for air travel news.

Routes: Full flights for July 4 + SJC-JFK, Hawaii, United rule changes, more EU nations reopen

Now SFGATE is trying something new, a Routes-like roundup of the good, the bad and the hilarious in the world of accommodations. The sporadic column, Get a Room, will be an opinionated take on hotels, motels, vacation rentals, camping, glamping, staycationing and whatever other obnoxious new travel portmanteau strikes me as comment-worthy.

Get a Room: Big Sur hotel breaks N. America record for most expensive room + more.

Travelskills is curated by our travel editor Freda Moon. You can contact her at Freda.Moon@sfgate.com.
Late last Thursday night, a man who was visiting Lake Tahoe returned to the home he was renting with a group of people when he heard sounds coming from the second floor. He grabbed his pistol.

The vacation rental in South Lake Tahoe had been empty for most of the night; the man and the people with him in Tahoe had all gone out to dinner. While they were out, a large female black bear entered the house through a sliding glass door, looking for food to eat in the kitchen upstairs.

The bears quest for food inside the house would be her death sentence.

Getty

Wildlife officials say the bear weighed as much as 400 to 500 pounds. The man, who has not been identified, told law enforcement officials that the bear charged at him, trying to swiping at him with her arm, huffing and growling. He said that, within a moment, the bear was on top of him. He said the bear had her mouth on his arm, said Capt. Patrick Foy of California Fish and Wildlifes Law Enforcement Division.

He had a pistol in his other hand, Foy said, and shot [the bear] in the head at point blank range.

Law enforcement and wildlife officials got the call reporting the shooting late on the night of June 24. They are calling the incident a bear attack and report that the man fired his gun in self defense. Investigations of the mans account have so far been backed up by evidence, based on the blood in the home and the number of casings found, Foy said.

Officers from the El Dorado County Sheriffs Office were among the first to respond. Despite early media reports that the shooter was a homeowner in Meyers, the El Dorado County Sheriffs Office confirmed to SFGATE that he was a visitor who was renting a vacation home in South Lake Tahoe, on Pioneer Trail. A spokesperson from El Dorado County Sheriffs Office answered questions to SFGATE via email, but was unavailable for a phone interview.

The person who was attacked and shot the bear was in a party of people that rented the home, said Sgt. Eric Palmer, spokesperson for the sheriff's department. They were from out of the area. The home is a vacation home rental.

Foy said the shooter did not sustain any injuries that warranted immediate medical treatment.

The bear, however, was bleeding profusely from the gunshot wound in her head and immediately retreated.

She left the home the way she entered, through the sliding glass door. Law enforcement officials do not know whether the sliding glass door was left unlocked when the renters left the house to go out to dinner.

The shooter told law enforcement that he fired two or three more times at the bear as she fled the house into the forest, Foy said.

The bear left behind a trail of blood.

[Law enforcement authorities] found blood in the house, Foy said. They found blood right outside the door. Blood going down the stairs.

El Dorado County Officials were unable to locate her that night in the darkness. On Friday morning, California Fish and Wildlife officials partnered with Wildlife Services trappers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for a search. They followed the trail of blood right to the bear, who had been suffering from her wound throughout the night.

The bear was significantly larger and heavier than an average black bear who eats entirely natural food sources. To Foy, her girth and weight, as well as the fact that she had entered the house and headed straight to the kitchen, were all indicators that she was accustomed to life in Tahoe, that she had been surviving off of human food and trash for some time.

In Tahoe, many bears know how to open sliding glass doors, especially if they are not locked. Bears know what a refrigerator and a pantry look like, and how to open them to get easy access to food. Even if a door is locked, bears can rip them open if they are determined enough. Thats why so many residents and homeowners in Tahoe string electric wires across their doors and windows, to prevent bear intrusions.

Live in Tahoe long enough  or even just a month or two  and those who are not vigilant about food and trash will inevitably deal with the aftermath of a bears forage.

Foy noted that the vacation rental had a bear box and that there was no trash misplaced or sign of any other negligence on the property.

Foy called the incident a bear attack. A bear showing that much aggression in a house, charging, making physical contact with a human  those are signs that add up to calling it an attack, he said. Shooting a bear in self defense, inside a home, is legal, Foy said. And so far, investigations of the incident have only backed up the shooters account of the incident.

While violent encounters like this one are rare, they do happen, Foy said. But not all of them are so clearly a case of self defense. In Tahoe, shooting bears who are not threatening or attacking is illegal. In a more suspect case, in South Lake Tahoe in 2015, an unidentified resident shot a bear in the butt. The shooter had reported property damage that they attributed to the bear. Some bear advocates claimed the bear was shot out of a tree.

Ann Bryant, executive director and co-founder of Tahoes BEAR League, a nonprofit that rescues injured wildlife and advocates for bears, takes issue with the word attack.

I dont want the bear to be blamed, Bryant said. Close and lock your doors and windows, especially if youre not home. Bears know how to open unsecured doors and windows and they will come in.

If a bear is inside a residence and a person comes home  or wakes up in the middle of the night and stumbles upon a bear raiding the fridge in the kitchen  the bear will respond predictably, Bryant says.

They want out, Bryant says. They know they dont belong in there. That house is someone elses den and the owner of that den just came home. So the bear is being submissive and they just want out. They will always try and run out the way they came in.

If you encounter a bear in your house, do not stand in the bears exit route, Bryant said.

The bear doesnt know the blueprints of the house, Bryant said. Hes going to push you out of his way.

When wildlife officials found the wounded bear the next morning, she was barely alive, Foy said. She was bleeding heavily.

Blood was coming out of its nose, Foy said.

Wildlife officials euthanized the bear on site, in the forest.

In the aftermath of early media reports, shaming has been rampant on the internet. Comments on local news stories are quick to point blame on the shooter, a tourist.

The amount of victim shaming that has taken place since this incident has occurred, thats a little bit disappointing, Foy said. People were very rapid to jump to conclusions that this person was not defending himself or caused the problem himself. We have no evidence to suggest that this person wasnt doing anything other than defending his life against a very major and serious threat inside his own home.

Meanwhile, Bryant has been on the phone with authorities, trying to learn more about what happened last Thursday night at the vacation rental in South Lake Tahoe that led to a bear being shot down. In addition to wounded bears, Bryant looks after many more wildlife. When SFGATE spoke to Bryant on Monday morning, she said that eight injured animals had been brought to her care in the past 24 hours for rehab and rescue. The peak of summer's tourism is the worst time of the year for wildlife in Tahoe, she said. She was feeding a baby bunny who had been attacked by a dog. A bird with a broken leg was also given to her for mending.

Bears in Tahoe are usually as nonthreatening as bunnies, Bryant said.

Theyre big scared bunny rabbits. Theyre not grizzly bears, Bryant said.

For visitors heading to Lake Tahoe, Bryant welcomes phone calls to the BEAR League, where she is happy to answer questions about how to discourage bears from entering homes before a bear is injured or killed. Her advice has been repeated many times: Lock doors and windows. Do not leave any food in your car. Dont leave trash out. Definitely dont feed the bears. Dont even feed the birds, because bird seed is bear food, too.
Two visitors to Lake Tahoe  one from Southern California, the other from Ohio  drowned in separate incidents last week.

Xavier Olivas, a 69-year-old man from Yucca Valley, was reported missing last Thursday after he jumped from a boat in the lake at 1 p.m. near Chimney Beach, on the eastern shoreline in Nevada. Olivas intended to swim to shore but was not seen again, the Washoe County Sheriffs Office said on Facebook.

Olivas was wearing red shorts and a silver chain when he went missing. Agencies searching for Olivas later recovered the body of a man matching his description, though confirmation from the medical examiner is still pending.

In a separate incident, Jack Bowling, a visitor from Ohio, drowned Saturday after diving into the lake near Baldwin Beach in South Lake Tahoe, reportedly suffering a medical emergency. According to the El Dorado County Sheriffs Office, Bowling was metal detecting with a weight belt and under 10 feet of water when he began experiencing "some sort of distress," KCRA reported.

Onlookers pulled Bowling out of the water, and first responders tried to revive him through CPR. He was taken to Barton Memorial Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Drownings in Lake Tahoe often occur because of cold water shock, especially in the lakes alpine waters. The lakes famously chilly waters range between 50 to 60 degrees in early summer, rising to between 65 to 75 degrees in the summer. But cold water shock can happen even in water as warm as 77 degrees, the Tahoe Daily Tribune reported.

"Warm air doesnt necessarily mean the water is warm. Survival time is greatly diminished for someone immersed in water below 70 degrees," the Nevada Division of Emergency Management/Homeland Security noted in a Facebook post from 2019. "... Cold water drains body heat up to 25 times faster than cold air. When cold water makes contact with your skin, cold shock causes an immediate loss of breathing control. This dramatically increases the risk of sudden drowning even if the water is calm and you know how to swim. The danger is even greater if the water is rough."
In the lead-up to our virtual June Convocation 2021 (June 24-29) we'll be sharing stories from across our eight faculties about some of our amazing graduands. You can read more stories here. Be sure to share your convocation celebrations with the hashtag #MySFUGrad.

By Cindy Li

It all started with a high school trip to a clinic with a medical imaging centre in Harare, Zimbabwe. It was there that Tatendaishe Jakaza discovered her passion for medicine and engineering, and her desire to understand how imaging technology such as CT scans and ultrasound machines work. It was also then, that Jakaza became determined to make a difference through medicine and technology in her home country.

In Zimbabwe, there is a shortage of machines and parts, and the issue of equipment breaking down with not enough experts to fix or operate the machines, says Jakaza. I want to improve the health and well-being of people by improving the technology in my hometown and country.

When it came time for post-secondary education, she chose SFU as it was one of the few universities to offer an undergraduate biomedical engineering program at the time. She was also the recipient of a renewable SFU Entrance Scholarship valued at more than $100,000 that covered her tuition and living costs, which further affirmed her decision to choose SFU.

As an engineering student, Jakaza had opportunities to put her skills into practice through research assistantships and co-operative education. Her first research opportunity was introduced to her through the co-op program as a Clinical Biomedical Engineer in engineering professor Marinko Sarunics Biomedical Optics Research Group (BORG). Through BORG and their collaboration with the Vancouver General Hospital, she gained invaluable experience in retinal optical coherence tomography (OCT), a non-invasive imaging technique for monitoring and tracking eye disease progress. She was able to witness firsthand on how medical imaging is used to help monitor patients, their retinal disease progression and how certain diseases, such as glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy, affected eye sight. She continued to successfully complete her undergraduate honours thesis in the same lab, where she focused on creating a multiscale OCT and two-photon excited fluorescence retinal imaging system.

In addition to being deeply involved in research, Jakaza believes in giving back to the community and making an impact in the younger generation. Through SFUs Faculty of Applied Sciences Outreach Program and Invent the Future: AI Scholars Program, Jakaza served as a program instructor and coordinator. In these roles, she helped design and teach STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) workshops to elementary and high school students.

I want to empower and inspire the next generation of young students, specifically young women, to pursue a career in STEM, says Jakaza. I also want to show and encourage them, by using myself as an example, that it is possible to pursue a career in the male-dominated fields of science and technology.
You are now listening to the sounds of the New Generation. A podcast created for those who desire a new way of gaining information rather than reading a traditional newspaper. In our show we will discuss everything from sports, pop culture, politics, and local news. To stay up to date on our latest episodes every week be sure to follow us on your favorite podcast service. And dont worry, we keep it short.
Page Content

An employer provided workers with wage statements that listed the total hours worked at the standard rate of pay and separately showed the hours for which workers earned an additional overtime premium of 0.5 times the standard rate. A California appeals court dismissed a claim asserting that the employer's practice violated state law.

Complying with California's wage statement rules can be complicated and technical. Section 226 of the California Labor Code requires employers to provide accurate, itemized wage statements showing "all applicable hourly rates in effect during the pay period and the corresponding number of hours worked at each hourly rate by the employee."

Nonexempt employees in California must be paid 1.5 times their regular rate of pay for all hours worked beyond eight in a day and 40 in a workweek. In this case, an employee sued her employer based on its alleged failure to identify the correct rate of pay for overtime wages. The employer's wage statements listed premiums as 0.5 times (rather than 1.5 times) the regular rate of pay.

The employer contended that its wage statements complied with the statute because they showed the total hours worked, with their standard rate or rates, and the overtime hours worked, with their additional premium rate. The employer moved to have the case dismissed before trial. The trial court denied the motion, and the employer sought review in the California Court of Appeals.



The appeals court concluded that the trial court wrongly held that the employer's wage statements violated Section 226 and ruled that the lawsuit should be dismissed.

The primary purpose of the law is to ensure employees can easily determine whether their wages were correctly calculated, the appeals court noted. "While other formats may also be acceptable, given the complexities of determining overtime compensation in various contexts, the format adopted by [the employer] adequately conveys the information required by statute."

Interpretation of Section 226

California Labor Code Section 226 requires an employer to furnish to its employee an accurate, itemized statement in writing showing, among other things, all applicable hourly rates in effect during the pay period and the corresponding number of hours worked at each hourly rate by the employee, the court first noted.

In interpreting Section 226, the court said, its primary job was to determine what the legislature intended when it passed the law. And in making this determination, the court's first task was to look to the words of the statute. Where a statutory term is not defined, it can be assumed that the legislature was referring to the conventional definition of that term, the court said.

In addition, statutes governing conditions of employment are to be construed broadly in favor of protecting employees, the court noted.

The core purpose of Section 226 is to ensure an employer documents the basis of the employee compensation payments to assist the employee in determining whether the employee has been compensated properly, the court said.

The employer in this case argued that its wage statements showed all applicable hourly rates and the corresponding number of hours worked at each hourly rate because the rates and hours listed formed the basis for calculating overtime compensation. They were the applicable hourly rates contemplated by the statute.

The employee claimed that the wage statements omitted the overtime rate, 1.5 times the regular rate, and therefore did not include all applicable hourly rates or the corresponding number of hours worked at each hourly rate.

The appellate court agreed with the employer. The phrase "applicable hourly rates" is not defined in the statute, the court noted. Therefore, it would apply its plain and commonsense meaning, viewing the phrase in context and keeping in mind its statutory purpose.

The wage statements showed the applicable hourly rates in effect and the corresponding number of hours worked at each rate, the court said. In the wage statements, the applicable hourly rates were:



The standard hourly rate determined by contract or other agreement between the employee and the employer.

The overtime premium hourly rate, determined by statute, that must be added to the employee's standard wages to compensate the employee for working overtime.

These rates were plainly shown, along with the hours worked at each rate, the court said. While other formats may also be acceptable, given the complexities of determining overtime compensation in various contexts, the format adopted by the employer adequately conveyed the information required by statute. It also allowed employees to easily determine whether their wages were correctly calculated, which is the central purpose of Section 226, the court concluded.

General Atomics v. Superior Court, Calif. Ct. App., No. D078211 (May 28, 2021).

Professional Pointer: This decision shows that courts are not likely to find violations of the California rules regarding wage statements as long as the statements provide the information necessary for employees to check the accuracy of the wages they have received.

Joanne Deschenaux, J.D., is a freelance writer in Annapolis, Md.


Nepal on Monday launched a digital visa system to replace its 45-year-old hand-written visa regime.

Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister Bishnu Prasad Paudel inaugurated the new system under which visas are produced digitally from the integrated information system of the Department of Immigration, the Xinhua news agency reported.

According to a statement by the Department of Immigration, key features of the digital visa system include hologram and water mark as security features and QR code in visa sticker with details of the visa enabling authorities to determine whether the visa is authentic with the help of QR code readers.

The department said that as the digital system generates visas, their details cannot be tempered. Likewise, the software system itself will generate visa numbers and three visas can be accommodated on a single page of passport.

"With the new system, the security and management of visas is expected to be strengthened," the department said.

"Currently, we issue visas by writing manually on a printed copy of visa sticker and such visa is pasted on the passport of foreigners," Jhanka Nath Dhakal, information officer at the Department of Immigration, told Xinhua. "Under the new system, nothing should be done manually to issue the visa."

He said the new system would pave the way for the issuance of e-visas in the future.

On the day, over 150 digital visas were issued to foreigners, with a Portuguese citizen being the first to receive such a visa, said Dhakal.

The Department of Immigration started the new system at its headquarters, but it aims to introduce it to all of its offices within four months after the new 2021-22 fiscal year begins in mid-July.

While launching the digital visa system, Paudel said it would make Nepali visas more credible and help ensure national security, according to a press statement released by the Home Ministry.
By Goh Lim Thye / Beh Loo See / Lin Woon Leong



Tourism has long been an essential industry for Malaysia. Its contribution to the national economy has grown significantly, and it is now the third most significant contributor to the GDP after manufacturing and commodities.

In 2019, the tourism industry recorded a contribution of 15.9 per cent (RM240.2 billion) to Malaysia's gross domestic product (GDP), as compared to 15.2 per cent (RM220.4 billion) in 2018.

Besides, the opportunities created by the tourism industry are astounding. A total of 3.6 million people were employed by the tourism sector, representing 23.6 % of the country's total employment in 2019.

The lucrative returns recorded by the tourism industry may have been one reason Malaysia launched its Visit Malaysia 2020 program which aimed to welcome 30 million tourists to Malaysia and register RM100 billion in tourist receipts.

Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic brought an unprecedented external shock to the tourism industry, and the Visit Malaysia 2020 program was forced to be canceled.

Today, interstate and interdistrict travel within Malaysia are severely restricted, and the country's international borders have been closed to all for more than a year.

The level of economic distress caused by the pandemic has been severe. The latest report published by the Department of Statistics Malaysia (DOSM) registered just 4,332,722 international tourist arrivals in 2020, a massive reduction of 83.4% compared to the previous year. The figures are expected to dip further in 2021 as Malaysia's borders have remained closed to international travelers.

Additionally, in a recent study conducted by Universiti Malaya, the level of tourist expenditures dropped from RM86.14 million in 2019 to RM12.69 million in 2020, indicating a reduction of 85.3%.

Also in 2020, the travel subsector recorded a deficit of RM7.8 billion for the first time in thirty years. Revenue from the accommodation subsector registered negative growth of 53.3%, and the decrease in air passengers led to the increase of RM1.6 billion deficit in the transport subsector in 2020.

Although the government has introduced multiple incentive programs such as Prihatin, Prihatin SMEs, Penjana Tourism Financing scheme, PEMERKASA stimulus package, a one-off special assistance grant of RM3,000 for 5,000 tour agencies registered with the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture (MOTAC), Wage Subsidy Program 3.0 and an extension of the exemption for tourism tax and service tax for hotel accommodation until Dec 31, 2021, and tax relief of up to RM1,000 for Individuals who purchase tourism packages from tour agents registered with MOTAC. However, these measures have not been sufficient to keep the tourism industry afloat.

According to data released by the Companies Commission of Malaysia and the Malaysian Association of Hotels (MAH), the hotel industry recorded a loss of over RM6.53 billion in 2020 and suffered estimated losses of RM300 million every two weeks during the Movement Control Order (MCO).

As a result, the hotel industry's loss of revenue in 2021 has already added up to more than RM5 billion.

In addition, as of end of March 2021, at least 2,041 hotel employees had been laid off while 9,773 were on unpaid leave and another 5,054 have taken pay cuts, while around 100 of three-, four- and five-star hotels have closed for business. It is expected to worsen with the current MCO 3.0 implemented since the May 10, 2021 and with Phase 1 of recovery and beyond given the expected slow reopening of the various phases of 2  3 of interdistrict and interstate travel and other related economic activities.

The current incentive programs are unlikely to prevent a significant collapse of Malaysia's tourism industry due to the persistent high number of COVID-19 cases, and the extended travel restrictions due to lockdown.

The effects of the pandemic have manifested into the tourism industry's most severe crisis which has offered some important lessons for both policymakers and industry players.

Although the industry previously experienced the SARS pandemic, its resilience towards the current pandemic has been weak.

While the industry is counting on vaccines for recovery, policymakers should develop a tourism weathered roadmap to restore traveler's confidence, promote domestic tourism and support the safe return of international tourism.

The government and industry players should try to outline turnaround plans and practical factors in conserving a more resilient and sustainable tourism in addition to the current vaccination program.

In our recent survey on the travel industry carried out as part of our research grant, 91.2% of the respondents agreed that their business operations had been affected. In contrast, all of the respondents had suffered revenue and profit contractions due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

It worries us that 86.8% of the respondents did not have sufficient cash flow to maintain their operations; thus, 25.8% of the respondents have laid off more than 41% of their pre-COVID-19 workforce.

Lastly, 44.1% of the respondents indicated that their operations would be permanently shut down within six months if the existing conditions persist with interstate travel being banned.

The future of the tourism industry and hoteliers remains bleak where most are at zero occupancy due to the travel restrictions while there were only 20% who solely relied on COVID-19 quarantine guests.

If further travel restrictions extensions, both locally and globally are to be expected, the hotel sector and tourism industry will continue to suffer with deeper economic impact on businesses, individuals and the country.

There must be pragmatic exit strategy for the upcoming phases of recovery to enable economic recovery plan for the domestic tourism sector as well as other sectors.

Note: The survey statistics are from our grant under UM CSRG010-2020SS.

(Goh Lim Thye is Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Economics and Administration, Universiti Malaya; Beh Loo See is Professor at the Faculty of Economics and Administration, Universiti Malaya; and Lin Woon Leong is Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Business and Law, Taylor's University.)
The Malaysian Health Coalition (MHC) supports all junior health professionals, and supports all recent statements by the Malaysian Medical Association (MMA), Malaysian Pharmacists Society (MPS), the Islamic Medical Association of Malaysia (IMAM), Persatuan Kesihatan IKRAM Malaysia (IKRAM Health) and the Malaysian Society for Occupational Safety and Health (MSOSH) on the contract system issue.



We urge the government to provide durable solutions and fair employment terms for all junior health professionals.

The possibility of a strike by junior doctors suggests that the government has failed to adequately protect their welfare.

We reiterate our previous statements (23 Jan 2021, 2 Nov 2020, 14 Sept 2020 and 28 Dec 2019), and further urge the following:

1. Deploy political will to solve contract doctors' problems now

The issue of contract doctors and other healthcare professionals require joint solutions by the Ministry of Health, Public Service Department (JPA) and potentially the Prime Minister or Cabinet.

Five years of the contract system have led to discontentment, departures from the civil service and Malaysia, and an exhausted health workforce.

Additionally, if MOH is indeed the only ministry with contract posts for professional-grade civil servants, this is an unfair anomaly.

The contract system must be drastically improved with durable and fair solutions to recognize all doctors and health professionals for their service.

Without political will to resolve this issue, the long-term health of the rakyat will suffer.

2. Ensure equality, anti-discrimination and transparency in the Ministry of Health (MOH)

We welcome the reassurance of the Secretary-General of the Health Ministry that employment and promotion within the MOH are based on merit and performance, and not driven by race or religion.

We support equality and reject any discrimination on the basis of race, religion, gender, age or other characteristics.

We call for transparency in the criteria and decisions for hiring and promotions.

Health professionals serve all rakyat, and a diverse workforce is needed for a culturally diverse Malaysia.

3. Show compassionate and thoughtful leadership

The contract system is treating junior doctors and health professionals like expendable assets.

The government must show compassionate and thoughtful leadership, instead of issuing high-handed press statements that are insensitive.

Junior health professionals have served Malaysia during this pandemic, and we owe them a debt of gratitude that must be repaid through better terms of service.

They should be allowed to make their voices and concerns heard, and meaningful channels for regular engagement should exist without threats of repercussions.

Compassionate and thoughtful leadership will be crucial.

The Black Monday movement will soon take place as a sign of solidarity with junior doctors and health professionals.

Malaysia's most valuable healthcare resource are our health professionals, and we must appropriately recognize their contributions.

Now is the time for durable and fair solutions.

Malaysian Health Coalition
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ASX investors continue to defy the doom and gloom of an unravelling COVID situation with the Australian sharemarket capping its best financial year since inception.

A year-ending flourish on Wednesday from telco giant Telstra, as well as gains for iron ore giants, helped the ASX200 index lock in its strongest fiscal performance since it launched in 2000.

The market finished the session 0.2 per cent higher at 7313, having been up by as much as 0.9 per cent.

The ASX 200 added a record 24 per cent in the 202-21 financial year. Credit:Louie Douvis

At Tuesdays close the local bourse had gained 23.9 per cent over the past 12 months, narrowly beating the previous financial year record of 2006-07, when Australia was entering its mining boom.

However, the markets continued optimism contrasted sharply to the darkening national mood on Tuesday around the handling of the coronavirus, as well as the lockdown measures currently in place for Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, Alice Springs and Darwin.

Nonetheless, GSFM Funds Management investment strategist Stephen Miller said the focus of the year - at least for markets - was clearly the faith placed in the Reserve Bank and governments to nurse the nation and the economy through the pandemic.

The narrative I think is how markets have had unbridled faith in the ability of policymakers to chart a course through the economic dislocation caused by the COVID, Mr Miller said.

Weve got to give policymakers a bit of a tick because it is clear certainly in the US and certainly here - probably less so in Europe and the UK - that the economic outcomes have been much much better than many of us have expected or feared.

Among the biggest gains today was Iluka, which gained 11.7 per cent to $9.15. The mineral sands miner jumped after news that Rio Tinto would be halting its mineral sands mine in Richard Bay, South Africa, due to violence against its machinery and staff. Ilukas mines are located in Australia and Sierra Leone.

Nuix fell a further 13 per cent to $2.21, and AGL Energy dropped 10 per cent to $8.20 after surprising shareholders with news it would not issue a special dividend as it split into two companies. It will instead preserve capital and also issued a profit warning for coming years.

Kogan shed Mondays gains to closed 9.5 per cent lower at $11.58. While travel stocks reversed Mondays losses, with Webjet up 4 per cent, Corporate Travel up 3.2 per cent, and Qantas up 2.4 per cent.
If ever there was an exercise that, since its inception, has overpromised and under-delivered, its the alleged Intergenerational Report. A report on relations between the generations, on the legacy the present generation is leaving for the coming generation?

No, not really. If it was, it would be mainly about the need for us and the other rich countries to be acting a lot more seriously and urgently to limit climate change. The document Treasurer Josh Frydenberg unveiled on Monday is our fifth five-yearly Intergenerational Report.

Federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg released the Intergenerational Report on Monday. Credit:Chris Hopkins

Initially, the report made no mention of climate change. These days, following the obvious criticism, it always includes a brief chapter on the topic, before moving on to matters considered more pertinent.

This year the chapter runs to nine of the reports almost 200 pages, in which the seriousness of the problem is acknowledged, along with the assurance but dont worry, Im on it. On every admitted dimension of the issue, were assured that reports have been commissioned, committees established and the government is spending $100 million on this and $67 million on that.
One financial planning opportunity that does not get enough attention is superannuation splitting. It can have a huge impact on the tax-free retirement income of a couple.

Super is a tax-friendly environment in which to accumulate wealth and then provide income in retirement, when you decide to put up your feet and stop working.

Super splitting can grow the total income of a couple in retirement. Credit:

Our super system had more than $3.1 trillion in assets under management at the end of the March. Over the 12 months to March 30, total super assets grew by more than 3.1 per cent.

With compulsory employer super payments legislated to rise from 9.5 per cent of income in half percentage point increments each year until they reach 12 per cent in 2025, total super assets under management are forecast to further grow significantly.
A coal mining executive, a physicist and a feminist philosophy lecturer might seem strange bedfellows but together they have reignited a long-simmering debate about the boundaries of free speech and tolerance in our universities.

Mark Vaile, chairman of Whitehaven Coal and a former leader of the Nationals, was the preferred candidate for chancellor at Newcastle University. But last week, after a campaign against his appointment by staff academics, university donors and activists, he turned the job down, with federal Education Minister Alan Tudge claiming he had been forced out because of cancel culture.

Last week also brought physicist Peter Ridd before the High Court, where he appealed against his sacking by Queenslands James Cook University in 2018. He argued that the critical comments hed made about his colleagues research into the effects of climate change on the Great Barrier Reef were protected by academic freedom. The university argued the comments constituted bullying.

Melbourne University, meanwhile, is considering a new gender affirmation policy, which comes in the wake of an activist campaign against feminist philosophy lecturer Holly Lawford-Smith. She stands accused of hate speech and transphobic rhetoric by the University of Melbourne Student Union Queer Political Action Collective.

Mr Vailes appointment was bound to be controversial. Newcastle is the worlds biggest coal port, but staff and protesters had a right to ask whether his appointment was consistent with the universitys pledge to be carbon neutral by 2025 and to divest from fossil fuel companies that were not committed to a low-carbon future. But theres a precedent here that may prove worrying if a vast range of views or positions are deemed unacceptable.
Theyve done the work to do the risk analysis for us, you dont have to do it yourself, and theyve recommended that people under the age of 60 get the Pfizer vaccine, he said. I dont have any objection to a younger person deciding to get the vaccine they can get now. But I believe we should follow ATAGIs recommendation because theyre the experts. While there were no new community cases of coronavirus recorded in Victoria on Tuesday, there were 25 identified elsewhere in the country. There were 19 cases announced in NSW, many of whom had not been in isolation while infectious. The perilous situation saw the Labor premiers of Victoria, Queensland and WA call for a temporary reduction in the number of people returning from overseas, at least through the colder months.

Loading Were seeing in Australia, and across the world, that you cannot manage Delta outbreaks without significant restrictions, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews said. The lockdowns and restrictions in place across the country right now are all a result of hotel quarantine breaches  which is why we need a national discussion about how many people were letting in. Locking some people out is better than locking everyone down  we need a national approach to how we manage this new threat until we achieve proper vaccine coverage. WA Premier Mark McGowan agreed with his Victorian counterpart. I actually think Premier Andrews is right, he said We do need to have a national conversation about this and about how many we can take as a country.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said she intended to bring the issue up again at Fridays national cabinet meeting, but urged the Commonwealth to act immediately. But their argument has not convinced Mr Hunt who instead urged the states to take as many returning citizens as possible. We should bring home Australians and the critical workers, whether its in health or medical or engineering, [this is] fundamental to helping save lives and protect lives around the country, he said Following Monday nights national cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the Commonwealth would introduce a new no-fault vaccine injury indemnity scheme for GPs this week, allowing doctors to administer the vaccine to anyone aged over 18 without the threat of legal action.

If you wish to get the AstraZeneca vaccine, then we would encourage you to go and have that discussion with your GP, Mr Morrison said. Mr Hunt reiterated on Tuesday the medical advice had not changed and Pfizer remained the preferred vaccine for those under 60. Health Minister Greg Hunt. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen If there are people who wish to access it, by informed consent, via the existing ATAGI rules, then that is simply being enabled, he said. On Tuesday, some general practitioners said they were so confused by conflicting advice, they were unwilling to administer the vaccine to younger patients until they received official guidance from the government.

Dr Khorshid said the AMA received no notice of the Prime Ministers move, although the group had been consulting with the federal government on the planned indemnity program as well as extending the Medicare item covering COVID-19 vaccine consultations to under-50s. The details of the indemnity scheme are still being worked on, but it will cover all pandemic vaccines and the period of the pandemic from February 22 this year. Vaccine uptake expert Margie Danchin said the change allowed all adults the choice of getting vaccinated after carefully weighing up the risks and benefits. What the government is doing is making AstraZeneca available for those people who are prepared to take the risk and want to protect themselves against COVID, said Associate Professor Danchin, who is a non-voting member of ATAGI.

ATAGI remained locked in meetings on Tuesday and Associate Professor Danchin said its advice could be overturned if there was a significant coronavirus outbreak. If we do suddenly see a rapid increase in the number and severity of COVID cases then the advice from ATAGI could change, but at the moment, this is really just opening up choice for people in the community who are not protected and want to have access to a vaccine, she said. Victorian GP advocate Dr Bernard Shiu said doctors across the country had been surprised by the Prime Ministers evening announcement, which had confused advice only recently given by ATAGI. We are in a very interesting situation. Are we listening to the Prime Minister [for] the legal guidelines of what we are capable of, or should we listen to the TGA [Therapeutic Goods Administration] and ATAGI as our clinical fallback system? he said. By Tuesday morning he said he had already conducted two phone consults with teachers in their 40s who were interested in getting the AstraZeneca vaccine.

And I strongly advised them that yes any vaccine is better than no vaccines, and they are both safe to have AstraZeneca. They are both booking in next Friday. Victorian Health Minister Martin Foley also appeared surprised by the news and told reporters it was not a decision of national cabinet, despite the Prime Minister and all state and territory premiers and chief ministers meeting last night. He said the Victorian government was yet to receive any formal guidance from the federal government and there were still details being confirmed before the vaccine rollout could expand. While applauding the Prime Minister for introducing the vaccine indemnity scheme, Dr Kidd said that young people who wished to have the AstraZeneca vaccine would not necessarily be able to get it immediately, as GPs were still working through those eligible under phase 1b of the rollout. But having said that, anyone who puts up their hand and identifies that they might be at some increased risk will Im sure be considered by their doctors, Dr Kidd said.

Loading And while there is ongoing good supply of AstraZeneca it may well be for people now who would appear to have been at relatively lower risk will be able to access it a lot sooner than they would have thought. Melbourne GP Todd Cameron said he would need more information before he would be prepared to dispense the AstraZeneca vaccine to younger Australians, as he was yet to see any official change of the guidance provided to GPs. As recently as two weeks ago [the advice] was its not safe to use in the under 60s, he said. Why the complete change of tack? Its important to articulate. GPs will be able to claim for vaccine consultations for under 50s by the end of the week.
He said the Victorian government was still yet to receive any formal guidance from the federal government and there were still details being confirmed before the vaccine rollout could expand. The Department of Health has reached out to the Commonwealth to request advice on whether the eligibility arrangements are formally changing and when we receive this formal advice, we will of course implement it, Mr Foley said. On Tuesday morning, Dr Shiu said GPs did not yet have a billing number that allowed them to charge younger people for the service. In the meantime, he had already conducted two phone consultants with teachers in their 40s who were interested in getting the AstraZeneca vaccine. Loading

I actually gave a free service for them, the Geelong doctor said. And I strongly advised them that yes any vaccine is better than no vaccines, and they are both are safe to have AstraZeneca. They are both booking in next Friday. Earlier this month, the federal Health Ministers top immunisation advisers decided to limit the AstraZeneca vaccine to over-60s due to a concerning number and severity of non-fatal cases of a blood clotting condition in people in their 50s and came after weeks of difficult deliberations. Experts on the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation told The Age on June 18 that the move to change the clinical advice, another major disruption to the nations lagging vaccine rollout, came after analysing months of local and international data. Melbourne GP Todd Cameron said he would need more information before he would be prepared to dispense the AstraZeneca vaccine to younger Australians, as he was yet to see any official change of the guidance provided to GPs.

As recently as two weeks ago [the advice] was its not safe to use in the under 60s, he said. Why the complete change of tack? Its important to articulate. However, the president of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, Dr Karen Price, said doctors will feel empowered by the governments decision to allow people under the age of 40 to request the AstraZeneca vaccine from their GP given there will be a no-fault indemnity scheme. Up until now, I think doctors have been reluctant to have that conversation [about AstraZeneca] with those people who are under 60, Dr Price told ABCs Radio National.

There was a general fear and reluctance given the uncertain nature of the way that the advice had been communicated and it certainly became a bit of a media storm ... about the good versus bad vaccine. It became a very difficult proposition for doctors to feel safe going down that path. Dr Price said doctors will talk to their patients individually about the risks associated with the AstraZeneca vaccine and what that means for them. (The Pfizer shot is the recommended jab for those under 60, however, people aged under 40 are not yet eligible under Australias staged rollout.) Dr Price said she wouldnt hesitate to dispense the AstraZeneca vaccine to a person under 40 as long as they consented and were fully informed about the risks, including the extremely rare side effect of blood clots. General practitioner Nathan Pinskier, who runs six medical clinics, said while there had initially been interest from younger people to get vaccinated with AstraZeneca last month when outbreaks were unfolding across Melbourne, that had dropped off significantly following changing ATAGI advice that the vaccine was recommended for people over 60.

Dr Pinskier, who had his second dose of AstraZeneca this month, said the vaccines reputation had taken a battering and a public health campaign was urgently needed to reverse the damage. It is a really sensible and pragmatic decision by the government, he said. But whether there is an appetite for people under 40 now given all the negative publicity associated with AstraZeneca, a lot of which is unwarranted, remains to be seen. Dr Pinskier said his clinics had thousands of AstraZeneca doses in the fridge as demand for the vaccine plummeted in recent weeks. He was hopeful a push for the younger population to get vaccinated with AstraZeneca would compel national health authorities to consider cutting the interval between doses of the vaccine by up to four weeks. Loading
The record of the Royal Australian Navy in this war is indeed a remarkable one. Notwithstanding that our cruisers and destroyers have been in the thickest of the fight, casualties have been almost negligible.

It will be remembered that when the cruiser Sydney returned to her home port after participating in some of the most spectacular actions in the Mediterranean, of which her sinking of the Italian cruiser Bartolomeo Colleoni was an outstanding feature, she was able to report that she had suffered no casualties.

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The Sydney herself was practically unscathed, Mr. Hughes said. The people of Australia will regret the loss of a fine ship in the Waterhen, but will be proud and glad that every man of its splendid crew has been saved.

Waterhen was carrying a complement of about 128 men.
Last Friday, I visited a vaccination clinic to request the AstraZeneca vaccine. There was no queue. I had a brief argument with the receptionist about my eligibility and persuaded them to let me discuss it with the GP in charge, considering how quiet it was. The doctor was willing to administer the vaccine and explained, for a very small proportion of recipients, it can cause harmful blood clots, especially for people in my age group: Im in my 20s. I was only too happy to accept the risk.

On Monday, the Australian government decided to give all Australian adults access to the AstraZeneca vaccine, which has been approved by the TGA for use for anyone over 18 since February. This invitation includes under-40s who, up until now, have not been welcomed into the vaccine rollout. The Prime Minister said on Monday night: If [under-40s] are willing to go and speak to their doctor and have access to the AstraZeneca vaccine, they can do so. This is great news. However, the Prime Minister should have gone one step further and encouraged all Australians, including those under 40, to take the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Jun Tong walked into a clinic last week and had an AstraZeneca jab.

The AstraZeneca vaccine is the only realistic and available option today for most Australians. Eighty per cent of our supply in the next few weeks will be AstraZeneca. It works well: data from Britain and from clinical trials show that it protects almost all recipients against hospitalisation and death. While the risk of clotting is real, it is very rare. Taking this vaccine urgently is the responsible thing to do when our neighbours in Indonesia, Fiji, and India are experiencing horrific waves of COVID infections. Once immunised, we should direct our future supplies to them. Taking the vaccine also hastens the restoration of our freedoms, opens our borders, and protects against further infringements of our rights.

We have two vaccines available today: the AstraZeneca vaccine and another by Pfizer. The former is produced locally in Melbourne and we have it in abundance: from July, 2.2 million new doses will be produced each week. The Pfizer vaccine is imported and its supply is currently constrained, with only about a tenth of the AstraZeneca supply. Pfizer stocks will ramp up to 1.7 million doses per week but not until October. If most Australians wait for Pfizer, many will not be vaccinated until next year. AstraZeneca is critical if we are to seriously protect ourselves against COVID-19 before the end of this year.
In 1982, a medical officer in the federal Department of Health returned to Australia from an annual meeting of global experts on the safety of medicines. He had learnt about schemes in Japan and New Zealand that compensate the small number of people who experience a serious reaction to a vaccine called no fault vaccine injury compensation. He recommended Australia adopt such a scheme. He was told it would not find favour with government.

GPs are to be indemnified in case of an adverse vaccine event with AZ. Credit:AP

This April he wrote to government, now as a retired citizen. In the reply he was told that the Australian government was not proposing to implement a scheme at this time. The reasons: vaccines are important, vaccines are not mandatory, we have universal health care, a right to access the courts, its difficult to demonstrate causation of injury, vaccines are approved for use within stringent safety systems, and our coverage for children is high indicating high public confidence anyway. The most perplexing reason: that no-fault schemes remove the incentives for health practitioners to operate carefully. This missed the point  such schemes are for when a doctor or other provider has operated within recommended practice and with informed consent, where there is no fault in the manufacturing, and yet the patient still experiences a rare serious side effect.

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It is perhaps ironic then that on Monday night the Prime Minister announced a new no-fault indemnity scheme  for GPs. That means that GPs and other providers are covered in a claim against them if a patient experiences an adverse event following a COVID vaccine. This is good in some ways. It provides extra assurance to GPs who remain hesitant about giving the AstraZeneca vaccine to a patient under 60 who wants it. This is positive if it gives greater confidence to offering a vaccine to younger people who remain keen to get the vaccine despite its approximately 4 in 100,000 risk to younger adults. Some people want protection from COVID now. They do not want the Pfizer vaccine, or do not wish to wait until its available to them. They want the choice to have a vaccine now. The Commonwealths vaccine advisory group, ATAGI, has been clear that such people should have that choice. There has never been vaccination expert advice to the contrary. It has been that Pfizer was preferred, first in April for under 50s, and now for under 60s. It was not that AstraZeneca was banned for those below these age thresholds.
Planning Minister Rob Stokes has smoothed the path for 3000 homes to be built in towers reaching 30 storeys under the first stage of the Waterloo public housing estate redevelopment in Sydneys inner south.

Mr Stokes has approved revised plans for Waterloo South to go on public exhibition, in a compromise aimed at breaking a deadlock between the City of Sydney and the states housing authority over the scale of development.

The council proposed three high-rise buildings, instead of the nine towers suggested by the state government. Credit:City of Sydney

The plans - which will go on exhibition later this year - push hundreds of vulnerable residents at the estate closer to having their homes demolished for a mix of private, affordable and public housing.

The redevelopment of the Waterloo estate is one of the states most significant urban regeneration projects, Mr Stokes said.
Police are investigating whether a street brawl in Sydneys west could be connected to a house fire that left a 14-year-old dead.

Tahma Jones, who died in the blaze while sleeping at a friends house, has been remembered by friends as sweet and kindhearted.

The cause of the fatal fire is under investigation. Credit:Kate Geraghty

Fire crews and police responded to multiple triple zero calls just after 1.30am when smoke was seen coming from a two-storey brick home on Montana Way in Macquarie Fields. When they arrived, two-metre-high flames were roaring out of every window.

The other occupants of the home, including a mother and five children, managed to escape the blaze.
The Granites gold mine COVID outbreak is a reminder that we continue to be one spark away from a COVID-19 wildfire in Australias Indigenous communities.

We know that COVID hits the elderly and those with underlying health conditions hardest. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are more likely to live with cardiovascular disease, kidney disease or cancer and almost one-quarter have two or more of these chronic conditions.

These COVID risks are compounded by where we live. One in eight Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples live in overcrowded housing, which means COVID-19 could spread rapidly through our communities. And overcrowding poses real challenges for isolating suspected cases. Poor health outcomes and overcrowding are worse in remote settings, making the Granites mine outbreak all the more dangerous.

Vaccination rates for the eligible Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population are well below that of the broader population. Credit:Chris Hopkins

We know the risks are real when we consider internationally how other First Nations groups have fared when facing the pandemic with similar health and living conditions. For example, the coronavirus is killing Native Americans at a faster rate than any other group in the United States.
Former Philippine president Benigno Aquino III, a scion of pro-democracy leaders who helped topple dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the 1980s, and a staunch campaigner in his own right against domestic corruption and Chinas expansive territorial claims, died on June 24 in a Manila hospital. He was 61.

The cause was renal failure as a result of diabetes, his family said in a statement.

Then newly inaugurated Philippine President Benigno Aquino III during his first day at the Malacanang presidential palace in Manila, Philippines, 2010. Credit:AP

Aquino, who was elected as the south-east Asian countrys 15th president in 2010, largely stayed out of the public eye after leaving office in 2016. (Philippine presidents are limited to a single six-year term.) He had spent the last years of his life in poor health, his family said.

Widely known by his nickname Noynoy, he was the son of two icons of Philippine democracy: Benigno Aquino Jr., a former senator who was assassinated upon his return from exile in 1983, and Corazon Aquino, a homemaker who rose to lead the opposition to the Marcos autocratic rule after her husbands death.
The woman accused of murdering Senior Constable David Masters has been arrested and charged by police.

Police arrested 33-year-old Skye Anne Wallis, from Caboolture, after she allegedly struck Constable Masters, 53, just after 3am on June 26 in a stolen car.

Skye Anne Wallis was arrested in relation to the hit-and-run death of Senior Constable David Masters on Saturday morning.

He died at the scene after being hit while trying to stop the suspected stolen car with road spikes along the Bruce Highway at Burpengary.

The car was a white Hyundai Kona that was originally hired from Budget Rent a Car in Ipswich, not returned and later reported stolen.
The Federal Court has called a month-long halt to war veteran Ben Roberts-Smiths defamation trial against The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald as coronavirus restrictions pose a barrier to witnesses travelling to and from Sydney amid a growing outbreak of cases.

Justice Anthony Besanko said on Tuesday he did not favour a stop-start approach to the trial, which entered its fourth week on Monday and is estimated to run for 10 weeks.

He said he wanted to hear as much of it as possible without adjournments so a month-long pause was appropriate, rather than attempting to hear evidence in coming weeks from a handful of witness via audiovisual link from Afghanistan before halting the trial for a second time.

Ben Roberts-Smith outside the Federal Court in Sydney on Monday. The parties did not appear in court in person on Tuesday. Credit:Peter Rae

The COVID-19 virus has flared in NSW and that has resulted in major restrictions being imposed in this state and, significantly for present purposes, bans on return or self-isolation requirements for those travelling to NSW and then seeking to return to their home states or regions, Justice Besanko said in Sydney.
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On June 28, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced that under-40s could now request AstraZeneca from their GP, with the Commonwealth agreeing to indemnify doctors who administer the vaccine.

If they are willing to go and speak to their doctor and have access to the AstraZeneca vaccine, they can do so, he said.

One point of confusion was that it was already possible for under 40s, who were eligible, to ask for an AstraZeneca vaccine from their GP  it was never banned, but the indemnity may give doctors more confidence to administer it.

But I thought you shouldnt have AstraZeneca if you were under 60?

The advice from the independent Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI)  that Pfizer is the preferred vaccine for under-60s due to an increased risk of rare clotting events linked to the AstraZeneca jab  remains unchanged.

Isnt this confusing?

Yes. The president of the Australian Medical Association, Omar Khorshid, says he was surprised by the announcement and does not endorse people under 40 receiving the AstraZeneca vaccine. Dr Khorshid urged people under 60 to continue to heed the advice of the ATAGI, the nations immunisation experts, and wait for the Pfizer vaccine if they could.
A convicted terrorist serving 42 years in prison for an attack on her Melbourne homestay host is facing more time behind bars after pleading guilty to stabbing a fellow inmate while in custody and being a member of Islamic State.

Bangladeshi woman Momena Shoma, 28, fronted Melbourne Magistrates Court on Tuesday after being charged with engaging in a terrorist act and being a member of a known terrorist organisation.

Momena Shoma in 2019. Credit:Eddie Jim

Court documents released to The Age show the jailhouse attack occurred at Dame Phyllis Frost Centre on October 30, 2020. The documents also reveal officers from the Joint Counter Terrorism Team charged Shoma late last year with being a member of Islamic State between about July 4, 2019, and the day of her latest attack. During this time she was behind bars.

I would like to plead guilty, Shoma said.
A housewife found guilty of keeping a woman as a slave in her Melbourne home has been described in court as a beacon of her community who instilled into her children the need to help others.

Kumuthini Kannan and husband Kandasamy Kannan were in April found guilty of keeping a woman as a slave in their Mount Waverley home for eight years, after their Supreme Court trial heard the Tamil Indian woman was on call around the clock as a domestic servant and to care for the couples three children, even as her health declined.

Kandasamy (left) and Kumuthini Kannan try to conceal their faces outside court in 2017. Credit:Jason South

Authorities only uncovered the offending when the woman, then in her 50s, was found by ambulance paramedics lying in a pool of her own urine inside the home on July 30, 2015, emaciated, weighing 40 kilograms and suffering from a urinary infection and undiagnosed diabetes. Mrs Kannan had raised the alarm.

The woman, who cannot be identified, later claimed Mrs Kannan physically and verbally abused her, including pouring boiling liquids on her, throwing hot tea in her face, hitting her with a frozen chicken and pushing her down stairs.
Dr Wilcox said about another 40 people aged under 40 had booked in to get the AstraZeneca vaccine on Wednesday so far. He said the clinic had seen an enthusiastic response from many younger people, who were motivated to get fully vaccinated against COVID-19 as soon as possible. All of them had a discussion with a GP about the side effects of the AstraZeneca vaccine, including extremely rare blood clots. All [are] very well informed of the rare instances of significant side effects, Dr Wilcox said. Dandenong Ranges resident Dave Bushell, 38, was among dozens of people who wrote to The Age saying they were keen to get the jab as soon as possible.

Both my parents are [vaccinated], my sister is a frontline health worker, my partner is eligible for [the] Pfizer [vaccine], so Im basically sitting around waiting to become eligible for a vaccine, he said. Loading Mr Bushell said COVID-19 vaccinations were the only way through the pandemic, and he didnt think hotel quarantine was going to be sustainable anymore. He was frustrated by there being no sense of when under-40s would be eligible to get vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine, although he appreciated the vaccine rollout was a massive logistical situation. [Ive been telling my family that] meanwhile, you see a bunch of ... sort of older people standing around going: Well, is this the right vaccine for me? Well, maybe Ill shop around, maybe Ill wait.

[Youre like], Ill take it, send it this way ... and then two days later after I was ... moaning to my family about it, they made the decision to do it, which I think is the correct one. Another resident of Victoria, Divya, said she was elated when she heard the news she could get an AstraZeneca vaccination. She asked The Age not to report her surname because of the polarising nature of the debate around COVID-19 vaccinations. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video The 27-year-old had by Tuesday booked in with her GP to give her consent to receive the AstraZeneca vaccine. She said she was aware of the risks associated with it, and had full faith in medical experts whod been working tirelessly to make sure it was safe.

Theres never a zero risk in anything that we do, and that includes leaving the house every day to go for a walk or getting in your car, she said. I am happy to be a part of the movement to see a more vaccinated Australia. Some Victorians, though, didnt want to get the AstraZeneca vaccine, preferring to wait until they were eligible for the Pfizer vaccine. John, who wrote in, said it seemed like GPs would be the only ones benefiting from all Australians being able to access the AstraZeneca vaccine. He said: Why would I get this vaccine if Ive just been told that you should only get it if youre over 60?

Why not try to get more doses of Pfizer instead? Loading Others werent sure whether they should get the AstraZeneca vaccine, like 37-year-old Lachlan Zubevich, who lives in Coburg. Basically, I have always been very concerned about the AstraZeneca, so when they did say that they werent going to recommend it for people under 50, I actually felt quite relieved, Mr Zubevich sad. I thought, OK, good, I dont have to take the risk, which I know is not a very big risk, but I do have some issues [with] my heart valve.
The lockdowns of Sydney, Perth and Brisbane are likely to cost the economy $2.5 billion with businesses demanding the federal government dramatically ramp up vaccine deliveries or face the demise of countless mum-and-dad operations across the country.

Business Council of Australia chief executive officer Jennifer Westacott said the cumulative impact of ongoing shutdowns or border closures was being particularly felt by smaller operations.

Sydney CBD in lockdown ... economists estimate the lockdowns across Sydney, Perth and Brisbane will cost the economy $2.5 billion. Credit:Peter Rae

Sydney went into a 14-day lockdown last week while Perth is one day into a four-day lockdown. The Queensland government on Tuesday ordered a snap three-day lockdown that will cover the states south-east, Townsville and Magnetic Island.

Ms Westacott said businesses needed certainty when it came to employing staff, setting opening hours and even buying stock and equipment. The continuing use of lockdowns was delivering a cumulative blow to the small businesses that would force many to close.
The heat wave across western Canada has much of a country known for its sweater weather sweating.

One man checked into an air-conditioned five-star hotel, after the five fans aimed at his bed at home and the seventh cold shower failed to bring relief.

Toronto: Vancouverites were frying eggs on pans placed on their terraces.

Canada broke a national heat record on Sunday when the temperature in a small town in British Columbia reached almost 116 degrees Fahrenheit (46.6 Celsius), breaking an 84-year-old record by nearly 3 degrees, with dangerously hot weather expected to continue for several more days.

This is a complete shock to a Canadian  this feels like Las Vegas or India  not Vancouver, said Chris Johnson, a criminal lawyer who was heading to an air-conditioned hotel room as temperatures inside his home reached 32.

Tying any weather event to climate change requires extensive attribution analysis, but heat waves around the world are growing more frequent, longer-lasting and more dangerous, experts say. David Phillips, senior climatologist at Environment Canada, a government agency, said the early timing of this one, its intensity and its duration, could all be attributable to rising global temperatures.

Its our grandparents heat waves, but its different now because of the human component, Phillips said, referring to climate change, and the well-documented effects of human behaviour like carbon emissions on the planet.

Phillips pointed to the public health dangers of having heat extend overnight. We know that nighttime temperatures, thats where people die from heat waves, he said.
Singapore: A couple of needles in the arm may not be everyones idea of an ideal getaway but Indonesia has unveiled a vaccination holiday scheme that it hopes will draw more tourists back to Bali.

While Indonesia has just endured its worst week of the pandemic in terms of new and active cases of the virus, Bali has been pressing ahead with plans for the province to begin welcoming foreigners again by the end of July.

The beaches of Bali have been emptied by the pandemic. Credit:Getty

President Joko Widodo, known as Jokowi, must still sign off on Balis re-opening and there are indications it may be delayed, with Tourism Minister Sandiaga Uno telling Reuters that Indonesia will be waiting for the situation to be more conducive.

But after prioritising vaccination on the island in a bid to re-boot its tourism-reliant economy, Jokos government is now set to use the lure of a jab as another reason for people to return there.
New York: Moderna said its vaccine has produced protective antibodies against the Delta variant of coronavirus spreading rapidly in many parts of the world.

Company researchers tested blood samples from eight people for antibodies against versions of the spike protein from different coronavirus variants, including Delta, which emerged in India. The vaccine produced neutralising titers against all variants tested, the company said in a statement. The results were released on the pre-print server bioRxiv, a repository where initial, not peer-reviewed studies are published.

A patient receives a Moderna COVID-19 vaccine shot in Reading, England. Credit:AP

The protective proteins are called neutralising antibodies because theyre capable of preventing the virus from entering cells. Compared to the quantity of antibodies produced against the main version of the virus, neutralising antibody levels against the Delta variant were reduced by 2.1-fold.

Antibody levels were reduced by 4.2-fold against the Eta strain first found Nigeria, and by eight-fold against a new variant identified in Angola called A.VOI.V2.
Wellington: The New Zealand government said it will resume quarantine-free travel with parts of Australia next week as it lifted COVID-19 curbs in Wellington on Tuesday.

New Zealand halted its travel bubble with Australia on Saturday as an outbreak of the highly contagious Delta variant took root in Sydney and several other Australian cities.

Minister for COVID-19 Response Chris Hipkins announced New Zealand is preparing to reopen the travel bubble with Australia. Credit:Getty Images

COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said quarantine-free travel will resume with Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory from Monday, although authorities would continue to review the situation until then.

The cabinet agreed that partially lifting the pause was the appropriate course of action, Hipkins told a news conferene. said. The health advice is that the spread of COVID-19 in these parts of Australia has been contained at this point, he said.
PHILIPSBURG:--- The UD party is not amused by the latest stunt by the presidium of parliament, so-called to improve the viewing quality of meetings of parliament.

By removing the live stream from the Facebook platform, the president of Parliament is taking away the opportunity for the population at large to interact in real-time with the members of parliament and with one another.

"This type of censorship is simply undemocratic and infringes on the fundamental right of freedom of expression."

The ire of the UD is the result of a decision communicated to members of parliament by letter dated June 25, 2021, informing them of a change to the broadcasting of Parliamentary meetings.

"Was this abrupt change necessary?," questioned the UD. "Is the continuous outcry of the public on the actions of this Coalition Government simply too much to handle?"

The latest action by this government flies in the face of the government self-professed mantra of openness and transparency. Rather, this is another affront to the people we serve. 
Meridian Mining Continues To Deliver At Cabacal With More Strong Results

Posted by Publisher Internet

Although metal prices and especially the gold price took a breather, Meridian Mining (TSXV: MNO) remains unfazed, and keeps providing investors with solid drill results from their Cabacal VMS Copper-Gold Project in Brazil , at or even above expectations of management. Their ongoing 10,000m field program of diamond drilling returned assays from hole CD-010 to CD-019 in the last few weeks, and as we are almost already getting used to it, almost all holes contained economic mineralization. Highlights were CD-013 (116.5m @ 0.7% CuEq), CD-017 (46m @ 1.0% CuEq), and CD-019 (110.7m @ 0.6% CuEq), representing the thickest intervals to date, and all starting close to surface which means a low overall strip ratio for future open pit potential becomes more and more likely, something pleasing management for sure.

All pictures are company material, unless stated otherwise.

All currencies are in US Dollars, unless stated otherwise.

The company is targeting all three zones with the ongoing drill program, being the Eastern Copper Zone (ECZ), Central Copper Zone (CCZ) and Southern Copper Zone (SCZ), using a combination of twin and infill drilling. Over 4,800m of drilling has been completed to date, meaning almost half of the program is done.

Here is the most recent map with drill collars to date, zoomed in a bit and with drill holes CD-010 to CD-019 circled orange for more clarity: (see attachement)

As can be seen, after the company targeted the more outer regions of the Southern and Eastern Copper Zone with drill holes CD-001 to CD-009, the last two batches with holes CD-010 to CD-019 focused more on zones within the historic workings around the Central Copper Zone. When looking at the map as a non-geologist, it seems as if the sequence of drill holes appears to be somewhat random instead of systematically exploring zones, something I noticed earlier, so I wondered what the overall strategy behind this particular pattern is, if they want to make sure they have some very good twin holes with every batch, mixed with more high risk infill drill holes which could disappoint of course, or following up on local geological concepts, or mixing some exploration of outer limits with infill each time in order to make efficiency for scale and grade as high as possible, or something else. CEO Adrian McArthur answered that the selection of sites drilled represent a combination of twin and infill holes; the twin holes need to span the range of holes drilled over the course of the project history. the pattern is different to what we would see in a newly discovered body of mineralization which would undergo systematic grid spacings. The program also targets certain high-grade Copper zones that were previously unmined, to both the near surface and extensions to the South East and North West.

Since drilling within historic underground workings could pose problems when the drill bit hits underground voids, as drill bits could be lost and holes could have to be terminated then, I wondered if management already encountered more these situations besides the several cases reported like at hole CD-012, and if not, how they manage to work around this, as I am not sure how accurate their underground maps/modelling are of the current situation. McArthur answered the position of the underground room and pillar workings can be seen in plan view in the diagram and is digitized from end-of-mine records. Workings do present a challenge in drilling. When we anticipate voids, we drill vertical holes with larger diameter HQ reducing to NQ diameter, which in good conditions allow us to cross a couple of levels.

It was interesting to read about the deployment of their new deep penetrating EM geophysical equipment, with surveys in progress over VTEM conductors at the Cabacal West target, followed by surveys at the Cabacal South conductors, in an attempt to expand the footprint of the known mineralization, well beyond the limits of current underground workings. As per the news release of June 15th:

?Extensions to the mineral system will be surveyed by a combination of EM and IP geophysical surveys in the coming weeks. The Company?s own modern Induced Polarization equipment is in the field targeting the disseminated and more brecciated styles of Cu-Au mineralization; supplementing the Company?s EM equipment that is now surveying and targeting more massive sulphide targets; with first results by late June. First IP and EM results are expected to extend mineralisation out from the mine?s limits and to vector near mine targets, starting with the down plunge Cabacal West VTEM plates then proceeding to the Eastern-Copper-Zone (?ECZ?) ~1000m south-eastern extension. Once the mine and near-mine upside is defined the geophysics will expand along the 16.0km long Mine Corridor zone.? ?

The location of the VTEM conductors at the Cabacal West target are not indicated at the map provided in the news release, so I asked McArthur to indicate them in the map below:?(see attachement)

On a sidenote: a recent soil sampling program confirmed lots of promising exploration potential to the north-west, for about a 1,000m additional meters and management currently has one rig allocated to extending the drill program over this corridor.

The collection of white stars at the right (and south-east of the Eastern Copper Zone) indicate the VTEM anomalies which will be followed upon after the Cabacal West VTEM plates are surveyed. The narrow VTEM plates located to the south are secondary targets, and will be surveyed together with the VTEM plates at the Cabacal North West target. These VTEM targets are located much deeper than current drilling and historic workings, as can be seen here in this schematic section, the VTEM targets being visualized by reddish rectangles, extending to about 600m depth:?(see attachement)

As these targets are located much deeper, I wondered how this could be related to the geology of the existing VMS mineralization of Cabacal, and what McArthur hopes/expects to find here. With the current open pit concept as a starter pit, any nearby underground mineralization certainly doesn?t need to be the grade a standalone underground operation would need. He stated that: ?The company will be targeting the Cabacal West conductors for massive copper sulphide mineralization. The conductors are distributed along the ?mine corridor? position ? the stratigraphic horizon which hosts the Cabacal Cu-Au-Ag deposit and the St Helena Zn-Pb-Ag-Au deposit. The stratigraphic horizon is tilted and thus has potential for discovery of deposits down-dip. The history in analogue VMS camps is that some deposits are discovered at surface, whilst others are present at depth. The belt has a high degree of deformation ? with the lower contact of the Cabacal mineralization pile being a thrust fault. Targets such as Cabacal West could potentially represent structural offsets to the Cabacal system itself, or the various VTEM targets may be related to separate hydrothermal centres.?

So far for the more general concepts of mineralization and exploration, let?s have a look at the recent drill results. The absolute highlights of the latest two batches are the following three assays:

CD-013: 116.5m @ 0.7% CuEq of cumulative Cu-Au-Ag mineralisation from 8.0m; including:

 94.0m @ 0.7% CuEq from 8.0m; including 8.5m @ 1.9% CuEq from 54.5m;

 22.5m @ 0.7% CuEq from 110.5m; including 5.6m @ 1.6% CuEq from 119.2m ;

CD-017: 0m @ 1.0% CuEq from 29.0m, including:

 9.6m @ 3.3% CuEq from 56.0m;

CD-019: 110.7m @ 0.6% CuEq from 12.0m, including:

 62.5m @ 0.6% CuEq from 12.0m, including:

???  2.5m @ 3.1% CuEq from 20.7m;

???  2.2m @ 3.5% CuEq from 53.5m;

 17.2m @ 1.2% CuEq from 130m;

I especially like the near surface character of these long intercepts, resulting in a hypothetical strip ratio of 0.07-0.63 : 1 at these particular collars, which of course isn?t the case at all mineralized intercepts, as the envelope gently dips to the south-west: (see attachement)

Notwithstanding this, an average strip ratio of close to 1-1.5 : 1 seems to be achievable here, just like an average CuEq grade of about 1%, and this could make this deposit extremely economic. For reference, an open pit gold deposit of 1g/t and a strip ratio of 4:1 is already economic (after-tax IRR >20%) at US$1300/oz Au, with a gross metal value of just over US$40/t. At a current copper price of US$4.28/lb Cu, the gross metal value of Cabacal would be US$94/t at a 1% CuEq grade, so at a much lower estimated strip ratio than 4 : 1 the economics will certainly be impressive. It is a bit early to go after economics yet, but rest assured, as soon as management seems to get a grip on the size potential, I will set up a peer comparison and derive hypothetical economics for Cabacal from there.

Back to the drill results. Here are the tables with the complete results, with the highlights in green:?(see attachement)

Holes CD-010 and CD-011 are assay results from the north-western limit of the CCZ mined area, highlighted the presence of shallow layers of open Cu-Au mineralisation providing future drill targets extending to the northwest of the historical workings. As CD-011 didn?t return much economic mineralization, it might indicate the northern end of the Central Copper Zone. CD-010 is much more interesting, with all the stacked layers, solid grade and near surface it could provide the potential for extension along strike.

CD-012 was designed to twin a zone of Cu-Au mineralisation intercepted by BP Mineral?s DDH JUSPD076 that returned (pre-mining) 42.2m @ 0.9% Cu, 0.6g/t Au & 3.2 g/t Ag from 59.8m. The CD-012 intercept of the same zone returned a favourable 40.0m @ 0.6% Cu, 0.6g/t Au, 2.2g/t Ag, 0.1% Zn from 59.8m. This excludes the mineralised zone within the 4.0m mining void that was intercepted by CD-012. According to McArthur, accounting for the mining void, the hole shows a good correlation with the historical results.

CD-013 targeted the Eastern Copper Zone and intercepted extensive mineralisation starting at 8.0m. The hole confirms that thick high-grade shallow mineralization remains after the selective but short-lived mining in the 1980?s and 1990?s by BP Minerals and Rio Tinto. The results highlight the potential of the ECZ, for infill resource definition drilling. As CD-013 is located at the edge of historic workings, and starting close to surface, with the mineralized envelope trending upwards to surface, I wondered what the results of historic hole JUSPD150 were:?(see attachement)

Continuing at this train of thought, I wondered if management isn?t designing a fence, off-setting the edge of the historic workings by for example 50 to 100m. I have drawn a light blue line in the above map with the drill collars as an example for such a fence, consisting of say 3-4 holes. McArthur answered the Eastern Copper Zone corridor will be targeted by fences of drill holes as part of the ongoing program. The corridor projecting through the decline position is comparatively sparsely drilled  being shallower and more copper-dominant was not a significant focus in the BP/RTZ programs; so there is a need to infill this as part of the resource definition program.?

CD-014 was designed to more or less twin JUSPD048 that returned 20.1m @ 0.3% Cu, 0.0g/t Au from 22m, 17.6m @ 0.3% Cu, 0.1g/t Au from 47.4m; 40.9m @ 0.7% Cu, 0.6g/t Au from 68.4m). CD-014 returned comparable results to the upper copper zones of JUSPD048, of 26.4m @ 0.3% Cu, 0.2g/t Au, 0.4g/t Ag from 20m, and 20.5m @ 0.6% Cu, 0.3g/t Au, 0.4g/t Ag from 54m). CD-014 struck a void from 75.1m-78.5m; and was terminated without fully traversing the lower results of JUSPD048. As the void was located above the lower results of JUSPD048, I wondered what those lower results were. McArthur stated the hole terminated without transecting the full interval of 40.9m @ 0.7% Cu, 0.6g/t Au from 68.4m noted above in JUSPD048. Below the void, we would have anticipated ~ 30.3m @ 0.8% Cu, 0.7g/t Au as part of this historical JUSPD048 intersection

CD-015 was designed to twin JUSPD068, which historically returned 42.7m @ 0.7% Cu, 0.5% Au from 43.8m in the CCZ. CD015 traversed a mining void between 52.7 ? 56.4m, and assays returned 20m @ 0.2% Cu, 0.1g;t Au, 0.7g/t Ag from 12m, and an aggregate 46m @ 0.4% Cu, 0.6g/t Au, 1.2g/t Ag from 37m, comprising 15.7m @ 0.4% Cu, 0.1g/t Au, 0.7g/t Ag 37m above the void, and 30.3m @ 0.5% Cu, 0.9g/t Au, 1.5g/t Ag from 56.4m. The lower zone included higher grade intervals of 3.8m @ 1.3% Cu, 0.4g/t Au, 1.7g/t Ag from 43m, and 6.1m @ 0.4% Cu, 1.0g/t Au, 1.0g/t Ag from 67.2m, 4.5m @ 1% Cu, 3.3g/t Au, 4.6g/t Ag from 77.9m. The hole terminated mineralization due to the drilling conditions (the holes was not advancing in mildly fractured ground; not assisted by due in the rod string from the void above].

CD-016 was designed to twin JUSPD280 , which historically returned 8.7m @ 0.3% Cu, 0.4g/t Au from 29m, 11.7m @ 1.3% Cu , 0.9g/t Au from 50m, and the lower limit of sampling terminating in disseminated copper mineralization at 75.2m. CD-016 traversed a mining void between 85.2  86.2m but the hole terminated at 87.1m in fractured ground marginal to the void, and assays returned results included 14m @ 0.3% Cu, 0.7g/t Ag from 20m, 26m @ 0.3% Cu, 0.3g/t Au, 1.4g/t Ag from 42.5m.

CD-017 was designed to twin JUSPD265 that returned 23.2m @ 0.8% Cu, 0.4g/t Au, 3.8g/t Ag from 44.6m (upper limit of sampling) being collared 4.6m from the historical collar. CD-017 returned 46m @ 0.8% Cu, 0.3g/t Au, 3.4g/t Ag from 29.0m, including a higher grade interval of 9.6m @ 2.6% Cu, 0.9g/t Au, 12.2g/t Ag, 0.1% Zn from 56m. McArthur told me the positive difference between the two intersections was simply that the JUSPD265 had not been fully sampled, reflecting the historic lack of interest in the broader disseminated mineralization halo ? requiring careful scrutiny of the database to identify other areas where mineralization may be under-represented as we move towards an initial resource calculation.

CD-018 was designed to twin BP?s JUSPD301 that returned 29.0m @ 1.8% Cu, 1.0g/t Au, 8.8g/t Ag from 36.0m. CD-018 returned 14.2m @ 0.3% Cu, 0.1g/t Au, 0.8g/t Ag from 9m (an interval incompletely sampled in JUSPD301, and 12.4m @ 0.3% Cu, 0.3g/t Au, 0.7g/t Ag from 33m. CD-018 encountered a void from 45.4 to 52.6m and was terminated without replicating the lower results of JUSPD301. This was one of the few disappointing results to me, considering the difference. McArthur explained that the higher grade sector of JUSPD301 was located in the lower sector of the drill hole, with the higher grade stringer and breccia sulphide mineralization located in the lowest parts of the pile. The rock mass in some cases around historical mining cavities can be fractured by the original blasting, ?and inevitably some holes will not be able to cross the full sequence. We will have sufficient holes in the full program nonetheless to characterize the sequence.?

CD-019 was designed to infill the ECZ and its aggregated Cu-Au mineralisation returned 110.7m @ 0.64% CuEq of disseminated, stringer and breccia sulphide mineralization. Comprised of 62.5m @ 0.5% Cu, 0.1g/t Au, 0.8g/t Ag from 12m, 31.0m @ 0.2% Cu, 0.3g/t Au, 0.1g/t Ag from 84.0m, and 17.2m @ 0.8% Cu, 0.4g/t Au, 3.9g/t Ag from 130m. CD-019 terminated ~72m SE of CD-013 at a depth of 174.1m and results are consistent down dip extension to the CD-013 results. As CD-019 resembles the very long mineralized intercept of CD-013, it is clear to me these two could be connected, and continue along strike of the nearby historic workings, but also parallel to these workings as discussed earlier. Management sees scope for some additional infill in this and other areas of the Eastern Copper Zone, which is less densely drilled than other sectors of the deposit.

The treasury holds approximately C$5M nowadays, also due to ongoing warrant conversions. On June 3th, the company reported C$2.73M from warrant conversions, and according to Executive Chairman Gilbert Clark, the vast majority of these exercised?warrants are in safe hands.

As a reminder, the current drilling is part of the Cabacal Central 60-70 hole drill program for 8,000m, of which 30 holes are twinning holes, in order to verify the 21.7Mt historic resource estimate. Another 2,000m is also budgeted to confirm the already defined near-mine and regional targets of the VMS camp. A third drill rig is operational now, increasing batch sizes but also turnaround times for assaying.

Conclusion

Drilling at Cabacal keeps returning pretty economical results, now also with local intercepts much longer than anticipated (CD-013 and CD-019). It seems the infill program is proceeding as planned, and the 21.7Mt historic estimate is becoming a reality to say the least. With the current results, I don?t rule out a 25-30Mt resource, and I am looking forward to the potential new targets the VTEM surveys might generate. And these targets are only close by, there are also large VTEM conductive plates further away, indicating even more potential. It is still early days at Cabacal for Meridian, but already very impressive. And again, I?m looking forward to start estimating economics, when management has developed a grip on eventual size of this already substantial VMS deposit.

I hope you will find this article interesting and useful and will have further interest in my upcoming articles on mining. To never miss a thing, please subscribe to my free newsletter, in order to get an email notice of my new articles soon after they are published.

Disclaimer:

The author is not a registered investment advisor and has a long position in this stock. Meridian Mining is a sponsoring company. All facts are to be checked by the reader. For more information go to www.meridianmining.co and read the company?s profile and?official documents on?www.sedar.com, also?for important risk disclosures. This article is provided for information purposes only and is not intended to be investment advice of any kind, and all readers are encouraged to do their own due diligence and talk to their own licensed investment advisors prior to making any investment decisions.
Lucille Morgan, 98, of Science Hill, passed away Wednesday, June 30, 2021 at the Hospice of Lake Cumberland. A Funeral Service will be held 2:00 PM Saturday, July 3, 2021 at the Chapel of Morris & Hislope Funeral Home. Burial will be in Science Hill Cemetery. Visitation will be after 12:
COVID-19 impacted nearly every industry virtually overnight, and the security sector was no different. It challenged us, as a society, to rethink how we view security entirely, and expanded the scope of security from protecting physical and digital assets to promoting safer, healthier, and more efficient environments in every context.

Now, as we progress through 2021, keeping people safe has become even more of a priority as workers begin heading back to the office. Businesses are evaluating how they can prioritise the security, health, and safety of their people as they invite employees, visitors, and customers back inside.

Technology is the solution

The solution to this problem, as it is to many others, is technology. Innovations in tech can help businesses address threats and stay ahead of the curve in a world in which weve come to expect a higher standard of safety. The use of technologies such as touchless doors, workflow management systems and health screenings will continue to be essential in the post-COVID workplace.

Theres also contact tracing, environmental monitoring and advanced visitor management, which are all useful tools that can be implemented to help protect and reassure employees ahead of their return to work. With these, and even more advances in development, technology will continue to be central to security. This industry isnt just locks on doors  its about integrated and innovative tech.Essentially, we need tech-savvy people in every part of the business



Of course, these new security solutions need tech talent in the form of innovators, engineers, installers and many more roles. Essentially, we need tech-savvy people in every part of the business. They are the ones developing new, intelligent solutions and theyre also the ones out in the field, making our work, home, and public environments safer, healthier, and more efficient.

For us, the tech transformation has already happened, but its an ongoing challenge, across our industry and others, to find tech talent at the rate of innovation. Once you start a tech transformation, the need for talent snowballs.

The tech talent shortfall is real, and its not going away soon

The problem is, while the demand for security tech has never been greater, tech talent is increasingly scarce. This was the case even before COVID-19. Weve known for a while now that the talent population is shrinking. Theres clear evidence to back this up too: There are millions of jobs around the world that remain unfilled because people lack the relevant skills, and a lot of these jobs are in tech. In the latest CIO Survey by KPMG, more than half surveyed said that hiring challenges were harming the industry. The tech talent shortage is real, and theres no imminent solution in sight.As remote work became commonplace, industries were suddenly forced to compete for tech talent with top firms worldwide



COVID-19 has only widened the talent gap. Many companies had to rapidly accelerate their digitisation efforts to function during lockdown, so the tech talent on the market was quickly snapped up. Additionally, while waves of furloughs and layoffs flooded the market with skilled talent throughout 2020, this led to a unique challenge: fierce competition across the globe to attract talent that was, in many cases, no longer bound by their geographic location. So, as remote work became commonplace and opened new doors for potential job candidates, it also further exacerbated the talent shortage for industries that were suddenly forced to compete for tech talent with top firms worldwide.

When businesses cant find the skills they need readily available, the only option is to train existing staff and new, under-skilled recruits. At a time when we couldnt meet face-to-face, this became much more difficult. Companies had to work out how to train, recruit, and onboard employees remotely and many simply didnt have a process in place for this. As a result, the tech talent shortfall continued to grow.

Mapping the solution to the tech talent shortage

So, what can we do? Ultimately, the private sector needs to become actively involved in developing solutions to address the problem. There are many ways of doing this too. First, businesses can create more entry-level positions that offer employees the opportunity to gain the hands-on training and education needed to grow. Implementing a high-quality training programme is critical to employees professional development, especially in remote environments that dont offer the same amount of face-to-face experience that often helps during the onboarding process.At STANLEY Security, we have launched international scholarships to provide opportunities for young people to develop the vocational and trade skills

Second, partnering with schools, associations, and governments to develop scholarship and apprenticeship programs is key to creating a sustainable pipeline of talent. Its not just about finding talent, but creating it too. At STANLEY Security, we have launched international scholarships to provide opportunities for young people to develop the vocational and trade skills needed both today as well as in the future.

Our apprenticeship programme also offers invaluable opportunities for technicians to collaborate with mentors and gain hands-on experience with security technologies. Both of these programs are key initiatives STANLEY Security has implemented to help address the talent shortage.

Then theres upskilling of your current workforce. We found that plenty of our existing employees in non-tech roles were eager to learn new tech skills, meaning they could be retrained while continuing to work, taking on more of a tech role as we nurtured their skills. This has been invaluable in enabling our own tech transformation and has helped get us to where we are today. Theres certainly a tech talent shortage, but theres no shortage of people who are open to training opportunities if they have the chance. Its up to businesses now to provide that training, for the benefit of the company and its employees.



Like many others, the security industry has rapidly evolved, and weve seen new challenges and opportunities arise. Technology  and the talent that develops and implements it  is our best resource to help make environments safer, healthier, and more efficient in a post-pandemic world.

Demand for tech talent isnt going to go away, nor can we ignore the problem. As businesses, we need to face the challenge head on and quickly work to find solutions. That could mean creating more entry-level positions, offering scholarships and apprenticeships, and upskilling our most valuable asset  our people. At the end of the day, we need to empower people with the skills, knowledge, and experience they need to design solutions that can help us face the challenges of the future.
ASSA ABLOY Opening Solutions embraces BIM to smooth specification and installation of door security solutions

BIM (building information modeling) provides a process for creating and managing information during the building lifecycle and beyond. BIM is often equated with 3D modeling of construction projects, but the visual component is just part of the value of BIM. Additional data, such as specifications and other documentation, is also part of the process, underlying the visual aspects, helping to drive decision making and providing immediate access to detailed information about all facets of the building process. Incorporating BIM systems For the last six years, ASSA ABLOY Opening Solutions has worked with specification writers and architects in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) to make it easy to incorporate ASSA ABLOY Opening Solutions doors, hardware, and security solutions into BIM systems. Everyone on a project can work together in the interactive and information-rich BIM environment. BIM tools are also used by contractors, distributors, facility owners, and security consultants. BIM software BIM information relating to doors, hardware, and security solutions is available in the cloud BIM information relating to doors, hardware, and security solutions is available in the cloud with the companys Openings Studio BIM software. This improves the process of door scheduling and visualisation and enables customers to focus on the design, installation, and management of openings. If you have up-to-date information inside the BIM model, you can reduce mistakes and misunderstanding in the building industry, says Marc Ameryckx, ASSA ABLOY Opening Solutions BIM Manager for the EMEIA region. It helps to eliminate mistakes before they happen or as early as possible in the building process. The earlier, the less it costs. We provide data as soon as possible in the process. (ASSA ABLOY Opening Solutions also has comparable systems available in other regions of the global company.) Centralised data in BIM 3D model Expanding the data available in BIM provides additional value compared to merely providing BIM objects that can be incorporated into a BIM 3D model. The combination of BIM modeling and the underlying specifications boosts the quality of the project and its key to success, says Marc Ameryckx. Even after the building is complete, the BIM model is still valuable, providing a repository of as-built information that can be used by building managers and security professionals tasked with operating and maintaining the building. For example, if a lock needs to be replaced, retrofitting is simpler because all the information about the lock and existing installation is available in a centralised data file. Revit and ArchiCAD A widely used BIM software is Revit from Autodesk, a program that brings architecture, engineering, and construction disciplines into a unified modeling environment to drive more efficient and cost-effective projects. Another BIM software program is ArchiCAD, developed by the Hungarian company Graphisoft. Openings Studio added a plugin for ArchiCAD this year, in addition to Revit. Tailor-made information security solutions We provide tailor-made information security solutions with various hardware on projects with more doors" We can provide tailor-made information security solutions with various hardware on projects with more doors, adding more flexibility, says Marc Ameryckx. Customers do not need to be the experts on the products because we provide expertise as part of our specifications. For example, how often do building mistakes occur because of a misunderstanding about the electrical needs of a lock and the wrong cabling is installed? The problem is especially expensive if it is discovered only after the walls are complete. Providing complete data about the electrical lock as part of a BIM system avoids the snafu. Another example is the specification of a deadbolt lock on a door that operates with an electric strike. The deadbolt undermines the intended operation of the electric strike and can interfere with escape routes in case of an emergency. The mistake becomes obvious in the BIM environment and can be rectified before consequences impact the real world. Data addition to Opening Suites site ASSA ABLOY Opening Solutions is continuously expanding the data it provides at the Opening Suites site, covering additional functionality and more components including the door, cabling, and electrical connections. Hardware sets are linked to specific doors in the BIM models, including all the details of various components, including article numbers, technical sheets, electrical requirements, all depending on customer expectations. Physical equipment includes QR codes that can be scanned by a smartphone to provide information on the door (A mobile app is in development). More details and more data Experienced BIM consultants work with the Openings Studio software on projects ranging from single doors to large buildings with many doors. Data will be more and more important, and there will be more data inside BIM models Adding more data and detail to the BIM process at the level of each door expands the usefulness of BIM, which has historically been focused on broader issues such as structural work and HVAC. Openings Studio provides all the data to integrate doors and security in the BIM process, says Marc Ameryckx. The higher level of detail may be a new aspect even for customers who already use BIM software. Data will be more and more important, and there will be more data inside BIM models, says Marc Ameryckx. In the future, the use of digital twins could expand the capabilities even further; for example, the software could simulate escape routes in case of fire. More data makes more things possible.
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spotlight

'Matson Strong' bill included in public safety budget agreement

Waseca Officer Arik Matson said during a January press conference in St. Paul that his case will undoubtedly not be the last time a perpetrator attempts to kill a peace officer. On Sunday, a bill authored by State Sen. John Jasinski (R-Faribault) and Rep. John Petersburg (R-Waseca) to increase the minimum penalties for first-degree assault of a peace officer was included in the Judicial and Public Safety budget agreement. (Senate Media Services) Petersburg Jasinski

Legislation to strengthen penalties for assaulting a police officer with a dangerous weapon, authored by a pair of local legislators and named for a Waseca police officer critically wounded in the line of duty, is included in the Legislatures comprehensive judiciary and public safety budget agreement.

The Matson Strong bill  inspired by and named after Waseca Officer Arik Matson who was shot while responding to a report of a suspicious person call in January 2020  will increase penalties for those convicted of first-degree assault with a dangerous weapon against a police officer, judge, prosecutor or correctional officer, upping the minimum sentence from 20 years to 25 years in prison.

I am thrilled that Matson Strong will soon officially become law, said Sen. John Jasinski (R-Faribault), who authored the Senate version of the bill now included in the proposed public safety budget. He and Rep. John Petersburg, R-Waseca, began working closely with Matson and his wife, Megan, as well as Waseca County Attorney Rachel Cornelius to champion the bill. We are so grateful for Officer Matson and all of Minnesotas police officers who put their lives on the line every day to keep us safe. This is a common-sense improvement that honors their service by showing the communitys strong support for police and the tough work they do every day.

Megan said its exciting for everyone who worked hard on the legislation, especially during these trying times with law enforcement officers. She added that she and Arik particularly appreciate the work of Cornelius, Jasinski, Petersburg, Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka and Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association Executive Director Brian Peters for never backing down, for never giving up and for being Matson Strong throughout these past months, pushing and fighting for this bill to get passed.

We couldnt have done it without this great team of leadership, of knowledge and respect for law enforcement in the state of Minnesota.

Cornelius also thanked the bills supporters who never gave up on this bill and are true champions of justice for law enforcement.

In addition to convictions for first-degree assault against a peace officer, convictions for use of deadly force and great bodily harm against an officer of judicial official will also increase.

While responding to a report of a suspicious person on Jan. 6, 2020, Matson was shot in the head and critically wounded by Tyler Robert Janovsky. Janovsky admitted he knowingly shot at the officer and at two others, Officer Andrew Harren and Sgt. Timothy Schroeder, that night.

In July 2020, Janovsky pleaded guilty to one count of attempted murder of Matson and one count of attempted murder of Harren and Schroeder, and was sentenced to 35 years in prison in November. State law requires Janovsky to serve at least two-thirds of his sentence with the remainder potentially being served on supervised release. Believing the sentence did not fit the crime, Cornelius, with the Matsons support, decided to change state law dictating that maximum sentencing.

Cornelius recalled the frustration with the current law she and the Matsons expressed during the press conference following Janovskys sentencing. The maximum sentence for shooting Matson was 20 years in prison.

The law did not account for if the officer almost dies, has to relearn how eat, talk and walk, and possibly never return to work, Cornelius said.

While it wont change the sentence for Janovsky, Cornelius said they are thankful Matson, Harren and Schroeder werent killed that night and are still here for their families, she said.

Officer Matson has a long journey ahead of him and we will continue to support him and his family every day, she said.

The bill originally targeted those who were convicted of attempted murder of a peace officer, but was reworded following negotiations to instead cover first-degree assault.

In addition to increasing the sentencing for attempted murder of an officer, the bill also would eliminate the two-thirds, one-third rule, which states that offenders could be eligible for supervised probation after serving two-thirds of their prison sentence. Instead, offenders would have to serve their full term of imprisonment as provided by law.

Petersburg said this bill, once signed into law, will bring a sense of justice and support for the community directly impacted by the violence against three of their officers.

Through a lot of hard work, the wishes of the community have been heard and addressed, Petersburg said. This will give the community a feeling of support for Arik and Megan and that we care a lot about what happened to them. We dont want this to happen any more times to anyone else.

Following Janovskys sentencing in November, Megan Matson said she there will never be a long enough sentence to make up for the time she and her daughters lost with her husband. Arik Matson was shot in early January, but his injuries kept him hospitalized and then in a rehabilitation facility for nine months.

Megan Matson also endorsed making penalties stricter depending on the severity of the injuries, and added that her husband will likely never be able to return to work as a result of the attempt on his life.

I feel like being able to have justice for the Thin Blue Line brothers and sisters and to be able to do something so in the future we can get them justice, she said. Thats our purpose.

Though there was a lot of negotiations and compromises that had to take place, specifically in the House, Petersburg said the changes secure their main objective: to increase potential sentences and the minimum length of time an offender must serve without the possibility of parole.

We got what we wanted, he said.

The judiciary and public safety budget is expected to be passed and signed into law this week, making Matson Strong bill changes effective Aug. 1.
News

spotlight

$2.5 million grant means Hwy.19/County Rd. 2 roundabout in 2025

The intersection at Hwy. 19 and County Road 2 has streetlights for extra lighting and a stop sign with flashing LED lights, but its history of vehicle crashes had the city advocating for a future roundabout. A Highway Safety Improvement Program grant for $2.5 million will make that possible for 2025. (News file photo/southernminn.com)

The city of Lonsdale has long advocated for a roundabout at the Hwy. 19/County Road 2 intersection, especially following a fatal vehicle crash there in January 2020.

Thanks to a $2.5 million Highway Safety Improvement Program (HSIP) grant, roundabout construction is expected to begin in 2025.

Since the project received grant funding, District 6 Engineer Heather Lukes said the next step for the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) is to work with county partners, the city of Lonsdale and local townships. Mark Trogstad-Isaacson will be the project manager for the design, overseeing and handling the technical portion of the project.

Mike Dougherty, MnDOT District 6 spokesperson for the roundabout project, said roundabouts are implemented first and foremost for safety purposes, and a high crash rate typically warrants the HSIP award.

The first thing is for safety and the other is for traffic flow, Dougherty said. You continue to drive through, and if youre not stopping and its not getting backed up, its better for the environment because vehicles arent stagnant at a stoplight or stop sign.

Between 2015-2019, Dougherty found there were 10 crashes (four injury crashes) at this location in addition to the fatal crash in 2020. Of these 11 total crashes, eight were right-angle, including the fatal crash.

Rice County implemented the short-term improvement recommendation of installing a flashing LED stop sign and advanced warning as an immediate response to the January 2020 fatality. The other MnDOT recommendation, rumble strips, were already in place.

I would say that intersection is in the top five for crashes in the past few years, Rice County Sheriff Troy Dunn told Lonsdale News Review in October 2020. Its unfortunate because many of these crashes are preventable if people are paying attention, if they would look to see if the driver on the cross ramp is stopping or not. The majority fail to yield if theyre pulling out from that stop sign going east or west.

The transition of vehicles moving from a 60 mile-per-hour zone into a 30-mile-per-hour zone also makes the crashes more serious, he said. Plus, with no stop signs on the north and south sides of the intersection, drivers need to watch out for traffic coming into Lonsdale on County Road 2.

Dougherty said when a community advocates for a roundabout, it shows the residents have an increased understanding how roundabouts function compared to years ago.

Some people are still hesitant about [roundabouts] but more have encountered them in recent years, Dougherty said. The more experience you have in driving through roundabouts you see how they function and people have less anxiety than maybe five years ago. They are proven to reduce crashes.

According to MnDOTs 2017 study of the traffic safety at roundabouts in Minnesota, which compared crash rates before and after construction, roundabouts contributed to an 80% decrease in fatal and serious injury crashes in the state.

Although side swipes may still occur in roundabouts, Dougherty said the speed reduction to 15 or 25 miles per hour has prevented major injuries and fatal crashes from happening.

The $2.5 million is a pretty strong estimate of what the roundabout project will cost, Doughtery said, and designers will try to tailor plans and the contract to get as close to that price point as possible.

There will be some additional costs for the project that are paid for by Rice County, but at this time the final costs havent been determined, Dougherty said. These are typically a very small percentage of the overall costs.

The contractor for the project will likely be awarded in January 2025, Dougherty said. In the meantime, designers will engage with those who use the intersection, review the right lane lines, and sort out nitty gritty details motorists may not notice.

For the outreach portion of the project, Dougherty said an eventual project website will give residents updates on construction timelines, plans, maps, and meeting dates. Website users can then sign up to receive emails or texts to alert them of information.

Just pay attention to the news, and well reach out to the Lonsdale community to get that information out there, Dougherty said. Thats the next big step.
News

spotlight

Area libraries encourage people to check out state parks

The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and local libraries have teamed up to offer free seven-day state park passes aimed to provide low-income households the opportunity to explore public lands. (Photo courtesy of MN DNR) Arielle Courtney, the partnership development Consultant in the DNRs Parks and Trails Division, said folks should check on their libraries website or by calling the library to make sure there are passes available. The picture is from Nerstrand Big Woods State Park in Nerstrand. (Photo courtesy of DNR) Unlike a normal library book where patrons have to return the item after a set period of time, the state park passes offered through the Minnesota State Parks Library Program automatically expire after seven days. Pass holders do not need to return the pass to the library, but are instead asked to recycle the pass. This picture was taken from Nerstrand Big Woods State Park in Nerstrand. (Photo courtesy of DNR) The falls at Minneopa State Park (Photo courtesy of DNR)

Libraries house a wealth of information and resources, from books and career training to databases and DVDs. More recently, some Minnesota libraries are offering patrons access to the great outdoors.

Area libraries have teamed up with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to participate in the Minnesota State Parks Library Program, a program which aims to reach new park users and expand access to Minnesotas 75 state parks and recreation areas.

State park passes are available to library patrons for a seven-day period, allowing households where park entrance fees are a barrier a chance to experience the natural resources of the state. With a library card, families can check out the seven-day pass and visit any state park within the state. Families can choose to plan a multiple state park road trip or decide to check out their local state park each day for a week.

The DNR originally piloted the program in 2017 and 2018, working with the St. Peter Library and the White Bear Lake Ramsey County Library. The pilot allowed the department to work out some of the programs operational pieces, according to Arielle Courtney, partnership development consultant in the DNRs Parks and Trails Division.

This time were doing it statewide, and were really focusing on communities where theres a financial need for providing free park passes, Courtney said. Where people might be more likely to live where they wouldnt be able to afford an entrance fee.

Courtney explains that the program is basically a grant program with an application process, which was launched in February of this year. Nearly 150 libraries applied to participate.

In order to be eligible, DNR staff viewed county census data, requiring libraries to be located in a county where the median household income was $58,000 or less or where 40% of the county residents are eligible for free or reduced lunch.

Due to our own DNR budget we couldnt grant passes to every library that applied, but we were able to give out to about half the libraries, Courtney said.

The program started on June 1 and will run through June 30, 2022. Depending on feedback and demand, the program may continue and expand to other libraries in the following years.

Owatonna Public Library and Blooming Prairie Library are among those libraries currently participating. The Owatonna library has two passes available and Blooming Prairie has one, but staff are anticipating a waiting list for available passes. To reserve a pass, search state parks pass in the Owatonna library catalog or call 507-444-2460 to place a request. Once a pass becomes available, library staff will call those on the waiting list. Residents will have 48 hours to check out the pass before it goes to the next person on the list, according to a recent library news release.

Expansion to other area libraries in the future is an exciting possibility, Courtney notes. Financial long-term planning would be necessary to expand and the focus would remain on providing the passes to areas with lower income communities.

I think theres definitely more need than we were able to provide this year and I think wed love to expand it if we can figure out a way to do it, Courtney said.

There are numerous benefits of spending time outside and in nature. Based on research and anecdotal evidence, Courtney explained that park entrance fees can be a financial barrier for some people. This program is an initiative to make public land more accessible to everyone, rather than just the people that can afford it.

The DNR is also trying to reach new park visitors and communities. Through park visitor surveys the department has noticed a lack of racial and ethnic diversity when it comes to people visiting state parks. Libraries are a way to reach new people and families which the DNR might not have reached otherwise, she noted.

Its a great partnership for us in order to spread our outreach opportunities to people who might not know about us, even if theyre not using the passes or if they dont have a financial need to use the pass. Its another opportunity for us to spread the word about state parks, Courtney said.

After a really difficult year with COVID-19, an increasing number of people are learning how important it is to get outside in nature for their mental and physical health, she said. Courtney and her team at the DNR wanted to provide another way for people to experience those nature-related benefits.

Folks who have checked out the passes can help further develop the program by completing a brief survey at http://mndnr.gov/LibraryPass. The DNR will be collecting feedback on where people went, what they liked about it and ways to improve their experience. Additionally, the department will complete monthly reports on how often the libraries are checking out the passes and analyzing the demand for the passes in order to plan for the future.

We anticipate that it will be a longer term program, we just have to kind of do some of this evaluation to make plans for how to maintain and monitor, she said.
If you have any questions about these provisions or any other issue the legislature is working on, feel free to contact me any time at sen.john.jasinski@senate.mn or 651-296-0284. It is a privilege to serve you!
2.1 - "N is for Night Terrors"

Written by Rockne S. OBannon

Directed by Nelson McCormick

Reviewed by KathM



Its back, its back, its finally back!

After nearly 18 months away, Evil returns to our screens in a new home, the online streaming service Paramount+. The delightfully unsettling drama hits the ground running, with possible murderer Kristen concerned that she might be possessed, a bloody encounter at the dentist's office, and a surprising request for an exorcism.

Orson LeRoux is dead and Kristen apparently did it. Shes got blood on some of her clothes and a scary-looking piece of climbing equipment has been scrubbed clean of physical evidence before being buried in the yard. While she is frantically hiding things she takes a moment to check whether shes cleaned herself up, but when she picks up a cross and it burns her hand. For a lapsed Catholic, this isnt a good sign. She puts on some aloe and wraps the hand tight, then gets on with the business of hiding evidence while trying to focus on their most recent case.

I am still not completely sure Kristen did kill Orson no matter what the showrunners say. As with anything on this show, you never can be sure what youll find around the corner. Im not sure because Kristen is so sure. Yes, it looks good, but I still dont buy it. One thing I will say is that regardless of whether or not she killed Orson, she sure is fine with it. As she calmly explains to her therapist (once she confirms that there is no legal way he can tell anyone else), she explains that yes, she did kill someone, and she feels okay about it because she was protecting her family. Then she schedules another appointment. I love her!

Aside: Though its probably a distraction, I am a firm believer that Lexis is evil. Maybe the other girls, too, but Lexis is the number one candidate. Might she have killed LeRoux and Kristen is covering for her? Yep. I would also not be surprised to find out that Kristen and Andys little IVF Bundle of Joy might somehow be influencing her sisters. The cacophony of sounds the four of them make when talking to almost anyone makes me wonder whether it's the sound you hear when you go insane. I And the girls were unsupervised when Lexis let George (aka Evil) into their home. Who knows what all they got up to when Mommy was theoretically committing homicide?



The fertility clinic is the focus when the trio meet with Bishop Marx. From their research the clinic is where a woman believes that her male twin destroyed his sister in utero. This is an actual thing that can happen, but it is very rare and virtually unheard of for the fetus to scream for help. Further research uncovered more medical abnormalities, and the gang decided that some kind of evil force was doing something to the eggs brought in for IVF, creating children which are evil in some way, or have the potential for evil. But the Bishop isnt as interested in bad kids as he is in a new parishioner who has donated a lot to the church and wants an exorcism. The exorcisee in question? Leland Townsend.

Well, this is a good way to insert himself further into the trios lives. They try to convince the Bishop that Leland is a crazy narcissist, but Marx still wants them to proceed. Leland tells them that he wants to change because hes in love (with Sheryl). When asked to explain why he sold his soul Leland tells them about when he was in high school and was bullied by the guy who drove the bus Leland rode every day. One evening the Devil stopped by while his parents were watching M*A*S*H in the den and asked Leland if there was anything hed be interested in trading his soul for, and Leland asked for the bus driver to have an awful death. Which he did.

The gang decides to visit Lelands present as well as his past but visiting his apartment. In addition to the items he planted (like a tattoo kit), they also find, hidden deep in a hidey-hole under his dresser, the copy of the map that map Leland asked Sheryl to photograph last season. The maps is being guarded by a "watch toy" that plays "Feliz Navidad"! Leland is completely on my last nerve, but that was fabulous. Ben also installs a camera on Lelands computer so that he can see what Leland is typing and watching.

Meanwhile, Lexis is having dental problems: it looks like shes growing fangs! One even nicks Kristens finger, causing it to bleed copiously. A trip to the oral surgeon confirms that she has some strange teeth thing going on, which isnt that unusual in kids her age. So she and Kristen make plans to have the fangs pulled later in the week. However, Lexiss teeth dont want to be pulled, and when the surgeon tries to pull one of a heavily anesthetized Lexis bites her so hard that she may have bitten a finger or two off of the surgeon's hand! And so the fangs remain.

The way Kristen has to keep reassuring Lexis that there is nothing wrong with her, I get the feeling that she has some pretty serious doubts. Meanwhile, Lexiss carefully neutral question leaves me wondering whether or not she really cares.

The next time they meet with Leland they explain that hes a liar and they know it (like anyone needs to be told). They tell him they found items that tried to convince them he was possessed, and that his ex-wife told them that Leland never took the bus. Therefore, no motive for Satan, not that I imagine he needed one. Unfortunately, shortly after her revelation Lelands ex was in a car accident and is now in a coma, poor dear. But no need to tell him: Leland already knows all about it. He tries to convince the trio that he did all of those things because he was possessed, and at this point I wish that David would just toss some Holy Water on Leland, stick a cross on his forehead and call it a day. But for some reason Bishop Marx sees nothing wrong with Leland (or his money), and puts Leland on the Exorcism track.



One thing I must say that I am disappointed to see Ben drawn onto the Leland Madness Express, but needs must. Hes the only one of the three whod never had to deal with Leland extensively, and therefore seemed to fit in his role as skeptic perfectly. But now Leland has eyes on our sceptic. He tells Ben that hes going to have a dream hes never had before. He even has his own nighttime demon, a succubus I'll call Georgia. I wonder how long Bens had trouble sleeping, and whats been causing it? Could his work be impacting his laissez faire attitude after all? <p>



2.2 - "A is for Angels"

Written by Robert King, Michelle King, Davita Scarlett

Directed by John Dahl

Reviewed by KathM



David seems to be having trouble balancing the classes required for Ordination, and is not doing well confession class because he wants to take a different tack when practicing with another trainee priest. Hes not sure about absolution and how it should be applied. Should the guy who says he beats his wife just be forgiven and assigned some prayers? Shouldnt the church do more? Recommend counseling, a more real penance? I found the discussion fascinating, but unfortunately Bishop Marx wants to talk to him about something else. It seems that in his opinion David isnt balancing the preparation for his vows with the work he does with Kristen and Ben, which the church asked him to do. He assures them he can.

Does anyone think that the members of the clergy dont want David to become a priest? I get a bad feeling about Bishop Marx (always have), and Father Kelly is just as bad. I also still wonder why David wants to be a priest in the first place, no answer has ever satisfied me.

Bishop Marx wants the gang to talk with parishioner Raymond. His wife, Ashley, thinks her newly church-going husband might be possessed: not by the devil, but by an angel. The Archangel Michael, to be specific, who David has been trying to communicate with. Ashley understood and was supportive initially, because she felt that if a being they discussed in church encouraged her husband to do good deeds like working in the soup kitchen, giving away some possessions and old clothes. But its more than that now; hes becoming obsessed, wanting to sell their house and live in their car. Ashley, seven months pregnant, is worried as he becomes more and more committed to following Michaels wishes.

When we meet Raymond, painting a large image of Michael on the homes vaulted ceiling, he is occasionally looks around as if listening to a voice no-one else can hear. I totally bought him as both possessed and insane. He speaks only of Michael and what Michael wants and how he should live, not how selling their home and other worldly possessions would impact his family. Besides, the idea of Michael, who is one of the Bibles champions, telling a believer that God wants him to do all of these things makes no sense.

While researching Raymond, Ben noticed a little discolored patch of skin behind one of his ears and determines that part of Raymonds issue might be a reaction to scopolamine. These patches can be worn to help people with problems with motion or heights. When Ashley confirms that Raymond does use them, Ben starts looking to see what they can do to help Raymond by checking with a doctor or psychiatrist.

In the meantime Raymond and Ashley are driving along and spot a car on fire. Raymond saves the family by, in part, picking up the burning car. He does leave one guy in the car for a bit longer, and explains to the trio Michael told him that the man in question had molested his niece and needed a bit more fear before he was saved. Ashley approaches Kristen later and says that Raymond wants their family to live by the tenets of the Bible. She is particularly worried as that choice impacts her and how she will have to live her life more than it would Raymond. When Kristen gives her a card with details of a shelter for new mothers Ashley worries that leaving might push Raymond over the edge, but she has to do what's best for her and her child.

Later, when the trio and Bishop visit the now empty house and ask Raymond where Ashley has gone, he points to a large pile of salt in the corner of the room. Ashley turned away from the Lord, Raymond tonelessly explains. Just like Lots wife.

Meanwhile, Leland learns that his exorcism has been moved back a week due to a scheduling problem. Furious, he takes his anger out on Sheryl, breaking up with her in the middle of the cake tasting. While Leland verbally abuses her to her face, telling her that the whole purpose of their relationship was to hurt Kristen, and now shes hurting. It doesnt matter how, only that she is. Therefore Sheryl is no longer of any use for him, so she and her shriveled ovaries should go back under the rock she crawled out from. Then he walks out of the wedding planners office, leaving Sheryl with a pile of scrummy cake samples that she should take home to her perpetually sugared granddaughters. Or sit in front of the tv and eat them herself.



But dont count Sheryl out yet. When Leland asks her out for drinks and grabs her, threatening her and her family, Sheryl just grabs his arm and hisses that shes dated demons before, and she knows enough about him and where the bodies, so to speak, buried to ensure her safety. She then proceeds to write something vulgar in blood on his office and pours out half a bottle of liquor on him when he stops by her apartment. The dynamic theyre creating has loads of possibilities: does he want to destroy her now, ensuring that his secrets are safe, or will they fight for some kind of dominance over the other? I completely believe that Sheryl has dated demons before, but what remains to be seen is how those relationships worked out.

We meet a new character this week and revisit a new one. Andrea Martin is Sister Andrea, a woman who tells David to stop trying to run to God and beg him to talk to him, and let God/Michael/Whoever come to him. And he should stop trying to hurt himself, too! Sister Andrea gives him a metronome app and tells him to play it while trying to meditate and see where it takes him. This does seem to help him, and he finds a new ally in her again when he returns from hearing Lelands confession. She says shell help him, but we're not sure about what that means. Considering the sheer volume of Davids issues, I have no idea where she can even begin.

We also encounter Anya, one of the police detectives who are not only investigating the LeRoux homicide but also the current incident which involved Raymond picking up a burning car, saving a family and leaving nary a scar on himself. Kristen is a complete mess while dealing with her, not wanting to be terribly helpful, especially when she killed LeRoux herself. Shes not ashamed of it, remember, but that doesnt mean she wants to go to prison.

And yes, I Leland wants to make a confession. Bishop Marx thinks that David should have a practical confession test instead of taking the normal Confession exam, and Leland is his assignment. How much money is Leland giving the church to be allowed to harass these poor people?

David gets through the confession, though, with nary a tear or outburst. Lelands tale is a story that mirrors the death of Davids girlfriend, except that Leland inserts himself and in the end supports Julias decision to kill herself. David holds tight to his cross and gives Leland a pretty standard penance, which leaves the little demon flabbergasted. Why isnt David devastated, why hasnt Leland destroyed him? Sorry, Leland. Better luck next time!
New York (United Nations) 15 June 2021 (SPS)- Frente Polisario Representative to the UN, Dr. Sidi Omar, called on the UN General Assemblys Committee of 24 (C-24) to implement General Assemblys resolution 1514 in Western Sahara, recalling that sovereignty over the territory is exclusive to the Saharawi people, in his statement before the Committees meeting yesterday.

He further recalled that the failure of the UN to resolve this decolonization conflict so far is due to the inaction and complacency of the international community that have emboldened the Moroccan occupying state to continue, with complete impunity, to violate UN resolutions and every rule of international law and international humanitarian law in the illegally occupied parts of Western Sahara and even violate the ceasefire and ignite a new war in the region. It is as simple as that, unfortunately.

Following is the full text of the Statement:



Statement of the Frente POLISARIO on Western Sahara Ambassador Sidi Omar



C-24 Substantive Session



New York, 14 June 2021

Madam Chair,

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to address the Special Committee on behalf of the Frente POLISARIO, the legitimate representative of the people of the Non-Self-Governing Territory of Western Sahara in line with relevant General Assembly and Security Council resolutions.

Distinguished Members of the Committee and Representatives of Member States,

Your session today takes place at a time when Western Sahara is witnessing serious developments that could have dire consequences for peace, security, and stability in the entire region.

On early 13 November last year, in flagrant violation of the 1991 ceasefire and Security Council resolutions, the Moroccan occupying state moved its armed forces into the Buffer Strip in Guerguerat in the Liberated Territory of Western Sahara and attacked a group of Sahrawi civilians who were protesting peacefully against Moroccos illegal occupation of our land.

Faced with the Moroccan new act of aggression, which continues with complete impunity, the Sahrawi people, under the leadership of the Frente POLISARIO, were left with no option but to exercise our legitimate right to self-defence.

Today, after almost thirty years since the deployment of the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO) in the Territory, there is no referendum on self-determination and there is no ceasefire. There is only war for which the Moroccan occupying state is fully responsible.

Now, why did we get to where we are today?

The answer is simple. We are where we are today because the Moroccan occupying state has been allowed with impunity to block the holding of the free and fair referendum on self-determination for the Sahrawi people, which was mutually accepted by both parties and approved by the Security Council and the General Assembly, and to which the Moroccan occupying state itself had committed for many years before backtracking for fear of losing the vote.

We are where we are today, Ladies and Gentlemen, because the international community has chosen to turn a blind eye to the unspeakable human rights violations to which Sahrawi civilians are being subjected daily in the occupied Western Sahara at the hands of Moroccan occupying state and to its attempts to impose a fait accompli by force in the Territory.

To sum up, it is the inaction and complacency of the international community that have emboldened the Moroccan occupying state to continue, with complete impunity, to violate UN resolutions and every rule of international law and international humanitarian law in the illegally occupied parts of Western Sahara and even violate the ceasefire and ignite a new war in the region. It is as simple as that, unfortunately. Ladies and Gentlemen,

For three decades, we have been committed to the peaceful solution and we have constructively engaged in the UN peace process demonstrating patience, utmost restraint, and flexibility, despite the provocations and all the injustices that our people continue to endure at the hands of the Moroccan occupying state.

Today, the Sahrawi people, under the leadership of the Frente POLISARIO, are saying loud and clear that enough is enough. Yes, we remain committed to peace, but we will never give up our inalienable and non-negotiable right to self-determination and independence.

Let me also underscore that sovereignty over Western Sahara is not a commodity to be traded in Wall Street Market or elsewhere. It is the exclusive right of the Sahrawi people, and our people, under the leadership of the Frente POLISARIO, will use all legitimate means to defend our sovereignty. The occupying state should make no mistake about this.

The legal nature of Western Sahara as a decolonisation issue on the agenda of this Committee since 1963 is abundantly clear, despite the futile attempts of the occupying power and its apologists to demonstrate otherwise. Therefore, given the gravity of the current situation, efforts should be redoubled to allow the people of Western Sahara the chance to exercise freely and democratically their right to self- determination and independence.

This is not too much to ask from a committee that was established by the United Nations to oversee the Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples.

Thank you! (SPS)

090/500/60 (SPS)
Crypto Kids Camp in Los Angeles offers games, snack time and cryptocurrency lessons, according to CNBC. 26 kids aged five to 17 learned how to process, buy and even mine bitcoin over five days.

The kids were mostly from non-white backgrounds, part of an effort to close the racial wealth gap, says founder and entrepreneur, Najah Roberts, who is Black.

Related: Binance, World's Biggest Crypto Exchange, Banned from the U.K.

Most of us grew up in school and nobody ever taught us how money worked," Roberts explained. "We really missed the significance of savings and investing and how these things came about.

Campers came from states like New Jersey and Texas to learn about the crypto trend thats spreading like wildfire through school clubs, social media and online trading exchanges.

Earlier this year, Georgia lawmakers even considered a bill requiring a personal finance course that included cryptocurrencies for high school students.

Related: The Future of Blockchain and the Marketplace

Despite concerns about volatility in the cryptocurrency market, there is no age limit to hold digital currencies, just as there is no age limit to hold cash. Some 9% of teens say they have traded cryptocurrencies, according to a survey by investment firm, Piper Sandler. And the trend is expected to continue.

Robertss camp could be the first of its kind in the country. But Ciris Hendricks, the camps chief operations officer, says the aim is nationwide.

We want to get it set up to the point where its in each city," he said.

Roberts opened the camp in 2019 after spending several years as a bitcoin investor.

Related: Bitcoin cuts in price below $30,000

Copyright 2021 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved
Microsoft Mexico made a self-diagnosis module available to SMEs in the country, in which owners and creators of small and medium businesses will be able to know their level of technological maturity and receive timely advice on the type of solutions they require to achieve recovery and growth.

This service is completely free and the goal of the technology company is to support Mexican SMEs in their recovery in the context of the pandemic, according to a statement.

The self-diagnosis consists of 15 questions, which are answered online and generate a report in which the SME can obtain a first approach with the level of technological maturity of their business, to evaluate the need to implement new tools that support their recovery and to build resilient businesses.

You may be interested: Microsoft tried to buy Nintendo, but they laughed at them

Microsoft explains that there is currently a large knowledge gap in this area and although 42% of SMEs implemented substantive changes in their operations, from the pandemic, such as the integration of technological tools, these are still at a very early stage in your digital transformation strategy.

The firm will provide advice on how SMEs can improve their operation, the flow of information generated in the business and the intelligent use of data to create or modify their business strategy with respect to the current context, implement telework or work schemes. hybrid and even activate new forms of sale with digital solutions.

In addition, entrepreneurs will be able to have access to in-depth diagnosis and advice with special attention from specialists who will be able to assist them through appointments to provide recommendations of the type of solutions they need and suggestions from local suppliers with whom they can consult directly.

This service is part of the series of benefits that Microsoft has as part of its Digital Pymes program, through which businesses in Mexico can support themselves in their economic recovery, through a process in which the company accompanies them and helps them start their digital transformation. Small and medium-sized companies can receive technological advice, guide to solutions developed by Mexican companies, financing and training at no cost and without any commitment to the technology firm.

Copyright 2021 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved
STAMFORD  Starting on July 1, Connecticut is officially weed-friendly.

But that doesnt mean Stamfordites should expect dispensaries on every corner. The long road toward buying cannabis in town involves plenty of state oversight and local decision-making at the hands of municipal zoning commissions about who can do what and where.

The basic rules are simple. Thanks to the new law, which Gov. Ned Lamont signed last week, people 21 and older can have up to 1.5 ounces of cannabis. In a locked container at home or in a car, adults can have up to five ounces.

For vendors, the easy part stops there. The state does not expect recreational sales to start until late 2022. Because of that, some rules remain unwritten.

Its legalized, but I think theres still a lot of things sort of open, where we are waiting for guidance from the state, Stamfords chief zoning official Ralph Blessing told the Advocate. Because of that, hes in no rush to have the board decide how the cannabis market could evolve locally.

The bill itself lays out introductory provisions on establishing dispensaries within the state, which sets the laws major tenets. Otherwise, its a local issue.

To open a dispensary, medicinal or otherwise, vendors need any necessary local zoning authority before jumping into the business. In Stamford, that means potential shops need explicit zoning board approval  also known as a special permit.

Even within those parameters, marijuana can only be sold in specific commercial and industrial zoning districts with a license from the state. Under the current medical marijuana program, the Department of Consumer Protection periodically releases licenses to potential dispensaries to control the number of in-state shops. DCP gave out medical marijuana licenses last in 2018.

Towns can place guidelines on where people can light up since the zoning board can regulate whether or not smoking cannabis is allowed in public spaces. Any municipality with more than 50,000 residents that chooses to regulate pot consumption must also designate spots where people can publicly smoke.

The city is in the process of surveying prospective areas, according to Mayor David Martins spokeperson Rachel LaBella.

Of course, these potential areas being considered are limited and will not include locations where cannabis use is prohibited (as outlined by the bill) such as state parks, state beaches and on state waters, she said in an email.

Further provisions arent on the table yet, according to Stamford Zoning Board Chair David Stein.

At this point, it has not been discussed by the zoning board, and I am not sure when we will be discussing it, he said. Along with any conversations between board members, the zoning board would also have to field community input at a public hearing to permit dispensaries in certain districts.

Public processes aside, only a certain number of retailers and micro-cultivators, the states term for small-scale cannabis growers, can exist within any given municipality. The newly signed bill permits one dispensary and one micro-cultivator for every 25,000 residents. For Stamford, that means five of each.

But even that is uncertain. Three years after the new law goes into effect  on July 1, 2024  the Department of Consumer Protection can alter the states dispensary cap.

Just as towns and cities can allow recreational marijuana sales in their towns, individual governments can also bar it. Some towns, like Prospect in New Haven County, have already banned cannabis sales in town. Other municipalities, like Ridgefield, want to blaze a similar trail.

Even with legal weed firmly in sight, the safest bet for residents who want to buy marijuana ahead of July 1 lies across the border in Massachusetts. Though the state legalized adult cannabis use there in 2016, dispensaries first opened in late 2018. Now, theyre all over the state.

veronica.delvalle@hearstmediact.com
STAMFORD  The former Norwalk college student who authorities said showed an interest in mass shootings was sentenced Tuesday to four years in prison after accepting a plea deal in April.

Brandon Wagshol, 23, was given a 10-year sentence to be suspended after four years. Judge Gary White also ordered Wagshol to serve five years of probation following his release from prison, and he will need to register with the Deadly Weapon Offender Registry.

In agreeing to plead guilty to charges of second-degree assault and illegal possession of high-capacity magazines, Wagshol faced up to five years in prison. Wagshol had been facing charges of attempted first-degree assault, second-degree assault, second-degree assault on an elderly person and four counts of illegal possession of a high-capacity magazine.

The deal, which had been in discussions between prosecutors and his defense since last fall, carried a 10-year sentence, suspended after three to five years in prison.

Assistant States Attorney Daniel Cummings argued on Tuesday that Wagshol should get the maximum of five years in prison.

The reason why the state is recommending the upper range of that period of incarceration is, first and foremost, the need to protect the community. The allegations in this case are extremely troubling and serious, in the states opinion, Cummings said.

Cummings cited instances dating back to Wagshols youth that were mentioned in his arrest warrant. In one incident, the warrant said he muttered Ill make Virginia Tech look like nothing, under his breath in front of middle school classmates, in reference to the Virginia Tech shooting in which 33 people died the previous year.

Cummings also pointed out an incident in 2010 when police received calls from people concerned about the contents of Wagshols Facebook page, which listed PLANNING MASS MURDER!!!! and IM GENOCIDAL under his activities and interests, according to the warrant.

What this shows, in the states opinion, is that these thoughts have been on his mind for quite a long time, since he was 11 years old, so its extremely troubling in this case, that weve come to learn, that he was trying to build a prohibited weapon  an AR-15-style rifle, which has been used before to commit violent acts  and possessed large-capacity magazines that are also banned. Why would he need a large-capacity magazine? What was he intending to do with this rifle? We dont know  we cant read his mind, we cant say for certain, but from his past statements, I dont think its unreasonable for any of us to be concerned that he is planning on doing something terrible and tragic with these weapons, Cummings said.

Wagshols attorney, Darnell Crosland, asked the court to consider the lesser sentence of three years. He argued his client deserved empathy for his struggles with mental illness and forgiveness for statements and actions he made flippantly as a teen.

People like Brandon Wagshol need help and need rehabilitation. Hes been in jail for quite a bit of time, and so Im asking the court to consider that in their sentencing, Crosland said.

After the hearing, Crosland called the states position on his clients case disturbing.

As articulated in the Supreme Court case Miller v. Alabama, there must be an approach to dealing with cases involving young people that is different from that of dealing with adults. This approach is even more critical when dealing with young people who have suffered from a history of mental health issues, Crosland said. As such, when the prosecutor asks that the court sentence 23-year-old Wagshol in a way that sends a message to people like him, I find that to be an unconstitutional and an unfair approach to mental health and criminal jurisprudence. ... This approach is cruel and unusual punishment.

Norwalk police first charged Wagshol in August 2019 after a tip from the FBI that he was buying high-capacity ammunition magazines from New Hampshire led them to guns, ammo, body armor and tactical equipment at his fathers apartment where he lived, officials said.

Initially released on bail for these charges, Wagshol has been jailed since he was arrested again in February 2020 when police said he assaulted his father with a 23-inch piece of pipe.
AP

DENPASAR, Indonesia (AP)  Rescuers searched into the night Tuesday for three missing people after a ferry sank with more than 50 people onboard in rough seas near Indonesias resort island of Bali, killing at least six people, officials said.

The ferry, the KMP Yunice, sank about half an hour after leaving East Javas Ketapang port, Bali Search and Rescue Agency chief Gede Darmada said. It was bound for Balis Gilimanuk port, a 50-kilometer (30-mile trip), with 41 passengers and 12 crew members.
A 14-month ban on most new eviction cases in Connecticut, intended to keep people housed as they dealt with the financial fallout of the pandemic, will end Wednesday.

Gov. Ned Lamont has no plans to extend the moratorium beyond the June 30 expiration date, his director of communications, Max Reiss, said Tuesday.

Hundreds of millions of federal relief dollars are available to eligible renters and landlords, and with that money being distributed more quickly, Lamont said earlier this week the ban is no longer needed.

The department of housing over the last month has been able to take care of more and more of those tenant-landlord disputes, Lamont said Monday after an event in Hartford.

The governor was referring to the $457 million in rental relief that is being distributed through a program called UniteCT within the department of housing. Renters must meet the income threshold and have their applications approved by their landlord. Up to $15,000 in rental assistance is available in addition to up to $1,500 for utility assistance.

Connecticut was one of at least 10 states that instituted its own eviction moratoriums in the wake of the pandemic in addition to the federal ban, which is in place until the end of July.

Connecticuts ban limited the reasons a landlord could evict a tenant to include owing six or more months of rent and committing a serious nuisance such as physically harming another tenant or the landlord.

Lamont extended the ban several times since first instituting it last spring as part of his emergency powers tied to the pandemic. He did so again last month to allow more time for money to get to those who needed it after a slow rollout of the program, which has been a problem for rental relief programs in other states.

At that point, about 200 applications had been approved, totaling $1.2 million in relief.

As of Tuesday, the number of approved applications was 2,921, totaling $21.9 million in relief.

Of the cases that have been approved, about 44 percent are in four of the states largest cities, led by Hartford then Bridgeport, Waterbury, and New Haven.

While the bans end is welcome news to landlords, whove complained that theyve been left to pay the bills with little to no support, housing advocates warn its still too soon to eliminate these protections for renters.

Oh, thats such bad news, said Erin Kemple, executive director of the Connecticut Fair Housing Center. What we expect is that there will be a dramatic rise in eviction cases filed as a result of the lifting of the eviction moratorium.

Kemple said she expects people will double up or triple up with family or friends as a result, as many of the homeless shelters in the state are at capacity. There are limited number of shelter beds available under normal circumstances.

Kemple cited a study by the Eviction Lab at Princeton University that found that communities with the lowest COVID-19 vaccination rates tend to be where eviction filings are the highest, so some are concerned the virus could spread among people living in those communities.

The benefit of Connecticuts moratorium was that it was automatic for some people, she said, adding the federal ban, instituted by the Centers for Disease Control and Protection, required renters to submit a declaration, which not all landlords and judges have honored.

The governor could ameliorate the situation by requiring landlords to participate in the UniteCT program, Kemple said, as most applicants have been tenants.

Elliot Lane, a Hartford-based attorney whos represented landlords for more than four decades, said changes made to the program at the end of May have led more landlords to apply.

Lane pushed back on the notion that lifting the ban would lead to large-scale evictions, saying many landlords would work with tenants, especially with up $15,000 available to cover back rent.

More cases certainly will be filed but that doesnt mean agreements cant be made, he said.

julia.bergman@hearstmediact.com
TUCSON, Ariz. (AP)  A Russian immigrant who once staged a monthlong hunger strike at an Arizona detention center and was shot months later during a struggle with a federal agent near the Mexican border was sentenced Tuesday to time served for illegally reentering the United States after he was deported.

Evgenii Glushchenko has already served about 151 days in custody. The plea deal that Glushchenko made two months ago said it was a virtual certainty that he will be deported.
CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP)  The South Carolina prosecutor investigating the January jail death of a mentally ill Black man said Tuesday that she needs more time to decide whether to press criminal charges in the case.

New evidence and additional interviews gathered in the past week on the death of Jamal Sutherland have led Ninth Circuit Solicitor Scarlett Wilson to extend her investigation, Wilson said in a statement.

Sutherland, 31, died in the Charleston County jail shortly after deputies forced him to the ground and repeatedly used stun guns and pepper spray on him when he refused to leave his cell for a court appearance. He had been booked the day before on a misdemeanor charge, after officers arrested him while investigating a fight at a mental health and substance abuse center. His death gained national attention after county officials released video of the incident months later.

Two deputies involved in the case, Lindsay Fickett and Brian Houle, have since been fired. Protesters in Charleston have called for Wilson to charge the deputies with murder or recuse herself from the case.

In her Tuesday statement, Wilson said she needed more time after retaining both a pathologist and a forensic toxicologist to review the coroner's autopsy report. Additional forensic testing by the coroner also needs to be factored into the review.

"Because these outstanding items are necessary for our experts reviews, and our experts opinions are critical in my analysis, I will not make a prosecutorial decision this week," Wilson said. Both the community and the Sutherland family deserve a thorough investigation and that is exactly what we are providing, Wilson said.

Wilson had previously said she would decide whether to file charges by the end of June.
After watching TV one night, 56-year-old Peter Marshall had an idea.

He pointed at the TV and said lets do it. I said do what, what are you talking about?, said Lisa Marshall, Peters wife. He said that. I looked at the TV and it was the couple getting married and I said do you want to get married? He said yeah. He had this big grin on his face. I said are you asking me to marry you? He nodded and he grinned and said yes. He said its going to be a lot of work.

The first time he asked me to marry him was a surprise and the second time he asked me to marry him was a surprise, Lisa, 54, said. When the person you love so deeply asks you twice and chooses you twice, it is remarkable.

Peter was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimers disease in 2018 and has been experiencing memory loss in recent years. After more than a decade of marriage, he had forgotten that he was already married. According to John Hopkins medicine, early onset Alzheimers disease is the most common form of dementia. The disease mostly affects individuals between their 30s and 60s and comprises roughly 10 percent of all Alzheimers-related cases.

The Andover, Conn. couple remarried in a ceremony in Holyoke, Mass. in April. The wedding was catered free-of-charge as Lisas daughter, Sarah Brehant, and others pitched in to make the wedding just as special as the first.

The event was covered by national outlets the Washington Post, CNN and People.

Lisa retired in January 2020 to take care of Peter, who has needed constant supervision. She compared taking care of Peter to watching out for a toddler. As with individuals who suffer from Alzheimer's-related diseases, Peter has been experiencing significant mood swings and memory loss, which have gotten more severe recently.

Its almost like you have to take the temperature of the mood all the time because the mood swings are so severe, Lisa said. We had friends over the other night. We have been friends for years and we were all laughing. Peter [didnt] understand what was happening and felt excluded...He thinks were laughing at him.

You really have to work to calm him down when that happens, Lisa added.

We were already best friends

To Lisa, Peter was initially just a neighbor of hers in Harrisburg, Pa. Peter and his ex-wife would frequently spend time with Lisa and her then husband, sometimes going on vacation together.

We were already best friends, Lisa said.

The two families raised their kids with one another and grew up being close friends.

When Peter, a Connecticut native, moved back to the state for a job offer, Lisa and her family were left without their good friend.

Dan Brehant Photography

After some time apart, the two reconnected after both consoling each other through their separate divorces. After a trip by Peter back down to Pennsylvania to visit Lisa, they knew they had something special.

Peter and Lisa married in 2009 alongside their five children and eventually the couple settled down in Andover, Conn.

Roughly three years after getting married, Lisa began to notice Peter struggling with memory issues.

It was easy to ignore. As we get older, we start forgetting things and our memory isnt as good as it once was. I chalked it up to that, Lisa said. I secretly knew something was wrong.

In the years that followed, Peter began to forget basic words, which raised suspicion in Lisa that something more significant could be occurring with her husband.

He would describe words instead of using them, Lisa said. We were talking about going on a trip and he couldn't come up with the word airplane. Common words were getting lost.

In 2017, Lisa took him to his primary care physician to examine the source behind Peters memory issues. One year and two neurologists later, Peter was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimers disease.

Dan Brehant Photography

Keeping the faith

To help cope with her situation, Lisa started the Oh Hello Alzheimers blog to write down her thoughts and share her experiences with others so that they might find solace in her words.

I think I started it as a cry for help. I didnt expect it to snowball into what it is today, Lisa said. Writing is a great opportunity to kind of get my feelings out and get rid of the frustration that I may feel.

Lisa said she has recently received a lot of correspondence from people online thanking her for sharing her experience with Peter.

For individuals who are caring for loved ones who are living with Alzheimers-related diseases, Lisa said that it is vital to keep the faith. For caregivers, Lisa stressed the importance of taking care of themselves and to delegate whatever you can."

Go sit on the front porch and go hold hands instead because the dog hair will be there later but the hand that you're holding may not, Lisa said.

The Alzheimer's Association offers 24-hour support for people living with dementia, their caregivers and family members. The service can be reached by phone at 800-272-3900.
The entire state remains under a heat advisory until Wednesday night with heat index values up to 104 degrees possible Tuesday, according to the National Weather Service.

A heat advisory is issued when the combination of heat and humidity makes the temperature feel like it is anywhere from 95 to 99 degrees for two or more consecutive days, or 100 to 104 degrees for any amount of time, the weather service said.

The latest forecasts indicate theres a 30 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms, mainly after 2 p.m. Tuesday. The high will be around 96 degrees, with a slight breeze. There could be more rain overnight, with mostly clear skies and a low around 73 degrees.

The highest heat index values are expected to hit Connecticut during the afternoon and early evening Tuesday.

The state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection said the air quality index for Connecticut on Tuesday is moderate to unhealthy for sensitive groups.

The weather service said there is a low chance that some areas might reach a heat index value of 105 degrees, which would lead to an excessive heat warning being issued for that area.

Those with chronic health issues and older adults are at increased risk for heat illness, including heat stroke. Homes without air conditioning or fans can quickly become much hotter than the temperature outdoors, the weather service said.

To reduce risk of heat illness, the NWS urges residents to limit outdoor work. For those who have to work outdoors, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration recommends frequent breaks in shaded or air conditioned areas.

Anyone who feels overcome by heat should quickly get to a cool, shaded spot. Heat stroke is considered any emergency. Anyone suffering symptoms should call 911 immediately.

There are splash pads and cooling centers open across the state to help people stay cool. Anyone in need of a cool place to rest can call 211 to find the nearest center.

The heat and humidity will continue Wednesday, as well as another low chance of some areas seeing an excessive heat warning should index values reach 105 degrees. There is also a slight risk of severe thunderstorms Wednesday afternoon and evening, with the potential for strong gusts of wind. The forecast indicates a high near 97 degrees, dropping to a low around 70 by night.

Showers and a thunderstorm are possible Thursday, with a high near 82 degrees. Showers are likely Thursday night, with a low around 64 degrees.

Rain is likely Friday, mostly before 2 p.m., with mostly cloudy skies and a high near 75 degrees. By night, the temperature drops to a low around 60 degrees. There will be a roughly 50 percent chance of showers.
Amy Goodman is the host of Democracy Now!, a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,400 stations. She is the co-author, with Denis Moynihan and David Goodman, of the New York Times best-seller Democracy Now!: 20 Years Covering the Movements Changing America.
Ogden jazz icon Joe McQueen may be gone, but his memory and legacy live on. One physical reminder of his life, McQueen's lifelong home at 3158 Grant Ave., has now become available for sale. The house received extensive remodeling, but as investor Richard Casperson has said, "Joe's energy is 


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Published: 29 June 2021

Prices of old dwellings in housing companies continued to rise in May

According to Statistics Finlands preliminary data, prices of old dwellings in housing companies rose in May in all the biggest towns and in all major regions except for Eastern Finland compared with the previous year.

Development of prices of old dwellings in housing companies by month in large cities in 2015 to 2021M05, index 2015=100

Prices rose strongly, as a rule, in various parts of Finland in both blocks of flats and terraced houses. In Greater Helsinki, prices of dwellings in blocks of flats rose by 5.3 per cent and in terraced houses by 6.5 per cent year-on-year.

Compared with the corresponding period of the year before, prices of old dwellings in housing companies rose most in Oulu and Helsinki. Since 2015, prices have risen by nearly 28 per cent in Helsinki and by seven per cent in Oulu.

Examined by major region, prices of old dwellings rose on the annual level most in Northern Finland.

Development of prices of old dwellings in housing companies by month in major regions 20152021M05, index 2015=100

In April to May 2020, dwelling transactions plummeted during corona shutdowns. In this years April, 60 per cent more dwelling transactions were made through real estate agents than one year ago. Compared with April 2021, four per cent fewer transactions were made in May.

Prices per square metre of old dwellings in housing companies, May 2021 1)

Area Price per square metre, EUR/m Index 2015=100 Monthly change, % Yearly change, % Whole country 2 299 108.5 0.1 3.9 Greater Helsinki 4 153 121.4 0.8 5.7 Rest of the Country (Whole Country - Greater Helsinki) 1 760 97.3 -0.6 2.1 Satellite municipalities 2) 2 334 97.4 -1.0 1.9 Helsinki 4 903 127.9 2.4 7.0 Espoo-Kauniainen 3 835 112.7 -3.8 4.7 Vantaa 2 803 108.5 1.9 1.5 Tampere 2 768 118.7 2.7 6.9 Turku 2 365 120.7 0.5 6.1 Oulu 1 851 107.0 2.2 8.9

1) Preliminary data2) Satellite municipalities = Hyvinkaa, Jarvenpaa, Kerava, Kirkkonummi, Nurmijarvi, Riihimaki, Sipoo, Tuusula and Vihti

The statistics on the prices of old dwellings in housing companies are based on the Tax Administration's data on dwellings (data on ownership of dwellings in housing companies). The numbers published from data on dwellings should not be used to assess the activeness of transactions in the latest periods.

When the monthly statistics on prices of old dwellings in housing companies are published for the first time, they cover approximately 60 per cent of all transactions made in the latest statistical reference month. The monthly data become revised during the following months so that the final data for the year are published in the release concerning the first quarter of the following year. Further information about data revisions can be found in separate tables.

The numbers of old dwellings in housing companies sold through real estate agents are based on the data from the price monitoring service of the Central Federation of Finnish Real Estate Agencies. As a rule, these data do not become revised retrospectively.

Data on prices of dwellings in housing companies in different areas and by house type are available at stat.fi/til/ashi/tau_en.html. The tables also contain data on the prices per square metre at the municipal and postal code levels and on the numbers of transactions. If only a few transactions are known in the area, a couple of deviating cases may significantly affect the average price for an area and the price index. Instead of individual monthly and annual changes, the development of prices should be examined over a longer time period and not only for a particular point in time.

Source: Prices of dwellings in housing companies, Statistics Finland

Inquiries: Petri Kettunen 029 551 3558, Elina Vuorio 029 551 3385, asuminen.hinnat@stat.fi

Head of Department in charge: Hannele Orjala

Publication in pdf-format (353.5 kB)

Updated 29.6.2021

Referencing instructions: Official Statistics of Finland (OSF): Prices of dwellings in housing companies [e-publication].

ISSN=2323-8801. May 2021. Helsinki: Statistics Finland [referred: 5.7.2021].

Access method: http://www.stat.fi/til/ashi/2021/05/ashi_2021_05_2021-06-29_tie_001_en.html
Monday, 28 June 2021 12:10:55 (GMT+3) | Istanbul

Turkey-based Corbus Metal has signed an agreement with the government of Djibouti in eastern Africa, for the processing, use and export of all scrap metal products in the country, SteelOrbis has learned.

According to the agreement, the collection and processing of all iron, steel and non-ferrous scrap metallic products in the country will be handled only by Corbus. Accordingly, scrap or products to be scrapped, including old vehicles, will soon be collected and exported from Djibouti by Corbus.

In the next steps of the given agreement, steel investments will be made by Corbus in Djibouti. The companys product portfolio includes deformed bars, angle bars, square, flat and round bars.
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President Klaus Iohannis decorated the ambassador of the Italian Republic to Romania, Marco Giungi, with the Order of the Star of Romania, in the rank of Commodore.

According to the Presidential Administration, the head of state awarded the Italian ambassador this distinction as a sign of "high appreciation for the exceptional contribution he had to the consolidation and development of the Romanian-Italian bilateral relations".

On Monday, President Iohannis signed the decree decorating the Italian ambassador.

Also on Monday, the head of state signed the decoration decree of Colonel Gheorghita Alexandru Aurel.

Thus, "on the occasion of the 190th anniversary of the establishment of the first modern military music, for its outstanding activity, high professionalism and meritorious results in promoting Romanian military cultural values and the image of the Romanian Army", President Klaus Iohannis conferred the Order "Cultural Merit" in the rank of Knight, Category B - "Music", to Colonel Gheorghita Alexandru Aurel, Inspector General in the General Inspectorate of Military Music (Ministry of National Defense).
Two underage migrants from Afghanistan were found on Tuesday morning, hidden in a freight truck which was about to exit the country through the Nadlac I Border Crossing Point (PTF), and two other, from Pakistan and Tunisia, were caught in the vicinity of the point when they wanted to exit the country, on foot, through the field.

"A Bulgarian citizen presented himself to carry out border formalities, on the exit point from the country, at the wheel of a freight vehicle registered in Bulgaria. He was transporting, according to the cargo manifest, sunflower seeds, on the Bulgaria-France route. Upon a detailed verification of the means of transportation, two foreign citizens were discovered, hidden in the cargo compartment. The persons were apprehended and transported to the headquarters of the research sector, where, upon verification, the border police established that they are citizens from Afghanistan, both 17 years old, asylum seekers in Romania," the Arad Border Police informed.

According to the quoted source, in the PTF Nadlac I area, at approximately 100 meters from the border line, two people were apprehended, who were on foot, and after verification it was established that they were citizens from Pakistan and Tunis, with the ages of 26, namely 38 years old.

In both cases, the border police is carrying out investigations.
Prime Minister Florin Citu declared on Tuesday, in the plenary sitting of the Parliament, at the debate of the censure motion, that the social democrats consider him "their biggest enemy," but he conveyed to them that they will not get rid of him because he "solved" the elections within the PNL.

"12.12.2019. 13.05.2020. Do you remember what these dates represent? Two simple motions tabled against me by PSD. Not to mention countless interpellations, calls for Prime Minister's Hour, Government Hour and so on. Romanians understood already the conclusion of these PSD tricks. The social democrats see in me their greatest enemy, a threat. And we see it in this motion today. Why? Because I am the only one who has systematically and vehemently opposed any collaboration, under any form with PSD. All Romanians must know that I will never compromise, but especially when it comes to PSD, you already know what kind of politician I am, and you know that I would never, but never, even joke, to bring down my own Government and then to govern with PSD. I entered politics being a convinced liberal and I will fully respect the liberal principles and values. Gentlemen from PSD, you hope in vain. You lie to yourself. After September 25 it will be even worse for you. I solved the elections in PNL, you will not get rid of the person you fear the most," said Florin Citu.
On Tuesday, PSD (Social Democratic Party) leader Marcel Ciolacu asked prime Minister Florin Citu "to come back to earth" and stop the "madness of loans," in order not to create other "generations of sacrifice."

"Mr Orban, you lost the election again. No matter how you try to turn this around, 17 is bigger than 15, just as PSD is better than your whole coalition of losers. Mr Orban, your colleagues are also right to demand your resignation. How many elections you must lose before you go? And we are also right (...) Mr Barna, I am only talking to you, because Mr Ciolos is looking for the man who can give birth. After Sunday, I believe you that you don't know your name even when you are holding your ID, but be optimistic, you have a real potential for growth, like your colleague Ghinea zero, cause only zero separates you from the infinity to the sky Mr Citu, you still have the audacity to sit there and tell the Romanians how good their life is? How great is that their children did not have their allowances increases, how well are the pensioners doing without having their pensions increased? Tell the millions of Romanians paid with the minimum wage how well they live on two lei more a day. (.. .) Mr Citu, your arrogance does not help, on the contrary, look at the history of the colleagues whose president you want to be, the whole gang of the former PD [Democratic Party - editor's note] behind you have burst into arrogance and lost. Come back to earth, stop the madness of loans. There are so many generations of sacrifice. Do not create more," Ciolacu told the joint plenary sitting of Parliament at the debate on the censure motion.

He added that each newborn in Romania will pay 2,500 euros for the loans contracted by the Government.
Prime Minister Florin Citu recalled, on Tuesday, that in the 3rd pillar of the National Plan for Recovery and Resilience (PNRR) 400 million euro were allotted for dual education, in the context in which this "is the only system that does not produce unemployed persons straight from school.

"In the third pillar we allotted for professional and dual education the sum of 400 million euro. It's an important, consistent sum which I am sure will be used efficiently. Ultimately, with 400 million euro we can work wonders. We see what private companies have done with their own resources," said the head of the executive at the Professional Dual Summit - event organized by the Department for Durable Development.

Florin Citu also said that "unfortunately, the Government or the state did not do so much in the recent period to support this education system, but the private system did," and private companies "have invested and created this dual system."

In this context, he spoke also about feedback received from said companies.

"All these companies that we discussed with, large companies (...), said very clearly that they had a problem with the workforce at a certain time and they resolved it by investing in certain classes, in certain high schools. So they found this dual system solution. But more must be done and the idea now is to expand a successful program to the national level. This system I believe is the only system that does not produce unemployed persons straight from school, because you have a system where people have the guarantee of a job exactly when they finish school," the Prime Minister noted.

Furthermore, Citu referred to the PNRR and stated that "we are at a crossroads in Romania now."

"There are going to be at least 70 billion euro invested in Romania through the PNRR and European Funds," he showed, Agerpres informs.
"On the one hand, the budget revenues are very good. We have a very good budget execution. We showed even today in Romania's Parliament that we have higher investments than last year, the budget revenues are higher than last year, and last year they were higher than in 2019. So, we have a good budget execution. We may have a first if things go like this - we will have a positive budget revision," Citu said at Parliament.The prime minister mentioned that the evaluation of the ministers is done daily."When I make a decision I will announce it," he added.
Minister of Environment Tanczos Barna declared on Monday evening, after attending the coalition meeting, at Parliament, that he proposes a gradual intervention in the case of bears coming to and around localities, but also that Romania currently lacks a rapid intervention procedure.

"I presented two things today. I have here an informative note that I prepared together with Minister Bode [Internal Affairs] on the interventions of the last five years, the number of calls in the last five years, the evolution of the population according to the estimates that exist at the level of hunting associations and the number of cases of bear attack, the amount of damage and the amount of compensation. At the same time, we presented to our colleagues in the coalition the comparative situation or the comparative analysis with the other EU Member States that manage larger or smaller bear populations and the immediate intervention action in each country. We have found that in every country where there is a larger or smaller population of brown bears, there is also a rapid intervention procedure, which is lacking in Romania, which is why legislation is needed to regulate the way we intervene in case we speak of force majeure, of critical situation.We propose, on behalf of the Ministry of Environment a gradual intervention," Minister Tanczos Barna said.

He explained the proposals of the Ministry of Environment.

"In cases where we are talking about a locality where these attacks are not repeated, a locality where a bear attack may occur for the first or second time, the solution is to drive away these specimens. Where there are many situations of attack or damage and they repeat and there is damage caused, the risk assessment should be made depending on the situation by this joint team made up of the Gendarmerie, hunters, possibly, and the local public authority, and should gradually intervene by tranquilization and relocation if it can be done and there are places where there the management of the hunting fund is accepted for relocation or in critical cases, where the attack is aggressive, where danger is imminent, where immediate action must be taken to protect the human household or human life, an intervention should be possible, by shooting, extracting that bear specimen," Tanczos Barna said.

He said the response teams will decide how to intervene in the case of the bears.

"We should allow the intervention teams decide. The minister cannot decide from how many hundred meters from the animal or human action can be taken. I cannot decide from Bucharest how dangerous the situation of a citizen in Sinaia or Azuga is," said the minister.

He further explained that the proposals for interventions target nearby localities and areas, and not interventions in the natural habitat of bears.

"We are talking about intervention to protect people's lives in localities," Tanczos Barna added.

The Environment minister said a week ago that the legislative proposal on immediate intervention in the case of bears coming to inhabited areas will be discussed in the governing coalition and pointed out that the ministry's obligation is to protect citizens. He pointed out that people in the counties where bear attacks are being recorded are "under terror" and the phenomenon is becoming increasingly dangerous.
The Minister of Health, Ioana Mihaila, on Tuesday informed that the government adopted a draft emergency ordinance regulating the legal framework for the release, starting with July 1, 2021, of the COVID-19 digital certificate for travel in the EU.

"The first is the emergency ordinance on measures to implement the European framework for the issuance, verification and acceptance of the digital certificate on COVID, in order to facilitate free movement during the pandemic of COVID-19. Thus, this normative act regulates creating the legal framework for the issuance, starting with July 1, 2021, of the COVID-19 digital certificate for travel to the EU, with the role of facilitating free movement during the pandemic," said Ioana Mihaila.

She mentioned that the certificates issued will be valid in the following intervals:- vaccination certificates, until June 30, 2022;- test certificates - 24 hours for the rapid antigen test and 72 hours for the real-time PCR test;- certificates of cure - 180 days from the date of the first positive result of the test for SARS-CoV-2 registered in the computer platform CoronaForms.According to her, the certificates can be issued in digital format or people who do not have access to get them in digital format can go to the town halls, population registries and public health departments, which will issue the certificate in print for them."In parallel with the certificate, an electronic platform for verifying the QR codes generated by this digital certificate has been created by STS [Special Telecommunication Service - editor's note]. For the time being, there are no regulations in place for the use of the certificates internally, but if there will be requests from professional associations or economic operators, we can also talk about internal use," she explained.
On Tuesday, Prime Minister Florin Citu delivered a message on the occasion the 80th anniversary of the Iasi Pogrom in which he underlined that "we must never let bloody history repeat itself.

"The last days of June remind us every year of a painful period that Romania went through exactly eight decades ago, when hatred and anti-Semitism darkened minds and pushed decision-makers and then law enforcement to acts of violence and crime against the Jews of Iasi. Nothing can justify what happened then, and nothing can erase the suffering of thousands of Iasi Jews then evicted from their own homes, separated from their families, crammed into death trains and trucks, most of them never to survive. Looking back at that large-scale assassination of the Jewish population under the Legionary regime of that time, we cannot but tremble at the thought that ordinary people, through no fault of their own, became victims of ideologies that divided the world, persecuted and killed people on racial grounds. We now remember with compassion, pain and revolt their sufferings and we must not ever let the bloody history repeat itself," says Citu in his message released by the government.

He points out that opening the Iasi Pogrom History Museum is a fitting gesture against forgetting the thousands of victims of the events of June 1941.

"We owe it to them to realise that we are all equal in the face of global dangers and only by being supportive can we overcome any challenge. For more than a year, the pandemic has affected us regardless of race, religious beliefs or any other criteria. The effects of global pollution, for which we are all responsible, affect us all equally. We can overcome such trials well by joining forces, not by division," he says.

He adds that, unfortunately, we are still witnessing "attempts by certain circles to normalise anti-Semitic, nationalist rhetoric, populism, negative discrimination on any grounds and, through manipulation, incite hatred and violence."

"Romanians want something else and they have fought for the values of democracy and my conviction is that we must respect their desire, including by fighting against any attempts to turn people against each other. May the memory of the victims of the Iasi Pogrom and of the Romanian Holocaust be eternal!" concludes Citu, Agerpres informs.
The Minister of Health Ioana Mihaila said on Tuesday that "a high degree of vigilance" is maintained regarding the Delta version of the new coronavirus, even if in the short term there are no reasons for concern, Agerpres informs.

"We continue to sequence according to the sequencing strategy developed by the genetics commission. The INSP continues to send us the answers. For now, the number of sequencings is quite small, but we continue to diagnose Delta-type infection. In the current conditions, in which the incidence is quite low, we do not think that in the extremely short term we have reasons for concern, but in the medium and long term I think that we must continue to be very vigilant. (...) For months. I would not like to make assumptions. The idea is that we maintain a high degree of vigilance. We have provided in the strategy and the normative framework, but also the sources of funding so that the sequencing requests come from all the regional centers and Bucharest, where they should be worked," the minister told a press conference.

According to her, not many sequencings are currently being done as there are not many diagnosed cases.

"At the moment, not many sequencings are done because not many cases are diagnosed. The framework exists, there is financing, there is a strategy," said Minister Ioana Mihaila.
President Klaus Iohannis sent today a message on the commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the Iasi anti-Jewish Pogrom (June 28 - 30, 1941).

"These days we mark eight decades since one of the bloodiest pages in the history of Romania. Undisguised hatred, atrocious violence, absolute contempt for human dignity were just some of the tools used by the authorities of the time to put into practice an abominable plan - cleansing the city of Jews. More than 13,000 innocent souls ended up in terrible torment, after the authorities that should have protected them turned into executioners. With indescribable cruelty Iasi Jews were forcibly snatched from their homes, separated from their loved ones, savagely beaten and then thrown into the death trains or killed by machine gun bullets. Representatives of the Police, the Army, the intelligence services swooped upon members of the Jewish community, robbed them, tortured, humiliated and killed them at the orders of a criminal regime," Iohannis states in the message delivered by presidential advisor Sergiu Nistor during the commemorative events organized in Iasi.

The head of the state emphasizes that "the Iasi Pogrom of is not only the tragedy of the Jews of Iasi, which followed that of the Jews killed during the legionary rebellion at the beginning of the same year, but is the drama and responsibility our nation has been facing since then."

"When the state institutions not only fail miserably in fulfilling their natural obligations towards their own citizens, but also discriminate against them, persecute them and mercilessly kill them, the rule of absolute evil and arbitrariness will have been established," Iohannis said.

Commemorating the victims of the Iasi Pogrom is the main moral reparation the current and future generations are bound to offer, underlines the head of the state.

"Anti-Semitic rhetoric and its cruel consequences struck Iasi, a city that was an important center of Jewish life; in 1930, Jews represented about 30 percent of the city's total population. From a cradle of Jewish life, culture and civilization, Iasi turned within short in a center of anti-Semitism and then of death, human degradation and terror. The remembrance of the suffering of those days and the commemoration of the victims are the main moral reparation the present and future generations have an obligation to follow. If this happens, we have the guarantee of owning up to the facts as they happened and of respecting the fundamental rights and freedoms. In this process of remembrance, let us also evoke the names of those people who showed courage and altruism in their attempt to save their fellow humans thrown into the clutches of hell," says Iohannis.

He points out that "the health of a society is inextricably linked to the honest assumption of the traumatic past, to the way it relates to democratic values, tolerance and respect for human dignity."

The head of the state welcomes the inauguration, in the courtyard of the former Police Headquarters, of the Memorial Museum dedicated to the victims of the Iasi Pogrom.

"It is a project the construction of which took a longer time, but I am convinced that it will play a prominent role in cultural and community life. This museum is not just a pious tribute to the memory of the pogrom victims, a proof that the lesson of the past has been authentically assumed, but also a space of European values, which will speak to the next generations about the importance of freedom, tolerance, respect for the other," the President notes.

He goes on to say that as lately denialism, hate speech, attempts to distort history, populism and anti-Semitism are becoming increasingly present in public space, we have the obligation to "defend our values, democratic principles, the rule of law, while education must remain at the heart of this ongoing struggle to counter these toxic currents."

"No matter how hard our efforts and no matter how determined we are, there will always be dark minds and souls who will play down crime, trivialize victims and defend criminals. We notice how, lately, negationism, hate speech, attempts to distort history, populism and anti-Semitism are becoming increasingly present in the public sphere, and where they find the fertile ground of ignorance, they take dangerous roots. We have an obligation to defend our values, democratic principles, the rule of law, and education must stay at the epicenter of this ongoing fight to counteract these toxic currents. The 'Educated Romania' project aims to create an inclusive education system, adapted to reality, to present and future needs. The grounds for responsible behavior, valuing truth, law and human rights are set at an early age and solidify along the way," Iohannis says.

He also points out that Holocaust education must play an important role in the education system.

"Schools and universities must be encouraged to promote such educational programs, so that children and young people are part of the process of consolidating a tolerant society," Iohannis advises, adding that democratic principles and values must be staunchly defended.

"Dear Romanians, bowing our foreheads in memory of those killed, showing their descendants our compassion and solidarity, may we always keep in mind the lessons of history and defend democratic principles and values! Without them, we have no future! May the memory of the victims live forever in our hearts!," concludes the President.
The personality of Romania's King Ferdinand I and the fundamental role of the military in the Romanian society were honoured on Tuesday at an event hosted by the Military Technical Academy in Bucharest.

Prince Radu mentioned that 2021 marks 140 years since the declaration of the Kingdom of Romania as a sovereign and independent state on the European continent and 100 years since the birth of King Mihai I, Marshal of the Romanian Army.

"You have a royal spiritual patron, Ferdinand the Unifier, the first marshal of the Romanian Army, whose name you have decided to use for your university. The past that the name of the university includes is, in fact, the most beautiful page in our modern history. The unifier of our country therefore raises the level of your ideals at least to the level at which he and Queen Marie agreed to do their duty to this country. But, you are also a symbol of the present, because after 154 years of the Crown standing next to the Romanian Army, writing together the modern history of this country, we, today, in 2021, are together again uninterrupted, to put properly, in its place, our identity and the Romanian present that has so much to learn from you through patriotism, discipline, a spirit of responsibility and the force of sacrifice, if need be," Radu told the Ferdinand I Military Technical Academy students in attendance.He said the defence of the future is defined by technology. "You are preparing to make Romania more stable and predictable, with both tools in your hands: military art and science. That is why we believe that the painting that Her Majesty, King Ferdinand's great-granddaughter, is handing you today is a symbol of the future as much as it is a symbol of the past," added Radu.The Custodian of the Romanian Crown, Margareta, presented the Military Technical Academy with a painting of King Ferdinand I by visual artist Valentin Tanase.The rector of the Ferdinand I Military Technical Academy, Constantin Iulian Vizitiu, said that the higher education institution wanted to receive the name of the unifier of the country in May 2018 because it is under his scepter that the Greater Union of 1918 was achieved.He invited Margareta and Radu to the July 29 graduation ceremony of the academy, which this year will symbolically bear the honorific name "King Mihai I 100."Vizitiu handed Margareta a plaque and a monograph of the Ferdinand I Military Technical Academy.
Despite the adverse context of the pandemic, new corporate and retail loans granted by Romanian banks in the first four months of 2021 increased 32 percent to 34 billion lei from 25.7 billion lei registered in the same period of the year before, shows data of the Romanian Banking Association (ARB).

Thus, the amount of new loans granted over January - April is by one third higher than last year and represents over 11 percent of the non-government credit. The non-government credit is calculated as the difference between the total loans granted to the population and the companies and partial and total repayments, as well as loan sales.

In the first four months of the year, new lending was boosted by corporate lending which accounts for 56 percent of the volume of new lending by banks. The upward trend of lending continued in May, as the non-government credit advanced 10.1 percent YoY to 296 billion lei - the fastest growth rate since the beginning of the pandemic.

ARB mentions that Romanian banks continue to provide loans in a sustained manner, both in order to support companies that have resumed or intensified their activity, and for the needs of the population. The population took out loans worth 15 billion lei, and companies accessed loans worth almost 19 billion lei between January and April 2021.

The distribution by currencies shows an increased interest for loans in the national currency, which account for almost 81.75 percent of the total amount of new loans accessed, followed by new loans in euro with 16.65 percent and loans in US dollars - with 1.60 percent. New loans in national currency granted over the first four months of the year totaled 27.8 billion lei, up 38 percent compared to January-April 2020. The loans taken out by the population were almost entirely in national currency - 99.2 percent of the aggregate new loans granted to the population, while loans in euro amounted to approximately 120 million lei, representing the difference of 0.8 percent.

The distribution by currency in the case of corporate loans shows a significant preference for the national currency, which accounts for 67.7 percent of the total new loans accessed by companies; loans in euro account for approximately 29 percent and the rest were in US dollars.

Amid the pandemic, the banks covered the clients' financing needs, with new loans granted last year on the non-governmental segment being slightly above the level registered in 2019.

"The banking system has the necessary stability/soundness indicators and the tools to support credit growth on a sustainable basis, but at the same time it needs support to remove existing barriers. The banking community wants to have a real, continuous and constructive dialogue with all stakeholders in order to prioritize the importance of sustainable lending in the economic development of Romania," the ARB release states, Agerpres informs.
Parliament will hold on Wednesday, starting at 14:00, a solemn sitting dedicated to the commemoration of the victims of the 1941 Iasi Pogrom, the joint Standing Bureaus decided today.

Delivering speeches at this solemn meeting will be President Klaus Iohannis, Senate and Chamber of Deputies heads Anca Dragu and Ludovic Orban, Prime Minister Florin Citu and representatives of the parliamentary groups and non-affiliated MPs.

At the request of deputy Alexandru Muraru, the Government's Special Representative for the Promotion of Memory Policies, the Combat of Anti-Semitism and Xenophobia, the joint Standing Bureaus decided today to include Ambassador of the State of Israel to Romania, David Saranga, Germany's Federal Commissioner for Jewish Life and the Fight against Anti-Semitism, Felix Klein, and Pogrom survivor Michael Cernea in the list of the speakers at the meeting.

Among the guests at the solemn event are members of the government, representatives of the diplomatic corps accredited in Bucharest, the Head of the Royal House of Romania, the Patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church and leaders of other religious denominations, representatives of the Federation of Romanian Jewish Communities, the Romanian Army's Chief of Staff, the president of the Romanian Academy, as well as survivors or descendants of the pogrom victims.

"Through the initiative to commemorate in a solemn session 80 years since the greatest massacre committed in modern time Romania, the supreme representative body of all Romanian citizens will convey a strong message of recognition of the suffering of the pogrom victims and survivors, and the respective historical events will thus benefit from significant attention from the domestic and international public opinion," Muraru said in a letter to Parliament, Agerpres informs.
President Klaus Iohannis on Tuesday had a meeting with the ambassadors of the EU member states accredited to Romania, on the occasion of the conclusion of the Portuguese Presidency of the EU Council, in which context he stated that the introduction of the EU COVID digital certificate is a very important step forward, towards the full restoration of the fundamental freedoms of the Internal Market, especially in what concerns the free movement of persons.

According to the Presidential Administration, the meeting addressed topical issues on the European and international agenda. The head of state congratulated the Portuguese Presidency of the EU Council for its efforts to advance the European agenda during this very difficult time.

With regard to the management of the COVID-19 pandemic, President Iohannis said that the coordinated approach at the EU level and the joint efforts of the member states and the European institutions had brought positive results, and he voiced his hope that a return to normalcy would take place as soon as possible, according to a press release sent to AGERPRES. In this context, Klaus Iohannis praised the European Commission's efforts to buy and distribute vaccines for citizens of all EU member states.The President also referred to the major importance of ensuring international solidarity and efforts for the proper distribution of COVID-19 vaccines to third countries, emphasizing, in this regard, the support that Romania has given to its neighbouring states, especially the Republic of Moldova, as well as Ukraine and Serbia.With regard to the lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, the head of state emphasized that the resilience of the EU member states is very important in dealing with possible future crises, highlighting, in this sense, the creation of the Euro-Atlantic Resilience Centre, which aims to provide expertise in this field for the EU and NATO.Regarding the economic recovery process, Klaus Iohannis welcomed the decisions taken at the European level during this period, especially the Recovery Instrument - Next Generation EU, which, together with the Multiannual Financial Framework 2021 - 2027 will be very useful in supporting the efforts of member states to mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Romanian President also mentioned the European instrument for temporary support to mitigate unemployment risks in an emergency (SURE) as a positive decision for the economies of the countries of the Union, according to the same source.In this context, the head of state expressed his appreciation for the rapid completion of the ratification process of the Own Resources Decision, which is very important in terms of the implementation of the EU Recovery Plan, as well as the Union budget for 2021-2027.Addressing the issue of the European Union's foreign affairs, President Iohannis referred to the EU's relations with the Russian Federation, reiterating the European Union's commitment to a unified, strategic and long-term approach based on the five guiding principles in its policy towards Russia. The head of state pointed out that, at the most recent European Council, the leaders of the Union reaffirmed unity and solidarity as essential elements in future actions and in formulating a coordinated response to Russia's actions. He underscored the particular importance of maintaining security in the Black Sea region.Regarding the Conference on the Future of Europe, President Iohannis mentioned that the emphasis must be on a pragmatic approach to topics of major interest at European level, with the common goal of strengthening the Union's internal and external resilience.The head of state underscored that this initiative, launched this year on May 9 in Strasbourg, offers the citizens of the Union the opportunity to actively engage in debates on issues of interest to them, as well as to indicate where it is important for the EU to intervene to improve the EU citizens lives.They also discussed at the meeting aspects related to the Three Seas Initiative, the Eastern Partnership and the Western Balkans region, and the prospects for Romania's accession to the Schengen Area and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).On the same occasion, the ambassadors of the EU member states thanked the Romanian authorities for the efficient way in which they organised the vaccination campaign for the foreign diplomats.
President Klaus Iohannis on Tuesday said that the way out of the economic crisis will not be achieved through austerity measures, but through investments.

On Tuesday, President Klaus Iohannis had a meeting with the ambassadors of the European Union member states accredited to Romania at the Athenee Palace Hotel.

"We also discussed how the EU sees the overcoming of the economic crisis and in this context I would say something that I think is both interesting and important for Romanians, because, on Friday, after the Council meeting, we had an extended Euro Summit, we all took part in the Euro Summit, even the countries that are not yet in the Eurozone, and I found the discussion there very applied and very interesting, because now we have the opportunity to see how the exit from the economic crisis of ten years ago was managed and how the current crisis is being dealt with. And the most important conclusion, and I want this to be very clear, is that we cannot overcome this crisis through austerity measures, but through investment," Iohannis said after attending the event.He recalled that ten years ago there was an attempt to get out of the crisis through austerity, and the result was not a good one."We have all learned the lesson of ten years ago, and this time no austerity policies will be applied. I know that there is a whole discussion, including now in Parliament there are some who are trying to say that we are moving towards austerity solutions. This is not true! This is not the solution. The solution is to invest. This is why we have approved the money from the European programme Next Generation EU, the programme for the next generations, which we call the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, at the national level, and which comes with money to be put in economy, with investments. We will overcome this economic crisis by spending money, putting money into infrastructure, into the real economy, and we will certainly see in a very short time the results, in infrastructure works, in projects, while the people will see the results in their pockets. It is obvious that our goal at European level is to produce prosperity," Iohannis added.The talks, according to the head of state, focused on managing the pandemic, the latest conclusions of the European Council on June 24-25, global policy, the way in which the relationships with the Russian Federation and China will be approached."We have discussed the conference on the future of the European Union, which has already begun, and I will also attend an event next week, in order to have a wider debate in our country as well. (...) We have discussed a little about the national recovery and resilience plan, where we also submitted an application and we are waiting immediately after the summer break to receive a positive response, I believe, and to implement those projects," added Iohannis.
Social Democratic Party (PSD) Chairman Marcel Ciolacu said on Tuesday that the Ombudsperson had been reinstated, and the Constitutional Court (CCR) unanimously confirmed that the National Liberal Party (PNL) and the Save Romania Union (USR) had committed a horrific abuse and attacked the very essence of the rule of law.

"CCR has confirmed today, unanimously, that PNL and USR have plotted a terrible abuse and have attacked the very essence of the rule of law! Upon the notification of PSD, the Ombudsperson has been reinstated, to the despair of Citu, Orban, Barna and the rest of the cardboard anti-corruption gang. I welcome the decision of the Court to strengthen the position of this institution in defending the rights and freedoms of citizens against abuses of power," Ciolacu wrote on Facebook.

He adds that he has seen that Ludovic Orban and Dan Barna "have already been continuing the delirium" and want a new procedure to revoke Renate Weber.

"They really don't have any reason left! They don't realize that their stupid pride will put Romania in the worst position in front of entire Europe! I order them to give up these suicidal maneuvers, which do enormous harm to the country! I am glad that the Ombudsperson is capable to resume full exercise of her duties. With all the abuses this government is preparing, Renate Weber will have a lot of work to do... I hope she will start with the GEO on cutting child allowances and the GEO on privatising the health sector," he also said, Agerpres informs.
Renate Weber filed suit against the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, calling on the judges of the Bucharest Court of Appeal to annul Parliament's decision whereby she was revoked from the leadership of the Ombudsman institution.

The first term of the trial will take place on Friday, July 2.

The request was registered with the 9th Administrative Litigation Section of the Bucharest Court of Appeal on June 17 and has as object "the annulment of the administrative act - decision no. 36 / 16.06.2021".

On June 16, deputies and senators voted on the draft decision on the revocation of Renata Weber from the leadership of the Ombudsman institution.

There were 247 votes "in favour", 32 "against", and one parliamentarian did not vote.

The revocation request, formulated by National Liberal Party (PNL), Save Romania Union, Freedom, Unity, Solidarity Party (USR-PLUS) and the Hungarian Democratic Union of Romania (UDMR), showed that Ombudsman Renate Weber, exceeded the legal powers, having as a consequence the non-observance of the law on the organization and functioning of the institution and the Constitution.
A project dedicated to the river Danube evaluates three types of scenarios to identify in view of restoration naturally floodable areas of the river and its main tributaries, the Romanian Waters National Administration (ANAR) informs, on the occasion of the International Danube Day, marked each year, on June 29.

"Less visibly, but just as important, the Danube and its riverbed play an essential role in stabilizing climate and managing the effects of climate change. The hydrological events that we've been through in the last period remind us of the fact that there is need to offer rivers more space to accumulate water and to give back flood-plains. As leaders of the #DanubeFloodplain project, the teams of the Romanian Waters National Administration, together with the Ministry for Environment, Waters and Forests, the National Institute for Hydrology and Water Management, together with WWF-Romania, are evaluating three types of scenarios to identify in view of restoration naturally floodable areas of the Danube and its main tributaries. Thus, the risk for flooding in the Danube basin can be reduced, while at the same time stimulating socio-economic development and improving eco-systemic services," wrote the institution on its own Facebook page.

Each year, on June 29, the 14 countries in the Danube river basin celebrate together one of the largest river systems in Europe. The International Danube Day is celebrated, in 2021, for the second time, in special conditions, according to www.danubeday.org.

The marking of the International Danube Day was instituted after the signing, in 1994, of the Convention regarding cooperation for the protection and sustainable use of the river Danube by the International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River (ICPDR). The document, signed on June 29, 1994, in Sofia, Bulgaria, offers the framework for cooperation for governments, non-governmental organizations, research and industry institutions, this date being marked internationally at the proposal of the Danube countries and under the banner of the International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River.

Officials of the states situated in the Danube basin (Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Germany, Hungary, the Republic of Moldova, Romania, Slovakia, and Ukraine) and on the part of the European Commission signed the document, bringing to the attention of public opinion the necessity to protect the Danube. Later, the Convention was signed by Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro. Romania is the depositary of the Convention regarding cooperation for the protection and sustainable use of the Danube river.

In Romania, the 11 administrations of the Danube Waters Basin organize special meetings dedicated to the celebrations of Danube Day. Other events for children and the general public have as a purpose raising awareness on the importance of the Danube and its tributaries.

The Danube is the main European river, which brings numerous economic benefits to its riparian countries and together with its affluents forms one of the most important water systems in Europe. The hydrographic basin of the Danube plays an important role in the political, social, economic, and cultural realms for the development of Central and South-East Europe. The Danube, the second river by length in Europe, crosses Austria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Germany, Hungary, the Republic of Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia and Slovenia. From the Black Forest Mountains in Germany and to the Delta, the Danube spans 2,845 km. Of all the riparian countries, Romania has the most Danube coverage, 98 pct of its surface being in the receptor basin of the Danube. At the meeting of the Black Sea, the Danube creates one of the largest and best preserved wet areas of Europe, the Danube Delta, with over 5,000 plants and animal species, according to the ANAR data, reports agerpres.
So viruses carrying such a mutation would be more successful, and would be more likely to replicate and spread than viruses without the mutation.

"A lot of what we are seeing now with the variants is that," Moore said.

There are other, more worrying mutations.

"Another is the ability to become somewhat more invisible to the human immune system. When we talk about immune evasion or antibody escape mutations, that's what we mean," Moore said.

"The virus has changed its coat through the incorporation of one of these mutations to allow itself to become somewhat less visible. It's like it hides under an umbrella from the immune system because it's managed to mutate its coat in some way."

The B.1.351 virus variant first seen in South Africa and now called the Beta variant carries both the E484K and N501Y mutations. So does the P.1. variant, first seen in Brazil and also known as Gamma. That means they can replicate more easily and also evade the effects of the human immune response, as well as monoclonal antibody treatments and, to some degree, vaccines.

"The ability to hide from the immune system is what scares us about these variants, really," Moore said.
ST. LOUIS COUNTY  A registered sex offender from Chesterfield who paid a high school student $200 for sex in 2019 was sentenced Tuesday to 10 years in federal prison.

Jeremy D. Rogers, 45, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in February to one felony charge of sex trafficking of a minor.

Rogers originally contacted the 17-year-old girl on Snapchat using an alias. He requested nude pictures and she declined, but he persuaded her to come to his apartment in July 2019. He paid her $200 after they engaged in sex acts, his plea says.

In a statement to the judge, the girl said the experience was "not what I thought I had agreed to," expecting instead "easy money for just spending time with somebody."

The overwhelming "guilt, shame and embarrassment" caused her to delete all her correspondence with Rogers, she wrote, but when he tried to contact her again, her mother saw the message.

Rogers was arrested after police took over the teen's phone and arranged another meeting.

She wrote that she has suffered anxiety and great emotional distress, and said, "knowing that this man will not be able to do this to anybody else will greatly help to give me peace of mind."
Nickerson said Tuesday that the calls to fire and investigate him are baloney and he criticized Gardner for bringing ludicrous allegations against him in the Johnson case. He said he still believes Johnson is guilty, recalling Johnsons co-defendant, Phillip Campbell, stated under oath when he pleaded guilty in 1996 that he and Johnson killed Boyd.

Gardners spokeswoman did not return a phone call.

Where do they have any substance that anything was done wrong? Nickerson said. Why would I resign or why would (Barton) fire me when its an unproven allegation? Its not even fathomable that this could have occurred the way theyre describing. Its just unheard of. Its just ridiculous.

A spokesman for Barton provided a statement saying, Employees will continue to serve in their roles until/unless they are transferred to meet the needs of the department or facts emerge that would inhibit their ability to serve in such a capacity. If faced with the latter, the department would appropriately address the matter without delay.

Nickerson earns an hourly wage of $28.65, the department said. Nickerson said he works about 900 hours per year.
The locations are scheduled to be cleaned, Steelman said. Upon learning of these cases, personnel acted swiftly in distributing testing kits to the impacted areas in the building. Please contact your Human Resources office if you have any questions, concerns or would like to be tested.

Moreland did not respond to a question about whether any of the infected employees were working from home before Gov. Mike Parson called state workers back to the office by May 17.

The plan drew criticism from employees, including from at least one union representing state workers, which demanded Parson allow paid time off for employees to receive the COVID-19 vaccine and that the state work with the union on safety protocols.

Local 6355 of the Communications Workers of America also wanted a way for workers with child and family responsibilities to request delayed returns to the office.
The understanding that adding other unrelated legislative priorities would risk putting the entire Medicaid program out of compliance was essential in the deliberation over the legislation, a statement from the organizations noted. SB1 will prevent the collapse of Missouris health care system jeopardizing the wellbeing of thousands of Missourians and creating widespread economic damage to the entire state.

Nikki Strong of the Missouri Health Care Association said if the tax isnt renewed, scores of nursing homes would close, affecting thousands of aging and ill individuals.

Those facilities would not be able to keep their doors open, Strong said.

In a separate move, the House Budget Committee forwarded a stand-alone version of an ongoing Republican attempt to defund Planned Parenthood.

The Medicaid program already does not cover the cost of abortions. But Planned Parenthood also provides family planning assistance and birth control at 11 locations in Missouri.

Previous attempts to stop funding the organization were rebuffed by the Missouri Supreme Court, which said the parliamentary process used by the Legislature violated the constitution.
There are a few subpoenas that are  were issued and I didnt have an opportunity to depose folks, Gross said. And one of those people happens to be Eric Greitens, whos now a Senate candidate.

Gross said Greitens will again be under subpoena when the case is transferred back to Cole County. Catherine Hanaway, Greitens attorney, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Kelli Jones, Parsons spokeswoman, said the office was reviewing the decision.

Our office will take all necessary steps to ensure compliance with the Missouri Supreme Courts decision, Jones said.

A spokesman for Attorney General Eric Schmitt said the case was still ongoing and declined comment.

Parson, Greitens and Schmitt are Republicans.

Other agencies have charged for legal review time. Such bills can total thousands of dollars and transparency advocates argued there was no authorization for the charges under the Sunshine Law.

In western Missouri, Clay County outsourced Sunshine request processing responsibilities to the Spencer Fane law firm. A Kansas City Star reporter asked how much the law firm was charging the county and requested copies of billing records.
CHICAGO  Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White has reached an agreement with a coalition of advocacy organizations to settle a lawsuit that alleged his office violated federal and state laws by botching the rollout of automatic voter registration.

The lawsuit, filed in February 2020 in federal court in Chicago, came after a series of problems with the system came to light last year, including a mix-up that resulted in at least one non-U.S. citizen voting in a 2018 election.

The groups that filed the lawsuit already had been critical of the state for the slow implementation of automatic voter registration, which is supposed to seamlessly add citizens to the voter rolls when they get a drivers license or state identification card, since it became law in 2017.

They alleged in their lawsuit that the secretary of states office and the State Board of Elections  which was later dismissed as a defendant  had ignored critiques and offers of assistance.
CARSON CITY, Nev. (AP)  MGM Resorts International switched on a giant solar farm Monday that will power up to 90% of the company's 13 Las Vegas properties and 36,000 hotel rooms.

As Nevadas largest private employer and operator on the Strip, MGM Resorts is uniquely positioned to use our scale and resources to make a significant and positive difference. Its an obligation and commitment to take incredibly seriously," MGM Resorts President and CEO Bill Hornbuckle said. Its fair to say that much in Las Vegas Strip has now gone solar.

The 323,000-panel system will produce an estimated 100 megawatts, roughly enough to power 27,000 U.S. homes annually. The company said the energy will be enough to supply 90% of its daytime energy needs.

MGM called the solar farm the hospitality industry's largest renewable energy project. It said it wants to transition toward renewable energy sources to reduce carbon emissions by 45% per square foot throughout its roughly 65 million square feet by 2025.

The array of solar panels sits in the desert northeast of Las Vegas and will be managed by Invenergy, which owns and operates renewable energy developments throughout the world.
Two of the graduates told Reuters they tried for years through connections with other political parties to get jobs in the energy sector. The Sadrist Movement were the only people who helped, said 25-year-old Shihab al-Din Nouri. I got a steady job through them three months ago working in the Basra Oil Company. Ill vote for them in the next election.

A key meeting

Starting in the mid-2000s, Sadr generally stood apart from Iraqi governments that were supported by either America or Iran.

In 2007 he pulled his Sadrist Movement out of the government over its refusal to set a timetable for a U.S. troop withdrawal. In 2008, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki led a crackdown on Sadrs Mehdi Army that killed several hundred fighters. And in 2014, Sadr announced he was quitting politics. Aides say he feared his reputation would be hurt by association with a ruling class that is perceived by almost all Iraqis to be corrupt.

To be sure, the Sadrist Movement continued to hold key posts in some ministries, notably the health ministry, and it continued to field candidates in elections. But it ceased to be a major force in the government of Iraq.
Mexicos central bank on Monday swatted down the cryptocurrency enthusiasm expressed over the weekend by one of the country's leading bankers.

Ricardo Salinas Pliego, a magnate with large operations in retail, banking and television who has been seen as President Andres Manuel Lopez Obradors closest business ally, wrote in his social media accounts Sunday that Bitcoin is a good investment. He said his Banco Azteca was working on ways to allow the public to buy the cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin is a good way to diversify your investment portfolio and I think every investor should study cryptocurrencies and their future, Salinas Pliego wrote. At Banco Azteca, we are working to bring them to our customers and continue promoting freedom.

But Mexicos central bank issued a public warning Monday, saying banks in Mexico are not allowed to conduct transactions with cryptocurrencies. It cited the volatility of cryptocurrencies and the fact they are not backed by any government.

This country's financial institutions are not authorized to conduct or offer to the public transactions with virtual assets like Bitcoin, the Bank of Mexico said in a statement.
RAYTOWN, Mo. (AP)  Authorities found a body Tuesday in the basement of a suburban Kansas City duplex where multiple people were injured in an explosion.

John Ham, a spokesman for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, told The Kansas City Star that the body will be taken to the medical examiner for identification once the Raytown building is secure.

About half the structure was reduced to rubble in Monday night's blast.

Police said in a news release posted on Facebook that there were multiple injuries reported" but didn't provide any details on their severity or the exact number of people hurt. The release also said the cause of the blast was unknown.

Witnesses told KMBC-TV that two boys were conscious and alert when they were wheeled from the scene on gurneys. The station reported that a man also was injured and taken to a hospital for treatment.
Theres really no excuse anymore for not getting vaccinated, says Dr. Rex Archer, director of health for Kansas City. The problem is, when people dont, then the virus has a chance to continue to mutate. And we will see something much worse than this delta variant if we dont get this virus under control.

The delta variant is likely to become the dominant strain here, Archer says, and one-shot vaccinations wont be enough to ward it off or keep it from spreading. It wont stay in rural areas, either, so urban areas will be paying a price for the lack of vaccinations and precautions in rural Missouri.

Archer says its absolutely essential for those whove only had one Pfizer or Moderna shot to get their second. He said hes awaiting word from the feds on whether they recommend that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine be boosted by a Pfizer or Moderna shot. But in the meantime, he recommends extreme caution for those folks, who he says should really be wearing masks in most indoor situations.

An Associated Press analysis of data from last month shows that nearly all deaths from COVID-19  over 99% of them  are now in unvaccinated patients. Fully vaccinated patients account for only 0.1% of hospitalizations.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP)  The family of a Black man fatally shot in 2019 in his own backyard by a white police detective is suing Kansas City police and the officer.

The lawsuit was filed Monday in federal court on behalf of Cameron Lambs four minor children, the Kansas City Star reported. The lawsuit accuses detective Eric DeValkenaere of violating Lambs civil rights when he ran onto Lambs property without a warrant and fatally shot Lamb, 26, as he sat in his pickup truck.

The lawsuit seeks more than $10 million in damages against the Kansas City police board and DeValkenaere. The detective, who has been suspended for more than a year, is awaiting trial on first-degree involuntary manslaughter and armed criminal action in Lambs death.

It wasnt immediately known whether DeValkenaere has a lawyer who could comment on the lawsuit. Hes represented in his criminal case by a public defender, who would not represent him in the lawsuit.

The police department declined to comment on the lawsuit, citing policy against commenting on pending litigation.
Board President Lewis Reed and several aldermen have demanded that Jones reveal how she plans to fill the hole created by her decision to end the federal contract in her quest to close the citys medium security jail, also known as the workhouse. During her campaign, Jones pledged to close the jail in her first 100 days despite warnings from jail officials that that would create dangerous overcrowding at the maximum-security City Justice Center downtown. The medium security jail is not closed and will not likely close anytime soon. Instead, the mayor has adjusted her language and now celebrates the jail as being empty. That is, for now. As needed, jail officials will move inmates back to the jail. In the meantime, the facility continues to cost taxpayers, though that cost is also not currently in the July 1 budget.
How did the Denver Post fare under Aldens management? Since the Alden takeover in 2011, the Denver Newspaper Guild has reported that the Denver Post has cut its staff by 70%. Hard to argue with former Post editor Chuck Plunkett when he labeled Alden as vulture capitalists.

The same day I received the email from my editor, six of the top Tribune columnists also took buyouts: Eric Zorn, Dahleen Glanton, John Kass, Heidi Stevens, Steve Chapman and Mary Schmich. Schmich won the Pulitzer Prize in 2012. Like four of her colleagues, she had been with the Tribune for decades.

The absence of these long-time Tribune writers and editors comes with a price that the bean counters cannot calculate. The irreplaceable loss of institutional knowledge coupled with the deep-rooted contacts one needs to cover a complex and often corrupt city like Chicago truly is a death knell for the paper.

Local dailies are also dying on the vine, creating news deserts across the United States. In their place we have unreliable blogs and myriad other poorly sourced and politically driven news outlets, such as the rapidly expanding media reach of Fox, Nexstar, One America News Network and Sinclair. In other words, more real fake news.
However, the real benefits of using different airline programs are you can fly with carriers that belong to multiple alliances, you can mix classes of service as you wish and you dont have to follow restrictive itinerary rules. Additionally, the difference in the number of miles required may not always be this close.

For someone looking for ways to minimize cash costs as much as possible, mixing multiple award programs will do the trick. Its also easier to collect miles in different programs.

How to Earn Enough Rewards to Build a Similar Trip

Go After High Welcome Offers

Its common for credit cards to offer welcome bonuses. Its also relatively common for banks to offer limited-time offers on certain cards. Its worthwhile to watch for increased offers before applying for a card, or at least be aware of what offers normally are. Because banks limit how many cards you can apply for and how often you can receive a welcome bonus on a particular card, or a whole family of cards, its important to earn certain bonuses while theyre higher than usual.
As weve had to postpone our travels because of the pandemic, I believe a weekly dose of travel dreaming can be good medicine. Here are a few of my favorite European memories from England  reminders of the fun that awaits us at the other end of this crisis.

On my first trip to Dartmoor National Park, back when I was a student, word of the wonders lurking just a bit deeper into the moors tempted me away from my hostel in Gidleigh. I was told of an especially rewarding hike that would lead me to the mysterious Scorhill Stone Circle. Climbing over a hill, surrounded by ominous towers of craggy granite, I was swallowed up by powerful, mystical moorland. Hills followed hills followed hills . . . green growing gray in the murk.

Where was that 4,000-year-old circle of stone? I wandered in a scrub-brush world of greenery, white rocks, eerie winds, and birds singing unseen. Then the stones appeared. It seemed they had waited for centuries, still and silent, for me to visit.

I sat on a fallen stone and my imagination ran wild, pondering the people who roamed England so long before written history documented their stories. I took out my journal, wanting to capture the moment . . . the moor, the distant town, the chill, this circle of stones. I dipped my pen into the cry of the birds and wrote.
Shares is the leading weekly publication for retail investors. It is packed with investment ideas, news and educational material to help build and run portfolios and get more from your money.

Shares puts on free Investor Events throughout the year across the country. They provide an opportunity for investors to learn more about companies on the stock market and hear from a range of investment experts including fund managers and Shares journalists.
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - June 29, 2021) - Central African Gold Inc. (TSXV: CAGR) (FSE: BC2) (OTCQB: NDENF) (the "Corporation" or "Central African Gold") is pleased to announce the Corporation has completed the first stage of a planned acquisition of multiple precious and base metals projects located in the resource rich Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Central African Gold has entered into an agreement to acquire an interest in the Musefu Gold Project which has historical gold exploration and production.

Central African Gold has entered into an Assignment Agreement with KBG Capital Sarl (KBG) pursuant to which KBG has agreed to assign to Central African Gold 100% of KBG's interest in an exclusive option agreement with La Societe Miniere de Bakwanga SA (MIBA) to enter a joint venture to develop and exploit the Musefu Gold Project located in Kasai Central Province in southern DRC. All shareholders of KBG are arms length to the Corporation. In consideration of the assignment, Central African Gold will reimburse supported prior expenses, assume certain non-material financial obligations and issue 8,000,000 million common shares of Central African Gold to the beneficial owners of KBG. Central African will pay a finder's fee consisting of 500,000 common shares to arms length parties. The closing of the transaction is subject to completion of a satisfactory due diligence review by Central African Gold, other industry standard conditions and regulatory approvals including the Toronto Stock Venture Exchange.

Mr. Kevin Torudag, Senior Advisor to the Corporation, stated: "The Musefu Gold Project is a significant land package controlled by a state owned mining company. It has been of interest and had earlier work completed by well known and knowledgeable groups in the DRC mining sector. We are not aware of any transactions of this magnitude currently being completed in the DRC. The mineralization in the region is polymetallic and the property is located close to the border with Angola and rail transportation. Musefu has excellent potential for an important new discovery."

Musefu Gold Project

The project comprises five concessions covering 924 sq kms located 315 kms south of the city of Kananga in Kasai Central Province, southern DRC. Kasai Central Province has been underexplored due to its location and the need for infrastructure expansion. Central African Gold believes the required investment in infrastructure is imminent and it is opportunistic to be an early entrant into the region with such a large tract of high potential underexplored land. Work programs completed in 2007 by a prior interest holder included acquisition and interpretation of geophysical data (Airborne Magnetics and Landsat imagery), geological mapping, geochemical soil sampling, bedrock sampling as rock chip and channel samples, trenching and trench sampling. A total of 11,107 soil samples, 66 rock chip samples and 286 channel samples were collected. The program identified several suitable structural targets and the initial results from the geochemical soil survey showed strong gold anomalism coinciding with these structures.

Twenty diamond drill holes ranging in depth from 10m to 110m were completed on one of the concessions. Historic significant intersections include:

Hole # From Gold Grade g/t * 14 15.5m to 18m, 2.5m at 28.38g/t 8 8m to 13m, 5m at 12.83g/t 2 5m to 12m, 7m at 8.71g/t 1 1.9m to 13m, 11m at 8.12g/t

* The Corporation obtained the above drilling results from an internal report prepared in 2007 by a third party who at the time had an interest in the project. This report included the above results from drilling completed in the mid 1930s. The Corporation is of the opinion the assay results are reliable and relevant, however the Corporation at this time has not completed due diligence on the assays. Additional recommended work for the Corporation would be to review any available drill and QC data in greater detail, duplicate informing sample data by perhaps twinning holes, and re-assay any available sample material. It is the Qualified Person's opinion that there is a potentially significant risk associated with the lack of assay certificates and QC analysis and the Corporation should dedicate resources to reviewing the issue. The Qualified Person considers the risk to be acceptable however cautions investors to rely on this non-compliant historical data only as an indicator of the future potential of the Musefu Gold Project until further reviews have been completed.

It is significant that the drill hole assays have high grade zones, broader lower grade zones and multiple zones with high grades surrounded by lower grades. Central African Gold believes with significant mineralization being encountered at or near surface, the Musefu Gold Project has the potential for expansion and for lower cost open pit mining. Although gold is the focus, there are also noted historical indicators of platinum.

Qualified/competent person -- National Instrument 43-101 and JORC code

The geological information in this announcement has been reviewed by Mr. Shu Zhan, Member and Registered Professional Geoscientist of the Australian Institute of Geoscientists (AIG), a competent person (as defined in the JORC code, 2012 edition) who is a practicing member of the Association of Professional Geologists of Ontario (being a recognized professional organization for the purposes of the Australian Securities Exchange listing rules). Mr. Zhan is also the Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101 who has reviewed and approved the contents of this news release. Mr. Zhan is a Director of Central African Gold. He has sufficient experience that is relevant to the style of mineralization, the type of deposit under consideration and to the activity being undertaken to qualify as a competent person as defined in the JORC code and under National Instrument 43-101.

Private Placement

The Corporation intends to complete a non-brokered private placement (the "Financing") of up to 10,000,000 units (each a "Unit") at a price of CAD $0.20 per Unit for aggregate proceeds of up to CAD $2,000,000. Each unit will consist of one common share of the Corporation (a "Share") and one Share Purchase Warrant (a "Warrant"). Two Warrants will be exercisable into one Share at an exercise price of CAD $0.30 per Share for a period of two years from the date of issuance.

The proceeds from the Financing will be used to fund due diligence and initial work programs on the Musefu Gold Project and for general working capital purposes.

The securities issued pursuant to the Financing will be subject to a hold period under applicable securities laws, which will expire four months plus one day from the date of closing of the Financing. Closing of the Financing is subject to receipt of all necessary corporate and regulatory approvals, including approval of the TSX Venture Exchange.

The Financing may constitute a "related party transactions" under Multilateral Instrument 61-101 Protection of Minority Security Holders in Special Transactions ("MI 61-101") as the investors in the Financing are expected to include parties closely related to the Corporation. The related party transactions will be exempt from the formal valuation requirements of Section 5.4 of MI 61-101 pursuant to subsection 5.5(a) of MI 61-101 and exempt from the minority approval requirements of Section 5.6 of MI 61-101 pursuant to subsection 5.7(1)(a) of MI 61-101, as the fair market value of the transactions contemplated under the Financing do not exceed 25% of the Corporation's market capitalization. A material change report as contemplated by the related party transaction requirements under MI 61-101 was not filed more than 21 days prior to closing of the transactions as the Financing is required shortly after the terms of the Financing were finalized to be able to meet the Corporation's anticipated short-term cash requirements.

About Central African Gold Inc.

Central African Gold is a natural resource company with a primary focus on the acquisition, exploration, development, and operation of mineral projects in the Democratic Republic of the Congo ("DRC"). Central African Gold currently holds rights to multiple mineral projects strategically located in the southern DRC. Central African Gold has the intention to acquire interests in additional concessions or relinquish concessions in the normal course of business. Central African Gold has an experienced management team located in the DRC.

For further information, please contact:

Stephen Barley, Chairman & CEO

Phone: (604-834-2968)

Email: info@centralafricangold.com

Website: www.centralafricangold.com

Reader Advisory

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 news release may contain "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities laws including, but not limited to the Corporation's intention to become involved in advanced stage mining projects in the DRC; the satisfactory completion of due diligence on the Musefu Gold Project; the closing of the acquisition of the Musefu Gold Project; the origin and methodology of historic assay results; the ability to use open-pit mining techniques and the completion of the announced necessary financings to fund the Corporation. Although the Corporation believes considering the experience of its officers and directors, current conditions and expected future developments and other factors that have been considered appropriate, that the expectations reflected in this forward-looking information are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on them as the Corporation can give no assurance that they will prove to be correct. Actual results and developments may differ materially from those contemplated by these statements. The statements in this press release are made as of the date of this release. The Corporation undertakes no obligation to comment on analyses, expectations or statements made by third parties in respect of the Corporation its securities, or its financial or operating results.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/88964
STOCKHOLM, June 28, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- EQT is pleased to announce that the EQT IX fund ("EQT Private Equity") has agreed to acquire PRO Unlimited Global Solutions Inc. ("PRO Unlimited" or the "Company"), a leader in contingent workforce management solutions, from funds managed by Harvest Partners, LP and its affiliates ("Harvest Partners") and Investcorp. Following the close of the transaction, EQT Private Equity will be the majority shareholder and the existing PRO Unlimited management team will continue to operate the business.

PRO Unlimited was established in 1991 to assist large companies in managing their contingent workforce to better attract specialist talent seeking a more flexible work solution. Today, the Company's integrated solutions have grown to incorporate a managed service program, vendor management software, direct sourcing and data and analytics capabilities. The platform handles the significant complexities of running an effective contingent workforce program on behalf of enterprise clients, fulfilling a multitude of tasks including discovering a client's staffing needs, finding and evaluating candidates, hiring, onboarding, providing payroll and offboarding the contingent workers. PRO Unlimited is differentiated through its focus on high-skilled labor, its staffing agency-neutral approach, and its unique integrated solutions of services, software, and proprietary market data. The Company is headquartered in San Francisco with global capabilities and has approximately 1,400 total employees.

EQT will leverage its extensive experience partnering with technology-enabled services businesses, in-house digital expertise and network of global EQT advisors to support PRO Unlimited in its next phase of development as the Company continues to invest in technology and innovation to expand its integrated platform capabilities.

Kasper Knokgaard, Partner within EQT Private Equity's Advisory Team, said, "EQT is excited to invest in PRO Unlimited and partner with CEO Kevin Akeroyd and the full PRO Unlimited team as the Company embarks on the next phase of continued growth. PRO Unlimited has been at the forefront of developing a fulsome suite of integrated solutions for companies to manage their contingent workforce through a combination of services, software, and data. We look forward to supporting the continued expansion of the platform to enable more flexible work solutions for the evolving contingent industry."

Andrew Schoenthal, Partner at Harvest Partners, said, "Through multi-year investments in people, technology and data, PRO Unlimited has developed among the most comprehensive contingent workforce platforms for large and global companies. We are excited to watch Kevin and his team build upon the enormous success that the Company has achieved to date and continue to bring new innovations to the market." Harvest's PRO Unlimited investment team is led by Ira Kleinman, Andrew Schoenthal and David Schwartz.

Kevin Akeroyd, CEO of PRO Unlimited, said, "We are proud of what PRO Unlimited has achieved in recent years in collaboration with Harvest Partners and Investcorp. The contingent labor industry is experiencing strong growth, fueled by workers desire for increased autonomy and flexibility. We are delighted to provide the solutions to enable enterprises and the contingent workforce to meet their needs. We look forward to partnering with EQT and leveraging their industry expertise, digital capabilities, and network of advisors."

The transaction is subject to customary conditions and approvals. It is expected to close in the second half of 2021.

EQT Private Equity was advised by BofA Securities, Sidley Austin LLP, McKinsey & Company and Alvarez & Marsal.

PRO Unlimited, Harvest Partners and Investcorp were advised by William Blair and White & Case.

With this transaction, EQT IX is expected to be 50-55 percent invested (including closed and/or signed investments, announced public offers, if applicable, and less any expected syndication) based on its target fund size, and subject to customary regulatory approvals.About EQTEQT is a purpose-driven global investment organization with more than EUR 67 billion in assets under management across 26 active funds. EQT funds have portfolio companies in Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Americas with total sales of approximately EUR 29 billion and more than 175,000 employees. EQT works with portfolio companies to achieve sustainable growth, operational excellence and market leadership.

More info: www.eqtgroup.comFollow EQT on LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram

About PRO UnlimitedServicing hundreds of the world's most recognizable brands, PRO Unlimited offers modern workforce management and a partner ecosystem supported by data, software, intelligence, and services to meet flexible workforce needs. PRO's Modern Workforce Management Platform can adapt quickly to regional or industry economic shifts, and provides the speed, scale, flexibility, transparency, and expertise to serve as the holistic platform for the modern workforce. Headquartered in San Francisco, PRO has helped global brands and organizations achieve operational and financial success for more than 30 years.

More info: www.prounlimited.com

About Harvest Partners, LPFounded in 1981, Harvest Partners, LP is an established New York-based private equity investment firm that focuses on investments in middle-market companies in the business services & industrial services, consumer, healthcare, industrials and software industries. Harvest's control strategy leverages the firm's 40 years of experience in financing organic and acquisition-oriented growth.

More info: www.harvestpartners.com.

CONTACT:

ContactUS inquiries:Stephanie Greengarten,+1 646 687 6810, stephanie.greengarten@eqtpartners.com

International inquiries:EQT Press Office,press@eqtpartners.com+46 8 506 55 334

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

https://news.cision.com/eqt/r/eqt-private-equity-to-acquire-pro-unlimited--a-leader-in-contingent-workforce-management,c3375667

The following files are available for download:

https://mb.cision.com/Main/87/3375667/1437800.pdf EQT Private Equity to acquire PRO Unlimited_06.28.21 https://news.cision.com/eqt/i/pro-unlimited,c2930599 PRO Unlimited

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/eqt-private-equity-to-acquire-pro-unlimited-a-leader-in-contingent-workforce-management-301321098.html

SOURCE Cision AB
The Air Force Installation and Mission Support Center is testing a mobile app designed to centralize and streamline the subletting of short-term slots at military child development centers this summer. (Holly E. Adern/U.S. Air Force)

(Tribune News Service) The Air Force is testing out a child care app to help families find child care slots.

The concept is similar to what you would use for Airbnb, but instead of subleasing your house or apartment, youre subleasing your childs spot at the CDC, Maj. Jacque Vasta, Air Force Personnel Center headquarters section commander and app originator, said in an Air Force release Monday.

The Air Force Installation and Mission Support Center is testing the app for its ability to centralize and streamline the subletting of short-term slots at military child development centers this summer, the center said.

The app, called Kinderspot, is meant to help Department of Defense families on Air Force installations sublet child care spots at their home station or find spots at a location they will visit temporarily.

After launching at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, the app will roll out to seven additional test bases: Davis-Monthan AFB, Ariz.; MacDill AFB, Fla.; Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, Washington, D.C.; Joint Base Andrews, Md.; Schriever Space Force Base, Colo.; Peterson SFB, Colo.; Luke AFB, Ariz.

Leaders at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base have identified a need for a new child care center.

No federal money has been allocated for such a center, but the Air Force has the proposal ranked six out of 30 unfunded priorities in the latest federal budget process.

U.S. Rep. Mike Turner, R- Dayton, said he has asked colleagues on the House Armed Services Committee, as well as House appropriators, that money be carved out in the new budget year for the child care center.

There are a lot of priorities and requests this year, especially coming out of COVID, and the increased needs that military employees have, Turner told the Dayton Daily News. So well have to see how these priorities evolve.

Child care at Wright-Patterson is offered at four child development centers housed in three facilities, the document says. That includes one building at 156 Spinning Road in the Prairies subdivision, a Riverside housing area for base personnel off Airway Road

If its built, a new center would likely be located on base.

(c)2021 the Dayton Daily News (Dayton, Ohio)

Visit the Dayton Daily News (Dayton, Ohio) at www.daytondailynews.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Officials at Fort Hood and the family of Spc. Abram Salas II who went missing last week from the Texas Army base said Tuesday that they have found him safe in San Antonio and are arranging his return. (Fort Hood)

Officials at Fort Hood and the family of a soldier who went missing last week from the Army base in Texas said Tuesday that they have found him safe and are arranging his return.

Spc. Abram Salas II, known to his family as AJ, failed to report to work Wednesday, which triggered implementation of new Army policies on what to do in situations of missing soldiers. Salas was given the newly created status of absent-unknown, and an immediate search began that included law enforcement agencies from Fort Hood, nearby cities and counties, and the state of Texas, according to base officials.

"We met with our son's leadership and Fort Hood law enforcement officials yesterday on base, Abram Salas Sr., the soldiers father, said in a statement. After listening to everyone and getting our questions answered, we are confident that Fort Hood is doing everything they can to bring our son home.

The soldiers family and base leaders established communication with him Monday, Fort Hood officials said. AJ Salas told them that he was staying with other relatives in the San Antonio area, which is about 150 miles south of Fort Hood.

"We just want AJ to know we love him," Lorena Salas, the soldiers mother, said in a statement. "We just want him to come back home safe."

After meeting with base leaders and confirming their son was safe, Salas parents returned Tuesday to their home in El Paso, Texas, according to Fort Hood.

"Our No. 1 priority remains getting Spc. Salas back to Fort Hood. We will not stop until we know he is back safely," Col. Chad R. Foster, Fort Hood garrison commander, said in a statement.

At Fort Hood, Salas served as the garrison commanders driver, according to the base. Last month, the soldier posted photos to social media to showcase that the outgoing garrison commander, Col. Jason Wesbrock, presented him with an Army Commendation Medal.

Fort Hoods Directorate of Emergency Services led the investigation with support from the Texas Rangers, Bell and Coryell County sheriff departments, the Texas Department of Public Safety and local area police departments. The San Antonio Police Department also provided support, said Bob Adams, deputy director for Fort Hood Directorate of Emergency Services.

thayer.rose@stripes.com

Twitter: @Rose_Lori
Col. Daniel Horn, left, assumes command of Tobyhanna Army Depot on June 28, 2021, as Maj. Gen. Mitchell Kilgo passes the flag. (Thomas Robbins/Tobyhanna Army Depot)

TOBYHANNA TOWNSHIP, Pa. (Tribune News Service)  Col. Daniel Horn has assumed command at the Tobyhanna Army Depot, and Sgt. Maj. Michael J. Wiles was installed as the depots senior enlisted officer.

The two new leaders are now at the helm of Northeastern Pennsylvanias largest industrial employer.

Col. John W. McDonald relinquished command of the depot during a change of command ceremony on June 28. Sgt. Maj. Shantae Gordon also relinquished responsibility as the depots senior enlisted officer.

The ceremony, which culminated with a passing of Tobyhannas flag, was presided over by Maj. Gen. Mitchell Kilgo, Commanding General of the U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Command. Depot employees, representatives of state and local government, and family members witnessed the event.

McDonalds next assignment is with the Joint Staff Operations Directorate at the Pentagon. In his parting remarks, he promised to never forget his time at Tobyhanna Army Depot.

My assignment here at Tobyhanna has been, without a doubt, the best and most broadening I have experienced in my career, McDonald said. I will take and share the Tobyhanna legacy with anyone who will listen.

Horn is the depots 34th commander, joining Team Tobyhanna fresh off an assignment as the military deputy of the Defense Logistics Agency, U.S. Central Command and U.S. Special Operations Command forward.

Horn earned a Bachelor of Science in Business from Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash. Horn also has Masters of Science degrees in Supply Chain Management from Kansas, and Strategic Studies from Army War College.

As commander, Horn will lead 3,700 employees responsible for supporting global readiness for Command, Control, Communications, Computer, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C5ISR) systems across the Department of Defense.

Sgt. Maj. Michael J. Wiles assumes responsibility as Sergeant Major of Tobyhanna Army Depot on June 28, 2021, as the new commander, Col. Daniel Horn, passes the flag. (Thomas Robbins/Tobyhanna Army Depot)

Wiles is the depots 21st sergeant major. His most recent assignment was as the chief mechanical operations sergeant major for the 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, Ga. He has served in staff and leadership positions at stateside and overseas military installations including the Republic of South Korea; Fort Bragg, N.C.; Fort Hood, Texas, and Fort Lee, Va.

As sergeant major, Wiles serves as the voice of the warfighters who use equipment repaired by the depot. He advises the commander on all matters relating to Soldiers, the civilian workforce and their family members.

In his first address as depot commander, Horn expressed his excitement at joining Team Tobyhanna.

When I learned that commanding Tobyhanna Army Depot was my next assignment, I was elated that Id be leading such a skilled and dedicated workforce, Col. Horn said, You have a reputation for strategic planning and innovation.

Horn added that he holds the mission of Tobyhanna close to his heart.

As Army civilians, you have what many other people do not  a sacred purpose behind your work, Col. Horn said. What you do matters. You matter. Like any job, there will be good days and frustrating days. But when you get home at night, I hope youll remember that your work helps our warfighters keep America safe. And I hope youll be as proud of that as I am.

Tobyhannas unparalleled capabilities include full-spectrum logistics support for sustainment, overhaul and repair, fabrication and manufacturing, engineering design and development, systems integration, post production software support, technology insertion, modification, foreign military sales and global field support to our joint warfighters.

About 3,700 personnel are employed at Tobyhanna, which is located in the Pocono Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania. Tobyhanna Army Depot is part of the U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Command. Headquartered at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, the commands mission is to empower the Soldier with winning C5ISR capabilities.

(c)2021 The Times Leader (Wilkes-Barre, Pa.)

Visit The Times Leader (Wilkes-Barre, Pa.) at www.timesleader.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Petty Officer 2nd Class Emilio Orozco-Murcia stands watch aboard the destroyer USS Ross in Odessa, Ukraine, for participation in Exercise Sea Breeze, June 27, 2021. (Damon Grosvenor/U.S. Navy)

STUTTGART, Germany  U.S. forces will help clear a sunken Soviet vessel from a Ukrainian pier and conduct drills during an international exercise in the Black Sea, where Navy officials say they are sending a message that the strategic waterway cant be dominated by Russia.

We are demonstrating to the world that the Black Sea is an international sea, Capt. Kyle Gantt, deputy commander of Task Force 65 based in Rota, Spain, said Tuesday. It is open and available for the free transport of commerce, shipping, for all nations. It is not owned by any one nation.

The U.S. and Ukraine this week kicked off Sea Breeze 21, which involves 32 countries, 5,000 troops, 32 ships, 40 aircraft, and 18 special operations and dive teams.

The drill is the largest since the exercise series was launched with Ukraine 27 years ago. It also comes less than one week after a tense encounter between a British warship and the Russian military in the Black Sea, in which Moscow claimed it fired warning shots at HMS Defender as it sailed near the shore of Crimea.

The destroyer USS Ross arrives in Odessa, Ukraine to take part in Exercise Sea Breeze, June 27, 2021. The drills will include 32 nations training together in the Black Sea region. (Twitter/Exercise Sea Breeze)

Russia said its actions forced the British destroyer to leave the area, but the U.K. disputed that claim, saying the vessel never altered course.

The tensions have put a spotlight on U.S. operations in the Black Sea and on Sea Breeze, which was planned well before the latest incident. While Moscow has called on the U.S. to cancel this years iteration of Sea Breeze, the Navy is moving forward.

Gantt declined to describe what kind of maneuvers they have seen so far from the Russians, citing intelligence concerns. However, it is expected that the Russian military will pay close attention, he said.

We see that Russia routinely observes our operations and it is their right to do so, Gantt said. But all nations must abide by the laws of the sea, including Russia, he added.

The Black Sea is bordered by six nations  Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey, Russia, Georgia and Ukraine. The first three are members of NATO, and Ukraine and Georgia are seeking to join the Western military pact.

Sea Breeze, which runs until July 10, involves forces rehearsing a range of tactics, with operations taking place on land, at sea and in the air.

The drill also will involve making improvements at a Ukrainian naval pier in Odessa, where U.S. and Ukrainian divers will clear away the old Soviet vessel that sunk years ago from neglect. The wreckage, which will be cut into pieces and hauled away, has created a blockage in the area, Navy officials said.

vandiver.john@stripes.com

Twitter: @john_vandiver
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Fla., on Feb. 27, 2021. Noem announced Tuesday, June 29, 2021, that she will join a growing list of Republican governors sending law enforcement officers to the U.S. border with Mexico. (John Raoux/AP)

SIOUX FALLS, S.D.  South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem announced Tuesday that she will join a growing list of Republican governors sending law enforcement officers to the U.S. border with Mexico.

Noem's announcement that she will send up to 50 South Dakota National Guard troops to Texas comes as the GOP ramps up a political fight with President Joe Biden over border security. The issue has drawn a host of prominent GOP figures: former President Donald Trump was expected to travel to the border this week and Republican governors from Florida, Nebraska and Iowa have all committed to sending law enforcement officers for border security.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott this month announced plans to build more barriers along the border.

Abbott's new push has been criticized as political theater, but he has defended the plan, saying the number of border crossers remains high. The governor said he will use $250 million in state money and crowdsourced financing for the barriers, although the timeline and cost for the push are unclear. It also faces potential court challenges from the federal government.

Large numbers of migrants have been showing up at the U.S. border with Mexico, with many turning themselves over to U.S. Border Patrol agents in seeking legal asylum status. But the numbers of families and children traveling without their parents crossing into the U.S. have dropped sharply since March and April, while the encounters with single adults have remained high.

A private donation will fund the cost of sending the South Dakota National Guard troops, Noem said. The deployment is expected to last from 30 to 60 days, while the other states involved are sending law enforcement officers for roughly two-week stints.

Noem, who is seen as a potential presidential contender, drew a distinction between her decision to send the National Guard and other governors who are sending state police officers.

"The border is a national security crisis that requires the kind of sustained response only the National Guard can provide," she said in a statement. "We should not be making our own communities less safe by sending our police or Highway Patrol to fix a long-term problem President Biden's Administration seems unable or unwilling to solve."

The governor's office did not respond when asked for the identity of the private donor paying for the National Guard deployment.

But Democratic state Sen. Reynold Nesiba said the fact Noem was using a private donor to pay for the deployment showed it was not a " real priority" for the state, but instead gave her "political cover." He said he was looking into whether using a private donation to fund the deployment is legal.

"This could set a dangerous precedent to allow anonymous political donors to call the governor and dispatch the Guard whenever they want," he said.
Performers dressed as rescue workers gather around the Communist Party flag during a gala show ahead of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing on Monday, June 28, 2021. (Ng Han Guan/AP)

BEIJING  Amid celebrations over the centenary of the ruling Communist Party, Chinese President Xi Jinping has awarded loyal party members with medals and called for adherence to Marxism.

Xi's speech at a ceremony Tuesday follows a lavish celebration at Beijing's Olympic stadium on Monday night emphasizing China's rise to economic and political prominence following reforms enacted more than 40 years ago.

While unleashing private industry, the ruling party has maintained an iron grip on political power, along with preferential policies toward state-run companies.

"All party comrades should take their faith in Marxism and the socialism with Chinese characteristics as their life's purposes," Xi said in his address to medal winners. Celebrations conclude with a commemoration Thursday at Beijing's Tiananmen Square.

Over his nine years as party head, Xi has established himself as China's most powerful ruler since Mao Zedong, who founded the People's Republic in 1949 after defeating Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists amid civil war.

Like Mao, Xi is not bound by term limits and, at 68, will likely remain in office for years to come. While repressing any sign of political opposition at home and promoting an anti-corruption campaign, he has advanced an increasingly assertive foreign policy that seeks to command control over the South China Sea, intimidate Taiwan into accepting Beijing's control, and join with Russia in challenging U.S. influence in international affairs.

China's Communist Party now boasts almost 92 million members, just over 6% of the country's population of 1.4 billion. The vast majority of government officials and leaders of state industry are party members, providing what the leadership hails as a source of social cohesion in contrast to partisan divides in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Alongside the anniversary celebrations, the party has been giving heavy coverage in the entirely state-controlled media to racial inequality and other social problems in the West. That appears to reflect confidence in its ability to deflect heavy criticism over China's detention of more than 1 million Uyghurs and a crackdown on freedom of speech and political opponents in Hong Kong.

In his speech, Xi said party members should lead the drive for China's "great rejuvenation," a reference to his agenda for China to retake its centuries-old role as a regional and international power in culture, economics and military power.

"On the new march to a fully established modern socialist nation, keep moving toward the goals of the second century," Xi said.
More than 300 South Korean officers and about 16 U.S. military police are expected to patrol Haeundae Beach in Busan over Fourth of July weekend. (Wikimedia Commons)

CAMP HUMPHREYS, South Korea  The U.S. military and local police plan to crack down on raucous parties and COVID-19 violations at a popular beach in Busan over Fourth of July weekend.

The move comes less than a month after U.S. Forces Korea said it was cooperating with a Korean National Police investigation into service members conduct during Memorial Day celebrations at Haeundae Beach. Police responded to more than 30 reports of a large party involving 1,500 or more foreigners.

Many were disregarding South Koreas coronavirus rules for wearing masks in public areas, maintaining 6 feet of social distance and limiting groups to five people, an officer who responded to the complaints told Stars and Stripes. Additional complaints included drinking, smoking, setting off fireworks, loud music, singing and close-contact dancing.

For the upcoming holidays patrols, more than 300 South Korean officers will team up with about 16 USFK police between Friday and Monday, a Haeundae tourist official recently told Stars and Stripes on a customary condition of anonymity.

USFK troops and other personnel will be expected to abide by COVID-19 safety measures and local laws at the beach, which prohibits smoking, eating between 7 p.m. and 2 a.m., and drinking alcoholic beverages, a Haeundae District official said.

Violators will first be warned of their behavior, the official said, adding that those found in contempt will be fined and reported to USFK police. Fines have doubled to 100,000 won, or about $89.

The reason why we adopted this administrative order is because of USFK members, the official said.

USFK, in a statement issued Tuesday, advised its personnel to avoid travel to Busan over the holiday weekend.

If visiting Haeundae and Songjung beaches, persons must observe social distancing, the statement said. No more than four people are allowed to gather at a time. Masks should be worn at all times.

More than 70 complaints were filed following a Fourth of July party at Haeundae Beach last year. One soldier was fined after firing a firecracker at local police and then fleeing the scene, and some others were accused of drunken driving.

In a letter obtained by Stars and Stripes, the Haeundae District office accused USFK service members of violating social distancing and mask guidelines and setting off firecrackers over Memorial Day weekend.

Local and military policemen were deployed as a result, but this did not stop the violations, said the letter, which was sent June 1 to U.S. Army Garrison Daegu.

Haeundae  is trying its best to combat the spread of COVID-19, the letter said. We are expressing our [disappointment] that U.S. forces in [South Korea] have committed these violations and chose not to cooperate with local authorities during this incident.

In response to a query about the local warnings, USFK spokesman Col. Lee Peters said in a statement Friday that it remains committed to being good neighbors with South Korea, and as ambassadors for our nation and military.

We do not condone any type of behavior that violate South Korean laws, rules or directives  especially [South Korean] or USFK COVID-19 mitigation measures  and have implemented good order and discipline measures to ensure we behave appropriately during the upcoming holiday period, Peters said.

USFK personnel have been allowed to travel freely in South Korea since April 11. They are still banned from bars, clubs, karaoke rooms and other adults-only businesses.

choi.david@stripes.com

Twitter: @choiboy

chang.kyong@stripes.com
Kashmiris clear debris from a house damaged in a gun battle on the outskirts of Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, Tuesday, June 29, 2021. (Dar Yasin/AP)

SRINAGAR, India  A suspected rebel commander being held in police custody was killed in a gunfight between government forces and another militant in disputed Kashmir's main city, Indian police said Tuesday.

The suspected commander, Nadeem Abrar, was arrested Monday in Srinagar city and interrogated on the basis of "a specific input about terrorists" planning to carry out "an attack on a highway," police said in a statement. Inspector General Vijay Kumar called his arrest a "big success" against Kashmiri rebels who have been fighting Indian rule since 1989.

Police said Abrar, during a "sustained interrogation," identified a house where he had concealed his automatic rifle. A police raiding party took Abrar to the house, where they were hit by gunfire from a Pakistani militant who was hiding inside, the statement said.

It said Abrar and three Indian soldiers were hit by the shots, which sparked a gun battle that ended early Tuesday.

"In the ensuing gunfire the foreign terrorist who fired from inside the house got neutralized and Abrar also got killed," the statement said. Police said the slain "Pakistani militant" was Abrar's associate.

Police said they recovered two rifles along with some ammunition from the site.

In the past, many militants have been killed while being taken by government forces to recover weapons, in what rights groups and residents have called extrajudicial killings.

Meanwhile, police confiscated a drone hovering over Srinagar's sprawling Dal Lake and started an investigation, Kumar told reporters. He said drones pose "a new technological threat and we will counter it by technology."

It was unclear whether the drone was being flown to carry out an attack or was merely being used for photography. On Monday, India's military said it thwarted a major threat when it intercepted two drones flying over an army base in the region's Jammu area. On Sunday, Indian police said two suspected explosives-laden drones were used to attack an air base in Jammu city.

The Himalayan region of Kashmir is divided between India and Pakistan and claimed by both in its entirety.

Most Muslim Kashmiris support the rebel goal of uniting the territory, either under Pakistani rule or as an independent country.

New Delhi insists the Kashmir militancy is Pakistan-sponsored terrorism. Pakistan denies the charge, and most Kashmiris consider it a legitimate freedom struggle.

Tens of thousands of civilians, rebels and government forces have been killed in the conflict.
Buy Photo A policy update that took effect Monday, June 28, 2021, limits monthly on-base wine purchases to 15 standard-size bottles for U.S. Forces Korea sponsors. (David Choi/Stars and Stripes)

CAMP HUMPHREYS, South Korea  The U.S. military has enacted restrictions to wine purchases from on-base shops in South Korea to discourage black market sales in the country.

The policy update, which took effect Monday, limits the monthly purchase of wine to 15 units of 750 ml, the standard size for a bottle of wine, for U.S. Forces Korea sponsors. Wine was previously excluded from purchase limits at exchange stores, unlike beer and hard liquor.

The policy update was established to deter black marketing, according to a memorandum signed by Maj. Gen. Brad Sullivan, Camp Humphreys chief of staff.

Military retirees in South Korea were previously caught abusing their tax-free shopping privileges, including one person who bought meat for his off-post restaurant and another individual spending over $100,000 in a few months. Each of the retirees received a 10-year ban from entering U.S. bases in South Korea.

Shoppers must scan their military identification card when entering the building and when making their purchases, or present a ration card if they do not possess a military ID. Some controlled items, such as alcohol, are tracked and flagged by USFK when purchased in excess.

There will be some exceptions to the policy update, the memorandum said, including special events hosted by unit commanders and for dependents over age 21.

In addition to the new wine cap, USFK announced in its memo that ration cards are no longer required for shoppers with a military identification number who are sponsored by USFK, United Nations Command, or Combined Forces Command-affiliated personnel. Some in South Korea, such as military dependents, were previously required to present their military identification card and their ration card at the point of sale.

USFK sponsors are allowed to access the on-base stores and their tax-free products without having to pay South Korean tariffs. Sponsors are normally allowed to spend $800 per month and an extra $300 for each dependent.

The $800 spending limit was implemented in September 2019 after a review of purchasing data revealed the preponderance of individuals stayed well below their monthly authorized commissary dollar purchase limit, Camp Humphreys said in a press release last year.

choi.david@stripes.com

Twitter: @choibboy
Crewmembers aboard the Dutch frigate Zr. Ms. Evertsen watch as a Russian fighter jet flies low over the ship. (Dutch Ministry of Defense)

THE HAGUE, Netherlands  Russian warplanes repeatedly flew low over a Dutch navy frigate in the Black Sea last week and carried out "mock attacks," the Defense Ministry of the Netherlands said Tuesday.

The incident involving the Dutch ship Zr. Ms. Evertsen happened last Thursday southeast of Crimea, the ministry said in a statement.

It came a day after after Russia said one of its warships in the Black Sea fired warning shots and a warplane dropped bombs to force a British destroyer out of an area near Crimea that Russia claims as its territorial waters. Britain denied that account and insisted its ship wasn't fired upon.

The Evertsen has been patrolling in the Black Sea with HMS Defender, the British ship that was involved in that incident.

Defense Minister Minister Ank Bijleveld-Schouten called the Russian actions "irresponsible."

"Evertsen has every right to sail there," she said. "There is no justification whatsoever for this kind of aggressive act, which also unnecessarily increases the chance of accidents."

She said the Netherlands would speak to Russia about the incident.

The ministry said that the Russian jets, armed with bombs and air-to-surface rockets flew past the frigate between 3:30 p.m and 8:30 p.m. and were followed by "disruptions to the Evertsen's electronic equipment."

The Russian Defense Ministry responded in a statement later Tuesday, saying that the military scrambled its warplanes "to prevent the violation of the Russian Federation's territorial waters" after the Evertsen changed course and headed toward the Kerch Strait between the Black Sea and the Azov Sea.

The ministry said that after the Su-30 fighter jets and the Su-24 bombers made flyovers "at a safe distance" from the Evertsen, the ship changed course and sailed away.

Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in 2014, a move not recognized by most countries, gaining access to its long Black Sea coast. Russia has chafed at NATO warships visiting near Crimea as destabilizing. In April, it declared a broader area off Crimea closed to foreign naval ships.

In April, Russia imposed restrictions on foreign naval movements near Crimea until November in a move that drew strong complaints from Ukraine and the West. Russia rejected the criticism and noted the restrictions wouldn't interfere with commercial shipping.

Earlier this year, Russia also bolstered its troops near the border with Ukraine and warned Kyiv against using force to reclaim control of the country's eastern industrial heartland, where a conflict with Russia-backed separatists has killed more than 14,000 people in seven years. Moscow withdrew some of its forces after maneuvers, but Ukrainian officials say many of them remain.

___

Associated Press writer Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow contributed to this report.
Airports across Europe could face "chaos" this summer as countries struggle to coordinate the rollout of a COVID-19 digital certificate for travel on the continent, industry representatives warned European Union leaders this week.

The certificate, designed to show a traveler's vaccination or infection status, will be available for all E.U. member states beginning July 1.

But a "worrying patchwork of approaches" by various governments threatens to cause long delays during the peak summer months, according to a joint letter sent by industry groups and seen by the Reuters news agency.

The groups, including the International Air Transport Association, urged European governments to process the certificates remotely before a passenger's arrival at the airport - or else grapple with hours-long lines as staff carry out extra document checks.

The European digital certificates provide information on the passenger via QR code, which requires special scanning equipment. Without uniform implementation across the E.U., "the risk of chaos at European Airports is real," Reuters quoted the letter as saying.

One of the signatories, the IATA's European Vice President Rafael Schvartzman, told Reuters that if travel capacity rebounded but no changes are made, the amount of time passengers would be required to wait at airports could skyrocket to between five and eight hours before departure.

Officials were set to meet Tuesday to discuss the rollout, which the European Commission, the E.U.'s executive arm, has said "will facilitate safe free movement of citizens" during the pandemic.

The certificate's launch, however, comes even as some European countries have imposed fresh travel restrictions to curb the spread of the highly contagious delta coronavirus variant. First identified in India, the variant is now dominant in Britain and Portugal and is gaining ground in countries such as Germany and France.

Last week, Germany barred entry for travelers from Portugal and said that only German citizens would be allowed to return, provided that they quarantine for 14 days - including those who are fully vaccinated. On Monday, citing a senior health official, Reuters reported that the delta variant now accounts for more than 50 percent of registered cases in Germany, up from just 15 percent earlier this month.

French Health Minister Olivier Veran said Tuesday that the variant accounts for around 20 percent of new cases in the country, doubling from just 10 percent last week. The variant is spreading mostly among unvaccinated populations in Europe, but also in Africa and the United States. According to the European Center for Disease Control, more than 58 percent of adults in the 27-member bloc have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine - and more than 35 percent have been fully vaccinated.

The Washington Post's Katerina Ang in Singapore contributed to this report.
A federal judge dismissed charges on June 23, 2021, against six former employees of a U.S. government contractor, who were accused of endangering U.S. troops in Afghanistan by hiring unqualified linguists to work alongside them. (AP)

KABUL, Afghanistan  Charges have been dropped against six former employees of a U.S. government contractor, who were accused of endangering U.S. troops and military operations in Afghanistan by hiring unqualified linguists to work alongside them.

A federal judge in Alexandria, Va., ruled on June 23 that the government waited too long to bring the case to court, denying the group due process.

The alleged offenses happened in 2011 and 2012.

The defendants argued the decadelong delay would prevent them from defending themselves at trial, pointing out that one witness had died, another had gone missing and others would have a foggy recollection of events that occurred so far in the past.

Government prosecutors obtained a grand jury indictment against the defendants in April, alleging they knowingly recruited linguists who lacked even minimum language proficiency in Dari or Pashto, the two main languages spoken in Afghanistan, in order to get bonuses worth thousands of dollars.

The six were charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and between two and six counts of fraud each, and could have been sentenced to up to 20 years in prison for each count if convicted.

The crimes they were accused of threatened to put American troops at greater risk in a combat zone, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction John Sopko said at the time.

Prosecutors last week argued the case should proceed, citing the Wartime Suspension of Limitations Act, which extends the statute of limitations for crimes in war zones until five years after the conflict ends.

But U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled on behalf of the defendants, dropping all charges against them.

wellman.phillip@stripes.com

Twitter: @pwwellman
U.S. Army Gen. Austin S. Miller, the top U.S. general in Afghanistan, speaks in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Tuesday, June 29, 2021, as he gave a sobering assessment of the country's deteriorating security situation as America winds down its so-called forever war. (Ahmad Seir/AP)

KABUL, Afghanistan  The U.S.s top general in Afghanistan on Tuesday gave a sobering assessment of the countrys deteriorating security situation as America winds down its so-called forever war.

Gen. Austin S. Miller said the rapid loss of districts around the country to the Taliban  several with significant strategic value  is worrisome. He also cautioned that the militias deployed to help the beleaguered national security forces could lead the country into civil war.

A civil war is certainly a path that can be visualized if this continues on the trajectory its on right now, that should be of concern to the world, he said.

Miller also told a small group of reporters in the Afghan capital that for now he has the weapons and the capability to aid Afghanistans National Defense and Security Forces.

What I dont want to do is speculate what that (support) looks like in the future, he said.

In meetings at the White House last week with President Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah  the Afghan official tasked with making peace with the Taliban, President Joe Biden said the U.S. was committed to humanitarian and security assistance to Afghanistan, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said.

But the president also said that keeping U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan defied a peace deal the Trump administration negotiated with the Taliban and that wasnt a risk he was prepared to take.

Given the timeline set by the prior administration, that if we did not withdraw our troops, U.S. men and women would be facing fire from on the ground and that was not something as the commander in chief, that he felt was acceptable, Psaki said.

Washington signed a peace deal with the Taliban in February 2020. It laid out the promise of a U.S. withdrawal and commitments by the Taliban to ensure Afghanistan does not harbor militants that can attack the United States. The details of those commitments have never been made public.

The Taliban have accused Washington of breaking the agreement, which called for all troops to be out by May 1, the date the final withdrawal began. U.S. officials have said the Taliban have made some progress, but its not clear whether the insurgent group has kept its end of the deal.

The insurgent group issued orders to commanders against allowing foreign fighters among their ranks, but evidence continues to surface that non-Afghans are on the battlefield.

Still, Miller was insistent that only a political solution will bring peace to the war-tortured nation.

It is a political settlement that brings peace to Afghanistan. And its not just the last 20 years. Its really the last 42 years, he said.

Miller was referring to not only the U.S. war but that of Russias 10-year occupation that ended in 1989. That conflict was followed by a brutal civil war fought by some of the same Afghan leaders deploying militias against the Taliban. The civil war gave rise to the Taliban, who took power in 1996.

American officials have said the entire pullout of U.S. troops will most likely be completed by July 4. But Miller refused to give any date or time frame, referring only to the Sept. 11 timeline given by Biden in April when he announced the withdrawal of the remaining 2,500-3,500 American troops.

Meanwhile, Taliban fighters have been over-running districts in rapid succession, many of them in the north of the country, which is dominated by Afghanistans minorities. The north is also the traditional stronghold of many former mujahedeen leaders who have been a dominant force in Afghanistan since driving the Taliban from power in 2001 together with the U.S.-led coalition.

Several of the districts are on key roads and one is on the border with northern Tajikistan. The Taliban have issued statements saying hundreds of Afghan security forces have surrendered, most of them going to their homes after being recorded on video receiving transportation money from the Taliban.

Miller said there are multiple reasons for the collapse of these districts, including troop fatigue and surrender, psychological defeat and military defeat. But he said the escalating violence puts the country at risk of falling into a deadly civil war.

Going forward, the Afghan defense forces must focus on consolidating their strengths and establishing strategic areas and protecting them, Miller said. Losing districts to the Taliban that allows them to sever transportation and communication links threatens provincial capitals.

As we start talking about how does this all end, the way it must end for the Afghan people is something that revolves around a political solution, he said. Ive also said that if you dont reduce the violence, that political solution becomes more and more difficult.

Miller refused to say where the U.S. and its NATO allies were in the withdrawal process.

He said his time as the head of the U.S.s military mission in Afghanistan was coming to an end, without giving a date, though the press briefing had the feeling of a farewell.

Miller wouldnt speculate on the legacy of Americas longest war, saying it will be for history to decide.

The future will tell the rest of the story, he said. What we will have to do is make an honest assessment of what went well and what didnt go so well over the years as we work forward.

___

Associated Press writer Aamer Madhani in Washington contributed.
An Afghan soldier walks near the gate of Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, Friday, June 25, 2021. (Rahmat Gul/AP)

BAGRAM, Afghanistan  For nearly 20 years, Bagram Airfield was the heart of American military power in Afghanistan, a sprawling mini-city behind fences and blast walls just an hour's drive north of Kabul. Initially, it was a symbol of the U.S. drive to avenge the 9/11 attacks, then of its struggle for a way through the ensuing war with the Taliban.

In just a matter of days, the last U.S. soldiers will depart Bagram. They are leaving what probably everyone connected to the base, whether American or Afghan, considers a mixed legacy.

"Bagram grew into such a massive military installation that, as with few other bases in Afghanistan and even Iraq, it came to symbolize and epitomize the phrase 'mission creep'," said Andrew Watkins, Afghanistan senior analyst for the Brussels-based International Crisis Group.

U.S. Central Command said last week that it's well past 50% done packing up Bagram, and the rest is going fast. American officials have said the entire pullout of U.S. troops will most likely be completely finished by July 4. The Afghan military will then take over Bagram as part of its continuing fight against the Taliban  and against what many in the country fear will be a new eruption of chaos.

The departure is rife with symbolism. Not least, it's the second time that an invader of Afghanistan has come and gone through Bagram.

The Soviet Union built the airfield in the 1950s. When it invaded Afghanistan in 1979 to back a communist government, it turned it into its main base from which it would defend its occupation of the country. For 10 years, the Soviets fought the U.S.-backed mujahedeen, dubbed freedom fighters by President Ronald Reagan, who saw them as a front-line force in one of the last Cold War battles.

The Soviet Union negotiated its withdrawal in 1989. Three years later, the pro-Moscow government collapsed, and the mujahedeen took power, only to turn their weapons on each other and kill thousands of civilians. That turmoil brought to power the Taliban who overran Kabul in 1996.

When the U.S. and NATO inherited Bagram in 2001, they found it in ruins, a collection of crumbling buildings, gouged by rockets and shells, most of its perimeter fence wrecked. It had been abandoned after being battered in the battles between the Taliban and rival mujahedeen warlords fleeing to their northern enclaves.

After dislodging the Taliban from Kabul, the U.S.-led coalition began working with their warlord allies to rebuild Bagram, first with temporary structures that then turned permanent. Its growth was explosive, eventually swallowing up roughly 30 square miles.

"The closure of Bagram is a major symbolic and strategic victory for the Taliban," said Bill Roggio, senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

"If the Taliban is able to take control of the base, it will serve as anti-U.S. propaganda fodder for years to come," said Roggio who is also editor of the foundation's Long War Journal.

It would also be a military windfall.

The enormous base has two runways. The most recent, at 12,000 feet long, was built in 2006 at a cost of $96 million. There are 110 revetments, which are basically parking spots for aircraft, protected by blast walls. GlobalSecurity, a security think tank, says Bagram includes three large hangars, a control tower and numerous support buildings. The base has a 50-bed hospital with a trauma bay, three operating theaters and a modern dental clinic. There are also fitness centers and fast food restaurants. Another section houses a prison, notorious and feared among Afghans.

Jonathan Schroden, of the U.S.-based research and analysis organization CNA, estimates that well over 100,000 people spent significant time at Bagram over the past two decades. "Bagram formed a foundation for the wartime experience of a large fraction of U.S. military members and contractors who served in Afghanistan," said Schroden, director of CNA's Center for Stability and Development.

"The departure of the last U.S. troops from there will likely serve as the final turn of the page for many of these folks with respect to their time in that country," he said.

For Afghans in Bagram district, a region of more than 100 villages supported by orchards and farming fields, the base has been a major supplier of employment. The U.S. withdrawal effects nearly every household, said Darwaish Raufi, district governor.

The Americans have been giving the Afghan military some weaponry and other material. Anything else that they are not taking, they are destroying and selling it to scrap dealers around Bagram. U.S. officials say they must ensure nothing usable can ever fall into Taliban hands.

Last week, the U.S. Central Command said it had junked 14,790 pieces of equipment and sent 763 C-17 aircraft loaded with material out of Afghanistan. Bagram villagers say they hear explosions from inside the base, apparently the Americans destroying buildings and material.

Raufi said many villagers have complained to him about the U.S. leaving just their junk behind.

"There's something sadly symbolic about how the U.S. has gone about leaving Bagram. The decision to take so much away and destroy so much of what is left speaks to the U.S. urgency to get out quickly," said Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Asia Program at the U.S.-based Wilson Center.

"It's not the kindest parting gift for Afghans, including those taking over the base," he said.

Inevitably, comparisons to the former Soviet Union have arisen.

Retired Afghan Gen. Saifullah Safi, who worked alongside U.S. forces at Bagram, said the Soviets left all their equipment when they withdrew. They "didn't take much with them, just the vehicles they needed to transport their soldiers back to Russia," he said.

The prison in the base was handed over to the Afghans in 2012, and they will continue to operate it. In the early years of the war, for many Afghans, Bagram became synonymous with fear, next only to Guantanamo Bay. Parents would threaten their crying children with the prison.

In the early years of the invasion, Afghans often disappeared for months without any reports of their whereabouts until the International Committee of the Red Cross located them in Bagram. Some returned home with tales of torture.

"When someone mentions even the word Bagram I hear the screams of pain from the prison," said Zabihullah, who spent six years in Bagram, accused of belonging to the faction of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a warlord designated a terrorist by the U.S. At the time of his arrest it was an offense to belong to Hekmatyar's party.

Zabihullah, who goes by one name, was released in 2020, four years after President Ashraf Ghani signed a peace deal with Hekmatyar.

Roggio says the status of the prison is a "major concern," noting that many of its prisoners are known Taliban leaders or members of militant groups, including al-Qaida and the Islamic State group. It's believed about 7,000 prisoners are still in the prison.

"If the base falls and the prison is overrun, these detainees can bolster the ranks of these terror groups," Roggio said.
Buy Photo Former Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, 42, speaks to Stars and Stripes via Skype about his new book, The Man in the Arena: From Fighting ISIS to Fighting for my Freedom. (Caitlin Doornbos/Stars and Stripes)

WASHINGTON  In his new book, notorious ex-Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher  acquitted of nine war crimes in 2017  writes like hes speaking to battle buddies hardened by the brutality of war.

For some, killing becomes an addiction, but I consider it a good addiction needed to win wars, Gallagher writes in his book, released Monday. For me, getting into firefights and killing the enemy was the biggest high I ever experienced.

Thats the reality of Gallaghers 20-year career in special operations, he told Stars and Stripes.

Gallagher made national headlines in September 2018 when members from his platoon accused him of shooting Iraqi civilians and stabbing a captured teenage Islamic State fighter to death, leading to 10 charges of war crimes. He was acquitted on all but one  posing with the teenagers corpse in a photo he sent to friends  and was reduced in rank after his conviction, from chief petty officer to 1st class petty officer. Then-President Donald Trump reversed the decision shortly after, and his rank was restored.

The book, The Man in the Arena, largely focuses on his life and career, rehashing his case and taking aim at SEALs from his platoon he claims plotted to accuse him of war crimes.

Those two spent more time and energy trying to turn the platoon against me than they did trying to kill ISIS, he wrote about Special Warfare Operators 1st Class Dylan Dille and Dalton Tolbert, who served in his platoon and told Naval Criminal Investigative Services of Gallaghers alleged killings of civilians and the ISIS teen.

Gallagher, wearing a T-shirt reading Kill Bad Dudes, told Stars and Stripes he hoped his book would show civilians an honest view of warfare and offer fellow veterans a relatable narrative.

I wrote it like I always talked when I was in the military, Gallagher said. I hope the reader, if theyre civilian, can at least absorb that information better than me trying to  talk in such a militarized manner.

The book is dark, depicting the brutality that special operators faced fighting ISIS in 2017. It attempts to explain the conditions that led to Gallaghers trophy photo with the dead ISIS teen. An accompanying text, Got him with my hunting knife, led to the accusations, but his lawyer said it was not a confession, but dark humor.

Gallagher writes of praying to keep his platoon safe  and for God to allow us to take out as many enemy fighters as possible.

To a non-warfighter, that last part may sound callous  praying for God to help you kill people  but thats why you arent a warfighter, Gallagher wrote.

Gallagher, 42, said its that kind of morbid honesty that he hopes will move readers to gain a better perspective on special operations and the guys that actually do the job.

Just because our job involves killing doesnt make us a psychopath. Were not broken or damaged, he said. Thats just some of the things that I hope you will take into perspective that special operators have to deal with.

Doornbos.caitlin@stripes.com

Twitter: @CaitlinDoornbos
Steam rises as Navy ROTC midshipmen begin to hose down a propane-fueled fire in a simulated ship's engine room at Naval Station Mayport. (Naval Station Mayport/TNS)

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (Tribune News Service)  The water was already up to their knees as they splashed into the steel compartment where water gushed from pipes as well as a gouge in a wall.

Wow, ice cold, yelped one midshipman as they plowed through roiling water in a sinking-ship simulator at Naval Station Mayport.

Three forced their way into one pipes powerful spray to seal a jagged break as five others hefted a jack to seal off an overhead leak, and one more hammered wooden wedges into the gouge.

Go, go, go, yelled damage control officer Ahmad Alford above the roaring water, pointing to a valve. Get it unstuck. Do what you need to do! ... Use your brains!

The ship may have been a mockup. But it was complete with damage control and repair stations and thousands of gallons of gushing water, all to teach midshipmen what to do when a hull is holed. And the realistic training was part of a drill that began before dawn as 75 second-year NROTC midshipmen braved flames and flood as part of Sea Trials 2021.

From classroom training and obstacle courses at Jacksonville Universitys NROTC program to the simulators, these midshipmen were demonstrating the skills they have learned in two years. And after being stuck on Zoom classes during last years COVID-19 outbreak, Baltimore midshipman Elisabeth Swift said its time to get back into physical training versus being stuck behind a desk all day.

The obstacle course is the toughest for me. I dont have much like that to practice on at home, she said. It was nice to have experience with it earlier in the week, but it was still difficult.

Ben Lyday said he is undergoing Navy officer training because it will help him become the man I need to be. Being able to work on actual fire and flooding simulations was energizing as he remembered last years video classrooms.

It was really easy to lose motivation in the past year and a half because theres really no relationship with the Navy at all, the Atlanta resident said. Trying to understand what the mission is and why you are trying to be this person is hard to grasp when its virtual.

The NROTC program is designed to develop mental, moral and physical training as men and women work toward college graduation, then a commission as Navy or Marine Corps officers, the Navy says. Jacksonville Universitys NROTC is one of four Florida universities that sponsor this training, part of 63 colleges and universities in the United States.

Are you going to save the ship?

JUs NROTC Unit has commissioned more than 1,680 Navy ensigns and Marine Corps second lieutenants for service in specialties including surface and submarine warfare, naval aviation and others. And along with JUs classroom training and a Marine Corps-designed obstacle course, the midshipmen also have access at Naval Station Mayport, Naval Air Station Jacksonville and Naval Station Kings Bay in Georgia.

It can be a tough task for the young men and women, who all went through versions of these scenarios before everything was ramped up this last day, chief damage control officer Nolan Freyoux said.

We throw in different things like a personnel casualty just to see how they are going to react at the end of it if they have to make that life decision, Freyoux said. ... We ask them what are they going to do  are you going to make that decision to save a sailor as the space is flooding out, or are you going to save the ship?

Every one of the 10-day training events began with 3 or 4 a.m. reveille, then obstacle course runs before breakfast. Tests were mixed with pistol range training, ship handling simulators, swim qualification and a helicopter fire. There were tours of area bases as well as the USS Paul Ignatius and USS Lassen guided missile destroyers and two helicopter maritime strike squadrons. Firefighting and flood control training were held during the 10 days.

The program ended Monday with a packed schedule that started with 3 a.m. reveille, a pre-dawn obstacle course, helm simulator, fire fighting, a flooding ship, swim qualification and man overboard drills.

It was like a blast furnace inside the firefight trainer, NROTC members wearing heavy bunker gear plus air tank and mask as steel doors opened on a propane-fueled inferno.

Man the hose, the instructor yelled as they lined up, steam billowing as water pummels the fire. Followed by a full-force flooding exercise, it all prepares them for the real thing, which could happen at any time in their careers, Freyoux said.

They are all pretty tired now, being up all morning, Freyoux said. Each one is their own person so we have to motivate each of them a little differently. But they are very eager and motivated to get through this.

Senior Chief Jesse Kenner said the officer candidates did well as the last day wrapped up, showing they had absorbed all the instructors had thrown at them in the past week. And sometimes, these days of training with fire, flood and obstacle course can reinforce their course into the Navy or Marines, he said.

They get to come here and do hands-on training for all this equipment and try stuff they will be doing in the future, Kenner said. Its a good opportunity to reflect, to really see where they stand against the evolutions we do every day in the fleet. This is their chance to try it and learn if this is the right career path for them.

Sea Trials 2021 ended with one more run around the obstacle course, then graduation and a cake before students headed home.

2021 www.jacksonville.com.

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Rescue crew members and their search-and-rescue dog continue to look for survivors Sunday at the collapsed Champlain Towers South condominium building in Surfside, Fla. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)

The first responder called out looking for survivors, and he was shocked to hear a response. A woman had been trapped for days in the rubble of a hotel in Haiti that had rumbled to the ground in an earthquake that killed some 250,000 people.

Jeff Lewis, a battalion fire chief with the Fairfax County Fire Department in Virginia, still recalls that day in 2010 often, he said. The woman, eventually extricated at the Hotel Montana in Port-au-Prince, marked a victory in a line of work that mixes devastation with jubilation, with successful rescues cherished for years.

Its a very sobering thing, said Lewis said of finding survivors. All of us who are in this field consider ourselves lucky, and very much appreciate that we can do it.

The highly specialized field jumped to the forefront following the collapse last week of Champlain Towers South, a 12-story beachfront condominium building in Surfside, Fla. As of Monday night, authorities had confirmed 11 deaths, with 150 more people unaccounted for and others grappling with the small decisions that kept them away from their home as it disintegrated.

The wicked challenges in the work are often in its unpredictability.

First responders are expected to assess and traverse piles of rubble with unknown hazards lurking, including jagged edges and the possibility of additional cave-ins. Over time, teams mark routes in and out of the disaster area, building shoring with boards and other material to prevent debris from falling.

Its a very long process, and its very complicated, Lewis said. You might need to tunnel through a washing machine. You might need to tunnel through a bed. Its anything you might find in a home.

As the crews work, they deploy an array of working dogs, acoustic sensors, cutting tools, and telescopic cameras in hopes of finding survivors. They wear protective gear that is lighter and allows for more dexterity than traditional firefighting equipment, a function of the tight spaces into which they squeeze.

Fairfax County Fire Chief John Butler said that the two most important things in urban search and rescue are intense training and recognition of potential hazards.

The reason many people cant self-extricate is the very same reason we have to take due diligence and intense attention to detail, so that we dont become a part of the rescue, Butler said. When you get into some of these areas you need a plan to mitigate the hazard, and you should also have a plan to get out of it.

As people are found, they receive medical care on-site as needed, and are carried out depending on their kinds of injuries, Butler said. People who are found dead are treated with dignity factored in, with coverings used to provide privacy, he added.

Gregg Favre, the executive director of the regional response system in St. Louis, said rescue teams often must build routes that resemble makeshift mine shafts. The most likely place to find survivors are in void spaces, spots in which steel beams, furniture or other heavy-duty material create a pocket that holds up to the onslaught of a building caving in.

Favre, who was trained in urban search and rescue as a St. Louis firefighter, recalled responding to a house fire at a vacant building that collapsed. Firefighters believed that a man without a home occasionally stayed there, and searched for him.

I was essentially in the basement of the building walking on the roofing materials, Favre said. The whole time you have to be mindful of where youre stepping.

Lewis leads Virginia Task Force 1, one of 28 urban search and rescue teams across the United States that are supported by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but sponsored and overseen on a local level. When dispatched in its entirety, each team has about 70 to 80 people, including physicians and structural engineers who can assess safety.

In Surfside, two similar Florida task forces have a leading role in the rescue, with other experts from as far away as Israel and Mexico joining. The Virginia team was put on alert that they could go, but the alert has been canceled, Lewis said, indicating the teams on the ground believe they have what they need.

While the passage of time since the collapse early Thursday diminishes the chance survivors will be found, miracles do occur. The team from Miami-Dade County responded in Haiti in 2010, and pulled a girl from rubble eight days after the earthquake.

In Haiti, Ken Keen, then a three-star Army general, had just arrived several hours before earthquake, and was on the porch at the U.S. ambassadors residence overlooking downtown Port-au-Prince when the ground began shaking. He ran out into the open, watched as the building swayed back and forth like a palm tree in a windstorm, and heard what he initially thought were explosions.

In reality, it was the collapse of buildings.

One of those buildings was the Hotel Montana a couple of blocks away. Reinforcing the cruel chance involved, one of the U.S. service members on his team was killed inside, while two others rode it down as the building collapsed and survived, Keen said.

The general, who had previously commanded the Armys elite 75th Ranger Regiment, was put in charge of the U.S. militarys relief effort, and came away deeply appreciative of the rescue crews, he said. He also realized that while some workers did not want to stop, they needed to rest.

You have to force people to do rotations and pull them off the site, and make it a part of the routine, he said. You have to have some down time.
Veterans and their guardians gather at the National World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, July 10, 2019. Emma Swislow/Stars and Stripes (STARS AND STRIPES)

WASHINGTON  The Honor Flight Network, which sends veterans to tour war memorials in Washington, D.C., will restart flights in August after a 16-month suspension during the coronavirus pandemic.

Flights will resume Aug. 16, said Carol Harlow, communications officer for the Honor Flight Network.

We have been monitoring closely the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] guidelines and also the District of Columbia guidelines, Harlow said. We wouldnt do this if we werent confident we could do it safely.

The Honor Flight Network has 125 chapters that help send veterans in their communities to Washington to see the memorials for their wars. Representatives from the hubs met virtually June 12 and decided to restart the flights in August.

The network is requiring all veterans, guardians and volunteers to be vaccinated against the coronavirus or take a coronavirus test 72 hours before the flight departs, Harlow said. The day of their flight, participants must fill out a self-assessment form that asks whether theyve experienced any coronavirus symptoms in recent days.

When the coronavirus pandemic hit the United States last year, the network canceled trips through April 2020 and later extended the cancellations through June, then August. Eventually, the board of directors that governs the network decided to end all trips through 2020 because of the ongoing risks.

The Honor Flight Network didnt want to take risks, particularly because it serves a vulnerable population of veterans, the group said. Priority for the flights is often given to terminally ill and older veterans, many of whom live in nursing homes.

Typically, the network transports about 20,000 veterans to Washington each year. Once travel resumes, the group is expected to reach the milestone of providing 250,000 trips to veterans in the 16 years since Honor Flight was founded.

wentling.nikki@tripes.com

Twitter: @nikkiwentling
The city council on Monday took the Urban Enterprise Association to task for its overall lack of rules in dispersing reimbursements after local business owners Brett and Lara Dawson expressed concern with how the entity is doing business.

The UEA last week voted to give the couple $10,000 for exterior improvements on a building they own at 402 N. Seventh St., one that houses Dawsforce Technology, Brett Dawsons own tech company.

But it was a year-long process, one fraught with frustration, and they believe they werent treated fairly along the way.

Brett Dawson said he believes the UEA is operating with two separate sets of standards  giving more money to some applicants than others  and he took particular issue with the way the UEA conducts its meetings, i.e. hearing from applicants then sending them away to deliberate and make a decision on which projects to fund and at how much.

This turned into a nightmare, Dawson told the council. I wanted to quit because I didnt see any chance of ever getting any money. At least that was the message I was getting. So this is my last stop, and I may never see any more money because of it.

But there needs to be oversight, a set of standards, he said, instead of a free-for-all and dealing (with applicants) on a case-by-case basis.

The couple first appeared before the UEA to seek help with exterior restorations in January of 2020. They came armed with a handful of quotes, each totaling about $100,000  including new windows, tuck-pointing and some fresh paint.

At the time, the UEA was low on funds, so the Dawsons were sent away.

In July of that same year, the UEA opted to award them $5,000 for some new windows, but the couple returned in January for a third time asking for more help.

The UEA opted to table their request as, given so much time had passed, they didnt fully understand the scope of the work, members said at the time.

So the Dawsons came back for a fourth time last week, this time armed with a brand new quote from local contractor Wolfe Construction, one for a similar amount  yet for a scaled-back project  of just over $100,000.

Previously-secured quotes were considered obsolete due to the ever-rising costs of construction materials, Dawson told the UEA.

Eventually, the couple was awarded $10,000  if they spend $20,000, a practice not customary for the UEA.

Why were their stipulations placed on my money? Dawson asked.

In many other cases, the UEA has awarded half the cost of the proposed project, if funding allows. Other local businesses have, in the past, secured more, including nearly $40,000 given to the owners of Procopios Pizza and Pasta and $60,000  spread over two years  to Old Chicago Pizza and Taproom.

Grouseland, too, received $50,000, also spread across two years, last week for its ongoing restoration project.

Councilman Marc McNeece then asked UEA president Jim Zeigler, who was present at the meeting Monday, if members had some kind of scoring process, to which Zeigler said they had never had any hard and fast rules when it comes to awards or anything else.

The UEA has, for years, prided itself on not having a set of written rules, preferring, instead, to be nimble and consider each project on its overall merit.

The mission, Zeigler said, is simply to make buildings within the Urban Enterprise Zone look nicer, thereby drawing more business and investment.

Established in 2002, the UEA provides tax breaks  such as income tax deductions and credits for job growth, capital investment and income creation  to businesses located within its boundaries. The UEA, in turn, gets 24% of any savings realized by participating businesses to spend fixing up other properties within the zone, which, theoretically, increases the tax base.

Zeigler, in referencing previous awards offered by the UEA, pointed to an applicants overall investment as a deciding factor in how much the organization offered in the way of reimbursement.

For instance, he said, Old Chicago was awarded 3% of its overall investment; Grouseland was 2%.

Kaitlyn Ashby, the owner of the old Esco Walks building on Main Street, was awarded $30,000 to fix it up  or about 15% of her expected overall investment.

Taking that same formula into consideration, Zeigler said Dawson got about 13% of his investment.

But council members  who appoint the UEA members  were still left confused.

So its a percentage youre shooting for? asked council president Tim Salters.

No, no its not, Zeigler replied. We dont have hard, fast rules.

So perhaps, council members suggested, its time for a change.

Wouldnt it be beneficial to get some, so we dont run into this? Salters asked.

McNeece, too, argued that, without them, someone could do more than just complain.

I would worry about someone becoming very angry and filing a suit, citing discrimination, he said.

Applicants, McNeece added, should understand ahead of time what to expect.

It seems to me (guidelines) should be part of the criteria, that they should be made to understand the rules theyre playing with, he said.

The UEA is set to expire in 2022, although current state law would allow for a five year extension if the council agrees, and members indicated on Monday that they would.

Mayor Joe Yochum commended the UEA for doing what they think is right, and Salters, too, said the UEA has done great work, allowing for major investment within historic downtown Vincennes.

Its important to keep that work going, he said.

But we need to think about how we can make the experience better for everyone, he said.
Local briefs

Road work continues on Hart Street Road

County highway superintendent Benji Boyd last week announced that Fog Seal operations began on Hart Street Road between Tower Road and Indiana 241.

Work will continue through most of this week, weather permitting. Work will include sweeping loose rock off the road and the application of fresh fog seal (oil). Motorists are advised to avoid the fresh oil for at least two to three hours. Drying time varies with weather conditions.

City seeking donations for Fourth of July fireworks show

The City of Vincennes recently announced that it is taking over the annual Fourth of July Fireworks show from veterans with the local American Legion. It was a long-time tradition for the American Legion to solicit donations for the fireworks, and the city plans to continue in that spirit.

To donate, contact City Hall at 812-882-7285 or send a check made payable to Vincennes Fireworks to City Hall, 201 Vigo St., Vincennes, IN, 47591.

United Ways new 21-Week Equity Challenge underway

The United Way of Knox County this month announced the launch of a new 21-week Equity Challenge, one meant to help people recognize their own bias  particularly in terms of race, class and gender.

People can still sign up for the 21-week Equity Challenge via the United Ways website. It works by sending out a weekly email to participants directing them to that weeks directive. Topics include things like race and racial identity, privilege, white fragility, institutional racism, the Black Lives Matter movement, stereotyping, the LGBTQ community and even ageism and disability, to name just a few.

Each link takes the participant to a choice of articles to read, a podcast to listen to or a video to watch, such as a Ted Talk. There, too, are corresponding activities, and each lesson is only meant to take about 15 minutes.

The challenge lasts through World Kindness Day on Nov. 13.

To register for the 21-Week Equity Challenge, visit https://www.unitedwayofknoxcounty.org/21.
New research from the Youth19 survey shows the simplistic label of Asian is hiding just how different the experiences of secondary school students from diverse Asian backgrounds are, especially when it comes to mental distress.

University of Auckland Associate Professor Roshini Peiris-John says the results highlight how misleading it can be to group young people of Asian identity into a single category as often happens in health and governmental studies.

The Youth19 survey is the latest in the Youth2000 survey series which asks more than 7,000 students about everything from family life to sexual activity.

Of these, nearly 2000  or one-quarter  identify as Asian. `Asian captures everyone from Afghanistan in the west to Japan in the east and from China in the north to Indonesia in the south.

It also covers everyone from new arrivals to those who have multi-generational ties to New Zealand.

The new data show South Asian students, from India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives, and Bangladesh, experience higher rates of poverty, with 15 per cent having parents who always worried about money for food.

Students from East Asian countries, from China in the west and north to Japan in the east and Indonesia in the south, are less likely to report concerns around poverty.

East Asian students have higher mental health needs than South Asian students, with about a third experiencing significant depressive symptoms. East Asian students were also less likely to access health care (73 per cent) and had higher unmet health care needs (21 per cent).

Getting away from that overly broad Asian label opens up opportunities for targeted interventions, says Professor Peiris-John.

The report also highlights the high rates of mental distress and discrimination experienced by both East Asian and South Asian young people.

One-in-three East Asian and South Asian girls experienced significant depressive symptoms.

A 15-year-old Pakistani female respondent says the biggest problem for young people today is feeling like they have to fit into the image that society wants us to be like  skinny, pretty, have the best phone or have a boyfriend.

A 15-year-old Chinese female survey participant however says the biggest problem is anxiety and depression; not having someone to talk to and being afraid to speak about it.

More East Asian boys (22 per cent) than South Asian boys (11 percent) experienced significant depressive symptoms.

Professor Peiris-John is particularly concerned about the studys findings on suicide with one-in-four Asian girls (26 per cent, as well as 16 per cent of Asian boys) saying they had seriously thought about killing themselves in the previous 12 months, compared to 23 per cent of European girls and 15 per cent of European boys.

Professor Peiris-John says Asian students often experience pressure to uphold the perception that they are successful, accomplished and resilient and these pressures and expectations could affect their mental health.

Even worse, mental health issues are often hidden, as the stereotype also acts as a barrier to accessing support, says Professor Peiris-John.

Students from all Asian groups also reported high rates of racism, discrimination, and safety concerns.

One-in-four say they were treated unfairly by a teacher because of their ethnicity, compared to 14 per cent of Pakeha and other European students).

Ten per cent say they were bullied in school because of their ethnicity or religion, compared to three per cent of Pakeha and other European students.

Five per cent say they were treated unfairly by a health professional because of their ethnicity, compared to 3 per cent of Pakeha and other European students.

Almost half of the participants, 45 per cent, felt unsafe in their neighbourhood compared to 39% of Pakeha and other European students.

A 14-year-old Sri Lankan respondent says the biggest problem for young people is being scared to go out and show their religion in public without getting hurt.

A 17-year-old Asian boy says not having to hear racism as banter and having to put on a face to adapt and go along with it would make school life better.

Professor Peiris-John says experiences of discrimination and racism is known to be an underlying cause for poorer health outcomes, reduced access to health care, and ethnic health inequities.

The impact of racism on mental health among Asian communities in New Zealand has been highlighted by the Suicide Mortality Review Committee.

Having data for specific Asian groups rather than a one-size-fits-all approach and addressing racism are a part of the committees recommendations.

The Youth19 study is jointly led by Associate Professor Terryann Clark of the University of Auckland and Associate Professor Terry Fleming of Victoria University, and draws on work by researchers from the universities of Auckland, Victoria, and Otago.

For the full report, visitwww.youth19.ac.nz.
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In brief: Samsungs Galaxy Z Flip 3 and Z Fold 3 phones are rumored to launch in August, which means renders of the devices are leaking all over the internet, some of which appear official.

Last week saw prolific leaker Even Blass tweet images of the Galaxy Z Flip 3 and Z Fold 3. They appear to be official Samsung press release photos, and in the case of the Z Fold 3, confirm support for the Galaxy S Pen.

A listing for the device on the FCC website also mentions the S Pen, which would make the Z Fold 3 the only other handset outside of the Note series and Galaxy S21 Ultra to support Samsungs stylus.

The FCC listing also confirms the Z Fold 3s mmWave 5G and UWB (ultra-wideband) support, 9W wireless charging, reverse wireless charging, and MST for Samsung Pay. The device is said to feature a 7.5-inch AMOLED inner screen, a 6.2-inch cover display, and a Snapdragon 888 processor. Its also rumored to be cheaper than the Z Fold 2, coming in at $1,600.

Looking to Samsungs other premium offering, the Galaxy Z Flip 3, GizNext has just published more renders of the flip-style handset. The new model is said to feature a dual-tone color scheme and a larger (1.9-inch) external cover screen, while the 6.7-inch 25:9 internal display from the predecessor remains unchanged.

The Z Flip 3's rear dual-camera layout is now vertical, theres a bigger battery, and it will reportedly have an under-screen selfie cam. Like the Z Fold 3, Qualcomms flagship Snapdragon 888 will be powering everything. Its expected to be priced at $1,400 and could be available in at least eight color options.

The handsets are rumored to be unveiled at a Samsung Unpacked event next month and launch sometime in August. Better get saving if you're interested.
Big quote: A prevalent trend at this years show: software-based solutions and platforms meant to drive the transformation of cellular networks away from the traditional, proprietary hardware-based network equipment of yore and toward software-based, virtualized networks running on standardized enterprise server hardware.

Most people didnt have particularly high expectations for this years Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona. After all, vendor after vendor pulled out several months back, and attendance was predicted to be (and now proven to be) very light compared to the large crowds of previous years.

Nevertheless, several big companies associated with the telecom market have been using the conventions time frame to make announcements about new products, technologies, and partnerships relevant to the mobile industry. To no ones surprise, the vast majority of those announcements have to do with 5G.

However, whereas much of the big news from past shows focused on 5G-enabled devices or discussions of far-reaching 5G-driven services, this years news is primarily focused on the network infrastructure components necessary to power 5G networks. A prevalent trend at this years show: software-based solutions and platforms meant to drive the transformation of cellular networks away from the traditional, proprietary hardware-based network equipment of yore and toward software-based, virtualized networks running on standardized enterprise server hardware.

Still, there were some developments on the mobile device front. Samsung generated some of the only non-5G news from the show with the debut of its One UI Watch. Details of the forthcoming hardware remain uncertainthough it will likely not support 5Gbut the watchs software will feature a new user interface called One UI thats designed to run on top of Googles WearOS.

The announcement is noteworthy, because it marks Samsungs exit from running Tizen on its wearables. It also shows a further tightening between the companys Galaxy phone software efforts, for which it has One UI, and its wearables. Equally important, this move gives the Android ecosystem an example of interface and experience consistency across devices, something that Apple currently has cornered with the iPhone and Apple Watch.

Qualcomm also had some device-related news with the debut of its speed-bumped Snapdragon 888+. The new SoC, which is expected to arrive in devices by the end of the year, kicks the main CPU speed up to 3 GHz from 2.8 GHz and offers a 20% improvement in AI performance.

The other news from Qualcomm highlights the network infrastructure focus of the show, as the company debuted a second-generation FSM200xx line of chips designed to power Open RAN (Radio Access Network) platforms in mmWave-capable 5G small cells. Whats interesting about the chip is that its touted to be the first to support all the latest 3GPP Release 16 standards.

These are essentially the second-generation extensions to the original 5G standard and include such things as Enhanced Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications (URLLC) for industrial applications. The support for O-RAN is also notable, because it is yet another example of the growing range of technologies designed to power the software-defined infrastructure mentioned earlier.

IBM made several announcements regarding its 5G software efforts, including the new IBM Cloud Pak for Network Automation and enhancements to its existing IBM Edge Application Manager. Part of the promise for software-defined network platforms is the ability to manage and automate them, and thats exactly what Cloud Pak for Network Automation is designed to do both more easily and more quickly than existing hardware networks.

Edge Application Manager, on the other hand, allows service providers to manage and distribute network-based applications to edge computing devices. Enhancements for the new version include support for 4x the number of edge devices and collaborations with over 30 partners. The company also discussed an expansion of its partnership with Verizon to power certain elements of its 5G network. In particular, Red Hat and IBMs Global Business Services (GBS) division plan to help Verizon create an open, cloud native, containerized platform for the carriers 5G core network using Red Hats OpenShift hybrid cloud platform.

On the topic of cloud technology-based partnerships, Amazons AWS made a series of announcements around its efforts both with a new carrier partner (Dish 5G in the US) and a traditional one (Swisscom). More than driving towards software-defined network infrastructure that might run within a carriers private cloud, Amazon highlighted the possibilities of running carrier networks on public cloud resources like AWS offers. Not surprisingly, thats a goal being targeted by Microsofts Azure and Google Cloud as well.

Through its online AWS Virtual Village, the company hosted a number of speakers that laid out the details of both its software and hardware offerings, like running cloud-native virtualized network functions in Kubernetes containers within the AWS environment.

Given the wide geographical reach that any cellular network needs to support, Amazon talked about not only its major computing zones (i.e., data centers), but also local zones and even private zones enabled with its Wavelength and Outpost onsite offerings. In other words, you could even run these network functions in a single rack server AWS Outpost box at the base of a 5G cell tower. Interestingly, the company also discussed how those Outpost devices could be powered by traditional x86 CPUs from Intel and AMD, but also by Amazon-designed, Arm-powered Graviton2 CPUs.

Of course, the theory of whats possible with these advanced network infrastructure-focused technologies, and what carriers will actually be willing to adopt, are often far apart. Indeed, one of the big challenges in making the transition is the huge investment in traditional network infrastructure that most telcos already have. Even if the software-based, virtualized, and O-RAN initiatives are all demonstrably much better than traditional hardware offerings, its still going to take a long time (and a lot of money!) for most carriers to make that transition. Given that fact, the AWS event highlighted both the opportunities that a new entrant to mobile networks, like Dish, can quickly enable by adopting its cloud-based model completely (because it has no existing infrastructure), as well as the more tempered, step-by-step approach a traditional carrier like Swisscom needs to take. The end results can be positive for both, but the income streams back to a cloud-based provider like Amazon will be radically different.

Although this years trade show wont likely amount to much, it is interesting to see that MWC can still serve as a catalyst for driving the news cycle of the mobile industry. The increased focus and attention on 5G network infrastructure coming out of this years event clearly reflects an important shift that will likely grow as the networks demands for 5G services also grows. Heres to hoping we can see how it continues to develop in person at next years show.

Bob ODonnell is the founder and chief analyst of TECHnalysis Research, LLC a technology consulting firm that provides strategic consulting and market research services to the technology industry and professional financial community. You can follow him on Twitter @bobodtech.

Image credit nikkimeel
Facebook can breathe a sigh of relief for now as a federal judge threw out two antitrust lawsuits in the U.S.

These two lawsuits were filed separately last year by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and a group of 48 attorneys general. Both lawsuits accused the social networking company of violating antitrust laws by acquiring competition such as Instagram and Whatsapp.

Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that there is no sufficient evidence that proves Facebook has a monopoly in the industry.

According to The Verge, Facebook's stock value surged due to the dismissal of the antitrust cases. The company's stock went past $1 trillion in market capitalization, a first for Facebook.

Facebook Antitrust Lawsuits: The Next Step

According to a report by NPR, new lawsuits can still be filed against Facebook despite Judge Boasberg.

FTC has been given 30 days to appeal the decision and file a new case. The Commission must be able "to explain how it concluded that Facebook has a market share of at least 60%."

As for the case of the attorneys general, Judge Boasberg ruled that the group "had waited too long to challenge Facebook's purchases of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014."

The judge cited the Doctrine of Laches in his decision on the lawsuit filed by the attorneys general. The Doctrine of Laches is a civil law doctrine which states that "precludes relief for those who sleep on their rights," according to Judge Boasberg.

The civil law doctrine does not apply in the FTC case.

Also Read: Facebook Antitrust Lawsuit FTC: 48 States Push Social Media Giant to Divest Instagram and WhatsApp Amid Monopoly Allegations

Antitrust Lawsuits Filed by FTC and Attorneys General

Despite having greenlit Facebook's acquisition of Instagram and Whatsapp, the FTC announced last year that it was looking to file an antitrust lawsuit against the company. The lawsuit was due to the results of an antitrust hearing conducted by Congress last July.

An internal email from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was revealed during the Congress hearing. The email was about plans to "neutralize a potential competitor."

A group of 48 attorneys general followed suit with their case. The attorneys general accused the social media company of anti-competitive behavior displayed by their acquisition of Instagram and Whatsapp.

Other Antitrust Lawsuits Facebook Must Face

Facebook's antitrust lawsuit battles are seemingly far from over. Not only can the NTC file a fresh case, but Facebook also has similar lawsuits it has to deal with outside the U.S.

The European Union (EU) and the U.K. started their own antitrust investigations involving Facebook. The EU's investigation is being conducted to check and review Facebook's control on classified ads in its Marketplace service.

The U.K. has its antitrust investigation with the country's Competition and Market Authority (CMA) looking into Facebook's market dominance. British authorities have since said that they will be cooperating with the EU investigation as well.

Facebook was previously probed by France but won the investigation

Related Article: FTC Will File Antitrust Case Against Facebook Over WhatsApp and Instagram Takeover, Despite Previously Approving These Acquisitions

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by Isabella James

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
SpaceX Falcon 9 will have an on-shore landing, as it would have its launch in Cape Canaveral, Florida, for its next mission and would not be in the usual drone ship to catch it. This would feature an on-shore landing that would have the landing pad around five and a half miles away from where it took off, having its sonic booms heard across the land.

The reusable rocket launcher has been used for many missions now for the private space company, and its most recent launch about a satellite that would monitor Climate Change and endangered wildlife on the planet.

SpaceX Falcon 9 Returns to Cape Canaveral

SpaceX is making a return to the island of Cape Canaveral, Florida, where it launched. The last time SpaceX featured this landing was last December, and it would use the Southerly Polar launch trajectory, which was not used since last August 2020 (via Spaceflight Now).

There are no explanations as to why SpaceX is substituting an on-shore landing maneuver for its drone ships. Still, it may do something with locations and geography as to where its payload and delivery would be. This means that it would not resort to an offshore landing, meaning that it would not use its drone ships to catch the rocket booster as it maneuvers back to the surface.

Cape Canaveral has been an iconic facility globally, being one of the most renowned launch islands that represent most of what the country has achieved on its ventures towards cosmic locations.

Read Also: Elon Musk Turns 50: 50 Times the Tesla CEO Made Headlines in the Past Year

Falcon 9 Sonic Booms

According to NASA, Sonic Booms can be heard during acceleration and deceleration, meaning that there would be ridiculously thundering sounds to be heard at both times that the Falcon 9 would launch and return.

This would be heard on both occasions and echoed across other Florida locations, including Brevard, St. Lucie, Seminole, Indian River, Orange, and more.

Sonic Booms are created when a moving object breaks the sound barrier, meaning that it is faster than the known speed of sound, 343 meters per second, on dry air. That is a loud type of sound, and it is incomparable to any known sounds, especially if gales of wind already annoy people during a windy day or when storms are approaching.

SpaceX Falcon 9 On-Shore Landing: How to Watch

The launch would happen by Tuesday, June 29, at 2:56 PM EDT (18:56 GMT), which would come in a few hours, and has an 80 percent chance of clear skies. Currently, there are no YouTube live placeholders for this launch. Still, SpaceX usually holds one on their YouTube channel for people to see and witness, especially with its return to Cape Canaveral.

Related Article: SpaceX Starship Launch Might Happen in July as SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell Says

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by Isaiah Richard

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
DiDi, China's version of Uber, is set for one of the biggest IPOs of the year when it begins trading on Wednesday.

The ride-hailing app is seeking to raise nearly $4 billion in its public offering by offering 288 million American depositary shares priced at $13 to $14 each.

The company is planning to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker DIDI, according to MarketWatch. According to the report, DiDi's valuation could soar up $62 billion to $67 billion.

DiDi IPO: What You Should Know

According to a report by Barron's, Morgan Stanley Investment Management is set to buy $750 million worth of shares. The company is also one of the underwriters of the DiDi deal. Singaporean investment company Temasek Holdings, on the other hand, is planning to purchase $500 million worth of shares.

The DiDi IPO is set to become one of the biggest of the year, following second to Coupang's IPO in March. The Coupang IPO raised $4.6 billion for the company.

DiDi: What It Is

DiDi is a Chinese company focusing on ride-hailing services that was founded in June 2012 by Cheng Wei. According to the company website, these services include taxi and private car-hailing, ridesharing, designated driving, and freight and logistics, among others.

The company is currently headquartered in Beijing.

The company's mission, according to its IPO filing submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), is "to make life better by transforming mobility." In its prospectus, the company talks about building "the future of mobility" in terms of shared mobility, auto solutions, autonomous driving, electric mobility, among others.

Outside of China, the company operates in countries such as Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, and South Africa. According to Barron's, DiDi is present in 4,000 locations in 15 countries with more than 493 million active users.

Also Read: Lyft, Ola, Didi Kuaidi And GrabTaxi Are Teaming Up To Take Down Uber

DiDi vs Uber

DiDi is seen as one of the strongest competitors of Uber Technologies Inc. worldwide. The IPO will put DiDi right behind Uber at second place in terms of market value, per MarketWatch. It will also increase the company's capitalization to a value more than three times that of another competitor, Lyft Inc.

DiDi and Uber previously engaged in a competitive battle in China that ended with Uber selling its Chinese operations to its rival for $35 billion. The deal eventually became the center of an investigation conducted by the Chinese's government's antitrust body.

According to MarketWatch, DiDi had already sold its Uber shares last year.

The company also invested in Indian ride-hailing app Ola in 2015, which was seen as an effort by DiDi to challenge Uber's place in the market. In 2016, tech giant Apple invested $1 billion in DiDi.

Related Article: Uber Sells China Operations To Rival Didi: Why The Ride-Sharing Company Failed To Conquer China And What It Means For Everyone Else

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 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
(Photo : Screenshot From Commons.Wikipedia.org) Elon Musk Turns 50 | Here's a Timeline of His Achievements

Elon Musk has just turned 50 on June 28, 2021 and although the Tesla CEO is very well known in the public's eye as of the moment for Tesla, SpaceX, and even Bitcoin and Doge, not a lot of people know the story behind this eccentric billionaire before 2020 (when everyone knew him). Check out how the young Elon Musk excelled at a very early age, according to Popular Times.

Elon Musk Timeline of Accomplishments

June 28, 1971

Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa.

1980

Elon Musk's parents divorced.

1981

Elon Musk started becoming interested in computing with the Commodore VIC-20 and even taught himself computer programming.

1983

By age 12, Elon Musk sold his first ever game "Blastar" to a magazine that was called PC and Office Technology for $500.

June 1989

Elon Musk, age 17, had to move to Canada in order to attend Queen's University. He planned to go to the United States and it was easier coming from Canada.

1992

Elon Musk studied Business and Physics at the University of Pennsylvania graduating with an undergraduate degree in economics and was able to stay for a second bachelor's degree in studying physics.

1995

Elon Musk started an internet city guide web software company Zip2 with his brother Kimbal.

February 1999

Zip2 was sold to Compaq for $307 million USD.

March 1999

Elon Musk cofounded X.com with $10 million coming from the sale of Zip2

2000

X.com merged with Confinity in order to form PayPal. Elon Musk married his first wife Justine Wilson whom he met at Ontario's Queen's University.

Elon Musk lost his infant son Nevada Alexander Musk at 10 weeks old.

October 2000

Elon Musk got fired as CEO of PayPal over his desire for PayPal's Unix-based infrastructure to be moved to Microsoft Windows.

2001

Elon Musk started conceptualizing the Mars Oasis in an attempt to raise public interest in space exploration.

October 2021

Elon Musk travelled to Moscow, Russia to buy refurbished Dnepr Intercontinental ballistic missiles or ICBMs which could send potential payloads into space. Elon Musk, however, went back to the United States empty-handed.

February 2002

Elon Musk decided to build affordable rockets by starting a company.

May 2002

Elon Musk founded SpaceX with $100 million USD of his own project becoming CEO and CTO.

October 2002

eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion USD. Elon Musk got $165 million.

July 2003

Tesla had become incorporated.

2004

Elon Musk's wife gave birth to two sons, twins, through in vitro fertilization.

February 2004

Elon Musk joined Tesla's board of directors as Chairman leading the Series A round of investment.

2006

Elon Musk's wife gave birth to three sons through in vitro fertilizations. Triplets

Elon Musk provided the financial capital and concept for SolarCity which were founded by his cousins Pete Rive and Lyndon.

SpaceX started to get various contracts from NASA to send cargo and astronauts to the ISS.

2007

Elon Musk became CEO and product architect of Tesla.

2008

Musk and wife Justine got divorced.

2010

Elon Musk married English actress Talulah Riley.

The Musk Foundation with Solar City donated a 25-kW solar power system to the official South Bay Community Alliance's hurricane response center in Coden, Alabama.

2011

Elon Musk announced plans to send humans to Mars in 10-20 years.

July 2011

The Musk Foundation donated $250,000 to a solar power project in Soma, Japan, after a tsunami.

2012

SolarCity and Tesla collaboration for better electric vehicle batteries.

May 25, 2012

SpaceX Dragon docked on the ISS.

2013

SolarCity became the world's second largest solar power provider.

August 12, 2013

Elon Musk revealed his concept for hush-speed transportation through reduced-pressure tubes.

2014

Elon Musk announced open-sourcing Tesla technology allowing anyone to use them.

June 17, 2014

SolarCity advanced production facility to be built in Buffalo, New York. Completed in 2017.

2015

Made a The Simpsons cameo in an episode titled "The Musk Who Fell to Earth."

January 2015

Held Hyperloop design competition.

November 2015

Made a cameo in The Big Bang Theory.

December 2015

Elon Musk announced the creation of OpenAI.

2016

Elon Musk started dating Amber Heard (aquaman)

SolarCity was acquired by Tesla.

Neuralink was co-founded by Musk.

Musk owned 54% of SpaceX stocks giving him 78% voting shares.

September 2016

Elon Musk revealed plans of colonizing Mars.

May 12, 2017

The Hyperloop test run began in Nevada.

2018

Elon Musk left OpenAI to avoid possible conflicts as Tesla CEO

May 7, 2018

Musk started dating Canadian musician Grimes, according to Cosmopolitan.

July 2018

Built a small rescue pod to help the Tham Luang cave rescue. The submarine, however, was unused.

Read Also: Tesla's Elon Musk Lives in a Small $50K Prefabricated House in Boca Chica, Texas

September 2018

Charged by SEC for tweet about taking Tesla private costing him and the company $20 million.

September 2018

Elon Musk warns about AI.

October 2018

The Musk Foundation donated over $480,000 to help install water fountains with filtration systems at all Flint, Michigan schools.

October 2018

Filed for an "intent to use" TM application for Teslaquila.

January 2019

Elon Musk went to China for the groundbreaking of the new Tesla Gigafactory Shanghai.

Related Article: Elon Musk 50th Birthday on June 28 Hints That a 'Big' Gift is Coming--What Could 'Starship Super Heavy' Mean?

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Written by Urian B.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Abu Dhabi has started distributing facial COVID-19 scanners in several malls to bolster the campaign for the mitigation of coronavirus in the region.

Many residents said that they were impressed with the addition of the technology made by the EDE Research Institute. The specialized device can yield the results in less than five seconds.

Coronavirus Scanners in Abu Dhabi Are Highly Effective

According to Bloomberg, the EDE technology has rolled out on Monday, June 28 in establishments like airports and malls where many people flock. The facial scanner was found out to be super effective after a trial involving 20,000 participants was conducted.

Like the previous technologies that are focused on detecting COVID-19 traces, the EDE scanner works the same but this time through the incorporation of electromagnetic waves. These are responsible for the alteration of the RNA particles in the virus. In just a few seconds, you will know if you are infected by the coronavirus or not.

On Sunday evening, June 27, the Department of Health (DoH) approved the roll-out of the facial scanners following the expansion plan of the Abu Dhabi Emergency, Crisis, and Disasters Committee.

The health department assured that the latest health technology was effective in identifying infections among COVID-19 patients. Furthermore, if you have been detected to be coronavirus-infected, you will be instructed to undergo a PCR test within 24 hours and follow the health protocols.

Read Also: New AI-Powered Thermal Scanner Can Identify People Even With a Face Mask

The Impressions of Abu Dhabi Residents About the COVID-19 Scanner

In an interview with Dubai-based news outlet, Khaleej Times, multiple shoppers expressed satisfaction about the launch of EDE scanners around the location. After being introduced to the public, people can now be more confident to roam malls without being worried about the coronavirus scare.

As per the authorities, public health is their utmost concern that's why this technology has been scattered already on several establishments. According to Mayar Salti, a Caribbean expat in Abu Dhabi, the new scanner was "convenient and quick."

"I visited Al Wahda mall this morning and I was surprised when a security guard used the Covid-19 scanner on my face. This was new to me. He then showed me the negative result and allowed me to enter," the 40-year-old Salti said.

Another expat who was from Finland, Helen Zimmer said that she was "amazed" by the EDE scanner when she went to a mall in Al Wahda earlier this week.

Meanwhile, Rose Peteho, a Filipina expat, told the news outlet that when she came to the mall, she showed the Alhosn app to the guard. The latter said that he would use the facial scanner for the detection of COVID infection. She was thankful that she was negative with the virus.

EDE Scanner Lightens the Load for Security Guards

Besides the shoppers, the UAE newspaper shared that the new technology helped many security guards in scanning the people who go to the mall. The whole process only takes less than five seconds.

One security guard said that there was a big difference between the facial scanner and the Green Pass. Unlike the latter, the EDE technology will not make use of any more of any apps on your phone. Simply, it will scan your face and immediately post the results.

The Green Pass has been utilized previously by the security guards to separate the infected from the uninfected persons. To use it, you must have a green pass on your Alhosn app when going to public buildings.

Related Article: Go COVID-19 Breath Test System: Singapore OKs 60-sec Breath Test Which Accurately Detects Coronavirus

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 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
(Photo : Pixabay from Pexels)

Shenzhou 12 was launched more than a week ago and now its three astronauts are adjusting to life in outer space.

Chinese astronauts Nie Haisheng, Liu Boming, and Tang Hongbo arrived at the Tianhe space station module on June 17, according to Space. The arrival at Tianhe took place 6.5 hours after the three astronauts boarded a Long March-2F rocket that blasted off a launch site in the Gobi Desert.

Shenzhou 12 is the third of 11 space missions planned by the Chinese National Space Administration that involves the construction of China's own space station.The space station is scheduled to be completed by next year.

Related Article: China Successfully Launches First Space Mission in Five Years

Shenzhou 12 Astronauts: Life in Outer Space

The Shenzhou 12 is expected to last three months and now that they're more than a week into their mission, the three astronauts are getting used to life in Tianhe. Tang, in particular, has grown accustomed to the microgravity environment. The Shenzhou 12 mission is his first trip to outer space.

According to Space, these astronauts are able to make calls back to their families on Earth. Tianhe is also equipped with a kitchen and microwave oven so that the astronauts can have a hot meal whenever they wish. A refrigerator and foldable tables are available as well for use.

The astronauts actually have more than 120 kinds of food and beverages they can choose from, per China Manned Space Agency assistant director Ji Qiming. The food prepared has already been divided into weekly menus that are based on the astronauts' own preferences.

The supplies were stored in the docked Tianzhou 2 cargo spacecraft, which was sent to space prior to the Shenzhou 12 launch. The supplies also include teas, juices, and coolers filled with fresh fruits and vegetables.

Xi Jinping Makes a Call

Chinese President Xi Jinping has made a video call to the three astronauts of Shenzhou 12, per Space. The call was made from the Beijing Aerospace Control Center with the help of China's network of Tianlian relay satellites. These satellites have made communication between Earth and those in outer space possible.

In his phone call, Xi Jinping is said to have congratulated and given his support to the astronauts in Tianhe.

"All the Chinese people care about your life and work in space all the time," he said during the video call.

The Chinese President also inquired about their work and living conditions aboard Tianhe. Liu Boming then informed the president that they are due to conduct two spacewalks as well as technical tests. One of the tests they are to conduct involves a large mechanical arm that will assist in the construction of the space station.

Shenzhou 13 is Being Readied

Despite the success of the Shenzhou 12 launch, Shenzhou 13 is being prepared in case of emergency.

The launch, should it be necessary, will involve another Long March 2F rocket as well as the Shenzhou 13 spacecraft. Both should be ready for a rapid launch at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert in the event of an emergency, according to Space.

Also Read: China to Launch 'Heavenly Harmony' Module into Orbit--Space Station Quest Continues

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 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Cryptocurrency's rise and the steep increase of ransomware attacks are highly linked, the FireEye CEO claims.

FireEye CEO, Kevin Mandia, told CNBC that the rise of both ransomware and cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin has a "direct correlation." He further said that the "anonymous digital currency" enables attackers to be paid without a trace.

Currently, cryptocurrencies still exhibit consistent rise despite critics tagging them as the riskiest asset globally.

On the other hand, ransomware attacks have been ubiquitous, which, in turn, forced cyber insurance to have limited coverage. The rising ransoms asked by criminal minds have been hurting the insurance industry as well. Thus, the fees of their policies have also faced a steep increase.

The FireEye boss added that cybersecurity awareness has already reached an all-time high as attacks have extended their ill-effects to gas and food supply, with the Colonial Pipeline and JBS incidents.

The latter paid about $11 million worth of Bitcoin to the attackers, whereas the pipeline spent $5 million to restore its services.

Cryptocurrency Enables Ransomware Attacks

Mandia also urged people to analyze the continued rise of ransomware and cryptos, which have been parallel.

He further claimed that digital currencies allow criminal minds, who infiltrate a system anonymously, to be paid untracked. Thus, hackers could do it even if they are "10,000 miles away in a safe harbor," the CEO said.

Cryptocurrency Expert Disagrees

However, a financial expert disagrees with the FireEye CEO's proposition.

An Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm partner, Katie Haun, told CNBC in a separate report that there is no truth to what others believe that Bitcoin helps criminal activities.

Haun noted that crypto is a step forward for authorities as it has better traceability than what the former financial system has. She explained that despite the anonymity feature of crypto, it still leaves "digital bread crumbs," thus cyber crimes are likely to be easier to solve.

Read Also: Crypto Weekend Drops Have Been Happening for Several Years, Experts Say--Here's Why

Cryptocurrency and Ransomware Attacks: What Now?

Nevertheless, Mandia did not lose hope and suggested some solutions to lessen the use of cypto in cyberattacks. He suggested that Bitcoin or other cryptos could be less susceptible to criminal use if they were made less anonymous, as per Seeking Alpha.

The FireEye boss further highlighted that the government serves a crucial role in fixing the cyberattack issue.

Mandia said that the United States should use diplomacy to push other countries that protect cyber criminals on their soil.

On June 27, ransomware payments are likely to be taxed soon to discourage companies and organizations from answering the hackers' plea.

Related Article: Ransomware Roundup: Cl0p Releases New Stolen Data; EU, US to Team Up Against Attacks

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Written by Teejay Boris

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
(Photo : Photo by Diego Donamaria/Getty Images for SXSW) AUSTIN, TX - MARCH 11: Elon Musk speaks onstage at Elon Musk Answers Your Questions! during SXSW at ACL Live on March 11, 2018 in Austin, Texas

Social media is a place where beautiful things happen, such as sharing information with family and friends, keeping in touch with loved ones, and posting photos of our daily lives.

However, it can also be a scary place because of online bashing and mocking.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is no beginner when it comes to online parody, but he usually posts funny memes and quirky remarks on his infamous Twitter account.

But recently, he became the target of social media's fierceness -- or at least, his statue.

Elon Musk Statue in Manhattan

To commemorate the popular CEO's 50th birthday on June 28, a life-size bronze statue was unveiled in Manhattan. It celebrates the billionaire's brilliance and half a century's worth of life.

Despite his birthday, people all over Twitter could not help but mock the statue.

Musk's life-size sculpture arrived in Manhattan on Monday, June 28, by Public.com. The investing website tweeted that whether you love or hate Musk, he still turned 50 on Monday.

The website also gave away 100 pieces of tiny Elon Musk statues and mentioned that what users do with their mini Musk's would be up to the owner.

Love or hate him, @elonmusk turns 50 today.



We're giving away 100 mini Elon statues. What you do with yours is up to you.



RT this for a chance to win.https://t.co/xb70h80by5  Public.com (@public) June 28, 2021

Public.com also tweeted a photo, saying that Muk's ambition (and maybe ego) is not small. They decided to drop a life-size sculpture on 14th Street in New York City.

Read Also: Tesla's Elon Musk In Favor of Meme Coin's Changes; DOGE to Offer 50x Charge Discount

This 6-foot bronze statue can be yours, for a price. Were auctioning it off and 100% of the proceeds will go to First Generation Investors (@fginvestors).



Place your bids now https://t.co/gXOivGC2Wq  Public.com (@public) June 28, 2021

What made the situation better is that interested buyers could purchase the statue. It will be auctioned off, and all of the proceeds will be received by the First Generation Investors.

Response On Musk's Statue

The statue received a lot of online attention, and social media users unleashed their fierceness by mocking the sculpture non-stop.

Tweets poured under Public.com's announcement, saying various things like "thanks for installing a new public washroom" and more.

A Twitter user replied that he can place it on his desk and that it would be the perfect expression as the Tesla CEO says, "wtf is this guy doing."

I can put this on my desk. Would be perfect expression by Elon on wtf is this guy doing pic.twitter.com/QKPDuow2so  Gaurav Deo (@_EatBurpRepeat) June 28, 2021

Another user said that it is located close to the Hudson River, which is quite convenient. It seems that the user is suggesting that it would be easy to throw the statue in the river -- as a joke.

very close to the Hudson River, very convenient  pinging pronoun role in discord server (@diidelphiis) June 28, 2021

Some users also ridiculed Public.com because they made a random statue and tried to pass it as Elon Musk.

Lmao yall made a random statue and trying to sell it as Elon musk    (@OshimaLovesYou) June 28, 2021

The hyperactivity that Musk's life-size statue received online incredibly reflects his influence over Twitter users.

Elon Musk's Birthday

According to News Sky, Tesla CEO Elon Musk originated from Pretoria, South Africa. He is currently the third-richest man globally thanks to Tesla's value. He is the CEO of two thriving companies: Tesla and SpaceX. He is famous for his fascination with electric vehicles, space, and crypto.

  Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 28, 2021

On his 50th birthday, his mother posted a photo of the CEO safely nestled in the arms of her mom, Maye Musk.

Musk replied with a red heart emoji.

Related Article: Elon Musk 50th Birthday on June 28 Hints That a 'Big' Gift is Coming--What Could 'Starship Super Heavy' Mean?

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Written by Fran Sanders

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Apple is preparing to improve its cloud services, and they're turning to an unconventional ally to help.

(Photo : Andrej Sokolow/picture alliance via Getty Images)

25 March 2019, US, Cupertino: Apple CEO Tim Cook welcomes viewers to an event at the Steve Jobs Theatre in the company's headquarters. Photo: Andrej Sokolow/dpa

Despite being massive competitors in the tech space, Apple and Google are entering into a much larger "partnership" after the former becomes the largest corporate client of Google's cloud storage services, reports AppleInsider.

As of May this year, Apple was spending around $300 million on cloud storage. Aside from that, industry experts are also predicting that this spending will grow by about 50% year-over-year, indicating Apple's focus on cloud usage. Right now, the company is allegedly holding over 8 exabytes of storage. That's over 8 billion gigabytes if the math is correct.

The information comes after Apple has been reported to be preparing iCloud+, according to a report by iMore. iCloud+ is a rebrand of the company's paid higher-tier iCloud subscriptions, allowing users to consume more cloud storage as needed. It's worth noting that current-gen and next-gen Apple devices will push a lot more data into the cloud, which is apparently something that not even their in-house servers can hold.

This is, however, not the first time that Apple is turning to Google for help on this specific matter. Back in 2018, it was confirmed that they were using Google's public cloud service, as reported by CNBC. It was part of their effort to try and catch up with industry giants Amazon and Microsoft, who have also been increasingly focusing on using the cloud.

While it's still not clear why Apple required such a massive storage capacity upgrade, their move to Google makes a lot of sense from a financial standpoint. According to industry analysts, it likely is cheaper for them to pay for a third-party provider than to improve their own server capacity. And with Google having more than enough space for all the user data that Apple needs to stash somewhere, they're the perfect fit.

Read also: Apple App Store's Top-Grossing Applications Contains Scams and Could Cost $48 Million, Experts Claim

Apple and the Cloud: A Much-Needed Partnership?

As part of the latest privacy improvements to their software ecosystem, Apple introduced iCloud Plus this year, promising to protect sensitive user data for a monthly fee. With it, people can store as much as 1TB of data for $9.99 a month, which is where their increased spending on Google Cloud Services falls perfectly in place.

Just imagine how many users there are in the world running different types of Apple devices, one way or another. Even if you're only talking about iPhones, for instance, you're still looking at over a billion active devices, as reported by The Verge. The amount of data that those active iPhones alone send to and from servers is more than what Apple's infrastructure can currently handle.

(Photo : Neville Elder/Corbis via Getty Images)

Larry Suzay from Equinix stands in a hallway. High speed data transfer plays an important part in programmatic advertising. Digital content, media and advertising companies accelerate real-time bidding for online ads at on of Equinix 's Data transfer centers. this one in New Jersey.

Plus, Apple does need a major upgrade in terms of iCloud security. Earlier this month, a researcher identified a potential security vulnerability that could lead to the takeover of an iCloud account by merely using the password reset feature.

If there's one company in the world that knows more about the cloud than anybody else, it's Google.

Related: Google Cloudtop is a Cloud-based Virtual Desktop Tool for Employees Only-Why Is It Kept Exclusive?

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Like their owners, dogs are susceptible to heat strokes and temperatures dont have to reach into the high 90s. Symptoms of heat stroke in dogs include excessive panting, excessive drooling, a dazed look and just a general appearance of distress, Mathis said.
The number of people in Louisiana who received their initial COVID-19 vaccine increased by 14% in the week after the state opened registration for its $2.3 million lottery incentive, though even with the modest bump, vaccination rates remain at historic lows.

Over the seven-day period ending Monday, 26,086 people received either the one-dose Johnson and Johnson vaccine or the first part of the two-dose Pfizer or Moderna vaccination, according to Louisiana Department of Health data.

Thats an increase of more than 3,200 from the 22,842 people who received their first shot in the week leading up to June 17 when Gov. John Bel Edwards unveiled a collection of cash prizes and scholarship giveaways, including a $1 million jackpot.

The change evens out to an increase of roughly 460 new doses a day, according to an analysis by The Times-Picayune and The Advocate.

State officials cautioned against using the department's publicly available data to measure the impact the Shot At A Million campaign has had on vaccination rates. Thats because theres sometimes a two- to- three-week delay between when a shot is administered and when the states online dashboard is updated, according to Kim Hood, an assistant health secretary.

We dont want to get over our skis, Hood said. When were looking for a trend and trying to tease out what the lottery has done, we want to make sure were not comparing apples to oranges.

Hood said the state will have a better idea of the lotterys impact next week, when data can be parsed to include shots given only after the incentives were unveiled. She expects there to be a flurry of activity leading up to July 9, the deadline to register for the first of five weekly drawings.

+3 What are Louisiana COVID vaccine lottery prizes? Here's a list, including $1M jackpot Fourteen cash prizes and scholarships will be doled out in a lottery exclusive to Louisiana residents who have received at least one dose of a

Louisianas experiment offering cash incentives to boost vaccination rates mirrors an initiative pioneered in Ohio, which recently wrapped up its lottery  with mixed results. When Ohios Republican Gov. Mike DeWine first announced the effort in May, weekly vaccinations there jumped 43%. But the effect was short-lived, and vaccinations soon fell off.

Hood said that Louisiana has had the benefit of seeing what a couple of other states have done, and expects the numbers here to follow a similar trajectory: a spike in vaccinations followed by a return to baseline.

New vaccinations in Louisiana have dropped off dramatically since peaking in March, when eligibility was expanded to include essential workers and those with one of a dozen, broadly defined medical conditions. At its peak, nearly 25,000 new vaccinations were administered daily.

It tapered off through April, as the supply of doses eclipsed demand. During that time, a federally-backed mass vaccination site opened in Baton Rouge with the capacity to deliver 3,000 jabs a day. In its first week, the site administered around 100 a day.

By May, the number of new vaccinations had settled into a relatively stable and low rate of about 5,185 vaccinations per day.

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+4 $1M jackpot, scholarships: COVID vaccine lottery announced in Louisiana. Here's how to qualify Louisiana residents who get a COVID-19 vaccine by the end of July will be eligible to enter to win a $1 million jackpot, Gov. John Bel Edwards

But beginning in June, vaccination rates again began trending downward, even as Louisiana began doling out perks for vaccinated residents, including free admission to state parks and historic sites and complimentary drinks at certain bars and restaurants.

In the week leading up to the lottery announcement, the number of new vaccinations bottomed out at an average of 3,263 per day.

Since then, the trend line has slowly bent upwards, and the average number of new vaccinations is now at 3,726 doses per day. Still, that's 28% lower than the May daily average  representing about 1,500 fewer new shots in arms a day.

Meanwhile, the state has poured itself into a resource-intensive, grassroots campaign, with door-to-door canvassing and pop-up clinics, aimed at convincing the "moveable middle" to get vaccinated, Hood said.

"A lot of people have questions, but aren't necessarily opposed to the vaccine," Hood said. "We take all people's concerns seriously. We're not flippant about it. Our core responsibility is education."

Louisianas vaccination campaign has taken on added urgency in recent weeks as concerns mount that the new Delta variant could cause a surge in coronavirus cases among the unvaccinated come the fall  particularly in the Deep South, where inoculations have sputtered. The strain, first identified in India, is more transmissible and virulent than previous mutations, though the vaccines remain an effective defense.

Louisiana ranks ahead of only Mississippi in its share of adults with at least one dose of the vaccine, at just over 48%, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That's a stark contrast from states like Vermont and Massachusetts, where more than 80% of adults have been inoculated.

Since registration for the lottery opened, 486,661 people have signed up for a chance to win, according to a Health Department spokesperson. The deadline to register for the first of five weekly drawings is July 9 and signing up once enters you into all subsequent drawings. The first winners will be announced on July 16.

All Louisiana residents, ages 12 and up, who have received at least one dose of the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines or have received the single-shot Johnson and Johnson vaccine are eligible to enter the sweepstakes.

Each of the first four weeks will see two drawings: one for a $100,000 college scholarship and one for a $100,000 cash prize. The fifth week will see drawings for the $1 million grand prize and for five $100,000 scholarships.

The vaccine lottery isnt a silver bullet, Hood acknowledged, but as weekly winners are selected, she hopes the excitement that's generated will help keep vaccinations front-and-center in the public eye.
The Louisiana Department of Corrections announced Monday changes in leadership at its two largest state prisons, including the appointment of a Black warden at Elayn Hunt Correctional Center in St. Gabriel  a change that came amid a larger push to increase diversity among top-ranking DOC officials.

Kirt Guerin will oversee Hunt, his latest posting in a 30-year career with DOC that started inside the same prison, where he was hired as a corrections cadet.

The Hunt warden position became available after Tim Hooper was transferred to oversee the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola following the retirement of Darrel Vannoy. Hooper also started out as a corrections cadet at Hunt.

+2 Former Black DOC officials: 'Good old boy' network perpetuates systemic racism inside department When Joe Buttross was selected to fill an assistant warden position at Elayn Hunt Correctional Center in St. Gabriel a couple years ago, he ha

"Tim and Kirt are proven leaders," DOC Secretary Jimmy LeBlanc said in a statement. "These two prisons are in good hands with individuals who have longstanding records and history with the Department. Both are visionaries who will continue the critical work to reform, rehabilitate and prepare people to return to our communities."

Guerin had been passed over for multiple promotions in recent years, including in 2019 when he applied for an assistant warden position at Hunt. Joe Buttross  who had no direct experience working in prisons but did have close connections to LeBlanc  was chosen instead.

DOC critics pointed to that decision as evidence that a "good-old boy" network still affects who lands in top leadership roles. Before his transfer to Hunt, Buttross was working at Prison Enterprises, the moneymaking arm of DOC that uses inmate labor to produce goods and services.

A group of retired Black DOC executives formed a committee last year to study hiring and promotions and to analyze the department's payroll data, with an eye toward racial discrimination. They found that, while the department was very diverse overall  roughly half of corrections employees are Black, compared to one in three Louisianans  African Americans were deeply underrepresented at the highest levels of leadership.

Black employees have rarely been named warden, the highest-ranking position within the eight state prisons in Louisiana. Guerin becomes the fifth Black state prison warden in Louisiana history, a DOC spokesman confirmed.

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"This is truly an honor," Guerin said in a statement Monday. "I prayed a long time for this job, for the dedicated employees that work here, and for the future of Elayn Hunt Correctional Center. I believe that with God all things are possible  and that the best is yet to come."

For decades, the only Black warden within the state prison system was Johnnie Jones, who oversaw the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women from 1975 to 2006. He repeatedly applied for warden posts at larger state prisons but his career stagnated, according to Jones.

After committee members reported the results of their analysis to LeBlanc, he met with them and publicly acknowledged the discouraging findings. He said his administration had already made progress increasing diversity and was committed to furthering that goal.

Larry Smith, committee chair, said the promotion of Guerin exemplifies that commitment, saying he wanted to commend LeBlanc for the decision.

"While there remains much work to be done regarding the elevation of Black employees to executive levels at the Louisiana Department of Corrections, this is certainly a step in the right direction," he said in a statement Monday.

Hooper replaces Vannoy in overseeing Angola, the largest in the state prison system. Vannoy took the reins in 2016 after the long tenure of Burl Cain came to an end amid investigations into his questionable business dealings.

Hooper had also served as warden of Hunt since 2016.

"I am very honored and humbled," said Hooper. "This is a huge responsibility.  I look forward to carrying the torch and implementing and improving programming aimed at changing the lives of the men we incarcerate."
Amtrak has come out against Canadian National Railways plan to buy Kansas City Southern Railway for $33.6 billion, citing specific concerns about a plan to sell a section of the railroad between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

In a letter sent to the U.S. Surface Transportation Board Monday opposing CNs plan to put KCS in a voting trust while federal regulators review the merger, Amtrak said efforts to address competitive issues creates a major new impediment to restoring passenger rail service between the two cities.

John Spain, executive vice president of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation and a longtime advocate for passenger rail service, said Amtraks statements were part of an aggressive jockeying effort to influence the transportation board.

CN has said it wanted to sell the 78-mile section of KCS rail, the only area of overlap between the two rail companies. But Amtrak said CN is proposing two freight railroads that would have the right to ship cargo on the section of rail. The two companies would be CN and whatever firm bought the railroad.

A Baton Rouge to New Orleans passenger rail? Heres how a big sell could help make it possible Canadian National said it will sell a 70-mile rail line connecting Baton Rouge and New Orleans to help secure regulators' approval for its $33

CNs divestiture proposal is the equivalent of a homeowner selling their house but reserving the right to continue to live in it, Amtrak said in the letter. It is beyond dispute that the divestiture of the KCS Baton Rouge Line that CN expects the Board to accept would be extraordinarily harmful  not only to restoration of intercity passenger rail service between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, but also with respect to nearly all of the public interest considerations that the Board must weigh.

Specifically, Amtrak said increasing freight train operations would increase the risk of collisions between automobiles and trains at crossings, boost diesel locomotive emissions and hamper efforts to evacuate New Orleans in the case of an emergency.

If the board decides to allow KCS to go into a voting trust, Amtrak said it is willing to work with stakeholders to develop a plan for the future of the KCS Baton Rouge Line that benefits rather than harms those who live along the line, and the future Amtrak passengers who will travel over it.

Monday was the deadline to submit comments about the CN-KCS deal. CN said more than 1,700 rail customers in Canada, Mexico and the United States, rail suppliers, elected officials, unions and local business organizations submitted letters in favor of the deal.

Plan to sell rail line from Baton Rouge to New Orleans would help city, Edwards, Broome, BRAF say A host of elected and business leaders from South Louisiana have come out in support of the Canadian National-Kansas City Southern merger and 

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Canadian Pacific, which made its own bid to buy KCS, said more than 300 letters have been submitted letters against the voting trust. Shipping associations, some unions and CP submitted letters. The company said about 1,200 letters have been filed in support of its merger with KCS or in opposition to the CN proposal.

In May, CN won the bidding war for KCS over a competing $25 billion bid from CP. CP said it plans to continue pursuing regulatory approval for its combination with KCS so it will be prepared if the CN deal fails to get approval.

CP maintains that competition will be hurt across much of central United States because CN and KCS both operate parallel rail lines that connect the Midwest to the Gulf Coast.

The issue is Amtrak doesnt want to see a freight railroad own the passenger line that would connect Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Spain said. That has to do with a long history of scuffles between businesses that transport people by rail and businesses that haul cargo.

+2 Jilted suitor for freight rail line wants to make Baton Rouge to New Orleans passenger rail a reality No matter which railroad business may be permitted to acquire Kansas City Southern, both companies have now indicated that a Baton Rouge to Ne

In the letter to the surface transportation board, Amtrak suggests the KCS line be sold for a nominal price to the government or a government-owned entity. That entity would provide rail service to shippers.

Amtrak wants to restore passenger rail between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, said Spain, the former chairman of the Southern Rail Commission. Earlier this year as part of its new strategic plan, Amtrak released a list of 30 new passenger rail routes and that service was included.

They want this to happen, he said. Because of this, Spain said he is cautiously optimistic that passenger rail will once again connect Baton Rouge and New Orleans, no matter who ends up owning KCS.

Weve got a president and a governor who support these projects for passenger rail, he said. This is an important moment and the stars appear to be aligning. Theres an opportunity for us to see something.
Children in Baton Rouge public schools will have the choice of whether or not to wear masks or face coverings this coming school year to protect themselves against the coronavirus, the schools superintendent said Monday.

Right now, where were standing on that, were looking at that as a choice, Superintendent Sito Narcisse said, speaking to the Baton Rouge Press Club.

On May 25, Gov. John Bel Edwards lifted the statewide mandate to wear masks in schools, instead leaving that call up to individual school districts. Most districts are expected to lift the requirement.

One exception is Orleans Parish, which has already announced that it will keep its mask rules in place. Prior to Mondays talk, Narcisse had not made a public announcement on which way East Baton Rouge Parish schools would go.

+2 Few teens are getting COVID vaccines. What does that mean for next school year? The prospects for a safe return to traditional in-person instruction in Louisiana schools got a lift earlier this month when almost 250,000 te

Mask-wearing has been a linchpin of the states effort to limit school-level spread of COVID-19 and it remains at the top of the list of prevention strategies promoted by the federal Centers for Disease Control. All adults and all children in third grade and above in Louisiana schools had to wear masks.

In making the call to relax its local mask mandate, Narcisse said he consulted with a small health advisory committee that has helped with the school system settle on safety measures since early on in the pandemic. The committee includes representatives from Our Lady of the Lake Medical Center and the Louisiana Department of Health.

More state-imposed minimum rules for COVID-19 safety in schools are expiring on Wednesday after summer school ends, and there are no plans to replace them. Last week, state officials instead released non-mandatory operational guidelines for schools for the 2021-22 school year.

Narcisse said Monday that Baton Rouge public schools will still require hand-washing, automated temperature checks when students arrive at school and social distancing. They will also supply plentiful personal protective equipment and upgrade air quality in many buildings.

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The superintendent said children will have to maintain only 3 feet of social distancing, as opposed the 6 feet that was required last school year. In March, the CDC shifted to a three-foot standard, except in certain instances such as when students are eating, exercising or in band practice.

The CDC, however, said such close proximity is advisable only where mask-wearing remains mandatory and in communities where COVID-19 cases are not too high. Adults are still urged to stay 6 feet apart from each other and from children.

Among school-age children in Louisiana and in the Baton Rouge region, case counts have declined as vaccinations became more common, bottoming out in early April. Counts have inched up since, but remain low.

Schools also saw steep declines in COVID cases during the same period, though school-level reporting was suspended in early June for the summer break.

Vaccinations, however, have slowed to a crawl and many Louisianans remain unvaccinated.

Asked how many of the districts 6,000 employees have been vaccinated, Narcisse said its more than half, but he is not sure of the latest numbers. The school systems figures miss employees who opted to get vaccinated on their own  its not clear how many. The state has not been tracking vaccination rates among Louisiana educators.

And very few children are vaccinated. As of Monday, just shy of 6% of the states nearly 800,000 children aged 5 to 17 had been vaccinated. Vaccines are currently available only for children 12 years old and up. Younger children are expected to be approved for vaccination sometime later this year.

+2 Fewer options likely next school year for Louisiana students learning virtually from home Amid ongoing concerns about the safety of physically returning to classrooms in a pandemic, Louisiana schools vastly expanded remote-learning 

Also Monday, Narcisse said that about 450 children have signed up for the recently expanded EBR Virtual Academy, which will be the sole route available this fall for families interested in remote learning. More than 12,000 schoolchildren, or about 30% of the students in the system, were learning remotely when the school year ended on May 20.
A Walker man won't be retried next month in the 2015 vigilante-style killing of his girlfriend's convicted molester because Monday marked the first time his lawyers have been able to meet with him in person since the coronavirus pandemic struck in early 2020.

At the request of one of those attorneys, state District Judge Fred Crifasi converted Jace Crehan's July 19 trial date to a status conference and said he would set a new trial date at that conference. The judge said he would like the case retried this year.

Crehan, 27, was granted a new trial last year after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed split-jury verdicts. He had been convicted of second-degree murder by a non-unanimous East Baton Rouge Parish jury in 2017 and later sentenced to life in prison. The conviction and sentence were overturned because of the high court's ruling.

+4 In 2015 vigilante-style killing, Walker man convicted by nonunanimous jury gets new trial A Walker man serving a life sentence in the 2015 vigilante-style slaying of his girlfriend's convicted molester in Zachary was granted a new t

Crehan has been held at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola. For many months during the pandemic, Angola inmates were not being transported away from the prison for court appearances, and defense lawyers were not allowed face-to-face meetings at the prison.

Further complicating the Crehan case is the fact that defense lawyer Carson Marcantel, who asked for the trial continuance, is planning to run for an open Baton Rouge City Court seat. Qualifying is July 14-16, and the election is Oct. 9.

Marcantel may have to withdraw from the case, depending on what occurs during the qualifying period and with the election.

Brittany Monk was 17 and seven months' pregnant with Crehan's child when she and Crehan broke into Robert Noce Jr.'s Zachary trailer the night of July 4, 2015.

+5 Will Walker man's girlfriend testify again in slaying of convicted molester? 'No agreements' yet A Walker man awaiting a new trial in the 2015 vigilante-style slaying of his girlfriends convicted molester wants to know if she will testify

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Noce, 47, was stabbed and strangled to death. His body was stuffed inside a 55-gallon barrel that Monk said Noce used to make wine.

Crehan told detectives the knife he used to stab Noce was retrieved from Noces kitchen by Monk, at Crehans direction.

Monk testified against Crehan after pleading guilty to manslaughter. She was later sentenced to 35 years in prison, five years shy of the maximum penalty allowed for that crime. She is trying to have her sentence reduced.

+5 In slaying of her convicted molester, imprisoned Walker woman tells judge she's rehabilitated A Walker woman serving a 35-year sentence in the 2015 vigilante-style slaying of her convicted molester has written directly to a Baton Rouge 

Monk testified at Crehan's trial that she sprayed Noce in the face with a mans body spray while Crehan wrestled with him. She denied stabbing Noce but admitted punching him 10 to 15 times while Crehan held him down.

Crehan tried to plead guilty to manslaughter before his trial, but prosecutors turned him down.

Two weeks before his death, Noce had been put on probation after pleading "no contest" to molesting Monk as a child. Noce was a former boyfriend of Monk's mother and raised Monk for about 10 years after her mother abandoned her. He denied abusing Monk.
A man who disappeared after his car crashed into a flooded canal in Port Allen during May's huge rainstorm, leading to one person's death, turned himself into police Monday.

The crash occurred May 17 when more than a foot of rain flooded many parts of the Baton Rouge area. Alfredo Rojas Alvarado was driving southbound on LA 415 when he ran off the road to the right, entering a flooded canal just north of I-10, deputies told The Advocate last month.

The sheriff's office said three people were inside the car when it crashed. One of them, 40-year-old Morentes Hermelindo, was unable to escape the car and died at the scene. Another passenger was treated for minor injuries.

Alvarado swam back to look for Hermelindo, but never returned, the sheriff's office said.

Alvarado turned himself in to Louisiana State Police Troop A Monday morning. He was arrested on counts of felony hit and run, careless operation and no driver's license and was booked into the West Baton Rouge Parish Jail, Scrantz said.

Staff writer Paul Cobler contributed to this report.
Dozens of farmers, lobbyists and representatives for the solar industry started hashing out their differences Tuesday over rules for solar projects that have started popping up across the state, which have sparked pushback from farmers worried they cant compete with the companies for land.

Officials with the state Department of Natural Resources held two hearings Tuesday to begin gathering input from the various players. The meetings kicked off a months-long rulemaking process for utility-scale solar projects.

Farmers complained the projects are taking land away from agriculture interests, and that would-be builders of such projects are outbidding them for land. Representatives of landowners asked regulators not to limit their ability to lease their land to who they want. And people representing the solar industry warned the state could lose out on big investments in renewable energy if the state singles out solar energy for heavy-handed regulation.

The backdrop for the hearings was a legislative session that featured several lawmakers sympathetic to agriculture interests pushing proposals that took aim at solar projects. Such projects are gaining momentum in Louisiana, even though they represent a tiny fraction of the electricity generated in the natural gas-dominated state.

Among the successful proposals was a new law sponsored by state Sen. Bret Allain to require the state Department of Natural Resources to craft regulations for the solar industry, which prompted one of the hearings Tuesday.

Property owners absolutely have the right to lease their property for whatever they want to, said Allain, a landowner and sugarcane farmer from Franklin. But I think its on us to make sure its done correctly and with the least amount of impact and protecting the environment and communities theyre in.

Sen. Beth Mizell, R-Franklinton, also passed a resolution calling for a public hearing on the topic. Mizell, who represents Washington Parish, where local officials have put a moratorium on new solar projects, has been one of the most outspoken critics of the solar projects that have popped up in the state.

Before we move forward with giving an industry unbridled opportunity in our state, there (needs to be) regulations, Mizell said.

The biggest concern driving the pushback appears to be the newfound competition Louisiana farmers are facing in leasing land. Jim Simon, of the American Sugarcane League, said many farmers operate at the mercy of landowners, and that solar projects can shutter sugar mills or farms if they take enough land in a certain area. Solar developers can often pay more per acre for land than farmers.

Proponents of solar say the fears that solar projects will take big chunks of agricultural land out of farmers hands are largely unfounded. While developers are negotiating options contracts for land, most projects will not come to fruition. A representative of the Public Service Commission said at one of the hearings that solar energy, which provides a miniscule fraction of the electricity generated in Louisiana, has a natural ceiling because the state needs backup power when the sun isnt shining.

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Stephen Wright, executive director of Gulf States Renewable Energy Industry Association, said plenty of states have established extensive rules for solar projects that could easily be adopted in Louisiana. For instance, some states require developers to put up bonds to ensure the projects will be decommissioned at the end of their life. Allain suggested that will be a key part of the rules.

We dont have to reinvent the wheel, Wright said, cautioning officials with the DNR not to put punitive restrictions on the industry.

Wilson Lagraize, an accountant in Washington Parish who is part of a group of concerned citizens in the area, questioned whether the solar projects are worth what he sees as risks. He claimed solar projects raise health and environmental questions.

Solar projects, like almost any large capital-intensive project, have for years been eligible for the states generous Industrial Tax Exemption Program for manufacturers. But a resolution passed by House Speaker Clay Schexnayder asks the board that doles out those tax breaks to halt them for solar projects until next year.

'I thought we were an oil and gas state': Solar developments in Louisiana draw increased scrutiny Two years ago, when regulators gave Entergy Louisiana the green light to buy power from a new utility-scale solar plant in West Baton Rouge Pa

Is it worth us giving up those revenues and have all the risks of environmental hazards, health hazards...is it worth it? Lagraize said. Frankly, I dont think it is in Washington Parish.

The development that has Franklinton residents up in arms is a solar project on 440 acres of property at the LSU AgCenter's Southeast Research Station, which LSU leased to a private developer called Iris Solar, LLC in 2016. LSU AgCenter spokesperson Frances Gould said the LSU AgCenter turned to leasing the property out to minimize the effects of steep budget cuts implemented by lawmakers in the 2000s. The project is expected to be completed in August.

"The (request for proposals) outlined the AgCenters intent to further its mission through research, extension and teaching opportunities while continuing dairy research operations at the Southeast Research Station in Franklinton, Louisiana," Gould said.

Mark Yates, vice president of the Advanced Power Alliance, which represents renewable energy developers, said many solar projects become top taxpayers in rural areas. Thats because they pay sales taxes and property taxes on the equipment. With the industrial tax exemption, developers pay just 20% of the property taxes they would otherwise owe 10 years.

I understand the apprehension, Yates said. It is new. And there is a lot of education that needs to be done at the local level and the state level.

Staff writer Kristen Mosbrucker contributed to this story.
LAKE CHARLES  Approaching from the west on Interstate 10, the lake that gave this city its name stretches out into the horizon  followed by a long-abandoned and derelict parking garage. That could soon change.

As the hurricane-battered region seeks to move past last years devastating storms, it will break ground on two very different projects on Wednesday. They include a $20 million plan to repurpose the six-story lakefront parking garage as part of a new childrens museum and science and nature center.

The second project is just across the Calcasieu River in Westlake, where BioLab, a manufacturer of chlorine tablets, plans a $143 million facility after fire destroyed the previous one during Hurricane Laura in August, an incident that triggered a shelter-in-place order. The plant was such a major player in the industry that its destruction has contributed to a shortage of chlorine tablets for pools nationwide.

Gov. John Bel Edwards is expected to attend both ceremonies, demonstrating the importance the region is placing on the projects as it rebuilds  both for their symbolic and economic impact.

The museum and nature center complex, labelled Port Wonder, is intended as something of a welcome beacon, its curving architecture and glass facade evoking the nearby water body. Downtown Lake Charles sits within walking distance. The parking garage that will be renovated for the project was once part of a Harrahs riverboat casino complex that did not reopen after Hurricane Rita in 2005.

Port Wonder was in the works before the hurricanes, but Mayor Nic Hunter says it has now become more vital as the city tries to pick itself back up after the wreckage left by Laura and its 150-mph winds, followed by Category 2 Hurricane Delta six weeks later. There is hope that the project will help spur further lakefront development.

+7 In flood-prone Lake Charles neighborhood, residents consider whether its time to leave LAKE CHARLES  Diadra Carmen steels herself before she opens the door, telling herself not to be afraid. Tears roll down her cheeks when she b

I believe that this project has taken on a new meaning and a new spirit to where it's not only about lakefront development, but it's about the resiliency of this community and the recovery of this community, he said.

It's about recovery. It's about aesthetics. But it's also about tourism. It's also about economy. And we believe that this is going to be a catalyst for lakefront development.

Construction is expected to take 18 months. The project is being partly financed by settlement proceeds from the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. A restaurant from the local brewery Crying Eagle is also being planned for nearby.

Concerning the BioLab facility, the company is rebuilding and expanding, with the aim of creating 71 new jobs in addition to the 30 already existing. Another 170 jobs would also be generated during construction, according to company filings with the state.

BioLab reportedly laid off around 100 workers following the fire, which took three days to extinguish and sent chemicals into the air.

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It is being granted hefty tax breaks under the states Industrial Tax Incentive Program, which require local approval as well. The company has estimated its first-year tax exemption at around $1.7 million.

The Calcasieu Parish Police Jury, the equivalent of a parish council, has approved an 80% exemption for five years, renewable for another five. The estimated property tax exempted by the police jury over the first five years amounts to around $2.2 million, according to its finance director Tammy Bufkin. Construction is expected to generate $2.1 million in sales tax for the police jury.

Continued investment into our community by an established community leader here in Calcasieu is a sign of resiliency and recovery, Calcasieu Police Jury President Brian Abshire said in a statement.

+4 Burned to the ground after Hurricane Laura, a chemical plant wants millions in tax breaks to rebuild A swimming pool chemical plant that was damaged by Hurricane Laura and burned to the ground last year near Lake Charles is looking to rebuild 

BioLab, based in Lawrenceville, Georgia, is the pool division of KIK Custom Products, a Canadian company.

Last years fire at the plant added further chaos to an already tense situation in southwest Louisiana on Aug. 27 amid the winds of Laura, the most powerful hurricane to make landfall in the state since 1856. The blaze was sparked by water intrusion that led to a chemical reaction, said Greg Langley, spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality.

Extinguishing the fire was made more complicated by storm winds as well as water adding to the chemical processes that set off the fire in the first place, he said.

The fire was a reminder of the degree to which the region and the state have come to rely on the petrochemical and energy industries. While the view from the I-10 from one vantage point is Lake Charles and its waterfront, another angle offers a glimpse of the industrial plants that make up a significant percentage of the local economy.

Dan Groft, director of the H.C. Drew Center for Business and Economic Analysis at McNeese State University, said petroleum and chemical manufacturing provide around half of total GDP and roughly 10% of employment in Calcasieu Parish. That doesnt include ripple effects, such as businesses that can open in the area to service workers at the plants.

Groft said the area needs both types of projects for now.

I think it's good to keep the industrial base here for the long term, Groft said. But you also have to make sure that it's not just 100% industry, that you have quality of life, things to keep people here and attract people.
Investors have warned COVID-affected Kathmandu wont be the only retailer to take a sizeable sales hit from recent lockdowns after the company revealed $12 million in lost earnings so far this year.

Kathmandu, which also owns surfwear brand Rip Curl, told shareholders on Tuesday it would not reach its predicted full-year sales and profit forecasts due to fresh lockdowns announced in NSW and Western Australia in recent days.

Kathmandu has said the latest round of Australian lockdowns will cost it $NZ13 million.

Currently, 40 Kathmandu stores are shut in NSW for a minimum of two weeks and a further 26 stores are closed in Western Australia for the next four days as both states kick off lockdowns in an attempt to combat the highly infectious Delta strain of the COVID-19 virus. Kathmandus sales are heavily weighted towards the winter period when it sells most of its outdoor gear such as puffer jackets and camping goods.

Shaun Weick, fund manager at Wilson Asset Management, said he fully expected other retailers to temper shareholder expectations in coming months due to the lockdowns. Theres no question foot traffic is going to be down materially through lockdowns and if youve got a larger store base and less ability to shift those sales online, youre going to struggle, he said.
Outdoor wear retailer Kathmandu just might be the canary in the retail sector coal mine, having announced a precipitous $NZ13 million ($12.1 million) drop in earnings thanks to the lockdowns in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth.

The warning from Kathmandu came just hours before Brisbane and large chunks of Queensland became the fourth state this month to have mandated consumers stay at home for other than essential services.

Kathmandu, feels the COVID revenue chill. Credit:

Australian discretionary retail revenues have fallen off a cliff in response to store closures this month in Melbourne, Sydney, Perth and now Brisbane. And shareholders should be bracing for other retail profit revisions as we near the end of the financial year.

Having enjoyed a particularly strong financial year for the first 11 months, most retailers have decided to shutter stores in the areas subject to lockdowns thus missing out on some of the busy end of financial year in-store sales. But store closures have not been universal, for example David Jones has remained open in Melbourne and Sydney when allowed - albeit with more limited trading hours. But Myer has closed stores for other than click and collect.
Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce has been fined $200 for not wearing a mask indoors after being dobbed in by a member of the public in his electorate.

A NSW Police spokesman confirmed a penalty notice was issued to a 54-year-old man found to be breaching the public health order in the states north-west on Monday.

Barnaby Joyce was fined for not wearing a mask at a petrol station in Armidale. Credit:Sky News

Officers attended a service station at Armidale after receiving a Crime Stoppers report from a member of the public about 8am, and found the newly re-elected Nationals leader was not wearing a face mask while in the store. Police spoke with him before issuing a $200 fine.

Speaking to Sky News on Monday night, Mr Joyce said he had been rushing to refuel the car for his partner Vikki Campion.
Last week also brought physicist Peter Ridd before the High Court , where he appealed against his sacking by Queenslands James Cook University in 2018. He argued that critical comments he had made about his colleagues research into the effects of climate change on the Great Barrier Reef were protected by academic freedom. The university argued the comments constituted bullying.

Mark Vaile, chairman of Whitehaven Coal and a former leader of the Nationals, was the preferred candidate for chancellor at Newcastle University . But last week  after a campaign against his appointment by staff academics, university donors and activists  he turned the job down. Federal Education Minister Alan Tudge claimed Mr Vaile had been forced out because of cancel culture .

A coal mining executive, a physicist and a feminist philosophy lecturer might seem strange bedfellows, but together they have re-energised a long-simmering debate about the boundaries of free speech and tolerance in our universities.

Loading

Mr Vailes appointment was bound to be controversial. Newcastle is the worlds biggest coal port, but staff and protesters had a right to ask whether his appointment was consistent with the universitys pledge to be carbon neutral by 2025 and to divest from fossil fuel companies that were not committed to a low-carbon future. But theres a precedent here that may prove worrying if a vast range of views or positions are deemed unacceptable.

Both the Ridd and Lawford-Smith cases are about the muddy area between an individuals rights to say what they want and whether that causes real harm to other people.

This is a complex area for universities. They must foster an environment where ideas of all kinds can be debated and challenged, where shibboleths on all sides are sometimes challenged. That is the notion of academic freedom; its how we know the world is not flat.

Universities also have a duty of care to their students and employees. That includes the legal standards around basic workplace codes  which is what James Cook is using to fight Dr Ridd. Now, though, duty-of-care ideas are being pushed into rather more abstract areas of what could cause somebody harm, or threaten their safety.
Ms Coffey with her father, who is now in a palliative care unit at a Melbourne hospital. But her plight required the intervention of two state ministers. Victorian Health Minister Martin Foley said he had discussed Ms Coffeys case with NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard before the exemption was granted. Mr Foley had described it as a sad case and we deal with compassionate exemptions a lot out of the course of the pandemic. We have sought to always accommodate those end-of-life, really sad human stories. Weve charged our officials and as soon as possible will seek to resolve those issues, to get this family back together in very sad circumstances. Ms Coffey told The Age that in the past week her fathers heart had briefly stopped, he had had a stroke and he was at high risk of another incident happening.

Being in the palliative care unit, they dont resuscitate, or they dont do anything. It could be in an hour, it could be tomorrow, it could be next week, I just cant say. [I wanted] some sort of other alternative to forcing people to have to pay $8000 to $10,000 to be transferred, especially when theyre vaccinated. [It] just seems extremely heartless. Ms Coffey said she had to wait until Friday, the day after her father was moved into the palliative care unit, to submit documents to Victorian and NSW health authorities explaining her situation and that she needed to visit him. When I submitted that off [on Friday morning], basically both of them have come back ... relatively quickly, saying, You need to provide more detailed documentation as to his condition, which is kind of ridiculous, she said. If someones in a palliative care facility, theyre end of life and, generally, people only spend 10 days in those types of facilities before they pass on. So I dont know why its necessary to have this other information.

Being in palliative care, they dont resuscitate ... It could be in an hour, it could be tomorrow, it could be next week, I just cant say. Ms Coffey said authorities had also asked that she show she had booked a charter flight. She expected to get documents back from the Melbourne hospital on Tuesday, as well as finalised quotes for charter flights. Loading She wanted authorities to let her drive to Melbourne, but before granting the exemption authorities had ruled it out, saying the trip would take between nine and 10 hours, with additional stops. Its not realistic that the common person will just have $8000 sitting around that they can [use to charter a flight], on top of hotel quarantine, on top of the inflated flight prices that were dealing with, Ms Coffey said.

I mean, Ive been a student for the past two years. Its very challenging. Prime Minister Scott Morrison had written to Ms Coffey saying he hoped a solution could be found so she could see her father. He said he hoped the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee could also find practical solutions that balance compassion with the need to keep Australians safe. Ms Coffey anticipated she would not be able to get to Melbourne  where shell have to finish her 14-day quarantine in a hotel but may be escorted in personal protective equipment to visit her father each day  until this weekend. The fact that its taking days and days and days and theres no end in sight is fairly shocking to me, especially when I feel like Ive already provided enough information to be able to be transferred, she said.

She said she wanted authorities to review the process for overseas arrivals coming into Australia on compassionate grounds. Ms Coffey was vaccinated against COVID-19 with the Moderna vaccine. Loading She has not been the only Australian based overseas who has raced home to try to see a dying relative. James Turbitt flew from Belgium recently and was denied an exemption to travel from Melbourne to Perth to visit his sick mother before she died. The 35-year-old said he applied for an exemption to be with her but was told that even if he was allowed out of hotel quarantine, he could not fly commercially or drive and would need to charter a plane to Perth.
The worlds largest coal export port at Newcastle has suffered a major setback in its bid to diversify from handling the fossil fuel after legal action aimed at increasing competition between container ports in NSW failed.

The decision on Tuesday to throw out the case spurred the countrys competition tsar, Rod Sims, to warn that the operator of Sydneys Port Botany and Illawarras Port Kembla will have an effective monopoly in transporting containers in NSW for 50 years.

The Port of Newcastle has been seeking to diversify away from coal exports. Credit:Bloomberg

The Federal Court judgment comes more than two years after the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission launched legal action aimed at the terms on which the Coalition government in 2013 privatised the operation of Port Botany and Port Kembla for $5.1 billion.

The ACCCs legal action concerned agreements that were entered into as part of the privatisation for a term of 50 years.
Theyve done the work to do the risk analysis for us, you dont have to do it yourself, and theyve recommended that people under the age of 60 get the Pfizer vaccine, he said. I dont have any objection to a younger person deciding to get the vaccine they can get now, instead of waiting for Pfizer, but I believe we should follow ATAGIs recommendation. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt said the medical advice had not changed and Pfizer remains the preferred vaccine for under 60s. Some GPs have reported that they have excess supply and excess spaces, and so if there are people who wish to access it, by informed consent, via the existing ATAGI rules, then that is simply being enabled, he said.

GPs will be able to claim for vaccine consultations for under-50s by the end of the week, to complement the existing Medicare item for people aged 50 and over. The Commonwealth also announced doctors would be covered by an indemnity scheme for administering AstraZeneca jabs for under-40s. Loading Dr Khorshid said it was reasonable the Prime Minister had given Australians worried about outbreaks a way to do something concrete to protect themselves but the management of these outbreaks did not necessitate a change in approach. However, we know there is a demand for [AstraZeneca], because people have been calling up GPs and asking for it, he said. Dr Charlotte Hespe from Glebe Family Medical Practice said the phones are running hot with people wanting to get vaccinated.

I think there would be few practices that didnt feel they had the space to accommodate more people who would like to get the AstraZeneca vaccine, said Dr Hespe, who is the NSW/ACT chair of Royal Australian College of GPs. Our practice is pretty fully booked with second AstraZeneca shot appointments and we werent expecting this onslaught. On Tuesday afternoon, the College called for clarity over AstraZeneca eligibility. The nations general practices had no warning of the announcements made last night and are now scrambling to figure out what this means for our patients, President Karen Price said. One of the advisers to ATAGI, chair of the Australian Medical Association Council of General Practice Richard Kidd, said I think ATAGI was as surprised as the rest of Australia by the announcement last night.

After strongly counselling younger people to wait for Pfizer, Dr Hespe said recent local cases meant the situation was different. Loading My philosophy has been all along that if somebody is fully informed and aware of their risks then they should go ahead and get an AstraZeneca shot, she said. Her clinic is one of the first in Sydney expecting Pfizer deliveries from Monday, however it is not taking bookings until then. GP Brendon Wong, at Maxim Family Medical Practice in West Ryde, said the practice has no issues with AstraZeneca supply and plenty of appointments available.

Ive had three patients in their 30s call this morning about an AstraZeneca appointment. They arent worried about clotting risk and people are becoming more aware of the risk of COVID-19 in the community, he said. I cant tell patients exactly how long they will be waiting for Pfizer. For Alice Boyd, a 33-year-old returning expat quarantined in Sydney, the Prime Ministers announcement was welcome: watching Australias rollout from Cambodia she was struck by the difference in availability of vaccine, despite Australia having a better healthcare system. I can see why people are complacent here, as mass outbreaks have been contained, but I find it really frustrating, she said. People were lining up for five hours in 35 degree heat to get vaccinated where I was.

Ms Boyd received a dose of Sinovac, the Chinese-manufactured COVID-19 vaccine, but will visit a doctor once out of quarantine for advice on receiving AstraZeneca instead. Chippendale opera singing student Jeremy Boulton, 22, called his doctor on Tuesday morning and booked a shot for Thursday night. With the Delta variant circulating, he wanted to do anything he could to reduce his risk of contracting COVID-19. I just dont want the risk of anything happening to my lungs, and we need the economy to reopen so artists can go back to work, he said. Mr Hunt wouldnt estimate how many people under the age of 40 were interested in getting an AstraZeneca vaccine.
NSW recorded 19 locally acquired COVID-19 cases on Tuesday as exposure site locations ballooned to more than 250 across Greater Sydney and as a financial package was announced in light of ongoing restrictions across NSW.

Of the 19 new cases, Premier Gladys Berejiklian said 17 had already been linked, while two were under investigation, bringing the total number of cases recorded since June 16 to 149.

A financial support package, including grants of between $5000 and $10,000 for small businesses (with an annual turnover of more than $75,000 but below the payroll tax threshold of $1.2 million) and tourism businesses (with turnover between $75,000 and $10 million), as well as payroll tax deferrals was announced.

In addition, there will also be an extension of the Dine & Discover voucher program to the end of August, and vouchers will be able to be used for takeaway dining. The NSW government will also invest $10.3 million in providing support and temporary accommodation for the homeless.
The University of Technology Sydneys vice-chancellor, Professor Attila Brungs, will become the new head of the University of New South Wales.

He will take up the job at the end of January 2022, when UNSWs incumbent vice-chancellor, Ian Jacobs, returns to the United Kingdom.

Professor Attila Brungs will become the new head of the University of New South Wales. Credit: Supplied

This is an outstanding appointment for UNSW, said the universitys chancellor, businessman David Gonski.

In many respects, Professor Brungs is returning home to UNSW where he studied science as an undergraduate, with distinction. We are not only welcoming our 10th president and vice chancellor; we are welcoming back an eminent alumnus and member of the UNSW family.
Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk insisted she was furious that an unvaccinated hospital worker had contracted COVID  yet her own government had not made the womans vaccination mandatory.

Millions of people living in 11 council areas in south-east Queensland, in addition to Townsville, Magnetic Island and Palm Island, were thrown into a three-day lockdown after a 19-year-old hospital receptionist tested positive.

Genomic sequencing found the woman, who had been infectious in the community for 10 days, had the highly contagious Delta variant, but further work was being carried out to determine if her infection was linked to any known cases. Her brother has since tested positive.

As of May 10, it has been mandatory for all health staff working with COVID patients in Queensland to be fully vaccinated.
In any case, the teenagers transgression leaves us with no option, according to the Premier. And so it came to be that Queenslands south-east corner  along with the Townsville local government area, where the young woman had recently travelled with family  was sent into a three-day lockdown from 6pm on Tuesday. No fury was levelled at Ms Palaszczuks own team at Queensland Health, which on June 17 directed an otherwise healthy FIFO mine worker from the regional Victorian city of Bendigo  which at the time was a hotspot, even though it had not dealt with a case of COVID-19 for nine months  into a Brisbane quarantine hotel teeming with it. In a familiar story, that mine worker became infected during his (overnight) stay. He then unwittingly transported the pandemic to the remote Granites gold mine in the Northern Territory, exposing 900 workers, who have since fanned out across Australia. Two of them have returned to Queensland carrying the virus. Darwin also recorded two new cases on Tuesday morning, however the real catastrophe will come if COVID-19 finds its way into vulnerable remote communities of the NT via transient Indigenous visitors to Darwin.

Theres a great fear that COVID will enter those communities, said Thomas Mayor, a widely regarded Torres Strait Islander man and campaigner based in Darwin. There are Third World conditions [in remote communities]  crowded housing, and much of the population has chronic disease and other health issues. The risk to our people is exacerbated by the continued failed policies of governments to close the gaps. COVID-19 poses a major risk to vulnerable indigenous communities. Credit:Pat Scala For her part, Dr Young said it was unusual to lump domestic travellers into the same hotels and floors as high-risk international returnees. This instance on June 17, she said under questioning from journalists, was a result of pressure in a system buckling under the weight of arrivals. Accordingly, Ms Palaszczuk called on Prime Minister Scott Morrison to oversee a massive reduction in people coming home from overseas.

They are going into hotels and all of our staff are having to deal with it, she said. We need to protect Australia. We need to protect Queensland. Deputy Premier Steven Miles blamed the federal governments failed and failing vaccine rollout. He also returned to Mr Morrisons rejection of the proposed Howard Springs-style quarantine facility at Toowoomba, which could have been built by now. Its all true, at least on the face of it. Yet highlighting the dangers of the current hotel quarantine arrangements also underscores the problems of his governments co-mixing of low- and high-risk travellers in Brisbane hotels. On Monday night, national cabinet determined it so problematic that it should not be allowed to happen again. Anywhere. I would question why it was ever there in the first place, Queensland Opposition Leader David Crisafulli said.

In the case of Western Australia, they dont mix those two groups of people. The buck with that stops with the state government. AMA Queensland president Chris Perry said the quarantine failure doesnt look good, and I think everyones terribly embarrassed by it. I think the Premier and Health Minister were both surprised that was happening as well, because it wasnt supposed to be. I think that was a mistake further down the line. Ms Palaszczuks office would not confirm if she knew about the co-mixing.
The Greater Darwin area remains a red zone, as does Greater Sydney, while the ACT and the rest of NSW have been declared an orange zone, except for communities in the border bubble. That gives a reflection of the scale of the red zone designations now happening across Australia, Mr Weimar said during Wednesdays COVID-19 update. People in red zones who are not residents of Victoria are barred from entering the state without an exemption, while residents can return but they have to obtain a permit and quarantine for 14 days at home upon their arrival. Mr Weimar said authorities checked more than 800 passengers on Tuesday and, of them, more than 90 per cent had the right documentation to get into Victoria. Those who didnt were able to organise it on the spot.

He said authorities had spoken to at least three-quarters of the red-zone permit holders and about a third of them had so far tested negative to COVID-19. Wed really like to sympathise with people, particularly Victorians, that were in those areas, Mr Weimar said. I know that many thousands of Victorians will have found some difficult decisions about whether to travel, or whether to return at this point in time. People in red zones who arent residents of Victoria are barred from entering the state unless they have an exemption, while residents may return, but they have to obtain a permit and quarantine for 14 days upon their arrival.

People in orange zones have to obtain a permit to enter Victoria and then get a COVID-19 test and isolate until they receive a negative result. Victorias tourism towns are packed as residents travel close to home to avoid the red and orange zones. The state also recorded one new coronavirus case in hotel quarantine in the 24 hours to midnight on Tuesday. And police confirmed they had conducted 2072 checks in a similar time period as part of Operation Sentinel VIII, which was established in response to the NSW outbreak. However, police did not disclose where those checks had taken place or how many patrols they had done on the Victorian border with NSW. New figures released on Wednesday show that Victorias tourism industry was hardest-hit of all states in the March quarter, suffering a $918 million loss.

Tourism Research Australia data showed that while regional areas enjoyed increased visitation and spending in the March quarter, all of Australias capital cities absorbed declines in both spending and trips. In Melbourne, spending dropped by 52 per cent over the three-month period. Across the nation spending plummeted by $45.7 billion in the year to March, the data showed. Victorian Tourism Industry Council chief executive Felicia Mariani said the past 12 months had been horrific for Melbournes tourism sector. She said the tourism industry needed a more comprehensive vaccination program and a government plan for reopening to the rest of the world. This is a national crisis, she said.

More than 20,000 Victorians received their COVID-19 vaccine doses in the past 24 hours, while nearly 30,000 test results were processed. AMA urges under-60s to wait for Pfizer vaccine The new coronavirus case was recorded as younger Victorians appeared to respond positively to the news that the AstraZeneca vaccine would be made available to all Australian adults on Tuesday, with some booking in immediately to get the jab. But later on in the day, the Australian Medical Association urged people under 60 to wait for a Pfizer vaccine if they can. Prime Minister Scott Morrisons announcement on Monday that any Australian over 18 will be able to access the AstraZeneca vaccine came without warning, surprising even the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation, which provides expert advice to the government on vaccines.

Loading The announcement also blindsided the Australian Medical Association, with president Dr Omar Khorshid urging younger people to continue to follow ATAGI advice and hold out for the Pfizer vaccine. Earlier this month, ATAGI changed its clinical guidance to limit the AstraZeneca vaccine to over 60s due to the severity of a number of non-fatal cases of a rare blood clotting condition in people in their 50s. Theyve done the work to do the risk analysis for us, you dont have to do it yourself, and theyve recommended that people under the age of 60 get the Pfizer vaccine, Dr Khorshid said on Tuesday. I dont have any objection to a younger person deciding to get the vaccine they can get now. But I believe we should follow ATAGIs recommendation because theyre the experts.
Greater Perth has been plunged into a four-day lockdown amid confirmation the highly contagious Delta variant of COVID-19 is spreading through fleeting contact in the citys northern suburbs.

WA Premier Mark McGowan made the announcement on Monday evening after a third case was detected in a man in his 30s who was at the Indian Ocean Brewery Co on June 22, the same night Perths initial case  a woman who had recently returned from Sydney  dined there.

WA Premier Mark McGowan has locked down Perth and Peel. Credit:Getty Images

The mans infection was realised just hours after a 32-year-old woman tested positive for the virus after also having minimal contact with the woman at a gym on Thursday.

No further cases were recorded overnight to 11am Tuesday.
Menulog has become the first major gig economy delivery company to directly employ workers, two months after it announced it would trial a move away from the independent contractor model that has been criticised for lacking unfair dismissal protections and a minimum wage.

One of the new employees, 46-year-old hospitality worker and courier Peter Sears, said he had worked for different companies doing deliveries over the last five years and enjoyed the work.

Peter Sears is one of the first workers to be directly employed by a gig economy delivery company. Credit:Rhett Wyman

Its a lifestyle choice for me, he said. Im out on the road making money, its great.

But the companys Australian managing director Morten Belling said the company would not permanently switch to an employment model wholesale without the introduction of more flexible industrial laws to address what it sees as unaffordable penalty rates of up to $50 an hour.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison says any changes to mandatory quarantine wont begin until at least next year, dashing hopes for fully vaccinated Australians outside the country to potentially quarantine for a shorter period of time or at home instead of in a hotel.

The Prime Minister revealed the timeframe when asked if he had a plan for how Australia could live with the virus.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison speaking after Monday nights national cabinet meeting.

Once we get into next year, I think were in a position where well be able to be considering changes to how, potentially, quarantine arrangements work, the PM told a virtual press conference from his official Canberra residence The Lodge, where he is quarantining following his trip to Britain.

It was never going to be the case where Australia was closed one day and opened the next  thats a completely naive position. Right now, the task is to ensure that we continue with the urgency of the vaccination rollout, and that provides the opportunities for different arrangements next year.
Mayors in Melbournes north-western suburbs say they are sick of getting a raw deal from the Morrison government on infrastructure following a scathing audit that found a multibillion-dollar fund for commuter car parks and road intersections had not been awarded on merit.

The Australian National Audit Office found projects under the $4.8 billion federal Urban Congestion Fund program had been green-lighted by Prime Minister Scott Morrison the day before he called the 2019 election, and the money was directed mainly in Liberal-held or marginal seats.

The carpark behind Balaclava station in Melbournes south-east was slated for redevelopment under the Morrison governments infrastructure plan. Credit:Joe Armao

The bulk of the funding in Melbourne was directed to roads in the south-east, even though infrastructure experts said roads in the citys Labor-dominated north-western suburbs were most congested and in greater need of upgrades. These include the Hume Freeway between Donnybrook and the M80 Ring Road, and the airport to the city via the Tullamarine Freeway, both of which run through Hume Council.

The Auditor-General found 21 commuter car parks in Victoria had been announced without consulting the state government and included some sites where the state was already building projects of its own. These included stations at Hurstbridge, Craigieburn, Seaford, Beaconsfield, Eltham, Pakenham and Frankston.
Nairobi: Ethiopias government has declared an immediate, unilateral ceasefire in its Tigray region after nearly eight months of deadly conflict as Tigray fighters occupied the regional capital and government soldiers retreated in a region where hundreds of thousands are suffering in the worlds worst famine crisis.

In a statement, the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front said Mekele was under its complete control again. It said it anticipated retaliation from the government and called on the citys residents to rally behind the group.

A fighter loyal to the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front mans a guard post on the outskirts of the town of Hawzen, then-controlled by the group, in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia in May. Credit:AP

The Ethiopian government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed declared the ceasefire earlier, claiming that it would last until the end of Tigrays planting season in September.

An unconditional, unilateral ceasefire has been declared starting from today, June 28, read a statement published by state media.
London: By now youve probably heard Scott Morrisons argument, which goes something like this: Australia cant yet talk about a post-pandemic future because we still dont know whether vaccines guarantee a return to normality.

To illustrate the point, the Prime Minister regularly notes COVID-19 cases are climbing in Britain even though 85 per cent of all adults have been given one dose of a vaccine and 62 per cent the full two.

It is true cases are rising: the 23,000 new infections reported on Monday make up the highest figure in four months. Nearly all new cases are the same highly transmissible Delta variant causing panic in Australia.

British authorities here are certainly wary of the trend. But they are not alarmed for two reasons: cases were always going to increase as the UK moved out of a strict four-month lockdown, and the contest between vaccine and virus is much more nuanced than Morrison and others make out.
Miami: Weeks before a Florida apartment building collapsed, the president of its board wrote that structural problems identified in a 2018 inspection had gotten significantly worse and owners needed to pay a hefty price to get them fixed.

The April 9 Dear Neighbours letter from Champlain Towers South Condominium President Jean Wodnicki hinted at an ongoing debate over the repairs and a reluctance by some apartment owners to pay for major work that would cost at least $US15.5 million ($20 million).

People stand near a makeshift memorial outside St Joseph Catholic Church near the Champlain Towers on Tuesday. Credit:AP

A lot of this work could have been done or planned for in years gone by. But this is where we are now, she wrote in the letter, which was confirmed to The Associated Press by a spokesman for the board.

Wodnicki noted costs had increased since an October 2018 report by engineering firm Morabito Consultants first identified key issues with weakening concrete, and she predicted they would only grow more if put off any longer.
Locksmith, Locksmith. Do you have my car keys?

There was a Door to which I found no Key

There was a Veil past which I could not see

Some little Talk awhile of ME and THEE

There seemed--and then no more of THEE and ME.

The legendry Omar Khayyam was ahead of his times- this adage is the proof. Maybe he had the vision of cars operating without keys, people talking through intercoms, all the high-end security stuff that has taken over the market now.

Security features in a car have been evolving over time with special emphasis on keys. To err is human after all and losing car keys or misplacing them is the most common of them.

SpotPal has found that an average American spends 10 minutes per day or roughly 2.5 days a year to search misplaced items. you would not have estimated that a whopping $2.7 billion are spent for replacement and repairing costs.







So, you need to keep your car locksmiths number on speed dial. If you do not have a trustworthy car locksmith in Seattle, maybe https://blueskylocksmith.com/ can help you.

With this, it is also smart to understand the functioning of the locks and keys in your car. So let us begin.

Story of a Key!

A key is as fascinating as the mythologies. It is an emotion that resonates with the key-holder. For some, it may be a tool to access something, but for some, it may be an insignia of nostalgia. You would be astonished to know that car earlier used door keys. Among these, a car key serves many purposes, like:-

 It helps you to open your car

 It helps you to start it

 It unlocks the trunk, steering, glove box and other things.

Valet Key It is an extra key that is provided by car manufacturing units to ensure the safety and privacy of the owners from valets. Generally, it starts the ignition and drivers door. It does not have access to other parts like the glove box and trunk of the car. Many car manufacturers give the feature of limiting the engine output for high-end vehicles to prevent unauthorized use of car or Joyriding.

Old-School Standard Key- Internal Cut Some car manufactures are still providing cars that are accessed through traditional keys. These keys are not very secure and automatic systems were installed in the cars to prevent theft in which the alarm starting to blare if it was touched by an object.

It is relatively easy and cheaper to replace. Chrysler introduced the first car lock and key in 1949. After that, these evolved and key manufacturers started making Flip Keys, Crest Keys, Logo Blanks, etc.

Transponder Keys or Chip keys

They are much more sophisticated than the standard keys. It works on radio signals. When the key is turned into the ignition, the chip installed in the key sends a coded radio signal to the cars computer. If it sends a wrong signal, the ignition will not start the engine.

Sometimes, the car will go immobile if a wrong key is inserted. So, the theft is avoided as the ignition cannot force start and these chips are not easy to duplicate.

Daimler-Benz was the first car manufacturer to hold the patent of a Transponder key. The key tries to reach the cars computer through an infrared beam which rolls out an exclusive code identifiable by the computer. However, it costs a lot to replace it as it can only be done by an experienced car locksmith with advanced tools.

Resister Key

Resister Key was made by General Motors in the year 1986 after meticulously studying the patterns employed by thieves to break a car. VATS or Vehicle Anti Theft System utilizes a resistor or an electrical code that is embedded in the key. There is a mechanical code also. The electrical code that reads the code from the resistor is embedded in a place that cannot be easily overpowered.

Electronic Key or Remote Key

Electronic keys can be used to open the car and the rest of the things can be done through push buttons. It is hard to open a car without them. It contains a radio transmitter that can work when the car is in the range of five to twenty meters from the key.

This technology was first used by Ford, Mercury, and Lincoln in which a keypad was installed above the door handle of the car. A remote keyless system was first used by French Renault in 1982.

Smart Key

It was developed by Siemens Automotive for Mercedes Benz in 1997. The key incorporated plastic in place of traditional metal key system. It is then inserted in the key fob and the ignition starts to read its code. It can be used as a traditional key.

Smart key comes with a Keyless Go function in which the user can access the trunk and start the car with the key in his pocket.

Display Key

Display key comes with a touch panel that can lock, unlock and start a car. The user can command the car to park itself through display key. It was developed by BMW. It can work for three weeks when fully charged. It can be charged through a USB port or BMW wireless console.

How can a car locksmith help you?

Thieves are also devising new ways to take away what is rightfully yours. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, approximately 6.4 billion dollars worth of automobiles were stolen in the year 2019. 2020 witnessed a rise in auto thefts by 9.2 %.

Cars accessories have also been a target. Logos, catalytic converters, tires of high-end vehicles have been escalating. Catalytic converters are used for turning poisonous gases emitted by the car to less harmful gas. 14,443 catalytic converters were reported stolen in 2020 alone.

A car locksmith can weave a veneer of protection on your vehicle other than just making or breaking a key. Let us take a look at how can he exploit the technology at hand to avoid any unwarranted access to your vehicle.

A locksmith can make you understand the correct use of three security devices that are divided into:-

 Deterrent devices

 Anti-theft devices

 Tracking devices

Install Alarm System

An auto alarm is installed to discourage thieves and notifies the owner and whoever is in the vicinity of the theft. If the car is parked at a place where it is highly improbable for anyone to hear the blaring siren or see the flashing lights as a sign of distress, the alarm would have no effect on the thief.

These systems prove their worth in crowded places where anyone can turn their attention towards the car. Here, we need to check that the alarm should be distinct. Some car manufacturers insert a panic button in the OEM remote key, owners press it all the times.

To overcome this, a car locksmith in Seattle may advice you to add one more layer to security alarm on the vehicle. They come with additional features and unique sound. They come with their remotes thus eliminating the possibility of pressing them accidently. A car alarm must be installed after considering the places where the car can be parked.

Alarms may be active or passive. For example, if an Original Equipment Manufacturers device is optimized to alert when opened with a duplicate key, it will stop only after the car is opened with the remote key. Active alarms can be optimised by the drivers according to their vehicles specifications.

Anti-theft Locks

They are designed to prevent a theft from happening. These locks may be present in the ignition, steering, tires, brake pedals, Gear console, etc. Anti-theft locks can prove to be a boon for vehicles that are parked frequently in remote or deserted areas.

Tire locks

Tire locks are recommended and preferred to be used when the car is going to get parked for a long time. Tire locks are heavy and require some mechanical effort to install. It is difficult to carry them and since they are installed in tires, the likelihood of clothes getting soiled is highly probable.

Lock that Steering

They are visible from the outside like tire locks, thus acts as a deterrent for a thief trying to steal. Steering wheel locks can function in two ways:-



 The first type of lock can jam the steering and not let it move.

 The second time may latch itself with the steering and the pedal.

These locks are durable and hard. They are designed with steel that cannot be easily hammered down or cut or drilled to pieces. Initially, they were cumbersome to handle.

Now, hybrid steering wheel locks come with dual latch mechanism and push-button locking system that makes it easy to apply and remove with minimum effort. However, it can spoil the interior of the car if it is not handled with care and caution.

Brakes will get locked! This lock with not allow the thief to access the brake of the car. It is not visible from the outside and should be used as a secondary shield after an alarm because the thief has to open your car to come to this lock.

No Gear, No Fear! It is also a secondary layer of the security as a thief has to get into the car to face this. So, it is recommended to use another security shield that deters the thief to enter the vehicle. It jams the shift lever and restricts the movement that car can make.

Make the car immobile!

The nature of the car is mobile. But desperate problems need desperate measures. Immobilising hardware is a preventive measure. They prevent the car and its components to function properly. They are installed out of sight permanently. They can be activated through a remote and the owner need not fuss about storing them when not using them. They are easy to handle if compared to other security measures.

Dont let the oil out!

Kill switches are installed in the bonnet so that it can interfere with the battery and flow of charge. This feature can deter the car from getting started as an interruption in charge flow would culminate in ignition not getting the command to start the car.

Other styles of kill switches like fuel disablers can cut-off the fuel supply to the engine. They are installed in the interior of the car and can be accessed remotely.

Car locksmith is going to recommend these

Instead of installing a kill switch, your car locksmith can recommend tools that are installed to dismantle and interfere either with the fuel supply or battery cable. They are cheaper then kill switches because the owner may have to get his hands dirty to disable them.

These valves are installed under the bonnet and can only be disarmed through human efforts. They are suitable for owners that have to park their cars for longer durations. These valves are not suitable for daily use.

The fuse is to be removed after parking the vehicle which will prevent it from starting. But, a thief will not take a long time since the owner also removed the fuse mechanically. Therefore, it is recommended to use kill switches that are installed away from prying eyes.

These windows are not going to break Some high-priced vehicles come with glass laminations and strong glass that is hard to break. You may install them in your car at the price that car locksmith provides. The lamination or the glass may break but the adhesive keeps everything in place and makes it difficult for a thief to puncture it. It is important as without this covering, it takes 3 minutes to break a car window glass.

Several other tracking devices like GPS, RFID, etc can be used to locate the position of the vehicle. That comes in the picture after the car has been stolen. Still, a car locksmith should be contacted for assessing the security features and to know if your vehicle wants some additional cover too.
A writer of history, Brad Dison earned his masters degree in the subject from Louisiana Tech University. He has written four history books and has been published in newspapers and scholarly journals. Keep up with the column through the Facebook group Remember This? by Brad Dison. For more real stories about real people with a twist, listen to Brad Disons podcast Remember This? at http://www.BradDison.com. Disons book Remember this? is available for preorder on that site.
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A drug syringe found behind a vacant property in northeast Albuquerque, N.M., is placed into a container on Friday, Aug. 9, 2019, as crews attempt to clear the lot of needles and other heroin paraphernalia.
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Nyamekye Daniel has been a journalist for five years. She was the managing editor for the South Florida Media Network and a staff writer for The Miami Times. Daniel's work has also appeared in the Sun-Sentinel, Miami Herald and The New York Times.
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Tim Gruver is a politics and public policy reporter. He is a University of Washington alum and the recipient of the 2017 Pioneer News Award for Reporting. His work has appeared in Politico, the Kitsap Daily News, and the Northwest Asian Weekly.
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FRANKLIN - Justin Curtis Harper, 50, passed away peacefully at his beloved home, July 1, 2021, after a hard fought battle with pancreatic cancer. Justin was born on March 13, 1971, to George and Mary Harper in Annapolis, MD. He was predeceased by his father in 2013. He is survived by his wif
Melanie joined The Daily Times in the early 90s and has served as the Life section editor since 1993. A William Blount and UT alum, Melanie is generally the early arriver who turns on the lights in the newsroom.

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 Latest Update: The children were identified today by the Los Angeles County coroner's office as Mia Camila Rodriguez, 4; Mason Mateo Rodriguez, 3; and Milan Mateas Rodriguez, who was born on May 5 of this year. Autopsies were pending to determine their cause of death.

East Los Angeles -- Detectives have arrested a 28-year-old woman in connection with the murder of her three children, the L.A. County Sheriff's Department announced today.

28-year-old Sandra Chico is scheduled to appear in court on Wednesday, June 30, and is being held in lieu of $2 million bail.

Sheriff's Department personnel responded to a residence in the 600 block of Ferris Avenue near Garfield High at about 12:45 p.m. on Monday after receiving a report that children at the home were not breathing, according to the department's Lt. Charles Calderaro.

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Deputies found two boys and one girl in a bedroom, all under age 3, and none were breathing, Calderaro said. Paramedics were called, but all three children were pronounced dead at the scene. Authorities did not indicate how they died.

They were identified today by the Los Angeles County coroner's office as Mia Camila Rodriguez, 4; Mason Mateo Rodriguez, 3; and Milan Mateas Rodriguez, who was born on May 5 of this year. Autopsies were pending to determine their cause of death.

There have been no previous reports of child abuse or neglect, according to preliminary findings. Relatives and neighbors told several media outlets that there had been no signs of trouble.

The deaths come after a family celebration on Sunday, reports ABC7. "She was a good mother ... She didn't have no problems with them," the children's uncle said.

Anyone with information was asked to contact the sheriff's Homicide Bureau at 323-890-5500. Anonymous tips can be called in to Crime Stoppers at 800-222-8477 or submitted online at lacrimestoppers.org.

Updated Tuesday, June 29 @ 10:54 am
An undercover sex trafficking operation in Nashville, Tennessee, has seen arrests and charges for 17 men. (Courtesy of Metropolitan Nashville Police Department)

17 Charged After Sex Trafficking Operation in Nashville

An undercover sex trafficking operation in Nashville, Tennessee, has seen arrests and charges for 17 men.

According to a release from the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department (MNPD), the two-day undercover operation June 24 to 25 found that 17 men had allegedly agreed to pay for sex with an undercover officer who posed as a 16-year-old girl.

The operation was conducted by MNPD human trafficking detectives with assistance from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and Homeland Security Investigations.

The men allegedly knowingly arrived at a hotel in response to an internet advertisement, in the area of Donelson Pike and Royal Parkway in Nashville.

They allegedly entered a room and exchanged money for sex, after which they were arrested. Each were charged with trafficking for a commercial sex act.

The identities of the 17 men have been released to the public:

Chhatra Bhujel, 35, of Nashville

Terrance Green, 41, of Smyrna

Robert Ambrose, 63, of Bon Aqua

Shontez Brown, 45, of Notasulga, Alabama

Joshua Haines, 26, of Dowelltown

Rex Payton, 49, of Lebanon

Eleazar Ramirez, 35, of Smyrna

Adolpho Ramirez, 38, of Crossville

Barry Gardner, 35, of Nashville (also charged with cocaine and gun possession)

Dwayne Small Jr., 23, of Nashville

Jack Davenport, 24, of Nashville

Jaykumar Patel, 21, of Murfreesboro

Sourabh Verma, 37, of Franklin

Michael Corsaro, 46, of Hendersonville

Fredy Padilla, 36, of Nashville

Byombe Issa, 30, of Bowling Green, Kentucky

Abraham Sanchez, 30, of Clarksville

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) has a statewide public awareness campaign, It Has to Stop, dedicated to informing the public about human trafficking, in efforts to stamp out the criminal industry.

According to the bureau, a child is bought or sold for sex about every two minutes, and the average age of a child sold for sex is 13.

Reports of human trafficking have increased across Tennessee over the last several years, with the Tennessee Human Trafficking Hotline having received 456 calls in 2018, 728 calls in 2019, and 898 calls in 2020, reported local station WKRN, citing TBI data.

WATCH: Think #HumanTrafficking is what youve seen in the movies? The truth is far worse. Hear from TBI ASAC Jeremy Lofquest about what we often see in the life of a sex trafficking victim in #Tennessee. LEARN MORE: https://t.co/z0cdvrBKdI#HumanTraffickingAwarenessDay pic.twitter.com/etDgP8P3dt  Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (@TBInvestigation) January 11, 2021

Update: This article has been updated with photos of mugshots of the alleged offenders.
Tseten Namgyal, 82, a 1962 India-China prisoner of war inside his home, in his village, Urgu, in Maan Panong B panchayat on the de-facto border in the union territory of Ladakh on June 22, 2021. (Venus Upadhayaya/Epoch times)

1962 IndoChina Prisoner of War From Remote Border Village Recalls History, Seeks Help

PANGONG TSO, IndiaEighty-two-year-old Tseten Namgyal is dressed in an Indian army jacket. Age and the tough, intensely cold trans-Himalayan terrain have hunched his back a bit, and his visibly thick-skinned fingers look almost mummified, yet alive. Meanwhile, his candor about having once been a prisoner of war, and the servant and porter of one of Indias most celebrated army officers, is youthful and infectious.

Communist China has started two bloody conflicts with India in the trans-Himalayan region; Namgyal is a rare witness to bothone as a prisoner of war in 1962 and the other as a resident of a village on the de facto border during last years clash in the Galwan Valley.

Namgyal was serving Maj. Dhan Singh Thapa when the 1962 war between India and China erupted. Then a post commander, Thapas valor during the war is a part of military historyhe was awarded the Param Vir Chakra, Indias highest military decoration, for his actions during the conflict, in which 80,000 Chinese troops faced off with 10,000 to 20,000 Indian soldiers.

The gallantry of Thapa and his men has been back in the news of late, following the June 2020 conflict in Galwan between India and China, and the recent military buildup in the Pangong Tso area.

On the second day of 1962 war, which lasted one month from October to November that year, Namgyal and nine others, including Thapa, were captured and taken to Xinjiang Province as prisoners of war. He was the only civilian in the group.

I used to cook for [Thapa], wash his clothes. I used to go along with the army. There was no road here then. We used to travel on horses. We used to stay in the posts for extended periods of time under harsh conditions, said Namgyal, who was 23 when the events of 1962 occurred.

That Day in 1962

On Oct. 21, 1962, the Chinese advanced to the north of Pangong Tso lake with the intention of capturing a few posts. Thapas men repelled three attacks before being overrun and captured.

On that day [when the attack happened], Indian soldiers were less in number. They came in extra numbers and killed our many soldiers. Those who survived were taken as prisoners, said Namgyal, adding that out of 23, 10 were killed, 10 were taken as prisoners, and three escaped.

I saw dead soldiers. I didnt get a bullet, but they forcibly arrested me. There were other soldiers with me. They took us to Xinjiang. They put us in tents. There was nothing around. We were kept under guard.

After seven months, the Chinese brought the Indian prisoners of war to an airfield in Chushul, a meeting point between the border personnel of the Indian and Chinese armies, and handed them over to the Indians.

While Namgyal was a prisoner of war, his family thought that he was dead. So when he suddenly reappeared one day in his almost inaccessible villageat a time when there were no phonesthe entire village was surprised.

The remote village of Urgu, in Maan Panong B panchayat on the de facto border in the union territory of Ladakh on June 22, 2021. (Venus Upadhayaya/Epoch Times)

Tseten Namgyal, 82, a 1962 India-China poisoner of war outside his home, in his village, Urgu in Maan Panong B panchayat on the de-facto border with China, in the union territory of Ladakh on June 22, 2021. (Venus Upadhayaya/Epoch times)

For Namgyal, the war and his time serving Thapa have become a part of his identity. Locals and the Indian army stationed nearby know him because of Thapas name, and hes invited to local army events that celebrate Thapas valor.

These days, Namgyal is alone and uncared for in his remote village, and feels that he hasnt gotten his due. Since he wasnt enlisted in the military and was just a locally employed servant of an army officer, he doesnt get the pension that soldiers get after retirement. He told The Epoch Times that he needs help.

When The Epoch Times on June 22 visited Namgyals village, Urgu, in the Maan Panong B panchayat (the basic territorial unit in Indias democratically elected governance system), he was found in the courtyard of his old home, where he has lived alone since his wifes death two decades ago.

Urgu is a village of 65 to 70 homes at more than 13,500 feet above sea level; Namgyal was born and raised there.

The hunched figure of Tseten Namgyal, 82, next to his old stone-mud home in the village of Urgu, on the de-facto India-China border in the union territory of Ladakh on June 22, 2021. (Venus Upadhayaya/Epoch Times)

Tseten Namgyal, inside his dimly lit home in Urgu, in the Maan Panong B panchayat on the de-facto border in the union territory of Ladakh on June 22, 2021. (Venus Upadhayaya/Epoch times)

That day, temperatures in the village ranged from a low of 27 degrees Fahrenheit (minus-3 Celsius) and a high temperature of 59 F (15 Celsius). In October 1962 when Namgyals team was attacked, it likely would have ranged between 16 F (minus 9 C) and 59 F (15 C).

Cry for Help

After his return to the village, he worked as a porter, grew barley in his village, and reared yaks, goats, and sheep.

Im old now and I cant work anymore. So I need help. Twenty years ago my wife passed away, and I cook for myself, he said. His village isnt yet connected to the electric grid and the homes survive on solar power.

Outside his stone and mud home, theres a yak pen. On one side of the door, he has collected dried horse and yak manure that he uses as fuel during winters. Inside almost everything is covered with dust and soot, and theres no light. Theres one solar bulb inside the room, along with some cooking utensils. In another room thats filled with objects, a shaft from the ceiling brings bright light.

I fought for India. I worked for the Indian army. I should be helped, he said, adding that the army battalion stationed nearby has helped him with some rations and clothes. He otherwise receives a paltry senior citizen pension of 1,000 rupees ($13.45) per month.
2 Injured in Stabbing in German City, Suspect Arrested

BERLINA man attacked and injured two passersby in the eastern German city of Erfurt early Monday, apparently with a knife, before fleeing. Police said the suspect was arrested several hours later.

The two victims, German men aged 45 and 68, were taken to nearby hospitals and underwent operations, police said. Meanwhile, authorities used a helicopter to search for the suspect after the attack at about 6 a.m.

The investigation led authorities to a 32-year-old German man with a record of violent and other offenses who had had mental health issues in the past, police said in a statement. He was arrested at his apartment with unspecified and apparently self-inflicted injuries and taken to a hospital.

The motive for the attack was not immediately clear, but police said there was no reason to suspect that it was politically motivated. The suspect and victims did not know each other.
5-4 Supreme Court Rules Pipeline Company Can Use Eminent Domain to Seize Land in NJ

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that federal eminent domain powers can be used to seize land to construct the PennEast Pipeline in New Jersey.

In Tuesdays ruling (pdf), Republican appointees Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Samuel Alito, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh voted in the majority along with Democrat-appointed Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor.

Justices Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, Clarence Thomas, and Elena Kagan dissented.

The majority ruled that PennEast has the power to seize state-owned and protected lands to construct its 120-mile-long natural gas pipeline between New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The decision upheld a precedent that energy firms have previously used to build pipelines around the United States.

Their ruling also reversed a September 2019 decision handed down by a federal appeals court that had blocked PennEast from seizing lands from New Jersey.

The pipeline would link Marcellus Shale dry gas production with markets in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. Some 1 billion cubic feet of natural gas will be transported per day from Pennsylvania to New Jersey, according to PennEast.

Paul Clement, an attorney for PennEast, argued in front of the Supreme Court that New Jerseys claim of sovereign immunity doesnt apply because the pipeline firm was acting on behalf of the federal government when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission granted approval for the project.

If we lose this case, then this pipeline will not be built in anything like its current configuration, Clement had said. I dont think there is a way to reroute this pipeline in a way that doesnt in some way impact New Jersey land.

New Jersey attorneys argued that a private entity like PennEast cannot file a lawsuit against a sovereign state to acquire the property, saying only the federal government has that ability. The Supreme Courts majority rejected that argument.

Although nonconsenting States are generally immune from suit, they surrendered their immunity from the exercise of the federal eminent domain power when they ratified the Constitution, Roberts wrote for the majority, adding that the federal government can delegate eminent domain power to private parties who then can initiate condemnation proceedings, including against state-owned property.

But Barrett, in a dissent, said the majority lacks evidence and cannot muster even a single decision involving a private condemnation suit against a State, let alone any decision holding that the States lack immunity from such suits.

It relies exclusively on suits brought by States, suits brought by the United States, suits brought by private parties against other private parties, and suits brought by Indian tribes against private partiesnone of which implicate state sovereign immunity, she wrote.

The Epoch Times has contacted PennEast for comment.

The case is PennEast Pipeline Co. v. New Jersey, 19-1039.
Already Deported Illegal Aliens Have No Right to Seek Release on Bond, Supreme Court Rules

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that previously deported illegal aliens again facing deportation who claim a fear of persecution if they are removed to their country of origin may be indefinitely detained by the government.

Over the dissent of its three Democrat-appointed justices, the high court found that those noncitizens arent entitled to a hearing about whether they should be released while the government processes their claims.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote the courts opinion in Johnson v. Guzman Sanchez, which was made public on June 29. Oral arguments took place telephonically on Jan. 11. Before that, both the trial court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit ruled against the government.

Not allowing people who have already been deported to seek release on bond makes sense, Alito wrote in the courts opinion.

Aliens who reentered the country illegally after removal have demonstrated a willingness to violate the terms of a removal order, and they therefore may be less likely to comply with the reinstated order, he wrote.

The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) provides that an alien unlawfully present in the United States may be deported after the Department of Justice issues a final order of removal, but Congress restricts to where the person may be deported. An alien may not be removed to a country where his or her life or freedom would be threatened in that country because of the aliens race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.

Individuals who have been deported previously and then reentered the country, or who have failed to seek asylum within one year of arriving in the United States, may not apply for asylum. Those individuals are generally allowed to apply for withholding of removal.

This means that at the end of the adjudication process an immigration judge signs a deportation order and then advises the government that it may not carry it out. The removal of the person is said to be withheld. This status is less certain than asylum, leaving its recipients in a sort of limbo, according to the American Immigration Council. The government may still deport the person to another country if it agrees to accept the individual.

According to Alito, the INA contains various provisions authorizing the government to detain aliens during the removal process, and this case concerns two of them: 8 U.S.C. Section 1226 and 8 U.S.C. Section 1231, Alito wrote for the court.

We are asked to decide which of those provisions applies to aliens who were removed from the United States but later reentered without authorization, were subject to reinstated orders of removal, and then sought withholding of removal based on fear of persecution in the particular countries designated by their removal orders, he wrote.

If the answer is [Section] 1226, which applies pending a decision on whether the alien is to be removed from the United States, then the alien may receive a bond hearing before an immigration judge. If the answer is 1231, which applies after the alien is ordered removed, then the alien is not entitled to a bond hearing.

We conclude that [Section] 1231, not [Section] 1226, governs the detention of aliens subject to reinstated orders of removal, meaning those aliens are not entitled to a bond hearing while they pursue withholding of removal.

In a dissent that was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, Breyer took issue with the courts majority.

I can understand why Congress might not want to grant a bond hearing to an alien whose circumstances fall within the removal period. But why  deny a bond hearing to individuals who reasonably fear persecution or torture, and who, as a result, face proceedings that may last for many months or years (while their withholding-only proceedings wend their way toward completion)?

Christopher Hajec, Director of Litigation for the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), praised the ruling in a statement provided to The Epoch Times.

Once again, the Supreme Court has read immigration law as written, and refused to make the status of an alien subject to a final order of removal murky where the law does not make it so. The Court explained that the withholding of removal process is about whether an alien can be removed to a specific country where he may fear persecution, and does not change the final order of removal saying that he is to be removed from the United States, he said.

IRLI had filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case.

Lawyer Paul Hughes, who represented six individuals who claimed they were entitled to bond hearings while detained, told Reuters that the decision was a devastating result for thousands of individuals each year who seek relief from torture or persecution abroad.
Republican member of the Arizona House of Representatives Mark Finchem speaks the Let the Church ROAR National Prayer Rally on the National Mall in Washington on Dec. 12, 2020. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

Arizona Lawmaker Says Media Losing Their Minds After He Attended Election Documentary Screening

An Arizona lawmaker said local media are losing their minds because he was sitting in the audience for Saturdays screening of The Deep Rig, a movie which purports that the 2020 general election was stolen from then-President Donald Trump.

Theyre losing their minds because I went to see a movie. Would they have lost their minds if I had seen An Inconvenient Truth? Because I did, but they didnt, Arizona Rep. Mark Finchem (R), who is currently running for Secretary of State, told The Epoch Times.

Finchem said there were no shocking new revelations in the movie. The Republican legislator said the main reason he went to see the movie was to see what was in it and to square information with the actual facts of the ongoing Maricopa County audit once the report is released.

Ive been an advocate of the audit process. We reserve the right to scrutinize the process, Finchem said.

The Deep Rig premiered on June 26 at Dream City Church in North Phoenix. Approximately 500 people attended, according to Arizona Central.

I was in the cheap seats. I was in the back observing. So people want to make a deal about that? Finchem said.

Arizona Sen. Sonny Borrelli (R-Lake Havasu City) also attended the screening, according to Arizona Central. A phone call to Borrellis office on Monday was not returned.

Finchem said there are details in the film that he wished not to discuss, such as potential electoral discrepancies among the 2.1 million ballots cast during the election in Arizonas Maricopa County.

On April 24, private contractors hired by the Arizona State Senate launched an audit of the ballots cast in Maricopa, the states most populous county. The auditors are looking to determine whether or not significant irregularities took place during the election.

Like everybody else, I am waiting to see the report because the report will have the evidence, Finchem said.

This is not about right and left. This audit is about right and wrong, Arizona Senate Liaison Ken Bennett said in the movie trailer.

Patrick Byrne, the founder and former CEO of Overstock.com, who wrote a book that inspired The Deep Rig, appears in the movie and trailer, saying the effort is to protect democracy.

I had a ringside seat to events from Nov. 3, 2020, and feel a duty to tell the world what happened. My only interest is honestly conveying the truth for historical purposes, Byrne said.

Finchem said he was concerned that Doug Logan, the CEO of Florida-based cybersecurity firm Cyber Ninjas, the company spearheading Arizonas audit of the 2020 Maricopa County general election, also appears in the film.

I am concerned. I dont know whether that interferes with that [audit] objective, Finchem said.

Logan could not be reached for comment.

Finchem said that for the most part, nothing about the movie was surprising to him.

Im still digesting what was in it. I understand the story has to be told and that there will be storytellers. I dont want to interfere with the storytelling. I want to make sure everything is rooted in fact. This is such an important topic. Weve got to vet and revet and revet [the facts], Finchem said. Its an effort to restore voter confidence in our electoral system.
Maricopa County ballots cast in the 2020 general election are examined and recounted by contractors working for Florida-based company, Cyber Ninjas, at Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, Ariz., on May 6, 2021. (Matt York/AP Photo/Pool)

Arizonas Maricopa County Will Replace All Voting Machines After Audit

Senate GOP leader says county's announcement yet another 'attack on the audit'

Authorities in Maricopa County, Arizona, announced they will replace all voting machines following a Senate-ordered audit of the countys 2020 election results.

The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which oversees elections in the county, issued a response to a letter sent by Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, saying the county shares [her] concerns that the integrity and security of the Dominion Voting Systems machines and ballots might have been compromised during the audit.

Accordingly, I write to notify you that Maricopa County will not use the subpoenaed election equipment in any future election, said the letter, dated Monday. And in a news release, the county pledged to never use equipment that could pose a risk to free and fair elections, suggesting that the auditors may have compromised the machines.

Hobbs, a Democrat, had written to the county in May that she has grave concerns regarding the security and integrity of these machines, given that the chain of custody, a critical security tenet, has been compromised and election officials do not know what was done to the machines while under Cyber Ninjas control. Cyber Ninjas is the Florida-based technology firm that helped with the audit, which was authorized earlier this year by the Republican-controlled state Senate.

Senate Majority Leader Karen Fann, a Republican, described Maricopa Countys letter as yet another attack on the audit, saying that the machines werent tampered with during the weekslong process.

If their experts cant prove the machines have not been tampered with, she asked, then how does the [Secretary of States office] or County Elections certify the machines before every audit to make sure the machines havent been tampered with?

We asked numerous times for this audit to be performed jointly with Maricopa County, at their facility, selecting a mutual auditor, and did not want the ballots or machines moved from their facilities, Fann contended, referring to the legal tug-of-war between the state Senate and Maricopas executives.

And several Republicans praised the move to do away with the machinesbut not for the reasons offered by Hobbs or the county officials.

No more machines, wrote Republican state Sen. Wendy Rogers on Twitter, alleging in another tweet that the machines are easily compromised. Go back to the old way, she also wrote in concurring with a tweet issued by GOP state Sen. Kelly Townsend.

Last week, the team overseeing the audit announced that both the paper examination and counting of the ballots were finished. Fann previously told The Epoch Times over the weekend said the team will meet within the next several days and will formulate a plan and timeline moving forward, with other officials suggesting the audit may be completed by the end of the summer.

Hobbs and Senate Republicans have gone back and forth in a war of words since the audit was proposed earlier this year, with the secretary of state characterizing it as a partisan operation designed to suppress voters and claimed auditors have operated with lax security.

But Republicans have disputed Hobbss and other Democrats assertions that the audit isnt being done securely or professionally. Fann and other GOP senators have said the audit is necessary to restore the publics confidence in the states election systems.

Alexander Kolodin, a lawyer who represents the Arizona GOP, told NTD that he believes the audit will uncover irregularities.

Something went wrong, he said on June 15, because something goes wrong in every election.

Meanwhile, if an audit reveals fraud, then there would be a referral to law enforcement authorities, Fann and other senators have previously said. And if fraud is revealed, according to her, they will focus on passing legislation to shore up any security flaws.

If the audit illuminates that theres [sic] vulnerabilities in X, Y, and Z parts of our election system, state legislatures can target those with a laser beam and fix X, Y, and Z parts of our election system, Kolodin also said in the interview.

The Arizona state Senate turned over the Dominion machines to auditors to determine if any of the equipment was compromised, using a legislative subpoena issued in April to seize nine tabulating machines and 385 precinct tabulators. Dominion has categorically denied the allegations that their machines had any problems in Maricopa.

Other than the machines, the auditors, led by Cyber Ninjas, started reviewing some 2.1 million ballots at Phoenixs Veterans Memorial Coliseum starting several weeks ago.

The Epoch Times has contacted the Fanns office and Cyber Ninjas for comment.
Vials labelled "Astra Zeneca COVID-19 Coronavirus Vaccine" and a syringe are seen in front of a displayed AstraZeneca logo, in this illustration photo taken March 14, 2021. (Dado Ruvic/Illustration/Reuters)

AstraZeneca Now Open for All Australian Adults to Take

The AstraZeneca vaccine is now available at the local GP for all Australian adults who understand the risks and are willing to take the vaccine.

On the evening of June 28, following an emergency cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced that while the British vaccine was recommended for peoples over 60, the advice now does not prohibit those under 60s from receiving it.

The advice does not preclude persons under 60 from getting the AstraZeneca vaccine, Morrison said. And so, if you wish to get the AstraZeneca vaccine, then we would encourage you to go and have that discussion with your GP, and weve already made announcements to support those additional consultations with the GPs so you can have that conversation.

Well, if [people under 40] wish to go and speak to their doctor and have access to the AstraZeneca vaccine, they can do so, Morrison later added.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison following the G-7 summit at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, on Jun. 15, 2021. (Photo by THOMAS SAMSON/AFP via Getty Images)

Lieutenant General John Frewen said he did not think it was a backflip on previous health advice. Instead, he said it was about giving the public a chance to make informed choices where they understand the risk of getting COVID-19 against the risk of getting vaccinated quickly.

What theyve done is theyve taken a very cautious approach to try to minimise any adverse effects at all  So we need to make risk-based judgements about giving people access to vaccines, Frewen told Nine on June 29.

Morrison also announced the implementation of a no-fault indemnity scheme for general practitioners who administer COVID-19 vaccinations.

And secondly, we are also providing the indemnity scheme for those general practitioners so they can actively engage with you and you can make the best decision for your health, he said.

Under the scheme, GPs will not be liable for any side effects from vaccines that may occur in the recipient.

It is common practice for the government to indemnify newly researched medical products to give the pharmaceutical and health industry assurance to administer the drugs to the public.

President of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners Doctor Karen Price said the indemnity scheme means GPs can confidently start having conversations with younger people who want the AZ vaccine.

I think the most important group would be those who have been hesitating about getting their second dose of AstraZeneca, Price told 3AW radio.

Many Australians have been cancelling their second AstraZeneca shot after the government changed the health advice of the vaccine for use to people over 60 two weeks ago.
At Least 30 Killed in Al-Shabaab Attack in Somalia: Security Official

MOGADISHUAn estimated 30 people died on Sunday when al Shabaab terrorist group launched an attack in a town in Somalias semi-autonomous state of Galmudug, a security official said.

The insurgents used car bombs in the assault on a military base in Galmudugs Wisil town, located in central Somalia, triggering a fight with government troops and armed locals, Major Mohamed Awale, a military officer in Galmudug told Reuters.

They attacked the base with two car bombs and fierce fighting that lasted over an hour followed, he said.

The car bombs damaged the military vehiclesresidents were well-armed and reinforced the base and chased the al-Shabaab.

Thirty people, including 17 soldiers and 13 civilians, died in the fighting, Awale said.

The al-Qaeda-allied al-Shabaab has been fighting in Somalia for more than a decade to try to topple the countrys central government and establish its own rule based on its strict interpretation of Islamic sharia law.

Terrorists from the group frequently carry out gun and bomb assaults on a range of both civilian and military targets including busy traffic intersections, hotels and military bases.

During the attack that lasted about an hour, Abdullahi Mohamed, a resident in Wisil said he and others had crept and slept on the ground, and added he had personally seen about 30 people injured in the assault.

The Somalia government condemned the attack and said 41 al-Shabaab terrorists had been killed in the fighting as both the military and armed residents pursued the assailants, according to a statement posted on the website of the Somalia state news agency, SONNA.

Those injured in the attack, the statement said, had been airlifted to the capital Mogadishu for treatment.

Al-Shabaab claimed responsibility for the attack via a statement on its Radio Al Andalus and said its terrorists had killed over 30 soldiers and injured over 40 others.
Richard Barnett sits inside the office of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi as he protests inside the Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)

Attorney for Man Made Infamous by Jan. 6 Photo Accuses Feds of Multiple Constitutional Violations

Richard Barnett, the retired Arkansas firefighter seen round the world in a Jan. 6 news photo with his foot on Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosis desk, could not have known a few days later when he surrendered to federal authorities that it would be nearly four long months before he would again see the outside world.

Given federal pre-trial detention law and precedent, as well as his explanation of his involvement in that day when hundreds of demonstrators angry about the outcome of the November 2020 presidential election entered the U.S. Capitol, Barnett could reasonably have expected, at worst, to be restricted to his home while awaiting trial.

And that was initially what Barnett received from federal Magistrate Judge Erin Weidemann of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Arkansas following his voluntary surrender on Jan. 8 to FBI agents.

But in an unusual move, U.S. attorneys successfully petitioned Chief U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell to reverse Weidemann and jail Barnett in the District of Columbia, pending trial on seven charges that if convicted could result in fines against him of nearly $400,000 and put him in prison for more than a decade.

As a result, Barnett was kept locked up in a District of Columbia jail until late April. He is one of the more than 500 individuals arrested by federal authorities in connection with Jan. 6, many of whom remain in detention.

Barnetts attorney, Joseph McBride, a former public defender from New York, finally succeeded in gaining his clients release back to his Arkansas home in April. Barnetts trial has not yet been scheduled to begin.

Detention Unwarranted

Among McBrides multiple arguments in a 46-page April 5 motion for releasing Barnett back to his home, three stand out. First, even given the governments charges, characterized by McBride as fallacious, Barnetts case failed to satisfy the 1984 Bail Reform Acts rigorous conditions under which a federal defendant could be kept in jail pending trial.

The law is clear: Only in a very limited set of circumstances is pretrial detention acceptable. The courts, therefore, must act swiftly and decisively to overturn pretrial detention orders granted in circumstances, such as here, where the government has objectively failed to overcome the Bail Reform Acts presumption against pretrial detention as a matter of law, McBride told the court.

At first glance, Barnett is charged with what sound like serious felonies. The government describes him as a Tier One domestic terrorist and a ticking time bomb.

But on closer examination, McBride points out that the charges dont match what Barnett actually did. The dangerous weapon he is accused of bringing into the U.S. Capitol, for example, was an inoperative stun gun/walking stick.

The federal property he is accused of stealing was a single, unopened envelope he took from Pelosis desk. Its not clear if it was his blood or that of somebody else on the envelope, but he left a quarter on Pelosi desk for reimbursement and turned the unopened envelope over to the FBI.

He is charged with illegally entering the Capitol and Pelosis office, but Barnett claims he was swept into the building by the crowd and only entered the Speakers quarters in search of a bathroom. He says he was enticed into posing for the desk photo by a news photographer.

Other Cases

McBrides second argument is that the governments severe treatment of Barnett makes no sense when compared with other individuals charged with far more serious crimes such as Elizabeth Duke, one of the participants in the 1983 bombing of a reception room adjoining the U.S. Senate by a radical communist terrorist outfit linked to at least 20 violent actions in the decade prior.

Fortunately, owing to the late hour, the 1983 explosion killed no one, but damage was extensive. Had the bomb been detonated just two hours earlier, dozens attending a reception would have been injured or killed.

Despite being charged with multiple crimes related to domestic terrorism, including the possession of stolen explosives, possession of instruments of forgery, and falsified identification documents  Elizabeth Duke was released on bail, McBride pointed out in the April motion.

The lenient terms of her bail, however, did not stop Duke from disappearing and she remains a fugitive from the law to this day. Curiously, then-Attorney General Eric Holder asked a federal magistrate in 2009 to quash Dukes outstanding arrest warrant.

Rights Violated

McBrides third argument focuses on what he claims were numerous violations of his clients constitutional rights.

By maintaining that Barnetts turning off his cell phones location service while returning to Arkansas from Washington, D.C. indicated his intent to evade detection, for example, McBride argues that the government violated the Fourth Amendments bar against warrantless searches and thereby set a dangerous precedent.

The Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution, amongst other things, secures the peoples right to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against warrantless searches and seizures, McBride tells the court.

In the context of the Internet Age, the Fourth Amendments ambit, without question, encompasses a reasonable expectation of privacy against warrantless tracking by the government or its agents. A persons reasonable expectation of privacy is normally at its highest point when they are inside their home with the doors locked 

A private cellular phone is analogous to the threshold of a home with a locked front door and the locked trunk of a car, in that the Fourth Amendment provides a reasonable expectation against warrantless searches of the phone itself and the movement of the person carrying it.

With its damaging interpretation of Barnetts action, McBride argues, in essence, the government has created a rule where a negative inference can be inferred from a private citizens refusal to be tracked by the government or its agents.

This rule is unconstitutional as it shifts the governments burden of needing to obtain a search warrant supported by probable cause, on to the citizen who must successfully rebut a negative inference or face pretrial detention.

This is a dangerous leap on to a slope so slippery that if action is not taken, here now, our Fourth Amendment will be irreparably damaged to the extent where it is no longer recognizable.

Governments Response

The Department of Justice did not respond to The Epoch Times request for comment on these issues. In its response to McBrides April motion for Barnetts release back to his home, the government insists a motion filed with the court that he remains a dangerous threat to the community who should be kept locked up.

The overwhelming weight of the evidence against the defendant likewise favors detention. The defendant is featured in high-quality photographs, surveillance footage, and body-worn camera footage in and around the Capitol, expressing his intent to obstruct the constitutional proceedings occurring there and his glee that he took Nancy Pelosis office.

The stun gun device is visible in multiple photos and videos spanning the defendants time in and around the U.S. Capitol, as well as in the surveillance video where he discharged it at his hotel bar the night before.

Indeed, the fact that he purchased the device on December 31, 2020, indicates that he bought it precisely for his criminal activity in the District on January 6, 2021.

Contact Congressional correspondent Mark Tapscott at mark.tapscott@epochtimes.nyc
A general view of the NSW Health Vaccination Centre in Sydney Olympic Park in Sydney, Australia on May 10, 2021. (Mark Kolbe/Getty Images)

Australia to Make Vaccinations Mandatory for Aged Care Workers

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has announced that the vaccination of all aged care workers will be made mandatory by September.

The decision was made at a special national cabinet meeting of all Australian state and territory leaders in response to the emergence of the more transmissible Delta variant of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus.

The leaders endorsed mandatory vaccination for aged care workers in a bid to complete what was supposed to be the first phase of the rollout.

This is not something any government should do lightly  we have been considering this matter for some time now based on the best possible medical advice, Morrison said.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison following the G-7 summit at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, on June 15, 2021. (Thomas Samson/AFP via Getty Images)

Morrison told reporters at a virtual press conference on Monday night the rollout will be a partnership between the federal government and the state and territory jurisdictions and will use the same system used for mandatory flu vaccinations.

Staff who experience side effects from the vaccines will be supported to take leave under a new $11 million federal government grant program. This is also in a bid to ensure no other unintended consequences, such as aged care workers leaving the sector.

Now that can also involve situations where a person may be experience some discomfort following a vaccination, and this would cover those circumstances, Morrison said.

So the Commonwealth will be backing up that decision for mandatory vaccination, not just by supporting the states and territories with compliance as a joint effort, but ensuring were also supporting residential aged care facility providers with that additional financial support to get that job done.

The decision comes as Australias CCP virus outbreaks have reignited calls for vaccinations to be increased amid concern about the highly contagious Delta strain sweeping the country.

Of the 910 deaths in Australia linked to the CCP virus, 685 have been aged care residents, and the vast majority have occurred in Victoria.

Almost 7.4 million Australians have been vaccinated.
Farmers picking cotton in the fields during the harvest season in Hami, in northwest China's Xinjiang region, on Sept. 20, 2015. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

Ban on Goods Made With Forced Labor Slows Clothing Imports

Increased enforcement of a ban on imported products made with forced labor has led to cargo stoppages and complaints from importers, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers are charged with enforcing the ban on goods, such cotton and tomato products from the Xinjiang region of China, where Uyghurs are detained in forced labor camps. The bans were first put in place during the Trump administration in an effort to remove forced labor from import supply chains, the WSJ reported.

The ban on cotton from the region has had an impact on retailers who rely heavily on the commodity and must prove their supply chains dont rely on slave labor, the WSJ reported. Importers have three months from the time of detainment to prove products pass CBP standards, if not, cargoes will be exported or abandoned.

Retailer Uniqlo Co, had a shipment of mens shirts detained in January at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach because customs officers suspected it violated the December ban on Xinjiang cotton, according to internal CBP documents, the WSJ reported.

Uniqlo objected, providing documents that showed the cotton came from Australia, Brazil and the U.S., the WSJ reported. But CBP still did not release the cargo, citing that the company was unable to prove the shirts werent made using forced labor.

A view of cotton fields is seen during harvest season in Hami, Xinjiang, China, on Oct. 14, 2018. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

Representatives for the retail industry say the burden of proof is too high and that expectations are unclear, the WSJ reported.

It turns U.S. jurisprudence on its head. As opposed to innocent until proven guilty, it is now guilty until proven innocent, said Nate Herman, senior vice president of policy at American Apparel & Footwear Association, the WSJ reported. Companies dont know what they are trying to prove because they dont know what part of the shipment triggered the detention or why it was in violation.

One possible factor for the lack of transparency and stalled imports could be a shortage of CBP staff, which limits its ability to pursue forced labor investigations, a Government Accountability Office report said in October.

Trade lawyers and business groups said they expect more import bans and disputed shipments, due to an increasing focus on human rights, the WSJ reported.

As President Biden made clear at the recent G7 summit, the United States will not tolerate modern-day slavery in our supply chains, said Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro N. Mayorkas in a press release Thursday. This Withhold Release Order demonstrates we continue to protect human rights and international labor standards and promote a more fair and competitive global marketplace by fulfilling the Biden-Harris Administrations commitment to ending forced labor.

By Kendall Tietz

From The Daily Caller News Foundation

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
Security personnel seen at a deserted railway station in Dhaka on April 19, 2021. (Munir Uz Zaman/AFP via Getty Images)

Bangladesh Cuts Cost of China-Funded BRI Railway Projects; Beijing Withdraws Funding

China has withdrawn its BRI (Belt and Road Initiative) funding for railway projects in Bangladesh, after the recipient country proposed significant cuts in costs. This happened amidst increasing tension between the two countries.

According to media reports, the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina found that Chinese companies were charging three times the normal price for construction, and slashed $5.72 billion from the China-funded Akhaura-Sylhet and Joydebpur-Ishwardi railway projects that are part of the BRI agreement signed between the two countries.

The main conditions of the contract with China required that the contractors of the railway construction be selected by the Chinese government, and the government of Bangladesh pay for land acquisition, resettlement of locals, and worker wages. The Chinese government pays construction costs, which account for about 80 percent to 85 percent of the total cost of the projects.

Chinese companies were selected for the projects, but after the Bangladesh government cut the project contract price, China decided to withdraw funding from both railway projects.

In response to Beijings decision, Bangladesh said it would seek loans from other channels to complete the projects, according to Nikkei Asia.

Chinas BRI (also known as One Belt, One Road) is Chinese leader Xi Jinpings foreign policy project launched in 2013. It aims to extend the regimes economic and political influence to countries in Asia, Europe, and Africa by recreating ancient Chinas silk road and maritime silk road for trading in the 21st century.

The BRI invests Chinese capital in the construction of various high-cost infrastructure projects in more than 60 participating countries. It has been widely criticized as setting up debt traps and causing debt crisis for those countries. For example, Sri Lanka could not pay off the loan and lost its Hambantota port to China.

Bangladesh signed the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) with China in 2016 at the risk of falling victim to the debt-trap diplomacy and losing strategically important ports on the Bay of Bengal to China, and giving the Beijing regime access points to the Indian Ocean.

The unprecedented funding cut to BRI projects by Bangladesh comes at a time when tensions between the two countries have been rising.

In May, Bangladeshs foreign minister rebuffed Chinas threat toward the South Asian nation joining the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue.

The Quad is a four-nation Indo-Pacific alliance led by the United States, along with India, Japan, and Australia. Beijing considers the Quad a small anti-Beijing club.

The Chinese ambassador to Bangladesh and the Chinese Defense Minister threatened that if Bangladesh were to join the group, ChinaBangladesh relations would suffer substantial damage.

Bangladeshi Foreign Minister A. K. Abdul Momen responded at a press conference on May 11, We are an independent and sovereign state, and We decide our foreign policy. Any country can uphold its position. But we will take decisions considering the interest of people and the country.

Momen expressed his surprise regarding the long reach of the Chinese communist regimes wolf warrior diplomacy in interfering with Bangladeshs affairs. He described it as unusual and aggressive, adding, We did not expect such behavior from China.
California Bans State-Funded Travel to 5 More States Over LGBT Laws

California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced on Monday that California would restrict state-funded travel to Arkansas, Florida, Montana, North Dakota, and West Virginia because of the anti-LGBTQ+ legislation recently enacted in these states, increasing the number of the targeted states to a total of 17.

Assembly Bill 1887 is about aligning our dollars with our values, Bonta said at a news conference. When states discriminate against LGBTQ+ Americans, California law requires our office to take action.

Assembly Bill 1887 became part of California law in 2016 in response to a North Carolina law that requires people to use public bathrooms according to the sex shown on their birth certificate.

The law (pdf) prohibits government agencies from approving state-funded travels to a state which enacted a law with discrimination against same-sex couples or their families or on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression, with some exceptions.

Some exceptions are travels for law enforcement, litigation, or to comply with requests by the federal government to appear before committees, among others.

Make no mistake: Were in the midst of an unprecedented wave of bigotry and discrimination in this countryand the State of California is not going to support it, Bonta added.

Bonta pointed out on Twitter that in recent months, over 250 anti-LGBTQ+ bills were introduced in state legislatures, and 95 of them are directly targeting transgender people.

The other 12 states that California banned state-funded travel to are Alabama, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Texas.

In February 2020, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton asked the Supreme Court to strike down Californias ban on Texas over its law that lets agencies place children only in houses with a married mother and father, among other provisions.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton speaks during the launch of an antitrust investigation into large tech companies outside of the Supreme Court in Washington on Sept. 9, 2019.(Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

California asserted the law does protect agencies that discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

In its unsigned order, the Supreme Court said on April 26 it wont hear the dispute but didnt explain why justices rejected Paxtons challenge.

In a dissent (pdf), Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, wondered why the court wouldnt allow the filing.

Can we justify our refusal to entertain Texass suit on essentially the same ground that we would reject out of hand in the hypothetical diversity case just described, that is, on the ground that our original jurisdiction no longer seems as important as it was when the Constitution was adopted, and that a proliferation of original cases would crowd out more important matters on our appellate docket? Alito wrote at the time.

Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.
An apartment complex in downtown Los Angeles at Eighth Street and Grand Avenue on Aug. 6, 2020. (Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times/TNS)

California Eviction Moratorium Extended

Commentary

Californias moratorium against evicting renters claiming a hardship caused by COVID-19 was extended to Sept. 30, despite the state covering the rent tab for those behind on payments.

The moratorium was previously set to expire June 30.

State legislative leaders and Gov. Gavin Newsom, all members of the Democratic Party, on June 25 announced they had reached an agreement in their three-way negotiations (among the governor, state senate, and state assembly) regarding the moratorium.

Legislators on June 28 published the revisions, which presumably incorporate the changes agreed to with the governor.

If passed by both chambers of the California legislature and signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom, Assembly Bill 832 would enact the COVID-19 Rental Housing Recovery Act.

The legislation protects tenants claiming to be under pandemic-related financial distress from eviction until Sept. 30. Landlords are prohibited from seeking evictions for any reason, and cannot turn off utilities or report tenants to immigration authorities in retaliation for tenants claiming to suffer COVID-19 related hardship.

Under the bill, the state would reimburse landlords up to 100 percent of overdue rent payments, as well as cover up to 100 percent of future rent payments. It would also help fund renters utility bills.

When announcing the results of the negotiations, Newsoms office said, The three-party agreement on AB 832which extends the current eviction moratorium through September 30, 2021will ensure that California quickly uses the more than $5 billion in federal rental assistance.

Senate President pro Tempore Toni Atkins (D-San Diego) said, Our housing situation in California was a crisis before COVID, and the pandemic has only made it worse.

Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon (D-Lakewood) added, This moratorium will keep families in homes, provide critical financial support to landlords, and help protect our supply of rental housing.

Women Faring Worse

According to current U.S. Census data, a higher percentage of women renters or homeowners are faring worse than they were a year ago. The most recent U.S. Census data shows that women who are behind on housing payments make up 6.3 percent of renters in Californiaup from six percent a year ago.

The experience of women renters is dramatically different from their male counterparts; a year ago, men who were behind on their rent payments made up 8.8 percent of all California renters. Today, men who are late on rent make up just 4.4 percent of renters.

Relief for Mortgage Borrowers

The legislation proposed by Assembly Bill 832 does have a provision that might be helpful for mortgage borrowers: if a mortgage lender doesnt grant a forbearance to a California borrower, it must declare in writing why the request was denied.

The most recent U.S, Census data shows that women behind on mortgage payments make up 4.8 percent of California mortgage borrowersup from 3.8 percent a year ago.

Again, this contrasts with the experience men are having. A year ago, about the same percentage of male mortgage borrowers, 4.1 percent, were behind on mortgage payments. However, in the most recent survey, the U.S. Census found that men behind on their mortgage payments made up only 3.3 percent of California mortgage borrowers.

Tying together many of the disparate issues at hand, Assemblyman David Chiu (D-San Francisco), chair of the Assembly Housing and Community Development Committee, said: Even though our state has reopened, hundreds of thousands of Californians are grappling with rental debt and the threat of eviction.

Removing eviction protections now, while billions of rent relief dollars are still available, would be a disaster and exacerbate our homelessness crisis. This proposal avoids a massive eviction cliff, allowing us to keep tenants in their homes, and get landlords the financial support they need.

Tim Shaler is a professional investor and economist based in Southern California. He is a regular columnist for The Epoch Times, where he exclusively provides some of his original economic analysis.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
18 Children Killed in School Fire in China

Eighteen kids have been killed in a school fire. Locked dorm room doors blocked their chance to escape. Now, their families are being silencedand made to sign compensation agreements.

Armed police, caged pigeons, K-9 dogsthats the scene ahead of the Chinese Communist Partys anniversary party. The regime is turning 100 in just a few days, and its kicking off the milestone with extravagant ceremonies, funded by taxpayers.

Hong Kong authorities arrest a senior journalist at the airport. He was trying to leave the city for the UK. The man had worked for now-closed pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily.

Foreign correspondents working for Chinas state-run media may actually double as spies, according to a former editor-in-chief for a Chinese media outlet. He says hes issued media IDs to Chinese intelligence personnel.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more first-hand news from China.

For more news and videos, please visit our website and Twitter.
China Versus America

Commentary

The longer the West placates China and pretends that it is not being aggressively challenged by China and is currently losing that challenge, the more the future of the West will be in doubt.

There can be little doubt the United States is now in a contest with China over which will be the most important country in the world. In important respects, we are replicating the German challenge to the United Kingdom prior to World War I and the renewed German challenge of the 1930s, or the Soviet challenge for 45 years after World War II. As China grows stronger and bolder, and especially as the United States fumbles its way through periods of great distraction and internal political strife, the Chineselike Hitlerbecome more brazen and provoking.

Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland in 1936 when the French easily could have forced him back, but did not. He swallowed Austria whole in early 1938 and the French and British regarded it as nothing more than the expression of Austrias national wishes. They recognized that they could not go to war to prevent German Czechs (Sudetenlanders) from becoming Germans, but their action at the Munich Conference destroyed the state of Czechoslovakia that their leaders, along with President Woodrow Wilson, had created not 20 years before. Only when Hitler seized what is now the Czech Republic as well, did the British begin to respond seriously. Even then, their prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, entered World War II only reluctantly after the invasion of Poland.

Of course, Chinese leader Xi Jinping is not remotely as psychotically belligerent as Hitler, who was a deranged genocidal romantic who actively sought war as long as it was in advantageous circumstances. Hitler had professed to have enjoyed his four years of trench warfare in World War I, in the course of which he was wounded, gassed, and twice decorated for bravery. He felt that he must unleash aggressive war on Europe according to a strict timetable because his obsessive hypochondria led him to believe that he would die prematurely. (He did, but only because he had provoked irresistible forces to destroy him.)

Nor could Xi be even slightly compared to Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had a childish ego and impetuosity and gave the decrepit Habsburg empire in Vienna the infamous blank check to plunge all of Europe into war. The comparison with Stalin must also be used with great caution; barbarous though he was, and intent though he and his successors were in stirring up Communist revolutions in different countries from Greece to the Congo to Cuba to Indonesia, neither Stalin nor any of his successors ever dared a military confrontation with United States.

There is no reason to believe Xi would either, but the whole world has seen China steadily raising the ante and becoming more brazen and provoking in its behavior. For decades it has exploited the belief of the well-meaning leaders of the West that good treatment would be reciprocated. But China has ignored its trade and monetary commitments and made a mockery of Western concepts of human rights by its oppression of the Uyghurs and of all forms of religious practice. And it has torn up the Hong Kong treaty with the United Kingdom, which remains one of the worlds most important and respected countries. To judge from the Chinese regimes public announcements, it only wishes to cuff its would-be rivals around a little and make the point that it is actually the worlds leading power to whom all other nations owe great deference.

While this is undoubtedly less onerous than what Hitler or Stalin or possibly even the Kaiser had in mind for us, no one should imagine that the overlordship and general suzerainty of Communist China is anything the West would wear lightly.

The West has been guided by Greco-Roman and then Judeo-Christian values since about 600 B.C.. No one should underestimate how demeaning and demoralizing it would be if those values were effectively subordinated to an ethos dictated by the Chinese Communist Party. The humiliation implicit in such an epochal upheaval of the world would shatter the morale of our society and we might enter a period of eclipse as lengthy and profound and miserable as that from which China has just emerged.

The Kaiser and Hitler managed to convince themselves that the leaders of the rival powers were weaklings, and Xi seems to have comeat least in the last few monthsto a similar conclusion. On the facts it is hard to fault them for that conclusion, but what the German emperor and Fuhrer did not take into account was that H.H. Asquith and Paul Painleve and Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier would shortly be replaced by Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau, Winston Churchill, and Charles de Gaulle, and life would become much more complicated. Communications and diplomacy are now much more informative than they were then and the ubiquity of nuclear weapons imposes a sobriety upon all world leaders unlike anything that obtained in the pre-nuclear era.

All three regimes, Wilhelmine Germany, the Third Reich, and Stalins Soviet Union, foundered on the identical and immense strategic error of underestimating the United States. With World War I in stalemate on the western front between Germany and the French and British Empire armies, the Kaiser made the catastrophic mistake of agreeing to attack American merchant shipping on the high seas to try to strangle Britain and France. The United States had no choice but to go to war against Germany, which President Wilson portrayed as a war to end all wars and a way to make the world safe for democracy. Though he was the principal founder of the League of Nations, he failed to gain United States adherence to it, and though he was the first person to inspire the masses of the world with a vision of enduring peace, he produced the Treaty of Versailles, which was admirably described by the supreme commander of the Allied armies, Frances Marshal Foch, as not a peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.

Hitler had learned the lesson of not attacking American shipping, even after President Franklin D. Roosevelt extended American territorial waters from three to 1,800 miles and ordered the U.S. Navy to attack, on detection, any German ship (as, under Lend-Lease, he sold the British and Canadians anything they wanted on generous terms). Hitler did not take the bait, but he didnt coordinate with the Japanese either. And when Roosevelt shut off oil supplies to Japanwhich imported 85 percent of its oil, mainly from the United StatesHitler did not devise any plan for supplying them from the Middle East and coordinating his planned attack on Russia with the Japanese attack from the Far East. And when Japan, rather than accept the humiliation of suspending its barbarous invasion of China and Indochina, attacked Pearl Harbor, Hitler declared war on the United States. In doing this on the heels of his invasion of the Soviet Union he found himself at war with the United States, the USSR, and the British Commonwealth and Empire, which between them possessed, as Churchill said at the time, twice, or thrice the power of Germany. And when Stalin declined Roosevelts offer of an immense economic recovery program and recognition as a coequal superpower in the world, and ignored his Tehran and Yalta commitments to free elections and evacuation of Eastern Europe, he entered into a Cold War that the USSR ultimately could not win.

Xi Jinping does not seem to possess any of the childishly intemperate and reckless tendencies of Kaiser Wilhelm, nor any of the madness of Hitler, and possesses a much subtler and more patient concept of advancing the Chinese interests than Stalin and his successors had about Soviet interests. He must have some recognition of the American reserves of national purpose and manifest destiny to maintain its unique standing in the world.

But people generallyespecially very powerful people unaccustomed to being contradictedtend to believe what they want to believe. The longer the West placates China and pretends that it is not being aggressively challenged by China and is currently losing that challenge, the more the future of the West will be in doubt. The next president of the United States will have both a mandate and a duty to restart this contest and to contain China within tolerable parameters. The longer we wait the more difficult it will be.

From American Greatness.

Conrad Black has been one of Canadas most prominent financiers for 40 years, and was one of the leading newspaper publishers in the world. Hes the author of authoritative biographies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, and, most recently, Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other, which has been republished in updated form. You can hear more of Conrads thoughts on his podcast Scholars & Sense alongside his co-hosts Bill Bennett and Victor Davis Hanson at ScholarsAndSense.buzzsprout.com

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Chinese Use Social Media Apps in Marijuana Money Laundering Scheme

A loophole in Colorados marijuana laws has prompted a group of people to engage in a dark occupation involving money laundering. This June, 21 people were accused of illegally growing and distributing marijuana in Colorado. The investigation found that Chinese social media apps played an active role in the drug proceeds being laundered back to the United States.

Drug Trafficking Colludes With Chinese Money Laundering

It is a money-laundering case with a side of marijuana, the District Attorney of the 18th Judicial District John Kellner said on June 10 at a news conference in Centennial.

The District Attorneys office provided The Epoch Times with a 24-page grand Jury indictment in Arapahoe County showing that the DEAs (Drug Enforcement Administration) five-year investigation revealed that Chinese Money Laundering Organizations [CMLOs] had become the dominate money laundering mechanism utilized by drug trafficking organizations [DTOs] to launder their drug money through the U.S.

In October 2020, a post on a Chinese social networking site caught the attention of a DEA agent. The netizen named Peter claimed an urgent need to exchange Chinese currency. A Mandarin-speaking DEA agent chatted with him privately, finding that Peter could offer an exchange rate more attractive than banks, as well as other advantages like trading in person and the capability to exchange $60,000 within one or two weeks.

Both sides agreed that the agent would first transfer the Chinese currency to Peters sister-in-laws Chinese account, and then collect the equivalent in U.S. dollars from the connector.

This type of underground money operation does not need to go through the U.S. financial systemno physical movement occurs, but it can reach a balance between the two places.

Especially here in Colorado, DEA and the Department of Revenue realized that CMLOs were illegally growing marijuana and using the  scheme to launder their illegal black market marijuana proceeds, states the indictment.

The funds were actually exchanged through Chinese social media apps, and can be easily shared by swiping the QR code with an e-wallet, and then properly cycled back to the United States by means of gifts from relatives and friends.

The Sting Operation

On Nov. 5, 2020, suspected money launderers Lin Zhang and Yan Chen appeared as scheduled to meet with the agent. The agent opened Zhangs cell phone and saw photos of marijuana plants and a handwritten schedule of marijuana cultivation, and eventually confiscated the $46,000 in cash brought by the two launderers, believing the cash came from the illegal manufacture and distribution of marijuana.

Subsequently, law enforcement agents conducted an in-depth investigation. On March 2 this year, agents raided two residences in Colorado with a search warrant and found tens of thousands of dollars in cash, several pounds of packaged marijuana, and a plant room used to grow marijuana. Although the homeowner demolished the plant room, the scene was still full of the strong smell of fresh cannabis plants.

According to an electricity bill of one of the residences, the monthly consumption was 1,230 kWh in November 2019, and increased by 710 times in January 2021 with a consumption of 11,737 kWh.

Indoor cannabis houses typically feature the following characteristics: multiple light bulbs to simulate long-term exposure, exhaust fans, dehumidifiers, and other equipment used to simulate outdoor growing conditions, which consumes huge amounts of electricity.

The investigation resulted in 21 Chinese people indicted in Colorado, 16 of whom have been arrested. The prosecutor issued several charges ranging from racketeering and conspiracy under the Colorado Organized Crime Control Act to drug cultivation and distribution to money laundering.

The indictment alleges that a portion of the investments to purchase illegal marijuana houses in Colorado came from mainland China, and the money laundering organization helped circumvent Chinas foreign exchange controls (remittances limited to less than $50,000 per person per year). In other words, marijuana was used to raise money by luring mainland Chinese investors to put their money into the U.S. illegal marijuana market and act as an underground money maker.

Cannabis cultivation needs three parties, the core party is the owner, financially responsible for getting the house (buy or rent) prepared for growing marijuana; as well as expansion, maintenance, and operating costs; including rent, electrical facilities, and other expenses. The second party is the expert who directly manages the cannabis cultivation, managing the stages of growth (cannabis is harvested about four times a year), environmental factors, nutrients, and pest control. The third party is the workers.

New York Chinese Flock to Other States to Grow Marijuana

During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, New York became the hardest epidemic area, and a lot of businesses were shut down, but the marijuana business was booming. Many unemployed Chinese people flocked to marijuana farms in other states to pursue the dream of growing marijuana to get rich.

After the lockdown when New Yorks economy restarted, many employers in the Chinese community found it difficult to recruit, because many of their former employees went to other states to grow cannabis.

One of my veteran staff who has been working with me for a long time told me that he wont come next Monday and was going to Oklahoma to grow marijuana, said Ling Fei, a computer store owner in Brooklyn.

Another anonymous interviewee called Lu, in charge of a Chinese mutual aid organization, explained that many Chinese restaurants cant recruit people because growing marijuana can earn from $4,000 to $5,000 or more per month, while restaurant workers earn only as much as $3,000 a month, so who doesnt want to make more money?

Legal Loopholes in Marijuana Laws Are Causing Trouble

All of this began when California became the first state to legalize medical marijuana in 1996 during the presidency of Bill Clinton. From then on, many Chinese began to grow marijuana and found it profitable.

Colorados recreational marijuana laws have made it easier for groups like this to flourish, admitted John Kellner. I want to emphasize that while this is a micro-cell in our state of Colorado  we believe that this is going on a macro-level across the entire United States.

Even if recreational marijuana is legal in Colorado, companies must apply for marijuana business licenses to become a verified seller in the state. However, some Chinese mistakenly think that legalizing marijuana in various states means that growing it on a large scale is also legal. Others know its illegal, but are driven by the huge profits and still take the risk of going in.

Lu said that most people join through business invitations from farmers with land and factories ready. You can rent a room, buy a seedling, or you can invest money in shares. A marijuana planting project is often funded by many fellow provincials or townsmen in China.

Some Chinese swarm to northwest Oklahoma to grow marijuana, where Chinese marijuana investors bid up to four times the original market price on homes. Local media Woodward News reported at the end of March that the Oklahoma State Business Federation met with senators and congressmen to discuss how to amend the legislation in order to regulate the behavior of Chinese investors.

The lax medical marijuana laws in Oklahoma have made the state a Wild West for marijuana cultivation. Its obvious that the black market is quickly overtaking our medical marijuana presence in the State of Oklahoma, a member of the Oklahoma House of Representatives Mike Dobrinski said. Actions are being taken. Everyone is concerned. I assure you its not falling on deaf ears.
Public Health Agency of Canada President Iain Stewart (R) approaches the bar in the House of Commons to be admonished by House Speaker Anthony Rota on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on June 21, 2021. (The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick)

Collaborating With China: Winnipeg Lab Debacle Could Be Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Commentary

In the summer of 2010, then-Canadian Security Intelligence Service director Richard Fadden warned in a CBC interview of elaborate espionage campaigns being conducted in Canada by foreign governments. Though he didnt identify a specific country, it was obvious he was referring to China.

Fadden also talked about what has more recently been termed elite capture, the Chinese Communist Partys efforts to curry favour with those in positions of power and influence to advance its interests.

As China has become more powerful and brazen, transparency around Canadas dealings with the CCP is even more important.

The controversy around the firing of two Chinese scientists from the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg and the transfer of deadly viruses from the facility to Wuhan, China, is a case in point.

The Liberal government has been trying to avoid releasing to Parliament the unredacted documents related to the firing of the two scientists. Last week, the government decided to take House Speaker Anthony Rota to court after he upheld the Houses order for the government to release the documents. This came about because Iain Stewart, the president of the Public Health Agency of Canada, refused to release the documents to the Special Committee on Canada-China relations for several weeks.

The governments move against Rota is seen as unprecedented, and much commentary has been rightly preoccupied with how this action reflects the diminished role of Parliament in our democracy and how the courts are becoming the prominent arena for political disputes. However, commentary should also focus on how our relations with communist China and the footprint weve allowed the regime to develop in our society has had a corrupting influence.

The governments argument is that the release of the documents could reveal information that could damage Canadas national security. Indeed, the nature of national security does require that some things remain under wraps. But in this instance, per the Constitution, Parliament should get what it has requested. This is, after all, a consequence of the Liberals continually stifling any serious discussion on China.

Looking deeper, aside from those in government typically going to great lengths to avoid offending Beijing, one senses a latent fear of what might be revealed about the connections many have with China and the continual ill-advised actions that are informed by a commitment to these connections, as Fadden and other security experts have consistently warned for years.

As the National Post recently reported, those in leadership positions at the Winnipeg lab have long been involved in collaborations with China, continuing to work with Beijing even after it was proven that the CCP was behind several incidents of economic espionage, cyberattacks, and intellectual property theft. Academics, particularly those at universities who maintain close partnerships with Chinese institutions, have rushed to defend such partnerships with arguments to the effect that scientific collaboration with foreign powers has nothing to do with national security concerns.

I think it would be short-sighted to heavily restrict research partnerships, one academic said in the National Post article. After all, science is a global enterprise and one never knows where and when a breakthrough or major discovery can emerge.

The question of what a ruthless, untrustworthy regime like the CCP would use such major discoveries for is apparently irrelevant.

As more information around the lab in Winnipeg has come to light, its no surprise that the voices wisely calling for a halt to collaborations with Beijing have been amplified. Its also not surprising that, in response, there have been many articles published by major publications condemning such calls as xenophobia, reckless nationalism, or the product of a Cold War mentality.

The hostile sentiment toward China and those who are pro-engagement is comparable to the McCarthy era of the Cold War and a cause of anti-Asian racism, argues a recent op-ed in The Globe and Mail by a prominent senator and academic. Moreover, exaggerations about the reach of Chinese organizations such as the United Front have led to racial profiling and stigmatization of those of Chinese background. Framing China as the enemy and insinuating elite capture will make relations with Beijing more difficult and undermine Canadian values and inclusiveness, they write.

Similarly, in an article in The Conversation in response to the Alberta governments ban on university partnerships with China, three Canadian university professors argue that curbing research ties with China increases anti-China hysteria at a time of heightened tensions between Canada and China. Continuing along these lines, they then denounce the Cold War mentality that informs such a policy, claiming it will have inevitably racist outcomes for Chinese academics and students, speculating that they will have to engage in self-censorship when talking to family members and colleagues back in China.

These arguments have also been voiced by our prime minister and other politicians in response to criticisms of China. And it is rather perturbing because they are basically repeating the talking points of Beijings propaganda. They allege an irrational hysteria among their detractors without providing any solid evidence outside of CCP-esque talking points as to why fear of China is overblown or hysterical. It is as if they are all drawing from the same script.

The reality is that evidence has long demonstrated that ever-deepening institutional co-operation and connection with the Beijing regime is a ticking time bomb. And we should know very well by now where it will lead if it is allowed to continue. The Winnipeg lab debacle and the problems it exposes in our institutions might only be the tip of the iceberg.

Shane Miller is a researcher for Probe International.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Comparing Hillarys Big Lie to Trumps Big Lie | Larry Elder

In this episode, Larry Elder points out how Hillary Clinton is continuously pushing the Big Lie about the 2016 election, claiming Russian President Vladimir Putin helped interfere with the election to help elect Donald Trump. When is the mainstream media going to start calling her out on this lie?

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Vials labelled "Astra Zeneca COVID-19 Coronavirus Vaccine" and a syringe are seen in front of a displayed AstraZeneca logo, in this illustration photo taken March 14, 2021. (Dado Ruvic/Illustration/Reuters)

Delayed Second Shot and Third Booster of AstraZenecas COVID Vaccine Offer Strong Immune Responses: Study

A new study into AstraZenecas COVID-19 vaccine shows that a second dose administered later than within the recommended 412 week period after the first one offered greater protection, while a third dose led to a further increase in immune response and protection against viral variants, offering both greater flexibility in vaccination schedules and showing promise as a booster shot.

The findings of the Oxford University study, which has not yet been peer reviewed, come as COVID-19 vaccine supply shortages in some countries are causing concerns about reduced immunity as the interval between the first dose and second dose extends, while countries with no supply issues are considering administering a third dose as a booster to enhance immunity and provide protection against emerging variants.

For the study, researchers evaluated AstraZenecas Vaxzevria (also known as AZD1222 or ChAdOx1 nCoV-19) vaccine, which uses a chimpanzee viral vector to deliver genetic information from the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes COVID-19, to human cells to produce an immune response.

The researchers found that Vaxzevria induced strong immune response following either a prolonged second dose interval of up to 45 weeks, or following a third booster shot.

A longer delay before the second dose of ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 leads to an increased antibody titer after the second dose. A third dose of ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 induces antibodies to a level that correlate with high efficacy after second dose and boosts T-cell responses, the researchers wrote.

With a 45-week dosing interval between the first and second dose, antibody titers were four times higher than with a 12-week interval, suggesting that a longer dosing interval is not only not problematic, but may provide stronger immunity.

A single dose of ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, with a second dose given after a prolonged period, may therefore be an effective strategy when vaccine supplies are scarce in the short term, the researchers wrote.

The findings are especially important for countries where administration of a second dose is delayed because of supply shortages.

This should come as reassuring news to countries with lower supplies of the vaccine, who may be concerned about delays in providing second doses to their populations, said Professor Sir Andrew J Pollard, chief investigator and director of the Oxford Vaccine Group at the University of Oxford, in a statement. There is an excellent response to a second dose, even after a 10 month delay from the first.

The researchers also found that a third dose is well tolerated and significantly boosts the antibody titers above those measured after the second dose, achieving antibody levels that are higher than the 80 percent efficacy level associated with a two-dose regimen.

Whats more, a third booster shot provided greater protection against Alpha (B.1.1.7), Beta (B.1.351), and the highly contagious Delta (B.1.617.2) variants as compared to after the second dose.

A third dose results in a further increase in immune responses, including greater neutralization of variant SARS-CoV-2 viruses, and could be used to increase vaccine efficacy against variants in vulnerable populations, the researchers wrote.

Another implication of the findings is that they mitigate concerns that antibodies raised against the ChAdOx1 vector would limit repeated use of AstraZenecas vaccine.

The AstraZeneca vaccine has not yet received emergency use authorization approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

The study follows the recent publication of peer-reviewed research showing that the COVID-19 vaccines developed by Moderna and the Pfizer-BioNTech alliance both may provide lasting protection against the CCP virus.
Dan Wells said he captured and relocated 47 rattlesnakes in June, 2021. (Courtesy of Dan Wells)

Drought Lures Rattlesnakes Into Residential Areas

Californias ongoing drought is enticing venomous reptiles out of the wild and toward residential areas, says an Orange County snake remover.

This drought were having this year is definitely causing an increase of snakes in neighborhoods, Dan Wells told The Epoch Times. Its causing snakes to be closer to water, prey, and shelter.

In June, Wells caught and relocated 47 rattlesnakes, compared to the seven snakes he captured 2020.

The dry, hot weather is prompting rattlesnakes to slither down the hills and toward more moisture-rich areas such as creeks and waterways behind homes, he said. As the snakes attempt to relocate, wet areas are also increasingly popular due to their abundance of prey.

Generally speaking, it is not uncommon for canyon-area homes to notice more snakes during the summer as the land becomes drier. Most of the snakes Wells has recently captured were discovered in Trabuco Canyon, Rancho Santa Margarita, and Silverado Canyon.

Residents are most likely to find rattlerswhich are eager for shelter and waterhidden under covered or cluttered areas.

When its too hot, theyll either retreat underground or theyll find some cover to go under, Wells said.

Theyre most likely to emerge in the evening when the weather begins to cool down, he said.

Those who spot a snake on their property should resist the urge to try trapping it, as it might attack, Wells said. Instead, he recommended backing away from the reptile and calling a snake removal service for help.

When help is on the way, residents should keep a watchful eye on the creature from a distance of about 20 feet until it is captured.

After capturing a snake, Wells said he relocates it into a safe environment away from residential neighborhoods.
This illustration photo shows a Facebook app logo displayed on a smartphone in Los Angeles, Calif., on March 1, 2021. (Chris Delmas/AFP via Getty Images)

Facebook Hits $1 Trillion Value After Judge Rejects Antitrust Complaints

WASHINGTONA U.S. judge on Monday dismissed federal and state antitrust complaints against Facebook Inc that sought to force the social media company to sell Instagram and WhatsApp, saying the federal complaint was legally insufficient.

Facebook shares rose more than 4 percent after the ruling. The share price rise put Facebooks market capitalization over $1 trillion for the first time.

The dismissal was the first big blow to state and federal lawsuits against Big Tech firms last year seeking to rein in alleged abuses of their massive market power.

Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said the FTC failed to show that Facebook had monopoly power in the social-networking market but said the FTC could file a new complaint by July 29.

He also dismissed a lawsuit by multiple U.S. states, saying they waited too long to challenge the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp in 2012 and 2014 respectively. The judge did not invite the states to refile their complaint.

A spokesperson for the New York Attorney Generals office said it was considering our legal options.

Facebook had asked for the lawsuits to be dismissed.

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)

Regarding the FTC lawsuit, the judge wrote: Although the court does not agree with all of Facebooks contentions here, it ultimately concurs that the agencys complaint is legally insufficient and must therefore be dismissed.

A Facebook spokesperson said: We are pleased that todays decisions recognize the defects in the government complaints filed against Facebook. An FTC spokesperson said the agency was closely reviewing the opinion and assessing the best option forward.

A bright spot for the FTC in the opinion was the judges saying that the agency was on firmer ground in scrutinizing the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, as the court rejects Facebooks argument that the FTC lacks authority to seek injunctive relief against those purchases.

The FTC and a big group of states filed separate lawsuits last year that accused Facebook of breaking antitrust law to keep smaller competitors at bay by snapping up rivals, such as Instagram for $1 billion and WhatsApp for $19 billion.

Judge Finds Flaws in Market Share Claim

The federal government and states filed a total of five lawsuits against Facebook and Alphabet Incs Google last year following bipartisan outrage over their social media clout in the economy and the political sphere.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) speaks to reporters in Washington, on Oct. 22, 2020. (Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

The judge said that the FTC did not adequately support its assertion that Facebook has more than 60 percent of the market. But Boasberg said the agency could potentially fix the issue in a refiling.

The judge also criticized portions of the FTCs case regarding its refusal to allow interoperability permissions with competing apps.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) criticized the courts decision on the FTC lawsuit as deeply disappointing.

By Diane Bartz and Elizabeth Culliford
Defendants in a Los Angeles criminal case used fraudulently obtained funds as down-payments on luxury homes and to buy gold coins, diamonds, jewelry, luxury watches, imported furnishings, designer handbags, clothing and a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Fraudsters Use COVID-19 Relief Funds to Buy Luxury Homes, Jewelry

LOS ANGELES, Calif.Sentencing is scheduled Sept. 13 for four Los Angeles residents found guilty of scheming to submit fraudulent loan applications under which they and their co-defendants obtained more than $18 million in COVID-19 relief funds used to put down-payments on luxury homes in Tarzana, Glendale and Palm Desert and purchase jewelry and other high-end items.

Richard Ayvazyan, 42, his wife Marietta Terabelian, 37, and his brother Artur Ayvazyan, 41, all of Encino, were each found guilty June 25 of one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud and wire fraud, 11 counts of wire fraud, eight counts of bank fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Richard Ayvazyan was also found guilty of two counts of aggravated identity theft, while his brother was found guilty of one count of aggravated identity theft.

Vahe Dadyan, 41, of Glendale, was found guilty of six counts of wire fraud, three counts of bank fraud, and one count each of conspiracy to commit bank fraud and wire fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and money laundering.

The Los Angeles federal court jury that convicted the four defendants found on June 28 that they must forfeit bank accounts, jewelry, watches, gold coins, three residential properties and about $450,000 in cash, according to the U.S. Attorneys Office.

Seeking quick riches, the defendants stole federal funds intended to help Americans harmed by the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic carnage left in its wake, said Acting U.S. Attorney Tracy L. Wilkison. The verdicts in this case are the first in this district resulting from a pandemic-related fraud scheme, and we are prepared to bring additional defendants to justice as we continue our efforts to safeguard our nations disaster-relief programs.

Evidence presented at trial showed the defendants used fake, stolen or fabricated identities to submit fraudulent applications for the loans. In support of the applications, the defendants also submitted false and fictitious documents to lenders and the Small Business Administration, including fake identity documents, tax documents and payroll records.

The defendants used the fraudulently obtained funds as down-payments on luxury homes and to buy gold coins, diamonds, jewelry, luxury watches, imported furnishings, designer handbags, clothing and a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

Prior to the verdict, several co-defendants pleaded guilty to criminal charges in the case.

Manuk Grigoryan, 46, of Sun Valley, pleaded guilty on June 7 to one count each of bank fraud and aggravated identity theft. Grigoryan faces up to 32 years in federal prison, with sentencing scheduled for Sept. 13.

Edvard Paronyan, 40, of Granada Hills, pleaded guilty on June 11 to one count of wire fraud. Hes scheduled to be sentenced Aug. 30 and faces up to 20 years in federal prison.

Tamara Dadyan, 39, of Encino, Artur Ayvazyans wife and Vahe Dadyans cousin, pleaded guilty on June 14 to one count each of conspiracy to commit bank fraud and wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Dadyan faces up to 52 years in federal prison, with sentencing set for Sept. 27.

Arman Hayrapetyan, 41, of Glendale, who pleaded guilty on June 21 to one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering and faces up to 20 years in federal prison, with sentencing scheduled for Sept. 20.
Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts in his office in the state's capitol in Lincoln, Neb., on June 24, 2021. (Petr Svab/The Epoch Times)

From Dove to Hawk: Nebraska Governor Explains Lessons From Dealing With CCP

Steering the flagship farming state of Nebraska, Gov. Pete Ricketts has been all about opening doors for the worlds markets to access his states plentiful produce. From top-quality beef raised on the lush Great Plains pastures to the premier agri-tech that assists the growing of crops around the world, Nebraska has been exporting billions of dollars worth of products, a lot of it to East Asia.

It made perfect sense to Ricketts to lead a trade mission to China in 2016 in an effort to expand the market further yet.

What happened on the trip, and in the following years, however, gave the Republican a rude awakening.

China started opening up to foreign trade in the 1970s, after the death of Mao Zedong brought an end to the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, which had left the country on the brink of economic collapse. Bit by bit, the communist regime developed a sophisticated regimen of soft-soaping foreign officials and businessmen.

Ricketts was welcomed with open arms and showered with swooning puff pieces in state-run media.

Yet, as he found out, the countrys economic reforms had political deception baked into them. As the former head of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Deng Xiaoping put it, the strategy was to say right, go left.

Ricketts soon realized the regime was never interested in a good-faith relationship.

While we were over there, some very disturbing things happened, he told The Epoch Times in an exclusive interview.

Members of our delegation were being followed in a very clumsy sort of way, he said. It was very clear that we were being monitored.

One member of the delegation was targeted in particular. One day, when he returned to his hotel room in the evening, he found out his hard drive had been stolen, Ricketts said.

The incident alerted the governor to the levels the CCP would stoop to in order to steal trade secrets.

As President Donald Trump assumed office, followed by a flock of China hawks such as Peter Navarro, Americas policy toward the CCP toughened up.

President Trump changed his trade policies to really try to get a level playing field for us in China, Ricketts said.

Trump wanted a trade deal with China that would address a litany of grievances, from currency manipulation to trade barriers and intellectual property theft.

With negotiations progressing slowly, Trump was gradually turning up the heat through wave after wave of import tariffs on Chinese goods. China responded with its own tariffs, but since it imports far less from the United States, its measures had less of an impact.

To escalate its retaliation, the CCP specifically went after industry sectors in which Trump enjoyed strong supportfarming and agriculture.

I think their philosophy was, lets undermine the presidents authority in the Midwest where a lot of his base is, Ricketts said.

The move completely backfired, he said.

I mean, farmers and ranchers, while they were not happy to see the demand for their goods go down, are patriotic and totally supported the presidents position about taking a tough stance with the CCP on trade issues.

Thats what drove the point home for Ricketts.

That whole thing started to really raise awareness with me about what the CCP was doing with regard to trade, he said.

Around the same time, Ricketts was becoming increasingly aware of the CCPs domestic abuses, particularly as information about the atrocities against the Uyghur population in the Xinjiang region started to make its way into the American mainstream.

The CCPs escalating persecution of the mostly Muslim ethnic minority through the use of internment camps, torture, and brainwashing has garnered considerable media attention and sparked virtually unified outrage in the West. In some regards, it appears to have also helped bring attention to other groups long persecuted by the CCP, including house Christians, Falun Gong adherents, and pro-democracy activists.

Ricketts said he believes relations with China need to be addressed holistically, taking into account not just trade, but also the national security and human rights implications.

But even if one was to focus on business alone, they werent a consistent trade partner in general, he said.

Its always going to be subject to whatever their political agenda is going to be, he said. The Chinese market is not an open market. Its not a free market.

In the end, he concluded that Nebraska needs to break free from reliance on the Chinese market.

We knew that we needed to diversify away from those markets the CCP was going to control, he said.

What followed was a series of decisions to limit CCP influence in Nebraska.

Ricketts moved the states trade office from Shanghai to Germany. He urged the University of NebraskaLincoln, to get rid of the CCP-controlled Confucius Institute, which it did. He banned the state government from doing business with CCP-related entities. He also banned the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok from government devices.

American companies need to think twice about doing business in China, he suggested, given the CCP law, for example, that any data stored in the country needs to be made available to the regime.

Its very concerning to me as an American, that we see so much of Wall Street continuing to invest in China, because, again, they need to know that anything they do there does not belong to them anymore, he said.

Businesses need to assume a more long-term strategy, he added.

So many publicly traded companies are driven quarter to quarter by earnings. And so that tends to make them more short-term oriented, rather than seeing the bigger, long-term picture, he said.

The Chinese government is very long-term oriented. [CCP leader] Xi Jinping has planned [for the regime] to be the global superpower by 2049, which is a long-range plan. And we here in America have to start thinking more long-range. We need to think bigger picture.

Nebraska continues to export to Chinaabout a billion dollars worth in 2019, in fact, in large part due to Trumps Phase One trade deal that obliged China to buy American produce. Ricketts, however, isnt planning on any more trade missions. Instead, hed like to see more exports to the emerging Southeast Asian countries as well as reliable partners such as Japan and Germany.

We would have wanted to diversify anyway, he said. And I think when the president went through his trade negotiations, that really helped us see all the things where the CCP was taking advantage of us and helped us make that move to try to find other markets.
A small globe above a fire to illustrate global warming is seen during the 21st Session of the Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21/CMP11), in France, on Nov. 4, 2015. (Lionel Bonaventure/AFP/Getty Images)

Happy Birthday, Global Warming: Climate Change at 33

Global warming entered politics in June 1988

Commentary

This month, climate change celebrates its 33rd birthday. On June 23, 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified that the greenhouse effect had been detected. Global Warming Has Begun, The New York Times declared the next day. Indeed, it had. A year older than Alexander the Great when he died, climate change took less than one-third of a century to conquer the West.

Four days earlier, the Toronto G7 had agreed that global climate change required priority attention. Before the month was out, the Toronto climate conference declared that humanity was conducting an uncontrolled experiment whose ultimate consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war. In September, Margaret Thatcher gave her famous speech to the Royal Society, warning of a global heat trap. We are told, although she didnt say by whom, that a warming of one degree centigrade per decade would greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope, an estimate that turned out to be a wild exaggeration. Observed warming since then has been closer to one-tenth of one degree centigrade per decade. Two months later, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) held its inaugural meeting in Geneva.

The tendency to catastrophism was present at the outset of global warming. The previous year, at a secretive meeting of scientists that included the IPCCs first chair, it had been recognized that traditional cost-benefit analysis was inappropriate, on account of the risk of major transformations of the world of future generations. The logic of this argument requires that climate change be presented as potentially catastrophicotherwise, the cure would appear worse than the putative disease.

Although catastrophism gave climate change emotive power, the most consistent feature of climate change is the failure of predictions of catastrophe to materialize. In 1990, Martin Parry, a future cochair of an IPCC working group, produced a report claiming that the world could suffer mass starvation and soaring food prices within 40 years. Yet the prevalence of undernourishment in developing countries has been on a downward trend since the 1970s and was nearly halved, from 23.3 percent in 1991 to 12.9 percent in 2015.

Although global warming conquered the West, it failed in the East. The model for international environmental cooperation was the 1987 Montreal Protocol on protecting the ozone layer. Its negotiation and ratification was led by the Reagan administration, which recognized that the United States would be the biggest beneficiary from having a strong treaty. Thanks to U.S. leadership, the negotiations were conducted quickly (in a matter of months) and the protocol has teeth, containing strong incentives for countries to join and the threat of trade sanctions for those that do not.

This path was quickly blocked for climate change. At the end of 1988, the Maltese government sponsored a resolution of the U.N. General Assembly on the conservation of the climate as mankinds common heritage, the subtext being that rich countries shouldnt negotiate a climate change treaty and then impose it on the rest of the world. The advantage of going down the U.N. route was that it led to the creation of a permanent and growing bureaucratic infrastructure with annual meetings to keep global warmings place in public discourse. The downside is that negotiating texts must be agreed by consensus, foreclosing the possibility of a Montreal-like negotiating process and outcome. In 1990, the General Assembly adopted a resolution establishing the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee for a Framework Convention on Climate Change, which produced a final text in time for the 1992 Rio Earth Summit.

The most important features of the 1992 climate convention are its ground plan, carving the world in two, with the developed North listed in Annex I, and the doctrine of common but differentiated responsibilities (the first principle listed in the convention and arguably its governing one). The bifurcation was made concrete in 1995 at the first conference of the parties in Berlin. Presided over by Angela Merkel as Germanys environment minister, the Berlin Mandate stipulated that Annex I parties should strengthen their commitment to decarbonize on condition that nonAnnex I parties did not, preparing the way for the Kyoto Protocol two years later.

The Clinton administration hadnt given much thought to the implications of the Berlin Mandate. The Senate did. In July 1997, by 95 votes (including those of then-senators Biden and Kerry) to zero, it adopted the Byrd-Hagel resolution: America should not sign any protocol that imposed limits on Annex I parties unless it also imposed specific, time-tabled commitments on nonAnnex I countries. Although the Clinton administration signed the Kyoto Protocol, the Senate had killed U.S. participation; it was left to the incoming president, George W. Bush, to garner the opprobrium for stating the obvious. Both he and Barack Obama pursued essentially the same post-Kyoto strategy of trying to get China and other major emerging economies to make treaty commitments to decarbonization, an attempt that failed at the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference, when China, India, South Africa, and Brazil vetoed a new climate treaty.

In picking up the pieces, Todd Stern, President Obamas climate negotiator, had the twin objectives of crafting something that China would accept but that didnt require the Senates advice and consent. The outcome was the Paris climate agreement. It embodies the climate equivalent of Mikhail Gorbachevs Sinatra Doctrine of allowing individual parties to the agreement to do it their way. Hailed as a game changer in the fight to save the planet, the reality of Paris was rather different. Just as Gorbachevs Sinatra Doctrine was an admission that the Soviet Union had lost the Cold War, the Paris agreement signaled that the West had given up on having a global decarbonization regime, with credible sanctions against free riding.

Although the Obama administration played an essential role in its gestation, the United States is the biggest loser from the Paris agreement. America is to forfeit its recently won position as the worlds largest producer of hydrocarbon energy. For what?

The story of carbon dioxide emissions is acceleration in the declining share of Western emissions. The year 1981 was the last one in which the Wests energy and cement manufacture carbon dioxide emissions were greater than the rest of the worlds (the latter includes Japanculturally non-Western, ambivalent about climate change, and the only nation to have hosted a major climate conference presided over by a foreign national). By 1988, despite the economic expansion of the 1980s, the Wests emissions had grown by only 3.8 percent, while the rest of the worlds had grown by 27.0 percent.

After 2002, non-Western emissions grew even faster. In the 12 years before 2002, non-Western emissions grew by 21.2 percent; and in the subsequent 12 years, by 76.8 percent. By 2014, with Western emissions broadly flat over the 24-year period, Western emissions had shrunk to 26 percent of the total, and the share of non-Western emissions had risen to 74 percent. In less than a decade and a half, the increase in non-Western emissions outstripped the combined total of U.S. and E.U. emissions. In terms of affecting the physics of global warming, it doesnt really matter what the West does any more.

William Nordhaus, the worlds preeminent climate economist, offers a brutal assessment of climate policy. After 30 years, international policy is at a dead end, he said in a little-noticed October 2020 presentation to the European Central Bank. We have policies, but they have not been effective, and theyre getting us basically nowhere. The culprit, in Nordhauss view? The free-rider problem. Nordhauss solution is to replace the current structure with a club whose members agree on a uniform price for carbon dioxide (he suggests $50 per ton of CO 2 ) plus a straight 3 percent penalty tariff on imports from non-club members. What Nordhaus proposes, in essence, is the Montreal Protocol structure adapted for climate change.

Joe Biden campaigned to restore U.S. climate leadership and rejoin the Paris agreement. The two are contradictory. Following the Europeans down the dead end of a three-decade-old U.N. process hardly constitutes leadership. Heeding Nordhauss advice and abandoning the U.N. process is something that only an American president can do. But that would be to assume that the purpose of the U.N. is to moderate global warming.

Days before the Paris conference, Maurice Strong died. A committed environmentalist, no person did more to put environmentalism on the international agenda, leading the 1972 Stockholm U.N. conference on the environment and the Rio Earth summit 20 years later. A small gathering was held at the Paris conference to share reminiscences about Strong and his achievements. One of his aides at the Stockholm conference recalled asking him what the policy of the conference should be. The process is the policy, Strong replied.

Strongs genius was to understand that a self-perpetuating U.N. process would continuously accrete money, influence, and, above all, power. Environmentalism would not have become the dominant ideology in the West without the deployment of the U.N.s climate apparatus: the annual cycle of climate conferences spliced periodically with ones that are going to save the planet (Kyoto in 1997; Bali in 2007; Copenhagen in 2009; Paris in 2015; and Glasgow in 2021). Then theres the IPCC, set up by the U.N. Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization, and its fivesoon to be sixgenerations of assessment reports.

Embedded in the goal of limiting warming to 1.5C is the opportunity for intentional societal transformation, the IPCC says in its scientific assessment of the 1.5 degrees Celsius target. All ideologies seek power. Seen in this light, global warming gave environmentalism the means for it to conquer the West and become the dominant ideology of our age. Environmentalisms attitude toward nuclear power provides a test for this proposition. If the paramount concern of environmentalists had been to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and slow down climate change, they would campaign to keep existing nuclear power stations and build new ones. Yet viable nuclear power stations are being prematurely closed in California, New York, Germany, and Belgium. Why?

Nuclear power is a Promethean crime of humanity stealing the deepest secrets of nature to release unlimited quantities of energy, in the eyes of environmentalistsa crime far worse than global warming. Instead, humanity must live within the rhythms and constraints decreed by nature; hence environmentalists belief that power stations should be replaced by inefficient, weather-dependent wind and solar farms.

The growth of wind and solar generation is not a market-driven phenomenon of a superior technology displacing an obsolete one. Its what happens when governments heavily subsidize zero-marginal cost output, flooding wholesale markets with unwanted electricity when theres too much sun and wind and risking power failures when theres too little. The ubiquity of wind and solar symbolizes environmentalism reversing the logic of the Industrial Revolution in transforming predominantly agrarian societies at the mercy of climate to weather-resistant ones and helps explain the contrasting fortunes of environmentalism and Marxism. Environmentalism succeeded in the West and has become part of the political mainstream, to the extent that it defines politically acceptable opinion. Marxism lost in the West but thrived in preindustrial societies, because the political priority remains economic development. In practical terms, this is synonymous with industrialization and carbonizing their economies.

The outcome has been to shift the balance of climate power from the West to the rest of the world and the major emerging economies, in particular. Yet the lopsided arithmetic of the West versus the rests emissions has not softened the effectiveness of global warming as an ideological weapon because it is not based on any rational calculus but derives from its threat of planetary catastrophe. The future, as it had been in Marxism, again becomes the great category of blackmail, as the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner writes in The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse.

Climate change does represent an existential threat to Western civilization, although not in the way environmentalists say. Net-zero climate policies threaten to undermine the internal cohesiveness of Western societies and drain them of economic vitality. Externally, they will accelerate the redistribution of power away from the West to those nations that decide not to decarbonize, especially to China. Decarbonization will see the progressive elimination of high-paying, high-productivity blue-collar employment such as coal mining, oil and gas, steelmaking, and energy-intensive manufacturing. The aristocracy of labor will become an extinct social class; instead, as social mobility stagnates and class stratifications solidify, social geographer Joel Kotkin foresees the coming of neo-feudalism.

Accompanying these regressive social developments is the atrophying of democratic politics. Net-zero climate policies require reorganizing society around the principle of decarbonizationnot through a couple of election cycles but over the next three decades. Net-zero must therefore be put beyond the reach of democratic politics so that voters cannot reverse a decision that was taken for them. This provides a better fit for a post-democratic polity such as the European Union. Britain has a statutory climate change committee to hold the government to account for meeting decarbonization targets.

Although the Biden administration has adopted a target of net-zero by 2050 and of halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, Congress has not passedand is unlikely to passclimate legislation mandating these targets. Nonetheless, American corporations in droves are pledging their own net-zero targets. Wall Street and ESG (environmental, social, and governance) investing and climate disclosures, which the SEC intends to mandate, have opened an alternative route on the basis of what gets measured gets managed.

Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the worlds largest asset manager, candidly admits that forcing companies to disclose their emissions isnt transparency for transparencys sake: disclosure should be a means to achieving a more sustainable and inclusive capitalism. This collusion between the administrative state and climate activists to bypass Congress has been condemned by Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee. Activists with no fiduciary duty to the company or its shareholders are trying to impose their progressive political views on publicly traded companies, and the country at large, having failed to enact change via the elected government, Senator Toomey and his colleagues wrote in a letter to SEC chair Gary Gensler earlier this month.

In addition to this usurpation of the political prerogatives of democratic government, forcing business to take on governmental functions to address societal problems will see them, over time, acquire the modes and culture of government bureaucracies. This subtracts from the core economic function of the business corporation in a capitalist economy. The capitalist economy, in the words of the growth economist William Baumol, can usefully be viewed as a machine whose primary product is economic growth. What distinguishes it most sharply from all other economic systems are free-market pressures that force firms to engage in a continuous, competitive process of innovation. This does not happen fortuitously, writes Baumol, but occurs when the structure of payoffs in an economy is such as to make unproductive activities such as rent-seeking (or worse) more profitable than activities that are productive.

If CEO remuneration is aligned with ESG objectives and decarbonization targets and if directors risk being voted off boards for not having them, businesses will increasingly focus their efforts on meeting these non-business objectives. As this incurs costs and impairs business performance, businesses will turn to politicians to seek protection from their antisocial competitors that refrain from doing the governments work. Capitalisms legitimacy rests on its record of raising living standards through its prodigious capacity to generate productive wealth. Should that slow down to a trickle, capitalism becomes hard to justify, even though the explanation is that the system is no longer a capitalistic, free-market one.

Global warming flourished during a period when the world had taken a holiday from geopolitics. It had entered the world as geopolitical tensions were easing. Six months earlier, in December 1987, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev signed the INF treaty, eliminating intermediate nuclear missiles. By the time of the Rio Earth Summit, the Soviet Union was gone. Geopolitics is now back. There is a broad consensus in Washington that President Xis China is a strategic rival to the United States. Yet the new strategic realism ceases when it comes to climate change.

According to the IPCC, net-zero requires transformative systemic change that involves unprecedented policy and geopolitical challenges. The International Energy Agency calls decarbonizing the energy sector perhaps the greatest challenge humankind has faced. The West embarking on this process when China does not is akin to signing a strategic arms-control treaty binding on only one side: it can only be to Chinas strategic advantage. So far, the grip of environmentalism on Western policymakers lulls them into the belief that global warming operates in a strategic vacuum, insulated from the factors that constitute geopolitical weight and ambition. It is in that sense that climate change constitutes an existential threat to the West.

From RealClearWire.

Rupert Darwall is a senior fellow of the RealClear Foundation and author of Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex and the reports The Climate Noose: Business, Net Zero, and the IPCCs Anti-Capitalism and Capitalism, Socialism and ESG.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Englands Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty outside the Department of Health in London on June 25, 2021. (Kirsty OConnor/PA)

Harassment of Englands Chief Medical Officer Prompts Security Questions

Police are investigating video footage showing Englands Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty apparently being accosted by two men in a London park.

It is the third time that footage of Whitty apparently being harassed has surfaced on social media, prompting questions over whether he should be assigned personal protection.

The footage shows two men jeering as they grab hold of Whitty, who appears to struggle to free himself.

At one point one of them can be heard saying, One photo please?

With a line of police vans visible in the background, a voice is heard saying leave the gentleman alone before the clip ends.

Whitty became a household name during the early period of the pandemic when he regularly appeared alongside Prime Minister Boris Johnson giving televised briefings and fielding questions on the scientific advice behind the UK governments pandemic response.

Britains Prime Minister Boris Johnson (R) and Chief Medical Officer for England Chris Whitty at a Downing Street briefing in London on Feb. 15, 2021. (Stefan Rousseau/POOL/AFP)

Security specialist Will Geddes told The Epoch Times that he was astonished that Whitty did not have a personal protection officer of some kind.

Regardless of whether the mens motive was to innocently obtain a selfie or to frighten and harass Whitty, it would have been a very traumatic and frightening episode.

This in itself raises some serious concerns about the absence of any kind of personal protection officer, which I would have thought in these somewhat inflammatory times should evidently be present, Geddes said.

Home Secretary Priti Patel told The Times of London she couldnt comment on whether Whitty needs security, but said, Its important that we make sure that Chris is given the right kind of support.

The Metropolitan Police told the Epoch Times in an emailed statement,Officers were in the vicinity policing a nearby demonstration and intervened when they saw what was happening.

They spoke to the victim and checked his welfare. He had not suffered any injuries and informed officers that at that time he did not wish to make any allegations.

The Met says details of the two men were recorded, and they were robustly warned about their behaviour.

The incident has been recorded as a common assault and continues to be investigated by the Mets Public Order crime team.

Fuelled by Smartphones

Geddes said that in his experience of protecting public figures the advent of smartphones and social media has fuelled the growth of such incidents.

Weve seen a real amplification of those that are wanting to achieve, obviously, notoriety or fame or recognition or exposure by posting certain content on their social media. Now, inevitably, you see those that are upping the ante every single time to get even more controversial postings or video footage, he said.

He said that in the security industry, they look at whether someone is in the public domain to assess risk, not whether their notoriety is by accident or by design.

Chief Medical Officer for England Chris Whitty gives an update on the pandemic in Downing Street, London, on March 29, 2021. (Hollie Adams/Pool/AFP)

Ive certainly protected many people who fall within the same category as professor Whitty, who have maybe embraced that initial role, feeling that they are contributing their experience, their expertise, to the better good of everybody around them, he said.

But inevitably there are always two sides to every opinion. There will be those that will support it, and those that will be opposed to it. And then there will be those, inevitably, there are the farthest reaches of opposition that actually take exception to it.

It is not the first time Whitty has been forced to endure public harassment.

Earlier this month, he was confronted in a street in Oxford by a man accusing him of lying to the public about the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, while in February a man accosted the chief medical officer when he was walking in Westminster.

The men filmed the incidents on mobile phones.

Geddes said that he hopes Whitty was offered a protection officer after the incidents. When people decline protection, he said, it is often because they dont understand what it is and that it can be delivered in a very non-intrusive, privacy respecting way.

MPs from across the political spectrum have condemned the actions of the men in the video.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he was shocked at the video.

I condemn the behaviour of these thugs, he wrote on Twitter. Our hard-working public servants should not have to face this kind of intimidation on our streets and we will not tolerate it.

Whitty brushed off the February incident, addressing it at a Downing Street press conference shortly afterwards.

He told viewers: In terms of being harangued  the odd young lad showing off occasionally happens. I didnt think anything of it, frankly. I was very surprised it was picked up by the media at all, as anything of any importance.

PA contributed to this report.

This article has been updated to include the latest statement from the Met Police
Harry Dunns Family to Fly to US to Give Evidence Under Oath in Damages Claim

The parents of teenage motorcyclist Harry Dunn are set to fly to the United States to give evidence under oath as part of a damages claim against their sons alleged killer.

Charlotte Charles and Tim Dunn will fly to the District of Columbia on Tuesday ahead of the deposition process which is due to begin later this week.

Dunns parents will face lawyers acting on behalf of suspect Anne Sacoolas, who left the UK after diplomatic immunity was asserted on her behalf following the 19-year-olds death in August 2019.

The 43-year-old was charged with causing the teenagers death by dangerous driving after her departure from the UK, but an extradition request was rejected by the US State Department in January last year.

Sacoolas, who will also be required to give legal testimony by July 23 as part of the civil claim, has the option to be present when Charles and Dunn are deposed.

Charlotte Charles and Tim Dunn are due to fly to Washington on Tuesday, in an undated photo. (Jacob King/PA)

The depositions will form part of the discovery process in the Dunn familys claim, in which correspondence and documentation relevant to the case will be handed over ahead of a trial at the end of the year.

Dunns mother described travelling to give evidence as punishing and exhausting but added: We would travel to the end of the Earth and back if that is what it takes.

Speaking ahead of their flight, Charles told the PA news agency: We are flying out to the United States once again in pursuit of justice for our son.

We are so grateful to the Court in Virginia for allowing our civil claim to proceed there.

We know that is not what the US Government wanted and the insurers did their best to kick the case back to the UK.

The Dunn familys claim, brought against both Sacoolas and her husband Jonathan, has unearthed a great deal of previously unheard material, such as the State Department roles held by the couple at the time of the crash.

The Alexandria District Court in the US State of Virginia heard the pairs work in intelligence was a factor in their departure from the UKwith the Sacoolases leaving for security reasons.

Asked how she was feeling ahead of her testimony, Charles said: It does not matter how much they try to beat us down.

Our whole family are suffering intensely but to be honest we would travel to the end of the Earth and back if that is what it takes.

It is punishing and exhausting travelling at the best of times and obviously more difficult in the middle of the pandemic, but they have required us to travel to appear at our depositions on Thursday and that is just what we will do.

The civil claim is one of a number of legal processes the Dunn family have entered into in order to secure justice for their son.

Earlier this month, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said the path was now clear for the UK to push for a form of virtual trial or process in the case.

Also speaking ahead of their flight, Dunn told PA: We loved our boy so much and are lost without him.

Every day that goes by is getting more and more painful.

We have never done anything like this before and dont know what to expect.

Its obviously daunting being involved in any court case but this is all about our suffering since we lost Harry and we will do whatever it takes to get justice.

By Josh Payne
Healing and Redemption: A Marine Corps Veterans 5,800-Mile Walk

War scars in more ways than one, and when our veterans come home, its not always easy to see at first glance. The stigma surrounding mental health and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) makes it even more difficult to address the trauma our men and women in uniform experience. Sometimes it takes bold action and candid conversation to heal.

Marine Corps veteran Jon Hancock was deployed to Ramadi, Iraq, as part of the 2nd Battalion 4th Marines in 2004. The platoon, known as the Magnificent Bastards, fought honorably and experienced many casualties. One in four Marines were wounded or killed in the fighting. Despite the heavy losses and unimaginable trauma, Hancock would return to Iraq for six more deployments. But the brutality of the war, the loss of his brothers, and the questioning of his own humanity all took a toll when he returned.

Hancock, now 38, left active duty on Sept. 21, 2009, and immediately began attending college at the University of Maryland. The transition into the student, civilian world wasnt a smooth one.

Probably then is when I started feeling the derision and the anonymity, Hancock said, because here I am having worked in all these teams, in these groups, in this really awesome career that Ive had up to this point, and then all of a sudden now Im sitting there listening to some kid try to tell me what Iraq and Afghanistan and war is like.

The Walk

Hancock felt alone, and symptoms of PTSD began to surface. He hated himself and others, and anyone outside of the military community experienced his wrath. He drank to try to cope, and that led to one DUI and then a second. He had a young son with his girlfriend but struggled to be a present father and loving partner. His downward spiral culminated with a suicide attempt in November 2014. Afterward, he checked himself into the VA and sought treatment. But he found that the agency was inadequate and unwilling to really help him.

Thats when he knew he had to do it himself. He decided to embark on a cross-country journey to visit his fellow Marines and the Gold Star families of his fallen brothers. He wanted to share his experience with them, and listen to and try to understand their struggles in return.

When he began his journey, he was uncertain how it would turn out. On Sept. 11, 2016, after two weeks of walking, he nearly turned around.

Jon Hancock embraces a Gold Star mother at Camp Pendleton. (Bastards Road)

I think there was still a little piece of me inside that thought I was going to die on this walk, Hancock said. I thought I was just going to sink into the darkness, into the background, and fade to black.

Hancock called his mother, and she offered to pick him up. But he had quit everything he had attempted after his service. He had quit school and work, and realized at that point that he had to follow through on this journey.

Trying to Understand

During Hancocks nearly 6,000-mile journey, he received both positive and negative reactions from people he encountered along the way. Every military member and veteran he ran into was supportive and congratulatory. Those responses solidified his will to carry on. Others were mean-spirited, and some even threw trash and other debris at him as he walked on the side of the road. In one instance, a woman saw the Marine Corps flag on his back, and screamed at him, calling him a baby killer. But this type of abhorrent behavior only emboldened him. In situations like this, he learned to let these insults roll off of his back.

It makes no sense to argue with people who are idiots, so I didnt. I just decided that I would agree with anybody that was negative, Hancock said.

While he was on his journey, cinematographer Brian Morrison noticed pieces of Hancocks story on local news outlets. The two had gone to high school together but had never actually met. They were eventually able to connect through mutual friends.

Walking along U.S. Highway 101. (Bastards Road)

Morrison had always wanted to work on a more profound, longer-term film, and was inspired by Hancocks mission.

A lot of these stories about veterans coming home, I just feel like theyre glossed over, and I wanted to give more attention to what he was going through. I wanted to hear it from him, Morrison said.

His desire and curiosity to truly understand what veterans endure when they come home motivated him to sit down with Hancock and discuss the prospect of filming a documentary about his walk. Hancock agreed, and his trust in Morrison in turned enabled his Marine brothers and their families to trust him and allow him to capture their story. He learned about the strength and resilience of our veterans and the extraordinary nature of the bonds of trust and loyalty in their community.

A New Beginning

When Hancock finally reached Camp Pendleton, members of the 2nd Battalion 4th Marines stood every 50 feet at attention to welcome him. He still struggles to articulate how he felt that day, but remembers a sense of accomplishment, follow-through, and support.

Hancock was lost before he embarked on his 5,800-mile trek, but by the time he reached the end of his journey, hed discovered a few critical aspects about himself. He relearned how to be accountable to himself, and that hed been blaming his PTSD and resulting struggles on other people and external factors. He also found out that while some of his fellow Marines seemed to be doing well, it wasnt until he spoke with them that he realized they were struggling too. But overall, he learned that he had to forgive himself if he wanted to begin to heal.

You have to forgive yourself for the things youve done in your past, otherwise they haunt you, and to see so many of my brothers actually do that, it was something that I was missing, Hancock said.

Hancock embraces fellow Marine Chris Macintosh. (Bastards Road)

Based on the informal name of his unit, Bastards Road (BastardsRoad.com) chronicles Hancocks cross-country odyssey in a series of road shots, interviews, and candid conversations. Morrison hopes the film gives audiences an intimate look at the lives of veterans, and that the documentary strips away some of the existing stigmas and stereotypes. He wants the film to encourage a conversation to foster understanding and promote healing.

Hancock hopes veterans learn from his story that theyre not alone, and that talking about their traumas doesnt make them weak. Its the only way to forgive oneself and heal from combat, and the struggles that follow afterward. For civilians, he hopes the documentary gives them an intimate look into the life of a veteran, which may prevent them from asking some unnecessary questions. He also hopes they get a glimpse of what our service members and veterans have endured for them.

Marine Corps veteran Jon Hancock in South Dakota. Hancock decided to create the nonprofit Bastards Road Project, dedicated to taking veterans on long-distance hikes to heal the wounds of war. (Bastards Road)

For his son, who is 10, he hopes he takes away the fact that while he wasnt a great man or father early in his life, hes making it up to him now.

I want to show him the strength in communication, the strength in talking to one another, and that the strength of the military man or woman is unparalleled, and that these are some of the most honored people that Ive ever had the chance to work with, and that theyre tough, and that if he chooses to go down that road that Id like for him to understand its OK to talk about things that he experiences as well, Hancock said.

To view Bastards Road, see BastardsRoad.com/watchnow or linktr.ee/bastardsroad
The Hong Kong government announced on June 28 that it would implement a regional flight circuit breaker for United Kingdom passenger flights arriving in Hong Kong starting July 1. (Song Bilong/The Epoch Times)

Hong Kong Activates Circuit Breaker for UK Passenger Flights Starting July 1

The Hong Kong government announced on June 28 that it would implement a regional flight circuit breaker for United Kingdom passenger flights arriving in Hong Kong starting July 1, due to a rise in variant cases of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.

The restriction affects all civil aircraft from the UK and lists the UK in its A1 very-high-risk category. Passengers who have stayed in the UK for more than two hours are restricted from boarding incoming passenger aircraft to Hong Kong.

The Hong Kong government stated that it had previously identified carriers of the L452R virus strain among the passengers arriving from the UK. It had announced on June 24 that the UK would be listed in its A2 high-risk category starting June 28.

However, in the past few days, Hong Kong has found more imported cases with variant strains from passengers arriving from the UK.

According to Hong Kong regulations, the Circuit Breaker Protocol can be activated if five or more airline passengers test positive for the N501Y mutated virus strain or related virus variant within seven days through a PCR test upon arrival in Hong Kong, or 10 or more airline passengers test positive within seven days through other PCR tests before arrival in Hong Kong.

The number of passengers found to carry variants of concern reached the threshold to activate the flight Circuit Breaker Protocol, which prohibits all civil aircraft from the UK from landing in Hong Kong and upgrades the UK to its A1 very-high-risk category.

Countries currently listed as very-high-risk areas by the Hong Kong government include Brazil, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, and South Africa.
An man waves a black Hong Kong flag on a street outside the Legislative Council Complex on July 1, 2019 in Hong Kong, China. (Anthony Kwan/Getty Images)

Hong Kong Getting Darker as Security Chief Promoted to Second-in-Command, Says China Expert

The communist Chinese regime is changing the semi-autonomous financial hub of Hong Kong into another mainland Chinese city as Beijing installed a security official as the citys senior leader, according to a Chinese academic.

Chen Kuide, a China scholar and editor-in-chief of the magazine China in Perspective, said the communist regime was replacing officials incongruous with the hard-line orders, or in other words, Xis Hong Kong policies, suggesting that the city is transforming into another jurisdiction under the regimes thumb.

Chen noted the semi-autonomous city is losing its independent legal system, which had been based on English common law due to its British colonial history, after the enactment of the Beijing-imposed national security law last August. But Hong Kong won its financial reputation based on its valuing the rule of law.

Hong Kong has almost lost its particularity in the world, Chen said in an interview with The Epoch Times on June 25.

Beijing appointed security chief John Lee to the second-highest ranking position in Hong Kong Government on June 25. Lee is in charge of enforcing Beijings national security law.

It came a day after a local pro-democratic newspaper, Apple Daily, printed its final edition. The publication was forced to cease operations following the freezing of its key assets and the arrests of its executives, who Lee accused of using news coverage as a tool to endanger national security.

Chen told The Epoch Times that Beijing is rapidly transforming Hong Kong into another mainland Chinese city, with even tighter controls in some parts. Chen interpreted Lees speedy promotion as a signal that the communist regime will further implement its sweeping national security law.

Hong Kong is getting darker, Chen said.

However, Chen Yonglin, a former Chinese diplomat, said the communization of Hong Kong is the Chinese Communist Partys first step.

The next is Taiwan, he told The Epoch Times in the interview on June 25.

The Chinese regime has long claimed Taiwan, a de facto independent nation, as its province, using Hong Kongs autonomy as a showcase to entice Taiwan to accept control from Beijing under the same one country, two systems model.

When Hong Kongs sovereignty was handed over from the United Kingdom to China in 1997, Beijing promised that it would allow the city to enjoy a degree of autonomy and keep its way of life within the communist regimes system for 50 years.

However, Hong Kong is under control now. Obviously, using force is the only [way] to deal with Taiwan, Chen Yonglin said.

He added that clear U.S. support remain crucial to the islands safety, and any strategic ambiguity could risk seeing Taiwan repeat Hong Kongs story. Chen suggested the Biden administration clarify that the United States will aid Taiwan if Beijing launches a war.

Read More The Future of Strategic Ambiguity

He said that if Taiwan falls into the hands of the communist regime, Beijings next target would be the United States.

Since the Clinton administration, Washington has kept to its policy of strategic ambiguity when asked whether it will back Taiwan in the event of an attack from mainland Chinese, although its stance against the Chinese regime is becoming tougher since former President Donald Trump.

Luo Ya contributed to this report.
A protester holds a flag ahead of the pro-democracy march in Hong Kong on July 1, 2015. (Anthony Kwan/Getty Images)

Hong Kong Police Refuse Permission for Rally to Mark Handover

HONG KONGHong Kong police on Monday denied permission for a rally on July 1, the 24th anniversary of the former British colonys handover to Chinese rule, citing coronavirus restrictions, the organizers said.

Tens of thousands of residents have traditionally marched on July 1 to demand everything from greater democracy to a solution to one of the worlds most expensive property markets.

This years anniversary is particularly sensitive as it coincides with events to mark the centenary of the Chinese Communist Party, with dozens of Hong Kong officials traveling to Beijing to join celebrations.

In a notice sent to the organizersthe League of Social Democrats, Tin Shui Wai Connection, Save Lantau Allianceand seen by Reuters, police said that given rules on gatherings of more than four people, any rally would cause great risk to citizens lives and health, harming public safety and affecting others rights.

Police also told the organizers anyone who defied the ban could face jail for up to up to five years.

A police spokesman was not immediately available for comment.

The organizers said they would appeal against the decision to a board on public meetings and processions.

Civil Human Rights Front, which has traditionally set up the annual rally, said this month it would not do so this year due to administrative difficulties and the citys political environment, Hong Kong media reported.

The demonstration last year was banned for the first time in 17 years, with police also citing coronavirus restrictions. Thousands defied the ban and took to the streets to protest against a sweeping national security law imposed on the city just hours earlier by Beijing.

Critics of the government have accused it of using social distancing measures to block rallies after anti-government protests in 2019. The government rejects the accusation.

Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam said last week there was no exact science in determining social distancing measures.

Some activists have questioned why the rally was banned when concerts, art fairs and other events were allowed to go ahead despite an official ban on large gatherings.

Authorities this year also banned an annual June 4 vigil to mark the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy activists in and around Beijings Tiananmen Square, implementing a security operation to prevent people gathering.

By Sharon Abratique
Participants enjoy the Blue Origin Space Simulator during the Amazon Re:MARS conference on robotics and artificial intelligence at the Aria Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada on June 5, 2019. (MARK RALSTON/AFP via Getty Images)

House Passes Bills to Boost Scientific Competitiveness Against China

The House on Monday passed two bipartisan bills aimed to boost the United States ability to compete with the Chinese regimes push to advance Chinas technology.

The bills, which seek to bolster research and development programs in the United States, passed with wide bipartisan support. The first bill, titled the National Science Foundation for the Future Act HR2225, passed 345-67, while the second, called the Department of Energy Science for the Future Act, HR3593, was approved in a 351-68 vote.

It paves the way for additional funding for the National Science Foundation and for the Department of Energy, and comes in response to a Senate version of the bill that included more than $52 billion in grants and incentives for semiconductor manufacturing on American soila provision omitted by the House bills.

The United States has long been a beacon of excellence in science and engineering, said House Science Committee Chair Eddie Bernice Johnson. While we should be cognizant of our increasing global competition, we must not be constrained by it. To continue to lead, we must chart our own course.

House Science, Space, and Technology Committee Chairwoman Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) said in a statement that the United States is at a critical juncture in our nations history and that Americans need to be more focused on the role of science in our society.

We must significantly boost funding for science. For years, we have allowed millions of dollars of excellent research [to] go unfunded, Johnson said.

The measures would boost funding for the National Science Foundation and Department of Energys Office of Science by roughly 7 percent per year. If signed into law, the bills will also bolster science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education (STEM) education, and professional development to assist with recruitment in those industries.

The National Science Foundation for the Future Act also includes a provision that prohibits research and development grant applicants from participating in malign foreign talent recruitment programs from a foreign country of concern for the duration of their award.

The countries of concerns currently include China, North Korea, Russia, Iran.

The measures would also encompass the Chinese regimes Thousand Talents Program, which has come under close U.S. scrutiny over threats to national security.

The Thousand Talents Program, enacted in 2008, was Beijings recruitment program to attract talented overseas Chinese and foreign experts in the fields of science and technology to help the ruling Chinese Communist Party fuel its innovation drive.

It is critical that we strike the correct balance between keeping our research enterprise open but also from protecting it from adversaries who seek to take advantage of our open system, Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.) said of the provision.

The Senates bill, known as the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, or USICA, was backed by a strong bipartisan 68-32 majority on June 8. The comprehensive bill aims to boost government support for science and technology, to address the efforts to overtake the United States as a global leader from communist China.

Chinas rubber stamp committee expressed strong indignation and resolute opposition to the Senate bill, which was praised in Washington as a rare example of bipartisan action by the deeply divided Congress.

President Joe Bidens fellow Democrats control both the House and Senate but only by narrow margins. However, the desire for a hard line in dealings with a totalitarian Beijing is a rare bipartisan sentiment in the deeply divided Congress.

In a statement Monday, the president said he was heartened by the passage of the House bills and that his administration looks forward to continuing to work with the House and the Senate in producing a final bill I can sign.

Biden said that decades of neglect and disinvestment have left us at a competitive disadvantage as countries across the globe, like China, have poured money and focus into new technologies and industries, leaving the United States at risk of being left behind.

By rebuilding those domestic sources of strength, we can out-compete China and the rest of the world for years to come, he said.

Reuters contributed to this report.
Ray Liberge completes a job application before interviewing and later being hired for a job on the spot as a line cook during a Zislis Group job fair at The Brew Hall in Torrance, Calif. on June 23, 2021. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images)

Indiana Must Reinstate Federal Unemployment Benefits, Judge Rules

An Indiana judge on Friday ordered that the state must continue the expanded federal unemployment benefits that were implemented during last years pandemic relief efforts, saying that ending the funds ahead of their expiration date could cause irreparable harm to residents who are unable to pay for daily necessities.

Marion County Superior Court Judge John Hanley granted the preliminary injunction in a lawsuit filed earlier this month by two legal organizations, which argued that Indiana law requires the state to procure federal insurance benefits to its residents and said the governors actions to end the benefits would hurt thousands of people.

Indiana should notify the U.S. Department of Labor immediately of its continued participation in the CARES Act programs pending further action by this Court, Hanley wrote.

The judge said a preponderance of evidence suggests that ending the unemployment payments prematurely could cause hardship and violate Indiana law.

A loss of housing or medical care and the inability to provide food, shelter and adequate childcare for a family constitute irreparable harm pending resolution of this cause of action and are not adequately compensable by an award of damages, Hanley wrote in his ruling.

Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb, a Republican, had announced last month that the state would pull out of the federal governments COVID-19 unemployment program by June 19.

Dozens of states, the majority of which are run by Republican governors, are opting out of the additional federal unemployment benefits this summer before funding for the program expires on Sept. 6. Republicans argue that the $300 weekly extra payments under President Joe Bidens $1.9 trillion stimulus plan have discouraged people from returning to the workforce and have become a drag on the recovery.

Responding to pleas from businesses to encourage Americans to return to work, Republican leaders from the states of Arkansas, Georgia, Montana, and South Carolina also said recently that they will be slashing the extended weekly unemployment benefits. Other states that have announced similar moves include Alabama, Arizona, Idaho, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and Wyoming.

Biden, who has pushed back against the notion that unemployment compensation is discouraging people from taking jobs, said on June 4 that its reasonable for the benefits to terminate in line with their scheduled date.

The temporary boost in unemployment benefits  helped people who lost their jobs through no fault of their own and are still maybe in the process of getting vaccinated, but its going to expire in 90 days, Biden said. That makes sense.

The American Action Forum, a center-right policy institute, said in a February report that 37 percent of workers could make more on unemployment at the $300 level than they would earn if they returned to work.

Indiana Gov. Eric Holcombs office told CBS News that it plans to appeal the judges ruling.

The state of Indiana took the appropriate steps to terminate its participation in federal pandemic unemployment program, the Republican governors office said in a statement. The agreement ended on June 19. The Governor and Department of Workforce Development will discuss an immediate appeal of the judges order with the Attorney General.

The Epoch Times has contacted the governors office for additional comment.
Investigators Search for Missing Fort Hood Soldier; Family Says He Called Killeen Pastor and Hes Safe

By Heather Osbourne

From Austin American-Statesman

AUSTIN, TexasU.S. Army Spc. Abram Salas II, a Fort Hood soldier reported missing last week, contacted his Killeen pastor Sunday night and is believed to be safe, his family told the Killeen Daily Herald on Monday.

Teresa Kiphen, the soldiers aunt, told the Daily Herald that the family still does not know the reasons for his absence without leave. Salas had unexpectedly married five days before he failed to show up for work, the newspaper reported.

Army officials said in a statement Monday that they think Salas might be in San Antonio after leaving the Central Texas post for an unknown reason Wednesday.

He currently has a status of absent-unknown as multiple military and civilian law enforcement agencies on and off Fort Hood search for him, according to a statement from Fort Hood officials Monday morning.

Fort Hood leaders in the past months have promised to properly investigate the disappearances of soldiers after the brutal slaying of 20-year-old Spc. Vanessa Guillen, who was last seen April 22, 2020, before her remains turned up last summer.

Missing Fort Hood soldier Vanessa Guillen. (Courtesy of Fort Hood Military Police)

An independent investigation into how the Central Texas military leaders handled the monthslong search for Guillen found several examples in which post officials loosely enforced soldier accountability, leading to an initial presumption that a soldier who fails to report for duty is absent without leave instead of looking into whether the soldier has been harmed.

In other instances, there was little to no effort expended at the unit level to even try to identify whether a missing soldiers absence was involuntary, or the circumstances suspicious, investigators stated in their report. The status of AWOL often became a default designation without fact gathering or any documented due diligence.

The Fort Hood Independent Review Committee, a team of independent investigators with various military and law enforcement backgrounds who were called in to assess the post, recommended in their report that an Army-wide set of protocols be established for failure to report, especially for the first 24 hours after a soldier is reported missing.

Even before the report was released in December, the U.S. Army last year began working on new AWOL policies after backlash over Guillens case. The policy now includes a category for missing soldiers, so not every soldier who doesnt show up for duty is listed as AWOL.

Those who are AWOL for more than 30 days can be listed as deserters, according to Army policy.

2021 www.statesman.com. Visit statesman.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Raises Significant Concerns: Wisconsin Elections Commission Sued Over Ballot Drop Boxes

A conservative nonprofit law firm filed a lawsuit that challenges Wisconsins law that allows ballot drop boxes, coming just days after the Wisconsin Supreme Court declined to hear a similar suit.

In a suit filed (pdf) Monday in a county circuit court on behalf of two voters in Waukesha County, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty argued that the court should make a declaratory judgment that the only legitimate means to vote in the state is via the U.S. mail or by handing the ballot in-person to a municipal clerk. The firm further argued that state law says that these are only the two options, not ballot drop boxes, and their usage during elections raises significant concerns.

Ballot drop boxes, however, were widely used in Wisconsinwhich narrowly certified a victory for President Joe Bidenduring the Nov. 3 election, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty noted.

Thats because, according to the suit, the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) sent memos to elections clerks in March and August of 2020 that encouraged the use of drop boxes. The memos further said that absentee ballots do not need to be mailed by the voter or delivered in-person to the clerkbut they can instead be placed in drop boxes.

But the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty said the WEC memos flout Wisconsins election rules, noting that state law says voting by absentee ballot is a privilege exercised wholly outside the traditional safeguards of the polling place, according to a press release from the firm. The law additionally says, The envelope [containing the ballot] shall be mailed by the elector, or delivered in person, to the municipal clerk issuing the ballot or ballots.

Several days ago, the Wisconsin Supreme Court declined to hear a lawsuit regarding drop boxes, tossing a case by a GOP donor named Jere Fabick who alleged the WEC triggered election irregularities by sending out the guidance documents about drop boxes last year. That lawsuit was among many that stemmed from the November 2020 election after a series of challenges from former President Donald Trumps team and third-party lawyers.

In the latest lawsuit, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty argues that it is not challenging the results of the November election and wants Wisconsin state law to be enforced during the upcoming 2022 elections.

A drop-box is not the municipal clerk. It is an unsupervised, inanimate object, the suit reads. Allowing ballots to be cast by placing them into an unsupervised, inanimate object invites the fraud and abuse that the Legislature was attempting to prevent by requiring strict compliance with the requirement that absentee ballots could only be cast by the two methods allowed, it said, noting that the law says the absentee ballots can only be sent in via the U.S. mail and by handing it off to a clerk.

The state Supreme Court, when ruling in another lawsuit relating to drop boxes, didnt examine their legal status because of the timing of the challenge, which came after the November election, according to the news release.

A spokesperson for Law Forward, a left-leaning group focused on voting issues, characterized Wisconsin Institute for Law & Libertys suit as baseless. The group noted that several Republican lawmakers in the state publicly endorsed the use of ballot drop boxes last year.

WILL and their allies have been attacking absentee voting and drop boxes in Wisconsin throughout 2020 and 2021 with no success. Courts have turned away these challenges over and over again, Law Forwards counsel, Mel Barnes, told the Journal-Sentinel.

Disability Rights Wisconsin, a group representing voters with disabilities told the paper that ballot drop boxes should remain in the state as they allow for increased participation of voters with disabilities and other Wisconsin voters.

The WEC hasnt yet responded to a request for comment.
Italy's Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio speaks during a news conference with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken at Fiera Roma in Rome, Italy, on June 28, 2021. (Andrew Harnik/Pool via Reuters)

Italy Says Its Relations With US Far More Important Than With China

ROMEItalian Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio said on Monday that Romes relations with the United States are much more important than its ties with China.

The United States has expressed concern over Italys links to China, particularly after a previous Italian government signed up to Beijings Belt and Road infrastructure drive in 2019.

We are a strong trade partner with China, we have a historic relationship, but it is absolutely not comparable, and it does not interfere with, the alliance of values we have with the United States, Di Maio said at a news conference with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
A pedestrian walks by a Now Hiring sign outside of a Lamps Plus store in San Francisco, on June 3, 2021. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Jobs Recovery Gains Speed in States That Are Ending Federal Benefits

WASHINGTONMany economists are scrambling to weigh whether the federal pandemic unemployment benefits have really discouraged workers from returning to work. There are a variety of factors contributing to the current labor shortage, they say. Early signs, however, show an acceleration in the labor market recovery in states that have ended the supplemental federal benefits early.

Severe labor shortages across the country have prompted 26 statesall but one led by Republican governorsto opt out of the expanded benefit program ahead of its expiration on Sept. 6. The effect on employment data wont be fully visible until early August when the July jobs report is published. However, continued claims for regular unemployment benefits have recently declined faster in those states that are ending the extra $300 weekly unemployment insurance early. A similar pattern is also observed in initial claims.

Expiration of unemployment insurance benefits will likely provide a tailwind to hiring in the coming months, according to Jan Hatzius, a chief economist at Goldman Sachs.

Our baseline assumption is that expiring benefits will boost job growth by over 150k in July and over 400k in September, Hatzius wrote in a report dated June 11, noting, however, that theres high uncertainty around these estimates.

Some other early signs also hint at a fast recovery in those states. For example, ZipRecruiter, a U.S. employment marketplace for job seekers and employers, has noted a rapid rise in job applications.

According to ZipRecruiters job search data, the number of applications submitted from the week ending June 12 to the week ending June 19 jumped 7.6 percent for statesAlaska, Iowa, Mississippi, and Missourithat had ended the enhanced benefits on June 12. This is compared to 1.3 percent in states that will maintain benefits until Labor Day (Sept. 6).

The results were even higherbetween 11.5 and 15 percentin states that were set to end the benefits on June 19, 26, and 27.

Job search sites have more frequent data on job search activity and are a valuable source of information on whats going on in real time, Julia Pollak, ZipRecruiters labor economist, told The Epoch Times.

To observe the labor market trends, ZipRecruiter is tracking the response to the expiration of enhanced benefits of job seeker clicks, application volumes, and searches in each state.

There was little difference in trends across states before June, according to Pollak.

However, after the Memorial Day holiday week ending June 5, there has been an uptick in some of the metrics in those states that are ending the enhanced benefits.

But it is too soon to tell for sure, Pollak said.

Millions of Americans are still unemployed, even as many business owners are having trouble filling jobs. Employers posted a record 9.3 million job openings in April as the economy continues to recover. And job positions are opening faster than businesses can fill them.

HomeGrounds, based in Westbury, New York, is a small business that provides an online community and content for coffee hobbyists. In the midst of a pandemic digital boom, the company has sought to grow, but its short of staff.

Youd think a digital business would be the easiest for finding workers during and after the pandemic. Its been such a trial, Alex Mastin, CEO of Home Grounds, told The Epoch Times.

Launched in 2015, HomeGrounds was recently acquired by digital media company Blexr. The online platform is looking to hire 10 people, including digital content creators, search engine optimization experts, web developers, and user experience specialists. All of the positions are remote, which makes it easy for job seekers who are concerned about returning to work due to COVID-19.

Weve tried any number of tactics, Mastin said, including headhunters, incentives, and easy applications but we have found no magic bullet.

Many business owners say they cant compete with the rich federal benefits, which incentivize people to stay home instead of working. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has called for all remaining states to end the $300 weekly unemployment supplement early to address the countrys ever-worsening workforce crisis.

Many Democrats and economists, however, dont see enhanced unemployment benefits as a key bottleneck for labor supply. They say factors including a lack of child care, ongoing health risks, skills mismatches, and jobless benefits are collectively holding back people from returning to work.

Concern about COVID-19 is the most cited reason that holds people back from rejoining the labor force, according to a survey by the Indeed Hiring Lab, which provides research on the global labor market.

The survey among 5,000 people in the United States between the ages of 18 and 64 found that only about 10 percent of respondents were urgently looking for a job. Spousal earnings, household savings, and enhanced unemployment benefits are other factors that allow unemployed workers to be patient, according to the survey.

This is an employees bargaining chip now, President Joe Biden told journalists on June 24 at the White House.

The solution to attracting workers, according to Biden, is to pay them more.

There is an increase in job postings that advertise bonuses and other incentives. Due to the labor shortage, the share of job postings that offer signing bonuses has increased to 20 percent recently from 2 percent, according to ZipRecruiter.

We have hired 20 people this year, but it gets harder and harder, Jim Jacobs, CEO and founder of Focus Insite, told The Epoch Times. Why would people work when they can make $47,000 a year on unemployment?

Based in Pennsylvania, Focus Insite is a market research company that provides recruitment for focus groups, online studies, and interviews.

Jacobs believes Pennsylvania has been brutal with the extension of benefits.

Since we have fully transitioned to a 100 percent remote company, we are specifically looking to recruit from only business-friendly states moving forward, Jacobs said.
Chinese communist propaganda app Xuexi Qiangguo, which literally translates as 'Study to make China strong,' is seen on a mobile phone in front of its website on a computer in this illustration picture taken February 18, 2019. (Tingshu Wang/Reuters)

Leaked Documents Reveal How CCP Uses Mobile App to Brainwash Its Citizens

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has ratcheted up its nationwide brainwashing efforts through the use of a mobile app to get citizens to accept CCP ideology and follow the Party narrative, leaked government documents obtained by The Epoch Times reveal.

The documents, issued by the CCPs Propaganda Department of the Guangxi Region in January 2019, expose the directives and implementation plans as to how the CCP fully mobilized all levels of its propaganda departments and all necessary resources when it rolled out the propaganda app across China.

The app Xuexi Qiangguo, which literally translates as Study to make China strong, quickly became the nations most downloaded app after it was launched by the Central Propaganda Department (CPD) in January 2019.

The app platform features what is officially called Xi Jinping Thought for Socialism with Chinese Characteristics in a New Era, communist ideology extracted from a collection of writings and important speeches by Xi and enshrined in the state and Party constitutions, calling for significant advancement of the countrys economic, technological, and military might by 2035. With a logo reading study in Chinese, or study Xi as a pun, Xuexi Qiangguo implies that studying the Party leaders words makes the country strong.

According to the documents, the CPD has been building the app since November 2017 in order for all Party members, cadres, and the masses nationwide to thoroughly study, propagandize, and comply with Xis political ideology.

Brainwash and Control Chinese People

Following the directives by the CPD and the Party Committee of the Guangxi region, a regional leadership work team, led by the regional Propaganda Department head, was established to oversee all work teams at lower levels that strive to promote the app in all fields, all fronts, all walks of life  to ensure that Xi Jinping Thought and the spirit of the Partys 19th National Congress take deep root in the hearts of people everywhere across the region, the leaked document states.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping applauds during the closing session of the National Peoples Congress at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on March 11, 2021. (Nicolas Asfouri/AFP via Getty Images)

To effectively achieve that goal, three task forces were to be established by the Propaganda Department of the Guangxi region, the documents indicate.

The first is a monitoring team, consisting of administrators appointed by the Party committees at all levels across the region, with each member responsible for organizing, supervising, inspecting, and reporting on the daily participation in the study on the app platform at his or her workplace.

The second is a propaganda team of Party-appointed correspondents from major CCP media outlets, responsible for censoring and feeding the app content to fully cover each county, city, and district throughout the region in a timely manner.

The third is a team of the Chinese regimes internet trolls, known as wumao dang in Chinese, or 50 cent army. Major media outlets, universities, and research institutions are required to recruit a group of online commentators, to work exclusively for the app platform and have themselves registered with and supervised by cyberspace administrators at all levels. Commentators are required to actively write comments, reply to comments, and promote key articles.

In addition, an enforcement mechanism was set up to ensure that all on the teams are evaluated and held responsible for how well each individual performs his or her duties.

Meanwhile, another mechanism for assessment and incentive was established to boost the individuals engagement with the app in all departments and units throughout the region. Rewards are given according to the points earned from the amount of time spent studying the app content.

The internal documents reveal that the platform was used not only to impose the CCPs ideology on Chinese citizens, but to also propagandize what the regime calls achievements in areas such as epidemic prevention and poverty eradication.

Of course, no one would ever report on or even mention the true pandemic situation across China, such as the origin of the CCP virus in Wuhan, which created a pandemic thats ravaging the world.

Digital Surveillance Backdoor Uncovered

Xuexi Qiangguo was developed by Chinas tech giant Alibaba, which is another example of a Chinese tech company collaborating with the Chinese regime, since Alibaba founder Jack Ma is a member of the CCP. The app has a potential backdoor that allows the CCP to log the locations, calls, and contact lists of its massive number of users, according to a report by German cybersecurity company Cure53.

The report raises security concerns as the CCP is tightening digital surveillance of its citizens while simultaneously brainwashing them. It also reveals the close relationship between the Party and Chinas tech companies, which are required to collaborate with Beijing to further the regimes goals.

Another Way to Brainwash the Nation

Communist Party members using the Xuexi Qiangguo app during a weekly meeting in Beijing in February 2019. Tens of millions of Chinese are now using the app, often under pressure from the regime. (Jason Lee/Reuters)

Xuexi Qiangguo has been touted as the most popular Chinese app, surpassing big hitters like WeChat and TikTok in the mainland following its debut in January 2019. Its runaway popularity can be attributed to directives issued by the regimes state and local authorities at all levels that require not only its more than 90 million CCP members but also many non-member Chinese citizens to download the app, as it aims to brainwash the nation, especially the youth.

The app has been likened to a digital version of the once-ubiquitous Little Red Book, containing quotations of the late CCP leader Mao Zedong, which was mandatory to own and carry during the Cultural Revolution (19661976).

As the leaked documents show, the CCP requires all propaganda departments, at all levels, to actively mobilize all departments and units across China to use the app, including state-owned enterprises, state-run institutions, privately owned companies, and schools.

For example, in Guanxi, the regional Propaganda Department worked with the Ministry of Education to require all primary and secondary school pupils and college students in the region to download the app and in this way instill the CCP ideology in them, according to an internal document issued by the CPD on March 18, 2020.

Beginning in the fall 2020 semester, 37 key colleges and universities across the country added a new course to their curriculum called Xi Jinping Thought, according to the CCPs theoretical journal, Seeking the Truth.

According to Li Linyi, a commentator on China and international affairs, the CCPs brainwashing and thought control targets all of society. For example, the CCP is forcing Chinese people of all ages and from all walks of life to download and use Xuexi Qiangguo. This is done through various means, such as administrative orders or as an imposed requirement through performance reviews.

Long Tengyun contributed to this report.
Most Americans Want No Government Action on Delta Variant of CCP Virus: Poll

A new poll by Trafalgar in partnership with Convention of States Action shows that most Americans want no government action on the Delta variant of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, a highly infectious mutation that some health officials predict will soon become the dominant strain in the United States.

The poll, released on Monday and based on a representative sample of 1,101 likely general election voters, asked respondents about what they think the response should be as the Delta variant continues to spread in the country.

A strong majority (63.0 percent) said that government should take no action and that, with the widespread availability of the vaccines and treatments individuals can make personal decisions on how to respond.

Respondents who identified as Republicans showed the greatest opposition to government action in response to the Delta variant, with 83.4 percent saying that government should stay on the sidelines.

Democrat respondents, who in past polls have tended to favor stronger government measures in response to the CCP virus, were also mostly opposed, with 50.1 percent saying they want no government action.

At the same time, 17.7 percent of all respondents said the government should reinstate mask-wearing and social distancing mandates, while 7.0 percent said they also want lockdowns in addition to mask and distancing requirements.

Only 7.2 percent of Republicans said they want mask and distancing mandates, while just 2.4 percent said they also want lockdowns.

By contrast, 25.8 percent of Democrats said they want the government to impose mask-wearing and social distancing restrictions in response to the Delta variant threat, while 11.3 percent said they also want lockdowns.

The poll comes as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently labeled the Delta mutation, which was first identified in India, as a variant of concern, while the head of the agency, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, has said she expects it to become the dominant strain in the United States.

The UK variant was more transmissible. That is now nearly 70 percent of the virus here, she told CNN in an interview on June 18. We know that the Delta variant is even more transmissible than the UK variant, and I anticipate that will be the predominant variant in the months ahead.

The United States entered near-nationwide lockdown in the spring of 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Every state, as well as the federal government, has since rolled back restrictions, although some have kept rules in place despite a sharp improvement in COVID-19 metrics such as average daily cases and patients in hospitals.

Health officials have said lockdowns helped keep people safe, but some experts have argued the strategy had unintended consequences, including leading to skyrocketing unemployment, widespread business closures, and a rise in mental health issues.

President Joe Biden has said the prevalence of the Delta strain will be unlikely to prompt another lockdown in the United States.

I dont think so, because so many people have already been vaccinated, he said at the White House when asked about the possibility of another lockdown.

But the Delta variant can cause more people to die in areas where people have not been vaccinated, he said. So, no, its not a lockdown, but some areas will be very hurt.

The leaders of Germany and France recently urged fellow European Union leaders to take a firmer stand on travel from countries outside the bloc to combat the Delta variant, while worries that the strain could spark outbreaks have prompted the government of Australia to impose lockdowns in three large cities and curbs of varying strictness in several more, affecting more than 20 million Australians, or about 80 percent of the population.

Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.
New Bill to Regulate Online Hate Sparks Debate, Worries Free-Speech Advocates

The Liberal government introduced legislation to combat online hate speech the day before Parliament rose for the summer, causing alarm for free-speech advocates and sparking new political debate as a potential election looms.

Bill C-36 seeks to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act (CHRA) to address hate speech posted online, defined as that which expresses detestation or vilification of an individual or group of individuals on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination, such as race, religion, or sex. Speech that expresses mere dislike or disdain or that discredits, humiliates, hurts, or offends wouldnt be affected by C-36.

The bill also proposes to amend the Criminal Code such that someone who reasonably fears being a target of a hate crime or hate propaganda offence could apply to the court for a peace bond to deter that criminal conduct. If breached, the peace bond would carry a maximum penalty of four years imprisonment.

Cara Zwibel, a director with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, says she is not hopeful the peace bond will work or be used very much because it does still require the attorney generals consent.

Unless the government has some good evidence that this is a tool thats been tried elsewhere thats been successful, I dont know what would make them think this is a good experiment, Zwibel said in an interview.

Theres some vulnerabilities there in terms of the constitutionality, because the peace bond is really a preventative measure. Its a prior restraint on expression. I think the courts will be quite concerned about making sure that something does really rise to the level of criminal hate speech to use that power.

The legislation would also amend the CHRA to restore the ability for individuals and groups to file complaints to the Canadian Human Rights Commission, an ability that used to be contained in a controversial hate speech provisionSection 13in that act. The section was repealed in 2013 due to longstanding criticism that it violated free-speech rights.

The former section 13 defined hate speech as any communication likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt  on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.

Bill C-36, with its narrower hate speech definition, would also improve CHRA complaint procedures so that the commission can quickly screen out complaints that dont meet the definition.

Definition, Ambiguities, and Scope

Zwibel pointed out a flip side. If youre a body that is supposed to be responsive to marginalized and vulnerable populations coming to you with complaints about discrimination, and you turn around and say, Sorry, this isnt that bad because it doesnt rise to that level, then I think it puts the commissioner in a difficult situation, she said.

The ambiguities in what constitutes hate could also curtail legitimate speech, Zwibel noted.

Some people have a different understanding of what hate speech is and what the law says it is, so people may bring complaints about things that dont rise to the level of hate speech. And even if the commission does a great job of screening those things out, theres going to be a process and a time of investigating that can do real harm to people, and that can have a chilling effect on people in terms of what theyre willing to say, she explained.

According to Justice Canadas backgrounder on the bill, These amendments would apply to public communications by individual users on the Internet, including on social media, on personal websites, and in mass emails.  They would also apply to operators of websites that primarily publish their own content but also publish comments by users and visitors, including in articles on online newspapers and in user comment sections.

Zwibel says if C-36 applies to comment sections on websites, those sections might disappear altogether.

You just wont be able to comment on things because its not worth someone having to vet everything and be responsible for what other people have written. So thats the place where dialogue and debate might be shut down just to avoid these regulatory mechanisms.

Political Posturing

The federal government will consult Canadians on the legislation this summer. In a press release, Conservative MP and Justice Critic Rob Moore said the timing of the bills introduction suggested political posturing ahead of the next election.

Conservatives condemn all hate speech and speech that incites violence. But this bill will not target hate speechjust ensure bureaucrats in Ottawa are bogged down with frivolous complaints about tweets. The Minister responsible for the first censorship bill and the Trudeau Liberals are empowering a bureaucracy to subjectively restrict the rights of Canadians, Moore said.

University of Lethbridge political science professor Geoffrey Hale says that public response will depend on how the opposition voices its criticism of the bill, and how the issue is covered by the media.

He thinks most will be unaware of any shortcomings of the bill until it becomes law.

I suspect that public backlash on this bill will have to await actual abuses of power, many of which can be explained away by those who have no objections to the rationing of speech to those who think like themselves, Hale said.
New Mom Hails Pregnancy for Saving Her Life After Cancer Diagnosis at 31 Weeks Pregnant

A new mom says that her baby saved her life after she was diagnosed with breast cancer at 31 weeks pregnant.

Claire Hilton-Ellison, 30, from Liverpool, England, says she regularly examined her breasts during her pregnancy, which led her to spot a pea size lump in her right breast.

She gave birth to a healthy baby boy, Jude William, on Feb. 1 and is soon due to finish her chemotherapy.

Claire said: Being pregnant saved my life because if I wasnt checking I would never have known and it could have been too late for me.

It was November last year when I found a pea size lump in my right breast. It was just after my 30th birthday and I was also around 30 weeks pregnant.

It was quite a hard lump and not really moving, so I went to the doctors to get it checked out, and then I was referred to the breast clinic where they did an ultrasound scan and biopsies.

The results came back inconclusive so the doctors had to do more biopsies, but they had told me that they suspected it was going to be breast cancer.

I am glad they were honest with me about this because it softened the blow when I received my actual diagnosis as I had prepared myself for the worst and accepted it.

After further tests, Claire received confirmation of her diagnosis; stage-3 invasive breast cancer, at 31 weeks pregnant.

She says that she was terrified of her diagnosis but determined to beat her cancer for her unborn baby.

Claire said: It was such a roller coaster of emotions. One minute I was upset and sad, the next I felt in control and determined to beat this.

And then I would feel angry about why this was happening to me as I was soon to have my first baby.

She added: After receiving my treatment plan I was so scared that it would be a risk to my baby.

But my treatment was flipped so that I had the treatment that wouldve been harmful to Jude at the end after I had given birth to him.

So I started receiving chemotherapy through the third trimester until I had Jude, and then my chemotherapy started again three weeks after I had given birth.

While Claire hails her pregnancy for saving her life, she also says that her baby boy has given her a new level of determination to beat her breast cancer.

She said: Being pregnant and going through chemo was tough, but I was so determined to get through it because I need to be here for my baby that Id not even met yet.

And now having a newborn, the determination levels are even higher. I am one of the only people he relies on so it gives me that get up and go element.

Having Jude here has really helped me cope with it all and distracted me from all of the side effects from chemo.

She added: I havent wanted to let my cancer ruin my time as a new mum.

I make sure I am there for him and celebrating all of his milestones. He really is my saving grace. He puts me in a positive mindset because I need to be okay for him.

The treatment can cause infertility and bring on early menopause. I feel so lucky that I was able to fall pregnant when I did last May, because if I cant have any more kids then at least I have Jude and have the experience of being a mum to him.

Claire says that she wants to emphasize the importance of checking your body no matter what age because it can save lives.

She advises women to trust their gut and push to be seen at a breast clinic because it will save lives.

Time is so precious when it comes to cancer, she said.

Epoch Times staff contributed to this report.

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Newsom Sues to Get Listed as a Democrat on Recall Ballot, Citing Good Faith Mistake

California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday filed suit against California Secretary of State Shirley Weber in a bid to get his Democrat party affiliation included on the ballot for the states upcoming recall election after an error on the part of his staff led to its absence.

Newsoms office received formal notification of the recall election on Feb. 28, 2020, and in replying to it, his staff failed to list him as a Democrat, according to the complaint (pdf), filed in Sacramento County Superior Court and first reported by Courthouse News.

California election law requires someone in Newsoms position to indicate whether they want their party preference on the ballot when they file the answer to the recall notice of intent, which did not happen, due to an inadvertent but good faith mistake on the part of his elections attorney, the complaint states.

Upon discovering the mistake, Newsoms attorney filed a notice on June 19, 2020, to have his party preference included on the ballot, asking Weber to accept it.

But Weber declined, the complaint states, prompting the lawsuit, which seeks to require all recall ballots to include beside Newsoms name the words: Party Preference: Democratic.

Webers spokesperson, Joe Kocurek, told the Los Angeles Times in a statement that the Secretary of State is required to accept timely filed documents and that acceptance of filings beyond a deadline requires judicial resolution.

But Newsoms complaint argues that the deadline set forth in the elections code is arbitrary and serves no purpose related to the efficient administration of running the election.

Weber must accept his notice of party preference under the doctrine of substantial compliance, the complaint argues, while pointing to a California Supreme Court ruling that, an unreasonably literal or inflexible application of constitutional or statutory election procedural requirements that fails to take into account the purpose underlying the particular requirement at issue is inconsistent with the fundamental rights involved and should not be permitted.

Newsoms complaint also argues that including his party affiliation will help voters make an informed choice.

The voters would be deprived of the very information the Legislature has deemed important for them to receive, all because the governors counsel inadvertently failed to file a form about the governors ballot designation at least 16 months before the recall election has been called, the complaint states.

The effort to recall Newsom cleared its final hurdle on June 23 when Weber confirmed that enough signatures remained on the recall petition after voters had been given a chance to withdraw their support.

While no date for the election has been set, it could come as early as August or as late as November of this year.

The recall petition against Newsom is only the second to succeed against a governor in the states history. While every governor since 1960 has faced a formal recall petition, the only petition with enough signatures to trigger an election was the one against Gov. Gray Davis (D), who was, in the end, replaced by actor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

A year of whipsaw pandemic lockdowns, crushing job losses from business closures, Californias wallet-sapping taxes, and a raging homelessness crisis have focused the frustrations of Californians, with Newsom, given his role as governor, becoming the target of those resentments. Adding to that is intense criticism of Newsom for flouting his own pandemic lockdown rules by being spotted dining maskless, and an investigative report showing he misled the public about his wildfire prevention efforts.

Ivan Pentchoukov contributed to this report.
In this file image, a students arrives for their graduation ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall on October 13, 2015 in London, England. (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

NZ Lecturers Suspect Chinese Spies Infiltrated Their Classrooms

Three NZ university lecturers who specialise in China issues have described how individualsnot enrolled as studentswere present in their classrooms observing or photographing their lectures.

The revelations emerge as New Zealand (NZ) authorities work towards shoring up the countrys national security amid ongoing concerns of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) interference in domestic affairs.

Auckland Universitys Stephen Noakes, a senior lecturer in politics and international relations, said on one occasion someone was taking photos during his class.

There was someone I did not recognise in the room, and that person was pointing a phone around and taking pictures of the slides, he told the Red Line podcast series. It made me incredibly uncomfortable, and I followed it up afterwards. Ive not seen that person again.

Catherine Churchman, an expert in Chinese history at Victoria University in Wellington, said in 2017, a student began correcting her on her lecture content and telling her what the official position on certain historical issues were.

I looked at him, and I thought, What are you actually [doing] in my class anyway? And he said, Im, Im a visiting scholar. And I said, Well, youre not supposed to be here.

Churchman told the person to leave but revealed she later saw the person getting off a bus near the Chinese Embassy in Wellington, NZs capital.

The exterior of a lecture theatre at Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand on 16 April 2004. (Michael Bradley/Getty Images)

Maybe this was just completely coincidental. Maybe he lived there; I dont know, she said.

Anne-Marie Brady, a China expert at Canterbury University, said people would often show up in her class that she had never met before.

I was getting people turning up to my class who were not enrolled students and were there to either observe or disrupt. I just simply said, If you havent enrolled in my class, you havent paid the fees, you cant be here.

On one occasion in 2019, she had to force a woman to leave.

She really wanted to stay and observe and not just observeit was in a disruptive way, it was a somewhat intimidating way, for some of the other people in the class, she said.

Chris Whelan, the CEO of Universities NZ, said the group had received complaints of individuals attending classes and photographing students.

Were not aware necessarily whether its spying or exactly whats going on. Theres enough there we do have some concern, and were encouraging academics to be aware of this, he said.

He said universities were committed to protecting intellectual property and ensuring that NZs free and open society was not being undermined.

The revelations from Red Line come as the NZ government continues its steady recalibration of the NZ-China relationship.

According to Anne Marie-Brady, since 2018, the government has been passing new laws and implementing quiet policy adjustments to counteract foreign interference activities by Beijing in its domestic affairs.

This was evidenced by the double resignations of two Chinese MPs last year. Yang Jian from the National party resigned from Parliament on July 10, 2020, while Raymond Huo from the governing Labour party resigned just 11 days later, July 21.

Leaders from both major parties remained tight-lipped on whether NZs security agencies were involved in the resignations.

Concerns have also been raised over NZ universities providing technological know-how to Chinese institutions connected to the Peoples Liberation Army.
Officer Rolf Seiferheld of the Duluth Police Department talking to Harrison Humphries, 6, during the Food Truck Friday event in downtown Duluth on May 21. (Courtesy of Duluth Police Department)

Officer Mentors 6-Year-Old Boy Born Without Arms Who Wants to Become a Detective

A 6-year-old Georgia boy born without leg bones and arms wants to become a detective, and he has found the perfect mentor.

A veteran officer from the Duluth Police Department took a shine to the boy after meeting him on downtown patrol, and the pair have become firm friends.

Officer Rolf Seiferheld met Harrison Humphries in early 2021. They quickly learned that their values aligned.

Harrison wants to work in law enforcement to help people get better, reported 11 Alive.

Seiferheld enrolled with a similar philosophy: Be kind, and treat people how you want to be treated. Show them the respect they deserve, the officer told the news outlet.

Officer Rolf Seiferheld of the Duluth Police Department with Harrison Humphries. (Courtesy of Duluth Police Department)

In late May, a bystander caught a sweet interaction between Harrison and Seiferheld on camera. Duluth Police Department shared the picture on social media.

Someone attending last weeks Food Truck Friday event in Downtown Duluth witnessed our very own Officer Seiferheld taking a moment to speak to this little guy, they posted.

He was super excited as they spoke about his toy trucks and wanted to see Officer Seiferhelds patrol car!

Moments like these, the department said, show the true colors of local law enforcement.

Officer Rolf Seiferheld talking to Harrison Humphries during the Food Truck Friday event in downtown Duluth on May 21. (Courtesy of Duluth Police Department)

The boys mother, Tara, said Seiferheld has been nothing but kind and encouraging toward her son and his brother. Not many people take the time, and sometimes theyre scared to interact with Harrison, she said, according to the news report.

Harrison was born without arms and then also minimal bones in his legs, so he has the absence of his hips, fibulas, and femurs, Tara said, adding that they were told that her son would never be able to walk or feed himself.

However, the brave little Harrison ignored his prognosis, finding ways to do everything he needed to do using his feet the way many people use their hands.

Harrison can brush his teeth, brush his hair, and even tries to dress himself unassisted, said his proud mother.

Harrison during his first day of in-person kindergarten on Aug. 28, 2020. (Courtesy of Tara Denton Humphries)

His dream, said Tara, is to be a detective, or the head police in charge, reported 11 Alive.

Harrison and Seiferheld now meet up on the officers Friday night downtown patrols; the duo agrees that it is the best part of their week.

During their weekly meetings, Harrison and Seiferheld help each other out. While the officer can tell his protege all about life in law enforcement, the 6-year-old takes inventory of the officers kit.

Harrison has already beaten numerous odds. Seiferhelds support is further evidence to the 6-year-old, and his family, that everybodys dream is valid and anything is possible.

I think this is a relationship that can continue to grow, a partnership, which is what a community should be, Tara told the news outlet.

Officer Rolf Seiferheld with Harrison. (Courtesy of Duluth Police Department)

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Orange County Fire Authority Attorney Racks Up $40,000 in Travel Fees

The Orange County Fire Authority (OCFA) has spent more than $40,000 on a lawyers travel fees in the past three years, an expense that continues to draw the ire of some elected officials.

An attorney representing the OCFA was compensated $40,425 for billed travel between Los Angeles and Orange County from 2017 to 2020. The rate is significantly higher than the standard IRS prevailing rate of about $0.58 per mile.

Thats completely unacceptable, Orange County Supervisor and OCFA Director Lisa Bartlett said. That is not openness, transparency, or accountability in government.

Despite Bartletts criticism, the OCFA approved its annual budget on June 24 after it was amended for review due to previously raised concerns.

The proposed 202122 fiscal budget was approved by every director in attendance, with the exception of Bartlett, who originally raised issues during the initial May 27 hearing.

With some of these anomalies that have not been appropriately addressed, they need to have an internal audit of the administrative operations and procurement practices, Bartlett said.

Bartlett said that for the most part, the budget was in order. However, she cast a no vote mainly because the board continued to contract a law firm that charges hundreds of dollars per hour in travel expenses.

Bartlett said that none of the other boards and commissions she sits on pay an hourly rate for travel time.

Our goal is to try to save [money for] the contract cities that pay for the services every year, she said.

Documents obtained by The Epoch Times show that the travel fees paid to the lawyer during the three-year time frame accounted for 14 percent of the OCFA lawyers total invoice amount of $279,911.

When the board hired the firm Liebert Cassidy Whitmore in 2017, it approved a $350 per hour payment for work and travel time.

[The law firm] did not propose or offer an option that would have allowed for billing of travel time at the prevailing federal mileage rate of 57 cents per mile, according to a city report.

The board in 2018 voted to increase the lawyers retainer by an extra $25,000 per year for three years; the law firms contract was extended last year to expire in June 2023.

Director Don Wagner opposed extending the law firms contract last year.

Though Wagner approved the budget, he said he would like to either lower the cost of travel expenses for the law firm, or find another lawyer to deal with.

Wagner said that very same lawyer represented the city of Irvine while he was mayor. At that time, the law firm was paid an hourly rate, including travel time, he said.

I would like to see the cost of government reduced by reducing those fees paid to a lawyer, but it is not unique to the fire authority, Wagner said.

Wagner raised concerns about whether OCFAs finances were carried out in accordance with the boards requests.

During the June 24 budget hearing, many of those concerns were answered by staff, who did an exhaustive job answering the boards questions.  The directors were much more comfortable after hearing from staff in detail, Wagner said.

It is a good comprehensive budget that does what the agency, and the public that the agency serves, needs to do.
ROUND TOP, TX - JULY 04: Kaitlyn Tarnoswki, 14, carries an American flag while riding a horse during the 168th annual Round Top Fourth of July Parade on July 4, 2018 in Round Top, Texas. The Round Top community's Fourth of July celebration started in 1851 and is known as the longest running Fourth of July celebration west of the Mississippi. (Photo by Tamir Kalifa/Getty Images)

Our Sacred Honor: Reflections on the Fourth of July

The place: Philadelphia. The time: June 1776.

The Continental Congress appoints a Committee of FiveBenjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, Robert Livingston of New York, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, and chairman John Adams of Massachusettsto draw up a declaration of independence from Britain. Though John Adams seems the natural choice to write the initial draft of this document, he defers to the Virginian for several reasons, telling Jefferson by his own account, You can write ten times better than I can.

The committee agrees with Adams, and Jefferson takes up his pen.

On July 2, Congress votes to declare Americas independence from Great Britain, a date that Adams believes will be forever remembered. In a letter written to his wife Abigail on July 3, Adams asserts: The second day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival.

Adams is mistaken.

On July 3 and 4, Congress debates the declaration presented them by the committee, making changes in the wording. To avoid offending some of the Southern members of the Congress, for example, they strike out Jeffersons charge blaming the English monarchy for the importation of slaves into the colonies.

On the evening of July 4, Congress approves the document we now call the Declaration of Independence. Over the next days and weeks, members will sign the document, knowing that by doing so they are possibly signing their own death warrants as rebels against King George III.

Despite the alterations made by Congress, one of Jeffersons passages is left untouched:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The Creed

Jeffersons words lie at the heart of the American Creed.

Near the beginning of his latest book, Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America, Charles Murray favorably cites fellow writer Samuel Huntingdons definition of this creed: the political principles of liberty, equality, democracy, individualism, human rights, the rule of law, and private property.

For more than 200 years, these principles have served as the bedrock of our American Republic. We have struggled to live up to these ideals, fighting a Civil War, for instance, to put an end to slavery, and nearly a century later, battling to ensure that the descendants of those slaves achieved equality under the rule of law. Women also fought for and won the right to vote and for other rights as well. Human rights remain paramount concerns both in this country and abroad, and our emphasis on the individual and freedom is demonstrated in a myriad of court actions over the course of our history.

Its this creed that has drawn so many immigrants to our shores. The numbers of Europeans who processed through Ellis Island in the late 19th century came not only to enjoy the bountiful gifts of this country and its free enterprise system, but also to follow their dreams and breathe the air of liberty.

Freedom Breeds Prosperity

That creed, first envisioned by Jefferson and which might also go under the name of the American Dream, brought us prosperity and numerous privileges: the right to vote in elections, the right to a fair trial, the right to protest injustices, the right to go our own way for better or for worse. We may forget this Dream and its many benefits in the day-to-day exigencies of life, but its what has allowed us to live as we do.

And that liberty accounts for the great achievements of some of our citizens. Henry Fords mass production of the automobile, Thomas Edisons electric lights, Silicon Valleys computers and phones, the writers, painters, musicians, and filmmakers who practice their arts without fear of government censorship, the scientists who have discovered everything from cures for polio to improved methods of agriculture: all of these people accomplished these things because they possessed the freedom to do so.

The same holds true for the rest of us. Here in America, we still possess the wonderful opportunity to make of ourselves what we will, to go as far as we can, to develop our own businesses. Around me, I see young adults operating their own construction companies, running restaurants and website businesses, practicing law, working as nurses and doctors. Others of their own volition enter college or the trades, free to succeed or to fail as they will.

The Price of Liberty

The American Dream comes with a price tag.

On Memorial Day, we remember those who died for their country in our various wars. On Veterans Day, we honor those who served their country in uniform.

On Independence Day, we might do well to remember our predecessors who also sacrificed themselves for our benefit. The wealthy surgeon who sends his children off to the best universities is the son of a successful owner of a car dealership, who, in turn, is the son of an immigrant tailor in Brooklyn. The surgeons wife grew up in an affluent home, but her great-grandmother lost her father to death when she was 12, dropped out of school, and worked a variety of jobs to help her mother make ends meet.

Then there are the volunteers who helped forge our country. The Fourth of July is the perfect time to remember with gratitude those who even today give of their time and treasure to help others: the mechanic who finds time on the weekends to work in a food bank, the busy mom who volunteers at her childrens school, the retiree who plays the piano twice a week to entertain residents in a nursing home.

Nearly 250 years ago, a small band of prominent men vowed to pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor. Knowing that the consequences of that pledge might mean death by execution and the ruination of their families, these men did not take this oath lightly. Yet they were willing to give up everything, including their lives, for the cause of liberty.

We should treasure our freedoms and our rights, but if we forget that the foundation stones of these privileges are sacrifice, duty, and self-responsibility, liberty will die.

Patriotism and Celebration

Like the United States, many countries around the world set aside a day to celebrate their country. Canadians, for example, have their Dominion Day, and Australians honor their country on Australia Day.

This patriotism is a positive good. Some equate patriotism with nationalism, but the two are quite different. The patriot loves and honors his country; the nationalist believes his country is superior to other countries. A patriot values his patch of earth, the people who live there, and the ideals upon which his country was founded. He has little interest in comparisons with other countries, any more than he would put his beloved mother into a competition against other moms.

To celebrate our patriotism here in America, we host backyard barbecues, head for the beach, plant American flags in the front yard, and shoot off fireworks. My wife used to dress our small children and herself in red, white, and blue for the day, and put out small flags along the front sidewalk of our house. Some of us may talk to our children about the American past or the Declaration; others may scarcely think of the holiday itself while they are grilling hamburgers or popping off bottle rockets. Whatever the circumstances, like those patriots of old who rang church bells and lighted bonfires to celebrate the Fourth of July, we are commemorating our liberties and our heritage.

When we celebrate the Fourth of July, we are observing more than our break with the British and the creation of our American nation. We are paying homage to one of the most remarkable documents in human history, to the venerable and universal proclamation of our Declaration of Independencethat human beings are all created equal, that by their very creation they possess certain inviolable rights, and that these truths are self-evident. To those Founding Fathers such as Jefferson, Adams, and the rest, humanitynot just Americansowes a debt of gratitude for these words alone.

Let me close with a remarkable story that seems closer to legend than to fact, but which is nonetheless true.

On July 4, 1826, exactly 50 years to the day after Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson and Adams died. That remarkable circumstance brings chills every time I remember it. What are the odds of these two men crossing the bar on the same day and on such an anniversary? What are the chances of that?

And yet it happened.

The last words spoken by Adams were Thomas Jefferson still lives, but Adams was wrong. His friend and sometime opponent Jefferson had taken his last breath five hours earlier at his home in Monticello.

But the words of Jefferson lived and should live still in the hearts and minds of patriots everywhere.

As we Americans celebrate Independence Day this year, lets be grateful for the republic those men gave us. More importantly, lets resolve to keep that republic alive.

Jeff Minick has four children and a growing platoon of grandchildren. For 20 years, he taught history, literature, and Latin to seminars of homeschooling students in Asheville, N.C. He is the author of two novels, Amanda Bell and Dust on Their Wings, and two works of non-fiction, Learning as I Go and Movies Make the Man. Today, he lives and writes in Front Royal, Va. See JeffMinick.com to follow his blog.
House State Government Committee Chairman Seth Grove (right) is the primary sponsor of the Voting Rights Protection Act (House Bill 1300) (Courtesy to Seth Grove)

Pennsylvania Senate Passes One of the Strongest Integrity Bills in the Country: Committee Chairman

The Pennsylvania Senate on June 25 passed a voting reform bill after it passed in the State House on June 22. The bill then went to Democrat Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolfs desk.

The Voting Rights Protection Act (HB1300) will require voter identification and a more stringent election audit.

This is a solid election reform bill, which simply ensures it is easier to vote and harder to cheat, the bills primary sponsor, House State Government Committee Chairman Seth Grove, told Epoch Times.

It is one of the strongest integrity bills in the entire country. Im really proud of the work of the House State Government Committee on this legislation, all the hearings. Weve had to provide the best election reform bill in the entire country that will modernize our system. And it is really great in ensuring that voters can trust the outcome of every election thereafter, Grove said.

The Voting Rights Protection Act came about after the House State Government Committee held 10 hearings from January through April, with 52 people of different backgrounds testifying.

Voter IDs and Signature Verification

The bill expands election security by ensuring voter identification through an updated county-provided voter registration card; creating an election fraud hotline; banning private donations to counties for election administration; and doubling penalties for election code violations.

We basically took every security and integrity process of every other state and put it in the bill, Grove said. Voter ID for in-person signature verification, which Pennsylvania had up until the 2020 General Election when the Supreme Court removed that. We bring that back in. We require training for elections directors for signature verification, we buy county sorters with artificial intelligence to help with signature verification on mail-in ballot applications requiring two unique identifiers.

Voter ID has widespread support in Pennsylvania and nationally. In a recent poll by Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 74 percent of Pennsylvania responders, including Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, said they support voter ID, and 81percent support signature verification. According to a recent Monmouth University poll, nationally 80 percent of Americans support voter ID.

Grove said these surveys show what the American public wants: They want secure elections. They want trust brought back in their elections. They want common-sense provisions, like we have in HB1300, for signature verification, and voter ID.

The Voting Rights Protection Act ensures security and rebuilds trust in elections after voters from both Democratic and Republican Parties have questioned the outcomes of the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.

In addition, the bill would also expand access to early in-person voting and curbside voting, improve voter rolls, and require audits after every election.

Voter Rolls and Voter Registration

Grove said voter rolls are a huge issue in Pennsylvania. A private organization recently sued Pennsylvania because we had over 20,000 deceased people still on the rolls. There are salient internal control failures within our election system.

According to Grove, there are two major problems that have the potential to create systematic voter fraud in Pennsylvania.

One problem is that the current law doesnt require election directors to validate a voters registration application to make sure the person can legally vote in Pennsylvania.

So you can have an organization that dumps 10,000 voters registerednew voter registration applicationson a county right before an election, Grove said. We closed that loophole by requiring the use of data analytics and verification. They have to verify before they add someone to the voter registration.

Another problem, according to Grove, is the Web API, which allows third parties to create a website, register voters, and capture all the personal information-name, address, unique identifiers, Social Security number, drivers license, and signature. And they can keep all that information internally for their use.

With mail-in ballots its the same as with voter applications, Grove said. Theres no internal control that would stop those third parties from taking these voter registrations and applying for ballots on behalf of those people, Grove said.

We end that entire Web API process, Grove said. To register, voters have to use the [Voter Registration] departments website.

Grove said they built provisions for the Department of State and counties to start using data analytics and doing fewer maintenance requirements to remove dead people, verify citizenship, and verify eligibility.

Were proposing the best audit function in the entire country. So were actually creating a bureau of election audits under our Auditor Generals office, Grove said.

Governor Wolf Threatened Veto

Pennsylvanias Governor Tom Wolf has stated that he will veto the bill if it reaches his desk.

Grove said the Governor has not negotiated with Pennsylvania Republicans on election reform. He explains what the State lawmakers are going to do in case the Governor vetoes the bill.

We will move on to doing a Constitutional Amendment for voter ID. And then we will be moving off of election reform, and were going to take it to the people if Governor Wolf doesnt want to work with us, Grove said.

Grove is confident that voter ID will become law through a ballot proposal, because these ballot questions in Pennsylvania pass 80 percent of the time, and support for voter ID is high. Were guaranteed to have voter ID in Pennsylvania, Grove said.

Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania Senate passed a Voter Verification Constitutional Amendment (SB735), sponsored by state Senator Judy Ward Senate, which allows voters to decide if the Pennsylvania Constitution should be amended to require identification each time a voter casts a ballot. Currently, Pennsylvania voters only need to provide an ID the first time they vote in person.

Currently HB1300 is waiting for Governor Wolfs decision to sign the bill into law, veto it, or allow it to become law without his signature.
Anti-China protestors mount a protest rally against China's territorial claims in the South China Sea in front of the Chinese Consulate in Makati, Philippines, on July 12, 2016. Philippines brought the case to Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague to challenge Chinas actions and claims in the South China Sea, which was ruled decisively in favor of the Philippines in July 2016. (Dondi Tawatao/Getty Images)

Playing the Race Card for China

Commentary

The concept of racism is being Shanghaied as soft-on-China individuals, from Canadas Prime Minister to a young influencer on TikTok, deploy the idea against critics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). These politicians, a professor, and an influencer, all acting in an ideological capacity, tend not to use actual examples of real individuals who they claim are racist. Rather, they discredit classes of criticism, for example of China by young people who use the term as shorthand for Chinas government, or of Chinas political influence in democratic politics in the West.

In May, Prime Minister Trudeau effectively linked criticism of Chinas technology theft, with racism. During a debate  about the dismissal of two Chinese scientists from the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg, Trudeau appeared to suggest that Conservative MPs [members of parliament] were feeding anti-Asian sentiments by asking questions, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. I hope that my Conservative Party colleagues are not raising fears about Asian Canadians, Trudeau told the Commons. The MPs had in no way done so. It was Trudeau who first utilized such broadly racialized language in a negative sense within that debate.

In response, Uyghur and Tibetan activists in Canada who have been targeted with harassment by the CCP, soundly criticized the prime minister. Folks who claim to be standing up against anti-Asian hatred and racism, please, listen to your constituents and Asian voices, Tibetan activist Chemi Lhamo said. Her campaign for University of Toronto (Scarborough Campus) student union president had previously provoked threats from Chinese nationalists.

As an Asian woman, there is a bigger target on my back, and conflating the idea of anti-CCP with anti-Asian is actually a much bigger disrespect, Lhamo said at a Commons special committee this summer.

Chemi Lhamo, a student at the University of Toronto Scarborough, in this undated photo. (Courtesy of Chemi Lhamo)

I think our prime minister is really confused, Uyghur activist Rukiye Turdush told the committee. If were against the CCP, it doesnt mean were against the Chinese people. It has nothing to do with anti-Asian racism. I really didnt get why he said that.

The most prominent recent example are two Canadians, themselves linked to Chinas political and business networks, claiming that anti-China sentiment is somehow linked to anti-Asian hate and that opposition to Chinas influence operations in Canada crosses a threshold into racism.

Two facts stand out: Anti-China sentiment is rising across the country, and so is anti-Asian hate. How are the two connected? write Professor Paul Evans and Senator Yuen Pau Woo said in one of Canadas leading newspapers, The Globe and Mail. The two Canadians, one of whom is a political science professor, do not mention that the correlation of two data points do not even imply, much less prove, causation. Yet the two hype the public discussion on China as toxic, racist, and McCarthyist in tone.

The Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI) in Canada, which partners with Concordia University, identified Evans and Woos Globe article as disinformation lacking in evidence to substantiate its claim that exaggerated portrayals in the media of the reach and influence of Chinese organizations such as the United Front, Confucius Institutes and the Thousand Talents programs have contributed to racial profiling and stigmatization of people of Chinese descent.

Professor Evans and Senator Woo both declined requests for comment.

Few who are knowledgeable and honest about China and racism will take seriously the authors claims of a link between racism and anti-China sentiment (which is almost always anti-Chinese Communist Party sentiment). Those who are toughest on China, such as the folks (full disclosure) who run this newspaper, are often Chinese themselves. My own editor at The Epoch Times was born in, grew up in, and worked in mainland China for years.

Effect on Young People of Racism Claims

But toxic claims of racism might just scare the naive from talking with each other about Chinas growing influence among elites in Canada, the United States, India, Japan, and other countries globally. Using scare words like racism has a chilling effect on efforts to hold the Chinese Communist Party accountable for its genocide and other human rights abuse, including against minority groups in China such as Uyghurs, Tibetans, Falun Gong, Christians, and Hongkongers (yes, Hong Kong is now a de facto part of China).

An Uyghur woman (C) goes through an entrance to a bazaar in Hotan, in Chinas northwest Xinjiang region, on May 31, 2019. (Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images)

An American high school teacher and activist in Japan recently wrote to me that two young people he knows were concerned about the conflation of criticism of China and racism.

When the Stop Asian Hate movement took off  a college student at Temple University in Japan, told me to stop pushing my petition [to let Taiwan be Taiwan, instead of Chinese Taipei, at the Tokyo Olympics] for awhile and forget trying to get any media attention, wrote Lindell Lucy on June 25. He thought I would get tarred as racist. He had a bad experience at Temple, himself getting unjustly accused of racism. He is half white [and] half Japanese.

The same teacher sent me a TikTok video that upset one of his students of Indian descent. The video shows a young TikTok influencer, midwestern Marxist Eddie Liger Smith, with 16.7 million likes, criticizing anti-China views as racist, and encouraging people to read Xi Jinpings book, which he holds up for all to see. In another video, he holds up Marxs Capital.

The Smith video opens with a banner stating, Stop the Sinophobia. Smith then says, The US Empire always weaponizes xenophobia and racism, fear of the other. This was the war on terror. Ahh, Americans, you need to be terrified of Muslim people, theyre terrorists. Here Smith uses superlatives and false statements that create a sense of anger among his listeners. In fact the war on terror included extensive participation by Muslim countries and supporters, and the United States is in no way an empire.

Smiths target audience is the young left. Prominent in the video background is a banner reading Bernie. The Marxist influencer states, And now [Americans are] doing the same thing [weaponizing racism] with China, and I feel like a lot of people on the left dont even realize it. If you look at any of the corporate medias coverage of China, theres nothing besides portraying this country as evil supervillains. Again, Smith uses falsehoods and superlatives when in fact mainstream media frequently lauded the supposed efficiency of Chinas measures to contain COVID-19, for example.

Smith then conflates criticism of the CCP with hate of the Chinese people. He says, And now its become really trendy on the left to hate China. Yeah Im a socialist but F*** China, bro. Really? F*** an entire country of 1.4 billion people?

He then draws a connection between criticism of China with hate crimes against Asian-Americans, but does not clarify what the connection might be. Youre really comfortable saying [F*** China] as hate crimes against Asian-Americans happen all over? Smith tells his 280,000 followers.

Ive seen people accusing me of worshipping China. I dont worship China. I have critiques of them, mostly surrounding corruption and their giant private market which exploits workers. Here Smith attempts to buttress his own credibility as an independent analyst by critiquing China. But he does so from a CCP perspective, as the criticisms he has are those already made by Xi Jinping himself.

I dont hate a country of 1.4 billion people. And [holding up Xi Jinpings book] I choose to read about their country from people who actually live in their country. Because I know western media is lying to me, he says.

Supposed lies by the western media is another CCP talking point. Nowhere does Smith acknowledge that there is little freedom of speech in China, so only reading authors who live there is likely to yield an analysis that is biased towards the CCP perspective. Reading Xi Jinping is not worshiping China, thats taking the time to research China so I dont spread sinophobic nonsense, he ends.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping attends the opening ceremony of the Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, on March 4, 2021. (Leo Ramirez/AFP via Getty Images)

Russian and Chinese Disinformation Against the Elite Capture Thesis

Many of the same themes are found in the Evans and Woo article, and proliferate through the CCPs United Front Work Department (UFWD) groups that operate globally.

MLI frequently covers Russian disinformation, and draws a parallel with the Globe opinion article. Accusing the critics of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes of racism was pioneered during the Soviet era and is a tactic that has been deployed with prolific zeal by the government of Vladimir Putin, the MLI authors write. The accusation of prejudice against Russiansor Russophobiais leveled at those who criticize the Kremlins repression of human rights activists . The goal of this tactic is to discredit dissidents and critics, and to deflect attention away from Russian government abuses.

MLI notes that the authors derogatory use of a 1950s McCarthy era reference follows Kremlin and Beijing talking points. This is a tactic frequently employed by authoritarian regimes who seek to discredit critics of their policies by accusing them of irrationality, according to the MLI analysis. The Kremlin started using the label in earnest when Russian interference in the US 2016 presidential election became a concern.

The Globe authors single-out the elite capture thesis for criticism. They call questioning the loyalty of people with pro-Beijing views extreme. But Charles Burton, a Senior Fellow at MLI, explains that elite capture by the PRCs integrated party-state-military-security-industrial complex is a disturbing reality in Canada. There is a cohort of influential Canadians who directly or indirectly receive benefits from the PRC because they receive income from the Chinese regime by board memberships or other paid associations such as consultancies, or they receive income from Canadian companies who do business with the Chinese regime, or they are associated with law firms who represent Chinese firms or Canadian firms who do business with the Chinese regime, or they receive income from policy think tanks in Canada who receive funding from China-associated sources such as Canadian companies who do business with the Chinese regime.

Dr. Burton wrote that, A correlation can be established showing that such persons have exerted influence over Canadas China policy formulation in ways that support the PRCs geopolitical interests.

Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) and Chinese leader Xi Jinping (R) attend the Tsinghua Universitys ceremony at Friendship Palace in Beijing, China, on April 26, 2019. (Kenzaburo Fukuhara/Pool/Getty Images)

There are dozens of examples of western academics and politicians (or former politicians) with financial ties to China, who go on to promote Chinas talking points around the world. Three of the most influential recent books on the CCPs influence globally, which include these examples, are Clive Hamiltons Silent Invasion, which addresses the issue in Australia, Hamilton and Mareike Ohlbergs Hidden Hand, which explores Chinas global influence, followed most recently by Sam Coopers Wilful Blindness, about Chinas influence in Canada. (Full disclosure: the latter two are published in North America by my publisher, Optimum Publishing International in Toronto).

Context for Claims of Racism

Professor Evans, who is the HSBC Chair in Asian Research at the University of British Columbia (UBC), appears in the final book. Given what we know about Professor Evans and Senator Woo, the two at times appear to be arguing in self-defense. So, it is odd that the Globe published their article without providing editorial context to the reader.

As Mark Stencel, co-director of the Duke Reporters Lab, and Eric MacDicken, a consultant whose work has been used by the National Press Club write in the Columbia Journalism Review, what information viewers want is not only commentators views but also more recent political activities and sources of income. The CJR authors advise provision of nutrition labels for the discerning media consumer.

Some of that necessary context is supplied here.

Professor Evanss UBC profile lists his involvement in a project with the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and funding from the Chinese government. From 1990 to 2002, according to UBC, he organized two dozen meetings involving participants from North Korea. Professor Evans reportedly has links to Huawei, including 2019 travel to its headquarters in Shenzhen, China for a meeting with the company founder.

The other Globe author, Senator Woo, was appointed to his position by Prime Minister Trudeau, who himself has links to China. According to Coopers book, Trudeau met with individuals linked to Chinas government at cash-for-access events, and his family foundation received $1 million from a Chinese official in 2016. In connection to the donation, Trudeau met twice with a real estate tycoon who runs Canadas largest ever illegal casino.

Professors Evans named professorship is for HSBC, a bank that donated millions of dollars to UBC, and is making money hand-over-fist in China (including Hong Kong and Macau). HSBCs chief executive in Asia for a decade was a member of a political advisory body to the Chinese Communist Party. He oversaw a 2020 strategy to redeploy over $100 billion to Asia, and cut 35,000 jobs by selling its retail branches in France and the United States.

Evans roles for UBCs School of Public Policy and Global Affairs (SPPGA) and the Institute of Asian Research (IAR) sound like an ideal vehicle for UBC and China influence operations. This two-year appointment is designed to enhance the policy engagement work of the IAR and SPPGA on Asia policy; promote better collaboration with suitable Asian institutions and counterparts; and extend and deepen the Schools connections with Canadian policy communities, particularly the federal government and the B.C. provincial government.

Pro-democracy protesters are arrested by police in the Causeway Bay district of Hong Kong on May 24, 2020. (Isaac Lawrence/AFP via Getty Images)

According to Dr. Burton, the phrasing of Evans role suggests a lobbying function. Shouldnt students, parents, and newspaper readers insist that their professors and opinion article writers, especially those with links to a totalitarian state, be unbiased teachers and researchers, rather than have any appearance of impropriety or bias as lobbyists?

Despite HSBCs substantial financial ties to China, and an accusation that the bank was aiding and abetting one of the biggest crackdowns on democracy in the world in Hong Kong, the Globe and Mail opinion article by an HSBC professor with at least one financial link to the Chinese regime, has no conflict of interest acknowledgement, as is standard for reputable papers.

Some newspapers have since 2016 made over $4 million from China Daily inserts designed to look like legitimate news articles. The Globe has also produced pay-for-play China Daily articles that were inadequately labeled as advertising for readers, according to the Globes own publisher and CEO, Phillip Crawley.

The Globe is owned by the Thomson family, with a reported net worth of $45.6 billion in 2021. David Thomson serves as chairman of Thomson Reuters, a major global news provider. He shouldnt cheapen the name of Canadas newspaper of record, or Reuters news, by allowing one of his papers to shill for a totalitarian communist regime, when he can afford to run the paper without those particularly tainted revenues. Sometimes a billionaire should step up and pay a penny to do the right thing for his country. When he doesnt do so voluntarily, his country should legislate against the totalitarian propaganda that his newspaper publishes as advertisements.

Before being made a senator, Mr. Woo was president of HQ Vancouver, established as a jointly-funded government-business venture in 2015 to spend millions of Canadian taxpayer dollars bringing Asian business to British Columbia (B.C.). The project mostly brought PRC companies, and was criticized by a Carleton University professor for bringing those with murky ownership structures that might not be bringing anything real to B.C.

HQ Vancouver touted Canadas federal and provincial tax credits to which Chinese companies could apply. However, Canadian taxpayers were not made privy to which companies, if any, won such credits. Some of the companies that HQ Vancouver brought had technical or military links, making them perfect vehicles for the transfer of sensitive military technologies to China. China Poly, a massive state-owned defense contractor, opened an office of the linked Poly Culture Group in Vancouver. China Polys governance and ownership are shadowy. China Poly Group was sanctioned from 2013 to 2015 by the United States for alleged violations of the Iran, North Korea, and Syria Nonproliferation Act. The Poly Culture Group planned to use Vancouver for two-way cultural exchanges.

HQ Vancouver also touted Zhiye Photoelectric Precision Technology of Nanjing, which manufactures optical components for telescopes and gun sights, as one of its success stories. China Fiber Optic Network System Group, probed by officials for its financial statements, operated an R&D facility in B.C. through a subsidiary, and was highlighted by HQ Vancouver. HQ Vancouver never mentioned that Chinas small arms sales globally are some of the least transparent, and therefore likely a cause of international conflicts and terrorism that lead to millions of deaths annually.

From a document that Senator Woos office allegedly repeatedly removed from its website, but that was publicly archived in 2019, it appears that the Senator led a forum discussion in a manner biased against proposed foreign agent registration laws in Canada. A panel discussion in 2018 that Senator Woo moderated, appears from the outset to have been geared to minimize the problem of foreign influence, tar concerns about it with racism, and problematize proposals for foreign agent registration laws in Canada.

According to the document, the panel discussion was Co-sponsored by Liberal MP Joyce Murray, NDP MP Don Davies, Conservative Senator Victor Oh, and Independent Senator Yuen Pau Woo. The event appeared to be biased in Beijings favor from the start as it was described as being designed to advance parliamentarians understanding of the issues in order to minimize the risk of politicization and public over-reaction to concerns about Chinese influence and interference. By learning from the US and Australian experience, Canada can avoid missteps taken in those countries and instead chart a response that is appropriate to our circumstances, needs, and priorities. Emphases are my own.

The event appears to have been geared towards influencing influential parliamentarians and staffers in Canada under secretive Chatham House rules that allow the conveyance of information anonymously. Following presentations by the four panelists, Senator Yuen Pau Woo moderated a discussion with members of the audience, which consisted of parliamentarians and Hill staffers, as well as Ottawa-based China policy and intelligence/security analysts, according to the summary. The meeting was conducted under Chatham House rules. By conducting the event secretively, and only releasing the summary of the event, rather than a recording, Senator Woos office controlled the narrative.

The document was on the Senators site for some time with a brief hiatus but came back after a journalist asked why it was not there, according to Dr. Burton. When it was finally removed again is unclear.

Ironically, the summary on Senator Woos site itself falls prey to a mix of anti-racism and racism when it states, Fears about United Front infiltration of the Canadian Chinese community tend to overestimate the power of the United Front while underestimating the strength of antibodies in the community that can resist propaganda and manipulation. If anything, a climate of suspicion around the loyalty of Canadian citizens of Chinese ancestry will only make it [sic] the community more susceptible to foreign influence.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Chinese leader Xi Jinping greet each other during the official welcome at the G20 Leaders Summit in Hangzhou, China, on Sept. 4, 2016. (The Canadian Press/Adrian Wyld)

No examples are given for fears of UFWD infiltration of the Canadian Chinese community. No other western commentators on Chinas political and economic influence abroad, that I know of, single out Canadian citizens of Chinese ancestry as susceptible to foreign influence. But here Senator Woos document appears to make not only this incorrect case, but the incorrect case that suspicion of this community would only make it  more susceptible to foreign influence. The author of this document found on Senator Woos website is apparently inventing the very racism of which the Senator accuses others.

The only other entity I know of that does appear to believe that the Chinese diaspora is possibly more susceptible to Chinas influence is the CCP or its intelligence agencies, which reportedly targets those of Chinese ancestry for compromise. However, there is no evidence that those of Chinese ancestry are in fact any more susceptible to compromise than those of any other ancestry. It is not ethnicity that determines affinity with the CCP, according to my intelligence sources, but ideology, money, and other human weaknesses.

Professor Evans was also on the 2018 panel that by Senator Woos own document, was designed to counter opinion in favor of U.S. and Australian-style foreign agent registration laws. Evans mentored the infamous Cameron Ortis on his China-related doctoral thesis in approximately 2006, according to Coopers book and other reporting. The thesis addressed compromised nodes and the digital black market of transnational organized crime in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, China. It propelled Ortiss career, which ended abruptly as a high-level Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) intelligence official who allegedly shared RCMP plans with Hong Kong and Iran-linked criminal entities starting in 2015.

Ortis was arrested in 2019 and incarcerated on suspicion of having violated Canadas Security of Information Act. According to Coopers book, Ortis was introduced to state sources in Mainland China through his academic research at UBC. Ortis academic network at the university frequently displays a pro-Beijing message, according to Cooper. For example, in 2020, the Globe and Mail reported that UBC prof Paul Evans [was] seen by Huawei Canada as one of the key opinion leaders that could help prevent the Chinese telecom giant from being banned from Canada 5G networks.

According to CTV News, Evans says he worked with Ortis at UBC over the course of several years, and they later met socially from time to time. The UBC work reportedly included several projects, including Ortis doctoral thesis.

The lack of a Foreign Agents Registration Act in Canada, as is found in the United States and Australia in order to make foreign attempts to influence policy debates public, makes it relatively easy for China and other malign foreign interests to compromise elite influencers in Canada. The lack of such an act and other transparency measures raises questions about what could well be innocent academic research.

The British flag and a smartphone with a Huawei and 5G network logo are seen on a PC motherboard in this illustration picture taken Jan. 29, 2020. (Dado Ruvic/Reuters)

The Evans and Woo Claims of Racism

The two Globe authors protest that those who do not support a harder stance against Beijing  are often seen as not just naive and wrong in their support for engagement, but also as lacking integrity because of ties to China that generate financial or other rewards. In its extreme form, academics, community leaders, businesspeople, and politicians with so-called pro-Beijing views are insinuated to be disloyal to Canada and agents of the Chinese Communist Partyan eerie throwback to the 1950s McCarthy era in the U.S.

Insinuation is exactly what Evans and Woo do when they associate racism with anti-CCP views. And, the authors all-but-admit that some pro-Beijing writers have financial links to China. Registered foreign agents in the United States, for example, can easily make $300,000 per year promoting their foreign patrons, with some foreign agents getting much more.

Academics and politicians, even in the United States where there are long-established foreign agent registration laws, typically dont disclose their foreign income as they take advantage of legal exemptions for academia, or, in the case of politicians, hope to get away with it given admitting it publicly would be a blow to their careers. In the United States, the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) of 1938 is rarely enforced, except against alleged spies that law enforcement cannot prosecute in any other way.

Being critical of Bill Clintons illegal campaign contributions from an Indonesian source, or Michael Flynns $200,000 per month meant to benefit Turkey, is not racism against Indonesians and Turks. It is an attempt to maintain the integrity of American democratic deliberation, free from the influence of foreign money. The same goes for concern about President Trump and President Bidens alleged links to Russia and China. The links are not always substantiated, but the higher the official, the more concern is warranted in order to mitigate the higher risk.

Links to democratic countries, which are less risky, elicit less public concern. Similar foreign influence from Japan and Taiwan for example, raises little to no public debate or law enforcement attention. There is little to no anti-Asian racism in these examples, or in concern about Chinas political influence. Public concern is a rightly heightened mitigation of the risk of authoritarian foreign influence at the head of state and other elite levels from powerful adversary states.

The bridges built with the Chinese state over the years have not been limited to Canadians of Chinese descent. Prime Minister Trudeau is not Chinese. Hunter Biden is not Chinese. Billionaires like Mike Bloomberg and Stephen Schwarzman, who have extensive and lucrative bridges with China, are not Chinese. The concern about elite capture gets more concerning, the closer it gets to real power. Most billionaires and politicians in the United States and Canada who are suspected of being overly influenced by the CCP are not Chinese.

Evans and Woo complain about legitimate concerns of Beijings capture of elites through financial incentives, defeating their own argument by implying that this scrutiny could put an end to the gravy train. University connections to China are under increasing scrutiny, they worry. Safeguarding research integrity and maintaining our principles of academic freedom are essential if we aim to keep the doors open to large-scale student recruitment from China, as well as to research partnerships and other forms of collaboration. The emphasis is mine, and the conflation of academic freedom with attracting Chinese money is theirs. Actually, the attempt to attract Chinese money contradicts academic freedom, because it distracts academics from following their own research priorities.

Academia is big business, with students at Professor Evans UBC paying over C$757 million in the 2019/2020 academic year as tuition. The authors apparently want the freedom to side with a regime that specializes in taking other peoples freedom away, in order to maintain university revenues from Chinas students and research grants. They call Albertas order to freeze new university partnerships with Chinese government-linked institutions precipitous and fraught with unintended consequences that are by implication in the context of their article, racism against Canadians of Chinese descent.

Since the early 1980s, Canadian universities have been building bridges with China, they write. Many of these bridges have been built by Canadians of Chinese descent. The chill and fear they are now feeling is palpable. The fear is magnified when the definition of an inappropriate partner includes all those with links to the Chinese state. But Canadians of Chinese descent are not the only ones with links to the Chinese state. As noted above, Paul Evans has his own. Again, this is not about race, but about avenues of influence, and conduits of cash.

The two Globe authors do not discuss how the Chinese state targets Canadians of Chinese descent who are publicly critical of the CCP, nor how the Canadian state fails to fully protect them. If the Chinese state is indeed committing a genocide, shouldnt we limit links to the Chinese state, including through the mildest of measures: public exposure and social pressure against its advocates? The same measures were used against slaveholders in the 19th century to excellent effect. Today, the CCP are the worlds biggest slaveholders given their utilization of forced Uyghur labor.

In the same breath that the authors decry exaggerated portrayals in the media of Chinas influence operations and espionage, the authors cherry-pick an example of MIT professor Gang Chen to fit their story, while omitting the arrest of Harvard chemistry and biology professor Charles Lieber. Professor Lieber allegedly lied in communications with the U.S. federal government, from which his group took a $15 million grant for research. The alleged lie was about his work for the Wuhan University of Technology, from which he took over $50,000 per month, plus $1.5 million to establish a lab, according to an FBI press release.

A person holds a sign with photographs of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, who have been detained in China since December 2018, as people gather for a rally in support of Hong Kong democracy, in Vancouver, B.C., on Aug. 16, 2020. (Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press)

Concern about espionage, lying, illicit technology transfer, and failure to report income from China is not limited to any one race. Technology transfer is technology transfer regardless of who makes the transfer, and takes the cash. Any trusted professional, from professors to politicians, who fail to report their financial ties to a genocidal and totalitarian state whose power is challenging democracy globally deserves the same opprobrium regardless of ethnicity.

Racism and CCP Influence

The Globe authors imply that sensationalizing Chinas actions and stigmatizing individuals or groups with China links crosses a threshold of racism. Here they trivialize, politicize, misuse, and expand the notion of racism well beyond prejudice, antagonism, differential treatment, or discrimination against a race or ethnicity, which is a universally valued definition of the term broadly accepted to address a universally denounced societal problem found across cultures and nations. By diluting the idea of racism to fit their political purposes, authors such as Evans and Woo do a real injustice to all those suffering the worst forms of racism, including that which leads to genocide.

The authors themselves slip into racism when they advocate differential treatment of people of Chinese descent by saying that criticism crosses the threshold when it demands loyalty statements, especially from people of Chinese descent [my emphasis], or imposes litmus tests based on the groups they associate with, the electronic devices they use and the social media apps on their devices.

According to that definition of racism, it is apparently racist to ask citizens, regardless of race, to pledge allegiance to the flag (which Americans did in public grade school when I was a kid). It is racist to disallow citizens, regardless of race, from joining terrorist and criminal groups, of which the CCP is arguably one. It is racist to forbid criminals, regardless of race, from using illegal communications devices such as Phantom Secure that are meant to evade police surveillance. The authors never acknowledge that by their own definition, and by standard definitions of racism, the Chinese state is far more racist than anything found in Canada or the United States.

In what appears to in part be an implied swipe at Sam Coopers reporting from Vancouver, the authors write that criticism crosses the threshold when it assigns broad responsibility for the problems of housing unaffordability, money laundering, and fentanyl deathsin British Columbia, for exampleto Canadians of Chinese descent. However, the authors offer no actual examples of an individual engaged in this ostensible racism. If one reads Coopers book, it is evident that he applies an even hand against all who engage in illegal gambling, money laundering, and fentanyl deaths, including the many non-Chinese (such as Prime Minister Trudeau) who he covers in a critical manner. Racism is nowhere to be found in his writing, and having corresponded with him privately, I can attest that he is the opposite of racist. Indeed, he lauds those who uphold Canadian values, including specifically Chinese-Canadians, as heros and models for us all.

Andy Yan, the Vancouver housing researcher, is an example. Cooper described Yans city studies and hope for an affordable Vancouver, versus a location for global wealth deposits, as brilliant. Unlike Cooper, the Globe authors language is so overbroad as to potentially target Yan and his research on housing unaffordability in Vancouver, which Yan ascribes to investment flows from mainland China. Yan is in no way racist, and does not target Canadians of Chinese descent. If Evans and Woo are talking about Yan in their Globe article, they would be implying that a Chinese-Canadian researcher is racist, a researcher whose research puts Evans HSBC and other banks in a negative light because they are making big bucks on China-Vancouver real estate purchases and possible money laundering.

Is Professor Evans here acting, in an insinuating and underhanded manner, as HSBCs hatchet man against a Canadian journalist, and Chinese Canadian, who are threatening one of HSBCs revenue streams? How could the Globe have been so negligent as not to have printed a conflict-of-interest statement along with Evans opinion article?

From my experience, people should be asking questions regarding those attempting to downplay the threat from China, wrote Calvin Chrustie, a Senior Associate with the Critical Risk Team, which specializes in Canadian security issues. For instance have they or do they play significant roles for business development for Canadian-Chinese connected corporations?

When asked about Evans and Woo, Chrustie wrote to me,

The concern one should always look for in the 21st Century, is someone masking business development, political or financial gain using ethnic or social issues, and racism, as a weapon versus a shield? When talking about racism, one would hope the spirit would be to protect persons, versus potentially as we see it being used by state actors and their proxies as a weapon for influence. A famous Canadian judge once said the law is designed to be a shield, not a sword.

Chrustie pointed out that the same could be said when states and their proxies use racism as [a] weapon, its one of the new ways states de-stabilize other states and Canadians need to be wary of these tactics and not fall prey to them.

Chrustie made the additional point that academics and business leaders often lack all the information about Chinas influence operations because they dont have access to classified information. This is arguably why former intelligence professionals are often the first and strongest proponents of stronger laws against Chinas malign influence in our democracies. They arent being racist. They simply have access to more data about China and its institutionalized influence operations, including most powerfully through non-Chinese individuals, than does the average citizen.

Chrustie is concerned about academics, political and business leaders countering the narrative that specialists such as CSIS [Canadas intelligence agency] have relative to the significant threat that has been identified from China. He continued, The question to be asked, [is] why are they countering the narrative? Why do they feel that their narratives are more credible than those articulated by CSIS and our international allies affiliated with democracies.

Data Omission and Disinformation Tactics

The MLI report notes that the Globe authors make no mention of the Chinese governments well documented transnational repression against its own people and human rights activists living in Canada. Canadas National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians has clearly outlined the threat of Chinese government influence and intimidation operations in Canada. Activists have received threats of violence, murder and even rape.

Paramilitary police officers march next to the entrance to the Forbidden City in Beijing on May 22, 2020. (Nicolas Asfouri/AFP via Getty Images)

Evans and Woo also conflate the hostage-taking of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, with Meng Wanzhous lawful arrest and trial, according to DisinfoWatch.org. By failing to provide the necessary context to the situation facing both Meng and the Two Michaels, the authors obfuscate an important distinction that serves the interests of the Chinese government and bears similarities to regime narratives about them, according to the MLI. It also coincides with the authors apparent unwillingness to place any blame on Chinas actions for this toxic public discussion. It can even be seen in how they seem to blame FBI and US Department of Justice prosecutions of academics on the grounds of espionage for the toxic atmosphere, as opposed to the actions of the people who committed the espionage in the first place.

The same is true of the Globe authors claim that criticism crosses a threshold [into racism, by implication] when it sensationalizes Chinese action.

According to the MLI authors, our analysis demonstrates that the accusation of sensationalism is regularly levelled against activists, governments and media that are critical of the Chinese government. They note that a search of Chinas hyper-nationalist Global Times state media site returns over 20 pages of results where western governments, media, elected officials and critics are directly accused of sensationalizing issues related to China.

What Evans and Woo seemingly fail to appreciate or acknowledge is that the very same Chinese diaspora community targeted by anti-Asian hate is not a monolithic group, according to the MLI authors. Many of the Chinese governments actions, of which Evans and Woo have tried to characterize criticism of as being sensational, have the most profound impact on the Chinese diaspora and dissidents.

According to MLI, Chinese dissidents face online harassment, death and sexual violence threats, doxxing and even physical assaults. Evans and Woo, though ostensibly concerned about racism, have neglected to mention these real challenges facing the Chinese diaspora and dissidents.

DisinfoWatch.Org continues, When elected and appointed officials repeat these narratives, they legitimize them and the state media propagandists and media that promote them. In so doing, they themselves become activeif naive or unwittingparticipants in their transnational repression of foreign critics.

Effect of Accusations of Racism on Discourse Regarding CCP

Noting that The chilling nature of accusations of racism in the context of legitimate criticism of totalitarian and autocratic regimes is a serious threat to civil discourse in all liberal western democracies, the MLI authors advocate foreign interference and disinformation training for government officials in Canada. The same should be provided to government officials globally, at least for states that value their independence and sovereignty. Academics at universities dependent on Chinese student tuition and research funding, and those that allow professors to take lucrative foreign and corporate consulting contracts, should also be offered counter-disinformation training.

The global professoriate, especially at elite universities, has sometimes lost touch with its role of unbiased research and teaching. Some are instead following money rather than lack of bias, and ought to be steered back by legislation and academic administrations, towards their primary functions.

The claim of racism against those concerned with the CCPs growing global influence operations is a dog whistle that has the effect of stigmatizing those who, at great risk to their own professional careers, are bringing light to a very inconvenient set of facts: over a trillion dollars worth of trade between China on one side, and North America, Europe, and Japan on the other (not to mention the even greater effect on other smaller economies), is influencing political and academic elites in these regions to look the other way on the issue of the CCPs unacceptable levels of human rights abuse, to the point of genocide. By targeting necessary criticism of the CCP with spurious claims of racism, the authors chill debate on the CCPs political influence, enable the genocide, and therefore further the worst form of racism.

Need for Stronger Foreign Agent Registration Laws

Unless we act with greater alacrity and decision against the CCP and its influential beneficiaries today, that kind of racism could in time come to Canada, the United States, or any other allied country. Our failure to act for what is right because of disinformational narratives and fake political correctness that serves authoritarian interests, and our own greed for cheap foreign goods despite evidence of forced labor and genocide, is a strategic and ethical lapse that must soon be fixed for the protection of our future freedoms.

Conservative Minister of parliament Michael Chong told iPolitics on June 23 that its long past due for the Canadian government to address the China threat to Canadian research. MP Chong said that Canada should ban funding for sensitive research partnerships with China in areas such as biotechnology, telecommunications, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and nanotechnologies. Perhaps that ban should be extended to professors who act in a manner consistent with political lobbying as well. What is more sensitive to Beijings money, than our own democratic political processes?

Canadas digital spy agency, the CSE, recently found that China targets academia to transfer intellectual property and improve its military, commercial, and diplomatic edge. Thus the ban on Chinas financial involvement with academics needs to extend beyond those involved in military or dual-use technology, to those who lobby on commercial or diplomatic matters.

Concern and transparency about allegations of Beijings influence is not racism, but an attempt to maintain the independence, transparency, integrity, and ultimately the sovereignty, of Canadian, and other democratic, governments. Theres a big difference between racism, which is antipathy towards an entire ethnicity, and concern about possible elite corruption, which affects every ethnicity. The folks who dislike the Chinese Communist Party and the gangs with which it associates, typically love Hong Kong democracy protesters and spunky Taiwan independence advocates. They are very often Chinese-Americans or Chinese-Canadians themselves. The split is ideological, not racial.

Anders Corr has a bachelors/masters in political science from Yale University (2001) and a doctorate in government from Harvard University (2008). He is a principal at Corr Analytics Inc., publisher of the Journal of Political Risk, and has conducted extensive research in North America, Europe, and Asia. He authored The Concentration of Power (forthcoming in 2021) and No Trespassing, and edited Great Powers, Grand Strategies.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
A supplied image obtained on, June 25, 2021, shows Victoria Police on patrol on the Victoria/NSW border in Australia. (AAP Image/Supplied by Victoria Police)

Australian Police Warn Travellers of Thousand Dollar Fines at Victorian-NSW Border

Victorian Police patrolling the border with New South Wales are telling travellers that the initial warning period is now over for those trying to sneak over the border.

Since Saturday, around 260 officers have been placed along the border equipped with automatic number plate recognition technology to check vehicles.

Since the start of border restrictions, officers have turned away 53 people with a simple warning. Many were from red zones, which are areas assessed as high risk for COVID-19 transmission during a specific period.

All visitors looking to get into Victoria are currently required to obtain a permit.

However, Chief Commissioner Shane Patton said people had had enough time to learn of current restrictions rules and will start facing thousands of dollars in on-the-spot fines if without a valid permit.

If theres a need to escalate, we will escalate, Patton told reporters on Monday. That discretion, that window period, is very rapidly closing. From here on in, youre going to see much stricter enforcement.

Patton also revealed that the state government had requested assistance from the Australian Defence Force to provide logistical support to free up frontline police.

Victorian Minister for Health Martin Foley addresses the media during a press conference in Melbourne, Australia, on June 25, 2021. (AAP Image/James Ross

Victorian Health Minister Martin Foley told reporters on Monday; the state has processed over 5,000 red zone permits and 21,000 orange zone permits since June 23, with 1,152 and 5,007 permits of each type issued, respectively, thus far.

Nothing describes the seriousness that the nation is facing more than those extents of border restrictions and permit applications that Victoria has in place.

We sympathise extremely much with Victorians who want to stay connected to family interstate, but we cannot take this invisible threat lightly, and we cannot take chances with the delta variant, in particular, spreading across our state, Foley said.

Sydneys latest outbreak is believed to be from a driver who was transporting an international flight crew.

Of the 139 passengers and crew who shared a flight from Sydney to Melbourne with the man, 85 percent have returned with a negative result.

All but 2 of the 67 people identified as close contacts from the mans workplace have also returned with a negative test so far.

Meanwhile, Victorian authorities have tracked down seven workers linked to an outbreak in a Northern Territory mine.

COVID-19 response commander Jeroen Weimar said three of the seven workers had returned with negative tests, with the other four due to be tested on Monday.

AAP contributed to this article.
Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH) questions Gordon Sondland, the U.S ambassador to the European Union, as he testifies before the House Intelligence Committee in the Longworth House Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, Nov. 20, 2019. (Alex Edelman/Getty Images)

Republican Bill Aims to Bolster Oversight on NIH Grant Recipients

Congressman Mike Turner (R-Ohio) has introduced legislation to ensure oversight and transparency of all grantees and subgrantees who are awarded funds for research grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the wake of growing concerns that the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic may have been caused by a man-made virus escaping from a Chinese lab that received U.S. funding.

The EMPOWER NIH Act was authored in response to a lack of oversight for grants provided to nonprofit EcoHealth, which then gave those research funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

There is suspicion that the WIV misused the funds to perform gain-of-function experimentation on coronaviruses, which can make them more lethal and was banned by NIH at the time.

The U.S. had blind faith that all federal dollars for health research went to fight disease. However, the pandemic exposed how American taxpayers might have unknowingly funded dangerous research that put global health at risk, said Turner. My bill, the EMPOWER NIH Act, would create necessary oversight, transparency, and accountability measures to the federal grant process.

According to the NIH, the agency devotes $41.7 billion on research through almost 50,000 grants annually. Current rules do not require inspections of the research facilities unless grantees file a formal complaint.

The NIH did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Turners bill will require surprise in-person inspections and full reporting on the use of funds. The bill would also mandate that NIH submit an annual report of inspections and research projects. If a grantee or subgrantee fails an inspection, they will become ineligible for 5 years. If they purposely block an inspection for any reason, they will lose their eligibility for at least 15 years.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has admitted that the NIH had awarded nearly $600,000 to EcoHealth Alliance in 2014 to study the risk of bat coronavirus emergence.

Some of the funding was channeled through subgrants to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is located in the same city where the CCP virus, which causes COVID-19, is believed to have first emerged.

The grant paperwork states that researchers would be using predictive models of host range. The models will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus, and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice, the documents say.

Fauci told members of a Senate panel on May 11 that the National Institutes of Health has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Republicans in the House are saying the grant appears to contradict Faucis claim that the NIH did not fund the controversial research and are calling on the whole of Congress to investigate the origin of the pandemic.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on June 23 laid out an eight-pronged plan focused on the communist regime and other bodies to ensure Americans get the accountability and transparency they deserve.

While the theory that the virus was the result of a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) was labeled by a number of mainstream media outlets and experts as a conspiracy theory last year, it has recently regained traction as a growing number of scientists and officials have lent credence to the hypothesis.

Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.
Former U.S. Marine Trevor Reed stands inside a defendants' cage during a court hearing in Moscow, Russia, on July 30, 2020. (Maxim Shemetov/Reuters)

Russian Court Upholds 9-Year Sentence for Former US Marine Reed

MOSCOWA Russian appeals court on Monday upheld a nine-year prison sentence for Trevor Reed, a former U.S. Marine who was convicted last year of endangering the lives of two police officers in August 2019, charges he denies.

U.S. Ambassador John Sullivan, who returned to Moscow last week after leaving in April amid a diplomatic crisis, said he regretted the courts decision.

Today marks another sad milestone as Trevor Reeds appeal was denied, Sullivan said, in comments shared on Twitter by the embassys spokesperson.

(It is) another absurd miscarriage of justice in Russia as the world watches, Sullivan said.

U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price said in a Twitter post, We are deeply troubled by the courts decision and that Washington would work on Reeds behalf until Russia does the right thing and returns him to his family.

Reeds defense team plan to lodge a further appeal, the RIA news agency cited Reeds lawyer as saying.

President Vladimir Putin and his U.S. counterpart Joe Biden discussed the topic of prisoner swaps at talks in Geneva this month.
Sen. Tim Scott Launches 2022 Reelection Campaign

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) officially announced his 2022 reelection bid on Monday in North Charleston, South Carolina, saying he will keep fighting to hold the Biden administration accountable.

I have never been more optimistic about the future of America and the limitless potential of the next generation, said Scott in a statement via email. And with the Palmetto States blessing, I look forward to holding the current administration accountable and continuing the fight in Washington.

The 55-year-old senator also talked about the achievements the Republicans made during the past four years, such as record-low unemployment rates, peace in the Middle East, historic and permanent funding for historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), bringing millions of Americans out of poverty, and a skyrocketing economy.

It has been an honor to represent South Carolina and work alongside President [Donald] Trump on these issues, Scott added.

Trump endorsed Scott in early March for his reelection.

It is my great honor to give Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina my complete and total endorsement, Trump said in a statement at the time. Strong on the military, law enforcement, loves our vets, protects our Second Amendment and our borders. Tim will continue to do an OUTSTANDING job for our country!

In a video released along with his announcement, some other prominent Republicans endorsed Scott as well, including former Vice President Mike Pence, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Scott served as a senator when then-Gov. Haley appointed him in late 2012 to succeed Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C). Scott was elected to a full Senate term in 2016.

Currently the only black Republican Senator, Scott is popular among Republicans. He was chosen to give the response speech to President Joe Bidens address to a joint session of Congress early this year. He also delivered a speech at the 2020 Republican National Convention.

Scott is expected to easily win his reelection as South Carolina is a deep red state.

His only GOP challenger is Tim Swain, a GOP precinct president with a background in construction estimating and management.

Swain pledged to put American first and South Carolina first. His website claims that he stands with election integrity, will fight Big Tech, and opposes mail-in voting.

Two Democrats have announced their Senate bids to challenge Scott; state Rep. Krystle Matthews (D-S.C.) and Angela Geter, Chairwoman of Spartanburg County Democratic Party.
Senate Democrat Unveils New Shield Law to Protect Journalists Records

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) on Monday unveiled a bill that aims to protect journalists data from government subpoenas, in the wake of the news that the Justice Department during the Trump administration worked to obtain records of lawmakers and journalists.

The Trump Administration spied on reporters it suspected of no crimes in its hunt to identify their sources and prevent the American people from learning the truth about Trumps lawlessness and corruption, Wyden said in a statement in introducing the bill, called the Protect Reporters from Excessive State Suppression (PRESS) Act (pdf).

President Biden and Attorney General Garland have pledged to end these surveillance abuses, but the new policies can be reversed by future administrations, the Senate Democrat added.

It comes after news emerged, as first reported by The New York Times on June 10, that prosecutors in the DOJ under the Trump administration had issued subpoenas to Apple in 2017 and 2018 seeking data from people associated with the House Intelligence Committee, as part of a probe to find out who was behind leaks of classified information related to the Russia investigation and other national-security issues.

Last month, Apple reportedly notified at least 12 people that they were being investigated via the grand jury subpoenas the DOJ had issued. Among them were Trump critics Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), now the committees chair, and Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), a committee member, as well as their aides and family members. According to the NY Times, the data Apple provided didnt establish any ties between the California politicians and the leaks.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) walks through Statuary Hall to the House Chamber for President Donald Trumps State of the Union address in the Capitol in Washington on Feb. 4, 2020. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

Impeachment Manager Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) speaks on the second day of former President Donald Trumps second impeachment trial at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Feb. 10, 2021. (congress.gov via Getty Images)

Lawmakers didnt know they were being investigated until Apple informed them last month, after a gag order on the company secured by the DOJ had expired this year.

The federal government, unlike most states, does not have a version of a shield law for journalists and media organisations. The state laws do not apply to investigations by federal agencies, such as the justice department.

There are also currently no legal restrictions that prevent the government from secretly obtaining a reporters records directly from phone companies, email providers, and other third parties in order to identify their sources.

The bill defines a journalist as anyone who gathers, prepares, collects, photographs, records, writes, edits, reports, or publishes news or information that concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public.

It would prohibit the federal government from compelling electronic storage service providers to hand over documents or information regarding a covered journalist. Reporters would also be given the opportunity to respond to demands for records from the federal government.

Wydens bill would protect journalists from court-ordered disclosures of information about their sources, with the exceptions of information necessary to prevent terrorism or identify a perpetrator of terrorism, or information that could prevent imminent violence or death.

As the son of an investigative journalist, I know reporters are essential to holding the government accountable, and shedding sunlight on the uncomfortable truths those in power seek to conceal, Wyden said in a statement. There need to be clear rules protecting reporters from government surveillance written into black-letter law.

He added: My legislation creates strong protections for reporters, with common-sense exceptions for cases when the government truly needs information immediately.

Mimi Nguyen Ly contributed to this report.
A student arrives for a graduation ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall in London on Oct. 13, 2015. (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

Snowflakes and Bureaucracy: Campaigners Split on UK Academic Free Speech Bill

The Conservative government has introduced legislation targeting so-called cancel culture in UK universities, which would include the appointment of official free speech tsars on each campus.

The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill, introduced last month, has been welcomed by some campaigners who warn free speech has long been frozen in a perfect storm of student snowflakes, hyper political correctness, and radical professors.

But not all are convinced. Some long-time academic freedom campaigners are also concerned that the universities will simply game any new bureaucracy, and that more legislation may hamper any natural thawing of generation snowflake.

The real issue thats being debated is legislation versus culture, Dennis Hayes, president of Academics for Academics Freedom (AFAF) told The Epoch Times.

Universities are very clever, theyll get round this in various ways, said Hayes, who has been at the forefront of the fight for academic freedom for a decade and a half. We already had legislation that says they must promote free speech, and theyve got around it.

He said that the new legislation also doesnt tackle all-powerful gagging clauses.

The current draft of the bill sets out three major new changes.

First, it tightens existing legislation to make promotion of free speech a statutory duty. That means if universities fail to do it, they can be taken to court, said Hayes.

Second, it brings the previously independent student unions within that remit. The student unions are responsible for many of the bans on speakers that happened since 1974, according to Hayes.

Third, it requires universities to each have a director of academic freedom and free speech at the office for students, dubbed a free speech champion. They will be tasked with overseeing a process of complaints about the university or student unions. Thats going to be a major change, said Hayes.

University students return for the spring term at Cambridge University in England on Jan. 13, 2004. (Graeme Robertson/Getty Images)

The Free Speech Union, Policy Exchange, and some other campaigners have welcomed the thrust of the legislation.

Other free speech organisations, such as the English PEN and Index on Censorship, claim that it could stifle free speech.

Some commentators and organisations, especially those that are left-leaning, question the existence of cancel culture in the first place.

Hayes said he half supports the legislative push. But Im really worried that it will make people quieter than ever before. To avoid getting into trouble, people will just not say anything, he said.

Puppy Rooms and Petting Zoos

He said that over a decade ago he was sounding the alarm on the potential impact of the growing therapeutic culture.

That still needs tackling, he said.

I dont see how the new legislation will change the sort of therapeutic attitude that universities have towards students; constantly protecting them when they come to university, providing them with counselling sessions and anti-stress sessions in puppy rooms and petting zoos.

But he thinks growing numbers of students no longer want to be seen as snowflakes.

The word snowflake came out in 2016. That was sort of the word of the year that year. But since then, I think students have been tired of being patronised and infantilised. So my hope is with the students, in fact, that they will actually challenge the lecturers to speak up.

In the past, he said he was depressed by the students attitudes towards free speech. That changed around 2017, he said.

I was speaking at University of Warwick and students were coming up and saying, how can I start a free speech society? And I think over the last few years free speech societies have been set up in several of the universities in the UK. Its students doing it outside of the students union. It takes one girl in Oxford, sets up a free speech society in a pub  thats a really positive change.

Education Secretary Gavin Williamson attends a Cabinet meeting of senior government ministers at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London on Sept. 1, 2020. (Toby Melville  WPA Pool/Getty Images)

Thats exactly the kind of change he thinks could be discouraged by new legislation, by creating a passive culture with people reliant on external rules.

In response to the bill last month, Universities UK, which represents all 140 UK universities, said in a statement the law already requires them to protect free speech and academic freedom.

It is important that the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill is proportionatefocusing on the small number of incidentsand does not duplicate existing legislation or create unnecessary bureaucracy for universities which could have unintended consequences, it said.

A Very Authoritarian Movement

Professor Eric Kaufmann is a leading researcher into cancel culture in the Western academic world.

He welcomed the governments proposed policy, which he said aligns with recommendations he made in a report by Policy Exchange.

He said it is naive to think anything other than legislation can now clip the wings of what he told The Epoch Times is a very authoritarian movement.

Like Hayes, he said that many problems come from people knowing how to manipulate the system.

Protagonists know how to to use this therapeutic lingo in order to shut down speech, he said. The new legislation aims to clarify that academic freedom takes precedence, that universities are not going to be allowed, essentially, to bring up the harassment or reputational damage claims as a way of wriggling out of their free speech obligations.

Students at the University of Birmingham graduate in England on July 14, 2011. (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

Previously, universities were able to hold all the power and operated in many ways as kangaroo courts and did not actually abide by the laws as intended, he said.

Kaufmann thinks that the threat of legislation can help drive cultural change, with universities knowing that the authorities are breathing down their necks.

Universities have a very strong incentive to be sure theyre not falling on the wrong side of this. And therefore they are less likely to try it on, to be honest, and more likely to just tell activists, sorry, our hands are tied, we cant do anything.'

Kaufmann said that the appetite for cancel culture has been growing among young people aged 2128, but with some evidence of a shift the other way among 18 to 21-year-olds.

Kaufmann described the driving force behind cancel culture as left modernism, which he said is the contemporary hegemonic ideology in elite institutions.

He said it is a blend of liberalism, Marxism, and the therapeutic ethos of universities.

An Ideological Conflict

A seminal study by Kaufmann earlier this year found there was a crisis of free speech at universities. He found the array of no-platforming, dismissal campaigns, social media mob attacks, open letters  formal complaints, and disciplinary action, mostly targeted conservative academics and students.

He doesnt think that cancel culture is a matter of a silent majority not speaking up.

All the data Ive seen shows that this is a battle of ideasits an ideological conflict, he said, adding that around half of academics support the aims of the cancel culture mob, even if they find their means distasteful. They like the social justice aims of the cancellers but they dont really like firing people. Theyre kind of torn, therefore theyre not going to speak up.

Both Hayes and Kaufmannwho has recently endured a campaign to oust himsaid that simply being in favour of free speech as an academic these days risks the ire of the cancel mob.

The unions and left-wing groups in the UK think free speech is a right-wing, fascist sort of plot, and you shouldnt have free speech on certain issues, said Hayes. So in that case, theres even arguing for free speech can be very, very difficult.

Eric Kaufmann, professor of politics at BirkBeck College in London. (Screenshot via NTD)

Gagging Clauses

Hayes is also worried about another area that wont be addressed by the new legislation: gagging clauses.

Most universities have a gagging clause on disciplinary policies, he said. That means you cant say anything if you are accused over even just a casual comment.

You can be sometimes suspended for gross misconduct, which means youre in danger of losing your job and you go through a long protracted disciplinary procedure  but you can never make it public or its another disciplinary offence.

Hayes gave the example of a lecturer who, despite a gagging clause, went public about what happened when he criticised the creation of a multi-faith centre.

He was talking to a student, and she said, What do you think about [the multi-faith centre]? And he saidparaphrasing slightlyWell, Im a lecturer in mathematics, Id rather have a centre for the study of mathematics, rather than this religious nonsense. Well suspended for gross misconduct. For that one comment. Thats the sort of thing that people face.
A transport officer searches immigrants before bussing them to a processing center after they crossed the border from Mexico in La Joya, Texas, on April 13, 2021. (John Moore/Getty Images)

South Dakota, Iowa to Send Law Enforcement Officers to Southern Border

The Republican governors of South Dakota and Iowa said in recent announcements they will be sending law enforcement personnel to the U.S.Mexico border. It comes after the governors of Texas and Arizona asked all other states to help with the ongoing border crisis by providing additional manpower.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem said late Monday that 50 South Dakota National Guard troops will be sent to the southern border.

Tomorrow morning Im officially announcing up to 50 National Guard troops to Texas to help secure our border, Noem announced on Twitter. The Biden administration has failed to keep America safe. We shouldnt be making our own communities vulnerable by sending police to fix Bidens border crisis.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem speaks to attendees at the NCGOP convention in Greenville, N.C., on June 5, 2021. (Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images)

Noems announcement comes several days after the office of Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds announced that Iowa State Patrol officers will be deployed to help with border security efforts. The move was in response to a June 10 request from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey for more law enforcement manpower.

South Dakota and Iowa now join Florida, Nebraska, and Idaho in committing to send law enforcement to the southern border to help Texas and Arizona.

Abbott and Ducey wrote in their letter, With your help, we can apprehend more of these perpetrators of state and federal crimes, before they can cause problems in your state. The letter asserted that under a mutual agreement between states, the Emergency Management Assistance Compact, any officers that states send to Texas or Arizona will be given the same power  duties, rights, and privileges as are afforded forces of the state in which they are performing emergency services, which will include the power to arrest migrants who illegally cross the border into our territory.

My first responsibility is to the health and safety of Iowans and the humanitarian crisis at our nations southern border is affecting all 50 states, Reynolds said in a statement on June 24.

The rise in drugs, human trafficking, and violent crime has become unsustainable. Iowa has no choice but to act, and its why I am honoring Texass Emergency Management Assistance Compact following assurances from the Iowa Department of Public Safety that it will not compromise our ability to provide all necessary public safety services to Iowans.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds addresses the Republican National Committee virtual convention on Aug. 25, 2020. (Committee on Arrangements for the 2020 Republican National Committee via Getty Images)

The Iowa governors office on June 24 noted that there has been a marked increase in drug trafficking seizures in the state, in particular of methamphetamine and fentanyl, since May last year.

In Iowa, law enforcement officials are recovering drugs, illegal narcotics, and weapons being smuggled across the nations southern border by drug cartels, the office announced.

Reynoldss office also acknowledged that the Iowa National Guard is currently carrying out a mission with 24 soldiers from Unit 2/34 IBCT to help law enforcement at the southern border. The mission was in response to a request from the federal government under the Trump administration in October 2020.

According to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, there were 180,034 border crossings in Maythe largest number in two decades.
Supreme Court Likely to Issue Major Ruling on Ballot Harvesting Soon

The Supreme Court is poised to issue a major ruling that could impact the practice of ballot harvesting across the United States.

The courts justices are set to hand down their last opinions of their current session on Thursday, perhaps including on a voting rights case that calls into question Arizonas law that bans ballot harvestingor the practice of collecting ballots for delivery. Also under consideration is the states law that mandates the dismissal of ballots that were cast in the wrong voting district.

After the Democratic National Committee filed a lawsuit against the laws, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the Democrats and overturned them. Later, Arizona state Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, appealed that decision to the Supreme Court.

The GOP-controlled Arizona Legislature passed a ballot harvesting bill in 2016 that made the practicetypically carried out by Democratic-aligned groupsof going door-to-door asking people to take their ballots to a local polling place unlawful. The law makes exceptions for family members, caregivers, and people living in the same household. Republicans have said this would eliminate fraud and other irregularities.

In a divided ruling, the 9th Circuit Court of Appealss majority argued that the law was a bid to suppress minority voters.

The district court found that, in contrast, the Republican Party has not significantly engaged in ballot collection as a Get Out the Vote strategy, Justice William Fletcher wrote for the majority last year. The base of the Republican Party in Arizona is white, Fletcher added. Individuals who engaged in ballot collection in past elections observed that voters in predominantly white areas were not as interested in ballot-collection services.

However, Brnovich argued (pdf) to the Supreme Court that the law barely impacted minority groups ability to vote and cited slight statistical differences.

No one was denied the opportunity, he said in his arguments before the court earlier this year.

Brnovich further stipulated there are a plethora of options for voters to cast ballots in elections, saying that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals used that small statistical difference and then tried to extrapolate that somehow that Arizonas laws were racist or unconstitutional.

Also during his arguments, the attorney general said that the law is a sensible election rule that exists in dozens of other states. Meanwhile, if the court strikes down Arizona state law, it would erode the publics trust in elections, Brnovich contended.

Michael Carvin, an attorney for the Arizona GOP, said during questioning that the law creates difficulties for Republicans during elections.

It puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats, he told Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Politics is a zero-sum game. And every extra vote they get through unlawful interpretations of Section 2 hurts us. Its the difference between winning an election 50 to 49 and losing an election.
Part of National Reconciliation Week 2016, the installation is for Australians to reflect on Australias national identity and the place of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures in the nation's story. (William West /AFP via Getty Images)

The Pascoe Fiasco: 3 Thoughts on the Dark Emu Debate

Commentary

The Pascoe fiasco has well and truly been in overdrive since the release of Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshes Farmers or Hunter-Gathers? The Dark Emu Debate, which expertly points out the many errors in the Dark Emu theory.

The theory put forth by Bruce Pascoe in his 2014 work Dark Emu claims Indigenous Australians were not just hunter-gatherers but were well-versed in sophisticated methods of food production, aquaculture, and land management.

Before Sutton and Walshes critique was published, individuals like Peter OBrien, Andrew Bolt, and Ian Keen also bravely weighed in, daring to challenge a story that has been so fervently and uncritically embraced.

In this article, I do not intend to persuade readers that Aboriginal society, before the British invasion, were not farmers. Nor do I intend to persuade readers that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was sophisticated and highly advanced. The aforementioned people have expertly done this.

Nor am I going to write an article on the back of the good work of those individuals I just mentioned while portraying myself as some expert voice for the people who exposed Dark Emu for its errors.

Too many people have jumped on the bandwagon already, portraying themselves as the brave insightful ones who have done the investigation and long hours of analysis exposing Dark Emu.

Some behave as if their tick of approval were significant and have bestowed it on Sutton and Walshes work.

Instead, I will discuss: 1) Why I think Dark Emu has been so well received; 2) Why even unlikely sources, such as the left-leaning The Guardian and The Conversation, have been very supportive of Farmers or Hunter-Gathers; and 3) Why some Dark Emu fans are slow to acknowledge that the book is full of major errors.

Why Has Dark Emu Been So Well Received?

I think Sutton summed it up best when he was quoted in The Sydney Morning Herald saying, Reading and accepting Dark Emu has become a search for moral recovery for some white Australians of goodwill.

On the Heralds Good Weekend Talks podcast, interviewer Greg Callaghan asked: Is part of the problem our perception theres a hierarchy of civilisation with agriculture at the top and hunter-gather at the bottom?

To which Sutton answers affirmatively, saying that, Dark Emu plays to that view.

In a 2018 article in The Conversation, Professor Tony Hughes-dAeth refers to Pascoe as an Indigenous historian who is clearly motivated by a desire to redress the serial denigration of Indigenous people.

With commentary and press such as this, is it any wonder Pascoe has taken on hero status?

Further, some peoples response has been along the lines of: Wow, I always knew the Aboriginal people were smarter than the Whites who invaded them, and Pascoe has proven it.

I, too, believe they were smarter, but not because they were farmers or builders, but because they were highly skilled hunter-gatherers. In an article in The Guardian, Mark McKenna suggests that Its as if the only way we can accept Indigenous Australians as sophisticated is to make them seem more Europeanhonorary whitefellas rather than the highly-skilled complex hunter gatherers they were and are.

Finally, many of those who had their doubts about Dark Emu may have been too afraid to say anything. In the Good Weekend Talks podcast, Sutton acknowledges that there is a fear of being lumped in with the right-leaning Sky News channel if they dare question Dark Emu.

Why Left-Leaning Media Are Welcoming of Farmers or Hunter-Gathers?

Very simply, because Sutton and Walshe, both highly qualified, have done such an excellent and meticulous job of reviewing Dark Emu.

And most importantly, the authors do so in a positive spirit.

Their book is so well written, I cannot envisage any scholar writing in opposition to it any time soon.

Through their motivation to present truth, they have shown the flaws in Dark Emu and still show that traditional Aboriginal people were very intelligent and sophisticated.

In fact, as I have taught psychology students in the recent past, if intelligence reflects a persons ability to adapt and thrive in their natural environment, then the hunter-gatherer was indeed very intelligent.

Why The Reluctance to Acknowledge Problems With Dark Emu?

This is easily explained by the well-researched psychology theory known as cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort we experience when holding contradicting beliefs.

A belief most people hold is Im intelligent and not easily fooled. But, after Dark Emus debunking by Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers, a second belief soon emerges, which is, I was fooled.

Clearly, this second belief does not align well with the first. Human beings do not accommodate contradictory views well.

At this stage, there are two options. First, a person can admit they got it wrong, and to their credit, many people do that.

But if the ego wont allow this and one has made a considerable investment in believing the myth that Indigenous Australians were agriculturalists, then it is a simple matter for the mind to conveniently dismiss critics of Dark Emu by calling them racist or lumping them with the Sky News crowd, Rupert Murdoch, or anything remotely right of centre.

Perhaps in the case of Pascoe, simply referring to Sutton and Walshes critique of his book as a difference of opinion is a simple way of avoiding having to say, I got it very wrong.

Interestingly, cognitive dissonance theory says that a person can sometimes be even more strongly committed to a belief when faced with opposing evidence. That is, after reading Sutton and Walshes book or even reviews of it, it can lead them to believe Dark Emu more strongly, rather than admit they were fooled.

In summation, for as long as political correctness, identity politics, and cancel culturewhat I call the evil threeare allowed to flourish and be endorsed by bodies like our national broadcaster the ABC, I dont imagine Dark Emu will lose any favour with fans in the near future.

In a few years, however, Dark Emu will be seen for what it isan attempt to win favour (and sales) by presenting the Aboriginal person as a brown version of the European.

Anthony Dillon is a researcher at the Institute of Positive Psychology and Education at the Australian Christian University. He has commentated on Australian Indigenous affairs for two decades.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
The Tragic Truth: Organ Harvesting in China

Commentary

For nearly two decades, allegations of organ harvesting in communist China have emerged. Today, Chinas organ transplant trade is estimated to be a $1 billion industry, reportedly fueled by the exploitation of prisoners of conscience.

After conducting an investigation, a seven-member international and independent China Tribunal issued a judgment in December 2018. The judgment concluded, The Tribunals members are certainunanimously, and sure beyond reasonable doubtthat in China forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience has been practiced for a substantial period of time involving a very substantial number of victims.

Chinas organ transplant industry began to increase dramatically in 2000. Hundreds of hospitals offered transplants, thousands of transplant surgeons were trained, transplant research was conducted by the military, and the immunosuppressant industry was subsidized by the state.

While transplant patients in most Western countries wait months or even years for an organ transplant, the wait times for a procedure in China have been as short as weeks, days, or even hours.

Initially, Chinese officials claimed that voluntary donors enabled the surge to tens of thousands of annual procedures. When that explanation didnt suffice, officials claimed that death row prisoners were the source of organs. Later, in 2015, China again reversed course, allegedly halting the use of prisoners for organ sourcing and thereafter touting its largest voluntary organ donation system in Asia.

Regardless of communist Chinas varied official explanations, reports indicate that the numbers simply dont add up. An investigation published in the BMC Medical Ethics journal uncovered the systematic falsification and manipulation of official organ transplant datasets. Officially, in 2018, China had only 6,000 official organ donors who allegedly provided more than 18,000 organs.

However, researchers found that these figures were easily surpassed when looking at a few of Chinas hospitals. The authors of the Bloody Harvest/The Slaughter: An Update confirmed that more than 700 hospitals in China perform liver and kidney transplants, while Tianjin First Center alone conducts more than 6,000 transplants per year. The experts further estimated that 60,000100,000 organ transplant procedures are performed annually in Chinas hospitals.

Moreover, according to a 2020 Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation report by Matthew Robertson, since 2000, death row executions have declined in communist China, while on demand transplants have increased.

Robertson writes, The only remaining plausible explanation for a substantial portion of the organ sourcing since 2000 is prisoners of conscience.

Both Robertson and the China Tribunal reached similar conclusions regarding the targeting of prisoners of conscience for their organs. The Tribunals judgment confirmed that Falun Gong practitioners are one of the main sources of organs. Additionally, based on the scale of recent persecution and medical testing in Xinjiang, there is evidence to suggest that Uyghurs are subject to organ harvesting.

In Xinjiang, an estimated 1.8 million to 3 million Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities have been forcibly imprisoned in so-called reeducation camps. Numerous testimonies and evidence of the horrors inside the camps have emerged from survivors, leading to a declaration of genocide by the United States in January 2021.

Survivors of the camps reported being subjected to involuntary physical examinations such as blood tests, X-rays, ultrasounds, and DNA tests. According to a statement by the Tribunal, Experts report that the only reasonable explanation for these examinations was to ensure that victims organs were healthy and fit for transplantation. Further reports have emerged that deceased bodies that have been returned to families from the camps had visible stitches on areas with organs, such as the kidneys.

Another survivor, Sayragul Sauytbay, was incarcerated as a teacher, fled Xinjiang, and honored as an International Woman of Courage by former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. She describes in her book The Chief Witness: Escape from Chinas Modern-Day Concentration Camps that young, healthy inmates with medical files marked with a red X were unexplainably taken away by guards. She writes, It was simply a fact that the Party took organs from prisoners.

The numerous reports and testimonies from researchers, survivors, and activists are extremely troubling. Action must be taken. In March, the U.S. Congress reintroduced bicameral and bipartisan legislation to combat this horrific evil. The Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act will mandate annual reporting of forced organ harvesting, authorize the U.S. government to deny or revoke passports from those who illicitly purchase organs, and sanction those who engage in forced organ harvesting.

The Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act will expose the cruelties of forced organ harvesting and hold perpetrators accountable.

We encourage you to contact your member of Congress and demand that the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act become law. Innocent lives can be saved.

From Gingrich360.com.

Newt Gingrich, a Republican, served as House speaker from 1995 to 1999 and ran as a presidential candidate in 2012.

Callista Louise Gingrich is a businesswoman, author, documentary film producer, and diplomat who served as the U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See from 2017 to 2021.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
The True Face of the Chinese Communist Party

Commentary

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is marking its 100th anniversary with extra-tight security. Not only are troops deployed into the capital to beef up security, but also bans were imposed against toy-grade flying objects such as drones and even kites. Its Propaganda Department rolled out programs to indoctrinate people with the so-called revolutionary spirit of the Party, such as the May Fourth spirit which gave rise to the party, and the Long March spirit which epitomized the hardship it had gone through. Such spirits were invoked to project a glamorous picture of its own history, yet are full of falsehood.

In the early 1920s, the CCP was already nicknamed the Ruble Party because people suspected that it was funded entirely by the now-defunct Soviet Union (USSR). Yet evidence was hard to come by in those early days. In 1991 the Soviet Empire collapsed, leading to the declassification of secret files of both the USSR and the outfit it used to redden Asia, the Communist International (Comintern, also known as the Third International). This produced a trove of information about the true face of the CCP.

Scanning through these documents, one can clearly see that the CCP, from its outset, was created by the USSR as a tool to sabotage the Chinese government and divide China. The USSR, through the Comintern, provided funds, weapons, military training, logistic supports, as well as ideological and organizational assistance to the CCP.

One resolution by the CCP literally called the Soviet Union our motherland because it was Russia, and not China, that gave birth to the CCP. It also adopted a resolution in its third-party Congress accepting the derogatory status as a local branch of the Comintern. Thus in its early years, the Comintern, through numerous resolutions, told the CCP what to do and how to do it. For example, the Comintern insisted that the CCP send members to join the ruling Kuomintang (KMT, or the Nationalist Party founded by Dr. Sun Yet-sun) and use their KMT status as a legal cover to operate openly, while concealing their real CCP identity. In this way, the CCP succeeded in infiltrating the KMT and planting many informants, who proved instrumental in the CCP seizing power.

A sculpture of the founder of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin, erected in 1970 at Moscow Square in front of the House of Soviets in Saint Petersburg, on June 25, 2017. (Mladen Antonov/AFP via Getty Images)

Since the CCP was created as an instrument to further Soviet interests in China, it makes sense that it played a traitorous role when Russia invaded China in 1929 over the Chinese Eastern Railway incident. While the whole country under KMT rule tried its best to repel the Russian invasion, the CCP issued directives to its members all over China to defend the Soviet Union by force. At that time the CCP did not possess an army. Its way of defending the Soviet Union by force was to stage nationwide riots and create social upheaval in every city where it had a branch. While dealing with the domestic turmoil, the central and northeastern governments ability to repel Soviet invasion was seriously undermined. Losing the war, China was forced to sign the Treaty of Khabarovsk, giving up the strategic Heixiazi Island in the Amur River. This was the only cession treaty China concluded with a foreign power since the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1911.

Such treason was also obvious in the Mongolian independence movement, a grand plan by the Soviet Union to dismember China. Declassified documents show that while the KMT-run central government had resisted time and again Soviet instigation of separatist movements, the CCP actively supported the Soviets.

During the Yalta Conference in 1945, of which China was not a participant, a secret deal was struck by the United States, Britain, and the USSR to accept the Soviet demand for an independent Mongolia in return for its agreement to take part in the anti-Japanese war. The KMT was totally in the dark but was forced by the United States to accept the Yalta deal. While the whole country was angered by the secret deal, declassified documents show that there were several telegram exchanges between Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and CCP leader Mao Zedong showing that the latter extended his whole-hearted support to the Soviet-orchestrated dismemberment of China while the former told Mao what to do in garnering domestic support for the independence of Mongolia.

Apart from Mongolia, the Soviet Union also tried to further dismember China by supporting the independence movement of Xinjiang, sending troops there to fight alongside the separatist forces against the local government loyal to the KMT central government. In support of this treacherous move, the CCP set up an office in Urumchi (present-day Wulumuqi, the capital city of Xinjiang) to facilitate contact with the movement and offered assistance to them. Mao hailed the movement there as part of the Great Revolutionary Movement of China.

From 1927 onward, with Russian support, the CCP managed to build up an armed force capable of conducting guerilla warfare as well as a military uprising, thus creating revolutionary bases all over the country. By 1931 such bases were strong enough that they were able to join forces to create a Soviet Republic of China with Mao as the head. He then proclaimed proudly that henceforth there are two nations in China, a Republic of China and a Soviet Republic of China. This marked the formal division of the country.

These outline some of the evidence from declassified documents exposing the loathsome nature of the CCP. Due to its infamous background, the CCP was adamant at whitewashing this chapter in its official narration. On Sept. 3, 2020, party boss Xi Jinping said empathetically that the Chinese people would never be allowed any attempt to discredit the party by distorting its history. This indicates that the CCP is fully aware of its scandalous past but wants to hide it from the public eye.

Ching Cheong is a graduate of the University of Hong Kong. In his decades-long journalism career, he has specialized in political, military, and diplomatic news in Hong Kong, Beijing, Taipei, and Singapore.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) speaks as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and then-President Donald Trump listen during a signing ceremony for H.R. 748, the CARES Act in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington on March 27, 2020. (Erin Schaff-Pool/Getty Images)

Trump: Republicans, McConnell Shouldnt Back Biden Infrastructure Deal

Former President Donald Trump criticized Republican senators, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), for engaging with the White House and some Democrats for a bipartisan infrastructure deal.

Last week, President Joe Biden said the White House came to an agreement with about a dozen Republican senators on a smaller $1.2 trillion infrastructure deal. Bidens infrastructure proposals were resoundingly panned by Republicans, who said theyre too expansive and would grant more power to the federal government.

So sad to see certain RINO Republican Senators go back and forth to the White House and continually get nothing for infrastructure or anything else, Trump said, referring to Republicans in name only.

The former commander-in-chief, who has frequently criticized McConnell since leaving office, also targeted the Senate Republican leader amid the infrastructure talks.

When will they learn that they are being played with, and used by, the Radical Left, Trump added, and only bad things can happen. Should have never lost the Senate in the first place, thanks Mitch! New leadership is needed, and fast!

Several Republicans, in comments to the media, signaled that they are opposed to the new deal after Biden last week threatened to veto the infrastructure deal unless a partisan multi-trillion-dollar measure called the American Families Act is passed in tandem. But over the weekend, Biden walked back his comments and said he would try to pass the infrastructure bill as a standalone measure, noting that he understandably upset some Republicans.

McConnell has made few public comments about Trump in recent days, although he penned a Wall Street Journal article after the Jan. 6 Capitol breach and excoriated the former president for his claims about the 2020 election. And while he didnt vote to convict Trump during his second impeachment, McConnell argued that Trumps election comments as well as his $2,000 stimulus check proposal cost Republicans two Senate seats during Georgias runoff elections.

Trump also reacted negatively in a separate statement earlier this week after a book excerpt from ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl detailed an alleged conversation between McConnell and former Attorney General William Barr in which McConnell told the attorney general to push back against Trumps post-Nov. 3 election assertions. Trump also criticized Barr for being a weak and ineffective attorney general.

When asked Tuesday about Trumps recent statement, McConnell made a similar statement to one he made in April and didnt signal a desire to continue the war-of-words with the former president.

Yeah, I dont have any observations about his comment, he told The Hill on Tuesday. Im focusing on the present and the future. We have a new administration. We have significant differences about many of the things theyre trying to do.

The GOP leader added: Although we hope to be able to get a bipartisan solution to the infrastructure needs that we have in the country. So Im putting all of my focus on the present and the future.

The Epoch Times has contacted McConnells office for comment.
Two paramilitary police officers patrol in the area south of the Great Hall of the People during the second plenary session of the National People's Congress in Beijing on March 8, 2021. (Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images)

UN Body Collaborating With CCP Agency Known for Human Rights Violations: Rights Group

A United Nations body set up to combat drugs and corruption is being questioned for having entered into an agreement with a Chinese extrajudicial agency known for its human rights violations.

On June 29, Madrid-based human rights group Safeguard Defenders announced a new investigation into Chinas secretive detention system known as liuzhi, as well as the submission of its investigative findings (pdf) to the U.N. Special Procedures, which consists of special rapporteurs and expert working groups.

The rights group calls the liuzhi system a legalized system for disappearance.

The rights groups concerns center around the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) choosing to work with the Chinese agency behind the liuzhi system, the National Supervision Commission (NSC). The two signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) in October 2019.

Since then, the NSC has subjected at least 28,983 victims to the liuzhi system, according to estimates by the rights group. During that same time span, the Chinese regime has only confirmed to have placed 5,909 people under the system.

The rights group also estimated that a minimum average of 16 to 76 people is subjected to the liuzhi system every day.

The NSC is responsible for widespread and systematic acts of enforced disappearance, torture, and other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health, gross human rights violations that have all been reported to the United Nations, the rights group stated.

There are limited details of the agreement, except that the two sides would work in areas including information sharing on corruption prevention and fugitive repatriation. As a result, Safeguard Defenders stated that it has asked the UNODC to release the full contents of the MOU, but its request has been denied.

If 28,983 people [arbitrarily] detained, disappeared and [tortured] since signing the MOU is not enough for the UNODC to realize NSC is not a suitable partner, let alone develop deeper cooperation with, [what would be]? Safeguard Defenders asked.

The NSC, a non-judicial organ, is a supersized anti-corruption agency established by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in March 2018. Its tasked with investigating economic crimes committed by business people, party members, and employees at state-run institutions.

The NSC holds enormous power, including the ability to issue warrants, freeze assets, summon suspects, and hold suspects for at least six months in the liuzhi system, where theyre denied access to their family or a lawyer.

Laura Harth, campaign director for Safeguard Defenders, said that U.N. agencies are all bound to the fundamental human rights contained in the human rights treaties and conventions, which prohibits arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances, tortures, and absence of access to legal representation.

Yet, in signing an MOU and recognizing the extrajudicial body NSC as the legitimate representative of the Chinese Government for the scope of the Convention Against Corruption, UNODC completely derogates from its obligations in this regard, Harth said in an email to The Epoch Times.

She noted that suspects could be held under liuzhi for more than six months.

The sole purpose for the time insideup to six monthsis to produce a confession, and a suspect will likely remain for as long as needed to secure such a confession, Harth said.

In May 2018, less than two months after the NSC was established, the first known death in the liuzhi system was reported. Citing Chinas state-run media Caixin, Safeguard Defenders reported that the dead man was Chen Yong, who was held in liuzhi for 26 days before his death. Chen was a driver for a local official who was a suspect in a corruption case.

Chens family saw his body, which was mangled and bruised, suggesting that he was tortured to death, according to the rights group (pdf).

Another known detainee under the system was Meng Hongwei, former president of Interpol. He went missing after returning to China in September 2018, before the NSC released a statement confirming his detention the following month. In January 2020, Meng was sentenced to 13 years and six months in prison after he pleaded guilty to accepting more than $2 million in bribes.

The MOU that the NSC signed with UNODC isnt the only one. According to the NSCs website, the commission also inked similar agreements with several countries, including Argentina, Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam.

At least for the NSC, signing of these MOU has effectively legitimized Chinas move of handing over judicial cooperation, and criminal investigations, to a non-judicial organ, Safeguard Defenders stated.

Liuzhi isnt the only form of forced disappearance in China. The CCP also commits mass state-sanctioned kidnapping of its people and foreigners under a system called Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location (RSDL). This system is carried out by police officers from Chinas ministries of public security and state security.

In August 2019, 27 human rights organizations, including Safeguard Defenders, World Uyghur Congress, and the International Campaign for Tibet, issued a joint statement calling on the Chinese regime to end all forms of forced disappearing, including RSDL and liuzhi.

Safeguard Defenders has asked the U.N. Special Procedures to carry out a comprehensive analysis of the liuzhi system and how it stands in line with international legal and human rights obligation.

Harth called on UNODC to release the contents of the MOU. The U.N. agency should immediately cease any cooperation with the NSC that puts the Party organ as the legitimate representative of the Chinese regime, she said.

UNDOC told The Epoch Times that it did not have any problems disclosing the MoU if NSC also agreed.

As any UN-entity and being an integrated part of the UN Secretariat, UNODC is bound to apply the standards set out in the UN human rights due diligence policy in whatever it undertakes, be it technical, normative and any other related work, UNDOC said in an email.

Cathy He contributed to the article.
Afghan security forces inspect the wreckage of a passenger van after a blast in Kabul, Afghanistan on June 12, 2021. (Stringer via Reuters)

US Commander in Afghanistan Warns of Deteriorating Security Situation: Its Not Good

Gen. Scott Miller, the military commander directing the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, told ABC in an interview that the security situation in the country has deteriorated as the Taliban talks peace and, at the same time, engages in offensive operations across the country.

I think what youre seeing, just if you look at the security situation, its not good, Miller told ABCs Martha Raddatz in Kabul, in an interview published Monday. The Afghans have recognized its not good. The Taliban are on the move.

Miller said that, even as the Taliban are in talks with the Afghan government about a political settlement to the decades-long conflict, you have an offensive operation going on across the country by the Taliban.

He said the Afghan government understands the severity of the problem and is now moving to consolidate security forces to maintain the ability to resist the Taliban at key junctures rather than trying to defend isolated pockets of territory.

At the same time, as the Taliban have seized control of more districts in recent weeks, there is growing concern among Afghans in major population centers about a military takeover and the potential for civil war.

As you watch the Taliban moving across the country, what you dont want to have happen is that the people lose hope, and they believe they now have a foregone conclusion presented to them, Miller told the outlet. The loss of terrain and the rapidity of that loss of terrain has to be a concerning one.

He warned that, at some point, there may be a fight for control of the capital, Kabul.

Youre starting to create conditions here that doesntwont look good for Afghanistan in the future if there is a push for a military takeover, he told the outlet.

Miller said that, as the U.S. troop pullout continues, he is increasingly having to deny requests for military assistance from the Afghan government.

Meanwhile, in a Monday interview with Washington Post Live, retired Army Gen. David Petraeus, who once commanded U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was even more explicit about the potential for civil war.

I feared that we were consigning Afghanistan to a civil war, and again, that seems to be materializing sooner than I had even feared it would, Petraeus told the outlet.

Petraeus said that waning U.S. support is leading to lowered morale among Afghan forces.

You have seen the Taliban take dozens of districts in recent weeks. It appears that that kind of psychological element that is so important with soldiers, that they know that someone is coming to the rescue and that there will be close air support, air medevac, additional forces, he said.

They seem to be doubting that, and whenever that happens, then you start to see soldiers not fight, desert, surrender, what have you, and weve seen that in dozens of districts, he added.

There have been multiple reports of Afghan forces surrendering to the Taliban since the U.S. troop pullout began in May.
The Pentagon building is seen in Arlington, Va., on Oct. 9, 2020. (Carlos Barria/Reuters)

US Forces Come Under Fire in Syria Following Airstrikes Against Iran-Backed Militia

U.S. troops in eastern Syria came under rocket fire on Monday night, shortly after President Joe Biden ordered airstrikes against Iran-backed militia groups embedded at the IraqSyria border region.

Col. Wayne Maratto, a spokesman for the U.S.-led mission in Syria, said U.S. forces responded to the rocket fire in self defense by firing back at the rocket launching positions.

U.S. Forces in Syria were attacked by multiple rockets. There are no injuries and damage is being assessed, Maratto said on Twitter. U.S. Forces in Syria, while under multiple rocket attack, acted in self- defense and conducted counter-battery artillery fire at rocket launching positions.

It wasnt immediately clear who fired the rockets in and around the U.S. base in Deir Ezzour in eastern Syria on Monday. However, Iran-backed militia groups claimed responsibility for the attacks, The Jerusalem Post reported.

Just hours before the rocket fire, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had told reporters in Rome that the U.S. airstrikes on Sunday were necessary, appropriate, and deliberate to limit the risk of escalation and to send a clear and unambiguous deterrent message.

Separately, the Pentagon said in a statement on Sunday that the defensive precision airstrikes were carried out on facilities known to be used by Iran-backed militias that are engaged in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) attacks against U.S. personnel and facilities in Iraq.

The Defense Department didnt disclose whether it believes anyone was killed or injured. Iran-backed militia groups said the strikes killed four of their members.

The U.S. strikes targeted operational and weapons storage facilities at two locations in Syria and one location in Iraq, both of which lie close to the border between those countries, the department stated Sunday, adding that several terrorist groups, including Kataib Hezbollah and Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada, use the facilities.

The Pentagon said the actions show that the U.S. president stands ready to act to protect U.S. personnel, who are in Iraq at the invitation of the Iraqi government. U.S. and coalition forces have been fighting side by side with the Iraqi Security Forces in an effort to defeat ISIS.

It was the second military operation by U.S. forces in Iraq since President Joe Biden took office.

As a matter of international law, the United States acted pursuant to its right of self-defense. The strikes were both necessary to address the threat and appropriately limited in scope. As a matter of domestic law, the president took this action pursuant to his Article II authority to protect U.S. personnel in Iraq, the statement said.

Biden on Monday defended the airstrikes, saying they targeted sites used by the Iranian-backed militia groups responsible for recent attacks on U.S. personnel in Iraq.

And I have that authority under Article II, and even those up in the Hill who are reluctant to acknowledge that have acknowledged thats the case, he said.

The Iraqi military condemned the U.S. strikes as a blatant and unacceptable violation of Iraqi sovereignty and national security. Iraqi militia groups meanwhile vowed to retaliate.

Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh accused the United States of disrupting the security of the region.

Melanie Sun contributed to this report.
A logo is pictured outside a building of the World Health Organization (WHO) during an executive board meeting on update on the CCP virus outbreak, in Geneva, Switzerland, Feb. 6, 2020. (Denis Balibouse/Reuters)

WHO Stops Recommending Widespread COVID-19 Testing of Asymptomatic Cases

In updated guidance on COVID-19 testing strategies, the World Health Organization (WHO) says it does not currently recommend widespread screening of people without symptoms, citing the cost of such a strategy and its ineffectiveness.

Widespread testing of asymptomatic populations, including through self-testing, is not currently recommended, based on lack of evidence on impact and cost-effectiveness of such approaches and the concern that this approach risks diverting resources from higher priority testing indications, the guidance stated.

However, countries with the resources and desire to expand testing to the general public (regardless of symptoms) should demonstrate that they have the necessary public health infrastructure in place to respond to positive results and that resources are not being taken away from the testing of suspected cases, which is the top priority, the WHO told The Epoch Times via email.

Testing should be directed to where they are expected to have the biggest public health impact, the WHO said, adding, this means that all those who are suspected [as defined by the WHO] to have COVID-19 based on symptoms should be prioritized for testing, irrespective of their vaccination status or disease history.

But in areas with ongoing community transmission, anyone who has come in contact with a probable or confirmed case should still quarantine for 14 days regardless if they are asymptomatic and have not been confirmed positive.

A general view of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) headquarters in Atlanta, Ga., on Sept. 30, 2014. (Tami Chappell/Reuters)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says in its most updated guidance that people who are asymptomatic and not vaccinated should be quarantined and tested if they were in close contact with a COVID-19 positive individual.

Viral testing is recommended for unvaccinated individuals who are close contacts of persons with COVID-19, the CDC said. These individuals should be tested immediately after being identified, and if negative, tested again in 5-7 days after last exposure or immediately if symptoms develop during quarantine.

Whereas, fully vaccinated individuals do not need to be quarantined, tested, or be restricted from work after being in close contact to individuals with suspected or confirmed COVID-19 if they do not have COVID-like symptoms, as their risk of infection is low, according to the CDC. However, they are recommended to self-monitor for symptoms of COVID-19 for 14 days after exposure.

The CDC says testing is still recommended for fully vaccinated residents and employees of correctional and detention facilities and homeless shelters.

People are considered fully vaccinated two weeks after their second dose of a messenger RNA vaccine or a single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

The WHOs current guidance on prioritizing tests for people with symptoms is consistent with what the guidance had been prior to the pandemic in treating and diagnosing respiratory viral outbreaksincluding the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak and the 2012 Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) outbreakwhich was to predominantly focus on symptomatic cases to stop the transmission of the disease.

Data has indicated that asymptomatic spread is not as prevalent as earlier studies claimed it to be and that the risk of transmission from asymptomatic patients is low.

COVID Cases May Be Confirmed with Antigen Test

Throughout the pandemic last year, the standard for diagnosing a CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus infection was through a PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test with cycle threshold values of 40 cycles or higher. This raised concerns that there may be an overreliance on and a misuse of the test as a diagnostic tool since it cant differentiate between a live infectious virus and an inactivated virus fragment that isnt infectious.

Individuals who had a positive PCR test with or without symptoms of COVID-19 were considered a case and added to the daily COVID-19 case count.

The CCP virus causes the disease COVID-19.

The WHO then updated its guidance on the use of PCR tests on Jan. 20, 2021, cautioning lab experts and in vitro diagnostic medical devise users to not rely solely on the results of the PCR test to diagnose COVID-19. Rather, a patients health history and epidemiological risk factors should also be considered alongside the PCR test in diagnosis.

Now, verification of a COVID-19 case can be done through an antigen test, instead of through a nucleic acid amplification test (NAAT) such as the widely used PCR test.

In the updated recommendation, the WHO states that while NAAT is considered as a reference standard for diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 infection, an antigen test can be used to diagnose a CCP infection where NAAT is not available or where results will be delayed by more than 48 hours.

Three scenarios where a nucleic acid amplification test is not required in addition to an antigen test result include:

In symptomatic people in high prevalence settings, it is not necessary to confirm positive antigen test results by NAAT, while a negative antigen test result may be confirmed by NAAT at clinical discretion.

In low prevalence settings, confirmation of negative antigen test results by NAAT is not necessary, whereas a positive antigen test result is up to the clinic to confirm it with NAAT.

In asymptomatic people that are contacts of confirmed cases or are frequently exposed, such as health care and long-term care facility workers, an antigen test result is not necessary to be confirmed by NAAT.

Antigen tests are immunoassays that can detect if an individual has an active CCP virus infection in about 15 to 30 minutes and is less sensitive than a PCR test. According to the WHO, antigen tests are sensitive only for detection of patients with a high viral load e.g. cycle threshold (Ct) values [of approximately] 25-30.
Woman Fighting Cancer Weds High School Sweetheart After Docs Say She Has Just Months to Live

A Memphis woman battling cancer was told by doctors that she had less than four months to livebut she recently married her longtime high school sweetheart.

Gracie Jeppsen, 20, suffers from a severe brain tumor, but she wedded her boyfriend Seth Madsen, 21, on Thursday, June 17.

The two lovebirds started dating while in high school, before being separated for three years when they went on different church missions abroad.

Upon returning, Gracie was diagnosed with a severe brain tumor on April 1, and she started her treatment at the St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital a few days later.

The blastoma had spread to her head, causing severe back painsthe reason she decided to end her mission prematurely.

The duo then decided to get married, initially planning for a small wedding until their plans changed when Gracies social worker at the hospital became her wedding planner.

When St. Jude called and asked if I could pitch in, I said we were not going to pitch in, we were going to sponsor the whole thing, Chris Hope told NBC.

The church wedding event was sponsored by the Chris Hope Foundation and staff at the St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital.

With all she is going through, hopefully she will forget about that tonight and this will be a night for her and her new groom to cherish the moment, said Chris.

Gracies parents said they were happy to help the couple realize their dream and give them something to hope for.

I think that being in love and having a future ahead of you gives you a reason to fight, and that is really important, said her mother, Tiffany Jeppsen.

David Jeppsen, Gracies father, said that Seth and his daughter have always wanted to be together, and despite the situation, as parents, they had to do whatever it took to make that happen.

Gracie is in her second round of chemo, and will undergo radiation once the therapy is completed.

(Courtesy of Chris Hope Foundation)

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The siren of a Santa Ana Police Department vehicle in Santa Ana, Calif., on March 11, 2021. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Woman Shot After Witnessing Car Crash

A woman who witnessed a hit-and-run in Mission Viejo, California, was shot after following a truck that fled the scene.

The shooting was preceded June 27 by reports of reckless driving near La Paz and Olympiad, the Orange County Sheriffs Department (OCSD) said. Soon after, about 7:40 p.m., the erratic driver crashed his truck into another vehicle near La Paz and Marguerite.

An eyewitness to the accident followed the truck as it continued into the intersection of La Paz and Commerce Center. As she drove past the driver, he fired several shots into her car, police said.

One struck the victims foot, said OCSD spokesperson Todd Hylton.

We got numerous calls about the vehicle and the erratic driving, and then soon after that we got a call of the shooting, Hylton told The Epoch Times.

Police said the shooter had been involved in a domestic violence incident in San Clemente earlier that evening but left the scene before officers arrived.

About 10 minutes after that call, we received a call about a reckless driver [in Mission Viejo], and that vehicle matched the description of the subject from the San Clemente incident, Hylton said.

After the shooting, he fled on foot.  He fled up the hillside, and he was located [there]. We positioned the deputies at the top of the hill and he was taken into custody.

Police recovered the gun used in the shooting, he said. The gunman, Aliso Viejo resident Michael French, 29, was arrested.

The victims injury was non-life-threatening. She didnt know the gunman, police said.
LONDON (AP)  Most people wouldnt volunteer to walk through a minefield. Princess Diana did it twice.

On Jan. 15, 1997, Diana walked gingerly down a narrow path cleared through an Angolan minefield, wearing a protective visor and flak jacket emblazoned with the name of The HALO Trust, a group devoted to removing mines from former war zones. When she realized some of the photographers accompanying her didnt get the shot, she turned around and did it again.

Later, she met with a group of landmine victims. A young girl who had lost her left leg perched on the princesss lap.

The images of that day appeared in newspapers and on TV sets around the globe, focusing international attention on the then-languishing campaign to rid the world of devices that lurk underground for decades after conflicts end. Today, a treaty banning landmines has 164 signatories.

Those touched by the life of the preschool teacher turned princess remembered her ahead of what would have been her 60th birthday on Thursday, recalling the complicated royal rebel who left an enduring imprint on the House of Windsor.

Diana had the emotional intelligence that allowed her to see that bigger picture  but also to bring it right down to individual human beings, said James Cowan, a retired major general who is now CEO of The HALO Trust. She knew that she could reach their hearts in a way that would outmaneuver those who would only be an influence through the head.

Dianas walk among the landmines seven months before she died in a Paris car crash is just one example of how she helped make the monarchy more accessible, changing the way the royal family related to people. By interacting more intimately with the public  kneeling to the level of a child, sitting on the edge of a patients hospital bed, writing personal notes to her fans  she connected with people in a way that inspired other royals, including her sons, Princes William and Harry, as the monarchy worked to become more human and remain relevant in the 21st century.

Diana didnt invent the idea of royals visiting the poor, destitute or downtrodden. Queen Elizabeth II herself visited a Nigerian leper colony in 1956. But Diana touched them  literally.

Diana was a real hugger in the royal family, said Sally Bedell Smith, author of Diana in Search of Herself. She was much more visibly tactile in the way she interacted with people. It was not something the queen was comfortable with and still is not.

Critically, she also knew that those interactions could bring attention to her causes since she was followed everywhere by photographers and TV crews.

Ten years before she embraced landmine victims in Angola, she shook hands with a young AIDS patient in London during the early days of the epidemic, showing people that the disease couldnt be transmitted through touch.

As her marriage to Prince Charles deteriorated, Diana used the same techniques to tell her side of the story. Embracing her children with open arms to show her love for her sons. Sitting alone in front of the Taj Mahal on a royal trip to India. Walking through that minefield as she was starting a new life after her divorce.

Diana understood the power of imagery  and she knew that a photograph was worth a hundred words, said Ingrid Seward, editor-in-chief of Majesty magazine and author of Diana: An Intimate Portrait. She wasnt an intellectual. She wasnt ever going to be the one to give the right words. But she gave the right image.

And that began on the day the 20-year-old Lady Diana Spencer married Prince Charles, the heir to throne, on July 29, 1981, at St. Pauls Cathedral.

Elizabeth Emanuel, who co-designed her wedding dress, describes an event comparable to the transformation of a chrysalis into a butterfly, or in this case a nursery school teacher in cardigans and sensible skirts into a fairytale princess.

We thought, right, lets do the biggest, most dramatic dress possible, the ultimate fairytale dress. Lets make it big. Lets have big sleeves. Lets have ruffles, Emanuel said. And St. Pauls was so huge. We knew that we needed to do something that was a statement. And Diana was completely up for that. She loved that idea.

But Emanuel said Diana also had a simplicity that made her more accessible to people.

She had this vulnerability about her, I think, so that ordinary people could relate to her. She wasnt perfect. And none of us are perfect, and I think thats why there is this thing, you know, people think of her almost like family. They felt they knew her.

Dianas sons learned from their mothers example, making more personal connections with the public during their charitable work, including supporting efforts to destigmatize mental health problems and treat young AIDS patients in Lesotho and Botswana.

William, who is second in line to the throne, worked as an air ambulance pilot before taking on full-time royal duties. Harry retraced Diana's footsteps through the minefield for The HALO Trust.

Her influence can be seen in other royals as well. Sophie, the Countess of Wessex and the wife of Charles' brother Prince Edward, grew teary, for example, in a television interview as she told the nation about her feelings on the death of her father-in-law, Prince Philip.

The public even began to see a different side of the queen, including her turn as a Bond girl during the 2012 London Olympics in which she starred in a mini-movie with Daniel Craig to open the games.

More recently, the monarch has reached out in Zoom calls, joking with school children about her meeting with Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. What was he like, ma'am?

Russian,'' she said flatly. The Zoom filled with chuckles.

Cowan, of HALO, said the attention that Diana, and now Harry, have brought to the landmine issue helped attract the funding that made it possible for thousands of workers to continue the slow process of ridding the world of the devices.

Sixty countries and territories are still contaminated with landmines, which killed or injured more than 5,500 people in 2019, according to Landmine Monitor.

She had that capacity to reach out and inspire people. Their imaginations were fired up by this work, Cowan said. And they like it and they want to fund it. And thats why shes had such a profound legacy for us.
NORWALK  A former Norwalk primary care physician reached a nearly $15 million agreement to settle allegations that he illegally billed the Connecticut Medical Assistance Program for services he never provided, officials said.

The $14,982,081 settlement against Ramil Mansourov was announced Tuesday by Connecticut Attorney General William Tong.

The Attorney Generals office and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration launched an investigation that found that Mansourov fabricated and submitted thousands of false claims for reimbursement for services that werent provided to Medicaid patients while running the Family Health Urgent Care Center in Norwalk from 2014 to 2016.

Mansourov allegedly billed the state for office visits, home visits and nursing home visits using billing codes that would provide maximum reimbursement rates, officials said.

In some cases, Mansourov billed for services in Connecticut on dates when he was working in Kentucky or vacationing in Florida, the Dominican Republic and Italy, officials said.

In total, Mansourov was accused of defrauding the Connecticut Medical Assistance Program of $4,994,027, according to officials.

Tongs office filed suit against Mansourov under the False Claims Act. This allowed the state to get a judgment in Hartford Superior Court this month for three times the amount of damages sustained from Mansourovs conduct, officials said.

Ramil Mansourov engaged in a massive, brazen fraud over the course of many years, robbing the state of millions of dollars. He is now paying a heavy price for those illegal acts, Tong said in a statement.

The Office of the U.S. Attorney filed criminal charges.

Mansourov allegedly fled to Canada in 2017 when he heard that federal agents were looking to arrest him in connection with health care fraud and money laundering offenses, officials said. He was taken into custody by Canadian authorities and turned over to federal agents.

He was convicted in 2019 in the U.S. District Court and sentenced to 87 months in prison. He is currently incarcerated.

Anyone with information of suspected fraud or abuse of the public health care system can contact the Attorney Generals Antitrust and Government Program Fraud Department at 860-808-5040 or by email at ag.fraud@ct.gov; the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit at 860-258-5986 or by email at conndcj@ct.gov; or the Department of Social Services fraud reporting hotline at 1-800-842-2155, online at www.ct.gov/dss/reportingfraud, or by email to providerfraud.dss@ct.gov.
(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.)

Woody Holton, University of South Carolina

(THE CONVERSATION) Editors note: Americans may think they know a lot about the Declaration of Independence, but many of those ideas are elitist and wrong, as historian Woody Holton explains.

His forthcoming book Liberty is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution shows how independence and the Revolutionary War were influenced by women, Indigenous and enslaved people, religious dissenters and other once-overlooked Americans.

In celebration of the United States 245th birthday, Holton offers six surprising facts about the nations founding document  including that it failed to achieve its most immediate goal and that its meaning has changed from the founding to today.

Ordinary Americans played a big role

The Declaration of Independence was written by wealthy white men, but the impetus for independence came from ordinary Americans. Historian Pauline Maier discovered that by July 2, 1776, when the Continental Congress voted to separate from Britain, 90 provincial and local bodies  conventions, town meetings and even grand juries  had already issued their own declarations or instructed Congress to.

In Maryland, county conventions demanded that the provincial convention tell Marylands congressmen to support independence. Pennsylvania assemblymen required their congressional delegates to oppose independence  until Philadelphians gathered outside the State House, later named Independence Hall, and threatened to overthrow the legislature, which then dropped this instruction.

American independence is due in part to African Americans

Like the U.S. Constitution, the final version of the Declaration never uses the word slave. But African Americans loomed large in the first draft, written by Thomas Jefferson.

In that early draft, Jeffersons single biggest grievance was that the mother country had first foisted enslaved Africans on white Americans and then attempted to incite them against their patriot owners. In an objection to which he gave 168 words  three times as many as any other complaint  Jefferson said George III had encouraged enslaved Americans to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them.

Numerous other white Southerners joined Jefferson in venting their rage at the mother country for, as one put it, pointing a dagger to their Throats, thru the hands of their Slaves.

Britain really had forged an informal alliance with African Americans  but it was the slaves who initiated it. In November 1774, James Madison became the first white American to report that slaves were plotting to take advantage of divisions between the colonies and the mother country to rebel and obtain their own freedom. Initially the British turned down African Americans offer to fight for their king, but the slaves kept coming, and on November 15, 1775, Lord Dunmore, the last British governor of Virginia, finally published an emancipation proclamation. It freed all rebel- (patriot-) owned slaves who could reach his lines and would fight to suppress the patriot rebellion.

The Second Continental Congress was talking about Dunmore and other British officials when it claimed, in the final draft of the Declaration, that George III had excited domestic insurrection amongst us. That brief euphemism was all that remained of Jeffersons 168-word diatribe against the British for sending Africans to America and then inciting them to kill their owners. But no one missed its meaning.

The complaints werent actually about the king

Britains king is the subject of 33 verbs in a declaration that never once says Parliament. But nine of Congress most pressing grievances actually were about parliamentary statutes. And even British officials like those who cracked down on Colonial smuggling worked not for George III but for his Cabinet, which was in effect a creature of Parliament.

By targeting only the king  who played a purely symbolic role in the Declaration of Independence, akin to modern Americas Uncle Sam  Congress reinforced its novel argument that Americans did not need to cut ties to Parliament, since they had never had any.

The Declaration of Independence does not actually denounce monarchy

As Julian P. Boyd, the founding editor of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, pointed out, the Declaration of Independence bore no necessary antagonism to the idea of kingship in general.

Indeed, several members of Congress, including John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, openly admired limited monarchy. Their beef was not with all kings and queens but with King George III  and him only as the front man for Parliament.

The Declaration of Independence fell short of its most pressing purpose

In June 1776, delegates who supported independence suggested that if Congress declared it soon, France might immediately accept its invitation to an alliance. Then the French Navy could start intercepting British supply ships bound for America that very summer.

But in reality it took French King Louis XVI a long 18 months to agree to a formal alliance, and the first French ships and soldiers did not enter the war until June 1778.

Abolitionists and feminists shifted the Declaration of Independences focus to human rights

In keeping with the Declaration of Independences largely diplomatic purpose, hardly any of its white contemporaries quoted its now-famous phrases about equality and rights. Instead, as the literary scholar Eric Slauter discovered, they spotlighted its clauses justifying one nation or state in breaking up with another.

But before the year 1776 was out, as Slauter also notes, Lemuel Haynes, a free African American soldier serving in the Continental Army, had drafted an essay called Liberty Further Extended. He opened by quoting Jeffersons truisms that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.

By highlighting these claims, Haynes began the process of shifting the focus and meaning of the Declaration of Independence from Congress ordinance of secession to a universal declaration of human rights. That effort was later carried forward by other abolitionists, Black and white, by womens rights activists and by other seekers of social justice, including Abraham Lincoln.

In time, abolitionists and feminists transformed Congress failed bid for an immediate French alliance into arguably the most consequential freedom document ever composed.

[The Conversations Politics + Society editors pick need-to-know stories. Sign up for Politics Weekly.]

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here: https://theconversation.com/the-declaration-of-independence-wasnt-really-complaining-about-king-george-and-5-other-surprising-facts-for-july-fourth-162640.
EDWARDSVILLE  Illinois continues to make progress in the battle against COVID-19, but the emergence of several variants of the virus serves as a reminder that the fight is a long way from being over.

On June 11, the state lifted the limited capacity in businesses, restaurants, and major events. That milestone was reached due to the vaccination program in Illinois that has provided more than 12 million doses of the vaccine and fully vaccinate over 6 million people. Cases have gone down to their lowest levels since the beginning of the pandemic, with a case positivity rate below 1%.

Last week, Illinois hit another big vaccination milestone when it became the first state in the Midwest to hit President Joe Bidens goal of having 70% of all adults aged 18 and older receive at least one dose of the vaccine by July 4.

At the same time, though, new variants of the virus continue to pop up, including Alpha, Beta, Gamma and two strains of Epsilon that are among the COVID-19 variants of concern listed on the Illinois Public Health Department website.

As of Sunday, the Delta variant accounted for only 84 of the 9,697 variant cases reported in Illinois, but it has displayed rapid growth in many parts of the nation.

As long as there is a human host for the COVID coronavirus to live in, we will see mutations, said Dr. Loren Hughes, a family physician and a former healthcare executive from Edwardsville. The original strain from Wuhan, China has undergone numerous mutations that have made it much more aggressive and contagious in a susceptible host.

The original native coronavirus that affected so many at the beginning of the pandemic is much different than what we are seeing now. Most current Illinois COVID cases are due to the Alpha variant that came over from the United Kingdom. Over 50 percent of all current cases in Illinois are due to the Alpha strain and its the predominant strain in the U.S. The Alpha variant is 50 percent more contagious than the original form of the virus. Our current concern is the Delta variant which came from India. It is 60 percent more contagious than the Alpha. In the UK, 90 percent of the cases now are the Delta variant. 

Hughes is a strong proponent of vaccination, including those who have already had the coronavirus infection. He recently convinced his sister, who was diagnosed with COVID-19 last year, to get vaccinated.

I see a lot on social media from those who say theyre not getting the vaccine because they have already had COVID, said Hughes, whose mother died from the coronavirus last year. The numbers speak for themselves. Two weeks ago, the Delta made up 10 percent of the cases in the U.S. and last week it was up to 20 percent. Any unvaccinated person is at risk of these variants. The numbers are going up in counties across the U.S. where less than 30 percent of the population has been vaccinated, and in areas where the vaccination rate is over 30 percent, were not seeing a huge spike in cases.

Hughes added that even though the overall numbers are down considerably, there were still 18,000 deaths from COVID in the U.S. last month, and all but 150 of them were in people that had not been vaccinated.

That 18,000 includes many people who had COVID already, so it shows me that we have lost the natural immunity from the virus that we may have had in the beginning due to the mutations of the original virus, Hughes said. The Delta variant is currently the flavor of the day, but new variants will pop up as long as we still have people who are infected. There is still real value in getting the vaccine.

For Hughes, vaccination is simply the best way to protect yourself and protect others, especially as the variants become more numerous and more prevalent.

Theres about a 10% failure rate with any of the vaccines, including cases caused by the variants. It shows that vaccines are currently protecting people regardless of the strain of virus, Hughes said. Natural immunity isnt showing much protection from these new variants while vaccines are 90% effective.

Its not that the Delta is more dangerous or deadly, but its more contagious. Since youre not protected from the original strain, you can get it a second time and it can still be serious. The hospitalization rate is twice as high for Delta as it is for the original strain, but fortunately, the death rate is fairly flat as we have learned how to treat people more effectively.

The improved knowledge of how to treat COVID patients, and the rapid manner in which the vaccines were developed, is something that Hughes believes will pay dividends for years to come.

There hasnt been a decision yet about whether we will need annual covid booster shots, but I believe that we will likely need them. Our current vaccines will have to be retooled because of the variants that will make them ineffective, Hughes said.

I think that the technology that weve learned from COVID is really going to help us in the future with autoimmune diseases, cancer and other viral infections. We had all parts of our society come together to build and implement the technology and it is proving itself to be very effective.
Salida, CO (81201)

Today

Mainly clear skies. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 56F. Winds WNW at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Mainly clear skies. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 56F. Winds WNW at 5 to 10 mph.
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PM Prayut to grace Phuket Sandbox launch

PHUKET: Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha will fly to Phuket on Thursday to preside over the opening ceremony of the Phuket Sandbox tourism scheme.

tourismeconomicspoliticsCOVID-19

By The Phuket News

Tuesday 29 June 2021, 05:12PM

Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha is to visit Phuket on Thursday (July 1) for the official opening of the Phuket Sandbox tourism scheme. Photo: NNT

We do not have any problems, and I guarantee that Phuket Sandbox will be open on July 1. I will go there too, he told the press at Government House yesterday (June 28).

Every person has to help together. If the prime minister makes an announcement, but people do not give their cooperation, nothing will work, he said.

If you do not like this and do not like that, what can we do? We need to find a suitable measure and step forward together, PM Prayut said.

I have consulted with doctors and medical staff who confirmed that if there are enough vaccinated people in the area, and the tourists are fully vaccinated with two doses, and the Phuket government can manage the re-opening well, then we can open the Sandbox project on other islands, he continued.

After that, we will finally move to mainland areas, he added.

According to Post Today, the draft schedule of the prime ministers visit, marked as issued on Saturday (June 26), shows that PM Prayut and his entourage will arrive at Phuket International Airport at 9:30am.

After his visit at the airport, PM Prayut will inspect Phuket Check Point in Tha Chatchai, the site of the only bridge onto the island, before inspecting the EOC Command Center at Phuket Provincial Police Station in Phuket Town.

At 11:30am, he will meet with Phuket Governor Narong Woonciew and other Phuket officials at the Royal Phuket City Hotel, where he will have lunch.

At 1:45pm, he will preside over what is described as the opening ceremony of Hug Thai Hug Phuket campaign, to be hosted by the Thai Chamber of Commerce at the Central Phuket shopping mall.

The Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Thai Chamber of Commerce (TCC) to launch the HUG THAIS project to stimulate Thai and foreign tourists spending to revive the economy, the Tourism Authority of Thailand announced Thursday last week (June 24) at an event to officially launch the campaign.

According to the TAT report of the launch, Tourism and SportsMinister Phiphat Ratchakitprakarn said, The HUG THAIS project is the latest public-private sector initiative of TAT, the Thai government, and partners like the TCC to reinvigorate Thailands tourism industry and the wider national economy. Such cooperation is vital as Thailand progresses towards once again enjoying its status as a preferred tourist destination.

The TAT noted that the use of hug in the HUG THAIS projects name and overall campaign carries special significance, as this word in local northern Thai dialect means love. It was chosen to symbolize the campaigns Eat More, Travel More and Shop More elements aimed at boosting public spending, in a warm and friendly manner.

According to the TAT, the HUG THAIS project is expected to help generate more than B100 billion for the Thai economy within the next six months.

Following the HUG THAIS Phuket launch, for the campaign with the Northern Thailand name, PM Prayut will visit Sirinath National Park on Phukets west coast to inspect the readiness of the facilities and staff of the park.

At 4:40pm, PM Prayut will arrive back at Phuket International Airport to welcome tourists arriving in Phuket on board a Singapore Airlines flight from Singapore.

At about 5:30pm, PM Prayut and his entourage will fly back to Bangkok.
Royal Gazette announces Thailands new regulations for online ride-hailing services

BANGKOK: Thailands Transport Ministry has reported that a ministerial regulation, covering online ride-hailing services, has been announced in the Royal Gazette, making the rules enforceable.

transporteconomics

By National News Bureau of Thailand

Tuesday 29 June 2021, 02:53PM

Photo: NNT

Transport Minister Saksayam Chidchob said, according to the regulations, personal motor vehicles can be registered for online ride-hailing services, reports state news agency NNT.

The Department of Land Transport (DLT) will now seek opinions from the various parties involved and, in 30 days, will announce criteria to support service providers and applications that will be used for the service, the report added.

Mr Saksayam said the regulation will help people make the most of their resources, in line with the principle of the sharing economy. People will be allowed to use their personal vehicles to provide ride-hailing services, as an alternative to taxis.

Each person is allowed to register only one personal vehicle, and the driver must be equipped with electronic communication systems endorsed by the DLT.

For small and medium-sized cars, the starting fare is no more than B50 for the first two kilometres, and no more than B12 for each subsequent kilometre traveled.

For larger vehicles, the starting fare is no more than B200 for the first two kilometres and no more B30 for each subsequent kilometre traveled.
Welcome back home

As the countdown to the Sandbox nears the July 1 deadline, resort island pays tribute to its real-life tourism attraction.

CommunityCOVID-19tourismeconomicsculture

By Press Release

Tuesday 29 June 2021, 08:30AM

The social-media focused campaign in the lead-up to the beginning of July is highlighted by the voice and images of Phuket people who have endured the pandemic and remain ready to welcome travelers back home in the coming weeks ahead.

The social-media focused campaign in the lead-up to the beginning of July is highlighted by the voice and images of Phuket people who have endured the pandemic and remain ready to welcome travelers back home in the coming weeks ahead.

Tourism eyes around the world are focused on a resort island in Thailand for the reopening of international, vaccinated travel to the Phuket Sandbox. A key emerging storyline from the islands frenzied runaway to 1st July has been the remarkable cross sector partnerships that has become a true catalyst of change.

Phukets private sector has massively rallied in the final days leading up to the Sandbox in support of its greatest asset, its people. The islands rich cultural tapestry is the theme of the newly launched Welcome Back Home hospitality community collaboration.

One key working part of Thailands Sandbox scheme, has been to achieve the vaccination baseline of over 70% of Phuket residents. With local government resources already stretched in fighting the COVID-19 crisis, hotels have thrown open their doors and embraced their neighbourhoods in hosting vaccination centers to help achieve the numbers.

The Sandbox has brought together various tourism organizations in a way our industry has never witnessed before, said Laguna Phukets Managing Director Ravi Chandran, who has experienced past events like SARS, the Asian tsunami and the global financial crisis.

The Sandbox has broken down barriers within our industry, and the hope displayed in the determination and spirit is teaching us a true-life lesson. Welcome Back Home is our tribute to acknowledging people first and supporting our local neighbours and not just relying on Instagram-ready photo libraries.

On an island that showcases some of Asias best beaches and world-renowned resorts, leading Phuket-based consultancy C9 Hotelworks Managing Director Bill Barnett added, We wanted the campaign to represent the true face of our tourism industry, its people. So, we took to the streets, had conversations, and engaged with our community which has remained resilient in the face of adversity, to actively be the face of this amazing change that is about to take place.

The campaign was shot by Delivering Asia Communications Thai photographer and videographer Thunwa Siripotisorut over two days of traveling the length and breadth of the island, visiting local villages, markets and fishing communities. (See video here.)

Sandbox champion and President of the Phuket Tourist Association, Bhummikitti Ruktaengam, expressed pride at how the efforts of local people had brought us to this historic point. There will be bumps in the road but we will get there. We are working together as one, one island. The industry has never shared a vision and intent so passionately, he said.

Welcome Back Home is a unique undertaking between the Laguna Phuket, Phuket Tourist Association, Delivering Asia Communications, and C9 Hotelworks.

The social-media focused campaign in the lead-up to the beginning of July is highlighted by the voice and images of Phuket people who have endured the pandemic and remain ready to welcome travelers back home in the coming weeks ahead. This is the true voice of Phuket tourism.
With propaganda push, Chinas Communist Party celebrates 100 years

WORLD: Hair windswept and 32-metres high, a statue of Mao Zedong presides over a crowd of millennials alternating between selfies and bubble teas  drawing a thread through the past, present and future of Chinas Communist Party in its red heartland.

ChineseCOVID-19

By AFP

Tuesday 29 June 2021, 04:54PM

Chinas Communist Party has put a propaganda campaign into overdrive with movies, history tours and well-timed space missions. Photo: AFP

As the party prepares to mark its 100th anniversary on Thursday (July 1), it has put a propaganda campaign into overdrive with movies, history tours and well-timed space missions, all lacquering the achievements of the party and its President Xi Jinping, Chinas most powerful leader since Mao.

Xi, who has led the country since 2012, abolished term limits and is yet to anoint a successor, will attend a week of events applauding the party for steering China through a tumultuous century of wars, famine and social upheaval.

China today is the worlds second-largest economy, where tech entrepreneurs write fortunes in thriving first-tier cities and millions have been lifted from abject poverty to join the globes biggest consumer market.

Throughout, the Communist Party has stayed firmly at the centre of the story, attracting the loyalty of a younger generation that has known no other political system and is unable to freely express dissent.

At Maos statue in Changsha, southern Chinas Hunan province, visitors young and old said the Communist Party is the lodestar for Chinas monumental progress.

China has been developing for so long thanks to the efforts of our forefathers and that generation of Communist Party members, said 23-year-old student and party member Li Peng.

The CCP isnt dying. Its a party thats full of life... now, young people are particularly patriotic and unafraid to speak out.

No Xi, no party

Xis leadership style pulls on the past, cherry-picking Maos history to renew patriotism.

In Maos hometown of Shaoshan, an hour away from his statue, locals and tourists alike revere the Chairman as a near deity.

Without Mao, there would be no today, said He Shaoyun, a 75-year-old farmer from Sichuan province who saw Mao give speeches six times as a child.

Nearly 50 years apart in age, red tourists like He and Li are riding the same wave of interest in the origins of the party, which was founded by a handful of underground members in Shanghai on July 23, 1921. The July 1 celebration date was arbitrarily chosen by Mao much later.

A party history study campaign has passed on the red lineage to a new generation, ensuring that a correct view of party history, in Xis words, percolates through society.

The simplified narrative the party tells  a group of heroic underdogs battling evil foes to reach a pre-destined victory for Communism  inevitably glosses over its failures.

The latest edition of the CCPs official concise history condenses the decade-long turmoil of the Cultural Revolution into three pages.

The Great Famine, when tens of millions of people died due to Maos disastrous economic policies, is only mentioned once in passing as a natural disaster.

The Xi era, since 2012, by contrast takes up over a quarter of the entire book.

The party history campaign is about raising Xis own profile, and centring the party on him personally, said Carl Minzner, professor of Chinese politics and law at Fordham University.

Any divergence from the official line is condemned as the party scrubs out dissent online, suppressing alternative interpretations of its past that are deemed historical nihilism.

Even veiled criticism is not tolerated. A viral essay by former Premier Wen Jiabao failed to survive the censors after it appeared to question the partys present-day ethos.

The China in my heart should be a country thats full of equality and justice, that will always respect peoples hearts and fundamental humanity, Wen wrote in April, shortly before it vanished from the internet.

In with the kids

History, relentless propaganda and zero tolerance for dissent protect the story of the party  especially its darker chapters and contradictions.

Open debate about the Mao-era is impossible in China today, said Julia Lovell, professor of modern Chinese history at Birkbeck, University of London.

To Xi, the Mao revival entails party control, celebrating Maos philosophy of ruthless struggle against adversaries and centralising personal power.

That sits awkwardly within a China thats so transformed from the Mao era, she added.

For example, a party that was founded to empower the working masses now routinely jails labour activists, while Chinas workforce still struggles with endemic social inequality, rising living costs and restricted upward mobility.

But the party has nonetheless consolidated public support, most recently by conquering COVID-19 and absolute poverty, maintaining economic growth and asserting Chinas position in a hostile international climate.

The partys longevity hinges on its promise of continued economic growth and its adaptability towards young people.

Theyve seen that China has controlled COVID-19 relatively well and... that this kind of governance can be a substitute for democracy and freedom, says Wu Qiang, a Beijing-based independent political analyst.

The party has also been on a social media drive, carefully nurturing a new generation of online ultra-nationalists.

This is a very important reason why it has succeeded in turning towards and winning over the youth.
Photo of a suspected wanted by Hatfield Police after an alleged robbery of a convenience store on Broad Street on June 21, 2021. An arrest was made this week.
Looking for something to read while lounging on the beach this summer? Here are 19 new fiction reads that are available in July to keep you glued to pages whether youre reclining by the water or seeking refuge by your air conditioner.

Based on the true story of Dorothy Kirwan Thomas, a business woman who freed herself, her mother and her sister from slavery in the 1700s, author Vanessa Riley tells a sweeping tale of perservence and adventure.

The Stranger Behind You by Carol Goodman - July 6

A journalists scathing expose about a sexual predator is published the same day shes viciously attacked. While laying low at a secure location, her life intersects with two other women with puzzling stories.

The Exiles by Christina Baker Kline - July 6

A disgraced, pregnant governess is sent to the penal colonies in Australia where she encounters a bright girl who was sent away for stealing a spoon.

The Forest of Vanishing Stars by Kristin Harmel - July 6

A woman is kidnapped from her German parents just before World War II. When her kidnapper dies in 1941, she encounters a group of Jewish people living in the woods as they hide from the Nazis.

Silver Tears by Camilla Lackberg - July 6

In the sequel to The Golden Cage, three generations of women must face the consequences of their secrets.

An Irish Hostage by Charles Todd - July 6

When Bess turns up for a wedding, shes enlisted to help find the missing groom, but in an unfamiliar place shes not sure who she can trust.

Appleseed by Matt Bell - July 13

A sweeping sci-fi epic explores food science in the past and future through the lens of climate change as people work to survive in a rapidly evolving world.

Such A Quiet Place by Megan Miranda - July 13

An idyllic neighborhood is simmering after a couple is murdered and the potential murderer has returned to their happy cul de sac. Ladened with tension and suspicion, it quickly becomes clear that everyone has secrets about the night of the murder.

The Taking of Jake Livingston by Ryan Douglass - July 13

Being a teenager is tough, but having to deal with puberty while being a medium is a lot. Jake takes on vengeful ghosts and racist teachers in Ryan Douglass YA novel.

Count the Ways by Joyce Maynard - July 13

When an accident tears apart one family, each member will feel the echoes of their loss over the course of several decades.

The Comfort of Monsters by Willa Richards - July 13

Thirty years after her sisters disappearance, Peg reaches out to a psychic to try and get answers about what happened that fateful summer.

The Therapist by B. A. Paris - July 13

After moving into her new home, Alice discovers theres a secret about the previous owner who was a therapist. As Alice becomes obsessed with the previous owner, she realizes that her new neighborhood is not what it seems.

The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix - July 13

Grady Hendrix pays homage to popular horror films in his book about a group of women who survived tragic and murderous events only to have one of their own suddenly disappear.

While We Were Dating by Jasmine Guillory - July 13

In bestselling author Jasmine Guillorys latest novel, an ad exec and an actress find that their light flirtation quickly becomes deeper after they ride out an emergency together.

False Witness by Karin Slaughter - July 20

When a lawyers past comes back to haunt her, the only person she can rely on is her estranged sister.

The Book of Accidents by Chuck Wendig - July 20

Something strange and terrible happened to Nate and Maddie when they were growing up. Years later the couple moves back to their hometown where something sinister seems to be happening to their young son.

A Woman of Intelligence by Karin Tanabe - July 20

A 1950s housewife is desperate to leave her gilded cage and finds the perfect opportunity when the FBI approaches her asking her to gather intelligence on the Soviets.

Heartbreak for Hire by Sonia Hartl - July 27

Brinkleys job is off the beaten path as shes paid to get revenge on those who have hurt her clients. When one of her former targets joins the company, she begins to question her position and realizes that the target isnt a bad guy.

Island of Thieves by Glen Erik Hamilton - July 27

A security job on a private island estate quickly becomes a murder investigation when Van stumbles across a corpse. The job turns shady when detectives try to pin the crime on Van, forcing him to take the investigation into his own hands.

tinamarie.craven@hearstmediact.com
Ridgefields annual Pride in the Park on June 26 was a resounding success, according to organizers from Ridgefield CT Pride. Smiles, rainbows and pride were in abundance to celebrate the local LGBTQ+ community.

The event grew out of Ridgefield Public Schools combined Gender and Sexuality Alliance clubs to give LGBTQ+ identifying individuals a day where they could celebrate and feel accepted. The students worked together to plan the festivities and many were volunteers at the event.

Ballard Park was filled with a plethora of family-friendly activities, including music, arts & crafts, field games, Kung-fu and Tai Chi lessons by SDSS Martial Arts and a yoga session courtesy of Grow Wellness. Adam Broderick Salon & Spa, a premier event sponsor, hosted a hair flair station, and information tables were available around the park.

What a wonderful thing to see so many from our own community, and from other places, too, coming together and celebrating authenticity and truth, state Rep. Aimee Berger-Girvalo said. Most of us have never had to worry about being stigmatized or marginalized just for being ourselves, or showing the world exactly who we are. And to see so many of our neighbors embracing uniqueness, individuality and pride in the identities of others, and leading the conversation about LGBTQ+ rights with love, fills me with such hope.

The celebration attracted people from all over the state, from Watertown to Wallingford and Waterford to West Hartford. When asked what brought them to Ridgefield, some noted that they preferred the more relaxed family-friendly nature of Ridgefield Pride. Several mentioned that they read about it in the paper or online. And a few said they happened to be a part of the LGBTQ+ family, were visiting from out of town and were thrilled to learn about the celebration.

Congregation Shir Shalom, which kicked off Pride Month with a Pride Shabbat service, was also a premier event sponsor.

Congregation Shir Shalom was thrilled to sponsor Pride in the Park in support of our rainbow families with the hope that all people will feel welcome in Ridgefield and in our sacred community during Pride Month and every month, Rabbi David Reiner said. We celebrate the diversity in our congregation and community every day and look forward to a time when everyone feels welcome and loved.

At 1 p.m., the crowd gathered around the rainbow-clad gazebo in the center of Ballard Park for opening remarks, which was followed by a pride march led by members of the GSA. Town dignitaries spoke first followed by Eva Trachtenberg, Ridgefields former Ms. President US who ran on an LGBTQ+ platform.

Trachtenberg addressed the fact that there has been a rise in anti-trans sentiment nationwide, including laws that allow discrimination against transgender people. Trachtenberg, however, took a hopeful tone.

The fact is (a) majority of Americans support trans rights, including federal non-discrimination protections for sexual orientation and gender identity, she said. Our town got to witness this overwhelming support for the LGBTQ+ community firsthand when some customers called Deborah Anns Sweet Shoppe to share their displeasure with the stores choice to offer Pride ice cream, and to say they would not be coming back.

Deborah Anns donated 100 percent of the profits from its Pride ice cream sales to Ridgefield CT Pride, which they developed specifically to support the event. After the store received complaints about the offering, people from all over came to buy a scoop and support the cause.

Event organizers Alisa Trachtenberg and Maureen Tyra expressed their gratitude to all the businesses, organizations and individuals who supported Ridgefield CT Pride.

We were thrilled to be able to gather again in person this year to celebrate, Trachtenberg said.

Seeing the joy on the faces of the children who typically feel unaccepted or marginalized was so incredibly overwhelming, Tyra said. This event was all about them and letting them know that they are loved, accepted, heard and seen.

The mission of Ridgefield CT Pride is to support LGBTQ+ identifying individuals through education and promoting awareness, understanding and acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community. It also provides ongoing monthly support groups for LGBTQ+ youth group and their parents, guardians and family members. For information, visit ridgefieldctpride.com.
Will you expect your staff to have the vaccine before returning to work? Will you be tracking uptake? Are you able to ask those questions? Will mask wearing be mandatory or optional in the workplace?
Christine Adams is a professor of history at St. Marys College of Maryland, a fellow at the American Council of Learned Societies and a Spring 2021 Newberry Library residential fellow.
EDWARDSVILLE  An Alton man is facing charges of domestic battery.

Anthony Wilson, 40, of Alton, was charged June 28 with aggravated domestic battery, a Class 2 felony.

The case was presented by the Alton Police Department. According to court documents, on June 25 Wilson allegedly strangled a family or household member.

Bail was set at $60,000.

Other felony charges filed June 28 by the Madison County States Attorneys Office include:

 Matthew W.E. Dean, 36, of New Baden, was charged with domestic battery (second subsequent offense), a Class 4 felony. The case was presented by the Glen Carbon Police Department. On June 27 Dean allegedly pushed and shoved a household or family member. Dean has a 2017 Madison County conviction for domestic battery (second subsequent offense). Bail was set at $25,000.

 Samuel D. Levitan, 38, of Collinsville, was charged with aggravated battery, a Class 3 felony. The case was presented by the Madison County Sheriffs Department. On May 25 Levitan allegedly repeatedly hit a person more than 90 years old with his fists. Bail was set at $100,000.

 Tommy G. Reynolds, 50, of Granite City, was charged with aggravated assault, a Class 4 felony. The case was presented by the Madison County Sheriffs Department. On June 26 Reynolds allegedly advanced on a sheriffs deputy armed with a machete. Bail was set at $25,000.

 Damon T. Starks, 26, of Granite City, was charged with aggravated unlawful use of weapons, a Class 4 felony. The case was presented by the Illinois State Police. On June 26 Starks allegedly was found to be carrying a loaded and accessible Diamondback AR-15 pistol in a motor vehicle, without a valid Firearm Owners Identification Card or concealed carry license. Bail was set at $75,000.
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 30

Coffee with Keener: 6-7 p.m., Maevas Coffee, 1320 Milton Rd, Alton. Ward 7 Alderman Nate Keener will host a meet and greet, allowing voters to express their concerns for Ward 7. The free event is open to all. There will be no formal presentation; residents can come and go as they please.

Al-Anon Meeting: 9:15 a.m., First Baptist Church Room 107 (ring buzzer), 201 S. Moreland Road, Bethalto.

Al-Anon Meeting: 7 p.m., Upper Alton Baptist Church and Preschool, 2726 College Ave., Alton. For more information, call 618-463-2429. To find more helpful meeting, visit SIAFG.org and District-18.org.

Take Off Pounds Sensibly (TOPS): 9 a.m. weigh-in; 9:45 a.m., meeting immediately follows the weigh in until 10:30 a.m., First Christian Church, 160 E. Lorena Ave., Wood River. Complimentary first meeting. For more information or if you intend to attend call Virginia at 259-7343.

Al-Anon Meeting: 7 p.m., Holy Family Community Center (Basement), 2606 Washington Ave., Granite City. For more information, call 618-463-2429. To find more helpful meeting, visit SIAFG.org and District-18.org.

THURSDAY, JULY 1

VIP Cross Cuts Grand Opening: Noon, VIP Cross Cuts, 2809 Homer M Adams Pkwy., Alton.

Alton Municipal Band Free Concerts in the Park: 8-9 p.m., Riverview Park Gazebo, Park Avenue, Alton. Reminder there is no parking on Riverview Drive. Concerts occur weekly through Aug. 5.

Farmers Market at Grafton Market: 2-6 p.m., Grafton Market, 1415 W. Main St., Grafton. Every Thursday from June 10-Oct. 28.

The National Alliance on Mental Illness Southwestern Illinois Zoom Meetings: 7-8:30 p.m., NAMI SWI announces virtual support meetings via Zoom for family members and other caregivers of individuals with mental illness. Registration is required in order to receive the link to these meetings. Email Pat Rudloff, silverlining6@charter.net to register.

A Course in Miracles: 1 p.m., New Bethel UMC, 131 N. Main St., Glen Carbon. For more information, call Phill at 618-288-7910 or Nancy at 618-698-5088.

For information about Al-Anon Meetings, call 618-463-2429. To find more helpful meeting, visit SIAFG.org and District-18.org.

FRIDAY, JULY 2

Fireworks on the Mississippi River: 9-11 p.m., Lighthouse Park, Grafton. As the sun goes down, fireworks will light up the night sky in the middle of town at Lighthouse Park. For more information, call (618) 786-7000.

Grafton Fireworks on the Hakuna Matata: 6:30-8:30 p.m., Grafton Harbor Boat Rentals, 215 W. Water St., Grafton. Be sure to bring your picnic baskets. The Tiki Bar will remain open until after the fireworks. (Outside beverages are prohibited).

Carlinville Fireworks: Fireworks begn at 9:15 p.m., Macoupin County Fairgrounds, 21149 State Rte 4, Carlinville. Limited to the first 100 vehicles. Parking spaces cannot be reserved in advance. Outside food and drinks are allowed but alcoholic beverages are prohibited. A rain date is scheduled for Monday, July 5

St. Andrews Book Fair Summer Outdoor Clearance Sale: 4-8 p.m., St. Andrews Episcopal Church, 406 Hillsboro, Edwardsville. In case of rain, it will be held in the Pearson Hall, the churchs parish hall. All books, DVDs, CDs, vinyl records, and games at the clearance sale are priced at 50 each. Payment is by cash or check.

For information about Al-Anon Meetings, call 618-463-2429. To find more helpful meeting, visit SIAFG.org and District-18.org.
EDWARDSVILLE  Lewis and Clark Community College hosted the last of its six community forums about the Mannie Jackson Center for the Humanities Foundation building in Edwardsville.

Moderator LCCC President Ken Trzaska said that the plan is to evaluate the feedback from the six meetings and bring the feedback to the LCCC Board of Trustees. Trzaska plans to bring a plan for the building to the board by October, he said.

The center represents an important part of the Edwardsville history, he said. Our purpose is hear the thoughts of the community.

Historic Lincoln School Alumni Foundations Donna Charleston, vice president, said that one way the building can serve the community is by starting a nonprofit incubator in the building, which would create efficiency and opportunity for collaboration with other nonprofits.

Communities benefit from improved direct services, cultural space and civic engagement, Charleston said.

Former Edwardsville trustee Margaret Moggio echoed what Charleston said.

Just looking at the building itself, there are so many things that it could used for, Moggio said. We can make this a place for everyone to come together and learn to work together as a society.

Nola Jones Williams, of Edwardsville, attended kindergarten through fourth grade at the historic former Lincoln School, the site of the Mannie Jackson Center. Williams argued that the Wesley Chapel A.M.E Church Edwardsville should be a benefactor of the center.

The church has suffered greatly during the pandemic, she said. It needs community help.

Williams agreed that a nonprofit incubator is a great idea for a separate building, but she believes that the center is meant for other things, she said.

This is a building for the pitter-patter of childrens feet, activities and development.

An employee of the center, Mike Syracuse, said that LCCC has provided tremendous support to the Edwardsville community.

The transformation of the Lincoln School site has been a great achievement, he noted.

Edwardsville Alderwoman Elizabeth Grant, Ward 7, and a LCCC speech professor, said that the community has a responsibility to drive business and the economy at the local level and believes the building is a place to do that.

This building has a ton of potential, she said. I want to drive by and see it vibrant.

The building was donated to LCCC by entrepreneur and African American business leader Mannie Jackson, an Edwardsville native, to house the former Mannie Jackson Center for the Humanities Foundation. The college broke ground on the Lincoln School site in 2014. The renovated building opened in December 2015.

Visit www.lc.edu/manniejackson/ for more information about the center.
MOSCOW (AP)  Restaurants and cafes in Moscow on Monday began requesting that patrons provide proof of vaccination or a negative coronavirus test as the Russian capital faces a surge of new infections.

According to a decision by city authorities last week, all Moscow restaurants, cafes and bars must only admit customers who have been vaccinated, have recovered from COVID-19 in the past six months or can provide a negative coronavirus test from the previous 72 hours.

As proof of vaccination for entering a restaurant, customers must visit a government website and get a QR code, a digital pattern designed to be read by a scanner.

Usually at this hour people come at lunch and there are no free tables," said Andrei Popov, a Moscow barkeeper. "Today we had just few visitors, around 10 people. I dont think well have more visitors in the evening as we dont have any reservations for tonight.

In one concession to desperate restaurant owners, the city officials agreed that the QR codes arent needed for the next two weeks at establishments with outdoor terraces. Underage customers wont have to provide documentation if accompanied by their parents.

The new restrictions come as Moscow has registered infection levels on par with last winter and recorded all-time high daily numbers of coronavirus deaths.

The coronavirus situation in Moscow remains extremely difficult, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin told reporters. Over the past week, we have registered new record highs of hospitalizations, ICU patients and coronavirus deaths.

Although Russia was the first country to announce a coronavirus vaccine, only about 14% of the population has received at least one shot of a vaccine.

Officials have blamed widespread skepticism about vaccines, lax attitudes toward taking necessary precautions and a quick spread of more infectious variants.

Amid the surge, 18 Russian regions  from Moscow and St. Petersburg to the remote far-eastern region of Sakhalin  have made vaccinations mandatory this month for employees in certain sectors, such as government offices, retail, health care, education, restaurants and other service industries.

In Moscow, authorities said companies should suspend without pay employees unwilling to get vaccinated, and they threatened to temporarily halt operations of businesses that dont meet the goal of having 60% of staff get at least one vaccine shot by July 15 and both shots by Aug. 15.

Russia's coronavirus task force on Monday reported 21,650 new infections and said 611 people died over the past day. Moscow, the region around the capital and the country's second-largest city of St. Petersburg account for the bulk of infections.

Since the pandemic started, Russia has recorded 5.47 million infection cases and 133,893 deaths.

Health Minister Mikhail Murashko said Monday that the country's health care system has spent more than 1 trillion rubles (about $14 billion) to counter the pandemic.

___

Associated Press journalist Kostya Manenkov in Moscow contributed to this report.

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Follow APs pandemic coverage at:

https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic

https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine

https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak
JERSEYVILLE  Felony weapon and drug charges were filed recently by the Jersey County States Attorneys Office in two separate incidents.

Nathaniel E. Higuera, 36, of Jerseyville, was charged June 25 with unlawful possession of weapon by felon, a super Class 3 felony; unlawful possession of methamphetamine, a Class 3 felony; and unlawful possession of controlled substance, a Class 4 felony.

According to court documents, on June 23 Higuera allegedly was found to be in possession of a spring-assisted dagger, which he is not eligible to possess because of prior convictions; less than five grams of methamphetamine; and less than 15 grams of cocaine.

Bail was set at $30,000.

In an unrelated case, Robert Earl Williams Jr., 40, of Jefferson City, Missouri, was charged June 21 with unlawful possession of weapon by felon, a super Class 3 felony; unlawful possession of controlled substance, a Class 4 felony; and unlawful possession of cannabis, a Class A misdemeanor.

According to court documents, on June 20 Williams allegedly was found to be in possession of a handgun magazine containing 12 9 mm rounds; less than 15 grams of cocaine; and between 30-100 grams of cannabis.

Bail was set at $30,000.

Other felony charges filed recently by the Jersey County States Attorneys Office include:

 Anthony J. Gettings, 29, of Jerseyville, was charged June 21 with aggravated battery, a Class 2 felony, and domestic battery, a Class 4 felony. On June 19 Gettings allegedly struck a police officer; and struck a girlfriend in the face with his fist. It was noted he has a previous conviction for domestic battery in 2014. Bail was set at $30,000.

 Staci M. Pillman, 35, of Dow, was charged June 21 with unlawful possession of methamphetamine, a Class 3 felony; and unlawful possession of drug paraphernalia, a Class A misdemeanor. On June 18 Pillman allegedly was found to be in possession of less than five grams of methamphetamine, and a Glass pipe. Bail was set at $10,000.

 Bethany N. Vahle, 41, listed as homeless, was charged June 25 with theft, a Class 2 felony; and unlawful possession of methamphetamine, a Class 3 felony. On June 25 Vahle allegedly took a 2016 Toyota Tundra valued at more than $10,000 from Fergusons Auto Body at 26354 Sunderland Road, Jerseyville, and was found to be in possession of less than five grams of methamphetamine. Bail was set at $50,000.

 Brian C. Wock, 43, of Jerseyville, was charged with disorderly conduct, a Class 4 felony. On June 20 Wock allegedly made a false 911 call and was screaming into the phone, knowing the call could result in the emergency response for a public safety agency. Bail was set at $10,000.
Manu Fernandez/AP

According to Pew Research, 7% of U.S. adults said they currently have an electric or hybrid vehicle, and 39% said they were very or somewhat likely to seriously consider buying an electric vehicle the next time theyre in the market for a new car. Nearly 1.8 million electric vehicles were registered in the U.S. as of 2020, three times as many as 2016.

The U.S. represents only about 17% of the worlds total stock of 10.2 million EVs, according to IEA data. China has 44% of all the EVs in the world (more than 4.5 million), and the nearly 3.2 million in Europe account for about 31%.
EDWARDSVILLE  A Wood River man was charged Monday with aggravated DUI, one of a number of felony cases filed by the Madison County States Attorneys Office.

Brady A. Wiseman, 28, of Wood River, was charged June 28 with aggravated driving under the influence while license revoked/suspended, a Class 4 felony.

The case was presented by the Alton Police Department.

According to court documents, on June 27 Wiseman allegedly was found to be driving a 2016 Chevrolet Cruze while under the influence of alcohol, at a time when his license had been revoked for a related crime.

Bail was set at $30,000.

Other felony charges filed June 28 include:

 Justin E. Kophzay, 23, of Bethalto, was charged with burglary, a Class 2 felony; and criminal damage to property, a Class 4 felony. The case was presented by the Bethalto Police Department. On June 25 Kophzay allegedly entered the Farm Fresh at 310 W. Bethalto Drive to commit theft, and caused in excess of $500 damage to a window. Bail was set at $60,000.

 Mark A. Schieler, 56, of East Alton, was charged with burglary, a Class 2 felony. The case was presented by the Madison County Sheriffs Department. On June 25 Schieler allegedly entered CF Remodeling, 36 Nuenaber St., Cottage Hills, to commit theft. Bail was set at $60,000.

 Garrick N. McFarland, 46, of Glen Carbon, was charged with criminal damage to government supported property, a Class 3 felony. The case was presented by the Glen Carbon Police Department. On June 27 McFarland allegedly caused in excess of $500 damage to a laptop computer belonging to the Granite City Community School District. Bail was set at $25,000.

 Travis L. McGovern, 45, of Pontoon Beach, was charged with criminal damage to property over $500, a Class 4 felony. The case was presented by the Pontoon Beach Police Department. On June 26 McGovern allegedly damaged the skirt of a mobile home on Lake Drive, in excess of $500. Bail was set at $15,000.

 Amelia L. Murrell, 49, of Medora, was charged with retail theft under $300 (second subsequent offense), a Class 4 felony. The case was presented by the Madison County Sheriffs Department. On June 25 Murrell allegedly took miscellaneous merchandise valued at less than $300 from the Godfrey Walmart, 6660 Godfrey Road. She has a previous Madison County conviction for retail theft (second subsequent offense). Bail was set at $15,000.
SCRANTON  From cigars to apartments.

Developer John Basalyga plans to convert the former Parodi Cigar building in North Scranton into 41 loft-style apartments.

A Basalyga company, JBAS Realty bought the property containing the industrial building at 1015 N. Main Ave. and its two neighboring parcels for $700,000 last week from Forte Development Group, public records show.

Basalyga said he initially was part of the Forte Development Group when it bought the Parodi property in 2014. A few years later, he pulled out of that venture over differing visions and now purchased the property from Forte.

Basalyga said he hopes to have renovations begin around late September, and the building completed and rented out by next summer. Hes not sure what he will call the finished product.

Its the latest property acquisition and project in the city for Basalyga, whose holdings in the county include several former industrial buildings redeveloped into apartments.

Earlier this year, he began converting the 84-year-old former Roosevelt Elementary School in Archbalds Eynon section into apartments.

Basalyga also owns the Marketplace at Steamtown and continues to transition it from a moribund, mostly empty retail mall into a more diverse center with retail, educational and medical facilities, offices and an aquarium.

He said the Parodi project will resemble his recent renovation of the former silk mill/pants factory/showroom of Giant Floor and Wall Covering Co. in South Side on Meadow Avenue at Maple Street into apartments called the Lofts at Village Square.

Just as the Lofts at Village Square is visible from Interstate 81, the Parodi building stands out along the McDade Expressway.

It represents the gateway coming into the city. Its one of the first things you see and its an eyesore, Basalyga said of the Parodi building. It will be a landmark when Im done with it.

The Parodi Cigar Company was founded in 1912 in New York City as Suraci Brothers, makers of small hand-rolled cigars. The three Italian immigrant siblings moved their company to Scranton around 1930 to the 400 block of North Main Avenue. After a fire there in 1944, the company set up shop at 1015 N. Main Ave.

Decades later, Parodi changed its name to Avanti Cigar. In 2013, Avanti moved to Dunmore.

Avanti was acquired in 2015, by Manifatture Sigaro Toscano, which is part of the Maccaferri Group, an Italian, multinational company, according to Avantis website. Avanti remains the only producer of dry cured cigars in the United States, the website says.

The Parodi building is next to the historic 1778 Tripp House.

Dorette OConnor, who has lived in the 1000 block of North Main Avenue for over 30 years, recalled how the vacant Parodi/Avanti building previously bustled with workers. She looks forward to seeing it repurposed into apartments.

It was a shame when it closed. Its been sitting there halfway done for years, OConnor said. Its a nice building. I hope they fix it up. It will help our neighborhood.

Basalyga expressed confidence in being able to fill a renovated building with tenants.

I have no concerns about getting it rented, he said. Thats going to be a fantastic building.
A Scranton dentist charged with groping a female patient over her clothing is free on bail while his court case proceeds.

Dr. Albert Hazzouri, 65, 1701 N. Washington Ave., turned himself in at the Lackawanna County Criminal Justice Center on Tuesday for arraignment by Magisterial District Judge Kipp Adcock on indecent assault and harassment charges.

Scranton police charged Hazzouri on Monday for allegedly grabbing the genitals of a female patient after a procedure last month. The Times-Tribune does not identify sex assault victims.

Hazzouri, represented Tuesday by attorney Ruth Lenahan, was released on $75,000 unsecured bail. In setting bail, Adcock noted Hazzouri is a lifelong resident who poses no risk of fleeing. Deputy District Attorney Sara Varela is prosecuting.

The investigation remains ongoing by the city police and county investigators, District Attorney Mark Powell said. Anyone with information should contact county Detective Chris Kolcharno at 570-963-6717, ext. 7461. Powell declined to say if they received any calls.

A preliminary hearing is scheduled 11:30 a.m. July 20.
Scientists say a massive fossilized skull that is at least 140,000 years old is a new species of ancient human, a finding that could potentially change prevailing views of how  and even where  our species, Homo sapiens, evolved.

The skull belonged to a mature male who had a huge brain, massive brow ridges, deep-set eyes and a bulbous nose. It had remained hidden in an abandoned well for 85 years, after a laborer came across it at a construction site in China.

The researchers named the new species Homo longi and gave it the nickname Dragon Man, for the Dragon River region of northeast China where the skull was discovered.

The team said that Homo longi, and not the Neanderthals, was the extinct human species most closely related to our own. If confirmed, that would change how scientists envision the origin of Homo sapiens, which has been built up over the years from fossil discoveries and the analysis of ancient DNA.

But a number of experts disputed this conclusion, published in three papers that provided the first detailed look at the fossil. Nevertheless, many still thought that the find could help scientists reconstruct the human family tree and how modern humans emerged.

All the experts who reviewed the data in the studies said it is a magnificent fossil.

Its a beautiful thing, said John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Its very rare to find a fossil like this, with a face in good condition. You dream of finding this stuff.

In 1933, a laborer working at a bridge construction site in the city of Harbin discovered the peculiar skull. Its likely that the man  whose name has been withheld by his family  recognized that he had found a scientifically important specimen. Just four years earlier, researchers had found another humanlike skull, nicknamed Peking Man, near Beijing. It appeared to link the people of Asia to their evolutionary forerunners.

Rather than hand over the new skull to the Japanese authorities who occupied northeast China at the time, the laborer chose to hide it. He did not mention the skull to anyone for decades. In an account of the fossils discovery, the authors of the new papers speculated that he was ashamed of having worked for the Japanese.

Shortly before his death in 2018, the laborer told his family about the fossil. They went to the well and found it. The family donated it to the Geoscience Museum of Hebei GEO University, where scientists immediately could see that it had been exquisitely well preserved.

In the papers published Friday, the researchers argued that Homo longi appears to have been an adult of great size. His cheeks were flat and his mouth broad. The lower jaw is missing, but the researchers infer from the Dragon Mans upper jaw and other fossil human skulls that he likely lacked a chin. They say that his brain was about 7% larger than the average brain of a living human.

The researchers argue that Dragon Mans combination of anatomical features are found in no previously named species of hominin, the lineage of bipedal apes that diverged from other African apes. They later evolved into larger-brained species that set the stage for Homo sapiens to expand across the entire globe.

Its distinctive enough to be a different species, said Christopher Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London and co-author of two of the three Dragon Man papers.

The scientists analyzed the chemical composition of the fossil, and determined it was at least 146,000 years old, but no older than 309,000 years.

Today, the planet is home to just one species of hominin  Homo sapiens. But Dragon Man existed at a time when a number of drastically different kinds of hominins coexisted, including Homo erectus  a tall human with a brain two-thirds the size of our own  as well as tiny hominins including Homo naledi in South Africa, Homo floresiensis in Indonesia and Homo luzonensis in the Philippines.

The oldest Homo sapiens fossils also date to this time. Neanderthals  which shared our large brain and sophisticated toolmaking  ranged from Europe to Central Asia during the period when Dragon Man may have lived.

In recent years, studies of fossil DNA have also revealed yet another humanlike lineage in this period, the Denisovans. The DNA came largely from isolated teeth, chipped bones and even dirt. Those remains are not enough to show us what Denisovans looked like.

The most promising fossil yet found that could be evidence of Denisovans came from a cave in Tibet: a massive jaw with two stout molars, dating back at least 160,000 years. In 2019, scientists isolated proteins from the jaw, and their molecular makeup suggests they belonged to a Denisovan, rather than a modern human or Neanderthal.

This molecular evidence  combined with fossil evidence  suggests that the common ancestors of Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans lived 600,000 years ago.

Our lineage split off on its own, and then 400,000 years ago, Neanderthals and Denisovans diverged. In other words, Neanderthals and Denisovans were our closest extinct relatives. They even interbred with the ancestors of modern humans, and we carry bits of their DNA today.

But many puzzles still endure from this stage of human history  especially in East Asia. Over the past few decades, paleoanthropologists have found a number of fossils, many incomplete or damaged, that have some features that make them look like our own species and other features that suggest they belong elsewhere on the hominin family tree.

Katerina Harvati, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tubingen in Germany who was not involved in the new study, said that the Dragon Man skull could help clarify some of the confusion.

To figure out how Homo longi fits into the human family tree, the scientists compared its anatomy with 54 hominin fossils. The researchers found that it belongs to a lineage that includes the jaw in Tibet that has been identified as a Denisovan.

The skull was even more similar to a portion of a skull discovered in 1978 in the Chinese county of Dali, dating back 200,000 years. Some researchers thought the Dali fossil was of our own species, while others thought it belonged to an older lineage. Still others even called the fossil a new species, Homo daliensis.

The authors of the new studies argue that Dragon Man, the Tibetan jaw and the Dali skull all belong to a single lineage  one that is the closest branch to our own species. While Homo longi had distinctive features, it also shared traits with us, such as a flat face tucked under its brow rather than jutting out, as was the case with Neanderthals.

It is widely believed that the Neanderthal belongs to an extinct lineage that is the closest relative of our own species. However, our discovery suggests that the new lineage we identified that includes Homo longi is the actual sister group of H. sapiens, Xijun Ni, a co-author of the studies and a paleoanthropologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Hebei GEO University, said in a news release.

Those conclusions are spurring debate among paleoanthropologists  including the authors of the new papers.

Some of the debate concerns what to call Dragon Man. Scientists follow strict rules about naming new species. That would require Dragon Man to share a name with the Dali skull, if they are as similar as the authors claim.

In my view, it is a distinct species which I would prefer to call Homo daliensis, Stringer said.

Other experts thought the similarity between the Tibetan jaw, with the Denisovan-like proteins, and the skull from Harbin pointed to Dragon Mans real identity.

When I first saw the picture of the fossil I thought, now we finally know what Denisovans looked like, said Philipp Gunz, a paleoanthropologist at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Karen Baab, a paleoanthropologist at Midwestern University in Arizona, agreed: Harbin is better understood as a Denisovan.

An assortment of clues point that way. The tooth on Dragon Mans upper jaw has the same massive shape as the one on the Denisovan jaw found in Tibet, for example. Both lack a third molar. Dragon Man also lived in Asia at the same time that Denisovan DNA tells us that they were in the same place.

Even if Dragon Man is a Denisovan, there would be more puzzles to solve. The DNA of Denisovans clearly shows that their closest cousins were Neanderthals. The new study, based instead on fossil anatomy, indicates instead that Homo longi and Homo sapiens are more closely related to each other than to Neanderthals.

I think that the genetic data in this case is more reliable than the morphological data, said Bence Viola, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Toronto, who was not involved in the new study.

Obviously, something doesnt match, Stringer acknowledged. The important thing is the recognition of a third human lineage in East Asia, with its own distinctive combination of features.

One way to solve the mystery of Dragon Man would be to get DNA from his remarkable skull. Stringer said he is ready for more surprises: Its going to be a more complicated plot.
June 29, 1941

West Scranton grocery store marks 65 years

Enyons Grocery Store in West Scranton celebrated its 65th year in business.

Thomas Enyon opened his store on South Main Avenue in the 1870s. As his business grew, he moved the store to 105 N. Main Ave.

Following his death in 1913, his son George took over the business. And under Georges leadership, the store once again moved to 114 S. Main Ave.

George died in 1918 and the store passed to his son, Charles. Charles managed the store for 23 years, going up against the chain grocery stores. He remembered that when he first took over the business, he would work long hours.

I used to work from 5 a.m. to 10 oclock at night. Now I dont open up until 7:30 a.m. and close at 6 oclock, Charles said.

He spoke of how he was seeing more cash business than credit. He believed the switch was because people were being paid weekly or semi-monthly.

Lincoln, Overholt visit VFW convention

President Abraham Lincoln and Old Man Overholt made an appearance June 28 in Scranton.

The pair of historical reenactors were in the Electric City to participate in the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention that was taking place in the city.

Lincoln was portrayed by Scranton native John Thiel. Overholt, portrayed by John Bachman, was an early 19th century farmer and distiller who produced rye whiskey in Western Pennsylvania.

The pairs appearance at the convention was organized by National Distillers.

Carrying on the Slocum name

William G. Slocum, 72, of Wilkes-Barre, was the last of the Slocum family that settled in the area so many years ago.

Slocum petitioned Luzerne Countys Orphans Court for permission to adopt 41-year old bachelor Ralph Campbell Matthewson. Matthewson had been living with Slocum for the past four years.

Slocum hoped Matthewson would marry and the Slocum name would be carried on.

The Matthewson family history also went back to the early days of the Wyoming Valley. He was a descendant of Colin Campbell, who, during the Revolutionary War days, leaped over Campbells Ledge on a horse while being chased by Native Americans loyal to the British.

The court hearing on the adoption was scheduled for July 27.

Brian Fulton, library manager, oversees The Times-Tribunes expansive digital and paper archives and is an authority on local history. Contact Brian at bfulton@timesshamrock.com or 570-348-9140.
PHILADELPHIA  A Pennsylvania woman accused of filming an attack on  and allegedly yelling for the attackers to mace  a New York Times photographer during the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol was arrested Monday.

Sandra Sandy Pomeroy Weyer, of Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, outside of Harrisburg, is facing charges of violently entering a restricted building, disrupting government proceedings and engaging in disorderly or threatening conduct while inside the Capitol. Court records did not list an attorney for Weyer, who is scheduled to make her first appearance Thursday in federal court via video conference.

According to court documents unsealed Monday in Weyers case, several witnesses contacted the FBI to report that Weyer had posted live video inside the Capitol on her Facebook profile. Facebook removed the videos but several were recovered by investigators.

FBI investigators say Weyer, who was wearing a red sweatshirt, can be seen on a landing filming with her cellphone as four or five men confront a female New York Times photographer taking photos. Investigators say the photographer told them the men demanded to know who she worked for and when she didnt answer, they reached into her vest and took her press credentials.

The photographer told investigators in an interview that the men became agitated when they saw she worked for the New York Times, pushed her down and took one of her cameras. She chased them and was pushed down again.

Investigators say Weyer can be heard screaming that the photographer was a traitor, to get her out and to mace her.

Agents also recovered a handful of conversations between Weyer and other Facebook users saying she had been inside the Capitol, that she hadnt seen rioters and characterizing the group as patriots, and saying that she did what needed to be done.
The vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna set off a persistent immune reaction in the body that may protect against the coronavirus for years, scientists reported Monday.

The findings add to growing evidence that most people immunized with the mRNA vaccines may not need boosters, so long as the virus and its variants do not evolve much beyond their current forms  which is not guaranteed. People who recovered from COVID-19 before being vaccinated may not need boosters even if the virus does make a significant transformation.

Its a good sign for how durable our immunity is from this vaccine, said Ali Ellebedy, an immunologist at Washington University in St. Louis who led the study, which was published in the journal Nature.

The study did not consider the coronavirus vaccine made by Johnson & Johnson, but Ellebedy said he expected the immune response to be less durable than that produced by mRNA vaccines.

Ellebedy and his colleagues reported last month that in people who survived COVID-19, immune cells that recognize the virus lie quiescent in the bone marrow for at least eight months after infection. A study by another team indicated that so-called memory B cells continue to mature and strengthen for at least a year after infection.

Based on those findings, researchers suggested that immunity might last for years, possibly a lifetime, in people who were infected with the coronavirus and later vaccinated. But it was unclear whether vaccination alone might have a similarly long-lasting effect.

Ellebedys team sought to address that question by looking at the source of memory cells: the lymph nodes, where immune cells train to recognize and fight the virus.

After an infection or a vaccination, a specialized structure called the germinal center forms in lymph nodes. This structure is an elite school of sorts for B cells  a boot camp where they become increasingly sophisticated and learn to recognize a diverse set of viral genetic sequences.

The broader the range and the longer these cells have to practice, the more likely they are to be able to thwart variants of the virus that may emerge.

Everyone always focuses on the virus evolving  this is showing that the B cells are doing the same thing, said Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. And its going to be protective against ongoing evolution of the virus, which is really encouraging.

After infection with the coronavirus, the germinal center forms in the lungs. But after vaccination, the cells education takes place in lymph nodes in the armpits, within reach of researchers.

Ellebedy and his colleagues recruited 41 people  including eight with a history of infection with the virus  who were immunized with two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. From 14 of these people, the team extracted samples from the lymph nodes at three, four, five, seven and 15 weeks after the first dose.

That painstaking work makes this a heroic study, said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale. This kind of careful time-course analysis in humans is very difficult to do.

Ellebedys team found that 15 weeks after the first dose of vaccine, the germinal center was still highly active in all 14 of the participants, and that the number of memory cells that recognized the coronavirus had not declined.

The fact that the reactions continued for almost four months after vaccination  thats a very, very good sign, Ellebedy said. Germinal centers typically peak one to two weeks after immunization, and then wane.

Usually by four to six weeks, theres not much left, said Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona. But germinal centers stimulated by the mRNA vaccines are still going, months into it, and not a lot of decline in most people.

Bhattacharya noted that most of what scientists know about the persistence of germinal centers is based on animal research. The new study is the first to show what happens in people after vaccination.

The results suggest that a vast majority of vaccinated people will be protected over the long term  at least, against the existing coronavirus variants. But older adults, people with weak immune systems and those who take drugs that suppress immunity may need boosters; people who survived COVID-19 and were later immunized may never need them at all.

Exactly how long the protection from mRNA vaccines will last is hard to predict. In the absence of variants that sidestep immunity, in theory immunity could last a lifetime, experts said. But the virus is clearly evolving.

Anything that would actually require a booster would be variant-based, not based on waning of immunity, Bhattacharya said. I just dont see that happening.

People who were infected with the coronavirus and then immunized see a major boost in their antibody levels, most likely because their memory B cells  which produce antibodies  had many months to evolve before vaccination.

The good news: A booster vaccine will probably have the same effect as prior infection in immunized people, Ellebedy said. If you give them another chance to engage, they will have a massive response, he said, referring to memory B cells.

In terms of bolstering the immune system, vaccination is probably better than recovering from the actual infection, he said. Other studies have suggested that the repertoire of memory B cells produced after vaccination is more diverse than that generated by infection, suggesting that the vaccines will protect better against variants than natural immunity alone.

Ellebedy said the results also suggested that these signs of persistent immune reaction might be caused by mRNA vaccines alone, as opposed to those made by more traditional means, like Johnson & Johnsons.

But that is an unfair comparison, because the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is given as a single dose, Iwasaki said: If the J & J had a booster, maybe it will induce this same kind of response.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
The Salvation Army Scranton Corps will distribute hundreds of free watermelons Thursday, just in time for the July Fourth holiday weekend.

All are invited to stop by the corps building at 500 S. Washington Ave. to grab a melon, which are being provided by Atlantic Fresh Trading LLC. There are no income or other eligibility requirements. Distribution will run from 11 a.m. to about 4 p.m., Salvation Army Maj. Bob Schmig said.

While the fruit is free, the local Salvation Army corps will accept donations.
Editor: Every so often, as I look at the region on Google Earth, I end up reminiscing.

I look at areas where Ive had very fun times. During a recent experience I looked at different lakes where I used to spend time. Their condition, as it appears on Google Earth, is concerning.

What do Kizer Pond in Jeffeson Twp., Lake Moc-a-Tek in Wayne County, and the lake at Merli-Sarnoski Park in Greenfield Twp. have in common? They all appear to be running out of water. Their sizes are about half of what I remember.

I know global warming doesnt help, but weve also had some really wet years recently. Yet there they are, on Google Earth, looking like they might disappear in another 30 years. Where is the water going? Im just wondering about what is actually happening.

Perhaps well never know for sure and lakes will disappear with no mention of it taking place. It would be a shame to lose those valuable wetlands.

RANDALL CIZENSKI

DICKSON CITY

Editor: If you read the newspaper and watch most TV news commentary shows, you seem to hear nothing regarding illegal crossings at our southern border.

Has this disaster been resolved? Or do the media purposely hide it from the American public? If so, why?

In May U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported that 180,034 people attempted to enter the country along the southwestern border, up from 23,000 in May 2020.

It appears the only place stopping illegal crossings is where that darn border wall was erected. Yet the Department of Homeland Security will redirect $1.9 billion in money dedicated to building more wall and use it for environmental safety and cleanup. What of the thousands of unaccompanied immigrant children crossing monthly? What of flights moving them around the country?

This disaster grows worse every day. Why is there no front page news reporting? The cause is the Biden administration policy.

Want to know why President Joe Biden and his border czar will not travel to the southern border? They want zero coverage on the horrific goings-on there. Out of sight, out of mind.

It is the same with the majority of news outlets that protect Biden and Democrats by simply ignoring it as if it does not exist.

RICHARD S. SUPKO

BROWNDALE, WAYNE COUNTY

Editor: As a lifelong Democrat Ive never found much to like about the Republican Party. I concede there was a time when occasionally the party managed to attract some good, decent people to run for office.

Former Sen. John Heinz, U.S. Rep. Joe McDade and Gov. Tom Ridge are good examples. They were good public servants who worked hard to serve the best interests of all Americans.

Compare that to todays Republican Party. No one in todays GOP can be called a good public servant. Republicans hold office only to further their own selfish interests. They refuse to work with Democrats to improve the lives of all Americans. When Democrats are in power the Republican game plan is to obstruct with the hope of producing gridlock so nothing gets done.

Todays Republicans spent four years protecting the most corrupt president that this nation ever has had. Through two impeachments Republicans refused to hold Trump accountable.

Compare that to Republicans during the Watergate scandal. In August 1974 Republican Sens. Hugh Scott and Barry Goldwater and GOP House Minority Leader John Rhodes told President Richard Nixon that he had two choices, resign or be removed from office through the impeachment process. Nixon resigned.

Those Republicans were patriots who defended our democracy from the abuse of a corrupt president.

Todays Republicans side with traitors. Not even an attack on our Capitol convinced them to take the necessary actions to protect our democracy.

On Jan. 6, 147 Republicans in Congress attempted to overturn the results of a fair and legal election. For the first time in our nations history a peaceful transfer of power seriously was in doubt.

Americans must face the fact that we can no longer trust the Republican Party to preserve, protect and defend our democracy.

BEN EGLESIA

DICKSON CITY

Editor: The Book of Proverbs states: The Lord has made everything for his own purposes, even the wicked for punishment.

To the perceptive observer it may seem that everything is coming due for former President Donald Trump. He doesnt, most assuredly, understand why bad things happen to him. Nor do many of his followers.

Others might be confused because they attempt to straddle the boundary between noble and dishonorable. I think of celebrated New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who continues to indulge resentment against former President Barack Obama. To many, it belies all reason, especially if measured against her prodigious talent. She can be insightful and petty. It divides her audience.

In her column printed in The Times-Tribune on June 8 (ETs no stranger than Capitol denizens) she posits that Obama takes advantage of President Joe Bidens current popularity to enhance his own legacy. But incredibly in the next paragraph, she wonders why the Biden White House doesnt return her calls.

Obama is being called upon by a wide range of citizens to answer various questions, like those about fatherhood, to which he will listen respectfully before proffering a modest reply.

Even to the big questions offered by journalist Anderson Cooper, Obama listens more than anything. Remember the president in between and his inability to be patient? Is it any wonder Obama is considered this centurys statesman?

RICHARD J. YOST

SOUTH ABINGTON TWP.
Brenda Darlene (Burnett, Witt, Bollmer) Curtin, 52, of Cincinnati, Ohio passed away June 21, 2021. She was born November 13, 1968, in Cincinnati, Ohio to the late Gladys (Jones) Napier and the late Wilburn Burnett. Brenda was preceded in death by a daughter, Jennifer Witt and sisters Alta Ru
Beachgoers use the water and breezes near the ocean to cool off on a beach, in Winthrop, Mass., Monday, June 28, 2021. New England is dealing with hot weather conditions Monday as temperatures climbed into the 90s.
For copyright information, check with the distributor of this item, The Boston Globe.
Cosmetics retailer Revolution Beauty is set to join the London stock market next month in a listing that could be worth 500million.

Founded just seven years ago, the online firm uses social media influencers to market its products, which it sells through more than 11,000 stores across five continents, including Superdrug and Boots in the UK.

It also has a tie-up with the United States' biggest specialist beauty retailer, Ulta, and digital partnerships with major e-commerce companies such as Amazon, ASOS, Boohoo, and PrettyLittleThing.

Story: Set up just seven years ago, Cosmetics retailer Revolution Beauty sells its products through over 11,000 stores across five continents, such as Superdrug in the UK

Revolution's average annual revenues have almost doubled each year since its founding, and in the 14 months to February 28 this year, it recorded 157.6million in sales alongside 13.1million in underlying earnings.

Founders Adam Minto, 51, and Tom Allsworth, 55, are forecast to receive a sizeable payout from the initial public offering on the junior AIM market, as will San Francisco-based minority investor TSG Consumer Partners.

Investment firm Jupiter Asset Management has already pledged to buy 90million of shares from the AIM-listed placing, which will see TSG sell the majority of its holding and leave Minto and Allsworth retaining a 30 per cent stake in their business.

Aside from investor payouts, Revolution Beauty has said that some money raised will help fulfil its growth strategy through a mix of developing new products, boosting its store presence and selling directly to consumers via its website.

It hopes to take advantage of the expected boom in the worldwide beauty market, which the Kent-based business forecasts will be worth $283billion by 2025.

The group says part of its success is down to identifying trends early within its influencer, retailer and consumer channels and then designing products that are brought to market within 16 weeks.

Tie-up: Boots is one of the major retailers which sells products from Revolution Beauty

Chief executive Adam Minto said: 'Our differentiated business model brings together both online and retail revenues, while our manufacturing and consumer feedback strategy enables us to bring new products to market quickly.

'This means that Revolution Beauty can quickly respond to the megatrends driving the global mass beauty industry.

'All of this, together with our broad geographic presence and extensive product ranges, means Revolution Beauty is well-positioned to take advantage of the significant opportunities for expansion in a compelling growth market.

'Today marks a significant milestone for Revolution Beauty and our people. As we work to build a business to match the scale and potential of our brand, I thank them for their hard work to get us to where we are today.'

Sending public: Online retailer Moonpig also listed on the London Stock Exchange this year

Revolution's IPO is the latest digital vendor to announce it will list in London this year following similar moves by secondhand music and electronics seller MusicMagpie and greetings card firm Moonpig.

All three companies have seen sales shoot up since the coronavirus pandemic started due to the closure of non-essential shops encouraging more people to buy their goods digitally.

Last year, meanwhile, the London Stock Exchange had its largest IPO since 2013 after health and beauty goods seller The Hut Group (THG) went public in a 1.88billion listing.

THG owns make-up seller Illamasqua and French haircare brand Christophe Robin, amongst others, and its listing netted founder Matthew Moulding a colossal 830million payday.

Founder: The Hut Group founder Matthew Moulding netted a colossal 830million payday when the health and beauty goods seller became a publicly-traded company last year

Private equity firm Bridgepoint Advisors also unveiled its plans today for an IPO that could value it at a reported 2billion. It said it would use some of the money raised from the listing to possibly invest in fields like infrastructure and real estate.

The group specialises in backing mid-market businesses, including East Asian-inspired food chain Itsu, arts and crafts retailer Hobbycraft, and upstart food delivery giant Deliveroo.

Bridgepoint formerly owned Pret a Manger for a decade, buying it in 2008 for 364million and helping oversee its expansion to become a ubiquitous presence on British travel hubs and high streets before selling it for 1.5billion in 2018.

Its planned listing comes at a time of rampant dealmaking involving private equity groups but also increased concerns that British firms are being bought on the cheap following the Brexit referendum in 2016 and the Covid-19 pandemic.
It's an unassuming office in a quiet industrial estate in the town of Harlow. But based on the 2nd floor of this red-brick building in Essex is the company at the heart of distressing delays in the nations probate system.

For two years, bereaved families have endured long waits when applying to take control of their loved ones estate after they die.

Delays in probate applications mean families have to wait to access their lost loved ones finances  and hold the sale of property in their estate.

Piling up: Stacks of boxes can be seen through the window of Exela Technologies's office in Harlow, Essex

It has now emerged that work outsourced to this private firm in Essex in a 4.5 million contract is the root of many delays.

A report shown to Money Mail reveals a string of frustrating errors made at the Exela Technologies office, where staff are tasked with scanning wills and uploading digital copies onto a system to be processed.

Money Mail visited the site yesterday in search of answers and saw hundreds of boxes stacked up high inside offices.

Dozens of Exela employees were spotted coming in and out, and laughed when asked about the backlog.

When someone dies, the executor of a will is required to apply for a legal document known as a grant of probate to take control of their estate.

This is not always required if an estate is small or property is jointly owned, but more than 200,000 applications are made every year.

Government hands job of detecting bogus wills to 'bulk scanning' firm to save cash Lawyers and the civil servants' union warned against outsourcing this work when news of the money-saving exercise emerged... read more here.

And until probate is granted, the executor cannot give out promised inheritances or allow family members to sell any property.

It used to take around two weeks to obtain a grant of probate by post. But in 2019 a new online system was introduced to speed up the process, but instead led to delays.

Online applications are now taking between five and six weeks on average, but many families say they have had to wait as long as six months or more.

Since January, solicitors have been told they must submit the vast majority of their clients probate applications using the new system.

Executors are also encouraged to use the online system via the HM Courts and Tribunal Services (HMCTS) website.

Necessary documents, including the will, must then be posted to Exela in Harlow.

Heartache: Delays in online probate applications mean families have to wait to access their lost loved ones finances - and hold the sale of property in their estate

The firm was awarded the multi-million pound two-year contract by the Government in April 2018, and it has since been extended.

The company is charged with scanning the will and uploading it onto the new system. Most digital applications will then be sent to civil servants.

Teething problems with the new system in early 2019 led to a backlog, while proposed plans to hike probate fees - which were later shelved - caused further delays as families rushed to get applications in before charges increased.

Farewill Legal Services says there is now a three week wait for wills to be scanned while some wills arent being uploaded correctly.

June Yap, of Farewill, says: While it is understandable that there would be teething problems when the online system was new, we shouldnt be seeing the high number of errors, stops and subsequent delays we are today.

The hold-ups are also putting house sales in jeopardy.

Justin Flanagan managing director of Charles Eden estate agents says he is acting for two different couples who are buying properties tied up in the probate system. The buyers are all ready to go and were right up to the point of exchange but were still waiting on probate.

One couple desperate to move is elderly and they dont want to lose the stamp duty savings. They have had to move into a second lot of temporary accommodation while they wait for probate to complete, he adds.

Retired police officer Derek Harper had to wait 11 months for probate after Exela failed to properly scan his mother Kathleens will.

He applied for probate last July, but heard nothing until November when an email said parts were missing from her will.

Derek, 63, who lives with his wife Sylvia in Cyprus, replied immediately and pointed out that the will was double-sided.

The probate was granted earlier this month after Money Mail approached the Ministry of Justice for a comment.

The Public and Commercial Services Union warned against the privatisation before the contract went to Exela.

Solicitors say many applications are also being stalled by HMCTS staff querying applications. Yet the internal report by Farewill found seven out of ten of its applications were unnecessarily stopped for further checks.

The Governments latest figures show online applications that have been stopped are taking almost double the average five week wait time.

An HMCTS spokesman says: Our scanning service has helped us to keep running, with online applications now being granted in less than a week.

Exela Technologies did not respond to requests for a comment.

f.parker@dailymail.co.uk
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HAGERSTOWN  Lois E. Harpold, 75, of Hagerstown, died Thursday, June 24, 2021, at her daughter's house in Philadelphia. Lois was born Dec. 26, 1945, the youngest of eight children born to the Rev. William C. and Drewry E. Harpold. Besides her parents, Lois was preceded in death by sister, Fl
Barre, VT (05641)

Today

Intervals of clouds and sunshine. High 79F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Showers in the evening with isolated thunderstorms arriving overnight. Low 66F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 50%.


remaining of

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Services for John Mark Rountree, 60, were held at Allen & Allen Celebration of Life Chapel on Friday, July 2, 2021 with burial following at Salem Cemetery. Mr. Rountree, was born on July 16, 1960, and died of injuries sustained in a single-car automobile accident on June 29, 2021. He was
Jim and Ann Country will host First Saturday Community Coffee House on July 3 at Southwest Virginia Museum.
Herb Cromwell retired as executive director of the Community Behavioral Health Association of Maryland. This was written for the Baltimore Sun.
SCHOHARIE  On Thursday, the judge overseeing the criminal case against Nauman Hussain, the only person charged in the 2018 limo crash in Schoharie that killed 20 people, will consider whether or not to accept a plea deal that would avoid an agonizing trial and provide some closure to the families of the victims, many of them from the Amsterdam area.

But Schoharie County District Attorney Susan Mallery won't have as much legal fire power as she originally planned to have to argue her case against Hussain.

That's because Matthew Peluso, a former assistant attorney general for Letitia James who was assigned to help Mallery's office in August 2019 as a special prosecutor in the Hussain case, left several months ago for a job at the state Department of Health.

It is unclear why Peluso left exactly and if his departure was related to Mallery's seeking a plea deal with one of Hussain's attorneys, Lee Kindlon.

Another lawyer from James' office who was assigned the case is still officially available to Mallery, although there has been little to no communication between the two offices over the past year, according to those with knowledge of the situation.

Back in March, Peluso took a job as special counsel for the state Department of Health, focusing on ethics, risk and compliance, according to his LinkedIn page. He had previously held a similar position with the state Department of Motor Vehicles before working in the AG's office for three-and-a-half years, about two years of which he was assigned to the Hussain case after Mallery realized she needed more help on the complex case.

"He is excited about the opportunity to bring his skills and experience to (the Department of Health)," DOH spokesperson Jill Montag said.

Mallery did not return a call seeking comment on Peluso's departure. The AG's office declined comment.

Meanwhile, the terms of the potential plea deal are unknown.

Schoharie County Judge George Bartlett III, who is overseeing the Hussain case, is meeting with Mallery and Kindlon behind closed doors on Thursday to decide whether or not he will support a proposed plea deal or move forward with the trial, which was supposed to take place in spring 2020 when the pandemic forced widespread government shutdowns and put the case on hold.

Hussain, who pleaded not guilty and has been free on bond since his April 2019 arraignment, is scheduled to appear before Bartlett in-person on July 7 in what is expected to be a hearing to put the plea deal on the record.

According to those with knowledge of the case, the State Police advocate who keeps the victims' families updated on the case has told the families that if Bartlett moves forward with a plea deal, Mallery would meet with the families on July 6, the day before the plea hearing in Schoharie.

Otherwise, Hussain's July 7 court appearance could be postponed to another time.

Kindlon and Mallery met virtually with Bartlett on June 23 to discuss a potential plea deal, but no agreement was reached, and the parties agreed to meet again virtually on July 1, which is Thursday.

"No decision has been made about a trial or a plea," Kindlon told the Times Union after the June 23 conference with Bartlett. "I anticipate we will know a lot more after (the July 1) virtual conference."

Hussain is accused of ignoring orders by the state Department of Transportation to keep his 2001 stretch Ford Excursion limo off the road after it was repeatedly deemed unsafe by a DOT investigator and for using a driver who lacked the appropriate license.

On Oct. 6, 2018, Hussain booked a party of 17 to ride in the Excursion from Amsterdam to Cooperstown for a birthday celebration. After the driver appeared to have gotten lost, he lost control of the limo driving down Route 30 toward the village of Schoharie, and slammed into an SUV in the parking lot of the Apple Barrel Country Store at the intersection of Route 30 and Route 30A while going more than 100 mph.

Two bystanders who were walking toward the SUV were killed instantly by the initial impact, and the Excursion then slammed into a ditch. All 18 aboard, including the driver, died from their injuries.

Brake failure was to blame, according to a State Police report. A National Transportation Safety Board report also blamed bad brakes, although, the NTSB also faulted the DOT and DMV for not doing enough to prevent the tragedy.
Should anyone open the Capital Regions first exclusively Nigerian restaurant, it surely would be Kelechi Nwagboso. Born in Nigeria and a resident of several regions of the country, she moved to America a decade ago to join her husband, Obinna Nwagboso, a chemical engineer, who seven years earlier had come to the Bronx before settling in Selkirk. When Nwagboso first came to the U.S., opening a Nigerian restaurant never crossed her mind, but she has never hesitated to be the first in line to try something new.

One thing I like about myself is my confidence, she said. Ive always been out there doing things for the first time, so why not open the first African restaurant? The result is Keobi, her Nigerian-focused restaurant on Lark Street in Albany. It opened in early April last year, just weeks after the state ordered restaurants to offer only takeout.

Nwagboso said she considers herself a pioneer in many facets of life. She was among the earliest of graduates of the first high school in her hometown in Nigeria and the first in her family to hold positions of influence in her chosen careers. She is her familys eldest daughter and started cooking for them and assisting her mother, who ran the cafeteria at a local cement factory, when she was 8 years old.

I was quick to learn, and ... in Nigeria the first daughter has the most responsibility, she said. After high school, Nwagboso became a nurse before transitioning to a career as flight attendant. Her medical knowledge made her a valuable part of her flight crew, and she became an elite service attendant, working in first class.

That job exposed me more to the customer service aspect of the (restaurant) business. One of the things that helped me in terms of presentation was my flight attendant job, Nwagboso said. She was able to travel throughout Africa and into the Middle East for work, sampling local food whenever she could. None of it compared to the complex flavors of Nigeria.

I always carried my spices in my crew bag, she said. Nigerians love their spice.

Nwagboso went back into nursing when she moved to the U.S. and worked in senior-living homes in the Capital Region and with individuals with disabilities through Living Resources. She would cook jollof rice, stewed goat, pepper sauces (called soups), plantain porridge and other Nigerian and West African specialties for local friends, earning acclaim from enraptured eaters that fostered the idea of sharing her food with paying customers.

I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I knew if I put my mind to it, I would do well, Nwagboso said. She and Obinna began looking for a restaurant space in 2018 but had difficulty obtaining financing through a bank, despite having money saved for a down payment on a building. In early 2020, the Nwagbosos decided to lease a space as a starting point for future goals. They signed the contract for the space, at 189 Lark, which formerly housed restaurants including the Slavonian cafe My Dacha. Nwagboso was pregnant at the time with her fourth child, and shortly after taking control of the space, the COVID-19 pandemic jeopardized their hopes of running a restaurant.

If we back out, then the vision is crashing, so lets make a bold decision and just push ahead. Ive gone too far to go back, Nwagboso said of her mindset in that moment.

Keobi, a portmanteau of the Nwagbosos first names, focuses on traditional Nigerian foods like fufu, a soft dough made of hot water and ground legumes, corn flour or rice, which is ripped apart with the fingers and used to sop up sauces and gather pieces of meat and rice, like an edible utensil; and Kos n Do, a fried platter of golden beans and African yams. Nwagboso strives to merge authentic flavors of her Nigerian Igbo heritage with the visually appealing finesse she learned working for airlines.

Those flavors reflect the meta-ethnicities present in Nigeria, including the Hausa and Yoruba cultures that are also part of Nwagboso's story. Spices including uziza leaves and ehuru, otherwise known as African nutmeg, are shipped from Nigeria. Curry powder is prominent in the recipes and harkens to the long history of British colonialism that introduced flavors into Nigerian cooking from other colonized regions.

Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa, gaining its independence in 1960 after centuries of European rule and slave entrapment. It is estimated that 3.5 million of the 12.5 million enslaved Africans transported to American soil were captured from Nigeria. The legacy of Nigerian culinary practices ripple through Black communities, as food traditionally thought of part of Black culture in America is built on the foundational techniques of West African cooking. Flavors and ideas from Nigeria can be found in the ways a soul food or Caribbean restaurant prepares rice and beans or stewed greens, among other dishes.

Still, while enclaves of West African cuisine in New York City and throughout Georgia and Texas readily embrace unfiltered and explicit Nigerian recipes, Keobi is the first Nigerian-focused restaurant in the Capital Region.

Russell Dymond, who moved to Albany from New York City five years ago, comes to Keobi once a week for peanut butter soup and couscous.

Its something different, he said. Its all the different spices. There is so much flavor. He thinks people are hesitant to try a Nigerian restaurant because it differs from food they have experienced before, but once they have their first sampling, similarities become more obvious and give Nigerian food deep familiarity.

White people should be open to that, too, Dymond said.

If you go Keobi Where: 189 Lark St., Albany

Hours: 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday to Saturday, noon to 10 p.m. Sunday

Menu: Traditional Nigerian and West African food, including goat-and-pepper soup ($10), ogbono soup ($16.99), jollof rice ($13.00), cow foot in chile gravy ($15.25) and peppered snails ($22.95)

Info: 518-977-3991 and keobirestaurant.com See More Collapse

Nwagboso said that while she has a diverse clientele, Opening the restaurant made me realize there are a lot of (people from West Africa) out there.

For some, the moment their lineage traversed the Atlantic by force or by choice goes back generations, while others are like the Nwagboso children: first-generation Americans with feet in two worlds, bridging the gap between assimilation and traditions of their parents homeland.

The funny thing is, my kids dont even like rice, Nwagboso said. Rice is a staple of Nigerian cooking, presented simply as a white-rice accouterment to complex cornerstones of West African culinary vernacular, like jollof, a rice dish made with tomatoes, onions and spices, or party rice, a vat of rice where browned bits of flavors caramelize and crust on the bottom of the pot for an explosive textural and sensory experience. When the Nwagboso children tell their mother that schoolmates do not understand their Nigerian food, she responds, How are they going to know it if you dont tell them?

Nwagboso applies this same idea to people who walk into her restaurant for the first time. She happily explains the process and ingredients behind each of her recipes. She cooks food intrinsic to her lived experience in Nigeria, but presents it in a way that nods to detail and haute cuisine. She wants to open a Nigerian-focused fine-dining restaurant to showcase the elegance of West African food and to expand the Keobi brand with multiple locations. She hopes to open other businesses as well, including an Afrocentric interior design studio.

The entrepreneurial spirit resonates deep with Nwagboso, and she knows that is a large contributing factor to why her family is the first in the area to venture into specific regional food from continental Africa.

Most people dont take this risk, because its the fear of knowing if its going to work, she said. It is a risk she is happy to take for her own personal fulfillment, both to promote Nigerian cuisine and to weave moments of connection among the African diaspora in America.

Deanna Fox is a food and agriculture journalist. Visit her website Fox on Food or follow her on Instagram @DeannaNFox.
LIVINGSTON, Mont. (AP)  A freight train hit a semitractor-trailer at a crossing east of Livingston, killing both people in the cab of the semitractor, Park County officials said.

The crash happened just after 9 p.m. Sunday, Park Rural Fire District officials said. The collision, in which the tractor was separated from its trailer, sparked a fire that caused some damage to the BNSF Railway train cab and burned grass near the tracks.
When health care leaders in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country began laying out a strategy to distribute COVID-19 vaccines, they knew it would be a tough sell with the Amish, who tend to be wary of preventive shots and government intervention.

Early on, they posted flyers at farm supply stores and at auctions where the Amish sell handmade furniture and quilts. They sought advice from members of the deeply religious and conservative sect, who told them not to be pushy. And they asked three newspapers widely read by the Amish to publish ads promoting the vaccine. Two refused.

By May, two rural vaccination clinics had opened at a fire station and a social services center, both familiar places to the Amish in Lancaster County. During the first six weeks, 400 people showed up. Only 12 were Amish.

The vaccination drive is lagging far behind in many Amish communities across the U.S. following a wave of virus outbreaks that swept through their churches and homes during the past year. In Ohio's Holmes County, home to the nation's largest concentration of Amish, just 14% of the county's overall population is fully vaccinated.

While their religious beliefs dont forbid them to get vaccines, the Amish are generally less likely to be vaccinated for preventable diseases such as measles and whooping cough. Though vaccine acceptance varies by church district, the Amish often rely on family tradition and advice from church leaders, and a core part of their Christian faith is accepting Gods will in times of illness or death.

Many think they don't need the COVID-19 vaccine now because they've already gotten sick and believe their communities have reached herd immunity, according to health care providers in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana, home to nearly two-thirds of the estimated 345,000 Amish in the U.S.

Thats the No. 1 reason we hear, said Alice Yoder, executive director of community health at Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health, a network of hospitals and clinics.

Experts say the low vaccination rates are a reflection of both the nature of the Amish and the general vaccine hesitancy found in many rural parts of the country.

Because many Amish work and shop alongside their neighbors and hire them as drivers, they hear the skepticism, the worries about side effects and the misinformation surrounding the vaccine from the English, or non-Amish, world around them even though they shun most modern conveniences.

They're not getting that from the media. They're not watching TV or reading it on the internet. They're getting it from their English neighbors, said Donald Kraybill, a leading expert on the Amish. In many ways, they are simply reflecting rural America and the same attitudes.

In one case, an anti-vaccine group took out a full-page newspaper ad showing a smashed buggy with the words Vaccines can have unintended consequences.

Public health officials trying to combat the confusion and hesitancy have put up billboards where the Amish travel by horse and buggy, sent letters to bishops and offered to take the vaccines into their homes and workplaces, all without much success.

Its not due to lack of effort, said Michael Derr, the health commissioner in Holmes County, Ohio. But this thing is so politically charged."

Some health clinics that serve the Amish are hesitant to push the issue for fear of driving them away from getting blood pressure checks and routine exams.

One local business and the organizers of a community event told the health department in Holmes County that it would no longer be welcome if it brought the vaccine to them, Derr said.

Staff members at the Parochial Medical Center, which serves the Amish and Mennonites in Pennsylvanias Lancaster County, encourage patients to get the vaccine, but many have little fear of the virus, said Allen Hoover, the clinics administrator.

Most of them listen and are respectful, but you can tell before youre finished that theyve already made up their mind, he said.

The clinic, he said, hardly sees any virus cases now after dealing with as many as five a day last fall. I would suspect weve gained some kind of immunity. I know thats up for debate, but I think thats why were seeing only a spattering right now, Hoover said.

Relying on possible herd immunity when little testing has taken place among the Amish is risky, said Esther Chernak, director of the Center for Public Health Readiness and Communication at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

Its not a community living on an island, not interacting with other people, she said. They dont have zero interaction with the outside world, so theyre still exposed.

Also, how long someone remains immune after having COVID-19 isnt clear, and many experts advise getting vaccinated because it brings a higher level of protection.

Close to 180 million Americans  54% of the population  have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Experts say low vaccination rates could allow the virus to mutate and make a comeback.

During the first months of the pandemic, the Amish followed social distancing guidelines and stopped gathering for church and funerals, said Steven Nolt, a scholar at the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania.

But when non-Amish neighbors and local elected officials began pushing back against state and federal mandates, they resumed the gatherings, he said. What followed was a surge of outbreaks last summer, Nolt said.

Most now say they have already had the virus and dont see a need to get vaccinated, said Mark Raber, who is Amish and a member of a settlement in Daviess County, Indiana, which has one of the state's lowest vaccination rates.

As long as everything stays the same, I dont think Ill get it, he said.

Changing those opinions will require building trusting relationships with the Amish, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report looking at outbreaks in those communities last year.

What won't work, health care providers say, is bombarding the Amish with statistics and vaccine lotteries because of their general mistrust and rejection of government help. The Amish don't accept Social Security benefits.

Trevor Thain, who owns Topeka Pharmacy in northern Indiana, where there are 25,000 Amish, worked with the CDC on bridging communication gaps in LaGrange County, where just 18% of all residents are fully vaccinated.

Since the vaccine became available, they've immunized 4,200 people, perhaps only 20 of them Amish, he said.

A few weeks ago he put out flyers offering private appointments or doses dispensed inside homes. Only a few Amish people responded, Thain said, including one who came with a request: Dont tell my family.
ALBANY  Faced with surging violent crime, Democratic voters in New York City and Buffalo voted for change last week. In Albany, though, the status quo was quite comfortable.

But what else is new?

Let's begin in New York City, where Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams holds the lead in the tabulation of ranked-choice Democratic primary votes. The Black former police captain derided "defund" rhetoric and promised to make public safety a top priority.

"How dare those with their philosophical and intellectual theorizing and their classroom mindset talking about the theory of policing," Adams said on election night. "Im going to keep my city safe.

As of this writing, Adams hasn't won the primary just yet, because ranked-choice voting has resulted in a ridiculous delay in ballot counting.

Nevertheless, Adams' success is being touted, particularly by conservatives and the tabloid that championed his candidacy, as a victory for sanity and a defeat for the progressive left  a sign that calls for radical changes to policing have little purchase even in the hometown of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

But at the other end of the state, Democrats in Buffalo delivered a striking counter-narrative. In a city where the number of shooting deaths this year already equals the total for a typical year, a woman sometimes described as a socialist stunned a four-term incumbent, despite angering the police union with plans for reform.

India Walton, a 38-year-old registered nurse and community activist, didn't call for defunding police, exactly. But she did call for reallocating police department spending toward social programs that could reduce crime. Progressives cheered her victory.

It's probably foolish to draw comparisons or distinctions between the elections in New York and Buffalo. Adams ran in a hotly contested primary and, if he does win the primary and general election, will become nationally prominent as the mayor of the nation's biggest city. His policing opinions and tactics will be noticed and debated.

Buffalo, by contrast, is, well, Buffalo, a smallish city where the national spotlight rarely shines. Walton won a low-turnout race against a 16-year mayor, Byron Brown, who barely bothered to acknowledge he was up for reelection. That was a big mistake; voters rarely appreciate arrogance.

But despite the differences, this much is clear: New York and Buffalo both voted for change.

In the former, Democrats rejected the progressivism of Mayor Bill de Blasio and gave Adams and other moderates more than 60 percent of the vote. In Buffalo, Democrats rejected Brown's centrist pragmatism and chose an idealistic newcomer. Both results indicate dissatisfaction with the status quo  hardly surprising, given the rise in violent crime.

But in Albany, the incumbent  that would be Mayor Kathy Sheehan, of course  rolled to another easy victory, garnering more than 60 percent of the vote against challenger Valerie Faust. That's hardly a surprise: Albany hasn't ejected an incumbent mayor since James Henry Blessing defeated Thomas Van Alstyne in ... wait for it ... 1899.

Maybe last week's margin of victory suggests Democratic voters are satisfied with Sheehan and the direction of the city. Or maybe the hideously low turnout means limited enthusiasm for the mayor and a missed opportunity for Common Council President Corey Ellis and others who declined to challenge her. Perhaps it means voters weren't given a real choice.

Yet maybe voters recognize that violent crime is surging in cities around the country and therefore don't hold Sheehan responsible for Albany's rise in violent crime. Maybe voters believe she's doing her best to confront an impossible problem.

Or maybe Faust, who ran a low-intensity campaign, to put it mildly, failed to capitalize on an issue that spurred change elsewhere. The fruit, in other words, may have been hanging within reach, but nobody grabbed it.

Who knows? It's hard to draw conclusions from this year's Democratic primary, which, of course, is the only election that typically matters in deep-blue Albany.

But Sheehan shouldn't be pleased about receiving roughly 3,700 votes, the lowest total of her three primary victories. In a city of 100,000, that's an embarrassing number for a mayor and perhaps a warning sign signaling disaffection.

And anybody who cares about Albany should be concerned by the apathy that remains a defining feature of the city. In six of the nine contested races for Common Council seats, the "winner" needed fewer than 250 votes for victory.

That staggering lack of interest suggests most residents see city government as irrelevant. And it means the status quo is too comfortable in the city, which is also, alas, the status quo.

Note: An earlier version of this column inaccurately described Eric Adams' current standing in the primary vote count.

cchurchill@timesunion.com  518-454-5442  @chris_churchill
WATERVLIET  The fire that destroyed row houses Monday was accidentally set by a resident smoking in the rear of one of the buildings who tossed a cigarette onto a pet bed, city officials said Tuesday.

The residents tried to extinguish the fire as the pet bed ignited on the back porch but it quickly spread, fire Chief Tom Garrett said.

The fire was accidental due to smoking, Garrett said.

The ensuing blaze spread to three row houses  2401, 2403 and 2405 Broadway  just north of the intersection with 24th Street. The fire was reported at 1:15 p.m. The city has ordered the demolition of the three buildings after a city engineeer evaluated them and ruled they had to to be razed, Mayor Charles Patricelli said.

"They need to come down," Patricelli said.

The buildings will be torn down in the next few days. Broadway remains closed from 25th Street south to 23rd Street. The city also has closed 24th Street between Second Avenue and Broadway.

Bricks are piled along 24th Street and Broadway where they fell from the buildings during the fire. Patricelli said an estimated 7 million gallons was poured on the buildings in the effort to put out the stubborn blaze.

Two Watervliet Arsenal firefighters were treated for heat exhaustion as temperatures hit 93 degrees and the heat index soared as high as 102 degrees. A resident was treated for smoke inhalation, according to authorities.

The local American Red Cross assisted 11 of the 12 families living in the three buildings.

The city has started a Watervliet Broadway Burn Out Fund to assist the families who were loss their homes and possessions in Monday's fire at through an account at Pioneer Bank. Those who wish to contribute can make checks payable to the Watervliet Broadway Burn out Fund or to the Watervliet Charitable Foundation (501c3), Patricelli said in multiple Facebook and social media postings.

Cash donations may be made at the Watervliet Pioneer branch or checks may be sent to the Mayors Office, Room 2, City Hall 2-15th St. for either the Pioneer account or the Charitable Foundation.

Families affected by the fire are asked to contact Patricelli's office at 518-270-3815 or by email at Cpatricelli@watervliet.com.

Two GoFundMe sites have been set up to assist an individual and a family of four that lost their homes in the fire. Pedro Valetin is trying to raise $20,000 for his family of four. Priscilla Medina established a site to aid her brother Paul Rostick by raising $5,000

City firefighters remained on the scene into Tuesday morning to watch for a resumption of fire in the wreckage.

The Watervliet Fire Department was assisted by firefighters from the Watervliet Arsenal, Troy, Green Island, Cohoes and Albany. Colonie emergency medical technicians were also at the scene.
QUEENSBURY  As Great Escape, like other businesses, struggles to get enough employees, they are dropping their "grooming guidelines" that required workers to not have piercings, tattoos and unique hairstyles.

While frowned upon in the past, those personal fashion statements are now all welcome when you join the Six Flags team.

And they are offering a 10 percent cash bonus to people who start work before Thursday, July 1, and stay through Sept. 12.

Some of their entry-level positions are starting at $15 an hour. Great Escape is part of the Six Flags corporate fleet of amusement parks.

We have updated our team member dress code policies to allow for more individual expression, while still maintaining a family-friendly environment/atmosphere. Six Flags is committed to fostering a welcoming and inclusive environment for guests and team members alike, spokeswoman Brit Gillespie said in a prepared statement.

Among the openings they still have are lifeguards, ride operations, security guards, and food service workers.

The park never opened last summer due to the pandemic.

And like other businesses, especially in tourist-dependent areas like Lake George and Saratoga Springs, they are competing vigorously for workers.

Leisure and hospitality workers were the first to lose their jobs and the hardest-hit by the pandemic as countless restaurants and tourist attractions closed or cut back their hours due to COVID-19 last year.

Now as they are reopening, these businesses are seeking to lure back workers, who may have gone into other occupations or who are remaining unemployed, thanks in part to the additional $300 the federal government has offered in weekly unemployment benefits.

Great Escape is a major employer in the area, and earlier in the year they said they needed 1,500 workers for the summer.

Another employer, the Saratoga Race Course 25 miles south, has also started staffing up for the annual 40-day thoroughbred meet starting in July.

There, the New York Racing Association, which runs the track, is hiring betting clerks, concession workers and others, with some jobs paying up to $20 an hour.

Everybody is stealing from each other, Todd Shimkus, president of the Saratoga Chamber of Commerce, said of the competition to get workers.

Saratoga Countys unemployment rate has fallen below 4 percent and every sector of the local economy is facing a labor shortage.

This is a multifaceted challenge, Shimkus said, explaining that some people are choosing to stay on unemployment.

But there are other factors as well.

Theres been a curtailment of workers who typically visit from abroad on work or student visas. European college students who clean hotel rooms and Central American laborers who work in fields like landscaping are both in short supply this year.

Moreover, many baby boomers , their bank accounts swollen with a strong stock market, are retiring.

The pandemic has impacted all of these decisions, Shimkus said.

Some employers are raising pay rates and offering bonuses. Some are closing for a day or two to be able to operate with fewer staff. People are going to need to be patient this summer. Enjoy the time we have together and be respectful of the staff that is working because chances are they will be working harder than ever before, said Shimkus.

Those interested in working at Great Escape should go to sixflagsjobs.com.

rkarlin@timesunion.com 518 454 5758 @RickKarlin




SURFSIDE, Florida (AP)  Elected officials pledged Tuesday to conduct multiple investigations into the collapse of an oceanfront Florida condo tower, vowing to convene a grand jury and to look closely at every possible angle to prevent any other building from experiencing such a catastrophic failure.

Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said she and her staff will meet with engineering, construction and geology experts, among others, to review building safety issues and develop recommendations "to ensure a tragedy like this will never, ever happen again.

State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle said she will pursue a grand jury investigation to examine factors and decisions that led to Thursdays collapse of the 12-story Champlain Towers South in Surfside. Another victim was recovered Tuesday, bringing the confirmed death toll to 12, with 149 people unaccounted for.

Even as officials looked to the future to determine the cause of the collapse, they were resolute in vowing to continue the effort to find survivors.

On the sixth day of a painstaking search, Gov. Ron DeSantis evoked a well-known military commitment to leave no one behind on the battlefield and pledged to do the same for the people still missing in the rubble.

The way I look at it, as an old Navy guy, is when somebody is missing in action, in the military, youre missing until youre found. We dont stop the search," DeSantis said at a news conference.

"I think thats what is happening. Those first responders are breaking their backs trying to find anybody they can. I think they are going to continue to do that. Theyve been very selfless. Theyve put themselves at risk to do it.

Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett cited the case of a woman who was found alive 17 days after a garment factory collapsed in 2013, killing more than 1,000 people in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

No one is giving up hope here. ... We are dedicated to getting everyone out of that pile of rubble," Burkett said.

Also Tuesday, the White House announced that President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden would travel to Surfside on Thursday.

Martin Langesfeld, whose sister, 26-year-old Nicole Langesfeld, is missing in the collapse, also expressed hope that there are still survivors.

Were not alone in this. Theres hope. I really believe miracles do happen. Things like this have happened around the world," he said during a vigil Monday night on the beach near the collapsed building.

The collapse has drawn scrutiny of the safety of older high-rise buildings throughout South Florida. Cava ordered a 30-day audit on whether buildings 40 years old or older are complying with a required recertification of their structural integrity, and that any issues raised by inspections are being addressed.

On Tuesday, the mayor said building inspections have found four balconies in one building in Miami-Dade County that must be immediately closed due to safety concerns.

Previous grand juries in South Florida have examined other large-scale disasters, such as the 2018 collapse of a pedestrian bridge at Florida International University, which killed six people. That investigation is ongoing.

Criminal charges in such matters are possible, such as the third-degree felony murder and manslaughter charges brought in the 1996 crash of ValuJet Flight 592, which killed 110 people in the Everglades.

Work at the site has been deliberate and treacherous. Debris fell onto the search area overnight from the shattered edge of the part of the building that still stands. That forced rescuers to mark a dont go beyond here line and focus their efforts on parts of the debris pile that are farther from the structure, Burkett told Miami television station WSVN.

Kevin Guthrie of the Florida Division of Emergency Management said his agency requested an additional search team. He said state officials want to rotate some of their teams out so they can be on hand in case of severe weather in the coming days.

Several members of an Israeli rescue team worked partly on hands and knees Tuesday over a small section of the rubble, digging with shovels, pickaxes and saws. They removed debris into buckets that were dumped into a metal construction bin, which was periodically lifted away by a crane. The crane then delivered an empty bin.

Late in the afternoon, rescue officials sounded a horn for a second time during the days work, signaling an approaching storm with lightning. Workers temporarily evacuated.

Authorities said its still a search-and-rescue operation, but no one has been found alive since hours after the collapse on Thursday.

The pancake collapse of the building left layer upon layer of intertwined debris, frustrating efforts to reach anyone who may have survived in a pocket of space.

Authorities meet frequently with families to explain what they're doing and to answer questions. They have discussed how DNA matches are made to help identify the dead, how next-of-kin will be contacted and explained in extreme detail how they are searching the mound, the mayor said.

With that knowledge, Cava said, families are coming to their own conclusions.

Some are feeling more hopeful, some less hopeful, because we do not have definitive answers. We give them the facts. We take them to the site," she said. "They have seen the operation. They understand now how it works, and they are preparing themselves for news, one way or the other.

Rachel Spiegel, whose 66-year-old mother, Judy Spiegel, is missing, said Tuesday that she was hoping for a miracle, but she also wrote about looking beyond the tragedy.

Our mom Judy was the glue that kept our family together. All of the family mementos, photos, clothing and heirlooms our father and mother have collected over the past 65 years were lost in a matter of seconds, Spiegel wrote in a message about setting up a fund for charities on behalf of her mother. As we continue to search for meaning in this catastrophe, we must also look to the future and rebuild.

In a text message exchange with The Associated Press, she added, Please keep praying for a miracle.

___

Associated Press writers Kelli Kennedy in Miami, Bobby Caina Calvan in Tallahassee, Florida, and Freida Frisaro in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, contributed to this report.
ALBANY  A planned monument to pay tribute to essential workers during the coronavirus pandemic is expected to move slightly after residents and lawmakers lashed out at Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo for attempting to put the memorial in a part of Manhattan's Battery Park that's cherished for its open space.

The "Circle of Heroes" monument, which would include 19 maple trees encircling an eternal flame and engravings over 3,000 square feet, is to be moved to a corner of the 143,000-square-foot Rockefeller Park in Battery Park that is less traversed by the public, the governor's office said Tuesday.

The monument was unveiled last week amid Cuomo's declaration ending the state of emergency and as he announced that related restrictions would be lifted.

"Your spirit is still alive in us, in our soul and we will never forget," Cuomo said. "We are eternally grateful for what you do."

Essential workers in the Battery Park neighborhood led the charge on social media Monday, saying the location of the planned memorial is the lone space they went to for relief during the pandemic and could let their children run. They called for the monument to be located outside of the park.

It was expected to be completed by Labor Day, which Cuomo acknowledged was a relatively quick turnaround for a construction project.

"How can it be done in a couple of months? Kelly Cummings has promised that it will get done in a couple months or she will be a new resident of Idaho," Cuomo said in jest, referring to a senior member of his administration.

The location was selected in an "open process" by a group of 23 leaders who represent essential workers, said Jordan Bennett, a spokesman for the governor. The governor's office declined to provide an estimated cost for the taxpayer-funded monument.

The monument came as a "shock" to local New York City Councilwoman Margaret S. Chin. She said in a letter to the governor that it would mark the third monument to go to Battery Park in the last five years, one for Hurricane Maria in 2018 and one for Mother Cabrini in 2020  all "have not included any form of public engagement."

Construction crews began to prep the originally planned area of Battery Park, at the southern tip of the island, on Monday. It resulted in protest from residents, according to social media posts. People reported bulldozers at the site of the main lawn of the park where children typically go to play. An online petition, calling to relocate the monument, collected more than 4,500 signatures.

"New Yorks essential workers deserve our honor and respect  and we can commemorate them with a memorial," U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler said in a tweet Monday. "But bulldozing vital open space in lower Manhattan isnt the way to do it."

Instead of spending an undisclosed amount of money on the monument, the governor's office could commit to paying hazard pay or raised wages to essential workers, Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou said.

"A tribute for their service is nice too, but it should be with community input," Niou said in a tweet.
SEATTLE (AP)  The hottest day of an unprecedented and dangerous heat wave scorched the Pacific Northwest on Monday, with temperatures obliterating records that had been set just the day before.

Seattle hit 108 degrees Fahrenheit (42 Celsius) by evening  well above Sundays all-time high of 104 F (40 C). Portland, Oregon, reached 116 F (46.6 C) after hitting records of 108 F (42 C) on Saturday and 112 F (44 C) on Sunday.

The temperatures were unheard of in a region better known for rain, and where June has historically been referred to as Juneuary for its cool drizzle. Seattle's average high temperature in June is around 70 F (21.1 C), and fewer than half of the city's residents have air conditioning, according to U.S. Census data.

The heat forced schools and businesses to close to protect workers and guests, including some places like outdoor pools and ice cream shops where people seek relief from the heat. COVID-19 testing sites and mobile vaccination units were out of service as well.

The Seattle Parks Department closed one indoor community pool after the air inside became too hot  leaving Stanlie James, who relocated from Arizona three weeks ago, to search for somewhere else to cool off. She doesn't have AC at her condo, she said.

Part of the reason I moved here was not only to be near my daughter, but also to come in the summer to have relief from Arizona heat," James said. And I seem to have brought it with me. So Im not real thrilled.

The heat wave was caused by what meteorologists described as a dome of high pressure over the Northwest and worsened by human-caused climate change, which is making such extreme weather events more likely and more intense.

Zeke Hausfather, a scientist at the climate-data nonprofit Berkeley Earth, said Monday that the Pacific Northwest has warmed by about 3 degrees F (1.7 degrees C) in the past half-century. That means a heat wave now is about 3 degrees warmer than it would have been before  and the difference between 111 degrees and 114 is significant, especially for vulnerable populations, he noted.

In a world without climate change, this still would have been a really extreme heat wave, Hausfather said. This is worse than the same event would have been 50 years ago, and notably so."

The blistering heat exposed a region with infrastructure not designed for it, hinting at the greater costs of climate change to come. Blackouts were reported throughout the region as people trying to keep cool with fans and air conditioners strained the power grid.

We are not meant for this, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said of the Pacific Northwest in an interview Monday on MSNBC. This is the beginning of a permanent emergency ... we have to tackle the source of this problem, which is climate change.

In Portland, light rail and street car service was suspended as power cables melted and electricity demand spiked.

Heat-related expansion caused road pavement to buckle or pop loose in many areas, including on Interstate 5 in Seattle. Workers in tanker trucks in Seattle were hosing down drawbridges with water at least twice a day to prevent the steel from expanding in the heat and interfering with their opening and closing mechanisms.

Democratic U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell said in a statement Monday that the heat illustrated an urgent need for the upcoming federal infrastructure package to promote clean energy, cut greenhouse gas emissions and protect people from extreme heat.

Washington state was not built for triple digit temperatures, she said.

In many cities in the region, officials opened cooling centers, including one in an Amazon meeting space in Seattle capable of holding 1,000 people. Officials also reminded residents where pools, splash pads and cooling centers were available and urged people to stay hydrated, check on their neighbors and avoid strenuous activities.

The closure of school buildings halted programs such as meal services for the needy, child care and summer enrichment activities. In eastern Washington state, the Richland and Kennewick school districts paused bus service for summer school because the vehicles arent air-conditioned, making it unsafe for students to travel in them.

Orchardists in central Washington tried to save their cherry crops from the heat, using canopies, deploying sprinklers and sending out workers in the night to pick.

Alaska Airlines said it was providing cool down vans for its workers at Seattle-Tacoma and Portland international airports, where temperatures on the ramp can be 20 degrees higher than elsewhere.

The heat wave stretched into the Canadian province of British Columbia, with the temperature in the village of Lytton reaching 115 F (46 C) Sunday afternoon, marking an all-time high recorded in Canada.

In Multnomah County, Oregon, which includes Portland, nearly 60 outreach teams have worked since Friday to reach homeless people with water, electrolytes and information on keeping cool, said county spokeswoman Julie Sullivan-Springhetti.

The county had 43 emergency department and urgent care clinic visits for heat illness from Friday to Sunday. Typically, there would be just one or two, Sullivan-Springhetti said.

Dr. Jennifer Vines, the Multnomah County health officer, said she believed there would be deaths from the heat wave, though how many remained to be seen.

We are worried about elderly and we are certainly worried about people with frail health, but kids can also overheat easily," Vines said. "Even adults who are fit and healthy  in temperatures like these  have ended up in the emergency department.

The heat was heading east, where temperatures in Boise, Idaho, were expected to top 100 F (38 C) for at least seven days starting Monday.

___

Cline 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. She reported from Portland, Oregon. AP video journalist Manuel Valdes contributed.
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (AP)  The trustees of North Carolina's flagship public university are meeting behind closed doors later this week amid intense criticism of their decision not to offer tenure to investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones.

A news release from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill did not mention the subject to be discussed in Wednesday's meeting. However, NC Policy Watch, which first reported on the meeting, said trustees would vote on whether to grant tenure to Hannah-Jones, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her work on the 1619 Project examining the bitter legacy of slavery. The publication cited two unidentified people who it says are directly involved in the process.
Will Waldron/Albany Times Union

If one point was made clear in the article, Looking back on decade of marriage equality, June 20, it is that the transgender community has been left behind by establishment LGBTQ organizations. Ten years after marriage equality, transgender people in the Empire State are still suffering from disproportionate levels of housing insecurity and unemployment.

The notion that marriage equality moved the ball on the transgender rights movement is offensive. If anything, it was transgender and gender-fluid people who unknowingly moved the ball on marriage equality. It was outcasts of their own communities, homeless sex workers and street kids who revolted against heavy-handed police only for cisgender gays to reap the benefits of our fight for liberation.
The following editorial appeared in the New York Daily News:

The Supreme Court got it right when, in an 8-1 ruling Wednesday, it held that Pennsylvania cheerleader Brandi Levy couldnt be suspended from the team for blurting on Snapchat, f--- cheer after she didnt make varsity. Overriding lower courts, the top bench vindicated the rights of students everywhere to be able to express themselves off school grounds and outside school hours.

Public schools can certainly regulate on-campus student (or teacher) speech when it meaningfully disrupts learning  but there should be an especially high bar for administrators using the long arm of a disciplinary code to sanction kids who pop off on social media or otherwise when ostensibly under parental supervision. Students, after all, are first and foremost Americans with First Amendment freedoms, which if they mean anything must be honored even when inconvenient to others.

Here in New York, we hope the ruling reaffirms the importance of free expression on and off school grounds, including student journalism thats allowed to ask tough questions and challenge authority. That might be a high-minded aspiration given that this decision centered on a low vulgarity, but its actually closely related.

And if students have a constitutionally protected right to express themselves in ways adults might dislike, those adults have a parallel right not to stack the deck for or against particular types of speech, particularly on controversial topics. Unfortunately, the citys Department of Education has been doing just that for years now.

In 2018, Mayor de Blasio and his schools chancellor encouraged students to attend a gun-safety march. In 2019, they gave students formal permission, in the form of excused absences, to skip school to attend a climate strike.

Unless they start giving floating days off for speech of students choice  including to attend protests for conservative causes  rewarding favored off-campus expression is classic viewpoint discrimination, just as disrespectful to students First Amendment rights as the attempt to mete out punishment to a kid who spouted the f-word.
A rental crisis spurred by the pandemic prompted many states to make bold promises to help renters, but most failed to deliver on them after Congress passed the sweeping CARES Act in March 2020
A judge ordered a life sentence for a 43-year-old Florida man who molested a 10-year-old girl and then doused her in bleach to destroy evidence
AT&T Reports 1 Billion Robocall Blocks Per Month As STIR/SHAKEN Deadline Nears

By Luke Bellos - Editor, Virtual PBX

American telecom giant AT&T has announced an update of the companys effort toward combating the momentous rise in spam phone calls. According to AT&T representatives, the companys anti-spoofing programming is preventing 1 billion fraudulent calls per month, more than double the amount of the previous year.

Over the last few years, mobile users across the country have experienced a noticeable rise in the amount of spam calls, leading telecom service providers to devise new strategies to prevent calls from successfully reaching customers. The problem became exacerbated over the course of the pandemic, due to a reduced workforce and dependence on remote activity. In fact, a recent CNBC article found that Americans collectively lost $29.8 billion in 2020 alone. To address this increase in criminal activity, AT&T created a triple-barrelled protection in combination with AT&T ActiveArmorSM, to help manage suspicious activity:

-AT&T Call Protect gives wireless customers automatic fraud blocking and suspected spam alerts.

-Our global fraud team runs an additional program that blocks fraud calls to every type of AT&T phone service.

-STIR/SHAKEN, a new call authentication technology, is now boosting both programs with extra data for detection and accuracy.

Coincidently, the update from AT&T has arrived only a few days before the FCCs STIR/SHAKEN protocol reaches the compliance deadline. To those who are unfamiliar, STIR/SHAKEN is a set of government protocols that hopes to provide customers with better protections against the recent rise in fraudulent calls from global VoIP systems.

"With AT&T ActiveArmorSM, we detect and prevent security issues with multiple layers of protection," said Jenifer Robertson, chief customer officer, AT&T Consumer. "Our robocall efforts are a prime example."Our ultimate goal is to be able to report fewer blocked calls, as an indication that fewer illegal calls are being sent. We'll continue to work with law enforcement and the Industry Traceback Group to trace illegal calls back to the source."

Please enable JavaScript to view the

Edited by Luke Bellos
June 29, 2021





When we talk about social platforms, we are more than used to witnessing the arrival of apps with innovative features that seek to seduce users. Without a doubt, it is a much more fragmented landscape than that of search engines, where Google has a lot of advantages over other competitors (with permission from Yandex (News - Alert) in Russia and Baidu in China). However, emerging search engines like DuckDuckGo have been steadily gaining users since 2020, and from an SEO point of view, you should not ignore trends like this according to Bluehat Marketing.







What is DuckDuckGo and How is it Different from Google (News - Alert) ?

In January 2021, DuckDuckGo surpassed one million daily global queries and this was a milestone for this emerging search engine, which has experienced exponential growth in the last year. The value proposition that DuckDuckGo makes to its users is based on the protection of privacy. This search engine does not use cookies to track its users and does not collect information, since its focus is on keywords. The ads that appear and organic searches will be related to the keywords used, but DuckDuckGo will not take into account the user's background or their previous search history.

How Does DuckDuckGo work?

DuckDuckGo is a hybrid search engine since it has its own tracker bot (DuckDuckBot), but it classifies the results by combining it with some 400 external sources, among which the Bing search engine or Wikipedia stand out. The search engine also does not know from which exact location the query is being made, although it has access to approximate information that allows it to zoom in on the results. In fact, when using DuckDuckGo you can select the country next to the search box. Another of the peculiarities that DuckDuckGo has is the bangs, which function as search shortcuts or commands that allow you to consult information directly on Wikipedia, Amazon, and Twitter (News - Alert) .

SEO for DuckDuckGo

Here are four basic tips for tackling SEO optimization at DuckDuckGo:

1. Optimize your brand's listing on Apple (News - Alert) Maps

DuckDuckGo uses Apple Maps to refine local search results, so it is essential that the brand has an optimized profile on Apple Maps . Similar to what happens with Google My Business, the tab must have key data such as name, address, phone number, hours, website and network profiles, as well as the business category to which that belongs.

2. Select the keywords with precision

As it does not have extra user data, this search engine is very sensitive to the words they choose to make a query. In practice, the results will generally be less accurate than those of Google, which offers a highly personalized SERP, almost tailored to each user. Therefore, SEO for DuckDuckGo should prioritize a very powerful copywriting and content marketing strategy focused on the search patterns most commonly used by users.

3. Take care of the linking profile of your website

Having quality links that redirect to your brand page is a positive sign for DuckDuckGo and for any other search engine (Google included). It is about forgetting the quantity and the old schemes to focus efforts on creating valuable content that generates connections more naturally.

4. Upload your website's sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools

DuckDuckGo's tracking system is combined with Bing's, so following the optimization tips for Bing will also help you better position your brand in this search engine. In this sense, a very important point is to include the web sitemap in Bing Webmaster Tools.

Conclusion

DuckDuckGo fulfills the same role as Google as a search engine, although it does not have such a broad ecosystem of services. This minority search engine does not intend to unseat the technology giant, but rather wants to position itself as an alternative for those users most concerned about the privacy of their data on the internet. If you are interested in taking your online brand to a new level with hybrid SEO, check out Blue Hat Marketing.
[June 29, 2021] Accenture Acquires Bionic to Help Brands Drive Customer Growth and Innovation

Accenture (News - Alert) (NYSE: ACN) announced it has acquired Bionic to help clients ignite customer growth through an entrepreneurial approach designed for large organizations, enabling them to launch new products and businesses that fulfill unmet customer needs. The acquisition strengthens Accenture Interactive's ability to help its clients drive growth by reimagining experiences and seizing new market and customer opportunities with less risk and more confidence. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629006014/en/ Bionic is now part of Accenture (Photo: Business Wire) Based in New York and founded in 2013, Bionic leverages its proven growth model, tools (GrowthOS), and entrepreneurial mindsets to institutionalize growth across Fortune 1000 companies. Bionic is comprised of 40 entrepreneurs, growth investors, and designers who have helped leading businesses including P&G (Growth Works), Exelon and AB InBev's ZX Ventures, among many others. "We believe venture capital and entrepreneurship are forms of management and strategy that are incredibly relevant, but remain elusive, to big businesses as they seek growth and relevance post-pandemic," said Baiju Shah, chief strategy officer, Accenture Interactive. "The ability to deeply understand and rapidly adapt to ever-changing customer needs is the battleground for brands today. In fact, eighty percent of CEOs acknowledge the need to reimagine their experiences to stay relevant to their customers. Bionic and Accenture Interactive will bring a new experience-led approach to customer growth, including a playbook for brands to build the organizational and operational muscles to innovate at pace." Bionic will join Accenture Interactive's Growth and Business Design practice, which was established to meet client demand for a new approach to growth. The multidisciplined practice brings together designers, strategists, technologists, entrepreneurs, venture investors, change makers and innovators to help clients unlock new revenue streams and enable organizations to innovate at scale. Bionic's proprietary GrowthOS will enhance Accenture Interactive's existing capabilities to catapult growth for clients with a proven, customizable, scalable and repeatable solution. "Brands today recognize, more than ever, that they're in a battle for new sources of growth, but often lack the capability and poise to attack those opportunities," said Pat Connolly, global Growth and Business Design practice lead, Accenture Interactive. "Many leaders know they need to adapt to meet fast-changing customer expectations, but face challenges making it happen. Bionic's GrowthOS, combined with Accenture Interactive's full suite of capabilities and accelerators, will enable our clients to improve the success rates of new growth initiatives with less risk." "In order to catalyze growth, business leaders need to adopt, drive and scale new growth mindsets and systems, resulting in a culture of transformation and growth that is capable of adapting to disruption. Bionic's success has been anchored ina venture-inspired approach that unlocks the potential of an organization through discovering new ideas, methodologies, and business models," said David Kidder, co-founder, and CEO of Bionic. "Joining forces with Accenture Interactive will bring both speed and scale to our clients, moving them toward a new future of always-on innovation and growth."



"Accenture Interactive and Bionic have a shared vision for empowering businesses to grow and thrive in an unpredictable world," said Anne Berkowitch, co-founder, Bionic. "Bionic brings evidence-backed methodologies to enhance Accenture's ability to scale new businesses and revenue streams for the world's biggest brands. This combination in the market will catapult the value we can create for our clients, and we couldn't be more excited to see what the future holds." Financial terms of the transaction are not being disclosed.

About Accenture Accenture is a global professional services company with leading capabilities in digital, cloud and security. Combining unmatched experience and specialized skills across more than 40 industries, we offer Strategy and Consulting, Interactive, Technology and Operations services - all powered by the world's largest network of Advanced Technology and Intelligent Operations centers. Our 569,000 people deliver on the promise of technology and human ingenuity every day, serving clients in more than 120 countries. We embrace the power of change to create value and shared success for our clients, people, shareholders, partners and communities. Visit us at www.accenture.com. Accenture Interactive is reimagining business through experience. We drive sustainable growth by creating meaningful experiences that live at the intersection of purpose and innovation. By connecting deep human and business insights with the possibilities of technology, we design, build, communicate and run experiences that make lives easier, more productive and rewarding. Accenture Interactive is ranked the world's largest digital agency by Ad Age and has been named a Most Innovative Company by Fast Company. To learn more, follow us @AccentureACTIVE and visit www.accentureinteractive.com. Forward-Looking Statements Except for the historical information and discussions contained herein, statements in this news release may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as "may," "will," "should," "likely," "anticipates," "expects," "intends," "plans," "projects," "believes," "estimates," "positioned," "outlook" and similar expressions are used to identify these forward-looking statements. These statements involve a number of risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied. Many of the following risks, uncertainties and other factors identified below are, and will be, amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic. These risks include, without limitation, risks that: the transaction might not achieve the anticipated benefits for Accenture; Accenture's results of operations have been significantly adversely affected and could in the future be materially adversely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic; Accenture's results of operations have been, and may in the future be, adversely affected by volatile, negative or uncertain economic and political conditions and the effects of these conditions on the company's clients' businesses and levels of business activity; Accenture's business depends on generating and maintaining ongoing, profitable client demand for the company's services and solutions including through the adaptation and expansion of its services and solutions in response to ongoing changes in technology and offerings, and a significant reduction in such demand or an inability to respond to the evolving technological environment could materially affect the company's results of operations; if Accenture is unable to keep its supply of skills and resources in balance with client demand around the world and attract and retain professionals with strong leadership skills, the company's business, the utilization rate of the company's professionals and the company's results of operations may be materially adversely affected; Accenture could face legal, reputational and financial risks if the company fails to protect client and/or company data from security incidents or cyberattacks; the markets in which Accenture operates are highly competitive, and Accenture might not be able to compete effectively; Accenture's profitability could materially suffer if the company is unable to obtain favorable pricing for its services and solutions, if the company is unable to remain competitive, if its cost-management strategies are unsuccessful or if it experiences delivery inefficiencies or fail to satisfy certain agreed-upon targets or specific service levels; changes in Accenture's level of taxes, as well as audits, investigations and tax proceedings, or changes in tax laws or in their interpretation or enforcement, could have a material adverse effect on the company's effective tax rate, results of operations, cash flows and financial condition; Accenture's ability to attract and retain business and employees may depend on its reputation in the marketplace; as a result of Accenture's geographically diverse operations and its growth strategy to continue to expand in its key markets around the world, the company is more susceptible to certain risks; Accenture's business could be materially adversely affected if the company incurs legal liability; Accenture's work with government clients exposes the company to additional risks inherent in the government contracting environment; Accenture's results of operations could be materially adversely affected by fluctuations in foreign currency exchange rates; if Accenture is unable to manage the organizational challenges associated with its size, the company might be unable to achieve its business objectives; if Accenture does not successfully manage and develop its relationships with key alliance partners or fails to anticipate and establish new alliances in new technologies, the company's results of operations could be adversely affected; Accenture might not be successful at acquiring, investing in or integrating businesses, entering into joint ventures or divesting businesses; if Accenture is unable to protect or enforce its intellectual property rights or if Accenture's services or solutions infringe upon the intellectual property rights of others or the company loses its ability to utilize the intellectual property of others, its business could be adversely affected; Accenture's results of operations and share price could be adversely affected if it is unable to maintain effective internal controls; changes to accounting standards or in the estimates and assumptions Accenture makes in connection with the preparation of its consolidated financial statements could adversely affect its financial results; Accenture might be unable to access additional capital on favorable terms or at all and if the company raises equity capital, it may dilute its shareholders' ownership interest in the company; Accenture may be subject to criticism and negative publicity related to its incorporation in Ireland; as well as the risks, uncertainties and other factors discussed under the "Risk Factors" heading in Accenture plc's most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and other documents filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Statements in this news release speak only as of the date they were made, and Accenture undertakes no duty to update any forward-looking statements made in this news release or to conform such statements to actual results or changes in Accenture's expectations. Copyright  2021 Accenture. All rights reserved. Accenture and its logo are trademarks of Accenture. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629006014/en/

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[June 29, 2021] AdvisorPeak Appoints Mark Hollingsworth as Chief Strategy Officer

LAYTON, Utah, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- AdvisorPeak today announced the appointment of Mark Hollingsworth as Chief Strategy Officer. In the newly created senior management role, Mr. Hollingsworth brings over 35 years of experience in investment management and financial services to a deep-rooted leadership team that has successfully introduced and scaled multiple technologies in the wealth management industry. He also joins the company's board of directors. Mr. Hollingsworth has a wealth of experience in helping advisory firms adopt the latest advisor technology solutions as well as helping technology providers go-to-market with rapid and large-scale adoption. He has held numerous industry positions including an expert co-host on CNBC for 5 years, Founder and CEO of NEXT Financial Group, a national independent broker dealer and RIA he grew from 2 to over 1,200 employees, and various executive positions in wealth tech firms including Riskalyze and FinMason. "I've known Mark for a number of years and I'm thrilled to have him join our team at this exciting juncture of rapid growth in our company's history," commented AdvisorPeak Founder and CEO, Damon Deru. "His intimate knowledge of advisor technology needs complements our product roadmap very well. He'll play a pivotal role in working with our growing customer base to hone existing features as well as bring new offerings to market." Serving over 1,000 financial advisors, AdvisorPeak's best-in-class trading and rebalancing solution continues to disrupt legacy providers with its customizable and data rich platform. The first half of 2021 saw the company introduce multiple investment model portfolios, the industry's first digital asset trading solution, as well as become the first trading and rebalancing platform to be offered on the INVENT.us leading cloud technology platform.



"I'm so excited to be working with the AdvisorPeak team," commented Mr. Hollingsworth. "The types of opportunities we are seeing and pursuing are the reason I moved into wealthtech in the first place. The rate of change and technology disruption in retail wealth management is on the verge of exploding and this team and company is poised to be in the heart of the action." About AdvisorPeak

Located on the Silicon Slopes of Salt Lake City, Utah, AdvisorPeak, Inc. was founded by former investment advisors and wealth management industry subject matter experts with the vision of bringing innovative software to the financial services industry. Designed to meet the real-world needs that advisors and institutions face, AdvisorPeak is the product of years of in-depth research and development of tax-smart portfolio trading and rebalancing. AdvisorPeak puts enterprise-class portfolio management tools within reach of all investment professionals. For more information about AdvisorPeak, or to schedule a software demo, please visit www.advisorpeak.com or follow @AdvisorPeak on Twitter.

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/advisorpeak-appoints-mark-hollingsworth-as-chief-strategy-officer-301321710.html SOURCE AdvisorPeak

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[June 29, 2021] Allen Matkins Elects Jessica Chu, Steven Farenbaugh, Rachel Sanders, Maxwell Shapiro, and Derek Weisbender to Partnership

Allen Matkins, a California-based full service real estate and business law firm, announced today that Jessica Chu, Steven M. Farenbaugh, Rachel M. Sanders, Maxwell B. Shapiro, and Derek G. Weisbender have been elected to the firm partnership, effective July 1, 2021. Jessica is a tax and joint venture attorney, Steve is a real estate transactional attorney, Rachel is a litigation attorney, and Max is a real estate transactional attorney, all residing in the firm's Los Angeles office; Derek is a construction and real estate attorney in the firm's Orange (News - Alert) County office. "This year's new partner class is a reflection of our firm's commitment to providing younger attorneys with a platform and the resources needed to grow as professionals and individuals," says Jeffrey Patterson, managing partner of Allen Matkins. "Jessica, Steve, Rache, Max, and Derek each exemplify the culture of entrepreneurism and client service Allen Matkins instills in its attorneys. Congratulations to all of them on this well-deserved honor."



Jessica Chu Jessica's practice focuses on structuring, negotiating and documenting complex joint ventures and business transactions for equity investors, financial institutions, developers, and others. She has counseled clients regarding joint ventures and transactions covering a broad range of real property types, including undeveloped land, industrial, master-planned communities, hotels and resorts, commercial office, retail projects, shopping centers, and mixed-use projects. Jessica assists clients in all phases of joint ventures, including formation, operation, restructuring, partner disputes, and wind-down.

In addition, Jessica has experience in a broad range of income taxation matters relating to real estate transactions, including debt and equity restructurings, 1031 transactions, and divestitures. She also advises clients on California real property and transfer tax issues. Steven Farenbaugh Steve's practice focuses on acquisitions and dispositions of commercial office, industrial and retail properties, and leasing transactions, in which he represents landlords and tenants in office, retail, industrial, medical, shopping center, and mixed-use real estate projects across the West Coast. Steve has a knack for finding simple solutions to complex problems, a skill he uses in counseling his clients on all facets of real estate law. Steve began his legal career as a judicial extern for the Honorable Brian J. Back, Ventura County Superior Court, and then as a summer intern at Allen Matkins. In 2019, Steve was named "Outstanding Young Lawyer" by the Los Angeles County Bar Association. Rachel Sanders Rachel's business litigation practice includes representing landlords, purchasers, sellers, and developers in commercial real estate matters, particularly in landlord/tenant disputes, and she has extensive experience prosecuting and defending large-scale contract and partnership lawsuits. She has provided customized training to clients on a number of topics, including website and premises liability pertaining to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the impact of cannabis laws and regulations on property owners, lenders, and landlords. Earlier in her career, Rachel was an attorney with the Alliance for Children's Rights in the NextStep Program, where she represented children in foster care and participated in legislative and systemic responses to the needs of youth aging out of the foster care system. She is co-chair of the Allen Matkins Pro Bono Committee as well as a member of the Los Angeles office's Community Outreach Committee. She serves on the Los Angeles County Bar Association Real Property Section's Executive Committee and is a member of the Cannabis Section. Maxwell Shapiro Max's work includes complex acquisitions and dispositions and commercial leasing for clients ranging from institutional real estate investors to small companies and individuals. Max has particular expertise in build-to-suit purchase agreements and large portfolio transactions. In addition, Max represents both landlords and tenants in office, recreational, retail, industrial, medical, shopping center and mixed-use projects in California, Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Texas, and other parts of the United States. He began his legal career as a Judicial Extern for the Honorable Berle M. Schiller, United States District Court, Eastern District of Pennsylvania, and also participated in the Summer Associate program at Allen Matkins. Max's community involvement includes serving on the firm's Community Outreach Committee and participating in the Los Angeles Food Bank's Food from the Bar program. Derek Weisbender Derek has negotiated design, construction, and other development agreements for some of the highest-profile projects in the United States, Canada, and South America, with values well in excess of fifteen billion dollars, including multiple cutting-edge developments valued at more than one billion dollars each. He advises end-users and developers on all types of projects, including office buildings, data centers, industrial and medical facilities, mixed-use, and infrastructure, and draws upon his prior experience as a construction and real estate litigator. He also has significant experience in negotiating, documenting, and closing complex commercial real estate acquisitions and dispositions, and commercial leases, for office, industrial, and retail properties. ABOUT ALLEN MATKINS Allen Matkins, founded in 1977, is a California-based law firm with more than 200 attorneys in four major metropolitan areas of California: Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego and San Francisco. The firm's areas of focus include real estate, construction, land use, environmental, and natural resources; corporate and securities, real estate and commercial finance, bankruptcy, restructurings and creditors' rights, joint ventures, and tax; labor and employment; and trials, litigation, risk management, and alternative dispute resolution in all of these areas. For more information about Allen Matkins please visit www.allenmatkins.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005200/en/

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[June 29, 2021] Ambi Robotics Selects DWFritz To Manufacture AI-Powered Robotic Systems for Global Shippers

Ambi Robotics, an artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics company that develops advanced supply chain solutions based on simulation-to-reality AI to power highly-dexterous robots, and DWFritz Automation (DWFritz), a leading global provider of high-precision automation and metrology solutions, announced today a partnership to build custom robotic solutions for Ambi Robotics' supply chain customers. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005249/en/ Ambi Robotics and DWFritz will build custom robotic solutions for Ambi Robotics' supply chain customers. (Photo: Business Wire) "We are excited to work with DWFritz as we scale deployments of AI-powered sorting systems," said Jim Liefer, CEO of Ambi Robotics. "DWFritz's engineer-to-orde and build-to-print capabilities complement Ambi's ability to configure solutions that meet the needs of each customer, which will reduce implementation costs for our customers as we rapidly deploy the AmbiSort solution for ecommerce and parcel sortation."



AmbiSort, a configurable AI-powered robotic sorting system, sorts and packs millions of unique parcels, such as boxes, polybags and envelopes, into destination containers more than 50% faster than manual systems. Ambi Robotics sorting systems run on AmbiOS, the company's advanced operating system that leverages proprietary simulation-to-reality AI to power its highly dexterous robots. "Our partnership with Ambi Robotics will help customers bring efficiencies of scale to their manufacturing capabilities while improving throughput and lowering costs," said Mike Fritz, CEO of DWFritz. "By leveraging our global supply chain, technology partnerships, precision automation, and advanced manufacturing capabilities, we can support the rapidly expanding demand for Ambi's warehouse automation products."

DWFritz core capabilities are in precision assembly and process automation, build-to-print, and inspection and metrology, enabling Ambi Robotics to rapidly deploy AI-powered sorting systems into existing customer workflows with greater ROI and improved operational efficiencies. Ambi Robotics systems can receive items from conveyors, chutes or bins, and can successfully stow into bins, totes or bags, integrating with each customer's existing workflow. About DWFritz Automation Established in 1973, DWFritz Automation, is a leading global provider of high-precision automation solutions for advanced, high-volume manufacturing. The company designs, builds, and supports engineer-to-order automation systems and high-speed, non-contact metrology products, as well as providing world-class build-to-print manufacturing capabilities to clients. The company is headquartered in Wilsonville, Oregon with offices in France and China. For more information, please visit www.DWFritz.com or follow us on Twitter (News - Alert) : @DWFritz. About Ambidextrous Robotics Ambi Robotics is an artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics company developing advanced solutions that scale e-commerce operations to meet demand while empowering humans to work smarter. The company's industry-leading AI operating system, AmbiOS, leverages Dex-Net simulation-to-reality technology to operate highly-dexterous robotic systems. Founded in 2018, the world's top roboticists, AI researchers, and leading business professionals work together to build the supply chain's most valued systems. The company is located in Emeryville, Calif. For more information, please visit www.ambirobotics.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005249/en/

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[June 29, 2021] Angel Oak Home Loans Opens New Branches in Colorado and Mississippi as Demand Heightens

Angel Oak Home Loans ("Angel Oak"), a leading full-service retail mortgage lender, announces the opening of two new branches located in Centennial, Colorado, and Natchez, Mississippi. Michael Chabot, VP, licensed area manager at Angel Oak Home Loans, will lead the lender's Colorado branch and Britni Gwin will manage the Mississippi office. These two branches mark the firm's 6th branch opening in the span of 30 days. "I'm thrilled to help direct Angel Oak Home Loans' rapid growth in Colorado by bringing a suite of innovative loan products to more borrowers in the area," said Chabot, a top-producing loan officer for Angel Oak. "In a hot housing market like this one, offering traditional loan products and a portfolio of distinct programs enables us to help a larger population of people, including those who may not have thought homeownership was a possibilty. We pride ourselves on our ability to quickly meet each homebuyer's financing needs based on their specific goals and timeline."



This customer-centric model is even more important in today's housing market, and Denver is one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in the United States. Borrowers need to partner with a lender like Angel Oak that's built for speed and efficiency. Under Chabot's leadership and with his impressive production background, Angel Oak will continue to increase its presence across Colorado. Chabot is also launching a podcast called "Mortgage Map Podcast by Angel Oak Home Loans," which will focus on discussing mortgage events important to industry professionals and borrowers, as well as other homebuying related topics. "We take into account every client's unique situation, and our products aim to ensure customer satisfaction," added Mac Cregger, SVP and divisional manager at Angel Oak. "Angel Oak's expansion to Centennial and Natchez allows us to reach a new array of clients and emboldens our vision of making homeownership a reality for buyers far and wide across the United States."

To learn more about Angel Oak Home Loans and view full licensing information, visit: www.angeloakhomeloans.com. If you are interested in joining our growing team, please contact Mac Cregger at mac.cregger@angeloakhomeloans.com Angel Oak Home Loans, LLC NMLS 685842. Angel Oak is an Equal Housing Lender. Each application will be evaluated individually; not all applicants will qualify. About Angel Oak Home Loans, LLC

Angel Oak Home Loans is a full-service mortgage lender. Its flexible, supportive approach empowers prospective homebuyers to embark on a new path with confidence. Angel Oak's experienced team of licensed mortgage advisors is leading the way by delivering start-to-finish mortgage support and an exceptional client experience. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005264/en/

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[June 29, 2021] Anterra Capital Announces $175 Million Initial Closing of Second Global Food and Agriculture Technology Fund

Anterra Capital ("Anterra"), the international food and agriculture specialist venture capital firm, today announced the initial closing of its second food and agriculture technology fund, Anterra F&A Ventures II, raising $175 million, exceeding the targeted size of the fund. Due to the positive market reception for the fund's mission and strategy, Anterra is tracking towards an upsized second fund, and anticipates a final closing in the third quarter, 2021. Anterra's unique investment approach has attracted commitments from a prestigious and aligned group of long-term oriented global investors, with continued support from Eight Roads Ventures, backed by Fidelity, and Rabo Investments, the captive investment arm of the largest global food and agricultural bank out of the Netherlands - Rabobank. New investors include Novo Holdings, a leading global life sciences investor based out of Denmark; Tattarang, one of Australia's largest private investment groups and the holding company of the Forrest family's private business interests; as well as other well-respected family offices, sovereign wealth funds, and state-owned investors that provide a global presence, spanning across multiple continents. Anterra's mission is to invest in and partner with entrepreneurs transforming our vital food economy through biotech and digital innovation across crop science, animal health, and human nutrition. As a research driven, value-focused specialist investor Anterra uniquely combines a traditional venture investment approach and "venture creation," building and scaling transformative businesses with its deep industry knowledge and vast global network as a pioneer in the space. While investor interest is growing in the Food & Ag industry, early-stage investment in this essential segment significantly trails that of other key industries, for comparison, less than half of that in Pharma & Biotech (~$40 billion) and about a fifth of venture investment in Software (~$100 billion). "The food economy is in critical condition, and new digital and biotech solutions are desperately needed in order to support better outcomes for farmers, consumers and the environment," said Adam Anders, Managing Partner of Anterra Capital. "With the first close, we continue our mission to sustainably transform our food economy, building on our leadership position as an early-stage investor in markets such as plant and animal health, while actively expanding our investment activity across the food and agriculture value chain." Daniel Auerbac, Senior Managing Partner and Global Head of Eight Roads Ventures, one of Anterra's original lead investors, added: "Within Food & Ag, Anterra sits at the intersection of life sciences and digital technology and our expanded investment reflects our confidence in Anterra's mission, leadership and performance for us over the past eight years."



"We are excited to partner with Anterra and support the fund's transformational mission, which is aligned with our investment activity across the biotech space overall, and emphasizes our commitment to investing in innovation within Food & Agriculture," said Kartik Dharmadhikari, a Partner of Novo Growth within Novo Holdings. About Anterra

With offices in Amsterdam and Boston, Anterra Capital is an international specialist venture capital investor dedicated to financing the growth of technology-driven companies with incredible potential in food, agriculture, and animal health. Supported by multinational institutional investors, Anterra provides patient strategic capital to entrepreneurs and innovative companies sustainably transforming our global food system. Further information: www.anterracapital.com

About Eight Roads Ventures

Eight Roads Ventures is a global investment firm backed by Fidelity. Eight Roads Ventures manages $7bn of assets across its offices in China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, UK and the US. Our 50-year history of investing includes partnerships with over 300 companies such as Alibaba, AppsFlyer, BlackDuck, Chewy, Devoted Health, Flywire, Icertis, iPipeline, Kensho, Letgo, Made.com, Neo4j, Nuance (News - Alert) , Paidy, Ping Identity, Pony.ai, PharmEasy, Shadowfax, Toast, Wallapop, WuXi PharmaTech, and Xoom. Further information: https://eightroads.com About Novo Holdings A/S

Novo Holdings is recognized as a leading international life science investor, with a focus on creating long-term value. As a life science investor, Novo Holdings provides seed and venture capital to development-stage companies and takes significant ownership positions in growth and well-established companies. Novo Holdings also manages a broad portfolio of diversified financial assets. Further information: http://www.novoholdings.dk About Rabo Investments

Rabo Investments is Rabobank's PE investment franchise. It has invested over 1.5 billion worldwide within the cutting-edge Food & Agri, Sustainability, and Healthcare sectors in the Netherlands and within the Food & Agri sector worldwide. The investments range from growth capital for innovative start-ups and scale-ups to investments in established companies and funds. Further information: https://raboinvestments.com About Tattarang

Tattarang is one of Australia's largest private investment groups and is owned by the Forrest family. Its diverse investment portfolio spans across agri-food, energy, resources, property and lifestyle. The group is made up of six business divisions including Harvest Road which is one of Australia's largest and most diverse agricultural businesses with an expanding portfolio of high-quality foods. Further information: www.tattarang.com View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005357/en/

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[June 29, 2021] As People Return to the Office, a Return to Office Romance?

AUSTIN, Texas, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- According to a national poll of 500 adults in the United States by online survey and research leader QuestionPro , Covid-19 wiped out office romance. With no water coolers, salad bars or happy hours, American workers found it hard to hook up with office mates.

According to survey results: 72 percent said they had not begun a workplace romance since Covid-19 began, and another 8 percent said its complicated.

Nearly 70 percent said they didnt have a crush on a remote co-worker during Covid-19

Another 70 percent they would never date a co-worker they only worked with remotely

Office romance was so rare, that 70 percent didnt even suspect other co-workers were dating (i.e. noticing the same background in zoom calls).

While 51 percent of people never slid into a co-workers DMs, surprisingly 12 percent did and 13 percent thought about it. Another 13 percent said what does this evn mean?





While many people are looking forward to the return to the workplace for reasons of collaboration, social activity and frankly just getting out of their home office perhaps an undervalued reason is the hope to find romance, said Dan Fleetwood, President of Research & Insights at QuestionPro. Clearly, video calls and remote work were not cutting it for people to find their soul mate. The survey of U.S. consumers was fielded June 16, 2021 and has a margin of error of +/- 3 percent. The survey was conducted using technology and multi-method behavioral fraud detection to verify respondents, including 80+ different security variables which accomplish the following: detection and rejection of suspicious IP addresses; digital fingerprinting; Captcha bot detection; event streaming and analysis, copy paste detection and translation of text detection. Mouse movements on desktops were also tracked.

About QuestionPro

Founded in 2006, QuestionPro is a global provider of online survey and research services that help companies make better decisions through data. From free consumer accounts to robust enterprise-level research, we offer tools for the creation, distribution, and analysis of surveys. We also offer platforms for polling, mobile research and data visualization. Fortune 100 companies rely on us to help unlock insights about customers, employees and the marketplace. With offices in the US, Mexico, Germany, the United Arab Emirates and India, we offer customers 24-7 access to highly trained support specialists and engineers. More information is available at www.questionpro.com .

Media Contact John Williams, Scoville PR for QuestionPro 206.660.5503, jwilliams@scovillepr.com

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[June 29, 2021] Avi Reshtick Joins Kramer Levin as Tax Practice Partner and Co-Chair of Israel Practice

Kramer Levin is pleased to announce that Abraham (Avi) Reshtick is joining the firm's New York office as a partner in its Tax practice and co-chair of its Israel practice. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005807/en/ Avi Reshtick (Photo: Business Wire) Mr. Reshtick represents clients in a wide range of domestic and cross-border tax matters, including private equity transactions, strategic mergers and acquisitions, business combinations with special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), joint ventures, capital market transactions, fund formations, and restructurings. "We are pleased to welcome Avi to Kramer Levin," said Kramer Levin co-managing partners Howard T. Spilko and Paul H. Schoeman. "Avi's legal acumen and deep expertise in the tax aspects of complex transactions and tructures will benefit our clients as we continue to expand our capacity to service our growing transactional practices."



Barry Herzog, chair of Kramer Levin's Tax practice, added: "Avi's experience in key areas, including in particular private equity and restructuring transactions, enhances the group's high-end capabilities." With training and experience both in the U.S. and Israel, Mr. Reshtick leverages his familiarity and understanding of both countries' business and legal systems when working with Israeli clients seeking to access the U.S. market or to expand their U.S. operations.

Harry Rubin, co-chair of Kramer Levin's Israel practice and chair of its Technology and IP Transactions practice, said, "I look forward to working closely with Avi and the rest of our interdisciplinary team to help Israeli clients capitalize on opportunities, particularly in the technology, cybersecurity, life sciences and real estate sectors." Mr. Reshtick said: "I am very excited to join the talented and versatile team at Kramer Levin and look forward to helping support the firm's growth. I am also enthusiastic about the collaboration with Harry and the prospects of Kramer's Israel practice." Mr. Reshtick received an LL.M. from New York University School of Law and an LL.M., magna cum laude, LL.B., magna cum laude, and B.A. from Tel Aviv University School of Law. He joins Kramer Levin from Mintz, Levin where he was a tax partner and co-chair of the firm's Israel practice. About Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP Kramer Levin provides proactive, creative and pragmatic solutions that address today's most challenging legal issues. The firm is headquartered in New York with offices in Silicon Valley and Paris and fosters a strong culture of involvement in public and community service. For more information, visit www.kramerlevin.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005807/en/

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[June 29, 2021] Bank of Hawaii Selects the Black Knight Servicing Digital Solution to Provide Consumers Timely, Personalized Information About Their Home and Mortgage

JACKSONVILLE, Fla., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Black Knight, Inc. (NYSE:BKI) announced that Bank of Hawaii, rated one of the world's best banks, will offer the Black Knight Servicing Digital solution to support the bank's customer-first digital strategy. Servicing Digital's detailed, timely and highly personalized loan information about the value of consumers' homes and how much wealth can be built from these real estate assets will help the organization strengthen customer relationships through continuous engagement and advanced self-service capabilities. "Bank of Hawaii has used Black Knight's MSP system for four decades because it continues to offer the most advanced and proven servicing capabilities in the industry," said Keith T. Rogers, senior vice president, Mortgage Banking, Bank of Hawaii. "We are excited about continuing our long-term relationship with Black Knight and the addition of Servicing Digital, which supports our digital, customer-focused strategy to offer convenient, self-service functionality that will take the experience to the next level." Servicing Digital enables homeowners to easily perform tasks and view information related to their mortgages through a simple, user-friendly interface, while providing a platform for continual engagement between servicers and their customers. The innovative, consumer-centric solution delivers useful information specific to an individual's mortgage, property and local housing market by accessing the servicer's data through Black Knight's comprehensive, end-to-end MSP system, as well as the company's industry-leading property records database, advanced analytics and automated valuation models. Bank of Hawaii will leverage the responsive web version of Servicing Digital, which is also available to clients as a mobile app. The MSP servicing system offers a robust and scalable, end-to-end loan servicing system that helps clients manage all servicing processes, including loan onboarding, cash management, investor reporting, loss mitigation and default. The system can accommodate virtually any size portfolio and is augmented by award-winning client support. Used to service approximately 36 million active first mortgages and home equity loans across the U.S. on one unified platform, MSP helps servicers increase operational efficiency, reduce operating costs and improve risk mitigation. The Black Knight Servicing Digital solution is fully integrated with the MSP system to support a seamless experience for servicers and consumers alike. Bank of Hawaii, which signed a renewal of the MSP servicing system, also uses the Black Knight Loss Mitigation solution, which is integrated with both MSP and Servicing Digital. Loss Mitigation offers advanced, question-and-answer-based workflows and automated decisioning capabilities to support servicers' loss-mitigation programs, making it easier for them to streamline the decisioning process and reduce risk through built-in quality controls. As a contributor to Black Knight's McDash mortgage performance dataset, Bank of Hawaii also receives a reporting suite leveraging industry-leading, McDash loan-level data. The dataset includes more than 30 years of tracked mortgage performance details and offers visibility into over 200 million primary mortgages and more than 30 million home equity loans and lines of credit across the full credit spectrum. "Bank of Hawaii has been an MSP client for 40 years. It's a privilege to deliver advanced, customer-focused technology to support its digital strategy as a way to extend value across the customer journey," said Joe Nackashi, president of Black Knight. "Servicing Digital and Black Knight's other innovative tools help organizations, such as Bank of Hawaii, engage with their customers throughout the complete homeownership life cycle, which can contribute to stronger customer relationships and improved retention." About Bank of Hawaii

Bank of Hawaii Corporation is an independent regional financial services company. The Company's principal subsidiary, Bank of Hawaii, was founded in 1897 and provides a broad range of financial products and services to businesses, consumers and governments in Hawaii and the West Pacific. About Black Knight

Black Knight, Inc. (NYSE:BKI) is an award-winning software, data and analytics company that drives innovation in the mortgage lending and servicing and real estate industries, as well as the capital and secondary markets. Businesses leverage our robust, integrated solutions across the entire homeownership life cycle to help retain existing customers, gain new customers, mitigate risk and operate more effectively. Our clients rely on our proven, comprehensive, scalable products and our unwavering commitment to delivering superior client support to achieve their strategic goals and better serve their customers. For more information on Black Knight, please visit www.blackknightinc.com.







For more information:

Michelle Kersch Mitch Cohen Black Knight, Inc. Black Knight, Inc. 904.854.5043 704.890.8158 michelle.kersch@bkfs.com mitch.cohen@bkfs.com

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bank-of-hawaii-selects-the-black-knight-servicing-digital-solution-to-provide-consumers-timely-personalized-information-about-their-home-and-mortgage-301321908.html SOURCE Black Knight, Inc.

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[June 29, 2021] Bechtel supports U.K. students in Elon Musk's 'Not-A-Boring Tunnelling Competition'

LONDON, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Bechtel is supporting Warwick University students to the tune of 10,000 to design and build a prototype of their innovative new tunnel boring machine (tbm) and compete in the final of a global challenge hosted by Elon Musk's The Boring Company. The competition is intended to revolutionise tunnelling methods to build tunnels faster and cheaper. It is hoped that improved methods will help to advance smart and efficient infrastructure building and support technologies including Hyperloop and Loop for electric vehicles or pods. Sanzhar Taizhan, Founder and Co-Project Lead of the Warwick Boring Team said: "It's amazing to have Bechtel supporting us, not only financially but with mentoring from their team who deliver complex tunnels all over the world. They have helped us consider how our design could perform in real-life conditions and reinforced that now is a very exciting time to be Boring." The Warwick team consists of thirty science, technology, engineering, and mathematics students. They began working on the project last autumn and had to pass various stages to be down-selected from 400-entries and named as one of the twelve finalists. The team is the only U.K university who will travel to the final in Nevada later in the year to compete with students and hobbyists from around the world, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Technical University of Munich. The final will see the team use their prototype named Silk-Worm 1 to drill a 30-metre long and 50-centremetre wide tunnel as quickly and accurately as possible. To make the competition more exciting and stimulate the imagination of the participants, there are three winning categories. The categories include the fastest to complete the tunnel, the fastest to complete the tunnel and a driving surface through which a remote-conrolled Tesla will drive, and the most accurate guidance system that keeps the tunnel on target. The team's innovative solution is top secret until competition day when the event is likely to attract worldwide interest.



John Williams, Bechtel's U.K & Ireland Managing Director said: "There is no better investment than encouraging our next generation of engineers to challenge old ways of thinking and doing. The Warwick Boring Team is smart, innovative and driven. They aspire to make a positive impact on the world. We're excited to see how they have approached this far-from-boring construction activity, and the impact the competition ideas could have on the future delivery of infrastructure projects."

Tunnelling is an important component of infrastructure construction, including for transport, energy, water, and digital, and as cities become more congested and air pollution worsens, building more underground infrastructure can be a good solution. Tunnelling is a complex activity with many variables that must be considered and carefully managed, including geology, water levels, ground settlement, and navigating existing infrastructure. Every year, Bechtel supports engineering college students with college donations in excess of US$180,000. In addition, the Bechtel Group Foundation gives US$2.45 million annually to pre-college students and the business supports STEM programmes globally through its stewardship programmes, including FIRST Robotics and FIRST LEGO League. You can support the Warwick Boring Team via their fundraising page: https://www.warwickboring.com/support-here About Bechtel

Bechtel is a trusted engineering, construction and project management partner to industry and government. Differentiated by the quality of our people and our relentless drive to deliver the most successful outcomes, we align our capabilities to our customers' objectives to create a lasting positive impact. Since 1898, we have helped customers complete more than 25,000 projects in 160 countries on all seven continents that have created jobs, grown economies, improved the resiliency of the world's infrastructure, increased access to energy, resources, and vital services, and made the world a safer, cleaner place. Bechtel serves the Energy; Infrastructure; Nuclear, Security & Environmental; and Mining & Metals markets. Our services span from initial planning and investment, through start-up and operations. www.bechtel.com Media contact:

Juliet Whitcombe

C : +44 (0) 7917 722304

jwhitcom@bechtel.com View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bechtel-supports-uk-students-in-elon-musks-not-a-boring-tunnelling-competition-301321934.html SOURCE Bechtel

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[June 29, 2021] Bill Enacted to Protect Victims of Domestic Violence

DENVER, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- On July 1, a new law goes into effect aimed to protect victims of domestic violence in Montana. Gov. Greg Gianforte signed House Bill 449 in early May, resulting in a revision of the state's domestic violence (DV) laws that make it easier for judges to order GPS monitoring for those suspected of certain DV and stalking charges. "Domestic violence victims often face a lifetime of fear, anxiety, and trauma," said Judge Gregory Pinski (Ret.) "This bill will allow for victims of partner or family member of assaults, including strangulation, stalking, or any violations of Felony orders of protection, to have the security knowing that the offender shall be required to be on GPS ankle monitoring, alcohol monitoring, or both," said Senator Chris Friedel, Montana State Senate District 26. "I heard this bill on the Senate Judiciary Committee and on the Senate floor and was proud to stand up for the victims of domestic violence in my community." The Montana Department of Justice reports from 2000 to 2018, 200 Montanans died at the hands of an intimate partner. And, in 2019 law enforcement responded to more than 4,000 cases of domestic violence across the state, meaning that an act of DV was reported every 2.5 hours on average. Montana isn't alone in this issue; this is a nationwide problem. In 2020, the coronavirus pandemic appears to have amplified incidents of domestic violence furher across the nation. According to the National Institutes of Health, data from U.S. police departments provide some early insight into the effect COVID-19 had on DV in some regions. For example, in Portland, Oregon, public schools closed March 16, 2020, followed by stay-at-home orders on March 23. Following these events, the Portland Police Bureau recorded a 22% increase in arrests related to DV compared to prior weeks.



The Honorable Gregory Pinski, former Cascade County District Court Judge, spent nearly eight years on the bench presiding over cases that he says would have benefitted from this kind of legislation. "Domestic violence victims often face a lifetime of fear, anxiety, and trauma," said Pinski. "As a judge, I relied on monitoring technologies to protect domestic violence victims and assure a defendant's compliance with no contact orders, location restrictions, and alcohol prohibitions. Not only do these technologies have a proven track record of protecting victims and the community, but they also save taxpayer dollars."

SCRAM Systems, an industry leader in alcohol and location monitoring solutions for the community corrections market, looks forward to playing a role in the implementation of this new law. The company provides SCRAM GPS location monitoring, and can combine that solution with the SCRAM Ally victim notification mobile app. SCRAM GPS provides state-of-the-art location monitoring and is an effective alternative to incarceration for community corrections, helping officers more effectively supervise clients while enhancing community safety. When combined with SCRAM Ally, victims and supervising authorities are notified when a GPS client is in proximity to the victim's own smartphone. This can help provide victims of domestic violence with added sense of security and gives officers additional insight into the location and actions of their clients. This combination of technology has already helped at least one victim of domestic violence in the state avoid a potential interaction with the individual against whom she had an order of protection. By alerting her that the GPS client was in her vicinity, the victim was able to call 9-1-1 and receive immediate support from local law enforcement. "In this situation, the technology worked exactly how it was designed," said Glenn Tubb, COO of SCRAM Systems. "Nothing is more rewarding than knowing that we were able to help this victim stay safe." About SCRAM Systems

SCRAM Systems is a leading provider of electronic monitoring and software solutions for the criminal justice industry. The company's flagship SCRAM Continuous Alcohol Monitoring (SCRAM CAM) technology, launched in 2003 and revolutionized the way courts, agencies and treatment providers monitor and manage alcohol-involved offenders. In 2013 the company launched the industry's most comprehensive suite of electronic monitoring technologies, which includes SCRAM Remote Breath, SCRAM GPS and SCRAM House Arrest. The company has since launched software solutions including SCRAM Nexus to support the adoption and deployment of Evidence-Based Practices, a mobile client engagement tool called SCRAM TouchPoint, and the first license-based software platform, SCRAM 24/7 to support probation and sobriety programs. SCRAM Systems employs 280 people worldwide and is a privately held company with headquarters in Littleton, Colorado. View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bill-enacted-to-protect-victims-of-domestic-violence-301321050.html SOURCE SCRAM Systems

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[June 29, 2021] BioT Raises $6.5 Million in Seed Round to Accelerate the Connected Care Revolution

TEL AVIV, Israel, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- BioT, the market leader in medical devices cloud connectivity and remote care, announces today a $6.5 million Seed Round financing led by Bridges Israel, together with North First Ventures, and XT Hi-Tech. The company unveils that the capital will be used for expanding the team, expediting the next generation of the platform, as well as supporting the growing sales pipeline in the US and in Europe. BioT also shares the new appointment of Daniel Adler as its Chief Executive Officer. Connected Care is quickly becoming a major factor in the healthcare industry by eliminating the need for patients to return to a physician's office for check-ups and monitoring. BioT is poised to disrupt Connected Care by offering innovative medical device providers a secure, HIPAA and GDPR-compliant cloud platform where they can connect their device, execute algorithms, disseminate alerts and engage with patients and caregivers remotely. In our world device providers are spending millions of dollars and years building connected care solutions with questionable cybersecurity measures that do not excel in patient engagement. With dozens ofcustomers utilizing its solutions, BioT offers a proven low-code platform that reduces the skill-set required to develop such systems. When integrating with a solution like BioT, Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) providers can save up to 80% of time and cost to market when compared to creating, building and executing an in-house platform.



"BioT invites IoMT innovators to see how a proven reliable platform can expedite their time to market, reduce dramatically their costs and jump over regulatory barriers, while enabling them to continue and focus on their core expertise" says Daniel Adler, Co-Founder & CEO of BioT. "Our mission with BioT is to accelerate the well-needed vision of providing better treatment for patients wherever they are as if they got it at the best hospitals and clinics in the world." "Healthcare must shift from reactive and acute to proactive and preventive. The only way to achieve this shift is through connected healthcare devices and services that allow ongoing remote monitoring and treatment for patients. We, at Bridges Israel, are happy to join forces with the management team at BioT and with N1V and XT Hi-Tech, our co-investors, to support BioT in developing its platform, improving and shortening time to market and enabling the fulfilment of this connected care vision with the goal of improving the health condition of many" says Ran Grodecki, Managing Partner at Bridges Israel.

About BioT: BioT is a low-code, easy-to-integrate, cloud-based platform for medical device manufacturers designed to instantly connect patients with caregivers to ensure a seamless continuum of care. BioT offers cutting-edge technology backed by security/regulation liability in a fully customizable, off-the-shelf product that eliminates barriers allowing fast and successful connected care adoption. To learn more about BioT, please visit biot-med.com Contact:

Efrat Dahari

Head of Marketing

efrat@biot-med.com View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/biot-raises-6-5-million-in-seed-round-to-accelerate-the-connected-care-revolution-301321989.html SOURCE BioT

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[June 29, 2021] Byline Bank Selects 360factors' Predict360 Risk Assessments Application and ABA Risk Library

AUSTIN, Texas, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- 360factors, Inc. announced today that Byline Bank, a $6.8 billion bank headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, selected 360factors' Predict360 Risk Management and Assessment application, pre-populated with the American Bankers Association (ABA) Risk Library, to enhance the bank's enterprise risk and compliance program. "The ABA Risk Library and Predict360's Risk Management and Assessments solution will enable our team to more quickly and easily evaluate risks and manage our program as we continue to serve our communities," said Michelle Johnson, Senior Vice President, Chief Risk Officer of Byline Bank. "We are pleased that Byline Bank is implementing this excellent resource which is free for ABA members using Predict360 and is developed from our industry-leding risk certificate courses," said ABA Chief Member Engagement Officer Jim Edrington. "The new ABA Risk Library, developed together with ABA endorsed solution provider 360factors, is an innovative offering to help banks across the country manage a constantly evolving risk landscape."



"After working with the ABA to develop its Risk Library, we at 360factors are excited to now deliver the tremendous value it brings to member banks," said Carl L. McCauley, CEO for 360factors. "Our mission is to deliver truly advanced risk and compliance management solutions to banks and financial services organizations for less time and cost than traditional legacy approaches. We look forward to working with Byline Bank and their impressive risk team."

As a risk and compliance solutions leader within the banking and financial services industries, 360factors continues to develop relationships with banks and financial services institutions seeking to remove inefficiencies while elevating their risk and compliance management programs.

About 360factors, Inc. 360factors empowers organizations to accelerate profitability, innovation and productivity by predicting risks and streamlining compliance. Predict360, its flagship software product, is a Risk and Compliance Intelligence Platform augmented with Artificial Intelligence technology to predict and mitigate operational risks while streamlining regulatory compliance. Predict360 integrates regulations and obligations, compliance management, risks and controls, audits and assessments, policies and procedures, and training in a single cloud-based SaaS platform based on artificial intelligence to provide predictive analytics and unique insights for predicting risks and streamlining compliance. 360factors is the exclusive endorsed solution provider for risk and compliance management by the American Bankers Association (ABA). Visit www.360factors.com for more information. View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/byline-bank-selects-360factors-predict360-risk-assessments-application-and-aba-risk-library-301322327.html SOURCE 360factors

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[June 29, 2021] Cambridge Global Payments Announces New Partnership with Steamchain Corp.

Cambridge Global Payments ("Cambridge"), a FLEETCOR company (NYSE: FLT) and a provider of integrated cross-border payments and currency risk management solutions, and Steamchain Corp. ("Steamchain"), a technology platform focused on helping to reduce the cost of currency conversion, currency fluctuation risk and cumbersome document flow, are pleased to announce they have partnered to bring a tailored solution to help companies in the global shipping and logistics industries, simplify sending and receiving payments with their global partners. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005002/en/ "We see a unique opportunity to partner with Steamchain and their forward-thinking payments technology," said Don Banowetz, Vice President, Enterprise Sales at Cambridge Global Payments. "This partnership delivers a unique offering for the shipping and logistics industry to leverage Cambridge's comprehensive globally delivery capabilities alongside Steamchain's innovative platform to move money around the world fast and efficiently." "Steamchain Corp. is excited to partner with Cambridge Global Payments as it aspires to bring reduced costs to any company conducting international commerce by simplifying the process of sending or receiving cross-border payments, with a cost effective, fast and smart solution," said Dan Biggs, CEO Steamchain Corp. <> About Cambridge Global Payments



Cambridge Global Payments1, a FLEETCOR company, is a provider of integrated cross-border payment services and currency risk management solutions. As a trusted partner for more than 25 years, Cambridge delivers innovative solutions designed to mitigate foreign exchange exposure and address unique business needs. Our award-winning capabilities and industry-leading technologies simplify the way businesses connect with the global marketplace. As one of the largest bank-independent providers globally, we are flexible and responsive, with offices and applicable licensing and regulatory approvals across North America, Europe, and Australia. Learn more at cambridgefx.com and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn. About Steamchain Corp.

Steamchain Corp, a United States based Financial-Technology company founded in 2018 has created a user controlled secure Platform that simplifies global B2B payments for any company conducting international commerce. Employing four disruptive FinTech technology Patents, the Platform helps enable clients to save money on currency conversion costs, potentially reduce currency fluctuation risk impact and is designed to improve antiquated paper flow efficiencies while facilitating companies making or receiving payments in over 145 local country currencies of choice. The traditional financial institution processes for global payments can be improved and Steamchain Corp is here to help solve that. 1Cambridge Global Payments is the trade name of various corporations in the Cambridge group of companies including Cambridge Mercantile Corp., Cambridge Mercantile Corp. (U.S.A.), Cambridge Mercantile Corp. (UK) Limited and Cambridge Mercantile (Australia) Pty. Ltd. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005002/en/

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[June 28, 2021] Canada and Alberta announce two broadband and wireless projects in Indigenous communities

COLD LAKE, AB, June 28, 2021 /CNW/ - The governments of Canada and Alberta continue to invest in infrastructure during this extraordinary time to enhance citizens' quality of life, meet the needs of communities, and create jobs in light of the impacts of COVID-19. Today, the Honourable Jim Carr, Minister and Special Representative for the Prairies, on behalf of the Honourable Maryam Monsef, Minister for Women and Gender Equality and Rural Economic Development and Prasad Panda, Alberta's Minister of Infrastructure, announced more than $2.9 million in funding for two broadband and wireless projects in Indigenous communities. The projects are funded under the Rural and Northern Communities Infrastructure Stream of the Investing in Canada Infrastructure Program. A project for the Saddle Lake Cree Nation will receive more than $2.6 million in federal funding. The project will upgrade the internet and cellular infrastructure for the Nation, which will improve the resilience of the broadband and cellular connectivity. Cold Lake First Nations' reserves will also benefit from another project receiving $241,544 in federal funding. This project will install Long Term Evolution equipment on both existing and new towers. Providing communities with reliable and sustainable infrastructure is a shared priority for both governments. Infrastructure Canada is investing more than $2.9 million in these projects. This funding is conditional on federal requirements regarding Indigenous consultations and environmental and/or impact assessments being met. Quotes "Projects like the ones we are announcing today in Saddle Lake and Cold Lake First Nations are about more than connectivitythey're a lifeline. Since November 2015, our government has invested over $42 million in 42 projects to connect more than 35,000 households in Alberta to high-speed Internet. We will continue investing in vital infrastructure projects, so that every Albertan, no matter where they live, is able to access their full potential." The Honourable Jim Carr, Minister and Special Representative for the Prairies, on behalf of the Honourable Maryam Monsef, Minister for Women and Gender Equality and Rural Economic Development "The Alberta government is pleasedto endorse these broadband and wireless projects that will help improve the lives and livelihoods of families and businesses in Saddle Lake Cree Nation and Cold Lake First Nations and neighbouring areas. The provision of reliable digital connectivity is critical to supporting learning opportunities, social activities, economic development and community growth within these regions."



Prasad Panda, Alberta's Minister of Infrastructure "Our nation is excited to be upgrading our existing broadband network and is thankful for the support of the Investing in Canada Infrastructure Program. Increased internet connectivity is a priority for our community members and is something that we have been striving towards for several years. The new infrastructure will lead to more opportunities for training, education, and entrepreneurship but will also increase overall community well-being."

Chief Roger Martens, Cold Lake First Nations "Saddle Lake Cree Nation is excited to have improved access to cellular and broadband communication. Through the last year during COVID-19 our community has been challenged with broadband capacity. This important project will provide our Nation with new opportunities for improved education, economic growth and critical service delivery. Through this partnership with the federal and provincial government Saddle Lake Cree Nation members will experience an improved quality of life on reserve." Ken Large, director of Public Works and Housing, Saddle Lake First Nation Quick facts Under 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. $2 billion of this funding is supporting infrastructure that meets the unique needs of rural and northern communities, like facilities to support food security, local access roads and enhanced broadband connectivity.

of this funding is supporting infrastructure that meets the unique needs of rural and northern communities, like facilities to support food security, local access roads and enhanced broadband connectivity. In Alberta , the Government of Canada has invested more than $5.1 billion in over 430 infrastructure projects since 2015 under the Investing in Canada Plan. Associated links Investing in Canada: Canada's Long-Term Infrastructure Plan

http://www.infrastructure.gc.ca/plan/icp-publication-pic-eng.html Investing in Canada Plan Project Map

http://www.infrastructure.gc.ca/map Federal infrastructure investments in Alberta

https://www.infrastructure.gc.ca/plan/prog-proj-ab-eng.html Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn

Web: Infrastructure Canada SOURCE Infrastructure Canada

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[June 29, 2021] Clearday Announces Launch of Clearday Network Alliance Program for Home Care Agencies

Clearday, an innovative leader in delivering high-quality, non-acute longevity care services that enable seniors to age in place, today announced the launch of Clearday Network, an alliance program focused on empowering the roughly 24,000 non-acute home care agencies in the U.S. to grow, thrive, and provide a superior care experience. The Clearday Network program enables non-acute home care agencies to offer innovative premium care services based on the Clearday at Home platform, Clearday's virtual care service that supports in-home delivery of goal-driven care for those with declining cognitive health and mobility. Launched in early 2021, Clearday at Home provides families with resources and content they need to provide superior care at home for loved ones with Alzheimer's, dementia, or other lifestyle limiting conditions. With the new Clearday Network alliance program, Clearday aligns these resources with the personal touch of senior home care agencies. These agencies will now be able to offer Clearday's diagnostic tools, care-centered content, and caregiver support services as a highly differentiated, value-added offering for their family clients, at preferred monthly rates. The platform will support their front-line caregivers in their delivery of care, while providing client families with resources to maintain a high quality of care when care aides are not on duty. "The Clearday at Home platform is a game-changer for our business," said George Heinemann, Owner and Operator of Your Choice Senior Care, a leading home care agency serving the Birmingham, Alabama metro area. "It allows us to fill in the gaps traditionally found within the in-home senior care industry, giving us resources that even large platforms could not provide before, while giving our client families the power to provide better care for their loved ones when we aren't there with them." Just as importantly, agencies will be able to standardize their care protocols and employee training and development programs on the Clearday care delivery methodology and "Technicians of Cognitive Care" training platform. Establishing a standardized framework of continuous trainng, development, and supportive resources for their employees allows agencies to attract and retain employees in a challenging economic environment.



"We believe the Clearday platform positions us as the preferred employer for caregivers in our local market, giving us an advantage in addressing a major challenge that everyone in our industry is facing," said Heinemann. "With Clearday, we're giving our employees the resources they need to deliver great care, as well as a pathway to build and certify their skills as caregivers, and we believe that makes us the provider that caregivers want to work for." The Clearday Network alliance program reflects Clearday's vision of making high quality, non-acute care options more accessible, affordable, and empowering for seniors who wish to age in place. With its focus on home care agencies, the Clearday Network initiative aims to empower and encourage caregivers to remain in the industry, and to help address the shortage of qualified caregivers as the U.S. population ages.

"We've built a platform that we believe can help the entire longevity care industry elevate its services and improve the lives of millions of Americans that are caring for aging loved ones," said Jim Walesa, Clearday's President and CEO. "With the Clearday Network alliance program, we're aiming to power more thriving home care businesses, staffed by more well-trained caregivers delivering exceptional care to older Americans and their families." About Clearday, Inc. Clearday is an innovative non-acute longevity health care services company with a modern, hopeful vision for making high quality care options more accessible, affordable, and empowering for older Americans and those who love and care for them. Clearday has decade-long experience in non-acute longevity care through our subsidiary Memory Care America, which operates highly rated residential memory care communities in four U.S. states. Clearday at Home - our digital service - brings Clearday to the intersection of telehealth, Software-as-a-Service ( SaaS (News - Alert) ), and subscription-based content. Learn more about Clearday at www.myclearday.com. Clearday and Superconductor Technologies (News - Alert) Inc. (OTCQB: SCON) are parties to an agreement and plan of merger that provided, among other matters, for the Clearday stockholders to acquire Superconductor Technologies, Inc., a public company. Through the expected merger, Clearday will acquire the Superconductor Technologies cryogenic products and related patent portfolio. Clearday has already begun to develop innovative air quality systems employing these assets. The closing is expected by July 30, 2021. Additional information regarding this merger is available through the definitive proxy statement on file with the SEC (News - Alert) at www.sec.gov. This communication is for informational purposes only and is neither an offer to sell nor a solicitation of an offer to purchase any securities of the Company or SCON. This communication and information made available on Clearday's website is not a part of any disclosure made or to be made by the Company with respect to any offer to sell or solicitation of an offer to purchase any securities of Clearday or SCON and are part of any filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005573/en/

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[June 29, 2021] Competitive Internet Service Providers launch email campaign against CRTC's affordability-killing decision

Email tool empowers Canadians to easily write their MP demanding Government overturn CRTC OTTAWA, ON, June 29, 2021 /CNW/ - Competitive internet service providers across Canada are asking their customers to fight a recent decision by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) to increase internet rates. The Competitive Network Operators of Canada (CNOC) is leading an email campaign requesting that the federal government reinstate previously promised rates. In May of this year the CRTC cowed to big telecom company pressure to overturn its own 2019 decision to lower the rates large telephone and cable companies charge smaller competitors to lease their networks to provide more affordable and innovative service offerings and better customer service. CNOC strongly denounced the ruling by CRTC, under the leadership of Chair Ian Scott who has admitted he personally does not believe in that smaller service-based competitors can deliver competition for Canadian consumers. The organization encouages Canadians to write to their MPs and sign a petition in support of the federal government overruling the CRTC. Titled "I want affordable internet", and available at iwantaffordableinternet | CNOC , the email tool lets all Canadians easily identify their local Member of Parliament, and email them, as well as the Minister empowered to overturn the decision, asking them to do so.



"For over a year, Canadians have relied more heavily on the internet to stay connected to work, school, and their loved ones than ever before," said Matt Stein, CNOC Chair. We created this tool to assist our customers in telling their MPs why the CRTC's surprise flip-flop must be overturned." The CRTC's flip-flop will increase internet rates for consumers across Canada  an increase which will allow larger internet companies to further hike fees. In a recent report , the House of Commons Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology argued that the CRTC's decisions did not meet "Canadians' expectations of affordability in the telecommunications sector."

"If the government does not put the CRTC back in line with its own policy of promoting competition, affordability, and consumer interests, which is its prerogative, Canadians can expect to pay even more for less," added Geoff White, CNOC Executive Director. "It's time that the government follows through on its commitments on affordable telecom service." SOURCE Competitive Network Operators of Canada (CNOC)

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[June 29, 2021] Dan the Tire Man Offers New Work from Home Side Hustle Income Opportunity

MADAWASKA, Maine, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Dan the Tire Man, LLC, a nationwide tire, wheel and accessories e-commerce company that offers a no credit needed lease-to-own program with very little out of pocket and low payments on paydays today launched its new work from home side hustle income opportunity. "Anyone who wants to work at home and make extra money can do this and the income is limitless," said Dan Marsh, CEO of danthetireman.com. "It's basically an affiliate program where anyone can refer people to our website and earn $50 per sale of 4 tires and/or 4 wheels. The customer who purchases using this special link will also get $50 off of their order." More people are working from home than ever before due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This side hustle is perfect for stay-at-home moms (SAHMs) and dads or anyone who is looking for a side income or even a full-time income from home. "We feel it will be appealing to folks because they can wrk as much or as little as they want to and they can do it from anywhere as long as they have a computer. We're excited to create a new income stream for digital nomads as well as expand our customer base," said Dan Marsh.



This sounds great but how will work from home digital marketers drive traffic to danthetireman.com so they can begin making $50 per sale? "We suggest they first begin with their inner circle of friends and family who need tires and/or wheels because almost everyone needs that sooner or later. Then they can post video reviews on YouTube, FaceBook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc. They can put free ads on craigslist, OfferUp, and LetGo. They can post the offer on coupon discount code sites. And even go real world and print up flyers and pass them around. I'm sure people will get creative and figure out how to spread the word," said Katie Marsh, co-owner of Dan the Tire Man, LLC.

To sign up for this work from home side hustle opportunity and begin earning money today, please go danthetireman.com/work-from-home/ About Dan and Katie Marsh: Dan Marsh has been in all aspects of the tire business for over 37 years. From owning a small tire shop and installing tires himself to exporting large containers of tires out of the US, he garnered the experience needed to create the e-commerce website that today is danthetireman.com. Katie Marsh has a background in SEO and marketing and manages the business day to day. To learn more, please visit danthetireman.com or call 207-316-2258. info@danthetireman.com. View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/dan-the-tire-man-offers-new-work-from-home-side-hustle-income-opportunity-301321300.html SOURCE DanTheTireMan.com

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[June 29, 2021] A digital platform drives Microland's COVID-19 vaccination program for its employees

BENGALURU, India, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Microland, a global digital transformation company, has completed the COVID-19 vaccination drives for the first dose of Covishield covering its employees and their families based in India. The vaccination in partnership with leading hospitals was provided free for all Microland employees and their families in seven major cities of India (Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai, NCR and Pune). A total of ten drives were conducted in the safety and comfort of Microland's offices and partner facilities. Microlanders working in all other countries have also received their vaccines through the respective countries they work in (Australia, Canada, KSA, Singapore, UAE, UK, US). In order to run the program smoothly, Microland developed MicroVax, a modern application built by its technologists as a one-stop platform for Microlanders and their families to get vaccinated in the most efficient manner. Beneficiaries could schedule their slots in the camps organized by Microland, get E-Passes, SMS alerts and download their vaccination certificates, with a seamless integration with CoWIN, the Indian government's portal that schedules and tracks COVID-19 vaccinations for citizens. MicroVax which will be used to schedule and administer the second dose of the vaccine too, has been deeply appreciated by employees for the smooth user experience it delivered. A brief video on how MicroVa works and the difference it has made to those covered under the program can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUeC5t7kplY



TR Srinivasan, Chief People Officer, Microland, said, "Our goal is to secure the health of our employees and their families. As an organization, we make digital happen for businesses across the world, so it was natural for us to create a digital application that made the vaccination processes fast, simple, convenient and accurate." Employee safety and wellbeing continues to be Microland's #1 priority. The company has institutionalized safety and precautionary measures and provides its employees online consultations with leading doctors in the country, regular health and wellness engagement, work from home infrastructure and priority attention in the event of a medical emergency.

Conducting an exclusive vaccination drive involved many stakeholders like hospitals, beneficiaries, CoWIN, local government bodies, on-ground administration, etc., and the overall planning, scheduling, and inoculating involved a significant amount of critical information being exchanged. Managing the stakeholders and associated data needed to be done on a resilient digital platform (like our MicroVax) from Day 0, to attain utmost efficiency, scalability, and to avoid errors. Global customers, all of whom have been kept abreast of Microland's COVID-19 protocols and crisis management strategy, have been appreciative of, and satisfied with, the pro-active, technology-driven processes that keep Microlanders safe and their business insulated from disruptions. About Microland

Microland's delivery of digital and "Making Digital Happen" allows technology to do more and intrude less. We make it easier for enterprises to adopt nextGen Digital infrastructure. We enable this using our expertise in Cloud and Data Centers, Networks, Digital Workplace, Cybersecurity and Industrial IoT-ensuring the embrace of brilliance is predictable, reliable and stable. In the COVID impacted world, Microland is making digital happen for enterprises with a laser focus on services that are more relevant to our clients and prospects than ever before. Incorporated in 1989 and headquartered in Bengaluru, India, Microland has more than 4,500 digital specialists across offices and delivery centers in Asia, Australia, Europe, Middle East and North America. Microland was recently recognized as a Leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Managed Network Services.* Read more here: https://www.microland.com/ Source(*) : Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Managed Network Services, Ted Corbett et al., 09 Nov 2020

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1343841/Microland_Logo.jpg

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[June 29, 2021] Does Data Culture Drive Revenue Growth? New Alation State of Data Culture Report Reveals...

As Global 2000 companies recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, revenue and growth have taken center stage. Nearly two-thirds (63%) of data professionals surveyed in the latest Alation State of Data Culture Report out today say their data strategy is focused on enabling business growth. The report found that generating revenue topped the list of key drivers of organizations' data and analytics priorities, with 54% ranking it #1. Coinciding with the focus on growth and revenue, 61% of data leaders cite sales and/or marketing as top proponents for data and analytics needs. Produced by Wakefield Research for Alation, the leader in enterprise data intelligence solutions, the Alation State of Data Culture Report provides a quarterly assessment of the progress enterprises have made in creating a data culture, the challenges they face in embracing data-driven decision-making, and the progress they have made in leveraging data to drive business value. As a part of its analysis, the report includes the Alation Data Culture Index (DCI), a quantitative assessment of how well an organization is positioned to enable data-driven decision-making across three key disciplines: data search & discovery, data literacy, and data governance. Enterprises are ranked low-, mid-, and top-tier based on how widely adopted these disciplines are across the enterprise. According to the report, 75% of top-tier data culture companies met or exceeded revenue targets. Also at top-tier data culture companies, product innovation is tied with generating revenue (51%) as a top data and analytics priority. "In what has been an extremely challenging year, a strong data culture has again asserted itself as an essential ingredient for organizations regaining their footing," sai Julie Smith, Director of Data & Analytics, Alation. "Any strong data culture needs data literacy which thrives when there is engagement between employees and data. Driving that engagement through the right technology, one that embraces the community element of data culture, is a foundational step towards this."



While revenue and growth take precedence for organizations, many still experience challenges with a lack of data democratization, which impedes utilizing data to drive business goals. Nearly all (97%) data leaders surveyed cite negative consequences due to inadequate data democratization, including: 77% citing negative impact on the bottom line

67% citing negative impact on innovation

61% citing negative impact on reporting and forecasting Despite this, only 30% of data professionals say that data democratization is a top priority, leaving companies vulnerable to these consequences.

Learn More: Download the Q2 2021 Alation State of Data Culture Report

Read the blog, Alation State of Data Culture Report: The Conflict Between Growth and Governance About the Alation State of Data Culture Report The Alation State of Data Culture Report is a quarterly study sponsored by Alation and executed by Wakefield Research. Wakefield Research conducted a quantitative research study among 300 Data & Analytics Leaders at enterprises with 2,500+ employees in the US, UK, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Enterprises are polled each quarter regarding the progress of establishing a data culture -- i.e., a culture of data-driven decision making -- within their organizations, the challenges they face in embracing data-driven decision making, and the progress they have made in leveraging data to drive business value for their organization. About Alation Alation is the leader in enterprise data intelligence solutions including data search & discovery, data governance, data stewardship, analytics, and digital transformation. Alation's initial offering dominates the data catalog market. Thanks to its powerful Behavioral Analysis Engine, inbuilt collaboration capabilities, and open interfaces, Alation combines machine learning with human insight to successfully tackle even the most demanding challenges in data and metadata management. More than 250 enterprises drive data culture, improve decision making, and realize business outcomes with Alation including AbbVie, American Family Insurance, Cisco (News - Alert) , Exelon, Finnair, Munich Re, New Balance, Pfizer, Scandinavian Airlines, and US Foods. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Alation was named to Inc. Magazine's Best Workplaces list and is backed by leading venture capitalists including Blackstone, Costanoa, Data Collective, Dell (News - Alert) Technologies, Icon, ISAI Cap, Riverwood, Salesforce, Sanabil, Sapphire, and Snowflake Ventures. For more information, visit alation.com. About Wakefield Research Wakefield Research supports the world's most prominent brands and agencies, including 50 of the Fortune 100, in 90 countries. We provide quantitative, qualitative, and hybrid market research and market intelligence. Our work is regularly featured in the media. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005333/en/

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[June 29, 2021] Enigmai, Wholly Owned Subsidiary of Golden Star Enterprises Ltd., Announces the Addition of Mr. Ziv Shalev as Sales Leader

Claymont, Delaware, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NewMediaWire -- Golden Star Enterprises Ltd., (OTCPink: GSPT) is pleased to announce that Mr. Ziv Shalev has joined the Enigmai team as the lead in sales. Mr. Shalev brings substantial experience and skills to the expanding operations of Enigmai to help the sales process meet demand.

Mrs. Eital Muskal, VP of Strategic and Business Development for Enigmai, stated, Im excited that Ziv has agreed to join our team. He brings incredibly vast experience with a strong vision for our sales team that will help Enigmai continue to grow. Enigmai offers a proprietary WorkForce Management platform that simplifies the scheduling process and streamlines operations. With specific experience in call center technology over the past 20+ years, Mr. Shalev will focus his efforts on capturing more of the call center marketplace as well as branching out into other industries that can benefit from our software. His area of expertise includes software solutions to accelerate and improve performance in Contact centers, and he has built a track record of success for call centers spanning numerous industries. As a serial entrepreneur, Mr. Shalev has founded and co-founded several companies, as well as serving as CEO for several other corporate enterprises since the early 2000s. Mr. Shalev commented, I am very happy to join the Enigmai team. Over the years, I have reviewed their WFM solution multiple times and the product offers unique advantages in this market. I know that the solution we can offer new customers will make a real difference to their operations and this is exactly what makes me so excited to lead the sales team.



As an expert in call center technology, Mr. Shalevs primary focus will be sales of Enigmais WorkForce Management platform, an all-in-one solution that provides companies with an easy-to-use interface. With just the click of a button, companies can schedule shifts and breaks or allow employees to request time off. Israeli clients of Enigmai are quickly learning the benefits of this web-based solution that is rich with multiple features and integrates with in-house systems. Mrs. Muskal added, Everyone at Enigmai is excited to bring about changes in the sales process to implement Zivs vision as he applies his outstanding skill set to our sales efforts. He is a leader in this field.

Mr. Eliav Kling, CEO of Golden Star Enterprises, concluded, Im pleased to see the addition of Mr. Shalev to the Enigmai team. It speaks to the companys promising future that someone of Mr. Shalevs caliber has joined our group. I couldnt be happier with Enigmais direction and plans for growth. About Enigmai Enigmai was founded in Israel in 2009. As an Israeli tech company, Enigmai developed a unique and advanced solution to address the challenges large contact centers face with workforce management. Our solution supports the entire workflow cycle, from managing shifts and employee breaks to forecasting every days HR needs. Our system offers numerous advantages like integration with other organization systems in use, real-time information update, easy access reports, and a web-based solution. Leading financial and insurance companies in Israel currently use our system, supporting the operation of hundreds of employees daily. Email: info@enigmai.com www.enigmai.com About Golden Star Enterprises Ltd. Golden Star Enterprises Ltd. (GSPT) is a publicly-traded holding and acquisition company interested in taking technology start-ups and growing them to the next level. We actively search for exceptional investment opportunities in the technology vertical. We leverage managements extensive experience in the marketplace and tech industry connections to create opportunities for companies in our portfolio. Email: info@goldenstarenterprisesltd.com www.goldenstarenterprisesltd.com This press release contains forward-looking statements that reflect the Company's current beliefs, expectations or intentions regarding future events. Any statements contained in this press release that are not statements of historical fact may be deemed forward-looking statements. Words such as "will," "will be," "anticipate," "predict," expect "continue," "future," and similar expressions are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. The Company anticipates that subsequent events and developments may cause views and expectations to change. The Company assumes no obligation, and specifically disclaims any intention or obligation, to update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.



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[June 29, 2021] Firmenich Group joins Union for Ethical BioTrade, strengthening its commitment to biodiversity & natural ingredients sourcing

GENEVA, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Firmenich, the world's largest privately-owned fragrance and taste company, has become a member of Union for Ethical BioTrade (UEBT), a non-profit association that promotes sourcing with respect. UEBT membership recognizes that Firmenich is operating worldwide according to ethical sourcing principles and has developed effective work plans for its supply chains on biodiversity, fair and equitable benefit sharing, local development, and labor rights. "Our Center of Expertise of Naturals in Grasse has been a member of UEBT since 2014 and now we are proud to join the organization at global level, having passed their independent assessment," said Gilbert Ghostine, CEO Firmenich. "UEBT is recognized for setting high standards and working with companies on biodiversity, making this partnership a key milestone for our 2030 ESG objectives on responsible sourcing. By integrating biodiversity protection in all our natural sourcing from 50 countries, we are making a real difference to people, planet and society, and offering our customers the highest quality, sustainably sourced, natural raw materials." As a precondition to becoming a global UEBT member, Firmenich's biodiversity policy commitments and its responsible sourcing system were assessed by UEBT in accordance with its principles. "With UEBT, we have designed and agreed on a clear work-plan for the next three years," added Boet Brinkgreve, President, Ingredients. "Our objective is to drive continuous improvement towards the local producers in our value chains and ensure proper risk management systems aross our natural sourcing portfolio. Through this collaboration, we also want to achieve certification for a large number of our critical ingredients by 2030."



In 2021, Firmenich also became the first company in the world to achieve the newly launched UEBT Access and Benefit-Sharing (ABS) Due Diligence Verification, whereby UEBT examined the system Firmenich uses to comply with rules linked to the Nagoya Protocol on ABS. ABS ensures that the benefits arising from biodiversity-based research and development are shared in a fair and equitable way, including through sustainable practices and collaboration with local communities. "Firmenich has set clear targets for 2030 on sourcing with respect for people and biodiversity," commented Rik Kutsch Lojenga, Executive Director of UEBT. "A solid implementation strategy is currently being rolled out by Firmenich to ensure these targets are met and positive impact is created for people and biodiversity. With Firmenich group joining UEBT, it is committing to continuous improvement with a focus on local sourcing practices in its responsible sourcing due diligence system and supplier support program. We look forward to working with Firmenich on this."

As part of its Naturals Together platform, Firmenich builds its leadership in Naturals on three pillars: sustainable procurement standards, collections of certified ingredients with strong involvement at source, as well as innovation. UEBT membership supports the Group's ambitions for sourcing with respect for people and biodiversity. About Firmenich Firmenich is the world's largest privately-owned perfume and taste company, founded in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1895 and has been family-owned for 125 years. Firmenich is a leading business-to-business company operating primarily in the fragrance and taste market, specialized in the research, creation, manufacture and sale of perfumes, flavors and ingredients. Renowned for its world-class research and creativity, as well as its leadership In sustainability, Firmenich offers its customers superior innovation in formulation, a broad and high-quality palette of ingredients, and proprietary technologies including biotechnology, encapsulation, olfactory science and taste modulation. Firmenich had an annual turnover of 3.9 billion Swiss Francs at end June 2020. More information about Firmenich is available at www.firmenich.com About UEBT UEBT is a non-profit association that promotes sourcing with respect. It works to regenerate nature and secure a better future for people through ethical sourcing of ingredients from biodiversity. It aims to contribute to a world in which all people and biodiversity thrive. It sets good practices for how companies and their suppliers source specialty ingredients for the beauty, food, natural pharmaceuticals, flavors & fragrances, herbs and spices sectors, among others. UEBT is internationally recognized for its work with companies on ethical sourcing of ingredients from biodiversity. More information about UEBT is available at www.ethicalbiotrade.org Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/798187/Firmenich_Logo.jpg

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[June 29, 2021] Global WholeHealth Partners Corp (GWHP-OTC) Acquires Rights to Distribute & Sell a 3rd COVID-19 Vaccine - Moderna

Moderna Generated $1.94 Billion in Revenue During the First Quarter, with $1.73 Billion Coming from Its COVID-19 Shot Company Now Has the Rights to Distribute & Sell Three of the Most Popular COVID-19 Vaccines in the World: The Pfizer-BioNTech; Moderna and J&J COVID-19 Vaccines SAN CLEMENTE, CA, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NewMediaWire  Global WholeHealth Partners Corp. (OTC: GWHP), a company that offers one of the largest lines of COVID 19 tests including SARS-CoV-2 viruses and that states that its Antibody IgG/IgM tests that they offer are capable of detecting all the current identified SARS-CoV-2 viruses, and that recently announced that they had acquired the rights to be able to distribute and sell both Pfizer-BioTech and Johnson & Johnsons COVID-19 vaccine, today announced that they have now, also, acquired the rights to sell and distribute Modernas vaccine. As with the Johnson & Johnson 8K filed on June 10, 2021, for the J&J rights, the Company filed on June 16, 2021, for Pfizer and filed for Moderna on June 25, 2021, stating that Effective June 22, 2021, Global WholeHealth Partners Corporation (the Company) was granted the rights from Nunzia Pharmaceutical Inc. (Nunzia) to distribute and sell the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine. The Company will serve as a broker for Nunzia and follow the same sales order processing as used by Nunzia in connection with the distribution and sale of the Vaccine.[1] According to reports: With additional supply agreements under its belt, Moderna now predicts its vaccine will generate $19.2 billion by years end. In comparison, rival drugmaker Pfizer posted $3.5 billion in COVID-19 vaccine sales during its first quarter and also upped its anticipated 2021 revenues to a whopping $26 billion, according to its earnings report released on Tuesday. More supply deals are likely on the horizon for Moderna, executives hinted. In Europe, mRNA vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer have already started taking a larger slice of the COVID-19 vaccine market[2] The Company already offers one of the largest lines of COVID 19 tests, including the strains identified in the United Kingdom (B.1.1.7), South Africa (B.1.351), and Brazil (P.1) strain contains multiple mutations, most reflected in the S gene, which encodes the spike protein. Mr. Charles Strongo, the CEO and Chairman of WholeHealth Products Inc., said: Global will now have both J&Js extremely convenient 1-shot vaccine, we now have the rights to the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, which are generally considered the ones with highest efficacy. Including against variants.  About Global WholeHealth Partners Corp GWHP develops, manufactures, and markets in vitro diagnostic (IVD) tests for OTC, or consumer-use as well as professional rapid diagnostic point-of-care (POC) test kits for hospitals, physicians' offices, and medical clinics in the US and abroad. The Company has the capaciy to deliver hundreds of thousands of tests, and can ramp up to 1 million tests per day and the Company presently has 56 products FDA approved and many are Approved for OTC use, and 9 POC products approved by the FDA, many of which are approved for OTC use, and 15 POC products approved by the CLIA WAIVED FDA.



For more information please go to: www.gwhpcorp.com Media: Charles Strongo 714-392-9752

This press release contains "forward-looking statements." Such statements may be preceded by the words "intends," "may," "will," "plans," "expects," "anticipates," "projects," "predicts," "estimates," "aims," "believes," "hopes," "potential" or similar words. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, are based on certain assumptions and are subject to various known and unknown risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond the Company's control, and cannot be predicted or quantified and consequently, actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such risks and uncertainties include, without limitation, risks and uncertainties associated with (i) market acceptance of our existing and new products, (ii) negative clinical trial results or lengthy product delays in key markets, (iii) an inability to secure regulatory approvals for the sale of our products, (iv) intense competition in the medical device industry from much larger, multinational companies, (v) product liability claims, (vi) product malfunctions, (vii) our limited manufacturing capabilities and reliance on subcontractors for assistance, (viii) insufficient or inadequate reimbursement by governmental and other third party payers for our products, (ix) our efforts to successfully obtain and maintain intellectual property protection covering our products, which may not be successful, (x) legislative or regulatory reform of the healthcare system in both the U.S. and foreign jurisdictions, (xi) our reliance on single suppliers for certain product components, (xii) the fact that we will need to raise additional capital to meet our business requirements in the future and that such capital raising may be costly, dilutive or difficult to obtain and (xiii) the fact that we conduct business in multiple foreign jurisdictions, exposing us to foreign currency exchange rate fluctuations, logistical and communications challenges, burdens and costs of compliance with foreign laws and political and economic instability in each jurisdiction. More detailed information about the Company and the risk factors that may affect the realization of forward-looking statements is set forth in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), including the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K and its Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q. Investors and security holders are urged to read these documents free of charge on the SEC's web site at http://www.sec.gov. The Company assumes no obligation to publicly update or revise its forward-looking statements as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. https://c212.net/c/img/favicon.png?sn=LA68315&sd=2021-05-06 View original content to download multimedia: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/alzheimers-disease-is-the-leading-cause-of-dementia-alzheimers-diagnostics-attained-by-global-wholehealth-partners-corp-otc-gwhp-as-a-leading-researcher-301285232.html SOURCE Global WholeHealth Partners Corp [1] https://www.otcmarkets.com/filing/html?id=15053509&guid=JyUkkaKc61nC_yh [2] https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/moderna-posts-massive-year-over-year-growth-thanks-to-1-7b-covid-19-vaccine-sales



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[June 29, 2021] Government of Canada invests over $620,000 to bring high-speed Internet to 146 more homes in Navan, Vars and Blackburn Hamlet, Ontario

Ontarians in rural communities to benefit from increased connectivity OTTAWA, ON, June 29, 2021 /CNW/ - The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted how much we rely on our connections. Now more than ever, Canadians across the country need access to reliable high-speed Internet as many of us are working, learning, and staying in touch with friends and family from home. Right now, too many Canadians living in rural and remote communities lack access to high-speed Internet. Through the Universal Broadband Fund (UBF) Rapid Response Stream, the Government of Canada is taking immediate action to get Canadians connected to the high-speed Internet they need. Today, Marie-France Lalonde, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Economic Development and Official Languages and Member of Parliament for Orleans, on behalf of the Honourable Maryam Monsef, Minister for Women and Gender Equality and Rural Economic Development, announced over $620,000 in federal funding for Rogers to bring high-speed Internet to residents of rural Ontario. This project will connect 146 underserved households in Navan, Vars and Blackburn Hamlet to high-speed Internet. The Universal Broadband Fund was launched in November 2020. Projects funded under the $2.75-billion UBF, as well as through other public and private investments, will help connect 98% of Canadians to high-speed Internet by 2026 and achieve the national target of 100% connectivity by 2030. Today's announcement builds on the progress the Government of Canada has already made to improve critical infrastructure in Ontario. Since 2015, the federal government has invested more than $2.85 billion in over 4,060 infrastructure projects in Ontario communities with a population of fewer than 100,000 people. These investments mean 452 km of new or upgraded roads that are making our communities safer; more than 938 projects to provide residents with cleaner, more sustainable sources of drinking water; and more than 5,427 additional housing units built in rural communities, helping ensure all Onarians have a safe place to call home.



Quotes "The pandemic has brought to light the importance of being connected to proper broadband services. That's why I am so pleased to see the federal government invest in rural communities such as Carlsbad Springs to improve Internet services, allowing residents to access services remotely, making work and education accessible. For these families, connectivity is not a luxury, but a necessity."

 Marie-France Lalonde, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Economic Development and Official Languages and Member of Parliament for Orleans

"We are pleased to be working together with the community of Carlsbad Springs to understand its needs and help deliver reliable broadband services to its residents. Whether it is working remotely, studying online, accessing virtual health care services or running a business, high-speed connectivity is essential to keeping Canadians connected to the people and things that matter most."

 Phil Hartling, Executive Vice President, Service Expansion, Rogers "Today's announcement targets 146 homes in 5 residential areas in Carlsbad Springs. The planned Rogers high-speed Internet expansion will change many lives in our area and promote its economic and social development. It is a game changer for many homeowners who have struggled for many years with poor or limited Internet service and connectivity."

 Denis Labreche, past president of the Carlsbad Springs Community Association Quick facts Canada's Connectivity Strategy aims to provide all Canadians with access to Internet speeds of at least 50 megabits per second (Mbps) download / 10 Mbps upload.

Connectivity Strategy aims to provide all Canadians with access to Internet speeds of at least 50 megabits per second (Mbps) download / 10 Mbps upload. The Universal Broadband Fund (UBF) is a $2.75-billion investment designed to help connect all Canadians to high-speed Internet. Applications to the UBF were accepted until March 15, 2021 , and are now being evaluated.

investment designed to help connect all Canadians to high-speed Internet. Applications to the UBF were accepted until , and are now being evaluated. The UBF is part of a suite of federal investments to improve high-speed Internet. The suite includes the Connect to Innovate program, which is expected to connect nearly 400,000 households by 2023, and the $2-billion broadband initiative from the Canada Infrastructure Bank. Associated links Backgrounder: Universal Broadband Fund and Telesat low Earth orbit satellite capacity agreement

Universal Broadband Fund

Connect to Innovate Program  Project status updates

Canada Infrastructure Bank announcement

High-Speed Access for All: Canada's Connectivity Strategy Stay connected Follow Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada on Twitter: @ISED_CA SOURCE Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada

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[June 29, 2021] Intellinetics Launches Business Process Outsourcing Services

COLUMBUS, Ohio, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Intellinetics, Inc., (OTCQB: INLX) a cloud-based document solutions provider, today announced the launch of its new Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) services to meet the evolving needs of existing customers and expand its service offering into other markets .

To better meet growing market demand for new business and service models, driven by a virtual workforce, Intellinetics is excited to launch expanded BPO solutions. Intellinetics integrated solutions are anchored by Accounts Payable invoice processing, digital mail-room services, and claims processing, and are a strategic and seamless expansion of core competencies in document conversions, digital and paper-based mail processing, enterprise content management solutions, and records storage and retrieval. In a post-pandemic environment, business functions have fundamentally changed. Tools, best-practices and technologies that enable virtual work models are in high demand and Intellinetics is focused on playing a key role. To win, businesses must be laser-focused on their customers, innovation, and business performance and often outsource critical non-strategic cost-centers to reduce costs, increase agility, and accelerate growth. Intellinetics BPO solutions enable customers to make this transition tailored to their unique goals and requirements. Our BPO services are a natural strategic expansion for our business, said James F. DeSocio, President & CEO of Intellinetics. For us, BPO is a vertically integrated model that delivers results and peace of mind for our customers  one partner who does it all. Intellinetics offers electronic content management, document conversion and cloud migration solutions for government, K-12, law enforcement, healthcare and commercial customers. Our digital mailroom service can be as straightforward as scanning your physical mail and forwarding it to your team in an electronic format. However, we can take it to next level and incorporate traditional scanning with advanced capture through optical character recognition (OCR), machine learning (ML), and API data integration to capture important information from your documents and route it to other business processes. Our mission is to not only automate tedious tasks like invoicing, mail processing, and document redaction, but to fundamentally transform the way our customers can leverage data and information at every stage of the process. Starting with things like paper mail BPO, legacy record scanning, and organizing and hosting unstructured digital documents, o providing efficient workflow routing, business intelligence (BI) and data visualization, Intellinetics has solutions and best practices to drive change, eliminate inefficiencies, and quickly adapt to market conditions.



As a long time Intellinetics customer, its exciting to know they are constantly innovating and transforming their platform and services to meet our changing work environments, said Kevin Mathew, Application Support Manager, On Top of the World Communities (OTOW). The ability to have them effortlessly automate the routing and approval process, as well as the general ledger coding, of our AP invoices enables us to focus on other strategic decisions for our business. Continued DeSocio, When businesses outsource to Intellinetics they experience technological efficiencies, achieve cost reduction, leverage highly-skilled professionals, improve productivity, and can focus on their core business activities and mission.

About Intellinetics, Inc. Intellinetics, Inc., located in Columbus, Ohio, is a cloud-based document services software provider. Its IntelliCloud suite of solutions serve a mission-critical role for organizations in highly regulated, risk and compliance-intensive markets in Healthcare, K-12, Public Safety, Public Sector, Risk Management, Financial Services and beyond. IntelliCloud solutions make content secure, compliant, and process-ready to drive innovation, efficiencies, and growth. Through its Image Technology Group and production scanning department, hundreds of millions of images have been converted from paper to digital, paper to microfilm, and microfiche to microfilm for business and federal, county, and municipal governments. Its operations in Madison Heights, Michigan, also provides its clients with long-term paper and microfilm storage and retrieval options. For additional information, please visit www.intellinetics.com . About On Top of the World Communities (OTOW) On Top of the World Communities & Related Entities, Inc. is one of the oldest privately held construction and land development companies in Florida, specializing in active adult retirement living in Ocala, FL. The company, founded by Sidney Colen, began building in 1947 and has constructed homes for tens of thousands of satisfied buyers throughout Florida. For additional information, please visit https://ontopoftheworldcommunities.com/. Cautionary Statement Statements in this press release which are not purely historical, including statements regarding expanded business process outsourcing services; future business and growth; future revenues; increased profit margins; market penetration; execution of Intellinetics business plan, strategy, direction and focus; and other intentions, beliefs, expectations, representations, projections, plans or strategies regarding future growth, financial results, and other future events mentioned in this release are forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties including, but not limited to, the risks associated with the effect of changing economic conditions, the impact of COVID-19 and related governmental actions and orders on customers, suppliers, employees and the economy and our industry, Intellinetics ability to execute on its business plan and strategy, customary risks attendant to acquisitions, trends in the products markets, variations in Intellinetics cash flow or adequacy of capital resources, market acceptance risks, the success of Intellinetics solutions providers, including human services, health care, and education, technical development risks, and other risks, uncertainties and other factors discussed from time to time in its reports filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission, including in Intellinetics most recent annual report on Form 10-K, quarterly report on Form 10-Q, as well as subsequently filed reports on Form 8-K. Intellinetics cautions investors not to place undue reliance on the forward-looking statements contained in this press release. Intellinetics disclaims any obligation and does not undertake to update or revise any forward-looking statements in this press release. Expanded and historical information is made available to the public by Intellinetics on its website at www.intellinetics.com or at www.sec.gov . CONTACT: Joe Spain, CFO

Intellinetics, Inc.

614.921.8170

investors@intellinetics.com



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[June 29, 2021] Kuke Music Announces Share Repurchase Plan by the Company

BEIJING, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Kuke Music Holding Limited (NYSE: KUKE) ("Kuke" or the "Company"), a leading AI-driven music education company and one of the largest classical music content providers in China, today announced that its board of directors has authorized a share repurchase program under which the Company may repurchase up to US$1 million of its American depositary shares ("ADSs") through December 31, 2021. The Company's proposed repurchases may be made from time to time in the open market at prevailing market prices, in privately negotiated transactions, in block trades and/or through other legally permissible means, depending on market conditions and in accordance with applicable rules and regulations. The Company plans to fund repurchases from its existing cash balance. He Yu, CEO of Kuke Music, commented, "The share repurchase program reaffirms our confidence in the fundamental and long-term growth of Kuke. It also reflects our ongoing commitment to enhancing shareholder value while at the same time growing our business." Forward-looking Statements This announcement contains forward looking statements. These statements are made under the "safe harbor" provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements can be identified by terminology such as "will," "expects," "anticipates," "aims," "future," "intends," "plans," "believes," "estimates," "confident," "potential," "continue" or other similar exprssions. Statements that are not historical facts, including but not limited to statements about Kuke's beliefs and expectations, are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. A number of factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statement, including those in Kuke's registration statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Further information regarding these and other risks is included in Kuke's filings with the SEC. All information provided in this press release is as of the date of this press release, and Kuke undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statement, except as required under applicable law.



About Kuke Music Holding Limited Kuke is China's leading comprehensive music education group encompassing the entire value chain from content provision to education services. The foundation of Kuke's extensive classical music content library is its unparalleled access to more than 900 top-tier record companies including Naxos, the leading classical music content provider in the world. Leveraging its market leadership in copyrighted classical music content in China, Kuke provides highly scalable classical music licensing and subscription services to over 700 universities, libraries and online music platforms. In addition, it has hosted BMF, the most renowned music festival in China, for 23 consecutive years. At the same time, Kuke provides consumers with premium music content, music literacy education, talent competitions, and public performances through its apps, Kuke Music and BMF Club. Through KUKEY, the Company's proprietary AI-driven music education system, Kuke aims to democratize music education via technological innovation, bring fascinating music content and professional music techniques to more students, and continuously improve the efficiency and penetration of music learning. By integrating music content and education, Kuke is constructing a unique smart music education ecosystem and providing students with full life-cycle music programs.

Investor Relations Contact Kuke Music Holding Limited

Email: kuke@icrinc.com

Jane.zuo@kuke.com

Phone: +1 (212) 321-0602 View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/kuke-music-announces-share-repurchase-plan-by-the-company-301321675.html SOURCE Kuke Music Holding Limited

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[June 29, 2021] Leading Engineers from Intel, Mayo Clinic, and AEye to Keynote DesignCon 2021

DesignCon, the nation's largest event for chip, board, and systems design engineers, today announced the following speakers will keynote the 2021 conference and expo, taking place August 16-18, at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California. To attend, please register here. To attend as press, please register here. Keynotes Mike Fitton, VP, Data Platforms Group & GM, Network Business Division, Intel

Mark Wehde, Chair, Division of Engineering, Mayo Clinic

Indu Vijayan, Director of Product Management, AEye Each keynote presentation will provide timely insights into DesignCon's communities of electrical engineering and executive attendees, part of the important semiconductor and integrated circuit industry set to boom 24% globally this year. Touching on such growth, Mark Wehde will speak to the accelerated transition from society's traditional hospital-centric medical care system to a more virtual, distributed care following the pandemic, while Intel's Mike Fitton will reveal how networks will need to adapt to meet AI and IoT data demands driven by 5G and 6G innovations. In alignment of this year's event being joined by Drive World and the Embedded Systems Conference ( ESC (News - Alert) ) program, attendees of the third-day keynote, focused on autonomous and automated vehicles, will experience a real-time, interactive driving demo conducted live from the keynote stage by Indu Vijayan, AEye's head of product management for ADAS solutions. "I look forward to connecting with my peers throughout the industry at the upcoming DesignCon event," states Indu. "I hope to inspire engineers of all levels and sectors by not only speaking to, but showing the perception advances we are making that enable higher levels of autonomy and safety." "Across markets, it's an exciting and pivotal year for electrical engineers," said Suzanne Deffree, Group Event Director, DesignCon. "DesignCon will serve as the first opportunity for many of our attendees to reconnect after the pandemic-forced hiatus. We are thrilled to welcome such distinguished leaders from influential companies as we return to in-person events to further education and the advancement of innovation across industries." Keynote details can be found below. Monday, August 16 Beyond 5G: The Need for End-to-End Programmability Speaker: Mike Fitton, VP, Data Platforms Group & GM, Network Business Division, Intel Abstract: 5G has tremendous potential to enable revolutionary services as technologies come together - from the rise of AI, to the emergence of the edge, to a tsunami of Internet of Things data, and transformed 5G networks. As we look to what is coming beyond 5G, we will see some of the same trends written large as well as new requirements. The emergence of vertically targeted and private networks could revolutionize how adjacent businesses operate (industrial, government, medical, etc.) but will also exert stringent requirements in terms of latency and reliability. 6G will see the convergence of compute and communication and will continue to stress our ability to deliver increasing performance within constrained power envelopes. Furthermore, deployment models have changed from only dedicated appliances to also encompass virtualized and now cloud-native implemenations. This keynote will explore how the plethora of solutions and emergence of new demands will drive the dual requirements of scalability and programmability to address the necessary portfolio breadth in a timely and power-efficient manner.



About Mike Fitton: Mike Fitton is vice president and general manager in the Programmable Solutions Group (PSG) and general manager of the Network Business Division at Intel Corporation. He sets the strategic direction of this group and operationally manages the Network Business, which includes wireless and wireline infrastructure within PSG, which services customers both internal and external to Intel. With over 25 years of experience in the telecommunications and semiconductor industries, Mike's depth of technical, market, and business acumen makes him a key part of Intel's strategy to enable the key transitions that underpins the transformation of the Network. Mike began his engineering career in algorithmic design for 2G wireless handsets, and variously provided input to 3G standards definition/selection, capacity analyses for 3G spectrum auctions, as well as driving early adoption of Wireless Personal Area Networks, including serving as the chair of the Bluetooth Radio Working Group. Mike has previously held senior Engineering and Business leadership roles with Altera and Intel PSG's Wireless and Access Business Unit, amongst other companies.

Mike received his bachelor's and doctoral degree in Electronics and Communications from the University of Bristol, UK; his Ph.D. thesis related to the air interface selection for 3G UMTS Radio Access Network and was funded under a UK EPSRC Research Grant. He was a post-doc researcher with the British Telecom Virtual Universities Research Initiative during the ETSI (News - Alert) evaluation of candidate radio access schemes for UMTS. Mike is the author/co-author of 45 patents across networking, semiconductors, and machine learning; he has had papers published in excess of 20 international conferences and journals. Tuesday, August 17 The Future of Healthcare is at the Edge Speaker: Mark Wehde, Chair, Division of Engineering, Mayo Clinic Abstract: The recent pandemic has accelerated the transition from our traditional hospital-centric medical care system to a more virtual, distributed care. Customer expectations, rising costs, and value-based care reimbursement models create an environment ripe for disruption. This shift is being enabled by advances that heavily leverage the latest technologies around AI, deep learning, data analytics, genomics, home-based healthcare, and robotics. And none of that is possible without incredible advances in computational power, communications, and data storage. Conventional wisdom implies that the cloud is the future of healthcare - and for much of healthcare innovation maybe - but the future of medical device innovation is really at the edge. About Mark Wehde: Mark Wehde is chair of the Mayo Clinic Division of Engineering, assistant professor of Biomedical Engineering in the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science, a fellow in the Mayo Clinic Academy of Educational Excellence, and associate lecturer for the University of Wisconsin MBA Consortium program. Mark is the executive leader of a team of engineers, software developers, and project managers providing development and integration of technology solutions across Mayo Clinic. Mark is on the board of governors for the IEEE (News - Alert) Technology and Engineering Management Society and the IEEE Systems Council, is an affiliate for the University of Minnesota Medical Industry Leadership Institute, and is a member of both the FDA Center for Devices and Radiological Health Network of Digital Health Experts and the Medical Device Innovation Consortium 5G-enabled Medical Device Workgroup. Mark is a juror for the Medical Design Excellence Awards, the R&D 100 Awards, and the Edison Awards. He is also a member of the South Dakota State University Electrical Engineering Industry Advisory Board, the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire Biomedical Engineering Advisory Board, and an Advisory Board Member for the Clinician Engineer Hub at Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham, Imperial College London, and King's College London. Wednesday, August 18 Autonomous Vehicle Technology: Sensing What Matters Speaker: Indu Vijayan, Director of Product Management, AEye Abstract: Autonomous and automated vehicles are coming to a road near you, and whether it's a truck, car, train, or delivery bot, it's a moving machine that will need to intelligently sense and safely navigate its surroundings. What is the current market for autonomous vehicles, what are the growth drivers, and how does the industry solve the most challenging edge cases inhibiting broader rollouts? AEye Director of Product Management Indu Vijayan will discuss AI-driven sensing and showcase - via a real-time, interactive driving demo conducted live from the keynote stage - how that technology is helping vehicles see smarter, respond faster, and accelerate the adoption of autonomous features. About Indu Vijayan: Indu is a specialist in systems, software, algorithms, and perception for self-driving cars. As AEye's head of product management for ADAS solutions, she works hand-in-hand with the company's business and technical side on AEye's ADAS product roadmap and development while collaborating with Tier 1 partners to ensure timely delivery and automotive-grade reliability of AEye ADAS components. Prior to AEye, Indu spent five years at Delphi (News - Alert) /Aptiv, where, as a senior software engineer on the Autonomous Driving team, she played a major role in bridging ADAS sensors and algorithms and extending them for mobility. She holds a BS in Technology in Computer Science from India's Amrita University and an MS in Computer Engineering from Stony Brook University. Indu is also the founder of Women in Autonomy (News - Alert) , an organization formed to educate, equip and empower women in the automotive and autotech space to become leaders and change-makers in the industry. About DesignCon DesignCon is the world's premier conference for chip, board, and systems design engineers in the high-speed communications and semiconductor communities. DesignCon, created by engineers for engineers, takes place annually in Silicon Valley and remains the largest gathering of chip, board, and systems designers in the country. This three-day technical conference and two-day expo combines technical paper sessions, tutorials, industry panels, product demos, and exhibits from the industry's leading experts and solutions providers. More information is available at: www.designcon.com. DesignCon is organized by is organized by Informa, a leading B2B information services group and the largest B2B events and exhibitions organizer in the world. To learn more and for the latest news and information, visit www.informa.com. The health & safety of the DesignCon and Drive World+ESC community remains a top priority. Health and safety information can be found on DesignCon's website and will be updated as venue and local protocols advance. About Informa Markets Informa Markets creates platforms for industries and specialist markets to trade, innovate and grow. Our portfolio is comprised of more than 550 international B2B events and brands in markets including Engineering, Healthcare & Pharmaceuticals, Infrastructure, Construction & Real Estate, Fashion & Apparel, Hospitality, Food & Beverage, and Health & Nutrition, among others. We provide customers and partners around the globe with opportunities to engage, experience and do business through face-to-face exhibitions, specialist digital content and actionable data solutions. As the world's leading exhibitions organizer, we bring a diverse range of specialist markets to life, unlocking opportunities and helping them to thrive 365 days of the year. For more information, please visit www.informamarkets.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005500/en/

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[June 29, 2021] Logiq Partners with Mentalku to Offer Mobile Payment Services to Millions of Driver License Applicants Across Indonesia

NEW YORK, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Logiq, Inc. (NEO: LGIQ) (OTCQX: LGIQ), a global provider of award-winning e-commerce and fintech solutions, has partnered with Mentalku, the exclusive government-licensed provider of psychological testing required for driver license applications and renewals in Indonesia, to offer a mobile payment option for Mentalkus testing services.

Logiq will integrate its mobile payment solution, AtozPay , into Mentalkus mobile app and payment terminals at in-person testing centers. This represents the first time mobile payments can be made via the Mentalku app or at the testing centers, and it will make it easier for millions of Indonesians to pay for the required psychological tests. By regulatory statute, any individual applying or renewing a license must pass a psychological evaluation. According to a Statistik Transportasi Darat report, Indonesia issued about 14 million driver licenses in 2019. Following the launch of a three-month pilot program in East Java, Indonesia, Logiq plans to expand the program to West Java. Mentalkus facilities are already operational in East Java and are expected to be rolled out to all provinces. Our partnership with Mentalku represents further digitization of government services and has the potential to help millions of Indonesians more conveniently apply for driver licenses with a seamless and contactless alternative to in-person testing, said Brent Suen, president of Logiq. Mentalku users will also gain access to our AtozGo digital wallet, which they can use to make other types of payments, as well as access additional financial services. Our more convenient payment solution is in line with the governments mandate to encourage more digital participation, lower costs and move away from a cash economy. Logiqs digital wallet enables users to perform multiple financial transactions quickly and securely, including money transfers, receiving and repaying loans, accessing insurance, buying airtime or data, paying bills or merchantsall on their mobile phone, anytime, anywhere. About Logiq Logiq Inc. is a U.S.-based leading global provider of e-commerce and fintech business enablement solutions. Its DataLogiq business provides a data-driven, end-to-end e-commerce marketing solution. Its AI-powered LogiqX data engine delivers valuable consumer insights that enhance the ROI of online marketing spend. The companys Fixel technology offers simplified online marketing with critical privacy features. In its AppLogiq business, Logiqs platform-as-a-service, branded as CreateAPP, enables small- and medium-sized businesses worldwide to easily create and deploy a native mobile app fr their business without technical knowledge or background. CreateAPP empowers businesses to reach more customers, increase sales, manage logistics, and promote their products and services in an easy, affordable, and highly efficient way. CreateAPP is offered in 14 languages across 10 countries and three continents, including some of the fastest-growing emerging markets in Southeast Asia. The companys PayLogiq, branded as AtozPay in Indonesia, offers mobile payments, and GoLogiq, branded as AtozGo in Indonesia, offers hyper-local food delivery services. Connect with Logiq: Website | LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook .



Important Cautions Regarding Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains certain forward-looking statements and information, as defined within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and is subject to the Safe Harbor created by those sections. This press release also contains forward-looking statements and forward-looking information within the meaning of Canadian securities legislation that relate to Logiqs current expectations and views of future events. Any statements that express, or involve discussions as to, expectations, beliefs, plans, objectives, assumptions or future events or performance (often, but not always, through the use of words or phrases such as "will likely result", "are expected to", "expects", "will continue", "is anticipated", "anticipates", "believes", "estimated", "intends", "plans", "forecast", "projection", "strategy", "objective" and "outlook") are not historical facts and may be forward-looking statements and may involve estimates, assumptions and uncertainties which could cause actual results or outcomes to differ materially from those expressed in such forward-looking statements. No assurance can be given that these expectations will prove to be correct and such forward-looking statements included in this press release should not be unduly relied upon.

These statements speak only as of the date of this press release. Forward-looking statements are based on a number of assumptions and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond Logiqs control, which could cause actual results and events to differ materially from those that are disclosed in or implied by such forward-looking statements. In particular and without limitation, this press release contains forward-looking statements regarding our products and services, the use and/or ongoing demand for our products and services, expectations regarding our revenue and the revenue generation potential of our products and services, our partnerships and strategic alliances, any pilot programs, integrations with, and any final commercial arrangements with Mentalku, the impact of global pandemics (including COVID-19) on the demand for our products and services, industry trends, overall market growth rates, our growth strategies, the continued growth of the addressable markets for our products and solutions, our business plans and strategies, our competitive position in our industry, and other risks described in the Companys prior press releases and in its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) including its Annual Report on Form 10-K and any subsequent public filings, and filings made pursuant to Canadian securities legislation that are available on www.sedar.com, including under the heading "Risk Factors" in the Company's Canadian Prospectus. Logiq undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as may be required by law. New factors emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for Logiq to predict all of them, or assess the impact of each such factor or the extent to which any factor, or combination of factors, may cause results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statement. Any forward-looking statements contained in this press release are expressly qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement. Company Contact

Brent Suen, President

Logiq, Inc.

Email contact Media & Investor Contact

Ronald Both or Justin Lumley

CMA Investor & Media Relations

Tel (949) 432-7566

Email contact



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[June 29, 2021] Mike Madden Joins SpiderOak as VP Finance

WASHINGTON, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- SpiderOak, a secure communication and collaboration company, is pleased to announce that Mike Madden has joined the company as Vice President of Finance. Madden has extensive knowledge of SpiderOak from his tenure as a principal at Method Capital, a Chicago-based B2B technology-focused venture capital firm that is the lead investor in the Company. During his five years at Method, Madden was engaged in deal sourcing, due diligence as well as working with portfolio company leadership teams on financial planning, marketing, recruiting, fundraising, M&A, exits and various ad-hoc projects. Madden began his career at Talon Asset Management as an equity analyst. After Talon's sale to Bank of New York Mellon, Mike served as an equity analyst at BW Capital Partners and Cloud Gate Capital, primarily covering the technology, media and telecom (TMT), healthcare, and real estate industries. Mike earned a BS degree inFinance with honors from DePaul University.



"We've worked with Mike for many years in his role at Method, and we are thrilled by the vote of confidence in our business demonstrated by his move in house," remarked David Pearah, SpiderOak CEO. "Beyond managing finance, legal and HR functions, we've wanted a strategic lead who can draw on past experience to help us as we grow into new markets and products. As someone who has worked with companies across the spectrum from early stages of growth through successful liquidity events, and understands the changing capital and development needs of companies at different stages, Mike is the right person for this key role on our executive team." Madden commented: "From my previous vantage as an investor in SpiderOak, I have been impressed with the quality of the SpiderOak team, the Company's traction-to-date and its growth prospects, both federally and commercially. SpiderOak is executing on an important shift into the B2G and B2B secure communication and collaboration markets while evolving its legacy products. I am excited to join the Company as it grows in these industries of great importance to our economy and national security."

About SpiderOak

SpiderOak, Inc. and its wholly owned subsidiary, SpiderOak Mission Systems, offer a growing portfolio of secure communication & collaboration products leverage zero-trust distributed data enclaves and a unique deployment of blockchain/distributed ledger, ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your most sensitive data in any environment. For more information about SpiderOak and SpiderOak Mission Systems, check us out at https://spideroak.com/ Editorial Contact

For inquiries, please call SpiderOak at (866) 432-9888 ext. 6 or write PR@SPIDEROAK-INC.COM View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mike-madden-joins-spideroak-as-vp-finance-301322062.html SOURCE SpiderOak Inc.

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[June 29, 2021] Moog Announces Sale of Ground Based Navigation Aids Business

Moog Inc. (NYSE: MOG.A and MOG.B) announced today that the company has entered into a definitive agreement to sell the assets of its Navigation Aids (Navaids) business to Thales (News - Alert) . The Navaids business represents less than 1% of Moog Inc.'s annual sales and the company does not anticipate any material charges as a result of the sale. Navaids is engaged in the business of designing, developing, manufacturing and marketing ground and ship-based radio frequency navigation beacons and related antennas for military and civilian applications. The business is based in Salt Lake City, Utah. The transaction is subject to regulatory review and customary closing conditions. Additional financial terms were not disclosed. Moog Inc. is a worldwide designer, manufacturer, and integrator of precision control components and systems. Moog's high-performance systems control military and commercial aircraft, satellites and space vehicles, launch vehicles, missiles, automated industrial machinery, marine, and medical equipment. Additional information about the Moog can be found at www.moog.com. Additional information about Thales can be found at www.thalesgroup.com. Cautionary Statement Information included or incorporated by reference in this report that does not consist of historical facts, including statements accompanied by or containing words such as "may," "will," "should," "believes," "expects," "expected," "intends," "plans," "projects," "approximate," "estimates," "predicts," "potential," "outlook," "forecast," "anticipates," "presume" and "assume," are forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements reflect the Company's current views with respect to certain current and future events and financial performance and are not guarantees of future performance. This includes but is not limited to, the Company's expectation and ability to pay a quarterly cash dividend on its common stock in the future, subject to the determination by the board of directors, and based on an evaluation of company earnings, financial condition and requirements, business conditions, capital allocation determinations and other factors, risks and uncertainties. The impact or occurrence of these could cause actual results to differ materially from the expected results escribed in the forward-looking statements. These important factors, risks and uncertainties include:



COVID-19 Pandemic Risks We face various risks related to health pandemics such as the global COVID-19 pandemic, which may have material adverse consequences on our operations, financial position, cash flows, and those of our customers and suppliers. Strategic Risks

We operate in highly competitive markets with competitors who may have greater resources than we possess;

Our new products and technology research and development efforts are substantial and may not be successful which could reduce our sales and earnings;

Our inability to adequately enforce and protect our intellectual property or defend against assertions of infringement could prevent or restrict our ability to compete; and

Our sales and earnings may be affected if we cannot identify, acquire or integrate strategic acquisitions, or as we conduct divestitures. Market Condition Risks The markets we serve are cyclical and sensitive to domestic and foreign economic conditions and events, which may cause our operating results to fluctuate;

We depend heavily on government contracts that may not be fully funded or may be terminated, and the failure to receive funding or the termination of one or more of these contracts could reduce our sales and increase our costs;

The loss of The Boeing (News - Alert) Company as a customer or a significant reduction in sales to The Boeing Company could adversely impact our operating results; and

We may not realize the full amounts reflected in our backlog as revenue, which could adversely affect our future revenue and growth prospects. Operational Risks Our business operations may be adversely affected by information systems interruptions, intrusions or new software implementations;

We may not be able to prevent, or timely detect, issues with our products and our manufacturing processes which may adversely affect our operations and our earnings;

If our subcontractors or suppliers fail to perform their contractual obligations, our prime contract performance and our ability to obtain future business could be materially and adversely impacted; and

The failure or misuse of our products may damage our reputation, necessitate a product recall or result in claims against us that exceed our insurance coverage, thereby requiring us to pay significant damages. Financial Risks We make estimates in accounting for over-time contracts, and changes in these estimates may have significant impacts on our earnings;

We enter into fixed-price contracts, which could subject us to losses if we have cost overruns;

Our indebtedness and restrictive covenants under our credit facilities could limit our operational and financial flexibility;

The phase out of LIBOR may negatively impact our debt agreements and financial position, results of operations and liquidity;

Significant changes in discount rates, rates of return on pension assets, mortality tables and other factors could adversely affect our earnings and equity and increase our pension funding requirements;

A write-off of all or part of our goodwill or other intangible assets could adversely affect our operating results and net worth; and

Unforeseen exposure to additional income tax liabilities may affect our operating results. Legal and Compliance Risks Contracting on government programs is subject to significant regulation, including rules related to bidding, billing and accounting standards, and any false claims or non-compliance could subject us to fines, penalties or possible debarment;

Our operations in foreign countries expose us to political and currency risks and adverse changes in local legal and regulatory environments;

Government regulations could limit our ability to sell our products outside the United States and otherwise adversely affect our business;

We are involved in various legal proceedings, the outcome of which may be unfavorable to us; and

Our operations are subject to environmental laws, and complying with those laws may cause us to incur significant costs. General Risks The United Kingdom's decision to exit the European Union may result in short-term and long-term adverse impacts on our results of operations;

Escalating tariffs, restrictions on imports or other trade barriers between the United States and various countries may impact our results of operations;

Future terror attacks, war, natural disasters or other catastrophic events beyond our control could negatively impact our business; and

Our performance could suffer if we cannot maintain our culture as well as attract, retain and engage our employees. These factors are not exhaustive. New factors, risks and uncertainties may emerge from time to time that may affect the forward-looking statements made herein. Given these factors, risks and uncertainties, investors should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements as predictive of future results. We disclaim any obligation to update the forward-looking statements made in this report. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005257/en/

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[June 29, 2021] More Than Half of Retail Professionals State Pandemic Accelerated Tech Product Launches

Approximately 58% of retail professionals say the pandemic accelerated new technology-related product launches at their company, according to the new report "Using Retail Tech Innovation to Enhance the Customer Experience" released by global market research company Euromonitor International and the National Retail Federation (NRF). "Technology will continue to be used to improve operational efficiencies and elevate the customer experience, positively impacting brand perception as a result," comments Michelle Evans, senior head of digital consumer at Euromonitor International. Brands have leveraged technologies like AR and VR to connect with consumers, leading to 31% of consumers utilising these technologies to buy household items and furniture this year. "The pandemic has drastically accelerated the implementation of new technology for many retailers," said NRF Vice President of Research Development and Industry Analysis Mark Mathews. "While these developments can typically take several years of meticulous planning, many were unveiled to consumers in a matter of weeks." Innovations such as livestreaming emerged as a new retail channel, and findings from Euromonitor's 'Voice of the Consumer: Digital Survey' fielded in March 2021 suggest that globally, nearly 30% of consumers purchased through this medium in the last month. China recorded a high adoption usage at 63%, whereas in the U.S., whle recording a relatively lower figure at 29%, popularity will likely continue as the concept takes hold.



Not only did companies accelerate transformation online, but they also ramped up in-store tech investments. Almost 40% of consumers point to scan-as-you-go, smart cart, and walk-in, walk-out technologies as top desired features. Tech-based immersive experiences will continue to pick up as consumers return to stores more frequently. Euromonitor's digital survey results found that more than 42% of consumers are comfortable with in-store assistance from robots, and one in five are open to the idea of microchip implantation to enable payments.

Download the free report to understand how consumers' relationship towards technology has changed and where companies should make technological investments. About Euromonitor International Euromonitor International is the world's leading provider for global business intelligence, market analysis and consumer insights. From local to global and tactical to strategic, our research solutions support decisions on how, where and when to grow your business. Find the right report, database or custom solution to validate priorities, redirect assumptions and uncover new opportunities. With offices around the world, analysts in over 100 countries, the latest data science techniques and market research on every key trend and driver, we help you make sense of global markets. About NRF The National Retail Federation, the world's largest retail trade association, passionately advocates for the people, brands, policies and ideas that help retail thrive. From its headquarters in Washington, D.C., NRF empowers the industry that powers the economy. Retail is the nation's largest private-sector employer, contributing $3.9 trillion to annual GDP and supporting one in four U.S. jobs - 52 million working Americans. For over a century, NRF has been a voice for every retailer and every retail job, educating, inspiring and communicating the powerful impact retail has on local communities and global economies. NRF.com View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005457/en/

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[June 29, 2021] Museum of Public Relations Launches Campaign To Preserve Industry's Response to COVID-19

New York City, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- (Via NGO Wire) The Museum of Public Relations today announced a major effort to document the PR industrys response to the COVID-19 pandemic in partnership with the Arthur W. Page Center for Integrity in Public Communications, the Page Society, the Institute for Public Relations, the PR Council, and the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Georgia. The initiative is modeled on a longstanding New York Historical Society program to preserve history as it happens. Under the banner History Responds: Communications in the Time of COVID, the PR Museum and its partners are putting out a call for objects and paper/digital materials that document the PR industrys response to the COVID-19 crisis, both within their own organizations and in the counsel they gave clients.

The Museum of Public Relations was founded on the belief that PR practitioners can learn from the past, both from its mistakes and from its successes, said the PR Museums co-founder Shelley Spector. In keeping with that belief, we plan to compile and curate the first in a series of collections documenting how public relations practitioners at agencies, businesses, and other institutions respond to the major societal crises of our time.

The museums initial collection will deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. While we all hope it will be generations before the world faces a pandemic of similar scale, Spector said, we believe lessons learned in recent months will have application in other crises, such as cyber-attacks on critical infrastructure, runs on financial institutions, and other widespread disruptions to daily life. An advisory council of senior public relations practitioners and academics will curate the donations received. The most telling and insightful material will be preserved in a multi-media repository future scholars, students, and practitioners can consult. The museum also expects its COVID-19 collection to be the basis for future conferences, papers, and exhibits on best practices in serving employees, clients, and consumers during widespread crises. Were asking for itemsno matter how modest or mundanethat tell how PR organizations responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, Spector said. Among the items the museum is looking for are: Research that helped shape COVID planning

that helped shape COVID planning PR counsel offered to internal or external clients

offered to internal or external clients Employee communications addressed to team members

addressed to team members Marketing communications directly related to the pandemic, e.g., about product shortaes, new offers, or advising customers on alternatives to in-person service.

directly related to the pandemic, e.g., about product shortaes, new offers, or advising customers on alternatives to in-person service. Artifacts such as branded masks and social-distancing signage created to address the pandemics impact on key publics, promote safe behavior, and facilitate vaccination.



Edelman Trust Barometer indicates that businesses emerged from the pandemic as the worlds most trusted institutions as well as the most ethical and competent. The impact of COVID-19 created the most disruptive crisis in the history of commercial aviation, said Josh Earnest, Uniteds senior vice president and chief communications officer. At United, we moved quickly to confront the reality about the depth of this crisis and leveled with our customers and employees about what was required to keep the airline flying and the traveling public safe. We also sought opportunities to help fight the pandemic by flying tons of medical supplies to COVID-19 hotspots, transporting the first doses of COVID-19 vaccine to the U.S. from Europe and repatriating tens of thousands of Americans stranded overseas.

Companies are used to dealing with crises, but seldom one that affects all of our stakeholders so profoundly in similar ways at the same time," said Roger Bolton, president of the Page Society, which counts nearly 800 global strategic communication leaders in its membership. Chief communication officers were at the center of helping their companies and institutions respond to the COVID-19 pandemic in a way that saved lives and addressed mental health and wellness issues. They also helped lead a strengthened commitment to stakeholder capitalism and societal value creation. In fact, recent research shows that more than two-thirds of the public expects businesses to address societal issues hyper-partisan politicians cant resolve.

To learn more about History Responds: Communications in a Time of COVID and how to donate material, visit https://www.prmuseum.org/historyresponds

# # #

The Museum of Public Relations is a non-profit, permanent institution, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates, and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of public relations practice for education and research that will help shape its future and inform the public of the practices social value. The Institute for Public Relations, founded in 1965, is an independent, nonprofit foundation dedicated to the science beneath the art of public relations. IPR creates, curates, and promotes research and initiatives that empower professionals with actionable insights and intelligence they can put to immediate use. The Arthur W. Page Center for Integrity in Public Communication is a research center at the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State. It's dedicated to the study and advancement of ethics and responsibility in all forms of public communication. The Page society is the worlds leading professional association for senior public relations and corporate communications executives and educators. The PR Council is the only association dedicated to supporting agencies with public relations offerings. PR Council Member agenciesmore than 120 of the countrys premier global, mid-size, regional and specialty firmsoperate in the most sophisticated public relations market in the world, set the standard for excellence, and share a common desire to build the worlds most successful agencies The New-York Historical Society is one of Americas preeminent cultural institutions dedicated to fostering research and public programs that reveal the dynamism of history and its influence on the world of today.

Media Contact Shelley Spector (212)943-9439 shelleyspector@prmuseum.org

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[June 29, 2021] Net Health's Tissue Analytics First to Receive the EU Class I(m) CE Mark For Mobile Wound Care Imaging and Analytics

PITTSBURGH, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Establishing itself as a global provider of artificial intelligence (AI)-based technology for wound care, Tissue Analytics, a Net Health company, announced today that it had been awarded The European Union (EU) Class I(m) CE Mark. The highly sought-after designation allows the company to market and sell its mobile wound imaging and analytics solution to healthcare organizations based in EU member countries. The EU strictly regulates medical technologies for member countries, including Germany, Italy and France. Before any medical technology can be sold in the EU, a manufacturer must comply with all applicable EU legislation requirements and affix a CE mark to their product. The CE Mark indicates that a product meets the essential health and safety requirements under the Medical Device Directives (MDD 93/42/EEC). The announcement makes Net Health 's Tissue Analytics the first mobile wound imaging company to achieve a class I(m) certification for the EU. The EU Class I(m) CE Mark is notable as it requires a higher level of regulatory approval  and commitment to obtain the certification  than a class I non-sterile designation. The "m" in the CE Mark indicates that the measurement functionality of Tissue Analytics' technology has been certified. The Net Health Tissue Analytics platform is used by thousands of wound care providers in the U.S. to accurately measre wounds, helping clinicians to better treat conditions related to diabetes, poor circulation, burns and other diseases or injuries.



Using a smartphone image, Net Health's Tissue Analytics deploys its proprietary AI technologies in real-time to automatically detect the boundaries of the injured skin. The image is analyzed by algorithms powered by Net Health's wound care database, one of the largest in the nation. The combination of leading-edge technology and a robust database provides a powerful tool for healthcare organizations and clinicians seeking to improve patient outcomes and quality of life. "Net Health's Tissue Analytics is recognized by the nation's leading hospitals and wound care clinics as an innovative and responsible developer of AI technologies" says Josh Budman, vice president of Analytics for Net Health and a founder of Tissue Analytics. "This certificate not only allows us to share our technology and insights with EU-based healthcare organizations, it also opens doors to new partnerships and opportunities with businesses that want to tap into our platform and the rich wound care data provided through our specialty EHRs."

Net Health's Tissue Analytics provides a unique platform that enables its imaging and other technologies to connect seamlessly to leading wound care electronic health record (EHR) and electronic medical record (EMR) systems, including Cerner, Epic and Net Health's Wound Expert solution. This capability makes it one of the most connected and interoperable wound care solutions on the market. For more information on Net Health's Tissue Analytics wound care technology, visit https://www.tissue-analytics.com/ and view this recent webinar on the use of analytics in wound care. About Net Health

Net Health's mission is to harness data for human health. We offer EHR software and predictive, actionable analytics for medical specialties, including rehab therapy, wound care, home health and hospice, and employee health and occupational medicine. Net Health solutions are trusted in over 23,000 facilities across the continuum of care. Our EHR software enables caregivers and their organizations to engage effectively with patients, streamline documentation, staff efficiently, secure maximum appropriate reimbursement and maintain regulatory compliance. Our unique approach to analytics seamlessly presents insights in clinical and operational workflows to improve care and business performance. Net Health is a portfolio company of The Carlyle Group, Level Equity and Silversmith Capital Partners. www.nethealth.com . View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/net-healths-tissue-analytics-first-to-receive-the-eu-class-im-ce-mark-for-mobile-wound-care-imaging-and-analytics-301321498.html SOURCE Net Health

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[June 29, 2021] Pico Achieves Outsourced Provider Audit Report (OSPAR) Attestation from The Association of Banks in Singapore

NEW YORK, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Pico, a leading provider of technology services for the financial markets community has attained Outsourced Provider Audit Report (OSPAR) attestation in Singapore, highlighting Picos strong record of robust governance and operational excellence.

Pico successfully completed an external audit, conducted by RSM, in accordance with criteria set out by the Association of Banks in Singapore (ABS), a non-profit organization representing the interests of the commercial and investment banking community. Compliance with ABS Outsourcing Guidelines assures financial institutions that Pico maintains an equivalent level of governance, rigor and processes required by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). This attestation builds on Picos strong technical excellence and adherence to internationally recognized industry leading standards, such as SOC2 and NIST, that further strengthens Picos commitment to providing trusted financial services solutions. Achieving OSPAR certification underscores Picos commitment to embedding excellence in our globally comprehensive technology solutions, said Roland Hamann, Chief Technology Officer & Head of APAC at Pico. The Association of Banks in Singapore plays a significant role in spearheading best banking practices. Our continued alignment to their guidelines, as well as our investments in operational and implementation excellence have been intrinsic to our success in Singapore and beyond. Since selecting Singapore as its Asia headquarters in 2017, Pico has enjoyed strong demand for its products and services from onshore clients as well as EU and US based trading firms expanding into the region. Last year the goernment of Singapore deemed Picos mission critical services as essential. Pico has also been at the forefront of developing Singapores world-leading FX hub, through infrastructure deployments that have supported major forex players as they rapidly established their market presence.



Fueling Picos growth has been the accelerated expansion of its comprehensive connectivity and venue presence across APAC serving electronic trading participants, all supported by local teams. Today, Pico is live in Hong Kong, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Taiwan, and China with imminent plans to add Australia to its APAC footprint. Pico has built a financial services trading cloud infrastructure with mission critical exchange connectivity spanning 47 data centers traversing all key global market centers in the Americas, Europe and Asia. Its resilient proprietary network, PicoNet is a globally comprehensive, low-latency and fully redundant network interconnecting all major financial data centers around the world and access to major public cloud providers. The combination of Picos global infrastructure and data services with its analytics and machine intelligence solution Corvil Analytics, contributes to clients being equipped with cutting-edge solutions to meet ever-changing market conditions.

Picos outperformance and innovation continues to garner industry recognition recently achieving: Best Company in the 2021 Markets Choice Awards; Best Managed Services for Trading in A-Team Groups 2021 TradingTech Insight Awards and Connectivity Provider of the Year in the FOW and Global Investor Asia Capital Market Awards 2020. Further, Ernst & Young LLP (EY US) named Jarrod Yuster, Pico Chairman, Founder and Co-CEO, an Entrepreneur Of The Year 2021 New York Award finalist. About Pico

Pico is a leading provider of technology services for the financial markets community. Pico provides a best-in-class portfolio of innovative, transparent, low-latency markets solutions coupled with an agile and expert service delivery model. Instant access to financial markets is provided via PicoNet, a globally comprehensive network platform instrumented natively with Corvil analytics and telemetry. Clients choose Pico when they want the freedom to move fast and create an operational edge in the fast-paced world of financial markets. To learn more about Pico, please visit pico.net. Media Contact

Pico Press Office:

Isabel Dalton

isabel.dalton@pico.net

+353 1 859 1040



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[June 29, 2021] Prilenia receives positive EMA opinion on Orphan Drug Designation for pridopidine in ALS

Prilenia Therapeutics B.V., a clinical stage biotech company focused on developing novel treatments for neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders, received a positive opinion on European Orphan Drug Designation for pridopidine in Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The orphan designation is expected to be granted within 30 days, following the positive opinion issued by the EMA (News - Alert) Committee for Orphan Medicinal Products (COMP). ALS (also known as motor neuron disease and Lou Gehrig disease) is a life-threatening and chronically debilitating disease due to progressive degeneration of motor neurons, ultimately leading to paralysis and respiratory failure. Pridopidine is a potent and selective Sigma-1 receptor (S1R) agonist, currently being assessed in the HEALEY ALS Platform trial in the US; a multi-center, multi-regimen clinical study evaluating the safety and efficacy of investigational products for the treatment of ALS. The ongoing trial enrolled its first participant for the pridopidine regimen in January 2021 and is on track to generate results in Q3 2022. The S1R is a promising therapeutic target for the treatment of ALS, based on human genetic data as well as compelling preclinical evidence. Pridopidine demonstrates beneficial effects in key processes relevant to ALS and shows neuroprotective properties in numerous ALS preclinical models, via activation of the S1R. The COMP granted Orphan Drug Designation for pridopidine in ALS based on supportive preclinical data indicating potential preservation of motor function, which is considered by the committee as an unmet need and a clinically relevant advantage over available treatment. Under orphandesignation in the European Union (EU), Prilenia would benefit from this designation with protocol assistance, reduced regulatory fees and market exclusivity. Orphan Drug Designation in Europe is granted for a serious or life-threatening disease affecting not more than five in 10,000 people.



Dr. Michael R. Hayden, CEO and Founder of Prilenia, commented: "This positive opinion from the EMA further validates the potential for pridopidine to impact the devastating course seen in patients with ALS. We are encouraged by pridopidine's diverse effects favorably impacting neurodegeneration in ALS models and look forward to the trial readout later next year". Prilenia holds Orphan Drug Designation for pridopidine in Huntington's Disease (HD) in both the US and EU. In addition to the ALS trial, Pridopidine is being studied in a global phase 3 trial for HD (PROOF-HD).

*** Notes to Editors About Prilenia

Prilenia is a clinical stage biotech startup founded in 2018 with the purpose of improving the lives of patients and their families by developing treatments for neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders. Prilenia raised $ 90.5 million thus far and is backed by a group of well-respected investors: Talisman, Forbion, Morningside and Sectoral and ALS Investment Fund. The Company is based in Naarden, the Netherlands, Herzliya, Israel and Boston, MA in the U.S. For more information visit www.prilenia.com and follow us on twitter @prileniaTx. About Pridopidine

Prilenia's lead asset is Pridopidine, a first-in-class, highly selective S1R agonist investigational drug. Pridopidine has an established safety profile and therapeutic potential in several neurodegenerative diseases, affecting adults and children. Pridopidine was acquired from Teva in 2018. Pridopidine is currently in late-stage clinical development for ALS and HD. About Pridopidine for ALS

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS (also known as motor neuron disease) and Lou gehrig disease, is the most prevalent adult-onset progressive motor neuron disease, affecting approximately 350,000 people worldwide. ALS causes the degeneration of motor neurons, resulting in progressive muscle weakness and atrophy and eventually death. There are currently three FDA therapies approved specifically for treating ALS-riluzole, Nuedexta and edaravone. The Sigma-1 Receptor is a promising therapeutic target for the treatment of ALS based on human genetic data and compelling preclinical evidence. Mutations in the S1R gene are causative of ALS where complete loss-of-function (LOF) mutations cause a severe juvenile form of ALS while partial LOF mutations cause late onset ALS, indicating a correlation between S1R function and the severity of ALS. Previous clinical data also suggest that S1R is a promising target for ALS therapy, indicating that S1R activation may enhance bulbar and speech function in ALS patients. Preclinical data highlight the role of S1R in ALS. Mice lacking the S1R show degeneration of motor neurons and motor impairment. Furthermore, in ALS mice that also lack S1R expression, disease progression is accelerated. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005762/en/

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[June 29, 2021] Renovacor Announces the Appointments of Joan Lau, Ph.D., and Gregory F. Covino to its Board of Directors

PHILADELPHIA, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Renovacor, Inc. (Renovacor), an early-stage biotechnology company developing adeno-associated virus (AAV)-based gene therapies for devastating cardiovascular and central nervous system diseases resulting from BAG3 gene variants, today announced the appointments of Joan Lau, Ph.D., and Gregory F. Covino to its Board of Directors, effective upon the closing of the previously announced merger (the Merger) between Renovacor and Chardan Healthcare Acquisition 2 Corp. (NYSE: CHAQ) (CHAQ). The closing of the Merger is expected to occur in the third quarter of 2021. Upon the close of the Merger, Mr. Covino will also serve as the Chair of Renovacors Audit Committee.

Joan and Greg are accomplished industry leaders with proven track records and we are thrilled to welcome them to our Board, said Magdalene Cook, M.D., chief executive officer of Renovacor. Joans extensive leadership experience in gene therapy and the broader biotech space, together with Gregs wealth of expertise in finance, accounting and capital markets, will be invaluable as we begin operating as a publicly traded company. We look forward to benefiting from their strategic guidance as we work to advance REN-001 towards the clinic and execute on our corporate objectives. Dr. Lau commented, It is an honor to be joining Renovacors Board. The company has impressive preclinical datasets and a sound development strategy, as it is utilizing a validated capsid to address a monogenic disease with a known origin. I look forward to working with my fellow directors and Renovacors world class scientific advisors to provide valuable insights and counsel to the companys management team. Mr. Covino added, The opportunity to join Renovacors board is truly exciting. The company is working to address a pressing unmet need with a unique therapeutic approach. It is also poised to enter the public market with a strong financial foundation and the backing of a premier group of institutional investors, which leaves it well positioned for sustained success. Dr. Lau brings over 20 years of biopharma leadership, drug development, and venture investing and transaction experience to Renovacors Board. She is currently the chief executive officer (CEO) of Spirovant Sciences, a gene therapy company focused on changing the course of cystic fibrosis and other respiratory diseases. Dr. Lau co-founded Spirovant (then called Talee Bio), and under Dr. Laus leadership, Spirovant gained the prestigious scientific support of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, received the Philadelphia Alliance for Capital and Technologies Healthcare startup of the year award and was acquired twice, first by Roivant Sciences, and most recently as part of a $3 billion transaction with Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma, which organized Spirovant as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sumitovant Biopharma Ltd. Before co-founding Spirovant, Dr. Lau co-founded and served as managing partner of Militia Hill Ventures. Additionally, she led several other companies, serving as CEO of Azelon Pharmaceuticals, president and CEO of Locus Pharmaceuticals, chief operating officer of Immunome and in various leadership roles at Merck, including in R&D drug development and business development functions. Dr. Laus work in the biopharma industry has earned her several honors, including being recognized as a winner of the 2020 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in Greater Philadelphia and as a 2020 Woman of Distinction by the Philadelphia Business Journal. Dr. Lau has a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, an MBA from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and a BSE in Bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania. Mr. Covino is a deeply experienced financial executive with extensive leadership, operations, process and accounting expertise. He is currently an executive advisor at Novavax, Inc., where he also served as chief financial officer (CFO) and led the completion of a $500 million at-the-market capital raise. Prior to joining Novavax, Mr. Covino worked as senior vice president and chief accounting officer of TESARO, Inc. through te companys $5.1 billion acquisition by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). Following this acquisition, GSK retained Mr. Covino as group CFO of its newly formed TESARO Oncology Division. Mr. Covino also previously worked for over 6 years as the chief accounting officer of Biogen Inc., where he was responsible for accounting, business analysis, internal control and financial reporting functions. During his time at Biogen, Mr. Covino helped lead the finance function through a period of rapid growth following the commercial success of the companys new products and extensive alliances. Previous to Biogen, Mr. Covino held positions as chief internal audit executive, and vice president, international finance for Boston Scientific. Additionally, Mr. Covino spent 10 years at the international accounting and consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, where he gained extensive experience related to accounting, financial reporting, finance operations, internal controls, M&A and corporate taxation. Mr. Covino earned his bachelors degree in business administration from Bryant University, where he has also served as an adjunct professor.



About Renovacor

Renovacor is a preclinical stage gene therapy company developing a pipeline of innovative and proprietary AAV-based gene therapies for BAG3 gene mutation-associated diseases in areas of high unmet medical need. Renovacors therapeutic focus is initially on cardiovascular disease, with a lead program in BAG3 mutation-associated dilated cardiomyopathy. For more information, please visit www.renovacor.com. No part of Renovacors website is incorporated by reference into or otherwise deemed to be a part of this press release. Renovacor previously announced that it had entered into a merger agreement with Chardan Healthcare Acquisition 2 Corp. (NYSE: CHAQ) (CHAQ), a special purposes acquisition company. Completion of the proposed merger is subject to approval by the shareholders of CHAQ and certain other conditions. The merger is expected to close in the third quarter of 2021.

About Chardan Healthcare Acquisition Corp.

CHAQ is a special purpose acquisition company formed for the purpose of effecting a merger, acquisition, or similar business combination. CHAQ raised approximately $86.0 million in April 2020 for the purpose of combining with a public or privately-held operating business. CHAQ was founded and sponsored by affiliates of Chardan Capital Markets LLC. CHAQ is Chardans sixth publicly traded acquisition vehicle. Additional Information and Where to Find It

This communication is being made in respect of a proposed transaction between Renovacor and CHAQ. This document does not constitute an offer to sell or exchange, or the solicitation of an offer to buy or exchange, any securities, nor shall there be any sale of securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, sale or exchange would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such jurisdiction. CHAQ intends to file a proxy statement, which will be sent to all CHAQ and Renovacor stockholders. CHAQ also will file other documents regarding the proposed transaction with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the SEC). BEFORE MAKING ANY VOTING DECISION, INVESTORS AND SECURITY HOLDERS OF CHAQ AND RENOVACOR ARE URGED TO READ THE PROXY STATEMENT, AS MAY BE AMENDED OR SUPPLEMENTED FROM TIME TO TIME, AND ALL OTHER RELEVANT DOCUMENTS FILED OR THAT WILL BE FILED WITH THE SEC IN CONNECTION WITH THE PROPOSED TRANSACTION AS THEY BECOME AVAILABLE BECAUSE THEY WILL CONTAIN IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT THE PROPOSED TRANSACTION AND THE PARTIES THERETO. Investors and security holders will be able to obtain free copies of the proxy statement and all other relevant documents filed or that will be filed with the SEC by CHAQ through the website maintained by the SEC at www.sec.gov. In addition, the documents filed by CHAQ may be obtained free of charge from CHAQs website at https://www.chardanhealthcarespac.com/ or by written request to CHAQ at Chardan Healthcare Acquisition 2 Corp., 17 State Street, 21st Floor, New York, NY 10004. Participants in Solicitation

CHAQ and Renovacor and their respective directors and officers may be deemed to be participants in the solicitation of proxies from CHAQs stockholders in connection with the proposed transaction. Information about CHAQs directors and executive officers and their ownership of CHAQs securities is set forth in CHAQs filings with the SEC, including CHAQs Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2020, which was filed with the SEC on March 4, 2021. To the extent that holdings of CHAQs securities have changed since the amounts printed in CHAQs Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2020, which was filed with the SEC on March 4, 2021, such changes have been or will be reflected on Statements of Change in Ownership on Form 4 filed with the SEC. Additional information regarding the interests of those persons and other persons who may be deemed participants in the proposed transaction may be obtained by reading the proxy statement regarding the proposed transaction when it becomes available. You may obtain free copies of these documents as described in the above paragraph. Forward-Looking Statements Legend

This communication contains certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, as amended, including statements regarding the anticipated timing of the transaction and Renovacors products under development. These forward-looking statements generally are identified by the words believe, project, expect, anticipate, estimate, intend, strategy, future, opportunity, plan, may, should, will, would, will be, will continue, will likely result, and similar expressions. Forward-looking statements are predictions, projections and other statements about future events that are based on current expectations and assumptions and, as a result, are subject to risks and uncertainties. Many factors could cause actual future events to differ materially from the forward-looking statements in this communication. You should carefully consider the risks and uncertainties described in the Risk Factors section of CHAQs Annual Reports on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and proxy statement discussed above and other documents filed by CHAQ from time to time with the SEC. These filings identify and address important risks and uncertainties that could cause actual events and results to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made. Readers are cautioned not to put undue reliance on forward-looking statements, and Renovacor and CHAQ assume no obligation and do not intend to update or revise these forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. Neither Renovacor nor CHAQ gives any assurance that either Renovacor or CHAQ will achieve its expectations. Investor Contact:

John Mullaly

LifeSci Advisors

617-429-3548

jmullaly@lifesciadvisors.com Media Contact:

Patrick Bursey

LifeSci Communications

646-970-4688

pbursey@lifescicomms.com



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[June 29, 2021] Rodin Cars Manufactures 3D-printed Gearbox for Bespoke Supercar with 3D Systems' Metal Additive Manufacturing Solution

First-of-its-kind production part designed to complement high-performance exotic vehicle - delivering unparalleled quality, durability, and luxury



3D Systems Application Innovation Group, DMP Factory 500, instrumental in delivering novel part

ROCK HILL, S. C., June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- 3D Systems (NYSE:DDD) today announced Rodin Cars, the New Zealand-based manufacturer of the ultimate track car, has selected 3D Systems metal additive manufacturing solutions to produce parts for its soon-to-be-released hypercar, the Rodin FZero. Rodin Cars designs and builds completely bespoke single-seat, open-wheel high-performance vehicles that are designed to be faster than contemporary Formula 1 cars. Among the hundreds of metal parts Rodin Cars is additively manufacturing for the Rodin FZero, they are producing a first-of-its-kind 8-speed sequential gearbox with a hydraulically controlled differential. This completely custom component can only be produced using additive manufacturing and was made possible through the collaboration of Rodin Cars design prowess and 3D Systems deep application expertise and additive manufacturing leadership. A gearbox created using traditional manufacturing methods would be cast out of Magnesium or machined from billet material. The resulting component would not only be slow to produce, but heavier and would not withstand the rigors presented by the track. Rodin Cars wanted to flip this design into a true innovation  the ultimate component produced from 3D printed Titanium that would be compact, light, strong, and durable. Rodin Cars released their first high-performance track car  the Rodin FZed  in 2019 with a gearbox designed by Ricardo, a UK-based engineering firm. For the new Rodin FZero, Rodin Cars envisioned a brand new gearbox with specific gear ratios and differential produced from Titanium to enhance the exotic reputation of this new high-performance vehicle. The 18-month design process  a collaboration between Rodin Cars for the casings and Ricardo for the internals - resulted in an unmatched gearbox with a hydraulically controlled differential that can only be produced using additive manufacturing due to its ability to directly 3D-print the necessary internal galleries and thin-wall bearing and mount structures. Rodin Cars engineers worked alongside members of 3D Systems Application Innovation Group (AIG) in Littleton, Colorado, and Leuven, Belgium to bring this unique design to life. The application engineers that comprise 3D Systems AIG possess deep expertise not only in additive manufacturing but in high-value applications across a variety of indutries  including motorsports. The teams engineering know-how combined with 3D Systems industry-leading direct metal printing (DMP) technology helped facilitate the production of the new gearbox that includes 2mm thick walls and a total weight of 68 kilograms. The application engineers in Littleton optimized the gearbox print design details for additive manufacturing at the large scale achievable on the DMP Factory 500 and produced the first part on its DMP Factory 500 in Leuven. This industry-leading solution - featuring a vacuum chamber to ensure the lowest O 2 content - enables the production of seamless large parts as large as 500mm x 500mm x 500mm. This results in the highest surface quality for metal 3D printed parts with outstanding material properties. 3D Systems AIG has successfully completed the technology transfer to Rodin Cars for full production. Rodin Cars recently installed a DMP Factory 500 on-site at its newly expanded facility and will produce the gearbox, as well as hundreds of other bespoke parts, for the Rodin FZero.



3D printing allows us to design and create components otherwise unachievable using traditional methods of manufacturing, said David Dicker, founder, Rodin Cars. With the Rodin FZERO gearbox, we had specific criteria we wanted to meet in terms of weight and durability. Because of the size and quality required for such a large component, it was only possible to print it on 3D Systems DMP Factory 500 machine. We couldnt source another AM supplier who was able to offer a similar solution for our needs - the print quality, volume capacity, testing facilities in Leuven, and continued technological support. In addition to 3D Systems DMP technology, Rodin Cars is also using the companys selective laser sintering (SLS) technology for production parts and stereolithography (SLA) to produce tooling for carbon fiber forms.

Additive manufacturing is enabling industry leaders to defy limitations and stand apart, said Kevin Baughey, segment leader, transportation & motorsports, 3D Systems. As a high technology, high-performance car constructor, Rodin Cars delivers unparalleled vehicles to their customers. This is a shining example of how additive manufacturing not only enables parts to be produced that couldnt be created through conventional methods, it is also delivering a lighter, more durable, beautiful vehicle. Its the blending of the art of design with the science of hyper-performance cars and motorsports. Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements made in this release that are not statements of historical or current facts are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. 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 be materially different from historical results or from any future results or projections expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. In many cases, forward-looking statements can be identified by terms such as "believes," "belief," "expects," "may," "will," "estimates," "intends," "anticipates" or "plans" or the negative of these terms or other comparable terminology. Forward-looking statements are based upon managements beliefs, assumptions, and current expectations and may include comments as to the companys beliefs and expectations as to future events and trends affecting its business and are necessarily subject to uncertainties, many of which are outside the control of the company. The factors described under the headings "Forward-Looking Statements" and "Risk Factors" in the companys periodic filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as other factors, could cause actual results to differ materially from those reflected or predicted in forward-looking statements. Although management believes that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, forward-looking statements are not, and should not be relied upon as a guarantee of future performance or results, nor will they necessarily prove to be accurate indications of the times at which such performance or results will be achieved. The forward-looking statements included are made only as of the date of the statement. 3D Systems undertakes no obligation to update or review any forward-looking statements made by management or on its behalf, whether as a result of future developments, subsequent events or circumstances or otherwise. About 3D Systems

More than 30 years ago, 3D Systems brought the innovation of 3D printing to the manufacturing industry. Today, as the leading additive manufacturing solutions partner, we bring innovation, performance, and reliability to every interaction - empowering our customers to create products and business models never before possible. Thanks to our unique offering of hardware, software, materials, and services, each application-specific solution is powered by the expertise of our application engineers who collaborate with customers to transform how they deliver their products and services. 3D Systems solutions address a variety of advanced applications in healthcare and industrial markets such as medical and dental, aerospace & defense, automotive, and durable goods. More information on the company is available at www.3dsystems.com. A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/5de76fa3-0bb2-4f28-a781-b5237ff35d89

Investor Contact: investor.relations@3dsystems.com Media Contact: press@3dsystems.com

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[June 29, 2021] Singapore Precious Metals Exchange Officially Launches the World's First End-to-End Platform that Democratizes Precious Metals Investment

SINGAPORE, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Singapore Precious Metals Exchange (SGPMX), the world's first 100 percent physically-backed precious metals exchange, has teamed up with Scottsdale Mint, a manufacturer of precious metal products to 20+ foreign governments, private banks, investors, collectors, and 3rd party bullion dealers to officially launch its Stacker Market platform. The platform will allow account holders to buy and sell physically backed, fractionalized gold and silver. Stacker Market will feature free storage, transfers in/out, trade, redemption, monetization and collateralization of gold and silver holdings, while instantly preserving client wealth in physical bullion. Retail and accredited investors continue to seek alternative assets to diversify their investment portfolios amidst the current global economic uncertainty and the volatility of cryptocurrencies. Recently, there has been a flight to gold and silver on the back of near record prices, further solidifying precious metals' long held reputation as a 'safe haven' investment. From Bars to Bucks Scottsdale Mint, a precious metals manufacturer based in Arizona, USA, is SGPMX's official partner for Stacker Market. Customers will be able to purchase fully backed physical gold and silver on the platform. Customers will also be able to transfer-in their existing physical holdings from anywhere in the world to be on-boarded within Stacker Market. Physical precious metals will be stored at no cost, fully insured, at SGPMX's headquarters, the highly secure Le Freeport facility in Singapore, as well as secure storage facilities in Hong Kong and Zurich. All Stacker Market account holders will be able to redeem their physical holdings at any time or transfer sales and trade proceeds to their bank accounts. Customers can also instantly transfer their physical holdings to another Stacker Market user. "We're thrilled to partner with SGPMX to launch Stacker Market," said Josh Phair, CEO of Scottsdale Mint. "We have a rich history when it comes to the design, manufacture and distribution of high-quality bullion to investors, collectors, private banks and bullion traders worldwide, handling billions in physical gold and silver over the last decade. Our physical infrastructure is the perfect complement to SGPMX's technological offering, and we look forward to helping investors diversify their portfolios with bullion during these uncertain economic conditions. The digital future of gold and silver investment is here."



Polishing the Details Customers of Stacker Market will be able to trade their fully insured and segregated physical bullion holdings in denominations of $0.01 USD. The platforms minimum trade size is $1.00 USD, redeemable for withdrawal in physical fractions as small as 1 gram and as large as 100 ounces. Stacker Market offers instant liquidity for clients at prevailing spot prices, connecting a global network of buyers and sellers of physical precious metals. The platform will also boast low transaction fees of 1 percent for gold trades and 1.5 percent for silver trades, with no storage fees. Institutional programs and rates are available for corporate treasury accounts.

In a bid to offer more value to both existing and prospective customers, Stacker Market will also provide free storage of their physical holdings at the secure vault within Le Freeport. For individuals who have existing bullion at home or in other markets, can bring in their holdings, or have them shipped over for a free authenticity test. "We're excited to partner with Scottsdale Mint to launch Stacker Market for all investors," said Victor Foo, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, SGPMX. "At SGPMX, we've had resounding feedback for our proprietary Asset Conversion Exchange platform with our existing clientele and Stacker Market is an evolution of that. Amidst the stock market volatility and digital asset skepticism, over 100,000 investors flocked to our platform seeking the security that only physical bullion can offer. By partnering with Scottsdale Mint, we can augment our technology offering with their physical infrastructure. We provide investors with end-to-end services offering speed, liquid and physical security within a unified ecosystem, so that they can maximize their returns." A Physically Backed Exchange that Lets You Spend and Offers You Credit Stacker Market will allow investors the opportunity to set up automatic and recurring purchases on the platform. Akin to how one would implement a monthly savings plan with a bank, users have the option to save a fixed monthly amount in both gold and silver. Just like an Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF), the bullion can also be held on the platform to grow in value over time in line with the evolving prices of gold and silver. Picture this: a child could contribute a dollar from their allowance every single day and through dollar-cost averaging, be the proud owner of a 1g gold wafer in just 3 months. As a value-added benefit, customers can monetize and spend their holdings. Stacker Market is partnering with a globally accepted card provider to offer its customers a pre-paid debit card that is linked to their Stacker Market accounts. Aerapass is the appointed program manager & financial service platform of choice for the pre-paid debit card program offered by SGPMX. Customers will be able to liquidate their holdings and spend instantly using their pre-paid debit cards within mobile wallets and payment platforms like Google Pay. The multi-currency card offers competitive foreign exchange rates with low spreads. For accredited investors that need access to credit, Stacker Market can offer them a solution. Partnering with Fairshore Asset Management, a Singapore-based, Monetary Authority of Singapore-regulated asset manager and holder of a Capital Markets Services License, Stacker Market customers will be able to finance their positions by collateralizing their holdings. This gives them quick access to capital, or the funds required to raise their precious metal holdings. Stacker Market is available at https://www.stackermarket.com/. About Singapore Precious Metals Exchange Established in August 2011, SGPMX is the world's first physical bullion exchange established for investors, traders, and institutions to trade physical precious metals like gold and silver with physically backed bullion storage facilities. It provides consolidated offerings for customers to buy, sell, store and exchange precious metals under one platform, and is privately held and independently funded. About Scottsdale Mint Scottsdale Mint designs, manufactures, and distributes exceptional precious metals products to 20+ foreign governments, private banks, investors, collectors, and 3rd party bullion dealers. About Stacker Market Stacker Market is a precious metals trading, investing, transferring, and spending platform all in one. We are taking the best of ETFs, Futures Contracts, Physical Ownership, and Banking and combining them into one easy to use platform. Stacker Market is a 100% wholly owned subsidiary of Singapore Precious Metals Exchange (SGPMX). View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/singapore-precious-metals-exchange-officially-launches-the-worlds-first-end-to-end-platform-that-democratizes-precious-metals-investment-301321476.html SOURCE SGPMX

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[June 29, 2021] Sinochem International Releases 2020 Sustainability Report

SHANGHAI, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Sinochem International (600500.SH) today released 2020 Sustainability Report. It is the 17th sustainability report issued in succession since 2005. The report highlights the company's achievements in addressing climate change, carbon emission management, new business presence, technological innovation, precision poverty alleviation, as well as contribution to containing the Covid-19 pandemic. It also demonstrates the remarkable results in improving the long-term sustainability mechanism and shaping competitive edges in environment, social and governance (ESG) issues. Liu Hongsheng, General Manager of Sinochem International, said: "The company is committed to building a world-class materials platform as we deliver on the strategy to be a technology-driven innovative fine chemical enterprise. We need to leverage our grand vision on sustainability to help us achieve higher targets, and our company has to grow in a high-quality manner in the new era." Advancing energy saving, emission reduction and green chemistry Sinochem International always gives priority to climate change and carbon emission reduction. The company has been advancing clean technology and energy-saving facilities, exploring new ways to reduce carbon emissions, and contributing to national sustainability strategies. The report shows that Sinochem International invested 424 million yuan in environmental protection projects in 2020 to foster energy-saving and emission reduction. The company's total carbon dioxide emissions dropped by 220,000 tons from 2019, and carbon dioxide emissions per ton of product declined from 1.72 tons in 2019 to 1.49 tons in 2020. Sinochem International will further incorporate the "carbon neutrality" target into its long-term strategy, increase investment in research and development, and improve overall efficiency via process improvement and supply chain mnagement, so as to forge ahead with decarbonization.



Responding to major policies and initiatives As Covid-19 rampaged in 2020, the company donated 130 tons of sodium hypochlorite, a disinfectant agent, and supplied more than 10,000 tons of them to the hard-hit areas. It also donated 1.38 million yuan in cash and 510,000 yuan in supplies to support the country's efforts to contain the pandemic.

In 2020, Sinochem International allocated 7.19 million yuan as special funds for poverty alleviation, and helped 832 national poverty-stricken counties sell 26,000 kilograms of their specialty agricultural products. In addition, the report identified Sinochem International's action framework, practice, and key performance in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Improving long-term mechanism for ESG In 2020, Sinochem International continued to improve its long-term mechanism for sustainability and stepped up efforts to build a quantitative evaluation system. The company set up a "sustainability committee" at the board of directors level, and released six sets of sustainability policies to improve information disclosure, ESG management, indicator management, and brand value. Sinochem International has been widely recognized for excellence in ESG. In 2020, Sinochem International was shortlisted in the Top 50 ESG Ratings of Listed Companies in China's Petrochemical Industry, ranked 4th with an A rating. It won the Responsible Enterprise of the Year award presented by the Southern Weekend, and the ESG Gold Responsibility Award by Sina Finance. The company was also awarded a bronze medal for corporate social responsibility from EcoVadis, with its score rising by 21% from 2019. TUV Rheinland, a worldwide testing and certification institute, verified Sinochem International's sustainability performance in terms of inclusivity, materiality, responsiveness, and impact. It's the first time that a third-party organization has been introduced to assess the report by Sinochem International. Yin Gefei, co-secretary of ISO 26000 Stakeholder Global Network, said that the report made comprehensive disclosures based on global and domestic standards, with a broader perspective to address both challenges and opportunities, and the report also included opinions from more stakeholders to help vividly depict the corporate value proposition. In 2021, Sinochem International will continue to accelerate the sustainability strategy, deliver the FINE 2030 Action, and contribute to the industry transformation and UN SDGs. About Sinochem International Sinochem International Corporation is a China-based international listed enterprise (stock code: 600500.SH) with core competitiveness in new materials, intermediates, polymer additives, agrochemicals, and natural rubber. It offers products and services to over 100 countries and regions. With a corporate vision of "Fine Chemistry, Green Life", Sinochem International is committed to establishing a world-class innovative fine chemicals enterprise.

http://www.sinochemintl.com/ View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sinochem-international-releases-2020-sustainability-report-301321656.html SOURCE Sinochem International

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[June 29, 2021] Summer 2021: Advanced Technologies and Predictive Analytics from LAZ Parking Reduce Traffic Tie-Ups at Busy Rhode Island State Beaches

PROVIDENCE, R.I., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (DEM), which operates eight saltwater beaches and associated parking facilities, has once again partnered with LAZ Parking to modernize, digitize, and streamline parking for more than one million annual beachgoers this year. Rhode Island has implemented a customized technology platform built upon LAZ's e-commerce, business intelligence, and customer care solutions. The technology allows residents and out-of-state visitors to purchase season parking passes and daily flex passes at https://beachparkingri.com. With a Daily Flex Pass, beachgoers are automatically charged the daily parking rate when their vehicle enters one of the state beach parking lots. The flex parking pass is a great option if a beachgoer is unsure how many times they may visit the beach but would like the opportunity to use the express lanes. Both passes use state-of-the art license plate recognition technology for validation and allow passholders to access express lanes for faster entry. The technology was in limited use in 2020 before being suspended due to travel restrictions and capacity limits associated with COVID-19. Improvements include allowing customers to buy both day and season online passes in advance, express lanes using license plate recognition technology for prepaid customers at some locations, capability to provide real-time parking lot capacity data that DEM can use to communicate alerts when lots are at or near capacity, and capability to capture visitation and revenue numbers in real time to ensure that the right fees are being charged and collected for every transaction. Initial data showed that purchasing a season or flex pass online and using an express lane significantly reduced the time to park. "In the summertime, DEM is in the business of providing safe and convenient access to the best beaches anywhere to hundreds of thousands of Rhode Islanders and out-of-state visitors," said DEM Acting Director Terrence Gray. "LAZ Parking's customized and customer-friendly technology speeds up the parking process and allows visitors to find their spot in the sand more quickly. Access to outdoor recreation venues where families and friends can relax and share special times is central to DEM's mission. LAZ Parking is our partner in fulfilling this promise." To help reduce the amount of time beachgoers spend at the entry booths, DEM encourages Rhode Islanders to buy season and daily flex parking passes online or in advance. Anyone who buys a season parking pass or a daily flex parking pass online or before heading to the beach may use the express lanes for quick beach entry. Purchasing season or daily flex parking passes online also helps DEM keep express lanes open, as there hav been past instances when the express lanes could not be used because too many people were paying for parking at the entry gates rather using pre-paid parking passes.



"Per-vehicle transaction times at beach entrance booths for sales of seasonal beach passes previously took up to three minutes a car," Gray said. "If you multiply that by the thousands of cars we welcome on busy summer weekends, the time really adds up and means worse traffic backups and delays for everyone. This technology will be even more critical in 2021, as the state expects record crowds this year." LAZ Parking manages more than one million parking spaces across the U.S. and is an industry leader in the development and implementation of technology, data analytics, and real-time monitoring tools that make parking faster, safer, easier, and more efficient.

DEM first contracted with LAZ Parking in early 2020, after a competitive bidding process, to operate and modernize parking at state beaches. DEM's selection of LAZ Parking is in keeping with the State's Parks Initiative, now in its third year, of celebrating the state park system by investing in it. Rhode Island's natural and public assets  including eight saltwater beaches, 25 parks and nature preserves, 8,200 acres of parkland, 1,000 campsites, 400 miles of hiking and biking trails, and 200 fishing spots  are magnets, attracting more than 9 million Rhode Islanders and tourists a year. They're also an engine that adds an estimated $315 million to the economy, generating nearly $40 million in state and local taxes and supporting nearly 4,000 jobs a year. Predictive Analytics Makes Parking Smarter & Safer In addition to the digital payment solutions provided by the LAZ technology (i.e., online passes, credit card payment onsite), the LAZ Business Intelligence solution allows DEM's Division of Parks and Recreation to collect, organize, and analyze data to improve the parking process. This technology was critical in 2020 during the pandemic because of frequent changes to capacity limits, new federal and state regulations, and heightened safety concerns by consumers. With the new technology stack in place, DEM could easily provide accurate data to demonstrate compliance with all COVID restrictions and guidelines. Dynamic data visualization eliminates guesswork by integrating multiple data sets (e.g., real-time lot capacity, historical parking data, current weather, seasonality, tide charts, etc.) to predict and manage potential over-crowding. This information can be used to increase/decrease the number of spots that are available, communicate alerts when lots are at or near capacity, and manage staffing decisions. "The Rhode Island team is a great partner for us because we are both always looking to take our data analysis to the next step," said Patrick Ryan, Vice President, Innovation, LAZ Parking. "Our proprietary forecasting and predictive analytics tools allow us to make sound business decisions based on hard data and the LAZ team's decades of operating experience and expertise." LAZ Parking is one of the largest parking companies in the world. The company is an industry leader in client-facing technologies that are reinventing the parking industry. In addition to access, e-commerce, and business intelligence, LAZ is a pioneer in the areas of touchless parking, text-to-park, cellular payments, and tools for the connected car. "LAZ has worked closely with DEM's Division of Parks and Recreation and been a great partner in enhancing services to benefit our customers," said DEM's Gray. "They work fast, their technology is scalable, and as they showed during the pandemic, they are focused on our needs and willing to work with us during a changing environment." LAZ is also a developing player in the "proximity on-demand" services sector. LAZ is developing a proprietary platform of adjacent products and services that allows parking lot owners and landlords to enhance customer loyalty and unlock new revenue streams by delivering high-value, real-time services to customers. Examples of these services include electric vehicle charging stations, kitchen pods, urban farming, micro warehouses, and same-day delivery. About LAZ Parking LAZ Parking, founded in Hartford, CT, in 1981, is one of the largest and fastest-growing parking companies in the United States, operating over 1.3 million parking spaces across the country in over 3,100 locations in 35 states and 439 cities. LAZ provides parking management, transportation, and mobility services across a variety of market segments, including hospitality and valet, office buildings, medical, airport and transportation, campus, government and municipal, retail, events, residential buildings, and shuttle services. Its suite of advanced technology improves customer experience while maximizing profitability. LAZ is an emerging leader in the "proximity on-demand" services sector, developing a proprietary platform of adjacent products and services that allows parking lot owners and landlords to enhance customer loyalty and unlock new revenue streams by delivering high-value, real-time services to customers like electric vehicle charging stations, kitchen pods, urban farming, micro warehouses, and same-day delivery. Additional information can be found at www.lazparking.com. View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/summer-2021-advanced-technologies-and-predictive-analytics-from-laz-parking-reduce-traffic-tie-ups-at-busy-rhode-island-state-beaches-301322007.html SOURCE LAZ Parking

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[June 29, 2021] TE Connectivity Named Among Forbes Best Workplaces for New Graduates

SCHAFFHAUSEN, Switzerland, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- TE Connectivity, a global leader in connectivity and sensors, has been named by Forbes magazine as one of the Best Employers for New Graduates in the United States. "I'm pleased that TE's purpose of working toward a safer, sustainable, connected and productive future has resonated with recent graduates just embarking on their careers," said CEO Terrence Curtin. "I believe we have created a workplace culture in which they can build their skillsets, discover their passions and help us change the world." The Forbes ranking was determined through a survey of 20,000 Americans with fewer than 10 years of experience working for businesses with at least 1,000 employees. Respondents were asked to rate their companies on a variety of criteria, including workplace safety, compensation, opportunities for advancement, diversity and inclusion initiatives and company image. TE's presence on the list doesn't come as a surprise to the members of TEYP, an employee resource group for young professionals that boasts a network of more than 2,300 people around the world. "From the very first day I discovered TE at a career fair, I was instantly impressed and was drawn to the company," said Brooke Glassman, a product development engineer based in Middletown, Pennsylvania, who joined TE in 2019. "This wasn't only because of the innovation and technology they were working on, but because they emphasied how much they cared about their employees and their personal and professional development. TE is a company that is willing to develop and invest in the next generation of employees, and to me, that stands out."



TE has committed to building a pipeline of new talent through internships, as well as its rotational program, which offers new graduates exposure to a variety of careers and industries within the company along with the support of experienced mentors. Visit TE's career site to learn more about our opportunities for young professionals at te.com/careers.

ABOUT TE CONNECTIVITY

TE Connectivity is a global industrial technology leader creating a safer, sustainable, productive and connected future. Our broad range of connectivity and sensor solutions, proven in the harshest environments, enable advancements in transportation, industrial applications, medical technology, energy, data communications and the home. With approximately 80,000 employees, including more than 7,500 engineers, working alongside customers in approximately 140 countries, TE ensures that EVERY CONNECTION COUNTS. Learn more at www.te.com and on LinkedIn, Facebook, WeChat and Twitter. View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/te-connectivity-named-among-forbes-best-workplaces-for-new-graduates-301321871.html SOURCE TE Connectivity Ltd.

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[June 29, 2021] Tyler Technologies Announces 2021 Maine App Challenge Winners

Tyler Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: TYL) announced today that three digitally-savvy high school students from Maine were recently selected as winners of the 2021 Tyler Technologies Maine App Challenge, a contest that encourages students to develop a mobile application and create a video to showcase their design. The winners received scholarships totaling $10,000, which were presented at Tyler's virtual awards ceremony on June 23. Steve Wozniak (News - Alert) - a renowned electronics engineer, computer programmer, philanthropist, and technology entrepreneur - also recorded a message played during the ceremony that congratulated the participants and winners of the Maine App Challenge. This year's winners are: First place: Aidan Blum Levine of Deering High School created Oops! I Forgot!, an app that provides students a way to stay organized and keep track of school assignments, classes and activities. Second place: Sarah Hagan of Cape Elizabeth High School created The Bookshelf Elf, a tool to help middle school students choose books that interest them to encourage independent reading. Third place: Frazier Dougherty of Yarmouth High Shool created Train ME, a workout app that focused on high intensity interval training (HIIT). The app allows users to create customizable workouts or choose from a database of premade workouts designed to maximize muscle growth.



These three winners were rewarded with college scholarships totaling $10,000 in 529 college savings plans. Tyler also gifted tablets to the students who completed the first 50 submissions. Additionally, a guaranteed internship interview will be given for the top 10 submission participants following each student's college sophomore year.

Tyler also awarded a $500 check to the Maine high school with the most teams or individuals submitting an eligible entry. This year's winner is Biddeford Regional Center of Technology in Biddeford whose students submitted a total of 11 applications. The Maine App Challenge was developed in 2015 in partnership with Educate Maine's Project>Login to encourage the next generation of professionals to pursue future careers in STEM-related disciplines and explore the world of software design and development. For more information about the Maine App Challenge, please contact MACT@tylertech.com. About Tyler Technologies (News - Alert) , Inc. Tyler Technologies (NYSE: TYL) provides integrated software and technology services to the public sector. Tyler's end-to-end solutions empower local, state, and federal government entities to operate more efficiently and connect more transparently with their constituents and with each other. By connecting data and processes across disparate systems, Tyler's solutions are transforming how clients gain actionable insights that solve problems in their communities. Tyler has more than 27,000 successful installations across more than 11,000 sites, with clients in all 50 states, Canada, the Caribbean, Australia, and other international locations. Tyler has been named to Government Technology's GovTech 100 list five times and has been recognized three times on Forbes' "Most Innovative Growth Companies" list. More information about Tyler Technologies, an S&P 500 company headquartered in Plano, Texas, can be found at tylertech.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005118/en/

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[June 29, 2021] upGrad Inc. announces partnership with Northern Arizona University to make quality learning affordable in the US

ATLANTA, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- upGrad, South Asias largest online higher education company, announced today that it has developed a Study Abroad program with Northern Arizona University for a degree course, as part of its online vertical upgradabroad.com . This new addition to its global network will further allow students to pursue an international quality education at a fraction of an offline cost and make transnational learning mainstream phenomena in the U.S.

Northern Arizona University is one of the oldest public universities in the U.S. to join upGrads Study Abroad program  this move comes soon after recent partnerships with James Cook University, Brisbane Campus, Australia, and International University of Applied Sciences, Germany. The program offers built-in personalized mentorship opportunities to provide continuous support throughout the program modules and includes end-to-end counseling to make the entire process and learning experience hassle-free for students. upGrads Study Abroad program is designed to bridge the financial gap that prevents students around the world from enrolling themselves in a high-quality U.S. education and subsequently building a meaningful career, said Karan Raturi, upGrad General Manager North America. This blended learning approach will help expand our learners' academic and professional exposure while also enabling them to substantially save on their education expenses. We are thrilled to have Northern Arizona University join us, and with many more top global universities joining our network for this program, we aim to become the largest transnational higher education leader, empowering learners across geographies. We look at closing 10 university partneships in the U.S. within a year.



Under this four-year course duration, any student who is enrolled in the Bachelor of Computer Application (BCA) course with Indias Chandigarh University during the first two years, can be transferred to Northern Arizona University for the remaining two years after meeting academic requirements. This pathway will assist in saving more than $67,000 in tuition fees along with the living expenses incurred by those who wish to pursue their bachelor's degree from the U.S., making this offering much more cost-effective. This new advancement further accelerates the U.S. governments mission to propel international students in the country, thus boosting the economy. Also, according to a senior American diplomat, the U.S. mission in India is actively working to accommodate as many student visa applicants as possible in July and August, and facilitating their travel remains a top priority.

International partnerships like the one we have developed with upGrad in India, are going to be an essential element of internationalization of higher education, particularly in a post-pandemic world, said Ragh Singh, Program Manager, Strategic Global Initiatives, Center for International Education, Northern Arizona University. Northern Arizona University recognizes the importance of developing such partnerships in India and many other parts of the world, which not only provides students the opportunity to pursue higher education from the United States but also allows them to complete part of their academic degree from their home country, thus lowering the cost of education in terms of earning a U.S. higher education degree. Learn more about the upGrads Study Abroad program here . About upGrad upGrad is South Asias largest online higher edtech company offering 100+ courses in collaboration with top-notch global universities like Duke Corporate Education (US), Michigan State University (US), Liverpool John Moores University (UK), Deakin Business School (Australia), Swiss School of Business Management, (Geneva), IIT Madras (India), IIM Kozhikode (India), and others. Founded in 2015, the international edtech leader has impacted over 1 million total registered learners over 50+ countries across the world. upGrad has ranked No.1 in the LinkedIn Top Startups India 2020 list. This is the third time in a row that upGrad has been featured in the LinkedIn Top Startup list after 2018 and 2019. It is also amongst GSV Global EdTech 50 and has ranked amongst the Top 50 in the FT Asia-Pacific High-Growth Companies 2021. To learn more, visit: www.upgrad.com. Media Contact:

Lexi Sunberg

lsunberg@tunheim.com

1+ (952) 836-7775



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[June 29, 2021] Western Europe Online Payment Methods Market Report 2021: Consumer Interest Towards Digital Payment is Increasing - ResearchAndMarkets.com

The "Western Europe Online Payment Methods 2021" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. "Western Europe Online Payment Methods 2021" provides insights into the current state and future trends of the online payment market in the countries of Western Europe. The publication reveals that consumer interest towards digital payment is increasing in the region and that COVID-19 resulted in a faster transition from cash. Western European consumers still tend to choose cards for online purchases During the COVID-19 health crisis, debit and credit cards and E-Wallets such as PayPal (News - Alert) appeared to be the most used payment methods when it comes to E-Commerce. Moreover, in some markets of Western Europe, including Germany and Italy, digital wallets even outpaced the cards. Furthermore, in Germany, Norway, Finland and Sweden direct payments via online banking ranked third among the most preferred payment methods for online shopping. Meanwhile, in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark the third place was taken by various mobile apps, such as Bancontact and Swish. Moreover, Bancontact online services accounted for nearly half of all B2C E-Commerce payments in 2020 in Belgium, and Swedish Swish was preferred by one-fifth of the Internet users in the country for online payments, according to recent research cited by the analyst. Contactless and mobile payments are accelerating in Western Europe Furthermore, despite the strong cash culture in Western Europe, mobile payment adoption started increasing in the region, especially after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The number of proximity mobile payment users in this part of Europe was predicted to increase steadily by CAGR 6% from 2020 to 2023. At the same time the preference for cash payments dropped compared to 2020. Moreover, contactless payments gained momentum during COVID-19. For example, in the UK, in 2020, every nine in ten purchases made with a card was contactless and, in the Netherlands, the share of contactless is increasing yearly, and in 2020 it constituted more than half of the total transaction value. Report Coverage This report covers the online payment market in Western Europe. It takes into account a wide definition of online payment, including payment methods used in online shopping and mobile payment, such as remote and proximity payments.

The major countries in the region are covered, while data availability varied across the markets.

The report includes data mostly published within the previous 12 months. The exact date of publication of th source is stated on each chart. The time period which the data refers to differs by source.



Report Structure The global chapter opens the report, featuring an overview of global online and mobile payment developments.

Next, information about European regional development and country comparisons are included.

The rest of the report contains country-specific information. The countries of Western Europe are presented in the descending order of B2C E-Commerce sales.

Depending on data availability, the following types of market information are included: payment methods most used by online shoppers, breakdown of ECommerce sales by payment methods, trends in online payment security and fraud, number and value of online/mobile payment transactions, mobile payment user penetration and consumer awareness of innovative payment means. Not all the mentioned types of information are available for each of the covered countries. Key Topics Covered:

1. Management Summary 2. Global Developments Top Online Payment Methods, in % of Respondents, August 2020

Top Payment Methods Consumers Consider Using In the Next Year, in % of Consumers, March 2021

Top Payment Methods Available, by B2C and B2B, in % of Payment Decision-Makers, 2020

Share of Mobile Commerce Transaction Value, in % of Overall E-Commerce Transactions Value, 2021e & 2025f

Share of QR Code Payments, in % of All Digital Wallet Transactions, 2020 & 2025f

Perception of Cryptocurrency, in % of Millennial Customers, March 2021

Top Payments Methods For Fraud Actions, in % of Fraud & Payment Professionals, August 2020

Value of Losses Due to E-Commerce Fraud, in USD billion, 2020 & 2021e

Number Of Users Making Payment With Facial Recognition, in billions, 2020 & 2025f

Number Of Users Who Will Be Confirming Transactions With Voice Recognition, in millions, 2020 & 2025f

Share of Online Consumers, by Likelihood Of Switching To A Digital-Only Bank, in % of Respondents, December 2020 3. Europe 3.1.Regional Overview of Online & Mobile Trends, June 2021

Overview of News About Payment Industry Players, June 2021

Overview of The Council of the European Union's Plans Regarding Payment System, June 2021

Profile of Real-Time Payments, and Objectives of the European Commission for 2021, June 2021

Values of real-time Payments, in USD trillion, and Share of West Europe in the World's Total, in %, 2020 & 2025f

Share of SCT Inst in All SEPA Credit Transfer Transactions, October 2019-September 2020

Average Daily Transaction Value via RT1 Real-Time Payments, in EUR million, and Month-on-Month Change, in %, January 2020-November 2020

Top Payment Methods Preferred, in % of Respondents, September 2020

Breakdown of Payment Methods Preferred When Shopping Online, in % of Consumers, by 12 Selected Countries, May 2020

Breakdown of Select Payment Methods Offered by Merchants, by "Growth" and "Non-Growth" Mindsets of Merchants, in %, September 2020

Consumers Who Shopped Online Via Mobile Phone (News - Alert) /Tablet At Least Once, by 12 Selected Countries, in % of Consumers, May 2020

Payment Behaviors When Shopping In Stores Impacted by COVID-19, in % of Respondents, September 2020

Consumers Who Were Willing To Share Their Data, by Country, in % of Consumers, March 2020

Breakdown of Organizations Where Consumers Share Their Personal Data, by the Degree of Willingness, in % of Consumers, March 2020

Proximity Mobile Payment Users, in millions, and Year-on-Year Change, in %, 2019 - 2023f 3.2.Western Europe 3.2.1. UK 3.2.2. Germany 3.2.3. France 3.2.4. Spain 3.2.5. Italy 3.2.6. Netherlands 3.2.7. Switzerland 3.2.9. Belgium 3.2.10. Norway 3.2.11. Denmark 3.2.12. Finland 3.2.13. Austria 3.2.14. Portugal Companies Mentioned Amazon Pay

American Express

Apple (News - Alert) Pay

Bancontact

Bankgirocentralen

Bankgirot

Checkout.com

Clearpay

Crossinx GmbH

Danske bank

Farfetch

Glovo

Google (News - Alert) Pay

Handelsbanken

iDeal

Ingenico

Klarna

LayBuy

Mango

Mastercard

Nordea

Nuapay

OP Financial Group

Openpay

Paypal

Robinhood

SEB

Sentenial

Splitit

Stripe

Swedbank

Unifiedpost Group

Veepee

VIPPS

Visa For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/jga8iq View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005508/en/

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[June 29, 2021] XINSURANCE Offers Space Insurance to Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin Passengers

XINSURANCE - a leading nationwide specialty lines liability insurance company - today offered to insure Jeff Bezos and his five Blue Origins passengers during the upcoming high-profile rocket flight in July. "Like Bezos, we are calculated risk takers, and XINSURANCE strives to find formulated solutions for the uninsurable," said J. Parker Lindsey, senior vice president of XINSURANCE. "We are confident we can accurately evaluate this new risk of space flight and provide quotes to and insure not only Bezos, but all future passengers of space flights." Bezos, the wealthiest person in the world, is the biggest name to take to space, and until now, could not find an insurance agency to cover the 11-minute trip for him and his space crew. While NASA's astronauts are effectively insured through U.S. taxpayers, Blue Origin is not legally required to offer insurance to its passengers. Until today, no firm was ready to offerliability coverage for space travelers.



In addition to offering to cover the space flight with Bezos, XINSURANCE will look to offer insurance for the budding space tourism industry in general. XINSURANCE specializes in helping individuals and businesses who live a lifestyle or participate in activities that make them difficult for traditional carriers to insure. "It's a risk category where there's a need," says Lindsay, "And we're the right company to fill it."

XINSURANCE is a specialty lines liability insurance company that provides insurance solutions for difficult risk individuals, homeowners and businesses when other insurance companies will not or cannot provide. The insurance company has more than 40 years of expertise in offering high-risk specialty insurance across the U.S. For more information about XINSURANCE, visit www.xinsurance.com. About XINSURANCE XINSURANCE is a dba of Evolution Insurance Brokers, LC, Salt Lake City, Utah. With more than 40 years of experience, XINSURANCE offers specialty lines, property and casualty, professional and personal liability Insurance coverage in all 50 states. By providing clients with access to customized liability insurance policies that cover gaps in their traditional insurance coverage, XINSURANCE helps minimize exposures and maximize peace of mind. For more information, visit XINSURANCE.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005911/en/

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[June 29, 2021] YouCare is born: the T-shirt that saves lives using 5G is now a reality

BARCELONA, Spain, June 29, 2021 /CNW/ -- It's called YouCare and is the new remote health monitoring service, based on a revolutionary new wearable technology, totally textile, washable and easy to use. This innovation, totally made in Italy, is able to detect a large number of bio-vital parameters of the individual and transmit them, in an intelligent way, thanks to 5G. The project focuses on the use of revolutionary textile devices like the T-shirt without metal components and with sensors naturally "set" into the fabric. The project was presented today in front of the world press during the Mobile World Congress 2021 being held in Barcelona. During the event, ZTE iterated that they are particularly proud to be partner in this extraordinary innovation and firmly believe that 5G technology is the key to a better quality of life. ZTE further emphasized that they believe in talent and capabilities and want to keep giving their contribution to the Italian and the global technological development. For this reason, starting from next fall, ZTE will initiate the YouCare 5G test in the Innovation and Research Center located in L'Aquila. YouCare enables the detection of bio-vital parameters, such as a "real" electrocardiogram, a respiratory act analysis, the components of the sweat, the muscle effort, and the body temperature, that has never been detected by textile sensors. The T-shirt allows the transmission, via ultra-fast 5G ZTE connection, to health centers and control, as well as to individual users. "It is an invention that will change the life and the quality of home and remote medical assistance to many citizens experiencing health problems and vulnerable people suffering from chronic diseases, ensuring accessibility t care services and the support of our national and international network," said Francesco Rocca, Chairman of Italian Red Cross and IFRC. "We have been working on the project since 2018 and today we are able to present the results of this important experimentation, born in the most difficult moment of the Covid emergenc. This experimentation allows us to think with pride about the path made so far and to look to the future with hope and certainty of having demonstrated the commitment, the ability and the dedication of Red Cross network, to use and to disseminate new technologies for the service of the people and of the society."



The textile technology, patented and certified, develops new services for the protection of health in the areas of telemedicine, work, sport, and the general well-being of an individual. By monitoring health, stress, and active living behaviors, it improves the safety of people, of the elderly, and of the sportive people.

The bio-vital parameters of YouCare, detected by imperceptible polymeric sensors "set" in the fabric, are sent to a miniaturized control unit that records the data, converts them into digital format, and ultimately sends, thanks to 5G, to a bidirectional platform transmitting them to the user's smartphone or smartwatch in addition to a remote unit that analyzes the values with the medical software. "From the very first moment - said Umberto Sgambati, CEO of Proger Group spa that, through the Start-Up Let's Web-earable Solutions, has created the "Smart T-shirt" sensor - we have believed and invested in what seemed to us a totally revolutionary idea that today is a concrete reality. Certified as a Medical Device, it has been enriched by the predictive algorithms of cardiovascular disorders of BSP-Medical the world leader in the field of Medical Data Science". About ZTE ZTE is a provider of advanced telecommunications systems, mobile devices and enterprise technology solutions for consumers, operators, businesses and public sector customers. As part of ZTE's strategy, the company is committed to providing customers with end-to-end integrated innovations to deliver excellence and value as the telecommunications and information technology sectors converge. Listed on the Hong Kong and Shenzhen stock exchanges (stock code H: 0763.HK / stock code A: 000063.SZ), ZTE sells its products and services in more than 160 countries. Media Contacts: Alessio De Sio

ZTE Italia

Tel: +39 366 682 4010

Email: alessio.desio@zte.com.cn View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/youcare-is-born-the-t-shirt-that-saves-lives-using-5g-is-now-a-reality-301321739.html SOURCE ZTE Corporation

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[June 29, 2021] Zencity Raises $30 Million to Help Local Governments Hear From Their Communities for More Data-Driven Decision-Making

Zencity, the leading community insights and analytics platform for state and local governments, announced today the closing of an additional $30 million investment from existing investors - TLV Partners, Vertex Ventures Israel, Salesforce Ventures, M12 - Microsoft's (News - Alert) venture fund, and Canaan Partners Israel. Choosing to double down and increase their holdings in the company is a great show of confidence by Zencity's investors and a testament to their deep commitment to the company's mission of helping local governments measure and understand community feedback. All together, this investment brings Zencity's total funding to over $50 million and will help Zencity continue to be a tour de force in meeting the continued need for impactful and innovative government technology. Now, as ever, local government leaders need accurate, real-time community feedback to guide key decision-making around critical efforts such as vaccination, re-opening, and police reform. Zencity is already an invaluable tool for hundreds of state and local government agencies across four continents, and has played a vital role in supporting government leaders and their communities in everything from day-to-day management, to strategic budget and policy decisions. By helping government leaders hear from all corners of their community, including those who may not typically engage with government for a host of reasons, Zencity is also playing an essential role in enabling more equitable and inclusive governance. Since the company's launch in 2015, Zencity has raised $51M in funding and is now among the most well-funded SaaS (News - Alert) startups in the government technology space. Since Zencity announced its last investment less than a year ago, the company has more than tripled the number of residents impacted, doubled the number of agencies who employ the platform, grown revenue by three times, and expanded the team to over 100 employees across four countries. This new round of funding will continue to drive Zencity's viion of providing a single platform for community input and insight, and will power Zencity's development of additional capabilities and offerings. It will also fuel the company's ever-growing expansion within existing and new markets, including new engagements with state agencies and local governments in the United Kingdom and Australia.



"The past year has proven, more than ever before, that local governments are the most essential institutions of our society. We're proud that our platform has played a role in helping leaders take into account more voices from across their communities and has helped them ensure they work for all their residents as they navigate this pivotal time," said Eyal Feder-Levy, CEO and Co-founder of Zencity. "We're humbled that our existing investors - who know our work, progress, and the impact that our product has on government decision-making - chose to lead this extraordinary round. This funding will allow us to double down on being a real force multiplier to our government partners." "Working with Zencity closely over the past year has been a rare opportunity to help realize one of the most exciting visions I have ever come across as an investor, for changing the landscape of an industry. And in Zencity's case, this vision has been coupled with impeccable execution," said Eitan Bek, Managing Partner at TLV Partners. "As Zencity was gearing up to its next round, doubling down and increasing our existing stake in the company was an easy decision and I'm excited to continue the journey alongside Eyal, Ido, and the Zencity team."

"As one of Zencity's early investors, watching the company execute so well on its vision to help local government agencies better serve their residents is inspiring," said Emanuel Timor, General Partner at Vertex (News - Alert) Ventures Israel. "Zencity's platform has already improved how tens of millions of Americans are able to engage with government leaders. Based on its impressive growth and the quality of its management and entire team, we were eager to more than double Vertex's investment in Zencity." Earlier this year, Zencity acquired community polling company Elucd to further revolutionize how local governments receive feedback from their communities. The company has since integrated Elucd's ongoing polling tools into the Zencity platform, creating the most comprehensive community insights and analytics platform on the market. State and local government leaders are already leveraging Zencity's unified solution to understand trends in organic discourse, as well as proactively seek community feedback via polls and surveys. Zencity is continuing to cement a new standard in the tools governments use for performance management and civic engagement. Through real-time, data-driven analysis of organic discourse and community surveys, Zencity delivers actionable community sentiment insights to help state and local governments better understand and address community priorities inclusively and representatively to make data-informed decisions. About Zencity Zencity is a community insights and analytics platform that provides actionable data to state and local government leaders about their residents' needs and priorities. As the most comprehensive civic engagement solution on the market, Zencity offers government organizations insights from resident feedback through the analysis of millions of pieces of anonymized and aggregated data points alongside continuous, community-based polling. More than 200 government agencies across the United States depend on Zencity to take civic engagement to the next level in order to inform decision-making, build trust, measure progress, and ensure the efficient allocation of resources. Visit https://zencity.io for more information. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005415/en/

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[June 28, 2021]

Korea's Shinhan Bank Joins Klaytn Blockchain Governance Council

SEOUL, South Korea, June 28, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Klaytn, the public blockchain project led by the South Korean Internet giant Kakao, today announced that Shinhan Bank has joined the Klaytn Governance Council to partake in the platform's blockchain operation.

Undertaking the Klaytn platform ownership, the Council members function as key decision-makers for Klaytn's business and technical developments, including the consensus node network operation dedicated to advancing blockchain utility. Existing members include Worldpay, LG Electronics, and more.

Shinhan Bank, a global financial leader in digital innovation, has built various blockchain based financial services including government policy loan, retirement pension, and derivative settlement since 2017. In addition to partcipating in co-governance of the Klaytn blockchain, Shinhan will develop various Klaytn-based digital services that can help foster the fintech ecosystem.







Officials at Klaytn said we welcome Shinhan, one of Korea's largest banks, to participate in the co-governance of Klaytn, and together with Shinhan and our Council members, we will continue to stimulate sustainable growth of the Klaytn ecosystem.

Officials at Shinhan Bank said we are excited to join Klaytn Governance Council involving various leading global organizations in diverse industries. We aim not only to create an ecosystem but also to introduce a digitally transformed financial service based on blockchain.

About Klaytn

Klaytn is a global public blockchain platform developed by Ground X, the blockchain affiliate of the leading South Korean Internet company, Kakao. Klaytn is a service-centric blockchain platform providing an intuitive development environment and friendly end-user experience. It is built upon solid reliability and significant stability with substantial service development for mass adoption. The platform allows real world applications of large scale to be produced right away so that our end-users can make full use of services without much expertise in blockchain or cryptocurrency. For more information, visithttps://www.klaytn.com.

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SOURCE Klaytn
[June 28, 2021] Fairbanc Secures Funding from ADB, Accion, East Ventures, and Sampoerna to Scale Indonesian's Micro Merchant's Access to Embedded Credit Products

JAKARTA, Indonesia and SINGAPORE, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Fairbanc announced it has raised an undisclosed seven figures investment in a pre-Series A from ADB Ventures, the Asian Development Bank's venture arm, Accion Venture Lab, East Ventures, Sampoerna Strategic Group, and others. This new financial backing comes on the heels of recent investments from 500 Startups and Indonesian billionaire Michael Sampoerna. This funding will enable Fairbanc to scale up credit access for Indonesia's small retailers, many of whom struggle to access working capital. The World Bank estimates Indonesia's micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) have a US $166 billion unmet need for credit. Fairbanc partners with large Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) companies to offer a 'pay-later' option through its AI-powered credit scoring that allows instant microcredit decisions. The credits help the unbanked and underbanked merchants with revenue growth by enabling them to increase inventory. According to Fairbanc Founder and CEO Mir Haque, "what makes Fairbanc so unique compared to other fintechs is that it plugs into large consumer brands like Unilever's vast merchant networksto offer 'Buy Now Pay Later' credit to tens of thousands of retailers without requiring any loan applications or smartphones. System integration into consumer brands' distribution app allows Fairbanc to access merchants' order and payment history, which in turn, allows Fairbanc to utilize advanced data science and machine learning to underwrite credit and grow merchant's sales while keeping loan defaults and operating costs very low."



Since Fairbanc's inception in 2019, the startup has partnered with major FMCG firms, including Unilever, L'Oreal, and Danone, to help MSMEs grow their sales by over 35% while limiting nonperforming loans to near-zero. "Fairbanc is empowering and future-proofing the many unbanked grocers who distribute Unilever products, a large percentage of whom are female," said Francisca Ho, Head of Customer Development Finance at Unilever Indonesia. Fairbanc's mission of financial inclusion "is aligned with Unilever's purpose to enhance the livelihoods of millions of people as we grow our business".

With nearly 60,000 merchants in its network, Fairbanc will deploy the new investment to expand its distributor partners and strengthen its sales and technology teams. The company is also developing a product recommendation system with new features, including timely alerts to help merchants plan inventory in advance of climate events, for which Indonesia is at high risk. "Fairbanc has shown us that it has what it takes to bridge the finance gap for Indonesia's many small retailers," said Daniel Hersson, Senior Fund Manager at ADB Ventures. "The company's inventory financing and experienced leadership sets it apart in a crowded fintech market and makes Fairbanc an important ally on our mission to accelerate financial inclusion and support climate resilience in the Asia Pacific region." "The pandemic is far from over in Indonesia, and micro merchants are uniquely vulnerable to its economic impact. Fairbanc is filling a critical gap in access to credit for these entrepreneurs, helping them keep their shops open and sustain their livelihoods," said Michael Schlein, President and CEO of Accion. "By embedding their product into existing partner channels, Fairbanc is able to provide micro merchants seamless access to much-needed inventory financing solutions. Fairbanc's work aligns strongly with our mission of supporting inclusive fintechs, and we look forward to working with the team to reach more micro and small businesses across Indonesia," said Paolo Limcaoco, Southeast Asia Investment Officer at Accion Venture Lab. "Supporting Fairbanc is aligned with our mission to bring financial inclusion to millions of unbanked merchants in Indonesia. We believe Fairbanc is a strong addition to accelerate supply chain financing adaptation in Southeast Asia," said Melisa Irene, Partner of East Ventures. Fairbanc's CEO is Mir Haque, who previously held roles at McKinsey & Company, Deutsche Bank, and Adobe, and its Chief Technology Officer is Kevin O'Brien, formerly CTO of the micro-credit platform Kiva. The company's Head of Operations is Siswanto Hadiprayitno, who has over twenty years of sales and executive experience at Indonesia-based corporations including Unilever Indonesia, Mead Johnson Indonesia, and Tiga Raksa Satria. Media Contact Mir Haque: mir@fairbanc.app

Phone Number: +1-917-463-7582 SOURCE Fairbanc

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[June 28, 2021] CAI Announces the formation of CAI Professional Services India Private Limited.

INDIANAPOLIS, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- On 25 June, 2021, CAI Professional Services India Private Limited officially opened for business. CAI is proud to now be able to serve clients in the data center, pharmaceutical, and biotechnology industries across the Indian subcontinent. Our focus on operational readiness and speed to market aligns well with the needs of industry and we expect strong demand for our services. CAI's leaders' thoughts on achieving this long-time goal: Mike Martin, President:

"From the time of our expansion into Asia almost 11 years ago, it was our dream to open an office in India. Today we're excited to announce we're bringing CAI's world leading consulting services and commitment to client outcomes to India's markets, and we look forward to exceeding client expectations."/p>



Rich Tree , COO:

"Meeting our clients where they are is what has driven CAI's growth and will continue as we support the launch of critical data center infrastructure across India . I'm excited to bring the CAI culture of excellence to our local Indian team. Sam Williamson Asia Vice President :

"I look forward to leading a team of dedicated engineers and scientists to deliver mission critical facilities and manufacturing in India. I know our team is world class and we are truly excited and honoured to drive value to our clients' bottom lines."

Ravi Kumar, India Country Head :

"As the face of CAI in India, I look forward to the challenge of building strong teams of experts and bringing CAI's long tradition of excellent service to our clients here." CAI is headquartered in Bangalore to serve the commissioning and startup needs of the data center critical infrastructure being developed. Growth plans include satellite offices in Hyderabad, Gurgaon, and Mumbai. ABOUT CAI Since CAI was founded in 1996, we have delivered nearly a billion dollars in services for hundreds of clients across thousands of projects globally. With offices in the US, Canada, Australia, Netherlands, Korea, Switzerland, India, Ireland, Italy, China, Singapore, and Malaysia, we have built an international team of over 650 professionals providing local support from a global company. Our engineering, technical, and consulting services are fashioned to deliver mission critical facilities with a high level of performance and reliability. When operational readiness and startup are critical, CAI delivers to a higher standard. www.cagents.com Contact:

David Shenberger

+13177219847

dwshen@cagents.com SOURCE CAI

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[June 28, 2021] Artificial Intelligence (AI) Chips Market in Communications Equipment Industry | Technavio

NEW YORK, June 28, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The artificial intelligence (AI) chips market is expected to grow by USD 73.49 billion at over 51% CAGR during 2021-2025, according to the latest market research report by Technavio. The report provides a detailed analysis of the market by analyzing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on businesses. Request a Free Sample Report to Know More According to Technavio, the COVID-19 pandemic will have a positive impact on the growth of the artificial intelligence (AI) chips market. The report expects the market value to increase in 2021 as compared to 2020. Many businesses currently are going through response, recovery, and renewal phases. With the continuing spread of the novel coronavirus pandemic, organizations worldwide are focusing on flattening their recessionary curve by leveraging technology. 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 Gain instant access to 17,000+ market research reports by using

Technavio's SUBSCRIPTION platform Related Reports on Information Technology Include: Global Artificial Intelligence (AI) Market - Global artificial intelligece market is segmented by end-user (retail, banking, manufacturing, healthcare, and others) and geography (North America, Europe, APAC, South America, and MEA).





Request a Free Sample Report Global Artificial Intelligence Platforms Market - Global artificial intelligence platforms market is segmented by deployment (on-premise and cloud-based) and geography (North America, APAC, Europe, South America, and MEA).

Request a Free Sample Report

Major Three Artificial Intelligence (AI) Chips Market Participants: Alphabet Inc.: The company offers Cloud Tensor Processing Units that accelerate the performance of linear algebra computation, which is used heavily in machine learning applications. Broadcom Inc.: The company offers Artificial Intelligence through Operational Intelligence, CA Mainframe Resource Intelligence, CA Mainframe Operational Intelligence, Automic Automation Intelligence, and others. Intel Corp.: The company offers Intel AI Hardware that excels at training massive, unstructured data sets, to extremely low power silicon for on-device inference, Intel AI supports cloud service providers, enterprises, and research teams with a portfolio of multi-purpose, purpose-built, customizable, and application-specific hardware that turn models into reality. 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 a report snapshot here for a detailed market share analysis of market participants during COVID-19 lockdown:

https://www.technavio.com/report/artificial-intelligence-chips-market-industry-analysis Artificial Intelligence (AI) Chips Market 2021-2025: Segmentation Artificial intelligence (AI) chips market is segmented as below: Product

ASICs



GPUs



CPUs



FPGAs

Geography

North America



Europe



APAC



South America



MEA The artificial intelligence (AI) chips market is driven by the increasing adoption of AI chips in data centers. In addition, the convergence of AI and IoT and advances in the quantum computing market are expected to trigger the artificial intelligence (AI) chips market toward witnessing a CAGR of over 51% during the forecast period. Get more insights about the global trends impacting the future of artificial intelligence (ai) chips market, Request Free Sample @ https://www.technavio.com/talk-to-us?report=IRTNTR41328 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: media@technavio.com

Website: www.technavio.com/

Report: www.technavio.com/report/artificial-intelligence-chips-market-industry-analysis

Newsroom: newsroom.technavio.com/news/artificial-intelligence-ai-chipsmarket View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/artificial-intelligence-ai-chips-market-in-communications-equipment-industry--technavio-301321404.html SOURCE Technavio

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[June 29, 2021] Adarga to Deploy Critical Artificial Intelligence Capability to the British Army in Contract Win

First live deployment of AI into The Field Army to enhance information exploitation underpins technology's vital role in transforming defence capability following the UK's Integrated Review LONDON, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Adarga is pleased to announce that it has been awarded a key contract to deliver its state-of-the-art AI-powered Knowledge Platform to the British Army for an extended Capability Concept Demonstrator. The UK developed software platform will enable the Army to exploit the vast, untapped and growing amount of data at its disposal at a speed and scale previously unimaginable to maximise its effectiveness on operations. The multimillion pound, multi-year software licence is the Field Army's first deployment of AI in day-to-day use, a significant development following the recent Integrated Review in which the UK Government committed to investing in new and emerging technologies to modernise Defence capability and enable the UK to maintain a competitive edge over its adversaries. The ability for the Army to better understand and effectively exploit the myriad of valuable information and knowledge available to them, which includes practical military experience from decades of lessons learnt on training and operations, is vital in succeeding in the highly-dynamic, challenging environments in which the Army operates. Adarga's AI platform, incorporating cutting-edge data science technology, provides the transformational approach the Army is seeking to enhance and extend its human capability, solve complex data problems and digitise otherwise time and knowledge intensive tasks. Mission critical insights and hidden data connections can be identified by the platform in seconds, presenting information that may have otherwise been missed or would have required weeks to find through human analysis. This is critical in today's fast-moving and competitive Information Age. The British Army's ability to maintain the initiative fundamentally depends on how rapidly personnel across the whole force gain and maintain understanding in an increasingly complex information environment ad where replicating past mistakes could have fatal consequences for success. Adarga is providing the technology to enhance the intellectual agility and speed of action of the British Army.



Adarga's Knowledge Platform fuses a variety of data formats from across a range of disparate Army sources and data repositories, combining these with other valuable real-world, open-source data in a single software platform. The platform uses high-fidelity AI models, trained to understand and analyse complex defence and national security data, to convert data sources and incoming, real-time information feeds into readily accessible knowledge. The platform creates a rich and ever-growing, interconnected digital picture, drawing complex links between critical pieces of information. Users benefit from an intuitive user interface providing a single view in which to explore this expanding knowledge - including videos and foreign language documents that have been transcribed and translated by the platform. Along with expansive visualisations of their topics of interest such as event timelines, network builders, graphs and maps, machine-generated document summaries and reports, suggested and corroborated reading on topics of interest and much more.

Adarga is solving one of the most complex challenges brought about by the pervasiveness of information  using cutting-edge AI to read and understand human language including text, voice and video - alongside structured data, to present it to users in context of their particular mission focus. Adarga's Knowledge Platform is helping Army personnel to prioritise information requirements, make sense of given context, apply learning and to make better decisions. This improved access to knowledge is key to succeeding on operations, reducing risk and maximising effectiveness. Robert Bassett Cross, CEO of Adarga, said: "In today's competitive and uncertain world, data and information are more of a strategic asset than ever before. Making sense of and understanding all of this available information underpins everything the British Army does and is vital to the success or failure of operations. Adarga is proud to be supporting the British Army in this first important, real-world application of AI. Harnessing AI technology provides Army users with a powerful capability to overcome the challenges of more traditional time and knowledge intensive methods of enabling understanding and highlights the Army's innovative approach and ambition to meet the challenges of a rapidly evolving operating environment. Working closely with our partners in the Field Army, the deployment of Adarga's AI platform has been pivotal in deciphering vast quantities of complex data at speed and scale, providing the context, insight and foresight required to drive effective decision making". Notes to Editors: About Adarga Adarga is the one of the UK's leading developers of artificial intelligence (AI) software for Defence and National Security, helping organisations to discover mission-critical insights in seconds. Based in London and Bristol, Adarga's mission is to enable its customers to make better decisions today, to work faster and smarter, and to unlock the hidden value their data. Its state-of-the-art enterprise AI analytics platform, the Knowledge PlatformTM, is providing organisations with a transformational competitive edge by automating the analysis of vast amounts of valuable, disparate data at high speeds to help users discover the deep and mission-critical insights that drive faster and better decisions. Adarga's world-class team has combined cutting-edge natural language processing, machine learning and network science technology into a fully scalable, extendable software platform that can understand, analyse and contextualise complex defence and national security data in all formats, including human generated data like text voice and video, at a speed and scale previously unimaginable. For more information visit Adarga.ai

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[June 29, 2021] Hastings Group selects Legerity's IFRS17 SaaS solution

FastPost Express helps leading UK digital insurer deliver IFRS17 compliance LONDON, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Hastings Group, an agile, data and digitally focused general insurance provider to the UK car, van, bike and home market, has selected Legerity's FastPost Express for IFRS17 solution to help it transition to the new International Financial Reporting Standard (IFRS17). The new standard takes effect from January 2023 and is one of the most significant changes to accounting in the insurance sector in years. FastPost Express for IFRS17 is a third generation accounting rules cloud platform. SaaS delivered with best practice, out of the box configuration, it provides a fast and effective route to deliver this new complex accounting standard for all sizes of general, life and reinsurance firms. "We undertook a rigorous evaluation exercise before selecting Legerity," commented John Worth, Group CFO at Hastings Group. "With our ambitious growth plans, and commitment to digital leadership through embracing new technology, we found the ideal partner in Legerity. The FastPost cloud solution should help us deliver IFRS17 efficiently plus supports our future growth plans through its scalable modern architecture." Jeremy Wood, CEO at Legerity, adds "we are delghted to have entered into this long term business partnership with Hastings Group. As a digital insurer, committed to the cloud and the use of modern technology, FastPost is the ideal platform for Hastings. We have quickly established a great working relationship, and with Hastings commitment to colleagues and support of the community, our corporate cultures closely align."



Notes to Editors. About Hastings Group

Hastings Group ("Hastings", "Group") comprises the ultimate UK parent entity Hastings Group (Consolidated) Limited, intermediate holding entities, and two main operating subsidiaries; Hastings Insurance Services Limited (trading as Hastings Direct), in the UK, and Advantage Insurance Company Limited, in Gibraltar. The Group operates as a technology driven insurance provider, delivering straightforward products and services to 3.1 million car, bike, van and home insurance customers, and employs over 3,300 colleagues across sites in Bexhill, Leicester, London and Gibraltar. About Legerity Legerity helps clients deliver digital finance transformation and complex accounting change, cost effectively and with minimum disruption. Legerity's FastPost Express is an enterprise grade, SaaS-delivered IFRS17 solution. It covers all the finance aspects of IFRS17 from receipt of cashflows, calculating the contractual service margin (CSM) through to the posting of journals and production of IFRS17 reports and disclosures. FastPost Express is not just about compliance, it lays down the foundation for finance transformation, business agility and is future-proofed for digital insurance products. Legerity was awarded the IFRS17 Solution of the Year award in February 2021 by InsuranceERM, a highly prestigious industry award that is subject to a rigorous selection process by an independent team of industry expert judges from across Europe and the UK. Legerity was also named a Category Leader in the Chartis Research report, "IFRS17 Technology Solutions: Market and Vendor Landscape 2020," a report that assesses leading vendors of IFRS 17 solutions. For further information please visit www.legerityfinancials.com Mike Richardson

+44(0)7949-186-358

mike.richardson@legerityfinancials.com

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[June 29, 2021] CloudCommerce Moves to Protect Its Unique Invention

SAN ANTONIO, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- CloudCommerce, Inc. ( CLWD ), a technology driven provider of digital advertising solutions, today announced that it plans to file patent applications to protect its novel use of artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to reduce the cost of advertising as it continues to transform into a tech company.

Simply put  a robust patent process adds enormous value to a tech company, said Andrew Van Noy, CloudCommerce CEO. And our continuing development of SWARM, our AI-driven advertising solution, is a cradle of a number of technology breakthroughs which we plan to protect with patent applications. We believe that building a patent portfolio will give us a durable competitive edge in our industry. Mr. Van Noy concluded, SWARM continues to perform well in the marketplace and our company continues to attract new clients over a broad range of industries. We are also developing a robust new business pipeline of both brands and agencies resulting from our new sales hires in NY, LA, and San Francisco. Word of mouth also seems to be traveling very rapidly. Ironically, this is a very old fashioned, but highly effective way of marketing a high-tech advertising solution. CloudCommerce recently announced that it will change its corprate name to AiAdvertising, Inc. For more information about AiAdvertising, please visit the Companys new website at www.AiAdvertising.com.



About CloudCommerce CloudCommerce is a technology driven provider of digital advertising solutions. Our flagship solution, SWARM, analyzes a robust mix of audience data to help businesses find who to talk to, what to say to them, and how to market to them. We do this by applying advanced data science, behavioral science, artificial intelligence, and market research techniques to discover, develop and create custom audiences for highly targeted digital marketing campaigns. For more information about the Company, please visit www.CloudCommerce.com.

Forward-Looking Statements This press release may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are neither historical facts nor assurances of future performance. Instead, they are based only on our current beliefs, expectations and assumptions regarding the future of our business, future plans and strategies, projections, anticipated events and trends, the economy and other future conditions. Because forward-looking statements relate to the future, they are subject to inherent uncertainties, risks and changes in circumstances that are difficult to predict and many of which are outside of our control. Our actual results and financial condition may differ materially from those indicated in the forward-looking statements. Therefore, you should not rely on any of these forward-looking statements. Important factors that could cause our actual results and financial condition to differ materially from those indicated in the forward-looking statements are included in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the Risk Factors section of our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2020. Any forward-looking statement made by us in this release is based only on information currently available to us and speaks only as of the date on which it is made. We undertake no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statement, whether written or oral, that may be made from time to time, whether as a result of new information, future developments or otherwise. Press Contact:



CloudCommerce, Inc.

Tel: (800) 673-0927

communications@cloudcommerce.com



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[June 29, 2021] Smartify Media Joins Digital Locations' Growing Network of 5G-ready Sites

SANTA BARBARA, Calif., June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Digital Locations, Inc. ( DLOC ), the leading aggregator and marketplace for small 5G cell sites, today announced that it has entered into an agreement with Smartify Media to add its locations to the Digital Locations small cell database.

Smartify Media turns any storefront or physical location into a (MXP) Media Experience Platform for property owners which creates recurring revenue and media value from programmatic and local media channels. This strategic agreement between the companies will allow Smartify Media to now offer incremental revenue increases to property owners by facilitating the activation of 5G on their properties. We are excited about the possibilities that can be achieved through our new partnership with Digital Locations, as the inherent value of physical real estate continues to expand into media and cellular technologies, said Joe Kunigonis, CEO of Smartify Media. Smartify Media is well positioned to offer our retail and real estate clients additional value in a combined digital media & 5G option. This strategic relationship between Smartify Media and Digital Locations is representative of how we have moved aggressively to become the leading 5G site aggregator and marketplace in the industry, said Bill Beifuss, the Companys President. The ability to tap into digital out of home advertising with partners such as Smartify Media is a unique approach to adding potential 5G small cell sites to our marketplace. This approach isnt currently being targeted in our industry. Our marketplace technology was the first of its kind in the industry, and we believe that these types of strategic relationships will add more value to both property owners and carriers. Mr. Beifuss concluded, As we strengthen our position as the leader in the 5G site aggregation industry, it will be relationships with companies like Smartify Media that will add signficant scale to our model and make Digital Locations the go-to source for carrier 5G site selection.



Digital Locations recently announced the issuance of its patent that covers a system and method for identifying wireless communications assets through our web-based software. This includes the ability for users to define geographical search areas on a map and to display wireless communications assets within pre-defined geographic areas. Among other claims, the patent also covers the method whereby physical distance from potential wireless communications assets to potential fiber backhauls are displayed. About Smartify Media, Inc.

Smartify Media, Inc., is a national DOOH and In-Retail digital advertising platform focused on location based-data and the customer experience. We are a group of technology and advertising industry leaders who understand how to elevate valuable retail spaces with technology and data and maximize programmatic enabled advertising campaigns for our partners. Our mission is to allow anyone to quickly understand the inherent media value of their physical space and to easily convert this value into a profitable and recurring revenue and data opportunity from digital media channels. To learn more about Smartify Media please visit www.smartifymedia.com About Digital Locations, Inc. Digital Locations, Inc., is the leading aggregator and marketplace for small 5G cell sites. 5G wireless networks are expected to be 100 times faster than current 4G LTE networks. This will enable global scale killer applications such as self-driving cars, the Internet of things (IOT), mobile streaming of 4K videos, real-time hologram-based collaboration, and lag-free high definition gaming. To realize this vision, many new 5G antennas are needed because high frequency 5G signals cannot travel farther than 100 meters. It is estimated that more than 1 million new 5G cell towers must be added in the United States alone. We currently have rights to more than 110,000 pre-qualified wireless cell sites that can be developed to help meet the demands of 5G networks. Using our patented software system, network operators such as Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile Sprint can easily contract with site owners all over the U.S, to quickly build out their wireless networks. Our goal is to continue to acquire the rights to more sites and become a landlord of tomorrows wireless communications assets. To learn more about Digital Locations please visit www.digitallocations.com Safe Harbor Statement Matters discussed in this press release contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. When used in this press release, the words "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "may," "intend," "expect" and similar expressions identify such forward-looking statements. Actual results, performance or achievements could differ materially from those contemplated, expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements contained herein, and while expected, there is no guarantee that we will attain the aforementioned anticipated developmental milestones. These forward-looking statements are based largely on the expectations of the Company and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties. These include, but are not limited to, risks and uncertainties associated with: the impact of economic, competitive and other factors affecting the Company and its operations, markets, product, and distributor performance, the impact on the national and local economies resulting from terrorist actions, and U.S. actions subsequently; and other factors detailed in reports filed by the Company. Press Contact:

communications@digitallocations.com

(805) 456-7000



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[June 29, 2021] Apromore and HeartCore Announce Exclusive Agreement to Distribute Process Mining Tools in Japan

MELBOURNE, Australia and TOKYO, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Apromore, the leading developer of open-source process mining technology, today announced an exclusive reseller agreement for the Japanese market with HeartCore, a reseller focused on helping enterprises accelerate digital transformation. The agreement recognizes HeartCore as the sole distributor of a new Japanese version of Apromore Enterprise Edition process mining tool.

Apromores leading-edge process mining capabilities and ease of use help businesses to look at critical business operations in systems such as SAP, ServiceNow, Oracle, and Dynamics in an unbiased and transparent manner. Based on advanced research from leading universities, Apromore enables operations and process improvement analysts to identify bottlenecks, perform what-if scenarios and unearth risks from non-conformance. Sumitaka Kanno, the CEO of HeartCore said, Japanese enterprises focused on leadership and performance are undertaking digitization initiatives and want tools and data to automate, digitize and transform business processes. Apromore process mining has the advanced capabilities and flexibility to help businesses meet or maintain the efficiency and resilience required in our current environment. Amid a shortage of skills and constrained budgets, enterprises in Japan are looking for efficient and effective ways to accelerate digital transformation by first optimizing, then automating processes. Process mining accelerates the time-to-value by speeding process discovery, improving accuracy and reducing the risk of changes. Apromores focus on democratizing process mining means that more users can access tools and data to effect positive change. Prof. Marlon Dumas, partnerships manager and Co-Founder of Apromore, sad, We welcome the opportunity to collaborate with HeartCore to unlock business value in Japanese organizations via process mining. Apromore and HeartCore share a common commitment to make process mining an integral part of the operations management practices of as many Japanese organizations as possible. The combination of process mining with Japanese operations management methods provides a powerful platform to drive business benefits from digital transformation efforts.



Apromore Enterprise Edition was recently recognized as a Star Performer among the Major Contenders in the Everest Group Process Mining Products PEAK Matrix Assessment 2021. A link to download the report can be found here. The company has rapidly accelerated its market position in EMEA and the Americas and is expanding relationships in Asia Pacific. More information about Apromore Enterprise Edition can be found at this link https://apromore.org/product

About HeartCore HeartCore, founded in 2009, is a reseller of mission-critical solutions like RPA tools and DBMS. HeartCore is driving development and digital transformation solutions in many leading Japanese companies. HeartCore serves globally recognized customers such as Japan Airlines, Ricoh, Yokohama and Brother. For more information, please visit www.heartcore.co.jp About Apromore By providing the finest and most accessible process mining experience, Apromore enables business leaders to quickly visualize their business processes for transformation or optimization. The result of over a decade of extensive research and innovation from leading universities, Apromore is the only organization offering both an open source, community edition as well as an enterprise-grade processing mining solution. For more information and access to the open-source version, please visit www.apromore.com Apromore Social Media Resources

LinkedIn: Apromore

Twitter: @apromore_BPM



Press Contact US Heather Racicot +1 360-632-5616 Global Press Contact Tamarie Ellis, Global Marketing Director Info@apromore.com +64-21-818-009 +1 206-445-0860

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[June 29, 2021] Avalara Appoints Srinivas Tallapragada and Retired Lieutenant General Bruce Crawford to its Board of Directors

Avalara, Inc. (NYSE: AVLR), a leading provider of tax compliance automation software for businesses of all sizes, today announced the appointment of global technology leader and innovator Srinivas Tallapragada and retired Lieutenant General Bruce Crawford to its board of directors. Tallapragada is president and chief engineering officer of Salesforce, the leader in customer relationship management, where he leads a global team responsible for building and managing the company's products and platform. Prior to Salesforce, he held multiple leadership roles at Oracle and SAP (News - Alert) , where he led enterprise software development and was responsible for the integration of numerous acquisitions. Tallapragada is known for his customer-centric approach to product design and has set the bar for other technology companies when it comes to upgrading their platform to enable ongoing customer success. Tallapragada contributes years of experience in product development, spanning many industries, segments, and geographies, to Avalara's board. "Digital commerce is changing at a pace never seen before, increasing the need for integrated technology solutions to address consumer expectations. Tax exists as a function within business transactions of all kinds - finance, commerce, marketing, human resources - and Avalara's technology platform will enable businesses of all types to simplify tax compliance within trusted systems and processes," said Srinivas Tallapragada. Crawford is senior vice president for strategic development, rowth, and sales at Jacobs, a leading technology-enabled solutions provider. Prior to joining Jacobs, Crawford served in the United States Army for 34 years, including his final position as the Army's chief information officer, the principal enterprise IT and cybersecurity policy advisor to the Secretary of the Army and the Army Chief of Staff. During his time with the Army, Crawford provided executive management on national security, enterprise information technology, and cybersecurity matters. He also oversaw development programs for the Army's senior leadership, contributing to one of the Army's most important missions, the development of competence, character, and other leadership traits among soldiers. Crawford serves on several nonprofit and advisory boards.



"Avalara is solving a significant pain point for businesses of all sizes through tax compliance automation, which requires engineering investment and innovation," said Lieutenant General Bruce Crawford. "With a global team working to apply emerging technologies to solve tax compliance, there is ample opportunity ahead. I am looking forward to joining Avalara's board to help build technology leadership through strategy, team, and practice." "Bruce and Srinivas bring a unique blend of leadership and IT experience to the board with extensive expertise in guiding business strategy and managing engineering and technology teams for an emerging global SaaS (News - Alert) platform," said Scott McFarlane, CEO and co-founder of Avalara. "Their addition to the board will help ensure that we are able to continue to develop leaders that are equipped to guide our teams through our rapid global expansion - something that is essential to our continued success."

Avalara's board comprises members whose backgrounds and perspectives add to the company's ability to grow the business and serve global customers. As Avalara grows and changes, additions to the board reflect the priorities of the business, and the needs of team members on the board, on the executive team, and at other employee levels. Today, Avalara's board is made up of 36% women and with the appointment of Crawford and Tallapragada, the company continues to bring leaders with diverse backgrounds onto the board. Crawford and Tallapragada join the Avalara board following the addition of Brian Sharples in April 2020, and Kathy Zwickert in January 2019. About Avalara Avalara helps businesses of all sizes get tax compliance right. In partnership with leading ERP, accounting, ecommerce, and other financial management system providers, Avalara delivers cloud-based compliance solutions for various transaction taxes, including sales and use, VAT, GST (News - Alert) , excise, communications, lodging, and other indirect tax types. Headquartered in Seattle, Avalara has offices across the U.S. and around the world in Brazil, Europe, and India. More information at avalara.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005131/en/

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[June 29, 2021] Skience Welcomes Ali McCarthy as Chief Marketing Officer. Expands Leadership Team to Further Accelerate Platform Growth and Best-in-Class Consulting Services

HERNDON, Va., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Skience , a leading financial services digital enablement provider and consultancy, announced today that 20-year industry veteran Ali McCarthy has joined its expanding executive team as Chief Marketing Officer. McCarthy brings deep expertise in the wealth management and wealth-tech industries leading digital transformation, sales enablement, and customer experience. Her successful track record will be instrumental in further accelerating the growth of Skience's best-in-class transformational digital solutions and consulting services for wealth management firms. "The fintech space is changing rapidly, and I'm very excited to join one of the most dynamic teams pushing this space forward," McCarthy said. "Skience has industry-leading products and platforms that can revolutionize how wealth management firms conduct their mission-critical operations. I look forward to building on the company's success supporting the digital transformation of the financial services industry." McCarthy is a results-oriented marketing and communcations executive with more than two decades of distinguished performance in the financial services industry. Previously she held senior positions with Orion, Brinker Capital, Guardian Life Insurance Co., and AllianceBernstein. She is recognized for helping organizations blend an evidence-based management approach with seamless integration of behavioral sciences into the client-advisor relationship.



"Ali deeply understands the advisor-client relationship, and we are confident her talents will further enhance our ability to deliver innovative digital solutions that will help wealth management firms and advisors better serve investors," said Marc Butler, Skience President and Chief Operating Officer. "Skience is building the technology and guidance to help financial services firms reinvent the way advisors work, and we're excited to have Ali join our leadership team to help drive this vision into the marketplace." Skience, in the last two years, has hired multiple fintech wealth management leaders, including Butler, Chief Product Officer Chris Zuczek, Executive Vice President, Sales Kyle Van Pelt, Senior Vice President, Sales Nick Thacker and Senior Vice President, Product Advocacy Damon Gladman.

Skience's road to an integrated wealth management platform begins here . About Skience

Skience delivers innovative digital strategies and solutions that transform businesses. Skience offers consulting services and an award-winning integrated platform that provides wealth management firms and RIAs an efficient way to unify their technology, increase back-office and advisor productivity, and set the stage for a great client experience. The Skience platform features a streamlined, end-to-end client onboarding and new account opening experience, deep integrations with leading custodial and clearing firms, compliance features, and daily data consolidation. Skience received a 2020 Technology Provider award from WealthManagement.com, a 2020 American Business Awards Silver Stevie award for fintech solutions and was a Northern Virginia Technology Council Tech 100 honoree in 2019 and 2020. Visit Skience.com to learn more. Media Contact:

Andrew Wang or Joseph Kuo

Haven Tower Group

424 317 4859 or 424 317 4851

awang@haventower.com or jkuo@haventower.com View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/skience-welcomes-ali-mccarthy-as-chief-marketing-officer-expands-leadership-team-to-further-accelerate-platform-growth-and-best-in-class-consulting-services-301321280.html SOURCE Skience

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[June 29, 2021] SonicWall Triples Threat Performance, Dramatically Improves TCO with Trio of New Enterprise Firewalls

MILPITAS, Calif., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- SonicWall today announced three new high-performance firewall models for enterprises and large organizations  NSa 4700, NSa 6700 and NSsp 13700  designed to accelerate network throughput, stop advanced cyberattacks like ransomware, and securely connect millions of users. Featuring some of the highest port densities in their class, the new appliances help enterprises keep pace with the speeds of their growing networks  all while drastically reducing total cost of ownership (TCO). SonicWall announces three new high-performance firewall models for enterprises and large organizations. "The growing volume of ransomware attacks has enterprises and government agencies moving quickly to evaluate their mitigation capabilities and strengthen their security postures," said SonicWall President and CEO Bill Conner. "The recent string of highly publicized cyberattacks has catapulted security to the top of the priority list. We're there to help by delivering multiple options to cost-effectively protect even the largest environments. With higher port densities and more capacity, the new offerings dramatically disrupt the traditional cost structure as organizations need fewer appliances to secure the same environment." New NSa Firewalls Disrupt Cost Expectations by Tripling Throughput, Expanding Port Densities

The new SonicWall NSa 4700 and NSa 6700 next-generation firewalls deliver 18 and 36 Gbps of firewall throughput  three times the previous comparable SonicWall appliances. Both also support critical TLS 1.3 encryption standards. "When designing large networks, high-bandwidth interfaces are a critical component," said NW Technology owner Ryan Oord. "SonicWall's new NSa series provides interface options that fit the different needs of varying and sizable networks." The NSa models boast some of the highest port densities in their class; the NSa 6700 even offers both 40G and 25G connectivity, delivering multi-gigabit threat protection for large environments. These higher port densities, coupled with hardware redundancy and high availability, allow distributed enterprises to purchase fewer appliances while supporting more secure connections as their networks grow. The NSa 4700 and NSa 6700 provide up to 115,000 and 153,000 connections, respectively, per second. They also support up to 2 million or 6 million concurrent DPI connections, and up to 4,000 or 6,000 site-to-site VPN tunnels. High-Performance NSsp 13700 Firewalls Designed To Protect The Fastest, Most Complex Environments

The new SonicWall NSsp 13700 is an advanced next-generation firewall for high-speed threat protection designed for enterprise-class networks an MSSPs that supports millions of encrypted connections.



The NSsp 13700 next-generation firewall delivers elite speeds for threat prevention throughput (45.5 Gbps), IPS (48 Gbps) and IPsec (29 Gbps), and include scalable hardware architecture with high port density. Like SonicWall's other new offerings, the NSsp 13700 supports the latest TLS 1.3 encryption standard.

New Capture Labs Portal Delivers Research Tools, Centralized Repository

Information-sharing and collaboration is a critical component of an organization's defensive posture. SonicWall is consolidating access to threat research and security news through the Capture Labs Portal, a free and centralized repository of research tools available to the public where visitors can track malicious actors and remain up to date with latest zero-day vulnerabilities.



To help expedite remediation, the Capture Labs Portal offers a single repository to look up threat signature, CVE details, IP reputation, and URL reputation, making it effortless to do your threat research from a single interface. SonicWall PSIRT advisories and Capture Labs threat researcher blogs with news regarding the latest vulnerabilities can be easily and quickly found out to take actions in response to emerging threats, attack vectors or vulnerabilities. Simplify Secure SD-WAN Deployment, Management with New Orchestration and Monitoring Capabilities

Enterprises, service providers, government agencies and MSSPs can efficiently manage large-scale deployments with SonicWall's cloud-native Network Security Manager (NSM), which delivers a single, easy-to-use cloud interface for streamlined management, analytics and reporting. With NSM 2.3, network infrastructure teams can quickly troubleshoot and resolve issues as they monitor secure SD-WAN landscapes in real time. Administrators can monitor the health and performance of complete SD-WAN environments to ensure consistent configurations and drive optimal application performance. SD-WAN environments are now easily organized using SonicWall's new and intuitive self-guided workflow as well as the use of Templates that allow the provisioning of thousands of remote firewalls efficiently. Enterprises also can leverage the NSM wizard-based setup process to ensure proper configuration for site-to-site VPN connectivity, and use the monitoring tools to track the connections and ensure optimum performance. Optimize Productivity with Enhanced Network Visibility, Monitoring and Reporting

Managing employees' internet utilization and behavior can be a substantial challenge for organizations. SonicWall has enhanced network visibility and reporting capabilities across security devices, users, VPN connections and more.

SonicWall Analytics 3.1 delivers Productivity Reports to provide insights into employees' internet utilization and behavior. Generated snapshots and drill-down reports can classify users' web activities into productivity groups such as productive, unproductive, acceptable, unacceptable or custom-defined groups. Drill-down capabilities enable analysts to easily and quickly pivot and investigate data points of interest at the user level, and establish evidence-backed, policy-controlled measures for risky users and applications as they unfold in the discovery process.

New VPN Reports allow organizations to summarize what company resources are being accessed inside VPN tunnels, how much bandwidth they are consuming and by whom. Network admins can leverage this information for monitoring business-critical applications, controlling or shaping traffic, and planning for capacity growth. Zero-Trust Security Offering Expanded to Include More Granular Control

SonicWall also introduced Device Posture Check with SonicWall Cloud Edge Secure Access 1.1, and the addition of new Network Traffic Control that enforces access control to the resources based on user groups, IP addresses, ports and network protocols. About SonicWall

SonicWall delivers Boundless Cybersecurity for the hyper-distributed era in a work reality where everyone is remote, mobile and unsecure. SonicWall safeguards organizations mobilizing for their new business normal with seamless protection that stops the most evasive cyberattacks across boundless exposure points and increasingly remote, mobile and cloud-enabled workforces. By knowing the unknown, providing real-time visibility and enabling breakthrough economics, SonicWall closes the cybersecurity business gap for enterprises, governments and SMBs worldwide. For more information, visit www.sonicwall.com or follow us on Twitter , LinkedIn , Facebook and Instagram .

Lindsey Lockhart

Director of Public Relations

T: 1 214 562 1521

llocakhart@sonicwall.com View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sonicwall-triples-threat-performance-dramatically-improves-tco-with-trio-of-new-enterprise-firewalls-301321252.html SOURCE SONICWALL INC

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[June 29, 2021] Survey: Nearly Half of Americans Quickly Lose Trust in a Brand If Exposed to Toxic or Fake User-Generated Content on Its Channels

Since the beginning of the pandemic (March 2020) there has been an increase of inappropriate or misleading user-generated content (UGC) online, and it has caused consumers to have trust issues with brands, according to a new survey from TELUS (News - Alert) International, a leading global customer experience (CX) and digital solutions provider. Over half (54%) of respondents have witnessed this rise, with 36% seeing instances of inaccurate, fake or even toxic UGC multiple times a day, and an additional 15% saying they see this type of content daily. More than 40% of respondents will disengage from a brand's community after as little as one exposure to toxic or fake UGC, while 45% say they will lose all trust in a brand. "People are being exposed to higher volumes of inappropriate and misleading user-generated content as more of their daily lives have moved online since the start of the pandemic - a challenge that consumers want to see brands tackle head on," said Jim Radzicki, chief technology officer at TELUS International. "It is in the best interest of organizations to deploy strong content moderation tactics and technologies to combat this material when it appears on their channels as nearly 70% of survey respondents stated that brands need to protect users from toxic content and 78% said it is a brand's responsibility to provide positive and welcoming online experiences." Other findings on the impact of inaccurate or otherwise harmful UGC identified by respondents included: The most frequently encountered unwanted content includes spam (61%), fake reviews and testimonials (61%), and inappropriate or harmful images (48%).

Consumers report finding these types of content so impactful that it has affected the quality of their day, with 38% saying it has made their day worse, and nearly 30% reporting it ruined the entire day. Brands that seek positive interaction with consumers online see higher engagement On the flip side, when a brand engages with a customer online (e.g. liking a social media post or responding to a review/comment) it has a positive effect on their relationship with that company. More than half (53%) said it makes them more likely to purchase from the company again, while 45% said it makes them more likely to post additional UGC and increases the likelihood they would recommend the brand. With 83% of Americans surveyed saying they have posted UGC - mot frequently, images (52%), reviews or testimonials (51%) and comments in forums/social/online communities (44%) - brands that turn to social listening and community management practices in addition to addressing unwanted content will have a stronger chance at positively impacting the online customer experience.



Positive, welcoming online experiences are driven by a hybrid human-technology approach "These findings demonstrate how brands have an amazing opportunity to prove how much they value their customers and take internet safety and experience seriously. The benefits of tech-assisted human content moderation are unmatched and essential for obtaining and sustaining customer trust. Our hybrid model, using humans and technology in tandem to combat fake and harmful content on one hand, and enable better customer engagement on the other, has proven successful with many of today's leading brands," continued Radzicki.

TELUS International delivers social media CX services that span customer care and technical support for B2C and B2B clients, community and content moderation, ad moderation, online reputation management, social media listening and monitoring, insights and analytics, trust and safety, fraud detection, identity verification, and protection of marketplaces. The company also provides data annotation services as part of its sales services, supporting sellers in online marketplaces to drive revenue, and better positioning brands in online advertising on social media platforms. In addition, TELUS International offers social media strategy consulting, content moderation policy and guidelines design, and channel enablement. The company partners with clients across media, financial services and fintech, games, travel, healthcare, e-commerce, consumer packaged goods, and retail industries in over 50 markets in more than 40 languages. Today's consumers are willing to help combat toxic or misleading UGC, with 66% reporting having flagged instances to brands. Respondents also indicated that many companies can provide a more timely response as less than a third (32%) of people received a response within 24 hours. In terms of actions they want to see taken by brands, 69% of those surveyed said they want the brand to remove the content, while 46% want a direct response about the actions the brand has taken and 40% want the offending user banned, at least temporarily. "Facing a state of a near infocalypse on social media with deep fakes, spam, bad actors, and the sheer exponential growth of user-generated content, both customers and brands want a more protected online environment. Together with the shift to social media marketing and sales, this change is fueling the global social media CX services market, which is expected to reach $6.5 billion in 2024," said Ivan Kotzev, customer experience lead analyst at NelsonHall. "Increasingly, companies look to partner with a trusted provider to benefit from multicultural and multimarket experience to improve social media CX at a local level. They also expect close to real-time customer and market insights at a granular level to enhance customer satisfaction, build brand loyalty, and grow revenue through cross-sell and upsell opportunities on digital channels." The survey findings are based on a Pollfish survey that was conducted on June 7, 2021, and included responses from 1,000 Americans familiar with the definition of user-generated content. About TELUS International TELUS International (NYSE and TSX: TIXT) designs, builds and delivers next-generation digital solutions to enhance the customer experience (CX) for global and disruptive brands. The company's services support the full lifecycle of its clients' digital transformation journeys and enable them to more quickly embrace next-generation digital technologies to deliver better business outcomes. TELUS International's integrated solutions and capabilities span digital strategy, innovation, consulting and design, digital transformation and IT lifecycle solutions, data annotation and intelligent automation, and omnichannel CX solutions that include content moderation, trust and safety solutions and other managed solutions. Fueling all stages of company growth, TELUS International partners with brands across high growth industry verticals, including tech and games, communications and media, eCommerce and fintech, healthcare, and travel and hospitality. Learn more at: telusinternational.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005298/en/

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[June 29, 2021] Signify Health and Humana Team Up with the Alamo Area Community Network to Address the Social Care Needs of Humana Medicare Advantage Members in San Antonio

Signify Health (NYSE: SGFY) and Humana (NYSE: HUM) are working together with the Alamo Area Community Network (AACN) to support Humana Medicare Advantage members in San Antonio through AACN's community resources and by connecting those in need with health-related social services, such as food, transportation, housing, and financial assistance. This move enhances the community efforts that Humana has built over its now six-year Bold Goal journey to address health-related social needs. The AACN is a partnership of over 40 organizations, with countless programs and services that are committed to working together to effectively impact social determinants of health (SDOH) for San Antonio residents. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005412/en/ "It's not enough to just support our community partners in their work. In order to create real change, we, as a community, are rethinking the way we approach social health and clinical health. By joining the Alamo Area Community Network, we are able to integrate the way we address health-related social needs into the same system as our San Antonio community partners," said Humana Texas Medicare President Bill White. The nonprofits, government agencies, providers, payers, and other social service organizations that are a part of the AACN, which use Signify Health's proprietary technology platform, are able to collaborate compliantly and securely to assure people's needs are being addressed and close the loop on referrals between AACN participants. The partnership will not only ensure needs are being met and that community services are being accessed, but will create an understanding of the effects on clinical outcomes for individuals and families over time. AACN's innovative approach continues to support community members like never before, as adoption grows and an increasing number of people are getting the assistance they need. Community-based organizations helping to meet needs will be able to more effectively manage their resources and know their clients bette. The AACN is convened by the Kronkosky Charitable Foundation and cofounded by Autism Lifeline Links, United Way of San Antonio and Bexar County and the Warm Springs Foundation.



"True collaboration across such a broad spectrum of organizations - social service providers, healthcare providers, philanthropies, government agencies, health plans - is only possible through trust. Humana is a trusted influencer in San Antonio and a great partner for the AACN," said Cara Magrane, Director of Initiatives and Partnerships, Kronkosky Charitable Foundation. Humana's partnership with the AACN continues its commitment to increasing the number of Healthy Days for San Antonio residents. Through the establishment of the San Antonio Health Advisory Board, Bold Goal has facilitated cross-sector groups in creating community-wide initiatives to impact diabetes, food insecurity, and loneliness and isolation. Through the tenure of the San Antonio's Bold Goal, San Antonio has seen an 8.6% reduction in unhealthy days for Humana Medicare Advantage members.

Signify Health's partnership with Humana also includes Signify Health's experienced Social Care Coordinators who will provide outreach to Humana members to help them resolve their unmet needs and achieve their best health and well-being. "Signify Health is guided by a commitment to be a catalyst for changing a model of care that has left far too many clinical, behavioral and social care needs unaddressed," says Peter Boumenot, Chief Product Officer, Signify Health. "Through our partnership with Humana and the AACN, we are able to connect more San Antonians with the services that can help them overcome barriers to their health and, at the same time, create collaborative care communities of organizations aligned around measurably improving health outcomes for the people they serve." Humana recognizes and champions innovation within communities, where the co-creation of solutions through community partnerships and collaboration is shaping the future of healthcare. About Signify Health Signify Health is a leading healthcare platform that leverages advanced analytics, technology, and nationwide healthcare provider networks to create and power value-based payment programs. Our mission is to transform how care is paid for and delivered so that people can enjoy more healthy, happy days at home. Our solutions support value-based payment programs by aligning financial incentives around outcomes, providing tools to health plans and healthcare organizations designed to assess and manage risk and identify actionable opportunities for improved patient outcomes, coordination and cost-savings. Through our platform, we coordinate what we believe is a holistic suite of clinical, social, and behavioral services to address an individual's healthcare needs and prevent adverse events that drive excess cost, all while shifting services towards the home. For more information on how we are taking health homeward, visit us at signifyhealth.com. About Humana Humana Inc. is committed to helping our millions of medical and specialty members achieve their best health. Our successful history in care delivery and health plan administration is helping us create a new kind of integrated care with the power to improve health and well-being and lower costs. Our efforts are leading to a better quality of life for people with Medicare, families, individuals, military service personnel, and communities at large. To accomplish that, we support physicians and other health care professionals as they work to deliver the right care in the right place for their patients, our members. Our range of clinical capabilities, resources and tools - such as in-home care, behavioral health, pharmacy services, data analytics and wellness solutions - combine to produce a simplified experience that makes health care easier to navigate and more effective. More information regarding Humana is available to investors via the Investor Relations page of the company's web site at www.humana.com, including copies of: - Annual reports to stockholders

- Securities and Exchange Commission filings

- Most recent investor conference presentations

- Quarterly earnings news releases and conference calls

- Calendar of events

- Corporate Governance information About Alamo Area Community Network The Alamo Area Community Network is an alliance of more than 40 community organizations working to improve the health and well-being of individuals and families in the San Antonio region. It was convened in 2019 by the Kronkosky Charitable Foundation and Autism Lifeline Links with their co-founders United Way of San Antonio and Bexar County, and the Warm Springs Foundation. The AACN brings together human service and nonprofit organizations, funders, government agencies, healthcare and health plans on a cloud-based, HIPAA compliant platform to coordinate social services. AACN members believe that social, economic and environmental factors such as access to developmental services, childcare, healthy food, social services, and transportation play the greatest role in determining an individual's well-being. The AACN looks to bridge community-based organizations with clinical providers and payers to achieve more equitable reimbursement for services which improve health outcomes, while striving to advance our community's health equity, by more effectively coordinating to provide these critical services. For more information visit us at ouraacn.org. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005412/en/

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[June 29, 2021] Unified VoC Analytics Platform Wonderflow Raises $20 Million in Series B Funding led by Klass Capital

AMSTERDAM, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Wonderflow , a leading Unified VoC Analytics platform, announced today that it has raised $20 million in Series B Funding led by Toronto-based Klass Capital - a long term-oriented growth equity firm that invests in enterprise software businesses. Existing investors, including Italian venture capital firm P101 , ITALIA 500 (Azimut Group) and renowned Dutch top manager Jan Bennink, also participated in the financing round.

This is the third financing round for Wonderflow, which has now raised $25M to date. Wonderflow makes Voice of the Customer (VoC) data valuable for businesses allowing brands to make winning decisions based on customer feedback. The start-up assists brands like Philips, Colgate-Palmolive, Uber, DHL, Delonghi, Reckitt Benckiser, Beiersdorf, Beko, Samsung, GSK, Lavazza, Grundig, Kantar and many more. The funding will be used to consolidate Wonderflow's leadership in creating and distributing predictive technologies based on VoC. The company aims to further strengthen its position in the European market by hiring new talent across its three offices in Amsterdam, Milan, and Trento. Wonderflow also aims to expand internationally by launching a new office in North America. Wonderflow makes VoC data valuable for businesses. Today, most enterprises that generate a large amount of unsolicited customer feedback are not able to properly leverage the data they have collected. Through its proprietary AI, Wonderflow can analyze all unstructured feedback, from multiple sources, and help brands improve the overall customer experience. Wonderflow is part of the VoC analytics sector. According to the most recent estimates by Gartner this market is steadily growing at approximately 20% to 25% per year, which has driven the VoC application software market size above $2 billion. Wonderflow was founded in 2014 by Italian entrepreneurs Riccardo Osti, Giovanni Gaglione, and Michele Ruini. Despite th pandemic, the company has grown more than 100% in the last 12 months. Wonderflow assists brands like Philips, Colgate-Palmolive, Uber, DHL, Delonghi, Reckitt Benckiser, Beiersdorf, Beko, Samsung, GSK, Lavazza, Grundig, Kantar and many more.



Today, approximately 50 people work in Wonderflows offices located in Amsterdam, Milan, and Trento. The founders have built a business environment rich in values and diversity as the company has employees from more than ten nationalities and over 60% of team members are women. Furthermore, the team includes senior executives and serial entrepreneurs who have advanced knowledge in the Customer Experience (CX) industry, particularly when it comes to driving customer insights through AI and Big Data. Wonderflow is recognized as the only HOT Vendor in the feedback analytics category in Europe by Aragon Research, Ovum, and OMDIA. Riccardo Osti, CEO of Wonderflow, stated that:

"Our partnership with Klass represents an important step in our global expansion plan. We will continue investing in Artificial Intelligence to strengthen our leadership in Natural Language Processing, Prediction, and Narrative Insights. We will grow our teams in Europe and North America to offer increasingly strong support to our enterprise customers."

Daniel Klass, Founder and Managing Partner of Klass Capital, stated that:

We're impressed with Wonderflow's cutting-edge technology and culture of innovation. The way Wonderflow uses advanced AI to analyze customer feedback is clearly disrupting the market. During the time we spent with Riccardo and the Wonderflow team, we were struck by their tenacity and collaborative approach with their partners. Were excited to start working with Wonderflow to help them scale and become the new global standard in customer feedback analysis. About Wonderflow

Wonderflow is an AI-based analytics platform that enables global brands to make winning decisions listening to the actual Voice of the Customer. Founded in 2014 by Italian entrepreneurs Riccardo Osti, Giovanni Gaglione and Michele Ruini, and backed by high-profile investors, Wonderflow assists global brands like Philips, Colgate-Palmolive, and De'Longhi Group in their path to become more consumer-centric. For more information, visit www.wonderflow.ai About Klass Capital

Klass is a Toronto-based growth equity firm that is passionate about helping software companies scale to become world-leading organizations. Klass takes a long-term approach to investing and is highly focused on adding value to its partners. Klass has invested in over 20 high-growth SaaS companies across North America and Europe. For more information, visit www.klass.com About P101 SGR

P101 SGR is one of the leading venture capital firms in Italy, investing in digital and technology-driven companies in Europe. Founded in 2013 by Andrea Di Camillo, it is supported by Azimut, Fondo Italiano di Investimento, European Investment Fund, Fondo Pensione BCC, Cassa Forense, as well as some of the main Italian entrepreneurial families. P101 SGR currently manages two funds, as well as the first VC retail investment fund, developed in collaboration with Azimut Group. Managing assets for over  200 million, P101 has invested in more than 40 tech companies, including BorsadelCredito.it, Cortilia, Milkman, MusixMatch, and Tannico. For more information, visit www.p101.it Wonderflow  Press Office Contacts

Michele Ruini - CMO - +39 329 05 34 211 - mike@wonderflow.ai

Paul Wilke - Upright Position Communications on behalf of Wonderflow - +1-415-215-8750 - paul@uprightcomms.com A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/85e46552-d4cc-4ae5-a200-0e4eb91bbfd0



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[June 29, 2021] Sustainable Electric Motor Company Enedym Inc. Secures $15 Million Investment to Accelerate Business Plan

Enedym, the technology company that develops next generation electric propulsion and electrified powertrains, today announced a $15 million financing round from an international group of strategic investors within the U.S., Canada, Europe, and India; including P&A Paletta Giving Inc., TRIO Capital Group Inc., Napino Group, KWG Capital Inc., Pathfinder Asset Management Limited, and others. The new investment will be used to accelerate Enedym's patented motor development technology and increase its footprint within the massive electric motor market, helping OEMs within automotive, micromobility, windfarm, and industrial markets transition to electrification faster and at lower cost. Headquartered at the McMaster Innovation Park in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, Enedym is capitalizing on the global megatrend of electrification, and within the rapidly transforming transportation industry. The Company is focused on the digitization of next-generation electric propulsion and electrified powertrains. Enedym has ownership of over 50 patents and significant IP in the space. "Enedym has a completely transformative solution within the transportation electrification segment that builds on its comprehensive IP, its powerful digital design tools, and its high-profile strategic mass production partnerships around the world. Dr. Emadi and the Enedym team have unmatched research and industry expertise that uniquely positions the company to capitalize on the sizeable electric motor market opportunity. We are thrilled to support Enedym as they grow," said Paul Paletta, President of TRIO Capital Group Inc. "A decade ago, Dr. Emadi established a world-leading research program to disrupt the design of electric motors," said Karen Mossman, McMaster University's vice-president, research. "His team's success has been remarkable and, in just a few short years, since the transfer of this technology to Enedym, they have developed innovative and software tools that will enable rapid transformation across multiple industries." The Enedym team has developed a disruptive way to design electric motors at a fraction of the time and cost of existing methods. Currently, a significant number of propulsion motors use expensive rare earth metalssourced predominantly from China in their permanent magnets. Enedym motors eliminate these costly magnets and replace them with novel Switched Reluctance Motors (SRMs). By removing the permanent magnets, the replacement SRMs have the potential to reduce the cost of propulsion motors by as much as 40%. Other advantages of SRMs, in addition to a low-cost structure, include high efficiency at high-speeds, fault tolerant operation, and the suitability to operate in harsh environments and at high temperature conditions. While SRMs have traditionally had challenges in the areas of acoustic noise, torque ripples, and power density, Enedym has successfully addressed these problems resulting in motors that are quiet, smooth, highly efficient, and power dense.



"Napino group has continuously endeavoured to invest in disruptive and pioneering electric vehicle technologies to promote green and sustainable future. Napino believes that Enedym's patented SRM technology is a strong alternative to the conventional motor technologies. This innovative solution also reduces the over dependency on rare earth magnets and sourcing challenges associated with it," said Vaibhav Raheja, Joint Managing Director, and Naveen Kumar, CEO, Napino Group, in a joint statement. "We are excited to welcome our new investors. Having the financial and strategic support of these sophisticated investors both validates our market opportunity and strengthens our momentum as a company," said Dr. Ali Emadi, Founder, President, and CEO of Enedym.

Dr. Emadi added, "This investment will help us ramp up our operations and grow our team. We are laser focused on strengthening our position as a leading transportation electrification company and accelerating our mission to target many electric motor applications and global markets at an unprecedented speed and scale." About Enedym Inc. Enedym is a technology start-up company from McMaster University. The company is headquartered at the McMaster Innovation Park in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Enedym has ownership of over 50 patents and pending patent applications and related inventions developed by the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Hybrid Powertrain Dr. Ali Emadi and his research group at the McMaster Automotive Resource Centre (MARC), McMaster University. Enedym's vision is to reduce the cost of electric propulsion motors significantly and power a new paradigm in the electric motor industry through novel switched reluctance motor (SRM) drive technologies. Enedym aspires to help save the planet, one electric motor market at a time. To learn more about Enedym, please visit www.enedym.com and our YouTube (News - Alert) channel at Enedym YouTube. About Napino Napino Group, a technology leader in automotive electronics space, is a Tier 1 supplier of proprietary automotive solutions to the global original equipment manufacturers. It is a $230 million Group by turnover. Napino is rapidly expanding its footprints with growing market share across all its product lines. It endeavours to deliver high technology and quality products to its customers. For more information about the Group and its businesses, please visit website at www.napino.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005130/en/

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[June 29, 2021] York County, PA Moves to Online Sheriff Sales with National Software Provider Realauction.com

YORK, Pa., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Sheriff's Office of York County will soon be holding their monthly Sheriff Sales online via an easy-to-use system provided by Realauction.com. Moving online will help the county to hold their sales without large public gatherings, thus helping to alleviate the spread of COVID-19. It will also open the county's sale up to a larger audience of bidders, resulting in a higher likelihood of those properties to be returned to the tax rolls. The new platform will allow bidders to view the list of properties being sold while keeping track of the auction in real time. All deposits and payments are made electronically. Deposits will be applied toward winning payments if applicable, & refunded if the bidder does not win. Prospective bidders can complete their research on the site as well  including links to such sites as the Assessment and Tax Claim Office. Any questions will be answered by Realauction.com's dedicated Customer Service Department. "We are excited to move to this online portal for our Sheriff Sales & are confident it will greatly improve the overall efficiency of our sales now and in the future.", said Richard Keuerleber, York County Sheriff. "Realauction.com was chosen due to their proven track record and user friendly software  plusthere's no cost to the County whatsoever."



Realauction.com's CEO, Lloyd McClendon said "Entering into the state of Pennsylvania was a logical next step for us, and we expect to be adding many more PA counties in the months to come." If you would like more information about Realauction.com, please visit their website at www.realauction.com. About Realauction.com

Realauction.com is an online auction software provider headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, FL. The company has been hosting online Sheriff's Sales, Tax Sales, Foreclosure Sales and Tax Lien Sales since 2005. Serving over 300 counties in 12 states, Realauction.com runs online sales for some of the largest metropolitan counties in the US including Miami-Dade, FL; Dallas, TX; Denver, CO; and Newark, NJ. For more information, please visit their website at www.realauction.com, or call their Customer Service Department at 1-877-361-7325. Contact: Mia Ahmed, Sales Director

Phone: (954)734-7400 X243

Email: mahmed@realauction.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/realauction View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/york-county-pa-moves-to-online-sheriff-sales-with-national-software-provider-realauctioncom-301320573.html SOURCE Realauction.com, LLC

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[June 29, 2021] New Health Disparities Report Reveals Urgent Need to Address Maternal Mortality, Mental and Behavioral Health, and Food Insecurity in the U.S.

The United Health Foundation, the philanthropic foundation of UnitedHealth Group (NYSE: UNH), released its inaugural America's Health Rankings Health Disparities Report, highlighting persistent and widening gaps in health and well-being by race and ethnicity, gender, geography and educational level. The report, and associated interactive website, builds on more than three decades of data and reporting from America's Health Rankings, and provides a comprehensive portrait of the breadth, depth and persistence of disparities in population health over time, in an effort to spark meaningful dialogue and action to advance health equity. Importantly, the report focuses on pre-pandemic data, providing an in-depth baseline measure of the magnitude of health disparities. UnitedHealth Group plans to use the findings of this report as a critical source of information to fulfill its mission of making the health system work better for everyone. Key findings of the report at the national level include: Deep and persistent disparities in mental and behavioral health by gender, educational attainment, and race and ethnicity, which have worsened for certain groups, particularly those without a high school education and females. For example, in the 2017-2019 time frame, adults with less than a high school education had a rate of frequent mental distress that was 123% higher than college graduates, and females had a 70% higher rate of depression compared to males.

Persistent and growing disparities in maternal mortality, including ongoing disparities among Black mothers who face a maternal mortality rate that is 3.4 times higher than Hispanic mothers. Rates of maternal mortality increased 55% for white mothers, 23% for Hispanic mothers, and 22% for Black mothers between 2005-2009 and 2015-2019.

Wide and growing disparities in household food insecurity, most notably for American Indian/Alaska Natives. In fact, this subpopulation experienced a 39% rate increase between 2003-2007 and 2015-2019.

A strong link between educational attainment and health, with those without a high school education facing the greatest social, economic and health challenges, and the largest health disparities. "Race and ethnicity, gender, geography, educational attainment and income level should not limit one's acess to health care, or the determinants and outcomes that contribute to our overall well-being," said Dr. Rhonda Randall, chief medical officer of UnitedHealthcare Employer and Individual, part of UnitedHealth Group. "Our 330,000 team members are dedicated to addressing health disparities and closing gaps in care for the most vulnerable populations."



The broad range of disparities, across multiple factors, is indicative of the work ahead to achieve more equitable health outcomes. In addition to national findings, America's Health Rankings includes state highlights where progress has been made and challenges persist, allowing local health officials and policymakers to better focus their efforts. "The America's Health Rankings Health Disparities Report is an excellent pre-pandemic baseline report for health and elected officials, and other stakeholders," said Georges C. Benjamin, MD, executive director of the American Public Health Association. "It provides actionable data that is relevant to leaders, not only in public health, but also across many sectors."

State-specific findings illustrate the vast differences across populations and states. For example: Child poverty rates varied widely, with South Dakota - the state with the highest disparities - exhibiting child poverty among American Indian/Alaska Natives at more than 10 times the rate than white children in Connecticut.

In Hawaii - the state with lowest disparities in child poverty - Hispanic children had a nearly 2 times higher rate of poverty than white children.

Food insecurity in North Dakota among Black households was nearly 20 times higher than white households in the District of Columbia.

In 2015-2019, Georgia, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah and Wyoming (all five states without Medicaid expansion prior to 2020) had the highest racial and ethnic disparities in rates of uninsured within their states, while Hawaii, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York and Vermont (all five states that expanded Medicaid in 2014) had the lowest disparities.

Many states with high rates of Black infant mortality have not made meaningful improvements. In particular, Black infants in Alabama, Oklahoma and West Virginia had an infant mortality rate that was 2.2 times higher than the national average in 2015-2018 - rates that have largely remained unchanged.

The states with the lowest rates of infant mortality are located in the Northeast and on the West Coast. However, even within these states, Black infants continue to face wide disparities, including rates that are 2 to 3 times higher than infants with the lowest rate in each state. "The America's Health Rankings Health Disparities Report provides a unique, data-driven analysis that identifies disparities not only according to race and ethnicity, but also gender, geography and education level. Through new analyses, this report provides public health officials and lawmakers with state-specific findings on their state's largest disparities so they can plan better strategies to address them," said Judy Monroe, MD, president and CEO, CDC Foundation. The America's Health Rankings Health Disparities Report draws on data across 30 measures of health, including social, economic and environmental determinants of health as well as health outcomes, to demonstrate the progress achieved and the challenges faced by a variety of population groups at the national level, and in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. UnitedHealth Group and America's Health Rankings

For more than 30 years, UnitedHealth Group has used findings from America's Health Rankings reports, along with additional data and insights from the organization's 330,000 employees, to devise and deliver targeted, meaningful solutions that address America's health disparities - in health care, insurance, clinical expertise and financial support. UnitedHealth Group partners with national and local organizations, government agencies, experts and lawmakers to further improve and better target these solutions, and help all people live healthier lives. In the past decade alone, UnitedHealth Group has invested nearly $23 million in new and emerging strategies to address maternal mortality, and in 2020 donated nearly 70 million meals to national and state-based organizations to address acute needs brought on by the pandemic. Learn more about UnitedHealth Group's commitment to building a sustainable health care system in the company's annual Sustainability Report. About America's Health Rankings

For over three decades, America's Health Rankings has assessed the nation's health and provided data-driven insights to support better health outcomes and build healthier communities. Produced by the United Health Foundation, America's Health Rankings evaluates a comprehensive set of health, environmental and socioeconomic data to illuminate both health challenges and successes, determine national and state health benchmarks, and enable stakeholders to take action in improving health. About the United Health Foundation

Through collaboration with community partners, grants and outreach efforts, the United Health Foundation works to improve our health system, build a diverse and dynamic health workforce and enhance the well-being of local communities. The United Health Foundation was established by UnitedHealth Group (NYSE: UNH) in 1999 as a not-for-profit, private foundation dedicated to improving health and health care. To date, the United Health Foundation has committed more than $500 million to programs and communities around the world. To learn more, visit UnitedHealthFoundation.org. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005267/en/

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[June 29, 2021] Fujitsu Teams Up with the Telecom Infra Project to Deliver Open RAN-Compliant 5G Radios

Fujitsu Network Communications, Inc. is collaborating with the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) OpenRAN Project Group to accelerate adoption of open radio access network infrastructure, helping service providers speed new 5G services to market at reduced costs. With commercial 5G deployments gaining momentum worldwide, an increasing number of network service providers are embracing Open RAN technologies to take advantage of greater component choice, reduced costs and improved network performance. The TIP OpenRAN Project Group strives to create a robust and sustainable ecosystem for open infrastructure compliant with 3GPP and O-RAN ALLIANCE specifications. As a pioneer in the development of open, disaggregated technology, Fujitsu (News - Alert) is contributing 5G multi-band O-RAN compliant radios to the TIP OpenRAN project group. The dual-band and tri-band radios are certified by Fujitsu and listed on the TIP Exchange marketplace, allowing service providers to quickly find interoperable solutions and reference designs for 4G and 5G networks.



The multi-band Fujitsu radios feature an open interface radio unit (RU) and world-class power efficiency. The radios also feature a new algorithm for wideband operation with digital pre-distortion compensation (DPD), and a new amplifier technology optimized for wideband signal transmission. "Availability of Open RAN-compliant radios is key to enabling service providers to quickly and efficiently build out tomorrow's 5G networks," said Dr. Femi Adeyemi, head of the wireless business unit at Fujitsu Network Communications (News - Alert) , Inc. "As a longstanding proponent of open networking, Fujitsu is committed to helping advance the adoption of Open RAN infrastructure through our innovative O-RAN radio technology."

"The development of a vibrant ecosystem will allow mobile network operators to select best-of-breed components from an increasing number of suppliers," said David Hutton, chief engineer, TIP. "Fujitsu's contributions to the TIP OpenRAN project group and its commitment to self-certification of its products according to the requirements of operators within the Project Group are an important part of our efforts to continually improve performance of the RAN through innovation, automation and competition." The Telecom Infra Project (TIP) is a global community of companies and organizations working together to accelerate development and deployment of open, disaggregated and standards-based technology solutions that deliver the high quality connectivity that the world needs - now and in the decades to come. About Fujitsu Fujitsu is the leading Japanese information and communication technology (ICT) company offering a full range of technology products, solutions and services. Approximately 126,000 Fujitsu people support customers in more than 100 countries. We use our experience and the power of ICT to shape the future of society with our customers. Fujitsu Limited (TSE:6702) reported consolidated revenues of 3.6 trillion yen (US$34 billion) for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2021. For more information, please see https://www.fujitsu.com/. About Fujitsu Network Communications Inc. Fujitsu Network Communications, Inc. is a leading provider of digital transformation solutions for network operators, service providers and content providers worldwide. We combine best-in-class hardware, software and services with multivendor expertise to enable cost savings, faster services delivery and improved network performance. Working closely with our customers and ecosystem partners, we design, build, operate and maintain better networks for the connected world. For more information, please see http://us.fujitsu.com/telecom or connect with us on LinkedIn (News - Alert) at www.linkedin.com/company/Fujitsu-network-communications. Fujitsu (and design), 1FINITY, Virtuora and "shaping tomorrow with you" are trademarks of Fujitsu Limited in the United States and other countries. All rights reserved. All other company or product names mentioned herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. Information provided in this press release is accurate at time of publication and is subject to change without advance notice. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005245/en/

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[June 29, 2021] Cheniere Publishes 2020 Corporate Responsibility Report

Cheniere Energy, Inc. ("Cheniere") (NYSE American: LNG) today published its 2020 Corporate Responsibility (CR) report, titled Built for the Challenge. The report details Cheniere's strategy and progress on environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues, and highlights the company's resiliency, responsible actions and response during a period overshadowed by the global COVID-19 pandemic. The report also spotlights Cheniere's recent efforts on integrating climate considerations into its business strategy and taking a leadership position on increased environmental transparency, including conducting a climate scenario analysis aligned with TCFD recommendations, and announcing the company's plan to provide LNG customers with Cargo Emissions Tags. "For Cheniere, 2020 will be remembered as a year when our business and people were tested like no other and proved that we really are Built for the Challenge," said Jack Fusco, Cheniere's President and Chief Executive Officer. "Whether it was keeping our workplace safe and healthy during the COVID-19 pandemic and multiple hurricanes, addressing Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, or taking action on integrating climate into our platform, 2020 was a year of remarkable progress and triumph in the face of significant challenges." Built for the Challenge is online at cheniere.com/IMPACT The report aligns with recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), the Sustainable Accounting Standards Board (SASB) and other leading reporting standards. It documents Cheniere's progress across six focus areas- Climate, Environment, Team, Health and Safety, Community and Governance. It also includes three global issue features on the energy transition; Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; and Cheniere's COVID-19 response. Highlights from the report include:



Zero employee recordable injuries and zero known COVID-19 workplace transmissions during 2020.

$3.6 million in direct community funding, COVID-19 relief and regional recovery assistance related to Hurricanes Laura and Delta.

Over 33% reduction of scope 1 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions intensity since startup of commercial LNG export operations in 2016.

Inclusion of an ESG metric for performance-based compensation determinations that accounts for 10% of the total annual incentive program scorecard value for 2021. Built for the Challenge builds on Cheniere's inaugural CR report published last year -- First and Forward - and the company's overall efforts to continually benchmark and assess Cheniere's actions on key ESG issues. For more information, please visit cheniere.com. About Cheniere

Cheniere Energy, Inc. is the leading producer and exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG) in the United States, reliably providing a clean, secure, and affordable solution to the growing global need for natural gas. Cheniere is a full-service LNG provider, with capabilities that include gas procurement and transportation, liquefaction, vessel chartering, and LNG delivery. Cheniere has one of the largest liquefaction platforms in the world, consisting of the Sabine Pass and Corpus Christi liquefaction facilities on the U.S. Gulf Coast, with expected total production capacity of approximately 45 million tonnes per annum of LNG operating or under construction. Cheniere is also pursuing liquefaction expansion opportunities and other projects along the LNG value chain. Cheniere is headquartered in Houston, Texas, and has additional offices in London, Singapore, Beijing, Tokyo, and Washington, D.C. For additional information, please refer to the Cheniere website at www.cheniere.com and Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2021, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains certain statements that may include "forward-looking statements" within the meanings of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. All statements, other than statements of historical or present facts or conditions, included herein are "forward-looking statements." Included among "forward-looking statements" are, among other things, (i) statements regarding Cheniere's financial and operational guidance, business strategy, plans and objectives, including the development, construction and operation of liquefaction facilities, (ii) statements regarding expectations regarding regulatory authorizations and approvals, (iii) statements expressing beliefs and expectations regarding the development of Cheniere's LNG terminal and pipeline businesses, including liquefaction facilities, (iv) statements regarding the business operations and prospects of third parties, (v) statements regarding potential financing arrangements, (vi) statements regarding future discussions and entry into contracts, (vii) statements relating to the amount and timing of share repurchases, and (viii) statements regarding the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on our business and operating results. Although Cheniere believes that the expectations reflected in these forward-looking statements are reasonable, they do involve assumptions, risks and uncertainties, and these expectations may prove to be incorrect. Cheniere's actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements as a result of a variety of factors, including those discussed in Cheniere's periodic reports that are filed with and available from the Securities and Exchange Commission. You should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this press release. Other than as required under the securities laws, Cheniere does not assume a duty to update these forward-looking statements. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005694/en/

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[June 29, 2021] Scottish Futures Trust, with Pioneer Consulting and FarrPoint, releases 'North-Eastern Scotland: Subsea Connectivity Feasibility Study'

The report lays logistical groundwork for a Scottish subsea telecom cable landing

EDINBURGH, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Pioneer Consulting , the full-service submarine fiber optic telecommunications consulting and project management company, partnered with UK connectivity consultancy FarrPoint to release a new report: North-Eastern Scotland: Subsea Connectivity Feasibility Study. Pioneer Consulting and FarrPoint were contracted by infrastructure experts, the Scottish Futures Trust (SFT) to investigate the cost, complexity, and deliverability of a number of subsea fiber options from the north coast of Scotland to Edinburgh. SFTs Host in Scotland program aims to attract new international subsea fiber and data center infrastructure to Scotland. The northernmost coast of Scotland offers immense capacity for tidal power generation. One option to capitalize on this potential, while supporting the nationwide growth of technologies such as 5G, AR/AI and IoT, is to build a data center. This new report explores the feasibility of connecting such a northern data center to Edinburgh via telecommunications cables, and analyzes the cost, complexity and deliverability differential between a terrestrial route and subsea options. The 74-page report, which is now available to the public on the Host in Scotland website (www.hostinscotland.com), includes overviews of cable construction options and trends, a review of existing infrastructure and potential landing partners, and analysis of marine obstructions  from hard constraints like shipwrecks and energy installations, to soft constraints like commercial fishing zones and nature conservation areas. The report includes recommendations for the design and construction of optimal routes, including potential build schedules and suppliers. It also includes an appendix containing carbon emissions calculations for all potential builds, an element that has not been previously explored. This report demonstrates that including subsea portions can significantly reduce the cost of an otherwise terrestrial cable route, said Iain Ritson, Director of Client Solutions at Pioneer Consulting. We hope this study helps inform and empower the countrys effort to encourage more direct international fiber-optic connectivity for Scotland as the nation boosts its support of bandwidth-heavy technologies.



This was a really interesting project to undertake, as it investigates the options for using subsea cables to improve the resilience of connectivity in Scotland and provide added routes into the more rural areas, said Andrew Muir, CEO of FarrPoint. The analysis we completed in partnership with Pioneer Consulting provided all the detail required to fully understand the options, deployment considerations, and costs. This is the first Scottish subsea connectivity infrastructure report that includes the carbon emission calculations for such a build. With tight net-zero targets ahead, such assessments should become an essential part of any infrastructure consideration. James King, Chairman of Host in Scotland, said "This report adds to the body of information that will be utilized in order to develop a subsea cable landing plan for Scotland as set out in the Scottish Government's recently published Green Datacentres and Digital Connectivity - a Vision and Action Plan for Scotland and we look forward to developing our ideas further in the coming months."





The report can be accessed here: https://hostinscotland.com/page/reports About Pioneer Consulting

Pioneer Consulting offers a comprehensive set of services for the submarine fiber optic telecommunications system industry. The company provides clients with valuable technical and commercial insight into the challenging issues facing this unique industry. Recognizing the diverse nature of the submarine telecommunications marketplace, Pioneer Consulting has built a team of industry-leading experts who are able to work across traditional boundaries and provide businesses with the strategic intelligence and operational skills needed to make long-term engineering and business decisions and deliver results. To learn more about the services Pioneer Consulting offers, please visit: https://www.pioneerconsulting.com/ . About FarrPoint

FarrPoint is an independent technology consultancy which specializes in digital connectivity.

FarrPoint provides independent advice on the commercial and technical considerations of the design of national and regional connectivity strategies, technical planning and modelling, procurement support and implementation assurance. Its team includes a mix of consulting technologists, economists, and data scientists who work together to provide experience, expertise, and complementary resources to clients in the public and private sectors. Find out more about FarrPoint and its services at https://www.farrpoint.com/ . About the Scottish Futures Trust

Established by Scottish Government as a center of infrastructure expertise, the Scottish Futures Trust provides additional skills, resources, and knowledge to public sector organizations, helping them plan, fund, deliver, and manage their infrastructure and buildings better. https://www.scottishfuturestrust.org.uk About Host in Scotland

SFTs Host in Scotland program was created in 2017 as an umbrella organization to represent and promote the interests of the Scottish data center industry. Its aim is to promote new investment in the sector, be it from existing operators seeking to expand or new entrants to Scotland. https://www.hostinscotland.com Media Contact:

Ariane Mandell

Trevi Communications

ariane@trevicomm.com A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/c5a27eed-c393-48d7-809a-c662db48e060



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[June 29, 2021] Vyopta Introduces Advanced Experience Monitoring

AUSTIN, Texas, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Vyopta, the Collaboration Intelligence Company, today announced the addition of Advanced Experience Monitoring capabilities to its Collaboration Performance Management (CPM) suite. The new functionality cements Vyopta's position as the leader in digital experience monitoring for collaboration. "While our customers are in varied industries, they all need visibility and monitoring to understand the health of their environments and the digital experience of their end users," said Jonathan Sass, Vyopta's VP of Product Management. "We're offering them the most robust monitoring solution in the industry that enables them to hone into a VIP's user experience or zoom out to better understand what is going on with the entire environment." Vyopta's new Advanced Experience Monitoring features help users quickly detect and investigate common collaboration issues, by: Proactively identifying degraded experiences of users in key roles to catch more high-stress and/or revenue-loss related incidents

Avoiding "noise" and false positives with higher thresholds and the ability to toggle between modalities and media direction

Determining if issues are stemming from spiking CPU use, external problems, or from the company's network

Empowering collaborationengineers to customize settings to their particular environment and what they feel is important or relevant



Alfredo Ramirez , CEO of Vyopta."This level of granularity along with troubleshooting will help IT teams make recommendations for minimum Internet connectivity requirements, headsets, and other tweaks that can be made at home to create a more stable hybrid work model." Related

Vyopta Unveils Advanced Intelligent Monitoring Engine

Vyopta Announces Real-time Quality Monitoring for Cisco Webex

Vyopta Improves UC and Video Collaboration Troubleshooting for IT Support Teams About Vyopta Incorporated

Vyopta , the Collaboration Intelligence company, is a global leader in comprehensive monitoring and analytics for Collaboration Performance Management and Workspace Insights. By integrating insights from multi-vendor Unified Communications & Collaboration vendors and IOT devices, Vyopta helps organizations deliver the best UC user experience and optimize their UC and real estate investments. Vyopta helps hundreds of organizations worldwide spanning 20+ industries monitor 6 million endpoints and over 20 billion meeting minutes a year. View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/vyopta-introduces-advanced-experience-monitoring-301322055.html SOURCE Vyopta Inc

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[June 29, 2021] Oxford Finance Provides $27.5 Million Credit Facility to Cascades Healthcare

Oxford Finance LLC ("Oxford"), a leading specialty finance firm providing senior debt to healthcare services and life sciences companies worldwide, today announced the closing of a $27.5 million senior credit facility to Cascades Healthcare ("Cascades" or "the Company"), an owner and operator of long term care facilities. The funds were used for the acquisition of four skilled nursing facilities ("SNFs") located in Texas containing 647 licensed beds. Cascades Healthcare was founded in 2016 to build and coordinate a network of associated senior care. The Company currently operates 19 SNFs in Utah, Idaho, and Texas, as well as providing operational support to three home health and hospice companies and managing a multi-state contract therapy company. "Oxford is pleased to complete our first transaction with Cascades," said Tracy S. Maziek, head of healthcare services at Oxford. "The team at Cascades operates with a cear mission-combining clinical expertise with a true appreciation for each patient they encounter and their unique challenges."



"With their vast expertise in the healthcare sector, Oxford was an obvious choice as a financial partner," added Darin McSpadden, CEO of Cascades Healthcare. "The team was able to quickly recognize our needs, provide flexible solutions, and execute the transaction as promised." About Oxford Finance LLC

Oxford Finance is a specialty finance firm providing senior secured loans to public and private life sciences and healthcare services companies worldwide. For over 20 years, Oxford has delivered flexible financing solutions to its clients, enabling these companies to maximize their equity by leveraging their assets. In recent years, Oxford has originated over $7 billion in loans, with lines of credit ranging from $5 million to $150 million. Oxford is headquartered in Alexandria, Va., with additional offices in San Diego, Calif.; Palo Alto (News - Alert) , Calif.; and the greater Boston and New York City areas. For more information, visit https://oxfordfinance.com/ View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005085/en/

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[June 29, 2021] Kane Biotech to meet investors at Whistler 2021 Capital Conference

WINNIPEG, Manitoba, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Kane Biotech Inc. will host investor meetings at the 10th Annual Whistler 2021 Capital Conference hosted by Capital Event Management the weekend of July 9-11, 2021 at The Fairmont Chateau, Whistler.

Kane Chief Executive Officer, Marc Edwards will be hosting onsite meetings with several current and potential investors throughout a full day of 1-on-1 meetings and a series of networking activities throughout the weekend. For a company like Kane, the Whistler conference has provided valuable exposure to an active group of investors in an environment which allows for meaningful long-term relationships to develop with significant players in the capital markets, commented Edwards. This year is especially exciting as we return to a new normal and meet with Kane investors in-person, we have a lot of new and exciting developments that are creating momentum across all three of our strategic pillars: animal health; OTC consumer goods; and, wound care. The discussions with investors will focus on these three strategic business lines, and highlight: The progress being made through Kanes STEM animal health partnerships, and the traction its gaining in pet oral care, itself a $5 billion market opportunity.

partnerships, and the traction its gaining in pet oral care, itself a $5 billion market opportunity. OTC consumer goods ; A growing portfolio of products in development as the company is actively pursuing appropriate licensing opportunities with several potential partners.

; A growing portfolio of products in development as the company is actively pursuing appropriate licensing opportunities with several potential partners. And, in wound care, Kanes continued progress with its DispersinB  wound gel program and development of a coactive+ surgical gel. The business has been awarded US$2.7 million in non-dilutive funding by the US Department of Defense to further develop DispersinB  -based products as well as $3.8 million in interest-free repayable contributions from Western Economic Diversification Canada. An expanding pipeline of partner opportunities is being pursued with discipline.

Kanes continued progress with its DispersinB wound gel program and development of a coactive+ surgical gel. The business has been awarded US$2.7 million in non-dilutive funding by the US Department of Defense to further develop DispersinB -based products as well as $3.8 million in interest-free repayable contributions from Western Economic Diversification Canada. An expanding pipeline of partner opportunities is being pursued with discipline. And, with respect to corporate developments, over 6.2 million warrants have been exercised by insiders, institutions and long-term individual investors. This represents approximately 13% of the total number of warrants outstanding, all of which expire between December 2021 and February 2022. The dilutive impact of these warrants is expected to be more than offset by the potential benefits that the cash injections of exercising provide the company, allowing it to make investments that will ultimately generate significant returns.



here. About Kane Biotech

Kane Biotech is a biotechnology company engaged in the research, development and commercialization of technologies and products that prevent and remove microbial biofilms. The Company has a portfolio of biotechnologies, intellectual property (54 patents and patents pending, trade secrets and trademarks) and products developed by the Company's own biofilm research expertise and acquired from leading research institutions. StrixNB, DispersinB, Aledex, bluestem, bluestem, silkstem, goldstem, coactiv+, coactive+, DermaKB and DermaKB Biofilm are trademarks of Kane Biotech Inc. The Company is listed on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol "KNE" and on the OTCQB Venture Market under the symbol KNBIF.

For more information, please visit kanebiotech.com , or contact: Marc Edwards Chief Executive Officer Kane Biotech Inc medwards@kanebiotech.com +1 (514) 910-6991 Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Caution Regarding Forward-Looking Information

This press release contains certain statements regarding Kane Biotech Inc. that constitute forward-looking information under applicable securities law. These statements reflect managements current beliefs and are based on information currently available to management. Certain material factors or assumptions are applied in making forward-looking statements, and actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in such statements. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, risks relating to the Companys: (a) financial condition, including lack of significant revenues to date and reliance on equity and other financing; (b) business, including its early stage of development, government regulation, market acceptance for its products, rapid technological change and dependence on key personnel; (c) intellectual property including the ability of the Company to protect its intellectual property and dependence on its strategic partners; and (d) capital structure, including its lack of dividends on its common shares, volatility of the market price of its common shares and public company costs. Further information about these and other risks and uncertainties can be found in the disclosure documents filed by the Company with applicable securities regulatory authorities, available at www.sedar.com. The Company cautions that the foregoing list of factors that may affect future results is not exhaustive.





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WekaIO Announces Support of NVIDIA's Turbocharged HGX AI Supercomputing Platform

WekaIO (Weka), one of the fastest-growing data platforms for artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML), life sciences research, and high-performance computing (HPC), today announced the WekaFS Limitless Data Platform's ability to leverage the newly-turbocharged NVIDIA HGX AI supercomputing platform to deliver the best performance and throughput required of today's most-demanding enterprise workloads.

The NVIDIA (News - Alert) HGX platform supports three key technologies: the NVIDIA A100 80GB GPU; NVIDIA NDR 400G InfiniBand networking; and NVIDIA Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage software.

Weka's launch-day support of NVIDIA's next-generation technologies is the result of a close collaborative relationship between the companies and the continued commitment by Weka to provide customers with the latest features needed to best help store, protect, and manage their data.

WekaFS recently delivered among the greatest aggregate NVIDIA Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage throughput numbers of all storage systems tested at Microsoft (News - Alert) Research. Tests were run on a system that has WekaFS deployed in conjunction with multiple NVIDIA DGX-2 servers in a staging environment and allowed engineers to achieve the highest throughput of any storage solution that had been tested to date.i This high-level performance was achieved and verified by running the NVIDIA gdsio utility as a stress test and it showed sustained performance over the duration of the test.

"Advanced AI development requires powerful computing, which is why NVIDIA works with innovative solution providers like WekaIO," said Dion Harris at NVIDIA. "Weka's support for the NVIDIA HGX reference architecture and NVIDIA Magnum IO ensures customers can quickly deploy world-leading infrastructure for AI and HPC workloads across a growing number of use cases."

Different stages within AI data pipelines have distinct storage requirements for massive ingest bandwidth, need mixed read/write handling and ultra-low latency, and often result in storage silos for each stage. This means business and IT leaders must reconsider how they architect their storage stacks and make purchasing decisions for these new workloads. Leveraging the upgrades to NVIDIA's platform, customers are better able to take advantage of significant performance gains with far less overhead, process data faster while minimizing power consumption, and increase AI/ML workloads while achievin improved accuracy.







Using WekaFS in conjunction with the new additions to the NVIDIA HGX AI supercomputing platform provides channel partners with the opportunity to deploy high-performance solutions to a growing number of industries that require fast access to data - whether on premises or in the cloud. Industries we serve that require an HPC storage system that can respond to application demands include manufacturing, life sciences, scientific research, energy exploration and extraction, and financial services.

"NVIDIA is not only a technology partner to Weka but also an investor," said Liran Zvibel, Co-founder and CEO at WekaIO. "As such, we work closely to ensure that our Limitless Data Platform supports and incorporates the latest improvements from NVIDIA as they become available. We have overcome significant challenges to modern enterprise workloads through our collaborations with leading technology providers like NVIDIA and are looking forward to continuing our fruitful relationship into the future."

WekaFS is the world's fastest and most scalable POSIX-compliant parallel file system, designed to transcend the limitations of legacy file systems that leverage local storage, NFS, or block storage, making it ideal for data-intensive AI and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. WekaFS is a clean-sheet design integrating NVMe-based flash storage for the performance tier with GPU servers, object storage, and ultra-low latency interconnect fabrics into an NVMe-over-Fabrics architecture, creating an extremely high-performance scale-out storage system. WekaFS performance scales linearly as more servers are added to the storage cluster allowing the infrastructure to grow with the increasing demands of the business.

Additional resources:

About WekaIO

WekaIO (Weka) is used by eight of the Fortune 50 enterprise organizations to uniquely solve the newest, biggest problems holding back innovation and discovery. Weka solutions are purpose-built to future-ready the accelerated and agile data center. Optimized for NVMe-flash and the hybrid cloud, its advanced architecture handles the most demanding storage challenges in the most data-intensive technical computing environments, delivering truly epic performance at any scale, enabling organizations to maximize the full value of their data center investments. Weka helps the enterprise solve big IT infrastructure problems to accelerate business outcomes and speed productivity. For more information, go to https://www.weka.io.

Follow WekaIO: Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook

WekaIO, WekaFS, Weka AI, Weka Innovation Network, Weka Within, Weka AI logo, WIN logo, Weka Within logo, and the WekaIO logo are trademarks of WekaIO, Inc.

i Performance numbers shown here with NVIDIA GPUDirect Storage on NVIDIA DGX A100 slots 0-3 and 6-9 are not the officially supported network configuration and are for experimental use only. Sharing the same network adapters for both compute and storage may impact the performance of standard or other benchmarks previously published by NVIDIA on DGX A100 systems.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005396/en/
[June 29, 2021] Persistent Systems delivers on protected communications contract with U.S. Army C5ISR Center

NEW YORK, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Persistent Systems, LLC ("Persistent") announced today that it has completed work on its $5.4M contract with the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command C5ISR Center to develop protected communications for Manned-Unmanned Teams (MUM-T). As part of the 18-month-long contract, Persistent worked with the C5ISR Center's Space and Terrestrial Communications Directorate to harden the company's mobile ad hoc networking (MANET) firmware, used in all its hardware devices, to counter jamming and hacking threats to MUM-T operations. "MUM-T envisions warfighters controlling and operating alongside unmanned systems," said Brian Soles, Vice President of Government and Military Relations and Business Strategy for Persistent. "The Army's Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle, for example, is meant to be networked with Robotic Combat Vehicles." All of this requires a robust, secure, and high-throughput communications network. "Our MANET solution is designed to keep pace with EW and cyber threats from near-peer powers," said Rahul Pandya, Programs Manager for Persistent. "In fact, it was the very first solution validated by the Army's electronic warfare lab." The protections developed by Persistent are "always on," so no product configuration is require, Pandya added. The capability is a firmware upgrade, compatible with all of Persistent's Wave Relay MANET devices, and customers will get it for free as a part of their regular firmware updates.



In addition to the hardened firmware, Persistent's work with the C5ISR Center has led to the creation of the GVR5, a new dual-band MANET radio for combat vehicles. Developed in conjunction with General Dynamics Mission Systems, the GVR5 operates on two frequency bands, simultaneously enabling continuous connectivity in RF-contested environments. The system delivers automated PACE (Primary, Alternate, Contingency, and Emergency) communications, enabling it to automatically select the best performing frequency band to ensure robust communication.

"The GVR5 is a mature and robust solution," Soles said. "We've already seen a lot of interest in the product from various services as well as international allies." The Persistent team appreciates the support, collaboration, expertise, and teamwork from the U.S Army C5ISR Center. Working together, we are able deliver a more robust capability to the warfighter. About Persistent Systems, LLC Headquartered in New York City since 2007, Persistent Systems, LLC is a global communications technology company that develops and manufactures a patented and secure Mobile Ad hoc Networking (MANET) system: Wave Relay. Wave Relay transmits and receives data, video, voice and other applications under the most difficult conditions. Their suite of products is utilized in Commercial, Military, Government, Industrial, Agriculture, Robotics, and Unmanned Systems markets. Please visit http://www.persistentsystems.com to learn more. Follow Persistent Systems on Twitter to get updates on the latest developments @pswaverelay. View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/persistent-systems-delivers-on-protected-communications-contract-with-us-army-c5isr-center-301322148.html SOURCE Persistent Systems, LLC

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[June 29, 2021] Consumers Feel Big Tech Companies Have Too Much Power and Require More Stringent Regulation

Nearly two-thirds of consumers in the United States feel big tech companies wield too much power and more than half feel the US government should act to curb their influence. Further, such sentiments are consistent across political party lines. These findings come from a new study, Big Tech Under Pressure: How to Navigate Disruption and Come Out on Top, from Escalent-a top human behavior and analytics advisory firm with extensive experience counseling big tech firms around the world. "Technology has grown to disrupt and interact with every part of consumers' daily lives," said Nancy Arter, senior vice president of the technology and telecommunications practices at Escalent. "As a result, those disruptors must now face broad societal challenges, including data management, security, information bias, misinformation and censorship. In essence, tech has become a sector that impacts every other industry each and every day." Escalent conducted the study in response to growing public and legislator outrage and scrutiny over the roles big tech companies have played in highly polarizing political and social situations in the past several yeas, including the January 6 assault on the US Capitol, the pandemic, and social unrest following the murder of George Floyd. In particular, Escalent sought to understand how big tech firms' stances and business practices may impact brand loyalty and defection among consumers.



Among the key takeaways: Nearly two-thirds (64%) of consumers across all party lines feel that tech companies have too much power, while over half (55%) feel that the government should impose more regulations. Consumers primarily care about four essential qualities when buying from or using services provided by big tech brands: Value : Products that make consumers' lives easier Security : Tech companies that keep consumers' information secure and private Business ethics : Tech companies that treat employees fairly Community : The ability to connect with family, friends and loved ones

While consumers don't want big tech to be too powerful, they also want big tech to be powerful enough to continue to make positive impacts on their lives through the products and services these brands provide. To learn more, including the actions consumers take in response to big tech business practices, what consumers hope to achieve by taking such actions, and what brands can do to positively engage their audiences and customers, download the full white paper.

About the Study Escalent interviewed 1,057 respondents online from April 14 to 20, 2021. The study was sampled within the United States and consisted of a general population audience of men and women age 18 to 65, with balanced representation across regions. To qualify, respondents had to be employed, retired or a student and knowledgeable about current events. The data have a margin of error of +/-2 percentage points at a confidence level of 95%. Escalent will supply the exact wording of any survey question upon request. About Escalent Escalent is a top human behavior and analytics advisory firm specializing in industries facing disruption and business transformation. As catalysts of progress for more than 40 years, we transform data and insight into a profound understanding of what drives human beings. And we help businesses turn those drivers into actions that build brands, enhance customer experiences and inspire product innovation. Visit escalent.co to see how we are helping shape the brands that are reshaping the world. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005791/en/

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[June 29, 2021] FDA Grants Rafael Pharmaceuticals Orphan Drug Designation for CPI-613 (Devimistat) for Treatment of Biliary Cancer

CRANBURY, N.J., June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Rafael Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (Rafael or the Company), a leader in the growing field of cancer metabolism-based therapeutics, announced today that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted orphan drug designation for CPI-613 (devimistat) for the treatment of biliary cancer. Biliary cancer, which includes gallbladder cancer and bile duct cancer (which is also known as cholangiocarcinoma), is classified as a rare disease, affecting just 12,000 people in the United States each year , respectively . Biliary cancer appears when cancer cells form in the bile ducts or gallbladder, an essential aspect of the gastrointestinal system. Biliary cancer is often identified as an advanced stage cancer and considered aggressive with only modest response to existing treatment options for patients, said Vaibhav Sahai, MBBS, M.S., Associate Professor of Medical Oncology at The University of Michigan Medicine and the principal investigator on the Phase 1b/2 clinical trial of devimistat in combination with gemcitabine and cisplatin for patients with biliary cancer, announced last year. The orphan drug designation for devimistat showcases the importance of discovering these new treatment options. Biliary cancer affects a small subset of cancer patients, but the unique complexities of the disease create an incredible need to investigate and identify effective treatments, said Sanjeev Luther, President and CEO of Rafael Pharmaceuticals. Therapies developed for hard-to-treat cancers need to consider the unique and complex intricacies of eachdisease. Having effective treatment options available to patients significantly improves the outlook for patients diagnosed with a rare cancer.



Devimistat has been granted orphan drug status by the FDA for the treatment of pancreatic cancer, acute myeloid leukemia (AML), myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), Burkitts lymphoma, peripheral T-cell lymphomas, and soft tissue sarcoma, and now, biliary cancer. With this, devimistat reaches 7 designations in total, making it one of the few compounds to have achieved this milestone. These designations support a future for therapies that focus on cancer metabolism. About CPI-613  (devimistat)

CPI-613 (devimistat) is a first-in-class clinical lead compound of Rafael, which targets enzymes that are involved in cancer cell energy metabolism and are located in the mitochondria of cancer cells. Devimistat is designed to target the mitochondrial tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle, a process essential to tumor cell multiplication and survival, selectively in cancer cells. Devimistat substantially increases the sensitivity of cancer cells to a diverse range of chemotherapeutic agents. This synergy allows for potential combinations of devimistat with lower doses of these generally toxic drugs to be more effective with lower patients side effects. Combination with devimistat represent a diverse range of opportunities to substantially improve patients benefit in many different cancers. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given Rafael approval to initiate pivotal Phase 3 clinical trials in pancreatic cancer (AVENGER 500) and acute myeloid leukemia (ARMADA 2000) and has designated devimistat as an orphan drug for the treatment of pancreatic cancer, acute myeloid leukemia, myelodysplastic syndrome, peripheral T-cell lymphoma, Soft Tissue Sarcoma, Burkitts lymphoma and biliary cancer. The EMA has granted orphan drug designation to devimistat for pancreatic cancer and acute myeloid leukemia.

About Rafael Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Rafael Pharmaceuticals is a leader in the growing field of cancer metabolism. The company is developing a new, first-in-class category of metabolic oncology therapeutics that attack hard-to-treat cancers by targeting the metabolic processes the disease needs to survive, grow and proliferate. Rafael Pharmaceuticals lead compound, CPI-613 (devimistat), is a highly selective, well-tolerated and effective anti-cancer agent that is being evaluated in ongoing and completed Phase 1, 2 and 3 clinical trials. Devimistat has been granted orphan drug status by the FDA for the treatment of pancreatic cancer, acute myeloid leukemia (AML), myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), Burkitts lymphoma, peripheral T-cell lymphomas, soft tissue sarcoma, and biliary cancer. The Company's investors include Rafael Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: RFL). For more information, please visit www.rafaelpharma.com. On June 21, 2021, we announced that we have entered into a merger agreement with Rafael Holdings, Inc., to create a publicly-traded late-stage clinical oncology company focused on cancer metabolism-based therapeutics. For more information, visit www.rafaelholdings.com. Safe Harbor Statement

This press release contains forward-looking statements. These statements relate to future events or the companys future financial performance. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by terminology such as "may", "will", "should", "expect", "plan", "anticipate", "believe", "estimate", "predict", "potential" or "continue", the negative of such terms, or other comparable terminology. These statements are only predictions. Actual events or results may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, such statements should not be regarded as a representation by the company, or any other person, that such forward-looking statements will be achieved. The business and operations of the company are subject to substantial risks which increase the uncertainty inherent in forward-looking statements. We undertake no duty to update any of the forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. In light of the foregoing, readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements. ### Rafael Media Contact:

Diana Cleinmark

rafael@antennagroup.com

(408) 713-1216



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[June 29, 2021] As drought drives an early California Wildfire season, Delos affirms its commitment to the California homeowners' insurance market

SAN FRANCISCO, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The 2020 California wildfire season had some unprecedented behavior, and due to continuing effects of climate change and severe drought conditions, 2021 could offer even more surprises, according to wildfire experts at Delos Insurance Solutions, a San Francisco-based homeowners' insurance MGA. The unexpected changes over the last five years have driven many insurance carriers to pull back from large segments of the California homeowners insurance market, creating a crisis of insurance availability and affordability for millions of California families living in wildfire-stressed areas. Many insurance carriers have decided that homes in areas potentially exposed to wildfire are uninsurable or not insurable at affordable rates. As a result, some homeowners have seen their policies non-renewed, while others have experienced sharp premium increases. Delos research indicates that it doesn't have to be that way. Delos uses satellite imagery and models based on machine learning algorithms to quantify a home's actual wildfire exposure  differentiating beteen "exposed" properties and properties that are in stressed areas but are far less exposed to wildfire. Not every home in wildfire-stressed areas is insurable, but many homes are less vulnerable and should be eligible for less costly coverage.



"More than ever, California homeowners need reliable insurance protection at a more affordable price," according to Kevin Stein, co-founder and CEO of Delos Insurance Solutions. "Unfortunately, during this time of crisis, when it is most needed, reasonably-priced insurance can be nearly impossible to find. As an MGA, focused exclusively on the needs of homeowners in wildfire-stressed zones, we remain committed - along with our carrier partners - to insuring homes in California regions that have few options due to even the slightest perception of exposure to wildfire. Our goal is to grow our network of carriers and reinsurers so that we can offer peace of mind to even more California homeowners." David Shew, with 31 years in fire suppression experience and a retired CalFire Chief, is an advisor to Delos. "Using satellite imagery and proprietary modeling, Delos is able to underwrite homes in areas that have been largely abandoned by much of the rest of the insurance industry. As we head into the new fire season that has all of the Western US on edge, the market requires a different underwriting model," said Shew. "Rather than an approach that rests on traditional methods, the increasing complexity and variability of this risk requires the enhanced technology, data, and analytics that Delos has pioneered."

About Delos Insurance Solutions Delos Insurance Solutions uses cutting-edge technology to offer insurance protection to homeowners in communities abandoned by other insurers because of wildfire risk. Founded in San Francisco in 2017 by aerospace engineers, Delos uses satellite imagery and artificial intelligence to identify insurable homes within territories deemed too risky by the rest of the insurance market. Delos is a Managing General Agent (MGA) offering policies on behalf of Canopius US Insurance, which is rated "A-" (Excellent) by AM Best. View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/as-drought-drives-an-early-california-wildfire-season-delos-affirms-its-commitment-to-the-california-homeowners-insurance-market-301322124.html SOURCE Delos Insurance Solutions

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[June 29, 2021] inVia Robotics announces channel partner network with more than 10 partners

WESTLAKE VILLAGE, Calif., June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- inVia Robotics , the provider of next-generation warehouse automation solutions, today announced agreements with more than 10 companies currently providing technology solutions in warehouses. The agreements are part of a comprehensive channel partner program designed to supplement inVia's direct selling initiatives through new channels, including international markets. It expands the company's capacity to provide its AI-driven optimization software and autonomous mobile robots to e-commerce fulfillment centers at a time when warehouses are being pressured to automate in order to keep up with growing consumer demand . As part of the program, partners can integrate inVia's automation service offerings into the solutions they provide to their customers. Participating companies are strategically selected to enable integrations with complementary technologies that increase the value and ROI available to retailers and third-party logistics poviders.



Companies currently participating in the program as Certified Partners include Argon Consulting, Atlantic Packaging, Conveyor Logistics, Innovation-Matrix, Midland Packaging, Pregis, Ryuu, STG Chile, and Storage Solutions Inc. In addition, the inVia channel program includes alliance agreements with a variety of companies that provide complementary offerings to inVia's comprehensive Robotics-as-a-Service (RaaS) automation systems. Pregis is one of the companies to join the channel partner program. As partners, inVia and Pregis will work together to integrate AI-driven software and autonomous mobile robots with automated poly bagging systems to extend automation across the fulfillment process, delivering greater operational efficiencies and faster cycle times. InVia services will be an integral component of Pregis' entire line of packing solutions.

"As a part of the inVia channel program, we are able to integrate inVia's market-leading automation technology with our integrated packaging systems to extend the value we bring to our customers' operations," said Tom Wetsch, chief innovation officer of Pregis. "inVia's unique ability to automate retrieval of goods with a system that is flexible and can scale pairs perfectly with the breadth of our end-of-line product offerings." "Our goal is to bring every efficiency we can into our customers' warehouse operations in order to enable exponential growth for their business," said Lior Elazary, chief executive officer and co-founder of inVia Robotics. "Strategic channel partners such as Pregis are critical in helping us integrate systems across the warehouse and ensure goods, people, and equipment are all flowing." About inVia Robotics

inVia Robotics is a robotics company that provides the next generation of warehouse automation solutions. Our system helps e-commerce businesses move products through fulfillment centers much more efficiently with our mobile robots and AI-driven software. It dramatically increases productivity and accuracy and minimizes labor management - all at a fraction of the cost of traditional automation. To learn more visit www.inviarobotics.com . About Pregis

Pregis LLC is a customer-driven solutions provider of innovative protective packaging materials, equipment systems and surface protection. As a material neutral company, the company works with its customers to find the right solution to solve their business challenges. Pregis serves a wide variety of consumer and industrial market segments including food, pharmaceutical, healthcare, medical devices, agricultural, e-commerce, retail, automotive, transportation, furniture, electronics, building, construction and military/aerospace. For more information: www.pregis.com . Contact: Jenny Bourne, jenny@bamcommunications.biz View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/invia-robotics-announces-channel-partner-network-with-more-than-10-partners-301322137.html SOURCE inVia Robotics

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[June 29, 2021] IndexIQ Launches New ESG Core Plus Bond ETF "ESGB" in Partnership with MacKay Shields

IndexIQ today announced the launch of its newest ETF - the IQ MacKay ESG Core Plus Bond ETF (ESGB or the Fund). The Fund focuses on investment in securities within the core bond universe that satisfy environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria developed by MacKay Shields (MacKay), a fellow New York Life Investments boutique and a global asset manager focused on fixed income and equity investing. ESGB is an actively managed strategy that seeks total return across a broad portfolio of fixed income securities, while incorporating MacKay's ESG analysis framework. Through selection and portfolio construction, the portfolio prioritizes issuers that demonstrate strong performance relative to peers across certain ESG metrics. MacKay's Senior Portfolio Managers in Global Fixed Income Stephen Cianci, Neil Moriarty, Alexandra Wilson-Elizondo and Joseph Cantwell serve as Co-Portfolio Managers of ESGB. Collectively, the Global Fixed Income team has more than $40 billion in assets under management, as of May 31, 2021, and a long-standing track record managing fixed income strategies across the globe. With proprietary research at the core of MacKay's approach to active management, the team utilizes an investment process that combines fundamental bottom-up research and top-down macroeconomic analysis with robust ESG elements. Janelle Woodward, President of MacKay Shields, commented: "As adoption and demand for ESG investment strategies grow in the fixed income marketplace, we saw a valuable opportunity to reflect our best thinking around ESG inclusion with ESGB, aligning the breadth of our internal research with our total return investment approach. Through the alignment of ESG values with our stakeholders, in our view ESGB can serve as a preferred solution for potential income generation and capital appreciation for both retail and institutional investors." Sal Bruno, CIO of IndexIQ, added: "With the launch of ESGB, we're excited to expand our existing ESG ETF lineup by building upon our partnership with MacKay Shields. We believe investors will recognize the potential benefits of working with a proven portfolio management team and investing in a fund that seeks to provide them broad fixed income exposure in the core bond category with an ESG lens that many investors value in their portfolios." ESGB's Investment Focus: ESGB invests at least 80% of its assets in debt or debt-related securities including government bonds, corporate bonds, mortgage and other asset-backed securities and could include fixed or floating rates of interest.

The Fund will generally seek to maintain a portfolio modified duration within 2.5 years (plus or minus) of the duration of the Bloomberg (News - Alert) Barclays U.S. Aggregate Bond Index.

The Fund will invest at least 80% of its assets in securities that meet MacKay's proprietary ESG methodology standards. IndexIQ's Expanding Actively Managed Fixed Income and ESG Lineup: /p> The Fund joins IndexIQ's solutions-driven ETF family and comes as an expansion of its actively managed fixed income lineup with MacKay, which includes the IQ MacKay Muni Insured ETF (MMIN) and the IQ MacKay Municipal Intermediate ETF (MMIT).

ESGB also illustrates IndexIQ's expansion of thoughtful ESG-focused offerings, including the IQ Healthy Hearts ETF (HART), the IQ Candriam ESG US Equity ETF (IQSU) and the IQ Candriam ESG International Equity ETF (IQSI).



About IndexIQ IndexIQ, a New York Life Investments company, is a provider of exchange-traded funds (ETFs), with a decade of offering highly differentiated and innovative solutions to retail and institutional investors. With $4.2 billion in assets under management as of December 31, 2020, IndexIQ leverages the asset management capabilities of New York Life Investments' multi-boutique platform into its suite of offerings which include: fixed income, equities, alternatives, ESG components and specialty asset classes. For additional information on IndexIQ, visit newyorklifeinvestments.com/etf or follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn.

About MacKay Shields MacKay Shields LLC (together with its subsidiaries, "MacKay")*, a New York Life Investments Company, is a global asset management firm with $158 billion in assets under management as of March 31, 2021. MacKay manages fixed income and equity strategies for high-net worth individuals and institutional clients, through separately managed accounts and collective investment vehicles including private funds, CLOs, UCITS, ETFs, closed end funds and mutual funds. MacKay maintains offices in New York City, Princeton, Los Angeles and Dublin. For more information, please visit www.mackayshields.com or follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn. *MacKay Shields is a wholly owned subsidiary of New York Life Investment Management Holdings LLC, which is wholly owned by New York Life Insurance Company. Investing involves risk, including loss on principal. Consider the Funds' investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses carefully before investing. The prospectus and the statement of additional information include this and other relevant information about the Funds and are available by visiting IQetfs.com or calling (888) 474-7725. Read the prospectus carefully before investing. Click on the fund name for the most current fund page, which includes, the prospectus, investment objectives, performance, risk, Morningstar ratings and other important information. Returns represent past performance which is no guarantee of future results. Current performance may be lower or higher. Investment return and principal value will fluctuate, and shares, when redeemed, may be worth more or less than their original cost. Visit nylinvestments.com/funds and for the most recent month-end performance. New York Life Investment Management LLC engages the services of federally registered investment advisors. MacKay Shields LLC is an affiliate of New York Life Investments. IndexIQ is an indirect wholly owned subsidiary of New York Life Investment Management Holdings LLC and serves as the advisor to the IndexIQ ETFs. ALPS Distributors, Inc. (ALPS) is the principal underwriter of the ETFs, and NYLIFE Distributors LLC is a distributor of the ETFs. NYLIFE Distributors LLC is located at 30 Hudson Street, Jersey City, NJ 07302. ALPS Distributors, Inc. is not affiliated with NYLIFE Distributors LLC. "New York Life Investments" is both a service mark, and the common trade name, of the investment advisors affiliated with New York Life Insurance Company. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005838/en/

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[June 29, 2021] Tiger Pistol Wins Distinguished 2021 Franchise Innovation Award

AUSTIN, Texas, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Tiger Pistol , the developers of the only Collaborative Advertising Platform that makes high performance social advertising simple and scalable for brands and their channel partners, recently won the Local Marketing Leadership Award in the prestigious Franchise Innovation Awards. "We're thrilled to be honored for this latest award, continuing our streak of more than 20 industry recognitions in the last 20 months," said Paul Elliott, CEO, Tiger Pistol. "Earning the distinguished Franchise Innovation Award demonstrates the power that our Collaborative Advertising Platform brings to the franchise advertising model, which requires a delicate balance between the needs of the brands and their franchise partners." Tiger Pistol's winning entry, Coldwell Banker Achieves Rebranding Success with Collaborative Social Advertising , highlighted Social Ad Engine, a purpose-built collaborative social advertising solution that pairs Coldwell Banker's real estate industry expertise with Tiger Pistol's knowledge of social advertising at scale. During the company's 2020 Project North Star rebrand, Coldwell Banker wanted a social advertising-focused rollout that empowered its agents and drove community connection, all while adhering to and promoting the new brand strategy. "Real estate transactions happen at the community level," said David Marine, Chief Marketing fficer at Coldwell Banker. "By empowering our agents with a hyperlocal collaborative solution like Social Ad Engine, we build brand equity while agents build trust within their communities. Tiger Pistol's technology enables these community connections and facilitates incredible results for our brand and agents."



The innovation of Social Ad Engine lies in the ability for agents to publish automatically-configured, high-performing Facebook and Instagram campaigns directly from their own Facebook Page. Social Ad Engine brought the power of Coldwell Banker's new branding to the local level with the ability for agents to personalize messaging alongside brand-controlled creative to ensure brand integrity. Affiliated agents and brokerages could now build local brand awareness and share a voice for themselves and their brokerage. "Every community has its own local dialect, landmarks, and culture," said Paul Elliott, CEO, Tiger Pistol. "By empowering agents to pair the power of their community knowledge with recognizable brand creative, agents can better reach and engage potential home buyers and sellers, while Coldwell Banker increases their brand awareness by reaching deeply into local communities."

The Franchise Innovation Awards by Franchise Update Media recognize the franchisors creating and implementing the most original and successful innovative strategies and tactics to build their brand. Judges evaluated the innovation, objectives, and results of more than 100 entrants. Tiger Pistol will be profiled in the third quarter edition of Franchise Update Magazine. About Tiger Pistol Tiger Pistol, the most award-winning social advertising platform of 2020, makes high performance collaborative advertising simple and scalable for brands and their channel partners, removing the barriers to customer acquisition and sales growth. Tiger Pistol's Collaborative Advertising Platform utilizes advanced technology and automation to unite brands with their channel partners (retailers, dealers, agents) to acquire and engage new customers within their local communities. As a long-standing Facebook Marketing Partner, Tiger Pistol is the largest third-party publisher of collaborative social ads in the world, supporting clients in 22 global markets with more than 500,000 campaigns published annually. Learn more by visiting TigerPistol.com , or following on Twitter , Facebook , or LinkedIn About Franchise Update Media Franchise Update Media has been a leader in the franchising space for more than 30 years. Founded in 1988, the company produces online franchise opportunity and educational websites, two quarterly print magazines, six newsletters, four annual conferences, independent research, and books, entirely focused on franchising. Targeting franchise audiences online, in print, and in person, Franchise Update Media delivers a unique combination of educational and lead generation sources to help franchisors, multi-unit franchisees, opportunity seekers, and suppliers achieve their growth objectives. For more information, visit franchising.com . CONTACT:

Christina Morello

Director, Marketing and Communications

christina.morello@tigerpistol.com

(330) 354-0899 View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/tiger-pistol-wins-distinguished-2021-franchise-innovation-award-301322073.html SOURCE Tiger Pistol

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[June 29, 2021] Canadian Fiber Optics Builds Fastest Residential Internet Network in Canada

Canadian Fiber Optics, Alberta-based rural internet service provider, privately funds Canada's first residential 10 Gigabit fiber optic network to support local community organizations, businesses and families, supporting jobs and spurring economic growth. VALLEYVIEW, AB, June 29, 2021 /CNW/ - Canadian Fiber Optics (CFOC) today announced the launch of Canada's fastest residential internet network through its Northern Lights Fiber (NLF) brand by offering 10 Gbps speeds to Valleyview's residential, business and industrial customers. Thousands of times faster than what is currently offered in most rural communities, the first customers will enjoy blazing fast internet late summer. Canadian Fiber Optics, privately funds Canada's first residential 10 Gigabit community in Northwestern Alberta . "We are very excited to be launching Canada's fastest residential internet in Valleyview, Alberta." stated Arjen Kaput, Co-founder and CEO of CFOC and NLF. "The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the need for everyone to have access to reliable and affordable high-speed internet. The whole community has been very supportive and great to work with and that has accelrated our decision to introduce 10Gbps technology which we believe is a game changer for our industry. Our rural communities deserve access to the very best technology available and today's announcement proves that rural Albertan communities can become connectivity and technology leaders in Canada."



"Reliable connectivity plays a critical role in the modern economy and for economic recovery and growth in Alberta," Service Alberta Minister Nate Glubish said, on hearing of the launch. "This project from Canadian Fiber Optics means that for the residential and business communities of Valleyview, new opportunities are available in education, innovation, and growth. Every investment that helps overcome the urban-rural divide is important and I'm excited to see this project move forward." "We are thrilled that CFOC, an Alberta based rural broadband provider, is globally connecting the residents and businesses of our active and bustling northern Alberta community, the Town of Valleyview. It has been a long time coming!!" said Mayor Vern Lymburner. "CFOC will not only speed up connectivity services for all existing businesses and residents alike with no interruptions or slow service through a 10 Gbps fiber optic network, it will also set our community up for growth opportunities enabling local and global commercial and industrial companies the ability to compete at international levels. Here's to our future as the Town is ready for all opportunities  we are open for business!!"

Trevor Ilg, a town resident states "Valleyview is incredibly fortunate to have a company providing this level of broadband speed to our community. It is future proofing the entire Town, giving us the ability to attract new technology and businesses, and greatly improve the services needed by the hospital, schools and college. Work is no longer based on location but on access to data and we are now able to be a part of that!" About Canadian Fiber Optics

Canadian Fiber Optics is a builder, owner, and operator of fiber optic networks, providing high-speed internet and connectivity solutions to communities, businesses and industry in Western Canada. Based in Calgary, Alberta with offices in Grande Prairie, Alberta and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, CFOC has deep roots in rural communities across the prairie provinces. Their passion lies in connecting rural Canada to high-speed fiber internet so communities and industry can continue to grow and thrive. Interested in learning more about all our community and industrial projects or in connecting your rural community, business or industrial site to our fiber network? Contact us at info@canadianfiberoptics.ca or contact Jodi Bloomer-Kaput, Co-Founder and Chief Business Development Officer, jodi@canadianfiberoptics.ca to set up a call or meeting. Related Links

https://canadianfiberoptics.ca/

www.lightupvalleyview.ca SOURCE Canadian Fiber Optics

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[June 29, 2021] Canada and FCM Announce New Green Investments in Northern Ontario Communities

ESPANOLA, ON, June 29, 2021 /CNW/ - In communities across the country, Canadians are experiencing the impacts of climate change. By investing in initiatives that lower emissions and increase the resiliency of communities, we are creating jobs and building Canada's low-emission energy future. The Honourable Patty Hajdu, Minister of Health, on behalf of the Honourable Seamus O'Regan Jr., Minister of Natural Resources, and Joanne Vanderheyden, President of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM), today announced a $1.4-million investment through FCM's Green Municipal Fund (GMF) to help reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in communities in Northern Ontario. The Town of Espanola will receive $1,276,500 for its biosolids management and digester optimization project. This initiative will improve treated effluent and operational reliability and provide a model for managing existing biosolids for small communities across Canada. The benefits of this project include reduced GHGs equivalent to 591 tonnes of carbon dioxide over the next 20 years, lowered energy consumption of 40 percent and $100,000 annual savings in biosolid hauling and treatment costs. The City of Timmins will receive $86,500 to investigate opportunities to transform its wastewater pollution control plant into a net-zero resource recovery facility by exploring source-separated organic availability and the most beneficial uses of increased biogas production. The City of Kenora will receive $40,000 to advance climate action with a Sustainable Neighbourhood Action Plan (SNAP) to reduce emissions, cut energy waste and move toward more sustainable sources of energy as part of its efforts to manage the effects of a changing climate. The Town of Bracebridge will receive $36,000 to study the feasibility of building a net-zero recreational and cultural centre that will include an ice rink. These varied initiatives highlight some of the ways that GMF continues to support transformative environmental initiatives at the community level and build on its 20-year record of environmental and economic impacts. The Government of Canada has invested $1.65 billion in GMF since its inception, enabling municipalities to support projects like these that leverage local resources to drive innovative solutions. Quotes "Local governments influence half of the country's greenhouse gas emissions. That means local action is critical. With support from the Green Municipal Fund, this is happening: municipalities of all sizes are implementing smart low-carbon solutions. Empowering this local expertise is vital to meeting Canada's climate goals. When orders of government work together to reduce emissions, we're building more resilient communities." Joanne Vanderheyden

President, Federation of Canadian Municipalities "Local green solutions create jobs, lower emissions and build a more prosperous and sustainable economy for all. This is how w get to net zero by 2050."



The Honourable Seamus O'Regan Jr.

Minister of Natural Resources "Tackling climate change is the challenge of our lifetime, but there are lots of great ideas about how to reduce emissions. The investment announced today will help local ideas come to life and support our region in becoming more sustainable. Every action counts, and these projects will help Canada meet our emissions target."

The Honourable Patty Hajdu

Minister of Health "Cities are key partners in pioneering practical climate solutions. Through the Green Municipal Fund, we're supporting municipalities in their efforts to lower emissions through projects like energy-efficient retrofits, electric and hybrid electric transit pilots and efficiencies in wastewater treatment. By working together, we can create good jobs and grow the economy, protect the environment and build cleaner, more inclusive communities." The Honourable Catherine McKenna

Minister of Infrastructure and Communities "Canadians in communities across the country are working hard to cut pollution and create jobs. Improving the energy efficiency of our homes and buildings will do just that while helping Canadians save on energy costs. Together, we are building a cleaner, healthier future for our children and grandchildren." The Honourable Jonathan Wilkinson

Minister of Environment and Climate Change "By investing in these initiatives, we're not only taking action to lower greenhouse gas emissions in Northern Ontario, we're also creating green jobs and more resilient and sustainable communities for Canadians." Marc G. Serre, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Natural Resources

Member of Parliament for Nickel Belt "The Town of Espanola is grateful to the Federation of Canadian Municipalities Green Municipal Fund for supporting our innovative biosolids management and digester optimization project. Our partnered commitment to this project will significantly reduce environmental impact and will increase operational efficiencies and cost savings in pursuit of a sustainable quality of life for our community." Jill Beer

Mayor, Town of Espanola "Any time we can talk about upgrading our current programs and services to a sustainable operation, it is positive news for the City. Add to that the possibility of adding a composting program, and we'll have a system in place that will greatly lower the City's carbon footprint. I want to thank Minister O'Regan, Canada's Minister of Natural Resources, and Joanne Vanderheyden, President of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, for helping us further explore this opportunity." George Pirie

Mayor, City of Timmins "The City of Kenora is thrilled to be one of four applicants to receive funding from the Green Municipal Fund through the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. This funding will help advance our Sustainability Action Plan and support our goal of developing projects with a local context and specific challenges and opportunities in Kenora. Climate change adaptation and mitigation are not the sole responsibility of one entity; they rely on collective action. We are excited to have this opportunity to work with our community partners to make meaningful changes in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, moving toward more sustainable energy sources, reducing waste and managing the impacts of a changing climate." Daniel Reynard

Mayor, City of Kenora "The Town of Bracebridge is delighted to be receiving funding from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities Green Municipal Fund. We will use this funding to support the cost of commissioning a study to investigate methods of achieving net-zero energy consumption on our new multi-use community centre. By partnering with us to complete this study, the Government of Canada and FCM are helping our Town find new and innovative ways to reduce our carbon footprint and demonstrate strong environmental stewardship, which is an important pillar of our Strategic Plan." Graydon Smith

Mayor, Town of Bracebridge Related products

Backgrounder: Canada and FCM announce new green investments in Northern Ontario communities Associated links

Green Municipal Fund

Investing in Canada: Canada's Long-Term Infrastructure Plan

Investing in Canada plan project map Follow us on Twitter: @NRCan (http://twitter.com/nrcan) SOURCE Natural Resources Canada

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[June 29, 2021] Rent-A-Center Raises Nearly $175,000 for Boys & Girls Clubs of America

Employees at Rent-A-Center, Inc. (RAC) recently joined forces for their annual Spring for Kids campaign, a fundraiser supporting family and youth empowerment efforts. This year, 100% of the funds raised over the course of the fundraiser were donated to Boys & Girls Clubs of America (BGCA)-a national, nonprofit organization which provides programs and services to promote and enhance the development of boys and girls by installing a sense of competence, usefulness, belonging and influence. BGCA's mission is to enable all young people, especially those most in need, to reach their full potential as productive, caring, responsible citizens by providing a safe place to learn and grow, developing ongoing relationships with caring, adult professionals and participating in life-enhancing programs and character development experiences. Due to the pandemic, this past year has created additional hardships, including food insecurity, uncertainty about the future, learning gaps and much more for kids across the country. RAC coworkers rallied together for the chance to raise money for a great cause in their communities and an all-out competition to see which stores could raise the most. During the course of the Spring for Kids campaign, employees based at the Field Support Center (FSC) in Plano, Texas, raised nearly $12,000 for Boys & Girls Clubs of Collin County, a local North Texas chapter. Additionally, throughout their stores, RAC employees raised a total of over $70,000 which will be donated to BGCA chapters across the U.S. and Puerto Rico, based on each store's location. Overall, through the combined RAC employee undraising efforts and the company donation match, RAC will contribute nearly $175,000 to strengthen youth empowerment in BGCA chapters across the country.



"Serving our communities and helping those in need has always been critically important to us. However, as children and families across the country continue to recover from the many challenges brought on by the pandemic, our support is more important than ever before," says CEO Mitch Fadel. "Rent-A-Center is proud to grow our partnership with BGCA and support their efforts to empower children and help them to thrive." "Youth empowerment is a vital component to allowing children to see and reach their full potential," says Jim Clark, President & CEO of BGCA. "As a pioneer in understanding social and emotional development of youth, we're so thankful for this generous donation from RAC to help provide more ways to instill a mindset of empowerment through community activation, elevating youth voice and other opportunities for Club kids nationwide."

About Rent-A-Center, Inc. A rent-to-own industry leader, Plano, Texas-based, Rent-A-Center, Inc. is focused on improving the quality of life for its customers by providing them the opportunity to obtain ownership of high-quality, durable products such as consumer electronics, appliances, computers, furniture and accessories, under flexible rental purchase agreements with no long-term obligation. About Boys & Girls Clubs of America For 160 years, Boys & Girls Clubs of America (BGCA.org) has provided a safe place for kids and teens to learn and grow. Clubs offer caring adult mentors, fun and friendship, and high-impact youth development programs on a daily basis during critical non-school hours. Boys & Girls Clubs programming promotes academic success, good character and leadership and healthy lifestyles. More than 4,700 Clubs serve over 4.6 million young people through Club membership and community outreach. Clubs are located in cities, towns, public housing and on Native lands throughout the country, and serve military families in BGCA-affiliated Youth Centers on U.S. military installations worldwide. National headquarters are located in Atlanta. Learn more about Boys & Girls Clubs of America on Facebook and Twitter. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005873/en/

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[June 29, 2021] Truyo Launches Free Adaptive Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) Tool

On the heels of the Colorado Privacy Act (CPA) legislation, Truyo, the leader in truly automated consent and data privacy rights management, has launched a free adaptive privacy impact assessment (PIA) tool that will become mission critical to privacy compliance. The PIA tool will enable organizations to evaluate privacy risks and mitigation of those risks, as well as prepare for compliance under the new privacy legislation to take effect in 2023. Currently, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires organizations that process consumers' personal information to complete privacy impact assessments and regular risk assessments on an ongoing basis. This will soon be a requirement under California's Consumer Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), Virginia's Consumer Data Protection Act (VCDPA), and the CPA if it's signed into law. Truyo's PIA tool enables organizations to see what personally identifiable information (PII) it has, where it is stored, where and how it is transmitted, which applications process it, and who can access it - information that is necessary for implementing privacy controls. The tool is also dynamic and adaptive, providing conditional questions based on the specific needs of the organization, as well applicable legal, privacy and data protection risks. "It's very likely the Colorado Privacy Act will pass and that will mean data privacy assessments will become a requirement for companies," said Dan Clarke, president of Truyo. "Companies will need to review their privacy procedures and they should start preparing sooner than later as this has become a 2021 agenda item. PIAs are a proactive step toward compliance and a good practice for privacy planning. As more privacy guidelines emerge, these assessments also help any organization regardless of industry or geographic exposure to know where it stands and prepare for the future." While the Virinia Consumer Data Protection Act does require data protection assessments, there are a number of exemptions. In Colorado, however, companies are very unlikely to be exempt.



"One of the more interesting parts of the Virginia and Colorado privacy acts is the requirement that companies complete data protection assessments. I'm frankly surprised the people that endorsed these bills in Colorado and Virginia didn't raise more red flags around the data protection assessment requirement," said David Zetoony, Co-Chair of Greenberg Traurig's the U.S. Data, Privacy & Cybersecurity Practice. "Both states have an open-ended requirement to conduct a protection assessment anytime there is a 'heightened risk' of harm to the consumer. That may end up being a pretty open-ended and subjective standard; companies really don't have proper notice as to what types of activities the attorneys general may argue require assessments. Both acts also challenge conceptual concepts of privilege when it comes to preparing legal opinions." The foundation of Truyo's cloud-based privacy impact assessment tool was developed by a nationally regarded law firm with extensive privacy experience, follows the NIST standard framework, and provides fully compliant risk assessment report documents with key compliance metrics. The Truyo PIA reveals:

personally identifiable information and how the organization collects, uses, manages and shares it;

potential privacy risks associated with the organization's data processing activities;

and answers to questions that clients, vendors and auditors may have regarding privacy compliance. "Because PIAs should be living documents that can be updated regularly as systems are changed and updated or data comes in from a new source, we made the Truyo PIA cloud-based so it can easily be revisited and accessed as needed," said Clarke. "Assessments can also be replicated so if a new PIA needs to be created, it doesn't require starting from scratch." To learn more about the Truyo privacy impact assessment (PIA) tool, visit truyo.com/assessment. About Truyo Truyo, an IntraEdge company, powered by Intel (News - Alert) , offers customers true consent and data privacy rights management automation. Specializing in privacy UX, Truyo has a nuanced understanding and a depth of experience in the operational delivery of privacy rights management creating better privacy rights and consent management experiences for users and companies. Through its Truyo Privacy Platform and Health-Check Management Solutions, Truyo enables global organizations to manage complex compliance requirements, minimize risk and deliver fast ROI. For more information, visit truyo.com. About IntraEdge IntraEdge is a large technology talent, products, services and training organization that functions with the agility of a significantly smaller firm. We provide our clients with the resources and expertise to enhance business performance through technology. We give our people the opportunity to grow in their fields, with the freedom to excel. For more information, visit intraedge.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005445/en/

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[June 29, 2021] LeaseLock Partners with MRI Software to Further Eliminate Security Deposits

LOS ANGELES, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- LeaseLock , the world's leading insurtech platform for enterprise real estate, today announced an expanded partnership with MRI Software , fully integrating Zero Deposit into the property management system's native workflow. "LeaseLock is a natively deployed solution that eliminates any out-of-workflow processing during the resident lifecycle," said Derek Merrill, founder and CEO of LeaseLock. "MRI clients can eliminate traditional deposits and deposit alternatives that offer inadequate coverage without burdening residents with outdated, off-system processes." LeaseLock is an AI-driven financial technology platform that integrates with a rental housing provider's native software system and existing online resident leasing process. Operators then market their communities as Zero Deposit, creating an affordable, seamless resident experience and conversion lift  while protecting their properties with $5,000 in rent loss and damage coverage on every new lease with the standard coverage plan. Meanwhile, residents are no longer saddled with expensive security deposits many cannot afford and that all to often provide operators with severely inadequate financial protection.



"We are excited to offer our clients the ability to integrate LeaseLock into their leasing processes," said Sean Slack, vice president of partnerships at MRI Software. "Giving MRI clients access to a growing ecosystem of innovative technologies is a key part of our open and connected approach to software, and we are proud to provide the multifamily industry with this integrated capability." NMHC Top 50 operator LeaseLock clients include Greystar, Cushman & Wakefield, Avenue5 Residential, Harbor Group Management, LLC, LMC, and RKW Residential. Top ownership clients include Goldman Sachs, ColRich, GoldCor, Olive Tree, TruAmerica, White Oak, Trinsic, Strata Equity Group, Goodman Real Estate, and Elevation Real Estate and Management.

LeaseLock integrates with all major property management systems, including Yardi, RealPage, Entrata, and Resman. The lease experience is seamless for residents, effortless for onsite teams, and fully integrated into enterprise back-office workflows. The insurtech platform provides on-demand access to asset performance metrics to quantify true enterprise impact, including bad debt reduction and NOI lift. About Us

LeaseLock is the world's leading insurtech platform for enterprise real estate. Our flagship lease insurance product leverages artificial intelligence to eliminate security deposits from enterprise operating infrastructurepowering a faster, simpler, more affordable rental transaction. LeaseLock seamlessly deploys within the native online leasing checkout, resulting in significant conversion liftwhile instantly generating industry-leading coverage for the property on every lease. LeaseLock has insured over $1 billion in leases backed by insurance rated A (Excellent) by A.M. Best. Our global investors include SoftBank Ventures Asia, Wildcat Ventures, Westerly Winds, Vertex Ventures US, Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures, American Family Ventures, Moderne Ventures, and Mucker Capital. About MRI Software

MRI Software is a leading provider of real estate software solutions that transform the way communities live, work and play. MRI's comprehensive, flexible, open and connected platform empowers owners, operators and occupiers in commercial and residential property organizations to innovate in rapidly changing markets. MRI has been a trailblazer in the PropTech industry for over five decades, serving more than two million users worldwide. Through leading solutions and a rich partner ecosystem, MRI gives real estate companies the freedom to elevate their business and gain a competitive edge. For more information, please visit mrisoftware.com . Media Contact:

LinnellTaylor Marketing

Marlena DeFalco

Account Director

(303) 682-3943

marlena@linnelltaylor.com View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/leaselock-partners-with-mri-software-to-further-eliminate-security-deposits-301322166.html SOURCE LeaseLock

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[June 29, 2021] Venterra Realty Partners With Rentgrata To Test Peer-To-Peer Marketing Technology

Rentgrata platform to connect future and current renters HOUSTON, June 29, 2021 /CNW/ -- Venterra Realty has partnered with Rentgrata, the first renter insights solution that creates connections and builds community for multifamily properties, to test its ability to increase referral communication between prospective and current residents at multiple Venterra communities. Rentgrata is the only platform on the market that offers prospects the opportunity to message current residents of apartment buildings when considering a new place, helping renters gather feedback from a resident's point of view before moving in. Through the Rentgrata platform, real conversations about floor plans, amenities, and other renter queries will be facilitated. If the prospect chooses to move into the community, both individuals will receive a reward that is offered by the property. "Rentgrata's platform is quite innovative and is a natural progression for our customer reviews. Now, instead of a prospective renter sorting through reviews for one that matches their concern, they can ask a current resident, gaining real-life insight while potentially making a new friend along the way. We are confident that our communities provide residents with a differentiated living experience that they will feel confident sharing with anyone who asks. Rentgrata's technology instills first-hand trust with prospective renters who may be thinking, 'who else lets you speak with their current residents?'" said Stephanie Gonzalez, Venterra's Vice President, Property & Customer Innovation. The platform will also deliver to Venterra anonymized data extracted from the conversations, reporting on important detils including what prospective residents are seeking in a new home and items current residents think could be improved.



Rentgrata's platform will allow Venterra to: Introduce prospective renters to their peers  Venterra's current residents.

Build community and retain more residents.

Help prospects gain familiarity sight unseen, if leasing virtually or from afar.

Increase resident sentiment and improve online reputation.

Improve leasing conversion rates. "Deciding on where to live can be a difficult choice, especially when decisions are based on evaluating various online ratings and reviews. Through implementing Rentgrata, genuine conversations can be facilitated between current and prospective renters while offering insights on the backend that will help uncover areas where Venterra can improve the lives of our residents," said Venterra CEO, John Foresi. "Our residents are the sole individuals who can truly speak to the day-to-day experiences of living at a Venterra property. We look forward to providing opportunities for our residents to be a part of our customer experience strategy, sharing their first-hand insights to help guide potential future neighbors," said Venterra Chairman Andrew Stewart.

91% of Rentgrata renters recently surveyed agreed that chatting with a resident helped them feel more confident in their decision. A solution that not only encourages interactions with real customers, but facilitates it, such as Rentgrata, is a promising tool for a company like Venterra who holds multiple Customer Satisfaction Awards from companies including Kingsley and ApartmentRatings.com. "Rentgrata is proud to partner with Venterra Realty, a company that shares our vision in providing an enjoyable resident experience through innovation and a people-first culture. Throughout the process of developing Rentgrata, frequent communication with the Venterra team has helped our employees build a technology that leverages resident sentiment through multiple channels," said Zach Sloan, Co-Founder, and Chief Sales Influencer of Rentgrata. About Venterra:

Venterra Realty is a rapidly growing owner/operator of multifamily rental communities with approximately 65 properties across 11 major US cities. The company is committed to improving the lives of its residents by delivering an industry-leading customer experience. More than 35,000 people and 11,000 pets call Venterra "home." Find out more about Venterra Realty and its award-winning company culture at Venterra.com . About Rentgrata:

Rentgrata is the first renter insights platform that creates connections and builds community for multifamily properties. As the only messaging platform for prospective and current residents to connect and share feedback, Rentgrata facilitates real conversations, while delivering data that helps multifamily professionals better understand renter needs. By helping apartment buildings feel more like communities, Rentgrata reduces resident turnover and increases NOI, while offering residents the chance to capitalize on referral incentives and connect in new ways. Media Contact: Allie Foard

Email: VenterraMedia@VenterraLiving.com View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/venterra-realty-partners-with-rentgrata-to-test-peer-to-peer-marketing-technology-301322302.html SOURCE Venterra Realty

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[June 29, 2021] The Buyer-Experience Becomes a Strategic Driver of Growth As B2B Companies Accelerate their Shift to Digital

In the wake of COVID-19, B2B firms are doubling down on buyer experience strategies to fuel growth in a digital-first marketplace, according to a recent survey of marketing professionals conducted by Folloze in partnership with the Demand Gen Report. Overnight, the pandemic raised the bar and put B2B companies on notice that they must deliver the same digitally-rich personalized experiences -- the hallmarks of B2C brands such as Starbucks, Airbnb, and Uber -- or perish. The research found that marketers expect to play a leading role as digital architects of personalized buyer journeys. At the same time, respondents did not feel empowered to deliver on their mandate, signaling the need for a more agile operating model led by frontline marketing teams. "One of the most interesting trends we saw from the survey was around the continued evolution of marketing's role, and the further convergence of marketing and sales at critical engagement points with buyers," said Andrew Gaffney, Editorial Director for Demand Gen Report. "The data really underscored the emergence of a 'frontline marketer,' who no longer just passes leads over the fence, but works actively with SDRs and account teams on educating members of the buying committing and enabling purchases at all stages, whether a buyer wants to self-navigate or requires support with customized and relevant content." The COVID-19 Catalyst that Forever Changed Marketing COVID-19 accelerated digital selling and upended long-held beliefs about the need for in-person meetings and traditional go-to-market motions. Reflecting these buyer-centric trends, the Folloze-Demand Gen Report Research uncovered four significant themes: 1. B2B firms finally take a page from the B2C playbook to fuel growth: In a post-pandemic marketplace, creating connected, contextual, and personalized digital experiences are core to driving growth. With an eye to replicating the success of their B2C marketing counterparts, 99% percent of respondents unanimously cited the importance of personalized content, messaging, and journeys to engage today's digital-first buyers. 2. Marketing is the only organization that can lead the digital-first mandate: The survey found that 50 percent of marketers believe that a digital-first marketplace will create hybrid GTM models that elevates the marketing function. In this model, marketing will lead and become the architects of digital experiences acrss the entire buyer journey with support from the direct sales team.



3. An expanded mandate gives rise to the "frontline marketer": When asked to rank the top three execution challenges associated with buyer engagement, respondents cited delivering a consistent experience (63%), engaging today's digital-first buyer (57%), and delivering personalization at scale (49%). With their new digital-first mandate, marketers must develop a strong execution muscle as they build end-to-end buyer journeys. The research found that only 25 percent of respondents felt they could successfully drive growth -- and at scale -- across every phase of the buyer journey.

A digital-first GTM model is shining the spotlight on customer-facing - or frontline - marketing teams in the field. These "frontline marketers'' know what their buyers want and how to deliver the engaging experiences that build trust and relationships. Yet, successful execution across the entire buyer journey and delivering a predictable pipeline will require a fundamentally new operating model that eliminates organizational silos and empowers frontline marketing teams with agile tools and data-driven best practices. 4. Sales Becomes a High Value Channel: In a digital-first environment where buyers are comfortable with digital self-service and discovery, the sales team becomes one of many channels that marketers will leverage across the entire B2B buyer journey. Within the survey, one-third of respondents said the most significant challenge with their sales counterparts is orchestrating digital campaigns that incorporate the sales team across different stages of the customer lifecycle. "Marketers have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build the next-gen digital engines of growth," said Randy Brasche, Vice President of Marketing at Folloze. "At the same time, marketers know they can't execute against this strategic mandate using the old-school tools and analog go-to-market models of the past. The findings from our B2B buyer research with the Demand Gen Report underscores the need for marketing to fundamentally rethink their teams and empower frontline marketers that know what their buyers want." To download a copy of the Demand Gen Report and Folloze research findings and recommendations, go to https://www.folloze.com/b2bstudy About the Survey Demand Gen Report surveyed 104 B2B marketing executives and professionals in April of 2021. The respondents range from Manager (20%), Director (32%), Vice President (16%), and C-level (26%) roles. Respondents work across a variety of industries, including business services/consulting (21%), software/technology (18%), manufacturing (10%), and financial services (9%). Their companies are equally diverse, with annual revenues ranging from under $100 million (43%) to greater than $10 billion (13%). About Folloze Folloze builds the leading B2B Buyer Experience Platform. Marketing and revenue teams rely on Folloze to quickly and easily deliver engaging, personalized, and data-driven experiences across the entire customer journey. Top B2B brands, including Autodesk, RingCentral, Cisco (News - Alert) , and ServiceNow, use Folloze to create amazing digital experiences that help win and keep more customers and fuel long-term growth. To learn more, visit https://www.folloze.com/. About Demand Gen Report Demand Gen Report is a targeted online publication that uncovers the strategies and solutions that help companies better align their sales and marketing organizations, and ultimately, drive growth. A key component of the publication's editorial coverage focuses on the sales and marketing automation tools that enable companies to better measure and manage their multi-channel demand generation efforts. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005924/en/

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[June 29, 2021] AgBiTech appoints Dr. Shachi Gurumayum as Head of Business Development

DALLAS, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- After a strategic review of AgBiTech's global growth ambitions, Dr. Shachi Gurumayum has been appointed as Head of Business Development. Shachi is currently managing AgBiTech's businesses in Africa and South Asia which he built from scratch over the last three years. This enabled AgBiTech to provide a safer and effective biological alternative to manage the threat of Fall armyworm as it spread rapidly across these regions. In doing so, Shachi established key partnerships and working relations with various local and international stakeholders, donors, research organizations, government institutions, distributors and farmers in many African countries, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Earlier this year, AgBiTech undertook a comprehensive review of its growth plans and strategic ambitions which resulted in a renewed focus to drive growth in Asia and Europe, two geographies whre AgBiTech currently has a very limited footprint. This will enable the company to increase its impact on the global biologicals sector while maximizing returns from its range of lepidopteran control solutions in the coming years.



Dr. Shachi Gurumayum grew up in Manipur, India, and graduated from St. Stephen's College, Delhi, with Honours in Chemistry before pursuing his MSc and PhD in Formulation Science from Bristol University. Shachi also has an MBA in Strategy & Marketing from HEC Paris and is currently pursuing an advanced degree in International Healthcare Management from the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute. He has over 18 years of experience in four continents in the Chemicals, Oil & Gas and Agricultural sectors including a three-year stint as country manager for Syngenta Nigeria. He is a founding trustee of the MaolKeki Foundation and in January 2021, was awarded the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman Award, the highest honour conferred to an overseas Indian by the President of India. About AgBiTech

Since 2002, AgBiTech has been delivering commercially proven products that help make farming more profitable and sustainable. AgBiTech combines field experience with innovative science and proprietary technology, working with farmers, advisors and researchers to develop products that deliver highly effective biological insect management solutions. AgBiTech manufactures all of its products in-house, with a tireless focus on quality and efficiency, allowing it to produce consistent and cost-effective biological products that have established market leading positions. For further information, visit www.agbitech.com. View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/agbitech-appoints-dr-shachi-gurumayum-as-head-of-business-development-301322337.html SOURCE AgBiTech

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[June 29, 2021] Minister Melanie Joly announces $5 million in Government of Canada support to C2MI

By upgrading its facilities, C2MI will play a role in building the expertise and bolstering the performance of SMEs that manufacture photonic sensors and components. BROMONT, QC, June 29, 2021 /CNW/ - Canada Economic Development for Quebec Regions (CED) The Monteregie region counts several dynamic businesses and organizations with innovative ideas helping to create a strong local economic fabric. During the COVID-19 pandemic, some organizations succeeded in adapting and are prospering, while others have had to reduce their operations. Today, as we put in place our plan for a robust economic recovery, they need our support now more than ever. The Government of Canada has committed to assisting them as they pursue their activities and to fostering their growth and success; this is precisely what it intends to do in the months to come. With this in mind, the Honourable Melanie Joly, Minister of Economic Development and Official Languages and Minister responsible for CED, accompanied by Lyne Bessette, Member of Parliament for BromeMissisquoi, today announced $5 million in financial support for the MiQro Innovation Collaborative Center (C2MI). C2MI is the largest microelectronics R&D and commercialization centre in Canada and is an international innovation hub. This non-refundable contribution will allow it to put in place state-of-the-art equipment to be used to manufacture microsystems, to integrate opto-electronic components and to screen print circuit boards in order to accelerate the development of new products and procedures. In addition to building new capacity, the Centre will be able to upgrade and optimize some of its existing industrial capabilities to maintain cutting-edge technology and train highly qualified personnel. This project will lead to the creation of two specialized positions for C2MI as well as several dozen other positions in Quebec and Canadian SMEs that will be able to use this innovative new technology. The Government of Canada recognizes and supports innovative businesses and organizations that are a source of pride in their communities. Innovationa major driver of economic development in Canadawill not only help rebuild a stronger, more resilient, and more just economy for all, but will also foster economic growth for decades to come. Quotes



"Helping businesses grow and innovate so they can enhance their competitiveness and create good-quality jobs is the key focus of our plan for a strong economic recovery. That is why we are providing our support to C2MI, an organization whose success is raising the profile not just of the Monteregie region but of the entire Canadian economy as well. We have been here to support workers and Quebec and Canadian SMEs in these difficult times and will continue to help them equip themselves with what they need so that, together, we can rebuild a stronger, more resilient and more sustainable economy." The Honourable Melanie Joly, Member of Parliament for Ahuntsic-Cartierville, Minister of Economic Development and Official Languages and Minister responsible for CED

"By investing in improvements to C2MI's state-of-the-art infrastructure, the Government of Canada is following through on its commitments and is helping homegrown businesses to innovate so they can create quality jobs for our regions, thereby ensuring a prosperous Canadian economy. Thanks to this support, C2MI will acquire innovative equipment that will allow it to develop and commercialize products for the electronics industry more quickly." Lyne Bessette, Member of Parliament for BromeMissisquoi "We are delighted that through its Federal Strategy on Innovation and Growth for the Quebec Regions, the Government of Canada is recognizing the important research and development work being done by C2MI in collaboration with its industrial and academic partners. For nearly 10 years now, C2MI has played a key role in supporting activity in all sectors of the Canadian economy through technological collaboration ensuring that companies integrating electronic components that are vital in a digital world can position themselves as leaders in their respective industries. This new facility improvement project guarantees that a bright future lies ahead for C2MI." Marie-Josee Turgeon, General Manager of C2MI Quick facts Funds have been granted under CED's Regional Economic Growth through Innovation program. This program targets entrepreneurs leveraging innovation to grow their businesses and enhance their competitiveness, as well as regional economic stakeholders helping to create an entrepreneurial environment conducive to innovation and growth for all, across all regions.

A successful economic recovery will depend, among other things, on the vaccination of as many Canadians as possible. To learn more: Vaccines for COVID-19.

CED is a key federal partner in Quebec's regional economic development. With its 12 regional business offices, CED accompanies businesses, supporting organizations and all regions across Quebec into tomorrow's economy. Associated links Budget 2021: A Recovery Plan for Jobs, Growth, and Resilience

Canada's COVID-19 Economic Response Plan

COVID-19 Economic Response Plan Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) Stay connected Follow CED on social media

Consult CED's news SOURCE Canada Economic Development for Quebec Regions

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[June 29, 2021] Insite360 Partners With Site IQ

HOUSTON, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Insite360, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Gilbarco Veeder-Root part of Vontier (NYSE: VNT), has signed a partnership agreement with Site IQ, enhancing our customers' ability to maximize the uptime of assets and improve their efficiency and profitability. Insite360's industry-standard platform combined with Site IQ's workflow and agnostic connectivity options enables easy, cloud-based management of equipment and related data across their networks, reducing costly site visits by service technicians. Managing a convenience retail network of sites is complex. Each network is comprised of sites with equipment of all ages, models, brands, and connectivity options. In addition, a myriad of systems must be connected to enable remote site management. These problems have led to a less-than-optimal customer experience. Insite360 and Site IQ remediate these issues by unlocking the data available to customers across their entire network. In addition, enabling convenience retailers to consolidate their data on the Insite360 platform makes data more actionable. This partnership changes how people manage and maintain their sites. By parnering with Site IQ, customers can connect any dispenser to the Insite360 platform, including:



Older dispensers without onboard connectivity

Competitive dispensers outside Gilbarco Veeder-Root family of devices

Dispensers that use different connections/protocols outside the United States "With Site IQ, we can expand our reach to include the majority of dispensers in the market. Our partnership will also add additional functionality and enhance the overall user experience," said Dan Wolf, Global Product Manager for the Insite360 Remote Site Management product line. The simple setup and deployment of Site IQ allows for instant connection to the Insite360 platform enabling the continued digital transformation of the fueling industry. "We are thrilled to partner with Insite360. By combining our Edge processing algorithms and intuitive mobile software solutions with the Insite360 platform, we will be able to provide an enhanced user experience to all customers," said Kishore Gangwani, Founder & CEO of Site IQ.

"We look forward to launching these solutions for the North American and global markets with offerings available to customers in the second half of 2021," said Gilles Mepossi Noutcha, Head of strategic growth for Insite360. About Insite360

Insite360 leads the fueling market as the industry's first and most comprehensive cloud platform for on-demand fueling and site management. With our specialized solutions, the Insite360 platform increases sales, reduces operational costs, optimizes equipment performance, enhances customer experience, and delivers sophisticated analytics to drive businesses forward. At the forefront of the industry for over 30 years, Insite360 has automated all aspects of the fuel and site management process from rack to nozzle, improving the customer experience. Insite360 is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Gilbarco Veeder-Root and is leading the revolution of fueling site service management. About SiteIQ

Site IQ was Incepted in 2018 to develop Industrial IOT platforms with a focus on providing 'Actionable Intelligence.' It has developed an end-to-end IOT platform for remote access and management of retail fuel dispensers. Its Edge device connects to all commonly found dispensers and offers multiple internet connectivity options, including - mesh, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and ethernet. Using the latest technologies in edge computing, AI, telematics, and cloud services, Site IQ is able to provide intuitive, easy-to-use dashboards and workflow solutions that removes the guesswork from the management of fueling sites. View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/insite360-partners-with-site-iq-301322359.html SOURCE Insite360

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[June 29, 2021] Segra International completes first export of Cannabis plantlets from Canada to the USA

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, June 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Segra International Corp, a leading cannabis agriculture technology company, is pleased to announce its first successful export of Verified Segra Stock Cannabis plantlets to the Biopharmaceutical Research Company (BRC), one of the first groups in the USA to receive approval from the DEA to cultivate Cannabis for scientific research purposes.

This shipment marks a tremendous milestone in the evolution of the US cannabis industry, as it represents one of the first imports of live Cannabis plants to a federally licensed US cultivator. In recent months, the DEA has issued a select number of licenses to several groups in the US to allow for the cultivation of Cannabis for scientific research purposes. BRC, based in California, is among the first companies granted a license and is now operational. Segras Verified Segra Stock plantlets will provide BRC with standardized and validated starting materials produced through plant tissue culture and backed by extensive agronomic data and Cannabis plant pathogen screening. BRC works with research groups studying Cannabis and Cannabis flower to understand the plant in a scientific and federally regulated environment. Under the federal licensing regime, BRC is only allowed to source genetics and starting material from DEA-compliant or federally legal sources. Segra's Verified Segra Stock guarantee means our plantlets are DNA fingerprinted and pathogen-free with virtually no risk of pathogen introduction to the receiving grow facility. Starting with this input material is critical to effectively grow replicable crops, something highly valued by researchers who are studying the finished product of the Cannabis plant and its derivatives," said Jamie Blundell, CEO of Segra International. "Furthermore, Segra's VNTR DNA Fingerprinting technology allows BRC to order plantlets and cultivars with certainty, knowing they are receiving the same input material with each shipment. The application of VNTR DNA fingerprinting technology can be used throughout the supply hain for track and trace purposes, from plantlet to flower, translating this certainty to researchers who can study the same product repeatedly."



"At BRC, we are focused on developing federally compliant active pharmaceutical ingredients for federally compliant researchers examining the therapeutic effects of Cannabis" said George Hodgin, CEO of Biopharmaceutical Research Company. "We're fortunate to be working with Segra to offer our clients a wide range of clean, high-quality Cannabis of specific chemical expressions and flower types to help them better understand the applications of the Cannabis plant." Learn more about Segra's services and premium cultivars by viewing the 2021 Cultivar and Services Catalogue.

About Segra:

Segra is an agriculture technology company offering plant tissue culture, plant genomics, and pathogen detection services to accelerate the advancement of the cannabis industry. The company's proprietary technologies empower its clients to drive financial performance and mitigate risk while exploring the next frontier of optimized cultivation practices for the rapidly evolving cannabis consumer. Segra has developed industrial-scale laboratories to produce Verified Segra Stock, robust, and DNA-fingerprinted Cannabis plantlets for licensed producers globally. Segra has assembled a world-class team of specialists in agronomy, molecular genetics, plant tissue culture, and regulatory compliance to support this vision. Learn more at segra-intl.com or by viewing the 2021 Cultivar and Services Catalogue . About Biopharmaceutical Research Company

BRC is a specialty pharmaceutical company that holds several DEA Registrations across the entire value chain of Cannabis and is pioneering the federally legal Cannabis space in the USA. Forward-Looking Information:

This news release includes statements containing certain "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities law ("forward-looking statements"). Forward-looking statements are frequently characterized by words such as "plan," "continue," "expect," "project," "intend," "believe," "anticipate," "estimate," "may," "will," "potential," "proposed" and other similar words, or statements that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" occur. These statements are only predictions. Various assumptions were used in drawing the conclusions or making the projections contained in the forward-looking statements throughout this news release. Forward-looking statements are based on the opinions and estimates of management at the date the statements are made and are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. The company is under no obligation, and expressly disclaims any intention or obligation, to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as expressly required by applicable law.

For Further Information: Carson Otto Carson.otto@segra-intl.com

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[June 29, 2021] Fluor Initiates $1 Million Program for Three Historically Black Colleges and Universities

Fluor Corporation (NYSE: FLR) and the Fluor Foundation announced today their commitment to a $1 million funding program in partnership with North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University, Texas' Prairie View A&M University and Alabama's Tuskegee University. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629006021/en/ Undergraduate chemical engineering students at North Carolina A&T State University learn about distillation processes inside a laboratory at McNair Hall. Photo credit: North Carolina A&T State University College of Engineering "Fluor and the Fluor Foundation's three-year, $1 million program will assist the universities' science, technology, engineering and math(STEM) programs and students in further developing undergraduate research and capstone design projects," said Torrence Robinson, president of the Fluor Foundation and senior director of Fluor Global Community Affairs.



The program specifically addresses merit-based scholarships for civil, chemical and mechanical engineering students; the integration of innovative experiential learning strategies; laboratory and creative workspace improvements; faculty professional development; and engineering student associations and groups. Fluor and the Fluor Foundation will provide $860,000 to the program. The new university partners can earn an additional $140,000 via dollar-for-dollar matching in coordination with external donors.

Global University Scholarship Program

Through its Global University Scholarship program, the Fluor Foundation sponsors annual grants for more than 30 member colleges and universities focusing on engineering, construction and business programs. The program fosters strong relationships between Fluor's executives and university faculty, staff and students. This leads to a more robust talent development pipeline enabling potential internship opportunities and future job prospects for qualified students. "Fluor partners closely with member universities around the world to assist in educating future graduates with highly marketable skill sets that will prepare them to thrive in today's competitive global engineering and construction industry," Robinson said. "Fluor's executives, often university alumni, also support student campus organizations, career fairs and other special events, as well as serve on university and engineering department advisory committees." Since 1952, Fluor and the Fluor Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Fluor, have contributed more than $210 million to a variety of charitable causes across the globe. This legacy is foundational to Fluor's strategic priority of fostering a high-performance culture with purpose, reinforcing its commitment to build an environment that embraces diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I). Fluor's DE&I framework focuses on championing an inclusive culture; recruiting, developing and retaining talent; enhancing employee experiences; and improving social progress and impact. About Fluor Corporation

Fluor Corporation (NYSE: FLR) is building a better world by applying world-class expertise to solve its clients' greatest challenges. Fluor's 44,000 employees provide professional and technical solutions that deliver safe, well-executed, capital-efficient projects to clients around the world. Fluor had revenue of $14.2 billion in 2020 and is ranked 196 among the Fortune 500 companies. With headquarters in Irving, Texas, Fluor has provided engineering, procurement and construction services for more than 100 years. For more information, please visit www.fluor.com or follow Fluor on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube. #corp View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629006021/en/

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[June 29, 2021] Fastly Appoints Ron Kisling as CFO

Fastly, Inc. (NYSE: FSLY), provider of a global edge cloud platform, today announced the appointment of Ronald W. "Ron" Kisling as Chief Financial Officer. Kisling will succeed Adriel Lares, who, as announced on May 5, 2021, will officially step down from the CFO position after five years of service. Kisling is expected to join Fastly in August, following a transition period from his current role. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629006004/en/ Fastly Appoints Ron Kisling as CFO (Photo: Business Wire) "Ron's expertise in leading sophisticated finance organizations in high-growth environments will make an immediate, positive impact on Fastly as we continue to grow and scale our business," said Joshua Bixby, CEO of Fastly. "Ron played a key role in building out Fitbit's financial leadership function to support public company rigor. I am confident Ron will bring the same strong leadership principles to Fastly as an excellent addition to the executive team." "Fastly's reputation as a market-leading edge cloud provider positions the company to apitalize on new and growing market opportunities stemming from the recent boom in digital transformation," said Kisling. "I look forward to working with the entire Fastly team to build on their momentum and strong business fundamentals."



Kisling joins Fastly from Google (News - Alert) , where he served as Chief Financial Officer of Fitbit. Kisling joined Fitbit in September 2014 and served as Chief Accounting Officer until his appointment as Chief Financial Officer. Kisling has held Chief Financial Officer positions at numerous other technology companies, including Nanometrics Incorporated, PGP (News - Alert) Corporation, Portal Software, Inc., Saba Software, Inc., and SPL WorldGroup, Inc. A seasoned finance expert, he brings extensive public company financial management and governance experience. About Fastly

Fastly helps people stay better connected with the things they love. Fastly's edge cloud platform enables customers to create great digital experiences quickly, securely, and reliably by processing, serving, and securing our customers' applications as close to their end-users as possible - at the edge of the internet. Fastly's platform is designed to take advantage of the modern internet, to be programmable, and to support agile software development with unmatched visibility and minimal latency, empowering developers to innovate with both performance and security. Fastly's customers include many of the world's most prominent companies, including Pinterest, The New York Times, and GitHub. This press release contains "forward-looking" statements that are based on our beliefs and assumptions and on information currently available to us on the date of this press release. Forward-looking statements may involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause our actual results, performance, or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. These statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding our future financial and operating performance, including our outlook and guidance, the demand for our platform, expectations regarding the long-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, our ability to meet the demand for our platform by seamlessly combining delivery, edge computing, and security, our ability to invest in our platform for future growth, our ability to continue to grow and scale our business, our ability to capitalize on new and growing market opportunities, and our ability to deliver on our long-term strategy. Except as required by law, we assume no obligation to update these forward-looking statements publicly or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in the forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future. Important factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially are detailed from time to time in the reports Fastly files with the Securities and Exchange Commission ( SEC (News - Alert) ), including in Fastly's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2020, and other filings that Fastly makes from time to time with the SEC. Copies of reports filed with the SEC are posted on Fastly's website and are available from Fastly without charge. Source (News - Alert) : Fastly, Inc. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629006004/en/

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[June 29, 2021] SAIC Appoints New Board Member Milford McGuirt

Science Applications International Corp. (NYSE: SAIC) today announced the appointment of Milford W. McGuirt, retired managing partner of KPMG's Atlanta office, to the company's board of directors, effective July 1, 2021. "We are pleased to welcome Milford McGuirt to SAIC's board of directors," said Donna Morea (News - Alert) , SAIC board chair. "His many years of experience as a managing partner for KPMG, as well as his extensive track record as an award-winning business leader, will bring additional strength to SAIC (News - Alert) as the company builds on its reputation as a top provider of digital transformation solutions. His demonstrated focus on innovation, strategy, and collaboration align well with SAIC's goals to bring advanced technology to our government customers." McGuirt will serve on the board's Audit Committee as well as the Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee. His appointment brings the board's total membership to 11, with nearly two-thirds of the board now comprised of women and people of color. McGuirt previously served as the managing partner of KPMG's Atlanta office as well as the company's area managing partner for the Mid-South region from January 2015 until September 2019, when he retired from the firm. He has 41 years of public accounting and auditing experience with Big 4 international accounting and consulting firms and was a partner for a total 29 years with KPMG, where he was responsible for overseeing the delivery of high-quality client service, attracting and retaining key professional talent and resources, execution of a growth and market expansion strategy, and representing the firm in the marketplace and community. About SAIC SAIC is a premier Fortune 500 technology integrator driving our nation's technology transformation. Our robust portfolio of offerings across the defense, space, civilian, and intelligence arkets includes secure high-end solutions in engineering, digital, artificial intelligence, and mission solutions. Using our expertise and understanding of existing and emerging technologies, we integrate the best components from our own portfolio and our partner ecosystem to deliver innovative, effective, and efficient solutions that are critical to achieving our customers' missions.



We are more than 26,000 strong; driven by mission, united by purpose, and inspired by opportunities. Headquartered in Reston, Virginia, SAIC has pro forma annual revenues of approximately $7.1 billion.???? For more information, visit saic.com. For ongoing news, please visit our newsroom. Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements in this release contain or are based on "forward-looking" information within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by words such as "expects," "intends," "plans," "anticipates," "believes," "estimates," "guidance," and similar words or phrases. Forward-looking statements in this release may include, among others, estimates of future revenues, operating income, earnings, earnings per share, charges, total contract value, backlog, outstanding shares and cash flows, as well as statements about future dividends, share repurchases and other capital deployment plans. Such statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risk, uncertainties and assumptions, and actual results may differ materially from the guidance and other forward-looking statements made in this release as a result of various factors. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause or contribute to these material differences include those discussed in the "Risk Factors," "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations" and "Legal Proceedings" sections of our Annual Report on Form 10-K, as updated in any subsequent Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and other filings with the SEC (News - Alert) , which may be viewed or obtained through the Investor Relations section of our website at saic.com or on the SEC's website at sec.gov. Due to such risks, uncertainties and assumptions you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date hereof. SAIC expressly disclaims any duty to update any forward-looking statement provided in this release to reflect subsequent events, actual results or changes in SAIC's expectations. SAIC also disclaims any duty to comment upon or correct information that may be contained in reports published by investment analysts or others. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629005929/en/

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[June 29, 2021] Carl Data Solutions Joins LoRa Alliance to Advance Connectivity for Environmental Monitoring as a Service (EMaaS)

Leading solutions provider in AI-enabled municipal and industrial infrastructure applications to deliver low cost, high reliability connectivity with networking LoRaWAN standard VANCOUVER, BC, June 29, 2021 /CNW/ - Carl Data Solutions Inc. (CSE: CRL) (FSE: 7C5) (OTC: CDTAF) ("Carl Data Solutions" or the "Company"), a leader in AI-enabled data monitoring, reporting, and modeling applications for municipal and industrial infrastructure customers, today announced that it joined the LoRa Alliance, a nonprofit association with over 500 members dedicated to advancing the adoption and implementation of the low-power long-range wide-area networking LoRaWAN standard. While the LoRaWAN standard is popular in Europe and other overseas countries it is relatively new in North America. Carl Data Solutions is one of only eight Canadian members that include six other companies and the University of Saskatchewan. "Carl Data Solutions will lend its deep Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning expertise to the LoRaWAN ecosystem as we evangelize the benefits of LoRaWAN connectivity to our customers and prospects through the LoRa Alliance," said CEO Jean Charles Phaneuf. "While we implement and promote this strategic technology, we will build business development profile with LoRa Alliance members for our AI-enabled time-series data monitoring. Environmental Monitoring as a Service, or EMaaS, is increasingly in demand for large infrastructure projects to help meet national and international environmental compliance mandates." LoRa stands for Long Range. The LoRaWAN connectivity standard is a proprietary low-power wide-area wireless radio frequency technology that is particularly well suited to remote or hard-to-reach application environments where conventional connectivity standards are either too expensive, unreliable or unavailable to implement. Carl Data Solutions has already implemented a LoRaWAN network in the Kootenay Region of British Columbia's for a Fresh Water Data Commons Project. The project was sponsored with $4.65 million of funding in a Master Project Agreement with Canada's Digital Technology Supercluster. According to Semtech, the founding member of the LoRa Alliance, the LoRaWAN connectivity standard is the de facto wireless platform of Internet of Things (IoT). LoRa devices and the open LoRaWAN standard enable smart IoT applications that solve some of the biggest challenges facing our planet: energy management, natural resource reduction, pollution control, infrastructure efficiency, disaster prevention, and more. LoRa devices and the LoRaWAN standard have amassed several hundred known use cases for smart cities, smart homes and buildings, smart agriculture, smart metering, smart supply chain and logistics, and more. With over 191 million devices connected to more than 151 networks and growing, LoRa devices are creating a Smarter Planet.1 "I am pleased to welcome Carl Data Solutions to the LoRa Alliance," said Donna Moore, CEO and Chairwoman of the LoRa Alliance. "The company's acceleration of municipal and industrial infrastructure deployments across North America will be a major driver of IIoT connectivity and the opportunity to leverage LoRaWAN is significant. I'm excited to follow Carl Data Solutions' progress and look forward to its participation in and contributions to our ecosystem as it brings its LoRaWAN solutions to market." The LoRa Alliance has become one of the largest and fastest-growing alliances in the technology sector since its inception in 2015. Its members collaborate closely and share expertise to develop and promote the LoRaWAN standard, the de facto global standard for secure, carrier-grade IoT LPWAN connectivity. LoRaWAN has the technical flexibility to address a broad range of IIoT applications and a robust LoRaWAN Certification program to guarantee that devices perform as specified. LoRa Alliance and LoRaWAN are marks used under license from the LoRa Alliance. About Carl Data Solutions Inc. Carl Data Solutions Inc. is an Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Big Data as a Service (BDaaS) company that is a leader in monitoring, reporting, and data modeling applications for municipal and industrial infrastructure customers. The Company provides next-generation collection, storage, and analytics solutions for data-centric organizations. Through its subsidiaries FlowWorks Inc. and Astra Smart Systems Corp., Carl Data Solutions helps customers analyze and model environmental data through a robust end-to-end network of custom sensor arrays combined with SaaS-based monitoring, reporting and predictive modeling applications. Carl Data Solutions works with cloud-based mass storage services and Artificial Intelligence (AI) Machine Learning (ML) analytical tools to provide the scalability required to effectively monitor vast amounts of data collected by its customers. The Company's solutions save customers time and money by aggregating information from any sensor or source to create a real-time data-driven decision support system with deep insights into protecting critical infrastructure and assets. More information can be found at www.CarlSolutions.com. The Canadian Securities Exchange (operated by CNSX Markets Inc.) has neither approved nor disapproved of the contents of this press release. This press release contains certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities law. Forward-looking statements are frequently characterized by words such as "plan", "expect", "project", "intend", "believe", "anticipate", "estimate" and other similar words, or statements that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" occur. Forward-looking information is based on certain key expectations and assumptions made by the management of Carl Data Solutions, including the expectation of future higher growth. Although the Corporation believes that the expectations and assumptions upon which such forward-looking information is based are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on the forward-looking information because the Company can provide no assurance that they will prove to be correct. Any forward-looking statements contained in this press release are made as of the date of this press release. The Corporation disclaims any intent or obligation to update publicly any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or results or otherwise, other than as required by applicable securities laws.







__________________________ 1 https://www.semtech.com/lora/what-is-lora

SOURCE Carl Data Solutions Inc.

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[June 29, 2021] Bank of America Recommends Shareholders Reject "Mini-Tender" Offer by Tutanota LLC

Bank of America today announced that it recently learned of an unsolicited "mini-tender" offer made by Tutanota LLC (Tutanota) to Bank of America shareholders to purchase up to 1 million shares of Bank of America common stock at $47 per share. The offer price of $47 per share is conditioned on, among other things, the closing price per share of Bank of America's common stock exceeding $47 per share on the last trading day before the offer expires. This means that unless this condition is waived by Tutanota, Bank of America shareholders who tender their shares in the offer will receive a below-market price. Tutanota can extend the offer for successive periods of 45 to 180 days, in which case payment would be delayed beyond the scheduled expiration date of Friday, July 16, 2021. Bank of America recommends that shareholders do not tender their shares in response to Tutanota's offer because the offer requires that the closing stock price for Bank of America common stock exceed the offer price, and the offer is subject to numerous additional conditions, including Tutanota obtaining financing for the offer. There is no guarantee the conditions of the offer will be satisfied. Shareholders who have already tendered their shares may withdraw them at any time by providing notice in the manner described in the Tutanota offering documents prior to the expiration of the offer, which is currently scheduled for 5:00 p.m., New York City time, on Friday, July 16, 2021, unless extended. Bank of America does not endorse Tutanota's unsolicited mini-tender offer and is not affiliated or associated in any way with Tutanota, its mini-tender offer, or the offer documentation. Because Tutanota's mini-tender offer is for less than 5 percent of Bank of America's outstanding shares, it is not subject to many of the disclosure and procedural requirements of Securities and Exchange Commission ( SEC (News - Alert) ) rules that are designed to protect investors. Tutanota has made similar unsolicited mini-tender offers for stock of other public companies. The SEC has cautioned investors about mini-tender offers, providing guidance to investors at http://www.sec.gov/investor/pubs/minitend.htm.



Bank of America encourages brokers and dealers, as well as other market participants, to review the SEC's letter regarding broker-dealer mini-tender offer dissemination and disclosures at www.sec.gov/divisions/marketreg/minitenders/sia072401.htm and the NASD Notice to Members 99-53 issued in July 1999 regarding guidance to members forwarding mini-tender offers to their customers, which can be found at https://www.finra.org/sites/default/files/NoticeDocument/p004221.pdf. Shareholders should obtain current market quotations for their shares, consult with their broker or financial advisor, and exercise caution with respect to Tutanota's mini-tender offer.

Bank of America requests that a copy of this news release be included with all distributions of materials relating to Tutanota's mini-tender offer related to Bank of America's common stock. 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 and register for news email alerts. www.bankofamerica.com View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629006046/en/

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[June 29, 2021] Peoples Community Health Clinic Impacted By Netgain Cyber Incident

WATERLOO, Iowa, June 29, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Peoples Community Health Clinic ("PCHC") is providing notice of a recent data security event that may affect the privacy of information of certain PCHC patients. This notification provides information about the event, PCHC's response to it, and resources available to individuals to help protect their information, should they feel it necessary to do so. What Happened? On March 22, 2021, PCHC became aware of suspicious activity related to an employee's email account. Following this, PCHC promptly launched an investigation with the assistance of third-party forensic specialists to assess the security of its systems and the nature and scope of this incident. This investigation determined that an unauthorized individual gained access to one PCHC email account between March 18, 2021 and March 22, 2021 but could not confirm what specific information within this account may have been actually accessed by the unauthorized individual. Therefore, in an abundance of caution, PCHC undertook a diligent and comprehensive review of the entire contents of this account in order to determine the full universe of sensitive data that could have been subject to unauthorized access. On May 24, 2021, PCHC completed this review and confirmed the full scope of sensitive data and potentially affected individuals. To date, PCHC has found no evidence suggesting any actual or attempted misuse of information as a result of this incident. What Information Was Involved? While the specific data elements vary for each potentially affected individual, the scope of information potentially involved includes: name; address; Social Security number; date of birth; driver's license number or state identification number; medical diagnosis/medical treatment information; health insurance information; payment card number; or card CVV/expiration date. PCHC is in the process of notifying individuals whose information was involved. What Is PCHC Doing? Data privacy and security are among PCHC's highest priorities, and there are extensive measures in place to protect information in PCHC's care. Upon discovery, PCHC promptly commenced an investigation to confirm the nature and scope of this incident and determine whether there was sensitive information contained within the impacted account. In an abundance of caution, PCHC is providing notice of this incident to potentially impacted individuals and pertinent state and/or federal regulators. As part of PCHC's ongoing commitment to the security of information, all policies and procedures are being reviewed and enhanced where possible, additional safeguards are being implemented, and workforce training is being conducted to reduce the likelihood of a similar event in the future. What You Can Do? PCHC encourages individuals to remain vigilant against incidents of identity theft and fraud, to review account statements and explanation of benefits forms, and to monitor free credit reports for suspicious activity and to detect errors. Under U.S. law individuals are entitled to one free credit report annually from each of the three major credit reporting bureaus. To order a free credit report, visit www.annualcreditreport.com or call, toll-free, 1-877-322-8228. Individuals may also contact the three major credit bureaus directly to request a free copy of their credit report, place a fraud alert, or a security freeze. Contact information for the credit bureaus is below:







Experian P.O. Box 9554 Allen, TX 75013 1-888-397-3742 www.experian.com/fraud/ form-minor-child.html TransUnion P.O. Box 2000 Chester, PA 19016 1-888-909-8872 www.transunion.com/credit-disputes/ child-identity-theft-inquiry-form Equifax P.O. Box 105788 Atlanta, GA 30348-5788 1-800-685-1111 https://www.equifax.com/personal/help/ request-child-credit-report/

Individuals can further educate themselves regarding identity theft, fraud alerts, security freezes, and steps to protect their information by contacting the Federal Trade Commission. Instances of known or suspected identity theft should be reported to law enforcement and the state attorney general. PCHC regrets any concern this security incident may cause. If individuals have questions about the incident, they may contact PCHC's toll-free dedicated assistance line at 855-867-0662. This toll-free line is available Monday  Friday from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm EST. View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/peoples-community-health-clinic-impacted-by-netgain-cyber-incident-301322434.html SOURCE Peoples Community Health Clinic

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[June 29, 2021] Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP Files Class Action Suit Against Rocket Companies, Inc. and Announces Opportunity for Investors With Substantial Losses to Lead Case - RKT

Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP today announced that it filed a class action seeking to represent purchasers of Rocket Companies, Inc. (NYSE:RKT) Class A common stock during the period between February 25, 2021 and May 5, 2021, both dates inclusive (the "Class Period"). The Rocket Companies class action lawsuit was filed in the Eastern District of Michigan and is captioned Qaiyum v. Rocket Companies, Inc., No. 21-cv-11528. The Rocket Companies class action lawsuit charges Rocket Companies and certain of its executives with violations of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. If you suffered substantial losses and wish to serve as lead plaintiff of the Rocket Companies class action lawsuit or have questions concerning your rights regarding the Rocket Companies class action lawsuit, please visit our website by clicking here or contact Brian Cochran of Robbins Geller, at 800/449-4900 or 619/231-1058 or via e-mail at bcochran@rgrdlaw.com. You can view a copy of the complaint as filed at https://www.rgrdlaw.com/cases-rocket-companies-inc-class-action-lawsuit.html. CASE ALLEGATIONS: The Rocket Companies class action lawsuit alleges that, throughout the Class Period, defendants made false and misleading statements and failed to disclose that: (i) Rocket Companies' gain on sale margins were contracting at the highest rate in two years as a result of increased competition among mortgage lenders, an unfavorable shift toward the lower margin Partner Network operating segment and compression in the price spread between the primary and secondary mortgage markets; (ii) Rocket Companies was engaged in a price war and battle for market share with its primary competitors in the wholesale market, which was further compressing margins in Rocket Companies' Partner Network operating segment; (iii) the adverse trends idenified above were accelerating and, as a result, Rocket Companies' gain on sale margins were on track to plummet at least 140 basis points in the first six months of 2021; (iv) as a result, the favorable market conditions that had preceded the Class Period and allowed Rocket Companies to achieve historically high gain on sale margins had vanished as Rocket Companies' gain on sale margins had returned to levels not seen since the first quarter of 2019; (v) rather than remaining elevated due to surging demand, Rocket Companies' company-wide gain-on-sale margins had fallen materially below pre-pandemic averages; and (vi) consequently, defendants' positive statements about Rocket Companies' business operations and prospects were materially misleading and/or lacked a reasonable basis.



On May 5, 2021, Rocket Companies reported that it was on track to achieve closed loan volume within a range of only $82.5 billion and $87.5 billion and gain on sale margins within a range of only 2.65% to 2.95% for the second quarter of 2021. At the mid-point, this gain on sale margin estimate equated to a 239 basis point decline year-over-year and a 94 basis point decline sequentially, which represented Rocket Companies' lowest quarterly gain on sale margin in two years. The stunning collapse in Rocket Companies' gain on sale margin reflected the fact that the favorable market conditions purportedly being experienced by Rocket Companies during the Class Period had in fact reversed. During a conference call to explain the results, Rocket Companies' Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer, defendant Julie R. Booth, revealed that the sharp decline in quarterly gain on sale margin was being caused by three factors: (i) pressure on loan pricing; (ii) a product mix shift to Rocket Companies' lower margin Partner Network segment; and (iii) a compression in price spreads between the primary and secondary mortgage markets. Defendant Booth also admitted that certain of these trends began "at the end of Q1." On this news, the price of Rocket Companies Class A common stock fell by nearly 17% to close at $19.01 per share. As the market continued to digest the news in the days that followed, the price of Rocket Companies Class A common stock continued to decline, falling to a low of just $16.48 per share by May 11, 2021. THE LEAD PLAINTIFF PROCESS: The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 permits any investor who purchased Rocket Companies common stock during the Class Period to seek appointment as lead plaintiff in the Rocket Companies class action lawsuit. A lead plaintiff is generally the movant with the greatest financial interest in the relief sought by the putative class who is also typical and adequate of the putative class. A lead plaintiff acts on behalf of all other class members in directing the Rocket Companies class action lawsuit. The lead plaintiff can select a law firm of its choice to litigate the Rocket Companies class action lawsuit. An investor's ability to share in any potential future recovery of the Rocket Companies class action lawsuit is not dependent upon serving as lead plaintiff. If you wish to serve as lead plaintiff in the Rocket Companies class action lawsuit, you must move the Court no later than 60 days from today.

The plaintiff is represented by Robbins Geller, which has extensive experience in prosecuting investor class actions including actions involving financial fraud. ABOUT ROBBINS GELLER RUDMAN & DOWD LLP: With 200 lawyers in 9 offices nationwide, Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP is the largest U.S. law firm representing investors in securities class actions. Robbins Geller attorneys have obtained many of the largest shareholder recoveries in history, including the largest securities class action recovery ever - $7.2 billion - in In re Enron Corp. Sec. Litig. The 2020 ISS Securities Class Action Services Top 50 Report ranked Robbins Geller first for recovering $1.6 billion for investors last year, more than double the amount recovered by any other securities plaintiffs' firm. Please visit http://www.rgrdlaw.com for more information. Attorney advertising.

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[June 29, 2021] TeraGo Announces Election of Directors

TORONTO, June 29, 2021 /CNW/ - TeraGo Inc. ("TeraGo" or the "Company") (TSX: TGO) (www.terago.ca), announced that the nominees listed in the management information circular for the Company's 2021 Annual and Special Meeting of Shareholders (the "Meeting") were each either elected or re-elected as directors of TeraGo. The Company welcomed its newly elected director, Mr. Martin (Marty) Pinnes, to its board of directors. Mr. Pinnes most recently served as Vice President of Finance and Corporate Development at FlexNetworks, a Toronto-based telecommunications provider that serves a fibre-optic and wireless network to a diverse range of customers in Canada. In that role at FlexNetworks, Mr. Pinnes led both capital budgeting and numerous organic and inorganic growth initiatives. Prior to FlexNetworks, Mr. Pinnes was an investment professional at Treeline Capital Partners, and a Senior Portfolio Manager at the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, with a focus on the telecommunications and media industries across North America, Europe, and Latin America. He has extensive investing experience across the capital structure in public and private telecommunication businesses and has served on multiple boards of private companies. Mr. Pinnes graduated from Colgate University with degrees in Mathematical Economics and Psychology. "On behalf of the Board and the entire leadership team, I would like to welcome Marty to the TeraGo board of directors," said Ken Campbell, Chair of TeraGo's Board. "Marty possesses the necessary skills and the relevant experience to help accelerate TeraGo's mission in becoming one of the first operators to launch commercial 5G fixed wireless services in Canada. We look forward to benefiting from his unique expertise as we execute on our near- and long-term growth objectives." Detailed results of the ballot voting for the election of directors held today on June 29, 2021, as well as the other matters voted on at the virtual Meeting are as follows:







Brief Description of Matter Voted Upon Outcome

of Vote For Against 1) In respect of fixing of the number of directors of the Company at seven (7); Approved 10,892,657 (99.98%) 2,230 (0.02%) 2) In respect of the election of directors to hold office until the close of the next annual meeting of Shareholders or until their successors are elected or appointed:

For Withheld Kenneth Campbell Approved 10,872,817 (99.80%) 22,070 (0.20%) Matthew Gerber Approved 10,873,547 (99.80%) 21,340 (0.20%) Michael Martin Approved 8,519,509 (78.20%) 2,375,378 (21.80%) Gary Sherlock Approved 10,773,556 (98.89%) 121,331 (1.11%) Laurel Buckner Approved 10,873,082 (99.80%) 21,805 (0.20%) Richard Brekka Approved 8,419,518 (77.28%) 2,475,369 (22.72%) Martin Pinnes Approved 10,873,547 (99.80%) 21,340 (0.20%) 3) In respect of the re-appointment of KPMG LLP, Chartered Accountants as auditors of the Company to hold office until the next annual meeting of Shareholders and authorizing the directors to fix their remuneration. Approved 10,916,859 (99.98%) 2,230 (0.02%)



For Against 4) In respect of the resolution to amend the Company's share option plan, and the reservation of 300,000 additional common shares issuable upon the vesting and due exercise of any options granted under such plan. Approved 8,124,707 (74.57%) 2,770,180 (25.43%)

A report of voting results for each resolution presented at the Meeting prepared in accordance with National Instrument 51-102  Continuous Disclosure Obligations has been filed on www.sedar.com. About TeraGo TeraGo owns a national spectrum portfolio of exclusive 24 GHz and 38 GHz wide-area spectrum licences including 2,120 MHz of spectrum across Canada's 6 largest cities. TeraGo provides businesses across Canada with cloud, colocation and connectivity services. TeraGo manages over 3,000 cloud workloads, operates five data centres in the Greater Toronto Area, the Greater Vancouver Area, and Kelowna, and owns and manages its own IP network. The Company serves business customers in major markets across Canada including Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, Ottawa and Winnipeg. For more information about TeraGo, please visit www.terago.ca. SOURCE TeraGo Inc.

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[June 29, 2021] Coalition of State Bioscience Institutes Releases the 2021 Life Sciences Workforce Trends Report at BIO Digital

The resilience of the life sciences industry is evidenced by continued job growth through 2020 despite the challenges arising from economic shutdowns and significant job losses in the overall private sector. The Coalition of State Bioscience Institutes (CSBI) released the 2021 Life Sciences Workforce Trends Report with TEConomy Partners at this year's global BIO Digital conference. The report provides a national snapshot of the most pressing current and anticipated talent needs of the nation's dynamic life sciences industry. This year's report also included key findings regarding the impact on talent and hiring dynamics of the global pandemic and the national focus on racial and social equity on the industry's talent needs. The life sciences industry continued to be a leading driver of employment across the country, employing 1.87 million across 101,000 companies as reported in The Bioscience Economy: Propelling Life-Saving Treatments, Supporting State and Local Communities 2020. The industry also continued to generate job growth through 2020 despite declines in the overall private sector. In 2020, U.S. life sciences employers published nearly 760,000 postings for life science positions. Building on the success of its four prior reports, the 2021 CSBI TEConomy Workforce Trends Report examines key trends that are driving talent acquisition. Against the backdrop of the global pandemic and racial and social unrest in the U.S., the life science industry rapidly mobilized and pivoted to respond to the COVID-19 challenge by developing tests and vaccines at unprecedented speed, while elevating diversity, equity and inclusion as strategic priorities within their companies. >



The report is supported in part by InnovATEBIO, a National Science Foundation Advanced Technological Education (ATE) Program-funded Center that supports a national network of community college biotechnology education programs that are training entry-level technicians for the biosciences industry.

"The NSF ATE Program has supported nationally coordinated community college training programs for the life science industry since 1998," stated Dr. Celeste Carter, lead program director, ATE Program. "This report supports and highlights the critical importance of preparing the skilled technical workforce for the biosciences industries." "The 2021 report is an important launch point for discussion about how multiple stakeholders from industry, academia and the public sector can work together to prepare the pipeline of talent needed to sustain critical innovation in our industry," said Liisa Bozinovic, CSBI chair and executive director of the Oregon Bioscience Association. "We look forward to launching a series of discussions beginning this fall aimed at building these important collaborations." In addition to quantitative analysis of over 2.5 million unique job postings from life science companies over the last four years, the analysis includes hiring surveys from nearly 700 companies and 200 interviews with life science executives collected across 18 states and Puerto Rico during the first quarter of 2021. The following trends emerging from these data are explored in the 2021 report: The life science industry's continued economic resilience: Increasing hiring and talent demand despite the challenges of a global pandemic The pandemic forced a seismic shift to remote work for many industry employees, and after facing daunting initial hurdles, many companies are embracing the change and finding advantages in remote or hybrid operations Life sciences companies are elevating commitments to a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive industry as a strategic priority Life sciences industry-academic partnerships remain vibrant and critical to meeting the talent challenge and industry inclusion goals. Download key findings and full report at https://www.csbioinstitutes.org/. About the Coalition for State Biotech Institutes (CSBI) The Coalition for State Biotech Institutes is dedicated to ensuring America's leadership in bioscience innovation by delivering industry-led life science education and workforce development programs through a nationally coordinated effort. Programs are uniquely positioned for life science industry to deliver, replicable in states across the U.S., extensible to other STEM industry sectors and are fully aligned with emerging K-12 Common Core Learning Standards. Learn more at www.csbioinstitutes.org. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629006086/en/

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[June 29, 2021] Strategy Analytics: One Billion Smartphones Worldwide Have Wireless Charging

According to new research from Strategy Analytics, the installed base of wireless charging capable smartphones will reach the record setting one billion mark by the end of this year. Smartphone vendors such as Samsung (News - Alert) , Xiaomi and OPPO and technology suppliers like Infineon, MediaTek, Samsung SDI and Qualcomm are powering the rise of wireless charging with proprietary solutions that top off a battery faster than ever. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629006040/en/ Figure 1. Global Wireless Charging Smartphones Installed Base in 2021 Percentage Share ( Source (News - Alert) : Strategy Analytics, Inc.) Ken Hyers, Director at Strategy Analytics, said "From its introduction ten years ago, in 2012, wireless charging has transitioned fro a finicky niche technology into an in-demand charging solution for high-end smartphones. In 2021 the installed base of smartphones with wireless charging technology will reach one billion devices, following a decade of double- and triple-digit annual sales growth of the devices. By 2026 we forecast it will top 2.2 billion wireless charging enabled smartphones as growing middle classes in emerging market countries expand the addressable market for higher-end smartphones with the technology."



Ville-Petteri Ukonaho, Associate Director at Strategy Analytics (News - Alert) , said "Despite the higher cost that wireless charging adds to smartphones, sales of the devices are strongest in the Asia Pacific region where 49% of the installed base of wireless charging enabled smartphones are. Fast growing middle classes in China, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and elsewhere in the Asia Pacific region mean that a growing proportion of the region's population can afford the technology. Meanwhile North America accounts for 21% of the installed base and Western Europe just 16%." Yiwen Wu, Senior Analyst at Strategy Analytics, said, "Smartphone vendors, particularly those in China, are introducing more advanced charging solutions, such as Xiaomi's Mi Air Charge. These vendors are responding to growing demand for wireless charging solutions, whether standards based using Wireless Power Consortium standards or proprietary charging solutions. The Asia Pacific region will remain the single largest market for wireless charging solutions for the foreseeable future and will continue to grow its installed base share of wireless charging enabled smartphones."

The report, One Billion Smartphones Have Wireless Charging, can be found here. #SA_Devices About Strategy Analytics Strategy Analytics, Inc. is a global leader in supporting companies across their planning lifecycle through a range of customized market research solutions. Our multi-discipline capabilities include: industry research advisory services, customer insights, user experience design and innovation expertise, mobile consumer on-device tracking and business-to-business consulting competencies. With domain expertise in: smart devices, connected cars, intelligent home, service providers, IoT, strategic components and media, Strategy Analytics can develop a solution to meet your specific planning need. For more information, visit us at www.strategyanalytics.com. For more information about Strategy Analytics Device Technologies: Click Here View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629006040/en/

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Farmers Edge Announces Result of Voting for Directors at 2021 Annual Meeting of Shareholders

Farmers Edge Inc. ("Farmers Edge" or the "Company") (TSX: FDGE) is pleased to announce the results of the vote on directors at its June 29, 2021 Annual Meeting of Shareholders (the "Meeting").

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FARMERS EDGE ANNOUNCES RESULT OF VOTING FOR DIRECTORS AT 2021 ANNUAL MEETING OF SHAREHOLDERS

Each of the nominee directors listed in the Farmers Edge management proxy circular dated April 20, 2021 was elected as a director. The voting results for the seven directors nominated for election are set forth in the table below:







Nominee Votes For Votes Withheld # % # % R. William McFarland 33,121,214 89.27 3,981,954 10.73 Wade Barnes 36,516,475 98.42 586,693 1.58 Steven Mills 33,223,904 89.54 3,879,264 10.46 Lawrence Zucker 35,722,171 96.28 1,380,997 3.72 James Borel 32,823,904 88.47 4,279,264 11.53 Quinn McLean 34,085,576 91.87 3,017,592 8.13 Natacha Mainville 37,085,075 99.95 18,093 0.05

Final results on all matters voted at the Meeting will be filed with the Canadian securities regulatory authorities and will be available on the Company's SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com.

About Farmers Edge

Farmers Edge is leading the next agricultural revolution with the industry's broadest portfolio of proprietary technological innovations, spanning hardware, software, and services. Powered by a unique combination of connected field sensors, artificial intelligence, big data analytics, and agronomic expertise, the Company's digital platform turns data into actions and intelligent insights, delivering value to all stakeholders of the agricultural ecosystem. Farmers Edge disruptive technologies accelerate digital transformation on the farm and beyond, protecting our global resources and ensuring sustainable food production for a rapidly growing population.

For more information on Farmers Edge, please visit www.farmersedge.ca. Additional information relating to the Company, including all public filings, is available on SEDAR (www.sedar.com).

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629006090/en/
[June 29, 2021] Carbon Streaming Announces Annual and Special General Meeting Results

Carbon Streaming Corporation ("Carbon Streaming" or the "Company") today held its annual general meeting of shareholders (the "Meeting"), where each of the six nominees proposed as directors and listed in the Company's management proxy circular dated May 28, 2021 were elected as directors. A total of 13,820,092 common shares were voted in respect of the election of directors at the Meeting, representing approximately 14.01% of the votes attached to all outstanding common shares. The detailed results of the vote are set out below:







Nominee Outcome of Vote Voted Voted (%) Maurice Swan Approved 13,768,765 Voted

3,500 Withheld 99.97%

0.03% Justin Cochrane Approved 13,768,705 Voted

3,560 Withheld 99.97%

0.03% R. Marc Bustin Approved 13,768,735 Voted

3,530 Withheld 99.97%

0.03% Saurabh Handa Approved 13,768,765 Voted

3,500 Withheld 99.97%

0.03% Andy Tester Approved 13,733,765 Voted

38,500 Withheld 99.72%

0.28% Jeanne Usonis Approved 13,768,705 Voted

3,560 Withheld 99.97%

0.03%

At the Meeting, the shareholders of the Company also approved: (i) the appointment of Baker Tilly WM LLP as auditor and authorized the directors to fix their remuneration; and (ii) the approval of the Company's omnibus long-term incentive plan of the Company. About Carbon Streaming Corporation: Carbon Streaming Corporation is a unique ESG principled investment vehicle offering investors exposure to carbon credits, a key instrument used by both governments and corporations to achieve their carbon neutral and net-zero climate goals. The Company intends to invest capital through carbon credit streaming arrangements with project developers and owners to accelerate the creation of carbon offset projects by bringing capital to projects that might not otherwise be developed. Many of these projects will have significant social and economic co-benefits in addition to their carbon reduction or removal potential. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210629006111/en/

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Automotive OEM supplier will create more than 90 new jobs in Rockford

Company will invest $5.5 million to increase production

NASHVILLE, Tenn.  Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, Department of Economic and Community Development Commissioner Bob Rolfe and Flex-N-Gate officials announced today that the company will expand its operations, creating 91 new jobs in Blount County.

Flex-N-Gate, an automotive original equipment manufacturer (OEM) supplier, specializes in manufacturing plastic, metal, lighting and mechanical assemblies. The company will invest $5.5 million to upgrade and expand its Rockford manufacturing facility and increase production in lighting materials.

Flex-N-Gate has been manufacturing automotive parts since the 1960s. Headquartered in Urbana, Ill., Flex-N-Gate currently employs approximately 185 people at its Rockford location and 23,000 throughout the world. For employment inquiries please go to www.Flex-N-Gate.com.

Over the last five years, TNECD has supported nearly 70 economic development projects in East Tennessee, resulting in 9,000 commitments and $2.5 billion in capital investment.

QUOTES

Supporting the companies in our automotive sector is key to the success and growth of Tennessees economy. Im pleased to have Flex-N-Gate expand its Rockford operations, and I thank them for creating over 90 new jobs in Blount County.  Gov. Bill Lee

Tennessee is home to over 900 automotive suppliers, and since last year we have seen more than $2.3 billion invested in the automotive sector. At TNECD, we are focused on doing all that we can to support these companies so that when they are looking to grow, Tennessee is the clear choice. Thank you, Flex-N-Gate, for choosing Tennessee.  TNECD Commissioner Bob Rolfe

We would like to thank the state of Tennessee and Blount County for making Rockford the best place to locate this project. Flex-N-Gate looks forward to continued growth and job creation in partnership with TNECD and Blount County.  Bill Beistline, Flex-N-Gate executive vice president of Metals and Procurement

TVA and Maryville Electric Department congratulate Flex-n-Gate on its decision to expand in Blount County. Its always an exciting day when we can celebrate a companys commitment to continued growth in the Valley, and we are proud to partner with the Blount Partnership and Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development to support Flex-n-Gates business success.  John Bradley, TVA senior vice president of Economic Development

Its no surprise to me that Flex-n-Gate is making a $5.5 million investment in Blount County to expand their operations and create 91 new jobs. Tennessee, especially Blount County, is a great place to do business. We are grateful to Governor Lee, Commissioner Rolfe and local officials for securing these jobs and this investment.  Sen. Art Swann (R-Maryville)

In Blount County, part of our mission has always been to help our existing companies expand and grow. We are grateful that Flex-N-Gate has the confidence to make this investment in our community.  Rep. Jerome Moon (R-Maryville)

About the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development

The Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Developments mission is to develop strategies that help make Tennessee the No. 1 location in the Southeast for high quality jobs. To grow and strengthen Tennessee, the department seeks to attract new corporate investment to the state and works with Tennessee companies to facilitate expansion and economic growth. Find us on the web: tnecd.com. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram: @tnecd. Like us on Facebook: facebook.com/tnecd.

TNECD Media Contact

Molly Hair

Public Information Officer

(615) 878-0063

molly.hair@tn.gov

###
Tullahoma, Tenn.  The Tennessee National Guard held its annual Adjutant General Match June 25-27, at Tullahomas Volunteer Training Site.

Hosted and organized by the Tennessee Combat Marksmanship Program, The TAG Match is a training exercise and competition testing marksmanship proficiency among National Guardsmen and local agencies from across the state. The weekend training and competition focused on rifle proficiency; the pistol competition will be held in August.

Competitors took part in multiple shooting events, such as the prone precision match and the close engagement clinic. Fourteen teams of four competed, while individual firers were scored throughout the weekend. At the conclusion of all events, scores were tallied up to see who came out on top.

The 117th Regimental Training Institute, headquartered in Smyrna, dominated the weekend. Aside from winning 1st place under the team competition, all three podium placements from the individual competition were from the 117th. Staff Sgt. Sean Hart placed first, while Sgt. 1st Class John Draper and Sgt. William Lukins finished second and third, respectably.

With everything that has gone on in the last year or so, its nice to get out and train, said Maj. Gen. Jeff Holmes, Tennessees Adjutant General. Our Guardsmen have been working hard in our communities and abroad; this weekend is all about getting together to gain valuable skills to be utilized throughout our organization.

While COVID-19 delayed last years TAG Matches, a modified training schedule allowed it to take place. This year, as COVID-19 restrictions subside, the Tennessee Combat Marksmanship Program is excited to host the training event with limited changes from the usual itinerary.

With the training schedule opening up post-pandemic, we are excited to get back to some core competency training, said Master Sgt. Michael Brumer, state marksmanship coordinator. Marksmanship is a highly perishable skill and we cannot allow anything to impact our readiness posture as an organization.

The purpose of the Tennessee Combat Marksmanship Program is to promote skills and training at all levels of the Tennessee National Guard. Members who compete in these competitions are considered subject matter experts in the marksmanship field and take valuable skills back to their peers within their units.

The Tennessee National Guard continues to operate at a high tempo. Over 700 Guard members are still providing COVID-19 support in communities throughout the state and hundreds more are deployed around the globe. Regularly scheduled training events like the TAG Matches are back on the training calendar and Soldiers and Airmen are completing their mission-essential tasks to stay ready for whatever happens next.
After earning rebuke from the entire metro . . . The Courthouse desperately seeks coverage from a friendly news outlet.

Take a peek . . .



KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Air conditioning repairs at the Jackson County Courthouse have been completed. County Executive Frank White said in a tweet Monday that the repairs were finished on schedule and the equipment has been operational since Friday. However, the "temporary cooling system" will stay in place, according to White.
Credit to capitalism . . . Now that the pandemic has turned quite a few locals into alcoholics . . . Both small & big biz is ready to cash in on human misery.

Here's a taste . . .

The 87 best bars in Kansas City right now Kansas City is an amazing bar city-and it has been for a long, long time. We've argued before that the birth of Kansas City as we know it came when the city took a pass on the whole Prohibition thing.

Thankfully, there's also room to profit on the low-end . . .

Strawberry Hill might just have the best collection of dive bars in America | Kansas City Magazine They are more like neighborhood museums that happen to serve Fireball shots. The best dive bars in Kansas City-really, the best dive bars in the lower Midwest, and maybe the country-are quietly clustered in a historically Croatian enclave of Kansas City, Kansas, called Strawberry Hill.

Developing . . .
More history and kind of a slap in the face to an old school bankrupt politico who will be forgotten in favor of a connection to civil rights era history . . .

Downtown Airport Terminal to be renamed in honor of Tuskegee Airman who still lives in Kansas City by: Heidi Schmidt Posted: / Updated: KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Kansas City will honor a Tuskegee Airman by naming a terminal at the Downtown Airport after him. Gen. Charles E. McGee, is one of only nine remaining Tuskegee pilots who flew in combat, lives in Kansas City.
Posted in fairness, this report is heartbreaking and intended to make locals feel horrible about a problem they'll never be able to solve . . . Read more:

Kansas City's housing crisis forced this couple into an extended stay hotel. And it's only getting worse. A donation to The Beacon goes beyond the newsroom. We amplify community voices, share resources and investigate systems, not just symptoms. The Beacon in your inbox. In-depth reporting delivered every Tuesday and Thursday morning. Night after night, Stephanie Murray sits up late in a recliner, searching the internet for help.
Posted only because our 2nd favorite inner suburb continues to confront harsh times and now seems to be in the process of demolition . . . Read more:

'I heard a loud boom': Multiple injured following explosion at Raytown duplex RAYTOWN, Mo. - Raytown Police and fire crews are investigating an explosion at a duplex Monday night that have sent at least three people to the hospital. Emergency crews responded to the duplex located near 75th and Englewood Lane just before 7 p.m. When FOX4 crews arrived police were setting up a crime scene around the area.

Multiple people injured following explosion at Raytown duplex RAYTOWN, MO (KCTV) -- The authorities are investigating after multiple people were injured Monday night in what's being called an explosion. According to the Raytown Police Department, they received a call just before 7 p.m. that said there was a house explosion in the 7400 block of Englewood Lane.

Dead body found in basement of duplex that exploded in Raytown by: Juan Cisneros Posted: / Updated: RAYTOWN, Mo. - Investigators discovered a dead body in the basement area of the home that exploded Monday night in Raytown. Police and fire crews responded to a duplex near 75th and Englewood lane before 7 p.m. on Monday where an explosion sent three people to the hospital.

Developing . . .
Beat the heat

 Stay hydrated

Drinking enough water is one of the most important things you can do to prevent heat-related illness. An average person needs to drink about three-quarters of a gallon of fluid daily. Avoid sugary, caffeinated and alcoholic drinks.

 Keep your home cool

Cover windows with drapes or shades. Use window reflectors, such as aluminum foil-covered cardboard, to reflect heat back outside. Use a powered attic ventilator or attic fan to regulate the heat level of your attic by clearing hot air. Install window air conditioners and insulate around them.

 Find a cool place

Stay in an air-conditioned place as much as possible. Spending a few hours each day in air conditioning can help prevent or reduce heat-related illness. If you do not have air conditioning in your home, identify a place where you can spend the warmest part of the day during an extreme heat event.

Contact a nearby neighbor, friend or relative who has air conditioning. Check to see if shopping malls or public libraries are open. Find out if your community plans to open public cooling centers.

Don't use an electric fan when the indoor air temperature is over 95F. Using a fan can be more harmful than helpful when indoor air temperatures are hotter than your body temperature. Fan use may cause your body to gain heat instead of losing it.

 Don't work so hard

Schedule outdoor work and other activities carefully: Try to limit your outdoor activity to when it's coolest, such as morning and evening hours. Rest often in shady areas so that your body has a chance to recover. Use your stove and oven less. Cut down on exercise during the heat, and choose lightweight, light-colored, and loose-fitting clothing.

 Stay connected

Never leave infants, children, older adults, individuals with disabilities or pets in a vehicle unattended. Cars can quickly heat up to dangerous temperatures, even with a window cracked open. Check in on older adults and individuals with chronic health conditions at least twice daily.

Source: American Red Cross
Stay up to date on COVID-19

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Sponsored By: Dorsett Automotive
Health authorities are ready to deal with any potential importation of the more infectious and deadly COVID-19 variants from the expected influx of visitors during the coming tourism season.

With Chief Executive Officer of the Barbados Hotel and Tourism Association (BHTA) Senator Rudy Grant recently forecasting very good bookings for the winter, the Governments chief medical advisor is assuring residents that the border protocol measures are strong enough to deal with potential carriers of the virus, including the variants which are currently wreaking havoc in some source markets.

On Monday, the Business Insider publication in the UK reported a total of 117 deaths from the Delta variant. Fifty were among people who had taken two doses of the vaccine.

The publication however disclosed that no fully vaccinated people under age 50 had died and the overall death rate was 0.13 per cent.

Based on what we have put in place, I think it is a fairly robust arrangement to make sure that we catch persons [before] coming into Barbados, Chief Medical Officer Dr Kenneth George told Barbados TODAY on Monday afternoon.

There are several circulating variants of concern out there, particularly the Delta variant and also the Gamma variant. You may recall that the Delta variant was very prevalent in the United Kingdom and it is becoming increasingly prevalent in the United States. So once we open our borders, Barbados will get ready for the importation of variants, Dr George stated.

What I would say, based on public health, we cant physically stop the importation of variants. What we can do, is ensure that our public health responses are most appropriate, he added.

Persons who are coming from the United Kingdom must remain in quarantine for five days and be tested on day six. This is for unvaccinated individuals. If you are vaccinated, the public health evidence shows that the likelihood of one getting severe disease is remote and the likelihood of you transmitting the disease is low, he explained.

The CMO said if a visitor is fully vaccinated and can prove it, they will be testedand based on the results, would be released from quarantine.

Still, all persons coming to Barbados require a PCR test at least three days prior to arrival. If they are vaccinated and their information is accepted by the public health officials at the airport, they are either tested at the airport or tested at their hotelThey remain in quarantine for 24 hours and released once their test results are negative. So it is still a two-step testing process, Dr George stated.

However, he stressed that visitors would be treated according to their vaccine status.

If you are not vaccinated, quarantine is from five to seven days depending on where you are travelling from, he added.

But the Chief Medical Officer contended that at the moment, the challenge with regards to COVID is coming from within the country.

The challenge with COVID is that if you look at our statistics recently, over the last two to three months, the level of persons travelling to Barbados with COVID remains small. The cases that are coming up are Barbadians or people who are resident who are presenting with symptoms, said Dr George.

He told Barbados TODAY that while it is important to protect the countrys borders, the message still needs to go out to the local population that they need to do the right thing.

You might get tired of hearing this. Fortunately, we had one case on Saturday and two out of the 616 cases we did yesterdaytwo who were positive and again those were linked to the original clusters which we spoke about, the CMO said.

His strong message to Barbadians is that while it is important to do everything necessary to protect the islands air and sea ports, it has to be done using a two-pronged approach.

He cautioned that one aspect of that approach is to let Barbadians know they have a responsibility to protect themselves and their family.

President of the Barbados Association of Medical Practitioners (BAMP) Dr Lynda Williams while acknowledging the protocols which have been implemented, said she looks forward to constant reporting on the variants and any changes that may occur in the variants in the Barbados population.

Dr William said she could not say if those protocols would stop a flow of variants from entering the country.

I dont know. I could only go with what we have and we have to follow, whether its a variant or not, we have to follow the same public health principles which are the social distancing, mask wearing, hand sanitizing, cough etiquette. We also have to use the screening methods which have been set up for unvaccinated and fully vaccinated personsand we would have been part of developing those protocols, the BAMP leader told Barbados TODAY.

I could only say we now have to go forward with them and see, the medical practitioner stated.
I know, I know there's been a million chains about COVID testing before flying. I'm traveling this Friday out of JFK and I thought I had my ducks in a row after reading everything here. I got an antigen test at CVS this morning, but when I received my results, none of the lab information was shown, and I can't find the location I got my test done at on the CLIA site, nor can I find any accreditation information online or get in touch with anyone at CVS - so I cannot prove that this test was done at an accredited location. I think the issue may be specific to NYC because we have so many pop-up walk in sites versus actual pharmacies testing patients.

So, I went to a City MD instead. When I told them what I needed for travel, they said to do the PCR since the antigen test wouldn't have a lab on it. But, when my boyfriend told them the same thing in another room, they told him to get the antigen. He received his results, but of course, no information about the lab, nor can we find anything online. I likely won't get my results until right before we leave, and won't know which lab they used until then either.

I looked up other PCR tests in the city since I know they'll go to a lab, but I can't find any within the Jamaica-mandated testing window that are within NYC, and outside of NYC the closest are drive-up only locations (and I don't have a car in the city).

I emailed the folks on the Visit Jamaica site and they said we'd probably be fine with the CVS antigen test, but to check with the airline. We're now waiting for Delta to call us back.

SO, my question is - has anyone traveled from NYC to Jamaica, and if so, where did you get tested and which test did you receive? If flying on Delta, did they look for lab certification?

THANK YOU & I'm sorry for more questions - just trying to do everything I can to ensure we're accepted.
To drive into Italy you have to deal with Italian rules regarding COVID and travel. These change relatively often but right now if you have been resident in one or more of the countries on their List C - which includes Switzerland - in the past 14 days you can drive in as long as you do two things:

1. Have a valid COVID vaccination certificate, vaccine to come from one of the makers on their list and done over 14 days before you enter Italy and present a negative test result

2. Complete a form which you download from their Ministry of Health's site.

Here is a link to that site:

However since you are only transitting Italy for a short time you do not have to have had a test. You can in fact be IN Italy for 36 hours without one. (See their list of exceptions)

Note that these rules are valid until 30 July. But they could change before then if the Italians think they have to! Also - tell your Swiss rental car company that you plan to drive into Italy. It is important that they say it is OK from an insurance viewpoint.

Now for the route - forget the two towns you mention. If you drive from Brig over the Simplon pass the Italian Border post is after the Swiss town of Gondo. Just stay on the main road after you pass the Swiss border and you will come to it. Then at Domodossola follow signs to Locarno (might also say "Svizzera") . This will bring you into Switzerland. be aware that this route (Domo to Locarno) which is called the Centovalli, is very scenic but it is also not a pleasant route to drive. The road changes in width frequently and without warning and lorries hurtle around bends on your side of the road! So stay very alert. (There are some people who actually like the road but to them driving is a sport!).

Edited: 29 June 2021, 15:32
There is currently no touristic traffic at all between Turkey and Greece.

Entry into Greece, see here

where it reads (Turkey not mentioned):

*****

The countries from which entry is allowed, under the aforementioned conditions, without the requirement for subsequent self-isolation are: EU & Schengen Area countries, USA, UK, Albania, Australia, Bahrein, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, China, Israel, Japan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Montenergro*, New Zealand, North Macedonia, Qatar, the Russian Federation*, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, UAE, Ukraine.

*****
At present i am in Sharm El Sheik having started my journey from CapeTown..Cooling my heels for the 14 days as per the requirements to continue into Israel as a traveller from SA..which will be completed by July 4th

I am fully aware of the flight restrictions which mean that avenue is closed for me right now so i hoped the overland journey from here to Tabah/Eilat would still be an option..

All the info i have been trying to collate for this journey has been conflicting to say the least, If any intrepid traveller has taken this route very recently and can throw some first hand light into the mix about this upcoming trip i would be delighted and appreciative to hear from you..

Please note i am a UK passport holder so i have no issues for visa on arrival and i am aware about the necessary Covid tests..the burning question is if the overland crossing for non-Israeli citizens is an available choice for me..

Thanks YC
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RICHMOND, Va. (AP)  Most of the new laws passed earlier this year by the Democrat-controlled Virginia General Assembly will take effect Thursday, including measures that legalize the recreational use of marijuana, largely ban police use of facial recognition technology and forgive certain unemployment overpayments.

In full control of state government for a second year, Democrats used their majority to pass bills that have further transformed Virginia into an outlier in the South.

Democrats say their policies will help Virginia recover from the pandemic, improve public education and make the criminal justice system more equitable. Republicans warn that the new laws will hamper small businesses, increase energy costs and make families less safe.

Here is a look at some of the year's notable changes:

MARIJUANA LEGALIZATION: Possession of up to 1 ounce (28.3 grams) with no intent to distribute will become legal for adults, 21 and older. Adults will also be allowed to grow up to four marijuana plants per household. But it will be years before a legal marketplace to buy the drug is set up.

DEATH PENALTY: Virginia lawmakers voted to end executions, marking a stunning change in direction for a traditionally busy death penalty state. Only two men remained on death row; their sentences will be commuted to life in prison without parole.

UNEMPLOYMENT OVERPAYMENTS: A measure from Del. Sally Hudson directs the beleaguered Virginia Employment Commission to forgive overpayments of unemployment benefits due to state or employer error if the recipient is effectively unable to repay. Thats a policy most other U.S. states, including many conservative Southern ones, already have in place. A spokesperson for the commission said those with overpayments will be contacted directly.

PAID SICK LEAVE: A compromise measure requires employers to provide paid sick leave to an estimated 30,000 home health care workers who serve Medicaid patients. The final version of the bill fell far short of what its sponsor, Del. Elizabeth Guzman, introduced, which would have covered a wide range of essential workers.

OPEN CONTAINER ZONES: One measure will effectively allow local governments to seek state approval to create open-container zones for alcohol. The bill expands a code section that previously dealt with special events, permitting localities to seek approval from the Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control Authority for an outdoor refreshment area license.

FACIAL RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGY: A new law prohibits all local law enforcement agencies and campus police departments from purchasing or using facial recognition technology unless it is expressly authorized by the state legislature. State police are not covered by the legislation.

LITTERING: Lawmakers increased the minimum fine for this misdemeanor from $250 to $500.

INVESTIGATIVE FILES: Criminal investigative files in cases that are no longer ongoing will be made publicly available, with limited exceptions. Families of the victims of the Virginia Beach mass shooting were among those advocating for the Freedom of Information Act reform bill.

GUN CONTROL: Democrats passed five gun control bills this year. Among them are measures that prohibit firearms on the state Capitol grounds and surrounding areas, lengthen the amount of time the FBI has to conduct a background check, and prohibit domestic abusers from purchasing, possessing or transporting a firearm for three years after their date of conviction.

CHILD CARE STABILIZATION: A bill from Sen. Jennifer McClellan aims to stabilize the child care industry, which has faced tremendous challenges amid the pandemic. The measure will loosen background check requirements, and it establishes a pilot program to test out new parameters for the spending of subsidies. Another child care-related measure that temporarily expanded financial assistance for families passed with an emergency clause, which meant it went into effect immediately.

COAL TAX CREDITS: One new law will phase out two antiquated and costly coal tax credits that a state investigation found generate economic losses for Virginia.

GAMBLING MACHINES: Unregulated betting machines called games of skill that have proliferated in locations like gas stations and bars across the commonwealth are on their way out after two years of wrangling over the issue. New legislation will prohibit them July 1.
NORTH HAVEN  A teacher suing the school district alleges she was fired in retaliation for raising concerns about resources in a special education classroom, according to a complaint filed in New Haven Superior Court.

The lawsuit filed by Michelle Mase contends the district violated state and federal law by failing to meet student needs. The Board of Education denied wrongdoing in its answer to the lawsuit; the brief by attorney Richard C. Buturla says the district did not break any regulations or deprive students of educational needs.

Buturlas answer to the suit alleges Mase was acting through her claims in self-interest rather than as a citizen concerned with a matter of public concern.

But Mases attorney John Williams alleged his client was fired for speaking up.

She was complaining instead of just going along and keeping her head down, he said.

Mase alleges in her suit that she worked in a classroom where far too many special needs students were being placed.  These children were being deprived intentionally of their right to a fair public education and the plaintiff advocated on their behalf, per her amended complaint.

Williams said the school was jamming too many special education students into one classroom with little or no paraprofessional support. He did not return a follow-up inquiry seeking information about how many paraprofessionals worked in Mases classroom.

Superintendent of Schools Patrick Stirk said in an email he could not comment on pending legal matters.

Williams said that over the years he often has had clients report problems with a lack of resources in special education services.

I know that this is pervasive. Theres certainly nothing unique to North Haven, Williams said.

In the North Haven case, Mase complained multiple times about challenges in the classroom, the lawsuit alleges, indicating that her complaints included reports of a student who threatened staff, repeatedly escaped from or tried to escape from the room and threw items at Mase and a colleague.

On at least two occasions, those disruptive behaviors prevented Mase from taking a lunch break, according to the lawsuit.

Throughout this, she was given no additional support and thus the needs of all ... students were not being met as required by statute, the complaint says.

In November, Mase was fired in retaliation for her aforesaid complaints of unlawful activity by the defendant and its agents, according to the complaint. It contends Mase was exercising rights protected by Connecticut General Statutes Sec. 31-51q, which holds employers liable if they fire employees for exercising certain constitutional rights that do not materially interfere with the employees job performance.

They claimed that she was not performing up to standards  to which the answer is, well, what am I supposed to do under the circumstances, said Williams.

The complaint cites Connecticuts Special Education Regulations, which

dictate special education services must comply with the federal Individual Disabilities Education Act, which aims to ensure that all children with disabilities have available to them a free appropriate public education that emphasizes special education and related services designed to meet their unique needs and prepare them for further education, employment, and independent living, according to IDEAs provisions.

Mase notes IDEA in her lawsuit, citing it as a section of the United States Code and alleging the district failed to comply with the federal law. The lawsuit does not specify which provisions allegedly were violated.

This is essentially a whistleblower retaliation case so we dont necessarily need to get into the weeds of the technicalities, Williams said.

meghan.friedmann@hearstmediact.com
Tucson, AZ (85741)

Today

A few clouds. Low near 80F. Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

A few clouds. Low near 80F. Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph.
The government plans to eventually liberalise the cost of fuel at the pumps, which has been on the cards for some-time now.

It has stated that a zero-tolerance approach to market monopolisation would be taken.
Currently, 405 Ukrainian citizens, including 44 servicepersons and 30 women, are being held captive in Russia and the occupied territories.

"The armed aggression of the Russian Federation and the temporary occupation of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol and a large part of Donbas led to the violation of Ukraine's territorial integrity and encroached on its independence ... Unfortunately, the state cannot guarantee constitutional rights and freedoms in the occupied territories. Our compatriots are forced to survive under the laws of natural selection of the aggressor state which eradicates not only everything Ukrainian but also human dignity. Currently, 405 citizens of Ukraine, including 44 servicepersons and 30 women, are held in concentration camps and torture chambers in the Russian Federation and in the occupied territories," Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights Liudmyla Denisova said during a solemn sitting of the Parliament on the occasion of the Constitution Day on June 28, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

According to her, the occupier deprived the prisoners of the right to freedom, personal security, legal protection but "it cannot deprive our compatriots of freedom of thought and conviction of hope to return to Ukraine."

The Commissioner stressed that our common duty was to make the Constitution of Ukraine work for everyone in the country.

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The armed formations of the Russian occupation forces continued to restrict the movement of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM), including at a checkpoint of the armed formations in southern Donetsk region and in a border area outside government control in Luhansk region, according to a daily report issued by the OSCE SMM on June 28.

On 26 June, at a checkpoint of the armed formations near Zaichenko (non-government-controlled, 93km south of Donetsk), one visibly armed memberof the armed formations denied the Mission passage westwards towards Pikuzy (formerly Kominternove, non-government-controlled, 92km south of Donetsk) and southwards towards Sakhanka (non-government-controlled, 97km south of Donetsk), citing 'the SMMs safety, reads the report.

In addition, on the same day, at the Chervona Mohyla railway station in Voznesenivka (formerly Chervonopartyzansk, non-government-controlled, 65km south-east of Luhansk), two visibly armed members of the armed formations told the SMM to leave the area, citing lack of permission from superiors.

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Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Dmytro Kuleba assures that Ukraine will continue to support the Belarusian people for as long as necessary to correct Oleksandr Lukashenkos historic mistakes.

One may announce the withdrawal from the Eastern Partnership, but one cannot escape geography. Belarusians have always been and remain part of our European family of nations. We will keep supporting them for as long as necessary to correct Oleksandr Lukashenkos historic mistakes, Kuleba posted on Twitter.

On June 28, the Foreign Ministry of Belarus announced the suspension of participation in the European Union's Eastern Partnership initiative. The reason for this position is "the inadmissibility of sanctions as an instrument of pressure on a sovereign and independent state."

Belarus also starts a procedure to terminate the readmission agreement with the EU. The Permanent Representative of Belarus to the EU is recalled to Minsk for consultations.

The European Union expressed regret over the Lukashenko regime's decision to withdraw from the Eastern Partnership program, noting that the move contradicts the interests of the Belarusians and is aimed at further isolating the country.

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The Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine passed a law on strengthening responsibility for declaring false information and failing to submit a declaration, taking into account the proposals of President Volodymyr Zelensky.

As an Ukrinform correspondent reports, 315 MPs voted in favor of the Presidents proposals for the Law of Ukraine On Amending the Code of Ukraine on Administrative Offenses and the Criminal Code of Ukraine to Improve Liability for Declaration of False Information and Non-Submission by a Declarant of the Declaration of Person Authorized to Perform the Functions of the State or Local Self-Government (No. 4651).

The President proposes to amend Article 366-3 by providing for a term of imprisonment of one year, not two years as was proposed by the bill, to observe the proportionality. With regard to Article 366-2, the Presidents veto removes the possibility of avoiding liability and non-declaration of assets which are registered to relatives as the law adopted in the version submitted for Presidents signature left the possibility to register property to relatives and, accordingly, to refer to the fact that relatives did not provide information about such property, Minister of Justice Denys Malyuska explained while presenting the Presidents proposals.

On June 15, President Zelensky returned law No. 4651, passed by lawmakers on June 3, with his proposals to the Verkhovna Rada.

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EU Ambassador to Ukraine Matti Maasikas has welcomed the adoption by the Verkhovna Rada of a law on the resumption of the work of the High Qualification Commission of Judges (HQCJ), which provides for the decisive role of international experts in the Commissions formation.

Maasikas wrote about this on Twitter.

"A determined step towards a fundamental reform of Ukraines judicial system taken today by the Verkhovna Rada. Welcome the adoption of the High Qualification Commission of Judges reform, look forward to seeing the final text of DL 3711 in line with Venice Commission recommendations," Maasikas said.

The ambassador noted that the European Union was ready to nominate independent experts to support the selection of the High Qualification Commission of Judges.

"For a comprehensive judicial reform, the High Council of Justice to be reformed as well - relevant draft legislation is well advanced," he said.

On Tuesday, June 29, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine adopted a law resuming work of the High Qualification Commission of Judges (HQCJ), which provides for the decisive role of international experts in the Commissions formation.

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Deputy Foreign Minister of Ukraine Yevhen Yenin expects an invitation from Iran to a new round of talks on the downing of the UIA Flight PS752 in the sky over Tehran on January 8, 2020 after the elections and the formation of a new Iranian government in the second half of September.

He said this in an interview with Radio Svoboda, Ukrinform reports.

"After the presidential elections in the country, we can expect the completion of the formation of a new Iranian government in the second half of September, and then we will look forward to an invitation of all of us to Tehran for a new round of talks," Yenin said.

The deputy minister noted that under the convention, Iran is obliged to invite the International Coordination Group for Victims of Flight PS752 to negotiations to resolve the dispute.

"After all, we regard negotiations as the only currently relevant tool for resolving this situation. That is, the ball is on the side of Iran," the official emphasized.

As reported, on January 8, 2020, Ukraine International Airlines plane (Flight PS752) heading from Tehran to Kyiv crashed shortly after taking off from the Imam Khomeini International Airport. There were 176 people on board  nine crew members (all Ukrainians) and 167 passengers (citizens of Ukraine, Iran, Canada, Sweden, Afghanistan, Germany, and the UK). All of them died.

On January 11, Iran admitted that its military had accidentally shot down the Ukrainian passenger jet. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) accepted full responsibility for the downing of the Ukrainian airliner.

On March 17, 2021, Irans Civil Aviation Organization released the final report on the crash of the Ukrainian passenger plane in January 2020. The report blamed an error by an air defence operator for the accidental downing of the Ukrainian plane.

Ontario's Superior Court of Justice ruled that the shooting down of UIA passenger plane near Tehran in January 2020 had been an intentional act of terrorism.

ish
From July 1, Cyprus will not require a negative test result for coronavirus and self-isolation from vaccinated travelers from Ukraine.

The Embassy of the Republic of Cyprus in Ukraine posted this on Facebook.

"As of 1 July 2021, vaccinated passengers holding a valid certificate of vaccination against COVID-19 arriving to Cyprus from Ukraine, regardless of their nationality, shall be exempted from the obligation of laboratory testing and self-isolation/quarantine," the report reads.

Ukrainian tourists must adhere to the following conditions: have a valid certificate of vaccination issued by Ukraine; be vaccinated either with one of the vaccines approved by the European Medicines Agency (Pfizer/BioNTech, AstraZeneca, Moderna, Janssen), or with Sputnik V vaccine, or with Sinopharm (BBIBP COVID-19) as of 21 May, and have completed their vaccination scheme.

On April 1, 2021, Cyprus opened its borders to all travelers from Ukraine.

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| By Mary Therese Phelan

Shania Kerina was pregnant  and homeless  when at least once a week she received a call from Angelise Shelby, MSW, LGSW, a social worker with Bmore for Healthy Babies (BHB), the outreach program operated by the University of Maryland School of Social Works (UMSSW) Promise Heights initiative.

Top: University of Maryland, Baltimore President Bruce E. Jarrell praises Bmore for Healthy Babies (BHB) and its community partners. Middle: (L) Antoine Dow, owner of Cut Styles, cuts a patrons hair; BHB Director Stacey Stephens thanks the community for its support. Bottom: BHB staff with Mayor Brandon M. Scott; Shania Kerina explains how BHB had a direct impact on her and the life of her son.

I was house to house. I was in and out the hospital from stress. I was bleeding a lot, Kerina said. I was so stressed that I just would ignore her call.

At the time, Kerina knew little about BHB, how the staff conducts aggressive outreach using door-to-door, word-of-mouth, and other methods to build family and community trust and increase community awareness of its prenatal and postnatal support services. She didnt know BHB would be credited for achieving a record-low infant mortality rate for Black infants in her neighborhood of Upton/Druid Heights.

Eventually Kerina saw a flyer for a Spa Night hosted by BHB for pregnant women and new moms in her neighborhood. Why not go, she thought. After all, dinner was included.

The room was packed just with pregnant moms, new moms, and they had a room where they were watching the kids. They supplied dinner for us at the end. And I dont even think they knew that was the only meal I had that day. And I was pregnant at eight months, Kerina said.

Now the proud mother of a son, 1-year-old Kimani, Kerina shared her story at a June 17 news conference celebrating a major milestone in the work of BHB and its partners. After more than a decade of sustained investment in Upton/Druid Heights, the infant mortality rate dropped by 75 percent to 3.8 deaths per 1,000 live births. This rate is lower than the citys overall white infant mortality rate (4.4 in 2019) and comparable to Baltimore communities that are far more wealthy and affected far less negatively by social determinants of health. The outcome is directly tied to years of local investment, outreach, and education through the work of the BHB program, officials said.

When BHB launched in 2009, Upton/Druid Heights, with a population that is among the citys least wealthy and almost entirely Black, had a higher rate of infant mortality than the city overall.

It is no secret that there is a distinct significant racial disparity in infant mortality with Black babies typically dying between two and five times the rate of white babies, said Mayor Brandon M. Scott, who hosted the news conference. This is an unfortunate dynamic that our city knows all too well. In 2009, 15 out of 1,000 infants in the neighborhood of Upton/Druid Height did not survive birth. But these are more than just statistics. Its 15 lives that will never have a chance to reach their full potential to watch Saturday cartoons, to eat crabs, dress up for Halloween. While the deck is already stacked against Black children growing up in these neighborhoods, 15 of those precious lives wont even have an opportunity to dream or fulfill their potential.

Scott was joined by University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) President Bruce E. Jarrell, MD, FACS; Stacey Stephens, LCSW-C, director of BHB; Letitia Dzirasa, MD, commissioner of the Baltimore City Health Department; Demaune Millard, president and chief executive officer of the Family League of Baltimore; Traci Kodeck, MPH, chief executive officer of HealthCare Access Maryland; Destiny Simone-Ramjohn, PhD, vice president of community health and social impact at CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield; and Antoine Dow, owner of the Cut Styles barbershop.

The work in Upton/Druid Heights is absolutely incredible, Scott said. I want to thank Director Stephens and Bmore for Healthy Babies for this measurable impact in this community, and subsequently in Baltimore as a whole.

In addition to promoting access to prenatal care and primary care services, BHB provides education to new parents through local organizations, schools, and businesses. BHB also leads Moms Clubs for prenatal education and postpartum support, breastfeeding support groups, parenting classes, and case management.

This isnt just an accomplishment relative to Baltimore. This is a national accomplishment, where we have done a spectacular job, Jarrell said. The hard part comes up now. How do we make it so that those infants now blossom, reach their potential, and become great contributors to this city? That's the challenge. The other challenge is, of course, to keep our federal government helping us to fund this great program. And so, Mr. Mayor and all of our delegation, were going to need your help to make this kind of funding that goes to social determinants of health really successful.

Stephens noted a central part of BHBs success has been cultivating trust and respect in the Upton/Druid Heights community.

We owe a tremendous thank you to Black women who partnered with us during the vulnerable but joyous time of pregnancy and parenting young children, Stephens said, addressing moms from the community who gathered on the sidewalk, joining program staff in donning purple BHB T-shirts, outside Cut Styles on McMechen Street, where the news conference was held.

During this period, we have deeply listened to Black women as you have transformed educational, perinatal groups into spaces that foster social connections and supports, she said. We admire how you have emerged as strong advocates and community organizers in your community, which has even led to new entrepreneurial and employment opportunities. We celebrate you as you lead and sustain this ongoing work.

Stephens especially thanked Dow and other barbers in the community. For eight years, barbershops and barbers have been instrumental in providing space in their shops to share BHB messaging around ways to reduce the infant mortality rate.

Dow met Stephens several years ago when she walked into the barbershop to educate men about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) and the importance of having babies sleep on their backs.

At the time, my son was a preemie, Dow said. So I was laying him down incorrectly. And what she did basically saved my son's life by giving me the information about alone, on the back, in the crib [a SIDS awareness campaign]. We still have a long battle. I'm not going to celebrate yet because Im working with a lot of fathers right now who have new children.

The barbershops TV plays BHB-created videos about safe sleep and other topics related to the health and wellness of children and families.

Meanwhile, mom Kerina has since become one of BHBs Community Achievers, a group of new moms that assembles and delivers care packages of helpful items to support new parents.

They are doing so much in the community. You know, not only are they saving lives, but theyre building families, she said. Without Bmore for Healthy Babies, a lot of people would just be S.O.L., she added, as the mayor laughed at the colloquial expression for bad luck.

Ive always wanted to say that at a press conference, Scott joked.
Rainbow flags at a LGBTIQ+ pride parade in San Salvador, El Salvador.  UNHCR/Tito Herrera

Geneva  States and those who engage in humanitarian and development work must do more to protect the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ+) people who are displaced or stateless. To do this, they must form stronger alliances with LGBTIQ+ civil society, according to participants in the 2021 Global Roundtable on Protection and Solutions for LGBTIQ+ People in Forced Displacement.

There is unprecedented momentum to improve protection of LGBTIQ+ people forced to flee violence and persecution. There has never been a greater need, said Gillian Triggs, Assistant High Commissioner for Protection for UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency after todays closing session.

That is why at UNHCR were redoubling efforts to strengthen our internal capacities, and to create a platform to bring together a bigger, stronger coalition to address the real, intersectional challenges faced by LGBTIQ+ people forced from home.

The invitation-only conference, held virtually from 7-29 June, was organized by the UN Refugee Agency and the United Nations Independent Expert on Protection Against Violence and Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (IE SOGI), Victor Madrigal-Borloz. They convened more than 500 people from around the world from governments, civil society, and the private sector, as well as LGBTIQ+ people who have experienced displacement, to discuss experiences, policies and programmes that have worked and ways to implement solutions.

There is great cruelty when the forced displacement of persons is the result of who they are or who they love  and it will take a global coalition to address the institutional drivers of violence and to deconstruct stigma at the base of it, said Madrigal-Borloz.

Forging alliances is based in mutual trust  and the creation of shared spaces for evidence-based dialogue is fundamental to that end. Bringing together this diverse, inclusive and empowered group of experts is an essential step to ensure that our joint knowledge base of root causes, challenges and opportunities remains relevant and accurate.

There are more than 82 million people who have been forcibly displaced worldwide and among them are refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced and stateless people who seek protection from discrimination, abuse and persecution related to their sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression and sex characteristics. Consensual same-sex relationships are currently criminalised in 68 countries and in at least six nations it is punishable by death.

Participants discussed the drivers of displacement, the challenges of seeking asylum, the need to include LGBTIQ+ people in national health services and social programmes, resettlement, local integration, livelihood opportunities and more. Recommendations included:

Develop and carry out regular, trauma-informed and intersectionally-inclusive training on sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression and sex characteristics.

Ensuring legal gender recognition via self-determination for all people of concern, enabling all refugees, asylum seekers and forcibly displaced people to amend their name and gender markers, based on self-determination and irrespective of details contained in identification documents issued to them from any country of nationality

Increased support and funding for LGBTIQ+ organisations on the ground, including existing national groups and those run by people with lived experience of forced displacement.

"We cannot achieve change without centering the lived experience. The meaningful engagement with LGBTIQ+ forcibly displaced people is about a recognition of equal relationships and building genuine partnership, said Tina Dixson, co-founder of Forcibly Displaced People Network.

It is about a recognition that we, as displaced communities, hold the expertise, and that we too bring the solutions. Engage with LGBTIQ+ refugee-led organisations from the beginning and you will deliver services that are needed the most.

The comprehensive list of recommendations of the LGBTIQ+ Roundtable can be found at https://qiqochat.com/a/unhcr-iesogi-roundtable. They will also be shared in a joint, hybrid press conference tomorrow 30 June at 9:30am CET with Victor Madrigal-Borloz, the IE SOGI and Gillian Triggs, UNHCR Assistant High Commissioner for Protection.

For more information, please contact:

UNHCR

In New York, Kathryn Mahoney, [email protected] , +1 347 443 7646

OHCHR:
Ethiopian refugees receive emergency relief items at a site near the Ethiopia-Sudan border.  UNHCR/Assadullah Nasrullah

More than 16,000 Ethiopian refugees in Sudans eastern refugee settlements of Um Rakuba and Tunaydbah have been impacted after several weeks of storms razed tents, swept away their belongings, and destroyed infrastructure.

Nearly 4,000 out of 10,000 individual family tents have been damaged by strong winds, heavy rains, and hailstorms. Emergency latrines and other facilities have also been destroyed.

UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, and its partners are in a race against time and nature to repair and reinforce shelters and ensure that affected families have access to clean water and safe latrines with storms expected to intensify further during the rainy season, which continues from June to October.

We are replacing blankets and sleeping mats and replenishing food supplies. Distributions of 2,500 emergency shelter kits  ropes, wooden poles, and bamboo sticks  are underway to help those most impacted to reinforce their tents. A total of 10,000 emergency shelters kits are planned for distribution with an additional 5,000 in reserve.

UNHCR and partners are currently finalizing construction and rehabilitation of some 60 kilometres of roads to both Um Rakuba and Tunaydbah, which is critical to ensure access to the camps as well as to about 15 host community villages throughout the rainy season. We are also digging drainage systems in the two sites to mitigate the risks of further flooding. Partners are constructing semi-permanent schools, as well as permanent latrines and showers. However, accelerating the work is challenging because of continuing storms.

More permanent shelters called tukuls  small round huts made from mud bricks and thatch, typical of the region  are planned. But we can only start building them after the rainy season is over, when the bricks will be able to dry properly.

The sudden onset of extreme weather is dramatically amplifying the risks for people forced to flee conflict and persecution, as the effects of climate change are felt disproportionately by the most vulnerable.

Last year, heavy seasonal rains caused flash floods and rivers to burst their banks, affecting hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people, refugees and host communities in Sudan.

UNHCR and 31 UN and NGO partners are calling for US$ 182 million in the recently released updated interagency appeal, an increase of US$ 33 million. The revised appeal incorporates additional funding requirements to carry out infrastructure improvements to the camps, including construction of more durable traditional shelters, and to meet the protection and basic needs of the Ethiopian refugees until the end of the year. So far 46 percent of the required amount has been received.

For more information on this topic, please contact:
The Radosavljevic-Dobrani are a Roma family of 11, who live in a dilapidated settlement in the northern town of Berane in Montenegro. Like many other Roma families in Montenegro, the family has no identity documents, which deprives them of basic human rights that all of us take for granted. After 35 years of life without any identity documents, Valentina Radosavljevic, finally received ID documents that will allow her to apply for a legal status in Montenegro. She will now be able to confer legal identity to her 9 children, find decent employment, go see a doctor or even open a bank account.

Until today, I felt lost all my life. You have to understand that statelessness is like a family virus  you pass it down to your children and wearing a mask and washing hands does not help. I am very happy that this nightmare is over, said Valentina Radosavljevic.

Without sufficient proof of their identities, the family was trapped in a legal limbo. The situation was especially critical for the 9 children born in Montenegro, as they only had birth certificates and no citizenship. In the short time that children get to be children, statelessness can set in stone grave problems that will sentence them to a life of limited opportunities and discrimination.

Stateless children live in a world in which their status profoundly affects their ability to learn, grow and fulfill their ambitions and dreams for the future. It is heart-warming for us to see that with UNHCRs assistance the Radosavljevic family, and especially the children, will now be able to achieve a stable legal status. If our hopes for the future generation are to be achieved, then children of this generation must be a meaningful part of the present, said Jean Yves Bouchardy, UNHCR Representative to Montenegro.

Not being recognized as a national of any country can create insurmountable barriers to healthcare, social care, jobs and stifles overall life prospects. Statelessness can often have devastating psychological toll not only for young people, but can also rip apart entire families, as it creates legal schism. The ID documents made a huge difference in their lives, Valentina says. We are now one step closer to finally making our family official. My children will not have to beg anymore, and we will be able to receive social assistance. It may seem little to others, but to us this is life-changing.

Statelessness is often passed on to children, which profoundly affects their ability to learn, grow and fulfil their dreams for the future. Not being recognized as a national of any country can create insurmountable barriers to healthcare, social care and jobs. Statelessness can have devastating psychological toll on young people and can also rip apart entire families. Valentina Radosavljevic, a mother of 9, receives her identity documents after being 35 years in a legal limbo.

UNHCR and its legal aid partner, the Civic Alliance, identified Valentina as a beneficiary of a novel form of support provided in cooperation with the Serbian Embassy in Montenegro since 2019. Without any identity documents, Valentina was unable to travel back home to Serbia and apply for ID card and passport. The Serbian Embassy issued an emergency travel certificate that allowed her to go back home, and with the logistical and administrative assistance from UNHCR, receive the identity documents from the Ministry of Interior of Serbia branch office.

UNHCRs work on ending statelessness in the country is one of the major pillars of the joint UN Montenegro programme on integrated social protection and employment  called Activate!, which is funded by the UNs Joint SDG Fund. So far, 703 people, both formerly displaced and internally displaced and those at risk of statelessness, were provided support by UNHCR for legal status regularization under this programme, which aims to enhance the capacities of the social welfare system in Montenegro and support vulnerable people in accessing social protection and employment.

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Berkley graduate Aaron Harvey proudly stands in the southeast San Diego neighborhood he grew up in and lives in, near his home on Wednesday, June 16, 2021 in San Diego, California. (Eduardo Contreras/The San Diego Union-Tribune/TNS)
American Philosophical Society's head of conservation Anne Downey, left, and Patrick Spero, director of the library, open their copy of the original Declaration of Independence ordered up by President John Quincy Adams in 1820, but not completed until 1823. (Tom Gralish/The Philadelphia Inquirer/TNS)
IN THE aftermath of the New Hampshire budget debate, there will be a lot of energy spent tallying the winners and losers of the process, with a lot of focus on how this two-year spending blueprint reflects on political leaders and on the political parties. The time spent on the most contro
Catherine H. Lewis, 93, peacefully went to be with her Lord June 28, 2021, at Southern Pines in Thomasville, GA. She was born August 22, 1927, in Milledgeville, GA as an only child to the late Oscar P. Hodges and Annabelle Leveritte Hodges. She was married 75 years to the late James M. Lewis
(@ChaudhryMAli88)

DUBAI, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News / WAM - 29th Jun, 2021) Lieutenant General Abdullah Khalifa Al Marri, Commander-in-Chief of Dubai Police, has recently met with Major General Pilot Sheikh Ahmed bin Tahnoun bin Mohammed Al Nahyan, Chairman of the National Service and Reserve Authority (NSR), at Jebel Ali Camp, in line with efforts to strengthen the strategic partnership and cooperation between the two entities.

The high-level meeting also aimed at reviewing preparations of the national service and reserve recruits who are joining the worlds much awaited event Expo 2020 Dubai from October 2021 to April 2022 in welcoming millions of visitors to the UAE.

During the meeting, Lt. Gen. Al Marri valued the unlimited support of Maj. Gen. Sheikh Ahmed bin Tahnoun to the efforts exerted by the Dubai Police General Command, Expo 2020 Dubai Office and all their strategic partners in preparation for the global event, thus contributing to providing top-notch services to visitors and participants with high professionalism and outstanding performance.

Lt. Gen. Al Marri further stressed that the nomination of national service and reserve recruits to participate in the organisation of Expo 2020 Dubai through the training programme aims to enhance and develop their capabilities and competencies by introducing them to legal and police procedures while performing their duties. He also stressed that Dubai Police pays great attention to national service recruits, because they play pivotal role in securing the international event and achieving national goals regarding successfully hosting major events.

Maj. Gen. Sheikh Ahmed bin Tahnoun reaffirmed that the participation of national service recruits in Expo 2020 Dubai is aimed at providing an exceptional experience for Expo 2020 Dubai visitors and the participating countries. He expressed pride in the recruits and assured them that their participation will enhance the bright image of Dubai beyond expectations, and will leave, without any shadow of doubt, a distinct legacy for future generations.

Lieutenant Colonel Salah Al Marzooqi, Coordinator-General, Support Sector, Expo 2020 Dubai, briefed the attendees on the security teams readiness, including the national service recruits, and on the accomplished specialised training programmes, which covered three security sectors: the Support Sector, the Operations Sector, and the Criminal Investigation. He also touched on the camp's readiness in terms of facilities and security points used, including military barracks, transportation, catering, medical and fitness and other services provided to national service recruits.

Major Salah Al Mazrouei, Director of Dubai Police Security Inspection- K9 Unit, briefed the attendees on the best practice of the Ministry of Interior regarding the use of police dogs in enhancing preventive and precautionary efforts and measures to limit the spread of COVID-19.

Towards the end of the meeting, Maj. Gen. Ahmed bin Tahnoun called upon the recruits to keep up their hard work and continue fulfilling their duties in a timely and accurate manner.

The meeting was held in the presence of Major General Prof. Muhammad Ahmed bin Fahd, Assistant Commander-in-Chief for Academic and Training Affairs at Dubai Police; Major General Abdullah Hussain Khan, Assistant Commander-in-Chief for Community Happiness and Logistic Support Affairs, Major General Abdullah Ali Al Ghaithi, Director of the General Department for Organisations Protective Security and Emergency; Brigadier Ahmed Muhammad Rafie, Acting Assistant Commander-in-Chief for Administration Affairs; Brigadier Prof. Ghaith Ghanem Al Suwaidi, Director of the Dubai Police Academy; and number of senior officers representing both entities.
(@FahadShabbir)

Manzini, Swaziland, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 29th Jun, 2021 ) :Eswatini deployed soldiers overnight to an industrial town near the capital to crack down on protests against the ruling authorities in Africa's last absolute monarchy, pro-democracy activists said Tuesday.

Protests are usually rare in Eswatini, but recent weeks have seen violent anti-monarchy demonstrations erupting in parts of the country.

"The military is on the streets," Lucky Lukhele, spokesman for the pro-democracy grouping Swaziland Solidarity Network, told AFP.

"Yesterday was the worst night ever where a young man was shot point-blank by the army, and some are in hospital as we speak," said Lukhele.

Shops were looted and torched overnight in Matsapha, an industrial hub on the western edge of the capital Manzini, according to several sources.

Lukhele also said he had been told by his military sources that King Mswati III had left Eswatini.

But a source close to the government told AFP that reports of the king fleeing the country were "fake news".

The government last week banned protests, with National Police Commissioner William Dlamini warning that officers would be "zero-tolerant" of breaches of the ban.

The king, crowned in 1986 when he was just 18, has come under fire for his expensive tastes and spending while most inhabitants live below the poverty line.

In 2019, the country was rocked by a series of strikes by civil servants who accused the monarch of draining public coffers at the expense of his subjects.
Athens, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 29th Jun, 2021 ) :Greece on Tuesday said it had recovered a Picasso painting personally donated by the Spanish master to the Greek people, almost a decade after it was stolen alongside two other artworks in an audacious heist at the National Gallery.

"Head of a Woman", gifted by Pablo Picasso to Greece in 1949, was recovered in Keratea, a rural area some 45 kilometres (28 miles) southeast of Athens, officials told a news conference.

Police said a 49-year-old builder had confessed to stealing the artworks in 2012 and had been arrested.

The man said he had initially hidden them in a home but had recently stashed them in thick vegetation at a local gorge.

- ' Great joy and emotion' - "Today is a special day, (a day of) great joy and emotion," Culture Minister Lina Mendoni told reporters.

Mendoni said the painting would have been "impossible" to sell as it had a personal inscription by Picasso on the back -- "For the Greek people, a tribute by Picasso." The artist had given the cubist painting to the Greek state in recognition of the country's resistance to Nazi Germany during a painful 1941-44 occupation.

"This painting is of particular importance and sentimental value to the Greek people, as it was personally dedicated by the great painter to the Greek people for their fight against fascist and Nazi forces," Mendoni said.

Another painting stolen in the same heist in January 2012, 'Stammer Windmill' by Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, was also found.

According to police sources cited by news agency ANA, the self-confessed thief had monitored security operations at Athens' National Gallery, Greece's largest state art collection, for six months previously.

The heist lasted just seven minutes.

It was originally believed that two men broke in, cutting the paintings from their frames.

But police said the suspect likely had no accomplices.

Greek media reports said police had brought the builder in for questioning following surveillance and he confessed, showing them where he had hidden the paintings.

The man, who is represented by one of Greece's leading criminal lawyers, reportedly claimed he was an art lover and did not intend to sell the paintings.

A sketch by 16th-century Italian artist Guglielmo Caccia, better known as Moncalvo, was also stolen in the same robbery. But state television reported it was damaged in the heist and discarded.

- Security 'non-existent' - A state report found that the National Gallery's security had not been upgraded for over a decade, with the then police minister calling safeguards "non-existent".

Several areas in the museum were out of range of security cameras, while the alarms were faulty and prone to ringing gratuitously.

In addition, the gallery had a reduced security presence at the time owing to a three-day staff strike.

On the night of the heist, the burglar had set off an alarm by manipulating an unlocked door to send the sole guard elsewhere in the building.

The guard told police he ran after one thief, who dropped another Mondrian oil painting.

The theft, at the height of the Greek debt crisis, was followed a few months later by another high-profile robbery of nearly 80 archaeological artefacts from a museum in Olympia dedicated to the ancient Olympic Games.

The items were recovered several months later.

The National Gallery holds a prominent collection of post-Byzantine Greek art, as well as a small collection of Renaissance works and some El Greco paintings.

It reopened in March after an extensive renovation that cost over 59 million Euros ($70 million) and doubled its capacity.
United Nations, United States, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 29th Jun, 2021 ) :The United States, Ireland and Britain have called for an emergency UN Security Council public meeting concerning Ethiopia's war-torn Tigray, where rebel fighters were able to enter the regional capital of Mekele on Monday, diplomatic sources said.

The meeting could be held Friday, the same sources added, although it is up to France, which holds the security council presidency in July, to set an exact date and time.

Since the war began in November, the West has yet to succeed in organizing a public session on Tigray, with many African countries, China, Russia and other nations deeming the crisis an internal Ethiopian affair.

These countries could request a procedural vote on the merits of the meeting prior to its occurrence, which could nullify it. Permanent member states would not be able to veto the move, but a vote by nine out of the 15 member states would be able to assure that it occurs.

Ethiopia's Federal government on Monday declared a "unilateral ceasefire" in Tigray, as rebel fighters entered the regional capital Mekele sparking celebrations in the streets.

The dramatic reversal for Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's forces signaled a turning point in the nearly eight-month-old conflict, which the UN says has pushed 350,000 people to the brink of famine.

The Security Council's last session on Tigray was held behind closed doors on June 15, just like all others before it since the conflict's start. China was opposed, according to diplomats, to the adoption of a joint declaration by the Council on the risk of extended famine in Ethiopia.

The war in Tigray began last November, when Abiy sent troops in to oust the dissident regional leadership.

He said the move came in response to attacks by the regional ruling party, the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), on federal army camps.

Abiy promised a swift victory, and federal troops took control of Mekele.

But intense fighting has persisted throughout the region amid mounting reports of massacres and widespread sexual violence.
(@FahadShabbir)

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 24th Jun, 2021 ) :Ambassador of the Arab Republic of Egypt Tarek Mohamed Dahroug called on Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Zaheer Ahmed Baber Sidhu here on Thursday.

Ambassador Tarek Mohamed Dahroug commended the professionalism of Pakistan Air Force and acknowledged its rising indigenous capacity in aviation industry.

During the meeting, both the dignitaries discussed matters of professional and mutual interest, said a Pakistan Air Force (PAF) media release received here.

The Air Chief said Pakistan and Egypt had longstanding religious, cultural and historical bonds which were manifested through strong ties between Egyptian Air Force and Pakistan Air Force.

The Air Chief also emphasised upon the significance of further deepening the relations between the two Air Forces.
ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 29th Jun, 2021 ) :The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has shared information with the relevant departments for an "appropriate action" on the theft of Schengen visa stickers from Italian embassy in Islamabad, the Foreign Office Spokesperson confirmed on Tuesday.

In response to questions by journalists, Spokesperson Zahid Hafeez Chaudhri said the theft of visa stickers was reported to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs by the foreign diplomatic mission, after which the information was immediately shared with the concerned departments.

"The information was immediately shared with the concerned authorities for taking appropriate action in this regard," he said.

According to reports, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has informed the Interior Ministry and Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) on report of around 1,000 visa stickers stolen from the locker-room of Italian embassy in Islamabad this month.

The concerned departments have been requested to keep track of the visa stickers at all entry and exit points and report any seizure to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

As per available information, 750 stolen visa stickers have serial numbers from ITA041913251 to ITA041914000 and the 250 visa stickers have the numbers from ITA041915751 to ITA041916000.
(@FahadShabbir)

The National Command and Operation Centre (NCOC) on Tuesday was apprised that the country so far had received 21.13 million doses of different types of Covid-19 vaccines out of which over 17 million doses were procured on payment

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 29th Jun, 2021 ) :The National Command and Operation Centre (NCOC) on Tuesday was apprised that the country so far had received 21.13 million doses of different types of Covid-19 vaccines out of which over 17 million doses were procured on payment.

This was briefed during the NCOC Session, chaired by National Coordinator Lieutenant General Hamood Uz Zaman Khan held here.

The Forum discussed roll out plan of three million doses of SinoVac vaccine arrived today from China through procurement Plan for the month of June.

Chairman National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) Lieutenant General Akhtar Nawaz Satti briefed the Forum on efforts put in for procurement plan of vaccines out of allotted budget of US $ 1.

2 billions.

The Forum expressed satisfaction on the availability of vaccine in the country.

It was also once again reiterated that all federating units could procure vaccine at their end.

The Forum expressed concerns over rising positivity of disease in GB and emphasised on stringent implementation of Standard Operating Procedures with regards to tourism in Northern region of the country.

It was reiterated that federating units have the discretion of planning summer holidays in their respective education institutions.

Special Assistant to Prime Minister for health Dr Faisal Sultan and Chairman National Disaster Management Authority Lieutenant General Akhtar Nawaz Satti also attended the session.
WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 29th June, 2021) The Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) complaint accusing Facebook of violating antitrust laws has been dismissed by a US federal judge, an opinion issued by the court on Monday revealed.

"Although the Court does not agree with all of Facebook's contentions here, it ultimately concurs that the agency's Complaint is legally insufficient and must therefore be dismissed. The FTC has failed to plead enough facts to plausibly establish a necessary element of all of its Section 2 claims  namely, that Facebook has monopoly power in the market for Personal Social Networking (PSN) Services," Judge James E. Boasberg said in the memorandum opinion.

The complaint alleges that Facebook has maintained a monopoly, in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act by acquiring firms that it believed to be competitive threats, including Instagram and WhatsApp, and adopting policies that inhibited interoperability between Facebook and other apps that they believed could grow into viable competitors.

The FTC was seeking equitable relief from the alleged behavior, including forced "divestiture or reconstruction of businesses," as well as orders not to behave similarly in the future.

However, Boasberg noted that the court only dismissed the FTC complaint against Facebook, and not the whole case. He stated that the FTC's inability to offer any indication of the way in which it calculated Facebook's market share renders its accusations too vague to go forward, but because the FTC could easily refile the complaint to address those concerns, Boasberg is dismissing in a way which will allow them to file an amended version in the future.
MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 29th June, 2021) The Ethiopian government announced an unconditional ceasefire in Tigray province following the recapture of the regional capital by rebel forces, local newspaper Addis Standard reported on Monday, citing a government statement.

According to the local media, after the Tigray Defence Forces took control of the city of Mekelle, forcing the government troops and officials to retreat, the head of Tigray interim administration asked Addis Ababa to establish a ceasefire agreement and work on a political solution to Tigray crisis.

"The government has announced an unconditional ceasefire that will last until the end of the farming season effective as of June 28, 2021," the Federal government was cited as saying by the Addis Standard.

Fighting in the province of Tigray broke out in November after the Ethiopian government accused the local ruling party  the Tigray People's Liberation Front  of attacking a regional military base to hijack weapons and arm the anti-government militia. The Tigray region has been occupied by the Ethiopian military since then, resulting in clashes with the rebels and heavy civilian losses.
(@FahadShabbir)

Russia is in favor of resolving the Cyprus problem based on legal norms and dialogue, the Russian Foreign Ministry stated on Tuesday, following a telephone conversation between Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and his Cypriot counterpart, Nikos Christodoulides

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 29th June, 2021) Russia is in favor of resolving the Cyprus problem based on legal norms and dialogue, the Russian Foreign Ministry stated on Tuesday, following a telephone conversation between Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and his Cypriot counterpart, Nikos Christodoulides.

"The Russian side reaffirmed its principled position in favor of a fair, viable and comprehensive resolution to the Cyprus problem on the basis of the existing UN Security Council resolutions. It was stated that it is possible to ensure long-term stability and peace in the Eastern Mediterranean through dialogue and quest for mutually acceptable solutions on the basis of internationally recognized norms," the ministry stated.

The Cyprus problem is nearly half a century old. The island, where Greek and Turkish Cypriots live, has been divided de facto since 1974, when an attempt to unify Cyprus with Greece caused Turkey to deploy armed forces to the island.

On November 15, 1983, Turkish Cypriots declared the independence of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus which is recognized only by Turkey.

Turkey and the new leader of Turkish Cypriots, Ersin Tatar, who was elected as president of the self-proclaimed Turkish Cypriot state on October 18, 2020, support a two-state solution in the island, while the Greek Cypriots support a bizonal, bicommunal federation. With the participation of the two sides and the three guarantor states of Turkey, Greece and the UK, negotiations under the guidance of the United Nations are occasionally held in order to find a solution to the problem.
WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 29th June, 2021) US-led Operation Inherent Resolve in Iraq and Syria spokesperson Wayne Marotto confirmed on Monday that US forces in Syria were attacked with multiple rockets, there are no injuries.

Earlier in the day, media reported that rockets hit a US military base in Syria's eastern Deir ez-Zor province.

"Initial report: At approx. 7:44 PM local time, US Forces in Syria were attacked by multiple rockets," Marotto said in a statement via Twitter. "There are no injuries and damage is being assessed. We will provide updates when we have more information.
Oceanography Camp for Girls (OCG) is a three-week summer program for young women from Pinellas County. Dr. Teresa Greely (far left), has served as the Camps director since 1994. Dr. Angela Lodge (far right), a former social worker and youth development expert co-directed OCG with Greely for more than 20 years.

Written by Kristen Kusek, Communications Director for USF CMS

The USF College of Marine Science launched its first Oceanography Camp for Girls (OCG) in 1991. That was the year digital cell phone technology was launched, although most people still had phones attached to walls  and the year the web became publicly available, although few knew what that really meant.

Oh my, how the world has changed since 1991. But the OCG has stood the test of time.

This three-week summer program, designed for young women from Pinellas County in their sandwich summer between middle school and high school, has earned billing by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as a model for immersive, experiential STEM learning for women and girls. Activities include a spectrum of hands-on field trips, guided laboratory experiments, interviews with scientists, communications training, and more.

Studies suggest middle school is the time young women start to lose interest in science, and 30 years of OCG survey data suggest that campers leave the experience with a much better appreciation for, and understanding of, what it means to do ocean science.

They learn, like I did, that being a marine scientist is about a lot more than training dolphins, said Makenzie Kerr, 26, who attended Camp in 2009.

Kerr is a prime example of the camp working as a feeder into USF and the St. Petersburg-based STEM workforce. She earned a bachelors degree in biology and a masters degree in marine science, both on the USF St. Petersburg campus. Today she works as the lab manager and outreach coordinator in a marine genomics lab at the USF College of Marine Science. Having come full circle, Kerr also works 10 hours a week for the OCG.

She vividly recalls, with an energetic enthusiasm she still carries today, the first time she observed seawater under the microscope as a camper.

The plankton looked like mini aliens swirling around, she said.

The 21-year-old tee shirt: one campers good luck charm

Dr. Jessica Cross, 34, OCG alum from the year 2000, is a chemical oceanographer who works for the NOAA Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle. She studies climate change in Alaska.

In rural Alaska especially, many people live off the land and climate change is a lived experience for everyone, she said. Its really about life and death decisions here.

Cross credits her natural tenacity and her OCG experience with launching her career in ocean science  so much so that she brings her OCG tee shirt, now 21 years old, with her as a good luck charm on every research expedition. Given that shes spent 413 days at sea so far, the shirt has seen more of the worlds ocean than most people ever will.

The holes give it character, said Cross, who describes herself as an average student at bestone who certainly had an enthusiasm for science but never a natural aptitude for it.

OCG humanizes what scientists do, she said. I realized I didnt have to be like Jacques Cousteau to work in marine science. There was so much more to it, and this huge spectrum of people contributing. OCG helped me envision that I, too, really could be a scientist.

So much more than STEM

While the Camps stated mission is to inspire and motivate young women entering high school to consider career opportunities in the sciences, describing the OCG as a STEM program is a bit like describing a Tampa Bay sunset or a Dali painting as nice.

It falls epically short.

Camp literally changed my life, said Dr. Rachel McCaffrey, 34, who attended Camp in 2001. A breast surgeon who helps cancer patients in Michigan, McCaffrey recently accepted a position at Vanderbilt University where shell work full-time as a surgeon and teach on the side.

My passion for teaching stems directly from the OCG, she said. McCaffrey speaks with a kind of surgical precision  not effusive, pretty darn to-the-point  except when speaking about Camp.

Theres a magic to Camp that I cant fully understand, she said. Yes, it teaches you about what it really means to do science but it also helps girls, at the perfect age where it really matters, to develop self-confidence, to build courage, and to learn that failing is OK  all in this safe and protected environment. It happens over the course of all these micro-moments and opportunities you get throughout the experience, and the lessons learned can stick with you for life.

Studies show that self-confidence plays a significant role in a young womens career choicessomething that can start as early as age 12, said Dr. Teresa Greely, who has served as the Camps director since 1994. She earned her masters in marine science and doctoral degree in science education, both at USF.

Their perception of failure is devastating, Greely said. Realizing that failure is not only OK but often critical to moving science forward is a big deal in Camp, she said.

The turning point

The OCG was the brainchild of former dean of the USF College of Marine Science, Dr. Peter Betzer, and two Pinellas County high school science teachers, Carmen Kelly and Jeanette Walker.

Key to OCGs longevity is the endowment Betzer established, valued today at more than $1 million, which would support it in perpetuity. Additional supporters have included private foundations, families, and donors; Duke Energy Foundation; NSF; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); Office of Naval Research (ONR); and the United States Geological Survey (USGS).

"Over my 37-year career in marine science, one of my proudest and most significant legacies is the critical part I played in starting the OCG and then singlehandedly building an endowment to support it in perpetuity, said Betzer. Through the years countless parents of our OCG alums have shared so many inspiring stories about the transformative experiences their young daughters had  and its thrilling to hear them every time."

OCG is offered at no charge every year to 30 young women inclusive of all backgrounds, literacy and aptitude levels  culturally, socially, economically, and otherwise. More than 1200 girls have participated since the Camps inception. (If you do the math, 30 a year over 30 years is 900 Campers but there were many years during which more than one Camp was offered.)

While our mission has remained consistent, our delivery of that mission has definitely evolved, said Greely.

In the early toddler years, as she calls them, the camp mentors and educators were scientists, mostly marine science grad students and some faculty, doing what they do  distilling marine science concepts the best they could for their teenaged audience.

We realized pretty quickly that we didnt have all the tools we needed, Greely said. Missing, big time, she said, were the cultural and social aspects of teaching that were critical to creating meaningful experiences for teenaged girls.

Thats where Dr. Angela Lodge, a former social worker and youth development expert came in, Greely said. She co-directed OCG for more than 20 years and worked with Greely to institute an intensive three-week training experience for all graduate student science mentors -- the same amount of time as the entire Camp experience.

We essentially doubled the impact of the Camp, Greely said. Its not just about teaching the science, and thats when our program really became a force to be reckoned with.

Topping the training list: safety, positive asset-building, cultural sensitivity, and building productive interactions amongst diverse groups. In addition, they embedded the Camp curriculum with exercises focused on team building, communications skills, building trust and relationships  skills that are essential in science, and also in life.

For example, if you put someone down, you have to give that person two put ups, Greely said. That same rule applies to mentors and Campers alike.

When you provide opportunities to stretch boundaries with positive can do attitudes and accountability, amazing things can happen, said Greely. She recalls several instances where they accepted, and continue to accept, girls who are considered at-risk.

My two passions are for people and for the ocean, said Greely. Like the campers, this Camp has developed my positive assets, and its been one of my lifes privileges to be a part of it.

OCG motto: Encouraging a positive sense of self, science, and the environment through ocean exploration.

Parent testimonial

Abigail felt each OCG camper was allowed to be themselves while learning how to be a respectful, young lady who will now be environmentally aware and contribute positively to our world. Plus, Abigail was able to  participate in activities she may not experience in high school classrooms (like working with sophisticated scientific equipment). --Terry and Laurie Grantges, Parents of an OCG Camper in 2013

A Sneak Peak of the OCG schedule

Each day begins with a group circle, an ice breaker and a quote of the day, and ends with a reflection.

Week 1: team building, intro to ocean concepts, and 3 field trips (groups of 10) to Fort de Soto (coastal ecology), kayaking on Shell Key (environmental conservation), and a day aboard the R/V ANGARI operated by the ANGARI Foundation (shipboard research cruise)

team building, intro to ocean concepts, and 3 field trips (groups of 10) to Fort de Soto (coastal ecology), kayaking on Shell Key (environmental conservation), and a day aboard the R/V ANGARI operated by the ANGARI Foundation (shipboard research cruise) Week 2: Lab experiments, Interviews with scientists, coastal geology field trip to Caladesi Island

Lab experiments, Interviews with scientists, coastal geology field trip to Caladesi Island Week 3: Lab experiments, Fish Banks activity (environmental sustainability and the tragedy of the commons), focus on communication skills (prep for a celebratory on-stage presentation to friends, family, and donors). The last day of Camp is a trip to Sea World!

Enjoy snapshots from Camp through the years. Happy 30th birthday, OCG!
University of South Florida psychology student and U.S. Army veteran Josh JB Burnes is being honored with a 2021 Tillman Scholarship awarded by the Pat Tillman Foundation. Burnes is among a prestigious group of 60 U.S. service members, veterans and military spouses to earn this recognition. He is the only student from a Florida university in this years class.

Burnes desire to serve others started when he began working as an emergency medical technician after graduating from high school. In 2000 he decided to enlist in the Army and remained active duty for 14 years. Burnes deployed three times to Afghanistan and once to Iraq, serving as a U.S. Army Ranger and then as a Green Beret with Special Forces.

Burnes is currently a senior working toward his bachelors degree and is a psychophysiology lab research assistant. After completing his undergraduate education, Burnes plans to pursue a doctorate in counseling psychology to research improved treatments for combat and career transitioning veterans.

Im both humbled and honored to be recognized as a 2021 Tillman Scholar, Burnes said. As a member of this elite community, Ill continue working to serve others and the community for the better. I believe my experiences will be beneficial in researching veteran mental health.

Burnes hopes to stay at USF for his doctoral program, noting the psychological research being conducted at the university and its proximity to James A. Haley Veterans Hospital. Burnes originally chose USF because the university is consistently recognized as one of the most veteran-friendly schools in the United States.

We are really excited to have Josh as our 2021 Tillman Scholar. He is an amazing veteran who has served our nation with honor and distinction and he will be a superb representative for USF in the Tillman community. I am looking forward to seeing the great things Josh does with his education, said Larry Braue, director of the USF Office of Veteran Success.

Founded in 2008, the Pat Tillman Foundation has invested more than $20 million in scholarships and named nearly 700 Tillman Scholars, who are selected based on their service, leadership and potential.

Since the first class of Tillman Scholars in 2009, 20 USF students have received the award.
The 2021 USA Cycling Professional Road National Championships came to Knoxville on Father's Day weekend. This is the fourth year for Knoxville to host the U.S. Pro Road and Individual Time Trial Championships and the third year to host the U.S. Pro Criterium Championships.
FILE - In this Monday, Jan. 4, 2021 file photo, frozen vials of the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine are taken out to thaw, at the MontLegia CHC hospital in Liege, Belgium. The U.S. will buy 500 million more doses of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine to share through the COVAX alliance for donation to 92 lower income countries and the African Union over the next year, a person familiar with the matter said Wednesday. President Joe Biden was set to make the announcement Thursday in a speech before the start of Group of Seven summit.
FILE - In this May 11, 2021, file photo, three young migrants hold hands as they run in the rain at an intake area after turning themselves in upon crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in Roma, Texas. On Monday, June 21, 2021, more than a dozen immigrant children described difficult conditions, feelings of isolation and a desperation to get out of emergency facilities set up by the Biden administration to cope with a rise in the arrival of minors on the southwest border.
South Africa is experiencing a surge in COVID-19 infections. Health officials reported 15,000 new cases Sunday and 122 deaths.

President Cyril Ramaphosa said Sunday night the Delta variant of the coronavirus is the likely culprit behind the outbreak.

New restrictions due to the explosion of cases include a ban on all public gatherings except funerals, which will be limited to 50 people. Liquor sales will also be prohibited and an extended nightly curfew will go into effect.

Gauteng province had 66% of the new infections, officials said. Authorities fear the other provinces with soon experience the uptick in cases.

Let us call on every bit of strength we have, let us summon our reserves of courage, and hold firm until this wave, too, passes over us, Ramaphosa said in a national broadcast Sunday.

Several of Britains top defense personnel are in self-isolation after attending a meeting last week with General Nick Carter, the head of Britains armed forces, who has tested positive for COVID-19. Defense Secretary Ben Wallace and the heads of the Royal Navy, RAF and Strategic Command are now in self-isolation after Carters positive test results.

Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center said early Monday the global count for COVID cases is more than 181 million. The U.S. is the country with the highest number of cases at 33.6 million, followed by India with more than 30 million and Brazil with more than 18 million.

Australias Sydney is currently under lockdown as it contends with a growing COVID outbreak, but two people who ignored the restriction to go sunbathing got more than they bargained for. The nude pair, according to an Agence France-Presse report, were startled by a deer, leading the scofflaws to run into the bushland of the Royal National Park to escape the animal. The men called authorities for help.

Officials say one 30-year-old man was found on a walking track naked and carrying a backpack. The other man, who was 49, was found later partially clothed.

By leaving home without a proper reason... and then getting lost in the national park and diverting important resources away from the health operation, I think they should be embarrassed," said New South Wales State Police Commissioner Mick Fuller. "It's difficult to legislate against idiots."

The men were fined $760 for ignoring Sydneys stay-at-home orders.
MBABANE (Reuters) - Demonstrators in the small southern African kingdom of eSwatini demanded reforms to its system of absolute monarchy on Tuesday, and security forces tried to repel them with gunfire and tear gas.

"I can hear gunshots and smell teargas. I do not know how I will get home, there is nothing in the bus rank, there is a strong presence of riot police and the army," Vusi Madalane, a shop assistant in the capital Mbabane, said by telephone.

Acting Prime Minister Themba Masuku denied some media reports that King Mswati III had fled the violence to neighbouring South Africa.

Anger against Mswati has been building for years, and protests occasionally turn violent, with police using tear gas, stun grenades and water cannons to disperse stone-throwing protesters.

Security forces set up road blocks to prevent access by some vehicles to the capital, Mbabane, on Tuesday. Some banks said they had shut until the unrest -- which started on the weekend and turned violent overnight -- subsides.

Government spokesperson Sabelo Dlamini said schools and bus stations had been ordered closed. Reuters saw school children hurrying home on the outskirts of the capital.

Campaigners say the king has consistently evaded calls for meaningful reforms that would nudge eSwatini, which changed its name from Swaziland in 2018, in the direction of democracy. They also accuse him of using public coffers as a piggy bank, funding a lavish lifestyle off the backs of his 1.5 million subjects, most of them subsistence farmers.

"His Majesty King Mswati III is in the country and continues to lead in working with government to advance the Kingdom's goals," the statement from Masuku said. "We appeal for calm, restraint and peace from all emaSwati (eSwatini citizens)."

The 53-year-old king denies being an autocrat, and is impenitent about the lifestyle enjoyed by him and his fifteen wives, who between them occupy several state-funded palaces.

A spate of crackdowns, such as the arrest of opposition leaders and activists in 2019, has done little to discourage anti-monarchy sentiment in the former British protectorate.

Reporting by Lunga Masuku Writing by Tim Cocks Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky
Kathryn Kathy Norum, age 80, of Alexandria, died on Saturday, June 26, 2021. A memorial service will be held at 11:00 AM on Friday, July 2, 2021, at Shalom Lutheran Church in Alexandria. Visitation will be held for one hour prior to the service at the church. This service will be live-str
Paris Hilton has stopped experiencing nightmares since filming her documentary.

The 40-year-old businesswoman has said she used to suffer from very bad insomnia and recurring bad dreams, which stemmed from the alleged abuse she faced while she attended Provo Canyon School in Utah as a teenager.

But Paris has now revealed that since discussing her abuse allegations in her YouTube Originals documentary This Is Paris, she no longer keeps having the same nightmares.

She told WSJ. Magazine: I used to have very bad insomnia, but ever since I did my documentary and I've been doing all of my work for my cause to help the children, it's been so healing that I don't have nightmares anymore.

Paris spoke about her nightmares in her documentary  which was released last year  when she said the bad dream often sees her being approached by two people while shes in bed.

She explained: I always have this recurring nightmare no matter what I do. I'm in bed and these two people come into my room and say, Do you want this to happen the easy way or the hard way? I try and just run.

In her initial claims against Provo Canyon School, Paris said she had regular "panic attacks" whilst at the school, and alleged she "felt like a prisoner" during her 11-month stay.

The Simple Life alum also said she was "cut off" from her parents, and was unable to tell them what was happening because the staff would "rip up" her letters.

She said: "I didn't really get to speak to my family. Maybe once every two or three months. We were cut off from the outside world. And when I tried to tell them once, I got in so much trouble I was scared to say it again. They would grab the phone or rip up letters I wrote telling me, 'No one is going to believe you.' And the staff would tell the parents that the kids were lying. So my parents had no idea what was going on."
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Breaking News The big news. Sent only as it happens.
At a G7 preparatory meeting on May 3, 2021, U.S. and U.K. foreign ministers Antony Blinken and Dominic Raab suggested that the West would fight both Russia and China. But it is an entirely different scenario that should be implemented.

We cannot live in a society without rules. If they are unjust, we revolt and change them. This is inevitable, because what seems right at one time is not necessarily right at another. In any case, we need an order, otherwise each one becomes the enemy of all. What is true for men is also true for peoples.

In 1945, the Yalta Conference laid the foundations for the division of the world into the zones of influence of the three great victors of the Second World War: the USA, the United Kingdom and above all the Soviet Union. Throughout the Cold War, each side publicly insulted the other, but they always got along under the table. Historical research has shown that, although at any moment the agreement could have turned into a confrontation, the invective was rather intended to weld each side together than to hurt the opponent/partner.

This system was never contested. It lasted until the disappearance of the USSR in 1991. Since then, the United States has claimed to be the only hyper-power capable of organizing the world. They have not succeeded. On many occasions, China and Russia -heir to the USSR- have tried to reshuffle the deck. They have not succeeded either, but they have not stopped making progress. The United Kingdom, which had joined the European Union during the Cold War, left it to compete again ("Global Britain"). Thus, there are no longer three, but four powers that aspire to share the world.

After the confusion of 1991-2021, from "Desert Storm" to the "reshaping of the broader Middle East," the United States ambition broke down in Syria. It took several years for it to admit defeat. The Russian armies now have much more advanced weapons and the Chinese army has much more qualified personnel. Washington urgently needs to take note of reality and accept an agreement otherwise it will lose everything. It is no longer a matter of calculating what is best for it, but of undertaking everything to survive.

The allies of the United States have not perceived the importance of the military disaster in Syria. They persist in lying to themselves and treating this major conflict, involving even more states than the Second World War, as a "civil" war in a small, distant country. It will therefore be particularly difficult for them to comply with Washingtons cascading retreat.

A Yalta II is the last chance for the United Kingdom. The former "Empire on which the sun never sets" no longer has the military means of its ambitions. But it still has an exceptional know-how and an unfailing cynicism (the "Perfidious Albion"). It will take part in any deal as long as it guarantees a payoff. It follows in the footsteps of the US Administration, taking advantage of their common culture and solid networks of influence. The Pilgrims Society, which was very present during the first Obama administration, is back in the White House.

Russia is not the USSR, where few leaders were Russian. It does not seek the triumph of an ideology. Its foreign policy is not based on a vague "geopolitical" theory either, but on the projection of its strong personality. It is ready to neglect its interests rather than to deny itself.

China has come a long way without owing anything to anyone, and especially not to those who destroyed it at the beginning of the 20th century. It intends above all to recover its regional influence and trade with the rest of the world. It knows how to wait, but is not ready to make any concessions. Today it is an ally of Russia, but it remembers its role during its colonization and has not given up its territorial claims on Eastern Siberia.

In short, none of the four major powers is acting according to the same logic and pursuing the same objectives. This makes it easier to reach an agreement, but more difficult to keep it.

The Pentagon has appointed a task force to consider possible options for dealing with China (DoD China Task Force), which it fears more than Russia. Indeed, whatever Beijing recovers from its regional zone of influence, it will do so at the expense of Washingtons positions in Asia. For its part, the White House has organized a top-secret working group to consider possible new orders. The first group has issued its report, which has been classified. No one knows whether the second group has completed its work or not.

It is this group that oversees the destiny of the United States. Its composition itself is secret. Its members are obviously more powerful than a senile president. It plays a central decision-making role comparable to that of the National Energy Policy Development Group (NEPD) during the Bush-Cheney Administration.

It is unclear at this point whether this group represents political objectives and/or financial interests. In any case, it is clear that Global Finance influences both NATO and the White House. It does not seek to change alliances, but rather to have the information necessary to adapt behind the scenes to these changes and preserve its social position.

The movements of Washingtons various special envoys suggest that the Biden Administration has already chosen to restore the Cold War duopoly. This is the only way for Washington to avoid a war against a Russian-Chinese alliance that it would probably not survive.

This option implies that Washington commits itself to defend the integrity of Russian Siberia against China and that Moscow reciprocally defends the US bases and possessions located in the Chinese zone of influence.

This option assumes that Washington recognizes Chinese economic pre-eminence in the world. But it leaves it the possibility of politically containing the "Middle Kingdom" so that it never becomes a world power in the full sense.

The only real loser would be China, still deprived of a part of its zone of influence and politically contained. However, it would be appeased, for the time being, by letting it recover Taiwan, which the Pentagon Think Tank has considered for a week as "non-essential" for the USA.

It is important to understand that the main obstacle for the US is mental. Since 2001, Washington has been convinced that instability plays in its favour. This is why it is unabashedly instrumentalizing jihadists around the world, thus implementing the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski strategy. However, the concept of a Yalta-type agreement is, on the contrary, a bet on stability, which is what Moscow has been preaching for two decades.

President Biden has planned to meet with his British partners to strengthen their alliance on the model of the Atlantic Charter; then to bring together his main allies for the G7: and finally to meet with his military and civilian allies in NATO and the European Union. It is only after having assured himself of the loyalty of all that he will meet his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in Geneva on June 16.

All this is paradoxical; because it amounts to making the Biden Administration do exactly what the Trump Administration was prevented from doing. Four years have been wasted for nothing.

(To be continued...)
The United States is withdrawing its anti-aircraft defense from the Greater Middle East. The removal of Patriot missiles has already started in Iraq, Jordan and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, which is also seeing the dismantling of the Thaaad system (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) [1].

Moscows new ambassador to Iraq, Elbruz Kutrashev (former charge daffaires in Syria) [photo], recommended a take over from the US and equipping the country with Russian S-400s, like in Syria. They could be operational in 2025.
In Geneva, President Putin, victorious in Syria, imposed his conditions on President Biden, leader of the defeated.

- Part I : Why a Yalta II ?, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagasse, Voltaire Network, 15 June 2021.

The Third World War, which pitted 119 states against each other in Syria, ended with the victory of Syria, Iran and Russia and the military defeat of the 116 Western states and allies. The time has come for the losers to acknowledge their crimes and pay back the damage and costs they have caused (at least 400,000 dead and $400 billion in damage in Syria, $100 billion in Russian armaments).

However, the West has not experienced this war on its own territory and has not suffered from the fighting, which they have mostly carried out through mercenaries (the "jihadists"). They have retained some of their power. The United States, along with the United Kingdom and France, remain at the head of a formidable atomic deterrent force.

From then on, the new world order must not only integrate the worlds leading economic power, China -which remained neutral during the war-, but must also spare the losers, not drive them to despair. This is all the more difficult as Western public opinion is not aware of their military defeat and persists in believing themselves to be the victors.

This is why Russia has chosen to collect war damages without presenting them as such; not to strangle NATO militarily; and not to publicize its decisions. In terms of form, the Russia-US summit is therefore more like a Yalta II (division of the world between allies) than a new Berlin (capitulation of the Third Reich).

It is worth noting that the United States was not held accountable for the destruction of Libya because, at the time, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev had supported it.

An opaque summit

Russia did not want to give the impression that it was crushing the West. Even before the meeting, the media had been warned that the heads of state would not hold a joint press conference, as no narrative would be acceptable to both publics at the same time. Not since at least 2014 (when Russia entered the war) has an intergovernmental summit been so poorly covered. When the presidents spoke separately, the security services had to intervene to control the crowd. In the end, things went according to plan: the journalists did not understand much and only had unimportant details to report. The US public believes that Russia tried to manipulate the last two presidential elections in favor of Donald Trump; that it attacked official US websites; that it poisoned some of its opponents; and that it is threatening Ukraine militarily.

Russia has denied all these childish illusions, and then praised the great US president, Joe Biden, for his experience, the quality of his exchanges, and even - without laughing - for the lucidity of this visibly senile man.

Decisions made by Moscow beforehand

On the military level, the important thing was to ensure that the United States would no longer modernize its atomic arsenal and would not be able to design hypersonic launchers.

President Biden announced at the opening of the summit that the United States would reopen arms reduction negotiations, which it had unilaterally halted during World War III. We do not know what steps have been taken to prevent the construction of Western hypersonic missiles, but given Russias lead in launchers, Moscow and Washington can drastically reduce their nuclear missile inventories without altering Russian dominance. US disarmament would be in the interests of peace.

President Biden has acknowledged that his country should repeal the Authorization for Use of Military Force of 2001, the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine of endless war.

Economically, Russia has demanded to secure its revenues. The United States therefore agreed, on May 19, that the European Unions industry would no longer run on Western oil, but on Russian gas. Washington announced that it was lifting the sanctions it had imposed on the companies involved in the construction of the North Stream 2 pipeline. It goes without saying that the price of this gas will not correspond to the market value of this product, but to the payment of the war debt. Nevertheless, it will always be possible for Western Europeans to escape this overpricing.

Eventually, Germany and France could be exempted from paying these damages, as former Chancellor Gerhard Schroder and former Prime Minister Francois Fillon have always been opposed to this war. Specifically, the socialist Gerhard Schroder is a director of the Russian state-owned gas company Rosneft, while the Gaullist Francois Fillon should be appointed director of the Russian state-owned oil company Zarubezhneft. Germany and France would still have to cease hostilities, while the former still has soldiers in Idleb and the latter in Jalabiyeh, and the main actors of this carnage would have to be struck down with indignity, such as Volker Perthes or Francois Hollande.

On the diplomatic front, Moscow and Washington announced the restoration of their relations and the return of their ambassadors. It remained to define the zones of influence.

First and foremost, President Putin set out lines for the United States not to cross: (1) a ban on Ukraine joining Nato or stationing nuclear launchers there (2) a ban on meddling in Belarus (3) a ban on intervening in Russian domestic politics.

It was agreed that the Middle East would be under joint Russian-US influence, with the exception of Syria, which is directly under Moscows wing; that the Sunnis would be divided into two groups in order to prevent the resurgence of the Ottoman Empire; that Syria (and not Iran) would take the leadership of an area including Lebanon, Iraq, Iran and Azerbaijan (again to prevent an Ottoman resurgence); and finally, that Israel would abandon Vladimir Jabotinskys expansionist project. In any case, Washington had already informed all the states in the broader Middle East on June 2 that it would withdraw its anti-missile systems (Patriot and Thaad).

Moscow anticipates that these agreements will encounter obstacles put in place by some US officials, not directly, but through the use of third-party actors.

Chinas place

As regards the Far East, Russia has firmly rejected proposals for an alliance with the West against China. It considers, in the light of history, that China will not lay claim to Eastern Siberia as long as it keeps the West out of harms way. That is why President Putin reaffirmed just before the summit that he did not consider Beijing a threat.

Moreover, from a Russian point of view, Chinas economic development could not be more normal. It violates the rules of Western globalization, but is based on a legitimate nationalist doctrine. The final communique of the G7, which condemns China and claims to set the standards for world trade, is a delusion of old glories. In any case, Beijing, having preferred to develop economically rather than pay blood money during the war, cannot demand privileges. Moscow is in favour of a "handover" of Taiwan to China, but without resorting to military confrontation.

Moscow intends to join Russias political and Chinas economic efforts through the Greater Eurasian Partnership, especially for the joint development of Eastern Russian Siberia. That is why it is building the Trans-Siberian Railway and the Magistrale connecting Lake Baikal to the Amur River, the Primorye-1 and Primorye-2 transport corridors, the Northern Silk Road, the Europe-Eastern China Expressway, the North-South Highway and the Russia-Mongolia economic corridor. To this connection of the Russian space to the Chinese Silk Roads should be added more than $700 billion of joint projects in both countries.

US expectations

Regarding the U.S. proposals on cybersecurity, the issue cannot be dealt with bilaterally. Moscow knows better than anyone else that it did not sponsor attacks on the US presidential elections or on the websites of US public agencies.

Computer attacks are carried out by private hackers, sometimes acting as privateers on behalf of states. The NKTsKI - Russian National Center on Computer Incidents (a department of the FSB created three years ago) - estimates that, contrary to what the Western media claim, a quarter of the computer attacks come from the United States.

Russia has obtained the creation by the UN General Assembly, on December 31, 2020 (A/RES/75/240), of an "open-ended working group (OWEG) on digital security and its use (2021-2025)". This group, and only this group, will be responsible. For Moscow, this is a way to give back to the United Nations the role of a democratic world forum, which it had been deprived of during the Third World War, which had turned it into a transmission channel for Washingtons hawks.
On June 16 in Geneva the US-Russia Summit was defined by President Biden "good, positive" and by President Putin "quite constructive". Should we, therefore, feel a little reassured in a situation where Europe is at the forefront of what NATO called "the lowest point in our relationship with Russia since the end of the Cold War"? The facts tell us otherwise. At the same time when the US-Russia Summit was underway in Switzerland, the Baltops 50 was underway in the Baltic, one of the 20 major US-NATO military exercises in Europe in 2021. The Baltops 50 was organized and directed by the US-African naval forces commander with headquarters in Naples-Capodichino, Admiral Robert Burke, who at the same time is head of the NATO Command in Lago Patria (JFC-Naples). From June 6 to 18, over 4,000 soldiers with 40 ships and 60 aircraft - belonging to 18 NATO member and partner countries, including Italy - practiced the air-naval war in the Baltic and surrounding regions", close to the Russian territory. Warships and bombers with nuclear capability took also part in the maneuver, and for the first time, the new NATO Space Center was integrated into the exercise.

While this big war exercise was clearly directed against Russia, President Putin declared in the press conference after the Summit: "We conduct military exercises within our territory, we do not bring our equipment and personnel close to the borders of the United States of America, as the USA and its partners are now doing near our borders.

The geographic location of the military forces, especially nuclear ones, is of primary importance: a tactical missile deployed 10,000 km away cannot hit the target but, if deployed at 1,000 km. has the same destructive effect as an ICBM. The two presidents declaration on "strategic stability", including the extension of the New Start Treaty for the control of nuclear weapons, will be nullified if the US installs new "tactical" nuclear weapons in Europe as it has planned.

This and other key issues have been ignored by the media who according to Washingtons direction used the Summit as a kind of trial with Putin in the dock. The President of the United States is a public minister who did not just answer the questions like Putin, after refusing to hold the traditional joint press confer-ence, but presented his own report on the Summit. According to Biden, he told Putin how he reacts anytime he sees violations of human rights in Russia and elsewhere: How could I be the President of the United States of America and not speak out against human rights violations? Defending fundamental freedoms is part of the DNA of our country.

This is solemnly declared by the current President of the United States, the Democrat Joseph Biden who in 2001 supported the war of Republican President Bush in Afghanistan and, in 2002 promoted a bipartisan resolution that authorized President Bush to invade Iraq on charges (later proved false) that it possessed weapons of mass destruction.

This was solemnly declared by Joseph Biden who was one of the architects of the US-NATO wars against Libya and Syria as vice president of the Obama Administration, he supported Islamic fundamentalist groups to undermine these countries from within, he favored the use of neo-Nazis in Ukraine for the putsch that opened the new confrontation with Russia. He was one of the architects of the "kill list", including people from all over the world who were secretly killed because they were judged harmful for the United States [1]. These wars and covert operations have caused directly and indirectly millions of deaths and the worst human rights violations.

However, good feelings are not lacking: in a long official obituary on Twitter (reported in full by Ansa), President Biden announced: "Our hearts are heavy today as we let you know that our beloved German shepherd Champ died peacefully at home.
On June 22, 1941, exactly 80 years ago, the Nazis, having conquered practically the whole of Europe, attacked the USSR. For the Soviet people the Great Patriotic War  the bloodiest one in the history of our country  began. Tens of millions of people lost their lives, the economic potential of the country and its cultural property were severely damaged.

We are proud of the courage and steadfastness of the heroes of the Red Army and home front workers who not only defended the independence and dignity of our homeland, but also saved Europe and the world from enslavement. Despite attempts to rewrite the pages of the past that are being made today, the truth is that Soviet soldiers came to Germany not to take revenge on the Germans, but with a noble and great mission of liberation. We hold sacred the memory of the heroes who fought against Nazism. We remember with gratitude our allies in the anti-Hitler coalition, participants in the Resistance movement, and German anti-fascists who brought our common victory closer.

Having lived through the horrors of the world war, the peoples of Europe were nevertheless able to overcome alienation and restore mutual trust and respect. They set a course for integration in order to draw a final line under the European tragedies of the first half of the last century. And I would like to emphasize that the historical reconciliation of our people with the Germans living both in the east and the west of modern united Germany played a huge role in the formation of such Europe.

I would also like to remind that it was German entrepreneurs who became pioneers of cooperation with our country in the post-war years. In 1970, the USSR and the Federal Republic of Germany concluded a deal of the century on long-term natural gas supplies to Europe that laid the foundation for constructive interdependence and initiated many future grand projects, including the construction of the Nord Stream gas pipeline.

We hoped that the end of the Cold War would be a common victory for Europe. It seemed that just a little more effort was needed to make Charles de Gaulles dream of a single continent  not even geographically from the Atlantic to the Urals, but culturally and civilizationally from Lisbon to Vladivostok  become a reality.

It is exactly with this logic in mind  the logic of building a Greater Europe united by common values and interests  that Russia has sought to develop its relations with the Europeans. Both Russia and the EU have done a lot on this path.

But a different approach has prevailed. It was based on the expansion of the North Atlantic Alliance which was itself a relic of the Cold War. After all, it was specifically created for the confrontation of that era.

It was the blocs movement eastwards  which, by the way, began when the Soviet leadership was actually persuaded to accept the united Germanys accession to NATO  that turned into the main reason for the rapid increase in mutual mistrust in Europe. Verbal promises made in that time such as this is not directed against you or the blocs borders will not get closer to you were quickly forgotten. But a precedent was set.

And since 1999, five more waves of NATO expansion have followed. Fourteen new countries, including the former Soviet Union republics, joined the organization, effectively dashing hopes for a continent without dividing lines. Interestingly, this was warned about in the mid-1980s by Egon Bahr, one of the SPD leaders, who proposed a radical restructuring of the entire European security system after German unification, involving both the USSR and the United States. But no one in the USSR, the USA or Europe was willing to listen to him at the time.

Moreover, many countries were put before the artificial choice of being either with the collective West or with Russia. In fact, it was an ultimatum. The Ukrainian tragedy of 2014 is an example of the consequences that this aggressive policy has led to. Europe actively supported the unconstitutional armed coup in Ukraine. This was where it all started. Why was it necessary to do this? Then incumbent president Yanukovych had already accepted all the demands of the opposition. Why did the USA organize the coup and the European countries weak-heartedly support it, provoking a split within Ukraine and the withdrawal of Crimea?

The whole system of European security has now degraded significantly. Tensions are rising and the risks of a new arms race are becoming real. We are missing out on the tremendous opportunities that cooperation offers  all the more important now that we are all facing common challenges, such as the pandemic and its dire social and economic consequences.

Why does this happen? And most importantly, what conclusions should we draw together? What lessons of history should we recall? I think, first and foremost, that the entire post-war history of Greater Europe confirms that prosperity and security of our common continent is only possible through the joint efforts of all countries, including Russia. Because Russia is one of the largest countries in Europe. And we are aware of our inseparable cultural and historical connection to Europe.

We are open to honest and constructive interaction. This is confirmed by our idea of creating a common space of cooperation and security from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean which would comprise various integration formats, including the European Union and the Eurasian Economic Union.

I reiterate that Russia is in favour of restoring a comprehensive partnership with Europe. We have many topics of mutual interest. These include security and strategic stability, healthcare and education, digitalization, energy, culture, science and technology, resolution of climate and environmental issues.

The world is a dynamic place, facing new challenges and threats. We simply cannot afford to carry the burden of past misunderstandings, hard feelings, conflicts, and mistakes. It is a burden that will prevent us from concentrating on the challenges at hand. We are convinced that we all should recognize these mistakes and correct them. Our common and indisputable goal is to ensure security on the continent without dividing lines, a common space for equitable cooperation and inclusive development for the prosperity of Europe and the world as a whole.
Arrival of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban at the European Council on June 24, 2021.

On June 15, the Hungarian Parliament adopted a law prohibiting the promotion of homosexuality among minors.

At the meeting of EU home affairs ministers on June 21, 2021, it was decided to launch a procedure against Hungary not for "clear risk of violation of the rule of law" but for "clear risk of violation of the values on which the Union is founded" (12266/1/18REV 1 COR 1).

17 out of 27 member states asked the president of the Council of European Heads of State and Government, Charles Michel, to put the issue of LGBTQI+ rights in Hungary on the agenda of the June 24-25 summit. At this meeting, the 17 accused Hungary of homophobia.

On the 25th, Commission President Ursula von der Layen strongly condemned the Hungarian law and asked her commissioners, Belgiums Didier Reynders (Justice) and Frances Thierry Breton (Internal Market), to write to the Hungarian government to "enforce the law. This they did without delay (Ares S(2021) 4587976).

Lets not get too carried away and examine what is behind these positions.

LGBTQI+

The issue of LGBTQI+ rights has never been part of European values. Simply because the Union was created by the Treaty of Rome, in 1957, and at that time, there were no LGBTQI+. There were, however, homosexuals, although they themselves did not exist until 1868, when the Hungarian writer Karl-Maria Kertbeny invented the concept. Until the adoption of "Paragraph 175" in Germany in 1871 and the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 in the United Kingdom, no one had ever had the idea of penalizing same-sex sexual relations.

There had indeed been laws in Europe prohibiting sodomy, but they applied to both same-sex and different-sex relationships, and "homosexuals" have many other practices. We make a mistake in believing that LGBTQI+ people were persecuted in the past and are not persecuted today in "modern" countries. In reality, the way we understand sexuality and the prohibitions we set for ourselves vary according to time and place, but the distinction between different-sex and same-sex partners is recent.

The LGBTQI+ concept does not come from the French thinking of the 60s as it is often claimed, but from American puritanical thinking. It is a kind of intellectual catch-all that amalgamates concepts related to sex (anatomical), sexual orientation (biological) and gender (psychological). Thus, this acronym designates :

L: Lesbian (lesbian), i.e. a woman having sexual relations with another woman ;

G: Gay, i.e. a man having sexual relations with another man;

B: Bisexual, i.e., a person who has sex with others of the same or different sex;

T: Transgender. We are not talking about individuals whose genetic sex is neither male (XY chromosomes) nor female (XX chromosomes), and who therefore do not recognize themselves in their anatomical sex (statistically less than 1 per 1000) [1]. No, we are talking about people who define themselves intellectually in a different social role from that attached to their anatomical sex. While transsexuals can make their chromosomal particularity correspond to their biological sex by very heavy and irreversible operations, transgender people do not aspire to operations and can change their gender several times during their life.

Q: Queer. This term refers to the provocative culture of people whose sexuality does not fit into the social norm. It is in this sense that I had created with others, at the beginning of the Nineties, the House of the homosexualities in Paris.

I: Intersex (intersexual): Refers to people in general whose genetic sex does not correspond to the binary classification male/female. Some of them can be transsexuals.

+ : More (others). Since this litany is endless [2], U.S. lawyers have closed it with a + that summarizes all the other options identified and to come.

In Washington, D.C., the Biden Administration pledged during "Gay Pride Month" to promote LGBTQI+ rights, not only in the U.S., but around the world [3]. Thus, US federal buildings, with the exception of the Pentagon, have raised the rainbow flag on their facades for the month of June. This is the framework in which the Commission and the European Council are acting, not the pseudo-defense of "European values" which have nothing to do with it.

Already in the 1980s, the Clinton Administration financed the AIDS issue in order to instrumentalize gay associations, all over the world, to exert pressure on governments and sell them US treatments.

Western confusion about gays

No one doubts that President Biden is sincere about ending discrimination against people based on their skin color. However, as I have shown in a previous article [4], what he is doing is the direct opposite. He thinks he is fighting racism, but he is pursuing a segregationist policy. My words shocked those of my readers who considered them a minority opinion. But today it is not an opinion, but an analysis shared by the greatest black intellectuals in the United States [5]. Similarly, no one thinks that Joe Biden is insincere when he intends to fight discrimination against people based on their sexual orientation. But this does not prevent him from doing the opposite.

Internationally, the Biden Administration is using the homosexual issue as it has used religious freedom or racism. Thus, it accuses Russia of being homophobic, whereas homosexuality is decriminalized there (it had been heavily penalized by Joseph Stalin as part of his fight against the homosexual soviets and was legalized again by Mikhail Gorbachev [6]).

The Western confusion is rooted in the institutionalization of homosexual marriage by the Scandinavian countries. It is important to be aware that marriage does not have the same meaning in different periods and civilizations. When the Scandinavian countries invented same-sex marriage, they were not seeking to create an equivalence with heterosexual marriage, but to give all citizens access to a public service of the state church. These countries have state churches whose pastors are civil servants, and they reserved one of their public services - marriage - for heterosexuals only.

By the way, I remember very well a lunch with a parliamentarian who was the rapporteur of the first law instituting gay marriage. She assured me that this law would put an end to the "sexual vagrancy" of this community. When I asked her what her country had planned for transsexuals, she told me that there were no people "like that" in her country.

Lets get back to the topic at hand. As president of the largest European gay political association, the Ornicar Project, I have opposed gay marriage in Latin countries. That is why the German environmentalist Claudia Roth, when she wrote her report to the European Parliament on the homosexual question in 1994, did not advise to introduce gay marriage everywhere, but only to end discrimination based on heterosexual marriage [7]

One can only regret the adoption of gay marriage by Spain, Portugal, France and Malta, whereas heterosexual marriage is a contract to govern the inheritance of children. Equality could have been achieved, not by opening marriage to infertile couples, but by ending the legal privileges of heterosexual married couples. This was the solution I negotiated with Bishop Joseph Duval, President of the French Episcopal Conference, who supported it.

Distinguishing the problems

It is generally considered that during puberty, one discovers ones sexuality and therefore ones sexual orientation. Most societies refrain from guiding adolescents in one direction or another. From this point of view, it is legitimate for Hungary to prohibit the promotion of homosexual orientation in schools as well as heterosexual orientation. This does not violate any human right as long as both sexual orientations are legal for adults.

For the same reasons, France adopted the Jolibois amendment in 1994, which penalized, among other things, pornography "likely to be seen or perceived by minors. Some groups intended to use this text to censor all kinds of films, books and magazines. The Voltaire Network was created to clarify this text so that it does not limit freedom of expression. It succeeded in doing so, and this is what should only be done in Hungary.

The fact that the European Union is interfering with the sovereign choice of the Hungarian people shows its willingness to impose itself as a supranational bureaucracy above national democracies.

By supporting the EU on this issue, European LGBTQI+ people are taking a stand in a conflict that is not theirs. They are taking the risk of a backlash when the People defeat the EU bureaucracy, which is inevitable.

The final word

It is interesting to note that the European Union has abandoned the argument of "clear risk of violation of the rule of law" for that of "clear risk of violation of the values on which the Union is founded". Everyone agrees that the Hungarian law does not violate the legal principles of the Union. The values argument is clarified by Commissioners Didier Reynders and Thierry Breton in their letter to the Hungarian Minister of Justice.

While they refer to Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union (Maastricht 1992) and Article 21 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (2000), they do not insist because they fail to establish discrimination. They devote most of their letter to the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) and the E-Commerce Directive. The idea is that the Hungarian law would be contrary to the commercial law of the European Common Market because it prohibits the distribution in Hungary of products that are legal in the rest of the Union. If this argument were to be supported in the long term by Brussels, the "clear risk of violation of the values on which the Union is based" would be limited to the risk of not being able to sell anything anywhere.

Clearly, the Union is misdirecting a fight for justice. It mocks homosexuals and their equality in Law.
The Peoples Republic of China has launched a media campaign to gather information on the activities of the US military laboratory at Fort Detrick.

Considering the string of staged anthrax attacks that occurred in late 2001 and in light of the accusations leveled against Chinas P4 laboratory in Wuhan, Beijing believes that a leak from Fort Detrick could have sparked the Covid-19 epidemic.

It has now been established that the Wuhan P4 laboratory had indirect dealings with the director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Anthony Fauci. This former associate of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld diverted public money to pay for gain of function experiments on bat viruses. This type of research was banned in the United States because of its extremely dangerous nature. The transaction was handled through the EcoHealth Alliance, whose director Peter Daszak had published a deceptive article in The Lancet claiming that the Covid-19 virus was of natural origin. The co-authors of this study have all retracted their claims and denounced Peter Daszaks lack of independence. He was also a member of the World Health Organization (WHO) Commission of Inquiry, which concluded that the Wuhan laboratory was blameless.

As shocking as this case may be, it does not prove that the Wuhan laboratory is entangled in the Covid-19 epidemic.

The US military laboratory at Fort Detrick was responsible for manufacturing the anthrax spores that were mailed to US politicians and media outlets in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks. The research it carries out is illegal in the United States. However, the laboratory has branches outside the US, notably the Richard Lugar Center for Public Health Research located in Georgia [1]

Fort Detrick was forced to temporarily shut down its biological laboratory in the summer of 2019 by order of the U.S. Department of Health and Safety (CDC). In December 2020, a mysterious respiratory infection struck Fort Detricks neighbors. At that same time, Covid-19 made its appearance in Wuhan.
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Tuesday morning defense attorneys for the man accused of one of Madison County's biggest mass murders are expected to make their case.

The prosecution rested Monday evening after a lengthy questioning of Christopher Henderson's first wife, Rhonda Carlson, who is also facing more than a dozen charges for the murders.

Christopher Henderson Christopher Henderson

A local attorney believes the defense will try to take advantage of the plea deal that allowed for Carlson to testify. However, he says he doesn't believe the case is a matter of innocence or guilt, but rather a matter of life or death.

"The big push for the defense in this case is trying to get the person life without parole instead of death," Mark McDaniel said.

He is a local defense attorney with more than 40 years of experience, and says he's been in similar situations time and time again.

"The primary goal for any defense lawyer in a capital murder case is to save their client's life," McDaniel said.

He believes the defense will try to use Carlson's plea deal to their advantage. She agreed to testify against her husband christopher henderson in order to avoid the death penalty. She will now serve life without parole for the same crime henderson is accused of.

"They're going to argue she was the mastermind and their client shouldn't get a greater sentence than her," McDaniel said.

However, McDaniel says prosecutors will not back down and believes the deal is necessary in order for them to make their case.

"Defense are going to be saying, 'You made a deal with a devil.' Prosecutors are going to say,"Yep! We made a deal with the devil to get a worse devil, who is right there.'" McDaniel explained.

If the jury convicts Henderson, a second trial will commence, where both attorneys will have to show whether or not he deserves the death penalty. The jury will then deliberate and make a decision.

Because the crime took place before April 2017, the trial will follow the old Alabama law, where the jury can only recommend a sentence. That means it will be up to the judge to make the final decision.

Once the jury makes their recommendation on the sentencing, a separate hearing will be held weeks after with the judge's decision.
The era of virtual work isn't ending at UBS.

The Swiss bank will allow up to two-thirds of its employees around the world to permanently adopt a hybrid schedule that includes a mix of working from home and from the office, a person familiar with the matter told CNN Business.

UBS' approach stands in contrast with the rush at Morgan Stanley and some other Wall Street firms to get employees back in the office.

"As a firm, we're committed to support the flexibility for hybrid working where possible," UBS executives wrote in an internal note to employees earlier this month. News of the hybrid approach by UBS was previously reported by the Financial Times.

There will be no maximum number of days these hybrid schedule employees can work remotely, the person told CNN Business.

However, UBS, which employed about 73,000 people around the world as of the end of 2020, said employees won't have carte blanche to work remotely.

"Please also understand that hybrid working doesn't mean that you can work wherever and whenever you want," the note said. "Business and team needs have to be taken into consideration and any agreement to work in a hybrid model needs to be discussed and agreed with your line manager."

UBS said hybrid working will be offered where "role, tasks and location allow," adding that some tasks may "require an onsite presence" and others may not be suited for remote work due to regulatory or supervisory reasons.

Morgan Stanley CEO will be 'very disappointed' if workers aren't back soon

The more relaxed stance by UBS and other European lenders could help them attract talent, especially against tech firms offering the flexibility that many younger employees and working parents are seeking.

Citigroup, the only big US bank with a woman as CEO, also announced in March that most roles at the company will be designated as hybrid. Citi said employees with hybrid roles can work from home up to twice a week.

But many US-based Wall Street firms have signaled a desire to turn the page on the era of virtual work for a variety of reasons, including cultural concerns, cybersecurity and legal vulnerabilities, and a hope to inspire confidence in New York City. At its core, banking is a face-to-face business.

Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman recently warned he'll be "very disappointed" if workers aren't back in the office by Labor Day. If they're not, "then we'll have a different kind of conversation," Gorman warned.

At Bank of America, CEO Brian Moynihan similarly said in a recent interview, "We expect the majority of our employees to return after Labor Day."

And Goldman Sachs asked its employees to be back at the office by mid-June. The bank also ordered staffers to say whether they've been vaccinated.

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The defense in the Christopher Henderson mass murder trial has rested without calling any witnesses to the stand.

The prosecution rested its case on Monday afternoon.

Jurors are dismissed until about 11 a.m.

Closing arguments start this afternoon.

Watch WAAY 31 News at 11 a.m. for more information

From earlier;

A key witness in a Madison County mass murder trial returned to the stand for a second day on Monday.

That witness is one of Christopher Henderson's wives.

He is accused of murdering five people including his second wife and their unborn child.

The cross-examination of Rhonda Carlson, the co-defendant and Henderson's first wife, started Monday morning.

Defense attorney Bruce Gardner asked Rhonda multiple background questions about her life and her relationship with Henderson.

At one point he asked her, "The truth does not come easy for you," and Carlson responded with, "Yes sir."

Gardner played for the courtroom almost two hours of the recorded interrogation of Carlson by investigators the night of the murders.

Carlson said multiple times in the interrogation video that she did not go into the house.

When Gardner paused the video he said, "You lied about what we saw there...going into the house," and she responded with, "Yes sir."

Now Carlson did admit to bringing gas cans to the house on St. Clair Lane, but said she did not know what happened in the house.

The defense also played three phone call recordings from the Madison County jail in court Monday.

The first phone call between Carlson and her father was just weeks after the murders happened.

At one point during the call she tells her dad, " I think I screwed up."

She also tells him that she does not really remember it because she had a headache that day in August and was in a fog.

The second recorded phone call was a conversation between Carlson and one of her daughters in late September of 2015.

During the call you can hear them talk about how you can call judges directly and the daughter keeps telling Carlson how much she loves her.

After the third recorded phone call was played Gardner brought up the fact that even two months after the murders Carlson still can't remember a lot of details from that August day.

Monday afternoon the defense also played a lengthy audio recording between Rhonda Carlson and the prosecution.

The recording is from August of 2019, that's when defense attorney Bruce Gardner says Carlson cut her deal with the prosecution.

She has a plea deal where her truthful testimony takes the death penalty off the table for her case.

In the recording, Carlson said that she and Christopher Henderson split up in Alabama.

She also told the prosecution that her and Henderson's relationship never got physical and that they broke up because he cheated on her with Kristin.

After the recording finished playing Gardner asked Carlson multiple questions about her mental state and the medications she was taking.

Gardner also asked her about how in 2016 she had reported that she was having nightmares.

After both the prosecution and defense finished their questioning of Rhonda Carlson she was dismissed from the stand.

The prosecution then brought up two more witnesses, one a forensic scientist, the other investigator Nash who questioned Rhonda the day of the murders.

The District Attorney's Chief Trial Attorney Tim Gann confirmed the prosecution rested its case late Monday afternoon.
A key witness in a Madison County mass murder trial returned to the stand for a second day on Monday.

That witness is one of Christopher Henderson's wives.

He is accused of murdering five people including his second wife and their unborn child.

The cross-examination of Rhonda Carlson, the co-defendant and Henderson's first wife, started Monday morning.

Defense attorney Bruce Gardner asked Rhonda multiple background questions about her life and her relationship with Henderson.

At one point he asked her, "The truth does not come easy for you," and Carlson responded with, "Yes sir."

Gardner played for the courtroom almost two hours of the recorded interrogation of Carlson by investigators the night of the murders.

Carlson said multiple times in the interrogation video that she did not go into the house.

When Gardner paused the video he said, "You lied about what we saw there...going into the house," and she responded with, "Yes sir."

Now Carlson did admit to bringing gas cans to the house on St. Clair Lane, but said she did not know what happened in the house.

The defense also played three phone call recordings from the Madison County jail in court Monday.

The first phone call between Carlson and her father was just weeks after the murders happened.

At one point during the call she tells her dad, " I think I screwed up."

She also tells him that she does not really remember it because she had a headache that day in August and was in a fog.

The second recorded phone call was a conversation between Carlson and one of her daughters in late September of 2015.

During the call you can hear them talk about how you can call judges directly and the daughter keeps telling Carlson how much she loves her.

After the third recorded phone call was played Gardner brought up the fact that even two months after the murders Carlson still can't remember a lot of details from that August day.

Monday afternoon the defense also played a lengthy audio recording between Rhonda Carlson and the prosecution.

The recording is from August of 2019, that's when defense attorney Bruce Gardner says Carlson cut her deal with the prosecution.

She has a plea deal where her truthful testimony takes the death penalty off the table for her case.

In the recording, Carlson said that she and Christopher Henderson split up in Alabama.

She also told the prosecution that her and Henderson's relationship never got physical and that they broke up because he cheated on her with Kristin.

After the recording finished playing Gardner asked Carlson multiple questions about her mental state and the medications she was taking.

Gardner also asked her about how in 2016 she had reported that she was having nightmares.

After both the prosecution and defense finished their questioning of Rhonda Carlson she was dismissed from the stand.

The prosecution then brought up two more witnesses, one a forensic scientist, the other investigator Nash who questioned Rhonda the day of the murders.

The District Attorney's Chief Trial Attorney Tim Gann confirmed the prosecution rested its case late Monday afternoon.
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22-year-old tourist did not return after swim in Lake Bracciano.

The search continues for a tourist from the Netherlands who went missing at Lago di Bracciano, about an hour north of Rome, on Friday 25 June.

A friend of the 22-year-old tourist, who is identified as Samuel Bajoudi, alerted the police after he failed to return from a swim in the direction of Trevignano.

Police, firefighters and civil protection volunteers continue the search, with the aid of a helicopter and patrol boats, as hopes of finding the tourist alive become increasingly faint.

It is believed that Bajourdi had attempted to swim across a section of the lake whose waters far offshore are extremely dangerous even for accomplished swimmers.

The tourist, who had been camping in Anguillara, is reportedly very active in evangelical circles. His friends have invited people to pray for a "mega miracle" and have launched the hashtag #samuelzalleven (Samuel will live).

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On December 24th, 1979, the Soviet Red Army charged into Afghanistan, marking the beginning of the SovietAfghan War. This war would draw many parallels with the Vietnam War, even being known to many as Russias Vietnam. Eventually, the war would claim the lives of around 15,000 Soviet troops and 500,0002 million Afghan civilians.

In 1978, a Soviet-backed coup by Nur Mohammad Taraki against Afghanistans government did not go as planned. In 1979, Hafizullah Amin, an Afghan politician and someone the Soviets did not trust to stay on their side, launched a counter-coup and removed Taraki from power. Amin had Taraki executed not long after.

With Amin in power, the USSR, under the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev, invaded Afghanistan in December of 1979 and assassinated Amin, replacing him with Babrak Karmal, who was loyal to them. The invasion was internationally condemned and only supported by a small number of the USSRs allies.

They met with a lot of resistance

With massive quantities of troops and equipment, the Soviets expected to easily contain the country, but, like the U.S. in Vietnam, they faced stiff resistance from determined locals. These rebels began a jihad (a holy war) against the new government and their occupiers. Many small groups of locals from different areas combined to fight the jihad, and these were collectively known as the mujahideen.

As the Cold War was still raging, nations opposing communism financially and physically backed the mujahideen, who received funds and equipment from Britain and the U.S., amongst others. The mujahideen were still outmatched by the larger, better-trained, and better-equipped Red Army, so they adopted guerrilla warfare tactics to fight their enemies. They harassed and sabotaged wherever possible.

To begin with, the Red Army made good progress, but eventually, the war ground down as the Soviets attempted to dig out the rebels, who knew how to use the landscape and climate to their advantage. This continued for nine years.

Eventually, the Soviets were forced to withdraw

After these long and hard nine years, it was painfully clear that the Soviets had no way of completely destroying the mujahideen and bringing Afghanistan under their rule. They began pulling their troops out in 1988. The Soviets were completely gone by 1989. The war had cost the USSR huge amounts of money, men, and political stability.

In 1991, just a few years after the last troops had left Afghanistan, the Soviet Union collapsed. Many believe the SovietAfghan War was a major contributor to the collapse.

Despite the withdrawal, the mujahideen had not won yet. The Soviets continued to back the Afghan government, who were left to fend off the mujahideen alone, but this funding ceased in 1991. The rebels took over control of the country by 1992.

However, this was still not a decisive victory, as without a common enemy, the many individual groups within the mujahideen began warring with each other in a civil war. In 1994, the civil war led to the creation of the notorious Taliban, who believed Muslim rule had not been properly established throughout the entire nation after the communist government was removed.

The Taliban were in possession of most of the weapons and equipment given to the Afghan rebels from supportive nations during the SovietAfghan War. This well-equipped group began defeating and assuming control of various territories around the country.

By 1998, 10 years after the Soviet withdrawal and long after the Soviet Unions collapse, the Taliban controlled 90% of Afghanistan.

Their rule was incredibly oppressive and affected peoples basic human rights, prompting the United Nations to condemn the Taliban. After the 9/11 attacks in 2001, Osama bin Laden went into hiding, where he was sheltered by the Taliban.

The Taliban ignored major U.S. pressure to hand over bin Laden, resulting in the American invasion of Afghanistan. The U.S. had much greater success than the Soviets a few decades earlier, as they had control of the country by the end of 2001. But, as with the Soviet occupation, rebel factions in Afghanistan resisted the invasion with guerrilla warfare and prevented the U.S. from declaring a complete victory.

More from us: Ilyushin Il-2: The T-34 Of The Skies

The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent backing of their enemies by Western and Middle-Eastern countries unintentionally created the terrorist groups that governments are still trying to tackle today.
Leaks from energy infrastructure are the easiest and cheapest sources of methane to identify and fix. Theres also an economic incentive: Producers can make up for the cost of repairs by selling the extra gas they capture. There are also efforts to create a natural gas standard that would certify emissions associated with production and transport. As much as 80% of measures to curb methane from oil and gas operations, and up to 98% from the coal sector, can be implemented at no cost or at a savings, according to the United Nations 2021 global methane assessment. Officials also hope to cut down on the venting (releasing) of natural gas that often happens when theres no available pipeline capacity or when producers are only interested in capturing the oil from a well. Some of that gas is flared (burned) to convert the methane into carbon dioxide, but environmentalists and some investors have pushed for limits on flaring because not all the methane is combusted in the process. Instead, excess gas could be reinjected into the ground.
So far China has shown a desire to avoid escalation. For example, the unreliable entitites list was announced in 2019, but Chinese officials have yet to put it into effect or name any targets. Instead, they have focused on tit-for-tat responses with little tangible effect, such as visa and travel bans for foreign officials with few ties to China. Targets include former U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo and other members of President Donald Trumps administration over their China policy. Companies including Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co.s defense unit were hit with unspecified sanctions for selling arms to Taiwan, which China claims as its territory. Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz as well as nongovernmental organizations and think tanks such as Human Rights Watch and the Mercator Institute for China Studies were sanctioned over human rights issues. In some of these cases, Beijing explicitly prohibited Chinese citizens and institutions from doing business or having exchanges with sanctioned entities.
It dates back to the 1950s. Skirmishes were reported after India granted the Dalai Lama asylum following an uprising against Chinese rule in Tibet in 1959. War broke out three years later after China objected to India establishing outposts along the effective boundary, established by the British in 1914, between the Tibetan region and Northeast India. The current Line of Actual Control that forms the ambiguous border partially adheres to the British-drawn boundaries. Clashes were also reported in 1967 and again in 1987 in whats sometimes referred to as the loudspeaker war -- no bullets were fired and soldiers simply kept shouting at each other via loudspeakers. Relations improved as the two governments signed five treaties between 1993 and 2013 and -- with economic growth racing ahead in both countries -- China became Indias largest trading partner. The border remained mostly calm through 2017, when troops faced off for several months at Doklam, a plateau near the Indian border that is claimed by both China and Bhutan. The clashes are mostly seasonal, given the harsh winter conditions.
Theres no doubt that Yelena is worthy of that honor. But it still feels like Johansson has gotten short shrift over the course of several Avengers movies in which Natasha has been little more than eye candy, despite her skills, sober-minded pragmatism and personal roots that intersect with geopolitical history in tantalizing ways. When Black Widow catches up with her as an adult, she has just gone into exile after the disastrous events of Captain America: Civil War; the Avengers have splintered, and shes ambivalent about her own place in an organization she once opposed. Yelena is a loner for her own reasons: When the two reunite in a Budapest apartment, the sequence resembles an outtake from another TV series, Killing Eve.
I open a new contact for "Refrigerator" and record the make, model and serial number, take a picture of the serial number plate and use it as the contact photo. I also can make a note for the date that I had a repair done, who did it, if I liked their service and how much it cost. I also add the repair person to my contact list.
Its a hopeful sign that the trustees apparently have decided to act. But given that the situation has made UNC a prominent outpost of the raging culture wars over the history of racism in America, its hard to be sure which way the vote will go. The fight over how to view racism in America is particularly heated right now. (My colleague Jeremy Barr wrote last week that a related topic, critical race theory  an academic framework for examining systemic racism  has been the subject of relentless bashing on Fox News, mentioned on the air more than 700 times this month.)
Though Fofanah had been a caregiver before the pandemic and liked the work helping patients, her hours werent guaranteed from week to week, so she never knew how much child care shed need or what days shed need it. Nor did she know how much money she could expect to earn in any given month, or where shed be assigned to work. Fofanah, who lives in Silver Spring, doesnt have a car, so she had to rely on public transportation, adding time to her commutes and dollars to her cumulative babysitting costs. When she did the math on the expenses of actually going to work vs. how much she was making, Fofanah came to the frustrating realization that some days she was barely breaking even.
Some species of mosquito prefer to get those blood meals from mammals, including humans  and the carbon dioxide that we release when we breathe is a universally recognized attractant, Brown said. So if you breathe more heavily than those around you or are exercising outdoors, you may be a target. The pests are also attracted to other bodily emissions, such as sweat and heat, he said, in addition to individual biochemistries.
If the question is, Is menthol bad for us? the answer certainly is yes. But if the question is, Is smoking bad for us? the answer also is yes, said council member Robert C. White Jr. (D-At Large), who voted against the ban. In the original bill, we were trying to get at things that were targeted toward youth, flavored items. Menthol to me seems like a different category. . . . Im seeing this as paternalistic.
A spokeswoman for Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) on Monday was unable to say how many of the gift cards had been given out since June 19. The gift cards for those getting vaccinated and those accompanying them will be offered through July 17, Bowsers office said. Hours for these and other city vaccination sites are available through the citys website.
Nevertheless, Mehta said there was no evidence Webster was still a danger or a flight risk. He had never been to a political protest before Jan. 6, did not plan to breach the Capitol building and did not have ties to any extremist group, according to his defense attorney. Mehta said Webster could await trial at his home in Orange County, N.Y., with strict control of his movements and use of electronic devices.
The buyer was an undercover agent with the Fish and Wildlife Service. Selling any piece of ivory across state lines without proper documentation is illegal; since 2016, only ivory proven to be more than 100 years old can be sold.
Mrs. Giff had wanted to write from the first time I picked up a book and read, she later said. But only in her early 40s, when she was established in her career as a reading teacher and when her children had reached school age, did she act on her abiding ambition. As she carved out the necessary time in her day to write, her husband carved out the necessary space in their home, combining two adjacent closets into a tiny studio.
Greensville County, on the border with North Carolina, is reporting about two new cases a day, or 17.2 cases per 100,000 people. Less than 33 percent of the population is vaccinated, according to Virginia Health Department data. In much more populous Fairfax County, by contrast, there is an average of nine new cases a day  less than one case per 100,000 people. About 54 percent of the population is vaccinated.
She is expected to argue that Ramoss mental conditions did not meet the threshold for disorders that would incapacitate his judgment or eliminate his ability to discern right from wrong. In the lead-up to the case, the state has pointed to Ramoss vendetta against the newspaper  which began in 2011 after a columnist wrote about his guilty plea in a harassment case.
And it was true. Through their journalism and their passions, their fingerprints were everywhere in town. They were on the local high school, where McNamara paced the sidelines, pen in hand. They were on the Chesapeake Bay, where Hiaasen and his wife used to celebrate their anniversary. They were at the Unitarian Universalist Church, where through a glass window Winterss son can see the door where his mom used to greet worshipers during the rare moments when she wasnt reporting. And they were on the neighborhood streets of Annapolis, lined with red mailboxes that read The Capital.
The new report compared the rate of force against various racial and ethnic groups against their proportionate rate of representation as suspects and arrestees in Fairfax. Smith said such rates vary widely among the different population groups, so are a better benchmark for use of force than general population figures alone.
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Daiva is proud shed kept the work family together through the pandemic, but now it means expanding into the space next door in Chevy Chase. Until the pandemic, there had been a dry cleaner business there. But then people had stopped wearing office clothes because there was no office to go to.
Asked how the administration would pressure the Russians, and what officials would do in the event of another veto, a senior State Department official said that whats been made clear all the way from the president on down . . . is that we want to have a constructive relationship with Russia on areas where we can work together, and Syria is one of them.
Elatr said her life was upended even before Khashoggis death because of their relationship. According to court documents and witness statements in her political asylum case, in April 2018, she said, when she was a flight attendant for Emirates airline, she was detained after returning to the UAE on a flight from Canada. At the airport, she said she was surrounded by seven state security agents, then blindfolded, handcuffed and interrogated for 17 hours. They took her passport, searched her home and confiscated family photos, computers and books.
According to a 2009 slide released by Snowden and published in the Intercept in 2015, many of the sites that XKeyscore relies on for data were either in the United States or linked to sites in the United States. LeBlanc, in his statement, suggested as much. It is beyond obvious that NSA must gather or collect that signals intelligence from somewhere  in the United States or abroad.
My concern is that the pace of activity directed at U.S. forces and the repeated retaliatory strikes against Iranian proxy forces are starting to look like what would qualify as a pattern of hostilities under the War Powers Act. Both the Constitution and the War Powers Act require the president to come to Congress for a war declaration under these circumstances.
The president looks forward to signing each bill. He has long supported the two-track approach, Psaki said. And his view is that the American people are most interested in what were going to do to deliver for them, how were going to rebuild the roads and their railways and their bridges, how were going to make sure they can have access to broadband, that were eliminating lead from drinking water.
The vote total just released by the Board of Elections is 100,000-plus more than the total announced on election night, raising serious questions, the statement said. We have asked the Board of Elections to explain such a massive increase and other irregularities before we comment on the Ranked Choice Voting projection. We remain confident that Eric Adams will be the next mayor of New York because he put together a historic five-borough working class coalition of New Yorkers to make our city a safer, fairer, more affordable place.
Gosar has previously attended events with Fuentes and appeared to defend the fundraiser in a tweet Monday night when he wrote: Not sure why anyone is freaking out. Ill say this: there are millions of Gen Z, Y and X conservatives. They believe in America First. They will not agree 100% on every issue. No group does. We will not let the left dictate our strategy, alliances and efforts. Ignore the left.
After Mondays session, spokespeople for both Vance and James declined to comment. No charges were announced on Monday. Vance has convened a grand jury in Manhattan to vote on potential indictments in the investigation, but so far, no person or entity connected to Trump has been charged. It remains possible that none will be. Those familiar with the investigation spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private meetings.
Taney wrote that at the time of the Constitutions ratification, Black people had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.
While The Shul has about 700 member families, many other Jews have ties to the congregation, even if they attend services elsewhere, said Motti Seligson, a spokesperson for the Chabad Lubavitch movement headquartered in New York City. They may send their kids to preschool or camp through the synagogue or attend adult education classes there.
If the community came to us and said we want to remove the churches, we would have done it  in a good way. But for one individual to go and do this without community consensus  its heartbreaking for the ones that utilize the church, Crow said.
Their strategy is to surround the city as well as the provincial capitals, pushing closer and closer from all sides until they can stop, just short of entering Kabul, and say they are now ready to talk about peace, Rahmatullah Nabil, a former national intelligence director, said in an interview this week. He also said the group is targeting other strategic spots, including some on the porous border with Pakistan, some containing mineral mines or dams, and others on rural link roads.
Priti Patel, Britains home secretary, suggested Whitty may be offered police protection. When asked about it on Times Radio, she said: Its important we make sure that Chris is given the right kind of support. It is terrible to see such an important public figure  someone that day in, day out has been serving our country in the way in which he has to keep us safe  being subject to such appalling abuse.
The upheaval comes as the political dynamic in the West Bank had already been roiled by the cancellation of elections and the recent air war between Israel and the militant group Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Hamas, which portrays its actions as a defense of Jerusalem at the expense of the Palestinian Authority, has experienced a surge in popularity in the West Bank. Hamas, which is regularly accused of suppressing dissent, has condemned Banats killing and the crackdown on demonstrations.
The council meeting was chaired by Estonian President Kersti Kaljulaid, who singled out serious consequences for children of the war in Yemen, the killing of children by Myanmars military junta and the killing of more than 150 children and injury to 400 in Afghanistan in the first three months of the year as well as damage to numerous schools preventing thousands of students from returning to classes.
Charles L. Riney, 86, of Washington, went home to be with our Lord and Savior on Sunday, June 27, 2021, at 7:25 a.m. He was born in Washington on Nov. 3, 1934, to Thomas and Ann Marie (Smith) Riney. He loved gardening and spending time with his beloved dog. He is survived by one sister, Paul
Trusted local news has never been more important, but providing the information you need, information that can change sometimes minute-by-minute, requires a partnership with you, our readers. Please consider making a contribution today to support this vital resource that you and countless others depend on.
Some of the nations biggest fund managers including AMP Capital and Perpetual are backing a push to force Australias largest companies to annually disclose climate risks, amid warnings firms that fail to do so could be starved of capital.

Three investor groups representing more than $100 trillion in assets  the Investor Group on Climate Change (IGCC), Principles for Responsible Investment and Carbon Disclosure Project  have launched a plan to force ASX-300 companies to properly disclose climate risks within the next three years.

The IGCCs members include around 100 leading Australian investment managers including Blackrock Investment Management Australia, Westpacs BT Management, CBAs Colonial, Perpetual Investments, AMP Capital and a raft of super funds including AustralianSuper.

IGCC policy director Erwin Jackson said around half of ASX300 companies are already disclosing climate risks voluntarily, but the absence of standardised and enforceable reporting requirements had created a spaghetti soup of corporate information on climate that is unhelpful to investors.
Three Labor premiers are calling for a reduction on international arrivals, with WA Premier Mark McGowan backing comments from his Queensland and Victorian counterparts that hotel quarantine was currently too risky.

As Victoria recovers from its May outbreak and Queensland and WA head into lockdowns because of the highly infectious Delta COVID-19 variant, the premiers used a national cabinet meeting on Monday to call for the reduction.

WA Premier Mark McGowan at a COVID press conference on June 29 in Perth. Credit:Hamish Hastie

But their arguments have not convinced federal Health Minister Greg Hunt, who instead urged the states to bring home as many Australians as possible.

On Tuesday morning, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews suggested caps could be reduced by up to 80 per cent until vaccination rates reached the magic number of between 70 and 80 per cent of the population.
An Aboriginal elder says a blast of verbal abuse from Greens senator Lidia Thorpe during a meeting at Parliament House left her physically ill, shaken and requiring medical attention.

First Peoples Assembly of Victoria co-chair Aunty Geraldine Atkinson is seeking a formal apology from Senator Thorpe  an Indigenous senator in her first term  for her conduct during a meeting to discuss Victorias treaty process at Parliament House in Canberra last Tuesday.

Co-chair of the First Peoples' Assembly of Victoria, Aunty Geraldine Atkinson.

According to a letter of complaint Ms Atkinson sent to Senate President Scott Ryan and the Greens leader Adam Bandt, Senator Thorpe began the meeting by telling Ms Atkinson they were not friends and that she did not respect her, accusing her of holding high-paid roles in organisations that did not benefit the Indigenous community.

The letter also contains allegations that Senator Thorpe criticised the prominent Bamblett family, of which Ms Atkinson is a member, saying they had always tried to undermine her and bring her down, and that she suggested Ms Atkinson was involved in corrupt Aboriginal organisations.
When it comes to the global image war, the narrative battle that has raged between China and the US over COVIDs origins is just one skirmish in a much wider campaign. Yet the impact of the pandemic has been to supercharge the conflict, reshaping the battlefield and allowing Beijing to take advantage of Washingtons distraction at a time of domestic Trump-related turmoil.

The elephants are just one manifestation of Beijings decade-long obsession with boosting what it calls its discourse power. President Xi firmly believes that Beijing needs to upgrade its global image in fitting with its status as the worlds second largest economy. To that end, its been steadily redrawing the global media landscape through the overseas expansion of its state-run media, the acquisition of stakes in foreign news outlets by pro-China businesspeople and the construction of global communications infrastructure, such as its satellite television network across Africa.

Chinas latest media stars are 14 photogenic wild elephants who wandered 500 kilometres from their home to end up on the outskirts of the southwestern city of Kunming. Images of the elephants nuzzling each other to sleep have whizzed around the world, accompanying stories outlining officials desperate attempts to guide the herd home. Thanks to the elephants, an image of a real and caring China is emerging, trumpeted the Global Times newspaper . This is no coincidence; the cuddly elephants are the latest weapon in President Xi Jinpings propaganda offensive to present a more lovable global image of China .

This represents a more assertive strategy, harnessing the web of content-sharing agreements it has already built, which offers Chinese propaganda for free to overseas news outlets. Beijing is also spending millions placing advertorials in foreign newspapers. Beijings sheer propaganda reach was revealed during a single week during the March meeting of Chinas legislative assembly, when the Peoples Daily boasted that it had placed a total of 4500 articles  or media drops as it terms them  in 12 languages in 200 news outlets.

In the pre-COVID era, Beijing also bought sympathetic coverage in foreign papers by offering free junkets to China for foreign journalists, wowing them with five-star treatment. Dozens of high-profile Australian journalists have availed themselves of such tours; many wrote breathless, wide-eyed paeans echoing the party line on Chinas warp-speed economic development. Wittingly or not, they ended up telling Chinas story well.

It is one indication of Beijings surprising sophistication at propaganda that even though the first known COVID-19 outbreak originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan, China has managed to leverage the pandemic to bolster its global reputation. In research for the International Federation of Journalists, our survey of journalism unions in 50 countries found that almost 60 per cent of respondents judged that coverage of China in their country had become more positive since the COVID outbreak. The vast majority  more than 90 per cent  of those surveyed had received Chinese medical aid, while 42 per cent were recipients of Chinas COVID vaccine. In vaccine recipient countries, the predominant narrative regarding Chinas handling of the pandemic was twice as likely to be positive.

Meanwhile, chaotic American and European responses to the pandemic played into Chinas hands, since they resulted in developing countries publicly pleading for Beijings help in providing masks, PPE and medical aid. The deliveries of these provided an opportunity for dramatic and public shows of gratitude, such as gigantic billboards bearing the words Thank you, brother Xi! in the streets of the Serbian capital. In Tunisia the opening of a Chinese-funded $70 million hospital caused many Tunisians to view Beijing as a saviour. In this way, Chinese aid donations do double duty by providing Beijing with propaganda wins that project its image as a responsible member of the international community.
Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size Within the next decade, the trajectories of the worlds two largest economies will collide. One has been the worlds dominant technological, financial and cultural superpower for a century. The other is a manufacturing titan, home to the worlds largest population and increasingly its most innovative industries. China is on track to become the largest economy in the world by 2028. It has already overtaken the US as the largest trading partner of most of its major allies and is pursuing Washingtons dominance of multilateral institutions, including the World Trade Organisation, and the financial clout of the US dollar. As China moves closer to the centre of the world stage, it has the ability and responsibility to play a greater role in global affairs and, together with other countries, make greater contributions to solving the problems of all mankind, Chinese President Xi Jinping told his top political deputies on June 2. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video In his first speech as US President, Joe Biden declared the two countries were in stiff competition. Were in competition with China and other countries to win the 21st Century, Biden said. Xi, Biden added, was deadly earnest about China becoming the most significant, consequential nation in the world.

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In June, six months after taking office, Biden pushed a bill worth $323 billion through the Senate in an attempt to re-energise American industry to compete with a surging Chinese economic machine. Xi has spent the past eight years cementing his grip on the Chinese Communist Party, fuelling Chinas own brand of economic development and its more strident nationalistic tone. The contest for economic dominance is not just about trade balances or gross domestic product, but about fundamentally different ways of managing the economy. By the end of this decade, Xis China will become the first socialist economy in the world to match the market strength of capitalisms largest player. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video There are now more Fortune 500 global companies based in mainland China and Hong Kong than in the US. Americas Walmart remains at the top of the list, but it is followed by three of Chinas state-backed conglomerates: Sinopec, State Grid and China National Petroleum. There were no Chinese companies on the list in 1990. Beijing is now home to more billionaires than any other city in the world. It beat New York for the first time this year with 100 billionaires to New Yorks 99, according to Forbes. Nationwide, Chinas 698 billionaires are rapidly catching the US at 724.

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But when that crude figure is divided by the population, it also reveals how far China has to go to catch up with the US in per capita terms. The US has 1.86 billionaires per million people, China only 0.27. Loading Chinas 1.4 billion strong population dwarfs the 330 million in the US, making any comparison on a like-for-like basis tricky. Chinas gross domestic product, which measures the total output of an economy, will overtake the US by 2028, according to International Monetary Fund figures analysed by financial services company Nomura. At that point, both economies will be heading towards the $US30 trillion mark ($39 trillion). That timeline could be shortened to 2026 if Chinas post-COVID recovery continues to accelerate ahead of the US.

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In Beijing, where COVID-19 was suppressed within months of the first outbreak in the countrys centre, the headline economic figures, which are often treated with suspicion, are backed up anecdotally by the buzz at street level. Takeaway shops are reporting food sales up by 30 per cent and 40 billion parcels were delivered in the first five months of 2021, two months ahead of last years record, as consumers stuck at home spent up big in Chinas $2.4 billion online shopping market. I come to work at around 7am and leave around 9pm, said JD logistics courier Shi Hailong, 31. This is a very exhausting job. But the more you work, the more you get paid. I have two kids and the elder is going to primary school this year. I need to make enough money for their education. JD logistics courier Shi Hailong at work late at night in Beijing in June. Credit:Sanghee Liu If China becomes the worlds largest economy, it will be on the back of workers like Shi. The milestone will trigger a range of geopolitical consequences. The International Monetary Fund, for example, is bound by its bylaws to base its head office in the worlds largest economy. One of the pillars of the worlds economic and financial order could move from Washington to Beijing. But Chinas GDP per capita, which measures the size of the economy divided by the population, will remain well below the US for decades to come. When adjusted for purchasing power parity  the value of a currency relative to the cost of goods  it will only reach $25,300 by 2025 compared to $76,500 for the US, according to IMF figures.

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The difference between the per capita and total output figures effectively allows China to argue it is a developing economy, securing concessions on trade policy and carbon emissions, while it becomes the largest economy in the world. By 2035, the Chinese Communist Party wants per capita GDP to reach the level of moderately developed countries. By 2049 - the centenary of the founding of the Peoples Republic of China - Xi wants Chinas living standards to match those of the West. To do this, China has made sweeping socio-economic changes, including implementing a three-child policy to reverse an ageing population. Loading It is also using infrastructure projects through the Belt and Road Initiative to drive influence throughout the Indo-Pacific and deliver contracts to its companies overseas, at the same time as it tells its people to produce and consume at home through its internal circulation strategy. To drive domestic production and consumption, it has pumped subsidies into sectors in which it believes it needs to become more competitive, such as semiconductors. US authorities claim it has also targeted intellectual property to gain an edge over its competitors in a brutal technology race. In February 2020, FBI Director Chris Wray said 1000 investigations were open into Chinese technology theft, many of them targeting US electric vehicle and aircraft technology. Aware that its position as the worlds economic leader is under threat after its economy was buffeted by COVID-19, Biden announced a $2.5 trillion stimulus package in January. He has since followed that up with a package worth $323 billion specifically targeted at competing with China on research, education, technology transfer, intellectual property and manufacturing. Of that, $83 billion over five years will be spent to spur the domestic manufacturing of semiconductors in the US. Another $103 billion will be spent on research into biotechnology, artificial intelligence and robotics.

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Weatherford, TX (76086)

Today

Sun and clouds mixed with a slight chance of thunderstorms during the afternoon. High 87F. Winds ESE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 30%..

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Partly cloudy. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 71F. Winds ESE at 5 to 10 mph.
This page contains all of The Wenatchee Worlds coverage of the novel coronavirus outbreak, and the illness it causes, called COVID-19.

Because this outbreak impacts public health, our coverage of the coronavirus is available to all readers, even without a subscription. But our journalists are working hard to bring you the verified information below. Please consider supporting important local journalism with a subscription. (Click Here)

Are you a North Central Washington resident whos been affected by the illness? Send us an email: newsroom@wenatcheeworld.com.
After a year of being COVID-cautious, Linda Matisoff counted the days until she could hug her 5-year-old granddaughter, Laila, again.

In March, two weeks after getting her second dose of the vaccine, it was finally time.

"We were coming down the street, getting closer and closer," said Matisoff, who lives in Plano, Texas. "We had gotten together over FaceTime, and we saw each other in person six feet apart.

"But that hug was the body contact we missed for a whole year. It was such a warm, wonderful feeling."

It's not just a feeling. Hugs can be good for you, medically and psychologically, and with life getting back to normal, health experts are glad they're back.

"It is definitely OK to hug again, and it's really important to go back to hugging," said Dr. Corrin Cross, a pediatrician at Children's Hospital Los Angeles. "It can help us feel connected, and we know from lots of studies that feeling connected does improve your health. It reduces your stress, your blood pressure, your anxiety."

Cross said hugs are part of the power of touch that spans a lifetime, from premature infants who respond better when they are held to the stress-relieving perks of daily hugs among adults.

"When you hold someone you love, you feel that sort of calm release," she said. "It's all really good for you."

The benefits have been documented in various ways. One study showed women who had physical contact with their partners responded better to stress, while another linked hugs to lower blood pressure in women.

Sheldon Cohen, a professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, led a 2015 study that exposed people to the cold virus, then compared people who received multiple hugs during the two weeks preceding being exposed to the virus to those who didn't. Even if people reported conflict in their lives  which is thought to weaken the immune system  the huggers got sick less often.

"The more hugs you got, the less likely you were to get sick," Cohen said. "It seemed to confer some kind of resistance to disease. The hugs were even buffering the effects of conflicts."

Michael Murphy, assistant professor of psychology at Texas Tech University in Lubbock who researches the effects of hugs, said scientists are working to figure out exactly why hugs and other forms of "supportive touch" can make such a difference.

"There's still a lot we don't know," he said. "But it appears to promote the body to release hormones that protect us from the harmful effects of stress. And psychologically, supportive touch can serve as a simple but powerful reminder there are people in our lives who love us and care for us."

During the pandemic, hugs didn't go away entirely. People who quarantined together could hug all they wanted. But for those who were isolated or separated from some of the people they wanted to hug, a hugless year left a major void.

"Isolation, loneliness and general lack of social support can all be harmful to our health," Murphy said. "They can be risk factors for consequences including heart disease, substance abuse and even suicide."

In normal times, Cross said, "kids get a lot of hugs from a lot of people. I think they felt that difference."

All that makes the green light for hugging an embraceable development. But there are caveats.

"All the upside of hugs is based on consensual hugs," Murphy said. "I've heard from many people who are really excited to be hugging again. But I've also heard from people who are still uncomfortable with touch. It's always important to respect other people's boundaries."

And while Cross is staunchly pro-hugging for people who are vaccinated, she also advocates common sense, such as turning your head to avoid exchanging breaths.

"Besides COVID, there are still other illnesses out there," she said. "You can still give somebody the flu. If you're sick, don't go around and spread it to other people."

And if a grandparent wants to hug an unvaccinated child?

"The risk of anything happening is extremely rare," Cross said. "And the reward is so high. We have to get busy living."

Matisoff and her granddaughter are taking that advice.

"We're making up for lost time," she said.

Editor's note: Because of the rapidly evolving events surrounding the coronavirus, the facts and advice presented in this story may have changed since publication. Visit Heart.org for the latest coverage, and check with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and local health officials for the most recent guidance.

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STAMFORD  A Westport teenager accused of downloading child pornography could have the charges eventually dropped because of what the state called potentially serious defects with the arrest warrants.

On Monday, Judge Gary White accepted an application for accelerated rehabilitation for 19-year-old Sam Gold, who was facing charges of second-degree possession of child pornography, tampering with evidence, interfering with a search and interfering with an officer.

Assistant States Attorney Daniel Cummings said that the state normallywould not entertain an AR application given the facts of the case, however Golds attorney, Edward Gavin, raised some potentially serious defects with the Westport polices search and arrest warrants, he said.

Gavin said Monday that police inaccurately stated the number of images that his client had allegedly downloaded to his computer in both warrants.

Given the information, Cummings said the state would not object to the program being granted and that the diversionary program was the second-best outcome given the apparently inaccurate information contained in the warrants.

Lt. Dave Wolf, a spokesperson for Westport police, said the department had no comment on Gavins allegations.

We understand that the Assistant States Attorneys have broad discretion in terms of how they prosecute the cases that a police department brings to them, Wolf said Monday in regard to Gold being granted the diversionary program.

Westport police said at the time of Golds arrest that investigators were alerted that a town resident was possibly downloading child pornography onto his computer on April 4, 2020.

The sergeant overseeing the investigation tracked down the IP address of the computer, which came back to a Westport home, police said. Investigators obtained a search warrant to examine the computers and electronic devices at the address.

During the execution of the search warrant, one of the residents, Sam Gold, allegedly tampered with some of the devices that the investigating detectives were attempting to inspect, police said.

Investigators found suspected images of child pornography that Gold allegedly downloaded, police said.

Under the accelerated rehabilitation program, Gold will not admit guilt in the case but would be placed on two years of probation instead.

If he does not commit any crimes during that probation, and abides by other special conditions imposed on him, the charges against him will be dropped. Gold also will not be allowed to have unsupervised contact with anyone younger than 16 years old.

Gold will remain on probation until June 26, 2023, when his next court date is scheduled.
The body of a missing Owensboro man was pulled from the Ohio River on Monday.

The Henderson County Coroner's Office was dispatched to the Angel Mounds Boat Ramp on Monday morning after a body was taken ashore there after being pulled from the Ohio River.

The coroner's office told 44News the body had been identified as 24-year-old Kue Gay of Owensboro, who went missing in the Ohio River early Saturday morning.

He originally lost control of his cast net, falling into the river. And while his friend tried to help rescue him, the current was too powerful for Gay.

"As soon as he heard him screaming for help he called 9-1-1," said Henderson Rescue Squad Chief Brian Coghill. "There was another fisherman nearby that tried to assist them. He was able to get the friend out of the water, but they were unable to find the other individual to get him out."

It would not be until Monday morning when Gay was finally found.

Emergency teams spent several days canvasing the Ohio River, going as far as four miles downstream, where he was discovered by the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources.

"Fish and Wildlife spotted the individual in the water," Chief Coghill said. "They called us and we went down to help them recover."

Gay worked at Specialty Foods Group in Owensboro. His co-workers were devastated when they finally heard their worst fears coming true.

"As soon as I found out, I mean I broke down and cried," said co-worker Felisha Thompson. "He was a very good guy at our plant. So, like my [emotions] are going crazy today."

As for the first responders who spent days searching for the fisherman? They are glad to have brought peace to Gay's family.

"The feeling the guys and girls are feeling right now is that we brought closure to the family," Chief Coghill said. "That's what we're out there for."
Phil Armstrong is the Lehigh County Executive, and Commissioner Geoff Brace is the Chair of the Lehigh County Board of Commissioners.

President Abraham Lincoln once said, The most reliable way to predict the future is to create it. In Lehigh County, we are working to create a brighter future by wisely using money from the American Rescue Plan to Build Back Better. Recently, your county leaders agreed to invest approximately $31M to aid in those efforts by placing a premium on small business recovery, and making improvements at Cedarbrook Skilled Nursing to keep vulnerable seniors safe.

Throughout 2020 and the early months of 2021, small businesses struggled mightily. Last year, we pumped $8.5M into small businesses, and we know it kept many open. The people who are the backbone of our community will continue to struggle until customers feel comfortable going back to normal with face-to-face interaction. While many of us are already doing that thanks to the miracles of vaccination, we know businesses are going to struggle for a while. That is why your county leaders agreed to make $10.2M in funding available to small businesses affected by the pandemic, to help them fully recover from the economic shock we just experienced. We need small businesses in our community. They are the drivers of job creation and long-term growth. They support our community and now it is up to us to help support them.

In the early months of the pandemic, nursing homes were ravaged by COVID-19. The nurses and staff worked tirelessly to keep people safe and help them recover if an outbreak happened in a facility. That is especially true at Cedarbrook. The county sustained significant financial loss through the pandemic as the number of residents declined due to decreased admissions. Other costsespecially protective equipment and overtime costsincreased. Cedarbrook provides world-class health care to our Lehigh County residents who need it and they deserve nothing less. That is why we are committing $4M to maintain the highest care at Cedarbrook for 2021. Additionally, we are committing $8M on top of the estimated $60M already committed to ensure completion of a state-of-the art expansion at the South Whitehall facility. With construction and material costs rising, Lehigh County wants seniors to know the facility available to them is safe and something we can afford to do because of the American Rescue Plan.

While small business support and Cedarbrook will receive the lions share of our commitment, the work does not stop there. We have committed $1M to help non-profit organizations that have served those in need, to help them recover. We will work with local health partners to provide additional public health services that were not previously available to Lehigh County residents. We will make improvements to county operations to better serve residents. We will add more job training and community services to keep people out of jail and address youth violence. We will add new housing Government Center 17 South Seventh Street Allentown, Pennsylvania 18101-2401 services to give people a place to call home. Finally, we will finish restoration of the Historic Lehigh County Courthouse and help make renovations on Coca Cola Park, home of your Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs.

These are ambitious plans and they should be. The global pandemic created a massive earthquake. Our job as Americans is to build back better. Thanks to President Joe Biden and leaders in Washington like Congresswoman Susan Wild and Senator Bob Casey we have the financial resources to do it. Your leaders in Lehigh County are committed to doing the job right because that is what you expect from us.
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Connecticut's approval of recreational marijuana could lead to neighboring states doing the same, the Delta COVID variant is impacting oil prices and production, and U.S. stock ownership nears record levels. Here's the Morning Business Report for June 29, sponsored by Access Health CT Small 
Quincy, IL (62301)

Today

Some clouds in the morning will give way to mainly sunny skies for the afternoon. High 91F. Winds SW at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Mostly clear. Low 67F. Winds light and variable.
Programme Associate, Tripoli, Libya

Organization: UNICEF - United Nations Childrens Fund

Country: Libya

City: Tripoli, Libya

Office: UNICEF Tripoli, Libya

Closing date: Sunday, 4 July 2021

Programme Associate, FT, (GS-6), (Libya Nationals Only) Tripoli-Libya # 00071390

Job no: 539758

Position type: Fixed Term Appointment

Location: Libya Division/Equivalent: Amman(MENA)

School/Unit: Libya

Department/Office: Tripoli, Libyan Arab Rep.

Categories: Programme Management

UNICEF works in some of the worlds toughest places, to reach the worlds most disadvantaged children. To save their lives. To defend their rights. To help them fulfill their potential.

Across 190 countries and territories, we work for every child, everywhere, every day, to build a better world for everyone.

And we never give up.

For every child, Support

The fundamental mission of UNICEF is to promote the rights of every child, everywhere, in everything the organization does in programs, in advocacy and in operations. The equity strategy, emphasizing the most disadvantaged and excluded children and families, translates this commitment to childrens rights into action. For UNICEF, equity means that all children have an opportunity to survive, develop and reach their full potential, without discrimination, bias or favoritism. To the degree that any child has an unequal chance in life in its social, political, economic, civic and cultural dimensions her or his rights are violated. There is growing evidence that investing in the health, education and protection of a societys most disadvantaged citizens addressing inequity not only will give all children the opportunity to fulfill their potential but also will lead to sustained growth and stability of countries. This is why the focus on equity is so vital. It accelerates progress towards realizing the human rights of all children, which is the universal mandate of UNICEF, as outlined by the Convention on the Rights of the Child, while also supporting the equitable development of nations.

How can you make a difference?

Under the supervision and guidance of Chief of Programme, the programme associate supports the respective sections by carrying out a range of programme support functions to help develop, implement and monitor their country programme, ensuring effective and timely delivery that is consistent with UNICEF rules and regulations.

The Programme Associate works in close collaboration with a range of staff in the CO, external partners and agency counterparts in support of programme design and delivery. S/He provides regular feedback on the status of projects through monitoring milestones and advises on improvements to keep activities on track.

Summary of key functions/accountabilities:

Facilitating the development of programme cooperation agreements (PCAs) by providing information and drafting selected sections of it.

Ensuring the timely and accurate recording and administrative processing of government & NGOs proposals and requests for direct cash transfers (DCTs).

Conducting programme monitoring in UNICEF focus districts for cash and supplies and informing team-members on the status.

Helping conduct regular spot checks of partners projects to assess their financial record-keeping, expenditure controls and reporting systems.

Monitoring and tracking the efficient distribution of supplies that are required for effective programme delivery.

Supporting the programme section in researching, compiling and analyzing qualitative and quantitative data and information from a variety of sources on subject matters relevant to the work of the section to facilitate programme delivery as well as preparation of reports, working papers and presentations.

Carrying out transactions in VISION ensuring programme results, activities and programme coding are as per annual work plans (AWPs), and making amendments and alterations as per section revisions when necessary.

Carrying out transactions in VISION pertaining to grants and programme-related items for his/her section including but not limited to registering grant allotments and tracking expiring programme grants.

Preparing monitoring and reporting information for supervisor and team on agreed performance indicators to drive more efficient management and accountability for results.

Regularly monitoring budgets and financial expenditures of section by employing applicable tools, ensuring compliance with UNICEF rules and regulations, keeping supervisor informed and advised on actions for decision and/or follow up.

Helping prepare periodic or ad-hoc financial reports relating to country office and donors to support the office in optimizing use of programme funds.

Supports capacity development activities related to programme development by preparing training materials and participating in exercises.

Required Skills

In-depth knowledge of the administration which underpins UNICEF country office programme/project operations, including monitoring and evaluation processes.

Strong organizational, planning and prioritizing skills and abilities.

High sense of confidentiality, initiative and good judgment.

Ability to work effectively with people of different national and cultural backgrounds.

Tags capacity development cash transfer human rights monitoring and evaluation monitoring and reporting office management programme management sharepoint

Strong office management skills.

High attention to detail.

Ability to effectively manage the sections material resources and monitor its budget.

Good analytical skills.

Experience using MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other UNICEF software such as SharePoint

To qualify as an advocate for every child you will have...

Completion of secondary education is required, preferably supplemented by technical or university courses related to the work of the organization.

A minimum of six years of administrative or clerical work experience is required. Prior experience in programme support functions is an asset. Relevant experience in a UN system agency or organization is considered as an asset.

Fluency in English is required. Knowledge of another official UN language or local language of the duty station is considered as an asset.

For every Child, you demonstrate...

UNICEFs values of Care, Respect, Integrity, Trust, and Accountability (CRITA) and core competencies in Communication, Working with People and Drive for Results.

The UNICEF competencies required for this post are...

Demonstrates Self Awareness and Ethical Awareness (1)

Works Collaboratively with others (1)

Builds and Maintains Partnerships (1)

Innovates and Embraces Change (1)

Thinks and Acts Strategically (1)

Drive to achieve impactful results (1)

Manages ambiguity and complexity (1)

Functional Competencies

Analyzing (2)

Applying technical expertise (2)

Planning and organizing (2)

Following Instructions and Procedures (2)

To view our competency framework, please visit here.

Click here to learn more about UNICEFs values and competencies.

UNICEF is committed to diversity and inclusion within its workforce, and encourages all candidates, irrespective of gender, nationality, religious and ethnic backgrounds, including persons living with disabilities, to apply to become a part of the organization.

UNICEF has a zero-tolerance policy on conduct that is incompatible with the aims and objectives of the United Nations and UNICEF, including sexual exploitation and abuse, sexual harassment, abuse of authority and discrimination. UNICEF also adheres to strict child safeguarding principles. All selected candidates will be expected to adhere to these standards and principles and will therefore undergo rigorous reference and background checks. Background checks will include the verification of academic credential(s) and employment history. Selected candidates may be required to provide additional information to conduct a background check.

Remarks:

Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted and advance to the next stage of the selection process.

Advertised: Jun 27 2021 E. Europe Daylight Time Application close: Jul 04 2021 E. Europe Daylight Time

Link to the organizations job offer: https://unjobs.org/vacancies/1624814668715
Human Resources Assistant, Beirut, Lebanon

Organization: UNICEF - United Nations Childrens Fund

Country: Lebanon

City: Beirut, Lebanon

Office: UNICEF Liban Beirut

Closing date: Wednesday, 7 July 2021

Human Resources Assistant, GS5, Beirut, Lebanon, Temporary Appointment up to 365 days

Job no: 541404

Position type: Temporary Appointment

Location: Lebanon Division/Equivalent: Amman(MENA)

School/Unit: Lebanon

Department/Office: Beirut, Lebanon

Categories: G-5

UNICEF works in some of the worlds toughest places, to reach the worlds most disadvantaged children. To save their lives. To defend their rights. To help them fulfill their potential.

Across 190 countries and territories, we work for every child, everywhere, every day, to build a better world for everyone.

And we never give up.

The focus of HR Assistant is to support in standardized and specialized activities pertaining to recruitment and placement, administration of entitlements, staff development and career development, job classification and/or performance management. Specialized activities pertain to the application of HR regulations, rules and procedures in the context of clear guidelines and procedures where the choice of action is limited and where issues requiring clarification and decision are directed to the relevant HR Business Partner.

For every child, a chance..

Under the close supervision and guidance of the Human Resources Officer/Specialist/Manager, the Human Resources Assistant provides administrative, procedural and operational support and assistance to the efficient implementation of a broad range of Human Resources functions for all categories of staff in his/her office, ensuring accurate and timely delivery that is in compliance with UNICEF HR rules and regulations.

How can you make a difference?

Support to business partnering

Support the business partners in developing initiatives to encourage employee well-being and employee recognition schemes

Support the management of change processes by advising clientele on changes to HR processes under the guidance of HR Business Partner

Support the business partners in assisting clientele in using HR systems such as talent management, agora and achieve

Support in processing of entitlement and benefits

Initiate the processing of a wide range of personnel actions in accordance with UNICEF rules and regulations, by ensuring all relevant forms and actions are completed by staff and forwarded to the GSSC.

Maintain and prepare all personnel-related records and files, ensuring all information on each staff member is up-to-date and accurate.

Support in recruitment and placement

Prepares and circulates internal and external advertisements.

Liaise with candidates in the various stages of the recruitment process.

Prepare formal acknowledgement, offer and regret letters.

Initiate and follow up on reference checks and academic verifications, and ensuring the completion of other background checks.

Record and maintain recruitment files, ensuring all necessary documentation has been prepared.

Monitor life-cycle of recruitment process to update supervisor as necessary.

Support in learning & capacity development

Develop and processes contracts for institutions providing training and courses, ensuring compliance with UNICEF rules and regulations.

Assist team in organizing and conducting courses, workshops and events by preparing and organizing distribution of materials for participants, ensuring availability of training venues and required equipment and supplies, while providing logistical and secretarial support at workshops and events as necessary.

General Office Support

Drafting and/or processing a variety of correspondence and other communications

Setting up and maintaining HR files/records (electronic and paper)

Tags capacity development career development human resources middle east performance management

Scheduling appointments and meetings

Maintain and generate automated databases containing HR related statistics and generating periodic reports; and performing a variety of administrative duties (e.g. leave recording, etc.).

To qualify as an advocate for every child you will have...

A secondary education preferably supplemented by technical or university courses related to the field of work.

A minimum of

5 years of relevant professional experience in HR, Administration or relevant clerical work.

Developing country work experience and/or familiarity with emergency is considered an asset.

Fluency in English and Arabic required.

Skills:

Technical

Good knowledge of HR principles, rules, regulations and procedures within the UN

Computer literacy and the ability to effectively use standard office software tools as well as good knowledge and skill in using HR systems.

Ability to extract and format data and to solve operational problems

Ability to organize own work, set priorities and meet deadlines.

Interpersonal and communication

Takes responsibility to respond to internal and external service needs promptly and proactively; takes initiative to ensure that deadlines, rules and regulations are met. Uses own discretion to address unforeseen situations.

Demonstrates a high degree of confidentiality, initiative and good judgment.

Demonstrates courtesy, tact, patience and ability to work effectively with people of different national and cultural backgrounds.

For every Child, you demonstrate...

UNICEFs values of Care, Respect, Integrity, Trust, and Accountability (CRITA) and core competencies in Communication, Working with People and Drive for Results.

The UNICEF competencies required for this post are...

Core Competencies

Demonstrates Self Awareness and Ethical Awareness (1)

Works Collaboratively with others (1)

Builds and Maintains Partnerships (1)

Innovates and Embraces Change (1)

Thinks and Acts Strategically (1)

Drive to achieve impactful results (1)

Manages ambiguity and complexity (1)

Functional Competencies

Analyzing (1)

Learning & Researching (1)

Planning and organizing (1)

Following Instructions and Procedures (1)

To view our competency framework, please visit here.

Click here to learn more about UNICEFs values and competencies.

UNICEF is committed to diversity and inclusion within its workforce, and encourages all candidates, irrespective of gender, nationality, religious and ethnic backgrounds, including persons living with disabilities, to apply to become a part of the organization.

UNICEF has a zero-tolerance policy on conduct that is incompatible with the aims and objectives of the United Nations and UNICEF, including sexual exploitation and abuse, sexual harassment, abuse of authority and discrimination. UNICEF also adheres to strict child safeguarding principles. All selected candidates will be expected to adhere to these standards and principles and will therefore undergo rigorous reference and background checks. Background checks will include the verification of academic credential(s) and employment history. Selected candidates may be required to provide additional information to conduct a background check.

Remarks:

Mobility is a condition of international professional employment with UNICEF and an underlying premise of the international civil service.

Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted and advance to the next stage of the selection process.

Advertised: Jun 23 2021 Middle East Daylight Time Application close: Jul 07 2021 Middle East Daylight Time

Link to the organizations job offer: https://unjobs.org/vacancies/1624471438255
Senior Budget Assistant, OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine, Kyiv

Organization: OSCE - Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe

Country: Ukraine

City: Kyiv, Ukraine

Office: OSCE in Kyiv, Ukraine

Grade: G-6

Closing date: Thursday, 15 July 2021

Background:

The OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine is looking for a Ukrainian professional for the position of Senior Budget Assistant in its Head Office in Kyiv. The OSCE is committed to achieving a better balance of women and men within the Organization. Initial duration of assignment for this post is for a period of 12 months, with a possibility of extension, subject to a subsequent OSCE Permanent Council Decision to extend the mandate of the Mission.

All qualified applicants are strongly encouraged to apply online, using the OSCE online application link http://www.osce.org/employment/.

Please note that applications received after the deadline, submitted in different formats than the OSCE Application Form or in other languages than the English language will not be considered.

For more detailed information on the structure and work of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine, please see https://www.osce.org/special-monitoring-mission-to-ukraine.

Tasks and Responsibilities:

Under the direct supervision of the Budget Officer, the incumbent is responsible for administering and supporting of the Mission budget process in accordance with the OSCE Regulatory Framework.

Specifically, the Senior Budget Assistant has the following tasks and responsibilities: 1. Verifying the funds availability and controlling the expenditure are made against approved budget, assisting in reporting and budget preparation processes; 2. Assisting in preparation of the Missions budget, in particular, consolidating and conducting analysis of the initial and follow-up inputs during budget processes; preparing the list of recurring goods/services in co-ordination with respective units/sections; conducting thorough expenditure analysis of past periods to ensure that over-budgeting is avoided; 3. Monitoring expenditures against approved budget; conducting and providing detailed analysis of expenditure on a monthly basis and upon request from Programmes during budget implementation process; assisting in preparation of the mid-year review and forecast plans; drafting budget forecast plan to ensure it is consistent with the plan of procurement activities and with the recruitment plan in co-ordination with respective units/sections; analysing budget implementation trends, by making comparisons with approved budget and estimated projections and identifies possible significant discrepancies in programmes; 4. Ensuring proper accounting of expenditure against approved programmes, assisting in monitoring of budget implementation, proposes budget revisions and adjustments where necessary; conducting account analysis on a monthly basis (or upon request) to identify Programme balances and/or incorrectly processed entries and processes adjustments in IRMA/Oracle; 5. Assisting in maintaining and updating the Hyperion system (Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service); 6. Assisting in reconciliation of active encumbrances; 7. Participating in preparation of different types of reports on budget and expenditures and trends analysis during budget implementation for Senior Management and Programme Managers; 8. Managing the Project module; 9. Assisting in preparation of regular reports to the Donors; 10. Performing other duties as required.

Necessary Qualifications:

Ukrainian citizenship or holding permanent resident status in Ukraine;

Completed secondary education supplemented by formal studies in finance, accounting, business administration;

Minimum six years of working experience in the field of finance, accounting, budget, project management, business administration, part of which should preferably have been in international environment;

Budgeting and analytical skills and experience is required;

Computer literate and practical experience with Microsoft applications; familiarity and experience with ERP Systems is desirable;

Professional fluency in English, Ukrainian and Russian languages, both, written and oral;

Demonstrated ability and willingness to work as a member of a team, with people of different cultural and religious backgrounds, different gender, and diverse political views, while maintaining impartiality and objectivity;

Demonstrated commitment to gender equality objectives as well as the ability to integrate a gender perspective into tasks and activities;

Cultural sensitivity and judgment.

Remuneration Package:

Monthly remuneration, subject to social security deductions is 1,225.00 Euro/month. Social benefits will include participation in the Cigna health insurance scheme and the OSCE Provident Fund. Appointments are normally made at step 1 of the applicable OSCE salary scale.

For more details please visit the OSCE website employment section at http://www.osce.org/employment/. All qualified applicants are strongly encouraged to apply online, using the OSCE online application link.

Please note that applications received after the deadline, submitted in different formats than the OSCE Application Form or in other languages than the English language will not be considered.

The OSCE is committed to diversity and inclusion within its workforce, and encourages the nomination of qualified female and male candidates from all national, religious, ethnic and social backgrounds.

The OSCE retains the discretion to re-advertise the vacancy, to cancel the recruitment, to offer an appointment at a lower grade or to offer an appointment with a modified job description or for a different duration.

Additional Information

Tags gender perspective oracle procurement project management reconciliation russian language ukrainian

Requisition ID: OSC000025

Contract Type: Fixed-Term

Grade: G6

Location: OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine, Kyiv

Posting Date: Jun 24, 2021

External Closing Date: Jul 15, 2021

Job Type: Contracted

Job Level: General Services

Employee Status: Fixed Term

Schedule: Full-time

Education Level: High School Diploma / (GED)

Link to the organizations job offer: https://unjobs.org/vacancies/1624559122481
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Willmar, MN (56201)

Today

Sunny along with a few clouds. High 96F. Winds NNW at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Cloudy skies early. Scattered thunderstorms developing later at night. Low 71F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 60%.
In 2016, a family in Rome sent a painting in to be restored after it fell and suffered minor damage. They believed the work, titled The Adoration of the Magi, to be a copy of a work by Rembrandt van Rijn. Five years later, they now have an answer as to the paintings origins, and it turns out there was no copying involved. This painting is, in fact, the genuine article  one with an estimated value of between $83.5 million and $238.5 million.



Over at ARTnews, Shanti Escalante-De Mattei has the full details. The saga of the paintings rediscovery involves a number of steps. Initially, art restorer Antonella Di Francesco found evidence that the painting might have been the genuine article; eventually, French Academy of the Villa Medici in Rome doubled down on that, confirming the paintings status as a Rembrandt original.

The announcement came at a symposium titled Rembrandt: Identifying the Prototype, Seeing the Invisible. Curiously, this makes the third time since 2018 that a Rembrandt painting was brought to light. The Adoration of the Magi, completed between 163233, joins 1635s Portrait of a Young Gentleman, which resurfaced in 2018, and 1630s Head of a Bearded Man, which had been believed to be a fake for a time but was recently confirmed as genuine.



If the idea of adoring The Adoration of the Magi sounds appealing, youre in luck  according to the article, the family that owns the painting plans to let museums and galleries borrow it in the coming years.
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NORWALK  A new apartment complex is coming to the Norwalk-Wilton border.

The Norwalk Zoning Commission last week voted to approve plans by iPark Norwalk II LLC to build a 132-unit apartment building at its property at 761 Main Ave. The planned 164,750-square-foot expansion will join an LA Fitness and several medical offices.

The four-story building will feature one-bedroom and studio apartments with about 750 square feet of space on average, according to Lynne Ward, executive vice president of National Resources Company, the parent company of iPark.

This application is to round out this mixed-use, Ward told commission members. It is an uno project as we have explained in the past. That is our brand, which means basically that these are all one-bedroom and studio apartments.

The commission voted 6-0 to approve the project at its regular meeting last week. Commissioner Richard Roina abstained from the vote.

The 132 units will be broken down into 78 one-bedroom apartments and 54 studio apartments. A total of 14 units  or just over 10 percent of the buildings apartments  will be designated as affordable housing units.

This is really akin to workforce housing, and many of the people who will live here are already working or visiting on the site, Ward wrote in the application.

According to architectural plans submitted to the city, the building will feature three floors of residential housing over one story of parking. A courtyard terrace will be built on the second floor.

The iPark property, which straddles the border between Wilton and Norwalk, currently has more than 371,000 square feet of buildings, including an LA Fitness gym, offices and warehouse space.

When iPark proposed the apartment building earlier this year, company officials informed the city they also planned to build an 80,000-square-foot, 120-bedroom hotel on the Wilton side of the property.

iPark has long eyed a potential expansion that would include a hotel. In June 2016, the developments owners successfully lobbied Wiltons Planning and Zoning Commission to amend the towns zoning regulations to make them more hotel friendly.

Under the new regulations, the maximum height of buildings in Wilton increased from three stories and 39 feet to four stories and 55 feet for properties that meet the minimum acreage requirements for 5- and 10-acre design-enterprise districts.

Michael Wrinn, the director of planning and land use management for Wilton, said his office has not yet received an application from iPark to build a hotel on the property. A representative for National Resources Company did not respond to a request for comment on Monday.

richard.chumney@hearstmediact.com
Wilton and Norwalk residents may soon be lugging a refillable growler on Danbury Road as a new brewpub has been proposed at a property sitting on the border of the suburban municipality and shoreline city.

The two-story building sitting at 4 Danbury Road, originally built in 1900, has been used primarily as a bank and most recently as a Wells Fargo branch. On June 28, a proposal by Dave Guda, owner of DWG Properties, LLC, along with architect Pierre-Christian Frye and attorney Liz Suchy was presented to the Wilton Planning and Zoning Commission for approval for the land use.

Brewpubs are gaining popularity in Connecticut right now, Suchy told the commission. Right now, there are more than 90, but there are none in Wilton.

Suchy noted there used to be two or three in Norwalk, and that Guda had, at one point, gained approval for a brewpub in Norwalk but due to difficulties negotiating with the landlord, it never came to pass.

Guda, a more than 30-year resident of neighboring New Canaan, said he is familiar with the area. The Fairfield County local, who plans to run the business with his wife Wendy and son Mike, also told the commission he plans to manage the different aspects of the brewpub as two different enterprises.

First, he explained the brewing process.

It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of space, but it doesnt take a lot of people, Guda said. We would anticipate, initially, brewing only once or twice a week, which is about a six- to eight-hour endeavor to do a brewing session.

He said on days hes not brewing, staff would tend to the beer. This process would be to let the beer ferment and carbonate, so that it becomes consumable.

This process would take place during the early morning to early afternoon hours, say 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., or 7 a.m. to 2 p.m., according to Guda. We would not overlap our activities in the brewery with our peak hours in our brewery upstairs.

Concurrently, the upstairs kitchen and dining room area would be prepping for an afternoon into night food service. Guda expects most of the peak restaurant hours would start in the mid-afternoon into the evening on Friday, and early afternoon into evening on the weekends.

For Frye, the architect pegged with renovating the exterior of the building, its about making a very stock-standard, 1980s-era corporate building look fun.

Initial plans include window replacements for a more industrial look; incorporating more visibility to the street by using glass to market the brewing equipment downstairs; and a small room upstairs, adjacent to the dining room area where microbatches can be brewed to show patrons how the process occurs.

For this project, there are 26 spots proposed for the existing lot, which adheres to the towns parking regulations for restaurants. While all of the building falls within Wiltons jurisdiction, roughly 20 of those parking spots fall onto the Norwalk side of the border.

Commissioners Eric Fanwick and Matthew Murphy both asked Guda if the small brewery would be selling wholesale to package stores, rather than just serving their products in-house.

Guda said most of the beer will be sold on the premises, and that package stores were not in the initial plans. But he added possibly selling beer to local restaurants as a marketing tool might be a more realistic option they would start with.

Initially, we (would) do what most small breweries do, fill growlers, Guda said.

Eventually, Guda said he would like to can some of the beers on the premises, to where he could sell four- and six-packs of the local beer from behind the bar to patrons on-site.
Contributed photo

Veterans from the American Legion Post 86 in Wilton are having an Open House on Sunday, July 4 with videos, lectures, and a tour of the Posts archive, and headquarters itself.

There will also be free handouts for children who attend the event, which the Legion is having in place of its activities at the towns fireworks display. The towns fireworks have been canceled for 2021.
FILE - In this Dec. 4, 2015, file photo Ray Curry, a regional director of the United Auto Workers, speaks in Chattanooga, Tenn. On Monday, June 28, 2021, Curry was elected president of the union.
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VANCOUVER - The federal government says it will close several commercial Pacific salmon fisheries in British Columbia and Yukon beginning this season to conserve fish stocks that are on the "verge of collapse."

Spawning sockeye salmon, a species of pacific salmon, are seen making their way up the Adams River in Roderick Haig-Brown Provincial Park near Chase, B.C., Tuesday, Oct. 14, 2014. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward

VANCOUVER - The federal government says it will close several commercial Pacific salmon fisheries in British Columbia and Yukon beginning this season to conserve fish stocks that are on the "verge of collapse."

The Fisheries Department said in a news release Tuesday that 79 of 138 commercial and First Nations communal fisheries will be affected, which amounts to about 60 per cent.

Fisheries Minister Bernadette Jordan said these closures will reduce immediate pressure on fragile stocks that have drastically declined.

"We're seeing a decline in the stock runs, in some cases up to 90 per cent," she said in an interview.

"And, you know, we need to do everything we can to conserve the species."

The government's announcement follows plans for the distribution of nearly $650 million earmarked for the Pacific Salmon Strategy Initiative. The plan will guide work on conservation, better hatchery production, an overhaul of fish harvesting methods and improve the collaboration of fisheries management.

The closures are intended to increase the number of salmon reaching spawning areas, specifically sockeye, pink and chum stocks.

Watershed Watch Salmon Society, a conservation group, called the move a "bold, necessary and courageous step."

"I think it stops the bleeding," said Greg Taylor, the society's fisheries adviser.

"I think it's something that we have to start. We have to increase the number of fish returning to their spawning grounds. We don't have time."

Jordan said the decline in fish stocks is because of a number of factors, including climate change, habitat degradation and the massive Big Bar landslide in the Fraser River.

"I mean, it's not all about overfishing," she said.

"There is going to be no silver bullet that saves the salmon stock. It's got to be an all-hands-on-deck approach."

The United Fishermen & Allied Workers' Union said the closure of 79 salmon fisheries has left them "worried" about the future of commercial operations.

"Today's closure announcements are deeply concerning," Emily Orr, UFAWU-Unifor business agent, said in a statement.

"The abruptness of the announcement, and lack of transparency for how these specific closures were decided, have blindsided harvesters."

While a licence retirement program is needed, she said it is only one part of a multi-pronged approach that is required.

"We need habitat restoration and investments in hatcheries," she added.

Andrew Trites, director of the marine mammal research unit at the University of British Columbia, said the closure of commercial fisheries will make a "huge difference" for small runs of salmon that are struggling to survive.

Each river has its own population of salmon where some are OK while others are in "real trouble," he said.

"The problem is that when you're fishing, you don't know which river it's coming from," Trites said.

"And so you get strong runs mixed in with weak runs, and it has a much bigger effect on the small populations."

Data from the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission shows that the global catch of Pacific salmon in 2020 was the lowest since 1982.

But the measures announced Tuesday will not produce immediate results because fish stocks may need multiple generations to stabilize and rebuild, Jordan noted.

"We may not see actual increases in the stock for a number of years, before we actually see that these measures are working," she said.

"But we can't wait because they're at a point now where if we don't do something now, there will be no fishery to have for generations to come."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 29, 2021.
CALGARY - An Alberta judge has found a Calgary pastor, his brother and a cafe owner guilty of contempt for deliberately violating COVID-19 health orders.

A message of support on the closed front door of the Whistle Stop Cafe in Mirror, Alta., on Saturday, May 8, 2021. An Alberta judge has found a Calgary pastor, his brother and the owner of the cafe guilty of contempt for violating COVID-19 health orders. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jason Franson

CALGARY - An Alberta judge has found a Calgary pastor, his brother and a cafe owner guilty of contempt for deliberately violating COVID-19 health orders.

Pastor Artur Pawlowski and his brother Dawid Pawlowski were arrested in May and accused of organizing an illegal gathering as well as promoting and attending an illegal gathering.

Christopher Scott, the owner of the Whistle Stop Cafe in the hamlet of Mirror, northeast of Red Deer, was arrested last month at the end of an anti-lockdown rally. The cafe had been closed by health officials earlier in the week.

The arrests came after court orders were granted allowing Alberta Health Services and police to arrest and charge those who advertise gatherings that would breach health restrictions.

Justice Adam Germain said Monday that the orders were implemented as Alberta hospitals and intensive care units became overcrowded.

"Some Albertans, including Pastor Artur Pawlowski, his brother Dawid Pawlowski and Christopher Scott, openly flouted the efforts of AHS to control a third wave of virus," Germain told the court.

Germain said Alberta Health Services filed extensive affidavits, which included videos and still shots of web pages and social media, that illustrated the three men were "vocal objectors" to health orders and were "openly encouraging gatherings contrary to the rules."

"I concluded in all cases that Alberta Health Services had proven, nearly to absolute certainty, that all three of the respondents ... are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of contempt."

The judge said the three had more than ample knowledge of the existence of the court orders.

"The orders were clear and unambiguous and the breach of them was deliberate and wilful, nor were there any legally recognized excuses. There is no turning back from this."

The matter is back in court July 27, when lawyers are to discuss sanctions.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 28, 2021.
WASHINGTON (AP)  A federal judge on Monday dismissed antitrust lawsuits brought against Facebook by the Federal Trade Commission and a coalition of state attorneys general, dealing a significant blow to attempts by regulators to rein in tech giants.

FILE - In this April 14, 2020 file photo, the thumbs up Like logo is shown on a sign at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. A federal judge has dismissed antitrust lawsuits brought against Facebook by the Federal Trade Commission and a coalition of state attorneys general, dealing a significant blow to attempts by regulators to rein in tech giants. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)

WASHINGTON (AP)  A federal judge on Monday dismissed antitrust lawsuits brought against Facebook by the Federal Trade Commission and a coalition of state attorneys general, dealing a significant blow to attempts by regulators to rein in tech giants.

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ruled Monday that the lawsuits were legally insufficient and didnt provide enough evidence to prove that Facebook was a monopoly. The ruling dismisses the complaint but not the case, meaning the FTC could refile another complaint.

These allegations  which do not even provide an estimated actual figure or range for Facebooks market share at any point over the past ten years  ultimately fall short of plausibly establishing that Facebook holds market power, he said.

The FTC said in a statement that it is closely reviewing the opinion and assessing the best option forward." The agency has 30 days in which to file a new complaint.

Boasberg closed that avenue for the states, however, in dismissing outright their separate complaint.

The U.S. government and 48 states and districts sued Facebook in December 2020, accusing the tech giant of abusing its market power in social networking to crush smaller competitors and seeking remedies that could include a forced spinoff of the social networks Instagram and WhatsApp messaging services.

The FTC had alleged Facebook engaged in a a systematic strategy to eliminate its competition, including by purchasing smaller up-and-coming rivals like Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. New York Attorney General Letitia James said when filing the suit that Facebook used its monopoly power to crush smaller rivals and snuff out competition, all at the expense of everyday users.

Facebook, in an e-mailed statement, said: We are pleased that todays decisions recognize the defects in the government complaints filed against Facebook. We compete fairly every day to earn peoples time and attention and will continue to deliver great products for the people and businesses that use our services.

Richard Hamilton Jr., a former prosecutor and Justice Department antitrust attorney, said the judge, while finding the FTC's arguments insufficient, gave the agency a sort of road map for how to bulk up its case in another round.

Whether government or private entity, you still need to sufficiently plead the case," Hamilton said. He noted that as Boasberg saw it, the FTC failed to demonstrate how it arrived at the claim that Facebook controls 60% of the market in social networking and how that market power is measured.

Alex Harman, competition policy advocate for Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group, said: Courts really have a hard time with that market definition for some reason. It's Exhibit A for why we need the laws changed."

Rebecca Allensworth, a law professor at Vanderbilt University who specializes in antitrust, said the ruling illustrates the problems regulators face right now bringing antitrust suits in markets without prices, like Facebook's, but also Google's, and in markets where huge, dominant firms offer suites of products that don't neatly fit into the mold of well-defined markets like aluminum ingot or crude oil."

An ambitious package of legislation to overhaul the antitrust laws, which could point toward breaking up Facebook as well as Google, Amazon and Apple, was approved by the House Judiciary Committee last week and sent to the full U.S. House.

As the FTC and 48 state attorneys general have alleged, Facebook is a monopolist and it has abused its monopoly power to buy or bury its competitive threats," Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., who heads the Judiciary panel, and Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., the legislation's lead sponsor, said Monday. In the weeks ahead, we will work to advance this legislation to restore choice, innovation and opportunity for American businesses and consumers.

Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado, the chief Republican sponsor of the legislation, said the ruling shows that antitrust reform is urgently needed. Congress needs to provide additional tools and resources to our antitrust enforcers to go after Big Tech companies engaging in anticompetitive conduct.

Last October the Trump Justice Department, joined by about a dozen states, brought a landmark antitrust suit against Google, accusing the company of using its dominance in online search to stifle competition and innovation at the expense of consumers. As it stands, the case isn't scheduled to go to trial in federal court for nearly three years.

__

AP Technology Writer Barbara Ortutay in Oakland, California, contributed to this report.
It will be a muted Canada Day in many parts of the country as grief and anger over the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves at former residential schools have made it hard for many Canadians to stomach the usual patriotic pomp of July 1.

A young new Canadian holds a flag as she takes part in a citizenship ceremony on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on April 17, 2019. It will be a muted Canada Day in many parts of the country as grief and anger over the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves at former residential schools has made it hard for many Canadians to stomach the usual patriotic pomp of July 1. Rather than fireworks, parades and performances, several municipalities say they will mark the national holiday with reflection and solidarity, but Indigenous leaders, advocates and scholars say that's just the start of broad efforts needed to reframe Canada Day as a reminder of the country's dark past and present, and what it means to be Canadian. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

It will be a muted Canada Day in many parts of the country as grief and anger over the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves at former residential schools have made it hard for many Canadians to stomach the usual patriotic pomp of July 1.

Rather than fireworks, parades and performances, several municipalities say they will mark the national holiday with reflection and solidarity. But Indigenous leaders, advocates and scholars say that's just the start of broad efforts needed to reframe Canada Day as a reminder of the country's dark past and present, and what it means to be Canadian.

"I think what this country is finally realizing and contemplating and thinking about is the lived reality of Indigenous Peoples," said Terry Teegee, regional chief of the British Columbia Assembly of First Nations.

"Residential schools were in the past but it still resonates today in regards to the social issues we are dealing with."

Calls to scale back or cancel Canada Day celebrations have been mounting since the remains of what are believed to be 215 children were found at a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C., last month.

Pressure intensified last week when Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan announced ground-penetrating radar had detected 751 unmarked graves at the site of another former residential school.

The outpouring of grief has prompted communities across the country to scrap or revise their usual Canada Day festivities, including Victoria; the New Brunswick cities of Saint John and Fredericton; St. Albert, Alta.; Wilmot Township near Waterloo, Ont.; the northern Manitoba town of Churchill and the Saskatchewan cities of Melville and Meadow.

Some activists have embraced "cancel Canada Day" as a rallying cry for protests that have been planned in many parts of the country, fuelling a pitched political debate over how the country commemorates its history.

But Teegee, who represents B.C. in the Assembly of First Nations, said the goal isn't so much to "cancel" Canada Day, but to reconcile the occasion with the pain it evokes for Indigenous people who would rather not celebrate the country responsible for their systematic oppression.

Teegee said he would like to see a concerted effort to recognize Indigenous history in the 153 years of Canada's existence, but also well before colonization.

As the rest of the country wakes up to the horrors of the residential school system, Canada Day could offer a chance to reckon with how that trauma reverberates across generations, he added.

"It opens that door for conversations about the current state of affairs with Indigenous people," Teegee said.

Elmer St. Pierre, the national chief of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, and Glen Hare, the regional chief for the Chiefs of Ontario, called for July 1 to be declared a national day of mourning, while Ghislain Picard, the chief of the Assembly of First Nations Quebec-Labrador, said residential school casualties should be commemorated in Canada Day events to come.

Picard cautioned against letting public outrage subside, and allowing Indigenous issues to be sidelined.

"The truth has been told," said Picard. "It's really up to us to provide that pressure so this is not forgotten."

The tribal chair of the United Chiefs and Council of Mnidoo Mnising, which represents several First Nations near Manitoulin Island, Ont., urged for more Indigenous perspectives to be incorporated into the Canada Day fanfare. Patsy Corbiere encouraged organizers to invite Indigenous speakers, drum groups or dancers to take part in the festivities.

The focus should be on education about Indigenous people and culture rather than barbecues and flag-waving, said Corbiere.

Cancelling the holiday is not the answer, she said, suggesting that would undermine the ultimate goal of building better relationships between Canada and First Nations.

"It's about working together and grieving together and resolving things together," she said.

Mary Jane Logan McCallum, a history professor at University of Winnipeg and a member of the Munsee Delaware Nation, said there's ample precedent for efforts to ensure a national celebration tells "the other side of the story."

In the United States, some have pushed to recast Columbus Day, which commemorates the anniversary of Christopher Columbus' landing in the Americas in 1492, as "Native American Day" or "Indigenous Peoples' Day," McCallum noted.

Australia's celebration of its national holiday in January was marked by protests denouncing what some dub "Invasion Day" because of historical wrongs committed against Indigenous people.

Back at home, said McCallum, Canada's 150th anniversary celebrations ignited campaigns and demonstrations taking the government to task for what some critics characterized as attempt to gloss over the genocide of Indigenous Peoples.

Unlike then, a growing number of local authorities are starting to actually respond this year, said McCallum.

"There are these moments where people get more and more convinced of another story of Canada, and also that there continues to be a colonial relationship between the federal government and First Nations people that is inequitable."

McCallum said it's going to take more than reframing Canada Day to bring about the transformative change needed for reconciliation. "It's part of a bigger project," she said.

For David Robertson, a writer in Winnipeg and member of Norway House Cree Nation, it's become harder to ignore the fractured realities of how life in this country differs depending on your identity.

As he reflects on the tragedies of this year alone  the devastating discoveries at former residential schools, last month's attack in London, Ont., that killed a Muslim family, the racial disparities of the pandemic  Robertson says it should be clear that marginalized Canadians live in "a different country" than their more privileged counterparts.

"I think we really need to question, what country are we living in? Because I don't think it's the country that we think it is, or that we thought it was," said Robertson.

"Why not work toward creating a country that is worth celebrating?"

 with a file from The Associated Press

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 29, 2021.
Congressional leaders and a media advocacy group are urging the Federal Communications Commission to examine how policy decisions and programs have disparately harmed Black Americans and other communities of color, according to a letter sent Tuesday to the acting FCC chair.

FILE - In this Monday, Aug. 24, 2020, file photo, U.S. Rep. Brenda Lawrence, D-Mich., questions Postmaster General Louis DeJoy during a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on the Postal Service on Capitol Hill, in Washington. Congressional leaders and a media accountability organization are urging the Federal Communications Commission to examine how policy decisions have disparately harmed Black people and other communities of color, according to a letter sent Tuesday, June 29, 2021, to the acting FCC chair. (Tom Williams/Pool Photo via AP, File)

Congressional leaders and a media advocacy group are urging the Federal Communications Commission to examine how policy decisions and programs have disparately harmed Black Americans and other communities of color, according to a letter sent Tuesday to the acting FCC chair.

In the letter, first shared with The Associated Press, Democratic Reps. Jamaal Bowman of New York, Yvette Clarke of New York, and Brenda Lawrence of Michigan along with Media 2070 said the FCC should conduct an assessment to address and redress the harm the agencys policies and programs have caused Black and brown communities and identify the affirmative steps the agency commits to taking to break down barriers to just media and telecommunication practices.

The FCC is an independent governmental agency that is responsible for regulating the nations communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable. In total, 25 members of Congress signed onto the letter, including Congresswomen Karen Bass of California, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.

A lack of diversity and representation has long been a concern for media advocates and experts who argue that racism permeates the nations media industry, partly because of historical exclusionary policies and regulations that have made it hard for Black Americans and others to control and shape news coverage and other forms of media in communities across the nation.

Media 2070, an initiative created by the Black caucus of the nonpartisan organization Free Press, has called for media reparations for the Black community and the FCC letter is part of its efforts. Earlier this month it delivered a petition to 3,000 newsrooms across the country, urging news outlets to dismantle anti-Black racism in the media, trust Black journalists and care for Black communities.

Although many journalists and artists of color have used their talent to ensure critical stories about their communities are being told, our nations big media companies nevertheless continue to stereotypically depict people of color as being a threat or a burden to society, the lawmakers wrote in their joint letter to Acting FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel. Historic federal policies are a primary reason why structural inequities exist in our nations media and telecommunication systems today. FCC policies, license decisions and inaction have had the result of effectively excluding people of color from media ownership opportunities.

The lawmakers noted the nations first radio and TV licenses were awarded by the Federal Radio Commission and then its successor, the FCC, during an era of Jim Crow segregation.

The (Trump administrations) efforts to consolidate the media marketplace limited ownership opportunities for people of color and women, the letter stated.

FILE - In this Wednesday, June 24, 2020, file photo, Jessica Rosenworcel answers a question during a Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation committee hearing to examine the Federal Communications Commission on Capitol Hill in Washington. Congressional leaders and a media accountability organization are urging the Federal Communications Commission to examine how policy decisions have disparately harmed Black people and other communities of color, according to a letter sent Tuesday, June 29, 2021, to the acting FCC chair. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post via AP, Pool, File)

President Joe Biden signed an executive order in January, directing executive agencies to assess how federal policies have exacted harm upon communities of color. Each agency was tasked with identifying potential barriers that underserved communities and individuals face in trying to access contracting opportunities and also whether new policies, regulations or guidance documents may be necessary to advance equity.

The order also strongly encouraged independent agencies, which would include the FCC, to conduct an assessment.

In a statement to the AP, an FCC spokesperson said Rosenworcel is committed to ensuring that FCC policies are equitable, fair, and transparent. Rosenworcel announced last week a plan to expand the work of the recently renamed Communications Equity and Diversity Council. The councils mission will expand from its initial focus on the media ecosystem to review more broadly critical diversity and equity issues across the tech sector.

She believes that we must prioritize diversity and expand opportunities for communities that have for too long been overlooked and underserved, the statement said. "While the FCC is an independent agency, it has been working diligently under her leadership to follow President Bidens executive order. But more work remains to be done. We are committed to working with those who sent this letter to do so.

People of color own and control just 6% of our nations full-power TV stations, 7% of commercial FM radio stations and 12% of commercial AM radio stations despite making up more than 40% of the U.S. population. As of 2017, Black Americans owned or controlled less than 1% of television stations, the group said, citing a 2020 FCC, Media Bureau, Industry Analysis Division report.

Bowman said he supports a full racial equity audit of the FCC.

Dismantling structural racism is a priority of our office, Bowman said. Media controls our narrative and controls our consciousness and if people of color arent owning those spaces and are strategically and just purposely excluded from those spaces, we have to do something about that.

A 2011 FCC report on the changing media landscape found that broadcast owners of color and advocates largely attribute low minority broadcast ownership levels to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which relaxed the local broadcast ownership rules and led to increased consolidation in broadcast media. The newspaper and radio industries have also faced rapid consolidation.

The FCC report noted that several studies have concluded that mainstream media outlets dont adequately cover Black Americans and other communities of color. The famous Kerner Commission report, which was commissioned by President Lyndon B. Johnson and released in 1968, found that the majority-white owned media outlets failed to cover the 1967 uprisings in Detroit and elsewhere from the perspective of Black Americans in a nuanced and accurate manner.

By and large, news organizations have failed to communicate to both their Black and white audiences a sense of the problems America faces and the sources of potential solutions. The media report and write from the standpoint of a white mans world, the 1968 Kerner Commission report stated.

And more than 50 years later, media organizations across the nation continue to grapple with a lack of people of color in newsrooms and media ownership. Efforts have been made to democratize the nations media system. But some of those changes were eventually rolled back.

In 1978, the FCC created the minority tax-certificate program, which allowed broadcasters to receive a tax break if they sold their stations to people of color. But in 1995, the Republican-controlled Congress passed legislation that ended the program, which had increased broadcast ownership by people of color from less than 1% to 3%.

Mark Lloyd, a former associate general counsel and chief diversity officer at the FCC, said there have been efforts over the years to address diversity and the agency is required by Congress to review its policies and determine whether or not those policies are in the public interest.

Thats the law, and having Congress reassert that I think has some utility, Lloyd said. "I would also say that it is important for the Federal Communications Commission to focus its concerns on whether or not the public is getting the critical information that it needs.

Congresswoman Lawrence said she has had previous conversations with the FCC about representation and she said shes hopeful the agency will conduct an audit.

President Biden made that commitment that he is going to really strive to have racial equality, and that includes the FCC because we know some of the policies have been more roadblocks and barriers, instead of being inclusive," Lawrence said.

Media 2070 leaders said the goal of the letter is to not only push the FCC to address its history and shift the public conversation but also outline tangible steps to repair harm, including fixing the ongoing consolidation of media and directing financial resources into Black-owned platforms.

The nation's demographics are changing and the "media system has to change if it is going to survive, said Collette Watson, co-creator of the Media 2070: Media Reparations consortium and the Free Press' vice president of cultural strategy.

Its not just a matter of being diverse or being inclusive, it's really about completely upending the structure that exists so that we can have something that looks more truthful to who we are and how were going to exist together as a multiracial society," Watson said. If we cant have a media system that tells the truth of Black lives, the truth of all, and one that is safe for Black people to exist in and have our stories told in, then we arent going to have a media system. It will become obsolete.

Stafford reported from Detroit. She is a national investigative writer with The Associated Press Race and Ethnicity team. Follow her on Twitter at https://www.twitter.com/Kat__Stafford.
BLANTYRE, Malawi (AP)  Prenatal services at the health clinic were free, but the motorcycle taxi fare cost more than Monica Maxwell could afford. Just four weeks before delivering her baby, she cobbled together 1,400 kwacha ($1.75) for the 50-kilometer (31-mile) round trip. It was only her third visit -- fewer than her first two pregnancies. The money she made selling tomatoes at the local market dried up due to the pandemic. Her husbands income selling goat meat also dwindled.

Pregnant women eat food provided by Lucy Mbewe, a traditional birth attendant at her home, in Simika Village, Chiradzulu, southern Malawi, Sunday, May 23, 2021. Health officials in Malawi say fewer women are getting prenatal care amid the COVID-19 pandemic. At risk are the developing country's gains on its poor rate of maternal deaths. (AP Photo/Thoko Chikondi)

BLANTYRE, Malawi (AP)  Prenatal services at the health clinic were free, but the motorcycle taxi fare cost more than Monica Maxwell could afford. Just four weeks before delivering her baby, she cobbled together 1,400 kwacha ($1.75) for the 50-kilometer (31-mile) round trip. It was only her third visit -- fewer than her first two pregnancies. The money she made selling tomatoes at the local market dried up due to the pandemic. Her husbands income selling goat meat also dwindled.

It was the most difficult period of our lives. We had no money for our daily survival, Maxwell, 31, said as she waited outside with other women to be seen by a medical midwife. Mostly we stayed home.

In a country where hospitals are so bare that women are expected to bring their own razor blades for cutting their babies' umbilical cords, the deepening poverty brought on by the pandemic is further imperiling women's lives.

Nursing and midwifery students sit in class at St Joseph College of Nursing and Midwifery in Chiradzulu southern Malawi on Friday May 28, 2021. Health officials in Malawi say fewer women are getting prenatal care amid the COVID-19 pandemic. At risk are the developing country's gains on its poor rate of maternal deaths. (AP Photo/Thoko Chikondi)

Officials say far fewer pregnant women in Malawi are getting the health care they need amid the pandemic, with many forgoing medical visits and relying solely on traditional birth attendants, who provide emotional support and administer traditional herbal treatments but are technically banned by the government from delivering babies because of their lack of formal training. Many families cant afford clinic visits, or, like Maxwell, the transportation to get there; they also fear theyll catch coronavirus in a medical facility.

At risk are the gains that Malawi  a largely rural sliver of a country, with 18 million people  has made over the past decade to combat its poor record of maternal deaths. Malawian women face a 1-in-29 lifetime risk of death related to a pregnancy or birth, according to the United Nations Population Fund. The country has 439 such deaths per 100,000 live births  a figure it had worked to reduce from 984 per 100,000 in 2004, as women got better access to medical care, especially in emergencies.

Still, Malawi's rate is the third-highest in southern Africa. The rates are 19 per 100,000 births in the United States and 7 per 100,000 in the United Kingdom.

This story is part of a yearlong series on how the pandemic is impacting women in Africa, most acutely in the least developed countries. APs series is funded by the European Journalism Centres European Development Journalism Grants program, which is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. AP is responsible for all content.

A view of a gestational calculator at St Joseph College of Nursing and Midwifery skills laboratory, in Chiradzulu southern Malawi on Friday, May 28, 2021. Health officials in Malawi say fewer women are getting prenatal care amid the COVID-19 pandemic. At risk are the developing country's gains on its poor rate of maternal deaths. (AP Photo/Thoko Chikondi)

Malawian hospitals also suffered staffing shortages when nurses were mobilized to treat coronavirus patients  leading to some lack of experienced personnel for births, said Young Hong, of the United Nations Population Fund.

Not only did the pandemic affect availability of manpower, it also exerted much pressure on the entire health system, including the stock out of certain medicines, equipment, basic medical supply like surgical gloves, said Hong, who noted that eight Malawian women die daily of pregnancy complications, far higher than the COVID-19 toll. This had a huge impact on the quality of maternal health service provision during the pandemic.

At the Ndirande Health Center, just northeast of the country's commercial capital of Blantyre, about 100 women visited daily for prenatal services before the pandemic. When COVID-19 emerged, that number dropped by half, and now is as low as 15 to 20 patients, said Jacqueline Kolove, a nursing officer at the clinic.

Sometimes even the women who come for prenatal care are afraid to deliver at the clinic during the pandemic, preferring to give birth at home. Malawian women are encouraged to give birth without medical intervention, and many here believe that emergency measures such as cesarean sections are shameful and a sign of weakness. Deciding to give birth at home, though, can be deadly  most women live too far away to make it in time if a dangerous complication arises.

A midwife cleans a new born baby boy soon after his birth, at the Malawi Government's Mauwa Health Centre, in Chiradzulu, southern Malawi on Wednesday, May 26, 2021. Health officials in Malawi say fewer women are getting prenatal care amid the COVID-19 pandemic. At risk are the developing country's gains on its poor rate of maternal deaths. (AP Photo/Thoko Chikondi)

We explain to them why such a decision might have the dire consequences ... sometimes even calling their husbands and parents to try to reason with them, Kolove said.

At Ndirande and other clinics, nurses, aides and medical midwives give pregnant women ultrasounds and use equipment to listen to the vital signs of mother and baby. A woman can undergo a cesarean section if needed, and medications are available to stop severe bleeding. Clinic staff take medical courses, observe simulated births, and become licensed.

Traditional birthing attendants learn from elders who pass down knowledge through generations and use little to no medical equipment  they listen to womens bellies by placing their ears there, for example, and gather herbs to induce labor. They say certain herbs, boiled into a dark-green liquid, can address situations such as breech babies who needs to change positions.

The government banned traditional birthing attendants' delivery work in 2007, but the practice has continued, with the ban rarely enforced. Some attendants charge nothing, and theyve seen an increase in women coming to them during the pandemic. Attendants such as Lucy Mbewe, whos 56 and estimates shes delivered 4,000 babies since 1983, say their work is key for women who cant afford anything else.

Pregnant women walk towards Lucy Mbewe, a traditional birth attendant's home, in Simika village, Chiradzulu, southern Malawi on Sunday June 20, 2021. Health officials in Malawi say fewer women are getting prenatal care amid the COVID-19 pandemic. At risk are the developing country's gains on its poor rate of maternal deaths. (AP Photo/Thoko Chikondi)

Even the colorful African cloth that is widely used to wrap babies, carry them on mothers backs or create makeshift diapers can be a potential obstacle to care, Mbewe noted. The government hospitals recommend that a woman who is going to deliver needs to carry with her at least 10 pieces of cloth, which is a deterrent to those that cannot even afford to put food on the table, she said.

At government facilities, Malawian women are even expected to bring a covering for the delivery bed, buckets for water, and sometimes candles or flashlights. Mbewe provides clothing and soap when she helps women give birth. She pays for transportation home. Some women are so grateful they return to pay her; she uses that money to care for other needy clients, she said.

But medically trained midwives say the mounting use of attendants has caused a spike in complicated deliveries, with women going to the hospital only once it's too late to save them. Mbewe says the complications are caused not by the traditional caregivers, but are attributable to expectant mothers getting pregnant at younger ages  a trend confirmed by a government report.

Midwives and health officials also say they're fighting against misinformation about the virus and vaccines that deters women from seeking proper medical care. Malawi didn't have a full social lockdown and has seen a dramatic rise in coronavirus cases, part of a surge across southern Africa. Experts believe cases are undercounted, and apprehension about the vaccine is widespread.

Nurses and midwives look at a sonogram at Ndirande Health Centre northeast of the country's commercial capital of Blantyre, Malawi, Wednesday, June 16, 2021. At Ndirande and other clinics, nurses, aides and medical midwives give pregnant women ultrasounds and use equipment to monitor mother and baby. (AP Photo/Thoko Chikondi)

The Malawian government has administered less than 213,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine. And officials destroyed about 20,000 expired doses provided by COVAX, the U.N.-backed program to ship vaccines to poor countries. Across all of Africa, just 1% of the population of 1.3 billion people in 54 countries has had one dose of the vaccine, according to the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Nurses and midwives say some women fear they'll secretly be given the vaccine if they deliver at a medical facility.

They feel, as health workers, we are giving them the COVID-19 vaccine instead of oxytocin, said Kolove, the nursing officer at the Ndirande Health Center, referring to medicine that strengthens contractions and reduces the risk of bleeding. They feel we are cheating them. As a result, there are some cases where women refuse.

Medical staff also understand that they and the women they treat are at a higher risk of contracting coronavirus. The medically trained midwives try to educate women, and they take every precaution possible against the virus, even though their work delivering babies makes keeping a physical distance impossible, said Keith Lipato, president of the Association of Malawian Midwives.

We make sure that all midwives are screened and tested so that those with signs and symptoms are excused from work, and given the necessary medical treatment so that they do not infect clients and patients, Lipato said.

The precautions don't persuade many expectant mothers, though. Five months into her pregnancy, Margret Kosamu has yet to visit a health clinic. Instead, the 30-year-old has turned to a traditional birth attendant for just two visits. Her family's farming income has dropped, but it's not just an issue of money; she fears visiting a medical facility could kill her, not save her life.

One is more likely going to contract the virus at the hospital than here, she said of the attendant's care.

Lipato and other medical workers fear that the pandemic will have long-lasting effects on women's health in Malawi and beyond.

Patricia Gunde, 26, has not received any prenatal services during her first pregnancy. She prefers instead to receive the herbs her attendant says will keep her healthy and hasten labor. Gunde has no plans to get a COVID-19 vaccine.

I am afraid," she said. "I have heard many stories about it.

With the traditional birth attendant, she feels at ease because women are seen one at a time.

When the attendant brings Gunde in for care, neither wears a mask.

AP writers Krista Larson in Dakar, Senegal, and Andrew Meldrum in Johannesburg contributed.

Follow APs multiformat Africa news on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AP_Africa

See the full series on how the pandemic is affecting women in Africa: https://apnews.com/hub/women-the-eyes-of-africa
WASHINGTON (AP)  Veteran forester Randy Moore has been named chief of the U.S. Forest Service, the first African American to lead the agency in its 116-year history.

FILE - In this July 10, 2015, file photo Randy Moore, of the U.S. Forest Service, listens as President Barack Obama talks about the designation of three new national monuments in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. Veteran forester Randy Moore has been named chief of the U.S. Forest Service, the first African American to lead the agency in its 116-year history. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)

WASHINGTON (AP)  Veteran forester Randy Moore has been named chief of the U.S. Forest Service, the first African American to lead the agency in its 116-year history.

Moore, 66, replaces Vicki Christiansen, who has led the agency since 2018. The Forest Service, a division of the Agriculture Department, oversees 193 million acres of public lands in 154 national forests and 20 national grasslands.

Moore has served as regional forester in the California-based Pacific Southwest Region since 2007, where he has responsibility for 18 national forests in California and Hawaii.

FILE - In this July 10, 2015, file photo, President Barack Obama, center, talks about the designation of three new national monuments in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. Behind him from left are Victor Knox, associate director of park planning, facilities and lands of the National Park Service; April Slayton, chief of public affairs and chief spokesperson of the National Park Service; Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell; U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell; and Randy Moore, Forest Service. Veteran forester Randy Moore has been named chief of the U.S. Forest Service, the first African American to lead the agency in its 116-year history. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)

He will take over from Christiansen as head of the 30,000-employee agency upon her retirement July 26. Christiansen and Moore will collaborate on what is already shaping up as a severe wildfire season in the West, where an epic drought, complicated by climate change, has made putting out fires more challenging and strained firefighting resources throughout the region.

In the Pacific Northwest, where an extended heat wave has triggered record-breaking temperatures in Oregon and Washington state, fire crews have been positioned in high-risk areas, and cities and counties have imposed burn bans.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who appointed Moore, called him a catalyst for change and creativity in carrying out the Forest Services mission to sustain the nations forests.

As a regional forester, Moore has been on the forefront of climate change, most notably leading the regions response to the dramatic increase in catastrophic wildfires in California over the last decade, Vilsack said. His proven track record of supporting and developing employees and putting communities at the center of the Forest Services work positions him well to lead the agency into the future at this critical time in our country,'' Vilsack said in a statement.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., praised Moore's selection as Forest Service chief.

California understands all too well the challenges facing our forests and Im glad a Californian will head efforts to tackle them, she said.

Arkansas Rep. Bruce Westerman, the top Republican on the House Natural Resources Committee, called Moore a seasoned professional,'' adding: I sincerely hope we can work together on mitigating catastrophic wildfires, opening up our national forests to sustainable lumber harvesting, making forests more resilient against insects and diseases and much more.''

Before heading the Pacific Southwest region, Moore was regional forester in the Wisconsin-based Eastern Region, where he oversaw forests in 20 states.

Moore started his federal career in 1978 at USDAs Natural Resources Conservation Service in North Dakota. He has worked at national forests in Colorado, North Carolina and Missouri, a national grassland in Kansas and as an administrator in Washington.

Moore's appointment comes as Congress and the Biden administration push to increase firefighter pay and convert at least 1,000 seasonal wildland firefighters to year-round workers as fires have grown more severe. President Joe Biden last week called for an increase in pay for federal firefighters, who start as low as $13 an hour.

Thats a ridiculously low salary to pay federal firefighters, Biden said. "Thats going to end in my administration.''
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP)  Israels foreign minister kicked off the highest-level visit by an Israeli official to the United Arab Emirates on Tuesday, nine months after the two countries established relations in a deal brokered by the United States.

FILE - In this June 27, 2021, file photo, Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid meets with Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Rome.The Israel's new foreign minister is heading to the United Arab Emirates for a state visit, the first high-level delegation by an Israeli official since the two countries signed an agreement to normalize relations last year. Lapid took off on Tuesday, June 29, for Abu Dhabi, where he will inaugurate the new Israeli Embassy and meet Emirati ministers. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP)  Israels foreign minister kicked off the highest-level visit by an Israeli official to the United Arab Emirates on Tuesday, nine months after the two countries established relations in a deal brokered by the United States.

Foreign Minister Yair Lapid met the UAE's foreign minister in Abu Dhabi and inaugurated Israel's first embassy in the Gulf.

Although the visit is historic, it received little fanfare across local media. Lapid was not greeted on the airport tarmac by Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, but by a lower-ranking minister of state. Even press access for Lapids various appearances in Abu Dhabi was strictly limited to Emirati media and select Israeli outlets traveling with him.

The toned-down atmosphere surrounding his visit belies the UAE's open-arm embrace of its newfound ties with Israel. In recent months, the two countries have rapidly expanded bilateral trade and signed investment deals, including in gas, technology and other sectors. More than 200,000 Israeli tourists have traveled to the UAE, the Israeli Foreign Ministry has said. Many of those visits have been to Dubai, which is open to tourists.

Lapid's visit, however, comes just weeks after a new government in Israel was formed in a power-sharing deal that named the ideologically hawkish, right-wing Naftali Bennett as Israels prime minister.

His visit also comes less than six week after emotions ran high across the Middle East amid Israel's 11-day war in the Gaza Strip that killed 254 Palestinians, including dozens of children. In Israel, 13 people died as a result of the conflict.

In this photo made available by the Israeli Government Press Office, Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid speaks during the inauguration of the Israeli Embassy in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, Tuesday, June 29, 2021. Israels new foreign minister is in the UAE on the first high-level trip by an Israeli official to the Gulf Arab state since the two countries normalized relations last year. (Shlomi Amsalem/Government Press Office via AP)

Lapid told diplomats gathered at the official opening of the Israeli Embassy in Abu Dhabi that the moment represented the right to determine our fate by ourselves. Israel, he said, isnt going anywhere.

The Middle East is our home. Were here to stay. We call on all the countries of the region to recognize that. And to come talk to us, he said, according to the speech released by Israels Foreign Ministry.

The Gaza war and tensions in Jerusalem, however, have interrupted U.S.-backed diplomatic efforts to encourage more Arab states to sign normalization deals with Israel.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken described Lapids visit as significant for Israel, the UAE, and the broader region. In a statement, he said the U.S. will work with Israel and the UAE to strengthen the partnership.

The Trump administration brokered the so-called "Abraham Accords" agreement that established ties between the UAE and Israel. It was hailed at the time by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump as among their greatest achievements.

Lapids visit to the UAE was one that Netanyahu had hoped to make himself before his 12-year-run at the helm ended earlier this month. He had repeatedly tried to score a lightning trip to Abu Dhabi to boost his re-election campaign.

In acknowledgement of Netanyahu, Lapid told diplomats gathered at the Israeli Embassy that the former prime minister is the architect of the Abraham Accords and that this moment is his, no less than it is ours.

Underpinning UAE-Israel ties is a shared concern that Iran's nuclear deal with world powers did not go far enough to curb Tehran's reach in the region. Their reservations about the deal helped propel quiet ties, long before they formally announced full diplomatic relations last year.

President Joe Biden is pushing to revive and expand the nuclear accord, which Trump pulled the U.S. out of in 2018. Earlier this week, Lapid was quoted as saying that Israel has serious reservations about the nuclear deal being discussed in Vienna, but pledged Israel would make its objections privately. Its expected that Lapids conversation with his Emirati counterpart included talk of Iran.

Theres been years of under-the-radar relations between Israel and the UAE, and we are now enjoying the fruits of the infrastructure of peace that weve built in the last decades, said Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Lior Haiat.

On Wednesday, Lapid will inaugurate Israels consulate in Dubai and visit the site of the World Fair's Expo in Dubai, which will open in October. Lapid is also due to meet with members of the expatriate Jewish community residing in Dubai.

The UAEs move to formalize ties with Israel marked the first time in over two decades that an Arab state had normalized relations with Israel. It paved the path for a similar announcement by Bahrain, and later by Sudan and Morocco in rapid succession.

Soon after its pact with Israel, the UAE scored U.S. authorization for the sale of 50 advanced F-35 fighter jets, which would make it only the second country in the Middle East, after Israel, to acquire them.

Meanwhile, Palestinians across the political spectrum have slammed the UAEs ties with Israel in the absence of peace talks or concessions toward a two-state solution.

In May, tensions flared in east Jerusalem when Israeli forces clashed with Palestinian protesters and worshippers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in the final days of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. The site in east Jerusalem is holy to both Jews and Muslims.

The tensions in Jerusalem drew rare public rebuke from the Emirati government. The UAE's public statements, however, changed in tone after Hamas militants in Gaza began firing rockets at Israel. The UAE considers Hamas as an Iran-backed militant group and an offshoot of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood.

Associated Press writer Ilan Ben Zion in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
LA CROSSE, Wisc. (AP)  President Joe Biden is looking to sell voters on the economic benefits of the proposed 973 billion infrastructure package while in Wisconsin on Tuesday, hoping to boost support for the bipartisan agreement that is held together in large part by the promise of millions of new jobs.

A Denver Water crew works to replace a lead water service line installed in 1927 with a new copper one at a private home on Thursday, June 17, 2021, in Denver. While President Joe Biden's infrastructure bill proposes $45 million for eliminating lead pipes and service lines, some utility companies and municipalities have already started replacing them. (AP Photo/Brittany Peterson)

LA CROSSE, Wisc. (AP)  President Joe Biden is looking to sell voters on the economic benefits of the proposed 973 billion infrastructure package while in Wisconsin on Tuesday, hoping to boost support for the bipartisan agreement that is held together in large part by the promise of millions of new jobs.

Biden traveled to La Crosse, population 52,000, and toured its public transit center, highlighting projects  including hybrid buses and road repair equipment  that would receive additional funding from the infrastructure bill. Then comes his speech about the package announced last week.

The president presented his message to Democratic donors on Monday that the agreement was a way for the United States to assert the principles of democracy and the economic might that can come from dramatic investments in the country's economic future.

This infrastructure bill signals to the world that we can function, we can deliver," Biden said. "We can do significant things, show that America is back.

White House officials issued an internal memo that highlights how the largest investment in transportation, water systems and services in nearly a century would boost growth. The memo notes that the total package is four times the size of the infrastructure investment made a dozen years ago in response to the Great Recession and the biggest since Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s.

It also emphasizes an analysis suggesting that 90% of the jobs generated by the spending could go to workers without college degrees, a key shift as a majority of net job gains before the pandemic went to college graduates.

President Joe Biden talks with Rep. Ron Kind, D-Wis., center, Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., left, and La Crosse Mayor Mitch Reynolds as he arrives on Air Force One at La Crosse Regional Airport Tuesday, June 29, 2021, in La Crosse, Wis. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

This is a blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America, the memo says.

Potential economic gains were a shared incentive for the group of Democratic and Republican senators who agreed to the deal on Thursday. But the process briefly fell into disarray late last week as Biden suggested the deal would be held up until he also received a separate package for infrastructure, jobs and education that would be determined solely by Democrats through the budget reconciliation process.

Biden said Saturday that this was not a veto threat, and by Sunday the package appeared back on track.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday that Biden is eager for both bills to be approved by Congress and that the president is going to work his heart out to make it happen.

Approval of both bills by Congress remains a long haul with this summer's initial votes expected in July. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said Monday in Kentucky he has not yet decided whether he will support the bipartisan package, but he wants Biden to pressure House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer to say they will allow the bipartisan arrangement to pass without mandating that the much larger and broader follow-up bill be in place.

I appreciate the president saying that hes willing to deal with infrastructure separately, But he doesnt control the Congress, McConnell said at a press conference in Louisville.

The two bills had always been expected to move in tandem, and that is likely to continue as Biden drops his veto threat but reaches across the aisle for the nearly $1 trillion bipartisan package as well as his own broader package. The Democratic leaders are pressing ahead on the broader bill, which includes Biden's families and climate change proposals, as well as their own investments in Medicare, swelling to some $6 trillion.

The prospect of additional economic gains might be a way to garner public support and soothe partisan tensions. Biden also faces pressure from Democrats such as New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who told NBC's Meet the Press that the spending isn't as huge as it might seem because the sums are spread out over multiple years.

The eight-page White House memo comes from Brian Deese, director of the National Economic Council, and senior adviser Anita Dunn. It indicates that the $110 billion for roads and bridges would help relieve traffic and congestion that costs the economy over $160 billion annually. The memo justifies the $48.5 billion planned for public transit by citing studies that link light rail and buses to increased earnings and employment for workers. It defends the $66 billion for repairs and upgrades for rail lines by saying that current delays and disruptions weigh on growth.

The bipartisan agreement also would help nurture the market for electric vehicles, improve broadband access, repair water lines and create resilience against damage from extreme weather events.

Meanwhile, the White House and Congress are pushing ahead on separate infrastructure legislation, a top priority of the administration that is shared by many lawmakers interested in securing federal funds for long-sought road, highway, bridge and other construction projects back home.

This week, the House is scheduled to vote on a highway, transit and water infrastructure bill that would invest up to $715 billion over five years. It overlaps parts of the bipartisan agreement and could become a building block toward the Democrats' broader package coming later this summer or fall.

The bill contains many of the priorities that Biden has set, including $45 billion to replace lead water service lines throughout the nation and $4 billion for electric vehicle charging stations, as well as a big boost in spending for transportation programs focusing on repairing existing roads and bridges.

It also opens the door to nearly 1,500 requests from lawmakers that would fund specific projects back in their congressional districts, moving Congress a step closer toward a return to earmarked spending.

Associated Press writers Lisa Mascaro and Kevin Freking in Washington and Bruce Schreiner in Louisville, Ky., contributed to this report.
Before the pandemic hit, Jacqueline Bartley, a mother of two girls and a boy, had a comfortable life. Then the 41-year-old lost her job at American Airlines, quickly spent her savings and found herself months behind on the $1,350-a-month home she rented. Until then she had never missed a rent payment.

Dylyn Price looks out a doorway from her kitchen at her rented townhome on Tuesday, June 22, 2021, in Athens, Ga. A rental crisis spurred by the pandemic prompted many states to make bold promises to help renters, but most failed to deliver on them after Congress passed the sweeping CARES Act in March 2020. Price said she got about $5,800 in rental assistance but that may not prevent her from losing her home. "It's a very nauseating and uncomfortable situation to be in," Price said. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)

Before the pandemic hit, Jacqueline Bartley, a mother of two girls and a boy, had a comfortable life. Then the 41-year-old lost her job at American Airlines, quickly spent her savings and found herself months behind on the $1,350-a-month home she rented. Until then she had never missed a rent payment.

Bartley, of Durham, North Carolina, turned to the state's rental assistance program and was relieved in January to be awarded $8,100. But she says her landlord refused the money after she rejected his request to amend her two-year lease to a shorter period. The program required landlords to honor leases, among other conditions, to get the money.

She turned to a second program launched this month by the state and again was approved. Last week, she learned her landlord had accepted nearly $20,000 for back rent and three months of future payments, and agreed to dismiss his eviction lawsuit.

The news means she won't be forced from her home after the federal eviction moratorium ends July 31. But the waiting and uncertainty meant months of stress.

Its been crazy especially when you have children in school, Bartley said. Its pretty much been going by a whim. OK, am I going to have somewhere to go each month?

Millions have found themselves in situations similar to Bartley's, facing possible eviction despite bold promises by governors to help renters after Congress passed the sweeping CARES Act in March 2020.

Nationwide, state leaders set aside at least $2.6 billion from the CARES Acts Coronavirus Relief Fund to prop up struggling renters, but a year later more than $425 million of that  or 16%  hadn't made it into the pockets of tenants or their landlords, according to an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity and The Associated Press.

Its mind-boggling, said Anne Kat Alexander, a project manager with Princeton Universitys Eviction Lab. I knew there were problems but thats a huge amount of money not to be disbursed in a timely manner.

Like many state leaders, North Carolina's Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper pledged to roll out an ambitious program last year offering tens of millions of dollars in federal aid that would help cover unpaid rent.

But it took months to get up and running and stopped accepting applications just weeks after it finally opened in October due to overwhelming demand. The 20 nonprofits designated to distribute the money often lacked the capacity to get it out quickly.

Then, faced with the Republican-controlled Legislature's takeover of CARES Act spending in January, the state had less money to award applicants. It eventually spent $133 million of a promised $167 million  far short of what some housing advocates say is needed.

We knew the money would not be enough. There were too many people who needed rental assistance, said Pamela Atwood, director of housing policy at the North Carolina Housing Coalition. There was a lot of poor execution in rolling out that first program and it caused a lot of inefficiency.

Dylyn Price looks to her busy desk in her rented townhome on Tuesday, June 22, 2021, in Athens, Ga. A rental crisis spurred by the pandemic prompted many states to make bold promises to help renters, but most failed to deliver on them after Congress passed the sweeping CARES Act in March 2020. Price said she got about $5,800 in rental assistance but that may not prevent her from losing her home. "It's a very nauseating and uncomfortable situation to be in," Price said. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)

Tens of billions of dollars more in rental assistance have been delivered to states from the federal government in 2021, but that has been slow to be disbursed, too.

With the first round of funds in 2020, bureaucracy was not the only problem. Politics also played a role, with a handful of states, many led by Republicans and with a history of weak tenant protections, offering little to no assistance.

Then, there was the often onerous application process and an end-of-the-year federal deadline for spending the money, extended so late that some states had already pulled funding to use on other expenses. Some landlords refused to participate over restrictions that meant they could not evict a tenant who fell behind again after the assistance. Tenants sometimes short-changed themselves by filing incomplete applications.

Congress' sweeping 2020 CARES Act sent billions of dollars to states and some local governments. But it didnt mandate that any money be spent on rental assistance, leaving it to states to create their own programs and set the rules.

According to the National Low Income Housing Coalitions database of rent relief programs in 2020, Georgia, West Virginia and Tennessee, all run by Republican governors, chose not to set up statewide rent-relief programs that year, despite having higher than average historic eviction rates. South Carolina allocated less than $14 per renter-occupied household.

Georgias Department of Community Affairs tried to set up a rental assistance program with funds from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in the fall of 2020, but when it became clear that a separate, larger amount of money would be coming from the U.S. Department of Treasury in 2021, the program stalled, said Susan Reif, housing unit director for Georgia Legal Services Program and director of the Eviction Prevention Project.

Still, many states did scramble into action, creating massive programs to keep families in their homes  the safest place to shelter during the coronavirus pandemic. By the summer of 2020, state and local government officials launched about 530 rental assistance programs, setting aside at least $4.3 billion from various sources.

Several states were praised for programs that ran well. Illinois, Indiana, Oregon and Washington state were among more than a dozen that reported distributing every dollar of the rental assistance set aside from the Coronavirus Relief Fund by March 31.

The Center for Public Integrity surveyed about 70 state and local agencies that the National Low Income Housing Coalition identified as having set aside Coronavirus Relief Fund money for rent help in 2020. About $1 out of every $6 of that $2.6 billion wound up getting spent on other COVID-19-related expenses, such as protective equipment, police officers' salaries and small-business loans.

Some states also spent millions of dollars setting up their programs, including North Carolina, which allocated around $20 million on administrative costs, and Hawaii, which spent $8 million. In the case of Hawaii, much of that went to help nonprofits scale up and rent space. The state also spent money on a software system in an effort to prevent fraud.

Diane Yentel, executive director of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, said last years funding challenges led Congress to earmark nearly $47 billion specifically for emergency rental assistance in December and March.

The previous funds, the vast majority of them, were very flexible and had a broad set of allowable uses," of which eviction prevention was just one, said Yentel, whose group has been tracking rental assistance programs.

Some states and cities carved out some of those funds for eviction prevention and to create emergency rental assistance programs," she said. "But many didnt or many didnt set aside enough.

Among the biggest challenges was states' failure to spend what they had allocated.

The Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency received $150 million to help renters, but returned about $96 million to the state treasury, which plugged holes in the states public safety budget. The Florida Housing Finance Corporation earmarked $250 million for rental assistance but returned about $99 million to the state treasury to be spent on other programs. Eighty-three percent of Montanas $50 million set aside for rental assistance went back to the state. New York ended up spending only $47.5 million of the $100 million promised for rental assistance.

New York's 2020 rent-relief program was set up to fail, said Ellen Davidson, a staff attorney at Legal Aid Society in New York. It was a program that really punished people. There was a real intention to make sure people didnt do better in being hurt by COVID, so if they were struggling before, they should be struggling after.

Tenants had to prove they were rent-burdened before the pandemic to qualify for rent relief in 2020, though eventually that stipulation was removed.

Hawaii spent around $71 million of the $100 million initially promised, though an analysis by the Hawaii Appleseed Center for Law and Economic Justice found the state spent the most per capita, at $44.50. Still, the Legislature set a late December deadline for the spending, which meant the remaining $29 million had to be redirected to the states unemployment insurance trust fund.

It would have been better to base the ending of the program on the CARES Act spending deadline with whatever extensions were enacted, because ultimately the deadline was extended, said Gavin Thornton, the centers executive director. If that had been done, the program would have continued, and landlords and tenants would have been able to continue to access those funds, which were certainly needed.

Smaller cities and counties were affected too. In Marion County, Florida, none of the $1 million set aside for renters from the Coronavirus Relief Fund ever made it to people who needed it because the United Way of Marion County, which administered the funds, didnt have enough workers to process applications, said Scot Quintel, the organizations president. The United Way was able to distribute rent assistance from another source, but the Coronavirus Relief Fund money went back to the city for other COVID-19-related expenses.

Its just horrifying how ill-prepared some states were, said Alexander, of the Eviction Lab. Some places made it work and some places didnt, which demonstrates that the places that didnt probably could have.

In Athens, Georgia, Dylyn Price said she got about $5,800 in rental assistance but that may not prevent her from losing her home. After her pay and hours at a fast food restaurant were cut, eviction notices started arriving in early 2020. They havent let up.

Price received rental assistance from the Ark, a nonprofit administering funds from the CARES Act on behalf of the city of Athens, but the assistance ended earlier this year. Prices landlord has refused to renew her lease after it expires Wednesday.

She fears having to live, once again, in a homeless shelter with her 14-year-old son.

Its a very nauseating and uncomfortable situation to be in, Price said.

Casey reported from Boston, Kleiner reported from Washington, D.C., and Johnston reported from Brook Park, Ohio. Casey can be reached at mcasey@ap.org. Follow him on Twitter at @mcasey1. Kleiner can be reached at skleiner@publicintegrity.org. Follow her on Twitter at @bysarahkleiner.



This story is a collaboration between The Associated Press and The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative newsroom in Washington.
Before the pandemic hit, Jacqueline Bartley, a mother of two girls and a boy, had a comfortable life. Then the 41-year-old lost her job at American Airlines, quickly spent her savings and found herself months behind on the $1,350-a-month home she rented. Until then she had never missed a rent payment.

Dylyn Price looks out a doorway from her kitchen at her rented townhome on Tuesday, June 22, 2021, in Athens, Ga. A rental crisis spurred by the pandemic prompted many states to make bold promises to help renters, but most failed to deliver on them after Congress passed the sweeping CARES Act in March 2020. Price said she got about $5,800 in rental assistance but that may not prevent her from losing her home. "It's a very nauseating and uncomfortable situation to be in," Price said. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)

Before the pandemic hit, Jacqueline Bartley, a mother of two girls and a boy, had a comfortable life. Then the 41-year-old lost her job at American Airlines, quickly spent her savings and found herself months behind on the $1,350-a-month home she rented. Until then she had never missed a rent payment.

Bartley, of Durham, North Carolina, turned to the states rental assistance program and was relieved in January to be awarded $8,100. But she says her landlord refused the money after she rejected his request to amend her two-year lease to a shorter period. The program required landlords to honor leases, among other conditions, to get the money.

She turned to a second program launched this month by the state and again was approved. Last week, she learned her landlord had accepted nearly $20,000 for back rent and three months of future payments, and agreed to dismiss his eviction lawsuit.

The news means she wont be forced from her home after the federal eviction moratorium ends July 31. But the waiting and uncertainty meant months of stress.

Its been crazy especially when you have children in school, Bartley said. Its pretty much been going by a whim. OK, am I going to have somewhere to go each month?

Millions have found themselves in situations similar to Bartleys, facing possible eviction despite bold promises by governors to help renters after Congress passed the sweeping CARES Act in March 2020.

Nationwide, state leaders set aside at least $2.6 billion from the CARES Acts Coronavirus Relief Fund to prop up struggling renters, but a year later more than $425 million of that  or 16%  hadnt made it into the pockets of tenants or their landlords, according to an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity and The Associated Press.

Dylyn Price looks to her busy desk in her rented townhome on Tuesday, June 22, 2021, in Athens, Ga. A rental crisis spurred by the pandemic prompted many states to make bold promises to help renters, but most failed to deliver on them after Congress passed the sweeping CARES Act in March 2020. Price said she got about $5,800 in rental assistance but that may not prevent her from losing her home. "It's a very nauseating and uncomfortable situation to be in," Price said. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)

Its mind-boggling, said Anne Kat Alexander, a project manager with Princeton Universitys Eviction Lab. I knew there were problems but thats a huge amount of money not to be disbursed in a timely manner.

Tens of billions of dollars more in rental assistance have been delivered to states from the federal government in 2021, but that has been slow to be disbursed, too.

With the first round of funds in 2020, bureaucracy was not the only problem. Politics also played a role, with a handful of states, many led by Republicans and with a history of weak tenant protections, offering little to no assistance.

Then, there was the often onerous application process and an end-of-the-year federal deadline for spending the money, extended so late that some states had already pulled funding to use on other expenses. Some landlords refused to participate over restrictions that meant they could not evict a tenant who fell behind again after the assistance.

Congress sweeping 2020 CARES Act sent billions of dollars to states and some local governments. But it didnt mandate that any money be spent on rental assistance, leaving it to states to create their own programs and set the rules.

According to the National Low Income Housing Coalitions database of rent relief programs in 2020, Georgia, West Virginia and Tennessee, all run by Republican governors, chose not to set up statewide programs in 2020, despite having higher than average historic eviction rates. South Carolina allocated less than $14 per renter-occupied household that year.

Still, many states did scramble into action, creating massive programs to keep families in their homes  the safest place to shelter during the coronavirus pandemic. By the summer of 2020, state and local government officials launched about 530 rental assistance programs, setting aside at least $4.3 billion from various sources.

Several states were praised for programs that ran well. Illinois, Indiana, Oregon and Washington state were among more than a dozen that reported distributing every dollar of the rental assistance set aside from the Coronavirus Relief Fund by March 31.

The Center for Public Integrity surveyed about 70 state and local agencies that the National Low Income Housing Coalition identified as having set aside Coronavirus Relief Fund money for rent help in 2020. About $1 out of every $6 of that $2.6 billion wound up getting spent on other COVID-19-related expenses, such as protective equipment, police officers salaries and small-business loans.

Some states also spent millions of dollars setting up their programs, including North Carolina, which allocated around $20 million on administrative costs, and Hawaii, which spent $8 million. In the case of Hawaii, much of that went to help nonprofits scale up and rent space. The state also spent money on a software system in an effort to prevent fraud.

Diane Yentel, executive director of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, said last years funding challenges led Congress to earmark nearly $47 billion specifically for emergency rental assistance in December and March.

Some states and cities carved out some of those funds for eviction prevention and to create emergency rental assistance programs, said Yentel, whose group has been tracking the programs. But many didnt or many didnt set aside enough.

Among the biggest challenges was states failure to spend what they had allocated.

The Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency received $150 million to help renters, but returned about $96 million to the state treasury, which plugged holes in the states public safety budget. The Florida Housing Finance Corporation earmarked $250 million but returned about $99 million to the state treasury to be spent on other programs. Eighty-three percent of Montanas $50 million set aside for rental assistance went back to the state. New York ended up spending only $47.5 million of the $100 million promised for rental assistance.

In Athens, Georgia, Dylyn Price said she got about $5,800 in rental assistance but that ended earlier this year and she fears losing her home when her lease expires Wednesday.

She worries about living, once again, in a homeless shelter with her 14-year-old son.

Its a very nauseating and uncomfortable situation to be in, Price said.

Casey reported from Boston, Kleiner reported from Washington, D.C., and Johnston reported from Brook Park, Ohio. Casey can be reached at mcasey@ap.org. Follow him on Twitter at @mcasey1. Kleiner can be reached at skleiner@publicintegrity.org. Follow her on Twitter at @bysarahkleiner.

This story is a collaboration between The Associated Press and The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative newsroom in Washington.
United Airlines is making one of the largest orders ever for commercial airplanes in an aggressive bet that air travel will rebound strongly from the pandemic.

File-This Nov. 18, 2020, file photo shows a Boeing 737 Max 9 built for United Airlines landing at King County International Airport - Boeing Field after a test flight from Moses Lake, Wash., in Seattle. United Airlines is placing a huge order for new planes so it can replace aging ones and prepare for growth as the pandemic subsides. United said Tuesday, June 29, 2021, that it will order 200 Boeing Max jets and 70 Airbus planes. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren, File)

United Airlines is making one of the largest orders ever for commercial airplanes in an aggressive bet that air travel will rebound strongly from the pandemic.

United said Tuesday that it will buy 200 Boeing Max jets and 70 planes from Europe's Airbus so that it can replace many of its smallest planes and some of its oldest and have room to grow its fleet.

Its the biggest order in Uniteds history and the biggest by any U.S. carrier since American Airlines ordered 460 Boeing and Airbus jets in 2011.

At list prices, the deals would be worth more than $30 billion, although airlines routinely get deep discounts. Figures from Ascend by Cirium, which tracks aircraft values, would put the deal around $15 billion. United declined to disclose financial terms.

Combined with previous orders, United expects to add about one new plane every three days in 2023, up from just over one a month next year. That is an ambitious amount of growth for an airline that lost $7 billion last year, when passenger traffic plunged 69%.

U.S. airlines needed billions of dollars in federal aid and private borrowing to stay afloat last year, but they are starting to see blue sky through the pandemic clouds. The number of people flying in the U.S. tops 2 million on many days now  not quite back to 2019 levels, but a turnaround from the days of fewer than 100,000 flyers in April 2020.

United said it expects to make money in July after excluding certain costs, although Wall Street doesn't expect United to earn an adjusted profit until the second quarter of next year, according to a FactSet survey of analysts.

CEO Scott Kirby said that business travel will pick up after Labor Day, and that both business and international travel will recover fully, although probably not until 2023.

United said it ordered 150 Boeing 737 Max 10s jets, 50 smaller Max 8s, and 70 Airbus A321neos, which usually seat 220 passengers in economy and premium. The larger planes from Europe's Airbus will be particularly valuable in San Francisco and Newark, New Jersey, where limited runways prevent United from adding many more flights, said Andrew Nocella, Uniteds chief commercial officer.

Combined with previous deals, United now expects to take delivery of about new 500 planes between now and 2026. Nocella said 300 will replace many of the airline's 50-seat regional jets and older Boeing 757s, while 200 will be used to grow.

The new planes will have more premium seats and seat-back entertainment screens. United also plans to refresh the interiors of its current planes by 2025.

United will sharply increase capital spending to pay for the new planes, from $4.2 billion next year to $8.5 billion in 2023. The airline is counting on rising revenue to lower its net debt from about $25 billion to less than $18 billion by 2026.

United's order is also, of course, a major boost for the worlds two main aircraft makers, especially Boeing. The Chicago-based company saw orders plummet after Max jets were grounded following two deadly crashes. On top of that, the pandemic has hurt sales at both companies.

Boeing "needs to play a bit of catch-up," and so it likely gave United a steep discount, said George Dimitroff, an analyst with Ascend by Cirium.

"From here forward, pricing will get firmer," Dimitroff said. "I think that United is probably taking advantage of the last of the good pricing."
As larger weddings become possible around the country, wedding planners say the COVID-19 vaccination status of attendees has become an important talking point.

A woman receives her first dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine at an immunization clinic in Surrey, B.C., on May 14, 2021. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

As larger weddings become possible around the country, wedding planners say the COVID-19 vaccination status of attendees has become an important talking point.

Alexandra Slawek of Boutiq Weddings and Events in Calgary said some of her clients have said they only want attendees who are at least partially vaccinated, and expects that more people will specify that requirement on invitations.

"It seems to be the trend right now, people still seem to be scared," particularly of the Delta variant of the virus, said Slawek

"A lot of weddings have websites now, I wouldn't be surprised if they put it as an asterisk on the website to please make sure you're vaccinated before accepting the invitation."

Meanwhile, Lynn Fletcher, founder of Lynn Fletcher Weddings in Calgary, said her clients definitely want their attendees to be vaccinated, but haven't gone as far as making it a hard rule.

"Ive definitely seen and heard a lot of clients talking informally and spreading word that way," said Fletcher.

She said some clients are eager to get married after having had to postpone the big day three or four times.

"So theyre really taking everything seriously."

For people who aren't vaccinated, Fletcher said her clients have been willing to make some compromises, such as asking that those attendees get tested before the event.

She said unvaccinated people have been receptive to those compromises, especially since people are desperate for social interaction after being physically distant for so long.

Both planners say they've often been asked about their own vaccination status, and Fletcher said her plan is to ensure that any unvaccinated vendors at the wedding are required to wear masks and be tested before the event.

"We'll probably wear masks anyway, especially for July while everybody is dipping their toes in the water and getting out of their shells," said Fletcher, who added that all of her own organization's staff are vaccinated.

"It's more of a 'we care about you' gesture to wear masks where we can in the first few weeks of this opening we're having."

Slawek said there are a host of precautions that couples can take to further protect their weddings, especially if there will be some unvaccinated people attending.

She said the use of rapid COVID-19 testing, hand sanitizer or masking requirements for people who are not vaccinated could be some possible measures.

The two planners reported varying levels of demand as restrictions ease across Canada, and as the Alberta government prepares to drop almost all restrictions  including gathering limits  on July 1.

Slawek said many of her clients are still hesitant to set a firm date and would like to see how the Delta variant plays out.

Meanwhile, Fletcher said inquiries doubled for the week immediately following the Alberta government's announcement that restrictions would almost entirely be dropped.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 29, 2021
Police say a sweltering heat wave that has settled over Western Canada for several days is believed to be a contributing factor in dozens of sudden-death calls they have responded to in Metro Vancouver.

Albert Huynh cools off in the frigid Lynn Creek water as Leanne Opuyes, left, laughs in North Vancouver, B.C., on Monday, June 28, 2021. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

Police say a sweltering heat wave that has settled over Western Canada for several days is believed to be a contributing factor in dozens of sudden-death calls they have responded to in Metro Vancouver.

Cpl. Mike Kalanj of Burnaby RCMP said Tuesday the 25 sudden-death calls the detachment responded to relate to a single 24-hour period starting on Monday.

The deaths are still under investigation and many of the deceased were seniors, he said.

Temperatures in the Vancouver area reached just under 32 C Monday, but the humidity made it feel close to 40 C in areas that aren't near water, Environment Canada said.

The record-breaking heat wave could ease over parts of British Columbia, Yukon and the Northwest Territories by Wednesday, but any reprieve for the Prairie provinces is further off.

In a news release, Kalanj urged residents to check on their neighbours and family members.

We are seeing this weather can be deadly for vulnerable members of our community, especially the elderly and those with underlying health issues," he said in the statement.

In Vancouver, the police department said it had redeployed dozens of officers and asked the public to only call 911 during emergencies because heat-related deaths had depleted front-line resources and delayed response times.

"Vancouver has never experienced heat like this, and sadly dozens of people are dying because of it," Sgt. Steve Addison said in a news release. "Our officers are stretched thin, but we're still doing everything we can to keep people safe."

As of mid-afternoon on Tuesday, he said police had responded to more than 65 sudden deaths since the heat wave began on Friday.

"The vast majority of these cases are related to the heat," Addison said, adding that on a typical day, Vancouver police respond to between three and four sudden-death calls.

British Columbia's chief coroner, Lisa Lapointe, said her office would normally receive about 130 reports of death over a four-day period. At least 233 deaths were reported from Friday to 3 p.m. on Monday, she said.

"Coroners are carefully gathering all information available for each death reported, to determine the cause and manner of death, and whether excessive heat played a role," she said in a statement.

"Environmental heat exposure can lead to severe or fatal results, particularly in older people, infants and young children and those with chronic illnesses."

Ingrid Jarrett, CEO of the B.C. Hotel Association, said residents in parts of the Lower Mainland, Victoria and the Okanagan region have been booking air-conditioned rooms so they can continue working and also get some sleep.

A lack of staff is the biggest challenge for hotels, motels and resorts, she said.

"So many hotels have to limit their occupancy and reservations that they can take because they simply don't have enough people working in order to clean the rooms," said Jarrett, who did not yet have the latest occupancy numbers for this week.

Environment Canada said the "historic" weather system shattered 103 heat records across B.C., Alberta, Yukon and N.W.T. on Monday.

Those records include a new Canadian high temperature of 47.9 C set in Lytton, B.C., smashing the previous record of 46.6 set in the same village a day earlier.

Temperature records were also set in the Alberta communities of Jasper, Grande Prairie and Hendrickson Creek for a second day as the mercury hit the mid- to high-30s.

It was 38.1 C in the Nahanni Butte region of N.W.T.

The weather office has also issued four heat warnings for regions along Manitoba's western boundary.

Forecasters warn extreme conditions will persist across the Prairies at least through this week and possibly into next.

As the sweltering system slides out of B.C., temperatures are expected to dip to more seasonal levels. The weather office is calling for a chance of lightning Wednesday night in the parched southern Interior. It's the same area where evacuation alerts were issued Monday because of a wildfire.

The BC Wildfire Service announced a provincewide campfire ban effective at noon Wednesday, as the fire risk across most of B.C. is rated at high to extreme. The ban, which also covers fireworks, torches and burn barrels, remains in effect until Oct. 15.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 29, 2021.

Note to readers: This is a corrected story. A previous version said the Nahanni Butte region set a temperature record for the Northwest Territories.
OTTAWA - The Conservative Party of Canada is positioning itself as the defender of Canada Day, as more communities decide to skip celebrations out of respect for First Nations discovering unmarked burial sites at former residential schools.

Leader of the Opposition Erin O'Toole is shown on a camera screen as he speaks during a news conference Monday May 31, 2021 in Ottawa. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

OTTAWA - The Conservative Party of Canada is positioning itself as the defender of Canada Day, as more communities decide to skip celebrations out of respect for First Nations discovering unmarked burial sites at former residential schools.

Leaders in different cities and towns from across the country have called into question the appropriateness of holding fireworks and festivities on July 1 since the findings were first reported.

The most recent include the northern Manitoba town of Churchill as well as the Saskatchewan cities of Melville and Meadow Lake, which announced the fireworks and parade planned for that day wouldn't go ahead.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford also on Monday asked "Ontarians to reflect over Canada Day on what has taken place."

Last week Cowessess First Nation, east of Regina, announced that ground- penetrating radar detected 751 unmarked graves at the former Marieval Indian Residential School. The news followed the discovery of what are believed to be the remains of 215 children at another former site in Kamloops, B.C.

Hours before the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations announced last Wednesday that the Cowessess had discovered a grave site, Conservative Leader Erin O'Toole told his caucus in a speech that he can't stay silent when there are calls to cancel Canada Day.

He said reconciliation is not about tearing Canada down, and no country could stand up to close scrutiny of its legacy, but whatever pain felt from the wrongs committed in Canada should be used as motivation to build a better future.

On Saturday, the party put a question out on social media: "Who is asking Canadians whether they want Canada Day to be cancelled?"

O'Toole's remarks echo his position as the "true blue" candidate in last summer's race to lead the party, where he campaigned against "cancel culture" and removing statues from Canada's historical past.

After the discovery at Cowessess, Alberta Member of Parliament Michelle Rempel Garner took to social media late Friday to respond to an article headlined, "Indigenous people call on Calgary to scale back or cancel Canada Day celebrations."

"And we should listen," she wrote on Twitter, saying "political cost be damned."

She expanded on her thoughts with a Facebook post in which she said some may feel changing how Canada Day is marked could be detrimental to the country, but including thoughts for deceased Indigenous children and what needs to happen next "into a day on which we traditionally give gratitude for the good that exists in our nation is only right and just."

"We should be proud and grateful for the good that exists in our nation. But we cannot use that celebration as an excuse to continue to blind ourselves to a truth we have never adequately confronted, or allow it to exacerbate the pain of injustice; we must listen to Indigenous voices and act," Rempel Garner said in the post.

"On July 1, we can and should do both."

In an interview with Global's "The West Block" aired on Sunday, O'Toole also suggested he may be the only federal leader who's proud of Canada that's running to be the next prime minister in a general election many speculate may happen this year.

The leader also said in the interview that it appears Trudeau and some of his Liberal cabinet ministers "almost want to cancel Canada Day because we failed in the past," after those politicians stated July 1 should be a time of reflection.

Federal Indigenous Services Minister Marc Miller on Sunday tweeted, "It is one thing to reflect on celebration of Canada Day and quite another to turn Canada Day into a rallying cry designed to whip up a political base, particularly at a time when Indigenous Peoples are hurting."

O'Toole's press secretary referred to the leader's initial comments to caucus last Wednesday when asked to respond to the concerns raised around the timing and content of his message.

Requests to hear directly from Saskatchewan Conservative MPs Cathay Wagantall and Gary Vidal, the party's critic for Indigenous services, were not granted.

Both of their ridings include communities that have decided against holding July 1 celebrations.

In a statement provided by Conservative spokeswoman Alexandra Spence, Vidal expressed his condolences over the unmarked graves. He also repeated the Conservatives' call for the Liberal government, by Canada Day, to implement a plan to fulfill the calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that address missing children from residential schools.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 28, 2021.
The latest news on COVID-19 developments in Canada (all times eastern):

People receive a dose of the COVID-19 vaccine at a mass vaccination clinic at Scotiabank Arena in Toronto on Sunday, June 27, 2021. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Cole Burston

The latest news on COVID-19 developments in Canada (all times eastern):

6:55 p.m.

The Northwest Territories is no longer requiring masks to be worn in public places in Yellowknife and three other communities.

The territory says it revoked the public health order effective this afternoon.

The chief public health officer kept the order in place for two weeks after a COVID-19 outbreak at N.J. Macpherson School in Yellowknife was officially declared over.

Dr. Kami Kandola says it is still a good idea to wear a mask indoors when there is a crowd, poor ventilation, or shouting or singing.

6:25 p.m.

B.C. is reporting 145 new cases of COVID-19 diagnosed over the last three days for an average of about 48 per day.

There are 930 active infections, including 107 people who are in hospital, and five more people have died, pushing the death toll in the province to 1,754.

Provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry presented data showing many B.C. communities did not record any new cases in the last week, while cases in the hard-hit Lower Mainland have dropped dramatically.

Henry says overall vaccine effectiveness in B.C. is 70 per cent, meaning immunization is preventing seven out of 10 infections  the vast majority of which are variants of concern.

The province is poised to move into the next phase of its reopening later this week.

6:05 p.m.

Alberta is reporting more declining daily COVID-19 case numbers over the last few days.

The province says there were 81 new infections Thursday, 64 on Friday, 33 on Saturday and 31 yesterday.

There are 1,261 active cases in Alberta.

And there are 179 people in hospital due to COVID-19, including 39 in intensive care.

3:40 p.m.

Saskatchewan is reporting 17 new cases of COVID-19.

The province says there are no additional deaths due to the virus.

There are 76 people in hospital because of COVID-19, and 13 of them are in intensive care.

So far, 70 per cent of residents who are 12 and older have received a first dose of vaccine.

1:35 p.m.

Manitoba is reporting 61 new COVID-19 cases and no deaths.

The province's chief public health officer says a child under 10, whose death was announced on the weekend, had underlying health conditions.

1:10 p.m.

Nova Scotia is reporting four new cases of COVID-19 today.

Health officials say three cases have been identified in the eastern zone, which includes Cape Breton, and the other case is in the Halifax area.

The province has 57 active cases of novel coronavirus, with two people in hospital as a result of the infection.

As of Sunday, 876,217 doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been administered, with 172,910 people having received a booster shot.

12:15 p.m.

Health officials in New Brunswick are reporting that more than 30.2 per cent of the population over 12 has received two doses of COVID-19 vaccine.

They say 77 per cent of eligible New Brunswickers have received at least one dose.

Health officials are reporting one new case of COVID-19 today, involving a person in their 50s in the Moncton region.

New Brunswick has 26 active reported cases of COVID-19 and four patients in hospital with the disease, including one in intensive care.

11:45 a.m.

Canada crossed a milestone this weekend of having 10 million people fully vaccinated against COVID-19.

Ontario reported today it had given second doses to more than 160,000 people Sunday, pushing the number of fully vaccinated people in the country to 10.14 million  or more than 30 per cent of eligible Canadians at least 12 years old.

Canada's fully vaccinated population is increasing quickly, with more than three million people vaccinated in the last week alone.

At the current pace, Canada could reach 50 per cent fully vaccinated in about two weeks.

11 a.m.

Quebec is reporting 76 new cases of COVID-19 today and no deaths attributed to the novel coronavirus.

Health officials in the province haven't reported a COVID-19-linked death since June 23.

Officials say they identified 178 cases on Friday and Saturday; the Health Department has stopped releasing COVID-19 data on weekends.

The province says COVID-19 hospitalizations dropped by 11 since Friday, to 124, and 31 people were in intensive care, a drop of nine since the last report.

10:45 a.m.

Ontario is reporting 210 new COVID-19 cases today and three more deaths attributed to the novel coronavirus.

The numbers are based on 13,071 tests.

There were 218 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 as of Monday and 287 patients in intensive care with COVID-19-related critical illness.

The province says more than 180,300 COVID-19 vaccines were administered Sunday.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 28, 2021.
OTTAWA - A vaccine study in the United Kingdom reports that getting a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine four weeks after a dose of Oxford-AstraZeneca produced a much stronger immune response than two doses of AstraZeneca.

Vials of both Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines sit empty on the counter at the Junction Chemist Pharmacy, in Toronto, Friday, June 18, 2021. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette

OTTAWA - A vaccine study in the United Kingdom reports that getting a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine four weeks after a dose of Oxford-AstraZeneca produced a much stronger immune response than two doses of AstraZeneca.

The results are similar to those reported earlier this year from small studies in Germany and Spain and will reinforce the decision to mix and match vaccines in much of Canada.

The National Advisory Committee on Immunization in Canada said June 1 there was enough evidence about the safety of mixing two vaccines to tell that provinces could begin to offer Pfizer or the other mRNA vaccine from Moderna as a second dose to people who got AstraZeneca first.

On June 17 NACI went further and said growing evidence that mixing the vaccines is creating a better immune response meant that it was now "preferred" for AstraZeneca recipients to get Pfizer or Moderna second.

NACI soured on the AstraZeneca vaccine in April when it was potentially linked to rare but serious vaccine-induced blood clots that have not been found in people who received Pfizer or Moderna.

Health Canada says the vaccine is still safe and effective, with the risks posed by COVID-19 higher than the risk of vaccine-induced blood clots. NACI however said if there is mRNA available it is the preferred type of vaccine.

As a result most provinces stopped using AstraZeneca for first doses by the middle of May. In the last two weeks of May, fewer than 18,000 new shots of AstraZeneca were administered, out of more than 5.4 million shots given across Canada.

Most provinces are still limiting first doses of AstraZeneca to those who can't get Pfizer or Moderna for some reason, such as an allergy. But supplies are also an issue. Pfizer and Moderna have collectively shipped more than 30 million doses since the beginning of May, while Canada has received about 1.45 million AstraZeneca doses.

In early June, all provinces moved to begin offering Pfizer or Moderna as a second dose to those who received AstraZeneca first. Health Canada says in the first three weeks of June 459,000 people got a mixed vaccine series, though that number is not broken down by vaccine. It will include people who also mixed the two mRNA vaccines.

The U.K. study at the University of Oxford, where the AstraZeneca vaccine was developed, found mixing Pfizer and AstraZeneca in any order produced better results than two doses of AstraZeneca but that getting AstraZeneca first generated better results than getting it second.

Two doses of Pfizer produced the best antibody results  proteins which help neutralize viruses when they get into your body. A dose of AstraZeneca followed by Pfizer produced the best T-cell results. T-cells are a type of white blood cell that attacks foreign particles in the body, including viruses.

However, the study's authors warn that the results so far are based on a four-week interval and it is already known from other studies that AstraZeneca has worked better if the second dose is given eight to 12 weeks later.

Additional results using a 12-week interval will be available in July.

Lead investigator Matthew Snape, an associate professor in pediatrics and vaccinology at Oxford, says the results show the vaccines can be used interchangeably, adding flexibility to the rollout of vaccines around the world.

The study is also now looking at mixed vaccine programs that include Moderna and the as-yet-unauthorized vaccine from Novavax.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 28, 2021.
THE Archbishop of St. Boniface is being urged to ask the head of the Roman Catholic Church to seek forgiveness from Indigenous people in Canada for the churchs role in running residential schools.

THE Archbishop of St. Boniface is being urged to ask the head of the Roman Catholic Church to seek forgiveness from Indigenous people in Canada for the churchs role in running residential schools.

In a letter Monday to Archbishop Albert LeGatt, St. Boniface MLA and Manitoba Liberal Leader Dougald Lamont asks him to ask Pope Francis to commit to reconciliation.

"For the church to recognize the historical reality, and ask forgiveness would not be an ending, but a beginning: an act that could make the process of healing possible," Lamonts four-page letter reads in part.

The message comes in the wake of 751 potential unmarked graves being discovered last week at the site of the former Marieval Indian Residential School on Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan.

"Acknowledging wrongs and asking forgiveness would be an act of recognition and of elevation  that elevates First Nations and Indigenous peoples and takes a step toward granting them the full dignity as human beings that they always deserved, and are continually denied," Lamonts letter says.

Manitobas NDP house leader and justice critic, Nahanni Fontaine, meanwhile, called for the Catholic Church to show "grace and courage."

"We must seek justice for these children and know the full truth of what happened in residential schools," said Fontaine, MLA for St. Johns and an Ojibwa from Sagkeeng First Nation.

"The Catholic Church must release its internal records to Indigenous communities and publicly commit to implementing the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions calls to action, which includes an apology from the Pope," Fontaine said in an email Monday. "Survivors have led the way, its time for the Catholic Church to finally follow their example of grace and courage."

Manitobas Progressive Conservative government said Monday it has not urged church leaders to apologize to Indigenous Canadians.

"At this time our government has not reached out to the Catholic church, however, we understand that as a country we must work towards healing and reconciliation," a spokeswoman for Indigenous and Northern Relations Minister Eileen Clarke said Monday.

"Our government continues working collaboratively with residential school survivors, families, Indigenous leadership and communities, elders and knowledge keepers to determine next steps."

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca
An iconic steakhouse is adding a little sizzle to an iconic street corner.

An iconic steakhouse is adding a little sizzle to an iconic street corner.

Hy's Steakhouse is celebrating Canada Day by opening a patio outside its Winnipeg location at Portage and Main.

"It's an amazing day to open up a fantastic patio," said Karen Byrne, Hy's director of marketing and communications.

"A lot of people have made reservations," said Megan Buckley, Hy's chief operating officer.

Executive Chef Jackie Hildebrand on Hy's patio at Portage and Main. (Mike Deal / Winnipeg Free Press)

The patio, outside the main floor of the Richardson Building, faces north towards Lombard Avenue. It will have 64 seats, but will only allow up to 25 under Manitoba's current pandemic public health restrictions.

"People will be well spaced out," said Byrne. "It's a very lovely space. Folks in Winnipeg will really enjoy sitting out there."

Buckley said Hy's  established 66 years ago and in Winnipeg since 1958  "always plans" for the long term.

"This was planned and we've been working with our landlord pre-COVID."

Hy's in Whistler and Calgary have patios, while the Toronto location has set up a few tables on the sidewalk outside the restaurant. Only the Vancouver location is dine-in only.

"This was planned and we've been working with our landlord pre-COVID."  Megan Buckley, Hy's chief operating officer

Buckley said the menu will remain the same, regardless where a customer chooses to dine.

"We want our guests to enjoy our Hy's favourites whether you're indoors or outside."

Kate Fenske, CEO of Downtown Winnipeg BIZ, said the new patio gives a welcome shot in the arm for an area that has been hit hard during the pandemic.

"Having new outdoor space downtown, where people can safely connect, is key to bringing life back to the neighbourhood this summer and gives businesses a fighting chance," Fenske said.

"I'm thrilled Hy's is giving Winnipeggers a chance to dine outside at the iconic intersection of Portage and Main."

Byrne said the patio and restaurant will open July 1 at 3 p.m., closing at 10 p.m. After that, regular hours will be Monday to Friday, 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m., Saturday 3-10 p.m., and Sunday 3-8 p.m.

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca
Before patio beverages and picnics in the park were permitted, Manitobans were already collecting dozens of close contacts  including more than 100 people forced to self-isolate after one tested positive for COVID-19.

Before patio beverages and picnics in the park were permitted, Manitobans were already collecting dozens of close contacts  including more than 100 people forced to self-isolate after one tested positive for COVID-19.

New data from the province shows the week before public health restrictions were eased, at least one Winnipegger who got sick with COVID-19 had 49 close contacts, and another person in the Northern Health region who caught the virus had 121.

"We cant lose sight of COVID, we cant lose sight of that delta variant, we cant have that many contacts on average," chief provincial public health officer Dr. Brent Roussin said Monday during a noon-hour news conference.

Young girl's death 'another tragedy' Manitobas top doctor is urging people to get vaccinated against COVID-19, after the death of a young girl was reported over the weekend. click to read more Manitobas top doctor is urging people to get vaccinated against COVID-19, after the death of a young girl was reported over the weekend. On Sunday, public health officials said a girl under the age of 10 from Winnipeg died after contracting the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. On Monday, Roussin said the girl had underlying health conditions. No other details were shared to respect the privacy of the family. This is another tragedy during this pandemic, he said. In Manitoba, severe outcomes, such as death or hospitalization, related to COVID-19 in children are rare, the top doctor said. In late November, a nine-year-old Manitoba boy also died after getting COVID-19. Currently, children under the age of 12 are not eligible to be vaccinated. Despite that, Roussin said public health is not expecting to see an increase in severe outcomes among youth, even with more infectious variants of concern. We know that the virus can change over time, and so were constantly surveilling that, but, thankfully, severe outcomes have been quite rare in the younger children, Roussin said. As restrictions are eased, Manitobans who cannot get vaccinated, including children, and people with health conditions that may make them vulnerable, will have to make individual COVID-19 risk assessments, he said. The No. 1 message is to have as many people around them vaccinated as soon as possible, Roussin said. Ensure everyone around them is fully vaccinated, decrease the amount of contacts outside the household, and practise those fundamentals. Close

"We still need Manitobans to follow by these current public health orders, we still need them to be well-aware of COVID, that COVID is still in our province, were still seeing transmission. If we see significant increases in the amount of contacts we have overall, then yes, we are at risk of seeing increase in the amount of cases."

The province's top doctor said he didnt know the circumstances that led to one person having 121 close contacts while they were infectious  and added they may have followed pandemic rules.

RUTH BONNEVILLE If there are increases in the number of contacts we have overall, then we are at risk of seeing increase in the amount of cases, says Dr. Brent Roussin, chief provincial public health officer. (Ruth Bonneville / Winnipeg Free Press files)

"When we talked about our reopen plan, we still had those two requirements: to get vaccinated, which we see Manitobans are doing, but we also need to follow those public health orders, which should diminish the amount of people who have those very high number of contacts," Roussin said.

About 15 per cent of close contacts develop a COVID-19 infection, Roussin said. However, vaccination will offset the impact of having a high number of contacts, so long as people have both required doses.

The provincial data covers the period between June 13 and 19.

During that time frame, in Interlake-Eastern, there were 79 cases, and at least one person had 41 contacts.

For Southern Health, there were 185 cases, and at least one person had 31 contacts. In Prairie Mountain, there were 79 cases and the highest number of contacts for one case was 20.

Public health orders were eased June 26 to allow (among other items) for gatherings outdoors with up to 25 people, increased capacity in retail settings, the reopening of restaurants and fitness centres, and the resumption of organized sports.

The record for close contacts was set when one Winnipegger who caught COVID-19 had a total of 249 close contacts. The province was unable to say Monday at what point in the pandemic that individual case was reported to public health.

Roussin said the most recent close contacts stem from a mix of interactions, from social gatherings to work and in the household. Public health nurses and contact tracers remain quite busy, he added.

The province considers a number of variables when determining whether a person is a close contact, including face mask or personal protective equipment use, the type of interaction, adherence to social distancing, and length of exposure.

In general, prolonged exposure is considered to be a period of more than 10 cumulative minutes of a 24-hour period.

Roussin said as case counts decline, public health is able to dial in on areas where COVID-19 is spreading. In all areas where transmission occurs, numbers are diminishing, he said.

"Were on the right trajectory, but were not out of the woods."

On Monday, the province reported 61 new infections, from 1,468 tests.

Ticking toward target Manitoba is making strides toward its second vaccination target for reopening, with 72.9 per cent of the population partially immunized and 38 per cent fully vaccinated, as of Monday. click to read more Manitoba is making strides toward its second vaccination target for reopening, with 72.9 per cent of the population partially immunized and 38 per cent fully vaccinated, as of Monday. However, should the province hit its goal of immunizing 75 per cent of the population and fully dosing 50 per cent before Aug. 2, restrictions may not immediately be lifted. Chief provincial public health officer Dr. Brent Roussin said Monday he wants to wait at least two weeks before moving forward with any additional reopening, if vaccination targets are met ahead of schedule. Weve said all along that if we hit our targets early, and all else being equal, then we could be at a stage to open earlier than planned, Roussin said. We did this with Step 1 and its looking like were going to be able to do that with Step 2, as well. We do need a reasonable amount of time between the openings, and I would put that reasonable amount at, at least, one incubation period. To reach the 75 per cent mark, a total of 881,777 Manitobans have to receive their first dose. Thus far, provincial data shows 871,994 first doses have been recorded in Manitoba. In the past week, Manitoba has recorded an average of 2,582 first doses a day. However, the province has said its population coverage calculation does not include non-residents and people who do not have valid information in its public health information management system. Those doses are recorded on the provinces vaccination online dashboard, however. To reach the goal for doubly dosed Manitobans, the province needs to administer at least 137,030 more shots. In the past week, the province averaged 20,592 second doses a day. The government has also resumed booking Pfizer vaccine appointments. The province said Pfizer shots are available for the end of July at all its super sites. Close

New cases were reported in all health regions, with 27 in Winnipeg, 20 in Interlake-Eastern, eight in Northern Health, four in Southern Health, and two in Prairie Mountain.

The five-day test positivity rate was 6.2 per cent across the province and 5.8 per cent in Winnipeg.

No new deaths due to COVID-19 were announced Monday. There have been 1,139 fatalities reported since the pandemic began.

On Monday, 194 Manitobans were receiving hospital care for COVID-19, including 183 in-province (50 in intensive care).

Eleven patients are receiving treatment in Ontario ICUs. No patients were transferred out of province for treatment Sunday.

Seventeen of the 61 COVID patients receiving intensive care are under the age of 40, a spokesman for Shared Health said.

In total, there were 118 people in Manitobas ICUs as of Monday morning. The pre-pandemic capacity was 72 beds.

danielle.dasilva@freepress.mb.ca
A Winnipeg woman whose two small dogs were killed at a canine daycare last month believes the larger dog who attacked them should be designated as dangerous.

A Winnipeg woman whose two small dogs were killed at a canine daycare last month believes the larger dog who attacked them should be designated as dangerous.

Andreina Holliday said her Yorkie-Maltese mix Tango and Yorkie Rocky were at Pooches Playhouse daycare on May 7 when both were fatally attacked.

SUPPLIED Andreina Holliday's Yorkie-Maltese mix Tango, right, and Yorkie, Rocky were at Pooches Playhouse daycare on May 7 when both were fatally attacked.

"Its left a huge hole in our hearts. It feels very empty They werent supposed to leave so early," said Holliday, her voice cracking with emotion. "They were supposed to be with us way longer. Their lives were cut too short."

The Animal Services Agency has since deemed a Siberian husky to be responsible for "biting causing death" in the incident and designated the husky a "dangerous dog," according to a city report.

The designation would mean strict rules separating the dog from others, but the huskys owner is now appealing the decision.

SUPPLIED Andreina Hollidays Yorkie-Maltese mix Tango, right, and Yorkie Rocky were fatally attacked last month. Holliday believes the larger dog who attacked them should be designated as dangerous.

Holliday first learned of the appeal on Monday, which councils protection and community services committee will consider on July 5.

While she expressed sympathy for the owner involved, Holliday said she hopes the designation will be upheld.

"I think there needs to be some sort of record that can follow (this dog)," she said. "Sometimes it is necessary to keep others safe."

Holliday and her husband, Keith, have reached out to multiple dog daycare owners, government officials, the Winnipeg Humane Society and the Animal Services Agency with a goal to add new regulations for canine daycares. The couple would like to ensure the daycares are required to keep small dogs separated from larger ones and that theyre mandated to meet minimum training standards for their staff.

Andreina Holliday hopes those changes can help prevent her loss from being repeated.

"We cant bring them back. No lawsuit or amount of money in the world would make it right or bring (our dogs) back. And so the only thing that I feel that I can do to deal with this grief is to help others so that it doesnt happen (again)," she said.

If the citys dangerous dog declaration is upheld, the huskys owner will be required to either find a home for the dog outside of Winnipeg, surrender the pet to animal services, or comply with the designation. Complying with the designation would require the owner to: have the dog sterilized; keep it secured and separated from others while at home; muzzle and leash the dog while away from home; and post a sign at every entrance to the dogs home that warns a dangerous dog is inside, according to the citys website.

The Free Press could not reach the huskys owner for comment on Monday.

Coun. Sherri Rollins, the chairwoman of councils protection and community services committee, declined to comment on the specific case prior to the hearing.

In May, the protection committee ordered a review of Winnipegs responsible-pet-ownership bylaw, which Rollins expects could lead to new rules being considered for canine-related businesses.

"I stand firmly behind the motion we put forward to look at the responsible pet ownership bylaw (which could affect) doggy daycares and even pet groomers," said Rollins.

The review is expected sometime in fall or winter.

Pooches Playhouse declined comment.

joyanne.pursaga@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @joyanne_pursaga
OTTAWA  Manitobans could see a farming boom thanks to global warming, but their quality of life and pocketbooks will likely take a hit as natural disasters become more common, according to a new federal report.

OTTAWA  Manitobans could see a farming boom thanks to global warming, but their quality of life and pocketbooks will likely take a hit as natural disasters become more common, according to a new federal report.

"What were seeing is this flipping back between drought and flood, a lot more frequently," said Al Pietroniro, a water scientist with Natural Resources Canada.

"Theres a fair amount of uncertainty when were looking at the Prairies and what the future might hold."

Pietroniro contributed to a 700-page report summarizing academic research, media reports and case studies on how well-prepared Canada is for climate change  which found a lot lacking.

Among the few positives is longer Prairie growing seasons and more farmable land.

"The economic consequences of climate change for agriculture in Canada could be positive and potentially significant  even by the 2080s  and especially for the Prairie provinces," reads the report.

It cites a handful of studies that estimated farmers in Manitoba could see a boost in revenue, though the average person could still be worse off due to price changes and the impact of global trade, resulting in less buying power.

For example, one analysis found the size of Manitobas economy could jump by 1.3 per cent GDP in 45 years due to more agriculture, while resulting in a 0.1 per cent drop in consumers purchasing power.

The forecast of abundant harvests is also tempered by the increasing risk in "more frequent drought, particularly in the southern Prairies and interior of British Columbia; extreme rainfall contributing to floods; and additional occurrences of harmful algae blooms," such as on Lake Winnipeg.

Researchers say this is in part caused by "the lack of co-ordination between the various agencies" in the three Prairie provinces, "resulting in a duplication of efforts, siloed expertise and gaps in responsibilities."

Meanwhile, a large swath of Manitoba is vulnerable to frequent forest fires, from a narrow stretch east of Winnipeg to most of the area north of Riding Mountain National Park. Wildfires in those areas are currently predicted to occur every 100 to 199 years, but 2070 will likely have wildfires return less than 49 years after the last one, according to a 2014 analysis Mondays report highlights.

The scientists tried to touch on intangible impacts, such as Indigenous peoples having to change cultural practices or rural communities where families have "a strong heritage associated with farming and daily personal interactions with their land."

It cites a handful of tourist market surveys taken between 2007 and 2019 that found many travellers visit the northern Manitoba town of Churchill out of a fear polar bears will soon be less bountiful.

The report notes steps already being taken, such as the re-establishment of a federal body that aims to co-ordinate water policy across the Prairies. Individual communities are trying to get ahead of these risks, such as Churchill expanding its tourism options beyond polar bears, and trying to establish more medical services in the town.

The report notes Prairie provinces are already used to "extreme climate variability" and have adapted over the decades through means such as irrigation and crop diversification.

Pietroniro, who leads the National Hydrology Research Centre in Saskatoon, said Manitobans will have to rely on adaptability to make the most of the coming decades.

"We already live in an extreme environment here," he said, adding better monitoring could mean better planning for irregular weather, instead of just responding to it. "Its a bit more of the same in terms of how weve always dealt with adaptation in the Prairies."

The report also noted industry lacks a co-ordinated approach from Ottawa on how to adapt to climate change.

Unlike other countries, its often up to individual Canadian firms to change their practices, which often involves planning for disruptions in supply chains or delays in construction.

Some federal stipends help with this planning but theres no coherent strategy to encourage whole industries to prepare their operations and employees for the changing climate.

"Despite growing awareness of climate change impacts, there is no widespread evidence of corporate adaptation in Canada. When adaptation does occur, it tends to focus on short-term actions to address physical risks," the report reads.

"Increased involvement of the private sector would accelerate adaptation in Canada as a whole."

dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca
The head of Manitoba Hydro has lashed out at the Consumers Coalition for saying the power utility is withholding requested data from the Public Utilities Board.

The head of Manitoba Hydro has lashed out at the Consumers Coalition for saying the power utility is withholding requested data from the Public Utilities Board.

"Its verging on offensive to suggest we are defying orders by not supplying information we have already told the PUB does not exist," Hydro president and CEO Jay Grewal said in a news release Monday.

The coalition that includes Harvest Manitoba, Consumers Association of Canada (Manitoba) and Aboriginal Council of Winnipeg in March asked Manitobas independent regulator, the Public Utilities Board, to order a review of Hydros current rates.

The group argued substantial changes at Hydro, including major new export sales to Saskatchewan and the operation of the $8-billion Keeyask generating station, warrant public scrutiny.

The tribunal agreed and, on May 10, ordered Hydro to provide versions of its 20-year integrated financial forecast, capital expenditure forecast and the prospective cost of service study currently in use in the operations and management of the utility.

It also asked for this years and next fiscal years forecast of net export revenue and net income for a number of possible water flow conditions.

Manitoba Hydro claimed it did not have a current forecast and did not provide the prospective cost of service study or next years forecast of net export revenue and net income for a number of water flow scenarios. The Consumers Coalition issued a statement Thursday urging the PUB to arrange a rate hearing "in the interests of transparency and accountability."

Gloria Desorcy with the Consumers Association of Canada (Manitoba) said Friday it was "surprising" those documents are not in existence, when there have been integrated financial forecasts available in the past.

On Monday, Grewal said the information supplied will allow the PUB to answer the question it currently has before it: whether theres been a substantial change in Manitoba Hydros finances.

"And were confident the information we provided clearly demonstrates that there has not been a substantive change since the last (general rate application)," she said.

Grewal said "going forward," the Crown corporations long-term financial forecasts will be more informed and comprehensive, with a thorough integration of long-term strategic and operating plans. Theyll be the basis for utilitys first five-year general rate application, which will be filed with the PUB in the winter of 2022-23, she said.

"We are implementing new processes and improved approaches that we believe are necessary to prepare Manitoba Hydro to be able to effectively respond to the changing energy landscape of the future and ensure we operate as efficiently as possible, both today and into the future."

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca
As calls grow to cancel Canada Day in the wake of the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves at residential schools across the country, one local business owner has made a statement through her work.

As calls grow to cancel Canada Day in the wake of the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves at residential schools across the country, one local business owner has made a statement through her work.

A simple orange tank top, featuring an upside-down Canadian flag and a short but powerful message: "No pride in genocide."

Its being sold by Blanche Chief, a 42-year-old mother of three, an Oji-Cree woman from Fisher River Cree Nation who also goes by her spirit name White Feather Woman, and a student completing her third year of Indigenous studies at the University of Winnipeg.

Shes also the owner of Nimis Creations, a one-woman Instagram-based boutique which usually sells art and jewellery based in beadwork and made from materials sourced from the land. Her work comes from a place of personal growth: her mother was a residential school survivor, and Chiefs own story includes 11 years of sobriety spent collaborating with Indigenous community groups.

"As an Indigenous woman, Ive, unfortunately, had the life that a lot of Indigenous people have," she said.

She was compelled to design several orange shirts after the announced discovery of 215 childrens graves at a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C.

"Every Canada Day, Ive had a feeling that it wasnt always right, because Canada was founded on the backs of Indigenous people, so it just didnt seem right," she said. "As times progressed to where I am now, I feel safe enough to have a voice and safe enough to speak up."

Chief owns Nimis Creations, a one-woman Instagram-based boutique which usually sells art and jewellery based in beadwork and made from materials sourced from the land. (Mike Deal / Winnipeg Free Press)

Orders have rushed in for the "No pride" design: 50 in the last two days, and she doesnt have enough shirts to keep up with further requests.

Chief said she believes the sudden interest has come, in part, from people who arent Indigenous being forced to reflect on Canadas history after the recent news of graves at residential schools.

"You want to bring that awareness to non-Indigenous people, and give non-Indigenous people an opportunity to be allies of Indigenous people, and by them wearing the orange T-shirts, it shows that theyre standing together with us in solidarity," she said.

Orange is the colour of the reconciliation movement and to recognize the harms done by the residential school system.

The conversation around how Manitobans should approach Canada Day has run the gamut in recent days.

The Town of Churchill has cancelled its July 1 celebrations.

On Tuesday, the Sage Creek Residents Association cancelled its planned, socially-distanced fireworks show.

"This is not a July 1 to celebrate," the southeast Winnipeg organization said, citing the recent discoveries at former residential schools.

A march at Portage and Main, along with prayers, speeches and a moment of silence, organized on social media and set for July 1, meant to mourn the Indigenous children found and those still missing has received hundreds of responses.

Signage on orange paper reading "Please no fireworks on July 1st!" and asking readers "consider not celebrating colonialism, land theft and genocide" has been spotted around Winnipeg.

At The Forks, typically a central point for local Canada Day celebrations, there will be no in-person events or fireworks for a second year due to COVID-19 pandemic restrictions.

The virtual events planned are meant to foster "a collective commitment to build a better future for all children," and will include a speech from Niigaan Sinclair (Indigenous curator at The Forks), a moment of silence, words from local elders, and a theatre piece. It will end with a virtual fireworks show set to O Canada.

Premier Brian Pallister encouraged Manitobans to celebrate the country, "warts and all," for a second time during a news conference Tuesday.

"I think we have no claim to perfection, nor does any country, but I think Canada and Manitoba have worked very, very hard on many issues that we deserve to acknowledge, and we also have to work harder on some issues that were now beginning to acknowledge, perhaps better than we did in our past," the premier said.

Chief said she felt hopeful listening to the way the conversation around the national holiday has changed, but there was more to be done.

"Its still the beginning, and theres still such a long way to go," she said. "And who knows? We might be suppressed again, Canada Day may still go on and exist here on after. But the fact that its being talked about today, thats a step in the right direction."

 with files from Erik Pindera

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: malakabas_
A Winnipeg man arrested for defacing a monument to fallen RCMP officers and spray painting graffiti on the Canadian Museum for Human Rights says his actions set back the very cause he was trying to support.

A Winnipeg man arrested for defacing a monument to fallen RCMP officers and spray painting graffiti on the Canadian Museum for Human Rights says his actions set back the very cause he was trying to support.

"This is a very big issue I really believe in, but I dont think my actions furthered the movement at all," Carter Grycko told provincial court Judge Kael McKenzie at a sentencing hearing Friday.

STEVE LAMBERT / CANADIAN PRESS FILES A red symbol was spray painted on the memorial statue for fallen officers at the RCMP headquarters on Portage Avenue.

"They really hurt the movement and they hurt others, obviously, too," Grycko said by phone, calling court from a tent in northern B.C., where he is working for the summer as a tree planter. "It was very foolish and immature to (protest) that way."

Grycko, 20, pleaded guilty to two counts of mischief to property for the Feb. 25, 2020, incidents, which came one day after Ontario Provincial Police arrested 10 protesters at a rail blockade near Belleville, Ont. That protest was in solidarity with Wetsuweten hereditary chiefs in B.C. opposing the construction of the Coastal GasLink natural gas pipeline.

Court heard Grycko, who is not Indigenous, and three still unidentified co-accused arrived at RCMP headquarters on Portage Avenue shortly after 10 p.m. A red symbol was spray painted on the memorial statue for fallen officers, and messages including "F--- RCMP," "Shut down KKKanada" and "Land back," were painted on an adjacent memorial, sidewalk and walls of the building.

Shortly after midnight, the group arrived at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, leaving the same messages and more in red spray paint, including "Is this the future you want" and "F--- KKKanada."

That same night, the constituency office of St. Boniface MP Dan Vandal was also vandalized. Grycko did not enter pleas in connection to that incident, and there was no mention of it in court.

MIKAELA MACKENZIE / FREE PRESS FILES Security video from the museum, as well as a witness cellphone video, captured the licence plate of the car Carter Grycko was driving, which police traced back to the home he shared with his parents.

Security video from the museum, as well as a witness cellphone video, captured the licence plate of the car Grycko was driving, which police traced back to the home he shared with his parents.

Grycko turned himself in to police two days later, red spray paint still visible on his sneakers and jacket, Crown attorney Ari Milo told court.

The vandalism was publicly condemned at the time by Indigenous leaders, including Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs Grand Chief Arlen Dumas and Manitoba Metis Federation president David Chartrand, and Ricky Strongquill, son of slain RCMP Const. Dennis Strongquill.

"That statue, you know, it means a lot to the families of fallen police officers, and one of those police officers happens to be an Aboriginal police officer and has an Aboriginal family. So it's absolutely disgraceful," Strongquill told the CBC at the time.

MIKAELA MACKENZIE / FREE PRESS FILES The Crown and defence both recommended Grycko perform an unspecified amount of community service work and repay the nearly $4,000 it cost to remove the graffiti.

Both the Crown and defence lawyer Karl Gowenlock recommended McKenzie sentence Grycko to one year of probation, but disagreed whether he should be granted a conditional discharge, which would spare him a criminal record.

"Both of the targets of the vandalism are ones that are deserving of protection," Milo said, arguing a conditional discharge would not be in the public interest. "The reprehensible and crude defacement of the RCMP monument constitutes an egregious act of vandalism akin to the desecration of a cemetery."

Grycko wanted to "call attention to what he saw as a great injustice," Gowenlock said, but has since come to realize how harmful his actions were, adding the parents of some of Gryckos closest friends are police officers.

"The amount of judgment and shame he has received from these families, as well as education, has caused him to really reconsider (his actions) and other perspectives," the lawyer said. "But for this incident, he is an extremely responsible, promising young man."

The Crown and defence both recommended Grycko perform an unspecified amount of community service work and repay the nearly $4,000 it cost to remove the graffiti.

McKenzie reserved his decision and will sentence Grycko at a later date.

dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca
Education Minister Cliff Cullen has characterized the criticism of Bill 64: The Modernization of Education Act, as a campaign of misinformation from a vocal minority (Winnipeg Free Press, June 15). Cullens comments imply the disapproval of Bill 64 is from a handful of ill-informed and mal-intended ragtags. But the resistance to Bill 64 is nothing of the sort.

Opinion

Education Minister Cliff Cullen has characterized the criticism of Bill 64: The Modernization of Education Act, as a campaign of misinformation from "a vocal minority" (Winnipeg Free Press, June 15). Cullens comments imply the disapproval of Bill 64 is from a handful of ill-informed and mal-intended ragtags. But the resistance to Bill 64 is nothing of the sort.

In fact, its a perfect example of the values we uphold in our social democracy  values of political engagement and critique, which represent our commitment to the public good of education.

First, there is nothing "minor" about this "vocal minority"  who might more aptly be called dissenting citizens. In fact, the organizations that represent these dissenting citizens include the Manitoba Teachers Society, the Manitoba School Boards Association, the Manitoba Association of Parent Councils and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

There are also local teachers associations, parent councils, Facebook groups, a coalition of the faculties of education in Manitoba, and community groups such as ProtectEdMB. These organizations and activities span urban and rural communities, central and suburban neighbourhoods. They include parents, teachers, trustees, researchers, students and community members.

And the actions of the dissenting citizens are numerous. Parents have been hosting local community events, such as the protest rally organized by the Waskada School Parent Advisory. Municipalities, such as the Rural Municipality of Tache, have passed resolutions formally opposing Bill 64. The Louis Riel School Division board of trustees hosted an online conversation about the bill, with more than 950 people registered.

At that meeting, a group of Grade 9 students presented their thorough and articulate critique of Bill 64 (which is available on their YouTube channel). There is a barrage of yard signs, letters to editors, hashtags, online toolkits, webinars, forums, rallies, and protest T-shirts. One petition circulating online has more than 15,000 signatures.

These dissenting citizens see that Bill 64 gives enormous power and oversight to the yet-to-be-created Provincial Education Authority Board, which will be comprised of the minister, six to 11 appointed board members and a CEO. This body will have the authority to appoint all regional directors (one per region), "designate" school principals, and employ (and thereby choose to not employ some) teachers.

This means all current influence that parents, community members, educational leaders and trustees have will be lost, and all decisions will be subsumed into a partisan bureaucracy, which will change priorities to reflect the ideologies of the political party in power. It is important to note that the current education governance structure allows for relationships between parents, school boards and superintendents that are collaborative and reflective of democratic principles. Currently, these relationships are also rarely (if ever) partisan.

Dissenting citizens have identified other elements of Bill 64 that will erode the public good of education  too many to mention here. However, I will note that the non-elected Provincial Authority Board will oversee decisions about closing local schools, charging school fees, determining educational programming and creating budgets. Again, these are currently decided by community-elected officials, but under Bill 64 will be in the hands of a partisan few.

An additional concern is about students and the ways in which Bill 64 considers students to be a homogenous group whose main concern should be to "develop competencies" for "entry into the workforce." Dissenting citizens want more for children than an education that is focused solely on creating compliant workers  we want more for our society, too.

There is a lack of acknowledgement in the bill about the diversity of students; that students are agentic; that they come from different families, communities and circumstances; and have different languages, races, ethnicities, abilities and interests. And deplorably, there is no recognition of the need for and importance of our collective commitment toward reconciliation.

In fact, there is no meaningful recognition of reconciliation or of Indigenous rights in Bill 64 at all.

This is  in part  what Cullen has so poorly understood; the rejection of Bill 64 is not the perspective of a misinformed vocal minority. This movement is a passionate and dissenting citizenry that shares a collective commitment to public education  a public education that must remain free for all, non-partisan and committed to all children.

Melanie Janzen is an associate professor at the University of Manitoba, a former public school teacher, and a dissenting citizen.
Infrastructure and Communities Minister Catherine McKennas announcement Monday that she will not seek re-election in Ottawa Centre offered further evidence of the ruling Liberal Party preparing for an early election call. Her retirement could offer the Liberals of Ottawa Centre the privilege of choosing former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney as their parliamentary candidate.

Infrastructure and Communities Minister Catherine McKennas announcement Monday that she will not seek re-election in Ottawa Centre offered further evidence of the ruling Liberal Party preparing for an early election call. Her retirement could offer the Liberals of Ottawa Centre the privilege of choosing former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney as their parliamentary candidate.

The party on Friday appointed seasoned campaign manager Azam Ishmael as its campaign director. All parties adjusted House of Commons procedures to allow retiring MPs to make farewell speeches before the House rose for its summer recess on Friday. The farewell speech of Nunavut NDP MP Mumilaaq Qaqqaq proved to be a humdinger, blasting Parliament and its security service for treating her as an alien presence during her two-year term.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his ministers have lately taken to complaining about the current Parliament and its obstruction of his minority government. Most recently, they were offended because the opposition parties and the Speaker combined to blame the government for refusing to disclose reasons for abruptly removing two leading scientists from the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg. A majority government could more easily ignore opposition demands for disclosure.

Minister of Infrastructure and Communities Catherine McKenna announced she will not be running in the next federal election. (Justin Tang / The Canadian Press files)

Recent opinion surveys suggest the Liberals and the New Democrats could pick up seats if an election were held today, while the Bloc Quebecois would hold its present 32 Quebec seats and the Conservatives could lose ground. It is far from certain that the Liberals would win the 170 seats needed for a majority in the Commons.

Even if Mr. Trudeau once again fell short of a majority, a loss of seats by the Conservatives would lead to a fresh bloodletting in the official Opposition party  probably a change of leader, perhaps a change in policy. Support from the NDP, and occasionally from the Bloc, has allowed Mr. Trudeau to govern with only mild resistance from the Conservatives. His most ardent critics  the Conservative premiers of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario  have had little impact on his policy or on his standing in public esteem.

The COVID-19 pandemic has allowed Mr. Trudeau and his ministers to address the nation on television every day of the week and has relegated opposition parties to the shadows. Parliament has been reduced to little more than a video conference in which the most remarkable events have been one naked appearance and one bathroom performance by William Amos, who was then a parliamentary secretary in Mr. Trudeaus government.

The country is not asking for an election. Mr. Trudeaus complaints about parliamentary obstruction are without merit. He and his ministers are so isolated from criticism on account of the pandemic emergency that they have forgotten what democratic government feels like and how accountability ordinarily works.

CP The pandemic has allowed Trudeau and his ministers to address the nation on television every day of the week and has relegated opposition parties to the shadows. (Sean Kilpatrick / The Canadian Press files)

The main reason for an election this year is that the Liberals smell Conservative blood in the water. The urge for a feeding frenzy lies in a part of the Liberal brain that is inaccessible to rational thought.

An election in current conditions would probably give us a Parliament much like the one we have now, but with a weakened Conservative opposition cast into fresh turmoil. That may serve a narrow partisan interest of Mr. Trudeau and his colleagues, but it will not improve Canada or its political life. It may be too late now to ask them to think again about what they are doing. They should at least come up with a valid reason for this election nobody is asking for.
Nearly two dozen workers at a poultry plant in Blumenort have caught COVID-19 in the past eight weeks, marking the second cluster connected to the workplace.

Nearly two dozen workers at a poultry plant in Blumenort have caught COVID-19 in the past eight weeks, marking the second cluster connected to the workplace.

Exceldor Cooperative, which operates the food processing facility just north of Steinbach, confirmed 23 staff members have tested positive for COVID-19 since May 5.

"Currently we have 10 active cases," company spokesman Jordan Ouellet said in a statement to the Free Press. "We are here to support our employees' recovery as best as we can."

Ouellet said approximately 25 workers were also in self-isolation as of Tuesday due to various COVID-19 exposures, including direct contact with a positive case, both inside or outside of the workplace, or due to family members being identified as a close contact.

The plant employs about 600 people.

Last fall, the plant was also affected by COVID-19 when at least 61 workers caught the virus during the second wave. At the time, the virus was said to be spreading in the community, at gatherings, among household members and during activities unrelated to the work of plant employees.

Two Exceldor employees died after falling ill with the virus last fall.

Questions sent to Manitoba Public Health about the cluster at the poultry plant were not answered Tuesday, including whether the more infectious delta variant had been identified in the cluster.

According to provincial data, 62 cases of the delta (B.1617.2) variant have been confirmed in the Southern Health-Sante Sud region. By comparison, 87 such cases have been confirmed in Winnipeg.

A provincial spokesperson provided the following statement: "If a public health risk is assessed and it is deemed necessary to protect the health of others, information is released. It is important to note that in the majority of cases, the most common type of transmission is outside the workplace.

"Public health officials, alongside Workplace Safety and Health, continue to work with workplaces across the province on a case-by-case basis to help support them if a staff member tests positive, or if there is an exposure at or cluster of cases related to the workplace."

Public health officials have not declared an outbreak at the facility.

Ouellet said the Quebec-based company has confirmed there have been "many gatherings outside the workplace" that may have contributed to the spread among workers, and a limited number of staff have been considered close contacts.

"We have been working very closely with public health on all of our cases and have been transparent with them in our findings," Ouellet said, adding the company is considering a vaccine clinic at the Blumenort plant.

"However, we are finding that a lot of our employees have already received at least one dose of the vaccine," Ouellet said.

On Tuesday, a spokesperson for United Food and Commercial Workers Local 832, which represents workers at the plant, said they had no comment.

The plant is the largest employer in Blumenort, a community of about 1,700, and the largest poultry processor in the province.

danielle.dasilva@freepress.mb.ca
ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP)  Minnesotas top Democratic and Republican lawmakers reached agreement on the highlights of a public safety bill that includes police accountability measures, a day after former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was sentenced to 22 1/2 years in prison for the death of George Floyd.

While some details had yet to be finalized, leaders from both parties said the compromise reached late Saturday settles the major issues after months of negotiations. It has been the most contentious piece of budget negotiations among a divided Legislature that's up against a Wednesday deadline to avoid a government shutdown.

The Democratic-controlled state House included several policing provisions in its overall public safety budget bill this session in the hopes of building on a package the Legislature approved last summer in the aftermath Floyds death under Chauvin's knee.
We already know from the pandemic some of our weaknesses, he said.

Republicans, meanwhile, grumbled about a tax increase on businesses with 500 or more employees. The hike would more than double an environmental fee that primarily goes into two funds to pay for cleaning up hazardous waste sites throughout the state.

The budget eliminates the fee for businesses with fewer than 100 employees and keeps it the same for those 100 to 499 workers.

State Sen. Shannon Grove, a Republican from Bakersfield, said the tax increase will discourage companies from hiring more people for fear of growing too large and having to pay a much bigger fee.

Why do we punish employers for hiring people? she said.

The tax increase required a two-thirds vote from the Legislature, a task made easier by Democrats controlling enough seats that they don't need Republican votes. Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia, a Democrat from Bell Gardens, said large employers were part of the negotiations on the bill and agreed to pay the higher tax because they understand that for a long time they have not been paying their fair share.
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Barabooms back in Baraboo Sunday with food, music and fireworks

NEWS REPUBLIC ARCHIVES Pauline Vaserman and her family, of the Chicago area, watch the fireworks show July 4, 2020, near the Sauk County Fairgrounds in Baraboo. Organizers chose to forgo the other typical BaraBooms activities last year due to COVID-19, but they will be back this year, starting at 5 p.m. Sunday at the Sauk County Fairgrounds. NEWS REPUBLIC ARCHIVES Pauline Vaserman, of the Chicago area, waits with her children, from left, Emily, then 10, Samuel, 1, and Shaun, 8, for the fireworks to start July 4, 2020, near the Sauk County Fairgrounds in Baraboo. Organizers chose to forgo the other typical BaraBooms activities last year due to COVID-19, but they will be back this year, starting at 5 p.m. Sunday at the Sauk County Fairgrounds.

Barabooms activities will be back this Fourth of July to complement the annual fireworks show at the Sauk County Fairgrounds.

Angela Witczak, vice president of nonprofit Barabooms Fireworks Inc., said organizers are keeping things simple this year with two inflatable obstacle courses for children, music from 99.7 MAX FM and food provided by the Baraboo Elks Lodge and Mary Edwards Ice Cream.

Weve always had activities, and so this is something that I think we wanted to get back to, to have a little sense of normalcy, Witczak said.

The gates will open at 5 p.m. Sunday, and the fireworks, provided by Festival Foods, will start at dusk around 9:45 p.m. The obstacle courses will run until 9 p.m.

Attendees should not bring sparklers, fireworks or carry-ins, a flyer said. Admission and the obstacle courses are free, but onsite parking is $5.

Witczak said Barabooms is accepting donations to help fund the event and looking for additional volunteers to help with sanitizing tables, parking and the obstacle courses. The organizations board also is looking to recruit new members, she said. Anyone interested in volunteering for the event or joining the board should contact Barabooms Fireworks Inc. via Facebook.

Baraboo Concerts on the Square debut next week after COVID-19 silenced 2020 From opera to big band to rock and country, musicians will once again project their sound Thursday nights this summer across Baraboos Courthouse Square.

Since forming the nonprofit, Witczak said she, Kory Hartman and Amy Bible Jackson have spearheaded Barabooms, ensuring an annual community event for Independence Day starting in 2018. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, last years Barabooms consisted of fireworks only.

According to the groups Facebook page, the event costs almost $8,000 to host, not including the fireworks, which Festival Foods covers entirely. Nina Winistorfer, a community involvement specialist for the Wisconsin grocery store company, declined to say how much Festival contributed for the show.

If you go What: Barabooms When: Gates open at 5 p.m. Sunday; fireworks start at 9:45 p.m. Where: Sauk County Fairgrounds, 700 Washington Ave., Baraboo Cost: Free admission; on-site parking for $5 Info: facebook.com/barabooms

Winistorfer said Fourth of July fireworks are Festival Foods signature event. Its first show was in 1991, when the company had just one location, she said; now, it provides a show each year in every community it serves.

Its just a moment of sharing our gratitude to the community and providing all of them a free, family-fun event that everyone can enjoy, she said.

Winistorfer echoed Witczaks sentiment about reemerging from the pandemic that left most large events canceled in 2020 to mitigate spread of COVID-19.

It definitely raises peoples spirits, especially hosting the show and having activities as well. Its really striving to make the community move forward, Winistorfer said. It also draws tourists, so just trying to bring that tourism back into the area and making sure that were moving forward successfully to bring it back, hopefully, to a brand-new show in 2022 with even more events, too.

Witczak declined to give an estimate on expected attendance.

We as an organization are just excited to have the community back, and if tourists come, then we welcome them, she said.
Barabooms activities will be back this Fourth of July to complement the annual fireworks show at the Sauk County Fairgrounds.

Angela Witczak, vice president of nonprofit Barabooms Fireworks Inc., said organizers are keeping things simple this year with two inflatable obstacle courses for children, music from 99.7 MAX FM and food provided by the Baraboo Elks Lodge and Mary Edwards Ice Cream.

Weve always had activities, and so this is something that I think we wanted to get back to, to have a little sense of normalcy, Witczak said.

The gates will open at 5 p.m. Sunday, and the fireworks, provided by Festival Foods, will start at dusk around 9:45 p.m. The obstacle courses will run until 9 p.m.

Attendees should not bring sparklers, fireworks or carry-ins, a flyer said. Admission and the obstacle courses are free, but onsite parking is $5.
When the officer asked for his drivers license, Orth said he didnt have one, but identified himself and told the police that he had only drank one beer that day. After being questioned further, Orth said he had been caught and that it was more likely nine or 10 beers he had consumed before getting in his truck to drive to Baraboo. The officer asked Orth to perform sobriety tests, but he declined both field testing and a breath test, according to the complaint. Orth again said he had been caught and said it was Calgon take me away time. According to court records, Orth was convicted of OWIs in May 1990, September 1993 and October 1997. He was convicted of an additional two in September 2019 and of an OWI which caused an injury in November 1997.
An area man faces up to 60 years in prison for allegedly sexually assaulting a 5-year-old in March during a stay at a Wisconsin Dells hotel.

Benjamin F. Hopinkah, 27, was charged Wednesday in Sauk County Circuit Court with felony first-degree sexual assault of a child under 12.

According to the Sauk County Sheriffs Office, Hopinkah is an alias for Jamieson Winter Patterson, of Lake Delton, who is also facing charges of armed burglary in Adams County Circuit Court.

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According to the criminal complaint, a woman was watching two children while a group of adults celebrated Hopinkahs birthday in the city. The adults were in an adjoining room of the Super 8 in Wisconsin Dells while she and the children were in the other.

The woman told police that she woke up after 1 a.m. to a noise and saw Hopinkah allegedly forcing the 5-year-old to perform a sex act. The woman said she screamed at him to leave.

The child had no shirt on and the pants on the child were partially pulled down.
Thats why democracies are ideal: they give people the authority, through elections, to change leadership when a leader or group takes unfair advantage of their power.

But here, the pendulum swung too far back as lawmakers made it harder for unions to survive at all. The power then went almost exclusively to the rich, big banks and corporations, and thats where weve been for quite a while. Thats where well stay, too, unless voters elect lawmakers with courage and conscience who will reform how campaigns are funded, eliminate gerrymandering, make Election Day a federal holiday, and ensure that every eligible voter has the opportunity to cast a vote by mail, or in person without having to stand in line for hours. It should be evident to most Americans that things need to change if we want our state and federal lawmakers to end the constant bickering and get things done.
JUNEAU  A 36-year-old Beaver Dam man was found guilty Tuesday of causing a fatal three-vehicle crash the summer of 2019 while driving under the influence.

Dustin Vandergalien, who appeared with his attorney Todd Snow, pleaded no contest to three counts against him: homicide by use of a vehicle while under the influence of a controlled substance, injury by use of a vehicle while under a controlled substance and causing injury while operating under a controlled substance.

Dodge County Circuit Court Judge Martin De Vries accepted the pleas and found Vandergalien guilty. Ten additional counts against him were dismissed but read into the record.

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As part of a plea agreement with the Dodge County District Attorneys Office, the state agreed not to argue for more than 28 years in prison.

A young man lost his life and six others were injured due to the careless and reckless operation of a vehicle by the defendant, Dodge County District Attorney Kurt Klomberg said in a press release. This crash was totally preventable, and should not have happened. The defendant, a repeat drunken driver, again chose to drive recklessly after consuming intoxicants. Seven innocent people paid the price. I will be seeking a long term in prison for the defendant.
Deputy Jay Helixon responded to the Camp Douglas area to search for the vehicle. At about 3:39 a.m. the Juneau County Communication Center received a call of a vehicle matching the description exiting the interstate and entering a parking lot with major front end damage. Helixon entered the parking lot and found the vehicle parked on the backside of the building with its lights off.

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Upon arrival Helixon attempted to make contact with the vehicle, but the tint on the windows was too dark to see the entirety of the vehicle. In the front seat Helixon observed an unlabeled pill bottle. Helixon requested Noe and his K9 unit to respond to the scene.

While searching the area waiting for backup Helixon observed a male about 10-15 feet from the vehicle standing behind an enclosed trailer. The male verbally identified as Jamel Ross.

Ross stated I have no idea when asked who was driving the vehicle, and again responded I have no idea when asked to whom the suspect vehicle belonged. Asked why he was behind a closed business at the late time of night, Ross stated he was coolin. Ross said he did not know where the driver of the vehicle was, that he knew nothing about the vehicle and that he was not driving the vehicle.
We still have other, ongoing legal challenges to this proposed pipeline, which is unnecessary and would be destructive to New Jersey lands, Grewal said, urging "the federal government to take another look at this harmful proposal.

In a statement, Anthony Cox, chair of the PennEast Board of Managers said the company was pleased with the decision.

This decision is about more than just the PennEast Pipeline Project; it protects consumers who rely on infrastructure projects  found to be in the public benefit after thorough scientific and environmental reviews  from being denied access to much-needed energy by narrow State political interests, Cox said.

New Jersey had argued that PennEast couldn't take the state to court to acquire the property it is seeking  only the United States government can. The state argued that the Natural Gas Act does not explicitly authorize private lawsuits by private parties against states. A federal appeals court sided with New Jersey while a lower court had sided with PennEast.

The case is PennEast Pipeline Co. v. New Jersey, 19-1039.

Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
"Labor-wise? It's a big challenge," David Koudelka told the group, who operates a nearby farm retail business.

Rep. Loren Oldenburg, R-Viroqua, agreed. "Labor, I believe, is a main issue in farming right now that we have to address," he said.

Other farmers said it has been hard to access the supplies they need in time, and that consumer knowledge of agriculture products needs to be improved.

The group emphasized the role farmers and the agriculture industry play in protecting the environment, but said that the current structure of regulations plays into a "broken circle" that hurt farmers.

Kevin Hoyer, Republican La Crosse County supervisor and local farmer, said that as a farmer his number one goal is to "get the work done right," but that he's seen the bureaucratic process to implement some environmental goals get in the way.

"As (farmers) ... we are stewards of the land. I mean, we are going to try and do our best to our best ability to keep good quality water," said Oldenburg, who is also an area farmer. "As a state Legislature, we have to keep addressing these issues and do our best to protect the environment, but also to protect these thriving businesses."
President Joe Biden is set to visit La Crosse Tuesday, according to the White House schedule.

The visit will put focus on the infrastructure bill, which has currently reached a bipartisan agreement and is awaiting its first votes next month.

The President will travel to La Crosse, Wisconsin, to highlight the benefits of the bipartisan infrastructure framework will deliver to communities across the country, said the schedule, which was sent to media Sunday night.

The White House announced last week that Biden would travel with U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to the area to discuss agriculture and rural economies.

More details about Bidens visit to La Crosse were not immediately available.
Listening, speaking, learning, thriving

Therapy offered by the University Speech and Hearing Clinic enables communication and advances societal good.

Communication is the cornerstone of relationship building. For children, effective communication skills contribute to their social and academic development and enable them to express themselves with ease. Audiology [hearing], speech or language difficulties may inhibit effective communication and affect a childs self-esteem.

Services offered by the University Speech and Hearing Clinic (USHC) in the Wits Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology have enhanced the communication skills of speech-challenged children and ignited hope in their families.

The USHC, which serves as a student training facility and a public service site, provides hearing interventions such as hearing assessments and aural rehabilitation, as well as hearing aid fitting and management. The clinics speech services provide interventions for speech delays and disorders, language delays and disorders, fluency disorders, stuttering, hearing assessments, hearing aid fittings and more.

Dr Kim Coutts, a Lecturer in Speech Pathology and Audiology says the services of the Speech and Hearing Clinic aid in improving their clients communication abilities.

We assist people across the lifespan who have difficulties with communication. Communication is the essence of human life and the ability to communicate effectively is so important for the quality of life of so many people, says Coutts.

For Bonnie Tshabalala, improvement in her sons speech through services provided by the clinic has brought joy and tranquillity. Tshabalala reached out to the clinic in 2020 when she realised t a speech delay in her three-year-old son.

Family members and relatives used to ask us why he was not talking at his age. I got a bit offended and thought they were picking on our child. This prompted us to take him for assessments and get him therapy, says Tshabalala.

She says her attitude to her relatives and the public has since changed as she now understands her sons challenges better because the clinic empowered her with information. Her son began therapy in March 2021.

Elizabeth Mokganya, mother to a nine-year-old boy who has communication difficulties due to stuttering, says that therapy sessions have positively transformed his son.

She explains that before therapy, her sons self-esteem was very low and schoolmates would mock him.

He used to come home and tell me that his former class mates would ask him, Why do you speak like this? Today, my son is very confident, such that he is able to tell his teachers to be patient with him when he is struggling to complete a sentence in class. He is doing very well at school, she says.

Although the lockdown in 2020 halted face-to-face services at the UHSC, Mokganya says the online sessions provided the opportunity for her to learn how to assist her son, as she occasionally joins the online sessions between the therapist and her son.

Both Tshabalala and Mokganya state that aside from techniques that they have learnt to aid their childrens communication, they hail the USHC for teaching them patience.

Another parent, Saskia Cowles advises parents to seek professional help and start their children on speech therapy sooner rather than later. She is pleased with the therapy her son received from USHC.

We got a report at the end of last year from the clinic, which showed us how his speech has improved from the various areas identified as problems. We are working on his pronunciation now and it is improving. He is starting to say words better now, says Cowles.

About the USHC

This year, USHC celebrates its 85th anniversary. It is the oldest clinic of its kind in South Africa. The public service speech and audiology facility offers both face-to-face and virtual therapy sessions and is committed to advancing the public good and providing professional services to the public at a low cost. Therapy is free for senior citizens and people who cannot afford the services. In a quest to continue offering services and assisting clients with communication challenges amidst the pandemic, the clinic provides data to clients who are unable to afford it for virtual sessions.
VOW FM bolsters youth entrepreneurship

The award-winning youth radio station, VOW FM has put money to support ventures of young entrepreneurs.

Unemployment is one of the underlying causes of the socioeconomic challenges in the country. Young people between the ages of 15-34 years account to the bulk of the unemployment figures in South Africa staggering at 46,3% in the first quarter of 2021 as reported by StatsSA.

In an effort to give young people a lifeline and aid in tackling unemployment, Wits campus radio station, VOW FM has championed youth entrepreneurship during Youth Month through various initiatives.

The station, in partnership with the Tshimologong Digital Innovation Precinct and launched the Inaugural Young Entrepreneurs Summit on 24 June 2021.

The summit, which provided a platform to engage with leading business people and acquire pivotal business knowledge, sought to reduce unemployment rates by providing tools, information and knowledge to entrepreneurs, which can be utilised to create job opportunities.

Shoeshoe Qhu, VOW FM Station Manager, says the shocking unemployment figures prompted the station to contribute to job creation for young people by rendering support to entrepreneurs.

The unemployment rate among university graduates was 9.3%. As a university-based community station, we had to ask ourselves what our role is contributing meaningfully to our society and our audience. Entrepreneurship is another way young people can contribute meaningfully to the country's economy and society, and we have an opportunity as a radio station to be an enabler and supporting them, says Qhu.

She believes that a proactive approach can expedite solutions to some of the societal ills facing the country. We often look to government for state led solutions, but as individuals and as an organisation we neglect our role of active citizenry. We should all be asking ourselves What am I doing to move South Africa forward?.

The station has taken it upon themselves to assist young entrepreneurs to build successful thriving businesses that will reduce unemployment. In commemoration of Youth Day on 16 June, VOW FM hosted a discussion, The Youth of 2021 Arising where entrepreneur, Sibusiso Mbiza was among the guests. Mbiza, who was born and raised in Thokoza in the East Rand, founded Kinobho, a sneaker-brand business venture to uplift and create employment opportunities for young people in his community.

His touching story of pursuing entrepreneurship and current challenges with the venture, spurred VOW FM to provide resources to help him. The station pledged R20 000 towards advertising his business to enable him to expand his market. He is currently only making use of social media to market his shoes.

At the Youth Day event, Sibusiso spoke about how he is struggling to formalise his business and is not able to reach clients. The station is supporting Mbiza with advertising to allow him to reach a wider market. We have also matched him to a business mentor, Lebohang Phasha, who is also a General Manager for Southern Africa at African Management Institute to help him formalise his business and put together a business plan to start looking for funding for a shoe-making machine to help his business grow, says Qhu. The station is also helping him find a webmaster to build him an e-commerce website to enable the young entrepreneur to sell his shoes online.

Mbiza says he is grateful for the sponsorship from VOW FM because it will enable him to grow his business, which he hopes will leave footprints in Africa.

I aspire to grow into a large business that provides the best quality footwear to customers across Africa and throughout the world and to remain a sustainable company that fairly rewards all its employees and gives back to the community, as well as acknowledge their respective interests and contributions, he says.

The 31-year-old is staunch on being a change agent in his community. The name of his shoe business, Kinobho, means button in Siswati, and is underpinned by his passion for community development.

I named by brand Kinobho because I want the brand to bring the community as together as one. I always say its not my brand, but communitys brand. We all know that buttons combine two things and I hope this brand will bring the community to work together and to uplift the people, says Mbiza.

VOW FM will continue to support young entrepreneurs in their ventures. The station awarded advertising packages to three entrepreneurs who pitched their businesses for funding at the Youth Entrepreneurs Summit. Thando Makubo, Founder of The Soweto Creamery, Gontse Selaocoe, Founder of All Day Jam and Nathan Govender, Founder of Client Link will receive R20 000 worth of advertising from VOW FM, as well as a mentorship opportunity with a leading entrepreneur.
Now you tell us.

He suspected it was all "bullsh*t" all along, says Bill Barr, the former attorney general, clearly trying to rehabilitate his image for the history books by distancing himself from the false notion of voter fraud pushed by former President Donald Trump.

The problem for Barr is that while he's trying to state the obvious now, while he was in office he publicly raised concerns about the voter fraud he now says it's clear it didn't exist.

CNN analyst Elie Honig, a former prosecutor who is writing a book arguing that Barr corrupted the Justice Department, lays out all the ways Barr helped let the "Big Lie" about election fraud take hold, with actions, in interviews and congressional testimony.

"Barr bears as much responsibility as anybody other than Trump himself for spreading the malicious lie that ultimately resulted in the January 6 Capitol insurrection," Honig concludes.

Barr, despite what he says now, earned his reputation as Trump's guardian and enabler.

 He slow-walked release of the Mueller report on Russian election interference, pushing the false early impression that it exonerated the former President. It did not.

 He insisted on the Justice Department custom of presuming a president can't be charged with a crime, which limited what Mueller could do in the first place.

 He appointed a US attorney as special counsel to review the origins of the Russia probe, placating Trump and teasing that there might have been wrongdoing when it was clear there was none.

 He rejected the Justice Department custom of not investigating election fraud allegations before an election concludes, even though he knew there was no fraud, which gave Trump's baseless allegations oxygen.

 He allowed Trump's allegations to fester for a month after the election before saying the department had uncovered no evidence of fraud.

 The Department under his leadership dialed back on prosecutions of former Trump aides like Michael Flynn and tried to slow publication of damaging books like John Bolton's.

 He dispatched an army of police to use force and disperse protesters in Lafayette Square outside the White House so Trump could walk to a photo op.

BUT! Trump requires total loyalty and the line Barr would not cross -- using the Justice Department to help Trump overturn the election results -- drew Trump's anger.

Barr resigned at the end of 2020 after angering Trump because he wouldn't do more to enable Trump's election lies.

Now we're getting something of Barr's side of the story, given to ABC's Jonathan Karl in a series of interviews this spring.

Karl, in a book excerpt published by the Atlantic, writes about Trump, looking like a madman, banging on a table and referring to himself in the third person, laying into Barr after the attorney general finally said what was clear, on December 1, 2020, that there was no evidence of fraud.

The Barr described to Karl is not afraid to insult Trump to his face.

"You know, you only have five weeks, Mr. President, after an election to make legal challenges," Barr told Trump, according to Karl. "This would have taken a crackerjack team with a really coherent and disciplined strategy. Instead, you have a clown show. No self-respecting lawyer is going anywhere near it. It's just a joke. That's why you are where you are."

Believe Barr or not, how to view Trump's enablers is a complicated equation.

Barr would not follow Trump over the cliff to actually challenging the election. But he went right up to that line.

Another character that features in Karl's report is Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, who Karl writes encouraged Barr, behind the scenes, to reject Trump's election tantrum. Rather than speak out himself (he wouldn't do that until January), McConnell wanted to harness Trump's power to win Senate races in Georgia even thought he clearly knew the damage Trump was doing to the republic.

McConnell ultimately spoke out against Trump at his impeachment trial. Great! But then McConnell voted to acquit him when he was impeached for inciting a raid on the Senate McConnell treasures. And he mobilized Republicans to kill a bipartisan review of the insurrection in order to help their election prospects.

McConnell is still in office and doesn't have the luxury of essentially ghosting the former President, which is not unlike what his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner have done, according to a report from CNN's Kate Bennett and Gabby Orr, who note that Trump and Kushner, mainstays of Trump's time in the White House, were largely absent from Mar-a-Lago during his winter stay there.

More visibly, they went on a double date with former South Carolina governor and US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, who has made no secret of her own presidential aspirations and frustrated Trump by questioning his handling of the 2020 election in her own series of interviews with Politico's Tim Alberta earlier this year.

Her oscillation between defending Trump and seeming to criticize him exemplifies the difficulty of Republicans who have not mainlined Trumpism and conspiracy theory, like Sen. John Hawley, but have also not rejected it.

Republican politicians can't just reject it since that's the direction the party has taken, towards the "Big Lie" -- not away from it. Barr may have known all along it was BS, but waiting so long to speak up helped the thing take hold.
ROME, N.Y.  A car and a riding lawn mower were destroyed in a fire inside an attached garage at a Rome home early Tuesday morning.

Fire crews were called to Winfield Circle around 5:40 a.m., after one of the residents of the home heard a noise and awoke to see the garage, and the Ford Mustang inside of it, engulfed in flames.

Keith Hunt // WKTV Keith Hunt // WKTV

"A call came in that there was a car on fire in the garage. Apparently, the resident was awakened at some point; I don't know if it was the smoke detectors that alerted him to the fire, but he said the car was on fire in the garage," said Rome Fire Chief Tom Iacovissi. "We don't know if the fire started at the car, or if the car caught on fire from the fire being in the garage, but there was a car that was on fire."

Fire officials say the fire extended into the home, but the six people inside were able to get out safely. The American Red Cross is assisting all of the residents.

The house next door also suffered heat damage from the flames.

Fire inspectors are investigating the cause.
ILION, N.Y. -- Ilion Mayor Brian Lamica confirms to NEWSChannel 2 that the village board approved the sale of the old Duofold property for $100,000.

Mayor Lamica says the investors are local and have promising ideas for the property. The board will not release the name of the new owners at this point only saying the sale will become final in the next couple of weeks.

The mayor said the board will release more information as soon as they can.
BARNEVELD, N.Y. -- According to the Oneida County Sheriff's Office, two people from Barneveld were arrested after they were driving around in a stolen vehicle from Utica.

The Oneida County Sheriff's Office charged 28-year-old Peter Clark and 24-year-old Alexis Broadbent with criminal possession of stolen property.

Deputies say they pulled them over during a traffic stop on Monday, around 6:30 p.m., on Mappa Ave in Barneveld.

The vehicle, which was reported stolen from Utica back on June 24, had new plates attached.

Clark and Broadbent were issued appearance tickets returnable to Town of Trenton Court at a later date.

Clark was issued several traffic tickets returnable at a later date as well.

The Sheriff's Office was assisted at the scene by New York State Police and the Utica Police Department.
In a stunning about-turn in the devastating eight-month civil war in Ethiopia's northern Tigray region, the Ethiopian government declared an immediate and unilateral ceasefire after Tigrayan troops retook the regional capital Mekelle on Monday evening.

Tigrayan forces on Tuesday had not accepted the truce.

The Ethiopian military has been in control of much of Tigray since last November, when it launched a major assault on the region with the support of Eritrean soldiers and local ethnic militias in an effort to remove the region's ruling party, the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), from power. The armed wing of the TPLF, known as the Tigray Defense Forces, had steadily been gearing up for the offensive and in recent days kicked off a coordinated push to recapture Mekelle.

The Tigrayan counterattack was a big blow for Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who had declared victory in late November last year when Ethiopia's military overran the city of a half-million people.

Since then, the ongoing conflict has killed thousands, forced millions to flee, fueled famine and severely damaged the international reputation of Ethiopia's Nobel Peace Prize-winning leader.

Less than a week into the offensive by Tigrayan forces, the Ethiopian military had withdrawn from the capital, a UN official told CNN on Monday. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal from the Ethiopian government.

The news was greeted with cheers in Mekelle, and CNN journalists spoke with residents who witnessed as people poured onto the streets in celebration, despite calls for them to stay indoors. Fireworks could also be heard as celebrations carried on into the night.

A spokesman for the regional government of Tigray, Getachew Reda, said Monday that its forces had "broken the backbone of the Ethiopian army" after fighting nine divisions to take the capital.

He said he would celebrate regaining the city with friends this evening, but that the conflict was far from over. "People are celebrating, the capital has been liberated from our enemies, but as far as I am concerned there is little to celebrate because we still have fighting to do," Reda told CNN over the phone.

"Our objectives are degrading the enemy's fighting capabilities. This is a criminal army and we will follow it everywhere to make sure it doesn't have the capacity to come back."

"We will not stop until Tigray has been cleared of any and all enemy forces. We will do whatever it takes," he concluded.

CNN reached out to the Ethiopian Government for comment but has yet to hear back. However, the government said Monday in a statement carried by state broadcaster EBC that it had accepted a ceasefire request by the Tigray Interim Government, which is loyal to the executive in Addis Ababa.

According to the statement, the unilateral ceasefire will last across the region until the end of the crucial planting season in Tigray, which ends at the end of September.

For seven months, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, with the help of neighbouring Eritrea, has been locked in conflict with the region's elected leadership -- the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF).

Last week, at least 30 people died when a government airstrike hit a busy marketplace in the small town of Togoga, west of Mekelle, eyewitnesses and medics told CNN.

That airstrike marked one of the deadliest attacks in the eight-month war that has fueled famine, forced millions to flee and severely damaged the reputation of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Abiy.

Allegations of damage and looting

Reda, the regional government spokesperson, also accused the retreating Ethiopian army of looting banks and damaging critical infrastructure on its way out of the Mekelle. "We decided to prioritize taking control of the capital rather than pursuing the enemy because they were targeting banks, vandalising property," he explained.

Earlier on Monday, witnesses told CNN that Ethiopian soldiers were seen entering banks, media bureaus and the offices of humanitarian agencies. A UN official also told CNN that the offices of UNICEF and the World Food Program were raided by Ethiopian forces around 4 pm local time.

UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore condemned the action "in the strongest terms."

"Members of the Ethiopian National Defense Forces entered our office in Mekele, Tigray, Ethiopia today and dismantled our VSAT equipment," she said. "This act violates UN privileges and immunities and the rules of International Humanitarian Law regarding respect for humanitarian relief objects."

UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric joined in on the criticism of Ethiopian forces when asked by journalists at the United Nations in New York.

"We condemn any and all attacks on humanitarian workers and assets and remind again all parties of their obligations under international humanitarian law," Dujarric told journalists on Monday. "The safety of our staff is a priority and we are doing everything we can to ensure it."

"All parties must ensure the protection of civilians and that all humanitarian assistance, provided by the United Nations, is provided according to humanitarian principles," he also said.

This story has been corrected to clarify which international organizations were raided by Ethiopian forces on Monday.
Miami County, Ind. (WLFI)  A two-vehicle crash on State Road 19 has killed one person. According to Indiana State Police, around 7:30 Monday night, officers from the ISP and the Miami County Sheriffs Department responded to a two-vehicle crash on State Road 19 near Miami County Road 550 East.

Police said an early investigation revealed that a Brandon Eller, 33, of Amboy, IN was driving a Dodge Caliber southbound on State Road 19 near County Road 550 East. when he crossed into the northbound lane causing a head-on collision with Steven Armfield, 69, Sheridan.

Eller and Armfield were both flown, via medical helicopter, to a Fort Wayne hospital. Eller suffered serious but non-life-threatening injuries. Armfield suffered life-threatening injuries. Carolann Pulley, 78, Converse, IN, a passenger in the Jeep was also flown to a Ft Wayne hospital. She succumbed to injuries sustained in the crash.

This crash is still under investigation.
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. (WTHI) - There are two new developments regarding a lawsuit filed against Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb.

First, the Attorney General's office has appealed a ruling made by a Marion County judge. That's to keep the state enrolled in the CARES Acts Federal Unemployment Insurance Program.

If granted, the court of appeals would decide on this ruling.

The case will stay in state court.

The judge in this care granted Indiana's motion for a new judge to hear the rest of the case.

No additional hearing dates have been set.

On Monday, we reached out to the governor's office before the decision to appeal was made. A representative told us:

The state of Indiana took the appropriate steps to terminate its participation in federal pandemic unemployment program. The agreement ended on June 19. The Governor and Department of Workforce Development will discuss an immediate appeal of the judges order with the Attorney General.
TIPPECANOE COUNTY, Ind. (WLFI)  Circuit Court Judge Sean Persin on Tuesday denied a legal move that would have blocked Trustee Jennifer Teising from terminating the township's three paid firefighters.

The decision came down to the wire as Teising plans to lay off the firefighters at the end of the day Tuesday.

The Wabash Township Firefighters Association filed the lawsuit against Teising, alleging for several reasons that she's unfit for office.

As News 18 previously reported, the Wabash Township Advisory Board, as well as the three firefighters, on Monday signed onto the suit.

"We have a stake in the case and obviously that's why we're here today and that's why the township chose to join the suit," board president Angel Valentin said. "Our ability to be able to allocate funds and allow the government body - the township - to carry out its responsibilities is dependent on the trustee carrying out her duties and not being negligent."

An injunction, requested as part of the lawsuit, would have blocked Teising's move to terminate the township's firefighters and keep them on the books while a jury trial plays out.

The board is prepared to file its own lawsuit if Teising carries out the layoffs.

"If we need to, we gotta do that because it's not just three firefighters ... It also would be really gut wrenching if we had a loss of life in our township due to the trustee's actions," Valentin says.

In a statement Tuesday morning, board members expressed new concerns over the township's legal counsel, Raymond Biederman, who, they say, is representing two parties on opposing sides of a legal battle.

"We dont think that he can represent both parties in the suit and we don't think he can choose to represent just one party in the suit either," Valentin said.

Biederman argued during a court hearing Monday the board didn't have standing to sign onto the suit.

In his decision, Persin agreed, writing each party "must be in the right or title to the office." He wrote they "cannot show reasonable likelihood of success at trial because they likely lack standing."

Teising also faces 20 counts of felony theft on allegations she didn't live in the township for several months but continued to collect a salary.

Her criminal defense attorney on Monday filed formal requests to change the trial's location and appoint a special prosecutor.

News 18 reached out to Biederman but didn't hear back.
Julie Bologna M.Ed. 22 selected as 2021 Tillman Scholar

Julie Bologna, a masters student in the military and veterans counseling program at William & Mary, has been selected by the Tillman Foundation as a 2021 Tillman Scholar. The prestigious scholarship, founded by the family of Pat Tillman, annually recognizes military service members, veterans and spouses who demonstrate extraordinary commitment to service, scholarship, humble leadership and impact.

Bologna is a veteran of the Navy, having served as a hospital corpsman who volunteered to deploy to Operation Desert Storm. She later earned her Aircrew wings and became one of two female search and rescue corpsmen in the Atlantic fleet. She flew diverse missions, including medical evacuation, search and rescue, and search and recovery, and was awarded the Sikorsky Life Saving Medal for her efforts.

While in the Navy, the tasks in front of me demanded that I look inward and find the courage to serve my country and my brothers and sisters in uniform, she said. I searched for missing pilots, delivered babies, evacuated critically injured patients and exhausted every medical skill I could while my patients took their last breath.

After leaving the Navy, Bologna continued to serve the military community as an ombudsman at two of her husbands commands while he served as a Navy SEAL. In that role, she worked as a liaison between the military and families, providing critical support and resources.

On her first day as an ombudsman, an encounter with Erin, a two-year-old girl, and her family was an experience that deepened her desire to provide support to military families. The girl had been admitted to the hospital with spinal meningitis and was in a coma. Bolognas role as ombudsman was to support the family as they made the difficult decision to remove her from life support and donate her organs.

Being a part of Erins care shook me to my core, said Bologna. The time I spent with Erins family made it more important than it had ever been for me to look inside myself and find the courage to be the support they needed.

Her role as caregiver became a deeply personal one when her husband sustained life-altering injuries after stepping on an IED while deployed in 2015. As they navigated the medical and mental health challenges of the years of recovery that followed, Bologna shared her knowledge and experiences with other families undergoing similar experiences. She continues to work closely with families of wounded warriors to help them navigate the complex system of military medical care and the personal struggles that arise.

Her passion for military families led her to the military and veterans specialization within the clinical mental health counseling program at William & Mary. The program, now in its third year, is the only one of its kind in Virginia. With both online and on-campus options, the program trains counselors to meet the unique needs of veterans and their families.

We have phenomenal medical care in the military and some of the best surgeons in the world, said Bologna. But we dont have enough people providing mental health care, and I knew thats where I could really make an impact.

Although the military has made significant progress in recent years, access to mental health care is still limited and a stigma surrounding mental health persists. Having lived through so many roles  veteran, military spouse, caregiver, ombudsman  Bologna understands the challenges that veterans and their families face and can personally relate to their experiences. I want to bring hope to this population, as well as camaraderie, and be the person they can turn to when they need help.

Bologna was encouraged to apply to the Tillman Scholars program by Elizabeth Burgin, assistant professor of counseling and coordinator of the military and veterans counseling program. A Tillman Scholar herself, Burgin knows firsthand the benefits of joining this elite network.

The sense of community and collective desire to serve among Tillman Scholars makes the foundation much more than a scholarship, said Burgin. Julie brings rigor, responsibility and empathy to her work and her relationships. As a counselor, she is going to enhance the lives of the veterans and military-connected clients she serves. I am looking forward to seeing the influence she will have on the counseling and military communities in Virginia.

In addition to an $11,000 scholarship, Bologna will join the Tillman Scholar community of peers and mentors that provides networking and opportunities for lifelong leadership development.

Upon graduating from William & Mary, she will be prepared to become a licensed professional counselor with a unique perspective on the needs of military-connected individuals and families. She is particularly passionate about working with individuals with post-traumatic stress, traumatic brain injuries and other invisible wounds, as well as the impact of military service on families and children.

The most important lesson I have learned throughout my journey with the military is the family, network and community bonds, she said. This community gave me the ability to fail without judgement and helped me grow as a person into the strong leader I am today. I hope to continue building these connections and fostering an encouraging community throughout my career as a counselor.
The COVID-19 pandemic strained our health care system nearly to a breaking point and mounted additional challenges for many to see a doctor in person. Fortunately, over the course of this past year, telehealth has allowed many Arizonans to use technology to conduct virtual visits with their 
Rockets landed at a US military base in eastern Syria on June 28, a day after the US carried out airstrikes on Iranian-backed militias, according to a US defense official with direct knowledge of the early reports.
Norway's Atlantic Ocean Road is a cultural heritage and a National Tourist Route. This Norwegian highway is a long stretch of County Road 64 that starts in Averoy and continues over the Norwegian Sea and numerous islands to connect to Eide on the mainland of Norway. Some portions of this breathtaking road have been described as a "roller coaster road". All told, the Atlantic Ocean Road is 8.274 kilometers long. The drive goes over seven bridges built on several islands, with four rest stops and vista points along the way. Unlike most destinations, this is one of the few places where tourists come to visit more during stormy weather, as the experience and the view can't be beat on stormy days.

Brief History

Amazing night sky with Aurora Borealis over Atlantic Ocean Road in Norway.

The Norwegian Public Roads Administration built the road, which opened on July 7, 1989 as a toll road. By June of 1999, its construction cost had been recouped, so the toll was removed. Tourists and locals come to enjoy the drive and experience the natural scenes in its proximity. The year 2009 alone saw about 258,654 visitors, and car television commercials have also been shot on the bridges by more than 10 car manufacturers. Anybody wishing to experience the Atlantic Ocean Road can fly to Norway, and getting there is easy with many international flights from any point in the world arriving in the country daily. The drive over the road itself can start from either end: that at Averoy, or Eide on the mainland.

Driving Through Paradise

Atlantic Ocean Road in winter.

The whole stretch of this drive is full of ocean vistas and marine life that could otherwise only be experienced on a boat. But driving and seeing it from above, however, is a unique experience all to itself. There are four vista points that allow visitors to eat, rest, and enjoy the ocean views. The different islands that are part of the road offer their own brand of views of moorlands, verdant green scapes, bays, and fishing villages. Opportunities to fish from the islands' shores or from on a boat abound here as well. An enterprising tourist could travel the whole span by car, bike, or backpacking. There are also many commercial facilities for the tourists to lodge and dine along and near to the Atlantic Ocean Road.

Waters Rich In Marine Life

The walkway on the coastline of "The Atlantic Ocean Road" at sunset.

Tourists can experience Norway's mountains, seas, fjords, lakes, and well-stocked rivers from Atlantic Ocean Road. The drive on the bridges and islands proffers the tourist an opportunity to watch whales, seals, and sea birds, depending on the different times of the year they visit. Sparse vegetation covers the islands and dot the the span of the drive, while activities such as diving offer an up-close and personal view of marine life. In Eide, on the mainland, one can visit the Gaustadvagen Nature Reserve and Wetland Area, which is home to the whopper swan and other "Endangered" species of birds. Another must do is the Eriklia Activity Farm that has the Nordland/Lyngshests, one of the rarest living breeds of horse. The same farm also features some 15 different species of other animals to see.

Notes On Safety

A car on the Atlantic Ocean Road.

Tourists who are thinking of driving the Atlantic Ocean Road should be aware that there are 60 hairpin turns on it. It is also frequently hit by strong ocean currents and hurricane winds, with storms often bringing high waves crashing into the bridges' pavement. Portions of the bridges' designs are leaning, and some have steep inclines. Conversely, people are a threat to the islands along the ocean road and the span that it was built upon. Some of the islands have wet marshlands which are protected, though often times tourists still trample on them. For this reason, hikers and sightseers venturing away from the highway should use the marked trails instead. Some tourists also ruin nature trails with the trash litter and vehicular emissions and runoff that they leave behind.
The AkzoNobel acquisition of Grupo Orbis deal includes the Pintuco paints and coatings business, Andercol and Poliquim (resins) and Mundial (distribution and services).

AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS: AkzoNobel is to further expand its long-term position in South and Central America after reaching an agreement to acquire Colombia-based paints and coatings company Grupo Orbis. Completion is expected by end of this year, or in early 2022. Financial details were not disclosed.

Present in ten countries in South America, Central America and the Antilles, Grupo Orbis has consolidated revenue of around COP $1.2 billion (260 million). The transaction includes the Pintuco paints and coatings business, Andercol and Poliquim (resins) and Mundial (distribution and services).

This is an excellent intended acquisition which aligns perfectly with our Grow & Deliver strategy of creating leading global positions and driving growth in emerging markets, said AkzoNobel CEO, Thierry Vanlancker. It will expand our long-term position across South America by establishing us as a frontrunner in the Andean region and in Central America, where several countries are high on the global growth rankings for the next decade.

Its an historic opportunity which offers attractive growth potential across both paints and coatings. Well be able to access highly complementary geographical positions in several new countries in the Andean, Central America and Antilles regions, including Colombia, which is the third largest in the region, said Daniel Campos, the companys regional director for South America.

This agreement represents an important growth opportunity for Orbis Groups companies. We strongly believe there are several benefits, such as access to technology and innovation pipelines. Likewise, we find great opportunities for the development of our employees and our clients, who will be able to access an enlarged and more complete portfolio, said CEO of Grupo Orbis, Andres Bernal.

In addition to creating value from global and regional product and service innovation, the intended acquisition will enable AkzoNobel to better serve customers across more geographies, as well as accessing new markets.

Both companies also share a strong belief in the transformative power of color and a highly committed approach to sustainability. Its therefore expected that joining AkzoNobels Lets Colour program with the expertise of the Pintuco Foundation will provide fresh impetus for further improving the quality of life for people in local communities throughout the region.

 Worldofchemicals News
The graphic provides schematics for a process central to research to find new ways to restore human health through re-engineering the body's biomechanisms.

Effective diagnostics, therapies and treatments for diseases and infections could increasingly involve re-engineering the bodys internal biomechanisms at their most basic chemical and molecular foundations.

Growing knowledge about the bodys biological processes is increasing the possibilities for restoring human health, said Xiao Wang, an associate professor of biomedical engineering in Arizona State Universitys Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. He and a team of researchers are exploring ways to trigger and control cell differentiation and transition to unlock properties that may change bioengineers approach to diagnostics, vaccine development and therapeutic treatments.

Recent research led by Wang and Alexander Green, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Boston University, reveals more about the potential for designing small add-on structures for biomolecules that can enhance their properties.

There could be new and better kinds of applications for diagnostics, therapeutics and treatments, and for genome engineering, Wang said. These could be big contributions to biomedicine.

The details about what the research may yield appear in the paper Predictable control of RNA lifetime using engineered degradation-tuning RNAs, published in the research journal Nature Chemical Biology.

Wang and Greens focus is on messenger RNA, or mRNA, which carries genetic information from DNA, the molecule that contains the genetic blueprint needed to develop and maintain organisms  including humans.

Within cells, mRNA transmits messages from DNA to the protein-producing ribosomes, informing them of which proteins need to be synthesized at a given time. While DNAs status as the information repository of the cell means that it is very stable, mRNAs message-carrying role means it rapidly degrades. This degradation has made it harder to implement RNA-based therapies and diagnostics.

Wang, Green and their research team are devising methods of controlling degradation to produce predictable, precise and stable results. The new research paper describes how they are attempting to fine-tune the speed of mRNA degradation to boost the ability to perform biotechnological functions. To do this, they have identified specific RNA structural features to build a library of RNA components called degradation-tuning RNAs, or dtRNAs.

Attaching the dtRNAs to an RNA of interest through genetic engineering enables them to increase or decrease the RNAs degradation rate, and fine-tune gene expression levels in vivo and in vitro  either inside a living organism or in a laboratory setting.

We found that dtRNAs could be used with a variety of different types of RNAs and modify gene expression levels over a very wide range. These capabilities can increase the speed and sensitivity of medical diagnostics and give us better control over cell function, said Green, who was an assistant professor in ASUs Biodesign Institute and School of Molecular Sciences from 2015 to 2020 and is currently an adjunct professor with the school.

One of the more impactful results of these refining processes could be the development of mRNA-based vaccines that would be especially effective against viruses, Wang said.

These behavior changes will inform how effective Wang and Greens bioengineering process will be at boosting the efficacy of diagnostics, vaccines, therapies and treatments.

Wang and Greens research team includes doctoral students Qi Zhang, Duo Ma, Kylie Standage-Beier and Xingwen Chen at ASU and doctoral student Kaiyue Wu at Boston University. Former ASU doctoral student Fuqing Wu, now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, contributed to earlier research that helped lead to the recent discoveries.

Funding for research described in the paper has come from the Arizona Department of Health Services, the Arizona Biomedical Research Centre, US Department of Health & Human Services, the National Institutes of Health and the NIH Directors New Innovator Award, the National Science Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Arizona State University.



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This June 27, 2021, photo shows the scene of a multi-vehicle crash on Interstate 24 near exit 3 in Paducah.
Economy Minister Proud that such a skilled and talented workforce is here in North Wales

The economy of north Wales can look ahead to a stronger future, Minister for Economy Vaughan Gething has said on visit to the region.

Last week he visited the A320 production facility at Airbus with Minister for Rural Affairs, North Wales and Trefnydd Lesley Griffiths, before calling at Toyota which has recently benefited from Welsh Government funding towards plans to invest in new aluminium smelting furnaces which are more energy efficient, reduce waste and help cut carbon emissions  as well as a trip to Wockhardt in Wrexham.

Wrexham.com asked the Minister for Economy what he had learnt from his visit to Airbus and his thoughts over the future of the company in Wales, and as a multi national affected by global forces, what he as a Minister can actually do.

The Minister said, It was really positive, Ive never been to the Airbus site, it was my first visit to actually see physically what happens on that site myself. There will be ongoing conversations between Airbus and the Welsh Government about its future, and it is about making sure the good work carries on now. I got to meet the management on the site, and met the trades unions who talked about what theyre hoping to do  and they are fairly optimistic about the jobs they managed to safeguard on that site by working between the managers and the trade unions to keep the head count up.

They expect that there is going to be a further recovery in the aviation sector, because other parts of the world are open like the United States and parts of Asia, they are already seeing an increase. Theyre looking at the fact they still have got an order book, so theres still work to be done and looking to invest in the future.

I met apprentices who are still coming through, and there is continued investment in apprenticeships. So I really do think theres a positive future for Airbus, for all the jobs not just directly supported at Airbus, but of course the wide supply chain across North East Wales, but obviously across Northwest England too.

Earlier he added, Its been a pleasure to visit these two key companies in north east Wales today. There remain many challenges as we continue to deal with the impact of the pandemic, but there is much to be positive about for the future too.

I have seen skill, dedication and innovation in the world-leading sites I have visited today. At the start of the pandemic Airbus workers played an important role in the manufacturing of ventilators at the nearby AMRC, and Im proud that such a skilled and talented workforce is here in north Wales.

During the pandemic Toyota also provided PPE to the local community and provided land for testing to take place. It was good to see the innovation at Toyota during the visit and hear about their projects to cut carbon emissions and help make the plant more energy efficient as they work to meet their ambition of being net zero in carbon emissions by 2050.

We asked the Minister about more indigenous production, with his recent role as Health Minister seeing more first hand benefits of locally made PPE, and if as a result of that experience he was more keen on it.

The Minister said, Were definitely interested in how we maintain resilience, and how we both trade with goods coming from other parts of the world as well as whats being produced here as well. Wockhardt invested in their facility to deliver the vaccine not just for UK, but also doing more things to help with supply around the world as well. So its really important to see what they are committed to that site, and they want to carry on investing in the future.

Thats good news for all the workers who actually exist there, but also for the life sciences sector where Wales continues to punch above its weight. So, Im very interested in doing this as a sector where theres real potential for growth in the future, that does mean greater resilience. What we want to be able to do in both the world of healthcare, as economic impact, which Im very much interested in.

Minister for Rural Affairs, North Wales and Trefnydd Lesley Griffiths said: The skill and state of the art technology which we can see in the workforce at Airbus is something all of north Wales can be proud of. I am focusing on the recovery in north Wales as we deal with the impact of the pandemic, and with the skill and innovation which is here I know we are starting from a strong position. With the North Wales Growth Deal and other developments there is much we can be positive about as we look to a stronger future for the region.
Number of Wrexham school pupils self-isolating jumps to 1,900

The number of school pupils self-isolating in Wrexham because of the coronavirus has jumped even further over the weekend to 1,900.

It represents a rise of just under 600 compared to the amount of youngsters forced to stay at home reported by Wrexham Council on Friday (June 25, 2021).

The number of schools experiencing positive cases of Covid-19 has also risen from 10 to 18 during the same period, according to the latest figures provided by the local authority.

It follows Year 12 students at the Maelor School in Penley being sent home earlier today after a positive lateral flow test.

In a post on Twitter, the schools headteacher Simon Ellis urged youngsters to follow the rules after becoming aware of sixth form pupils attending parties over the weekend, despite some potentially testing positive for the virus.

He said: I am concerned to hear this morning of at least two parties having taken place over the weekend where attendees may have tested positive for Covid 19.

I request that if identified as a close contact by Track and Trace students must isolate for ten days.

The school needs to be informed immediately should anyone test positive on a lateral flow test or a PCR test.

I would recommend that any attendees at gatherings should be laterally flow testing regularly.

I realise the inconvenience, but as a school community, one case in a year group will send the whole year group home for ten days. This is having a significant impact on learning.

Public Health Wales has today confirmed 73 new Covid cases across Wrexham county borough in the 48 hours up to 9am on Sunday.

It represents the second highest number of cases reported in Wales, with Cardiff being the only area to have more in that period.

Meanwhile, the rolling seven-day infection rate per 100,000 of the population in Wrexham stands at 91.2.

The spike in cases has been driven by the Delta variant, which has particularly pushed numbers up among young adults and school children, many of whom have yet to be vaccinated.

In Fridays update, a Wrexham Council spokesperson said: The spread of the Delta variant in Wales and specifically in Wrexham continues to increase and our management of this third wave of infection is crucial.

Current spread is primarily within younger people and it is of some comfort that hospital admissions remain low.

Our message to families and individuals in Wrexham is that we encourage them all to become vaccinated, whether that be their first vaccine, or their second.

Our progress out of this pandemic depends on achieving the greatest level of vaccination amongst our population so that further steps to recovery can be progressed.

By Liam Randall  BBC Local Democracy Reporter
Unions question Welsh Government proposals to localise decisions over covid-19 safety measures in schools

Education unions have questioned plans by the Welsh Government to localise decisions over coronavirus safety measures in schools.

Currently all education settings in Wales follow national guidance in terms of face masks, social distancing, hygiene measures, the use of lateral flow tests and self-isolation for bubbles.

However yesterday newly appointed Education Minister Jeremy Miles said there is a need to move to a more localised approach rather than a blanket approach as Wales moves towards the next stage of the pandemic.

The minister said that whilst education settings will not be back to normal by September, the Welsh Government will look to gradually ease the extraordinary measures weve had to put in place.

A new framework will be published which will allow an escalation or de-escalation of measures, such as testing the use of face coverings, and social distancing.

These decisions would be made by local incident management teams and do not mean that safety measures can be scrapped altogether.

Mr Miles said the framework will also look at best practice across Wales to ensure that we do not have a disproportionate number of learners self isolating.

He said the proposals would aim to reduce the disproportionate number of learners having to self-isolate by ensuring that settings distinguish between bubbles on the one hand and personal contact with cases on the other.

Currently around 1,900 school pupils are currently self-isolating in Wrexham following a rise in coronavirus cases in the county.

Changes wont mean a wholesale removal of Covid measures but are about schools being able to make decisions based on the balance of harms and minimising disruption to learning all within the wider context of our successful vaccine program and relatively low case numbers.

Speaking at a press conference yesterday the minister said: Our guiding principle has to be a move towards education being enabled to operate as normally as possible in the autumn.

The framework will set out a range of safety measures depending on the risk category based on low, moderate, high and very high risk categories.

In the spirit of social partnership we are sharing draft frameworks with partners this week to be further developed between now and the end of term.

The framework will allow escalation or de-escalation of measures such as testing, the use of face coverings and social distancing. It will apply to schools, colleges and universities and follows the approach already modelled in care homes.

While class or year bubbles have played an important role over the last year, we need to ensure that settings distinguish between bubbles on the one hand and personal contact with cases on the other.

Linked to this we want to discuss how settings can return to the usual session times as opposed to having staggered start and finish times as currently in place.

These changes do not mean a wholesale removal of mitigating measures but they are about our schools, colleges and universities being able to make decisions based on the balance of harms and minimising disruption to learning all within the wider context of our successful vaccine program and relatively low case numbers.

However Eithne Hughes, Director of ASCL Cymru, said Mr Miles suspects some schools in Wales are guilty of sending home large numbers of young people to self-isolate unnecessarily.

The very last thing any school leader wants to do is to now have learners lose any more time in the classroom following the significant disruption to education they have experienced over the course of the last 16 months, she said.

Schools take their responsibilities very seriously and are not trigger-happy when dealing with issues where learners have been in close contact with positive Covid cases.

They are following the advice and safe practice guidelines from the experts at the Test, Track and Protect team and Public Health Wales to the letter.

Director of school leaders union, NAHT Cymru, Laura Doel, said they want to see an end to restrictions on social distancing in schools as soon a possible.

However she described the plan to do away with class bubbles but retain a requirement for schools to identify close contacts of pupils is impractical.

Laura said: For self-isolation purposes, schools would be expected to provide intelligence to the contact tracers at Public Health Wales.

This would include knowing who they were near in school as well as when being dropped-off and picked up. Welsh government needs to be realistic about what is actually possible here.

She also said the proposed ending of staggered start and finish times, such as lunches and breaks, is premature and would have an impact on a schools ability to carry out a host of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), such as enabling staff to clean rooms and equipment with sanitiser.

Laura added: In addition, theres as yet no clarity on face-coverings among these measures for September. The reality is that this halfway house approach could create as many problems as it solves.

The Welsh government also needs to be realistic about what the data is telling them and the level of protection school staff currently have.

The Minister accepts there has been an increase in cases linked to the Delta variant and acknowledges that it may not be until the end of September that all education staff will have had the chance to take up the offer of a second jab.
For the first time, officers are officially out patrolling with mental health professionals at their side. The newly launched program is called "partners in care" and News 4's Carley Gordon joins us to explain how it works.
There is growing sentiment among Mack-Volvo workers in Pennsylvania and Maryland and auto industry workers for joint action to support their brothers and sisters now in the fourth week of their strike at Volvo Trucks New River Valley (NRV) plant in Dublin, Virginia.

Workers at the Macungie, Pennsylvania, Mack plant, who are members of United Auto Workers Local 677, are outraged because cabs painted by strikebreakers in Virginia are being shipped to their plant. The Sweden-based multinational bought Mack trucks in 2001 and assembles all its heavy-duty Mack trucks for the North American and export markets at the Macungie plant near Allentown. This includes models with sleeper cabs built by a third-party contractor and currently being painted by strikebreakers at NRV.

United Auto Workers International and Local 677 officials have opposed calls by the Mack workers for joint action against Volvo, even though parts shortages have already led to temporary layoffs. The UAW sold out a 12-day strike by 3,600 Mack workers in 2019 and keeps Volvo workers at NRV and Mack Council workers in Pennsylvania, Maryland and other states under separate agreements with different expiration dates. This enables Volvo to whipsaw workers against each other, shifting production between the facilities based on wherever the UAW can lower labor costs the most.

Striking Mack workers in Allentown, Pennsylvania in 2019 (WSWS Media)

Aware of the anger over handling scab parts and growing sentiment for collective action in solidarity with the NRV strikers, UAW 677 posted a notice Monday, which read: As the NRV strike continues, our brothers and sisters at Local 2069 need our support. Far from calling the workers out or even calling for a ban on handling scab parts, the Local 677 officials instruct workers to donate money to striking Volvo workers during the general membership meeting Thursday at the local union hall.

While workers will no doubt gladly contribute, even though they are facing the loss of income due to temporary layoffs, it is the UAW which is fully responsible for the precarious economic situation facing striking Volvo workers. Even though the UAW sits on a strike fund worth nearly $800 million, it has put workers on starvation rations of $275 a week in strike benefits. While strikers face destitution, the UAWs newly installed president, Ray Curry, who negotiated the two wage- and benefit-cutting deals overwhelmingly rejected by Volvo workers, is expected to get a hefty pay bump from his current salary of $236,600, or $4,538 a week.

Leaflet from UAW Local 677 posted Tuesday

We should not be handling any parts that come from NRV, a Macungie worker told the World Socialist Web Site. That would really screw Volvo. Right now, Mack workers are thinking, Should I stick with my brothers at NRV and face the consequences from the bosses or do I just wait and see what is going to happen?

The Macungie plant is working this week and off next week. Hagerstown is going to be down from July 5 to 23. There are at least 1,700 Mack trucks in the float, which are incomplete because of the lack of microchips and the impact of the strike. If all the Mack workers acted together with the NRV workers, Volvo would be screwed. Right now, NRV is on strike, but Macungie and Hagerstown are still making the company money. If we werent running it would really hit the shareholders where it hurts.

The UAW is not telling us anything. During the strike in 2019, our local union didnt give us any information until they got a tentative agreement. We should have stayed out longer than two weeks and stayed out along with the GM workers. The UAW added a signing bonus and a little money to get the contract through but in the end, we lost much more.

We thought with the exposure of the corruption scheme that the executive board would have to make some changes. But now theyve got Curry in charge, the same guy who sold out our strike in 2019. Weve given up so much as workers. Its time for all of us, Volvo, Mack, GM, Ford, Chrysler, to stick together. We have to get the information out and start rank-and-file committees in Allentown, Hagerstown and all the facilities in the Mack Council, just like the NRV workers did.

In his statement accepting the top post at the UAW, Curry said, As president, I pledge to continue to build upon our commitment to a culture of transparency, reforms and checks and balances. In fact, Curry is doing everything to conceal the deal the UAW is working out with Volvo in ongoing negotiations in Charlotte, North Carolina. The UAW has released no information about the talks, which are joint labor-management sessions to figure out the best strategy to beat back the resistance of Volvo workers who have already decisively rejected two pro-company contract proposals signed by Curry.

At the same time, the UAW has imposed a news blackout on the strike to prevent other autoworkers from learning about and backing this critical struggle. But unlike the countless other struggles isolated and sold out by the UAW and other unions, this battle has a different character because the Virginia workers have formed the Volvo Workers Rank-and-File Committee, which functions as a real leadership of the workers. Earlier this month, the Volvo Workers Rank-and-File Committee issued a powerful open letter to the UAW which demanded joint action, beginning with Mack-Volvo workers to shut down Volvos operations.

In opposition to the UAW news blackout of the strike, campaigners from the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter spoke to autoworkers in Chicago and Detroit over the weekend and distributed the statement, Autoworkers: Form rank-and-file solidarity committees to break the isolation of the strike at Volvo Trucks!

An autoworker in the Ford Chicago Assembly Plant (CAP) told the WSWS, I was reading the last article on Volvo. Its uplifting to hear the stand they have taken, but sad to hear how the UAW is only giving $275 for support of the matter. Its even worse to keep their strike covered up, in an attempt to keep all other plants in the dark. I believe this is needed and will hit the CAP soon. We just got to get someone to lead the charge.

Chicago Ford worker (WSWS Media)

They definitely should get more, said Devon, another Chicago Ford worker, when he heard about the poverty strike pay of $275 a week for Volvo workers. Especially in a pandemicin a pandemic when they have a couple kids and sick relatives. The strike pay is definitely not enough. What we face at Ford is pretty much the same thing. The type of work we do and the amount of stress we put on our body, we all deserve more!

Speaking on the treachery of the UAW, Mike, another Chicago autoworker said, Theres UAW management collecting millions in dues while everybody is still getting the same wages, and they havent taken a cut. I dont think that is fair. They are still taking our union dues. It took me five weeks to get a check. The UAW isnt anywhere to be found.

Mike praised the Volvo workers and the autoworkers in India who have carried out wildcat strikes against the spread of COVID-19 at Ford and other auto companies. We got to take a stand too.

Another autoworker, Anthony, had not heard about the strike due to the UAW blackout but gave his support once reporters discussed the issues involved. I didnt even know about the strike, he said. But I support them. I hope things turn out how they want them. They should absolutely get full income for their strike. We work hard just like everybody else. Everything needs to be equal.

A former autoworker spoke out in support of the defense of the Volvo workers: I was an automotive worker for 20 years before moving out of the Detroit area. I want to send a message of support and solidarity to the Volvo workers facing a challenging strike. Were all watching you and we all support you. You may not realize it, but youre standing up for each other, for your hometown, and for all of us right now. Dont give up!

I watched the steady decline of my hometown for three decades. We got eaten up as profits for the auto industry bosses. They told us if we paid for more of our health insurance, theyd keep the plants open. They told us if we gave them tax breaks, theyd keep the plants open. They told us if we slowed down our raise schedule, theyd keep the plants open. But they closed the plants anyway. They closed the Jobs Bank. They laid off thousands of engineers too. None of it was true.

Weve got to work together, across plants, across companies, and across industries. Thats the way were going to win. When we all agree that were not going to take any less.

We urge Volvo and Mack Trucks workers and autoworkers to sign up today to find out more about joining the Volvo Workers Rank-and-File Committee or forming a solidarity committee.
Beaumont Health, based in Southfield, Michigan, and Spectrum Health, based in Grand Rapids, Michigan announced on June 17 a plan to merge into one company and create the largest health care organization in the state.

Spectrum Healths Lemmen-Holton Cancer Pavilion in Grand Rapids. (Spectrum Health)

In an 8-page letter of intent dated June 16 and entitled For Michigan, By Michigan, the leaderships of the two nonprofit corporations elaborate on their shared goal of establishing the new firm to transform health care and coverage in Michigan.

Signed by the Board Chair, CEO and President of both hospital groups, the letter goes on at length about how the merger will improve health, health access and health equity, enhance customer experience, improve the quality, value, and outcomes of health care, make health care more affordable for the communities we serve and ensure the voices of team members and physicians are heard.

As health care workers employed by Beaumont and Spectrumalong with the public that uses their facilitiesare fully aware, these phrases are being used purely for the purpose of winning regulatory approval for the merger. The one thing that is missing from the hailing by the hospital executives of how great this merger will be for Michigan is any discussion of the financial arrangements that lie behind the agreement and, most significantly, how much they will be paid to oversee it.

Beaumont Health is currently Michigans fourth largest health care system with eight hospitals, 3,375 beds and 155 outpatient sites in the Detroit Metropolitan area. The organization has 5,000 doctors and 33,000 employees and annual revenue of $4.7 billion. Beaumonts current resources are the product of two previous mergers with Botsford Hospital in Farmington Hills and Oakwood Hospital in Dearborn.

Beaumont Health has a history of giving massive payouts to executives while cutting the compensation of health care staff and destroying long-established work practices. Last November, it was revealed that the hospital system paid CEO and President John Foxa signer of the merger agreementa $2.6 million bonus as part of his 2019 total compensation of $6.75 million. The bonus was prepared just as the deadly coronavirus pandemic was hitting Detroit and paid out as the hospital was laying off employees even as it received $866 million in federal CARES Act funds.

Spectrum Health is Michigans largest health care system with 15 hospitals, 12 urgent care facilities and 43 labs and physician practices in the western Michigan region. The corporation also includes the insurance provider Priority Health. With an annual revenue of $7.2 billion, Spectrum is the largest employer in the area with 4,200 physicians and 31,000 employees.

According to a 2018 government filing, Spectrum paid its top 21 executives more than $27 million in compensation ranging from $4.8 million to Director Richard Breon to $451,461 to SVP of Human Resources Brian Krupiczewicz. CEO and President Christina Freese Decker, who has signed the merger letter of intent, was paid more than $3.5 million in salary and benefits during 2018.

Beckers Hospital Review says that the tentative name of the new company will be BHSH System and the leadership arrangement will be Freese Decker as the new CEO and Fox staying on board throughout the transition with plans to leave the organization once the merger is complete.

The plan also calls for the headquarters of the new organization to remain in both Southfield and Grand Rapids. There will be a 16-member board with seven each from the former company boards plus Freese Decker and Fox.

The corporate media, Michigan political elite and industry experts have been quick to praise the merger announcement. The Detroit Free Press published an article on June 18 that cited Professor Erik Gordon of the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan who gushed, Folks should be relievedpatients and employees. This is a happy combination.

The Free Press added, Spectrum comes to the negotiations with a reputation for being well run and without major financial troubles. And because there is no market overlap between the health systems, there shouldn't be much concern about hospitals closing, major job losses or antitrust issues to snarl the deal.

Meanwhile, Representative Andy Levin, Democrat from Bloomfield Township, whose 9th Congressional District includes Beaumonts flagship Royal Oak Hospital, said, I am committed to preventing spikes in health care costs and worse patient outcomes, as evidence indicates can happen following mergers. I will not accept inferior care for my constituents in the name of consolidation of competition or growth of revenue.

The only published opposition to the deal came from the former CFO of Spectrum, Michael Freed, who said, I only see the potential for massive financial loss and added that the merger, which spans a distance of 150 miles from Grand Rapids to Detroit, will lead to a loss of local control.

Staff opposition to previous merger plans between Beaumont Health and Advocate-Aurora in Chicago, Illinois last summer disrupted the deal and caused Fox and others on the board to pull their proposal off the table. At the time, the World Socialist Web Site warned that, with the collapse of the deal with Advocate-Aurora, Beaumont management was biding its time and another merger deal was likely in the works.

The financial manipulation of the nonprofit health care industry by executives who collectively take tens of millions of dollars in compensation each year will again face opposition from doctors, nurses and the health care staff at both the Beaumont and Spectrum facilities. The workforce that has been responsible for the functioning of the hospitals and clinics throughout the pandemicworking under conditions which threaten their lives each daymust take forward this fight by organizing its own independent workplace committees fighting for a socialist program which guarantees free universal health care for all.

Only on this basis can the health care industry be truly transformed to serve the medical needs of the public and not the wealth-generating interests of a handful of executives and top administrators.
The Pacific Northwest of the United States and Canada is experiencing a heatwave more intense than any other that has been recorded in human history. The National Weather Service described the weather as historic, dangerous, prolonged and unprecedented. At first, meteorologists throughout the region struggled to grasp how a heatwave of this magnitude was possible. How could an event with a 1/1,000, or even 1/10,000 chance of occurring, take place now? The only explanation is that the consequences of human-induced climate change are creating a new normal for a region that typically experiences wet, temperate weather.

Salem Fire Department paramedic Justin Jones tries to stay cool after responding to a heat exposure call during a heat wave, Saturday, June 26, 2021, in Salem, Ore. (AP Photo/Nathan Howard)

More than 20 million people throughout the region are experiencing excessive heat. Seattle, Washington, recorded a temperature of 104 degrees Fahrenheit on Sunday, breaking the previous record of 103. Portland, Oregon, surged to an unprecedented temperature of 112 degrees that same day. This is the highest temperature ever recorded in the city. The highest temperature ever recorded in Canada was reached in Lytton, British Columbia, when the temperature reached 116 degrees. A number of cities further from the coast in Oregon and Washington have reached from 115 to 120 degrees.

This historically unprecedented heatwave has been caused by a heat dome. Layers of hot air have increased the thickness of the atmosphere across the region, creating a dome. The heat increases the thickness of the air, further increasing temperatures. Numerous climate scientists have noted that the movement of jet streams is becoming more abnormal because of climate change. Scientists hypothesize that jet streams are becoming more elongated, leading to more streams splitting off and spinning in place. The pools of heat intensify within the separated portions of the stream.

Heat kills more people in the US annually than any other extreme-weather event. Two deaths have been recorded near the cities of Kirkland and SeaTac in Washington. Both men drowned after diving into cold lakes to escape the sweltering heat. More individuals are drowning each year as temperatures rise because the shock of exiting blistering heat and entering cold water is often debilitating.

Masses of people have been left wholly unprepared for the heatwave. Only 31 percent of households in the Seattle area had air conditioning in 2013, although this rose to 44 percent in 2019 due to the consistent rise in temperatures. Seattle has fewer air conditioners per household than any other metro area in the US, according to the American Housing Survey. Only 34 percent of households that bring in incomes of $50,000 or less have air conditioners.

The failure of the ruling elites policies to contain COVID-19 has created a situation in which those suffering from the heat will crowd into libraries, stores and community centers turned into cooling centers where they will be placed at risk of contracting and spreading the more infectious Delta variant.

A substantial homeless population in the region is at risk from the extreme heat. The 2020 census counted more than 11,751 people experiencing homelessness on one night in January in Seattle, with 53 percent sheltered and 47 percent unsheltered. Portland has at least 14,655 people experiencing homelessness on any given day. These populations are especially vulnerable to the heat due to lack of access to air conditioning and shelter.

Agricultural workers are facing horrific and potentially fatal conditions. These workers already work through an average of 21 days when temperatures rise past what is safe. It is now cherry-picking season in Washington state, where 10 million pounds of cherries are harvested every day. The heat can destroy the crop, putting even more pressure on workers to pick them as quickly as possible. Federal laws intended to protect agricultural workers are usually ignored, since they cut into the profits of the enormous agricultural monopolies.

More than 100 locations across the Pacific Northwest have experienced record-breaking temperatures, dramatically increasing the likelihood of wildfires. The West Coast already experienced major fires across the region in 2020 that broke records. Last years fires were the worst in 18 years. The fires burned through 10.2 million acres, killed 32 people and caused nearly $20 billion in damages. This latest unprecedented heatwave will only exacerbate this crisis.

Extreme-weather events, driven by climate change, have increased in frequency across the US. The National Climate Assessment states on its website that over the last 50 years, much of the U.S. has seen increases in prolonged periods of excessively high temperatures, heavy downpours, and in some regions, severe floods and droughts. Record-breaking heat was recorded in the Midwest in 2012, and in Texas in 2011. The website also states that prolonged (multi-month) extreme heat has been unprecedented since the start of reliable instrumental records in 1895.

An extreme heat wave swept through the Southwestern United States from June 11 to June 19 that broke temperature records, fueled wildfires, and threatened to overwhelm power grids. The region has already had to contend with years of droughts. Tucson, Arizona, had at least eight consecutive days of at least 110-degree temperatures, breaking previous records. Phoenix also broke records with six days of at least 115-degree temperatures. Michael Crimmins, a University of Arizona environmental scientist, emphasized to the Arizona Daily Star that I think its really hard to explain this heat wave without having climate change at least in part of the equation. The Southwest was subjected to a heat dome very much like what the Pacific Northwest and Canada are enduring now.

The international climate situation is dire. The website Carbon Brief notes that between 1984 and 2015, human-induced climate change has doubled the area affected by wildfires. The average rainfall brought by hurricanes has notably increased since pre-industrial times across regions affected by hurricanes. The Mediterranean has continued to become much drier from 1970 to 2010 compared to 1901 to 1970. An increase in the magnitude and frequency of flooding has been recorded in Southeast Asia.

Climate change is fueled by the burning of fossil fuels by transnational corporations and the release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Dr. Michael Mann, distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University, speaking to CBS News, explained the issue bluntly: We will continue to see more and more extreme heat waves, droughts, wildfires and floods as long as we continue to warm the planet through fossil fuel burning and carbon emissions.

The nation-state system, which exists to defend the private property of competing ruling elites, is utterly incapable of reversing this course. The US ruling class is escalating the war drive against Russia and China, and is primarily concerned with what President Joe Biden called winning the 21st century. In other words, the ruling elite in the US is focused on placing the US economy on a war footing. Climate change is not of immediate geo-strategic significance.

The COVID-19 pandemic has starkly revealed that the global capitalist system, and the division of the world into rival nation-states, is totally incapable of responding to a predictable global crisis. The belief that rival ruling elites will cooperate to address climate change has been refuted by the past half-century and has no historical foundation of support.

It is not merely irresponsible to argue that such an international economic and political system can solve the global climate crisis; it is theoretically, politically and morally bankrupt. The intervention of the international working class on the basis of a socialist program without concern for national divisions is necessary to solve the climate crisis, halt the war drive, and put an end to the assault on democratic rights.
A letter from the president of the Champlain Towers South Condominium Association in Surfside, Florida, sent in April of this year said that damage to the buildings underground parking garage had gotten significantly worse since a consulting engineers inspection report two and a half years prior.

Ariana Hevia, of New Orleans, center, stands with Sean Wilt, left, on Friday, June 25, 2021, near the 12-story beachfront condo building that collapsed on Thursday in Surfside, Fla., north of Miami. Hevia's mother, Cassondra Billedeau-Stratton, lived in the building and is listed among those missing. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky)

While the 2018 report had warned that the decay of concrete and steel was related to a fundamental flaw in the original design and was approaching a critical point requiring prompt repair, a town inspector had informed residents that the building was in fact in good shape.

The sudden structural failure last week that sent much of the building to the ground early Thursday morning has left 11 people confirmed dead so far and more than 150 listed as missing. Rescuers have been using cranes, dogs, ultra-sensitive microphones and infrared scanners in the effort to identify survivors under the rubble of the 12-story tower. Little hope remains for the more than 150 occupants who are still unaccounted for.

The condo association presidents letter explains that the many millions of dollars in needed repairs had been a subject of frustration among residents: We have discussed, debated, and argued for years now, and will continue to do so for years to come as different items come into play, it said.

The April 9 letter was obtained by USA TODAY from a family member of two building residents missing since Thursdays collapse and made public on Monday. The author, Jean Wodnicki, president of the associations board of directors, survived Thursdays collapse, a condo association attorney told the media.

Over seven pages, Wodnicki reviews the major repairs that were pending. She noted that in the fall of 2018, as documents previously released by the town of Surfside show, the association hired engineering firm Morabito Consultants to inspect the building.

That report, which was signed and sealed by structural engineer Frank Morabito, stated, The main issue with this building structure is that the entrance drive/pool deck/planter waterproofing is laid on a flat structure. Since the reinforced concrete slab is not sloped to drain, the water sits on the waterproofing until it evaporates.

Morabitos report was clear and unambiguous. Acknowledging that his approach was different from and, in fact, in contradiction to the view of other architects, engineers and contractors who had worked on the building, Morabito explained the scientific logic of his argument.

Concrete is porous and unless it is protected, water penetrates through it to carry chloride solutions to the reinforcing steel causing corrosion. If not corrected, this will result in failure. If a slab does not drain, the pooling water will find the inevitable weak points in the waterproofing layer where minute leaks expand to concentrate the processes that lead to corrosion and failure.

Morabito continued, This is a major error in the development of the original contract documents prepared by William M Friedman and associates architects Inc. and Breiterman Jurado & Associates, Consulting Engineers.

His report acknowledged that the necessary repairs to this critical structural slab of the building would be disruptive and very expensive. Furthermore, Morabito explained in detail what had to be done, proposing a system that would assure that all water that penetrates to the waterproofing layer will be able to flow freely to the deck drains, resulting in an extended life for the replacement waterproofing membrane. This system also provides expert extra protection for the existing reinforced concrete structure and allows future membrane repair/replacement to be completed more economically.

Moreover, he made a blunt warning that if the problems he had identified were not repaired promptly, they would in the near future...cause the extent of the concrete deterioration to expand exponentially. Wodnickis letter confirmed his tragic prediction.

In another apparent confirmation of Morabitos concerns, Mike Stratton told NBC News that he was on the phone with his wife, Cassondra Billedeau-Stratton, 40, who was in their fourth-floor apartment when the collapse happened. She had worriedly called her husband to report that a sinkhole had opened up underneath the condos pool before the call cut out. Billedeau-Stratton is still among those missing in the wreckage.

If members of the condominium association were confused about the importance of taking prompt action in 2018, a large part of the responsibility for that rests with then-Surfside Building Official Ross Prieto, the building inspector who met with them to discuss Morabitos findings. According to the documentary record of the meeting that was released on Monday, the town official told the board that the building was in very good shape after reviewing the engineers report.

In an e-mail from Prieto to the town manager at the time, which has also been released, Prieto said the meeting went very well. The response was very positive from everyone in the room. All main concerns over their 40 year recertification process were addressed.

Prieto is no longer employed with the town, having left his position in 2020 and has not been available for comment other than to report via the Miami Herald that he did not remember getting the report in question.

Miami-Dade and Broward County ordinances require that all such towers obtain a recertification after 40 years. Morabitos report was the first step in that process.

Prieto met with the Champlain Tower South Condominium Association on November 15, 2018, according to NPR. The outlet obtained the minutes from the meeting and reported that Prieto expressed optimism about the condition of the tower condo. The minutes of the meeting reportedly include that Prieto had reviewed the structural engineer report and that it appears the building is in very good shape.

Champlain Tower South resident Susana Alvarez, who attended that meeting, told NPR that officials had reassured them their building was safe: I want you to know that in 2018, we had a board meeting. And we sat there with the town of Surfside. And the town of Surfside said to us that the building was not in bad shape, that the building was not in bad shape. That is what they said, OK? The structural engineer has been around for a while. We took out $15 million to fix that building at his say-so. No one ever, ever, ever told us that thisthat that building was in such bad shapeno one, no one.

Prieto has been working in the construction industry for several decades. According to public records on the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation website, he has been a licensed general contractor since at least 1991. Prieto received a license as a certified roofing contractor in 1996.

He has also been certified as an inspector since the mid-1990s. Prieto received both Standard Inspector and Standard Roofing Inspector licenses in 1997. His current Building Code Administrator license has been active since November 2006.

Notably, Prieto was the assistant director of building and zoning for the village of Miami Shores, Florida, when the Biscayne Kennel Club collapsed in 1997 during a construction project, killing two workers.

Prieto told the Associated Press after the deadly incident that inspectors had visited the project several times and everything was going according to plan. He added, From what I hear, this is just a construction accident. Accidents can happen. He also told the Sun-Sentinel that he had visited the dog track project on inspections three or four times.

Prieto was most recently working for the city of Doral, Florida, which is also within Miami-Dade County. He was serving as an interim building official, CNN reported. A county document listing Building Officials included Prietos name for the city of Doral. The list was last updated on May 13, 2021.
Over the last several years, news of a racial wealth gap has flooded Americas airwaves and print media. According to those pushing the concept, white Americans have a great deal more in all respects than black Americans, and that, therefore, race-based remedies tailored to upper income blackssuch as reparations, set-asides, and affirmative actionmust be deployed.

New apartment buildings are under construction overlooking Central Park, Tuesday, April 17, 2018, in New York. (AP Photo - Mark Lennihan)

These racialist politics share one common feature: They leave untouched the actual source of social inequality for workers of all racescapitalism.

The concept of the racial wealth gap, and the attendant idea of white privilege, have been promoted by academics for some time, but it is only recently that they have appeared broadly in the news media. An analysis of newspaper articles on the archive Newspapers.com shows that the terms racial wealth gap, racial wealth divide, racial inequality, and white privilege appeared 4,689 times in the 1990s and then more than tripled in the 2010s, reaching 15,758 mentions. Over the 2020sthat is, just the last year-and-a-halfthere have already been 10,658 references to these terms. By contrast, during the 1960s, the height of the civil rights era, they only appeared 4,560 times.

The deluge coincides with a massive growth in overall wealth and income inequality in the US and globally. The wealthiest 10 percent of US households owns 34.5 times more than the bottom 50 percent, and over the course of just 2020 they increased their fortune by more than $18.8 trillionabout $1.53 million per household, with far higher going to the super-rich. As the richest of all races have seen their fortunes climb into the stratosphere and their counterparts in the bottom 90 percent have seen theirs stagnate and crumble, an obsessive focus on race has emerged. It is being pumped into the veins of American society. The purpose is to transform a looming class war into a race war.

The argument that the racial wealth gap is the most salient feature of American society today is, to be blunt, a fraud. It is based on the tendentious selection and presentation of data. There is nothing about it that is remotely progressive or left-wing, much less Marxist, as those on the political right claim.

Before delving into the data, it is essential to underscore one point. Race is neither biologically real nor socially immutable. But when it comes to the creation of categories of people for the purposes of social analysis, it is assumed that it is. The data spin around the idea that there is some sort of clear distinction as to what constitutes a white household and what constitutes a black household, even though people have always formed, and increasingly continue to form, family bonds across these lines.

Each racial group in fact subsumes within it populations with extremely different histories. So-called white households may include the children of Appalachian coal miners, Soviet-Jewish immigrants from the Caucasus, Persians from modern-day Iran, Spaniards from the Mediterranean, Arabs from Morocco, the great-great-great grandchildren of American slaves, dispossessed Palestinians, and so on. So-called black households might include some of the same groups, as well as Caribbean islanders, individuals from the Indian subcontinent, French immigrants of west African descent, etc.

But census forms, surveys, and medical histories require Americans to adopt some sort of racial identity. The resulting data is then utilized to argue that race is the overwhelming determinant of social realityregardless of whether it is personally meaningful or significant in explaining any given individuals place in the social structure. All other factorssuch as language, culture, citizenship status, time of arrival in the United States, role in the labor force, and, above all, classare regarded as small change in the face of the concept of race.

The data

When investigating the racial wealth gap, mean and median wealth for different racial groups is commonly cited to demonstrate the existence of universal white privilege. Analysts and commentators draw on different data sources, generally surveys, the census, and tax records, of which the Federal Reserves Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) is frequently cited.

In 2020, the Federal Reserve published the results of its 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). The data were picked up by the media, with news articles on the findings appearing in many press outlets. According to the SCF:

In 2019, the typical white family had $188,200 in wealth and the typical Black family had $24,100 [T]he typical White family has $50,600 in equities they could tap into in an emergency compared to just $14,400 for the typical Black family and $14,900 for the typical Hispanic family The typical White families home value is $230,000 and the typical other families home value is $310,000. The typical Black and Hispanic families home values are lower, at $150,000 and $200,000, respectively. While the typical Black or Hispanic family has $2,000 or less in liquid savings, the typical White family has more than four times that amount [emphases added].

In the Federal Reserves ten pages of analysis of the SCF, typical appears 25 times. The use of the word gives the impression that the great majority of whites possess eight times more, own homes worth $80,000 more, and have quadruple the financial reserves of their black counterparts. This implies that white families are overwhelmingly comfortable and secure, and that they have tidy bundles in the bank.

But this is an intentionally distorted portrait of social reality. In order to arrive at it, analysts have to do several things. First, they attach to mathematical measures a social meaning that they lack. Second, they remain silent about the scale of inequality that exists within racial groups, and within society as a whole, both of which dwarf by many times the racial wealth gap. Third, they focus on strata of whites and blacks and make no mention of the absolute numbers of people that these percentages encompass. Because the white population is five to six times the size of the black population, even if lower percentages of white households are poor, in aggregate tens of millions of whitesactually moreshare the same level of social deprivation as the most oppressed minorities.

Returning to the question of the median wealth of white versus black households, it is essential to realize that the description of this value as reflective of the wealth of the typical or average white family in the US is deceptive. A median is a halfway point in a data set. When dealing with wealth and income, in which there is a massive chasm between the best and least-well off, a median is often a better measure of the overall situation than a mean (commonly referred to as an average), which is pulled upward by the super wealthy and extremely high-income earners. However, under situations in which there are very high levels of inequality, a median also hides more than it reveals.

Using the median, SCF data found that half of all white families own more, and half own less, than $188,200, compared to $24,100 for the fiftieth percentile division among black families. But what is lost by focusing on the median for the white population as a whole is the fact that among those who own less than the median, tens of millions of families own vastly less. Massive numbers of white households are not experiencing anything like this allegedly typical reality.

According to SCF data, the bottom 20 percent of white households18.6 million (using an average household size of 2.53, about 47 million people)own virtually nothing or are so indebted that the total value of their wealth is negative. Their reality is shared by the 30 percent of black households4.5 million (approximately 11 million people)and 20 percent of Latino households3.4 million (an estimated 8.6 million people). Using different data, economist Gabriel Zucman calculated in 2014 that as much as 50 percent of the total US populationnearly 160 million people at the timehas zero or negative wealth.

In other words, for the tens of millions of households that have zero or negative wealth, the racial wealth gap is a meaningless concept. It does not exist. Regardless of skin color, no one has anything. A more equitable distribution of wealth across the lower strata of racial groups would not pay a single bill for a poor black family, for the simple reason that you cannot divide something that does not exist.

The United States is a sea of multi-racial destitution. According to the analysis of SCF data by Matt Bruenig with the Peoples Policy Project, the poorest 10 percent of the US population is about 54 percent white, 27 percent black, 12 percent Hispanic, and 3 percent some other group. The next most impoverished layer is 42 percent white, 32 percent black, 20 percent Hispanic, and 5 percent other. And the third one up from the bottom is 53 percent white, 20 percent black, 20 percent Hispanic and 7 percent other. When one gets to the top three deciles of wealth holders, the racial composition begins to strongly favor whites. The largest imbalance exists in the highest tier. The racial wealth gap is primarily meaningful for elite African Americans, who are frustrated at being underrepresented where the vast majority of net worth is concentrated.

Looking at the middle of the wealth pyramid, white households whose net worth puts them in the fifth decile (the 40th to 50th percentiles) control just 1.5 percent of the total $93.82 trillion possessed by white households, according to the Federal Reserve. Imagining this tiny share could be spread evenly among all families in that decile group, it would amount to about $151,200 per household. This is $30,000 shy of the median wealth of white households as a whole, which is $188,200, and about 16 percent of the mean wealth of all white households, which stands at around $950,000.

White Household Wealth Share by White Wealth Decile (2019)

The fifth decile of black households possess only 0.9 percent of the approximately $4.46 trillion held by all households in this racial categorization. If we divided this share up evenly among fifth-decile black households, we find an average wealth for black families of about $26,760. White households in the parallel bracket, in other words, own about 5.5 times more than black households because African Americans are overrepresented among the poor. According to the racial wealth gap proponents, having $151,200which as Federal Reserve data show will be largely comprised of a partially paid off mortgage and a small retirement fundis an incredible level of white privilege.

Black Household Wealth Share by Black Wealth Decile (2019)

However, when we consider the privilege that accrues to the richest households of all races, the real stratification in society becomes evident. Today, the top 10 percent of white households control 74.4 percent of all the wealth for that group. The situation for rich blacks is similar. They have 70.6 percent of everything held by their racial category as a whole. Imagining that this is divided equally among the white households in the top 10 percent, each would have a net worth of $7.5 million. The equivalent number for black households is only $2.1 million.

Inequality is greater among black households than among white households. The average wealth of top white households and the fifth decile of white householdstechnically families that fall somewhere near the middle of the wealth pyramiddiffers by a factor of nearly 50. Comparing black households at the top to blacks in the fifth decile yields a difference of 78.5 times.

Looking at the data cross-racially, we also see big differences between the wealthiest black families and middle class white families, with the former being 14 times richer than the latter. This gives the lie to the claim that all whites enjoy skin privilege.

Fifth vs. Top Decile Average Wealth of Black and White Households (2019)

The gap between the wealthiest white and wealthiest black households is 3.5 times, tiny compared to what exists more broadly in society. But because the volume of assets at stake at the upper echelons is so large, such a discrepancy is intolerable to the richest African Americans.

Since the first quarter of 2020, total white household wealth has grown by $21.3 trillion and total black household wealth has increased by $1.12 trillion. Again, the racial wealth gap proponents point to the fact that white household wealth grew by far more than that of black households. But as the increase for both groups was driven by an extraordinary run-up in stocks, of which the bottom 50 percent of the population owns just 0.7 percent compared to 87.2 percent for the top 10 percent, virtually all of this wealth has been captured by the rich of all races. Of the entirety of the wealth generated over the course of 2020, the bottom half of the population shared in just 2.8 percent.

In addition to net worth, it is often emphasized that typical white families have significantly more back-up reserves than blacks and Hispanics. Again, an image of relative security is imposed on white families. But this betrays, on the part of the government analysts, journalists, and academics with six-figure salaries, a complete lack of understanding of how what most people have really stacks up against the economic burdens they face.

The SCF data show that the average black, Latino, and white families have somewhere between $14,000 and $50,000 of equities (including stocks, mutual funds, and retirement accounts) that theoretically could be transformed into cash in the event of an emergency. In addition, the typical white family has $8,000 in liquid savings compared to the typical black family with just $2,000. That is, white households, it would appear, have about four times as much.

But these numbers simply do not apply to the bottom 20 to 30 percent of any racial group, who own nothing. And four times a pittance is still a pittance. While some white households are in a better position to hold out against financial blows for a longer period of time, in the event of a job loss, unexpected medical bill, major home repair, or similar disaster, tens of thousands of dollars can swiftly evaporate.

A 2018 report, based on a survey also conducted by the Federal Reserve, found that four out of ten adults said they could not cope with an unexpected expense of just $400the equivalent of a set of tires blown out on a freeway or a flu test not covered by insurancewithout taking out a loan, overdrawing on their bank account, borrowing from a friend or family member, or simply not paying the bill. Among this group are tens of millions of people from all races.

This data took on a human face during the COVID-19 crisis in the form of miles-long lines of cars that appeared at food banks. Those queues were made up of families of all backgrounds who, it seems, somehow did not get the memo about their net worth, equity, and liquid savings calculated by the racial wealth gap specialists.

It must be stressed that the way the Federal Reserve measures net worth minimizes the wealth of the very richest, who are very adept at hiding their fortunes, while overstating the wealth in the working class. In its calculation of household net worth, the Federal Reserve includes unfunded pensions, for instance, of which 99 percent are promised to government employees. When the 2019 SCF data were released, analysts highlighted the fact that more white households tend to have pensions and retirement accounts than black households. However, as Gabriel Zucman and Emanuel Saez noted in September 2020, unfunded pensions are not backed by anything. They actually have no real value.

Conclusion

The overrepresentation of black families in the poorest strata of society is the outcome of historynamely, specific forms of capitalist exploitation for which racism provided ideological justification, including slavery and sharecropping. Historically, African Americans have suffered from horrendous forms of prejudice and discrimination, with many pushed into the most oppressed layers of the population as a consequence. But the origins of racism do not lie in the DNA of white people, as is claimed by the N ew Y ork Times 1619 Project, but in capitalism. The capitalist class foments divisions among workers in order to exercise its rule. All those who insist that the racial wealth gap, not the class gap, is most important division in society do the same.

The dire conditions facing masses of black workers today arise out of a sweeping assault on living standards that started in the 1960s and 1970s and was overseen by both Democrats and Republicans, black and white. The advances of the civil rights movement and mass entry of African Americans into industrial work in northern cities during the post-World War II era had just begun to lift sections of that population out of the extreme poverty and oppression of the Jim Crow era. For a short time, some black workers began to share in the rising living standards of the American working class, experiencing modest gains that were won through hard-fought class battles. But the weakening global position of American capitalism led the US ruling class to determine that such concessions were intolerable. While the South, where many blacks lived, remained poor, deindustrialization hammered northern city after city, such as Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Cleveland, which were home to millions of blacks. African American workers shared the fate of their class as a whole: job losses, wage cuts, collapsing property values, the destruction of whole communities.

But a narrow layer, including a black elite, shared in the spoils of the wreckage. In the 1970s, as the assault on the working class intensified, affirmative action, black capitalism, and black power in the form of black mayors, police chiefs, and school boards were part of the thin gruel dished out to the residents of Americas hollowed-out cities. They did nothing for the overwhelming majority of the African American population, but a great deal for a small few. The obsession with the racial wealth gap is intended to obscure these class realities, hide this history, and drown class anger in a toxic swamp of racial hatred.

Social scientists expend incredible effort to suppress the reality of social class. Unlike race, class is not a scientifically false category. It arises objectively from control over the means of production. There are those who own great wealth and those who labor to produce it. But in contemporary American sociology, class is, at best, of tertiary interest, important to the allegedly more decisive categories of race, gender, and sexuality only as it intersects with them. More often it is treated as essentially meaningless.

Trotsky once explained that behind every social categorization is a political prognosis. Those that insist that universal white privilege is the cornerstone of modern American reality demand more racial equity. In doing so, they reveal more than they intend to. In the original meaning of the term, to have equity means to own stocks. Indeed, this is what they are after. It is to be achieved by impoverishing a section of the white population, ensuring that poor blacks stay poor, and growing the share of total wealth that goes to the African American population at the top. Class inequality is not only to remain untouched, it is to be defended, deepened, and expanded.
On June 18, the death of celebrated California-based vocalist and lyricist Gift of Gab (born Timothy Jerome Parker, October 7, 1970) was announced in a statement. Tim peacefully departed this earth to be with our ancestors  He is survived by two brothers, one sister, many nieces and nephews, countless friends, and fans across the globe, noted a Quannum collective press release.

Gift of Gab, 2006 (Photo creditGohsuke Takama)

While the exact causes of Parkers passing have not been provided to the media, the rapper had been suffering from kidney failure for a number of years and receiving dialysis. In January 2020, Parker received a transplant, which allowed the rapper to perform a final time before live venues were shut down by the COVID-19 pandemic. [Parker had] been going through a lot physically for years and [we] hope there is some sort of peace for him now Another sad loss, commented independent hip hop label Mello Music Group, with which Parker had been associated, on Twitter.

Parker was a founding member of the San Francisco Bay Area-based Quannum (formerly Solesides) collective in 1992. Parker-Gift of Gab was one-half of alternative hip hop group Blackalicious, which released a string of critically acclaimed extended play (EP) and long-playing (LP) records in the mid-late 1990s-mid 2000s. Chief among these releases are Melodica (1994, Mo Wax), A2G (1999, Quannum Projects) and the LPs Nia (1999, Quannum Projects) and Blazing Arrow (2002, MCA/Universal). The latter album in particular introduced Gift of Gab and Blackalicious to a wider audience. In addition, the rapper has several solo albums to his credit.

Gift of Gab-Blackaliciouss best work exudes a free spirited and unpretentious quality: While the groups skill level would have been more than adequate to maintain a presence in the music industry in any number of formats, and to rest on their laurels, so to speak, Blackalicious consistently experimented and evolved their sound without taking themselves too seriously.

This quality comes through strongly in the first decade of the groups career in particular. Each song has a quality and sound distinct from every other in the groups initial period, 1994-2002. In addition to Parkers experimentations with wordplay and cadence, producer Chief Xcel deserves credit for constructing densely layered, upbeat and cinematic atmospheres in which the rapper performs.

On 2002s Blazing Arrow, for instance, Pitchfork reviewer Chris Dahlen remarked that the group crams in so much sound and so much life that listening to it is like going to a block party [or an] all-day concert.

Blackalicious, Blazing Arrow (2002)

In terms of sheer verbal facility, Gift of Gab lived up to his moniker. A 2009 comment in Pitchfork termed him technically astounding, capable of delivering hyperspeed tongue-twisters with an almost preternatural ability to remain confidently atop any beat of his choosing. Often enough, the production duties of keeping up with Parker were more than adequately handled by partner Chief Xcel, with whom Parker had been collaborating since the two attended high school in the Sacramento area together.

Parkers ability as a vocalist can best be experienced by listening to 1999s Alphabet Aerobics. The Gift of Gab rhymes with finesse over a minimalist piano loop, beginning each word with a designated letter in the alphabet, all while keeping pace with a gradually fluctuating tempo. While this concept in rap has been tried before, and Blackalicious regularly reprises such themes in later releases, one will not find this idea more ably executed than on Alphabet Aerobics.

This combination of talent and playfulness means that even eccentric numbers, such as Cliff Hanger (on 1999s Nia ) which stood out at the time, remain enjoyable today.

By all accounts, Parker was a humble and compassionate individual. Commenting on his colleagues death, manager Brian Ross remarked: He was one of the most positive human beings I have ever known and always looking toward the future. He was endlessly brimming with new ideas, philosophical perspectives, and thoughts about the future. He was always ready to learn, grow and engage in a deep conversation about things he was less familiar with.

However, one should not get too carried away. Much of Blackaliciouss output and Gift of Gabs solo work in particular suffer from a certain narrowness and shallowness that mar the hip hop genre as a whole. By the mid-2000s, a perfunctory quality was detectable in the rappers music. Already in 2004, it was possible for critics to remark that, while all of his music was pretty nicely constructed more interesting and fun production can be found virtually everywhere else across the hip-hop spectrum, and neither Gift nor the Chief seem very interested in exploring that (Matt Cibula, Popmatters ).

More was involved, however, than simply a lack of fun or a certain staleness. In the post-9/11 and Iraq war era, significant social and political processes were at work that required a more elevated, thoughtful artistic response. As the World Socialist Web Site noted following the death of a similarly celebrated hip hop contemporary of Gift of Gab-Parker, MF Doom (Daniel Dumile), for such topics to be tackled effectively, a degree of social perspective is necessary.

For Parker, efforts to comment on social reality usually rose no higher than generalized discontent translated into references to racial discrimination, as well as appeals to faith and religion. Inevitably, his musical and artistic conceptions wore thin.

On 2015s Imani (literally the Swahili word for faith), Blackaliciouss first album together since 2005s The Craft (ANTI-), the group reveals genuine chemistry in performance, while the music is skillfully crafted. However, the latter all seems to revolve in familiar circles, with precious little added to what has come before.

This inability to substantially address events during these years, the endless wars and invasions, the attacks on democratic rights, the corporate criminality, was by no means a failing of Parker or rap music alone. After the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, numerous artists and cultural figures retreated, either in resignation or accommodation.

The distorting and disorienting role of identity politics, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial meltdown and the election of Barack Obama, the first African American President and the supposed apostle of change, cannot be overlooked either. While never having commented directly on these events, Gift of Gab-Parker was inevitably affected and shifted by them.

In any case, Parker will chiefly be remembered as a consummate hip hop vocalist, as well as a sensitive musician who contributed significantly toward expanding the musics forms and aesthetic. Below is a selection of some of his more memorable work:

Blackalicious  Swan Lake ( Melodica, 1994)

Blackalicious  Alphabet Aerobics ( A2G, 1999)

Blackalicious  Deception ( Nia, 1999)

Blackalicious  Make You Feel That Way ( Blazing Arrow, 2002)
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio plans to move about 8,000 homeless people out of hotel rooms, where they have been staying during the pandemic, and back to shelters. The timing of the move is uncertain, but the administration plans to complete it by the end of July. The campaign will disrupt the lives and threaten the health of homeless people to make hotel rooms available for tourists as de Blasio declares, This is going to be the summer of New York City.

A homeless person in New York City (Anthony Quintano/Flickr.com)

The Delta variant of the coronavirus, which is about 2.5 times more infectious than the wild-type variant, now accounts for more than 10 percent of tested cases in New York City. It is on its way to becoming the dominant strain in the United States. Only 49 percent of city residents and 48 percent of state residents have been fully vaccinated against the virus. Moreover, vaccination rates for homeless people may be significantly lower than those in the general population, according to advocates.

Yet city, state and national politicians are prematurely proclaiming the end of the pandemic and removing all impediments to the generation of profit. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat like de Blasio, ended almost all restrictions related to the pandemic on June 15. Capacity limits, social distancing and information for contact tracing are now optional for offices, retail stores and other businesses. Shelters themselves are merely required to have residents wear masks.

It is time to move homeless folks who were in hotels for a temporary period of time back to shelters where they can get the support they need, said de Blasio at a news conference earlier this month. But many homeless people have continued to receive support at the hotels and do not want to return to shelters. Moreover, the Federal Emergency Management Agency offered to pay for the hotel rooms until the end of September.

I dont want to go backits like Im going backward, Andrew Ward told the New York Times. Ward was moved from a shelter to the Williams Hotel in Brooklyn. Its not safe to go back there. Youve got people bringing in knives.

Before the pandemic arrived in New York, the shelters were notoriously overcrowded. In some shelters, as many as 60 people stayed in one room. These conditions enabled the rapid spread of the coronavirus. More than 3,700 residents of New Yorks main shelter system became ill with COVID-19, and 102 have died, according to city data. But considering the inadequate systems for testing and contact tracing, particularly in the early stages of the pandemic, these figures are undoubtedly underestimates.

The pre-pandemic crowding of shelters, combined with the continual rise of homelessness, emphasizes that the existing shelter system is inadequate to meet the needs of all homeless New Yorkers, including those who stayed in hotels recently.

In spring 2020, the de Blasio administration moved homeless people out of the shelters and into 60 Manhattan hotels, many of which were in middle-class or wealthy neighborhoods. The residents of these neighborhoods soon complained about noise and claimed that homeless people were using drugs and urinating in public. A neighborhood group in the affluent Upper West Side area demanded that approximately 300 homeless men be evicted from the Hotel Lucerne. When the city developed a plan to move them to a hotel in the Financial District, residents of that neighborhood filed suit to stop its implementation.

Understandably, many homeless people prefer the hotels, which provide far better living conditions than the shelters. Hotel rooms have granted homeless residents privacy, kept their belongings secure and reduced confrontations involving residents with substance abuse or mental health problems. Its peaceful. Its less stressful, Ward explained to the Times. He added that if he were moved back to a shelter, Id just stay in the street like before.

The spread of the Delta variant of the coronavirus and the inadequate distribution of vaccines create the conditions for a health disaster if homeless people are returned to shelters or sleeping rough. There are people sleeping in shelters who are still testing positive and getting sick, said Giselle Routhier, policy director at Coalition for the Homeless, in a statement. Until permanent affordable housing can be secured, the safest option remains placement in hotel rooms.

Moreover, shelter operators have been able to maintain most of the treatment and counseling services for those without homes while the latter have stayed at the hotels. It is simply inaccurate to say that people arent getting services in hotels, said Routhier, in a direct response to de Blasios statement.

When he ran for mayor eight years ago, de Blasio decried New Yorks inequality, using A Tale of Two Cities as a major theme of his campaign and promising to reduce homelessness dramatically. Today, homelessness in the city is at its highest level since the Great Depression. During fiscal year 2020, 122,926 individual homeless men, women and children slept in the citys shelter system. The number of homeless New Yorkers sleeping in shelters each night is 39 percent higher now than it was 10 years ago, and people from every New York City zip code are homeless.

But these stark figures do not provide a full picture, because they do not account for those who do not sleep in shelters. Natalie Monarrez is a homeless woman who works full time at Amazons JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, a borough of New York City. Her hourly wage of $19.30 is too low to afford a studio apartment in Staten Island or New Jersey, so she sleeps in her car. Her clothes are stored in suitcases, and she keeps food in a cooler.

Monarrez maintains a membership at Planet Fitness gyms so that she has a place to shower and brush her teeth. She relies on fast food restaurants and retail stores for their public bathrooms. When businesses were locked down and their bathrooms inaccessible, Monarrez was forced to buy anti-bacterial wipes and use her car.

Jeff Bezos donates to homeless shelters for tax write-offs and PR. He needs to know that some of his own workers (without family or a second income) cant afford rent, she told Vice News .

The candidates in New York Citys recent Democratic mayoral primary scarcely acknowledged the crisis of homelessness. As of this writing, Eric Adams, a former policeman and former Republican, is ahead in the initial first-choice results in the primary election. Adams has made vague promises to provide housing for homeless New Yorkers, but these promises are as meaningful as those that fellow Democrat de Blasio made eight years ago.

Andrew Yang, the businessman and former candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, depicted homeless people themselves as the problem, alleging that they degraded other New Yorkers quality of life. No doubt he was appealing to the affluent and heartless residents who demanded that homeless people be ejected from their neighborhoods. That such a vile position is accepted within the Democratic Party is a further indication of its reactionary character.

The crisis of homelessness in New York City is a product of capitalism, which is itself in historic crisis. Homelessness cannot be addressed in a humane or meaningful way by either of the capitalist parties, which uphold the interests of finance capital and subordinate all other considerations to private profit.
In just over a week, mathematics students at Sydneys Macquarie University have already won the support of well over 400 students and colleagues for a petition demanding the reversal of an announced retrenchment of a highly-regarded mathematics lecturer.

Dr Frank Valckenborgh was told he was made redundant on June 18 as a result of a hunger games-style process. Academic staff members across the entire university were forced to compete for their own jobs, via a spill and fill process, as the management sought to forcibly retrench more than 80 full-time academics.

The campaign initiated by the Macquarie University Mathematics Society is an important stand taken by students, in the face of the refusal of the student and staff unions to fight the ongoing government-management offensive against university workers and students, which has seen up to 90,000 jobs eliminated throughout Australias public universities since the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

Screenshot of the petition to reinstate Valckenborgh (change.org)

As part of the deepening cuts at Macquarie University, the Faculty of Science and Engineering instructed staff that savings of nearly $6 million had to be made across the facultys departments, which include Physics and Astronomy, Mathematics and Statistics (M&S), Earth and Environmental Sciences, Biology and Chemistry.

Various staff members were told they had to reapply for their own positions and that between 26 and 34 academics would lose their jobs as a result of a ranking process. A further round of voluntary redundancies was opened also. The management calculated that staff, faced with competing with their friends and colleagues for jobs, would fall on their own swords.

The job losses follow more than 350 voluntary redundancies inflicted on academics and professional staff members at Macquarie University in 2020. M&S, for instance, was to lose four more positions in the current fill-and-spill procedure, on top of five full-time positions being slashed in 2020. University workers, already facing enormous workloads, would face even more difficult conditions, with the educational experience of students diminishing further.

On the announcement of the forced retrenchment of Valckenborgh, the Macquarie University Mathematics Society (MQMS), led by its president Nora Darwish, launched a petition to Vice Chancellor S. Bruce Dowton and the universitys executive management unreservedly calling for the overturning of his dismissal, noting that so many of us have obtained our degrees because of Franks commitment to education and teaching.

The petition states: He is a powerhouse of knowledge and imparts this to his students, his care for his students is indisputable and his teaching empowers students to reach their full potential.

Many students have made heartfelt comments on the petition about Valckenborghs unstinting contributions of time, effort and expertise in their education. Colleagues commented also on his generosity and scholarship.

Macquarie has cut far too many staff, enough is enough, was one comment. Another said: Frank is one of the most passionate lecturers out there and also an extremely knowledgeable, patient teacher. Rarely anyone will sit down with you for 2 hours to make sure you understand something!

A former student wrote: I was very fortunate to have Frank as a lecturer when I was an undergraduate student and have experienced his knowledge and passion for mathematics first hand. He was also one of my mentors when undertaking my PhD. I am so grateful for his erudition and unending support.

A psychologist who was employed at Macquarie University as Student Support Officer in the Mathematics Department for 10 years wrote: I had first-hand experience of the excellence of Dr Frank Valckenborghs lecturing & engagement with the students. Frank was always willing to devote his time & effort to helping students who had difficulty with any aspect of their Maths His commitment to the students is legendary.

This response is highly significant, going beyond the defence of Valckenborgh. The reasons provided for signing the petition reveal an appreciation of the need for education and scholarship, and disgust for the cost-cutting measures that have a direct negative impact on students education, both under-graduate and post-graduate.

In supporting the petition, students are seeking to find independent means of opposing the assault on the universities. A similar petition, signed by more than 900 people, including students and former students, has been launched at Melbournes Monash University against the effective dismissal of Dr Jan Bryant, who has been teaching as a casual in Monashs Art, Design and Architecture faculty for 11 years, during which she has taught thousands of students, supervised dozens of PhDs and published books, papers and essays.

Such actions everywhere need to be supported and broadened, through the development of joint rank-and-file committees of university workers and students.

Explaining why students are leading the fight to defend Valckenborgh, MQMS president Darwish told the WSWS: Our aim is to save his job. That will have a knock-on effect to save other peoples jobs. We want to stop the funding cuts to the maths department. Mathematics is the heart of any university.

I have seen four to five rounds of so-called voluntary redundancies [VRs]. With a round of VRs, everybodys job is under stress. It means no ones job is safe. Morale has been low, and I feel sad for esteemed professors being treated like an expendable resource. Its insulting to education as a whole. This is not how you treat a scholar.

We have had great support in the past week. Some people have said the most eloquent things. One comment in particular said: He made me love mathematics from a person who dreaded maths and almost got kicked out of class in high school. This person had mathematics anxiety and had problems with other professors and was looking at failing. Frank provided help, and the student received a high distinction.

We are overwhelmed at the response. People remember Franks teaching. Its relevant. A lot of the support is from people who are now working.

Its like they have targeted Frank. So many people took VRs Every day, MQMS are finding out about more redundancies. And we will not be silent and we will not hide the voluntary redundancies

I couldnt agree more with the World Socialist Web Site article on the cuts at Macquarie. You write: The proposals insist that academics must compete with each other in Hunger Games-style spill and fill processes to determine who will keep their jobs. Thats exactly true. Its traumatic for staff. Its like going through a war at uni. Its not healthy, and its not in the universitys duty of care to the staff.

Valckenborgh is representative of thousands of tertiary education workers who have lost their jobs, with the pandemic used as the pretext for a further pro-business purging and restructuring of universities. This is only possible because the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) has systematically opposed any unified struggle against the onslaught.

Instead, as the drop in international student enrolments exacerbated the billions of dollars cut to education funding by successive Liberal-National and Labor governments, the NTEU quickly offered the employers salary cuts and sacrifices of conditions, while still volunteering to accept the loss of thousands of jobs.

When outraged university workers opposed this falsely-named Job Protection Framework, forcing it to be withdrawn, the NTEU pushed through deals at individual universities to satisfy the cost-cutting requirements of the employers and the government.

University workers, as well as students, are increasingly disgusted by the role of the NTEU and looking for alternative means to fight the cuts. Another retrenched Macquarie University academic commented on the I support Macquarie staff Facebook site:

Dont bother with the union. They missed the boat at the beginning of this attack by going cap in hand to management expecting them to voluntarily submit to measures against their interests, which obviously they declined to do. If the union had shown some balls and organised actual industrial action straight away we may have gotten at least some of our demands met. As it stands, the NTEU has achieved absolutely zero in stopping or delaying the gutting of our Universities.

Typifying the NTEUs part in the job cuts, the unions Macquarie University branch president Nikki Balnave sent an email to members last week encouraging retrenched academics to seek an internal review of their redundancy.

Rather than providing an opposition to all cuts, the NTEU was once again herding academics into the dead end of appealing job losses as isolated individuals within the very framework that facilitated the retrenchments.

A joint public meeting of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) and the Committee for Public Education (CFPE), called earlier this year to discuss how to fight the cuts at Macquarie and nationally, adopted a resolution offering a way forward.

The motion demanded the basic social right to free, first-class education for all students, including international students, and full-time jobs for all university workers. It called for students and university workers to establish rank-and-file committees, completely independent of the unions, to (1) organise a nationwide, unified struggle to defend all jobs and basic rights, (2) protect university staff from unsafe COVID-19 conditions and (3) link up with workers internationally who are facing similar critical struggles against the impact of the worsening global crisis.

These committees will be a means of rejecting the dictates of the corporate elite and its governments and developing the struggle against the root cause of the attacksthe capitalist profit system itself. This requires a socialist perspective to reorganise society on the basis of social need, not private wealth accumulation.

The formation of such a committee is urgently required at Macquarie, and throughout all universities, to fight the retrenchment of Dr Frank Valckenborgh and every other university worker, whether full-time, contract or casual. To discuss how to join this fight contact the IYSSE and CFPE.
We are seeing the great resignation in health care. Studies show three-tenths of health care workers are looking for new jobs. We ran on adrenaline for a year, burning the candle at both ends. Now we are empty and have nothing but time to reflect on the tragedy. The many lonely deaths witnessed left us traumatized. We remember feeling scared, unprotected and let down by our administration, who didnt value us enough for a plastic gown. Every day a new direction and our lives, our families lives and our patients lives were caught in the balance. I will never be the same person as I was before this pandemic. I will never forget that management hid in offices and made decisions that I was not worth the value of a paper mask. I have never felt more strongly that nurses are not [considered] valuable. Every day I showed up and gave my whole heart to those who were scared and alone. I held their hand with empathy, knowing that their fate was inevitable. If you were a prostitute, a politician, a lawyer, a drug dealer, it didnt matter. I would care for you, giving everything I had. I am realizing that I am the one that is treated without care.

 Erin, a nurse in Riverside, California

The coronavirus pandemic has lasted for more than 15 months, severely impacting not only the physical but the mental health of the vast majority of the worlds population. While almost 4 million people have died globally, hundreds of millions more have experienced overwhelming levels of stress, loss, economic anxiety, depression, isolation and uncertainty.

In few other fields have workers been exposed to such high levels of stress as in health care. Health care workers, especially those on the frontline, have faced increased work hours, shortages of lifesaving personal protective equipment (PPE) and endless exposure to patient deaths. Large numbers of their colleagues have also died fighting to save lives.

Nurse Debbi Hinderliter (left) collects a sample from a woman at a coronavirus testing site near the nation's busiest pedestrian border crossing, August 13, 2020, in San Diego [Credit: AP Photo/Gregory Bull]

During the first year of the pandemic, more than 3,600 health care workers died in the United States, according to the ongoing study, Lost on the frontline, by Kaiser Health News and the Guardian newspaper. Nurses and health care support specialists accounted for the largest share of these deaths. More than 700 died in New York and New Jersey alone, the study found.

While the report outlines a shocking scale of death among health care workers, these statistics are not comprehensively tracked by the government, and the authors of the study suggest the true toll is higher.

Many of these deaths were the product of a direct failure of hospital administrators and governments to procure adequate supplies of masks and other personal protective gear, lack of mass testing and contact tracing, inadequate safety measures at workplaces, and refusal to implement necessary public health measures like lockdowns and restrictions until COVID-19 was successfully contained.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, essential workers are more likely to report symptoms of anxiety or depressive disorder, substance use and suicidal thoughts during the pandemic. Many current studies of health care workers are showing increased rates of post-traumatic symptoms among those workers caring for COVID-19 patients, with nurses being more often adversely impacted than doctors.

Psychiatrist Dr. Julian Lagoy at Community Psychology in California explained to Healthline: Generally, PTSD trauma is defined as being exposed to a traumatic event, such as a sexual assault, war, a car accident, or child abuse. However, the current COVID-19 pandemic has qualities that qualify as a traumatic experience as it takes a physical and emotional toll on many people.

In 2019, a review of available literature by The Journal of the Missouri State Medical Association found that burnout among health care workers was endemic even before the pandemic. After a year of exposure to massive deaths and increasing staffing shortages, burnout has certainly increased, and many health care workers are reaching a breaking point.

According to a survey by the Vivan Health website, in 2021, 43 percent of respondents considered leaving the health care profession in 2021. By comparison, at the start of the pandemic, 80 percent of respondents said they were likely to continue working in their field. Additionally, a staggering 87 percent of respondents now say that their hospitals or facilities are, on average, short staffed.

Data from staffing firm Aya Healthcare shows that such results are already being reflected in mass vacancies within the health care system. One year into the pandemic, permanent nurse vacancies have skyrocketed, with job postings at hospitals and health systems up 20 percent compared to the start of the pandemic.

These conditions are not isolated to the United States but are part of the international impact of the pandemic. In the United Kingdom, thousands of doctors plan to leave the National Health Service after the pandemic due to exhaustion and mental health concerns, according to a report released in May by the British Medical Association. The report finds that the number of UK doctors seeking early retirement has doubled, and 25 percent are more likely to take a break from their profession.

The disastrous state of health care is the result of decades of cuts to public and private health systems. Years of cost-cutting measures mean that the medical system has fewer resources to confront the worst global health crisis in a century. Health care systems in the US are both publicly and privately funded and lack proper coordination to treat the needs of society effectively and holistically.

Hospitals are still experiencing impacts from the virus with continued increasing staff shortages. In May of this year, Oregon State Hospital had to call in the National Guard for help with treating severely mentally ill patients. The hospital is chronically understaffed, by as much as 30 percent.

Despite a rising number of vaccinations, numbers are far below what is required for herd immunity, even in advanced countries. The more infectious and deadly Delta variant of the coronavirus is present in at least 80 countries, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). In the US, it accounts for at least 10 percent of all new cases and is probable to soon become the dominant variant, according to the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Rochelle Walensky. There exists the danger of new surges of the virus as the Delta variant spreads, as well as the threat of COVID-19 becoming an ongoing endemic lasting for years, so long as policy decisions remain in the hands of the profit-driven ruling class.

In response to the deadly, stressful and unsafe conditions facing health care workers, exacerbated by the pandemic, nurses, hospital workers, and other health professionals have gone on strike throughout the world over the last year. Recently, health care professionals throughout India have been on strike, including thousands of doctors, health care teachers and hospital workers.

Earlier this year, hundreds of doctors went on a 24-hour strike in Israel, midwives went on a one-day strike in France, and health care workers in Bolivia also went on strike. In May, 30,000 New Zealand public sector nurses voted to strike, while in Massachusetts, 700 nurses at Saint Vincent Hospital have been striking for weeks over patient care and unsafe conditions.

While trillions of dollars have been handed out to the major banks to weather the economic fallout from the pandemic, vital frontline health care professionals face death, sickness, burnout and poor conditions that have led them to the brink.

Health care workers worldwide have suffered immensely under the decaying capitalist health care system that was ill prepared for a global pandemic. It is time for health care workers and all workers to fight for a rational, science-based plan to suppress the virus, based on putting human lives before profits.

We call on health care workers to write in with their own stories about the conditions they face in their workplace. Contact us today.
Last week, representatives from the United States, South Korea, and Japan met in Seoul to discuss North Korea. While portrayed as an attempt by Washington to reduce tensions with Pyongyang, over the latters nuclear program, the discussions between the three are part of the ongoing war drive in East Asia, spearheaded by the Biden administration and directed against China.

In this Thursday, June 17, 2021 file photo provided by the North Korean government, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un speaks during a Workers' Party meeting in Pyongyang, North Korea. (Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP. File)

The US special representative for North Korean affairs, Sung Kim, arrived in Seoul on June 19 for a five-day trip, holding trilateral meetings with his South Korean and Japanese counterparts, No Gyu-deok and Takehiro Funakoshi. Kim, who previously served as ambassador to South Korea during the Obama administration, also met with President Moon Jae-in and other South Korean officials from the Unification Ministry, which is responsible for North Korea policy.

The trip was a continuation of the plans established by Presidents Biden and Moon at their summit in May. During his visit to Washington, Moon backed the US war drive against China.

The talks lacked the bombastic appearance that has characterized US threats against the impoverished North Korea in recent years. Kim stated that Washington continued to hope that the DPRK will respond positively to our outreach and our offer to meet anywhere, anytime without preconditions. DPRK refers to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, North Koreas formal name. As a minor enticement to return to talks, Kim and No Gyu-deok stated they would consider dissolving a US/South Korean working group forum, opposed by Pyongyang.

No said of the discussions, We wish to restore the structure where inter-Korean and US-DPRK relations reinforce each other in a mutually beneficial way. No also held bilateral discussions with Funakoshi, an indication that Seoul and Tokyo are further developing their relationship, under Washingtons auspices. The US sees both of its allies, which together host approximately 80,000 US troops, along with their radar and ballistic missile systems, as key elements in future war plans.

The offer of talks is not a turn away from the war drive, but instead, a reworking of US imperialisms agenda. Washington is attempting to de-escalate tensions with Pyongyang, as it focuses on ramping up pressure on China. The Biden administration is not ruling out the possibility of greater aggression against North Korea, but hopes that it can turn Pyongyang away from Beijing, to deprive China of its only military ally and buffer, which separates Manchuria from US bases in South Korea. These bases would be used to direct American and South Korean troops in an attack on China.

In this vein, the offer of talks to North is similar to Bidens recent summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, in which the US leader appeared to try to ease tensions with Moscow, in order to isolate Beijing from potential allies.

North Koreas Foreign Minister Ri Son-gwon responded to the US offer last Wednesday, saying, We are not considering even the possibility of any contact with the US, let alone having it, which would get us nowhere, only taking up precious time. Kim Yo-jong, the influential sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, stated the previous day that the US had the wrong expectations about dialogue with Pyongyang.

The US State Department responded to these comments, stating, We remain open to diplomacy and hope the DPRK will respond positively to our efforts of dialogue.

There are some indications that Pyongyang may, in fact, be considering resuming talks with Washington. The trip by US official Sung Kim followed a four-day plenary session of the Central Committee of the ruling Workers Party of Korea (WPK), during which Kim Jong-un reportedly stressed the need to get prepared for both dialogue and confrontation. It was Kims first direct statement on the US since Bidens inauguration.

Talks between Washington and North Korea have been stalled since February 2019, when then-President Donald Trump met Kim Jong-un in Hanoi for a second summit. The meeting broke down, without any agreement, after Trump walked out. The first meeting between the two took place the previous June in Singapore, but yielded little more than a vague declaration. While Pyongyang made some conciliatory gestures, Washington flatly refused to lift any sanctions, unless the North agreed to fully denuclearize.

During the first summit, Trump issued an ultimatum to Kim, demonstrated by a short video showing a glamorized and fictitious North Korean future if Kim moved closer to the US. At the same time, the movie contained images of the US launching military strikes on North Korea, effectively telling Kim these were his only two choices.

Having been in the crosshairs of US imperialism for decades, the Stalinist regime in North Korea is well aware of what happened to countries like Iraq and Libya that have previously tried to make deals with Washington. Pyongyang regards its nuclear weapon and missile programs as crucial bargaining chips in negotiations, and a means of preventing military attack.

US demand for complete North Korean denuclearization as the precondition for any significant easing of crippling sanctions, has resulted in the breakdown of deals under multiple American administrations.

Sung Kim also made clear that Washington would continue to uphold the sanctions regime against Pyongyang. He also made a barely veiled criticism of China: We will also urge all UN member states, especially UN Security Council members, to do the same, to address the threat posed to the international community by the DPRK. Washington has regularly accused China of violating the sanctions in its trade relations with North Korea.

For the time being, Pyongyang and Beijing are making a show of solidarity. On June 21, Rodong Sinmun, the official paper of the WPK, published an op-ed by Chinese Ambassador to North Korea Li Jinjun, that emphasized cooperation between Beijing and Pyongyang.

China and North Korea know the importance of peace, as they have gone through suffering together, Li wrote. China and North Korea will actively contribute to regional peace, stability, development and prosperity, while strengthening communication at every possible level, and discuss issues necessary for long-term stability. North Koreas Ambassador to Beijing Ri Ryong-nam published a similar op-ed in the Chinese Communist Partys paper, the Peoples Daily.

US machinations in East Asia are not aimed at bringing peace and stability to the region, as Washington so often claims. Whatever offers it is willing to make to North Korea are based on its calculations for maintaining hegemony in the region. The danger remains of a catastrophic war, if Pyongyang does not bend to the will of US imperialism.
New Zealands maritime security is facing a host of rising threats, according to a strategy paper recently released by the Labour-Green Party government.

The 40-page document, Maritime Security StrategyGuardianship of Aotearoa New Zealands Maritime Waters, was officially launched on June 17 at a conference hosted by the Victoria University of Wellington (VUW) Centre for Strategic Studies, following its publication in December by the Ministry of Transport.

Royal New Zealand Navy (Wikimedia Commons)

The strategy requires the countrys maritime security systems to step up in line with the governments major Strategic Defence Policy Statement, published in 2018. That paper lined up with US preparations for war, singling out China and Russia for the first time as the principal threats to the international community.

The new security document voices alarm over pressures in the South Pacific and Southern Oceans, and says New Zealands maritime security is increasingly stressed by geopolitical tensions, transnational crime, illegal fishing, and rising seas. Among the alleged risks are a weakening of the law of the sea, threats to global supply chains, and escalating migration due to climate change.

The strategy stresses the need to reduce and prevent malicious and negligent actors using the maritime environment to undermine national security interests and objectives. This is really about defending New Zealands interests as a minor imperialist power in the Pacific region. New Zealand exercises colonial or semi-colonial influence over several island states, including Tonga, Samoa, the Cook Islands, Niue, Tuvalu and Kiribati. Wellington increasingly views Chinas economic influence as a threat to its own interests.

Thus the document states that a proliferation of actors in the Pacific could impact New Zealands role as a partner of choice within the region. Some actors may support or complement our interests, while others may undermine them, it warns. The paper builds on the governments Pacific Reset policy, launched in 2018 to drive New Zealands re-engagement with the region and push back against China, while strengthening the military alliance with Washington.

While not naming China, the Maritime Security Strategy cites the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and refers to unspecified efforts to frustrate the current norms and behaviours that in turn threaten the integrity of the maritime rules-based order. This echoes the US denunciations of Chinas actions in the South China and East China Seas, which have served as the pretext for war preparations by Washington and its allies.

In fact, the major threat to global order is US imperialism, which established the post-World War II order, in which it sets the rules, to ensure its unchallenged hegemony. Washington now asserts its right to stage provocative military exercises and so-called freedom of navigation operations near China and Taiwan. Australia and New Zealand have fallen into line as a quid-pro-quo for having a free hand to pursue their own imperialist interests across the Pacific.

The document makes clear that New Zealand sees its interests as far-reaching. Maritime territorial coverage extends beyond the countrys immediate borders to include the defence and security of Tokelau, the Cook Islands and Niue, as well as the shipping routes across the Tasman Sea separating New Zealand and Australia. It claims deep and sustained interests across 30 million square kilometres of the Pacific and the Southern Ocean towards Antarctica.

Massey University Pacific security specialist Anna Powles told the VUW conference the strategys talk of state actors, which could undermine New Zealands interests, was a signalling statement about Chinas role in the Pacific. Chinese interests in the Pacific very much include maritime interests, she declared, pointing to an increase in Chinese naval visits since 2006. The Chinese Pacific fishing fleet had also grown by more than 500 percent since 2012.

The Maritime Security Strategy proposes to utilise diplomatic, military, economic, intelligence and law enforcement components to achieve its objectives. Deterrence has a big part to play, it declares, by convincing potential threat actors that the costs of conducting actions that impact on New Zealands maritime security interest outweigh benefits.

In practical terms, this means doing away with what the document calls fragmented and ad-hoc arrangements, and bringing together the full range of maritime agencies, under a lead organisation with a security, i.e. military/defence focus, with increased funding and technology. The areas itemised are defence, intelligence, fisheries, border protection, biosecurity, search and rescue and organised crime.

VUW strategic studies professor Robert Ayson observed that the deterrence objective would require alliances, given New Zealands limited military means. How in particular does New Zealand deter unwanted state-based adversaries? ... This actually means a heavy reliance on international partners, Ayson said, clearly referencing the US and Australia.

The Ardern government is already diverting billions of dollars from essential social services such as health, housing and education to modernise and expand the military for future US-led wars. A $NZ20 billion upgrade of the defence force involves the purchase of new P8 Poseidon and Super Hercules aircraft, specifically designed for interoperability with US forces. Ardern meanwhile has encouraged Washingtons aggressive positioning across the Pacific, including expanded operations by the US Coast Guard in the region.

Both Australia and New Zealand have boosted their military presence alongside smaller Pacific partners. Last November, Australia and Fiji announced a new Status of Forces Agreement, to facilitate joint defence exchanges and deployments. This followed Arderns own visit to Fiji in February, only the second by a NZ leader since 2006, which bolstered joint military training connections.

Following a bilateral leaders meeting last month, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he and Ardern were in lockstep in seeking a free and open Indo-Pacific, a peaceful Indo-Pacific, echoing US statements against China in the contested region.

The leaders joint statement was intended to assuage fears in Canberra that New Zealand was backsliding on its responsibilities to the US-led Five Eyes intelligence network. The Ardern government has been reluctant to openly denounce Beijing, as Australia has done, because of New Zealands economic reliance on trade with China.

Nevertheless, the release of the maritime strategic document underscores the increasingly bellicose anti-China orientation within New Zealands political establishment.
Washington ordered airstrikes against two nations simultaneously Sunday night, using F-15 and F-16 warplanes to rain an assortment of precision-guided munitions on two targets in Syria and one in Iraq.

Screenshot of footage of the United States military airstrikes on what they said were facilities used by Iran-backed militia groups near the Iraq-Syria border on June 27. (DVIDS via Storyful)

Sources on the ground reported five people killed on the Iraqi side of the border and one child killed and several other people wounded on the Syrian side.

Iraqs Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhemi denounced the airstrike as a blatant and unacceptable violation of Iraqi sovereignty. Syrias Foreign Ministry told the official Sana news agency that the air raids demonstrated the recklessness of US policies and the need for Washington to withdraw its aggressor forces from the region.

The attacks were answered Monday by a militia shelling a US base in Syria and threats by Iraqi militias of retaliation against US forces.

This is second such bombing raid launched by the Pentagon against the Iraqi-Syrian border region since the Democratic administration of President Joe Biden came into office in January. The first, against a target in eastern Syria, came just one month after Biden entered the White House.

That February airstrike marked the first such US bombing inside Syria since the end of 2019, when the Trump administration brought the region, and potentially the entire planet, to the brink of war with its drone missile assassination of Iranian Revolutionary Guard General Qassem Suleimani. It signaled to the world what Bidens vacuous slogan proclaiming that America is back really means: US imperialism is embarking upon an even more aggressive foreign policy under the Democrats, threatening the world with catastrophic new wars.

Ostensibly, both Mondays and Februarys attacks were carried out in retaliation against attacks on US bases inside Iraq by Iranian-backed Iraqi militias hostile to the nearly two-decade-long American occupation. In February, the Pentagon cited a rocket that was fired at the US base in Iraqi Kurdistans capital of Erbil. The latest airstrikes were justified as a response to militia attacks using drones against several targets, including a secret CIA facility.

One of the remarkable characteristics of the latest attacks is their failure to elicit any significant response or analysis, much less criticism, from within the US media and political establishment. A US president attacking two countries on the same day, in flagrant violation of international law and with no legal authorization from the US Congress, barely makes the news. Leading Democrats and Republicans both praised the action, with some suggesting that further aggression was in order against Iran.

Two decades after the launching of the Global War on Terror and the bloody colonial-style interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, illegal military actions by the United States launched without warning in any part of the globe have become fully normalized. While the Obama administration acknowledged six theaters in this global warIraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen and Somaliathe full list of countries and entities targeted by Washington remains classified under the Biden administration.

The Pentagons claim that Washingtons bombing and killing of Iraqis and Syrians was pursuant to its right of self-defense and designed to protect US personnel is nowhere questioned. The most obvious question is, if Washington is so intent on protecting its personnel, why doesnt it withdraw them?

In the wake of the Suleimani assassination, the Iraqi Parliament demanded the immediate withdrawal of all US and other foreign occupation forces. A year and a half later, 2,500 US troops remain on the ground, along with an unknown number of military contractors, CIA operatives and other personnel. A force of some 900 uniformed troops, backed by an unknown number of contractors are occupying Syria in blatant violation of the countrys sovereignty and with the express purpose of denying the government in Damascus access to oil reserves needed for the countrys reconstruction after a decade-long US-orchestrated war for regime change that has left it in ruins.

In both countries, Washington bases its occupation on the lie that American troops are there to combat the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. ISIS, a Frankenstein's monster created by US backing for Al Qaeda forces in Syria, was decisively defeated in Iraqin large measure by the very militias that the Pentagon is now attackingin 2017, and lost its last hold on Syrian territory in March of 2019.

The real reasons for the continued military presence in the region are bound up with US imperialisms desperate drive to reverse the decline of its global hegemony through militarism. The Biden administration, like the Obama and Trump administrations before it, made rhetorical promises to end the forever wars in the region, with the patent aim of directing the full force of Washingtons military apparatus against its great power rivals, first and foremost China.

They have all found it impossible, however, to extricate the US military from the Middle East, which remains a strategic battlefield in the confrontation with China, which has emerged as the regions number one investor and the number one trading partner for countries that include Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

This was spelled out last week by Central Command (CENTCOM) chief Marine Corps Gen. Kenneth McKenzie Jr. in an online conference held by the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank.

Noting that China depends upon the region for half of its energy supplies, General McKenzie stated: China's interests in the Middle East and North Africa extend well beyond oil. Straddling the world's major shipping routes, the region will remain key terrain in a geostrategic sense, long after weve completed the transition to renewable sources of energy. As such, it is one of the principal arenas for strategic competition between two systems with very different values ...

The eruption of US aggression in the Middle East is part of a global escalation of imperialist militarism. Last week saw the dangerous provocation by the HMS Defender, in which Russian forces fired warning shots and dropped bombs in the British warships path after it deliberately entered waters claimed by Russia off of Crimea. Far from seeking to ease tensions, NATO is now launching Operation Sea Breeze, a massive two-week military exercise in the Black Sea that Moscow has warned can lead to confrontation.

Only a day before the provocation by the British ship in the Black Sea, the guided missile destroyer USS Curtis Wilbur was sent through the Taiwan Strait, provoking protests from Beijing. This is the sixth US warship sent through the Taiwan Strait since Biden took office on January 20, increasing the threat that the sensitive waterway will become a flashpoint for a US-China military confrontation.

Meanwhile, the Japan-based USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier strike group has been sent for the first time into the North Arabian Sea. While the Pentagon has claimed its deployment near the Persian Gulf is to provide security for US troops withdrawing from Afghanistan, it is far more likely that its arrival amid the US airstrikes is no mere coincidence, a preparation for wider military action, including against Iran.

Any one of these regions can provide the spark for a global military conflagration.

The normalization of war has been joined with the normalization of mass death as the ruling classes the world over subordinate the defense of human life to the pursuit of profit, even as yet another wave of the COVID-19 pandemic drives up an official toll that already numbers 4 million lives lost.

In 1938, on the eve of the outbreak of World War II, Leon Trotsky wrote in The Transitional Program, the founding document of the Fourth International:

Imperialist war is the continuation and sharpening of the predatory politics of the bourgeoisie. The struggle of the proletariat against war is the continuation and sharpening of its class struggle.

The murderous pursuit of profits at the expense of millions of lives during the pandemic has exposed the essential antagonism between the capitalist system and the needs of humanity and provoked an explosive growth of the class struggle internationally.

It is this struggle of the world working class that provides the only genuine foundation for opposing the war drive by US and world imperialism. The burning question is that of a revolutionary leadership that can impart to this struggle a socialist and internationalist perspective. This requires the building of the International Committee of the Fourth International.
The following statement was distributed this morning to teachers picketing at Oaks Park High School in East London.

The Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee stands in solidarity with teachers at Oaks Park High School, fighting to defend colleagues victimised for upholding their rights to a safe workplace during the coronavirus pandemic.

Amid a second wave of the pandemic in January and with schools identified as a major vector for the spread of Covid, 26 staff members invoked their rights under Section 44 of the Employment Rights Act to remove themselves from danger and teach online. The schools headteacher and Senior Leadership Team responded with denial, intimidation and victimisation. Four teachers who took part in the Section 44 action had their employment terminated, including a newly elected union rep who was frog-marched from the school. The union rep remains sacked.

The stand taken by staff at Oaks Park High was part of mass action by school staff nationally on January 4 as tens of thousands of educators invoked their rights under Section 44 to a safe workplace. It was this which forced the government to make a humiliating U-turn less than 24 hours after Johnson had insisted that schools must stay open. On January 5, all schools were shut to all except the children of key workers and vulnerable children, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson publicly admitting that schools are a key vector in virus transmission.

Teachers on the picket line (with Keiran Mahon, centre) at Oaks Park High School (Credit: GoFundMe campaign for Kieran Mahon https://gofund.me/dcf61da6)

The impetus for the Section 44 action was mass opposition by educators toward the unions refusal to call strike action to protect staff. Schools which threatened to close were targeted for legal action and threats of fines under the Coronavirus Act. Some 400,000 members of the National Education Union (NEU) participated in an online rally, the largest online trade union meeting in history, as members demanded the closure of all schools.

The union opposed any strike action and instead advised that teachers could invoke Section 44 on an individual basis following legal advice. NASUWT, the second largest union with 400,000 members, opposed the calls for Section 44 telling members that if they took such action the union would not protect them, thereby dividing staff.

The January lockdown was used to dissipate opposition by the unions while they prepared, yet again, for another full reopening of schools as demanded by the government. Throughout the January lockdown, school attendance rose dramatically compared to the first lockdown. Early Years educators and special needs staff were forced to open to anyone who wanted a place and the definition of key worker was expanded so broadly that many schools reported 10-60 percent attendance, up to 10 times higher than the previous lockdown.

On March 1, just days before the ending of the lockdown, the NEU organised another mass online rally to impose the governments demands for the full reopening of schools. The NEUs only demand was a pathetic appeal to Johnson to stagger the reopening for two weeks instead of the big bang demanded by the government. Just 17,000 educators attended this second online meeting. Teachers were disgusted at the unions refusal to demand a full closure of schools amid high infection ratesat least 570 educators had already died from Covid. During the meeting, members insisted the union should ballot for strike action and were attacked by joint General Secretary Mary Bousted who declared, What is the right way to go ahead is to ensure school by school, that the return is as safe as possible. Given that infection rates are falling, hospitalisation rates are falling and given that the vaccine rollout is taking place, the executive agreed this is not the way forward. She insisted that no further action must be taken under Section 44, without the unions approval, which clearly was not going to be forthcoming considering they had deemed that schools are safe.

Oaks Park staff are victims not just of the employers. The unions created the conditions for the most militant sections of workers to be identified and picked off in preparation for the full reopening of schools in March, which the unions fully supported.

The NEU conference held in April did not raise a single word about the plight of victimised reps, including those in executive positions such as Kirstie Paton in Greenwich and Louise Lewis in Huddersfield, relegating their struggle to a fringe meeting organised by the victimised individuals themselves. Joint General Secretary Kevin Courtney made a three-minute appearance claiming the reps were victims of rogue employers, concealing the murderous herd immunity agenda of the government and emphasising the NEUs desire to work with school heads who were victimising teachers. We have thousands of workplace reps and many thousands of member reps and management interactions are good. Why dont they come and talk to us, our reps are experts, they want to talk sort problems that is what we do, if they have a problem they should come to us, he said.

The victimisations at Oaks Park are not just the actions of a local head, they are government policy. Schools have been kept open as the lynchpin of efforts to end national lockdown measures and drive parents back to unsafe workplaces. But there is a further chilling aspect to this policy. Newly released documents show that the UKs Cabinet Office asked the Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (SAGE) to model herd immunity through a resurgence of infection in young people. Schools have served as the test bed for this homicidal policy.

As more contagious variants of Covid spread throughout schools, data reveals major risks to children and staff:

 Child COVID-19 hospitalisations continue to rise, up +19 percent in a week to June 21.

 7 percent of all COVID-19 hospitalisations are children and one in every 100 child cases of COVID-19 are hospitalised.

 One child in every 30 at state school was out of the classroom on 17 June, including 9,000 pupils with confirmed Covid-19 cases, 16,000 with suspected cases, and more than 7,000 whose schools had shut entirely because of Covid outbreaks.

 Long-Covid is affecting 7.4 percent of infected children 2-11 and 8.2 percent of infected children 12-16

The NEU, NASUWT and other education unions have continued their collusion with the government to keep schools open, in line with the pro-business agenda of Sir Keir Starmers Labour Party. Staff at Oaks Park have protested the actions of Labour-run Redbridge Borough Council whose leaders have lined up with the sacking and victimisation of teachers. But Redbridge councils disgraceful actions echo Labours role nationally as a de facto coalition partner with the Johnson government.

It is time to organise a fightback! We urge Oaks Park teachers to break the stranglehold of the NEU and form an independent rank-and-file committee. This will enable you to turn out, contact victimised colleagues in other schools and unite with teachers and parents everywhere who are facing the same attacks.

In one recent struggle after another, including at British Airways, British Gas, London buses, the private rail franchises, Jacobs Douwe Egberts, Weetabix and many more, workers face union organisations committed to the suppression of the class struggle and the maintenance of corporate profits at workers expense. The same is true throughout the world.

The pandemic that has claimed more than 4 million lives globally shows the failure of capitalism. We appeal to teachers at Oaks Park to base themselves on a conscious struggle to unify the working class in every country against the common capitalist enemy, in the fight for socialism.

We urge teachers and parents who support this fight or who would like further discussion to contact the Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee and attend our public forum on July 10, 2 p.m. Click this link to register.


As a result of a brutal police operation on June 19 against a member of the Roma minority in the northern Bohemian town of Teplice, 46-year-old Stanislav Tomas died during his arrest. While video footage clearly proves the violent actions of the security forces, the government in Prague has declared its full support for the police and announced there will be no investigation of the perpetrators.

A video circulated on social media shows how a police officer pushed Tomas to the ground, holding him down for minutes with his knee on his neck and throat. Another video shows a half-dressed man hitting a car parked on the side of the road in an uncoordinated manner. The police officers who then approached acted with tremendous brutality against the man, who was already lying on the ground and obviously in a wretched physical and mental condition.

The second video, almost six minutes long, shows Tomas being pushed to the ground by three police officers. After his hands were tied behind his back, one of the officers pressed his knee into the victims neck for minuteseven after he was already lying motionless on the ground and the two other officers were no longer holding him. Terrible screams can be heard, which fall silent at a certain point.

A few minutes later the man was pronounced dead, after rescue workers tried in vain to resuscitate him. Another video has not yet been released by the police, according to media reports. It is said to document the arrival of an ambulance and may show that the victim was already dead. Eyewitnesses were expressly asked by the police not to speak to the media about the case.

The death of the Roma man is frighteningly reminiscent of that of George Floyd last year in the USA. The latters killing, in a similar manner by the now-convicted police officer Derek Chauvin, triggered a worldwide wave of protests. Millions of workers were shocked by Floyds killing, which they saw as symptomatic of police terror in the US and around the world.

Many reacted to the video of the death of Tomas in horror. This is the height of brutality, commented Roma activist Michal Miko. Last Wednesday, a demonstration against police brutality and discrimination against Roma took place in Prague, the capital. In Teplice, several hundred people demonstrated on Saturday afternoon after a memorial service for Tomas, and spontaneously marched to the local police station, where they chanted, Come and kill us.

Although the European media hardly reported the case, hundreds of people also gathered in cities such as Berlin and Glasgow for protests and vigils. The Council of Europe is calling for an independent investigation, saying the footage of the police action was alarming. Amnesty International is also calling for an investigation into the incident.

Contrary to the video footage that has emerged, which leaves no doubt about a connection between the death and the brutal operation, the security forces have denied any responsibility for the mans death. The General Inspectorate of the Security Forces (GIBS) said on Thursday that there was no evidence of a criminal offence and therefore no criminal proceedings would be initiated against the police officers.

There is no connection, supposedly, between the death of the Roma man and the actions of the police, according to an evaluation of police documents and captured images, as well as the autopsy report. According to the report, the deceased had crystal meth in his blood, which was the cause of his death. The coercive measures applied by the police had been appropriate, it says. A statement by the Czech police says explicitly, There is no Czech Floyd.

Immediately following the crime, the deadly police action was justified by the highest government circles. Social Democratic Interior Minister Jan Hamacek declared on Twitter, The intervening police have my full support. If someone breaks the law while under the influence of addictive drugs they must expect the @PolicieCZ [Czech police] to intervene; thanks mainly to the work of police officers, we are among the ten safest countries in the world. The leader of the Czech Social Democratic Party (CSSD) described police officers as great professionals.

Head of government Andrej Babis also justified the murderous actions of the security forces. When someone demolishes cars, acts aggressively and even bites a policeman, he cannot expect to be handled with kid gloves, he wrote on Facebook. The prime minister explicitly thanked the police in Teplice for their work.

Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis at the EU summit in Brussels on 24-25 June (Aris Oikonomou, Pool Photo via AP)

The dramatic incident is the latest in a series of brutal attacks by security forces against Roma. In October 2016, Miroslav Demeter, a mentally ill man, died under similar circumstances when he was arrested by police about 50 kilometres from Teplice. Again, the official cause of death was given as a drug overdose; and again, there were no investigations, let alone sanctions against the police officers involved.

In 2017, two police officers were investigated on suspicion of forcibly coercing confessions from Roma. One police officer was convicted but acquitted on appeal. Many cases of police abuse against Roma do not even come to public attention.

Of the approximately 300,000 Czech Roma, many live in Teplice. The town, which is about 75 kilometres from Prague, is considered a social hotspot, with high levels of unemployment. The Roma are particularly affected by this. In the Roma settlements, unemployment is often as high as 80 percent. Across Europe, 62 percent of young Roma are currently without work or education.

This minority is exposed to systematic social harassment and racist agitation. Following an amendment to the social laws in 2017, certain zones were defined in which residents are not entitled to housing benefits. This regulation is almost exclusively limited to areas with a high Roma population. In 2018, President Milos Zeman publicly called for Roma to be beaten if they refuse to work.

But the police brutality, legitimised and publicly defended by the government, is not only directed against the Roma minority, it is also a feature of the capitalist system, a social and economic order in which workers are exploited for the profit of a small minority.

During the coronavirus pandemic, the establishment parties have demonstrated very clearly whose interests they represent. Government head Babis is a businessman and the fourth-richest person in the Czech Republic. His party, ANO, forms a minority government with the completely discredited Social Democrats, which is kept in office by the Communist Party.

As a result of the policy of opening up the economy, the Czech Republic has at times recorded the highest infection and death rates in the EU. More than 10 percent of the population has so far been infected with the virus and over 30,000 people have died. As everywhere in Europe, the pandemic is accompanied by mass layoffs, rising unemployment and poverty.

By publicly defending police violence, and mobilising right-wing and racist forces, the government in Prague is preparing for fierce class battles ahead.
The Cowessess First Nation has announced that 751 unmarked graves have been discovered on reserve land that once housed the Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewans QuAppelle Valley.

This grisly discovery comes just weeks after the remains of 215 children were discovered on the site of an Indian residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia, and sheds light, yet again, on the brutal and inhumane treatment Canadian capitalism and its state have meted out to the indigenous population.

A group of students from the Marieval Indian Residential School (National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation)

Cowessess Chief Cadmus Delorme addressed reporters at a virtual news conference last Thursday morning, where he relayed details of the operation that has been underway to locate the graves.

The First Nation partnered with technical teams from Saskatchewan Polytechnic to begin the search in early June. Using ground-penetrating radar (GPR), the teams covered the 44,000 square metres that previously constituted the residential schools Roman Catholic cemetery.

Delorme said that there could be more than 751 bodies buried at the site. GPR registered 751 recorded hits during the searches. However, it is possible that more than one set of remains are buried at some hit locations. He noted that penetrating radar has a 10 to 15 percent error rate and that technical teams will announce a verified number of how many remains have been found in the weeks to come.

This is not a mass grave site. These are unmarked graves, he clarified at Thursdays press conference. He explained that the community will now be treating the site like a crime scene, with the goal of matching names to those in the graves and eventually erecting a monument on the site to memorialize them. On Saturday, a vigil involving members of the First Nation band was held at which 751 solar-powered lamps were placed on the 751 grave sites identified to date.

Memorial on the steps of the Vancouver Art gallery for the 215 children whose corpses were recently discovered on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School. (Wikimedia Commons)

The search efforts are Phase 1 of ongoing work within the Cowessess First Nation, guided by the communitys oral history, to locate the victims of the residential school system as well as other unmarked gravesites. These include unbaptized babies whom Church authorities refused to allow to be buried alongside those inducted into the Catholic faith.

Chief Delorme says that oral history indicates that adults were buried at the site, as well as children, and that it is possible people who attended the church or lived in nearby towns may be among the remains.

The Marieval Indian Residential School operated from 1899 to 1997 and was long run by organizations affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church. The school building itself was controversially demolished in 1999. However, the church, rectory and grassy plot of land that was the cemetery remain.

The federal governmentwhich at one time funded 130 residential schools across Canadapurchased Marieval for $70,000 in January 1926. The site is located approximately 140 kilometres east of Regina, Saskatchewan. On government orders and with the support of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Indian Agents, the Department of Indian Affairs representatives on reserves, native children, as young as five or six from across southeastern Saskatchewan and southwestern Manitoba, were separated from their parents and sent to the Marieval School.

Saskatchewan had the highest number of residential schools of any province or territory in Canada and has the highest number of survivors. It is currently known that 566 children died at residential schools within the province, although the single site at Marieval indicates that the true death count is much higher.

In the face of mounting protests by residential school survivors and native groups, the Harper Conservative government convened a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 2008 to investigate the abuse faced by First Nations, Inuit and Metis children at Canadas residential schools. The TRCs final report, issued in 2015, identified 4,100 children who had died at or while trying to escape residential schools. However, it estimated the real death toll could exceed 6,000. It also documented tens of thousands of cases of physical and sexual abuse.

An estimated 150,000 children were enlisted in Canadas government-ordered, church-administered residential school system during its more than century-long existence. This puts the odds of dying in a residential school as high as a Canadian soldier who served in the armed forces during World War II.

The youngest survivor to provide the TRC with a statement about Marieval attended from 1993 to 1997. Amber K.K. Pelletier wrote that during her time there, students had their hair cut by teachers upon arrival. They were also assigned numbers, and when staff were upset, they would refer to students by these numbers instead of their names. As well as the haircuts that Pelletier described, children were stripped of their traditional clothing upon arrival.

Classes at the school were taught in English and French; it is widely known that children were routinely beaten in residential schools for speaking their native language. Survivors that attended Marieval report that staff at the school were very physical with the children and that students were repeatedly slapped, kicked, hit and punched.

Residence at Marieval was enforced. Local parents were allowed to visit their children and take them home for a meal during the first few decades after the schools establishment, but this was disallowed in 1933. From then on, children were only allowed to visit their homes and families under special circumstances.

The school was overcrowded, something that was all too common in residential schools, which were often awarded funding on the basis of how many students they housed. Overcrowding, combined with malnutrition, unsanitary environments and other deplorable living conditions, made the schools ripe for the spread of tuberculosis and other often fatal diseases. Inspectors reports of appalling health and safety violations recorded at Marieval can be found in TRC documents.

Barry Kennedy, a survivor of Marieval, told CTV News that he cant find the words to describe how he feels in light of the discovery of the graves. Kennedy spoke about a friend he had made at Marieval named Brian, who was taken one night like everybody else and was never seen again. Kennedy wonders today if Brian is among those buried at the site.

Having attended the school from the age of five, Kennedy said that he was witness to frequent burials during his time helping the church as an altar boy. We were called to the church one early morning  we were brought outside and they were burying someone. Who it was, whether it was a boy or a girl, I dont know. But what I do know is that this individual was wrapped in a sheet and there was a hole dug, he recalled.

According to Chief Delorme, senior Cowessess First Nation members who are survivors of the Marieval school say that they were forced to dig graves for and bury their own classmates. Delorme also noted that formerly there were headstones on many or all of the now-unmarked graves, but that they were likely removed by Catholic Church officials at some point in the 1960s. This in itself is a crime under Canadian law.

Archbishop of Regina Donald Bolen commented that the graves were unmarked at least in part due to an argument that occurred between an oblate priest at the school and a local First Nations chief. According to Bolen, the priest took a bulldozer and knocked over huge numbers of headstones following the dispute.

On Friday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that he had spoken personally with Pope Francis and implored him to visit Canada and make a formal apology to indigenous Canadians for the Roman Catholic Churchs role in operating 60 percent of the countrys residential schools. The Catholic Church has steadfastly refused to issue any apology for its role, so as to limit its financial liability and uphold its claims to infallibility. The most Pope Francis would do following the discovery of the 215 corpses on the site of the former Catholic Church-run Kamloops Indian Residential School was to express sorrow and call for healing.

In his initial media statements on the latest discovery of hundreds of unmarked indigenous graves, Trudeau said that the pain and grief indigenous communities are feeling is Canadas responsibility to bear.

This is a despicable cover-up. The Canadian population at large is not responsible for the 751 unmarked graves in Saskatchewan or the 215 at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. Nor should it be blamed for the genocidal policies pursued by the Canadian capitalist state and its representatives during the process of Confederation and its aftermath. The dispossession of the native people; the deliberate starvation of thousands of indigenous people in order to force them onto reserves and create space for agricultural and industrial expansion across Western Canada; the subsequent violations of treaty rights and encroachments on resource-rich reserve lands; and the seizure and forcible placing of children in residential schools with the aim of killing the Indian in the child and transforming them into pliant wage-labourersthese were crimes carried out by the Canadian ruling class and its state, not working people. They arose out of the conflict between capitalist private property and indigenous society. Similarly, the appalling conditions the majority of Canadas native people face today derive from the requirements of the capitalist market.

All attempts to blame the entire population or white society are either aimed at whitewashing the role of Canadian capitalism or advancing the interests of a privileged minority of the native elite, which calls for reconciliation on a capitalist basis, i.e., the granting of positions of power within government and the private sector to a tiny minority of indigenous people while the majority continues to live in grinding poverty.

The hypocrisy of the prime ministers empty pledges to walk the shared path of reconciliation in order to build a better future is exemplified by the fact that the federal Liberal federal government is currently embroiled in judicial proceedings to overturn two Canadian Human Rights Tribunal orders regarding discrimination against indigenous children and their families, resulting from the federal governments decades-long systematic underfunding of child family services on the reserves.

The first of the two orders, issued in 2016, would widen the application of Jordans Principle, a child-first principle which states that First Nations children on reserves must not be deprived of critical social services in the event that Ottawa and the provinces cannot decide which level of government will pay for such services. The principle was created because native children were suffering and, in some cases, dying while governments wrangled over who would pay for essential services the state was legally obligated to provide.

The terrible oppression of the indigenous population will continue and deepen unless and until a mass political movement of the working class emerges, uniting native and non-native, in a struggle to overthrow the capitalist profit system and for social equality for all, that is, socialism.
NATO intensified its provocations against Russia Monday, with the launch of two weeks of military exercises in the Black Sea region. Operation Sea Breeze will continue until at least July 10.

The largest ever NATO operation in the Black Sea takes place under explosive conditions, beginning just six days after Russian armed forced fired warning shots and then dropped four bombs in the path of HMS Defender, a British warship that entered Russias territorial waters off Crimea. The US ignored a request made June 22 from Russia's embassy in Washingtonjust hours before the UK warship incidentfor Sea Breeze to be cancelled this year, with Moscow warning of the danger of military confrontation.

This weeks Sea Breeze manoeuvres, which have taken place annually since 1997, are the largest ever. Co-hosted by the US and Ukrainian navies, Sea Breeze 2021 will involve 32 countries, 5,000 troops, 32 ships, 40 aircraft and 18 special operations. It is being led by the Standing NATO Maritime Group 2 (SNMG2), an immediate reaction force which consists of four to six destroyers and frigates. A squadron of US Marines are taking part, with the main naval force involved the US Navys Sixth Fleet headquartered in Naples, Italy.

Ships and aircrafts from eight countries participate in the 2020 Operation Sea Breeze exercises (navy.mil/Ukraine Navy)

The NATO website states that allies and partners will participate from Albania, Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Denmark, Egypt, Estonia, France, Georgia, Greece, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Morocco, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, Senegal, Spain, South Korea, Sweden, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, and the United States.

2021 Operation Sea Breeze poster showing participating countries (Credit: navy.mil)

Last year Sea Breeze took place over just four days between July 20 and 24. with only ships, aircraft and personnel from the United States, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Georgia, Norway, Romania, Spain and Turkey.

In a June 25 statement NATO said, The exercise will focus on multiple warfare areas including amphibious warfare, land manoeuvre warfare, diving operations, maritime interdiction operations, air defence, special operations integration, anti-submarine warfare, and search and rescue operations.

Ahead of the operation, the missile destroyer USS Ross sailed into the Black Sea on June 26. Kristina Kvien, the Charge d'affaires at the US Embassy in Ukraine called this a tangible demonstration of US support for Ukraine and is necessary now more than ever. The statement noted, Ross, forward-deployed at Naval Station Rota, Spain, is conducting naval operations in the US Sixth Fleet area of operations in support of U.S. national security interests in Europe Ross is one of four US Navy destroyers based in Rota, Spain, and assigned to Commander, Task Force 65 in support of NATOs Integrated Air Missile Defense architecture.

USS Ross begins its northbound transit into the Black Sea (Credit: U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa/U.S. Sixth Fleet/Twitter)

While Sea Breeze was only formally announced this month, its planning has been worked out for months. In April, the London Times reported according to senior naval sources" that one Type 45 destroyer armed with anti-aircraft missiles and an anti-submarine Type 23 frigate will peel off from the Royal Navys carrier task group in the Mediterranean and head through the Bosphorus into the Black Sea.

The Carrier Strike Group left the UK on May 23 and the Type 45 destroyerHMS Defenderentered the Black Sea last week to carry out its provocation off the coast of Crimea, just a few miles from Russias major Black Sea fleet based at Sevastopol.

NATOs statement announcing Sea Breeze denounced Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, in response to which NATO has increased its presence in the Black Sea. NATO supports Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity within its internationally recognized borders, extending to its territorial waters. NATO does not and will not recognize Russia's illegal and illegitimate annexation of Crimea and denounces its temporary occupation.

The exercise began despite Russias warnings last week against further incursions into its territory. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said after the Defender incident, Over the past seven years, the intensity of flights of strategic bomber aviation of the US Air Force in Europe has increased 14-fold. He noted that seven joint military exercises with the alliance countries are planned in Ukraine in 2021 alone.

The war danger is being heightened daily in one of the worlds major flashpoints. Russias response to NATO operations on its borders has been a substantial show of force. Russias Defense Ministry said that its navy closely monitored the USS Ross as it entered the Black Sea.

The previous day Russia began its own large-scale military exercises in the eastern Mediterranean, where the main ship in the UKs/NATOs Carrier Strike Group, the HMS Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier, is located.

Russias manoeuvres involved several warships, two submarines, long-range Tu-22M3 bombers and other warplanes. According to the Russian Defense Ministry, two MiG-31 fighter jets capable of carrying Kinzhal hypersonic missiles, operating from the Moscow-run Hemeimeem airbase in Syria, practiced strikes on targets in the Mediterranean. The missiles can travel at 10 times the speed of sound and have a range of up to 2,000 kilometres (about 1,250 miles). The Washington Post reported that it was the first time the warplanes capable of carrying Kinzhal have been deployed outside Russias borders.

Russias submarine arsenal is also being massively upgraded. Last month the Russian Navy launched the Kazan, its first Yasen-M-class nuclear-powered guided missile submarine and the first of seven under construction.

This ratcheting up of Russias military operations follows the May 31 announcement by Defense Minister Shoigu that Vladimir Putins government will establish a further 20 military bases in the countrys west before the years end. NATOs continuing encirclement and operations near Russias borders would destroy the international security system and force us to take the relevant countermeasures," Shoigu said.

With the worlds attention focused on the dangerous events in the Black Sea, Russias military, including destroyers and fighter jets, also carried out military exercises on June 19 within 35 miles of Hawaii. According to the Daily Mail, these were the largest war games since Cold War and involved at least 20 Russian warships, submarines, and support vessels, flanked by 20 fighter jets

The Russian Defence Minister said that during the exercise, two detachments worked out the tasks of detecting, countering and delivering missile strikes against an aircraft carrier strike group of a mock enemy.

NATOs reckless provocations against Moscow can spill over into outright conflict at any timea danger the military heads of the major imperialist nations is well aware of.

Speaking at the Chalke Valley History Festival in England, just two days after Russia fired upon HMS Defender, General Sir Nick Carter, the head of the UKs armed forces, pointed out that such events could rapidly escalate out of control into a shooting war. The thing that keeps me awake in bed at night is a miscalculation that comes from unwarranted escalation, he said.

In an extraordinary intervention given that Sea Breeze was just hours away from launch, Carter, an anti-Kremlin hawk, said, The sort of thing we saw in the Black Sea on Monday and Tuesday is the sort of thing it could come from. It wouldnt have done on that occasion but its the type of thing one needs to think quite hard about.
Vice Admiral G. Ashok Kumar, vice chief of Indias naval staff, told Asia News International on June 17 that the China-funded Colombo Port City (CPC) project in Sri Lanka could pose a threat to Indian interests in the region.

Vice Admiral G. Ashok Kumar (Source: Wikipedia)

When somebody external to the region starts showing so much interest, even though they might have rational reasons to do so, it was necessary to keep a close watch on their activities. The Indian navy, he continued, was very well prepared to secure the maritime boundaries of the country.

On the same day, Indian external affairs ministry spokesperson Arindam Bagchi told the media that his government had been closely following recent developments in Sri Lanka, including the CPC, from a security perspective. He said that his countrys concerns had been explained to the Sri Lankan government of President Gotabaya Rajapakse.

Remarks such as these by top Indian officials are an open expression of New Delhis hostility towards Colombos growing relations with China. The Indian governments anger has particularly increased since Rajapakses administration pushed through parliament its amended CPC Economic Commission Act, which establishes a Special Economic Zone at the port development.

The CPC is a key component of Beijings Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a strategic plan to ensure the free movement of imports and exports across the Indian Ocean and Central Asia and to counteract US-led efforts to encircle China.

Hit hard economically by the global pandemic and facing long-term foreign debts, the Rajapakse government is desperate for increased foreign investment and, in particular, financial assistance from China.

Addressing last weeks online Asia and Pacific High-level Conference on Belt and Road Cooperation, Sri Lankan External Affairs Minister Dinesh Gunawardena called on all participants to take advantage of the opportunities available in Sri Lanka for investment. He specifically referred to Colombo Port City and the Hambantota port infrastructure project, funded by China.

New Delhi arrogantly regards smaller countries in South Asia as part of its backyard and insists that their administrations should operate accordingly.

When India voices its concerns over Chinas relations with Sri Lanka, however, it is not just speaking for itself but for the US. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India has become a frontline state in the US war plans against China, which are now being intensified under the new Biden administration.

Comments by senior Indian military and government officials about maritime security are in line with hypocritical US claims that Chinas naval movements in the region are a threat to freedom of navigation.

A recent article in the Print, a New Delhi-based media outlet, said that the Indian government was looking at a recalibration of its bilateral ties with Sri Lanka as China is gaining massive inroads in the Indian Ocean island nation. India, the article added, now believes that Sri Lanka has taken a firm decision on completely aligning with China even if that means doing away with the balancing act with India.

These comments make clear that New Delhi, as well as Washington, will be stepping up their moves to undermine and scuttle Colombos relations with Beijing.

In keeping with the Obama administrations 2011 pivot to Asia policy, involving a military, diplomatic and economic campaign against China, Washington opposed Colombos relations with Beijing.

The US brought a series of resolutions to the UN Human Rights Council, hypocritically seizing on bloody war crimes committed by then President Mahinda Rajapakses regime during the final weeks of its war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in 2009.

The resolutions had nothing to do with defending human rights but were to pressure Mahinda Rajapakse to distance his regime from Beijing. When these efforts failed to remove Rajapakse, Washington, with the assistance of New Delhi, orchestrated a regime-change operation in the 2015 presidential election, installing Maithripala Sirisena to power.

The international pressure now being directed against President Gotabaya Rajapakses government is being orchestrated by the new Biden administration, which has intensified its aggressive military preparations targeting China.

At the G7 summit early this month, President Biden pressured other countries to support Washingtons new measures against China. In the Indo-Pacific region the Biden administration has enhanced the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue or the Quad, a military alliance of the US, Japan, Australia and India directed against China.

Washington is also seeking to deepen its relations with the Sri Lankan military. The US Navy has led a week-long exercise near Trincomalee naval dockyard in eastern Sri Lanka that began on June 24. For the first time, the US military invited Japans Maritime Self Defence Force to join the ongoing US Seventh Fleet and Sri Lankan Navy operation.

Rear Admiral Christopher Engdahl, head of US Indo-Pacific Commands Expeditionary Strike Group, said the exercise series creates an opportunity to sharpen our skills, learn from one another and allows us to work towards our shared goal of a free and open Indo-Pacific.

When we have a better understanding of the environments in which we operate, we can focus on upholding international rules-based order in the maritime environment. Engdahl statements further underline that these strategic exercises are directed against China.

The Rajapakse regime is also facing increased diplomatic pressure, which is being ratcheted up in the UNHRC by the major powers. Addressing this months UNHRC session, a UK envoy decried the lack of progress in addressing human rights violations in Sri Lanka cited in a resolution passed in March. The resolution, which called for an investigation into Colombos war crimes, was presented by a so-called core group of countries, led by the UK, Germany, France and Canada, and co-sponsored by the US.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet addressed the session, citing increasing attacks on human rights under the Rajapakse regime, including several extra-judicial killings by Sri Lankan police. The US and these European powers, which are all responsible for numerous war crimes and other human right violations, are not concerned in the slightest over government repression, war crimes and attacks on democratic rights in Sri Lanka.

Nervous about further antagonising the US and India, the Rajapakse government has not commented on the recent statements by Indian military and government officials about Chinas presence in Sri Lanka, or the US-led military exercises in Trincomalee.

Thus far, Sri Lankas official opposition parties, including Samagi Jana Balawegaya, the United National Party and the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, all of which campaigned against the CPC and presented it as the creation of a Chinese colony, have also said nothing on the recent Indian statements.

On June 17, Indias High Commissioner in Colombo Gopal Baglay held discussions with the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), the principal party of the Tamil elite.

According to media reports, the discussions centered on the TNAs calls for India to support development in the North and East of the country and the full implementation of provincial council powers in these provinces. Baglay voiced his support for these demands.

India is seeking closer relations with the TNA and other Tamil parties to pressure the Colombo government. At the same time, these parties are fully backing Washingtons geo-strategic operations against China.

The increasing rivalry between the US and India on one hand, and China on the other, seriously poses the danger of a war between these nuclear armed nations that would engulf the world.

This imperialist-instigated catastrophe can only be stopped by a global mobilisation of workers and youth on the basis of an international socialist perspective aimed at putting an end to capitalism and its nation-state system. The International Committee of the Fourth International is the only organisation that advances this perspective, with its Sri Lankan section, the Socialist Equality Party fighting for the unity of the working class in South Asia and across the region, based on this program.
Support is growing for striking Volvo Trucks workers in Dublin, Virginia among Indian workers including auto and transport workers.

The strike begun by nearly 3,000 workers June 7 after the workers rejected by 90 percent a second pro-company contract backed by the United Auto Workers (UAW) union, entered the second week. The pro-corporate UAW leadership has done everything to isolate the striking workers. On the other hand, workers internationally support the call from the Volvo workers rank-and-file committee for support for their strike action.

Striking Volvo workers (Source: UAW Local 2069)

Balakrishnan is one of 50 workers dismissed by the Motherson Automotive Technologies & Engineering (MATE), an auto-parts company operating in Sriperumbudur in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. He has worked in the plant for 19 years. He was paid a monthly salary of 11,700 rupees (US $ 160), the average salary paid to Motherson workers.

His family, including his wife and four children, has been thrown into dire poverty, like many other dismissed workers, by his dismissal. He has also lost his salary during the 140-day strike.

Speaking about the Volvo workers struggle, he said: The Volvo Trucks workers strike is a historic strike that should continue uncompromisingly. I am in complete solidarity with courageous striking Volvo workers. The management and its agents, the UAW leadership must be terrified by this movement of Volvo rank-and-file workers and mounting international support for them.

The Volvo Trucks rank-and-file committee will monitor the wheelings and dealings of the joint conspiracies of the Volvo management and the UAW leadership like a CCTV camera and keep the workers informed.

The strike should set an example of how to rally support for workers internationally in defence of workers basic rights. Even if it becomes a protracted strike so be it and it should demonstrate the fighting spirit of workers. Whatever the outcome of this struggle, the coming generation of workers will appreciate and learn from this heroic strike.

I am inspired by the struggles of the Volvo Truck workers and inclined to follow their example. Though we live far from the Volvo strikers, my heart beats like yours as workers facing a common enemyin the form of a treacherous union and profiteering company. On the significance of the formation of rank-and-file committees of workers, I would like to discuss this experience with all my fellow workers. I am not afraid of taking up this struggle forward in the interests of the entire working class.

He briefed the long strike he was actively involved in, and the treacherous role played by the trade union that operated in the plantwhich was initially affiliated with the Maoist AICCTU. Later, it broke up and Tamil Nadu regional-based splinter group formed the LTUC.

He said it has been extremely difficult for him to feed his family without a job. After the dismissal, the MATE sent a severance package of 150,000 rupees (US$ 2,055) to all the dismissed workers. The union insisted that dismissed workers not accept it and instead return the cheques to the union office. This action was only to contain the anger of the workers who were in the forefront of 148 days Motherson strike and to give an impression that the union is keen on taking up the dismissal case in the courts.

A year passed by, said Balakrishnan, but the LTUC has not yet approached the labour courts in this regard. He said, But I dont trust the union will take this up. I am in a very difficult situation to manage my family with my children. I have been borrowing money from the people I know. I am also embarrassed to keep on asking for help from the same people, as they are also thrown into financial crisis due to the impact of the coronavirus.

How long can we tolerate these conditions, we have been working like slaves in the companies, now the union also treating us like slaves, that we should not talk to anyone who raises critical remarks about the union.

He appreciated the extensive coverage provided by the WSWS for the Motherson strike that the main media deliberately blacked out.

He said he knew the union leadership in the plant was frightened by the WSWS. Union officials told strikers not to talk to WSWS reporters as they were reporting fake news about the union.

Other workers also talked about WSWS coverage of struggles and its exposure about the companys global network and huge profits.

One criticized the companys refusal to compensate workers for COVID-19s disastrous impact. He said the company should take up responsibilities for workers safety, but instead they give corona relief funds to the state chief ministers corona relief fund. He expressed his opposition to the division of workers based on religion, language and caste and declared workers must be mobilized independently.

S. Vasan, a conductor at Tamil Nadu state transport corporation, said: Volvo Trucks workers are involved in a major struggle against a joint conspiracy of the UAW bureaucracy and corporate management against the vast majority of rebellious workers at the Virginia Dublin plant. Their courageous struggle must be supported by the workers all over the world, as it developed into a two-front struggle, against the corporate management and pro-corporate union.

I see the common character of the trade unions in the US and here in India. I have seen through my own experience over the last three decades the perfidious role of the unions. Most of the workers are in one or the other unions that are affiliated to various political parties. But the major political parties function like big corporations. They spend millions of rupees to contest and win elections.

The unions linked to them operate like mini corporate unions in the state transport sector. Whenever the rule of the party changes after elections, the state transport sector comes under the influence of the ruling party. The control of unions changes when parties come to power changes.

Though there are several trade unions operating among state transport workers, none of them in reality work for the interests of workers. They are only concerned about preserving and improving their own privileges. The unions are concerned about collecting dues from workers. The union leaders in order to please the officers serve them as servants.

Generally, wage hike agreements are signed every three years, however not even at the fourth or the fifth year, now we are stepping into the sixth year, still, there is no sign of any wage hike agreement being signed. What we see before our eyes, one after another every hard-won gain is being taken away by the transport corporation with the complicity of the trade unions.

I strongly believe all the problems that we transport workers face can only be resolved through the formation of the rank-and-file committees that are independent of the unions and based on socialist policies.

A WSWS reader from Hyderabad spoke in favour of the Volvo workers strike, The Volvo workers by coming out against the company ownership and dumping out the union siding with the management, have demonstrated courageous direct action by the workers. They are fighting courageously. They may face setbacks in the short run, but they will win. Their success will have a chain reaction across the world. I want the brave Volvo workers to win.

The cracks within the American capitalist order are now clear to all the world. So far it is being proclaimed by capitalist intellectuals as the ideal and invincible. Even they are compelled to introspect their understanding. The hollowness of the corrupt unions is also out in the open. The only way forward is for the workers, middle class, and peasants to unite and fight the corrupt system.
On Friday, a commentary by Zeynep Tufekci appeared in the New York Times upholding the viability of the Wuhan Lab conspiracy theory for the origins of coronavirus.

The claim that COVID-19 is caused by a man-made virus was rejected as extremely unlikely by the World Health Organizations report on the origins of the disease, and it is regarded as a conspiracy theory by the worlds leading experts on the origins of infectious diseases.

This composite image shows text and art from Zeynep Tufekci's article advocating internet censorship and 2018 and the "wuhan lab" conspiracy theory in 2021.

The claim that coronavirus was released from the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been promoted by the fascistic former US president Donald Trump, who said this weekend it comes out of the lab. US President Joe Biden has falsely claimed that the lab leak conspiracy theory is as likely as the claim by scientists that coronavirus has emerged naturally, and has called on the US intelligence agencies to determine whether it was released from a laboratory accident.

The publication of Tufekcis report follows the discrediting of two leading advocates of the conspiracy theory.

In a widely cited June 1 article, the World Socialist Web Site brought attention to the fact that Michael R. Gordon, whose Wall Street Journal article led every major US newspaper to declare the lab leak theory credible, was the co-author with Judith Miller of the September 8, 2002, article in the Times falsely asserting that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was seeking to build a nuclear weapon.

On June 6, the World Socialist Web Site drew attention to the fact that Nicholas Wade, cited by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post as an authority on the lab-leak theory, is a serial falsifier and advocate of racist pseudo-science.

Since the publication of these articles, neither Wade nor Gordon has been cited by name in the New York Times, Washington Post, or Wall Street Journal in connection to the Wuhan lab theory.

Now in their place has stepped Zeynep Tufekci, a Techno-sociologist, to attempt to salvage the discredited lab-leak theory pioneered by Trumps fascistic counselor Steve Bannon and a number of Chinese multimillionaire exiles.

Tufekci claims that For the first time, science itself seemed to have caused a pandemic while trying to prepare for it.

Tufekcis column is an example of what in the world of accounting is referred to as money laundering. Tufekci takes Wades arguments and repackages them without citation. She repeatedly makes the same arguments as Wade, and even links the same primary sources, all without attribution to Wade himself.

Two examples will suffice. In his oft-quoted article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Wade sought to give research by two of the worlds leading experts in dangerous infectious diseasesRalph S. Baric and Shi Zhenglia sinister coloration.

Wade writes:

Shi then teamed up with Ralph S. Baric, an eminent coronavirus researcher at the University of North Carolina. Their work focused on enhancing the ability of bat viruses to attack humans so as to examine the emergence potential (that is, the potential to infect humans) of circulating bat CoVs [coronaviruses]. In pursuit of this aim, in November 2015 they created a novel virus by taking the backbone of the SARS1 virus and replacing its spike protein with one from a bat virus (known as SHC014-CoV). This manufactured virus was able to infect the cells of the human airway, at least when tested against a lab culture of such cells. The SHC014-CoV/SARS1 virus is known as a chimera because its genome contains genetic material from two strains of virus.

Tufekci repeats this narrative almost verbatim, even citing the same 2015 Nature article as Wade:

In an article in Nature Medicine in 2015, researchers from two of the major coronavirus laboratories in the worldDr. Shi; Ralph Baric, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and otherswrote that they had bioengineered a coronavirus. The work was carried out in Dr. Barics laboratory at U.N.C. They took a spike protein, the key that coronaviruses use to unlock and infect cells, from a horseshoe bat virus and combined it with a human SARS virus adapted for mice. They reported that this chimeric virus could infect human cells, suggesting some bat viruses may be capable of infecting humans without mutation or adaptation.

In another instance, Wade cites an addendum to an article in Nature by Shi Zhengli, which he argues implies some sort of nefarious cover-up by the researcher.

The bat coronaviruses of the Yunnan caves can infect people directly. In April 2012 six miners clearing bat guano from the Mojiang mine contracted severe pneumonia with COVID-19-like symptoms and three eventually died. A virus isolated from the Mojiang mine, called RaTG13, is still the closest known relative of SARS2. Much mystery surrounds the origin, reporting and strangely low affinity of RaTG13 for bat cells, as well as the nature of 8 similar viruses that Shi reports she collected at the same time but has not yet published despite their great relevance to the ancestry of SARS2.

Tufekci not only borrows Wades narrative, but cites the same obscure two-paragraph addendum published in Nature on November 17, 2020:

Suspicious internet sleuths combed through genomic databases and found that RaTG13 was an exact match for a bat coronavirus called 4991 retrieved from a cave implicated in an unexplained outbreak of pneumonia in 2012 among miners who collected bat guano from a mine in Yunnan. Three of the six miners died.

The article likewise borrowed many arguments by Katherine Eban of Vanity Fair without citation, including comparing some bioresearch facilities to American dentists offices. Tufekci later apologized to Eban on Twitter, claiming unconvincingly that we didnt use your piece, but nevertheless inserted a link to Ebans report.

Although Ebans article is less directly derivative of Wades article than that of Tufekci, it directly cites Wade and links to his writings, also noting his controversial writings on racism.

Why does Tufekci not cite Wade? The central purpose of her article is to launder the pseudo-scientific arguments of Nicholas Wade and make them once again suitable for citation without having to explain away the fact that Wade is a notorious liar and racist. She appropriates the arguments made by Wade, all the while claiming that she, unlike Wade, remains open-minded.

Even as she claims her narrative doesnt fit into camps around the origin question, she constructs a narrative that points every finger at scientists and China. For example:

While the Chinese governments obstruction may keep us from knowing for sure whether the virus, SARS-CoV-2, came from the wild directly or through a lab in Wuhan or if genetic experimentation was involved, what we know already is troubling. Years of research on the dangers of coronaviruses, and the broader history of lab accidents and errors around the world, provided scientists with plenty of reasons to proceed with caution as they investigated this class of pathogens. But troubling safety practices persisted.

The central argument made by Tufekcis piece is that there are two theories of the origins of COVID-19, both of which are approximately equally likely. This is not true. While every pandemic known to man has been shown to have a zoonotic origin, no one has ever been proven to have died from a genetically engineered disease. As Dan Samorodnitsky of Massive Science wrote:

One hypothesis requires a colossal cover-up and the silent, unswerving, leak-proof compliance of a vast network of scientists, civilians, and government officials for over a year. The other requires only for biology to behave as it always has, for a family of viruses that have done this before to do it again. The zoonotic spillover hypothesis is simple and explains everything. Its scientific malpractice to pretend that one idea is equally as meritorious as the other. The lab-leak hypothesis is a scientific deus ex machina, a narrative shortcut that points a finger at a specific set of bad actors. I would be embarrassed to stand up in front of a room of scientists, lay out both hypotheses, and then pretend that one isnt clearly, obviously better than the other.

The condemnation of Nicholas Wades 2014 book in an earlier review in the New York Times applies just as well for Tufekci: he does this sort of thing repeatedly: He constantly gathers up long shots, speculations and spurious claims, then declares they add up to substantiate his case.

For instance, Tufekci categorically declares, The 1977 pandemic was tied to research activities, then links to an article that bluntly states, there is no hard evidence available to substantiate this essentially speculative claim.

In other words, for Tufekci, as for Wade, the fact that something might have happened is a substantive argument for the fact that it did happen.

Like Wade, Tufekci operates by negating the so-called Sagan Standard, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

She makes an extraordinary claimthat COVID-19 is likely to be the first man-made pandemic in historyand offers up only speculation in lieu of evidencethat a virus could potentially have been made in a lab, that it could have potentially been released, that the release could have been covered up by lab workers, government officials at the local, state and national level, as well as in a conspiracy encompassing the United Nations and every leading expert in infectious diseases.

In other words, Zeynep Tufekci is a conspiracy theorist.

This fact is particularly significant given her background and role as a leading advocate of the censorship of the Internet by technology companies.

In 2016, she repeated critical arguments in the US efforts to prosecute journalist Julian Assange for exposing US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan that contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

WikiLeaks Isnt Whistleblowing, she wrote.

She called the Nobel Peace Prizenominated journalist, the recipient of the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, and Amnesty International UK Media Award a hacker, and called his publishing activities a form of censorship, a distortion of Orwellian dimensions.

This is all hogwash. As Nils Melzer, United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, made clear:

Since 2010, when Wikileaks started publishing evidence of war crimes and torture committed by US forces, we have seen a sustained and concerted effort by several States towards getting Mr. Assange extradited to the United States for prosecution, raising serious concern over the criminalisation of investigative journalism in violation of both the US Constitution and international human rights law.

From merely cheering on the persecution of journalists by the US government, Tufekci went on to actively call for censorship. In 2018, concretizing ideas she had been advancing for years, Tufekci wrote a commentary published by the Times on March 10, 2018, headlined YouTube, the Great Radicalizer.

She claimed that by serving us what we want, Google was helping to propagate conspiracy theories.

She demanded that Google stop showing videos of a leftish conspiratorial cast, and condemned it for promoting far-left videos. The solution, Tufekci argued, was for Google to alter its algorithms to stop showing people what we want, and instead show something else.

As with her cheering the persecution of Julian Assange, Tufekci was justifying what was already underway. In April 2017, Google implemented a change to its algorithm, termed Project Owl, that slashed search traffic to left-wing, anti-war and socialist sites.

When the World Socialist Web Site published an open letter to Google demanding that it end its censorship of socialist, progressive and anti-war publications, the company made no response. But in 2020, asked by Republican Senator Mike Lee to name for me one high profile person or entity from a liberal ideology who you have censored, Google CEO Sundar Pichai named the World Socialist Review [sic], which is a left-leaning publication.

Both Tufekcis advocacy of Internet censorship and Googles actions were sold to the public as necessary to combat unsupported conspiracy theories, in the words of Google executive Ben Gomes. Both Tufekci and Google argued that an epidemic of fake news was undermining the ability of expertssuch as scientists and historiansto help the public see and understand the truth.

Tufekcis advocacy of a right-wing conspiracy theory makes clear that this justification for censorship was always a hollow pretext. The censors were concerned not with telling the public the truth, but with ensuring that the public could only know the version of the truth favored by the US government.

In defiance of public health experts, the censorship advocate Tufekci is promoting the right-wing conspiracy theory that research activities have sparked a pandemic. She is, in other words, taking part in an insurrection against scientific authority.

The fact is that censorship against the left never had anything to do with defending historical truth and the influence of scientists or historians. It is about ensuring that war propaganda goes unchallenged.

There is a common thread connecting Tufekcis condemnation of Julian Assange, her calls for Internet censorship against left-wing, socialist and anti-war viewpoints, and her promotion of a right-wing conspiracy theory aimed at providing a pretext for conflict with China.

The story of Zeynep Tufekci shows that propaganda and censorship are two sides of the same coin.
With the assistance of university managements, Australias US-linked intelligence agencies are intensifying their monitoring and screening of university workers as the Liberal-National government moves to block all links with Chinese universities.

Australian Strategic Policy Institute in Canberra (Source: Wikipedia)

The stepped-up surveillance of academics goes hand in hand with increasing involvement of the universities in military projects related to preparations for a US-provoked war against China.

Evidence from Senate Estimates hearings earlier this month revealed that the Australian Research Council (ARC), which allocates government research grants, has been working with the spy agencies for several years to compile sensitivity files on researchers.

ARC chief executive Professor Sue Thomas told a hearing that the ARC had been collecting files, based on media reports and information provided by intelligence agencies, to ensure research grants were not issued to academics who may pose a threat to national security.

The ARC checks for sensitivities using a tracker developed by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), a Canberra-based, government-subsidised and US-linked military policy think tank.

In true blacklisting fashion, ASPI previously publicly named 325 academics linked to the Thousand Talents Plan, allegedly a Chinese government research program. Such claims by ASPI have been based on flawed evidence, such as the number of Chinese academics and their international colleagues who are openly publishing articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

The ARCs sensitivity files indicate widespread spying on academics, researchers and university workers. The ARC receives upwards of 6,000 grant applications each year, collectively involving more than 10,000 researchers from tertiary institutions across Australia.

In March, a parliamentary committee confirmed that five research grants had been secretly rejected last December, without clear reasons, from 18 referred for security checking by the intelligence agencies.

Universities themselves are employing corporate consultants and foreign interference compliance officers to conduct security checks on their staff as part of the federal governments crackdown.

The universities of Sydney, New South Wales, Monash and Queensland have hired corporate advisory firm McGrathNicol to help detect the risk of foreign influence, including by auditing academics to check for secondary loyalties.

A senior risk advisor at McGrathNicol is John Garnaut, a former corporate media journalist and advisor to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, whose government introduced far-reaching, anti-democratic foreign interference laws in 2018, supported by the Labor Party opposition.

At the same time, the Liberal-National Coalition government has ordered the universities to supply lists of their agreements with foreign entities by this month, to be subject to possible veto under last years unprecedented Foreign Relations Act.

That legislation gives the foreign minister arbitrary powers to terminate relationships between a university and any foreign entity that the minister deems may adversely affect Australias foreign relations or are inconsistent with our foreign policy.

In April, the government used this power to tear up two vague agreements by the Victorian state government to participate in Chinas Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure program. The universities are evidently next in the firing line.

A bipartisan parliamentary committee is conducting a scare-mongering investigation into the universities and other research bodies, such as the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).

In their submissions to the inquiry both the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and Australian Federal Police declared, without providing any details, that Australian universities, researchers and their families are at risk from foreign states.

ASIO insisted that, while global collaboration has been the foundation of scientific and technological accomplishments, this had left Australian research institutions vulnerable to international partners with different political, cultural and moral valuesa clear reference to China.

In his testimony, ASIO boss Mike Burgess revealed ASIO had 60 engagements with universities in 2020. He provided no further information.

Appearing before the committee, university chiefs pledged their loyalty. Our universities and our researchers are not naive to geopolitical imperatives, and we support the Morrison governments view that national security risks must be dealt with proactively, Group of Eight (Go8) chief executive Vicki Thomson said, representing the eight most prestigious public universities.

The Go8 submission declared that its beneficial working relationship with the security agencies was already regarded as an exemplar by the Five Eyes Plus group of nations and their leading research-intensive universities.

The US-led global Five Eyes eavesdropping network conducts mass surveillance on millions of people around the world, as exposed by Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.

Australian National University (ANU) vice-chancellor Brian Schmidt said the universitys relationship with the security sector had ramped up dramatically since 2018, when it expanded to include the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) and the Office of National Intelligence. The ASD is the electronic surveillance agency that forms a direct part of the Five Eyes operations.

Universities Australia chief executive Catriona Jackson said the universities were cooperating closely with the government in a University Foreign Interference Taskforce. She cautioned against duplication with this mechanism, only because that would make it harder for universities to root out foreign interference.

University of Adelaide vice chancellor and president Peter Hoj boasted that his institution had turned down seven collaborative research projects with overseas institutions due to concerns over foreign interference. This had come at significant financial cost and put the renewal of staff employment contracts in jeopardy.

In a statement to the committee, the University of Adelaide said it was one of the most defence-engaged universities in Australia. This underscores the connection between the anti-China crusade and the integration of the universities into military preparations. We were granted just last week a renewal of our Defence Industry Security Program membership at the highest level for personnel and governance, the statement read.

Through this program and other schemes, university managements have tied their institutions into joint research with US universities under the Pentagons Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative, which the Australian government joined in 2017.

All this is happening with the complicity of the main university trade union, the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU). While expressing concern about the chilling impact of sensitivity files on academic freedom, it has not opposed them. Instead, NTEU national president Alison Barnes said the union would write to the ARC to ask for more information and to request procedural fairness for targeted academics to respond to allegations made against them.

Similarly, the NTEU has not opposed, let alone campaigned against, the Foreign Relations Act veto power but only expressed concerns about the lack of an appeal process or right of reply once a banning decision is announced.

Over the past three years, the Australian government has become a frontrunner in measures against China, including the repressive foreign interference laws passed in 2018, which Washington regards as a model for similar provisions internationally.

For the past decade, successive Liberal-National and Labor governments have increasingly placed Australia on the front lines of Washingtons plans for war to prevent China from challenging the global hegemony established by US imperialism after World War II.

It is now clear that the universities also have become global exemplars for measures to cut off research cooperation with China and prepare for war.
Latest government data from a React-2 study by Imperial College London found there are two million cases of Long COVID among England population of around 56 million. Long COVID covers those people still suffering symptoms more than 12 weeks after infection.

The UKs COVID-19 death toll has passed 152,000, but the Conservative government lifted most safety restrictions on May 17. Cases since then have surged, fuelled by the spread of the highly transmissible Delta variant.

This has allowed the virus to spread among young adults and school children in particular, and others who are either unvaccinated or have not received the two required jabs.

Yet, despite scientists predicting a catastrophic rise in hospitalisations and deaths without the strictest public health measures, the government is intent on lifting all measures to mitigate the virus, including mask wearing, by July 19. It is impervious to the suffering inflicted, including the long-term effects of the disease.

The React-2 study found that women and those admitted to hospital were at greater risk of Long COVID, and the prevalence of symptoms increased with age. It also found a correlation between deprivation and the risk of developing Long COVID.

University College London and King's College London carried out a separate study which found that symptoms persisted long after the initial infection in one in six middle-aged people, falling to one in 13 among younger adults.

A survey in Norway published in Nature magazine found that out of 312 patients, 61 percent had persistent symptoms after six monthsincluding 52 percent of 16-30-year-olds.

A brain imaging study conducted by the University of Oxford and Imperial College London found damage to brain tissue in COVID patients, suggesting a possible a predisposition to dementia and Alzheimers at a future date.

A socially distanced assembly takes place at a school in in Manchester, England, Monday March 8, 2021. (Jon Super/PA via AP)

Despite this, teachers and other workers who fight for health and safety face victimisation from employers. Several National Education Union representatives were sacked during the pandemic for invoking the right to a safe workplace under Section 44 of the Employment Rights Act, leading to walkouts.

The education unions have done nothing to defend their victimised members and have abandoned those with Long COVID to their fate, prompting them to take matters into their own hands. Part-time Media studies and Photography teacher Kodoma founded Facebook support group Teachers With COVID UK. Aged 52, she has been suffering from Long COVID since March 2020, and said it was a disease I caught at work which could easily have been prevented.

Kodoma told a WSWS reporter that by the end of May, I was really ill for weeks. I cant really remember it. I slept. My two adult children had to check my SATS [oxygen saturation levels] a few times a day. It feels like your lungs are on fire, like someone is leaning on your chest; every breath is a real effort. I knew I was fighting for my life.

Kodoma was not just fighting the disease but her employers, with virtually no help from the National Education Union (NEU). She explained how at some schools like her own, teachers with Long COVID are bullied by management to return to full-time work over a phased four-week period before they are fit, with no support in place. Many return due to financial pressures as their sickness pay diminishes, which, coupled with the stress of it all, exacerbates the illness and leads to relapses. If they do not comply they are forced to resign.

I went back to school in September, said Kodoma, walking on a frame, though doctors said I was not ready to go back. I lasted a couple of days. Towards the end of December, I had a formal absence meeting. When you get to the third formal absence meeting, you either have to accept ill health retirement or lose your job. They said I couldnt have more than 10 days off sick over two terms, then I could have gone to the second stage. I was saved by lockdown.

Ive sent the NEU so many emails, saying Im really struggling, Im frightened, please help, but got no reply.

Kodoma decided to take matters into her own hands and founded the Facebook group. Its much more help than the unions, she said.

She noticed that some teachers in the group were getting better and better and others got worse and worse. Some schools get taxis for staff, so they dont have the commute to work, flowers, mobility equipment, a gradual phased return and remote teaching, even paying for two members of staff. One in the group, a head of year, highly qualified and experienced, she had a short-phased return [to work], with no accommodation timetabled, she had to work upstairs. I think she got fired.

We are passionate about our courses and want to be doing our jobs. Its crazy that we are not being accommodated for.

As the only media and photography teacher in the sixth form, Kodoma had to set and mark this years exams. Because we have teacher assessed grades this year, I had to do all the marking and create my own exams. It set my health back. The school environment is just not safe.

Before being forced to resign last Saturday from his post as health secretary for abusing the governments own advice on social distancing, Matt Hancock responded to the latest data by acknowledging, Long COVID can have a lasting and debilitating impact on the lives of those affected. But in the face of what is a growing health time-bomb, the government has pledged only 50 million into Long COVID research. This is a pittance compared to the 37 billion squandered mainly on the private sector to develop its failed track and trace system, or the 17 billion given to Tory cronies to provide personal protective equipment.

Trades Union Congress General Secretary Frances OGrady stated that Long COVID should be recognised as a disability. Its time to recognise this condition properlyand make sure workers who are living with Long COVID get the support they need to do their jobs, she said.

This conceals the fact that it was only with the support of the trade unions and the Labour Party that the government was able to keep much of the non-essential economy open for business during the pandemic and has done nothing to mobilise their millions of members against an unsafe reopening. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer insisted last summer that schools be reopened, no ifs, no buts, no equivocations.

Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer's tweet of August 16, 2020 demanding the government reopen schools.

The education unions have played a pernicious role, maintaining the fiction that schools can be made COVID safe while suppressing opposition by parents and teachers who favour remote learning until schools are safe.

The Socialist Equality Party calls on educators and parents to join the Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee to take forward the fight for a rational response to the pandemic based on science, including the closure of all educational settings and non-essential workplaces until the virus is suppressed.

Tens of billions of pounds must be given over to resource remote learning. The necessary funds must be provided for research into Long COVID. No teacher should be victimized for raising awareness about COVID in schools, and those with Long COVID should be given all the support they need on full pay, without their jobs being threatened.

Such a fightback can be successful only if waged independently of the unions, as part of a united struggle for socialism with workers in all sectors against capitalisms subordination of lives to profit. Spearheading the fight in Britain is the London Bus Rank-and-File Committee, who are campaigning for the reinstatement of victimised bus driver David OSullivan. OSullivan was sacked for demanding for COVID safety at work and is fighting to link up his struggle with that of workers in other sectors, including educators.

To attend the next online public forum of the Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee on Saturday, July 1 0 at 2pm BST , register here .
VIGO COUNTY, Ind. (WTHI) - A local organization is working to help inmates on death row after several federal executions took place last year.

The Sisters of Providence started the "Death Row Visitation Project" to help families get to see their loved ones face to face while awaiting execution.

Many of the people on death row have gone 10 to 20 years without seeing their families.

Justice Promoter for the Providence community, Sister Barbara Battista, says this could be due to low funds, or long commutes.

Through the Death Row Visitation Project families and friends receive money to see the inmates in person.

LINK | COMPLETE COVERAGE OF FEDERAL EXECUTIONS

In the meantime, sister Battista visits with the inmates to help console and prepare them to pass peacefully.

"We are working to abolish the death penalty...no doubt," Battista said. "And yet these guys, you know, those last few days for me...it wasn't nearly as awful or as violent as it was for them."

In 2020, there were 13 men executed at the Federal Penitentiary in Terre Haute. There are another 40 inmates remaining on death row in the U.S.

If you want to help abolish the death penalty, you can contact your local representatives, and if you want to donate to the project, click here.
VIGO COUNTY, Ind. (WTHI) - The Vigo County School Board announced a new photographer for the district at Monday's board meeting. It led to some frustration from the former company.

Petits & Associates Photography is a locally owned business in Terre Haute. It has worked with the Vigo County School Corporation for nearly a decade. Now a company based in North Carolina will be taking the role as the new school photographers.

The board approved a three year contract with Strawbridge Studio Inc., based in North Carolina. But members of Petits & Associates Photography voiced their concerns.

"We live here, we bank here, we go to church here, we hire all Vigo County graduates," Randy Petit said. "Was it about price was it about service was it about quality was it about commissions was it about local representation or lack of was it personal," Caleb Petit said.

A committee of principals and administrators voted on the new photographer in a formal request for the proposal process. At Monday night's meeting, the board voted. Six members of the board voted to approve the new contract, while one member abstained.

Superintendent Dr. Haworth says he trusts the decision of the committee to support the new company. He also says this was a competitive process and petit photography ultimately did not get the position.

"That can be tough, especially with a local company," he said. "But we do believe we had a transparent process and it led us to a different vendor."

The new company has a three-year contract with the district. After that, it will go through another bidding process.
WABASH VALLEY (WTHI) - Indiana State Police are reminding you that safety is the number one priority as we celebrate the 4th of July.

Police also shared a breakdown of state fireworks laws. Statewide it is legal to light fireworks from 9 am to 11 pm, though some cities and towns may have different ordinances.

On state holidays it is legal to set off fireworks from 9 a.m. to midnight, but this may be limited further by local ordinances. The times on the following dates are protected in Indiana for consumer use of fireworks and may not be prohibited by local ordinance:

June 29 to July 3: from 5 p.m. until two hours after sunset;

July 4: from 10 a.m. to midnight;

July 5 to July 9: from 5 p.m. until two hours after sunset; and

December 31: from 10 a.m. to 1 a.m.

Here's a list of safety tips police have to share with you:
A total of 81 universities representing 33 WTO members and observers participated in regional rounds held from February to May 2021. The top 26 teams from the regional rounds qualified for the final round. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the regional rounds and the final oral round took place virtually.

After four days of competition among the best in the world, four teams qualified for the semi-finals: Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), Los Andes University (Colombia), Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva (Switzerland) and University of Colombo (Sri Lanka).

The winning team, from the University of Colombo, was composed of Ms Saheli Wikramanayake, Ms Adithya Ramanitharan, Mr Avishka Jayaweera and Mr Sandun Batagoda. They also won the prize for the best respondents written submission, and Ms Wikramanayake was awarded the best orator of the Grand Final. The University of Ottawa Faculty of Law (Canada) won the prize for the best overall written submissions.

Winners of individual and team awards received prizes from the WTO and from the competition's academic supporters  Georgetown University (United States), the World Trade Institute (Switzerland) and the European Public Law Organization (Greece). WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala sent a video address to all the participants.

The John H. Jackson Moot Court Competition is a simulated hearing under the rules of the WTO dispute settlement system involving exchanges of written submissions and adversarial hearings before panelists on international trade law issues. The competition is organized by the European Law Students' Association (ELSA) with the technical support of the WTO.

As part of the competition, teams prepare and analyse a fictitious case and present their arguments both as a complainant and as respondent in front of a panel that consists of international trade law experts. This year the case, Budica  Measures relating to the importation and marketing of nutrition food bars was authored by Gustavo Guarin-Duque (Universidad Externado, Colombia), Julian Becerra-Sanchez, (Universidad Externado) and Sara Lucia Dangon-Novoa, (Universidad de los Andes, Colombia). The case addressed issues regarding the balance between international trade liberalization and protection of public health.

The WTO has been a technical supporter of the competition since its inception in 2002. The John H. Jackson Moot Court Competition is an example of the WTO's broad support for capacity building. This year, WTO staff members participated virtually as panelists for written submissions and oral pleadings and advised ELSA on the logistical and academic aspects of running the competition.

For more information about the John H. Jackson Moot Court Competition, visit its website here or its LinkedIn page here.
A spectator waving a sign caused a disastrous pile-up at the Tour de France, and now French authorities have opened an investigation.

Here's what you need to know to Get Up to Speed and On with Your Day.

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1. Condo collapse

Rescue crews are still searching through the debris -- and families are still waiting in agony -- after a Miami-area condo building partially collapsed last week. At least nine people are confirmed dead and 152 are unaccounted for this morning. Crews have carved out trenches, contained a deeply rooted fire, and burrowed into the site to pull out remains as those above ground use K9s, sonar and heavy equipment to locate the missing. Some families have expressed frustration at how long rescue and recovery efforts are taking. Three years ago, a structural report on the building showed major issues in need of repair but didn't indicate whether it was at risk of collapse. Officials are now inspecting nearby buildings for signs of structural damage.

2. Coronavirus

We know the Delta variant of the coronavirus could become a major problem in the US, but experts say it won't be as pervasive as the stages of the pandemic we've seen so far. Rather, it will be hyper-regionalized, devastating dense at-risk communities across the country. Those pockets will have low vaccination rates and low rates of prior infection. Meanwhile, Australians are feeling the frustration of repeated lockdowns. The country was praised for its early handling of the pandemic, but outbreaks of the Delta variant -- and low vaccination rates -- have led to prolonged restrictions in some regions.

3. Airstrikes

President Biden directed military forces yesterday to conduct defensive precision airstrikes against facilities used by Iran-backed militia groups in the Iraq-Syria border region. The President directed the actions after recent attacks by Iran-backed groups on US targets in Iraq, the Pentagon's press secretary said. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi supported the airstrikes in a statement, calling them a "targeted and proportional response to a serious and specific threat" but said Congress would review the formal notification of the operation. This isn't the first time Biden has ordered such an airstrike. The military's first known action under Biden came in February, when it struck a site in Syria, prompting concern among lawmakers who said Biden had not asked for the necessary congressional authorization.

4. Infrastructure

Biden also this weekend tried to walk back a rogue comment he made last week when he said he wouldn't sign the big bipartisan infrastructure bill unless it came paired with a multi-trillion dollar Democratic spending plan for "human infrastructure." He was referring to huge economic recovery bill backed by Democrats. Biden assured potential defectors that he wasn't issuing a veto threat, and for now, it looks like the bill is back on track with bipartisan support. Republican senators like Mitt Romney accepted that Biden's comments were a flub -- but the mistake gave opposing GOP members the opportunity to paint Biden's comments as deceptive.

5. China

Indonesia and the United States have broken ground on a new $3.5 million maritime training center in the strategic area of Batam on the edge of the South China Sea. The body of water has been the site of increasing tensions among nearby powers, including China. The move is yet another factor in an evolving US-China relationship that some in Washington are starting to see as a new "Cold War." China is about to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, and Biden and world leaders just discussed Beijing as part of a growing threat to global democracy.

BREAKFAST BROWSE

Cardi B debuts baby bump at last night's BET Awards

Some people celebrate their pregnancy with a Facebook announcement, and others with a bedazzled bodysuit at a major awards show.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta talks about being a 'Jeopardy!' guest host

DREAM JOB.

Nude sunbathers running from deer fined for violating Sydney lockdown

You really can't explain your way out of something like this.

A civil engineer broke the world record for stacking M&Ms

There truly is a record for everything.

Book series about sexy blue aliens is taking over Amazon best seller lists

When the world gets too rough, you can always fantasize about being blasted out of the solar system to a planet of giant, amorous alien barbarians.

TODAY'S QUOTE

"With the exception of the one instance where we determined with high confidence that the reported UAP was airborne clutter, specifically a deflating balloon, we currently lack sufficient information in our dataset to attribute incidents to specific explanations."

An excerpt from the US intelligence community's unclassified report on unidentified aerial phenomena (aka UFOs). In the report, intelligence personnel admitted they don't have an explanation for all of the reported UAPs and may need further scientific knowledge to understand them.

TODAY'S NUMBER

108

That's how hot, in degrees Fahrenheit, it got Saturday in Portland, Oregon, setting a new high temperature record there. More than 20 million people are under a heat warning or advisory as an unprecedented heat wave bakes the West.

TODAY'S WEATHER

Check your local forecast here>>>

AND FINALLY

Flying high

America's best, most brilliant athletes are punching their tickets to Tokyo ... and among them is, of course, gymnast Simone Biles, who polished off this great floor routine over the weekend. (Click here to view.)
OXFORD, Miss. (WTVA) - A federal grand jury indicted a Parchman deputy warden for allegedly assaulting an inmate there in 2016.

According to the Department of Justice, 49-year-old Melvin Hilson is currently a deputy warden at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, also known as Parchman.

He allegedly hit the unnamed inmate repeatedly and knocked the inmate to the ground, injuring the inmate.

The indictment charges Hilson with a felony civil rights offense.

The indictment also alleges Hilson wrote a false report to hide the incident and later lied to investigators when questioned.
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Staff Writer JoAnn Snoderly can be reached at 304-626-1445, by email at jsnoderly@theet.com or on Twitter at @JoAnnSnoderly.
top story

Defendants lawyer: The governments case leaves you wondering what in the world does this have to do with Mr. Banks

4th & final member of 'Georgia Boys' goes on trial in alleged Georgia-to-West Virginia drug conspiracy
Clarksburg, WV (26301)

Today

Mostly cloudy skies early will become partly cloudy later in the day. High 91F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

A few clouds. Low 67F. Winds light and variable.
Wyoming Rep. Chuck Gray (R-Casper) works the crowd on a campaign stop in Sheridan County in May 2021. Gray is one of eight candidates running in the 2022 Republican Primary against Liz Cheney.
Governor Mark Gordon and Secretary of State Ed Buchanan wrote this letter to the National Rifle Association, inviting the organization to cons
A Wyoming Highway Patrol vehicle blocks access to Sinks Canyon Road near Lander on Friday, June 25 as officials investigate the scene of an officer-involved shooting. According to official reports, a man was killed and a trooper was injured in an exchange of gunfire that occurred after a traffic stop.
The FBI obtained a warrant to search a Pennsylvania cave for fabled Civil War gold without permission of state officials over concerns they would claim it as lost property, court documents show.

A warrant application, released following a petition by the Associated Press and Philadelphia Inquirer, discloses that Dennis and Ken Parada, a father-son treasure hunting duo, went to the FBI to share rumors about the final resting place of the cache of gold bars, according to the Washington Post.

PENNSYLVANIA LAWYER INVESTIGATING WHETHER FBI UNCOVERED $400 MILLION WORTH OF CIVIL WAR GOLD

Although some historians doubt whether the lost gold even exists, the FBI obtained a warrant to search a cave in Elk County on state-owned land, the supposed resting place of the treasure, without informing Pennsylvania officials.

"I am concerned that, even if [Department of Conservation and Natural Resources] gave initial consent for the FBI to excavate the cache of gold secreted at the Dent's Run Site, that consent could be revoked before the FBI recovered the United States property, with the result of DCNR unlawfully claiming that that cache of gold is abandoned property and, thus, belongs to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania," said an affidavit filed by an FBI agent.

The warrant application was approved by U.S. Magistrate Judge Richard Lloret.

Dennis Parada, right, and his son Kem Parada. (AP Photo/Michael Rubinkam, File)



Legend holds that in the summer of 1863, a Union detachment tasked with escorting a large amount of government gold to Philadelphia was intentionally misled by their guide  and then disappeared. Investigative journalist and author Warren Getler theorized the gold was stolen by the Knights of the Golden Circle, a Confederate secret society that sought to expand the Confederacy into Mexico and Central America.

Based on the rumors, the Paradas searched for the treasure and located a cave in Elk County.

An attorney for the pair, Bill Cluck, told Fox News they had a gadget that indicated "precious metals" were buried at the site, and the FBI used a device known as a gravimeter that also detected something. The Paradas and Getler said a government contractor found several tons of a precious metal that could be worth $250 million if it was all gold, the Associated Press reported in 2018.

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When the FBI excavation team arrived in 2018, the Paradas said they were ordered to wait in their car far from the dig site, a move the pair claim was a renege on their deal to let them observe the dig.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

The FBI claims nothing was found and the case was closed. However, the Paradas found the FBIs behavior suspicious, accusing them of lying about not finding anything at the dig site.

Neighbors reported they heard drilling tools in the area throughout the night, long after the dig supposedly ended. The Paradas are currently engaged in a court battle with the FBI to uncover documents and video footage of the excavation.

The Washington Examiner reached out to the FBI and Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources for comment.

Washington Examiner Videos

Tags: FBI, Pennsylvania, USA, News

Original Author: Brady Knox

Original Location: FBI searched cave for Civil War gold over fears Pennsylvania officials would claim it, court documents show
Members of the South Florida Urban Search and Rescue team look for possible survivors in the partially collapsed 12-story Champlain Towers South condo building on June 26, 2021 in Surfside, Florida. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

At least 11 people are confirmed dead and 150 missing after a Florida condo collapsed.

Over $1 million has been raised to help victims and their families, The Washington Post reported.

The funds will be used to cover what insurance won't and to help with expenses.

See more stories on Insider's business page.

Over $1 million has been raised for families of victims of the Florida building collapse, The Washington Post reported.

As of Monday night, $1,195,164.04 was raised on the Chesed Fund, which will be administered through the Shul of Bal Harbour synagogue.

The Miami Heat and other local organizations including the Global Empowerment Mission have also established funds. Businessmen including Puerto Rican billionaire Orlando Bravo, co-founder of the private equity firm Thoma Bravo, donated $250,000, WFLA reported.

"If you have something that's very personal to you that hits family, friends, communities, if you don't do something about it, nobody's going to do anything about it," Bravo said.

The Champlain Towers South building in Surfside, Florida partially collapsed just after 1 a.m. on Thursday. Search and rescue crews are still working through the rubble and at least 11 people have been confirmed dead with 150 still unaccounted for.

The funds collected will be used for medical needs insurance won't cover for those who are injured and given to the families of those who died, the Post reported.

Michael Capponi, founder of Global Empowerment Mission, a Miami-based nonprofit organization, told the Post that his organization normally assists with international disasters but is now helping get necessary aid to those impacted in Surfside.

The Post reported that Capponi's organization teamed up with BStrong, an initiative by reality TV star Bethenny Frankel, and has so far given 17 families $1,500 Visa gift cards.

Capponi told the Post that "$1,500 is a nice gesture, but in reality, they've lost everything."

Story continues

He said the pain of the families in Surfside is like none he's seen before. Two residents told him they paid off their 20-year mortgage a week before the blast.

"An entire life working and now it's crumbled and it's rock and it's debris and it's nothing," Capponi said.

Others working to provide relief to the families also said the situation was dire.

Shekar Reddy, of the Gummakonda Foundation in Hallandale, Florida, told the Post his organization is working to help displaced people and assist the international family members of those who are missing traveling to the site. The group is helping them book accommodations.

People still missing hailed from more than a dozen countries and authorities have taken DNA samples from family members to help identify them.

"Some of these families, they come from outside the country [and] don't speak English or know how to navigate things like reservations," Yeny Paola Rico, who founded the Gummakonda Foundation with Reddy, said. "And right now, it's a little bit crazy."

Read the original article on Business Insider
Jun. 29As part of a long-running program, dozens of free electric fans were given to Micronesian households needing utility assistance for the summer in Enid.

OG&E Electric Services staff and volunteers with Salvation Army of Enid and United Way of Enid and Northwest Oklahoma on Monday distributed 60 box fans provided by OG&E to people living in the New View Apartments, at 1726 Leona Mitchell.

One fan was available for every apartment, OG&E spokesperson Alex Mantz said.

Residents also received shopper bags with energy-efficient lightbulbs, laundry detergent, hand fans and other items provided by OG&E to cut down on utility costs for the summer.

Salvation Army served around 110 meals of grilled burgers, chips, cookies and water to New View residents and event volunteers.

Capt. David Brittle said Salvation Army had brought 25 fans left from last year's distribution event, while Dan Schiedel with United Way also had fans to give away.

"What we're trying to do is have a seat at the table so we can offer resources needed in our community," Brittle said. "We just want to be a help and fit where we can to help out."

For 15 years, OG&E has been providing fans to people especially vulnerable to summer heat living throughout the service territory of Oklahoma and Arkansas, Mantz said.

She said as far as she could remember, this year's giveaway was the first to specifically address the needs of the Micronesian population in OG&E's service territory, in partnership with the Enid-based Micronesian Coalition of Oklahoma.

"We couldn't have asked for a better event, a better turnout, and certainly hopefully made a difference," she said.

Jay Sharp, vice chair of the Micronesian Coalition, which works to address the needs of the long-underserved population in Enid, said this year's program collaboration came about after several meetings with community members.

Sharp said the giveaway event drew a lot of attention to other needs of the families living in the apartment complex, such as older playground equipment and Bibles written in Marshallese.

Story continues

"These folks are struggling to make ends meet, and I just think raising awareness to this population is so valuable," he said.

Sharp said the apartments house a high concentration of Enid's Micronesian population, which is estimated as one of the largest in Oklahoma and the United States.

The New View's often multi-generational households, with an average of eight people each, operate on an annual average income of $34,000, according to a needs assessment study the Micronesian Coalition conducted in 2016 with the Rural Health Projects.

Aside from the recent federal expansion of Medicaid benefits to eligible Micronesian citizens, those in the U.S. from three Pacific Island nations such as the Marshall Islands are largely unable to access for public aid, as part of the 1986 federal Compact of Free Association (COFA) agreement that granted citizens legal residency and work status in the U.S.

"These are our neighbors. ... We need to take care of each other," Sharp said.

Brittle said more free fans are still available at the Salvation Army's social services center, at 516 N. Independence. The office is open 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday-Thursday and 9 a.m. to noon Friday.

Ewald is copy editor and city/education reporter for the Enid News & Eagle.

Have a question about this story? Do you see something we missed? Send an email to aewald@enidnews.com.
WASHINGTON  Liberal House Democrats, squeezed between President Joe Bidens personal lobbying for a bipartisan infrastructure deal and their own ambitions for a far more expansive domestic agenda, are warning that they will not hesitate to bring down the accord without action on their long-sought priorities.

The brewing fight, which pits progressives against moderates more aligned with the presidents tactics, is exposing cracks in the partys fragile strategy for enacting its economic plans.

Democratic leaders have said the Senate centrists agreement, which would pump $1.2 trillion into roads, bridges, tunnels and broadband, will not get through Congress without a second, larger bill. That measure includes progressive wish-list items that Republicans have rejected, such as universal preschool and community college access, a health care expansion and a broad effort to combat climate change.

Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times

But progressive House members have begun questioning the depth of that commitment, particularly after Biden walked back a threat he made to condition the narrower bill on the more costly one, and as he and other administration officials begin a lobbying blitz around the country to build support for the infrastructure package.

On Tuesday, Biden will promote the deal in La Crosse, Wisconsin, the home district of a long-targeted House Democrat, Rep. Ron Kind. And on Monday, Pete Buttigieg, the Transportation secretary, toured a crumbling tunnel to Manhattan with two New Jersey Democrats, both of whom said they came away convinced that Congress should move now on infrastructure.

Were going to do what we should have done from the start, which is to try to pass this good bipartisan bill, and then Democrats, as the majority party, will try to legislate, one of the representatives, Tom Malinowski, said after the visit with Buttigieg. Theres no need for drama around that.

Rep. Josh Gottheimer, who was also on the tour, said the bipartisan infrastructure deal was historic on its own and something we should celebrate by getting it passed as quickly as possible.

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But the fear among liberals is that if the bipartisan measure gathers enough momentum to quickly pass, some Democrats  particularly centrists like Sens. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona  will lose their appetite for another major economic package, or will force progressives to substantially scale back the scope and cost of any such plan before they are willing to vote for it.

Progressives in the House warn that their support for the infrastructure agreement is contingent on the success of the bigger bill, which could amount to several trillion dollars and which Democrats plan to push through using a budget maneuver known as reconciliation to shield it from a Republican filibuster.

The president can say hes bipartisan, he can go out and support the deal, but at the end of the day, if he wants it, hes going to have to support our priorities, said Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash. and the chairwoman of the Progressive Caucus, which represents 93 House members.

The pressure will rise. Buttigiegs trip to New Jersey and New York on Monday included Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, and it centered around perhaps the biggest infrastructure priority in the region, a pair of long-sought rail tunnels into the city.

As Biden visits La Crosse, Tom Vilsack, the Agriculture secretary, will also be in western Wisconsin to promote the potential benefits of the infrastructure compromise to rural communities.

Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, the chief vote counter of the Progressive Caucus, had a blunt message about the administrations lobbying effort.

I think its really important to know that nothing is going to get accomplished by doing that, she said. Its clear a majority of the Democratic caucus, whether progressive or not, is interested in delivering, and that delivery will only happen if the progressives are on board.

But Republicans are already working to pressure Democrats to decouple the two measures.

The president has appropriately delinked a potential bipartisan infrastructure bill from the massive, unrelated tax-and-spend plans that Democrats want to pursue on a partisan basis, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate minority leader, said in a statement Monday. Now I am calling on President Biden to engage Leader Schumer and Speaker Pelosi and make sure they follow his lead.

Both have said the two measures will move on parallel tracks, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said last week that there would be no infrastructure measure without a reconciliation bill.

The legislative two-step is tricky. The infrastructure deal has the support of five Republican senators, but must get five more to beat a filibuster, and even more if any Democrats peel away. At the same time, Democrats must unite around a reconciliation bill on social and climate spending that cannot be too big for moderate Democrats but also cannot jettison so many liberal priorities that it loses the left flank.

McConnells push to delink the bills and pass an infrastructure deal on its own was quickly embraced by some Republicans whom the centrist senators badly want to persuade to support their compromise. Sen. Mike Braun, R-Ind., followed McConnells statement with one of his own saying the compromise on infrastructure was a bad deal so long as President Biden, Speaker Pelosi and Leader Schumer insist on pursuing a multitrillion-dollar tax-and-spend reconciliation package.

All of that is prompting House liberals to worry that Biden and moderate Democrats will take the infrastructure deal now, rather than play for the larger package later.

We want to make sure that our communities are represented in federal legislation, said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and the fact of the matter is that these bipartisan deals are often very exclusionary of working-class communities and of communities of color that really badly need infrastructure investments.

The House Progressive Caucus is pushing for a bill that addresses five categories: the care economy, which includes paid family leave, universal child care and $400 billion for long-term health care; Medicare expansion to lower eligibility to age 60, widen coverage to vision, dental and hearing, and empower the government to negotiate prescription drug prices; climate change measures, including a clean-energy standard for electric utilities and a civilian climate corps; a path to citizenship for essential immigrant workers; and low-income housing.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who leads the Senate Budget Committee, sees putting all of that into a budget resolution in July that could cost $6 trillion. Other Senate Democrats say they want a much smaller package.

But House liberals are in no mood to give up their priorities while giving Republicans their infrastructure spending. Progressive Caucus leaders have been actively canvassing their members to show Pelosi how cohesive and serious they are, Jayapal said.

Omar said House liberals would meet this week with the House Budget Committee chairman, Rep. John Yarmuth of Kentucky, as he begins drafting the House budget blueprint, and had been in constant communication with Sanders.

On this, the last thing you want is progressives saying, Were voting no because theyve sold out climate, education and child care, said Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., who predicted a united left flank would bring down an infrastructure-only bill.

Moderate Democrats in the House and the Senate are similarly working together to head off such a result, said Gottheimer, who used language like that deployed by Senate Republicans: I dont think we should hold our infrastructure hostage.

Rep. Rick Larsen, a Democrat whose district north of Seattle is sweltering under record-breaking heat, said a House surface transportation bill set for passage this week would lay down yet another marker for House and Senate negotiators. That bill includes climate-related funding not in the Senate deal, to replace diesel-powered buses and ferries with zero-emissions versions and pump record sums into mass transit and rail. It is strongly opposed by House Republican leaders.

Larsen, a senior member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said the bill should help shape any final deal, which Democrats hope to produce before existing transportation programs expire on Sept. 30. For the first time in more than a decade, the House bill also includes member-requested earmarks for home district projects, giving lawmakers more of a personal investment in it.

House action keeps the momentum moving on the Senate bill and on a final deal, Larsen said. What it looks like at the end, I can tell you when we get to the end.

 2021 The New York Times Company
Pride began as a commemoration of the Stonewall riot at a bar in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of NYC in 1969. It has since grown into a month of celebration and advocacy for the LGBTQ+ community. Just in time for the tail end of this year's pride month, Kataluna Enriquez gave everyone a new milestone to celebrate. She became the first openly transgender woman to win the title of Miss Nevada USA, also making her the first openly trans woman to be in the running for Miss USA (which will take place in November).

Kataluna-Enriquez-Miss-Nevada-Win-GettyImages-865000926

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The 27-year-old has been making history all year, starting in March when she became the first trans woman to win Miss Silver State USA in March, the biggest preliminary pageant for Miss Nevada USA. Enriquez began competing in transgender beauty pageants in 2016 and won a major title as Transnation Queen USA that same year, according to W Magazine. (Related: How to Celebrate Pride In 2020 Amidst Protests and a Global Pandemic)

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Enriquez's accomplishments go beyond her pageant titles, though. From modeling to designing her own gowns (which she wore like a true queen while competing for the Miss Nevada USA title), to being a health care administrator and human rights advocate, she quite literally does it all. (Related: How Nicole Maines Is Paving the Way for the Next Generation of LGBTQ Youth)

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What's more, as the reigning Miss Silver State USA, she's created a campaign called #BEVISIBLE, aimed at combating hate through vulnerability. In the spirit of the campaign, Enriquez has been vulnerable about her own struggles as a transgender Filipino-American woman. She has revealed that she's a physical and sexual abuse survivor and shared her experiences with bullying in high school because of her gender identity. Enriquez has used her platform to highlight the importance of mental health and organizations that advocate for LGBTQ+ people. (Related: LGBTQ+ Glossary of Gender and Sexuality Definitions Allies Should Know)

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"Today I am a proud transgender woman of color," Enriquez told Las Vegas Review Journal in an interview after winning Miss Silver State USA. "Personally, I've learned that my differences do not make me less than, it makes me more than. And my differences is what makes me unique, and I know that my uniqueness will take me to all my destinations, and whatever I need to go through in life."

If Enriquez goes on to win Miss USA, she will then become the second transgender woman to ever compete in Miss Universe. For now, you can plan on rooting for her when she competes in Miss USA on November 29th.
LSU Health Sciences Center/Facebook

Two Louisiana State University medical students were "in the right place at the right time" when a passenger had a health emergency on their flight to Europe.

Lauren Bagneris and Heather Duplessis were en route to Greece when a woman on their flight fell down after she became lightheaded due to temperature and low blood sugar, according to LSU Health Sciences Center.

Flight attendants put out a call for a medical professional, but after no passengers came forward, the two friends identified themselves as medical students.

"We waited a second to make sure no actual medical professionals were around to respond," 25-year-old Duplessis told the Washington Post. "When no one responded, that's when we identified ourselves as med students. They said, 'Definitely, we could use your help.'"

Bagneris and Duplessis helped the woman relax as they checked her vitals, such as blood pressure, pulse, and blood sugar. They also maintained communication with a doctor advising them from the ground.

RELATED: Dallas Doctor Reflects on Being Treated as a 'Hero' in His Scrubs But 'Hated in a Hoodie'

"The patient ended up feeling much better thanks to these two talented doctors in the making and their LSU medical education," LSU Health Sciences Center wrote on Facebook. "Way to Geaux Tigers! You do us proud!!!

RELATED VIDEO: Woman Who Was Unaware of Pregnancy Gives Birth on Flight with Help From Nurses, Doctor

Bagneris told the Post that she and Duplessis were on their way to Greece for a 10-day trip before they go back to school. They've been friends since undergrad at LSU, and have trained together in medical school over the last year.

"We're happy nothing went wrong on that flight," Duplessis told the Post.

RELATED: Cancer Patient Completes Marathon with Doctor Who Gave Him a New Hip: 'It Was Very Cool'

"Our main hope is that there are other, more qualified, medical professionals on board," she added to the outlet, in response to whether the two would be prepared if they find themselves in a similar situation on their flight back home. "[If not], we'll do the same thing over again."
Jun. 29A Manchester woman has filed a lawsuit against a consumer-reporting agency, accusing it of reporting inaccurate information that caused her to be rejected for a job.

Jasmine Jessica Ann Jackson, 32, of Manchester, filed the lawsuit in federal court against Crimcheck.com Inc., which is based in Ohio.

Jackson is accusing the company of violating the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which requires companies like Crimcheck to ensure they report information fairly and accurately.

Instead, in March when Jackson applied for a job, Crimcheck inaccurately reported that Jackson is a felon, causing her to be rejected for the position, according to the lawsuit.

"There is perhaps no greater error that a consumer reporting agency can make," the lawsuit says.

Crimcheck failed to follow procedures to ensure the maximum possible accuracy of its information, according to the lawsuit.

"Had it followed such procedures it would not have reported the inaccurate information," the lawsuit states.

Jackson's lawyer, Alexis Lehmann, of the firm Francis Mailman Soumilas in Philadelphia, said Monday that mistakes like this happen because consumer-reporting agencies sometimes use only a portion of consumers' names, instead of their whole names.

In Jackson's case, the inaccurate criminal information listed about her belongs to another person with the same first and last names, but a different middle name and age, Lehmann said.

In addition, the felony the company reported is from Texas, a state in which Jackson has never lived.

Jackson said she was shocked when the staffing agency told her what the background check reported.

"I was embarrassed," Jackson said Monday. "I didn't know what to do when they said that."

She said she was particularly embarrassed to tell her 14-year-old son, and didn't want him to worry, Jackson said.

According to Lehmann, filing a lawsuit is often the only way to make a consumer-reporting agency fix its mistakes. Her firm has handled cases like Jackson's for 20 years, and has had many clients who dispute the information on their own without success.

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"A lot of the time, people just want their reports corrected," Lehmann said.

Most cases end with a settlement, but there are other times when the agencies take it to trial, she said. "It's not about the money for them, it's about clearing their name."

For breaking news and happenings in North Central Connecticut, follow Matthew Knox on Twitter: @MatthewPKnoxJI, and Facebook: Matthew P. Knox JI.
Jun. 29A dispute between Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and the Legislature over federal spending powers heated up Monday as House Republicans announced they are calling for an extraordinary session to debate how the state should divvy $1.75 billion in COVID-19 relief funds.

House Minority Whip Rod Montoya, R-Farmington, told lawmakers on the Legislative Council he planned to ask the Legislative Council Service to draft a petition seeking support for the extraordinary session, in which the Legislature would convene itself.

"[Lujan Grisham] is completely bypassing the appropriate body, which is us in the Legislature," Montoya said.

The petition would need three-fifths of support from each chamber, or 42 members of the House of Representatives and 25 senators. It comes just days after State Treasurer Tim Eichenberg confirmed New Mexico had received the full $1.75 billion in aid from the federal government.

In March, Lujan Grisham vetoed the Legislature's plan to allocate $1.2 billion in expected federal aid, saying the legislative branch had overstepped its authority by allocating federal dollars. That authority falls to the executive, the governor said.

Nora Meyers Sackett, a spokeswoman for the governor, reiterated that in an email Monday.

She cited a state Supreme Court ruling in the 1974 case Sego v. Kirkpatrick, in which, she said, justices found the Legislature did not have the power to appropriate certain federal funds.

Lawmakers in both major political parties have given different interpretations of the ruling and have pointed to state laws directing revenue to the general fund and a constitutional provision requiring a legislative appropriation for money paid out of the state treasury.

While some Democrats in the Legislature have criticized Lujan Grisham's veto of the federal spending and have pushed back against her assertion she has sole authority over allocating the funds, the most vocal opposition has come from Republicans.

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House Speaker Brian Egolf, D-Santa Fe, in recent months has characterized their accusations against Lujan Grisham as a political ploy in the GOP effort to take back the Governor's Office.

Egolf said in a statement Monday there was no need to fight about the issue.

"Both sides of the Legislature can have robust conversations with the Governor on how to spend these dollars," he said in the statement. "It's entirely a waste of everyone's time to be focused yet again on another Republican stunt, but sadly, that's what Americans have come to expect from their party."

Montoya tried to make a motion regarding the petition during the Legislative Council meeting Monday, but Egolf said the move was unnecessary.

Raul Burciaga, director of the Legislative Council Service, said the council should refrain from introducing any action.

Rep. Daymon Ely, D-Corrales, called Montoya's request for the petition "a straw poll."

"That is not appropriate for what the Legislative Council is supposed to be doing," he said.

House Minority Leader Jim Townsend, R-Artesia, defended Montoya's effort. He said he believed the action was appropriate because it addressed constitutionality and the three branches of government.

It's the second time in the past 12 months GOP lawmakers have called for an extraordinary session. In August, Republicans called for a session to limit Lujan Grisham's emergency powers to address the pandemic.

However, extraordinary sessions are rare. The state's only one came in 2002 to address a budget standoff with then-Republican Gov. Gary Johnson.

House Republicans issued a news release Monday afternoon accusing Lujan Grisham of holding a "series of closed door meetings" with legislative Democrats, as well as "secretive memos" outlining a plan to spend federal relief funds.

Sackett denied there were any secret messages or closed-door meetings. She wrote in an email the governor has spoken to all legislative leadership, including Republicans, about her priorities for federal spending.

"Information on the administration's plans for the federal funds will be coming soon and we look forward to allocating the funds to effective and impactful use benefitting New Mexicans across the state," Sackett wrote.
Rich Polk/Getty

Sharon Stone is channeling one of her most famous film roles.

On Monday, the 63-year-old actress gave a nod to her iconic Basic Instinct pose with a more casual look in a snapshot shared on Instagram.

Holding a makeshift cigarette with one hand on her hip, Stone wears just a black T-shirt that recreates the infamous police interrogation scene, with an animated version of her Instinct character, Catherine Tramell, wearing the same white outfit while smoking a cigarette. In the film, Catherine famously uncrosses her legs to reveal that she isn't wearing any underwear.

"Been there, done that; got the T-Shirt @groovyshelly ," she wrote alongside the post.

RELATED: Sharon Stone Says She Can't Stop 'Director's XXX Cut' of Basic Instinct from Coming Out

Sharon stone/ instagram

TriStar/courtesy Everett Collection

In the comments section, an array of Stone's famous pals reacted to her tribute photograph.

"Yes! You little vixen! ," model Angie Stevenson wrote as Lisa Rinna said, "FABULOUS."

"I want your thighs. And 100 other things," added Debra Messing.

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Meanwhile, Vera Wang simply commented "Yup" on the post as Andie Macdowell shared a similar short message, writing, "Gorgeous."

Stone's Basic Instinct post came about days after the actress shared a photograph of herself enjoying the sunshine while hanging in a backyard over the weekend.

Showing off her fit physique as she modeled a sporty, high-rise yellow swimsuit, Stone shared the photo on Instagram, beaming at the camera with her arms above her head.

While the star took the photo, her French bulldog adorably sat in the doorway of her home admiring her modeling skills. Stone captioned the animated photo, "Happy Summer."

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RELATED VIDEO: Sharon Stone Reveals to Oprah Winfrey Why She's Releasing Her Memoir Now

Despite her appreciation for Basic Instinct, in her memoir, The Beauty of Living Twice, Stone wrote about the complications involved in the explicit scene in the 1992 erotic thriller. She wrote that a member of the film's production told her to take her underwear off during the infamous scene under the pretense that nothing would be visible on film.

Stone said she was called to see the final cut of the movie "with a room full of agents and lawyers, most of whom had nothing to do with the project."

"That was how I saw my vagina-shot for the first time, long after I'd been told, 'We can't see anythingI just need you to remove your panties, as the white is reflecting the light, so we know you have panties on,' " she wrote. "Yes, there have been many points of view on this topic, but since I'm the one with the vagina, in question, let me say: The other points of view are bulls.  It was me and my parts up there."

"Do you have any idea how many people have watched Basic Instinct in the last 20-something years? Think about it. It's about more than just a peek up my skirt, people," she added.

The 4K restoration of Basic Instinct opens in this month in France, Australia and New Zealand. It will open in the U.S. later this year.
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An active-duty U.S. Marine came under federal investigation for allegedly plotting with at least two others to assassinate minorities, drug users, and employees of the Democratic National Committee with explosives, rocket launchers, and automatic rifles.

Thats according to a newly unsealed FBI search warrant affidavit obtained by The Daily Beast, which indicates USMC Private First Class Travis Owens and his partners in the unrealized murder plot were influenced by Timothy McVeigh, the former U.S. Army soldier behind the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that left 168 people dead and injured nearly 700. The document also states that one of the suspects had links to the Atomwaffen Division, a violent neo-Nazi group linked to at least five murders. A handful of active service members and veterans have been identified as being members of Atomwaffen, which calls for the armed overthrow of the U.S. government.

The investigation began in late August 2019, when a tipster contacted the FBI about disturbingly violent conversations they had observed in a private Facebook Messenger chat group named Right Wing Death Squad. According to the FBI, three men were behind the troubling chats: James Wisdom of Arkansas; mechanic Jason DJuan Garfieldalso of Arkansaswho went by the noms de guerre Moon Man and Jugger Bugger; and Owens, a Marine Corps E-1 from Arkansas stationed at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri.

Rhetoric in the private chat messages was consistent with racially motivated extremism ideology, to include aspirational violence against religious and racial minorities, states the affidavit, which was signed by Special Agent Ryan Crump of the FBI Little Rock Joint Terrorism Task Force.

The only one of the three who has been charged to date is Garfield, who in May 2021 was sentenced to 78 months in prison for illegal gun possession. Charges against Wisdom and Owens have not been filed, a DOJ spokesperson confirmed to The Daily Beast, and neither has a lawyer listed in court records. Assistant U.S. Attorney Aaron Jennen, the prosecutor handling the case, declined to comment.

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This Deadly Neo-Nazi Groups Media Obsession Could Be Its Downfall

Owens, however, was kicked out of the Marine Corps in April 2020, after news of the NCIS/FBI investigation came to light, USMC spokesman Capt. Andrew Wood told The Daily Beast.

Participation in supremacist or extremist organizations or activities is a violation of Department of Defense and Marine Corps orders and will lead to mandatory processing for separation following the first substantiated incident, Wood said in an email. The Marine Corps is clear on its stance as it relates to racial hatred or extremism: There is no place for either in the Marine Corps. Our strength is derived from the individual excellence of every Marine regardless of background. Bigotry and racial extremism run contrary to our core values.

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During its inquiry, the FBI reviewed numerous exchanges between Garfield, Wisdom, and Owens. In one, Wisdom allegedly messaged Garfield, saying, We can take care of druggies anytime. We need to get rid of Jews ASAP though.

According to the warrant, Garfield replied: Do both at the same time. Clean up the white community and show them whos controlling and manipulating and our numbers go up We dont have the time to do one goal at a time.

Im aware, Wisdom allegedly responded. Doesnt mean we need to be too hasty though. We need at least a rudimentary plan and proper resources before we try anything big.

The trio seemed to be preparing for a full-blown race war. Their goals were laid out in group chats underneath exhortations such as, WISDOM: WE CAN ACCELERATE TODAY FOR A NEW WORLD TOMORROW, and, SP**CS AND NI***RS NEED TO HANG FROM TREES, the warrant states. In one conversation, Garfield allegedly wrote, Racism isnt real, whites are the only humans. In another, he discussed assassinating Arkansas state Sen. Stephanie Flowers, who is Black.

Just fucking McVeigh the DNC, Garfield, who boasted of his Atomwaffen connections, wrote in one message.

You know what to buy, replied Wisdom, who also discussed constructing knockoff Panzerschreck [rocket] launchers out of PVC pipe. Call me up when youve got it and Ill be more than happy to help.

Getting those supplies, at least in part, would come from Owens, the men hoped.

I want a full auto Scar H., Garfield wrote to Owens in one chat, according to the FBI, referring to a fully automatic assault rifle used by Special Operations forces. Travis, hook me up with some goodies from the armory. Ill pay you $100 worth of McChickens.

Lol I cant do that with how the security is now in the military, Owens allegedly replied. [Its] ridiculous to get your issued M16A4 service rifle.

However, Owens told the others that he could obtain enough C-4 explosives from other service members to do the job.

I have access to 300k lbs of anhydrous ammonia, Garfield allegedly wrote in an Aug. 16, 2019, message. Just need a container to store it.

Nice, wrote Owens, the warrant states. I have combat engineers as friends with access to c4.

BOMBS AWAY MR. MCVEIGH, Garfield allegedly wrote back.

Yes kill them all, Owens allegedly replied. I have access to so much hahaha we can make it rain bullets for days.

Garfield pushed the others hard, seeming to get impatient at one point.

Im really tempted to act soon, Garfield wrote. I cant stand by and do nothing.

Civil War-Happy Cop Bragged About Beating Black Man, Feds Say

In October 2019, Garfield sent the group photographs of a handgun decorated with hand-drawn dates, symbols, and markings that gave winking nods to neo-Nazism, and a reference to Saint Tarrant, which the FBI affidavit states was a shoutout to New Zealand mosque shooter Brenton Tarrant.

Also among them were references to the Iron Guard, a Romanian fascist group; coded anti-Black messages; an acronym associated with the Azov Battalion, a Ukrainian National Guard Unit with neo-Nazi ties; and 42089, which the FBI affidavit described as a reference to Adolf Hitlers birthday, April 20, 1889.

Jonathan Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington Universitys Program on Extremism, said the men seemed to be accelerationists. The notion of speeding up the creation of a white ethnostate drives certain extremists of a certain stripe, who use it to justify violence.

Within the doctrine of accelerationism, we see a clear trend not just in violence for the sake of violence, or violence in the name of collapse, but actions that can be linked to the deification of individuals held up as 'martyrs'from Anders Breivik and Patrick Crusius to Brenton Tarrant, Lewis told The Daily Beast. The iconography on the firearm within the search warrant, for example, highlights both established accelerationist and white supremacist motifs, as well as shows direct inspirational linkages to the symbols and icons on the weapon used by Brenton Tarrant in the Christchurch massacre.

In short, the investigation provides a grim reminder that violent extremism often begets violent extremism.

The references to Attomwaffen and Timothy McVeigh suggest that the individuals involved looked to the acts of violence and terrorism inflicted by other ideologically-driven killers as an aspirational goal, Jared Holt, an extremism researcher at the Atlantic Council, told The Daily Beast. Though extremism can morph and change its form, the underlying motives and philosophies driving these movements are a constant.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Child Care Aware offers assistance for families seeking child care. Families can search the online database of licensed child care providers anytime or call the Family Center to speak to a representative for free in any language Monday through Friday 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Families can also get help finding sources of financial support they may be eligible for to help pay for child care, or families with young children who are experiencing homelessness can find child care at no cost to them for up to one year. Visit www.childcareawarewa.org/families to search the database online or call the Family Center at 1-800-446-1114.
Yankton, SD (57078)

Today

Sunshine and some clouds. High 99F. Winds S at 10 to 15 mph..

Tonight

Considerable cloudiness. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 71F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph.
One of my late fathers favorite sayings was, That guy just dont believe sh*t stinks. It 
Today

A few passing clouds. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 83F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph.

Tonight

A few passing clouds. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 83F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph.

Tomorrow

Mostly sunny skies. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 109F. Winds S at 10 to 15 mph.
Calvin graduated from LCF with a BA (Hons) in Fashion Photography. A natural storyteller, who fosters a range of approaches, rather than a singular or fixed practice of fashion photography, Calvin is able to define fashion photography in practice, research and development, and a cultural, educational, professional, and global context; breaking new ground through visually representing the fashion narrative.

Having worked for over five years on both national and international brands  across corporate, creative, and advertising campaigns, and in a freelance capacity  devising and delivering successful visual content, Calvin brings innovation and tenacity together, with his specialist subject knowledge in fashion film production, creative production, content creation, fashion photography and distribution, Calvin offers a holistic approach to developing and creating a rich digital body of work, ready for industry.



Recent award-winning Sri Lankan fashion film available here



Social Media instagram.com/fashion_calvin



1. When did you arrive in Hungary and what brought you here?

I was in and out of Hungary for the last few years, Since last year I have stayed here more regularly and now a settled British citizen in HU.



2. Have you ever been an expatriate elsewhere?

I am from London but my parents are Sri Lankan, So I do have strong connections with Sri Lanka and usually, I spend most of my time there. So I would say, Sri Lanka.



3. What surprised you most about Hungary?

The city, It's like a walking museum, I love the architecture and the cityscape with the river.



4. Friends are in Budapest for a weekend - what must they absolutely see and do?

I would say, Buckle up! Go sightseeing and city walk. Usual tourist spots like Basilica, Chain Bridge, Parliament, Varket Bazar, and the Castle district. Then jump into a spa and have a beer or two downtown.



5. What is your favorite Hungarian food?

For me Goulash and Langos, YUM.



6. What is never missing from your refrigerator?

Cheese and Beer.



7. What is your favorite Hungarian word?

Nem tudom, because you can get away with anything saying Nem tudom, ha!



8. What do you miss most from home?

Good fish and chips or a chip butty from local fishy.



9. What career other than yours would you love to pursue?

I always love my creative ventures. Even though Im a fashion Photographer by trade. I would love to be a documentary travel Photographer, imagine capturing those untold stories of people and places.



10. What's a job you would definitely never want?

I wouldnt want to become a running instructor, thats just too hard I think.



11. Where did you spend your last vacation?

I was in Sri Lanka, Actually, I travel around Sri Lanka in a Scooter for 90 days doing my personal documentary photography project. Now Im putting that into a book project.



12. Where do you hope to spend your next holiday?

Somewhere warm. May be back in Sri Lanka as I have not had a chance to visit there for over a year due to this evil pandemic.



13. Apart from temptation what can't you resist?

Cheese, Coffee, and Heineken.



14. What was your favorite band, film, or hobby as a teen?

Backstreet boys for sure. Hmm, wait !! oh, Britney may be. ( Hit me, baby, one more time ) that was one of my favorites. Haha yes, dont judge me.



15. Red wine or white?

White, Sauvignon blanc - Medium-light body to be specific.



16. Book or movie?

Movies or documentaries.



17. Morning person or night person?

Both actually. I have way too much energy.



18. Which social issue do you feel most strongly about?

I believe in and support Zero Discrimination and promote equality.



19. Buda or Pest side?

Pest for me.



20. What would you say is your personal motto?

Live simply, Love generously, Care deeply, Speak kindly, Stay Focused and take a lot of pictures.
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One of the people in the vehicle gave consent to search and during the search the troopers found three grams of methamphetamine, two scales with methamphetamine residue and drug paraphernalia, in the bed of the pickup.

Troopers spoke with a man who had been in the vehicle and he said he was scared for his life and that Scalf threatened to burn down his parents house if he was not paid and if police showed up at the house, according to court documents.

After Scalf was arrested, he eventually made bail but a condition of his bond was that he constantly wear an electronic monitoring device. Soon after being allowed to leave jail, corrections staff determined it had been cut off and Scalf had broken the terms of his bond.

His prior criminal history is abysmal, York County Attorney John Lyons said this week during Scalfs sentencing hearing. To say the least, its pretty bad. One basic understanding, when you are a prohibited person, is that you do not carry weapons. Why he had these weapons on him is concerning. Incarceration is necessary. He would benefit from incarceration. And the seriousness of this crime justifies that.
YORK  The number of vaccinations in York County continue to linger around the 11,500 mark, with the most recent figure from the health department being 11,533.

That compares to 14,519 in Seward County; 6,768 in Butler County; and 3,925 in Polk County.

So far, according to the Four Corners Health Department, the vaccination total for the entire health district is 36,820. Of those, 18,385 are first doses; 17,421 are second doses; and 1,014 are Johnson & Johnson one-dose vaccinations.

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Health officials have been urging residents in the district to get vaccinated, particularly in the last few days as there has been a surge of new COVID-19 cases in York County due to two separate outbreaks and the identification of two COVID variants.

In a statement released by Four Corners, officials said, Several of the earlier test results have been sequenced, and two variants of concern were confirmed on Friday, June 25, including the Delta (B.1.617) and P1 (first seen in Brazil) variants. Both of these variants are more contagious and easily spread than the earlier COVID seen last winter. The most important action we can take at this moment is to get vaccinated so that these variants do not spread further into the community.
A pursuit began and the vehicle continued east across Road T and then Road U, where it slowed and the driver steered the vehicle off the road, across the grass, and around a church located at 2202 Road 12. The driver shut off his lights and drove around the rear of the church in an attempt to hide and became high centered on a large pile of dirt. There he abandoned the vehicle and ran on foot. (The lieutenant) located the vehicle behind the church and called for additional units. (The lieutenant) ran in the VIN on the motorcycle (which was in the back of the pickup) and it came back as a stolen vehicle, as did the pickup.

Located in the vehicle were numerous two-inch square plastic baggies commonly used to sell narcotics and hypodermic needles, one of which was filled with what is believed to be blood, the lieutenants account details. The driver was later located hiding in a hay pile by the Nebraska State Patrol air wing and K9 units. The subject, Renschler, admitted to being the driver of the vehicle.

It was found that Renschler had an active warrant in Hamilton County and from the Nebraska Department of Corrections. It was also noted that Renschler had a suspended drivers license.
New Delhi: An accident on the Agra-Lucknow Expressway on Tuesday (June 29, 2021) early morning killed 5 and injured 4 people in Firozabad. The incident took place in Nagla Khangar when a truck crashed into a stationary bus.

As per the latest reports, the bus was destined for Agra from Lucknow.

The injured were rushed to Saifai hospital.

(More details awaited)



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Jammu: At a time when the Narendra Modi-led NDA government is taking steps towards restoring the statehood of Jammu and Kashmir, the alleged forced religious conversion of two Sikh girls has sparked widespread protests and raised concerns about the security of minorities in the newly-created UT.

The issue has now snowballed into a major political controversy and appears to have divided the political class, with some demanding a stringent law against forced religious conversion like in UP and other BJP-ruled states, while others maintaining a stoic silence fearing loss of their vote bank.

The investigation being carried out by the police in several states has revealed that the Hindu girls or women have become soft targets in 'Jihad' for religious conversion and the people behind this racket mostly target those belonging to poor families, unemployed youth, or people with a physical disability.

The latest incident came to light after protests broke out in Kashmir over the weekend after the reports about the alleged forced religious conversion of two Sikh girls surfaced. It was reported that the Sikh girls were allegedly kidnapped, forcibly converted and married off without the consent of their families.

One of the girls, an 18-year-old allegedly mentally unstable, was forced to perform nikaah with a married man aged 62. The Sik leaders claimed that their marriage was validated by a local court, without the consent of the girls parents. The second girl allegedly went missing after attending an event with a friend.

The recent incident has exposed a pattern of ethnic cleansing of minorities in J&K decades after the forced migration of Kashmiri Pandits. The incident also exposes the hidden agenda of Pakistan-backed anti-India elements to force conversion to Islam from Kerala to Kashmir.



The issue has sparked tension since the Muslim leadership in J&K is on the defensive mode and the mainstream non-BJP parties like Samajwadi Party, BSP, Congress and AAP have given a lukewarm or delayed response to the forced conversion of two Sikh girls in J&K.

The Sikh community, including the Akal Takht and Shiromani Akali Dal, has taken the matter very seriously and demanded safety measures in the Kashmir Valley for the protection of minorities. The SAD  Punjabs former ruling party  has called for the imposition of anti-conversion laws by the Centre in J&K.

SAD leader Manjinder Sirsa, who has been leading the protests, demanded that the girls be returned to their families. He said that a high-level Sikh delegation will meet to discuss minority concerns in Jammu and Kashmir. As protest over the issue intensified, Lieutenant Governor of J&K Manoj Sinha also took cognisance of the matter of girls safety and assured that a stringent law against forced religious conversion will be introduced soon.

The influential Akal Takht has also come forward with the demand for an anti-conversion law in Jammu and Kashmir, in line with the similar legislation in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. Some Kashmiri Pandit organisations also demanded severe punishment for the culprits and the return of the "abducted" Sikh women to their families.

However, this issue has a different political connotation too. During the 2020 protests against the new citizenship law, several Sikh bodies had supported the protesting Muslim community, especially women who staged a month-long sit at Shaheen Bagh against the Centre.

At that time a political narrative suggesting that the members of two religious minority communities in India - Muslims and the Sikhs  should stick together against a fascist BJP regime at the Centre was strongly built.

But all that now stands exposed as hollow and the Sikh-Muslim bonhomie build over the anti-CAA protest has vanished now. After staying mum initially, the PAGD leaders in J&K have now realised that the incident will create a wedge between the Sikhs and Muslims and cause irreparable harm to Jammu and Kashmir.

The local J&K leaders have said that the two communities (Muslims and Sikhs) have supported each other through thick and thin, having withstood countless attempts to damage age-old relationships, and that vthey should stand together this tie too.

However, this incident also points to a larger sinister plot to terrorise the local Hindus and Sikhs in J&K and force them to embrace Islam by the Pakistan-funded terror groups like Hizbul Mujahideen and LeT.

The National Investigating Agency (NIA) has recently revealed how Hizbul is creating terror to force Hindus exodus from Kashmir. A charge-sheet filed by NIA outlined Hizbuls plan to revive terrorism in Doda, Kishtwar, Ramban and other districts of Kashmir by carrying out targeted killings of Hindus in the area.

Among the mainstream political players, BJP is the only political party that has strongly opposed forced conversions on religious lines. Several BJP-ruled states have passed powerful legislation against forceful conversions and marriages and making them cognizable and non-bailable offences.

These laws intend to counter alleged attempts to convert Hindu women to Islam in the guise of marriage, which right-wing Hindu activists refer to as 'love jihad'. However, such laws are not new in India. These have been in existence in several states, the first such being enacted in 1967 in Odisha with the aim of stopping conversions of tribal people by Christian missionaries.

In the backdrop of love jihad cases, a document prepared by the BJP had identified forced religious conversion and NGOs that receive foreign funds as internal threats the nation faces. The BJP document categorised religious conversion as a serious domestic threat and a conspiracy by Christian and Jihadi activities to disturb the demographic structure of the country with the help from funds and force.

While the Opposition parties have always blamed BJP's "communal plank", it is heart-warming to see SAD and Sikh bodies coming out in the open to oppose the incidents of forced religious conversions.

For the restoration of J&Ks statehood, it is important that all including the minorities are provided with a terror-free atmosphere and no party encourages such coercive activities. The growing cases of forced religious conversions validate the demand for legislation that strongly deals with religious conversion through allurement, force or by misrepresentation or by any other fraudulent means.

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New Delhi: In fresh trouble for Twitter, the Delhi Police Cyber Cell on Tuesday (June 29) filed a case against it for allowing child pornographic content on their platform.

The police registered the case based on a complaint filed by National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR).

"Delhi Police Cyber Cell has registered a case under POCSO Act & IT Act against Twitter on the basis of a complaint from NCPCR citing the availability of links/material pertaining to child exploitation. The complaint is against Twitter Inc and Twitter Communication India Pvt Ltd," Delhi Police was quoted by ANI.

Yesterday, the Uttar Pradesh Police had lodged an FIR against two senior officials of Twitter India over the social media platform putting up a distorted map of India. The FIR was lodged at the Khurja Nagar police station in Bulandshahr district on Monday evening on the basis of a complaint by an office-bearer of right-wing Bajrang Dal.

The FIR in distorted map case named Twitter India MD Manish Maheshwari and News Partnerships Head Amrita Tripathi as accused who have been booked under Indian Penal Code section 505 (2) (public mischief). Charges under Information Technology Act section 74 (publication for fraudulent purpose) have also been invoked in the case, according to the FIR, seen by PTI.

The map, which showed the Union Territories of Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir outside India, was noticed on Monday, leading to an uproar by netizens. Twitter had removed that map on Monday evening after facing a severe backlash from all over.

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Guwahati: The Assam government is likely to announce the evaluation criteria for the Assam Board exams results 2021 soon. The Assam Higher Secondary Education Council (AHSEC) will release the evaluation criteria for class 12 and SEBA class 10.

The Assam government formed two committees in order to decide the alternative evaluation criteria to prepare the board results for classes 10 and 12. As per the reports, the committees have already submitted their reports last week in the wake of the cancellation of High School Leaving Certification (HSLC, or Class 10) and Higher Secondary (HS, or Class 12) exams.

According to a report od an English daily, the committee headed by Dr. Alok Buragohain for Class 10 results recommended that the marks of Class 9 and pre-board examinations of the students should be considered for evaluation criteria and preparation of results of class 10.

The committee for class 12 results was headed by Kumar Bhaskar Varma Sanskrit and Ancient Studies University Vice-Chancellor Professor Dipak Kumar Sharma.

However, there is no clarity on what exactly the committee has proposed for the evaluation criteria for board exam results.

Notably, the Assam government cancelled Assam Board exams for class 10 and class 12 in the wake of the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

ALSO READ: Odisha minister clarifies students' admission queries over class 10 results

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New Delhi: Foreign Secretary Harsh Shringla on Monday (June 28, 2021) expressed worry over children being recruited by terror groups and this being compounded by pandemics via online ways of radicalization.

Shringla's comments came during an address at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Open Debate on Children and Armed Conflict.

The Foreign Secretary said, "We are witnessing a dangerous and worrying trend in global terrorism and that is an increase in the number of children that are being recruited and involved in terrorism-related activities."

He added that the terror groups take advantage of the fact that children are the most susceptible.

ALSO READ | India slams Pakistan at UNHRC, highlights terrorism, forced conversions

"School closures due to the pandemic have provided an even greater opportunity to these terrorist groups to target children, including through online avenues, for radicalization and indoctrination in violent extremist ideologies," Shringla stated.

The FS said that there is a need for a more coordinated approach in implementing the child protection and counter-terrorism agendas.

He added, "States need to demonstrate the greater political will to hold the perpetrators of terrorism and their sponsors to account, and to fulfill the Council's child protection obligations."

#IndiainUNSC States need to demonstrate greater political will to hold the perpetrators of terrorism & their sponsors to account, & to fulfill the Councils child protection obligations. FS @harshvshringla at the #UNSC Open Debate on Children & armed conflict #CAAC@MeaIndia pic.twitter.com/iAWKe5bSSp  India at UN, NY (@IndiaUNNewYork) June 28, 2021

A global treaty came into effect in 2002 that forbids non-state armed groups from recruiting anyone under the age of 18. The treaty 'Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict' has 180 Signatories and includes all the countries in South Asia.

This is to be noted that the office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, with parties engaged in armed conflict, has resulted in the release of 12,643 children over the last year.
New Delhi: A day after West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee called Governor Jagdeep Dhankhar a corrupt man highlighting his involvement in the infamous Jain Hawala scam, noted journalist and anti-corruption activist, Vineet Narain, known for exposing the 1996 scandal, jumped into the debate.

In a Facebook post, Narain said that the Bengal Governor should resign on moral grounds. He added, Since there was no trial, how can one be acquitted?

Notably, Dhankhar was one of the persons chargesheeted in the 1996 Hawala case in which several Cabinet Ministers, Chief Ministers, Governors and Leaders of Opposition besides bureaucrats were chargesheeted for corruption.

On Monday, Banerjee targeted Dhankhar by recalling his connection in the Hawala case. She has been consistently demanding for his removal from the position of Governor of the state.

He is a corrupt man. He was named in the chargesheet in the 1996 Hawala Jain case. Why has the central government allowed a governor like this to continue? Banerjee said.

If the central government has no information that the governor was named in the chargesheet, I am telling them now. They should find it out, she added.

Banerjee claimed that the governor had even asked people to organise demonstrations in the state.

"I don't think that is the job of a governor. I have not seen such a governor in my life. But, as per the Constitution, I will continue to meet him, talk to him and follow the courtesies till he is here, she further said.

"I have written thrice to the Centre asking for Dhankhar's removal. The union government must consider this," she added.

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New Delhi: ICAI told the Supreme Court on Monday that it is the most conducive time to hold CA exams as the COVID-19 spread is now at a substantially low level, offering an opportune moment for chartered accountants to further their professional career.

The CA examinations which are conducted by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) in May, were postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic and are now scheduled to be held from July 5-20.

ICAI told the top court that as on date, the numbers of COVID-19 cases are comparatively low and thus it would be in the best interests of the candidates if the examinations are held as per the schedule and not cancelled or postponed.

A bench of Justices AM Khanwilkar, Dinesh Maheshwari and Aniruddha Bose said that since it has not received the ICAI note, it will hear the matter on Tuesday (June 29).

The top court is hearing a batch of pleas seeking different reliefs including an opt-out option for the candidates, postponement of the exam, and increase in number of centres this year.

At the outset, senior advocate Ramji Srinivasan, appearing for ICAI, said that they have circulated a note which if taken into consideration deals with some of the issues raised in the petitions.

Senior advocate Meenakshi Arora, appearing for one of the petitioners, said that they are not seeking deferment but want more centres to be given as many of them have been unilaterally closed by ICAI.

The bench said it will hear the matter on Tuesday and asked Srinivasan to take instruction on the contention raised by Arora.

In the note, ICAI has said the "chartered accountant exams are professional examinations and ought not to be equated with CBSE or other State Board Examinations for Class 10 or 12", and it is in the interest of the candidates to start their "professional lives and earn livelihoods".

It said the ICAI has no vested interest in holding the exams but to safeguard the interest of the aspiring CAs, ensuring that the exams are held at the most appropriate and conducive time.

The ICAI further told the top court that whenever the risk has been minimum this court has allowed exams to be held, like Class 12 exams in Kerala and Bihar which were held in April, 2021 and February, 2021 respectively.

"Further, the 3rd wave of COVID-19 cases is expected only by September-October. The Institute of Company Secretaries of India and the Institute of Cost Accountants of India are scheduled to hold examinations in August-September, 2021.

"Many candidates appear for 2 or more of these exams, hence the three Institutes hold the exams in a manner that the same do not overlap. Therefore, since COVID is dynamic in nature, the ICAI has got this very narrow window to hold the exam in July, 2021," it said.

The ICAI said the CA exams are normally scheduled to be held in May, but owing to the high number of cases at that time it postponed them, and after evaluating all factors, has now decided to hold the exams this month when the number of COVID-19 cases is comparatively low.

It said that the present COVID situation in the country is similar to when this court had allowed ICAI to hold examinations in November, 2020 and there is no reason to believe that it will not take adequate precautions.

About the arrangements, it said that the average number of examinees in an examination room will be 12 and in any case not more than 50 percent of the capacity of the room.

It said there will be 10,820 exam rooms in 847 centres and the total number of examinees will be 3,74,230.

It further added that of these 580 centres have less than 200 candidates, 208 centres have 201-250 candidates, 58 centres have 251-300 candidates and one centre has more than 500 candidates.

It said that candidates are eager to appear in the examination, as out of 3,74,230 candidates, as on June 27, more than 2, 82, 000 candidates have downloaded their admit cards.

"It is understandable that some of the candidates would have inhibitions in appearing for the exams, but that cannot be allowed to jeopardize the aspirations of a majority of the candidates," it said.
Mumbai: While almost one-and-a-half months is still left for the Ganeshotsav, Maharashtra government has decided that it will be a low key affair even this year, keeping the pandemic in mind. For the second consecutive year, the Maharashtra government has decided to ban gigantic idols of Lord Ganesha and mega public celebrations for the upcoming 10-day Ganeshotsav festival starting September 10, even as the organisers cried foul. As the country is fearing a 'third wave', the state government on Tuesday (June 30) issued a detailed notification restricting the height of the idols to up to four feet at public events and two feet for idols at home.

The government has also stipulated simple, unostentatious celebrations, without crowds and strictly following all COVID-19 protocols during the 10 days which mark the state's biggest public festival.

No processions will be permitted for the start of the festival on September 10 or for the visarjan (immersion) ceremonies on various dates till the final adieu on September 19.

Meanwhile, objecting to the notification, the president of the influential BrihanMumbai Sarvajanik Ganeshotsav Samanvay Samiti (BSGSS), Naresh Dahibavkar, termed it as "a rude shock" for the second year running. "The organisers and idol-makers are surprised and stunned. We had sent several letters to the state government but they remained unacknowledged and now suddenly this unilateral and one-sided decision has come," Dahibhavkar said in a strong statement. He appealed to Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray to convene a meeting of the BSGSS and others in the state to discuss and jointly finalise the norms for the 2021 Ganeshotsav.

As in 2020, the government has recommended giving priority to health camps or blood donation drives or health awareness campaigns for coronavirus, malaria, dengue etc., with highest levels of cleanliness maintained by all the public mandals and organisers of the mega Ganeshotsav groups.

The authorities have made it clear that the restrictions will not be eased during Ganeshotsav and directed the public mandals to ensure that there is no overcrowding during the daily aartis, pujas and darshan. The state government has asked the public mandals to switch over to online darshan or relaying the celebrations in the marquees through the local cable television networks, websites or social media platforms, as per the notification issued by Sanjay D. Khedekar, Deputy Secretary, Home Department.

For the visarjan, children and senior citizens must avoid stepping out and as far as possible, the immersion ceremonies should be performed at artificial ponds which will be created by various public and private bodies, as in 2020, at the height of the first wave of COVID-19.

Last year as well, the celebrations of the festival were subdued due to the rampant surge in COVID cases in the state. For the first time in history, Lalbaughcha Raja Ganeshotsav Mandal had decided not to hold the festivities in the wake of the pandemic. Maharashtra has reported more than 60 lakh COVID cases so far and has been one of the worst hit states amid the pandemic in India.

(With Agency inputs)

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New Delhi: As the wait continues over the commercial launch of the Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine, Dr Reddy's Laboratories has said that it may be deferred.

In an interview with an English news channel, Dr Reddy's on Tuesday (June 29, 2021) said that the commercial launch of Sputnik V may be postponed due to dependency on imported consignments and quality testing.

The Hyderabad based pharmaceutical company informed that it is planning to scale up the soft launch to 28 cities by the end of this final leg of the pilot phase.

ALSO READ | Dr Reddy's Laboratories announces commercial launch of anti-COVID 2-DG drug

Recently, Dr Reddy's Laboraties had also announced that Sputnik V which was initially launched only in Hyderabad, will now be available in nine other Indian cities.

"The limited pilot soft launch of the Sputnik V vaccine in India has now been successfully scaled up to other cities such as Visakhapatnam, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi, Baddi, Chennai, Miryalaguda and Kolhapur, with more cities to follow in the next few days," it said on June 16.

Earlier, the roll-out of the Russian COVID-19 vaccine Sputnik V at various private hospitals in the Delhi-NCR region was delayed again.

"We do not have clarity on the dates of the vaccine roll-out," a spokesman of Apollo Hospitals said.

Indraprastha Apollo had earlier said that it would tentatively start administering the two-dose vaccine by June 25.

An official of Madhukar Rainbow Children's Hospital said the facility has also not received Sputnik V doses so far.

"There is a delay on the part of the suppliers. They have not shared any specific reason for it. I think it could be related to the supply of both the doses together," he said.

This is to be noted that Sputnik V uses two different viruses that cause the common cold (adenovirus) in humans. The two doses, given 21 days apart, are different and not interchangeable.

The Centre has fixed the price of the vaccine at Rs 1,145 per dose. On the other hand, the maximum price of Covishield for private COVID-19 Vaccination Centres (CVCs) has been fixed at Rs 780 per dose, while that of Covaxin at Rs 1,410 per dose.

Russia's Gamaleya National Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology has developed the vaccine and the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) is marketing it globally.

Dr Reddy's Laboratories has been importing the shots from Russia and in the coming weeks, the vaccine is also going to be manufactured in India.

According to Gamaleya and the RDIF, Sputnik V has demonstrated an efficacy rate of 92 per cent.

Meanwhile, top officials of the Union government informed a parliamentary panel on Monday (June 28) that 135 crore jabs will be made available in the country during the August-December period this year. The doses would be reportedly of Covishield, Covaxin, Bio E Subunit vaccine, Zydus Cadila's DNA vaccine and Sputnik V.

(With agency inputs)
New Delhi: In 2018, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was attacked by two drones during a military ceremony. Both drones carried one kilogram of RDX each. However, the drones exploded in the air and Maduro narrowly escaped. That is just one instance of how drones could be used as a dangerous weapon.

Zee News Editor-in-Chief Sudhir Chaudhary on Tuesday (June 29) discussed how drone attacks have emerged as a new, low-budget model of terrorism.

On June 27, two RDX-laden drones were dropped at the Air Force Station in Jammu at around 1.30 pm, followed by two bomb blasts at an interval of 5 minutes. One of these bombings took place in the Hanger area of the Air Force Station, where the aircraft are parked. The bomb blast caused a big hole in the roof of a building. The investigating agencies suspect the target of the drones were aircraft and that the attack was possibly carried out by terrorists.

After this attack, three more drones have been seen in Kaluchak military area and Sunjwan military area. Since then the security of military bases in Jammu and Kashmir has been increased.

That is, now the Indian Army is not facing terrorists, who can be killed in encounters. They are facing these armed drones being operated by terrorists, which can become a big threat not only to India but to the whole world.

India raised the issue of threat due to the use of drones by terrorists in the United Nations on Tuesday. The Indian side said that armed drones are cheap and are very easily available or made. In the hands of terrorist organizations, they can be a big threat to the security of countries around the world.

While the Indian government is taking the drone attack at Jammu's Air Force Station seriously, the rest of the world is still not getting the gravity of the issue.

Notably, before the 9/11 attacks, America did not consider terrorism as a global challenge and thought that it is a political and legal problem. At that time, when India used to say that there is an organized jihadi ideology behind terrorism, these countries felt that India was exaggerating the subject. For many decades these countries did not consider terrorism a problem.

But when America was attacked by terrorist organization Al Qaeda in the year 2001, it understood that India was right that terrorism is a global challenge. Just like terrorism, India has warned of the threat due to the use of drones which the world needs to understand.

Drones have become a part of everyday life these days and it is said that in the future, medicines, pizza and even bread, butter and eggs will be delivered to homes by drones. In such a situation, what if a drone comes flying over someones house and instead of pizza, a bomb is placed in it.

The threat posed by drone attacks is very real and needs to be taken seriously.

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New Delhi: A Delhi hospital on Tuesday (June 29, 2021) informed that they have found the first case of Cytomegalovirus (CMV) related rectal bleeding in the coronavirus patients.

The cases were found in the Sir Ganga Ram Hospital in the national capital and are the first report from India of CMV related rectal bleeding in COVID-19 immunocompetent patients.

"During the second wave of the COVID-19, in April-May 2021, we have seen five cases of CMV infection in otherwise immunocompetent patients with COVID-19. These patients presented with pain abdomen and bleeding in stools. These patients presented with a mean of 20 to 30 days after the diagnosis of COVID-19," said Prof Anil Arora, Chairman, Institute of Liver Gastroenterology and Pancreaticoblliary Sciences, Sir Ganga Ram Hospital.

He added that none of them had other predisposing immunosuppressed states accounting for the viral infection.

Prof Arora said that the cases were from Delhi-NCR in the age group of 30-70 years. While four had complained of a lower gastrointestinal bleed, that is bleeding in stools, one patient had presented with intestinal obstruction.

He further stated that two of them also had a massive bleed with one requiring emergency lifesaving surgery in the form of removal of the right side of the colon and one of them succumbed due to massive bleeding and severe COVID-19 chest disease.

"Other three patients were successfully treated with antiviral therapy with ganciclovir," Prof Anil Arora said.

"In such cases of high index of suspicion and timely intervention in the form of an early diagnosis and effective antiviral therapy can save many precious lives," said Dr Praveen Sharma of Sir Ganga Ram Hospital.

This is to be noted that the Cytomegalovirus reportedly exists in 80 to 90 % of the Indians in asymptomatic form. Clinical presentation with symptoms secondary to CMV is usually seen in patients whose immunity is compromised.



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New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Tuesday (June 29) said it will not pass any directions to postpone the Chartered Accountancy (CA) examinations scheduled to commence in July.

It, however, asked the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) to allow an opt out scheme for students who could not take exams due to COVID-19 situation.

A bench headed by Justice AM Khanwilkar said it was not inclined in stopping the exam.

"We are not stopping the exam. We are going to consider how opting out can be granted. In the midst of exams, out of five papers, if a student appears for three papers, he should be appearing in two papers only next time," the Bench observed.

The court will hear the plea seeking directions for an "opt out" on Wednesday.

The ICAI told the court that they have given opt out option to students who were down with COVID-19.

"We have given in this cycle an opt out scheme. We have suggestions which we will put to the institute. The opt out facility will be available to people who are affected by COVID in one form or the other," said Senior advocate Ramji Srinivasan, appearing for the ICAI.

The court asked the ICAI to give an elaborate note of assurance with details on standard operating protocols that shall be maintained in the examination halls.

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New Delhi: Supreme Court of India on Tuesday (June 29) has directed every state and Union Territory to implement the 'One Nation, One Ration Card' scheme till July 31.

'One Nation, One Ration Card' scheme for migrant workers should be implemented by all states by July 31 the Supreme Court said.

In a suo motu case, the Supreme Court said that the distribution of dry ration and community kitchen shall continue until the COVID-19 pandemic rages on. It also said that the states should frame schemes for the distribution of food grains to those who do not have ration cards. The Centre should allocate the same accordingly, the Bench also said.

The Supreme Court also directed the Centre to make national portals for registration of the unrecognised workers by July 31.

A bench of justices Ashok Bhushan and M R Shah had on June 11 reserved its judgement on pleas of activists Anjali Bharadwaj, Harsh Mander and Jagdeep Chhokar seeking the implementation of welfare measures for such workers.

The fresh plea was filed in a pending suo motu case of 2020 in which the top court had in May last year taken cognisance of problems and miseries of migrant labourers and had passed a slew of directions, including asking states not to charge fare from migrant workers and provide them free food till they board trains or buses.

While reserving the order, the bench had asked the states and union territories (UTs) to implement 'one nation, one ration card' (ONORC) scheme as it allows migrant workers to get ration at the place of their work in other states as well where their ration cards are not registered.

The Centre had said that while most states were implementing the ONORC, four of them -- Assam, Chhattisgarh, Delhi and West Bengal -- had not done so and implementing it would depend on their technical readiness.

The Centre later also said the AAP government's claim regarding the launch of the ONORC plan is misleading as a large number of migrant workers are unable to take the benefit of subsidised National Food Security Act (NFSA) food grains in Delhi as there is no full implementation.

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New Delhi: The Indian embassy in Afghanistan on Tuesday advised all Indians visiting, staying and working in Afghanistan to exercise utmost caution with regard to their security and avoid all types of non-essential travel in view of escalating violence in various parts of the country.

In an advisory, the embassy said the security situation in Afghanistan remains "dangerous" and that terror groups have carried out a series of complex attacks, including targeting civilians, adding that Indian nationals additionally face a "serious threat" of abduction.

According to official data, over 3,000 Indians are staying in Afghanistan currently.

The embassy "strongly advised" all Indians to avoid all types of non-essential movements and urged them to keep essential movements as discrete as possible.

"The security situation in Afghanistan remains dangerous in several provinces. Terror groups operating in Afghanistan have escalated violent activities and carried out a series of complex attacks in various parts of Afghanistan, including targeting Afghan defence and security forces and Afghan government institutions and even civilians," the embassy said.

"Indian nationals are not exceptions, and they additionally face a serious threat of kidnapping," it said in the 13-point advisory.

Afghanistan witnessed a series of attacks in the last few weeks as the United States looks to complete the withdrawal of its forces from the war-ravaged country by September 11, ending nearly two decades of its military presence there.

The embassy also strongly advised the Indian companies operating in Afghanistan to take up necessary security measures for their Indian employees deployed at project sites.

"In recent weeks, targeted attacks that are on the rise in various provinces and districts, directed against government establishments and security posts, have seen civilians caught in the middle of the conflict. Incidents of roadside IED (improvised explosive device) blasts and magnetic IEDs used to target vehicles of civilians continue to be reported from many parts of the country," it said.

In view of the heightened security threats, the embassy asked all Indian nationals visiting, staying and working in Afghanistan to exercise utmost vigilance and caution with regard to security at workplace, place of residence and also during movement to their places of work.

It said movements, especially during peak commuting hours, should also be avoided.

"While travelling on roads, maintain distance from possible targets like military convoys, vehicles of government ministries/offices, high-ranking officials, law-enforcement agencies, and avoid visiting crowded markets," it said.

The embassy said travelling outside the main cities should be avoided, adding that essential travel should be undertaken by air as many highways and roads are unsafe and prone to attacks.

"All Indian nationals arriving in Afghanistan are advised to register with the Embassy/Consulates on the website: https://eoi.Gov.In/kabul/ or by email to paw.Kabul@mea.Gov.In. Those who are already present but have not registered or updated their contact details are also requested to do so immediately," it said.

The embassy also advised people to avoid visiting crowded markets, shopping complexes, mandis, restaurants and other public places.

"Any essential movement may please be kept as discrete as possible. Movements generally should not have a predictable pattern and timing and routes taken should be changed wherever possible to maintain an element of surprise. It is advisable to be in a high state of alertness during essential movements," it added.

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New Delhi: Keeping in view the future requirements, the Indian Railways is ready to award 58 critical and 68 most-critical projects worth more than Rs 11,5000 crore in the next few years. Despite the challenges of COVID-19, Indian Railways is working expeditiously to complete the urgent projects to increase the capacity of the tracks.

In the last year, 29 critical projects with a total length of 1,044 km worth Rs 11,588 crore have been commissioned. Major projects were delivered in states like Assam, West Bengal, Maharashtra and Uttarakhand.

The Indian Railways has identified 58 very important projects with a total length of 3,750 km costing Rs 39,663 crore. Out of these 58 very important projects, 27 projects will be completed by December, 2021 while the remaining two projects will be handed over by March 2022.

58 critical projects with a total length of 3,750 km costing Rs 39,663 crore; and 68 important projects with a total length of 6,913 km costing Rs 75,736 crore have been commissioned. These projects of multi-tracking i.e. Doubling/Third Line/Fourth Line are on busy routes.

It may be noted that most of the traffic on the Indian Railways network runs on the Golden Quadrilateral, the high density network routes and the heavily used Indian Railway network routes. The high-density and heavily used network route accounts for 51 per cent of the route length of the Indian Railways network but carries 96 per cent of the traffic.

On the basis of traffic density, type of material to be carried, strategic importance of the route, projects requiring immediate expansion are classified as critical category (58 projects) including fast progressing projects (expenditure already exceeds 60 per cent). has been placed in.

The projects which are to be completed in the next phase have been considered as critical projects (68 projects). These are all civil projects (related to electrification and signaling works).

With focused funding and constant monitoring, the target has been fixed for early completion of these projects so that the investment can be reaped. When completed, these projects will improve mobility, safety and create additional capacity for passenger and freight trains on these saturated and busy routes. High priority has been given to budget allocation for the identified projects to be completed soon.

MOST IMPORTANT PROJECTS:

58 projects with a total length of 3,750 km costing Rs 39,663 crore have been identified as very important. These very important projects are on busy routes of multi-tracking i.e. Doubling/Third Line/Fourth Line. On completion of these projects, Railways will be able to operate more traffic at higher speed with safety on these dense / saturated / busy routes. So far, 29 projects with a total length of 1,044 km costing Rs 11,588 crore have been commissioned. 27 projects will be completed by December, 2021 while remaining 02 projects will be completed by March 2022.

Important Projects:

68 important projects of total length 6,913 km costing Rs 75,736 crore have been identified and 04 projects of 108 km length costing Rs 1,408 crore have been completed so far and remaining projects are targeted to be completed by March 2024 has gone.

68 important projects: The estimated cost was Rs 75,736 crore of which 37,734 have been spent till March 21. The outlay for this year is Rs 14,466 crore. Till now 4 projects have been completed.

Indian Railways has commissioned 1,614 kms doubling / 3rd / 4th line during the financial year 2020-21 despite the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the pandemic situation, Indian Railways has so far commissioned 133 kms of Doubling/Third Line during the financial year 2021-22.

Indian Railways has given some major capacity building projects in states like Assam, West Bengal, Maharashtra and Uttarakhand. Some of them are as follows-

Assam: The commissioning of second line track on Narayan Setu on Brahmaputra river of New Bongaigaon-Guwahati section will bring great relief to this section.

West Bengal:

a) In May 2021, Indian Railways has commissioned two doubling projects i.e. Katwa-Bazar Sau and Azimganj-Bazar Sau part in West Bengal despite the COVID-19 pandemic and state elections.

b) Katwa-Bazar Sau and Azimganj-Bazar Sau: Doubling of this line is very important considering the to and fro traffic of Bardhaman Sahibganj for movement of coal to NTPC TPS ie Farakka Thermal Power Station (under construction)

Maharashtra: In June 21, Indian Railways has started the very important project Bhusaval-Jalgaon third line in Maharashtra, which will remove the bottleneck in this section and will provide much relief to train service operation in Mamad-Khandwa and Bhusaval-Udhna sections.

Uttarakhand:

Haridwar-Luxor doubling: . The entire route of this section from the national capital New Delhi to Haridwar via Meerut, Muzaffarnagar and Roorkee has become double line (in January, 2021) after commissioning. This will improve punctuality on this congested route.

After completion of the above very important and critical projects, more line capacity will be available for smooth movement of passengers and freight on congested routes, increasing the speed of trains, starting new rail service, increasing safety as maintenance on these congested routes. Margin will be available.

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Bengaluru: The Karnataka High Court will on Tuesday hear the petition of Twitter India Managing Director Manish Maheshwari against the notice issued by Ghaziabad Police under Section 41A of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC), asking him to physically appear before the police.

On June 24, the court heard the matter and granted interim relief to Twitter India MD Maheshwari and directed the Uttar Pradesh Police not to take any coercive steps against him till the next date of hearing in connection with the probe into the circulation of a viral video clip of an assault of an elderly man on the social media platform.

Karnataka High Court to hear Twitter Managing Director Manish Maheshwari's petition against notice issued by Ghaziabad, UP Police under Sec 41A CrPC, asked him to appear physically before the police The Court heard the matter on June 24 and granted interim relief to Twitter MD pic.twitter.com/0VW59IBQhk  ANI (@ANI) June 29, 2021

A bench of Justice G Narendra also clarified that if Ghaziabad Police want to examine the petitioner, Twitter MD, they can do it through virtual mode. The court listed the matter for further hearing on June 29.

The Uttar Pradesh Police had on June 16 filed FIR against nine entities, including Twitter India in connection with the Loni incident.

In the FIR, the police said, "There is no communal angle to the incident in Loni where a man was thrashed and his beard was chopped off.

The following entities - The Wire, Rana Ayyub, Mohammad Zubair, Dr Shama Mohammed, Saba Naqvi, Maskoor Usmani, Salman Nizami - without checking the fact, started giving communal colour to the incident on Twitter and suddenly they started spreading messages to disrupt the peace and bring differences between the religious communities."

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Bhopal: Madhya Pradesh Home Minister Narottam Mishra on Tuesday (June 29) has directed the state Director General of Police to file a case against Twitter over the microblogging site posting a distorted map of India on its website.

This is a serious issue and we have seen it has been going on for a long time, sometimes there are comments against Bharat Mata and sometimes it comes up in this way on Twitter. These issues cannot be taken lightly. The Central government has taken it seriously and Madhya Pradesh Government is also taking it seriously. I have directed the DGP to investigate all aspects and register FIR and file a case," Mishra told ANI.

A map of India, which showed the Union Territories of Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir as not a part of India had appeared on Twitter`s website under its Career page and had invited severe backlash from netizens.

The social media platform had late on Monday removed the distorted map from its site.

Earlier, based on a complaint by a Bajrang Dal leader in Bulandshahr, the Uttar Pradesh Police had booked Twitter India Managing Director Manish Maheshwari under Section 505 (2) of Indian Penal Code and Section 74 of IT (Amendment) Act 2008 for showing the wrong map of India on its website.

Previously, in October 2020, Twitter had labelled the Indian territory of Leh in Ladakh as part of the People`s Republic of China (PRC).

The government of India had then issued a warning to CEO Jack Dorsey over the misrepresentation of the Indian map.

Giving notice to Twitter, Secretary IT had said that such attempts not only bring disrepute to Twitter but also raise questions about its neutrality and fairness as an intermediary.

Now for the past several months, Twitter has been involved in a stand-off with the Indian government over the new amendments in the country`s new Information Technology laws with the microblogging platform losing its intermediary status and becoming liable for user-generated content.

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Hyderabad: Andhra Pradesh police on Tuesday (June 29) said they were on the lookout for a man who allegedly killed his wife, and set her corpse on fire in a suitcase to get rid of it.

Alipiri police in Tirupati found the charred body of the woman in bushes near a government hospital and with the help of forensics identified her and where she was from.

In a shocking revelation in the case, the police found that the husband had told the family that his wife died of COVID-19 and the government authorities had disposed the body.

They also found CCTV footage of the husband leaving his apartment with a similar looking suitcase than the one they found the body.

CCTV footage from the areas around the hospital show the moving around in a cab. The police picked up the cab driver and after interrogation found that he had helped the man dispose the body.

We have launched the manhunt for Srikanth Reddy, who had been absconding since the incident happened. We are yet to gather complete details about him, inspector Devendra Kumar told Hindustan Times.

He said the woman, along with her husband M Srikanth Reddy, from Badwel in Kadapa district, and their 18-month-old daughter, had been residing in Tirupati for the last three months due to COVID-19 pandemic.

A man-hunt is underway to find the murderer and bring him to justice.

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New Delhi: An All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Delhi study has suggested that more people lost their lives due to COVID-19 under 50 than any other age group.

The study published in the 'Indian Journal of Critical Care Medicine' is authored by AIIMS Delhi Director Dr Randeep Guleria, Chief of the AIIMS trauma centre Dr Rajesh Malthotra, among others.

The study covered deceased adult patients who were admitted between April 4 and July 24, 2020.

It aimed to describe the clinic epidemiological feature and the causes of mortality of patients admitted in dedicated COVID-19 centres in India.

ALSO READ | Mixing two COVID-19 vaccines could help fight new variants, need more data: AIIMS Chief Dr Randeep Guleria

During the study period, a total of 654 adult patients were admitted to the ICU, of which, 247 died. A mortality per cent of 37.7 per cent was recorded (247 out of 654) and adult patients were further divided into age groups of 18 to 50, 51 to 65 and above 65, to compare their clinical characteristics and outcomes.

The study showed that 42.1 per cent were between 18-50, 34.8 per cent were in 51-65 and 23.1 per cent were in 65+ age group.

The most common comorbidities were hypertension, diabetes mellitus and chronic kidney disease along with the most common presenting features being fever cough and shortness of breath.

Data of all the patients who died in the ICU were collected from their electronic medic report, patients daily progress chart as well as nursing notes.

In different studies, the ICU mortality among COVID-19 patients varies between 8 to 66.7 per cent, while in this study, the hospital mortality was 18.2 per cent and the ICU mortality was 36.1 per cent.

46 Pediatric were also admitted during this period, of which, six died due to coronavirus and the ICU mortality among the Pediatric group was recorded at 13 per cent.

(With ANI inputs)

ALSO READ | Children unlikely to get hit by COVID-19 third wave: WHO-AIIMS Study reveals
New Delhi: A team of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) team was allegedly attacked in West Bengal's Jadavpur on Tuesday (June 29) when it arrived to investigate alleged incidents of post-poll violence in the state. According to Atif Rasheed, a member of the NHRC investigation team, the team was attacked by goons while he was visiting areas affected in post-poll violence.

"During the probe, it has been found that more than 40 houses have been destroyed here. We are being attacked by goons," said Rasheed. Meanwhile, Rajya Sabha MP, Swapan Dasgupta today wrote to Rajiv Jain, Member, NHRC stating, "I write to bring to your notice complete breakdown of law and order, wherein citizens of Tarakeshwar were subjected to continuous post-poll atrocities for no reason apart from their political preferences".

On Sunday, NHRC invited complainants to meet and address their grievances to NHRC committee members either in person or via mail, or telephonically regarding the alleged post-poll violence in West Bengal.

A press note issued by the NHRC on Sunday stated that as per the direction of the West Bengal High Court, a Committee has been constituted by the NHRC Chairperson to look into the various cases, complaints, allegations of violations of human rights, particularly in the post-poll period in West Bengal.

It stated that the Committee, headed by Rajiv Jain, Member, NHRC and other members of the Committee and several teams of NHRC has been touring various places of West Bengal and enquiring into the veracity of these complaints/allegations.

Earlier, on June 21, the NHRC chairperson Justice (Retired) Arun Mishra has constituted a committee headed by former Intelligence Bureau chief Rajiv Jain to enquire into the complaints of post-poll violence in West Bengal.

The inquiry was ordered in accordance with the orders of the High Court of Calcutta, NHRC officials said. As per the orders of the High Court, the NHRC Committee shall examine all cases of post-poll violence in West Bengal, complaints about which have already been received in the National Human Rights Commission or which may be received.

A four-member team deputed by the Ministry of Home Affairs has also visited the post-poll violence-affected areas after several incidents of violence have been reported at various places after the declaration of the Assembly poll results on May 2.
New Delhi: The Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) on Tuesday (June 29) handed over the probe of the Jammu Air Force station attack case to the National Investigation Agency (NIA) and has reregistered an FIR under various sections.

According to a press release, the FIR has been registered under sections 3 and 4 of Explosive Substances Act, 1908, sections 13, 16, 18 and 23 of the UA (P) Act, 1967 and sections 307, 120B of IPC, 1860.

The case relates to an explosion that occurred inside the premises of the Air Force Station, Satwari campus, Jammu on June 27 and a subsequent blast, after about 6 minutes carried out by drones in a well-planned conspiracy that led to the injury to two Air Force personnel and damaged the office buildings.

While NIA has been working with other agencies since immediately after the incident, pursuant to reregistration of the case, requisite actions as per law, for expeditious investigation of the case have been initiated.

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NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday held crucial discussions with Union Home Minister Amit Shah, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and NSA Ajit Doval. PM Modi's crucial virtual meeting with his top ministers and the NSA comes in the backdrop of a drone attack on the Indian Air Force station in Jammu.

Ahead of this crucial meeting, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh was briefed by the Air Force Chief, the sources said.

Notably, the meeting also took place a day after Rajnath Singh concluded his two-day visit to Ladakh. Though there has been no official word on the agenda of the high-level virtual meeting, the situation in J&K and along the Line of Actual Control is expected to be the top focus.

News agency ANI later quoted sources as saying that discussions were held on futuristic challenges in the defence sector and equipping the armed forces with modern equipment.

PM holds high-level meeting with Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, Union Home Minister Amit Shah and NSA Ajit Doval, discussions held on futuristic challenges in the defence sector & equipping our forces with modern equipment: Sources (File photos) pic.twitter.com/hkM6aJhq8M  ANI (@ANI) June 29, 2021

In a major security concern, a drone attack was carried out on the Jammu Air Force station in the early hours of Sunday. Explosives were dropped on the IAF station in Jammu by two drones. The case has been handed over to the National Investigation Agency (NIA).

Meanwhile, alert Army soldiers thwarted a possible attack by drones on a military station in Jammu on June 28. "Both the drones flew away. A major threat was thwarted by the alertness and proactive approach of troops," he said.

Director-General of Jammu and Kashmir Police Dilbag Singh has said that the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba terror outfit is suspected to be behind the drone attack.

The Centre has handed over the investigation into the drone attack to the NIA.

Importantly, PM Narendra Modi will chair a meeting of the Union Council of Ministers on Wednesday, which is likely to discuss the Covid situation and may also focus on the functioning of few ministries, sources said. The meeting will be held virtually.

The Union Council of Ministers is headed by the Prime Minister and includes the Cabinet Ministers and Ministers of State (MoS) with the ones being given independent charge

The work done by the Road and Transport Ministry and Civil Aviation and Telecom ministries may be reviewed in the meeting, the sources said. A detailed discussion on the COVID-19 situation is also likely during the meeting.

Political observers feel the council of ministers meeting assumes significance as it is being held at a time when political circles are abuzz with speculation of a cabinet expansion and possible reshuffle.

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New Delhi: A parliamentary panel on Tuesday (June 29) asked Twitter to explain with 48 hours why it had blocked access of Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and Congress MP Shashi Tharoor to their accounts, sources said. The missive from the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information and Technology, headed by Tharoor, came amid a continuous tussle between the microblogging platform and the central government over various issues, including new IT rules.

The panel was instructed by Tharoor to seek reply from Twitter on the blocking of access to accounts of Prasad and others on its platform, the sources said. Last week, Twitter had blocked Union Information and Technology Minister Prasad from accessing his account which ratcheted up tensions with the government as it came under renewed attack for not following local laws.

Twitter denied Prasad access to his account '@rsprasad' for almost an hour on the grounds that he violated the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but the minister said the microblogging platform violated new IT rules that require intermediary or a host of user content to give prior notice before locking access.

The IT Minister called out Twitter over the brazen arbitrariness and running its 'own agenda'. Soon after Prasad flagged the issue, Congress leader Shashi Tharoor tweeted that he too had faced something similar. "Raviji, the same thing just happened to me. Clearly DMCA is getting hyperactive. This tweet has been deleted by @Twitter because its video includes the copyrighted BoneyM song 'Rasputin'," Tharoor tweeted.

Tharoor further said: "As Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology, I can state that we will be seeking an explanation from @TwitterIndia for the locking of @rsprasad's & my accounts & the rules & procedures they follow while operating in India".

Prasad lashed out at Twitter, and in a series of posts on rival social media platform Koo said it was apparent that his statements calling out the "high handedness and arbitrary actions" of Twitter, had ruffled feathers.

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Mumbai: NCP president Sharad Pawar on Tuesday (June 29) met Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray amid speculation in state political circles over differences in Maharashtra's ruling Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government of the Shiv Sena-NCP-Congress alliance.

The meeting came amid rumours that Shiv Sena is considering a patch-up with the BJP, its ally of 35 years. Pawar drove to Varsha, the chief minister's official bungalow in the posh Malabar Hill area in south Mumbai and had a lengthy discussion with Thackeray, sources said.

The meeting comes ahead of the two-day monsoon session of the state legislature, slated here from July 5. Shiv Sena on Tuesday issued a whip to party legislators to attend the entire two-day proceedings. There have been differing voices among MVA partners over handling of issues like Maratha quota and OBC reservations. Maharashtra Congress chief Nana Patole recently said the alliance with the Sena has an expiry date and in the next polls, his party will fly solo.

Thackeray had taken a dig at the grand old party saying people would beat with footwear those who talk of contesting elections alone without offering solutions to people's problems. Pawar recently expressed confidence that the MVA government in Maharashtra, which came to power in 2019, will complete its full term and had praised ally Shiv Sena, saying it is the party which one can trust.

His remarks had come against the backdrop of the one-on-one meeting between Thackeray and PM Narendra Modi in Delhi and Pawar's meeting with BJP leader and former CM Devendra Fadnavis in Mumbai earlier this month.

Pawar had also said the MVA will do well in the next Assembly and Lok Sabha elections, indicating the three parties may contest the 2024 polls together.

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Chennai: The first bench of the Madras High Court has observed that without the nod of the Supreme Court, the Tamil Nadu Government cannot form a committee to study the impact of NEET on socially backward students.

The Madras High Court asked the Tamil Nadu government to file a reply within a week, regarding a petition moved by the state BJP, challenging the government-constituted AK Rajan Committee.

The plea filed by BJP State General Secretary Karu Nagarajan, who called the 9-member AK Rajan Committee unconstitutional, illegal, unfair and unreasonable. Nagarajans plea wanted the Court to restrain the committee from proceeding further.

It added that as per the 2017 Supreme Court ruling, the Tamil Nadu government was required to implement NEET exam for medical entrance.

During the hearing of this plea, the Court questioned the Tamil Nadu government over whether it had sought or obtained the permission of the Supreme Court in this matter, as forming such a committee would be against its orders.

Appearing on behalf of the state government, Advocate General Shanmugasundaram submitted that the committee formation was a policy decision taken by the government. He added that it was also backed by the DMK manifesto and the peoples demand.

Responding to this, the first bench of Justices Sanjib Banerjee and Senthilkumar Ramamoorthy said, May be, but if it is contrary to the Supreme Court order, then it cannot be permitted.

It was the ruling DMKs election promise to abolish NEET if voted to power. DMK President MK Stalin had said that a law would be passed in the state assembly to abolish NEET, following which the Indian Presidents assent would be sought.

The case will be heard next on July 5.

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New Delhi: Uttar Pradesh government moves to Supreme Court on Tuesday (June 29) against the order of protection by Karnataka high court for Twitter MD Maneesh Maheshwari in Loni assault case.

The Karnataka High Court on Tuesday will hear the petition of Twitter Managing Director Manish Maheshwari against the notice issued by Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh Police under Section 41A of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC), asking him to physically appear before the police.

On June 24, the court heard the matter and granted interim relief to Maheshwari and directed the Uttar Pradesh Police not to take any coercive steps against him till the next date of hearing in connection with the probe into the circulation of a viral video clip of an assault of an elderly man on the social media platform. A bench of Justice G Narendra also clarified that if Ghaziabad Police want to examine the petitioner, Twitter MD, they can do it through virtual mode.

The Court listed the matter for further hearing on June 29.

The Uttar Pradesh Police on June 16, filed FIR against nine entities, including Twitter India in connection with the Loni incident. In the FIR, the police said, "There is no communal angle to the incident in Loni where a man was thrashed and his beard was chopped off.

The following entities -- The Wire, Rana Ayyub, Mohammad Zubair, Dr Shama Mohammed, Saba Naqvi, Maskoor Usmani, Salman Nizami -- without checking the fact, started giving communal colour to the incident on Twitter and suddenly they started spreading messages to disrupt the peace and bring differences between the religious communities."

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New Delhi: Three days after announcing that pregnant women can be vaccinated against COVID-19, the Union Health Ministry on Monday (June 28, 2021) issued guidelines for the same and stated that pregnancy does not increase the risk of coronavirus infection.

"Most pregnant women will be asymptomatic or have a mild disease, but their health may deteriorate rapidly and that might affect the foetus too. It is important that they take all precautions to protect themselves from acquiring COVID-19, including taking vaccination against COVID-19. It is therefore advised that a pregnant woman should take COVID-19 vaccines," the ministry said.

The Health Ministry also informed that in case a woman has been infected with COVID-19 during the current pregnancy, then she should be vaccinated soon after the delivery.

Answering whether COVID-19 vaccines have any side effects, the ministry said that the COVID-19 vaccines available are safe and vaccination protects pregnant women against COVID-19 illness/disease.

"Like any medicine, a vaccine may have side effects which are normally mild," it said.

"After getting the vaccine injection, she can get a mild fever, pain at the injection site or feel unwell for 1-3 days," the Ministry stated.

However, it added that the long-term adverse effects and safety of the vaccine for foetus and child is not established yet.

"Very rarely (one in 1-5 lakh persons), pregnant women may experience some of the following symptoms within 20 days after getting the COVID-19 vaccination which may require immediate attention," the Health Ministry said.

Union Ministry of Health issues guidelines for vaccination of pregnant women; COVID-19 vaccines available are safe & vaccination protects pregnant women against COVID-19 illness/disease like other individuals. pic.twitter.com/k47ggCOKj4  ANI (@ANI) June 28, 2021

The Union Health Ministry also advised all pregnant women to register themselves on the Co-WIN portal or get themselves registered on-site at the COVID-19 vaccination centre.

The Ministry said the following fall in the high-risk category of getting an infection: someone who is a health care worker or a frontline worker; community having a high or increasing rate of COVID-19 infections; frequently exposed to people outside the household and difficulty in complying with social distancing if living in a crowded household.

If a pregnant woman gets infected with the virus, the ministry said that although most (>90 per cent) infected pregnant women recover without any need for hospitalisation, rapid deterioration in health may occur in a few.

Symptomatic pregnant women appear to be at an increased risk of severe disease and death.

In case of severe disease, like all other patients, pregnant women shall also need hospitalization.

Pregnant women with underlying medical conditions eg, high blood pressure, obesity, age over 35 years are at a higher risk of severe illness due to COVID-19.

Further answering the apprehensions regarding the baby's health, the ministry informed that over 95 per cent of newborns of COVID-19 positive mothers have been in good condition at birth.

In some cases, COVID-19 infections in pregnancy may increase the possibility of premature delivery, the baby`s weight might be less than 2.5 kg and in rare situations, the baby might die before birth.

Women older than 35 years of age, obese women, having a pre-existing illness such as diabetes or high blood pressure, having a history of clotting in the limbs are at a higher risk of developing complications after COVID-19 infection.

(With ANI inputs)
New Delhi: A Pakistani terrorist and top Lashkar-e-Taiba commander Abrar killed in the encounter with security forces in Maloora Parimpora, Srinagar, according to reports.

"Top LeT commander Abrar, who was arrested yesterday, disclosed during interrogation that he had kept his AK-47 rifle in a house. When the party was entering the house to recover the weapon, one of his associates hiding inside the house fired on the party," IGP Kashmir Vijay Kumar told ANI.

In the ensuing gunfire, the foreign terrorist who fired from inside the house was neutralised and Abrar was also killed, said Vijay Kumar, adding that two AK-47 rifles were recovered from the site.

"In the initial firing, 3 CRPF personnel got injured and the said terrorist Abrar accompanying the search party got hit. The injured SF personnel were evacuated and the rest of the party took position and called for reinforcement. The house was cordoned immediately by an additional component of JKP, CRPF, and Army and the fire was further retaliated," the IGP said.

Vijay Kumar told ANI, "Both terrorists have been killed in Srinagar encounter. Jammu and Kashmir Police had a specific input about terrorists carrying an attack on the highway. Keeping in view the seriousness of the input, a few joint nakas of JKP and CRPF were placed along the highway."

"On Parimpora naka, a vehicle was stopped and their identity was asked. The person sitting at the back seat tried to open his bag and took out a grenade. The Naka party swiftly swung into action and grabbed the person sitting at the back seat. Both the driver and the person sitting at the back seat were taken to the police station wherein after taking off his mask, it was identified that one was a terrorist Abrar, a top LeT commander," said IGP Kumar.

The IGP said, "He was put to joint interrogation by Jammu and Kashmir Police, CRPF and Army. One pistol and hand grenades were recovered from his possession. On sustained interrogation by the joint teams of JKP, CRPF and Army, he disclosed that he had kept his AK-47 rifle in a house located at Malhoora."

Notably, Lashkar-e-Taiba commander Abrar was involved in several killings of SFs and civilians along with other terrorists.

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The Haryana Staff Selection Commission (SSC) will end registration for the position of Male Constable in the commando wing (Group C) on Tuesday (June 29). This recruitment drive is being conducted to fill 520 male constable positions in the Haryana Police Departments Commando Wing (Group C).

The Haryana Staff Selection Commission conducts examinations/interviews for Group C service appointments and may be called upon by the state government to conduct examinations/interviews for Group B and D service appointments. The Commission conducts examinations/interviews for Group C service appointments and may be called upon by the state government to conduct examinations/interviews for Group B and D service appointments.

Haryana SSC Group C recruitment: Important dates

Last date to apply for Haryana recruitment 2021: June 29, 2021

The deadline for submitting the fee is July 5.

Ex-servicemen are also eligible to apply for the positions

Application fee for Haryana SSC Recruitment 2021

The application cost for all general male applicants is Rs 100. Candidates from Haryanas SC/BC/EWS categories must pay a Rs 25 application fee. Haryanas ex-servicemen are free from paying the application fee.

How to Apply for Haryana SSC Recruitment 2021

1. Candidates who are interested and qualified can apply by visiting the official website of Haryana SSC  hssc.gov.in

2. A new page will appear on the screen.

3. Proceed by clicking on the registration.

4. Register and fill out all of the needed information.

5. Following the submission of the application, a registration number and password will be generated.

6. Take a final printout of the application form and challan once it has been successfully submitted.

For any further information, candidates are advised to visit the Haryana SSCs official website at hssc.gov.in.

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New Delhi: The University Grants Commission (UGC) has started inviting online applications for hiring Junior Consultants to perform the various functions of the Distance Education Bureau (DEB).

Prof Rajnish Jain, Secretary, UGC informed that there are eight vacant posts and the last date for filling up the online application is July 12, 2021.

Qualifications:

The interested candidate should be a Post Graduate from a recognized University with a minimum of 55% marks, preferably with broad knowledge of the Distance online mode of Education. He/she should be well versed in the use of computers involving MS Office/Excel/Use of internet, etc.

Age limit: A candidate should not be more than 35 years on the last date of submission of application.

Period of engagement: Six months which may be extended further on the basis of the review of performance and conduct.

Range Consultancy Fee: Between Rs 50,000 and 60,000 per month.

Click here for direct link
New Delhi: Karnataka government has initiated precautionary measures in the wake of Delta plus variant of COVID-19 being reported from Maharashtra. The state government on Tuesday (June 29) made RT-PCR test report or a vaccination certificate mandatory for the travellers coming from Maharashtra as the cases surged in the neighbouring state.

"Negative RT-PCR certificate not older than 72 hours or vaccination certificate of at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine shall be compulsorily produced by the passengers coming to Karnataka by flight, bus, train, taxi, personal transport, etc. This will also be applicable for all the flights originating from Maharashtra to Karnataka," Chief Secretary P Ravi Kumar said in his order.

Stating that Maharashtra continues to be threatened with the spread of COVID-19 virus, the order said that Delta Plus variant of COVID-19, a variant of concern, has been reported in certain districts of Maharashtra. Hence, the prevailing situation in the neighbouring state entails taking special surveillance measures to prevent the spread into the border districts of the state, the order said.

The airlines, Railways and bus service providers have been directed to issue boarding passes to those who possess RT-PCR or vaccination certificates. The deputy commissioners of the border districts have been asked to intensify their surveillance and allow those people to enter the state by their private vehicles who possess the two certificates.

There is exemption for negative RT-PCR for those who took the first dose of vaccine, constitutional functionaries and healthcare professionals, children below two years and in dire emergency situations.

In case of dire emergency, the passenger's swab should be collected on arrival in Karnataka with necessary details like phone number and address 'duly verifying from their ID', the order said.

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MUMBAI: Former Maharashtra Home Minister Anil Deshmukh will on Tuesday appear before Enforcement Directorate (ED) for questioning in connection with an alleged money laundering case.

Deshmukh was earlier asked to depose before the investigating officer at the ED's office on Saturday for questioning in the money laundering case related to an alleged multi-crore bribery-cum-extortion racket that led to his resignation from the post of state home minister in April this year.

Enforcement Directorate (ED) has summoned former Maharashtra Home Minister Anil Deshmukh for questioning today in connection with an alleged money laundering case. pic.twitter.com/7XUOOeVgDN  ANI (@ANI) June 29, 2021

The NCP leader, however, had sought a fresh date for appearance before the ED, following which the agency asked him to appear for questioning this week.

The central agency on Saturday arrested Deshmukh's personal secretary Sanjeev Palande (51) and personal assistant Kundan Shinde (45) after it carried out raids against them and the former home minister in Mumbai and Nagpur on Friday.

The ED's case against Deshmukh and others was made out after the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) first carried out a preliminary inquiry followed by a regular case being filed on the orders of the Bombay High Court.

The court had asked the CBI to look into the allegations of bribery made against Deshmukh by former Mumbai Police commissioner Param Bir Singh.

Deshmukh, who resigned from his post in April following the allegations, has denied any wrongdoing.

In a related development, a Nagpur-based lawyer had appeared before the Enforcement Directorate on Monday in connection with a money laundering case against Deshmukh.

The central agency had summoned advocate Tarun Parmar last week after he complained to the agency against Deshmukh and some other politicians, claiming that he knew how these people were involved in money laundering and had documents to prove it.

Parmar reached the ED's office in south Mumbai around 11 am on Monday carrying some documents against Deshmukh and others.

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NEW DELHI: The Punjab government on Tuesday extended the COVID-19 curbs till July 10 as more cases of the deadly Delta plus variant were reported across the state.

However, the Capt. Amarinder Singh government also announced certain relaxations, including the opening of bars, pubs and 'ahatas' at 50% capacity, beginning July 1

With cases of Delhi Plus variant coming to light, Punjab CM Captain Amarinder Singh has ordered the extension of COVID restrictions till July 10, with certain more relaxations, including the opening of bars, pubs and 'ahatas' at 50% capacity, beginning July 1, a statement issued by the Punjab Chief Minister's Office said.

With cases of Delta Plus variant coming to light, Punjab CM Captain Amarinder Singh on Tuesday ordered extension of Covid restrictions till July 10, with certain more relaxations, including opening of bars, pubs and 'ahatas' at 50% capacity, beginning July 1: Punjab CMO  ANI (@ANI) June 29, 2021

The Central Government had on Friday informed that 50 cases of Delta Plus variant of Covid-19 have been recorded across 11 states of India, adding that the maximum number of such cases were in Maharashtra.

Meanwhile, Punjab on Monday recorded 271 fresh COVID-19 cases that took its infection tally to 5,95,136 while 18 more fatalities pushed the death toll to 16,011, according to a medical bulletin.

Ludhiana reported 35 fresh cases, followed by 26 in Jalandhar and 21 in Hoshiarpur, the bulletin stated. The latest deaths were reported from Barnala, Bathinda and Faridkot, among other districts, it said.

There are 3,639 active COVID-19 cases in Punjab. While 114 critical patients are on ventilator support, 381 critical patients and 1,560 others are on oxygen support, the bulletin said.

The state's positivity rate stands at 0.67 per cent. As many as 614 more coronavirus patients recovered from the infection the previous day, taking the total number of cured people to 5,75,486, it said.

So far, 1,07,95,548 samples have been collected for testing in the state, it added. Meanwhile, Chandigarh's COVID-19 caseload increased to 61,632 with eight fresh infections, according to the medical bulletin.

No fresh deaths were reported in the union territory. The death toll stands at 807. There are 181 active COVID-19 cases in Chandigarh, the bulletin stated.

A total of 60,644 COVID-19 patients have recovered from the disease, with 30 discharged from hospitals the previous day, it said. So far, 5,64,021 samples have been taken for testing. Of these, 5,01,131 samples have tested negative while reports of 11 are awaited, it said.

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DEHRADUN: The Uttarakhand government on Tuesday postponed the Char Dham Yatra with immediate effect till further orders, in compliance with the order of the Uttarakhand High Court in this regard. The state government also issued a revised SOP in this regard.

With this, the proposed Char Dham Yatra which was scheduled to begin from July 1 stands cancelled. Defying the Uttarakhand High Court`s order against holding Char Dham yatra this year, the state government had earlier issued a fresh set of COVID guidelines for the pilgrimage and said the first phase of the yatra will begin from July 1.

The state government further said that the second phase of Char Dham Yatra will commence from July 11.

As per the government, the COVID negative report was mandatory for those undertaking the yatra. It is to be noted that the state High Court had on Monday stayed the state Cabinet`s decision permitting Char Dham Yatra with a limited number of pilgrims and had also ordered live streaming of Char Dham shrines.

Despite Uttarakhand High Court's order against holding Char Dham Yatra this year, the state govt in a fresh set of COVID guidelines said the first phase of the yatra will begin from July 1, while the second phase will commence from July 11; COVID negative report to be mandatory https://t.co/Fm16PD3ssc  ANI (@ANI) June 29, 2021

The standard operating procedures (SOPs) were issued for the residents of Rudraprayag, Chamoli and Uttarkashi. While it allowed the residents of Rudraprayag to visit the pilgrimage site -- Kedarnath, locals from Chamoli district were permitted to undertake yatra of Badrinath.

The residents of Uttarkashi were allowed to visit Yamunotri and Gangotri in the first phase. In the second phase, all the residents of the state will be permitted to take part in the yatra, the notification said.

In view of COVID-19 and poor health preparedness, the decision of the government was put on hold by the High court. The court asked the government to file the affidavit again by July 7.

Earlier on June 25, the State Cabinet decided to partially open the Char Dham Yatra for locals in limited numbers from July 1. Initially, it was decided, the yatra would be opened for residents of Chamoli, Uttarkashi, and Rudraprayag districts with a cap on the number of pilgrims to visit the temples daily.

The four pilgrimage sites in Uttarakhand are Badrinath, Kedarnath, Yamunotri, and Gangotri.

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New Delhi: In a proud moment, a 20-year-old self-taught cybersecurity analyst and ethical hacker named Aditi Singh has received a bounty of $30,000 (roughly over Rs 22 lakh from Microsoft for finding a bug in their system.

The tech giant rewarded the ethical hacker for detecting a bug in the Azure cloud system. According to a news report, Aditi found a similar bug in Facebook 2 months back and had won a bounty of $7500 (over Rs 5.5 lakh).

She said that both companies had a remote code execution (RCE) bug, which is relatively new and is currently not being paid much attention to. Through such bugs, hackers can get access to internal systems and the information they hold.

Notably, it was around 2 months ago that Aditi had spotted the RCE bug in Microsoft Azure. She even informed the company about the bug but didnt get any kind of response as the company was busy checking if anyone had downloaded the insecure version of the system.

Explaining the reason behind the RCE bug, she said developers should have first downloaded a Node Package Manager instead of writing the code directly. Developers should write codes only after they have the NPM, Aditi was quoted as saying.

Further, the talented girl also spoke about her ethical hacking journey, revealing how she recognised her skill after she managed to hack into her neighbours Wi-Fi password.

She then took an interest in ethical hacking when she was preparing for her medical entrance exam, NEET. Sadly, she was not able to crack the exam, but she again managed to find bugs in over 40 companies including Facebook, TikTok, Microsoft, Mozilla, Paytm, and HP. Aditi added that she became confident about ethical hacking after she discovered an OTP bypass bug in TikToks Forgot Password system.

She has also received appreciation letters from Harvard University, Columbia University, Stanford University, University of California and has also been highlighted in the Google hall of fame.

(With inputs from news agencies)

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Toronto: As it is said that age is just a number and one can learn or do anything at any age of their life. The same has been proved by a 46-year-old woman who has impressed the internet with her cool skating moves. Thats not it, she has pulled off the task in a saree! The woman named Oorbee Roy from Toronto often shares videos of herself skating on her Instagram page called, Aunty Skates.

In one of her videos, she is seen gliding around on a skateboard in a saree. The video shows were shared on the Instagram page with a caption that read "Heres the TikTok that spread like wildfire!

The video has gone viral on social media and people are praising her. The video got more than 70k likes and thousands of comments appreciating her. One of the comments read, This is so beautiful and badass, while another wrote, Okay, I can barely walk gracefully in a sariand here you are skating in one!

Oorbee has been uploading her skating videos amidst the pandemic, in order to spread a bit of positivity during difficult situations. In a few months, she gained 30 K followers. Though she had to face trolls, who called her an aunty for doing what she was doing in her forties. However, she continued posting skating videos along with her family members.

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SEOUL: Everyone in North Korea is heartbroken over leader Kim Jong Un`s apparent weight loss, said an unidentified resident of Pyongyang quoted on the country`s tightly controlled state media, after watching recent video footage of Kim.

The rare public comment on Kim`s health comes after foreign analysts noted in early June that the autocratic leader, who is believed to be 37, appeared to have lost a noticeable amount of weight.

"Seeing respected general secretary (Kim Jong Un) looking emaciated breaks our people`s heart so much," the man said in an interview aired by state broadcaster KRT on Friday.

"Everyone is saying that their tears welled up," he said.

In the clip, which Reuters could not independently verify, Pyongyang residents were seen watching a big screen on the street showing a concert attended by Kim and party officials after a plenary meeting of their Workers` Party of Korea (WPK).

The broadcast did not provide any details on what had led to the weight loss.

When Kim reappeared in state media in June after not being seen in public for almost a month, analysts at NK News, a Seoul-based website that monitors North Korea, noted that his watch appeared to be fastened more tightly than before around an apparently slimmer wrist.

Given Kim`s tight grip on power in North Korea - and the uncertainty over any plans for a successor - international media, spy agencies, and specialists closely watch his health.

Early last year speculation about Kims health exploded after he missed the birth anniversary celebrations of state founder Kim II Sung on April 15, only to reappear in public in early May.

In 2014, state media reported that Kim was suffering from "discomfort", after a prolonged period out of the public eye.


Washington: US troops came under rocket fire in Syria on Monday, but escaped injury, in apparent retaliation for weekend US airstrikes against Iran-aligned militia in Syria and Iraq. A US military spokesman said US forces were attacked by multiple rockets but did not provide details.

"There are no injuries and damage is being assessed. We will provide updates when we have more information," said Colonel Wayne Marotto.

Sources in Deir al Zor, in eastern Syria, said that an Iranian-backed militia group had fired a few artillery rounds in the vicinity of al Omar oil field, which is controlled by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces.

The rocket fire underscored the risk of escalation and the limits of US military firepower to restrain Iran-aligned militias that Washington blames for a series of increasingly sophisticated drone strikes against US personnel and facilities in Iraq.

Hours earlier, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the White House had defended the US strikes in Iraq and Syria on Sunday (June 27) as a way to tamp down on the risk of conflict.

"We took necessary, appropriate, deliberate action that is designed to limit the risk of escalation, but also to send a clear and unambiguous deterrent message," Blinken told reporters in Rome.

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Iraqi militia groups aligned with Iran in a statement named four members of the Kataib Sayyed al-Shuhada faction they said were killed in the attack on the Syria-Iraq border. They vowed to retaliate.

But it was not immediately unclear who fired the latest salvo at US forces. Iraq`s government, wary of getting dragged into a US-Iran conflict, had condemned the U.S. strikes on its territory and said it would "study all legal options" to prevent such action from being repeated. Syria called the strikes a "flagrant violation of the sanctity of Syrian and Iraqi lands."

Iraq`s military issued a condemnation of the US strikes. The Iraqi and US militaries coordinate closely in a separate battle in Iraq, fighting remnants of the Sunni extremist group Islamic State.

It was the second time President Joe Biden had ordered retaliatory strikes against Iran-backed militia since taking office five months ago. He ordered limited strikes in Syria in February, that time in response to rocket attacks in Iraq.

Two US officials, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said Iran-backed militias have carried out at least five drone attacks against facilities used by US and coalition personnel in Iraq since April.

Biden`s administration has been looking to potentially revive a 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. The attacks underscore how Biden aims to compartmentalize such defensive strikes, while simultaneously engaging Tehran in diplomacy.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Iran was a bad actor in the region who supported "extremely problematic behavior" but defended the diplomatic outreach as a way to deny Tehran a nuclear weapon.

Biden`s critics say Iran cannot be trusted and point to the drone attacks as further evidence that Iran and its proxies will never accept a US military presence in Iraq or Syria.

Iran called on the United States to avoid "creating crisis" in the region. "Certainly what the United States is doing is disrupting security in the region, and one of the victims of this disruption will be the United States," Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said on Monday (June 28).



ALSO READ: US carries out air strikes against Iran-backed militia in Iraq and Syria

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Danielle Anderson, the last and only foreign scientist who worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, at the heart of the pandemic storm, has allegedly downplayed theories that suggest the coronavirus leaked from there, killing nearly 4 million people worldwide.

In an interview to Bloomberg, Anderson, 42, said that no one she knew at Wuhan was ill towards the end of 2019. If people were sick, I assume that I would have been sick-and I wasnt, she said. I was tested for coronavirus in Singapore before I was vaccinated, and had never had it, the expert in bat-borne viruses was quoted as saying in the Bloomberg report.

Anderson was stationed in the BSL-4 lab that reportedly manages the planets most dangerous pathogens.

Anderson in the report said the lab had a system for reporting symptoms that correspond with the pathogens handled in high-risk containment labs.

There was no chatter, Anderson told the agency in the interview. Scientists are gossipy and excited. There was nothing strange from my point of view going on at that point that would make you think something is going on here.

China and Shi Zhengli, the labs now-famous bat-virus researcher and also known as bat lady, have denied that anyone from the facility contracted COVID-19. According to the report, Andersons work at the facility, and her funding, ended after the pandemic emerged and she focused on the novel coronavirus.

US President Joe Biden had ordered intelligence officials to "redouble their efforts" on the investigation of the origins of COVID-19, including whether it had emerged "from a laboratory accident."

Anderson said with proof that the virus leaked from the Wuhan lab, she "could foresee how things could maybe happen," she told Bloomberg. "I'm not naive enough to say I absolutely write this (the lab leak theory) off." However, she added: "The pandemic is something no one could have imagined on this scale. The virus was in the right place at the right time and everything lined up to cause this disaster," she said.

Anderson still believes it most likely came from a natural source, adding that it took researchers almost a decade to pin down the pathogen behind SARS.

Anderson in her interview did concede that it would be theoretically possible for a scientist in the lab to be working on a gain of function technique to unknowingly infect themselves and to then unintentionally infect others in the community. But theres no evidence that occurred and Anderson rated its likelihood as exceedingly slim.

She was reportedly impressed with the institute's biocontainment lab, which she visited before it formally opened in 2018. Bloomberg reported the facility has the highest biosafety designation. Anderson said there were strict rules and regulations in place aimed to contain pathogens that were being studied.

Getting authorization to create a virus required many layers of approval, she said. The Australian scientist believes an investigation is needed to nail down the viruss origin but is dumbfounded by the portrayal of the lab by some media outside China, and the toxic attacks on scientists that have ensued.



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